[{
  "context": """A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for
Crows, and A Dance with Dragons are works of ction. Names, places,
and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are
used ctitiously.
A Bantam Dell eBook Edition
A Game of Thrones copyright © 1996 by George R. R. Martin
A Clash of Kings copyright © 1999 by George R. R. Martin
A Storm of Swords copyright © 2000 by George R. R. Martin
A Feast for Crows copyright © 2005 by George R. R. Martin
A Dance with Dragons copyright © 2011 by George R. R. Martin
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The
Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.
Bantam Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.
The novels contained in this omnibus were each published
separately by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1996, 1999,
2000, 2005 and 2011.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-53553-5
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CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright

A Game of Thrones
A Clash of Kings
A Storm of Swords
A Feast for Crows
A Dance with Dragons

A Game of Thrones
A Bantam Spectra Book
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of
Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published September 1996
Bantam paperback edition / September 1997
Maps by James Sinclair.
Heraldic crests by Virginia Norey.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1996 by George R. R. Martin
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-43936.
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and Trademark O ce and in other countries. Marca Registrada.
Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
v3.1_r2

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Prologue

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20

Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50

Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Appendix
House Baratheon
House Stark
House Lannister
House Arryn
House Tully
House Tyrell
House Greyjoy
House Martell
The Old Dynasty: House Targaryen
Acknowledgments

Preview of A Game of Thrones Graphic Novel

this one is for Melinda

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PROLOGUE

“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow
dark around them.
“The wildlings are dead.”
“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just
the hint of a smile.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fty, and
he had seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is dead,” he said. “We
have no business with the dead.”
“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What proof have we?”
“Will saw them,” Gared said. “If he says they are dead, that’s
proof enough for me.”
Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or
later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. “My mother
told me that dead men sing no songs,” he put in.
“My wet nurse said the same thing, Will,” Royce replied. “Never
believe anything you hear at a woman’s tit. There are things to be
learned even from the dead.” His voice echoed, too loud in the
twilit forest.
“We have a long ride before us,” Gared pointed out. “Eight days,
maybe nine. And night is falling.”
Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest. “It does
that every day about this time. Are you unmanned by the dark,
Gared?”

Will could see the tightness around Gared’s mouth, the barely
suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak.
Gared had spent forty years in the Night’s Watch, man and boy, and
he was not accustomed to being made light of. Yet it was more than
that. Under the wounded pride, Will could sense something else in
the older man. You could taste it; a nervous tension that came
perilous close to fear.
Will shared his unease. He had been four years on the Wall. The
rst time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come
rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. He had laughed
about it afterward. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now,
and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the haunted
forest had no more terrors for him.
Until tonight. Something was di erent tonight. There was an edge
to this darkness that made his hackles rise. Nine days they had been
riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther and
farther from the Wall, hard on the track of a band of Wildling
raiders. Each day had been worse than the day that had come before
it. Today was the worst of all. A cold wind was blowing out of the
north, and it made the trees rustle like living things. All day, Will
had felt as though something were watching him, something cold
and implacable that loved him not. Gared had felt it too. Will
wanted nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the
Wall, but that was not a feeling to share with your commander.
Especially not a commander like this one.
Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with
too many heirs. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed
and graceful and slender as a knife. Mounted on his huge black
destrier, the knight towered above Will and Gared on their smaller
garrons. He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black
moleskin gloves, and a ne supple coat of gleaming black ringmail
over layers of black wool and boiled leather. Ser Waymar had been
a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch for less than half a year, but
no one could say he had not prepared for his vocation. At least
insofar as his wardrobe was concerned.

His cloak was his crowning glory; sable, thick and black and soft
as sin. “Bet he killed them all himself, he did,” Gared told the
barracks over wine, “twisted their little heads o , our mighty
warrior.” They had all shared the laugh.
It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your cups,
Will re ected as he sat shivering atop his garron. Gared must have
felt the same.
“Mormont said as we should track them, and we did,” Gared said.
“They’re dead. They shan’t trouble us no more. There’s hard riding
before us. I don’t like this weather. If it snows, we could be a
fortnight getting back, and snow’s the best we can hope for. Ever
seen an ice storm, my lord?”
The lordling seemed not to hear him. He studied the deepening
twilight in that half-bored, half-distracted way he had. Will had
ridden with the knight long enough to understand that it was best
not to interrupt him when he looked like that. “Tell me again what
you saw, Will. All the details. Leave nothing out.”
Will had been a hunter before he joined the Night’s Watch. Well,
a poacher in truth. Mallister freeriders had caught him red-handed
in the Mallisters’ own woods, skinning one of the Mallisters’ own
bucks, and it had been a choice of putting on the black or losing a
hand. No one could move through the woods as silent as Will, and it
had not taken the black brothers long to discover his talent.
“The camp is two miles farther on, over that ridge, hard beside a
stream,” Will said. “I got close as I dared. There’s eight of them,
men and women both. No children I could see. They put up a leanto against the rock. The snow’s pretty well covered it now, but I
could still make it out. No re burning, but the repit was still plain
as day. No one moving. I watched a long time. No living man ever
lay so still.”
“Did you see any blood?”
“Well, no,” Will admitted.
“Did you see any weapons?”
“Some swords, a few bows. One man had an axe. Heavy-looking,
double-bladed, a cruel piece of iron. It was on the ground beside
him, right by his hand.”

“Did you make note of the position of the bodies?”
Will shrugged. “A couple are sitting up against the rock. Most of
them on the ground. Fallen, like.”
“Or sleeping,” Royce suggested.
“Fallen,” Will insisted. “There’s one woman up an ironwood, halfhid in the branches. A far-eyes.” He smiled thinly. “I took care she
never saw me. When I got closer, I saw that she wasn’t moving
neither.” Despite himself, he shivered.
“You have a chill?” Royce asked.
“Some,” Will muttered. “The wind, m’lord.”
The young knight turned back to his grizzled man-at-arms. Frostfallen leaves whispered past them, and Royce’s destrier moved
restlessly. “What do you think might have killed these men,
Gared?” Ser Waymar asked casually. He adjusted the drape of his
long sable cloak.
“It was the cold,” Gared said with iron certainty. “I saw men
freeze last winter, and the one before, when I was half a boy.
Everyone talks about snows forty foot deep, and how the ice wind
comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the cold. It
steals up on you quieter than Will, and at rst you shiver and your
teeth chatter and you stamp your feet and dream of mulled wine
and nice hot res. It burns, it does. Nothing burns like the cold. But
only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to ll you up,
and after a while you don’t have the strength to ght it. It’s easier
just to sit down or go to sleep. They say you don’t feel any pain
toward the end. First you go weak and drowsy, and everything
starts to fade, and then it’s like sinking into a sea of warm milk.
Peaceful, like.”
“Such eloquence, Gared,” Ser Waymar observed. “I never
suspected you had it in you.”
“I’ve had the cold in me too, lordling.” Gared pulled back his
hood, giving Ser Waymar a good long look at the stumps where his
ears had been. “Two ears, three toes, and the little nger o my left
hand. I got o light. We found my brother frozen at his watch, with
a smile on his face.”
Ser Waymar shrugged. “You ought dress more warmly, Gared.”

Gared glared at the lordling, the scars around his ear holes
ushed red with anger where Maester Aemon had cut the ears
away. “We’ll see how warm you can dress when the winter comes.”
He pulled up his hood and hunched over his garron, silent and
sullen.
“If Gared said it was the cold …” Will began.
“Have you drawn any watches this past week, Will?”
“Yes, m’lord.” There never was a week when he did not draw a
dozen bloody watches. What was the man driving at?
“And how did you nd the Wall?”
“Weeping,” Will said, frowning. He saw it clear enough, now that
the lordling had pointed it out. “They couldn’t have froze. Not if the
Wall was weeping. It wasn’t cold enough.”
Royce nodded. “Bright lad. We’ve had a few light frosts this past
week, and a quick urry of snow now and then, but surely no cold
erce enough to kill eight grown men. Men clad in fur and leather,
let me remind you, with shelter near at hand, and the means of
making re.” The knight’s smile was cocksure. “Will, lead us there.
I would see these dead men for myself.”
And then there was nothing to be done for it. The order had been
given, and honor bound them to obey.
Will went in front, his shaggy little garron picking the way
carefully through the undergrowth. A light snow had fallen the
night before, and there were stones and roots and hidden sinks lying
just under its crust, waiting for the careless and the unwary. Ser
Waymar Royce came next, his great black destrier snorting
impatiently. The warhorse was the wrong mount for ranging, but
try and tell that to the lordling. Gared brought up the rear. The old
man-at-arms muttered to himself as he rode.
Twilight deepened. The cloudless sky turned a deep purple, the
color of an old bruise, then faded to black. The stars began to come
out. A half-moon rose. Will was grateful for the light.
“We can make a better pace than this, surely,” Royce said when
the moon was full risen.
“Not with this horse,” Will said. Fear had made him insolent.
“Perhaps my lord would care to take the lead?”

Ser Waymar Royce did not deign to reply.
Somewhere o in the wood a wolf howled.
Will pulled his garron over beneath an ancient gnarled ironwood
and dismounted.
“Why are you stopping?” Ser Waymar asked.
“Best go the rest of the way on foot, m’lord. It’s just over that
ridge.”
Royce paused a moment, staring o into the distance, his face
re ective. A cold wind whispered through the trees. His great sable
cloak stirred behind like something half-alive.
“There’s something wrong here,” Gared muttered.
The young knight gave him a disdainful smile. “Is there?”
“Can’t you feel it?” Gared asked. “Listen to the darkness.”
Will could feel it. Four years in the Night’s Watch, and he had
never been so afraid. What was it?
“Wind. Trees rustling. A wolf. Which sound is it that unmans you
so, Gared?” When Gared did not answer, Royce slid gracefully from
his saddle. He tied the destrier securely to a low-hanging limb, well
away from the other horses, and drew his longsword from its
sheath. Jewels glittered in its hilt, and the moonlight ran down the
shining steel. It was a splendid weapon, castle-forged, and newmade from the look of it. Will doubted it had ever been swung in
anger.
“The trees press close here,” Will warned. “That sword will tangle
you up, m’lord. Better a knife.”
“If I need instruction, I will ask for it,” the young lord said.
“Gared, stay here. Guard the horses.”
Gared dismounted. “We need a re. I’ll see to it.”
“How big a fool are you, old man? If there are enemies in this
wood, a re is the last thing we want.”
“There’s some enemies a re will keep away,” Gared said. “Bears
and direwolves and … and other things …”
Ser Waymar’s mouth became a hard line. “No re.”
Gared’s hood shadowed his face, but Will could see the hard
glitter in his eyes as he stared at the knight. For a moment he was
afraid the older man would go for his sword. It was a short, ugly

thing, its grip discolored by sweat, its edge nicked from hard use,
but Will would not have given an iron bob for the lordling’s life if
Gared pulled it from its scabbard.
Finally Gared looked down. “No re,” he muttered, low under his
breath.
Royce took it for acquiescence and turned away. “Lead on,” he
said to Will.
Will threaded their way through a thicket, then started up the
slope to the low ridge where he had found his vantage point under a
sentinel tree. Under the thin crust of snow, the ground was damp
and muddy, slick footing, with rocks and hidden roots to trip you
up. Will made no sound as he climbed. Behind him, he heard the
soft metallic slither of the lordling’s ringmail, the rustle of leaves,
and muttered curses as reaching branches grabbed at his longsword
and tugged on his splendid sable cloak.
The great sentinel was right there at the top of the ridge, where
Will had known it would be, its lowest branches a bare foot o the
ground. Will slid in underneath, at on his belly in the snow and the
mud, and looked down on the empty clearing below.
His heart stopped in his chest. For a moment he dared not
breathe. Moonlight shone down on the clearing, the ashes of the
repit, the snow-covered lean-to, the great rock, the little halffrozen stream. Everything was just as it had been a few hours ago.
They were gone. All the bodies were gone.
“Gods!” he heard behind him. A sword slashed at a branch as Ser
Waymar Royce gained the ridge. He stood there beside the sentinel,
longsword in hand, his cloak billowing behind him as the wind
came up, outlined nobly against the stars for all to see.
“Get down!” Will whispered urgently. “Something’s wrong.”
Royce did not move. He looked down at the empty clearing and
laughed. “Your dead men seem to have moved camp, Will.”
Will’s voice abandoned him. He groped for words that did not
come. It was not possible. His eyes swept back and forth over the
abandoned campsite, stopped on the axe. A huge double-bladed
battle-axe, still lying where he had seen it last, untouched. A
valuable weapon …

“On your feet, Will,” Ser Waymar commanded. “There’s no one
here. I won’t have you hiding under a bush.”
Reluctantly, Will obeyed.
Ser Waymar looked him over with open disapproval. “I am not
going back to Castle Black a failure on my rst ranging. We will nd
these men.” He glanced around. “Up the tree. Be quick about it.
Look for a re.”
Will turned away, wordless. There was no use to argue. The wind
was moving. It cut right through him. He went to the tree, a
vaulting grey-green sentinel, and began to climb. Soon his hands
were sticky with sap, and he was lost among the needles. Fear lled
his gut like a meal he could not digest. He whispered a prayer to
the nameless gods of the wood, and slipped his dirk free of its
sheath. He put it between his teeth to keep both hands free for
climbing. The taste of cold iron in his mouth gave him comfort.
Down below, the lordling called out suddenly, “Who goes there?”
Will heard uncertainty in the challenge. He stopped climbing; he
listened; he watched.
The woods gave answer: the rustle of leaves, the icy rush of the
stream, a distant hoot of a snow owl.
The Others made no sound.
Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes
gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white
shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone. Branches stirred gently
in the wind, scratching at one another with wooden ngers. Will
opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to
freeze in his throat. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had only
been a bird, a re ection on the snow, some trick of the moonlight.
What had he seen, after all?
“Will, where are you?” Ser Waymar called up. “Can you see
anything?” He was turning in a slow circle, suddenly wary, his
sword in hand. He must have felt them, as Will felt them. There was
nothing to see. “Answer me! Why is it so cold?”
It was cold. Shivering, Will clung more tightly to his perch. His
face pressed hard against the trunk of the sentinel. He could feel the
sweet, sticky sap on his cheek.

A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of
Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with esh pale
as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it was
white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere
dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran like
moonlight on water with every step it took.
Will heard the breath go out of Ser Waymar Royce in a long hiss.
“Come no farther,” the lordling warned. His voice cracked like a
boy’s. He threw the long sable cloak back over his shoulders, to free
his arms for battle, and took his sword in both hands. The wind had
stopped. It was very cold.
The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a longsword
like none that Will had ever seen. No human metal had gone into
the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a
shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to vanish when seen
edge-on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing, a ghost-light
that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew it was
sharper than any razor.
Ser Waymar met him bravely. “Dance with me then.” He lifted
his sword high over his head, de ant. His hands trembled from the
weight of it, or perhaps from the cold. Yet in that moment, Will
thought, he was a boy no longer, but a man of the Night’s Watch.
The Other halted. Will saw its eyes; blue, deeper and bluer than
any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice. They xed on the
longsword trembling on high, watched the moonlight running cold
along the metal. For a heartbeat he dared to hope.
They emerged silently from the shadows, twins to the rst. Three
of them … four … ve … Ser Waymar may have felt the cold that
came with them, but he never saw them, never heard them. Will
had to call out. It was his duty. And his death, if he did. He
shivered, and hugged the tree, and kept the silence.
The pale sword came shivering through the air.
Ser Waymar met it with steel. When the blades met, there was no
ring of metal on metal; only a high, thin sound at the edge of
hearing, like an animal screaming in pain. Royce checked a second

blow, and a third, then fell back a step. Another urry of blows, and
he fell back again.
Behind him, to right, to left, all around him, the watchers stood
patient, faceless, silent, the shifting patterns of their delicate armor
making them all but invisible in the wood. Yet they made no move
to interfere.
Again and again the swords met, until Will wanted to cover his
ears against the strange anguished keening of their clash. Ser
Waymar was panting from the e ort now, his breath steaming in
the moonlight. His blade was white with frost; the Other’s danced
with pale blue light.
Then Royce’s parry came a beat too late. The pale sword bit
through the ringmail beneath his arm. The young lord cried out in
pain. Blood welled between the rings. It steamed in the cold, and
the droplets seemed red as re where they touched the snow. Ser
Waymar’s ngers brushed his side. His moleskin glove came away
soaked with red.
The Other said something in a language that Will did not know;
his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the
words were mocking.
Ser Waymar Royce found his fury. “For Robert!” he shouted, and
he came up snarling, lifting the frost-covered longsword with both
hands and swinging it around in a at sidearm slash with all his
weight behind it. The Other’s parry was almost lazy.
When the blades touched, the steel shattered.
A scream echoed through the forest night, and the longsword
shivered into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like a
rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered his
eyes. Blood welled between his ngers.
The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been
given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold
butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk.
Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voices and
laughter sharp as icicles.
When he found the courage to look again, a long time had passed,
and the ridge below was empty.

He stayed in the tree, scarce daring to breathe, while the moon
crept slowly across the black sky. Finally, his muscles cramping and
his ngers numb with cold, he climbed down.
Royce’s body lay facedown in the snow, one arm out ung. The
thick sable cloak had been slashed in a dozen places. Lying dead like
that, you saw how young he was. A boy.
He found what was left of the sword a few feet away, the end
splintered and twisted like a tree struck by lightning. Will knelt,
looked around warily, and snatched it up. The broken sword would
be his proof. Gared would know what to make of it, and if not him,
then surely that old bear Mormont or Maester Aemon. Would Gared
still be waiting with the horses? He had to hurry.
Will rose. Ser Waymar Royce stood over him.
His ne clothes were a tatter, his face a ruin. A shard from his
sword trans xed the blind white pupil of his left eye.
The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.
The broken sword fell from nerveless ngers. Will closed his eyes
to pray. Long, elegant hands brushed his cheek, then tightened
around his throat. They were gloved in the nest moleskin and
sticky with blood, yet the touch was icy cold.

BRAN

The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that
hinted at the end of summer. They set forth at daybreak to see a
man beheaded, twenty in all, and Bran rode among them, nervous
with excitement. This was the rst time he had been deemed old
enough to go with his lord father and his brothers to see the king’s
justice done. It was the ninth year of summer, and the seventh of
Bran’s life.
The man had been taken outside a small holdfast in the hills.
Robb thought he was a wildling, his sword sworn to Mance Rayder,
the King-beyond-the-Wall. It made Bran’s skin prickle to think of it.
He remembered the hearth tales Old Nan told them. The wildlings
were cruel men, she said, slavers and slayers and thieves. They
consorted with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of
night, and drank blood from polished horns. And their women lay
with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human
children.
But the man they found bound hand and foot to the holdfast wall
awaiting the king’s justice was old and scrawny, not much taller
than Robb. He had lost both ears and a nger to frostbite, and he
dressed all in black, the same as a brother of the Night’s Watch,
except that his furs were ragged and greasy.
The breath of man and horse mingled, steaming, in the cold
morning air as his lord father had the man cut down from the wall
and dragged before them. Robb and Jon sat tall and still on their

horses, with Bran between them on his pony, trying to seem older
than seven, trying to pretend that he’d seen all this before. A faint
wind blew through the holdfast gate. Over their heads apped the
banner of the Starks of Winterfell: a grey direwolf racing across an
ice-white eld.
Bran’s father sat solemnly on his horse, long brown hair stirring
in the wind. His closely trimmed beard was shot with white, making
him look older than his thirty- ve years. He had a grim cast to his
grey eyes this day, and he seemed not at all the man who would sit
before the re in the evening and talk softly of the age of heroes
and the children of the forest. He had taken o Father’s face, Bran
thought, and donned the face of Lord Stark of Winterfell.
There were questions asked and answers given there in the chill
of morning, but afterward Bran could not recall much of what had
been said. Finally his lord father gave a command, and two of his
guardsmen dragged the ragged man to the ironwood stump in the
center of the square. They forced his head down onto the hard black
wood. Lord Eddard Stark dismounted and his ward Theon Greyjoy
brought forth the sword. “Ice,” that sword was called. It was as
wide across as a man’s hand, and taller even than Robb. The blade
was Valyrian steel, spell-forged and dark as smoke. Nothing held an
edge like Valyrian steel.
His father peeled o his gloves and handed them to Jory Cassel,
the captain of his household guard. He took hold of Ice with both
hands and said, “In the name of Robert of the House Baratheon, the
First of his Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First
Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, by
the word of Eddard of the House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and
Warden of the North, I do sentence you to die.” He lifted the
greatsword high above his head.
Bran’s bastard brother Jon Snow moved closer. “Keep the pony
well in hand,” he whispered. “And don’t look away. Father will
know if you do.”
Bran kept his pony well in hand, and did not look away.
His father took o the man’s head with a single sure stroke. Blood
sprayed out across the snow, as red as summerwine. One of the

horses reared and had to be restrained to keep from bolting. Bran
could not take his eyes o the blood. The snows around the stump
drank it eagerly, reddening as he watched.
The head bounced o a thick root and rolled. It came up near
Greyjoy’s feet. Theon was a lean, dark youth of nineteen who found
everything amusing. He laughed, put his boot on the head, and
kicked it away.
“Ass,” Jon muttered, low enough so Greyjoy did not hear. He put
a hand on Bran’s shoulder, and Bran looked over at his bastard
brother. “You did well,” Jon told him solemnly. Jon was fourteen,
an old hand at justice.
It seemed colder on the long ride back to Winterfell, though the
wind had died by then and the sun was higher in the sky. Bran rode
with his brothers, well ahead of the main party, his pony struggling
hard to keep up with their horses.
“The deserter died bravely,” Robb said. He was big and broad and
growing every day, with his mother’s coloring, the fair skin, redbrown hair, and blue eyes of the Tullys of Riverrun. “He had
courage, at the least.”
“No,” Jon Snow said quietly. “It was not courage. This one was
dead of fear. You could see it in his eyes, Stark.” Jon’s eyes were a
grey so dark they seemed almost black, but there was little they did
not see. He was of an age with Robb, but they did not look alike.
Jon was slender where Robb was muscular, dark where Robb was
fair, graceful and quick where his half brother was strong and fast.
Robb was not impressed. “The Others take his eyes,” he swore.
“He died well. Race you to the bridge?”
“Done,” Jon said, kicking his horse forward. Robb cursed and
followed, and they galloped o down the trail, Robb laughing and
hooting, Jon silent and intent. The hooves of their horses kicked up
showers of snow as they went.
Bran did not try to follow. His pony could not keep up. He had
seen the ragged man’s eyes, and he was thinking of them now. After
a while, the sound of Robb’s laughter receded, and the woods grew
silent again.

So deep in thought was he that he never heard the rest of the
party until his father moved up to ride beside him. “Are you well,
Bran?” he asked, not unkindly.
“Yes, Father,” Bran told him. He looked up. Wrapped in his furs
and leathers, mounted on his great warhorse, his lord father loomed
over him like a giant. “Robb says the man died bravely, but Jon
says he was afraid.”
“What do you think?” his father asked.
Bran thought about it. “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”
“That is the only time a man can be brave,” his father told him.
“Do you understand why I did it?”
“He was a wildling,” Bran said. “They carry o women and sell
them to the Others.”
His lord father smiled. “Old Nan has been telling you stories
again. In truth, the man was an oathbreaker, a deserter from the
Night’s Watch. No man is more dangerous. The deserter knows his
life is forfeit if he is taken, so he will not inch from any crime, no
matter how vile. But you mistake me. The question was not why the
man had to die, but why I must do it.”
Bran had no answer for that. “King Robert has a headsman,” he
said, uncertainly.
“He does,” his father admitted. “As did the Targaryen kings
before him. Yet our way is the older way. The blood of the First
Men still ows in the veins of the Starks, and we hold to the belief
that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If
you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes
and hear his nal words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then
perhaps the man does not deserve to die.
“One day, Bran, you will be Robb’s bannerman, holding a keep of
your own for your brother and your king, and justice will fall to
you. When that day comes, you must take no pleasure in the task,
but neither must you look away. A ruler who hides behind paid
executioners soon forgets what death is.”
That was when Jon reappeared on the crest of the hill before
them. He waved and shouted down at them. “Father, Bran, come
quickly, see what Robb has found!” Then he was gone again.

Jory rode up beside them. “Trouble, my lord?”
“Beyond a doubt,” his lord father said. “Come, let us see what
mischief my sons have rooted out now.” He sent his horse into a
trot. Jory and Bran and the rest came after.
They found Robb on the riverbank north of the bridge, with Jon
still mounted beside him. The late summer snows had been heavy
this moonturn. Robb stood knee-deep in white, his hood pulled back
so the sun shone in his hair. He was cradling something in his arm,
while the boys talked in hushed, excited voices.
The riders picked their way carefully through the drifts, groping
for solid footing on the hidden, uneven ground. Jory Cassel and
Theon Greyjoy were the rst to reach the boys. Greyjoy was
laughing and joking as he rode. Bran heard the breath go out of
him. “Gods!” he exclaimed, struggling to keep control of his horse
as he reached for his sword.
Jory’s sword was already out. “Robb, get away from it!” he called
as his horse reared under him.
Robb grinned and looked up from the bundle in his arms. “She
can’t hurt you,” he said. “She’s dead, Jory.”
Bran was a re with curiosity by then. He would have spurred the
pony faster, but his father made them dismount beside the bridge
and approach on foot. Bran jumped o and ran.
By then Jon, Jory, and Theon Greyjoy had all dismounted as well.
“What in the seven hells is it?” Greyjoy was saying.
“A wolf,” Robb told him.
“A freak,” Greyjoy said. “Look at the size of it.”
Bran’s heart was thumping in his chest as he pushed through a
waist-high drift to his brothers’ side.
Half-buried in bloodstained snow, a huge dark shape slumped in
death. Ice had formed in its shaggy grey fur, and the faint smell of
corruption clung to it like a woman’s perfume. Bran glimpsed blind
eyes crawling with maggots, a wide mouth full of yellowed teeth.
But it was the size of it that made him gasp. It was bigger than his
pony, twice the size of the largest hound in his father’s kennel.
“It’s no freak,” Jon said calmly. “That’s a direwolf. They grow
larger than the other kind.”

Theon Greyjoy said, “There’s not been a direwolf sighted south of
the Wall in two hundred years.”
“I see one now,” Jon replied.
Bran tore his eyes away from the monster. That was when he
noticed the bundle in Robb’s arms. He gave a cry of delight and
moved closer. The pup was a tiny ball of grey-black fur, its eyes still
closed. It nuzzled blindly against Robb’s chest as he cradled it,
searching for milk among his leathers, making a sad little whimpery
sound. Bran reached out hesitantly. “Go on,” Robb told him. “You
can touch him.”
Bran gave the pup a quick nervous stroke, then turned as Jon
said, “Here you go.” His half brother put a second pup into his
arms. “There are ve of them.” Bran sat down in the snow and
hugged the wolf pup to his face. Its fur was soft and warm against
his cheek.
“Direwolves loose in the realm, after so many years,” muttered
Hullen, the master of horse. “I like it not.”
“It is a sign,” Jory said.
Father frowned. “This is only a dead animal, Jory,” he said. Yet
he seemed troubled. Snow crunched under his boots as he moved
around the body. “Do we know what killed her?”
“There’s something in the throat,” Robb told him, proud to have
found the answer before his father even asked. “There, just under
the jaw.”
His father knelt and groped under the beast’s head with his hand.
He gave a yank and held it up for all to see. A foot of shattered
antler, tines snapped o , all wet with blood.
A sudden silence descended over the party. The men looked at the
antler uneasily, and no one dared to speak. Even Bran could sense
their fear, though he did not understand.
His father tossed the antler to the side and cleansed his hands in
the snow. “I’m surprised she lived long enough to whelp,” he said.
His voice broke the spell.
“Maybe she didn’t,” Jory said. “I’ve heard tales … maybe the
bitch was already dead when the pups came.”
“Born with the dead,” another man put in. “Worse luck.”

“No matter,” said Hullen. “They be dead soon enough too.”
Bran gave a wordless cry of dismay.
“The sooner the better,” Theon Greyjoy agreed. He drew his
sword. “Give the beast here, Bran.”
The little thing squirmed against him, as if it heard and
understood. “No!” Bran cried out ercely. “It’s mine.”
“Put away your sword, Greyjoy,” Robb said. For a moment he
sounded as commanding as their father, like the lord he would
someday be. “We will keep these pups.”
“You cannot do that, boy,” said Harwin, who was Hullen’s son.
“It be a mercy to kill them,” Hullen said.
Bran looked to his lord father for rescue, but got only a frown, a
furrowed brow. “Hullen speaks truly, son. Better a swift death than
a hard one from cold and starvation.”
“No!” He could feel tears welling in his eyes, and he looked away.
He did not want to cry in front of his father.
Robb resisted stubbornly. “Ser Rodrik’s red bitch whelped again
last week,” he said. “It was a small litter, only two live pups. She’ll
have milk enough.”
“She’ll rip them apart when they try to nurse.”
“Lord Stark,” Jon said. It was strange to hear him call Father that,
so formal. Bran looked at him with desperate hope. “There are ve
pups,” he told Father. “Three male, two female.”
“What of it, Jon?”
“You have ve trueborn children,” Jon said. “Three sons, two
daughters. The direwolf is the sigil of your House. Your children
were meant to have these pups, my lord.”
Bran saw his father’s face change, saw the other men exchange
glances. He loved Jon with all his heart at that moment. Even at
seven, Bran understood what his brother had done. The count had
come right only because Jon had omitted himself. He had included
the girls, included even Rickon, the baby, but not the bastard who
bore the surname Snow, the name that custom decreed be given to
all those in the north unlucky enough to be born with no name of
their own.

Their father understood as well. “You want no pup for yourself,
Jon?” he asked softly.
“The direwolf graces the banners of House Stark,” Jon pointed
out. “I am no Stark, Father.”
Their lord father regarded Jon thoughtfully. Robb rushed into the
silence he left. “I will nurse him myself, Father,” he promised. “I
will soak a towel with warm milk, and give him suck from that.”
“Me too!” Bran echoed.
The lord weighed his sons long and carefully with his eyes. “Easy
to say, and harder to do. I will not have you wasting the servants’
time with this. If you want these pups, you will feed them
yourselves. Is that understood?”
Bran nodded eagerly. The pup squirmed in his grasp, licked at his
face with a warm tongue.
“You must train them as well,” their father said. “You must train
them. The kennelmaster will have nothing to do with these
monsters, I promise you that. And the gods help you if you neglect
them, or brutalize them, or train them badly. These are not dogs to
beg for treats and slink o at a kick. A direwolf will rip a man’s arm
o his shoulder as easily as a dog will kill a rat. Are you sure you
want this?”
“Yes, Father,” Bran said.
“Yes,” Robb agreed.
“The pups may die anyway, despite all you do.”
“They won’t die,” Robb said. “We won’t let them die.”
“Keep them, then. Jory, Desmond, gather up the other pups. It’s
time we were back to Winterfell.”
It was not until they were mounted and on their way that Bran
allowed himself to taste the sweet air of victory. By then, his pup
was snuggled inside his leathers, warm against him, safe for the
long ride home. Bran was wondering what to name him.
Halfway across the bridge, Jon pulled up suddenly.
“What is it, Jon?” their lord father asked.
“Can’t you hear it?”
Bran could hear the wind in the trees, the clatter of their hooves
on the ironwood planks, the whimpering of his hungry pup, but Jon

was listening to something else.
“There,” Jon said. He swung his horse around and galloped back
across the bridge. They watched him dismount where the direwolf
lay dead in the snow, watched him kneel. A moment later he was
riding back to them, smiling.
“He must have crawled away from the others,” Jon said.
“Or been driven away,” their father said, looking at the sixth pup.
His fur was white, where the rest of the litter was grey. His eyes
were as red as the blood of the ragged man who had died that
morning. Bran thought it curious that this pup alone would have
opened his eyes while the others were still blind.
“An albino,” Theon Greyjoy said with wry amusement. “This one
will die even faster than the others.”
Jon Snow gave his father’s ward a long, chilling look. “I think
not, Greyjoy,” he said. “This one belongs to me.”

CATELYN

Catelyn had never liked this godswood.
She had been born a Tully, at Riverrun far to the south, on the
Red Fork of the Trident. The godswood there was a garden, bright
and airy, where tall redwoods spread dappled shadows across
tinkling streams, birds sang from hidden nests, and the air was spicy
with the scent of owers.
The gods of Winterfell kept a di erent sort of wood. It was a
dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten
thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of
moist earth and decay. No redwoods grew here. This was a wood of
stubborn sentinel trees armored in grey-green needles, of mighty
oaks, of ironwoods as old as the realm itself. Here thick black
trunks crowded close together while twisted branches wove a dense
canopy overhead and misshapen roots wrestled beneath the soil.
This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the
gods who lived here had no names.
But she knew she would nd her husband here tonight. Whenever
he took a man’s life, afterward he would seek the quiet of the
godswood.
Catelyn had been anointed with the seven oils and named in the
rainbow of light that lled the sept of Riverrun. She was of the
Faith, like her father and grandfather and his father before him. Her
gods had names, and their faces were as familiar as the faces of her
parents. Worship was a septon with a censer, the smell of incense, a

seven-sided crystal alive with light, voices raised in song. The Tullys
kept a godswood, as all the great houses did, but it was only a place
to walk or read or lie in the sun. Worship was for the sept.
For her sake, Ned had built a small sept where she might sing to
the seven faces of god, but the blood of the First Men still owed in
the veins of the Starks, and his own gods were the old ones, the
nameless, faceless gods of the greenwood they shared with the
vanished children of the forest.
At the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a
small pool where the waters were black and cold. “The heart tree,”
Ned called it. The weirwood’s bark was white as bone, its leaves
dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been
carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and
melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely
watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself.
They had seen Brandon the Builder set the rst stone, if the tales
were true; they had watched the castle’s granite walls rise around
them. It was said that the children of the forest had carved the faces
in the trees during the dawn centuries before the coming of the First
Men across the narrow sea.
In the south the last weirwoods had been cut down or burned out
a thousand years ago, except on the Isle of Faces where the green
men kept their silent watch. Up here it was di erent. Here every
castle had its godswood, and every godswood had its heart tree, and
every heart tree its face.
Catelyn found her husband beneath the weirwood, seated on a
moss-covered stone. The greatsword Ice was across his lap, and he
was cleaning the blade in those waters black as night. A thousand
years of humus lay thick upon the godswood oor, swallowing the
sound of her feet, but the red eyes of the weirwood seemed to
follow her as she came. “Ned,” she called softly.
He lifted his head to look at her. “Catelyn,” he said. His voice was
distant and formal. “Where are the children?”
He would always ask her that. “In the kitchen, arguing about
names for the wolf pups.” She spread her cloak on the forest oor
and sat beside the pool, her back to the weirwood. She could feel

the eyes watching her, but she did her best to ignore them. “Arya is
already in love, and Sansa is charmed and gracious, but Rickon is
not quite sure.”
“Is he afraid?” Ned asked.
“A little,” she admitted. “He is only three.”
Ned frowned. “He must learn to face his fears. He will not be
three forever. And winter is coming.”
“Yes,” Catelyn agreed. The words gave her a chill, as they always
did. The Stark words. Every noble house had its words. Family
mottoes, touchstones, prayers of sorts, they boasted of honor and
glory, promised loyalty and truth, swore faith and courage. All but
the Starks. Winter is coming, said the Stark words. Not for the rst
time, she re ected on what a strange people these northerners
were.
“The man died well, I’ll give him that,” Ned said. He had a swatch
of oiled leather in one hand. He ran it lightly up the greatsword as
he spoke, polishing the metal to a dark glow. “I was glad for Bran’s
sake. You would have been proud of Bran.”
“I am always proud of Bran,” Catelyn replied, watching the sword
as he stroked it. She could see the rippling deep within the steel,
where the metal had been folded back on itself a hundred times in
the forging. Catelyn had no love for swords, but she could not deny
that Ice had its own beauty. It had been forged in Valyria, before
the Doom had come to the old Freehold, when the ironsmiths had
worked their metal with spells as well as hammers. Four hundred
years old it was, and as sharp as the day it was forged. The name it
bore was older still, a legacy from the age of heroes, when the
Starks were Kings in the North.
“He was the fourth this year,” Ned said grimly. “The poor man
was half-mad. Something had put a fear in him so deep that my
words could not reach him.” He sighed. “Ben writes that the
strength of the Night’s Watch is down below a thousand. It’s not
only desertions. They are losing men on rangings as well.”
“Is it the wildlings?” she asked.
“Who else?” Ned lifted Ice, looked down the cool steel length of
it. “And it will only grow worse. The day may come when I will

have no choice but to call the banners and ride north to deal with
this King-beyond-the-Wall for good and all.”
“Beyond the Wall?” The thought made Catelyn shudder.
Ned saw the dread on her face. “Mance Rayder is nothing for us
to fear.”
“There are darker things beyond the Wall.” She glanced behind
her at the heart tree, the pale bark and red eyes, watching,
listening, thinking its long slow thoughts.
His smile was gentle. “You listen to too many of Old Nan’s
stories. The Others are as dead as the children of the forest, gone
eight thousand years. Maester Luwin will tell you they never lived
at all. No living man has ever seen one.”
“Until this morning, no living man had ever seen a direwolf
either,” Catelyn reminded him.
“I ought to know better than to argue with a Tully,” he said with
a rueful smile. He slid Ice back into its sheath. “You did not come
here to tell me crib tales. I know how little you like this place.
What is it, my lady?”
Catelyn took her husband’s hand. “There was grievous news
today, my lord. I did not wish to trouble you until you had cleansed
yourself.” There was no way to soften the blow, so she told him
straight. “I am so sorry, my love. Jon Arryn is dead.”
His eyes found hers, and she could see how hard it took him, as
she had known it would. In his youth, Ned had fostered at the Eyrie,
and the childless Lord Arryn had become a second father to him and
his fellow ward, Robert Baratheon. When the Mad King Aerys II
Targaryen had demanded their heads, the Lord of the Eyrie had
raised his moon-and-falcon banners in revolt rather than give up
those he had pledged to protect.
And one day fteen years ago, this second father had become a
brother as well, as he and Ned stood together in the sept at
Riverrun to wed two sisters, the daughters of Lord Hoster Tully.
“Jon …” he said. “Is this news certain?”
“It was the king’s seal, and the letter is in Robert’s own hand. I
saved it for you. He said Lord Arryn was taken quickly. Even

Maester Pycelle was helpless, but he brought the milk of the poppy,
so Jon did not linger long in pain.”
“That is some small mercy, I suppose,” he said. She could see the
grief on his face, but even then he thought rst of her. “Your
sister,” he said. “And Jon’s boy. What word of them?”
“The message said only that they were well, and had returned to
the Eyrie,” Catelyn said. “I wish they had gone to Riverrun instead.
The Eyrie is high and lonely, and it was ever her husband’s place,
not hers. Lord Jon’s memory will haunt each stone. I know my
sister. She needs the comfort of family and friends around her.”
“Your uncle waits in the Vale, does he not? Jon named him
Knight of the Gate, I’d heard.”
Catelyn nodded. “Brynden will do what he can for her, and for
the boy. That is some comfort, but still …”
“Go to her,” Ned urged. “Take the children. Fill her halls with
noise and shouts and laughter. That boy of hers needs other children
about him, and Lysa should not be alone in her grief.”
“Would that I could,” Catelyn said. “The letter had other tidings.
The king is riding to Winterfell to seek you out.”
It took Ned a moment to comprehend her words, but when the
understanding came, the darkness left his eyes. “Robert is coming
here?” When she nodded, a smile broke across his face.
Catelyn wished she could share his joy. But she had heard the talk
in the yards; a direwolf dead in the snow, a broken antler in its
throat. Dread coiled within her like a snake, but she forced herself
to smile at this man she loved, this man who put no faith in signs. “I
knew that would please you,” she said. “We should send word to
your brother on the Wall.”
“Yes, of course,” he agreed. “Ben will want to be here. I shall tell
Maester Luwin to send his swiftest bird.” Ned rose and pulled her to
her feet. “Damnation, how many years has it been? And he gives us
no more notice than this? How many in his party, did the message
say?”
“I should think a hundred knights, at the least, with all their
retainers, and half again as many freeriders. Cersei and the children
travel with them.”

“Robert will keep an easy pace for their sakes,” he said. “It is just
as well. That will give us more time to prepare.”
“The queen’s brothers are also in the party,” she told him.
Ned grimaced at that. There was small love between him and the
queen’s family, Catelyn knew. The Lannisters of Casterly Rock had
come late to Robert’s cause, when victory was all but certain, and
he had never forgiven them. “Well, if the price for Robert’s
company is an infestation of Lannisters, so be it. It sounds as though
Robert is bringing half his court.”
“Where the king goes, the realm follows,” she said.
“It will be good to see the children. The youngest was still
sucking at the Lannister woman’s teat the last time I saw him. He
must be, what, ve by now?”
“Prince Tommen is seven,” she told him. “The same age as Bran.
Please, Ned, guard your tongue. The Lannister woman is our queen,
and her pride is said to grow with every passing year.”
Ned squeezed her hand. “There must be a feast, of course, with
singers, and Robert will want to hunt. I shall send Jory south with
an honor guard to meet them on the kingsroad and escort them
back. Gods, how are we going to feed them all? On his way already,
you said? Damn the man. Damn his royal hide.”

DAENERYS

Her brother held the gown up for her inspection.
“This is beauty. Touch it. Go on. Caress the fabric.”
Dany touched it. The cloth was so smooth that it seemed to run
through her ngers like water. She could not remember ever
wearing anything so soft. It frightened her. She pulled her hand
away. “Is it really mine?”
“A gift from the Magister Illyrio,” Viserys said, smiling. Her
brother was in a high mood tonight. “The color will bring out the
violet in your eyes. And you shall have gold as well, and jewels of
all sorts. Illyrio has promised. Tonight you must look like a
princess.”
A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like.
Perhaps she had never really known. “Why does he give us so
much?” she asked. “What does he want from us?” For nigh on half a
year, they had lived in the magister’s house, eating his food,
pampered by his servants. Dany was thirteen, old enough to know
that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city
of Pentos.
“Illyrio is no fool,” Viserys said. He was a gaunt young man with
nervous hands and a feverish look in his pale lilac eyes. “The
magister knows that I will not forget my friends when I come into
my throne.”
Dany said nothing. Magister Illyrio was a dealer in spices,
gemstones, dragonbone, and other, less savory things. He had

friends in all of the Nine Free Cities, it was said, and even beyond,
in Vaes Dothrak and the fabled lands beside the Jade Sea. It was
also said that he’d never had a friend he wouldn’t cheerfully sell for
the right price. Dany listened to the talk in the streets, and she
heard these things, but she knew better than to question her brother
when he wove his webs of dream. His anger was a terrible thing
when roused. Viserys called it “waking the dragon.”
Her brother hung the gown beside the door. “Illyrio will send the
slaves to bathe you. Be sure you wash o the stink of the stables.
Khal Drogo has a thousand horses, tonight he looks for a di erent
sort of mount.” He studied her critically. “You still slouch.
Straighten yourself.” He pushed back her shoulders with his hands.
“Let them see that you have a woman’s shape now.” His ngers
brushed lightly over her budding breasts and tightened on a nipple.
“You will not fail me tonight. If you do, it will go hard for you. You
don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?” His ngers twisted her,
the pinch cruelly hard through the rough fabric of her tunic. “Do
you?” he repeated.
“No,” Dany said meekly.
Her brother smiled. “Good.” He touched her hair, almost with
a ection. “When they write the history of my reign, sweet sister,
they will say that it began tonight.”
When he was gone, Dany went to her window and looked out
wistfully on the waters of the bay. The square brick towers of
Pentos were black silhouettes outlined against the setting sun. Dany
could hear the singing of the red priests as they lit their night res
and the shouts of ragged children playing games beyond the walls
of the estate. For a moment she wished she could be out there with
them, barefoot and breathless and dressed in tatters, with no past
and no future and no feast to attend at Khal Drogo’s manse.
Somewhere beyond the sunset, across the narrow sea, lay a land
of green hills and owered plains and great rushing rivers, where
towers of dark stone rose amidst magni cent blue-grey mountains,
and armored knights rode to battle beneath the banners of their
lords. The Dothraki called that land Rhaesh Andahli, the land of the
Andals. In the Free Cities, they talked of Westeros and the Sunset

Kingdoms. Her brother had a simpler name. “Our land,” he called it.
The words were like a prayer with him. If he said them enough, the
gods were sure to hear. “Ours by blood right, taken from us by
treachery, but ours still, ours forever. You do not steal from the
dragon, oh, no. The dragon remembers.”
And perhaps the dragon did remember, but Dany could not. She
had never seen this land her brother said was theirs, this realm
beyond the narrow sea. These places he talked of, Casterly Rock
and the Eyrie, Highgarden and the Vale of Arryn, Dorne and the Isle
of Faces, they were just words to her. Viserys had been a boy of
eight when they ed King’s Landing to escape the advancing armies
of the Usurper, but Daenerys had been only a quickening in their
mother’s womb.
Yet sometimes Dany would picture the way it had been, so often
had her brother told her the stories. The midnight ight to
Dragonstone, moonlight shimmering on the ship’s black sails. Her
brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the bloody waters of the
Trident and dying for the woman he loved. The sack of King’s
Landing by the ones Viserys called the Usurper’s dogs, the lords
Lannister and Stark. Princess Elia of Dorne pleading for mercy as
Rhaegar’s heir was ripped from her breast and murdered before her
eyes. The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down
sightlessly from the walls of the throne room while the Kingslayer
opened Father’s throat with a golden sword.
She had been born on Dragonstone nine moons after their ight,
while a raging summer storm threatened to rip the island fastness
apart. They said that storm was terrible. The Targaryen eet was
smashed while it lay at anchor, and huge stone blocks were ripped
from the parapets and sent hurtling into the wild waters of the
narrow sea. Her mother had died birthing her, and for that her
brother Viserys had never forgiven her.
She did not remember Dragonstone either. They had run again,
just before the Usurper’s brother set sail with his new-built eet. By
then only Dragonstone itself, the ancient seat of their House, had
remained of the Seven Kingdoms that had once been theirs. It would
not remain for long. The garrison had been prepared to sell them to

the Usurper, but one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had
broken into the nursery and stolen them both, along with her wet
nurse, and set sail under cover of darkness for the safety of the
Braavosian coast.
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man,
half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The
servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to
Dany. He called her “Little Princess” and sometimes “My Lady,” and
his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though,
and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist,
sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big
house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a
lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the
servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after
they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the
red door closed behind them forever.
They had wandered since then, from Braavos to Myr, from Myr to
Tyrosh, and on to Qohor and Volantis and Lys, never staying long in
any one place. Her brother would not allow it. The Usurper’s hired
knives were close behind them, he insisted, though Dany had never
seen one.
At rst the magisters and archons and merchant princes were
pleased to welcome the last Targaryens to their homes and tables,
but as the years passed and the Usurper continued to sit upon the
Iron Throne, doors closed and their lives grew meaner. Years past
they had been forced to sell their last few treasures, and now even
the coin they had gotten from Mother’s crown had gone. In the
alleys and wine sinks of Pentos, they called her brother “the beggar
king.” Dany did not want to know what they called her.
“We will have it all back someday, sweet sister,” he would
promise her. Sometimes his hands shook when he talked about it.
“The jewels and the silks, Dragonstone and King’s Landing, the Iron
Throne and the Seven Kingdoms, all they have taken from us, we
will have it back.” Viserys lived for that day. All that Daenerys
wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree
outside her window, the childhood she had never known.

There came a soft knock on her door. “Come,” Dany said, turning
away from the window. Illyrio’s servants entered, bowed, and set
about their business. They were slaves, a gift from one of the
magister’s many Dothraki friends. There was no slavery in the free
city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves. The old woman, small
and grey as a mouse, never said a word, but the girl made up for it.
She was Illyrio’s favorite, a fair-haired, blue-eyed wench of sixteen
who chattered constantly as she worked.
They lled her bath with hot water brought up from the kitchen
and scented it with fragrant oils. The girl pulled the rough cotton
tunic over Dany’s head and helped her into the tub. The water was
scalding hot, but Daenerys did not inch or cry out. She liked the
heat. It made her feel clean. Besides, her brother had often told her
that it was never too hot for a Targaryen. “Ours is the house of the
dragon,” he would say. “The re is in our blood.”
The old woman washed her long, silver-pale hair and gently
combed out the snags, all in silence. The girl scrubbed her back and
her feet and told her how lucky she was. “Drogo is so rich that even
his slaves wear golden collars. A hundred thousand men ride in his
khalasar, and his palace in Vaes Dothrak has two hundred rooms and
doors of solid silver.” There was more like that, so much more,
what a handsome man the khal was, so tall and erce, fearless in
battle, the best rider ever to mount a horse, a demon archer.
Daenerys said nothing. She had always assumed that she would wed
Viserys when she came of age. For centuries the Targaryens had
married brother to sister, since Aegon the Conqueror had taken his
sisters to bride. The line must be kept pure, Viserys had told her a
thousand times; theirs was the kingsblood, the golden blood of old
Valyria, the blood of the dragon. Dragons did not mate with the
beasts of the eld, and Targaryens did not mingle their blood with
that of lesser men. Yet now Viserys schemed to sell her to a
stranger, a barbarian.
When she was clean, the slaves helped her from the water and
toweled her dry. The girl brushed her hair until it shone like molten
silver, while the old woman anointed her with the spice ower
perfume of the Dothraki plains, a dab on each wrist, behind her

ears, on the tips of her breasts, and one last one, cool on her lips,
down there between her legs. They dressed her in the wisps that
Magister Illyrio had sent up, and then the gown, a deep plum silk to
bring out the violet in her eyes. The girl slid the gilded sandals onto
her feet, while the old woman xed the tiara in her hair, and slid
golden bracelets crusted with amethysts around her wrists. Last of
all came the collar, a heavy golden torc emblazoned with ancient
Valyrian glyphs.
“Now you look all a princess,” the girl said breathlessly when
they were done. Dany glanced at her image in the silvered looking
glass that Illyrio had so thoughtfully provided. A princess, she
thought, but she remembered what the girl had said, how Khal
Drogo was so rich even his slaves wore golden collars. She felt a
sudden chill, and goose esh pimpled her bare arms.
Her brother was waiting in the cool of the entry hall, seated on
the edge of the pool, his hand trailing in the water. He rose when
she appeared and looked her over critically. “Stand there,” he told
her. “Turn around. Yes. Good. You look …”
“Regal,” Magister Illyrio said, stepping through an archway. He
moved with surprising delicacy for such a massive man. Beneath
loose garments of ame-colored silk, rolls of fat jiggled as he
walked. Gemstones glittered on every nger, and his man had oiled
his forked yellow beard until it shone like real gold. “May the Lord
of Light shower you with blessings on this most fortunate day,
Princess Daenerys,” the magister said as he took her hand. He
bowed his head, showing a thin glimpse of crooked yellow teeth
through the gold of his beard. “She is a vision, Your Grace, a
vision,” he told her brother. “Drogo will be enraptured.”
“She’s too skinny,” Viserys said. His hair, the same silver-blond as
hers, had been pulled back tightly behind his head and fastened
with a dragonbone brooch. It was a severe look that emphasized the
hard, gaunt lines of his face. He rested his hand on the hilt of the
sword that Illyrio had lent him, and said, “Are you sure that Khal
Drogo likes his women this young?”
“She has had her blood. She is old enough for the khal,” Illyrio
told him, not for the rst time. “Look at her. That silver-gold hair,

those purple eyes … she is the blood of old Valyria, no doubt, no
doubt … and highborn, daughter of the old king, sister to the new,
she cannot fail to entrance our Drogo.” When he released her hand,
Daenerys found herself trembling.
“I suppose,” her brother said doubtfully. “The savages have queer
tastes. Boys, horses, sheep …”
“Best not suggest this to Khal Drogo,” Illyrio said.
Anger ashed in her brother’s lilac eyes. “Do you take me for a
fool?”
The magister bowed slightly. “I take you for a king. Kings lack
the caution of common men. My apologies if I have given o ense.”
He turned away and clapped his hands for his bearers.
The streets of Pentos were pitch-dark when they set out in
Illyrio’s elaborately carved palanquin. Two servants went ahead to
light their way, carrying ornate oil lanterns with panes of pale blue
glass, while a dozen strong men hoisted the poles to their shoulders.
It was warm and close inside behind the curtains. Dany could smell
the stench of Illyrio’s pallid esh through his heavy perfumes.
Her brother, sprawled out on his pillows beside her, never
noticed. His mind was away across the narrow sea. “We won’t need
his whole khalasar,” Viserys said. His ngers toyed with the hilt of
his borrowed blade, though Dany knew he had never used a sword
in earnest. “Ten thousand, that would be enough, I could sweep the
Seven Kingdoms with ten thousand Dothraki screamers. The realm
will rise for its rightful king. Tyrell, Redwyne, Darry, Greyjoy, they
have no more love for the Usurper than I do. The Dornishmen burn
to avenge Elia and her children. And the smallfolk will be with us.
They cry out for their king.” He looked at Illyrio anxiously. “They
do, don’t they?”
“They are your people, and they love you well,” Magister Illyrio
said amiably. “In holdfasts all across the realm, men lift secret
toasts to your health while women sew dragon banners and hide
them against the day of your return from across the water.” He
gave a massive shrug. “Or so my agents tell me.”
Dany had no agents, no way of knowing what anyone was doing
or thinking across the narrow sea, but she mistrusted Illyrio’s sweet

words as she mistrusted everything about Illyrio. Her brother was
nodding eagerly, however. “I shall kill the Usurper myself,” he
promised, who had never killed anyone, “as he killed my brother
Rhaegar. And Lannister too, the Kingslayer, for what he did to my
father.”
“That would be most tting,” Magister Illyrio said. Dany saw the
smallest hint of a smile playing around his full lips, but her brother
did not notice. Nodding, he pushed back a curtain and stared o
into the night, and Dany knew he was ghting the Battle of the
Trident once again.
The nine-towered manse of Khal Drogo sat beside the waters of
the bay, its high brick walls overgrown with pale ivy. It had been
given to the khal by the magisters of Pentos, Illyrio told them. The
Free Cities were always generous with the horselords. “It is not that
we fear these barbarians,” Illyrio would explain with a smile. “The
Lord of Light would hold our city walls against a million Dothraki,
or so the red priests promise … yet why take chances, when their
friendship comes so cheap?”
Their palanquin was stopped at the gate, the curtains pulled
roughly back by one of the house guards. He had the copper skin
and dark almond eyes of a Dothraki, but his face was hairless and
he wore the spiked bronze cap of the Unsullied. He looked them
over coldly. Magister Illyrio growled something to him in the rough
Dothraki tongue; the guardsman replied in the same voice and
waved them through the gates.
Dany noticed that her brother’s hand was clenched tightly around
the hilt of his borrowed sword. He looked almost as frightened as
she felt. “Insolent eunuch,” Viserys muttered as the palanquin
lurched up toward the manse.
Magister Illyrio’s words were honey. “Many important men will
be at the feast tonight. Such men have enemies. The khal must
protect his guests, yourself chief among them, Your Grace. No
doubt the Usurper would pay well for your head.”
“Oh, yes,” Viserys said darkly. “He has tried, Illyrio, I promise
you that. His hired knives follow us everywhere. I am the last
dragon, and he will not sleep easy while I live.”

The palanquin slowed and stopped. The curtains were thrown
back, and a slave o ered a hand to help Daenerys out. His collar,
she noted, was ordinary bronze. Her brother followed, one hand
still clenched hard around his sword hilt. It took two strong men to
get Magister Illyrio back on his feet.
Inside the manse, the air was heavy with the scent of spices,
pinch re and sweet lemon and cinnamon. They were escorted
across the entry hall, where a mosaic of colored glass depicted the
Doom of Valyria. Oil burned in black iron lanterns all along the
walls. Beneath an arch of twining stone leaves, a eunuch sang their
coming. “Viserys of the House Targaryen, the Third of his Name,”
he called in a high, sweet voice, “King of the Andals and the
Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and
Protector of the Realm. His sister, Daenerys Stormborn, Princess of
Dragonstone. His honorable host, Illyrio Mopatis, Magister of the
Free City of Pentos.”
They stepped past the eunuch into a pillared courtyard overgrown
in pale ivy. Moonlight painted the leaves in shades of bone and
silver as the guests drifted among them. Many were Dothraki
horselords, big men with red-brown skin, their drooping mustachios
bound in metal rings, their black hair oiled and braided and hung
with bells. Yet among them moved bravos and sellswords from
Pentos and Myr and Tyrosh, a red priest even fatter than Illyrio,
hairy men from the Port of Ibben, and lords from the Summer Isles
with skin as black as ebony. Daenerys looked at them all in
wonder … and realized, with a sudden start of fear, that she was the
only woman there.
Illyrio whispered to them. “Those three are Drogo’s bloodriders,
there,” he said. “By the pillar is Khal Moro, with his son Rhogoro.
The man with the green beard is brother to the Archon of Tyrosh,
and the man behind him is Ser Jorah Mormont.”
The last name caught Daenerys. “A knight?”
“No less.” Illyrio smiled through his beard. “Anointed with the
seven oils by the High Septon himself.”
“What is he doing here?” she blurted.

“The Usurper wanted his head,” Illyrio told them. “Some tri ing
a ront. He sold some poachers to a Tyroshi slaver instead of giving
them to the Night’s Watch. Absurd law. A man should be able to do
as he likes with his own chattel.”
“I shall wish to speak with Ser Jorah before the night is done,”
her brother said. Dany found herself looking at the knight curiously.
He was an older man, past forty and balding, but still strong and t.
Instead of silks and cottons, he wore wool and leather. His tunic
was a dark green, embroidered with the likeness of a black bear
standing on two legs.
She was still looking at this strange man from the homeland she
had never known when Magister Illyrio placed a moist hand on her
bare shoulder. “Over there, sweet princess,” he whispered, “there is
the khal himself.”
Dany wanted to run and hide, but her brother was looking at her,
and if she displeased him she knew she would wake the dragon.
Anxiously, she turned and looked at the man Viserys hoped would
ask to wed her before the night was done.
The slave girl had not been far wrong, she thought. Khal Drogo
was a head taller than the tallest man in the room, yet somehow
light on his feet, as graceful as the panther in Illyrio’s menagerie.
He was younger than she’d thought, no more than thirty. His skin
was the color of polished copper, his thick mustachios bound with
gold and bronze rings.
“I must go and make my submissions,” Magister Illyrio said.
“Wait here. I shall bring him to you.”
Her brother took her by the arm as Illyrio waddled over to the
khal, his ngers squeezing so hard that they hurt. “Do you see his
braid, sweet sister?”
Drogo’s braid was black as midnight and heavy with scented oil,
hung with tiny bells that rang softly as he moved. It swung well
past his belt, below even his buttocks, the end of it brushing against
the back of his thighs.
“You see how long it is?” Viserys said. “When Dothraki are
defeated in combat, they cut o their braids in disgrace, so the

world will know their shame. Khal Drogo has never lost a ght. He
is Aegon the Dragonlord come again, and you will be his queen.”
Dany looked at Khal Drogo. His face was hard and cruel, his eyes
as cold and dark as onyx. Her brother hurt her sometimes, when she
woke the dragon, but he did not frighten her the way this man
frightened her. “I don’t want to be his queen,” she heard herself say
in a small, thin voice. “Please, please, Viserys, I don’t want to, I
want to go home.”
“Home!” He kept his voice low, but she could hear the fury in his
tone. “How are we to go home, sweet sister? They took our home
from us!” He drew her into the shadows, out of sight, his ngers
digging into her skin. “How are we to go home?” he repeated,
meaning King’s Landing, and Dragonstone, and all the realm they
had lost.
Dany had only meant their rooms in Illyrio’s estate, no true home
surely, though all they had, but her brother did not want to hear
that. There was no home there for him. Even the big house with the
red door had not been home for him. His ngers dug hard into her
arm, demanding an answer. “I don’t know …” she said at last, her
voice breaking. Tears welled in her eyes.
“I do,” he said sharply. “We go home with an army, sweet sister.
With Khal Drogo’s army, that is how we go home. And if you must
wed him and bed him for that, you will.” He smiled at her. “I’d let
his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty
thousand men, and their horses too if that was what it took to get
my army. Be grateful it is only Drogo. In time you may even learn
to like him. Now dry your eyes. Illyrio is bringing him over, and he
will not see you crying.”
Dany turned and saw that it was true. Magister Illyrio, all smiles
and bows, was escorting Khal Drogo over to where they stood. She
brushed away unfallen tears with the back of her hand.
“Smile,” Viserys whispered nervously, his hand falling to the hilt
of his sword. “And stand up straight. Let him see that you have
breasts. Gods know, you have little enough as is.”
Daenerys smiled, and stood up straight.

EDDARD

The visitors poured through the castle gates in a river of gold and
silver and polished steel, three hundred strong, a pride of
bannermen and knights, of sworn swords and freeriders. Over their
heads a dozen golden banners whipped back and forth in the
northern wind, emblazoned with the crowned stag of Baratheon.
Ned knew many of the riders. There came Ser Jaime Lannister
with hair as bright as beaten gold, and there Sandor Clegane with
his terrible burned face. The tall boy beside him could only be the
crown prince, and that stunted little man behind them was surely
the Imp, Tyrion Lannister.
Yet the huge man at the head of the column, anked by two
knights in the snow-white cloaks of the Kingsguard, seemed almost
a stranger to Ned … until he vaulted o the back of his warhorse
with a familiar roar, and crushed him in a bone-crunching hug.
“Ned! Ah, but it is good to see that frozen face of yours.” The king
looked him over top to bottom, and laughed. “You have not
changed at all.”
Would that Ned had been able to say the same. Fifteen years past,
when they had ridden forth to win a throne, the Lord of Storm’s End
had been clean-shaven, clear-eyed, and muscled like a maiden’s
fantasy. Six and a half feet tall, he towered over lesser men, and
when he donned his armor and the great antlered helmet of his
House, he became a veritable giant. He’d had a giant’s strength too,
his weapon of choice a spiked iron warhammer that Ned could

scarcely lift. In those days, the smell of leather and blood had clung
to him like perfume.
Now it was perfume that clung to him like perfume, and he had a
girth to match his height. Ned had last seen the king nine years
before during Balon Greyjoy’s rebellion, when the stag and the
direwolf had joined to end the pretensions of the self-proclaimed
King of the Iron Islands. Since the night they had stood side by side
in Greyjoy’s fallen stronghold, where Robert had accepted the rebel
lord’s surrender and Ned had taken his son Theon as hostage and
ward, the king had gained at least eight stone. A beard as coarse
and black as iron wire covered his jaw to hide his double chin and
the sag of the royal jowls, but nothing could hide his stomach or the
dark circles under his eyes.
Yet Robert was Ned’s king now, and not just a friend, so he said
only, “Your Grace. Winterfell is yours.”
By then the others were dismounting as well, and grooms were
coming forward for their mounts. Robert’s queen, Cersei Lannister,
entered on foot with her younger children. The wheelhouse in
which they had ridden, a huge double-decked carriage of oiled oak
and gilded metal pulled by forty heavy draft horses, was too wide
to pass through the castle gate. Ned knelt in the snow to kiss the
queen’s ring, while Robert embraced Catelyn like a long-lost sister.
Then the children had been brought forward, introduced, and
approved of by both sides.
No sooner had those formalities of greeting been completed than
the king had said to his host, “Take me down to your crypt, Eddard.
I would pay my respects.”
Ned loved him for that, for remembering her still after all these
years. He called for a lantern. No other words were needed. The
queen had begun to protest. They had been riding since dawn,
everyone was tired and cold, surely they should refresh themselves
rst. The dead would wait. She had said no more than that; Robert
had looked at her, and her twin brother Jaime had taken her quietly
by the arm, and she had said no more.
They went down to the crypt together, Ned and this king he
scarcely recognized. The winding stone steps were narrow. Ned

went rst with the lantern. “I was starting to think we would never
reach Winterfell,” Robert complained as they descended. “In the
south, the way they talk about my Seven Kingdoms, a man forgets
that your part is as big as the other six combined.”
“I trust you enjoyed the journey, Your Grace?”
Robert snorted. “Bogs and forests and elds, and scarcely a
decent inn north of the Neck. I’ve never seen such a vast emptiness.
Where are all your people?”
“Likely they were too shy to come out,” Ned jested. He could feel
the chill coming up the stairs, a cold breath from deep within the
earth. “Kings are a rare sight in the north.”
Robert snorted. “More likely they were hiding under the snow.
Snow, Ned!” The king put one hand on the wall to steady himself as
they descended.
“Late summer snows are common enough,” Ned said. “I hope they
did not trouble you. They are usually mild.”
“The Others take your mild snows,” Robert swore. “What will this
place be like in winter? I shudder to think.”
“The winters are hard,” Ned admitted. “But the Starks will
endure. We always have.”
“You need to come south,” Robert told him. “You need a taste of
summer before it ees. In Highgarden there are elds of golden
roses that stretch away as far as the eye can see. The fruits are so
ripe they explode in your mouth—melons, peaches, replums,
you’ve never tasted such sweetness. You’ll see, I brought you some.
Even at Storm’s End, with that good wind o the bay, the days are
so hot you can barely move. And you ought to see the towns, Ned!
Flowers everywhere, the markets bursting with food, the
summerwines so cheap and so good that you can get drunk just
breathing the air. Everyone is fat and drunk and rich.” He laughed
and slapped his own ample stomach a thump. “And the girls, Ned!”
he exclaimed, his eyes sparkling. “I swear, women lose all modesty
in the heat. They swim naked in the river, right beneath the castle.
Even in the streets, it’s too damn hot for wool or fur, so they go
around in these short gowns, silk if they have the silver and cotton
if not, but it’s all the same when they start sweating and the cloth

sticks to their skin, they might as well be naked.” The king laughed
happily.
Robert Baratheon had always been a man of huge appetites, a
man who knew how to take his pleasures. That was not a charge
anyone could lay at the door of Eddard Stark. Yet Ned could not
help but notice that those pleasures were taking a toll on the king.
Robert was breathing heavily by the time they reached the bottom
of the stairs, his face red in the lantern light as they stepped out
into the darkness of the crypt.
“Your Grace,” Ned said respectfully. He swept the lantern in a
wide semicircle. Shadows moved and lurched. Flickering light
touched the stones underfoot and brushed against a long procession
of granite pillars that marched ahead, two by two, into the dark.
Between the pillars, the dead sat on their stone thrones against the
walls, backs against the sepulchres that contained their mortal
remains. “She is down at the end, with Father and Brandon.”
He led the way between the pillars and Robert followed
wordlessly, shivering in the subterranean chill. It was always cold
down here. Their footsteps rang o the stones and echoed in the
vault overhead as they walked among the dead of House Stark. The
Lords of Winterfell watched them pass. Their likenesses were
carved into the stones that sealed the tombs. In long rows they sat,
blind eyes staring out into eternal darkness, while great stone
direwolves curled round their feet. The shifting shadows made the
stone gures seem to stir as the living passed by.
By ancient custom an iron longsword had been laid across the lap
of each who had been Lord of Winterfell, to keep the vengeful
spirits in their crypts. The oldest had long ago rusted away to
nothing, leaving only a few red stains where the metal had rested
on stone. Ned wondered if that meant those ghosts were free to
roam the castle now. He hoped not. The rst Lords of Winterfell
had been men hard as the land they ruled. In the centuries before
the Dragonlords came over the sea, they had sworn allegiance to no
man, styling themselves the Kings in the North.
Ned stopped at last and lifted the oil lantern. The crypt continued
on into darkness ahead of them, but beyond this point the tombs

were empty and unsealed; black holes waiting for their dead,
waiting for him and his children. Ned did not like to think on that.
“Here,” he told his king.
Robert nodded silently, knelt, and bowed his head.
There were three tombs, side by side. Lord Rickard Stark, Ned’s
father, had a long, stern face. The stonemason had known him well.
He sat with quiet dignity, stone ngers holding tight to the sword
across his lap, but in life all swords had failed him. In two smaller
sepulchres on either side were his children.
Brandon had been twenty when he died, strangled by order of the
Mad King Aerys Targaryen only a few short days before he was to
wed Catelyn Tully of Riverrun. His father had been forced to watch
him die. He was the true heir, the eldest, born to rule.
Lyanna had only been sixteen, a child-woman of surpassing
loveliness. Ned had loved her with all his heart. Robert had loved
her even more. She was to have been his bride.
“She was more beautiful than that,” the king said after a silence.
His eyes lingered on Lyanna’s face, as if he could will her back to
life. Finally he rose, made awkward by his weight. “Ah, damn it,
Ned, did you have to bury her in a place like this?” His voice was
hoarse with remembered grief. “She deserved more than
darkness …”
“She was a Stark of Winterfell,” Ned said quietly. “This is her
place.”
“She should be on a hill somewhere, under a fruit tree, with the
sun and clouds above her and the rain to wash her clean.”
“I was with her when she died,” Ned reminded the king. “She
wanted to come home, to rest beside Brandon and Father.” He could
hear her still at times. Promise me, she had cried, in a room that
smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken
her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he
gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister’s eyes. Ned
remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her ngers
had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals
spilling from her palm, dead and black. After that he remembered
nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with

grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand
from his. Ned could recall none of it. “I bring her owers when I
can,” he said. “Lyanna was … fond of owers.”
The king touched her cheek, his ngers brushing across the rough
stone as gently as if it were living esh. “I vowed to kill Rhaegar
for what he did to her.”
“You did,” Ned reminded him.
“Only once,” Robert said bitterly.
They had come together at the ford of the Trident while the
battle crashed around them, Robert with his warhammer and his
great antlered helm, the Targaryen prince armored all in black. On
his breastplate was the three-headed dragon of his House, wrought
all in rubies that ashed like re in the sunlight. The waters of the
Trident ran red around the hooves of their destriers as they circled
and clashed, again and again, until at last a crushing blow from
Robert’s hammer stove in the dragon and the chest beneath it.
When Ned had nally come on the scene, Rhaegar lay dead in the
stream, while men of both armies scrabbled in the swirling waters
for rubies knocked free of his armor.
“In my dreams, I kill him every night,” Robert admitted. “A
thousand deaths will still be less than he deserves.”
There was nothing Ned could say to that. After a quiet, he said,
“We should return, Your Grace. Your wife will be waiting.”
“The Others take my wife,” Robert muttered sourly, but he
started back the way they had come, his footsteps falling heavily.
“And if I hear ‘Your Grace’ once more, I’ll have your head on a
spike. We are more to each other than that.”
“I had not forgotten,” Ned replied quietly. When the king did not
answer, he said, “Tell me about Jon.”
Robert shook his head. “I have never seen a man sicken so
quickly. We gave a tourney on my son’s name day. If you had seen
Jon then, you would have sworn he would live forever. A fortnight
later he was dead. The sickness was like a re in his gut. It burned
right through him.” He paused beside a pillar, before the tomb of a
long-dead Stark. “I loved that old man.”

“We both did.” Ned paused a moment. “Catelyn fears for her
sister. How does Lysa bear her grief?”
Robert’s mouth gave a bitter twist. “Not well, in truth,” he
admitted. “I think losing Jon has driven the woman mad, Ned. She
has taken the boy back to the Eyrie. Against my wishes. I had hoped
to foster him with Tywin Lannister at Casterly Rock. Jon had no
brothers, no other sons. Was I supposed to leave him to be raised by
women?”
Ned would sooner entrust a child to a pit viper than to Lord
Tywin, but he left his doubts unspoken. Some old wounds never
truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word. “The wife has lost
the husband,” he said carefully. “Perhaps the mother feared to lose
the son. The boy is very young.”
“Six, and sickly, and Lord of the Eyrie, gods have mercy,” the
king swore. “Lord Tywin had never taken a ward before. Lysa ought
to have been honored. The Lannisters are a great and noble House.
She refused to even hear of it. Then she left in the dead of night,
without so much as a by-your-leave. Cersei was furious.” He sighed
deeply. “The boy is my namesake, did you know that? Robert
Arryn. I am sworn to protect him. How can I do that if his mother
steals him away?”
“I will take him as ward, if you wish,” Ned said. “Lysa should
consent to that. She and Catelyn were close as girls, and she would
be welcome here as well.”
“A generous o er, my friend,” the king said, “but too late. Lord
Tywin has already given his consent. Fostering the boy elsewhere
would be a grievous a ront to him.”
“I have more concern for my nephew’s welfare than I do for
Lannister pride,” Ned declared.
“That is because you do not sleep with a Lannister.” Robert
laughed, the sound rattling among the tombs and bouncing from the
vaulted ceiling. His smile was a ash of white teeth in the thicket of
the huge black beard. “Ah, Ned,” he said, “you are still too serious.”
He put a massive arm around Ned’s shoulders. “I had planned to
wait a few days to speak to you, but I see now there’s no need for
it. Come, walk with me.”

They started back down between the pillars. Blind stone eyes
seemed to follow them as they passed. The king kept his arm
around Ned’s shoulder. “You must have wondered why I nally
came north to Winterfell, after so long.”
Ned had his suspicions, but he did not give them voice. “For the
joy of my company, surely,” he said lightly. “And there is the Wall.
You need to see it, Your Grace, to walk along its battlements and
talk to those who man it. The Night’s Watch is a shadow of what it
once was. Benjen says—”
“No doubt I will hear what your brother says soon enough,”
Robert said. “The Wall has stood for what, eight thousand years? It
can keep a few days more. I have more pressing concerns. These are
di cult times. I need good men about me. Men like Jon Arryn. He
served as Lord of the Eyrie, as Warden of the East, as the Hand of
the King. He will not be easy to replace.”
“His son …” Ned began.
“His son will succeed to the Eyrie and all its incomes,” Robert
said brusquely. “No more.”
That took Ned by surprise. He stopped, startled, and turned to
look at his king. The words came unbidden. “The Arryns have
always been Wardens of the East. The title goes with the domain.”
“Perhaps when he comes of age, the honor can be restored to
him,” Robert said. “I have this year to think of, and next. A six-yearold boy is no war leader, Ned.”
“In peace, the title is only an honor. Let the boy keep it. For his
father’s sake if not his own. Surely you owe Jon that much for his
service.”
The king was not pleased. He took his arm from around Ned’s
shoulders. “Jon’s service was the duty he owed his liege lord. I am
not ungrateful, Ned. You of all men ought to know that. But the son
is not the father. A mere boy cannot hold the east.” Then his tone
softened. “Enough of this. There is a more important o ce to
discuss, and I would not argue with you.” Robert grasped Ned by
the elbow. “I have need of you, Ned.”
“I am yours to command, Your Grace. Always.” They were words
he had to say, and so he said them, apprehensive about what might

come next.
Robert scarcely seemed to hear him. “Those years we spent in the
Eyrie … gods, those were good years. I want you at my side again,
Ned. I want you down in King’s Landing, not up here at the end of
the world where you are no damned use to anybody.” Robert
looked o into the darkness, for a moment as melancholy as a
Stark. “I swear to you, sitting a throne is a thousand times harder
than winning one. Laws are a tedious business and counting coppers
is worse. And the people … there is no end of them. I sit on that
damnable iron chair and listen to them complain until my mind is
numb and my ass is raw. They all want something, money or land
or justice. The lies they tell … and my lords and ladies are no
better. I am surrounded by atterers and fools. It can drive a man to
madness, Ned. Half of them don’t dare tell me the truth, and the
other half can’t nd it. There are nights I wish we had lost at the
Trident. Ah, no, not truly, but …”
“I understand,” Ned said softly.
Robert looked at him. “I think you do. If so, you are the only one,
my old friend.” He smiled. “Lord Eddard Stark, I would name you
the Hand of the King.”
Ned dropped to one knee. The o er did not surprise him; what
other reason could Robert have had for coming so far? The Hand of
the King was the second-most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms.
He spoke with the king’s voice, commanded the king’s armies,
drafted the king’s laws. At times he even sat upon the Iron Throne
to dispense king’s justice, when the king was absent, or sick, or
otherwise indisposed. Robert was o ering him a responsibility as
large as the realm itself.
It was the last thing in the world he wanted.
“Your Grace,” he said. “I am not worthy of the honor.”
Robert groaned with good-humored impatience. “If I wanted to
honor you, I’d let you retire. I am planning to make you run the
kingdom and ght the wars while I eat and drink and wench myself
into an early grave.” He slapped his gut and grinned. “You know
the saying, about the king and his Hand?”

Ned knew the saying. “What the king dreams,” he said, “the Hand
builds.”
“I bedded a shmaid once who told me the lowborn have a
choicer way to put it. The king eats, they say, and the Hand takes
the shit.” He threw back his head and roared his laughter. The
echoes rang through the darkness, and all around them the dead of
Winterfell seemed to watch with cold and disapproving eyes.
Finally the laughter dwindled and stopped. Ned was still on one
knee, his eyes upraised. “Damn it, Ned,” the king complained. “You
might at least humor me with a smile.”
“They say it grows so cold up here in winter that a man’s laughter
freezes in his throat and chokes him to death,” Ned said evenly.
“Perhaps that is why the Starks have so little humor.”
“Come south with me, and I’ll teach you how to laugh again,” the
king promised. “You helped me win this damnable throne, now help
me hold it. We were meant to rule together. If Lyanna had lived,
we should have been brothers, bound by blood as well as a ection.
Well, it is not too late. I have a son. You have a daughter. My Jo
and your Sansa shall join our houses, as Lyanna and I might once
have done.”
This o er did surprise him. “Sansa is only eleven.”
Robert waved an impatient hand. “Old enough for betrothal. The
marriage can wait a few years.” The king smiled. “Now stand up
and say yes, curse you.”
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Your Grace,” Ned
answered. He hesitated. “These honors are all so unexpected. May I
have some time to consider? I need to tell my wife …”
“Yes, yes, of course, tell Catelyn, sleep on it if you must.” The
king reached down, clasped Ned by the hand, and pulled him
roughly to his feet. “Just don’t keep me waiting too long. I am not
the most patient of men.”
For a moment Eddard Stark was lled with a terrible sense of
foreboding. This was his place, here in the north. He looked at the
stone gures all around them, breathed deep in the chill silence of
the crypt. He could feel the eyes of the dead. They were all
listening, he knew. And winter was coming.

JON

There were times—not many, but a few—when Jon Snow was glad
he was a bastard. As he lled his wine cup once more from a
passing agon, it struck him that this might be one of them.
He settled back in his place on the bench among the younger
squires and drank. The sweet, fruity taste of summerwine lled his
mouth and brought a smile to his lips.
The Great Hall of Winterfell was hazy with smoke and heavy with
the smell of roasted meat and fresh-baked bread. Its grey stone
walls were draped with banners. White, gold, crimson: the direwolf
of Stark, Baratheon’s crowned stag, the lion of Lannister. A singer
was playing the high harp and reciting a ballad, but down at this
end of the hall his voice could scarcely be heard above the roar of
the re, the clangor of pewter plates and cups, and the low mutter
of a hundred drunken conversations.
It was the fourth hour of the welcoming feast laid for the king.
Jon’s brothers and sisters had been seated with the royal children,
beneath the raised platform where Lord and Lady Stark hosted the
king and queen. In honor of the occasion, his lord father would
doubtless permit each child a glass of wine, but no more than that.
Down here on the benches, there was no one to stop Jon drinking as
much as he had a thirst for.
And he was nding that he had a man’s thirst, to the raucous
delight of the youths around him, who urged him on every time he
drained a glass. They were ne company, and Jon relished the

stories they were telling, tales of battle and bedding and the hunt.
He was certain that his companions were more entertaining than the
king’s o spring. He had sated his curiosity about the visitors when
they made their entrance. The procession had passed not a foot
from the place he had been given on the bench, and Jon had gotten
a good long look at them all.
His lord father had come rst, escorting the queen. She was as
beautiful as men said. A jeweled tiara gleamed amidst her long
golden hair, its emeralds a perfect match for the green of her eyes.
His father helped her up the steps to the dais and led her to her
seat, but the queen never so much as looked at him. Even at
fourteen, Jon could see through her smile.
Next had come King Robert himself, with Lady Stark on his arm.
The king was a great disappointment to Jon. His father had talked
of him often: the peerless Robert Baratheon, demon of the Trident,
the ercest warrior of the realm, a giant among princes. Jon saw
only a fat man, red-faced under his beard, sweating through his
silks. He walked like a man half in his cups.
After them came the children. Little Rickon rst, managing the
long walk with all the dignity a three-year-old could muster. Jon
had to urge him on when he stopped to visit. Close behind came
Robb, in grey wool trimmed with white, the Stark colors. He had
the Princess Myrcella on his arm. She was a wisp of a girl, not quite
eight, her hair a cascade of golden curls under a jeweled net. Jon
noticed the shy looks she gave Robb as they passed between the
tables and the timid way she smiled at him. He decided she was
insipid. Robb didn’t even have the sense to realize how stupid she
was; he was grinning like a fool.
His half sisters escorted the royal princes. Arya was paired with
plump young Tommen, whose white-blond hair was longer than
hers. Sansa, two years older, drew the crown prince, Jo rey
Baratheon. He was twelve, younger than Jon or Robb, but taller
than either, to Jon’s vast dismay. Prince Jo rey had his sister’s hair
and his mother’s deep green eyes. A thick tangle of blond curls
dripped down past his golden choker and high velvet collar. Sansa
looked radiant as she walked beside him, but Jon did not like

Jo rey’s pouty lips or the bored, disdainful way he looked at
Winterfell’s Great Hall.
He was more interested in the pair that came behind him: the
queen’s brothers, the Lannisters of Casterly Rock. The Lion and the
Imp; there was no mistaking which was which. Ser Jaime Lannister
was twin to Queen Cersei; tall and golden, with ashing green eyes
and a smile that cut like a knife. He wore crimson silk, high black
boots, a black satin cloak. On the breast of his tunic, the lion of his
House was embroidered in gold thread, roaring its de ance. They
called him the Lion of Lannister to his face and whispered
“Kingslayer” behind his back.
Jon found it hard to look away from him. This is what a king
should look like, he thought to himself as the man passed.
Then he saw the other one, waddling along half-hidden by his
brother’s side. Tyrion Lannister, the youngest of Lord Tywin’s brood
and by far the ugliest. All that the gods had given to Cersei and
Jaime, they had denied Tyrion. He was a dwarf, half his brother’s
height, struggling to keep pace on stunted legs. His head was too
large for his body, with a brute’s squashed-in face beneath a swollen
shelf of brow. One green eye and one black one peered out from
under a lank fall of hair so blond it seemed white. Jon watched him
with fascination.
The last of the high lords to enter were his uncle, Benjen Stark of
the Night’s Watch, and his father’s ward, young Theon Greyjoy.
Benjen gave Jon a warm smile as he went by. Theon ignored him
utterly, but there was nothing new in that. After all had been
seated, toasts were made, thanks were given and returned, and then
the feasting began.
Jon had started drinking then, and he had not stopped.
Something rubbed against his leg beneath the table. Jon saw red
eyes staring up at him. “Hungry again?” he asked. There was still
half a honeyed chicken in the center of the table. Jon reached out to
tear o a leg, then had a better idea. He knifed the bird whole and
let the carcass slide to the oor between his legs. Ghost ripped into
it in savage silence. His brothers and sisters had not been permitted
to bring their wolves to the banquet, but there were more curs than

Jon could count at this end of the hall, and no one had said a word
about his pup. He told himself he was fortunate in that too.
His eyes stung. Jon rubbed at them savagely, cursing the smoke.
He swallowed another gulp of wine and watched his direwolf
devour the chicken.
Dogs moved between the tables, trailing after the serving girls.
One of them, a black mongrel bitch with long yellow eyes, caught a
scent of the chicken. She stopped and edged under the bench to get
a share. Jon watched the confrontation. The bitch growled low in
her throat and moved closer. Ghost looked up, silent, and xed the
dog with those hot red eyes. The bitch snapped an angry challenge.
She was three times the size of the direwolf pup. Ghost did not
move. He stood over his prize and opened his mouth, baring his
fangs. The bitch tensed, barked again, then thought better of this
ght. She turned and slunk away, with one last de ant snap to save
her pride. Ghost went back to his meal.
Jon grinned and reached under the table to ru e the shaggy
white fur. The direwolf looked up at him, nipped gently at his hand,
then went back to eating.
“Is this one of the direwolves I’ve heard so much of?” a familiar
voice asked close at hand.
Jon looked up happily as his uncle Ben put a hand on his head and
ru ed his hair much as Jon had ru ed the wolf’s. “Yes,” he said.
“His name is Ghost.”
One of the squires interrupted the bawdy story he’d been telling
to make room at the table for their lord’s brother. Benjen Stark
straddled the bench with long legs and took the wine cup out of
Jon’s hand. “Summerwine,” he said after a taste. “Nothing so sweet.
How many cups have you had, Jon?”
Jon smiled.
Ben Stark laughed. “As I feared. Ah, well. I believe I was younger
than you the rst time I got truly and sincerely drunk.” He snagged
a roasted onion, dripping brown with gravy, from a nearby trencher
and bit into it. It crunched.
His uncle was sharp-featured and gaunt as a mountain crag, but
there was always a hint of laughter in his blue-grey eyes. He

dressed in black, as be tted a man of the Night’s Watch. Tonight it
was rich black velvet, with high leather boots and a wide belt with
a silver buckle. A heavy silver chain was looped round his neck.
Benjen watched Ghost with amusement as he ate his onion. “A very
quiet wolf,” he observed.
“He’s not like the others,” Jon said. “He never makes a sound.
That’s why I named him Ghost. That, and because he’s white. The
others are all dark, grey or black.”
“There are still direwolves beyond the Wall. We hear them on our
rangings.” Benjen Stark gave Jon a long look. “Don’t you usually
eat at table with your brothers?”
“Most times,” Jon answered in a at voice. “But tonight Lady
Stark thought it might give insult to the royal family to seat a
bastard among them.”
“I see.” His uncle glanced over his shoulder at the raised table at
the far end of the hall. “My brother does not seem very festive
tonight.”
Jon had noticed that too. A bastard had to learn to notice things,
to read the truth that people hid behind their eyes. His father was
observing all the courtesies, but there was tightness in him that Jon
had seldom seen before. He said little, looking out over the hall
with hooded eyes, seeing nothing. Two seats away, the king had
been drinking heavily all night. His broad face was ushed behind
his great black beard. He made many a toast, laughed loudly at
every jest, and attacked each dish like a starving man, but beside
him the queen seemed as cold as an ice sculpture. “The queen is
angry too,” Jon told his uncle in a low, quiet voice. “Father took the
king down to the crypts this afternoon. The queen didn’t want him
to go.”
Benjen gave Jon a careful, measuring look. “You don’t miss much,
do you, Jon? We could use a man like you on the Wall.”
Jon swelled with pride. “Robb is a stronger lance than I am, but
I’m the better sword, and Hullen says I sit a horse as well as anyone
in the castle.”
“Notable achievements.”

“Take me with you when you go back to the Wall,” Jon said in a
sudden rush. “Father will give me leave to go if you ask him, I
know he will.”
Uncle Benjen studied his face carefully. “The Wall is a hard place
for a boy, Jon.”
“I am almost a man grown,” Jon protested. “I will turn fteen on
my next name day, and Maester Luwin says bastards grow up faster
than other children.”
“That’s true enough,” Benjen said with a downward twist of his
mouth. He took Jon’s cup from the table, lled it fresh from a
nearby pitcher, and drank down a long swallow.
“Daeren Targaryen was only fourteen when he conquered Dorne,”
Jon said. The Young Dragon was one of his heroes.
“A conquest that lasted a summer,” his uncle pointed out. “Your
Boy King lost ten thousand men taking the place, and another fty
trying to hold it. Someone should have told him that war isn’t a
game.” He took another sip of wine. “Also,” he said, wiping his
mouth, “Daeren Targaryen was only eighteen when he died. Or
have you forgotten that part?”
“I forget nothing,” Jon boasted. The wine was making him bold.
He tried to sit very straight, to make himself seem taller. “I want to
serve in the Night’s Watch, Uncle.”
He had thought on it long and hard, lying abed at night while his
brothers slept around him. Robb would someday inherit Winterfell,
would command great armies as the Warden of the North. Bran and
Rickon would be Robb’s bannermen and rule holdfasts in his name.
His sisters Arya and Sansa would marry the heirs of other great
houses and go south as mistress of castles of their own. But what
place could a bastard hope to earn?
“You don’t know what you’re asking, Jon. The Night’s Watch is a
sworn brotherhood. We have no families. None of us will ever
father sons. Our wife is duty. Our mistress is honor.”
“A bastard can have honor too,” Jon said. “I am ready to swear
your oath.”
“You are a boy of fourteen,” Benjen said. “Not a man, not yet.
Until you have known a woman, you cannot understand what you

would be giving up.”
“I don’t care about that!” Jon said hotly.
“You might, if you knew what it meant,” Benjen said. “If you
knew what the oath would cost you, you might be less eager to pay
the price, son.”
Jon felt anger rise inside him. “I’m not your son!”
Benjen Stark stood up. “More’s the pity.” He put a hand on Jon’s
shoulder. “Come back to me after you’ve fathered a few bastards of
your own, and we’ll see how you feel.”
Jon trembled. “I will never father a bastard,” he said carefully.
“Never!” He spat it out like venom.
Suddenly he realized that the table had fallen silent, and they
were all looking at him. He felt the tears begin to well behind his
eyes. He pushed himself to his feet.
“I must be excused,” he said with the last of his dignity. He
whirled and bolted before they could see him cry. He must have
drunk more wine than he had realized. His feet got tangled under
him as he tried to leave, and he lurched sideways into a serving girl
and sent a agon of spiced wine crashing to the oor. Laughter
boomed all around him, and Jon felt hot tears on his cheeks.
Someone tried to steady him. He wrenched free of their grip and
ran, half-blind, for the door. Ghost followed close at his heels, out
into the night.
The yard was quiet and empty. A lone sentry stood high on the
battlements of the inner wall, his cloak pulled tight around him
against the cold. He looked bored and miserable as he huddled there
alone, but Jon would have traded places with him in an instant.
Otherwise the castle was dark and deserted. Jon had seen an
abandoned holdfast once, a drear place where nothing moved but
the wind and the stones kept silent about whatever people had lived
there. Winterfell reminded him of that tonight.
The sounds of music and song spilled through the open windows
behind him. They were the last things Jon wanted to hear. He
wiped away his tears on the sleeve of his shirt, furious that he had
let them fall, and turned to go.
“Boy,” a voice called out to him. Jon turned.

Tyrion Lannister was sitting on the ledge above the door to the
Great Hall, looking for all the world like a gargoyle. The dwarf
grinned down at him. “Is that animal a wolf?”
“A direwolf,” Jon said. “His name is Ghost.” He stared up at the
little man, his disappointment suddenly forgotten. “What are you
doing up there? Why aren’t you at the feast?”
“Too hot, too noisy, and I’d drunk too much wine,” the dwarf told
him. “I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your
brother. Might I have a closer look at your wolf?”
Jon hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Can you climb down, or shall
I bring a ladder?”
“Oh, bleed that,” the little man said. He pushed himself o the
ledge into empty air. Jon gasped, then watched with awe as Tyrion
Lannister spun around in a tight ball, landed lightly on his hands,
then vaulted backward onto his legs.
Ghost backed away from him uncertainly.
The dwarf dusted himself o and laughed. “I believe I’ve
frightened your wolf. My apologies.”
“He’s not scared,” Jon said. He knelt and called out. “Ghost, come
here. Come on. That’s it.”
The wolf pup padded closer and nuzzled at Jon’s face, but he kept
a wary eye on Tyrion Lannister, and when the dwarf reached out to
pet him, he drew back and bared his fangs in a silent snarl. “Shy,
isn’t he?” Lannister observed.
“Sit, Ghost,” Jon commanded. “That’s it. Keep still.” He looked up
at the dwarf. “You can touch him now. He won’t move until I tell
him to. I’ve been training him.”
“I see,” Lannister said. He ru ed the snow-white fur between
Ghost’s ears and said, “Nice wolf.”
“If I wasn’t here, he’d tear out your throat,” Jon said. It wasn’t
actually true yet, but it would be.
“In that case, you had best stay close,” the dwarf said. He cocked
his oversized head to one side and looked Jon over with his
mismatched eyes. “I am Tyrion Lannister.”
“I know,” Jon said. He rose. Standing, he was taller than the
dwarf. It made him feel strange.

“You’re Ned Stark’s bastard, aren’t you?”
Jon felt a coldness pass right through him. He pressed his lips
together and said nothing.
“Did I o end you?” Lannister said. “Sorry. Dwarfs don’t have to
be tactful. Generations of capering fools in motley have won me the
right to dress badly and say any damn thing that comes into my
head.” He grinned. “You are the bastard, though.”
“Lord Eddard Stark is my father,” Jon admitted sti y.
Lannister studied his face. “Yes,” he said. “I can see it. You have
more of the north in you than your brothers.”
“Half brothers,” Jon corrected. He was pleased by the dwarf’s
comment, but he tried not to let it show.
“Let me give you some counsel, bastard,” Lannister said. “Never
forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your
strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it,
and it will never be used to hurt you.”
Jon was in no mood for anyone’s counsel. “What do you know
about being a bastard?”
“All dwarfs are bastards in their father’s eyes.”
“You are your mother’s trueborn son of Lannister.”
“Am I?” the dwarf replied, sardonic. “Do tell my lord father. My
mother died birthing me, and he’s never been sure.”
“I don’t even know who my mother was,” Jon said.
“Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are.” He favored Jon with
a rueful grin. “Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet
not all bastards need be dwarfs.” And with that he turned and
sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune. When he opened the
door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard,
and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.

CATELYN

Of all the rooms in Winterfell’s Great Keep, Catelyn’s bedchambers
were the hottest. She seldom had to light a re. The castle had been
built over natural hot springs, and the scalding waters rushed
through its walls and chambers like blood through a man’s body,
driving the chill from the stone halls, lling the glass gardens with a
moist warmth, keeping the earth from freezing. Open pools smoked
day and night in a dozen small courtyards. That was a little thing, in
summer; in winter, it was the di erence between life and death.
Catelyn’s bath was always hot and steaming, and her walls warm
to the touch. The warmth reminded her of Riverrun, of days in the
sun with Lysa and Edmure, but Ned could never abide the heat. The
Starks were made for the cold, he would tell her, and she would
laugh and tell him in that case they had certainly built their castle in
the wrong place.
So when they had nished, Ned rolled o and climbed from her
bed, as he had a thousand times before. He crossed the room, pulled
back the heavy tapestries, and threw open the high narrow windows
one by one, letting the night air into the chamber.
The wind swirled around him as he stood facing the dark, naked
and empty-handed. Catelyn pulled the furs to her chin and watched
him. He looked somehow smaller and more vulnerable, like the
youth she had wed in the sept at Riverrun, fteen long years gone.
Her loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a
good ache. She could feel his seed within her. She prayed that it

might quicken there. It had been three years since Rickon. She was
not too old. She could give him another son.
“I will refuse him,” Ned said as he turned back to her. His eyes
were haunted, his voice thick with doubt.
Catelyn sat up in the bed. “You cannot. You must not.”
“My duties are here in the north. I have no wish to be Robert’s
Hand.”
“He will not understand that. He is a king now, and kings are not
like other men. If you refuse to serve him, he will wonder why, and
sooner or later he will begin to suspect that you oppose him. Can’t
you see the danger that would put us in?”
Ned shook his head, refusing to believe. “Robert would never
harm me or any of mine. We were closer than brothers. He loves
me. If I refuse him, he will roar and curse and bluster, and in a
week we will laugh about it together. I know the man!”
“You knew the man,” she said. “The king is a stranger to you.”
Catelyn remembered the direwolf dead in the snow, the broken
antler lodged deep in her throat. She had to make him see. “Pride is
everything to a king, my lord. Robert came all this way to see you,
to bring you these great honors, you cannot throw them back in his
face.”
“Honors?” Ned laughed bitterly.
“In his eyes, yes,” she said.
“And in yours?”
“And in mine,” she blazed, angry now. Why couldn’t he see? “He
o ers his own son in marriage to our daughter, what else would
you call that? Sansa might someday be queen. Her sons could rule
from the Wall to the mountains of Dorne. What is so wrong with
that?”
“Gods, Catelyn, Sansa is only eleven,” Ned said. “And
Jo rey … Jo rey is …”
She nished for him. “… crown prince, and heir to the Iron
Throne. And I was only twelve when my father promised me to
your brother Brandon.”
That brought a bitter twist to Ned’s mouth. “Brandon. Yes.
Brandon would know what to do. He always did. It was all meant

for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was born to be a
King’s Hand and a father to queens. I never asked for this cup to
pass to me.”
“Perhaps not,” Catelyn said, “but Brandon is dead, and the cup
has passed, and you must drink from it, like it or not.”
Ned turned away from her, back to the night. He stood staring
out in the darkness, watching the moon and the stars perhaps, or
perhaps the sentries on the wall.
Catelyn softened then, to see his pain. Eddard Stark had married
her in Brandon’s place, as custom decreed, but the shadow of his
dead brother still lay between them, as did the other, the shadow of
the woman he would not name, the woman who had borne him his
bastard son.
She was about to go to him when the knock came at the door,
loud and unexpected. Ned turned, frowning. “What is it?”
Desmond’s voice came through the door. “My lord, Maester
Luwin is without and begs urgent audience.”
“You told him I had left orders not to be disturbed?”
“Yes, my lord. He insists.”
“Very well. Send him in.”
Ned crossed to the wardrobe and slipped on a heavy robe.
Catelyn realized suddenly how cold it had become. She sat up in bed
and pulled the furs to her chin. “Perhaps we should close the
windows,” she suggested.
Ned nodded absently. Maester Luwin was shown in.
The maester was a small grey man. His eyes were grey, and
quick, and saw much. His hair was grey, what little the years had
left him. His robe was grey wool, trimmed with white fur, the Stark
colors. Its great oppy sleeves had pockets hidden inside. Luwin
was always tucking things into those sleeves and producing other
things from them: books, messages, strange artifacts, toys for the
children. With all he kept hidden in his sleeves, Catelyn was
surprised that Maester Luwin could lift his arms at all.
The maester waited until the door had closed behind him before
he spoke. “My lord,” he said to Ned, “pardon for disturbing your
rest. I have been left a message.”

Ned looked irritated. “Been left? By whom? Has there been a
rider? I was not told.”
“There was no rider, my lord. Only a carved wooden box, left on
a table in my observatory while I napped. My servants saw no one,
but it must have been brought by someone in the king’s party. We
have had no other visitors from the south.”
“A wooden box, you say?” Catelyn said.
“Inside was a ne new lens for the observatory, from Myr by the
look of it. The lenscrafters of Myr are without equal.”
Ned frowned. He had little patience for this sort of thing, Catelyn
knew. “A lens,” he said. “What has that to do with me?”
“I asked the same question,” Maester Luwin said. “Clearly there
was more to this than the seeming.”
Under the heavy weight of her furs, Catelyn shivered. “A lens is
an instrument to help us see.”
“Indeed it is.” He ngered the collar of his order; a heavy chain
worn tight around the neck beneath his robe, each link forged from
a di erent metal.
Catelyn could feel dread stirring inside her once again. “What is it
that they would have us see more clearly?”
“The very thing I asked myself.” Maester Luwin drew a tightly
rolled paper out of his sleeve. “I found the true message concealed
within a false bottom when I dismantled the box the lens had come
in, but it is not for my eyes.”
Ned held out his hand. “Let me have it, then.”
Luwin did not stir. “Pardons, my lord. The message is not for you
either. It is marked for the eyes of the Lady Catelyn, and her alone.
May I approach?”
Catelyn nodded, not trusting to speak. The maester placed the
paper on the table beside the bed. It was sealed with a small blob of
blue wax. Luwin bowed and began to retreat.
“Stay,” Ned commanded him. His voice was grave. He looked at
Catelyn. “What is it? My lady, you’re shaking.”
“I’m afraid,” she admitted. She reached out and took the letter in
trembling hands. The furs dropped away from her nakedness,
forgotten. In the blue wax was the moon-and-falcon seal of House

Arryn. “It’s from Lysa.” Catelyn looked at her husband. “It will not
make us glad,” she told him. “There is grief in this message, Ned. I
can feel it.”
Ned frowned, his face darkening. “Open it.”
Catelyn broke the seal.
Her eyes moved over the words. At rst they made no sense to
her. Then she remembered. “Lysa took no chances. When we were
girls together, we had a private language, she and I.”
“Can you read it?”
“Yes,” Catelyn admitted.
“Then tell us.”
“Perhaps I should withdraw,” Maester Luwin said.
“No,” Catelyn said. “We will need your counsel.” She threw back
the furs and climbed from the bed. The night air was as cold as the
grave on her bare skin as she padded across the room.
Maester Luwin averted his eyes. Even Ned looked shocked. “What
are you doing?” he asked.
“Lighting a re,” Catelyn told him. She found a dressing gown
and shrugged into it, then knelt over the cold hearth.
“Maester Luwin—” Ned began.
“Maester Luwin has delivered all my children,” Catelyn said.
“This is no time for false modesty.” She slid the paper in among the
kindling and placed the heavier logs on top of it.
Ned crossed the room, took her by the arm, and pulled her to her
feet. He held her there, his face inches from her. “My lady, tell me!
What was this message?”
Catelyn sti ened in his grasp. “A warning,” she said softly. “If we
have the wits to hear.”
His eyes searched her face. “Go on.”
“Lysa says Jon Arryn was murdered.”
His ngers tightened on her arm. “By whom?”
“The Lannisters,” she told him. “The queen.”
Ned released his hold on her arm. There were deep red marks on
her skin. “Gods,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse. “Your sister is
sick with grief. She cannot know what she is saying.”

“She knows,” Catelyn said. “Lysa is impulsive, yes, but this
message was carefully planned, cleverly hidden. She knew it meant
death if her letter fell into the wrong hands. To risk so much, she
must have had more than mere suspicion.” Catelyn looked to her
husband. “Now we truly have no choice. You must be Robert’s
Hand. You must go south with him and learn the truth.”
She saw at once that Ned had reached a very di erent conclusion.
“The only truths I know are here. The south is a nest of adders I
would do better to avoid.”
Luwin plucked at his chain collar where it had chafed the soft skin
of his throat. “The Hand of the King has great power, my lord.
Power to nd the truth of Lord Arryn’s death, to bring his killers to
the king’s justice. Power to protect Lady Arryn and her son, if the
worst be true.”
Ned glanced helplessly around the bedchamber. Catelyn’s heart
went out to him, but she knew she could not take him in her arms
just then. First the victory must be won, for her children’s sake.
“You say you love Robert like a brother. Would you leave your
brother surrounded by Lannisters?”
“The Others take both of you,” Ned muttered darkly. He turned
away from them and went to the window. She did not speak, nor
did the maester. They waited, quiet, while Eddard Stark said a silent
farewell to the home he loved. When he turned away from the
window at last, his voice was tired and full of melancholy, and
moisture glittered faintly in the corners of his eyes. “My father
went south once, to answer the summons of a king. He never came
home again.”
“A di erent time,” Maester Luwin said. “A di erent king.”
“Yes,” Ned said dully. He seated himself in a chair by the hearth.
“Catelyn, you shall stay here in Winterfell.”
His words were like an icy draft through her heart. “No,” she
said, suddenly afraid. Was this to be her punishment? Never to see
his face again, nor to feel his arms around her?
“Yes,” Ned said, in words that would brook no argument. “You
must govern the north in my stead, while I run Robert’s errands.
There must always be a Stark in Winterfell. Robb is fourteen. Soon

enough, he will be a man grown. He must learn to rule, and I will
not be here for him. Make him part of your councils. He must be
ready when his time comes.”
“Gods will, not for many years,” Maester Luwin murmured.
“Maester Luwin, I trust you as I would my own blood. Give my
wife your voice in all things great and small. Teach my son the
things he needs to know. Winter is coming.”
Maester Luwin nodded gravely. Then silence fell, until Catelyn
found her courage and asked the question whose answer she most
dreaded. “What of the other children?”
Ned stood, and took her in his arms, and held her face close to
his. “Rickon is very young,” he said gently. “He should stay here
with you and Robb. The others I would take with me.”
“I could not bear it,” Catelyn said, trembling.
“You must,” he said. “Sansa must wed Jo rey, that is clear now,
we must give them no grounds to suspect our devotion. And it is
past time that Arya learned the ways of a southron court. In a few
years she will be of an age to marry too.”
Sansa would shine in the south, Catelyn thought to herself, and
the gods knew that Arya needed re nement. Reluctantly, she let go
of them in her heart. But not Bran. Never Bran. “Yes,” she said, “but
please, Ned, for the love you bear me, let Bran remain here at
Winterfell. He is only seven.”
“I was eight when my father sent me to foster at the Eyrie,” Ned
said. “Ser Rodrik tells me there is bad feeling between Robb and
Prince Jo rey. That is not healthy. Bran can bridge that distance.
He is a sweet boy, quick to laugh, easy to love. Let him grow up
with the young princes, let him become their friend as Robert
became mine. Our House will be the safer for it.”
He was right; Catelyn knew it. It did not make the pain any easier
to bear. She would lose all four of them, then: Ned, and both girls,
and her sweet, loving Bran. Only Robb and little Rickon would be
left to her. She felt lonely already. Winterfell was such a vast place.
“Keep him o the walls, then,” she said bravely. “You know how
Bran loves to climb.”

Ned kissed the tears from her eyes before they could fall. “Thank
you, my lady,” he whispered. “This is hard, I know.”
“What of Jon Snow, my lord?” Maester Luwin asked.
Catelyn tensed at the mention of the name. Ned felt the anger in
her, and pulled away.
Many men fathered bastards. Catelyn had grown up with that
knowledge. It came as no surprise to her, in the rst year of her
marriage, to learn that Ned had fathered a child on some girl chance
met on campaign. He had a man’s needs, after all, and they had
spent that year apart, Ned o at war in the south while she
remained safe in her father’s castle at Riverrun. Her thoughts were
more of Robb, the infant at her breast, than of the husband she
scarcely knew. He was welcome to whatever solace he might nd
between battles. And if his seed quickened, she expected he would
see to the child’s needs.
He did more than that. The Starks were not like other men. Ned
brought his bastard home with him, and called him “son” for all the
north to see. When the wars were over at last, and Catelyn rode to
Winterfell, Jon and his wet nurse had already taken up residence.
That cut deep. Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much
as a word, but a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids
repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband’s soldiers.
They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning,
deadliest of the seven knights of Aerys’s Kingsguard, and of how
their young lord had slain him in single combat. And they told how
afterward Ned had carried Ser Arthur’s sword back to the beautiful
young sister who awaited him in a castle called Starfall on the
shores of the Summer Sea. The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair,
with haunting violet eyes. It had taken her a fortnight to marshal
her courage, but nally, in bed one night, Catelyn had asked her
husband the truth of it, asked him to his face.
That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever
frightened her. “Never ask me about Jon,” he said, cold as ice. “He
is my blood, and that is all you need to know. And now I will learn
where you heard that name, my lady.” She had pledged to obey; she

told him; and from that day on, the whispering had stopped, and
Ashara Dayne’s name was never heard in Winterfell again.
Whoever Jon’s mother had been, Ned must have loved her
ercely, for nothing Catelyn said would persuade him to send the
boy away. It was the one thing she could never forgive him. She
had come to love her husband with all her heart, but she had never
found it in her to love Jon. She might have overlooked a dozen
bastards for Ned’s sake, so long as they were out of sight. Jon was
never out of sight, and as he grew, he looked more like Ned than
any of the trueborn sons she bore him. Somehow that made it
worse. “Jon must go,” she said now.
“He and Robb are close,” Ned said. “I had hoped …”
“He cannot stay here,” Catelyn said, cutting him o . “He is your
son, not mine. I will not have him.” It was hard, she knew, but no
less the truth. Ned would do the boy no kindness by leaving him
here at Winterfell.
The look Ned gave her was anguished. “You know I cannot take
him south. There will be no place for him at court. A boy with a
bastard’s name … you know what they will say of him. He will be
shunned.”
Catelyn armored her heart against the mute appeal in her
husband’s eyes. “They say your friend Robert has fathered a dozen
bastards himself.”
“And none of them has ever been seen at court!” Ned blazed. “The
Lannister woman has seen to that. How can you be so damnably
cruel, Catelyn? He is only a boy. He—”
His fury was on him. He might have said more, and worse, but
Maester Luwin cut in. “Another solution presents itself,” he said, his
voice quiet. “Your brother Benjen came to me about Jon a few days
ago. It seems the boy aspires to take the black.”
Ned looked shocked. “He asked to join the Night’s Watch?”
Catelyn said nothing. Let Ned work it out in his own mind; her
voice would not be welcome now. Yet gladly would she have kissed
the maester just then. His was the perfect solution. Benjen Stark
was a Sworn Brother. Jon would be a son to him, the child he would
never have. And in time the boy would take the oath as well. He

would father no sons who might someday contest with Catelyn’s
own grandchildren for Winterfell.
Maester Luwin said, “There is great honor in service on the Wall,
my lord.”
“And even a bastard may rise high in the Night’s Watch,” Ned
re ected. Still, his voice was troubled. “Jon is so young. If he asked
this when he was a man grown, that would be one thing, but a boy
of fourteen …”
“A hard sacri ce,” Maester Luwin agreed. “Yet these are hard
times, my lord. His road is no crueler than yours or your lady’s.”
Catelyn thought of the three children she must lose. It was not
easy keeping silent then.
Ned turned away from them to gaze out the window, his long
face silent and thoughtful. Finally he sighed, and turned back. “Very
well,” he said to Maester Luwin. “I suppose it is for the best. I will
speak to Ben.”
“When shall we tell Jon?” the maester asked.
“When I must. Preparations must be made. It will be a fortnight
before we are ready to depart. I would sooner let Jon enjoy these
last few days. Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.
When the time comes, I will tell him myself.”

ARYA

Arya’s stitches were crooked again.
She frowned down at them with dismay and glanced over to
where her sister Sansa sat among the other girls. Sansa’s
needlework was exquisite. Everyone said so. “Sansa’s work is as
pretty as she is,” Septa Mordane told their lady mother once. “She
has such ne, delicate hands.” When Lady Catelyn had asked about
Arya, the septa had sni ed. “Arya has the hands of a blacksmith.”
Arya glanced furtively across the room, worried that Septa
Mordane might have read her thoughts, but the septa was paying
her no attention today. She was sitting with the Princess Myrcella,
all smiles and admiration. It was not often that the septa was
privileged to instruct a royal princess in the womanly arts, as she
had said when the queen brought Myrcella to join them. Arya
thought that Myrcella’s stitches looked a little crooked too, but you
would never know it from the way Septa Mordane was cooing.
She studied her own work again, looking for some way to salvage
it, then sighed and put down the needle. She looked glumly at her
sister. Sansa was chatting away happily as she worked. Beth Cassel,
Ser Rodrik’s little girl, was sitting by her feet, listening to every
word she said, and Jeyne Poole was leaning over to whisper
something in her ear.
“What are you talking about?” Arya asked suddenly.
Jeyne gave her a startled look, then giggled. Sansa looked
abashed. Beth blushed. No one answered.

“Tell me,” Arya said.
Jeyne glanced over to make certain that Septa Mordane was not
listening. Myrcella said something then, and the septa laughed
along with the rest of the ladies.
“We were talking about the prince,” Sansa said, her voice soft as
a kiss.
Arya knew which prince she meant: Jo rey, of course. The tall,
handsome one. Sansa got to sit with him at the feast. Arya had to sit
with the little fat one. Naturally.
“Jo rey likes your sister,” Jeyne whispered, proud as if she had
something to do with it. She was the daughter of Winterfell’s
steward and Sansa’s dearest friend. “He told her she was very
beautiful.”
“He’s going to marry her,” little Beth said dreamily, hugging
herself. “Then Sansa will be queen of all the realm.”
Sansa had the grace to blush. She blushed prettily. She did
everything prettily, Arya thought with dull resentment. “Beth, you
shouldn’t make up stories,” Sansa corrected the younger girl, gently
stroking her hair to take the harshness out of her words. She looked
at Arya. “What did you think of Prince Jo , sister? He’s very
gallant, don’t you think?”
“Jon says he looks like a girl,” Arya said.
Sansa sighed as she stitched. “Poor Jon,” she said. “He gets
jealous because he’s a bastard.”
“He’s our brother,” Arya said, much too loudly. Her voice cut
through the afternoon quiet of the tower room.
Septa Mordane raised her eyes. She had a bony face, sharp eyes,
and a thin lipless mouth made for frowning. It was frowning now.
“What are you talking about, children?”
“Our half brother,” Sansa corrected, soft and precise. She smiled
for the septa. “Arya and I were remarking on how pleased we were
to have the princess with us today,” she said.
Septa Mordane nodded. “Indeed. A great honor for us all.”
Princess Myrcella smiled uncertainly at the compliment. “Arya, why
aren’t you at work?” the septa asked. She rose to her feet, starched

skirts rustling as she started across the room. “Let me see your
stitches.”
Arya wanted to scream. It was just like Sansa to go and attract
the septa’s attention. “Here,” she said, surrendering up her work.
The septa examined the fabric. “Arya, Arya, Arya,” she said. “This
will not do. This will not do at all.”
Everyone was looking at her. It was too much. Sansa was too well
bred to smile at her sister’s disgrace, but Jeyne was smirking on her
behalf. Even Princess Myrcella looked sorry for her. Arya felt tears
lling her eyes. She pushed herself out of her chair and bolted for
the door.
Septa Mordane called after her. “Arya, come back here! Don’t you
take another step! Your lady mother will hear of this. In front of
our royal princess too! You’ll shame us all!”
Arya stopped at the door and turned back, biting her lip. The
tears were running down her cheeks now. She managed a sti little
bow to Myrcella. “By your leave, my lady.”
Myrcella blinked at her and looked to her ladies for guidance. But
if she was uncertain, Septa Mordane was not. “Just where do you
think you are going, Arya?” the septa demanded.
Arya glared at her. “I have to go shoe a horse,” she said sweetly,
taking a brief satisfaction in the shock on the septa’s face. Then she
whirled and made her exit, running down the steps as fast as her
feet would take her.
It wasn’t fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older;
maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left.
Often it felt that way. Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She
wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp and
the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had gotten their mother’s
ne high cheekbones and the thick auburn hair of the Tullys. Arya
took after their lord father. Her hair was a lusterless brown, and her
face was long and solemn. Jeyne used to call her Arya Horseface,
and neigh whenever she came near. It hurt that the one thing Arya
could do better than her sister was ride a horse. Well, that and
manage a household. Sansa had never had much of a head for

gures. If she did marry Prince Jo , Arya hoped for his sake that he
had a good steward.
Nymeria was waiting for her in the guardroom at the base of the
stairs. She bounded to her feet as soon as she caught sight of Arya.
Arya grinned. The wolf pup loved her, even if no one else did. They
went everywhere together, and Nymeria slept in her room, at the
foot of her bed. If Mother had not forbidden it, Arya would gladly
have taken the wolf with her to needlework. Let Septa Mordane
complain about her stitches then.
Nymeria nipped eagerly at her hand as Arya untied her. She had
yellow eyes. When they caught the sunlight, they gleamed like two
golden coins. Arya had named her after the warrior queen of the
Rhoyne, who had led her people across the narrow sea. That had
been a great scandal too. Sansa, of course, had named her pup
“Lady.” Arya made a face and hugged the wol ing tight. Nymeria
licked her ear, and she giggled.
By now Septa Mordane would certainly have sent word to her
lady mother. If she went to her room, they would nd her. Arya did
not care to be found. She had a better notion. The boys were at
practice in the yard. She wanted to see Robb put gallant Prince
Jo rey at on his back. “Come,” she whispered to Nymeria. She got
up and ran, the wolf coming hard at her heels.
There was a window in the covered bridge between the armory
and the Great Keep where you had a view of the whole yard. That
was where they headed.
They arrived, ushed and breathless, to nd Jon seated on the
sill, one leg drawn up languidly to his chin. He was watching the
action, so absorbed that he seemed unaware of her approach until
his white wolf moved to meet them. Nymeria stalked closer on
wary feet. Ghost, already larger than his litter mates, smelled her,
gave her ear a careful nip, and settled back down.
Jon gave her a curious look. “Shouldn’t you be working on your
stitches, little sister?”
Arya made a face at him. “I wanted to see them ght.”
He smiled. “Come here, then.”

Arya climbed up on the window and sat beside him, to a chorus of
thuds and grunts from the yard below.
To her disappointment, it was the younger boys drilling. Bran was
so heavily padded he looked as though he had belted on a
featherbed, and Prince Tommen, who was plump to begin with,
seemed positively round. They were hu ng and pu ng and hitting
at each other with padded wooden swords under the watchful eye
of old Ser Rodrik Cassel, the master-at-arms, a great stout keg of a
man with magni cent white cheek whiskers. A dozen spectators,
man and boy, were calling out encouragement, Robb’s voice the
loudest among them. She spotted Theon Greyjoy beside him, his
black doublet emblazoned with the golden kraken of his House, a
look of wry contempt on his face. Both of the combatants were
staggering. Arya judged that they had been at it awhile.
“A shade more exhausting than needlework,” Jon observed.
“A shade more fun than needlework,” Arya gave back at him. Jon
grinned, reached over, and messed up her hair. Arya ushed. They
had always been close. Jon had their father’s face, as she did. They
were the only ones. Robb and Sansa and Bran and even little Rickon
all took after the Tullys, with easy smiles and re in their hair.
When Arya had been little, she had been afraid that meant that she
was a bastard too. It had been Jon she had gone to in her fear, and
Jon who had reassured her.
“Why aren’t you down in the yard?” Arya asked him.
He gave her a half smile. “Bastards are not allowed to damage
young princes,” he said. “Any bruises they take in the practice yard
must come from trueborn swords.”
“Oh.” Arya felt abashed. She should have realized. For the second
time today, Arya re ected that life was not fair.
She watched her little brother whack at Tommen. “I could do just
as good as Bran,” she said. “He’s only seven. I’m nine.”
Jon looked her over with all his fourteen-year-old wisdom.
“You’re too skinny,” he said. He took her arm to feel her muscle.
Then he sighed and shook his head. “I doubt you could even lift a
longsword, little sister, never mind swing one.”

Arya snatched back her arm and glared at him. Jon messed up her
hair again. They watched Bran and Tommen circle each other.
“You see Prince Jo rey?” Jon asked.
She hadn’t, not at rst glance, but when she looked again she
found him to the back, under the shade of the high stone wall. He
was surrounded by men she did not recognize, young squires in the
livery of Lannister and Baratheon, strangers all. There were a few
older men among them; knights, she surmised.
“Look at the arms on his surcoat,” Jon suggested.
Arya looked. An ornate shield had been embroidered on the
prince’s padded surcoat. No doubt the needlework was exquisite.
The arms were divided down the middle; on one side was the
crowned stag of the royal House, on the other the lion of Lannister.
“The Lannisters are proud,” Jon observed. “You’d think the royal
sigil would be su cient, but no. He makes his mother’s House equal
in honor to the king’s.”
“The woman is important too!” Arya protested.
Jon chuckled. “Perhaps you should do the same thing, little sister.
Wed Tully to Stark in your arms.”
“A wolf with a sh in its mouth?” It made her laugh. “That would
look silly. Besides, if a girl can’t ght, why should she have a coat
of arms?”
Jon shrugged. “Girls get the arms but not the swords. Bastards
get the swords but not the arms. I did not make the rules, little
sister.”
There was a shout from the courtyard below. Prince Tommen was
rolling in the dust, trying to get up and failing. All the padding
made him look like a turtle on its back. Bran was standing over him
with upraised wooden sword, ready to whack him again once he
regained his feet. The men began to laugh.
“Enough!” Ser Rodrik called out. He gave the prince a hand and
yanked him back to his feet. “Well fought. Lew, Donnis, help them
out of their armor.” He looked around. “Prince Jo rey, Robb, will
you go another round?”
Robb, already sweaty from a previous bout, moved forward
eagerly. “Gladly.”

Jo rey moved into the sunlight in response to Rodrik’s summons.
His hair shone like spun gold. He looked bored. “This is a game for
children, Ser Rodrik.”
Theon Greyjoy gave a sudden bark of laughter. “You are
children,” he said derisively.
“Robb may be a child,” Jo rey said. “I am a prince. And I grow
tired of swatting at Starks with a play sword.”
“You got more swats than you gave, Jo ,” Robb said. “Are you
afraid?”
Prince Jo rey looked at him. “Oh, terri ed,” he said. “You’re so
much older.” Some of the Lannister men laughed.
Jon looked down on the scene with a frown. “Jo rey is truly a
little shit,” he told Arya.
Ser Rodrik tugged thoughtfully at his white whiskers. “What are
you suggesting?” he asked the prince.
“Live steel.”
“Done,” Robb shot back. “You’ll be sorry!”
The master-at-arms put a hand on Robb’s shoulder to quiet him.
“Live steel is too dangerous. I will permit you tourney swords, with
blunted edges.”
Jo rey said nothing, but a man strange to Arya, a tall knight with
black hair and burn scars on his face, pushed forward in front of the
prince. “This is your prince. Who are you to tell him he may not
have an edge on his sword, ser?”
“Master-at-arms of Winterfell, Clegane, and you would do well
not to forget it.”
“Are you training women here?” the burned man wanted to
know. He was muscled like a bull.
“I am training knights,” Ser Rodrik said pointedly. “They will have
steel when they are ready. When they are of an age.”
The burned man looked at Robb. “How old are you, boy?”
“Fourteen,” Robb said.
“I killed a man at twelve. You can be sure it was not with a blunt
sword.”
Arya could see Robb bristle. His pride was wounded. He turned
on Ser Rodrik. “Let me do it. I can beat him.”

“Beat him with a tourney blade, then,” Ser Rodrik said.
Jo rey shrugged. “Come and see me when you’re older, Stark. If
you’re not too old.” There was laughter from the Lannister men.
Robb’s curses rang through the yard. Arya covered her mouth in
shock. Theon Greyjoy seized Robb’s arm to keep him away from the
prince. Ser Rodrik tugged at his whiskers in dismay.
Jo rey feigned a yawn and turned to his younger brother.
“Come, Tommen,” he said. “The hour of play is done. Leave the
children to their frolics.”
That brought more laughter from the Lannisters, more curses
from Robb. Ser Rodrik’s face was beet-red with fury under the
white of his whiskers. Theon kept Robb locked in an iron grip until
the princes and their party were safely away.
Jon watched them leave, and Arya watched Jon. His face had
grown as still as the pool at the heart of the godswood. Finally he
climbed down o the window. “The show is done,” he said. He bent
to scratch Ghost behind the ears. The white wolf rose and rubbed
against him. “You had best run back to your room, little sister.
Septa Mordane will surely be lurking. The longer you hide, the
sterner the penance. You’ll be sewing all through winter. When the
spring thaw comes, they will nd your body with a needle still
locked tight between your frozen ngers.”
Arya didn’t think it was funny. “I hate needlework!” she said with
passion. “It’s not fair!”
“Nothing is fair,” Jon said. He messed up her hair again and
walked away from her, Ghost moving silently beside him. Nymeria
started to follow too, then stopped and came back when she saw
that Arya was not coming.
Reluctantly she turned in the other direction.
It was worse than Jon had thought. It wasn’t Septa Mordane
waiting in her room. It was Septa Mordane and her mother.

BRAN

The hunt left at dawn. The king wanted wild boar at the feast
tonight. Prince Jo rey rode with his father, so Robb had been
allowed to join the hunters as well. Uncle Benjen, Jory, Theon
Greyjoy, Ser Rodrik, and even the queen’s funny little brother had
all ridden out with them. It was the last hunt, after all. On the
morrow they left for the south.
Bran had been left behind with Jon and the girls and Rickon. But
Rickon was only a baby and the girls were only girls and Jon and
his wolf were nowhere to be found. Bran did not look for him very
hard. He thought Jon was angry at him. Jon seemed to be angry at
everyone these days. Bran did not know why. He was going with
Uncle Ben to the Wall, to join the Night’s Watch. That was almost as
good as going south with the king. Robb was the one they were
leaving behind, not Jon.
For days, Bran could scarcely wait to be o . He was going to ride
the kingsroad on a horse of his own, not a pony but a real horse.
His father would be the Hand of the King, and they were going to
live in the red castle at King’s Landing, the castle the Dragonlords
had built. Old Nan said there were ghosts there, and dungeons
where terrible things had been done, and dragon heads on the walls.
It gave Bran a shiver just to think of it, but he was not afraid. How
could he be afraid? His father would be with him, and the king with
all his knights and sworn swords.

Bran was going to be a knight himself someday, one of the
Kingsguard. Old Nan said they were the nest swords in all the
realm. There were only seven of them, and they wore white armor
and had no wives or children, but lived only to serve the king. Bran
knew all the stories. Their names were like music to him. Serwyn of
the Mirror Shield. Ser Ryam Redwyne. Prince Aemon the
Dragonknight. The twins Ser Erryk and Ser Arryk, who had died on
one another’s swords hundreds of years ago, when brother fought
sister in the war the singers called the Dance of the Dragons. The
White Bull, Gerold Hightower. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the
Morning. Barristan the Bold.
Two of the Kingsguard had come north with King Robert. Bran
had watched them with fascination, never quite daring to speak to
them. Ser Boros was a bald man with a jowly face, and Ser Meryn
had droopy eyes and a beard the color of rust. Ser Jaime Lannister
looked more like the knights in the stories, and he was of the
Kingsguard too, but Robb said he had killed the old mad king and
shouldn’t count anymore. The greatest living knight was Ser
Barristan Selmy, Barristan the Bold, the Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard. Father had promised that they would meet Ser
Barristan when they reached King’s Landing, and Bran had been
marking the days on his wall, eager to depart, to see a world he had
only dreamed of and begin a life he could scarcely imagine.
Yet now that the last day was at hand, suddenly Bran felt lost.
Winterfell had been the only home he had ever known. His father
had told him that he ought to say his farewells today, and he had
tried. After the hunt had ridden out, he wandered through the castle
with his wolf at his side, intending to visit the ones who would be
left behind, Old Nan and Gage the cook, Mikken in his smithy,
Hodor the stableboy who smiled so much and took care of his pony
and never said anything but “Hodor,” the man in the glass gardens
who gave him a blackberry when he came to visit …
But it was no good. He had gone to the stable rst, and seen his
pony there in its stall, except it wasn’t his pony anymore, he was
getting a real horse and leaving the pony behind, and all of a
sudden Bran just wanted to sit down and cry. He turned and ran o

before Hodor and the other stableboys could see the tears in his
eyes. That was the end of his farewells. Instead Bran spent the
morning alone in the godswood, trying to teach his wolf to fetch a
stick, and failing. The wol ing was smarter than any of the hounds
in his father’s kennel and Bran would have sworn he understood
every word that was said to him, but he showed very little interest
in chasing sticks.
He was still trying to decide on a name. Robb was calling his
Grey Wind, because he ran so fast. Sansa had named hers Lady, and
Arya named hers after some old witch queen in the songs, and little
Rickon called his Shaggydog, which Bran thought was a pretty
stupid name for a direwolf. Jon’s wolf, the white one, was Ghost.
Bran wished he had thought of that rst, even though his wolf
wasn’t white. He had tried a hundred names in the last fortnight,
but none of them sounded right.
Finally he got tired of the stick game and decided to go climbing.
He hadn’t been up to the broken tower for weeks with everything
that had happened, and this might be his last chance.
He raced across the godswood, taking the long way around to
avoid the pool where the heart tree grew. The heart tree had always
frightened him; trees ought not have eyes, Bran thought, or leaves
that looked like hands. His wolf came sprinting at his heels. “You
stay here,” he told him at the base of the sentinel tree near the
armory wall. “Lie down. That’s right. Now stay.”
The wolf did as he was told. Bran scratched him behind the ears,
then turned away, jumped, grabbed a low branch, and pulled
himself up. He was halfway up the tree, moving easily from limb to
limb, when the wolf got to his feet and began to howl.
Bran looked back down. His wolf fell silent, staring up at him
through slitted yellow eyes. A strange chill went through him. He
began to climb again. Once more the wolf howled. “Quiet,” he
yelled. “Sit down. Stay. You’re worse than Mother.” The howling
chased him all the way up the tree, until nally he jumped o onto
the armory roof and out of sight.
The rooftops of Winterfell were Bran’s second home. His mother
often said that Bran could climb before he could walk. Bran could

not remember when he rst learned to walk, but he could not
remember when he started to climb either, so he supposed it must
be true.
To a boy, Winterfell was a grey stone labyrinth of walls and
towers and courtyards and tunnels spreading out in all directions. In
the older parts of the castle, the halls slanted up and down so that
you couldn’t even be sure what oor you were on. The place had
grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree, Maester
Luwin told him once, and its branches were gnarled and thick and
twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth.
When he got out from under it and scrambled up near the sky,
Bran could see all of Winterfell in a glance. He liked the way it
looked, spread out beneath him, only birds wheeling over his head
while all the life of the castle went on below. Bran could perch for
hours among the shapeless, rain-worn gargoyles that brooded over
the First Keep, watching it all: the men drilling with wood and steel
in the yard, the cooks tending their vegetables in the glass garden,
restless dogs running back and forth in the kennels, the silence of
the godswood, the girls gossiping beside the washing well. It made
him feel like he was lord of the castle, in a way even Robb would
never know.
It taught him Winterfell’s secrets too. The builders had not even
leveled the earth; there were hills and valleys behind the walls of
Winterfell. There was a covered bridge that went from the fourth
oor of the bell tower across to the second oor of the rookery.
Bran knew about that. And he knew you could get inside the inner
wall by the south gate, climb three oors and run all the way
around Winterfell through a narrow tunnel in the stone, and then
come out on ground level at the north gate, with a hundred feet of
wall looming over you. Even Maester Luwin didn’t know that, Bran
was convinced.
His mother was terri ed that one day Bran would slip o a wall
and kill himself. He told her that he wouldn’t, but she never
believed him. Once she made him promise that he would stay on
the ground. He had managed to keep that promise for almost a

fortnight, miserable every day, until one night he had gone out the
window of his bedroom when his brothers were fast asleep.
He confessed his crime the next day in a t of guilt. Lord Eddard
ordered him to the godswood to cleanse himself. Guards were
posted to see that Bran remained there alone all night to re ect on
his disobedience. The next morning Bran was nowhere to be seen.
They nally found him fast asleep in the upper branches of the
tallest sentinel in the grove.
As angry as he was, his father could not help but laugh. “You’re
not my son,” he told Bran when they fetched him down, “you’re a
squirrel. So be it. If you must climb, then climb, but try not to let
your mother see you.”
Bran did his best, although he did not think he ever really fooled
her. Since his father would not forbid it, she turned to others. Old
Nan told him a story about a bad little boy who climbed too high
and was struck down by lightning, and how afterward the crows
came to peck out his eyes. Bran was not impressed. There were
crows’ nests atop the broken tower, where no one ever went but
him, and sometimes he lled his pockets with corn before he
climbed up there and the crows ate it right out of his hand. None of
them had ever shown the slightest bit of interest in pecking out his
eyes.
Later, Maester Luwin built a little pottery boy and dressed him in
Bran’s clothes and ung him o the wall into the yard below, to
demonstrate what would happen to Bran if he fell. That had been
fun, but afterward Bran just looked at the maester and said, “I’m
not made of clay. And anyhow, I never fall.”
Then for a while the guards would chase him whenever they saw
him on the roofs, and try to haul him down. That was the best time
of all. It was like playing a game with his brothers, except that Bran
always won. None of the guards could climb half so well as Bran,
not even Jory. Most of the time they never saw him anyway.
People never looked up. That was another thing he liked about
climbing; it was almost like being invisible.
He liked how it felt too, pulling himself up a wall stone by stone,
ngers and toes digging hard into the small crevices between. He

always took o his boots and went barefoot when he climbed; it
made him feel as if he had four hands instead of two. He liked the
deep, sweet ache it left in the muscles afterward. He liked the way
the air tasted way up high, sweet and cold as a winter peach. He
liked the birds: the crows in the broken tower, the tiny little
sparrows that nested in cracks between the stones, the ancient owl
that slept in the dusty loft above the old armory. Bran knew them
all.
Most of all, he liked going places that no one else could go, and
seeing the grey sprawl of Winterfell in a way that no one else ever
saw it. It made the whole castle Bran’s secret place.
His favorite haunt was the broken tower. Once it had been a
watchtower, the tallest in Winterfell. A long time ago, a hundred
years before even his father had been born, a lightning strike had
set it a re. The top third of the structure had collapsed inward, and
the tower had never been rebuilt. Sometimes his father sent ratters
into the base of the tower, to clean out the nests they always found
among the jumble of fallen stones and charred and rotten beams.
But no one ever got up to the jagged top of the structure now
except for Bran and the crows.
He knew two ways to get there. You could climb straight up the
side of the tower itself, but the stones were loose, the mortar that
held them together long gone to ash, and Bran never liked to put his
full weight on them.
The best way was to start from the godswood, shinny up the tall
sentinel, and cross over the armory and the guards hall, leaping roof
to roof, barefoot so the guards wouldn’t hear you overhead. That
brought you up to the blind side of the First Keep, the oldest part of
the castle, a squat round fortress that was taller than it looked. Only
rats and spiders lived there now but the old stones still made for
good climbing. You could go straight up to where the gargoyles
leaned out blindly over empty space, and swing from gargoyle to
gargoyle, hand over hand, around to the north side. From there, if
you really stretched, you could reach out and pull yourself over to
the broken tower where it leaned close. The last part was the
scramble up the blackened stones to the eyrie, no more than ten

feet, and then the crows would come round to see if you’d brought
any corn.
Bran was moving from gargoyle to gargoyle with the ease of long
practice when he heard the voices. He was so startled he almost lost
his grip. The First Keep had been empty all his life.
“I do not like it,” a woman was saying. There was a row of
windows beneath him, and the voice was drifting out of the last
window on this side. “You should be the Hand.”
“Gods forbid,” a man’s voice replied lazily. “It’s not an honor I’d
want. There’s far too much work involved.”
Bran hung, listening, suddenly afraid to go on. They might
glimpse his feet if he tried to swing by.
“Don’t you see the danger this puts us in?” the woman said.
“Robert loves the man like a brother.”
“Robert can barely stomach his brothers. Not that I blame him.
Stannis would be enough to give anyone indigestion.”
“Don’t play the fool. Stannis and Renly are one thing, and Eddard
Stark is quite another. Robert will listen to Stark. Damn them both. I
should have insisted that he name you, but I was certain Stark would
refuse him.”
“We ought to count ourselves fortunate,” the man said. “The king
might as easily have named one of his brothers, or even Little nger,
gods help us. Give me honorable enemies rather than ambitious
ones, and I’ll sleep more easily by night.”
They were talking about Father, Bran realized. He wanted to hear
more. A few more feet … but they would see him if he swung out in
front of the window.
“We will have to watch him carefully,” the woman said.
“I would sooner watch you,” the man said. He sounded bored.
“Come back here.”
“Lord Eddard has never taken any interest in anything that
happened south of the Neck,” the woman said. “Never. I tell you, he
means to move against us. Why else would he leave the seat of his
power?”
“A hundred reasons. Duty. Honor. He yearns to write his name
large across the book of history, to get away from his wife, or both.

Perhaps he just wants to be warm for once in his life.”
“His wife is Lady Arryn’s sister. It’s a wonder Lysa was not here
to greet us with her accusations.”
Bran looked down. There was a narrow ledge beneath the
window, only a few inches wide. He tried to lower himself toward
it. Too far. He would never reach.
“You fret too much. Lysa Arryn is a frightened cow.”
“That frightened cow shared Jon Arryn’s bed.”
“If she knew anything, she would have gone to Robert before she
ed King’s Landing.”
“When he had already agreed to foster that weakling son of hers
at Casterly Rock? I think not. She knew the boy’s life would be
hostage to her silence. She may grow bolder now that he’s safe atop
the Eyrie.”
“Mothers.” The man made the word sound like a curse. “I think
birthing does something to your minds. You are all mad.” He
laughed. It was a bitter sound. “Let Lady Arryn grow as bold as she
likes. Whatever she knows, whatever she thinks she knows, she has
no proof.” He paused a moment. “Or does she?”
“Do you think the king will require proof?” the woman said. “I
tell you, he loves me not.”
“And whose fault is that, sweet sister?”
Bran studied the ledge. He could drop down. It was too narrow to
land on, but if he could catch hold as he fell past, pull himself
up … except that might make a noise, draw them to the window.
He was not sure what he was hearing, but he knew it was not meant
for his ears.
“You are as blind as Robert,” the woman was saying.
“If you mean I see the same thing, yes,” the man said. “I see a
man who would sooner die than betray his king.”
“He betrayed one already, or have you forgotten?” the woman
said. “Oh, I don’t deny he’s loyal to Robert, that’s obvious. What
happens when Robert dies and Jo takes the throne? And the
sooner that comes to pass, the safer we’ll all be. My husband grows
more restless every day. Having Stark beside him will only make
him worse. He’s still in love with the sister, the insipid little dead

sixteen-year-old. How long till he decides to put me aside for some
new Lyanna?”
Bran was suddenly very frightened. He wanted nothing so much
as to go back the way he had come, to nd his brothers. Only what
would he tell them? He had to get closer, Bran realized. He had to
see who was talking.
The man sighed. “You should think less about the future and more
about the pleasures at hand.”
“Stop that!” the woman said. Bran heard the sudden slap of esh
on esh, then the man’s laughter.
Bran pulled himself up, climbed over the gargoyle, crawled out
onto the roof. This was the easy way. He moved across the roof to
the next gargoyle, right above the window of the room where they
were talking.
“All this talk is getting very tiresome, sister,” the man said.
“Come here and be quiet.”
Bran sat astride the gargoyle, tightened his legs around it, and
swung himself around, upside down. He hung by his legs and slowly
stretched his head down toward the window. The world looked
strange upside down. A courtyard swam dizzily below him, its
stones still wet with melted snow.
Bran looked in the window.
Inside the room, a man and a woman were wrestling. They were
both naked. Bran could not tell who they were. The man’s back was
to him, and his body screened the woman from view as he pushed
her up against a wall.
There were soft, wet sounds. Bran realized they were kissing. He
watched, wide-eyed and frightened, his breath tight in his throat.
The man had a hand down between her legs, and he must have been
hurting her there, because the woman started to moan, low in her
throat. “Stop it,” she said, “stop it, stop it. Oh, please …” But her
voice was low and weak, and she did not push him away. Her hands
buried themselves in his hair, his tangled golden hair, and pulled his
face down to her breast.
Bran saw her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open,
moaning. Her golden hair swung from side to side as her head

moved back and forth, but still he recognized the queen.
He must have made a noise. Suddenly her eyes opened, and she
was staring right at him. She screamed.
Everything happened at once then. The woman pushed the man
away wildly, shouting and pointing. Bran tried to pull himself up,
bending double as he reached for the gargoyle. He was in too much
of a hurry. His hand scraped uselessly across smooth stone, and in
his panic his legs slipped, and suddenly he was falling. There was an
instant of vertigo, a sickening lurch as the window ashed past. He
shot out a hand, grabbed for the ledge, lost it, caught it again with
his other hand. He swung against the building, hard. The impact
took the breath out of him. Bran dangled, one-handed, panting.
Faces appeared in the window above him.
The queen. And now Bran recognized the man beside her. They
looked as much alike as re ections in a mirror.
“He saw us,” the woman said shrilly.
“So he did,” the man said.
Bran’s ngers started to slip. He grabbed the ledge with his other
hand. Fingernails dug into unyielding stone. The man reached
down. “Take my hand,” he said. “Before you fall.”
Bran seized his arm and held on tight with all his strength. The
man yanked him up to the ledge. “What are you doing?” the woman
demanded.
The man ignored her. He was very strong. He stood Bran up on
the sill. “How old are you, boy?”
“Seven,” Bran said, shaking with relief. His ngers had dug deep
gouges in the man’s forearm. He let go sheepishly.
The man looked over at the woman. “The things I do for love,” he
said with loathing. He gave Bran a shove.
Screaming, Bran went backward out the window into empty air.
There was nothing to grab on to. The courtyard rushed up to meet
him.
Somewhere o in the distance, a wolf was howling. Crows circled
the broken tower, waiting for corn.

TYRION

Somewhere in the great stone maze of Winterfell, a wolf howled.
The sound hung over the castle like a ag of mourning.
Tyrion Lannister looked up from his books and shivered, though
the library was snug and warm. Something about the howling of a
wolf took a man right out of his here and now and left him in a
dark forest of the mind, running naked before the pack.
When the direwolf howled again, Tyrion shut the heavy leatherbound cover on the book he was reading, a hundred-year-old
discourse on the changing of the seasons by a long-dead maester. He
covered a yawn with the back of his hand. His reading lamp was
ickering, its oil all but gone, as dawn light leaked through the high
windows. He had been at it all night, but that was nothing new.
Tyrion Lannister was not much a one for sleeping.
His legs were sti and sore as he eased down o the bench. He
massaged some life back into them and limped heavily to the table
where the septon was snoring softly, his head pillowed on an open
book in front of him. Tyrion glanced at the title. A life of the Grand
Maester Aethelmure, no wonder. “Chayle,” he said softly. The
young man jerked up, blinking, confused, the crystal of his order
swinging wildly on its silver chain. “I’m o to break my fast. See
that you return the books to the shelves. Be gentle with the
Valyrian scrolls, the parchment is very dry. Ayrmidon’s Engines of
War is quite rare, and yours is the only complete copy I’ve ever
seen.” Chayle gaped at him, still half-asleep. Patiently, Tyrion

repeated his instructions, then clapped the septon on the shoulder
and left him to his tasks.
Outside, Tyrion swallowed a lungful of the cold morning air and
began his laborious descent of the steep stone steps that
corkscrewed around the exterior of the library tower. It was slow
going; the steps were cut high and narrow, while his legs were short
and twisted. The rising sun had not yet cleared the walls of
Winterfell, but the men were already hard at it in the yard below.
Sandor Clegane’s rasping voice drifted up to him. “The boy is a long
time dying. I wish he would be quicker about it.”
Tyrion glanced down and saw the Hound standing with young
Jo rey as squires swarmed around them. “At least he dies quietly,”
the prince replied. “It’s the wolf that makes the noise. I could scarce
sleep last night.”
Clegane cast a long shadow across the hard-packed earth as his
squire lowered the black helm over his head. “I could silence the
creature, if it please you,” he said through his open visor. His boy
placed a longsword in his hand. He tested the weight of it, slicing at
the cold morning air. Behind him, the yard rang to the clangor of
steel on steel.
The notion seemed to delight the prince. “Send a dog to kill a
dog!” he exclaimed. “Winterfell is so infested with wolves, the
Starks would never miss one.”
Tyrion hopped o the last step onto the yard. “I beg to di er,
nephew,” he said. “The Starks can count past six. Unlike some
princes I might name.”
Jo rey had the grace at least to blush.
“A voice from nowhere,” Sandor said. He peered through his
helm, looking this way and that. “Spirits of the air!”
The prince laughed, as he always laughed when his bodyguard did
this mummer’s farce. Tyrion was used to it. “Down here.”
The tall man peered down at the ground, and pretended to notice
him. “The little lord Tyrion,” he said. “My pardons. I did not see
you standing there.”
“I am in no mood for your insolence today.” Tyrion turned to his
nephew. “Jo rey, it is past time you called on Lord Eddard and his

lady, to o er them your comfort.”
Jo rey looked as petulant as only a boy prince can look. “What
good will my comfort do them?”
“None,” Tyrion said. “Yet it is expected of you. Your absence has
been noted.”
“The Stark boy is nothing to me,” Jo rey said. “I cannot abide the
wailing of women.”
Tyrion Lannister reached up and slapped his nephew hard across
the face. The boy’s cheek began to redden.
“One word,” Tyrion said, “and I will hit you again.”
“I’m going to tell Mother!” Jo rey exclaimed.
Tyrion hit him again. Now both cheeks amed.
“You tell your mother,” Tyrion told him. “But rst you get
yourself to Lord and Lady Stark, and you fall to your knees in front
of them, and you tell them how very sorry you are, and that you
are at their service if there is the slightest thing you can do for them
or theirs in this desperate hour, and that all your prayers go with
them. Do you understand? Do you?”
The boy looked as though he was going to cry. Instead, he
managed a weak nod. Then he turned and ed headlong from the
yard, holding his cheek. Tyrion watched him run.
A shadow fell across his face. He turned to nd Clegane looming
overhead like a cli . His soot-dark armor seemed to blot out the
sun. He had lowered the visor on his helm. It was fashioned in the
likeness of a snarling black hound, fearsome to behold, but Tyrion
had always thought it a great improvement over Clegane’s
hideously burned face.
“The prince will remember that, little lord,” the Hound warned
him. The helm turned his laugh into a hollow rumble.
“I pray he does,” Tyrion Lannister replied. “If he forgets, be a
good dog and remind him.” He glanced around the courtyard. “Do
you know where I might nd my brother?”
“Breaking fast with the queen.”
“Ah,” Tyrion said. He gave Sandor Clegane a perfunctory nod and
walked away as briskly as his stunted legs would carry him,

whistling. He pitied the rst knight to try the Hound today. The
man did have a temper.
A cold, cheerless meal had been laid out in the morning room of
the Guest House. Jaime sat at table with Cersei and the children,
talking in low, hushed voices.
“Is Robert still abed?” Tyrion asked as he seated himself,
uninvited, at the table.
His sister peered at him with the same expression of faint distaste
she had worn since the day he was born. “The king has not slept at
all,” she told him. “He is with Lord Eddard. He has taken their
sorrow deeply to heart.”
“He has a large heart, our Robert,” Jaime said with a lazy smile.
There was very little that Jaime took seriously. Tyrion knew that
about his brother, and forgave it. During all the terrible long years
of his childhood, only Jaime had ever shown him the smallest
measure of a ection or respect, and for that Tyrion was willing to
forgive him most anything.
A servant approached. “Bread,” Tyrion told him, “and two of
those little sh, and a mug of that good dark beer to wash them
down. Oh, and some bacon. Burn it until it turns black.” The man
bowed and moved o . Tyrion turned back to his siblings. Twins,
male and female. They looked very much the part this morning.
Both had chosen a deep green that matched their eyes. Their blond
curls were all a fashionable tumble, and gold ornaments shone at
wrists and ngers and throats.
Tyrion wondered what it would be like to have a twin, and
decided that he would rather not know. Bad enough to face himself
in a looking glass every day. Another him was a thought too
dreadful to contemplate.
Prince Tommen spoke up. “Do you have news of Bran, Uncle?”
“I stopped by the sickroom last night,” Tyrion announced. “There
was no change. The maester thought that a hopeful sign.”
“I don’t want Brandon to die,” Tommen said timorously. He was a
sweet boy. Not like his brother, but then Jaime and Tyrion were
somewhat less than peas in a pod themselves.

“Lord Eddard had a brother named Brandon as well,” Jaime
mused. “One of the hostages murdered by Targaryen. It seems to be
an unlucky name.”
“Oh, not so unlucky as all that, surely,” Tyrion said. The servant
brought his plate. He ripped o a chunk of black bread.
Cersei was studying him warily. “What do you mean?”
Tyrion gave her a crooked smile. “Why, only that Tommen may
get his wish. The maester thinks the boy may yet live.” He took a
sip of beer.
Myrcella gave a happy gasp, and Tommen smiled nervously, but
it was not the children Tyrion was watching. The glance that passed
between Jaime and Cersei lasted no more than a second, but he did
not miss it. Then his sister dropped her gaze to the table. “That is no
mercy. These northern gods are cruel to let the child linger in such
pain.”
“What were the maester’s words?” Jaime asked.
The bacon crunched when he bit into it. Tyrion chewed
thoughtfully for a moment and said, “He thinks that if the boy were
going to die, he would have done so already. It has been four days
with no change.”
“Will Bran get better, Uncle?” little Myrcella asked. She had all of
her mother’s beauty, and none of her nature.
“His back is broken, little one,” Tyrion told her. “The fall
shattered his legs as well. They keep him alive with honey and
water, or he would starve to death. Perhaps, if he wakes, he will be
able to eat real food, but he will never walk again.”
“If he wakes,” Cersei repeated. “Is that likely?”
“The gods alone know,” Tyrion told her. “The maester only
hopes.” He chewed some more bread. “I would swear that wolf of
his is keeping the boy alive. The creature is outside his window day
and night, howling. Every time they chase it away, it returns. The
maester said they closed the window once, to shut out the noise,
and Bran seemed to weaken. When they opened it again, his heart
beat stronger.”
The queen shuddered. “There is something unnatural about those
animals,” she said. “They are dangerous. I will not have any of them

coming south with us.”
Jaime said, “You’ll have a hard time stopping them, sister. They
follow those girls everywhere.”
Tyrion started on his sh. “Are you leaving soon, then?”
“Not near soon enough,” Cersei said. Then she frowned. “Are we
leaving?” she echoed. “What about you? Gods, don’t tell me you are
staying here?”
Tyrion shrugged. “Benjen Stark is returning to the Night’s Watch
with his brother’s bastard. I have a mind to go with them and see
this Wall we have all heard so much of.”
Jaime smiled. “I hope you’re not thinking of taking the black on
us, sweet brother.”
Tyrion laughed. “What, me, celibate? The whores would go
begging from Dorne to Casterly Rock. No, I just want to stand on
top of the Wall and piss o the edge of the world.”
Cersei stood abruptly. “The children don’t need to hear this lth.
Tommen, Myrcella, come.” She strode briskly from the morning
room, her train and her pups trailing behind her.
Jaime Lannister regarded his brother thoughtfully with those cool
green eyes. “Stark will never consent to leave Winterfell with his
son lingering in the shadow of death.”
“He will if Robert commands it,” Tyrion said. “And Robert will
command it. There is nothing Lord Eddard can do for the boy in any
case.”
“He could end his torment,” Jaime said. “I would, if it were my
son. It would be a mercy.”
“I advise against putting that suggestion to Lord Eddard, sweet
brother,” Tyrion said. “He would not take it kindly.”
“Even if the boy does live, he will be a cripple. Worse than a
cripple. A grotesque. Give me a good clean death.”
Tyrion replied with a shrug that accentuated the twist of his
shoulders. “Speaking for the grotesques,” he said, “I beg to di er.
Death is so terribly nal, while life is full of possibilities.”
Jaime smiled. “You are a perverse little imp, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Tyrion admitted. “I hope the boy does wake. I would
be most interested to hear what he might have to say.”

His brother’s smile curdled like sour milk. “Tyrion, my sweet
brother,” he said darkly, “there are times when you give me cause
to wonder whose side you are on.”
Tyrion’s mouth was full of bread and sh. He took a swallow of
strong black beer to wash it all down, and grinned up wol shly at
Jaime. “Why, Jaime, my sweet brother,” he said, “you wound me.
You know how much I love my family.”

JON

Jon climbed the steps slowly, trying not to think that this might be
the last time ever. Ghost padded silently beside him. Outside, snow
swirled through the castle gates, and the yard was all noise and
chaos, but inside the thick stone walls it was still warm and quiet.
Too quiet for Jon’s liking.
He reached the landing and stood for a long moment, afraid.
Ghost nuzzled at his hand. He took courage from that. He
straightened, and entered the room.
Lady Stark was there beside his bed. She had been there, day and
night, for close on a fortnight. Not for a moment had she left Bran’s
side. She had her meals brought to her there, and chamber pots as
well, and a small hard bed to sleep on, though it was said she had
scarcely slept at all. She fed him herself, the honey and water and
herb mixture that sustained life. Not once did she leave the room.
So Jon had stayed away.
But now there was no more time.
He stood in the door for a moment, afraid to speak, afraid to
come closer. The window was open. Below, a wolf howled. Ghost
heard and lifted his head.
Lady Stark looked over. For a moment she did not seem to
recognize him. Finally she blinked. “What are you doing here?” she
asked in a voice strangely at and emotionless.
“I came to see Bran,” Jon said. “To say good-bye.”

Her face did not change. Her long auburn hair was dull and
tangled. She looked as though she had aged twenty years. “You’ve
said it. Now go away.”
Part of him wanted only to ee, but he knew that if he did he
might never see Bran again. He took a nervous step into the room.
“Please,” he said.
Something cold moved in her eyes. “I told you to leave,” she said.
“We don’t want you here.”
Once that would have sent him running. Once that might even
have made him cry. Now it only made him angry. He would be a
Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch soon, and face worse dangers
than Catelyn Tully Stark. “He’s my brother,” he said.
“Shall I call the guards?”
“Call them,” Jon said, de ant. “You can’t stop me from seeing
him.” He crossed the room, keeping the bed between them, and
looked down on Bran where he lay.
She was holding one of his hands. It looked like a claw. This was
not the Bran he remembered. The esh had all gone from him. His
skin stretched tight over bones like sticks. Under the blanket, his
legs bent in ways that made Jon sick. His eyes were sunken deep
into black pits; open, but they saw nothing. The fall had shrunken
him somehow. He looked half a leaf, as if the rst strong wind
would carry him o to his grave.
Yet under the frail cage of those shattered ribs, his chest rose and
fell with each shallow breath.
“Bran,” he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t come before. I was afraid.” He
could feel the tears rolling down his cheeks. Jon no longer cared.
“Don’t die, Bran. Please. We’re all waiting for you to wake up. Me
and Robb and the girls, everyone …”
Lady Stark was watching. She had not raised a cry. Jon took that
for acceptance. Outside the window, the direwolf howled again. The
wolf that Bran had not had time to name.
“I have to go now,” Jon said. “Uncle Benjen is waiting. I’m to go
north to the Wall. We have to leave today, before the snows come.”
He remembered how excited Bran had been at the prospect of the
journey. It was more than he could bear, the thought of leaving him

behind like this. Jon brushed away his tears, leaned over, and kissed
his brother lightly on the lips.
“I wanted him to stay here with me,” Lady Stark said softly.
Jon watched her, wary. She was not even looking at him. She was
talking to him, but for a part of her, it was as though he were not
even in the room.
“I prayed for it,” she said dully. “He was my special boy. I went
to the sept and prayed seven times to the seven faces of god that
Ned would change his mind and leave him here with me. Sometimes
prayers are answered.”
Jon did not know what to say. “It wasn’t your fault,” he managed
after an awkward silence.
Her eyes found him. They were full of poison. “I need none of
your absolution, bastard.”
Jon lowered his eyes. She was cradling one of Bran’s hands. He
took the other, squeezed it. Fingers like the bones of birds. “Goodbye,” he said.
He was at the door when she called out to him. “Jon,” she said.
He should have kept going, but she had never called him by his
name before. He turned to nd her looking at his face, as if she
were seeing it for the rst time.
“Yes?” he said.
“It should have been you,” she told him. Then she turned back to
Bran and began to weep, her whole body shaking with the sobs. Jon
had never seen her cry before.
It was a long walk down to the yard.
Outside, everything was noise and confusion. Wagons were being
loaded, men were shouting, horses were being harnessed and
saddled and led from the stables. A light snow had begun to fall,
and everyone was in an uproar to be o .
Robb was in the middle of it, shouting commands with the best of
them. He seemed to have grown of late, as if Bran’s fall and his
mother’s collapse had somehow made him stronger. Grey Wind was
at his side.
“Uncle Benjen is looking for you,” he told Jon. “He wanted to be
gone an hour ago.”

“I know,” Jon said. “Soon.” He looked around at all the noise and
confusion. “Leaving is harder than I thought.”
“For me too,” Robb said. He had snow in his hair, melting from
the heat of his body. “Did you see him?”
Jon nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“He’s not going to die,” Robb said. “I know it.”
“You Starks are hard to kill,” Jon agreed. His voice was at and
tired. The visit had taken all the strength from him.
Robb knew something was wrong. “My mother …”
“She was … very kind,” Jon told him.
Robb looked relieved. “Good.” He smiled. “The next time I see
you, you’ll be all in black.”
Jon forced himself to smile back. “It was always my color. How
long do you think it will be?”
“Soon enough,” Robb promised. He pulled Jon to him and
embraced him ercely. “Farewell, Snow.”
Jon hugged him back. “And you, Stark. Take care of Bran.”
“I will.” They broke apart and looked at each other awkwardly.
“Uncle Benjen said to send you to the stables if I saw you,” Robb
nally said.
“I have one more farewell to make,” Jon told him.
“Then I haven’t seen you,” Robb replied. Jon left him standing
there in the snow, surrounded by wagons and wolves and horses. It
was a short walk to the armory. He picked up his package and took
the covered bridge across to the Keep.
Arya was in her room, packing a polished ironwood chest that
was bigger than she was. Nymeria was helping. Arya would only
have to point, and the wolf would bound across the room, snatch up
some wisp of silk in her jaws, and fetch it back. But when she
smelled Ghost, she sat down on her haunches and yelped at them.
Arya glanced behind her, saw Jon, and jumped to her feet. She
threw her skinny arms tight around his neck. “I was afraid you were
gone,” she said, her breath catching in her throat. “They wouldn’t
let me out to say good-bye.”
“What did you do now?” Jon was amused.

Arya disentangled herself from him and made a face. “Nothing. I
was all packed and everything.” She gestured at the huge chest, no
more than a third full, and at the clothes that were scattered all
over the room. “Septa Mordane says I have to do it all over. My
things weren’t properly folded, she says. A proper southron lady
doesn’t just throw her clothes inside her chest like old rags, she
says.”
“Is that what you did, little sister?”
“Well, they’re going to get all messed up anyway,” she said.
“Who cares how they’re folded?”
“Septa Mordane,” Jon told her. “I don’t think she’d like Nymeria
helping, either.” The she-wolf regarded him silently with her dark
golden eyes. “It’s just as well. I have something for you to take with
you, and it has to be packed very carefully.”
Her face lit up. “A present?”
“You could call it that. Close the door.”
Wary but excited, Arya checked the hall. “Nymeria, here. Guard.”
She left the wolf out there to warn of intruders and closed the door.
By then Jon had pulled o the rags he’d wrapped it in. He held it
out to her.
Arya’s eyes went wide. Dark eyes, like his. “A sword,” she said in
a small, hushed breath.
The scabbard was soft grey leather, supple as sin. Jon drew out
the blade slowly, so she could see the deep blue sheen of the steel.
“This is no toy,” he told her. “Be careful you don’t cut yourself. The
edges are sharp enough to shave with.”
“Girls don’t shave,” Arya said.
“Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa’s legs?”
She giggled at him. “It’s so skinny.”
“So are you,” Jon told her. “I had Mikken make this special. The
bravos use swords like this in Pentos and Myr and the other Free
Cities. It won’t hack a man’s head o , but it can poke him full of
holes if you’re fast enough.”
“I can be fast,” Arya said.
“You’ll have to work at it every day.” He put the sword in her
hands, showed her how to hold it, and stepped back. “How does it

feel? Do you like the balance?”
“I think so,” Arya said.
“First lesson,” Jon said. “Stick them with the pointy end.”
Arya gave him a whap on the arm with the at of her blade. The
blow stung, but Jon found himself grinning like an idiot. “I know
which end to use,” Arya said. A doubtful look crossed her face.
“Septa Mordane will take it away from me.”
“Not if she doesn’t know you have it,” Jon said.
“Who will I practice with?”
“You’ll nd someone,” Jon promised her. “King’s Landing is a
true city, a thousand times the size of Winterfell. Until you nd a
partner, watch how they ght in the yard. Run, and ride, make
yourself strong. And whatever you do …”
Arya knew what was coming next. They said it together.
“… don’t … tell … Sansa!”
Jon messed up her hair. “I will miss you, little sister.”
Suddenly she looked like she was going to cry. “I wish you were
coming with us.”
“Di erent roads sometimes lead to the same castle. Who knows?”
He was feeling better now. He was not going to let himself be sad.
“I better go. I’ll spend my rst year on the Wall emptying chamber
pots if I keep Uncle Ben waiting any longer.”
Arya ran to him for a last hug. “Put down the sword rst,” Jon
warned her, laughing. She set it aside almost shyly and showered
him with kisses.
When he turned back at the door, she was holding it again, trying
it for balance. “I almost forgot,” he told her. “All the best swords
have names.”
“Like Ice,” she said. She looked at the blade in her hand. “Does
this have a name? Oh, tell me.”
“Can’t you guess?” Jon teased. “Your very favorite thing.”
Arya seemed puzzled at rst. Then it came to her. She was that
quick. They said it together:
“Needle!”
The memory of her laughter warmed him on the long ride north.

DAENERYS

Daenerys Targaryen wed Khal Drogo with fear and barbaric
splendor in a eld beyond the walls of Pentos, for the Dothraki
believed that all things of importance in a man’s life must be done
beneath the open sky.
Drogo had called his khalasar to attend him and they had come,
forty thousand Dothraki warriors and uncounted numbers of
women, children, and slaves. Outside the city walls they camped
with their vast herds, raising palaces of woven grass, eating
everything in sight, and making the good folk of Pentos more
anxious with every passing day.
“My fellow magisters have doubled the size of the city guard,”
Illyrio told them over platters of honey duck and orange snap
peppers one night at the manse that had been Drogo’s. The khal had
joined his khalasar, his estate given over to Daenerys and her
brother until the wedding.
“Best we get Princess Daenerys wedded quickly before they hand
half the wealth of Pentos away to sellswords and bravos,” Ser Jorah
Mormont jested. The exile had o ered her brother his sword the
night Dany had been sold to Khal Drogo; Viserys had accepted
eagerly. Mormont had been their constant companion ever since.
Magister Illyrio laughed lightly through his forked beard, but
Viserys did not so much as smile. “He can have her tomorrow, if he
likes,” her brother said. He glanced over at Dany, and she lowered
her eyes. “So long as he pays the price.”

Illyrio waved a languid hand in the air, rings glittering on his fat
ngers. “I have told you, all is settled. Trust me. The khal has
promised you a crown, and you shall have it.”
“Yes, but when?”
“When the khal chooses,” Illyrio said. “He will have the girl rst,
and after they are wed he must make his procession across the
plains and present her to the dosh khaleen at Vaes Dothrak. After
that, perhaps. If the omens favor war.”
Viserys seethed with impatience. “I piss on Dothraki omens. The
Usurper sits on my father’s throne. How long must I wait?”
Illyrio gave a massive shrug. “You have waited most of your life,
great king. What is another few months, another few years?”
Ser Jorah, who had traveled as far east as Vaes Dothrak, nodded
in agreement. “I counsel you to be patient, Your Grace. The
Dothraki are true to their word, but they do things in their own
time. A lesser man may beg a favor from the khal, but must never
presume to berate him.”
Viserys bristled. “Guard your tongue, Mormont, or I’ll have it out.
I am no lesser man, I am the rightful Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.
The dragon does not beg.”
Ser Jorah lowered his eyes respectfully. Illyrio smiled
enigmatically and tore a wing from the duck. Honey and grease ran
over his ngers and dripped down into his beard as he nibbled at
the tender meat. There are no more dragons, Dany thought, staring at
her brother, though she did not dare say it aloud.
Yet that night she dreamt of one. Viserys was hitting her, hurting
her. She was naked, clumsy with fear. She ran from him, but her
body seemed thick and ungainly. He struck her again. She stumbled
and fell. “You woke the dragon,” he screamed as he kicked her.
“You woke the dragon, you woke the dragon.” Her thighs were
slick with blood. She closed her eyes and whimpered. As if in
answer, there was a hideous ripping sound and the crackling of some
great re. When she looked again, Viserys was gone, great columns
of ame rose all around, and in the midst of them was the dragon.
It turned its great head slowly. When its molten eyes found hers,

she woke, shaking and covered with a ne sheen of sweat. She had
never been so afraid …
… until the day of her wedding came at last.
The ceremony began at dawn and continued until dusk, an endless
day of drinking and feasting and ghting. A mighty earthen ramp
had been raised amid the grass palaces, and there Dany was seated
beside Khal Drogo, above the seething sea of Dothraki. She had
never seen so many people in one place, nor people so strange and
frightening. The horselords might put on rich fabrics and sweet
perfumes when they visited the Free Cities, but out under the open
sky they kept the old ways. Men and women alike wore painted
leather vests over bare chests and horsehair leggings cinched by
bronze medallion belts, and the warriors greased their long braids
with fat from the rendering pits. They gorged themselves on
horse esh roasted with honey and peppers, drank themselves blind
on fermented mare’s milk and Illyrio’s ne wines, and spat jests at
each other across the res, their voices harsh and alien in Dany’s
ears.
Viserys was seated just below her, splendid in a new black wool
tunic with a scarlet dragon on the chest. Illyrio and Ser Jorah sat
beside him. Theirs was a place of high honor, just below the khal’s
own bloodriders, but Dany could see the anger in her brother’s lilac
eyes. He did not like sitting beneath her, and he fumed when the
slaves o ered each dish rst to the khal and his bride, and served
him from the portions they refused. He could do nothing but nurse
his resentment, so nurse it he did, his mood growing blacker by the
hour at each insult to his person.
Dany had never felt so alone as she did seated in the midst of that
vast horde. Her brother had told her to smile, and so she smiled
until her face ached and the tears came unbidden to her eyes. She
did her best to hide them, knowing how angry Viserys would be if
he saw her crying, terri ed of how Khal Drogo might react. Food
was brought to her, steaming joints of meat and thick black
sausages and Dothraki blood pies, and later fruits and sweetgrass
stews and delicate pastries from the kitchens of Pentos, but she

waved it all away. Her stomach was a roil, and she knew she could
keep none of it down.
There was no one to talk to. Khal Drogo shouted commands and
jests down to his bloodriders, and laughed at their replies, but he
scarcely glanced at Dany beside him. They had no common
language. Dothraki was incomprehensible to her, and the khal knew
only a few words of the bastard Valyrian of the Free Cities, and
none at all of the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms. She
would even have welcomed the conversation of Illyrio and her
brother, but they were too far below to hear her.
So she sat in her wedding silks, nursing a cup of honeyed wine,
afraid to eat, talking silently to herself. I am blood of the dragon, she
told herself. I am Daenerys Stormborn, Princess of Dragonstone, of the
blood and seed of Aegon the Conqueror.
The sun was only a quarter of the way up the sky when she saw
her rst man die. Drums were beating as some of the women
danced for the khal. Drogo watched without expression, but his eyes
followed their movements, and from time to time he would toss
down a bronze medallion for the women to ght over.
The warriors were watching too. One of them nally stepped into
the circle, grabbed a dancer by the arm, pushed her down to the
ground, and mounted her right there, as a stallion mounts a mare.
Illyrio had told her that might happen. “The Dothraki mate like the
animals in their herds. There is no privacy in a khalasar, and they do
not understand sin or shame as we do.”
Dany looked away from the coupling, frightened when she
realized what was happening, but a second warrior stepped
forward, and a third, and soon there was no way to avert her eyes.
Then two men seized the same woman. She heard a shout, saw a
shove, and in the blink of an eye the arakhs were out, long razorsharp blades, half sword and half scythe. A dance of death began as
the warriors circled and slashed, leaping toward each other,
whirling the blades around their heads, shrieking insults at each
clash. No one made a move to interfere.
It ended as quickly as it began. The arakhs shivered together
faster than Dany could follow, one man missed a step, the other

swung his blade in a at arc. Steel bit into esh just above the
Dothraki’s waist, and opened him from backbone to belly button,
spilling his entrails into the dust. As the loser died, the winner took
hold of the nearest woman—not even the one they had been
quarreling over—and had her there and then. Slaves carried o the
body, and the dancing resumed.
Magister Illyrio had warned Dany about this too. “A Dothraki
wedding without at least three deaths is deemed a dull a air,” he
had said. Her wedding must have been especially blessed; before
the day was over, a dozen men had died.
As the hours passed, the terror grew in Dany, until it was all she
could do not to scream. She was afraid of the Dothraki, whose ways
seemed alien and monstrous, as if they were beasts in human skins
and not true men at all. She was afraid of her brother, of what he
might do if she failed him. Most of all, she was afraid of what
would happen tonight under the stars, when her brother gave her
up to the hulking giant who sat drinking beside her with a face as
still and cruel as a bronze mask.
I am the blood of the dragon, she told herself again.
When at last the sun was low in the sky, Khal Drogo clapped his
hands together, and the drums and the shouting and feasting came
to a sudden halt. Drogo stood and pulled Dany to her feet beside
him. It was time for her bride gifts.
And after the gifts, she knew, after the sun had gone down, it
would be time for the rst ride and the consummation of her
marriage. Dany tried to put the thought aside, but it would not
leave her. She hugged herself to try to keep from shaking.
Her brother Viserys gifted her with three handmaids. Dany knew
they had cost him nothing; Illyrio no doubt had provided the girls.
Irri and Jhiqui were copper-skinned Dothraki with black hair and
almond-shaped eyes, Doreah a fair-haired, blue-eyed Lysene girl.
“These are no common servants, sweet sister,” her brother told her
as they were brought forward one by one. “Illyrio and I selected
them personally for you. Irri will teach you riding, Jhiqui the
Dothraki tongue, and Doreah will instruct you in the womanly arts

of love.” He smiled thinly. “She’s very good, Illyrio and I can both
swear to that.”
Ser Jorah Mormont apologized for his gift. “It is a small thing,
my princess, but all a poor exile could a ord,” he said as he laid a
small stack of old books before her. They were histories and songs
of the Seven Kingdoms, she saw, written in the Common Tongue.
She thanked him with all her heart.
Magister Illyrio murmured a command, and four burly slaves
hurried forward, bearing between them a great cedar chest bound in
bronze. When she opened it, she found piles of the nest velvets
and damasks the Free Cities could produce … and resting on top,
nestled in the soft cloth, three huge eggs. Dany gasped. They were
the most beautiful things she had ever seen, each di erent than the
others, patterned in such rich colors that at rst she thought they
were crusted with jewels, and so large it took both of her hands to
hold one. She lifted it delicately, expecting that it would be made of
some ne porcelain or delicate enamel, or even blown glass, but it
was much heavier than that, as if it were all of solid stone. The
surface of the shell was covered with tiny scales, and as she turned
the egg between her ngers, they shimmered like polished metal in
the light of the setting sun. One egg was a deep green, with
burnished bronze ecks that came and went depending on how
Dany turned it. Another was pale cream streaked with gold. The last
was black, as black as a midnight sea, yet alive with scarlet ripples
and swirls. “What are they?” she asked, her voice hushed and full of
wonder.
“Dragon’s eggs, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai,” said
Magister Illyrio. “The eons have turned them to stone, yet still they
burn bright with beauty.”
“I shall treasure them always.” Dany had heard tales of such eggs,
but she had never seen one, nor thought to see one. It was a truly
magni cent gift, though she knew that Illyrio could a ord to be
lavish. He had collected a fortune in horses and slaves for his part in
selling her to Khal Drogo.
The khal’s bloodriders o ered her the traditional three weapons,
and splendid weapons they were. Haggo gave her a great leather

whip with a silver handle, Cohollo a magni cent arakh chased in
gold, and Qotho a double-curved dragonbone bow taller than she
was. Magister Illyrio and Ser Jorah had taught her the traditional
refusals for these o erings. “This is a gift worthy of a great warrior,
O blood of my blood, and I am but a woman. Let my lord husband
bear these in my stead.” And so Khal Drogo too received his “bride
gifts.”
Other gifts she was given in plenty by other Dothraki: slippers
and jewels and silver rings for her hair, medallion belts and painted
vests and soft furs, sandsilks and jars of scent, needles and feathers
and tiny bottles of purple glass, and a gown made from the skin of a
thousand mice. “A handsome gift, Khaleesi,” Magister Illyrio said of
the last, after he had told her what it was. “Most lucky.” The gifts
mounted up around her in great piles, more gifts than she could
possibly imagine, more gifts than she could want or use.
And last of all, Khal Drogo brought forth his own bride gift to
her. An expectant hush rippled out from the center of the camp as
he left her side, growing until it had swallowed the whole khalasar.
When he returned, the dense press of Dothraki gift-givers parted
before him, and he led the horse to her.
She was a young lly, spirited and splendid. Dany knew just
enough about horses to know that this was no ordinary animal.
There was something about her that took the breath away. She was
grey as the winter sea, with a mane like silver smoke.
Hesitantly she reached out and stroked the horse’s neck, ran her
ngers through the silver of her mane. Khal Drogo said something
in Dothraki and Magister Illyrio translated. “Silver for the silver of
your hair, the khal says.”
“She’s beautiful,” Dany murmured.
“She is the pride of the khalasar,” Illyrio said. “Custom decrees
that the khaleesi must ride a mount worthy of her place by the side
of the khal.”
Drogo stepped forward and put his hands on her waist. He lifted
her up as easily as if she were a child and set her on the thin
Dothraki saddle, so much smaller than the ones she was used to.

Dany sat there uncertain for a moment. No one had told her about
this part. “What should I do?” she asked Illyrio.
It was Ser Jorah Mormont who answered. “Take the reins and
ride. You need not go far.”
Nervously Dany gathered the reins in her hands and slid her feet
into the short stirrups. She was only a fair rider; she had spent far
more time traveling by ship and wagon and palanquin than by
horseback. Praying that she would not fall o and disgrace herself,
she gave the lly the lightest and most timid touch with her knees.
And for the rst time in hours, she forgot to be afraid. Or perhaps
it was for the rst time ever.
The silver-grey lly moved with a smooth and silken gait, and the
crowd parted for her, every eye upon them. Dany found herself
moving faster than she had intended, yet somehow it was exciting
rather than terrifying. The horse broke into a trot, and she smiled.
Dothraki scrambled to clear a path. The slightest pressure with her
legs, the lightest touch on the reins, and the lly responded. She
sent it into a gallop, and now the Dothraki were hooting and
laughing and shouting at her as they jumped out of her way. As she
turned to ride back, a repit loomed ahead, directly in her path.
They were hemmed in on either side, with no room to stop. A
daring she had never known lled Daenerys then, and she gave the
lly her head.
The silver horse leapt the ames as if she had wings.
When she pulled up before Magister Illyrio, she said, “Tell Khal
Drogo that he has given me the wind.” The fat Pentoshi stroked his
yellow beard as he repeated her words in Dothraki, and Dany saw
her new husband smile for the rst time.
The last sliver of sun vanished behind the high walls of Pentos to
the west just then. Dany had lost all track of time. Khal Drogo
commanded his bloodriders to bring forth his own horse, a lean red
stallion. As the khal was saddling the horse, Viserys slid close to
Dany on her silver, dug his ngers into her leg, and said, “Please
him, sweet sister, or I swear, you will see the dragon wake as it has
never woken before.”

The fear came back to her then, with her brother’s words. She felt
like a child once more, only thirteen and all alone, not ready for
what was about to happen to her.
They rode out together as the stars came out, leaving the khalasar
and the grass palaces behind. Khal Drogo spoke no word to her, but
drove his stallion at a hard trot through the gathering dusk. The
tiny silver bells in his long braid rang softly as he rode. “I am the
blood of the dragon,” she whispered aloud as she followed, trying
to keep her courage up. “I am the blood of the dragon. I am the
blood of the dragon.” The dragon was never afraid.
Afterward she could not say how far or how long they had ridden,
but it was full dark when they stopped at a grassy place beside a
small stream. Drogo swung o his horse and lifted her down from
hers. She felt as fragile as glass in his hands, her limbs as weak as
water. She stood there helpless and trembling in her wedding silks
while he secured the horses, and when he turned to look at her, she
began to cry.
Khal Drogo stared at her tears, his face strangely empty of
expression. “No,” he said. He lifted his hand and rubbed away the
tears roughly with a callused thumb.
“You speak the Common Tongue,” Dany said in wonder.
“No,” he said again.
Perhaps he had only that word, she thought, but it was one word
more than she had known he had, and somehow it made her feel a
little better. Drogo touched her hair lightly, sliding the silver-blond
strands between his ngers and murmuring softly in Dothraki. Dany
did not understand the words, yet there was warmth in the tone, a
tenderness she had never expected from this man.
He put his nger under her chin and lifted her head, so she was
looking up into his eyes. Drogo towered over her as he towered
over everyone. Taking her lightly under the arms, he lifted her and
seated her on a rounded rock beside the stream. Then he sat on the
ground facing her, legs crossed beneath him, their faces nally at a
height. “No,” he said.
“Is that the only word you know?” she asked him.

Drogo did not reply. His long heavy braid was coiled in the dirt
beside him. He pulled it over his right shoulder and began to
remove the bells from his hair, one by one. After a moment Dany
leaned forward to help. When they were done, Drogo gestured. She
understood. Slowly, carefully, she began to undo his braid.
It took a long time. All the while he sat there silently, watching
her. When she was done, he shook his head, and his hair spread out
behind him like a river of darkness, oiled and gleaming. She had
never seen hair so long, so black, so thick.
Then it was his turn. He began to undress her.
His ngers were deft and strangely tender. He removed her silks
one by one, carefully, while Dany sat unmoving, silent, looking at
his eyes. When he bared her small breasts, she could not help
herself. She averted her eyes and covered herself with her hands.
“No,” Drogo said. He pulled her hands away from her breasts,
gently but rmly, then lifted her face again to make her look at
him. “No,” he repeated.
“No,” she echoed back at him.
He stood her up then and pulled her close to remove the last of
her silks. The night air was chilly on her bare skin. She shivered,
and goose esh covered her arms and legs. She was afraid of what
would come next, but for a while nothing happened. Khal Drogo sat
with his legs crossed, looking at her, drinking in her body with his
eyes.
After a while he began to touch her. Lightly at rst, then harder.
She could sense the erce strength in his hands, but he never hurt
her. He held her hand in his own and brushed her ngers, one by
one. He ran a hand gently down her leg. He stroked her face,
tracing the curve of her ears, running a nger gently around her
mouth. He put both hands in her hair and combed it with his
ngers. He turned her around, massaged her shoulders, slid a
knuckle down the path of her spine.
It seemed as if hours passed before his hands nally went to her
breasts. He stroked the soft skin underneath until it tingled. He
circled her nipples with his thumbs, pinched them between thumb

and fore nger, then began to pull at her, very lightly at rst, then
more insistently, until her nipples sti ened and began to ache.
He stopped then, and drew her down onto his lap. Dany was
ushed and breathless, her heart uttering in her chest. He cupped
her face in his huge hands and she looked into his eyes. “No?” he
said, and she knew it was a question.
She took his hand and moved it down to the wetness between her
thighs. “Yes,” she whispered as she put his nger inside her.

EDDARD

The summons came in the hour before the dawn, when the world
was still and grey.
Alyn shook him roughly from his dreams and Ned stumbled into
the predawn chill, groggy from sleep, to nd his horse saddled and
the king already mounted. Robert wore thick brown gloves and a
heavy fur cloak with a hood that covered his ears, and looked for all
the world like a bear sitting a horse. “Up, Stark!” he roared. “Up,
up! We have matters of state to discuss.”
“By all means,” Ned said. “Come inside, Your Grace.” Alyn lifted
the ap of the tent.
“No, no, no,” Robert said. His breath steamed with every word.
“The camp is full of ears. Besides, I want to ride out and taste this
country of yours.” Ser Boros and Ser Meryn waited behind him with
a dozen guardsmen, Ned saw. There was nothing to do but rub the
sleep from his eyes, dress, and mount up.
Robert set the pace, driving his huge black destrier hard as Ned
galloped along beside him, trying to keep up. He called out a
question as they rode, but the wind blew his words away, and the
king did not hear him. After that Ned rode in silence. They soon left
the kingsroad and took o across rolling plains dark with mist. By
then the guard had fallen back a small distance, safely out of
earshot, but still Robert would not slow.
Dawn broke as they crested a low ridge, and nally the king
pulled up. By then they were miles south of the main party. Robert

was ushed and exhilarated as Ned reined up beside him. “Gods,” he
swore, laughing, “it feels good to get out and ride the way a man
was meant to ride! I swear, Ned, this creeping along is enough to
drive a man mad.” He had never been a patient man, Robert
Baratheon. “That damnable wheelhouse, the way it creaks and
groans, climbing every bump in the road as if it were a
mountain … I promise you, if that wretched thing breaks another
axle, I’m going to burn it, and Cersei can walk!”
Ned laughed. “I will gladly light the torch for you.”
“Good man!” The king clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ve half a
mind to leave them all behind and just keep going.”
A smile touched Ned’s lips. “I do believe you mean it.”
“I do, I do,” the king said. “What do you say, Ned? Just you and
me, two vagabond knights on the kingsroad, our swords at our sides
and the gods know what in front of us, and maybe a farmer’s
daughter or a tavern wench to warm our beds tonight.”
“Would that we could,” Ned said, “but we have duties now, my
liege … to the realm, to our children, I to my lady wife and you to
your queen. We are not the boys we were.”
“You were never the boy you were,” Robert grumbled. “More’s
the pity. And yet there was that one time … what was her name,
that common girl of yours? Becca? No, she was one of mine, gods
love her, black hair and these sweet big eyes, you could drown in
them. Yours was … Aleena? No. You told me once. Was it Merryl?
You know the one I mean, your bastard’s mother?”
“Her name was Wylla,” Ned replied with cool courtesy, “and I
would sooner not speak of her.”
“Wylla. Yes.” The king grinned. “She must have been a rare
wench if she could make Lord Eddard Stark forget his honor, even
for an hour. You never told me what she looked like …”
Ned’s mouth tightened in anger. “Nor will I. Leave it be, Robert,
for the love you say you bear me. I dishonored myself and I
dishonored Catelyn, in the sight of gods and men.”
“Gods have mercy, you scarcely knew Catelyn.”
“I had taken her to wife. She was carrying my child.”

“You are too hard on yourself, Ned. You always were. Damn it,
no woman wants Baelor the Blessed in her bed.” He slapped a hand
on his knee. “Well, I’ll not press you if you feel so strong about it,
though I swear, at times you’re so prickly you ought to take the
hedgehog as your sigil.”
The rising sun sent ngers of light through the pale white mists of
dawn. A wide plain spread out beneath them, bare and brown, its
atness here and there relieved by long, low hummocks. Ned
pointed them out to his king. “The barrows of the First Men.”
Robert frowned. “Have we ridden onto a graveyard?”
“There are barrows everywhere in the north, Your Grace,” Ned
told him. “This land is old.”
“And cold,” Robert grumbled, pulling his cloak more tightly
around himself. The guard had reined up well behind them, at the
bottom of the ridge. “Well, I did not bring you out here to talk of
graves or bicker about your bastard. There was a rider in the night,
from Lord Varys in King’s Landing. Here.” The king pulled a paper
from his belt and handed it to Ned.
Varys the eunuch was the king’s master of whisperers. He served
Robert now as he had once served Aerys Targaryen. Ned unrolled
the paper with trepidation, thinking of Lysa and her terrible
accusation, but the message did not concern Lady Arryn. “What is
the source for this information?”
“Do you remember Ser Jorah Mormont?”
“Would that I might forget him,” Ned said bluntly. The Mormonts
of Bear Island were an old house, proud and honorable, but their
lands were cold and distant and poor. Ser Jorah had tried to swell
the family co ers by selling some poachers to a Tyroshi slaver. As
the Mormonts were bannermen to the Starks, his crime had
dishonored the north. Ned had made the long journey west to Bear
Island, only to nd when he arrived that Jorah had taken ship
beyond the reach of Ice and the king’s justice. Five years had passed
since then.
“Ser Jorah is now in Pentos, anxious to earn a royal pardon that
would allow him to return from exile,” Robert explained. “Lord
Varys makes good use of him.”

“So the slaver has become a spy,” Ned said with distaste. He
handed the letter back. “I would rather he become a corpse.”
“Varys tells me that spies are more useful than corpses,” Robert
said. “Jorah aside, what do you make of his report?”
“Daenerys Targaryen has wed some Dothraki horselord. What of
it? Shall we send her a wedding gift?”
The king frowned. “A knife, perhaps. A good sharp one, and a
bold man to wield it.”
Ned did not feign surprise; Robert’s hatred of the Targaryens was
a madness in him. He remembered the angry words they had
exchanged when Tywin Lannister had presented Robert with the
corpses of Rhaegar’s wife and children as a token of fealty. Ned had
named that murder; Robert called it war. When he had protested
that the young prince and princess were no more than babes, his
new-made king had replied, “I see no babes. Only dragonspawn.”
Not even Jon Arryn had been able to calm that storm. Eddard Stark
had ridden out that very day in a cold rage, to ght the last battles
of the war alone in the south. It had taken another death to
reconcile them; Lyanna’s death, and the grief they had shared over
her passing.
This time, Ned resolved to keep his temper. “Your Grace, the girl
is scarcely more than a child. You are no Tywin Lannister, to
slaughter innocents.” It was said that Rhaegar’s little girl had cried
as they dragged her from beneath her bed to face the swords. The
boy had been no more than a babe in arms, yet Lord Tywin’s
soldiers had torn him from his mother’s breast and dashed his head
against a wall.
“And how long will this one remain an innocent?” Robert’s mouth
grew hard. “This child will soon enough spread her legs and start
breeding more dragonspawn to plague me.”
“Nonetheless,” Ned said, “the murder of children … it would be
vile … unspeakable …”
“Unspeakable?” the king roared. “What Aerys did to your brother
Brandon was unspeakable. The way your lord father died, that was
unspeakable. And Rhaegar … how many times do you think he
raped your sister? How many hundreds of times?” His voice had

grown so loud that his horse whinnied nervously beneath him. The
king jerked the reins hard, quieting the animal, and pointed an
angry nger at Ned. “I will kill every Targaryen I can get my hands
on, until they are as dead as their dragons, and then I will piss on
their graves.”
Ned knew better than to defy him when the wrath was on him. If
the years had not quenched Robert’s thirst for revenge, no words of
his would help. “You can’t get your hands on this one, can you?” he
said quietly.
The king’s mouth twisted in a bitter grimace. “No, gods be
cursed. Some pox-ridden Pentoshi cheesemonger had her brother
and her walled up on his estate with pointy-hatted eunuchs all
around them, and now he’s handed them over to the Dothraki. I
should have had them both killed years ago, when it was easy to get
at them, but Jon was as bad as you. More fool I, I listened to him.”
“Jon Arryn was a wise man and a good Hand.”
Robert snorted. The anger was leaving him as suddenly as it had
come. “This Khal Drogo is said to have a hundred thousand men in
his horde. What would Jon say to that?”
“He would say that even a million Dothraki are no threat to the
realm, so long as they remain on the other side of the narrow sea,”
Ned replied calmly. “The barbarians have no ships. They hate and
fear the open sea.”
The king shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. “Perhaps. There are
ships to be had in the Free Cities, though. I tell you, Ned, I do not
like this marriage. There are still those in the Seven Kingdoms who
call me Usurper. Do you forget how many houses fought for
Targaryen in the war? They bide their time for now, but give them
half a chance, they will murder me in my bed, and my sons with
me. If the beggar king crosses with a Dothraki horde at his back,
the traitors will join him.”
“He will not cross,” Ned promised. “And if by some mischance he
does, we will throw him back into the sea. Once you choose a new
Warden of the East—”
The king groaned. “For the last time, I will not name the Arryn
boy Warden. I know the boy is your nephew, but with Targaryens

climbing in bed with Dothraki, I would be mad to rest one quarter
of the realm on the shoulders of a sickly child.”
Ned was ready for that. “Yet we still must have a Warden of the
East. If Robert Arryn will not do, name one of your brothers.
Stannis proved himself at the siege of Storm’s End, surely.”
He let the name hang there for a moment. The king frowned and
said nothing. He looked uncomfortable.
“That is,” Ned nished quietly, watching, “unless you have
already promised the honor to another.”
For a moment Robert had the grace to look startled. Just as
quickly, the look became annoyance. “What if I have?”
“It’s Jaime Lannister, is it not?”
Robert kicked his horse back into motion and started down the
ridge toward the barrows. Ned kept pace with him. The king rode
on, eyes straight ahead. “Yes,” he said at last. A single hard word to
end the matter.
“Kingslayer,” Ned said. The rumors were true, then. He rode on
dangerous ground now, he knew. “An able and courageous man, no
doubt,” he said carefully, “but his father is Warden of the West,
Robert. In time Ser Jaime will succeed to that honor. No one man
should hold both East and West.” He left unsaid his real concern;
that the appointment would put half the armies of the realm into
the hands of Lannisters.
“I will ght that battle when the enemy appears on the eld,” the
king said stubbornly. “At the moment, Lord Tywin looms eternal as
Casterly Rock, so I doubt that Jaime will be succeeding anytime
soon. Don’t vex me about this, Ned, the stone has been set.”
“Your Grace, may I speak frankly?”
“I seem unable to stop you,” Robert grumbled. They rode through
tall brown grasses.
“Can you trust Jaime Lannister?”
“He is my wife’s twin, a Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard, his life
and fortune and honor all bound to mine.”
“As they were bound to Aerys Targaryen’s,” Ned pointed out.
“Why should I mistrust him? He has done everything I have ever
asked of him. His sword helped win the throne I sit on.”

His sword helped taint the throne you sit on, Ned thought, but he did
not permit the words to pass his lips. “He swore a vow to protect
his king’s life with his own. Then he opened that king’s throat with
a sword.”
“Seven hells, someone had to kill Aerys!” Robert said, reining his
mount to a sudden halt beside an ancient barrow. “If Jaime hadn’t
done it, it would have been left for you or me.”
“We were not Sworn Brothers of the Kingsguard,” Ned said. The
time had come for Robert to hear the whole truth, he decided then
and there. “Do you remember the Trident, Your Grace?”
“I won my crown there. How should I forget it?”
“You took a wound from Rhaegar,” Ned reminded him. “So when
the Targaryen host broke and ran, you gave the pursuit into my
hands. The remnants of Rhaegar’s army ed back to King’s Landing.
We followed. Aerys was in the Red Keep with several thousand
loyalists. I expected to nd the gates closed to us.”
Robert gave an impatient shake of his head. “Instead you found
that our men had already taken the city. What of it?”
“Not our men,” Ned said patiently. “Lannister men. The lion of
Lannister ew over the ramparts, not the crowned stag. And they
had taken the city by treachery.”
The war had raged for close to a year. Lords great and small had
ocked to Robert’s banners; others had remained loyal to
Targaryen. The mighty Lannisters of Casterly Rock, the Wardens of
the West, had remained aloof from the struggle, ignoring calls to
arms from both rebels and royalists. Aerys Targaryen must have
thought that his gods had answered his prayers when Lord Tywin
Lannister appeared before the gates of King’s Landing with an army
twelve thousand strong, professing loyalty. So the mad king had
ordered his last mad act. He had opened his city to the lions at the
gate.
“Treachery was a coin the Targaryens knew well,” Robert said.
The anger was building in him again. “Lannister paid them back in
kind. It was no less than they deserved. I shall not trouble my sleep
over it.”

“You were not there,” Ned said, bitterness in his voice. Troubled
sleep was no stranger to him. He had lived his lies for fourteen
years, yet they still haunted him at night. “There was no honor in
that conquest.”
“The Others take your honor!” Robert swore. “What did any
Targaryen ever know of honor? Go down into your crypt and ask
Lyanna about the dragon’s honor!”
“You avenged Lyanna at the Trident,” Ned said, halting beside the
king. Promise me, Ned, she had whispered.
“That did not bring her back.” Robert looked away, o into the
grey distance. “The gods be damned. It was a hollow victory they
gave me. A crown … it was the girl I prayed them for. Your sister,
safe … and mine again, as she was meant to be. I ask you, Ned,
what good is it to wear a crown? The gods mock the prayers of
kings and cowherds alike.”
“I cannot answer for the gods, Your Grace … only for what I
found when I rode into the throne room that day,” Ned said. “Aerys
was dead on the oor, drowned in his own blood. His dragon skulls
stared down from the walls. Lannister’s men were everywhere.
Jaime wore the white cloak of the Kingsguard over his golden
armor. I can see him still. Even his sword was gilded. He was seated
on the Iron Throne, high above his knights, wearing a helm
fashioned in the shape of a lion’s head. How he glittered!”
“This is well known,” the king complained.
“I was still mounted. I rode the length of the hall in silence,
between the long rows of dragon skulls. It felt as though they were
watching me, somehow. I stopped in front of the throne, looking up
at him. His golden sword was across his legs, its edge red with a
king’s blood. My men were lling the room behind me. Lannister’s
men drew back. I never said a word. I looked at him seated there on
the throne, and I waited. At last Jaime laughed and got up. He took
o his helm, and he said to me, ‘Have no fear, Stark. I was only
keeping it warm for our friend Robert. It’s not a very comfortable
seat, I’m afraid.’ ”
The king threw back his head and roared. His laughter startled a
ight of crows from the tall brown grass. They took to the air in a

wild beating of wings. “You think I should mistrust Lannister
because he sat on my throne for a few moments?” He shook with
laughter again. “Jaime was all of seventeen, Ned. Scarce more than
a boy.”
“Boy or man, he had no right to that throne.”
“Perhaps he was tired,” Robert suggested. “Killing kings is weary
work. Gods know, there’s no place else to rest your ass in that
damnable room. And he spoke truly, it is a monstrous
uncomfortable chair. In more ways than one.” The king shook his
head. “Well, now I know Jaime’s dark sin, and the matter can be
forgotten. I am heartily sick of secrets and squabbles and matters of
state, Ned. It’s all as tedious as counting coppers. Come, let’s ride,
you used to know how. I want to feel the wind in my hair again.”
He kicked his horse back into motion and galloped up over the
barrow, raining earth down behind him.
For a moment Ned did not follow. He had run out of words, and
he was lled with a vast sense of helplessness. Not for the rst
time, he wondered what he was doing here and why he had come.
He was no Jon Arryn, to curb the wildness of his king and teach him
wisdom. Robert would do what he pleased, as he always had, and
nothing Ned could say or do would change that. He belonged in
Winterfell. He belonged with Catelyn in her grief, and with Bran.
A man could not always be where he belonged, though. Resigned,
Eddard Stark put his boots into his horse and set o after the king.

TYRION

The north went on forever.
Tyrion Lannister knew the maps as well as anyone, but a
fortnight on the wild track that passed for the kingsroad up here
had brought home the lesson that the map was one thing and the
land quite another.
They had left Winterfell on the same day as the king, amidst all
the commotion of the royal departure, riding out to the sound of
men shouting and horses snorting, to the rattle of wagons and the
groaning of the queen’s huge wheelhouse, as a light snow urried
about them. The kingsroad was just beyond the sprawl of castle and
town. There the banners and the wagons and the columns of knights
and freeriders turned south, taking the tumult with them, while
Tyrion turned north with Benjen Stark and his nephew.
It had grown colder after that, and far more quiet.
West of the road were int hills, grey and rugged, with tall
watchtowers on their stony summits. To the east the land was
lower, the ground attening to a rolling plain that stretched away
as far as the eye could see. Stone bridges spanned swift, narrow
rivers, while small farms spread in rings around holdfasts walled in
wood and stone. The road was well tra cked, and at night for their
comfort there were rude inns to be found.
Three days ride from Winterfell, however, the farmland gave way
to dense wood, and the kingsroad grew lonely. The int hills rose
higher and wilder with each passing mile, until by the fth day they

had turned into mountains, cold blue-grey giants with jagged
promontories and snow on their shoulders. When the wind blew
from the north, long plumes of ice crystals ew from the high peaks
like banners.
With the mountains a wall to the west, the road veered north by
northeast through the wood, a forest of oak and evergreen and
black brier that seemed older and darker than any Tyrion had ever
seen. “The wolfswood,” Benjen Stark called it, and indeed their
nights came alive with the howls of distant packs, and some not so
distant. Jon Snow’s albino direwolf pricked up his ears at the
nightly howling, but never raised his own voice in reply. There was
something very unsettling about that animal, Tyrion thought.
There were eight in the party by then, not counting the wolf.
Tyrion traveled with two of his own men, as be t a Lannister.
Benjen Stark had only his bastard nephew and some fresh mounts
for the Night’s Watch, but at the edge of the wolfswood they stayed
a night behind the wooden walls of a forest holdfast, and there
joined up with another of the black brothers, one Yoren. Yoren was
stooped and sinister, his features hidden behind a beard as black as
his clothing, but he seemed as tough as an old root and as hard as
stone. With him were a pair of ragged peasant boys from the
Fingers. “Rapers,” Yoren said with a cold look at his charges. Tyrion
understood. Life on the Wall was said to be hard, but no doubt it
was preferable to castration.
Five men, three boys, a direwolf, twenty horses, and a cage of
ravens given over to Benjen Stark by Maester Luwin. No doubt they
made a curious fellowship for the kingsroad, or any road.
Tyrion noticed Jon Snow watching Yoren and his sullen
companions, with an odd cast to his face that looked uncomfortably
like dismay. Yoren had a twisted shoulder and a sour smell, his hair
and beard were matted and greasy and full of lice, his clothing old,
patched, and seldom washed. His two young recruits smelled even
worse, and seemed as stupid as they were cruel.
No doubt the boy had made the mistake of thinking that the
Night’s Watch was made up of men like his uncle. If so, Yoren and
his companions were a rude awakening. Tyrion felt sorry for the

boy. He had chosen a hard life … or perhaps he should say that a
hard life had been chosen for him.
He had rather less sympathy for the uncle. Benjen Stark seemed
to share his brother’s distaste for Lannisters, and he had not been
pleased when Tyrion had told him of his intentions. “I warn you,
Lannister, you’ll nd no inns at the Wall,” he had said, looking
down on him.
“No doubt you’ll nd some place to put me,” Tyrion had replied.
“As you might have noticed, I’m small.”
One did not say no to the queen’s brother, of course, so that had
settled the matter, but Stark had not been happy. “You will not like
the ride, I promise you that,” he’d said curtly, and since the moment
they set out, he had done all he could to live up to that promise.
By the end of the rst week, Tyrion’s thighs were raw from hard
riding, his legs were cramping badly, and he was chilled to the
bone. He did not complain. He was damned if he would give Benjen
Stark that satisfaction.
He took a small revenge in the matter of his riding fur, a tattered
bearskin, old and musty-smelling. Stark had o ered it to him in an
excess of Night’s Watch gallantry, no doubt expecting him to
graciously decline. Tyrion had accepted with a smile. He had
brought his warmest clothing with him when they rode out of
Winterfell, and soon discovered that it was nowhere near warm
enough. It was cold up here, and growing colder. The nights were
well below freezing now, and when the wind blew it was like a
knife cutting right through his warmest woolens. By now Stark was
no doubt regretting his chivalrous impulse. Perhaps he had learned
a lesson. The Lannisters never declined, graciously or otherwise.
The Lannisters took what was o ered.
Farms and holdfasts grew scarcer and smaller as they pressed
northward, ever deeper into the darkness of the wolfswood, until
nally there were no more roofs to shelter under, and they were
thrown back on their own resources.
Tyrion was never much use in making a camp or breaking one.
Too small, too hobbled, too in-the-way. So while Stark and Yoren
and the other men erected rude shelters, tended the horses, and

built a re, it became his custom to take his fur and a wineskin and
go o by himself to read.
On the eighteenth night of their journey, the wine was a rare
sweet amber from the Summer Isles that he had brought all the way
north from Casterly Rock, and the book a rumination on the history
and properties of dragons. With Lord Eddard Stark’s permission,
Tyrion had borrowed a few rare volumes from the Winterfell
library and packed them for the ride north.
He found a comfortable spot just beyond the noise of the camp,
beside a swift-running stream with waters clear and cold as ice. A
grotesquely ancient oak provided shelter from the biting wind.
Tyrion curled up in his fur with his back against the trunk, took a
sip of the wine, and began to read about the properties of
dragonbone. Dragonbone is black because of its high iron content, the
book told him. It is strong as steel, yet lighter and far more exible, and
of course utterly impervious to re. Dragonbone bows are greatly prized
by the Dothraki, and small wonder. An archer so armed can outrange
any wooden bow.
Tyrion had a morbid fascination with dragons. When he had rst
come to King’s Landing for his sister’s wedding to Robert
Baratheon, he had made it a point to seek out the dragon skulls that
had hung on the walls of Targaryen’s throne room. King Robert had
replaced them with banners and tapestries, but Tyrion had persisted
until he found the skulls in the dank cellar where they had been
stored.
He had expected to
nd them impressive, perhaps even
frightening. He had not thought to nd them beautiful. Yet they
were. As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to
shimmer in the light of his torch. They liked the re, he sensed.
He’d thrust the torch into the mouth of one of the larger skulls and
made the shadows leap and dance on the wall behind him. The teeth
were long, curving knives of black diamond. The ame of the torch
was nothing to them; they had bathed in the heat of far greater
res. When he had moved away, Tyrion could have sworn that the
beast’s empty eye sockets had watched him go.

There were nineteen skulls. The oldest was more than three
thousand years old; the youngest a mere century and a half. The
most recent were also the smallest; a matched pair no bigger than
masti ’s skulls, and oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last
two hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the
Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they
had not lived very long.
From there the skulls ranged upward in size to the three great
monsters of song and story, the dragons that Aegon Targaryen and
his sisters had unleashed on the Seven Kingdoms of old. The singers
had given them the names of gods: Balerion, Meraxes, Vhaghar.
Tyrion had stood between their gaping jaws, wordless and awed.
You could have ridden a horse down Vhaghar’s gullet, although you
would not have ridden it out again. Meraxes was even bigger. And
the greatest of them, Balerion, the Black Dread, could have
swallowed an aurochs whole, or even one of the hairy mammoths
said to roam the cold wastes beyond the Port of Ibben.
Tyrion stood in that dank cellar for a long time, staring at
Balerion’s huge, empty-eyed skull until his torch burned low, trying
to grasp the size of the living animal, to imagine how it must have
looked when it spread its great black wings and swept across the
skies, breathing re.
His own remote ancestor, King Loren of the Rock, had tried to
stand against the re when he joined with King Mern of the Reach
to oppose the Targaryen conquest. That was close on three hundred
years ago, when the Seven Kingdoms were kingdoms, and not mere
provinces of a greater realm. Between them, the Two Kings had six
hundred banners ying, ve thousand mounted knights, and ten
times as many freeriders and men-at-arms. Aegon Dragonlord had
perhaps a fth that number, the chroniclers said, and most of those
were conscripts from the ranks of the last king he had slain, their
loyalties uncertain.
The hosts met on the broad plains of the Reach, amidst golden
elds of wheat ripe for harvest. When the Two Kings charged, the
Targaryen army shivered and shattered and began to run. For a few
moments, the chroniclers wrote, the conquest was at an end … but

only for those few moments, before Aegon Targaryen and his sisters
joined the battle.
It was the only time that Vhaghar, Meraxes, and Balerion were all
unleashed at once. The singers called it the Field of Fire.
Near four thousand men had burned that day, among them King
Mern of the Reach. King Loren had escaped, and lived long enough
to surrender, pledge his fealty to the Targaryens, and beget a son,
for which Tyrion was duly grateful.
“Why do you read so much?”
Tyrion looked up at the sound of the voice. Jon Snow was
standing a few feet away, regarding him curiously. He closed the
book on a nger and said, “Look at me and tell me what you see.”
The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Is this some kind of trick? I
see you. Tyrion Lannister.”
Tyrion sighed. “You are remarkably polite for a bastard, Snow.
What you see is a dwarf. You are what, twelve?”
“Fourteen,” the boy said.
“Fourteen, and you’re taller than I will ever be. My legs are short
and twisted, and I walk with di culty. I require a special saddle to
keep from falling o my horse. A saddle of my own design, you
may be interested to know. It was either that or ride a pony. My
arms are strong enough, but again, too short. I will never make a
swordsman. Had I been born a peasant, they might have left me out
to die, or sold me to some slaver’s grotesquerie. Alas, I was born a
Lannister of Casterly Rock, and the grotesqueries are all the poorer.
Things are expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for
twenty years. My brother later killed that very same king, as it
turns out, but life is full of these little ironies. My sister married the
new king and my repulsive nephew will be king after him. I must
do my part for the honor of my House, wouldn’t you agree? Yet
how? Well, my legs may be too small for my body, but my head is
too large, although I prefer to think it is just large enough for my
mind. I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses.
My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has
his warhammer, and I have my mind … and a mind needs books as
a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” Tyrion tapped

the leather cover of the book. “That’s why I read so much, Jon
Snow.”
The boy absorbed that all in silence. He had the Stark face if not
the name: long, solemn, guarded, a face that gave nothing away.
Whoever his mother had been, she had left little of herself in her
son. “What are you reading about?” he asked.
“Dragons,” Tyrion told him.
“What good is that? There are no more dragons,” the boy said
with the easy certainty of youth.
“So they say,” Tyrion replied. “Sad, isn’t it? When I was your age,
I used to dream of having a dragon of my own.”
“You did?” the boy said suspiciously. Perhaps he thought Tyrion
was making fun of him.
“Oh, yes. Even a stunted, twisted, ugly little boy can look down
over the world when he’s seated on a dragon’s back.” Tyrion pushed
the bearskin aside and climbed to his feet. “I used to start res in
the bowels of Casterly Rock and stare at the ames for hours,
pretending they were dragon re. Sometimes I’d imagine my father
burning. At other times, my sister.” Jon Snow was staring at him, a
look equal parts horror and fascination. Tyrion gu awed. “Don’t
look at me that way, bastard. I know your secret. You’ve dreamt
the same kind of dreams.”
“No,” Jon Snow said, horri ed. “I wouldn’t …”
“No? Never?” Tyrion raised an eyebrow. “Well, no doubt the
Starks have been terribly good to you. I’m certain Lady Stark treats
you as if you were one of her own. And your brother Robb, he’s
always been kind, and why not? He gets Winterfell and you get the
Wall. And your father … he must have good reasons for packing
you o to the Night’s Watch …”
“Stop it,” Jon Snow said, his face dark with anger. “The Night’s
Watch is a noble calling!”
Tyrion laughed. “You’re too smart to believe that. The Night’s
Watch is a midden heap for all the mis ts of the realm. I’ve seen
you looking at Yoren and his boys. Those are your new brothers,
Jon Snow, how do you like them? Sullen peasants, debtors,
poachers, rapers, thieves, and bastards like you all wind up on the

Wall, watching for grumkins and snarks and all the other monsters
your wet nurse warned you about. The good part is there are no
grumkins or snarks, so it’s scarcely dangerous work. The bad part is
you freeze your balls o , but since you’re not allowed to breed
anyway, I don’t suppose that matters.”
“Stop it!” the boy screamed. He took a step forward, his hands
coiling into sts, close to tears.
Suddenly, absurdly, Tyrion felt guilty. He took a step forward,
intending to give the boy a reassuring pat on the shoulder or mutter
some word of apology.
He never saw the wolf, where it was or how it came at him. One
moment he was walking toward Snow and the next he was at on
his back on the hard rocky ground, the book spinning away from
him as he fell, the breath going out of him at the sudden impact, his
mouth full of dirt and blood and rotting leaves. As he tried to get
up, his back spasmed painfully. He must have wrenched it in the
fall. He ground his teeth in frustration, grabbed a root, and pulled
himself back to a sitting position. “Help me,” he said to the boy,
reaching up a hand.
And suddenly the wolf was between them. He did not growl. The
damned thing never made a sound. He only looked at him with
those bright red eyes, and showed him his teeth, and that was more
than enough. Tyrion sagged back to the ground with a grunt. “Don’t
help me, then. I’ll sit right here until you leave.”
Jon Snow stroked Ghost’s thick white fur, smiling now. “Ask me
nicely.”
Tyrion Lannister felt the anger coiling inside him, and crushed it
out with a will. It was not the rst time in his life he had been
humiliated, and it would not be the last. Perhaps he even deserved
this. “I should be very grateful for your kind assistance, Jon,” he
said mildly.
“Down, Ghost,” the boy said. The direwolf sat on his haunches.
Those red eyes never left Tyrion. Jon came around behind him, slid
his hands under his arms, and lifted him easily to his feet. Then he
picked up the book and handed it back.

“Why did he attack me?” Tyrion asked with a sidelong glance at
the direwolf. He wiped blood and dirt from his mouth with the back
of his hand.
“Maybe he thought you were a grumkin.”
Tyrion glanced at him sharply. Then he laughed, a raw snort of
amusement that came bursting out through his nose entirely
without his permission. “Oh, gods,” he said, choking on his laughter
and shaking his head, “I suppose I do rather look like a grumkin.
What does he do to snarks?”
“You don’t want to know.” Jon picked up the wineskin and
handed it to Tyrion.
Tyrion pulled out the stopper, tilted his head, and squeezed a long
stream into his mouth. The wine was cool re as it trickled down
his throat and warmed his belly. He held out the skin to Jon Snow.
“Want some?”
The boy took the skin and tried a cautious swallow. “It’s true,
isn’t it?” he said when he was done. “What you said about the
Night’s Watch.”
Tyrion nodded.
Jon Snow set his mouth in a grim line. “If that’s what it is, that’s
what it is.”
Tyrion grinned at him. “That’s good, bastard. Most men would
rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
“Most men,” the boy said. “But not you.”
“No,” Tyrion admitted, “not me. I seldom even dream of dragons
anymore. There are no dragons.” He scooped up the fallen bearskin.
“Come, we had better return to camp before your uncle calls the
banners.”
The walk was short, but the ground was rough underfoot and his
legs were cramping badly by the time they got back. Jon Snow
o ered a hand to help him over a thick tangle of roots, but Tyrion
shook him o . He would make his own way, as he had all his life.
Still, the camp was a welcome sight. The shelters had been thrown
up against the tumbledown wall of a long-abandoned holdfast, a
shield against the wind. The horses had been fed and a re had been
laid. Yoren sat on a stone, skinning a squirrel. The savory smell of

stew lled Tyrion’s nostrils. He dragged himself over to where his
man Morrec was tending the stewpot. Wordlessly, Morrec handed
him the ladle. Tyrion tasted and handed it back. “More pepper,” he
said.
Benjen Stark emerged from the shelter he shared with his
nephew. “There you are. Jon, damn it, don’t go o like that by
yourself. I thought the Others had gotten you.”
“It was the grumkins,” Tyrion told him, laughing. Jon Snow
smiled. Stark shot a ba ed look at Yoren. The old man grunted,
shrugged, and went back to his bloody work.
The squirrel gave some body to the stew, and they ate it with
black bread and hard cheese that night around their re. Tyrion
shared around his skin of wine until even Yoren grew mellow. One
by one the company drifted o to their shelters and to sleep, all but
Jon Snow, who had drawn the night’s rst watch.
Tyrion was the last to retire, as always. As he stepped into the
shelter his men had built for him, he paused and looked back at Jon
Snow. The boy stood near the re, his face still and hard, looking
deep into the ames.
Tyrion Lannister smiled sadly and went to bed.

CATELYN

Ned and the girls were eight days gone when Maester Luwin came
to her one night in Bran’s sickroom, carrying a reading lamp and the
books of account. “It is past time that we reviewed the gures, my
lady,” he said. “You’ll want to know how much this royal visit cost
us.”
Catelyn looked at Bran in his sickbed and brushed his hair back
o his forehead. It had grown very long, she realized. She would
have to cut it soon. “I have no need to look at gures, Maester
Luwin,” she told him, never taking her eyes from Bran. “I know
what the visit cost us. Take the books away.”
“My lady, the king’s party had healthy appetites. We must
replenish our stores before—”
She cut him o . “I said, take the books away. The steward will
attend to our needs.”
“We have no steward,” Maester Luwin reminded her. Like a little
grey rat, she thought, he would not let go. “Poole went south to
establish Lord Eddard’s household at King’s Landing.”
Catelyn nodded absently. “Oh, yes. I remember.” Bran looked so
pale. She wondered whether they might move his bed under the
window, so he could get the morning sun.
Maester Luwin set the lamp in a niche by the door and ddled
with its wick. “There are several appointments that require your
immediate attention, my lady. Besides the steward, we need a
captain of the guards to ll Jory’s place, a new master of horse—”

Her eyes snapped around and found him. “A master of horse?” Her
voice was a whip.
The maester was shaken. “Yes, my lady. Hullen rode south with
Lord Eddard, so—”
“My son lies here broken and dying, Luwin, and you wish to
discuss a new master of horse? Do you think I care what happens in
the stables? Do you think it matters to me one whit? I would gladly
butcher every horse in Winterfell with my own hands if it would
open Bran’s eyes, do you understand that? Do you!”
He bowed his head. “Yes, my lady, but the appointments—”
“I’ll make the appointments,” Robb said.
Catelyn had not heard him enter, but there he stood in the
doorway, looking at her. She had been shouting, she realized with a
sudden ush of shame. What was happening to her? She was so
tired, and her head hurt all the time.
Maester Luwin looked from Catelyn to her son. “I have prepared
a list of those we might wish to consider for the vacant o ces,” he
said, o ering Robb a paper plucked from his sleeve.
Her son glanced at the names. He had come from outside, Catelyn
saw; his cheeks were red from the cold, his hair shaggy and
windblown. “Good men,” he said. “We’ll talk about them
tomorrow.” He handed back the list of names.
“Very good, my lord.” The paper vanished into his sleeve.
“Leave us now,” Robb said. Maester Luwin bowed and departed.
Robb closed the door behind him and turned to her. He was wearing
a sword, she saw. “Mother, what are you doing?”
Catelyn had always thought Robb looked like her; like Bran and
Rickon and Sansa, he had the Tully coloring, the auburn hair, the
blue eyes. Yet now for the rst time she saw something of Eddard
Stark in his face, something as stern and hard as the north. “What
am I doing?” she echoed, puzzled. “How can you ask that? What do
you imagine I’m doing? I am taking care of your brother. I am
taking care of Bran.”
“Is that what you call it? You haven’t left this room since Bran
was hurt. You didn’t even come to the gate when Father and the
girls went south.”

“I said my farewells to them here, and watched them ride out
from that window.” She had begged Ned not to go, not now, not
after what had happened; everything had changed now, couldn’t he
see that? It was no use. He had no choice, he had told her, and then
he left, choosing. “I can’t leave him, even for a moment, not when
any moment could be his last. I have to be with him, if … if …” She
took her son’s limp hand, sliding his ngers through her own. He
was so frail and thin, with no strength left in his hand, but she could
still feel the warmth of life through his skin.
Robb’s voice softened. “He’s not going to die, Mother. Maester
Luwin says the time of greatest danger has passed.”
“And what if Maester Luwin is wrong? What if Bran needs me and
I’m not here?”
“Rickon needs you,” Robb said sharply. “He’s only three, he
doesn’t understand what’s happening. He thinks everyone has
deserted him, so he follows me around all day, clutching my leg and
crying. I don’t know what to do with him.” He paused a moment,
chewing on his lower lip the way he’d done when he was little.
“Mother, I need you too. I’m trying but I can’t … I can’t do it all by
myself.” His voice broke with sudden emotion, and Catelyn
remembered that he was only fourteen. She wanted to get up and
go to him, but Bran was still holding her hand and she could not
move.
Outside the tower, a wolf began to howl. Catelyn trembled, just
for a second.
“Bran’s.” Robb opened the window and let the night air into the
stu y tower room. The howling grew louder. It was a cold and
lonely sound, full of melancholy and despair.
“Don’t,” she told him. “Bran needs to stay warm.”
“He needs to hear them sing,” Robb said. Somewhere out in
Winterfell, a second wolf began to howl in chorus with the rst.
Then a third, closer. “Shaggydog and Grey Wind,” Robb said as
their voices rose and fell together. “You can tell them apart if you
listen close.”
Catelyn was shaking. It was the grief, the cold, the howling of the
direwolves. Night after night, the howling and the cold wind and

the grey empty castle, on and on they went, never changing, and
her boy lying there broken, the sweetest of her children, the
gentlest, Bran who loved to laugh and climb and dreamt of
knighthood, all gone now, she would never hear him laugh again.
Sobbing, she pulled her hand free of his and covered her ears
against those terrible howls. “Make them stop!” she cried. “I can’t
stand it, make them stop, make them stop, kill them all if you must,
just make them stop!”
She didn’t remember falling to the oor, but there she was, and
Robb was lifting her, holding her in strong arms. “Don’t be afraid,
Mother. They would never hurt him.” He helped her to her narrow
bed in the corner of the sickroom. “Close your eyes,” he said gently.
“Rest. Maester Luwin tells me you’ve hardly slept since Bran’s fall.”
“I can’t,” she wept. “Gods forgive me, Robb, I can’t, what if he
dies while I’m asleep, what if he dies, what if he dies …” The
wolves were still howling. She screamed and held her ears again.
“Oh, gods, close the window!”
“If you swear to me you’ll sleep.” Robb went to the window, but
as he reached for the shutters another sound was added to the
mournful howling of the direwolves. “Dogs,” he said, listening. “All
the dogs are barking. They’ve never done that before …” Catelyn
heard his breath catch in his throat. When she looked up, his face
was pale in the lamplight. “Fire,” he whispered.
Fire, she thought, and then, Bran! “Help me,” she said urgently,
sitting up. “Help me with Bran.”
Robb did not seem to hear her. “The library tower’s on re,” he
said.
Catelyn could see the ickering reddish light through the open
window now. She sagged with relief. Bran was safe. The library was
across the bailey, there was no way the re would reach them here.
“Thank the gods,” she whispered.
Robb looked at her as if she’d gone mad. “Mother, stay here. I’ll
come back as soon as the re’s out.” He ran then. She heard him
shout to the guards outside the room, heard them descending
together in a wild rush, taking the stairs two and three at a time.

Outside, there were shouts of “Fire!” in the yard, screams,
running footsteps, the whinny of frightened horses, and the frantic
barking of the castle dogs. The howling was gone, she realized as
she listened to the cacophony. The direwolves had fallen silent.
Catelyn said a silent prayer of thanks to the seven faces of god as
she went to the window. Across the bailey, long tongues of ame
shot from the windows of the library. She watched the smoke rise
into the sky and thought sadly of all the books the Starks had
gathered over the centuries. Then she closed the shutters.
When she turned away from the window, the man was in the
room with her.
“You weren’t s’posed to be here,” he muttered sourly. “No one
was s’posed to be here.”
He was a small, dirty man in lthy brown clothing, and he stank
of horses. Catelyn knew all the men who worked in their stables,
and he was none of them. He was gaunt, with limp blond hair and
pale eyes deep-sunk in a bony face, and there was a dagger in his
hand.
Catelyn looked at the knife, then at Bran. “No,” she said. The
word stuck in her throat, the merest whisper.
He must have heard her. “It’s a mercy,” he said. “He’s dead
already.”
“No,” Catelyn said, louder now as she found her voice again. “No,
you can’t.” She spun back toward the window to scream for help,
but the man moved faster than she would have believed. One hand
clamped down over her mouth and yanked back her head, the other
brought the dagger up to her windpipe. The stench of him was
overwhelming.
She reached up with both hands and grabbed the blade with all
her strength, pulling it away from her throat. She heard him cursing
into her ear. Her ngers were slippery with blood, but she would
not let go of the dagger. The hand over her mouth clenched more
tightly, shutting o her air. Catelyn twisted her head to the side and
managed to get a piece of his esh between her teeth. She bit down
hard into his palm. The man grunted in pain. She ground her teeth
together and tore at him, and all of a sudden he let go. The taste of

his blood lled her mouth. She sucked in air and screamed, and he
grabbed her hair and pulled her away from him, and she stumbled
and went down, and then he was standing over her, breathing hard,
shaking. The dagger was still clutched tightly in his right hand, slick
with blood. “You weren’t s’posed to be here,” he repeated stupidly.
Catelyn saw the shadow slip through the open door behind him.
There was a low rumble, less than a snarl, the merest whisper of a
threat, but he must have heard something, because he started to
turn just as the wolf made its leap. They went down together, half
sprawled over Catelyn where she’d fallen. The wolf had him under
the jaw. The man’s shriek lasted less than a second before the beast
wrenched back its head, taking out half his throat.
His blood felt like warm rain as it sprayed across her face.
The wolf was looking at her. Its jaws were red and wet and its
eyes glowed golden in the dark room. It was Bran’s wolf, she
realized. Of course it was. “Thank you,” Catelyn whispered, her
voice faint and tiny. She lifted her hand, trembling. The wolf
padded closer, sni ed at her ngers, then licked at the blood with a
wet rough tongue. When it had cleaned all the blood o her hand, it
turned away silently and jumped up on Bran’s bed and lay down
beside him. Catelyn began to laugh hysterically.
That was the way they found them, when Robb and Maester
Luwin and Ser Rodrik burst in with half the guards in Winterfell.
When the laughter nally died in her throat, they wrapped her in
warm blankets and led her back to the Great Keep, to her own
chambers. Old Nan undressed her and helped her into a scalding hot
bath and washed the blood o her with a soft cloth.
Afterward Maester Luwin arrived to dress her wounds. The cuts
in her ngers went deep, almost to the bone, and her scalp was raw
and bleeding where he’d pulled out a handful of hair. The maester
told her the pain was just starting now, and gave her milk of the
poppy to help her sleep.
Finally she closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, they told her that she had slept
four days. Catelyn nodded and sat up in bed. It all seemed like a
nightmare to her now, everything since Bran’s fall, a terrible dream

of blood and grief, but she had the pain in her hands to remind her
that it was real. She felt weak and light-headed, yet strangely
resolute, as if a great weight had lifted from her.
“Bring me some bread and honey,” she told her servants, “and
take word to Maester Luwin that my bandages want changing.”
They looked at her in surprise and ran to do her bidding.
Catelyn remembered the way she had been before, and she was
ashamed. She had let them all down, her children, her husband, her
House. It would not happen again. She would show these
northerners how strong a Tully of Riverrun could be.
Robb arrived before her food. Rodrik Cassel came with him, and
her husband’s ward Theon Greyjoy, and lastly Hallis Mollen, a
muscular guardsman with a square brown beard. He was the new
captain of the guard, Robb said. Her son was dressed in boiled
leather and ringmail, she saw, and a sword hung at his waist.
“Who was he?” Catelyn asked them.
“No one knows his name,” Hallis Mollen told her. “He was no
man of Winterfell, m’lady, but some says they seen him here and
about the castle these past few weeks.”
“One of the king’s men, then,” she said, “or one of the Lannisters’.
He could have waited behind when the others left.”
“Maybe,” Hal said. “With all these strangers lling up Winterfell
of late, there’s no way of saying who he belonged to.”
“He’d been hiding in your stables,” Greyjoy said. “You could
smell it on him.”
“And how could he go unnoticed?” she said sharply.
Hallis Mollen looked abashed. “Between the horses Lord Eddard
took south and them we sent north to the Night’s Watch, the stalls
were half-empty. It were no great trick to hide from the stableboys.
Could be Hodor saw him, the talk is that boy’s been acting queer,
but simple as he is …” Hal shook his head.
“We found where he’d been sleeping,” Robb put in. “He had
ninety silver stags in a leather bag buried beneath the straw.”
“It’s good to know my son’s life was not sold cheaply,” Catelyn
said bitterly.

Hallis Mollen looked at her, confused. “Begging your grace,
m’lady, you saying he was out to kill your boy?”
Greyjoy was doubtful. “That’s madness.”
“He came for Bran,” Catelyn said. “He kept muttering how I
wasn’t supposed to be there. He set the library re thinking I would
rush to put it out, taking any guards with me. If I hadn’t been halfmad with grief, it would have worked.”
“Why would anyone want to kill Bran?” Robb said. “Gods, he’s
only a little boy, helpless, sleeping …”
Catelyn gave her rstborn a challenging look. “If you are to rule
in the north, you must think these things through, Robb. Answer
your own question. Why would anyone want to kill a sleeping
child?”
Before he could answer, the servants returned with a plate of
food fresh from the kitchen. There was much more than she’d asked
for: hot bread, butter and honey and blackberry preserves, a rasher
of bacon and a soft-boiled egg, a wedge of cheese, a pot of mint tea.
And with it came Maester Luwin.
“How is my son, Maester?” Catelyn looked at all the food and
found she had no appetite.
Maester Luwin lowered his eyes. “Unchanged, my lady.”
It was the reply she had expected, no more and no less. Her hands
throbbed with pain, as if the blade were still in her, cutting deep.
She sent the servants away and looked back to Robb. “Do you have
the answer yet?”
“Someone is afraid Bran might wake up,” Robb said, “afraid of
what he might say or do, afraid of something he knows.”
Catelyn was proud of him. “Very good.” She turned to the new
captain of the guard. “We must keep Bran safe. If there was one
killer, there could be others.”
“How many guards do you want, m’lady?” Hal asked.
“So long as Lord Eddard is away, my son is the master of
Winterfell,” she told him.
Robb stood a little taller. “Put one man in the sickroom, night and
day, one outside the door, two at the bottom of the stairs. No one
sees Bran without my warrant or my mother’s.”

“As you say, m’lord.”
“Do it now,” Catelyn suggested.
“And let his wolf stay in the room with him,” Robb added.
“Yes,” Catelyn said. And then again: “Yes.”
Hallis Mollen bowed and left the room.
“Lady Stark,” Ser Rodrik said when the guardsman had gone, “did
you chance to notice the dagger the killer used?”
“The circumstances did not allow me to examine it closely, but I
can vouch for its edge,” Catelyn replied with a dry smile. “Why do
you ask?”
“We found the knife still in the villain’s grasp. It seemed to me
that it was altogether too ne a weapon for such a man, so I looked
at it long and hard. The blade is Valyrian steel, the hilt dragonbone.
A weapon like that has no business being in the hands of such as
him. Someone gave it to him.”
Catelyn nodded, thoughtful. “Robb, close the door.”
He looked at her strangely, but did as she told him.
“What I am about to tell you must not leave this room,” she told
them. “I want your oaths on that. If even part of what I suspect is
true, Ned and my girls have ridden into deadly danger, and a word
in the wrong ears could mean their lives.”
“Lord Eddard is a second father to me,” said Theon Greyjoy. “I do
so swear.”
“You have my oath,” Maester Luwin said.
“And mine, my lady,” echoed Ser Rodrik.
She looked at her son. “And you, Robb?”
He nodded his consent.
“My sister Lysa believes the Lannisters murdered her husband,
Lord Arryn, the Hand of the King,” Catelyn told them. “It comes to
me that Jaime Lannister did not join the hunt the day Bran fell. He
remained here in the castle.” The room was deathly quiet. “I do not
think Bran fell from that tower,” she said into the stillness. “I think
he was thrown.”
The shock was plain on their faces. “My lady, that is a monstrous
suggestion,” said Rodrik Cassel. “Even the Kingslayer would inch
at the murder of an innocent child.”

“Oh, would he?” Theon Greyjoy asked. “I wonder.”
“There is no limit to Lannister pride or Lannister ambition,”
Catelyn said.
“The boy had always been surehanded in the past,” Maester
Luwin said thoughtfully. “He knew every stone in Winterfell.”
“Gods,” Robb swore, his young face dark with anger. “If this is
true, he will pay for it.” He drew his sword and waved it in the air.
“I’ll kill him myself!”
Ser Rodrik bristled at him. “Put that away! The Lannisters are a
hundred leagues away. Never draw your sword unless you mean to
use it. How many times must I tell you, foolish boy?”
Abashed, Robb sheathed his sword, suddenly a child again.
Catelyn said to Ser Rodrik, “I see my son is wearing steel now.”
The old master-at-arms said, “I thought it was time.”
Robb was looking at her anxiously. “Past time,” she said.
“Winterfell may have need of all its swords soon, and they had best
not be made of wood.”
Theon Greyjoy put a hand on the hilt of his blade and said, “My
lady, if it comes to that, my House owes yours a great debt.”
Maester Luwin pulled at his chain collar where it chafed against
his neck. “All we have is conjecture. This is the queen’s beloved
brother we mean to accuse. She will not take it kindly. We must
have proof, or forever keep silent.”
“Your proof is in the dagger,” Ser Rodrik said. “A ne blade like
that will not have gone unnoticed.”
There was only one place to nd the truth of it, Catelyn realized.
“Someone must go to King’s Landing.”
“I’ll go,” Robb said.
“No,” she told him. “Your place is here. There must always be a
Stark in Winterfell.” She looked at Ser Rodrik with his great white
whiskers, at Maester Luwin in his grey robes, at young Greyjoy,
lean and dark and impetuous. Who to send? Who would be
believed? Then she knew. Catelyn struggled to push back the
blankets, her bandaged ngers as sti and unyielding as stone. She
climbed out of bed. “I must go myself.”

“My lady,” said Maester Luwin, “is that wise? Surely the
Lannisters would greet your arrival with suspicion.”
“What about Bran?” Robb asked. The poor boy looked utterly
confused now. “You can’t mean to leave him.”
“I have done everything I can for Bran,” she said, laying a
wounded hand on his arm. “His life is in the hands of the gods and
Maester Luwin. As you reminded me yourself, Robb, I have other
children to think of now.”
“You will need a strong escort, my lady,” Theon said.
“I’ll send Hal with a squad of guardsmen,” Robb said.
“No,” Catelyn said. “A large party attracts unwelcome attention. I
would not have the Lannisters know I am coming.”
Ser Rodrik protested. “My lady, let me accompany you at least.
The kingsroad can be perilous for a woman alone.”
“I will not be taking the kingsroad,” Catelyn replied. She thought
for a moment, then nodded her consent. “Two riders can move as
fast as one, and a good deal faster than a long column burdened by
wagons and wheel-houses. I will welcome your company, Ser
Rodrik. We will follow the White Knife down to the sea, and hire a
ship at White Harbor. Strong horses and brisk winds should bring us
to King’s Landing well ahead of Ned and the Lannisters.” And then,
she thought, we shall see what we shall see.

SANSA

Eddard Stark had left before dawn, Septa Mordane informed Sansa
as they broke their fast. “The king sent for him. Another hunt, I do
believe. There are still wild aurochs in these lands, I am told.”
“I’ve never seen an aurochs,” Sansa said, feeding a piece of bacon
to Lady under the table. The direwolf took it from her hand, as
delicate as a queen.
Septa Mordane sni ed in disapproval. “A noble lady does not feed
dogs at her table,” she said, breaking o another piece of comb and
letting the honey drip down onto her bread.
“She’s not a dog, she’s a direwolf,” Sansa pointed out as Lady
licked her ngers with a rough tongue. “Anyway, Father said we
could keep them with us if we want.”
The septa was not appeased. “You’re a good girl, Sansa, but I do
vow, when it comes to that creature you’re as willful as your sister
Arya.” She scowled. “And where is Arya this morning?”
“She wasn’t hungry,” Sansa said, knowing full well that her sister
had probably stolen down to the kitchen hours ago and wheedled a
breakfast out of some cook’s boy.
“Do remind her to dress nicely today. The grey velvet, perhaps.
We are all invited to ride with the queen and Princess Myrcella in
the royal wheelhouse, and we must look our best.”
Sansa already looked her best. She had brushed out her long
auburn hair until it shone, and picked her nicest blue silks. She had
been looking forward to today for more than a week. It was a great

honor to ride with the queen, and besides, Prince Jo rey might be
there. Her betrothed. Just thinking it made her feel a strange
uttering inside, even though they were not to marry for years and
years. Sansa did not really know Jo rey yet, but she was already in
love with him. He was all she ever dreamt her prince should be, tall
and handsome and strong, with hair like gold. She treasured every
chance to spend time with him, few as they were. The only thing
that scared her about today was Arya. Arya had a way of ruining
everything. You never knew what she would do. “I’ll tell her,”
Sansa said uncertainly, “but she’ll dress the way she always does.”
She hoped it wouldn’t be too embarrassing. “May I be excused?”
“You may.” Septa Mordane helped herself to more bread and
honey, and Sansa slid from the bench. Lady followed at her heels as
she ran from the inn’s common room.
Outside, she stood for a moment amidst the shouts and curses and
the creak of wooden wheels as the men broke down the tents and
pavilions and loaded the wagons for another day’s march. The inn
was a sprawling three-story structure of pale stone, the biggest that
Sansa had ever seen, but even so, it had accommodations for less
than a third of the king’s party, which had swollen to more than
four hundred with the addition of her father’s household and the
freeriders who had joined them on the road.
She found Arya on the banks of the Trident, trying to hold
Nymeria still while she brushed dried mud from her fur. The
direwolf was not enjoying the process. Arya was wearing the same
riding leathers she had worn yesterday and the day before.
“You better put on something pretty,” Sansa told her. “Septa
Mordane said so. We’re traveling in the queen’s wheelhouse with
Princess Myrcella today.”
“I’m not,” Arya said, trying to brush a tangle out of Nymeria’s
matted grey fur. “Mycah and I are going to ride upstream and look
for rubies at the ford.”
“Rubies,” Sansa said, lost. “What rubies?”
Arya gave her a look like she was so stupid. “Rhaegar’s rubies.
This is where King Robert killed him and won the crown.”

Sansa regarded her scrawny little sister in disbelief. “You can’t
look for rubies, the princess is expecting us. The queen invited us
both.”
“I don’t care,” Arya said. “The wheelhouse doesn’t even have
windows, you can’t see a thing.”
“What could you want to see?” Sansa said, annoyed. She had been
thrilled by the invitation, and her stupid sister was going to ruin
everything, just as she’d feared. “It’s all just elds and farms and
holdfasts.”
“It is not,” Arya said stubbornly. “If you came with us sometimes,
you’d see.”
“I hate riding,” Sansa said fervently. “All it does is get you soiled
and dusty and sore.”
Arya shrugged. “Hold still,” she snapped at Nymeria, “I’m not
hurting you.” Then to Sansa she said, “When we were crossing the
Neck, I counted thirty-six owers I never saw before, and Mycah
showed me a lizard-lion.”
Sansa shuddered. They had been twelve days crossing the Neck,
rumbling down a crooked causeway through an endless black bog,
and she had hated every moment of it. The air had been damp and
clammy, the causeway so narrow they could not even make proper
camp at night, they had to stop right on the kingsroad. Dense
thickets of half-drowned trees pressed close around them, branches
dripping with curtains of pale fungus. Huge owers bloomed in the
mud and oated on pools of stagnant water, but if you were stupid
enough to leave the causeway to pluck them, there were quicksands
waiting to suck you down, and snakes watching from the trees, and
lizard-lions oating half-submerged in the water, like black logs
with eyes and teeth.
None of which stopped Arya, of course. One day she came back
grinning her horsey grin, her hair all tangled and her clothes
covered in mud, clutching a raggedy bunch of purple and green
owers for Father. Sansa kept hoping he would tell Arya to behave
herself and act like the highborn lady she was supposed to be, but
he never did, he only hugged her and thanked her for the owers.
That just made her worse.

Then it turned out the purple owers were called poison kisses,
and Arya got a rash on her arms. Sansa would have thought that
might have taught her a lesson, but Arya laughed about it, and the
next day she rubbed mud all over her arms like some ignorant bog
woman just because her friend Mycah told her it would stop the
itching. She had bruises on her arms and shoulders too, dark purple
welts and faded green-and-yellow splotches; Sansa had seen them
when her sister undressed for sleep. How she had gotten those only
the seven gods knew.
Arya was still going on, brushing out Nymeria’s tangles and
chattering about things she’d seen on the trek south. “Last week we
found this haunted watchtower, and the day before we chased a
herd of wild horses. You should have seen them run when they
caught a scent of Nymeria.” The wolf wriggled in her grasp and
Arya scolded her. “Stop that, I have to do the other side, you’re all
muddy.”
“You’re not supposed to leave the column,” Sansa reminded her.
“Father said so.”
Arya shrugged. “I didn’t go far. Anyway, Nymeria was with me
the whole time. I don’t always go o , either. Sometimes it’s fun just
to ride along with the wagons and talk to people.”
Sansa knew all about the sorts of people Arya liked to talk to:
squires and grooms and serving girls, old men and naked children,
rough-spoken freeriders of uncertain birth. Arya would make friends
with anybody. This Mycah was the worst; a butcher’s boy, thirteen
and wild, he slept in the meat wagon and smelled of the
slaughtering block. Just the sight of him was enough to make Sansa
feel sick, but Arya seemed to prefer his company to hers.
Sansa was running out of patience now. “You have to come with
me,” she told her sister rmly. “You can’t refuse the queen. Septa
Mordane will expect you.”
Arya ignored her. She gave a hard yank with the brush. Nymeria
growled and spun away, a ronted. “Come back here!”
“There’s going to be lemon cakes and tea,” Sansa went on, all
adult and reasonable. Lady brushed against her leg. Sansa scratched
her ears the way she liked, and Lady sat beside her on her haunches,

watching Arya chase Nymeria. “Why would you want to ride a
smelly old horse and get all sore and sweaty when you could recline
on feather pillows and eat cakes with the queen?”
“I don’t like the queen,” Arya said casually. Sansa sucked in her
breath, shocked that even Arya would say such a thing, but her
sister prattled on, heedless. “She won’t even let me bring Nymeria.”
She thrust the brush under her belt and stalked her wolf. Nymeria
watched her approach warily.
“A royal wheelhouse is no place for a wolf,” Sansa said. “And
Princess Myrcella is afraid of them, you know that.”
“Myrcella is a little baby.” Arya grabbed Nymeria around her
neck, but the moment she pulled out the brush again the direwolf
wriggled free and bounded o . Frustrated, Arya threw down the
brush. “Bad wolf!” she shouted.
Sansa couldn’t help but smile a little. The kennelmaster once told
her that an animal takes after its master. She gave Lady a quick
little hug. Lady licked her cheek. Sansa giggled. Arya heard and
whirled around, glaring. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going out
riding.” Her long horsey face got the stubborn look that meant she
was going to do something willful.
“Gods be true, Arya, sometimes you act like such a child,” Sansa
said. “I’ll go by myself then. It will be ever so much nicer that way.
Lady and I will eat all the lemon cakes and just have the best time
without you.”
She turned to walk o , but Arya shouted after her, “They won’t
let you bring Lady either.” She was gone before Sansa could think
of a reply, chasing Nymeria along the river.
Alone and humiliated, Sansa took the long way back to the inn,
where she knew Septa Mordane would be waiting. Lady padded
quietly by her side. She was almost in tears. All she wanted was for
things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs. Why
couldn’t Arya be sweet and delicate and kind, like Princess
Myrcella? She would have liked a sister like that.
Sansa could never understand how two sisters, born only two
years apart, could be so di erent. It would have been easier if Arya
had been a bastard, like their half brother Jon. She even looked like

Jon, with the long face and brown hair of the Starks, and nothing of
their lady mother in her face or her coloring. And Jon’s mother had
been common, or so people whispered. Once, when she was littler,
Sansa had even asked Mother if perhaps there hadn’t been some
mistake. Perhaps the grumkins had stolen her real sister. But Mother
had only laughed and said no, Arya was her daughter and Sansa’s
trueborn sister, blood of their blood. Sansa could not think why
Mother would want to lie about it, so she supposed it had to be
true.
As she neared the center of camp, her distress was quickly
forgotten. A crowd had gathered around the queen’s wheelhouse.
Sansa heard excited voices buzzing like a hive of bees. The doors
had been thrown open, she saw, and the queen stood at the top of
the wooden steps, smiling down at someone. She heard her saying,
“The council does us great honor, my good lords.”
“What’s happening?” she asked a squire she knew.
“The council sent riders from King’s Landing to escort us the rest
of the way,” he told her. “An honor guard for the king.”
Anxious to see, Sansa let Lady clear a path through the crowd.
People moved aside hastily for the direwolf. When she got closer,
she saw two knights kneeling before the queen, in armor so ne and
gorgeous that it made her blink.
One knight wore an intricate suit of white enameled scales,
brilliant as a eld of new-fallen snow, with silver chasings and
clasps that glittered in the sun. When he removed his helm, Sansa
saw that he was an old man with hair as pale as his armor, yet he
seemed strong and graceful for all that. From his shoulders hung the
pure white cloak of the Kingsguard.
His companion was a man near twenty whose armor was steel
plate of a deep forest-green. He was the handsomest man Sansa had
ever set eyes upon; tall and powerfully made, with jet-black hair
that fell to his shoulders and framed a clean-shaven face, and
laughing green eyes to match his armor. Cradled under one arm was
an antlered helm, its magni cent rack shimmering in gold.
At rst Sansa did not notice the third stranger. He did not kneel
with the others. He stood to one side, beside their horses, a gaunt

grim man who watched the proceedings in silence. His face was
pockmarked and beardless, with deepset eyes and hollow cheeks.
Though he was not an old man, only a few wisps of hair remained
to him, sprouting above his ears, but those he had grown long as a
woman’s. His armor was iron-grey chainmail over layers of boiled
leather, plain and unadorned, and it spoke of age and hard use.
Above his right shoulder the stained leather hilt of the blade
strapped to his back was visible; a two-handed greatsword, too long
to be worn at his side.
“The king is gone hunting, but I know he will be pleased to see
you when he returns,” the queen was saying to the two knights who
knelt before her, but Sansa could not take her eyes o the third
man. He seemed to feel the weight of her gaze. Slowly he turned his
head. Lady growled. A terror as overwhelming as anything Sansa
Stark had ever felt lled her suddenly. She stepped backward and
bumped into someone.
Strong hands grasped her by the shoulders, and for a moment
Sansa thought it was her father, but when she turned, it was the
burned face of Sandor Clegane looking down at her, his mouth
twisted in a terrible mockery of a smile. “You are shaking, girl,” he
said, his voice rasping. “Do I frighten you so much?”
He did, and had since she had rst laid eyes on the ruin that re
had made of his face, though it seemed to her now that he was not
half so terrifying as the other. Still, Sansa wrenched away from him,
and the Hound laughed, and Lady moved between them, rumbling a
warning. Sansa dropped to her knees to wrap her arms around the
wolf. They were all gathered around gaping, she could feel their
eyes on her, and here and there she heard muttered comments and
titters of laughter.
“A wolf,” a man said, and someone else said, “Seven hells, that’s a
direwolf,” and the rst man said, “What’s it doing in camp?” and
the Hound’s rasping voice replied, “The Starks use them for wet
nurses,” and Sansa realized that the two stranger knights were
looking down on her and Lady, swords in their hands, and then she
was frightened again, and ashamed. Tears lled her eyes.
She heard the queen say, “Jo rey, go to her.”

And her prince was there.
“Leave her alone,” Jo rey said. He stood over her, beautiful in
blue wool and black leather, his golden curls shining in the sun like
a crown. He gave her his hand, drew her to her feet. “What is it,
sweet lady? Why are you afraid? No one will hurt you. Put away
your swords, all of you. The wolf is her little pet, that’s all.” He
looked at Sandor Clegane. “And you, dog, away with you, you’re
scaring my betrothed.”
The Hound, ever faithful, bowed and slid away quietly through
the press. Sansa struggled to steady herself. She felt like such a fool.
She was a Stark of Winterfell, a noble lady, and someday she would
be a queen. “It was not him, my sweet prince,” she tried to explain.
“It was the other one.”
The two stranger knights exchanged a look. “Payne?” chuckled
the young man in the green armor.
The older man in white spoke to Sansa gently. “Ofttimes Ser Ilyn
frightens me as well, sweet lady. He has a fearsome aspect.”
“As well he should.” The queen had descended from the
wheelhouse. The spectators parted to make way for her. “If the
wicked do not fear the King’s Justice, you have put the wrong man
in the o ce.”
Sansa nally found her words. “Then surely you have chosen the
right one, Your Grace,” she said, and a gale of laughter erupted all
around her.
“Well spoken, child,” said the old man in white. “As be ts the
daughter of Eddard Stark. I am honored to know you, however
irregular the manner of our meeting. I am Ser Barristan Selmy, of
the Kingsguard.” He bowed.
Sansa knew the name, and now the courtesies that Septa Mordane
had taught her over the years came back to her. “The Lord
Commander of the Kingsguard,” she said, “and councillor to Robert
our king and to Aerys Targaryen before him. The honor is mine,
good knight. Even in the far north, the singers praise the deeds of
Barristan the Bold.”
The green knight laughed again. “Barristan the Old, you mean.
Don’t atter him too sweetly, child, he thinks overmuch of himself

already.” He smiled at her. “Now, wolf girl, if you can put a name
to me as well, then I must concede that you are truly our Hand’s
daughter.”
Jo rey sti ened beside her. “Have a care how you address my
betrothed.”
“I can answer,” Sansa said quickly, to quell her prince’s anger.
She smiled at the green knight. “Your helmet bears golden antlers,
my lord. The stag is the sigil of the royal House. King Robert has
two brothers. By your extreme youth, you can only be Renly
Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End and councillor to the king, and so I
name you.”
Ser Barristan chuckled. “By his extreme youth, he can only be a
prancing jackanapes, and so I name him.”
There was general laughter, led by Lord Renly himself. The
tension of a few moments ago was gone, and Sansa was beginning
to feel comfortable … until Ser Ilyn Payne shouldered two men
aside, and stood before her, unsmiling. He did not say a word. Lady
bared her teeth and began to growl, a low rumble full of menace,
but this time Sansa silenced the wolf with a gentle hand to the head.
“I am sorry if I o ended you, Ser Ilyn,” she said.
She waited for an answer, but none came. As the headsman
looked at her, his pale colorless eyes seemed to strip the clothes
away from her, and then the skin, leaving her soul naked before
him. Still silent, he turned and walked away.
Sansa did not understand. She looked at her prince. “Did I say
something wrong, Your Grace? Why will he not speak to me?”
“Ser Ilyn has not been feeling talkative these past fourteen years,”
Lord Renly commented with a sly smile.
Jo rey gave his uncle a look of pure loathing, then took Sansa’s
hands in his own. “Aerys Targaryen had his tongue ripped out with
hot pincers.”
“He speaks most eloquently with his sword, however,” the queen
said, “and his devotion to our realm is unquestioned.” Then she
smiled graciously and said, “Sansa, the good councillors and I must
speak together until the king returns with your father. I fear we
shall have to postpone your day with Myrcella. Please give your

sweet sister my apologies. Jo rey, perhaps you would be so kind as
to entertain our guest today.”
“It would be my pleasure, Mother,” Jo rey said very formally.
He took her by the arm and led her away from the wheelhouse, and
Sansa’s spirits took ight. A whole day with her prince! She gazed at
Jo rey worshipfully. He was so gallant, she thought. The way he
had rescued her from Ser Ilyn and the Hound, why, it was almost
like the songs, like the time Serwyn of the Mirror Shield saved the
Princess Daeryssa from the giants, or Prince Aemon the
Dragonknight championing Queen Naerys’s honor against evil Ser
Morgil’s slanders.
The touch of Jo rey’s hand on her sleeve made her heart beat
faster. “What would you like to do?”
Be with you, Sansa thought, but she said, “Whatever you’d like to
do, my prince.”
Jo rey re ected a moment. “We could go riding.”
“Oh, I love riding,” Sansa said.
Jo rey glanced back at Lady, who was following at their heels.
“Your wolf is liable to frighten the horses, and my dog seems to
frighten you. Let us leave them both behind and set o on our own,
what do you say?”
Sansa hesitated. “If you like,” she said uncertainly. “I suppose I
could tie Lady up.” She did not quite understand, though. “I didn’t
know you had a dog …”
Jo rey laughed. “He’s my mother’s dog, in truth. She has set him
to guard me, and so he does.”
“You mean the Hound,” she said. She wanted to hit herself for
being so slow. Her prince would never love her if she seemed
stupid. “Is it safe to leave him behind?”
Prince Jo rey looked annoyed that she would even ask. “Have no
fear, lady. I am almost a man grown, and I don’t ght with wood
like your brothers. All I need is this.” He drew his sword and
showed it to her; a longsword adroitly shrunken to suit a boy of
twelve, gleaming blue steel, castle-forged and double-edged, with a
leather grip and a lion’s-head pommel in gold. Sansa exclaimed over

it admiringly, and Jo rey looked pleased. “I call it Lion’s Tooth,” he
said.
And so they left her direwolf and his bodyguard behind them,
while they ranged east along the north bank of the Trident with no
company save Lion’s Tooth.
It was a glorious day, a magical day. The air was warm and heavy
with the scent of owers, and the woods here had a gentle beauty
that Sansa had never seen in the north. Prince Jo rey’s mount was a
blood bay courser, swift as the wind, and he rode it with reckless
abandon, so fast that Sansa was hard-pressed to keep up on her
mare. It was a day for adventures. They explored the caves by the
riverbank, and tracked a shadowcat to its lair, and when they grew
hungry, Jo rey found a holdfast by its smoke and told them to fetch
food and wine for their prince and his lady. They dined on trout
fresh from the river, and Sansa drank more wine than she had ever
drunk before. “My father only lets us have one cup, and only at
feasts,” she confessed to her prince.
“My betrothed can drink as much as she wants,” Jo rey said,
re lling her cup.
They went more slowly after they had eaten. Jo rey sang for her
as they rode, his voice high and sweet and pure. Sansa was a little
dizzy from the wine. “Shouldn’t we be starting back?” she asked.
“Soon,” Jo rey said. “The battleground is right up ahead, where
the river bends. That was where my father killed Rhaegar
Targaryen, you know. He smashed in his chest, crunch, right
through the armor.” Jo rey swung an imaginary warhammer to
show her how it was done. “Then my uncle Jaime killed old Aerys,
and my father was king. What’s that sound?”
Sansa heard it too, oating through the woods, a kind of wooden
clattering, snack snack snack. “I don’t know,” she said. It made her
nervous, though. “Jo rey, let’s go back.”
“I want to see what it is.” Jo rey turned his horse in the direction
of the sounds, and Sansa had no choice but to follow. The noises
grew louder and more distinct, the clack of wood on wood, and as
they grew closer they heard heavy breathing as well, and now and
then a grunt.

“Someone’s there,” Sansa said anxiously. She found herself
thinking of Lady, wishing the direwolf was with her.
“You’re safe with me.” Jo rey drew his Lion’s Tooth from its
sheath. The sound of steel on leather made her tremble. “This way,”
he said, riding through a stand of trees.
Beyond, in a clearing overlooking the river, they came upon a
boy and a girl playing at knights. Their swords were wooden sticks,
broom handles from the look of them, and they were rushing across
the grass, swinging at each other lustily. The boy was years older, a
head taller, and much stronger, and he was pressing the attack. The
girl, a scrawny thing in soiled leathers, was dodging and managing
to get her stick in the way of most of the boy’s blows, but not all.
When she tried to lunge at him, he caught her stick with his own,
swept it aside, and slid his wood down hard on her ngers. She
cried out and lost her weapon.
Prince Jo rey laughed. The boy looked around, wide-eyed and
startled, and dropped his stick in the grass. The girl glared at them,
sucking on her knuckles to take the sting out, and Sansa was
horri ed. “Arya?” she called out incredulously.
“Go away,” Arya shouted back at them, angry tears in her eyes.
“What are you doing here? Leave us alone.”
Jo rey glanced from Arya to Sansa and back again. “Your sister?”
She nodded, blushing. Jo rey examined the boy, an ungainly lad
with a coarse, freckled face and thick red hair. “And who are you,
boy?” he asked in a commanding tone that took no notice of the
fact that the other was a year his senior.
“Mycah,” the boy muttered. He recognized the prince and averted
his eyes. “M’lord.”
“He’s the butcher’s boy,” Sansa said.
“He’s my friend,” Arya said sharply. “You leave him alone.”
“A butcher’s boy who wants to be a knight, is it?” Jo rey swung
down from his mount, sword in hand. “Pick up your sword,
butcher’s boy,” he said, his eyes bright with amusement. “Let us see
how good you are.”
Mycah stood there, frozen with fear.

Jo rey walked toward him. “Go on, pick it up. Or do you only
ght little girls?”
“She ast me to, m’lord,” Mycah said. “She ast me to.”
Sansa had only to glance at Arya and see the ush on her sister’s
face to know the boy was telling the truth, but Jo rey was in no
mood to listen. The wine had made him wild. “Are you going to
pick up your sword?”
Mycah shook his head. “It’s only a stick, m’lord. It’s not no sword,
it’s only a stick.”
“And you’re only a butcher’s boy, and no knight.” Jo rey lifted
Lion’s Tooth and laid its point on Mycah’s cheek below the eye, as
the butcher’s boy stood trembling. “That was my lady’s sister you
were hitting, do you know that?” A bright bud of blood blossomed
where his sword pressed into Mycah’s esh, and a slow red line
trickled down the boy’s cheek.
“Stop it!” Arya screamed. She grabbed up her fallen stick.
Sansa was afraid. “Arya, you stay out of this.”
“I won’t hurt him … much,” Prince Jo rey told Arya, never
taking his eyes o the butcher’s boy.
Arya went for him.
Sansa slid o her mare, but she was too slow. Arya swung with
both hands. There was a loud crack as the wood split against the
back of the prince’s head, and then everything happened at once
before Sansa’s horri ed eyes. Jo rey staggered and whirled around,
roaring curses. Mycah ran for the trees as fast as his legs would take
him. Arya swung at the prince again, but this time Jo rey caught
the blow on Lion’s Tooth and sent her broken stick ying from her
hands. The back of his head was all bloody and his eyes were on
re. Sansa was shrieking, “No, no, stop it, stop it, both of you,
you’re spoiling it,” but no one was listening. Arya scooped up a rock
and hurled it at Jo rey’s head. She hit his horse instead, and the
blood bay reared and went galloping o after Mycah. “Stop it, don’t,
stop it!” Sansa screamed. Jo rey slashed at Arya with his sword,
screaming obscenities, terrible words, lthy words. Arya darted
back, frightened now, but Jo rey followed, hounding her toward

the woods, backing her up against a tree. Sansa didn’t know what to
do. She watched helplessly, almost blind from her tears.
Then a grey blur ashed past her, and suddenly Nymeria was
there, leaping, jaws closing around Jo rey’s sword arm. The steel
fell from his ngers as the wolf knocked him o his feet, and they
rolled in the grass, the wolf snarling and ripping at him, the prince
shrieking in pain. “Get it o ,” he screamed. “Get it o !”
Arya’s voice cracked like a whip. “Nymeria!”
The direwolf let go of Jo rey and moved to Arya’s side. The
prince lay in the grass, whimpering, cradling his mangled arm. His
shirt was soaked in blood. Arya said, “She didn’t hurt you … much.”
She picked up Lion’s Tooth where it had fallen, and stood over him,
holding the sword with both hands.
Jo rey made a scared whimpery sound as he looked up at her.
“No,” he said, “don’t hurt me. I’ll tell my mother.”
“You leave him alone!” Sansa screamed at her sister.
Arya whirled and heaved the sword into the air, putting her
whole body into the throw. The blue steel ashed in the sun as the
sword spun out over the river. It hit the water and vanished with a
splash. Jo rey moaned. Arya ran o to her horse, Nymeria loping at
her heels.
After they had gone, Sansa went to Prince Jo rey. His eyes were
closed in pain, his breath ragged. Sansa knelt beside him. “Jo rey,”
she sobbed. “Oh, look what they did, look what they did. My poor
prince. Don’t be afraid. I’ll ride to the holdfast and bring help for
you.” Tenderly she reached out and brushed back his soft blond
hair.
His eyes snapped open and looked at her, and there was nothing
but loathing there, nothing but the vilest contempt. “Then go,” he
spit at her. “And don’t touch me.”

EDDARD

“They’ve found her, my lord.”
Ned rose quickly. “Our men or Lannister’s?”
“It was Jory,” his steward Vayon Poole replied. “She’s not been
harmed.”
“Thank the gods,” Ned said. His men had been searching for Arya
for four days now, but the queen’s men had been out hunting as
well. “Where is she? Tell Jory to bring her here at once.”
“I am sorry, my lord,” Poole told him. “The guards on the gate
were Lannister men, and they informed the queen when Jory
brought her in. She’s being taken directly before the king …”
“Damn that woman!” Ned said, striding to the door. “Find Sansa
and bring her to the audience chamber. Her voice may be needed.”
He descended the tower steps in a red rage. He had led searches
himself for the rst three days, and had scarcely slept an hour since
Arya had disappeared. This morning he had been so heartsick and
weary he could scarcely stand, but now his fury was on him, lling
him with strength.
Men called out to him as he crossed the castle yard, but Ned
ignored them in his haste. He would have run, but he was still the
King’s Hand, and a Hand must keep his dignity. He was aware of
the eyes that followed him, of the muttered voices wondering what
he would do.
The castle was a modest holding a half day’s ride south of the
Trident. The royal party had made themselves the uninvited guests

of its lord, Ser Raymun Darry, while the hunt for Arya and the
butcher’s boy was conducted on both sides of the river. They were
not welcome visitors. Ser Raymun lived under the king’s peace, but
his family had fought beneath Rhaegar’s dragon banners at the
Trident, and his three older brothers had died there, a truth neither
Robert nor Ser Raymun had forgotten. With king’s men, Darry men,
Lannister men, and Stark men all crammed into a castle far too
small for them, tensions burned hot and heavy.
The king had appropriated Ser Raymun’s audience chamber, and
that was where Ned found them. The room was crowded when he
burst in. Too crowded, he thought; left alone, he and Robert might
have been able to settle the matter amicably.
Robert was slumped in Darry’s high seat at the far end of the
room, his face closed and sullen. Cersei Lannister and her son stood
beside him. The queen had her hand on Jo rey’s shoulder. Thick
silken bandages still covered the boy’s arm.
Arya stood in the center of the room, alone but for Jory Cassel,
every eye upon her. “Arya,” Ned called loudly. He went to her, his
boots ringing on the stone oor. When she saw him, she cried out
and began to sob.
Ned went to one knee and took her in his arms. She was shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“I know,” he said. She felt so tiny in his arms, nothing but a
scrawny little girl. It was hard to see how she had caused so much
trouble. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Her face was dirty, and her tears left pink tracks down her
cheeks. “Hungry some. I ate some berries, but there was nothing
else.”
“We’ll feed you soon enough,” Ned promised. He rose to face the
king. “What is the meaning of this?” His eyes swept the room,
searching for friendly faces. But for his own men, they were few
enough. Ser Raymun Darry guarded his look well. Lord Renly wore
a half smile that might mean anything, and old Ser Barristan was
grave; the rest were Lannister men, and hostile. Their only good
fortune was that both Jaime Lannister and Sandor Clegane were
missing, leading searches north of the Trident. “Why was I not told

that my daughter had been found?” Ned demanded, his voice
ringing. “Why was she not brought to me at once?”
He spoke to Robert, but it was Cersei Lannister who answered.
“How dare you speak to your king in that manner!”
At that, the king stirred. “Quiet, woman,” he snapped. He
straightened in his seat. “I am sorry, Ned. I never meant to frighten
the girl. It seemed best to bring her here and get the business done
with quickly.”
“And what business is that?” Ned put ice in his voice.
The queen stepped forward. “You know full well, Stark. This girl
of yours attacked my son. Her and her butcher’s boy. That animal of
hers tried to tear his arm o .”
“That’s not true,” Arya said loudly. “She just bit him a little. He
was hurting Mycah.”
“Jo told us what happened,” the queen said. “You and the
butcher boy beat him with clubs while you set your wolf on him.”
“That’s not how it was,” Arya said, close to tears again. Ned put a
hand on her shoulder.
“Yes it is!” Prince Jo rey insisted. “They all attacked me, and she
threw Lion’s Tooth in the river!” Ned noticed that he did not so
much as glance at Arya as he spoke.
“Liar!” Arya yelled.
“Shut up!” the prince yelled back.
“Enough!” the king roared, rising from his seat, his voice thick
with irritation. Silence fell. He glowered at Arya through his thick
beard. “Now, child, you will tell me what happened. Tell it all, and
tell it true. It is a great crime to lie to a king.” Then he looked over
at his son. “When she is done, you will have your turn. Until then,
hold your tongue.”
As Arya began her story, Ned heard the door open behind him. He
glanced back and saw Vayon Poole enter with Sansa. They stood
quietly at the back of the hall as Arya spoke. When she got to the
part where she threw Jo rey’s sword into the middle of the Trident,
Renly Baratheon began to laugh. The king bristled. “Ser Barristan,
escort my brother from the hall before he chokes.”

Lord Renly sti ed his laughter. “My brother is too kind. I can nd
the door myself.” He bowed to Jo rey. “Perchance later you’ll tell
me how a nine-year-old girl the size of a wet rat managed to disarm
you with a broom handle and throw your sword in the river.” As the
door swung shut behind him, Ned heard him say, “Lion’s Tooth,”
and gu aw once more.
Prince Jo rey was pale as he began his very di erent version of
events. When his son was done talking, the king rose heavily from
his seat, looking like a man who wanted to be anywhere but here.
“What in all the seven hells am I supposed to make of this? He says
one thing, she says another.”
“They were not the only ones present,” Ned said. “Sansa, come
here.” Ned had heard her version of the story the night Arya had
vanished. He knew the truth. “Tell us what happened.”
His eldest daughter stepped forward hesitantly. She was dressed
in blue velvets trimmed with white, a silver chain around her neck.
Her thick auburn hair had been brushed until it shone. She blinked
at her sister, then at the young prince. “I don’t know,” she said
tearfully, looking as though she wanted to bolt. “I don’t remember.
Everything happened so fast, I didn’t see …”
“You rotten!” Arya shrieked. She ew at her sister like an arrow,
knocking Sansa down to the ground, pummeling her. “Liar, liar,
liar, liar.”
“Arya, stop it!” Ned shouted. Jory pulled her o her sister,
kicking. Sansa was pale and shaking as Ned lifted her back to her
feet. “Are you hurt?” he asked, but she was staring at Arya, and she
did not seem to hear.
“The girl is as wild as that lthy animal of hers,” Cersei Lannister
said. “Robert, I want her punished.”
“Seven hells,” Robert swore. “Cersei, look at her. She’s a child.
What would you have me do, whip her through the streets? Damn
it, children ght. It’s over. No lasting harm was done.”
The queen was furious. “Jo will carry those scars for the rest of
his life.”
Robert Baratheon looked at his eldest son. “So he will. Perhaps
they will teach him a lesson. Ned, see that your daughter is

disciplined. I will do the same with my son.”
“Gladly, Your Grace,” Ned said with vast relief.
Robert started to walk away, but the queen was not done. “And
what of the direwolf?” she called after him. “What of the beast that
savaged your son?”
The king stopped, turned back, frowned. “I’d forgotten about the
damned wolf.”
Ned could see Arya tense in Jory’s arms. Jory spoke up quickly.
“We found no trace of the direwolf, Your Grace.”
Robert did not look unhappy. “No? So be it.”
The queen raised her voice. “A hundred golden dragons to the
man who brings me its skin!”
“A costly pelt,” Robert grumbled. “I want no part of this, woman.
You can damn well buy your furs with Lannister gold.”
The queen regarded him coolly. “I had not thought you so
niggardly. The king I’d thought to wed would have laid a wolfskin
across my bed before the sun went down.”
Robert’s face darkened with anger. “That would be a ne trick,
without a wolf.”
“We have a wolf,” Cersei Lannister said. Her voice was very
quiet, but her green eyes shone with triumph.
It took them all a moment to comprehend her words, but when
they did, the king shrugged irritably. “As you will. Have Ser Ilyn
see to it.”
“Robert, you cannot mean this,” Ned protested.
The king was in no mood for more argument. “Enough, Ned, I
will hear no more. A direwolf is a savage beast. Sooner or later it
would have turned on your girl the same way the other did on my
son. Get her a dog, she’ll be happier for it.”
That was when Sansa nally seemed to comprehend. Her eyes
were frightened as they went to her father. “He doesn’t mean Lady,
does he?” She saw the truth on his face. “No,” she said. “No, not
Lady, Lady didn’t bite anybody, she’s good …”
“Lady wasn’t there,” Arya shouted angrily. “You leave her alone!”
“Stop them,” Sansa pleaded, “don’t let them do it, please, please,
it wasn’t Lady, it was Nymeria, Arya did it, you can’t, it wasn’t

Lady, don’t let them hurt Lady, I’ll make her be good, I promise, I
promise …” She started to cry.
All Ned could do was take her in his arms and hold her while she
wept. He looked across the room at Robert. His old friend, closer
than any brother. “Please, Robert. For the love you bear me. For
the love you bore my sister. Please.”
The king looked at them for a long moment, then turned his eyes
on his wife. “Damn you, Cersei,” he said with loathing.
Ned stood, gently disengaging himself from Sansa’s grasp. All the
weariness of the past four days had returned to him. “Do it yourself
then, Robert,” he said in a voice cold and sharp as steel. “At least
have the courage to do it yourself.”
Robert looked at Ned with at, dead eyes and left without a
word, his footsteps heavy as lead. Silence lled the hall.
“Where is the direwolf?” Cersei Lannister asked when her
husband was gone. Beside her, Prince Jo rey was smiling.
“The beast is chained up outside the gatehouse, Your Grace,” Ser
Barristan Selmy answered reluctantly.
“Send for Ilyn Payne.”
“No,” Ned said. “Jory, take the girls back to their rooms and
bring me Ice.” The words tasted of bile in his throat, but he forced
them out. “If it must be done, I will do it.”
Cersei Lannister regarded him suspiciously. “You, Stark? Is this
some trick? Why would you do such a thing?”
They were all staring at him, but it was Sansa’s look that cut.
“She is of the north. She deserves better than a butcher.”
He left the room with his eyes burning and his daughter’s wails
echoing in his ears, and found the direwolf pup where they chained
her. Ned sat beside her for a while. “Lady,” he said, tasting the
name. He had never paid much attention to the names the children
had picked, but looking at her now, he knew that Sansa had chosen
well. She was the smallest of the litter, the prettiest, the most
gentle and trusting. She looked at him with bright golden eyes, and
he ru ed her thick grey fur.
Shortly, Jory brought him Ice.

When it was over, he said, “Choose four men and have them take
the body north. Bury her at Winterfell.”
“All that way?” Jory said, astonished.
“All that way,” Ned a rmed. “The Lannister woman shall never
have this skin.”
He was walking back to the tower to give himself up to sleep at
last when Sandor Clegane and his riders came pounding through the
castle gate, back from their hunt.
There was something slung over the back of his destrier, a heavy
shape wrapped in a bloody cloak. “No sign of your daughter, Hand,”
the Hound rasped down, “but the day was not wholly wasted. We
got her little pet.” He reached back and shoved the burden o , and
it fell with a thump in front of Ned.
Bending, Ned pulled back the cloak, dreading the words he would
have to nd for Arya, but it was not Nymeria after all. It was the
butcher’s boy, Mycah, his body covered in dried blood. He had been
cut almost in half from shoulder to waist by some terrible blow
struck from above.
“You rode him down,” Ned said.
The Hound’s eyes seemed to glitter through the steel of that
hideous dog’s-head helm. “He ran.” He looked at Ned’s face and
laughed. “But not very fast.”

BRAN

It seemed as though he had been falling for years.
Fly, a voice whispered in the darkness, but Bran did not know
how to y, so all he could do was fall.
Maester Luwin made a little boy of clay, baked him till he was
hard and brittle, dressed him in Bran’s clothes, and ung him o a
roof. Bran remembered the way he shattered. “But I never fall,” he
said, falling.
The ground was so far below him he could barely make it out
through the grey mists that whirled around him, but he could feel
how fast he was falling, and he knew what was waiting for him
down there. Even in dreams, you could not fall forever. He would
wake up in the instant before he hit the ground, he knew. You
always woke up in the instant before you hit the ground.
And if you don’t? the voice asked.
The ground was closer now, still far far away, a thousand miles
away, but closer than it had been. It was cold here in the darkness.
There was no sun, no stars, only the ground below coming up to
smash him, and the grey mists, and the whispering voice. He
wanted to cry.
Not cry. Fly.
“I can’t y,” Bran said. “I can’t, I can’t …”
How do you know? Have you ever tried?
The voice was high and thin. Bran looked around to see where it
was coming from. A crow was spiraling down with him, just out of

reach, following him as he fell. “Help me,” he said.
I’m trying, the crow replied. Say, got any corn?
Bran reached into his pocket as the darkness spun dizzily around
him. When he pulled his hand out, golden kernels slid from between
his ngers into the air. They fell with him.
The crow landed on his hand and began to eat.
“Are you really a crow?” Bran asked.
Are you really falling? the crow asked back.
“It’s just a dream,” Bran said.
Is it? asked the crow.
“I’ll wake up when I hit the ground,” Bran told the bird.
You’ll die when you hit the ground, the crow said. It went back to
eating corn.
Bran looked down. He could see mountains now, their peaks
white with snow, and the silver thread of rivers in dark woods. He
closed his eyes and began to cry.
That won’t do any good, the crow said. I told you, the answer is
ying, not crying. How hard can it be. I’m doing it. The crow took to
the air and apped around Bran’s hand.
“You have wings,” Bran pointed out.
Maybe you do too.
Bran felt along his shoulders, groping for feathers.
There are di erent kinds of wings, the crow said.
Bran was staring at his arms, his legs. He was so skinny, just skin
stretched taut over bones. Had he always been so thin? He tried to
remember. A face swam up at him out of the grey mist, shining
with light, golden. “The things I do for love,” it said.
Bran screamed.
The crow took to the air, cawing. Not that, it shrieked at him.
Forget that, you do not need it now, put it aside, put it away. It landed
on Bran’s shoulder, and pecked at him, and the shining golden face
was gone.
Bran was falling faster than ever. The grey mists howled around
him as he plunged toward the earth below. “What are you doing to
me?” he asked the crow, tearful.
Teaching you how to y.

“I can’t y!”
You’re ying right now.
“I’m falling!”
Every ight begins with a fall, the crow said. Look down.
“I’m afraid …”
LOOK DOWN!
Bran looked down, and felt his insides turn to water. The ground
was rushing up at him now. The whole world was spread out below
him, a tapestry of white and brown and green. He could see
everything so clearly that for a moment he forgot to be afraid. He
could see the whole realm, and everyone in it.
He saw Winterfell as the eagles see it, the tall towers looking
squat and stubby from above, the castle walls just lines in the dirt.
He saw Maester Luwin on his balcony, studying the sky through a
polished bronze tube and frowning as he made notes in a book. He
saw his brother Robb, taller and stronger than he remembered him,
practicing swordplay in the yard with real steel in his hand. He saw
Hodor, the simple giant from the stables, carrying an anvil to
Mikken’s forge, hefting it onto his shoulder as easily as another man
might heft a bale of hay. At the heart of the godswood, the great
white weirwood brooded over its re ection in the black pool, its
leaves rustling in a chill wind. When it felt Bran watching, it lifted
its eyes from the still waters and stared back at him knowingly.
He looked east, and saw a galley racing across the waters of the
Bite. He saw his mother sitting alone in a cabin, looking at a
bloodstained knife on a table in front of her, as the rowers pulled at
their oars and Ser Rodrik leaned across a rail, shaking and heaving.
A storm was gathering ahead of them, a vast dark roaring lashed by
lightning, but somehow they could not see it.
He looked south, and saw the great blue-green rush of the
Trident. He saw his father pleading with the king, his face etched
with grief. He saw Sansa crying herself to sleep at night, and he saw
Arya watching in silence and holding her secrets hard in her heart.
There were shadows all around them. One shadow was dark as ash,
with the terrible face of a hound. Another was armored like the sun,
golden and beautiful. Over them both loomed a giant in armor

made of stone, but when he opened his visor, there was nothing
inside but darkness and thick black blood.
He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the narrow sea, to the Free
Cities and the green Dothraki sea and beyond, to Vaes Dothrak
under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade Sea, to Asshai by
the Shadow, where dragons stirred beneath the sunrise.
Finally he looked north. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal,
and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin
growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth ed from him.
And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow,
past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the
dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north
he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then
beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and
then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his
cheeks.
Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now
you know why you must live.
“Why?” Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling.
Because winter is coming.
Bran looked at the crow on his shoulder, and the crow looked
back. It had three eyes, and the third eye was full of a terrible
knowledge. Bran looked down. There was nothing below him now
but snow and cold and death, a frozen wasteland where jagged bluewhite spires of ice waited to embrace him. They ew up at him like
spears. He saw the bones of a thousand other dreamers impaled
upon their points. He was desperately afraid.
“Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” he heard his own voice
saying, small and far away.
And his father’s voice replied to him. “That is the only time a man
can be brave.”
Now, Bran, the crow urged. Choose. Fly or die.
Death reached for him, screaming.
Bran spread his arms and ew.
Wings unseen drank the wind and lled and pulled him upward.
The terrible needles of ice receded below him. The sky opened up

above. Bran soared. It was better than climbing. It was better than
anything. The world grew small beneath him.
“I’m ying!” he cried out in delight.
I’ve noticed, said the three-eyed crow. It took to the air, apping
its wings in his face, slowing him, blinding him. He faltered in the
air as its pinions beat against his cheeks. Its beak stabbed at him
ercely, and Bran felt a sudden blinding pain in the middle of his
forehead, between his eyes.
“What are you doing?” he shrieked.
The crow opened its beak and cawed at him, a shrill scream of
fear, and the grey mists shuddered and swirled around him and
ripped away like a veil, and he saw that the crow was really a
woman, a serving woman with long black hair, and he knew her
from somewhere, from Winterfell, yes, that was it, he remembered
her now, and then he realized that he was in Winterfell, in a bed
high in some chilly tower room, and the black-haired woman
dropped a basin of water to shatter on the oor and ran down the
steps, shouting, “He’s awake, he’s awake, he’s awake.”
Bran touched his forehead, between his eyes. The place where the
crow had pecked him was still burning, but there was nothing there,
no blood, no wound. He felt weak and dizzy. He tried to get out of
bed, but nothing happened.
And then there was movement beside the bed, and something
landed lightly on his legs. He felt nothing. A pair of yellow eyes
looked into his own, shining like the sun. The window was open and
it was cold in the room, but the warmth that came o the wolf
enfolded him like a hot bath. His pup, Bran realized … or was it?
He was so big now. He reached out to pet him, his hand trembling
like a leaf.
When his brother Robb burst into the room, breathless from his
dash up the tower steps, the direwolf was licking Bran’s face. Bran
looked up calmly. “His name is Summer,” he said.

CATELYN

“We will make King’s Landing within the hour.”
Catelyn turned away from the rail and forced herself to smile.
“Your oarmen have done well by us, Captain. Each one of them
shall have a silver stag, as a token of my gratitude.”
Captain Moreo Tumitis favored her with a half bow. “You are far
too generous, Lady Stark. The honor of carrying a great lady like
yourself is all the reward they need.”
“But they’ll take the silver anyway.”
Moreo smiled. “As you say.” He spoke the Common Tongue
uently, with only the slightest hint of a Tyroshi accent. He’d been
plying the narrow sea for thirty years, he’d told her, as oarman,
quartermaster, and nally captain of his own trading galleys. The
Storm Dancer was his fourth ship, and his fastest, a two-masted
galley of sixty oars.
She had certainly been the fastest of the ships available in White
Harbor when Catelyn and Ser Rodrik Cassel had arrived after their
headlong gallop downriver. The Tyroshi were notorious for their
avarice, and Ser Rodrik had argued for hiring a shing sloop out of
the Three Sisters, but Catelyn had insisted on the galley. It was
good that she had. The winds had been against them much of the
voyage, and without the galley’s oars they’d still be beating their
way past the Fingers, instead of skimming toward King’s Landing
and journey’s end.

So close, she thought. Beneath the linen bandages, her ngers still
throbbed where the dagger had bitten. The pain was her scourge,
Catelyn felt, lest she forget. She could not bend the last two ngers
on her left hand, and the others would never again be dexterous.
Yet that was a small enough price to pay for Bran’s life.
Ser Rodrik chose that moment to appear on deck. “My good
friend,” said Moreo through his forked green beard. The Tyroshi
loved bright colors, even in their facial hair. “It is so ne to see you
looking better.”
“Yes,” Ser Rodrik agreed. “I haven’t wanted to die for almost two
days now.” He bowed to Catelyn. “My lady.”
He was looking better. A shade thinner than he had been when
they set out from White Harbor, but almost himself again. The
strong winds in the Bite and the roughness of the narrow sea had
not agreed with him, and he’d almost gone over the side when the
storm seized them unexpectedly o Dragonstone, yet somehow he
had clung to a rope until three of Moreo’s men could rescue him and
carry him safely below decks.
“The captain was just telling me that our voyage is almost at an
end,” she said.
Ser Rodrik managed a wry smile. “So soon?” He looked odd
without his great white side whiskers; smaller somehow, less erce,
and ten years older. Yet back on the Bite it had seemed prudent to
submit to a crewman’s razor, after his whiskers had become
hopelessly befouled for the third time while he leaned over the rail
and retched into the swirling winds.
“I will leave you to discuss your business,” Captain Moreo said.
He bowed and took his leave of them.
The galley skimmed the water like a dragon y, her oars rising
and falling in perfect time. Ser Rodrik held the rail and looked out
over the passing shore. “I have not been the most valiant of
protectors.”
Catelyn touched his arm. “We are here, Ser Rodrik, and safely.
That is all that truly matters.” Her hand groped beneath her cloak,
her ngers sti and fumbling. The dagger was still at her side. She
found she had to touch it now and then, to reassure herself. “Now

we must reach the king’s master-at-arms, and pray that he can be
trusted.”
“Ser Aron Santagar is a vain man, but an honest one.” Ser
Rodrik’s hand went to his face to stroke his whiskers and discovered
once again that they were gone. He looked nonplussed. “He may
know the blade, yes … but, my lady, the moment we go ashore we
are at risk. And there are those at court who will know you on
sight.”
Catelyn’s mouth grew tight. “Little nger,” she murmured. His
face swam up before her; a boy’s face, though he was a boy no
longer. His father had died several years before, so he was Lord
Baelish now, yet still they called him Little nger. Her brother
Edmure had given him that name, long ago at Riverrun. His family’s
modest holdings were on the smallest of the Fingers, and Petyr had
been slight and short for his age.
Ser Rodrik cleared his throat. “Lord Baelish once, ah …” His
thought trailed o uncertainly in search of the polite word.
Catelyn was past delicacy. “He was my father’s ward. We grew
up together in Riverrun. I thought of him as a brother, but his
feelings for me were … more than brotherly. When it was
announced that I was to wed Brandon Stark, Petyr challenged for
the right to my hand. It was madness. Brandon was twenty, Petyr
scarcely fteen. I had to beg Brandon to spare Petyr’s life. He let
him o with a scar. Afterward my father sent him away. I have not
seen him since.” She lifted her face to the spray, as if the brisk wind
could blow the memories away. “He wrote to me at Riverrun after
Brandon was killed, but I burned the letter unread. By then I knew
that Ned would marry me in his brother’s place.”
Ser Rodrik’s ngers fumbled once again for nonexistent whiskers.
“Little nger sits on the small council now.”
“I knew he would rise high,” Catelyn said. “He was always clever,
even as a boy, but it is one thing to be clever and another to be
wise. I wonder what the years have done to him.”
High overhead, the far-eyes sang out from the rigging. Captain
Moreo came scrambling across the deck, giving orders, and all

around them the Storm Dancer burst into frenetic activity as King’s
Landing slid into view atop its three high hills.
Three hundred years ago, Catelyn knew, those heights had been
covered with forest, and only a handful of sherfolk had lived on
the north shore of the Blackwater Rush where that deep, swift river
owed into the sea. Then Aegon the Conqueror had sailed from
Dragonstone. It was here that his army had put ashore, and there on
the highest hill that he built his rst crude redoubt of wood and
earth.
Now the city covered the shore as far as Catelyn could see;
manses and arbors and granaries, brick storehouses and timbered
inns and merchant’s stalls, taverns and graveyards and brothels, all
piled one on another. She could hear the clamor of the sh market
even at this distance. Between the buildings were broad roads lined
with trees, wandering crookback streets, and alleys so narrow that
two men could not walk abreast. Visenya’s hill was crowned by the
Great Sept of Baelor with its seven crystal towers. Across the city on
the hill of Rhaenys stood the blackened walls of the Dragonpit, its
huge dome collapsing into ruin, its bronze doors closed now for a
century. The Street of the Sisters ran between them, straight as an
arrow. The city walls rose in the distance, high and strong.
A hundred quays lined the waterfront, and the harbor was
crowded with ships. Deepwater shing boats and river runners
came and went, ferrymen poled back and forth across the
Blackwater Rush, trading galleys unloaded goods from Braavos and
Pentos and Lys. Catelyn spied the queen’s ornate barge, tied up
beside a fat-bellied whaler from the Port of Ibben, its hull black
with tar, while upriver a dozen lean golden warships rested in their
cribs, sails furled and cruel iron rams lapping at the water.
And above it all, frowning down from Aegon’s high hill, was the
Red Keep; seven huge drum-towers crowned with iron ramparts, an
immense grim barbican, vaulted halls and covered bridges, barracks
and dungeons and granaries, massive curtain walls studded with
archers’ nests, all fashioned of pale red stone. Aegon the Conqueror
had commanded it built. His son Maegor the Cruel had seen it
completed. Afterward he had taken the heads of every stonemason,

woodworker, and builder who had labored on it. Only the blood of
the dragon would ever know the secrets of the fortress the
Dragonlords had built, he vowed.
Yet now the banners that ew from its battlements were golden,
not black, and where the three-headed dragon had once breathed
re, now pranced the crowned stag of House Baratheon.
A high-masted swan ship from the Summer Isles was beating out
from port, its white sails huge with wind. The Storm Dancer moved
past it, pulling steadily for shore.
“My lady,” Ser Rodrik said, “I have thought on how best to
proceed while I lay abed. You must not enter the castle. I will go in
your stead and bring Ser Aron to you in some safe place.”
She studied the old knight as the galley drew near to a pier.
Moreo was shouting in the vulgar Valyrian of the Free Cities. “You
would be as much at risk as I would.”
Ser Rodrik smiled. “I think not. I looked at my re ection in the
water earlier and scarcely recognized myself. My mother was the
last person to see me without whiskers, and she is forty years dead.
I believe I am safe enough, my lady.”
Moreo bellowed a command. As one, sixty oars lifted from the
river, then reversed and backed water. The galley slowed. Another
shout. The oars slid back inside the hull. As they thumped against
the dock, Tyroshi seamen leapt down to tie up. Moreo came
bustling up, all smiles. “King’s Landing, my lady, as you did
command, and never has a ship made a swifter or surer passage.
Will you be needing assistance to carry your things to the castle?”
“We shall not be going to the castle. Perhaps you can suggest an
inn, someplace clean and comfortable and not too far from the
river.”
The Tyroshi ngered his forked green beard. “Just so. I know of
several establishments that might suit your needs. Yet rst, if I may
be so bold, there is the matter of the second half of the payment we
agreed upon. And of course the extra silver you were so kind as to
promise. Sixty stags, I believe it was.”
“For the oarmen,” Catelyn reminded him.

“Oh, of a certainty,” said Moreo. “Though perhaps I should hold it
for them until we return to Tyrosh. For the sake of their wives and
children. If you give them the silver here, my lady, they will dice it
away or spend it all for a night’s pleasure.”
“There are worse things to spend money on,” Ser Rodrik put in.
“Winter is coming.”
“A man must make his own choices,” Catelyn said. “They earned
the silver. How they spend it is no concern of mine.”
“As you say, my lady,” Moreo replied, bowing and smiling.
Just to be sure, Catelyn paid the oarmen herself, a stag to each
man, and a copper to the two men who carried their chests halfway
up Visenya’s hill to the inn that Moreo had suggested. It was a
rambling old place on Eel Alley. The woman who owned it was a
sour crone with a wandering eye who looked them over
suspiciously and bit the coin that Catelyn o ered her to make sure it
was real. Her rooms were large and airy, though, and Moreo swore
that her sh stew was the most savory in all the Seven Kingdoms.
Best of all, she had no interest in their names.
“I think it best if you stay away from the common room,” Ser
Rodrik said, after they had settled in. “Even in a place like this, one
never knows who may be watching.” He wore ringmail, dagger, and
longsword under a dark cloak with a hood he could pull up over his
head. “I will be back before nightfall, with Ser Aron,” he promised.
“Rest now, my lady.”
Catelyn was tired. The voyage had been long and fatiguing, and
she was no longer as young as she had been. Her windows opened
on the alley and rooftops, with a view of the Blackwater beyond.
She watched Ser Rodrik set o , striding briskly through the busy
streets until he was lost in the crowds, then decided to take his
advice. The bedding was stu ed with straw instead of feathers, but
she had no trouble falling asleep.
She woke to a pounding on her door.
Catelyn sat up sharply. Outside the window, the rooftops of
King’s Landing were red in the light of the setting sun. She had slept
longer than she intended. A st hammered at her door again, and a
voice called out, “Open, in the name of the king.”

“A moment,” she called out. She wrapped herself in her cloak.
The dagger was on the bedside table. She snatched it up before she
unlatched the heavy wooden door.
The men who pushed into the room wore the black ringmail and
golden cloaks of the City Watch. Their leader smiled at the dagger
in her hand and said, “No need for that, m’lady. We’re to escort you
to the castle.”
“By whose authority?” she said.
He showed her a ribbon. Catelyn felt her breath catch in her
throat. The seal was a mockingbird, in grey wax. “Petyr,” she said.
So soon. Something must have happened to Ser Rodrik. She looked
at the head guardsman. “Do you know who I am?”
“No, m’lady,” he said. “M’lord Little nger said only to bring you
to him, and see that you were not mistreated.”
Catelyn nodded. “You may wait outside while I dress.”
She bathed her hands in the basin and wrapped them in clean
linen. Her ngers were thick and awkward as she struggled to lace
up her bodice and knot a drab brown cloak about her neck. How
could Little nger have known she was here? Ser Rodrik would
never have told him. Old he might be, but he was stubborn, and
loyal to a fault. Were they too late, had the Lannisters reached
King’s Landing before her? No, if that were true, Ned would be here
too, and surely he would have come to her. How …?
Then she thought, Moreo. The Tyroshi knew who they were and
where they were, damn him. She hoped he’d gotten a good price for
the information.
They had brought a horse for her. The lamps were being lit along
the streets as they set out, and Catelyn felt the eyes of the city on
her as she rode, surrounded by the guard in their golden cloaks.
When they reached the Red Keep, the portcullis was down and the
great gates sealed for the night, but the castle windows were alive
with ickering lights. The guardsmen left their mounts outside the
walls and escorted her through a narrow postern door, then up
endless steps to a tower.
He was alone in the room, seated at a heavy wooden table, an oil
lamp beside him as he wrote. When they ushered her inside, he set

down his pen and looked at her. “Cat,” he said quietly.
“Why have I been brought here in this fashion?”
He rose and gestured brusquely to the guards. “Leave us.” The
men departed. “You were not mistreated, I trust,” he said after they
had gone. “I gave rm instructions.” He noticed her bandages.
“Your hands …”
Catelyn ignored the implied question. “I am not accustomed to
being summoned like a serving wench,” she said icily. “As a boy,
you still knew the meaning of courtesy.”
“I’ve angered you, my lady. That was never my intent.” He
looked contrite. The look brought back vivid memories for Catelyn.
He had been a sly child, but after his mischiefs he always looked
contrite; it was a gift he had. The years had not changed him much.
Petyr had been a small boy, and he had grown into a small man, an
inch or two shorter than Catelyn, slender and quick, with the sharp
features she remembered and the same laughing grey-green eyes.
He had a little pointed chin beard now, and threads of silver in his
dark hair, though he was still shy of thirty. They went well with the
silver mockingbird that fastened his cloak. Even as a child, he had
always loved his silver.
“How did you know I was in the city?” she asked him.
“Lord Varys knows all,” Petyr said with a sly smile. “He will be
joining us shortly, but I wanted to see you alone rst. It has been
too long, Cat. How many years?”
Catelyn ignored his familiarity. There were more important
questions. “So it was the King’s Spider who found me.”
Little nger winced. “You don’t want to call him that. He’s very
sensitive. Comes of being an eunuch, I imagine. Nothing happens in
this city without Varys knowing. Ofttimes he knows about it before
it happens. He has informants everywhere. His little birds, he calls
them. One of his little birds heard about your visit. Thankfully,
Varys came to me rst.”
“Why you?”
He shrugged. “Why not me? I am master of coin, the king’s own
councillor. Selmy and Lord Renly rode north to meet Robert, and
Lord Stannis is gone to Dragonstone, leaving only Maester Pycelle

and me. I was the obvious choice. I was ever a friend to your sister
Lysa, Varys knows that.”
“Does Varys know about …”
“Lord Varys knows everything … except why you are here.” He
lifted an eyebrow. “Why are you here?”
“A wife is allowed to yearn for her husband, and if a mother
needs her daughters close, who can tell her no?”
Little nger laughed. “Oh, very good, my lady, but please don’t
expect me to believe that. I know you too well. What were the
Tully words again?”
Her throat was dry. “Family, Duty, Honor,” she recited sti y. He
did know her too well.
“Family, Duty, Honor,” he echoed. “All of which required you to
remain in Winterfell, where our Hand left you. No, my lady,
something has happened. This sudden trip of yours bespeaks a
certain urgency. I beg of you, let me help. Old sweet friends should
never hesitate to rely upon each other.” There was a soft knock on
the door. “Enter,” Little nger called out.
The man who stepped through the door was plump, perfumed,
powdered, and as hairless as an egg. He wore a vest of woven gold
thread over a loose gown of purple silk, and on his feet were
pointed slippers of soft velvet. “Lady Stark,” he said, taking her
hand in both of his, “to see you again after so many years is such a
joy.” His esh was soft and moist, and his breath smelled of lilacs.
“Oh, your poor hands. Have you burned yourself, sweet lady? The
ngers are so delicate … Our good Maester Pycelle makes a
marvelous salve, shall I send for a jar?”
Catelyn slid her ngers from his grasp. “I thank you, my lord, but
my own Maester Luwin has already seen to my hurts.”
Varys bobbed his head. “I was grievous sad to hear about your
son. And him so young. The gods are cruel.”
“On that we agree, Lord Varys,” she said. The title was but a
courtesy due him as a council member; Varys was lord of nothing
but the spiderweb, the master of none but his whisperers.
The eunuch spread his soft hands. “On more than that, I hope,
sweet lady. I have great esteem for your husband, our new Hand,

and I know we do both love King Robert.”
“Yes,” she was forced to say. “For a certainty.”
“Never has a king been so beloved as our Robert,” quipped
Little nger. He smiled slyly. “At least in Lord Varys’s hearing.”
“Good lady,” Varys said with great solicitude. “There are men in
the Free Cities with wondrous healing powers. Say only the word,
and I will send for one for your dear Bran.”
“Maester Luwin is doing all that can be done for Bran,” she told
him. She would not speak of Bran, not here, not with these men.
She trusted Little nger only a little, and Varys not at all. She would
not let them see her grief. “Lord Baelish tells me that I have you to
thank for bringing me here.”
Varys giggled like a little girl. “Oh, yes. I suppose I am guilty. I
hope you forgive me, kind lady.” He eased himself down into a seat
and put his hands together. “I wonder if we might trouble you to
show us the dagger?”
Catelyn Stark stared at the eunuch in stunned disbelief. He was a
spider, she thought wildly, an enchanter or worse. He knew things
no one could possibly know, unless … “What have you done to Ser
Rodrik?” she demanded.
Little nger was lost. “I feel rather like the knight who arrives at
the battle without his lance. What dagger are we talking about?
Who is Ser Rodrik?”
“Ser Rodrik Cassel is master-at-arms at Winterfell,” Varys
informed him. “I assure you, Lady Stark, nothing at all has been
done to the good knight. He did call here early this afternoon. He
visited with Ser Aron Santagar in the armory, and they talked of a
certain dagger. About sunset, they left the castle together and
walked to that dreadful hovel where you were staying. They are
still there, drinking in the common room, waiting for your return.
Ser Rodrik was very distressed to nd you gone.”
“How could you know all that?”
“The whisperings of little birds,” Varys said, smiling. “I know
things, sweet lady. That is the nature of my service.” He shrugged.
“You do have the dagger with you, yes?”

Catelyn pulled it out from beneath her cloak and threw it down
on the table in front of him. “Here. Perhaps your little birds will
whisper the name of the man it belongs to.”
Varys lifted the knife with exaggerated delicacy and ran a thumb
along its edge. Blood welled, and he let out a squeal and dropped
the dagger back on the table.
“Careful,” Catelyn told him, “it’s sharp.”
“Nothing holds an edge like Valyrian steel,” Little nger said as
Varys sucked at his bleeding thumb and looked at Catelyn with
sullen admonition. Little nger hefted the knife lightly in his hand,
testing the grip. He ipped it in the air, caught it again with his
other hand. “Such sweet balance. You want to nd the owner, is
that the reason for this visit? You have no need of Ser Aron for that,
my lady. You should have come to me.”
“And if I had,” she said, “what would you have told me?”
“I would have told you that there was only one knife like this at
King’s Landing.” He grasped the blade between thumb and
fore nger, drew it back over his shoulder, and threw it across the
room with a practiced ick of his wrist. It struck the door and
buried itself deep in the oak, quivering. “It’s mine.”
“Yours?” It made no sense. Petyr had not been at Winterfell.
“Until the tourney on Prince Jo rey’s name day,” he said,
crossing the room to wrench the dagger from the wood. “I backed
Ser Jaime in the jousting, along with half the court.” Petyr’s
sheepish grin made him look half a boy again. “When Loras Tyrell
unhorsed him, many of us became a tri e poorer. Ser Jaime lost a
hundred golden dragons, the queen lost an emerald pendant, and I
lost my knife. Her Grace got the emerald back, but the winner kept
the rest.”
“Who?” Catelyn demanded, her mouth dry with fear. Her ngers
ached with remembered pain.
“The Imp,” said Little nger as Lord Varys watched her face.
“Tyrion Lannister.”

JON

The courtyard rang to the song of swords.
Under black wool, boiled leather, and mail, sweat trickled icily
down Jon’s chest as he pressed the attack. Grenn stumbled
backward, defending himself clumsily. When he raised his sword,
Jon went underneath it with a sweeping blow that crunched against
the back of the other boy’s leg and sent him staggering. Grenn’s
downcut was answered by an overhand that dented his helm. When
he tried a sideswing, Jon swept aside his blade and slammed a
mailed forearm into his chest. Grenn lost his footing and sat down
hard in the snow. Jon knocked his sword from his ngers with a
slash to his wrist that brought a cry of pain.
“Enough!” Ser Alliser Thorne had a voice with an edge like
Valyrian steel.
Grenn cradled his hand. “The bastard broke my wrist.”
“The bastard hamstrung you, opened your empty skull, and cut
o your hand. Or would have, if these blades had an edge. It’s
fortunate for you that the Watch needs stableboys as well as
rangers.” Ser Alliser gestured at Jeren and Toad. “Get the Aurochs
on his feet, he has funeral arrangements to make.”
Jon took o his helm as the other boys were pulling Grenn to his
feet. The frosty morning air felt good on his face. He leaned on his
sword, drew a deep breath, and allowed himself a moment to savor
the victory.

“That is a longsword, not an old man’s cane,” Ser Alliser said
sharply. “Are your legs hurting, Lord Snow?”
Jon hated that name, a mockery that Ser Alliser had hung on him
the rst day he came to practice. The boys had picked it up, and
now he heard it everywhere. He slid the longsword back into its
scabbard. “No,” he replied.
Thorne strode toward him, crisp black leathers whispering faintly
as he moved. He was a compact man of fty years, spare and hard,
with grey in his black hair and eyes like chips of onyx. “The truth
now,” he commanded.
“I’m tired,” Jon admitted. His arm burned from the weight of the
longsword, and he was starting to feel his bruises now that the ght
was done.
“What you are is weak.”
“I won.”
“No. The Aurochs lost.”
One of the other boys sniggered. Jon knew better than to reply.
He had beaten everyone that Ser Alliser had sent against him, yet it
gained him nothing. The master-at-arms served up only derision.
Thorne hated him, Jon had decided; of course, he hated the other
boys even worse.
“That will be all,” Thorne told them. “I can only stomach so much
ineptitude in any one day. If the Others ever come for us, I pray
they have archers, because you lot are t for nothing more than
arrow fodder.”
Jon followed the rest back to the armory, walking alone. He
often walked alone here. There were almost twenty in the group he
trained with, yet not one he could call a friend. Most were two or
three years his senior, yet not one was half the ghter Robb had
been at fourteen. Dareon was quick but afraid of being hit. Pyp used
his sword like a dagger, Jeren was weak as a girl, Grenn slow and
clumsy. Halder’s blows were brutally hard but he ran right into
your attacks. The more time he spent with them, the more Jon
despised them.
Inside, Jon hung sword and scabbard from a hook in the stone
wall, ignoring the others around him. Methodically, he began to

strip o his mail, leather, and sweat-soaked woolens. Chunks of coal
burned in iron braziers at either end of the long room, but Jon
found himself shivering. The chill was always with him here. In a
few years he would forget what it felt like to be warm.
The weariness came on him suddenly, as he donned the
roughspun blacks that were their everyday wear. He sat on a bench,
his ngers fumbling with the fastenings on his cloak. So cold, he
thought, remembering the warm halls of Winterfell, where the hot
waters ran through the walls like blood through a man’s body.
There was scant warmth to be found in Castle Black; the walls were
cold here, and the people colder.
No one had told him the Night’s Watch would be like this; no one
except Tyrion Lannister. The dwarf had given him the truth on the
road north, but by then it had been too late. Jon wondered if his
father had known what the Wall would be like. He must have, he
thought; that only made it hurt the worse.
Even his uncle had abandoned him in this cold place at the end of
the world. Up here, the genial Benjen Stark he had known became a
di erent person. He was First Ranger, and he spent his days and
nights with Lord Commander Mormont and Maester Aemon and the
other high o cers, while Jon was given over to the less than tender
charge of Ser Alliser Thorne.
Three days after their arrival, Jon had heard that Benjen Stark
was to lead a half-dozen men on a ranging into the haunted forest.
That night he sought out his uncle in the great timbered common
hall and pleaded to go with him. Benjen refused him curtly. “This is
not Winterfell,” he told him as he cut his meat with fork and
dagger. “On the Wall, a man gets only what he earns. You’re no
ranger, Jon, only a green boy with the smell of summer still on
you.”
Stupidly, Jon argued. “I’ll be fteen on my name day,” he said.
“Almost a man grown.”
Benjen Stark frowned. “A boy you are, and a boy you’ll remain
until Ser Alliser says you are t to be a man of the Night’s Watch. If
you thought your Stark blood would win you easy favors, you were
wrong. We put aside our old families when we swear our vows.

Your father will always have a place in my heart, but these are my
brothers now.” He gestured with his dagger at the men around
them, all the hard cold men in black.
Jon rose at dawn the next day to watch his uncle leave. One of
his rangers, a big ugly man, sang a bawdy song as he saddled his
garron, his breath steaming in the cold morning air. Ben Stark
smiled at that, but he had no smile for his nephew. “How often
must I tell you no, Jon? We’ll speak when I return.”
As he watched his uncle lead his horse into the tunnel, Jon had
remembered the things that Tyrion Lannister told him on the
kingsroad, and in his mind’s eye he saw Ben Stark lying dead, his
blood red on the snow. The thought made him sick. What was he
becoming? Afterward he sought out Ghost in the loneliness of his
cell, and buried his face in his thick white fur.
If he must be alone, he would make solitude his armor. Castle
Black had no godswood, only a small sept and a drunken septon, but
Jon could not nd it in him to pray to any gods, old or new. If they
were real, he thought, they were as cruel and implacable as winter.
He missed his true brothers: little Rickon, bright eyes shining as
he begged for a sweet; Robb, his rival and best friend and constant
companion; Bran, stubborn and curious, always wanting to follow
and join in whatever Jon and Robb were doing. He missed the girls
too, even Sansa, who never called him anything but “my half
brother” since she was old enough to understand what bastard
meant. And Arya … he missed her even more than Robb, skinny
little thing that she was, all scraped knees and tangled hair and torn
clothes, so erce and willful. Arya never seemed to t, no more
than he had … yet she could always make Jon smile. He would give
anything to be with her now, to muss up her hair once more and
watch her make a face, to hear her nish a sentence with him.
“You broke my wrist, bastard boy.”
Jon lifted his eyes at the sullen voice. Grenn loomed over him,
thick of neck and red of face, with three of his friends behind him.
He knew Todder, a short ugly boy with an unpleasant voice. The
recruits all called him Toad. The other two were the ones Yoren had
brought north with them, Jon remembered, rapers taken down in

the Fingers. He’d forgotten their names. He hardly ever spoke to
them, if he could help it. They were brutes and bullies, without a
thimble of honor between them.
Jon stood up. “I’ll break the other one for you if you ask nicely.”
Grenn was sixteen and a head taller than Jon. All four of them were
bigger than he was, but they did not scare him. He’d beaten every
one of them in the yard.
“Maybe we’ll break you,” one of the rapers said.
“Try.” Jon reached back for his sword, but one of them grabbed
his arm and twisted it behind his back.
“You make us look bad,” complained Toad.
“You looked bad before I ever met you,” Jon told him. The boy
who had his arm jerked upward on him, hard. Pain lanced through
him, but Jon would not cry out.
Toad stepped close. “The little lordling has a mouth on him,” he
said. He had pig eyes, small and shiny. “Is that your mommy’s
mouth, bastard? What was she, some whore? Tell us her name.
Maybe I had her a time or two.” He laughed.
Jon twisted like an eel and slammed a heel down across the
instep of the boy holding him. There was a sudden cry of pain, and
he was free. He ew at Toad, knocked him backward over a bench,
and landed on his chest with both hands on his throat, slamming his
head against the packed earth.
The two from the Fingers pulled him o , throwing him roughly to
the ground. Grenn began to kick at him. Jon was rolling away from
the blows when a booming voice cut through the gloom of the
armory. “STOP THIS! NOW!”
Jon pulled himself to his feet. Donal Noye stood glowering at
them. “The yard is for ghting,” the armorer said. “Keep your
quarrels out of my armory, or I’ll make them my quarrels. You
won’t like that.”
Toad sat on the oor, gingerly feeling the back of his head. His
ngers came away bloody. “He tried to kill me.”
“ ’S true. I saw it,” one of the rapers put in.
“He broke my wrist,” Grenn said again, holding it out to Noye for
inspection.

The armorer gave the o ered wrist the briefest of glances. “A
bruise. Perhaps a sprain. Maestor Aemon will give you a salve. Go
with him, Todder, that head wants looking after. The rest of you,
return to your cells. Not you, Snow. You stay.”
Jon sat heavily on the long wooden bench as the others left,
oblivious to the looks they gave him, the silent promises of future
retribution. His arm was throbbing.
“The Watch has need of every man it can get,” Donal Noye said
when they were alone. “Even men like Toad. You won’t win any
honors killing him.”
Jon’s anger ared. “He said my mother was—”
“—a whore. I heard him. What of it?”
“Lord Eddard Stark was not a man to sleep with whores,” Jon
said icily. “His honor—”
“—did not prevent him from fathering a bastard. Did it?”
Jon was cold with rage. “Can I go?”
“You go when I tell you to go.”
Jon stared sullenly at the smoke rising from the brazier, until
Noye took him under the chin, thick ngers twisting his head
around. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy.”
Jon looked. The armorer had a chest like a keg of ale and a gut to
match. His nose was at and broad, and he always seemed in need
of a shave. The left sleeve of his black wool tunic was fastened at
the shoulder with a silver pin in the shape of a longsword. “Words
won’t make your mother a whore. She was what she was, and
nothing Toad says can change that. You know, we have men on the
Wall whose mothers were whores.”
Not my mother, Jon thought stubbornly. He knew nothing of his
mother; Eddard Stark would not talk of her. Yet he dreamed of her
at times, so often that he could almost see her face. In his dreams,
she was beautiful, and highborn, and her eyes were kind.
“You think you had it hard, being a high lord’s bastard?” the
armorer went on. “That boy Jeren is a septon’s get, and Cotter Pyke
is the baseborn son of a tavern wench. Now he commands
Eastwatch by the Sea.”

“I don’t care,” Jon said. “I don’t care about them and I don’t care
about you or Thorne or Benjen Stark or any of it. I hate it here. It’s
too … it’s cold.”
“Yes. Cold and hard and mean, that’s the Wall, and the men who
walk it. Not like the stories your wet nurse told you. Well, piss on
the stories and piss on your wet nurse. This is the way it is, and
you’re here for life, same as the rest of us.”
“Life,” Jon repeated bitterly. The armorer could talk about life.
He’d had one. He’d only taken the black after he’d lost an arm at
the siege of Storm’s End. Before that he’d smithed for Stannis
Baratheon, the king’s brother. He’d seen the Seven Kingdoms from
one end to the other; he’d feasted and wenched and fought in a
hundred battles. They said it was Donal Noye who’d forged King
Robert’s warhammer, the one that crushed the life from Rhaegar
Targaryen on the Trident. He’d done all the things that Jon would
never do, and then when he was old, well past thirty, he’d taken a
glancing blow from an axe and the wound had festered until the
whole arm had to come o . Only then, crippled, had Donal Noye
come to the Wall, when his life was all but over.
“Yes, life,” Noye said. “A long life or a short one, it’s up to you,
Snow. The road you’re walking, one of your brothers will slit your
throat for you one night.”
“They’re not my brothers,” Jon snapped. “They hate me because
I’m better than they are.”
“No. They hate you because you act like you’re better than they
are. They look at you and see a castle-bred bastard who thinks he’s
a lordling.” The armorer leaned close. “You’re no lordling.
Remember that. You’re a Snow, not a Stark. You’re a bastard and a
bully.”
“A bully?” Jon almost choked on the word. The accusation was so
unjust it took his breath away. “They were the ones who came after
me. Four of them.”
“Four that you’ve humiliated in the yard. Four who are probably
afraid of you. I’ve watched you ght. It’s not training with you. Put
a good edge on your sword, and they’d be dead meat; you know it,

I know it, they know it. You leave them nothing. You shame them.
Does that make you proud?”
Jon hesitated. He did feel proud when he won. Why shouldn’t he?
But the armorer was taking that away too, making it sound as if he
were doing something wrong. “They’re all older than me,” he said
defensively.
“Older and bigger and stronger, that’s the truth. I’ll wager your
master-at-arms taught you how to ght bigger men at Winterfell,
though. Who was he, some old knight?”
“Ser Rodrik Cassel,” Jon said warily. There was a trap here. He
felt it closing around him.
Donal Noye leaned forward, into Jon’s face. “Now think on this,
boy. None of these others have ever had a master-at-arms until Ser
Alliser. Their fathers were farmers and wagonmen and poachers,
smiths and miners and oars on a trading galley. What they know of
ghting they learned between decks, in the alleys of Oldtown and
Lannisport, in wayside brothels and taverns on the kingsroad. They
may have clacked a few sticks together before they came here, but I
promise you, not one in twenty was ever rich enough to own a real
sword.” His look was grim. “So how do you like the taste of your
victories now, Lord Snow?”
“Don’t call me that!” Jon said sharply, but the force had gone out
of his anger. Suddenly he felt ashamed and guilty. “I never … I
didn’t think …”
“Best you start thinking,” Noye warned him. “That, or sleep with
a dagger by your bed. Now go.”
By the time Jon left the armory, it was almost midday. The sun
had broken through the clouds. He turned his back on it and lifted
his eyes to the Wall, blazing blue and crystalline in the sunlight.
Even after all these weeks, the sight of it still gave him the shivers.
Centuries of windblown dirt had pocked and scoured it, covering it
like a lm, and it often seemed a pale grey, the color of an overcast
sky … but when the sun caught it fair on a bright day, it shone,
alive with light, a colossal blue-white cli that lled up half the sky.
The largest structure ever built by the hands of man, Benjen Stark
had told Jon on the kingsroad when they had rst caught sight of

the Wall in the distance. “And beyond a doubt the most useless,”
Tyrion Lannister had added with a grin, but even the Imp grew
silent as they rode closer. You could see it from miles o , a pale
blue line across the northern horizon, stretching away to the east
and west and vanishing in the far distance, immense and unbroken.
This is the end of the world, it seemed to say.
When they nally spied Castle Black, its timbered keeps and
stone towers looked like nothing more than a handful of toy blocks
scattered on the snow, beneath the vast wall of ice. The ancient
stronghold of the black brothers was no Winterfell, no true castle at
all. Lacking walls, it could not be defended, not from the south, or
east, or west; but it was only the north that concerned the Night’s
Watch, and to the north loomed the Wall. Almost seven hundred
feet high it stood, three times the height of the tallest tower in the
stronghold it sheltered. His uncle said the top was wide enough for
a dozen armored knights to ride abreast. The gaunt outlines of huge
catapults and monstrous wooden cranes stood sentry up there, like
the skeletons of great birds, and among them walked men in black
as small as ants.
As he stood outside the armory looking up, Jon felt almost as
overwhelmed as he had that day on the kingsroad, when he’d seen
it for the rst time. The Wall was like that. Sometimes he could
almost forget that it was there, the way you forgot about the sky or
the earth underfoot, but there were other times when it seemed as
if there was nothing else in the world. It was older than the Seven
Kingdoms, and when he stood beneath it and looked up, it made
Jon dizzy. He could feel the great weight of all that ice pressing
down on him, as if it were about to topple, and somehow Jon knew
that if it fell, the world fell with it.
“Makes you wonder what lies beyond,” a familiar voice said.
Jon looked around. “Lannister. I didn’t see—I mean, I thought I
was alone.”
Tyrion Lannister was bundled in furs so thickly he looked like a
very small bear. “There’s much to be said for taking people
unawares. You never know what you might learn.”

“You won’t learn anything from me,” Jon told him. He had seen
little of the dwarf since their journey ended. As the queen’s own
brother, Tyrion Lannister had been an honored guest of the Night’s
Watch. The Lord Commander had given him rooms in the King’s
Tower—so-called, though no king had visited it for a hundred years
—and Lannister dined at Mormont’s own table and spent his days
riding the Wall and his nights dicing and drinking with Ser Alliser
and Bowen Marsh and the other high o cers.
“Oh, I learn things everywhere I go.” The little man gestured up
at the Wall with a gnarled black walking stick. “As I was
saying … why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man
immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?” He cocked
his head and looked at Jon with his curious mismatched eyes. “You
do want to know what’s on the other side, don’t you?”
“It’s nothing special,” Jon said. He wanted to ride with Benjen
Stark on his rangings, deep into the mysteries of the haunted forest,
wanted to ght Mance Rayder’s wildlings and ward the realm
against the Others, but it was better not to speak of the things you
wanted. “The rangers say it’s just woods and mountains and frozen
lakes, with lots of snow and ice.”
“And the grumkins and the snarks,” Tyrion said. “Let us not
forget them, Lord Snow, or else what’s that big thing for?”
“Don’t call me Lord Snow.”
The dwarf lifted an eyebrow. “Would you rather be called the
Imp? Let them see that their words can cut you, and you’ll never be
free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make
it your own. Then they can’t hurt you with it anymore.” He
gestured with his stick. “Come, walk with me. They’ll be serving
some vile stew in the common hall by now, and I could do with a
bowl of something hot.”
Jon was hungry too, so he fell in beside Lannister and slowed his
pace to match the dwarf’s awkward, waddling steps. The wind was
rising, and they could hear the old wooden buildings creaking
around them, and in the distance a heavy shutter banging, over and
over, forgotten. Once there was a mu ed thump as a blanket of
snow slid from a roof and landed near them.

“I don’t see your wolf,” Lannister said as they walked.
“I chain him up in the old stables when we’re training. They
board all the horses in the east stables now, so no one bothers him.
The rest of the time he stays with me. My sleeping cell is in
Hardin’s Tower.”
“That’s the one with the broken battlement, no? Shattered stone
in the yard below, and a lean to it like our noble king Robert after a
long night’s drinking? I thought all those buildings had been
abandoned.”
Jon shrugged. “No one cares where you sleep. Most of the old
keeps are empty, you can pick any cell you want.” Once Castle
Black had housed ve thousand ghting men with all their horses
and servants and weapons. Now it was home to a tenth that
number, and parts of it were falling into ruin.
Tyrion Lannister’s laughter steamed in the cold air. “I’ll be sure to
tell your father to arrest more stonemasons, before your tower
collapses.”
Jon could taste the mockery there, but there was no denying the
truth. The Watch had built nineteen great strongholds along the
Wall, but only three were still occupied: Eastwatch on its grey
windswept shore, the Shadow Tower hard by the mountains where
the Wall ended, and Castle Black between them, at the end of the
kingsroad. The other keeps, long deserted, were lonely, haunted
places, where cold winds whistled through black windows and the
spirits of the dead manned the parapets.
“It’s better that I’m by myself,” Jon said stubbornly. “The rest of
them are scared of Ghost.”
“Wise boys,” Lannister said. Then he changed the subject. “The
talk is, your uncle is too long away.”
Jon remembered the wish he’d wished in his anger, the vision of
Benjen Stark dead in the snow, and he looked away quickly. The
dwarf had a way of sensing things, and Jon did not want him to see
the guilt in his eyes. “He said he’d be back by my name day,” he
admitted. His name day had come and gone, unremarked, a
fortnight past. “They were looking for Ser Waymar Royce, his
father is bannerman to Lord Arryn. Uncle Benjen said they might

search as far as the Shadow Tower. That’s all the way up in the
mountains.”
“I hear that a good many rangers have vanished of late,”
Lannister said as they mounted the steps to the common hall. He
grinned and pulled open the door. “Perhaps the grumkins are
hungry this year.”
Inside, the hall was immense and drafty, even with a re roaring
in its great hearth. Crows nested in the timbers of its lofty ceiling.
Jon heard their cries overhead as he accepted a bowl of stew and a
heel of black bread from the day’s cooks. Grenn and Toad and some
of the others were seated at the bench nearest the warmth, laughing
and cursing each other in rough voices. Jon eyed them thoughtfully
for a moment. Then he chose a spot at the far end of the hall, well
away from the other diners.
Tyrion Lannister sat across from him, sni ng at the stew
suspiciously. “Barley, onion, carrot,” he muttered. “Someone should
tell the cooks that turnip isn’t a meat.”
“It’s mutton stew.” Jon pulled o his gloves and warmed his
hands in the steam rising from the bowl. The smell made his mouth
water.
“Snow.”
Jon knew Alliser Thorne’s voice, but there was a curious note in it
that he had not heard before. He turned.
“The Lord Commander wants to see you. Now.”
For a moment Jon was too frightened to move. Why would the
Lord Commander want to see him? They had heard something
about Benjen, he thought wildly, he was dead, the vision had come
true. “Is it my uncle?” he blurted. “Is he returned safe?”
“The Lord Commander is not accustomed to waiting,” was Ser
Alliser’s reply. “And I am not accustomed to having my commands
questioned by bastards.”
Tyrion Lannister swung o the bench and rose. “Stop it, Thorne.
You’re frightening the boy.”
“Keep out of matters that don’t concern you, Lannister. You have
no place here.”

“I have a place at court, though,” the dwarf said, smiling. “A
word in the right ear, and you’ll die a sour old man before you get
another boy to train. Now tell Snow why the Old Bear needs to see
him. Is there news of his uncle?”
“No,” Ser Alliser said. “This is another matter entirely. A bird
arrived this morning from Winterfell, with a message that concerns
his brother.” He corrected himself. “His half brother.”
“Bran,” Jon breathed, scrambling to his feet. “Something’s
happened to Bran.”
Tyrion Lannister laid a hand on his arm. “Jon,” he said. “I am
truly sorry.”
Jon scarcely heard him. He brushed o Tyrion’s hand and strode
across the hall. He was running by the time he hit the doors. He
raced to the Commander’s Keep, dashing through drifts of old snow.
When the guards passed him, he took the tower steps two at a time.
By the time he burst into the presence of the Lord Commander, his
boots were soaked and Jon was wild-eyed and panting. “Bran,” he
said. “What does it say about Bran?”
Jeor Mormont, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, was a
gru old man with an immense bald head and a shaggy grey beard.
He had a raven on his arm, and he was feeding it kernels of corn. “I
am told you can read.” He shook the raven o , and it apped its
wings and ew to the window, where it sat watching as Mormont
drew a roll of paper from his belt and handed it to Jon. “Corn,” it
muttered in a raucous voice. “Corn, corn.”
Jon’s nger traced the outline of the direwolf in the white wax of
the broken seal. He recognized Robb’s hand, but the letters seemed
to blur and run as he tried to read them. He realized he was crying.
And then, through the tears, he found the sense in the words, and
raised his head. “He woke up,” he said. “The gods gave him back.”
“Crippled,” Mormont said. “I’m sorry, boy. Read the rest of the
letter.”
He looked at the words, but they didn’t matter. Nothing
mattered. Bran was going to live. “My brother is going to live,” he
told Mormont. The Lord Commander shook his head, gathered up a

stful of corn, and whistled. The raven ew to his shoulder, crying,
“Live! Live!”
Jon ran down the stairs, a smile on his face and Robb’s letter in
his hand. “My brother is going to live,” he told the guards. They
exchanged a look. He ran back to the common hall, where he found
Tyrion Lannister just nishing his meal. He grabbed the little man
under the arms, hoisted him up in the air, and spun him around in a
circle. “Bran is going to live!” he whooped. Lannister looked startled.
Jon put him down and thrust the paper into his hands. “Here, read
it,” he said.
Others were gathering around and looking at him curiously. Jon
noticed Grenn a few feet away. A thick woolen bandage was
wrapped around one hand. He looked anxious and uncomfortable,
not menacing at all. Jon went to him. Grenn edged backward and
put up his hands. “Stay away from me now, you bastard.”
Jon smiled at him. “I’m sorry about your wrist. Robb used the
same move on me once, only with a wooden blade. It hurt like
seven hells, but yours must be worse. Look, if you want, I can show
you how to defend that.”
Alliser Thorne overheard him. “Lord Snow wants to take my place
now.” He sneered. “I’d have an easier time teaching a wolf to juggle
than you will training this aurochs.”
“I’ll take that wager, Ser Alliser,” Jon said. “I’d love to see Ghost
juggle.”
Jon heard Grenn suck in his breath, shocked. Silence fell.
Then Tyrion Lannister gu awed. Three of the black brothers
joined in from a nearby table. The laughter spread up and down the
benches, until even the cooks joined in. The birds stirred in the
rafters, and nally even Grenn began to chuckle.
Ser Alliser never took his eyes from Jon. As the laughter rolled
around him, his face darkened, and his sword hand curled into a
st. “That was a grievous error, Lord Snow,” he said at last in the
acid tones of an enemy.

EDDARD

Eddard Stark rode through the towering bronze doors of the Red
Keep sore, tired, hungry, and irritable. He was still ahorse,
dreaming of a long hot soak, a roast fowl, and a featherbed, when
the king’s steward told him that Grand Maester Pycelle had
convened an urgent meeting of the small council. The honor of the
Hand’s presence was requested as soon as it was convenient. “It will
be convenient on the morrow,” Ned snapped as he dismounted.
The steward bowed very low. “I shall give the councillors your
regrets, my lord.”
“No, damn it,” Ned said. It would not do to o end the council
before he had even begun. “I will see them. Pray give me a few
moments to change into something more presentable.”
“Yes, my lord,” the steward said. “We have given you Lord
Arryn’s former chambers in the Tower of the Hand, if it please you.
I shall have your things taken there.”
“My thanks,” Ned said as he ripped o his riding gloves and
tucked them into his belt. The rest of his household was coming
through the gate behind him. Ned saw Vayon Poole, his own
steward, and called out. “It seems the council has urgent need of
me. See that my daughters nd their bedchambers, and tell Jory to
keep them there. Arya is not to go exploring,” Poole bowed. Ned
turned back to the royal steward. “My wagons are still straggling
through the city. I shall need appropriate garments.”
“It will be my great pleasure,” the steward said.

And so Ned had come striding into the council chambers, bonetired and dressed in borrowed clothing, to nd four members of the
small council waiting for him.
The chamber was richly furnished. Myrish carpets covered the
oor instead of rushes, and in one corner a hundred fabulous beasts
cavorted in bright paints on a carved screen from the Summer Isles.
The walls were hung with tapestries from Norvos and Qohor and
Lys, and a pair of Valyrian sphinxes anked the door, eyes of
polished garnet smoldering in black marble faces.
The councillor Ned liked least, the eunuch Varys, accosted him
the moment he entered. “Lord Stark, I was grievous sad to hear
about your troubles on the kingsroad. We have all been visiting the
sept to light candles for Prince Jo rey. I pray for his recovery.” His
hand left powder stains on Ned’s sleeve, and he smelled as foul and
sweet as owers on a grave.
“Your gods have heard you,” Ned replied, cool yet polite. “The
prince grows stronger every day.” He disentangled himself from the
eunuch’s grip and crossed the room to where Lord Renly stood by
the screen, talking quietly with a short man who could only be
Little nger. Renly had been a boy of eight when Robert won the
throne, but he had grown into a man so like his brother that Ned
found it disconcerting. Whenever he saw him, it was as if the years
had slipped away and Robert stood before him, fresh from his
victory on the Trident.
“I see you have arrived safely, Lord Stark,” Renly said.
“And you as well,” Ned replied. “You must forgive me, but
sometimes you look the very image of your brother Robert.”
“A poor copy,” Renly said with a shrug.
“Though much better dressed,” Little nger quipped. “Lord Renly
spends more on clothing than half the ladies of the court.”
It was true enough. Lord Renly was in dark green velvet, with a
dozen golden stags embroidered on his doublet. A cloth-of-gold half
cape was draped casually across one shoulder, fastened with an
emerald brooch. “There are worse crimes,” Renly said with a laugh.
“The way you dress, for one.”

Little nger ignored the jibe. He eyed Ned with a smile on his lips
that bordered on insolence. “I have hoped to meet you for some
years, Lord Stark. No doubt Lady Catelyn has mentioned me to
you.”
“She has,” Ned replied with a chill in his voice. The sly arrogance
of the comment rankled him. “I understand you knew my brother
Brandon as well.”
Renly Baratheon laughed. Varys shu ed over to listen.
“Rather too well,” Little nger said. “I still carry a token of his
esteem. Did Brandon speak of me too?”
“Often, and with some heat,” Ned said, hoping that would end it.
He had no patience with this game they played, this dueling with
words.
“I should have thought that heat ill suits you Starks,” Little nger
said. “Here in the south, they say you are all made of ice, and melt
when you ride below the Neck.”
“I do not plan on melting soon, Lord Baelish. You may count on
it.” Ned moved to the council table and said, “Maester Pycelle, I
trust you are well.”
The Grand Maester smiled gently from his tall chair at the foot of
the table. “Well enough for a man of my years, my lord,” he
replied, “yet I do tire easily, I fear.” Wispy strands of white hair
fringed the broad bald dome of his forehead above a kindly face.
His maester’s collar was no simple metal choker such as Luwin
wore, but two dozen heavy chains wound together into a ponderous
metal necklace that covered him from throat to breast. The links
were forged of every metal known to man: black iron and red gold,
bright copper and dull lead, steel and tin and pale silver, brass and
bronze and platinum. Garnets and amethysts and black pearls
adorned the metal-work, and here and there an emerald or ruby.
“Perhaps we might begin soon,” the Grand Maester said, hands
knitting together atop his broad stomach. “I fear I shall fall asleep if
we wait much longer.”
“As you will.” The king’s seat sat empty at the head of the table,
the crowned stag of Baratheon embroidered in gold thread on its

pillows. Ned took the chair beside it, as the right hand of his king.
“My lords,” he said formally, “I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”
“You are the King’s Hand,” Varys said. “We serve at your
pleasure, Lord Stark.”
As the others took their accustomed seats, it struck Eddard Stark
forcefully that he did not belong here, in this room, with these men.
He remembered what Robert had told him in the crypts below
Winterfell. I am surrounded by atterers and fools, the king had
insisted. Ned looked down the council table and wondered which
were the atterers and which the fools. He thought he knew
already. “We are but ve,” he pointed out.
“Lord Stannis took himself to Dragonstone not long after the king
went north,” Varys said, “and our gallant Ser Barristan no doubt
rides beside the king as he makes his way through the city, as be ts
the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.”
“Perhaps we had best wait for Ser Barristan and the king to join
us,” Ned suggested.
Renly Baratheon laughed aloud. “If we wait for my brother to
grace us with his royal presence, it could be a long sit.”
“Our good King Robert has many cares,” Varys said. “He entrusts
some small matters to us, to lighten his load.”
“What Lord Varys means is that all this business of coin and crops
and justice bores my royal brother to tears,” Lord Renly said, “so it
falls to us to govern the realm. He does send us a command from
time to time.” He drew a tightly rolled paper from his sleeve and
laid it on the table. “This morning he commanded me to ride ahead
with all haste and ask Grand Maester Pycelle to convene this council
at once. He has an urgent task for us.”
Little nger smiled and handed the paper to Ned. It bore the royal
seal. Ned broke the wax with his thumb and attened the letter to
consider the king’s urgent command, reading the words with
mounting disbelief. Was there no end to Robert’s folly? And to do
this in his name, that was salt in the wound. “Gods be good,” he
swore.
“What Lord Eddard means to say,” Lord Renly announced, “is that
His Grace instructs us to stage a great tournament in honor of his

appointment as the Hand of the King.”
“How much?” asked Little nger, mildly.
Ned read the answer o the letter. “Forty thousand golden
dragons to the champion. Twenty thousand to the man who comes
second, another twenty to the winner of the melee, and ten
thousand to the victor of the archery competition.”
“Ninety thousand gold pieces,” Little nger sighed. “And we must
not neglect the other costs. Robert will want a prodigious feast.
That means cooks, carpenters, serving girls, singers, jugglers,
fools …”
“Fools we have in plenty,” Lord Renly said.
Grand Maester Pycelle looked to Little nger and asked, “Will the
treasury bear the expense?”
“What treasury is that?” Little nger replied with a twist of his
mouth. “Spare me the foolishness, Maester. You know as well as I
that the treasury has been empty for years. I shall have to borrow
the money. No doubt the Lannisters will be accommodating. We
owe Lord Tywin some three million dragons at present, what matter
another hundred thousand?”
Ned was stunned. “Are you claiming that the Crown is three
million gold pieces in debt?”
“The Crown is more than six million gold pieces in debt, Lord
Stark. The Lannisters are the biggest part of it, but we have also
borrowed from Lord Tyrell, the Iron Bank of Braavos, and several
Tyroshi trading cartels. Of late I’ve had to turn to the Faith. The
High Septon haggles worse than a Dornish shmonger.”
Ned was aghast. “Aerys Targaryen left a treasury owing with
gold. How could you let this happen?”
Little nger gave a shrug. “The master of coin nds the money.
The king and the Hand spend it.”
“I will not believe that Jon Arryn allowed Robert to beggar the
realm,” Ned said hotly.
Grand Maester Pycelle shook his great bald head, his chains
clinking softly. “Lord Arryn was a prudent man, but I fear that His
Grace does not always listen to wise counsel.”

“My royal brother loves tournaments and feasts,” Renly
Baratheon said, “and he loathes what he calls ‘counting coppers.’ ”
“I will speak with His Grace,” Ned said. “This tourney is an
extravagance the realm cannot a ord.”
“Speak to him as you will,” Lord Renly said, “we had still best
make our plans.”
“Another day,” Ned said. Perhaps too sharply, from the looks they
gave him. He would have to remember that he was no longer in
Winterfell, where only the king stood higher; here, he was but rst
among equals. “Forgive me, my lords,” he said in a softer tone. “I
am tired. Let us call a halt for today and resume when we are
fresher.” He did not ask for their consent, but stood abruptly,
nodded at them all, and made for the door.
Outside, wagons and riders were still pouring through the castle
gates, and the yard was a chaos of mud and horse esh and shouting
men. The king had not yet arrived, he was told. Since the ugliness
on the Trident, the Starks and their household had ridden well
ahead of the main column, the better to separate themselves from
the Lannisters and the growing tension. Robert had hardly been
seen; the talk was he was traveling in the huge wheelhouse, drunk
as often as not. If so, he might be hours behind, but he would still
be here too soon for Ned’s liking. He had only to look at Sansa’s
face to feel the rage twisting inside him once again. The last
fortnight of their journey had been a misery. Sansa blamed Arya
and told her that it should have been Nymeria who died. And Arya
was lost after she heard what had happened to her butcher’s boy.
Sansa cried herself to sleep, Arya brooded silently all day long, and
Eddard Stark dreamed of a frozen hell reserved for the Starks of
Winterfell.
He crossed the outer yard, passed under a portcullis into the inner
bailey, and was walking toward what he thought was the Tower of
the Hand when Little nger appeared in front of him. “You’re going
the wrong way, Stark. Come with me.”
Hesitantly, Ned followed. Little nger led him into a tower, down
a stair, across a small sunken courtyard, and along a deserted
corridor where empty suits of armor stood sentinel along the walls.

They were relics of the Targaryens, black steel with dragon scales
cresting their helms, now dusty and forgotten. “This is not the way
to my chambers,” Ned said.
“Did I say it was? I’m leading you to the dungeons to slit your
throat and seal your corpse up behind a wall,” Little nger replied,
his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We have no time for this, Stark.
Your wife awaits.”
“What game are you playing, Little nger? Catelyn is at
Winterfell, hundreds of leagues from here.”
“Oh?” Little nger’s grey-green eyes glittered with amusement.
“Then it appears someone has managed an astonishing
impersonation. For the last time, come. Or don’t come, and I’ll keep
her for myself.” He hurried down the steps.
Ned followed him warily, wondering if this day would ever end.
He had no taste for these intrigues, but he was beginning to realize
that they were meat and mead to a man like Little nger.
At the foot of the steps was a heavy door of oak and iron. Petyr
Baelish lifted the crossbar and gestured Ned through. They stepped
out into the ruddy glow of dusk, on a rocky blu high above the
river. “We’re outside the castle,” Ned said.
“You are a hard man to fool, Stark,” Little nger said with a
smirk. “Was it the sun that gave it away, or the sky? Follow me.
There are niches cut in the rock. Try not to fall to your death,
Catelyn would never understand.” With that, he was over the side
of the cli , descending as quick as a monkey.
Ned studied the rocky face of the blu for a moment, then
followed more slowly. The niches were there, as Little nger had
promised, shallow cuts that would be invisible from below, unless
you knew just where to look for them. The river was a long,
dizzying distance below. Ned kept his face pressed to the rock and
tried not to look down any more often than he had to.
When at last he reached the bottom, a narrow, muddy trail along
the water’s edge, Little nger was lazing against a rock and eating
an apple. He was almost down to the core. “You are growing old
and slow, Stark,” he said, ipping the apple casually into the
rushing water. “No matter, we ride the rest of the way.” He had

two horses waiting. Ned mounted up and trotted behind him, down
the trail and into the city.
Finally Baelish drew rein in front of a ramshackle building, three
stories, timbered, its windows bright with lamplight in the
gathering dusk. The sounds of music and raucous laughter drifted
out and oated over the water. Beside the door swung an ornate oil
lamp on a heavy chain, with a globe of leaded red glass.
Ned Stark dismounted in a fury. “A brothel,” he said as he seized
Little nger by the shoulder and spun him around. “You’ve brought
me all this way to take me to a brothel.”
“Your wife is inside,” Little nger said.
It was the nal insult. “Brandon was too kind to you,” Ned said as
he slammed the small man back against a wall and shoved his
dagger up under the little pointed chin beard.
“My lord, no,” an urgent voice called out. “He speaks the truth.”
There were footsteps behind him.
Ned spun, knife in hand, as an old white-haired man hurried
toward them. He was dressed in brown roughspun, and the soft
esh under his chin wobbled as he ran. “This is no business of
yours,” Ned began; then, suddenly, the recognition came. He
lowered the dagger, astonished. “Ser Rodrik?”
Rodrik Cassel nodded. “Your lady awaits you upstairs.”
Ned was lost. “Catelyn is truly here? This is not some strange jape
of Little nger’s?” He sheathed his blade.
“Would that it were, Stark,” Little nger said. “Follow me, and try
to look a shade more lecherous and a shade less like the King’s
Hand. It would not do to have you recognized. Perhaps you could
fondle a breast or two, just in passing.”
They went inside, through a crowded common room where a fat
woman was singing bawdy songs while pretty young girls in linen
shifts and wisps of colored silk pressed themselves against their
lovers and dandled on their laps. No one paid Ned the least bit of
attention. Ser Rodrik waited below while Little nger led him up to
the third oor, along a corridor, and through a door.
Inside, Catelyn was waiting. She cried out when she saw him, ran
to him, and embraced him ercely.

“My lady,” Ned whispered in wonderment.
“Oh, very good,” said Little nger, closing the door. “You
recognized her.”
“I feared you’d never come, my lord,” she whispered against his
chest. “Petyr has been bringing me reports. He told me of your
troubles with Arya and the young prince. How are my girls?”
“Both in mourning, and full of anger,” he told her. “Cat, I do not
understand. What are you doing in King’s Landing? What’s
happened?” Ned asked his wife. “Is it Bran? Is he …” Dead was the
word that came to his lips, but he could not say it.
“It is Bran, but not as you think,” Catelyn said.
Ned was lost. “Then how? Why are you here, my love? What is
this place?”
“Just what it appears,” Little nger said, easing himself onto a
window seat. “A brothel. Can you think of a less likely place to nd
a Catelyn Tully?” He smiled. “As it chances, I own this particular
establishment, so arrangements were easily made. I am most
anxious to keep the Lannisters from learning that Cat is here in
King’s Landing.”
“Why?” Ned asked. He saw her hands then, the awkward way she
held them, the raw red scars, the sti ness of the last two ngers on
her left. “You’ve been hurt.” He took her hands in his own, turned
them over. “Gods. Those are deep cuts … a gash from a sword
or … how did this happen, my lady?”
Catelyn slid a dagger out from under her cloak and placed it in
his hand. “This blade was sent to open Bran’s throat and spill his
life’s blood.”
Ned’s head jerked up. “But … who … why would …”
She put a nger to his lips. “Let me tell it all, my love. It will go
faster that way. Listen.”
So he listened, and she told it all, from the re in the library
tower to Varys and the guardsmen and Little nger. And when she
was done, Eddard Stark sat dazed beside the table, the dagger in his
hand. Bran’s wolf had saved the boy’s life, he thought dully. What
was it that Jon had said when they found the pups in the snow?
Your children were meant to have these pups, my lord. And he had

killed Sansa’s, and for what? Was it guilt he was feeling? Or fear? If
the gods had sent these wolves, what folly had he done?
Painfully, Ned forced his thoughts back to the dagger and what it
meant. “The Imp’s dagger,” he repeated. It made no sense. His hand
curled around the smooth dragonbone hilt, and he slammed the
blade into the table, felt it bite into the wood. It stood mocking
him. “Why should Tyrion Lannister want Bran dead? The boy has
never done him harm.”
“Do you Starks have nought but snow between your ears?”
Little nger asked. “The Imp would never have acted alone.”
Ned rose and paced the length of the room. “If the queen had a
role in this or, gods forbid, the king himself … no, I will not believe
that.” Yet even as he said the words, he remembered that chill
morning on the barrowlands, and Robert’s talk of sending hired
knives after the Targaryen princess. He remembered Rhaegar’s
infant son, the red ruin of his skull, and the way the king had turned
away, as he had turned away in Darry’s audience hall not so long
ago. He could still hear Sansa pleading, as Lyanna had pleaded once.
“Most likely the king did not know,” Little nger said. “It would
not be the rst time. Our good Robert is practiced at closing his
eyes to things he would rather not see.”
Ned had no reply for that. The face of the butcher’s boy swam up
before his eyes, cloven almost in two, and afterward the king had
said not a word. His head was pounding.
Little nger sauntered over to the table, wrenched the knife from
the wood. “The accusation is treason either way. Accuse the king
and you will dance with Ilyn Payne before the words are out of
your mouth. The queen … if you can nd proof, and if you can
make Robert listen, then perhaps …”
“We have proof,” Ned said. “We have the dagger.”
“This?” Little nger ipped the knife casually end over end. “A
sweet piece of steel, but it cuts two ways, my lord. The Imp will no
doubt swear the blade was lost or stolen while he was at Winterfell,
and with his hireling dead, who is there to give him the lie?” He
tossed the knife lightly to Ned. “My counsel is to drop that in the
river and forget that it was ever forged.”

Ned regarded him coldly. “Lord Baelish, I am a Stark of
Winterfell. My son lies crippled, perhaps dying. He would be dead,
and Catelyn with him, but for a wolf pup we found in the snow. If
you truly believe I could forget that, you are as big a fool now as
when you took up sword against my brother.”
“A fool I may be, Stark … yet I’m still here, while your brother
has been moldering in his frozen grave for some fourteen years
now. If you are so eager to molder beside him, far be it from me to
dissuade you, but I would rather not be included in the party, thank
you very much.”
“You would be the last man I would willingly include in any
party, Lord Baelish.”
“You wound me deeply.” Little nger placed a hand over his
heart. “For my part, I always found you Starks a tiresome lot, but
Cat seems to have become attached to you, for reasons I cannot
comprehend. I shall try to keep you alive for her sake. A fool’s task,
admittedly, but I could never refuse your wife anything.”
“I told Petyr our suspicions about Jon Arryn’s death,” Catelyn
said. “He has promised to help you nd the truth.”
That was not news that Eddard Stark welcomed, but it was true
enough that they needed help, and Little nger had been almost a
brother to Cat once. It would not be the rst time that Ned had
been forced to make common cause with a man he despised. “Very
well,” he said, thrusting the dagger into his belt. “You spoke of
Varys. Does the eunuch know all of it?”
“Not from my lips,” Catelyn said. “You did not wed a fool,
Eddard Stark. But Varys has ways of learning things that no man
could know. He has some dark art, Ned, I swear it.”
“He has spies, that is well known,” Ned said, dismissive.
“It is more than that,” Catelyn insisted. “Ser Rodrik spoke to Ser
Aron Santagar in all secrecy, yet somehow the Spider knew of their
conversation. I fear that man.”
Little nger smiled. “Leave Lord Varys to me, sweet lady. If you
will permit me a small obscenity—and where better for it than here
—I hold the man’s balls in the palm of my hand.” He cupped his
ngers, smiling. “Or would, if he were a man, or had any balls. You

see, if the pie is opened, the birds begin to sing, and Varys would
not like that. Were I you, I would worry more about the Lannisters
and less about the eunuch.”
Ned did not need Little nger to tell him that. He was thinking
back to the day Arya had been found, to the look on the queen’s
face when she said, We have a wolf, so soft and quiet. He was
thinking of the boy Mycah, of Jon Arryn’s sudden death, of Bran’s
fall, of old mad Aerys Targaryen dying on the oor of his throne
room while his life’s blood dried on a gilded blade. “My lady,” he
said, turning to Catelyn, “there is nothing more you can do here. I
want you to return to Winterfell at once. If there was one assassin,
there could be others. Whoever ordered Bran’s death will learn soon
enough that the boy still lives.”
“I had hoped to see the girls …” Catelyn said.
“That would be most unwise,” Little nger put in. “The Red Keep
is full of curious eyes, and children talk.”
“He speaks truly, my love,” Ned told her. He embraced her.
“Take Ser Rodrik and ride for Winterfell. I will watch over the girls.
Go home to our sons and keep them safe.”
“As you say, my lord.” Catelyn lifted her face, and Ned kissed
her. Her maimed ngers clutched against his back with a desperate
strength, as if to hold him safe forever in the shelter of her arms.
“Would the lord and lady like the use of a bedchamber?” asked
Little nger. “I should warn you, Stark, we usually charge for that
sort of thing around here.”
“A moment alone, that’s all I ask,” Catelyn said.
“Very well.” Little nger strolled to the door. “Don’t be too long.
It is past time the Hand and I returned to the castle, before our
absence is noted.”
Catelyn went to him and took his hands in her own. “I will not
forget the help you gave me, Petyr. When your men came for me, I
did not know whether they were taking me to a friend or an enemy.
I have found you more than a friend. I have found a brother I’d
thought lost.”
Petyr Baelish smiled. “I am desperately sentimental, sweet lady.
Best not tell anyone. I have spent years convincing the court that I

am wicked and cruel, and I should hate to see all that hard work go
for naught.”
Ned believed not a word of that, but he kept his voice polite as he
said, “You have my thanks as well, Lord Baelish.”
“Oh, now there’s a treasure,” Little nger said, exiting.
When the door had closed behind him, Ned turned back to his
wife. “Once you are home, send word to Helman Tallhart and
Galbart Glover under my seal. They are to raise a hundred bowmen
each and fortify Moat Cailin. Two hundred determined archers can
hold the Neck against an army. Instruct Lord Manderly that he is to
strengthen and repair all his defenses at White Harbor, and see that
they are well manned. And from this day on, I want a careful watch
kept over Theon Greyjoy. If there is war, we shall have sore need of
his father’s eet.”
“War?” The fear was plain on Catelyn’s face.
“It will not come to that,” Ned promised her, praying it was true.
He took her in his arms again. “The Lannisters are merciless in the
face of weakness, as Aerys Targaryen learned to his sorrow, but
they would not dare attack the north without all the power of the
realm behind them, and that they shall not have. I must play out
this fool’s masquerade as if nothing is amiss. Remember why I came
here, my love. If I nd proof that the Lannisters murdered Jon
Arryn …”
He felt Catelyn tremble in his arms. Her scarred hands clung to
him. “If,” she said, “what then, my love?”
That was the most dangerous part, Ned knew. “All justice ows
from the king,” he told her. “When I know the truth, I must go to
Robert.” And pray that he is the man I think he is, he nished silently,
and not the man I fear he has become.

TYRION

“Are you certain that you must leave us so soon?” the Lord
Commander asked him.
“Past certain, Lord Mormont,” Tyrion replied. “My brother Jaime
will be wondering what has become of me. He may decide that you
have convinced me to take the black.”
“Would that I could.” Mormont picked up a crab claw and cracked
it in his st. Old as he was, the Lord Commander still had the
strength of a bear. “You’re a cunning man, Tyrion. We have need of
men of your sort on the Wall.”
Tyrion grinned. “Then I shall scour the Seven Kingdoms for
dwarfs and ship them all to you, Lord Mormont.” As they laughed,
he sucked the meat from a crab leg and reached for another. The
crabs had arrived from Eastwatch only this morning, packed in a
barrel of snow, and they were succulent.
Ser Alliser Thorne was the only man at table who did not so much
as crack a smile. “Lannister mocks us.”
“Only you, Ser Alliser,” Tyrion said. This time the laughter round
the table had a nervous, uncertain quality to it.
Thorne’s black eyes xed on Tyrion with loathing. “You have a
bold tongue for someone who is less than half a man. Perhaps you
and I should visit the yard together.”
“Why?” asked Tyrion. “The crabs are here.”
The remark brought more gu aws from the others. Ser Alliser
stood up, his mouth a tight line. “Come and make your japes with

steel in your hand.”
Tyrion looked pointedly at his right hand. “Why, I have steel in
my hand, Ser Alliser, although it appears to be a crab fork. Shall we
duel?” He hopped up on his chair and began poking at Thorne’s
chest with the tiny fork. Roars of laughter lled the tower room.
Bits of crab ew from the Lord Commander’s mouth as he began to
gasp and choke. Even his raven joined in, cawing loudly from above
the window. “Duel! Duel! Duel!”
Ser Alliser Thorne walked from the room so sti y it looked as
though he had a dagger up his butt.
Mormont was still gasping for breath. Tyrion pounded him on the
back. “To the victor goes the spoils,” he called out. “I claim
Thorne’s share of the crabs.”
Finally the Lord Commander recovered himself. “You are a
wicked man, to provoke our Ser Alliser so,” he scolded.
Tyrion seated himself and took a sip of wine. “If a man paints a
target on his chest, he should expect that sooner or later someone
will loose an arrow at him. I have seen dead men with more humor
than your Ser Alliser.”
“Not so,” objected the Lord Steward, Bowen Marsh, a man as
round and red as a pomegranate. “You ought to hear the droll
names he gives the lads he trains.”
Tyrion had heard a few of those droll names. “I’ll wager the lads
have a few names for him as well,” he said. “Chip the ice o your
eyes, my good lords. Ser Alliser Thorne should be mucking out your
stables, not drilling your young warriors.”
“The Watch has no shortage of stableboys,” Lord Mormont
grumbled. “That seems to be all they send us these days. Stableboys
and sneak thieves and rapers. Ser Alliser is an anointed knight, one
of the few to take the black since I have been Lord Commander. He
fought bravely at King’s Landing.”
“On the wrong side,” Ser Jaremy Rykker commented dryly. “I
ought to know, I was there on the battlements beside him. Tywin
Lannister gave us a splendid choice. Take the black, or see our
heads on spikes before evenfall. No o ense intended, Tyrion.”

“None taken, Ser Jaremy. My father is very fond of spiked heads,
especially those of people who have annoyed him in some fashion.
And a face as noble as yours, well, no doubt he saw you decorating
the city wall above the King’s Gate. I think you would have looked
very striking up there.”
“Thank you,” Ser Jaremy replied with a sardonic smile.
Lord Commander Mormont cleared his throat. “Sometimes I fear
Ser Alliser saw you true, Tyrion. You do mock us and our noble
purpose here.”
Tyrion shrugged. “We all need to be mocked from time to time,
Lord Mormont, lest we start to take ourselves too seriously. More
wine, please.” He held out his cup.
As Rykker lled it for him, Bowen Marsh said, “You have a great
thirst for a small man.”
“Oh, I think that Lord Tyrion is quite a large man,” Maester
Aemon said from the far end of the table. He spoke softly, yet the
high o cers of the Night’s Watch all fell quiet, the better to hear
what the ancient had to say. “I think he is a giant come among us,
here at the end of the world.”
Tyrion answered gently, “I’ve been called many things, my lord,
but giant is seldom one of them.”
“Nonetheless,” Maester Aemon said as his clouded, milk-white
eyes moved to Tyrion’s face, “I think it is true.”
For once, Tyrion Lannister found himself at a loss for words. He
could only bow his head politely and say, “You are too kind,
Maester Aemon.”
The blind man smiled. He was a tiny thing, wrinkled and hairless,
shrunken beneath the weight of a hundred years so his maester’s
collar with its links of many metals hung loose about his throat. “I
have been called many things, my lord,” he said, “but kind is seldom
one of them.” This time Tyrion himself led the laughter.
Much later, when the serious business of eating was done and the
others had left, Mormont o ered Tyrion a chair beside the re and
a cup of mulled spirits so strong they brought tears to his eyes. “The
kingsroad can be perilous this far north,” the Lord Commander told
him as they drank.

“I have Jyck and Morrec,” Tyrion said, “and Yoren is riding south
again.”
“Yoren is only one man. The Watch shall escort you as far as
Winterfell,” Mormont announced in a tone that brooked no
argument. “Three men should be su cient.”
“If you insist, my lord,” Tyrion said. “You might send young
Snow. He would be glad for a chance to see his brothers.”
Mormont frowned through his thick grey beard. “Snow? Oh, the
Stark bastard. I think not. The young ones need to forget the lives
they left behind them, the brothers and mothers and all that. A visit
home would only stir up feelings best left alone. I know these
things. My own blood kin … my sister Maege rules Bear Island
now, since my son’s dishonor. I have nieces I have never seen.” He
took a swallow. “Besides, Jon Snow is only a boy. You shall have
three strong swords, to keep you safe.”
“I am touched by your concern, Lord Mormont.” The strong drink
was making Tyrion light-headed, but not so drunk that he did not
realize that the Old Bear wanted something from him. “I hope I can
repay your kindness.”
“You can,” Mormont said bluntly. “Your sister sits beside the
king. Your brother is a great knight, and your father the most
powerful lord in the Seven Kingdoms. Speak to them for us. Tell
them of our need here. You have seen for yourself, my lord. The
Night’s Watch is dying. Our strength is less than a thousand now.
Six hundred here, two hundred in the Shadow Tower, even fewer at
Eastwatch, and a scant third of those ghting men. The Wall is a
hundred leagues long. Think on that. Should an attack come, I have
three men to defend each mile of wall.”
“Three and a third,” Tyrion said with a yawn.
Mormont scarcely seemed to hear him. The old man warmed his
hands before the re. “I sent Benjen Stark to search after Yohn
Royce’s son, lost on his rst ranging. The Royce boy was green as
summer grass, yet he insisted on the honor of his own command,
saying it was his due as a knight. I did not wish to o end his lord
father, so I yielded. I sent him out with two men I deemed as good
as any in the Watch. More fool I.”

“Fool,” the raven agreed. Tyrion glanced up. The bird peered
down at him with those beady black eyes, ru ing its wings. “Fool,”
it called again. Doubtless old Mormont would take it amiss if he
throttled the creature. A pity.
The Lord Commander took no notice of the irritating bird. “Gared
was near as old as I am and longer on the Wall,” he went on, “yet it
would seem he forswore himself and ed. I should never have
believed it, not of him, but Lord Eddard sent me his head from
Winterfell. Of Royce, there is no word. One deserter and two men
lost, and now Ben Stark too has gone missing.” He sighed deeply.
“Who am I to send searching after him? In two years I will be
seventy. Too old and too weary for the burden I bear, yet if I set it
down, who will pick it up? Alliser Thorne? Bowen Marsh? I would
have to be as blind as Maester Aemon not to see what they are. The
Night’s Watch has become an army of sullen boys and tired old
men. Apart from the men at my table tonight, I have perhaps
twenty who can read, and even fewer who can think, or plan, or
lead. Once the Watch spent its summers building, and each Lord
Commander raised the Wall higher than he found it. Now it is all
we can do to stay alive.”
He was in deadly earnest, Tyrion realized. He felt faintly
embarrassed for the old man. Lord Mormont had spent a good part
of his life on the Wall, and he needed to believe if those years were
to have any meaning. “I promise, the king will hear of your need,”
Tyrion said gravely, “and I will speak to my father and my brother
Jaime as well.” And he would. Tyrion Lannister was as good as his
word. He left the rest unsaid; that King Robert would ignore him,
Lord Tywin would ask if he had taken leave of his senses, and Jaime
would only laugh.
“You are a young man, Tyrion,” Mormont said. “How many
winters have you seen?”
He shrugged. “Eight, nine. I misremember.”
“And all of them short.”
“As you say, my lord.” He had been born in the dead of winter, a
terrible cruel one that the maesters said had lasted near three years,
but Tyrion’s earliest memories were of spring.

“When I was a boy, it was said that a long summer always meant
a long winter to come. This summer has lasted nine years, Tyrion,
and a tenth will soon be upon us. Think on that.”
“When I was a boy,” Tyrion replied, “my wet nurse told me that
one day, if men were good, the gods would give the world a
summer without ending. Perhaps we’ve been better than we
thought, and the Great Summer is nally at hand.” He grinned.
The Lord Commander did not seem amused. “You are not fool
enough to believe that, my lord. Already the days grow shorter.
There can be no mistake, Aemon has had letters from the Citadel,
ndings in accord with his own. The end of summer stares us in the
face.” Mormont reached out and clutched Tyrion tightly by the
hand. “You must make them understand. I tell you, my lord, the
darkness is coming. There are wild things in the woods, direwolves
and mammoths and snow bears the size of aurochs, and I have seen
darker shapes in my dreams.”
“In your dreams,” Tyrion echoed, thinking how badly he needed
another strong drink.
Mormont was deaf to the edge in his voice. “The sherfolk near
Eastwatch have glimpsed white walkers on the shore.”
This time Tyrion could not hold his tongue. “The sherfolk of
Lannisport often glimpse merlings.”
“Denys Mallister writes that the mountain people are moving
south, slipping past the Shadow Tower in numbers greater than ever
before. They are running, my lord … but running from what?” Lord
Mormont moved to the window and stared out into the night.
“These are old bones, Lannister, but they have never felt a chill like
this. Tell the king what I say, I pray you. Winter is coming, and
when the Long Night falls, only the Night’s Watch will stand
between the realm and the darkness that sweeps from the north.
The gods help us all if we are not ready.”
“The gods help me if I do not get some sleep tonight. Yoren is
determined to ride at rst light.” Tyrion got to his feet, sleepy from
wine and tired of doom. “I thank you for all the courtesies you have
done me, Lord Mormont.”

“Tell them, Tyrion. Tell them and make them believe. That is all
the thanks I need.” He whistled, and his raven ew to him and
perched on his shoulder. Mormont smiled and gave the bird some
corn from his pocket, and that was how Tyrion left him.
It was bitter cold outside. Bundled thickly in his furs, Tyrion
Lannister pulled on his gloves and nodded to the poor frozen
wretches standing sentry outside the Commander’s Keep. He set o
across the yard for his own chambers in the King’s Tower, walking
as briskly as his legs could manage. Patches of snow crunched
beneath his feet as his boots broke the night’s crust, and his breath
steamed before him like a banner. He shoved his hands into his
armpits and walked faster, praying that Morrec had remembered to
warm his bed with hot bricks from the re.
Behind the King’s Tower, the Wall glimmered in the light of the
moon, immense and mysterious. Tyrion stopped for a moment to
look up at it. His legs ached of cold and haste.
Suddenly a strange madness took hold of him, a yearning to look
once more o the end of the world. It would be his last chance, he
thought; tomorrow he would ride south, and he could not imagine
why he would ever want to return to this frozen desolation. The
King’s Tower was before him, with its promise of warmth and a soft
bed, yet Tyrion found himself walking past it, toward the vast pale
palisade of the Wall.
A wooden stair ascended the south face, anchored on huge roughhewn beams sunk deep into the ice and frozen in place. Back and
forth it switched, clawing its way upward as crooked as a bolt of
lightning. The black brothers assured him that it was much stronger
than it looked, but Tyrion’s legs were cramping too badly for him to
even contemplate the ascent. He went instead to the iron cage
beside the well, clambered inside, and yanked hard on the bell rope,
three quick pulls.
He had to wait what seemed an eternity, standing there inside the
bars with the Wall to his back. Long enough for Tyrion to begin to
wonder why he was doing this. He had just about decided to forget
his sudden whim and go to bed when the cage gave a jerk and
began to ascend.

He moved upward slowly, by ts and starts at rst, then more
smoothly. The ground fell away beneath him, the cage swung, and
Tyrion wrapped his hands around the iron bars. He could feel the
cold of the metal even through his gloves. Morrec had a re
burning in his room, he noted with approval, but the Lord
Commander’s tower was dark. The Old Bear had more sense than he
did, it seemed.
Then he was above the towers, still inching his way upward.
Castle Black lay below him, etched in moonlight. You could see how
stark and empty it was from up here; windowless keeps, crumbling
walls, courtyards choked with broken stone. Farther o , he could
see the lights of Mole’s Town, the little village half a league south
along the kingsroad, and here and there the bright glitter of
moonlight on water where icy streams descended from the
mountain heights to cut across the plains. The rest of the world was
a bleak emptiness of windswept hills and rocky elds spotted with
snow.
Finally a thick voice behind him said, “Seven hells, it’s the
dwarf,” and the cage jerked to a sudden stop and hung there,
swinging slowly back and forth, the ropes creaking.
“Bring him in, damn it.” There was a grunt and a loud groaning of
wood as the cage slid sideways and then the Wall was beneath him.
Tyrion waited until the swinging had stopped before he pushed
open the cage door and hopped down onto the ice. A heavy gure
in black was leaning on the winch, while a second held the cage
with a gloved hand. Their faces were mu ed in woolen scarves so
only their eyes showed, and they were plump with layers of wool
and leather, black on black. “And what will you be wanting, this
time of night?” the one by the winch asked.
“A last look.”
The men exchanged sour glances. “Look all you want,” the other
one said. “Just have a care you don’t fall o , little man. The Old
Bear would have our hides.” A small wooden shack stood under the
great crane, and Tyrion saw the dull glow of a brazier and felt a
brief gust of warmth when the winch men opened the door and
went back inside. And then he was alone.

It was bitingly cold up here, and the wind pulled at his clothes
like an insistent lover. The top of the Wall was wider than the
kingsroad often was, so Tyrion had no fear of falling, although the
footing was slicker than he would have liked. The brothers spread
crushed stone across the walkways, but the weight of countless
footsteps would melt the Wall beneath, so the ice would seem to
grow around the gravel, swallowing it, until the path was bare
again and it was time to crush more stone.
Still, it was nothing that Tyrion could not manage. He looked o
to the east and west, at the Wall stretching before him, a vast white
road with no beginning and no end and a dark abyss on either side.
West, he decided, for no special reason, and he began to walk that
way, following the pathway nearest the north edge, where the
gravel looked freshest.
His bare cheeks were ruddy with the cold, and his legs
complained more loudly with every step, but Tyrion ignored them.
The wind swirled around him, gravel crunched beneath his boots,
while ahead the white ribbon followed the lines of the hills, rising
higher and higher, until it was lost beyond the western horizon. He
passed a massive catapult, as tall as a city wall, its base sunk deep
into the Wall. The throwing arm had been taken o for repairs and
then forgotten; it lay there like a broken toy, half-embedded in the
ice.
On the far side of the catapult, a mu ed voice called out a
challenge. “Who goes there? Halt!”
Tyrion stopped. “If I halt too long I’ll freeze in place, Jon,” he
said as a shaggy pale shape slid toward him silently and sni ed at
his furs. “Hello, Ghost.”
Jon Snow moved closer. He looked bigger and heavier in his
layers of fur and leather, the hood of his cloak pulled down over his
face. “Lannister,” he said, yanking loose the scarf to uncover his
mouth. “This is the last place I would have expected to see you.” He
carried a heavy spear tipped in iron, taller than he was, and a sword
hung at his side in a leather sheath. Across his chest was a gleaming
black warhorn, banded with silver.

“This is the last place I would have expected to be seen,” Tyrion
admitted. “I was captured by a whim. If I touch Ghost, will he chew
my hand o ?”
“Not with me here,” Jon promised.
Tyrion scratched the white wolf behind the ears. The red eyes
watched him impassively. The beast came up as high as his chest
now. Another year, and Tyrion had the gloomy feeling he’d be
looking up at him. “What are you doing up here tonight?” he asked.
“Besides freezing your manhood o …”
“I have drawn night guard,” Jon said. “Again. Ser Alliser has
kindly arranged for the watch commander to take a special interest
in me. He seems to think that if they keep me awake half the night,
I’ll fall asleep during morning drill. So far I have disappointed him.”
Tyrion grinned. “And has Ghost learned to juggle yet?”
“No,” said Jon, smiling, “but Grenn held his own against Halder
this morning, and Pyp is no longer dropping his sword quite so
often as he did.”
“Pyp?”
“Pypar is his real name. The small boy with the large ears. He
saw me working with Grenn and asked for help. Thorne had never
even shown him the proper way to grip a sword.” He turned to look
north. “I have a mile of Wall to guard. Will you walk with me?”
“If you walk slowly,” Tyrion said.
“The watch commander tells me I must walk, to keep my blood
from freezing, but he never said how fast.”
They walked, with Ghost pacing along beside Jon like a white
shadow. “I leave on the morrow,” Tyrion said.
“I know.” Jon sounded strangely sad.
“I plan to stop at Winterfell on the way south. If there is any
message that you would like me to deliver …”
“Tell Robb that I’m going to command the Night’s Watch and
keep him safe, so he might as well take up needlework with the
girls and have Mikken melt down his sword for horseshoes.”
“Your brother is bigger than me,” Tyrion said with a laugh. “I
decline to deliver any message that might get me killed.”

“Rickon will ask when I’m coming home. Try to explain where
I’ve gone, if you can. Tell him he can have all my things while I’m
away, he’ll like that.”
People seemed to be asking a great deal of him today, Tyrion
Lannister thought. “You could put all this in a letter, you know.”
“Rickon can’t read yet. Bran …” He stopped suddenly. “I don’t
know what message to send to Bran. Help him, Tyrion.”
“What help could I give him? I am no maester, to ease his pain. I
have no spells to give him back his legs.”
“You gave me help when I needed it,” Jon Snow said.
“I gave you nothing,” Tyrion said. “Words.”
“Then give your words to Bran too.”
“You’re asking a lame man to teach a cripple how to dance,”
Tyrion said. “However sincere the lesson, the result is likely to be
grotesque. Still, I know what it is to love a brother, Lord Snow. I
will give Bran whatever small help is in my power.”
“Thank you, my lord of Lannister.” He pulled o his glove and
o ered his bare hand. “Friend.”
Tyrion found himself oddly touched. “Most of my kin are
bastards,” he said with a wry smile, “but you’re the rst I’ve had to
friend.” He pulled a glove o with his teeth and clasped Snow by
the hand, esh against esh. The boy’s grip was rm and strong.
When he had donned his glove again, Jon Snow turned abruptly
and walked to the low, icy northern parapet. Beyond him the Wall
fell away sharply; beyond him there was only the darkness and the
wild. Tyrion followed him, and side by side they stood upon the
edge of the world.
The Night’s Watch permitted the forest to come no closer than
half a mile of the north face of the Wall. The thickets of ironwood
and sentinel and oak that had once grown there had been harvested
centuries ago, to create a broad swath of open ground through
which no enemy could hope to pass unseen. Tyrion had heard that
elsewhere along the Wall, between the three fortresses, the
wildwood had come creeping back over the decades, that there
were places where grey-green sentinels and pale white weirwoods
had taken root in the shadow of the Wall itself, but Castle Black had

a prodigious appetite for rewood, and here the forest was still kept
at bay by the axes of the black brothers.
It was never far, though. From up here Tyrion could see it, the
dark trees looming beyond the stretch of open ground, like a second
wall built parallel to the rst, a wall of night. Few axes had ever
swung in that black wood, where even the moonlight could not
penetrate the ancient tangle of root and thorn and grasping limb.
Out there the trees grew huge, and the rangers said they seemed to
brood and knew not men. It was small wonder the Night’s Watch
named it the haunted forest.
As he stood there and looked at all that darkness with no res
burning anywhere, with the wind blowing and the cold like a spear
in his guts, Tyrion Lannister felt as though he could almost believe
the talk of the Others, the enemy in the night. His jokes of
grumkins and snarks no longer seemed quite so droll.
“My uncle is out there,” Jon Snow said softly, leaning on his
spear as he stared o into the darkness. “The rst night they sent
me up here, I thought, Uncle Benjen will ride back tonight, and I’ll
see him rst and blow the horn. He never came, though. Not that
night and not any night.”
“Give him time,” Tyrion said.
Far o to the north, a wolf began to howl. Another voice picked
up the call, then another. Ghost cocked his head and listened. “If he
doesn’t come back,” Jon Snow promised, “Ghost and I will go nd
him.” He put his hand on the direwolf’s head.
“I believe you,” Tyrion said, but what he thought was, And who
will go nd you? He shivered.

ARYA

Her father had been ghting with the council again. Arya could see
it on his face when he came to table, late again, as he had been so
often. The rst course, a thick sweet soup made with pumpkins, had
already been taken away when Ned Stark strode into the Small Hall.
They called it that to set it apart from the Great Hall, where the
king could feast a thousand, but it was a long room with a high
vaulted ceiling and bench space for two hundred at its trestle tables.
“My lord,” Jory said when Father entered. He rose to his feet,
and the rest of the guard rose with him. Each man wore a new
cloak, heavy grey wool with a white satin border. A hand of beaten
silver clutched the woolen folds of each cloak and marked their
wearers as men of the Hand’s household guard. There were only
fty of them, so most of the benches were empty.
“Be seated,” Eddard Stark said. “I see you have started without
me. I am pleased to know there are still some men of sense in this
city.” He signaled for the meal to resume. The servants began
bringing out platters of ribs, roasted in a crust of garlic and herbs.
“The talk in the yard is we shall have a tourney, my lord,” Jory
said as he resumed his seat. “They say that knights will come from
all over the realm to joust and feast in honor of your appointment
as Hand of the King.”
Arya could see that her father was not very happy about that. “Do
they also say this is the last thing in the world I would have
wished?”

Sansa’s eyes had grown wide as the plates. “A tourney,” she
breathed. She was seated between Septa Mordane and Jeyne Poole,
as far from Arya as she could get without drawing a reproach from
Father. “Will we be permitted to go, Father?”
“You know my feelings, Sansa. It seems I must arrange Robert’s
games and pretend to be honored for his sake. That does not mean I
must subject my daughters to this folly.”
“Oh, please,” Sansa said. “I want to see.”
Septa Mordane spoke up. “Princess Myrcella will be there, my
lord, and her younger than Lady Sansa. All the ladies of the court
will be expected at a grand event like this, and as the tourney is in
your honor, it would look queer if your family did not attend.”
Father looked pained. “I suppose so. Very well, I shall arrange a
place for you, Sansa.” He saw Arya. “For both of you.”
“I don’t care about their stupid tourney,” Arya said. She knew
Prince Jo rey would be there, and she hated Prince Jo rey.
Sansa lifted her head. “It will be a splendid event. You shan’t be
wanted.”
Anger ashed across Father’s face. “Enough, Sansa. More of that
and you will change my mind. I am weary unto death of this endless
war you two are ghting. You are sisters. I expect you to behave
like sisters, is that understood?”
Sansa bit her lip and nodded. Arya lowered her face to stare
sullenly at her plate. She could feel tears stinging her eyes. She
rubbed them away angrily, determined not to cry.
The only sound was the clatter of knives and forks. “Pray excuse
me,” her father announced to the table. “I nd I have small appetite
tonight.” He walked from the hall.
After he was gone, Sansa exchanged excited whispers with Jeyne
Poole. Down the table Jory laughed at a joke, and Hullen started in
about horse esh. “Your warhorse, now, he may not be the best one
for the joust. Not the same thing, oh, no, not the same at all.” The
men had heard it all before; Desmond, Jacks, and Hullen’s son
Harwin shouted him down together, and Porther called for more
wine.

No one talked to Arya. She didn’t care. She liked it that way. She
would have eaten her meals alone in her bedchamber if they let her.
Sometimes they did, when Father had to dine with the king or some
lord or the envoys from this place or that place. The rest of the
time, they ate in his solar, just him and her and Sansa. That was
when Arya missed her brothers most. She wanted to tease Bran and
play with baby Rickon and have Robb smile at her. She wanted Jon
to muss up her hair and call her “little sister” and nish her
sentences with her. But all of them were gone. She had no one left
but Sansa, and Sansa wouldn’t even talk to her unless Father made
her.
Back at Winterfell, they had eaten in the Great Hall almost half
the time. Her father used to say that a lord needed to eat with his
men, if he hoped to keep them. “Know the men who follow you,”
she heard him tell Robb once, “and let them know you. Don’t ask
your men to die for a stranger.” At Winterfell, he always had an
extra seat set at his own table, and every day a di erent man would
be asked to join him. One night it would be Vayon Poole, and the
talk would be coppers and bread stores and servants. The next time
it would be Mikken, and her father would listen to him go on about
armor and swords and how hot a forge should be and the best way
to temper steel. Another day it might be Hullen with his endless
horse talk, or Septon Chayle from the library, or Jory, or Ser
Rodrik, or even Old Nan with her stories.
Arya had loved nothing better than to sit at her father’s table and
listen to them talk. She had loved listening to the men on the
benches too; to freeriders tough as leather, courtly knights and bold
young squires, grizzled old men-at-arms. She used to throw
snowballs at them and help them steal pies from the kitchen. Their
wives gave her scones and she invented names for their babies and
played monsters-and-maidens and hide-the-treasure and come-intomy-castle with their children. Fat Tom used to call her “Arya
Underfoot,” because he said that was where she always was. She’d
liked that a lot better than “Arya Horseface.”
Only that was Winterfell, a world away, and now everything was
changed. This was the rst time they had supped with the men since

arriving in King’s Landing. Arya hated it. She hated the sounds of
their voices now, the way they laughed, the stories they told.
They’d been her friends, she’d felt safe around them, but now she
knew that was a lie. They’d let the queen kill Lady, that was
horrible enough, but then the Hound found Mycah. Jeyne Poole had
told Arya that he’d cut him up in so many pieces that they’d given
him back to the butcher in a bag, and at rst the poor man had
thought it was a pig they’d slaughtered. And no one had raised a
voice or drawn a blade or anything, not Harwin who always talked
so bold, or Alyn who was going to be a knight, or Jory who was
captain of the guard. Not even her father.
“He was my friend,” Arya whispered into her plate, so low that no
one could hear. Her ribs sat there untouched, grown cold now, a
thin lm of grease congealing beneath them on the plate. Arya
looked at them and felt ill. She pushed away from the table.
“Pray, where do you think you are going, young lady?” Septa
Mordane asked.
“I’m not hungry.” Arya found it an e ort to remember her
courtesies. “May I be excused, please?” she recited sti y.
“You may not,” the septa said. “You have scarcely touched your
food. You will sit down and clean your plate.”
“You clean it!” Before anyone could stop her, Arya bolted for the
door as the men laughed and Septa Mordane called loudly after her,
her voice rising higher and higher.
Fat Tom was at his post, guarding the door to the Tower of the
Hand. He blinked when he saw Arya rushing toward him and heard
the septa’s shouts. “Here now, little one, hold on,” he started to say,
reaching, but Arya slid between his legs and then she was running
up the winding tower steps, her feet hammering on the stone while
Fat Tom hu ed and pu ed behind her.
Her bedchamber was the only place that Arya liked in all of
King’s Landing, and the thing she liked best about it was the door, a
massive slab of dark oak with black iron bands. When she slammed
that door and dropped the heavy crossbar, nobody could get into
her room, not Septa Mordane or Fat Tom or Sansa or Jory or the
Hound, nobody! She slammed it now.

When the bar was down, Arya nally felt safe enough to cry.
She went to the window seat and sat there, sni ing, hating them
all, and herself most of all. It was all her fault, everything bad that
had happened. Sansa said so, and Jeyne too.
Fat Tom was knocking on her door. “Arya girl, what’s wrong?” he
called out. “You in there?”
“No!” she shouted. The knocking stopped. A moment later she
heard him going away. Fat Tom was always easy to fool.
Arya went to the chest at the foot of her bed. She knelt, opened
the lid, and began pulling her clothes out with both hands, grabbing
handfuls of silk and satin and velvet and wool and tossing them on
the oor. It was there at the bottom of the chest, where she’d
hidden it. Arya lifted it out almost tenderly and drew the slender
blade from its sheath.
Needle.
She thought of Mycah again and her eyes lled with tears. Her
fault, her fault, her fault. If she had never asked him to play at
swords with her …
There was a pounding at her door, louder than before. “Arya
Stark, you open this door at once, do you hear me?”
Arya spun around, with Needle in her hand. “You better not come
in here!” she warned. She slashed at the air savagely.
“The Hand will hear of this!” Septa Mordane raged.
“I don’t care,” Arya screamed. “Go away.”
“You will rue this insolent behavior, young lady, I promise you that.”
Arya listened at the door until she heard the sound of the septa’s
receding footsteps.
She went back to the window, Needle in hand, and looked down
into the courtyard below. If only she could climb like Bran, she
thought; she would go out the window and down the tower, run
away from this horrible place, away from Sansa and Septa Mordane
and Prince Jo rey, from all of them. Steal some food from the
kitchens, take Needle and her good boots and a warm cloak. She
could nd Nymeria in the wild woods below the Trident, and
together they’d return to Winterfell, or run to Jon on the Wall. She

found herself wishing that Jon was here with her now. Then maybe
she wouldn’t feel so alone.
A soft knock at the door behind her turned Arya away from the
window and her dreams of escape. “Arya,” her father’s voice called
out. “Open the door. We need to talk.”
Arya crossed the room and lifted the crossbar. Father was alone.
He seemed more sad than angry. That made Arya feel even worse.
“May I come in?” Arya nodded, then dropped her eyes, ashamed.
Father closed the door. “Whose sword is that?”
“Mine.” Arya had almost forgotten Needle, in her hand.
“Give it to me.”
Reluctantly Arya surrendered her sword, wondering if she would
ever hold it again. Her father turned it in the light, examining both
sides of the blade. He tested the point with his thumb. “A bravo’s
blade,” he said. “Yet it seems to me that I know this maker’s mark.
This is Mikken’s work.”
Arya could not lie to him. She lowered her eyes.
Lord Eddard Stark sighed. “My nine-year-old daughter is being
armed from my own forge, and I know nothing of it. The Hand of
the King is expected to rule the Seven Kingdoms, yet it seems I
cannot even rule my own household. How is it that you come to
own a sword, Arya? Where did you get this?”
Arya chewed her lip and said nothing. She would not betray Jon,
not even to their father.
After a while, Father said, “I don’t suppose it matters, truly.” He
looked down gravely at the sword in his hands. “This is no toy for
children, least of all for a girl. What would Septa Mordane say if she
knew you were playing with swords?”
“I wasn’t playing,” Arya insisted. “I hate Septa Mordane.”
“That’s enough.” Her father’s voice was curt and hard. “The septa
is doing no more than is her duty, though gods know you have
made it a struggle for the poor woman. Your mother and I have
charged her with the impossible task of making you a lady.”
“I don’t want to be a lady!” Arya ared.
“I ought to snap this toy across my knee here and now, and put
an end to this nonsense.”

“Needle wouldn’t break,” Arya said de antly, but her voice
betrayed her words.
“It has a name, does it?” Her father sighed. “Ah, Arya. You have a
wildness in you, child. ‘The wolf blood,’ my father used to call it.
Lyanna had a touch of it, and my brother Brandon more than a
touch. It brought them both to an early grave.” Arya heard sadness
in his voice; he did not often speak of his father, or of the brother
and sister who had died before she was born. “Lyanna might have
carried a sword, if my lord father had allowed it. You remind me of
her sometimes. You even look like her.”
“Lyanna was beautiful,” Arya said, startled. Everybody said so. It
was not a thing that was ever said of Arya.
“She was,” Eddard Stark agreed, “beautiful, and willful, and dead
before her time.” He lifted the sword, held it out between them.
“Arya, what did you think to do with this … Needle? Who did you
hope to skewer? Your sister? Septa Mordane? Do you know the rst
thing about sword ghting?”
All she could think of was the lesson Jon had given her. “Stick
them with the pointy end,” she blurted out.
Her father snorted back laughter. “That is the essence of it, I
suppose.”
Arya desperately wanted to explain, to make him see. “I was
trying to learn, but …” Her eyes lled with tears. “I asked Mycah to
practice with me.” The grief came on her all at once. She turned
away, shaking. “I asked him,” she cried. “It was my fault, it was
me …”
Suddenly her father’s arms were around her. He held her gently
as she turned to him and sobbed against his chest. “No, sweet one,”
he murmured. “Grieve for your friend, but never blame yourself.
You did not kill the butcher’s boy. That murder lies at the Hound’s
door, him and the cruel woman he serves.”
“I hate them,” Arya con ded, red-faced, sni ing. “The Hound
and the queen and the king and Prince Jo rey. I hate all of them.
Jo rey lied, it wasn’t the way he said. I hate Sansa too. She did
remember, she just lied so Jo rey would like her.”

“We all lie,” her father said. “Or did you truly think I’d believe
that Nymeria ran o ?”
Arya blushed guiltily. “Jory promised not to tell.”
“Jory kept his word,” her father said with a smile. “There are
some things I do not need to be told. Even a blind man could see
that wolf would never have left you willingly.”
“We had to throw rocks,” she said miserably. “I told her to run, to
go be free, that I didn’t want her anymore. There were other wolves
for her to play with, we heard them howling, and Jory said the
woods were full of game, so she’d have deer to hunt. Only she kept
following, and nally we had to throw rocks. I hit her twice. She
whined and looked at me and I felt so ’shamed, but it was right,
wasn’t it? The queen would have killed her.”
“It was right,” her father said. “And even the lie was … not
without honor.” He’d put Needle aside when he went to Arya to
embrace her. Now he took the blade up again and walked to the
window, where he stood for a moment, looking out across the
courtyard. When he turned back, his eyes were thoughtful. He
seated himself on the window seat, Needle across his lap. “Arya, sit
down. I need to try and explain some things to you.”
She perched anxiously on the edge of her bed. “You are too young
to be burdened with all my cares,” he told her, “but you are also a
Stark of Winterfell. You know our words.”
“Winter is coming,” Arya whispered.
“The hard cruel times,” her father said. “We tasted them on the
Trident, child, and when Bran fell. You were born in the long
summer, sweet one, you’ve never known anything else, but now the
winter is truly coming. Remember the sigil of our House, Arya.”
“The direwolf,” she said, thinking of Nymeria. She hugged her
knees against her chest, suddenly afraid.
“Let me tell you something about wolves, child. When the snows
fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack
survives. Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must
protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths. So
if you must hate, Arya, hate those who would truly do us harm.
Septa Mordane is a good woman, and Sansa … Sansa is your sister.

You may be as di erent as the sun and the moon, but the same
blood ows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs
you … and I need both of you, gods help me.”
He sounded so tired that it made Arya sad. “I don’t hate Sansa,”
she told him. “Not truly.” It was only half a lie.
“I do not mean to frighten you, but neither will I lie to you. We
have come to a dark dangerous place, child. This is not Winterfell.
We have enemies who mean us ill. We cannot ght a war among
ourselves. This willfulness of yours, the running o , the angry
words, the disobedience … at home, these were only the summer
games of a child. Here and now, with winter soon upon us, that is a
di erent matter. It is time to begin growing up.”
“I will,” Arya vowed. She had never loved him so much as she did
in that instant. “I can be strong too. I can be as strong as Robb.”
He held Needle out to her, hilt rst. “Here.”
She looked at the sword with wonder in her eyes. For a moment
she was afraid to touch it, afraid that if she reached for it it would
be snatched away again, but then her father said, “Go on, it’s
yours,” and she took it in her hand.
“I can keep it?” she said. “For true?”
“For true.” He smiled. “If I took it away, no doubt I’d nd a
morningstar hidden under your pillow within the fortnight. Try not
to stab your sister, whatever the provocation.”
“I won’t. I promise.” Arya clutched Needle tightly to her chest as
her father took his leave.
The next morning, as they broke their fast, she apologized to
Septa Mordane and asked for her pardon. The septa peered at her
suspiciously, but Father nodded.
Three days later, at midday, her father’s steward Vayon Poole
sent Arya to the Small Hall. The trestle tables had been dismantled
and the benches shoved against the walls. The hall seemed empty,
until an unfamiliar voice said, “You are late, boy.” A slight man
with a bald head and a great beak of a nose stepped out of the
shadows, holding a pair of slender wooden swords. “Tomorrow you
will be here at midday,” He had an accent, the lilt of the Free Cities,
Braavos perhaps, or Myr.

“Who are you?” Arya asked.
“I am your dancing master.” He tossed her one of the wooden
blades. She grabbed for it, missed, and heard it clatter to the oor.
“Tomorrow you will catch it. Now pick it up.”
It was not just a stick, but a true wooden sword complete with
grip and guard and pommel. Arya picked it up and clutched it
nervously with both hands, holding it out in front of her. It was
heavier than it looked, much heavier than Needle.
The bald man clicked his teeth together. “That is not the way,
boy. This is not a greatsword that is needing two hands to swing it.
You will take the blade in one hand.”
“It’s too heavy,” Arya said.
“It is heavy as it needs to be to make you strong, and for the
balancing. A hollow inside is lled with lead, just so. One hand now
is all that is needing.”
Arya took her right hand o the grip and wiped her sweaty palm
on her pants. She held the sword in her left hand. He seemed to
approve. “The left is good. All is reversed, it will make your
enemies more awkward. Now you are standing wrong. Turn your
body sideface, yes, so. You are skinny as the shaft of a spear, do
you know. That is good too, the target is smaller. Now the grip. Let
me see.” He moved closer and peered at her hand, prying her
ngers apart, rearranging them. “Just so, yes. Do not squeeze it so
tight, no, the grip must be deft, delicate.”
“What if I drop it?” Arya said.
“The steel must be part of your arm,” the bald man told her. “Can
you drop part of your arm? No. Nine years Syrio Forel was rst
sword to the Sealord of Braavos, he knows these things. Listen to
him, boy.”
It was the third time he had called her “boy.” “I’m a girl,” Arya
objected.
“Boy, girl,” Syrio Forel said. “You are a sword, that is all.” He
clicked his teeth together. “Just so, that is the grip. You are not
holding a battle-axe, you are holding a—”
“—needle,” Arya nished for him, ercely.

“Just so. Now we will begin the dance. Remember, child, this is
not the iron dance of Westeros we are learning, the knight’s dance,
hacking and hammering, no. This is the bravo’s dance, the water
dance, swift and sudden. All men are made of water, do you know
this? When you pierce them, the water leaks out and they die.” He
took a step backward, raised his own wooden blade. “Now you will
try to strike me.”
Arya tried to strike him. She tried for four hours, until every
muscle in her body was sore and aching, while Syrio Forel clicked
his teeth together and told her what to do.
The next day their real work began.

DAENERYS

“The Dothraki sea,” Ser Jorah Mormont said as he reined to a halt
beside her on the top of the ridge. Beneath them, the plain stretched
out immense and empty, a vast at expanse that reached to the
distant horizon and beyond. It was a sea, Dany thought. Past here,
there were no hills, no mountains, no trees nor cities nor roads,
only the endless grasses, the tall blades rippling like waves when
the winds blew. “It’s so green,” she said.
“Here and now,” Ser Jorah agreed. “You ought to see it when it
blooms, all dark red owers from horizon to horizon, like a sea of
blood. Come the dry season, and the world turns the color of old
bronze. And this is only hranna, child. There are a hundred kinds of
grass out there, grasses as yellow as lemon and as dark as indigo,
blue grasses and orange grasses and grasses like rainbows. Down in
the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they say there are oceans of ghost
grass, taller than a man on horseback with stalks as pale as
milkglass. It murders all other grass and glows in the dark with the
spirits of the damned. The Dothraki claim that someday ghost grass
will cover the entire world, and then all life will end.”
That thought gave Dany the shivers. “I don’t want to talk about
that now,” she said. “It’s so beautiful here, I don’t want to think
about everything dying.”
“As you will, Khaleesi,” Ser Jorah said respectfully.
She heard the sound of voices and turned to look behind her. She
and Mormont had outdistanced the rest of their party, and now the

others were climbing the ridge below them. Her handmaid Irri and
the young archers of her khas were uid as centaurs, but Viserys
still struggled with the short stirrups and the at saddle. Her
brother was miserable out here. He ought never have come.
Magister Illyrio had urged him to wait in Pentos, had o ered him
the hospitality of his manse, but Viserys would have none of it. He
would stay with Drogo until the debt had been paid, until he had
the crown he had been promised. “And if he tries to cheat me, he
will learn to his sorrow what it means to wake the dragon,” Viserys
had vowed, laying a hand on his borrowed sword. Illyrio had
blinked at that and wished him good fortune.
Dany realized that she did not want to listen to any of her
brother’s complaints right now. The day was too perfect. The sky
was a deep blue, and high above them a hunting hawk circled. The
grass sea swayed and sighed with each breath of wind, the air was
warm on her face, and Dany felt at peace. She would not let Viserys
spoil it.
“Wait here,” Dany told Ser Jorah. “Tell them all to stay. Tell
them I command it.”
The knight smiled. Ser Jorah was not a handsome man. He had a
neck and shoulders like a bull, and coarse black hair covered his
arms and chest so thickly that there was none left for his head. Yet
his smiles gave Dany comfort. “You are learning to talk like a
queen, Daenerys.”
“Not a queen,” said Dany. “A khaleesi.” She wheeled her horse
about and galloped down the ridge alone.
The descent was steep and rocky, but Dany rode fearlessly, and
the joy and the danger of it were a song in her heart. All her life
Viserys had told her she was a princess, but not until she rode her
silver had Daenerys Targaryen ever felt like one.
At rst it had not come easy. The khalasar had broken camp the
morning after her wedding, moving east toward Vaes Dothrak, and
by the third day Dany thought she was going to die. Saddle sores
opened on her bottom, hideous and bloody. Her thighs were chafed
raw, her hands blistered from the reins, the muscles of her legs and
back so wracked with pain that she could scarcely sit. By the time

dusk fell, her handmaids would need to help her down from her
mount.
Even the nights brought no relief. Khal Drogo ignored her when
they rode, even as he had ignored her during their wedding, and
spent his evenings drinking with his warriors and bloodriders,
racing his prize horses, watching women dance and men die. Dany
had no place in these parts of his life. She was left to sup alone, or
with Ser Jorah and her brother, and afterward to cry herself to
sleep. Yet every night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would
come to her tent and wake her in the dark, to ride her as
relentlessly as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind,
Dothraki fashion, for which Dany was grateful; that way her lord
husband could not see the tears that wet her face, and she could use
her pillow to mu e her cries of pain. When he was done, he would
close his eyes and begin to snore softly and Dany would lie beside
him, her body bruised and sore, hurting too much for sleep.
Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she
could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather
than go on, she decided one night …
Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream
again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the
dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her
blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and
when it opened its mouth, the ame came roaring out in a hot jet.
She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms to the re,
embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper
her and scour her clean. She could feel her esh sear and blacken
and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and
yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and erce.
And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite so
much. It was as if the gods had heard her and taken pity. Even her
handmaids noticed the change. “Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “what is
wrong? Are you sick?”
“I was,” she answered, standing over the dragon’s eggs that
Illyrio had given her when she wed. She touched one, the largest of
the three, running her hand lightly over the shell. Black-and-scarlet,

she thought, like the dragon in my dream. The stone felt strangely
warm beneath her ngers … or was she still dreaming? She pulled
her hand back nervously.
From that hour onward, each day was easier than the one before
it. Her legs grew stronger; her blisters burst and her hands grew
callused; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.
The khal had commanded the handmaid Irri to teach Dany to ride
in the Dothraki fashion, but it was the lly who was her real
teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared a
single mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat.
The Dothraki were a hard and unsentimental people, and it was not
their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her only as
the silver. She had never loved anything so much.
As the riding became less an ordeal, Dany began to notice the
beauties of the land around her. She rode at the head of the khalasar
with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each country fresh
and unspoiled. Behind them the great horde might tear the earth
and muddy the rivers and send up clouds of choking dust, but the
elds ahead of them were always green and verdant.
They crossed the rolling hills of Norvos, past terraced farms and
small villages where the townsfolk watched anxiously from atop
white stucco walls. They forded three wide placid rivers and a
fourth that was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a
high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbled ruins of a vast dead city
where ghosts were said to moan among blackened marble columns.
They raced down Valyrian roads a thousand years old and straight
as a Dothraki arrow. For half a moon, they rode through the Forest
of Qohor, where the leaves made a golden canopy high above them,
and the trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates. There were
great elk in that wood, and spotted tigers, and lemurs with silver
fur and huge purple eyes, but all ed before the approach of the
khalasar and Dany got no glimpse of them.
By then her agony was a fading memory. She still ached after a
long day’s riding, yet somehow the pain had a sweetness to it now,
and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to know
what wonders waited for her in the lands ahead. She began to nd

pleasure even in her nights, and if she still cried out when Drogo
took her, it was not always in pain.
At the bottom of the ridge, the grasses rose around her, tall and
supple. Dany slowed to a trot and rode out onto the plain, losing
herself in the green, blessedly alone. In the khalasar she was never
alone. Khal Drogo came to her only after the sun went down, but
her handmaids fed her and bathed her and slept by the door of her
tent, Drogo’s bloodriders and the men of her khas were never far,
and her brother was an unwelcome shadow, day and night. Dany
could hear him on the top of the ridge, his voice shrill with anger as
he shouted at Ser Jorah. She rode on, submerging herself deeper in
the Dothraki sea.
The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of
earth and grass, mixed with the smell of horse esh and Dany’s
sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They seemed to
belong here. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a sudden
urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curl her toes in that thick
black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the silver graze
while she pulled o her high boots.
Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse
rearing beneath him as he reined up too hard. “You dare!” he
screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To me?” He vaulted
o the horse, stumbling as he landed. His face was ushed as he
struggled back to his feet. He grabbed her, shook her. “Have you
forgotten who you are? Look at you. Look at you!”
Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair,
wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a
bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was
soiled and stained in city silks and ringmail.
He was still screaming. “You do not command the dragon. Do you
understand? I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, I will not hear
orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear me?” His hand went
under her vest, his ngers digging painfully into her breast. “Do you
hear me?”
Dany shoved him away, hard.

Viserys stared at her, his lilac eyes incredulous. She had never
de ed him. Never fought back. Rage twisted his features. He would
hurt her now, and badly, she knew that.
Crack.
The whip made a sound like thunder. The coil took Viserys
around the throat and yanked him backward. He went sprawling in
the grass, stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him
as he struggled to free himself. The one with the whip, young
Jhogo, rasped a question. Dany did not understand his words, but
by then Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas.
“Jhogo asks if you would have him dead, Khaleesi,” Irri said.
“No,” Dany replied. “No.”
Jhogo understood that. One of the others barked out a comment,
and the Dothraki laughed. Irri told her, “Quaro thinks you should
take an ear to teach him respect.”
Her brother was on his knees, his ngers digging under the
leather coils, crying incoherently, struggling for breath. The whip
was tight around his windpipe.
“Tell them I do not wish him harmed,” Dany said.
Irri repeated her words in Dothraki. Jhogo gave a pull on the
whip, yanking Viserys around like a puppet on a string. He went
sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of
blood under his chin where the whip had cut deep.
“I warned him what would happen, my lady,” Ser Jorah Mormont
said. “I told him to stay on the ridge, as you commanded.”
“I know you did,” Dany replied, watching Viserys. He lay on the
ground, sucking in air noisily, red-faced and sobbing. He was a
pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had she never
seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her where her
fear had been.
“Take his horse,” Dany commanded Ser Jorah. Viserys gaped at
her. He could not believe what he was hearing; nor could Dany
quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came. “Let my
brother walk behind us back to the khalasar.” Among the Dothraki,
the man who does not ride was no man at all, the lowest of the low,
without honor or pride. “Let everyone see him as he is.”

“No!” Viserys screamed. He turned to Ser Jorah, pleading in the
Common Tongue with words the horsemen would not understand.
“Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands it. Kill these
Dothraki dogs and teach her.”
The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot,
with dirt between her toes and oil in her hair, he with his silks and
steel. Dany could see the decision on his face. “He shall walk,
Khaleesi,” he said. He took her brother’s horse in hand while Dany
remounted her silver.
Viserys gaped at him, and sat down in the dirt. He kept his
silence, but he would not move, and his eyes were full of poison as
they rode away. Soon he was lost in the tall grass. When they could
not see him anymore, Dany grew afraid. “Will he nd his way
back?” she asked Ser Jorah as they rode.
“Even a man as blind as your brother should be able to follow our
trail,” he replied.
“He is proud. He may be too shamed to come back.”
Jorah laughed. “Where else should he go? If he cannot nd the
khalasar, the khalasar will most surely nd him. It is hard to drown
in the Dothraki sea, child.”
Dany saw the truth of that. The khalasar was like a city on the
march, but it did not march blindly. Always scouts ranged far ahead
of the main column, alert for any sign of game or prey or enemies,
while outriders guarded their anks. They missed nothing, not here,
in this land, the place where they had come from. These plains were
a part of them … and of her, now.
“I hit him,” she said, wonder in her voice. Now that it was over,
it seemed like some strange dream that she had dreamed. “Ser
Jorah, do you think … he’ll be so angry when he gets back …” She
shivered. “I woke the dragon, didn’t I?”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your brother
Rhaegar was the last dragon, and he died on the Trident. Viserys is
less than the shadow of a snake.”
His blunt words startled her. It seemed as though all the things
she had always believed were suddenly called into question.
“You … you swore him your sword …”

“That I did, girl,” Ser Jorah said. “And if your brother is the
shadow of a snake, what does that make his servants?” His voice
was bitter.
“He is still the true king. He is …”
Jorah pulled up his horse and looked at her. “Truth now. Would
you want to see Viserys sit a throne?”
Dany thought about that. “He would not be a very good king,
would he?”
“There have been worse … but not many.” The knight gave his
heels to his mount and started o again.
Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said, “the common people
are waiting for him. Magister Illyrio says they are sewing dragon
banners and praying for Viserys to return from across the narrow
sea to free them.”
“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a
summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to
them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they
are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.”
Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a
puzzle box. It went against everything that Viserys had ever told
her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king
or a usurper reigned over them. Yet the more she thought on
Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.
“What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?” she asked him.
“Home,” he said. His voice was thick with longing.
“I pray for home too,” she told him, believing it.
Ser Jorah laughed. “Look around you then, Khaleesi.”
But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King’s Landing
and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built. It was
Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye they
burned with a thousand lights, a re blazing in every window. In
her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.
“My brother will never take back the Seven Kingdoms,” Dany
said. She had known that for a long time, she realized. She had
known it all her life. Only she had never let herself say the words,

even in a whisper, but now she said them for Jorah Mormont and
all the world to hear.
Ser Jorah gave her a measuring look. “You think not.”
“He could not lead an army even if my lord husband gave him
one,” Dany said. “He has no coin and the only knight who follows
him reviles him as less than a snake. The Dothraki make mock of his
weakness. He will never take us home.”
“Wise child.” The knight smiled.
“I am no child,” she told him ercely. Her heels pressed into the
sides of her mount, rousing the silver to a gallop. Faster and faster
she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the others far behind, the
warm wind in her hair and the setting sun red on her face. By the
time she reached the khalasar, it was dusk.
The slaves had erected her tent by the shore of a spring-fed pool.
She could hear rough voices from the woven grass palace on the
hill. Soon there would be laughter, when the men of her khas told
the story of what had happened in the grasses today. By the time
Viserys came limping back among them, every man, woman, and
child in the camp would know him for a walker. There were no
secrets in the khalasar.
Dany gave the silver over to the slaves for grooming and entered
her tent. It was cool and dim beneath the silk. As she let the door
ap close behind her, Dany saw a nger of dusty red light reach out
to touch her dragon’s eggs across the tent. For an instant a thousand
droplets of scarlet ame swam before her eyes. She blinked, and
they were gone.
Stone, she told herself. They are only stone, even Illyrio said so, the
dragons are all dead. She put her palm against the black egg, ngers
spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone was warm.
Almost hot. “The sun,” Dany whispered. “The sun warmed them as
they rode.”
She commanded her handmaids to prepare her a bath. Doreah
built a re outside the tent, while Irri and Jhiqui fetched the big
copper tub—another bride gift—from the packhorses and carried
water from the pool. When the bath was steaming, Irri helped her
into it and climbed in after her.

“Have you ever seen a dragon?” she asked as Irri scrubbed her
back and Jhiqui sluiced sand from her hair. She had heard that the
rst dragons had come from the east, from the Shadow Lands
beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea. Perhaps some were
still living there, in realms strange and wild.
“Dragons are gone, Khaleesi,” Irri said.
“Dead,” agreed Jhiqui. “Long and long ago.”
Viserys had told her that the last Targaryen dragons had died no
more than a century and a half ago, during the reign of Aegon III,
who was called the Dragonbane. That did not seem so long ago to
Dany. “Everywhere?” she said, disappointed. “Even in the east?”
Magic had died in the west when the Doom fell on Valyria and the
Lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell-forged steel nor
stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back, but Dany had always
heard that the east was di erent. It was said that manticores
prowled the islands of the Jade Sea, that basilisks infested the
jungles of Yi Ti, that spellsingers, warlocks, and aeromancers
practiced their arts openly in Asshai, while shadowbinders and
bloodmages worked terrible sorceries in the black of night. Why
shouldn’t there be dragons too?
“No dragon,” Irri said. “Brave men kill them, for dragon terrible
evil beasts. It is known.”
“It is known,” agreed Jhiqui.
“A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from the
moon,” blond Doreah said as she warmed a towel over the re.
Jhiqui and Irri were of an age with Dany, Dothraki girls taken as
slaves when Drogo destroyed their father’s khalasar. Doreah was
older, almost twenty. Magister Illyrio had found her in a pleasure
house in Lys.
Silvery-wet hair tumbled across her eyes as Dany turned her head,
curious. “The moon?”
“He told me the moon was an egg, Khaleesi,” the Lysene girl said.
“Once there were two moons in the sky, but one wandered too close
to the sun and cracked from the heat. A thousand thousand dragons
poured forth, and drank the re of the sun. That is why dragons

breathe ame. One day the other moon will kiss the sun too, and
then it will crack and the dragons will return.”
The two Dothraki girls giggled and laughed. “You are foolish
strawhead slave,” Irri said. “Moon is no egg. Moon is god, woman
wife of sun. It is known.”
“It is known,” Jhiqui agreed.
Dany’s skin was ushed and pink when she climbed from the tub.
Jhiqui laid her down to oil her body and scrape the dirt from her
pores. Afterward Irri sprinkled her with spice ower and cinnamon.
While Doreah brushed her hair until it shone like spun silver, she
thought about the moon, and eggs, and dragons.
Her supper was a simple meal of fruit and cheese and fry bread,
with a jug of honeyed wine to wash it down. “Doreah, stay and eat
with me,” Dany commanded when she sent her other handmaids
away. The Lysene girl had hair the color of honey, and eyes like the
summer sky.
She lowered those eyes when they were alone. “You honor me,
Khaleesi,” she said, but it was no honor, only service. Long after the
moon had risen, they sat together, talking.
That night, when Khal Drogo came, Dany was waiting for him.
He stood in the door of her tent and looked at her with surprise. She
rose slowly and opened her sleeping silks and let them fall to the
ground. “This night we must go outside, my lord,” she told him, for
the Dothraki believed that all things of importance in a man’s life
must be done beneath the open sky.
Khal Drogo followed her out into the moonlight, the bells in his
hair tinkling softly. A few yards from her tent was a bed of soft
grass, and it was there that Dany drew him down. When he tried to
turn her over, she put a hand on his chest. “No,” she said. “This
night I would look on your face.”
There is no privacy in the heart of the khalasar. Dany felt the eyes
on her as she undressed him, heard the soft voices as she did the
things that Doreah had told her to do. It was nothing to her. Was
she not khaleesi? His were the only eyes that mattered, and when
she mounted him she saw something there that she had never seen
before. She rode him as ercely as ever she had ridden her silver,

and when the moment of his pleasure came, Khal Drogo called out
her name.
They were on the far side of the Dothraki sea when Jhiqui
brushed the soft swell of Dany’s stomach with her ngers and said,
“Khaleesi, you are with child.”
“I know,” Dany told her.
It was her fourteenth name day.

BRAN

In the yard below, Rickon ran with the wolves.
Bran watched from his window seat. Wherever the boy went,
Grey Wind was there rst, loping ahead to cut him o , until Rickon
saw him, screamed in delight, and went pelting o in another
direction. Shaggydog ran at his heels, spinning and snapping if the
other wolves came too close. His fur had darkened until he was all
black, and his eyes were green re. Bran’s Summer came last. He
was silver and smoke, with eyes of yellow gold that saw all there
was to see. Smaller than Grey Wind, and more wary. Bran thought
he was the smartest of the litter. He could hear his brother’s
breathless laughter as Rickon dashed across the hard-packed earth
on little baby legs.
His eyes stung. He wanted to be down there, laughing and
running. Angry at the thought, Bran knuckled away the tears before
they could fall. His eighth name day had come and gone. He was
almost a man grown now, too old to cry.
“It was just a lie,” he said bitterly, remembering the crow from
his dream. “I can’t y. I can’t even run.”
“Crows are all liars,” Old Nan agreed, from the chair where she
sat doing her needlework. “I know a story about a crow.”
“I don’t want any more stories,” Bran snapped, his voice petulant.
He had liked Old Nan and her stories once. Before. But it was
di erent now. They left her with him all day now, to watch over

him and clean him and keep him from being lonely, but she just
made it worse. “I hate your stupid stories.”
The old woman smiled at him toothlessly. “My stories? No, my
little lord, not mine. The stories are, before me and after me, before
you too.”
She was a very ugly old woman, Bran thought spitefully;
shrunken and wrinkled, almost blind, too weak to climb stairs, with
only a few wisps of white hair left to cover a mottled pink scalp. No
one really knew how old she was, but his father said she’d been
called Old Nan even when he was a boy. She was the oldest person
in Winterfell for certain, maybe the oldest person in the Seven
Kingdoms. Nan had come to the castle as a wet nurse for a Brandon
Stark whose mother had died birthing him. He had been an older
brother of Lord Rickard, Bran’s grandfather, or perhaps a younger
brother, or a brother to Lord Rickard’s father. Sometimes Old Nan
told it one way and sometimes another. In all the stories the little
boy died at three of a summer chill, but Old Nan stayed on at
Winterfell with her own children. She had lost both her sons to the
war when King Robert won the throne, and her grandson was killed
on the walls of Pyke during Balon Greyjoy’s rebellion. Her
daughters had long ago married and moved away and died. All that
was left of her own blood was Hodor, the simpleminded giant who
worked in the stables, but Old Nan just lived on and on, doing her
needlework and telling her stories.
“I don’t care whose stories they are,” Bran told her, “I hate
them.” He didn’t want stories and he didn’t want Old Nan. He
wanted his mother and father. He wanted to go running with
Summer loping beside him. He wanted to climb the broken tower
and feed corn to the crows. He wanted to ride his pony again with
his brothers. He wanted it to be the way it had been before.
“I know a story about a boy who hated stories,” Old Nan said
with her stupid little smile, her needles moving all the while, click
click click, until Bran was ready to scream at her.
It would never be the way it had been, he knew. The crow had
tricked him into ying, but when he woke up he was broken and
the world was changed. They had all left him, his father and his

mother and his sisters and even his bastard brother Jon. His father
had promised he would ride a real horse to King’s Landing, but
they’d gone without him. Maester Luwin had sent a bird after Lord
Eddard with a message, and another to Mother and a third to Jon
on the Wall, but there had been no answers. “Ofttimes the birds are
lost, child,” the maester had told him. “There’s many a mile and
many a hawk between here and King’s Landing, the message may
not have reached them.” Yet to Bran it felt as if they had all died
while he had slept … or perhaps Bran had died, and they had
forgotten him. Jory and Ser Rodrik and Vayon Poole had gone too,
and Hullen and Harwin and Fat Tom and a quarter of the guard.
Only Robb and baby Rickon were still here, and Robb was
changed. He was Robb the Lord now, or trying to be. He wore a
real sword and never smiled. His days were spent drilling the guard
and practicing his swordplay, making the yard ring with the sound
of steel as Bran watched forlornly from his window. At night he
closeted himself with Maester Luwin, talking or going over account
books. Sometimes he would ride out with Hallis Mollen and be gone
for days at a time, visiting distant holdfasts. Whenever he was away
more than a day, Rickon would cry and ask Bran if Robb was ever
coming back. Even when he was home at Winterfell, Robb the Lord
seemed to have more time for Hallis Mollen and Theon Greyjoy
than he ever did for his brothers.
“I could tell you the story about Brandon the Builder,” Old Nan
said. “That was always your favorite.”
Thousands and thousands of years ago, Brandon the Builder had
raised Winterfell, and some said the Wall. Bran knew the story, but
it had never been his favorite. Maybe one of the other Brandons had
liked that story. Sometimes Nan would talk to him as if he were her
Brandon, the baby she had nursed all those years ago, and
sometimes she confused him with his uncle Brandon, who was killed
by the Mad King before Bran was even born. She had lived so long,
Mother had told him once, that all the Brandon Starks had become
one person in her head.
“That’s not my favorite,” he said. “My favorites were the scary
ones.” He heard some sort of commotion outside and turned back to

the window. Rickon was running across the yard toward the
gatehouse, the wolves following him, but the tower faced the
wrong way for Bran to see what was happening. He smashed a st
on his thigh in frustration and felt nothing.
“Oh, my sweet summer child,” Old Nan said quietly, “what do
you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the
snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out
of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face
for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all
in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the
white walkers move through the woods.”
“You mean the Others,” Bran said querulously.
“The Others,” Old Nan agreed. “Thousands and thousands of years
ago, a winter fell that was cold and hard and endless beyond all
memory of man. There came a night that lasted a generation, and
kings shivered and died in their castles even as the swineherds in
their hovels. Women smothered their children rather than see them
starve, and cried, and felt their tears freeze on their cheeks.” Her
voice and her needles fell silent, and she glanced up at Bran with
pale, lmy eyes and asked, “So, child. This is the sort of story you
like?”
“Well,” Bran said reluctantly, “yes, only …”
Old Nan nodded. “In that darkness, the Others came for the rst
time,” she said as her needles went click click click. “They were cold
things, dead things, that hated iron and re and the touch of the
sun, and every creature with hot blood in its veins. They swept over
holdfasts and cities and kingdoms, felled heroes and armies by the
score, riding their pale dead horses and leading hosts of the slain.
All the swords of men could not stay their advance, and even
maidens and suckling babes found no pity in them. They hunted the
maids through frozen forests, and fed their dead servants on the
esh of human children.”
Her voice had dropped very low, almost to a whisper, and Bran
found himself leaning forward to listen.
“Now these were the days before the Andals came, and long
before the women ed across the narrow sea from the cities of the

Rhoyne, and the hundred kingdoms of those times were the
kingdoms of the First Men, who had taken these lands from the
children of the forest. Yet here and there in the fastness of the
woods the children still lived in their wooden cities and hollow
hills, and the faces in the trees kept watch. So as cold and death
lled the earth, the last hero determined to seek out the children, in
the hopes that their ancient magics could win back what the armies
of men had lost. He set out into the dead lands with a sword, a
horse, a dog, and a dozen companions. For years he searched, until
he despaired of ever nding the children of the forest in their secret
cities. One by one his friends died, and his horse, and nally even
his dog, and his sword froze so hard the blade snapped when he
tried to use it. And the Others smelled the hot blood in him, and
came silent on his trail, stalking him with packs of pale white
spiders big as hounds—”
The door opened with a bang, and Bran’s heart leapt up into his
mouth in sudden fear, but it was only Maester Luwin, with Hodor
looming in the stairway behind him. “Hodor!” the stableboy
announced, as was his custom, smiling hugely at them all.
Maester Luwin was not smiling. “We have visitors,” he
announced, “and your presence is required, Bran.”
“I’m listening to a story now,” Bran complained.
“Stories wait, my little lord, and when you come back to them,
why, there they are,” Old Nan said. “Visitors are not so patient, and
ofttimes they bring stories of their own.”
“Who is it?” Bran asked Maester Luwin.
“Tyrion Lannister, and some men of the Night’s Watch, with word
from your brother Jon. Robb is meeting with them now. Hodor,
will you help Bran down to the hall?”
“Hodor!” Hodor agreed happily. He ducked to get his great
shaggy head under the door. Hodor was nearly seven feet tall. It
was hard to believe that he was the same blood as Old Nan. Bran
wondered if he would shrivel up as small as his great-grandmother
when he was old. It did not seem likely, even if Hodor lived to be a
thousand.

Hodor lifted Bran as easy as if he were a bale of hay, and cradled
him against his massive chest. He always smelled faintly of horses,
but it was not a bad smell. His arms were thick with muscle and
matted with brown hair. “Hodor,” he said again. Theon Greyjoy had
once commented that Hodor did not know much, but no one could
doubt that he knew his name. Old Nan had cackled like a hen when
Bran told her that, and confessed that Hodor’s real name was
Walder. No one knew where “Hodor” had come from, she said, but
when he started saying it, they started calling him by it. It was the
only word he had.
They left Old Nan in the tower room with her needles and her
memories. Hodor hummed tunelessly as he carried Bran down the
steps and through the gallery, with Maester Luwin following
behind, hurrying to keep up with the stableboy’s long strides.
Robb was seated in Father’s high seat, wearing ringmail and
boiled leather and the stern face of Robb the Lord. Theon Greyjoy
and Hallis Mollen stood behind him. A dozen guardsmen lined the
grey stone walls beneath tall narrow windows. In the center of the
room the dwarf stood with his servants, and four strangers in the
black of the Night’s Watch. Bran could sense the anger in the hall
the moment that Hodor carried him through the doors.
“Any man of the Night’s Watch is welcome here at Winterfell for
as long as he wishes to stay,” Robb was saying with the voice of
Robb the Lord. His sword was across his knees, the steel bare for all
the world to see. Even Bran knew what it meant to greet a guest
with an unsheathed sword.
“Any man of the Night’s Watch,” the dwarf repeated, “but not me,
do I take your meaning, boy?”
Robb stood and pointed at the little man with his sword. “I am
the lord here while my mother and father are away, Lannister. I am
not your boy.”
“If you are a lord, you might learn a lord’s courtesy,” the little
man replied, ignoring the sword point in his face. “Your bastard
brother has all your father’s graces, it would seem.”
“Jon,” Bran gasped out from Hodor’s arms.

The dwarf turned to look at him. “So it is true, the boy lives. I
could scarce believe it. You Starks are hard to kill.”
“You Lannisters had best remember that,” Robb said, lowering his
sword. “Hodor, bring my brother here.”
“Hodor,” Hodor said, and he trotted forward smiling and set Bran
in the high seat of the Starks, where the Lords of Winterfell had sat
since the days when they called themselves the Kings in the North.
The seat was cold stone, polished smooth by countless bottoms; the
carved heads of direwolves snarled on the ends of its massive arms.
Bran clasped them as he sat, his useless legs dangling. The great
seat made him feel half a baby.
Robb put a hand on his shoulder. “You said you had business with
Bran. Well, here he is, Lannister.”
Bran was uncomfortably aware of Tyrion Lannister’s eyes. One
was black and one was green, and both were looking at him,
studying him, weighing him. “I am told you were quite the climber,
Bran,” the little man said at last. “Tell me, how is it you happened
to fall that day?”
“I never,” Bran insisted. He never fell, never never never.
“The child does not remember anything of the fall, or the climb
that came before it,” said Maester Luwin gently.
“Curious,” said Tyrion Lannister.
“My brother is not here to answer questions, Lannister,” Robb
said curtly. “Do your business and be on your way.”
“I have a gift for you,” the dwarf said to Bran. “Do you like to
ride, boy?”
Maester Luwin came forward. “My lord, the child has lost the use
of his legs. He cannot sit a horse.”
“Nonsense,” said Lannister. “With the right horse and the right
saddle, even a cripple can ride.”
The word was a knife through Bran’s heart. He felt tears come
unbidden to his eyes. “I’m not a cripple!”
“Then I am not a dwarf,” the dwarf said with a twist of his
mouth. “My father will rejoice to hear it.” Greyjoy laughed.
“What sort of horse and saddle are you suggesting?” Maester
Luwin asked.

“A smart horse,” Lannister replied. “The boy cannot use his legs
to command the animal, so you must shape the horse to the rider,
teach it to respond to the reins, to the voice. I would begin with an
unbroken yearling, with no old training to be unlearned,” He drew
a rolled paper from his belt. “Give this to your saddler. He will
provide the rest.”
Maester Luwin took the paper from the dwarf’s hand, curious as a
small grey squirrel. He unrolled it, studied it. “I see. You draw
nicely, my lord. Yes, this ought to work. I should have thought of
this myself.”
“It came easier to me, Maester. It is not terribly unlike my own
saddles.”
“Will I truly be able to ride?” Bran asked. He wanted to believe
them, but he was afraid. Perhaps it was just another lie. The crow
had promised him that he could y.
“You will,” the dwarf told him. “And I swear to you, boy, on
horseback you will be as tall as any of them.”
Robb Stark seemed puzzled. “Is this some trap, Lannister? What’s
Bran to you? Why should you want to help him?”
“Your brother Jon asked it of me. And I have a tender spot in my
heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.” Tyrion Lannister
placed a hand over his heart and grinned.
The door to the yard ew open. Sunlight came streaming across
the hall as Rickon burst in, breathless. The direwolves were with
him. The boy stopped by the door, wide-eyed, but the wolves came
on. Their eyes found Lannister, or perhaps they caught his scent.
Summer began to growl rst. Grey Wind picked it up. They padded
toward the little man, one from the right and one from the left.
“The wolves do not like your smell, Lannister,” Theon Greyjoy
commented.
“Perhaps it’s time I took my leave,” Tyrion said. He took a step
backward … and Shaggydog came out of the shadows behind him,
snarling. Lannister recoiled, and Summer lunged at him from the
other side. He reeled away, unsteady on his feet, and Grey Wind
snapped at his arm, teeth ripping at his sleeve and tearing loose a
scrap of cloth.

“No!” Bran shouted from the high seat as Lannister’s men reached
for their steel. “Summer, here. Summer, to me!”
The direwolf heard the voice, glanced at Bran, and again at
Lannister. He crept backward, away from the little man, and settled
down below Bran’s dangling feet.
Robb had been holding his breath. He let it out with a sigh and
called, “Grey Wind.” His direwolf moved to him, swift and silent.
Now there was only Shaggy dog, rumbling at the small man, his
eyes burning like green re.
“Rickon, call him,” Bran shouted to his baby brother, and Rickon
remembered himself and screamed, “Home, Shaggy, home now.”
The black wolf gave Lannister one nal snarl and bounded o to
Rickon, who hugged him tightly around the neck.
Tyrion Lannister undid his scarf, mopped at his brow, and said in
a at voice, “How interesting.”
“Are you well, my lord?” asked one of his men, his sword in
hand. He glanced nervously at the direwolves as he spoke.
“My sleeve is torn and my breeches are unaccountably damp, but
nothing was harmed save my dignity.”
Even Robb looked shaken. “The wolves … I don’t know why they
did that …”
“No doubt they mistook me for dinner.” Lannister bowed sti y to
Bran. “I thank you for calling them o , young ser. I promise you,
they would have found me quite indigestible. And now I will be
leaving, truly.”
“A moment, my lord,” Maester Luwin said. He moved to Robb
and they huddled close together, whispering. Bran tried to hear
what they were saying, but their voices were too low.
Robb Stark nally sheathed his sword. “I … I may have been
hasty with you,” he said. “You’ve done Bran a kindness, and,
well …” Robb composed himself with an e ort. “The hospitality of
Winterfell is yours if you wish it, Lannister.”
“Spare me your false courtesies, boy. You do not love me and you
do not want me here. I saw an inn outside your walls, in the winter
town. I’ll nd a bed there, and both of us will sleep easier. For a
few coppers I may even nd a comely wench to warm the sheets for

me.” He spoke to one of the black brothers, an old man with a
twisted back and a tangled beard. “Yoren, we go south at daybreak.
You will nd me on the road, no doubt.” With that he made his exit,
struggling across the hall on his short legs, past Rickon and out the
door. His men followed.
The four of the Night’s Watch remained. Robb turned to them
uncertainly. “I have had rooms prepared, and you’ll nd no lack of
hot water to wash o the dust of the road. I hope you will honor us
at table tonight,” He spoke the words so awkwardly that even Bran
took note; it was a speech he had learned, not words from the heart,
but the black brothers thanked him all the same.
Summer followed them up the tower steps as Hodor carried Bran
back to his bed. Old Nan was asleep in her chair. Hodor said
“Hodor,” gathered up his great-grandmother, and carried her o ,
snoring softly, while Bran lay thinking. Robb had promised that he
could feast with the Night’s Watch in the Great Hall. “Summer,” he
called. The wolf bounded up on the bed. Bran hugged him so hard
he could feel the hot breath on his cheek. “I can ride now,” he
whispered to his friend. “We can go hunting in the woods soon,
wait and see.” After a time he slept.
In his dream he was climbing again, pulling himself up an ancient
windowless tower, his
ngers forcing themselves between
blackened stones, his feet scrabbling for purchase. Higher and
higher he climbed, through the clouds and into the night sky, and
still the tower rose before him. When he paused to look down, his
head swam dizzily and he felt his ngers slipping. Bran cried out
and clung for dear life. The earth was a thousand miles beneath him
and he could not y. He could not y. He waited until his heart had
stopped pounding, until he could breathe, and he began to climb
again. There was no way to go but up. Far above him, outlined
against a vast pale moon, he thought he could see the shapes of
gargoyles. His arms were sore and aching, but he dared not rest. He
forced himself to climb faster. The gargoyles watched him ascend.
Their eyes glowed red as hot coals in a brazier. Perhaps once they
had been lions, but now they were twisted and grotesque. Bran
could hear them whispering to each other in soft stone voices

terrible to hear. He must not listen, he told himself, he must not
hear, so long as he did not hear them he was safe. But when the
gargoyles pulled themselves loose from the stone and padded down
the side of the tower to where Bran clung, he knew he was not safe
after all. “I didn’t hear,” he wept as they came closer and closer, “I
didn’t, I didn’t.”
He woke gasping, lost in darkness, and saw a vast shadow
looming over him. “I didn’t hear,” he whispered, trembling in fear,
but then the shadow said “Hodor,” and lit the candle by the bedside,
and Bran sighed with relief.
Hodor washed the sweat from him with a warm, damp cloth and
dressed him with deft and gentle hands. When it was time, he
carried him down to the Great Hall, where a long trestle table had
been set up near the re. The lord’s seat at the head of the table had
been left empty, but Robb sat to the right of it, with Bran across
from him. They ate suckling pig that night, and pigeon pie, and
turnips soaking in butter, and afterward the cook had promised
honeycombs. Summer snatched table scraps from Bran’s hand, while
Grey Wind and Shaggydog fought over a bone in the corner.
Winterfell’s dogs would not come near the hall now. Bran had found
that strange at rst, but he was growing used to it.
Yoren was senior among the black brothers, so the steward had
seated him between Robb and Maester Luwin. The old man had a
sour smell, as if he had not washed in a long time. He ripped at the
meat with his teeth, cracked the ribs to suck out the marrow from
the bones, and shrugged at the mention of Jon Snow. “Ser Alliser’s
bane,” he grunted, and two of his companions shared a laugh that
Bran did not understand. But when Robb asked for news of their
uncle Benjen, the black brothers grew ominously quiet.
“What is it?” Bran asked.
Yoren wiped his ngers on his vest. “There’s hard news, m’lords,
and a cruel way to pay you for your meat and mead, but the man as
asks the question must bear the answer. Stark’s gone.”
One of the other men said, “The Old Bear sent him out to look for
Waymar Royce, and he’s late returning, my lord.”
“Too long,” Yoren said. “Most like he’s dead.”

“My uncle is not dead,” Robb Stark said loudly, anger in his
tones. He rose from the bench and laid his hand on the hilt of his
sword. “Do you hear me? My uncle is not dead!” His voice rang
against the stone walls, and Bran was suddenly afraid.
Old sour-smelling Yoren looked up at Robb, unimpressed.
“Whatever you say, m’lord,” he said. He sucked at a piece of meat
between his teeth.
The youngest of the black brothers shifted uncomfortably in his
seat. “There’s not a man on the Wall knows the haunted forest
better than Benjen Stark. He’ll nd his way back.”
“Well,” said Yoren, “maybe he will and maybe he won’t. Good
men have gone into those woods before, and never come out.”
All Bran could think of was Old Nan’s story of the Others and the
last hero, hounded through the white woods by dead men and
spiders big as hounds. He was afraid for a moment, until he
remembered how that story ended. “The children will help him,” he
blurted, “the children of the forest!”
Theon Greyjoy sniggered, and Maester Luwin said, “Bran, the
children of the forest have been dead and gone for thousands of
years. All that is left of them are the faces in the trees.”
“Down here, might be that’s true, Maester,” Yoren said, “but up
past the Wall, who’s to say? Up there, a man can’t always tell
what’s alive and what’s dead.”
That night, after the plates had been cleared, Robb carried Bran
up to bed himself. Grey Wind led the way, and Summer came close
behind. His brother was strong for his age, and Bran was as light as
a bundle of rags, but the stairs were steep and dark, and Robb was
breathing hard by the time they reached the top.
He put Bran into bed, covered him with blankets, and blew out
the candle. For a time Robb sat beside him in the dark. Bran wanted
to talk to him, but he did not know what to say. “We’ll nd a horse
for you, I promise,” Robb whispered at last.
“Are they ever coming back?” Bran asked him.
“Yes,” Robb said with such hope in his voice that Bran knew he
was hearing his brother and not just Robb the Lord. “Mother will be
home soon. Maybe we can ride out to meet her when she comes.

Wouldn’t that surprise her, to see you ahorse?” Even in the dark
room, Bran could feel his brother’s smile. “And afterward, we’ll ride
north to see the Wall. We won’t even tell Jon we’re coming, we’ll
just be there one day, you and me. It will be an adventure.”
“An adventure,” Bran repeated wistfully. He heard his brother
sob. The room was so dark he could not see the tears on Robb’s
face, so he reached out and found his hand. Their ngers twined
together.

EDDARD

“Lord Arryn’s death was a great sadness for all of us, my lord,”
Grand Maester Pycelle said. “I would be more than happy to tell
you what I can of the manner of his passing. Do be seated. Would
you care for refreshments? Some dates, perhaps? I have some very
ne persimmons as well. Wine no longer agrees with my digestion,
I fear, but I can o er you a cup of iced milk, sweetened with honey.
I nd it most refreshing in this heat.”
There was no denying the heat; Ned could feel the silk tunic
clinging to his chest. Thick, moist air covered the city like a damp
woolen blanket, and the riverside had grown unruly as the poor ed
their hot, airless warrens to jostle for sleeping places near the
water, where the only breath of wind was to be found. “That would
be most kind,” Ned said, seating himself.
Pycelle lifted a tiny silver bell with thumb and fore nger and
tinkled it gently. A slender young serving girl hurried into the solar.
“Iced milk for the King’s Hand and myself, if you would be so kind,
child. Well sweetened.”
As the girl went to fetch their drinks, the Grand Maester knotted
his ngers together and rested his hands on his stomach. “The
smallfolk say that the last year of summer is always the hottest. It is
not so, yet ofttimes it feels that way, does it not? On days like this,
I envy you northerners your summer snows.” The heavy jeweled
chain around the old man’s neck chinked softly as he shifted in his
seat. “To be sure, King Maekar’s summer was hotter than this one,

and near as long. There were fools, even in the Citadel, who took
that to mean that the Great Summer had come at last, the summer
that never ends, but in the seventh year it broke suddenly, and we
had a short autumn and a terrible long winter. Still, the heat was
erce while it lasted. Oldtown steamed and sweltered by day and
came alive only by night. We would walk in the gardens by the
river and argue about the gods. I remember the smells of those
nights, my lord—perfume and sweat, melons ripe to bursting,
peaches and pomegranates, nightshade and moonbloom. I was a
young man then, still forging my chain. The heat did not exhaust
me as it does now.” Pycelle’s eyes were so heavily lidded he looked
half-asleep. “My pardons, Lord Eddard. You did not come to hear
foolish meanderings of a summer forgotten before your father was
born. Forgive an old man his wanderings, if you would. Minds are
like swords, I do fear. The old ones go to rust. Ah, and here is our
milk.” The serving girl placed the tray between them, and Pycelle
gave her a smile. “Sweet child.” He lifted a cup, tasted, nodded.
“Thank you. You may go.”
When the girl had taken her leave, Pycelle peered at Ned through
pale, rheumy eyes. “Now where were we? Oh, yes. You asked about
Lord Arryn …”
“I did.” Ned sipped politely at the iced milk. It was pleasantly
cold, but oversweet to his taste.
“If truth be told, the Hand had not seemed quite himself for some
time,” Pycelle said. “We had sat together on council many a year,
he and I, and the signs were there to read, but I put them down to
the great burdens he had borne so faithfully for so long. Those
broad shoulders were weighed down by all the cares of the realm,
and more besides. His son was ever sickly, and his lady wife so
anxious that she would scarcely let the boy out of her sight. It was
enough to weary even a strong man, and the Lord Jon was not
young. Small wonder if he seemed melancholy and tired. Or so I
thought at the time. Yet now I am less certain.” He gave a
ponderous shake of his head.
“What can you tell me of his nal illness?”

The Grand Maester spread his hands in a gesture of helpless
sorrow. “He came to me one day asking after a certain book, as hale
and healthy as ever, though it did seem to me that something was
troubling him deeply. The next morning he was twisted over in
pain, too sick to rise from bed. Maester Colemon thought it was a
chill on the stomach. The weather had been hot, and the Hand often
iced his wine, which can upset the digestion. When Lord Jon
continued to weaken, I went to him myself, but the gods did not
grant me the power to save him.”
“I have heard that you sent Maester Colemon away.”
The Grand Maester’s nod was as slow and deliberate as a glacier.
“I did, and I fear the Lady Lysa will never forgive me that. Maybe I
was wrong, but at the time I thought it best. Maester Colemon is
like a son to me, and I yield to none in my esteem for his abilities,
but he is young, and the young ofttimes do not comprehend the
frailty of an older body. He was purging Lord Arryn with wasting
potions and pepper juice, and I feared he might kill him.”
“Did Lord Arryn say anything to you during his nal hours?”
Pycelle wrinkled his brow. “In the last stage of his fever, the
Hand called out the name Robert several times, but whether he was
asking for his son or for the king I could not say. Lady Lysa would
not permit the boy to enter the sickroom, for fear that he too might
be taken ill. The king did come, and he sat beside the bed for hours,
talking and joking of times long past in hopes of raising Lord Jon’s
spirits. His love was erce to see.”
“Was there nothing else? No nal words?”
“When I saw that all hope had ed, I gave the Hand the milk of
the poppy, so he should not su er. Just before he closed his eyes for
the last time, he whispered something to the king and his lady wife,
a blessing for his son. The seed is strong, he said. At the end, his
speech was too slurred to comprehend. Death did not come until the
next morning, but Lord Jon was at peace after that. He never spoke
again.”
Ned took another swallow of milk, trying not to gag on the
sweetness of it. “Did it seem to you that there was anything
unnatural about Lord Arryn’s death?”

“Unnatural?” The aged maester’s voice was thin as a whisper.
“No, I could not say so. Sad, for a certainty. Yet in its own way,
death is the most natural thing of all, Lord Eddard. Jon Arryn rests
easy now, his burdens lifted at last.”
“This illness that took him,” said Ned. “Had you ever seen its like
before, in other men?”
“Near forty years I have been Grand Maester of the Seven
Kingdoms,” Pycelle replied. “Under our good King Robert, and
Aerys Targaryen before him, and his father Jaehaerys the Second
before him, and even for a few short months under Jaehaerys’s
father, Aegon the Fortunate, the Fifth of His Name. I have seen
more of illness than I care to remember, my lord. I will tell you
this: Every case is di erent, and every case is alike. Lord Jon’s
death was no stranger than any other.”
“His wife thought otherwise.”
The Grand Maester nodded. “I recall now, the widow is sister to
your own noble wife. If an old man may be forgiven his blunt
speech, let me say that grief can derange even the strongest and
most disciplined of minds, and the Lady Lysa was never that. Since
her last stillbirth, she has seen enemies in every shadow, and the
death of her lord husband left her shattered and lost.”
“So you are quite certain that Jon Arryn died of a sudden illness?”
“I am,” Pycelle replied gravely. “If not illness, my good lord,
what else could it be?”
“Poison,” Ned suggested quietly.
Pycelle’s sleepy eyes icked open. The aged maester shifted
uncomfortably in his seat. “A disturbing thought. We are not the
Free Cities, where such things are common. Grand Maester
Aethelmure wrote that all men carry murder in their hearts, yet
even so, the poisoner is beneath contempt.” He fell silent for a
moment, his eyes lost in thought. “What you suggest is possible, my
lord, yet I do not think it likely. Every hedge maester knows the
common poisons, and Lord Arryn displayed none of the signs. And
the Hand was loved by all. What sort of monster in man’s esh
would dare to murder such a noble lord?”
“I have heard it said that poison is a woman’s weapon.”

Pycelle stroked his beard thoughtfully. “It is said. Women,
cravens … and eunuchs.” He cleared his throat and spat a thick glob
of phlegm onto the rushes. Above them, a raven cawed loudly in the
rookery. “The Lord Varys was born a slave in Lys, did you know?
Put not your trust in spiders, my lord.”
That was scarcely anything Ned needed to be told; there was
something about Varys that made his esh crawl. “I will remember
that, Maester. And I thank you for your help. I have taken enough
of your time.” He stood.
Grand Maester Pycelle pushed himself up from his chair slowly
and escorted Ned to the door. “I hope I have helped in some small
way to put your mind at ease. If there is any other service I might
perform, you need only ask.”
“One thing,” Ned told him. “I should be curious to examine the
book that you lent Jon the day before he fell ill.”
“I fear you would nd it of little interest,” Pycelle said. “It was a
ponderous tome by Grand Maester Malleon on the lineages of the
great houses.”
“Still, I should like to see it.”
The old man opened the door. “As you wish. I have it here
somewhere. When I nd it, I shall have it sent to your chambers
straightaway.”
“You have been most courteous,” Ned told him. Then, almost as
an afterthought, he said, “One last question, if you would be so
kind. You mentioned that the king was at Lord Arryn’s bedside
when he died. I wonder, was the queen with him?”
“Why, no,” Pycelle said. “She and the children were making the
journey to Casterly Rock, in company with her father. Lord Tywin
had brought a retinue to the city for the tourney on Prince Jo rey’s
name day, no doubt hoping to see his son Jaime win the champion’s
crown. In that he was sadly disappointed. It fell to me to send the
queen word of Lord Arryn’s sudden death. Never have I sent o a
bird with a heavier heart.”
“Dark wings, dark words,” Ned murmured. It was a proverb Old
Nan had taught him as a boy.

“So the shwives say,” Grand Maester Pycelle agreed, “but we
know it is not always so. When Maester Luwin’s bird brought the
word about your Bran, the message lifted every true heart in the
castle, did it not?”
“As you say, Maester.”
“The gods are merciful.” Pycelle bowed his head. “Come to me as
often as you like, Lord Eddard. I am here to serve.”
Yes, Ned thought as the door swung shut, but whom?
On the way back to his chambers, he came upon his daughter
Arya on the winding steps of the Tower of the Hand, windmilling
her arms as she struggled to balance on one leg. The rough stone
had scu ed her bare feet. Ned stopped and looked at her. “Arya,
what are you doing?”
“Syrio says a water dancer can stand on one toe for hours.” Her
hands ailed at the air to steady herself.
Ned had to smile. “Which toe?” he teased.
“Any toe,” Arya said, exasperated with the question. She hopped
from her right leg to her left, swaying dangerously before she
regained her balance.
“Must you do your standing here?” he asked. “It’s a long hard fall
down these steps.”
“Syrio says a water dancer never falls.” She lowered her leg to
stand on two feet. “Father, will Bran come and live with us now?”
“Not for a long time, sweet one,” he told her. “He needs to win
his strength back.”
Arya bit her lip. “What will Bran do when he’s of age?”
Ned knelt beside her. “He has years to nd that answer, Arya. For
now, it is enough to know that he will live.” The night the bird had
come from Winterfell, Eddard Stark had taken the girls to the castle
godswood, an acre of elm and alder and black cottonwood
overlooking the river. The heart tree there was a great oak, its
ancient limbs overgrown with smokeberry vines; they knelt before
it to o er their thanksgiving, as if it had been a weirwood. Sansa
drifted to sleep as the moon rose, Arya several hours later, curling
up in the grass under Ned’s cloak. All through the dark hours he
kept his vigil alone. When dawn broke over the city, the dark red

blooms of dragon’s breath surrounded the girls where they lay. “I
dreamed of Bran,” Sansa had whispered to him. “I saw him
smiling.”
“He was going to be a knight,” Arya was saying now. “A knight
of the Kingsguard. Can he still be a knight?”
“No,” Ned said. He saw no use in lying to her. “Yet someday he
may be the lord of a great holdfast and sit on the king’s council. He
might raise castles like Brandon the Builder, or sail a ship across the
Sunset Sea, or enter your mother’s Faith and become the High
Septon.” But he will never run beside his wolf again, he thought with a
sadness too deep for words, or lie with a woman, or hold his own son
in his arms.
Arya cocked her head to one side. “Can I be a king’s councillor
and build castles and become the High Septon?”
“You,” Ned said, kissing her lightly on the brow, “will marry a
king and rule his castle, and your sons will be knights and princes
and lords and, yes, perhaps even a High Septon.”
Arya screwed up her face. “No,” she said, “that’s Sansa.” She
folded up her right leg and resumed her balancing. Ned sighed and
left her there.
Inside his chambers, he stripped o his sweat-stained silks and
sluiced cold water over his head from the basin beside the bed. Alyn
entered as he was drying his face. “My lord,” he said, “Lord Baelish
is without and begs audience.”
“Escort him to my solar,” Ned said, reaching for a fresh tunic, the
lightest linen he could nd. “I’ll see him at once.”
Little nger was perched on the window seat when Ned entered,
watching the knights of the Kingsguard practice at swords in the
yard below. “If only old Selmy’s mind were as nimble as his blade,”
he said wistfully, “our council meetings would be a good deal
livelier.”
“Ser Barristan is as valiant and honorable as any man in King’s
Landing.” Ned had come to have a deep respect for the aged, whitehaired Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.
“And as tiresome,” Little nger added, “though I daresay he
should do well in the tourney. Last year he unhorsed the Hound,

and it was only four years ago that he was champion.”
The question of who might win the tourney interested Eddard
Stark not in the least. “Is there a reason for this visit, Lord Petyr, or
are you here simply to enjoy the view from my window?”
Little nger smiled. “I promised Cat I would help you in your
inquiries, and so I have.”
That took Ned aback. Promise or no promise, he could not nd it
in him to trust Lord Petyr Baelish, who struck him as too clever by
half. “You have something for me?”
“Someone,” Little nger corrected. “Four someones, if truth be
told. Had you thought to question the Hand’s servants?”
Ned frowned. “Would that I could. Lady Arryn took her
household back to the Eyrie.” Lysa had done him no favor in that
regard. All those who had stood closest to her husband had gone
with her when she ed: Jon’s maester, his steward, the captain of
his guard, his knights and retainers.
“Most of her household,” Little nger said, “not all. A few remain.
A pregnant kitchen girl hastily wed to one of Lord Renly’s grooms,
a stablehand who joined the City Watch, a potboy discharged from
service for theft, and Lord Arryn’s squire.”
“His squire?” Ned was pleasantly surprised. A man’s squire often
knew a great deal of his comings and goings.
“Ser Hugh of the Vale,” Little nger named him. “The king
knighted the boy after Lord Arryn’s death.”
“I shall send for him,” Ned said. “And the others.”
Little nger winced. “My lord, step over here to the window, if
you would be so kind.”
“Why?”
“Come, and I’ll show you, my lord.”
Frowning, Ned crossed to the window. Petyr Baelish made a
casual gesture. “There, across the yard, at the door of the armory,
do you see the boy squatting by the steps honing a sword with an
oilstone?”
“What of him?”
“He reports to Varys. The Spider has taken a great interest in you
and all your doings.” He shifted in the window seat. “Now glance at

the wall. Farther west, above the stables. The guardsman leaning on
the ramparts?”
Ned saw the man. “Another of the eunuch’s whisperers?”
“No, this one belongs to the queen. Notice that he enjoys a ne
view of the door to this tower, the better to note who calls on you.
There are others, many unknown even to me. The Red Keep is full
of eyes. Why do you think I hid Cat in a brothel?”
Eddard Stark had no taste for these intrigues. “Seven hells,” he
swore. It did seem as though the man on the walls was watching
him. Suddenly uncomfortable, Ned moved away from the window.
“Is everyone someone’s informer in this cursed city?”
“Scarcely,” said Little nger. He counted on the ngers on his
hand. “Why, there’s me, you, the king … although, come to think
on it, the king tells the queen much too much, and I’m less than
certain about you.” He stood up. “Is there a man in your service
that you trust utterly and completely?”
“Yes,” said Ned.
“In that case, I have a delightful palace in Valyria that I would
dearly love to sell you,” Little nger said with a mocking smile.
“The wiser answer was no, my lord, but be that as it may. Send this
paragon of yours to Ser Hugh and the others. Your own comings
and goings will be noted, but even Varys the Spider cannot watch
every man in your service every hour of the day.” He started for the
door.
“Lord Petyr,” Ned called after him. “I … am grateful for your
help. Perhaps I was wrong to distrust you.”
Little nger ngered his small pointed beard. “You are slow to
learn, Lord Eddard. Distrusting me was the wisest thing you’ve done
since you climbed down o your horse.”

JON

Jon was showing Dareon how best to deliver a sidestroke when the
new recruit entered the practice yard. “Your feet should be farther
apart,” he urged. “You don’t want to lose your balance. That’s good.
Now pivot as you deliver the stroke, get all your weight behind the
blade.”
Dareon broke o and lifted his visor. “Seven gods,” he murmured.
“Would you look at this, Jon.”
Jon turned. Through the eye slit of his helm, he beheld the fattest
boy he had ever seen standing in the door of the armory. By the
look of him, he must have weighed twenty stone. The fur collar of
his embroidered surcoat was lost beneath his chins. Pale eyes
moved nervously in a great round moon of a face, and plump
sweaty ngers wiped themselves on the velvet of his doublet.
“They … they told me I was to come here for … for training,” he
said to no one in particular.
“A lordling,” Pyp observed to Jon. “Southron, most like near
Highgarden.” Pyp had traveled the Seven Kingdoms with a
mummers’ troupe, and bragged that he could tell what you were
and where you’d been born just from the sound of your voice.
A striding huntsman had been worked in scarlet thread upon the
breast of the fat boy’s fur-trimmed surcoat. Jon did not recognize
the sigil. Ser Alliser Thorne looked over his new charge and said, “It
would seem they have run short of poachers and thieves down

south. Now they send us pigs to man the Wall. Is fur and velvet
your notion of armor, my Lord of Ham?”
It was soon revealed that the new recruit had brought his own
armor with him; padded doublet, boiled leather, mail and plate and
helm, even a great wood-and-leather shield blazoned with the same
striding huntsman he wore on his surcoat. As none of it was black,
however, Ser Alliser insisted that he reequip himself from the
armory. That took half the morning. His girth required Donal Noye
to take apart a mail hauberk and re t it with leather panels at the
sides. To get a helm over his head the armorer had to detach the
visor. His leathers bound so tightly around his legs and under his
arms that he could scarcely move. Dressed for battle, the new boy
looked like an overcooked sausage about to burst its skin. “Let us
hope you are not as inept as you look,” Ser Alliser said. “Halder, see
what Ser Piggy can do.”
Jon Snow winced. Halder had been born in a quarry and
apprenticed as a stonemason. He was sixteen, tall and muscular, and
his blows were as hard as any Jon had ever felt. “This will be uglier
than a whore’s ass,” Pyp muttered, and it was.
The ght lasted less than a minute before the fat boy was on the
ground, his whole body shaking as blood leaked through his
shattered helm and between his pudgy ngers. “I yield,” he shrilled.
“No more, I yield, don’t hit me.” Rast and some of the other boys
were laughing.
Even then, Ser Alliser would not call an end. “On your feet, Ser
Piggy,” he called. “Pick up your sword.” When the boy continued to
cling to the ground, Thorne gestured to Halder. “Hit him with the
at of your blade until he nds his feet.” Halder delivered a
tentative smack to his foe’s upraised cheeks. “You can hit harder
than that,” Thorne taunted. Halder took hold of his longsword with
both hands and brought it down so hard the blow split leather, even
on the at. The new boy screeched in pain.
Jon Snow took a step forward. Pyp laid a mailed hand on his arm.
“Jon, no,” the small boy whispered with an anxious glance at Ser
Alliser Thorne.

“On your feet,” Thorne repeated. The fat boy struggled to rise,
slipped, and fell heavily again. “Ser Piggy is starting to grasp the
notion,” Ser Alliser observed. “Again.”
Halder lifted the sword for another blow. “Cut us o a ham!” Rast
urged, laughing.
Jon shook o Pyp’s hand. “Halder, enough.”
Halder looked to Ser Alliser.
“The Bastard speaks and the peasants tremble,” the master-atarms said in that sharp, cold voice of his. “I remind you that I am
the master-at-arms here, Lord Snow.”
“Look at him, Halder,” Jon urged, ignoring Thorne as best he
could. “There’s no honor in beating a fallen foe. He yielded.” He
knelt beside the fat boy.
Halder lowered his sword. “He yielded,” he echoed.
Ser Alliser’s onyx eyes were xed on Jon Snow. “It would seem
our Bastard is in love,” he said as Jon helped the fat boy to his feet.
“Show me your steel, Lord Snow.”
Jon drew his longsword. He dared defy Ser Alliser only to a
point, and he feared he was well beyond it now.
Thorne smiled. “The Bastard wishes to defend his lady love, so we
shall make an exercise of it. Rat, Pimple, help our Stone Head
here.” Rast and Albett moved to join Halder. “Three of you ought to
be su cient to make Lady Piggy squeal. All you need do is get past
the Bastard.”
“Stay behind me,” Jon said to the fat boy. Ser Alliser had often
sent two foes against him, but never three. He knew he would
likely go to sleep bruised and bloody tonight. He braced himself for
the assault.
Suddenly Pyp was beside him. “Three to two will make for better
sport,” the small boy said cheerfully. He dropped his visor and slid
out his sword. Before Jon could even think to protest, Grenn had
stepped up to make a third.
The yard had grown deathly quiet. Jon could feel Ser Alliser’s
eyes. “Why are you waiting?” he asked Rast and the others in a
voice gone deceptively soft, but it was Jon who moved rst. Halder
barely got his sword up in time.

Jon drove him backward, attacking with every blow, keeping the
older boy on the heels. Know your foe, Ser Rodrik had taught him
once; Jon knew Halder, brutally strong but short of patience, with
no taste for defense. Frustrate him, and he would leave himself
open, as certain as sunset.
The clang of steel echoed through the yard as the others joined
battle around him. Jon blocked a savage cut at his head, the shock
of impact running up his arm as the swords crashed together. He
slammed a sidestroke into Halder’s ribs, and was rewarded with a
mu ed grunt of pain. The counterstroke caught Jon on the
shoulder. Chainmail crunched, and pain ared up his neck, but for
an instant Halder was unbalanced. Jon cut his left leg from under
him, and he fell with a curse and a crash.
Grenn was standing his ground as Jon had taught him, giving
Albett more than he cared for, but Pyp was hard-pressed. Rast had
two years and forty pounds on him. Jon stepped up behind him and
rang the raper’s helm like a bell. As Rast went reeling, Pyp slid in
under his guard, knocked him down, and leveled a blade at his
throat. By then Jon had moved on. Facing two swords, Albett
backed away. “I yield,” he shouted.
Ser Alliser Thorne surveyed the scene with disgust. “The
mummer’s farce has gone on long enough for today.” He walked
away. The session was at an end.
Dareon helped Halder to his feet. The quarryman’s son wrenched
o his helm and threw it across the yard. “For an instant, I thought
I nally had you, Snow.”
“For an instant, you did,” Jon replied. Under his mail and leather,
his shoulder was throbbing. He sheathed his sword and tried to
remove his helm, but when he raised his arm, the pain made him
grit his teeth.
“Let me,” a voice said. Thick- ngered hands unfastened helm
from gorget and lifted it o gently. “Did he hurt you?”
“I’ve been bruised before.” He touched his shoulder and winced.
The yard was emptying around them.
Blood matted the fat boy’s hair where Halder had split his helm
asunder. “My name is Samwell Tarly, of Horn …” He stopped and

licked his lips. “I mean, I was of Horn Hill, until I … left. I’ve come
to take the black. My father is Lord Randyll, a bannerman to the
Tyrells of Highgarden. I used to be his heir, only …” His voice
trailed o .
“I’m Jon Snow, Ned Stark’s bastard, of Winterfell.”
Samwell Tarly nodded. “I … if you want, you can call me Sam.
My mother calls me Sam.”
“You can call him Lord Snow,” Pyp said as he came up to join
them. “You don’t want to know what his mother calls him.”
“These two are Grenn and Pypar,” Jon said.
“Grenn’s the ugly one,” Pyp said.
Grenn scowled. “You’re uglier than me. At least I don’t have ears
like a bat.”
“My thanks to all of you,” the fat boy said gravely.
“Why didn’t you get up and ght?” Grenn demanded.
“I wanted to, truly. I just … I couldn’t. I didn’t want him to hit
me anymore.” He looked at the ground. “I … I fear I’m a coward.
My lord father always said so.”
Grenn looked thunderstruck. Even Pyp had no words to say to
that, and Pyp had words for everything. What sort of man would
proclaim himself a coward?
Samwell Tarly must have read their thoughts on their faces. His
eyes met Jon’s and darted away, quick as frightened animals.
“I … I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to … to be like I am.” He
walked heavily toward the armory.
Jon called after him. “You were hurt,” he said. “Tomorrow you’ll
do better.”
Sam looked mournfully back over one shoulder. “No I won’t,” he
said, blinking back tears. “I never do better.”
When he was gone, Grenn frowned. “Nobody likes cravens,” he
said uncomfortably. “I wish we hadn’t helped him. What if they
think we’re craven too?”
“You’re too stupid to be craven,” Pyp told him.
“I am not,” Grenn said.
“Yes you are. If a bear attacked you in the woods, you’d be too
stupid to run away.”

“I would not,” Grenn insisted. “I’d run away faster than you.” He
stopped suddenly, scowling when he saw Pyp’s grin and realized
what he’d just said. His thick neck ushed a dark red. Jon left them
there arguing as he returned to the armory, hung up his sword, and
stripped o his battered armor.
Life at Castle Black followed certain patterns; the mornings were
for swordplay, the afternoons for work. The black brothers set new
recruits to many di erent tasks, to learn where their skills lay. Jon
cherished the rare afternoons when he was sent out with Ghost
ranging at his side to bring back game for the Lord Commander’s
table, but for every day spent hunting, he gave a dozen to Donal
Noye in the armory, spinning the whetstone while the one-armed
smith sharpened axes grown dull from use, or pumping the bellows
as Noye hammered out a new sword. Other times he ran messages,
stood at guard, mucked out stables, etched arrows, assisted
Maester Aemon with his birds or Bowen Marsh with his counts and
inventories.
That afternoon, the watch commander sent him to the winch cage
with four barrels of fresh-crushed stone, to scatter gravel over the
icy footpaths atop the Wall. It was lonely and boring work, even
with Ghost along for company, but Jon found he did not mind. On a
clear day you could see half the world from the top of the Wall, and
the air was always cold and bracing. He could think here, and he
found himself thinking of Samwell Tarly … and, oddly, of Tyrion
Lannister. He wondered what Tyrion would have made of the fat
boy. Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it, the dwarf
had told him, grinning. The world was full of cravens who
pretended to be heroes; it took a queer sort of courage to admit to
cowardice as Samwell Tarly had.
His sore shoulder made the work go slowly. It was late afternoon
before Jon nished graveling the paths. He lingered on high to
watch the sun go down, turning the western sky the color of blood.
Finally, as dusk was settling over the north, Jon rolled the empty
barrels back into the cage and signaled the winch men to lower him.
The evening meal was almost done by the time he and Ghost
reached the common hall. A group of the black brothers were dicing

over mulled wine near the re. His friends were at the bench
nearest the west wall, laughing. Pyp was in the middle of a story.
The mummer’s boy with the big ears was a born liar with a hundred
di erent voices, and he did not tell his tales so much as live them,
playing all the parts as needed, a king one moment and a swineherd
the next. When he turned into an alehouse girl or a virgin princess,
he used a high falsetto voice that reduced them all to tears of
helpless laughter, and his eunuchs were always eerily accurate
caricatures of Ser Alliser. Jon took as much pleasure from Pyp’s
antics as anyone … yet that night he turned away and went instead
to the end of the bench, where Samwell Tarly sat alone, as far from
the others as he could get.
He was nishing the last of the pork pie the cooks had served up
for supper when Jon sat down across from him. The fat boy’s eyes
widened at the sight of Ghost. “Is that a wolf?”
“A direwolf,” Jon said. “His name is Ghost. The direwolf is the
sigil of my father’s House.”
“Ours is a striding huntsman,” Samwell Tarly said.
“Do you like to hunt?”
The fat boy shuddered. “I hate it.” He looked as though he was
going to cry again.
“What’s wrong now?” Jon asked him. “Why are you always so
frightened?”
Sam stared at the last of his pork pie and gave a feeble shake of
his head, too scared even to talk. A burst of laughter lled the hall.
Jon heard Pyp squeaking in a high voice. He stood. “Let’s go
outside.”
The round fat face looked up at him, suspicious. “Why? What will
we do outside?”
“Talk,” Jon said. “Have you seen the Wall?”
“I’m fat, not blind,” Samwell Tarly said. “Of course I saw it, it’s
seven hundred feet high.” Yet he stood up all the same, wrapped a
fur-lined cloak over his shoulders, and followed Jon from the
common hall, still wary, as if he suspected some cruel trick was
waiting for him in the night. Ghost padded along beside them. “I
never thought it would be like this,” Sam said as they walked, his

words steaming in the cold air. Already he was hu ng and pu ng
as he tried to keep up. “All the buildings are falling down, and it’s
so … so …”
“Cold?” A hard frost was settling over the castle, and Jon could
hear the soft crunch of grey weeds beneath his boots.
Sam nodded miserably. “I hate the cold,” he said. “Last night I
woke up in the dark and the re had gone out and I was certain I
was going to freeze to death by morning.”
“It must have been warmer where you come from.”
“I never saw snow until last month. We were crossing the
barrowlands, me and the men my father sent to see me north, and
this white stu began to fall, like a soft rain. At rst I thought it
was so beautiful, like feathers drifting from the sky, but it kept on
and on, until I was frozen to the bone. The men had crusts of snow
in their beards and more on their shoulders, and still it kept coming.
I was afraid it would never end.”
Jon smiled.
The Wall loomed before them, glimmering palely in the light of
the half moon. In the sky above, the stars burned clear and sharp.
“Are they going to make me go up there?” Sam asked. His face
curdled like old milk as he looked at the great wooden stairs. “I’ll
die if I have to climb that.”
“There’s a winch,” Jon said, pointing. “They can draw you up in a
cage.”
Samwell Tarly sni ed. “I don’t like high places.”
It was too much. Jon frowned, incredulous. “Are you afraid of
everything?” he asked. “I don’t understand. If you are truly so
craven, why are you here? Why would a coward want to join the
Night’s Watch?”
Samwell Tarly looked at him for a long moment, and his round
face seemed to cave in on itself. He sat down on the frost-covered
ground and began to cry, huge choking sobs that made his whole
body shake. Jon Snow could only stand and watch. Like the
snowfall on the barrowlands, it seemed the tears would never end.
It was Ghost who knew what to do. Silent as shadow, the pale
direwolf moved closer and began to lick the warm tears o Samwell

Tarly’s face. The fat boy cried out, startled … and somehow, in a
heartbeat, his sobs turned to laughter.
Jon Snow laughed with him. Afterward they sat on the frozen
ground, huddled in their cloaks with Ghost between them. Jon told
the story of how he and Robb had found the pups newborn in the
late summer snows. It seemed a thousand years ago now. Before
long he found himself talking of Winterfell.
“Sometimes I dream about it,” he said. “I’m walking down this
long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so
I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don’t even know
who I’m looking for. Most nights it’s my father, but sometimes it’s
Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle.” The thought of
Benjen Stark saddened him; his uncle was still missing. The Old
Bear had sent out rangers in search of him. Ser Jaremy Rykker had
led two sweeps, and Quorin Halfhand had gone forth from the
Shadow Tower, but they’d found nothing aside from a few blazes in
the trees that his uncle had left to mark his way. In the stony
highlands to the northwest, the marks stopped abruptly and all trace
of Ben Stark vanished.
“Do you ever nd anyone in your dream?” Sam asked.
Jon shook his head. “No one. The castle is always empty.” He had
never told anyone of the dream, and he did not understand why he
was telling Sam now, yet somehow it felt good to talk of it. “Even
the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of
bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open
doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for
someone, for anyone. And then I nd myself in front of the door to
the crypts. It’s black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down.
Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don’t want to. I’m
afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are
down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet
and iron swords across their laps, but it’s not them I’m afraid of. I
scream that I’m not a Stark, that this isn’t my place, but it’s no
good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I
descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker,
until I want to scream.” He stopped, frowning, embarrassed. “That’s

when I always wake.” His skin cold and clammy, shivering in the
darkness of his cell. Ghost would leap up beside him, his warmth as
comforting as daybreak. He would go back to sleep with his face
pressed into the direwolf’s shaggy white fur. “Do you dream of
Horn Hill?” Jon asked.
“No.” Sam’s mouth grew tight and hard. “I hated it there.” He
scratched Ghost behind the ear, brooding, and Jon let the silence
breathe. After a long while Samwell Tarly began to talk, and Jon
Snow listened quietly, and learned how it was that a self-confessed
coward found himself on the Wall.
The Tarlys were a family old in honor, bannermen to Mace
Tyrell, Lord of Highgarden and Warden of the South. The eldest son
of Lord Randyll Tarly, Samwell was born heir to rich lands, a strong
keep, and a storied two-handed greatsword named Heartsbane,
forged of Valyrian steel and passed down from father to son near
ve hundred years.
Whatever pride his lord father might have felt at Samwell’s birth
vanished as the boy grew up plump, soft, and awkward. Sam loved
to listen to music and make his own songs, to wear soft velvets, to
play in the castle kitchen beside the cooks, drinking in the rich
smells as he snitched lemon cakes and blueberry tarts. His passions
were books and kittens and dancing, clumsy as he was. But he grew
ill at the sight of blood, and wept to see even a chicken slaughtered.
A dozen masters-at-arms came and went at Horn Hill, trying to turn
Samwell into the knight his father wanted. The boy was cursed and
caned, slapped and starved. One man had him sleep in his chainmail
to make him more martial. Another dressed him in his mother’s
clothing and paraded him through the bailey to shame him into
valor. He only grew fatter and more frightened, until Lord Randyll’s
disappointment turned to anger and then to loathing. “One time,”
Sam con ded, his voice dropping from a whisper, “two men came
to the castle, warlocks from Qarth with white skin and blue lips.
They slaughtered a bull aurochs and made me bathe in the hot
blood, but it didn’t make me brave as they’d promised. I got sick
and retched. Father had them scourged.”

Finally, after three girls in as many years, Lady Tarly gave her
lord husband a second son. From that day, Lord Randyll ignored
Sam, devoting all his time to the younger boy, a erce, robust child
more to his liking. Samwell had known several years of sweet peace
with his music and his books.
Until the dawn of his fteenth name day, when he had been
awakened to nd his horse saddled and ready. Three men-at-arms
had escorted him into a wood near Horn Hill, where his father was
skinning a deer. “You are almost a man grown now, and my heir,”
Lord Randyll Tarly had told his eldest son, his long knife laying
bare the carcass as he spoke. “You have given me no cause to
disown you, but neither will I allow you to inherit the land and title
that should be Dickon’s. Heartsbane must go to a man strong
enough to wield her, and you are not worthy to touch her hilt. So I
have decided that you shall this day announce that you wish to take
the black. You will forsake all claim to your brother’s inheritance
and start north before evenfall.
“If you do not, then on the morrow we shall have a hunt, and
somewhere in these woods your horse will stumble, and you will be
thrown from the saddle to die … or so I will tell your mother. She
has a woman’s heart and nds it in her to cherish even you, and I
have no wish to cause her pain. Please do not imagine that it will
truly be that easy, should you think to defy me. Nothing would
please me more than to hunt you down like the pig you are.” His
arms were red to the elbow as he laid the skinning knife aside. “So.
There is your choice. The Night’s Watch”—he reached inside the
deer, ripped out its heart, and held it in his st, red and dripping
—“or this.”
Sam told the tale in a calm, dead voice, as if it were something
that had happened to someone else, not to him. And strangely, Jon
thought, he did not weep, not even once. When he was done, they
sat together and listened to the wind for a time. There was no other
sound in all the world.
Finally Jon said, “We should go back to the common hall.”
“Why?” Sam asked.

Jon shrugged. “There’s hot cider to drink, or mulled wine if you
prefer. Some nights Dareon sings for us, if the mood is on him. He
was a singer, before … well, not truly, but almost, an apprentice
singer.”
“How did he come here?” Sam asked.
“Lord Rowan of Goldengrove found him in bed with his daughter.
The girl was two years older, and Dareon swears she helped him
through her window, but under her father’s eye she named it rape,
so here he is. When Maester Aemon heard him sing, he said his
voice was honey poured over thunder.” Jon smiled. “Toad
sometimes sings too, if you call it singing. Drinking songs he
learned in his father’s winesink. Pyp says his voice is piss poured
over a fart.” They laughed at that together.
“I should like to hear them both,” Sam admitted, “but they would
not want me there.” His face was troubled. “He’s going to make me
ght again on the morrow, isn’t he?”
“He is,” Jon was forced to say.
Sam got awkwardly to his feet. “I had better try to sleep,” He
huddled down in his cloak and plodded o .
The others were still in the common room when Jon returned,
alone but for Ghost. “Where have you been?” Pyp asked.
“Talking with Sam,” he said.
“He truly is craven,” said Grenn. “At supper, there were still
places on the bench when he got his pie, but he was too scared to
come sit with us.”
“The Lord of Ham thinks he’s too good to eat with the likes of
us,” suggested Jeren.
“I saw him eat a pork pie,” Toad said, smirking. “Do you think it
was a brother?” He began to make oinking noises.
“Stop it!” Jon snapped angrily.
The other boys fell silent, taken aback by his sudden fury. “Listen
to me,” Jon said into the quiet, and he told them how it was going
to be. Pyp backed him, as he’d known he would, but when Halder
spoke up, it was a pleasant surprise. Grenn was anxious at the rst,
but Jon knew the words to move him. One by one the rest fell in
line. Jon persuaded some, cajoled some, shamed the others, made

threats where threats were required. At the end they had all
agreed … all but Rast.
“You girls do as you please,” Rast said, “but if Thorne sends me
against Lady Piggy, I’m going to slice me o a rasher of bacon.” He
laughed in Jon’s face and left them there.
Hours later, as the castle slept, three of them paid a call on his
cell. Grenn held his arms while Pyp sat on his legs. Jon could hear
Rast’s rapid breathing as Ghost leapt onto his chest. The direwolf’s
eyes burned red as embers as his teeth nipped lightly at the soft skin
of the boy’s throat, just enough to draw blood. “Remember, we
know where you sleep,” Jon said softly.
The next morning Jon heard Rast tell Albett and Toad how his
razor had slipped while he shaved.
From that day forth, neither Rast nor any of the others would
hurt Samwell Tarly. When Ser Alliser matched them against him,
they would stand their ground and swat aside his slow, clumsy
strokes. If the master-at-arms screamed for an attack, they would
dance in and tap Sam lightly on breastplate or helm or leg. Ser
Alliser raged and threatened and called them all cravens and women
and worse, yet Sam remained unhurt. A few nights later, at Jon’s
urging, he joined them for the evening meal, taking a place on the
bench beside Halder. It was another fortnight before he found the
nerve to join their talk, but in time he was laughing at Pyp’s faces
and teasing Grenn with the best of them.
Fat and awkward and frightened he might be, but Samwell Tarly
was no fool. One night he visited Jon in his cell. “I don’t know what
you did,” he said, “but I know you did it.” He looked away shyly.
“I’ve never had a friend before.”
“We’re not friends,” Jon said. He put a hand on Sam’s broad
shoulder. “We’re brothers.”
And so they were, he thought to himself after Sam had taken his
leave. Robb and Bran and Rickon were his father’s sons, and he
loved them still, yet Jon knew that he had never truly been one of
them. Catelyn Stark had seen to that. The grey walls of Winterfell
might still haunt his dreams, but Castle Black was his life now, and

his brothers were Sam and Grenn and Halder and Pyp and the other
cast-outs who wore the black of the Night’s Watch.
“My uncle spoke truly,” he whispered to Ghost. He wondered if
he would ever see Benjen Stark again, to tell him.

EDDARD

“It’s the Hand’s tourney that’s the cause of all the trouble, my
lords,” the Commander of the City Watch complained to the king’s
council.
“The king’s tourney,” Ned corrected, wincing. “I assure you, the
Hand wants no part of it.”
“Call it what you will, my lord. Knights have been arriving from
all over the realm, and for every knight we get two freeriders, three
craftsmen, six men-at-arms, a dozen merchants, two dozen whores,
and more thieves than I dare guess. This cursed heat had half the
city in a fever to start, and now with all these visitors … last night
we had a drowning, a tavern riot, three knife ghts, a rape, two
res, robberies beyond count, and a drunken horse race down the
Street of the Sisters. The night before a woman’s head was found in
the Great Sept, oating in the rainbow pool. No one seems to know
how it got there or who it belongs to.”
“How dreadful,” Varys said with a shudder.
Lord Renly Baratheon was less sympathetic. “If you cannot keep
the king’s peace, Janos, perhaps the City Watch should be
commanded by someone who can.”
Stout, jowly Janos Slynt pu ed himself up like an angry frog, his
bald pate reddening. “Aegon the Dragon himself could not keep the
peace, Lord Renly. I need more men.”
“How many?” Ned asked, leaning forward. As ever, Robert had
not troubled himself to attend the council session, so it fell to his

Hand to speak for him.
“As many as can be gotten, Lord Hand.”
“Hire fty new men,” Ned told him. “Lord Baelish will see that
you get the coin.”
“I will?” Little nger said.
“You will. You found forty thousand golden dragons for a
champion’s purse, surely you can scrape together a few coppers to
keep the king’s peace.” Ned turned back to Janos Slynt. “I will also
give you twenty good swords from my own household guard, to
serve with the Watch until the crowds have left.”
“All thanks, Lord Hand,” Slynt said, bowing. “I promise you, they
shall be put to good use.”
When the Commander had taken his leave, Eddard Stark turned
to the rest of the council. “The sooner this folly is done with, the
better I shall like it.” As if the expense and trouble were not
irksome enough, all and sundry insisted on salting Ned’s wound by
calling it “the Hand’s tourney,” as if he were the cause of it. And
Robert honestly seemed to think he should feel honored!
“The realm prospers from such events, my lord,” Grand Maester
Pycelle said. “They bring the great the chance of glory, and the
lowly a respite from their woes.”
“And put coins in many a pocket,” Little nger added. “Every inn
in the city is full, and the whores are walking bowlegged and
jingling with each step.”
Lord Renly laughed. “We’re fortunate my brother Stannis is not
with us. Remember the time he proposed to outlaw brothels? The
king asked him if perhaps he’d like to outlaw eating, shitting, and
breathing while he was at it. If truth be told, I ofttimes wonder how
Stannis ever got that ugly daughter of his. He goes to his marriage
bed like a man marching to a battle eld, with a grim look in his
eyes and a determination to do his duty.”
Ned had not joined the laughter. “I wonder about your brother
Stannis as well. I wonder when he intends to end his visit to
Dragonstone and resume his seat on this council.”
“No doubt as soon as we’ve scourged all those whores into the
sea,” Little nger replied, provoking more laughter.

“I have heard quite enough about whores for one day,” Ned said,
rising. “Until the morrow.”
Harwin had the door when Ned returned to the Tower of the
Hand. “Summon Jory to my chambers and tell your father to saddle
my horse,” Ned told him, too brusquely.
“As you say, my lord.”
The Red Keep and the “Hand’s tourney” were cha ng him raw,
Ned re ected as he climbed. He yearned for the comfort of
Catelyn’s arms, for the sounds of Robb and Jon crossing swords in
the practice yard, for the cool days and cold nights of the north.
In his chambers he stripped o his council silks and sat for a
moment with the book while he waited for Jory to arrive. The
Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms, With
Descriptions of Many High Lords and Noble Ladies and Their Children,
by Grand Maester Malleon. Pycelle had spoken truly; it made for
ponderous reading. Yet Jon Arryn had asked for it, and Ned felt
certain he had reasons. There was something here, some truth
buried in these brittle yellow pages, if only he could see it. But
what? The tome was over a century old. Scarcely a man now alive
had yet been born when Malleon had compiled his dusty lists of
weddings, births, and deaths.
He opened to the section on House Lannister once more, and
turned the pages slowly, hoping against hope that something would
leap out at him. The Lannisters were an old family, tracing their
descent back to Lann the Clever, a trickster from the Age of Heroes
who was no doubt as legendary as Bran the Builder, though far
more beloved of singers and taletellers. In the songs, Lann was the
fellow who winkled the Casterlys out of Casterly Rock with no
weapon but his wits, and stole gold from the sun to brighten his
curly hair. Ned wished he were here now, to winkle the truth out of
this damnable book.
A sharp rap on the door heralded Jory Cassel. Ned closed
Malleon’s tome and bid him enter. “I’ve promised the City Watch
twenty of my guard until the tourney is done,” he told him. “I rely
on you to make the choice. Give Alyn the command, and make
certain the men understand that they are needed to stop ghts, not

start them.” Rising, Ned opened a cedar chest and removed a light
linen undertunic. “Did you nd the stableboy?”
“The watchman, my lord,” Jory said. “He vows he’ll never touch
another horse.”
“What did he have to say?”
“He claims he knew Lord Arryn well. Fast friends, they were.”
Jory snorted. “The Hand always gave the lads a copper on their
name days, he says. Had a way with horses. Never rode his mounts
too hard, and brought them carrots and apples, so they were always
pleased to see him.”
“Carrots and apples,” Ned repeated. It sounded as if this boy
would be even less use than the others. And he was the last of the
four Little nger had turned up. Jory had spoken to each of them in
turn. Ser Hugh had been brusque and uninformative, and arrogant
as only a new-made knight can be. If the Hand wished to talk to
him, he should be pleased to receive him, but he would not be
questioned by a mere captain of guards … even if said captain was
ten years older and a hundred times the swordsman. The serving
girl had at least been pleasant. She said Lord Jon had been reading
more than was good for him, that he was troubled and melancholy
over his young son’s frailty, and gru with his lady wife. The
potboy, now cordwainer, had never exchanged so much as a word
with Lord Jon, but he was full of oddments of kitchen gossip: the
lord had been quarreling with the king, the lord only picked at his
food, the lord was sending his boy to be fostered on Dragonstone,
the lord had taken a great interest in the breeding of hunting
hounds, the lord had visited a master armorer to commission a new
suit of plate, wrought all in pale silver with a blue jasper falcon and
a mother-of-pearl moon on the breast. The king’s own brother had
gone with him to help choose the design, the potboy said. No, not
Lord Renly, the other one, Lord Stannis.
“Did our watchman recall anything else of note?”
“The lad swears Lord Jon was as strong as a man half his age.
Often went riding with Lord Stannis, he says.”
Stannis again, Ned thought. He found that curious. Jon Arryn and
he had been cordial, but never friendly. And while Robert had been

riding north to Winterfell, Stannis had removed himself to
Dragonstone, the Targaryen island fastness he had conquered in his
brother’s name. He had given no word as to when he might return.
“Where did they go on these rides?” Ned asked.
“The boy says that they visited a brothel.”
“A brothel?” Ned said. “The Lord of the Eyrie and Hand of the
King visited a brothel with Stannis Baratheon?” He shook his head,
incredulous, wondering what Lord Renly would make of this tidbit.
Robert’s lusts were the subject of ribald drinking songs throughout
the realm, but Stannis was a di erent sort of man; a bare year
younger than the king, yet utterly unlike him, stern, humorless,
unforgiving, grim in his sense of duty.
“The boy insists it’s true. The Hand took three guardsmen with
him, and the boy says they were joking of it when he took their
horses afterward.”
“Which brothel?” Ned asked.
“The boy did not know. The guards would.”
“A pity Lysa carried them o to the Vale,” Ned said dryly. “The
gods are doing their best to vex us. Lady Lysa, Maester Colemon,
Lord Stannis … everyone who might actually know the truth of
what happened to Jon Arryn is a thousand leagues away.”
“Will you summon Lord Stannis back from Dragonstone?”
“Not yet,” Ned said. “Not until I have a better notion of what this
is all about and where he stands.” The matter nagged at him. Why
did Stannis leave? Had he played some part in Jon Arryn’s murder?
Or was he afraid? Ned found it hard to imagine what could frighten
Stannis Baratheon, who had once held Storm’s End through a year
of siege, surviving on rats and boot leather while the Lords Tyrell
and Redwyne sat outside with their hosts, banqueting in sight of his
walls.
“Bring me my doublet, if you would. The grey, with the direwolf
sigil. I want this armorer to know who I am. It might make him
more forthcoming.”
Jory went to the wardrobe. “Lord Renly is brother to Lord Stannis
as well as the king.”

“Yet it seems that he was not invited on these rides.” Ned was not
sure what to make of Renly, with all his friendly ways and easy
smiles. A few days past, he had taken Ned aside to show him an
exquisite rose gold locklet. Inside was a miniature painted in the
vivid Myrish style, of a lovely young girl with doe’s eyes and a
cascade of soft brown hair. Renly had seemed anxious to know if
the girl reminded him of anyone, and when Ned had no answer but
a shrug, he had seemed disappointed. The maid was Loras Tyrell’s
sister Margaery, he’d confessed, but there were those who said she
looked like Lyanna. “No,” Ned had told him, bemused. Could it be
that Lord Renly, who looked so like a young Robert, had conceived
a passion for a girl he fancied to be a young Lyanna? That struck
him as more than passing queer.
Jory held out the doublet, and Ned slid his hands through the
armholes. “Perhaps Lord Stannis will return for Robert’s tourney,”
he said as Jory laced the garment up the back.
“That would be a stroke of fortune, my lord,” Jory said.
Ned buckled on a longsword. “In other words, not bloody likely.”
His smile was grim.
Jory draped Ned’s cloak across his shoulders and clasped it at the
throat with the Hand’s badge of o ce. “The armorer lives above his
shop, in a large house at the top of the Street of Steel. Alyn knows
the way, my lord.”
Ned nodded. “The gods help this potboy if he’s sent me o haring
after shadows.” It was a slim enough sta to lean on, but the Jon
Arryn that Ned Stark had known was not one to wear jeweled and
silvered plate. Steel was steel; it was meant for protection, not
ornament. He might have changed his views, to be sure. He would
scarcely have been the rst man who came to look on things
di erently after a few years at court … but the change was marked
enough to make Ned wonder.
“Is there any other service I might perform?”
“I suppose you’d best begin visiting whorehouses.”
“Hard duty, my lord.” Jory grinned. “The men will be glad to
help. Porther has made a fair start already.”

Ned’s favorite horse was saddled and waiting in the yard. Varly
and Jacks fell in beside him as he rode through the yard. Their steel
caps and shirts of mail must have been sweltering, yet they said no
word of complaint. As Lord Eddard passed beneath the King’s Gate
into the stink of the city, his grey and white cloak streaming from
his shoulders, he saw eyes everywhere and kicked his mount into a
trot. His guard followed.
He looked behind him frequently as they made their way through
the crowded city streets. Tomard and Desmond had left the castle
early this morning to take up positions on the route they must take,
and watch for anyone following them, but even so, Ned was
uncertain. The shadow of the King’s Spider and his little birds had
him fretting like a maiden on her wedding night.
The Street of Steel began at the market square beside the River
Gate, as it was named on maps, or the Mud Gate, as it was
commonly called. A mummer on stilts was striding through the
throngs like some great insect, with a horde of barefoot children
trailing behind him, hooting. Elsewhere, two ragged boys no older
than Bran were dueling with sticks, to the loud encouragement of
some and the furious curses of others. An old woman ended the
contest by leaning out of her window and emptying a bucket of
slops on the heads of the combatants. In the shadow of the wall,
farmers stood beside their wagons, bellowing out, “Apples, the best
apples, cheap at twice the price,” and “Blood melons, sweet as
honey,” and “Turnips, onions, roots, here you go here, here you go,
turnips, onions, roots, here you go here.”
The Mud Gate was open, and a squad of City Watchmen stood
under the portcullis in their golden cloaks, leaning on spears. When
a column of riders appeared from the west, the guardsmen sprang
into action, shouting commands and moving the carts and foot
tra c aside to let the knight enter with his escort. The rst rider
through the gate carried a long black banner. The silk rippled in the
wind like a living thing; across the fabric was blazoned a night sky
slashed with purple lightning. “Make way for Lord Beric!” the rider
shouted. “Make way for Lord Beric!” And close behind came the
young lord himself, a dashing gure on a black courser, with red-

gold hair and a black satin cloak dusted with stars. “Here to ght in
the Hand’s tourney, my lord?” a guardsman called out to him. “Here
to win the Hand’s tourney,” Lord Beric shouted back as the crowd
cheered.
Ned turned o the square where the Street of Steel began and
followed its winding path up a long hill, past blacksmiths working
at open forges, freeriders haggling over mail shirts, and grizzled
ironmongers selling old blades and razors from their wagons. The
farther they climbed, the larger the buildings grew. The man they
wanted was all the way at the top of the hill, in a huge house of
timber and plaster whose upper stories loomed over the narrow
street. The double doors showed a hunting scene carved in ebony
and weirwood. A pair of stone knights stood sentry at the entrance,
armored in fanciful suits of polished red steel that transformed them
into gri n and unicorn. Ned left his horse with Jacks and
shouldered his way inside.
The slim young serving girl took quick note of Ned’s badge and
the sigil on his doublet, and the master came hurrying out, all
smiles and bows. “Wine for the King’s Hand,” he told the girl,
gesturing Ned to a couch. “I am Tobho Mott, my lord, please,
please, put yourself at ease.” He wore a black velvet coat with
hammers embroidered on the sleeves in silver thread. Around his
neck was a heavy silver chain and a sapphire as large as a pigeon’s
egg. “If you are in need of new arms for the Hand’s tourney, you
have come to the right shop.” Ned did not bother to correct him.
“My work is costly, and I make no apologies for that, my lord,” he
said as he lled two matching silver goblets. “You will not nd
craftsmanship equal to mine anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms, I
promise you. Visit every forge in King’s Landing if you like, and
compare for yourself. Any village smith can hammer out a shirt of
mail; my work is art.”
Ned sipped his wine and let the man go on. The Knight of Flowers
bought all his armor here, Tobho boasted, and many high lords, the
ones who knew ne steel, and even Lord Renly, the king’s own
brother. Perhaps the Hand had seen Lord Renly’s new armor, the
green plate with the golden antlers? No other armorer in the city

could get that deep a green; he knew the secret of putting color in
the steel itself, paint and enamel were the crutches of a
journeyman. Or mayhaps the Hand wanted a blade? Tobho had
learned to work Valyrian steel at the forges of Qohor as a boy. Only
a man who knew the spells could take old weapons and forge them
anew. “The direwolf is the sigil of House Stark, is it not? I could
fashion a direwolf helm so real that children will run from you in
the street,” he vowed.
Ned smiled. “Did you make a falcon helm for Lord Arryn?”
Tobho Mott paused a long moment and set aside his wine. “The
Hand did call upon me, with Lord Stannis, the king’s brother. I
regret to say, they did not honor me with their patronage.”
Ned looked at the man evenly, saying nothing, waiting. He had
found over the years that silence sometimes yielded more than
questions. And so it was this time.
“They asked to see the boy,” the armorer said, “so I took them
back to the forge.”
“The boy,” Ned echoed. He had no notion who the boy might be.
“I should like to see the boy as well.”
Tobho Mott gave him a cool, careful look. “As you wish, my
lord,” he said with no trace of his former friendliness. He led Ned
out a rear door and across a narrow yard, back to the cavernous
stone barn where the work was done. When the armorer opened the
door, the blast of hot air that came through made Ned feel as
though he were walking into a dragon’s mouth. Inside, a forge
blazed in each corner, and the air stank of smoke and sulfur.
Journeymen armorers glanced up from their hammers and tongs
just long enough to wipe the sweat from their brows, while barechested apprentice boys worked the bellows.
The master called over a tall lad about Robb’s age, his arms and
chest corded with muscle. “This is Lord Stark, the new Hand of the
King,” he told him as the boy looked at Ned through sullen blue
eyes and pushed back sweat-soaked hair with his ngers. Thick hair,
shaggy and unkempt and black as ink. The shadow of a new beard
darkened his jaw. “This is Gendry. Strong for his age, and he works
hard. Show the Hand that helmet you made, lad.” Almost shyly, the

boy led them to his bench, and a steel helm shaped like a bull’s
head, with two great curving horns.
Ned turned the helm over in his hands. It was raw steel,
unpolished but expertly shaped. “This is ne work. I would be
pleased if you would let me buy it.”
The boy snatched it out of his hands. “It’s not for sale.”
Tobho Mott looked horror-struck. “Boy, this is the King’s Hand. If
his lordship wants this helm, make him a gift of it. He honors you
by asking.”
“I made it for me,” the boy said stubbornly.
“A hundred pardons, my lord,” his master said hurriedly to Ned.
“The boy is crude as new steel, and like new steel would pro t from
some beating. That helm is journeyman’s work at best. Forgive him
and I promise I will craft you a helm like none you have ever seen.”
“He’s done nothing that requires my forgiveness. Gendry, when
Lord Arryn came to see you, what did you talk about?”
“He asked me questions is all, m’lord.”
“What sort of questions?”
The boy shrugged. “How was I, and was I well treated, and if I
liked the work, and stu about my mother. Who she was and what
she looked like and all.”
“What did you tell him?” Ned asked.
The boy shoved a fresh fall of black hair o his forehead. “She
died when I was little. She had yellow hair, and sometimes she used
to sing to me, I remember. She worked in an alehouse.”
“Did Lord Stannis question you as well?”
“The bald one? No, not him. He never said no word, just glared at
me, like I was some raper who done for his daughter.”
“Mind your lthy tongue,” the master said. “This is the King’s
own Hand.” The boy lowered his eyes. “A smart boy, but stubborn.
That helm … the others call him bullheaded, so he threw it in their
teeth.”
Ned touched the boy’s head, ngering the thick black hair. “Look
at me, Gendry.” The apprentice lifted his face. Ned studied the
shape of his jaw, the eyes like blue ice. Yes, he thought, I see it. “Go
back to your work, lad. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” He walked

back to the house with the master. “Who paid the boy’s apprentice
fee?” he asked lightly.
Mott looked fretful. “You saw the boy. Such a strong boy. Those
hands of his, those hands were made for hammers. He had such
promise, I took him on without a fee.”
“The truth now,” Ned urged. “The streets are full of strong boys.
The day you take on an apprentice without a fee will be the day the
Wall comes down. Who paid for him?”
“A lord,” the master said reluctantly. “He gave no name, and
wore no sigil on his coat. He paid in gold, twice the customary sum,
and said he was paying once for the boy, and once for my silence.”
“Describe him.”
“He was stout, round of shoulder, not so tall as you. Brown beard,
but there was a bit of red in it, I’ll swear. He wore a rich cloak, that
I do remember, heavy purple velvet worked with silver threads, but
the hood shadowed his face and I never did see him clear.” He
hesitated a moment. “My lord, I want no trouble.”
“None of us wants trouble, but I fear these are troubled times,
Master Mott,” Ned said. “You know who the boy is.”
“I am only an armorer, my lord. I know what I’m told.”
“You know who the boy is,” Ned repeated patiently. “That is not
a question.”
“The boy is my apprentice,” the master said. He looked Ned in
the eye, stubborn as old iron. “Who he was before he came to me,
that’s none of my concern.”
Ned nodded. He decided that he liked Tobho Mott, master
armorer. “If the day ever comes when Gendry would rather wield a
sword than forge one, send him to me. He has the look of a warrior.
Until then, you have my thanks, Master Mott, and my promise.
Should I ever want a helm to frighten children, this will be the rst
place I visit.”
His guard was waiting outside with the horses. “Did you nd
anything, my lord?” Jacks asked as Ned mounted up.
“I did,” Ned told him, wondering. What had Jon Arryn wanted
with a king’s bastard, and why was it worth his life?

CATELYN

“My lady, you ought cover your head,” Ser Rodrik told her as their
horses plodded north. “You will take a chill.”
“It is only water, Ser Rodrik,” Catelyn replied. Her hair hung wet
and heavy, a loose strand stuck to her forehead, and she could
imagine how ragged and wild she must look, but for once she did
not care. The southern rain was soft and warm. Catelyn liked the
feel of it on her face, gentle as a mother’s kisses. It took her back to
her childhood, to long grey days at Riverrun. She remembered the
godswood, drooping branches heavy with moisture, and the sound
of her brother’s laughter as he chased her through piles of damp
leaves. She remembered making mud pies with Lysa, the weight of
them, the mud slick and brown between her ngers. They had
served them to Little nger, giggling, and he’d eaten so much mud
he was sick for a week. How young they all had been.
Catelyn had almost forgotten. In the north, the rain fell cold and
hard, and sometimes at night it turned to ice. It was as likely to kill
a crop as nurture it, and it sent grown men running for the nearest
shelter. That was no rain for little girls to play in.
“I am soaked through,” Ser Rodrik complained. “Even my bones
are wet.” The woods pressed close around them, and the steady
pattering of rain on leaves was accompanied by the small sucking
sounds their horses made as their hooves pulled free of the mud.
“We will want a re tonight, my lady, and a hot meal would serve
us both.”

“There is an inn at the crossroads up ahead,” Catelyn told him.
She had slept many a night there in her youth, traveling with her
father. Lord Hoster Tully had been a restless man in his prime,
always riding somewhere. She still remembered the innkeep, a fat
woman named Masha Heddle who chewed sourleaf night and day
and seemed to have an endless supply of smiles and sweet cakes for
the children. The sweet cakes had been soaked with honey, rich and
heavy on the tongue, but how Catelyn had dreaded those smiles.
The sourleaf had stained Masha’s teeth a dark red, and made her
smile a bloody horror.
“An inn,” Ser Rodrik repeated wistfully. “If only … but we dare
not risk it. If we wish to remain unknown, I think it best we seek
out some small holdfast …” He broke o as they heard sounds up
the road; splashing water, the clink of mail, a horse’s whinny.
“Riders,” he warned, his hand dropping to the hilt of his sword.
Even on the kingsroad, it never hurt to be wary.
They followed the sounds around a lazy bend of the road and saw
them; a column of armed men noisily fording a swollen stream.
Catelyn reined up to let them pass. The banner in the hand of the
foremost rider hung sodden and limp, but the guardsmen wore
indigo cloaks and on their shoulders ew the silver eagle of
Seagard. “Mallisters,” Ser Rodrik whispered to her, as if she had not
known. “My lady, best pull up your hood.”
Catelyn made no move. Lord Jason Mallister himself rode with
them, surrounded by his knights, his son Patrek by his side and their
squires close behind. They were riding for King’s Landing and the
Hand’s tourney, she knew. For the past week, the travelers had
been thick as ies upon the kingsroad; knights and freeriders,
singers with their harps and drums, heavy wagons laden with hops
or corn or casks of honey, traders and craftsmen and whores, and all
of them moving south.
She studied Lord Jason boldly. The last time she had seen him he
had been jesting with her uncle at her wedding feast; the Mallisters
stood bannermen to the Tullys, and his gifts had been lavish. His
brown hair was salted with white now, his face chiseled gaunt by
time, yet the years had not touched his pride. He rode like a man

who feared nothing. Catelyn envied him that; she had come to fear
so much. As the riders passed, Lord Jason nodded a curt greeting,
but it was only a high lord’s courtesy to strangers chance met on the
road. There was no recognition in those erce eyes, and his son did
not even waste a look.
“He did not know you,” Ser Rodrik said after, wondering.
“He saw a pair of mud-spattered travelers by the side of the road,
wet and tired. It would never occur to him to suspect that one of
them was the daughter of his liege lord. I think we shall be safe
enough at the inn, Ser Rodrik.”
It was near dark when they reached it, at the crossroads north of
the great con uence of the Trident. Masha Heddle was fatter and
greyer than Catelyn remembered, still chewing her sourleaf, but she
gave them only the most cursory of looks, with nary a hint of her
ghastly red smile. “Two rooms at the top of the stair, that’s all there
is,” she said, chewing all the while. “They’re under the bell tower,
you won’t be missing meals, though there’s some thinks it too noisy.
Can’t be helped. We’re full up, or near as makes no matter. It’s
those rooms or the road.”
It was those rooms, low, dusty garrets at the top of a cramped
narrow staircase. “Leave your boots down here,” Masha told them
after she’d taken their coin. “The boy will clean them. I won’t have
you tracking mud up my stairs. Mind the bell. Those who come late
to meals don’t eat.” There were no smiles, and no mention of sweet
cakes.
When the supper bell rang, the sound was deafening. Catelyn had
changed into dry clothes. She sat by the window, watching rain run
down the pane. The glass was milky and full of bubbles, and a wet
dusk was falling outside. Catelyn could just make out the muddy
crossing where the two great roads met.
The crossroads gave her pause. If they turned west from here, it
was an easy ride down to Riverrun. Her father had always given her
wise counsel when she needed it most, and she yearned to talk to
him, to warn him of the gathering storm. If Winterfell needed to
brace for war, how much more so Riverrun, so much closer to
King’s Landing, with the power of Casterly Rock looming to the

west like a shadow. If only her father had been stronger, she might
have chanced it, but Hoster Tully had been bedridden these past
two years, and Catelyn was loath to tax him now.
The eastern road was wilder and more dangerous, climbing
through rocky foothills and thick forests into the Mountains of the
Moon, past high passes and deep chasms to the Vale of Arryn and
the stony Fingers beyond. Above the Vale, the Eyrie stood high and
impregnable, its towers reaching for the sky. There she would nd
her sister … and, perhaps, some of the answers Ned sought. Surely
Lysa knew more than she had dared to put in her letter. She might
have the very proof that Ned needed to bring the Lannisters to ruin,
and if it came to war, they would need the Arryns and the eastern
lords who owed them service.
Yet the mountain road was perilous. Shadowcats prowled those
passes, rock slides were common, and the mountain clans were
lawless brigands, descending from the heights to rob and kill and
melting away like snow whenever the knights rode out from the
Vale in search of them. Even Jon Arryn, as great a lord as any the
Eyrie had ever known, had always traveled in strength when he
crossed the mountains. Catelyn’s only strength was one elderly
knight, armored in loyalty.
No, she thought, Riverrun and the Eyrie would have to wait. Her
path ran north to Winterfell, where her sons and her duty were
waiting for her. As soon as they were safely past the Neck, she
could declare herself to one of Ned’s bannermen, and send riders
racing ahead with orders to mount a watch on the kingsroad.
The rain obscured the elds beyond the crossroads, but Catelyn
saw the land clear enough in her memory. The marketplace was just
across the way, and the village a mile farther on, half a hundred
white cottages surrounding a small stone sept. There would be more
now; the summer had been long and peaceful. North of here the
kingsroad ran along the Green Fork of the Trident, through fertile
valleys and green woodlands, past thriving towns and stout
holdfasts and the castles of the river lords.
Catelyn knew them all: the Blackwoods and the Brackens, ever
enemies, whose quarrels her father was obliged to settle; Lady

Whent, last of her line, who dwelt with her ghosts in the cavernous
vaults of Harrenhal; irascible Lord Frey, who had outlived seven
wives and lled his twin castles with children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren, and bastards and grandbastards as well. All of
them were bannermen to the Tullys, their swords sworn to the
service of Riverrun. Catelyn wondered if that would be enough, if it
came to war. Her father was the staunchest man who’d ever lived,
and she had no doubt that he would call his banners … but would
the banners come? The Darrys and Rygers and Mootons had sworn
oaths to Riverrun as well, yet they had fought with Rhaegar
Targaryen on the Trident, while Lord Frey had arrived with his
levies well after the battle was over, leaving some doubt as to
which army he had planned to join (theirs, he had assured the
victors solemnly in the aftermath, but ever after her father had
called him the Late Lord Frey). It must not come to war, Catelyn
thought fervently. They must not let it.
Ser Rodrik came for her just as the bell ceased its clangor. “We
had best make haste if we hope to eat tonight, my lady.”
“It might be safer if we were not knight and lady until we pass
the Neck,” she told him. “Common travelers attract less notice. A
father and daughter taken to the road on some family business,
say.”
“As you say, my lady,” Ser Rodrik agreed. It was only when she
laughed that he realized what he’d done. “The old courtesies die
hard, my—my daughter.” He tried to tug on his missing whiskers,
and sighed with exasperation.
Catelyn took his arm. “Come, Father,” she said. “You’ll nd that
Masha Heddle sets a good table, I think, but try not to praise her.
You truly don’t want to see her smile.”
The common room was long and drafty, with a row of huge
wooden kegs at one end and a replace at the other. A serving boy
ran back and forth with skewers of meat while Masha drew beer
from the kegs, chewing her sourleaf all the while.
The benches were crowded, townsfolk and farmers mingling
freely with all manner of travelers. The crossroads made for odd
companions; dyers with black and purple hands shared a bench with

rivermen reeking of sh, an ironsmith thick with muscle squeezed
in beside a wizened old septon, hard-bitten sellswords and soft
plump merchants swapped news like boon companions.
The company included more swords than Catelyn would have
liked. Three by the re wore the red stallion badge of the Brackens,
and there was a large party in blue steel ringmail and capes of a
silvery grey. On their shoulder was another familiar sigil, the twin
towers of House Frey. She studied their faces, but they were all too
young to have known her. The senior among them would have been
no older than Bran when she went north.
Ser Rodrik found them an empty place on the bench near the
kitchen. Across the table a handsome youth was ngering a
woodharp. “Seven blessings to you, goodfolk,” he said as they sat.
An empty wine cup stood on the table before him.
“And to you, singer,” Catelyn returned. Ser Rodrik called for
bread and meat and beer in a tone that meant now. The singer, a
youth of some eighteen years, eyed them boldly and asked where
they were going, and from whence they had come, and what news
they had, letting the questions y as quick as arrows and never
pausing for an answer. “We left King’s Landing a fortnight ago,”
Catelyn replied, answering the safest of his questions.
“That’s where I’m bound,” the youth said. As she had suspected,
he was more interested in telling his own story than in hearing
theirs. Singers loved nothing half so well as the sound of their own
voices. “The Hand’s tourney means rich lords with fat purses. The
last time I came away with more silver than I could carry … or
would have, if I hadn’t lost it all betting on the Kingslayer to win
the day.”
“The gods frown on the gambler,” Ser Rodrik said sternly. He was
of the north, and shared the Stark views on tournaments.
“They frowned on me, for certain,” the singer said. “Your cruel
gods and the Knight of Flowers altogether did me in.”
“No doubt that was a lesson for you,” Ser Rodrik said.
“It was. This time my coin will champion Ser Loras.”
Ser Rodrik tried to tug at whiskers that were not there, but before
he could frame a rebuke the serving boy came scurrying up. He laid

trenchers of bread before them and lled them with chunks of
browned meat o a skewer, dripping with hot juice. Another
skewer held tiny onions, re peppers, and fat mushrooms. Ser
Rodrik set to lustily as the lad ran back to fetch them beer.
“My name is Marillion,” the singer said, plucking a string on his
woodharp. “Doubtless you’ve heard me play somewhere?”
His manner made Catelyn smile. Few wandering singers ever
ventured as far north as Winterfell, but she knew his like from her
girlhood in Riverrun. “I fear not,” she told him.
He drew a plaintive chord from the woodharp. “That is your
loss,” he said. “Who was the nest singer you’ve ever heard?”
“Alia of Braavos,” Ser Rodrik answered at once.
“Oh, I’m much better than that old stick,” Marillion said. “If you
have the silver for a song, I’ll gladly show you.”
“I might have a copper or two, but I’d sooner toss it down a well
than pay for your howling,” Ser Rodrik groused. His opinion of
singers was well known; music was a lovely thing for girls, but he
could not comprehend why any healthy boy would ll his hand with
a harp when he might have had a sword.
“Your grandfather has a sour nature,” Marillion said to Catelyn. “I
meant to do you honor. An homage to your beauty. In truth, I was
made to sing for kings and high lords.”
“Oh, I can see that,” Catelyn said. “Lord Tully is fond of song, I
hear. No doubt you’ve been to Riverrun.”
“A hundred times,” the singer said airily. “They keep a chamber
for me, and the young lord is like a brother.”
Catelyn smiled, wondering what Edmure would think of that.
Another singer had once bedded a girl her brother fancied; he had
hated the breed ever since. “And Winterfell?” she asked him. “Have
you traveled north?”
“Why would I?” Marillion asked. “It’s all blizzards and bearskins
up there, and the Starks know no music but the howling of wolves.”
Distantly, she was aware of the door banging open at the far end of
the room.
“Innkeep,” a servant’s voice called out behind her, “we have
horses that want stabling, and my lord of Lannister requires a room

and a hot bath.”
“Oh, gods,” Ser Rodrik said before Catelyn reached out to silence
him, her ngers tightening hard around his forearm.
Masha Heddle was bowing and smiling her hideous red smile.
“I’m sorry, m’lord, truly, we’re full up, every room.”
There were four of them, Catelyn saw. An old man in the black of
the Night’s Watch, two servants … and him, standing there small
and bold as life. “My men will sleep in your stable, and as for
myself, well, I do not require a large room, as you can plainly see.”
He ashed a mocking grin. “So long as the re’s warm and the
straw reasonably free of eas, I am a happy man.”
Masha Heddle was beside herself. “M’lord, there’s nothing, it’s
the tourney, there’s no help for it, oh …”
Tyrion Lannister pulled a coin from his purse and icked it up
over his head, caught it, tossed it again. Even across the room,
where Catelyn sat, the wink of gold was unmistakable.
A freerider in a faded blue cloak lurched to his feet. “You’re
welcome to my room, m’lord.”
“Now there’s a clever man,” Lannister said as he sent the coin
spinning across the room. The freerider snatched it from the air.
“And a nimble one to boot.” The dwarf turned back to Masha
Heddle. “You will be able to manage food, I trust?”
“Anything you like, m’lord, anything at all,” the innkeep
promised. And may he choke on it, Catelyn thought, but it was Bran
she saw choking, drowning on his own blood.
Lannister glanced at the nearest tables. “My men will have
whatever you’re serving these people. Double portions, we’ve had a
long hard ride. I’ll take a roast fowl—chicken, duck, pigeon, it
makes no matter. And send up a agon of your best wine. Yoren,
will you sup with me?”
“Aye, m’lord, I will,” the black brother replied.
The dwarf had not so much as glanced toward the far end of the
room, and Catelyn was thinking how grateful she was for the
crowded benches between them when suddenly Marillion bounded
to his feet. “My lord of Lannister!” he called out. “I would be pleased

to entertain you while you eat. Let me sing you the lay of your
father’s great victory at King’s Landing!”
“Nothing would be more likely to ruin my supper,” the dwarf said
dryly. His mismatched eyes considered the singer brie y, started to
move away … and found Catelyn. He looked at her for a moment,
puzzled. She turned her face away, but too late. The dwarf was
smiling. “Lady Stark, what an unexpected pleasure,” he said. “I was
sorry to miss you at Winterfell.”
Marillion gaped at her, confusion giving way to chagrin as
Catelyn rose slowly to her feet. She heard Ser Rodrik curse. If only
the man had lingered at the Wall, she thought, if only …
“Lady … Stark?” Masha Heddle said thickly.
“I was still Catelyn Tully the last time I bedded here,” she told
the innkeep. She could hear the muttering, feel the eyes upon her.
Catelyn glanced around the room, at the faces of the knights and
sworn swords, and took a deep breath to slow the frantic beating of
her heart. Did she dare take the risk? There was no time to think it
through, only the moment and the sound of her own voice ringing
in her ears. “You in the corner,” she said to an older man she had
not noticed until now. “Is that the black bat of Harrenhal I see
embroidered on your surcoat, ser?”
The man got to his feet. “It is, my lady.”
“And is Lady Whent a true and honest friend to my father, Lord
Hoster Tully of Riverrun?”
“She is,” the man replied stoutly.
Ser Rodrik rose quietly and loosened his sword in its scabbard.
The dwarf was blinking at them, blank-faced, with puzzlement in
his mismatched eyes.
“The red stallion was ever a welcome sight in Riverrun,” she said
to the trio by the re. “My father counts Jonos Bracken among his
oldest and most loyal bannermen.”
The three men-at-arms exchanged uncertain looks. “Our lord is
honored by his trust,” one of them said hesitantly.
“I envy your father all these ne friends,” Lannister quipped, “but
I do not quite see the purpose of this, Lady Stark.”

She ignored him, turning to the large party in blue and grey.
They were the heart of the matter; there were more than twenty of
them. “I know your sigil as well: the twin towers of Frey. How
fares your good lord, sers?”
Their captain rose. “Lord Walder is well, my lady. He plans to
take a new wife on his ninetieth name day, and has asked your lord
father to honor the wedding with his presence.”
Tyrion Lannister sniggered. That was when Catelyn knew he was
hers. “This man came a guest into my house, and there conspired to
murder my son, a boy of seven,” she proclaimed to the room at
large, pointing. Ser Rodrik moved to her side, his sword in hand.
“In the name of King Robert and the good lords you serve, I call
upon you to seize him and help me return him to Winterfell to
await the king’s justice.”
She did not know what was more satisfying: the sound of a dozen
swords drawn as one or the look on Tyrion Lannister’s face.

SANSA

Sansa rode to the Hand’s tourney with Septa Mordane and Jeyne
Poole, in a litter with curtains of yellow silk so ne she could see
right through them. They turned the whole world gold. Beyond the
city walls, a hundred pavilions had been raised beside the river, and
the common folk came out in the thousands to watch the games.
The splendor of it all took Sansa’s breath away; the shining armor,
the great chargers caparisoned in silver and gold, the shouts of the
crowd, the banners snapping in the wind … and the knights
themselves, the knights most of all.
“It is better than the songs,” she whispered when they found the
places that her father had promised her, among the high lords and
ladies. Sansa was dressed beautifully that day, in a green gown that
brought out the auburn of her hair, and she knew they were looking
at her and smiling.
They watched the heroes of a hundred songs ride forth, each
more fabulous than the last. The seven knights of the Kingsguard
took the eld, all but Jaime Lannister in scaled armor the color of
milk, their cloaks as white as fresh-fallen snow. Ser Jaime wore the
white cloak as well, but beneath it he was shining gold from head to
foot, with a lion’s-head helm and a golden sword. Ser Gregor
Clegane, the Mountain That Rides, thundered past them like an
avalanche. Sansa remembered Lord Yohn Royce, who had guested
at Winterfell two years before. “His armor is bronze, thousands and
thousands of years old, engraved with magic runes that ward him

against harm,” she whispered to Jeyne. Septa Mordane pointed out
Lord Jason Mallister, in indigo chased with silver, the wings of an
eagle on his helm. He had cut down three of Rhaegar’s bannermen
on the Trident. The girls giggled over the warrior priest Thoros of
Myr, with his apping red robes and shaven head, until the septa
told them that he had once scaled the walls of Pyke with a aming
sword in hand.
Other riders Sansa did not know; hedge knights from the Fingers
and Highgarden and the mountains of Dorne, unsung freeriders and
new-made squires, the younger sons of high lords and the heirs of
lesser houses. Younger men, most had done no great deeds as yet,
but Sansa and Jeyne agreed that one day the Seven Kingdoms would
resound to the sound of their names. Ser Balon Swann. Lord Bryce
Caron of the Marches. Bronze Yohn’s heir, Ser Andar Royce, and his
younger brother Ser Robar, their silvered steel plate ligreed in
bronze with the same ancient runes that warded their father. The
twins Ser Horas and Ser Hobber, whose shields displayed the grape
cluster sigil of the Redwynes, burgundy on blue. Patrek Mallister,
Lord Jason’s son. Six Freys of the Crossing: Ser Jared, Ser Hosteen,
Ser Danwell, Ser Emmon, Ser Theo, Ser Perwyn, sons and grandsons
of old Lord Walder Frey, and his bastard son Martyn Rivers as well.
Jeyne Poole confessed herself frightened by the look of Jalabhar
Xho, an exile prince from the Summer Isles who wore a cape of
green and scarlet feathers over skin as dark as night, but when she
saw young Lord Beric Dondarrion, with his hair like red gold and
his black shield slashed by lightning, she pronounced herself willing
to marry him on the instant.
The Hound entered the lists as well, and so too the king’s brother,
handsome Lord Renly of Storm’s End. Jory, Alyn, and Harwin rode
for Winterfell and the north. “Jory looks a beggar among these
others,” Septa Mordane sni ed when he appeared. Sansa could only
agree. Jory’s armor was blue-grey plate without device or
ornament, and a thin grey cloak hung from his shoulders like a
soiled rag. Yet he acquitted himself well, unhorsing Horas Redwyne
in his rst joust and one of the Freys in his second. In his third
match, he rode three passes at a freerider named Lothor Brune

whose armor was as drab as his own. Neither man lost his seat, but
Brune’s lance was steadier and his blows better placed, and the king
gave him the victory. Alyn and Harwin fared less well; Harwin was
unhorsed in his rst tilt by Ser Meryn of the Kingsguard, while Alyn
fell to Ser Balon Swann.
The jousting went all day and into the dusk, the hooves of the
great warhorses pounding down the lists until the eld was a
ragged wasteland of torn earth. A dozen times Jeyne and Sansa
cried out in unison as riders crashed together, lances exploding into
splinters while the commons screamed for their favorites. Jeyne
covered her eyes whenever a man fell, like a frightened little girl,
but Sansa was made of sterner stu . A great lady knew how to
behave at tournaments. Even Septa Mordane noted her composure
and nodded in approval.
The Kingslayer rode brilliantly. He overthrew Ser Andar Royce
and the Marcher Lord Bryce Caron as easily as if he were riding at
rings, and then took a hard-fought match from white-haired
Barristan Selmy, who had won his rst two tilts against men thirty
and forty years his junior.
Sandor Clegane and his immense brother, Ser Gregor the
Mountain, seemed unstoppable as well, riding down one foe after
the next in ferocious style. The most terrifying moment of the day
came during Ser Gregor’s second joust, when his lance rode up and
struck a young knight from the Vale under the gorget with such
force that it drove through his throat, killing him instantly. The
youth fell not ten feet from where Sansa was seated. The point of
Ser Gregor’s lance had snapped o in his neck, and his life’s blood
owed out in slow pulses, each weaker than the one before. His
armor was shiny new; a bright streak of re ran down his
outstretched arm, as the steel caught the light. Then the sun went
behind a cloud, and it was gone. His cloak was blue, the color of the
sky on a clear summer’s day, trimmed with a border of crescent
moons, but as his blood seeped into it, the cloth darkened and the
moons turned red, one by one.
Jeyne Poole wept so hysterically that Septa Mordane nally took
her o to regain her composure, but Sansa sat with her hands folded

in her lap, watching with a strange fascination. She had never seen
a man die before. She ought to be crying too, she thought, but the
tears would not come. Perhaps she had used up all her tears for
Lady and Bran. It would be di erent if it had been Jory or Ser
Rodrik or Father, she told herself. The young knight in the blue
cloak was nothing to her, some stranger from the Vale of Arryn
whose name she had forgotten as soon as she heard it. And now the
world would forget his name too, Sansa realized; there would be no
songs sung for him. That was sad.
After they carried o the body, a boy with a spade ran onto the
eld and shoveled dirt over the spot where he had fallen, to cover
up the blood. Then the jousts resumed.
Ser Balon Swann also fell to Gregor, and Lord Renly to the
Hound. Renly was unhorsed so violently that he seemed to y
backward o his charger, legs in the air. His head hit the ground
with an audible crack that made the crowd gasp, but it was just the
golden antler on his helm. One of the tines had snapped o beneath
him. When Lord Renly climbed to his feet, the commons cheered
wildly, for King Robert’s handsome young brother was a great
favorite. He handed the broken tine to his conqueror with a
gracious bow. The Hound snorted and tossed the broken antler into
the crowd, where the commons began to punch and claw over the
little bit of gold, until Lord Renly walked out among them and
restored the peace. By then Septa Mordane had returned, alone.
Jeyne had been feeling ill, she explained; she had helped her back
to the castle. Sansa had almost forgotten about Jeyne.
Later a hedge knight in a checkered cloak disgraced himself by
killing Beric Dondarrion’s horse, and was declared forfeit. Lord
Beric shifted his saddle to a new mount, only to be knocked right
o it by Thoros of Myr. Ser Aron Santagar and Lothor Brune tilted
thrice without result; Ser Aron fell afterward to Lord Jason
Mallister, and Brune to Yohn Royce’s younger son, Robar.
In the end it came down to four; the Hound and his monstrous
brother Gregor, Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer, and Ser Loras
Tyrell, the youth they called the Knight of Flowers.

Ser Loras was the youngest son of Mace Tyrell, the Lord of
Highgarden and Warden of the South. At sixteen, he was the
youngest rider on the eld, yet he had unhorsed three knights of the
Kingsguard that morning in his rst three jousts. Sansa had never
seen anyone so beautiful. His plate was intricately fashioned and
enameled as a bouquet of a thousand di erent owers, and his
snow-white stallion was draped in a blanket of red and white roses.
After each victory, Ser Loras would remove his helm and ride
slowly round the fence, and nally pluck a single white rose from
the blanket and toss it to some fair maiden in the crowd.
His last match of the day was against the younger Royce. Ser
Robar’s ancestral runes proved small protection as Ser Loras split his
shield and drove him from his saddle to crash with an awful clangor
in the dirt. Robar lay moaning as the victor made his circuit of the
eld. Finally they called for a litter and carried him o to his tent,
dazed and unmoving. Sansa never saw it. Her eyes were only for
Ser Loras. When the white horse stopped in front of her, she
thought her heart would burst.
To the other maidens he had given white roses, but the one he
plucked for her was red. “Sweet lady,” he said, “no victory is half so
beautiful as you.” Sansa took the ower timidly, struck dumb by his
gallantry. His hair was a mass of lazy brown curls, his eyes like
liquid gold. She inhaled the sweet fragrance of the rose and sat
clutching it long after Ser Loras had ridden o .
When Sansa nally looked up, a man was standing over her,
staring. He was short, with a pointed beard and a silver streak in his
hair, almost as old as her father. “You must be one of her
daughters,” he said to her. He had grey-green eyes that did not
smile when his mouth did. “You have the Tully look.”
“I’m Sansa Stark,” she said, ill at ease. The man wore a heavy
cloak with a fur collar, fastened with a silver mockingbird, and he
had the e ortless manner of a high lord, but she did not know him.
“I have not had the honor, my lord.”
Septa Mordane quickly took a hand. “Sweet child, this is Lord
Petyr Baelish, of the king’s small council.”

“Your mother was my queen of beauty once,” the man said
quietly. His breath smelled of mint. “You have her hair.” His ngers
brushed against her cheek as he stroked one auburn lock. Quite
abruptly he turned and walked away.
By then, the moon was well up and the crowd was tired, so the
king decreed that the last three matches would be fought the next
morning, before the melee. While the commons began their walk
home, talking of the day’s jousts and the matches to come on the
morrow, the court moved to the riverside to begin the feast. Six
monstrous huge aurochs had been roasting for hours, turning slowly
on wooden spits while kitchen boys basted them with butter and
herbs until the meat crackled and spit. Tables and benches had been
raised outside the pavilions, piled high with sweetgrass and
strawberries and fresh-baked bread.
Sansa and Septa Mordane were given places of high honor, to the
left of the raised dais where the king himself sat beside his queen.
When Prince Jo rey seated himself to her right, she felt her throat
tighten. He had not spoken a word to her since the awful thing had
happened, and she had not dared to speak to him. At rst she
thought she hated him for what they’d done to Lady, but after Sansa
had wept her eyes dry, she told herself that it had not been Jo rey’s
doing, not truly. The queen had done it; she was the one to hate,
her and Arya. Nothing bad would have happened except for Arya.
She could not hate Jo rey tonight. He was too beautiful to hate.
He wore a deep blue doublet studded with a double row of golden
lion’s heads, and around his brow a slim coronet made of gold and
sapphires. His hair was as bright as the metal. Sansa looked at him
and trembled, afraid that he might ignore her or, worse, turn
hateful again and send her weeping from the table.
Instead Jo rey smiled and kissed her hand, handsome and gallant
as any prince in the songs, and said, “Ser Loras has a keen eye for
beauty, sweet lady.”
“He was too kind,” she demurred, trying to remain modest and
calm, though her heart was singing. “Ser Loras is a true knight. Do
you think he will win tomorrow, my lord?”

“No,” Jo rey said. “My dog will do for him, or perhaps my uncle
Jaime. And in a few years, when I am old enough to enter the lists,
I shall do for them all.” He raised his hand to summon a servant
with a agon of iced summerwine, and poured her a cup. She
looked anxiously at Septa Mordane, until Jo rey leaned over and
lled the septa’s cup as well, so she nodded and thanked him
graciously and said not another word.
The servants kept the cups lled all night, yet afterward Sansa
could not recall ever tasting the wine. She needed no wine. She was
drunk on the magic of the night, giddy with glamour, swept away
by beauties she had dreamt of all her life and never dared hope to
know. Singers sat before the king’s pavilion, lling the dusk with
music. A juggler kept a cascade of burning clubs spinning through
the air. The king’s own fool, the pie-faced simpleton called Moon
Boy, danced about on stilts, all in motley, making mock of everyone
with such deft cruelty that Sansa wondered if he was simple after
all. Even Septa Mordane was helpless before him; when he sang his
little song about the High Septon, she laughed so hard she spilled
wine on herself.
And Jo rey was the soul of courtesy. He talked to Sansa all night,
showering her with compliments, making her laugh, sharing little
bits of court gossip, explaining Moon Boy’s japes. Sansa was so
captivated that she quite forgot all her courtesies and ignored Septa
Mordane, seated to her left.
All the while the courses came and went. A thick soup of barley
and venison. Salads of sweetgrass and spinach and plums, sprinkled
with crushed nuts. Snails in honey and garlic. Sansa had never eaten
snails before; Jo rey showed her how to get the snail out of the
shell, and fed her the rst sweet morsel himself. Then came trout
fresh from the river, baked in clay; her prince helped her crack open
the hard casing to expose the aky white esh within. And when the
meat course was brought out, he served her himself, slicing a
queen’s portion from the joint, smiling as he laid it on her plate. She
could see from the way he moved that his right arm was still
troubling him, yet he uttered not a word of complaint.

Later came sweetbreads and pigeon pie and baked apples fragrant
with cinnamon and lemon cakes frosted in sugar, but by then Sansa
was so stu ed that she could not manage more than two little
lemon cakes, as much as she loved them. She was wondering
whether she might attempt a third when the king began to shout.
King Robert had grown louder with each course. From time to
time Sansa could hear him laughing or roaring a command over the
music and the clangor of plates and cutlery, but they were too far
away for her to make out his words.
Now everybody heard him. “No,” he thundered in a voice that
drowned out all other speech. Sansa was shocked to see the king on
his feet, red of face, reeling. He had a goblet of wine in one hand,
and he was drunk as a man could be. “You do not tell me what to
do, woman,” he screamed at Queen Cersei. “I am king here, do you
understand? I rule here, and if I say that I will ght tomorrow, I will
ght!”
Everyone was staring. Sansa saw Ser Barristan, and the king’s
brother Renly, and the short man who had talked to her so oddly
and touched her hair, but no one made a move to interfere. The
queen’s face was a mask, so bloodless that it might have been
sculpted from snow. She rose from the table, gathered her skirts
around her, and stormed o in silence, servants trailing behind.
Jaime Lannister put a hand on the king’s shoulder, but the king
shoved him away hard. Lannister stumbled and fell. The king
gu awed. “The great knight. I can still knock you in the dirt.
Remember that, Kingslayer.” He slapped his chest with the jeweled
goblet, splashing wine all over his satin tunic. “Give me my hammer
and not a man in the realm can stand before me!”
Jaime Lannister rose and brushed himself o . “As you say, Your
Grace.” His voice was sti .
Lord Renly came forward, smiling. “You’ve spilled your wine,
Robert. Let me bring you a fresh goblet.”
Sansa started as Jo rey laid his hand on her arm. “It grows late,”
the prince said. He had a queer look on his face, as if he were not
seeing her at all. “Do you need an escort back to the castle?”

“No,” Sansa began. She looked for Septa Mordane, and was
startled to nd her with her head on the table, snoring soft and
ladylike snores. “I mean to say … yes, thank you, that would be
most kind. I am tired, and the way is so dark. I should be glad for
some protection.”
Jo rey called out, “Dog!”
Sandor Clegane seemed to take form out of the night, so quickly
did he appear. He had exchanged his armor for a red woolen tunic
with a leather dog’s head sewn on the front. The light of the torches
made his burned face shine a dull red. “Yes, Your Grace?” he said.
“Take my betrothed back to the castle, and see that no harm
befalls her,” the prince told him brusquely. And without even a
word of farewell, Jo rey strode o , leaving her there.
Sansa could feel the Hound watching her. “Did you think Jo was
going to take you himself?” He laughed. He had a laugh like the
snarling of dogs in a pit. “Small chance of that.” He pulled her
unresisting to her feet. “Come, you’re not the only one needs sleep.
I’ve drunk too much, and I may need to kill my brother tomorrow.”
He laughed again.
Suddenly terri ed, Sansa pushed at Septa Mordane’s shoulder,
hoping to wake her, but she only snored the louder. King Robert
had stumbled o and half the benches were suddenly empty. The
feast was over, and the beautiful dream had ended with it.
The Hound snatched up a torch to light their way. Sansa followed
close beside him. The ground was rocky and uneven; the ickering
light made it seem to shift and move beneath her. She kept her eyes
lowered, watching where she placed her feet. They walked among
the pavilions, each with its banner and its armor hung outside, the
silence weighing heavier with every step. Sansa could not bear the
sight of him, he frightened her so, yet she had been raised in all the
ways of courtesy. A true lady would not notice his face, she told
herself. “You rode gallantly today, Ser Sandor,” she made herself
say.
Sandor Clegane snarled at her. “Spare me your empty little
compliments, girl … and your ser’s. I am no knight. I spit on them

and their vows. My brother is a knight. Did you see him ride
today?”
“Yes,” Sansa whispered, trembling. “He was …”
“Gallant?” the Hound nished.
He was mocking her, she realized. “No one could withstand him,”
she managed at last, proud of herself. It was no lie.
Sandor Clegane stopped suddenly in the middle of a dark and
empty eld. She had no choice but to stop beside him. “Some septa
trained you well. You’re like one of those birds from the Summer
Isles, aren’t you? A pretty little talking bird, repeating all the pretty
little words they taught you to recite.”
“That’s unkind.” Sansa could feel her heart uttering in her chest.
“You’re frightening me. I want to go now.”
“No one could withstand him,” the Hound rasped. “That’s truth
enough. No one could ever withstand Gregor. That boy today, his
second joust, oh, that was a pretty bit of business. You saw that, did
you? Fool boy, he had no business riding in this company. No
money, no squire, no one to help him with that armor. That gorget
wasn’t fastened proper. You think Gregor didn’t notice that? You
think Ser Gregor’s lance rode up by chance, do you? Pretty little
talking girl, you believe that, you’re empty-headed as a bird for
true. Gregor’s lance goes where Gregor wants it to go. Look at me.
Look at me!” Sandor Clegane put a huge hand under her chin and
forced her face up. He squatted in front of her, and moved the torch
close. “There’s a pretty for you. Take a good long stare. You know
you want to. I’ve watched you turning away all the way down the
kingsroad. Piss on that. Take your look.”
His ngers held her jaw as hard as an iron trap. His eyes watched
hers. Drunken eyes, sullen with anger. She had to look.
The right side of his face was gaunt, with sharp cheekbones and a
grey eye beneath a heavy brow. His nose was large and hooked, his
hair thin, dark. He wore it long and brushed it sideways, because no
hair grew on the other side of that face.
The left side of his face was a ruin. His ear had been burned
away; there was nothing left but a hole. His eye was still good, but
all around it was a twisted mass of scar, slick black esh hard as

leather, pocked with craters and ssured by deep cracks that
gleamed red and wet when he moved. Down by his jaw, you could
see a hint of bone where the esh had been seared away.
Sansa began to cry. He let go of her then, and snu ed out the
torch in the dirt. “No pretty words for that, girl? No little
compliment the septa taught you?” When there was no answer, he
continued. “Most of them, they think it was some battle. A siege, a
burning tower, an enemy with a torch. One fool asked if it was
dragonsbreath.” His laugh was softer this time, but just as bitter.
“I’ll tell you what it was, girl,” he said, a voice from the night, a
shadow leaning so close now that she could smell the sour stench of
wine on his breath. “I was younger than you, six, maybe seven. A
woodcarver set up shop in the village under my father’s keep, and
to buy favor he sent us gifts. The old man made marvelous toys. I
don’t remember what I got, but it was Gregor’s gift I wanted. A
wooden knight, all painted up, every joint pegged separate and
xed with strings, so you could make him ght. Gregor is ve years
older than me, the toy was nothing to him, he was already a squire,
near six foot tall and muscled like an ox. So I took his knight, but
there was no joy to it, I tell you. I was scared all the while, and true
enough, he found me. There was a brazier in the room. Gregor
never said a word, just picked me up under his arm and shoved the
side of my face down in the burning coals and held me there while I
screamed and screamed. You saw how strong he is. Even then, it
took three grown men to drag him o me. The septons preach about
the seven hells. What do they know? Only a man who’s been burned
knows what hell is truly like.
“My father told everyone my bedding had caught re, and our
maester gave me ointments. Ointments! Gregor got his ointments
too. Four years later, they anointed him with the seven oils and he
recited his knightly vows and Rhaegar Targaryen tapped him on the
shoulder and said, ‘Arise, Ser Gregor.’ ”
The rasping voice trailed o . He squatted silently before her, a
hulking black shape shrouded in the night, hidden from her eyes.
Sansa could hear his ragged breathing. She was sad for him, she
realized. Somehow, the fear had gone away.

The silence went on and on, so long that she began to grow afraid
once more, but she was afraid for him now, not for herself. She
found his massive shoulder with her hand. “He was no true knight,”
she whispered to him.
The Hound threw back his head and roared. Sansa stumbled back,
away from him, but he caught her arm. “No,” he growled at her,
“no, little bird, he was no true knight.”
The rest of the way into the city, Sandor Clegane said not a word.
He led her to where the carts were waiting, told a driver to take
them back to the Red Keep, and climbed in after her. They rode in
silence through the King’s Gate and up torchlit city streets. He
opened the postern door and led her into the castle, his burned face
twitching and his eyes brooding, and he was one step behind her as
they climbed the tower stairs. He took her safe all the way to the
corridor outside her bedchamber.
“Thank you, my lord,” Sansa said meekly.
The Hound caught her by the arm and leaned close. “The things I
told you tonight,” he said, his voice sounding even rougher than
usual. “If you ever tell Jo rey … your sister, your father … any of
them …”
“I won’t,” Sansa whispered. “I promise.”
It was not enough. “If you ever tell anyone,” he nished, “I’ll kill
you.”

EDDARD

“I stood last vigil for him myself,” Ser Barristan Selmy said as they
looked down at the body in the back of the cart. “He had no one
else. A mother in the Vale, I am told.”
In the pale dawn light, the young knight looked as though he
were sleeping. He had not been handsome, but death had smoothed
his rough-hewn features and the silent sisters had dressed him in his
best velvet tunic, with a high collar to cover the ruin the lance had
made of his throat. Eddard Stark looked at his face, and wondered if
it had been for his sake that the boy had died. Slain by a Lannister
bannerman before Ned could speak to him; could that be mere
happenstance? He supposed he would never know.
“Hugh was Jon Arryn’s squire for four years,” Selmy went on.
“The king knighted him before he rode north, in Jon’s memory. The
lad wanted it desperately, yet I fear he was not ready.”
Ned had slept badly last night and he felt tired beyond his years.
“None of us is ever ready,” he said.
“For knighthood?”
“For death.” Gently Ned covered the boy with his cloak, a
bloodstained bit of blue bordered in crescent moons. When his
mother asked why her son was dead, he re ected bitterly, they
would tell her he had fought to honor the King’s Hand, Eddard
Stark. “This was needless. War should not be a game.” Ned turned
to the woman beside the cart, shrouded in grey, face hidden but for
her eyes. The silent sisters prepared men for the grave, and it was

ill fortune to look on the face of death. “Send his armor home to the
Vale. The mother will want to have it.”
“It is worth a fair piece of silver,” Ser Barristan said. “The boy
had it forged special for the tourney. Plain work, but good. I do not
know if he had nished paying the smith.”
“He paid yesterday, my lord, and he paid dearly,” Ned replied.
And to the silent sister he said, “Send the mother the armor. I will
deal with this smith.” She bowed her head.
Afterward Ser Barristan walked with Ned to the king’s pavilion.
The camp was beginning to stir. Fat sausages sizzled and spit over
repits, spicing the air with the scents of garlic and pepper. Young
squires hurried about on errands as their masters woke, yawning
and stretching, to meet the day. A serving man with a goose under
his arm bent his knee when he caught sight of them. “M’lords,” he
muttered as the goose honked and pecked at his ngers. The shields
displayed outside each tent heralded its occupant: the silver eagle of
Seagard, Bryce Caron’s eld of nightingales, a cluster of grapes for
the Redwynes, brindled boar, red ox, burning tree, white ram, triple
spiral, purple unicorn, dancing maiden, blackadder, twin towers,
horned owl, and last the pure white blazons of the Kingsguard,
shining like the dawn.
“The king means to ght in the melee today,” Ser Barristan said
as they were passing Ser Meryn’s shield, its paint sullied by a deep
gash where Loras Tyrell’s lance had scarred the wood as he drove
him from his saddle.
“Yes,” Ned said grimly. Jory had woken him last night to bring
him that news. Small wonder he had slept so badly.
Ser Barristan’s look was troubled. “They say night’s beauties fade
at dawn, and the children of wine are oft disowned in the morning
light.”
“They say so,” Ned agreed, “but not of Robert.” Other men might
reconsider words spoken in drunken bravado, but Robert Baratheon
would remember and, remembering, would never back down.
The king’s pavilion was close by the water, and the morning mists
o the river had wreathed it in wisps of grey. It was all of golden
silk, the largest and grandest structure in the camp. Outside the

entrance, Robert’s warhammer was displayed beside an immense
iron shield blazoned with the crowned stag of House Baratheon.
Ned had hoped to discover the king still abed in a wine-soaked
sleep, but luck was not with him. They found Robert drinking beer
from a polished horn and roaring his displeasure at two young
squires who were trying to buckle him into his armor. “Your
Grace,” one was saying, almost in tears, “it’s made too small, it
won’t go.” He fumbled, and the gorget he was trying to t around
Robert’s thick neck tumbled to the ground.
“Seven hells!” Robert swore. “Do I have to do it myself? Piss on
the both of you. Pick it up. Don’t just stand there gaping, Lancel,
pick it up!” The lad jumped, and the king noticed his company.
“Look at these oafs, Ned. My wife insisted I take these two to squire
for me, and they’re worse than useless. Can’t even put a man’s
armor on him properly. Squires, they say. I say they’re swineherds
dressed up in silk.”
Ned only needed a glance to understand the di culty. “The boys
are not at fault,” he told the king. “You’re too fat for your armor,
Robert.”
Robert Baratheon took a long swallow of beer, tossed the empty
horn onto his sleeping furs, wiped his mouth with the back of his
hand, and said darkly, “Fat? Fat, is it? Is that how you speak to your
king?” He let go his laughter, sudden as a storm. “Ah, damn you,
Ned, why are you always right?”
The squires smiled nervously until the king turned on them. “You.
Yes, both of you. You heard the Hand. The king is too fat for his
armor. Go nd Ser Aron Santagar. Tell him I need the breastplate
stretcher. Now! What are you waiting for?”
The boys tripped over each other in their haste to be quit of the
tent. Robert managed to keep a stern face until they were gone.
Then he dropped back into a chair, shaking with laughter.
Ser Barristan Selmy chuckled with him. Even Eddard Stark
managed a smile. Always, though, the graver thoughts crept in. He
could not help taking note of the two squires: handsome boys, fair
and well made. One was Sansa’s age, with long golden curls; the

other perhaps fteen, sandy-haired, with a wisp of a mustache and
the emerald-green eyes of the queen.
“Ah, I wish I could be there to see Santagar’s face,” Robert said.
“I hope he’ll have the wit to send them to someone else. We ought
to keep them running all day!”
“Those boys,” Ned asked him. “Lannisters?”
Robert nodded, wiping tears from his eyes. “Cousins. Sons of Lord
Tywin’s brother. One of the dead ones. Or perhaps the live one,
now that I come to think on it. I don’t recall. My wife comes from a
very large family, Ned.”
A very ambitious family, Ned thought. He had nothing against the
squires, but it troubled him to see Robert surrounded by the queen’s
kin, waking and sleeping. The Lannister appetite for o ces and
honors seemed to know no bounds. “The talk is you and the queen
had angry words last night.”
The mirth curdled on Robert’s face. “The woman tried to forbid
me to ght in the melee. She’s sulking in the castle now, damn her.
Your sister would never have shamed me like that.”
“You never knew Lyanna as I did, Robert,” Ned told him. “You
saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath. She would have told
you that you have no business in the melee.”
“You too?” The king frowned. “You are a sour man, Stark. Too
long in the north, all the juices have frozen inside you. Well, mine
are still running.” He slapped his chest to prove it.
“You are the king,” Ned reminded him.
“I sit on the damn iron seat when I must. Does that mean I don’t
have the same hungers as other men? A bit of wine now and again,
a girl squealing in bed, the feel of a horse between my legs? Seven
hells, Ned, I want to hit someone.”
Ser Barristan Selmy spoke up. “Your Grace,” he said, “it is not
seemly that the king should ride into the melee. It would not be a
fair contest. Who would dare strike you?”
Robert seemed honestly taken aback. “Why, all of them, damn it.
If they can. And the last man left standing …”
“… will be you,” Ned nished. He saw at once that Selmy had hit
the mark. The dangers of the melee were only a savor to Robert,

but this touched on his pride. “Ser Barristan is right. There’s not a
man in the Seven Kingdoms who would dare risk your displeasure
by hurting you.”
The king rose to his feet, his face ushed. “Are you telling me
those prancing cravens will let me win?”
“For a certainty,” Ned said, and Ser Barristan Selmy bowed his
head in silent accord.
For a moment Robert was so angry he could not speak. He strode
across the tent, whirled, strode back, his face dark and angry. He
snatched up his breastplate from the ground and threw it at
Barristan Selmy in a wordless fury. Selmy dodged. “Get out,” the
king said then, coldly. “Get out before I kill you.”
Ser Barristan left quickly. Ned was about to follow when the king
called out again. “Not you, Ned.”
Ned turned back. Robert took up his horn again, lled it with
beer from a barrel in the corner, and thrust it at Ned. “Drink,” he
said brusquely.
“I’ve no thirst—”
“Drink. Your king commands it.”
Ned took the horn and drank. The beer was black and thick, so
strong it stung the eyes.
Robert sat down again. “Damn you, Ned Stark. You and Jon
Arryn, I loved you both. What have you done to me? You were the
one should have been king, you or Jon.”
“You had the better claim, Your Grace.”
“I told you to drink, not to argue. You made me king, you could
at least have the courtesy to listen when I talk, damn you. Look at
me, Ned. Look at what kinging has done to me. Gods, too fat for my
armor, how did it ever come to this?”
“Robert …”
“Drink and stay quiet, the king is talking. I swear to you, I was
never so alive as when I was winning this throne, or so dead as now
that I’ve won it. And Cersei … I have Jon Arryn to thank for her. I
had no wish to marry after Lyanna was taken from me, but Jon said
the realm needed an heir. Cersei Lannister would be a good match,
he told me, she would bind Lord Tywin to me should Viserys

Targaryen ever try to win back his father’s throne,” The king shook
his head. “I loved that old man, I swear it, but now I think he was a
bigger fool than Moon Boy. Oh, Cersei is lovely to look at, truly,
but cold … the way she guards her cunt, you’d think she had all the
gold of Casterly Rock between her legs. Here, give me that beer if
you won’t drink it.” He took the horn, upended it, belched, wiped
his mouth. “I am sorry for your girl, Ned. Truly. About the wolf, I
mean. My son was lying, I’d stake my soul on it. My son … you
love your children, don’t you?”
“With all my heart,” Ned said.
“Let me tell you a secret, Ned. More than once, I have dreamed of
giving up the crown. Take ship for the Free Cities with my horse
and my hammer, spend my time warring and whoring, that’s what I
was made for. The sellsword king, how the singers would love me.
You know what stops me? The thought of Jo rey on the throne,
with Cersei standing behind him whispering in his ear. My son.
How could I have made a son like that, Ned?”
“He’s only a boy,” Ned said awkwardly. He had small liking for
Prince Jo rey, but he could hear the pain in Robert’s voice. “Have
you forgotten how wild you were at his age?”
“It would not trouble me if the boy was wild, Ned. You don’t
know him as I do.” He sighed and shook his head. “Ah, perhaps you
are right. Jon despaired of me often enough, yet I grew into a good
king.” Robert looked at Ned and scowled at his silence. “You might
speak up and agree now, you know.”
“Your Grace …” Ned began, carefully.
Robert slapped Ned on the back. “Ah, say that I’m a better king
than Aerys and be done with it. You never could lie for love nor
honor, Ned Stark. I’m still young, and now that you’re here with
me, things will be di erent. We’ll make this a reign to sing of, and
damn the Lannisters to seven hells. I smell bacon. Who do you think
our champion will be today? Have you seen Mace Tyrell’s boy? The
Knight of Flowers, they call him. Now there’s a son any man would
be proud to own to. Last tourney, he dumped the Kingslayer on his
golden rump, you ought to have seen the look on Cersei’s face. I

laughed till my sides hurt. Renly says he has this sister, a maid of
fourteen, lovely as a dawn …”
They broke their fast on black bread and boiled goose eggs and
sh fried up with onions and bacon, at a trestle table by the river’s
edge. The king’s melancholy melted away with the morning mist,
and before long Robert was eating an orange and waxing fond
about a morning at the Eyrie when they had been boys. “… had
given Jon a barrel of oranges, remember? Only the things had gone
rotten, so I ung mine across the table and hit Dacks right in the
nose. You remember, Redfort’s pock-faced squire? He tossed one
back at me, and before Jon could so much as fart, there were
oranges ying across the High Hall in every direction.” He laughed
uproariously, and even Ned smiled, remembering.
This was the boy he had grown up with, he thought; this was the
Robert Baratheon he’d known and loved. If he could prove that the
Lannisters were behind the attack on Bran, prove that they had
murdered Jon Arryn, this man would listen. Then Cersei would fall,
and the Kingslayer with her, and if Lord Tywin dared to rouse the
west, Robert would smash him as he had smashed Rhaegar
Targaryen on the Trident. He could see it all so clearly.
That breakfast tasted better than anything Eddard Stark had eaten
in a long time, and afterward his smiles came easier and more
often, until it was time for the tournament to resume.
Ned walked with the king to the jousting eld. He had promised
to watch the nal tilts with Sansa; Septa Mordane was ill today, and
his daughter was determined not to miss the end of the jousting. As
he saw Robert to his place, he noted that Cersei Lannister had
chosen not to appear; the place beside the king was empty. That too
gave Ned cause to hope.
He shouldered his way to where his daughter was seated and
found her as the horns blew for the day’s rst joust. Sansa was so
engrossed she scarcely seemed to notice his arrival.
Sandor Clegane was the rst rider to appear. He wore an olivegreen cloak over his soot-grey armor. That, and his hound’s-head
helm, were his only concession to ornament.

“A hundred golden dragons on the Kingslayer,” Little nger
announced loudly as Jaime Lannister entered the lists, riding an
elegant blood bay destrier. The horse wore a blanket of gilded
ringmail, and Jaime glittered from head to heel. Even his lance was
fashioned from the golden wood of the Summer Isles.
“Done,” Lord Renly shouted back. “The Hound has a hungry look
about him this morning.”
“Even hungry dogs know better than to bite the hand that feeds
them,” Little nger called dryly.
Sandor Clegane dropped his visor with an audible clang and took
up his position. Ser Jaime tossed a kiss to some woman in the
commons, gently lowered his visor, and rode to the end of the lists.
Both men couched their lances.
Ned Stark would have loved nothing so well as to see them both
lose, but Sansa was watching it all moist-eyed and eager. The
hastily erected gallery trembled as the horses broke into a gallop.
The Hound leaned forward as he rode, his lance rock steady, but
Jaime shifted his seat deftly in the instant before impact. Clegane’s
point was turned harmlessly against the golden shield with the lion
blazon, while his own hit square. Wood shattered, and the Hound
reeled, ghting to keep his seat. Sansa gasped. A ragged cheer went
up from the commons.
“I wonder how I ought spend your money,” Little nger called
down to Lord Renly.
The Hound just managed to stay in his saddle. He jerked his
mount around hard and rode back to the lists for the second pass.
Jaime Lannister tossed down his broken lance and snatched up a
fresh one, jesting with his squire. The Hound spurred forward at a
hard gallop. Lannister rode to meet him. This time, when Jaime
shifted his seat, Sandor Clegane shifted with him. Both lances
exploded, and by the time the splinters had settled, a riderless blood
bay was trotting o in search of grass while Ser Jaime Lannister
rolled in the dirt, golden and dented.
Sansa said, “I knew the Hound would win.”
Little nger overheard. “If you know who’s going to win the
second match, speak up now before Lord Renly plucks me clean,” he

called to her. Ned smiled.
“A pity the Imp is not here with us,” Lord Renly said. “I should
have won twice as much.”
Jaime Lannister was back on his feet, but his ornate lion helmet
had been twisted around and dented in his fall, and now he could
not get it o . The commons were hooting and pointing, the lords
and ladies were trying to sti e their chuckles, and failing, and over
it all Ned could hear King Robert laughing, louder than anyone.
Finally they had to lead the Lion of Lannister o to a blacksmith,
blind and stumbling.
By then Ser Gregor Clegane was in position at the head of the
lists. He was huge, the biggest man that Eddard Stark had ever
seen. Robert Baratheon and his brothers were all big men, as was
the Hound, and back at Winterfell there was a simpleminded
stableboy named Hodor who dwarfed them all, but the knight they
called the Mountain That Rides would have towered over Hodor. He
was well over seven feet tall, closer to eight, with massive
shoulders and arms thick as the trunks of small trees. His destrier
seemed a pony in between his armored legs, and the lance he
carried looked as small as a broom handle.
Unlike his brother, Ser Gregor did not live at court. He was a
solitary man who seldom left his own lands, but for wars and
tourneys. He had been with Lord Tywin when King’s Landing fell, a
new-made knight of seventeen years, even then distinguished by his
size and his implacable ferocity. Some said it had been Gregor
who’d dashed the skull of the infant prince Aegon Targaryen against
a wall, and whispered that afterward he had raped the mother, the
Dornish princess Elia, before putting her to the sword. These things
were not said in Gregor’s hearing.
Ned Stark could not recall ever speaking to the man, though
Gregor had ridden with them during Balon Greyjoy’s rebellion, one
knight among thousands. He watched him with disquiet. Ned
seldom put much stock in gossip, but the things said of Ser Gregor
were more than ominous. He was soon to be married for the third
time, and one heard dark whisperings about the deaths of his rst
two wives. It was said that his keep was a grim place where

servants disappeared unaccountably and even the dogs were afraid
to enter the hall. And there had been a sister who had died young
under queer circumstances, and the re that had dis gured his
brother, and the hunting accident that had killed their father.
Gregor had inherited the keep, the gold, and the family estates. His
younger brother Sandor had left the same day to take service with
the Lannisters as a sworn sword, and it was said that he had never
returned, not even to visit.
When the Knight of Flowers made his entrance, a murmur ran
through the crowd, and he heard Sansa’s fervent whisper, “Oh, he’s
so beautiful.” Ser Loras Tyrell was slender as a reed, dressed in a suit
of fabulous silver armor polished to a blinding sheen and ligreed
with twining black vines and tiny blue forget-me-nots. The
commons realized in the same instant as Ned that the blue of the
owers came from sapphires; a gasp went up from a thousand
throats. Across the boy’s shoulders his cloak hung heavy. It was
woven of forget-me-nots, real ones, hundreds of fresh blooms sewn
to a heavy woolen cape.
His courser was as slim as her rider, a beautiful grey mare, built
for speed. Ser Gregor’s huge stallion trumpeted as he caught her
scent. The boy from Highgarden did something with his legs, and
his horse pranced sideways, nimble as a dancer. Sansa clutched at
his arm. “Father, don’t let Ser Gregor hurt him,” she said. Ned saw
she was wearing the rose that Ser Loras had given her yesterday.
Jory had told him about that as well.
“These are tourney lances,” he told his daughter. “They make
them to splinter on impact, so no one is hurt.” Yet he remembered
the dead boy in the cart with his cloak of crescent moons, and the
words were raw in his throat.
Ser Gregor was having trouble controlling his horse. The stallion
was screaming and pawing the ground, shaking his head. The
Mountain kicked at the animal savagely with an armored boot. The
horse reared and almost threw him.
The Knight of Flowers saluted the king, rode to the far end of the
list, and couched his lance, ready. Ser Gregor brought his animal to
the line, ghting with the reins. And suddenly it began. The

Mountain’s stallion broke in a hard gallop, plunging forward wildly,
while the mare charged as smooth as a ow of silk. Ser Gregor
wrenched his shield into position, juggled with his lance, and all the
while fought to hold his unruly mount on a straight line, and
suddenly Loras Tyrell was on him, placing the point of his lance just
there, and in an eye blink the Mountain was falling. He was so huge
that he took his horse down with him in a tangle of steel and esh.
Ned heard applause, cheers, whistles, shocked gasps, excited
muttering, and over it all the rasping, raucous laughter of the
Hound. The Knight of Flowers reined up at the end of the lists. His
lance was not even broken. His sapphires winked in the sun as he
raised his visor, smiling. The commons went mad for him.
In the middle of the eld, Ser Gregor Clegane disentangled
himself and came boiling to his feet. He wrenched o his helm and
slammed it down onto the ground. His face was dark with fury and
his hair fell down into his eyes. “My sword,” he shouted to his
squire, and the boy ran it out to him. By then his stallion was back
on its feet as well.
Gregor Clegane killed the horse with a single blow of such
ferocity that it half severed the animal’s neck. Cheers turned to
shrieks in a heartbeat. The stallion went to its knees, screaming as it
died. By then Gregor was striding down the lists toward Ser Loras
Tyrell, his bloody sword clutched in his st. “Stop him!” Ned
shouted, but his words were lost in the roar. Everyone else was
yelling as well, and Sansa was crying.
It all happened so fast. The Knight of Flowers was shouting for
his own sword as Ser Gregor knocked his squire aside and made a
grab for the reins of his horse. The mare scented blood and reared.
Loras Tyrell kept his seat, but barely. Ser Gregor swung his sword,
a savage two-handed blow that took the boy in the chest and
knocked him from the saddle. The courser dashed away in panic as
Ser Loras lay stunned in the dirt. But as Gregor lifted his sword for
the killing blow, a rasping voice warned, “Leave him be,” and a
steel-clad hand wrenched him away from the boy.
The Mountain pivoted in wordless fury, swinging his longsword
in a killing arc with all his massive strength behind it, but the

Hound caught the blow and turned it, and for what seemed an
eternity the two brothers stood hammering at each other as a dazed
Loras Tyrell was helped to safety. Thrice Ned saw Ser Gregor aim
savage blows at the hound’s-head helmet, yet not once did Sandor
send a cut at his brother’s unprotected face.
It was the king’s voice that put an end to it … the king’s voice
and twenty swords. Jon Arryn had told them that a commander
needs a good battle eld voice, and Robert had proved the truth of
that on the Trident. He used that voice now. “STOP THIS
MADNESS,” he boomed, “IN THE NAME OF YOUR KING!”
The Hound went to one knee. Ser Gregor’s blow cut air, and at
last he came to his senses. He dropped his sword and glared at
Robert, surrounded by his Kingsguard and a dozen other knights
and guardsmen. Wordlessly, he turned and strode o , shoving past
Barristan Selmy. “Let him go,” Robert said, and as quickly as that, it
was over.
“Is the Hound the champion now?” Sansa asked Ned.
“No,” he told her. “There will be one nal joust, between the
Hound and the Knight of Flowers.”
But Sansa had the right of it after all. A few moments later Ser
Loras Tyrell walked back onto the eld in a simple linen doublet
and said to Sandor Clegane, “I owe you my life. The day is yours,
ser.”
“I am no ser,” the Hound replied, but he took the victory, and the
champion’s purse, and, for perhaps the rst time in his life, the love
of the commons. They cheered him as he left the lists to return to
his pavilion.
As Ned walked with Sansa to the archery eld, Little nger and
Lord Renly and some of the others fell in with them. “Tyrell had to
know the mare was in heat,” Little nger was saying. “I swear the
boy planned the whole thing. Gregor has always favored huge, illtempered stallions with more spirit than sense.” The notion seemed
to amuse him.
It did not amuse Ser Barristan Selmy. “There is small honor in
tricks,” the old man said sti y.
“Small honor and twenty thousand golds.” Lord Renly smiled.

That afternoon a boy named Anguy, an unheralded commoner
from the Dornish Marches, won the archery competition,
outshooting Ser Balon Swann and Jalabhar Xho at a hundred paces
after all the other bowmen had been eliminated at the shorter
distances. Ned sent Alyn to seek him out and o er him a position
with the Hand’s guard, but the boy was ush with wine and victory
and riches undreamed of, and he refused.
The melee went on for three hours. Near forty men took part,
freeriders and hedge knights and new-made squires in search of a
reputation. They fought with blunted weapons in a chaos of mud
and blood, small troops ghting together and then turning on each
other as alliances formed and fractured, until only one man was left
standing. The victor was the red priest, Thoros of Myr, a madman
who shaved his head and fought with a aming sword. He had won
melees before; the re sword frightened the mounts of the other
riders, and nothing frightened Thoros. The nal tally was three
broken limbs, a shattered collarbone, a dozen smashed ngers, two
horses that had to be put down, and more cuts, sprains, and bruises
than anyone cared to count. Ned was desperately pleased that
Robert had not taken part.
That night at the feast, Eddard Stark was more hopeful than he
had been in a great while. Robert was in high good humor, the
Lannisters were nowhere to be seen, and even his daughters were
behaving. Jory brought Arya down to join them, and Sansa spoke to
her sister pleasantly. “The tournament was magni cent,” she sighed.
“You should have come. How was your dancing?”
“I’m sore all over,” Arya reported happily, proudly displaying a
huge purple bruise on her leg.
“You must be a terrible dancer,” Sansa said doubtfully.
Later, while Sansa was o listening to a troupe of singers perform
the complex round of interwoven ballads called the “Dance of the
Dragons,” Ned inspected the bruise himself. “I hope Forel is not
being too hard on you,” he said.
Arya stood on one leg. She was getting much better at that of
late. “Syrio says that every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes
you better.”

Ned frowned. The man Syrio Forel had come with an excellent
reputation, and his amboyant Braavosi style was well suited to
Arya’s slender blade, yet still … a few days ago, she had been
wandering around with a swatch of black silk tied over her eyes.
Syrio was teaching her to see with her ears and her nose and her
skin, she told him. Before that, he had her doing spins and back
ips. “Arya, are you certain you want to persist in this?”
She nodded. “Tomorrow we’re going to catch cats.”
“Cats.” Ned sighed. “Perhaps it was a mistake to hire this
Braavosi. If you like, I will ask Jory to take over your lessons. Or I
might have a quiet word with Ser Barristan. He was the nest
sword in the Seven Kingdoms in his youth.”
“I don’t want them,” Arya said. “I want Syrio.”
Ned ran his ngers through his hair. Any decent master-at-arms
could give Arya the rudiments of slash-and-parry without this
nonsense of blindfolds, cartwheels, and hopping about on one leg,
but he knew his youngest daughter well enough to know there was
no arguing with that stubborn jut of jaw. “As you wish,” he said.
Surely she would grow tired of this soon. “Try to be careful.”
“I will,” she promised solemnly as she hopped smoothly from her
right leg to her left.
Much later, after he had taken the girls back through the city and
seen them both safe in bed, Sansa with her dreams and Arya with
her bruises, Ned ascended to his own chambers atop the Tower of
the Hand. The day had been warm and the room was close and
stu y. Ned went to the window and unfastened the heavy shutters
to let in the cool night air. Across the Great Yard, he noticed the
ickering glow of candlelight from Little nger’s windows. The hour
was well past midnight. Down by the river, the revels were only
now beginning to dwindle and die.
He took out the dagger and studied it. Little nger’s blade, won
by Tyrion Lannister in a tourney wager, sent to slay Bran in his
sleep. Why would the dwarf want Bran dead? Why would anyone
want Bran dead?
The dagger, Bran’s fall, all of it was linked somehow to the
murder of Jon Arryn, he could feel it in his gut, but the truth of

Jon’s death remained as clouded to him as when he had started.
Lord Stannis had not returned to King’s Landing for the tourney.
Lysa Arryn held her silence behind the high walls of the Eyrie. The
squire was dead, and Jory was still searching the whorehouses.
What did he have but Robert’s bastard?
That the armorer’s sullen apprentice was the king’s son, Ned had
no doubt. The Baratheon look was stamped on his face, in his jaw,
his eyes, that black hair. Renly was too young to have fathered a
boy of that age, Stannis too cold and proud in his honor. Gendry
had to be Robert’s.
Yet knowing all that, what had he learned? The king had other
baseborn children scattered throughout the Seven Kingdoms. He had
openly acknowledged one of his bastards, a boy of Bran’s age whose
mother was highborn. The lad was being fostered by Lord Renly’s
castellan at Storm’s End.
Ned remembered Robert’s rst child as well, a daughter born in
the Vale when Robert was scarcely more than a boy himself. A
sweet little girl; the young lord of Storm’s End had doted on her. He
used to make daily visits to play with the babe, long after he had
lost interest in the mother. Ned was often dragged along for
company, whether he willed it or not. The girl would be seventeen
or eighteen now, he realized; older than Robert had been when he
fathered her. A strange thought.
Cersei could not have been pleased by her lord husband’s byblows, yet in the end it mattered little whether the king had one
bastard or a hundred. Law and custom gave the baseborn few
rights. Gendry, the girl in the Vale, the boy at Storm’s End, none of
them could threaten Robert’s trueborn children …
His musings were ended by a soft rap on his door. “A man to see
you, my lord,” Harwin called. “He will not give his name.”
“Send him in,” Ned said, wondering.
The visitor was a stout man in cracked, mud-caked boots and a
heavy brown robe of the coarsest roughspun, his features hidden by
a cowl, his hands drawn up into voluminous sleeves.
“Who are you?” Ned asked.

“A friend,” the cowled man said in a strange, low voice. “We
must speak alone, Lord Stark.”
Curiosity was stronger than caution. “Harwin, leave us,” he
commanded. Not until they were alone behind closed doors did his
visitor draw back his cowl.
“Lord Varys?” Ned said in astonishment.
“Lord Stark,” Varys said politely, seating himself. “I wonder if I
might trouble you for a drink?”
Ned lled two cups with summerwine and handed one to Varys.
“I might have passed within a foot of you and never recognized
you,” he said, incredulous. He had never seen the eunuch dress in
anything but silk and velvet and the richest damasks, and this man
smelled of sweat instead of lilacs.
“That was my dearest hope,” Varys said. “It would not do if
certain people learned that we had spoken in private. The queen
watches you closely. This wine is very choice. Thank you.”
“How did you get past my other guards?” Ned asked. Porther and
Cayn had been posted outside the tower, and Alyn on the stairs.
“The Red Keep has ways known only to ghosts and spiders.”
Varys smiled apologetically. “I will not keep you long, my lord.
There are things you must know. You are the King’s Hand, and the
king is a fool.” The eunuch’s cloying tones were gone; now his voice
was thin and sharp as a whip. “Your friend, I know, yet a fool
nonetheless … and doomed, unless you save him. Today was a near
thing. They had hoped to kill him during the melee.”
For a moment Ned was speechless with shock. “Who?”
Varys sipped his wine. “If I truly need to tell you that, you are a
bigger fool than Robert and I am on the wrong side.”
“The Lannisters,” Ned said. “The queen … no, I will not believe
that, not even of Cersei. She asked him not to ght!”
“She forbade him to ght, in front of his brother, his knights, and
half the court. Tell me truly, do you know any surer way to force
King Robert into the melee? I ask you.”
Ned had a sick feeling in his gut. The eunuch had hit upon a truth;
tell Robert Baratheon he could not, should not, or must not do a

thing, and it was as good as done. “Even if he’d fought, who would
have dared to strike the king?”
Varys shrugged. “There were forty riders in the melee. The
Lannisters have many friends. Amidst all that chaos, with horses
screaming and bones breaking and Thoros of Myr waving that
absurd resword of his, who could name it murder if some chance
blow felled His Grace?” He went to the agon and re lled his cup.
“After the deed was done, the slayer would be beside himself with
grief. I can almost hear him weeping. So sad. Yet no doubt the
gracious and compassionate widow would take pity, lift the poor
unfortunate to his feet, and bless him with a gentle kiss of
forgiveness. Good King Jo rey would have no choice but to pardon
him.” The eunuch stroked his cheek. “Or perhaps Cersei would let
Ser Ilyn strike o his head. Less risk for the Lannisters that way,
though quite an unpleasant surprise for their little friend.”
Ned felt his anger rise. “You knew of this plot, and yet you did
nothing.”
“I command whisperers, not warriors.”
“You might have come to me earlier.”
“Oh, yes, I confess it. And you would have rushed straight to the
king, yes? And when Robert heard of his peril, what would he have
done? I wonder.”
Ned considered that. “He would have damned them all, and
fought anyway, to show he did not fear them.”
Varys spread his hands. “I will make another confession, Lord
Eddard. I was curious to see what you would do. Why not come to
me? you ask, and I must answer, Why, because I did not trust you, my
lord.”
“You did not trust me?” Ned was frankly astonished.
“The Red Keep shelters two sorts of people, Lord Eddard,” Varys
said. “Those who are loyal to the realm, and those who are loyal
only to themselves. Until this morning, I could not say which you
might be … so I waited to see … and now I know, for a certainty.”
He smiled a plump tight little smile, and for a moment his private
face and public mask were one. “I begin to comprehend why the
queen fears you so much. Oh, yes I do.”

“You are the one she ought to fear,” Ned said.
“No. I am what I am. The king makes use of me, but it shames
him. A most puissant warrior is our Robert, and such a manly man
has little love for sneaks and spies and eunuchs. If a day should
come when Cersei whispers, ‘Kill that man,’ Ilyn Payne will snick
my head o in a twinkling, and who will mourn poor Varys then?
North or south, they sing no songs for spiders.” He reached out and
touched Ned with a soft hand. “But you, Lord Stark … I think … no,
I know … he would not kill you, not even for his queen, and there
may lie our salvation.”
It was all too much. For a moment Eddard Stark wanted nothing
so much as to return to Winterfell, to the clean simplicity of the
north, where the enemies were winter and the wildlings beyond the
Wall. “Surely Robert has other loyal friends,” he protested. “His
brothers, his—”
“—wife?” Varys nished, with a smile that cut. “His brothers hate
the Lannisters, true enough, but hating the queen and loving the
king are not quite the same thing, are they? Ser Barristan loves his
honor, Grand Maester Pycelle loves his o ce, and Little nger loves
Little nger.”
“The Kingsguard—”
“A paper shield,” the eunuch said. “Try not to look so shocked,
Lord Stark. Jaime Lannister is himself a Sworn Brother of the White
Swords, and we all know what his oath is worth. The days when
men like Ryam Redwyne and Prince Aemon the Dragonknight wore
the white cloak are gone to dust and song. Of these seven, only Ser
Barristan Selmy is made of the true steel, and Selmy is old. Ser
Boros and Ser Meryn are the queen’s creatures to the bone, and I
have deep suspicions of the others. No, my lord, when the swords
come out in earnest, you will be the only true friend Robert
Baratheon will have.”
“Robert must be told,” Ned said. “If what you say is true, if even
a part of it is true, the king must hear it for himself.”
“And what proof shall we lay before him? My words against
theirs? My little birds against the queen and the Kingslayer, against
his brothers and his council, against the Wardens of East and West,

against all the might of Casterly Rock? Pray, send for Ser Ilyn
directly, it will save us all some time. I know where that road
ends.”
“Yet if what you say is true, they will only bide their time and
make another attempt.”
“Indeed they will,” said Varys, “and sooner rather than later, I do
fear. You are making them most anxious, Lord Eddard. But my little
birds will be listening, and together we may be able to forestall
them, you and I.” He rose and pulled up his cowl so his face was
hidden once more. “Thank you for the wine. We will speak again.
When you see me next at council, be certain to treat me with your
accustomed contempt. You should not nd it di cult.”
He was at the door when Ned called, “Varys,” The eunuch turned
back. “How did Jon Arryn die?”
“I wondered when you would get around to that.”
“Tell me.”
“The tears of Lys, they call it. A rare and costly thing, clear and
sweet as water, and it leaves no trace. I begged Lord Arryn to use a
taster, in this very room I begged him, but he would not hear of it.
Only one who was less than a man would even think of such a
thing, he told me.”
Ned had to know the rest. “Who gave him the poison?”
“Some dear sweet friend who often shared meat and mead with
him, no doubt. Oh, but which one? There were many such. Lord
Arryn was a kindly, trusting man.” The eunuch sighed. “There was
one boy. All he was, he owed Jon Arryn, but when the widow ed
to the Eyrie with her household, he stayed in King’s Landing and
prospered. It always gladdens my heart to see the young rise in the
world.” The whip was in his voice again, every word a stroke. “He
must have cut a gallant gure in the tourney, him in his bright new
armor, with those crescent moons on his cloak. A pity he died so
untimely, before you could talk to him …”
Ned felt half-poisoned himself. “The squire,” he said. “Ser Hugh.”
Wheels within wheels within wheels. Ned’s head was pounding.
“Why? Why now? Jon Arryn had been Hand for fourteen years.
What was he doing that they had to kill him?”

“Asking questions,” Varys said, slipping out the door.

TYRION

As he stood in the predawn chill watching Chiggen butcher his
horse, Tyrion Lannister chalked up one more debt owed the Starks.
Steam rose from inside the carcass when the squat sellsword opened
the belly with his skinning knife. His hands moved deftly, with
never a wasted cut; the work had to be done quickly, before the
stink of blood brought shadowcats down from the heights.
“None of us will go hungry tonight,” Bronn said. He was near a
shadow himself; bone thin and bone hard, with black eyes and black
hair and a stubble of beard.
“Some of us may,” Tyrion told him. “I am not fond of eating
horse. Particularly my horse.”
“Meat is meat,” Bronn said with a shrug. “The Dothraki like horse
more than beef or pork.”
“Do you take me for a Dothraki?” Tyrion asked sourly. The
Dothraki ate horse, in truth; they also left deformed children out for
the feral dogs who ran behind their khalasars. Dothraki customs had
scant appeal for him.
Chiggen sliced a thin strip of bloody meat o the carcass and held
it up for inspection. “Want a taste, dwarf?”
“My brother Jaime gave me that mare for my twenty-third name
day,” Tyrion said in a at voice.
“Thank him for us, then. If you ever see him again.” Chiggen
grinned, showing yellow teeth, and swallowed the raw meat in two
bites. “Tastes well bred.”

“Better if you fry it up with onions,” Bronn put in.
Wordlessly, Tyrion limped away. The cold had settled deep in his
bones, and his legs were so sore he could scarcely walk. Perhaps his
dead mare was the lucky one. He had hours more riding ahead of
him, followed by a few mouthfuls of food and a short, cold sleep on
hard ground, and then another night of the same, and another, and
another, and the gods only knew how it would end. “Damn her,” he
muttered as he struggled up the road to rejoin his captors,
remembering, “damn her and all the Starks.”
The memory was still bitter. One moment he’d been ordering
supper, and an eye blink later he was facing a room of armed men,
with Jyck reaching for a sword and the fat innkeep shrieking, “No
swords, not here, please, m’lords.”
Tyrion wrenched down Jyck’s arm hurriedly, before he got them
both hacked to pieces. “Where are your courtesies, Jyck? Our good
hostess said no swords. Do as she asks.” He forced a smile that must
have looked as queasy as it felt. “You’re making a sad mistake, Lady
Stark. I had no part in any attack on your son. On my honor—”
“Lannister honor,” was all she said. She held up her hands for all
the room to see. “His dagger left these scars. The blade he sent to
open my son’s throat.”
Tyrion felt the anger all around him, thick and smoky, fed by the
deep cuts in the Stark woman’s hands. “Kill him,” hissed some
drunken slattern from the back, and other voices took up the call,
faster than he would have believed. Strangers all, friendly enough
only a moment ago, and yet now they cried for his blood like
hounds on a trail.
Tyrion spoke up loudly, trying to keep the quaver from his voice.
“If Lady Stark believes I have some crime to answer for, I will go
with her and answer for it.”
It was the only possible course. Trying to cut their way out of this
was a sure invitation to an early grave. A good dozen swords had
responded to the Stark woman’s plea for help: the Harrenhal man,
the three Brackens, a pair of unsavory sellswords who looked as
though they’d kill him as soon as spit, and some fool eld hands
who doubtless had no idea what they were doing. Against that,

what did Tyrion have? A dagger at his belt, and two men. Jyck
swung a fair enough sword, but Morrec scarcely counted; he was
part groom, part cook, part body servant, and no soldier. As for
Yoren, whatever his feelings might have been, the black brothers
were sworn to take no part in the quarrels of the realm. Yoren
would do nothing.
And indeed, the black brother stepped aside silently when the old
knight by Catelyn Stark’s side said, “Take their weapons,” and the
sellsword Bronn stepped forward to pull the sword from Jyck’s
ngers and relieve them all of their daggers. “Good,” the old man
said as the tension in the common room ebbed palpably,
“excellent.” Tyrion recognized the gru voice; Winterfell’s masterat-arms, shorn of his whiskers.
Scarlet-tinged spittle ew from the fat innkeep’s mouth as she
begged of Catelyn Stark, “Don’t kill him here!”
“Don’t kill him anywhere,” Tyrion urged.
“Take him somewheres else, no blood here, m’lady, I wants no
high lordlin’s quarrels.”
“We are taking him back to Winterfell,” she said, and Tyrion
thought, Well, perhaps … By then he’d had a moment to glance over
the room and get a better idea of the situation. He was not
altogether displeased by what he saw. Oh, the Stark woman had
been clever, no doubt of it. Force them to make a public a rmation
of the oaths sworn her father by the lords they served, and then call
on them for succor, and her a woman, yes, that was sweet. Yet her
success was not as complete as she might have liked. There were
close to fty in the common room by his rough count. Catelyn
Stark’s plea had roused a bare dozen; the others looked confused, or
frightened, or sullen. Only two of the Freys had stirred, Tyrion
noted, and they’d sat back down quick enough when their captain
failed to move. He might have smiled if he’d dared.
“Winterfell it is, then,” he said instead. That was a long ride, as
he could well attest, having just ridden it the other way. So many
things could happen along the way. “My father will wonder what
has become of me,” he added, catching the eye of the swordsman
who’d o ered to yield up his room. “He’ll pay a handsome reward

to any man who brings him word of what happened here today.”
Lord Tywin would do no such thing, of course, but Tyrion would
make up for it if he won free.
Ser Rodrik glanced at his lady, his look worried, as well it might
be. “His men come with him,” the old knight announced. “And we’ll
thank the rest of you to stay quiet about what you’ve seen here.”
It was all Tyrion could do not to laugh. Quiet? The old fool.
Unless he took the whole inn, the word would begin to spread the
instant they were gone. The freerider with the gold coin in his
pocket would y to Casterly Rock like an arrow. If not him, then
someone else. Yoren would carry the story south. That fool singer
might make a lay of it. The Freys would report back to their lord,
and the gods only knew what he might do. Lord Walder Frey might
be sworn to Riverrun, but he was a cautious man who had lived a
long time by making certain he was always on the winning side. At
the very least he would send his birds winging south to King’s
Landing, and he might well dare more than that.
Catelyn Stark wasted no time. “We must ride at once. We’ll want
fresh mounts, and provisions for the road. You men, know that you
have the eternal gratitude of House Stark. If any of you choose to
help us guard our captives and get them safe to Winterfell, I
promise you shall be well rewarded.” That was all it took; the fools
came rushing forward. Tyrion studied their faces; they would
indeed be well rewarded, he vowed to himself, but perhaps not
quite as they imagined.
Yet even as they were bundling him outside, saddling the horses
in the rain, and tying his hands with a length of coarse rope, Tyrion
Lannister was not truly afraid. They would never get him to
Winterfell, he would have given odds on that. Riders would be after
them within the day, birds would take wing, and surely one of the
river lords would want to curry favor with his father enough to take
a hand. Tyrion was congratulating himself on his subtlety when
someone pulled a hood down over his eyes and lifted him up onto a
saddle.
They set out through the rain at a hard gallop, and before long
Tyrion’s thighs were cramped and aching and his butt throbbed with

pain. Even when they were safely away from the inn, and Catelyn
Stark slowed them to a trot, it was a miserable pounding journey
over rough ground, made worse by his blindness. Every twist and
turn put him in danger of falling o his horse. The hood mu ed
sound, so he could not make out what was being said around him,
and the rain soaked through the cloth and made it cling to his face,
until even breathing was a struggle. The rope chafed his wrists raw
and seemed to grow tighter as the night wore on. I was about to
settle down to a warm re and a roast fowl, and that wretched singer
had to open his mouth, he thought mournfully. The wretched singer
had come along with them. “There is a great song to be made from
this, and I’m the one to make it,” he told Catelyn Stark when he
announced his intention of riding with them to see how the
“splendid adventure” turned out. Tyrion wondered whether the boy
would think the adventure quite so splendid once the Lannister
riders caught up with them.
The rain had nally stopped and dawn light was seeping through
the wet cloth over his eyes when Catelyn Stark gave the command
to dismount. Rough hands pulled him down from his horse, untied
his wrists, and yanked the hood o his head. When he saw the
narrow stony road, the foothills rising high and wild all around
them, and the jagged snowcapped peaks on the distant horizon, all
the hope went out of him in a rush. “This is the high road,” he
gasped, looking at Lady Stark with accusation. “The eastern road.
You said we were riding for Winterfell!”
Catelyn Stark favored him with the faintest of smiles. “Often and
loudly,” she agreed. “No doubt your friends will ride that way when
they come after us. I wish them good speed.”
Even now, long days later, the memory lled him with a bitter
rage. All his life Tyrion had prided himself on his cunning, the only
gift the gods had seen t to give him, and yet this seven-timesdamned she-wolf Catelyn Stark had outwitted him at every turn.
The knowledge was more galling than the bare fact of his
abduction.
They stopped only as long as it took to feed and water the horses,
and then they were o again. This time Tyrion was spared the hood.

After the second night they no longer bound his hands, and once
they had gained the heights they scarcely bothered to guard him at
all. It seemed they did not fear his escape. And why should they?
Up here the land was harsh and wild, and the high road little more
than a stony track. If he did run, how far could he hope to go, alone
and without provisions? The shadowcats would make a morsel of
him, and the clans that dwelt in the mountain fastnesses were
brigands and murderers who bowed to no law but the sword.
Yet still the Stark woman drove them forward relentlessly. He
knew where they were bound. He had known it since the moment
they pulled o his hood. These mountains were the domain of
House Arryn, and the late Hand’s widow was a Tully, Catelyn
Stark’s sister … and no friend to the Lannisters. Tyrion had known
the Lady Lysa slightly during her years at King’s Landing, and did
not look forward to renewing the acquaintance.
His captors were clustered around a stream a short ways down
the high road. The horses had drunk their ll of the icy cold water,
and were grazing on clumps of brown grass that grew from clefts in
the rock. Jyck and Morrec huddled close, sullen and miserable.
Mohor stood over them, leaning on his spear and wearing a rounded
iron cap that made him look as if he had a bowl on his head.
Nearby, Marillion the singer sat oiling his woodharp, complaining
of what the damp was doing to his strings.
“We must have some rest, my lady,” the hedge knight Ser Willis
Wode was saying to Catelyn Stark as Tyrion approached. He was
Lady Whent’s man, sti -necked and stolid, and the rst to rise to aid
Catelyn Stark back at the inn.
“Ser Willis speaks truly, my lady,” Ser Rodrik said. “This is the
third horse we have lost—”
“We will lose more than horses if we’re overtaken by the
Lannisters,” she reminded them. Her face was windburnt and gaunt,
but it had lost none of its determination.
“Small chance of that here,” Tyrion put in.
“The lady did not ask your views, dwarf,” snapped Kurleket, a
great fat oaf with short-cropped hair and a pig’s face. He was one of
the Brackens, a man-at-arms in the service of Lord Jonos. Tyrion

had made a special e ort to learn all their names, so he might thank
them later for their tender treatment of him. A Lannister always
paid his debts. Kurleket would learn that someday, as would his
friends Lharys and Mohor, and the good Ser Willis, and the
sellswords Bronn and Chiggen. He planned an especially sharp
lesson for Marillion, him of the woodharp and the sweet tenor
voice, who was struggling so manfully to rhyme imp with gimp and
limp so he could make a song of this outrage.
“Let him speak,” Lady Stark commanded.
Tyrion Lannister seated himself on a rock. “By now our pursuit is
likely racing across the Neck, chasing your lie up the
kingsroad … assuming there is a pursuit, which is by no means
certain. Oh, no doubt the word has reached my father … but my
father does not love me overmuch, and I am not at all sure that he
will bother to bestir himself.” It was only half a lie; Lord Tywin
Lannister cared not a g for his deformed son, but he tolerated no
slights on the honor of his House. “This is a cruel land, Lady Stark.
You’ll nd no succor until you reach the Vale, and each mount you
lose burdens the others all the more. Worse, you risk losing me. I
am small, and not strong, and if I die, then what’s the point?” That
was no lie at all; Tyrion did not know how much longer he could
endure this pace.
“It might be said that your death is the point, Lannister,” Catelyn
Stark replied.
“I think not,” Tyrion said. “If you wanted me dead, you had only
to say the word, and one of these staunch friends of yours would
gladly have given me a red smile.” He looked at Kurleket, but the
man was too dim to taste the mockery.
“The Starks do not murder men in their beds.”
“Nor do I,” he said. “I tell you again, I had no part in the attempt
to kill your son.”
“The assassin was armed with your dagger.”
Tyrion felt the heat rise in him. “It was not my dagger,” he
insisted. “How many times must I swear to that? Lady Stark,
whatever you may believe of me, I am not a stupid man. Only a
fool would arm a common footpad with his own blade.”

Just for a moment, he thought he saw a icker of doubt in her
eyes, but what she said was, “Why would Petyr lie to me?”
“Why does a bear shit in the woods?” he demanded. “Because it is
his nature. Lying comes as easily as breathing to a man like
Little nger. You ought to know that, you of all people.”
She took a step toward him, her face tight. “And what does that
mean, Lannister?”
Tyrion cocked his head. “Why, every man at court has heard him
tell how he took your maidenhead, my lady.”
“That is a lie!” Catelyn Stark said.
“Oh, wicked little imp,” Marillion said, shocked.
Kurleket drew his dirk, a vicious piece of black iron. “At your
word, m’lady, I’ll toss his lying tongue at your feet.” His pig eyes
were wet with excitement at the prospect.
Catelyn Stark stared at Tyrion with a coldness on her face such as
he had never seen. “Petyr Baelish loved me once. He was only a
boy. His passion was a tragedy for all of us, but it was real, and
pure, and nothing to be made mock of. He wanted my hand. That is
the truth of the matter. You are truly an evil man, Lannister.”
“And you are truly a fool, Lady Stark. Little nger has never loved
anyone but Little nger, and I promise you that it is not your hand
that he boasts of, it’s those ripe breasts of yours, and that sweet
mouth, and the heat between your legs.”
Kurleket grabbed a handful of hair and yanked his head back in a
hard jerk, baring his throat. Tyrion felt the cold kiss of steel
beneath his chin. “Shall I bleed him, my lady?”
“Kill me and the truth dies with me,” Tyrion gasped.
“Let him talk,” Catelyn Stark commanded.
Kurleket let go of Tyrion’s hair, reluctantly.
Tyrion took a deep breath. “How did Little nger tell you I came
by this dagger of his? Answer me that.”
“You won it from him in a wager, during the tourney on Prince
Jo rey’s name day.”
“When my brother Jaime was unhorsed by the Knight of Flowers,
that was his story, no?”
“It was,” she admitted. A line creased her brow.

“Riders!”
The shriek came from the wind-carved ridge above them. Ser
Rodrik had sent Lharys scrambling up the rock face to watch the
road while they took their rest.
For a long second, no one moved. Catelyn Stark was the rst to
react. “Ser Rodrik, Ser Willis, to horse,” she shouted. “Get the other
mounts behind us. Mohor, guard the prisoners—”
“Arm us!” Tyrion sprang to his feet and seized her by the arm.
“You will need every sword.”
She knew he was right, Tyrion could see it. The mountain clans
cared nothing for the enmities of the great houses; they would
slaughter Stark and Lannister with equal fervor, as they slaughtered
each other. They might spare Catelyn herself; she was still young
enough to bear sons. Still, she hesitated.
“I hear them!” Ser Rodrik called out. Tyrion turned his head to
listen, and there it was: hoofbeats, a dozen horses or more, coming
nearer. Suddenly everyone was moving, reaching for weapons,
running to their mounts.
Pebbles rained down around them as Lharys came springing and
sliding down the ridge. He landed breathless in front of Catelyn
Stark, an ungainly-looking man with wild tufts of rust-colored hair
sticking out from under a conical steel cap. “Twenty men, maybe
twenty- ve,” he said, breathless. “Milk Snakes or Moon Brothers,
by my guess. They must have eyes out, m’lady … hidden
watchers … they know we’re here.”
Ser Rodrik Cassel was already ahorse, a longsword in hand.
Mohor crouched behind a boulder, both hands on his iron-tipped
spear, a dagger between his teeth. “You, singer,” Ser Willis Wode
called out. “Help me with this breastplate.” Marillion sat frozen,
clutching his woodharp, his face as pale as milk, but Tyrion’s man
Morrec bounded quickly to his feet and moved to help the knight
with his armor.
Tyrion kept his grip on Catelyn Stark. “You have no choice,” he
told her. “Three of us, and a fourth man wasted guarding us … four
men can be the di erence between life and death up here.”

“Give me your word that you will put down your swords again
after the ght is done.”
“My word?” The hoofbeats were louder now. Tyrion grinned
crookedly. “Oh, that you have, my lady … on my honor as a
Lannister.”
For a moment he thought she would spit at him, but instead she
snapped, “Arm them,” and as quick as that she was pulling away.
Ser Rodrik tossed Jyck his sword and scabbard, and wheeled to
meet the foe. Morrec helped himself to a bow and quiver, and went
to one knee beside the road. He was a better archer than
swordsman. And Bronn rode up to o er Tyrion a double-bladed axe.
“I have never fought with an axe.” The weapon felt awkward and
unfamiliar in his hands. It had a short haft, a heavy head, a nasty
spike on top.
“Pretend you’re splitting logs,” Bronn said, drawing his
longsword from the scabbard across his back. He spat, and trotted
o to form up beside Chiggen and Ser Rodrik. Ser Willis mounted
up to join them, fumbling with his helmet, a metal pot with a thin
slit for his eyes and a long black silk plume.
“Logs don’t bleed,” Tyrion said to no one in particular. He felt
naked without armor. He looked around for a rock and ran over to
where Marillion was hiding. “Move over.”
“Go away!” the boy screamed back at him. “I’m a singer, I want
no part of this ght!”
“What, lost your taste for adventure?” Tyrion kicked at the youth
until he slid over, and not a moment too soon. A heartbeat later, the
riders were on them.
There were no heralds, no banners, no horns nor drums, only the
twang of bowstrings as Morrec and Lharys let y, and suddenly the
clansmen came thundering out of the dawn, lean dark men in boiled
leather and mismatched armor, faces hidden behind barred half
helms. In gloved hands were clutched all manner of weapons:
longswords and lances and sharpened scythes, spiked clubs and
daggers and heavy iron mauls. At their head rode a big man in a
striped shadowskin cloak, armed with a two-handed greatsword.

Ser Rodrik shouted “Winterfell!” and rode to meet him, with
Bronn and Chiggen beside him, screaming some wordless battle cry.
Ser Willis Wode followed, swinging a spiked morningstar around his
head. “Harrenhal! Harrenhal!” he sang. Tyrion felt a sudden urge to
leap up, brandish his axe, and boom out, “Casterly Rock!” but the
insanity passed quickly and he crouched down lower.
He heard the screams of frightened horses and the crash of metal
on metal. Chiggen’s sword raked across the naked face of a mailed
rider, and Bronn plunged through the clansmen like a whirlwind,
cutting down foes right and left. Ser Rodrik hammered at the big
man in the shadowskin cloak, their horses dancing round each other
as they traded blow for blow. Jyck vaulted onto a horse and
galloped bareback into the fray. Tyrion saw an arrow sprout from
the throat of the man in the shadowskin cloak. When he opened his
mouth to scream, only blood came out. By the time he fell, Ser
Rodrik was ghting someone else.
Suddenly Marillion shrieked, covering his head with his woodharp
as a horse leapt over their rock. Tyrion scrambled to his feet as the
rider turned to come back at them, hefting a spiked maul. Tyrion
swung his axe with both hands. The blade caught the charging horse
in the throat with a meaty thunk, angling upward, and Tyrion
almost lost his grip as the animal screamed and collapsed. He
managed to wrench the axe free and lurch clumsily out of the way.
Marillion was less fortunate. Horse and rider crashed to the ground
in a tangle on top of the singer. Tyrion danced back in while the
brigand’s leg was still pinned beneath his fallen mount, and buried
the axe in the man’s neck, just above the shoulder blades.
As he struggled to yank the blade loose, he heard Marillion
moaning under the bodies. “Someone help me,” the singer gasped.
“Gods have mercy, I’m bleeding.”
“I believe that’s horse blood,” Tyrion said. The singer’s hand came
crawling out from beneath the dead animal, scrabbling in the dirt
like a spider with ve legs. Tyrion put his heel on the grasping
ngers and felt a satisfying crunch. “Close your eyes and pretend
you’re dead,” he advised the singer before he hefted the axe and
turned away.

After that, things ran together. The dawn was full of shouts and
screams and heavy with the scent of blood, and the world had
turned to chaos. Arrows hissed past his ear and clattered o the
rocks. He saw Bronn unhorsed, ghting with a sword in each hand.
Tyrion kept on the fringes of the ght, sliding from rock to rock
and darting out of the shadows to hew at the legs of passing horses.
He found a wounded clansman and left him dead, helping himself to
the man’s halfhelm. It t too snugly, but Tyrion was glad of any
protection at all. Jyck was cut down from behind while he sliced at
a man in front of him, and later Tyrion stumbled over Kurleket’s
body. The pig face had been smashed in with a mace, but Tyrion
recognized the dirk as he plucked it from the man’s dead ngers. He
was sliding it through his belt when he heard a woman’s scream.
Catelyn Stark was trapped against the stone face of the mountain
with three men around her, one still mounted and the other two on
foot. She had a dagger clutched awkwardly in her maimed hands,
but her back was to the rock now and they had penned her on three
sides. Let them have the bitch, Tyrion thought, and welcome to her, yet
somehow he was moving. He caught the rst man in the back of the
knee before they even knew he was there, and the heavy axehead
split esh and bone like rotten wood. Logs that bleed, Tyrion thought
inanely as the second man came for him. Tyrion ducked under his
sword, lashed out with the axe, the man reeled backward … and
Catelyn Stark stepped up behind him and opened his throat. The
horseman remembered an urgent engagement elsewhere and
galloped o suddenly.
Tyrion looked around. The enemy were all vanquished or
vanished. Somehow the ghting had ended when he wasn’t looking.
Dying horses and wounded men lay all around, screaming or
moaning. To his vast astonishment, he was not one of them. He
opened his ngers and let the axe thunk to the ground. His hands
were sticky with blood. He could have sworn they had been ghting
for half a day, but the sun seemed scarcely to have moved at all.
“Your rst battle?” Bronn asked later as he bent over Jyck’s body,
pulling o his boots. They were good boots, as be t one of Lord

Tywin’s men; heavy leather, oiled and supple, much ner than what
Bronn was wearing.
Tyrion nodded. “My father will be so proud,” he said. His legs
were cramping so badly he could scarcely stand. Odd, he had never
once noticed the pain during the battle.
“You need a woman now,” Bronn said with a glint in his black
eyes. He shoved the boots into his saddlebag. “Nothing like a
woman after a man’s been blooded, take my word.”
Chiggen stopped looting the corpses of the brigands long enough
to snort and lick his lips.
Tyrion glanced over to where Lady Stark was dressing Ser
Rodrik’s wounds. “I’m willing if she is,” he said. The freeriders
broke into laughter, and Tyrion grinned and thought, There’s a start.
Afterward he knelt by the stream and washed the blood o his
face in water cold as ice. As he limped back to the others, he
glanced again at the slain. The dead clansmen were thin, ragged
men, their horses scrawny and undersized, with every rib showing.
What weapons Bronn and Chiggen had left them were none too
impressive. Mauls, clubs, a scythe … He remembered the big man in
the shadowskin cloak who had dueled Ser Rodrik with a two-handed
greatsword, but when he found his corpse sprawled on the stony
ground, the man was not so big after all, the cloak was gone, and
Tyrion saw that the blade was badly notched, its cheap steel spotted
with rust. Small wonder the clansmen had left nine bodies on the
ground.
They had only three dead; two of Lord Bracken’s men-at-arms,
Kurleket and Mohor, and his own man Jyck, who had made such a
bold show with his bareback charge. A fool to the end, Tyrion
thought.
“Lady Stark, I urge you to press on, with all haste,” Ser Willis
Wode said, his eyes scanning the ridgetops warily through the slit in
his helm. “We drove them o for the moment, but they will not
have gone far.”
“We must bury our dead, Ser Willis,” she said. “These were brave
men. I will not leave them to the crows and shadowcats.”
“This soil is too stony for digging,” Ser Willis said.

“Then we shall gather stones for cairns.”
“Gather all the stones you want,” Bronn told her, “but do it
without me or Chiggen. I’ve better things to do than pile rocks on
dead men … breathing, for one.” He looked over the rest of the
survivors. “Any of you who hope to be alive come nightfall, ride
with us.”
“My lady, I fear he speaks the truth,” Ser Rodrik said wearily.
The old knight had been wounded in the ght, a deep gash in his
left arm and a spear thrust that grazed his neck, and he sounded his
age. “If we linger here, they will be on us again for a certainty, and
we may not live through a second attack.”
Tyrion could see the anger in Catelyn’s face, but she had no
choice. “May the gods forgive us, then. We will ride at once.”
There was no shortage of horses now. Tyrion moved his saddle to
Jyck’s spotted gelding, who looked strong enough to last another
three or four days at least. He was about to mount when Lharys
stepped up and said, “I’ll take that dirk now, dwarf.”
“Let him keep it.” Catelyn Stark looked down from her horse.
“And see that he has his axe back as well. We may have need of it if
we are attacked again.”
“You have my thanks, lady,” Tyrion said, mounting up.
“Save them,” she said curtly. “I trust you no more than I did
before.” She was gone before he could frame a reply.
Tyrion adjusted his stolen helm and took the axe from Bronn. He
remembered how he had begun the journey, with his wrists bound
and a hood pulled down over his head, and decided that this was a
de nite improvement. Lady Stark could keep her trust; so long as
he could keep the axe, he would count himself ahead in the game.
Ser Willis Wode led them out. Bronn took the rear, with Lady
Stark safely in the middle, Ser Rodrik a shadow beside her.
Marillion kept throwing sullen looks back at Tyrion as they rode.
The singer had broken several ribs, his woodharp, and all four
ngers on his playing hand, yet the day had not been an utter loss
to him; somewhere he had acquired a magni cent shadowskin
cloak, thick black fur slashed by stripes of white. He huddled
beneath its folds silently, and for once had nothing to say.

They heard the deep growls of shadowcats behind them before
they had gone half a mile, and later the wild snarling of the beasts
ghting over the corpses they had left behind. Marillion grew
visibly pale. Tyrion trotted up beside him. “Craven,” he said,
“rhymes nicely with raven.” He kicked his horse and moved past the
singer, up to Ser Rodrik and Catelyn Stark.
She looked at him, lips pressed tightly together.
“As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted,” Tyrion
began, “there is a serious aw in Little nger’s fable. Whatever you
may believe of me, Lady Stark, I promise you this—I never bet
against my family.”

ARYA

The one-eared black tom arched his back and hissed at her.
Arya padded down the alley, balanced lightly on the balls of her
bare feet, listening to the utter of her heart, breathing slow deep
breaths. Quiet as a shadow, she told herself, light as a feather. The
tomcat watched her come, his eyes wary.
Catching cats was hard. Her hands were covered with half-healed
scratches, and both knees were scabbed over where she had scraped
them raw in tumbles. At rst even the cook’s huge fat kitchen cat
had been able to elude her, but Syrio had kept her at it day and
night. When she’d run to him with her hands bleeding, he had said,
“So slow? Be quicker, girl. Your enemies will give you more than
scratches.” He had dabbed her wounds with Myrish re, which
burned so bad she had had to bite her lip to keep from screaming.
Then he sent her out after more cats.
The Red Keep was full of cats: lazy old cats dozing in the sun,
cold-eyed mousers twitching their tails, quick little kittens with
claws like needles, ladies’ cats all combed and trusting, ragged
shadows prowling the midden heaps. One by one Arya had chased
them down and snatched them up and brought them proudly to
Syrio Forel … all but this one, this one-eared black devil of a
tomcat. “That’s the real king of this castle right there,” one of the
gold cloaks had told her. “Older than sin and twice as mean. One
time, the king was feasting the queen’s father, and that black
bastard hopped up on the table and snatched a roast quail right out

of Lord Tywin’s ngers. Robert laughed so hard he like to burst.
You stay away from that one, child.”
He had run her halfway across the castle; twice around the Tower
of the Hand, across the inner bailey, through the stables, down the
serpentine steps, past the small kitchen and the pig yard and the
barracks of the gold cloaks, along the base of the river wall and up
more steps and back and forth over Traitor’s Walk, and then down
again and through a gate and around a well and in and out of
strange buildings until Arya didn’t know where she was.
Now at last she had him. High walls pressed close on either side,
and ahead was a blank windowless mass of stone. Quiet as a shadow,
she repeated, sliding forward, light as a feather.
When she was three steps away from him, the tomcat bolted.
Left, then right, he went; and right, then left, went Arya, cutting o
his escape. He hissed again and tried to dart between her legs. Quick
as a snake, she thought. Her hands closed around him. She hugged
him to her chest, whirling and laughing aloud as his claws raked at
the front of her leather jerkin. Ever so fast, she kissed him right
between the eyes, and jerked her head back an instant before his
claws would have found her face. The tomcat yowled and spit.
“What’s he doing to that cat?”
Startled, Arya dropped the cat and whirled toward the voice. The
tom bounded o in the blink of an eye. At the end of the alley stood
a girl with a mass of golden curls, dressed as pretty as a doll in blue
satin. Beside her was a plump little blond boy with a prancing stag
sewn in pearls across the front of his doublet and a miniature sword
at his belt. Princess Myrcella and Prince Tommen, Arya thought. A
septa as large as a draft horse hovered over them, and behind her
two big men in crimson cloaks, Lannister house guards.
“What were you doing to that cat, boy?” Myrcella asked again,
sternly. To her brother she said, “He’s a ragged boy, isn’t he? Look
at him.” She giggled.
“A ragged dirty smelly boy,” Tommen agreed.
They don’t know me, Arya realized. They don’t even know I’m a girl.
Small wonder; she was barefoot and dirty, her hair tangled from the
long run through the castle, clad in a jerkin ripped by cat claws and

brown roughspun pants hacked o above her scabby knees. You
don’t wear skirts and silks when you’re catching cats. Quickly she
lowered her head and dropped to one knee. Maybe they wouldn’t
recognize her. If they did, she would never hear the end of it. Septa
Mordane would be morti ed, and Sansa would never speak to her
again from the shame.
The old fat septa moved forward. “Boy, how did you come here?
You have no business in this part of the castle.”
“You can’t keep this sort out,” one of the red cloaks said. “Like
trying to keep out rats.”
“Who do you belong to, boy?” the septa demanded. “Answer me.
What’s wrong with you, are you mute?”
Arya’s voice caught in her throat. If she answered, Tommen and
Myrcella would know her for certain.
“Godwyn, bring him here,” the septa said. The taller of the
guardsmen started down the alley.
Panic gripped her throat like a giant’s hand. Arya could not have
spoken if her life had hung on it. Calm as still water, she mouthed
silently.
As Godwyn reached for her, Arya moved. Quick as a snake. She
leaned to her left, letting his ngers brush her arm, spinning around
him. Smooth as summer silk. By the time he got himself turned, she
was sprinting down the alley. Swift as a deer. The septa was
screeching at her. Arya slid between legs as thick and white as
marble columns, bounded to her feet, bowled into Prince Tommen
and hopped over him when he sat down hard and said “Oof,” spun
away from the second guard, and then she was past them all,
running full out.
She heard shouts, then pounding footsteps, closing behind her.
She dropped and rolled. The red cloak went careening past her,
stumbling. Arya sprang back to her feet. She saw a window above
her, high and narrow, scarcely more than an arrow slit. Arya leapt,
caught the sill, pulled herself up. She held her breath as she
wriggled through. Slippery as an eel. Dropping to the oor in front of
a startled scrubwoman, she hopped up, brushed the rushes o her
clothes, and was o again, out the door and along a long hall, down

a stair, across a hidden courtyard, around a corner and over a wall
and through a low narrow window into a pitch-dark cellar. The
sounds grew more and more distant behind her.
Arya was out of breath and quite thoroughly lost. She was in for
it now if they had recognized her, but she didn’t think they had.
She’d moved too fast. Swift as a deer.
She hunkered down in the dark against a damp stone wall and
listened for the pursuit, but the only sound was the beating of her
own heart and a distant drip of water. Quiet as a shadow, she told
herself. She wondered where she was. When they had rst come to
King’s Landing, she used to have bad dreams about getting lost in
the castle. Father said the Red Keep was smaller than Winterfell,
but in her dreams it had been immense, an endless stone maze with
walls that seemed to shift and change behind her. She would nd
herself wandering down gloomy halls past faded tapestries,
descending endless circular stairs, darting through courtyards or
over bridges, her shouts echoing unanswered. In some of the rooms
the red stone walls would seem to drip blood, and nowhere could
she nd a window. Sometimes she would hear her father’s voice,
but always from a long way o , and no matter how hard she ran
after it, it would grow fainter and fainter, until it faded to nothing
and Arya was alone in the dark.
It was very dark right now, she realized. She hugged her bare
knees tight against her chest and shivered. She would wait quietly
and count to ten thousand. By then it would be safe for her to come
creeping back out and nd her way home.
By the time she had reached eighty-seven, the room had begun to
lighten as her eyes adjusted to the blackness. Slowly the shapes
around her took on form. Huge empty eyes stared at her hungrily
through the gloom, and dimly she saw the jagged shadows of long
teeth. She had lost the count. She closed her eyes and bit her lip and
sent the fear away. When she looked again, the monsters would be
gone. Would never have been. She pretended that Syrio was beside
her in the dark, whispering in her ear. Calm as still water, she told
herself. Strong as a bear. Fierce as a wolverine. She opened her eyes
again.

The monsters were still there, but the fear was gone.
Arya got to her feet, moving warily. The heads were all around
her. She touched one, curious, wondering if it was real. Her
ngertips brushed a massive jaw. It felt real enough. The bone was
smooth beneath her hand, cold and hard to the touch. She ran her
ngers down a tooth, black and sharp, a dagger made of darkness.
It made her shiver.
“It’s dead,” she said aloud. “It’s just a skull, it can’t hurt me.” Yet
somehow the monster seemed to know she was there. She could feel
its empty eyes watching her through the gloom, and there was
something in that dim, cavernous room that did not love her. She
edged away from the skull and backed into a second, larger than the
rst. For an instant she could feel its teeth digging into her
shoulder, as if it wanted a bite of her esh. Arya whirled, felt
leather catch and tear as a huge fang nipped at her jerkin, and then
she was running. Another skull loomed ahead, the biggest monster
of all, but Arya did not even slow. She leapt over a ridge of black
teeth as tall as swords, dashed through hungry jaws, and threw
herself against the door.
Her hands found a heavy iron ring set in the wood, and she
yanked at it. The door resisted a moment, before it slowly began to
swing inward, with a creak so loud Arya was certain it could be
heard all through the city. She opened the door just far enough to
slip through, into the hallway beyond.
If the room with the monsters had been dark, the hall was the
blackest pit in the seven hells. Calm as still water, Arya told herself,
but even when she gave her eyes a moment to adjust, there was
nothing to see but the vague grey outline of the door she had come
through. She wiggled her ngers in front of her face, felt the air
move, saw nothing. She was blind. A water dancer sees with all her
senses, she reminded herself. She closed her eyes and steadied her
breathing one two three, drank in the quiet, reached out with her
hands.
Her ngers brushed against rough un nished stone to her left.
She followed the wall, her hand skimming along the surface, taking
small gliding steps through the darkness. All halls lead somewhere.

Where there is a way in, there is a way out. Fear cuts deeper than
swords. Arya would not be afraid. It seemed as if she had been
walking a long ways when the wall ended abruptly and a draft of
cold air blew past her cheek. Loose hairs stirred faintly against her
skin.
From somewhere far below her, she heard noises. The scrape of
boots, the distant sound of voices. A ickering light brushed the
wall ever so faintly, and she saw that she stood at the top of a great
black well, a shaft twenty feet across plunging deep into the earth.
Huge stones had been set into the curving walls as steps, circling
down and down, dark as the steps to hell that Old Nan used to tell
them of. And something was coming up out of the darkness, out of
the bowels of the earth …
Arya peered over the edge and felt the cold black breath on her
face. Far below, she saw the light of a single torch, small as the
ame of a candle. Two men, she made out. Their shadows writhed
against the sides of the well, tall as giants. She could hear their
voices, echoing up the shaft.
“… found one bastard,” one said. “The rest will come soon. A
day, two days, a fortnight …”
“And when he learns the truth, what will he do?” a second voice
asked in the liquid accents of the Free Cities.
“The gods alone know,” the rst voice said. Arya could see a wisp
of grey smoke drifting up o the torch, writhing like a snake as it
rose. “The fools tried to kill his son, and what’s worse, they made a
mummer’s farce of it. He’s not a man to put that aside. I warn you,
the wolf and lion will soon be at each other’s throats, whether we
will it or no.”
“Too soon, too soon,” the voice with the accent complained.
“What good is war now? We are not ready. Delay.”
“As well bid me stop time. Do you take me for a wizard?”
The other chuckled. “No less.” Flames licked at the cold air. The
tall shadows were almost on top of her. An instant later the man
holding the torch climbed into her sight, his companion beside him.
Arya crept back away from the well, dropped to her stomach, and

attened herself against the wall. She held her breath as the men
reached the top of the steps.
“What would you have me do?” asked the torchbearer, a stout
man in a leather half cape. Even in heavy boots, his feet seemed to
glide soundlessly over the ground. A round scarred face and a
stubble of dark beard showed under his steel cap, and he wore mail
over boiled leather, and a dirk and shortsword at his belt. It seemed
to Arya there was something oddly familiar about him.
“If one Hand can die, why not a second?” replied the man with
the accent and the forked yellow beard. “You have danced the
dance before, my friend.” He was no one Arya had ever seen before,
she was certain of it. Grossly fat, yet he seemed to walk lightly,
carrying his weight on the balls of his feet as a water dancer might.
His rings glimmered in the torchlight, red-gold and pale silver,
crusted with rubies, sapphires, slitted yellow tiger eyes. Every
nger wore a ring; some had two.
“Before is not now, and this Hand is not the other,” the scarred
man said as they stepped out into the hall. Still as stone, Arya told
herself, quiet as a shadow. Blinded by the blaze of their own torch,
they did not see her pressed at against the stone, only a few feet
away.
“Perhaps so,” the forked beard replied, pausing to catch his
breath after the long climb. “Nonetheless, we must have time. The
princess is with child. The khal will not bestir himself until his son is
born. You know how they are, these savages.”
The man with the torch pushed at something. Arya heard a deep
rumbling. A huge slab of rock, red in the torchlight, slid down out
of the ceiling with a resounding crash that almost made her cry out.
Where the entry to the well had been was nothing but stone, solid
and unbroken.
“If he does not bestir himself soon, it may be too late,” the stout
man in the steel cap said. “This is no longer a game for two players,
if ever it was. Stannis Baratheon and Lysa Arryn have ed beyond
my reach, and the whispers say they are gathering swords around
them. The Knight of Flowers writes Highgarden, urging his lord
father to send his sister to court. The girl is a maid of fourteen,

sweet and beautiful and tractable, and Lord Renly and Ser Loras
intend that Robert should bed her, wed her, and make a new queen.
Little nger … the gods only know what game Little nger is
playing. Yet Lord Stark’s the one who troubles my sleep. He has the
bastard, he has the book, and soon enough he’ll have the truth. And
now his wife has abducted Tyrion Lannister, thanks to Little nger’s
meddling. Lord Tywin will take that for an outrage, and Jaime has a
queer a ection for the Imp. If the Lannisters move north, that will
bring the Tullys in as well. Delay, you say. Make haste, I reply. Even
the nest of jugglers cannot keep a hundred balls in the air
forever.”
“You are more than a juggler, old friend. You are a true sorcerer.
All I ask is that you work your magic awhile longer.” They started
down the hall in the direction Arya had come, past the room with
the monsters.
“What I can do, I will,” the one with the torch said softly. “I must
have gold, and another fty birds.”
She let them get a long way ahead, then went creeping after
them. Quiet as a shadow.
“So many?” The voices were fainter as the light dwindled ahead
of her. “The ones you need are hard to nd … so young, to know
their letters … perhaps older … not die so easy …”
“No. The younger are safer … treat them gently …”
“… if they kept their tongues …”
“… the risk …”
Long after their voices had faded away, Arya could still see the
light of the torch, a smoking star that bid her follow. Twice it
seemed to disappear, but she kept on straight, and both times she
found herself at the top of steep, narrow stairs, the torch
glimmering far below her. She hurried after it, down and down.
Once she stumbled over a rock and fell against the wall, and her
hand found raw earth supported by timbers, whereas before the
tunnel had been dressed stone.
She must have crept after them for miles. Finally they were gone,
but there was no place to go but forward. She found the wall again
and followed, blind and lost, pretending that Nymeria was padding

along beside her in the darkness. At the end she was knee-deep in
foul-smelling water, wishing she could dance upon it as Syrio might
have, and wondering if she’d ever see light again. It was full dark
when nally Arya emerged into the night air.
She found herself standing at the mouth of a sewer where it
emptied into the river. She stank so badly that she stripped right
there, dropping her soiled clothing on the riverbank as she dove
into the deep black waters. She swam until she felt clean, and
crawled out shivering. Some riders went past along the river road as
Arya was washing her clothes, but if they saw the scrawny naked
girl scrubbing her rags in the moonlight, they took no notice.
She was miles from the castle, but from anywhere in King’s
Landing you needed only to look up to see the Red Keep high on
Aegon’s Hill, so there was no danger of losing her way. Her clothes
were almost dry by the time she reached the gatehouse. The
portcullis was down and the gates barred, so she turned aside to a
postern door. The gold cloaks who had the watch sneered when she
told them to let her in. “O with you,” one said. “The kitchen scraps
are gone, and we’ll have no begging after dark.”
“I’m not a beggar,” she said. “I live here.”
“I said, o with you. Do you need a clout on the ear to help your
hearing?”
“I want to see my father.”
The guards exchanged a glance. “I want to fuck the queen myself,
for all the good it does me,” the younger one said.
The older scowled. “Who’s this father of yours, boy, the city
ratcatcher?”
“The Hand of the King,” Arya told him.
Both men laughed, but then the older one swung his st at her,
casually, as a man would swat a dog. Arya saw the blow coming
even before it began. She danced back out of the way, untouched.
“I’m not a boy,” she spat at them. “I’m Arya Stark of Winterfell, and
if you lay a hand on me my lord father will have both your heads
on spikes. If you don’t believe me, fetch Jory Cassel or Vayon Poole
from the Tower of the Hand.” She put her hands on her hips. “Now

are you going to open the gate, or do you need a clout on the ear to
help your hearing?”
Her father was alone in the solar when Harwin and Fat Tom
marched her in, an oil lamp glowing softly at his elbow. He was
bent over the biggest book Arya had ever seen, a great thick tome
with cracked yellow pages of crabbed script, bound between faded
leather covers, but he closed it to listen to Harwin’s report. His face
was stern as he sent the men away with thanks.
“You realize I had half my guard out searching for you?” Eddard
Stark said when they were alone. “Septa Mordane is beside herself
with fear. She’s in the sept praying for your safe return. Arya, you
know you are never to go beyond the castle gates without my
leave.”
“I didn’t go out the gates,” she blurted. “Well, I didn’t mean to. I
was down in the dungeons, only they turned into this tunnel. It was
all dark, and I didn’t have a torch or a candle to see by, so I had to
follow. I couldn’t go back the way I came on account of the
monsters. Father, they were talking about killing you! Not the
monsters, the two men. They didn’t see me, I was being still as
stone and quiet as a shadow, but I heard them. They said you had a
book and a bastard and if one Hand could die, why not a second? Is
that the book? Jon’s the bastard, I bet.”
“Jon? Arya, what are you talking about? Who said this?”
“They did,” she told him. “There was a fat one with rings and a
forked yellow beard, and another in mail and a steel cap, and the
fat one said they had to delay but the other one told him he couldn’t
keep juggling and the wolf and the lion were going to eat each
other and it was a mummer’s farce.” She tried to remember the rest.
She hadn’t quite understood everything she’d heard, and now it was
all mixed up in her head. “The fat one said the princess was with
child. The one in the steel cap, he had the torch, he said that they
had to hurry. I think he was a wizard.”
“A wizard,” said Ned, unsmiling. “Did he have a long white beard
and tall pointed hat speckled with stars?”
“No! It wasn’t like Old Nan’s stories. He didn’t look like a wizard,
but the fat one said he was.”

“I warn you, Arya, if you’re spinning this thread of air—”
“No, I told you, it was in the dungeons, by the place with the
secret wall. I was chasing cats, and well …” She screwed up her
face. If she admitted knocking over Prince Tommen, he would be
really angry with her. “… well, I went in this window. That’s where
I found the monsters.”
“Monsters and wizards,” her father said. “It would seem you’ve
had quite an adventure. These men you heard, you say they spoke
of juggling and mummery?”
“Yes,” Arya admitted, “only—”
“Arya, they were mummers,” her father told her. “There must be
a dozen troupes in King’s Landing right now, come to make some
coin o the tourney crowds. I’m not certain what these two were
doing in the castle, but perhaps the king has asked for a show.”
“No.” She shook her head stubbornly. “They weren’t—”
“You shouldn’t be following people about and spying on them in
any case. Nor do I cherish the notion of my daughter climbing in
strange windows after stray cats. Look at you, sweetling. Your arms
are covered with scratches. This has gone on long enough. Tell
Syrio Forel that I want a word with him—”
He was interrupted by a short, sudden knock. “Lord Eddard,
pardons,” Desmond called out, opening the door a crack, “but
there’s a black brother here begging audience. He says the matter is
urgent. I thought you would want to know.”
“My door is always open to the Night’s Watch,” Father said.
Desmond ushered the man inside. He was stooped and ugly, with
an unkempt beard and unwashed clothes, yet Father greeted him
pleasantly and asked his name.
“Yoren, as it please m’lord. My pardons for the hour.” He bowed
to Arya. “And this must be your son. He has your look.”
“I’m a girl,” Arya said, exasperated. If the old man was down from
the Wall, he must have come by way of Winterfell. “Do you know
my brothers?” she asked excitedly. “Robb and Bran are at
Winterfell, and Jon’s on the Wall. Jon Snow, he’s in the Night’s
Watch too, you must know him, he has a direwolf, a white one with
red eyes. Is Jon a ranger yet? I’m Arya Stark.” The old man in his

smelly black clothes was looking at her oddly, but Arya could not
seem to stop talking. “When you ride back to the Wall, would you
bring Jon a letter if I wrote one?” She wished Jon were here right
now. He’d believe her about the dungeons and the fat man with the
forked beard and the wizard in the steel cap.
“My daughter often forgets her courtesies,” Eddard Stark said
with a faint smile that softened his words. “I beg your forgiveness,
Yoren. Did my brother Benjen send you?”
“No one sent me, m’lord, saving old Mormont. I’m here to nd
men for the Wall, and when Robert next holds court, I’ll bend the
knee and cry our need, see if the king and his Hand have some scum
in the dungeons they’d be well rid of. You might say as Benjen Stark
is why we’re talking, though. His blood ran black. Made him my
brother as much as yours. It’s for his sake I’m come. Rode hard, I
did, near killed my horse the way I drove her, but I left the others
well behind.”
“The others?”
Yoren spat. “Sellswords and freeriders and like trash. That inn
was full o’ them, and I saw them take the scent. The scent of blood
or the scent of gold, they smell the same in the end. Not all o’ them
made for King’s Landing, either. Some went galloping for Casterly
Rock, and the Rock lies closer. Lord Tywin will have gotten the
word by now, you can count on it.”
Father frowned. “What word is this?”
Yoren eyed Arya. “One best spoken in private, m’lord, begging
your pardons.”
“As you say. Desmond, see my daughter to her chambers.” He
kissed her on the brow. “We’ll nish our talk on the morrow.”
Arya stood rooted to the spot. “Nothing bad’s happened to Jon,
has it?” she asked Yoren. “Or Uncle Benjen?”
“Well, as to Stark, I can’t say. The Snow boy was well enough
when I left the Wall. It’s not them as concerns me.”
Desmond took her hand. “Come along, milady. You heard your
lord father.”
Arya had no choice but to go with him, wishing it had been Fat
Tom. With Tom, she might have been able to linger at the door on

some excuse and hear what Yoren was saying, but Desmond was too
single-minded to trick. “How many guards does my father have?”
she asked him as they descended to her bedchamber.
“Here at King’s Landing? Fifty.”
“You wouldn’t let anyone kill him, would you?” she asked.
Desmond laughed. “No fear on that count, little lady. Lord
Eddard’s guarded night and day. He’ll come to no harm.”
“The Lannisters have more than fty men,” Arya pointed out.
“So they do, but every northerner is worth ten of these southron
swords, so you can sleep easy.”
“What if a wizard was sent to kill him?”
“Well, as to that,” Desmond replied, drawing his longsword,
“wizards die the same as other men, once you cut their heads o .”

EDDARD

“Robert, I beg of you,” Ned pleaded, “hear what you are saying.
You are talking of murdering a child.”
“The whore is pregnant!” The king’s st slammed down on the
council table loud as a thunderclap. “I warned you this would
happen, Ned. Back in the barrowlands, I warned you, but you did
not care to hear it. Well, you’ll hear it now. I want them dead,
mother and child both, and that fool Viserys as well. Is that plain
enough for you? I want them dead.”
The other councillors were all doing their best to pretend that
they were somewhere else. No doubt they were wiser than he was.
Eddard Stark had seldom felt quite so alone. “You will dishonor
yourself forever if you do this.”
“Then let it be on my head, so long as it is done. I am not so blind
that I cannot see the shadow of the axe when it is hanging over my
own neck.”
“There is no axe,” Ned told his king. “Only the shadow of a
shadow, twenty years removed … if it exists at all.”
“If?” Varys asked softly, wringing powdered hands together. “My
lord, you wrong me. Would I bring lies to king and council?”
Ned looked at the eunuch coldly. “You would bring us the
whisperings of a traitor half a world away, my lord. Perhaps
Mormont is wrong. Perhaps he is lying.”
“Ser Jorah would not dare deceive me,” Varys said with a sly
smile. “Rely on it, my lord. The princess is with child.”

“So you say. If you are wrong, we need not fear. If the girl
miscarries, we need not fear. If she births a daughter in place of a
son, we need not fear. If the babe dies in infancy, we need not
fear.”
“But if it is a boy?” Robert insisted. “If he lives?”
“The narrow sea would still lie between us. I shall fear the
Dothraki the day they teach their horses to run on water.”
The king took a swallow of wine and glowered at Ned across the
council table. “So you would counsel me to do nothing until the
dragonspawn has landed his army on my shores, is that it?”
“This ‘dragonspawn’ is in his mother’s belly,” Ned said. “Even
Aegon did no conquering until after he was weaned.”
“Gods! You are stubborn as an aurochs, Stark.” The king looked
around the council table. “Have the rest of you mislaid your
tongues? Will no one talk sense to this frozen-faced fool?”
Varys gave the king an unctuous smile and laid a soft hand on
Ned’s sleeve. “I understand your qualms, Lord Eddard, truly I do. It
gave me no joy to bring this grievous news to council. It is a
terrible thing we contemplate, a vile thing. Yet we who presume to
rule must do vile things for the good of the realm, howevermuch it
pains us.”
Lord Renly shrugged. “The matter seems simple enough to me.
We ought to have had Viserys and his sister killed years ago, but
His Grace my brother made the mistake of listening to Jon Arryn.”
“Mercy is never a mistake, Lord Renly,” Ned replied. “On the
Trident, Ser Barristan here cut down a dozen good men, Robert’s
friends and mine. When they brought him to us, grievously
wounded and near death, Roose Bolton urged us to cut his throat,
but your brother said, ‘I will not kill a man for loyalty, nor for
ghting well,’ and sent his own maester to tend Ser Barristan’s
wounds.” He gave the king a long cool look. “Would that man were
here today.”
Robert had shame enough to blush. “It was not the same,” he
complained. “Ser Barristan was a knight of the Kingsguard.”
“Whereas Daenerys is a fourteen-year-old girl.” Ned knew he was
pushing this well past the point of wisdom, yet he could not keep

silent. “Robert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen
for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?”
“To put an end to Targaryens!” the king growled.
“Your Grace, I never knew you to fear Rhaegar.” Ned fought to
keep the scorn out of his voice, and failed. “Have the years so
unmanned you that you tremble at the shadow of an unborn child?”
Robert purpled. “No more, Ned,” he warned, pointing. “Not
another word. Have you forgotten who is king here?”
“No, Your Grace,” Ned replied. “Have you?”
“Enough!” the king bellowed. “I am sick of talk. I’ll be done with
this, or be damned. What say you all?”
“She must be killed,” Lord Renly declared.
“We have no choice,” murmured Varys. “Sadly, sadly …”
Ser Barristan Selmy raised his pale blue eyes from the table and
said, “Your Grace, there is honor in facing an enemy on the
battle eld, but none in killing him in his mother’s womb. Forgive
me, but I must stand with Lord Eddard.”
Grand Maester Pycelle cleared his throat, a process that seemed
to take some minutes. “My order serves the realm, not the ruler.
Once I counseled King Aerys as loyally as I counsel King Robert
now, so I bear this girl child of his no ill will. Yet I ask you this—
should war come again, how many soldiers will die? How many
towns will burn? How many children will be ripped from their
mothers to perish on the end of a spear?” He stroked his luxuriant
white beard, in nitely sad, in nitely weary. “Is it not wiser, even
kinder, that Daenerys Targaryen should die now so that tens of
thousands might live?”
“Kinder,” Varys said. “Oh, well and truly spoken, Grand Maester.
It is so true. Should the gods in their caprice grant Daenerys
Targaryen a son, the realm must bleed.”
Little nger was the last. As Ned looked to him, Lord Petyr sti ed
a yawn. “When you nd yourself in bed with an ugly woman, the
best thing to do is close your eyes and get on with it,” he declared.
“Waiting won’t make the maid any prettier. Kiss her and be done
with it.”
“Kiss her?” Ser Barristan repeated, aghast.

“A steel kiss,” said Little nger.
Robert turned to face his Hand. “Well, there it is, Ned. You and
Selmy stand alone on this matter. The only question that remains is,
who can we nd to kill her?”
“Mormont craves a royal pardon,” Lord Renly reminded them.
“Desperately,” Varys said, “yet he craves life even more. By now,
the princess nears Vaes Dothrak, where it is death to draw a blade.
If I told you what the Dothraki would do to the poor man who used
one on a khaleesi, none of you would sleep tonight.” He stroked a
powdered cheek. “Now, poison … the tears of Lys, let us say. Khal
Drogo need never know it was not a natural death.”
Grand Maester Pycelle’s sleepy eyes icked open. He squinted
suspiciously at the eunuch.
“Poison is a coward’s weapon,” the king complained.
Ned had heard enough. “You send hired knives to kill a fourteenyear-old girl and still quibble about honor?” He pushed back his
chair and stood. “Do it yourself, Robert. The man who passes the
sentence should swing the sword. Look her in the eyes before you
kill her. See her tears, hear her last words. You owe her that much
at least.”
“Gods,” the king swore, the word exploding out of him as if he
could barely contain his fury. “You mean it, damn you.” He reached
for the agon of wine at his elbow, found it empty, and ung it
away to shatter against the wall. “I am out of wine and out of
patience. Enough of this. Just have it done.”
“I will not be part of murder, Robert. Do as you will, but do not
ask me to x my seal to it.”
For a moment Robert did not seem to understand what Ned was
saying. De ance was not a dish he tasted often. Slowly his face
changed as comprehension came. His eyes narrowed and a ush
crept up his neck past the velvet collar. He pointed an angry nger
at Ned. “You are the King’s Hand, Lord Stark. You will do as I
command you, or I’ll nd me a Hand who will.”
“I wish him every success.” Ned unfastened the heavy clasp that
clutched at the folds of his cloak, the ornate silver hand that was his
badge of o ce. He laid it on the table in front of the king, saddened

by the memory of the man who had pinned it on him, the friend he
had loved. “I thought you a better man than this, Robert. I thought
we had made a nobler king.”
Robert’s face was purple. “Out,” he croaked, choking on his rage.
“Out, damn you, I’m done with you. What are you waiting for? Go,
run back to Winterfell. And make certain I never look on your face
again, or I swear, I’ll have your head on a spike!”
Ned bowed, and turned on his heel without another word. He
could feel Robert’s eyes on his back. As he strode from the council
chambers, the discussion resumed with scarcely a pause. “On
Braavos there is a society called the Faceless Men,” Grand Maester
Pycelle o ered.
“Do you have any idea how costly they are?” Little nger
complained. “You could hire an army of common sellswords for half
the price, and that’s for a merchant. I don’t dare think what they
might ask for a princess.”
The closing of the door behind him silenced the voices. Ser Boros
Blount was stationed outside the chamber, wearing the long white
cloak and armor of the Kingsguard. He gave Ned a quick, curious
glance from the corner of his eye, but asked no questions.
The day felt heavy and oppressive as he crossed the bailey back
to the Tower of the Hand. He could feel the threat of rain in the air.
Ned would have welcomed it. It might have made him feel a tri e
less unclean. When he reached his solar, he summoned Vayon Poole.
The steward came at once. “You sent for me, my lord Hand?”
“Hand no longer,” Ned told him. “The king and I have quarreled.
We shall be returning to Winterfell.”
“I shall begin making arrangements at once, my lord. We will
need a fortnight to ready everything for the journey.”
“We may not have a fortnight. We may not have a day. The king
mentioned something about seeing my head on a spike.” Ned
frowned. He did not truly believe the king would harm him, not
Robert. He was angry now, but once Ned was safely out of sight, his
rage would cool as it always did.
Suddenly, uncomfortably, he found himself recalling Rhaegar
Targaryen. Fifteen years dead, yet Robert hates him as much as ever. It

was a disturbing notion … and there was the other matter, the
business with Catelyn and the dwarf that Yoren had warned him of
last night. That would come to light soon, as sure as sunrise, and
with the king in such a black fury … Robert might not care a g for
Tyrion Lannister, but it would touch on his pride, and there was no
telling what the queen might do.
“It might be safest if I went on ahead,” he told Poole. “I will take
my daughters and a few guardsmen. The rest of you can follow
when you are ready. Inform Jory, but tell no one else, and do
nothing until the girls and I have gone. The castle is full of eyes and
ears, and I would rather my plans were not known.”
“As you command, my lord.”
When he had gone, Eddard Stark went to the window and sat
brooding. Robert had left him no choice that he could see. He ought
to thank him. It would be good to return to Winterfell. He ought
never have left. His sons were waiting there. Perhaps he and
Catelyn would make a new son together when he returned, they
were not so old yet. And of late he had often found himself
dreaming of snow, of the deep quiet of the wolfswood at night.
And yet, the thought of leaving angered him as well. So much
was still undone. Robert and his council of cravens and atterers
would beggar the realm if left unchecked … or, worse, sell it to the
Lannisters in payment of their loans. And the truth of Jon Arryn’s
death still eluded him. Oh, he had found a few pieces, enough to
convince him that Jon had indeed been murdered, but that was no
more than the spoor of an animal on the forest oor. He had not
sighted the beast itself yet, though he sensed it was there, lurking,
hidden, treacherous.
It struck him suddenly that he might return to Winterfell by sea.
Ned was no sailor, and ordinarily would have preferred the
kingsroad, but if he took ship he could stop at Dragonstone and
speak with Stannis Baratheon. Pycelle had sent a raven o across
the water, with a polite letter from Ned requesting Lord Stannis to
return to his seat on the small council. As yet, there had been no
reply, but the silence only deepened his suspicions. Lord Stannis
shared the secret Jon Arryn had died for, he was certain of it. The

truth he sought might very well be waiting for him on the ancient
island fortress of House Targaryen.
And when you have it, what then? Some secrets are safer kept hidden.
Some secrets are too dangerous to share, even with those you love and
trust. Ned slid the dagger that Catelyn had brought him out of the
sheath on his belt. The Imp’s knife. Why would the dwarf want Bran
dead? To silence him, surely. Another secret, or only a di erent
strand of the same web?
Could Robert be part of it? He would not have thought so, but
once he would not have thought Robert could command the murder
of women and children either. Catelyn had tried to warn him. You
knew the man, she had said. The king is a stranger to you. The sooner
he was quit of King’s Landing, the better. If there was a ship sailing
north on the morrow, it would be well to be on it.
He summoned Vayon Poole again and sent him to the docks to
make inquiries, quietly but quickly. “Find me a fast ship with a
skilled captain,” he told the steward. “I care nothing for the size of
its cabins or the quality of its appointments, so long as it is swift
and safe. I wish to leave at once.”
Poole had no sooner taken his leave than Tomard announced a
visitor. “Lord Baelish to see you, m’lord.”
Ned was half-tempted to turn him away, but thought better of it.
He was not free yet; until he was, he must play their games. “Show
him in, Tom.”
Lord Petyr sauntered into the solar as if nothing had gone amiss
that morning. He wore a slashed velvet doublet in cream-and-silver,
a grey silk cloak trimmed with black fox, and his customary
mocking smile.
Ned greeted him coldly. “Might I ask the reason for this visit,
Lord Baelish?”
“I won’t detain you long, I’m on my way to dine with Lady
Tanda. Lamprey pie and roast suckling pig. She has some thought to
wed me to her younger daughter, so her table is always astonishing.
If truth be told, I’d sooner marry the pig, but don’t tell her. I do
love lamprey pie.”

“Don’t let me keep you from your eels, my lord,” Ned said with
icy disdain. “At the moment, I cannot think of anyone whose
company I desire less than yours.”
“Oh, I’m certain if you put your mind to it, you could come up
with a few names. Varys, say. Cersei. Or Robert. His Grace is most
wroth with you. He went on about you at some length after you
took your leave of us this morning. The words insolence and
ingratitude came into it frequently, I seem to recall.”
Ned did not honor that with a reply. Nor did he o er his guest a
seat, but Little nger took one anyway. “After you stormed out, it
was left to me to convince them not to hire the Faceless Men,” he
continued blithely. “Instead Varys will quietly let it be known that
we’ll make a lord of whoever does in the Targaryen girl.”
Ned was disgusted. “So now we grant titles to assassins.”
Little nger shrugged. “Titles are cheap. The Faceless Men are
expensive. If truth be told, I did the Targaryen girl more good than
you with all your talk of honor. Let some sellsword drunk on visions
of lordship try to kill her. Likely he’ll make a botch of it, and
afterward the Dothraki will be on their guard. If we’d sent a
Faceless Man after her, she’d be as good as buried.”
Ned frowned. “You sit in council and talk of ugly women and
steel kisses, and now you expect me to believe that you tried to
protect the girl? How big a fool do you take me for?”
“Well, quite an enormous one, actually,” said Little nger,
laughing.
“Do you always nd murder so amusing, Lord Baelish?”
“It’s not murder I nd amusing, Lord Stark, it’s you. You rule like
a man dancing on rotten ice. I daresay you will make a noble
splash. I believe I heard the rst crack this morning.”
“The rst and last,” said Ned. “I’ve had my ll.”
“When do you mean to return to Winterfell, my lord?”
“As soon as I can. What concern is that of yours?”
“None … but if perchance you’re still here come evenfall, I’d be
pleased to take you to this brothel your man Jory has been
searching for so ine ectually.” Little nger smiled. “And I won’t
even tell the Lady Catelyn.”

CATELYN

“My lady, you should have sent word of your coming,” Ser Donnel
Waynwood told her as their horses climbed the pass. “We would
have sent an escort. The high road is not as safe as it once was, for a
party as small as yours.”
“We learned that to our sorrow, Ser Donnel,” Catelyn said.
Sometimes she felt as though her heart had turned to stone; six
brave men had died to bring her this far, and she could not even
nd it in her to weep for them. Even their names were fading. “The
clansmen harried us day and night. We lost three men in the rst
attack, and two more in the second, and Lannister’s serving man
died of a fever when his wounds festered. When we heard your men
approaching, I thought us doomed for certain.” They had drawn up
for a last desperate ght, blades in hand and backs to the rock. The
dwarf had been whetting the edge of his axe and making some
mordant jest when Bronn spotted the banner the riders carried
before them, the moon-and-falcon of House Arryn, sky-blue and
white. Catelyn had never seen a more welcome sight.
“The clans have grown bolder since Lord Jon died,” Ser Donnel
said. He was a stocky youth of twenty years, earnest and homely,
with a wide nose and a shock of thick brown hair. “If it were up to
me, I would take a hundred men into the mountains, root them out
of their fastnesses, and teach them some sharp lessons, but your
sister has forbidden it. She would not even permit her knights to
ght in the Hand’s tourney. She wants all our swords kept close to

home, to defend the Vale … against what, no one is certain.
Shadows, some say.” He looked at her anxiously, as if he had
suddenly remembered who she was. “I hope I have not spoken out
of turn, my lady. I meant no o ense.”
“Frank talk does not o end me, Ser Donnel.” Catelyn knew what
her sister feared. Not shadows, Lannisters, she thought to herself,
glancing back to where the dwarf rode beside Bronn. The two of
them had grown thick as thieves since Chiggen had died. The little
man was more cunning than she liked. When they had entered the
mountains, he had been her captive, bound and helpless. What was
he now? Her captive still, yet he rode along with a dirk through his
belt and an axe strapped to his saddle, wearing the shadowskin
cloak he’d won dicing with the singer and the chainmail hauberk
he’d taken o Chiggen’s corpse. Two score men anked the dwarf
and the rest of her ragged band, knights and men-at-arms in service
to her sister Lysa and Jon Arryn’s young son, and yet Tyrion
betrayed no hint of fear. Could I be wrong? Catelyn wondered, not
for the rst time. Could he be innocent after all, of Bran and Jon
Arryn and all the rest? And if he was, what did that make her? Six
men had died to bring him here.
Resolute, she pushed her doubts away. “When we reach your
keep, I would take it kindly if you could send for Maester Colemon
at once. Ser Rodrik is feverish from his wounds.” More than once
she had feared the gallant old knight would not survive the journey.
Toward the end he could scarcely sit his horse, and Bronn had urged
her to leave him to his fate, but Catelyn would not hear of it. They
had tied him in the saddle instead, and she had commanded
Marillion the singer to watch over him.
Ser Donnel hesitated before he answered. “The Lady Lysa has
commanded the maester to remain at the Eyrie at all times, to care
for Lord Robert,” he said. “We have a septon at the gate who tends
to our wounded. He can see to your man’s hurts.”
Catelyn had more faith in a maester’s learning than a septon’s
prayers. She was about to say as much when she saw the
battlements ahead, long parapets built into the very stone of the
mountains on either side of them. Where the pass shrank to a

narrow de le scarce wide enough for four men to ride abreast, twin
watchtowers clung to the rocky slopes, joined by a covered bridge
of weathered grey stone that arched above the road. Silent faces
watched from arrow slits in tower, battlements, and bridge. When
they had climbed almost to the top, a knight rode out to meet them.
His horse and his armor were grey, but his cloak was the rippling
blue-and-red of Riverrun, and a shiny black sh, wrought in gold
and obsidian, pinned its folds against his shoulder. “Who would pass
the Bloody Gate?” he called.
“Ser Donnel Waynwood, with the Lady Catelyn Stark and her
companions,” the young knight answered.
The Knight of the Gate lifted his visor. “I thought the lady looked
familiar. You are far from home, little Cat.”
“And you, Uncle,” she said, smiling despite all she had been
through. Hearing that hoarse, smoky voice again took her back
twenty years, to the days of her childhood.
“My home is at my back,” he said gru y.
“Your home is in my heart,” Catelyn told him. “Take o your
helm. I would look on your face again.”
“The years have not improved it, I fear,” Brynden Tully said, but
when he lifted o the helm, Catelyn saw that he lied. His features
were lined and weathered, and time had stolen the auburn from his
hair and left him only grey, but the smile was the same, and the
bushy eyebrows fat as caterpillars, and the laughter in his deep blue
eyes. “Did Lysa know you were coming?”
“There was no time to send word ahead,” Catelyn told him. The
others were coming up behind her. “I fear we ride before the storm,
Uncle.”
“May we enter the Vale?” Ser Donnel asked. The Waynwoods
were ever ones for ceremony.
“In the name of Robert Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the
Vale, True Warden of the East, I bid you enter freely, and charge
you to keep his peace,” Ser Brynden replied. “Come.”
And so she rode behind him, beneath the shadow of the Bloody
Gate where a dozen armies had dashed themselves to pieces in the
Age of Heroes. On the far side of the stoneworks, the mountains

opened up suddenly upon a vista of green elds, blue sky, and
snowcapped mountains that took her breath away. The Vale of
Arryn bathed in the morning light.
It stretched before them to the misty east, a tranquil land of rich
black soil, wide slow-moving rivers, and hundreds of small lakes
that shone like mirrors in the sun, protected on all sides by its
sheltering peaks. Wheat and corn and barley grew high in its elds,
and even in Highgarden the pumpkins were no larger nor the fruit
any sweeter than here. They stood at the western end of the valley,
where the high road crested the last pass and began its winding
descent to the bottomlands two miles below. The Vale was narrow
here, no more than a half day’s ride across, and the northern
mountains seemed so close that Catelyn could almost reach out and
touch them. Looming over them all was the jagged peak called the
Giant’s Lance, a mountain that even mountains looked up to, its
head lost in icy mists three and a half miles above the valley oor.
Over its massive western shoulder owed the ghost torrent of
Alyssa’s Tears. Even from this distance, Catelyn could make out the
shining silver thread, bright against the dark stone.
When her uncle saw that she had stopped, he moved his horse
closer and pointed. “It’s there, beside Alyssa’s Tears. All you can see
from here is a ash of white every now and then, if you look hard
and the sun hits the walls just right.”
Seven towers, Ned had told her, like white daggers thrust into the
belly of the sky, so high you can stand on the parapets and look down on
the clouds. “How long a ride?” she asked.
“We can be at the mountain by evenfall,” Uncle Brynden said,
“but the climb will take another day.”
Ser Rodrik Cassel spoke up from behind. “My lady,” he said, “I
fear I can go no farther today.” His face sagged beneath his ragged,
new-grown whiskers, and he looked so weary Catelyn feared he
might fall o his horse.
“Nor should you,” she said. “You have done all I could have asked
of you, and a hundred times more. My uncle will see me the rest of
the way to the Eyrie. Lannister must come with me, but there is no

reason that you and the others should not rest here and recover
your strength.”
“We should be honored to have them to guest,” Ser Donnel said
with the grave courtesy of the young. Beside Ser Rodrik, only
Bronn, Ser Willis Wode, and Marillion the singer remained of the
party that had ridden with her from the inn by the crossroads.
“My lady,” Marillion said, riding forward. “I beg you allow me to
accompany you to the Eyrie, to see the end of the tale as I saw its
beginnings.” The boy sounded haggard, yet strangely determined;
he had a fevered shine to his eyes.
Catelyn had never asked the singer to ride with them; that choice
he had made himself, and how he had come to survive the journey
when so many braver men lay dead and unburied behind them, she
could never say. Yet here he was, with a scru of beard that made
him look almost a man. Perhaps she owed him something for
having come this far. “Very well,” she told him.
“I’ll come as well,” Bronn announced.
She liked that less well. Without Bronn she would never have
reached the Vale, she knew; the sellsword was as erce a ghter as
she had ever seen, and his sword had helped cut them through to
safety. Yet for all that, Catelyn misliked the man. Courage he had,
and strength, but there was no kindness in him, and little loyalty.
And she had seen him riding beside Lannister far too often, talking
in low voices and laughing at some private joke. She would have
preferred to separate him from the dwarf here and now, but having
agreed that Marillion might continue to the Eyrie, she could see no
gracious way to deny that same right to Bronn. “As you wish,” she
said, although she noted that he had not actually asked her
permission.
Ser Willis Wode remained with Ser Rodrik, a soft-spoken septon
fussing over their wounds. Their horses were left behind as well,
poor ragged things. Ser Donnel promised to send birds ahead to the
Eyrie and the Gates of the Moon with the word of their coming.
Fresh mounts were brought forth from the stables, surefooted
mountain stock with shaggy coats, and within the hour they set
forth once again. Catelyn rode beside her uncle as they began the

descent to the valley oor. Behind came Bronn, Tyrion Lannister,
Marillion, and six of Brynden’s men.
Not until they were a third of the way down the mountain path,
well out of earshot of the others, did Brynden Tully turn to her and
say, “So, child. Tell me about this storm of yours.”
“I have not been a child in many years, Uncle,” Catelyn said, but
she told him nonetheless. It took longer than she would have
believed to tell it all, Lysa’s letter and Bran’s fall, the assassin’s
dagger and Little nger and her chance meeting with Tyrion
Lannister in the crossroads inn.
Her uncle listened silently, heavy brows shadowing his eyes as his
frown grew deeper. Brynden Tully had always known how to
listen … to anyone but her father. He was Lord Hoster’s brother,
younger by ve years, but the two of them had been at war as far
back as Catelyn could remember. During one of their louder
quarrels, when Catelyn was eight, Lord Hoster had called Brynden
“the black goat of the Tully ock.” Laughing, Brynden had pointed
out that the sigil of their house was a leaping trout, so he ought to
be a black sh rather than a black goat, and from that day forward
he had taken it as his personal emblem.
The war had not ended until the day she and Lysa had been wed.
It was at their wedding feast that Brynden told his brother he was
leaving Riverrun to serve Lysa and her new husband, the Lord of
the Eyrie. Lord Hoster had not spoken his brother’s name since,
from what Edmure told her in his infrequent letters.
Nonetheless, during all those years of Catelyn’s girlhood, it had
been Brynden the Black sh to whom Lord Hoster’s children had run
with their tears and their tales, when Father was too busy and
Mother too ill. Catelyn, Lysa, Edmure … and yes, even Petyr
Baelish, their father’s ward … he had listened to them all patiently,
as he listened now, laughing at their triumphs and sympathizing
with their childish misfortunes.
When she was done, her uncle remained silent for a long time, as
his horse negotiated the steep, rocky trail. “Your father must be
told,” he said at last. “If the Lannisters should march, Winterfell is

remote and the Vale walled up behind its mountains, but Riverrun
lies right in their path.”
“I’d had the same fear,” Catelyn admitted. “I shall ask Maester
Colemon to send a bird when we reach the Eyrie.” She had other
messages to send as well; the commands that Ned had given her for
his bannermen, to ready the defenses of the north. “What is the
mood in the Vale?” she asked.
“Angry,” Brynden Tully admitted. “Lord Jon was much loved, and
the insult was keenly felt when the king named Jaime Lannister to
an o ce the Arryns had held for near three hundred years. Lysa has
commanded us to call her son the True Warden of the East, but no
one is fooled. Nor is your sister alone in wondering at the manner
of the Hand’s death. None dare say Jon was murdered, not openly,
but suspicion casts a long shadow.” He gave Catelyn a look, his
mouth tight. “And there is the boy.”
“The boy? What of him?” She ducked her head as they passed
under a low overhang of rock, and around a sharp turn.
Her uncle’s voice was troubled. “Lord Robert,” he sighed. “Six
years old, sickly, and prone to weep if you take his dolls away. Jon
Arryn’s trueborn heir, by all the gods, yet there are some who say
he is too weak to sit his father’s seat. Nestor Royce has been high
steward these past fourteen years, while Lord Jon served in King’s
Landing, and many whisper that he should rule until the boy comes
of age. Others believe that Lysa must marry again, and soon.
Already the suitors gather like crows on a battle eld. The Eyrie is
full of them.”
“I might have expected that,” Catelyn said. Small wonder there;
Lysa was still young, and the kingdom of Mountain and Vale made a
handsome wedding gift. “Will Lysa take another husband?”
“She says yes, provided she nds a man who suits her,” Brynden
Tully said, “but she has already rejected Lord Nestor and a dozen
other suitable men. She swears that this time she will choose her
lord husband.”
“You of all people can scarce fault her for that.”
Ser Brynden snorted. “Nor do I, but … it seems to me Lysa is only
playing at courtship. She enjoys the sport, but I believe your sister

intends to rule herself until her boy is old enough to be Lord of the
Eyrie in truth as well as name.”
“A woman can rule as wisely as a man,” Catelyn said.
“The right woman can,” her uncle said with a sideways glance.
“Make no mistake, Cat. Lysa is not you.” He hesitated a moment.
“If truth be told, I fear you may not nd your sister as … helpful as
you would like.”
She was puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“The Lysa who came back from King’s Landing is not the same
girl who went south when her husband was named Hand. Those
years were hard for her. You must know. Lord Arryn was a dutiful
husband, but their marriage was made from politics, not passion.”
“As was my own.”
“They began the same, but your ending has been happier than
your sister’s. Two babes stillborn, twice as many miscarriages, Lord
Arryn’s death … Catelyn, the gods gave Lysa only the one child, and
he is all your sister lives for now, poor boy. Small wonder she ed
rather than see him handed over to the Lannisters. Your sister is
afraid, child, and the Lannisters are what she fears most. She ran to
the Vale, stealing away from the Red Keep like a thief in the night,
and all to snatch her son out of the lion’s mouth … and now you
have brought the lion to her door.”
“In chains,” Catelyn said. A crevasse yawned on her right, falling
away into darkness. She reined up her horse and picked her way
along step by careful step.
“Oh?” Her uncle glanced back, to where Tyrion Lannister was
making his slow descent behind them. “I see an axe on his saddle, a
dirk at his belt, and a sellsword that trails after him like a hungry
shadow. Where are the chains, sweet one?”
Catelyn shifted uneasily in her seat. “The dwarf is here, and not
by choice. Chains or no, he is my prisoner. Lysa will want him to
answer for his crimes no less than I. It was her own lord husband
the Lannisters murdered, and her own letter that rst warned us
against them.”
Brynden Black sh gave her a weary smile. “I hope you are right,
child,” he sighed, in tones that said she was wrong.

The sun was well to the west by the time the slope began to
atten beneath the hooves of their horses. The road widened and
grew straight, and for the rst time Catelyn noticed wild owers and
grasses growing. Once they reached the valley oor, the going was
faster and they made good time, cantering through verdant
greenwoods and sleepy little hamlets, past orchards and golden
wheat elds, splashing across a dozen sunlit streams. Her uncle sent
a standard-bearer ahead of them, a double banner ying from his
sta ; the moon-and-falcon of House Arryn on high, and below it his
own black sh. Farm wagons and merchants’ carts and riders from
lesser houses moved aside to let them pass.
Even so, it was full dark before they reached the stout castle that
stood at the foot of the Giant’s Lance. Torches ickered atop its
ramparts, and the horned moon danced upon the dark waters of its
moat. The drawbridge was up and the portcullis down, but Catelyn
saw lights burning in the gatehouse and spilling from the windows
of the square towers beyond.
“The Gates of the Moon,” her uncle said as the party drew rein.
His standard-bearer rode to the edge of the moat to hail the men in
the gatehouse. “Lord Nestor’s seat. He should be expecting us. Look
up.”
Catelyn raised her eyes, up and up and up. At rst all she saw was
stone and trees, the looming mass of the great mountain shrouded
in night, as black as a starless sky. Then she noticed the glow of
distant res well above them; a tower keep, built upon the steep
side of the mountain, its lights like orange eyes staring down from
above. Above that was another, higher and more distant, and still
higher a third, no more than a ickering spark in the sky. And
nally, up where the falcons soared, a ash of white in the
moonlight. Vertigo washed over her as she stared upward at the
pale towers, so far above.
“The Eyrie,” she heard Marillion murmur, awed.
The sharp voice of Tyrion Lannister broke in. “The Arryns must
not be overfond of company. If you’re planning to make us climb
that mountain in the dark, I’d rather you kill me here.”

“We’ll spend the night here and make the ascent on the morrow,”
Brynden told him.
“I can scarcely wait,” the dwarf replied. “How do we get up
there? I’ve no experience at riding goats.”
“Mules,” Brynden said, smiling.
“There are steps carved into the mountain,” Catelyn said. Ned had
told her about them when he talked of his youth here with Robert
Baratheon and Jon Arryn.
Her uncle nodded. “It is too dark to see them, but the steps are
there. Too steep and narrow for horses, but mules can manage them
most of the way. The path is guarded by three waycastles, Stone
and Snow and Sky. The mules will take us as far up as Sky.”
Tyrion Lannister glanced up doubtfully. “And beyond that?”
Brynden smiled. “Beyond that, the path is too steep even for
mules. We ascend on foot the rest of the way. Or perchance you’d
prefer to ride a basket. The Eyrie clings to the mountain directly
above Sky, and in its cellars are six great winches with long iron
chains to draw supplies up from below. If you prefer, my lord of
Lannister, I can arrange for you to ride up with the bread and beer
and apples.”
The dwarf gave a bark of laughter. “Would that I were a
pumpkin,” he said. “Alas, my lord father would no doubt be most
chagrined if his son of Lannister went to his fate like a load of
turnips. If you ascend on foot, I fear I must do the same. We
Lannisters do have a certain pride.”
“Pride?” Catelyn snapped. His mocking tone and easy manner
made her angry. “Arrogance, some might call it. Arrogance and
avarice and lust for power.”
“My brother is undoubtedly arrogant,” Tyrion Lannister replied.
“My father is the soul of avarice, and my sweet sister Cersei lusts
for power with every waking breath. I, however, am innocent as a
little lamb. Shall I bleat for you?” He grinned.
The drawbridge came creaking down before she could reply, and
they heard the sound of oiled chains as the portcullis was drawn up.
Men-at-arms carried burning brands out to light their way, and her
uncle led them across the moat. Lord Nestor Royce, High Steward of

the Vale and Keeper of the Gates of the Moon, was waiting in the
yard to greet them, surrounded by his knights. “Lady Stark,” he
said, bowing. He was a massive, barrel-chested man, and his bow
was clumsy.
Catelyn dismounted to stand before him. “Lord Nestor,” she said.
She knew the man only by reputation; Bronze Yohn’s cousin, from a
lesser branch of House Royce, yet still a formidable lord in his own
right. “We have had a long and tiring journey. I would beg the
hospitality of your roof tonight, if I might.”
“My roof is yours, my lady,” Lord Nestor returned gru y, “but
your sister the Lady Lysa has sent down word from the Eyrie. She
wishes to see you at once. The rest of your party will be housed
here and sent up at rst light.”
Her uncle swung o his horse. “What madness is this?” he said
bluntly. Brynden Tully had never been a man to blunt the edge of
his words. “A night ascent, with the moon not even full? Even Lysa
should know that’s an invitation to a broken neck.”
“The mules know the way, Ser Brynden.” A wiry girl of seventeen
or eighteen years stepped up beside Lord Nestor. Her dark hair was
cropped short and straight around her head, and she wore riding
leathers and a light shirt of silvered ringmail. She bowed to Catelyn,
more gracefully than her lord. “I promise you, my lady, no harm
will come to you. It would be my honor to take you up. I’ve made
the dark climb a hundred times. Mychel says my father must have
been a goat.”
She sounded so cocky that Catelyn had to smile. “Do you have a
name, child?”
“Mya Stone, if it please you, my lady,” the girl said.
It did not please her; it was an e ort for Catelyn to keep the
smile on her face. Stone was a bastard’s name in the Vale, as Snow
was in the north, and Flowers in Highgarden; in each of the Seven
Kingdoms, custom had fashioned a surname for children born with
no names of their own. Catelyn had nothing against this girl, but
suddenly she could not help but think of Ned’s bastard on the Wall,
and the thought made her angry and guilty, both at once. She
struggled to nd words for a reply.

Lord Nestor lled the silence. “Mya’s a clever girl, and if she
vows she will bring you safely to the Lady Lysa, I believe her. She
has not failed me yet.”
“Then I put myself in your hands, Mya Stone,” Catelyn said.
“Lord Nestor, I charge you to keep a close guard on my prisoner.”
“And I charge you to bring the prisoner a cup of wine and a nicely
crisped capon, before he dies of hunger,” Lannister said. “A girl
would be pleasant as well, but I suppose that’s too much to ask of
you.” The sellsword Bronn laughed aloud.
Lord Nestor ignored the banter. “As you say, my lady, so it will
be done.” Only then did he look at the dwarf. “See our lord of
Lannister to a tower cell, and bring him meat and mead.”
Catelyn took her leave of her uncle and the others as Tyrion
Lannister was led o , then followed the bastard girl through the
castle. Two mules were waiting in the upper bailey, saddled and
ready. Mya helped her mount one while a guardsman in a sky-blue
cloak opened the narrow postern gate. Beyond was dense forest of
pine and spruce, and the mountain like a black wall, but the steps
were there, chiseled deep into the rock, ascending into the sky.
“Some people nd it easier if they close their eyes,” Mya said as she
led the mules through the gate into the dark wood. “When they get
frightened or dizzy, sometimes they hold on to the mule too tight.
They don’t like that.”
“I was born a Tully and wed to a Stark,” Catelyn said. “I do not
frighten easily. Do you plan to light a torch?” The steps were black
as pitch.
The girl made a face. “Torches just blind you. On a clear night
like this, the moon and the stars are enough. Mychel says I have the
eyes of the owl.” She mounted and urged her mule up the rst step.
Catelyn’s animal followed of its own accord.
“You mentioned Mychel before,” Catelyn said. The mules set the
pace, slow but steady. She was perfectly content with that.
“Mychel’s my love,” Mya explained. “Mychel Redfort. He’s squire
to Ser Lyn Corbray. We’re to wed as soon as he becomes a knight,
next year or the year after.”

She sounded so like Sansa, so happy and innocent with her
dreams. Catelyn smiled, but the smile was tinged with sadness. The
Redforts were an old name in the Vale, she knew, with the blood of
the First Men in their veins. His love she might be, but no Redfort
would ever wed a bastard. His family would arrange a more
suitable match for him, to a Corbray or a Waynwood or a Royce, or
perhaps a daughter of some greater house outside the Vale. If
Mychel Redfort laid with this girl at all, it would be on the wrong
side of the sheet.
The ascent was easier than Catelyn had dared hope. The trees
pressed close, leaning over the path to make a rustling green roof
that shut out even the moon, so it seemed as though they were
moving up a long black tunnel. But the mules were surefooted and
tireless, and Mya Stone did indeed seem blessed with night-eyes.
They plodded upward, winding their way back and forth across the
face of the mountain as the steps twisted and turned. A thick layer
of fallen needles carpeted the path, so the shoes of their mules made
only the softest sound on the rock. The quiet soothed her, and the
gentle rocking motion set Catelyn to swaying in her saddle. Before
long she was ghting sleep.
Perhaps she did doze for a moment, for suddenly a massive
ironbound gate was looming before them. “Stone,” Mya announced
cheerily, dismounting. Iron spikes were set along the tops of
formidable stone walls, and two fat round towers overtopped the
keep. The gate swung open at Mya’s shout. Inside, the portly knight
who commanded the waycastle greeted Mya by name and o ered
them skewers of charred meat and onions still hot from the spit.
Catelyn had not realized how hungry she was. She ate standing in
the yard, as stablehands moved their saddles to fresh mules. The hot
juices ran down her chin and dripped onto her cloak, but she was
too famished to care.
Then it was up onto a new mule and out again into the starlight.
The second part of the ascent seemed more treacherous to Catelyn.
The trail was steeper, the steps more worn, and here and there
littered with pebbles and broken stone. Mya had to dismount a halfdozen times to move fallen rocks from their path. “You don’t want

your mule to break a leg up here,” she said. Catelyn was forced to
agree. She could feel the altitude more now. The trees were sparser
up here, and the wind blew more vigorously, sharp gusts that
tugged at her clothing and pushed her hair into her eyes. From time
to time the steps doubled back on themselves, and she could see
Stone below them, and the Gates of the Moon farther down, its
torches no brighter than candles.
Snow was smaller than Stone, a single forti ed tower and a
timber keep and stable hidden behind a low wall of unmortared
rock. Yet it nestled against the Giant’s Lance in such a way as to
command the entire stone stair above the lower waycastle. An
enemy intent on the Eyrie would have to ght his way from Stone
step by step, while rocks and arrows rained down from Snow above.
The commander, an anxious young knight with a pockmarked face,
o ered bread and cheese and the chance to warm themselves before
his re, but Mya declined. “We ought to keep going, my lady,” she
said. “If it please you.” Catelyn nodded.
Again they were given fresh mules. Hers was white. Mya smiled
when she saw him. “Whitey’s a good one, my lady. Sure of foot,
even on ice, but you need to be careful. He’ll kick if he doesn’t like
you.”
The white mule seemed to like Catelyn; there was no kicking,
thank the gods. There was no ice either, and she was grateful for
that as well. “My mother says that hundreds of years ago, this was
where the snow began,” Mya told her. “It was always white above
here, and the ice never melted.” She shrugged. “I can’t remember
ever seeing snow this far down the mountain, but maybe it was that
way once, in the olden times.”
So young, Catelyn thought, trying to remember if she had ever
been like that. The girl had lived half her life in summer, and that
was all she knew. Winter is coming, child, she wanted to tell her. The
words were on her lips; she almost said them. Perhaps she was
becoming a Stark at last.
Above Snow, the wind was a living thing, howling around them
like a wolf in the waste, then falling o to nothing as if to lure them
into complacency. The stars seemed brighter up here, so close that

she could almost touch them, and the horned moon was huge in the
clear black sky. As they climbed, Catelyn found it was better to look
up than down. The steps were cracked and broken from centuries of
freeze and thaw and the tread of countless mules, and even in the
dark the heights put her heart in her throat. When they came to a
high saddle between two spires of rock, Mya dismounted. “It’s best
to lead the mules over,” she said. “The wind can be a little scary
here, my lady.”
Catelyn climbed sti y from the shadows and looked at the path
ahead; twenty feet long and close to three feet wide, but with a
precipitous drop to either side. She could hear the wind shrieking.
Mya stepped lightly out, her mule following as calmly as if they
were crossing a bailey. It was her turn. Yet no sooner had she taken
her rst step than fear caught Catelyn in its jaws. She could feel the
emptiness, the vast black gulfs of air that yawned around her. She
stopped, trembling, afraid to move. The wind screamed at her and
wrenched at her cloak, trying to pull her over the edge. Catelyn
edged her foot backward, the most timid of steps, but the mule was
behind her, and she could not retreat. I am going to die here, she
thought. She could feel cold sweat trickling down her back.
“Lady Stark,” Mya called across the gulf. The girl sounded a
thousand leagues away. “Are you well?”
Catelyn Tully Stark swallowed what remained of her pride. “I … I
cannot do this, child,” she called out.
“Yes you can,” the bastard girl said. “I know you can. Look how
wide the path is.”
“I don’t want to look.” The world seemed to be spinning around
her, mountain and sky and mules, whirling like a child’s top.
Catelyn closed her eyes to steady her ragged breathing.
“I’ll come back for you,” Mya said. “Don’t move, my lady.”
Moving was about the last thing Catelyn was about to do. She
listened to the skirling of the wind and the scu ing sound of
leather on stone. Then Mya was there, taking her gently by the arm.
“Keep your eyes closed if you like. Let go of the rope now, Whitey
will take care of himself. Very good, my lady. I’ll lead you over, it’s
easy, you’ll see. Give me a step now. That’s it, move your foot, just

slide it forward. See. Now another. Easy. You could run across.
Another one, go on. Yes.” And so, foot by foot, step by step, the
bastard girl led Catelyn across, blind and trembling, while the white
mule followed placidly behind them.
The waycastle called Sky was no more than a high, crescentshaped wall of unmortared stone raised against the side of the
mountain, but even the topless towers of Valyria could not have
looked more beautiful to Catelyn Stark. Here at last the snow crown
began; Sky’s weathered stones were rimed with frost, and long
spears of ice hung from the slopes above.
Dawn was breaking in the east as Mya Stone hallooed for the
guards, and the gates opened before them. Inside the walls there
was only a series of ramps and a great tumble of boulders and
stones of all sizes. No doubt it would be the easiest thing in the
world to begin an avalanche from here. A mouth yawned in the
rock face in front of them. “The stables and barracks are in there,”
Mya said. “The last part is inside the mountain. It can be a little
dark, but at least you’re out of the wind. This is as far as the mules
can go. Past here, well, it’s a sort of chimney, more like a stone
ladder than proper steps, but it’s not too bad. Another hour and
we’ll be there.”
Catelyn looked up. Directly overhead, pale in the dawn light, she
could see the foundations of the Eyrie. It could not be more than six
hundred feet above them. From below it looked like a small white
honeycomb. She remembered what her uncle had said of baskets
and winches. “The Lannisters may have their pride,” she told Mya,
“but the Tullys are born with better sense. I have ridden all day and
the best part of a night. Tell them to lower a basket. I shall ride
with the turnips.”
The sun was well above the mountains by the time Catelyn Stark
nally reached the Eyrie. A stocky, silver-haired man in a sky-blue
cloak and hammered moon-and-falcon breastplate helped her from
the basket; Ser Vardis Egen, captain of Jon Arryn’s household guard.
Beside him stood Maester Colemon, thin and nervous, with too little
hair and too much neck. “Lady Stark,” Ser Vardis said, “the pleasure
is as great as it is unanticipated.” Maester Colemon bobbed his head

in agreement. “Indeed it is, my lady, indeed it is. I have sent word
to your sister. She left orders to be awakened the instant you
arrived.”
“I hope she had a good night’s rest,” Catelyn said with a certain
bite in her tone that seemed to go unnoticed.
The men escorted her from the winch room up a spiral stair. The
Eyrie was a small castle by the standards of the great houses; seven
slender white towers bunched as tightly as arrows in a quiver on a
shoulder of the great mountain. It had no need of stables nor
smithys nor kennels, but Ned said its granary was as large as
Winterfell’s, and its towers could house ve hundred men. Yet it
seemed strangely deserted to Catelyn as she passed through it, its
pale stone halls echoing and empty.
Lysa was waiting alone in her solar, still clad in her bed robes.
Her long auburn hair tumbled unbound across bare white shoulders
and down her back. A maid stood behind her, brushing out the
night’s tangles, but when Catelyn entered, her sister rose to her
feet, smiling. “Cat,” she said. “Oh, Cat, how good it is to see you.
My sweet sister.” She ran across the chamber and wrapped her
sister in her arms. “How long it has been,” Lysa murmured against
her. “Oh, how very very long.”
It had been ve years, in truth; ve cruel years, for Lysa. They
had taken their toll. Her sister was two years the younger, yet she
looked older now. Shorter than Catelyn, Lysa had grown thick of
body, pale and pu y of face. She had the blue eyes of the Tullys,
but hers were pale and watery, never still. Her small mouth had
turned petulant. As Catelyn held her, she remembered the slender,
high-breasted girl who’d waited beside her that day in the sept at
Riverrun. How lovely and full of hope she had been. All that
remained of her sister’s beauty was the great fall of thick auburn
hair that cascaded to her waist.
“You look well,” Catelyn lied, “but … tired.”
Her sister broke the embrace. “Tired. Yes. Oh, yes.” She seemed
to notice the others then; her maid, Maester Colemon, Ser Vardis.
“Leave us,” she told them. “I wish to speak to my sister alone.” She
held Catelyn’s hand as they withdrew …

… and dropped it the instant the door closed. Catelyn saw her
face change. It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. “Have
you taken leave of your senses?” Lysa snapped at her. “To bring him
here, without a word of permission, without so much as a warning,
to drag us into your quarrels with the Lannisters …”
“My quarrels?” Catelyn could scarce believe what she was
hearing. A great re burned in the hearth, but there was no trace of
warmth in Lysa’s voice. “They were your quarrels rst, sister. It
was you who sent me that cursed letter, you who wrote that the
Lannisters had murdered your husband.”
“To warn you, so you could stay away from them! I never meant
to ght them! Gods, Cat, do you know what you’ve done?”
“Mother?” a small voice said. Lysa whirled, her heavy robe
swirling around her. Robert Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie, stood in the
doorway, clutching a ragged cloth doll and looking at them with
large eyes. He was a painfully thin child, small for his age and
sickly all his days, and from time to time he trembled. The shaking
sickness, the maesters called it. “I heard voices.”
Small wonder, Catelyn thought; Lysa had almost been shouting.
Still, her sister looked daggers at her. “This is your aunt Catelyn,
baby. My sister, Lady Stark. Do you remember?”
The boy glanced at her blankly. “I think so,” he said, blinking,
though he had been less than a year old the last time Catelyn had
seen him.
Lysa seated herself near the re and said, “Come to Mother, my
sweet one.” She straightened his bedclothes and fussed with his ne
brown hair. “Isn’t he beautiful? And strong too, don’t you believe
the things you hear. Jon knew. The seed is strong, he told me. His
last words. He kept saying Robert’s name, and he grabbed my arm
so hard he left marks. Tell them, the seed is strong. His seed. He
wanted everyone to know what a good strong boy my baby was
going to be.”
“Lysa,” Catelyn said, “if you’re right about the Lannisters, all the
more reason we must act quickly. We—”
“Not in front of the baby,” Lysa said. “He has a delicate temper,
don’t you, sweet one?”

“The boy is Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale,” Catelyn
reminded her, “and these are not times for delicacy. Ned thinks it
may come to war.”
“Quiet!” Lysa snapped at her. “You’re scaring the boy.” Little
Robert took a quick peek over his shoulder at Catelyn and began to
tremble. His doll fell to the rushes, and he pressed himself against
his mother. “Don’t be afraid, my sweet baby,” Lysa whispered.
“Mother’s here, nothing will hurt you.” She opened her robe and
drew out a pale, heavy breast, tipped with red. The boy grabbed for
it eagerly, buried his face against her chest, and began to suck. Lysa
stroked his hair.
Catelyn was at a loss for words, Jon Arryn’s son, she thought
incredulously. She remembered her own baby, three-year-old
Rickon, half the age of this boy and ve times as erce. Small
wonder the lords of the Vale were restive. For the rst time she
understood why the king had tried to take the child away from his
mother to foster with the Lannisters …
“We’re safe here,” Lysa was saying. Whether to her or to the boy,
Catelyn was not sure.
“Don’t be a fool,” Catelyn said, the anger rising in her. “No one is
safe. If you think hiding here will make the Lannisters forget you,
you are sadly mistaken.”
Lysa covered her boy’s ear with her hand. “Even if they could
bring an army through the mountains and past the Bloody Gate, the
Eyrie is impregnable. You saw for yourself. No enemy could ever
reach us up here.”
Catelyn wanted to slap her. Uncle Brynden had tried to warn her,
she realized. “No castle is impregnable.”
“This one is,” Lysa insisted. “Everyone says so. The only thing is,
what am I to do with this Imp you have brought me?”
“Is he a bad man?” the Lord of the Eyrie asked, his mother’s
breast popping from his mouth, the nipple wet and red.
“A very bad man,” Lysa told him as she covered herself, “but
Mother won’t let him harm my little baby.”
“Make him y,” Robert said eagerly.

Lysa stroked her son’s hair. “Perhaps we will,” she murmured.
“Perhaps that is just what we will do.”

EDDARD

He found Little nger in the brothel’s common room, chatting
amiably with a tall, elegant woman who wore a feathered gown
over skin as black as ink. By the hearth, Heward and a buxom
wench were playing at forfeits. From the look of it, he’d lost his
belt, his cloak, his mail shirt, and his right boot so far, while the girl
had been forced to unbutton her shift to the waist. Jory Cassel stood
beside a rain-streaked window with a wry smile on his face,
watching Heward turn over tiles and enjoying the view.
Ned paused at the foot of the stair and pulled on his gloves. “It’s
time we took our leave. My business here is done.”
Heward lurched to his feet, hurriedly gathering up his things. “As
you will, my lord,” Jory said. “I’ll help Wyl bring round the horses.”
He strode to the door.
Little nger took his time saying his farewells. He kissed the black
woman’s hand, whispered some joke that made her laugh aloud, and
sauntered over to Ned. “Your business,” he said lightly, “or
Robert’s? They say the Hand dreams the king’s dreams, speaks with
the king’s voice, and rules with the king’s sword. Does that also
mean you fuck with the king’s—”
“Lord Baelish,” Ned interrupted, “you presume too much. I am
not ungrateful for your help. It might have taken us years to nd
this brothel without you. That does not mean I intend to endure
your mockery. And I am no longer the King’s Hand.”

“The direwolf must be a prickly beast,” said Little nger with a
sharp twist of his mouth.
A warm rain was pelting down from a starless black sky as they
walked to the stables. Ned drew up the hood of his cloak. Jory
brought out his horse. Young Wyl came right behind him, leading
Little nger’s mare with one hand while the other fumbled with his
belt and the lacings of his trousers. A barefoot whore leaned out of
the stable door, giggling at him.
“Will we be going back to the castle now, my lord?” Jory asked.
Ned nodded and swung into the saddle. Little nger mounted up
beside him. Jory and the others followed.
“Chataya runs a choice establishment,” Little nger said as they
rode. “I’ve half a mind to buy it. Brothels are a much sounder
investment than ships, I’ve found. Whores seldom sink, and when
they are boarded by pirates, why, the pirates pay good coin like
everyone else.” Lord Petyr chuckled at his own wit.
Ned let him prattle on. After a time, he quieted and they rode in
silence. The streets of King’s Landing were dark and deserted. The
rain had driven everyone under their roofs. It beat down on Ned’s
head, warm as blood and relentless as old guilts. Fat drops of water
ran down his face.
“Robert will never keep to one bed,” Lyanna had told him at
Winterfell, on the night long ago when their father had promised
her hand to the young Lord of Storm’s End. “I hear he has gotten a
child on some girl in the Vale.” Ned had held the babe in his arms;
he could scarcely deny her, nor would he lie to his sister, but he had
assured her that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no
matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with
all his heart. Lyanna had only smiled. “Love is sweet, dearest Ned,
but it cannot change a man’s nature.”
The girl had been so young Ned had not dared to ask her age. No
doubt she’d been a virgin; the better brothels could always nd a
virgin, if the purse was fat enough. She had light red hair and a
powdering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and when she
slipped free a breast to give her nipple to the babe, he saw that her
bosom was freckled as well. “I named her Barra,” she said as the

child nursed. “She looks so like him, does she not, milord? She has
his nose, and his hair …”
“She does.” Eddard Stark had touched the baby’s ne, dark hair.
It owed through his ngers like black silk. Robert’s rstborn had
had the same ne hair, he seemed to recall.
“Tell him that when you see him, milord, as it … as it please you.
Tell him how beautiful she is.”
“I will,” Ned had promised her. That was his curse. Robert would
swear undying love and forget them before evenfall, but Ned Stark
kept his vows. He thought of the promises he’d made Lyanna as she
lay dying, and the price he’d paid to keep them.
“And tell him I’ve not been with no one else. I swear it, milord,
by the old gods and new. Chataya said I could have half a year, for
the baby, and for hoping he’d come back. So you’ll tell him I’m
waiting, won’t you? I don’t want no jewels or nothing, just him. He
was always good to me, truly.”
Good to you, Ned thought hollowly. “I will tell him, child, and I
promise you, Barra shall not go wanting.”
She had smiled then, a smile so tremulous and sweet that it cut
the heart out of him. Riding through the rainy night, Ned saw Jon
Snow’s face in front of him, so like a younger version of his own. If
the gods frowned so on bastards, he thought dully, why did they ll
men with such lusts? “Lord Baelish, what do you know of Robert’s
bastards?”
“Well, he has more than you, for a start.”
“How many?”
Little nger shrugged. Rivulets of moisture twisted down the back
of his cloak. “Does it matter? If you bed enough women, some will
give you presents, and His Grace has never been shy on that count. I
know he’s acknowledged that boy at Storm’s End, the one he
fathered the night Lord Stannis wed. He could hardly do otherwise.
The mother was a Florent, niece to the Lady Selyse, one of her
bedmaids. Renly says that Robert carried the girl upstairs during the
feast, and broke in the wedding bed while Stannis and his bride
were still dancing. Lord Stannis seemed to think that was a blot on
the honor of his wife’s House, so when the boy was born, he

shipped him o to Renly.” He gave Ned a sideways glance. “I’ve
also heard whispers that Robert got a pair of twins on a serving
wench at Casterly Rock, three years ago when he went west for
Lord Tywin’s tourney. Cersei had the babes killed, and sold the
mother to a passing slaver. Too much an a ront to Lannister pride,
that close to home.”
Ned Stark grimaced. Ugly tales like that were told of every great
lord in the realm. He could believe it of Cersei Lannister readily
enough … but would the king stand by and let it happen? The
Robert he had known would not have, but the Robert he had known
had never been so practiced at shutting his eyes to things he did not
wish to see. “Why would Jon Arryn take a sudden interest in the
king’s baseborn children?”
The short man gave a sodden shrug. “He was the King’s Hand.
Doubtless Robert asked him to see that they were provided for.”
Ned was soaked through to the bone, and his soul had grown
cold. “It had to be more than that, or why kill him?”
Little nger shook the rain from his hair and laughed. “Now I see.
Lord Arryn learned that His Grace had lled the bellies of some
whores and shwives, and for that he had to be silenced. Small
wonder. Allow a man like that to live, and next he’s like to blurt out
that the sun rises in the east.”
There was no answer Ned Stark could give to that but a frown.
For the rst time in years, he found himself remembering Rhaegar
Targaryen. He wondered if Rhaegar had frequented brothels;
somehow he thought not.
The rain was falling harder now, stinging the eyes and drumming
against the ground. Rivers of black water were running down the
hill when Jory called out, “My lord,” his voice hoarse with alarm.
And in an instant, the street was full of soldiers.
Ned glimpsed ringmail over leather, gauntlets and greaves, steel
helms with golden lions on the crests. Their cloaks clung to their
backs, sodden with rain. He had no time to count, but there were
ten at least, a line of them, on foot, blocking the street, with
longswords and iron-tipped spears. “Behind!” he heard Wyl cry, and
when he turned his horse, there were more in back of them, cutting

o their retreat. Jory’s sword came singing from its scabbard.
“Make way or die!”
“The wolves are howling,” their leader said. Ned could see rain
running down his face. “Such a small pack, though.”
Little nger walked his horse forward, step by careful step. “What
is the meaning of this? This is the Hand of the King.”
“He was the Hand of the King.” The mud mu ed the hooves of
the blood bay stallion. The line parted before him. On a golden
breastplate, the lion of Lannister roared its de ance. “Now, if truth
be told, I’m not sure what he is.”
“Lannister, this is madness,” Little nger said. “Let us pass. We are
expected back at the castle. What do you think you’re doing?”
“He knows what he’s doing,” Ned said calmly.
Jaime Lannister smiled. “Quite true. I’m looking for my brother.
You remember my brother, don’t you, Lord Stark? He was with us
at Winterfell. Fair-haired, mismatched eyes, sharp of tongue. A
short man.”
“I remember him well,” Ned replied.
“It would seem he has met some trouble on the road. My lord
father is quite vexed. You would not perchance have any notion of
who might have wished my brother ill, would you?”
“Your brother has been taken at my command, to answer for his
crimes,” Ned Stark said.
Little nger groaned in dismay. “My lords—”
Ser Jaime ripped his longsword from its sheath and urged his
stallion forward. “Show me your steel, Lord Eddard. I’ll butcher you
like Aerys if I must, but I’d sooner you died with a blade in your
hand.” He gave Little nger a cool, contemptuous glance. “Lord
Baelish, I’d leave here in some haste if I did not care to get
bloodstains on my costly clothing.”
Little nger did not need to be urged. “I will bring the City
Watch,” he promised Ned. The Lannister line parted to let him
through, and closed behind him. Little nger put his heels to his
mare and vanished around a corner.
Ned’s men had drawn their swords, but they were three against
twenty. Eyes watched from nearby windows and doors, but no one

was about to intervene. His party was mounted, the Lannisters on
foot save for Jaime himself. A charge might win them free, but it
seemed to Eddard Stark that they had a surer, safer tactic. “Kill
me,” he warned the Kingslayer, “and Catelyn will most certainly
slay Tyrion.”
Jaime Lannister poked at Ned’s chest with the gilded sword that
had sipped the blood of the last of the Dragonkings. “Would she?
The noble Catelyn Tully of Riverrun murder a hostage? I
think … not.” He sighed. “But I am not willing to chance my
brother’s life on a woman’s honor.” Jaime slid the golden sword
into its sheath. “So I suppose I’ll let you run back to Robert to tell
him how I frightened you. I wonder if he’ll care.” Jaime pushed his
wet hair back with his ngers and wheeled his horse around. When
he was beyond the line of swordsmen, he glanced back at his
captain. “Tregar, see that no harm comes to Lord Stark.”
“As you say, m’lord.”
“Still … we wouldn’t want him to leave here entirely unchastened,
so”—through the night and the rain, he glimpsed the white of
Jaime’s smile—“kill his men.”
“No!” Ned Stark screamed, clawing for his sword. Jaime was
already cantering o down the street as he heard Wyl shout. Men
closed from both sides. Ned rode one down, cutting at phantoms in
red cloaks who gave way before him. Jory Cassel put his heels into
his mount and charged. A steel-shod hoof caught a Lannister
guardsman in the face with a sickening crunch. A second man reeled
away and for an instant Jory was free. Wyl cursed as they pulled
him o his dying horse, swords slashing in the rain. Ned galloped to
him, bringing his longsword down on Tregar’s helm. The jolt of
impact made him grit his teeth. Tregar stumbled to his knees, his
lion crest sheared in half, blood running down his face. Heward was
hacking at the hands that had seized his bridle when a spear caught
him in the belly. Suddenly Jory was back among them, a red rain
ying from his sword. “No!” Ned shouted. “Jory, away!” Ned’s horse
slipped under him and came crashing down in the mud. There was a
moment of blinding pain and the taste of blood in his mouth.

He saw them cut the legs from Jory’s mount and drag him to the
earth, swords rising and falling as they closed in around him. When
Ned’s horse lurched back to its feet, he tried to rise, only to fall
again, choking on his scream. He could see the splintered bone
poking through his calf. It was the last thing he saw for a time. The
rain came down and down and down.
When he opened his eyes again, Lord Eddard Stark was alone
with his dead. His horse moved closer, caught the rank scent of
blood, and galloped away. Ned began to drag himself through the
mud, gritting his teeth at the agony in his leg. It seemed to take
years. Faces watched from candlelit windows, and people began to
emerge from alleys and doors, but no one moved to help.
Little nger and the City Watch found him there in the street,
cradling Jory Cassel’s body in his arms.
Somewhere the gold cloaks found a litter, but the trip back to the
castle was a blur of agony, and Ned lost consciousness more than
once. He remembered seeing the Red Keep looming ahead of him in
the rst grey light of dawn. The rain had darkened the pale pink
stone of the massive walls to the color of blood.
Then Grand Maester Pycelle was looming over him, holding a
cup, whispering, “Drink, my lord. Here. The milk of the poppy, for
your pain.” He remembered swallowing, and Pycelle was telling
someone to heat the wine to boiling and fetch him clean silk, and
that was the last he knew.

DAENERYS

The Horse Gate of Vaes Dothrak was made of two gigantic bronze
stallions, rearing, their hooves meeting a hundred feet above the
roadway to form a pointed arch.
Dany could not have said why the city needed a gate when it had
no walls … and no buildings that she could see. Yet there it stood,
immense and beautiful, the great horses framing the distant purple
mountain beyond. The bronze stallions threw long shadows across
the waving grasses as Khal Drogo led the khalasar under their
hooves and down the godsway, his bloodriders beside him.
Dany followed on her silver, escorted by Ser Jorah Mormont and
her brother Viserys, mounted once more. After the day in the grass
when she had left him to walk back to the khalasar, the Dothraki
had laughingly called him Khal Rhae Mhar, the Sorefoot King. Khal
Drogo had o ered him a place in a cart the next day, and Viserys
had accepted. In his stubborn ignorance, he had not even known he
was being mocked; the carts were for eunuchs, cripples, women
giving birth, the very young and the very old. That won him yet
another name: Khal Rhaggat, the Cart King. Her brother had thought
it was the khal’s way of apologizing for the wrong Dany had done
him. She had begged Ser Jorah not to tell him the truth, lest he be
shamed. The knight had replied that the king could well do with a
bit of shame … yet he had done as she bid. It had taken much
pleading, and all the pillow tricks Doreah had taught her, before

Dany had been able to make Drogo relent and allow Viserys to
rejoin them at the head of the column.
“Where is the city?” she asked as they passed beneath the bronze
arch. There were no buildings to be seen, no people, only the grass
and the road, lined with ancient monuments from all the lands the
Dothraki had sacked over the centuries.
“Ahead,” Ser Jorah answered. “Under the mountain.”
Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed
to either side of them. The forgotten deities of dead cities
brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her
silver past their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their
thrones, their faces chipped and stained, even their names lost in
the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths,
draped only in owers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters
stood in the grass beside the road; black iron dragons with jewels
for eyes, roaring gri ns, manticores with their barbed tails poised
to strike, and other beasts she could not name. Some of the statues
were so lovely they took her breath away, others so misshapen and
terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser
Jorah said, had likely come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai.
“So many,” she said as her silver stepped slowly onward, “and
from so many lands.”
Viserys was less impressed. “The trash of dead cities,” he sneered.
He was careful to speak in the Common Tongue, which few
Dothraki could understand, yet even so Dany found herself glancing
back at the men of her khas, to make certain he had not been
overheard. He went on blithely. “All these savages know how to do
is steal the things better men have built … and kill.” He laughed.
“They do know how to kill. Otherwise I’d have no use for them at
all.”
“They are my people now,” Dany said. “You should not call them
savages, brother.”
“The dragon speaks as he likes,” Viserys said … in the Common
Tongue. He glanced over his shoulder at Aggo and Rakharo, riding
behind them, and favored them with a mocking smile. “See, the
savages lack the wit to understand the speech of civilized men.” A

moss-eaten stone monolith loomed over the road, fty feet tall.
Viserys gazed at it with boredom in his eyes. “How long must we
linger amidst these ruins before Drogo gives me my army? I grow
tired of waiting.”
“The princess must be presented to the dosh khaleen …”
“The crones, yes,” her brother interrupted, “and there’s to be
some mummer’s show of a prophecy for the whelp in her belly, you
told me. What is that to me? I’m tired of eating horsemeat and I’m
sick of the stink of these savages.” He sni ed at the wide, oppy
sleeve of his tunic, where it was his custom to keep a sachet. It
could not have helped much. The tunic was lthy. All the silk and
heavy wools that Viserys had worn out of Pentos were stained by
hard travel and rotted from sweat.
Ser Jorah Mormont said, “The Western Market will have food
more to your taste, Your Grace. The traders from the Free Cities
come there to sell their wares. The khal will honor his promise in
his own time.”
“He had better,” Viserys said grimly. “I was promised a crown,
and I mean to have it. The dragon is not mocked.” Spying an
obscene likeness of a woman with six breasts and a ferret’s head, he
rode o to inspect it more closely.
Dany was relieved, yet no less anxious. “I pray that my sun-andstars will not keep him waiting too long,” she told Ser Jorah when
her brother was out of earshot.
The knight looked after Viserys doubtfully. “Your brother should
have bided his time in Pentos. There is no place for him in a
khalasar. Illyrio tried to warn him.”
“He will go as soon as he has his ten thousand. My lord husband
promised a golden crown.”
Ser Jorah grunted. “Yes, Khaleesi, but … the Dothraki look on
these things di erently than we do in the west. I have told him as
much, as Illyrio told him, but your brother does not listen. The
horselords are no traders. Viserys thinks he sold you, and now he
wants his price. Yet Khal Drogo would say he had you as a gift. He
will give Viserys a gift in return, yes … in his own time. You do not
demand a gift, not of a khal. You do not demand anything of a khal.”

“It is not right to make him wait.” Dany did not know why she
was defending her brother, yet she was. “Viserys says he could
sweep the Seven Kingdoms with ten thousand Dothraki screamers.”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Viserys could not sweep a stable with ten
thousand brooms.”
Dany could not pretend to surprise at the disdain in his tone.
“What … what if it were not Viserys?” she asked. “If it were
someone else who led them? Someone stronger? Could the Dothraki
truly conquer the Seven Kingdoms?”
Ser Jorah’s face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together
down the godsway. “When I rst went into exile, I looked at the
Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If
you had asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a
thousand good knights would have no trouble putting to ight a
hundred times as many Dothraki.”
“But if I asked you now?”
“Now,” the knight said, “I am less certain. They are better riders
than any knight, utterly fearless, and their bows outrange ours. In
the Seven Kingdoms, most archers ght on foot, from behind a
shieldwall or a barricade of sharpened stakes. The Dothraki re
from horseback, charging or retreating, it makes no matter, they
are full as deadly … and there are so many of them, my lady. Your
lord husband alone counts forty thousand mounted warriors in his
khalasar.”
“Is that truly so many?”
“Your brother Rhaegar brought as many men to the Trident,” Ser
Jorah admitted, “but of that number, no more than a tenth were
knights. The rest were archers, freeriders, and foot soldiers armed
with spears and pikes. When Rhaegar fell, many threw down their
weapons and ed the eld. How long do you imagine such a rabble
would stand against the charge of forty thousand screamers howling
for blood? How well would boiled leather jerkins and mailed shirts
protect them when the arrows fall like rain?”
“Not long,” she said, “not well.”
He nodded. “Mind you, Princess, if the lords of the Seven
Kingdoms have the wit the gods gave a goose, it will never come to

that. The riders have no taste for siegecraft. I doubt they could take
even the weakest castle in the Seven Kingdoms, but if Robert
Baratheon were fool enough to give them battle …”
“Is he?” Dany asked. “A fool, I mean?”
Ser Jorah considered that for a moment. “Robert should have
been born Dothraki,” he said at last. “Your khal would tell you that
only a coward hides behind stone walls instead of facing his enemy
with a blade in hand. The Usurper would agree. He is a strong man,
brave … and rash enough to meet a Dothraki horde in the open
eld. But the men around him, well, their pipers play a di erent
tune. His brother Stannis, Lord Tywin Lannister, Eddard Stark …”
He spat.
“You hate this Lord Stark,” Dany said.
“He took from me all I loved, for the sake of a few lice-ridden
poachers and his precious honor,” Ser Jorah said bitterly. From his
tone, she could tell the loss still pained him. He changed the subject
quickly. “There,” he announced, pointing. “Vaes Dothrak. The city
of the horselords.”
Khal Drogo and his bloodriders led them through the great bazaar
of the Western Market, down the broad ways beyond. Dany
followed close on her silver, staring at the strangeness about her.
Vaes Dothrak was at once the largest city and the smallest that she
had ever known. She thought it must be ten times as large as
Pentos, a vastness without walls or limits, its broad windswept
streets paved in grass and mud and carpeted with wild owers. In
the Free Cities of the west, towers and manses and hovels and
bridges and shops and halls all crowded in on one another, but Vaes
Dothrak sprawled languorously, baking in the warm sun, ancient,
arrogant, and empty.
Even the buildings were so queer to her eyes. She saw carved
stone pavilions, manses of woven grass as large as castles, rickety
wooden towers, stepped pyramids faced with marble, log halls open
to the sky. In place of walls, some palaces were surrounded by
thorny hedges. “None of them are alike,” she said.
“Your brother had part of the truth,” Ser Jorah admitted. “The
Dothraki do not build. A thousand years ago, to make a house, they

would dig a hole in the earth and cover it with a woven grass roof.
The buildings you see were made by slaves brought here from lands
they’ve plundered, and they built each after the fashion of their own
peoples.”
Most of the halls, even the largest, seemed deserted. “Where are
the people who live here?” Dany asked. The bazaar had been full of
running children and men shouting, but elsewhere she had seen only
a few eunuchs going about their business.
“Only the crones of the dosh khaleen dwell permanently in the
sacred city, them and their slaves and servants,” Ser Jorah replied,
“yet Vaes Dothrak is large enough to house every man of every
khalasar, should all the khals return to the Mother at once. The
crones have prophesied that one day that will come to pass, and so
Vaes Dothrak must be ready to embrace all its children.”
Khal Drogo nally called a halt near the Eastern Market where
the caravans from Yi Ti and Asshai and the Shadow Lands came to
trade, with the Mother of Mountains looming overhead. Dany
smiled as she recalled Magister Illyrio’s slave girl and her talk of a
palace with two hundred rooms and doors of solid silver. The
“palace” was a cavernous wooden feasting hall, its rough-hewn
timbered walls rising forty feet, its roof sewn silk, a vast billowing
tent that could be raised to keep out the rare rains, or lowered to
admit the endless sky. Around the hall were broad grassy horse
yards fenced with high hedges, repits, and hundreds of round
earthen houses that bulged from the ground like miniature hills,
covered with grass.
A small army of slaves had gone ahead to prepare for Khal
Drogo’s arrival. As each rider swung down from his saddle, he
unbelted his arakh and handed it to a waiting slave, and any other
weapons he carried as well. Even Khal Drogo himself was not
exempt. Ser Jorah had explained that it was forbidden to carry a
blade in Vaes Dothrak, or to shed a free man’s blood. Even warring
khalasars put aside their feuds and shared meat and mead together
when they were in sight of the Mother of Mountains. In this place,
the crones of the dosh khaleen had decreed, all Dothraki were one
blood, one khalasar, one herd.

Cohollo came to Dany as Irri and Jhiqui were helping her down
o her silver. He was the oldest of Drogo’s three bloodriders, a
squat bald man with a crooked nose and a mouth full of broken
teeth, shattered by a mace twenty years before when he saved the
young khalakka from sellswords who hoped to sell him to his
father’s enemies. His life had been bound to Drogo’s the day her
lord husband was born.
Every khal had his bloodriders. At rst Dany had thought of them
as a kind of Dothraki Kingsguard, sworn to protect their lord, but it
went further than that. Jhiqui had taught her that a bloodrider was
more than a guard; they were the khal’s brothers, his shadows, his
ercest friends. “Blood of my blood,” Drogo called them, and so it
was; they shared a single life. The ancient traditions of the
horselords demanded that when the khal died, his bloodriders died
with him, to ride at his side in the night lands. If the khal died at the
hands of some enemy, they lived only long enough to avenge him,
and then followed him joyfully into the grave. In some khalasars,
Jhiqui said, the bloodriders shared the khal’s wine, his tent, and
even his wives, though never his horses. A man’s mount was his
own.
Daenerys was glad that Khal Drogo did not hold to those ancient
ways. She should not have liked being shared. And while old
Cohollo treated her kindly enough, the others frightened her;
Haggo, huge and silent, often glowered as if he had forgotten who
she was, and Qotho had cruel eyes and quick hands that liked to
hurt. He left bruises on Doreah’s soft white skin whenever he
touched her, and sometimes made Irri sob in the night. Even his
horses seemed to fear him.
Yet they were bound to Drogo for life and death, so Daenerys had
no choice but to accept them. And sometimes she found herself
wishing her father had been protected by such men. In the songs,
the white knights of the Kingsguard were ever noble, valiant, and
true, and yet King Aerys had been murdered by one of them, the
handsome boy they now called the Kingslayer, and a second, Ser
Barristan the Bold, had gone over to the Usurper. She wondered if
all men were as false in the Seven Kingdoms. When her son sat the

Iron Throne, she would see that he had bloodriders of his own to
protect him against treachery in his Kingsguard.
“Khaleesi,” Cohollo said to her, in Dothraki. “Drogo, who is blood
of my blood, commands me to tell you that he must ascend the
Mother of Mountains this night, to sacri ce to the gods for his safe
return.”
Only men were allowed to set foot on the Mother, Dany knew.
The khal’s bloodriders would go with him, and return at dawn. “Tell
my sun-and-stars that I dream of him, and wait anxious for his
return,” she replied, thankful. Dany tired more easily as the child
grew within her; in truth, a night of rest would be most welcome.
Her pregnancy only seemed to have in amed Drogo’s desire for her,
and of late his embraces left her exhausted.
Doreah led her to the hollow hill that had been prepared for her
and her khal. It was cool and dim within, like a tent made of earth.
“Jhiqui, a bath, please,” she commanded, to wash the dust of travel
from her skin and soak her weary bones. It was pleasant to know
that they would linger here for a while, that she would not need to
climb back on her silver on the morrow.
The water was scalding hot, as she liked it. “I will give my
brother his gifts tonight,” she decided as Jhiqui was washing her
hair. “He should look a king in the sacred city. Doreah, run and nd
him and invite him to sup with me.” Viserys was nicer to the Lysene
girl than to her Dothraki handmaids, perhaps because Magister
Illyrio had let him bed her back in Pentos. “Irri, go to the bazaar
and buy fruit and meat. Anything but horse esh.”
“Horse is best,” Irri said. “Horse makes a man strong.”
“Viserys hates horsemeat.”
“As you say, Khaleesi.”
She brought back a haunch of goat and a basket of fruits and
vegetables. Jhiqui roasted the meat with sweetgrass and repods,
basting it with honey as it cooked, and there were melons and
pomegranates and plums and some queer eastern fruit Dany did not
know. While her handmaids prepared the meal, Dany laid out the
clothing she’d had made to her brother’s measure: a tunic and
leggings of crisp white linen, leather sandals that laced up to the

knee, a bronze medallion belt, a leather vest painted with rebreathing dragons. The Dothraki would respect him more if he
looked less a beggar, she hoped, and perhaps he would forgive her
for shaming him that day in the grass. He was still her king, after
all, and her brother. They were both blood of the dragon.
She was arranging the last of his gifts—a sandsilk cloak, green as
grass, with a pale grey border that would bring out the silver in his
hair—when Viserys arrived, dragging Doreah by the arm. Her eye
was red where he’d hit her. “How dare you send this whore to give
me commands,” he said. He shoved the handmaid roughly to the
carpet.
The anger took Dany utterly by surprise. “I only
wanted … Doreah, what did you say?”
“Khaleesi, pardons, forgive me. I went to him, as you bid, and told
him you commanded him to join you for supper.”
“No one commands the dragon,” Viserys snarled. “I am your king!
I should have sent you back her head!”
The Lysene girl quailed, but Dany calmed her with a touch.
“Don’t be afraid, he won’t hurt you. Sweet brother, please, forgive
her, the girl misspoke herself, I told her to ask you to sup with me,
if it pleases Your Grace.” She took him by the hand and drew him
across the room. “Look. These are for you.”
Viserys frowned suspiciously. “What is all this?”
“New raiment. I had it made for you.” Dany smiled shyly.
He looked at her and sneered. “Dothraki rags. Do you presume to
dress me now?”
“Please … you’ll be cooler and more comfortable, and I
thought … maybe if you dressed like them, the Dothraki …” Dany
did not know how to say it without waking his dragon.
“Next you’ll want to braid my hair.”
“I’d never …” Why was he always so cruel? She had only wanted
to help. “You have no right to a braid, you have won no victories
yet.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Fury shone from his lilac eyes, yet
he dared not strike her, not with her handmaids watching and the
warriors of her khas outside. Viserys picked up the cloak and sni ed

at it. “This stinks of manure. Perhaps I shall use it as a horse
blanket.”
“I had Doreah sew it specially for you,” she told him, wounded.
“These are garments t for a khal.”
“I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, not some grass-stained
savage with bells in his hair,” Viserys spat back at her. He grabbed
her arm. “You forget yourself, slut. Do you think that big belly will
protect you if you wake the dragon?”
His ngers dug into her arm painfully and for an instant Dany felt
like a child again, quailing in the face of his rage. She reached out
with her other hand and grabbed the rst thing she touched, the
belt she’d hoped to give him, a heavy chain of ornate bronze
medallions. She swung it with all her strength.
It caught him full in the face. Viserys let go of her. Blood ran
down his cheek where the edge of one of the medallions had sliced
it open. “You are the one who forgets himself,” Dany said to him.
“Didn’t you learn anything that day in the grass? Leave me now,
before I summon my khas to drag you out. And pray that Khal
Drogo does not hear of this, or he will cut open your belly and feed
you your own entrails.”
Viserys scrambled back to his feet. “When I come into my
kingdom, you will rue this day, slut.” He walked o , holding his
torn face, leaving her gifts behind him.
Drops of his blood had spattered the beautiful sandsilk cloak.
Dany clutched the soft cloth to her cheek and sat cross-legged on
her sleeping mats.
“Your supper is ready, Khaleesi,” Jhiqui announced.
“I’m not hungry,” Dany said sadly. She was suddenly very tired.
“Share the food among yourselves, and send some to Ser Jorah, if
you would.” After a moment she added, “Please, bring me one of
the dragon’s eggs.”
Irri fetched the egg with the deep green shell, bronze ecks
shining amid its scales as she turned it in her small hands. Dany
curled up on her side, pulling the sandsilk cloak across her and
cradling the egg in the hollow between her swollen belly and small,
tender breasts. She liked to hold them. They were so beautiful, and

sometimes just being close to them made her feel stronger, braver,
as if somehow she were drawing strength from the stone dragons
locked inside.
She was lying there, holding the egg, when she felt the child
move within her … as if he were reaching out, brother to brother,
blood to blood. “You are the dragon,” Dany whispered to him, “the
true dragon. I know it. I know it.” And she smiled, and went to
sleep dreaming of home.

BRAN

A light snow was falling. Bran could feel the akes on his face,
melting as they touched his skin like the gentlest of rains. He sat
straight atop his horse, watching as the iron portcullis was winched
upward. Try as he might to keep calm, his heart was uttering in
his chest.
“Are you ready?” Robb asked.
Bran nodded, trying not to let his fear show. He had not been
outside Winterfell since his fall, but he was determined to ride out
as proud as any knight.
“Let’s ride, then.” Robb put his heels into his big grey-and-white
gelding, and the horse walked under the portcullis.
“Go,” Bran whispered to his own horse. He touched her neck
lightly, and the small chestnut lly started forward. Bran had
named her Dancer. She was two years old, and Joseth said she was
smarter than any horse had a right to be. They had trained her
special, to respond to rein and voice and touch. Up to now, Bran
had only ridden her around the yard. At rst Joseth or Hodor would
lead her, while Bran sat strapped to her back in the oversize saddle
the Imp had drawn up for him, but for the past fortnight he had
been riding her on his own, trotting her round and round, and
growing bolder with every circuit.
They passed beneath the gatehouse, over the drawbridge, through
the outer walls. Summer and Grey Wind came loping beside them,
sni ng at the wind. Close behind came Theon Greyjoy, with his

longbow and a quiver of broadheads; he had a mind to take a deer,
he had told them. He was followed by four guardsmen in mailed
shirts and coifs, and Joseth, a stick-thin stableman whom Robb had
named master of horse while Hullen was away. Maester Luwin
brought up the rear, riding on a donkey. Bran would have liked it
better if he and Robb had gone o alone, just the two of them, but
Hal Mollen would not hear of it, and Maester Luwin backed him. If
Bran fell o his horse or injured himself, the maester was
determined to be with him.
Beyond the castle lay the market square, its wooden stalls
deserted now. They rode down the muddy streets of the village,
past rows of small neat houses of log and undressed stone. Less than
one in ve were occupied, thin tendrils of woodsmoke curling up
from their chimneys. The rest would ll up one by one as it grew
colder. When the snow fell and the ice winds howled down out of
the north, Old Nan said, farmers left their frozen elds and distant
holdfasts, loaded up their wagons, and then the winter town came
alive. Bran had never seen it happen, but Maester Luwin said the
day was looming closer. The end of the long summer was near at
hand. Winter is coming.
A few villagers eyed the direwolves anxiously as the riders went
past, and one man dropped the wood he was carrying as he shrank
away in fear, but most of the town-folk had grown used to the
sight. They bent the knee when they saw the boys, and Robb
greeted each of them with a lordly nod.
With his legs unable to grip, the swaying motion of the horse
made Bran feel unsteady at rst, but the huge saddle with its thick
horn and high back cradled him comfortingly, and the straps around
his chest and thighs would not allow him to fall. After a time the
rhythm began to feel almost natural. His anxiety faded, and a
tremulous smile crept across his face.
Two serving wenches stood beneath the sign of the Smoking Log,
the local alehouse. When Theon Greyjoy called out to them, the
younger girl turned red and covered her face. Theon spurred his
mount to move up beside Robb. “Sweet Kyra,” he said with a laugh.
“She squirms like a weasel in bed, but say a word to her on the

street, and she blushes pink as a maid. Did I ever tell you about the
night that she and Bessa—”
“Not where my brother can hear, Theon,” Robb warned him with
a glance at Bran.
Bran looked away and pretended not to have heard, but he could
feel Greyjoy’s eyes on him. No doubt he was smiling. He smiled a
lot, as if the world were a secret joke that only he was clever
enough to understand. Robb seemed to admire Theon and enjoy his
company, but Bran had never warmed to his father’s ward.
Robb rode closer. “You are doing well, Bran.”
“I want to go faster,” Bran replied.
Robb smiled. “As you will.” He sent his gelding into a trot. The
wolves raced after him. Bran snapped the reins sharply, and Dancer
picked up her pace. He heard a shout from Theon Greyjoy, and the
hoofbeats of the other horses behind him.
Bran’s cloak billowed out, rippling in the wind, and the snow
seemed to rush at his face. Robb was well ahead, glancing back over
his shoulder from time to time to make sure Bran and the others
were following. He snapped the reins again. Smooth as silk, Dancer
slid into a gallop. The distance closed. By the time he caught Robb
on the edge of the wolfswood, two miles beyond the winter town,
they had left the others well behind. “I can ride!” Bran shouted,
grinning. It felt almost as good as ying.
“I’d race you, but I fear you’d win.” Robb’s tone was light and
joking, yet Bran could tell that something was troubling his brother
underneath the smile.
“I don’t want to race.” Bran looked around for the direwolves.
Both had vanished into the wood. “Did you hear Summer howling
last night?”
“Grey Wind was restless too,” Robb said. His auburn hair had
grown shaggy and unkempt, and a reddish stubble covered his jaw,
making him look older than his fteen years. “Sometimes I think
they know things … sense things …” Robb sighed. “I never know
how much to tell you, Bran. I wish you were older.”
“I’m eight now!” Bran said. “Eight isn’t so much younger than
fteen, and I’m the heir to Winterfell, after you.”

“So you are.” Robb sounded sad, and even a little scared. “Bran, I
need to tell you something. There was a bird last night. From King’s
Landing. Maester Luwin woke me.”
Bran felt a sudden dread. Dark wings, dark words, Old Nan always
said, and of late the messenger ravens had been proving the truth of
the proverb. When Robb wrote to the Lord Commander of the
Night’s Watch, the bird that came back brought word that Uncle
Benjen was still missing. Then a message had arrived from the
Eyrie, from Mother, but that had not been good news either. She
did not say when she meant to return, only that she had taken the
Imp as prisoner. Bran had sort of liked the little man, yet the name
Lannister sent cold ngers creeping up his spine. There was
something about the Lannisters, something he ought to remember,
but when he tried to think what, he felt dizzy and his stomach
clenched hard as a stone. Robb spent most of that day locked behind
closed doors with Maester Luwin, Theon Greyjoy, and Hallis
Mollen. Afterward, riders were sent out on fast horses, carrying
Robb’s commands throughout the north. Bran heard talk of Moat
Cailin, the ancient stronghold the First Men had built at the top of
the Neck. No one ever told him what was happening, yet he knew it
was not good.
And now another raven, another message. Bran clung to hope.
“Was the bird from Mother? Is she coming home?”
“The message was from Alyn in King’s Landing. Jory Cassel is
dead. And Wyl and Heward as well. Murdered by the Kingslayer.”
Robb lifted his face to the snow, and the akes melted on his
cheeks. “May the gods give them rest.”
Bran did not know what to say. He felt as if he’d been punched.
Jory had been captain of the household guard at Winterfell since
before Bran was born. “They killed Jory?” He remembered all the
times Jory had chased him over the roofs. He could picture him
striding across the yard in mail and plate, or sitting at his
accustomed place on the bench in the Great Hall, joking as he ate.
“Why would anyone kill Jory?”
Robb shook his head numbly, the pain plain in his eyes. “I don’t
know, and … Bran, that’s not the worst of it. Father was caught

beneath a falling horse in the ght. Alyn says his leg was shattered,
and … Maester Pycelle has given him the milk of the poppy, but
they aren’t sure when … when he …” The sound of hoofbeats made
him glance down the road, to where Theon and the others were
coming up. “When he will wake,” Robb nished. He laid his hand
on the pommel of his sword then, and went on in the solemn voice
of Robb the Lord. “Bran, I promise you, whatever might happen, I
will not let this be forgotten.”
Something in his tone made Bran even more fearful. “What will
you do?” he asked as Theon Greyjoy reined in beside them.
“Theon thinks I should call the banners,” Robb said.
“Blood for blood.” For once Greyjoy did not smile. His lean, dark
face had a hungry look to it, and black hair fell down across his
eyes.
“Only the lord can call the banners,” Bran said as the snow drifted
down around them.
“If your father dies,” Theon said, “Robb will be Lord of
Winterfell.”
“He won’t die!” Bran screamed at him.
Robb took his hand. “He won’t die, not Father,” he said calmly.
“Still … the honor of the north is in my hands now. When our lord
father took his leave of us, he told me to be strong for you and for
Rickon. I’m almost a man grown, Bran.”
Bran shivered. “I wish Mother was back,” he said miserably. He
looked around for Maester Luwin; his donkey was visible in the far
distance, trotting over a rise. “Does Maester Luwin say to call the
banners too?”
“The maester is timid as an old woman,” said Theon.
“Father always listened to his counsel,” Bran reminded his
brother. “Mother too.”
“I listen to him,” Robb insisted. “I listen to everyone.”
The joy Bran had felt at the ride was gone, melted away like the
snow akes on his face. Not so long ago, the thought of Robb calling
the banners and riding o to war would have lled him with
excitement, but now he felt only dread. “Can we go back now?” he
asked. “I’m cold.”

Robb glanced around. “We need to nd the wolves. Can you
stand to go a bit longer?”
“I can go as long as you can.” Maester Luwin had warned him to
keep the ride short, for fear of saddle sores, but Bran would not
admit to weakness in front of his brother. He was sick of the way
everyone was always fussing over him and asking how he was.
“Let’s hunt down the hunters, then,” Robb said. Side by side, they
urged their mounts o the kingsroad and struck out into the
wolfswood. Theon dropped back and followed well behind them,
talking and joking with the guardsmen.
It was nice under the trees. Bran kept Dancer to a walk, holding
the reins lightly and looking all around him as they went. He knew
this wood, but he had been so long con ned to Winterfell that he
felt as though he were seeing it for the rst time. The smells lled
his nostrils; the sharp fresh tang of pine needles, the earthy odor of
wet rotting leaves, the hints of animal musk and distant cooking
res. He caught a glimpse of a black squirrel moving through the
snow-covered branches of an oak, and paused to study the silvery
web of an empress spider.
Theon and the others fell farther and farther behind, until Bran
could no longer hear their voices. From ahead came the faint sound
of rushing waters. It grew louder until they reached the stream.
Tears stung his eyes.
“Bran?” Robb asked. “What’s wrong?”
Bran shook his head. “I was just remembering,” he said. “Jory
brought us here once, to sh for trout. You and me and Jon. Do you
remember?”
“I remember,” Robb said, his voice quiet and sad.
“I didn’t catch anything,” Bran said, “but Jon gave me his sh on
the way back to Winterfell. Will we ever see Jon again?”
“We saw Uncle Benjen when the king came to visit,” Robb
pointed out. “Jon will visit too, you’ll see.”
The stream was running high and fast. Robb dismounted and led
his gelding across the ford. In the deepest part of the crossing, the
water came up to midthigh. He tied his horse to a tree on the far
side, and waded back across for Bran and Dancer. The current

foamed around rock and root, and Bran could feel the spray on his
face as Robb led him over. It made him smile. For a moment he felt
strong again, and whole. He looked up at the trees and dreamed of
climbing them, right up to the very top, with the whole forest
spread out beneath him.
They were on the far side when they heard the howl, a long rising
wail that moved through the trees like a cold wind. Bran raised his
head to listen. “Summer,” he said. No sooner had he spoken than a
second voice joined the rst.
“They’ve made a kill,” Robb said as he remounted, “I’d best go
and bring them back. Wait here, Theon and the others should be
along shortly.”
“I want to go with you,” Bran said.
“I’ll nd them faster by myself.” Robb spurred his gelding and
vanished into the trees.
Once he was gone, the woods seemed to close in around Bran.
The snow was falling more heavily now. Where it touched the
ground it melted, but all about him rock and root and branch wore
a thin blanket of white. As he waited, he was conscious of how
uncomfortable he felt. He could not feel his legs, hanging useless in
the stirrups, but the strap around his chest was tight and cha ng,
and the melting snow had soaked through his gloves to chill his
hands. He wondered what was keeping Theon and Maester Luwin
and Joseth and the rest.
When he heard the rustle of leaves, Bran used the reins to make
Dancer turn, expecting to see his friends, but the ragged men who
stepped out onto the bank of the stream were strangers.
“Good day to you,” he said nervously. One look, and Bran knew
they were neither foresters nor farmers. He was suddenly conscious
of how richly he was dressed. His surcoat was new, dark grey wool
with silver buttons, and a heavy silver pin fastened his fur-trimmed
cloak at the shoulders. His boots and gloves were lined with fur as
well.
“All alone, are you?” said the biggest of them, a bald man with a
raw windburnt face. “Lost in the wolfswood, poor lad.”

“I’m not lost.” Bran did not like the way the strangers were
looking at him. He counted four, but when he turned his head, he
saw two others behind him. “My brother rode o just a moment
ago, and my guard will be here shortly.”
“Your guard, is it?” a second man said. Grey stubble covered his
gaunt face. “And what would they be guarding, my little lord? Is
that a silver pin I see there on your cloak?”
“Pretty,” said a woman’s voice. She scarcely looked like a
woman; tall and lean, with the same hard face as the others, her
hair hidden beneath a bowl-shaped halfhelm. The spear she held
was eight feet of black oak, tipped in rusted steel.
“Let’s have a look,” said the big bald man.
Bran watched him anxiously. The man’s clothes were lthy, fallen
almost to pieces, patched here with brown and here with blue and
there with a dark green, and faded everywhere to grey, but once
that cloak might have been black. The grey stubbly man wore black
rags too, he saw with a sudden start. Suddenly Bran remembered
the oathbreaker his father had beheaded, the day they had found
the wolf pups; that man had worn black as well, and Father said he
had been a deserter from the Night’s Watch. No man is more
dangerous, he remembered Lord Eddard saying. The deserter knows
his life is forfeit if he is taken, so he will not inch from any crime, no
matter how vile or cruel.
“The pin, lad,” the big man said. He held out his hand.
“We’ll take the horse too,” said another of them, a woman shorter
than Robb, with a broad at face and lank yellow hair. “Get down,
and be quick about it.” A knife slid from her sleeve into her hand,
its edge jagged as a saw.
“No,” Bran blurted. “I can’t …”
The big man grabbed his reins before Bran could think to wheel
Dancer around and gallop o . “You can, lordling … and will, if you
know what’s good for you.”
“Stiv, look how he’s strapped on.” The tall woman pointed with
her spear. “Might be it’s the truth he’s telling.”
“Straps, is it?” Stiv said. He drew a dagger from a sheath at his
belt. “There’s ways to deal with straps.”

“You some kind of cripple?” asked the short woman.
Bran ared. “I’m Brandon Stark of Winterfell, and you better let
go of my horse, or I’ll see you all dead.”
The gaunt man with the grey stubbled face laughed. “The boy’s a
Stark, true enough. Only a Stark would be fool enough to threaten
where smarter men would beg.”
“Cut his little cock o and stu it in his mouth,” suggested the
short woman. “That should shut him up.”
“You’re as stupid as you are ugly, Hali,” said the tall woman.
“The boy’s worth nothing dead, but alive … gods be damned, think
what Mance would give to have Benjen Stark’s own blood to
hostage!”
“Mance be damned,” the big man cursed. “You want to go back
there, Osha? More fool you. Think the white walkers will care if
you have a hostage?” He turned back to Bran and slashed at the
strap around his thigh. The leather parted with a sigh.
The stroke had been quick and careless, biting deep. Looking
down, Bran glimpsed pale esh where the wool of his leggings had
parted. Then the blood began to ow. He watched the red stain
spread, feeling light-headed, curiously apart; there had been no
pain, not even a hint of feeling. The big man grunted in surprise.
“Put down your steel now, and I promise you shall have a quick
and painless death,” Robb called out.
Bran looked up in desperate hope, and there he was. The strength
of the words were undercut by the way his voice cracked with
strain. He was mounted, the bloody carcass of an elk slung across
the back of his horse, his sword in a gloved hand.
“The brother,” said the man with the grey stubbly face.
“He’s a erce one, he is,” mocked the short woman. Hali, they
called her. “You mean to ght us, boy?”
“Don’t be a fool, lad. You’re one against six.” The tall woman,
Osha, leveled her spear. “O the horse, and throw down the sword.
We’ll thank you kindly for the mount and for the venison, and you
and your brother can be on your way.”
Robb whistled. They heard the faint sound of soft feet on wet
leaves. The undergrowth parted, low-hanging branches giving up

their accumulation of snow, and Grey Wind and Summer emerged
from the green. Summer sni ed the air and growled.
“Wolves,” gasped Hali.
“Direwolves,” Bran said. Still half-grown, they were as large as
any wolf he had ever seen, but the di erences were easy to spot, if
you knew what to look for. Maester Luwin and Farlen the
kennelmaster had taught him. A direwolf had a bigger head and
longer legs in proportion to its body, and its snout and jaw were
markedly leaner and more pronounced. There was something gaunt
and terrible about them as they stood there amid the gently falling
snow. Fresh blood spotted Grey Wind’s muzzle.
“Dogs,” the big bald man said contemptuously. “Yet I’m told
there’s nothing like a wolfskin cloak to warm a man by night.” He
made a sharp gesture. “Take them.”
Robb shouted, “Winterfell!” and kicked his horse. The gelding
plunged down the bank as the ragged men closed. A man with an
axe rushed in, shouting and heedless. Robb’s sword caught him full
in the face with a sickening crunch and a spray of bright blood. The
man with the gaunt stubbly face made a grab for the reins, and for
half a second he had them … and then Grey Wind was on him,
bearing him down. He fell back into the stream with a splash and a
shout, ailing wildly with his knife as his head went under. The
direwolf plunged in after him, and the white water turned red
where they had vanished.
Robb and Osha matched blows in midstream. Her long spear was
a steel-headed serpent, ashing out at his chest, once, twice, three
times, but Robb parried every thrust with his longsword, turning
the point aside. On the fourth or fth thrust, the tall woman
overextended herself and lost her balance, just for a second. Robb
charged, riding her down.
A few feet away, Summer darted in and snapped at Hali. The
knife bit at his ank. Summer slid away, snarling, and came rushing
in again. This time his jaws closed around her calf. Holding the
knife with both hands, the small woman stabbed down, but the
direwolf seemed to sense the blade coming. He pulled free for an
instant, his mouth full of leather and cloth and bloody esh. When

Hali stumbled and fell, he came at her again, slamming her
backward, teeth tearing at her belly.
The sixth man ran from the carnage … but not far. As he went
scrambling up the far side of the bank, Grey Wind emerged from
the stream, dripping wet. He shook the water o and bounded after
the running man, hamstringing him with a single snap of his teeth,
and going for the throat as the screaming man slid back down
toward the water.
And then there was no one left but the big man, Stiv. He slashed
at Bran’s chest strap, grabbed his arm, and yanked. Suddenly Bran
was falling. He sprawled on the ground, his legs tangled under him,
one foot in the stream. He could not feel the cold of the water, but
he felt the steel when Stiv pressed his dagger to his throat. “Back
away,” the man warned, “or I’ll open the boy’s windpipe, I swear
it.”
Robb reined his horse in, breathing hard. The fury went out of his
eyes, and his sword arm dropped.
In that moment Bran saw everything. Summer was savaging Hali,
pulling glistening blue snakes from her belly. Her eyes were wide
and staring. Bran could not tell whether she was alive or dead. The
grey stubbly man and the one with the axe lay unmoving, but Osha
was on her knees, crawling toward her fallen spear. Grey Wind
padded toward her, dripping wet. “Call him o !” the big man
shouted. “Call them both o , or the cripple boy dies now!”
“Grey Wind, Summer, to me,” Robb said.
The direwolves stopped, turned their heads. Grey Wind loped
back to Robb. Summer stayed where he was, his eyes on Bran and
the man beside him. He growled. His muzzle was wet and red, but
his eyes burned.
Osha used the butt end of her spear to lever herself back to her
feet. Blood leaked from a wound on the upper arm where Robb had
cut her. Bran could see sweat trickling down the big man’s face. Stiv
was as scared as he was, he realized. “Starks,” the man muttered,
“bloody Starks.” He raised his voice. “Osha, kill the wolves and get
his sword.”

“Kill them yourself,” she replied. “I’ll not be getting near those
monsters.”
For a moment Stiv was at a loss. His hand trembled; Bran felt a
trickle of blood where the knife pressed against his neck. The stench
of the man lled his nose; he smelled of fear. “You,” he called out
to Robb. “You have a name?”
“I am Robb Stark, the heir to Winterfell.”
“This is your brother?”
“Yes.”
“You want him alive, you do what I say. O the horse.”
Robb hesitated a moment. Then, slowly and deliberately, he
dismounted and stood with his sword in hand.
“Now kill the wolves.”
Robb did not move.
“You do it. The wolves or the boy.”
“No!” Bran screamed. If Robb did as they asked, Stiv would kill
them both anyway, once the direwolves were dead.
The bald man took hold of his hair with his free hand and twisted
it cruelly, till Bran sobbed in pain. “You shut your mouth, cripple,
you hear me?” He twisted harder. “You hear me?”
A low thrum came from the woods behind them. Stiv gave a
choked gasp as a half foot of razor-tipped broadhead suddenly
exploded out of his chest. The arrow was bright red, as if it had
been painted in blood.
The dagger fell away from Bran’s throat. The big man swayed and
collapsed, facedown in the stream. The arrow broke beneath him.
Bran watched his life go swirling o in the water.
Osha glanced around as Father’s guardsmen appeared from
beneath the trees, steel in hand. She threw down her spear. “Mercy,
m’lord,” she called to Robb.
The guardsmen had a strange, pale look to their faces as they
took in the scene of slaughter. They eyed the wolves uncertainly,
and when Summer returned to Hali’s corpse to feed, Joseth dropped
his knife and scrambled for the bush, heaving. Even Maester Luwin
seemed shocked as he stepped from behind a tree, but only for an

instant. Then he shook his head and waded across the stream to
Bran’s side. “Are you hurt?”
“He cut my leg,” Bran said, “but I couldn’t feel it.”
As the maester knelt to examine the wound, Bran turned his head.
Theon Greyjoy stood beside a sentinel tree, his bow in hand. He was
smiling. Ever smiling. A half-dozen arrows were thrust into the soft
ground at his feet, but it had taken only one. “A dead enemy is a
thing of beauty,” he announced.
“Jon always said you were an ass, Greyjoy,” Robb said loudly. “I
ought to chain you up in the yard and let Bran take a few practice
shots at you.”
“You should be thanking me for saving your brother’s life.”
“What if you had missed the shot?” Robb said. “What if you’d
only wounded him? What if you had made his hand jump, or hit
Bran instead? For all you knew, the man might have been wearing a
breastplate, all you could see was the back of his cloak. What would
have happened to my brother then? Did you ever think of that,
Greyjoy?”
Theon’s smile was gone. He gave a sullen shrug and began to pull
his arrows from the ground, one by one.
Robb glared at his guardsmen. “Where were you?” he demanded
of them. “I was sure you were close behind us.”
The men traded unhappy glances. “We were following, m’lord,”
said Quent, the youngest of them, his beard a soft brown fuzz.
“Only rst we waited for Maester Luwin and his ass, begging your
pardons, and then, well, as it were …” He glanced over at Theon
and quickly looked away, abashed.
“I spied a turkey,” Theon said, annoyed by the question. “How
was I to know that you’d leave the boy alone?”
Robb turned his head to look at Theon once more. Bran had never
seen him so angry, yet he said nothing. Finally he knelt beside
Maester Luwin. “How badly is my brother wounded?”
“No more than a scratch,” the maester said. He wet a cloth in the
stream to clean the cut. “Two of them wear the black,” he told Robb
as he worked.

Robb glanced over at where Stiv lay sprawled in the stream, his
ragged black cloak moving tfully as the rushing waters tugged at
it. “Deserters from the Night’s Watch,” he said grimly. “They must
have been fools, to come so close to Winterfell.”
“Folly and desperation are ofttimes hard to tell apart,” said
Maester Luwin.
“Shall we bury them, m’lord?” asked Quent.
“They would not have buried us,” Robb said. “Hack o their
heads, we’ll send them back to the Wall. Leave the rest for the
carrion crows.”
“And this one?” Quent jerked a thumb toward Osha.
Robb walked over to her. She was a head taller than he was, but
she dropped to her knees at his approach. “Give me my life, m’lord
of Stark, and I am yours.”
“Mine? What would I do with an oathbreaker?”
“I broke no oaths. Stiv and Wallen ew down o the Wall, not
me. The black crows got no place for women.”
Theon Greyjoy sauntered closer. “Give her to the wolves,” he
urged Robb. The woman’s eyes went to what was left of Hali, and
just as quickly away. She shuddered. Even the guardsmen looked
queasy.
“She’s a woman,” Robb said.
“A wildling,” Bran told him. “She said they should keep me alive
so they could take me to Mance Rayder.”
“Do you have a name?” Robb asked her.
“Osha, as it please the lord,” she muttered sourly.
Maester Luwin stood. “We might do well to question her.”
Bran could see the relief on his brother’s face. “As you say,
Maester. Wayn, bind her hands. She’ll come back to Winterfell with
us … and live or die by the truths she gives us.”

TYRION

“You want eat?” Mord asked, glowering. He had a plate of boiled
beans in one thick, stub- ngered hand.
Tyrion Lannister was starved, but he refused to let this brute see
him cringe. “A leg of lamb would be pleasant,” he said, from the
heap of soiled straw in the corner of his cell. “Perhaps a dish of peas
and onions, some fresh baked bread with butter, and a agon of
mulled wine to wash it down. Or beer, if that’s easier. I try not to
be overly particular.”
“Is beans,” Mord said. “Here.” He held out the plate.
Tyrion sighed. The turnkey was twenty stone of gross stupidity,
with brown rotting teeth and small dark eyes. The left side of his
face was slick with scar where an axe had cut o his ear and part of
his cheek. He was as predictable as he was ugly, but Tyrion was
hungry. He reached up for the plate.
Mord jerked it away, grinning. “Is here,” he said, holding it out
beyond Tyrion’s reach.
The dwarf climbed sti y to his feet, every joint aching. “Must we
play the same fool’s game with every meal?” He made another grab
for the beans.
Mord shambled backward, grinning through his rotten teeth. “Is
here, dwarf man.” He held the plate out at arm’s length, over the
edge where the cell ended and the sky began. “You not want eat?
Here. Come take.”

Tyrion’s arms were too short to reach the plate, and he was not
about to step that close to the edge. All it would take would be a
quick shove of Mord’s heavy white belly, and he would end up a
sickening red splotch on the stones of Sky, like so many other
prisoners of the Eyrie over the centuries. “Come to think on it, I’m
not hungry after all,” he declared, retreating to the corner of his
cell.
Mord grunted and opened his thick ngers. The wind took the
plate, ipping it over as it fell. A handful of beans sprayed back at
them as the food tumbled out of sight. The turnkey laughed, his gut
shaking like a bowl of pudding.
Tyrion felt a pang of rage. “You fucking son of a pox-ridden ass,”
he spat. “I hope you die of a bloody ux.”
For that, Mord gave him a kick, driving a steel-toed boot hard
into Tyrion’s ribs on the way out. “I take it back!” he gasped as he
doubled over on the straw. “I’ll kill you myself, I swear it!” The
heavy iron-bound door slammed shut. Tyrion heard the rattle of
keys.
For a small man, he had been cursed with a dangerously big
mouth, he re ected as he crawled back to his corner of what the
Arryns laughably called their dungeon. He huddled beneath the thin
blanket that was his only bedding, staring out at a blaze of empty
blue sky and distant mountains that seemed to go on forever,
wishing he still had the shadowskin cloak he’d won from Marillion
at dice, after the singer had stolen it o the body of that brigand
chief. The skin had smelled of blood and mold, but it was warm and
thick. Mord had taken it the moment he laid eyes on it.
The wind tugged at his blanket with gusts sharp as talons. His cell
was miserably small, even for a dwarf. Not ve feet away, where a
wall ought to have been, where a wall would be in a proper
dungeon, the oor ended and the sky began. He had plenty of fresh
air and sunshine, and the moon and stars by night, but Tyrion would
have traded it all in an instant for the dankest, gloomiest pit in the
bowels of the Casterly Rock.
“You y,” Mord had promised him, when he’d shoved him into
the cell. “Twenty day, thirty, fty maybe. Then you y.”

The Arryns kept the only dungeon in the realm where the
prisoners were welcome to escape at will. That rst day, after
girding up his courage for hours, Tyrion had lain at on his stomach
and squirmed to the edge, to poke out his head and look down. Sky
was six hundred feet below, with nothing between but empty air. If
he craned his neck out as far as it could go, he could see other cells
to his right and left and above him. He was a bee in a stone
honeycomb, and someone had torn o his wings.
It was cold in the cell, the wind screamed night and day, and
worst of all, the oor sloped. Ever so slightly, yet it was enough. He
was afraid to close his eyes, afraid that he might roll over in his
sleep and wake in sudden terror as he went sliding o the edge.
Small wonder the sky cells drove men mad.
Gods save me, some previous tenant had written on the wall in
something that looked suspiciously like blood, the blue is calling. At
rst Tyrion wondered who he’d been, and what had become of him;
later, he decided that he would rather not know.
If only he had shut his mouth …
The wretched boy had started it, looking down on him from a
throne of carved weirwood beneath the moon-and-falcon banners of
House Arryn. Tyrion Lannister had been looked down on all his life,
but seldom by rheumy-eyed six-year-olds who needed to stu fat
cushions under their cheeks to lift them to the height of a man. “Is
he the bad man?” the boy had asked, clutching his doll.
“He is,” the Lady Lysa had said from the lesser throne beside him.
She was all in blue, powdered and perfumed for the suitors who
lled her court.
“He’s so small,” the Lord of the Eyrie said, giggling.
“This is Tyrion the Imp, of House Lannister, who murdered your
father.” She raised her voice so it carried down the length of High
Hall of the Eyrie, ringing o the milk-white walls and the slender
pillars, so every man could hear it. “He slew the Hand of the King!”
“Oh, did I kill him too?” Tyrion had said, like a fool.
That would have been a very good time to have kept his mouth
closed and his head bowed. He could see that now; seven hells, he
had seen it then. The High Hall of the Arryns was long and austere,

with a forbidding coldness to its walls of blue-veined white marble,
but the faces around him had been colder by far. The power of
Casterly Rock was far away, and there were no friends of the
Lannisters in the Vale of Arryn. Submission and silence would have
been his best defenses.
But Tyrion’s mood had been too foul for sense. To his shame, he
had faltered during the last leg of their day-long climb up to the
Eyrie, his stunted legs unable to take him any higher. Bronn had
carried him the rest of the way, and the humiliation poured oil on
the ames of his anger. “It would seem I’ve been a busy little
fellow,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “I wonder when I found the
time to do all this slaying and murdering.”
He ought to have remembered who he was dealing with. Lysa
Arryn and her half-sane weakling son had not been known at court
for their love of wit, especially when it was directed at them.
“Imp,” Lysa said coldly, “you will guard that mocking tongue of
yours and speak to my son politely, or I promise you will have
cause to regret it. Remember where you are. This is the Eyrie, and
these are knights of the Vale you see around you, true men who
loved Jon Arryn well. Every one of them would die for me.”
“Lady Arryn, should any harm come to me, my brother Jaime will
be pleased to see that they do.” Even as he spat out the words,
Tyrion knew they were folly.
“Can you y, my lord of Lannister?” Lady Lysa asked. “Does a
dwarf have wings? If not, you would be wiser to swallow the next
threat that comes to mind.”
“I made no threats,” Tyrion said. “That was a promise.”
Little Lord Robert hopped to his feet at that, so upset he dropped
his doll. “You can’t hurt us,” he screamed. “No one can hurt us here.
Tell him, Mother, tell him he can’t hurt us here.” The boy began to
twitch.
“The Eyrie is impregnable,” Lysa Arryn declared calmly. She drew
her son close, holding him safe in the circle of her plump white
arms. “The Imp is trying to frighten us, sweet baby. The Lannisters
are all liars. No one will hurt my sweet boy.”

The hell of it was, she was no doubt right. Having seen what it
took to get here, Tyrion could well imagine how it would be for a
knight trying to ght his way up in armor, while stones and arrows
poured down from above and enemies contested with him for every
step. Nightmare did not begin to describe it. Small wonder the Eyrie
had never been taken.
Still, Tyrion had been unable to silence himself. “Not
impregnable,” he said, “merely inconvenient.”
Young Robert pointed down, his hand trembling. “You’re a liar.
Mother, I want to see him y.” Two guardsmen in sky-blue cloaks
seized Tyrion by the arms, lifting him o his oor.
The gods only know what might have happened then were it not
for Catelyn Stark. “Sister,” she called out from where she stood
below the thrones, “I beg you to remember, this man is my
prisoner. I will not have him harmed.”
Lysa Arryn glanced at her sister coolly for a moment, then rose
and swept down on Tyrion, her long skirts trailing after her. For an
instant he feared she would strike him, but instead she commanded
them to release him. Her men shoved him to the oor, his legs went
out from under him, and Tyrion fell.
He must have made quite a sight as he struggled to his knees,
only to feel his right leg spasm, sending him sprawling once more.
Laughter boomed up and down the High Hall of the Arryns.
“My sister’s little guest is too weary to stand,” Lady Lysa
announced. “Ser Vardis, take him down to the dungeon. A rest in
one of our sky cells will do him much good.”
The guardsmen jerked him upright. Tyrion Lannister dangled
between them, kicking feebly, his face red with shame. “I will
remember this,” he told them all as they carried him o .
And so he did, for all the good it did him.
At rst he had consoled himself that this imprisonment could not
last long. Lysa Arryn wanted to humble him, that was all. She
would send for him again, and soon. If not her, then Catelyn Stark
would want to question him. This time he would guard his tongue
more closely. They dare not kill him out of hand; he was still a

Lannister of Casterly Rock, and if they shed his blood, it would
mean war. Or so he had told himself.
Now he was not so certain.
Perhaps his captors only meant to let him rot here, but he feared
he did not have the strength to rot for long. He was growing
weaker every day, and it was only a matter of time until Mord’s
kicks and blows did him serious harm, provided the gaoler did not
starve him to death rst. A few more nights of cold and hunger, and
the blue would start calling to him too.
He wondered what was happening beyond the walls (such as they
were) of his cell. Lord Tywin would surely have sent out riders
when the word reached him. Jaime might be leading a host through
the Mountains of the Moon even now … unless he was riding north
against Winterfell instead. Did anyone outside the Vale even suspect
where Catelyn Stark had taken him? He wondered what Cersei
would do when she heard. The king could order him freed, but
would Robert listen to his queen or his Hand? Tyrion had no
illusions about the king’s love for his sister.
If Cersei kept her wits about her, she would insist the king sit in
judgment of Tyrion himself. Even Ned Stark could scarcely object to
that, not without impugning the honor of the king. And Tyrion
would be only too glad to take his chances in a trial. Whatever
murders they might lay at his door, the Starks had no proof of
anything so far as he could see. Let them make their case before the
Iron Throne and the lords of the land. It would be the end of them.
If only Cersei were clever enough to see that …
Tyrion Lannister sighed. His sister was not without a certain low
cunning, but her pride blinded her. She would see the insult in this,
not the opportunity. And Jaime was even worse, rash and
headstrong and quick to anger. His brother never untied a knot
when he could slash it in two with his sword.
He wondered which of them had sent the footpad to silence the
Stark boy, and whether they had truly conspired at the death of
Lord Arryn. If the old Hand had been murdered, it was deftly and
subtly done. Men of his age died of sudden illness all the time. In
contrast, sending some oaf with a stolen knife after Brandon Stark

struck him as unbelievably clumsy. And wasn’t that peculiar, come
to think on it …
Tyrion shivered. Now there was a nasty suspicion. Perhaps the
direwolf and the lion were not the only beasts in the woods, and if
that was true, someone was using him as a catspaw. Tyrion
Lannister hated being used.
He would have to get out of here, and soon. His chances of
overpowering Mord were small to none, and no one was about to
smuggle him a six-hundred-foot-long rope, so he would have to talk
himself free. His mouth had gotten him into this cell; it could damn
well get him out.
Tyrion pushed himself to his feet, doing his best to ignore the
slope of the oor beneath him, with its ever-so-subtle tug toward
the edge. He hammered on the door with a st. “Mord!” he shouted.
“Turnkey! Mord, I want you!” He had to keep it up a good ten
minutes before he heard footsteps. Tyrion stepped back an instant
before the door opened with a crash.
“Making noise,” Mord growled, with blood in his eyes. Dangling
from one meaty hand was a leather strap, wide and thick, doubled
over in his st.
Never show them you’re afraid, Tyrion reminded himself. “How
would you like to be rich?” he asked.
Mord hit him. He swung the strap backhand, lazily, but the
leather caught Tyrion high on the arm. The force of it staggered
him, and the pain made him grit his teeth. “No mouth, dwarf man,”
Mord warned him.
“Gold,” Tyrion said, miming a smile. “Casterly Rock is full of
gold … ahhhh …” This time the blow was a forehand, and Mord put
more of his arm into the swing, making the leather crack and jump.
It caught Tyrion in the ribs and dropped him to his knees,
wimpering. He forced himself to look up at the gaoler. “As rich as
the Lannisters,” he wheezed. “That’s what they say, Mord—”
Mord grunted. The strap whistled through the air and smashed
Tyrion full in the face. The pain was so bad he did not remember
falling, but when he opened his eyes again he was on the oor of
his cell. His ear was ringing, and his mouth was full of blood. He

groped for purchase, to push himself up, and his ngers brushed
against … nothing. Tyrion snatched his hand back as fast as if it had
been scalded, and tried his best to stop breathing. He had fallen
right on the edge, inches from the blue.
“More to say?” Mord held the strap between his sts and gave it
a sharp pull. The snap made Tyrion jump. The turnkey laughed.
He won’t push me over, Tyrion told himself desperately as he
crawled away from the edge. Catelyn Stark wants me alive, he doesn’t
dare kill me. He wiped the blood o his lips with the back of his
hand, grinned, and said, “That was a sti one, Mord.” The gaoler
squinted at him, trying to decide if he was being mocked. “I could
make good use of a strong man like you.” The strap ew at him, but
this time Tyrion was able to cringe away from it. He took a
glancing blow to the shoulder, nothing more. “Gold,” he repeated,
scrambling backward like a crab, “more gold than you’ll see here in
a lifetime. Enough to buy land, women, horses … you could be a
lord. Lord Mord.” Tyrion hawked up a glob of blood and phlegm
and spat it out into the sky.
“Is no gold,” Mord said.
He’s listening! Tyrion thought. “They relieved me of my purse
when they captured me, but the gold is still mine. Catelyn Stark
might take a man prisoner, but she’d never stoop to rob him. That
wouldn’t be honorable. Help me, and all the gold is yours.” Mord’s
strap licked out, but it was a halfhearted, desultory swing, slow and
contemptuous. Tyrion caught the leather in his hand and held it
prisoned. “There will be no risk to you. All you need do is deliver a
message.”
The gaoler yanked his leather strap free of Tyrion’s grasp.
“Message,” he said, as if he had never heard the word before. His
frown made deep creases in his brow.
“You heard me, my lord. Only carry my word to your lady. Tell
her …” What? What would possibly make Lysa Arryn relent? The
inspiration came to Tyrion Lannister suddenly. “… tell her that I
wish to confess my crimes.”
Mord raised his arm and Tyrion braced himself for another blow,
but the turnkey hesitated. Suspicion and greed warred in his eyes.

He wanted that gold, yet he feared a trick; he had the look of a man
who had often been tricked. “Is lie,” he muttered darkly. “Dwarf
man cheat me.”
“I will put my promise in writing,” Tyrion vowed.
Some illiterates held writing in disdain; others seemed to have a
superstitious reverence for the written word, as if it were some sort
of magic. Fortunately, Mord was one of the latter. The turnkey
lowered the strap. “Writing down gold. Much gold.”
“Oh, much gold,” Tyrion assured him. “The purse is just a taste,
my friend. My brother wears armor of solid gold plate.” In truth,
Jaime’s armor was gilded steel, but this oaf would never know the
di erence.
Mord ngered his strap thoughtfully, but in the end, he relented
and went to fetch paper and ink. When the letter was written, the
gaoler frowned at it suspiciously. “Now deliver my message,”
Tyrion urged.
He was shivering in his sleep when they came for him, late that
night. Mord opened the door but kept his silence. Ser Vardis Egen
woke Tyrion with the point of his boot. “On your feet, Imp. My
lady wants to see you.”
Tyrion rubbed the sleep from his eyes and put on a grimace he
scarcely felt. “No doubt she does, but what makes you think I wish
to see her?”
Ser Vardis frowned. Tyrion remembered him well from the years
he had spent at King’s Landing as the captain of the Hand’s
household guard. A square, plain face, silver hair, a heavy build,
and no humor whatsoever. “Your wishes are not my concern. On
your feet, or I’ll have you carried.”
Tyrion clambered awkwardly to his feet. “A cold night,” he said
casually, “and the High Hall is so drafty. I don’t wish to catch a
chill. Mord, if you would be so good, fetch my cloak.”
The gaoler squinted at him, face dull with suspicion.
“My cloak,” Tyrion repeated. “The shadowskin you took from me
for safekeeping. You recall.”
“Get him the damnable cloak,” Ser Vardis said.

Mord did not dare grumble. He gave Tyrion a glare that promised
future retribution, yet he went for the cloak. When he draped it
around his prisoner’s neck, Tyrion smiled. “My thanks. I shall think
of you whenever I wear it.” He ung the trailing end of the long fur
over his right shoulder, and felt warm for the rst time in days.
“Lead on, Ser Vardis.”
The High Hall of the Arryns was aglow with the light of fty
torches, burning in the sconces along the walls. The Lady Lysa wore
black silk, with the moon-and-falcon sewn on her breast in pearls.
Since she did not look the sort to join the Night’s Watch, Tyrion
could only imagine that she had decided mourning clothes were
appropriate garb for a confession. Her long auburn hair, woven into
an elaborate braid, fell across her left shoulder. The taller throne
beside her was empty; no doubt the little Lord of the Eyrie was o
shaking in his sleep. Tyrion was thankful for that much, at least.
He bowed deeply and took a moment to glance around the hall.
Lady Arryn had summoned her knights and retainers to hear his
confession, as he had hoped. He saw Ser Brynden Tully’s craggy
face and Lord Nestor Royce’s blu one. Beside Nestor stood a
younger man with erce black sidewhiskers who could only be his
heir, Ser Albar. Most of the principal houses of the Vale were
represented. Tyrion noted Ser Lyn Corbray, slender as a sword,
Lord Hunter with his gouty legs, the widowed Lady Waynwood
surrounded by her sons. Others sported sigils he did not know;
broken lance, green viper, burning tower, winged chalice.
Among the lords of the Vale were several of his companions from
the high road; Ser Rodrik Cassel, pale from half-healed wounds,
stood with Ser Willis Wode beside him. Marillion the singer had
found a new woodharp. Tyrion smiled; whatever happened here
tonight, he did not wish it to happen in secret, and there was no one
like a singer for spreading a story near and far.
In the rear of the hall, Bronn lounged beneath a pillar. The
freerider’s black eyes were xed on Tyrion, and his hand lay lightly
on the pommel of his sword. Tyrion gave him a long look,
wondering …

Catelyn Stark spoke rst. “You wish to confess your crimes, we
are told.”
“I do, my lady,” Tyrion answered.
Lysa Arryn smiled at her sister. “The sky cells always break them.
The gods can see them there, and there is no darkness to hide in.”
“He does not look broken to me,” Lady Catelyn said.
Lady Lysa paid her no mind. “Say what you will,” she
commanded Tyrion.
And now to roll the dice, he thought with another quick glance
back at Bronn. “Where to begin? I am a vile little man, I confess it.
My crimes and sins are beyond counting, my lords and ladies. I have
lain with whores, not once but hundreds of times. I have wished my
own lord father dead, and my sister, our gracious queen, as well.”
Behind him, someone chuckled. “I have not always treated my
servants with kindness. I have gambled. I have even cheated, I
blush to admit. I have said many cruel and malicious things about
the noble lords and ladies of the court.” That drew outright
laughter. “Once I—”
“Silence!” Lysa Arryn’s pale round face had turned a burning pink.
“What do you imagine you are doing, dwarf?”
Tyrion cocked his head to one side. “Why, confessing my crimes,
my lady.”
Catelyn Stark took a step forward. “You are accused of sending a
hired knife to slay my son Bran in his bed, and of conspiring to
murder Lord Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King.”
Tyrion gave a helpless shrug. “Those crimes I cannot confess, I
fear. I know nothing of any murders.”
Lady Lysa rose from her weirwood throne. “I will not be made
mock of. You have had your little jape, Imp. I trust you enjoyed it.
Ser Vardis, take him back to the dungeon … but this time nd him a
smaller cell, with a oor more sharply sloped.”
“Is this how justice is done in the Vale?” Tyrion roared, so loudly
that Ser Vardis froze for an instant. “Does honor stop at the Bloody
Gate? You accuse me of crimes, I deny them, so you throw me into
an open cell to freeze and starve.” He lifted his head, to give them
all a good look at the bruises Mord had left on his face. “Where is

the king’s justice? Is the Eyrie not part of the Seven Kingdoms? I
stand accused, you say. Very well. I demand a trial! Let me speak,
and let my truth or falsehood be judged openly, in the sight of gods
and men.”
A low murmuring lled the High Hall. He had her, Tyrion knew.
He was highborn, the son of the most powerful lord in the realm,
the brother of the queen. He could not be denied a trial. Guardsmen
in sky-blue cloaks had started toward Tyrion, but Ser Vardis bid
them halt and looked to Lady Lysa.
Her small mouth twitched in a petulant smile. “If you are tried
and found to be guilty of the crimes for which you stand accused,
then by the king’s own laws, you must pay with your life’s blood.
We keep no headsman in the Eyrie, my lord of Lannister. Open the
Moon Door.”
The press of spectators parted. A narrow weirwood door stood
between two slender marble pillars, a crescent moon carved in the
white wood. Those standing closest edged backward as a pair of
guardsmen marched through. One man removed the heavy bronze
bars; the second pulled the door inward. Their blue cloaks rose
snapping from their shoulders, caught in the sudden gust of wind
that came howling through the open door. Beyond was the
emptiness of the night sky, speckled with cold uncaring stars.
“Behold the king’s justice,” Lysa Arryn said. Torch ames
uttered like pennons along the walls, and here and there the odd
torch guttered out.
“Lysa, I think this unwise,” Catelyn Stark said as the black wind
swirled around the hall.
Her sister ignored her. “You want a trial, my lord of Lannister.
Very well, a trial you shall have. My son will listen to whatever you
care to say, and you shall hear his judgment. Then you may
leave … by one door or the other.”
She looked so pleased with herself, Tyrion thought, and small
wonder. How could a trial threaten her, when her weakling son was
the lord judge? Tyrion glanced at her Moon Door. Mother, I want to
see him y! the boy had said. How many men had the snot-nosed
little wretch sent through that door already?

“I thank you, my good lady, but I see no need to trouble Lord
Robert,” Tyrion said politely. “The gods know the truth of my
innocence. I will have their verdict, not the judgment of men. I
demand trial by combat.”
A storm of sudden laughter lled the High Hall of the Arryns.
Lord Nestor Royce snorted, Ser Willis chuckled, Ser Lyn Corbray
gu awed, and others threw back their heads and howled until tears
ran down their faces. Marillion clumsily plucked a gay note on his
new woodharp with the ngers of his broken hand. Even the wind
seemed to whistle with derision as it came skirling through the
Moon Door.
Lysa Arryn’s watery blue eyes looked uncertain. He had caught
her o balance. “You have that right, to be sure.”
The young knight with the green viper embroidered on his
surcoat stepped forward and went to one knee. “My lady, I beg the
boon of championing your cause.”
“The honor should be mine,” old Lord Hunter said. “For the love I
bore your lord husband, let me avenge his death.”
“My father served Lord Jon faithfully as High Steward of the
Vale,” Ser Albar Royce boomed. “Let me serve his son in this.”
“The gods favor the man with the just cause,” said Ser Lyn
Corbray, “yet often that turns out to be the man with the surest
sword. We all know who that is.” He smiled modestly.
A dozen other men all spoke at once, clamoring to be heard.
Tyrion found it disheartening to realize so many strangers were
eager to kill him. Perhaps this had not been such a clever plan after
all.
Lady Lysa raised a hand for silence. “I thank you, my lords, as I
know my son would thank you if he were among us. No men in the
Seven Kingdoms are as bold and true as the knights of the Vale.
Would that I could grant you all this honor. Yet I can choose only
one.” She gestured. “Ser Vardis Egen, you were ever my lord
husband’s good right hand. You shall be our champion.”
Ser Vardis had been singularly silent. “My lady,” he said gravely,
sinking to one knee, “pray give this burden to another, I have no
taste for it. The man is no warrior. Look at him. A dwarf, half my

size and lame in the legs. It would be shameful to slaughter such a
man and call it justice.”
Oh, excellent, Tyrion thought. “I agree.”
Lysa glared at him. “You demanded a trial by combat.”
“And now I demand a champion, such as you have chosen for
yourself. My brother Jaime will gladly take my part, I know.”
“Your precious Kingslayer is hundreds of leagues from here,”
snapped Lysa Arryn.
“Send a bird for him. I will gladly await his arrival.”
“You will face Ser Vardis on the morrow.”
“Singer,” Tyrion said, turning to Marillion, “when you make a
ballad of this, be certain you tell them how Lady Arryn denied the
dwarf the right to a champion, and sent him forth lame and bruised
and hobbling to face her nest knight.”
“I deny you nothing!” Lysa Arryn said, her voice peeved and shrill
with irritation. “Name your champion, Imp … if you think you can
nd a man to die for you.”
“If it is all the same to you, I’d sooner nd one to kill for me.”
Tyrion looked over the long hall. No one moved. For a long
moment he wondered if it had all been a colossal blunder.
Then there was a stirring in the rear of the chamber. “I’ll stand
for the dwarf,” Bronn called out.

EDDARD

He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a
tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood.
In the dream his friends rode with him, as they had in life. Proud
Martyn Cassel, Jory’s father; faithful Theo Wull; Ethan Glover, who
had been Brandon’s squire; Ser Mark Ryswell, soft of speech and
gentle of heart; the crannogman, Howland Reed; Lord Dustin on his
great red stallion. Ned had known their faces as well as he knew his
own once, but the years leech at a man’s memories, even those he
has vowed never to forget. In the dream they were only shadows,
grey wraiths on horses made of mist.
They were seven, facing three. In the dream as it had been in life.
Yet these were no ordinary three. They waited before the round
tower, the red mountains of Dorne at their backs, their white cloaks
blowing in the wind. And these were no shadows; their faces burned
clear, even now. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, had a
sad smile on his lips. The hilt of the greatsword Dawn poked up
over his right shoulder. Ser Oswell Whent was on one knee,
sharpening his blade with a whetstone. Across his white-enameled
helm, the black bat of his House spread its wings. Between them
stood erce old Ser Gerold Hightower, the White Bull, Lord
Commander of the Kingsguard.
“I looked for you on the Trident,” Ned said to them.
“We were not there,” Ser Gerold answered.
“Woe to the Usurper if we had been,” said Ser Oswell.

“When King’s Landing fell, Ser Jaime slew your king with a
golden sword, and I wondered where you were.”
“Far away,” Ser Gerold said, “or Aerys would yet sit the Iron
Throne, and our false brother would burn in seven hells.”
“I came down on Storm’s End to lift the siege,” Ned told them,
“and the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne dipped their banners, and all
their knights bent the knee to pledge us fealty. I was certain you
would be among them.”
“Our knees do not bend easily,” said Ser Arthur Dayne.
“Ser Willem Darry is ed to Dragonstone, with your queen and
Prince Viserys. I thought you might have sailed with him.”
“Ser Willem is a good man and true,” said Ser Oswell.
“But not of the Kingsguard,” Ser Gerold pointed out. “The
Kingsguard does not ee.”
“Then or now,” said Ser Arthur. He donned his helm.
“We swore a vow,” explained old Ser Gerold.
Ned’s wraiths moved up beside him, with shadow swords in hand.
They were seven against three.
“And now it begins,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the
Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The
blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light.
“No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.” As they
came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna
screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across
a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death.
“Lord Eddard,” Lyanna called again.
“I promise,” he whispered. “Lya, I promise …”
“Lord Eddard,” a man echoed from the dark.
Groaning, Eddard Stark opened his eyes. Moonlight streamed
through the tall windows of the Tower of the Hand.
“Lord Eddard?” A shadow stood over the bed.
“How … how long?” The sheets were tangled, his leg splinted and
plastered. A dull throb of pain shot up his side.
“Six days and seven nights.” The voice was Vayon Poole’s. The
steward held a cup to Ned’s lips. “Drink, my lord.”
“What …?”

“Only water. Maester Pycelle said you would be thirsty.”
Ned drank. His lips were parched and cracked. The water tasted
sweet as honey.
“The king left orders,” Vayon Poole told him when the cup was
empty. “He would speak with you, my lord.”
“On the morrow,” Ned said. “When I am stronger.” He could not
face Robert now. The dream had left him weak as a kitten.
“My lord,” Poole said, “he commanded us to send you to him the
moment you opened your eyes.” The steward busied himself
lighting a bedside candle.
Ned cursed softly. Robert was never known for his patience. “Tell
him I’m too weak to come to him. If he wishes to speak with me, I
should be pleased to receive him here. I hope you wake him from a
sound sleep. And summon …” He was about to say Jory when he
remembered. “Summon the captain of my guard.”
Alyn stepped into the bedchamber a few moments after the
steward had taken his leave. “My lord.”
“Poole tells me it has been six days,” Ned said. “I must know how
things stand.”
“The Kingslayer is ed the city,” Alyn told him. “The talk is he’s
ridden back to Casterly Rock to join his father. The story of how
Lady Catelyn took the Imp is on every lip. I have put on extra
guards, if it please you.”
“It does,” Ned assured him. “My daughters?”
“They have been with you every day, my lord. Sansa prays
quietly, but Arya …” He hesitated. “She has not said a word since
they brought you back. She is a erce little thing, my lord. I have
never seen such anger in a girl.”
“Whatever happens,” Ned said, “I want my daughters kept safe. I
fear this is only the beginning.”
“No harm will come to them, Lord Eddard,” Alyn said. “I stake
my life on that.”
“Jory and the others …”
“I gave them over to the silent sisters, to be sent north to
Winterfell. Jory would want to lie beside his grandfather.”

It would have to be his grandfather, for Jory’s father was buried
far to the south. Martyn Cassel had perished with the rest. Ned had
pulled the tower down afterward, and used its bloody stones to
build eight cairns upon the ridge. It was said that Rhaegar had
named that place the tower of joy, but for Ned it was a bitter
memory. They had been seven against three, yet only two had lived
to ride away; Eddard Stark himself and the little crannogman,
Howland Reed. He did not think it omened well that he should
dream that dream again after so many years.
“You’ve done well, Alyn,” Ned was saying when Vayon Poole
returned. The steward bowed low. “His Grace is without, my lord,
and the queen with him.”
Ned pushed himself up higher, wincing as his leg trembled with
pain. He had not expected Cersei to come. It did not bode well that
she had. “Send them in, and leave us. What we have to say should
not go beyond these walls.” Poole withdrew quietly.
Robert had taken time to dress. He wore a black velvet doublet
with the crowned stag of Baratheon worked upon the breast in
golden thread, and a golden mantle with a cloak of black and gold
squares. A agon of wine was in his hand, his face already ushed
from drink. Cersei Lannister entered behind him, a jeweled tiara in
her hair.
“Your Grace,” Ned said. “Your pardons. I cannot rise.”
“No matter,” the king said gru y. “Some wine? From the Arbor.
A good vintage.”
“A small cup,” Ned said. “My head is still heavy from the milk of
the poppy.”
“A man in your place should count himself fortunate that his head
is still on his shoulders,” the queen declared.
“Quiet, woman,” Robert snapped. He brought Ned a cup of wine.
“Does the leg still pain you?”
“Some,” Ned said. His head was swimming, but it would not do to
admit to weakness in front of the queen.
“Pycelle swears it will heal clean,” Robert frowned. “I take it you
know what Catelyn has done?”

“I do.” Ned took a small swallow of wine. “My lady wife is
blameless, Your Grace. All she did she did at my command.”
“I am not pleased, Ned,” Robert grumbled.
“By what right do you dare lay hands on my blood?” Cersei
demanded. “Who do you think you are?”
“The Hand of the King,” Ned told her with icy courtesy. “Charged
by your own lord husband to keep the king’s peace and enforce the
king’s justice.”
“You were the Hand,” Cersei began, “but now—”
“Silence!” the king roared. “You asked him a question and he
answered it.” Cersei subsided, cold with anger, and Robert turned
back to Ned. “Keep the king’s peace, you say. Is this how you keep
my peace, Ned? Seven men are dead …”
“Eight,” the queen corrected. “Tregar died this morning, of the
blow Lord Stark gave him.”
“Abductions on the kingsroad and drunken slaughter in my
streets,” the king said. “I will not have it, Ned.”
“Catelyn had good reason for taking the Imp—”
“I said, I will not have it! To hell with her reasons. You will
command her to release the dwarf at once, and you will make your
peace with Jaime.”
“Three of my men were butchered before my eyes, because Jaime
Lannister wished to chasten me. Am I to forget that?”
“My brother was not the cause of this quarrel,” Cersei told the
king. “Lord Stark was returning drunk from a brothel. His men
attacked Jaime and his guards, even as his wife attacked Tyrion on
the kingsroad.”
“You know me better than that, Robert,” Ned said. “Ask Lord
Baelish if you doubt me. He was there.”
“I’ve talked to Little nger,” Robert said. “He claims he rode o to
bring the gold cloaks before the ghting began, but he admits you
were returning from some whorehouse.”
“Some whorehouse? Damn your eyes, Robert, I went there to
have a look at your daughter! Her mother has named her Barra. She
looks like that rst girl you fathered, when we were boys together

in the Vale.” He watched the queen as he spoke; her face was a
mask, still and pale, betraying nothing.
Robert ushed. “Barra,” he grumbled. “Is that supposed to please
me? Damn the girl. I thought she had more sense.”
“She cannot be more than fteen, and a whore, and you thought
she had sense?” Ned said, incredulous. His leg was beginning to pain
him sorely. It was hard to keep his temper. “The fool child is in love
with you, Robert.”
The king glanced at Cersei. “This is no t subject for the queen’s
ears.”
“Her Grace will have no liking for anything I have to say,” Ned
replied. “I am told the Kingslayer has ed the city. Give me leave to
bring him back to justice.”
The king swirled the wine in his cup, brooding. He took a
swallow. “No,” he said. “I want no more of this. Jaime slew three of
your men, and you ve of his. Now it ends.”
“Is that your notion of justice?” Ned ared. “If so, I am pleased
that I am no longer your Hand.”
The queen looked to her husband. “If any man had dared speak to
a Targaryen as he has spoken to you—”
“Do you take me for Aerys?” Robert interrupted.
“I took you for a king. Jaime and Tyrion are your own brothers,
by all the laws of marriage and the bonds we share. The Starks have
driven o the one and seized the other. This man dishonors you
with every breath he takes, and yet you stand there meekly, asking
if his leg pains him and would he like some wine.”
Robert’s face was dark with anger. “How many times must I tell
you to hold your tongue, woman?”
Cersei’s face was a study in contempt. “What a jape the gods have
made of us two,” she said. “By all rights, you ought to be in skirts
and me in mail.”
Purple with rage, the king lashed out, a vicious backhand blow to
the side of the head. She stumbled against the table and fell hard,
yet Cersei Lannister did not cry out. Her slender ngers brushed her
cheek, where the pale smooth skin was already reddening. On the

morrow the bruise would cover half her face. “I shall wear this as a
badge of honor,” she announced.
“Wear it in silence, or I’ll honor you again,” Robert vowed. He
shouted for a guard. Ser Meryn Trant stepped into the room, tall
and somber in his white armor. “The queen is tired. See her to her
bedchamber.” The knight helped Cersei to her feet and led her out
without a word.
Robert reached for the agon and re lled his cup. “You see what
she does to me, Ned.” The king seated himself, cradling his wine
cup. “My loving wife. The mother of my children.” The rage was
gone from him now; in his eyes Ned saw something sad and scared.
“I should not have hit her. That was not … that was not kingly.” He
stared down at his hands, as if he did not quite know what they
were. “I was always strong … no one could stand before me, no
one. How do you ght someone if you can’t hit them?” Confused,
the king shook his head. “Rhaegar … Rhaegar won, damn him. I
killed him, Ned, I drove the spike right through that black armor
into his black heart, and he died at my feet. They made up songs
about it. Yet somehow he still won. He has Lyanna now, and I have
her.” The king drained his cup.
“Your Grace,” Ned Stark said, “we must talk …”
Robert pressed his ngertips against his temples. “I am sick unto
death of talk. On the morrow I’m going to the kingswood to hunt.
Whatever you have to say can wait until I return.”
“If the gods are good, I shall not be here on your return. You
commanded me to return to Winterfell, remember?”
Robert stood up, grasping one of the bedposts to steady himself.
“The gods are seldom good, Ned. Here, this is yours.” He pulled the
heavy silver hand clasp from a pocket in the lining of his cloak and
tossed it on the bed. “Like it or not, you are my Hand, damn you. I
forbid you to leave.”
Ned picked up the silver clasp. He was being given no choice, it
seemed. His leg throbbed, and he felt as helpless as a child. “The
Targaryen girl—”
The king groaned. “Seven hells, don’t start with her again. That’s
done, I’ll hear no more of it.”

“Why would you want me as your Hand, if you refuse to listen to
my counsel?”
“Why?” Robert laughed. “Why not? Someone has to rule this
damnable kingdom. Put on the badge, Ned. It suits you. And if you
ever throw it in my face again, I swear to you, I’ll pin the damned
thing on Jaime Lannister.”

CATELYN

The eastern sky was rose and gold as the sun broke over the Vale of
Arryn. Catelyn Stark watched the light spread, her hands resting on
the delicate carved stone of the balustrade outside her window.
Below her the world turned from black to indigo to green as dawn
crept across elds and forests. Pale white mists rose o Alyssa’s
Tears, where the ghost waters plunged over the shoulder of the
mountain to begin their long tumble down the face of the Giant’s
Lance. Catelyn could feel the faint touch of spray on her face.
Alyssa Arryn had seen her husband, her brothers, and all her
children slain, and yet in life she had never shed a tear. So in death,
the gods had decreed that she would know no rest until her weeping
watered the black earth of the Vale, where the men she had loved
were buried. Alyssa had been dead six thousand years now, and still
no drop of the torrent had ever reached the valley oor far below.
Catelyn wondered how large a waterfall her own tears would make
when she died. “Tell me the rest of it,” she said.
“The Kingslayer is massing a host at Casterly Rock,” Ser Rodrik
Cassel answered from the room behind her. “Your brother writes
that he has sent riders to the Rock, demanding that Lord Tywin
proclaim his intent, but he has had no answer. Edmure has
commanded Lord Vance and Lord Piper to guard the pass below the
Golden Tooth. He vows to you that he will yield no foot of Tully
land without rst watering it with Lannister blood.”

Catelyn turned away from the sunrise. Its beauty did little to
lighten her mood; it seemed cruel for a day to dawn so fair and end
so foul as this one promised to. “Edmure has sent riders and made
vows,” she said, “but Edmure is not the Lord of Riverrun. What of
my lord father?”
“The message made no mention of Lord Hoster, my lady.” Ser
Rodrik tugged at his whiskers. They had grown in white as snow
and bristly as a thornbush while he was recovering from his
wounds; he looked almost himself again.
“My father would not have given the defense of Riverrun over to
Edmure unless he was very sick,” she said, worried. “I should have
been woken as soon as this bird arrived.”
“Your lady sister thought it better to let you sleep, Maester
Colemon told me.”
“I should have been woken,” she insisted.
“The maester tells me your sister planned to speak with you after
the combat,” Ser Rodrik said.
“Then she still plans to go through with this mummer’s farce?”
Catelyn grimaced. “The dwarf has played her like a set of pipes, and
she is too deaf to hear the tune. Whatever happens this morning,
Ser Rodrik, it is past time we took our leave. My place is at
Winterfell with my sons. If you are strong enough to travel, I shall
ask Lysa for an escort to see us to Gulltown. We can take ship from
there.”
“Another ship?” Ser Rodrik looked a shade green, yet he managed
not to shudder. “As you say, my lady.”
The old knight waited outside her door as Catelyn summoned the
servants Lysa had given her. If she spoke to her sister before the
duel, perhaps she could change her mind, she thought as they
dressed her. Lysa’s policies varied with her moods, and her moods
changed hourly. The shy girl she had known at Riverrun had grown
into a woman who was by turns proud, fearful, cruel, dreamy,
reckless, timid, stubborn, vain, and, above all, inconstant.
When that vile turnkey of hers had come crawling to tell them
that Tyrion Lannister wished to confess, Catelyn had urged Lysa to
have the dwarf brought to them privately, but no, nothing would do

but that her sister must make a show of him before half the Vale.
And now this …
“Lannister is my prisoner,” she told Ser Rodrik as they descended
the tower stairs and made their way through the Eyrie’s cold white
halls. Catelyn wore plain grey wool with a silvered belt. “My sister
must be reminded of that.”
At the doors to Lysa’s apartments, they met her uncle storming
out. “Going to join the fool’s festival?” Ser Brynden snapped. “I’d
tell you to slap some sense into your sister, if I thought it would do
any good, but you’d only bruise your hand.”
“There was a bird from Riverrun,” Catelyn began, “a letter from
Edmure …”
“I know, child.” The black sh that fastened his cloak was
Brynden’s only concession to ornament. “I had to hear it from
Maester Colemon. I asked your sister for leave to take a thousand
seasoned men and ride for Riverrun with all haste. Do you know
what she told me? The Vale cannot spare a thousand swords, nor even
one, Uncle, she said. You are the Knight of the Gate. Your place is
here.” A gust of childish laughter drifted through the open doors
behind him, and her uncle glanced darkly over his shoulder. “Well, I
told her she could bloody well nd herself a new Knight of the
Gate. Black sh or no, I am still a Tully. I shall leave for Riverrun
by evenfall.”
Catelyn could not pretend to surprise. “Alone? You know as well
as I that you will never survive the high road. Ser Rodrik and I are
returning to Winterfell. Come with us, Uncle. I will give you your
thousand men. Riverrun will not ght alone.”
Brynden thought a moment, then nodded a brusque agreement.
“As you say. It’s the long way home, but I’m more like to get there.
I’ll wait for you below.” He went striding o , his cloak swirling
behind him.
Catelyn exchanged a look with Ser Rodrik. They went through the
doors to the high, nervous sound of a child’s giggles.
Lysa’s apartments opened over a small garden, a circle of dirt and
grass planted with blue owers and ringed on all sides by tall white
towers. The builders had intended it as a godswood, but the Eyrie

rested on the hard stone of the mountain, and no matter how much
soil was hauled up from the Vale, they could not get a weirwood to
take root here. So the Lords of the Eyrie planted grass and scattered
statuary amidst low, owering shrubs. It was there the two
champions would meet to place their lives, and that of Tyrion
Lannister, into the hands of the gods.
Lysa, freshly scrubbed and garbed in cream velvet with a rope of
sapphires and moonstones around her milk-white neck, was holding
court on the terrace overlooking the scene of the combat,
surrounded by her knights, retainers, and lords high and low. Most
of them still hoped to wed her, bed her, and rule the Vale of Arryn
by her side. From what Catelyn had seen during her stay at the
Eyrie, it was a vain hope.
A wooden platform had been built to elevate Robert’s chair; there
the Lord of the Eyrie sat, giggling and clapping his hands as a
humpbacked puppeteer in blue-and-white motley made two wooden
knights hack and slash at each other. Pitchers of thick cream and
baskets of blackberries had been set out, and the guests were
sipping a sweet orange-scented wine from engraved silver cups. A
fool’s festival, Brynden had called it, and small wonder.
Across the terrace, Lysa laughed gaily at some jest of Lord
Hunter’s, and nibbled a blackberry from the point of Ser Lyn
Corbray’s dagger. They were the suitors who stood highest in Lysa’s
favor … today, at least. Catelyn would have been hard-pressed to
say which man was more unsuitable. Eon Hunter was even older
than Jon Arryn had been, half-crippled by gout, and cursed with
three quarrelsome sons, each more grasping than the last. Ser Lyn
was a di erent sort of folly; lean and handsome, heir to an ancient
but impoverished house, but vain, reckless, hot-tempered … and, it
was whispered, notoriously uninterested in the intimate charms of
women.
When Lysa espied Catelyn, she welcomed her with a sisterly
embrace and a moist kiss on the cheek. “Isn’t it a lovely morning?
The gods are smiling on us. Do try a cup of the wine, sweet sister.
Lord Hunter was kind enough to send for it, from his own cellars.”
“Thank you, no. Lysa, we must talk.”

“After,” her sister promised, already beginning to turn away from
her.
“Now.” Catelyn spoke more loudly than she’d intended. Men were
turning to look. “Lysa, you cannot mean to go ahead with this folly.
Alive, the Imp has value. Dead, he is only food for crows. And if his
champion should prevail here—”
“Small chance of that, my lady,” Lord Hunter assured her, patting
her shoulder with a liver-spotted hand. “Ser Vardis is a doughty
ghter. He will make short work of the sellsword.”
“Will he, my lord?” Catelyn said coolly. “I wonder.” She had seen
Bronn ght on the high road; it was no accident that he had
survived the journey while other men had died. He moved like a
panther, and that ugly sword of his seemed a part of his arm.
Lysa’s suitors were gathering around them like bees round a
blossom. “Women understand little of these things,” Ser Morton
Waynwood said. “Ser Vardis is a knight, sweet lady. This other
fellow, well, his sort are all cowards at heart. Useful enough in a
battle, with thousands of their fellows around them, but stand them
up alone and the manhood leaks right out of them.”
“Say you have the truth of it, then,” Catelyn said with a courtesy
that made her mouth ache. “What will we gain by the dwarf’s
death? Do you imagine that Jaime will care a g that we gave his
brother a trial before we ung him o a mountain?”
“Behead the man,” Ser Lyn Corbray suggested. “When the
Kingslayer receives the Imp’s head, it will be a warning to him.”
Lysa gave an impatient shake of her waist-long auburn hair. “Lord
Robert wants to see him y,” she said, as if that settled the matter.
“And the Imp has only himself to blame. It was he who demanded a
trial by combat.”
“Lady Lysa had no honorable way to deny him, even if she’d
wished to,” Lord Hunter intoned ponderously.
Ignoring them all, Catelyn turned all her force on her sister. “I
remind you, Tyrion Lannister is my prisoner.”
“And I remind you, the dwarf murdered my lord husband!” Her
voice rose. “He poisoned the Hand of the King and left my sweet
baby fatherless, and now I mean to see him pay!” Whirling, her

skirts swinging around her, Lysa stalked across the terrace. Ser Lyn
and Ser Morton and the other suitors excused themselves with cool
nods and trailed after her.
“Do you think he did?” Ser Rodrik asked her quietly when they
were alone again. “Murder Lord Jon, that is? The Imp still denies it,
and most ercely …”
“I believe the Lannisters murdered Lord Arryn,” Catelyn replied,
“but whether it was Tyrion, or Ser Jaime, or the queen, or all of
them together, I could not begin to say.” Lysa had named Cersei in
the letter she had sent to Winterfell, but now she seemed certain
that Tyrion was the killer … perhaps because the dwarf was here,
while the queen was safe behind the walls of the Red Keep,
hundreds of leagues to the south. Catelyn almost wished she had
burned her sister’s letter before reading it.
Ser Rodrik tugged at his whiskers. “Poison, well … that could be
the dwarf’s work, true enough. Or Cersei’s. It’s said poison is a
woman’s weapon, begging your pardons, my lady. The Kingslayer,
now … I have no great liking for the man, but he’s not the sort. Too
fond of the sight of blood on that golden sword of his. Was it
poison, my lady?”
Catelyn frowned, vaguely uneasy. “How else could they make it
look a natural death?” Behind her, Lord Robert shrieked with
delight as one of the puppet knights sliced the other in half, spilling
a ood of red sawdust onto the terrace. She glanced at her nephew
and sighed. “The boy is utterly without discipline. He will never be
strong enough to rule unless he is taken away from his mother for a
time.”
“His lord father agreed with you,” said a voice at her elbow. She
turned to behold Maester Colemon, a cup of wine in his hand. “He
was planning to send the boy to Dragonstone for fostering, you
know … oh, but I’m speaking out of turn.” The apple of his throat
bobbed anxiously beneath the loose maester’s chain. “I fear I’ve had
too much of Lord Hunter’s excellent wine. The prospect of
bloodshed has my nerves all a-fray …”
“You are mistaken, Maester,” Catelyn said. “It was Casterly Rock,
not Dragonstone, and those arrangements were made after the

Hand’s death, without my sister’s consent.”
The maester’s head jerked so vigorously at the end of his absurdly
long neck that he looked half a puppet himself. “No, begging your
forgiveness, my lady, but it was Lord Jon who—”
A bell tolled loudly below them. High lords and serving girls alike
broke o what they were doing and moved to the balustrade.
Below, two guardsmen in sky-blue cloaks led forth Tyrion Lannister.
The Eyrie’s plump septon escorted him to the statue in the center of
the garden, a weeping woman carved in veined white marble, no
doubt meant to be Alyssa.
“The bad little man,” Lord Robert said, giggling. “Mother, can I
make him y? I want to see him y.”
“Later, my sweet baby,” Lysa promised him.
“Trial rst,” drawled Ser Lyn Corbray, “then execution.”
A moment later the two champions appeared from opposite sides
of the garden. The knight was attended by two young squires, the
sellsword by the Eyrie’s master-at-arms.
Ser Vardis Egen was steel from head to heel, encased in heavy
plate armor over mail and padded surcoat. Large circular rondels,
enameled cream-and-blue in the moon-and-falcon sigil of House
Arryn, protected the vulnerable juncture of arm and breast. A skirt
of lobstered metal covered him from waist to midthigh, while a
solid gorget encircled his throat. Falcon’s wings sprouted from the
temples of his helm, and his visor was a pointed metal beak with a
narrow slit for vision.
Bronn was so lightly armored he looked almost naked beside the
knight. He wore only a shirt of black oiled ringmail over boiled
leather, a round steel halfhelm with a noseguard, and a mail coif.
High leather boots with steel shinguards gave some protection to
his legs, and discs of black iron were sewn into the ngers of his
gloves. Yet Catelyn noted that the sellsword stood half a hand taller
than his foe, with a longer reach … and Bronn was fteen years
younger, if she was any judge.
They knelt in the grass beneath the weeping woman, facing each
other, with Lannister between them. The septon removed a faceted
crystal sphere from the soft cloth bag at his waist. He lifted it high

above his head, and the light shattered. Rainbows danced across the
Imp’s face. In a high, solemn, singsong voice, the septon asked the
gods to look down and bear witness, to nd the truth in this man’s
soul, to grant him life and freedom if he was innocent, death if he
was guilty. His voice echoed o the surrounding towers.
When the last echo had died away, the septon lowered his crystal
and made a hasty departure. Tyrion leaned over and whispered
something in Bronn’s ear before the guardsmen led him away. The
sellsword rose laughing and brushed a blade of grass from his knee.
Robert Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale, was
dgeting impatiently in his elevated chair. “When are they going to
ght?” he asked plaintively.
Ser Vardis was helped back to his feet by one of his squires. The
other brought him a triangular shield almost four feet tall, heavy
oak dotted with iron studs. They strapped it to his left forearm.
When Lysa’s master-at-arms o ered Bronn a similar shield, the
sellsword spat and waved it away. Three days growth of coarse
black beard covered his jaw and cheeks, but if he did not shave it
was not for want of a razor; the edge of his sword had the
dangerous glimmer of steel that had been honed every day for
hours, until it was too sharp to touch.
Ser Vardis held out a gauntleted hand, and his squire placed a
handsome double-edged longsword in his grasp. The blade was
engraved with a delicate silver tracery of a mountain sky; its
pommel was a falcon’s head, its crossguard fashioned into the shape
of wings. “I had that sword crafted for Jon in King’s Landing,” Lysa
told her guests proudly as they watched Ser Vardis try a practice
cut. “He wore it whenever he sat the Iron Throne in King Robert’s
place. Isn’t it a lovely thing? I thought it only tting that our
champion avenge Jon with his own blade.”
The engraved silver blade was beautiful beyond a doubt, but it
seemed to Catelyn that Ser Vardis might have been more
comfortable with his own sword. Yet she said nothing; she was
weary of futile arguments with her sister.
“Make them ght!” Lord Robert called out.

Ser Vardis faced the Lord of the Eyrie and lifted his sword in
salute. “For the Eyrie and the Vale!”
Tyrion Lannister had been seated on a balcony across the garden,
anked by his guards. It was to him that Bronn turned with a
cursory salute.
“They await your command,” Lady Lysa said to her lord son.
“Fight!” the boy screamed, his arms trembling as they clutched at
his chair.
Ser Vardis swiveled, bringing up his heavy shield. Bronn turned to
face him. Their swords rang together, once, twice, a testing. The
sellsword backed o a step. The knight came after, holding his
shield before him. He tried a slash, but Bronn jerked back, just out
of reach, and the silver blade cut only air. Bronn circled to his right.
Ser Vardis turned to follow, keeping his shield between them. The
knight pressed forward, placing each foot carefully on the uneven
ground. The sellsword gave way, a faint smile playing over his lips.
Ser Vardis attacked, slashing, but Bronn leapt away from him,
hopping lightly over a low, moss-covered stone. Now the sellsword
circled left, away from the shield, toward the knight’s unprotected
side. Ser Vardis tried a hack at his legs, but he did not have the
reach. Bronn danced farther to his left. Ser Vardis turned in place.
“The man is craven,” Lord Hunter declared. “Stand and ght,
coward!” Other voices echoed the sentiment.
Catelyn looked to Ser Rodrik. Her master-at-arms gave a curt
shake of his head. “He wants to make Ser Vardis chase him. The
weight of armor and shield will tire even the strongest man.”
She had seen men practice at their swordplay near every day of
her life, had viewed half a hundred tourneys in her time, but this
was something di erent and deadlier: a dance where the smallest
misstep meant death. And as she watched, the memory of another
duel in another time came back to Catelyn Stark, as vivid as if it
had been yesterday.
They met in the lower bailey of Riverrun. When Brandon saw that
Petyr wore only helm and breastplate and mail, he took o most of
his armor. Petyr had begged her for a favor he might wear, but she
had turned him away. Her lord father promised her to Brandon

Stark, and so it was to him that she gave her token, a pale blue
handscarf she had embroidered with the leaping trout of Riverrun.
As she pressed it into his hand, she pleaded with him. “He is only a
foolish boy, but I have loved him like a brother. It would grieve me
to see him die.” And her betrothed looked at her with the cool grey
eyes of a Stark and promised to spare the boy who loved her.
That ght was over almost as soon as it began. Brandon was a
man grown, and he drove Little nger all the way across the bailey
and down the water stair, raining steel on him with every step, until
the boy was staggering and bleeding from a dozen wounds. “Yield!”
he called, more than once, but Petyr would only shake his head and
ght on, grimly. When the river was lapping at their ankles,
Brandon nally ended it, with a brutal backhand cut that bit
through Petyr’s rings and leather into the soft esh below the ribs,
so deep that Catelyn was certain that the wound was mortal. He
looked at her as he fell and murmured “Cat” as the bright blood
came owing out between his mailed ngers. She thought she had
forgotten that.
That was the last time she had seen his face … until the day she
was brought before him in King’s Landing.
A fortnight passed before Little nger was strong enough to leave
Riverrun, but her lord father forbade her to visit him in the tower
where he lay abed. Lysa helped their maester nurse him; she had
been softer and shyer in those days. Edmure had called on him as
well, but Petyr had sent him away. Her brother had acted as
Brandon’s squire at the duel, and Little nger would not forgive
that. As soon as he was strong enough to be moved, Lord Hoster
Tully sent Petyr Baelish away in a closed litter, to nish his healing
on the Fingers, upon the windswept jut of rock where he’d been
born.
The ringing clash of steel on steel jarred Catelyn back to the
present. Ser Vardis was coming hard at Bronn, driving into him with
shield and sword. The sellsword scrambled backward, checking each
blow, stepping lithely over rock and root, his eyes never leaving his
foe. He was quicker, Catelyn saw; the knight’s silvered sword never

came near to touching him, but his own ugly grey blade hacked a
notch from Ser Vardis’s shoulder plate.
The brief urry of ghting ended as swiftly as it had begun when
Bronn sidestepped and slid behind the statue of the weeping
woman. Ser Vardis lunged at where he had been, striking a spark o
the pale marble of Alyssa’s thigh.
“They’re not ghting good, Mother,” the Lord of the Eyrie
complained. “I want them to ght.”
“They will, sweet baby,” his mother soothed him. “The sellsword
can’t run all day.”
Some of the lords on Lysa’s terrace were making wry jests as they
re lled their wine cups, but across the garden, Tyrion Lannister’s
mismatched eyes watched the champions dance as if there were
nothing else in the world.
Bronn came out from behind the statue hard and fast, still moving
left, aiming a two-handed cut at the knight’s unshielded right side.
Ser Vardis blocked, but clumsily, and the sellsword’s blade ashed
upward at his head. Metal rang, and a falcon’s wing collapsed with
a crunch. Ser Vardis took a half step back to brace himself, raised
his shield. Oak chips ew as Bronn’s sword hacked at the wooden
wall. The sellsword stepped left again, away from the shield, and
caught Ser Vardis across the stomach, the razor edge of his blade
leaving a bright gash when it bit into the knight’s plate.
Ser Vardis drove forward o his back foot, his own silver blade
descending in a savage arc. Bronn slammed it aside and danced
away. The knight crashed into the weeping woman, rocking her on
her plinth. Staggered, he stepped backward, his head turning this
way and that as he searched for his foe. The slit visor of his helm
narrowed his vision.
“Behind you, ser!” Lord Hunter shouted, too late. Bronn brought
his sword down with both hands, catching Ser Vardis in the elbow
of his sword arm. The thin lobstered metal that protected the joint
crunched. The knight grunted, turning, wrenching his weapon up.
This time Bronn stood his ground. The swords ew at each other,
and their steel song lled the garden and rang o the white towers
of the Eyrie.

“Ser Vardis is hurt,” Ser Rodrik said, his voice grave.
Catelyn did not need to be told; she had eyes, she could see the
bright nger of blood running along the knight’s forearm, the
wetness inside the elbow joint. Every parry was a little slower and a
little lower than the one before. Ser Vardis turned his side to his
foe, trying to use his shield to block instead, but Bronn slid around
him, quick as a cat. The sellsword seemed to be getting stronger.
His cuts were leaving their marks now. Deep shiny gashes gleamed
all over the knight’s armor, on his right thigh, his beaked visor,
crossing on his breastplate, a long one along the front of his gorget.
The moon-and-falcon rondel over Ser Vardis’s right arm was sheared
clean in half, hanging by its strap. They could hear his labored
breath, rattling through the air holes in his visor.
Blind with arrogance as they were, even the knights and lords of
the Vale could see what was happening below them, yet her sister
could not. “Enough, Ser Vardis!” Lady Lysa called down. “Finish
him now, my baby is growing tired.”
And it must be said of Ser Vardis Egen that he was true to his
lady’s command, even to the last. One moment he was reeling
backward, half-crouched behind his scarred shield; the next he
charged. The sudden bull rush caught Bronn o balance. Ser Vardis
crashed into him and slammed the lip of his shield into the
sellsword’s face. Almost, almost, Bronn lost his feet … he staggered
back, tripped over a rock, and caught hold of the weeping woman
to keep his balance. Throwing aside his shield, Ser Vardis lurched
after him, using both hands to raise his sword. His right arm was
blood from elbow to ngers now, yet his last desperate blow would
have opened Bronn from neck to navel … if the sellsword had stood
to receive it.
But Bronn jerked back. Jon Arryn’s beautiful engraved silver
sword glanced o the marble elbow of the weeping woman and
snapped clean a third of the way up the blade. Bronn put his
shoulder into the statue’s back. The weathered likeness of Alyssa
Arryn tottered and fell with a great crash, and Ser Vardis Egen went
down beneath her.

Bronn was on him in a heartbeat, kicking what was left of his
shattered rondel aside to expose the weak spot between arm and
breastplate. Ser Vardis was lying on his side, pinned beneath the
broken torso of the weeping woman. Catelyn heard the knight
groan as the sellsword lifted his blade with both hands and drove it
down and in with all his weight behind it, under the arm and
through the ribs. Ser Vardis Egen shuddered and lay still.
Silence hung over the Eyrie. Bronn yanked o his halfhelm and
let it fall to the grass. His lip was smashed and bloody where the
shield had caught him, and his coal-black hair was soaked with
sweat. He spit out a broken tooth.
“Is it over, Mother?” the Lord of the Eyrie asked.
No, Catelyn wanted to tell him, it’s only now beginning.
“Yes,” Lysa said glumly, her voice as cold and dead as the captain
of her guard.
“Can I make the little man y now?”
Across the garden, Tyrion Lannister got to his feet. “Not this little
man,” he said. “This little man is going down in the turnip hoist,
thank you very much.”
“You presume—” Lysa began.
“I presume that House Arryn remembers its own words,” the Imp
said. “As High as Honor.”
“You promised I could make him y,” the Lord of the Eyrie
screamed at his mother. He began to shake.
Lady Lysa’s face was ushed with fury. “The gods have seen t to
proclaim him innocent, child. We have no choice but to free him.”
She lifted her voice. “Guards. Take my lord of Lannister and
his … creature here out of my sight. Escort them to the Bloody Gate
and set them free. See that they have horses and supplies su cient
to reach the Trident, and make certain all their goods and weapons
are returned to them. They shall need them on the high road.”
“The high road,” Tyrion Lannister said. Lysa allowed herself a
faint, satis ed smile. It was another sort of death sentence, Catelyn
realized. Tyrion Lannister must know that as well. Yet the dwarf
favored Lady Arryn with a mocking bow. “As you command, my
lady,” he said. “I believe we know the way.”

JON

“You are as hopeless as any boys I have ever trained,” Ser Alliser
Thorne announced when they had all assembled in the yard. “Your
hands were made for manure shovels, not for swords, and if it were
up to me, the lot of you would be set to herding swine. But last
night I was told that Gueren is marching ve new boys up the
kingsroad. One or two may even be worth the price of piss. To
make room for them, I have decided to pass eight of you on to the
Lord Commander to do with as he will.” He called out the names
one by one. “Toad. Stone Head. Aurochs. Lover. Pimple. Monkey.
Ser Loon.” Last, he looked at Jon. “And the Bastard.”
Pyp let y a whoop and thrust his sword into the air. Ser Alliser
xed him with a reptile stare. “They will call you men of Night’s
Watch now, but you are bigger fools than the Mummer’s Monkey
here if you believe that. You are boys still, green and stinking of
summer, and when the winter comes you will die like ies.” And
with that, Ser Alliser Thorne took his leave of them.
The other boys gathered round the eight who had been named,
laughing and cursing and o ering congratulations. Halder smacked
Toad on the butt with the at of his sword and shouted, “Toad, of
the Night’s Watch!” Yelling that a black brother needed a horse, Pyp
leapt onto Grenn’s shoulders, and they tumbled to the ground,
rolling and punching and hooting. Dareon dashed inside the armory
and returned with a skin of sour red. As they passed the wine from
hand to hand, grinning like fools, Jon noticed Samwell Tarly

standing by himself beneath a bare dead tree in the corner of the
yard. Jon o ered him the skin. “A swallow of wine?”
Sam shook his head. “No thank you, Jon.”
“Are you well?”
“Very well, truly,” the fat boy lied. “I am so happy for you all.”
His round face quivered as he forced a smile. “You will be First
Ranger someday, just as your uncle was.”
“Is,” Jon corrected. He would not accept that Benjen Stark was
dead. Before he could say more, Halder cried, “Here, you planning
to drink that all yourself?” Pyp snatched the skin from his hand and
danced away, laughing. While Grenn seized his arm, Pyp gave the
skin a squeeze, and a thin stream of red squirted Jon in the face.
Halder howled in protest at the waste of good wine. Jon sputtered
and struggled. Matthar and Jeren climbed the wall and began
pelting them all with snowballs.
By the time he wrenched free, with snow in his hair and wine
stains on his surcoat, Samwell Tarly had gone.
That night, Three-Finger Hobb cooked the boys a special meal to
mark the occasion. When Jon arrived at the common hall, the Lord
Steward himself led him to the bench near the re. The older men
clapped him on the arm in passing. The eight soon-to-be brothers
feasted on rack of lamb baked in a crust of garlic and herbs,
garnished with sprigs of mint, and surrounded by mashed yellow
turnips swimming in butter. “From the Lord Commander’s own
table,” Bowen Marsh told them. There were salads of spinach and
chickpeas and turnip greens, and afterward bowls of iced
blueberries and sweet cream.
“Do you think they’ll keep us together?” Pyp wondered as they
gorged themselves happily.
Toad made a face. “I hope not. I’m sick of looking at those ears of
yours.”
“Ho,” said Pyp. “Listen to the crow call the raven black. You’re
certain to be a ranger, Toad. They’ll want you as far from the castle
as they can. If Mance Rayder attacks, lift your visor and show your
face, and he’ll run o screaming.”
Everyone laughed but Grenn. “I hope I’m a ranger.”

“You and everyone else,” said Matthar. Every man who wore the
black walked the Wall, and every man was expected to take up steel
in its defense, but the rangers were the true ghting heart of the
Night’s Watch. It was they who dared ride beyond the Wall,
sweeping through the haunted forest and the icy mountain heights
west of the Shadow Tower, ghting Wildlings and giants and
monstrous snow bears.
“Not everyone,” said Halder. “It’s the builders for me. What use
would rangers be if the Wall fell down?”
The order of builders provided the masons and carpenters to
repair keeps and towers, the miners to dig tunnels and crush stone
for roads and footpaths, the woodsmen to clear away new growth
wherever the forest pressed too close to the Wall. Once, it was said,
they had quarried immense blocks of ice from frozen lakes deep in
the haunted forest, dragging them south on sledges so the Wall
might be raised ever higher. Those days were centuries gone,
however; now, it was all they could do to ride the Wall from
Eastwatch to the Shadow Tower, watching for cracks or signs of
melt and making what repairs they could.
“The Old Bear’s no fool,” Dareon observed. “You’re certain to be
a builder, and Jon’s certain to be a ranger. He’s the best sword and
the best rider among us, and his uncle was the First before he …”
His voice trailed o awkwardly as he realized what he had almost
said.
“Benjen Stark is still First Ranger,” Jon Snow told him, toying
with his bowl of blueberries. The rest might have given up all hope
of his uncle’s safe return, but not him. He pushed away the berries,
scarcely touched, and rose from the bench.
“Aren’t you going to eat those?” Toad asked.
“They’re yours.” Jon had hardly tasted Hobb’s great feast. “I
could not eat another bite.” He took his cloak from its hook near
the door and shouldered his way out.
Pyp followed him. “Jon, what is it?”
“Sam,” he admitted. “He was not at table tonight.”
“It’s not like him to miss a meal,” Pyp said thoughtfully. “Do you
suppose he’s taken ill?”

“He’s frightened. We’re leaving him.” He remembered the day he
had left Winterfell, all the bittersweet farewells; Bran lying broken,
Robb with snow in his hair, Arya raining kisses on him after he’d
given her Needle. “Once we say our words, we’ll all have duties to
attend to. Some of us may be sent away, to Eastwatch or the
Shadow Tower. Sam will remain in training, with the likes of Rast
and Cuger and these new boys who are coming up the kingsroad.
Gods only know what they’ll be like, but you can bet Ser Alliser will
send them against him, rst chance he gets.”
Pyp made a grimace. “You did all you could.”
“All we could wasn’t enough,” Jon said.
A deep restlessness was on him as he went back to Hardin’s
Tower for Ghost. The direwolf walked beside him to the stables.
Some of the more skittish horses kicked at their stalls and laid back
their ears as they entered. Jon saddled his mare, mounted, and rode
out from Castle Black, south across the moonlit night. Ghost raced
ahead of him, ying over the ground, gone in the blink of an eye.
Jon let him go. A wolf needed to hunt.
He had no destination in mind. He wanted only to ride. He
followed the creek for a time, listening to the icy trickle of water
over rock, then cut across the elds to the kingsroad. It stretched
out before him, narrow and stony and pocked with weeds, a road of
no particular promise, yet the sight of it lled Jon Snow with a vast
longing. Winterfell was down that road, and beyond it Riverrun and
King’s Landing and the Eyrie and so many other places; Casterly
Rock, the Isles of Faces, the red mountains of Dorne, the hundred
islands of Braavos in the sea, the smoking ruins of old Valyria. All
the places that Jon would never see. The world was down that
road … and he was here.
Once he swore his vow, the Wall would be his home until he was
old as Maester Aemon. “I have not sworn yet,” he muttered. He was
no outlaw, bound to take the black or pay the penalty for his
crimes. He had come here freely, and he might leave freely … until
he said the words. He need only ride on, and he could leave it all
behind. By the time the moon was full again, he would be back in
Winterfell with his brothers.

Your half brothers, a voice inside reminded him. And Lady Stark,
who will not welcome you. There was no place for him in Winterfell,
no place in King’s Landing either. Even his own mother had not had
a place for him. The thought of her made him sad. He wondered
who she had been, what she had looked like, why his father had left
her. Because she was a whore or an adulteress, fool. Something dark and
dishonorable, or else why was Lord Eddard too ashamed to speak of her?
Jon Snow turned away from the kingsroad to look behind him.
The res of Castle Black were hidden behind a hill, but the Wall
was there, pale beneath the moon, vast and cold, running from
horizon to horizon.
He wheeled his horse around and started for home.
Ghost returned as he crested a rise and saw the distant glow of
lamplight from the Lord Commander’s Tower. The direwolf’s
muzzle was red with blood as he trotted beside the horse. Jon found
himself thinking of Samwell Tarly again on the ride back. By the
time he reached the stables, he knew what he must do.
Maester Aemon’s apartments were in a stout wooden keep below
the rookery. Aged and frail, the maester shared his chambers with
two of the younger stewards, who tended to his needs and helped
him in his duties. The brothers joked that he had been given the two
ugliest men in the Night’s Watch; being blind, he was spared having
to look at them. Clydas was short, bald, and chinless, with small
pink eyes like a mole. Chett had a wen on his neck the size of a
pigeon’s egg, and a face red with boils and pimples. Perhaps that
was why he always seemed so angry.
It was Chett who answered Jon’s knock. “I need to speak to
Maester Aemon,” Jon told him.
“The maester is abed, as you should be. Come back on the
morrow and maybe he’ll see you.” He began to shut the door.
Jon jammed it open with his boot. “I need to speak to him now.
The morning will be too late.”
Chett scowled. “The maester is not accustomed to being woken in
the night. Do you know how old he is?”
“Old enough to treat visitors with more courtesy than you,” Jon
said. “Give him my pardons. I would not disturb his rest if it were

not important.”
“And if I refuse?”
Jon had his boot wedged solidly in the door. “I can stand here all
night if I must.”
The black brother made a disgusted noise and opened the door to
admit him. “Wait in the library. There’s wood. Start a re. I won’t
have the maester catching a chill on account of you.”
Jon had the logs crackling merrily by the time Chett led in
Maester Aemon. The old man was clad in his bed robe, but around
his throat was the chain collar of his order. A maester did not
remove it even to sleep. “The chair beside the re would be
pleasant,” he said when he felt the warmth on his face. When he
was settled comfortably, Chett covered his legs with a fur and went
to stand by the door.
“I am sorry to have woken you, Maester,” Jon Snow said.
“You did not wake me,” Maester Aemon replied. “I nd I need
less sleep as I grow older, and I am grown very old. I often spend
half the night with ghosts, remembering times fty years past as if
they were yesterday. The mystery of a midnight visitor is a
welcome diversion. So tell me, Jon Snow, why have you come
calling at this strange hour?”
“To ask that Samwell Tarly be taken from training and accepted
as a brother of the Night’s Watch.”
“This is no concern of Maester Aemon,” Chett complained.
“Our Lord Commander has given the training of recruits into the
hands of Ser Alliser Thorne,” the maester said gently. “Only he may
say when a boy is ready to swear his vow, as you surely know. Why
then come to me?”
“The Lord Commander listens to you,” Jon told him. “And the
wounded and the sick of the Night’s Watch are in your charge.”
“And is your friend Samwell wounded or sick?”
“He will be,” Jon promised, “unless you help.”
He told them all of it, even the part where he’d set Ghost at Rast’s
throat. Maester Aemon listened silently, blind eyes xed on the re,
but Chett’s face darkened with each word. “Without us to keep him
safe, Sam will have no chance,” Jon nished. “He’s hopeless with a

sword. My sister Arya could tear him apart, and she’s not yet ten. If
Ser Alliser makes him ght, it’s only a matter of time before he’s
hurt or killed.”
Chett could stand no more. “I’ve seen this fat boy in the common
hall,” he said. “He is a pig, and a hopeless craven as well, if what
you say is true.”
“Maybe it is so,” Maester Aemon said. “Tell me, Chett, what
would you have us do with such a boy?”
“Leave him where he is,” Chett said. “The Wall is no place for the
weak. Let him train until he is ready, no matter how many years
that takes. Ser Alliser shall make a man of him or kill him, as the
gods will.”
“That’s stupid,” Jon said. He took a deep breath to gather his
thoughts. “I remember once I asked Maester Luwin why he wore a
chain around his throat.”
Maester Aemon touched his own collar lightly, his bony, wrinkled
nger stroking the heavy metal links. “Go on.”
“He told me that a maester’s collar is made of chain to remind
him that he is sworn to serve,” Jon said, remembering. “I asked
why each link was a di erent metal. A silver chain would look
much ner with his grey robes, I said. Maester Luwin laughed. A
maester forges his chain with study, he told me. The di erent
metals are each a di erent kind of learning, gold for the study of
money and accounts, silver for healing, iron for warcraft. And he
said there were other meanings as well. The collar is supposed to
remind a maester of the realm he serves, isn’t that so? Lords are
gold and knights steel, but two links can’t make a chain. You also
need silver and iron and lead, tin and copper and bronze and all the
rest, and those are farmers and smiths and merchants and the like. A
chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people.”
Maester Aemon smiled. “And so?”
“The Night’s Watch needs all sorts too. Why else have rangers and
stewards and builders? Lord Randyll couldn’t make Sam a warrior,
and Ser Alliser won’t either. You can’t hammer tin into iron, no
matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn’t mean tin is useless.
Why shouldn’t Sam be a steward?”

Chett gave an angry scowl. “I’m a steward. You think it’s easy
work, t for cowards? The order of stewards keeps the Watch alive.
We hunt and farm, tend the horses, milk the cows, gather rewood,
cook the meals. Who do you think makes your clothing? Who brings
up supplies from the south? The stewards.”
Maester Aemon was gentler. “Is your friend a hunter?”
“He hates hunting,” Jon had to admit.
“Can he plow a eld?” the maester asked. “Can he drive a wagon
or sail a ship? Could he butcher a cow?”
“No.”
Chett gave a nasty laugh. “I’ve seen what happens to soft
lordlings when they’re put to work. Set them to churning butter and
their hands blister and bleed. Give them an axe to split logs, and
they cut o their own foot.”
“I know one thing Sam could do better than anyone.”
“Yes?” Maester Aemon prompted.
Jon glanced warily at Chett, standing beside the door, his boils
red and angry. “He could help you,” he said quickly. “He can do
sums, and he knows how to read and write. I know Chett can’t read,
and Clydas has weak eyes. Sam read every book in his father’s
library. He’d be good with the ravens too. Animals seem to like
him. Ghost took to him straight o . There’s a lot he could do,
besides ghting. The Night’s Watch needs every man. Why kill one,
to no end? Make use of him instead.”
Maester Aemon closed his eyes, and for a brief moment Jon was
afraid that he had gone to sleep. Finally he said, “Maester Luwin
taught you well, Jon Snow. Your mind is as deft as your blade, it
would seem.”
“Does that mean …?”
“It means I shall think on what you have said,” the maester told
him rmly. “And now, I believe I am ready to sleep. Chett, show
our young brother to the door.”

TYRION

They had taken shelter beneath a copse of aspens just o the high
road. Tyrion was gathering deadwood while their horses took water
from a mountain stream. He stooped to pick up a splintered branch
and examined it critically. “Will this do? I am not practiced at
starting res. Morrec did that for me.”
“A re?” Bronn said, spitting. “Are you so hungry to die, dwarf?
Or have you taken leave of your senses? A re will bring the
clansmen down on us from miles around. I mean to survive this
journey, Lannister.”
“And how do you hope to do that?” Tyrion asked. He tucked the
branch under his arm and poked around through the sparse
undergrowth, looking for more. His back ached from the e ort of
bending; they had been riding since daybreak, when a stone-faced
Ser Lyn Corbray had ushered them through the Bloody Gate and
commanded them never to return.
“We have no chance of ghting our way back,” Bronn said, “but
two can cover more ground than ten, and attract less notice. The
fewer days we spend in these mountains, the more like we are to
reach the riverlands. Ride hard and fast, I say. Travel by night and
hole up by day, avoid the road where we can, make no noise and
light no res.”
Tyrion Lannister sighed. “A splendid plan, Bronn. Try it, as you
like … and forgive me if I do not linger to bury you.”

“You think to outlive me, dwarf?” The sellsword grinned. He had
a dark gap in his smile where the edge of Ser Vardis Egen’s shield
had cracked a tooth in half.
Tyrion shrugged. “Riding hard and fast by night is a sure way to
tumble down a mountain and crack your skull. I prefer to make my
crossing slow and easy. I know you love the taste of horse, Bronn,
but if our mounts die under us this time, we’ll be trying to saddle
shadowcats … and if truth be told, I think the clans will nd us no
matter what we do. Their eyes are all around us.” He swept a
gloved hand over the high, wind-carved crags that surrounded
them.
Bronn grimaced. “Then we’re dead men, Lannister.”
“If so, I prefer to die comfortable,” Tyrion replied. “We need a
re. The nights are cold up here, and hot food will warm our bellies
and lift our spirits. Do you suppose there’s any game to be had?
Lady Lysa has kindly provided us with a veritable feast of salt beef,
hard cheese, and stale bread, but I would hate to break a tooth so
far from the nearest maester.”
“I can nd meat.” Beneath a fall of black hair, Bronn’s dark eyes
regarded Tyrion suspiciously. “I should leave you here with your
fool’s re. If I took your horse, I’d have twice the chance to make it
through. What would you do then, dwarf?”
“Die, most like.” Tyrion stooped to get another stick.
“You don’t think I’d do it?”
“You’d do it in an instant, if it meant your life. You were quick
enough to silence your friend Chiggen when he caught that arrow in
his belly.” Bronn had yanked back the man’s head by the hair and
driven the point of his dirk in under the ear, and afterward told
Catelyn Stark that the other sellsword had died of his wound.
“He was good as dead,” Bronn said, “and his moaning was
bringing them down on us. Chiggen would have done the same for
me … and he was no friend, only a man I rode with. Make no
mistake, dwarf. I fought for you, but I do not love you.”
“It was your blade I needed,” Tyrion said, “not your love.” He
dumped his armful of wood on the ground.

Bronn grinned. “You’re bold as any sellsword, I’ll give you that.
How did you know I’d take your part?”
“Know?” Tyrion squatted awkwardly on his stunted legs to build
the re. “I tossed the dice. Back at the inn, you and Chiggen helped
take me captive. Why? The others saw it as their duty, for the
honor of the lords they served, but not you two. You had no lord,
no duty, and precious little honor, so why trouble to involve
yourselves?” He took out his knife and whittled some thin strips of
bark o one of the sticks he’d gathered, to serve as kindling. “Well,
why do sellswords do anything? For gold. You were thinking Lady
Catelyn would reward you for your help, perhaps even take you
into her service. Here, that should do, I hope. Do you have a int?”
Bronn slid two ngers into the pouch at his belt and tossed down
a int. Tyrion caught it in the air.
“My thanks,” he said. “The thing is, you did not know the Starks.
Lord Eddard is a proud, honorable, and honest man, and his lady
wife is worse. Oh, no doubt she would have found a coin or two for
you when this was all over, and pressed it in your hand with a
polite word and a look of distaste, but that’s the most you could
have hoped for. The Starks look for courage and loyalty and honor
in the men they choose to serve them, and if truth be told, you and
Chiggen were lowborn scum.” Tyrion struck the int against his
dagger, trying for a spark. Nothing.
Bronn snorted. “You have a bold tongue, little man. One day
someone is like to cut it out and make you eat it.”
“Everyone tells me that.” Tyrion glanced up at the sellsword.
“Did I o end you? My pardons … but you are scum, Bronn, make
no mistake. Duty, honor, friendship, what’s that to you? No, don’t
trouble yourself, we both know the answer. Still, you’re not stupid.
Once we reached the Vale, Lady Stark had no more need of
you … but I did, and the one thing the Lannisters have never lacked
for is gold. When the moment came to toss the dice, I was counting
on your being smart enough to know where your best interest lay.
Happily for me, you did.” He slammed stone and steel together
again, fruitlessly.

“Here,” said Bronn, squatting, “I’ll do it.” He took the knife and
int from Tyrion’s hands and struck sparks on his rst try. A curl of
bark began to smolder.
“Well done,” Tyrion said. “Scum you may be, but you’re
undeniably useful, and with a sword in your hand you’re almost as
good as my brother Jaime. What do you want, Bronn? Gold? Land?
Women? Keep me alive, and you’ll have it.”
Bronn blew gently on the re, and the ames leapt up higher.
“And if you die?”
“Why then, I’ll have one mourner whose grief is sincere,” Tyrion
said, grinning. “The gold ends when I do.”
The re was blazing up nicely. Bronn stood, tucked the int back
into his pouch, and tossed Tyrion his dagger. “Fair enough,” he said.
“My sword’s yours, then … but don’t go looking for me to bend the
knee and m’lord you every time you take a shit. I’m no man’s
toady.”
“Nor any man’s friend,” Tyrion said. “I’ve no doubt you’d betray
me as quick as you did Lady Stark, if you saw a pro t in it. If the
day ever comes when you’re tempted to sell me out, remember this,
Bronn—I’ll match their price, whatever it is. I like living. And now,
do you think you could do something about nding us some
supper?”
“Take care of the horses,” Bronn said, unsheathing the long dirk
he wore at his hip. He strode into the trees.
An hour later the horses had been rubbed down and fed, the re
was crackling away merrily, and a haunch of a young goat was
turning above the ames, spitting and hissing. “All we lack now is
some good wine to wash down our kid,” Tyrion said.
“That, a woman, and another dozen swords,” Bronn said. He sat
cross-legged beside the re, honing the edge of his longsword with
an oilstone. There was something strangely reassuring about the
rasping sound it made when he drew it down the steel. “It will be
full dark soon,” the sellsword pointed out. “I’ll take
rst
watch … for all the good it will do us. It might be kinder to let
them kill us in our sleep.”

“Oh, I imagine they’ll be here long before it comes to sleep.” The
smell of the roasting meat made Tyrion’s mouth water.
Bronn watched him across the re. “You have a plan,” he said
atly, with a scrape of steel on stone.
“A hope, call it,” Tyrion said. “Another toss of the dice.”
“With our lives as the stake?”
Tyrion shrugged. “What choice do we have?” He leaned over the
re and sawed a thin slice of meat from the kid. “Ahhhh,” he sighed
happily as he chewed. Grease ran down his chin. “A bit tougher than
I’d like, and in want of spicing, but I’ll not complain too loudly. If I
were back at the Eyrie, I’d be dancing on a precipice in hopes of a
boiled bean.”
“And yet you gave the turnkey a purse of gold,” Bronn said.
“A Lannister always pays his debts.”
Even Mord had scarcely believed it when Tyrion tossed him the
leather purse. The gaoler’s eyes had gone big as boiled eggs as he
yanked open the drawstring and beheld the glint of gold. “I kept the
silver,” Tyrion had told him with a crooked smile, “but you were
promised the gold, and there it is.” It was more than a man like
Mord could hope to earn in a lifetime of abusing prisoners. “And
remember what I said, this is only a taste. If you ever grow tired of
Lady Arryn’s service, present yourself at Casterly Rock, and I’ll pay
you the rest of what I owe you.” With golden dragons spilling out
of both hands, Mord had fallen to his knees and promised that he
would do just that.
Bronn yanked out his dirk and pulled the meat from the re. He
began to carve thick chunks of charred meat o the bone as Tyrion
hollowed out two heels of stale bread to serve as trenchers. “If we
do reach the river, what will you do then?” the sellsword asked as
he cut.
“Oh, a whore and a featherbed and a agon of wine, for a start.”
Tyrion held out his trencher, and Bronn lled it with meat. “And
then to Casterly Rock or King’s Landing, I think. I have some
questions that want answering, concerning a certain dagger.”
The sellsword chewed and swallowed. “So you were telling it
true? It was not your knife?”

Tyrion smiled thinly. “Do I look a liar to you?”
By the time their bellies were full, the stars had come out and a
half-moon was rising over the mountains. Tyrion spread his
shadowskin cloak on the ground and stretched out with his saddle
for a pillow. “Our friends are taking their sweet time.”
“If I were them, I’d fear a trap,” Bronn said. “Why else would we
be so open, if not to lure them in?”
Tyrion chuckled. “Then we ought to sing and send them eeing in
terror.” He began to whistle a tune.
“You’re mad, dwarf,” Bronn said as he cleaned the grease out
from under his nails with his dirk.
“Where’s your love of music, Bronn?”
“If it was music you wanted, you should have gotten the singer to
champion you.”
Tyrion grinned. “That would have been amusing. I can just see
him fending o Ser Vardis with his woodharp.” He resumed his
whistling. “Do you know this song?” he asked.
“You hear it here and there, in inns and whorehouses.”
“Myrish. ‘The Seasons of My Love.’ Sweet and sad, if you
understand the words. The rst girl I ever bedded used to sing it,
and I’ve never been able to put it out of my head.” Tyrion gazed up
at the sky. It was a clear cold night and the stars shone down upon
the mountains as bright and merciless as truth. “I met her on a night
like this,” he heard himself saying. “Jaime and I were riding back
from Lannisport when we heard a scream, and she came running out
into the road with two men dogging her heels, shouting threats. My
brother unsheathed his sword and went after them, while I
dismounted to protect the girl. She was scarcely a year older than I
was, dark-haired, slender, with a face that would break your heart.
It certainly broke mine. Lowborn, half-starved, unwashed … yet
lovely. They’d torn the rags she was wearing half o her back, so I
wrapped her in my cloak while Jaime chased the men into the
woods. By the time he came trotting back, I’d gotten a name out of
her, and a story. She was a crofter’s child, orphaned when her father
died of fever, on her way to … well, nowhere, really.

“Jaime was all in a lather to hunt down the men. It was not often
outlaws dared prey on travelers so near to Casterly Rock, and he
took it as an insult. The girl was too frightened to send o by
herself, though, so I o ered to take her to the closest inn and feed
her while my brother rode back to the Rock for help.
“She was hungrier than I would have believed. We nished two
whole chickens and part of a third, and drank a agon of wine,
talking. I was only thirteen, and the wine went to my head, I fear.
The next thing I knew, I was sharing her bed. If she was shy, I was
shyer. I’ll never know where I found the courage. When I broke her
maidenhead, she wept, but afterward she kissed me and sang her
little song, and by morning I was in love.”
“You?” Bronn’s voice was amused.
“Absurd, isn’t it?” Tyrion began to whistle the song again. “I
married her,” he nally admitted.
“A Lannister of Casterly Rock wed to a crofter’s daughter,” Bronn
said. “How did you manage that?”
“Oh, you’d be astonished at what a boy can make of a few lies,
fty pieces of silver, and a drunken septon. I dared not bring my
bride home to Casterly Rock, so I set her up in a cottage of her
own, and for a fortnight we played at being man and wife. And then
the septon sobered and confessed all to my lord father.” Tyrion was
surprised at how desolate it made him feel to say it, even after all
these years. Perhaps he was just tired. “That was the end of my
marriage.” He sat up and stared at the dying re, blinking at the
light.
“He sent the girl away?”
“He did better than that,” Tyrion said. “First he made my brother
tell me the truth. The girl was a whore, you see. Jaime arranged the
whole a air, the road, the outlaws, all of it. He thought it was time
I had a woman. He paid double for a maiden, knowing it would be
my rst time.
“After Jaime had made his confession, to drive home the lesson,
Lord Tywin brought my wife in and gave her to his guards. They
paid her fair enough. A silver for each man, how many whores
command that high a price? He sat me down in the corner of the

barracks and bade me watch, and at the end she had so many silvers
the coins were slipping through her ngers and rolling on the oor,
she …” The smoke was stinging his eyes. Tyrion cleared his throat
and turned away from the re, to gaze out into darkness. “Lord
Tywin had me go last,” he said in a quiet voice. “And he gave me a
gold coin to pay her, because I was a Lannister, and worth more.”
After a time he heard the noise again, the rasp of steel on stone as
Bronn sharpened his sword. “Thirteen or thirty or three, I would
have killed the man who did that to me.”
Tyrion swung around to face him. “You may get that chance one
day. Remember what I told you. A Lannister always pays his debts.”
He yawned. “I think I will try and sleep. Wake me if we’re about to
die.”
He rolled himself up in the shadowskin and shut his eyes. The
ground was stony and cold, but after a time Tyrion Lannister did
sleep. He dreamt of the sky cell. This time he was the gaoler, not
the prisoner, big, with a strap in his hand, and he was hitting his
father, driving him back, toward the abyss …
“Tyrion.” Bronn’s warning was low and urgent.
Tyrion was awake in the blink of an eye. The re had burned
down to embers, and the shadows were creeping in all around them.
Bronn had raised himself to one knee, his sword in one hand and his
dirk in the other. Tyrion held up a hand: stay still, it said. “Come
share our re, the night is cold,” he called out to the creeping
shadows. “I fear we’ve no wine to o er you, but you’re welcome to
some of our goat.”
All movement stopped. Tyrion saw the glint of moonlight on
metal. “Our mountain,” a voice called out from the trees, deep and
hard and unfriendly. “Our goat.”
“Your goat,” Tyrion agreed. “Who are you?”
“When you meet your gods,” a di erent voice replied, “say it was
Gunthor son of Gurn of the Stone Crows who sent you to them.” A
branch cracked underfoot as he stepped into the light; a thin man in
a horned helmet, armed with a long knife.
“And Shagga son of Dolf.” That was the rst voice, deep and
deadly. A boulder shifted to their left, and stood, and became a

man. Massive and slow and strong he seemed, dressed all in skins,
with a club in his right hand and an axe in his left. He smashed
them together as he lumbered closer.
Other voices called other names, Conn and Torrek and Jaggot and
more that Tyrion forgot the instant he heard them; ten at least. A
few had swords and knives; others brandished pitchforks and
scythes and wooden spears. He waited until they were done
shouting out their names before he gave them answer. “I am Tyrion
son of Tywin, of the Clan Lannister, the Lions of the Rock. We will
gladly pay you for the goat we ate.”
“What do you have to give us, Tyrion son of Tywin?” asked the
one who named himself Gunthor, who seemed to be their chief.
“There is silver in my purse,” Tyrion told them. “This hauberk I
wear is large for me, but it should t Conn nicely, and the battleaxe I carry would suit Shagga’s mighty hand far better than that
wood-axe he holds.”
“The half man would pay us with our own coin,” said Conn.
“Conn speaks truly,” Gunthor said. “Your silver is ours. Your
horses are ours. Your hauberk and your battle-axe and the knife at
your belt, those are ours too. You have nothing to give us but your
lives. How would you like to die, Tyrion son of Tywin?”
“In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden’s mouth
around my cock, at the age of eighty,” he replied.
The huge one, Shagga, laughed rst and loudest. The others
seemed less amused. “Conn, take their horses,” Gunthor
commanded. “Kill the other and seize the halfman. He can milk the
goats and make the mothers laugh.”
Bronn sprang to his feet. “Who dies rst?”
“No!” Tyrion said sharply. “Gunthor son of Gurn, hear me. My
House is rich and powerful. If the Stone Crows will see us safely
through these mountains, my lord father will shower you with
gold.”
“The gold of a lowland lord is as worthless as a half man’s
promises,” Gunthor said.
“Half a man I may be,” Tyrion said, “yet I have the courage to
face my enemies. What do the Stone Crows do, but hide behind

rocks and shiver with fear as the knights of the Vale ride by?”
Shagga gave a roar of anger and clashed club against axe. Jaggot
poked at Tyrion’s face with the re-hardened point of a long
wooden spear. He did his best not to inch. “Are these the best
weapons you could steal?” he said. “Good enough for killing sheep,
perhaps … if the sheep do not ght back. My father’s smiths shit
better steel.”
“Little boyman,” Shagga roared, “will you mock my axe after I
chop o your manhood and feed it to the goats?”
But Gunthor raised a hand. “No. I would hear his words. The
mothers go hungry, and steel lls more mouths than gold. What
would you give us for your lives, Tyrion son of Tywin? Swords?
Lances? Mail?”
“All that, and more, Gunthor son of Gurn,” Tyrion Lannister
replied, smiling. “I will give you the Vale of Arryn.”

EDDARD

Through the high narrow windows of the Red Keep’s cavernous
throne room, the light of sunset spilled across the oor, laying dark
red stripes upon the walls where the heads of dragons had once
hung. Now the stone was covered with hunting tapestries, vivid
with greens and browns and blues, and yet still it seemed to Ned
Stark that the only color in the hall was the red of blood.
He sat high upon the immense ancient seat of Aegon the
Conqueror, an ironwork monstrosity of spikes and jagged edges and
grotesquely twisted metal. It was, as Robert had warned him, a
hellishly uncomfortable chair, and never more so than now, with his
shattered leg throbbing more sharply every minute. The metal
beneath him had grown harder by the hour, and the fanged steel
behind made it impossible to lean back. A king should never sit easy,
Aegon the Conqueror had said, when he commanded his armorers to
forge a great seat from the swords laid down by his enemies. Damn
Aegon for his arrogance, Ned thought sullenly, and damn Robert and
his hunting as well.
“You are quite certain these were more than brigands?” Varys
asked softly from the council table beneath the throne. Grand
Maester Pycelle stirred uneasily beside him, while Little nger toyed
with a pen. They were the only councillors in attendance. A white
hart had been sighted in the kingswood, and Lord Renly and Ser
Barristan had joined the king to hunt it, along with Prince Jo rey,

Sandor Clegane, Balon Swann, and half the court. So Ned must
needs sit the Iron Throne in his absence.
At least he could sit. Save the council, the rest must stand
respectfully, or kneel. The petitioners clustered near the tall doors,
the knights and high lords and ladies beneath the tapestries, the
smallfolk in the gallery, the mailed guards in their cloaks, gold or
grey: all stood.
The villagers were kneeling: men, women, and children, alike
tattered and bloody, their faces drawn by fear. The three knights
who had brought them here to bear witness stood behind them.
“Brigands, Lord Varys?” Ser Raymun Darry’s voice dripped scorn.
“Oh, they were brigands, beyond a doubt. Lannister brigands.”
Ned could feel the unease in the hall, as high lords and servants
alike strained to listen. He could not pretend to surprise. The west
had been a tinderbox since Catelyn had seized Tyrion Lannister.
Both Riverrun and Casterly Rock had called their banners, and
armies were massing in the pass below the Golden Tooth. It had
only been a matter of time until the blood began to ow. The sole
question that remained was how best to stanch the wound.
Sad-eyed Ser Karyl Vance, who would have been handsome but
for the winestain birthmark that discolored his face, gestured at the
kneeling villagers. “This is all the remains of the holdfast of Sherrer,
Lord Eddard. The rest are dead, along with the people of Wendish
Town and the Mummer’s Ford.”
“Rise,” Ned commanded the villagers. He never trusted what a
man told him from his knees. “All of you, up.”
In ones and twos, the holdfast of Sherrer struggled to its feet. One
ancient needed to be helped, and a young girl in a bloody dress
stayed on her knees, staring blankly at Ser Arys Oakheart, who
stood by the foot of the throne in the white armor of the
Kingsguard, ready to protect and defend the king … or, Ned
supposed, the King’s Hand.
“Joss,” Ser Raymun Darry said to a plump balding man in a
brewer’s apron. “Tell the Hand what happened at Sherrer.”
Joss nodded. “If it please His Grace—”

“His Grace is hunting across the Blackwater,” Ned said,
wondering how a man could live his whole life a few days ride from
the Red Keep and still have no notion what his king looked like.
Ned was clad in a white linen doublet with the direwolf of Stark on
the breast; his black wool cloak was fastened at the collar by his
silver hand of o ce. Black and white and grey, all the shades of
truth. “I am Lord Eddard Stark, the King’s Hand. Tell me who you
are and what you know of these raiders.”
“I keep … I kept … I kept an alehouse, m’lord, in Sherrer, by the
stone bridge. The nest ale south of the Neck, everyone said so,
begging your pardons, m’lord. It’s gone now like all the rest,
m’lord. They come and drank their ll and spilled the rest before
they red my roof, and they would of spilled my blood too, if
they’d caught me. M’lord.”
“They burnt us out,” a farmer beside him said. “Come riding in
the dark, up from the south, and red the elds and the houses
alike, killing them as tried to stop them. They weren’t no raiders,
though, m’lord. They had no mind to steal our stock, not these, they
butchered my milk cow where she stood and left her for the ies
and the crows.”
“They rode down my ’prentice boy,” said a squat man with a
smith’s muscles and a bandage around his head. He had put on his
nest clothes to come to court, but his breeches were patched, his
cloak travel-stained and dusty. “Chased him back and forth across
the elds on their horses, poking at him with their lances like it was
a game, them laughing and the boy stumbling and screaming till the
big one pierced him clean through.”
The girl on her knees craned her head up at Ned, high above her
on the throne. “They killed my mother too, Your Grace. And
they … they …” Her voice trailed o , as if she had forgotten what
she was about to say. She began to sob.
Ser Raymun Darry took up the tale. “At Wendish Town, the
people sought shelter in their holdfast, but the walls were timbered.
The raiders piled straw against the wood and burnt them all alive.
When the Wendish folk opened their gates to ee the re, they shot

them down with arrows as they came running out, even women
with suckling babes.”
“Oh, dreadful,” murmured Varys. “How cruel can men be?”
“They would of done the same for us, but the Sherrer holdfast’s
made of stone,” Joss said. “Some wanted to smoke us out, but the
big one said there was riper fruit up river, and they made for the
Mummer’s Ford.”
Ned could feel cold steel against his ngers as he leaned forward.
Between each nger was a blade, the points of twisted swords
fanning out like talons from arms of the throne. Even after three
centuries, some were still sharp enough to cut. The Iron Throne was
full of traps for the unwary. The songs said it had taken a thousand
blades to make it, heated white-hot in the furnace breath of
Balerion the Black Dread. The hammering had taken fty-nine days.
The end of it was this hunched black beast made of razor edges and
barbs and ribbons of sharp metal; a chair that could kill a man, and
had, if the stories could be believed.
What Eddard Stark was doing sitting there he would never
comprehend, yet there he sat, and these people looked to him for
justice. “What proof do you have that these were Lannisters?” he
asked, trying to keep his fury under control. “Did they wear
crimson cloaks or y a lion banner?”
“Even Lannisters are not so blind stupid as that,” Ser Marq Piper
snapped. He was a swaggering bantam rooster of a youth, too
young and too hot-blooded for Ned’s taste, though a fast friend of
Catelyn’s brother, Edmure Tully.
“Every man among them was mounted and mailed, my lord,” Ser
Karyl answered calmly. “They were armed with steel-tipped lances
and longswords, with battle-axes for the butchering.” He gestured
toward one of the ragged survivors. “You. Yes, you, no one’s going
to hurt you. Tell the Hand what you told me.”
The old man bobbed his head. “Concerning their horses,” he said,
“it were warhorses they rode. Many a year I worked in old Ser
Willum’s stables, so I knows the di erence. Not a one of these ever
pulled a plow, gods bear witness if I’m wrong.”

“Well-mounted brigands,” observed Little nger. “Perhaps they
stole the horses from the last place they raided.”
“How many men were there in this raiding party?” Ned asked.
“A hundred, at the least,” Joss answered, in the same instant as
the bandaged smith said, “Fifty,” and the grandmother behind him,
“Hunnerds and hunnerds, m’lord, an army they was.”
“You are more right than you know, goodwoman,” Lord Eddard
told her. “You say they ew no banners. What of the armor they
wore? Did any of you note ornaments or decorations, devices on
shield or helm?”
The brewer, Joss, shook his head. “It grieves me, m’lord, but no,
the armor they showed us was plain, only … the one who led them,
he was armored like the rest, but there was no mistaking him all the
same. It was the size of him, m’lord. Those as say the giants are all
dead never saw this one, I swear. Big as an ox he was, and a voice
like stone breaking.”
“The Mountain!” Ser Marq said loudly. “Can any man doubt it?
This was Gregor Clegane’s work.”
Ned heard muttering from beneath the windows and the far end
of the hall. Even in the galley, nervous whispers were exchanged.
High lords and smallfolk alike knew what it could mean if Ser Marq
was proved right. Ser Gregor Clegane stood bannerman to Lord
Tywin Lannister.
He studied the frightened faces of the villagers. Small wonder
they had been so fearful; they had thought they were being dragged
here to name Lord Tywin a red-handed butcher before a king who
was his son by marriage. He wondered if the knights had given
them a choice.
Grand Maester Pycelle rose ponderously from the council table,
his chain of o ce clinking. “Ser Marq, with respect, you cannot
know that this outlaw was Ser Gregor. There are many large men in
the realm.”
“As large as the Mountain That Rides?” Ser Karyl said. “I have
never met one.”
“Nor has any man here,” Ser Raymun added hotly. “Even his
brother is a pup beside him. My lords, open your eyes. Do you need

to see his seal on the corpses? It was Gregor.”
“Why should Ser Gregor turn brigand?” Pycelle asked. “By the
grace of his liege lord, he holds a stout keep and lands of his own.
The man is an anointed knight.”
“A false knight!” Ser Marq said. “Lord Tywin’s mad dog.”
“My lord Hand,” Pycelle declared in a sti voice, “I urge you to
remind this good knight that Lord Tywin Lannister is the father of
our own gracious queen.”
“Thank you, Grand Maester Pycelle,” Ned said. “I fear we might
have forgotten that if you had not pointed it out.”
From his vantage point atop the throne, he could see men slipping
out the door at the far end of the hall. Hares going to ground, he
supposed … or rats o to nibble the queen’s cheese. He caught a
glimpse of Septa Mordane in the gallery, with his daughter Sansa
beside her. Ned felt a ash of anger; this was no place for a girl. But
the septa could not have known that today’s court would be
anything but the usual tedious business of hearing petitions, settling
disputes between rival holdfasts, and adjudicating the placement of
boundary stones.
At the council table below, Petyr Baelish lost interest in his quill
and leaned forward. “Ser Marq, Ser Karyl, Ser Raymun—perhaps I
might ask you a question? These holdfasts were under your
protection. Where were you when all this slaughtering and burning
was going on?”
Ser Karyl Vance answered. “I was attending my lord father in the
pass below the Golden Tooth, as was Ser Marq. When the word of
these outrages reached Ser Edmure Tully, he sent word that we
should take a small force of men to nd what survivors we could
and bring them to the king.”
Ser Raymun Darry spoke up. “Ser Edmure had summoned me to
Riverrun with all my strength. I was camped across the river from
his walls, awaiting his commands, when the word reached me. By
the time I could return to my own lands, Clegane and his vermin
were back across the Red Fork, riding for Lannister’s hills.”
Little nger stroked the point of his beard thoughtfully. “And if
they come again, ser?”

“If they come again, we’ll use their blood to water the elds they
burnt,” Ser Marq Piper declared hotly.
“Ser Edmure has sent men to every village and holdfast within a
day’s ride of the border,” Ser Karyl explained. “The next raider will
not have such an easy time of it.”
And that may be precisely what Lord Tywin wants, Ned thought to
himself, to bleed o strength from Riverrun, goad the boy into scattering
his swords. His wife’s brother was young, and more gallant than
wise. He would try to hold every inch of his soil, to defend every
man, woman, and child who named him lord, and Tywin Lannister
was shrewd enough to know that.
“If your elds and holdfasts are safe from harm,” Lord Petyr was
saying, “what then do you ask of the throne?”
“The lords of the Trident keep the king’s peace,” Ser Raymun
Darry said. “The Lannisters have broken it. We ask leave to answer
them, steel for steel. We ask justice for the smallfolk of Sherrer and
Wendish Town and the Mummer’s Ford.”
“Edmure agrees, we must pay Gregor Clegane back his bloody
coin,” Ser Marq declared, “but old Lord Hoster commanded us to
come here and beg the king’s leave before we strike.”
Thank the gods for old Lord Hoster, then. Tywin Lannister was as
much fox as lion. If indeed he’d sent Ser Gregor to burn and pillage
—and Ned did not doubt that he had—he’d taken care to see that he
rode under cover of night, without banners, in the guise of a
common brigand. Should Riverrun strike back, Cersei and her father
would insist that it had been the Tullys who broke the king’s peace,
not the Lannisters. The gods only knew what Robert would believe.
Grand Maester Pycelle was on his feet again. “My lord Hand, if
these good folk believe that Ser Gregor has forsaken his holy vows
for plunder and rape, let them go to his liege lord and make their
complaint. These crimes are no concern of the throne. Let them seek
Lord Tywin’s justice.”
“It is all the king’s justice,” Ned told him. “North, south, east, or
west, all we do we do in Robert’s name.”
“The king’s justice,” Grand Maester Pycelle said. “So it is, and so
we should defer this matter until the king—”

“The king is hunting across the river and may not return for
days,” Lord Eddard said. “Robert bid me to sit here in his place, to
listen with his ears, and to speak with his voice. I mean to do just
that … though I agree that he must be told.” He saw a familiar face
beneath the tapestries. “Ser Robar.”
Ser Robar Royce stepped forward and bowed. “My lord.”
“Your father is hunting with the king,” Ned said. “Will you bring
them word of what was said and done here today?”
“At once, my lord.”
“Do we have your leave to take our vengeance against Ser
Gregor, then?” Marq Piper asked the throne.
“Vengeance?” Ned said. “I thought we were speaking of justice.
Burning Clegane’s elds and slaughtering his people will not restore
the king’s peace, only your injured pride.” He glanced away before
the young knight could voice his outraged protest, and addressed
the villagers. “People of Sherrer, I cannot give you back your homes
or your crops, nor can I restore your dead to life. But perhaps I can
give you some small measure of justice, in the name of our king,
Robert.”
Every eye in the hall was xed on him, waiting. Slowly Ned
struggled to his feet, pushing himself up from the throne with the
strength of his arms, his shattered leg screaming inside its cast. He
did his best to ignore the pain; it was no moment to let them see his
weakness. “The First Men believed that the judge who called for
death should wield the sword, and in the north we hold to that still.
I mislike sending another to do my killing … yet it seems I have no
choice.” He gestured at his broken leg.
“Lord Eddard!” The shout came from the west side of the hall as a
handsome stripling of a boy strode forth boldly. Out of his armor,
Ser Loras Tyrell looked even younger than his sixteen years. He
wore pale blue silk, his belt a linked chain of golden roses, the sigil
of his House. “I beg you the honor of acting in your place. Give this
task to me, my lord, and I swear I shall not fail you.”
Little nger chuckled. “Ser Loras, if we send you o alone, Ser
Gregor will send us back your head with a plum stu ed in that

pretty mouth of yours. The Mountain is not the sort to bend his
neck to any man’s justice.”
“I do not fear Gregor Clegane,” Ser Loras said haughtily.
Ned eased himself slowly back onto the hard iron seat of Aegon’s
misshapen throne. His eyes searched the faces along the wall. “Lord
Beric,” he called out. “Thoros of Myr. Ser Gladden. Lord Lothar.”
The men named stepped forward one by one. “Each of you is to
assemble twenty men, to bring my word to Gregor’s keep. Twenty
of my own guards shall go with you. Lord Beric Dondarrion, you
shall have the command, as be ts your rank.”
The young lord with the red-gold hair bowed. “As you command,
Lord Eddard.”
Ned raised his voice, so it carried to the far end of the throne
room. “In the name of Robert of the House Baratheon, the First of
his Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men,
Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, by the
word of Eddard of the House Stark, his Hand, I charge you to ride
to the westlands with all haste, to cross the Red Fork of the Trident
under the king’s ag, and there bring the king’s justice to the false
knight Gregor Clegane, and to all those who shared in his crimes. I
denounce him, and attaint him, and strip him of all rank and titles,
of all lands and incomes and holdings, and do sentence him to
death. May the gods take pity on his soul.”
When the echo of his words had died away, the Knight of Flowers
seemed perplexed. “Lord Eddard, what of me?”
Ned looked down on him. From on high, Loras Tyrell seemed
almost as young as Robb. “No one doubts your valor, Ser Loras, but
we are about justice here, and what you seek is vengeance.” He
looked back to Lord Beric. “Ride at rst light. These things are best
done quickly.” He held up a hand. “The throne will hear no more
petitions today.”
Alyn and Porther climbed the steep iron steps to help him back
down. As they made their descent, he could feel Loras Tyrell’s
sullen stare, but the boy had stalked away before Ned reached the
oor of the throne room.

At the base of the Iron Throne, Varys was gathering papers from
the council table. Little nger and Grand Maester Pycelle had
already taken their leave. “You are a bolder man than I, my lord,”
the eunuch said softly.
“How so, Lord Varys?” Ned asked brusquely. His leg was
throbbing, and he was in no mood for word games.
“Had it been me up there, I should have sent Ser Loras. He so
wanted to go … and a man who has the Lannisters for his enemies
would do well to make the Tyrells his friends.”
“Ser Loras is young,” said Ned. “I daresay he will outgrow the
disappointment.”
“And Ser Ilyn?” The eunuch stroked a plump, powdered cheek.
“He is the King’s Justice, after all. Sending other men to do his
o ce … some might construe that as a grave insult.”
“No slight was intended.” In truth, Ned did not trust the mute
knight, though perhaps that was only because he misliked
executioners. “I remind you, the Paynes are bannermen to House
Lannister. I thought it best to choose men who owed Lord Tywin no
fealty.”
“Very prudent, no doubt,” Varys said. “Still, I chanced to see Ser
Ilyn in the back of the hall, staring at us with those pale eyes of his,
and I must say, he did not look pleased, though to be sure it is hard
to tell with our silent knight. I hope he outgrows his disappointment
as well. He does so love his work …”

SANSA

“He wouldn’t send Ser Loras,” Sansa told Jeyne Poole that night as
they shared a cold supper by lamplight. “I think it was because of
his leg.”
Lord Eddard had taken his supper in his bedchamber with Alyn,
Harwin, and Vayon Poole, the better to rest his broken leg, and
Septa Mordane had complained of sore feet after standing in the
gallery all day. Arya was supposed to join them, but she was late
coming back from her dancing lesson.
“His leg?” Jeyne said uncertainly. She was a pretty, dark-haired
girl of Sansa’s own age. “Did Ser Loras hurt his leg?”
“Not his leg,” Sansa said, nibbling delicately at a chicken leg.
“Father’s leg, silly. It hurts him ever so much, it makes him cross.
Otherwise I’m certain he would have sent Ser Loras.”
Her father’s decision still bewildered her. When the Knight of
Flowers had spoken up, she’d been sure she was about to see one of
Old Nan’s stories come to life. Ser Gregor was the monster and Ser
Loras the true hero who would slay him. He even looked a true
hero, so slim and beautiful, with golden roses around his slender
waist and his rich brown hair tumbling down into his eyes. And then
Father had refused him! It had upset her more than she could tell.
She had said as much to Septa Mordane as they descended the stairs
from the gallery, but the septa had only told her it was not her
place to question her lord father’s decisions.

That was when Lord Baelish had said, “Oh, I don’t know, Septa.
Some of her lord father’s decisions could do with a bit of
questioning. The young lady is as wise as she is lovely.” He made a
sweeping bow to Sansa, so deep she was not quite sure if she was
being complimented or mocked.
Septa Mordane had been very upset to realize that Lord Baelish
had overheard them. “The girl was just talking, my lord,” she’d
said. “Foolish chatter. She meant nothing by the comment.”
Lord Baelish stroked his little pointed beard and said, “Nothing?
Tell me, child, why would you have sent Ser Loras?”
Sansa had no choice but to explain about heroes and monsters.
The king’s councillor smiled. “Well, those are not the reasons I’d
have given, but …” He had touched her cheek, his thumb lightly
tracing the line of a cheekbone. “Life is not a song, sweetling. You
may learn that one day to your sorrow.”
Sansa did not feel like telling all that to Jeyne, however; it made
her uneasy just to think back on it.
“Ser Ilyn’s the King’s Justice, not Ser Loras,” Jeyne said. “Lord
Eddard should have sent him.”
Sansa shuddered. Every time she looked at Ser Ilyn Payne, she
shivered. He made her feel as though something dead were
slithering over her naked skin. “Ser Ilyn’s almost like a second
monster. I’m glad Father didn’t pick him.”
“Lord Beric is as much a hero as Ser Loras. He’s ever so brave and
gallant.”
“I suppose,” Sansa said doubtfully. Beric Dondarrion was
handsome enough, but he was awfully old, almost twenty-two; the
Knight of Flowers would have been much better. Of course, Jeyne
had been in love with Lord Beric ever since she had rst glimpsed
him in the lists. Sansa thought she was being silly; Jeyne was only a
steward’s daughter, after all, and no matter how much she mooned
after him, Lord Beric would never look at someone so far beneath
him, even if she hadn’t been half his age.
It would have been unkind to say so, however, so Sansa took a sip
of milk and changed the subject. “I had a dream that Jo rey would
be the one to take the white hart,” she said. It had been more of a

wish, actually, but it sounded better to call it a dream. Everyone
knew that dreams were prophetic. White harts were supposed to be
very rare and magical, and in her heart she knew her gallant prince
was worthier than his drunken father.
“A dream? Truly? Did Prince Jo rey just go up to it and touch it
with his bare hand and do it no harm?”
“No,” Sansa said. “He shot it with a golden arrow and brought it
back for me.” In the songs, the knights never killed magical beasts,
they just went up to them and touched them and did them no harm,
but she knew Jo rey liked hunting, especially the killing part. Only
animals, though. Sansa was certain her prince had no part in
murdering Jory and those other poor men; that had been his wicked
uncle, the Kingslayer. She knew her father was still angry about
that, but it wasn’t fair to blame Jo . That would be like blaming
her for something that Arya had done.
“I saw your sister this afternoon,” Jeyne blurted out, as if she’d
been reading Sansa’s thoughts. “She was walking through the
stables on her hands. Why would she do a thing like that?”
“I’m sure I don’t know why Arya does anything.” Sansa hated
stables, smelly places full of manure and ies. Even when she went
riding, she liked the boy to saddle the horse and bring it to her in
the yard. “Do you want to hear about the court or not?”
“I do,” Jeyne said.
“There was a black brother,” Sansa said, “begging men for the
Wall, only he was kind of old and smelly.” She hadn’t liked that at
all. She had always imagined the Night’s Watch to be men like
Uncle Benjen. In the songs, they were called the black knights of the
Wall. But this man had been crookbacked and hideous, and he
looked as though he might have lice. If this was what the Night’s
Watch was truly like, she felt sorry for her bastard half brother,
Jon. “Father asked if there were any knights in the hall who would
do honor to their houses by taking the black, but no one came
forward, so he gave this Yoren his pick of the king’s dungeons and
sent him on his way. And later these two brothers came before him,
freeriders from the Dornish Marches, and pledged their swords to
the service of the king. Father accepted their oaths …”

Jeyne yawned. “Are there any lemon cakes?”
Sansa did not like being interrupted, but she had to admit, lemon
cakes sounded more interesting than most of what had gone on in
the throne room. “Let’s see,” she said.
The kitchen yielded no lemon cakes, but they did nd half of a
cold strawberry pie, and that was almost as good. They ate it on the
tower steps, giggling and gossiping and sharing secrets, and Sansa
went to bed that night feeling almost as wicked as Arya.
The next morning she woke before rst light and crept sleepily to
her window to watch Lord Beric form up his men. They rode out as
dawn was breaking over the city, with three banners going before
them; the crowned stag of the king ew from the high sta , the
direwolf of Stark and Lord Beric’s own forked lightning standard
from shorter poles. It was all so exciting, a song come to life; the
clatter of swords, the icker of torchlight, banners dancing in the
wind, horses snorting and whinnying, the golden glow of sunrise
slanting through the bars of the portcullis as it jerked upward. The
Winterfell men looked especially ne in their silvery mail and long
grey cloaks.
Alyn carried the Stark banner. When she saw him rein in beside
Lord Beric to exchange words, it made Sansa feel ever so proud.
Alyn was handsomer than Jory had been; he was going to be a
knight one day.
The Tower of the Hand seemed so empty after they left that
Sansa was even pleased to see Arya when she went down to break
her fast. “Where is everyone?” her sister wanted to know as she
ripped the skin from a blood orange. “Did Father send them to hunt
down Jaime Lannister?”
Sansa sighed. “They rode with Lord Beric, to behead Ser Gregor
Clegane.” She turned to Septa Mordane, who was eating porridge
with a wooden spoon. “Septa, will Lord Beric spike Ser Gregor’s
head on his own gate or bring it back here for the king?” She and
Jeyne Poole had been arguing over that last night.
The septa was horror-struck. “A lady does not discuss such things
over her porridge. Where are your courtesies, Sansa? I swear, of
late you’ve been near as bad as your sister.”

“What did Gregor do?” Arya asked.
“He burned down a holdfast and murdered a lot of people,
women and children too.”
Arya screwed up her face in a scowl. “Jaime Lannister murdered
Jory and Heward and Wyl, and the Hound murdered Mycah.
Somebody should have beheaded them.”
“It’s not the same,” Sansa said. “The Hound is Jo rey’s sworn
shield. Your butcher’s boy attacked the prince.”
“Liar,” Arya said. Her hand clenched the blood orange so hard
that red juice oozed between her ngers.
“Go ahead, call me all the names you want,” Sansa said airily.
“You won’t dare when I’m married to Jo rey. You’ll have to bow to
me and call me Your Grace.” She shrieked as Arya ung the orange
across the table. It caught her in the middle of the forehead with a
wet squish and plopped down into her lap.
“You have juice on your face, Your Grace,” Arya said.
It was running down her nose and stinging her eyes. Sansa wiped
it away with a napkin. When she saw what the fruit in her lap had
done to her beautiful ivory silk dress, she shrieked again. “You’re
horrible,” she screamed at her sister. “They should have killed you
instead of Lady!”
Septa Mordane came lurching to her feet. “Your lord father will
hear of this! Go to your chambers, at once. At once!”
“Me too?” Tears welled in Sansa’s eyes. “That’s not fair.”
“The matter is not subject to discussion. Go!”
Sansa stalked away with her head up. She was to be a queen, and
queens did not cry. At least not where people could see. When she
reached her bedchamber, she barred the door and took o her dress.
The blood orange had left a blotchy red stain on the silk. “I hate
her!” she screamed. She balled up the dress and ung it into the
cold hearth, on top of the ashes of last night’s re. When she saw
that the stain had bled through onto her underskirt, she began to
sob despite herself. She ripped o the rest of her clothes wildly,
threw herself into bed, and cried herself back to sleep.
It was midday when Septa Mordane knocked upon her door.
“Sansa. Your lord father will see you now.”

Sansa sat up. “Lady,” she whispered. For a moment it was as if
the direwolf was there in the room, looking at her with those
golden eyes, sad and knowing. She had been dreaming, she realized.
Lady was with her, and they were running together,
and … and … trying to remember was like trying to catch the rain
with her ngers. The dream faded, and Lady was dead again.
“Sansa.” The rap came again, sharply. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Septa,” she called out. “Might I have a moment to dress,
please?” Her eyes were red from crying, but she did her best to
make herself beautiful.
Lord Eddard was bent over a huge leather-bound book when
Septa Mordane marched her into the solar, his plaster-wrapped leg
sti beneath the table. “Come here, Sansa,” he said, not unkindly,
when the septa had gone for her sister. “Sit beside me.” He closed
the book.
Septa Mordane returned with Arya squirming in her grasp. Sansa
had put on a lovely pale green damask gown and a look of remorse,
but her sister was still wearing the ratty leathers and roughspun
she’d worn at breakfast. “Here is the other one,” the septa
announced.
“My thanks, Septa Mordane. I would talk to my daughters alone,
if you would be so kind.” The septa bowed and left.
“Arya started it,” Sansa said quickly, anxious to have the rst
word. “She called me a liar and threw an orange at me and spoiled
my dress, the ivory silk, the one Queen Cersei gave me when I was
betrothed to Prince Jo rey. She hates that I’m going to marry the
prince. She tries to spoil everything, Father, she can’t stand for
anything to be beautiful or nice or splendid.”
“Enough, Sansa.” Lord Eddard’s voice was sharp with impatience.
Arya raised her eyes. “I’m sorry, Father. I was wrong and I beg
my sweet sister’s forgiveness.”
Sansa was so startled that for a moment she was speechless.
Finally she found her voice. “What about my dress?”
“Maybe … I could wash it,” Arya said doubtfully.
“Washing won’t do any good,” Sansa said. “Not if you scrubbed
all day and all night. The silk is ruined.”

“Then I’ll … make you a new one,” Arya said.
Sansa threw back her head in disdain. “You? You couldn’t sew a
dress t to clean the pigsties.”
Their father sighed. “I did not call you here to talk of dresses. I’m
sending you both back to Winterfell.”
For the second time Sansa found herself too stunned for words.
She felt her eyes grow moist again.
“You can’t,” Arya said.
“Please, Father,” Sansa managed at last. “Please don’t.”
Eddard Stark favored his daughters with a tired smile. “At last
we’ve found something you agree on.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Sansa pleaded with him. “I don’t
want to go back.” She loved King’s Landing; the pagaentry of the
court, the high lords and ladies in their velvets and silks and
gemstones, the great city with all its people. The tournament had
been the most magical time of her whole life, and there was so
much she had not seen yet, harvest feasts and masked balls and
mummer shows. She could not bear the thought of losing it all.
“Send Arya away, she started it, Father, I swear it. I’ll be good,
you’ll see, just let me stay and I promise to be as ne and noble and
courteous as the queen.”
Father’s mouth twitched strangely. “Sansa, I’m not sending you
away for ghting, though the gods know I’m sick of you two
squabbling. I want you back in Winterfell for your own safety.
Three of my men were cut down like dogs not a league from where
we sit, and what does Robert do? He goes hunting.”
Arya was chewing at her lip in that disgusting way she had. “Can
we take Syrio back with us?”
“Who cares about your stupid dancing master?” Sansa ared.
“Father, I only just now remembered, I can’t go away, I’m to marry
Prince Jo rey.” She tried to smile bravely for him. “I love him,
Father, I truly truly do, I love him as much as Queen Naerys loved
Prince Aemon the Dragonknight, as much as Jonquil loved Ser
Florian. I want to be his queen and have his babies.”
“Sweet one,” her father said gently, “listen to me. When you’re
old enough, I will make you a match with a high lord who’s worthy

of you, someone brave and gentle and strong. This match with
Jo rey was a terrible mistake. That boy is no Prince Aemon, you
must believe me.”
“He is!” Sansa insisted. “I don’t want someone brave and gentle, I
want him. We’ll be ever so happy, just like in the songs, you’ll see.
I’ll give him a son with golden hair, and one day he’ll be the king of
all the realm, the greatest king that ever was, as brave as the wolf
and as proud as the lion.”
Arya made a face. “Not if Jo rey’s his father,” she said. “He’s a
liar and a craven and anyhow he’s a stag, not a lion.”
Sansa felt tears in her eyes. “He is not! He’s not the least bit like
that old drunken king,” she screamed at her sister, forgetting herself
in her grief.
Father looked at her strangely. “Gods,” he swore softly, “out of
the mouth of babes …” He shouted for Septa Mordane. To the girls
he said, “I am looking for a fast trading galley to take you home.
These days, the sea is safer than the kingsroad. You will sail as soon
as I can nd a proper ship, with Septa Mordane and a complement
of guards … and yes, with Syrio Forel, if he agrees to enter my
service. But say nothing of this. It’s better if no one knows of our
plans. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Sansa cried as Septa Mordane marched them down the steps. They
were going to take it all away; the tournaments and the court and
her prince, everything, they were going to send her back to the
bleak grey walls of Winterfell and lock her up forever. Her life was
over before it had begun.
“Stop that weeping, child,” Septa Mordane said sternly. “I am
certain your lord father knows what is best for you.”
“It won’t be so bad, Sansa,” Arya said. “We’re going to sail on a
galley. It will be an adventure, and then we’ll be with Bran and
Robb again, and Old Nan and Hodor and the rest.” She touched her
on the arm.
“Hodor!” Sansa yelled. “You ought to marry Hodor, you’re just
like him, stupid and hairy and ugly!” She wrenched away from her
sister’s hand, stormed into her bedchamber, and barred the door
behind her.

EDDARD

“Pain is a gift from the gods, Lord Eddard,” Grand Maester Pycelle
told him. “It means the bone is knitting, the esh healing itself. Be
thankful.”
“I will be thankful when my leg stops throbbing.”
Pycelle set a stoppered ask on the table by the bed. “The milk of
the poppy, for when the pain grows too onerous.”
“I sleep too much already.”
“Sleep is the great healer.”
“I had hoped that was you.”
Pycelle smiled wanly. “It is good to see you in such a erce
humor, my lord.” He leaned close and lowered his voice. “There
was a raven this morning, a letter for the queen from her lord
father. I thought you had best know.”
“Dark wings, dark words,” Ned said grimly. “What of it?”
“Lord Tywin is greatly wroth about the men you sent after Ser
Gregor Clegane,” the maester con ded. “I feared he would be. You
will recall, I said as much in council.”
“Let him be wroth,” Ned said. Every time his leg throbbed, he
remembered Jaime Lannister’s smile, and Jory dead in his arms.
“Let him write all the letters to the queen he likes. Lord Beric rides
beneath the king’s own banner. If Lord Tywin attempts to interfere
with the king’s justice, he will have Robert to answer to. The only
thing His Grace enjoys more than hunting is making war on lords
who defy him.”

Pycelle pulled back, his maester’s chain jangling. “As you say. I
shall visit again on the morrow.” The old man hurriedly gathered up
his things and took his leave. Ned had little doubt that he was
bound straight for the royal apartments, to whisper at the queen. I
thought you had best know, indeed … as if Cersei had not instructed
him to pass along her father’s threats. He hoped his response rattled
those perfect teeth of hers. Ned was not near as con dent of Robert
as he pretended, but there was no reason Cersei need know that.
When Pycelle was gone, Ned called for a cup of honeyed wine.
That clouded the mind as well, yet not as badly. He needed to be
able to think. A thousand times, he asked himself what Jon Arryn
might have done, had he lived long enough to act on what he’d
learned. Or perhaps he had acted, and died for it.
It was queer how sometimes a child’s innocent eyes can see things
that grown men are blind to. Someday, when Sansa was grown, he
would have to tell her how she had made it all come clear for him.
He’s not the least bit like that old drunken king, she had declared,
angry and unknowing, and the simple truth of it had twisted inside
him, cold as death. This was the sword that killed Jon Arryn, Ned
thought then, and it will kill Robert as well, a slower death but full as
certain. Shattered legs may heal in time, but some betrayals fester
and poison the soul.
Little nger came calling an hour after the Grand Maester had left,
clad in a plum-colored doublet with a mockingbird embroidered on
the breast in black thread, and a striped cloak of black and white. “I
cannot visit long, my lord,” he announced. “Lady Tanda expects me
to lunch with her. No doubt she will roast me a fatted calf. If it’s
near as fatted as her daughter, I’m like to rupture and die. And how
is your leg?”
“In amed and painful, with an itch that is driving me mad.”
Little nger lifted an eyebrow. “In future, try not to let any horses
fall on it. I would urge you to heal quickly. The realm grows
restive. Varys has heard ominous whispers from the west. Freeriders
and sellswords have been ocking to Casterly Rock, and not for the
thin pleasure of Lord Tywin’s conversation.”

“Is there word of the king?” Ned demanded. “Just how long does
Robert intend to hunt?”
“Given his preferences, I believe he’d stay in the forest until you
and the queen both die of old age,” Lord Petyr replied with a faint
smile. “Lacking that, I imagine he’ll return as soon as he’s killed
something. They found the white hart, it seems … or rather, what
remained of it. Some wolves found it rst, and left His Grace
scarcely more than a hoof and a horn. Robert was in a fury, until he
heard talk of some monstrous boar deeper in the forest. Then
nothing would do but he must have it. Prince Jo rey returned this
morning, with the Royces, Ser Balon Swann, and some twenty
others of the party. The rest are still with the king.”
“The Hound?” Ned asked, frowning. Of all the Lannister party,
Sandor Clegane was the one who concerned him the most, now that
Ser Jaime had ed the city to join his father.
“Oh, returned with Jo rey, and went straight to the queen.”
Little nger smiled. “I would have given a hundred silver stags to
have been a roach in the rushes when he learned that Lord Beric
was o to behead his brother.”
“Even a blind man could see the Hound loathed his brother.”
“Ah, but Gregor was his to loathe, not yours to kill. Once
Dondarrion lops the summit o our Mountain, the Clegane lands
and incomes will pass to Sandor, but I wouldn’t hold my water
waiting for his thanks, not that one. And now you must forgive me.
Lady Tanda awaits with her fatted calves.”
On the way to the door, Lord Petyr spied Grand Maester
Malleon’s massive tome on the table and paused to idly ip open
the cover. “The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven
Kingdoms, With Descriptions of Many High Lords and Noble Ladies and
Their Children,” he read. “Now there is tedious reading if ever I saw
it. A sleeping potion, my lord?”
For a brief moment Ned considered telling him all of it, but there
was something in Little nger’s japes that irked him. The man was
too clever by half, a mocking smile never far from his lips. “Jon
Arryn was studying this volume when he was taken sick,” Ned said
in a careful tone, to see how he might respond.

And he responded as he always did: with a quip. “In that case,” he
said, “death must have come as a blessed relief.” Lord Petyr Baelish
bowed and took his leave.
Eddard Stark allowed himself a curse. Aside from his own
retainers, there was scarcely a man in this city he trusted.
Little nger had concealed Catelyn and helped Ned in his inquiries,
yet his haste to save his own skin when Jaime and his swords had
come out of the rain still rankled. Varys was worse. For all his
protestations of loyalty, the eunuch knew too much and did too
little. Grand Maester Pycelle seemed more Cersei’s creature with
every passing day, and Ser Barristan was an old man, and rigid. He
would tell Ned to do his duty.
Time was perilously short. The king would return from his hunt
soon, and honor would require Ned to go to him with all he had
learned. Vayon Poole had arranged for Sansa and Arya to sail on the
Wind Witch out of Braavos, three days hence. They would be back
at Winterfell before the harvest. Ned could no longer use his
concern for their safety to excuse his delay.
Yet last night he had dreamt of Rhaegar’s children. Lord Tywin
had laid the bodies beneath the Iron Throne, wrapped in the
crimson cloaks of his house guard. That was clever of him; the
blood did not show so badly against the red cloth. The little princess
had been barefoot, still dressed in her bed gown, and the boy … the
boy …
Ned could not let that happen again. The realm could not
withstand a second mad king, another dance of blood and
vengeance. He must nd some way to save the children.
Robert could be merciful. Ser Barristan was scarcely the only man
he had pardoned. Grand Maester Pycelle, Varys the Spider, Lord
Balon Greyjoy; each had been counted an enemy to Robert once,
and each had been welcomed into friendship and allowed to retain
honors and o ce for a pledge of fealty. So long as a man was brave
and honest, Robert would treat him with all the honor and respect
due a valiant enemy.
This was something else: poison in the dark, a knife thrust to the
soul. This he could never forgive, no more than he had forgiven

Rhaegar. He will kill them all, Ned realized.
And yet, he knew he could not keep silent. He had a duty to
Robert, to the realm, to the shade of Jon Arryn … and to Bran, who
surely must have stumbled on some part of the truth. Why else
would they have tried to slay him?
Late that afternoon he summoned Tomard, the portly guardsman
with the ginger-colored whiskers his children called Fat Tom. With
Jory dead and Alyn gone, Fat Tom had command of his household
guard. The thought lled Ned with vague disquiet. Tomard was a
solid man; a able, loyal, tireless, capable in a limited way, but he
was near fty, and even in his youth he had never been energetic.
Perhaps Ned should not have been so quick to send o half his
guard, and all his best swords among them.
“I shall require your help,” Ned said when Tomard appeared,
looking faintly apprehensive, as he always did when called before
his lord. “Take me to the godswood.”
“Is that wise, Lord Eddard? With your leg and all?”
“Perhaps not. But necessary.”
Tomard summoned Varly. With one arm around each man’s
shoulders, Ned managed to descend the steep tower steps and
hobble across the bailey. “I want the guard doubled,” he told Fat
Tom. “No one enters or leaves the Tower of the Hand without my
leave.”
Tom blinked. “M’lord, with Alyn and the others away, we are
hard-pressed already—”
“It will only be a short while. Lengthen the watches.”
“As you say, m’lord,” Tom answered. “Might I ask why—”
“Best not,” Ned answered crisply.
The godswood was empty, as it always was here in this citadel of
the southron gods. Ned’s leg was screaming as they lowered him to
the grass beside the heart tree. “Thank you.” He drew a paper from
his sleeve, sealed with the sigil of his House. “Kindly deliver this at
once.”
Tomard looked at the name Ned had written on the paper and
licked his lips anxiously. “My lord …”
“Do as I bid you, Tom,” Ned said.

How long he waited in the quiet of the godswood, he could not
say. It was peaceful here. The thick walls shut out the clamor of the
castle, and he could hear birds singing, the murmur of crickets,
leaves rustling in a gentle wind. The heart tree was an oak, brown
and faceless, yet Ned Stark still felt the presence of his gods. His leg
did not seem to hurt so much.
She came to him at sunset, as the clouds reddened above the walls
and towers. She came alone, as he had bid her. For once she was
dressed simply, in leather boots and hunting greens. When she drew
back the hood of her brown cloak, he saw the bruise where the king
had struck her. The angry plum color had faded to yellow, and the
swelling was down, but there was no mistaking it for anything but
what it was.
“Why here?” Cersei Lannister asked as she stood over him.
“So the gods can see.”
She sat beside him on the grass. Her every move was graceful.
Her curling blond hair moved in the wind, and her eyes were green
as the leaves of summer. It had been a long time since Ned Stark
had seen her beauty, but he saw it now. “I know the truth Jon
Arryn died for,” he told her.
“Do you?” The queen watched his face, wary as a cat. “Is that
why you called me here, Lord Stark? To pose me riddles? Or is it
your intent to seize me, as your wife seized my brother?”
“If you truly believed that, you would never have come.” Ned
touched her cheek gently. “Has he done this before?”
“Once or twice.” She shied away from his hand. “Never on the
face before. Jaime would have killed him, even if it meant his own
life.” Cersei looked at him de antly. “My brother is worth a
hundred of your friend.”
“Your brother?” Ned said. “Or your lover?”
“Both.” She did not inch from the truth. “Since we were children
together. And why not? The Targaryens wed brother to sister for
three hundred years, to keep the bloodlines pure. And Jaime and I
are more than brother and sister. We are one person in two bodies.
We shared a womb together. He came into this world holding my

foot, our old maester said. When he is in me, I feel … whole.” The
ghost of a smile itted over her lips.
“My son Bran …”
To her credit, Cersei did not look away. “He saw us. You love
your children, do you not?”
Robert had asked him the very same question, the morning of the
melee. He gave her the same answer. “With all my heart.”
“No less do I love mine.”
Ned thought, If it came to that, the life of some child I did not know,
against Robb and Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon, what would I
do? Even more so, what would Catelyn do, if it were Jon’s life, against
the children of her body? He did not know. He prayed he never
would.
“All three are Jaime’s,” he said. It was not a question.
“Thank the gods.”
The seed is strong, Jon Arryn had cried on his deathbed, and so it
was. All those bastards, all with hair as black as night. Grand
Maester Malleon recorded the last mating between stag and lion,
some ninety years ago, when Tya Lannister wed Gowen Baratheon,
third son of the reigning lord. Their only issue, an unnamed boy
described in Malleon’s tome as a large and lusty lad born with a full
head of black hair, died in infancy. Thirty years before that a male
Lannister had taken a Baratheon maid to wife. She had given him
three daughters and a son, each black-haired. No matter how far
back Ned searched in the brittle yellowed pages, always he found
the gold yielding before the coal.
“A dozen years,” Ned said. “How is it that you have had no
children by the king?”
She lifted her head, de ant. “Your Robert got me with child
once,” she said, her voice thick with contempt. “My brother found a
woman to cleanse me. He never knew. If truth be told, I can
scarcely bear for him to touch me, and I have not let him inside me
for years. I know other ways to pleasure him, when he leaves his
whores long enough to stagger up to my bedchamber. Whatever we
do, the king is usually so drunk that he’s forgotten it all by the next
morning.”

How could they have all been so blind? The truth was there in
front of them all the time, written on the children’s faces. Ned felt
sick. “I remember Robert as he was the day he took the throne,
every inch a king,” he said quietly. “A thousand other women might
have loved him with all their hearts. What did he do to make you
hate him so?”
Her eyes burned, green re in the dusk, like the lioness that was
her sigil. “The night of our wedding feast, the rst time we shared a
bed, he called me by your sister’s name. He was on top of me, in
me, stinking of wine, and he whispered Lyanna.”
Ned Stark thought of pale blue roses, and for a moment he
wanted to weep. “I do not know which of you I pity most.”
The queen seemed amused by that. “Save your pity for yourself,
Lord Stark. I want none of it.”
“You know what I must do.”
“Must!” She put her hand on his good leg, just above the knee. “A
true man does what he will, not what he must.” Her ngers brushed
lightly against his thigh, the gentlest of promises. “The realm needs
a strong Hand. Jo will not come of age for years. No one wants
war again, least of all me.” Her hand touched his face, his hair. “If
friends can turn to enemies, enemies can become friends. Your wife
is a thousand leagues away, and my brother has ed. Be kind to me,
Ned. I swear to you, you shall never regret it.”
“Did you make the same o er to Jon Arryn?”
She slapped him.
“I shall wear that as a badge of honor,” Ned said dryly.
“Honor,” she spat. “How dare you play the noble lord with me!
What do you take me for? You’ve a bastard of your own, I’ve seen
him. Who was the mother, I wonder? Some Dornish peasant you
raped while her holdfast burned? A whore? Or was it the grieving
sister, the Lady Ashara? She threw herself into the sea, I’m told.
Why was that? For the brother you slew, or the child you stole? Tell
me, my honorable Lord Eddard, how are you any di erent from
Robert, or me, or Jaime?”
“For a start,” said Ned, “I do not kill children. You would do well
to listen, my lady. I shall say this only once. When the king returns

from his hunt, I intend to lay the truth before him. You must be
gone by then. You and your children, all three, and not to Casterly
Rock. If I were you, I should take ship for the Free Cities, or even
farther, to the Summer Isles or the Port of Ibben. As far as the
winds blow.”
“Exile,” she said. “A bitter cup to drink from.”
“A sweeter cup than your father served Rhaegar’s children,” Ned
said, “and kinder than you deserve. Your father and your brothers
would do well to go with you. Lord Tywin’s gold will buy you
comfort and hire swords to keep you safe. You shall need them. I
promise you, no matter where you ee, Robert’s wrath will follow
you, to the back of beyond if need be.”
The queen stood. “And what of my wrath, Lord Stark?” she asked
softly. Her eyes searched his face. “You should have taken the realm
for yourself. It was there for the taking. Jaime told me how you
found him on the Iron Throne the day King’s Landing fell, and made
him yield it up. That was your moment. All you needed to do was
climb those steps, and sit. Such a sad mistake.”
“I have made more mistakes than you can possibly imagine,” Ned
said, “but that was not one of them.”
“Oh, but it was, my lord,” Cersei insisted. “When you play the
game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”
She turned up her hood to hide her swollen face and left him
there in the dark beneath the oak, amidst the quiet of the
godswood, under a blue-black sky. The stars were coming out.

DAENERYS

The heart was steaming in the cool evening air when Khal Drogo set
it before her, raw and bloody. His arms were red to the elbow.
Behind him, his bloodriders knelt on the sand beside the corpse of
the wild stallion, stone knives in their hands. The stallion’s blood
looked black in the ickering orange glare of the torches that ringed
the high chalk walls of the pit.
Dany touched the soft swell of her belly. Sweat beaded her skin
and trickled down her brow. She could feel the old women watching
her, the ancient crones of Vaes Dothrak, with eyes that shone dark
as polished int in their wrinkled faces. She must not inch or look
afraid. I am the blood of the dragon, she told herself as she took the
stallion’s heart in both hands, lifted it to her mouth, and plunged
her teeth into the tough, stringy esh.
Warm blood lled her mouth and ran down over her chin. The
taste threatened to gag her, but she made herself chew and
swallow. The heart of a stallion would make her son strong and
swift and fearless, or so the Dothraki believed, but only if the
mother could eat it all. If she choked on the blood or retched up the
esh, the omens were less favorable; the child might be stillborn, or
come forth weak, deformed, or female.
Her handmaids had helped her ready herself for the ceremony.
Despite the tender mother’s stomach that had a icted her these
past two moons, Dany had dined on bowls of half-clotted blood to
accustom herself to the taste, and Irri made her chew strips of dried

horse esh until her jaws were aching. She had starved herself for a
day and a night before the ceremony in the hopes that hunger
would help her keep down the raw meat.
The wild stallion’s heart was all muscle, and Dany had to worry it
with her teeth and chew each mouthful a long time. No steel was
permitted within the sacred con nes of Vaes Dothrak, beneath the
shadow of the Mother of Mountains; she had to rip the heart apart
with teeth and nails. Her stomach roiled and heaved, yet she kept
on, her face smeared with the heartsblood that sometimes seemed
to explode against her lips.
Khal Drogo stood over her as she ate, his face as hard as a bronze
shield. His long black braid was shiny with oil. He wore gold rings
in his mustache, gold bells in his braid, and a heavy belt of solid
gold medallions around his waist, but his chest was bare. She looked
at him whenever she felt her strength failing; looked at him, and
chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, chewed and
swallowed. Toward the end, Dany thought she glimpsed a erce
pride in his dark, almond-shaped eyes, but she could not be sure.
The khal’s face did not often betray the thoughts within.
And nally it was done. Her cheeks and ngers were sticky as she
forced down the last of it. Only then did she turn her eyes back to
the old women, the crones of the dosh khaleen.
“Khalakka dothrae mr’anha!” she proclaimed in her best Dothraki.
A prince rides inside me! She had practiced the phrase for days with
her handmaid Jhiqui.
The oldest of the crones, a bent and shriveled stick of a woman
with a single black eye, raised her arms on high. “Khalakka dothrae!”
she shrieked. The prince is riding!
“He is riding!” the other women answered. “Rakh! Rakh! Rakh
haj!” they proclaimed. A boy, a boy, a strong boy.
Bells rang, a sudden clangor of bronze birds. A deep-throated
warhorn sounded its long low note. The old women began to chant.
Underneath their painted leather vests, their withered dugs swayed
back and forth, shiny with oil and sweat. The eunuchs who served
them threw bundles of dried grasses into a great bronze brazier, and
clouds of fragrant smoke rose up toward the moon and the stars.

The Dothraki believed the stars were horses made of re, a great
herd that galloped across the sky by night.
As the smoke ascended, the chanting died away and the ancient
crone closed her single eye, the better to peer into the future. The
silence that fell was complete. Dany could hear the distant call of
night birds, the hiss and crackle of the torches, the gentle lapping of
water from the lake. The Dothraki stared at her with eyes of night,
waiting.
Khal Drogo laid his hand on Dany’s arm. She could feel the
tension in his ngers. Even a khal as mighty as Drogo could know
fear when the dosh khaleen peered into smoke of the future. At her
back, her handmaids uttered anxiously.
Finally the crone opened her eye and lifted her arms. “I have seen
his face, and heard the thunder of his hooves,” she proclaimed in a
thin, wavery voice.
“The thunder of his hooves!” the others chorused.
“As swift as the wind he rides, and behind him his khalasar covers
the earth, men without number, with arakhs shining in their hands
like blades of razor grass. Fierce as a storm this prince will be. His
enemies will tremble before him, and their wives will weep tears of
blood and rend their esh in grief. The bells in his hair will sing his
coming, and the milk men in the stone tents will fear his name.”
The old woman trembled and looked at Dany almost as if she were
afraid. “The prince is riding, and he shall be the stallion who
mounts the world.”
“The stallion who mounts the world!” the onlookers cried in echo,
until the night rang to the sound of their voices.
The one-eyed crone peered at Dany. “What shall he be called, the
stallion who mounts the world?”
She stood to answer. “He shall be called Rhaego,” she said, using
the words that Jhiqui had taught her. Her hands touched the swell
beneath her breasts protectively as a roar went up from the
Dothraki. “Rhaego,” they screamed. “Rhaego, Rhaego, Rhaego!”
The name was still ringing in her ears as Khal Drogo led her from
the pit. His bloodriders fell in behind them. A procession followed
them out onto the godsway, the broad grassy road that ran through

the heart of Vaes Dothrak, from the horse gate to the Mother of
Mountains. The crones of the dosh khaleen came rst, with their
eunuchs and slaves. Some supported themselves with tall carved
sta s as they struggled along on ancient, shaking legs, while others
walked as proud as any horselord. Each of the old women had been
a khaleesi once. When their lord husbands died and a new khal took
his place at the front of his riders, with a new khaleesi mounted
beside him, they were sent here, to reign over the vast Dothraki
nation. Even the mightiest of khals bowed to the wisdom and
authority of the dosh khaleen. Still, it gave Dany the shivers to think
that one day she might be sent to join them, whether she willed it
or no.
Behind the wise women came the others; Khal Ogo and his son,
the khalakka Fogo, Khal Jommo and his wives, the chief men of
Drogo’s khalasar, Dany’s handmaids, the khal’s servants and slaves,
and more. Bells rang and drums beat a stately cadence as they
marched along the godsway. Stolen heroes and the gods of dead
peoples brooded in the darkness beyond the road. Alongside the
procession, slaves ran lightly through the grass with torches in their
hands, and the ickering ames made the great monuments seem
almost alive.
“What is meaning, name Rhaego?” Khal Drogo asked as they
walked, using the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms. She had
been teaching him a few words when she could. Drogo was quick to
learn when he put his mind to it, though his accent was so thick and
barbarous that neither Ser Jorah nor Viserys could understand a
word he said.
“My brother Rhaegar was a erce warrior, my sun-and-stars,” she
told him. “He died before I was born. Ser Jorah says that he was the
last of the dragons.”
Khal Drogo looked down at her. His face was a copper mask, yet
under the long black mustache, drooping beneath the weight of its
gold rings, she thought she glimpsed the shadow of a smile. “Is
good name, Dan Ares wife, moon of my life,” he said.
They rode to the lake the Dothraki called the Womb of the World,
surrounded by a fringe of reeds, its water still and calm. A thousand

thousand years ago, Jhiqui told her, the rst man had emerged from
its depths, riding upon the back of the rst horse.
The procession waited on the grassy shore as Dany stripped and
let her soiled clothing fall to the ground. Naked, she stepped
gingerly into the water. Irri said the lake had no bottom, but Dany
felt soft mud squishing between her toes as she pushed through the
tall reeds. The moon oated on the still black waters, shattering and
re-forming as her ripples washed over it. Goose pimples rose on her
pale skin as the coldness crept up her thighs and kissed her lower
lips. The stallion’s blood had dried on her hands and around her
mouth. Dany cupped her ngers and lifted the sacred waters over
her head, cleansing herself and the child inside her while the khal
and the others looked on. She heard the old women of the dosh
khaleen muttering to each other as they watched, and wondered
what they were saying.
When she emerged from the lake, shivering and dripping, her
handmaid Doreah hurried to her with a robe of painted sandsilk, but
Khal Drogo waved her away. He was looking on her swollen breasts
and the curve of her belly with approval, and Dany could see the
shape of his manhood pressing through his horsehide trousers,
below the heavy gold medallions of his belt. She went to him and
helped him unlace. Then her huge khal took her by the hips and
lifted her into the air, as he might lift a child. The bells in his hair
rang softly.
Dany wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her face
against his neck as he thrust himself inside her. Three quick strokes
and it was done. “The stallion who mounts the world,” Drogo
whispered hoarsely. His hands still smelled of horse blood. He bit at
her throat, hard, in the moment of his pleasure, and when he lifted
her o , his seed lled her and trickled down the inside of her
thighs. Only then was Doreah permitted to drape her in the scented
sandsilk, and Irri to t soft slippers to her feet.
Khal Drogo laced himself up and spoke a command, and horses
were brought to the lakeshore. Cohollo had the honor of helping the
khaleesi onto her silver. Drogo spurred his stallion, and set o down

the godsway beneath the moon and stars. On her silver, Dany easily
kept pace.
The silk tenting that roofed Khal Drogo’s hall had been rolled up
tonight, and the moon followed them inside. Flames leapt ten feet
in the air from three huge stone-lined repits. The air was thick
with the smells of roasting meat and curdled, fermented mare’s
milk. The hall was crowded and noisy when they entered, the
cushions packed with those whose rank and name were not
su cient to allow them at the ceremony. As Dany rode beneath the
arched entry and up the center aisle, every eye was on her. The
Dothraki screamed out comments on her belly and her breasts,
hailing the life within her. She could not understand all they
shouted, but one phrase came clear. “The stallion that mounts the
world,” she heard, bellowed in a thousand voices.
The sounds of drums and horns swirled up into the night. Halfclothed women spun and danced on the low tables, amid joints of
meat and platters piled high with plums and dates and
pomegranates. Many of the men were drunk on clotted mare’s milk,
yet Dany knew no arakhs would clash tonight, not here in the sacred
city, where blades and bloodshed were forbidden.
Khal Drogo dismounted and took his place on the high bench.
Khal Jommo and Khal Ogo, who had been in Vaes Dothrak with
their khalasars when they arrived, were given seats of high honor to
Drogo’s right and left. The bloodriders of the three khals sat below
them, and farther down Khal Jommo’s four wives.
Dany climbed o her silver and gave the reins to one of the
slaves. As Doreah and Irri arranged her cushions, she searched for
her brother. Even across the length of the crowded hall, Viserys
should have been conspicuous with his pale skin, silvery hair, and
beggar’s rags, but she did not see him anywhere.
Her glance roamed the crowded tables near the walls, where men
whose braids were even shorter than their manhoods sat on frayed
rugs and at cushions around the low tables, but all the faces she
saw had black eyes and copper skin. She spied Ser Jorah Mormont
near the center of the hall, close to the middle repit. It was a place
of respect, if not high honor; the Dothraki esteemed the knight’s

prowess with a sword. Dany sent Jhiqui to bring him to her table.
Mormont came at once, and went to one knee before her.
“Khaleesi,” he said, “I am yours to command.”
She patted the stu ed horsehide cushion beside her. “Sit and talk
with me.”
“You honor me.” The knight seated himself cross-legged on the
cushion. A slave knelt before him, o ering a wooden platter full of
ripe gs. Ser Jorah took one and bit it in half.
“Where is my brother?” Dany asked. “He ought to have come by
now, for the feast.”
“I saw His Grace this morning,” he told her. “He told me he was
going to the Western Market, in search of wine.”
“Wine?” Dany said doubtfully. Viserys could not abide the taste of
the fermented mare’s milk the Dothraki drank, she knew that, and
he was oft at the bazaars these days, drinking with the traders who
came in the great caravans from east and west. He seemed to nd
their company more congenial than hers.
“Wine,” Ser Jorah con rmed, “and he has some thought to recruit
men for his army from the sellswords who guard the caravans.” A
serving girl laid a blood pie in front of him, and he attacked it with
both hands.
“Is that wise?” she asked. “He has no gold to pay soldiers. What if
he’s betrayed?” Caravan guards were seldom troubled much by
thoughts of honor, and the Usurper in King’s Landing would pay
well for her brother’s head. “You ought to have gone with him, to
keep him safe. You are his sworn sword.”
“We are in Vaes Dothrak,” he reminded her. “No one may carry a
blade here or shed a man’s blood.”
“Yet men die,” she said. “Jhogo told me. Some of the traders have
eunuchs with them, huge men who strangle thieves with wisps of
silk. That way no blood is shed and the gods are not angered.”
“Then let us hope your brother will be wise enough not to steal
anything.” Ser Jorah wiped the grease o his mouth with the back
of his hand and leaned close over the table. “He had planned to take
your dragon’s eggs, until I warned him that I’d cut o his hand if he
so much as touched them.”

For a moment Dany was so shocked she had no words. “My
eggs … but they’re mine, Magister Illyrio gave them to me, a bride
gift, why would Viserys want … they’re only stones …”
“The same could be said of rubies and diamonds and re opals,
Princess … and dragon’s eggs are rarer by far. Those traders he’s
been drinking with would sell their own manhoods for even one of
those stones, and with all three Viserys could buy as many
sellswords as he might need.”
Dany had not known, had not even suspected. “Then … he should
have them. He does not need to steal them. He had only to ask. He
is my brother … and my true king.”
“He is your brother,” Ser Jorah acknowledged.
“You do not understand, ser,” she said. “My mother died giving
me birth, and my father and my brother Rhaegar even before that. I
would never have known so much as their names if Viserys had not
been there to tell me. He was the only one left. The only one. He is
all I have.”
“Once,” said Ser Jorah. “No longer, Khaleesi. You belong to the
Dothraki now. In your womb rides the stallion who mounts the
world.” He held out his cup, and a slave lled it with fermented
mare’s milk, sour-smelling and thick with clots.
Dany waved her away. Even the smell of it made her feel ill, and
she would take no chances of bringing up the horse heart she had
forced herself to eat. “What does it mean?” she asked. “What is this
stallion? Everyone was shouting it at me, but I don’t understand.”
“The stallion is the khal of khals promised in ancient prophecy,
child. He will unite the Dothraki into a single khalasar and ride to
the ends of the earth, or so it was promised. All the people of the
world will be his herd.”
“Oh,” Dany said in a small voice. Her hand smoothed her robe
down over the swell of her stomach. “I named him Rhaego.”
“A name to make the Usurper’s blood run cold.”
Suddenly Doreah was tugging at her elbow. “My lady,” the
handmaid whispered urgently, “your brother …”
Dany looked down the length of the long, roo ess hall and there
he was, striding toward her. From the lurch in his step, she could

tell at once that Viserys had found his wine … and something that
passed for courage.
He was wearing his scarlet silks, soiled and travel-stained. His
cloak and gloves were black velvet, faded from the sun. His boots
were dry and cracked, his silver-blond hair matted and tangled. A
longsword swung from his belt in a leather scabbard. The Dothraki
eyed the sword as he passed; Dany heard curses and threats and
angry muttering rising all around her, like a tide. The music died
away in a nervous stammering of drums.
A sense of dread closed around her heart. “Go to him,” she
commanded Ser Jorah. “Stop him. Bring him here. Tell him he can
have the dragon’s eggs if that is what he wants.” The knight rose
swiftly to his feet.
“Where is my sister?” Viserys shouted, his voice thick with wine.
“I’ve come for her feast. How dare you presume to eat without me?
No one eats before the king. Where is she? The whore can’t hide
from the dragon.”
He stopped beside the largest of the three repits, peering around
at the faces of the Dothraki. There were ve thousand men in the
hall, but only a handful who knew the Common Tongue. Yet even if
his words were incomprehensible, you had only to look at him to
know that he was drunk.
Ser Jorah went to him swiftly, whispered something in his ear,
and took him by the arm, but Viserys wrenched free. “Keep your
hands o me! No one touches the dragon without leave.”
Dany glanced anxiously up at the high bench. Khal Drogo was
saying something to the other khals beside him. Khal Jommo
grinned, and Khal Ogo began to gu aw loudly.
The sound of laughter made Viserys lift his eyes. “Khal Drogo,”
he said thickly, his voice almost polite. “I’m here for the feast.” He
staggered away from Ser Jorah, making to join the three khals on
the high bench.
Khal Drogo rose, spat out a dozen words in Dothraki, faster than
Dany could understand, and pointed. “Khal Drogo says your place is
not on the high bench,” Ser Jorah translated for her brother. “Khal
Drogo says your place is there.”

Viserys glanced where the khal was pointing. At the back of the
long hall, in a corner by the wall, deep in shadow so better men
would not need to look on them, sat the lowest of the low; raw
unblooded boys, old men with clouded eyes and sti joints, the dimwitted and the maimed. Far from the meat, and farther from honor.
“That is no place for a king,” her brother declared.
“Is place,” Khal Drogo answered, in the Common Tongue that
Dany had taught him, “for Sorefoot King.” He clapped his hands
together. “A cart! Bring cart for Khal Rhaggat!”
Five thousand Dothraki began to laugh and shout. Ser Jorah was
standing beside Viserys, screaming in his ear, but the roar in the
hall was so thunderous that Dany could not hear what he was
saying. Her brother shouted back and the two men grappled, until
Mormont knocked Viserys bodily to the oor.
Her brother drew his sword.
The bared steel shone a fearful red in the glare from the repits.
“Keep away from me!” Viserys hissed. Ser Jorah backed o a step,
and her brother climbed unsteadily to his feet. He waved the sword
over his head, the borrowed blade that Magister Illyrio had given
him to make him seem more kingly. Dothraki were shrieking at him
from all sides, screaming vile curses.
Dany gave a wordless cry of terror. She knew what a drawn
sword meant here, even if her brother did not.
Her voice made Viserys turn his head, and he saw her for the rst
time. “There she is,” he said, smiling. He stalked toward her,
slashing at the air as if to cut a path through a wall of enemies,
though no one tried to bar his way.
“The blade … you must not,” she begged him. “Please, Viserys. It
is forbidden. Put down the sword and come share my cushions.
There’s drink, food … is it the dragon’s eggs you want? You can
have them, only throw away the sword.”
“Do as she tells you, fool,” Ser Jorah shouted, “before you get us
all killed.”
Viserys laughed. “They can’t kill us. They can’t shed blood here in
the sacred city … but I can.” He laid the point of his sword between
Daenerys’s breasts and slid it downward, over the curve of her

belly. “I want what I came for,” he told her. “I want the crown he
promised me. He bought you, but he never paid for you. Tell him I
want what I bargained for, or I’m taking you back. You and the
eggs both. He can keep his bloody foal. I’ll cut the bastard out and
leave it for him.” The sword point pushed through her silks and
pricked at her navel. Viserys was weeping, she saw; weeping and
laughing, both at the same time, this man who had once been her
brother.
Distantly, as from far away, Dany heard her handmaid Jhiqui
sobbing in fear, pleading that she dared not translate, that the khal
would bind her and drag her behind his horse all the way up the
Mother of Mountains. She put her arm around the girl. “Don’t be
afraid,” she said. “I shall tell him.”
She did not know if she had enough words, yet when she was
done Khal Drogo spoke a few brusque sentences in Dothraki, and
she knew he understood. The sun of her life stepped down from the
high bench. “What did he say?” the man who had been her brother
asked her, inching.
It had grown so silent in the hall that she could hear the bells in
Khal Drogo’s hair, chiming softly with each step he took. His
bloodriders followed him, like three copper shadows. Daenerys had
gone cold all over. “He says you shall have a splendid golden crown
that men shall tremble to behold.”
Viserys smiled and lowered his sword. That was the saddest thing,
the thing that tore at her afterward … the way he smiled. “That was
all I wanted,” he said. “What was promised.”
When the sun of her life reached her, Dany slid an arm around his
waist. The khal said a word, and his bloodriders leapt forward.
Qotho seized the man who had been her brother by the arms.
Haggo shattered his wrist with a single, sharp twist of his huge
hands. Cohollo pulled the sword from his limp ngers. Even now
Viserys did not understand. “No,” he shouted, “you cannot touch
me, I am the dragon, the dragon, and I will be crowned!”
Khal Drogo unfastened his belt. The medallions were pure gold,
massive and ornate, each one as large as a man’s hand. He shouted a
command. Cook slaves pulled a heavy iron stew pot from the

repit, dumped the stew onto the ground, and returned the pot to
the ames. Drogo tossed in the belt and watched without expression
as the medallions turned red and began to lose their shape. She
could see res dancing in the onyx of his eyes. A slave handed him a
pair of thick horsehair mittens, and he pulled them on, never so
much as looking at the man.
Viserys began to scream the high, wordless scream of the coward
facing death. He kicked and twisted, whimpered like a dog and
wept like a child, but the Dothraki held him tight between them.
Ser Jorah had made his way to Dany’s side. He put a hand on her
shoulder. “Turn away, my princess, I beg you.”
“No.” She folded her arms across the swell of her belly,
protectively.
At the last, Viserys looked at her. “Sister, please … Dany, tell
them … make them … sweet sister …”
When the gold was half-melted and starting to run, Drogo
reached into the ames, snatched out the pot. “Crown!” he roared.
“Here. A crown for Cart King!” And upended the pot over the head
of the man who had been her brother.
The sound Viserys Targaryen made when that hideous iron helmet
covered his face was like nothing human. His feet hammered a
frantic beat against the dirt oor, slowed, stopped. Thick globs of
molten gold dripped down onto his chest, setting the scarlet silk to
smoldering … yet no drop of blood was spilled.
He was no dragon, Dany thought, curiously calm. Fire cannot kill a
dragon.

EDDARD

He was walking through the crypts beneath Winterfell, as he had
walked a thousand times before. The Kings of Winter watched him
pass with eyes of ice, and the direwolves at their feet turned their
great stone heads and snarled. Last of all, he came to the tomb
where his father slept, with Brandon and Lyanna beside him.
“Promise me, Ned,” Lyanna’s statue whispered. She wore a garland
of pale blue roses, and her eyes wept blood.
Eddard Stark jerked upright, his heart racing, the blankets tangled
around him. The room was black as pitch, and someone was
hammering on the door. “Lord Eddard,” a voice called loudly.
“A moment.” Groggy and naked, he stumbled his way across the
darkened chamber. When he opened the door, he found Tomard
with an upraised st, and Cayn with a taper in hand. Between them
stood the king’s own steward.
The man’s face might have been carved of stone, so little did it
show. “My lord Hand,” he intoned. “His Grace the King commands
your presence. At once.”
So Robert had returned from his hunt. It was long past time. “I
shall need a few moments to dress.” Ned left the man waiting
without. Cayn helped him with his clothes; white linen tunic and
grey cloak, trousers cut open down his plaster-sheathed leg, his
badge of o ce, and last of all a belt of heavy silver links. He
sheathed the Valyrian dagger at his waist.

The Red Keep was dark and still as Cayn and Tomard escorted
him across the inner bailey. The moon hung low over the walls,
ripening toward full. On the ramparts, a guardsman in a gold cloak
walked his rounds.
The royal apartments were in Maegor’s Holdfast, a massive
square fortress that nestled in the heart of the Red Keep behind
walls twelve feet thick and a dry moat lined with iron spikes, a
castle-within-a-castle. Ser Boros Blount guarded the far end of the
bridge, white steel armor ghostly in the moonlight. Within, Ned
passed two other knights of the Kingsguard; Ser Preston Green eld
stood at the bottom of the steps, and Ser Barristan Selmy waited at
the door of the king’s bedchamber. Three men in white cloaks, he
thought, remembering, and a strange chill went through him. Ser
Barristan’s face was as pale as his armor. Ned had only to look at
him to know that something was dreadfully wrong. The royal
steward opened the door. “Lord Eddard Stark, the Hand of the
King,” he announced.
“Bring him here,” Robert’s voice called, strangely thick.
Fires blazed in the twin hearths at either end of the bedchamber,
lling the room with a sullen red glare. The heat within was
su ocating. Robert lay across the canopied bed. At the bedside
hovered Grand Maester Pycelle, while Lord Renly paced restlessly
before the shuttered windows. Servants moved back and forth,
feeding logs to the re and boiling wine. Cersei Lannister sat on the
edge of the bed beside her husband. Her hair was tousled, as if from
sleep, but there was nothing sleepy in her eyes. They followed Ned
as Tomard and Cayn helped him cross the room. He seemed to
move very slowly, as if he were still dreaming.
The king still wore his boots. Ned could see dried mud and blades
of grass clinging to the leather where Robert’s feet stuck out
beneath the blanket that covered him. A green doublet lay on the
oor, slashed open and discarded, the cloth crusted with red-brown
stains. The room smelled of smoke and blood and death.
“Ned,” the king whispered when he saw him. His face was pale as
milk. “Come … closer.”

His men brought him close. Ned steadied himself with a hand on
the bedpost. He had only to look down at Robert to know how bad
it was. “What …?” he began, his throat clenched.
“A boar.” Lord Renly was still in his hunting greens, his cloak
spattered with blood.
“A devil,” the king husked. “My own fault. Too much wine, damn
me to hell. Missed my thrust.”
“And where were the rest of you?” Ned demanded of Lord Renly.
“Where was Ser Barristan and the Kingsguard?”
Renly’s mouth twitched. “My brother commanded us to stand
aside and let him take the boar alone.”
Eddard Stark lifted the blanket.
They had done what they could to close him up, but it was
nowhere near enough. The boar must have been a fearsome thing. It
had ripped the king from groin to nipple with its tusks. The winesoaked bandages that Grand Maester Pycelle had applied were
already black with blood, and the smell o the wound was hideous.
Ned’s stomach turned. He let the blanket fall.
“Stinks,” Robert said. “The stink of death, don’t think I can’t smell
it. Bastard did me good, eh? But I … I paid him back in kind, Ned.”
The king’s smile was as terrible as his wound, his teeth red. “Drove
a knife right through his eye. Ask them if I didn’t. Ask them.”
“Truly,” Lord Renly murmured. “We brought the carcass back
with us, at my brother’s command.”
“For the feast,” Robert whispered. “Now leave us. The lot of you.
I need to speak with Ned.”
“Robert, my sweet lord …” Cersei began.
“I said leave,” Robert insisted with a hint of his old erceness.
“What part of that don’t you understand, woman?”
Cersei gathered up her skirts and her dignity and led the way to
the door. Lord Renly and the others followed. Grand Maester
Pycelle lingered, his hands shaking as he o ered the king a cup of
thick white liquid. “The milk of the poppy, Your Grace,” he said.
“Drink. For your pain.”
Robert knocked the cup away with the back of his hand. “Away
with you. I’ll sleep soon enough, old fool. Get out.”

Grand Maester Pycelle gave Ned a stricken look as he shu ed
from the room.
“Damn you, Robert,” Ned said when they were alone. His leg was
throbbing so badly he was almost blind with pain. Or perhaps it was
grief that fogged his eyes. He lowered himself to the bed, beside his
friend. “Why do you always have to be so headstrong?”
“Ah, fuck you, Ned,” the king said hoarsely. “I killed the bastard,
didn’t I?” A lock of matted black hair fell across his eyes as he
glared up at Ned. “Ought to do the same for you. Can’t leave a man
to hunt in peace. Ser Robar found me. Gregor’s head. Ugly thought.
Never told the Hound. Let Cersei surprise him.” His laugh turned
into a grunt as a spasm of pain hit him. “Gods have mercy,” he
muttered, swallowing his agony. “The girl. Daenerys. Only a child,
you were right … that’s why, the girl … the gods sent the
boar … sent to punish me …” The king coughed, bringing up blood.
“Wrong, it was wrong, I … only a girl … Varys, Little nger, even
my brother … worthless … no one to tell me no but you,
Ned … only you …” He lifted his hand, the gesture pained and
feeble. “Paper and ink. There, on the table. Write what I tell you.”
Ned smoothed the paper out across his knee and took up the quill.
“At your command, Your Grace.”
“This is the will and word of Robert of House Baratheon, the First
of his Name, King of the Andals and all the rest—put in the damn
titles, you know how it goes. I do hereby command Eddard of
House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Hand of the King, to serve as
Lord Regent and Protector of the Realm upon my … upon my
death … to rule in my … in my stead, until my son Jo rey does
come of age …”
“Robert …” Jo rey is not your son, he wanted to say, but the
words would not come. The agony was written too plainly across
Robert’s face; he could not hurt him more. So Ned bent his head and
wrote, but where the king had said “my son Jo rey,” he scrawled
“my heir” instead. The deceit made him feel soiled. The lies we tell
for love, he thought. May the gods forgive me. “What else would you
have me say?”

“Say … whatever you need to. Protect and defend, gods old and
new, you have the words. Write. I’ll sign it. You give it to the
council when I’m dead.”
“Robert,” Ned said in a voice thick with grief, “you must not do
this. Don’t die on me. The realm needs you.”
Robert took his hand, ngers squeezing hard. “You are … such a
bad liar, Ned Stark,” he said through his pain. “The realm … the
realm knows … what a wretched king I’ve been. Bad as Aerys, the
gods spare me.”
“No,” Ned told his dying friend, “not so bad as Aerys, Your Grace.
Not near so bad as Aerys.”
Robert managed a weak red smile. “At the least, they will
say … this last thing … this I did right. You won’t fail me. You’ll
rule now. You’ll hate it, worse than I did … but you’ll do well. Are
you done with the scribbling?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Ned o ered Robert the paper. The king
scrawled his signature blindly, leaving a smear of blood across the
letter. “The seal should be witnessed.”
“Serve the boar at my funeral feast,” Robert rasped. “Apple in its
mouth, skin seared crisp. Eat the bastard. Don’t care if you choke on
him. Promise me, Ned.”
“I promise.” Promise me, Ned, Lyanna’s voice echoed.
“The girl,” the king said. “Daenerys. Let her live. If you can, if
it … not too late … talk to them … Varys, Little nger … don’t let
them kill her. And help my son, Ned. Make him be … better than
me.” He winced. “Gods have mercy.”
“They will, my friend,” Ned said. “They will.”
The king closed his eyes and seemed to relax. “Killed by a pig,”
he muttered. “Ought to laugh, but it hurts too much.”
Ned was not laughing. “Shall I call them back?”
Robert gave a weak nod. “As you will. Gods, why is it so cold in
here?”
The servants rushed back in and hurried to feed the res. The
queen had gone; that was some small relief, at least. If she had any
sense, Cersei would take her children and y before the break of
day, Ned thought. She had lingered too long already.

King Robert did not seem to miss her. He bid his brother Renly
and Grand Maester Pycelle to stand in witness as he pressed his seal
into the hot yellow wax that Ned had dripped upon his letter. “Now
give me something for the pain and let me die.”
Hurriedly Grand Maester Pycelle mixed him another draught of
the milk of the poppy. This time the king drank deeply. His black
beard was beaded with thick white droplets when he threw the
empty cup aside. “Will I dream?”
Ned gave him his answer. “You will, my lord.”
“Good,” he said, smiling. “I will give Lyanna your love, Ned.
Take care of my children for me.”
The words twisted in Ned’s belly like a knife. For a moment he
was at a loss. He could not bring himself to lie. Then he
remembered the bastards: little Barra at her mother’s breast, Mya in
the Vale, Gendry at his forge, and all the others. “I shall … guard
your children as if they were my own,” he said slowly.
Robert nodded and closed his eyes. Ned watched his old friend
sag softly into the pillows as the milk of the poppy washed the pain
from his face. Sleep took him.
Heavy chains jangled softly as Grand Maester Pycelle came up to
Ned. “I will do all in my power, my lord, but the wound has
morti ed. It took them two days to get him back. By the time I saw
him, it was too late. I can lessen His Grace’s su ering, but only the
gods can heal him now.”
“How long?” Ned asked.
“By rights, he should be dead already. I have never seen a man
cling to life so ercely.”
“My brother was always strong,” Lord Renly said. “Not wise,
perhaps, but strong.” In the sweltering heat of the bedchamber, his
brow was slick with sweat. He might have been Robert’s ghost as he
stood there, young and dark and handsome. “He slew the boar. His
entrails were sliding from his belly, yet somehow he slew the boar.”
His voice was full of wonder.
“Robert was never a man to leave the battleground so long as a
foe remained standing,” Ned told him.

Outside the door, Ser Barristan Selmy still guarded the tower
stairs. “Maester Pycelle has given Robert the milk of the poppy,”
Ned told him. “See that no one disturbs his rest without leave from
me.”
“It shall be as you command, my lord.” Ser Barristan seemed old
beyond his years. “I have failed my sacred trust.”
“Even the truest knight cannot protect a king against himself,”
Ned said. “Robert loved to hunt boar. I have seen him take a
thousand of them.” He would stand his ground without inching, his
legs braced, the great spear in his hands, and as often as not he
would curse the boar as it charged, and wait until the last possible
second, until it was almost on him, before he killed it with a single
sure and savage thrust. “No one could know this one would be his
death.”
“You are kind to say so, Lord Eddard.”
“The king himself said as much. He blamed the wine.”
The white-haired knight gave a weary nod. “His Grace was
reeling in his saddle by the time we ushed the boar from his lair,
yet he commanded us all to stand aside.”
“I wonder, Ser Barristan,” asked Varys, so quietly, “who gave the
king this wine?”
Ned had not heard the eunuch approach, but when he looked
around, there he stood. He wore a black velvet robe that brushed
the oor, and his face was freshly powdered.
“The wine was from the king’s own skin,” Ser Barristan said.
“Only one skin? Hunting is such thirsty work.”
“I did not keep count. More than one, for a certainty. His squire
would fetch him a fresh skin whenever he required it.”
“Such a dutiful boy,” said Varys, “to make certain His Grace did
not lack for refreshment.”
Ned had a bitter taste in his mouth. He recalled the two fairhaired boys Robert had sent chasing after a breastplate stretcher.
The king had told everyone the tale that night at the feast, laughing
until he shook. “Which squire?”
“The elder,” said Ser Barristan. “Lancel.”

“I know the lad well,” said Varys. “A stalwart boy, Ser Kevan
Lannister’s son, nephew to Lord Tywin and cousin to the queen. I
hope the dear sweet lad does not blame himself. Children are so
vulnerable in the innocence of their youth, how well do I
remember.”
Certainly Varys had once been young. Ned doubted that he had
ever been innocent. “You mention children. Robert had a change of
heart concerning Daenerys Targaryen. Whatever arrangements you
made, I want unmade. At once.”
“Alas,” said Varys. “At once may be too late. I fear those birds
have own. But I shall do what I can, my lord. With your leave.” He
bowed and vanished down the steps, his soft-soled slippers
whispering against the stone as he made his descent.
Cayn and Tomard were helping Ned across the bridge when Lord
Renly emerged from Maegor’s Holdfast. “Lord Eddard,” he called
after Ned, “a moment, if you would be so kind.”
Ned stopped. “As you wish.”
Renly walked to his side. “Send your men away.” They met in the
center of the bridge, the dry moat beneath them. Moonlight silvered
the cruel edges of the spikes that lined its bed.
Ned gestured. Tomard and Cayn bowed their heads and backed
away respectfully. Lord Renly glanced warily at Ser Boros on the far
end of the span, at Ser Preston in the doorway behind them. “That
letter.” He leaned close. “Was it the regency? Has my brother
named you Protector?” He did not wait for a reply. “My lord, I have
thirty men in my personal guard, and other friends beside, knights
and lords. Give me an hour, and I can put a hundred swords in your
hand.”
“And what should I do with a hundred swords, my lord?”
“Strike! Now, while the castle sleeps.” Renly looked back at Ser
Boros again and dropped his voice to an urgent whisper. “We must
get Jo rey away from his mother and take him in hand. Protector
or no, the man who holds the king holds the kingdom. We should
seize Myrcella and Tommen as well. Once we have her children,
Cersei will not dare oppose us. The council will con rm you as Lord
Protector and make Jo rey your ward.”

Ned regarded him coldly. “Robert is not dead yet. The gods may
spare him. If not, I shall convene the council to hear his nal words
and consider the matter of the succession, but I will not dishonor his
last hours on earth by shedding blood in his halls and dragging
frightened children from their beds.”
Lord Renly took a step back, taut as a bowstring. “Every moment
you delay gives Cersei another moment to prepare. By the time
Robert dies, it may be too late … for both of us.”
“Then we should pray that Robert does not die.”
“Small chance of that,” said Renly.
“Sometimes the gods are merciful.”
“The Lannisters are not.” Lord Renly turned away and went back
across the moat, to the tower where his brother lay dying.
By the time Ned returned to his chambers, he felt weary and
heartsick, yet there was no question of his going back to sleep, not
now. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die, Cersei
Lannister had told him in the godswood. He found himself
wondering if he had done the right thing by refusing Lord Renly’s
o er. He had no taste for these intrigues, and there was no honor in
threatening children, and yet … if Cersei elected to ght rather than
ee, he might well have need of Renly’s hundred swords, and more
besides.
“I want Little nger,” he told Cayn. “If he’s not in his chambers,
take as many men as you need and search every winesink and
whorehouse in King’s Landing until you nd him. Bring him to me
before break of day.” Cayn bowed and took his leave, and Ned
turned to Tomard. “The Wind Witch sails on the evening tide. Have
you chosen the escort?”
“Ten men, with Porther in command.”
“Twenty, and you will command,” Ned said. Porther was a brave
man, but headstrong. He wanted someone more solid and sensible
to keep watch over his daughters.
“As you wish, m’lord,” Tom said. “Can’t say I’ll be sad to see the
back of this place. I miss the wife.”
“You will pass near Dragonstone when you turn north. I need you
to deliver a letter for me.”

Tom looked apprehensive. “To Dragonstone, m’lord?” The island
fortress of House Targaryen had a sinister repute.
“Tell Captain Qos to hoist my banner as soon as he comes in sight
of the island. They may be wary of unexpected visitors. If he is
reluctant, o er him whatever it takes. I will give you a letter to
place into the hand of Lord Stannis Baratheon. No one else. Not his
steward, nor the captain of his guard, nor his lady wife, but only
Lord Stannis himself.”
“As you command, m’lord.”
When Tomard had left him, Lord Eddard Stark sat staring at the
ame of the candle that burned beside him on the table. For a
moment his grief overwhelmed him. He wanted nothing so much as
to seek out the godswood, to kneel before the heart tree and pray
for the life of Robert Baratheon, who had been more than a brother
to him. Men would whisper afterward that Eddard Stark had
betrayed his king’s friendship and disinherited his sons; he could
only hope that the gods would know better, and that Robert would
learn the truth of it in the land beyond the grave.
Ned took out the king’s last letter. A roll of crisp white parchment
sealed with golden wax, a few short words and a smear of blood.
How small the di erence between victory and defeat, between life
and death.
He drew out a fresh sheet of paper and dipped his quill in the
inkpot. To His Grace, Stannis of the House Baratheon, he wrote. By the
time you receive this letter, your brother Robert, our King these past
fteen years, will be dead. He was savaged by a boar whilst hunting in
the kingswood …
The letters seemed to writhe and twist on the paper as his hand
trailed to a stop. Lord Tywin and Ser Jaime were not men to su er
disgrace meekly; they would ght rather than ee. No doubt Lord
Stannis was wary, after the murder of Jon Arryn, but it was
imperative that he sail for King’s Landing at once with all his
power, before the Lannisters could march.
Ned chose each word with care. When he was done, he signed the
letter Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, Hand of the King, and Protector

of the Realm, blotted the paper, folded it twice, and melted the
sealing wax over the candle ame.
His regency would be a short one, he re ected as the wax
softened. The new king would choose his own Hand. Ned would be
free to go home. The thought of Winterfell brought a wan smile to
his face. He wanted to hear Bran’s laughter once more, to go
hawking with Robb, to watch Rickon at play. He wanted to drift o
to a dreamless sleep in his own bed with his arms wrapped tight
around his lady, Catelyn.
Cayn returned as he was pressing the direwolf seal down into the
soft white wax. Desmond was with him, and between them
Little nger. Ned thanked his guards and sent them away.
Lord Petyr was clad in a blue velvet tunic with pu ed sleeves, his
silvery cape patterned with mockingbirds. “I suppose
congratulations are in order,” he said as he seated himself.
Ned scowled. “The king lies wounded and near to death.”
“I know,” Little nger said. “I also know that Robert has named
you Protector of the Realm.”
Ned’s eyes icked to the king’s letter on the table beside him, its
seal unbroken. “And how is it you know that, my lord?”
“Varys hinted as much,” Little nger said, “and you have just
con rmed it.”
Ned’s mouth twisted in anger. “Damn Varys and his little birds.
Catelyn spoke truly, the man has some black art. I do not trust
him.”
“Excellent. You’re learning.” Little nger leaned forward. “Yet I’ll
wager you did not drag me here in the black of night to discuss the
eunuch.”
“No,” Ned admitted. “I know the secret Jon Arryn was murdered
to protect. Robert will leave no trueborn son behind him. Jo rey
and Tommen are Jaime Lannister’s bastards, born of his incestuous
union with the queen.”
Little nger lifted an eyebrow. “Shocking,” he said in a tone that
suggested he was not shocked at all. “The girl as well? No doubt. So
when the king dies …”

“The throne by rights passes to Lord Stannis, the elder of Robert’s
two brothers.”
Lord Petyr stroked his pointed beard as he considered the matter.
“So it would seem. Unless …”
“Unless, my lord? There is no seeming to this. Stannis is the heir.
Nothing can change that.”
“Stannis cannot take the throne without your help. If you’re wise,
you’ll make certain Jo rey succeeds.”
Ned gave him a stony stare. “Have you no shred of honor?”
“Oh, a shred, surely,” Little nger replied negligently. “Hear me
out. Stannis is no friend of yours, nor of mine. Even his brothers can
scarcely stomach him. The man is iron, hard and unyielding. He’ll
give us a new Hand and a new council, for a certainty. No doubt
he’ll thank you for handing him the crown, but he won’t love you
for it. And his ascent will mean war. Stannis cannot rest easy on the
throne until Cersei and her bastards are dead. Do you think Lord
Tywin will sit idly while his daughter’s head is measured for a
spike? Casterly Rock will rise, and not alone. Robert found it in him
to pardon men who served King Aerys, so long as they did him
fealty. Stannis is less forgiving. He will not have forgotten the siege
of Storm’s End, and the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne dare not. Every
man who fought beneath the dragon banner or rose with Balon
Greyjoy will have good cause to fear. Seat Stannis on the Iron
Throne and I promise you, the realm will bleed.
“Now look at the other side of the coin. Jo rey is but twelve, and
Robert gave you the regency, my lord. You are the Hand of the King
and Protector of the Realm. The power is yours, Lord Stark. All you
need do is reach out and take it. Make your peace with the
Lannisters. Release the Imp. Wed Jo rey to your Sansa. Wed your
younger girl to Prince Tommen, and your heir to Myrcella. It will
be four years before Jo rey comes of age. By then he will look to
you as a second father, and if not, well … four years is a good long
while, my lord. Long enough to dispose of Lord Stannis. Then,
should Jo rey prove troublesome, we can reveal his little secret and
put Lord Renly on the throne.”
“We?” Ned repeated.

Little nger gave a shrug. “You’ll need someone to share your
burdens. I assure you, my price would be modest.”
“Your price.” Ned’s voice was ice. “Lord Baelish, what you
suggest is treason.”
“Only if we lose.”
“You forget,” Ned told him. “You forget Jon Arryn. You forget
Jory Cassel. And you forget this.” He drew the dagger and laid it on
the table between them; a length of dragonbone and Valyrian steel,
as sharp as the di erence between right and wrong, between true
and false, between life and death. “They sent a man to cut my son’s
throat, Lord Baelish.”
Little nger sighed. “I fear I did forget, my lord. Pray forgive me.
For a moment I did not remember that I was talking to a Stark.” His
mouth quirked. “So it will be Stannis, and war?”
“It is not a choice. Stannis is the heir.”
“Far be it from me to dispute the Lord Protector. What would you
have of me, then? Not my wisdom, for a certainty.”
“I shall do my best to forget your … wisdom,” Ned said with
distaste. “I called you here to ask for the help you promised
Catelyn. This is a perilous hour for all of us. Robert has named me
Protector, true enough, but in the eyes of the world, Jo rey is still
his son and heir. The queen has a dozen knights and a hundred menat-arms who will do whatever she commands … enough to
overwhelm what remains of my own household guard. And for all I
know, her brother Jaime may be riding for King’s Landing even as
we speak, with a Lannister host at his back.”
“And you without an army.” Little nger toyed with the dagger on
the table, turning it slowly with a nger. “There is small love lost
between Lord Renly and the Lannisters. Bronze Yohn Royce, Ser
Balon Swann, Ser Loras, Lady Tanda, the Redwyne twins … each of
them has a retinue of knights and sworn swords here at court.”
“Renly has thirty men in his personal guard, the rest even fewer.
It is not enough, even if I could be certain that all of them will
choose to give me their allegiance. I must have the gold cloaks. The
City Watch is two thousand strong, sworn to defend the castle, the
city, and the king’s peace.”

“Ah, but when the queen proclaims one king and the Hand
another, whose peace do they protect?” Lord Petyr icked at the
dagger with his nger, setting it spinning in place. Round and round
it went, wobbling as it turned. When at last it slowed to a stop, the
blade pointed at Little nger. “Why, there’s your answer,” he said,
smiling. “They follow the man who pays them.” He leaned back and
looked Ned full in the face, his grey-green eyes bright with
mockery. “You wear your honor like a suit of armor, Stark. You
think it keeps you safe, but all it does is weigh you down and make
it hard for you to move. Look at you now. You know why you
summoned me here. You know what you want to ask me to do. You
know it has to be done … but it’s not honorable, so the words stick
in your throat.”
Ned’s neck was rigid with tension. For a moment he was so angry
that he did not trust himself to speak.
Little nger laughed. “I ought to make you say it, but that would
be cruel … so have no fear, my good lord. For the sake of the love I
bear for Catelyn, I will go to Janos Slynt this very hour and make
certain that the City Watch is yours. Six thousand gold pieces should
do it. A third for the Commander, a third for the o cers, a third for
the men. We might be able to buy them for half that much, but I
prefer not to take chances.” Smiling, he plucked up the dagger and
o ered it to Ned, hilt rst.

JON

Jon was breaking his fast on applecakes and blood sausage when
Samwell Tarly plopped himself down on the bench. “I’ve been
summoned to the sept,” Sam said in an excited whisper. “They’re
passing me out of training. I’m to be made a brother with the rest of
you. Can you believe it?”
“No, truly?”
“Truly. I’m to assist Maester Aemon with the library and the
birds. He needs someone who can read and write letters.”
“You’ll do well at that,” Jon said, smiling.
Sam glanced about anxiously. “Is it time to go? I shouldn’t be
late, they might change their minds.” He was fairly bouncing as
they crossed the weed-strewn courtyard. The day was warm and
sunny. Rivulets of water trickled down the sides of the Wall, so the
ice seemed to sparkle and shine.
Inside the sept, the great crystal caught the morning light as it
streamed through the south-facing window and spread it in a
rainbow on the altar. Pyp’s mouth dropped open when he caught
sight of Sam, and Toad poked Grenn in the ribs, but no one dared
say a word. Septon Celladar was swinging a censer, lling the air
with fragrant incense that reminded Jon of Lady Stark’s little sept in
Winterfell. For once the septon seemed sober.
The high o cers arrived in a body; Maester Aemon leaning on
Clydas, Ser Alliser cold-eyed and grim, Lord Commander Mormont
resplendent in a black wool doublet with silvered bearclaw

fastenings. Behind them came the senior members of the three
orders: red-faced Bowen Marsh the Lord Steward, First Builder
Othell Yarwyck, and Ser Jaremy Rykker, who commanded the
rangers in the absence of Benjen Stark.
Mormont stood before the altar, the rainbow shining on his broad
bald head. “You came to us outlaws,” he began, “poachers, rapers,
debtors, killers, and thieves. You came to us children. You came to
us alone, in chains, with neither friends nor honor. You came to us
rich, and you came to us poor. Some of you bear the names of
proud houses. Others have only bastards’ names, or no names at all.
It makes no matter. All that is past now. On the Wall, we are all one
house.
“At evenfall, as the sun sets and we face the gathering night, you
shall take your vows. From that moment, you will be a Sworn
Brother of the Night’s Watch. Your crimes will be washed away,
your debts forgiven. So too you must wash away your former
loyalties, put aside your grudges, forget old wrongs and old loves
alike. Here you begin anew.
“A man of the Night’s Watch lives his life for the realm. Not for a
king, nor a lord, nor the honor of this house or that house, neither
for gold nor glory nor a woman’s love, but for the realm, and all the
people in it. A man of the Night’s Watch takes no wife and fathers
no sons. Our wife is duty. Our mistress is honor. And you are the
only sons we shall ever know.
“You have learned the words of the vow. Think carefully before
you say them, for once you have taken the black, there is no turning
back. The penalty for desertion is death.” The Old Bear paused for a
moment before he said, “Are there any among you who wish to
leave our company? If so, go now, and no one shall think the less of
you.”
No one moved.
“Well and good,” said Mormont. “You may take your vows here
at evenfall, before Septon Celladar and the rst of your order. Do
any of you keep to the old gods?”
Jon stood. “I do, my lord.”

“I expect you will want to say your words before a heart tree, as
your uncle did,” Mormont said.
“Yes, my lord,” Jon said. The gods of the sept had nothing to do
with him; the blood of the First Men owed in the veins of the
Starks.
He heard Grenn whispering behind him. “There’s no godswood
here. Is there? I never saw a godswood.”
“You wouldn’t see a herd of aurochs until they trampled you into
the snow,” Pyp whispered back.
“I would so,” Grenn insisted. “I’d see them a long way o .”
Mormont himself con rmed Grenn’s doubts. “Castle Black has no
need of a godswood. Beyond the Wall the haunted forest stands as it
stood in the Dawn Age, long before the Andals brought the Seven
across the narrow sea. You will nd a grove of weirwoods half a
league from this spot, and mayhap your gods as well.”
“My lord.” The voice made Jon glance back in surprise. Samwell
Tarly was on his feet. The fat boy wiped his sweaty palms against
his tunic. “Might I … might I go as well? To say my words at this
heart tree?”
“Does House Tarly keep the old gods too?” Mormont asked.
“No, my lord,” Sam replied in a thin, nervous voice. The high
o cers frightened him, Jon knew, the Old Bear most of all. “I was
named in the light of the Seven at the sept on Horn Hill, as my
father was, and his father, and all the Tarlys for a thousand years.”
“Why would you forsake the gods of your father and your
House?” wondered Ser Jaremy Rykker.
“The Night’s Watch is my House now,” Sam said. “The Seven have
never answered my prayers. Perhaps the old gods will.”
“As you wish, boy,” Mormont said. Sam took his seat again, as
did Jon. “We have placed each of you in an order, as be ts our need
and your own strengths and skills.” Bowen Marsh stepped forward
and handed him a paper. The Lord Commander unrolled it and
began to read. “Halder, to the builders,” he began. Halder gave a
sti nod of approval. “Grenn, to the rangers. Albett, to the builders.
Pypar, to the rangers,” Pyp looked over at Jon and wiggled his ears.
“Samwell, to the stewards,” Sam sagged with relief, mopping at his

brow with a scrap of silk. “Matthar, to the rangers. Dareon, to the
stewards. Todder, to the rangers. Jon, to the stewards.”
The stewards! For a moment Jon could not believe what he had
heard. Mormont must have read it wrong. He started to rise, to
open his mouth, to tell them there had been a mistake … and then
he saw Ser Alliser studying him, eyes shiny as two akes of
obsidian, and he knew.
The Old Bear rolled up the paper. “Your rsts will instruct you in
your duties. May all the gods preserve you, brothers.” The Lord
Commander favored them with a half bow, and took his leave. Ser
Alliser went with him, a thin smile on his face. Jon had never seen
the master-at-arms look quite so happy.
“Rangers with me,” Ser Jaremy Rykker called when they were
gone. Pyp was staring at Jon as he got slowly to his feet. His ears
were red. Grenn, grinning broadly, did not seem to realize that
anything was amiss. Matt and Toad fell in beside them, and they
followed Ser Jaremy from the sept.
“Builders,” announced lantern-jawed Othell Yarwyck. Halder and
Albett trailed out after him.
Jon looked around him in sick disbelief. Maester Aemon’s blind
eyes were raised toward the light he could not see. The septon was
arranging crystals on the altar. Only Sam and Dareon remained on
the benches; a fat boy, a singer … and him.
Lord Steward Bowen Marsh rubbed his plump hands together.
“Samwell, you will assist Maester Aemon in the rookery and library.
Chett is going to the kennels, to help with the hounds. You shall
have his cell, so as to be close to the maester night and day. I trust
you will take good care of him. He is very old and very precious to
us.
“Dareon, I am told that you sang at many a high lord’s table and
shared their meat and mead. We are sending you to Eastwatch. It
may be your palate will be some help to Cotter Pyke when
merchant galleys come trading. We are paying too dear for salt beef
and pickled sh, and the quality of the olive oil we’re getting has
been frightful. Present yourself to Borcas when you arrive, he will
keep you busy between ships.”

Marsh turned his smile on Jon. “Lord Commander Mormont has
requested you for his personal steward, Jon. You’ll sleep in a cell
beneath his chambers, in the Lord Commander’s tower.”
“And what will my duties be?” Jon asked sharply. “Will I serve
the Lord Commander’s meals, help him fasten his clothes, fetch hot
water for his bath?”
“Certainly.” Marsh frowned at Jon’s tone. “And you will run his
messages, keep a re burning in his chambers, change his sheets
and blankets daily, and do all else that the Lord Commander might
require of you.”
“Do you take me for a servant?”
“No,” Maester Aemon said, from the back of the sept. Clydas
helped him stand. “We took you for a man of Night’s Watch … but
perhaps we were wrong in that.”
It was all Jon could do to stop himself from walking out. Was he
supposed to churn butter and sew doublets like a girl for the rest of
his days? “May I go?” he asked sti y.
“As you wish,” Bowen Marsh responded.
Dareon and Sam left with him. They descended to the yard in
silence. Outside, Jon looked up at the Wall shining in the sun, the
melting ice creeping down its side in a hundred thin ngers. Jon’s
rage was such that he would have smashed it all in an instant, and
the world be damned.
“Jon,” Samwell Tarly said excitedly. “Wait. Don’t you see what
they’re doing?”
Jon turned on him in a fury. “I see Ser Alliser’s bloody hand,
that’s all I see. He wanted to shame me, and he has.”
Dareon gave him a look. “The stewards are ne for the likes of
you and me, Sam, but not for Lord Snow.”
“I’m a better swordsman and a better rider than any of you,” Jon
blazed back. “It’s not fair.”
“Fair?” Dareon sneered. “The girl was waiting for me, naked as
the day she was born. She pulled me through the window, and you
talk to me of fair?” He walked o .
“There is no shame in being a steward,” Sam said.

“Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life washing an old
man’s smallclothes?”
“The old man is Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch,” Sam
reminded him. “You’ll be with him day and night. Yes, you’ll pour
his wine and see that his bed linen is fresh, but you’ll also take his
letters, attend him at meetings, squire for him in battle. You’ll be as
close to him as his shadow. You’ll know everything, be a part of
everything … and the Lord Steward said Mormont asked for you
himself!
“When I was little, my father used to insist that I attend him in
the audience chamber whenever he held court. When he rode to
Highgarden to bend his knee to Lord Tyrell, he made me come.
Later, though, he started to take Dickon and leave me at home, and
he no longer cared whether I sat through his audiences, so long as
Dickon was there. He wanted his heir at his side, don’t you see? To
watch and listen and learn from all he did. I’ll wager that’s why
Lord Mormont requested you, Jon. What else could it be? He wants
to groom you for command!”
Jon was taken aback. It was true, Lord Eddard had often made
Robb part of his councils back at Winterfell. Could Sam be right?
Even a bastard could rise high in the Night’s Watch, they said. “I
never asked for this,” he said stubbornly.
“None of us are here for asking,” Sam reminded him.
And suddenly Jon Snow was ashamed.
Craven or not, Samwell Tarly had found the courage to accept his
fate like a man. On the Wall, a man gets only what he earns, Benjen
Stark had said the last night Jon had seen him alive. You’re no
ranger, Jon, only a green boy with the smell of summer still on you.
He’d heard it said that bastards grow up faster than other children;
on the Wall, you grew up or you died.
Jon let out a deep sigh. “You have the right of it. I was acting the
boy.”
“Then you’ll stay and say your words with me?”
“The old gods will be expecting us.” He made himself smile.
They set out late that afternoon. The Wall had no gates as such,
neither here at Castle Black nor anywhere along its three hundred

miles. They led their horses down a narrow tunnel cut through the
ice, cold dark walls pressing in around them as the passage twisted
and turned. Three times their way was blocked by iron bars, and
they had to stop while Bowen Marsh drew out his keys and
unlocked the massive chains that secured them. Jon could sense the
vast weight pressing down on him as he waited behind the Lord
Steward. The air was colder than a tomb, and more still. He felt a
strange relief when they reemerged into the afternoon light on the
north side of the Wall.
Sam blinked at the sudden glare and looked around
apprehensively. “The Wildlings … they wouldn’t … they’d never
dare come this close to the Wall. Would they?”
“They never have.” Jon climbed into his saddle. When Bowen
Marsh and their ranger escort had mounted, Jon put two ngers in
his mouth and whistled. Ghost came loping out of the tunnel.
The Lord Steward’s garron whickered and backed away from the
direwolf. “Do you mean to take that beast?”
“Yes, my lord,” Jon said. Ghost’s head lifted. He seemed to taste
the air. In the blink of an eye he was o , racing across the broad,
weed-choked eld to vanish in the trees.
Once they had entered the forest, they were in a di erent world.
Jon had often hunted with his father and Jory and his brother Robb.
He knew the wolfswood around Winterfell as well as any man. The
haunted forest was much the same, and yet the feel of it was very
di erent.
Perhaps it was all in the knowing. They had ridden past the end
of the world; somehow that changed everything. Every shadow
seemed darker, every sound more ominous. The trees pressed close
and shut out the light of the setting sun. A thin crust of snow
cracked beneath the hooves of their horses, with a sound like
breaking bones. When the wind set the leaves to rustling, it was like
a chilly nger tracing a path up Jon’s spine. The Wall was at their
backs, and only the gods knew what lay ahead.
The sun was sinking below the trees when they reached their
destination, a small clearing in the deep of the wood where nine
weirwoods grew in a rough circle. Jon drew in a breath, and he saw

Sam Tarly staring. Even in the wolfswood, you never found more
than two or three of the white trees growing together; a grove of
nine was unheard of. The forest oor was carpeted with fallen
leaves, bloodred on top, black rot beneath. The wide smooth trunks
were bone pale, and nine faces stared inward. The dried sap that
crusted in the eyes was red and hard as ruby. Bowen Marsh
commanded them to leave their horses outside the circle. “This is a
sacred place, we will not de le it.”
When they entered the grove, Samwell Tarly turned slowly
looking at each face in turn. No two were quite alike. “They’re
watching us,” he whispered. “The old gods.”
“Yes.” Jon knelt, and Sam knelt beside him.
They said the words together, as the last light faded in the west
and grey day became black night.
“Hear my words, and bear witness to my vow,” they recited, their
voices lling the twilit grove. “Night gathers, and now my watch
begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no
lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I
shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am
the watcher on the walls. I am the re that burns against the cold,
the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the
shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to
the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”
The woods fell silent. “You knelt as boys,” Bowen Marsh intoned
solemnly. “Rise now as men of the Night’s Watch.”
Jon held out a hand to pull Sam back to his feet. The rangers
gathered round to o er smiles and congratulations, all but the
gnarled old forester Dywen. “Best we be starting back, m’lord,” he
said to Bowen Marsh. “Dark’s falling, and there’s something in the
smell o’ the night that I mislike.”
And suddenly Ghost was back, stalking softly between two
weirwoods. White fur and red eyes, Jon realized, disquieted. Like the
trees …
The wolf had something in his jaws. Something black. “What’s he
got there?” asked Bowen Marsh, frowning.
“To me, Ghost.” Jon knelt. “Bring it here.”

The direwolf trotted to him. Jon heard Samwell Tarly’s sharp
intake of breath.
“Gods be good,” Dywen muttered. “That’s a hand.”

EDDARD

The grey light of dawn was streaming through his window when the
thunder of hoofbeats awoke Eddard Stark from his brief, exhausted
sleep. He lifted his head from the table to look down into the yard.
Below, men in mail and leather and crimson cloaks were making the
morning ring to the sound of swords, and riding down mock
warriors stu ed with straw. Ned watched Sandor Clegane gallop
across the hard-packed ground to drive an iron-tipped lance through
a dummy’s head. Canvas ripped and straw exploded as Lannister
guardsmen joked and cursed.
Is this brave show for my bene t, he wondered. If so, Cersei was a
greater fool than he’d imagined. Damn her, he thought, why is the
woman not ed? I have given her chance after chance …
The morning was overcast and grim. Ned broke his fast with his
daughters and Septa Mordane. Sansa, still disconsolate, stared
sullenly at her food and refused to eat, but Arya wolfed down
everything that was set in front of her. “Syrio says we have time for
one last lesson before we take ship this evening,” she said. “Can I,
Father? All my things are packed.”
“A short lesson, and make certain you leave yourself time to
bathe and change. I want you ready to leave by midday, is that
understood?”
“By midday,” Arya said.
Sansa looked up from her food. “If she can have a dancing lesson,
why won’t you let me say farewell to Prince Jo rey?”

“I would gladly go with her, Lord Eddard,” Septa Mordane
o ered. “There would be no question of her missing the ship.”
“It would not be wise for you to go to Jo rey right now, Sansa.
I’m sorry.”
Sansa’s eyes lled with tears. “But why?”
“Sansa, your lord father knows best,” Septa Mordane said. “You
are not to question his decisions.”
“It’s not fair!” Sansa pushed back from her table, knocked over
her chair, and ran weeping from the solar.
Septa Mordane rose, but Ned gestured her back to her seat. “Let
her go, Septa. I will try to make her understand when we are all
safely back in Winterfell.” The septa bowed her head and sat down
to nish her breakfast.
It was an hour later when Grand Maester Pycelle came to Eddard
Stark in his solar. His shoulders slumped, as if the weight of the
great maester’s chain around his neck had become too great to bear.
“My lord,” he said, “King Robert is gone. The gods give him rest.”
“No,” Ned answered. “He hated rest. The gods give him love and
laughter, and the joy of righteous battle.” It was strange how empty
he felt. He had been expecting the visit, and yet with those words,
something died within him. He would have given all his titles for
the freedom to weep … but he was Robert’s Hand, and the hour he
dreaded had come. “Be so good as to summon the members of the
council here to my solar,” he told Pycelle. The Tower of the Hand
was as secure as he and Tomard could make it; he could not say the
same for the council chambers.
“My lord?” Pycelle blinked. “Surely the a airs of the kingdom
will keep till the morrow, when our grief is not so fresh.”
Ned was quiet but rm. “I fear we must convene at once.”
Pycelle bowed. “As the Hand commands.” He called his servants
and sent them running, then gratefully accepted Ned’s o er of a
chair and a cup of sweet beer.
Ser Barristan Selmy was the rst to answer the summons,
immaculate in white cloak and enameled scales. “My lords,” he said,
“my place is beside the young king now. Pray give me leave to
attend him.”

“Your place is here, Ser Barristan,” Ned told him.
Little nger came next, still garbed in the blue velvets and silver
mockingbird cape he had worn the night previous, his boots dusty
from riding. “My lords,” he said, smiling at nothing in particular
before he turned to Ned. “That little task you set me is
accomplished, Lord Eddard.”
Varys entered in a wash of lavender, pink from his bath, his
plump face scrubbed and freshly powdered, his soft slippers all but
soundless. “The little birds sing a grievous song today,” he said as
he seated himself. “The realm weeps. Shall we begin?”
“When Lord Renly arrives,” Ned said.
Varys gave him a sorrowful look. “I fear Lord Renly has left the
city.”
“Left the city?” Ned had counted on Renly’s support.
“He took his leave through a postern gate an hour before dawn,
accompanied by Ser Loras Tyrell and some fty retainers,” Varys
told them. “When last seen, they were galloping south in some
haste, no doubt bound for Storm’s End or Highgarden.”
So much for Renly and his hundred swords. Ned did not like the
smell of that, but there was nothing to be done for it. He drew out
Robert’s last letter. “The king called me to his side last night and
commanded me to record his nal words. Lord Renly and Grand
Maester Pycelle stood witness as Robert sealed the letter, to be
opened by the council after his death. Ser Barristan, if you would be
so kind?”
The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard examined the paper.
“King Robert’s seal, and unbroken.” He opened the letter and read.
“Lord Eddard Stark is herein named Protector of the Realm, to rule
as regent until the heir comes of age.”
And as it happens, he is of age, Ned re ected, but he did not give
voice to the thought. He trusted neither Pycelle nor Varys, and Ser
Barristan was honor-bound to protect and defend the boy he
thought his new king. The old knight would not abandon Jo rey
easily. The need for deceit was a bitter taste in his mouth, but Ned
knew he must tread softly here, must keep his counsel and play the
game until he was rmly established as regent. There would be

time enough to deal with the succession when Arya and Sansa were
safely back in Winterfell, and Lord Stannis had returned to King’s
Landing with all his power.
“I would ask this council to con rm me as Lord Protector, as
Robert wished,” Ned said, watching their faces, wondering what
thoughts hid behind Pycelle’s half-closed eyes, Little nger’s lazy
half-smile, and the nervous utter of Varys’s ngers.
The door opened. Fat Tom stepped into the solar. “Pardon, my
lords, the king’s steward insists …”
The royal steward entered and bowed. “Esteemed lords, the king
demands the immediate presence of his small council in the throne
room.”
Ned had expected Cersei to strike quickly; the summons came as
no surprise. “The king is dead,” he said, “but we shall go with you
nonetheless. Tom, assemble an escort, if you would.”
Little nger gave Ned his arm to help him down the steps. Varys,
Pycelle, and Ser Barristan followed close behind. A double column
of men-at-arms in chainmail and steel helms was waiting outside the
tower, eight strong. Grey cloaks snapped in the wind as the
guardsmen marched them across the yard. There was no Lannister
crimson to be seen, but Ned was reassured by the number of gold
cloaks visible on the ramparts and at the gates.
Janos Slynt met them at the door to the throne room, armored in
ornate black-and-gold plate, with a high-crested helm under one
arm. The Commander bowed sti y. His men pushed open the great
oaken doors, twenty feet tall and banded with bronze.
The royal steward led them in. “All hail His Grace, Jo rey of the
Houses Baratheon and Lannister, the First of his Name, King of the
Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven
Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm,” he sang out.
It was a long walk to the far end of the hall, where Jo rey waited
atop the Iron Throne. Supported by Little nger, Ned Stark slowly
limped and hopped toward the boy who called himself king. The
others followed. The rst time he had come this way, he had been
on horseback, sword in hand, and the Targaryen dragons had

watched from the walls as he forced Jaime Lannister down from the
throne. He wondered if Jo rey would step down quite so easily.
Five knights of the Kingsguard—all but Ser Jaime and Ser
Barristan—were arrayed in a crescent around the base of the throne.
They were in full armor, enameled steel from helm to heel, long
pale cloaks over their shoulders, shining white shields strapped to
their left arms. Cersei Lannister and her two younger children stood
behind Ser Boros and Ser Meryn. The queen wore a gown of seagreen silk, trimmed with Myrish lace as pale as foam. On her nger
was a golden ring with an emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg, on her
head a matching tiara.
Above them, Prince Jo rey sat amidst the barbs and spikes in a
cloth-of-gold doublet and a red satin cape. Sandor Clegane was
stationed at the foot of the throne’s steep narrow stair. He wore
mail and soot-grey plate and his snarling dog’s-head helm.
Behind the throne, twenty Lannister guardsmen waited with
longswords hanging from their belts. Crimson cloaks draped their
shoulders and steel lions crested their helms. But Little nger had
kept his promise; all along the walls, in front of Robert’s tapestries
with their scenes of hunt and battle, the gold-cloaked ranks of the
City Watch stood sti y to attention, each man’s hand clasped
around the haft of an eight-foot-long spear tipped in black iron.
They outnumbered the Lannisters ve to one.
Ned’s leg was a blaze of pain by the time he stopped. He kept a
hand on Little nger’s shoulder to help support his weight.
Jo rey stood. His red satin cape was patterned in gold thread;
fty roaring lions to one side, fty prancing stags to the other. “I
command the council to make all the necessary arrangements for
my coronation,” the boy proclaimed. “I wish to be crowned within
the fortnight. Today I shall accept oaths of fealty from my loyal
councillors.”
Ned produced Robert’s letter. “Lord Varys, be so kind as to show
this to my lady of Lannister.”
The eunuch carried the letter to Cersei. The queen glanced at the
words. “Protector of the Realm,” she read. “Is this meant to be your

shield, my lord? A piece of paper?” She ripped the letter in half,
ripped the halves in quarters, and let the pieces utter to the oor.
“Those were the king’s words,” Ser Barristan said, shocked.
“We have a new king now,” Cersei Lannister replied. “Lord
Eddard, when last we spoke, you gave me some counsel. Allow me
to return the courtesy. Bend the knee, my lord. Bend the knee and
swear fealty to my son, and we shall allow you to step down as
Hand and live out your days in the grey waste you call home.”
“Would that I could,” Ned said grimly. If she was so determined
to force the issue here and now, she left him no choice. “Your son
has no claim to the throne he sits. Lord Stannis is Robert’s true
heir.”
“Liar!” Jo rey screamed, his face reddening.
“Mother, what does he mean?” Princess Myrcella asked the queen
plaintively. “Isn’t Jo the king now?”
“You condemn yourself with your own mouth, Lord Stark,” said
Cersei Lannister. “Ser Barristan, seize this traitor.”
The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard hesitated. In the blink of
an eye he was surrounded by Stark guardsmen, bare steel in their
mailed sts.
“And now the treason moves from words to deeds,” Cersei said.
“Do you think Ser Barristan stands alone, my lord?” With an
ominous rasp of metal on metal, the Hound drew his longsword.
The knights of the Kingsguard and twenty Lannister guardsmen in
crimson cloaks moved to support him.
“Kill him!” the boy king screamed down from the Iron Throne.
“Kill all of them, I command it!”
“You leave me no choice,” Ned told Cersei Lannister. He called
out to Janos Slynt. “Commander, take the queen and her children
into custody. Do them no harm, but escort them back to the royal
apartments and keep them there, under guard.”
“Men of the Watch!” Janos Slynt shouted, donning his helm. A
hundred gold cloaks leveled their spears and closed.
“I want no bloodshed,” Ned told the queen. “Tell your men to lay
down their swords, and no one need—”

With a single sharp thrust, the nearest gold cloak drove his spear
into Tomard’s back. Fat Tom’s blade dropped from nerveless ngers
as the wet red point burst out through his ribs, piercing leather and
mail. He was dead before his sword hit the oor.
Ned’s shout came far too late. Janos Slynt himself slashed open
Varly’s throat. Cayn whirled, steel ashing, drove back the nearest
spearman with a urry of blows; for an instant it looked as though
he might cut his way free. Then the Hound was on him. Sandor
Clegane’s rst cut took o Cayn’s sword hand at the wrist; his
second drove him to his knees and opened him from shoulder to
breastbone.
As his men died around him, Little nger slid Ned’s dagger from
its sheath and shoved it up under his chin. His smile was apologetic.
“I did warn you not to trust me, you know.”

ARYA

“High,” Syrio Forel called out, slashing at her head. The stick
swords clacked as Arya parried. “Left,” he shouted, and his blade
came whistling. Hers darted to meet it. The clack made him click his
teeth together.
“Right,” he said, and “Low,” and “Left,” and “Left” again, faster
and faster, moving forward. Arya retreated before him, checking
each blow.
“Lunge,” he warned, and when he thrust she sidestepped, swept
his blade away, and slashed at his shoulder. She almost touched
him, almost, so close it made her grin. A strand of hair dangled in
her eyes, limp with sweat. She pushed it away with the back of her
hand.
“Left,” Syrio sang out. “Low.” His sword was a blur, and the
Small Hall echoed to the clack clack clack. “Left. Left. High. Left.
Right. Left. Low. Left!”
The wooden blade caught her high in the breast, a sudden
stinging blow that hurt all the more because it came from the
wrong side. “Ow,” she cried out. She would have a fresh bruise
there by the time she went to sleep, somewhere out at sea. A bruise
is a lesson, she told herself, and each lesson makes us better.
Syrio stepped back. “You are dead now.”
Arya made a face. “You cheated,” she said hotly. “You said left
and you went right.”
“Just so. And now you are a dead girl.”

“But you lied!”
“My words lied. My eyes and my arm shouted out the truth, but
you were not seeing.”
“I was so,” Arya said. “I watched you every second!”
“Watching is not seeing, dead girl. The water dancer sees. Come,
put down the sword, it is time for listening now.”
She followed him over to the wall, where he settled onto a bench.
“Syrio Forel was rst sword to the Sealord of Braavos, and are you
knowing how that came to pass?”
“You were the nest swordsman in the city.”
“Just so, but why? Other men were stronger, faster, younger,
why was Syrio Forel the best? I will tell you now.” He touched the
tip of his little nger lightly to his eyelid. “The seeing, the true
seeing, that is the heart of it.
“Hear me. The ships of Braavos sail as far as the winds blow, to
lands strange and wonderful, and when they return their captains
fetch queer animals to the Sealord’s menagerie. Such animals as you
have never seen, striped horses, great spotted things with necks as
long as stilts, hairy mouse-pigs as big as cows, stinging manticores,
tigers that carry their cubs in a pouch, terrible walking lizards with
scythes for claws. Syrio Forel has seen these things.
“On the day I am speaking of, the rst sword was newly dead,
and the Sealord sent for me. Many bravos had come to him, and as
many had been sent away, none could say why. When I came into
his presence, he was seated, and in his lap was a fat yellow cat. He
told me that one of his captains had brought the beast to him, from
an island beyond the sunrise. ‘Have you ever seen her like?’ he
asked of me.
“And to him I said, ‘Each night in the alleys of Braavos I see a
thousand like him,’ and the Sealord laughed, and that day I was
named the rst sword.”
Arya screwed up her face. “I don’t understand.”
Syrio clicked his teeth together. “The cat was an ordinary cat, no
more. The others expected a fabulous beast, so that is what they
saw. How large it was, they said. It was no larger than any other
cat, only fat from indolence, for the Sealord fed it from his own

table. What curious small ears, they said. Its ears had been chewed
away in kitten ghts. And it was plainly a tomcat, yet the Sealord
said ‘her,’ and that is what the others saw. Are you hearing?”
Arya thought about it. “You saw what was there.”
“Just so. Opening your eyes is all that is needing. The heart lies
and the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true. Look with
your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with
your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward,
and in that way knowing the truth.”
“Just so,” said Arya, grinning.
Syrio Forel allowed himself a smile. “I am thinking that when we
are reaching this Winterfell of yours, it will be time to put this
needle in your hand.”
“Yes!” Arya said eagerly. “Wait till I show Jon—”
Behind her the great wooden doors of the Small Hall ew open
with a resounding crash. Arya whirled.
A knight of the Kingsguard stood beneath the arch of the door
with ve Lannister guardsmen arrayed behind him. He was in full
armor, but his visor was up. Arya remembered his droopy eyes and
rust-colored whiskers from when he had come to Winterfell with
the king: Ser Meryn Trant. The red cloaks wore mail shirts over
boiled leather and steel caps with lion crests. “Arya Stark,” the
knight said, “come with us, child.”
Arya chewed her lip uncertainly. “What do you want?”
“Your father wants to see you.”
Arya took a step forward, but Syrio Forel held her by the arm.
“And why is it that Lord Eddard is sending Lannister men in the
place of his own? I am wondering.”
“Mind your place, dancing master,” Ser Meryn said. “This is no
concern of yours.”
“My father wouldn’t send you,” Arya said. She snatched up her
stick sword. The Lannisters laughed.
“Put down the stick, girl,” Ser Meryn told her. “I am a Sworn
Brother of the Kingsguard, the White Swords.”
“So was the Kingslayer when he killed the old king,” Arya said. “I
don’t have to go with you if I don’t want.”

Ser Meryn Trant ran out of patience. “Take her,” he said to his
men. He lowered the visor of his helm.
Three of them started forward, chainmail clinking softly with
each step. Arya was suddenly afraid. Fear cuts deeper than swords,
she told herself, to slow the racing of her heart.
Syrio Forel stepped between them, tapping his wooden sword
lightly against his boot. “You will be stopping there. Are you men
or dogs that you would threaten a child?”
“Out of the way, old man,” one of the red cloaks said.
Syrio’s stick came whistling up and rang against his helm. “I am
Syrio Forel, and you will now be speaking to me with more
respect.”
“Bald bastard.” The man yanked free his longsword. The stick
moved again, blindingly fast. Arya heard a loud crack as the sword
went clattering to the stone oor. “My hand,” the guardsman
yelped, cradling his broken ngers.
“You are quick, for a dancing master,” said Ser Meryn.
“You are slow, for a knight,” Syrio replied.
“Kill the Braavosi and bring me the girl,” the knight in the white
armor commanded.
Four Lannister guardsmen unsheathed their swords. The fth,
with the broken ngers, spat and pulled free a dagger with his left
hand.
Syrio Forel clicked his teeth together, sliding into his water
dancer’s stance, presenting only his side to the foe. “Arya child,” he
called out, never looking, never taking his eyes o the Lannisters,
“we are done with dancing for the day. Best you are going now.
Run to your father.”
Arya did not want to leave him, but he had taught her to do as he
said. “Swift as a deer,” she whispered.
“Just so,” said Syrio Forel as the Lannisters closed.
Arya retreated, her own sword stick clutched tightly in her hand.
Watching him now, she realized that Syrio had only been toying
with her when they dueled. The red cloaks came at him from three
sides with steel in their hands. They had chainmail over their chest
and arms, and steel codpieces sewn into their pants, but only leather

on their legs. Their hands were bare, and the caps they wore had
noseguards, but no visor over the eyes.
Syrio did not wait for them to reach him, but spun to his left.
Arya had never seen a man move as fast. He checked one sword
with his stick and whirled away from a second. O balance, the
second man lurched into the rst. Syrio put a boot to his back and
the red cloaks went down together. The third guard came leaping
over them, slashing at the water dancer’s head. Syrio ducked under
his blade and thrust upward. The guardsman fell screaming as blood
welled from the wet red hole where his left eye had been.
The fallen men were getting up. Syrio kicked one in the face and
snatched the steel cap o the other’s head. The dagger man stabbed
at him. Syrio caught the thrust in the helmet and shattered the
man’s kneecap with his stick. The last red cloak shouted a curse and
charged, hacking down with both hands on his sword. Syrio rolled
right, and the butcher’s cut caught the helmetless man between neck
and shoulder as he struggled to his knees. The longsword crunched
through mail and leather and esh. The man on his knees shrieked.
Before his killer could wrench free his blade, Syrio jabbed him in
the apple of his throat. The guardsman gave a choked cry and
staggered back, clutching at his neck, his face blackening.
Five men were down, dead, or dying by the time Arya reached
the back door that opened on the kitchen. She heard Ser Meryn
Trant curse. “Bloody oafs,” he swore, drawing his longsword from
its scabbard.
Syrio Forel resumed his stance and clicked his teeth together.
“Arya child,” he called out, never looking at her, “be gone now.”
Look with your eyes, he had said. She saw: the knight in his pale
armor head to foot, legs, throat, and hands sheathed in metal, eyes
hidden behind his high white helm, and in his hand cruel steel.
Against that: Syrio, in a leather vest, with a wooden sword in his
hand. “Syrio, run,” she screamed.
“The rst sword of Braavos does not run,” he sang as Ser Meryn
slashed at him. Syrio danced away from his cut, his stick a blur. In a
heartbeat, he had bounced blows o the knight’s temple, elbow, and
throat, the wood ringing against the metal of helm, gauntlet, and

gorget. Arya stood frozen. Ser Meryn advanced; Syrio backed away.
He checked the next blow, spun away from the second, de ected
the third.
The fourth sliced his stick in two, splintering the wood and
shearing through the lead core.
Sobbing, Arya spun and ran.
She plunged through the kitchens and buttery, blind with panic,
weaving between cooks and potboys. A baker’s helper stepped in
front of her, holding a wooden tray. Arya bowled her over,
scattering fragrant loaves of fresh-baked bread on the oor. She
heard shouting behind her as she spun around a portly butcher who
stood gaping at her with a cleaver in his hands. His arms were red
to the elbow.
All that Syrio Forel had taught her went racing through her head.
Swift as a deer. Quiet as a shadow. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Quick
as a snake. Calm as still water. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Strong as a
bear. Fierce as a wolverine. Fear cuts deeper than swords. The man who
fears losing has already lost. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fear cuts
deeper than swords. Fear cuts deeper than swords. The grip of her
wooden sword was slick with sweat, and Arya was breathing hard
when she reached the turret stair. For an instant she froze. Up or
down? Up would take her to the covered bridge that spanned the
small court to the Tower of the Hand, but that would be the way
they’d expect her to go, for certain. Never do what they expect, Syrio
once said. Arya went down, around and around, leaping over the
narrow stone steps two and three at a time. She emerged in a
cavernous vaulted cellar, surrounded by casks of ale stacked twenty
feet tall. The only light came through narrow slanting windows high
in the wall.
The cellar was a dead end. There was no way out but the way she
had come in. She dare not go back up those steps, but she couldn’t
stay here, either. She had to nd her father and tell him what had
happened. Her father would protect her.
Arya thrust her wooden sword through her belt and began to
climb, leaping from cask to cask until she could reach the window.
Grasping the stone with both hands, she pulled herself up. The wall

was three feet thick, the window a tunnel slanting up and out. Arya
wriggled toward daylight. When her head reached ground level, she
peered across the bailey to the Tower of the Hand.
The stout wooden door hung splintered and broken, as if by axes.
A dead man sprawled facedown on the steps, his cloak tangled
beneath him, the back of his mailed shirt soaked red. The corpse’s
cloak was grey wool trimmed with white satin, she saw with sudden
terror. She could not tell who he was.
“No,” she whispered. What was happening? Where was her
father? Why had the red cloaks come for her? She remembered
what the man with the yellow beard had said, the day she had
found the monsters. If one Hand can die, why not a second? Arya felt
tears in her eyes. She held her breath to listen. She heard the sounds
of ghting, shouts, screams, the clang of steel on steel, coming
through the windows of the Tower of the Hand.
She could not go back. Her father …
Arya closed her eyes. For a moment she was too frightened to
move. They had killed Jory and Wyl and Heward, and that
guardsman on the step, whoever he had been. They could kill her
father too, and her if they caught her. “Fear cuts deeper than swords,”
she said aloud, but it was no good pretending to be a water dancer,
Syrio had been a water dancer and the white knight had probably
killed him, and anyhow she was only a little girl with a wooden
stick, alone and afraid.
She squirmed out into the yard, glancing around warily as she
climbed to her feet. The castle seemed deserted. The Red Keep was
never deserted. All the people must be hiding inside, their doors
barred. Arya glanced up longingly at her bedchamber, then moved
away from the Tower of the Hand, keeping close to the wall as she
slid from shadow to shadow. She pretended she was chasing
cats … except she was the cat now, and if they caught her, they
would kill her.
Moving between buildings and over walls, keeping stone to her
back wherever possible so no one could surprise her, Arya reached
the stables almost without incident. A dozen gold cloaks in mail and
plate ran past as she was edging across the inner bailey, but without

knowing whose side they were on, she hunched down low in the
shadows and let them pass.
Hullen, who had been master of horse at Winterfell as long as
Arya could remember, was slumped on the ground by the stable
door. He had been stabbed so many times it looked as if his tunic
was patterned with scarlet owers. Arya was certain he was dead,
but when she crept closer, his eyes opened. “Arya Underfoot,” he
whispered. “You must … warn your … your lord father …” Frothy
red spittle bubbled from his mouth. The master of horse closed his
eyes again and said no more.
Inside were more bodies; a groom she had played with, and three
of her father’s household guard. A wagon, laden with crates and
chests, stood abandoned near the door of the stable. The dead men
must have been loading it for the trip to the docks when they were
attacked. Arya snuck closer. One of the corpses was Desmond,
who’d shown her his longsword and promised to protect her father.
He lay on his back, staring blindly at the ceiling as ies crawled
across his eyes. Close to him was a dead man in the red cloak and
lion-crest helm of the Lannisters. Only one, though. Every northerner
is worth ten of these southron swords, Desmond had told her. “You
liar!” she said, kicking his body in a sudden fury.
The animals were restless in their stalls, whickering and snorting
at the scent of blood. Arya’s only plan was to saddle a horse and
ee, away from the castle and the city. All she had to do was stay
on the kingsroad and it would take her back to Winterfell. She took
a bridle and harness o the wall.
As she crossed in back of the wagon, a fallen chest caught her
eye. It must have been knocked down in the ght or dropped as it
was being loaded. The wood had split, the lid opening to spill the
chest’s contents across the ground. Arya recognized silks and satins
and velvets she never wore. She might need warm clothes on the
kingsroad, though … and besides …
Arya knelt in the dirt among the scattered clothes. She found a
heavy woolen cloak, a velvet skirt and a silk tunic and some
smallclothes, a dress her mother had embroidered for her, a silver
baby bracelet she might sell. Shoving the broken lid out of the way,

she groped inside the chest for Needle. She had hidden it way down
at the bottom, under everything, but her stu had all been jumbled
around when the chest was dropped. For a moment Arya was afraid
someone had found the sword and stolen it. Then her ngers felt
the hardness of metal under a satin gown.
“There she is,” a voice hissed close behind her.
Startled, Arya whirled. A stableboy stood behind her, a smirk on
his face, his lthy white undertunic peeking out from beneath a
soiled jerkin. His boots were covered with manure, and he had a
pitchfork in one hand. “Who are you?” she asked.
“She don’t know me,” he said, “but I knows her, oh, yes. The wolf
girl.”
“Help me saddle a horse,” Arya pleaded, reaching back into the
chest, groping for Needle. “My father’s the Hand of the King, he’ll
reward you.”
“Father’s dead,” the boy said. He shu ed toward her. “It’s the
queen who’ll be rewarding me. Come here, girl.”
“Stay away!” Her ngers closed around Needle’s hilt.
“I says, come.” He grabbed her arm, hard.
Everything Syrio Forel had ever taught her vanished in a
heartbeat. In that instant of sudden terror, the only lesson Arya
could remember was the one Jon Snow had given her, the very
rst.
She stuck him with the pointy end, driving the blade upward with
a wild, hysterical strength.
Needle went through his leather jerkin and the white esh of his
belly and came out between his shoulder blades. The boy dropped
the pitchfork and made a soft noise, something between a gasp and
a sigh. His hands closed around the blade. “Oh, gods,” he moaned,
as his undertunic began to redden. “Take it out.”
When she took it out, he died.
The horses were screaming. Arya stood over the body, still and
frightened in the face of death. Blood had gushed from the boy’s
mouth as he collapsed, and more was seeping from the slit in his
belly, pooling beneath his body. His palms were cut where he’d
grabbed at the blade. She backed away slowly, Needle red in her

hand. She had to get away, someplace far from here, someplace safe
away from the stableboy’s accusing eyes.
She snatched up the bridle and harness again and ran to her mare,
but as she lifted the saddle to the horse’s back, Arya realized with a
sudden sick dread that the castle gates would be closed. Even the
postern doors would likely be guarded. Maybe the guards wouldn’t
recognize her. If they thought she was a boy, perhaps they’d let
her … no, they’d have orders not to let anyone out, it wouldn’t
matter whether they knew her or not.
But there was another way out of the castle …
The saddle slipped from Arya’s ngers and fell to the dirt with a
thump and a pu of dust. Could she nd the room with the
monsters again? She wasn’t certain, yet she knew she had to try.
She found the clothing she’d gathered and slipped into the cloak,
concealing Needle beneath its folds. The rest of her things she tied
in a roll. With the bundle under her arm, she crept to the far end of
the stable. Unlatching the back door, she peeked out anxiously. She
could hear the distant sound of swordplay, and the shivery wail of a
man screaming in pain across the bailey. She would need to go
down the serpentine steps, past the small kitchen and the pig yard,
that was how she’d gone last time, chasing the black tomcat … only
that would take her right past the barracks of the gold cloaks. She
couldn’t go that way. Arya tried to think of another way. If she
crossed to the other side of the castle, she could creep along the
river wall and through the little godswood … but rst she’d have to
cross the yard, in the plain view of the guards on the walls.
She had never seen so many men on the walls. Gold cloaks, most
of them, armed with spears. Some of them knew her by sight. What
would they do if they saw her running across the yard? She’d look
so small from up there, would they be able to tell who she was?
Would they care?
She had to leave now, she told herself, but when the moment
came, she was too frightened to move.
Calm as still water, a small voice whispered in her ear. Arya was so
startled she almost dropped her bundle. She looked around wildly,

but there was no one in the stable but her, and the horses, and the
dead men.
Quiet as a shadow, she heard. Was it her own voice, or Syrio’s?
She could not tell, yet somehow it calmed her fears.
She stepped out of the stable.
It was the scariest thing she’d ever done. She wanted to run and
hide, but she made herself walk across the yard, slowly, putting one
foot in front of the other as if she had all the time in the world and
no reason to be afraid of anyone. She thought she could feel their
eyes, like bugs crawling on her skin under her clothes. Arya never
looked up. If she saw them watching, all her courage would desert
her, she knew, and she would drop the bundle of clothes and run
and cry like a baby, and then they would have her. She kept her
gaze on the ground. By the time she reached the shadow of the
royal sept on the far side of the yard, Arya was cold with sweat, but
no one had raised the hue and cry.
The sept was open and empty. Inside, half a hundred prayer
candles burned in a fragrant silence. Arya gured the gods would
never miss two. She stu ed them up her sleeves, and left by a back
window. Sneaking back to the alley where she had cornered the
one-eared tom was easy, but after that she got lost. She crawled in
and out of windows, hopped over walls, and felt her way through
dark cellars, quiet as a shadow. Once she heard a woman weeping.
It took her more than an hour to nd the low narrow window that
slanted down to the dungeon where the monsters waited.
She tossed her bundle through and doubled back to light her
candle. That was chancy; the re she’d remembered seeing had
burnt down to embers, and she heard voices as she was blowing on
the coals. Cupping her ngers around the ickering candle, she
went out the window as they were coming in the door, without ever
getting a glimpse of who it was.
This time the monsters did not frighten her. They seemed almost
old friends. Arya held the candle over her head. With each step she
took, the shadows moved against the walls, as if they were turning
to watch her pass. “Dragons,” she whispered. She slid Needle out
from under her cloak. The slender blade seemed very small and the

dragons very big, yet somehow Arya felt better with steel in her
hand.
The long windowless hall beyond the door was as black as she
remembered. She held Needle in her left hand, her sword hand, the
candle in her right st. Hot wax ran down across her knuckles. The
entrance to the well had been to the left, so Arya went right. Part of
her wanted to run, but she was afraid of snu ng out her candle.
She heard the faint squeaking of rats and glimpsed a pair of tiny
glowing eyes on the edge of the light, but rats did not scare her.
Other things did. It would be so easy to hide here, as she had
hidden from the wizard and the man with the forked beard. She
could almost see the stableboy standing against the wall, his hands
curled into claws with the blood still dripping from the deep gashes
in his palms where Needle had cut him. He might be waiting to grab
her as she passed. He would see her candle coming a long way o .
Maybe she would be better o without the light …
Fear cuts deeper than swords, the quiet voice inside her whispered.
Suddenly Arya remembered the crypts at Winterfell. They were a
lot scarier than this place, she told herself. She’d been just a little
girl the rst time she saw them. Her brother Robb had taken them
down, her and Sansa and baby Bran, who’d been no bigger than
Rickon was now. They’d only had one candle between them, and
Bran’s eyes had gotten as big as saucers as he stared at the stone
faces of the Kings of Winter, with their wolves at their feet and
their iron swords across their laps.
Robb took them all the way down to the end, past Grandfather
and Brandon and Lyanna, to show them their own tombs. Sansa
kept looking at the stubby little candle, anxious that it might go
out. Old Nan had told her there were spiders down here, and rats as
big as dogs. Robb smiled when she said that. “There are worse
things than spiders and rats,” he whispered. “This is where the dead
walk.” That was when they heard the sound, low and deep and
shivery. Baby Bran had clutched at Arya’s hand.
When the spirit stepped out of the open tomb, pale white and
moaning for blood, Sansa ran shrieking for the stairs, and Bran
wrapped himself around Robb’s leg, sobbing. Arya stood her ground

and gave the spirit a punch. It was only Jon, covered with our.
“You stupid,” she told him, “you scared the baby,” but Jon and Robb
just laughed and laughed, and pretty soon Bran and Arya were
laughing too.
The memory made Arya smile, and after that the darkness held no
more terrors for her. The stableboy was dead, she’d killed him, and
if he jumped out at her she’d kill him again. She was going home.
Everything would be better once she was home again, safe behind
Winterfell’s grey granite walls.
Her footsteps sent soft echoes hurrying ahead of her as Arya
plunged deeper into the darkness.

SANSA

They came for Sansa on the third day.
She chose a simple dress of dark grey wool, plainly cut but richly
embroidered around the collar and sleeves. Her ngers felt thick
and clumsy as she struggled with the silver fastenings without the
bene t of servants. Jeyne Poole had been con ned with her, but
Jeyne was useless. Her face was pu y from all her crying, and she
could not seem to stop sobbing about her father.
“I’m certain your father is well,” Sansa told her when she had
nally gotten the dress buttoned right. “I’ll ask the queen to let you
see him.” She thought that kindness might lift Jeyne’s spirits, but
the other girl just looked at her with red, swollen eyes and began to
cry all the harder. She was such a child.
Sansa had wept too, the rst day. Even within the stout walls of
Maegor’s Holdfast, with her door closed and barred, it was hard not
to be terri ed when the killing began. She had grown up to the
sound of steel in the yard, and scarcely a day of her life had passed
without hearing the clash of sword on sword, yet somehow
knowing that the ghting was real made all the di erence in the
world. She heard it as she had never heard it before, and there were
other sounds as well, grunts of pain, angry curses, shouts for help,
and the moans of wounded and dying men. In the songs, the knights
never screamed nor begged for mercy.
So she wept, pleading through her door for them to tell her what
was happening, calling for her father, for Septa Mordane, for the

king, for her gallant prince. If the men guarding her heard her
pleas, they gave no answer. The only time the door opened was late
that night, when they thrust Jeyne Poole inside, bruised and
shaking. “They’re killing everyone,” the steward’s daughter had
shrieked at her. She went on and on. The Hound had broken down
her door with a warhammer, she said. There were bodies on the
stair of the Tower of the Hand, and the steps were slick with blood.
Sansa dried her own tears as she struggled to comfort her friend.
They went to sleep in the same bed, cradled in each other’s arms
like sisters.
The second day was even worse. The room where Sansa had been
con ned was at the top of the highest tower of Maegor’s Holdfast.
From its window, she could see that the heavy iron portcullis in the
gatehouse was down, and the drawbridge drawn up over the deep
dry moat that separated the keep-within-a-keep from the larger
castle that surrounded it. Lannister guardsmen prowled the walls
with spears and crossbows to hand. The ghting was over, and the
silence of the grave had settled over the Red Keep. The only sounds
were Jeyne Poole’s endless whimpers and sobs.
They were fed—hard cheese and fresh-baked bread and milk to
break their fast, roast chicken and greens at midday, and a late
supper of beef and barley stew—but the servants who brought the
meals would not answer Sansa’s questions. That evening, some
women brought her clothes from the Tower of the Hand, and some
of Jeyne’s things as well, but they seemed nearly as frightened as
Jeyne, and when she tried to talk to them, they ed from her as if
she had the grey plague. The guards outside the door still refused to
let them leave the room.
“Please, I need to speak to the queen again,” Sansa told them, as
she told everyone she saw that day. “She’ll want to talk to me, I
know she will. Tell her I want to see her, please. If not the queen,
then Prince Jo rey, if you’d be so kind. We’re to marry when we’re
older.”
At sunset on the second day, a great bell began to ring. Its voice
was deep and sonorous, and the long slow clanging lled Sansa with
a sense of dread. The ringing went on and on, and after a while they

heard other bells answering from the Great Sept of Baelor on
Visenya’s Hill. The sound rumbled across the city like thunder,
warning of the storm to come.
“What is it?” Jeyne asked, covering her ears. “Why are they
ringing the bells?”
“The king is dead.” Sansa could not say how she knew it, yet she
did. The slow, endless clanging lled their room, as mournful as a
dirge. Had some enemy stormed the castle and murdered King
Robert? Was that the meaning of the ghting they had heard?
She went to sleep wondering, restless, and fearful. Was her
beautiful Jo rey the king now? Or had they killed him too? She
was afraid for him, and for her father. If only they would tell her
what was happening …
That night Sansa dreamt of Jo rey on the throne, with herself
seated beside him in a gown of woven gold. She had a crown on her
head, and everyone she had ever known came before her, to bend
the knee and say their courtesies.
The next morning, the morning of the third day, Ser Boros Blount
of the Kingsguard came to escort her to the queen.
Ser Boros was an ugly man with a broad chest and short, bandy
legs. His nose was at, his cheeks baggy with jowls, his hair grey
and brittle. Today he wore white velvet, and his snowy cloak was
fastened with a lion brooch. The beast had the soft sheen of gold,
and his eyes were tiny rubies. “You look very handsome and
splendid this morning, Ser Boros,” Sansa told him. A lady
remembered her courtesies, and she was resolved to be a lady no
matter what.
“And you, my lady,” Ser Boros said in a at voice. “Her Grace
awaits. Come with me.”
There were guards outside her door, Lannister men-at-arms in
crimson cloaks and lion-crested helms. Sansa made herself smile at
them pleasantly and bid them a good morning as she passed. It was
the rst time she had been allowed outside the chamber since Ser
Arys Oakheart had led her there two mornings past. “To keep you
safe, my sweet one,” Queen Cersei had told her. “Jo rey would
never forgive me if anything happened to his precious.”

Sansa had expected that Ser Boros would escort her to the royal
apartments, but instead he led her out of Maegor’s Holdfast. The
bridge was down again. Some workmen were lowering a man on
ropes into the depths of the dry moat. When Sansa peered down,
she saw a body impaled on the huge iron spikes below. She averted
her eyes quickly, afraid to ask, afraid to look too long, afraid he
might be someone she knew.
They found Queen Cersei in the council chambers, seated at the
head of a long table littered with papers, candles, and blocks of
sealing wax. The room was as splendid as any that Sansa had ever
seen. She stared in awe at the carved wooden screen and the twin
sphinxes that sat beside the door.
“Your Grace,” Ser Boros said when they were ushered inside by
another of the Kingsguard, Ser Mandon of the curiously dead face,
“I’ve brought the girl.”
Sansa had hoped Jo rey might be with her. Her prince was not
there, but three of the king’s councillors were. Lord Petyr Baelish
sat on the queen’s left hand, Grand Maester Pycelle at the end of the
table, while Lord Varys hovered over them, smelling owery. All of
them were clad in black, she realized with a feeling of dread.
Mourning clothes …
The queen wore a high-collared black silk gown, with a hundred
dark red rubies sewn into her bodice, covering her from neck to
bosom. They were cut in the shape of teardrops, as if the queen
were weeping blood. Cersei smiled to see her, and Sansa thought it
was the sweetest and saddest smile she had ever seen. “Sansa, my
sweet child,” she said, “I know you’ve been asking for me. I’m sorry
that I could not send for you sooner. Matters have been very
unsettled, and I have not had a moment. I trust my people have
been taking good care of you?”
“Everyone has been very sweet and pleasant, Your Grace, thank
you ever so much for asking,” Sansa said politely. “Only, well, no
one will talk to us or tell us what’s happened …”
“Us?” Cersei seemed puzzled.
“We put the steward’s girl in with her,” Ser Boros said. “We did
not know what else to do with her.”

The queen frowned. “Next time, you will ask,” she said, her voice
sharp. “The gods only know what sort of tales she’s been lling
Sansa’s head with.”
“Jeyne’s scared,” Sansa said. “She won’t stop crying. I promised
her I’d ask if she could see her father.”
Old Grand Maester Pycelle lowered his eyes.
“Her father is well, isn’t he?” Sansa said anxiously. She knew
there had been ghting, but surely no one would harm a steward.
Vayon Poole did not even wear a sword.
Queen Cersei looked at each of the councillors in turn. “I won’t
have Sansa fretting needlessly. What shall we do with this little
friend of hers, my lords?”
Lord Petyr leaned forward. “I’ll nd a place for her.”
“Not in the city,” said the queen.
“Do you take me for a fool?”
The queen ignored that. “Ser Boros, escort this girl to Lord Petyr’s
apartments and instruct his people to keep her there until he comes
for her. Tell her that Little nger will be taking her to see her
father, that ought to calm her down. I want her gone before Sansa
returns to her chamber.”
“As you command, Your Grace,” Ser Boros said. He bowed
deeply, spun on his heel, and took his leave, his long white cloak
stirring the air behind him.
Sansa was confused. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Where is
Jeyne’s father? Why can’t Ser Boros take her to him instead of Lord
Petyr having to do it?” She had promised herself she would be a
lady, gentle as the queen and as strong as her mother, the Lady
Catelyn, but all of a sudden she was scared again. For a second she
thought she might cry. “Where are you sending her? She hasn’t
done anything wrong, she’s a good girl.”
“She’s upset you,” the queen said gently. “We can’t be having
that. Not another word, now. Lord Baelish will see that Jeyne’s well
taken care of, I promise you.” She patted the chair beside her. “Sit
down, Sansa. I want to talk to you.”
Sansa seated herself beside the queen. Cersei smiled again, but
that did not make her feel any less anxious. Varys was wringing his

soft hands together, Grand Maester Pycelle kept his sleepy eyes on
the papers in front of him, but she could feel Little nger staring.
Something about the way the small man looked at her made Sansa
feel as though she had no clothes on. Goose bumps pimpled her
skin.
“Sweet Sansa,” Queen Cersei said, laying a soft hand on her wrist.
“Such a beautiful child. I do hope you know how much Jo rey and I
love you.”
“You do?” Sansa said, breathless. Little nger was forgotten. Her
prince loved her. Nothing else mattered.
The queen smiled. “I think of you almost as my own daughter.
And I know the love you bear for Jo rey.” She gave a weary shake
of her head. “I am afraid we have some grave news about your lord
father. You must be brave, child.”
Her quiet words gave Sansa a chill. “What is it?”
“Your father is a traitor, dear,” Lord Varys said.
Grand Maester Pycelle lifted his ancient head. “With my own
ears, I heard Lord Eddard swear to our beloved King Robert that he
would protect the young princes as if they were his own sons. And
yet the moment the king was dead, he called the small council
together to steal Prince Jo rey’s rightful throne.”
“No,” Sansa blurted. “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t!”
The queen picked up a letter. The paper was torn and sti with
dried blood, but the broken seal was her father’s, the direwolf
stamped in pale wax. “We found this on the captain of your
household guard, Sansa. It is a letter to my late husband’s brother
Stannis, inviting him to take the crown.”
“Please, Your Grace, there’s been a mistake.” Sudden panic made
her dizzy and faint. “Please, send for my father, he’ll tell you, he
would never write such a letter, the king was his friend.”
“Robert thought so,” said the queen. “This betrayal would have
broken his heart. The gods are kind, that he did not live to see it.”
She sighed. “Sansa, sweetling, you must see what a dreadful
position this has left us in. You are innocent of any wrong, we all
know that, and yet you are the daughter of a traitor. How can I
allow you to marry my son?”

“But I love him,” Sansa wailed, confused and frightened. What did
they mean to do to her? What had they done to her father? It was
not supposed to happen this way. She had to wed Jo rey, they were
betrothed, he was promised to her, she had even dreamed about it.
It wasn’t fair to take him away from her on account of whatever her
father might have done.
“How well I know that, child,” Cersei said, her voice so kind and
sweet. “Why else should you have come to me and told me of your
father’s plan to send you away from us, if not for love?”
“It was for love,” Sansa said in a rush. “Father wouldn’t even give
me leave to say farewell.” She was the good girl, the obedient girl,
but she had felt as wicked as Arya that morning, sneaking away
from Septa Mordane, defying her lord father. She had never done
anything so willful before, and she would never have done it then if
she hadn’t loved Jo rey as much as she did. “He was going to take
me back to Winterfell and marry me to some hedge knight, even
though it was Jo I wanted. I told him, but he wouldn’t listen.” The
king had been her last hope. The king could command Father to let
her stay in King’s Landing and marry Prince Jo rey, Sansa knew he
could, but the king had always frightened her. He was loud and
rough-voiced and drunk as often as not, and he would probably
have just sent her back to Lord Eddard, if they even let her see him.
So she went to the queen instead, and poured out her heart, and
Cersei had listened and thanked her sweetly … only then Ser Arys
had escorted her to the high room in Maegor’s Holdfast and posted
guards, and a few hours later, the ghting had begun outside.
“Please,” she nished, “you have to let me marry Jo rey, I’ll be
ever so good a wife to him, you’ll see. I’ll be a queen just like you, I
promise.”
Queen Cersei looked to the others. “My lords of the council, what
do you say to her plea?”
“The poor child,” murmured Varys. “A love so true and innocent,
Your Grace, it would be cruel to deny it … and yet, what can we
do? Her father stands condemned.” His soft hands washed each
other in a gesture of helpless distress.

“A child born of traitor’s seed will nd that betrayal comes
naturally to her,” said Grand Maester Pycelle. “She is a sweet thing
now, but in ten years, who can say what treasons she may hatch?”
“No,” Sansa said, horri ed. “I’m not, I’d never … I wouldn’t
betray Jo rey, I love him, I swear it, I do.”
“Oh, so poignant,” said Varys. “And yet, it is truly said that blood
runs truer than oaths.”
“She reminds me of the mother, not the father,” Lord Petyr
Baelish said quietly. “Look at her. The hair, the eyes. She is the very
image of Cat at the same age.”
The queen looked at her, troubled, and yet Sansa could see
kindness in her clear green eyes. “Child,” she said, “if I could truly
believe that you were not like your father, why nothing should
please me more than to see you wed to my Jo rey. I know he loves
you with all his heart.” She sighed. “And yet, I fear that Lord Varys
and the Grand Maester have the right of it. The blood will tell. I
have only to remember how your sister set her wolf on my son.”
“I’m not like Arya,” Sansa blurted. “She has the traitor’s blood,
not me. I’m good, ask Septa Mordane, she’ll tell you, I only want to
be Jo rey’s loyal and loving wife.”
She felt the weight of Cersei’s eyes as the queen studied her face.
“I believe you mean it, child.” She turned to face the others. “My
lords, it seems to me that if the rest of her kin were to remain loyal
in this terrible time, that would go a long way toward laying our
fears to rest.”
Grand Maester Pycelle stroked his huge soft beard, his wide brow
furrowed in thought. “Lord Eddard has three sons.”
“Mere boys,” Lord Petyr said with a shrug. “I should be more
concerned with Lady Catelyn and the Tullys.”
The queen took Sansa’s hand in both of hers. “Child, do you know
your letters?”
Sansa nodded nervously. She could read and write better than any
of her brothers, although she was hopeless at sums.
“I am pleased to hear that. Perhaps there is hope for you and
Jo rey still …”
“What do you want me to do?”

“You must write your lady mother, and your brother, the
eldest … what is his name?”
“Robb,” Sansa said.
“The word of your lord father’s treason will no doubt reach them
soon. Better that it should come from you. You must tell them how
Lord Eddard betrayed his king.”
Sansa wanted Jo rey desperately, but she did not think she had
the courage to do as the queen was asking. “But he never … I
don’t … Your Grace, I wouldn’t know what to say …”
The queen patted her hand. “We will tell you what to write, child.
The important thing is that you urge Lady Catelyn and your brother
to keep the king’s peace.”
“It will go hard for them if they don’t,” said Grand Maester
Pycelle. “By the love you bear them, you must urge them to walk
the path of wisdom.”
“Your lady mother will no doubt fear for you dreadfully,” the
queen said. “You must tell her that you are well and in our care,
that we are treating you gently and seeing to your every want. Bid
them to come to King’s Landing and pledge their fealty to Jo rey
when he takes his throne. If they do that … why, then we shall
know that there is no taint in your blood, and when you come into
the ower of your womanhood, you shall wed the king in the Great
Sept of Baelor, before the eyes of gods and men.”
… wed the king … The words made her breath come faster, yet
still Sansa hesitated. “Perhaps … if I might see my father, talk to
him about …”
“Treason?” Lord Varys hinted.
“You disappoint me, Sansa,” the queen said, with eyes gone hard
as stones. “We’ve told you of your father’s crimes. If you are truly
as loyal as you say, why should you want to see him?”
“I … I only meant …” Sansa felt her eyes grow wet. “He’s
not … please, he hasn’t been … hurt, or … or …”
“Lord Eddard has not been harmed,” the queen said.
“But … what’s to become of him?”
“That is a matter for the king to decide,” Grand Maester Pycelle
announced ponderously.

The king! Sansa blinked back her tears. Jo rey was the king now,
she thought. Her gallant prince would never hurt her father, no
matter what he might have done. If she went to him and pleaded
for mercy, she was certain he’d listen. He had to listen, he loved
her, even the queen said so. Jo would need to punish Father, the
lords would expect it, but perhaps he could send him back to
Winterfell, or exile him to one of the Free Cities across the narrow
sea. It would only have to be for a few years. By then she and
Jo rey would be married. Once she was queen, she could persuade
Jo to bring Father back and grant him a pardon.
Only … if Mother or Robb did anything treasonous, called the
banners or refused to swear fealty or anything, it would all go
wrong. Her Jo rey was good and kind, she knew it in her heart, but
a king had to be stern with rebels. She had to make them
understand, she had to!
“I’ll … I’ll write the letters,” Sansa told them.
With a smile as warm as the sunrise, Cersei Lannister leaned close
and kissed her gently on the cheek. “I knew you would. Jo rey will
be so proud when I tell him what courage and good sense you’ve
shown here today.”
In the end, she wrote four letters. To her mother, the Lady
Catelyn Stark, and to her brothers at Winterfell, and to her aunt and
her grandfather as well, Lady Lysa Arryn of the Eyrie, and Lord
Hoster Tully of Riverrun. By the time she had done, her ngers
were cramped and sti and stained with ink. Varys had her father’s
seal. She warmed the pale white beeswax over a candle, poured it
carefully, and watched as the eunuch stamped each letter with the
direwolf of House Stark.
Jeyne Poole and all her things were gone when Ser Mandon
Moore returned Sansa to the high tower of Maegor’s Holdfast. No
more weeping, she thought gratefully. Yet somehow it seemed
colder with Jeyne gone, even after she’d built a re. She pulled a
chair close to the hearth, took down one of her favorite books, and
lost herself in the stories of Florian and Jonquil, of Lady Shella and
the Rainbow Knight, of valiant Prince Aemon and his doomed love
for his brother’s queen.

It was not until later that night, as she was drifting o to sleep,
that Sansa realized she had forgotten to ask about her sister.

JON

“Othor,” announced Ser Jaremy Rykker, “beyond a doubt. And this
one was Jafer Flowers.” He turned the corpse over with his foot,
and the dead white face stared up at the overcast sky with blue,
blue eyes. “They were Ben Stark’s men, both of them.”
My uncle’s men, Jon thought numbly. He remembered how he’d
pleaded to ride with them. Gods, I was such a green boy. If he had
taken me, it might be me lying here …
Jafer’s right wrist ended in the ruin of torn esh and splintered
bone left by Ghost’s jaws. His right hand was oating in a jar of
vinegar back in Maester Aemon’s tower. His left hand, still at the
end of his arm, was as black as his cloak.
“Gods have mercy,” the Old Bear muttered. He swung down from
his garron, handing his reins to Jon. The morning was unnaturally
warm; beads of sweat dotted the Lord Commander’s broad forehead
like dew on a melon. His horse was nervous, rolling her eyes,
backing away from the dead men as far as her lead would allow.
Jon led her o a few paces, ghting to keep her from bolting. The
horses did not like the feel of this place. For that matter, neither did
Jon.
The dogs liked it least of all. Ghost had led the party here; the
pack of hounds had been useless. When Bass the kennelmaster had
tried to get them to take the scent from the severed hand, they had
gone wild, yowling and barking, ghting to get away. Even now

they were snarling and whimpering by turns, pulling at their leashes
while Chett cursed them for curs.
It is only a wood, Jon told himself, and they’re only dead men. He
had seen dead men before …
Last night he had dreamt the Winterfell dream again. He was
wandering the empty castle, searching for his father, descending
into the crypts. Only this time the dream had gone further than
before. In the dark he’d heard the scrape of stone on stone. When he
turned he saw that the vaults were opening, one after the other. As
the dead kings came stumbling from their cold black graves, Jon
had woken in pitch-dark, his heart hammering. Even when Ghost
leapt up on the bed to nuzzle at his face, he could not shake his
deep sense of terror. He dared not go back to sleep. Instead he had
climbed the Wall and walked, restless, until he saw the light of the
dawn o to the east. It was only a dream. I am a brother of the Night’s
Watch now, not a frightened boy.
Samwell Tarly huddled beneath the trees, half-hidden behind the
horses. His round fat face was the color of curdled milk. So far he
had not lurched o to the woods to retch, but he had not so much as
glanced at the dead men either. “I can’t look,” he whispered
miserably.
“You have to look,” Jon told him, keeping his voice low so the
others would not hear. “Maester Aemon sent you to be his eyes,
didn’t he? What good are eyes if they’re shut?”
“Yes, but … I’m such a coward, Jon.”
Jon put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “We have a dozen rangers with
us, and the dogs, even Ghost. No one will hurt you, Sam. Go ahead
and look. The rst look is the hardest.”
Sam gave a tremulous nod, working up his courage with a visible
e ort. Slowly he swiveled his head. His eyes widened, but Jon held
his arm so he could not turn away.
“Ser Jaremy,” the Old Bear asked gru y, “Ben Stark had six men
with him when he rode from the Wall. Where are the others?”
Ser Jaremy shook his head. “Would that I knew.”
Plainly Mormont was not pleased with that answer. “Two of our
brothers butchered almost within sight of the Wall, yet your rangers

heard nothing, saw nothing. Is this what the Night’s Watch has
fallen to? Do we still sweep these woods?”
“Yes, my lord, but—”
“Do we still mount watches?”
“We do, but—”
“This man wears a hunting horn.” Mormont pointed at Othor.
“Must I suppose that he died without sounding it? Or have your
rangers all gone deaf as well as blind?”
Ser Jaremy bristled, his face taut with anger. “No horn was
blown, my lord, or my rangers would have heard it. I do not have
su cient men to mount as many patrols as I should like … and
since Benjen was lost, we have stayed closer to the Wall than we
were wont to do before, by your own command.”
The Old Bear grunted. “Yes. Well. Be that as it may.” He made an
impatient gesture. “Tell me how they died.”
Squatting beside the dead man he had named Jafer Flowers, Ser
Jaremy grasped his head by the scalp. The hair came out between
his ngers, brittle as straw. The knight cursed and shoved at the
face with the heel of his hand. A great gash in the side of the
corpse’s neck opened like a mouth, crusted with dried blood. Only a
few ropes of pale tendon still attached the head to the neck. “This
was done with an axe.”
“Aye,” muttered Dywen, the old forester. “Belike the axe that
Othor carried, m’lord.”
Jon could feel his breakfast churning in his belly, but he pressed
his lips together and made himself look at the second body. Othor
had been a big ugly man, and he made a big ugly corpse. No axe
was in evidence. Jon remembered Othor; he had been the one
bellowing the bawdy song as the rangers rode out. His singing days
were done. His esh was blanched white as milk, everywhere but
his hands. His hands were black like Jafer’s. Blossoms of hard
cracked blood decorated the mortal wounds that covered him like a
rash, breast and groin and throat. Yet his eyes were still open. They
stared up at the sky, blue as sapphires.
Ser Jaremy stood. “The Wildlings have axes too.”

Mormont rounded on him. “So you believe this is Mance Rayder’s
work? This close to the Wall?”
“Who else, my lord?”
Jon could have told him. He knew, they all knew, yet no man of
them would say the words. The Others are only a story, a tale to make
children shiver. If they ever lived at all, they are gone eight thousand
years. Even the thought made him feel foolish; he was a man grown
now, a black brother of the Night’s Watch, not the boy who’d once
sat at Old Nan’s feet with Bran and Robb and Arya.
Yet Lord Commander Mormont gave a snort. “If Ben Stark had
come under Wildling attack a half day’s ride from Castle Black, he
would have returned for more men, chased the killers through all
seven hells and brought me back their heads.”
“Unless he was slain as well,” Ser Jaremy insisted.
The words hurt, even now. It had been so long, it seemed folly to
cling to the hope that Ben Stark was still alive, but Jon Snow was
nothing if not stubborn.
“It has been close on half a year since Benjen left us, my lord,”
Ser Jaremy went on. “The forest is vast. The Wildlings might have
fallen on him anywhere. I’d wager these two were the last survivors
of his party, on their way back to us … but the enemy caught them
before they could reach the safety of the Wall. The corpses are still
fresh, these men cannot have been dead more than a day …”
“NO,” Samwell Tarly squeaked.
Jon was startled. Sam’s nervous, high-pitched voice was the last
he would have expected to hear. The fat boy was frightened of the
o cers, and Ser Jaremy was not known for his patience.
“I did not ask for your views, boy,” Rykker said coldly.
“Let him speak, ser,” Jon blurted.
Mormont’s eyes icked from Sam to Jon and back again. “If the
lad has something to say, I’ll hear him out. Come closer, boy. We
can’t see you behind those horses.”
Sam edged past Jon and the garrons, sweating profusely. “My
lord, it … it can’t be a day or … look … the blood …”
“Yes?” Mormont growled impatiently. “Blood, what of it?”

“He soils his smallclothes at the sight of it,” Chett shouted out,
and the rangers laughed.
Sam mopped at the sweat on his brow. “You … you can see
where Ghost … Jon’s direwolf … you can see where he tore o that
man’s hand, and yet … the stump hasn’t bled, look …” He waved a
hand. “My father … L-lord Randyll, he, he made me watch him
dress animals sometimes, when … after …” Sam shook his head
from side to side, his chins quivering. Now that he had looked at the
bodies, he could not seem to look away. “A fresh kill … the blood
would still ow, my lords. Later … later it would be clotted, like
a … a jelly, thick and … and …” He looked as though he was going
to be sick. “This man … look at the wrist, it’s
all … crusty … dry … like …”
Jon saw at once what Sam meant. He could see the torn veins in
the dead man’s wrist, iron worms in the pale esh. His blood was a
black dust. Yet Jaremy Rykker was unconvinced. “If they’d been
dead much longer than a day, they’d be ripe by now, boy. They
don’t even smell.”
Dywen, the gnarled old forester who liked to boast that he could
smell snow coming on, sidled closer to the corpses and took a whi .
“Well, they’re no pansy owers, but … m’lord has the truth of it.
There’s no corpse stink.”
“They … they aren’t rotting.” Sam pointed, his fat nger shaking
only a little. “Look, there’s … there’s no maggots or … or … worms
or anything … they’ve been lying here in the woods, but
they … they haven’t been chewed or eaten by animals … only
Ghost … otherwise they’re … they’re …”
“Untouched,” Jon said softly. “And Ghost is di erent. The dogs
and the horses won’t go near them.”
The rangers exchanged glances; they could see it was true, every
man of them. Mormont frowned, glancing from the corpses to the
dogs. “Chett, bring the hounds closer.”
Chett tried, cursing, yanking on the leashes, giving one animal a
lick of his boot. Most of the dogs just whimpered and planted their
feet. He tried dragging one. The bitch resisted, growling and
squirming as if to escape her collar. Finally she lunged at him. Chett

dropped the leash and stumbled backward. The dog leapt over him
and bounded o into the trees.
“This … this is all wrong,” Sam Tarly said earnestly. “The
blood … there’s bloodstains on their clothes, and … and their esh,
dry and hard, but … there’s none on the ground, or … anywhere.
With those … those … those …” Sam made himself swallow, took a
deep breath. “With those wounds … terrible wounds … there should
be blood all over. Shouldn’t there?”
Dywen sucked at his wooden teeth. “Might be they didn’t die
here. Might be someone brought ’em and left ’em for us. A warning,
as like.” The old forester peered down suspiciously. “And might be
I’m a fool, but I don’t know that Othor never had no blue eyes
afore.”
Ser Jaremy looked startled. “Neither did Flowers,” he blurted,
turning to stare at the dead man.
A silence fell over the wood. For a moment all they heard was
Sam’s heavy breathing and the wet sound of Dywen sucking on his
teeth. Jon squatted beside Ghost.
“Burn them,” someone whispered. One of the rangers; Jon could
not have said who. “Yes, burn them,” a second voice urged.
The Old Bear gave a stubborn shake of his head. “Not yet. I want
Maester Aemon to have a look at them. We’ll bring them back to
the Wall.”
Some commands are more easily given than obeyed. They
wrapped the dead men in cloaks, but when Hake and Dywen tried
to tie one onto a horse, the animal went mad, screaming and
rearing, lashing out with its hooves, even biting at Ketter when he
ran to help. The rangers had no better luck with the other garrons;
not even the most placid wanted any part of these burdens. In the
end they were forced to hack o branches and fashion crude slings
to carry the corpses back on foot. It was well past midday by the
time they started back.
“I will have these woods searched,” Mormont commanded Ser
Jaremy as they set out. “Every tree, every rock, every bush, and
every foot of muddy ground within ten leagues of here. Use all the
men you have, and if you do not have enough, borrow hunters and

foresters from the stewards. If Ben and the others are out here, dead
or alive, I will have them found. And if there is anyone else in these
woods, I will know of it. You are to track them and take them, alive
if possible. Is that understood?”
“It is, my lord,” Ser Jaremy said. “It will be done.”
After that, Mormont rode in silence, brooding. Jon followed close
behind him; as the Lord Commander’s steward, that was his place.
The day was grey, damp, overcast, the sort of day that made you
wish for rain. No wind stirred the wood; the air hung humid and
heavy, and Jon’s clothes clung to his skin. It was warm. Too warm.
The Wall was weeping copiously, had been weeping for days, and
sometimes Jon even imagined it was shrinking.
The old men called this weather spirit summer, and said it meant
the season was giving up its ghosts at last. After this the cold would
come, they warned, and a long summer always meant a long
winter. This summer had lasted ten years. Jon had been a babe in
arms when it began.
Ghost ran with them for a time and then vanished among the
trees. Without the direwolf, Jon felt almost naked. He found
himself glancing at every shadow with unease. Unbidden, he
thought back on the tales that Old Nan used to tell them, when he
was a boy at Winterfell. He could almost hear her voice again, and
the click-click-click of her needles. In that darkness, the Others came
riding, she used to say, dropping her voice lower and lower. Cold
and dead they were, and they hated iron and re and the touch of the
sun, and every living creature with hot blood in its veins. Holdfasts and
cities and kingdoms of men all fell before them, as they moved south on
pale dead horses, leading hosts of the slain. They fed their dead servants
on the esh of human children …
When he caught his rst glimpse of the Wall looming above the
tops of an ancient gnarled oak, Jon was vastly relieved. Mormont
reined up suddenly and turned in his saddle. “Tarly,” he barked,
“come here.”
Jon saw the start of fright on Sam’s face as he lumbered up on his
mare; doubtless he thought he was in trouble. “You’re fat but you’re

not stupid, boy,” the Old Bear said gru y. “You did well back
there. And you, Snow.”
Sam blushed a vivid crimson and tripped over his own tongue as
he tried to stammer out a courtesy. Jon had to smile.
When they emerged from under the trees, Mormont spurred his
tough little garron to a trot. Ghost came streaking out from the
woods to meet them, licking his chops, his muzzle red from prey.
High above, the men on the Wall saw the column approaching. Jon
heard the deep, throaty call of the watchman’s great horn, calling
out across the miles; a single long blast that shuddered through the
trees and echoed o the ice.
UUUUUUUoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
The sound faded slowly to silence. One blast meant rangers
returning, and Jon thought, I was a ranger for one day, at least.
Whatever may come, they cannot take that away from me.
Bowen Marsh was waiting at the rst gate as they led their
garrons through the icy tunnel. The Lord Steward was red-faced and
agitated. “My lord,” he blurted at Mormont as he swung open the
iron bars, “there’s been a bird, you must come at once.”
“What is it, man?” Mormont said gru y.
Curiously, Marsh glanced at Jon before he answered. “Maester
Aemon has the letter. He’s waiting in your solar.”
“Very well. Jon, see to my horse, and tell Ser Jaremy to put the
dead men in a storeroom until the maester is ready for them.”
Mormont strode away grumbling.
As they led their horses back to the stable, Jon was
uncomfortably aware that people were watching him. Ser Alliser
Thorne was drilling his boys in the yard, but he broke o to stare at
Jon, a faint half smile on his lips. One-armed Donal Noye stood in
the door of the armory. “The gods be with you, Snow,” he called
out.
Something’s wrong, Jon thought. Something’s very wrong.
The dead men were carried to one of the storerooms along the
base of the Wall, a dark cold cell chiseled from the ice and used to
keep meat and grain and sometimes even beer. Jon saw that
Mormont’s horse was fed and watered and groomed before he took

care of his own. Afterward he sought out his friends. Grenn and
Toad were on watch, but he found Pyp in the common hall. “What’s
happened?” he asked.
Pyp lowered his voice. “The king’s dead.”
Jon was stunned. Robert Baratheon had looked old and fat when
he visited Winterfell, yet he’d seemed hale enough, and there’d
been no talk of illness. “How can you know?”
“One of the guards overheard Clydas reading the letter to
Maester Aemon.” Pyp leaned close. “Jon, I’m sorry. He was your
father’s friend, wasn’t he?”
“They were as close as brothers, once.” Jon wondered if Jo rey
would keep his father as the King’s Hand. It did not seem likely.
That might mean Lord Eddard would return to Winterfell, and his
sisters as well. He might even be allowed to visit them, with Lord
Mormont’s permission. It would be good to see Arya’s grin again
and to talk with his father. I will ask him about my mother, he
resolved. I am a man now, it is past time he told me. Even if she was a
whore, I don’t care, I want to know.
“I heard Hake say the dead men were your uncle’s,” Pyp said.
“Yes,” Jon replied. “Two of the six he took with him. They’d been
dead a long time, only … the bodies are queer.”
“Queer?” Pyp was all curiosity. “How queer?”
“Sam will tell you.” Jon did not want to talk of it. “I should see if
the Old Bear has need of me.”
He walked to the Lord Commander’s Tower alone, with a curious
sense of apprehension. The brothers on guard eyed him solemnly as
he approached. “The Old Bear’s in his solar,” one of them
announced. “He was asking for you.”
Jon nodded. He should have come straight from the stable. He
climbed the tower steps briskly. He wants wine or a re in his hearth,
that’s all, he told himself.
When he entered the solar, Mormont’s raven screamed at him.
“Corn!” the bird shrieked. “Corn! Corn! Corn!”
“Don’t you believe it, I just fed him,” the Old Bear growled. He
was seated by the window, reading a letter. “Bring me a cup of
wine, and pour one for yourself.”

“For myself, my lord?”
Mormont lifted his eyes from the letter to stare at Jon. There was
pity in that look; he could taste it. “You heard me.”
Jon poured with exaggerated care, vaguely aware that he was
drawing out the act. When the cups were lled, he would have no
choice but to face whatever was in that letter. Yet all too soon, they
were lled. “Sit, boy,” Mormont commanded him. “Drink.”
Jon remained standing. “It’s my father, isn’t it?”
The Old Bear tapped the letter with a nger. “Your father and the
king,” he rumbled. “I won’t lie to you, it’s grievous news. I never
thought to see another king, not at my age, with Robert half my
years and strong as a bull.” He took a gulp of wine. “They say the
king loved to hunt. The things we love destroy us every time, lad.
Remember that. My son loved that young wife of his. Vain woman.
If not for her, he would never have thought to sell those poachers.”
Jon could scarcely follow what he was saying. “My lord, I don’t
understand. What’s happened to my father?”
“I told you to sit,” Mormont grumbled. “Sit,” the raven screamed.
“And have a drink, damn you. That’s a command, Snow.”
Jon sat, and took a sip of wine.
“Lord Eddard has been imprisoned. He is charged with treason. It
is said he plotted with Robert’s brothers to deny the throne to
Prince Jo rey.”
“No,” Jon said at once. “That couldn’t be. My father would never
betray the king!”
“Be that as it may,” said Mormont. “It is not for me to say. Nor
for you.”
“But it’s a lie,” Jon insisted. How could they think his father was a
traitor, had they all gone mad? Lord Eddard Stark would never
dishonor himself … would he?
He fathered a bastard, a small voice whispered inside him. Where
was the honor in that? And your mother, what of her? He will not even
speak her name.
“My lord, what will happen to him? Will they kill him?”
“As to that, I cannot say, lad. I mean to send a letter. I knew
some of the king’s councillors in my youth. Old Pycelle, Lord

Stannis, Ser Barristan … Whatever your father has done, or hasn’t
done, he is a great lord. He must be allowed to take the black and
join us here. Gods knows, we need men of Lord Eddard’s ability.”
Jon knew that other men accused of treason had been allowed to
redeem their honor on the Wall in days past. Why not Lord Eddard?
His father here. That was a strange thought, and strangely
uncomfortable. It would be a monstrous injustice to strip him of
Winterfell and force him to take the black, and yet if it meant his
life …
And would Jo rey allow it? He remembered the prince at
Winterfell, the way he’d mocked Robb and Ser Rodrik in the yard.
Jon himself he had scarcely even noticed; bastards were beneath
even his contempt. “My lord, will the king listen to you?”
The Old Bear shrugged. “A boy king … I imagine he’ll listen to
his mother. A pity the dwarf isn’t with them. He’s the lad’s uncle,
and he saw our need when he visited us. It was a bad thing, your
lady mother taking him captive—”
“Lady Stark is not my mother,” Jon reminded him sharply. Tyrion
Lannister had been a friend to him. If Lord Eddard was killed, she
would be as much to blame as the queen. “My lord, what of my
sisters? Arya and Sansa, they were with my father, do you know—”
“Pycelle makes no mention of them, but doubtless they’ll be
treated gently. I will ask about them when I write.” Mormont shook
his head. “This could not have happened at a worse time. If ever the
realm needed a strong king … there are dark days and cold nights
ahead, I feel it in my bones …” He gave Jon a long shrewd look. “I
hope you are not thinking of doing anything stupid, boy.”
He’s my father, Jon wanted to say, but he knew that Mormont
would not want to hear it. His throat was dry. He made himself
take another sip of wine.
“Your duty is here now,” the Lord Commander reminded him.
“Your old life ended when you took the black.” His bird made a
raucous echo. “Black.” Mormont took no notice. “Whatever they do
in King’s Landing is none of our concern.” When Jon did not
answer, the old man nished his wine and said, “You’re free to go.

I’ll have no further need of you today. On the morrow you can help
me write that letter.”
Jon did not remember standing or leaving the solar. The next he
knew, he was descending the tower steps, thinking, This is my father,
my sisters, how can it be none of my concern.
Outside, one of the guards looked at him and said, “Be strong,
boy. The gods are cruel.”
They know, Jon realized. “My father is no traitor,” he said
hoarsely. Even the words stuck in his throat, as if to choke him. The
wind was rising, and it seemed colder in the yard than it had when
he’d gone in. Spirit summer was drawing to an end.
The rest of the afternoon passed as if in a dream. Jon could not
have said where he walked, what he did, who he spoke with. Ghost
was with him, he knew that much. The silent presence of the
direwolf gave him comfort. The girls do not even have that much, he
thought. Their wolves might have kept them safe, but Lady is dead and
Nymeria’s lost, they’re all alone.
A north wind had begun to blow by the time the sun went down.
Jon could hear it skirling against the Wall and over the icy
battlements as he went to the common hall for the evening meal.
Hobb had cooked up a venison stew, thick with barley, onions, and
carrots. When he spooned an extra portion onto Jon’s plate and
gave him the crusty heel of the bread, he knew what it meant. He
knows. He looked around the hall, saw heads turn quickly, eyes
politely averted. They all know.
His friends rallied to him. “We asked the septon to light a candle
for your father,” Matthar told him. “It’s a lie, we all know it’s a lie,
even Grenn knows it’s a lie,” Pyp chimed in. Grenn nodded, and
Sam clasped Jon’s hand, “You’re my brother now, so he’s my father
too,” the fat boy said. “If you want to go out to the weirwoods and
pray to the old gods, I’ll go with you.”
The weirwoods were beyond the Wall, yet he knew Sam meant
what he said. They are my brothers, he thought. As much as Robb and
Bran and Rickon …
And then he heard the laughter, sharp and cruel as a whip, and
the voice of Ser Alliser Thorne. “Not only a bastard, but a traitor’s

bastard,” he was telling the men around him.
In the blink of an eye, Jon had vaulted onto the table, dagger in
his hand. Pyp made a grab for him, but he wrenched his leg away,
and then he was sprinting down the table and kicking the bowl from
Ser Alliser’s hand. Stew went ying everywhere, spattering the
brothers. Thorne recoiled. People were shouting, but Jon Snow did
not hear them. He lunged at Ser Alliser’s face with the dagger,
slashing at those cold onyx eyes, but Sam threw himself between
them and before Jon could get around him, Pyp was on his back
clinging like a monkey, and Grenn was grabbing his arm while Toad
wrenched the knife from his ngers.
Later, much later, after they had marched him back to his
sleeping cell, Mormont came down to see him, raven on his
shoulder. “I told you not to do anything stupid, boy,” the Old Bear
said. “Boy,” the bird chorused. Mormont shook his head, disgusted.
“And to think I had high hopes for you.”
They took his knife and his sword and told him he was not to
leave his cell until the high o cers met to decide what was to be
done with him. And then they placed a guard outside his door to
make certain he obeyed. His friends were not allowed to see him,
but the Old Bear did relent and permit him Ghost, so he was not
utterly alone.
“My father is no traitor,” he told the direwolf when the rest had
gone. Ghost looked at him in silence. Jon slumped against the wall,
hands around his knees, and stared at the candle on the table beside
his narrow bed. The ame ickered and swayed, the shadows
moved around him, the room seemed to grow darker and colder. I
will not sleep tonight, Jon thought.
Yet he must have dozed. When he woke, his legs were sti and
cramped and the candle had long since burned out. Ghost stood on
his hind legs, scrabbling at the door. Jon was startled to see how
tall he’d grown. “Ghost, what is it?” he called softly. The direwolf
turned his head and looked down at him, baring his fangs in a silent
snarl. Has he gone mad? Jon wondered. “It’s me, Ghost,” he
murmured, trying not to sound afraid. Yet he was trembling,
violently. When had it gotten so cold?

Ghost backed away from the door. There were deep gouges
where he’d raked the wood. Jon watched him with mounting
disquiet. “There’s someone out there, isn’t there?” he whispered.
Crouching, the direwolf crept backward, white fur rising on the
back of his neck. The guard, he thought, they left a man to guard my
door, Ghost smells him through the door, that’s all it is.
Slowly, Jon pushed himself to his feet. He was shivering
uncontrollably, wishing he still had a sword. Three quick steps
brought him to the door. He grabbed the handle and pulled it
inward. The creak of the hinges almost made him jump.
His guard was sprawled bonelessly across the narrow steps,
looking up at him. Looking up at him, even though he was lying on
his stomach. His head had been twisted completely around.
It can’t be, Jon told himself. This is the Lord Commander’s Tower,
it’s guarded day and night, this couldn’t happen, it’s a dream, I’m having
a nightmare.
Ghost slid past him, out the door. The wolf started up the steps,
stopped, looked back at Jon. That was when he heard it; the soft
scrape of a boot on stone, the sound of a latch turning. The sounds
came from above. From the Lord Commander’s chambers.
A nightmare this might be, yet it was no dream.
The guard’s sword was in its sheath. Jon knelt and worked it free.
The heft of steel in his st made him bolder. He moved up the
steps, Ghost padding silently before him. Shadows lurked in every
turn of the stair. Jon crept up warily, probing any suspicious
darkness with the point of his sword.
Suddenly he heard the shriek of Mormont’s raven. “Corn,” the
bird was screaming. “Corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn.” Ghost
bounded ahead, and Jon came scrambling after. The door to
Mormont’s solar was wide open. The direwolf plunged through. Jon
stopped in the doorway, blade in hand, giving his eyes a moment to
adjust. Heavy drapes had been pulled across the windows, and the
darkness was black as ink. “Who’s there?” he called out.
Then he saw it, a shadow in the shadows, sliding toward the inner
door that led to Mormont’s sleeping cell, a man-shape all in black,

cloaked and hooded … but beneath the hood, its eyes shone with an
icy blue radiance …
Ghost leapt. Man and wolf went down together with neither
scream nor snarl, rolling, smashing into a chair, knocking over a
table laden with papers. Mormont’s raven was apping overhead,
screaming, “Corn, corn, corn, corn.” Jon felt as blind as Maester
Aemon. Keeping the wall to his back, he slid toward the window
and ripped down the curtain. Moonlight ooded the solar. He
glimpsed black hands buried in white fur, swollen dark ngers
tightening around his direwolf’s throat. Ghost was twisting and
snapping, legs ailing in the air, but he could not break free.
Jon had no time to be afraid. He threw himself forward, shouting,
bringing down the longsword with all his weight behind it. Steel
sheared through sleeve and skin and bone, yet the sound was wrong
somehow. The smell that engulfed him was so queer and cold he
almost gagged. He saw arm and hand on the oor, black ngers
wriggling in a pool of moonlight. Ghost wrenched free of the other
hand and crept away, red tongue lolling from his mouth.
The hooded man lifted his pale moon face, and Jon slashed at it
without hesitation. The sword laid the intruder open to the bone,
taking o half his nose and opening a gash cheek to cheek under
those eyes, eyes, eyes like blue stars burning. Jon knew that face.
Othor, he thought, reeling back. Gods, he’s dead, he’s dead, I saw him
dead.
He felt something scrabble at his ankle. Black ngers clawed at
his calf. The arm was crawling up his leg, ripping at wool and esh.
Shouting with revulsion, Jon pried the ngers o his leg with the
point of his sword and ipped the thing away. It lay writhing,
ngers opening and closing.
The corpse lurched forward. There was no blood. One-armed, face
cut near in half, it seemed to feel nothing. Jon held the longsword
before him. “Stay away!” he commanded, his voice gone shrill.
“Corn,” screamed the raven, “corn, corn.” The severed arm was
wriggling out of its torn sleeve, a pale snake with a black vengered head. Ghost pounced and got it between his teeth. Finger

bones crunched. Jon hacked at the corpse’s neck, felt the steel bite
deep and hard.
Dead Othor slammed into him, knocking him o his feet.
Jon’s breath went out of him as the fallen table caught him
between his shoulder blades. The sword, where was the sword?
He’d lost the damned sword! When he opened his mouth to scream,
the wight jammed its black corpse ngers into Jon’s mouth.
Gagging, he tried to shove it o , but the dead man was too heavy.
Its hand forced itself farther down his throat, icy cold, choking him.
Its face was against his own, lling the world. Frost covered its
eyes, sparkling blue. Jon raked cold esh with his nails and kicked
at the thing’s legs. He tried to bite, tried to punch, tried to
breathe …
And suddenly the corpse’s weight was gone, its ngers ripped
from his throat. It was all Jon could do to roll over, retching and
shaking. Ghost had it again. He watched as the direwolf buried his
teeth in the wight’s gut and began to rip and tear. He watched, only
half conscious, for a long moment before he nally remembered to
look for his sword …
… and saw Lord Mormont, naked and groggy from sleep,
standing in the doorway with an oil lamp in hand. Gnawed and
ngerless, the arm thrashed on the oor, wriggling toward him.
Jon tried to shout, but his voice was gone. Staggering to his feet,
he kicked the arm away and snatched the lamp from the Old Bear’s
ngers. The ame ickered and almost died. “Burn!” the raven
cawed. “Burn, burn, burn!”
Spinning, Jon saw the drapes he’d ripped from the window. He
ung the lamp into the puddled cloth with both hands. Metal
crunched, glass shattered, oil spewed, and the hangings went up in a
great whoosh of ame. The heat of it on his face was sweeter than
any kiss Jon had ever known. “Ghost!” he shouted.
The direwolf wrenched free and came to him as the wight
struggled to rise, dark snakes spilling from the great wound in its
belly. Jon plunged his hand into the ames, grabbed a stful of the
burning drapes, and whipped them at the dead man. Let it burn, he

prayed as the cloth smothered the corpse, gods, please, please, let it
burn.

BRAN

The Karstarks came in on a cold windy morning, bringing three
hundred horsemen and near two thousand foot from their castle at
Karhold. The steel points of their pikes winked in the pale sunlight
as the column approached. A man went before them, pounding out a
slow, deep-throated marching rhythm on a drum that was bigger
than he was, boom, boom, boom.
Bran watched them come from a guard turret atop the outer wall,
peering through Maester Luwin’s bronze far-eye while perched on
Hodor’s shoulders. Lord Rickard himself led them, his sons Harrion
and Eddard and Torrhen riding beside him beneath night-black
banners emblazoned with the white sunburst of their House. Old
Nan said they had Stark blood in them, going back hundreds of
years, but they did not look like Starks to Bran. They were big men,
and erce, faces covered with thick beards, hair worn loose past the
shoulders. Their cloaks were made of skins, the pelts of bear and
seal and wolf.
They were the last, he knew. The other lords were already here,
with their hosts. Bran yearned to ride out among them, to see the
winter houses full to bursting, the jostling crowds in the market
square every morning, the streets rutted and torn by wheel and
hoof. But Robb had forbidden him to leave the castle. “We have no
men to spare to guard you,” his brother had explained.
“I’ll take Summer,” Bran argued.

“Don’t act the boy with me, Bran,” Robb said. “You know better
than that. Only two days ago one of Lord Bolton’s men knifed one
of Lord Cerwyn’s at the Smoking Log. Our lady mother would skin
me for a pelt if I let you put yourself at risk.” He was using the
voice of Robb the Lord when he said it; Bran knew that meant there
was no appeal.
It was because of what had happened in the wolfswood, he knew.
The memory still gave him bad dreams. He had been as helpless as
a baby, no more able to defend himself than Rickon would have
been. Less, even … Rickon would have kicked them, at the least. It
shamed him. He was only a few years younger than Robb; if his
brother was almost a man grown, so was he. He should have been
able to protect himself.
A year ago, before, he would have visited the town even if it
meant climbing over the walls by himself. In those days he could
run down stairs, get on and o his pony by himself, and wield a
wooden sword good enough to knock Prince Tommen in the dirt.
Now he could only watch, peering out through Maester Luwin’s lens
tube. The maester had taught him all the banners: the mailed st of
the Glovers, silver on scarlet; Lady Mormont’s black bear; the
hideous ayed man that went before Roose Bolton of the Dreadfort;
a bull moose for the Hornwoods; a battle-axe for the Cerwyns; three
sentinel trees for the Tallharts; and the fearsome sigil of House
Umber, a roaring giant in shattered chains.
And soon enough he learned the faces too, when the lords and
their sons and knights retainer came to Winterfell to feast. Even the
Great Hall was not large enough to seat all of them at once, so Robb
hosted each of the principal bannermen in turn. Bran was always
given the place of honor at his brother’s right hand. Some of the
lords bannermen gave him queer hard stares as he sat there, as if
they wondered by what right a green boy should be placed above
them, and him a cripple too.
“How many is it now?” Bran asked Maester Luwin as Lord
Karstark and his sons rode through the gates in the outer wall.
“Twelve thousand men, or near enough as makes no matter.”
“How many knights?”

“Few enough,” the maester said with a touch of impatience. “To
be a knight, you must stand your vigil in a sept, and be anointed
with the seven oils to consecrate your vows. In the north, only a
few of the great houses worship the Seven. The rest honor the old
gods, and name no knights … but those lords and their sons and
sworn swords are no less erce or loyal or honorable. A man’s
worth is not marked by a ser before his name. As I have told you a
hundred times before.”
“Still,” said Bran, “how many knights?”
Maester Luwin sighed. “Three hundred, perhaps four … among
three thousand armored lances who are not knights.”
“Lord Karstark is the last,” Bran said thoughtfully. “Robb will
feast him tonight.”
“No doubt he will.”
“How long before … before they go?”
“He must march soon, or not at all,” Maester Luwin said. “The
winter town is full to bursting, and this army of his will eat the
countryside clean if it camps here much longer. Others are waiting
to join him all along the kingsroad, barrow knights and crannogmen
and the Lords Manderly and Flint. The ghting has begun in the
riverlands, and your brother has many leagues to go.”
“I know.” Bran felt as miserable as he sounded. He handed the
bronze tube back to the maester, and noticed how thin Luwin’s hair
had grown on top. He could see the pink of scalp showing through.
It felt queer to look down on him this way, when he’d spent his
whole life looking up at him, but when you sat on Hodor’s back you
looked down on everyone. “I don’t want to watch anymore. Hodor,
take me back to the keep.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
Maester Luwin tucked the tube up his sleeve. “Bran, your lord
brother will not have time to see you now. He must greet Lord
Karstark and his sons and make them welcome.”
“I won’t trouble Robb. I want to visit the godswood.” He put his
hand on Hodor’s shoulder. “Hodor.”
A series of chisel-cut handholds made a ladder in the granite of
the tower’s inner wall. Hodor hummed tunelessly as he went down

hand under hand, Bran bouncing against his back in the wicker seat
that Maester Luwin had fashioned for him. Luwin had gotten the
idea from the baskets the women used to carry rewood on their
backs; after that it had been a simple matter of cutting legholes and
attaching some new straps to spread Bran’s weight more evenly. It
was not as good as riding Dancer, but there were places Dancer
could not go, and this did not shame Bran the way it did when
Hodor carried him in his arms like a baby. Hodor seemed to like it
too, though with Hodor it was hard to tell. The only tricky part was
doors. Sometimes Hodor forgot that he had Bran on his back, and
that could be painful when he went through a door.
For near a fortnight there had been so many comings and goings
that Robb ordered both portcullises kept up and the drawbridge
down between them, even in the dead of night. A long column of
armored lancers was crossing the moat between the walls when
Bran emerged from the tower; Karstark men, following their lords
into the castle. They wore black iron halfhelms and black woolen
cloaks patterned with the white sunburst. Hodor trotted along
beside them, smiling to himself, his boots thudding against the
wood of the drawbridge. The riders gave them queer looks as they
went by, and once Bran heard someone gu aw. He refused to let it
trouble him. “Men will look at you,” Maester Luwin had warned
him the rst time they had strapped the wicker basket around
Hodor’s chest. “They will look, and they will talk, and some will
mock you.” Let them mock, Bran thought. No one mocked him in his
bedchamber, but he would not live his life in bed.
As they passed beneath the gatehouse portcullis, Bran put two
ngers into his mouth and whistled. Summer came loping across the
yard. Suddenly the Karstark lancers were ghting for control, as
their horses rolled their eyes and whickered in dismay. One stallion
reared, screaming, his rider cursing and hanging on desperately.
The scent of the direwolves sent horses into a frenzy of fear if they
were not accustomed to it, but they’d quiet soon enough once
Summer was gone. “The godswood,” Bran reminded Hodor.
Even Winterfell itself was crowded. The yard rang to the sound of
sword and axe, the rumble of wagons, and the barking of dogs. The

armory doors were open, and Bran glimpsed Mikken at his forge,
his hammer ringing as sweat dripped o his bare chest. Bran had
never seen as many strangers in all his years, not even when King
Robert had come to visit Father.
He tried not to inch as Hodor ducked through a low door. They
walked down a long dim hallway, Summer padding easily beside
them. The wolf glanced up from time to time, eyes smoldering like
liquid gold. Bran would have liked to touch him, but he was riding
too high for his hand to reach.
The godswood was an island of peace in the sea of chaos that
Winterfell had become. Hodor made his way through the dense
stands of oak and ironwood and sentinels, to the still pool beside
the heart tree. He stopped under the gnarled limbs of the weirwood,
humming. Bran reached up over his head and pulled himself out of
his seat, drawing the dead weight of his legs up through the holes in
the wicker basket. He hung for a moment, dangling, the dark red
leaves brushing against his face, until Hodor lifted him and lowered
him to the smooth stone beside the water. “I want to be by myself
for a while,” he said. “You go soak. Go to the pools.”
“Hodor.” Hodor stomped through the trees and vanished. Across
the godswood, beneath the windows of the Guest House, an
underground hot spring fed three small ponds. Steam rose from the
water day and night, and the wall that loomed above was thick with
moss. Hodor hated cold water, and would ght like a treed wildcat
when threatened with soap, but he would happily immerse himself
in the hottest pool and sit for hours, giving a loud burp to echo the
spring whenever a bubble rose from the murky green depths to
break upon the surface.
Summer lapped at the water and settled down at Bran’s side. He
rubbed the wolf under the jaw, and for a moment boy and beast
both felt at peace. Bran had always liked the godswood, even before,
but of late he found himself drawn to it more and more. Even the
heart tree no longer scared him the way it used to. The deep red
eyes carved into the pale trunk still watched him, yet somehow he
took comfort from that now. The gods were looking over him, he
told himself; the old gods, gods of the Starks and the First Men and

the children of the forest, his father’s gods. He felt safe in their
sight, and the deep silence of the trees helped him think. Bran had
been thinking a lot since his fall; thinking, and dreaming, and
talking with the gods.
“Please make it so Robb won’t go away,” he prayed softly. He
moved his hand through the cold water, sending ripples across the
pool. “Please make him stay. Or if he has to go, bring him home
safe, with Mother and Father and the girls. And make it … make it
so Rickon understands.”
His baby brother had been wild as a winter storm since he
learned Robb was riding o to war, weeping and angry by turns.
He’d refused to eat, cried and screamed for most of a night, even
punched Old Nan when she tried to sing him to sleep, and the next
day he’d vanished. Robb had set half the castle searching for him,
and when at last they’d found him down in the crypts, Rickon had
slashed at them with a rusted iron sword he’d snatched from a dead
king’s hand, and Shaggydog had come slavering out of the darkness
like a green-eyed demon. The wolf was near as wild as Rickon; he’d
bitten Gage on the arm and torn a chunk of esh from Mikken’s
thigh. It had taken Robb himself and Grey Wind to bring him to
bay. Farlen had the black wolf chained up in the kennels now, and
Rickon cried all the more for being without him.
Maester Luwin counseled Robb to remain at Winterfell, and Bran
pleaded with him too, for his own sake as much as Rickon’s, but his
brother only shook his head stubbornly and said, “I don’t want to
go. I have to.”
It was only half a lie. Someone had to go, to hold the Neck and
help the Tullys against the Lannisters, Bran could understand that,
but it did not have to be Robb. His brother might have given the
command to Hal Mollen or Theon Greyjoy, or to one of his lords
bannermen. Maester Luwin urged him to do just that, but Robb
would not hear of it. “My lord father would never have sent men o
to die while he huddled like a craven behind the walls of
Winterfell,” he said, all Robb the Lord.
Robb seemed half a stranger to Bran now, transformed, a lord in
truth, though he had not yet seen his sixteenth name day. Even their

father’s bannermen seemed to sense it. Many tried to test him, each
in his own way. Roose Bolton and Robett Glover both demanded the
honor of battle command, the rst brusquely, the second with a
smile and a jest. Stout, grey-haired Maege Mormont, dressed in mail
like a man, told Robb bluntly that he was young enough to be her
grandson, and had no business giving her commands … but as it
happened, she had a granddaughter she would be willing to have
him marry. Soft-spoken Lord Cerwyn had actually brought his
daughter with him, a plump, homely maid of thirty years who sat at
her father’s left hand and never lifted her eyes from her plate.
Jovial Lord Hornwood had no daughters, but he did bring gifts, a
horse one day, a haunch of venison the next, a silver-chased hunting
horn the day after, and he asked nothing in return … nothing but a
certain holdfast taken from his grandfather, and hunting rights
north of a certain ridge, and leave to dam the White Knife, if it
please the lord.
Robb answered each of them with cool courtesy, much as Father
might have, and somehow he bent them to his will.
And when Lord Umber, who was called the Greatjon by his men
and stood as tall as Hodor and twice as wide, threatened to take his
forces home if he was placed behind the Hornwoods or the Cerwyns
in the order of march, Robb told him he was welcome to do so.
“And when we are done with the Lannisters,” he promised,
scratching Grey Wind behind the ear, “we will march back north,
root you out of your keep, and hang you for an oathbreaker.”
Cursing, the Greatjon ung a agon of ale into the re and
bellowed that Robb was so green he must piss grass. When Hallis
Mollen moved to restrain him, he knocked him to the oor, kicked
over a table, and unsheathed the biggest, ugliest greatsword that
Bran had ever seen. All along the benches, his sons and brothers and
sworn swords leapt to their feet, grabbing for their steel.
Yet Robb only said a quiet word, and in a snarl and the blink of
an eye Lord Umber was on his back, his sword spinning on the oor
three feet away and his hand dripping blood where Grey Wind had
bitten o two ngers. “My lord father taught me that it was death
to bare steel against your liege lord,” Robb said, “but doubtless you

only meant to cut my meat.” Bran’s bowels went to water as the
Greatjon struggled to rise, sucking at the red stumps of
ngers … but then, astonishingly, the huge man laughed. “Your
meat,” he roared, “is bloody tough.”
And somehow after that the Greatjon became Robb’s right hand,
his staunchest champion, loudly telling all and sundry that the boy
lord was a Stark after all, and they’d damn well better bend their
knees if they didn’t fancy having them chewed o .
Yet that very night, his brother came to Bran’s bedchamber pale
and shaken, after the res had burned low in the Great Hall. “I
thought he was going to kill me,” Robb confessed. “Did you see the
way he threw down Hal, like he was no bigger than Rickon? Gods, I
was so scared. And the Greatjon’s not the worst of them, only the
loudest. Lord Roose never says a word, he only looks at me, and all
I can think of is that room they have in the Dreadfort, where the
Boltons hang the skins of their enemies.”
“That’s just one of Old Nan’s stories,” Bran said. A note of doubt
crept into his voice. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” He gave a weary shake of his head. “Lord Cerwyn
means to take his daughter south with us. To cook for him, he says.
Theon is certain I’ll nd the girl in my bedroll one night. I wish … I
wish Father was here …”
That was the one thing they could agree on, Bran and Rickon and
Robb the Lord; they all wished Father was here. But Lord Eddard
was a thousand leagues away, a captive in some dungeon, a hunted
fugitive running for his life, or even dead. No one seemed to know
for certain; every traveler told a di erent tale, each more terrifying
than the last. The heads of Father’s guardsmen were rotting on the
walls of the Red Keep, impaled on spikes. King Robert was dead at
Father’s hands. The Baratheons had laid siege to King’s Landing.
Lord Eddard had ed south with the king’s wicked brother Renly.
Arya and Sansa had been murdered by the Hound. Mother had
killed Tyrion the Imp and hung his body from the walls of Riverrun.
Lord Tywin Lannister was marching on the Eyrie, burning and
slaughtering as he went. One wine-sodden taleteller even claimed
that Rhaegar Targaryen had returned from the dead and was

marshaling a vast host of ancient heroes on Dragonstone to reclaim
his father’s throne.
When the raven came, bearing a letter marked with Father’s own
seal and written in Sansa’s hand, the cruel truth seemed no less
incredible. Bran would never forget the look on Robb’s face as he
stared at their sister’s words. “She says Father conspired at treason
with the king’s brothers,” he read. “King Robert is dead, and Mother
and I are summoned to the Red Keep to swear fealty to Jo rey. She
says we must be loyal, and when she marries Jo rey she will plead
with him to spare our lord father’s life.” His ngers closed into a
st, crushing Sansa’s letter between them. “And she says nothing of
Arya, nothing, not so much as a word. Damn her! What’s wrong with
the girl?”
Bran felt all cold inside. “She lost her wolf,” he said, weakly,
remembering the day when four of his father’s guardsmen had
returned from the south with Lady’s bones. Summer and Grey Wind
and Shaggydog had begun to howl before they crossed the
drawbridge, in voices drawn and desolate. Beneath the shadow of
the First Keep was an ancient lichyard, its headstones spotted with
pale lichen, where the old Kings of Winter had laid their faithful
servants. It was there they buried Lady, while her brothers stalked
between the graves like restless shadows. She had gone south, and
only her bones had returned.
Their grandfather, old Lord Rickard, had gone as well, with his
son Brandon who was Father’s brother, and two hundred of his best
men. None had ever returned. And Father had gone south, with
Arya and Sansa, and Jory and Hullen and Fat Tom and the rest, and
later Mother and Ser Rodrik had gone, and they hadn’t come back
either. And now Robb meant to go. Not to King’s Landing and not to
swear fealty, but to Riverrun, with a sword in his hand. And if their
lord father were truly a prisoner, that could mean his death for a
certainty. It frightened Bran more than he could say.
“If Robb has to go, watch over him,” Bran entreated the old gods,
as they watched him with the heart tree’s red eyes, “and watch over
his men, Hal and Quent and the rest, and Lord Umber and Lady
Mormont and the other lords. And Theon too, I suppose. Watch

them and keep them safe, if it please you, gods. Help them defeat
the Lannisters and save Father and bring them home.”
A faint wind sighed through the godswood and the red leaves
stirred and whispered. Summer bared his teeth. “You hear them,
boy?” a voice asked.
Bran lifted his head. Osha stood across the pool, beneath an
ancient oak, her face shadowed by leaves. Even in irons, the
Wildling moved quiet as a cat. Summer circled the pool, sni ed at
her. The tall woman inched.
“Summer, to me,” Bran called. The direwolf took one nal sni ,
spun, and bounded back. Bran wrapped his arms around him. “What
are you doing here?” He had not seen Osha since they’d taken her
captive in the wolfswood, though he knew she’d been set to
working in the kitchens.
“They are my gods too,” Osha said. “Beyond the Wall, they are
the only gods.” Her hair was growing out, brown and shaggy. It
made her look more womanly, that and the simple dress of brown
roughspun they’d given her when they took her mail and leather.
“Gage lets me have my prayers from time to time, when I feel the
need, and I let him do as he likes under my skirt, when he feels the
need. It’s nothing to me. I like the smell of our on his hands, and
he’s gentler than Stiv.” She gave an awkward bow. “I’ll leave you.
There’s pots that want scouring.”
“No, stay,” Bran commanded her. “Tell me what you meant,
about hearing the gods.”
Osha studied him. “You asked them and they’re answering. Open
your ears, listen, you’ll hear.”
Bran listened. “It’s only the wind,” he said after a moment,
uncertain. “The leaves are rustling.”
“Who do you think sends the wind, if not the gods?” She seated
herself across the pool from him, clinking faintly as she moved.
Mikken had xed iron manacles to her ankles, with a heavy chain
between them; she could walk, so long as she kept her strides small,
but there was no way for her to run, or climb, or mount a horse.
“They see you, boy. They hear you talking. That rustling, that’s
them talking back.”

“What are they saying?”
“They’re sad. Your lord brother will get no help from them, not
where he’s going. The old gods have no power in the south. The
weirwoods there were all cut down, thousands of years ago. How
can they watch your brother when they have no eyes?”
Bran had not thought of that. It frightened him. If even the gods
could not help his brother, what hope was there? Maybe Osha
wasn’t hearing them right. He cocked his head and tried to listen
again. He thought he could hear the sadness now, but nothing more
than that.
The rustling grew louder. Bran heard mu ed footfalls and a low
humming, and Hodor came blundering out of the trees, naked and
smiling. “Hodor!”
“He must have heard our voices,” Bran said. “Hodor, you forgot
your clothes.”
“Hodor,” Hodor agreed. He was dripping wet from the neck
down, steaming in the chill air. His body was covered with brown
hair, thick as a pelt. Between his legs, his manhood swung long and
heavy.
Osha eyed him with a sour smile. “Now there’s a big man,” she
said. “He has giant’s blood in him, or I’m the queen.”
“Maester Luwin says there are no more giants. He says they’re all
dead, like the children of the forest. All that’s left of them are old
bones in the earth that men turn up with plows from time to time.”
“Let Maester Luwin ride beyond the Wall,” Osha said. “He’ll nd
giants then, or they’ll nd him. My brother killed one. Ten foot tall
she was, and stunted at that. They’ve been known to grow big as
twelve and thirteen feet. Fierce things they are too, all hair and
teeth, and the wives have beards like their husbands, so there’s no
telling them apart. The women take human men for lovers, and it’s
from them the half bloods come. It goes harder on the women they
catch. The men are so big they’ll rip a maid apart before they get
her with child.” She grinned at him. “But you don’t know what I
mean, do you, boy?”
“Yes I do,” Bran insisted. He understood about mating; he had
seen dogs in the yard, and watched a stallion mount a mare. But

talking about it made him uncomfortable. He looked at Hodor. “Go
back and bring your clothes, Hodor,” he said. “Go dress.”
“Hodor.” He walked back the way he had come, ducking under a
low-hanging tree limb.
He was awfully big, Bran thought as he watched him go. “Are
there truly giants beyond the Wall?” he asked Osha, uncertainly.
“Giants and worse than giants, Lordling. I tried to tell your
brother when he asked his questions, him and your maester and that
smiley boy Greyjoy. The cold winds are rising, and men go out from
their res and never come back … or if they do, they’re not men no
more, but only wights, with blue eyes and cold black hands. Why do
you think I run south with Stiv and Hali and the rest of them fools?
Mance thinks he’ll ght, the brave sweet stubborn man, like the
white walkers were no more than rangers, but what does he know?
He can call himself King-beyond-the-Wall all he likes, but he’s still
just another old black crow who ew down from the Shadow
Tower. He’s never tasted winter. I was born up there, child, like my
mother and her mother before her and her mother before her, born
of the Free Folk. We remember.” Osha stood, her chains rattling
together. “I tried to tell your lordling brother. Only yesterday,
when I saw him in the yard. ‘M’lord Stark,’ I called to him,
respectful as you please, but he looked through me, and that sweaty
oaf Greatjon Umber shoves me out of the path. So be it. I’ll wear
my irons and hold my tongue. A man who won’t listen can’t hear.”
“Tell me. Robb will listen to me, I know he will.”
“Will he now? We’ll see. You tell him this, m’lord. You tell him
he’s bound on marching the wrong way. It’s north he should be
taking his swords. North, not south. You hear me?”
Bran nodded. “I’ll tell him.”
But that night, when they feasted in the Great Hall, Robb was not
with them. He took his meal in the solar instead, with Lord Rickard
and the Greatjon and the other lords bannermen, to make the nal
plans for the long march to come. It was left to Bran to ll his place
at the head of the table, and act the host to Lord Karstark’s sons and
honored friends. They were already at their places when Hodor
carried Bran into the hall on his back, and knelt beside the high

seat. Two of the serving men helped lift him from his basket. Bran
could feel the eyes of every stranger in the hall. It had grown quiet.
“My lords,” Hallis Mollen announced, “Brandon Stark, of
Winterfell.”
“I welcome you to our res,” Bran said sti y, “and o er you
meat and mead in honor of our friendship.”
Harrion Karstark, the oldest of Lord Rickard’s sons, bowed, and
his brothers after him, yet as they settled back in their places he
heard the younger two talking in low voices, over the clatter of
wine cups. “… sooner die than live like that,” muttered one, his
father’s namesake Eddard, and his brother Torrhen said likely the
boy was broken inside as well as out, too craven to take his own
life.
Broken, Bran thought bitterly as he clutched his knife. Is that what
he was now? Bran the Broken? “I don’t want to be broken,” he
whispered ercely to Maester Luwin, who’d been seated to his
right. “I want to be a knight.”
“There are some who call my order the knights of the mind,”
Luwin replied. “You are a surpassing clever boy when you work at
it, Bran. Have you ever thought that you might wear a maester’s
chain? There is no limit to what you might learn.”
“I want to learn magic,” Bran told him. “The crow promised that I
would y.”
Maester Luwin sighed. “I can teach you history, healing, herblore.
I can teach you the speech of ravens, and how to build a castle, and
the way a sailor steers his ship by the stars. I can teach you to
measure the days and mark the seasons, and at the Citadel in
Oldtown they can teach you a thousand things more. But, Bran, no
man can teach you magic.”
“The children could,” Bran said. “The children of the forest.” That
reminded him of the promise he had made to Osha in the
godswood, so he told Luwin what she had said.
The maester listened politely. “The Wildling woman could give
Old Nan lessons in telling tales, I think,” he said when Bran was
done. “I will talk with her again if you like, but it would be best if
you did not trouble your brother with this folly. He has more than

enough to concern him without fretting over giants and dead men in
the woods. It’s the Lannisters who hold your lord father, Bran, not
the children of the forest.” He put a gentle hand on Bran’s arm.
“Think on what I said, child.”
And two days later, as a red dawn broke across a windswept sky,
Bran found himself in the yard beneath the gatehouse, strapped atop
Dancer as he said his farewells to his brother.
“You are the lord in Winterfell now,” Robb told him. He was
mounted on a shaggy grey stallion, his shield hung from the horse’s
side; wood banded with iron, white and grey, and on it the snarling
face of a direwolf. His brother wore grey chainmail over bleached
leathers, sword and dagger at his waist, a fur-trimmed cloak across
his shoulders. “You must take my place, as I took Father’s, until we
come home.”
“I know,” Bran replied miserably. He had never felt so little or
alone or scared. He did not know how to be a lord.
“Listen to Maester Luwin’s counsel, and take care of Rickon. Tell
him that I’ll be back as soon as the ghting is done.”
Rickon had refused to come down. He was up in his chamber, redeyed and de ant. “No!” he’d screamed when Bran had asked if he
didn’t want to say farewell to Robb. “NO farewell!”
“I told him,” Bran said. “He says no one ever comes back.”
“He can’t be a baby forever. He’s a Stark, and near four.” Robb
sighed. “Well, Mother will be home soon. And I’ll bring back
Father, I promise.”
He wheeled his courser around and trotted away. Grey Wind
followed, loping beside the warhorse, lean and swift. Hallis Mollen
went before them through the gate, carrying the rippling white
banner of House Stark atop a high standard of grey ash. Theon
Greyjoy and the Greatjon fell in on either side of Robb, and their
knights formed up in a double column behind them, steel-tipped
lances glinting in the sun.
Uncomfortably, he remembered Osha’s words. He’s marching the
wrong way, he thought. For an instant he wanted to gallop after him
and shout a warning, but when Robb vanished beneath the
portcullis, the moment was gone.

Beyond the castle walls, a roar of sound went up. The foot
soldiers and townsfolk were cheering Robb as he rode past, Bran
knew; cheering for Lord Stark, for the Lord of Winterfell on his
great stallion, with his cloak streaming and Grey Wind racing beside
him. They would never cheer for him that way, he realized with a
dull ache. He might be the lord in Winterfell while his brother and
father were gone, but he was still Bran the Broken. He could not
even get o his own horse, except to fall.
When the distant cheers had faded to silence and the yard was
empty at last, Winterfell seemed deserted and dead. Bran looked
around at the faces of those who remained, women and children and
old men … and Hodor. The huge stableboy had a lost and
frightened look to his face. “Hodor?” he said sadly.
“Hodor,” Bran agreed, wondering what it meant.

DAENERYS

When he had taken his pleasure, Khal Drogo rose from their
sleeping mats to tower above her. His skin shone dark as bronze in
the ruddy light from the brazier, the faint lines of old scars visible
on his broad chest. Ink-black hair, loose and unbound, cascaded
over his shoulders and down his back, well past his waist. His
manhood glistened wetly. The khal’s mouth twisted in a frown
beneath the droop of his long mustachio. “The stallion who mounts
the world has no need of iron chairs.”
Dany propped herself on an elbow to look up at him, so tall and
magni cent. She loved his hair especially. It had never been cut; he
had never known defeat. “It was prophesied that the stallion will
ride to the ends of the earth,” she said.
“The earth ends at the black salt sea,” Drogo answered at once.
He wet a cloth in a basin of warm water to wipe the sweat and oil
from his skin. “No horse can cross the poison water.”
“In the Free Cities, there are ships by the thousand,” Dany told
him, as she had told him before. “Wooden horses with a hundred
legs, that y across the sea on wings full of wind.”
Khal Drogo did not want to hear it. “We will speak no more of
wooden horses and iron chairs.” He dropped the cloth and began to
dress. “This day I will go to the grass and hunt, woman wife,” he
announced as he shrugged into a painted vest and buckled on a wide
belt with heavy medallions of silver, gold, and bronze.

“Yes, my sun-and-stars,” Dany said. Drogo would take his
bloodriders and ride in search of hrakkar, the great white lion of the
plains. If they returned triumphant, her lord husband’s joy would be
erce, and he might be willing to hear her out.
Savage beasts he did not fear, nor any man who had ever drawn
breath, but the sea was a di erent matter. To the Dothraki, water
that a horse could not drink was something foul; the heaving greygreen plains of the ocean lled them with superstitious loathing.
Drogo was a bolder man than the other horselords in half a hundred
ways, she had found … but not in this. If only she could get him
onto a ship …
After the khal and his bloodriders had ridden o with their bows,
Dany summoned her handmaids. Her body felt so fat and ungainly
now that she welcomed the help of their strong arms and deft
hands, whereas before she had often been uncomfortable with the
way they fussed and uttered about her. They scrubbed her clean
and dressed her in sandsilk, loose and owing. As Doreah combed
out her hair, she sent Jhiqui to nd Ser Jorah Mormont.
The knight came at once. He wore horsehair leggings and painted
vest, like a rider. Coarse black hair covered his thick chest and
muscular arms. “My princess. How may I serve you?”
“You must talk to my lord husband,” Dany said. “Drogo says the
stallion who mounts the world will have all the lands of the earth to
rule, and no need to cross the poison water. He talks of leading his
khalasar east after Rhaego is born, to plunder the lands around the
Jade Sea.”
The knight looked thoughtful. “The khal has never seen the Seven
Kingdoms,” he said. “They are nothing to him. If he thinks of them
at all, no doubt he thinks of islands, a few small cities clinging to
rocks in the manner of Lorath or Lys, surrounded by stormy seas.
The riches of the east must seem a more tempting prospect.”
“But he must ride west,” Dany said, despairing. “Please, help me
make him understand.” She had never seen the Seven Kingdoms
either, no more than Drogo, yet she felt as though she knew them
from all the tales her brother had told her. Viserys had promised her

a thousand times that he would take her back one day, but he was
dead now and his promises had died with him.
“The Dothraki do things in their own time, for their own
reasons,” the knight answered. “Have patience, Princess. Do not
make your brother’s mistake. We will go home, I promise you.”
Home? The word made her feel sad. Ser Jorah had his Bear
Island, but what was home to her? A few tales, names recited as
solemnly as the words of a prayer, the fading memory of a red
door … was Vaes Dothrak to be her home forever? When she
looked at the crones of the dosh khaleen, was she looking at her
future?
Ser Jorah must have seen the sadness on her face. “A great
caravan arrived during the night, Khaleesi. Four hundred horses,
from Pentos by way of Norvos and Qohor, under the command of
Merchant Captain Byan Votyris. Illyrio may have sent a letter.
Would you care to visit the Western Market?”
Dany stirred. “Yes,” she said. “I would like that.” The markets
came alive when a caravan had come in. You could never tell what
treasures the traders might bring this time, and it would be good to
hear men speaking Valyrian again, as they did in the Free Cities.
“Irri, have them prepare a litter.”
“I shall tell your khas,” Ser Jorah said, withdrawing.
If Khal Drogo had been with her, Dany would have ridden her
silver. Among the Dothraki, mothers stayed on horseback almost up
to the moment of birth, and she did not want to seem weak in her
husband’s eyes. But with the khal o hunting, it was pleasant to lie
back on soft cushions and be carried across Vaes Dothrak, with red
silk curtains to shield her from the sun. Ser Jorah saddled up and
rode beside her, with the four young men of her khas and her
handmaids.
The day was warm and cloudless, the sky a deep blue. When the
wind blew, she could smell the rich scents of grass and earth. As her
litter passed beneath the stolen monuments, she went from sunlight
to shadow and back again. Dany swayed along, studying the faces
of dead heroes and forgotten kings. She wondered if the gods of
burned cities could still answer prayers.

If I were not the blood of the dragon, she thought wistfully, this
could be my home. She was khaleesi, she had a strong man and a
swift horse, handmaids to serve her, warriors to keep her safe, an
honored place in the dosh khaleen awaiting her when she grew
old … and in her womb grew a son who would one day bestride the
world. That should be enough for any woman … but not for the
dragon. With Viserys gone, Daenerys was the last, the very last. She
was the seed of kings and conquerors, and so too the child inside
her. She must not forget.
The Western Market was a great square of beaten earth
surrounded by warrens of mud-baked brick, animal pens,
whitewashed drinking halls. Hummocks rose from the ground like
the backs of great subterranean beasts breaking the surface,
yawning black mouths leading down to cool and cavernous
storerooms below. The interior of the square was a maze of stalls
and crookback aisles, shaded by awnings of woven grass.
A hundred merchants and traders were unloading their goods and
setting up in stalls when they arrived, yet even so the great market
seemed hushed and deserted compared to the teeming bazaars that
Dany remembered from Pentos and the other Free Cities. The
caravans made their way to Vaes Dothrak from east and west not so
much to sell to the Dothraki as to trade with each other, Ser Jorah
had explained. The riders let them come and go unmolested, so long
as they observed the peace of the sacred city, did not profane the
Mother of Mountains or the Womb of the World, and honored the
crones of the dosh khaleen with the traditional gifts of salt, silver,
and seed. The Dothraki did not truly comprehend this business of
buying and selling.
Dany liked the strangeness of the Eastern Market too, with all its
queer sights and sounds and smells. She often spent her mornings
there, nibbling tree eggs, locust pie, and green noodles, listening to
the high ululating voices of the spellsingers, gaping at manticores in
silver cages and immense grey elephants and the striped black-andwhite horses of the Jogos Nhai. She enjoyed watching all the people
too: dark solemn Asshai’i and tall pale Qartheen, the bright-eyed
men of Yi Ti in monkey-tail hats, warrior maids from Bayasabhad,

Shamyriana, and Kayakayanaya with iron rings in their nipples and
rubies in their cheeks, even the dour and frightening Shadow Men,
who covered their arms and legs and chests with tattoos and hid
their faces behind masks. The Eastern Market was a place of wonder
and magic for Dany.
But the Western Market smelled of home.
As Irri and Jhiqui helped her from her litter, she sni ed, and
recognized the sharp odors of garlic and pepper, scents that
reminded Dany of days long gone in the alleys of Tyrosh and Myr
and brought a fond smile to her face. Under that she smelled the
heady sweet perfumes of Lys. She saw slaves carrying bolts of
intricate Myrish lace and ne wools in a dozen rich colors. Caravan
guards wandered among the aisles in copper helmets and kneelength tunics of quilted yellow cotton, empty scabbards swinging
from their woven leather belts. Behind one stall an armorer
displayed steel breastplates worked with gold and silver in ornate
patterns, and helms hammered in the shapes of fanciful beasts. Next
to him was a pretty young woman selling Lannisport goldwork,
rings and brooches and torcs and exquisitely wrought medallions
suitable for belting. A huge eunuch guarded her stall, mute and
hairless, dressed in sweat-stained velvets and scowling at anyone
who came close. Across the aisle, a fat cloth trader from Yi Ti was
haggling with a Pentoshi over the price of some green dye, the
monkey tail on his hat swaying back and forth as he shook his head.
“When I was a little girl, I loved to play in the bazaar,” Dany told
Ser Jorah as they wandered down the shady aisle between the stalls.
“It was so alive there, all the people shouting and laughing, so many
wonderful things to look at … though we seldom had enough coin
to buy anything … well, except for a sausage now and again, or
honey ngers … do they have honey ngers in the Seven Kingdoms,
the kind they bake in Tyrosh?”
“Cakes, are they? I could not say, Princess.” The knight bowed.
“If you would pardon me for a time, I will seek out the captain and
see if he has letters for us.”
“Very well. I’ll help you nd him.”

“There is no need for you to trouble yourself.” Ser Jorah glanced
away impatiently. “Enjoy the market. I will rejoin you when my
business is concluded.”
Curious, Dany thought as she watched him stride o through the
throngs. She didn’t see why she should not go with him. Perhaps Ser
Jorah meant to nd a woman after he met with the merchant
captain. Whores frequently traveled with the caravans, she knew,
and some men were queerly shy about their couplings. She gave a
shrug. “Come,” she told the others.
Her handmaids trailed along as Dany resumed her stroll through
the market. “Oh, look,” she exclaimed to Doreah, “those are the
kind of sausages I meant.” She pointed to a stall where a wizened
little woman was grilling meat and onions on a hot restone. “They
make them with lots of garlic and hot peppers.” Delighted with her
discovery, Dany insisted the others join her for a sausage. Her
handmaids wolfed theirs down giggling and grinning, though the
men of her khas sni ed at the grilled meat suspiciously. “They taste
di erent than I remember,” Dany said after her rst few bites.
“In Pentos, I make them with pork,” the old woman said, “but all
my pigs died on the Dothraki sea. These are made of horsemeat,
Khaleesi, but I spice them the same.”
“Oh.” Dany felt disappointed, but Quaro liked his sausage so well
he decided to have another one, and Rakharo had to outdo him and
eat three more, belching loudly. Dany giggled.
“You have not laughed since your brother the Khal Rhaggat was
crowned by Drogo,” said Irri. “It is good to see, Khaleesi.”
Dany smiled shyly. It was sweet to laugh. She felt half a girl
again.
They wandered for half the morning. She saw a beautiful
feathered cloak from the Summer Isles, and took it for a gift. In
return, she gave the merchant a silver medallion from her belt. That
was how it was done among the Dothraki. A birdseller taught a
green-and-red parrot to say her name, and Dany laughed again, yet
still refused to take him. What would she do with a green-and-red
parrot in a khalasar? She did take a dozen asks of scented oils, the
perfumes of her childhood; she had only to close her eyes and sni

them and she could see the big house with the red door once more.
When Doreah looked longingly at a fertility charm at a magician’s
booth, Dany took that too and gave it to the handmaid, thinking
that now she should nd something for Irri and Jhiqui as well.
Turning a corner, they came upon a wine merchant o ering
thimble-sized cups of his wares to the passersby. “Sweet reds,” he
cried in uent Dothraki, “I have sweet reds, from Lys and Volantis
and the Arbor. Whites from Lys, Tyroshi pear brandy, rewine,
pepperwine, the pale green nectars of Myr. Smokeberry browns and
Andalish sours, I have them, I have them.” He was a small man,
slender and handsome, his axen hair curled and perfumed after the
fashion of Lys. When Dany paused before his stall, he bowed low.
“A taste for the khaleesi? I have a sweet red from Dorne, my lady, it
sings of plums and cherries and rich dark oak. A cask, a cup, a
swallow? One taste, and you will name your child after me.”
Dany smiled. “My son has his name, but I will try your
summerwine,” she said in Valyrian, Valyrian as they spoke it in the
Free Cities. The words felt strange on her tongue, after so long.
“Just a taste, if you would be so kind.”
The merchant must have taken her for Dothraki, with her clothes
and her oiled hair and sun-browned skin. When she spoke, he gaped
at her in astonishment. “My lady, you are … Tyroshi? Can it be so?”
“My speech may be Tyroshi, and my garb Dothraki, but I am of
Westeros, of the Sunset Kingdoms,” Dany told him.
Doreah stepped up beside her. “You have the honor to address
Daenerys of the House Targaryen, Daenerys Stormborn, khaleesi of
the riding men and princess of the Seven Kingdoms.”
The wine merchant dropped to his knees. “Princess,” he said,
bowing his head.
“Rise,” Dany commanded him. “I would still like to taste that
summerwine you spoke of.”
The man bounded to his feet. “That? Dornish swill. It is not
worthy of a princess. I have a dry red from the Arbor, crisp and
delectable. Please, let me give you a cask.”
Khal Drogo’s visits to the Free Cities had given him a taste for
good wine, and Dany knew that such a noble vintage would please

him. “You honor me, ser,” she murmured sweetly.
“The honor is mine.” The merchant rummaged about in the back
of his stall and produced a small oaken cask. Burned into the wood
was a cluster of grapes. “The Redwyne sigil,” he said, pointing, “for
the Arbor. There is no ner drink.”
“Khal Drogo and I will share it together. Aggo, take this back to
my litter, if you’d be so kind.” The wineseller beamed as the
Dothraki hefted the cask.
She did not realize that Ser Jorah had returned until she heard the
knight say, “No.” His voice was strange, brusque. “Aggo, put down
that cask.”
Aggo looked at Dany. She gave a hesitant nod. “Ser Jorah, is
something wrong?”
“I have a thirst. Open it, wineseller.”
The merchant frowned. “The wine is for the khaleesi, not for the
likes of you, ser.”
Ser Jorah moved closer to the stall. “If you don’t open it, I’ll
crack it open with your head.” He carried no weapons here in the
sacred city, save his hands—yet his hands were enough, big, hard,
dangerous, his knuckles covered with coarse dark hairs. The
wineseller hesitated a moment, then took up his hammer and
knocked the plug from the cask.
“Pour,” Ser Jorah commanded. The four young warriors of Dany’s
khas arrayed themselves behind him, frowning, watching with their
dark, almond-shaped eyes.
“It would be a crime to drink this rich a wine without letting it
breathe.” The wineseller had not put his hammer down.
Jhogo reached for the whip coiled at his belt, but Dany stopped
him with a light touch on the arm. “Do as Ser Jorah says,” she said.
People were stopping to watch.
The man gave her a quick, sullen glance. “As the princess
commands.” He had to set aside his hammer to lift the cask. He
lled two thimble-sized tasting cups, pouring so deftly he did not
spill a drop.
Ser Jorah lifted a cup and sni ed at the wine, frowning.

“Sweet, isn’t it?” the wineseller said, smiling. “Can you smell the
fruit, ser? The perfume of the Arbor. Taste it, my lord, and tell me
it isn’t the nest, richest wine that’s ever touched your tongue.”
Ser Jorah o ered him the cup. “You taste it rst.”
“Me?” The man laughed. “I am not worthy of this vintage, my
lord. And it’s a poor wine merchant who drinks up his own wares.”
His smile was amiable, yet she could see the sheen of sweat on his
brow.
“You will drink,” Dany said, cold as ice. “Empty the cup, or I will
tell them to hold you down while Ser Jorah pours the whole cask
down your throat.”
The wineseller shrugged, reached for the cup … and grabbed the
cask instead, inging it at her with both hands. Ser Jorah bulled
into her, knocking her out of the way. The cask bounced o his
shoulder and smashed open on the ground. Dany stumbled and lost
her feet. “No,” she screamed, thrusting her hands out to break her
fall … and Doreah caught her by the arm and wrenched her
backward, so she landed on her legs and not her belly.
The trader vaulted over the stall, darting between Aggo and
Rakharo. Quaro reached for an arakh that was not there as the blond
man slammed him aside. He raced down the aisle. Dany heard the
snap of Jhogo’s whip, saw the leather lick out and coil around the
wineseller’s leg. The man sprawled face rst in the dirt.
A dozen caravan guards had come running. With them was the
master himself, Merchant Captain Byan Votyris, a diminutive
Norvoshi with skin like old leather and a bristling blue mustachio
that swept up to his ears. He seemed to know what had happened
without a word being spoken. “Take this one away to await the
pleasure of the khal,” he commanded, gesturing at the man on the
ground. Two guards hauled the wineseller to his feet. “His goods I
gift to you as well, Princess,” the merchant captain went on. “Small
token of regret, that one of mine would do this thing.”
Doreah and Jhiqui helped Dany back to her feet. The poisoned
wine was leaking from the broken cask into the dirt. “How did you
know?” she asked Ser Jorah, trembling. “How?”

“I did not know, Khaleesi, not until the man refused to drink, but
once I read Magister Illyrio’s letter, I feared.” His dark eyes swept
over the faces of the strangers in the market. “Come. Best not to
talk of it here.”
Dany was near tears as they carried her back. The taste in her
mouth was one she had known before: fear. For years she had lived
in terror of Viserys, afraid of waking the dragon. This was even
worse. It was not just for herself that she feared now, but for her
baby. He must have sensed her fright, for he moved restlessly inside
her. Dany stroked the swell of her belly gently, wishing she could
reach him, touch him, soothe him. “You are the blood of the
dragon, little one,” she whispered as her litter swayed along,
curtains drawn tight. “You are the blood of the dragon, and the
dragon does not fear.”
Under the hollow hummock of earth that was her home in Vaes
Dothrak, Dany ordered them to leave her—all but Ser Jorah. “Tell
me,” she commanded as she lowered herself onto her cushions.
“Was it the Usurper?”
“Yes.” The knight drew out a folded parchment. “A letter to
Viserys, from Magister Illyrio. Robert Baratheon o ers lands and
lordships for your death, or your brother’s.”
“My brother?” Her sob was half a laugh. “He does not know yet,
does he? The Usurper owes Drogo a lordship.” This time her laugh
was half a sob. She hugged herself protectively. “And me, you said.
Only me?”
“You and the child,” Ser Jorah said, grim.
“No. He cannot have my son.” She would not weep, she decided.
She would not shiver with fear. The Usurper has woken the dragon
now, she told herself … and her eyes went to the dragon’s eggs
resting in their nest of dark velvet. The shifting lamplight limned
their stony scales, and shimmering motes of jade and scarlet and
gold swam in the air around them, like courtiers around a king.
Was it madness that seized her then, born of fear? Or some
strange wisdom buried in her blood? Dany could not have said. She
heard her own voice saying, “Ser Jorah, light the brazier.”

“Khaleesi?” The knight looked at her strangely. “It is so hot. Are
you certain?”
She had never been so certain. “Yes. I … I have a chill. Light the
brazier.”
He bowed. “As you command.”
When the coals were a re, Dany sent Ser Jorah from her. She had
to be alone to do what she must do. This is madness, she told herself
as she lifted the black-and-scarlet egg from the velvet. It will only
crack and burn, and it’s so beautiful, Ser Jorah will call me a fool if I
ruin it, and yet, and yet …
Cradling the egg with both hands, she carried it to the re and
pushed it down amongst the burning coals. The black scales seemed
to glow as they drank the heat. Flames licked against the stone with
small red tongues. Dany placed the other two eggs beside the black
one in the re. As she stepped back from the brazier, the breath
trembled in her throat.
She watched until the coals had turned to ashes. Drifting sparks
oated up and out of the smokehole. Heat shimmered in waves
around the dragon’s eggs. And that was all.
Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, Ser Jorah had said. Dany
gazed at her eggs sadly. What had she expected? A thousand
thousand years ago they had been alive, but now they were only
pretty rocks. They could not make a dragon. A dragon was air and
re. Living esh, not dead stone.
The brazier was cold again by the time Khal Drogo returned.
Cohollo was leading a packhorse behind him, with the carcass of a
great white lion slung across its back. Above, the stars were coming
out. The khal laughed as he swung down o his stallion and showed
her the scars on his leg where the hrakkar had raked him through his
leggings. “I shall make you a cloak of its skin, moon of my life,” he
swore.
When Dany told him what had happened at the market, all
laughter stopped, and Khal Drogo grew very quiet.
“This poisoner was the rst,” Ser Jorah Mormont warned him,
“but he will not be the last. Men will risk much for a lordship.”

Drogo was silent for a time. Finally he said, “This seller of
poisons ran from the moon of my life. Better he should run after
her. So he will. Jhogo, Jorah the Andal, to each of you I say, choose
any horse you wish from my herds, and it is yours. Any horse save
my red and the silver that was my bride gift to the moon of my life.
I make this gift to you for what you did.
“And to Rhaego son of Drogo, the stallion who will mount the
world, to him I also pledge a gift. To him I will give this iron chair
his mother’s father sat in. I will give him Seven Kingdoms. I, Drogo,
khal, will do this thing.” His voice rose, and he lifted his st to the
sky. “I will take my khalasar west to where the world ends, and ride
the wooden horses across the black salt water as no khal has done
before. I will kill the men in the iron suits and tear down their stone
houses. I will rape their women, take their children as slaves, and
bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak to bow down beneath
the Mother of Mountains. This I vow, I, Drogo son of Bharbo. This I
swear before the Mother of Mountains, as the stars look down in
witness.”
His khalasar left Vaes Dothrak two days later, striking south and
west across the plains. Khal Drogo led them on his great red
stallion, with Daenerys beside him on her silver. The wineseller
hurried behind them, naked, on foot, chained at throat and wrists.
His chains were fastened to the halter of Dany’s silver. As she rode,
he ran after her, barefoot and stumbling. No harm would come to
him … so long as he kept up.

CATELYN

It was too far to make out the banners clearly, but even through the
drifting fog she could see that they were white, with a dark smudge
in their center that could only be the direwolf of Stark, grey upon
its icy eld. When she saw it with her own eyes, Catelyn reined up
her horse and bowed her head in thanks. The gods were good. She
was not too late.
“They await our coming, my lady,” Ser Wylis Manderly said, “as
my lord father swore they would.”
“Let us not keep them waiting any longer, ser.” Ser Brynden Tully
put the spurs to his horse and trotted briskly toward the banners.
Catelyn rode beside him.
Ser Wylis and his brother Ser Wendel followed, leading their
levies, near fteen hundred men: some twenty-odd knights and as
many squires, two hundred mounted lances, swordsmen, and
freeriders, and the rest foot, armed with spears, pikes and tridents.
Lord Wyman had remained behind to see to the defenses of White
Harbor. A man of near sixty years, he had grown too stout to sit a
horse. “If I had thought to see war again in my lifetime, I should
have eaten a few less eels,” he’d told Catelyn when he met her ship,
slapping his massive belly with both hands. His ngers were fat as
sausages. “My boys will see you safe to your son, though, have no
fear.”
His “boys” were both older than Catelyn, and she might have
wished that they did not take after their father quite so closely. Ser

Wylis was only a few eels short of not being able to mount his own
horse; she pitied the poor animal. Ser Wendel, the younger boy,
would have been the fattest man she’d ever known, had she only
neglected to meet his father and brother. Wylis was quiet and
formal, Wendel loud and boisterous; both had ostentatious walrus
mustaches and heads as bare as a baby’s bottom; neither seemed to
own a single garment that was not spotted with food stains. Yet she
liked them well enough; they had gotten her to Robb, as their father
had vowed, and nothing else mattered.
She was pleased to see that her son had sent eyes out, even to the
east. The Lannisters would come from the south when they came,
but it was good that Robb was being careful. My son is leading a host
to war, she thought, still only half believing it. She was desperately
afraid for him, and for Winterfell, yet she could not deny feeling a
certain pride as well. A year ago he had been a boy. What was he
now? she wondered.
Outriders spied the Manderly banners—the white merman with
trident in hand, rising from a blue-green sea—and hailed them
warmly. They were led to a spot of high ground dry enough for a
camp. Ser Wylis called a halt there, and remained behind with his
men to see the res laid and the horses tended, while his brother
Wendel rode on with Catelyn and her uncle to present their father’s
respects to their liege lord.
The ground under their horses’ hooves was soft and wet. It fell
away slowly beneath them as they rode past smoky peat res, lines
of horses, and wagons heavy-laden with hardbread and salt beef. On
a stony outcrop of land higher than the surrounding country, they
passed a lord’s pavilion with walls of heavy sailcloth. Catelyn
recognized the banner, the bull moose of the Hornwoods, brown on
its dark orange eld.
Just beyond, through the mists, she glimpsed the walls and
towers of Moat Cailin … or what remained of them. Immense
blocks of black basalt, each as large as a crofter’s cottage, lay
scattered and tumbled like a child’s wooden blocks, half-sunk in the
soft boggy soil. Nothing else remained of a curtain wall that had
once stood as high as Winterfell’s. The wooden keep was gone

entirely, rotted away a thousand years past, with not so much as a
timber to mark where it had stood. All that was left of the great
stronghold of the First Men were three towers … three where there
had once been twenty, if the taletellers could be believed.
The Gatehouse Tower looked sound enough, and even boasted a
few feet of standing wall to either side of it. The Drunkard’s Tower,
o in the bog where the south and west walls had once met, leaned
like a man about to spew a bellyful of wine into the gutter. And the
tall, slender Children’s Tower, where legend said the children of the
forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer
of the waters, had lost half its crown. It looked as if some great
beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower top,
and spit the rubble across the bog. All three towers were green with
moss. A tree was growing out between the stones on the north side
of the Gatehouse Tower, its gnarled limbs festooned with ropy
white blankets of ghostskin.
“Gods have mercy,” Ser Brynden exclaimed when he saw what lay
before them. “This is Moat Cailin? It’s no more than a—”
“—death trap,” Catelyn nished. “I know how it looks, Uncle. I
thought the same the rst time I saw it, but Ned assured me that
this ruin is more formidable than it seems. The three surviving
towers command the causeway from all sides, and any enemy must
pass between them. The bogs here are impenetrable, full of
quicksands and suckholes and teeming with snakes. To assault any
of the towers, an army would need to wade through waist-deep
black muck, cross a moat full of lizard-lions, and scale walls slimy
with moss, all the while exposing themselves to re from archers in
the other towers.” She gave her uncle a grim smile. “And when
night falls, there are said to be ghosts, cold vengeful spirits of the
north who hunger for southron blood.”
Ser Brynden chuckled. “Remind me not to linger here. Last I
looked, I was southron myself.”
Standards had been raised atop all three towers. The Karstark
sunburst hung from the Drunkard’s Tower, beneath the direwolf; on
the Children’s Tower it was the Greatjon’s giant in shattered chains.
But on the Gatehouse Tower, the Stark banner ew alone. That was

where Robb had made his seat. Catelyn made for it, with Ser
Brynden and Ser Wendel behind her, their horses stepping slowly
down the log-and-plank road that had been laid across the greenand-black elds of mud.
She found her son surrounded by his father’s lords bannermen, in
a drafty hall with a peat re smoking in a black hearth. He was
seated at a massive stone table, a pile of maps and papers in front of
him, talking intently with Roose Bolton and the Greatjon. At rst he
did not notice her … but his wolf did. The great grey beast was
lying near the re, but when Catelyn entered he lifted his head, and
his golden eyes met hers. The lords fell silent one by one, and Robb
looked up at the sudden quiet and saw her. “Mother!” he said, his
voice thick with emotion.
Catelyn wanted to run to him, to kiss his sweet brow, to wrap
him in her arms and hold him so tightly that he would never come
to harm … but here in front of his lords, she dared not. He was
playing a man’s part now, and she would not take that away from
him. So she held herself at the far end of the basalt slab they were
using for a table. The direwolf got to his feet and padded across the
room to where she stood. It seemed bigger than a wolf ought to be.
“You’ve grown a beard,” she said to Robb, while Grey Wind sni ed
her hand.
He rubbed his stubbled jaw, suddenly awkward. “Yes.” His chin
hairs were redder than the ones on his head.
“I like it.” Catelyn stroked the wolf’s head, gently. “It makes you
look like my brother Edmure.” Grey Wind nipped at her ngers,
playful, and trotted back to his place by the re.
Ser Helman Tallhart was the rst to follow the direwolf across
the room to pay his respects, kneeling before her and pressing his
brow to her hand. “Lady Catelyn,” he said, “you are fair as ever, a
welcome sight in troubled times.” The Glovers followed, Galbart
and Robett, and Greatjon Umber, and the rest, one by one. Theon
Greyjoy was the last. “I had not looked to see you here, my lady,”
he said as he knelt.
“I had not thought to be here,” Catelyn said, “until I came ashore
at White Harbor, and Lord Wyman told me that Robb had called the

banners. You know his son, Ser Wendel,” Wendel Manderly stepped
forward and bowed as low as his girth would allow. “And my uncle,
Ser Brynden Tully, who has left my sister’s service for mine.”
“The Black sh,” Robb said. “Thank you for joining us, ser. We
need men of your courage. And you, Ser Wendel, I am glad to have
you here. Is Ser Rodrik with you as well, Mother? I’ve missed him.”
“Ser Rodrik is on his way north from White Harbor. I have named
him castellan and commanded him to hold Winterfell till our return.
Maester Luwin is a wise counsellor, but unskilled in the arts of
war.”
“Have no fear on that count, Lady Stark,” the Greatjon told her in
his bass rumble. “Winterfell is safe. We’ll shove our swords up
Tywin Lannister’s bunghole soon enough, begging your pardons,
and then it’s on to the Red Keep to free Ned.”
“My lady, a question, as it please you.” Roose Bolton, Lord of the
Dreadfort, had a small voice, yet when he spoke larger men quieted
to listen. His eyes were curiously pale, almost without color, and his
look disturbing. “It is said that you hold Lord Tywin’s dwarf son as
captive. Have you brought him to us? I vow, we should make good
use of such a hostage.”
“I did hold Tyrion Lannister, but no longer,” Catelyn was forced
to admit. A chorus of consternation greeted the news. “I was no
more pleased than you, my lords. The gods saw t to free him, with
some help from my fool of a sister.” She ought not to be so open in
her contempt, she knew, but her parting from the Eyrie had not
been pleasant. She had o ered to take Lord Robert with her, to
foster him at Winterfell for a few years. The company of other boys
would do him good, she had dared to suggest. Lysa’s rage had been
frightening to behold. “Sister or no,” she had replied, “if you try to
steal my son, you will leave by the Moon Door.” After that there
was no more to be said.
The lords were anxious to question her further, but Catelyn raised
a hand. “No doubt we will have time for all this later, but my
journey has fatigued me. I would speak with my son alone. I know
you will forgive me, my lords.” She gave them no choice; led by the
ever-obliging Lord Hornwood, the bannermen bowed and took their

leave. “And you, Theon,” she added when Greyjoy lingered. He
smiled and left them.
There was ale and cheese on the table. Catelyn lled a horn, sat,
sipped, and studied her son. He seemed taller than when she’d left,
and the wisps of beard did make him look older. “Edmure was
sixteen when he grew his rst whiskers.”
“I will be sixteen soon enough,” Robb said.
“And you are fteen now. Fifteen, and leading a host to battle.
Can you understand why I might fear, Robb?”
His look grew stubborn. “There was no one else.”
“No one?” she said. “Pray, who were those men I saw here a
moment ago? Roose Bolton, Rickard Karstark, Galbart and Robett
Glover, the Greatjon, Helman Tallhart … you might have given the
command to any of them. Gods be good, you might even have sent
Theon, though he would not be my choice.”
“They are not Starks,” he said.
“They are men, Robb, seasoned in battle. You were ghting with
wooden swords less than a year past.”
She saw anger in his eyes at that, but it was gone as quick as it
came, and suddenly he was a boy again. “I know,” he said, abashed.
“Are you … are you sending me back to Winterfell?”
Catelyn sighed. “I should. You ought never have left. Yet I dare
not, not now. You have come too far. Someday these lords will look
to you as their liege. If I pack you o now, like a child being sent to
bed without his supper, they will remember, and laugh about it in
their cups. The day will come when you need them to respect you,
even fear you a little. Laughter is poison to fear. I will not do that
to you, much as I might wish to keep you safe.”
“You have my thanks, Mother,” he said, his relief obvious
beneath the formality.
She reached across his table and touched his hair. “You are my
rstborn, Robb. I have only to look at you to remember the day you
came into the world, red-faced and squalling.”
He rose, clearly uncomfortable with her touch, and walked to the
hearth. Grey Wind rubbed his head against his leg. “You
know … about Father?”

“Yes.” The reports of Robert’s sudden death and Ned’s fall had
frightened Catelyn more than she could say, but she would not let
her son see her fear. “Lord Manderly told me when I landed at
White Harbor. Have you had any word of your sisters?”
“There was a letter,” Robb said, scratching his direwolf under the
jaw. “One for you as well, but it came to Winterfell with mine.” He
went to the table, rummaged among some maps and papers, and
returned with a crumpled parchment. “This is the one she wrote me,
I never thought to bring yours.”
Something in Robb’s tone troubled her. She smoothed out the
paper and read. Concern gave way to disbelief, then to anger, and
lastly to fear. “This is Cersei’s letter, not your sister’s,” she said
when she was done. “The real message is in what Sansa does not
say. All this about how kindly and gently the Lannisters are treating
her … I know the sound of a threat, even whispered. They have
Sansa hostage, and they mean to keep her.”
“There’s no mention of Arya,” Robb pointed out, miserable.
“No.” Catelyn did not want to think what that might mean, not
now, not here.
“I had hoped … if you still held the Imp, a trade of hostages …”
He took Sansa’s letter and crumpled it in his st, and she could tell
from the way he did it that it was not the rst time. “Is there word
from the Eyrie? I wrote to Aunt Lysa, asking help. Has she called
Lord Arryn’s banners, do you know? Will the knights of the Vale
come join us?”
“Only one,” she said, “the best of them, my uncle … but Brynden
Black sh was a Tully rst. My sister is not about to stir beyond her
Bloody Gate.”
Robb took it hard. “Mother, what are we going to do? I brought
this whole army together, eighteen thousand men, but I don’t … I’m
not certain …” He looked to her, his eyes shining, the proud young
lord melted away in an instant, and quick as that he was a child
again, a fteen-year-old boy looking to his mother for answers.
It would not do.
“What are you so afraid of, Robb?” she asked gently.

“I …” He turned his head away, to hide the rst tear. “If we
march … even if we win … the Lannisters hold Sansa, and Father.
They’ll kill them, won’t they?”
“They want us to think so.”
“You mean they’re lying?”
“I do not know, Robb. What I do know is that you have no
choice. If you go to King’s Landing and swear fealty, you will never
be allowed to leave. If you turn your tail and retreat to Winterfell,
your lords will lose all respect for you. Some may even go over to
the Lannisters. Then the queen, with that much less to fear, can do
as she likes with her prisoners. Our best hope, our only true hope, is
that you can defeat the foe in the eld. If you should chance to take
Lord Tywin or the Kingslayer captive, why then a trade might very
well be possible, but that is not the heart of it. So long as you have
power enough that they must fear you, Ned and your sister should
be safe. Cersei is wise enough to know that she may need them to
make her peace, should the ghting go against her.”
“What if the ghting doesn’t go against her?” Robb asked. “What
if it goes against us?”
Catelyn took his hand. “Robb, I will not soften the truth for you.
If you lose, there is no hope for any of us. They say there is naught
but stone at the heart of Casterly Rock. Remember the fate of
Rhaegar’s children.”
She saw the fear in his young eyes then, but there was a strength
as well. “Then I will not lose,” he vowed.
“Tell me what you know of the ghting in the riverlands,” she
said. She had to learn if he was truly ready.
“Less than a fortnight past, they fought a battle in the hills below
the Golden Tooth,” Robb said. “Uncle Edmure had sent Lord Vance
and Lord Piper to hold the pass, but the Kingslayer descended on
them and put them to ight. Lord Vance was slain. The last word
we had was that Lord Piper was falling back to join your brother
and his other bannermen at Riverrun, with Jaime Lannister on his
heels. That’s not the worst of it, though. All the time they were
battling in the pass, Lord Tywin was bringing a second Lannister

army around from the south. It’s said to be even larger than Jaime’s
host.
“Father must have known that, because he sent out some men to
oppose them, under the king’s own banner. He gave the command
to some southron lordling, Lord Erik or Derik or something like
that, but Ser Raymun Darry rode with him, and the letter said there
were other knights as well, and a force of Father’s own guardsmen.
Only it was a trap. Lord Derik had no sooner crossed the Red Fork
than the Lannisters fell upon him, the king’s banner be damned, and
Gregor Clegane took them in the rear as they tried to pull back
across the Mummer’s Ford. This Lord Derik and a few others may
have escaped, no one is certain, but Ser Raymun was killed, and
most of our men from Winterfell. Lord Tywin has closed o the
kingsroad, it’s said, and now he’s marching north toward Harrenhal,
burning as he goes.”
Grim and grimmer, thought Catelyn. It was worse than she’d
imagined. “You mean to meet him here?” she asked.
“If he comes so far, but no one thinks he will,” Robb said. “I’ve
sent word to Howland Reed, Father’s old friend at Greywater
Watch. If the Lannisters come up the Neck, the crannogmen will
bleed them every step of the way, but Galbart Glover says Lord
Tywin is too smart for that, and Roose Bolton agrees. He’ll stay
close to the Trident, they believe, taking the castles of the river
lords one by one, until Riverrun stands alone. We need to march
south to meet him.”
The very idea of it chilled Catelyn to the bone. What chance
would a
fteen-year-old boy have against seasoned battle
commanders like Jaime and Tywin Lannister? “Is that wise? You are
strongly placed here. It’s said that the old Kings in the North could
stand at Moat Cailin and throw back hosts ten times the size of their
own.”
“Yes, but our food and supplies are running low, and this is not
land we can live o easily. We’ve been waiting for Lord Manderly,
but now that his sons have joined us, we need to march.”
She was hearing the lords bannermen speaking with her son’s
voice, she realized. Over the years, she had hosted many of them at

Winterfell, and been welcomed with Ned to their own hearths and
tables. She knew what sorts of men they were, each one. She
wondered if Robb did.
And yet there was sense in what they said. This host her son had
assembled was not a standing army such as the Free Cities were
accustomed to maintain, nor a force of guardsmen paid in coin.
Most of them were smallfolk: crofters, eldhands, shermen,
sheepherders, the sons of innkeeps and traders and tanners,
leavened with a smattering of sellswords and freeriders hungry for
plunder. When their lords called, they came … but not forever.
“Marching is all very well,” she said to her son, “but where, and to
what purpose? What do you mean to do?”
Robb hesitated. “The Greatjon thinks we should take the battle to
Lord Tywin and surprise him,” he said, “but the Glovers and the
Karstarks feel we’d be wiser to go around his army and join up with
Uncle Ser Edmure against the Kingslayer.” He ran his ngers
through his shaggy mane of auburn hair, looking unhappy. “Though
by the time we reach Riverrun … I’m not certain …”
“Be certain,” Catelyn told her son, “or go home and take up that
wooden sword again. You cannot a ord to seem indecisive in front
of men like Roose Bolton and Rickard Karstark. Make no mistake,
Robb—these are your bannermen, not your friends. You named
yourself battle commander. Command.”
Her son looked at her, startled, as if he could not credit what he
was hearing. “As you say, Mother.”
“I’ll ask you again. What do you mean to do?”
Robb drew a map across the table, a ragged piece of old leather
covered with lines of faded paint. One end curled up from being
rolled; he weighed it down with his dagger. “Both plans have
virtues, but … look, if we try to swing around Lord Tywin’s host,
we take the risk of being caught between him and the Kingslayer,
and if we attack him … by all reports, he has more men than I do,
and a lot more armored horse. The Greatjon says that won’t matter
if we catch him with his breeches down, but it seems to me that a
man who has fought as many battles as Tywin Lannister won’t be so
easily surprised.”

“Good,” she said. She could hear echoes of Ned in his voice, as he
sat there, puzzling over the map. “Tell me more.”
“I’d leave a small force here to hold Moat Cailin, archers mostly,
and march the rest down the causeway,” he said, “but once we’re
below the Neck, I’d split our host in two. The foot can continue
down the kingsroad, while our horsemen cross the Green Fork at
the Twins.” He pointed. “When Lord Tywin gets word that we’ve
come south, he’ll march north to engage our main host, leaving our
riders free to hurry down the west bank to Riverrun.” Robb sat
back, not quite daring to smile, but pleased with himself and hungry
for her praise.
Catelyn frowned down at the map. “You’d put a river between
the two parts of your army.”
“And between Jaime and Lord Tywin,” he said eagerly. The smile
came at last. “There’s no crossing on the Green Fork above the ruby
ford, where Robert won his crown. Not until the Twins, all the way
up here, and Lord Frey controls that bridge. He’s your father’s
bannerman, isn’t that so?”
The Late Lord Frey, Catelyn thought. “He is,” she admitted, “but
my father has never trusted him. Nor should you.”
“I won’t,” Robb promised. “What do you think?”
She was impressed despite herself. He looks like a Tully, she
thought, yet he’s still his father’s son, and Ned taught him well. “Which
force would you command?”
“The horse,” he answered at once. Again like his father; Ned
would always take the more dangerous task himself.
“And the other?”
“The Greatjon is always saying that we should smash Lord Tywin.
I thought I’d give him the honor.”
It was his rst misstep, but how to make him see it without
wounding his edgling con dence? “Your father once told me that
the Greatjon was as fearless as any man he had ever known.”
Robb grinned. “Grey Wind ate two of his ngers, and he laughed
about it. So you agree, then?”
“Your father is not fearless,” Catelyn pointed out. “He is brave,
but that is very di erent.”

Her son considered that for a moment. “The eastern host will be
all that stands between Lord Tywin and Winterfell,” he said
thoughtfully. “Well, them and whatever few bowmen I leave here
at the Moat. So I don’t want someone fearless, do I?”
“No. You want cold cunning, I should think, not courage.”
“Roose Bolton,” Robb said at once. “That man scares me.”
“Then let us pray he will scare Tywin Lannister as well.”
Robb nodded and rolled up the map. “I’ll give the commands, and
assemble an escort to take you home to Winterfell.”
Catelyn had fought to keep herself strong, for Ned’s sake and for
this stubborn brave son of theirs. She had put despair and fear aside,
as if they were garments she did not choose to wear … but now she
saw that she had donned them after all.
“I am not going to Winterfell,” she heard herself say, surprised at
the sudden rush of tears that blurred her vision. “My father may be
dying behind the walls of Riverrun. My brother is surrounded by
foes. I must go to them.”

TYRION

Chella daughter of Cheyk of the Black Ears had gone ahead to scout,
and it was she who brought back word of the army at the
crossroads. “By their res I call them twenty thousand strong,” she
said. “Their banners are red, with a golden lion.”
“Your father?” Bronn asked.
“Or my brother Jaime,” Tyrion said. “We shall know soon
enough.” He surveyed his ragged band of brigands: near three
hundred Stone Crows, Moon Brothers, Black Ears, and Burned Men,
and those just the seed of the army he hoped to grow. Gunthor son
of Gurn was raising the other clans even now. He wondered what
his lord father would make of them in their skins and bits of stolen
steel. If truth be told, he did not know what to make of them
himself. Was he their commander or their captive? Most of the
time, it seemed to be a little of both. “It might be best if I rode
down alone,” he suggested.
“Best for Tyrion son of Tywin,” said Ulf, who spoke for the Moon
Brothers.
Shagga glowered, a fearsome sight to see. “Shagga son of Dolf
likes this not. Shagga will go with the boyman, and if the boyman
lies, Shagga will chop o his manhood—”
“—and feed it to the goats, yes,” Tyrion said wearily. “Shagga, I
give you my word as a Lannister, I will return.”
“Why should we trust your word?” Chella was a small hard
woman, at as a boy, and no fool. “Lowland lords have lied to the

clans before.”
“You wound me, Chella,” Tyrion said. “Here I thought we had
become such friends. But as you will. You shall ride with me, and
Shagga and Conn for the Stone Crows, Ulf for the Moon Brothers,
and Timett son of Timett for the Burned Men.” The clansmen
exchanged wary looks as he named them. “The rest shall wait here
until I send for you. Try not to kill and maim each other while I’m
gone.”
He put his heels to his horse and trotted o , giving them no
choice but to follow or be left behind. Either was ne with him, so
long as they did not sit down to talk for a day and a night. That was
the trouble with the clans; they had an absurd notion that every
man’s voice should be heard in council, so they argued about
everything, endlessly. Even their women were allowed to speak.
Small wonder that it had been hundreds of years since they last
threatened the Vale with anything beyond an occasional raid.
Tyrion meant to change that.
Bronn rode with him. Behind them—after a quick bit of
grumbling—the ve clansmen followed on their under-size garrons,
scrawny things that looked like ponies and scrambled up rock walls
like goats.
The Stone Crows rode together, and Chella and Ulf stayed close
as well, as the Moon Brothers and Black Ears had strong bonds
between them. Timett son of Timett rode alone. Every clan in the
Mountains of the Moon feared the Burned Men, who morti ed their
esh with re to prove their courage and (the others said) roasted
babies at their feasts. And even the other Burned Men feared
Timett, who had put out his own left eye with a white-hot knife
when he reached the age of manhood. Tyrion gathered that it was
more customary for a boy to burn o a nipple, a nger, or (if he
was truly brave, or truly mad) an ear. Timett’s fellow Burned Men
were so awed by his choice of an eye that they promptly named him
a red hand, which seemed to be some sort of a war chief.
“I wonder what their king burned o ,” Tyrion said to Bronn when
he heard the tale. Grinning, the sellsword had tugged at his
crotch … but even Bronn kept a respectful tongue around Timett. If

a man was mad enough to put out his own eye, he was unlikely to
be gentle to his enemies.
Distant watchers peered down from towers of unmortared stone
as the party descended through the foothills, and once Tyrion saw a
raven take wing. Where the high road twisted between two rocky
outcrops, they came to the rst strong point. A low earthen wall
four feet high closed o the road, and a dozen crossbowmen
manned the heights. Tyrion halted his followers out of range and
rode to the wall alone. “Who commands here?” he shouted up.
The captain was quick to appear, and even quicker to give them
an escort when he recognized his lord’s son. They trotted past
blackened elds and burned holdfasts, down to the riverlands and
the Green Fork of the Trident. Tyrion saw no bodies, but the air was
full of ravens and carrion crows; there had been ghting here, and
recently.
Half a league from the crossroads, a barricade of sharpened stakes
had been erected, manned by pikemen and archers. Behind the line,
the camp spread out to the far distance. Thin ngers of smoke rose
from hundreds of cook res, mailed men sat under trees and honed
their blades, and familiar banners uttered from sta s thrust into
the muddy ground.
A party of mounted horsemen rode forward to challenge them as
they approached the stakes. The knight who led them wore silver
armor inlaid with amethysts and a striped purple-and-silver cloak.
His shield bore a unicorn sigil, and a spiral horn two feet long jutted
up from the brow of his horsehead helm. Tyrion reined up to greet
him. “Ser Flement.”
Ser Flement Brax lifted his visor. “Tyrion,” he said in
astonishment. “My lord, we all feared you dead, or …” He looked at
the clansmen uncertainly. “These … companions of yours …”
“Bosom friends and loyal retainers,” Tyrion said. “Where will I
nd my lord father?”
“He has taken the inn at the crossroads for his quarters.”
Tyrion laughed. The inn at the crossroads! Perhaps the gods were
just after all. “I will see him at once.”

“As you say, my lord.” Ser Flement wheeled his horse about and
shouted commands. Three rows of stakes were pulled from the
ground to make a hole in the line. Tyrion led his party through.
Lord Tywin’s camp spread over leagues. Chella’s estimate of
twenty thousand men could not be far wrong. The common men
camped out in the open, but the knights had thrown up tents, and
some of the high lords had erected pavilions as large as houses.
Tyrion spied the red ox of the Presters, Lord Crakehall’s brindled
boar, the burning tree of Marbrand, the badger of Lydden. Knights
called out to him as he cantered past, and men-at-arms gaped at the
clansmen in open astonishment.
Shagga was gaping back; beyond a certainty, he had never seen
so many men, horses, and weapons in all his days. The rest of the
mountain brigands did a better job of guarding their faces, but
Tyrion had no doubts that they were full as much in awe. Better and
better. The more impressed they were with the power of the
Lannisters, the easier they would be to command.
The inn and its stables were much as he remembered, though
little more than tumbled stones and blackened foundations
remained where the rest of the village had stood. A gibbet had been
erected in the yard, and the body that swung there was covered
with ravens. At Tyrion’s approach they took to the air, squawking
and apping their black wings. He dismounted and glanced up at
what remained of the corpse. The birds had eaten her lips and eyes
and most of her cheeks, baring her stained red teeth in a hideous
smile. “A room, a meal, and a agon of wine, that was all I asked,”
he reminded her with a sigh of reproach.
Boys emerged hesitantly from the stables to see to their horses.
Shagga did not want to give his up. “The lad won’t steal your
mare,” Tyrion assured him. “He only wants to give her some oats
and water and brush out her coat.” Shagga’s coat could have used a
good brushing too, but it would have been less than tactful to
mention it. “You have my word, the horse will not be harmed.”
Glaring, Shagga let go his grip on the reins. “This is the horse of
Shagga son of Dolf,” he roared at the stableboy.

“If he doesn’t give her back, chop o his manhood and feed it to
the goats,” Tyrion promised. “Provided you can nd some.”
A pair of house guards in crimson cloaks and lion-crested helms
stood under the inn’s sign, on either side of the door. Tyrion
recognized their captain. “My father?”
“In the common room, m’lord.”
“My men will want meat and mead,” Tyrion told him. “See that
they get it.” He entered the inn, and there was Father.
Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock and Warden of the West,
was in his middle fties, yet hard as a man of twenty. Even seated,
he was tall, with long legs, broad shoulders, a at stomach. His thin
arms were corded with muscle. When his once-thick golden hair had
begun to recede, he had commanded his barber to shave his head;
Lord Tywin did not believe in half measures. He razored his lip and
chin as well, but kept his sidewhiskers, two great thickets of wiry
golden hair that covered most of his cheeks from ear to jaw. His
eyes were a pale green, ecked with gold. A fool more foolish than
most had once jested that even Lord Tywin’s shit was ecked with
gold. Some said the man was still alive, deep in the bowels of
Casterly Rock.
Ser Kevan Lannister, his father’s only surviving brother, was
sharing a agon of ale with Lord Tywin when Tyrion entered the
common room. His uncle was portly and balding, with a closecropped yellow beard that followed the line of his massive jaw. Ser
Kevan saw him rst. “Tyrion,” he said in surprise.
“Uncle,” Tyrion said, bowing. “And my lord father. What a
pleasure to nd you here.”
Lord Tywin did not stir from his chair, but he did give his dwarf
son a long, searching look. “I see that the rumors of your demise
were unfounded.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Father,” Tyrion said. “No need to leap
up and embrace me, I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself.” He
crossed the room to their table, acutely conscious of the way his
stunted legs made him waddle with every step. Whenever his
father’s eyes were on him, he became uncomfortably aware of all
his deformities and shortcomings. “Kind of you to go to war for

me,” he said as he climbed into a chair and helped himself to a cup
of his father’s ale.
“By my lights, it was you who started this,” Lord Tywin replied.
“Your brother Jaime would never have meekly submitted to capture
at the hands of a woman.”
“That’s one way we di er, Jaime and I. He’s taller as well, you
may have noticed.”
His father ignored the sally. “The honor of our House was at
stake. I had no choice but to ride. No man sheds Lannister blood
with impunity.”
“Hear Me Roar,” Tyrion said, grinning. The Lannister words.
“Truth be told, none of my blood was actually shed, although it was
a close thing once or twice. Morrec and Jyck were killed.”
“I suppose you will be wanting some new men.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Father, I’ve acquired a few of my own.”
He tried a swallow of the ale. It was brown and yeasty, so thick you
could almost chew it. Very ne, in truth. A pity his father had
hanged the innkeep. “How is your war going?”
His uncle answered. “Well enough, for the nonce. Ser Edmure had
scattered small troops of men along his borders to stop our raiding,
and your lord father and I were able to destroy most of them
piecemeal before they could regroup.”
“Your brother has been covering himself with glory,” his father
said. “He smashed the Lords Vance and Piper at the Golden Tooth,
and met the massed power of the Tullys under the walls of
Riverrun. The lords of the Trident have been put to rout. Ser
Edmure Tully was taken captive, with many of his knights and
bannermen. Lord Blackwood led a few survivors back to Riverrun,
where Jaime has them under siege. The rest ed to their own
strongholds.”
“Your father and I have been marching on each in turn,” Ser
Kevan said. “With Lord Blackwood gone, Raventree fell at once, and
Lady Whent yielded Harrenhal for want of men to defend it. Ser
Gregor burnt out the Pipers and the Brackens …”
“Leaving you unopposed?” Tyrion said.

“Not wholly,” Ser Kevan said. “The Mallisters still hold Seagard
and Walder Frey is marshaling his levies at the Twins.”
“No matter,” Lord Tywin said. “Frey only takes the eld when the
scent of victory is in the air, and all he smells now is ruin. And
Jason Mallister lacks the strength to ght alone. Once Jaime takes
Riverrun, they will both be quick enough to bend the knee. Unless
the Starks and the Arryns come forth to oppose us, this war is good
as won.”
“I would not fret overmuch about the Arryns if I were you,”
Tyrion said. “The Starks are another matter. Lord Eddard—”
“—is our hostage,” his father said. “He will lead no armies while
he rots in a dungeon under the Red Keep.”
“No,” Ser Kevan agreed, “but his son has called the banners and
sits at Moat Cailin with a strong host around him.”
“No sword is strong until it’s been tempered,” Lord Tywin
declared. “The Stark boy is a child. No doubt he likes the sound of
warhorns well enough, and the sight of his banners uttering in the
wind, but in the end it comes down to butcher’s work. I doubt he
has the stomach for it.”
Things had gotten interesting while he’d been away, Tyrion
re ected. “And what is our fearless monarch doing whilst all this
‘butcher’s work’ is being done?” he wondered. “How has my lovely
and persuasive sister gotten Robert to agree to the imprisonment of
his dear friend Ned?”
“Robert Baratheon is dead,” his father told him. “Your nephew
reigns in King’s Landing.”
That did take Tyrion aback. “My sister, you mean.” He took
another gulp of ale. The realm would be a much di erent place with
Cersei ruling in place of her husband.
“If you have a mind to make yourself of use, I will give you a
command,” his father said. “Marq Piper and Karyl Vance are loose
in our rear, raiding our lands across the Red Fork.”
Tyrion made a tsking sound. “The gall of them, ghting back.
Ordinarily I’d be glad to punish such rudeness, Father, but the truth
is, I have pressing business elsewhere.”

“Do you?” Lord Tywin did not seem awed. “We also have a pair
of Ned Stark’s afterthoughts making a nuisance of themselves by
harassing my foraging parties. Beric Dondarrion, some young
lordling with delusions of valor. He has that fat jape of a priest with
him, the one who likes to set his sword on re. Do you think you
might be able to deal with them as you scamper o ? Without
making too much a botch of it?”
Tyrion wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled.
“Father, it warms my heart to think that you might entrust me
with … what, twenty men? Fifty? Are you sure you can spare so
many? Well, no matter. If I should come across Thoros and Lord
Beric, I shall spank them both.” He climbed down from his chair and
waddled to the sideboard, where a wheel of veined white cheese sat
surrounded by fruit. “First, though, I have some promises of my
own to keep,” he said as he sliced o a wedge. “I shall require three
thousand helms and as many hauberks, plus swords, pikes, steel
spearheads, maces, battle-axes, gauntlets, gorgets, greaves,
breastplates, wagons to carry all this—”
The door behind him opened with a crash, so violently that
Tyrion almost dropped his cheese. Ser Kevan leapt up swearing as
the captain of the guard went ying across the room to smash
against the hearth. As he tumbled down into the cold ashes, his lion
helm askew, Shagga snapped the man’s sword in two over a knee
thick as a tree trunk, threw down the pieces, and lumbered into the
common room. He was preceded by his stench, riper than the
cheese and overpowering in the closed space. “Little redcape,” he
snarled, “when next you bare steel on Shagga son of Dolf, I will
chop o your manhood and roast it in the re.”
“What, no goats?” Tyrion said, taking a bite of cheese.
The other clansmen followed Shagga into the common room,
Bronn with them. The sellsword gave Tyrion a rueful shrug.
“Who might you be?” Lord Tywin asked, cool as snow.
“They followed me home, Father,” Tyrion explained. “May I keep
them? They don’t eat much.”
No one was smiling. “By what right do you savages intrude on
our councils?” demanded Ser Kevan.

“Savages, lowlander?” Conn might have been handsome if you
washed him. “We are free men, and free men by rights sit on all
war councils.”
“Which one is the lion lord?” Chella asked.
“They are both old men,” announced Timett son of Timett, who
had yet to see his twentieth year.
Ser Kevan’s hand went to his sword hilt, but his brother placed
two ngers on his wrist and held him fast. Lord Tywin seemed
unperturbed. “Tyrion, have you forgotten your courtesies? Kindly
acquaint us with our … honored guests.”
Tyrion licked his ngers. “With pleasure,” he said. “The fair maid
is Chella daughter of Cheyk of the Black Ears.”
“I’m no maid,” Chella protested. “My sons have taken fty ears
among them.”
“May they take fty more.” Tyrion waddled away from her. “This
is Conn son of Coratt. Shagga son of Dolf is the one who looks like
Casterly Rock with hair. They are Stone Crows. Here is Ulf son of
Umar of the Moon Brothers, and here Timett son of Timett, a red
hand of the Burned Men. And this is Bronn, a sellsword of no
particular allegiance. He has already changed sides twice in the
short time I’ve known him, you and he ought to get on famously,
Father.” To Bronn and the clansmen he said, “May I present my lord
father, Tywin son of Tytos of House Lannister, Lord of Casterly
Rock, Warden of the West, Shield of Lannisport, and once and
future Hand of the King.”
Lord Tywin rose, digni ed and correct. “Even in the west, we
know the prowess of the warrior clans of the Mountains of the
Moon. What brings you down from your strongholds, my lords?”
“Horses,” said Shagga.
“A promise of silk and steel,” said Timett son of Timett.
Tyrion was about to tell his lord father how he proposed to
reduce the Vale of Arryn to a smoking wasteland, but he was never
given the chance. The door banged open again. The messenger gave
Tyrion’s clansmen a quick, queer look as he dropped to one knee
before Lord Tywin. “My lord,” he said, “Ser Addam bid me tell you
that the Stark host is moving down the causeway.”

Lord Tywin Lannister did not smile. Lord Tywin never smiled, but
Tyrion had learned to read his father’s pleasure all the same, and it
was there on his face. “So the wol ing is leaving his den to play
among the lions,” he said in a voice of quiet satisfaction. “Splendid.
Return to Ser Addam and tell him to fall back. He is not to engage
the northerners until we arrive, but I want him to harass their anks
and draw them farther south.”
“It will be as you command.” The rider took his leave.
“We are well situated here,” Ser Kevan pointed out. “Close to the
ford and ringed by pits and spikes. If they are coming south, I say
let them come, and break themselves against us.”
“The boy may hang back or lose his courage when he sees our
numbers,” Lord Tywin replied. “The sooner the Starks are broken,
the sooner I shall be free to deal with Stannis Baratheon. Tell the
drummers to beat assembly, and send word to Jaime that I am
marching against Robb Stark.”
“As you will,” Ser Kevan said.
Tyrion watched with a grim fascination as his lord father turned
next to the half-wild clansmen. “It is said that the men of the
mountain clans are warriors without fear.”
“It is said truly,” Conn of the Stone Crows answered.
“And the women,” Chella added.
“Ride with me against my enemies, and you shall have all my son
promised you, and more,” Lord Tywin told them.
“Would you pay us with our own coin?” Ulf son of Umar said.
“Why should we need the father’s promise, when we have the
son’s?”
“I said nothing of need,” Lord Tywin replied. “My words were
courtesy, nothing more. You need not join us. The men of the
winterlands are made of iron and ice, and even my boldest knights
fear to face them.”
Oh, deftly done, Tyrion thought, smiling crookedly.
“The Burned Men fear nothing. Timett son of Timett will ride
with the lions.”
“Wherever the Burned Men go, the Stone Crows have been there
rst,” Conn declared hotly. “We ride as well.”

“Shagga son of Dolf will chop o their manhoods and feed them
to the crows.”
“We will ride with you, lion lord,” Chella daughter of Cheyk
agreed, “but only if your halfman son goes with us. He has bought
his breath with promises. Until we hold the steel he has pledged us,
his life is ours.”
Lord Tywin turned his gold- ecked eyes on his son.
“Joy,” Tyrion said with a resigned smile.

SANSA

The walls of the throne room had been stripped bare, the hunting
tapestries that King Robert loved taken down and stacked in the
corner in an untidy heap.
Ser Mandon Moore went to take his place under the throne beside
two of his fellows of the Kingsguard. Sansa hovered by the door, for
once unguarded. The queen had given her freedom of the castle as a
reward for being good, yet even so, she was escorted everywhere
she went. “Honor guards for my daughter-to-be,” the queen called
them, but they did not make Sansa feel honored.
“Freedom of the castle” meant that she could go wherever she
chose within the Red Keep so long as she promised not to go
beyond the walls, a promise Sansa had been more than willing to
give. She couldn’t have gone beyond the walls anyway. The gates
were watched day and night by Janos Slynt’s gold cloaks, and
Lannister house guards were always about as well. Besides, even if
she could leave the castle, where would she go? It was enough that
she could walk in the yard, pick owers in Myrcella’s garden, and
visit the sept to pray for her father. Sometimes she prayed in the
godswood as well, since the Starks kept the old gods.
This was the rst court session of Jo rey’s reign, so Sansa looked
about nervously. A line of Lannister house guards stood beneath the
western windows, a line of gold-cloaked City Watchmen beneath
the east. Of smallfolk and commoners, she saw no sign, but under
the gallery a cluster of lords great and small milled restlessly. There

were no more than twenty, where a hundred had been accustomed
to wait upon King Robert.
Sansa slipped in among them, murmuring greetings as she worked
her way toward the front. She recognized black-skinned Jalabhar
Xho, gloomy Ser Aron Santagar, the Redwyne twins Horror and
Slobber … only none of them seemed to recognize her. Or if they
did, they shied away as if she had the grey plague. Sickly Lord
Gyles covered his face at her approach and feigned a t of
coughing, and when funny drunken Ser Dontos started to hail her,
Ser Balon Swann whispered in his ear and he turned away.
And so many others were missing. Where had the rest of them
gone? Sansa wondered. Vainly, she searched for friendly faces. Not
one of them would meet her eyes. It was as if she had become a
ghost, dead before her time.
Grand Maester Pycelle was seated alone at the council table,
seemingly asleep, his hands clasped together atop his beard. She
saw Lord Varys hurry into the hall, his feet making no sound. A
moment later Lord Baelish entered through the tall doors in the
rear, smiling. He chatted amiably with Ser Balon and Ser Dontos as
he made his way to the front. Butter ies uttered nervously in
Sansa’s stomach. I shouldn’t be afraid, she told herself. I have nothing
to be afraid of, it will all come out well, Jo loves me and the queen
does too, she said so.
A herald’s voice rang out. “All hail His Grace, Jo rey of the
Houses Baratheon and Lannister, the First of his Name, King of the
Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, and Lord of the Seven
Kingdoms. All hail his lady mother, Cersei of House Lannister,
Queen Regent, Light of the West, and Protector of the Realm.”
Ser Barristan Selmy, resplendent in white plate, led them in. Ser
Arys Oakheart escorted the queen, while Ser Boros Blount walked
beside Jo rey, so six of the Kingsguard were now in the hall, all the
White Swords save Jaime Lannister alone. Her prince—no, her king
now!—took the steps of the Iron Throne two at a time, while his
mother was seated with the council. Jo wore plush black velvets
slashed with crimson, a shimmering cloth-of-gold cape with a high

collar, and on his head a golden crown crusted with rubies and
black diamonds.
When Jo rey turned to look out over the hall, his eye caught
Sansa’s. He smiled, seated himself, and spoke. “It is a king’s duty to
punish the disloyal and reward those who are true. Grand Maester
Pycelle, I command you to read my decrees.”
Pycelle pushed himself to his feet. He was clad in a magni cent
robe of thick red velvet, with an ermine collar and shiny gold
fastenings. From a drooping sleeve, heavy with gilded scrollwork,
he drew a parchment, unrolled it, and began to read a long list of
names, commanding each in the name of king and council to present
themselves and swear their fealty to Jo rey. Failing that, they
would be adjudged traitors, their lands and titles forfeit to the
throne.
The names he read made Sansa hold her breath. Lord Stannis
Baratheon, his lady wife, his daughter. Lord Renly Baratheon. Both
Lord Royces and their sons. Ser Loras Tyrell. Lord Mace Tyrell, his
brothers, uncles, sons. The red priest, Thoros of Myr. Lord Beric
Dondarrion. Lady Lysa Arryn and her son, the little Lord Robert.
Lord Hoster Tully, his brother Ser Brynden, his son Ser Edmure.
Lord Jason Mallister. Lord Bryce Caron of the Marches. Lord Tytos
Blackwood. Lord Walder Frey and his heir Ser Stevron. Lord Karyl
Vance. Lord Jonos Bracken. Lady Shella Whent. Doran Martell,
Prince of Dorne, and all his sons. So many, she thought as Pycelle
read on and on, it will take a whole ock of ravens to send out these
commands.
And at the end, near last, came the names Sansa had been
dreading. Lady Catelyn Stark. Robb Stark. Brandon Stark, Rickon
Stark, Arya Stark. Sansa sti ed a gasp. Arya. They wanted Arya to
present herself and swear an oath … it must mean her sister had
ed on the galley, she must be safe at Winterfell by now …
Grand Maester Pycelle rolled up the list, tucked it up his left
sleeve, and pulled another parchment from his right. He cleared his
throat and resumed. “In the place of the traitor Eddard Stark, it is
the wish of His Grace that Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock
and Warden of the West, take up the o ce of Hand of the King, to

speak with his voice, lead his armies against his enemies, and carry
out his royal will. So the king has decreed. The small council
consents.
“In the place of the traitor Stannis Baratheon, it is the wish of His
Grace that his lady mother, the Queen Regent Cersei Lannister, who
has ever been his staunchest support, be seated upon his small
council, that she may help him rule wisely and with justice. So the
king has decreed. The small council consents.”
Sansa heard a soft murmuring from the lords around her, but it
was quickly stilled. Pycelle continued.
“It is also the wish of His Grace that his loyal servant, Janos
Slynt, Commander of the City Watch of King’s Landing, be at once
raised to the rank of lord and granted the ancient seat of Harrenhal
with all its attendant lands and incomes, and that his sons and
grandsons shall hold these honors after him until the end of time. It
is moreover his command that Lord Slynt be seated immediately
upon his small council, to assist in the governance of the realm. So
the king has decreed. The small council consents.”
Sansa glimpsed motion from the corner of her eye as Janos Slynt
made his entrance. This time the muttering was louder and angrier.
Proud lords whose houses went back thousands of years made way
reluctantly for the balding, frog-faced commoner as he marched
past. Golden scales had been sewn onto the black velvet of his
doublet and rang together softly with each step. His cloak was
checked black-and-gold satin. Two ugly boys who must have been
his sons went before him, struggling with the weight of a heavy
metal shield as tall as they were. For his sigil he had taken a bloody
spear, gold on a night-black eld. The sight of it raised goose
prickles up and down Sansa’s arms.
As Lord Slynt took his place, Grand Maester Pycelle resumed.
“Lastly, in these times of treason and turmoil, with our beloved
Robert so lately dead, it is the view of the council that the life and
safety of King Jo rey is of paramount importance …” He looked to
the queen.
Cersei stood. “Ser Barristan Selmy, stand forth.”

Ser Barristan had been standing at the foot of the Iron Throne, as
still as any statue, but now he went to one knee and bowed his
head. “Your Grace, I am yours to command.”
“Rise, Ser Barristan,” Cersei Lannister said. “You may remove
your helm.”
“My lady?” Standing, the old knight took o his high white helm,
though he did not seem to understand why.
“You have served the realm long and faithfully, good ser, and
every man and woman in the Seven Kingdoms owes you thanks. Yet
now I fear your service is at an end. It is the wish of king and
council that you lay down your heavy burden.”
“My … burden? I fear I … I do not …”
The new-made lord, Janos Slynt, spoke up, his voice heavy and
blunt. “Her Grace is trying to tell you that you are relieved as Lord
Commander of the Kingsguard.”
The tall, white-haired knight seemed to shrink as he stood there,
scarcely breathing. “Your Grace,” he said at last. “The Kingsguard is
a Sworn Brotherhood. Our vows are taken for life. Only death may
relieve the Lord Commander of his sacred trust.”
“Whose death, Ser Barristan?” The queen’s voice was soft as silk,
but her words carried the whole length of the hall. “Yours, or your
king’s?”
“You let my father die,” Jo rey said accusingly from atop the
Iron Throne. “You’re too old to protect anybody.”
Sansa watched as the knight peered up at his new king. She had
never seen him look his years before, yet now he did. “Your Grace,”
he said. “I was chosen for the White Swords in my twenty-third
year. It was all I had ever dreamed, from the moment I rst took
sword in hand. I gave up all claim to my ancestral keep. The girl I
was to wed married my cousin in my place, I had no need of land or
sons, my life would be lived for the realm. Ser Gerold Hightower
himself heard my vows … to ward the king with all my
strength … to give my blood for his … I fought beside the White
Bull and Prince Lewyn of Dorne … beside Ser Arthur Dayne, the
Sword of the Morning. Before I served your father, I helped shield
King Aerys, and his father Jaehaerys before him … three kings …”

“And all of them dead,” Little nger pointed out.
“Your time is done,” Cersei Lannister announced. “Jo rey
requires men around him who are young and strong. The council
has determined that Ser Jaime Lannister will take your place as the
Lord Commander of Sworn Brothers of the White Swords.”
“The Kingslayer,” Ser Barristan said, his voice hard with
contempt. “The false knight who profaned his blade with the blood
of the king he had sworn to defend.”
“Have a care for your words, ser,” the queen warned. “You are
speaking of our beloved brother, your king’s own blood.”
Lord Varys spoke, gentler than the others. “We are not unmindful
of your service, good ser. Lord Tywin Lannister has generously
agreed to grant you a handsome tract of land north of Lannisport,
beside the sea, with gold and men su cient to build you a stout
keep, and servants to see to your every need.”
Ser Barristan looked up sharply. “A hall to die in, and men to
bury me. I thank you, my lords … but I spit upon your pity.” He
reached up and undid the clasps that held his cloak in place, and the
heavy white garment slithered from his shoulders to fall in a heap
on the oor. His helmet dropped with a clang. “I am a knight,” he
told them. He opened the silver fastenings of his breastplate and let
that fall as well. “I shall die a knight.”
“A naked knight, it would seem,” quipped Little nger.
They all laughed then, Jo rey on his throne, and the lords
standing attendance, Janos Slynt and Queen Cersei and Sandor
Clegane and even the other men of the Kingsguard, the ve who
had been his brothers until a moment ago. Surely that must have hurt
the most, Sansa thought. Her heart went out to the gallant old man
as he stood shamed and red-faced, too angry to speak. Finally he
drew his sword.
Sansa heard someone gasp. Ser Boros and Ser Meryn moved
forward to confront him, but Ser Barristan froze them in place with
a look that dripped contempt. “Have no fear, sers, your king is
safe … no thanks to you. Even now, I could cut through the ve of
you as easy as a dagger cuts cheese. If you would serve under the
Kingslayer, not a one of you is t to wear the white.” He ung his

sword at the foot of the Iron Throne. “Here, boy. Melt it down and
add it to the others, if you like. It will do you more good than the
swords in the hands of these ve. Perhaps Lord Stannis will chance
to sit on it when he takes your throne.”
He took the long way out, his steps ringing loud against the oor
and echoing o the bare stone walls. Lords and ladies parted to let
him pass. Not until the pages had closed the great oak-and-bronze
doors behind him did Sansa hear sounds again: soft voices, uneasy
stirrings, the shu e of papers from the council table. “He called me
boy,” Jo rey said peevishly, sounding younger than his years. “He
talked about my uncle Stannis too.”
“Idle talk,” said Varys the eunuch. “Without meaning …”
“He could be making plots with my uncles. I want him seized and
questioned.” No one moved. Jo rey raised his voice. “I said, I want
him seized!”
Janos Slynt rose from the council table. “My gold cloaks will see
to it, Your Grace.”
“Good,” said King Jo rey. Lord Janos strode from the hall, his
ugly sons double-stepping to keep up as they lugged the great metal
shield with the arms of House Slynt.
“Your Grace,” Little nger reminded the king. “If we might
resume, the seven are now six. We nd ourselves in need of a new
sword for your Kingsguard.”
Jo rey smiled. “Tell them, Mother.”
“The king and council have determined that no man in the Seven
Kingdoms is more t to guard and protect His Grace than his sworn
shield, Sandor Clegane.”
“How do you like that, dog?” King Jo rey asked.
The Hound’s scarred face was hard to read. He took a long
moment to consider. “Why not? I have no lands nor wife to forsake,
and who’d care if I did?” The burned side of his mouth twisted. “But
I warn you, I’ll say no knight’s vows.”
“The Sworn Brothers of the Kingsguard have always been
knights,” Ser Boros said rmly.
“Until now,” the Hound said in his deep rasp, and Ser Boros fell
silent.

When the king’s herald moved forward, Sansa realized the
moment was almost at hand. She smoothed down the cloth of her
skirt nervously. She was dressed in mourning, as a sign of respect
for the dead king, but she had taken special care to make herself
beautiful. Her gown was the ivory silk that the queen had given
her, the one Arya had ruined, but she’d had them dye it black and
you couldn’t see the stain at all. She had fretted over her jewelry for
hours and nally decided upon the elegant simplicity of a plain
silver chain.
The herald’s voice boomed out. “If any man in this hall has other
matters to set before His Grace, let him speak now or go forth and
hold his silence.”
Sansa quailed. Now, she told herself, I must do it now. Gods give me
courage. She took one step, then another. Lords and knights stepped
aside silently to let her pass, and she felt the weight of their eyes on
her. I must be as strong as my lady mother. “Your Grace,” she called
out in a soft, tremulous voice.
The height of the Iron Throne gave Jo rey a better vantage point
than anyone else in the hall. He was the rst to see her. “Come
forward, my lady,” he called out, smiling.
His smile emboldened her, made her feel beautiful and strong. He
does love me, he does. Sansa lifted her head and walked toward him,
not too slow and not too fast. She must not let them see how
nervous she was.
“The Lady Sansa, of House Stark,” the herald cried.
She stopped under the throne, at the spot where Ser Barristan’s
white cloak lay puddled on the oor beside his helm and
breastplate. “Do you have some business for king and council,
Sansa?” the queen asked from the council table.
“I do.” She knelt on the cloak, so as not to spoil her gown, and
looked up at her prince on his fearsome black throne. “As it please
Your Grace, I ask mercy for my father, Lord Eddard Stark, who was
the Hand of the King.” She had practiced the words a hundred
times.
The queen sighed. “Sansa, you disappoint me. What did I tell you
about traitor’s blood?”

“Your father has committed grave and terrible crimes, my lady,”
Grand Maester Pycelle intoned.
“Ah, poor sad thing,” sighed Varys. “She is only a babe, my lords,
she does not know what she asks.”
Sansa had eyes only for Jo rey. He must listen to me, he must, she
thought. The king shifted on his seat. “Let her speak,” he
commanded. “I want to hear what she says.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.” Sansa smiled, a shy secret smile, just
for him. He was listening. She knew he would.
“Treason is a noxious weed,” Pycelle declared solemnly. “It must
be torn up, root and stem and seed, lest new traitors sprout from
every roadside.”
“Do you deny your father’s crime?” Lord Baelish asked.
“No, my lords.” Sansa knew better than that. “I know he must be
punished. All I ask is mercy. I know my lord father must regret
what he did. He was King Robert’s friend and he loved him, you all
know he loved him. He never wanted to be Hand until the king
asked him. They must have lied to him. Lord Renly or Lord Stannis
or … or somebody, they must have lied, otherwise …”
King Jo rey leaned forward, hands grasping the arms of the
throne. Broken sword points fanned out between his ngers. “He
said I wasn’t the king. Why did he say that?”
“His leg was broken,” Sansa replied eagerly. “It hurt ever so
much, Maester Pycelle was giving him milk of the poppy, and they
say that milk of the poppy lls your head with clouds. Otherwise he
would never have said it.”
Varys said, “A child’s faith … such sweet innocence … and yet,
they say wisdom oft comes from the mouths of babes.”
“Treason is treason,” Pycelle replied at once.
Jo rey rocked restlessly on the throne. “Mother?”
Cersei Lannister considered Sansa thoughtfully. “If Lord Eddard
were to confess his crime,” she said at last, “we would know he had
repented his folly.”
Jo rey pushed himself to his feet. Please, Sansa thought, please,
please, be the king I know you are, good and kind and noble, please.
“Do you have any more to say?” he asked her.

“Only … that as you love me, you do me this kindness, my
prince,” Sansa said.
King Jo rey looked her up and down. “Your sweet words have
moved me,” he said gallantly, nodding, as if to say all would be
well. “I shall do as you ask … but rst your father has to confess.
He has to confess and say that I’m the king, or there will be no
mercy for him.”
“He will,” Sansa said, heart soaring. “Oh, I know he will.”

EDDARD

The straw on the oor stank of urine. There was no window, no
bed, not even a slop bucket. He remembered walls of pale red stone
festooned with patches of nitre, a grey door of splintered wood,
four inches thick and studded with iron. He had seen them, brie y,
a quick glimpse as they shoved him inside. Once the door had
slammed shut, he had seen no more. The dark was absolute. He had
as well been blind.
Or dead. Buried with his king. “Ah, Robert,” he murmured as his
groping hand touched a cold stone wall, his leg throbbing with
every motion. He remembered the jest the king had shared in the
crypts of Winterfell, as the Kings of Winter looked on with cold
stone eyes. The king eats, Robert had said, and the Hand takes the
shit. How he had laughed. Yet he had gotten it wrong. The king dies,
Ned Stark thought, and the Hand is buried.
The dungeon was under the Red Keep, deeper than he dared
imagine. He remembered the old stories about Maegor the Cruel,
who murdered all the masons who labored on his castle, so they
might never reveal its secrets.
He damned them all: Little nger, Janos Slynt and his gold cloaks,
the queen, the Kingslayer, Pycelle and Varys and Ser Barristan, even
Lord Renly, Robert’s own blood, who had run when he was needed
most. Yet in the end he blamed himself. “Fool,” he cried to the
darkness, “thrice-damned blind fool.”

Cersei Lannister’s face seemed to oat before him in the darkness.
Her hair was full of sunlight, but there was mockery in her smile.
“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die,” she
whispered. Ned had played and lost, and his men had paid the price
of his folly with their life’s blood.
When he thought of his daughters, he would have wept gladly,
but the tears would not come. Even now, he was a Stark of
Winterfell, and his grief and his rage froze hard inside him.
When he kept very still, his leg did not hurt so much, so he did
his best to lie unmoving. For how long he could not say. There was
no sun and no moon. He could not see to mark the walls. Ned closed
his eyes and opened them; it made no di erence. He slept and woke
and slept again. He did not know which was more painful, the
waking or the sleeping. When he slept, he dreamed: dark disturbing
dreams of blood and broken promises. When he woke, there was
nothing to do but think, and his waking thoughts were worse than
nightmares. The thought of Cat was as painful as a bed of nettles.
He wondered where she was, what she was doing. He wondered
whether he would ever see her again.
Hours turned to days, or so it seemed. He could feel a dull ache in
his shattered leg, an itch beneath the plaster. When he touched his
thigh, the esh was hot to his ngers. The only sound was his
breathing. After a time, he began to talk aloud, just to hear a voice.
He made plans to keep himself sane, built castles of hope in the
dark. Robert’s brothers were out in the world, raising armies at
Dragonstone and Storm’s End. Alyn and Harwin would return to
King’s Landing with the rest of his household guard once they had
dealt with Ser Gregor. Catelyn would raise the north when the word
reached her, and the lords of river and mountain and Vale would
join her.
He found himself thinking of Robert more and more. He saw the
king as he had been in the ower of his youth, tall and handsome,
his great antlered helm on his head, his warhammer in hand, sitting
his horse like a horned god. He heard his laughter in the dark, saw
his eyes, blue and clear as mountain lakes. “Look at us, Ned,”

Robert said. “Gods, how did we come to this? You here, and me
killed by a pig. We won a throne together …”
I failed you, Robert, Ned thought. He could not say the words. I
lied to you, hid the truth. I let them kill you.
The king heard him. “You sti -necked fool,” he muttered, “too
proud to listen. Can you eat pride, Stark? Will honor shield your
children?” Cracks ran down his face, ssures opening in the esh,
and he reached up and ripped the mask away. It was not Robert at
all; it was Little nger, grinning, mocking him. When he opened his
mouth to speak, his lies turned to pale grey moths and took wing.
Ned was half-asleep when the footsteps came down the hall. At
rst he thought he dreamt them; it had been so long since he had
heard anything but the sound of his own voice. Ned was feverish by
then, his leg a dull agony, his lips parched and cracked. When the
heavy wooden door creaked open, the sudden light was painful to
his eyes.
A gaoler thrust a jug at him. The clay was cool and beaded with
moisture. Ned grasped it with both hands and gulped eagerly. Water
ran from his mouth and dripped down through his beard. He drank
until he thought he would be sick. “How long …?” he asked weakly
when he could drink no more.
The gaoler was a scarecrow of a man with a rat’s face and frayed
beard, clad in a mail shirt and a leather half cape. “No talking,” he
said as he wrenched the jug from Ned’s hands.
“Please,” Ned said, “my daughters …” The door crashed shut. He
blinked as the light vanished, lowered his head to his chest, and
curled up on the straw. It no longer stank of urine and shit. It no
longer smelled at all.
He could no longer tell the di erence between waking and
sleeping. The memory came creeping upon him in the darkness, as
vivid as a dream. It was the year of false spring, and he was
eighteen again, down from the Eyrie to the tourney at Harrenhal.
He could see the deep green of the grass, and smell the pollen on
the wind. Warm days and cool nights and the sweet taste of wine.
He remembered Brandon’s laughter, and Robert’s berserk valor in
the melee, the way he laughed as he unhorsed men left and right.

He remembered Jaime Lannister, a golden youth in scaled white
armor, kneeling on the grass in front of the king’s pavilion and
making his vows to protect and defend King Aerys. Afterward, Ser
Os well Whent helped Jaime to his feet, and the White Bull himself,
Lord Commander Ser Gerold Hightower, fastened the snowy cloak
of the Kingsguard about his shoulders. All six White Swords were
there to welcome their newest brother.
Yet when the jousting began, the day belonged to Rhaegar
Targaryen. The crown prince wore the armor he would die in:
gleaming black plate with the three-headed dragon of his House
wrought in rubies on the breast. A plume of scarlet silk streamed
behind him when he rode, and it seemed no lance could touch him.
Brandon fell to him, and Bronze Yohn Royce, and even the splendid
Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning.
Robert had been jesting with Jon and old Lord Hunter as the
prince circled the eld after unhorsing Ser Barristan in the nal tilt
to claim the champion’s crown. Ned remembered the moment when
all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse
past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the
queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a
crown of winter roses, blue as frost.
Ned Stark reached out his hand to grasp the owery crown, but
beneath the pale blue petals the thorns lay hidden. He felt them
clawing at his skin, sharp and cruel, saw the slow trickle of blood
run down his ngers, and woke, trembling, in the dark.
Promise me, Ned, his sister had whispered from her bed of blood.
She had loved the scent of winter roses.
“Gods save me,” Ned wept. “I am going mad.”
The gods did not deign to answer.
Each time the turnkey brought him water, he told himself another
day had passed. At rst he would beg the man for some word of his
daughters and the world beyond his cell. Grunts and kicks were his
only replies. Later, when the stomach cramps began, he begged for
food instead. It made no matter; he was not fed. Perhaps the
Lannisters meant for him to starve to death. “No,” he told himself.
If Cersei had wanted him dead, he would have been cut down in the

throne room with his men. She wanted him alive. Weak, desperate,
yet alive. Catelyn held her brother; she dare not kill him or the
Imp’s life would be forfeit as well.
From outside his cell came the rattle of iron chains. As the door
creaked open, Ned put a hand to the damp wall and pushed himself
toward the light. The glare of a torch made him squint. “Food,” he
croaked.
“Wine,” a voice answered. It was not the rat-faced man; this
gaoler was stouter, shorter, though he wore the same leather half
cape and spiked steel cap. “Drink, Lord Eddard.” He thrust a
wineskin into Ned’s hands.
The voice was strangely familiar, yet it took Ned Stark a moment
to place it. “Varys?” he said groggily when it came. He touched the
man’s face. “I’m not … not dreaming this. You’re here.” The
eunuch’s plump cheeks were covered with a dark stubble of beard.
Ned felt the coarse hair with his ngers. Varys had transformed
himself into a grizzled turnkey, reeking of sweat and sour wine.
“How did you … what sort of magician are you?”
“A thirsty one,” Varys said. “Drink, my lord.”
Ned’s hands fumbled at the skin. “Is this the same poison they
gave Robert?”
“You wrong me,” Varys said sadly. “Truly, no one loves a eunuch.
Give me the skin.” He drank, a trickle of red leaking from the
corner of his plump mouth. “Not the equal of the vintage you
o ered me the night of the tourney, but no more poisonous than
most,” he concluded, wiping his lips. “Here.”
Ned tried a swallow. “Dregs.” He felt as though he were about to
bring the wine back up.
“All men must swallow the sour with the sweet. High lords and
eunuchs alike. Your hour has come, my lord.”
“My daughters …”
“The younger girl escaped Ser Meryn and ed,” Varys told him. “I
have not been able to nd her. Nor have the Lannisters. A kindness,
there. Our new king loves her not. Your older girl is still betrothed
to Jo rey. Cersei keeps her close. She came to court a few days ago
to plead that you be spared. A pity you couldn’t have been there,

you would have been touched.” He leaned forward intently. “I trust
you realize that you are a dead man, Lord Eddard?”
“The queen will not kill me,” Ned said. His head swam; the wine
was strong, and it had been too long since he’d eaten. “Cat … Cat
holds her brother …”
“The wrong brother,” Varys sighed. “And lost to her, in any case.
She let the Imp slip through her ngers. I expect he is dead by now,
somewhere in the Mountains of the Moon.”
“If that is true, slit my throat and have done with it.” He was
dizzy from the wine, tired and heartsick.
“Your blood is the last thing I desire.”
Ned frowned. “When they slaughtered my guard, you stood
beside the queen and watched, and said not a word.”
“And would again. I seem to recall that I was unarmed,
unarmored, and surrounded by Lannister swords.” The eunuch
looked at him curiously, tilting his head. “When I was a young boy,
before I was cut, I traveled with a troupe of mummers through the
Free Cities. They taught me that each man has a role to play, in life
as well as mummery. So it is at court. The King’s Justice must be
fearsome, the master of coin must be frugal, the Lord Commander
of the Kingsguard must be valiant … and the master of whisperers
must be sly and obsequious and without scruple. A courageous
informer would be as useless as a cowardly knight.” He took the
wineskin back and drank.
Ned studied the eunuch’s face, searching for truth beneath the
mummer’s scars and false stubble. He tried some more wine. This
time it went down easier. “Can you free me from this pit?”
“I could … but will I? No. Questions would be asked, and the
answers would lead back to me.”
Ned had expected no more. “You are blunt.”
“A eunuch has no honor, and a spider does not enjoy the luxury of
scruples, my lord.”
“Would you at least consent to carry a message out for me?”
“That would depend on the message. I will gladly provide you
with paper and ink, if you like. And when you have written what

you will, I will take the letter and read it, and deliver it or not, as
best serves my own ends.”
“Your own ends. What ends are those, Lord Varys?”
“Peace,” Varys replied without hesitation. “If there was one soul
in King’s Landing who was truly desperate to keep Robert
Baratheon alive, it was me.” He sighed. “For fteen years I
protected him from his enemies, but I could not protect him from
his friends. What strange t of madness led you to tell the queen
that you had learned the truth of Jo rey’s birth?”
“The madness of mercy,” Ned admitted.
“Ah,” said Varys. “To be sure. You are an honest and honorable
man, Lord Eddard. Ofttimes I forget that. I have met so few of them
in my life.” He glanced around the cell. “When I see what honesty
and honor have won you, I understand why.”
Ned Stark laid his head back against the damp stone wall and
closed his eyes. His leg was throbbing. “The king’s wine … did you
question Lancel?”
“Oh, indeed. Cersei gave him the wineskins, and told him it was
Robert’s favorite vintage.” The eunuch shrugged. “A hunter lives a
perilous life. If the boar had not done for Robert, it would have
been a fall from a horse, the bite of a wood adder, an arrow gone
astray … the forest is the abbatoir of the gods. It was not wine that
killed the king. It was your mercy.”
Ned had feared as much. “Gods forgive me.”
“If there are gods,” Varys said, “I expect they will. The queen
would not have waited long in any case. Robert was becoming
unruly, and she needed to be rid of him to free her hands to deal
with his brothers. They are quite a pair, Stannis and Renly. The iron
gauntlet and the silk glove.” He wiped his mouth with the back of
his hand. “You have been foolish, my lord. You ought to have
heeded Little nger when he urged you to support Jo rey’s
succession.”
“How … how could you know of that?”
Varys smiled. “I know, that’s all that need concern you. I also
know that on the morrow the queen will pay you a visit.”
Slowly Ned raised his eyes. “Why?”

“Cersei is frightened of you, my lord … but she has other enemies
she fears even more. Her beloved Jaime is ghting the river lords
even now. Lysa Arryn sits in the Eyrie, ringed in stone and steel,
and there is no love lost between her and the queen. In Dorne, the
Martells still brood on the murder of Princess Elia and her babes.
And now your son marches down the Neck with a northern host at
his back.”
“Robb is only a boy,” Ned said, aghast.
“A boy with an army,” Varys said. “Yet only a boy, as you say.
The king’s brothers are the ones giving Cersei sleepless
nights … Lord Stannis in particular. His claim is the true one, he is
known for his prowess as a battle commander, and he is utterly
without mercy. There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a
truly just man. No one knows what Stannis has been doing on
Dragonstone, but I will wager you that he’s gathered more swords
than seashells. So here is Cersei’s nightmare: while her father and
brother spend their power battling Starks and Tullys, Lord Stannis
will land, proclaim himself king, and lop o her son’s curly blond
head … and her own in the bargain, though I truly believe she cares
more about the boy.”
“Stannis Baratheon is Robert’s true heir,” Ned said. “The throne is
his by rights. I would welcome his ascent.”
Varys tsked. “Cersei will not want to hear that, I promise you.
Stannis may win the throne, but only your rotting head will remain
to cheer unless you guard that tongue of yours. Sansa begged so
sweetly, it would be a shame if you threw it all away. You are
being given your life back, if you’ll take it. Cersei is no fool. She
knows a tame wolf is of more use than a dead one.”
“You want me to serve the woman who murdered my king,
butchered my men, and crippled my son?” Ned’s voice was thick
with disbelief.
“I want you to serve the realm,” Varys said. “Tell the queen that
you will confess your vile treason, command your son to lay down
his sword, and proclaim Jo rey as the true heir. O er to denounce
Stannis and Renly as faithless usurpers. Our green-eyed lioness
knows you are a man of honor. If you will give her the peace she

needs and the time to deal with Stannis, and pledge to carry her
secret to your grave, I believe she will allow you to take the black
and live out the rest of your days on the Wall, with your brother
and that baseborn son of yours.”
The thought of Jon lled Ned with a sense of shame, and a
sorrow too deep for words. If only he could see the boy again, sit
and talk with him … pain shot through his broken leg, beneath the
lthy grey plaster of his cast. He winced, his ngers opening and
closing helplessly. “Is this your own scheme,” he gasped out at
Varys, “or are you in league with Little nger?”
That seemed to amuse the eunuch. “I would sooner wed the Black
Goat of Qohor. Little nger is the second most devious man in the
Seven Kingdoms. Oh, I feed him choice whispers, su cient so that
he thinks I am his … just as I allow Cersei to believe I am hers.”
“And just as you let me believe that you were mine. Tell me, Lord
Varys, who do you truly serve?”
Varys smiled thinly. “Why, the realm, my good lord, how ever
could you doubt that? I swear it by my lost manhood. I serve the
realm, and the realm needs peace.” He nished the last swallow of
wine, and tossed the empty skin aside. “So what is your answer,
Lord Eddard? Give me your word that you’ll tell the queen what she
wants to hear when she comes calling.”
“If I did, my word would be as hollow as an empty suit of armor.
My life is not so precious to me as that.”
“Pity.” The eunuch stood. “And your daughter’s life, my lord?
How precious is that?”
A chill pierced Ned’s heart. “My daughter …”
“Surely you did not think I’d forgotten about your sweet
innocent, my lord? The queen most certainly has not.”
“No,” Ned pleaded, his voice cracking. “Varys, gods have mercy,
do as you like with me, but leave my daughter out of your schemes.
Sansa’s no more than a child.”
“Rhaenys was a child too. Prince Rhaegar’s daughter. A precious
little thing, younger than your girls. She had a small black kitten
she called Balerion, did you know? I always wondered what
happened to him. Rhaenys liked to pretend he was the true

Balerion, the Black Dread of old, but I imagine the Lannisters taught
her the di erence between a kitten and a dragon quick enough, the
day they broke down her door.” Varys gave a long weary sigh, the
sigh of a man who carried all the sadness of the world in a sack
upon his shoulders. “The High Septon once told me that as we sin,
so do we su er. If that’s true, Lord Eddard, tell me … why is it
always the innocents who su er most, when you high lords play
your game of thrones? Ponder it, if you would, while you wait upon
the queen. And spare a thought for this as well: The next visitor
who calls on you could bring you bread and cheese and the milk of
the poppy for your pain … or he could bring you Sansa’s head.
“The choice, my dear lord Hand, is entirely yours.”

CATELYN

As the host trooped down the causeway through the black bogs of
the Neck and spilled out into the riverlands beyond, Catelyn’s
apprehensions grew. She masked her fears behind a face kept still
and stern, yet they were there all the same, growing with every
league they crossed. Her days were anxious, her nights restless, and
every raven that ew overhead made her clench her teeth.
She feared for her lord father, and wondered at his ominous
silence. She feared for her brother Edmure, and prayed that the
gods would watch over him if he must face the Kingslayer in battle.
She feared for Ned and her girls, and for the sweet sons she had left
behind at Winterfell. And yet there was nothing she could do for
any of them, and so she made herself put all thought of them aside.
You must save your strength for Robb, she told herself. He is the only
one you can help. You must be as erce and hard as the north, Catelyn
Tully. You must be a Stark for true now, like your son.
Robb rode at the front of the column, beneath the apping white
banner of Winterfell. Each day he would ask one of his lords to join
him, so they might confer as they marched; he honored every man
in turn, showing no favorites, listening as his lord father had
listened, weighing the words of one against the other. He has
learned so much from Ned, she thought as she watched him, but has
he learned enough?
The Black sh had taken a hundred picked men and a hundred
swift horses and raced ahead to screen their movements and scout

the way. The reports Ser Brynden’s riders brought back did little to
reassure her. Lord Tywin’s host was still many days to the
south … but Walder Frey, Lord of the Crossing, had assembled a
force of near four thousand men at his castles on the Green Fork.
“Late again,” Catelyn murmured when she heard. It was the
Trident all over, damn the man. Her brother Edmure had called the
banners; by rights, Lord Frey should have gone to join the Tully
host at Riverrun, yet here he sat.
“Four thousand men,” Robb repeated, more perplexed than angry.
“Lord Frey cannot hope to ght the Lannisters by himself. Surely he
means to join his power to ours.”
“Does he?” Catelyn asked. She had ridden forward to join Robb
and Robett Glover, his companion of the day. The vanguard spread
out behind them, a slow-moving forest of lances and banners and
spears. “I wonder. Expect nothing of Walder Frey, and you will
never be surprised.”
“He’s your father’s bannerman.”
“Some men take their oaths more seriously than others, Robb.
And Lord Walder was always friendlier with Casterly Rock than my
father would have liked. One of his sons is wed to Tywin Lannister’s
sister. That means little of itself, to be sure. Lord Walder has sired a
great many children over the years, and they must needs marry
someone. Still …”
“Do you think he means to betray us to the Lannisters, my lady?”
Robett Glover asked gravely.
Catelyn sighed. “If truth be told, I doubt even Lord Frey knows
what Lord Frey intends to do. He has an old man’s caution and a
young man’s ambition, and has never lacked for cunning.”
“We must have the Twins, Mother,” Robb said heatedly. “There is
no other way across the river. You know that.”
“Yes. And so does Walder Frey, you can be sure of that.”
That night they made camp on the southern edge of the bogs,
halfway between the kingsroad and the river. It was there Theon
Greyjoy brought them further word from her uncle. “Ser Brynden
says to tell you he’s crossed swords with the Lannisters. There are a
dozen scouts who won’t be reporting back to Lord Tywin anytime

soon. Or ever.” He grinned. “Ser Addam Marbrand commands their
outriders, and he’s pulling back south, burning as he goes. He
knows where we are, more or less, but the Black sh vows he will
not know when we split.”
“Unless Lord Frey tells him,” Catelyn said sharply. “Theon, when
you return to my uncle, tell him he is to place his best bowmen
around the Twins, day and night, with orders to bring down any
raven they see leaving the battlements. I want no birds bringing
word of my son’s movements to Lord Tywin.”
“Ser Brynden has seen to it already, my lady,” Theon replied with
a cocky smile. “A few more blackbirds, and we should have enough
to bake a pie. I’ll save you their feathers for a hat.”
She ought to have known that Brynden Black sh would be well
ahead of her. “What have the Freys been doing while the Lannisters
burn their elds and plunder their holdfasts?”
“There’s been some ghting between Ser Addam’s men and Lord
Walder’s,” Theon answered. “Not a day’s ride from here, we found
two Lannister scouts feeding the crows where the Freys had strung
them up. Most of Lord Walder’s strength remains massed at the
Twins, though.”
That bore Walder Frey’s seal beyond a doubt, Catelyn thought
bitterly; hold back, wait, watch, take no risk unless forced to it.
“If he’s been ghting the Lannisters, perhaps he does mean to
hold to his vows,” Robb said.
Catelyn was less encouraged. “Defending his own lands is one
thing, open battle against Lord Tywin quite another.”
Robb turned back to Theon Greyjoy. “Has the Black sh found any
other way across the Green Fork?”
Theon shook his head. “The river’s running high and fast. Ser
Brynden says it can’t be forded, not this far north.”
“I must have that crossing!” Robb declared, fuming. “Oh, our
horses might be able to swim the river, I suppose, but not with
armored men on their backs. We’d need to build rafts to pole our
steel across, helms and mail and lances, and we don’t have the trees
for that. Or the time. Lord Tywin is marching north …” He balled
his hand into a st.

“Lord Frey would be a fool to try and bar our way,” Theon
Greyjoy said with his customary easy con dence. “We have ve
times his numbers. You can take the Twins if you need to, Robb.”
“Not easily,” Catelyn warned them, “and not in time. While you
were mounting your siege, Tywin Lannister would bring up his host
and assault you from the rear.”
Robb glanced from her to Greyjoy, searching for an answer and
nding none. For a moment he looked even younger than his fteen
years, despite his mail and sword and the stubble on his cheeks.
“What would my lord father do?” he asked her.
“Find a way across,” she told him. “Whatever it took.”
The next morning it was Ser Brynden Tully himself who rode
back to them. He had put aside the heavy plate and helm he’d worn
as the Knight of the Gate for the lighter leather-and-mail of an
outrider, but his obsidian sh still fastened his cloak.
Her uncle’s face was grave as he swung down o his horse.
“There has been a battle under the walls of Riverrun,” he said, his
mouth grim. “We had it from a Lannister outrider we took captive.
The Kingslayer has destroyed Edmure’s host and sent the lords of
the Trident reeling in ight.”
A cold hand clutched at Catelyn’s heart. “And my brother?”
“Wounded and taken prisoner,” Ser Brynden said. “Lord
Blackwood and the other survivors are under siege inside Riverrun,
surrounded by Jaime’s host.”
Robb looked fretful. “We must get across this accursed river if
we’re to have any hope of relieving them in time.”
“That will not be easily done,” her uncle cautioned. “Lord Frey
has pulled his whole strength back inside his castles, and his gates
are closed and barred.”
“Damn the man,” Robb swore. “If the old fool does not relent and
let me cross, he’ll leave me no choice but to storm his walls. I’ll pull
the Twins down around his ears if I have to, we’ll see how well he
likes that!”
“You sound like a sulky boy, Robb,” Catelyn said sharply. “A
child sees an obstacle, and his rst thought is to run around it or

knock it down. A lord must learn that sometimes words can
accomplish what swords cannot.”
Robb’s neck reddened at the rebuke. “Tell me what you mean,
Mother,” he said meekly.
“The Freys have held the crossing for six hundred years, and for
six hundred years they have never failed to exact their toll.”
“What toll? What does he want?”
She smiled. “That is what we must discover.”
“And what if I do not choose to pay this toll?”
“Then you had best retreat back to Moat Cailin, deploy to meet
Lord Tywin in battle … or grow wings. I see no other choices.”
Catelyn put her heels to her horse and rode o , leaving her son to
ponder her words. It would not do to make him feel as if his mother
were usurping his place. Did you teach him wisdom as well as valor,
Ned? she wondered. Did you teach him how to kneel? The graveyards
of the Seven Kingdoms were full of brave men who had never
learned that lesson.
It was near midday when their vanguard came in sight of the
Twins, where the Lords of the Crossing had their seat.
The Green Fork ran swift and deep here, but the Freys had
spanned it many centuries past and grown rich o the coin men paid
them to cross. Their bridge was a massive arch of smooth grey rock,
wide enough for two wagons to pass abreast; the Water Tower rose
from the center of the span, commanding both road and river with
its arrow slits, murder holes, and portcullises. It had taken the Freys
three generations to complete their bridge; when they were done
they’d thrown up stout timber keeps on either bank, so no one
might cross without their leave.
The timber had long since given way to stone. The Twins—two
squat, ugly, formidable castles, identical in every respect, with the
bridge arching between—had guarded the crossing for centuries.
High curtain walls, deep moats, and heavy oak-and-iron gates
protected the approaches, the bridge footings rose from within stout
inner keeps, there was a barbican and portcullis on either bank, and
the Water Tower defended the span itself.

One glance was su cient to tell Catelyn that the castle would not
be taken by storm. The battlements bristled with spears and swords
and scorpions, there was an archer at every crenel and arrow slit,
the drawbridge was up, the portcullis down, the gates closed and
barred.
The Greatjon began to curse and swear as soon as he saw what
awaited them. Lord Rickard Karstark glowered in silence. “That
cannot be assaulted, my lords,” Roose Bolton announced.
“Nor can we take it by siege, without an army on the far bank to
invest the other castle,” Helman Tallhart said gloomily. Across the
deep-running green waters, the western twin stood like a re ection
of its eastern brother. “Even if we had the time. Which, to be sure,
we do not.”
As the northern lords studied the castle, a sally port opened, a
plank bridge slid across the moat, and a dozen knights rode forth to
confront them, led by four of Lord Walder’s many sons. Their
banner bore twin towers, dark blue on a eld of pale silver-grey.
Ser Stevron Frey, Lord Walder’s heir, spoke for them. The Freys all
looked like weasels; Ser Stevron, past sixty with grandchildren of
his own, looked like an especially old and tired weasel, yet he was
polite enough. “My lord father has sent me to greet you, and
inquire as to who leads this mighty host.”
“I do.” Robb spurred his horse forward. He was in his armor, with
the direwolf shield of Winterfell strapped to his saddle and Grey
Wind padding by his side.
The old knight looked at her son with a faint icker of
amusement in his watery grey eyes, though his gelding whickered
uneasily and sidled away from the direwolf. “My lord father would
be most honored if you would share meat and mead with him in the
castle and explain your purpose here.”
His words crashed among the lords bannermen like a great stone
from a catapult. Not one of them approved. They cursed, argued,
shouted down each other.
“You must not do this, my lord,” Galbart Glover pleaded with
Robb. “Lord Walder is not to be trusted.”

Roose Bolton nodded. “Go in there alone and you’re his. He can
sell you to the Lannisters, throw you in a dungeon, or slit your
throat, as he likes.”
“If he wants to talk to us, let him open his gates, and we will all
share his meat and mead,” declared Ser Wendel Manderly.
“Or let him come out and treat with Robb here, in plain sight of
his men and ours,” suggested his brother, Ser Wylis.
Catelyn Stark shared all their doubts, but she had only to glance
at Ser Stevron to see that he was not pleased by what he was
hearing. A few more words and the chance would be lost. She had
to act, and quickly. “I will go,” she said loudly.
“You, my lady?” The Greatjon furrowed his brow.
“Mother, are you certain?” Clearly, Robb was not.
“Never more,” Catelyn lied glibly. “Lord Walder is my father’s
bannerman. I have known him since I was a girl. He would never
o er me any harm.” Unless he saw some pro t in it, she added
silently, but some truths did not bear saying, and some lies were
necessary.
“I am certain my lord father would be pleased to speak to the
Lady Catelyn,” Ser Stevron said. “To vouchsafe for our good
intentions, my brother Ser Perwyn will remain here until she is
safely returned to you.”
“He shall be our honored guest,” said Robb. Ser Perwyn, the
youngest of the four Freys in the party, dismounted and handed the
reins of his horse to a brother. “I require my lady mother’s return
by evenfall, Ser Stevron,” Robb went on. “It is not my intent to
linger here long.”
Ser Stevron Frey gave a polite nod. “As you say, my lord.”
Catelyn spurred her horse forward and did not look back. Lord
Walder’s sons and envoys fell in around her.
Her father had once said of Walder Frey that he was the only lord
in the Seven Kingdoms who could eld an army out of his breeches.
When the Lord of the Crossing welcomed Catelyn in the great hall
of the east castle, surrounded by twenty living sons (minus Ser
Perwyn, who would have made twenty-one), thirty-six grandsons,
nineteen great-grandsons, and numerous daughters, granddaughters,

bastards, and grandbastards, she understood just what he had
meant.
Lord Walder was ninety, a wizened pink weasel with a bald
spotted head, too gouty to stand unassisted. His newest wife, a pale
frail girl of sixteen years, walked beside his litter when they carried
him in. She was the eighth Lady Frey.
“It is a great pleasure to see you again after so many years, my
lord,” Catelyn said.
The old man squinted at her suspiciously. “Is it? I doubt that.
Spare me your sweet words, Lady Catelyn, I am too old. Why are
you here? Is your boy too proud to come before me himself? What
am I to do with you?”
Catelyn had been a girl the last time she had visited the Twins,
but even then Lord Walder had been irascible, sharp of tongue, and
blunt of manner. Age had made him worse than ever, it would
seem. She would need to choose her words with care, and do her
best to take no o ense from his.
“Father,” Ser Stevron said reproachfully, “you forget yourself.
Lady Stark is here at your invitation.”
“Did I ask you? You are not Lord Frey yet, not until I die. Do I
look dead? I’ll hear no instructions from you.”
“This is no way to speak in front of our noble guest, Father,” one
of his younger sons said.
“Now my bastards presume to teach me courtesy,” Lord Walder
complained. “I’ll speak any way I like, damn you. I’ve had three
kings to guest in my life, and queens as well, do you think I require
lessons from the likes of you, Ryger? Your mother was milking
goats the rst time I gave her my seed.” He dismissed the red-faced
youth with a ick of his ngers and gestured to two of his other
sons. “Danwell, Whalen, help me to my chair.”
They shifted Lord Walder from his litter and carried him to the
high seat of the Freys, a tall chair of black oak whose back was
carved in the shape of two towers linked by a bridge. His young
wife crept up timidly and covered his legs with a blanket. When he
was settled, the old man beckoned Catelyn forward and planted a
papery dry kiss on her hand. “There,” he announced. “Now that I

have observed the courtesies, my lady, perhaps my sons will do me
the honor of shutting their mouths. Why are you here?”
“To ask you to open your gates, my lord,” Catelyn replied
politely. “My son and his lords bannermen are most anxious to cross
the river and be on their way.”
“To Riverrun?” He sniggered. “Oh, no need to tell me, no need.
I’m not blind yet. The old man can still read a map.”
“To Riverrun,” Catelyn con rmed. She saw no reason to deny it.
“Where I might have expected to nd you, my lord. You are still my
father’s bannerman, are you not?”
“Heh,” said Lord Walder, a noise halfway between a laugh and a
grunt. “I called my swords, yes I did, here they are, you saw them
on the walls. It was my intent to march as soon as all my strength
was assembled. Well, to send my sons. I am well past marching
myself, Lady Catelyn.” He looked around for likely con rmation
and pointed to a tall, stooped man of fty years. “Tell her, Jared.
Tell her that was my intent.”
“It was, my lady,” said Ser Jared Frey, one of his sons by his
second wife. “On my honor.”
“Is it my fault that your fool brother lost his battle before we
could march?” He leaned back against his cushions and scowled at
her, as if challenging her to dispute his version of events. “I am told
the Kingslayer went through him like an axe through ripe cheese.
Why should my boys hurry south to die? All those who did go south
are running north again.”
Catelyn would gladly have spitted the querulous old man and
roasted him over a re, but she had only till evenfall to open the
bridge. Calmly, she said, “All the more reason that we must reach
Riverrun, and soon. Where can we go to talk, my lord?”
“We’re talking now,” Lord Frey complained. The spotted pink
head snapped around. “What are you all looking at?” he shouted at
his kin. “Get out of here. Lady Stark wants to speak to me in
private. Might be she has designs on my delity, heh. Go, all of you,
nd something useful to do. Yes, you too, woman. Out, out, out.”
As his sons and grandsons and daughters and bastards and nieces
and nephews streamed from the hall, he leaned close to Catelyn and

confessed, “They’re all waiting for me to die. Stevron’s been waiting
for forty years, but I keep disappointing him. Heh. Why should I die
just so he can be a lord? I ask you. I won’t do it.”
“I have every hope that you will live to be a hundred.”
“That would boil them, to be sure. Oh, to be sure. Now, what do
you want to say?”
“We want to cross,” Catelyn told him.
“Oh, do you? That’s blunt. Why should I let you?”
For a moment her anger ared. “If you were strong enough to
climb your own battlements, Lord Frey, you would see that my son
has twenty thousand men outside your walls.”
“They’ll be twenty thousand fresh corpses when Lord Tywin gets
here,” the old man shot back. “Don’t you try and frighten me, my
lady. Your husband’s in some traitor’s cell under the Red Keep, your
father’s sick, might be dying, and Jaime Lannister’s got your
brother in chains. What do you have that I should fear? That son of
yours? I’ll match you son for son, and I’ll still have eighteen when
yours are all dead.”
“You swore an oath to my father,” Catelyn reminded him.
He bobbed his head side to side, smiling. “Oh, yes, I said some
words, but I swore oaths to the crown too, it seems to me. Jo rey’s
the king now, and that makes you and your boy and all those fools
out there no better than rebels. If I had the sense the gods gave a
sh, I’d help the Lannisters boil you all.”
“Why don’t you?” she challenged him.
Lord Walder snorted with disdain. “Lord Tywin the proud and
splendid, Warden of the West, Hand of the King, oh, what a great
man that one is, him and his gold this and gold that and lions here
and lions there. I’ll wager you, he eats too many beans, he breaks
wind just like me, but you’ll never hear him admit it, oh, no. What’s
he got to be so pu ed up about anyway? Only two sons, and one of
them’s a twisted little monster. I’ll match him son for son, and I’ll
still have nineteen and a half left when all of his are dead!” He
cackled. “If Lord Tywin wants my help, he can bloody well ask for
it.”

That was all Catelyn needed to hear. “I am asking for your help,
my lord,” she said humbly. “And my father and my brother and my
lord husband and my sons are asking with my voice.”
Lord Walder jabbed a bony nger at her face. “Save your sweet
words, my lady. Sweet words I get from my wife. Did you see her?
Sixteen she is, a little ower, and her honey’s only for me. I wager
she gives me a son by this time next year. Perhaps I’ll make him
heir, wouldn’t that boil the rest of them?”
“I’m certain she will give you many sons.”
His head bobbed up and down. “Your lord father did not come to
the wedding. An insult, as I see it. Even if he is dying. He never
came to my last wedding either. He calls me the Late Lord Frey,
you know. Does he think I’m dead? I’m not dead, and I promise
you, I’ll outlive him as I outlived his father. Your family has always
pissed on me, don’t deny it, don’t lie, you know it’s true. Years ago,
I went to your father and suggested a match between his son and
my daughter. Why not? I had a daughter in mind, sweet girl, only a
few years older than Edmure, but if your brother didn’t warm to
her, I had others he might have had, young ones, old ones, virgins,
widows, whatever he wanted. No, Lord Hoster would not hear of it.
Sweet words he gave me, excuses, but what I wanted was to get rid
of a daughter.
“And your sister, that one, she’s full as bad. It was, oh, a year
ago, no more, Jon Arryn was still the King’s Hand, and I went to the
city to see my sons ride in the tourney. Stevron and Jared are too
old for the lists now, but Danwell and Hosteen rode, Perwyn as
well, and a couple of my bastards tried the melee. If I’d known how
they’d shame me, I would never have troubled myself to make the
journey. Why did I need to ride all that way to see Hosteen knocked
o his horse by that Tyrell whelp? I ask you. The boy’s half his age,
Ser Daisy they call him, something like that. And Danwell was
unhorsed by a hedge knight! Some days I wonder if those two are
truly mine. My third wife was a Crakehall, all of the Crakehall
women are sluts. Well, never mind about that, she died before you
were born, what do you care?

“I was speaking of your sister. I proposed that Lord and Lady
Arryn foster two of my grandsons at court, and o ered to take their
own son to ward here at the Twins. Are my grandsons unworthy to
be seen at the king’s court? They are sweet boys, quiet and
mannerly. Walder is Merrett’s son, named after me, and the other
one … heh, I don’t recall … he might have been another Walder,
they’re always naming them Walder so I’ll favor them, but his
father … which one was his father now?” His face wrinkled up.
“Well, whoever he was, Lord Arryn wouldn’t have him, or the other
one, and I blame your lady sister for that. She frosted up as if I’d
suggested selling her boy to a mummer’s show or making a eunuch
out of him, and when Lord Arryn said the child was going to
Dragonstone to foster with Stannis Baratheon, she stormed o
without a word of regrets and all the Hand could give me was
apologies. What good are apologies? I ask you.”
Catelyn frowned, disquieted. “I had understood that Lysa’s boy
was to be fostered with Lord Tywin at Casterly Rock.”
“No, it was Lord Stannis,” Walder Frey said irritably. “Do you
think I can’t tell Lord Stannis from Lord Tywin? They’re both
bungholes who think they’re too noble to shit, but never mind about
that, I know the di erence. Or do you think I’m so old I can’t
remember? I’m ninety and I remember very well. I remember what
to do with a woman too. That wife of mine will give me a son
before this time next year, I’ll wager. Or a daughter, that can’t be
helped. Boy or girl, it will be red, wrinkled, and squalling, and like
as not she’ll want to name it Walder or Walda.”
Catelyn was not concerned with what Lady Frey might choose to
name her child. “Jon Arryn was going to foster his son with Lord
Stannis, you are quite certain of that?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the old man said. “Only he died, so what does it
matter? You say you want to cross the river?”
“We do.”
“Well, you can’t!” Lord Walder announced crisply. “Not unless I
allow it, and why should I? The Tullys and the Starks have never
been friends of mine.” He pushed himself back in his chair and
crossed his arms, smirking, waiting for her answer.

The rest was only haggling.
A swollen red sun hung low against the western hills when the
gates of the castle opened. The drawbridge creaked down, the
portcullis winched up, and Lady Catelyn Stark rode forth to rejoin
her son and his lords bannermen. Behind her came Ser Jared Frey,
Ser Hosteen Frey, Ser Danwell Frey, and Lord Walder’s bastard son
Ronel Rivers, leading a long column of pikemen, rank on rank of
shu ing men in blue steel ringmail and silvery grey cloaks.
Robb galloped out to meet her, with Grey Wind racing beside his
stallion. “It’s done,” she told him. “Lord Walder will grant you your
crossing. His swords are yours as well, less four hundred he means
to keep back to hold the Twins. I suggest that you leave four
hundred of your own, a mixed force of archers and swordsmen. He
can scarcely object to an o er to augment his garrison … but make
certain you give the command to a man you can trust. Lord Walder
may need help keeping faith.”
“As you say, Mother,” Robb answered, gazing at the ranks of
pikemen. “Perhaps … Ser Helman Tallhart, do you think?”
“A ne choice.”
“What … what did he want of us?”
“If you can spare a few of your swords, I need some men to
escort two of Lord Frey’s grandsons north to Winterfell,” she told
him. “I have agreed to take them as wards. They are young boys,
aged eight years and seven. It would seem they are both named
Walder. Your brother Bran will welcome the companionship of lads
near his own age, I should think.”
“Is that all? Two fosterlings? That’s a small enough price to—”
“Lord Frey’s son Olyvar will be coming with us,” she went on.
“He is to serve as your personal squire. His father would like to see
him knighted, in good time.”
“A squire.” He shrugged. “Fine, that’s ne, if he’s—”
“Also, if your sister Arya is returned to us safely, it is agreed that
she will marry Lord Walder’s youngest son, Elmar, when the two of
them come of age.”
Robb looked nonplussed. “Arya won’t like that one bit.”

“And you are to wed one of his daughters, once the ghting is
done,” she nished. “His lordship has graciously consented to allow
you to choose whichever girl you prefer. He has a number he thinks
might be suitable.”
To his credit, Robb did not inch. “I see.”
“Do you consent?”
“Can I refuse?”
“Not if you wish to cross.”
“I consent,” Robb said solemnly. He had never seemed more
manly to her than he did in that moment. Boys might play with
swords, but it took a lord to make a marriage pact, knowing what it
meant.
They crossed at evenfall as a horned moon oated upon the river.
The double column wound its way through the gate of the eastern
twin like a great steel snake, slithering across the courtyard, into
the keep and over the bridge, to issue forth once more from the
second castle on the west bank.
Catelyn rode at the head of the serpent, with her son and her
uncle Ser Brynden and Ser Stevron Frey. Behind followed nine
tenths of their horse; knights, lancers, freeriders, and mounted
bowmen. It took hours for them all to cross. Afterward, Catelyn
would remember the clatter of countless hooves on the drawbridge,
the sight of Lord Walder Frey in his litter watching them pass, the
glitter of eyes peering down through the slats of the murder holes
in the ceiling as they rode through the Water Tower.
The larger part of the northern host, pikes and archers and great
masses of men-at-arms on foot, remained upon the east bank under
the command of Roose Bolton. Robb had commanded him to
continue the march south, to confront the huge Lannister army
coming north under Lord Tywin.
For good or ill, her son had thrown the dice.

JON

“Are you well, Snow?” Lord Mormont asked, scowling.
“Well,” his raven squawked. “Well.”
“I am, my lord,” Jon lied … loudly, as if that could make it true.
“And you?”
Mormont frowned. “A dead man tried to kill me. How well could
I be?” He scratched under his chin. His shaggy grey beard had been
singed in the re, and he’d hacked it o . The pale stubble of his
new whiskers made him look old, disreputable, and grumpy. “You
do not look well. How is your hand?”
“Healing.” Jon exed his bandaged ngers to show him. He had
burned himself more badly than he knew throwing the aming
drapes, and his right hand was swathed in silk halfway to the
elbow. At the time he’d felt nothing; the agony had come after. His
cracked red skin oozed uid, and fearsome blood blisters rose
between his ngers, big as roaches. “The maester says I’ll have
scars, but otherwise the hand should be as good as it was before.”
“A scarred hand is nothing. On the Wall, you’ll be wearing gloves
often as not.”
“As you say, my lord.” It was not the thought of scars that
troubled Jon; it was the rest of it. Maester Aemon had given him
milk of the poppy, yet even so, the pain had been hideous. At rst it
had felt as if his hand were still a ame, burning day and night. Only
plunging it into basins of snow and shaved ice gave any relief at all.
Jon thanked the gods that no one but Ghost saw him writhing on his

bed, whimpering from the pain. And when at last he did sleep, he
dreamt, and that was even worse. In the dream, the corpse he
fought had blue eyes, black hands, and his father’s face, but he
dared not tell Mormont that.
“Dywen and Hake returned last night,” the Old Bear said. “They
found no sign of your uncle, no more than the others did.”
“I know.” Jon had dragged himself to the common hall to sup
with his friends, and the failure of the rangers’ search had been all
the men had been talking of.
“You know,” Mormont grumbled. “How is it that everyone knows
everything around here?” He did not seem to expect an answer. “It
would seem there were only the two of … of those creatures,
whatever they were, I will not call them men. And thank the gods
for that. Any more and … well, that doesn’t bear thinking of. There
will be more, though. I can feel it in these old bones of mine, and
Maester Aemon agrees. The cold winds are rising. Summer is at an
end, and a winter is coming such as this world has never seen.”
Winter is coming. The Stark words had never sounded so grim or
ominous to Jon as they did now. “My lord,” he asked hesitantly,
“it’s said there was a bird last night …”
“There was. What of it?”
“I had hoped for some word of my father.”
“Father,” taunted the old raven, bobbing its head as it walked
across Mormont’s shoulders. “Father.”
The Lord Commander reached up to pinch its beak shut, but the
raven hopped up on his head, uttered its wings, and ew across
the chamber to light above a window. “Grief and noise,” Mormont
grumbled. “That’s all they’re good for, ravens. Why I put up with
that pestilential bird … if there was news of Lord Eddard, don’t you
think I would have sent for you? Bastard or no, you’re still his
blood. The message concerned Ser Barristan Selmy. It seems he’s
been removed from the Kingsguard. They gave his place to that
black dog Clegane, and now Selmy’s wanted for treason. The fools
sent some watchmen to seize him, but he slew two of them and
escaped.” Mormont snorted, leaving no doubt of his view of men
who’d send gold cloaks against a knight as renowed as Barristan the

Bold. “We have white shadows in the woods and unquiet dead
stalking our halls, and a boy sits the Iron Throne,” he said in disgust.
The raven laughed shrilly. “Boy, boy, boy, boy.”
Ser Barristan had been the Old Bear’s best hope, Jon remembered;
if he had fallen, what chance was there that Mormont’s letter would
be heeded? He curled his hand into a st. Pain shot through his
burned ngers. “What of my sisters?”
“The message made no mention of Lord Eddard or the girls.” He
gave an irritated shrug. “Perhaps they never got my letter. Aemon
sent two copies, with his best birds, but who can say? More like,
Pycelle did not deign to reply. It would not be the rst time, nor
the last. I fear we count for less than nothing in King’s Landing.
They tell us what they want us to know, and that’s little enough.”
And you tell me what you want me to know, and that’s less, Jon
thought resentfully. His brother Robb had called the banners and
ridden south to war, yet no word of that had been breathed to
him … save by Samwell Tarly, who’d read the letter to Maester
Aemon and whispered its contents to Jon that night in secret, all the
time saying how he shouldn’t. Doubtless they thought his brother’s
war was none of his concern. It troubled him more than he could
say. Robb was marching and he was not. No matter how often Jon
told himself that his place was here now, with his new brothers on
the Wall, he still felt craven.
“Corn,” the raven was crying. “Corn, corn.”
“Oh, be quiet,” the Old Bear told it. “Snow, how soon does
Maester Aemon say you’ll have use of that hand back?”
“Soon,” Jon replied.
“Good.” On the table between them, Lord Mormont laid a large
sword in a black metal scabbard banded with silver. “Here. You’ll
be ready for this, then.”
The raven apped down and landed on the table, strutting toward
the sword, head cocked curiously. Jon hesitated. He had no inkling
what this meant. “My lord?”
“The re melted the silver o the pommel and burnt the
crossguard and grip. Well, dry leather and old wood, what could
you expect? The blade, now … you’d need a re a hundred times as

hot to harm the blade.” Mormont shoved the scabbard across the
rough oak planks. “I had the rest made anew. Take it.”
“Take it,” echoed his raven, preening. “Take it, take it.”
Awkwardly, Jon took the sword in hand. His left hand; his
bandaged right was still too raw and clumsy. Carefully he pulled it
from its scabbard and raised it level with his eyes.
The pommel was a hunk of pale stone weighted with lead to
balance the long blade. It had been carved into the likeness of a
snarling wolf’s head, with chips of garnet set into the eyes. The grip
was virgin leather, soft and black, as yet unstained by sweat or
blood. The blade itself was a good half foot longer than those Jon
was used to, tapered to thrust as well as slash, with three fullers
deeply incised in the metal. Where Ice was a true two-handed
greatsword, this was a hand-and-a-halfer, sometimes named a
“bastard sword.” Yet the wolf sword actually seemed lighter than
the blades he had wielded before. When Jon turned it sideways, he
could see the ripples in the dark steel where the metal had been
folded back on itself again and again. “This is Valyrian steel, my
lord,” he said wonderingly. His father had let him handle Ice often
enough; he knew the look, the feel.
“It is,” the Old Bear told him. “It was my father’s sword, and his
father’s before him. The Mormonts have carried it for ve centuries.
I wielded it in my day and passed it on to my son when I took the
black.”
He is giving me his son’s sword. Jon could scarcely believe it. The
blade was exquisitely balanced. The edges glimmered faintly as they
kissed the light. “Your son—”
“My son brought dishonor to House Mormont, but at least he had
the grace to leave the sword behind when he ed. My sister
returned it to my keeping, but the very sight of it reminded me of
Jorah’s shame, so I put it aside and thought no more of it until we
found it in the ashes of my bedchamber. The original pommel was a
bear’s head, silver, yet so worn its features were all but
indistinguishable. For you, I thought a white wolf more apt. One of
our builders is a fair stonecarver.”

When Jon had been Bran’s age, he had dreamed of doing great
deeds, as boys always did. The details of his feats changed with
every dreaming, but quite often he imagined saving his father’s life.
Afterward Lord Eddard would declare that Jon had proved himself a
true Stark, and place Ice in his hand. Even then he had known it was
only a child’s folly; no bastard could ever hope to wield a father’s
sword. Even the memory shamed him. What kind of man stole his
own brother’s birthright? I have no right to this, he thought, no more
than to Ice. He twitched his burned ngers, feeling a throb of pain
deep under the skin. “My lord, you honor me, but—”
“Spare me your but’s, boy,” Lord Mormont interrupted. “I would
not be sitting here were it not for you and that beast of yours. You
fought bravely … and more to the point, you thought quickly. Fire!
Yes, damn it. We ought to have known. We ought to have
remembered. The Long Night has come before. Oh, eight thousand
years is a good while, to be sure … yet if the Night’s Watch does
not remember, who will?”
“Who will,” chimed the talkative raven. “Who will.”
Truly, the gods had heard Jon’s prayer that night; the re had
caught in the dead man’s clothing and consumed him as if his esh
were candle wax and his bones old dry wood. Jon had only to close
his eyes to see the thing staggering across the solar, crashing
against the furniture and ailing at the ames. It was the face that
haunted him most; surrounded by a nimbus of re, hair blazing like
straw, the dead esh melting away and sloughing o its skull to
reveal the gleam of bone beneath.
Whatever demonic force moved Othor had been driven out by the
ames; the twisted thing they had found in the ashes had been no
more than cooked meat and charred bone. Yet in his nightmare he
faced it again … and this time the burning corpse wore Lord
Eddard’s features. It was his father’s skin that burst and blackened,
his father’s eyes that ran liquid down his cheeks like jellied tears.
Jon did not understand why that should be or what it might mean,
but it frightened him more than he could say.
“A sword’s small payment for a life,” Mormont concluded. “Take
it, I’ll hear no more of it, is that understood?”

“Yes, my lord.” The soft leather gave beneath Jon’s ngers, as if
the sword were molding itself to his grip already. He knew he
should be honored, and he was, and yet …
He is not my father. The thought leapt unbidden to Jon’s mind.
Lord Eddard Stark is my father. I will not forget him, no matter how
many swords they give me. Yet he could scarcely tell Lord Mormont
that it was another man’s sword he dreamt of …
“I want no courtesies either,” Mormont said, “so thank me no
thanks. Honor the steel with deeds, not words.”
Jon nodded. “Does it have a name, my lord?”
“It did, once. Longclaw, it was called.”
“Claw,” the raven cried. “Claw.”
“Longclaw is an apt name.” Jon tried a practice cut. He was
clumsy and uncomfortable with his left hand, yet even so the steel
seemed to ow through the air, as if it had a will of its own.
“Wolves have claws, as much as bears.”
The Old Bear seemed pleased by that. “I suppose they do. You’ll
want to wear that over the shoulder, I imagine. It’s too long for the
hip, at least until you’ve put on a few inches. And you’ll need to
work at your two-handed strikes as well. Ser Endrew can show you
some moves, when your burns have healed.”
“Ser Endrew?” Jon did not know the name.
“Ser Endrew Tarth, a good man. He’s on his way from the
Shadow Tower to assume the duties of master-at-arms. Ser Alliser
Thorne left yestermorn for Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.”
Jon lowered the sword. “Why?” he said, stupidly.
Mormont snorted. “Because I sent him, why do you think? He’s
bringing the hand your Ghost tore o the end of Jafer Flowers’s
wrist. I have commanded him to take ship to King’s Landing and lay
it before this boy king. That should get young Jo rey’s attention, I’d
think … and Ser Alliser’s a knight, highborn, anointed, with old
friends at court, altogether harder to ignore than a glori ed crow.”
“Crow.” Jon thought the raven sounded faintly indignant.
“As well,” the Lord Commander continued, ignoring the bird’s
protest, “it puts a thousand leagues twixt him and you without it
seeming a rebuke.” He jabbed a nger up at Jon’s face. “And don’t

think this means I approve of that nonsense in the common hall.
Valor makes up for a fair amount of folly, but you’re not a boy
anymore, however many years you’ve seen. That’s a man’s sword
you have there, and it will take a man to wield her. I’ll expect you
to act the part, henceforth.”
“Yes, my lord.” Jon slid the sword back into the silver-banded
scabbard. If not the blade he would have chosen, it was nonetheless
a noble gift, and freeing him from Alliser Thorne’s malignance was
nobler still.
The Old Bear scratched at his chin. “I had forgotten how much a
new beard itches,” he said. “Well, no help for that. Is that hand of
yours healed enough to resume your duties?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Good. The night will be cold, I’ll want hot spice wine. Find me a
agon of red, not too sour, and don’t skimp on the spices. And tell
Hobb that if he sends me boiled mutton again I’m like to boil him.
That last haunch was grey. Even the bird wouldn’t touch it.” He
stroked the raven’s head with his thumb, and the bird made a
contented quorking sound. “Away with you. I’ve work to do.”
The guards smiled at him from their niches as he wound his way
down the turret stair, carrying the sword in his good hand. “Sweet
steel,” one man said. “You earned that, Snow,” another told him.
Jon made himself smile back at them, but his heart was not in it. He
knew he should be pleased, yet he did not feel it. His hand ached,
and the taste of anger was in his mouth, though he could not have
said who he was angry with or why.
A half dozen of his friends were lurking outside when he left the
King’s Tower, where Lord Commander Mormont now made his
residence. They’d hung a target on the granary doors, so they could
seem to be honing their skills as archers, but he knew lurkers when
he saw them. No sooner did he emerge than Pyp called out, “Well,
come about, let’s have a look.”
“At what?” Jon said.
Toad sidled close. “Your rosy butt cheeks, what else?”
“The sword,” Grenn stated. “We want to see the sword.”
Jon raked them with an accusing look. “You knew.”

Pyp grinned. “We’re not all as dumb as Grenn.”
“You are so,” insisted Grenn. “You’re dumber.”
Halder gave an apologetic shrug. “I helped Pate carve the stone
for the pommel,” the builder said, “and your friend Sam bought the
garnets in Mole’s Town.”
“We knew even before that, though,” Grenn said. “Rudge has
been helping Donal Noye in the forge. He was there when the Old
Bear brought him the burnt blade.”
“The sword!” Matt insisted. The others took up the chant. “The
sword, the sword, the sword.”
Jon unsheathed Longclaw and showed it to them, turning it this
way and that so they could admire it. The bastard blade glittered in
the pale sunlight, dark and deadly. “Valyrian steel,” he declared
solemnly, trying to sound as pleased and proud as he ought to have
felt.
“I heard of a man who had a razor made of Valyrian steel,”
declared Toad. “He cut his head o trying to shave.”
Pyp grinned. “The Night’s Watch is thousands of years old,” he
said, “but I’ll wager Lord Snow’s the rst brother ever honored for
burning down the Lord Commander’s Tower.”
The others laughed, and even Jon had to smile. The re he’d
started had not, in truth, burned down that formidable stone tower,
but it had done a fair job of gutting the interior of the top two
oors, where the Old Bear had his chambers. No one seemed to
mind that very much, since it had also destroyed Othor’s murderous
corpse.
The other wight, the one-handed thing that had once been a
ranger named Jafer Flowers, had also been destroyed, cut near to
pieces by a dozen swords … but not before it had slain Ser Jaremy
Rykker and four other men. Ser Jaremy had nished the job of
hacking its head o , yet had died all the same when the headless
corpse pulled his own dagger from its sheath and buried it in his
bowels. Strength and courage did not avail much against foemen
who would not fall because they were already dead; even arms and
armor o ered small protection.

That grim thought soured Jon’s fragile mood. “I need to see Hobb
about the Old Bear’s supper,” he announced brusquely, sliding
Longclaw back into its scabbard. His friends meant well, but they
did not understand. It was not their fault, truly; they had not had to
face Othor, they had not seen the pale glow of those dead blue eyes,
had not felt the cold of those dead black ngers. Nor did they know
of the ghting in the riverlands. How could they hope to
comprehend? He turned away from them abruptly and strode o ,
sullen. Pyp called after him, but Jon paid him no mind.
They had moved him back to his old cell in tumbledown Hardin’s
Tower after the re, and it was there he returned. Ghost was curled
up asleep beside the door, but he lifted his head at the sound of
Jon’s boots. The direwolf’s red eyes were darker than garnets and
wiser than men. Jon knelt, scratched his ear, and showed him the
pommel of the sword. “Look. It’s you.”
Ghost sni ed at his carved stone likeness and tried a lick. Jon
smiled. “You’re the one deserves an honor,” he told the wolf … and
suddenly he found himself remembering how he’d found him, that
day in the late summer snow. They had been riding o with the
other pups, but Jon had heard a noise and turned back, and there he
was, white fur almost invisible against the drifts. He was all alone,
he thought, apart from the others in the litter. He was di erent, so they
drove him out.
“Jon?” He looked up. Samwell Tarly stood rocking nervously on
his heels. His cheeks were red, and he was wrapped in a heavy fur
cloak that made him look ready for hibernation.
“Sam.” Jon stood. “What is it? Do you want to see the sword?” If
the others had known, no doubt Sam did too.
The fat boy shook his head. “I was heir to my father’s blade
once,” he said mournfully. “Heartsbane. Lord Randyll let me hold it
a few times, but it always scared me. It was Valyrian steel, beautiful
but so sharp I was afraid I’d hurt one of my sisters. Dickon will have
it now.” He wiped sweaty hands on his cloak. “I … ah … Maester
Aemon wants to see you.”
It was not time for his bandages to be changed. Jon frowned
suspiciously. “Why?” he demanded. Sam looked miserable. That was

answer enough. “You told him, didn’t you?” Jon said angrily. “You
told him that you told me.”
“I … he … Jon, I didn’t want to … he asked … I mean … I think
he knew, he sees things no one else sees …”
“He’s blind,” Jon pointed out forcefully, disgusted. “I can nd the
way myself.” He left Sam standing there, openmouthed and
quivering.
He found Maester Aemon up in the rookery, feeding the ravens.
Clydas was with him, carrying a bucket of chopped meat as they
shu ed from cage to cage. “Sam said you wanted me?”
The maester nodded. “I did indeed. Clydas, give Jon the bucket.
Perhaps he will be kind enough to assist me.” The hunched, pinkeyed brother handed Jon the bucket and scurried down the ladder.
“Toss the meat into the cages,” Aemon instructed him. “The birds
will do the rest.”
Jon shifted the bucket to his right hand and thrust his left down
into the bloody bits. The ravens began to scream noisily and y at
the bars, beating at the metal with night-black wings. The meat had
been chopped into pieces no larger than a nger joint. He lled his
st and tossed the raw red morsels into the cage, and the squawking
and squabbling grew hotter. Feathers ew as two of the larger birds
fought over a choice piece. Quickly Jon grabbed a second handful
and threw it in after the rst. “Lord Mormont’s raven likes fruit and
corn.”
“He is a rare bird,” the maester said. “Most ravens will eat grain,
but they prefer esh. It makes them strong, and I fear they relish
the taste of blood. In that they are like men … and like men, not all
ravens are alike.”
Jon had nothing to say to that. He threw meat, wondering why
he’d been summoned. No doubt the old man would tell him, in his
own good time. Maester Aemon was not a man to be hurried.
“Doves and pigeons can also be trained to carry messages,” the
maester went on, “though the raven is a stronger yer, larger,
bolder, far more clever, better able to defend itself against
hawks … yet ravens are black, and they eat the dead, so some godly
men abhor them. Baelor the Blessed tried to replace all the ravens

with doves, did you know?” The maester turned his white eyes on
Jon, smiling. “The Night’s Watch prefers ravens.”
Jon’s ngers were in the bucket, blood up to the wrist. “Dywen
says the wildlings call us crows,” he said uncertainly.
“The crow is the raven’s poor cousin. They are both beggars in
black, hated and misunderstood.”
Jon wished he understood what they were talking about, and
why. What did he care about ravens and doves? If the old man had
something to say to him, why couldn’t he just say it?
“Jon, did you ever wonder why the men of the Night’s Watch take
no wives and father no children?” Maester Aemon asked.
Jon shrugged. “No.” He scattered more meat. The ngers of his
left hand were slimy with blood, and his right throbbed from the
weight of the bucket.
“So they will not love,” the old man answered, “for love is the
bane of honor, the death of duty.”
That did not sound right to Jon, yet he said nothing. The maester
was a hundred years old, and a high o cer of the Night’s Watch; it
was not his place to contradict him.
The old man seemed to sense his doubts. “Tell me, Jon, if the day
should ever come when your lord father must needs choose between
honor on the one hand and those he loves on the other, what would
he do?”
Jon hesitated. He wanted to say that Lord Eddard would never
dishonor himself, not even for love, yet inside a small sly voice
whispered, He fathered a bastard, where was the honor in that? And
your mother, what of his duty to her, he will not even say her name. “He
would do whatever was right,” he said … ringingly, to make up for
his hesitation. “No matter what.”
“Then Lord Eddard is a man in ten thousand. Most of us are not
so strong. What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty
against the feel of a newborn son in your arms … or the memory of
a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only
human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great
glory, and our great tragedy.

“The men who formed the Night’s Watch knew that only their
courage shielded the realm from the darkness to the north. They
knew they must have no divided loyalties to weaken their resolve.
So they vowed they would have no wives nor children.
“Yet brothers they had, and sisters. Mothers who gave them birth,
fathers who gave them names. They came from a hundred
quarrelsome kingdoms, and they knew times may change, but men
do not. So they pledged as well that the Night’s Watch would take
no part in the battles of the realms it guarded.
“They kept their pledge. When Aegon slew Black Harren and
claimed his kingdom, Harren’s brother was Lord Commander on the
Wall, with ten thousand swords to hand. He did not march. In the
days when the Seven Kingdoms were seven kingdoms, not a
generation passed that three or four of them were not at war. The
Watch took no part. When the Andals crossed the narrow sea and
swept away the kingdoms of the First Men, the sons of the fallen
kings held true to their vows and remained at their posts. So it has
always been, for years beyond counting. Such is the price of honor.
“A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to
fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy
it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every
man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must
choose.”
Some of the ravens were still eating, long stringy bits of meat
dangling from their beaks. The rest seemed to be watching him. Jon
could feel the weight of all those tiny black eyes. “And this is my
day … is that what you’re saying?”
Maester Aemon turned his head and looked at him with those
dead white eyes. It was as if he were seeing right into his heart. Jon
felt naked and exposed. He took the bucket in both hands and ung
the rest of the slops through the bars. Strings of meat and blood
ew everywhere, scattering the ravens. They took to the air,
shrieking wildly. The quicker birds snatched morsels on the wing
and gulped them down greedily. Jon let the empty bucket clang to
the oor.

The old man laid a withered, spotted hand on his shoulder. “It
hurts, boy,” he said softly. “Oh, yes. Choosing … it has always hurt.
And always will. I know.”
“You don’t know,” Jon said bitterly. “No one knows. Even if I am
his bastard, he’s still my father …”
Maester Aemon sighed. “Have you heard nothing I’ve told you,
Jon? Do you think you are the rst?” He shook his ancient head, a
gesture weary beyond words. “Three times the gods saw t to test
my vows. Once when I was a boy, once in the fullness of my
manhood, and once when I had grown old. By then my strength was
ed, my eyes grown dim, yet that last choice was as cruel as the
rst. My ravens would bring the news from the south, words darker
than their wings, the ruin of my House, the death of my kin,
disgrace and desolation. What could I have done, old, blind, frail? I
was helpless as a suckling babe, yet still it grieved me to sit
forgotten as they cut down my brother’s poor grandson, and his son,
and even the little children …”
Jon was shocked to see the shine of tears in the old man’s eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked quietly, almost in dread.
A toothless smile quivered on the ancient lips. “Only a maester of
the Citadel, bound in service to Castle Black and the Night’s Watch.
In my order, we put aside our house names when we take our vows
and don the collar.” The old man touched the maester’s chain that
hung loosely around his thin, eshless neck. “My father was
Maekar, the First of his Name, and my brother Aegon reigned after
him in my stead. My grandfather named me for Prince Aemon the
Dragonknight, who was his uncle, or his father, depending on which
tale you believe. Aemon, he called me …”
“Aemon … Targaryen?” Jon could scarcely believe it.
“Once,” the old man said. “Once. So you see, Jon, I do
know … and knowing, I will not tell you stay or go. You must make
that choice yourself, and live with it all the rest of your days. As I
have.” His voice fell to a whisper. “As I have …”

DAENERYS

When the battle was done, Dany rode her silver through the elds
of the dead. Her handmaids and the men of her khas came after,
smiling and jesting among themselves.
Dothraki hooves had torn the earth and trampled the rye and
lentils into the ground, while arakhs and arrows had sown a terrible
new crop and watered it with blood. Dying horses lifted their heads
and screamed at her as she rode past. Wounded men moaned and
prayed. Jaqqa rhan moved among them, the mercy men with their
heavy axes, taking a harvest of heads from the dead and dying
alike. After them would scurry a ock of small girls, pulling arrows
from the corpses to ll their baskets. Last of all the dogs would
come sni ng, lean and hungry, the feral pack that was never far
behind the khalasar.
The sheep had been dead longest. There seemed to be thousands
of them, black with ies, arrow shafts bristling from each carcass.
Khal Ogo’s riders had done that, Dany knew; no man of Drogo’s
khalasar would be such a fool as to waste his arrows on sheep when
there were shepherds yet to kill.
The town was a re, black plumes of smoke roiling and tumbling
as they rose into a hard blue sky. Beneath broken walls of dried
mud, riders galloped back and forth, swinging their long whips as
they herded the survivors from the smoking rubble. The women and
children of Ogo’s khalasar walked with a sullen pride, even in defeat
and bondage; they were slaves now, but they seemed not to fear it.

It was di erent with the townsfolk. Dany pitied them; she
remembered what terror felt like. Mothers stumbled along with
blank, dead faces, pulling sobbing children by the hand. There were
only a few men among them, cripples and cowards and
grandfathers.
Ser Jorah said the people of this country named themselves the
Lhazareen, but the Dothraki called them haesh rakhi, the Lamb Men.
Once Dany might have taken them for Dothraki, for they had the
same copper skin and almond-shaped eyes. Now they looked alien
to her, squat and at-faced, their black hair cropped unnaturally
short. They were herders of sheep and eaters of vegetables, and
Khal Drogo said they belonged south of the river bend. The grass of
the Dothraki sea was not meant for sheep.
Dany saw one boy bolt and run for the river. A rider cut him o
and turned him, and the others boxed him in, cracking their whips
in his face, running him this way and that. One galloped behind
him, lashing him across the buttocks until his thighs ran red with
blood. Another snared his ankle with a lash and sent him sprawling.
Finally, when the boy could only crawl, they grew bored of the
sport and put an arrow through his back.
Ser Jorah met her outside the shattered gate. He wore a dark
green surcoat over his mail. His gauntlets, greaves, and greathelm
were dark grey steel. The Dothraki had mocked him for a coward
when he donned his armor, but the knight had spit insults right back
in their teeth, tempers had ared, longsword had clashed with
arakh, and the rider whose taunts had been loudest had been left
behind to bleed to death.
Ser Jorah lifted the visor of his at-topped greathelm as he rode
up. “Your lord husband awaits you within the town.”
“Drogo took no harm?”
“A few cuts,” Ser Jorah answered, “nothing of consequence. He
slew two khals this day. Khal Ogo rst, and then the son, Fogo, who
became khal when Ogo fell. His bloodriders cut the bells from their
hair, and now Khal Drogo’s every step rings louder than before.”
Ogo and his son had shared the high bench with her lord husband
at the naming feast where Viserys had been crowned, but that was

in Vaes Dothrak, beneath the Mother of Mountains, where every
rider was a brother and all quarrels were put aside. It was di erent
out in the grass. Ogo’s khalasar had been attacking the town when
Khal Drogo caught him. She wondered what the Lamb Men had
thought, when they rst saw the dust of their horses from atop
those cracked-mud walls. Perhaps a few, the younger and more
foolish who still believed that the gods heard the prayers of
desperate men, took it for deliverance.
Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high
thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, facedown,
and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take their
turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought the
Lamb Men.
I am the blood of the dragon, Daenerys Targaryen reminded herself
as she turned her face away. She pressed her lips together and
hardened her heart and rode on toward the gate.
“Most of Ogo’s riders ed,” Ser Jorah was saying. “Still, there
may be as many as ten thousand captives.”
Slaves, Dany thought. Khal Drogo would drive them downriver to
one of the towns on Slaver’s Bay. She wanted to cry, but she told
herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it looks like,
this is the price of the Iron Throne.
“I’ve told the khal he ought to make for Meereen,” Ser Jorah said.
“They’ll pay a better price than he’d get from a slaving caravan.
Illyrio writes that they had a plague last year, so the brothels are
paying double for healthy young girls, and triple for boys under ten.
If enough children survive the journey, the gold will buy us all the
ships we need, and hire men to sail them.”
Behind them, the girl being raped made a heartrending sound, a
long sobbing wail that went on and on and on. Dany’s hand
clenched hard around the reins, and she turned the silver’s head.
“Make them stop,” she commanded Ser Jorah.
“Khaleesi?” The knight sounded perplexed.
“You heard my words,” she said. “Stop them.” She spoke to her
khas in the harsh accents of Dothraki. “Jhogo, Quaro, you will aid
Ser Jorah. I want no rape.”

The warriors exchanged a ba ed look.
Jorah Mormont spurred his horse closer. “Princess,” he said, “you
have a gentle heart, but you do not understand. This is how it has
always been. Those men have shed blood for the khal. Now they
claim their reward.”
Across the road, the girl was still crying, her high singsong
tongue strange to Dany’s ears. The rst man was done with her
now, and a second had taken his place.
“She is a lamb girl,” Quaro said in Dothraki. “She is nothing,
Khaleesi. The riders do her honor. The Lamb Men lay with sheep, it
is known.”
“It is known,” her handmaid Irri echoed.
“It is known,” agreed Jhogo, astride the tall grey stallion that
Drogo had given him. “If her wailing o ends your ears, Khaleesi,
Jhogo will bring you her tongue.” He drew his arakh.
“I will not have her harmed,” Dany said. “I claim her. Do as I
command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason why.”
“Ai, Khaleesi,” Jhogo replied, kicking his horse. Quaro and the
others followed his lead, the bells in their hair chiming.
“Go with them,” she commanded Ser Jorah.
“As you command.” The knight gave her a curious look. “You are
your brother’s sister, in truth.”
“Viserys?” She did not understand.
“No,” he answered. “Rhaegar.” He galloped o .
Dany heard Jhogo shout. The rapers laughed at him. One man
shouted back. Jhogo’s arakh ashed, and the man’s head went
tumbling from his shoulders. Laughter turned to curses as the
horsemen reached for weapons, but by then Quaro and Aggo and
Rakharo were there. She saw Aggo point across the road to where
she sat upon her silver. The riders looked at her with cold black
eyes. One spat. The others scattered to their mounts, muttering.
All the while the man atop the lamb girl continued to plunge in
and out of her, so intent on his pleasure that he seemed unaware of
what was going on around him. Ser Jorah dismounted and
wrenched him o with a mailed hand. The Dothraki went sprawling
in the mud, bounced up with a knife in hand, and died with Aggo’s

arrow through his throat. Mormont pulled the girl o the pile of
corpses and wrapped her in his blood-spattered cloak. He led her
across the road to Dany. “What do you want done with her?”
The girl was trembling, her eyes wide and vague. Her hair was
matted with blood. “Doreah, see to her hurts. You do not have a
rider’s look, perhaps she will not fear you. The rest, with me.” She
urged the silver through the broken wooden gate.
It was worse inside the town. Many of the houses were a re, and
the jaqqa rhan had been about their grisly work. Headless corpses
lled the narrow, twisty lanes. They passed other women being
raped. Each time Dany reined up, sent her khas to make an end to it,
and claimed the victim as slave. One of them, a thick-bodied, atnosed woman of forty years, blessed Dany haltingly in the Common
Tongue, but from the others she got only at black stares. They
were suspicious of her, she realized with sadness; afraid that she
had saved them for some worse fate.
“You cannot claim them all, child,” Ser Jorah said, the fourth time
they stopped, while the warriors of her khas herded her new slaves
behind her.
“I am khaleesi, heir to the Seven Kingdoms, the blood of the
dragon,” Dany reminded him. “It is not for you to tell me what I
cannot do.” Across the city, a building collapsed in a great gout of
re and smoke, and she heard distant screams and the wailing of
frightened children.
They found Khal Drogo seated before a square windowless temple
with thick mud walls and a bulbous dome like some immense brown
onion. Beside him was a pile of heads taller than he was. One of the
short arrows of the Lamb Men stuck through the meat of his upper
arm, and blood covered the left side of his bare chest like a splash
of paint. His three bloodriders were with him.
Jhiqui helped Dany dismount; she had grown clumsy as her belly
grew larger and heavier. She knelt before the khal. “My sun-andstars is wounded.” The arakh cut was wide but shallow; his left
nipple was gone, and a ap of bloody esh and skin dangled from
his chest like a wet rag.

“Is scratch, moon of life, from arakh of one bloodrider to Khal
Ogo,” Khal Drogo said in the Common Tongue. “I kill him for it,
and Ogo too.” He turned his head, the bells in his braid ringing
softly. “Is Ogo you hear, and Fogo his khalakka, who was khal when
I slew him.”
“No man can stand before the sun of my life,” Dany said, “the
father of the stallion who mounts the world.”
A mounted warrior rode up and vaulted from his saddle. He spoke
to Haggo, a stream of angry Dothraki too fast for Dany to
understand. The huge bloodrider gave her a heavy look before he
turned to his khal. “This one is Mago, who rides in the khas of Ko
Jhaqo. He says the khaleesi has taken his spoils, a daughter of the
lambs who was his to mount.”
Khal Drogo’s face was still and hard, but his black eyes were
curious as they went to Dany. “Tell me the truth of this, moon of
my life,” he commanded in Dothraki.
Dany told him what she had done, in his own tongue so the khal
would understand her better, her words simple and direct.
When she was done, Drogo was frowning. “This is the way of
war. These women are our slaves now, to do with as we please.”
“It pleases me to hold them safe,” Dany said, wondering if she
had dared too much. “If your warriors would mount these women,
let them take them gently and keep them for wives. Give them
places in the khalasar and let them bear you sons.”
Qotho was ever the cruelest of the bloodriders. It was he who
laughed. “Does the horse breed with the sheep?”
Something in his tone reminded her of Viserys. Dany turned on
him angrily. “The dragon feeds on horse and sheep alike.”
Khal Drogo smiled. “See how erce she grows!” he said. “It is my
son inside her, the stallion who mounts the world, lling her with
his re. Ride slowly, Qotho … if the mother does not burn you
where you sit, the son will trample you into the mud. And you,
Mago, hold your tongue and nd another lamb to mount. These
belong to my khaleesi.” He started to reach out a hand to Daenerys,
but as he lifted his arm Drogo grimaced in sudden pain and turned
his head.

Dany could almost feel his agony. The wounds were worse than
Ser Jorah had led her to believe. “Where are the healers?” she
demanded. The khalasar had two sorts: barren women and eunuch
slaves. The herbwomen dealt in potions and spells, the eunuchs in
knife, needle, and re. “Why do they not attend the khal?”
“The khal sent the hairless men away, Khaleesi,” old Cohollo
assured her. Dany saw the bloodrider had taken a wound himself; a
deep gash in his left shoulder.
“Many riders are hurt,” Khal Drogo said stubbornly. “Let them be
healed rst. This arrow is no more than the bite of a y, this little
cut only a new scar to boast of to my son.”
Dany could see the muscles in his chest where the skin had been
cut away. A trickle of blood ran from the arrow that pierced his
arm. “It is not for Khal Drogo to wait,” she proclaimed. “Jhogo,
seek out these eunuchs and bring them here at once.”
“Silver Lady,” a woman’s voice said behind her, “I can help the
Great Rider with his hurts.”
Dany turned her head. The speaker was one of the slaves she had
claimed, the heavy, at-nosed woman who had blessed her.
“The khal needs no help from women who lie with sheep,” barked
Qotho. “Aggo, cut out her tongue.”
Aggo grabbed her hair and pressed a knife to her throat.
Dany lifted a hand. “No. She is mine. Let her speak.”
Aggo looked from her to Qotho. He lowered his knife.
“I meant no wrong, erce riders.” The woman spoke Dothraki
well. The robes she wore had once been the lightest and nest of
woolens, rich with embroidery, but now they were mud-caked and
bloody and ripped. She clutched the torn cloth of her bodice to her
heavy breasts. “I have some small skill in the healing arts.”
“Who are you?” Dany asked her.
“I am named Mirri Maz Duur. I am godswife of this temple.”
“Maegi,” grunted Haggo, ngering his arakh. His look was dark.
Dany remembered the word from a terrifying story that Jhiqui had
told her one night by the cook re. A maegi was a woman who lay
with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries, a vile thing,

evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of night and sucked
life and strength from their bodies.
“I am a healer,” Mirri Maz Duur said.
“A healer of sheeps,” sneered Qotho. “Blood of my blood, I say
kill this maegi and wait for the hairless men.”
Dany ignored the bloodrider’s outburst. This old, homely, thickbodied woman did not look like a maegi to her. “Where did you
learn your healing, Mirri Maz Duur?”
“My mother was godswife before me, and taught me all the songs
and spells most pleasing to the Great Shepherd, and how to make
the sacred smokes and ointments from leaf and root and berry.
When I was younger and more fair, I went in caravan to Asshai by
the Shadow, to learn from their mages. Ships from many lands come
to Asshai, so I lingered long to study the healing ways of distant
peoples. A moonsinger of the Jogos Nhai gifted me with her
birthing songs, a woman of your own riding people taught me the
magics of grass and corn and horse, and a maester from the Sunset
Lands opened a body for me and showed me all the secrets that hide
beneath the skin.”
Ser Jorah Mormont spoke up. “A maester?”
“Marwyn, he named himself,” the woman replied in the Common
Tongue. “From the sea. Beyond the sea. The Seven Lands, he said.
Sunset Lands. Where men are iron and dragons rule. He taught me
this speech.”
“A maester in Asshai,” Ser Jorah mused. “Tell me, Godswife, what
did this Marwyn wear about his neck?”
“A chain so tight it was like to choke him, Iron Lord, with links of
many metals.”
The knight looked at Dany. “Only a man trained in the Citadel of
Oldtown wears such a chain,” he said, “and such men do know
much of healing.”
“Why should you want to help my khal?”
“All men are one ock, or so we are taught,” replied Mirri Maz
Duur. “The Great Shepherd sent me to earth to heal his lambs,
wherever I might nd them.”
Qotho gave her a stinging slap. “We are no sheep, maegi.”

“Stop it,” Dany said angrily. “She is mine. I will not have her
harmed.”
Khal Drogo grunted. “The arrow must come out, Qotho.”
“Yes, Great Rider,” Mirri Maz Duur answered, touching her
bruised face. “And your breast must be washed and sewn, lest the
wound fester.”
“Do it, then,” Khal Drogo commanded.
“Great Rider,” the woman said, “my tools and potions are inside
the god’s house, where the healing powers are strongest.”
“I will carry you, blood of my blood,” Haggo o ered.
Khal Drogo waved him away. “I need no man’s help,” he said, in
a voice proud and hard. He stood, unaided, towering over them all.
A fresh wave of blood ran down his breast, from where Ogo’s arakh
had cut o his nipple. Dany moved quickly to his side. “I am no
man,” she whispered, “so you may lean on me.” Drogo put a huge
hand on her shoulder. She took some of his weight as they walked
toward the great mud temple. The three bloodriders followed. Dany
commanded Ser Jorah and the warriors of her khas to guard the
entrance and make certain no one set the building a re while they
were still inside.
They passed through a series of anterooms, into the high central
chamber under the onion. Faint light shone down through hidden
windows above. A few torches burnt smokily from sconces on the
walls. Sheepskins were scattered across the mud oor. “There,”
Mirri Maz Duur said, pointing to the altar, a massive blue-veined
stone carved with images of shepherds and their ocks. Khal Drogo
lay upon it. The old woman threw a handful of dried leaves onto a
brazier, lling the chamber with fragrant smoke. “Best if you wait
outside,” she told the rest of them.
“We are blood of his blood,” Cohollo said. “Here we wait.”
Qotho stepped close to Mirri Maz Duur. “Know this, wife of the
Lamb God. Harm the khal and you su er the same.” He drew his
skinning knife and showed her the blade.
“She will do no harm.” Dany felt she could trust this old, plainfaced woman with her at nose; she had saved her from the hard
hands of her rapers, after all.

“If you must stay, then help,” Mirri told the bloodriders. “The
Great Rider is too strong for me. Hold him still while I draw the
arrow from his esh.” She let the rags of her gown fall to her waist
as she opened a carved chest, and busied herself with bottles and
boxes, knives and needles. When she was ready, she broke o the
barbed arrowhead and pulled out the shaft, chanting in the singsong
tongue of the Lhazareen. She heated a agon of wine to boiling on
the brazier, and poured it over his wounds. Khal Drogo cursed her,
but he did not move. She bound the arrow wound with a plaster of
wet leaves and turned to the gash on his breast, smearing it with a
pale green paste before she pulled the ap of skin back in place. The
khal ground his teeth together and swallowed a scream. The
godswife took out a silver needle and a bobbin of silk thread and
began to close the esh. When she was done she painted the skin
with red ointment, covered it with more leaves, and bound the
breast in a ragged piece of lambskin. “You must say the prayers I
give you and keep the lambskin in place for ten days and ten
nights,” she said. “There will be fever, and itching, and a great scar
when the healing is done.”
Khal Drogo sat, bells ringing. “I sing of my scars, sheep woman.”
He exed his arm and scowled.
“Drink neither wine nor the milk of the poppy,” she cautioned
him. “Pain you will have, but you must keep your body strong to
ght the poison spirits.”
“I am khal,” Drogo said. “I spit on pain and drink what I like.
Cohollo, bring my vest.” The older man hastened o .
“Before,” Dany said to the ugly Lhazareen woman, “I heard you
speak of birthing songs …”
“I know every secret of the bloody bed, Silver Lady, nor have I
ever lost a babe,” Mirri Maz Duur replied.
“My time is near,” Dany said. “I would have you attend me when
he comes, if you would.”
Khal Drogo laughed. “Moon of my life, you do not ask a slave,
you tell her. She will do as you command.” He jumped down from
the altar. “Come, my blood. The stallions call, this place is ashes. It
is time to ride.”

Haggo followed the khal from the temple, but Qotho lingered
long enough to favor Mirri Maz Duur with a stare. “Remember,
maegi, as the khal fares, so shall you.”
“As you say, rider,” the woman answered him, gathering up her
jars and bottles. “The Great Shepherd guards the ock.”

TYRION

On a hill overlooking the kingsroad, a long trestle table of roughhewn pine had been erected beneath an elm tree and covered with a
golden cloth. There, beside his pavilion, Lord Tywin took his
evening meal with his chief knights and lords bannermen, his great
crimson-and-gold standard waving overhead from a lofty pike.
Tyrion arrived late, saddlesore, and sour, all too vividly aware of
how amusing he must look as he waddled up the slope to his father.
The day’s march had been long and tiring. He thought he might get
quite drunk tonight. It was twilight, and the air was alive with
drifting re ies.
The cooks were serving the meat course: ve suckling pigs, skin
seared and crackling, a di erent fruit in every mouth. The smell
made his mouth water. “My pardons,” he began, taking his place on
the bench beside his uncle.
“Perhaps I’d best charge you with burying our dead, Tyrion,”
Lord Tywin said. “If you are as late to battle as you are to table, the
ghting will all be done by the time you arrive.”
“Oh, surely you can save me a peasant or two, Father,” Tyrion
replied. “Not too many, I wouldn’t want to be greedy.” He lled his
wine cup and watched a serving man carve into the pig. The crisp
skin crackled under his knife, and hot juice ran from the meat. It
was the loveliest sight Tyrion had seen in ages.
“Ser Addam’s outriders say the Stark host has moved south from
the Twins,” his father reported as his trencher was lled with slices

of pork. “Lord Frey’s levies have joined them. They are likely no
more than a day’s march north of us.”
“Please, Father,” Tyrion said. “I’m about to eat.”
“Does the thought of facing the Stark boy unman you, Tyrion?
Your brother Jaime would be eager to come to grips with him.”
“I’d sooner come to grips with that pig. Robb Stark is not half so
tender, and he never smelled as good.”
Lord Le ord, the sour bird who had charge of their stores and
supplies, leaned forward. “I hope your savages do not share your
reluctance, else we’ve wasted our good steel on them.”
“My savages will put your steel to excellent use, my lord,” Tyrion
replied. When he had told Le ord he needed arms and armor to
equip the three hundred men Ulf had fetched down out of the
foothills, you would have thought he’d asked the man to turn his
virgin daughters over to their pleasure.
Lord Le ord frowned. “I saw that great hairy one today, the one
who insisted that he must have two battle-axes, the heavy black
steel ones with twin crescent blades.”
“Shagga likes to kill with either hand,” Tyrion said as a trencher
of steaming pork was laid in front of him.
“He still had that wood-axe of his strapped to his back.”
“Shagga is of the opinion that three axes are even better than
two.” Tyrion reached a thumb and fore nger into the salt dish, and
sprinkled a healthy pinch over his meat.
Ser Kevan leaned forward. “We had a thought to put you and
your wildlings in the vanguard when we come to battle.”
Ser Kevan seldom “had a thought” that Lord Tywin had not had
rst. Tyrion had skewered a chunk of meat on the point of his
dagger and brought it to his mouth. Now he lowered it. “The
vanguard?” he repeated dubiously. Either his lord father had a new
respect for Tyrion’s abilities, or he’d decided to rid himself of his
embarrassing get for good. Tyrion had the gloomy feeling he knew
which.
“They seem ferocious enough,” Ser Kevan said.
“Ferocious?” Tyrion realized he was echoing his uncle like a
trained bird. His father watched, judging him, weighing every

word. “Let me tell you how ferocious they are. Last night, a Moon
Brother stabbed a Stone Crow over a sausage. So today as we made
camp three Stone Crows seized the man and opened his throat for
him. Perhaps they were hoping to get the sausage back, I couldn’t
say. Bronn managed to keep Shagga from chopping o the dead
man’s cock, which was fortunate, but even so Ulf is demanding
blood money, which Conn and Shagga refuse to pay.”
“When soldiers lack discipline, the fault lies with their lord
commander,” his father said.
His brother Jaime had always been able to make men follow him
eagerly, and die for him if need be. Tyrion lacked that gift. He
bought loyalty with gold, and compelled obedience with his name.
“A bigger man would be able to put the fear in them, is that what
you’re saying, my lord?”
Lord Tywin Lannister turned to his brother. “If my son’s men will
not obey his commands, perhaps the vanguard is not the place for
him. No doubt he would be more comfortable in the rear, guarding
our baggage train.”
“Do me no kindnesses, Father,” he said angrily. “If you have no
other command to o er me, I’ll lead your van.”
Lord Tywin studied his dwarf son. “I said nothing about
command. You will serve under Ser Gregor.”
Tyrion took one bite of pork, chewed a moment, and spit it out
angrily. “I nd I am not hungry after all,” he said, climbing
awkwardly o the bench. “Pray excuse me, my lords.”
Lord Tywin inclined his head, dismissing him. Tyrion turned and
walked away. He was conscious of their eyes on his back as he
waddled down the hill. A great gust of laughter went up from
behind him, but he did not look back. He hoped they all choked on
their suckling pigs.
Dusk had settled, turning all the banners black. The Lannister
camp sprawled for miles between the river and the kingsroad. In
amongst the men and the horses and the trees, it was easy to get
lost, and Tyrion did. He passed a dozen great pavilions and a
hundred cook res. Fire ies drifted amongst the tents like
wandering stars. He caught the scent of garlic sausage, spiced and

savory, so tempting it made his empty stomach growl. Away in the
distance, he heard voices raised in some bawdy song. A giggling
woman raced past him, naked beneath a dark cloak, her drunken
pursuer stumbling over tree roots. Farther on, two spearmen faced
each other across a little trickle of a stream, practicing their thrustand-parry in the fading light, their chests bare and slick with sweat.
No one looked at him. No one spoke to him. No one paid him any
mind. He was surrounded by men sworn to House Lannister, a vast
host twenty thousand strong, and yet he was alone.
When he heard the deep rumble of Shagga’s laughter booming
through the dark, he followed it to the Stone Crows in their small
corner of the night. Conn son of Coratt waved a tankard of ale.
“Tyrion Half man! Come, sit by our re, share meat with the Stone
Crows. We have an ox.”
“I can see that, Conn son of Coratt.” The huge red carcass was
suspended over a roaring re, skewered on a spit the size of a small
tree. No doubt it was a small tree. Blood and grease dripped down
into the ames as two Stone Crows turned the meat. “I thank you.
Send for me when the ox is cooked.” From the look of it, that might
even be before the battle. He walked on.
Each clan had its own cook re; Black Ears did not eat with Stone
Crows, Stone Crows did not eat with Moon Brothers, and no one ate
with Burned Men. The modest tent he had coaxed out of Lord
Le ord’s stores had been erected in the center of the four res.
Tyrion found Bronn sharing a skin of wine with the new servants.
Lord Tywin had sent him a groom and a body servant to see to his
needs, and even insisted he take a squire. They were seated around
the embers of a small cook re. A girl was with them; slim, darkhaired, no more than eighteen by the look of her. Tyrion studied
her face for a moment, before he spied shbones in the ashes.
“What did you eat?”
“Trout, m’lord,” said his groom. “Bronn caught them.”
Trout, he thought. Suckling pig. Damn my father. He stared
mournfully at the bones, his belly rumbling.
His squire, a boy with the unfortunate name of Podrick Payne,
swallowed whatever he had been about to say. The lad was a

distant cousin to Ser Ilyn Payne, the king’s headsman … and almost
as quiet, although not for want of a tongue. Tyrion had made him
stick it out once, just to be certain. “De nitely a tongue,” he had
said. “Someday you must learn to use it.”
At the moment, he did not have the patience to try and coax a
thought out of the lad, whom he suspected had been in icted on
him as a cruel jape. Tyrion turned his attention back to the girl. “Is
this her?” he asked Bronn.
She rose gracefully and looked down at him from the lofty height
of ve feet or more. “It is, m’lord, and she can speak for herself, if
it please you.”
He cocked his head to one side. “I am Tyrion, of House Lannister.
Men call me the Imp.”
“My mother named me Shae. Men call me … often.”
Bronn laughed, and Tyrion had to smile. “Into the tent, Shae, if
you would be so kind.” He lifted the ap and held it for her. Inside,
he knelt to light a candle.
The life of a soldier was not without certain compensations.
Wherever you have a camp, you are certain to have camp followers.
At the end of the day’s march, Tyrion had sent Bronn back to nd
him a likely whore. “I would prefer one who is reasonably young,
with as pretty a face as you can nd,” he had said. “If she has
washed sometime this year, I shall be glad. If she hasn’t, wash her.
Be certain that you tell her who I am, and warn her of what I am.”
Jyck had not always troubled to do that. There was a look the girls
got in their eyes sometimes when they rst beheld the lordling
they’d been hired to pleasure … a look that Tyrion Lannister did not
ever care to see again.
He lifted the candle and looked her over. Bronn had done well
enough; she was doe-eyed and slim, with small rm breasts and a
smile that was by turns shy, insolent, and wicked. He liked that.
“Shall I take my gown o , m’lord?” she asked.
“In good time. Are you a maiden, Shae?”
“If it please you, m’lord,” she said demurely.
“What would please me would be the truth of you, girl.”
“Aye, but that will cost you double.”

Tyrion decided they would get along splendidly. “I am a
Lannister. Gold I have in plenty, and you’ll nd me generous … but
I’ll want more from you than what you’ve got between your legs,
though I’ll want that too. You’ll share my tent, pour my wine, laugh
at my jests, rub the ache from my legs after each day’s ride … and
whether I keep you a day or a year, for so long as we are together
you will take no other men into your bed.”
“Fair enough.” She reached down to the hem of her thin
roughspun gown and pulled it up over her head in one smooth
motion, tossing it aside. There was nothing underneath but Shae. “If
he don’t put down that candle, m’lord will burn his ngers.”
Tyrion put down the candle, took her hand in his, and pulled her
gently to him. She bent to kiss him. Her mouth tasted of honey and
cloves, and her ngers were deft and practiced as they found the
fastenings of his clothes.
When he entered her, she welcomed him with whispered
endearments and small, shuddering gasps of pleasure. Tyrion
suspected her delight was feigned, but she did it so well that it did
not matter. That much truth he did not crave.
He had needed her, Tyrion realized afterward, as she lay quietly
in his arms. Her or someone like her. It had been nigh on a year
since he’d lain with a woman, since before he had set out for
Winterfell in company with his brother and King Robert. He could
well die on the morrow or the day after, and if he did, he would
sooner go to his grave thinking of Shae than of his lord father, Lysa
Arryn, or the Lady Catelyn Stark.
He could feel the softness of her breasts pressed against his arm
as she lay beside him. That was a good feeling. A song lled his
head. Softly, quietly, he began to whistle.
“What’s that, m’lord?” Shae murmured against him.
“Nothing,” he told her. “A song I learned as a boy, that’s all. Go
to sleep, sweetling.”
When her eyes were closed and her breathing deep and steady,
Tyrion slid out from beneath her, gently, so as not to disturb her
sleep. Naked, he crawled outside, stepped over his squire, and
walked around behind his tent to make water.

Bronn was seated cross-legged under a chestnut tree, near where
they’d tied the horses. He was honing the edge of his sword, wide
awake; the sellsword did not seem to sleep like other men. “Where
did you nd her?” Tyrion asked him as he pissed.
“I took her from a knight. The man was loath to give her up, but
your name changed his thinking somewhat … that, and my dirk at
his throat.”
“Splendid,” Tyrion said dryly, shaking o the last drops. “I seem
to recall saying nd me a whore, not make me an enemy.”
“The pretty ones were all claimed,” Bronn said. “I’ll be pleased to
take her back if you’d prefer a toothless drab.”
Tyrion limped closer to where he sat. “My lord father would call
that insolence, and send you to the mines for impertinence.”
“Good for me you’re not your father,” Bronn replied. “I saw one
with boils all over her nose. Would you like her?”
“What, and break your heart?” Tyrion shot back. “I shall keep
Shae. Did you perchance note the name of this knight you took her
from? I’d rather not have him beside me in the battle.”
Bronn rose, cat-quick and cat-graceful, turning his sword in his
hand. “You’ll have me beside you in the battle, dwarf.”
Tyrion nodded. The night air was warm on his bare skin. “See
that I survive this battle, and you can name your reward.”
Bronn tossed the longsword from his right hand to his left, and
tried a cut. “Who’d want to kill the likes of you?”
“My lord father, for one. He’s put me in the van.”
“I’d do the same. A small man with a big shield. You’ll give the
archers ts.”
“I nd you oddly cheering,” Tyrion said. “I must be mad.”
Bronn sheathed his sword. “Beyond a doubt.”
When Tyrion returned to his tent, Shae rolled onto her elbow and
murmured sleepily, “I woke and m’lord was gone.”
“M’lord is back now.” He slid in beside her.
Her hand went between his stunted legs, and found him hard.
“Yes he is,” she whispered, stroking him.
He asked her about the man Bronn had taken her from, and she
named the minor retainer of an insigni cant lordling. “You need not

fear his like, m’lord,” the girl said, her ngers busy at his cock. “He
is a small man.”
“And what am I, pray?” Tyrion asked her. “A giant?”
“Oh, yes,” she purred, “my giant of Lannister.” She mounted him
then, and for a time, she almost made him believe it. Tyrion went
to sleep smiling …
… and woke in darkness to the blare of trumpets. Shae was
shaking him by the shoulder. “M’lord,” she whispered. “Wake up,
m’lord. I’m frightened.”
Groggy, he sat up and threw back the blanket. The horns called
through the night, wild and urgent, a cry that said hurry hurry hurry.
He heard shouts, the clatter of spears, the whicker of horses, though
nothing yet that spoke to him of ghting. “My lord father’s
trumpets,” he said. “Battle assembly. I thought Stark was yet a day’s
march away.”
Shae shook her head, lost. Her eyes were wide and white.
Groaning, Tyrion lurched to his feet and pushed his way outside,
shouting for his squire. Wisps of pale fog drifted through the night,
long white ngers o the river. Men and horses blundered through
the predawn chill; saddles were being cinched, wagons loaded, res
extinguished. The trumpets blew again: hurry hurry hurry. Knights
vaulted onto snorting coursers while men-at-arms buckled their
sword belts as they ran. When he found Pod, the boy was snoring
softly. Tyrion gave him a sharp poke in the ribs with his toe. “My
armor,” he said, “and be quick about it.” Bronn came trotting out of
the mists, already armored and ahorse, wearing his battered
halfhelm. “Do you know what’s happened?” Tyrion asked him.
“The Stark boy stole a march on us,” Bronn said. “He crept down
the kingsroad in the night, and now his host is less than a mile north
of here, forming up in battle array.”
Hurry, the trumpets called, hurry hurry hurry.
“See that the clansmen are ready to ride.” Tyrion ducked back
inside his tent. “Where are my clothes?” he barked at Shae. “There.
No, the leather, damn it. Yes. Bring me my boots.”
By the time he was dressed, his squire had laid out his armor,
such that it was. Tyrion owned a ne suit of heavy plate, expertly

crafted to t his misshapen body. Alas, it was safe at Casterly Rock,
and he was not. He had to make do with oddments assembled from
Lord Le ord’s wagons: mail hauberk and coif, a dead knight’s
gorget, lobstered greaves and gauntlets and pointed steel boots.
Some of it was ornate, some plain; not a bit of it matched, or t as
it should. His breastplate was meant for a bigger man; for his
oversize head, they found a huge bucket-shaped greathelm topped
with a foot-long triangular spike.
Shae helped Pod with the buckles and clasps. “If I die, weep for
me,” Tyrion told the whore.
“How will you know? You’ll be dead.”
“I’ll know.”
“I believe you would.” Shae lowered the greathelm down over his
head, and Pod fastened it to his gorget. Tyrion buckled on his belt,
heavy with the weight of shortsword and dirk. By then his groom
had brought up his mount, a formidable brown courser armored as
heavily as he was. He needed help to mount; he felt as though he
weighed a thousand stone. Pod handed him up his shield, a massive
slab of heavy ironwood banded with steel. Lastly they gave him his
battle-axe. Shae stepped back and looked him over. “M’lord looks
fearsome.”
“M’lord looks a dwarf in mismatched armor,” Tyrion answered
sourly, “but I thank you for the kindness. Podrick, should the battle
go against us, see the lady safely home.” He saluted her with his
axe, wheeled his horse about, and trotted o . His stomach was a
hard knot, so tight it pained him. Behind, his servants hurriedly
began to strike his tent. Pale crimson ngers fanned out to the east
as the rst rays of the sun broke over the horizon. The western sky
was a deep purple, speckled with stars. Tyrion wondered whether
this was the last sunrise he would ever see … and whether
wondering was a mark of cowardice. Did his brother Jaime ever
contemplate death before a battle?
A warhorn sounded in the far distance, a deep mournful note that
chilled the soul. The clansmen climbed onto their scrawny mountain
horses, shouting curses and rude jokes. Several appeared to be
drunk. The rising sun was burning o the drifting tendrils of fog as

Tyrion led them o . What grass the horses had left was heavy with
dew, as if some passing god had scattered a bag of diamonds over
the earth. The mountain men fell in behind him, each clan arrayed
behind its own leaders.
In the dawn light, the army of Lord Tywin Lannister unfolded like
an iron rose, thorns gleaming.
His uncle would lead the center. Ser Kevan had raised his
standards above the kingsroad. Quivers hanging from their belts,
the foot archers arrayed themselves into three long lines, to east
and west of the road, and stood calmly stringing their bows.
Between them, pikemen formed squares; behind were rank on rank
of men-at-arms with spear and sword and axe. Three hundred heavy
horse surrounded Ser Kevan and the lords bannermen Le ord,
Lydden, and Serrett with all their sworn retainers.
The right wing was all cavalry, some four thousand men, heavy
with the weight of their armor. More than three quarters of the
knights were there, massed together like a great steel st. Ser
Addam Marbrand had the command. Tyrion saw his banner unfurl
as his standard-bearer shook it out; a burning tree, orange and
smoke. Behind him ew Ser Flement’s purple unicorn, the brindled
boar of Crakehall, the bantam rooster of Swyft, and more.
His lord father took his place on the hill where he had slept.
Around him, the reserve assembled; a huge force, half mounted and
half foot, ve thousand strong. Lord Tywin almost always chose to
command the reserve; he would take the high ground and watch the
battle unfold below him, committing his forces when and where
they were needed most.
Even from afar, his lord father was resplendent. Tywin Lannister’s
battle armor put his son Jaime’s gilded suit to shame. His greatcloak
was sewn from countless layers of cloth-of-gold, so heavy that it
barely stirred even when he charged, so large that its drape covered
most of his stallion’s hindquarters when he took the saddle. No
ordinary clasp would su ce for such a weight, so the greatcloak
was held in place by a matched pair of miniature lionesses
crouching on his shoulders, as if poised to spring. Their mate, a
male with a magni cent mane, reclined atop Lord Tywin’s

greathelm, one paw raking the air as he roared. All three lions were
wrought in gold, with ruby eyes. His armor was heavy steel plate,
enameled in a dark crimson, greaves and gauntlets inlaid with
ornate gold scrollwork. His rondels were golden sunbursts, all his
fastenings were gilded, and the red steel was burnished to such a
high sheen that it shone like re in the light of the rising sun.
Tyrion could hear the rumble of the foemen’s drums now. He
remembered Robb Stark as he had last seen him, in his father’s high
seat in the Great Hall of Winterfell, a sword naked and shining in
his hands. He remembered how the direwolves had come at him out
of the shadows, and suddenly he could see them again, snarling and
snapping, teeth bared in his face. Would the boy bring his wolves to
war with him? The thought made him uneasy.
The northerners would be exhausted after their long sleepless
march. Tyrion wondered what the boy had been thinking. Did he
think to take them unawares while they slept? Small chance of that;
whatever else might be said of him, Tywin Lannister was no man’s
fool.
The van was massing on the left. He saw the standard rst, three
black dogs on a yellow eld. Ser Gregor sat beneath it, mounted on
the biggest horse Tyrion had ever seen. Bronn took one look at him
and grinned. “Always follow a big man into battle.”
Tyrion threw him a hard look. “And why is that?”
“They make such splendid targets. That one, he’ll draw the eyes
of every bowman on the eld.”
Laughing, Tyrion regarded the Mountain with fresh eyes. “I
confess, I had not considered it in that light.”
Clegane had no splendor about him; his armor was steel plate,
dull grey, scarred by hard use and showing neither sigil nor
ornament. He was pointing men into position with his blade, a twohanded greatsword that Ser Gregor waved about with one hand as a
lesser man might wave a dagger. “Any man runs, I’ll cut him down
myself,” he was roaring when he caught sight of Tyrion. “Imp! Take
the left. Hold the river. If you can.”
The left of the left. To turn their ank, the Starks would need
horses that could run on water. Tyrion led his men toward the

riverbank. “Look,” he shouted, pointing with his axe. “The river.” A
blanket of pale mist still clung to the surface of the water, the
murky green current swirling past underneath. The shallows were
muddy and choked with reeds. “That river is ours. Whatever
happens, keep close to the water. Never lose sight of it. Let no
enemy come between us and our river. If they dirty our waters,
hack o their cocks and feed them to the shes.”
Shagga had an axe in either hand. He smashed them together and
made them ring. “Halfman!” he shouted. Other Stone Crows picked
up the cry, and the Black Ears and Moon Brothers as well. The
Burned Men did not shout, but they rattled their swords and spears.
“Halfman! Halfman! Halfman!”
Tyrion turned his courser in a circle to look over the eld. The
ground was rolling and uneven here; soft and muddy near the river,
rising in a gentle slope toward the kingsroad, stony and broken
beyond it, to the east. A few trees spotted the hillsides, but most of
the land had been cleared and planted. His heart pounded in his
chest in time to the drums, and under his layers of leather and steel
his brow was cold with sweat. He watched Ser Gregor as the
Mountain rode up and down the line, shouting and gesticulating.
This wing too was all cavalry, but where the right was a mailed st
of knights and heavy lancers, the vanguard was made up of the
sweepings of the west: mounted archers in leather jerkins, a
swarming mass of undisciplined freeriders and sellswords,
eldhands on plow horses armed with scythes and their fathers’
rusted swords, half-trained boys from the stews of
Lannisport … and Tyrion and his mountain clansmen.
“Crow food,” Bronn muttered beside him, giving voice to what
Tyrion had left unsaid. He could only nod. Had his lord father taken
leave of his senses? No pikes, too few bowmen, a bare handful of
knights, the ill-armed and unarmored, commanded by an unthinking
brute who led with his rage … how could his father expect this
travesty of a battle to hold his left?
He had no time to think about it. The drums were so near that the
beat crept under his skin and set his hands to twitching. Bronn drew
his longsword, and suddenly the enemy was there before them,

boiling over the tops of the hills, advancing with measured tread
behind a wall of shields and pikes.
Gods be damned, look at them all, Tyrion thought, though he knew
his father had more men on the eld. Their captains led them on
armored warhorses, standard-bearers riding alongside with their
banners. He glimpsed the bull moose of the Hornwoods, the
Karstark sunburst, Lord Cerwyn’s battle-axe, and the mailed st of
the Glovers … and the twin towers of Frey, blue on grey. So much
for his father’s certainty that Lord Walder would not bestir himself.
The white of House Stark was seen everywhere, the grey
direwolves seeming to run and leap as the banners swirled and
streamed from the high sta s. Where is the boy? Tyrion wondered.
A warhorn blew. Haroooooooooooooooooooooooo, it cried, its voice
as long and low and chilling as a cold wind from the north. The
Lannister trumpets answered, da-DA da-DA da-DAAAAAAAAA,
brazen and de ant, yet it seemed to Tyrion that they sounded
somehow smaller, more anxious. He could feel a uttering in his
bowels, a queasy liquid feeling; he hoped he was not going to die
sick.
As the horns died away, a hissing lled the air; a vast ight of
arrows arched up from his right, where the archers stood anking
the road. The northerners broke into a run, shouting as they came,
but the Lannister arrows fell on them like hail, hundreds of arrows,
thousands, and shouts turned to screams as men stumbled and went
down. By then a second ight was in the air, and the archers were
tting a third arrow to their bowstrings.
The trumpets blared again, da-DAAA da-DAAA da-DA da-DA daDAAAAAAA. Ser Gregor waved his huge sword and bellowed a
command, and a thousand other voices screamed back at him.
Tyrion put his spurs to his horse and added one more voice to the
cacophony, and the van surged forward. “The river!” he shouted at
his clansmen as they rode. “Remember, hew to the river.” He was
still leading when they broke a canter, until Chella gave a
bloodcurdling shriek and galloped past him, and Shagga howled and
followed. The clansmen charged after them, leaving Tyrion in their
dust.

A crescent of enemy spearmen had formed ahead, a double
hedgehog bristling with steel, waiting behind tall oaken shields
marked with the sunburst of Karstark. Gregor Clegane was the rst
to reach them, leading a wedge of armored veterans. Half the
horses shied at the last second, breaking their charge before the row
of spears. The others died, sharp steel points ripping through their
chests. Tyrion saw a dozen men go down. The Mountain’s stallion
reared, lashing out with iron-shod hooves as a barbed spearhead
raked across his neck. Maddened, the beast lunged into the ranks.
Spears thrust at him from every side, but the shield wall broke
beneath his weight. The northerners stumbled away from the
animal’s death throes. As his horse fell, snorting blood and biting
with his last red breath, the Mountain rose untouched, laying about
him with his two-handed greatsword.
Shagga went bursting through the gap before the shields could
close, other Stone Crows hard behind him. Tyrion shouted, “Burned
Men! Moon Brothers! After me!” but most of them were ahead of
him. He glimpsed Timett son of Timett vault free as his mount died
under him in full stride, saw a Moon Brother impaled on a Karstark
spear, watched Conn’s horse shatter a man’s ribs with a kick. A
ight of arrows descended on them; where they came from he could
not say, but they fell on Stark and Lannister alike, rattling o armor
or nding esh. Tyrion lifted his shield and hid beneath it.
The hedgehog was crumbling, the northerners reeling back under
the impact of the mounted assault. Tyrion saw Shagga catch a
spearman full in the chest as the fool came on at a run, saw his axe
shear through mail and leather and muscle and lungs. The man was
dead on his feet, the axehead lodged in his breast, yet Shagga rode
on, cleaving a shield in two with his left-hand battle-axe while the
corpse was bouncing and stumbling bonelessly along on his right.
Finally the dead man slid o . Shagga smashed the two axes together
and roared.
By then the enemy was on him, and Tyrion’s battle shrunk to the
few feet of ground around his horse. A man-at-arms thrust at his
chest and his axe lashed out, knocking the spear aside. The man
danced back for another try, but Tyrion spurred his horse and rode

right over him. Bronn was surrounded by three foes, but he lopped
the head o the rst spear that came at him, and raked his blade
across a second man’s face on his backslash.
A thrown spear came hurtling at Tyrion from the left and lodged
in his shield with a woody chunk. He wheeled and raced after the
thrower, but the man raised his own shield over his head. Tyrion
circled around him, raining axe blows down on the wood. Chips of
oak went ying, until the northerner lost his feet and slipped,
falling at on his back with his shield on top of him. He was below
the reach of Tyrion’s axe and it was too much bother to dismount,
so he left him there and rode after another man, taking him from
behind with a sweeping downcut that sent a jolt of impact up his
arm. That won him a moment’s respite. Reining up, he looked for
the river. There it was, o to the right. Somehow he had gotten
turned around.
A Burned Man rode past, slumped against his horse. A spear had
entered his belly and come out through his back. He was past any
help, but when Tyrion saw one of the northerners run up and make
a grab for his reins, he charged.
His quarry met him sword in hand. He was tall and spare,
wearing a long chainmail hauberk and gauntlets of lobstered steel,
but he’d lost his helm and blood ran down into his eyes from a gash
across his forehead. Tyrion aimed a swipe at his face, but the tall
man slammed it aside. “Dwarf,” he screamed. “Die.” He turned in a
circle as Tyrion rode around him, hacking at his head and shoulders.
Steel rang on steel, and Tyrion soon realized that the tall man was
quicker and stronger than he was. Where in the seven hells was
Bronn? “Die,” the man grunted, chopping at him savagely. Tyrion
barely got his shield up in time, and the wood seemed to explode
inward under the force of the blow. The shattered pieces fell away
from his arm. “Die!” the swordsman bellowed, shoving in close and
whanging Tyrion across the temple so hard his head rang. The blade
made a hideous scraping sound as he drew it back over the steel.
The tall man grinned … until Tyrion’s destrier bit, quick as a snake,
laying his cheek bare to the bone. Then he screamed. Tyrion buried
his axe in his head. “You die,” he told him, and he did.

As he wrenched the blade free, he heard a shout. “Eddard!” a
voice rang out. “For Eddard and Winterfell!” The knight came
thundering down on him, swinging the spiked ball of a morningstar
around his head. Their warhorses slammed together before Tyrion
could so much as open his mouth to shout for Bronn. His right
elbow exploded with pain as the spikes punched through the thin
metal around the joint. His axe was gone, as fast as that. He clawed
for his sword, but the morningstar was circling again, coming at his
face. A sickening crunch, and he was falling. He did not recall
hitting the ground, but when he looked up there was only sky above
him. He rolled onto his side and tried to nd his feet, but pain
shuddered through him and the world throbbed. The knight who
had felled him drew up above him. “Tyrion the Imp,” he boomed
down. “You are mine. Do you yield, Lannister?”
Yes, Tyrion thought, but the word caught in his throat. He made a
croaking sound and fought his way to his knees, fumbling for a
weapon. His sword, his dirk, anything …
“Do you yield?” The knight loomed overhead on his armored
warhorse. Man and horse both seemed immense. The spiked ball
swung in a lazy circle. Tyrion’s hands were numb, his vision
blurred, his scabbard empty. “Yield or die,” the knight declared, his
ail whirling faster and faster.
Tyrion lurched to his feet, driving his head into the horse’s belly.
The animal gave a hideous scream and reared. It tried to twist away
from the agony, a shower of blood and viscera poured down over
Tyrion’s face, and the horse fell like an avalanche. The next he
knew, his visor was packed with mud and something was crushing
his foot. He wriggled free, his throat so tight he could scarce talk.
“… yield …” he managed to croak faintly.
“Yes,” a voice moaned, thick with pain.
Tyrion scraped the mud o his helm so he could see again. The
horse had fallen away from him, onto its rider. The knight’s leg was
trapped, the arm he’d used to break his fall twisted at a grotesque
angle. “Yield,” he repeated. Fumbling at his belt with his good
hand, he drew a sword and ung it at Tyrion’s feet. “I yield, my
lord.”

Dazed, the dwarf knelt and lifted the blade. Pain hammered
through his elbow when he moved his arm. The battle seemed to
have moved beyond him. No one remained on his part of the eld
save a large number of corpses. Ravens were already circling and
landing to feed. He saw that Ser Kevan had brought up his center in
support of the van; his huge mass of pikemen had pushed the
northerners back against the hills. They were struggling on the
slopes, pikes thrusting against another wall of shields, these oval
and reinforced with iron studs. As he watched, the air lled with
arrows again, and the men behind the oak wall crumbled beneath
the murderous re. “I believe you are losing, ser,” he told the
knight under the horse. The man made no reply.
The sound of hooves coming up behind him made him whirl,
though he could scarcely lift the sword he held for the agony in his
elbow. Bronn reined up and looked down on him.
“Small use you turned out to be,” Tyrion told him.
“It would seem you did well enough on your own,” Bronn
answered. “You’ve lost the spike o your helm, though.”
Tyrion groped at the top of the greathelm. The spike had snapped
o clean. “I haven’t lost it. I know just where it is. Do you see my
horse?”
By the time they found it, the trumpets had sounded again and
Lord Tywin’s reserve came sweeping up along the river. Tyrion
watched his father y past, the crimson-and-gold banner of
Lannister rippling over his head as he thundered across the eld.
Five hundred knights surrounded him, sunlight ashing o the
points of their lances. The remnants of the Stark lines shattered like
glass beneath the hammer of their charge.
With his elbow swollen and throbbing inside his armor, Tyrion
made no attempt to join the slaughter. He and Bronn went looking
for his men. Many he found among the dead. Ulf son of Umar lay in
a pool of congealing blood, his arm gone at the elbow, a dozen of
his Moon Brothers sprawled around him. Shagga was slumped
beneath a tree, riddled with arrows, Conn’s head in his lap. Tyrion
thought they were both dead, but as he dismounted, Shagga opened
his eyes and said, “They have killed Conn son of Coratt.” Handsome

Conn had no mark but for the red stain over his breast, where the
spear thrust had killed him. When Bronn pulled Shagga to his feet,
the big man seemed to notice the arrows for the rst time. He
plucked them out one by one, cursing the holes they had made in
his layers of mail and leather, and yowling like a babe at the few
that had buried themselves in his esh. Chella daughter of Cheyk
rode up as they were yanking arrows out of Shagga, and showed
them four ears she had taken. Timett they discovered looting the
bodies of the slain with his Burned Men. Of the three hundred
clansmen who had ridden to battle behind Tyrion Lannister, perhaps
half had survived.
He left the living to look after the dead, sent Bronn to take
charge of his captive knight, and went alone in search of his father.
Lord Tywin was seated by the river, sipping wine from a jeweled
cup as his squire undid the fastenings on his breastplate. “A ne
victory,” Ser Kevan said when he saw Tyrion. “Your wild men
fought well.”
His father’s eyes were on him, pale green ecked with gold, so
cool they gave Tyrion a chill. “Did that surprise you, Father?” he
asked. “Did it upset your plans? We were supposed to be butchered,
were we not?”
Lord Tywin drained his cup, his face expressionless. “I put the
least disciplined men on the left, yes. I anticipated that they would
break. Robb Stark is a green boy, more like to be brave than wise.
I’d hoped that if he saw our left collapse, he might plunge into the
gap, eager for a rout. Once he was fully committed, Ser Kevan’s
pikes would wheel and take him in the ank, driving him into the
river while I brought up the reserve.”
“And you thought it best to place me in the midst of this carnage,
yet keep me ignorant of your plans.”
“A feigned rout is less convincing,” his father said, “and I am not
inclined to trust my plans to a man who consorts with sellswords
and savages.”
“A pity my savages ruined your dance.” Tyrion pulled o his steel
gauntlet and let it fall to the ground, wincing at the pain that
stabbed up his arm.

“The Stark boy proved more cautious than I expected for one of
his years,” Lord Tywin admitted, “but a victory is a victory. You
appear to be wounded.”
Tyrion’s right arm was soaked with blood. “Good of you to
notice, Father,” he said through clenched teeth. “Might I trouble
you to send for your maesters? Unless you relish the notion of
having a one-armed dwarf for a son …”
An urgent shout of “Lord Tywin!” turned his father’s head before
he could reply. Tywin Lannister rose to his feet as Ser Addam
Marbrand leapt down o his courser. The horse was lathered and
bleeding from the mouth. Ser Addam dropped to one knee, a rangy
man with dark copper hair that fell to his shoulders, armored in
burnished bronzed steel with the ery tree of his House etched
black on his breastplate. “My liege, we have taken some of their
commanders. Lord Cerwyn, Ser Wylis Manderly, Harrion Karstark,
four Freys. Lord Hornwood is dead, and I fear Roose Bolton has
escaped us.”
“And the boy?” Lord Tywin asked.
Ser Addam hesitated. “The Stark boy was not with them, my lord.
They say he crossed at the Twins with the great part of his horse,
riding hard for Riverrun.”
A green boy, Tyrion remembered, more like to be brave than wise.
He would have laughed, if he hadn’t hurt so much.

CATELYN

The woods were full of whispers.
Moonlight winked on the tumbling waters of the stream below as
it wound its rocky way along the oor of the valley. Beneath the
trees, warhorses whickered softly and pawed at the moist, leafy
ground, while men made nervous jests in hushed voices. Now and
again, she heard the chink of spears, the faint metallic slither of
chain mail, but even those sounds were mu ed.
“It should not be long now, my lady,” Hallis Mollen said. He had
asked for the honor of protecting her in the battle to come; it was
his right, as Winterfell’s captain of guards, and Robb had not
refused it to him. She had thirty men around her, charged to keep
her unharmed and see her safely home to Winterfell if the ghting
went against them. Robb had wanted fty; Catelyn had insisted that
ten would be enough, that he would need every sword for the ght.
They made their peace at thirty, neither happy with it.
“It will come when it comes,” Catelyn told him. When it came,
she knew it would mean death. Hal’s death perhaps … or hers, or
Robb’s. No one was safe. No life was certain. Catelyn was content to
wait, to listen to the whispers in the woods and the faint music of
the brook, to feel the warm wind in her hair.
She was no stranger to waiting, after all. Her men had always
made her wait. “Watch for me, little cat,” her father would always
tell her, when he rode o to court or fair or battle. And she would,
standing patiently on the battlements of Riverrun as the waters of

the Red Fork and the Tumblestone owed by. He did not always
come when he said he would, and days would ofttimes pass as
Catelyn stood her vigil, peering out between crenels and through
arrow loops until she caught a glimpse of Lord Hoster on his old
brown gelding, trotting along the river-shore toward the landing.
“Did you watch for me?” he’d ask when he bent to hug her. “Did
you, little cat?”
Brandon Stark had bid her wait as well. “I shall not be long, my
lady,” he had vowed. “We will be wed on my return.” Yet when the
day came at last, it was his brother Eddard who stood beside her in
the sept.
Ned had lingered scarcely a fortnight with his new bride before
he too had ridden o to war with promises on his lips. At least he
had left her with more than words; he had given her a son. Nine
moons had waxed and waned, and Robb had been born in Riverrun
while his father still warred in the south. She had brought him forth
in blood and pain, not knowing whether Ned would ever see him.
Her son. He had been so small …
And now it was for Robb that she waited … for Robb, and for
Jaime Lannister, the gilded knight who men said had never learned
to wait at all. “The Kingslayer is restless, and quick to anger,” her
uncle Brynden had told Robb. And he had wagered their lives and
their best hope of victory on the truth of what he said.
If Robb was frightened, he gave no sign of it. Catelyn watched
her son as he moved among the men, touching one on the shoulder,
sharing a jest with another, helping a third to gentle an anxious
horse. His armor clinked softly when he moved. Only his head was
bare. Catelyn watched a breeze stir his auburn hair, so like her own,
and wondered when her son had grown so big. Fifteen, and near as
tall as she was.
Let him grow taller, she asked the gods. Let him know sixteen, and
twenty, and fty. Let him grow as tall as his father, and hold his own son
in his arms. Please, please, please. As she watched him, this tall young
man with the new beard and the direwolf prowling at his heels, all
she could see was the babe they had laid at her breast at Riverrun,
so long ago.

The night was warm, but the thought of Riverrun was enough to
make her shiver. Where are they? she wondered. Could her uncle
have been wrong? So much rested on the truth of what he had told
them. Robb had given the Black sh three hundred picked men, and
sent them ahead to screen his march. “Jaime does not know,” Ser
Brynden said when he rode back. “I’ll stake my life on that. No bird
has reached him, my archers have seen to that. We’ve seen a few of
his outriders, but those that saw us did not live to tell of it. He
ought to have sent out more. He does not know.”
“How large is his host?” her son asked.
“Twelve thousand foot, scattered around the castle in three
separate camps, with the rivers between,” her uncle said, with the
craggy smile she remembered so well. “There is no other way to
besiege Riverrun, yet still, that will be their undoing. Two or three
thousand horse.”
“The Kingslayer has us three to one,” said Galbart Glover.
“True enough,” Ser Brynden said, “yet there is one thing Ser
Jaime lacks.”
“Yes?” Robb asked.
“Patience.”
Their host was greater than it had been when they left the Twins.
Lord Jason Mallister had brought his power out from Seagard to
join them as they swept around the headwaters of the Blue Fork and
galloped south, and others had crept forth as well, hedge knights
and small lords and masterless men-at-arms who had ed north
when her brother Edmure’s army was shattered beneath the walls of
Riverrun. They had driven their horses as hard as they dared to
reach this place before Jaime Lannister had word of their coming,
and now the hour was at hand.
Catelyn watched her son mount up. Olyvar Frey held his horse for
him, Lord Walder’s son, two years older than Robb, and ten years
younger and more anxious. He strapped Robb’s shield in place and
handed up his helm. When he lowered it over the face she loved so
well, a tall young knight sat on his grey stallion where her son had
been. It was dark among the trees, where the moon did not reach.
When Robb turned his head to look at her, she could see only black

inside his visor. “I must ride down the line, Mother,” he told her.
“Father says you should let the men see you before a battle.”
“Go, then,” she said. “Let them see you.”
“It will give them courage,” Robb said.
And who will give me courage? she wondered, yet she kept her
silence and made herself smile for him. Robb turned the big grey
stallion and walked him slowly away from her, Grey Wind
shadowing his steps. Behind him his battle guard formed up. When
he’d forced Catelyn to accept her protectors, she had insisted that he
be guarded as well, and the lords bannermen had agreed. Many of
their sons had clamored for the honor of riding with the Young
Wolf, as they had taken to calling him. Torrhen Karstark and his
brother Eddard were among his thirty, and Patrek Mallister,
Smalljon Umber, Daryn Hornwood, Theon Greyjoy, no less than ve
of Walder Frey’s vast brood, along with older men like Ser Wendel
Manderly and Robin Flint. One of his companions was even a
woman: Dacey Mormont, Lady Maege’s eldest daughter and heir to
Bear Island, a lanky six-footer who had been given a morningstar at
an age when most girls were given dolls. Some of the other lords
muttered about that, but Catelyn would not listen to their
complaints. “This is not about the honor of your houses,” she told
them. “This is about keeping my son alive and whole.”
And if it comes to that, she wondered, will thirty be enough? Will six
thousand be enough?
A bird called faintly in the distance, a high sharp trill that felt like
an icy hand on Catelyn’s neck. Another bird answered; a third, a
fourth. She knew their call well enough, from her years at
Winterfell. Snow shrikes. Sometimes you saw them in the deep of
winter, when the godswood was white and still. They were northern
birds.
They are coming, Catelyn thought.
“They’re coming, my lady,” Hal Mollen whispered. He was
always a man for stating the obvious. “Gods be with us.”
She nodded as the woods grew still around them. In the quiet she
could hear them, far o yet moving closer; the tread of many

horses, the rattle of swords and spears and armor, the murmur of
human voices, with here a laugh, and there a curse.
Eons seemed to come and go. The sounds grew louder. She heard
more laughter, a shouted command, splashing as they crossed and
recrossed the little stream. A horse snorted. A man swore. And then
at last she saw him … only for an instant, framed between the
branches of the trees as she looked down at the valley oor, yet she
knew it was him. Even at a distance, Ser Jaime Lannister was
unmistakable. The moonlight had silvered his armor and the gold of
his hair, and turned his crimson cloak to black. He was not wearing
a helm.
He was there and he was gone again, his silvery armor obscured
by the trees once more. Others came behind him, long columns of
them, knights and sworn swords and freeriders, three quarters of
the Lannister horse.
“He is no man for sitting in a tent while his carpenters build siege
towers,” Ser Brynden had promised. “He has ridden out with his
knights thrice already, to chase down raiders or storm a stubborn
holdfast.”
Nodding, Robb had studied the map her uncle had drawn him.
Ned had taught him to read maps. “Raid him here,” he said,
pointing. “A few hundred men, no more. Tully banners. When he
comes after you, we will be waiting”—his nger moved an inch to
the left—“here.”
Here was a hush in the night, moonlight and shadows, a thick
carpet of dead leaves underfoot, densely wooded ridges sloping
gently down to the streambed, the underbrush thinning as the
ground fell away.
Here was her son on his stallion, glancing back at her one last
time and lifting his sword in salute.
Here was the call of Maege Mormont’s warhorn, a long low blast
that rolled down the valley from the east, to tell them that the last
of Jaime’s riders had entered the trap.
And Grey Wind threw back his head and howled.
The sound seemed to go right through Catelyn Stark, and she
found herself shivering. It was a terrible sound, a frightening sound,

yet there was music in it too. For a second she felt something like
pity for the Lannisters below. So this is what death sounds like, she
thought.
HAAroooooooooooooooooooooooo came the answer from the far
ridge as the Greatjon winded his own horn. To east and west, the
trumpets of the Mallisters and Freys blew vengeance. North, where
the valley narrowed and bent like a cocked elbow, Lord Karstark’s
warhorns added their own deep, mournful voices to the dark
chorus. Men were shouting and horses rearing in the stream below.
The whispering wood let out its breath all at once, as the bowmen
Robb had hidden in the branches of the trees let y their arrows and
the night erupted with the screams of men and horses. All around
her, the riders raised their lances, and the dirt and leaves that had
buried the cruel bright points fell away to reveal the gleam of
sharpened steel. “Winterfell!” she heard Robb shout as the arrows
sighed again. He moved away from her at a trot, leading his men
downhill.
Catelyn sat on her horse, unmoving, with Hal Mollen and her
guard around her, and she waited as she had waited before, for
Brandon and Ned and her father. She was high on the ridge, and the
trees hid most of what was going on beneath her. A heartbeat, two,
four, and suddenly it was as if she and her protectors were alone in
the wood. The rest were melted away into the green.
Yet when she looked across the valley to the far ridge, she saw
the Greatjon’s riders emerge from the darkness beneath the trees.
They were in a long line, an endless line, and as they burst from the
wood there was an instant, the smallest part of a heartbeat, when
all Catelyn saw was the moonlight on the points of their lances, as if
a thousand willowisps were coming down the ridge, wreathed in
silver ame.
Then she blinked, and they were only men, rushing down to kill
or die.
Afterward, she could not claim she had seen the battle. Yet she
could hear, and the valley rang with echoes. The crack of a broken
lance, the clash of swords, the cries of “Lannister” and “Winterfell”
and “Tully! Riverrun and Tully!” When she realized there was no

more to see, she closed her eyes and listened. The battle came alive
around her. She heard hoofbeats, iron boots splashing in shallow
water, the woody sound of swords on oaken shields and the scrape
of steel against steel, the hiss of arrows, the thunder of drums, the
terri ed screaming of a thousand horses. Men shouted curses and
begged for mercy, and got it (or not), and lived (or died). The
ridges seemed to play queer tricks with sound. Once she heard
Robb’s voice, as clear as if he’d been standing at her side, calling,
“To me! To me!” And she heard his direwolf, snarling and growling,
heard the snap of those long teeth, the tearing of esh, shrieks of
fear and pain from man and horse alike. Was there only one wolf?
It was hard to be certain.
Little by little, the sounds dwindled and died, until at last there
was only the wolf. As a red dawn broke in the east, Grey Wind
began to howl again.
Robb came back to her on a di erent horse, riding a piebald
gelding in the place of the grey stallion he had taken down into the
valley. The wolf’s head on his shield was slashed half to pieces, raw
wood showing where deep gouges had been hacked in the oak, but
Robb himself seemed unhurt. Yet when he came closer, Catelyn saw
that his mailed glove and the sleeve of his surcoat were black with
blood. “You’re hurt,” she said.
Robb lifted his hand, opened and closed his ngers. “No,” he said.
“This is … Torrhen’s blood, perhaps, or …” He shook his head. “I do
not know.”
A mob of men followed him up the slope, dirty and dented and
grinning, with Theon and the Greatjon at their head. Between them
they dragged Ser Jaime Lannister. They threw him down in front of
her horse. “The Kingslayer,” Hal announced, unnecessarily.
Lannister raised his head. “Lady Stark,” he said from his knees.
Blood ran down one cheek from a gash across his scalp, but the pale
light of dawn had put the glint of gold back in his hair. “I would
o er you my sword, but I seem to have mislaid it.”
“It is not your sword I want, ser,” she told him. “Give me my
father and my brother Edmure. Give me my daughters. Give me my
lord husband.”

“I have mislaid them as well, I fear.”
“A pity,” Catelyn said coldly.
“Kill him, Robb,” Theon Greyjoy urged. “Take his head o .”
“No,” her son answered, peeling o his bloody glove. “He’s more
use alive than dead. And my lord father never condoned the murder
of prisoners after a battle.”
“A wise man,” Jaime Lannister said, “and honorable.”
“Take him away and put him in irons,” Catelyn said.
“Do as my lady mother says,” Robb commanded, “and make
certain there’s a strong guard around him. Lord Karstark will want
his head on a pike.”
“That he will,” the Greatjon agreed, gesturing. Lannister was led
away to be bandaged and chained.
“Why should Lord Karstark want him dead?” Catelyn asked.
Robb looked away into the woods, with the same brooding look
that Ned often got. “He … he killed them …”
“Lord Karstark’s sons,” Galbart Glover explained.
“Both of them,” said Robb. “Torrhen and Eddard. And Daryn
Hornwood as well.”
“No one can fault Lannister on his courage,” Glover said. “When
he saw that he was lost, he rallied his retainers and fought his way
up the valley, hoping to reach Lord Robb and cut him down. And
almost did.”
“He mislaid his sword in Eddard Karstark’s neck, after he took
Torrhen’s hand o and split Daryn Hornwood’s skull open,” Robb
said. “All the time he was shouting for me. If they hadn’t tried to
stop him—”
“—I should then be mourning in place of Lord Karstark,” Catelyn
said. “Your men did what they were sworn to do, Robb. They died
protecting their liege lord. Grieve for them. Honor them for their
valor. But not now. You have no time for grief. You may have
lopped the head o the snake, but three quarters of the body is still
coiled around my father’s castle. We have won a battle, not a war.”
“But such a battle!” said Theon Greyjoy eagerly. “My lady, the
realm has not seen such a victory since the Field of Fire. I vow, the
Lannisters lost ten men for every one of ours that fell. We’ve taken

close to a hundred knights captive, and a dozen lords bannermen.
Lord Westerling, Lord Banefort, Ser Garth Green eld, Lord Estren,
Ser Tytos Brax, Mallor the Dornishman … and three Lannisters
besides Jaime, Lord Tywin’s own nephews, two of his sister’s sons
and one of his dead brother’s …”
“And Lord Tywin?” Catelyn interrupted. “Have you perchance
taken Lord Tywin, Theon?”
“No,” Greyjoy answered, brought up short.
“Until you do, this war is far from done.”
Robb raised his head and pushed his hair back out of his eyes.
“My mother is right. We still have Riverrun.”

DAENERYS

The ies circled Khal Drogo slowly, their wings buzzing, a low
thrum at the edge of hearing that lled Dany with dread.
The sun was high and pitiless. Heat shimmered in waves o the
stony outcrops of low hills. A thin nger of sweat trickled slowly
between Dany’s swollen breasts. The only sounds were the steady
clop of their horses’ hooves, the rhythmic tingle of the bells in
Drogo’s hair, and the distant voices behind them.
Dany watched the ies.
They were as large as bees, gross, purplish, glistening. The
Dothraki called them blood ies. They lived in marshes and stagnant
pools, sucked blood from man and horse alike, and laid their eggs in
the dead and dying. Drogo hated them. Whenever one came near
him, his hand would shoot out quick as a striking snake to close
around it. She had never seen him miss. He would hold the y
inside his huge st long enough to hear its frantic buzzing. Then his
ngers would tighten, and when he opened his hand again, the y
would be only a red smear on his palm.
Now one crept across the rump of his stallion, and the horse gave
an angry ick of its tail to brush it away. The others itted about
Drogo, closer and closer. The khal did not react. His eyes were xed
on distant brown hills, the reins loose in his hands. Beneath his
painted vest, a plaster of g leaves and caked blue mud covered the
wound on his breast. The herbwomen had made it for him. Mirri
Maz Duur’s poultice had itched and burned, and he had torn it o

six days ago, cursing her for a maegi. The mud plaster was more
soothing, and the herbwomen made him poppy wine as well. He’d
been drinking it heavily these past three days; when it was not
poppy wine, it was fermented mare’s milk or pepper beer.
Yet he scarcely touched his food, and he thrashed and groaned in
the night. Dany could see how drawn his face had become. Rhaego
was restless in her belly, kicking like a stallion, yet even that did
not stir Drogo’s interest as it had. Every morning her eyes found
fresh lines of pain on his face when he woke from his troubled
sleep. And now this silence. It was making her afraid. Since they
had mounted up at dawn, he had said not a word. When she spoke,
she got no answer but a grunt, and not even that much since
midday.
One of the blood ies landed on the bare skin of the khal’s
shoulder. Another, circling, touched down on his neck and crept up
toward his mouth. Khal Drogo swayed in the saddle, bells ringing,
as his stallion kept onward at a steady walking pace.
Dany pressed her heels into her silver and rode closer. “My lord,”
she said softly. “Drogo. My sun-and-stars.”
He did not seem to hear. The blood y crawled up under his
drooping mustache and settled on his cheek, in the crease beside his
nose. Dany gasped, “Drogo,” Clumsily she reached over and touched
his arm.
Khal Drogo reeled in the saddle, tilted slowly, and fell heavily
from his horse. The ies scattered for a heartbeat, and then circled
back to settle on him where he lay.
“No,” Dany said, reining up. Heedless of her belly for once, she
scrambled o her silver and ran to him.
The grass beneath him was brown and dry. Drogo cried out in
pain as Dany knelt beside him. His breath rattled harshly in his
throat, and he looked at her without recognition. “My horse,” he
gasped. Dany brushed the ies o his chest, smashing one as he
would have. His skin burned beneath her ngers.
The khal’s bloodriders had been following just behind them. She
heard Haggo shout as they galloped up. Cohollo vaulted from his

horse. “Blood of my blood,” he said as he dropped to his knees. The
other two kept to their mounts.
“No,” Khal Drogo groaned, struggling in Dany’s arms. “Must ride.
Ride. No.”
“He fell from his horse,” Haggo said, staring down. His broad
face was impassive, but his voice was leaden.
“You must not say that,” Dany told him. “We have ridden far
enough today. We will camp here.”
“Here?” Haggo looked around them. The land was brown and
sere, inhospitable. “This is no camping ground.”
“It is not for a woman to bid us halt,” said Qotho, “not even a
khaleesi.”
“We camp here,” Dany repeated. “Haggo, tell them Khal Drogo
commanded the halt. If any ask why, say to them that my time is
near and I could not continue. Cohollo, bring up the slaves, they
must put up the khal’s tent at once. Qotho—”
“You do not command me, Khaleesi,” Qotho said.
“Find Mirri Maz Duur,” she told him. The godswife would be
walking among the other Lamb Men, in the long column of slaves.
“Bring her to me, with her chest.”
Qotho glared down at her, his eyes hard as int. “The maegi.” He
spat. “This I will not do.”
“You will,” Dany said, “or when Drogo wakes, he will hear why
you de ed me.”
Furious, Qotho wheeled his stallion around and galloped o in
anger … but Dany knew he would return with Mirri Maz Duur,
however little he might like it. The slaves erected Khal Drogo’s tent
beneath a jagged outcrop of black rock whose shadow gave some
relief from the heat of the afternoon sun. Even so, it was sti ing
under the sandsilk as Irri and Doreah helped Dany walk Drogo
inside. Thick patterned carpets had been laid down over the ground,
and pillows scattered in the corners. Eroeh, the timid girl Dany had
rescued outside the mud walls of the Lamb Men, set up a brazier.
They stretched Drogo out on a woven mat. “No,” he muttered in the
Common Tongue. “No, no.” It was all he said, all he seemed capable
of saying.

Doreah unhooked his medallion belt and stripped o his vest and
leggings, while Jhiqui knelt by his feet to undo the laces of his
riding sandals. Irri wanted to leave the tent aps open to let in the
breeze, but Dany forbade it. She would not have any see Drogo this
way, in delirium and weakness. When her khas came up, she posted
them outside at guard. “Admit no one without my leave,” she told
Jhogo. “No one.”
Eroeh stared fearfully at Drogo where he lay. “He dies,” she
whispered.
Dany slapped her. “The khal cannot die. He is the father of the
stallion who mounts the world. His hair has never been cut. He still
wears the bells his father gave him.”
“Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “he fell from his horse.”
Trembling, her eyes full of sudden tears, Dany turned away from
them. He fell from his horse! It was so, she had seen it, and the
bloodriders, and no doubt her handmaids and the men of her khas as
well. And how many more? They could not keep it secret, and Dany
knew what that meant. A khal who could not ride could not rule,
and Drogo had fallen from his horse.
“We must bathe him,” she said stubbornly. She must not allow
herself to despair. “Irri, have the tub brought at once. Doreah,
Eroeh, nd water, cool water, he’s so hot.” He was a re in human
skin.
The slaves set up the heavy copper tub in the corner of the tent.
When Doreah brought the rst jar of water, Dany wet a length of
silk to lay across Drogo’s brow, over the burning skin. His eyes
looked at her, but he did not see. When his lips opened, no words
escaped them, only a moan. “Where is Mirri Maz Duur?” she
demanded, her patience rubbed raw with fear.
“Qotho will nd her,” Irri said.
Her handmaids lled the tub with tepid water that stank of sulfur,
sweetening it with jars of bitter oil and handfuls of crushed mint
leaves. While the bath was being prepared, Dany knelt awkwardly
beside her lord husband, her belly great with their child within. She
undid his braid with anxious ngers, as she had on the night he’d
taken her for the rst time, beneath the stars. His bells she laid

aside carefully, one by one. He would want them again when he
was well, she told herself.
A breath of air entered the tent as Aggo poked his head through
the silk. “Khaleesi,” he said, “the Andal is come, and begs leave to
enter.”
“The Andal” was what the Dothraki called Ser Jorah. “Yes,” she
said, rising clumsily, “send him in.” She trusted the knight. He
would know what to do if anyone did.
Ser Jorah Mormont ducked through the door ap and waited a
moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. In the erce heat of
the south, he wore loose trousers of mottled sandsilk and open-toed
riding sandals that laced up to his knee. His scabbard hung from a
twisted horsehair belt. Under a bleached white vest, he was barechested, skin reddened by the sun. “Talk goes from mouth to ear, all
over the khalasar,” he said. “It is said Khal Drogo fell from his
horse.”
“Help him,” Dany pleaded. “For the love you say you bear me,
help him now.”
The knight knelt beside her. He looked at Drogo long and hard,
and then at Dany. “Send your maids away.”
Wordlessly, her throat tight with fear, Dany made a gesture. Irri
herded the other girls from the tent.
When they were alone, Ser Jorah drew his dagger. Deftly, with a
delicacy surprising in such a big man, he began to scrape away the
black leaves and dried blue mud from Drogo’s chest. The plaster had
caked hard as the mud walls of the Lamb Men, and like those walls
it cracked easily. Ser Jorah broke the dry mud with his knife, pried
the chunks from the esh, peeled o the leaves one by one. A foul,
sweet smell rose from the wound, so thick it almost choked her. The
leaves were crusted with blood and pus, Drogo’s breast black and
glistening with corruption.
“No,” Dany whispered as tears ran down her cheeks. “No, please,
gods hear me, no.”
Khal Drogo thrashed, ghting some unseen enemy. Black blood
ran slow and thick from his open wound.
“Your khal is good as dead, Princess.”

“No, he can’t die, he mustn’t, it was only a cut.” Dany took his
large callused hand in her own small ones, and held it tight between
them. “I will not let him die …”
Ser Jorah gave a bitter laugh. “Khaleesi or queen, that command is
beyond your power. Save your tears, child. Weep for him
tomorrow, or a year from now. We do not have time for grief. We
must go, and quickly, before he dies.”
Dany was lost. “Go? Where should we go?”
“Asshai, I would say. It lies far to the south, at the end of the
known world, yet men say it is a great port. We will nd a ship to
take us back to Pentos. It will be a hard journey, make no mistake.
Do you trust your khas? Will they come with us?”
“Khal Drogo commanded them to keep me safe,” Dany replied
uncertainly, “but if he dies …” She touched the swell of her belly. “I
don’t understand. Why should we ee? I am khaleesi. I carry Drogo’s
heir. He will be khal after Drogo …”
Ser Jorah frowned. “Princess, hear me. The Dothraki will not
follow a suckling babe. Drogo’s strength was what they bowed to,
and only that. When he is gone, Jhaqo and Pono and the other kos
will ght for his place, and this khalasar will devour itself. The
winner will want no more rivals. The boy will be taken from your
breast the moment he is born. They will give him to the dogs …”
Dany hugged herself. “But why?” she cried plaintively. “Why
should they kill a little baby?”
“He is Drogo’s son, and the crones say he will be the stallion who
mounts the world. It was prophesied. Better to kill the child than to
risk his fury when he grows to manhood.”
The child kicked inside her, as if he had heard. Dany remembered
the story Viserys had told her, of what the Usurper’s dogs had done
to Rhaegar’s children. His son had been a babe as well, yet they had
ripped him from his mother’s breast and dashed his head against a
wall. That was the way of men. “They must not hurt my son!” she
cried. “I will order my khas to keep him safe, and Drogo’s
bloodriders will—”
Ser Jorah held her by the shoulders. “A bloodrider dies with his
khal. You know that, child. They will take you to Vaes Dothrak, to

the crones, that is the last duty they owe him in life … when it is
done, they will join Drogo in the night lands.”
Dany did not want to go back to Vaes Dothrak and live the rest of
her life among those terrible old women, yet she knew that the
knight spoke the truth. Drogo had been more than her sun-and-stars;
he had been the shield that kept her safe. “I will not leave him,” she
said stubbornly, miserably. She took his hand again. “I will not.”
A stirring at the tent ap made Dany turn her head. Mirri Maz
Duur entered, bowing low. Days on the march, trailing behind the
khalasar, had left her limping and haggard, with blistered and
bleeding feet and hollows under her eyes. Behind her came Qotho
and Haggo, carrying the godswife’s chest between them. When the
bloodriders caught sight of Drogo’s wound, the chest slipped from
Haggo’s ngers and crashed to the oor of the tent, and Qotho
swore an oath so foul it seared the air.
Mirri Maz Duur studied Drogo, her face still and dead. “The
wound has festered.”
“This is your work, maegi,” Qotho said. Haggo laid his st across
Mirri’s cheek with a meaty smack that drove her to the ground.
Then he kicked her where she lay.
“Stop it!” Dany screamed.
Qotho pulled Haggo away, saying, “Kicks are too merciful for a
maegi. Take her outside. We will stake her to the earth, to be the
mount of every passing man. And when they are done with her, the
dogs will use her as well. Weasels will tear out her entrails and
carrion crows feast upon her eyes. The ies o the river shall lay
their eggs in her womb and drink pus from the ruins of her
breasts …” He dug iron-hard ngers into the soft, wobbly esh
under the godswife’s arm and hauled her to her feet.
“No,” Dany said. “I will not have her harmed.”
Qotho’s lips skinned back from his crooked brown teeth in a
terrible mockery of a smile. “No? You say me no? Better you should
pray that we do not stake you out beside your maegi. You did this,
as much as the other.”
Ser Jorah stepped between them, loosening his longsword in its
scabbard. “Rein in your tongue, bloodrider. The princess is still your

khaleesi.”
“Only while the blood-of-my-blood still lives,” Qotho told the
knight. “When he dies, she is nothing.”
Dany felt a tightness inside her. “Before I was khaleesi, I was the
blood of the dragon. Ser Jorah, summon my khas.”
“No,” said Qotho. “We will go. For now … Khaleesi.” Haggo
followed him from the tent, scowling.
“That one means you no good, Princess,” Mormont said. “The
Dothraki say a man and his bloodriders share one life, and Qotho
sees it ending. A dead man is beyond fear.”
“No one has died,” Dany said. “Ser Jorah, I may have need of
your blade. Best go don your armor.” She was more frightened than
she dared admit, even to herself.
The knight bowed. “As you say.” He strode from the tent.
Dany turned back to Mirri Maz Duur. The woman’s eyes were
wary. “So you have saved me once more.”
“And now you must save him,” Dany said. “Please …”
“You do not ask a slave,” Mirri replied sharply, “you tell her.”
She went to Drogo burning on his mat, and gazed long at his
wound. “Ask or tell, it makes no matter. He is beyond a healer’s
skills.” The khal’s eyes were closed. She opened one with her
ngers. “He has been dulling the hurt with milk of the poppy.”
“Yes,” Dany admitted.
“I made him a poultice of repod and sting-me-not and bound it
in a lambskin.”
“It burned, he said. He tore it o . The herbwomen made him a
new one, wet and soothing.”
“It burned, yes. There is great healing magic in re, even your
hairless men know that.”
“Make him another poultice,” Dany begged. “This time I will
make certain he wears it.”
“The time for that is past, my lady,” Mirri said. “All I can do now
is ease the dark road before him, so he might ride painless to the
night lands. He will be gone by morning.”
Her words were a knife through Dany’s breast. What had she ever
done to make the gods so cruel? She had nally found a safe place,

had nally tasted love and hope. She was nally going home. And
now to lose it all … “No,” she pleaded. “Save him, and I will free
you, I swear it. You must know a way … some magic, some …”
Mirri Maz Duur sat back on her heels and studied Daenerys
through eyes as black as night. “There is a spell.” Her voice was
quiet, scarcely more than a whisper. “But it is hard, lady, and dark.
Some would say that death is cleaner. I learned the way in Asshai,
and paid dear for the lesson. My teacher was a bloodmage from the
Shadow Lands.”
Dany went cold all over. “Then you truly are a maegi …”
“Am I?” Mirri Maz Duur smiled. “Only a maegi can save your
rider now, Silver Lady.”
“Is there no other way?”
“No other.”
Khal Drogo gave a shuddering gasp.
“Do it,” Dany blurted. She must not be afraid; she was the blood
of the dragon. “Save him.”
“There is a price,” the godswife warned her.
“You’ll have gold, horses, whatever you like.”
“It is not a matter of gold or horses. This is bloodmagic, lady.
Only death may pay for life.”
“Death?” Dany wrapped her arms around herself protectively,
rocked back and forth on her heels. “My death?” She told herself
she would die for him, if she must. She was the blood of the dragon,
she would not be afraid. Her brother Rhaegar had died for the
woman he loved.
“No,” Mirri Maz Duur promised. “Not your death, Khaleesi.”
Dany trembled with relief. “Do it.”
The maegi nodded solemnly. “As you speak, so it shall be done.
Call your servants.”
Khal Drogo writhed feebly as Rakharo and Quaro lowered him
into the bath. “No,” he muttered, “no. Must ride.” Once in the
water, all the strength seemed to leak out of him.
“Bring his horse,” Mirri Maz Duur commanded, and so it was
done. Jhogo led the great red stallion into the tent. When the

animal caught the scent of death, he screamed and reared, rolling
his eyes. It took three men to subdue him.
“What do you mean to do?” Dany asked her.
“We need the blood,” Mirri answered. “That is the way.”
Jhogo edged back, his hand on his arakh. He was a youth of
sixteen years, whip-thin, fearless, quick to laugh, with the faint
shadow of his rst mustachio on his upper lip. He fell to his knees
before her. “Khaleesi,” he pleaded, “you must not do this thing. Let
me kill this maegi.”
“Kill her and you kill your khal,” Dany said.
“This is bloodmagic,” he said. “It is forbidden.”
“I am khaleesi, and I say it is not forbidden. In Vaes Dothrak, Khal
Drogo slew a stallion and I ate his heart, to give our son strength
and courage. This is the same. The same.”
The stallion kicked and reared as Rakharo, Quaro, and Aggo
pulled him close to the tub where the khal oated like one already
dead, pus and blood seeping from his wound to stain the
bathwaters. Mirri Maz Duur chanted words in a tongue that Dany
did not know, and a knife appeared in her hand. Dany never saw
where it came from. It looked old; hammered red bronze, leafshaped, its blade covered with ancient glyphs. The maegi drew it
across the stallion’s throat, under the noble head, and the horse
screamed and shuddered as the blood poured out of him in a red
rush. He would have collapsed, but the men of her khas held him
up. “Strength of the mount, go into the rider,” Mirri sang as horse
blood swirled into the waters of Drogo’s bath. “Strength of the
beast, go into the man.”
Jhogo looked terri ed as he struggled with the stallion’s weight,
afraid to touch the dead esh, yet afraid to let go as well. Only a
horse, Dany thought. If she could buy Drogo’s life with the death of
a horse, she would pay a thousand times over.
When they let the stallion fall, the bath was a dark red, and
nothing showed of Drogo but his face. Mirri Maz Duur had no use
for the carcass. “Burn it,” Dany told them. It was what they did, she
knew. When a man died, his mount was killed and placed beneath
him on the funeral pyre, to carry him to the night lands. The men of

her khas dragged the carcass from the tent. The blood had gone
everywhere. Even the sandsilk walls were spotted with red, and the
rugs underfoot were black and wet.
Braziers were lit. Mirri Maz Duur tossed a red powder onto the
coals. It gave the smoke a spicy scent, a pleasant enough smell, yet
Eroeh ed sobbing, and Dany was lled with fear. But she had gone
too far to turn back now. She sent her handmaids away. “Go with
them, Silver Lady,” Mirri Maz Duur told her.
“I will stay,” Dany said. “The man took me under the stars and
gave life to the child inside me. I will not leave him.”
“You must. Once I begin to sing, no one must enter this tent. My
song will wake powers old and dark. The dead will dance here this
night. No living man must look on them.”
Dany bowed her head, helpless. “No one will enter.” She bent
over the tub, over Drogo in his bath of blood, and kissed him lightly
on the brow. “Bring him back to me,” she whispered to Mirri Maz
Duur before she ed.
Outside, the sun was low on the horizon, the sky a bruised red.
The khalasar had made camp. Tents and sleeping mats were
scattered as far as the eye could see. A hot wind blew. Jhogo and
Aggo were digging a repit to burn the dead stallion. A crowd had
gathered to stare at Dany with hard black eyes, their faces like
masks of beaten copper. She saw Ser Jorah Mormont, wearing mail
and leather now, sweat beading on his broad, balding forehead. He
pushed his way through the Dothraki to Dany’s side. When he saw
the scarlet footprints her boots had left on the ground, the color
seemed to drain from his face. “What have you done, you little
fool?” he asked hoarsely.
“I had to save him.”
“We could have ed,” he said. “I would have seen you safe to
Asshai, Princess. There was no need …”
“Am I truly your princess?” she asked him.
“You know you are, gods save us both.”
“Then help me now.”
Ser Jorah grimaced. “Would that I knew how.”

Mirri Maz Duur’s voice rose to a high, ululating wail that sent a
shiver down Dany’s back. Some of the Dothraki began to mutter and
back away. The tent was aglow with the light of braziers within.
Through the blood-spattered sandsilk, she glimpsed shadows
moving.
Mirri Maz Duur was dancing, and not alone.
Dany saw naked fear on the faces of the Dothraki. “This must not
be,” Qotho thundered.
She had not seen the bloodrider return. Haggo and Cohollo were
with him. They had brought the hairless men, the eunuchs who
healed with knife and needle and re.
“This will be,” Dany replied.
“Maegi,” Haggo growled. And old Cohollo—Cohollo who had
bound his life to Drogo’s on the day of his birth, Cohollo who had
always been kind to her—Cohollo spat full in her face.
“You will die, maegi,” Qotho promised, “but the other must die
rst.” He drew his arakh and made for the tent.
“No,” she shouted, “you mustn’t.” She caught him by the shoulder,
but Qotho shoved her aside. Dany fell to her knees, crossing her
arms over her belly to protect the child within. “Stop him,” she
commanded her khas, “kill him.”
Rakharo and Quaro stood beside the tent ap. Quaro took a step
forward, reaching for the handle of his whip, but Qotho spun
graceful as a dancer, the curved arakh rising. It caught Quaro low
under the arm, the bright sharp steel biting up through leather and
skin, through muscle and rib bone. Blood fountained as the young
rider reeled backward, gasping.
Qotho wrenched the blade free. “Horselord,” Ser Jorah Mormont
called. “Try me.” His longsword slid from its scabbard.
Qotho whirled, cursing. The arakh moved so fast that Quaro’s
blood ew from it in a ne spray, like rain in a hot wind. The
longsword caught it a foot from Ser Jorah’s face, and held it
quivering for an instant as Qotho howled in fury. The knight was
clad in chainmail, with gauntlets and greaves of lobstered steel and
a heavy gorget around his throat, but he had not thought to don his
helm.

Qotho danced backward, arakh whirling around his head in a
shining blur, ickering out like lightning as the knight came on in a
rush. Ser Jorah parried as best he could, but the slashes came so fast
that it seemed to Dany that Qotho had four arakhs and as many
arms. She heard the crunch of sword on mail, saw sparks y as the
long curved blade glanced o a gauntlet. Suddenly it was Mormont
stumbling backward, and Qotho leaping to the attack. The left side
of the knight’s face ran red with blood, and a cut to the hip opened
a gash in his mail and left him limping. Qotho screamed taunts at
him, calling him a craven, a milk man, a eunuch in an iron suit.
“You die now!” he promised, arakh shivering through the red
twilight. Inside Dany’s womb, her son kicked wildly. The curved
blade slipped past the straight one and bit deep into the knight’s hip
where the mail gaped open.
Mormont grunted, stumbled. Dany felt a sharp pain in her belly, a
wetness on her thighs. Qotho shrieked triumph, but his arakh had
found bone, and for half a heartbeat it caught.
It was enough. Ser Jorah brought his longsword down with all the
strength left him, through esh and muscle and bone, and Qotho’s
forearm dangled loose, opping on a thin cord of skin and sinew.
The knight’s next cut was at the Dothraki’s ear, so savage that
Qotho’s face seemed almost to explode.
The Dothraki were shouting, Mirri Maz Duur wailing inside the
tent like nothing human, Quaro pleading for water as he died. Dany
cried out for help, but no one heard. Rakharo was ghting Haggo,
arakh dancing with arakh until Jhogo’s whip cracked, loud as
thunder, the lash coiling around Haggo’s throat. A yank, and the
bloodrider stumbled backward, losing his feet and his sword.
Rakharo sprang forward, howling, swinging his arakh down with
both hands through the top of Haggo’s head. The point caught
between his eyes, red and quivering. Someone threw a stone, and
when Dany looked, her shoulder was torn and bloody. “No,” she
wept, “no, please, stop it, it’s too high, the price is too high.” More
stones came ying. She tried to crawl toward the tent, but Cohollo
caught her. Fingers in her hair, he pulled her head back and she felt
the cold touch of his knife at her throat. “My baby,” she screamed,

and perhaps the gods heard, for as quick as that, Cohollo was dead.
Aggo’s arrow took him under the arm, to pierce his lungs and heart.
When at last Daenerys found the strength to raise her head, she
saw the crowd dispersing, the Dothraki stealing silently back to
their tents and sleeping mats. Some were saddling horses and riding
o . The sun had set. Fires burned throughout the khalasar, great
orange blazes that crackled with fury and spit embers at the sky.
She tried to rise, and agony seized her and squeezed her like a
giant’s st. The breath went out of her; it was all she could do to
gasp. The sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s voice was like a funeral dirge.
Inside the tent, the shadows whirled.
An arm went under her waist, and then Ser Jorah was lifting her
o her feet. His face was sticky with blood, and Dany saw that half
his ear was gone. She convulsed in his arms as the pain took her
again, and heard the knight shouting for her handmaids to help him.
Are they all so afraid? She knew the answer. Another pain grasped
her, and Dany bit back a scream. It felt as if her son had a knife in
each hand, as if he were hacking at her to cut his way out. “Doreah,
curse you,” Ser Jorah roared. “Come here. Fetch the birthing
women.”
“They will not come. They say she is accursed.”
“They’ll come or I’ll have their heads.”
Doreah wept. “They are gone, my lord.”
“The maegi,” someone else said. Was that Aggo? “Take her to the
maegi.”
No, Dany wanted to say, no, not that, you mustn’t, but when she
opened her mouth, a long wail of pain escaped, and the sweat broke
over her skin. What was wrong with them, couldn’t they see? Inside
the tent the shapes were dancing, circling the brazier and the
bloody bath, dark against the sandsilk, and some did not look
human. She glimpsed the shadow of a great wolf, and another like a
man wreathed in ames.
“The Lamb Woman knows the secrets of the birthing bed,” Irri
said. “She said so, I heard her.”
“Yes,” Doreah agreed, “I heard her too.”

No, she shouted, or perhaps she only thought it, for no whisper of
sound escaped her lips. She was being carried. Her eyes opened to
gaze up at a at dead sky, black and bleak and starless. Please, no.
The sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s voice grew louder, until it lled the
world. The shapes! she screamed. The dancers!
Ser Jorah carried her inside the tent.

ARYA

The scent of hot bread drifting from the shops along the Street of
Flour was sweeter than any perfume Arya had ever smelled. She
took a deep breath and stepped closer to the pigeon. It was a plump
one, speckled brown, busily pecking at a crust that had fallen
between two cobblestones, but when Arya’s shadow touched it, it
took to the air.
Her stick sword whistled out and caught it two feet o the
ground, and it went down in a urry of brown feathers. She was on
it in the blink of an eye, grabbing a wing as the pigeon apped and
uttered. It pecked at her hand. She grabbed its neck and twisted
until she felt the bone snap.
Compared with catching cats, pigeons were easy.
A passing septon was looking at her askance. “Here’s the best
place to nd pigeon,” Arya told him as she brushed herself o and
picked up her fallen stick sword. “They come for the crumbs.” He
hurried away.
She tied the pigeon to her belt and started down the street. A man
was pushing a load of tarts by on a two-wheeled cart; the smells
sang of blueberries and lemons and apricots. Her stomach made a
hollow rumbly noise. “Could I have one?” she heard herself say. “A
lemon, or … or any kind.”
The pushcart man looked her up and down. Plainly he did not like
what he saw. “Three coppers.”

Arya tapped her wooden sword against the side of her boot. “I’ll
trade you a fat pigeon,” she said.
“The Others take your pigeon,” the pushcart man said.
The tarts were still warm from the oven. The smells were making
her mouth water, but she did not have three coppers … or one. She
gave the pushcart man a look, remembering what Syrio had told her
about seeing. He was short, with a little round belly, and when he
moved he seemed to favor his left leg a little. She was just thinking
that if she snatched a tart and ran he would never be able to catch
her when he said, “You be keepin’ your lthy hands o . The gold
cloaks know how to deal with thieving little gutter rats, that they
do.”
Arya glanced warily behind her. Two of the City Watch were
standing at the mouth of an alley. Their cloaks hung almost to the
ground, the heavy wool dyed a rich gold; their mail and boots and
gloves were black. One wore a longsword at his hip, the other an
iron cudgel. With a last wistful glance at the tarts, Arya edged back
from the cart and hurried o . The gold cloaks had not been paying
her any special attention, but the sight of them tied her stomach in
knots. Arya had been staying as far from the castle as she could get,
yet even from a distance she could see the heads rotting atop the
high red walls. Flocks of crows squabbled noisily over each head,
thick as ies. The talk in Flea Bottom was that the gold cloaks had
thrown in with the Lannisters, their commander raised to a lord,
with lands on the Trident and a seat on the king’s council.
She had also heard other things, scary things, things that made no
sense to her. Some said her father had murdered King Robert and
been slain in turn by Lord Renly. Others insisted that Renly had
killed the king in a drunken quarrel between brothers. Why else
should he have ed in the night like a common thief? One story said
the king had been killed by a boar while hunting, another that he’d
died eating a boar, stu ng himself so full that he’d ruptured at the
table. No, the king had died at table, others said, but only because
Varys the Spider poisoned him. No, it had been the queen who
poisoned him. No, he had died of a pox. No, he had choked on a sh
bone.

One thing all the stories agreed on: King Robert was dead. The
bells in the seven towers of the Great Sept of Baelor had tolled for a
day and a night, the thunder of their grief rolling across the city in a
bronze tide. They only rang the bells like that for the death of a
king, a tanner’s boy told Arya.
All she wanted was to go home, but leaving King’s Landing was
not so easy as she had hoped. Talk of war was on every lip, and
gold cloaks were as thick on the city walls as eas on … well, her,
for one. She had been sleeping in Flea Bottom, on rooftops and in
stables, wherever she could nd a place to lie down, and it hadn’t
taken her long to learn that the district was well named.
Every day since her escape from the Red Keep, Arya had visited
each of the seven city gates in turn. The Dragon Gate, the Lion
Gate, and the Old Gate were closed and barred. The Mud Gate and
the Gate of the Gods were open, but only to those who wanted to
enter the city; the guards let no one out. Those who were allowed
to leave left by the King’s Gate or the Iron Gate, but Lannister menat-arms in crimson cloaks and lion-crested helms manned the guard
posts there. Spying down from the roof of an inn by the King’s Gate,
Arya saw them searching wagons and carriages, forcing riders to
open their saddlebags, and questioning everyone who tried to pass
on foot.
Sometimes she thought about swimming the river, but the
Blackwater Rush was wide and deep, and everyone agreed that its
currents were wicked and treacherous. She had no coin to pay a
ferryman or take passage on a ship.
Her lord father had taught her never to steal, but it was growing
harder to remember why. If she did not get out soon, she would
have to take her chances with the gold cloaks. She hadn’t gone
hungry much since she learned to knock down birds with her stick
sword, but she feared so much pigeon was making her sick. A
couple she’d eaten raw, before she found Flea Bottom.
In the Bottom there were pot-shops along the alleys where huge
tubs of stew had been simmering for years, and you could trade half
your bird for a heel of yesterday’s bread and a “bowl o’ brown,” and
they’d even stick the other half in the re and crisp it up for you, so

long as you plucked the feathers yourself. Arya would have given
anything for a cup of milk and a lemon cake, but the brown wasn’t
so bad. It usually had barley in it, and chunks of carrot and onion
and turnip, and sometimes even apple, with a lm of grease
swimming on top. Mostly she tried not to think about the meat.
Once she had gotten a piece of sh.
The only thing was, the pot-shops were never empty, and even as
she bolted down her food, Arya could feel them watching. Some of
them stared at her boots or her cloak, and she knew what they were
thinking. With others, she could almost feel their eyes crawling
under her leathers; she didn’t know what they were thinking, and
that scared her even more. A couple times, she was followed out
into the alleys and chased, but so far no one had been able to catch
her.
The silver bracelet she’d hoped to sell had been stolen her rst
night out of the castle, along with her bundle of good clothes,
snatched while she slept in a burnt-out house o Pig Alley. All they
left her was the cloak she had been huddled in, the leathers on her
back, her wooden practice sword … and Needle. She’d been lying
on top of Needle, or else it would have been gone too; it was worth
more than all the rest together. Since then Arya had taken to
walking around with her cloak draped over her right arm, to
conceal the blade at her hip. The wooden sword she carried in her
left hand, out where everybody could see it, to scare o robbers,
but there were men in the pot-shops who wouldn’t have been scared
o if she’d had a battle-axe. It was enough to make her lose her
taste for pigeon and stale bread. Often as not, she went to bed
hungry rather than risk the stares.
Once she was outside the city, she would nd berries to pick, or
orchards she might raid for apples and cherries. Arya remembered
seeing some from the kingsroad on the journey south. And she could
dig for roots in the forest, even run down some rabbits. In the city,
the only things to run down were rats and cats and scrawny dogs.
The pot-shops would give you a stful of coppers for a litter of
pups, she’d heard, but she didn’t like to think about that.

Down below the Street of Flour was a maze of twisting alleys and
cross streets. Arya scrambled through the crowds, trying to put
distance between her and the gold cloaks. She had learned to keep
to the center of the street. Sometimes she had to dodge wagons and
horses, but at least you could see them coming. If you walked near
the buildings, people grabbed you. In some alleys you couldn’t help
but brush against the walls; the buildings leaned in so close they
almost met.
A whooping gang of small children went running past, chasing a
rolling hoop. Arya stared at them with resentment, remembering
the times she’d played at hoops with Bran and Jon and their baby
brother Rickon. She wondered how big Rickon had grown, and
whether Bran was sad. She would have given anything if Jon had
been here to call her “little sister” and muss her hair. Not that it
needed mussing. She’d seen her re ection in puddles, and she didn’t
think hair got any more mussed than hers.
She had tried talking to the children she saw in the street, hoping
to make a friend who would give her a place to sleep, but she must
have talked wrong or something. The little ones only looked at her
with quick, wary eyes and ran away if she came too close. Their big
brothers and sisters asked questions Arya couldn’t answer, called
her names, and tried to steal from her. Only yesterday, a scrawny
barefoot girl twice her age had knocked her down and tried to pull
the boots o her feet, but Arya gave her a crack on her ear with her
stick sword that sent her o sobbing and bleeding.
A gull wheeled overhead as she made her way down the hill
toward Flea Bottom. Arya glanced at it thoughtfully, but it was well
beyond the reach of her stick. It made her think of the sea. Maybe
that was the way out. Old Nan used to tell stories of boys who
stowed away on trading galleys and sailed o into all kinds of
adventures. Maybe Arya could do that too. She decided to visit the
riverfront. It was on the way to the Mud Gate anyway, and she
hadn’t checked that one today.
The wharfs were oddly quiet when Arya got there. She spied
another pair of gold cloaks, walking side by side through the sh
market, but they never so much as looked at her. Half the stalls

were empty, and it seemed to her that there were fewer ships at
dock than she remembered. Out on the Blackwater, three of the
king’s war galleys moved in formation, gold-painted hulls splitting
the water as their oars rose and fell. Arya watched them for a bit,
then began to make her way along the river.
When she saw the guardsmen on the third pier, in grey woolen
cloaks trimmed with white satin, her heart almost stopped in her
chest. The sight of Winterfell's colors brought tears to her eyes.
Behind them, a sleek three-banked trading galley rocked at her
moorings. Arya could not read the name painted on the hull; the
words were strange, Myrish, Braavosi, perhaps even High Valyrian.
She grabbed a passing longshoreman by the sleeve. “Please,” she
said, “what ship is this?”
“She’s the Wind Witch, out of Myr,” the man said.
“She’s still here,” Arya blurted. The longshoreman gave her a
queer look, shrugged, and walked away. Arya ran toward the pier.
The Wind Witch was the ship Father had hired to take her
home … still waiting! She’d imagined it had sailed ages ago.
Two of the guardsmen were dicing together while the third
walked rounds, his hand on the pommel of his sword. Ashamed to
let them see her crying like a baby, she stopped to rub at her eyes.
Her eyes her eyes her eyes, why did …
Look with your eyes, she heard Syrio whisper.
Arya looked. She knew all of her father’s men. The three in the
grey cloaks were strangers. “You,” the one walking rounds called
out. “What do you want here, boy?” The other two looked up from
their dice.
It was all Arya could do not to bolt and run, but she knew that if
she did, they would be after her at once. She made herself walk
closer. They were looking for a girl, but he thought she was a boy.
She’d be a boy, then. “Want to buy a pigeon?” She showed him the
dead bird.
“Get out of here,” the guardsman said.
Arya did as he told her. She did not have to pretend to be
frightened. Behind her, the men went back to their dice.

She could not have said how she got back to Flea Bottom, but she
was breathing hard by the time she reached the narrow crooked
unpaved streets between the hills. The Bottom had a stench to it, a
stink of pigsties and stables and tanner’s sheds, mixed in with the
sour smell of winesinks and cheap whorehouses. Arya wound her
way through the maze dully. It was not until she caught a whi of
bubbling brown coming through a pot-shop door that she realized
her pigeon was gone. It must have slipped from her belt as she ran,
or someone had stolen it and she’d never noticed. For a moment she
wanted to cry again. She’d have to walk all the way back to the
Street of Flour to nd another one that plump.
Far across the city, bells began to ring.
Arya glanced up, listening, wondering what the ringing meant
this time.
“What’s this now?” a fat man called from the pot-shop.
“The bells again, gods ha’mercy,” wailed an old woman.
A red-haired whore in a wisp of painted silk pushed open a
second-story window. “Is it the boy king that’s died now?” she
shouted down, leaning out over the street. “Ah, that’s a boy for you,
they never last long.” As she laughed, a naked man slid his arms
around her from behind, biting her neck and rubbing the heavy
white breasts that hung loose beneath her shift.
“Stupid slut,” the fat man shouted up. “The king’s not dead, that’s
only summoning bells. One tower tolling. When the king dies, they
ring every bell in the city.”
“Here, quit your biting, or I’ll ring your bells,” the woman in the
window said to the man behind her, pushing him o with an elbow.
“So who is it died, if not the king?”
“It’s a summoning,” the fat man repeated.
Two boys close to Arya’s age scampered past, splashing through a
puddle. The old woman cursed them, but they kept right on going.
Other people were moving too, heading up the hill to see what the
noise was about. Arya ran after the slower boy. “Where you going?”
she shouted when she was right behind him. “What’s happening?”
He glanced back without slowing. “The gold cloaks is carryin’ him
to the sept.”

“Who?” she yelled, running hard.
“The Hand! They’ll be taking his head o , Buu says.”
A passing wagon had left a deep rut in the street. The boy leapt
over, but Arya never saw it. She tripped and fell, face rst, scraping
her knee open on a stone and smashing her ngers when her hands
hit the hard-packed earth. Needle tangled between her legs. She
sobbed as she struggled to her knees. The thumb of her left hand
was covered with blood. When she sucked on it, she saw that half
the thumbnail was gone, ripped o in her fall. Her hands throbbed,
and her knee was all bloody too.
“Make way!” someone shouted from the cross street. “Make way
for my lords of Redwyne!” It was all Arya could do to get out of the
road before they ran her down, four guardsmen on huge horses,
pounding past at a gallop. They wore checked cloaks, blue-andburgundy. Behind them, two young lordlings rode side by side on a
pair of chestnut mares alike as peas in a pod. Arya had seen them in
the bailey a hundred times; the Redwyne twins, Ser Horas and Ser
Hobber, homely youths with orange hair and square, freckled faces.
Sansa and Jeyne Poole used to call them Ser Horror and Ser
Slobber, and giggle whenever they caught sight of them. They did
not look funny now.
Everyone was moving in the same direction, all in a hurry to see
what the ringing was all about. The bells seemed louder now,
clanging, calling. Arya joined the stream of people. Her thumb hurt
so bad where the nail had broken that it was all she could do not to
cry. She bit her lip as she limped along, listening to the excited
voices around her.
“—the King’s Hand, Lord Stark. They’re carrying him up to
Baelor’s Sept.”
“I heard he was dead.”
“Soon enough, soon enough. Here, I got me a silver stag says they
lop his head o .”
“Past time, the traitor.” The man spat.
Arya struggled to nd a voice. “He never—” she started, but she
was only a child and they talked right over her.

“Fool! They ain’t neither going to lop him. Since when do they
knick traitors on the steps of the Great Sept?”
“Well, they don’t mean to anoint him no knight. I heard it was
Stark killed old King Robert. Slit his throat in the woods, and when
they found him, he stood there cool as you please and said it was
some old boar did for His Grace.”
“Ah, that’s not true, it was his own brother did him, that Renly,
him with his gold antlers.”
“You shut your lying mouth, woman. You don’t know what you’re
saying, his lordship’s a ne true man.”
By the time they reached the Street of the Sisters, they were
packed in shoulder to shoulder. Arya let the human current carry
her along, up to the top of Visenya’s Hill. The white marble plaza
was a solid mass of people, all yammering excitedly at each other
and straining to get closer to the Great Sept of Baelor. The bells
were very loud here.
Arya squirmed through the press, ducking between the legs of
horses and clutching tight to her sword stick. From the middle of
the crowd, all she could see were arms and legs and stomachs, and
the seven slender towers of the sept looming overhead. She spotted
a wood wagon and thought to climb up on the back where she
might be able to see, but others had the same idea. The teamster
cursed at them and drove them o with a crack of his whip.
Arya grew frantic. Forcing her way to the front of the crowd, she
was shoved up against the stone of a plinth. She looked up at Baelor
the Blessed, the septon king. Sliding her stick sword through her
belt, Arya began to climb. Her broken thumbnail left smears of
blood on the painted marble, but she made it up, and wedged
herself in between the king’s feet.
That was when she saw her father.
Lord Eddard stood on the High Septon’s pulpit outside the doors
of the sept, supported between two of the gold cloaks. He was
dressed in a rich grey velvet doublet with a white wolf sewn on the
front in beads, and a grey wool cloak trimmed with fur, but he was
thinner than Arya had ever seen him, his long face drawn with pain.

He was not standing so much as being held up; the cast over his
broken leg was grey and rotten.
The High Septon himself stood behind him, a squat man, grey
with age and ponderously fat, wearing long white robes and an
immense crown of spun gold and crystal that wreathed his head
with rainbows whenever he moved.
Clustered around the doors of the sept, in front of the raised
marble pulpit, were a knot of knights and high lords. Jo rey was
prominent among them, his raiment all crimson, silk and satin
patterned with prancing stags and roaring lions, a gold crown on his
head. His queen mother stood beside him in a black mourning gown
slashed with crimson, a veil of black diamonds in her hair. Arya
recognized the Hound, wearing a snowy white cloak over his dark
grey armor, with four of the Kingsguard around him. She saw Varys
the eunuch gliding among the lords in soft slippers and a patterned
damask robe, and she thought the short man with the silvery cape
and pointed beard might be the one who had once fought a duel for
Mother.
And there in their midst was Sansa, dressed in sky-blue silk, with
her long auburn hair washed and curled and silver bracelets on her
wrists. Arya scowled, wondering what her sister was doing here,
why she looked so happy.
A long line of gold-cloaked spearmen held back the crowd,
commanded by a stout man in elaborate armor, all black lacquer
and gold ligree. His cloak had the metallic shimmer of true clothof-gold.
When the bell ceased to toll, a quiet slowly settled across the
great plaza, and her father lifted his head and began to speak, his
voice so thin and weak she could scarcely make him out. People
behind her began to shout out, “What?” and “Louder!” The man in
the black-and-gold armor stepped up behind Father and prodded
him sharply. You leave him alone! Arya wanted to shout, but she
knew no one would listen. She chewed her lip.
Her father raised his voice and began again. “I am Eddard Stark,
Lord of Winterfell and Hand of the King,” he said more loudly, his

voice carrying across the plaza, “and I come before you to confess
my treason in the sight of gods and men.”
“NO,” Arya whimpered. Below her, the crowd began to scream
and shout. Taunts and obscenities lled the air. Sansa had hidden
her face in her hands.
Her father raised his voice still higher, straining to be heard. “I
betrayed the faith of my king and the trust of my friend, Robert,”
he shouted. “I swore to defend and protect his children, yet before
his blood was cold, I plotted to depose and murder his son and seize
the throne for myself. Let the High Septon and Baelor the Beloved
and the Seven bear witness to the truth of what I say: Jo rey
Baratheon is the one true heir to the Iron Throne, and by the grace
of all the gods, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the
Realm.”
A stone came sailing out of the crowd. Arya cried out as she saw
her father hit. The gold cloaks kept him from falling. Blood ran
down his face from a deep gash across his forehead. More stones
followed. One struck the guard to Father’s left. Another went
clanging o the breastplate of the knight in the black-and-gold
armor. Two of the Kingsguard stepped in front of Jo rey and the
queen, protecting them with their shields.
Her hand slid beneath her cloak and found Needle in its sheath.
She tightened her ngers around the grip, squeezing as hard as she
had ever squeezed anything. Please, gods, keep him safe, she prayed.
Don’t let them hurt my father.
The High Septon knelt before Jo rey and his mother. “As we sin,
so do we su er,” he intoned, in a deep swelling voice much louder
than Father’s. “This man has confessed his crimes in the sight of
gods and men, here in this holy place.” Rainbows danced around his
head as he lifted his hands in entreaty. “The gods are just, yet
Blessed Baelor taught us that they are also merciful. What shall be
done with this traitor, Your Grace?”
A thousand voices were screaming, but Arya never heard them.
Prince Jo rey … no, King Jo rey … stepped out from behind the
shields of his Kingsguard. “My mother bids me let Lord Eddard take
the black, and Lady Sansa has begged mercy for her father.” He

looked straight at Sansa then, and smiled, and for a moment Arya
thought that the gods had heard her prayer, until Jo rey turned
back to the crowd and said, “But they have the soft hearts of
women. So long as I am your king, treason shall never go
unpunished. Ser Ilyn, bring me his head!”
The crowd roared, and Arya felt the statue of Baelor rock as they
surged against it. The High Septon clutched at the king’s cape, and
Varys came rushing over waving his arms, and even the queen was
saying something to him, but Jo rey shook his head. Lords and
knights moved aside as he stepped through, tall and eshless, a
skeleton in iron mail, the King’s Justice. Dimly, as if from far o ,
Arya heard her sister scream. Sansa had fallen to her knees, sobbing
hysterically. Ser Ilyn Payne climbed the steps of the pulpit.
Arya wriggled between Baelor’s feet and threw herself into the
crowd, drawing Needle. She landed on a man in a butcher’s apron,
knocking him to the ground. Immediately someone slammed into
her back and she almost went down herself. Bodies closed in around
her, stumbling and pushing, trampling on the poor butcher. Arya
slashed at them with Needle.
High atop the pulpit, Ser Ilyn Payne gestured and the knight in
black-and-gold gave a command. The gold cloaks ung Lord Eddard
to the marble, with his head and chest out over the edge.
“Here, you!” an angry voice shouted at Arya, but she bowled
past, shoving people aside, squirming between them, slamming into
anyone in her way. A hand fumbled at her leg and she hacked at it,
kicked at shins. A woman stumbled and Arya ran up her back,
cutting to both sides, but it was no good, no good, there were too
many people, no sooner did she make a hole than it closed again.
Someone bu eted her aside. She could still hear Sansa screaming.
Ser Ilyn drew a two-handed greatsword from the scabbard on his
back. As he lifted the blade above his head, sunlight seemed to
ripple and dance down the dark metal, glinting o an edge sharper
than any razor. Ice, she thought, he has Ice! Her tears streamed
down her face, blinding her.
And then a hand shot out of the press and closed round her arm
like a wolf trap, so hard that Needle went ying from her hand.

Arya was wrenched o her feet. She would have fallen if he hadn’t
held her up, as easy as if she were a doll. A face pressed close to
hers, long black hair and tangled beard and rotten teeth. “Don’t
look!” a thick voice snarled at her.
“I … I … I …” Arya sobbed.
The old man shook her so hard her teeth rattled. “Shut your
mouth and close your eyes, boy.” Dimly, as if from far away, she
heard a … a noise … a soft sighing sound, as if a million people had
let out their breath at once. The old man’s ngers dug into her arm,
sti as iron. “Look at me. Yes, that’s the way of it, at me.” Sour
wine perfumed his breath. “Remember, boy?”
It was the smell that did it. Arya saw the matted greasy hair, the
patched, dusty black cloak that covered his twisted shoulders, the
hard black eyes squinting at her. And she remembered the black
brother who had come to visit her father.
“Know me now, do you? There’s a bright boy.” He spat. “They’re
done here. You’ll be coming with me, and you’ll be keeping your
mouth shut.” When she started to reply, he shook her again, even
harder. “Shut, I said.”
The plaza was beginning to empty. The press dissolved around
them as people drifted back to their lives. But Arya’s life was gone.
Numb, she trailed along beside … Yoren, yes, his name is Yoren. She
did not recall him nding Needle, until he handed the sword back to
her. “Hope you can use that, boy.”
“I’m not—” she started.
He shoved her into a doorway, thrust dirty ngers through her
hair, and gave it a twist, yanking her head back. “—not a smart boy,
that what you mean to say?”
He had a knife in his other hand.
As the blade ashed toward her face, Arya threw herself
backward, kicking wildly, wrenching her head from side to side, but
he had her by the hair, so strong, she could feel her scalp tearing,
and on her lips the salt taste of tears.

BRAN

The oldest were men grown, seventeen and eighteen years from the
day of their naming. One was past twenty. Most were younger,
sixteen or less.
Bran watched them from the balcony of Maester Luwin’s turret,
listening to them grunt and strain and curse as they swung their
staves and wooden swords. The yard was alive to the clack of wood
on wood, punctuated all too often by thwacks and yowls of pain
when a blow struck leather or esh. Ser Rodrik strode among the
boys, face reddening beneath his white whiskers, muttering at them
one and all. Bran had never seen the old knight look so erce. “No,”
he kept saying. “No. No. No.”
“They don’t ght very well,” Bran said dubiously. He scratched
Summer idly behind the ears as the direwolf tore at a haunch of
meat. Bones crunched between his teeth.
“For a certainty,” Maester Luwin agreed with a deep sigh. The
maester was peering through his big Myrish lens tube, measuring
shadows and noting the position of the comet that hung low in the
morning sky. “Yet given time … Ser Rodrik has the truth of it, we
need men to walk the walls. Your lord father took the cream of his
guard to King’s Landing, and your brother took the rest, along with
all the likely lads for leagues around. Many will not come back to
us, and we must needs nd the men to take their places.”
Bran stared resentfully at the sweating boys below. “If I still had
my legs, I could beat them all.” He remembered the last time he’d

held a sword in his hand, when the king had come to Winterfell. It
was only a wooden sword, yet he’d knocked Prince Tommen down
half a hundred times. “Ser Rodrik should teach me to use a poleaxe.
If I had a poleaxe with a big long haft, Hodor could be my legs. We
could be a knight together.”
“I think that … unlikely,” Maester Luwin said. “Bran, when a man
ghts, his arms and legs and thoughts must be as one.”
Below in the yard, Ser Rodrik was yelling. “You ght like a
goose. He pecks you and you peck him harder. Parry! Block the
blow. Goose ghting will not su ce. If those were real swords, the
rst peck would take your arm o !” One of the other boys laughed,
and the old knight rounded on him. “You laugh. You. Now that is
gall. You ght like a hedgehog …”
“There was a knight once who couldn’t see,” Bran said
stubbornly, as Ser Rodrik went on below. “Old Nan told me about
him. He had a long sta with blades at both ends and he could spin
it in his hands and chop two men at once.”
“Symeon Star-Eyes,” Luwin said as he marked numbers in a book.
“When he lost his eyes, he put star sapphires in the empty sockets,
or so the singers claim. Bran, that is only a story, like the tales of
Florian the Fool. A fable from the Age of Heroes.” The maester
tsked. “You must put these dreams aside, they will only break your
heart.”
The mention of dreams reminded him. “I dreamed about the crow
again last night. The one with three eyes. He ew into my
bedchamber and told me to come with him, so I did. We went down
to the crypts. Father was there, and we talked. He was sad.”
“And why was that?” Luwin peered through his tube.
“It was something to do about Jon, I think.” The dream had been
deeply disturbing, more so than any of the other crow dreams.
“Hodor won’t go down into the crypts.”
The maester had only been half listening, Bran could tell. He
lifted his eye from the tube, blinking. “Hodor won’t …?”
“Go down into the crypts. When I woke, I told him to take me
down, to see if Father was truly there. At rst he didn’t know what
I was saying, but I got him to the steps by telling him to go here

and go there, only then he wouldn’t go down. He just stood on the
top step and said ‘Hodor,’ like he was scared of the dark, but I had a
torch. It made me so mad I almost gave him a swat in the head, like
Old Nan is always doing.” He saw the way the maester was
frowning and hurriedly added, “I didn’t, though.”
“Good. Hodor is a man, not a mule to be beaten.”
“In the dream I ew down with the crow, but I can’t do that when
I’m awake,” Bran explained.
“Why would you want to go down to the crypts?”
“I told you. To look for Father.”
The maester tugged at the chain around his neck, as he often did
when he was uncomfortable. “Bran, sweet child, one day Lord
Eddard will sit below in stone, beside his father and his father’s
father and all the Starks back to the old Kings in the North … but
that will not be for many years, gods be good. Your father is a
prisoner of the queen in King’s Landing. You will not nd him in the
crypts.”
“He was there last night. I talked to him.”
“Stubborn boy,” the maester sighed, setting his book aside.
“Would you like to go see?”
“I can’t. Hodor won’t go, and the steps are too narrow and twisty
for Dancer.”
“I believe I can solve that di culty.”
In place of Hodor, the wildling woman Osha was summoned. She
was tall and tough and uncomplaining, willing to go wherever she
was commanded. “I lived my life beyond the Wall, a hole in the
ground won’t fret me none, m’lords,” she said.
“Summer, come,” Bran called as she lifted him in wiry-strong
arms. The direwolf left his bone and followed as Osha carried Bran
across the yard and down the spiral steps to the cold vault under the
earth. Maester Luwin went ahead with a torch. Bran did not even
mind—too badly—that she carried him in her arms and not on her
back. Ser Rodrik had ordered Osha’s chain struck o , since she had
served faithfully and well since she had been at Winterfell. She still
wore the heavy iron shackles around her ankles—a sign that she

was not yet wholly trusted—but they did not hinder her sure strides
down the steps.
Bran could not recall the last time he had been in the crypts. It
had been before, for certain. When he was little, he used to play
down here with Robb and Jon and his sisters.
He wished they were here now; the vault might not have seemed
so dark and scary. Summer stalked out in the echoing gloom, then
stopped, lifted his head, and sni ed the chill dead air. He bared his
teeth and crept backward, eyes glowing golden in the light of the
maester’s torch. Even Osha, hard as old iron, seemed
uncomfortable. “Grim folk, by the look of them,” she said as she
eyed the long row of granite Starks on their stone thrones.
“They were the Kings of Winter,” Bran whispered. Somehow it
felt wrong to talk too loudly in this place.
Osha smiled. “Winter’s got no king. If you’d seen it, you’d know
that, summer boy.”
“They were the Kings in the North for thousands of years,”
Maester Luwin said, lifting the torch high so the light shone on the
stone faces. Some were hairy and bearded, shaggy men erce as the
wolves that crouched by their feet. Others were shaved clean, their
features gaunt and sharp-edged as the iron longswords across their
laps. “Hard men for a hard time. Come.” He strode briskly down the
vault, past the procession of stone pillars and the endless carved
gures. A tongue of ame trailed back from the upraised torch as he
went.
The vault was cavernous, longer than Winterfell itself, and Jon
had told him once that there were other levels underneath, vaults
even deeper and darker where the older kings were buried. It would
not do to lose the light. Summer refused to move from the steps,
even when Osha followed the torch, Bran in her arms.
“Do you recall your history, Bran?” the maester said as they
walked. “Tell Osha who they were and what they did, if you can.”
He looked at the passing faces and the tales came back to him.
The maester had told him the stories, and Old Nan had made them
come alive. “That one is Jon Stark. When the sea raiders landed in
the east, he drove them out and built the castle at White Harbor.

His son was Rickard Stark, not my father’s father but another
Rickard, he took the Neck away from the Marsh King and married
his daughter. Theon Stark’s the real thin one with the long hair and
the skinny beard. They called him the ‘Hungry Wolf,’ because he
was always at war. That’s a Brandon, the tall one with the dreamy
face, he was Brandon the Shipwright, because he loved the sea. His
tomb is empty. He tried to sail west across the Sunset Sea and was
never seen again. His son was Brandon the Burner, because he put
the torch to all his father’s ships in grief. There’s Rodrik Stark, who
won Bear Island in a wrestling match and gave it to the Mormonts.
And that’s Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt. He was the last King
in the North and the rst Lord of Winterfell, after he yielded to
Aegon the Conqueror. Oh, there, he’s Cregan Stark. He fought with
Prince Aemon once, and the Dragonknight said he’d never faced a
ner swordsman.” They were almost at the end now, and Bran felt a
sadness creeping over him. “And there’s my grandfather, Lord
Rickard, who was beheaded by Mad King Aerys. His daughter
Lyanna and his son Brandon are in the tombs beside him. Not me,
another Brandon, my father’s brother. They’re not supposed to have
statues, that’s only for the lords and the kings, but my father loved
them so much he had them done.”
“The maid’s a fair one,” Osha said.
“Robert was betrothed to marry her, but Prince Rhaegar carried
her o and raped her,” Bran explained. “Robert fought a war to win
her back. He killed Rhaegar on the Trident with his hammer, but
Lyanna died and he never got her back at all.”
“A sad tale,” said Osha, “but those empty holes are sadder.”
“Lord Eddard’s tomb, for when his time comes,” Maester Luwin
said. “Is this where you saw your father in your dream, Bran?”
“Yes.” The memory made him shiver. He looked around the vault
uneasily, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling. Had he heard a
noise? Was there someone here?
Maester Luwin stepped toward the open sepulchre, torch in hand.
“As you see, he’s not here. Nor will he be, for many a year. Dreams
are only dreams, child.” He thrust his arm into the blackness inside

the tomb, as into the mouth of some great beast. “Do you see? It’s
quite empt—”
The darkness sprang at him, snarling.
Bran saw eyes like green re, a ash of teeth, fur as black as the
pit around them. Maester Luwin yelled and threw up his hands. The
torch went ying from his ngers, caromed o the stone face of
Brandon Stark, and tumbled to the statue’s feet, the ames licking
up his legs. In the drunken shifting torchlight, they saw Luwin
struggling with the direwolf, beating at his muzzle with one hand
while the jaws closed on the other.
“Summer!” Bran screamed.
And Summer came, shooting from the dimness behind them, a
leaping shadow. He slammed into Shaggydog and knocked him
back, and the two direwolves rolled over and over in a tangle of
grey and black fur, snapping and biting at each other, while Maester
Luwin struggled to his knees, his arm torn and bloody. Osha
propped Bran up against Lord Rickard’s stone wolf as she hurried to
assist the maester. In the light of the guttering torch, shadow
wolves twenty feet tall fought on the wall and roof.
“Shaggy,” a small voice called. When Bran looked up, his little
brother was standing in the mouth of Father’s tomb. With one nal
snap at Summer’s face, Shaggydog broke o and bounded to
Rickon’s side. “You let my father be,” Rickon warned Luwin. “You
let him be.”
“Rickon,” Bran said softly. “Father’s not here.”
“Yes he is. I saw him.” Tears glistened on Rickon’s face. “I saw
him last night.”
“In your dream …?”
Rickon nodded. “You leave him. You leave him be. He’s coming
home now, like he promised. He’s coming home.”
Bran had never seen Maester Luwin look so uncertain before.
Blood dripped down his arm where Shaggydog had shredded the
wool of his sleeve and the esh beneath. “Osha, the torch,” he said,
biting through his pain, and she snatched it up before it went out.
Soot stains blackened both legs of his uncle’s likeness. “That … that

beast,” Luwin went on, “is supposed to be chained up in the
kennels.”
Rickon patted Shaggydog’s muzzle, damp with blood. “I let him
loose. He doesn’t like chains.” He licked at his ngers.
“Rickon,” Bran said, “would you like to come with me?”
“No. I like it here.”
“It’s dark here. And cold.”
“I’m not afraid. I have to wait for Father.”
“You can wait with me,” Bran said. “We’ll wait together, you and
me and our wolves.” Both of the direwolves were licking wounds
now, and would bear close watching.
“Bran,” the maester said rmly, “I know you mean well, but
Shaggydog is too wild to run loose. I’m the third man he’s savaged.
Give him the freedom of the castle and it’s only a question of time
before he kills someone. The truth is hard, but the wolf has to be
chained, or …” He hesitated.
… or killed, Bran thought, but what he said was, “He was not
made for chains. We will wait in your tower, all of us.”
“That is quite impossible,” Maester Luwin said.
Osha grinned. “The boy’s the lordling here, as I recall.” She
handed Luwin back his torch and scooped Bran up into her arms
again. “The maester’s tower it is.”
“Will you come, Rickon?”
His brother nodded. “If Shaggy comes too,” he said, running after
Osha and Bran, and there was nothing Maester Luwin could do but
follow, keeping a wary eye on the wolves.
Maester Luwin’s turret was so cluttered that it seemed to Bran a
wonder that he ever found anything. Tottering piles of books
covered tables and chairs, rows of stoppered jars lined the shelves,
candle stubs and puddles of dried wax dotted the furniture, the
bronze Myrish lens tube sat on a tripod by the terrace door, star
charts hung from the walls, shadow maps lay scattered among the
rushes, papers, quills, and pots of inks were everywhere, and all of
it was spotted with droppings from the ravens in the rafters. Their
strident quorks drifted down from above as Osha washed and
cleaned and bandaged the maester’s wounds, under Luwin’s terse

instruction. “This is folly,” the small grey man said while she
dabbed at the wolf bites with a stinging ointment. “I agree that it is
odd that both you boys dreamed the same dream, yet when you
stop to consider it, it’s only natural. You miss your lord father, and
you know that he is a captive. Fear can fever a man’s mind and give
him queer thoughts. Rickon is too young to comprehend—”
“I’m four now,” Rickon said. He was peeking through the lens
tube at the gargoyles on the First Keep. The direwolves sat on
opposite sides of the large round room, licking their wounds and
gnawing on bones.
“—too young, and—ooh, seven hells, that burns, no, don’t stop,
more. Too young, as I say, but you, Bran, you’re old enough to
know that dreams are only dreams.”
“Some are, some aren’t.” Osha poured pale red remilk into a
long gash. Luwin gasped. “The children of the forest could tell you a
thing or two about dreaming.”
Tears were streaming down the maester’s face, yet he shook his
head doggedly. “The children … live only in dreams. Now. Dead
and gone. Enough, that’s enough. Now the bandages. Pads and then
wrap, and make it tight, I’ll be bleeding.”
“Old Nan says the children knew the songs of the trees, that they
could y like birds and swim like sh and talk to the animals,” Bran
said. “She says that they made music so beautiful that it made you
cry like a little baby just to hear it.”
“And all this they did with magic,” Maester Luwin said,
distracted. “I wish they were here now. A spell would heal my arm
less painfully, and they could talk to Shaggy dog and tell him not to
bite.” He gave the big black wolf an angry glance out of the corner
of his eye. “Take a lesson, Bran. The man who trusts in spells is
dueling with a glass sword. As the children did. Here, let me show
you something.” He stood abruptly, crossed the room, and returned
with a green jar in his good hand. “Have a look at these,” he said as
he pulled the stopper and shook out a handful of shiny black
arrowheads.
Bran picked one up. “It’s made of glass.” Curious, Rickon drifted
closer to peer over the table.

“Dragonglass,” Osha named it as she sat down beside Luwin,
bandagings in hand.
“Obsidian,” Maester Luwin insisted, holding out his wounded
arm. “Forged in the res of the gods, far below the earth. The
children of the forest hunted with that, thousands of years ago. The
children worked no metal. In place of mail, they wore long shirts of
woven leaves and bound their legs in bark, so they seemed to melt
into the wood. In place of swords, they carried blades of obsidian.”
“And still do.” Osha placed soft pads over the bites on the
maester’s forearm and bound them tight with long strips of linen.
Bran held the arrowhead up close. The black glass was slick and
shiny. He thought it beautiful. “Can I keep one?”
“As you wish,” the maester said.
“I want one too,” Rickon said. “I want four. I’m four.”
Luwin made him count them out. “Careful, they’re still sharp.
Don’t cut yourself.”
“Tell me about the children,” Bran said. It was important.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Everything.”
Maester Luwin tugged at his chain collar where it chafed against
his neck. “They were people of the Dawn Age, the very rst, before
kings and kingdoms,” he said. “In those days, there were no castles
or holdfasts, no cities, not so much as a market town to be found
between here and the sea of Dorne. There were no men at all. Only
the children of the forest dwelt in the lands we now call the Seven
Kingdoms.
“They were a people dark and beautiful, small of stature, no taller
than children even when grown to manhood. They lived in the
depths of the wood, in caves and crannogs and secret tree towns.
Slight as they were, the children were quick and graceful. Male and
female hunted together, with weirwood bows and ying snares.
Their gods were the gods of the forest, stream, and stone, the old
gods whose names are secret. Their wise men were called greenseers,
and carved strange faces in the weirwoods to keep watch on the
woods. How long the children reigned here or where they came
from, no man can know.

“But some twelve thousand years ago, the First Men appeared
from the east, crossing the Broken Arm of Dorne before it was
broken. They came with bronze swords and great leathern shields,
riding horses. No horse had ever been seen on this side of the
narrow sea. No doubt the children were as frightened by the horses
as the First Men were by the faces in the trees. As the First Men
carved out holdfasts and farms, they cut down the faces and gave
them to the re. Horror-struck, the children went to war. The old
songs say that the greenseers used dark magics to make the seas rise
and sweep away the land, shattering the Arm, but it was too late to
close the door. The wars went on until the earth ran red with blood
of men and children both, but more children than men, for men
were bigger and stronger, and wood and stone and obsidian make a
poor match for bronze. Finally the wise of both races prevailed, and
the chiefs and heroes of the First Men met the greenseers and wood
dancers amidst the weirwood groves of a small island in the great
lake called Gods Eye.
“There they forged the Pact. The First Men were given the
coastlands, the high plains and bright meadows, the mountains and
bogs, but the deep woods were to remain forever the children’s, and
no more weirwoods were to be put to the axe anywhere in the
realm. So the gods might bear witness to the signing, every tree on
the island was given a face, and afterward, the sacred order of
green men was formed to keep watch over the Isle of Faces.
“The Pact began four thousand years of friendship between men
and children. In time, the First Men even put aside the gods they
had brought with them, and took up the worship of the secret gods
of the wood. The signing of the Pact ended the Dawn Age, and
began the Age of Heroes.”
Bran’s st curled around the shiny black arrowhead. “But the
children of the forest are all gone now, you said.”
“Here, they are,” said Osha, as she bit o the end of the last
bandage with her teeth. “North of the Wall, things are di erent.
That’s where the children went, and the giants, and the other old
races.”

Maester Luwin sighed. “Woman, by rights you ought to be dead
or in chains. The Starks have treated you more gently than you
deserve. It is unkind to repay them for their kindness by lling the
boys’ heads with folly.”
“Tell me where they went,” Bran said. “I want to know.”
“Me too,” Rickon echoed.
“Oh, very well,” Luwin muttered. “So long as the kingdoms of the
First Men held sway, the Pact endured, all through the Age of
Heroes and the Long Night and the birth of the Seven Kingdoms, yet
nally there came a time, many centuries later, when other peoples
crossed the narrow sea.
“The Andals were the rst, a race of tall, fair-haired warriors who
came with steel and re and the seven-pointed star of the new gods
painted on their chests. The wars lasted hundreds of years, but in
the end the six southron kingdoms all fell before them. Only here,
where the King in the North threw back every army that tried to
cross the Neck, did the rule of the First Men endure. The Andals
burnt out the weirwood groves, hacked down the faces, slaughtered
the children where they found them, and everywhere proclaimed
the triumph of the Seven over the old gods. So the children ed
north—”
Summer began to howl.
Maester Luwin broke o , startled. When Shaggydog bounded to
his feet and added his voice to his brother’s, dread clutched at
Bran’s heart. “It’s coming,” he whispered, with the certainty of
despair. He had known it since last night, he realized, since the
crow had led him down into the crypts to say farewell. He had
known it, but he had not believed. He had wanted Maester Luwin to
be right. The crow, he thought, the three-eyed crow …
The howling stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Summer
padded across the tower oor to Shaggydog, and began to lick at a
mat of bloody fur on the back of his brother’s neck. From the
window came a utter of wings.
A raven landed on the grey stone sill, opened its beak, and gave a
harsh, raucous rattle of distress.

Rickon began to cry. His arrowheads fell from his hand one by
one and clattered on the oor. Bran pulled him close and hugged
him.
Maester Luwin stared at the black bird as if it were a scorpion
with feathers. He rose, slow as a sleepwalker, and moved to the
window. When he whistled, the raven hopped onto his bandaged
forearm. There was dried blood on its wings. “A hawk,” Luwin
murmured, “perhaps an owl. Poor thing, a wonder it got through.”
He took the letter from its leg.
Bran found himself shivering as the maester unrolled the paper.
“What is it?” he said, holding his brother all the harder.
“You know what it is, boy,” Osha said, not unkindly. She put her
hand on his head.
Maester Luwin looked up at them numbly, a small grey man with
blood on the sleeve of his grey wool robe and tears in his bright
grey eyes. “My lords,” he said to the sons, in a voice gone hoarse
and shrunken, “we … we shall need to nd a stonecarver who knew
his likeness well …”

SANSA

In the tower room at the heart of Maegor’s Holdfast, Sansa gave
herself to the darkness.
She drew the curtains around her bed, slept, woke weeping, and
slept again. When she could not sleep she lay under her blankets
shivering with grief. Servants came and went, bringing meals, but
the sight of food was more than she could bear. The dishes piled up
on the table beneath her window, untouched and spoiling, until the
servants took them away again.
Sometimes her sleep was leaden and dreamless, and she woke
from it more tired than when she had closed her eyes. Yet those
were the best times, for when she dreamed, she dreamed of Father.
Waking or sleeping, she saw him, saw the gold cloaks ing him
down, saw Ser Ilyn striding forward, unsheathing Ice from the
scabbard on his back, saw the moment … the moment when … she
had wanted to look away, she had wanted to, her legs had gone out
from under her and she had fallen to her knees, yet somehow she
could not turn her head, and all the people were screaming and
shouting, and her prince had smiled at her, he’d smiled and she’d felt
safe, but only for a heartbeat, until he said those words, and her
father’s legs … that was what she remembered, his legs, the way
they’d jerked when Ser Ilyn … when the sword …
Perhaps I will die too, she told herself, and the thought did not
seem so terrible to her. If she ung herself from the window, she
could put an end to her su ering, and in the years to come the

singers would write songs of her grief. Her body would lie on the
stones below, broken and innocent, shaming all those who had
betrayed her. Sansa went so far as to cross the bedchamber and
throw open the shutters … but then her courage left her, and she
ran back to her bed, sobbing.
The serving girls tried to talk to her when they brought her
meals, but she never answered them. Once Grand Maester Pycelle
came with a box of asks and bottles, to ask if she was ill. He felt
her brow, made her undress, and touched her all over while her
bedmaid held her down. When he left he gave her a potion of
honeywater and herbs and told her to drink a swallow every night.
She drank it all right then and went back to sleep.
She dreamt of footsteps on the tower stair, an ominous scraping
of leather on stone as a man climbed slowly toward her
bedchamber, step by step. All she could do was huddle behind her
door and listen, trembling, as he came closer and closer. It was Ser
Ilyn Payne, she knew, coming for her with Ice in his hand, coming
to take her head. There was no place to run, no place to hide, no
way to bar the door. Finally the footsteps stopped and she knew he
was just outside, standing there silent with his dead eyes and his
long pocked face. That was when she realized she was naked. She
crouched down, trying to cover herself with her hands, as her door
began to swing open, creaking, the point of the greatsword poking
through …
She woke murmuring, “Please, please, I’ll be good, I’ll be good,
please don’t,” but there was no one to hear.
When they nally came for her in truth, Sansa never heard their
footsteps. It was Jo rey who opened her door, not Ser Ilyn but the
boy who had been her prince. She was in bed, curled up tight, her
curtains drawn, and she could not have said if it was noon or
midnight. The rst thing she heard was the slam of the door. Then
her bed hangings were yanked back, and she threw up a hand
against the sudden light and saw them standing over her.
“You will attend me in court this afternoon,” Jo rey said. “See
that you bathe and dress as be ts my betrothed.” Sandor Clegane
stood at his shoulder in a plain brown doublet and green mantle, his

burned face hideous in the morning light. Behind them were two
knights of the Kingsguard in long white satin cloaks.
Sansa drew her blanket up to her chin to cover herself. “No,” she
whimpered, “please … leave me be.”
“If you won’t rise and dress yourself, my Hound will do it for
you,” Jo rey said.
“I beg of you, my prince …”
“I’m king now. Dog, get her out of bed.”
Sandor Clegane scooped her up around the waist and lifted her o
the featherbed as she struggled feebly. Her blanket fell to the oor.
Underneath she had only a thin bedgown to cover her nakedness.
“Do as you’re bid, child,” Clegane said. “Dress.” He pushed her
toward her wardrobe, almost gently.
Sansa backed away from them. “I did as the queen asked, I wrote
the letters, I wrote what she told me. You promised you’d be
merciful. Please, let me go home. I won’t do any treason, I’ll be
good, I swear it, I don’t have traitor’s blood, I don’t. I only want to
go home.” Remembering her courtesies, she lowered her head. “As
it please you,” she nished weakly.
“It does not please me,” Jo rey said. “Mother says I’m still to
marry you, so you’ll stay here, and you’ll obey.”
“I don’t want to marry you,” Sansa wailed. “You chopped o my
father’s head!”
“He was a traitor. I never promised to spare him, only that I’d be
merciful, and I was. If he hadn’t been your father, I would have had
him torn or ayed, but I gave him a clean death.”
Sansa stared at him, seeing him for the rst time. He was wearing
a padded crimson doublet patterned with lions and a cloth-of-gold
cape with a high collar that framed his face. She wondered how she
could ever have thought him handsome. His lips were as soft and
red as the worms you found after a rain, and his eyes were vain and
cruel. “I hate you,” she whispered.
King Jo rey’s face hardened. “My mother tells me that it isn’t
tting that a king should strike his wife. Ser Meryn.”
The knight was on her before she could think, yanking back her
hand as she tried to shield her face and back-handing her across the

ear with a gloved st. Sansa did not remember falling, yet the next
she knew she was sprawled on one knee amongst the rushes. Her
head was ringing. Ser Meryn Trant stood over her, with blood on
the knuckles of his white silk glove.
“Will you obey now, or shall I have him chastise you again?”
Sansa’s ear felt numb. She touched it, and her ngertips came
away wet and red. “I … as … as you command, my lord.”
“Your Grace,” Jo rey corrected her. “I shall look for you in
court.” He turned and left.
Ser Meryn and Ser Arys followed him out, but Sandor Clegane
lingered long enough to yank her roughly to her feet. “Save
yourself some pain, girl, and give him what he wants.”
“What … what does he want? Please, tell me.”
“He wants you to smile and smell sweet and be his lady love,” the
Hound rasped. “He wants to hear you recite all your pretty little
words the way the septa taught you. He wants you to love
him … and fear him.”
After he was gone, Sansa sank back onto the rushes, staring at the
wall until two of her bedmaids crept timidly into the chamber. “I
will need hot water for my bath, please,” she told them, “and
perfume, and some powder to hide this bruise.” The right side of
her face was swollen and beginning to ache, but she knew Jo rey
would want her to be beautiful.
The hot water made her think of Winterfell, and she took strength
from that. She had not washed since the day her father died, and
she was startled at how lthy the water became. Her maids sluiced
the blood o her face, scrubbed the dirt from her back, washed her
hair and brushed it out until it sprang back in thick auburn curls.
Sansa did not speak to them, except to give them commands; they
were Lannister servants, not her own, and she did not trust them.
When the time came to dress, she chose the green silk gown that
she had worn to the tourney. She recalled how gallant Jo had been
to her that night at the feast. Perhaps it would make him remember
as well, and treat her more gently.
She drank a glass of buttermilk and nibbled at some sweet
biscuits as she waited, to settle her stomach. It was midday when

Ser Meryn returned. He had donned his white armor; a shirt of
enameled scales chased with gold, a tall helm with a golden
sunburst crest, greaves and gorget and gauntlet and boots of
gleaming plate, a heavy wool cloak clasped with a golden lion. His
visor had been removed from his helm, to better show his dour
face; pouchy bags under his eyes, a wide sour mouth, rusty hair
spotted with grey. “My lady,” he said, bowing, as if he had not
beaten her bloody only three hours past. “His Grace has instructed
me to escort you to the throne room.”
“Did he instruct you to hit me if I refused to come?”
“Are you refusing to come, my lady?” The look he gave her was
without expression. He did not so much as glance at the bruise he
had left her.
He did not hate her, Sansa realized; neither did he love her. He
felt nothing for her at all. She was only a … a thing to him. “No,”
she said, rising. She wanted to rage, to hurt him as he’d hurt her, to
warn him that when she was queen she would have him exiled if he
ever dared strike her again … but she remembered what the Hound
had told her, so all she said was, “I shall do whatever His Grace
commands.”
“As I do,” he replied.
“Yes … but you are no true knight, Ser Meryn.”
Sandor Clegane would have laughed at that, Sansa knew. Other
men might have cursed her, warned her to keep silent, even begged
for her forgiveness. Ser Meryn Trant did none of these. Ser Meryn
Trant simply did not care.
The balcony was deserted save for Sansa. She stood with her head
bowed, ghting to hold back her tears, while below Jo rey sat on
his Iron Throne and dispensed what it pleased him to call justice.
Nine cases out of ten seemed to bore him; those he allowed his
council to handle, squirming restlessly while Lord Baelish, Grand
Maester Pycelle, or Queen Cersei resolved the matter. When he did
choose to make a ruling, though, not even his queen mother could
sway him.
A thief was brought before him and he had Ser Ilyn chop his hand
o , right there in court. Two knights came to him with a dispute

about some land, and he decreed that they should duel for it on the
morrow. “To the death,” he added. A woman fell to her knees to
plead for the head of a man executed as a traitor. She had loved
him, she said, and she wanted to see him decently buried. “If you
loved a traitor, you must be a traitor too,” Jo rey said. Two gold
cloaks dragged her o to the dungeons.
Frog-faced Lord Slynt sat at the end of the council table wearing a
black velvet doublet and a shiny cloth-of-gold cape, nodding with
approval every time the king pronounced a sentence. Sansa stared
hard at his ugly face, remembering how he had thrown down her
father for Ser Ilyn to behead, wishing she could hurt him, wishing
that some hero would throw him down and cut o his head. But a
voice inside her whispered, There are no heroes, and she remembered
what Lord Petyr had said to her, here in this very hall. “Life is not a
song, sweetling,” he’d told her. “You may learn that one day to
your sorrow.” In life, the monsters win, she told herself, and now it
was the Hound’s voice she heard, a cold rasp, metal on stone. “Save
yourself some pain, girl, and give him what he wants.”
The last case was a plump tavern singer, accused of making a
song that ridiculed the late King Robert. Jo commanded them to
fetch his woodharp and ordered him to perform the song for the
court. The singer wept and swore he would never sing that song
again, but the king insisted. It was sort of a funny song, all about
Robert ghting with a pig. The pig was the boar who’d killed him,
Sansa knew, but in some verses it almost sounded as if he were
singing about the queen. When the song was done, Jo rey
announced that he’d decided to be merciful. The singer could keep
either his ngers or his tongue. He would have a day to make his
choice. Janos Slynt nodded.
That was the nal business of the afternoon, Sansa saw with
relief, but her ordeal was not yet done. When the herald’s voice
dismissed the court, she ed the balcony, only to nd Jo rey
waiting for her at the base of the curving stairs. The Hound was
with him, and Ser Meryn as well. The young king examined her
critically, top to bottom. “You look much better than you did.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Sansa said. Hollow words, but they
made him nod and smile.
“Walk with me,” Jo rey commanded, o ering her his arm. She
had no choice but to take it. The touch of his hand would have
thrilled her once; now it made her esh crawl. “My name day will
be here soon,” Jo rey said as they slipped out the rear of the throne
room. “There will be a great feast, and gifts. What are you going to
give me?”
“I … I had not thought, my lord.”
“Your Grace,” he said sharply. “You truly are a stupid girl, aren’t
you? My mother says so.”
“She does?” After all that had happened, his words should have
lost their power to hurt her, yet somehow they had not. The queen
had always been so kind to her.
“Oh, yes. She worries about our children, whether they’ll be
stupid like you, but I told her not to trouble herself.” The king
gestured, and Ser Meryn opened a door for them.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she murmured. The Hound was right,
she thought, I am only a little bird, repeating the words they taught me.
The sun had fallen below the western wall, and the stones of the
Red Keep glowed dark as blood.
“I’ll get you with child as soon as you’re able,” Jo rey said as he
escorted her across the practice yard. “If the rst one is stupid, I’ll
chop o your head and nd a smarter wife. When do you think
you’ll be able to have children?”
Sansa could not look at him, he shamed her so. “Septa Mordane
says most … most highborn girls have their owering at twelve or
thirteen.”
Jo rey nodded. “This way.” He led her into the gatehouse, to the
base of the steps that led up to the battlements.
Sansa jerked back away from him, trembling. Suddenly she knew
where they were going. “No,” she said, her voice a frightened gasp.
“Please, no, don’t make me, I beg you …”
Jo rey pressed his lips together. “I want to show you what
happens to traitors.”
Sansa shook her head wildly. “I won’t. I won’t.”

“I can have Ser Meryn drag you up,” he said. “You won’t like
that. You had better do what I say.” Jo rey reached for her, and
Sansa cringed away from him, backing into the Hound.
“Do it, girl,” Sandor Clegane told her, pushing her back toward
the king. His mouth twitched on the burned side of his face and
Sansa could almost hear the rest of it. He'll have you up there no
matter what, so give him what he wants.
She forced herself to take King Jo rey’s hand. The climb was
something out of a nightmare; every step was a struggle, as if she
were pulling her feet out of ankle-deep mud, and there were more
steps than she would have believed, a thousand thousand steps, and
horror waiting on the ramparts.
From the high battlements of the gatehouse, the whole world
spread out below them. Sansa could see the Great Sept of Baelor on
Visenya’s hill, where her father had died. At the other end of the
Street of the Sisters stood the re-blackened ruins of the Dragonpit.
To the west, the swollen red sun was half-hidden behind the Gate of
the Gods. The salt sea was at her back, and to the south was the sh
market and the docks and the swirling torrent of the Blackwater
Rush. And to the north …
She turned that way, and saw only the city, streets and alleys and
hills and bottoms and more streets and more alleys and the stone of
distant walls. Yet she knew that beyond them was open country,
farms and elds and forests, and beyond that, north and north and
north again, stood Winterfell.
“What are you looking at?” Jo rey said. “This is what I wanted
you to see, right here.”
A thick stone parapet protected the outer edge of the rampart,
reaching as high as Sansa’s chin, with crenellations cut into it every
ve feet for archers. The heads were mounted between the crenels,
along the top of the wall, impaled on iron spikes so they faced out
over the city. Sansa had noted them the moment she’d stepped out
onto the wallwalk, but the river and the bustling streets and the
setting sun were ever so much prettier. He can make me look at the
heads, she told herself, but he can’t make me see them.

“This one is your father,” he said. “This one here. Dog, turn it
around so she can see him.”
Sandor Clegane took the head by the hair and turned it. The
severed head had been dipped in tar to preserve it longer. Sansa
looked at it calmly, not seeing it at all. It did not really look like
Lord Eddard, she thought; it did not even look real. “How long do I
have to look?”
Jo rey seemed disappointed. “Do you want to see the rest?”
There was a long row of them.
“If it please Your Grace.”
Jo rey marched her down the wallwalk, past a dozen more heads
and two empty spikes. “I’m saving those for my uncle Stannis and
my uncle Renly,” he explained. The other heads had been dead and
mounted much longer than her father. Despite the tar, most were
long past being recognizable. The king pointed to one and said,
“That’s your septa there,” but Sansa could not even have told that it
was a woman. The jaw had rotted o her face, and birds had eaten
one ear and most of a cheek.
Sansa had wondered what had happened to Septa Mordane,
although she supposed she had known all along. “Why did you kill
her?” she asked. “She was god-sworn …”
“She was a traitor.” Jo rey looked pouty; somehow she was
upsetting him. “You haven’t said what you mean to give me for my
name day. Maybe I should give you something instead, would you
like that?”
“If it please you, my lord,” Sansa said.
When he smiled, she knew he was mocking her. “Your brother is
a traitor too, you know.” He turned Septa Mordane’s head back
around. “I remember your brother from Winterfell. My dog called
him the lord of the wooden sword. Didn’t you, dog?”
“Did I?” the Hound replied. “I don’t recall.”
Jo rey gave a petulant shrug. “Your brother defeated my uncle
Jaime. My mother says it was treachery and deceit. She wept when
she heard. Women are all weak, even her, though she pretends she
isn’t. She says we need to stay in King’s Landing in case my other
uncles attack, but I don’t care. After my name day feast, I’m going

to raise a host and kill your brother myself. That’s what I’ll give
you, Lady Sansa. Your brother’s head.”
A kind of madness took over her then, and she heard herself say,
“Maybe my brother will give me your head.”
Jo rey scowled. “You must never mock me like that. A true wife
does not mock her lord. Ser Meryn, teach her.”
This time the knight grasped her beneath the jaw and held her
head still as he struck her. He hit her twice, left to right, and
harder, right to left. Her lip split and blood ran down her chin, to
mingle with the salt of her tears.
“You shouldn’t be crying all the time,” Jo rey told her. “You’re
more pretty when you smile and laugh.”
Sansa made herself smile, afraid that he would have Ser Meryn
hit her again if she did not, but it was no good, the king still shook
his head. “Wipe o the blood, you’re all messy.”
The outer parapet came up to her chin, but along the inner edge
of the walk was nothing, nothing but a long plunge to the bailey
seventy or eighty feet below. All it would take was a shove, she
told herself. He was standing right there, right there, smirking at her
with those fat wormlips. You could do it, she told herself. You could.
Do it right now. It wouldn’t even matter if she went over with him. It
wouldn’t matter at all.
“Here, girl.” Sandor Clegane knelt before her, between her and
Jo rey. With a delicacy surprising in such a big man, he dabbed at
the blood welling from her broken lip.
The moment was gone. Sansa lowered her eyes. “Thank you,” she
said when he was done. She was a good girl, and always
remembered her courtesies.

DAENERYS

Wings shadowed her fever dreams.
“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”
She was walking down a long hall beneath high stone arches. She
could not look behind her, must not look behind her. There was a
door ahead of her, tiny with distance, but even from afar, she saw
that it was painted red. She walked faster, and her bare feet left
bloody footprints on the stone.
“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”
She saw sunlight on the Dothraki sea, the living plain, rich with
the smells of earth and death. Wind stirred the grasses, and they
rippled like water. Drogo held her in strong arms, and his hand
stroked her sex and opened her and woke that sweet wetness that
was his alone, and the stars smiled down on them, stars in a
daylight sky. “Home,” she whispered as he entered her and lled
her with his seed, but suddenly the stars were gone, and across the
blue sky swept the great wings, and the world took ame.
“… don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”
Ser Jorah’s face was drawn and sorrowful. “Rhaegar was the last
dragon,” he told her. He warmed translucent hands over a glowing
brazier where stone eggs smouldered red as coals. One moment he
was there and the next he was fading, his esh colorless, less
substantial than the wind. “The last dragon,” he whispered, thin as a
wisp, and was gone. She felt the dark behind her, and the red door
seemed farther away than ever.

“… don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”
Viserys stood before her, screaming. “The dragon does not beg,
slut. You do not command the dragon. I am the dragon, and I will
be crowned.” The molten gold trickled down his face like wax,
burning deep channels in his esh. “I am the dragon and I will be
crowned!” he shrieked, and his ngers snapped like snakes, biting at
her nipples, pinching, twisting, even as his eyes burst and ran like
jelly down seared and blackened cheeks.
“… don’t want to wake the dragon …”
The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy
breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a
death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the
darkness. She began to run.
“… don’t want to wake the dragon …”
She could feel the heat inside her, a terrible burning in her womb.
Her son was tall and proud, with Drogo’s copper skin and her own
silver-gold hair, violet eyes shaped like almonds. And he smiled for
her and began to lift his hand toward hers, but when he opened his
mouth the re poured out. She saw his heart burning through his
chest, and in an instant he was gone, consumed like a moth by a
candle, turned to ash. She wept for her child, the promise of a sweet
mouth on her breast, but her tears turned to steam as they touched
her skin.
“… want to wake the dragon …”
Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings.
In their hands were swords of pale re. They had hair of silver and
hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal
and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. “Faster,” they cried, “faster,
faster.” She raced, her feet melting the stone wherever they
touched. “Faster!” the ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and
threw herself forward. A great knife of pain ripped down her back,
and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning
blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen ew.
“… wake the dragon …”
The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the
hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the

stone was gone and she ew across the Dothraki sea, high and
higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed
ed in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home,
she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green elds and great
stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the
door.
“… the dragon …”
And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as
his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his
helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice whispered faintly. “The
last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within
was her own.
After that, for a long time, there was only the pain, the re
within her, and the whisperings of stars.
She woke to the taste of ashes.
“No,” she moaned, “no, please.”
“Khaleesi?” Jhiqui hovered over her, a frightened doe.
The tent was drenched in shadow, still and close. Flakes of ash
drifted upward from a brazier, and Dany followed them with her
eyes through the smoke hole above. Flying, she thought. I had wings,
I was ying. But it was only a dream. “Help me,” she whispered,
struggling to rise. “Bring me …” Her voice was raw as a wound,
and she could not think what she wanted. Why did she hurt so
much? It was as if her body had been torn to pieces and remade
from the scraps. “I want …”
“Yes, Khaleesi.” Quick as that Jhiqui was gone, bolting from the
tent, shouting. Dany needed … something … someone … what? It
was important, she knew. It was the only thing in the world that
mattered. She rolled onto her side and got an elbow under her,
ghting the blanket tangled about her legs. It was so hard to move.
The world swam dizzily. I have to …
They found her on the carpet, crawling toward her dragon eggs.
Ser Jorah Mormont lifted her in his arms and carried her back to
her sleeping silks, while she struggled feebly against him. Over his
shoulder she saw her three handmaids, Jhogo with his little wisp of

mustache, and the at broad face of Mirri Maz Duur. “I must,” she
tried to tell them, “I have to …”
“… sleep, Princess,” Ser Jorah said.
“No,” Dany said. “Please. Please.”
“Yes.” He covered her with silk, though she was burning. “Sleep
and grow strong again, Khaleesi. Come back to us.” And then Mirri
Maz Duur was there, the maegi, tipping a cup against her lips. She
tasted sour milk, and something else, something thick and bitter.
Warm liquid ran down her chin. Somehow she swallowed. The tent
grew dimmer, and sleep took her again. This time she did not
dream. She oated, serene and at peace, on a black sea that knew
no shore.
After a time—a night, a day, a year, she could not say—she woke
again. The tent was dark, its silken walls apping like wings when
the wind gusted outside. This time Dany did not attempt to rise.
“Irri,” she called, “Jhiqui. Doreah.” They were there at once. “My
throat is dry,” she said, “so dry,” and they brought her water. It was
warm and at, yet Dany drank it eagerly, and sent Jhiqui for more.
Irri dampened a soft cloth and stroked her brow. “I have been sick,”
Dany said. The Dothraki girl nodded. “How long?” The cloth was
soothing, but Irri seemed so sad, it frightened her. “Long,” she
whispered. When Jhiqui returned with more water, Mirri Maz Duur
came with her, eyes heavy from sleep. “Drink,” she said, lifting
Dany’s head to the cup once more, but this time it was only wine.
Sweet, sweet wine. Dany drank, and lay back, listening to the soft
sound of her own breathing. She could feel the heaviness in her
limbs, as sleep crept in to ll her up once more. “Bring me …” she
murmured, her voice slurred and drowsy. “Bring … I want to
hold …”
“Yes?” the maegi asked. “What is it you wish, Khaleesi?”
“Bring me … egg … dragon’s egg … please …” Her lashes turned
to lead, and she was too weary to hold them up.
When she woke the third time, a shaft of golden sunlight was
pouring through the smoke hole of the tent, and her arms were
wrapped around a dragon’s egg. It was the pale one, its scales the
color of butter cream, veined with whorls of gold and bronze, and

Dany could feel the heat of it. Beneath her bedsilks, a ne sheen of
perspiration covered her bare skin. Dragondew, she thought. Her
ngers trailed lightly across the surface of the shell, tracing the
wisps of gold, and deep in the stone she felt something twist and
stretch in response. It did not frighten her. All her fear was gone,
burned away.
Dany touched her brow. Under the lm of sweat, her skin was
cool to the touch, her fever gone. She made herself sit. There was a
moment of dizziness, and the deep ache between her thighs. Yet she
felt strong. Her maids came running at the sound of her voice.
“Water,” she told them, “a agon of water, cold as you can nd it.
And fruit, I think. Dates.”
“As you say, Khaleesi.”
“I want Ser Jorah,” she said, standing. Jhiqui brought a sandsilk
robe and draped it over her shoulders. “And a warm bath, and Mirri
Maz Duur, and …” Memory came back to her all at once, and she
faltered. “Khal Drogo,” she forced herself to say, watching their
faces with dread. “Is he—?”
“The khal lives,” Irri answered quietly … yet Dany saw a darkness
in her eyes when she said the words, and no sooner had she spoken
than she rushed away to fetch water.
She turned to Doreah. “Tell me.”
“I … I shall bring Ser Jorah,” the Lysene girl said, bowing her
head and eeing the tent.
Jhiqui would have run as well, but Dany caught her by the wrist
and held her captive. “What is it? I must know. Drogo … and my
child.” Why had she not remembered the child until now? “My
son … Rhaego … where is he? I want him.”
Her handmaid lowered her eyes. “The boy … he did not live,
Khaleesi.” Her voice was a frightened whisper.
Dany released her wrist. My son is dead, she thought as Jhiqui left
the tent. She had known somehow. She had known since she woke
the rst time to Jhiqui’s tears. No, she had known before she woke.
Her dream came back to her, sudden and vivid, and she
remembered the tall man with the copper skin and long silver-gold
braid, bursting into ame.

She should weep, she knew, yet her eyes were dry as ash. She had
wept in her dream, and the tears had turned to steam on her cheeks.
All the grief has been burned out of me, she told herself. She felt sad,
and yet … she could feel Rhaego receding from her, as if he had
never been.
Ser Jorah and Mirri Maz Duur entered a few moments later, and
found Dany standing over the other dragon’s eggs, the two still in
their chest. It seemed to her that they felt as hot as the one she had
slept with, which was passing strange. “Ser Jorah, come here,” she
said. She took his hand and placed it on the black egg with the
scarlet swirls. “What do you feel?”
“Shell, hard as rock.” The knight was wary. “Scales.”
“Heat?”
“No. Cold stone.” He took his hand away. “Princess, are you
well? Should you be up, weak as you are?”
“Weak? I am strong, Jorah.” To please him, she reclined on a pile
of cushions. “Tell me how my child died.”
“He never lived, my princess. The women say …” He faltered,
and Dany saw how the esh hung loose on him, and the way he
limped when he moved.
“Tell me. Tell me what the women say.”
He turned his face away. His eyes were haunted. “They say the
child was …”
She waited, but Ser Jorah could not say it. His face grew dark
with shame. He looked half a corpse himself.
“Monstrous,” Mirri Maz Duur nished for him. The knight was a
powerful man, yet Dany understood in that moment that the maegi
was stronger, and crueler, and in nitely more dangerous. “Twisted.
I drew him forth myself. He was scaled like a lizard, blind, with the
stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. When I
touched him, the esh sloughed o the bone, and inside he was full
of graveworms and the stink of corruption. He had been dead for
years.”
Darkness, Dany thought. The terrible darkness sweeping up behind
to devour her. If she looked back she was lost. “My son was alive

and strong when Ser Jorah carried me into this tent,” she said. “I
could feel him kicking, ghting to be born.”
“That may be as it may be,” answered Mirri Maz Duur, “yet the
creature that came forth from your womb was as I said. Death was
in that tent, Khaleesi.”
“Only shadows,” Ser Jorah husked, but Dany could hear the doubt
in his voice. “I saw, maegi. I saw you, alone, dancing with the
shadows.”
“The grave casts long shadows, Iron Lord,” Mirri said. “Long and
dark, and in the end no light can hold them back.”
Ser Jorah had killed her son, Dany knew. He had done what he
did for love and loyalty, yet he had carried her into a place no
living man should go and fed her baby to the darkness. He knew it
too; the grey face, the hollow eyes, the limp. “The shadows have
touched you too, Ser Jorah,” she told him. The knight made no
reply. Dany turned to the godswife. “You warned me that only
death could pay for life. I thought you meant the horse.”
“No,” Mirri Maz Duur said. “That was a lie you told yourself. You
knew the price.”
Had she? Had she? If I look back I am lost. “The price was paid,”
Dany said. “The horse, my child, Quaro and Qotho, Haggo and
Cohollo. The price was paid and paid and paid.” She rose from her
cushions. “Where is Khal Drogo? Show him to me, godswife, maegi,
bloodmage, whatever you are. Show me Khal Drogo. Show me what
I bought with my son’s life.”
“As you command, Khaleesi,” the old woman said. “Come, I will
take you to him.”
Dany was weaker than she knew. Ser Jorah slipped an arm
around her and helped her stand. “Time enough for this later, my
princess,” he said quietly.
“I would see him now, Ser Jorah.”
After the dimness of the tent, the world outside was blinding
bright. The sun burned like molten gold, and the land was seared
and empty. Her handmaids waited with fruit and wine and water,
and Jhogo moved close to help Ser Jorah support her. Aggo and
Rakharo stood behind. The glare of sun on sand made it hard to see

more, until Dany raised her hand to shade her eyes. She saw the
ashes of a re, a few score horses milling listlessly and searching for
a bite of grass, a scattering of tents and bedrolls. A small crowd of
children had gathered to watch her, and beyond she glimpsed
women going about their work, and withered old men staring at the
at blue sky with tired eyes, swatting feebly at blood ies. A count
might show a hundred people, no more. Where the other forty
thousand had made their camp, only the wind and dust lived now.
“Drogo’s khalasar is gone,” she said.
“A khal who cannot ride is no khal,” said Jhogo.
“The Dothraki follow only the strong,” Ser Jorah said. “I am
sorry, my princess. There was no way to hold them. Ko Pono left
rst, naming himself Khal Pono, and many followed him. Jhaqo was
not long to do the same. The rest slipped away night by night, in
large bands and small. There are a dozen new khalasars on the
Dothraki sea, where once there was only Drogo’s.”
“The old remain,” said Aggo. “The frightened, the weak, and the
sick. And we who swore. We remain.”
“They took Khal Drogo’s herds, Khaleesi,” Rakharo said. “We were
too few to stop them. It is the right of the strong to take from the
weak. They took many slaves as well, the khal’s and yours, yet they
left some few.”
“Eroeh?” asked Dany, remembering the frightened child she had
saved outside the city of the Lamb Men.
“Mago seized her, who is Khal Jhaqo’s bloodrider now,” said
Jhogo. “He mounted her high and low and gave her to his khal, and
Jhaqo gave her to his other bloodriders. They were six. When they
were done with her, they cut her throat.”
“It was her fate, Khaleesi,” said Aggo.
If I look back I am lost. “It was a cruel fate,” Dany said, “yet not so
cruel as Mago’s will be. I promise you that, by the old gods and the
new, by the lamb god and the horse god and every god that lives. I
swear it by the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World.
Before I am done with them, Mago and Ko Jhaqo will plead for the
mercy they showed Eroeh.”

The Dothraki exchanged uncertain glances. “Khaleesi,” the
handmaid Irri explained, as if to a child, “Jhaqo is a khal now, with
twenty thousand riders at his back.”
She lifted her head. “And I am Daenerys Stormborn, Daenerys of
House Targaryen, of the blood of Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor
the Cruel and old Valyria before them. I am the dragon’s daughter,
and I swear to you, these men will die screaming. Now bring me to
Khal Drogo.”
He was lying on the bare red earth, staring up at the sun.
A dozen blood ies had settled on his body, though he did not
seem to feel them. Dany brushed them away and knelt beside him.
His eyes were wide open but did not see, and she knew at once that
he was blind. When she whispered his name, he did not seem to
hear. The wound on his breast was as healed as it would ever be,
the scar that covered it grey and red and hideous.
“Why is he out here alone, in the sun?” she asked them.
“He seems to like the warmth, Princess,” Ser Jorah said. “His eyes
follow the sun, though he does not see it. He can walk after a
fashion. He will go where you lead him, but no farther. He will eat
if you put food in his mouth, drink if you dribble water on his lips.”
Dany kissed her sun-and-stars gently on the brow, and stood to
face Mirri Maz Duur. “Your spells are costly, maegi.”
“He lives,” said Mirri Maz Duur. “You asked for life. You paid for
life.”
“This is not life, for one who was as Drogo was. His life was
laughter, and meat roasting over a repit, and a horse between his
legs. His life was an arakh in his hand and his bells ringing in his
hair as he rode to meet an enemy. His life was his bloodriders, and
me, and the son I was to give him.”
Mirri Maz Duur made no reply.
“When will he be as he was?” Dany demanded.
“When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east,” said Mirri
Maz Duur. “When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind
like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living
child. Then he will return, and not before.”

Dany gestured at Ser Jorah and the others. “Leave us. I would
speak with this maegi alone.” Mormont and the Dothraki withdrew.
“You knew,” Dany said when they were gone. She ached, inside and
out, but her fury gave her strength. “You knew what I was buying,
and you knew the price, and yet you let me pay it.”
“It was wrong of them to burn my temple,” the heavy, at-nosed
woman said placidly. “That angered the Great Shepherd.”
“This was no god’s work,” Dany said coldly. If I look back I am
lost. “You cheated me. You murdered my child within me.”
“The stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. His
khalasar shall trample no nations into dust.”
“I spoke for you,” she said, anguished. “I saved you.”
“Saved me?” The Lhazareen woman spat. “Three riders had taken
me, not as a man takes a woman but from behind, as a dog takes a
bitch. The fourth was in me when you rode past. How then did you
save me? I saw my god’s house burn, where I had healed good men
beyond counting. My home they burned as well, and in the street I
saw piles of heads. I saw the head of a baker who made my bread. I
saw the head of a boy I had saved from deadeye fever, only three
moons past. I heard children crying as the riders drove them o
with their whips. Tell me again what you saved.”
“Your life.”
Mirri Maz Duur laughed cruelly. “Look to your khal and see what
life is worth, when all the rest is gone.”
Dany called out for the men of her khas and bid them take Mirri
Maz Duur and bind her hand and foot, but the maegi smiled at her as
they carried her o , as if they shared a secret. A word, and Dany
could have her head o … yet then what would she have? A head?
If life was worthless, what was death?
They led Khal Drogo back to her tent, and Dany commanded
them to ll a tub, and this time there was no blood in the water.
She bathed him herself, washing the dirt and the dust from his arms
and chest, cleaning his face with a soft cloth, soaping his long black
hair and combing the knots and tangles from it till it shone again as
she remembered. It was well past dark before she was done, and
Dany was exhausted. She stopped for drink and food, but it was all

she could do to nibble at a g and keep down a mouthful of water.
Sleep would have been a release, but she had slept enough … too
long, in truth. She owed this night to Drogo, for all the nights that
had been, and yet might be.
The memory of their rst ride was with her when she led him out
into the darkness, for the Dothraki believed that all things of
importance in a man’s life must be done beneath the open sky. She
told herself that there were powers stronger than hatred, and spells
older and truer than any the maegi had learned in Asshai. The night
was black and moonless, but overhead a million stars burned bright.
She took that for an omen.
No soft blanket of grass welcomed them here, only the hard dusty
ground, bare and strewn with stones. No trees stirred in the wind,
and there was no stream to soothe her fears with the gentle music
of water. Dany told herself that the stars would be enough.
“Remember, Drogo,” she whispered. “Remember our rst ride
together, the day we wed. Remember the night we made Rhaego,
with the khalasar all around us and your eyes on my face.
Remember how cool and clean the water was in the Womb of the
World. Remember, my sun-and-stars. Remember, and come back to
me.”
The birth had left her too raw and torn to take him inside of her,
as she would have wanted, but Doreah had taught her other ways.
Dany used her hands, her mouth, her breasts. She raked him with
her nails and covered him with kisses and whispered and prayed
and told him stories, and by the end she had bathed him with her
tears. Yet Drogo did not feel, or speak, or rise.
And when the bleak dawn broke over an empty horizon, Dany
knew that he was truly lost to her. “When the sun rises in the west
and sets in the east,” she said sadly. “When the seas go dry and
mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When my womb quickens
again, and I bear a living child. Then you will return, my sun-andstars, and not before.”
Never, the darkness cried, never never never.
Inside the tent Dany found a cushion, soft silk stu ed with
feathers. She clutched it to her breasts as she walked back out to

Drogo, to her sun-and-stars. If I look back I am lost. It hurt even to
walk, and she wanted to sleep, to sleep and not to dream.
She knelt, kissed Drogo on the lips, and pressed the cushion down
across his face.

TYRION

“They have my son,” Tywin Lannister said.
“They do, my lord.” The messenger’s voice was dulled by
exhaustion. On the breast of his torn surcoat, the brindled boar of
Crakehall was half-obscured by dried blood.
One of your sons, Tyrion thought. He took a sip of wine and said
not a word, thinking of Jaime. When he lifted his arm, pain shot
through his elbow, reminding him of his own brief taste of battle.
He loved his brother, but he would not have wanted to be with him
in the Whispering Wood for all the gold in Casterly Rock.
His lord father’s assembled captains and bannermen had fallen
very quiet as the courier told his tale. The only sound was the
crackle and hiss of the log burning in the hearth at the end of the
long, drafty common room.
After the hardships of the long relentless drive south, the prospect
of even a single night in an inn had cheered Tyrion
mightily … though he rather wished it had not been this inn again,
with all its memories. His father had set a grueling pace, and it had
taken its toll. Men wounded in the battle kept up as best they could
or were abandoned to fend for themselves. Every morning they left
a few more by the roadside, men who went to sleep never to wake.
Every afternoon a few more collapsed along the way. And every
evening a few more deserted, stealing o into the dusk. Tyrion had
been half-tempted to go with them.

He had been upstairs, enjoying the comfort of a featherbed and
the warmth of Shae’s body beside him, when his squire had woken
him to say that a rider had arrived with dire news of Riverrun. So it
had all been for nothing. The rush south, the endless forced
marches, the bodies left beside the road … all for naught. Robb
Stark had reached Riverrun days and days ago.
“How could this happen?” Ser Harys Swyft moaned. “How? Even
after the Whispering Wood, you had Riverrun ringed in iron,
surrounded by a great host … what madness made Ser Jaime decide
to split his men into three separate camps? Surely he knew how
vulnerable that would leave them?”
Better than you, you chinless craven, Tyrion thought. Jaime might
have lost Riverrun, but it angered him to hear his brother slandered
by the likes of Swyft, a shameless lickspittle whose greatest
accomplishment was marrying his equally chinless daughter to Ser
Kevan, and thereby attaching himself to the Lannisters.
“I would have done the same,” his uncle responded, a good deal
more calmly than Tyrion might have. “You have never seen
Riverrun, Ser Harys, or you would know that Jaime had little choice
in the matter. The castle is situated at the end of the point of land
where the Tumblestone ows into the Red Fork of the Trident. The
rivers form two sides of a triangle, and when danger threatens, the
Tullys open their sluice gates upstream to create a wide moat on the
third side, turning Riverrun into an island. The walls rise sheer from
the water, and from their towers the defenders have a commanding
view of the opposite shores for many leagues around. To cut o all
the approaches, a besieger must needs place one camp north of the
Tumblestone, one south of the Red Fork, and a third between the
rivers, west of the moat. There is no other way, none.”
“Ser Kevan speaks truly, my lords,” the courier said. “We’d built
palisades of sharpened stakes around the camps, yet it was not
enough, not with no warning and the rivers cutting us o from each
other. They came down on the north camp rst. No one was
expecting an attack. Marq Piper had been raiding our supply trains,
but he had no more than fty men. Ser Jaime had gone out to deal
with them the night before … well, with what we thought was them.

We were told the Stark host was east of the Green Fork, marching
south …”
“And your outriders?” Ser Gregor Clegane’s face might have been
hewn from rock. The re in the hearth gave a somber orange cast to
his skin and put deep shadows in the hollows of his eyes. “They saw
nothing? They gave you no warning?”
The bloodstained messenger shook his head. “Our outriders had
been vanishing. Marq Piper’s work, we thought. The ones who did
come back had seen nothing.”
“A man who sees nothing has no use for his eyes,” the Mountain
declared. “Cut them out and give them to your next outrider. Tell
him you hope that four eyes might see better than two … and if
not, the man after him will have six.”
Lord Tywin Lannister turned his face to study Ser Gregor. Tyrion
saw a glimmer of gold as the light shone o his father’s pupils, but
he could not have said whether the look was one of approval or
disgust. Lord Tywin was oft quiet in council, preferring to listen
before he spoke, a habit Tyrion himself tried to emulate. Yet this
silence was uncharacteristic even for him, and his wine was
untouched.
“You said they came at night,” Ser Kevan prompted.
The man gave a weary nod. “The Black sh led the van, cutting
down our sentries and clearing away the palisades for the main
assault. By the time our men knew what was happening, riders were
pouring over the ditch banks and galloping through the camp with
swords and torches in hand. I was sleeping in the west camp,
between the rivers. When we heard the ghting and saw the tents
being red, Lord Brax led us to the rafts and we tried to pole across,
but the current pushed us downstream and the Tullys started
inging rocks at us with the catapults on their walls. I saw one raft
smashed to kindling and three others overturned, men swept into
the river and drowned … and those who did make it across found
the Starks waiting for them on the riverbanks.”
Ser Flement Brax wore a silver-and-purple tabard and the look of
a man who cannot comprehend what he has just heard. “My lord
father—”

“Sorry, my lord,” the messenger said. “Lord Brax was clad in
plate-and-mail when his raft overturned. He was very gallant.”
He was a fool, Tyrion thought, swirling his cup and staring down
into the winy depths. Crossing a river at night on a crude raft,
wearing armor, with an enemy waiting on the other side—if that
was gallantry, he would take cowardice every time. He wondered if
Lord Brax had felt especially gallant as the weight of his steel pulled
him under the black water.
“The camp between the rivers was overrun as well,” the
messenger was saying. “While we were trying to cross, more Starks
swept in from the west, two columns of armored horse. I saw Lord
Umber’s giant-in-chains and the Mallister eagle, but it was the boy
who led them, with a monstrous wolf running at his side. I wasn’t
there to see, but it’s said the beast killed four men and ripped apart
a dozen horses. Our spearmen formed up a shieldwall and held
against their rst charge, but when the Tullys saw them engaged,
they opened the gates of Riverrun and Tytos Blackwood led a sortie
across the drawbridge and took them in the rear.”
“Gods save us,” Lord Le ord swore.
“Greatjon Umber red the siege towers we were building, and
Lord Blackwood found Ser Edmure Tully in chains among the other
captives, and made o with them all. Our south camp was under the
command of Ser Forley Prester. He retreated in good order when he
saw that the other camps were lost, with two thousand spears and
as many bowmen, but the Tyroshi sellsword who led his freeriders
struck his banners and went over to the foe.”
“Curse the man.” His uncle Kevan sounded more angry than
surprised. “I warned Jaime not to trust that one. A man who ghts
for coin is loyal only to his purse.”
Lord Tywin wove his ngers together under his chin. Only his
eyes moved as he listened. His bristling golden sidewhiskers framed
a face so still it might have been a mask, but Tyrion could see tiny
beads of sweat dappling his father’s shaven head.
“How could it happen?” Ser Harys Swyft wailed again. “Ser Jaime
taken, the siege broken … this is a catastrophe!”

Ser Addam Marbrand said, “I am sure we are all grateful to you
for pointing out the obvious, Ser Harys. The question is, what shall
we do about it?”
“What can we do? Jaime’s host is all slaughtered or taken or put
to ight, and the Starks and the Tullys sit squarely across our line of
supply. We are cut o from the west! They can march on Casterly
Rock if they so choose, and what’s to stop them? My lords, we are
beaten. We must sue for peace.”
“Peace?” Tyrion swirled his wine thoughtfully, took a deep draft,
and hurled his empty cup to the oor, where it shattered into a
thousand pieces. “There’s your peace, Ser Harys. My sweet nephew
broke it for good and all when he decided to ornament the Red
Keep with Lord Eddard’s head. You’ll have an easier time drinking
wine from that cup than you will convincing Robb Stark to make
peace now. He’s winning … or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Two battles do not make a war,” Ser Addam insisted. “We are
far from lost. I should welcome the chance to try my own steel
against this Stark boy.”
“Perhaps they would consent to a truce, and allow us to trade our
prisoners for theirs,” o ered Lord Le ord.
“Unless they trade three-for-one, we still come out light on those
scales,” Tyrion said acidly. “And what are we to o er for my
brother? Lord Eddard’s rotting head?”
“I had heard that Queen Cersei has the Hand’s daughters,” Le ord
said hopefully. “If we give the lad his sisters back …”
Ser Addam snorted disdainfully. “He would have to be an utter
ass to trade Jaime Lannister’s life for two girls.”
“Then we must ransom Ser Jaime, whatever it costs,” Lord
Le ord said.
Tyrion rolled his eyes. “If the Starks feel the need for gold, they
can melt down Jaime’s armor.”
“If we ask for a truce, they will think us weak,” Ser Addam
argued. “We should march on them at once.”
“Surely our friends at court could be prevailed upon to join us
with fresh troops,” said Ser Harys. “And someone might return to
Casterly Rock to raise a new host.”

Lord Tywin Lannister rose to his feet. “They have my son,” he said
once more, in a voice that cut through the babble like a sword
through suet. “Leave me. All of you.”
Ever the soul of obedience, Tyrion rose to depart with the rest,
but his father gave him a look. “Not you, Tyrion. Remain. And you
as well, Kevan. The rest of you, out.”
Tyrion eased himself back onto the bench, startled into
speechlessness. Ser Kevan crossed the room to the wine casks.
“Uncle,” Tyrion called, “if you would be so kind—”
“Here.” His father o ered him his cup, the wine untouched.
Now Tyrion truly was nonplussed. He drank.
Lord Tywin seated himself. “You have the right of it about Stark.
Alive, we might have used Lord Eddard to forge a peace with
Winterfell and Riverrun, a peace that would have given us the time
we need to deal with Robert’s brothers. Dead …” His hand curled
into a st. “Madness. Rank madness.”
“Jo ’s only a boy,” Tyrion pointed out. “At his age, I committed a
few follies of my own.”
His father gave him a sharp look. “I suppose we ought to be
grateful that he has not yet married a whore.”
Tyrion sipped at his wine, wondering how Lord Tywin would
look if he ung the cup in his face.
“Our position is worse than you know,” his father went on. “It
would seem we have a new king.”
Ser Kevan looked poleaxed. “A new—who? What have they done
to Jo rey?”
The faintest icker of distaste played across Lord Tywin’s thin
lips. “Nothing … yet. My grandson still sits the Iron Throne, but the
eunuch has heard whispers from the south. Renly Baratheon wed
Margaery Tyrell at Highgarden this fortnight past, and now he has
claimed the crown. The bride’s father and brothers have bent the
knee and sworn him their swords.”
“Those are grave tidings.” When Ser Kevan frowned, the furrows
in his brow grew deep as canyons.
“My daughter commands us to ride for King’s Landing at once, to
defend the Red Keep against King Renly and the Knight of Flowers.”

His mouth tightened. “Commands us, mind you. In the name of the
king and council.”
“How is King Jo rey taking the news?” Tyrion asked with a
certain black amusement.
“Cersei has not seen t to tell him yet,” Lord Tywin said. “She
fears he might insist on marching against Renly himself.”
“With what army?” Tyrion asked. “You don’t plan to give him this
one, I hope?”
“He talks of leading the City Watch,” Lord Tywin said.
“If he takes the Watch, he’ll leave the city undefended,” Ser
Kevan said. “And with Lord Stannis on Dragonstone …”
“Yes.” Lord Tywin looked down at his son. “I had thought you
were the one made for motley, Tyrion, but it would appear that I
was wrong.”
“Why, Father,” said Tyrion, “that almost sounds like praise.” He
leaned forward intently. “What of Stannis? He’s the elder, not
Renly. How does he feel about his brother’s claim?”
His father frowned. “I have felt from the beginning that Stannis
was a greater danger than all the others combined. Yet he does
nothing. Oh, Varys hears his whispers. Stannis is building ships,
Stannis is hiring sellswords, Stannis is bringing a shadowbinder
from Asshai. What does it mean? Is any of it true?” He gave an
irritated shrug. “Kevan, bring us the map.”
Ser Kevan did as he was bid. Lord Tywin unrolled the leather,
smoothing it at. “Jaime has left us in a bad way. Roose Bolton and
the remnants of his host are north of us. Our enemies hold the
Twins and Moat Cailin. Robb Stark sits to the west, so we cannot
retreat to Lannisport and the Rock unless we choose to give battle.
Jaime is taken, and his army for all purposes has ceased to exist.
Thoros of Myr and Beric Dondarrion continue to plague our
foraging parties. To our east we have the Arryns, Stannis Baratheon
sits on Dragonstone, and in the south Highgarden and Storm’s End
are calling their banners.”
Tyrion smiled crookedly. “Take heart, Father. At least Rhaegar
Targaryen is still dead.”

“I had hoped you might have more to o er us than japes, Tyrion,”
Lord Tywin Lannister said.
Ser Kevan frowned over the map, forehead creasing. “Robb Stark
will have Edmure Tully and the lords of the Trident with him now.
Their combined power may exceed our own. And with Roose Bolton
behind us … Tywin, if we remain here, I fear we might be caught
between three armies.”
“I have no intention of remaining here. We must nish our
business with young Lord Stark before Renly Baratheon can march
from Highgarden. Bolton does not concern me. He is a wary man,
and we made him warier on the Green Fork. He will be slow to give
pursuit. So … on the morrow, we make for Harrenhal. Kevan, I
want Ser Addam’s outriders to screen our movements. Give him as
many men as he requires, and send them out in groups of four. I
will have no vanishings.”
“As you say, my lord, but … why Harrenhal? That is a grim,
unlucky place. Some call it cursed.”
“Let them,” Lord Tywin said. “Unleash Ser Gregor and send him
before us with his reavers. Send forth Vargo Hoat and his freeriders
as well, and Ser Amory Lorch. Each is to have three hundred horse.
Tell them I want to see the riverlands a re from the Gods Eye to
the Red Fork.”
“They will burn, my lord,” Ser Kevan said, rising. “I shall give the
commands.” He bowed and made for the door.
When they were alone, Lord Tywin glanced at Tyrion. “Your
savages might relish a bit of rapine. Tell them they may ride with
Vargo Hoat and plunder as they like—goods, stock, women, they
may take what they want and burn the rest.”
“Telling Shagga and Timett how to pillage is like telling a rooster
how to crow,” Tyrion commented, “but I should prefer to keep
them with me.” Uncouth and unruly they might be, yet the
wildlings were his, and he trusted them more than any of his
father’s men. He was not about to hand them over.
“Then you had best learn to control them. I will not have the city
plundered.”
“The city?” Tyrion was lost. “What city would that be?”

“King’s Landing. I am sending you to court.”
It was the last thing Tyrion Lannister would ever have
anticipated. He reached for his wine, and considered for a moment
as he sipped. “And what am I to do there?”
“Rule,” his father said curtly.
Tyrion hooted with laughter. “My sweet sister might have a word
or two to say about that!”
“Let her say what she likes. Her son needs to be taken in hand
before he ruins us all. I blame those jackanapes on the council—our
friend Petyr, the venerable Grand Maester, and that cockless
wonder Lord Varys. What sort of counsel are they giving Jo rey
when he lurches from one folly to the next? Whose notion was it to
make this Janos Slynt a lord? The man’s father was a butcher, and
they grant him Harrenhal. Harrenhal, that was the seat of kings! Not
that he will ever set foot inside it, if I have a say. I am told he took
a bloody spear for his sigil. A bloody cleaver would have been my
choice.” His father had not raised his voice, yet Tyrion could see the
anger in the gold of his eyes. “And dismissing Selmy, where was the
sense in that? Yes, the man was old, but the name of Barristan the
Bold still has meaning in the realm. He lent honor to any man he
served. Can anyone say the same of the Hound? You feed your dog
bones under the table, you do not seat him beside you on the high
bench.” He pointed a nger at Tyrion’s face. “If Cersei cannot curb
the boy, you must. And if these councillors are playing us false …”
Tyrion knew. “Spikes,” he sighed. “Heads. Walls.”
“I see you have taken a few lessons from me.”
“More than you know, Father,” Tyrion answered quietly. He
nished his wine and set the cup aside, thoughtful. A part of him
was more pleased than he cared to admit. Another part was
remembering the battle upriver, and wondering if he was being sent
to hold the left again. “Why me?” he asked, cocking his head to one
side. “Why not my uncle? Why not Ser Addam or Ser Flement or
Lord Serrett? Why not a … bigger man?”
Lord Tywin rose abruptly. “You are my son.”
That was when he knew. You have given him up for lost, he
thought. You bloody bastard, you think Jaime’s good as dead, so I’m all

you have left. Tyrion wanted to slap him, to spit in his face, to draw
his dagger and cut the heart out of him and see if it was made of old
hard gold, the way the smallfolks said. Yet he sat there, silent and
still.
The shards of the broken cup crunched beneath his father’s heels
as Lord Tywin crossed the room. “One last thing,” he said at the
door. “You will not take the whore to court.”
Tyrion sat alone in the common room for a long while after his
father was gone. Finally he climbed the steps to his cozy garret
beneath the bell tower. The ceiling was low, but that was scarcely a
drawback for a dwarf. From the window, he could see the gibbet his
father had erected in the yard. The innkeep’s body turned slowly on
its rope whenever the night wind gusted. Her esh had grown as
thin and ragged as Lannister hopes.
Shae murmured sleepily and rolled toward him when he sat on
the edge of the featherbed. He slid his hand under the blanket and
cupped a soft breast, and her eyes opened. “M’lord,” she said with a
drowsy smile.
When he felt her nipple sti en, Tyrion kissed her. “I have a mind
to take you to King’s Landing, sweetling,” he whispered.

JON

The mare whickered softly as Jon Snow tightened the cinch. “Easy,
sweet lady,” he said in a soft voice, quieting her with a touch. Wind
whispered through the stable, a cold dead breath on his face, but
Jon paid it no mind. He strapped his roll to the saddle, his scarred
ngers sti and clumsy. “Ghost,” he called softly, “to me.” And the
wolf was there, eyes like embers.
“Jon, please. You must not do this.”
He mounted, the reins in his hand, and wheeled the horse around
to face the night. Samwell Tarly stood in the stable door, a full
moon peering over his shoulder. He threw a giant’s shadow,
immense and black. “Get out of my way, Sam.”
“Jon, you can’t,” Sam said. “I won’t let you.”
“I would sooner not hurt you,” Jon told him. “Move aside, Sam,
or I’ll ride you down.”
“You won’t. You have to listen to me. Please …”
Jon put his spurs to horse esh, and the mare bolted for the door.
For an instant Sam stood his ground, his face as round and pale as
the moon behind him, his mouth a widening O of surprise. At the
last moment, when they were almost on him, he jumped aside as
Jon had known he would, stumbled, and fell. The mare leapt over
him, out into the night.
Jon raised the hood of his heavy cloak and gave the horse her
head. Castle Black was silent and still as he rode out, with Ghost
racing at his side. Men watched from the Wall behind him, he knew,

but their eyes were turned north, not south. No one would see him
go, no one but Sam Tarly, struggling back to his feet in the dust of
the old stables. He hoped Sam hadn’t hurt himself, falling like that.
He was so heavy and so ungainly, it would be just like him to break
a wrist or twist his ankle getting out of the way. “I warned him,”
Jon said aloud. “It was nothing to do with him, anyway.” He exed
his burned hand as he rode, opening and closing the scarred ngers.
They still pained him, but it felt good to have the wrappings o .
Moonlight silvered the hills as he followed the twisting ribbon of
the kingsroad. He needed to get as far from the Wall as he could
before they realized he was gone. On the morrow he would leave
the road and strike out overland through eld and bush and stream
to throw o pursuit, but for the moment speed was more important
than deception. It was not as though they would not guess where he
was going.
The Old Bear was accustomed to rise at rst light, so Jon had
until dawn to put as many leagues as he could between him and the
Wall … if Sam Tarly did not betray him. The fat boy was dutiful and
easily frightened, but he loved Jon like a brother. If questioned,
Sam would doubtless tell them the truth, but Jon could not imagine
him braving the guards in front of the King’s Tower to wake
Mormont from sleep.
When Jon did not appear to fetch the Old Bear’s breakfast from
the kitchen, they’d look in his cell and nd Longclaw on the bed. It
had been hard to abandon it, but Jon was not so lost to honor as to
take it with him. Even Jorah Mormont had not done that, when he
ed in disgrace. Doubtless Lord Mormont would nd someone more
worthy of the blade. Jon felt bad when he thought of the old man.
He knew his desertion would be salt in the still-raw wound of his
son’s disgrace. That seemed a poor way to repay him for his trust,
but it couldn’t be helped. No matter what he did, Jon felt as though
he were betraying someone.
Even now, he did not know if he was doing the honorable thing.
The southron had it easier. They had their septons to talk to,
someone to tell them the gods’ will and help sort out right from

wrong. But the Starks worshiped the old gods, the nameless gods,
and if the heart trees heard, they did not speak.
When the last lights of Castle Black vanished behind him, Jon
slowed his mare to a walk. He had a long journey ahead and only
the one horse to see him through. There were holdfasts and farming
villages along the road south where he might be able to trade the
mare for a fresh mount when he needed one, but not if she were
injured or blown.
He would need to nd new clothes soon; most like, he’d need to
steal them. He was clad in black from head to heel; high leather
riding boots, roughspun breeches and tunic, sleeveless leather
jerkin, and heavy wool cloak. His longsword and dagger were
sheathed in black moleskin, and the hauberk and coif in his
saddlebag were black ringmail. Any bit of it could mean his death if
he were taken. A stranger wearing black was viewed with cold
suspicion in every village and holdfast north of the Neck, and men
would soon be watching for him. Once Maester Aemon’s ravens
took ight, Jon knew he would nd no safe haven. Not even at
Winterfell. Bran might want to let him in, but Maester Luwin had
better sense. He would bar the gates and send Jon away, as he
should. Better not to call there at all.
Yet he saw the castle clear in his mind’s eye, as if he had left it
only yesterday; the towering granite walls, the Great Hall with its
smells of smoke and dog and roasting meat, his father’s solar, the
turret room where he had slept. Part of him wanted nothing so
much as to hear Bran laugh again, to sup on one of Gage’s beef-andbacon pies, to listen to Old Nan tell her tales of the children of the
forest and Florian the Fool.
But he had not left the Wall for that; he had left because he was
after all his father’s son, and Robb’s brother. The gift of a sword,
even a sword as ne as Longclaw, did not make him a Mormont.
Nor was he Aemon Targaryen. Three times the old man had chosen,
and three times he had chosen honor, but that was him. Even now,
Jon could not decide whether the maester had stayed because he
was weak and craven, or because he was strong and true. Yet he

understood what the old man had meant, about the pain of
choosing; he understood that all too well.
Tyrion Lannister had claimed that most men would rather deny a
hard truth than face it, but Jon was done with denials. He was who
he was; Jon Snow, bastard and oathbreaker, motherless, friendless,
and damned. For the rest of his life—however long that might be—
he would be condemned to be an outsider, the silent man standing
in the shadows who dares not speak his true name. Wherever he
might go throughout the Seven Kingdoms, he would need to live a
lie, lest every man’s hand be raised against him. But it made no
matter, so long as he lived long enough to take his place by his
brother’s side and help avenge his father.
He remembered Robb as he had last seen him, standing in the
yard with snow melting in his auburn hair. Jon would have to come
to him in secret, disguised. He tried to imagine the look on Robb’s
face when he revealed himself. His brother would shake his head
and smile, and he’d say … he’d say …
He could not see the smile. Hard as he tried, he could not see it.
He found himself thinking of the deserter his father had beheaded
the day they’d found the direwolves. “You said the words,” Lord
Eddard had told him. “You took a vow, before your brothers, before
the old gods and the new.” Desmond and Fat Tom had dragged the
man to the stump. Bran’s eyes had been wide as saucers, and Jon
had to remind him to keep his pony in hand. He remembered the
look on Father’s face when Theon Greyjoy brought forth Ice, the
spray of blood on the snow, the way Theon had kicked the head
when it came rolling at his feet.
He wondered what Lord Eddard might have done if the deserter
had been his brother Benjen instead of that ragged stranger. Would
it have been any di erent? It must, surely, surely … and Robb
would welcome him, for a certainty. He had to, or else …
It did not bear thinking about. Pain throbbed, deep in his ngers,
as he clutched the reins. Jon put his heels into his horse and broke
into a gallop, racing down the kingsroad, as if to outrun his doubts.
Jon was not afraid of death, but he did not want to die like that,
trussed and bound and beheaded like a common brigand. If he must

perish, let it be with a sword in his hand, ghting his father’s
killers. He was no true Stark, had never been one … but he could
die like one. Let them say that Eddard Stark had fathered four sons,
not three.
Ghost kept pace with them for almost half a mile, red tongue
lolling from his mouth. Man and horse alike lowered their heads as
he asked the mare for more speed. The wolf slowed, stopped,
watching, his eyes glowing red in the moonlight. He vanished
behind, but Jon knew he would follow, at his own pace.
Scattered lights ickered through the trees ahead of him, on both
sides of the road: Mole’s Town. A dog barked as he rode through,
and he heard a mule’s raucous haw from the stable, but otherwise
the village was still. Here and there the glow of hearth res shone
through shuttered windows, leaking between wooden slats, but only
a few.
Mole’s Town was bigger than it seemed, but three quarters of it
was under the ground, in deep warm cellars connected by a maze of
tunnels. Even the whorehouse was down there, nothing on the
surface but a wooden shack no bigger than a privy, with a red
lantern hung over the door. On the Wall, he’d heard men call the
whores “buried treasures.” He wondered whether any of his
brothers in black were down there tonight, mining. That was
oathbreaking too, yet no one seemed to care.
Not until he was well beyond the village did Jon slow again. By
then both he and the mare were damp with sweat. He dismounted,
shivering, his burned hand aching. A bank of melting snow lay
under the trees, bright in the moonlight, water trickling o to form
small shallow pools. Jon squatted and brought his hands together,
cupping the runo between his ngers. The snowmelt was icy cold.
He drank, and splashed some on his face, until his cheeks tingled.
His ngers were throbbing worse than they had in days, and his
head was pounding too. I am doing the right thing, he told himself, so
why do I feel so bad?
The horse was well lathered, so Jon took the lead and walked her
for a while. The road was scarcely wide enough for two riders to
pass abreast, its surface cut by tiny streams and littered with stone.

That run had been truly stupid, an invitation to a broken neck. Jon
wondered what had gotten into him. Was he in such a great rush to
die?
O in the trees, the distant scream of some frightened animal
made him look up. His mare whinnied nervously. Had his wolf
found some prey? He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Ghost!”
he shouted. “Ghost, to me.” The only answer was a rush of wings
behind him as an owl took ight.
Frowning, Jon continued on his way. He led the mare for half an
hour, until she was dry. Ghost did not appear. Jon wanted to mount
up and ride again, but he was concerned about his missing wolf.
“Ghost,” he called again. “Where are you? To me! Ghost!” Nothing in
these woods could trouble a direwolf, even a half-grown direwolf,
unless … no, Ghost was too smart to attack a bear, and if there was
a wolf pack anywhere close Jon would have surely heard them
howling.
He should eat, he decided. Food would settle his stomach and
give Ghost the chance to catch up. There was no danger yet; Castle
Black still slept. In his saddlebag, he found a biscuit, a piece of
cheese, and a small withered brown apple. He’d brought salt beef as
well, and a rasher of bacon he’d lched from the kitchens, but he
would save the meat for the morrow. After it was gone he’d need to
hunt, and that would slow him.
Jon sat under the trees and ate his biscuit and cheese while his
mare grazed along the kingsroad. He kept the apple for last. It had
gone a little soft, but the esh was still tart and juicy. He was down
to the core when he heard the sounds: horses, and from the north.
Quickly Jon leapt up and strode to his mare. Could he outrun them?
No, they were too close, they’d hear him for a certainty, and if they
were from Castle Black …
He led the mare o the road, behind a thick stand of grey-green
sentinels. “Quiet now,” he said in a hushed voice, crouching down
to peer through the branches. If the gods were kind, the riders
would pass by. Likely as not, they were only smallfolk from Mole’s
Town, farmers on their way to their elds, although what they were
doing out in the middle of the night …

He listened to the sound of hooves growing steadily louder as
they trotted briskly down the kingsroad. From the sound, there
were ve or six of them at the least. Their voices drifted through
the trees.
“… certain he came this way?”
“We can’t be certain.”
“He could have ridden east, for all you know. Or left the road to
cut through the woods. That’s what I’d do.”
“In the dark? Stupid. If you didn’t fall o your horse and break
your neck, you’d get lost and wind up back at the Wall when the
sun came up.”
“I would not.” Grenn sounded peeved. “I’d just ride south, you
can tell south by the stars.”
“What if the sky was cloudy?” Pyp asked.
“Then I wouldn’t go.”
Another voice broke in. “You know where I’d be if it was me? I’d
be in Mole’s Town, digging for buried treasure.” Toad’s shrill
laughter boomed through the trees. Jon’s mare snorted.
“Keep quiet, all of you,” Halder said. “I thought I heard
something.”
“Where? I didn’t hear anything.” The horses stopped.
“You can’t hear yourself fart.”
“I can too,” Grenn insisted.
“Quiet!”
They all fell silent, listening. Jon found himself holding his
breath. Sam, he thought. He hadn’t gone to the Old Bear, but he
hadn’t gone to bed either, he’d woken the other boys. Damn them
all. Come dawn, if they were not in their beds, they’d be named
deserters too. What did they think they were doing?
The hushed silence seemed to stretch on and on. From where Jon
crouched, he could see the legs of their horses through the branches.
Finally Pyp spoke up. “What did you hear?”
“I don’t know,” Halder admitted. “A sound, I thought it might
have been a horse but …”
“There’s nothing here.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jon glimpsed a pale shape moving
through the trees. Leaves rustled, and Ghost came bounding out of
the shadows, so suddenly that Jon’s mare started and gave a
whinny. “There!” Halder shouted.
“I heard it too!”
“Traitor,” Jon told the direwolf as he swung up into the saddle.
He turned the mare’s head to slide o through the trees, but they
were on him before he had gone ten feet.
“Jon!” Pyp shouted after him.
“Pull up,” Grenn said. “You can’t outrun us all.”
Jon wheeled around to face them, drawing his sword. “Get back.
I don’t wish to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”
“One against seven?” Halder gave a signal. The boys spread out,
surrounding him.
“What do you want with me?” Jon demanded.
“We want to take you back where you belong,” Pyp said.
“I belong with my brother.”
“We’re your brothers now,” Grenn said.
“They’ll cut o your head if they catch you, you know,” Toad put
in with a nervous laugh. “This is so stupid, it’s like something the
Aurochs would do.”
“I would not,” Grenn said. “I’m no oathbreaker. I said the words
and I meant them.”
“So did I,” Jon told them. “Don’t you understand? They murdered
my father. It’s war, my brother Robb is ghting in the riverlands—”
“We know,” said Pyp solemnly. “Sam told us everything.”
“We’re sorry about your father,” Grenn said, “but it doesn’t
matter. Once you say the words, you can’t leave, no matter what.”
“I have to,” Jon said fervently.
“You said the words,” Pyp reminded him. “Now my watch begins,
you said it. It shall not end until my death.”
“I shall live and die at my post,” Grenn added, nodding.
“You don’t have to tell me the words, I know them as well as you
do.” He was angry now. Why couldn’t they let him go in peace?
They were only making it harder.
“I am the sword in the darkness,” Halder intoned.

“The watcher on the walls,” piped Toad.
Jon cursed them all to their faces. They took no notice. Pyp
spurred his horse closer, reciting, “I am the re that burns against the
cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the
shield that guards the realms of men.”
“Stay back,” Jon warned him, brandishing his sword. “I mean it,
Pyp.” They weren’t even wearing armor, he could cut them to
pieces if he had to.
Matthar had circled behind him. He joined the chorus. “I pledge
my life and honor to the Night’s Watch.”
Jon kicked his mare, spinning her in a circle. The boys were all
around him now, closing from every side.
“For this night …,” Halder trotted in from the left.
“… and all the nights to come,” nished Pyp. He reached over for
Jon’s reins. “So here are your choices. Kill me, or come back with
me.”
Jon lifted his sword … and lowered it, helpless. “Damn you,” he
said. “Damn you all.”
“Do we have to bind your hands, or will you give us your word
you’ll ride back peaceful?” asked Halder.
“I won’t run, if that’s what you mean.” Ghost moved out from
under the trees and Jon glared at him. “Small help you were,” he
said. The deep red eyes looked at him knowingly.
“We had best hurry,” Pyp said. “If we’re not back before rst
light, the Old Bear will have all our heads.”
Of the ride back, Jon Snow remembered little. It seemed shorter
than the journey south, perhaps because his mind was elsewhere.
Pyp set the pace, galloping, walking, trotting, and then breaking
into another gallop. Mole’s Town came and went, the red lantern
over the brothel long extinguished. They made good time. Dawn
was still an hour o when Jon glimpsed the towers of Castle Black
ahead of them, dark against the pale immensity of the Wall. It did
not seem like home this time.
They could take him back, Jon told himself, but they could not
make him stay. The war would not end on the morrow, or the day
after, and his friends could not watch him day and night. He would

bide his time, make them think he was content to remain
here … and then, when they had grown lax, he would be o again.
Next time he would avoid the kingsroad. He could follow the Wall
east, perhaps all the way to the sea, a longer route but a safer one.
Or even west, to the mountains, and then south over the high
passes. That was the wildling’s way, hard and perilous, but at least
no one would follow him. He wouldn’t stray within a hundred
leagues of Winterfell or the kingsroad.
Samwell Tarly awaited them in the old stables, slumped on the
ground against a bale of hay, too anxious to sleep. He rose and
brushed himself o . “I … I’m glad they found you, Jon.”
“I’m not,” Jon said, dismounting.
Pyp hopped o his horse and looked at the lightening sky with
disgust. “Give us a hand bedding down the horses, Sam,” the small
boy said. “We have a long day before us, and no sleep to face it on,
thanks to Lord Snow.”
When day broke, Jon walked to the kitchens as he did every
dawn. Three-Finger Hobb said nothing as he gave him the Old
Bear’s breakfast. Today it was three brown eggs boiled hard, with
fried bread and ham steak and a bowl of wrinkled plums. Jon
carried the food back to the King’s Tower. He found Mormont at the
window seat, writing. His raven was walking back and forth across
his shoulders, muttering, “Corn, corn, corn.” The bird shrieked when
Jon entered. “Put the food on the table,” the Old Bear said, glancing
up. “I’ll have some beer.”
Jon opened a shuttered window, took the agon of beer o the
outside ledge, and lled a horn. Hobb had given him a lemon, still
cold from the Wall. Jon crushed it in his st. The juice trickled
through his ngers. Mormont drank lemon in his beer every day,
and claimed that was why he still had his own teeth.
“Doubtless you loved your father,” Mormont said when Jon
brought him his horn. “The things we love destroy us every time,
lad. Remember when I told you that?”
“I remember,” Jon said sullenly. He did not care to talk of his
father’s death, not even to Mormont.

“See that you never forget it. The hard truths are the ones to hold
tight. Fetch me my plate. Is it ham again? So be it. You look weary.
Was your moonlight ride so tiring?”
Jon’s throat was dry. “You know?”
“Know,” the raven echoed from Mormont’s shoulder. “Know.”
The Old Bear snorted. “Do you think they chose me Lord
Commander of the Night’s Watch because I’m dumb as a stump,
Snow? Aemon told me you’d go. I told him you’d be back. I know
my men … and my boys too. Honor set you on the kingsroad … and
honor brought you back.”
“My friends brought me back,” Jon said.
“Did I say it was your honor?” Mormont inspected his plate.
“They killed my father. Did you expect me to do nothing?”
“If truth be told, we expected you to do just as you did.”
Mormont tried a plum, spit out the pit. “I ordered a watch kept over
you. You were seen leaving. If your brothers had not fetched you
back, you would have been taken along the way, and not by friends.
Unless you have a horse with wings like a raven. Do you?”
“No.” Jon felt like a fool.
“Pity, we could use a horse like that.”
Jon stood tall. He told himself that he would die well; that much
he could do, at the least. “I know the penalty for desertion, my lord.
I’m not afraid to die.”
“Die!” the raven cried.
“Nor live, I hope,” Mormont said, cutting his ham with a dagger
and feeding a bite to the bird. “You have not deserted—yet. Here
you stand. If we beheaded every boy who rode to Mole’s Town in
the night, only ghosts would guard the Wall. Yet maybe you mean
to ee again on the morrow, or a fortnight from now. Is that it? Is
that your hope, boy?”
Jon kept silent.
“I thought so.” Mormont peeled the shell o a boiled egg. “Your
father is dead, lad. Do you think you can bring him back?”
“No,” he answered, sullen.
“Good,” Mormont said. “We’ve seen the dead come back, you and
me, and it’s not something I care to see again.” He ate the egg in

two bites and icked a bit of shell out from between his teeth.
“Your brother is in the eld with all the power of the north behind
him. Any one of his lords bannermen commands more swords than
you’ll nd in all the Night’s Watch. Why do you imagine that they
need your help? Are you such a mighty warrior, or do you carry a
grumkin in your pocket to magic up your sword?”
Jon had no answer for him. The raven was pecking at an egg,
breaking the shell. Pushing his beak through the hole, he pulled out
morsels of white and yoke.
The Old Bear sighed. “You are not the only one touched by this
war. Like as not, my sister is marching in your brother’s host, her
and those daughters of hers, dressed in men’s mail. Maege is a
hoary old snark, stubborn, short-tempered, and willful. Truth be
told, I can hardly stand to be around the wretched woman, but that
does not mean my love for her is any less than the love you bear
your half sisters.” Frowning, Mormont took his last egg and
squeezed it in his st until the shell crunched. “Or perhaps it does.
Be that as it may, I’d still grieve if she were slain, yet you don’t see
me running o . I said the words, just as you did. My place is
here … where is yours, boy?”
I have no place, Jon wanted to say, I’m a bastard, I have no rights,
no name, no mother, and now not even a father. The words would not
come. “I don’t know.”
“I do,” said Lord Commander Mormont. “The cold winds are
rising, Snow. Beyond the Wall, the shadows lengthen. Cotter Pyke
writes of vast herds of elk, streaming south and east toward the sea,
and mammoths as well. He says one of his men discovered huge,
misshapen footprints not three leagues from Eastwatch. Rangers
from the Shadow Tower have found whole villages abandoned, and
at night Ser Denys says they see res in the mountains, huge blazes
that burn from dusk till dawn. Quorin Halfhand took a captive in
the depths of the Gorge, and the man swears that Mance Rayder is
massing all his people in some new, secret stronghold he’s found, to
what end the gods only know. Do you think your uncle Benjen was
the only ranger we’ve lost this past year?”

“Ben Jen,” the raven squawked, bobbing its head, bits of egg
dribbling from its beak. “Ben Jen. Ben Jen.”
“No,” Jon said. There had been others. Too many.
“Do you think your brother’s war is more important than ours?”
the old man barked.
Jon chewed his lip. The raven apped its wings at him. “War,
war, war, war,” it sang.
“It’s not,” Mormont told him. “Gods save us, boy, you’re not blind
and you’re not stupid. When dead men come hunting in the night,
do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?”
“No.” Jon had not thought of it that way.
“Your lord father sent you to us, Jon. Why, who can say?”
“Why? Why? Why?” the raven called.
“All I know is that the blood of the First Men ows in the veins of
the Starks. The First Men built the Wall, and it’s said they
remember things otherwise forgotten. And that beast of yours … he
led us to the wights, warned you of the dead man on the steps. Ser
Jaremy would doubtless call that happenstance, yet Ser Jaremy is
dead and I’m not.” Lord Mormont stabbed a chunk of ham with the
point of his dagger. “I think you were meant to be here, and I want
you and that wolf of yours with us when we go beyond the Wall.”
His words sent a chill of excitement down Jon’s back. “Beyond
the Wall?”
“You heard me. I mean to nd Ben Stark, alive or dead.” He
chewed and swallowed. “I will not sit here meekly and wait for the
snows and the ice winds. We must know what is happening. This
time the Night’s Watch will ride in force, against the King-beyondthe-Wall, the Others, and anything else that may be out there. I
mean to command them myself.” He pointed his dagger at Jon’s
chest. “By custom, the Lord Commander’s steward is his squire as
well … but I do not care to wake every dawn wondering if you’ve
run o again. So I will have an answer from you, Lord Snow, and I
will have it now. Are you a brother of the Night’s Watch … or only
a bastard boy who wants to play at war?”
Jon Snow straightened himself and took a long deep breath.
Forgive me, Father. Robb, Arya, Bran … forgive me, I cannot help you.

He has the truth of it. This is my place. “I am … yours, my lord. Your
man. I swear it. I will not run again.”
The Old Bear snorted. “Good. Now go put on your sword.”

CATELYN

It seemed a thousand years ago that Catelyn Stark had carried her
infant son out of Riverrun, crossing the Tumblestone in a small boat
to begin their journey north to Winterfell. And it was across the
Tumblestone that they came home now, though the boy wore plate
and mail in place of swaddling clothes.
Robb sat in the bow with Grey Wind, his hand resting on his
direwolf’s head as the rowers pulled at their oars. Theon Greyjoy
was with him. Her uncle Brynden would come behind in the second
boat, with the Greatjon and Lord Karstark.
Catelyn took a place toward the stern. They shot down the
Tumblestone, letting the strong current push them past the looming
Wheel Tower. The splash and rumble of the great waterwheel
within was a sound from her girlhood that brought a sad smile to
Catelyn’s face. From the sandstone walls of the castle, soldiers and
servants shouted down her name, and Robb’s, and “Winterfell!”
From every rampart waved the banner of House Tully: a leaping
trout, silver, against a rippling blue-and-red eld. It was a stirring
sight, yet it did not lift her heart. She wondered if indeed her heart
would ever lift again. Oh, Ned …
Below the Wheel Tower, they made a wide turn and knifed
through the churning water. The men put their backs into it. The
wide arch of the Water Gate came into view, and she heard the
creak of heavy chains as the great iron portcullis was winched
upward. It rose slowly as they approached, and Catelyn saw that the

lower half of it was red with rust. The bottom foot dripped brown
mud on them as they passed underneath, the barbed spikes mere
inches above their heads. Catelyn gazed up at the bars and
wondered how deep the rust went and how well the portcullis
would stand up to a ram and whether it ought to be replaced.
Thoughts like that were seldom far from her mind these days.
They passed beneath the arch and under the walls, moving from
sunlight to shadow and back into sunlight. Boats large and small
were tied up all around them, secured to iron rings set in the stone.
Her father’s guards waited on the water stair with her brother. Ser
Edmure Tully was a stocky young man with a shaggy head of
auburn hair and a ery beard. His breastplate was scratched and
dented from battle, his blue-and-red cloak stained by blood and
smoke. At his side stood the Lord Tytos Blackwood, a hard pike of a
man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper whiskers and a hook nose.
His bright yellow armor was inlaid with jet in elaborate vine-andleaf patterns, and a cloak sewn from raven feathers draped his thin
shoulders. It had been Lord Tytos who led the sortie that plucked
her brother from the Lannister camp.
“Bring them in,” Ser Edmure commanded. Three men scrambled
down the stairs knee-deep in the water and pulled the boat close
with long hooks. When Grey Wind bounded out, one of them
dropped his pole and lurched back, stumbling and sitting down
abruptly in the river. The others laughed, and the man got a
sheepish look on his face. Theon Greyjoy vaulted over the side of
the boat and lifted Catelyn by the waist, setting her on a dry step
above him as water lapped around his boots.
Edmure came down the steps to embrace her. “Sweet sister,” he
murmured hoarsely. He had deep blue eyes and a mouth made for
smiles, but he was not smiling now. He looked worn and tired,
battered by battle and haggard from strain. His neck was bandaged
where he had taken a wound. Catelyn hugged him ercely.
“Your grief is mine, Cat,” he said when they broke apart. “When
we heard about Lord Eddard … the Lannisters will pay, I swear it,
you will have your vengeance.”

“Will that bring Ned back to me?” she said sharply. The wound
was still too fresh for softer words. She could not think about Ned
now. She would not. It would not do. She had to be strong. “All that
will keep. I must see Father.”
“He awaits you in his solar,” Edmure said.
“Lord Hoster is bedridden, my lady,” her father’s steward
explained. When had that good man grown so old and grey? “He
instructed me to bring you to him at once.”
“I’ll take her.” Edmure escorted her up the water stair and across
the lower bailey, where Petyr Baelish and Brandon Stark had once
crossed swords for her favor. The massive sandstone walls of the
keep loomed above them. As they pushed through a door between
two guardsmen in sh-crest helms, she asked, “How bad is he?”
dreading the answer even as she said the words.
Edmure’s look was somber. “He will not be with us long, the
maesters say. The pain is … constant, and grievous.”
A blind rage lled her, a rage at all the world; at her brother
Edmure and her sister Lysa, at the Lannisters, at the maesters, at
Ned and her father and the monstrous gods who would take them
both away from her. “You should have told me,” she said. “You
should have sent word as soon as you knew.”
“He forbade it. He did not want his enemies to know that he was
dying. With the realm so troubled, he feared that if the Lannisters
suspected how frail he was …”
“… they might attack?” Catelyn nished, hard. It was your doing,
yours, a voice whispered inside her. If you had not taken it upon
yourself to seize the dwarf …
They climbed the spiral stair in silence.
The keep was three-sided, like Riverrun itself, and Lord Hoster’s
solar was triangular as well, with a stone balcony that jutted out to
the east like the prow of some great sandstone ship. From there the
lord of the castle could look down on his walls and battlements, and
beyond, to where the waters met. They had moved her father’s bed
out onto the balcony. “He likes to sit in the sun and watch the
rivers,” Edmure explained. “Father, see who I’ve brought. Cat has
come to see you …”

Hoster Tully had always been a big man; tall and broad in his
youth, portly as he grew older. Now he seemed shrunken, the
muscle and meat melted o his bones. Even his face sagged. The
last time Catelyn had seen him, his hair and beard had been brown,
well streaked with grey. Now they had gone white as snow.
His eyes opened to the sound of Edmure’s voice. “Little cat,” he
murmured in a voice thin and wispy and wracked by pain. “My
little cat.” A tremulous smile touched his face as his hand groped for
hers. “I watched for you …”
“I shall leave you to talk,” her brother said, kissing their lord
father gently on the brow before he withdrew.
Catelyn knelt and took her father’s hand in hers. It was a big
hand, but eshless now, the bones moving loosely under the skin,
all the strength gone from it. “You should have told me,” she said.
“A rider, a raven …”
“Riders are taken, questioned,” he answered. “Ravens are brought
down …” A spasm of pain took him, and his ngers clutched hers
hard. “The crabs are in my belly … pinching, always pinching. Day
and night. They have erce claws, the crabs. Maester Vyman makes
me dreamwine, milk of the poppy … I sleep a lot … but I wanted to
be awake to see you, when you came. I was afraid … when the
Lannisters took your brother, the camps all around us … I was
afraid I would go, before I could see you again … I was afraid …”
“I’m here, Father,” she said. “With Robb, my son. He’ll want to
see you too.”
“Your boy,” he whispered. “He had my eyes, I remember …”
“He did, and does. And we’ve brought you Jaime Lannister, in
irons. Riverrun is free again, Father.”
Lord Hoster smiled. “I saw. Last night, when it began, I told
them … had to see. They carried me to the gatehouse … watched
from the battlements. Ah, that was beautiful … the torches came in
a wave, I could hear the cries oating across the river … sweet
cries … when that siege tower went up, gods … would have died
then, and glad, if only I could have seen you children rst. Was it
your boy who did it? Was it your Robb?”

“Yes,” Catelyn said, ercely proud. “It was Robb … and Brynden.
Your brother is here as well, my lord.”
“Him.” Her father’s voice was a faint whisper. “The
Black sh … came back? From the Vale?”
“Yes.”
“And Lysa?” A cool wind moved through his thin white hair.
“Gods be good, your sister … did she come as well?”
He sounded so full of hope and yearning that it was hard to tell
the truth. “No. I’m sorry …”
“Oh.” His face fell, and some light went out of his eyes. “I’d
hoped … I would have liked to see her, before …”
“She’s with her son, in the Eyrie.”
Lord Hoster gave a weary nod. “Lord Robert now, poor Arryn’s
gone … I remember … why did she not come with you?”
“She is frightened, my lord. In the Eyrie she feels safe.” She
kissed his wrinkled brow. “Robb will be waiting. Will you see him?
And Brynden?”
“Your son,” he whispered. “Yes. Cat’s child … he had my eyes, I
remember. When he was born. Bring him … yes.”
“And your brother?”
Her father glanced out over the rivers. “Black sh,” he said. “Has
he wed yet? Taken some … girl to wife?”
Even on his deathbed, Catelyn thought sadly. “He has not wed. You
know that, Father. Nor will he ever.”
“I told him … commanded him. Marry! I was his lord. He knows.
My right, to make his match. A good match. A Redwyne. Old
House. Sweet girl, pretty … freckles … Bethany, yes. Poor child.
Still waiting. Yes. Still …”
“Bethany Redwyne wed Lord Rowan years ago,” Catelyn
reminded him. “She has three children by him.”
“Even so,” Lord Hoster muttered. “Even so. Spit on the girl. The
Redwynes. Spit on me. His lord, his brother … that Black sh. I had
other o ers. Lord Bracken’s girl. Walder Frey … any of three, he
said … Has he wed? Anyone? Anyone?”
“No one,” Catelyn said, “yet he has come many leagues to see
you, ghting his way back to Riverrun. I would not be here now, if

Ser Brynden had not helped us.”
“He was ever a warrior,” her father husked. “That he could do.
Knight of the Gate, yes.” He leaned back and closed his eyes,
inutterably weary. “Send him. Later. I’ll sleep now. Too sick to
ght. Send him up later, the Black sh …”
Catelyn kissed him gently, smoothed his hair, and left him there
in the shade of his keep, with his rivers owing beneath. He was
asleep before she left the solar.
When she returned to the lower bailey, Ser Brynden Tully stood
on the water stairs with wet boots, talking with the captain of
Riverrun’s guards. He came to her at once. “Is he—?”
“Dying,” she said. “As we feared.”
Her uncle’s craggy face showed his pain plain. He ran his ngers
through his thick grey hair. “Will he see me?”
She nodded. “He says he is too sick to ght.”
Brynden Black sh chuckled. “I am too old a soldier to believe
that. Hoster will be chiding me about the Redwyne girl even as we
light his funeral pyre, damn his bones.”
Catelyn smiled, knowing it was true. “I do not see Robb.”
“He went with Greyjoy to the hall, I believe.”
Theon Greyjoy was seated on a bench in Riverrun’s Great Hall,
enjoying a horn of ale and regaling her father’s garrison with an
account of the slaughter in the Whispering Wood. “Some tried to
ee, but we’d pinched the valley shut at both ends, and we rode out
of the darkness with sword and lance. The Lannisters must have
thought the Others themselves were on them when that wolf of
Robb’s got in among them. I saw him tear one man’s arm from his
shoulder, and their horses went mad at the scent of him. I couldn’t
tell you how many men were thrown—”
“Theon,” she interrupted, “where might I nd my son?”
“Lord Robb went to visit the godswood, my lady.”
It was what Ned would have done. He is his father’s son as much as
mine, I must remember. Oh, gods, Ned …
She found Robb beneath the green canopy of leaves, surrounded
by tall redwoods and great old elms, kneeling before the heart tree,
a slender weirwood with a face more sad than erce. His longsword

was before him, the point thrust in the earth, his gloved hands
clasped around the hilt. Around him others knelt: Greatjon Umber,
Rickard Karstark, Maege Mormont, Galbart Glover, and more. Even
Tytos Blackwood was among them, the great raven cloak fanned
out behind him. These are the ones who keep the old gods, she
realized. She asked herself what gods she kept these days, and could
not nd an answer.
It would not do to disturb them at their prayers. The gods must
have their due … even cruel gods who would take Ned from her,
and her lord father as well. So Catelyn waited. The river wind
moved through the high branches, and she could see the Wheel
Tower to her right, ivy crawling up its side. As she stood there, all
the memories came ooding back to her. Her father had taught her
to ride amongst these trees, and that was the elm that Edmure had
fallen from when he broke his arm, and over there, beneath that
bower, she and Lysa had played at kissing with Petyr.
She had not thought of that in years. How young they all had
been—she no older than Sansa, Lysa younger than Arya, and Petyr
younger still, yet eager. The girls had traded him between them,
serious and giggling by turns. It came back to her so vividly she
could almost feel his sweaty ngers on her shoulders and taste the
mint on his breath. There was always mint growing in the
godswood, and Petyr had liked to chew it. He had been such a bold
little boy, always in trouble. “He tried to put his tongue in my
mouth,” Catelyn had confessed to her sister afterward, when they
were alone. “He did with me too,” Lysa had whispered, shy and
breathless. “I liked it.”
Robb got to his feet slowly and sheathed his sword, and Catelyn
found herself wondering whether her son had ever kissed a girl in
the godswood. Surely he must have. She had seen Jeyne Poole
giving him moist-eyed glances, and some of the serving girls, even
ones as old as eighteen … he had ridden in battle and killed men
with a sword, surely he had been kissed. There were tears in her
eyes. She wiped them away angrily.
“Mother,” Robb said when he saw her standing there. “We must
call a council. There are things to be decided.”

“Your grandfather would like to see you,” she said. “Robb, he’s
very sick.”
“Ser Edmure told me. I am sorry, Mother … for Lord Hoster and
for you. Yet rst we must meet. We’ve had word from the south.
Renly Baratheon has claimed his brother’s crown.”
“Renly?” she said, shocked. “I had thought, surely it would be
Lord Stannis …”
“So did we all, my lady,” Galbart Glover said.
The war council convened in the Great Hall, at four long trestle
tables arranged in a broken square. Lord Hoster was too weak to
attend, asleep on his balcony, dreaming of the sun on the rivers of
his youth. Edmure sat in the high seat of the Tullys, with Brynden
Black sh at his side, and his father’s bannermen arrayed to right
and left and along the side tables. Word of the victory at Riverrun
had spread to the fugitive lords of the Trident, drawing them back.
Karyl Vance came in, a lord now, his father dead beneath the
Golden Tooth. Ser Marq Piper was with him, and they brought a
Darry, Ser Raymun’s son, a lad no older than Bran. Lord Jonos
Bracken arrived from the ruins of Stone Hedge, glowering and
blustering, and took a seat as far from Tytos Blackwood as the
tables would permit.
The northern lords sat opposite, with Catelyn and Robb facing her
brother across the tables. They were fewer. The Greatjon sat at
Robb’s left hand, and then Theon Greyjoy; Galbart Glover and Lady
Mormont were to the right of Catelyn. Lord Rickard Karstark, gaunt
and hollow-eyed in his grief, took his seat like a man in a
nightmare, his long beard uncombed and unwashed. He had left two
sons dead in the Whispering Wood, and there was no word of the
third, his eldest, who had led the Karstark spears against Tywin
Lannister on the Green Fork.
The arguing raged on late into the night. Each lord had a right to
speak, and speak they did … and shout, and curse, and reason, and
cajole, and jest, and bargain, and slam tankards on the table, and
threaten, and walk out, and return sullen or smiling. Catelyn sat and
listened to it all.

Roose Bolton had re-formed the battered remnants of their other
host at the mouth of the causeway. Ser Helman Tallhart and Walder
Frey still held the Twins. Lord Tywin’s army had crossed the
Trident, and was making for Harrenhal. And there were two kings
in the realm. Two kings, and no agreement.
Many of the lords bannermen wanted to march on Harrenhal at
once, to meet Lord Tywin and end Lannister power for all time.
Young, hot-tempered Marq Piper urged a strike west at Casterly
Rock instead. Still others counseled patience. Riverrun sat athwart
the Lannister supply lines, Jason Mallister pointed out; let them
bide their time, denying Lord Tywin fresh levies and provisions
while they strengthened their defenses and rested their weary
troops. Lord Blackwood would have none of it. They should nish
the work they began in the Whispering Wood. March to Harrenhal
and bring Roose Bolton’s army down as well. What Blackwood
urged, Bracken opposed, as ever; Lord Jonos Bracken rose to insist
they ought pledge their fealty to King Renly, and move south to
join their might to his.
“Renly is not the king,” Robb said. It was the rst time her son
had spoken. Like his father, he knew how to listen.
“You cannot mean to hold to Jo rey, my lord,” Galbart Glover
said. “He put your father to death.”
“That makes him evil,” Robb replied. “I do not know that it
makes Renly king. Jo rey is still Robert’s eldest trueborn son, so
the throne is rightfully his by all the laws of the realm. Were he to
die, and I mean to see that he does, he has a younger brother.
Tommen is next in line after Jo rey.”
“Tommen is no less a Lannister,” Ser Marq Piper snapped.
“As you say,” said Robb, troubled. “Yet if neither one is king,
still, how could it be Lord Renly? He’s Robert’s younger brother.
Bran can’t be Lord of Winterfell before me, and Renly can’t be king
before Lord Stannis.”
Lady Mormont agreed. “Lord Stannis has the better claim.”
“Renly is crowned,” said Marq Piper. “Highgarden and Storm’s
End support his claim, and the Dornishmen will not be laggardly. If
Winterfell and Riverrun add their strength to his, he will have ve

of the seven great houses behind him. Six, if the Arryns bestir
themselves! Six against the Rock! My lords, within the year, we will
have all their heads on pikes, the queen and the boy king, Lord
Tywin, the Imp, the Kingslayer, Ser Kevan, all of them! That is what
we shall win if we join with King Renly. What does Lord Stannis
have against that, that we should cast it all aside?”
“The right,” said Robb stubbornly. Catelyn thought he sounded
eerily like his father as he said it.
“So you mean us to declare for Stannis?” asked Edmure.
“I don’t know,” said Robb. “I prayed to know what to do, but the
gods did not answer. The Lannisters killed my father for a traitor,
and we know that was a lie, but if Jo rey is the lawful king and we
ght against him, we will be traitors.”
“My lord father would urge caution,” aged Ser Stevron said, with
the weaselly smile of a Frey. “Wait, let these two kings play their
game of thrones. When they are done ghting, we can bend our
knees to the victor, or oppose him, as we choose. With Renly
arming, likely Lord Tywin would welcome a truce … and the safe
return of his son. Noble lords, allow me to go to him at Harrenhal
and arrange good terms and ransoms …”
A roar of outrage drowned out his voice. “Craven!” the Greatjon
thundered. “Begging for a truce will make us seem weak,” declared
Lady Mormont. “Ransoms be damned, we must not give up the
Kingslayer,” shouted Rickard Karstark.
“Why not a peace?” Catelyn asked.
The lords looked at her, but it was Robb’s eyes she felt, his and
his alone. “My lady, they murdered my lord father, your husband,”
he said grimly. He unsheathed his longsword and laid it on the table
before him, the bright steel on the rough wood. “This is the only
peace I have for Lannisters.”
The Greatjon bellowed his approval, and other men added their
voices, shouting and drawing swords and pounding their sts on the
table. Catelyn waited until they had quieted. “My lords,” she said
then, “Lord Eddard was your liege, but I shared his bed and bore his
children. Do you think I love him any less than you?” Her voice
almost broke with her grief, but Catelyn took a long breath and

steadied herself. “Robb, if that sword could bring him back, I should
never let you sheathe it until Ned stood at my side once more … but
he is gone, and a hundred Whispering Woods will not change that.
Ned is gone, and Daryn Hornwood, and Lord Karstark’s valiant sons,
and many other good men besides, and none of them will return to
us. Must we have more deaths still?”
“You are a woman, my lady,” the Greatjon rumbled in his deep
voice. “Women do not understand these things.”
“You are the gentle sex,” said Lord Karstark, with the lines of
grief fresh on his face. “A man has a need for vengeance.”
“Give me Cersei Lannister, Lord Karstark, and you would see how
gentle a woman can be,” Catelyn replied. “Perhaps I do not
understand tactics and strategy … but I understand futility. We
went to war when Lannister armies were ravaging the riverlands,
and Ned was a prisoner, falsely accused of treason. We fought to
defend ourselves, and to win my lord’s freedom.
“Well, the one is done, and the other forever beyond our reach. I
will mourn for Ned until the end of my days, but I must think of the
living. I want my daughters back, and the queen holds them still. If
I must trade our four Lannisters for their two Starks, I will call that
a bargain and thank the gods. I want you safe, Robb, ruling at
Winterfell from your father’s seat. I want you to live your life, to
kiss a girl and wed a woman and father a son. I want to write an
end to this. I want to go home, my lords, and weep for my
husband.”
The hall was very quiet when Catelyn nished speaking.
“Peace,” said her uncle Brynden. “Peace is sweet, my lady … but
on what terms? It is no good hammering your sword into a
plowshare if you must forge it again on the morrow.”
“What did Torrhen and my Eddard die for, if I am to return to
Karhold with nothing but their bones?” asked Rickard Karstark.
“Aye,” said Lord Bracken. “Gregor Clegane laid waste to my
elds, slaughtered my smallfolk, and left Stone Hedge a smoking
ruin. Am I now to bend the knee to the ones who sent him? What
have we fought for, if we are to put all back as it was before?”

Lord Blackwood agreed, to Catelyn’s surprise and dismay. “And if
we do make peace with King Jo rey, are we not then traitors to
King Renly? What if the stag should prevail against the lion, where
would that leave us?”
“Whatever you may decide for yourselves, I shall never call a
Lannister my king,” declared Marq Piper.
“Nor I!” yelled the little Darry boy. “I never will!”
Again the shouting began. Catelyn sat despairing. She had come
so close, she thought. They had almost listened, almost … but the
moment was gone. There would be no peace, no chance to heal, no
safety. She looked at her son, watched him as he listened to the
lords debate, frowning, troubled, yet wedded to his war. He had
pledged himself to marry a daughter of Walder Frey, but she saw
his true bride plain before her now: the sword he had laid on the
table.
Catelyn was thinking of her girls, wondering if she would ever
see them again, when the Greatjon lurched to his feet.
“MY LORDS!” he shouted, his voice booming o the rafters. “Here
is what I say to these two kings!” He spat. “Renly Baratheon is
nothing to me, nor Stannis neither. Why should they rule over me
and mine, from some owery seat in Highgarden or Dorne? What
do they know of the Wall or the wolfswood or the barrows of the
First Men? Even their gods are wrong. The Others take the
Lannisters too, I’ve had a bellyful of them.” He reached back over
his shoulder and drew his immense two-handed greatsword. “Why
shouldn’t we rule ourselves again? It was the dragons we married,
and the dragons are all dead!” He pointed at Robb with the blade.
“There sits the only king I mean to bow my knee to, m’lords,” he
thundered. “The King in the North!”
And he knelt, and laid his sword at her son’s feet.
“I’ll have peace on those terms,” Lord Karstark said. “They can
keep their red castle and their iron chair as well.” He eased his
longsword from its scabbard. “The King in the North!” he said,
kneeling beside the Greatjon.
Maege Mormont stood. “The King of Winter!” she declared, and
laid her spiked mace beside the swords. And the river lords were

rising too, Blackwood and Bracken and Mallister, houses who had
never been ruled from Winterfell, yet Catelyn watched them rise
and draw their blades, bending their knees and shouting the old
words that had not been heard in the realm for more than three
hundred years, since Aegon the Dragon had come to make the Seven
Kingdoms one … yet now were heard again, ringing from the
timbers of her father’s hall:
“The King in the North!”
“The King in the North!”
“THE KING IN THE NORTH!”

DAENERYS

The land was red and dead and parched, and good wood was hard
to come by. Her foragers returned with gnarled cottonwoods,
purple brush, sheaves of brown grass. They took the two straightest
trees, hacked the limbs and branches from them, skinned o their
bark, and split them, laying the logs in a square. Its center they
lled with straw, brush, bark shavings, and bundles of dry grass.
Rakharo chose a stallion from the small herd that remained to them;
he was not the equal of Khal Drogo’s red, but few horses were. In
the center of the square, Aggo fed him a withered apple and
dropped him in an instant with an axe blow between the eyes.
Bound hand and foot, Mirri Maz Duur watched from the dust with
disquiet in her black eyes. “It is not enough to kill a horse,” she told
Dany. “By itself, the blood is nothing. You do not have the words to
make a spell, nor the wisdom to nd them. Do you think
bloodmagic is a game for children? You call me maegi as if it were a
curse, but all it means is wise. You are a child, with a child’s
ignorance. Whatever you mean to do, it will not work. Loose me
from these bonds and I will help you.”
“I am tired of the maegi’s braying,” Dany told Jhogo. He took his
whip to her, and after that the godswife kept silent.
Over the carcass of the horse, they built a platform of hewn logs;
trunks of smaller trees and limbs from the greater, and the thickest
straightest branches they could nd. They laid the wood east to
west, from sunrise to sunset. On the platform they piled Khal

Drogo’s treasures: his great tent, his painted vests, his saddles and
harness, the whip his father had given him when he came to
manhood, the arakh he had used to slay Khal Ogo and his son, a
mighty dragonbone bow. Aggo would have added the weapons
Drogo’s bloodriders had given Dany for bride gifts as well, but she
forbade it. “Those are mine,” she told him, “and I mean to keep
them.” Another layer of brush was piled about the khal’s treasures,
and bundles of dried grass scattered over them.
Ser Jorah Mormont drew her aside as the sun was creeping
toward its zenith. “Princess …” he began.
“Why do you call me that?” Dany challenged him. “My brother
Viserys was your king, was he not?”
“He was, my lady.”
“Viserys is dead. I am his heir, the last blood of House Targaryen.
Whatever was his is mine now.”
“My … queen,” Ser Jorah said, going to one knee. “My sword
that was his is yours, Daenerys. And my heart as well, that never
belonged to your brother. I am only a knight, and I have nothing to
o er you but exile, but I beg you, hear me. Let Khal Drogo go. You
shall not be alone. I promise you, no man shall take you to Vaes
Dothrak unless you wish to go. You need not join the dosh khaleen.
Come east with me. Yi Ti, Qarth, the Jade Sea, Asshai by the
Shadow. We will see all the wonders yet unseen, and drink what
wines the gods see t to serve us. Please, Khaleesi. I know what you
intend. Do not. Do not.”
“I must,” Dany told him. She touched his face, fondly, sadly. “You
do not understand.”
“I understand that you loved him,” Ser Jorah said in a voice thick
with despair. “I loved my lady wife once, yet I did not die with her.
You are my queen, my sword is yours, but do not ask me to stand
aside as you climb on Drogo’s pyre. I will not watch you burn.”
“Is that what you fear?” Dany kissed him lightly on his broad
forehead. “I am not such a child as that, sweet ser.”
“You do not mean to die with him? You swear it, my queen?”
“I swear it,” she said in the Common Tongue of the Seven
Kingdoms that by rights were hers.

The third level of the platform was woven of branches no thicker
than a nger, and covered with dry leaves and twigs. They laid
them north to south, from ice to re, and piled them high with soft
cushions and sleeping silks. The sun had begun to lower toward the
west by the time they were done. Dany called the Dothraki around
her. Fewer than a hundred were left. How many had Aegon started
with? she wondered. It did not matter.
“You will be my khalasar,” she told them. “I see the faces of
slaves. I free you. Take o your collars. Go if you wish, no one shall
harm you. If you stay, it will be as brothers and sisters, husbands
and wives.” The black eyes watched her, wary, expressionless. “I
see the children, women, the wrinkled faces of the aged. I was a
child yesterday. Today I am a woman. Tomorrow I will be old. To
each of you I say, give me your hands and your hearts, and there
will always be a place for you.” She turned to the three young
warriors of her khas. “Jhogo, to you I give the silver-handled whip
that was my bride gift, and name you ko, and ask your oath, that
you will live and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to
keep me safe from harm.”
Jhogo took the whip from her hands, but his face was confused.
“Khaleesi,” he said hesitantly, “this is not done. It would shame me,
to be bloodrider to a woman.”
“Aggo,” Dany called, paying no heed to Jhogo’s words. If I look
back I am lost. “To you I give the dragonbone bow that was my
bride gift.” It was double-curved, shiny black and exquisite, taller
than she was. “I name you ko, and ask your oath, that you should
live and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to keep me safe
from harm.”
Aggo accepted the bow with lowered eyes. “I cannot say these
words. Only a man can lead a khalasar or name a ko.”
“Rakharo,” Dany said, turning away from the refusal, “you shall
have the great arakh that was my bride gift, with hilt and blade
chased in gold. And you too I name my ko, and ask that you live
and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to keep me safe
from harm.”

“You are khaleesi,” Rakharo said, taking the arakh. “I shall ride at
your side to Vaes Dothrak beneath the Mother of Mountains, and
keep you safe from harm until you take your place with the crones
of the dosh khaleen. No more can I promise.”
She nodded, as calmly as if she had not heard his answer, and
turned to the last of her champions. “Ser Jorah Mormont,” she said,
“ rst and greatest of my knights, I have no bride gift to give you,
but I swear to you, one day you shall have from my hands a
longsword like none the world has ever seen, dragon-forged and
made of Valyrian steel. And I would ask for your oath as well.”
“You have it, my queen,” Ser Jorah said, kneeling to lay his
sword at her feet. “I vow to serve you, to obey you, to die for you
if need be.”
“Whatever may come?”
“Whatever may come.”
“I shall hold you to that oath. I pray you never regret the giving
of it.” Dany lifted him to his feet. Stretching on her toes to reach his
lips, she kissed the knight gently and said, “You are the rst of my
Queensguard.”
She could feel the eyes of the khalasar on her as she entered her
tent. The Dothraki were muttering and giving her strange sideways
looks from the corners of their dark almond eyes. They thought her
mad, Dany realized. Perhaps she was. She would know soon
enough. If I look back I am lost.
Her bath was scalding hot when Irri helped her into the tub, but
Dany did not inch or cry aloud. She liked the heat. It made her feel
clean. Jhiqui had scented the water with the oils she had found in
the market in Vaes Dothrak; the steam rose moist and fragrant.
Doreah washed her hair and combed it out, working loose the mats
and tangles. Irri scrubbed her back. Dany closed her eyes and let the
smell and the warmth enfold her. She could feel the heat soaking
through the soreness between her thighs. She shuddered when it
entered her, and her pain and sti ness seemed to dissolve. She
oated.
When she was clean, her handmaids helped her from the water.
Irri and Jhiqui fanned her dry, while Doreah brushed her hair until

it fell like a river of liquid silver down her back. They scented her
with spice ower and cinnamon; a touch on each wrist, behind her
ears, on the tips of her milk-heavy breasts. The last dab was for her
sex. Irri’s nger felt as light and cool as a lover’s kiss as it slid softly
up between her lips.
Afterward, Dany sent them all away, so she might prepare Khal
Drogo for his nal ride into the night lands. She washed his body
clean and brushed and oiled his hair, running her ngers through it
for the last time, feeling the weight of it, remembering the rst
time she had touched it, the night of their wedding ride. His hair
had never been cut. How many men could die with their hair uncut?
She buried her face in it and inhaled the dark fragrance of the oils.
He smelled like grass and warm earth, like smoke and semen and
horses. He smelled like Drogo. Forgive me, sun of my life, she
thought. Forgive me for all I have done and all I must do. I paid the
price, my star, but it was too high, too high …
Dany braided his hair and slid the silver rings onto his mustache
and hung his bells one by one. So many bells, gold and silver and
bronze. Bells so his enemies would hear him coming and grow weak
with fear. She dressed him in horsehair leggings and high boots,
buckling a belt heavy with gold and silver medallions about his
waist. Over his scarred chest she slipped a painted vest, old and
faded, the one Drogo had loved best. For herself she chose loose
sandsilk trousers, sandals that laced halfway up her legs, and a vest
like Drogo’s.
The sun was going down when she called them back to carry his
body to the pyre. The Dothraki watched in silence as Jhogo and
Aggo bore him from the tent. Dany walked behind them. They laid
him down on his cushions and silks, his head toward the Mother of
Mountains far to the northeast.
“Oil,” she commanded, and they brought forth the jars and
poured them over the pyre, soaking the silks and the brush and the
bundles of dry grass, until the oil trickled from beneath the logs and
the air was rich with fragrance. “Bring my eggs,” Dany commanded
her handmaids. Something in her voice made them run.

Ser Jorah took her arm. “My queen, Drogo will have no use for
dragon’s eggs in the night lands. Better to sell them in Asshai. Sell
one and we can buy a ship to take us back to the Free Cities. Sell all
three and you will be a wealthy woman all your days.”
“They were not given to me to sell,” Dany told him.
She climbed the pyre herself to place the eggs around her sunand-stars. The black beside his heart, under his arm. The green
beside his head, his braid coiled around it. The cream-and-gold
down between his legs. When she kissed him for the last time, Dany
could taste the sweetness of the oil on his lips.
As she climbed down o the pyre, she noticed Mirri Maz Duur
watching her. “You are mad,” the godswife said hoarsely.
“Is it so far from madness to wisdom?” Dany asked. “Ser Jorah,
take this maegi and bind her to the pyre.”
“To the … my queen, no, hear me …”
“Do as I say.” Still he hesitated, until her anger ared. “You
swore to obey me, whatever might come. Rakharo, help him.”
The godswife did not cry out as they dragged her to Khal Drogo’s
pyre and staked her down amidst his treasures. Dany poured the oil
over the woman’s head herself. “I thank you, Mirri Maz Duur,” she
said, “for the lessons you have taught me.”
“You will not hear me scream,” Mirri responded as the oil dripped
from her hair and soaked her clothing.
“I will,” Dany said, “but it is not your screams I want, only your
life. I remember what you told me. Only death can pay for life.”
Mirri Maz Duur opened her mouth, but made no reply. As she
stepped away, Dany saw that the contempt was gone from the
maegi’s at black eyes; in its place was something that might have
been fear. Then there was nothing to be done but watch the sun and
look for the rst star.
When a horselord dies, his horse is slain with him, so he might
ride proud into the night lands. The bodies are burned beneath the
open sky, and the khal rises on his ery steed to take his place
among the stars. The more ercely the man burned in life, the
brighter his star will shine in the darkness.

Jhogo spied it rst. “There,” he said in a hushed voice. Dany
looked and saw it, low in the east. The rst star was a comet,
burning red. Bloodred; re red; the dragon’s tail. She could not have
asked for a stronger sign.
Dany took the torch from Aggo’s hand and thrust it between the
logs. The oil took the re at once, the brush and dried grass a
heartbeat later. Tiny ames went darting up the wood like swift red
mice, skating over the oil and leaping from bark to branch to leaf. A
rising heat pu ed at her face, soft and sudden as a lover’s breath,
but in seconds it had grown too hot to bear. Dany stepped
backward. The wood crackled, louder and louder. Mirri Maz Duur
began to sing in a shrill, ululating voice. The ames whirled and
writhed, racing each other up the platform. The dusk shimmered as
the air itself seemed to liquefy from the heat. Dany heard logs spit
and crack. The res swept over Mirri Maz Duur. Her song grew
louder, shriller … then she gasped, again and again, and her song
became a shuddering wail, thin and high and full of agony.
And now the ames reached her Drogo, and now they were all
around him. His clothing took re, and for an instant the khal was
clad in wisps of oating orange silk and tendrils of curling smoke,
grey and greasy. Dany’s lips parted and she found herself holding
her breath. Part of her wanted to go to him as Ser Jorah had feared,
to rush into the ames to beg for his forgiveness and take him
inside her one last time, the re melting the esh from their bones
until they were as one, forever.
She could smell the odor of burning esh, no di erent than
horse esh roasting in a repit. The pyre roared in the deepening
dusk like some great beast, drowning out the fainter sound of Mirri
Maz Duur’s screaming and sending up long tongues of ame to lick
at the belly of the night. As the smoke grew thicker, the Dothraki
backed away, coughing. Huge orange gouts of re unfurled their
banners in that hellish wind, the logs hissing and cracking, glowing
cinders rising on the smoke to oat away into the dark like so many
newborn re ies. The heat beat at the air with great red wings,
driving the Dothraki back, driving o even Mormont, but Dany

stood her ground. She was the blood of the dragon, and the re was
in her.
She had sensed the truth of it long ago, Dany thought as she took
a step closer to the con agration, but the brazier had not been hot
enough. The ames writhed before her like the women who had
danced at her wedding, whirling and singing and spinning their
yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet
lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them,
her skin ushed and glowing. This is a wedding, too, she thought.
Mirri Maz Duur had fallen silent. The godswife thought her a child,
but children grow, and children learn.
Another step, and Dany could feel the heat of the sand on the
soles of her feet, even through her sandals. Sweat ran down her
thighs and between her breasts and in rivulets over her cheeks,
where tears had once run. Ser Jorah was shouting behind her, but
he did not matter anymore, only the re mattered. The ames were
so beautiful, the loveliest things she had ever seen, each one a
sorcerer robed in yellow and orange and scarlet, swirling long
smoky cloaks. She saw crimson relions and great yellow serpents
and unicorns made of pale blue ame; she saw sh and foxes and
monsters, wolves and bright birds and owering trees, each more
beautiful than the last. She saw a horse, a great grey stallion limned
in smoke, its owing mane a nimbus of blue ame. Yes, my love, my
sun-and-stars, yes, mount now, ride now.
Her vest had begun to smolder, so Dany shrugged it o and let it
fall to the ground. The painted leather burst into sudden ame as
she skipped closer to the re, her breasts bare to the blaze, streams
of milk owing from her red and swollen nipples. Now, she thought,
now, and for an instant she glimpsed Khal Drogo before her,
mounted on his smoky stallion, a aming lash in his hand. He
smiled, and the whip snaked down at the pyre, hissing.
She heard a crack, the sound of shattering stone. The platform of
wood and brush and grass began to shift and collapse in upon itself.
Bits of burning wood slid down at her, and Dany was showered with
ash and cinders. And something else came crashing down, bouncing
and rolling, to land at her feet; a chunk of curved rock, pale and

veined with gold, broken and smoking. The roaring lled the world,
yet dimly through the refall Dany heard women shriek and
children cry out in wonder.
Only death can pay for life.
And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and
the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the
logs exploding as the re touched their secret hearts. She heard the
screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised
in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and
cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not
fear for me. The re is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of
dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you
SEE? With a belch of ame and smoke that reached thirty feet into
the sky, the pyre collapsed and came down around her. Unafraid,
Dany stepped forward into the restorm, calling to her children.
The third crack was as loud and sharp as the breaking of the
world.
When the re died at last and the ground became cool enough to
walk upon, Ser Jorah Mormont found her amidst the ashes,
surrounded by blackened logs and bits of glowing ember and the
burnt bones of man and woman and stallion. She was naked,
covered with soot, her clothes turned to ash, her beautiful hair all
crisped away … yet she was unhurt.
The cream-and-gold dragon was suckling at her left breast, the
green-and-bronze at the right. Her arms cradled them close. The
black-and-scarlet beast was draped across her shoulders, its long
sinuous neck coiled under her chin. When it saw Jorah, it raised its
head and looked at him with eyes as red as coals.
Wordless, the knight fell to his knees. The men of her khas came
up behind him. Jhogo was the rst to lay his arakh at her feet.
“Blood of my blood,” he murmured, pushing his face to the smoking
earth. “Blood of my blood,” she heard Aggo echo. “Blood of my
blood,” Rakharo shouted.
And after them came her handmaids, and then the others, all the
Dothraki, men and women and children, and Dany had only to look

at their eyes to know that they were hers now, today and tomorrow
and forever, hers as they had never been Drogo’s.
As Daenerys Targaryen rose to her feet, her black hissed, pale
smoke venting from its mouth and nostrils. The other two pulled
away from her breasts and added their voices to the call, translucent
wings unfolding and stirring the air, and for the rst time in
hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.

APPENDIX

HOUSE BARATHEON
The youngest of the Great Houses, born during the Wars of
Conquest. Its founder, Orys Baratheon, was rumored to be Aegon
the Dragon’s bastard brother. Orys rose through the ranks to
become one of Aegon’s ercest commanders. When he defeated and
slew Argilac the Arrogant, the last Storm King, Aegon rewarded him
with Argilac’s castle, lands, and daughter. Orys took the girl to
bride, and adopted the banner, honors, and words of her line. The
Baratheon sigil is a crowned stag, black, on a golden eld. Their
words are Ours is the Fury.
KING ROBERT BARATHEON, the First of His Name,
—his wife, QUEEN CERSEI, of House Lannister,
—their children:
—PRINCE JOFFREY, heir to the Iron Throne, twelve,
—PRINCESS MYRCELLA, a girl of eight,
—PRINCE TOMMEN, a boy of seven,
—his brothers:
—STANNIS BARATHEON, Lord of Dragonstone,
—his wife, LADY SELYSE of House Florent,
—their daughter, SHIREEN, a girl of nine,
—RENLY BARATHEON, Lord of Storm’s End,
—his small council:
—GRAND MAESTER PYCELLE,
—LORD PETYR BAELISH, called LITTLEFINGER,
master of coin,
—LORD STANNIS BARATHEON, master of ships,
—LORD RENLY BARATHEON, master of laws,
—SER BARRISTAN SELMY, Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard,

—VARYS, a eunuch, called the Spider, master of
whisperers,
—his court and retainers:
—SER ILYN PAYNE, the King’s Justice, a headsman,
—SANDOR CLEGANE, called the Hound, sworn shield to
Prince Jo rey,
—JANOS SLYNT, a commoner, commander of the City
Watch of King’s Landing,
—JALABHAR XHO, an exile prince from the Summer Isles,
—MOON BOY, a jester and fool,
—LANCEL and TYREK LANNISTER, squires to the king, the
queen’s cousins,
—SER ARON SANTAGAR, master-at-arms,
—his Kingsguard:
—SER BARRISTAN SELMY, Lord Commander,
—SER JAIME LANNISTER, called the Kingslayer,
—SER BOROS BLOUNT,
—SER MERYN TRANT,
—SER ARYS OAKHEART,
—SER PRESTON GREENFIELD,
—SER MANDON MOORE,
The principal houses sworn to Storm’s End are Selmy, Wylde, Trant,
Penrose, Errol, Estermont, Tarth, Swann, Dondarrion, Caron.
The principal houses sworn to Dragonstone are Celtigar, Velaryon,
Seaworth, Bar Emmon, and Sunglass.

HOUSE STARK
The Starks trace their descent from Brandon the Builder and the
ancient Kings of Winter. For thousands of years, they ruled from
Winterfell as Kings in the North, until Torrhen Stark, the King Who
Knelt, chose to swear fealty to Aegon the Dragon rather than give
battle. Their blazon is a grey direwolf on an ice-white eld. The
Stark words are Winter Is Coming.
EDDARD STARK, Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North,
—his wife, LADY CATELYN, of House Tully,
—their children:
—ROBB, the heir to Winterfell, fourteen years of age,
—SANSA, the eldest daughter, eleven,
—ARYA, the younger daughter, a girl of nine,
—BRANDON, called Bran, seven,
—RICKON, a boy of three,
—his bastard son, JON SNOW, a boy of fourteen,
—his ward, THEON GREYJOY, heir to the Iron Islands,
—his siblings:
—{BRANDON}, his elder brother, murdered by the
command of Aerys II Targaryen,
—{LYANNA}, his younger sister, died in the mountains of
Dorne,
—BENJEN, his younger brother, a man of the Night’s
Watch,
—his household:
—MAESTER LUWIN, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—VAYON POOLE, steward of Winterfell,
—JEYNE, his daughter, Sansa’s closest friend,
—JORY CASSEL, captain of the guard,

—HALLIS MOLLEN, DESMOND, JACKS, PORTHER,
QUENT, ALYN, TOMARD, VARLY, HEWARD, CAYN, WYL,
guardsmen,
—SER RODRIK CASSEL, master-at-arms, Jory’s uncle,
—BETH, his young daughter,
—SEPTA MORDANE, tutor to Lord Eddard’s daughters,
—SEPTON CHAYLE, keeper of the castle sept and library,
—HULLEN, master of horse,
—his son, HARWIN, a guardsman,
—JOSETH, a stableman and horse trainer,
—FARLEN, kennelmaster,
—OLD NAN, storyteller, once a wet nurse,
—HODOR, her great-grandson, a simpleminded stableboy,
—GAGE, the cook,
—MIKKEN, smith and armorer,
—his principal lords bannermen:
—SER HELMAN TALLHART,
—RICKARD KARSTARK, Lord of Karhold,
—ROOSE BOLTON, Lord of the Dreadfort,
—JON UMBER, called the Greatjon,
—GALBART and ROBETT GLOVER,
—WYMAN MANDERLY, Lord of White Harbor,
—MAEGE MORMONT, the Lady of Bear Island,
The principal houses sworn to Winterfell are Karstark, Umber, Flint,
Mormont, Hornwood, Cerwyn, Reed, Manderly, Glover, Tallhart,
Bolton.

HOUSE LANNISTER
Fair-haired, tall, and handsome, the Lannisters are the blood of
Andal adventurers who carved out a mighty kingdom in the western
hills and valleys. Through the female line they boast of descent
from Lann the Clever, the legendary trickster of the Age of Heroes.
The gold of Casterly Rock and the Golden Tooth has made them the
wealthiest of the Great Houses. Their sigil is a golden lion upon a
crimson eld. The Lannister words are Hear Me Roar!
TYWIN LANNISTER, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West,
Shield of Lannisport,
—his wife, {LADY JOANNA}, a cousin, died in childbed,
—their children:
—SER JAIME, called the Kingslayer, heir to Casterly Rock,
a twin to Cersei,
—QUEEN CERSEI, wife of King Robert I Baratheon, a twin
to Jaime,
—TYRION, called the Imp, a dwarf,
—his siblings:
—SER KEVAN, his eldest brother,
—his wife, DORNA, of House Swyft,
—their eldest son, LANCEL, squire to the king,
—their twin sons, WILLEM and MARTYN,
—their infant daughter, JANEI,
—GENNA, his sister, wed to Ser Emmon Frey,
—their son, SER CLEOS FREY,
—their son, TION FREY, a squire,
—{SER TYGETT}, his second brother, died of a pox,
—his widow, DARLESSA, of House Marbrand,
—their son, TYREK, squire to the king,

—{GERION}, his youngest brother, lost at sea,
—his bastard daughter, JOY, a girl of ten,
—their cousin, SER STAFFORD LANNISTER, brother to the late
Lady Joanna,
—his daughters, CERENNA and MYRIELLE,
—his son, SER DAVEN LANNISTER,
—his counselor, MAESTER CREYLEN,
—his chief knights and lords bannermen:
—LORD LEO LEFFORD,
—SER ADDAM MARBRAND,
—SER GREGOR CLEGANE, the Mountain That Rides,
—SER HARYS SWYFT, father by marriage to Ser Kevan,
—LORD ANDROS BRAK,
—SER FORLEY PRESTER,
—SER AMORY LORCH,
—VARGO HOAT, of the Free City of Qohor, a sellsword,
Principal houses sworn to Casterly Rock are Payne, Swyft,
Marbrand, Lydden, Banefort, Le ord, Crakehall, Serrett, Broom,
Clegane, Prester, and Westerling.

HOUSE ARRYN
The Arryns are descended from the Kings of Mountain and Vale, one
of the oldest and purest lines of Andal nobility. Their sigil is the
moon-and-falcon, white, upon a sky blue eld. The Arryn words are
As High As Honor.
{JON ARRYN}, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale, Warden
of the East, Hand of the King, recently deceased,
—his rst wife, {LADY JEYNE, of House Royce}, died in
childbed, her daughter stillborn,
—his second wife, {LADY ROWENA, of House Arryn}, his
cousin, died of a winter chill, childless,
—his third wife and widow, LADY LYSA, of House Tully,
—their son:
—ROBERT ARRYN, a sickly boy of six years, now Lord of
the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale,
—their retainers and household:
—MAESTER COLEMON, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER VARDIS EGEN, captain of the guard,
—SER BRYNDEN TULLY, called the Black sh, Knight of
the Gate and uncle to the Lady Lysa,
—LORD NESTOR ROYCE, High Steward of the Vale,
—SER ALBAR ROYCE, his son,
—MYA STONE, a bastard girl in his service,
—LORD EON HUNTER, suitor to Lady Lysa,
—SER LYN CORBRAY, suitor to Lady Lysa,
—MYCHEL REDFORT, his squire,
—LADY ANYA WAYNWOOD, a widow,
—SER MORTON WAYNWOOD, her son, suitor to Lady
Lysa,

—SER DONNEL WAYNWOOD, her son,
—MORD, a brutal gaoler,
The principal houses sworn to the Eyrie are Royce, Baelish, Egen,
Waynwood, Hunter, Redfort, Corbray, Belmore, Melcolm, and
Hersy.

HOUSE TULLY
The Tullys never reigned as kings, though they held rich lands and
the great castle at Riverrun for a thousand years. During the Wars
of Conquest, the riverlands belonged to Harren the Black, King of
the Isles. Harren’s grandfather, King Harwyn Hardhand, had taken
the Trident from Arrec the Storm King, whose ancestors had
conquered all the way to the Neck three hundred years earlier,
slaying the last of the old River Kings. A vain and bloody tyrant,
Harren the Black was little loved by those he ruled, and many of the
river lords deserted him to join Aegon’s host. First among them was
Edmyn Tully of Riverrun. When Harren and his line perished in the
burning of Harrenhal, Aegon rewarded House Tully by raising Lord
Edmyn to dominion over the lands of the Trident and requiring the
other river lords to swear him fealty. The Tully sigil is a leaping
trout, silver, on a eld of rippling blue and red. The Tully words are
Family, Duty, Honor.
HOSTER TULLY, Lord of Riverrun,
—his wife, {LADY MINISA, of House Whent}, died in childbed,
—their children:
—CATELYN, the eldest daughter, wed to Lord Eddard
Stark,
—LYSA, the younger daughter, wed to Lord Jon Arryn,
—SER EDMURE, heir to Riverrun,
—his brother, SER BRYNDEN, called the Black sh,
—his household:
—MAESTER VYMAN, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER DESMOND GRELL, master-at-arms,
—SER ROBIN RYGER, captain of the guard,
—UTHERYDES WAYN, steward of Riverrun,

—his knights and lords bannermen:
—JASON MALLISTER, Lord of Seagard,
—PATREK MALLISTER, his son and heir,
—WALDER FREY, Lord of the Crossing,
—his numerous sons, grandsons, and bastards,
—JONOS BRACKEN, Lord of the Stone Hedge,
—TYTOS BLACKWOOD, Lord of Raventree,
—SER RAYMUN DARRY,
—SER KARYL VANCE,
—SER MARQ PIPER,
—SHELLA WHENT, Lady of Harrenhal,
—SER WILLIS WODE, a knight in her service,
Lesser houses sworn to Riverrun include Darry, Frey, Mallister,
Bracken, Blackwood, Whent, Ryger, Piper, Vance.

HOUSE TYRELL
The Tyrells rose to power as stewards to the Kings of the Reach,
whose domain included the fertile plains of the southwest from the
Dornish marches and Blackwater Rush to the shores of the Sunset
Sea. Through the female line, they claim descent from Garth
Greenhand, gardener king of the First Men, who wore a crown of
vines and owers and made the land bloom. When King Mern, last
of the old line, perished on the Field of Fire, his steward Harlen
Tyrell surrendered Highgarden to Aegon Targaryen, pledging fealty.
Aegon granted him the castle and dominion over the Reach. The
Tyrell sigil is a golden rose on a grass-green eld. Their words are
Growing Strong.
MACE TYRELL, Lord of Highgarden, Warden of the South,
Defender of the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach,
—his wife, LADY ALERIE, of House Hightower of Oldtown,
—their children:
—WILLAS, their eldest son, heir to Highgarden,
—SER GARLAN, called the Gallant, their second son,
—SER LORAS, the Knight of Flowers, their youngest son,
—MARGAERY, their daughter, a maid of fourteen years,
—his widowed mother, LADY OLENNA of House Redwyne,
called the Queen of Thorns,
—his sisters:
—MINA, wed to Lord Paxter Redwyne,
—JANNA, wed to Ser Jon Fossoway,
—his uncles:
—GARTH, called the Gross, Lord Seneschal of Highgarden,
—his bastard sons, GARSE and GARRETT FLOWERS,

—SER MORYN, Lord Commander of the City Watch of
Oldtown,
—MAESTER GORMON, a scholar of the Citadel,
—his household:
—MAESTER LOMYS, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—IGON VYRWEL, captain of the guard,
—SER VORTIMER CRANE, master-at-arms,
—his knights and lord bannermen:
—PAXTER REDWYNE, Lord of the Arbor,
—his wife, LADY MINA, of House Tyrell,
—their children:
—SER HORAS, mocked as Horror, twin to Hobber,
—SER HOBBER, mocked as Slobber, twin to Horas,
—DESMERA, a maid of fteen,
—RANDYLL TARLY, Lord of Horn Hill,
—SAMWELL, his elder son, of the Night’s Watch,
—DICKON, his younger son, heir to Horn Hill,
—ARWYN OAKHEART, Lady of Old Oak,
—MATHIS ROWAN, Lord of Goldengrove,
—LEYTON HIGHTOWER, Voice of Oldtown, Lord of the Port,
—SER JON FOSSOWAY,
Principal houses sworn to Highgarden are Vyrwel, Florent,
Oakheart, Hightower, Crane, Tarly, Redwyne, Rowan, Fossoway,
and Mullendore.

HOUSE GREYJOY
The Greyjoys of Pyke claim descent from the Grey King of the Age
of Heroes. Legend says the Grey King ruled not only the western
isles but the sea itself, and took a mermaid to wife.
For thousands of years, raiders from the Iron Islands—called
“ironmen” by those they plundered—were the terrors of the seas,
sailing as far as the Port of Ibben and the Summer Isles. They prided
themselves on their erceness in battle and their sacred freedoms.
Each island had its own “salt king” and “rock king.” The High King
of the Isles was chosen from among their number, until King Urron
made the throne hereditary by murdering the other kings when they
assembled for a choosing. Urron’s own line was extinguished a
thousand years later when the Andals swept over the islands. The
Greyjoys, like other island lords, intermarried with the conquerers.
The Iron Kings extended their rule far beyond the isles themselves,
carving kingdoms out of the mainland with re and sword. King
Qhored could truthfully boast that his writ ran “wherever men can
smell salt water or hear the crash of waves.” In later centuries,
Qhored’s descendents lost the Arbor, Oldtown, Bear Island, and
much of the western shore. Still, come the Wars of Conquest, King
Harren the Black ruled all the lands between the mountains, from
the Neck to the Blackwater Rush. When Harren and his sons
perished in the fall of Harrenhal, Aegon Targaryen granted the
riverlands to House Tully, and allowed the surviving lords of the
Iron Islands to revive their ancient custom and chose who should
have the primacy among them. They chose Lord Vickon Greyjoy of
Pyke.

The Greyjoy sigil is a golden kraken upon a black eld. Their words
are We Do Not Sow.
BALON GREYJOY, Lord of the Iron Islands, King of Salt and
Rock, Son of the Sea Wind, Lord Reaper of Pyke,
—his wife, LADY ALANNYS, of House Harlaw,
—their children:
—{RODRIK}, their eldest son, slain at Seagard during
Greyjoy’s Rebellion,
—{MARON}, their second son, slain on the walls of Pyke
during Greyjoy’s Rebellion,
—ASHA, their daughter, captain of the Black Wind,
—THEON, their sole surviving son, heir to Pyke, a ward of
Lord Eddard Stark,
—his brothers:
—EURON, called Crow’s Eye, captain of the Silence, an
outlaw, pirate, and raider,
—VICTARION, Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet,
—AERON, called Damphair, a priest of the Drowned God,
Lesser houses sworn to Pyke include Harlaw, Stonehouse, Merlyn,
Sunderly, Botley, Tawney, Wynch, Goodbrother.

HOUSE MARTELL
Nymeria, the warrior queen of the Rhoyne, brought her ten
thousand ships to land in Dorne, the southernmost of the Seven
Kingdoms, and took Lord Mors Martell to husband. With her help,
he vanquished his rivals to rule all Dorne. The Rhoynar in uence
remains strong. Thus Dornish rulers style themselves “Prince” rather
than “King.” Under Dornish law, lands and titles pass to the eldest
child, not the eldest male. Dorne, alone of the Seven Kingdoms, was
never conquered by Aegon the Dragon. It was not permanently
joined to the realm until two hundred years later, and then by
marriage and treaty, not the sword. Peaceable King Daeron II
succeeded where the warriors had failed by wedding the Dornish
princess Myriah and giving his own sister in marriage to the
reigning Prince of Dorne. The Martell banner is a red sun pierced by
a golden spear. Their words are Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.
DORAN NYMEROS MARTELL, Lord of Sunspear, Prince of
Dorne,
—his wife, MELLARIO, of the Free City of Norvos,
—their children:
—PRINCESS ARIANNE, their eldest daughter, heir to
Sunspear,
—PRINCE QUENTYN, their elder son,
—PRINCE TRYSTANE, their younger son,
—his siblings:
—his sister, {PRINCESS ELIA}, wed to Prince Rhaegar
Targaryen, slain during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—their children:
—{PRINCESS RHAENYS}, a young girl, slain during the
Sack of King’s Landing,

—{PRINCE AEGON}, a babe, slain during the Sack of
King’s Landing,
—his brother, PRINCE OBERYN, the Red Viper,
—his household:
—AREO HOTAH, a Norvoshi sellsword, captain of guards,
—MAESTER CALEOTTE, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—his knights and lord bannermen:
—EDRIC DAYNE, Lord of Starfall,
The principal houses sworn to Sunspear include Jordayne, Santagar,
Allyrion, Toland, Yronwood, Wyl, Fowler, and Dayne.

The Old Dynasty
HOUSE TARGARYEN
The Targaryens are the blood of the dragon, descended from the
high lords of the ancient Freehold of Valyria, their heritage
proclaimed in a striking (some say inhuman) beauty, with lilac or
indigo or violet eyes and hair of silver-gold or platinum white.
Aegon the Dragon’s ancestors escaped the Doom of Valyria and the
chaos and slaughter that followed to settle on Dragonstone, a rocky
island in the narrow sea. It was from there that Aegon and his
sisters Visenya and Rhaenys sailed to conquer the Seven Kingdoms.
To preserve the blood royal and keep it pure, House Targaryen has
often followed the Valyrian custom of wedding brother to sister.
Aegon himself took both his sisters to wife, and fathered sons on
each. The Targaryen banner is a three-headed dragon, red on black,
the three heads representing Aegon and his sisters. The Targaryen
words are Fire and Blood.
THE TARGARYEN SUCCESSION

dated by years after Aegon’s Landing
1–37

Aegon I

Aegon the Conquerer, Aegon the Dragon,

37–42

Aenys I

son of Aegon and Rhaenys,

42–48

Maegor I

48–103

Jaehaerys I

103–129 Viserys I

Maegor the Cruel, son of Aegon and
Visenya,
the Old King, the Conciliator, Aenys’ son,
grandson to Jaehaerys,

129–131 Aegon II

eldest son of Viserys,
[Aegon II’s ascent was disputed by his
sister Rhaenyra, a year his elder. Both
perished in the war between them, called
by singers the Dance of the Dragons.]

131–157 Aegon III

the Dragonbane, Rhaenyra’s son,
[The last of the Targaryen dragons died
during the reign of Aegon III.]
the Young Dragon, the Boy King, eldest son

157–161 Daeron I

of Aegon III, [Daeron conquered Dorne,
but was unable to hold it, and died young.]

161–171 Baelor I

the Beloved, the Blessed, septon and king,
second son of Aegon III,

171–172 Viserys II

younger brother of Aegon III,

172–184 Aegon IV

the Unworthy, eldest son of Viserys,
[His younger brother, Prince Aemon the
Dragonknight, was champion and some say
lover to Queen Naerys.]
Queen Naerys’ son, by Aegon or Aemon,

184–209 Daeron II

[Daeron brought Dorne into the realm by
wedding the Dornish princess Myriah.]

209–221 Aerys I

second son to Daeron II (left no issue),

221–233 Maekar I

fourth son of Daeron II,

233–259 Aegon V

the Unlikely, Maekar’s fourth

259–262 Jaehaerys II second son of Aegon the Unlikely,
262–283 Aerys II

the Mad King, only son to Jaehaerys,

Therein the line of the dragon kings ended, when Aerys II was
dethroned and killed, along with his heir, the crown prince Rhaegar
Targaryen, slain by Robert Baratheon on the Trident.
THE LAST TARGARYENS
{KING AERYS TARGARYEN}, the Second of His Name, slain by
Jaime Lannister during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—his sister and wife, {QUEEN RHAELLA} of House Targaryen,
died in childbed on Dragonstone,
—their children:
—{PRINCE RHAEGAR}, heir to the Iron Throne, slain by
Robert Baratheon on the Trident,
—his wife, {PRINCESS ELIA} of House Martell, slain
during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—their children:
—{PRINCESS RHAENYS}, a young girl, slain during the
Sack of King’s Landing,
—{PRINCE AEGON}, a babe, slain during the Sack of
King’s Landing,
—PRINCE VISERYS, styling himself Viserys, the Third of His
Name, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, called the Beggar King,
—PRINCESS DAENERYS, called Daenerys Stormborn, a maid of
thirteen years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The devil is in the details, they say.
A book this size has a lot of devils, any one of which will bite you
if you don’t watch out. Fortunately, I know a lot of angels.
Thanks and appreciation, therefore, to all those good folks who so
kindly lent me their ears and their expertise (and in some cases
their books) so I could get all those little details right—to Sage
Walker, Martin Wright, Melinda Snodgrass, Carl Keim, Bruce
Baugh, Tim O’Brien, Roger Zelazny, Jane Lindskold, and Laura J.
Mixon, and of course to Parris.
And a special thanks to Jennifer Hershey, for labors above and
beyond the call …

A GAME OF THRONES:
THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
George R. R. Martin—dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time
Magazine—has created a masterwork of modern fantasy with his
landmark series, A Song of Ice and Fire. His much-beloved characters
and settings have not only made the books bestsellers in multiple
countries, but have spun o a host of a liated products, from
calendars, card games, and board games to swords, gurines, and
coins. Game of Thrones, HBO’s stunning adaptation of George’s
world to the small screen, premiered to rampant fan excitement.
And now comes the next exciting chapter in A Game of Thrones
adaptations: the graphic novel! From a joint partnership between
Dynamic Forces and Random House comes a stunning visual
representation of George’s seminal world, adapted by acclaimed
novelist Daniel J. Abraham, and illustrated by Tommy Patterson. As
you can see from this handful of character sketches and rough
sample pages, this will be an absolutely stunning-looking series—
and one that we hope will give George’s long-time fans a new way
to appreciate his world, as well as providing a new entry-point for
more recent converts.
We hope that you will share our enthusiasm for watching how this
amazing world unfolds, visually, over the course of the planned
twenty-four issues … because we are all enormously excited!

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover
edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

A CLASH OF KINGS
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam Spectra hardcover edition published February 1999

Bantam Spectra paperback edition / September 2000
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of
Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 by George R. R. Martin.
Maps by James Sinclair.
Heraldic crest by Virginia Norey.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-37954.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra and the portrayal of a
boxed “s” are registered trademarks of Random House Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-89785-2
v3.0_r1

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Prologue

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20

Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50

Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Appendix: The Kings and Their Courts
The King on the Iron Throne
The King in the Narrow Sea
The King in Highgarden
The King in the North
The Queen Across the Water
Other Houses Great and Small
House Arryn
House Florent
House Frey
House Greyjoy
House Lannister
House Martell
House Tyrell
The Men of the Night’s Watch
Acknowledgments

To John and Gail
for all the meat and mead we’ve shared

Click here to view the maps in greater detail:
http://atrandom.com/ckmaps

PROLOGUE

The comet’s tail spread across the dawn, a red slash that bled

above the crags of Dragonstone like a wound in the pink and purple
sky.
The maester stood on the windswept balcony outside his
chambers. It was here the ravens came, after long ight. Their
droppings speckled the gargoyles that rose twelve feet tall on either
side of him, a hellhound and a wyvern, two of the thousand that
brooded over the walls of the ancient fortress. When rst he came
to Dragonstone, the army of stone grotesques had made him
uneasy, but as the years passed he had grown used to them. Now he
thought of them as old friends. The three of them watched the sky
together with foreboding.
The maester did not believe in omens. And yet … old as he was,
Cressen had never seen a comet half so bright, nor yet that color,
that terrible color, the color of blood and ame and sunsets. He
wondered if his gargoyles had ever seen its like. They had been
here so much longer than he had, and would still be here long after
he was gone. If stone tongues could speak …
Such folly. He leaned against the battlement, the sea crashing
beneath him, the black stone rough beneath his ngers. Talking
gargoyles and prophecies in the sky. I am an old done man, grown giddy
as a child again. Had a lifetime’s hard-won wisdom ed him along
with his health and strength? He was a maester, trained and chained

in the great Citadel of Oldtown. What had he come to, when
superstition lled his head as if he were an ignorant eldhand?
And yet … and yet … the comet burned even by day now, while
pale grey steam rose from the hot vents of Dragonmont behind the
castle, and yestermorn a white raven had brought word from the
Citadel itself, word long-expected but no less fearful for all that,
word of summer’s end. Omens, all. Too many to deny. What does it
all mean? he wanted to cry.
“Maester Cressen, we have visitors.” Pylos spoke softly, as if
loath to disturb Cressen’s solemn meditations. Had he known what
drivel lled his head, he would have shouted. “The princess would
see the white raven.” Ever correct, Pylos called her princess now, as
her lord father was a king. King of a smoking rock in the great salt
sea, yet a king nonetheless. “Her fool is with her.”
The old man turned away from the dawn, keeping a hand on his
wyvern to steady himself. “Help me to my chair and show them in.”
Taking his arm, Pylos led him inside. In his youth, Cressen had
walked briskly, but he was not far from his eightieth name day
now, and his legs were frail and unsteady. Two years past, he had
fallen and shattered a hip, and it had never mended properly. Last
year when he took ill, the Citadel had sent Pylos out from Oldtown,
mere days before Lord Stannis had closed the isle … to help him in
his labors, it was said, but Cressen knew the truth. Pylos had come
to replace him when he died. He did not mind. Someone must take
his place, and sooner than he would like …
He let the younger man settle him behind his books and papers.
“Go bring her. It is ill to keep a lady waiting.” He waved a hand, a
feeble gesture of haste from a man no longer capable of hastening.
His esh was wrinkled and spotted, the skin so papery thin that he
could see the web of veins and the shape of bones beneath. And
how they trembled, these hands of his that had once been so sure
and deft …
When Pylos returned the girl came with him, shy as ever. Behind
her, shu ing and hopping in that queer sideways walk of his, came
her fool. On his head was a mock helm fashioned from an old tin
bucket, with a rack of deer antlers strapped to the crown and hung

with cowbells. With his every lurching step, the bells rang, each
with a di erent voice, clang-a-dang bong-dong ring-a-ling clong clong
clong.
“Who comes to see us so early, Pylos?” Cressen said.
“It’s me and Patches, Maester.” Guileless blue eyes blinked at
him. Hers was not a pretty face, alas. The child had her lord father’s
square jut of jaw and her mother’s unfortunate ears, along with a
dis gurement all her own, the legacy of the bout of greyscale that
had almost claimed her in the crib. Across half one cheek and well
down her neck, her esh was sti and dead, the skin cracked and
aking, mottled black and grey and stony to the touch. “Pylos said
we might see the white raven.”
“Indeed you may,” Cressen answered. As if he would ever deny
her. She had been denied too often in her time. Her name was
Shireen. She would be ten on her next name day, and she was the
saddest child that Maester Cressen had ever known. Her sadness is
my shame, the old man thought, another mark of my failure. “Maester
Pylos, do me a kindness and bring the bird down from the rookery
for the Lady Shireen.”
“It would be my pleasure.” Pylos was a polite youth, no more
than ve-and-twenty, yet solemn as a man of sixty. If only he had
more humor, more life in him; that was what was needed here. Grim
places needed lightening, not solemnity, and Dragonstone was grim
beyond a doubt, a lonely citadel in the wet waste surrounded by
storm and salt, with the smoking shadow of the mountain at its
back. A maester must go where he is sent, so Cressen had come here
with his lord some twelve years past, and he had served, and served
well. Yet he had never loved Dragonstone, nor ever felt truly at
home here. Of late, when he woke from restless dreams in which
the red woman gured disturbingly, he often did not know where
he was.
The fool turned his patched and piebald head to watch Pylos
climb the steep iron steps to the rookery. His bells rang with the
motion. “Under the sea, the birds have scales for feathers,” he said,
clang-a-langing. “I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”

Even for a fool, Patchface was a sorry thing. Perhaps once he
could evoke gales of laughter with a quip, but the sea had taken
that power from him, along with half his wits and all his memory.
He was soft and obese, subject to twitches and trembles, incoherent
as often as not. The girl was the only one who laughed at him now,
the only one who cared if he lived or died.
An ugly little girl and a sad fool, and maester makes three … now
there is a tale to make men weep. “Sit with me, child.” Cressen
beckoned her closer. “This is early to come calling, scarce past
dawn. You should be snug in your bed.”
“I had bad dreams,” Shireen told him. “About the dragons. They
were coming to eat me.”
The child had been plagued by nightmares as far back as Maester
Cressen could recall. “We have talked of this before,” he said
gently. “The dragons cannot come to life. They are carved of stone,
child. In olden days, our island was the westernmost outpost of the
great Freehold of Valyria. It was the Valyrians who raised this
citadel, and they had ways of shaping stone since lost to us. A castle
must have towers wherever two walls meet at an angle, for defense.
The Valyrians fashioned these towers in the shape of dragons to
make their fortress seem more fearsome, just as they crowned their
walls with a thousand gargoyles instead of simple crenellations.” He
took her small pink hand in his own frail spotted one and gave it a
gentle squeeze. “So you see, there is nothing to fear.”
Shireen was unconvinced. “What about the thing in the sky? Dalla
and Matrice were talking by the well, and Dalla said she heard the
red woman tell Mother that it was dragonsbreath. If the dragons are
breathing, doesn’t that mean they are coming to life?”
The red woman, Maester Cressen thought sourly. Ill enough that
she’s lled the head of the mother with her madness, must she poison the
daughter’s dreams as well? He would have a stern word with Dalla,
warn her not to spread such tales. “The thing in the sky is a comet,
sweet child. A star with a tail, lost in the heavens. It will be gone
soon enough, never to be seen again in our lifetimes. Watch and
see.”

Shireen gave a brave little nod. “Mother said the white raven
means it’s not summer anymore.”
“That is so, my lady. The white ravens y only from the Citadel.”
Cressen’s ngers went to the chain about his neck, each link forged
from a di erent metal, each symbolizing his mastery of another
branch of learning; the maester’s collar, mark of his order. In the
pride of his youth, he had worn it easily, but now it seemed heavy
to him, the metal cold against his skin. “They are larger than other
ravens, and more clever, bred to carry only the most important
messages. This one came to tell us that the Conclave has met,
considered the reports and measurements made by maesters all over
the realm, and declared this great summer done at last. Ten years,
two turns, and sixteen days it lasted, the longest summer in living
memory.”
“Will it get cold now?” Shireen was a summer child, and had
never known true cold.
“In time,” Cressen replied. “If the gods are good, they will grant
us a warm autumn and bountiful harvests, so we might prepare for
the winter to come.” The smallfolk said that a long summer meant
an even longer winter, but the maester saw no reason to frighten
the child with such tales.
Patchface rang his bells. “It is always summer under the sea,” he
intoned. “The merwives wear nennymoans in their hair and weave
gowns of silver seaweed. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”
Shireen giggled. “I should like a gown of silver seaweed.”
“Under the sea, it snows up,” said the fool, “and the rain is dry as
bone. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”
“Will it truly snow?” the child asked.
“It will,” Cressen said. But not for years yet, I pray, and then not for
long. “Ah, here is Pylos with the bird.”
Shireen gave a cry of delight. Even Cressen had to admit the bird
made an impressive sight, white as snow and larger than any hawk,
with the bright black eyes that meant it was no mere albino, but a
truebred white raven of the Citadel. “Here,” he called. The raven
spread its wings, leapt into the air, and apped noisily across the
room to land on the table beside him.

“I’ll see to your breakfast now,” Pylos announced. Cressen
nodded. “This is the Lady Shireen,” he told the raven. The bird
bobbed its pale head up and down, as if it were bowing. “Lady,” it
croaked. “Lady.”
The child’s mouth gaped open. “It talks!”
“A few words. As I said, they are clever, these birds.”
“Clever bird, clever man, clever clever fool,” said Patchface,
jangling. “Oh, clever clever clever fool.” He began to sing. “The
shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord,” he
sang, hopping from one foot to the other and back again. “The
shadows come to stay, my lord, stay my lord, stay my lord.” He jerked
his head with each word, the bells in his antlers sending up a
clangor.
The white raven screamed and went apping away to perch on
the iron railing of the rookery stairs. Shireen seemed to grow
smaller. “He sings that all the time. I told him to stop but he won’t.
It makes me scared. Make him stop.”
And how do I do that? the old man wondered. Once I might have
silenced him forever, but now …
Patchface had come to them as a boy. Lord Ste on of cherished
memory had found him in Volantis, across the narrow sea. The king
—the old king, Aerys II Targaryen, who had not been quite so mad
in those days—had sent his lordship to seek a bride for Prince
Rhaegar, who had no sisters to wed. “We have found the most
splendid fool,” he wrote Cressen, a fortnight before he was to
return home from his fruitless mission. “Only a boy, yet nimble as a
monkey and witty as a dozen courtiers. He juggles and riddles and
does magic, and he can sing prettily in four tongues. We have
bought his freedom and hope to bring him home with us. Robert
will be delighted with him, and perhaps in time he will even teach
Stannis how to laugh.”
It saddened Cressen to remember that letter. No one had ever
taught Stannis how to laugh, least of all the boy Patchface. The
storm came up suddenly, howling, and Shipbreaker Bay proved the
truth of its name. The lord’s two-masted galley Windproud broke up
within sight of his castle. From its parapets his two eldest sons had

watched as their father’s ship was smashed against the rocks and
swallowed by the waters. A hundred oarsmen and sailors went
down with Lord Ste on Baratheon and his lady wife, and for days
thereafter every tide left a fresh crop of swollen corpses on the
strand below Storm’s End.
The boy washed up on the third day. Maester Cressen had come
down with the rest, to help put names to the dead. When they found
the fool he was naked, his skin white and wrinkled and powdered
with wet sand. Cressen had thought him another corpse, but when
Jommy grabbed his ankles to drag him o to the burial wagon, the
boy coughed water and sat up. To his dying day, Jommy had sworn
that Patchface’s esh was clammy cold.
No one ever explained those two days the fool had been lost in
the sea. The sherfolk liked to say a mermaid had taught him to
breathe water in return for his seed. Patchface himself had said
nothing. The witty, clever lad that Lord Ste on had written of never
reached Storm’s End; the boy they found was someone else, broken
in body and mind, hardly capable of speech, much less of wit. Yet
his fool’s face left no doubt of who he was. It was the fashion in the
Free City of Volantis to tattoo the faces of slaves and servants; from
neck to scalp the boy’s skin had been patterned in squares of red
and green motley.
“The wretch is mad, and in pain, and no use to anyone, least of all
himself,” declared old Ser Harbert, the castellan of Storm’s End in
those years. “The kindest thing you could do for that one is ll his
cup with the milk of the poppy. A painless sleep, and there’s an end
to it. He’d bless you if he had the wit for it.” But Cressen had
refused, and in the end he had won. Whether Patchface had gotten
any joy of that victory he could not say, not even today, so many
years later.
“The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my
lord,” the fool sang on, swinging his head and making his bells clang
and clatter. Bong dong, ring-a-ling, bong dong.
“Lord,” the white raven shrieked. “Lord, lord, lord.”
“A fool sings what he will,” the maester told his anxious princess.
“You must not take his words to heart. On the morrow he may

remember another song, and this one will never be heard again.” He
can sing prettily in four tongues, Lord Ste on had written …
Pylos strode through the door. “Maester, pardons.”
“You have forgotten the porridge,” Cressen said, amused. That
was most unlike Pylos.
“Maester, Ser Davos returned last night. They were talking of it
in the kitchen. I thought you would want to know at once.”
“Davos … last night, you say? Where is he?”
“With the king. They have been together most of the night.”
There was a time when Lord Stannis would have woken him, no
matter the hour, to have him there to give his counsel. “I should
have been told,” Cressen complained. “I should have been woken.”
He disentangled his ngers from Shireen’s. “Pardons, my lady, but I
must speak with your lord father. Pylos, give me your arm. There
are too many steps in this castle, and it seems to me they add a few
every night, just to vex me.”
Shireen and Patchface followed them out, but the child soon grew
restless with the old man’s creeping pace and dashed ahead, the fool
lurching after her with his cowbells clanging madly.
Castles are not friendly places for the frail, Cressen was reminded
as he descended the turnpike stairs of Sea Dragon Tower. Lord
Stannis would be found in the Chamber of the Painted Table, atop
the Stone Drum, Dragonstone’s central keep, so named for the way
its ancient walls boomed and rumbled during storms. To reach him
they must cross the gallery, pass through the middle and inner walls
with their guardian gargoyles and black iron gates, and ascend more
steps than Cressen cared to contemplate. Young men climbed steps
two at a time; for old men with bad hips, every one was a torment.
But Lord Stannis would not think to come to him, so the maester
resigned himself to the ordeal. He had Pylos to help him, at the
least, and for that he was grateful.
Shu ing along the gallery, they passed before a row of tall
arched windows with commanding views of the outer bailey, the
curtain wall, and the shing village beyond. In the yard, archers
were ring at practice butts to the call of “Notch, draw, loose.”
Their arrows made a sound like a ock of birds taking wing.

Guardsmen strode the wallwalks, peering between the gargoyles on
the host camped without. The morning air was hazy with the smoke
of cook res, as three thousand men sat down to break their fasts
beneath the banners of their lords. Past the sprawl of the camp, the
anchorage was crowded with ships. No craft that had come within
sight of Dragonstone this past half year had been allowed to leave
again. Lord Stannis’s Fury, a triple-decked war galley of three
hundred oars, looked almost small beside some of the big-bellied
carracks and cogs that surrounded her.
The guardsmen outside the Stone Drum knew the maesters by
sight, and passed them through. “Wait here,” Cressen told Pylos,
within. “It’s best I see him alone.”
“It is a long climb, Maester.”
Cressen smiled. “You think I have forgotten? I have climbed these
steps so often I know each one by name.”
Halfway up, he regretted his decision. He had stopped to catch his
breath and ease the pain in his hip when he heard the scu of boots
on stone, and came face-to-face with Ser Davos Seaworth,
descending.
Davos was a slight man, his low birth written plain upon a
common face. A well-worn green cloak, stained by salt and spray
and faded from the sun, draped his thin shoulders, over brown
doublet and breeches that matched brown eyes and hair. About his
neck a pouch of worn leather hung from a thong. His small beard
was well peppered with grey, and he wore a leather glove on his
maimed left hand. When he saw Cressen, he checked his descent.
“Ser Davos,” the maester said. “When did you return?”
“In the black of morning. My favorite time.” It was said that no
one had ever handled a ship by night half so well as Davos
Shorthand. Before Lord Stannis had knighted him, he had been the
most notorious and elusive smuggler in all the Seven Kingdoms.
“And?”
The man shook his head. “It is as you warned him. They will not
rise, Maester. Not for him. They do not love him.”
No, Cressen thought. Nor will they ever. He is strong, able,
just … aye, just past the point of wisdom … yet it is not enough. It has

never been enough. “You spoke to them all?”
“All? No. Only those that would see me. They do not love me
either, these highborns. To them I’ll always be the Onion Knight.”
His left hand closed, stubby ngers locking into a st; Stannis had
hacked the ends o at the last joint, all but the thumb. “I broke
bread with Gulian Swann and old Penrose, and the Tarths consented
to a midnight meeting in a grove. The others—well, Beric
Dondarrion is gone missing, some say dead, and Lord Caron is with
Renly. Bryce the Orange, of the Rainbow Guard.”
“The Rainbow Guard?”
“Renly’s made his own Kingsguard,” the onetime smuggler
explained, “but these seven don’t wear white. Each one has his own
color. Loras Tyrell’s their Lord Commander.”
It was just the sort of notion that would appeal to Renly
Baratheon; a splendid new order of knighthood, with gorgeous new
raiment to proclaim it. Even as a boy, Renly had loved bright colors
and rich fabrics, and he had loved his games as well. “Look at me!”
he would shout as he ran laughing through the halls of Storm’s End.
“Look at me, I’m a dragon,” or “Look at me, I’m a wizard,” or
“Look at me, look at me, I’m the rain god.”
The bold little boy with wild black hair and laughing eyes was a
man grown now, one-and-twenty, and still he played his games.
Look at me, I’m a king, Cressen thought sadly. Oh, Renly, Renly, dear
sweet child, do you know what you are doing? And would you care if
you did? Is there anyone who cares for him but me? “What reasons did
the lords give for their refusals?” he asked Ser Davos.
“Well, as to that, some gave me soft words and some blunt, some
made excuses, some promises, some only lied.” He shrugged. “In
the end words are just wind.”
“You could bring him no hope?”
“Only the false sort, and I’d not do that,” Davos said. “He had the
truth from me.”
Maester Cressen remembered the day Davos had been knighted,
after the siege of Storm’s End. Lord Stannis and a small garrison had
held the castle for close to a year, against the great host of the
Lords Tyrell and Redwyne. Even the sea was closed against them,

watched day and night by Redwyne galleys ying the burgundy
banners of the Arbor. Within Storm’s End, the horses had long since
been eaten, the dogs and cats were gone, and the garrison was
down to roots and rats. Then came a night when the moon was new
and black clouds hid the stars. Cloaked in that darkness, Davos the
smuggler had dared the Redwyne cordon and the rocks of
Shipbreaker Bay alike. His little ship had a black hull, black sails,
black oars, and a hold crammed with onions and salt sh. Little
enough, yet it had kept the garrison alive long enough for Eddard
Stark to reach Storm’s End and break the siege.
Lord Stannis had rewarded Davos with choice lands on Cape
Wrath, a small keep, and a knight’s honors … but he had also
decreed that he lose a joint of each nger on his left hand, to pay
for all his years of smuggling. Davos had submitted, on the
condition that Stannis wield the knife himself; he would accept no
punishment from lesser hands. The lord had used a butcher’s
cleaver, the better to cut clean and true. Afterward, Davos had
chosen the name Seaworth for his new-made house, and he took for
his banner a black ship on a pale grey eld—with an onion on its
sails. The onetime smuggler was fond of saying that Lord Stannis
had done him a boon, by giving him four less ngernails to clean
and trim.
No, Cressen thought, a man like that would give no false hope,
nor soften a hard truth. “Ser Davos, truth can be a bitter draught,
even for a man like Lord Stannis. He thinks only of returning to
King’s Landing in the fullness of his power, to tear down his
enemies and claim what is rightfully his. Yet now …”
“If he takes this meager host to King’s Landing, it will be only to
die. He does not have the numbers. I told him as much, but you
know his pride.” Davos held up his gloved hand. “My ngers will
grow back before that man bends to sense.”
The old man sighed. “You have done all you could. Now I must
add my voice to yours.” Wearily, he resumed his climb.
Lord Stannis Baratheon’s refuge was a great round room with
walls of bare black stone and four tall narrow windows that looked
out to the four points of the compass. In the center of the chamber

was the great table from which it took its name, a massive slab of
carved wood fashioned at the command of Aegon Targaryen in the
days before the Conquest. The Painted Table was more than fty
feet long, perhaps half that wide at its widest point, but less than
four feet across at its narrowest. Aegon’s carpenters had shaped it
after the land of Westeros, sawing out each bay and peninsula until
the table nowhere ran straight. On its surface, darkened by near
three hundred years of varnish, were painted the Seven Kingdoms
as they had been in Aegon’s day; rivers and mountains, castles and
cities, lakes and forests.
There was a single chair in the room, carefully positioned in the
precise place that Dragonstone occupied o the coast of Westeros,
and raised up to give a good view of the tabletop. Seated in the
chair was a man in a tight-laced leather jerkin and breeches of
roughspun brown wool. When Maester Cressen entered, he glanced
up. “I knew you would come, old man, whether I summoned you or
no.” There was no hint of warmth in his voice; there seldom was.
Stannis Baratheon, Lord of Dragonstone and by the grace of the
gods rightful heir to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of
Westeros, was broad of shoulder and sinewy of limb, with a
tightness to his face and esh that spoke of leather cured in the sun
until it was as tough as steel. Hard was the word men used when
they spoke of Stannis, and hard he was. Though he was not yet veand-thirty, only a fringe of thin black hair remained on his head,
circling behind his ears like the shadow of a crown. His brother, the
late King Robert, had grown a beard in his nal years. Maester
Cressen had never seen it, but they said it was a wild thing, thick
and erce. As if in answer, Stannis kept his own whiskers cropped
tight and short. They lay like a blue-black shadow across his square
jaw and the bony hollows of his cheeks. His eyes were open wounds
beneath his heavy brows, a blue as dark as the sea by night. His
mouth would have given despair to even the drollest of fools; it was
a mouth made for frowns and scowls and sharply worded
commands, all thin pale lips and clenched muscles, a mouth that had
forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh.
Sometimes when the world grew very still and silent of a night,

Maester Cressen fancied he could hear Lord Stannis grinding his
teeth half a castle away.
“Once you would have woken me,” the old man said.
“Once you were young. Now you are old and sick, and need your
sleep.” Stannis had never learned to soften his speech, to dissemble
or atter; he said what he thought, and those that did not like it
could be damned. “I knew you’d learn what Davos had to say soon
enough. You always do, don’t you?”
“I would be of no help to you if I did not,” Cressen said. “I met
Davos on the stair.”
“And he told all, I suppose? I should have had the man’s tongue
shortened along with his ngers.”
“He would have made you a poor envoy then.”
“He made me a poor envoy in any case. The storm lords will not
rise for me. It seems they do not like me, and the justice of my
cause means nothing to them. The cravenly ones will sit behind
their walls waiting to see how the wind rises and who is likely to
triumph. The bold ones have already declared for Renly. For Renly!”
He spat out the name like poison on his tongue.
“Your brother has been the Lord of Storm’s End these past
thirteen years. These lords are his sworn bannermen—”
“His,” Stannis broke in, “when by rights they should be mine. I
never asked for Dragonstone. I never wanted it. I took it because
Robert’s enemies were here and he commanded me to root them
out. I built his eet and did his work, dutiful as a younger brother
should be to an elder, as Renly should be to me. And what was
Robert’s thanks? He names me Lord of Dragonstone, and gives
Storm’s End and its incomes to Renly. Storm’s End belonged to
House Baratheon for three hundred years; by rights it should have
passed to me when Robert took the Iron Throne.”
It was an old grievance, deeply felt, and never more so than now.
Here was the heart of his lord’s weakness; for Dragonstone, old and
strong though it was, commanded the allegiance of only a handful
of lesser lords, whose stony island holdings were too thinly peopled
to yield up the men that Stannis needed. Even with the sellswords
he had brought across the narrow sea from the Free Cities of Myr

and Lys, the host camped outside his walls was far too small to
bring down the power of House Lannister.
“Robert did you an injustice,” Maester Cressen replied carefully,
“yet he had sound reasons. Dragonstone had long been the seat of
House Targaryen. He needed a man’s strength to rule here, and
Renly was but a child.”
“He is a child still,” Stannis declared, his anger ringing loud in the
empty hall, “a thieving child who thinks to snatch the crown o my
brow. What has Renly ever done to earn a throne? He sits in council
and jests with Little nger, and at tourneys he dons his splendid suit
of armor and allows himself to be knocked o his horse by a better
man. That is the sum of my brother Renly, who thinks he ought to
be a king. I ask you, why did the gods in ict me with brothers?”
“I cannot answer for the gods.”
“You seldom answer at all these days, it seems to me. Who
maesters for Renly? Perchance I should send for him, I might like
his counsel better. What do you think this maester said when my
brother decided to steal my crown? What counsel did your
colleague o er to this traitor blood of mine?”
“It would surprise me if Lord Renly sought counsel, Your Grace.”
The youngest of Lord Ste on’s three sons had grown into a man
bold but heedless, who acted from impulse rather than calculation.
In that, as in so much else, Renly was like his brother Robert, and
utterly unlike Stannis.
“Your Grace,” Stannis repeated bitterly. “You mock me with a
king’s style, yet what am I king of? Dragonstone and a few rocks in
the narrow sea, there is my kingdom.” He descended the steps of his
chair to stand before the table, his shadow falling across the mouth
of the Blackwater Rush and the painted forest where King’s Landing
now stood. There he stood, brooding over the realm he sought to
claim, so near at hand and yet so far away. “Tonight I am to sup
with my lords bannermen, such as they are. Celtigar, Velaryon, Bar
Emmon, the whole paltry lot of them. A poor crop, if truth be told,
but they are what my brothers have left me. That Lysene pirate
Salladhor Saan will be there with the latest tally of what I owe him,
and Morosh the Myrman will caution me with talk of tides and

autumn gales, while Lord Sunglass mutters piously of the will of the
Seven. Celtigar will want to know which storm lords are joining us.
Velaryon will threaten to take his levies home unless we strike at
once. What am I to tell them? What must I do now?”
“Your true enemies are the Lannisters, my lord,” Maester Cressen
answered. “If you and your brother were to make common cause
against them—”
“I will not treat with Renly,” Stannis answered in a tone that
brooked no argument. “Not while he calls himself a king.”
“Not Renly, then,” the maester yielded. His lord was stubborn and
proud; when he had set his mind, there was no changing it. “Others
might serve your needs as well. Eddard Stark’s son has been
proclaimed King in the North, with all the power of Winterfell and
Riverrun behind him.”
“A green boy,” said Stannis, “and another false king. Am I to
accept a broken realm?”
“Surely half a kingdom is better than none,” Cressen said, “and if
you help the boy avenge his father’s murder—”
“Why should I avenge Eddard Stark? The man was nothing to me.
Oh, Robert loved him, to be sure. Loved him as a brother, how often
did I hear that? I was his brother, not Ned Stark, but you would
never have known it by the way he treated me. I held Storm’s End
for him, watching good men starve while Mace Tyrell and Paxter
Redwyne feasted within sight of my walls. Did Robert thank me?
No. He thanked Stark, for lifting the siege when we were down to
rats and radishes. I built a eet at Robert’s command, took
Dragonstone in his name. Did he take my hand and say, Well done,
brother, whatever should I do without you? No, he blamed me for
letting Willem Darry steal away Viserys and the babe, as if I could
have stopped it. I sat on his council for fteen years, helping Jon
Arryn rule his realm while Robert drank and whored, but when Jon
died, did my brother name me his Hand? No, he went galloping o
to his dear friend Ned Stark, and o ered him the honor. And small
good it did either of them.”
“Be that as it may, my lord,” Maester Cressen said gently. “Great
wrongs have been done you, but the past is dust. The future may

yet be won if you join with the Starks. There are others you might
sound out as well. What of Lady Arryn? If the queen murdered her
husband, surely she will want justice for him. She has a young son,
Jon Arryn’s heir. If you were to betroth Shireen to him—”
“The boy is weak and sickly,” Lord Stannis objected. “Even his
father saw how it was, when he asked me to foster him on
Dragonstone. Service as a page might have done him good, but that
damnable Lannister woman had Lord Arryn poisoned before it could
be done, and now Lysa hides him in the Eyrie. She’ll never part with
the boy, I promise you that.”
“Then you must send Shireen to the Eyrie,” the maester urged.
“Dragonstone is a grim home for a child. Let her fool go with her,
so she will have a familiar face about her.”
“Familiar and hideous.” Stannis furrowed his brow in thought.
“Still … perhaps it is worth the trying …”
“Must the rightful Lord of the Seven Kingdoms beg for help from
widow women and usurpers?” a woman’s voice asked sharply.
Maester Cressen turned, and bowed his head. “My lady,” he said,
chagrined that he had not heard her enter.
Lord Stannis scowled. “I do not beg. Of anyone. Mind you
remember that, woman.”
“I am pleased to hear it, my lord.” Lady Selyse was as tall as her
husband, thin of body and thin of face, with prominent ears, a sharp
nose, and the faintest hint of a mustache on her upper lip. She
plucked it daily and cursed it regularly, yet it never failed to return.
Her eyes were pale, her mouth stern, her voice a whip. She cracked
it now. “Lady Arryn owes you her allegiance, as do the Starks, your
brother Renly, and all the rest. You are their one true king. It would
not be tting to plead and bargain with them for what is rightfully
yours by the grace of god.”
God, she said, not gods. The red woman had won her, heart and
soul, turning her from the gods of the Seven Kingdoms, both old
and new, to worship the one they called the Lord of Light.
“Your god can keep his grace,” said Lord Stannis, who did not
share his wife’s fervent new faith. “It’s swords I need, not blessings.
Do you have an army hidden somewhere that you’ve not told me

of?” There was no a ection in his tone. Stannis had always been
uncomfortable around women, even his own wife. When he had
gone to King’s Landing to sit on Robert’s council, he had left Selyse
on Dragonstone with their daughter. His letters had been few, his
visits fewer; he did his duty in the marriage bed once or twice a
year, but took no joy in it, and the sons he had once hoped for had
never come.
“My brothers and uncles and cousins have armies,” she told him.
“House Florent will rally to your banner.”
“House Florent can eld two thousand swords at best.” It was
said that Stannis knew the strength of every house in the Seven
Kingdoms. “And you have a deal more faith in your brothers and
uncles than I do, my lady. The Florent lands lie too close to
Highgarden for your lord uncle to risk Mace Tyrell’s wrath.”
“There is another way.” Lady Selyse moved closer. “Look out
your windows, my lord. There is the sign you have waited for,
blazoned on the sky. Red, it is, the red of ame, red for the ery
heart of the true god. It is his banner—and yours! See how it unfurls
across the heavens like a dragon’s hot breath, and you the Lord of
Dragonstone. It means your time has come, Your Grace. Nothing is
more certain. You are meant to sail from this desolate rock as
Aegon the Conqueror once sailed, to sweep all before you as he did.
Only say the word, and embrace the power of the Lord of Light.”
“How many swords will the Lord of Light put into my hand?”
Stannis demanded again.
“All you need,” his wife promised. “The swords of Storm’s End
and Highgarden for a start, and all their lords bannermen.”
“Davos would tell you di erent,” Stannis said. “Those swords are
sworn to Renly. They love my charming young brother, as they
once loved Robert … and as they have never loved me.”
“Yes,” she answered, “but if Renly should die …”
Stannis looked at his lady with narrowed eyes, until Cressen could
not hold his tongue. “It is not to be thought. Your Grace, whatever
follies Renly has committed—”
“Follies? I call them treasons.” Stannis turned back to his wife.
“My brother is young and strong, and he has a vast host around

him, and these rainbow knights of his.”
“Melisandre has gazed into the ames, and seen him dead.”
Cressen was horrorstruck. “Fratricide … my lord, this is evil,
unthinkable … please, listen to me.”
Lady Selyse gave him a measured look. “And what will you tell
him, Maester? How he might win half a kingdom if he goes to the
Starks on his knees and sells our daughter to Lysa Arryn?”
“I have heard your counsel, Cressen,” Lord Stannis said. “Now I
will hear hers. You are dismissed.”
Maester Cressen bent a sti knee. He could feel Lady Selyse’s
eyes on his back as he shu ed slowly across the room. By the time
he reached the bottom of the steps it was all he could do to stand
erect. “Help me,” he said to Pylos.
When he was safe back in his own rooms, Cressen sent the
younger man away and limped to his balcony once more, to stand
between his gargoyles and stare out to sea. One of Salladhor Saan’s
warships was sweeping past the castle, her gaily striped hull slicing
through the grey-green waters as her oars rose and fell. He watched
until she vanished behind a headland. Would that my fears could
vanish so easily. Had he lived so long for this?
When a maester donned his collar, he put aside the hope of
children, yet Cressen had oft felt a father nonetheless. Robert,
Stannis, Renly … three sons he had raised after the angry sea
claimed Lord Ste on. Had he done so ill that now he must watch
one kill the other? He could not allow it, would not allow it.
The woman was the heart of it. Not the Lady Selyse, the other
one. The red woman, the servants had named her, afraid to speak
her name. “I will speak her name,” Cressen told his stone hellhound.
“Melisandre. Her.” Melisandre of Asshai, sorceress, shadowbinder,
and priestess to R’hllor, the Lord of Light, the Heart of Fire, the God
of Flame and Shadow. Melisandre, whose madness must not be
allowed to spread beyond Dragonstone.
His chambers seemed dim and gloomy after the brightness of the
morning. With fumbling hands, the old man lit a candle and carried
it to the workroom beneath the rookery stair, where his ointments,
potions, and medicines stood neatly on their shelves. On the bottom

shelf behind a row of salves in squat clay jars he found a vial of
indigo glass, no larger than his little nger. It rattled when he
shook it. Cressen blew away a layer of dust and carried it back to
his table. Collapsing into his chair, he pulled the stopper and spilled
out the vial’s contents. A dozen crystals, no larger than seeds,
rattled across the parchment he’d been reading. They shone like
jewels in the candlelight, so purple that the maester found himself
thinking that he had never truly seen the color before.
The chain around his throat felt very heavy. He touched one of
the crystals lightly with the tip of his little nger. Such a small thing
to hold the power of life and death. It was made from a certain plant
that grew only on the islands of the Jade Sea, half a world away.
The leaves had to be aged, and soaked in a wash of limes and sugar
water and certain rare spices from the Summer Isles. Afterward they
could be discarded, but the potion must be thickened with ash and
allowed to crystallize. The process was slow and di cult, the
necessaries costly and hard to acquire. The alchemists of Lys knew
the way of it, though, and the Faceless Men of Braavos … and the
maesters of his order as well, though it was not something talked
about beyond the walls of the Citadel. All the world knew that a
maester forged his silver link when he learned the art of healing—
but the world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal
also knew how to kill.
Cressen no longer recalled the name the Asshai’i gave the leaf, or
the Lysene poisoners the crystal. In the Citadel, it was simply called
the strangler. Dissolved in wine, it would make the muscles of a
man’s throat clench tighter than any st, shutting o his windpipe.
They said a victim’s face turned as purple as the little crystal seed
from which his death was grown, but so too did a man choking on a
morsel of food.
And this very night Lord Stannis would feast his bannermen, his
lady wife … and the red woman, Melisandre of Asshai.
I must rest, Maester Cressen told himself. I must have all my
strength come dark. My hands must not shake, nor my courage ag. It is
a dreadful thing I do, yet it must be done. If there are gods, surely they
will forgive me. He had slept so poorly of late. A nap would refresh

him for the ordeal ahead. Wearily, he tottered o to his bed. Yet
when he closed his eyes, he could still see the light of the comet,
red and ery and vividly alive amidst the darkness of his dreams.
Perhaps it is my comet, he thought drowsily at the last, just before
sleep took him. An omen of blood, foretelling murder … yes …
When he woke it was full dark, his bedchamber was black, and
every joint in his body ached. Cressen pushed himself up, his head
throbbing. Clutching for his cane, he rose unsteady to his feet. So
late, he thought. They did not summon me. He was always
summoned for feasts, seated near the salt, close to Lord Stannis. His
lord’s face swam up before him, not the man he was but the boy he
had been, standing cold in the shadows while the sun shone on his
elder brother. Whatever he did, Robert had done rst, and better.
Poor boy … he must hurry, for his sake.
The maester found the crystals where he had left them, and
scooped them o the parchment. Cressen owned no hollow rings,
such as the poisoners of Lys were said to favor, but a myriad of
pockets great and small were sewn inside the loose sleeves of his
robe. He secreted the strangler seeds in one of them, threw open his
door, and called, “Pylos? Where are you?” When he heard no reply,
he called again, louder. “Pylos, I need help.” Still there came no
answer. That was queer; the young maester had his cell only a half
turn down the stair, within easy earshot.
In the end, Cressen had to shout for the servants. “Make haste,”
he told them. “I have slept too long. They will be feasting by
now … drinking … I should have been woken.” What had happened
to Maester Pylos? Truly, he did not understand.
Again he had to cross the long gallery. A night wind whispered
through the great windows, sharp with the smell of the sea. Torches
ickered along the walls of Dragonstone, and in the camp beyond,
he could see hundreds of cook res burning, as if a eld of stars had
fallen to the earth. Above, the comet blazed red and malevolent. I
am too old and wise to fear such things, the maester told himself.
The doors to the Great Hall were set in the mouth of a stone
dragon. He told the servants to leave him outside. It would be
better to enter alone; he must not appear feeble. Leaning heavily on

his cane, Cressen climbed the last few steps and hobbled beneath
the gateway teeth. A pair of guardsmen opened the heavy red doors
before him, unleashing a sudden blast of noise and light. Cressen
stepped down into the dragon’s maw.
Over the clatter of knife and plate and the low mutter of table
talk, he heard Patchface singing, “… dance, my lord, dance my lord,”
to the accompaniment of jangling cowbells. The same dreadful song
he’d sung this morning. “The shadows come to stay, my lord, stay my
lord, stay my lord.” The lower tables were crowded with knights,
archers, and sellsword captains, tearing apart loaves of black bread
to soak in their sh stew. Here there was no loud laughter, no
raucous shouting such as marred the dignity of other men’s feasts;
Lord Stannis did not permit such.
Cressen made his way toward the raised platform where the lords
sat with the king. He had to step wide around Patchface. Dancing,
his bells ringing, the fool neither saw nor heard his approach. As he
hopped from one leg to the other, Patchface lurched into Cressen,
knocking his cane out from under him. They went crashing down
together amidst the rushes in a tangle of arms and legs, while a
sudden gale of laughter went up around them. No doubt it was a
comical sight.
Patchface sprawled half on top of him, motley fool’s face pressed
close to his own. He had lost his tin helm with its antlers and bells.
“Under the sea, you fall up,” he declared. “I know, I know, oh, oh,
oh.” Giggling, the fool rolled o , bounded to his feet, and did a
little dance.
Trying to make the best of it, the maester smiled feebly and
struggled to rise, but his hip was in such pain that for a moment he
was half afraid that he had broken it all over again. He felt strong
hands grasp him under the arms and lift him back to his feet.
“Thank you, ser,” he murmured, turning to see which knight had
come to his aid …
“Maester,” said Lady Melisandre, her deep voice avored with the
music of the Jade Sea. “You ought take more care.” As ever, she
wore red head to heel, a long loose gown of owing silk as bright
as re, with dagged sleeves and deep slashes in the bodice that

showed glimpses of a darker bloodred fabric beneath. Around her
throat was a red gold choker tighter than any maester’s chain,
ornamented with a single great ruby. Her hair was not the orange
or strawberry color of common red-haired men, but a deep
burnished copper that shone in the light of the torches. Even her
eyes were red … but her skin was smooth and white, unblemished,
pale as cream. Slender she was, graceful, taller than most knights,
with full breasts and narrow waist and a heart-shaped face. Men’s
eyes that once found her did not quickly look away, not even a
maester’s eyes. Many called her beautiful. She was not beautiful.
She was red, and terrible, and red.
“I … thank you, my lady.”
“A man your age must look to where he steps,” Melisandre said
courteously. “The night is dark and full of terrors.”
He knew the phrase, some prayer of her faith. It makes no matter,
I have a faith of my own. “Only children fear the dark,” he told her.
Yet even as he said the words, he heard Patchface take up his song
again. “The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my
lord.”
“Now here is a riddle,” Melisandre said. “A clever fool and a
foolish wise man.” Bending, she picked up Patchface’s helm from
where it had fallen and set it on Cressen’s head. The cowbells rang
softly as the tin bucket slid down over his ears. “A crown to match
your chain, Lord Maester,” she announced. All around them, men
were laughing.
Cressen pressed his lips together and fought to still his rage. She
thought he was feeble and helpless, but she would learn otherwise
before the night was done. Old he might be, yet he was still a
maester of the Citadel. “I need no crown but truth,” he told her,
removing the fool’s helm from his head.
“There are truths in this world that are not taught at Oldtown.”
Melisandre turned from him in a swirl of red silk and made her way
back to the high table, where King Stannis and his queen were
seated. Cressen handed the antlered tin bucket back to Patchface,
and made to follow.
Maester Pylos sat in his place.

The old man could only stop and stare. “Maester Pylos,” he said
at last. “You … you did not wake me.”
“His Grace commanded me to let you rest.” Pylos had at least the
grace to blush. “He told me you were not needed here.”
Cressen looked over the knights and captains and lords sitting
silent. Lord Celtigar, aged and sour, wore a mantle patterned with
red crabs picked out in garnets. Handsome Lord Velaryon chose seagreen silk, the white gold seahorse at his throat matching his long
fair hair. Lord Bar Emmon, that plump boy of fourteen, was
swathed in purple velvet trimmed with white seal, Ser Axell Florent
remained homely even in russet and fox fur, pious Lord Sunglass
wore moonstones at throat and wrist and nger, and the Lysene
captain Salladhor Saan was a sunburst of scarlet satin, gold, and
jewels. Only Ser Davos dressed simply, in brown doublet and green
wool mantle, and only Ser Davos met his gaze, with pity in his eyes.
“You are too ill and too confused to be of use to me, old man.” It
sounded so like Lord Stannis’s voice, but it could not be, it could
not. “Pylos will counsel me henceforth. Already he works with the
ravens, since you can no longer climb to the rookery. I will not
have you kill yourself in my service.”
Maester Cressen blinked. Stannis, my lord, my sad sullen boy, son I
never had, you must not do this, don’t you know how I have cared for
you, lived for you, loved you despite all? Yes, loved you, better than
Robert even, or Renly, for you were the one unloved, the one who
needed me most. Yet all he said was, “As you command, my lord,
but … but I am hungry. Might not I have a place at your table?” At
your side, I belong at your side …
Ser Davos rose from the bench. “I should be honored if the
maester would sit here beside me, Your Grace.”
“As you will.” Lord Stannis turned away to say something to
Melisandre, who had seated herself at his right hand, in the place of
high honor. Lady Selyse was on his left, ashing a smile as bright
and brittle as her jewels.
Too far, Cressen thought dully, looking at where Ser Davos was
seated. Half of the lords bannermen were between the smuggler and

the high table. I must be closer to her if I am to get the strangler into her
cup, yet how?
Patchface was capering about as the maester made his slow way
around the table to Davos Seaworth. “Here we eat sh,” the fool
declared happily, waving a cod about like a scepter. “Under the sea,
the sh eat us. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”
Ser Davos moved aside to make room on the bench. “We all
should be in motley tonight,” he said gloomily as Cressen seated
himself, “for this is fool’s business we’re about. The red woman has
seen victory in her ames, so Stannis means to press his claim, no
matter what the numbers. Before she’s done we’re all like to see
what Patchface saw, I fear—the bottom of the sea.”
Cressen slid his hands up into his sleeves as if for warmth. His
ngers found the hard lumps the crystals made in the wool. “Lord
Stannis.”
Stannis turned from the red woman, but it was Lady Selyse who
replied. “King Stannis. You forget yourself, Maester.”
“He is old, his mind wanders,” the king told her gru y. “What is
it, Cressen? Speak your mind.”
“As you intend to sail, it is vital that you make common cause
with Lord Stark and Lady Arryn …”
“I make common cause with no one,” Stannis Baratheon said.
“No more than light makes common cause with darkness.” Lady
Selyse took his hand.
Stannis nodded. “The Starks seek to steal half my kingdom, even
as the Lannisters have stolen my throne and my own sweet brother
the swords and service and strongholds that are mine by rights.
They are all usurpers, and they are all my enemies.”
I have lost him, Cressen thought, despairing. If only he could
somehow approach Melisandre unseen … he needed but an instant’s
access to her cup. “You are the rightful heir to your brother Robert,
the true Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and King of the Andals, the
Rhoynar, and the First Men,” he said desperately, “but even so, you
cannot hope to triumph without allies.”
“He has an ally,” Lady Selyse said. “R’hllor, the Lord of Light, the
Heart of Fire, the God of Flame and Shadow.”

“Gods make uncertain allies at best,” the old man insisted, “and
that one has no power here.”
“You think not?” The ruby at Melisandre’s throat caught the light
as she turned her head, and for an instant it seemed to glow bright
as the comet. “If you will speak such folly, Maester, you ought to
wear your crown again.”
“Yes,” Lady Selyse agreed. “Patches’s helm. It suits you well, old
man. Put it on again, I command you.”
“Under the sea, no one wears hats,” Patchface said. “I know, I
know, oh, oh, oh.”
Lord Stannis’s eyes were shadowed beneath his heavy brow, his
mouth tight as his jaw worked silently. He always ground his teeth
when he was angry. “Fool,” he growled at last, “my lady wife
commands. Give Cressen your helm.”
No, the old maester thought, this is not you, not your way, you were
always just, always hard yet never cruel, never, you did not understand
mockery, no more than you understood laughter.
Patchface danced closer, his cowbells ringing, clang-a-lang, dingding, clink-clank-clink-clank. The maester sat silent while the fool set
the antlered bucket on his brow. Cressen bowed his head beneath
the weight. His bells clanged. “Perhaps he ought sing his counsel
henceforth,” Lady Selyse said.
“You go too far, woman,” Lord Stannis said. “He is an old man,
and he’s served me well.”
And I will serve you to the last, my sweet lord, my poor lonely son,
Cressen thought, for suddenly he saw the way. Ser Davos’s cup was
before him, still half-full of sour red. He found a hard ake of
crystal in his sleeve, held it tight between thumb and fore nger as
he reached for the cup. Smooth motions, deft, I must not fumble now,
he prayed, and the gods were kind. In the blink of an eye, his
ngers were empty. His hands had not been so steady for years, nor
half so uid. Davos saw, but no one else, he was certain. Cup in
hand, he rose to his feet. “Mayhaps I have been a fool. Lady
Melisandre, will you share a cup of wine with me? A cup in honor
of your god, your Lord of Light? A cup to toast his power?”
The red woman studied him. “If you wish.”

He could feel them all watching him. Davos clutched at him as he
left the bench, catching his sleeve with the ngers that Lord Stannis
had shortened. “What are you doing?” he whispered.
“A thing that must be done,” Maester Cressen answered, “for the
sake of the realm, and the soul of my lord.” He shook o Davos’s
hand, spilling a drop of wine on the rushes.
She met him beneath the high table with every man’s eyes upon
them. But Cressen saw only her. Red silk, red eyes, the ruby red at
her throat, red lips curled in a faint smile as she put her hand atop
his own, around the cup. Her skin felt hot, feverish. “It is not too
late to spill the wine, Maester.”
“No,” he whispered hoarsely. “No.”
“As you will.” Melisandre of Asshai took the cup from his hands
and drank long and deep. There was only half a swallow of wine
remaining when she o ered it back to him. “And now you.”
His hands were shaking, but he made himself be strong. A
maester of the Citadel must not be afraid. The wine was sour on his
tongue. He let the empty cup drop from his ngers to shatter on the
oor. “He does have power here, my lord,” the woman said. “And
re cleanses.” At her throat, the ruby shimmered redly.
Cressen tried to reply, but his words caught in his throat. His
cough became a terrible thin whistle as he strained to suck in air.
Iron ngers tightened round his neck. As he sank to his knees, still
he shook his head, denying her, denying her power, denying her
magic, denying her god. And the cowbells peeled in his antlers,
singing fool, fool, fool while the red woman looked down on him in
pity, the candle ames dancing in her red red eyes.

ARYA

At Winterfell they had called her “Arya Horseface” and she’d
thought nothing could be worse, but that was before the orphan boy
Lommy Greenhands had named her “Lumpyhead.”
Her head felt lumpy when she touched it. When Yoren had
dragged her into that alley she’d thought he meant to kill her, but
the sour old man had only held her tight, sawing through her mats
and tangles with his dagger. She remembered how the breeze sent
the stfuls of dirty brown hair skittering across the paving stones,
toward the sept where her father had died. “I’m taking men and
boys from the city,” Yoren growled as the sharp steel scraped at her
head. “Now you hold still, boy.” By the time he had nished, her
scalp was nothing but tufts and stubble.
Afterward he told her that from there to Winterfell she’d be Arry
the orphan boy. “Gate shouldn’t be hard, but the road’s another
matter. You got a long way to go in bad company. I got thirty this
time, men and boys all bound for the Wall, and don’t be thinking
they’re like that bastard brother o’ yours.” He shook her. “Lord
Eddard gave me pick o’ the dungeons, and I didn’t nd no little
lordlings down there. This lot, half o’ them would turn you over to
the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a few silvers. The
other half’d do the same, only they’d rape you rst. So you keep to
yourself and make your water in the woods, alone. That’ll be the
hardest part, the pissing, so don’t drink no more’n you need.”

Leaving King’s Landing was easy, just like he’d said. The
Lannister guardsmen on the gate were stopping everyone, but
Yoren called one by name and their wagons were waved through.
No one spared Arya a glance. They were looking for a highborn girl,
daughter of the King’s Hand, not for a skinny boy with his hair
chopped o . Arya never looked back. She wished the Rush would
rise and wash the whole city away, Flea Bottom and the Red Keep
and the Great Sept and everything, and everyone too, especially
Prince Jo rey and his mother. But she knew it wouldn’t, and
anyhow Sansa was still in the city and would wash away too. When
she remembered that, Arya decided to wish for Winterfell instead.
Yoren was wrong about the pissing, though. That wasn’t the
hardest part at all; Lommy Greenhands and Hot Pie were the
hardest part. Orphan boys. Yoren had plucked some from the streets
with promises of food for their bellies and shoes for their feet. The
rest he’d found in chains. “The Watch needs good men,” he told
them as they set out, “but you lot will have to do.”
Yoren had taken grown men from the dungeons as well, thieves
and poachers and rapers and the like. The worst were the three he’d
found in the black cells who must have scared even him, because he
kept them fettered hand and foot in the back of a wagon, and
vowed they’d stay in irons all the way to the Wall. One had no
nose, only the hole in his face where it had been cut o , and the
gross fat bald one with the pointed teeth and the weeping sores on
his cheeks had eyes like nothing human.
They took ve wagons out of King’s Landing, laden with supplies
for the Wall: hides and bolts of cloth, bars of pig iron, a cage of
ravens, books and paper and ink, a bale of sourleaf, jars of oil, and
chests of medicine and spices. Teams of plow horses pulled the
wagons, and Yoren had bought two coursers and a half-dozen
donkeys for the boys. Arya would have preferred a real horse, but
the donkey was better than riding on a wagon.
The men paid her no mind, but she was not so lucky with the
boys. She was two years younger than the youngest orphan, not to
mention smaller and skinnier, and Lommy and Hot Pie took her
silence to mean she was scared, or stupid, or deaf. “Look at that

sword Lumpyhead’s got there,” Lommy said one morning as they
made their plodding way past orchards and wheat elds. He’d been
a dyer’s apprentice before he was caught stealing, and his arms
were mottled green to the elbow. When he laughed he brayed like
the donkeys they were riding. “Where’s a gutter rat like Lumpyhead
get him a sword?”
Arya chewed her lip sullenly. She could see the back of Yoren’s
faded black cloak up ahead of the wagons, but she was determined
not to go crying to him for help.
“Maybe he’s a little squire,” Hot Pie put in. His mother had been
a baker before she died, and he’d pushed her cart through the
streets all day, shouting “Hot pies! Hot pies!” “Some lordy lord’s
little squire boy, that’s it.”
“He ain’t no squire, look at him. I bet that’s not even a real
sword. I bet it’s just some play sword made of tin.”
Arya hated them making fun of Needle. “It’s castle-forged steel,
you stupid,” she snapped, turning in the saddle to glare at them,
“and you better shut your mouth.”
The orphan boys hooted. “Where’d you get a blade like that,
Lumpyface?” Hot Pie wanted to know.
“Lumpyhead,” corrected Lommy. “He prob’ly stole it.”
“I did not!” she shouted. Jon Snow had given her Needle. Maybe
she had to let them call her Lumpyhead, but she wasn’t going to let
them call Jon a thief.
“If he stole it, we could take it o him,” said Hot Pie. “It’s not his
anyhow. I could use me a sword like that.”
Lommy egged him on. “Go on, take it o him, I dare you.”
Hot Pie kicked his donkey, riding closer. “Hey, Lumpyface, you
gimme that sword.” His hair was the color of straw, his fat face all
sunburnt and peeling. “You don’t know how to use it.”
Yes I do, Arya could have said. I killed a boy, a fat boy like you, I
stabbed him in the belly and he died, and I’ll kill you too if you don’t let
me alone. Only she did not dare. Yoren didn’t know about the
stableboy, but she was afraid of what he might do if he found out.
Arya was pretty sure that some of the other men were killers too,

the three in the manacles for sure, but the queen wasn’t looking for
them, so it wasn’t the same.
“Look at him,” brayed Lommy Greenhands. “I bet he’s going to
cry now. You want to cry, Lumpyhead?”
She had cried in her sleep the night before, dreaming of her
father. Come morning, she’d woken red-eyed and dry, and could not
have shed another tear if her life had hung on it.
“He’s going to wet his pants,” Hot Pie suggested.
“Leave him be,” said the boy with the shaggy black hair who rode
behind them. Lommy had named him the Bull, on account of this
horned helm he had that he polished all the time but never wore.
Lommy didn’t dare mock the Bull. He was older, and big for his
age, with a broad chest and strong-looking arms.
“You better give Hot Pie the sword, Arry,” Lommy said. “Hot Pie
wants it bad. He kicked a boy to death. He’ll do the same to you, I
bet.”
“I knocked him down and I kicked him in the balls, and I kept
kicking him there until he was dead,” Hot Pie boasted. “I kicked
him all to pieces. His balls were broke open and bloody and his cock
turned black. You better gimme the sword.”
Arya slid her practice sword from her belt. “You can have this
one,” she told Hot Pie, not wanting to ght.
“That’s just some stick.” He rode nearer and tried to reach over
for Needle’s hilt.
Arya made the stick whistle as she laid the wood across his
donkey’s hindquarters. The animal hawed and bucked, dumping Hot
Pie on the ground. She vaulted o her own donkey and poked him
in the gut as he tried to get up and he sat back down with a grunt.
Then she whacked him across the face and his nose made a crack
like a branch breaking. Blood dribbled from his nostrils. When Hot
Pie began to wail, Arya whirled toward Lommy Greenhands, who
was sitting on his donkey openmouthed. “You want some sword
too?” she yelled, but he didn’t. He raised dyed green hands in front
of his face and squealed at her to get away.
The Bull shouted, “Behind you,” and Arya spun. Hot Pie was on
his knees, his st closing around a big jagged rock. She let him

throw it, ducking her head as it sailed past. Then she ew at him.
He raised a hand and she hit it, and then his cheek, and then his
knee. He grabbed for her, and she danced aside and bounced the
wood o the back of his head. He fell down and got up and
stumbled after her, his red face all smeared with dirt and blood.
Arya slid into a water dancer’s stance and waited. When he came
close enough, she lunged, right between his legs, so hard that if her
wooden sword had had a point it would have come out between his
butt cheeks.
By the time Yoren pulled her o him, Hot Pie was sprawled out
on the ground with his breeches brown and smelly, crying as Arya
whapped him over and over and over. “Enough,” the black brother
roared, prying the stick sword from her ngers, “you want to kill
the fool?” When Lommy and some others started to squeal, the old
man turned on them too. “Shut your mouths, or I’ll be shutting
them for you. Any more o’ this, I’ll tie you lot behind the wagons
and drag you to the Wall.” He spat. “And that goes twice for you,
Arry. You come with me, boy. Now.”
They were all looking at her, even the three chained and
manacled in the back of the wagon. The fat one snapped his pointy
teeth together and hissed, but Arya ignored him.
The old man dragged her well o the road into a tangle of trees,
cursing and muttering all the while. “If I had a thimble o’ sense, I
would’ve left you in King’s Landing. You hear me, boy?” He always
snarled that word, putting a bite in it so she would be certain to
hear. “Unlace your breeches and pull ’em down. Go on, there’s no
one here to see. Do it.” Sullenly, Arya did as he said. “Over there,
against the oak. Yes, like that.” She wrapped her arms around the
trunk and pressed her face to the rough wood. “You scream now.
You scream loud.”
I won’t, Arya thought stubbornly, but when Yoren laid the wood
against the back of her bare thighs, the shriek burst out of her
anyway. “Think that hurt?” he said. “Try this one.” The stick came
whistling. Arya shrieked again, clutching the tree to keep from
falling. “One more.” She held on tight, chewing her lip, inching
when she heard it coming. The stroke made her jump and howl. I

won’t cry, she thought, I won’t do that. I’m a Stark of Winterfell, our
sigil is the direwolf, direwolves don’t cry. She could feel a thin trickle
of blood running down her left leg. Her thighs and cheeks were
ablaze with pain. “Might be I got your attention now,” Yoren said.
“Next time you take that stick to one of your brothers, you’ll get
twice what you give, you hear me? Now cover yourself.”
They’re not my brothers, Arya thought as she bent to yank up her
breeches, but she knew better than to say so. Her hands fumbled
with her belt and laces.
Yoren was looking at her. “You hurt?”
Calm as still water, she told herself, the way Syrio Forel had taught
her. “Some.”
He spat. “That pie boy’s hurting worse. It wasn’t him as killed
your father, girl, nor that thieving Lommy neither. Hitting them
won’t bring him back.”
“I know,” Arya muttered sullenly.
“Here’s something you don’t know. It wasn’t supposed to happen
like it did. I was set to leave, wagons bought and loaded, and a man
comes with a boy for me, and a purse of coin, and a message, never
mind who it’s from. Lord Eddard’s to take the black, he says to me,
wait, he’ll be going with you. Why d’you think I was there? Only
something went queer.”
“Jo rey,” Arya breathed. “Someone should kill him!”
“Someone will, but it won’t be me, nor you neither.” Yoren tossed
back her stick sword. “Got sourleaf back at the wagons,” he said as
they made their way back to the road. “You’ll chew some, it’ll help
with the sting.”
It did help, some, though the taste of it was foul and it made her
spit look like blood. Even so, she walked for the rest of that day,
and the day after, and the day after that, too raw to sit a donkey.
Hot Pie was worse o ; Yoren had to shift some barrels around so he
could lie in the back of a wagon on some sacks of barley, and he
whimpered every time the wheels hit a rock. Lommy Greenhands
wasn’t even hurt, yet he stayed as far away from Arya as he could
get. “Every time you look at him, he twitches,” the Bull told her as

she walked beside his donkey. She did not answer. It seemed safer
not to talk to anyone.
That night she lay upon her thin blanket on the hard ground,
staring up at the great red comet. The comet was splendid and scary
all at once. “The Red Sword,” the Bull named it; he claimed it
looked like a sword, the blade still red-hot from the forge. When
Arya squinted the right way she could see the sword too, only it
wasn’t a new sword, it was Ice, her father’s greatsword, all ripply
Valyrian steel, and the red was Lord Eddard’s blood on the blade
after Ser Ilyn the King’s Justice had cut o his head. Yoren had
made her look away when it happened, yet it seemed to her that the
comet looked like Ice must have, after.
When at last she slept, she dreamed of home. The kingsroad
wound its way past Winterfell on its way to the Wall, and Yoren
had promised he’d leave her there with no one any wiser about who
she’d been. She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and
Bran and Rickon … but it was Jon Snow she thought of most. She
wished somehow they could come to the Wall before Winterfell, so
Jon might muss up her hair and call her “little sister.” She’d tell
him, “I missed you,” and he’d say it too at the very same moment,
the way they always used to say things together. She would have
liked that. She would have liked that better than anything.

SANSA

The morning of King Jo rey’s name day dawned bright and windy,

with the long tail of the great comet visible through the high
scuttling clouds. Sansa was watching it from her tower window
when Ser Arys Oakheart arrived to escort her down to the tourney
grounds. “What do you think it means?” she asked him.
“Glory to your betrothed,” Ser Arys answered at once. “See how
it ames across the sky today on His Grace’s name day, as if the
gods themselves had raised a banner in his honor. The smallfolk
have named it King Jo rey’s Comet.”
Doubtless that was what they told Jo rey; Sansa was not so sure.
“I’ve heard servants calling it the Dragon’s Tail.”
“King Jo rey sits where Aegon the Dragon once sat, in the castle
built by his son,” Ser Arys said. “He is the dragon’s heir—and
crimson is the color of House Lannister, another sign. This comet is
sent to herald Jo rey’s ascent to the throne, I have no doubt. It
means that he will triumph over his enemies.”
Is it true? she wondered. Would the gods be so cruel? Her mother
was one of Jo rey’s enemies now, her brother Robb another. Her
father had died by the king’s command. Must Robb and her lady
mother die next? The comet was red, but Jo rey was Baratheon as
much as Lannister, and their sigil was a black stag on a golden eld.
Shouldn’t the gods have sent Jo a golden comet?
Sansa closed the shutters and turned sharply away from the
window. “You look very lovely today, my lady,” Ser Arys said.

“Thank you, ser.” Knowing that Jo rey would require her to
attend the tourney in his honor, Sansa had taken special care with
her face and clothes. She wore a gown of pale purple silk and a
moonstone hair net that had been a gift from Jo rey. The gown had
long sleeves to hide the bruises on her arms. Those were Jo rey’s
gifts as well. When they told him that Robb had been proclaimed
King in the North, his rage had been a fearsome thing, and he had
sent Ser Boros to beat her.
“Shall we go?” Ser Arys o ered his arm and she let him lead her
from her chamber. If she must have one of the Kingsguard dogging
her steps, Sansa preferred that it be him. Ser Boros was shorttempered, Ser Meryn cold, and Ser Mandon’s strange dead eyes
made her uneasy, while Ser Preston treated her like a lackwit child.
Arys Oakheart was courteous, and would talk to her cordially. Once
he even objected when Jo rey commanded him to hit her. He did
hit her in the end, but not hard as Ser Meryn or Ser Boros might
have, and at least he had argued. The others obeyed without
question … except for the Hound, but Jo never asked the Hound
to punish her. He used the other ve for that.
Ser Arys had light brown hair and a face that was not unpleasant
to look upon. Today he made quite the dashing gure, with his
white silk cloak fastened at the shoulder by a golden leaf, and a
spreading oak tree worked upon the breast of his tunic in shining
gold thread. “Who do you think will win the day’s honors?” Sansa
asked as they descended the steps arm in arm.
“I will,” Ser Arys answered, smiling. “Yet I fear the triumph will
have no savor. This will be a small eld, and poor. No more than
two score will enter the lists, including squires and freeriders. There
is small honor in unhorsing green boys.”
The last tourney had been di erent, Sansa re ected. King Robert
had staged it in her father’s honor. High lords and fabled champions
had come from all over the realm to compete, and the whole city
had turned out to watch. She remembered the splendor of it: the
eld of pavilions along the river with a knight’s shield hung before
each door, the long rows of silken pennants waving in the wind, the
gleam of sunlight on bright steel and gilded spurs. The days had

rung to the sounds of trumpets and pounding hooves, and the nights
had been full of feasts and song. Those had been the most magical
days of her life, but they seemed a memory from another age now.
Robert Baratheon was dead, and her father as well, beheaded for a
traitor on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor. Now there were
three kings in the land, and war raged beyond the Trident while the
city lled with desperate men. Small wonder that they had to hold
Jo ’s tournament behind the thick stone walls of the Red Keep.
“Will the queen attend, do you think?” Sansa always felt safer
when Cersei was there to restrain her son.
“I fear not, my lady. The council is meeting, some urgent
business.” Ser Arys dropped his voice. “Lord Tywin has gone to
ground at Harrenhal instead of bringing his army to the city as the
queen commanded. Her Grace is furious.” He fell silent as a column
of Lannister guardsmen marched past, in crimson cloaks and lioncrested helms. Ser Arys was fond of gossip, but only when he was
certain that no one was listening.
The carpenters had erected a gallery and lists in the outer bailey.
It was a poor thing indeed, and the meager throng that had
gathered to watch lled but half the seats. Most of the spectators
were guardsmen in the gold cloaks of the City Watch or the crimson
of House Lannister; of lords and ladies there were but a paltry few,
the handful that remained at court. Grey-faced Lord Gyles Rosby
was coughing into a square of pink silk. Lady Tanda was bracketed
by her daughters, placid dull Lollys and acid-tongued Falyse. Ebonskinned Jalabhar Xho was an exile who had no other refuge, Lady
Ermesande a babe seated on her wet nurse’s lap. The talk was she
would soon be wed to one of the queen’s cousins, so the Lannisters
might claim her lands.
The king was shaded beneath a crimson canopy, one leg thrown
negligently over the carved wooden arm of his chair. Princess
Myrcella and Prince Tommen sat behind him. In the back of the
royal box, Sandor Clegane stood at guard, his hands resting on his
swordbelt. The white cloak of the Kingsguard was draped over his
broad shoulders and fastened with a jeweled brooch, the snowy
cloth looking somehow unnatural against his brown roughspun tunic

and studded leather jerkin. “Lady Sansa,” the Hound announced
curtly when he saw her. His voice was as rough as the sound of a
saw on wood. The burn scars on his face and throat made one side
of his mouth twitch when he spoke.
Princess Myrcella nodded a shy greeting at the sound of Sansa’s
name, but plump little Prince Tommen jumped up eagerly. “Sansa,
did you hear? I’m to ride in the tourney today. Mother said I could.”
Tommen was all of eight. He reminded her of her own little
brother, Bran. They were of an age. Bran was back at Winterfell, a
cripple, yet safe.
Sansa would have given anything to be with him. “I fear for the
life of your foeman,” she told Tommen solemnly.
“His foeman will be stu ed with straw,” Jo said as he rose. The
king was clad in a gilded breastplate with a roaring lion engraved
upon its chest, as if he expected the war to engulf them at any
moment. He was thirteen today, and tall for his age, with the green
eyes and golden hair of the Lannisters.
“Your Grace,” she said, dipping in a curtsy.
Ser Arys bowed. “Pray pardon me, Your Grace. I must equip
myself for the lists.”
Jo rey waved a curt dismissal while he studied Sansa from head
to heels. “I’m pleased you wore my stones.”
So the king had decided to play the gallant today. Sansa was
relieved. “I thank you for them … and for your tender words. I pray
you a lucky name day, Your Grace.”
“Sit,” Jo commanded, gesturing her to the empty seat beside his
own. “Have you heard? The Beggar King is dead.”
“Who?” For a moment Sansa was afraid he meant Robb.
“Viserys. The last son of Mad King Aerys. He’s been going about
the Free Cities since before I was born, calling himself a king. Well,
Mother says the Dothraki nally crowned him. With molten gold.”
He laughed. “That’s funny, don’t you think? The dragon was their
sigil. It’s almost as good as if some wolf killed your traitor brother.
Maybe I’ll feed him to wolves after I’ve caught him. Did I tell you, I
intend to challenge him to single combat?”

“I should like to see that, Your Grace.” More than you know. Sansa
kept her tone cool and polite, yet even so Jo rey’s eyes narrowed
as he tried to decide whether she was mocking him. “Will you enter
the lists today?” she asked quickly.
The king frowned. “My lady mother said it was not tting, since
the tourney is in my honor. Otherwise I would have been champion.
Isn’t that so, dog?”
The Hound’s mouth twitched. “Against this lot? Why not?”
He had been the champion in her father’s tourney, Sansa
remembered. “Will you joust today, my lord?” she asked him.
Clegane’s voice was thick with contempt. “Wouldn’t be worth the
bother of arming myself. This is a tournament of gnats.”
The king laughed. “My dog has a erce bark. Perhaps I should
command him to ght the day’s champion. To the death.” Jo rey
was fond of making men ght to the death.
“You’d be one knight the poorer.” The Hound had never taken a
knight’s vows. His brother was a knight, and he hated his brother.
A blare of trumpets sounded. The king settled back in his seat and
took Sansa’s hand. Once that would have set her heart to pounding,
but that was before he had answered her plea for mercy by
presenting her with her father’s head. His touch lled her with
revulsion now, but she knew better than to show it. She made
herself sit very still.
“Ser Meryn Trant of the Kingsguard,” a herald called.
Ser Meryn entered from the west side of the yard, clad in
gleaming white plate chased with gold and mounted on a milkwhite charger with a owing grey mane. His cloak streamed behind
him like a eld of snow. He carried a twelve-foot lance.
“Ser Hobber of House Redwyne, of the Arbor,” the herald sang. Ser
Hobber trotted in from the east, riding a black stallion caparisoned
in burgundy and blue. His lance was striped in the same colors, and
his shield bore the grape cluster sigil of his House. The Redwyne
twins were the queen’s unwilling guests, even as Sansa was. She
wondered whose notion it had been for them to ride in Jo rey’s
tourney. Not their own, she thought.

At a signal from the master of revels, the combatants couched
their lances and put their spurs to their mounts. There were shouts
from the watching guardsmen and the lords and ladies in the
gallery. The knights came together in the center of the yard with a
great shock of wood and steel. The white lance and the striped one
exploded in splinters within a second of each other. Hobber
Redwyne reeled at the impact, yet somehow managed to keep his
seat. Wheeling their horses about at the far end of the lists, the
knights tossed down their broken lances and accepted replacements
from the squires. Ser Horas Redwyne, Ser Hobber’s twin, shouted
encouragement to his brother.
But on their second pass Ser Meryn swung the point of his lance
to strike Ser Hobber in the chest, driving him from the saddle to
crash resoundingly to the earth. Ser Horas cursed and ran out to
help his battered brother from the eld.
“Poorly ridden,” declared King Jo rey.
“Ser Balon Swann, of Stonehelm in the Red Watch,” came the
herald’s cry. Wide white wings ornamented Ser Balon’s greathelm,
and black and white swans fought on his shield. “Morros of House
Slynt, heir to Lord Janos of Harrenhal.”
“Look at that upjumped oaf,” Jo hooted, loud enough for half
the yard to hear. Morros, a mere squire and a new-made squire at
that, was having di culty managing lance and shield. The lance
was a knight’s weapon, Sansa knew, the Slynts lowborn. Lord Janos
had been no more than commander of the City Watch before Jo rey
had raised him to Harrenhal and the council.
I hope he falls and shames himself, she thought bitterly. I hope Ser
Balon kills him. When Jo rey proclaimed her father’s death, it had
been Janos Slynt who seized Lord Eddard’s severed head by the hair
and raised it on high for king and crowd to behold, while Sansa
wept and screamed.
Morros wore a checkered black-and-gold cloak over black armor
inlaid with golden scrollwork. On his shield was the bloody spear
his father had chosen as the sigil of their new-made house. But he
did not seem to know what to do with the shield as he urged his
horse forward, and Ser Balon’s point struck the blazon square.

Morros dropped his lance, fought for balance, and lost. One foot
caught in a stirrup as he fell, and the runaway charger dragged the
youth to the end of the lists, head bouncing against the ground. Jo
hooted derision. Sansa was appalled, wondering if the gods had
heard her vengeful prayer. But when they disentangled Morros
Slynt from his horse, they found him bloodied but alive. “Tommen,
we picked the wrong foe for you,” the king told his brother. “The
straw knight jousts better than that one.”
Next came Ser Horas Redwyne’s turn. He fared better than his
twin, vanquishing an elderly knight whose mount was bedecked
with silver gri ns against a striped blue-and-white eld. Splendid
as he looked, the old man made a poor contest of it. Jo rey curled
his lip. “This is a feeble show.”
“I warned you,” said the Hound. “Gnats.”
The king was growing bored. It made Sansa anxious. She lowered
her eyes and resolved to keep quiet, no matter what. When Jo rey
Baratheon’s mood darkened, any chance word might set o one of
his rages.
“Lothor Brune, freerider in the service of Lord Baelish,” cried the
herald. “Ser Dontos the Red, of House Hollard.”
The freerider, a small man in dented plate without device, duly
appeared at the west end of the yard, but of his opponent there was
no sign. Finally a chestnut stallion trotted into view in a swirl of
crimson and scarlet silks, but Ser Dontos was not on it. The knight
appeared a moment later, cursing and staggering, clad in
breastplate and plumed helm and nothing else. His legs were pale
and skinny, and his manhood opped about obscenely as he chased
after his horse. The watchers roared and shouted insults. Catching
his horse by the bridle, Ser Dontos tried to mount, but the animal
would not stand still and the knight was so drunk that his bare foot
kept missing the stirrup.
By then the crowd was howling with laughter … all but the king.
Jo rey had a look in his eyes that Sansa remembered well, the same
look he’d had at the Great Sept of Baelor the day he pronounced
death on Lord Eddard Stark. Finally Ser Dontos the Red gave it up

for a bad job, sat down in the dirt, and removed his plumed helm. “I
lose,” he shouted. “Fetch me some wine.”
The king stood. “A cask from the cellars! I’ll see him drowned in
it.”
Sansa heard herself gasp. “No, you can’t.”
Jo rey turned his head. “What did you say?”
Sansa could not believe she had spoken. Was she mad? To tell
him no in front of half the court? She hadn’t meant to say anything,
only … Ser Dontos was drunk and silly and useless, but he meant no
harm.
“Did you say I can’t? Did you?”
“Please,” Sansa said, “I only meant … it would be ill luck, Your
Grace … to, to kill a man on your name day.”
“You’re lying,” Jo rey said. “I ought to drown you with him, if
you care for him so much.”
“I don’t care for him, Your Grace.” The words tumbled out
desperately. “Drown him or have his head o , only … kill him on
the morrow, if you like, but please … not today, not on your name
day. I couldn’t bear for you to have ill luck … terrible luck, even for
kings, the singers all say so …”
Jo rey scowled. He knew she was lying, she could see it. He
would make her bleed for this.
“The girl speaks truly,” the Hound rasped. “What a man sows on
his name day, he reaps throughout the year.” His voice was at, as
if he did not care a whit whether the king believed him or no. Could
it be true? Sansa had not known. It was just something she’d said,
desperate to avoid punishment.
Unhappy, Jo rey shifted in his seat and icked his ngers at Ser
Dontos. “Take him away. I’ll have him killed on the morrow, the
fool.”
“He is,” Sansa said. “A fool. You’re so clever, to see it. He’s better
tted to be a fool than a knight, isn’t he? You ought to dress him in
motley and make him clown for you. He doesn’t deserve the mercy
of a quick death.”
The king studied her a moment. “Perhaps you’re not so stupid as
Mother says.” He raised his voice. “Did you hear my lady, Dontos?

From this day on, you’re my new fool. You can sleep with Moon
Boy and dress in motley.”
Ser Dontos, sobered by his near brush with death, crawled to his
knees. “Thank you, Your Grace. And you, my lady. Thank you.”
As a brace of Lannister guardsmen led him o , the master of
revels approached the box. “Your Grace,” he said, “shall I summon a
new challenger for Brune, or proceed with the next tilt?”
“Neither. These are gnats, not knights. I’d have them all put to
death, only it’s my name day. The tourney is done. Get them all out
of my sight.”
The master of revels bowed, but Prince Tommen was not so
obedient. “I’m supposed to ride against the straw man.”
“Not today.”
“But I want to ride!”
“I don’t care what you want.”
“Mother said I could ride.”
“She said,” Princess Myrcella agreed.
“Mother said,” mocked the king. “Don’t be childish.”
“We’re children,” Myrcella declared haughtily. “We’re supposed to
be childish.”
The Hound laughed. “She has you there.”
Jo rey was beaten. “Very well. Even my brother couldn’t tilt any
worse than these others. Master, bring out the quintain, Tommen
wants to be a gnat.”
Tommen gave a shout of joy and ran o to be readied, his chubby
little legs pumping hard. “Luck,” Sansa called to him.
They set up the quintain at the far end of the lists while the
prince’s pony was being saddled. Tommen’s opponent was a childsized leather warrior stu ed with straw and mounted on a pivot,
with a shield in one hand and a padded mace in the other. Someone
had fastened a pair of antlers to the knight’s head. Jo rey’s father
King Robert had worn antlers on his helm, Sansa
remembered … but so did his uncle Lord Renly, Robert’s brother,
who had turned traitor and crowned himself king.
A pair of squires buckled the prince into his ornate silver-andcrimson armor. A tall plume of red feathers sprouted from the crest

of his helm, and the lion of Lannister and crowned stag of
Baratheon frolicked together on his shield. The squires helped him
mount, and Ser Aron Santagar, the Red Keep’s master-at-arms,
stepped forward and handed Tommen a blunted silver longsword
with a leaf-shaped blade, crafted to t an eight-year-old hand.
Tommen raised the blade high. “Casterly Rock!” he shouted in a
high boyish voice as he put his heels into his pony and started
across the hard-packed dirt at the quintain. Lady Tanda and Lord
Gyles started a ragged cheer, and Sansa added her voice to theirs.
The king brooded in silence.
Tommen got his pony up to a brisk trot, waved his sword
vigorously, and struck the knight’s shield a solid blow as he went
by. The quintain spun, the padded mace ying around to give the
prince a mighty whack in the back of his head. Tommen spilled
from the saddle, his new armor rattling like a bag of old pots as he
hit the ground. His sword went ying, his pony cantered away
across the bailey, and a great gale of derision went up. King Jo rey
laughed longest and loudest of all.
“Oh,” Princess Myrcella cried. She scrambled out of the box and
ran to her little brother.
Sansa found herself possessed of a queer giddy courage. “You
should go with her,” she told the king. “Your brother might be
hurt.”
Jo rey shrugged. “What if he is?”
“You should help him up and tell him how well he rode.” Sansa
could not seem to stop herself.
“He got knocked o his horse and fell in the dirt,” the king
pointed out. “That’s not riding well.”
“Look,” the Hound interrupted. “The boy has courage. He’s going
to try again.”
They were helping Prince Tommen mount his pony. If only
Tommen were the elder instead of Jo rey, Sansa thought. I wouldn’t
mind marrying Tommen.
The sounds from the gatehouse took them by surprise. Chains
rattled as the portcullis was drawn upward, and the great gates
opened to the creak of iron hinges. “Who told them to open the

gate?” Jo demanded. With the troubles in the city, the gates of the
Red Keep had been closed for days.
A column of riders emerged from beneath the portcullis with a
clink of steel and a clatter of hooves. Clegane stepped close to the
king, one hand on the hilt of his longsword. The visitors were
dinted and haggard and dusty, yet the standard they carried was the
lion of Lannister, golden on its crimson eld. A few wore the red
cloaks and mail of Lannister men-at-arms, but more were freeriders
and sellswords, armored in oddments and bristling with sharp
steel … and there were others, monstrous savages out of one of Old
Nan’s tales, the scary ones Bran used to love. They were clad in
shabby skins and boiled leather, with long hair and erce beards.
Some wore bloodstained bandages over their brows or wrapped
around their hands, and others were missing eyes, ears, and ngers.
In their midst, riding on a tall red horse in a strange high saddle
that cradled him back and front, was the queen’s dwarf brother
Tyrion Lannister, the one they called the Imp. He had let his beard
grow to cover his pushed-in face, until it was a bristly tangle of
yellow and black hair, coarse as wire. Down his back owed a
shadowskin cloak, black fur striped with white. He held the reins in
his left hand and carried his right arm in a white silk sling, but
otherwise looked as grotesque as Sansa remembered from when he
had visited Winterfell. With his bulging brow and mismatched eyes,
he was still the ugliest man she had ever chanced to look upon.
Yet Tommen put his spurs into his pony and galloped headlong
across the yard, shouting with glee. One of the savages, a huge
shambling man so hairy that his face was all but lost beneath his
whiskers, scooped the boy out of his saddle, armor and all, and
deposited him on the ground beside his uncle. Tommen’s breathless
laughter echoed o the walls as Tyrion clapped him on the
backplate, and Sansa was startled to see that the two were of a
height. Myrcella came running after her brother, and the dwarf
picked her up by the waist and spun her in a circle, squealing.
When he lowered her back to the ground, the little man kissed
her lightly on the brow and came waddling across the yard toward
Jo rey. Two of his men followed close behind him; a black-haired

black-eyed sellsword who moved like a stalking cat, and a gaunt
youth with an empty socket where one eye should have been.
Tommen and Myrcella trailed after them.
The dwarf went to one knee before the king. “Your Grace.”
“You,” Jo rey said.
“Me,” the Imp agreed, “although a more courteous greeting might
be in order, for an uncle and an elder.”
“They said you were dead,” the Hound said.
The little man gave the big one a look. One of his eyes was green,
one was black, and both were cool. “I was speaking to the king, not
to his cur.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” said Princess Myrcella.
“We share that view, sweet child.” Tyrion turned to Sansa. “My
lady, I am sorry for your losses. Truly, the gods are cruel.”
Sansa could not think of a word to say to him. How could he be
sorry for her losses? Was he mocking her? It wasn’t the gods who’d
been cruel, it was Jo rey.
“I am sorry for your loss as well, Jo rey,” the dwarf said.
“What loss?”
“Your royal father? A large erce man with a black beard; you’ll
recall him if you try. He was king before you.”
“Oh, him. Yes, it was very sad, a boar killed him.”
“Is that what ‘they’ say, Your Grace?”
Jo rey frowned. Sansa felt that she ought to say something. What
was it that Septa Mordane used to tell her? A lady’s armor is
courtesy, that was it. She donned her armor and said, “I’m sorry my
lady mother took you captive, my lord.”
“A great many people are sorry for that,” Tyrion replied, “and
before I am done, some may be a deal sorrier … yet I thank you for
the sentiment. Jo rey, where might I nd your mother?”
“She’s with my council,” the king answered. “Your brother Jaime
keeps losing battles.” He gave Sansa an angry look, as if it were her
fault. “He’s been taken by the Starks and we’ve lost Riverrun and
now her stupid brother is calling himself a king.”
The dwarf smiled crookedly. “All sorts of people are calling
themselves kings these days.”

Jo did not know what to make of that, though he looked
suspicious and out of sorts. “Yes. Well. I am pleased you’re not
dead, Uncle. Did you bring me a gift for my name day?”
“I did. My wits.”
“I’d sooner have Robb Stark’s head,” Jo said with a sly glance at
Sansa. “Tommen, Myrcella, come.”
Sandor Clegane lingered behind a moment. “I’d guard that tongue
of yours, little man,” he warned, before he strode o after his liege.
Sansa was left with the dwarf and his monsters. She tried to think
of what else she might say. “You hurt your arm,” she managed at
last.
“One of your northmen hit me with a morningstar during the
battle on the Green Fork. I escaped him by falling o my horse.”
His grin turned into something softer as he studied her face. “Is it
grief for your lord father that makes you so sad?”
“My father was a traitor,” Sansa said at once. “And my brother
and lady mother are traitors as well.” That re ex she had learned
quickly. “I am loyal to my beloved Jo rey.”
“No doubt. As loyal as a deer surrounded by wolves.”
“Lions,” she whispered, without thinking. She glanced about
nervously, but there was no one close enough to hear.
Lannister reached out and took her hand, and gave it a squeeze. “I
am only a little lion, child, and I vow, I shall not savage you.”
Bowing, he said, “But now you must excuse me. I have urgent
business with queen and council.”
Sansa watched him walk o , his body swaying heavily from side
to side with every step, like something from a grotesquerie. He
speaks more gently than Jo rey, she thought, but the queen spoke to
me gently too. He’s still a Lannister, her brother and Jo ’s uncle, and no
friend. Once she had loved Prince Jo rey with all her heart, and
admired and trusted his mother, the queen. They had repaid that
love and trust with her father’s head. Sansa would never make that
mistake again.

TYRION

In the chilly white raiment of the Kingsguard, Ser Mandon Moore

looked like a corpse in a shroud. “Her Grace left orders, the council
in session is not to be disturbed.”
“I would be only a small disturbance, ser.” Tyrion slid the
parchment from his sleeve. “I bear a letter from my father, Lord
Tywin Lannister, the Hand of the King. There is his seal.”
“Her Grace does not wish to be disturbed,” Ser Mandon repeated
slowly, as if Tyrion were a dullard who had not heard him the rst
time.
Jaime had once told him that Moore was the most dangerous of
the Kingsguard—excepting himself, always—because his face gave
no hint as what he might do next. Tyrion would have welcomed a
hint. Bronn and Timett could likely kill the knight if it came to
swords, but it would scarcely bode well if he began by slaying one
of Jo rey’s protectors. Yet if he let the man turn him away, where
was his authority? He made himself smile. “Ser Mandon, you have
not met my companions. This is Timett son of Timett, a red hand of
the Burned Men. And this is Bronn. Perchance you recall Ser Vardis
Egen, who was captain of Lord Arryn’s household guard?”
“I know the man.” Ser Mandon’s eyes were pale grey, oddly at
and lifeless.
“Knew,” Bronn corrected with a thin smile.
Ser Mandon did not deign to show that he had heard that.

“Be that as it may,” Tyrion said lightly, “I truly must see my
sister and present my letter, ser. If you would be so kind as to open
the door for us?”
The white knight did not respond. Tyrion was almost at the point
of trying to force his way past when Ser Mandon abruptly stood
aside. “You may enter. They may not.”
A small victory, he thought, but sweet. He had passed his rst test.
Tyrion Lannister shouldered through the door, feeling almost tall.
Five members of the king’s small council broke o their discussion
suddenly. “You,” his sister Cersei said in a tone that was equal parts
disbelief and distaste.
“I can see where Jo rey learned his courtesies.” Tyrion paused to
admire the pair of Valyrian sphinxes that guarded the door,
a ecting an air of casual con dence. Cersei could smell weakness
the way a dog smells fear.
“What are you doing here?” His sister’s lovely green eyes studied
him without the least hint of a ection.
“Delivering a letter from our lord father.” He sauntered to the
table and placed the tightly rolled parchment between them.
The eunuch Varys took the letter and turned it in his delicate
powdered hands. “How kind of Lord Tywin. And his sealing wax is
such a lovely shade of gold.” Varys gave the seal a close inspection.
“It gives every appearance of being genuine.”
“Of course it’s genuine.” Cersei snatched it out of his hands. She
broke the wax and unrolled the parchment.
Tyrion watched her read. His sister had taken the king’s seat for
herself—he gathered Jo rey did not often trouble to attend council
meetings, no more than Robert had—so Tyrion climbed up into the
Hand’s chair. It seemed only appropriate.
“This is absurd,” the queen said at last. “My lord father has sent
my brother to sit in his place in this council. He bids us accept
Tyrion as the Hand of the King, until such time as he himself can
join us.”
Grand Maester Pycelle stroked his owing white beard and
nodded ponderously. “It would seem that a welcome is in order.”

“Indeed.” Jowly, balding Janos Slynt looked rather like a frog, a
smug frog who had gotten rather above himself. “We have sore
need of you, my lord. Rebellion everywhere, this grim omen in the
sky, rioting in the city streets …”
“And whose fault is that, Lord Janos?” Cersei lashed out. “Your
gold cloaks are charged with keeping order. As to you, Tyrion, you
could better serve us on the eld of battle.”
He laughed. “No, I’m done with elds of battle, thank you. I sit a
chair better than a horse, and I’d sooner hold a wine goblet than a
battle-axe. All that about the thunder of the drums, sunlight ashing
on armor, magni cent destriers snorting and prancing? Well, the
drums gave me headaches, the sunlight ashing on my armor
cooked me up like a harvest day goose, and those magni cent
destriers shit everywhere. Not that I am complaining. Compared to
the hospitality I enjoyed in the Vale of Arryn, drums, horseshit, and
y bites are my favorite things.”
Little nger laughed. “Well said, Lannister. A man after my own
heart.”
Tyrion smiled at him, remembering a certain dagger with a
dragonbone hilt and a Valyrian steel blade. We must have a talk
about that, and soon. He wondered if Lord Petyr would nd that
subject amusing as well. “Please,” he told them, “do let me be of
service, in whatever small way I can.”
Cersei read the letter again. “How many men have you brought
with you?”
“A few hundred. My own men, chie y. Father was loath to part
with any of his. He is ghting a war, after all.”
“What use will your few hundred men be if Renly marches on the
city, or Stannis sails from Dragonstone? I ask for an army and my
father sends me a dwarf. The king names the Hand, with the consent
of council. Jo rey named our lord father.”
“And our lord father named me.”
“He cannot do that. Not without Jo ’s consent.”
“Lord Tywin is at Harrenhal with his host, if you’d care to take it
up with him,” Tyrion said politely. “My lords, perchance you would
permit me a private word with my sister?”

Varys slithered to his feet, smiling in that unctuous way he had.
“How you must have yearned for the sound of your sweet sister’s
voice. My lords, please, let us give them a few moments together.
The woes of our troubled realm shall keep.”
Janos Slynt rose hesitantly and Grand Maester Pycelle
ponderously, yet they rose. Little nger was the last. “Shall I tell the
steward to prepare chambers in Maegor’s Holdfast?”
“My thanks, Lord Petyr, but I will be taking Lord Stark’s former
quarters in the Tower of the Hand.”
Little nger laughed. “You’re a braver man than me, Lannister.
You do know the fate of our last two Hands?”
“Two? If you mean to frighten me, why not say four?”
“Four?” Little nger raised an eyebrow. “Did the Hands before
Lord Arryn meet some dire end in the Tower? I’m afraid I was too
young to pay them much mind.”
“Aerys Targaryen’s last Hand was killed during the Sack of King’s
Landing, though I doubt he’d had time to settle into the Tower. He
was only Hand for a fortnight. The one before him was burned to
death. And before them came two others who died landless and
penniless in exile, and counted themselves lucky. I believe my lord
father was the last Hand to depart King’s Landing with his name,
properties, and parts all intact.”
“Fascinating,” said Little nger. “And all the more reason I’d
sooner bed down in the dungeon.”
Perhaps you’ll get that wish, Tyrion thought, but he said, “Courage
and folly are cousins, or so I’ve heard. Whatever curse may linger
over the Tower of the Hand, I pray I’m small enough to escape its
notice.”
Janos Slynt laughed, Little nger smiled, and Grand Maester
Pycelle followed them both out, bowing gravely.
“I hope Father did not send you all this way to plague us with
history lessons,” his sister said when they were alone.
“How I have yearned for the sound of your sweet voice,” Tyrion
sighed to her.
“How I have yearned to have that eunuch’s tongue pulled out
with hot pincers,” Cersei replied. “Has father lost his senses? Or did

you forge this letter?” She read it once more, with mounting
annoyance. “Why would he in ict you on me? I wanted him to come
himself.” She crushed Lord Tywin’s letter in her ngers. “I am
Jo rey’s regent, and I sent him a royal command!”
“And he ignored you,” Tyrion pointed out. “He has quite a large
army, he can do that. Nor is he the rst. Is he?”
Cersei’s mouth tightened. He could see her color rising. “If I name
this letter a forgery and tell them to throw you in a dungeon, no
one will ignore that, I promise you.”
He was walking on rotten ice now, Tyrion knew. One false step
and he would plunge through. “No one,” he agreed amiably, “least
of all our father. The one with the army. But why should you want
to throw me into a dungeon, sweet sister, when I’ve come all this
long way to help you?”
“I do not require your help. It was our father’s presence that I
commanded.”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “but it’s Jaime you want.”
His sister fancied herself subtle, but he had grown up with her.
He could read her face like one of his favorite books, and what he
read now was rage, and fear, and despair. “Jaime—”
“—is my brother no less than yours,” Tyrion interrupted. “Give
me your support and I promise you, we will have Jaime freed and
returned to us unharmed.”
“How?” Cersei demanded. “The Stark boy and his mother are not
like to forget that we beheaded Lord Eddard.”
“True,” Tyrion agreed, “yet you still hold his daughters, don’t
you? I saw the older girl out in the yard with Jo rey.”
“Sansa,” the queen said. “I’ve given it out that I have the younger
brat as well, but it’s a lie. I sent Meryn Trant to take her in hand
when Robert died, but her wretched dancing master interfered and
the girl ed. No one has seen her since. Likely she’s dead. A great
many people died that day.”
Tyrion had hoped for both Stark girls, but he supposed one would
have to do. “Tell me about our friends on the council.”
His sister glanced at the door. “What of them?”

“Father seems to have taken a dislike to them. When I left him,
he was wondering how their heads might look on the wall beside
Lord Stark’s.” He leaned forward across the table. “Are you certain
of their loyalty? Do you trust them?”
“I trust no one,” Cersei snapped. “I need them. Does Father
believe they are playing us false?”
“Suspects, rather.”
“Why? What does he know?”
Tyrion shrugged. “He knows that your son’s short reign has been
a long parade of follies and disasters. That suggests that someone is
giving Jo rey some very bad counsel.”
Cersei gave him a searching look. “Jo has had no lack of good
counsel. He’s always been strong-willed. Now that he’s king, he
believes he should do as he pleases, not as he’s bid.”
“Crowns do queer things to the heads beneath them,” Tyrion
agreed. “This business with Eddard Stark … Jo rey’s work?”
The queen grimaced. “He was instructed to pardon Stark, to allow
him to take the black. The man would have been out of our way
forever, and we might have made peace with that son of his, but
Jo took it upon himself to give the mob a better show. What was I
to do? He called for Lord Eddard’s head in front of half the city.
And Janos Slynt and Ser Ilyn went ahead blithely and shortened the
man without a word from me!” Her hand tightened into a st. “The
High Septon claims we profaned Baelor’s Sept with blood, after
lying to him about our intent.”
“It would seem he has a point,” said Tyrion. “So this Lord Slynt,
he was part of it, was he? Tell me, whose ne notion was it to grant
him Harrenhal and name him to the council?”
“Little nger made the arrangements. We needed Slynt’s gold
cloaks. Eddard Stark was plotting with Renly and he’d written to
Lord Stannis, o ering him the throne. We might have lost all. Even
so, it was a close thing. If Sansa hadn’t come to me and told me all
her father’s plans …”
Tyrion was surprised. “Truly? His own daughter?” Sansa had
always seemed such a sweet child, tender and courteous.

“The girl was wet with love. She would have done anything for
Jo rey, until he cut o her father’s head and called it mercy. That
put an end to that.”
“His Grace has a unique way of winning the hearts of his
subjects,” Tyrion said with a crooked smile. “Was it Jo rey’s wish
to dismiss Ser Barristan Selmy from his Kingsguard too?”
Cersei sighed. “Jo wanted someone to blame for Robert’s death.
Varys suggested Ser Barristan. Why not? It gave Jaime command of
the Kingsguard and a seat on the small council, and allowed Jo to
throw a bone to his dog. He is very fond of Sandor Clegane. We
were prepared to o er Selmy some land and a towerhouse, more
than the useless old fool deserved.”
“I hear that useless old fool slew two of Slynt’s gold cloaks when
they tried to seize him at the Mud Gate.”
His sister looked very unhappy. “Janos should have sent more
men. He is not as competent as might be wished.”
“Ser Barristan was the Lord Commander of Robert Baratheon’s
Kingsguard,” Tyrion reminded her pointedly. “He and Jaime are the
only survivors of Aerys Targaryen’s seven. The smallfolk talk of him
in the same way they talk of Serwyn of the Mirror Shield and Prince
Aemon the Dragonknight. What do you imagine they’ll think when
they see Barristan the Bold riding beside Robb Stark or Stannis
Baratheon?”
Cersei glanced away. “I had not considered that.”
“Father did,” said Tyrion. “That is why he sent me. To put an end
to these follies and bring your son to heel.”
“Jo will be no more tractable for you than for me.”
“He might.”
“Why should he?”
“He knows you would never hurt him.”
Cersei’s eyes narrowed. “If you believe I’d ever allow you to
harm my son, you’re sick with fever.”
Tyrion sighed. She’d missed the point, as she did so often.
“Jo rey is as safe with me as he is with you,” he assured her, “but
so long as the boy feels threatened, he’ll be more inclined to listen.”
He took her hand. “I am your brother, you know. You need me,

whether you care to admit it or no. Your son needs me, if he’s to
have a hope of retaining that ugly iron chair.”
His sister seemed shocked that he would touch her. “You have
always been cunning.”
“In my own small way.” He grinned.
“It may be worth the trying … but make no mistake, Tyrion. If I
accept you, you shall be the King’s Hand in name, but my Hand in
truth. You will share all your plans and intentions with me before
you act, and you will do nothing without my consent. Do you
understand?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do you agree?”
“Certainly,” he lied. “I am yours, sister.” For as long as I need to
be. “So, now that we are of one purpose, we ought have no more
secrets between us. You say Jo rey had Lord Eddard killed, Varys
dismissed Ser Barristan, and Little nger gifted us with Lord Slynt.
Who murdered Jon Arryn?”
Cersei yanked her hand back. “How should I know?”
“The grieving widow in the Eyrie seems to think it was me.
Where did she come by that notion, I wonder?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. That fool Eddard Stark accused me of the
same thing. He hinted that Lord Arryn suspected or … well,
believed …”
“That you were fucking our sweet Jaime?”
She slapped him.
“Did you think I was as blind as Father?” Tyrion rubbed his
cheek. “Who you lie with is no matter to me … although it doesn’t
seem quite just that you should open your legs for one brother and
not the other.”
She slapped him.
“Be gentle, Cersei, I’m only jesting with you. If truth be told, I’d
sooner have a nice whore. I never understood what Jaime saw in
you, apart from his own re ection.”
She slapped him.
His cheeks were red and burning, yet he smiled. “If you keep
doing that, I may get angry.”

That stayed her hand. “Why should I care if you do?”
“I have some new friends,” Tyrion confessed. “You won’t like
them at all. How did you kill Robert?”
“He did that himself. All we did was help. When Lancel saw that
Robert was going after boar, he gave him strongwine. His favorite
sour red, but forti ed, three times as potent as he was used to. The
great stinking fool loved it. He could have stopped swilling it down
anytime he cared to, but no, he drained one skin and told Lancel to
fetch another. The boar did the rest. You should have been at the
feast, Tyrion. There has never been a boar so delicious. They
cooked it with mushrooms and apples, and it tasted like triumph.”
“Truly, sister, you were born to be a widow.” Tyrion had rather
liked Robert Baratheon, great blustering oaf that he
was … doubtless in part because his sister loathed him so. “Now, if
you are done slapping me, I will be o .” He twisted his legs around
and clambered down awkwardly from the chair.
Cersei frowned. “I haven’t given you leave to depart. I want to
know how you intend to free Jaime.”
“I’ll tell you when I know. Schemes are like fruit, they require a
certain ripening. Right now, I have a mind to ride through the
streets and take the measure of this city.” Tyrion rested his hand on
the head of the sphinx beside the door. “One parting request. Kindly
make certain no harm comes to Sansa Stark. It would not do to lose
both the daughters.”
Outside the council chamber, Tyrion nodded to Ser Mandon and
made his way down the long vaulted hall. Bronn fell in beside him.
Of Timett son of Timett there was no sign. “Where’s our red hand?”
Tyrion asked.
“He felt an urge to explore. His kind was not made for waiting
about in halls.”
“I hope he doesn’t kill anyone important.” The clansmen Tyrion
had brought down from their fastnesses in the Mountains of the
Moon were loyal in their own erce way, but they were proud and
quarrelsome as well, prone to answer insults real or imagined with
steel. “Try to nd him. And while you are at it, see that the rest
have been quartered and fed. I want them in the barracks beneath

the Tower of the Hand, but don’t let the steward put the Stone
Crows near the Moon Brothers, and tell him the Burned Men must
have a hall all to themselves.”
“Where will you be?”
“I’m riding back to the Broken Anvil.”
Bronn grinned insolently. “Need an escort? The talk is, the streets
are dangerous.”
“I’ll call upon the captain of my sister’s household guard, and
remind him that I am no less a Lannister than she is. He needs to
recall that his oath is to Casterly Rock, not to Cersei or Jo rey.”
An hour later, Tyrion rode from the Red Keep accompanied by a
dozen Lannister guardsmen in crimson cloaks and lion-crested
halfhelms. As they passed beneath the portcullis, he noted the heads
mounted atop the walls. Black with rot and old tar, they had long
since become unrecognizable. “Captain Vylarr,” he called, “I want
those taken down on the morrow. Give them to the silent sisters for
cleaning.” It would be hell to match them with the bodies, he
supposed, yet it must be done. Even in the midst of war, certain
decencies needed to be observed.
Vylarr grew hesitant. “His Grace has told us he wishes the
traitors’ heads to remain on the walls until he lls those last three
empty spikes there on the end.”
“Let me hazard a wild stab. One is for Robb Stark, the others for
Lords Stannis and Renly. Would that be right?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“My nephew is thirteen years old today, Vylarr. Try and recall
that. I’ll have the heads down on the morrow, or one of those
empty spikes may have a di erent lodger. Do you take my
meaning, Captain?”
“I’ll see that they’re taken down myself, my lord.”
“Good.” Tyrion put his heels into his horse and trotted away,
leaving the red cloaks to follow as best they could.
He had told Cersei he intended to take the measure of the city.
That was not entirely a lie. Tyrion Lannister was not pleased by
much of what he saw. The streets of King’s Landing had always
been teeming and raucous and noisy, but now they reeked of danger

in a way that he did not recall from past visits. A naked corpse
sprawled in the gutter near the Street of Looms, being torn at by a
pack of feral dogs, yet no one seemed to care. Watchmen were
much in evidence, moving in pairs through the alleys in their gold
cloaks and shirts of black ringmail, iron cudgels never far from their
hands. The markets were crowded with ragged men selling their
household goods for any price they could get … and conspicuously
empty of farmers selling food. What little produce he did see was
three times as costly as it had been a year ago. One peddler was
hawking rats roasted on a skewer. “Fresh rats,” he cried loudly,
“fresh rats.” Doubtless fresh rats were to be preferred to old stale
rotten rats. The frightening thing was, the rats looked more
appetizing than most of what the butchers were selling. On the
Street of Flour, Tyrion saw guards at every other shop door. When
times grew lean, even bakers found sellswords cheaper than bread,
he re ected.
“There is no food coming in, is there?” he said to Vylarr.
“Little enough,” the captain admitted. “With the war in the
riverlands and Lord Renly raising rebels in Highgarden, the roads
are closed to south and west.”
“And what has my good sister done about this?”
“She is taking steps to restore the king’s peace,” Vylarr assured
him. “Lord Slynt has tripled the size of the City Watch, and the
queen has put a thousand craftsmen to work on our defenses. The
stonemasons are strengthening the walls, carpenters are building
scorpions and catapults by the hundred, etchers are making
arrows, the smiths are forging blades, and the Alchemists’ Guild has
pledged ten thousand jars of wild re.”
Tyrion shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. He was pleased that
Cersei had not been idle, but wild re was treacherous stu , and ten
thousand jars were enough to turn all of King’s Landing into
cinders. “Where has my sister found the coin to pay for all of this?”
It was no secret that King Robert had left the crown vastly in debt,
and alchemists were seldom mistaken for altruists.
“Lord Little nger always nds a way, my lord. He has imposed a
tax on those wishing to enter the city.”

“Yes, that would work,” Tyrion said, thinking, Clever. Clever and
cruel. Tens of thousands had ed the ghting for the supposed
safety of King’s Landing. He had seen them on the kingsroad,
troupes of mothers and children and anxious fathers who had gazed
on his horses and wagons with covetous eyes. Once they reached
the city they would doubtless pay over all they had to put those
high comforting walls between them and the war … though they
might think twice if they knew about the wild re.
The inn beneath the sign of the broken anvil stood within sight of
those walls, near the Gate of the Gods where they had entered that
morning. As they rode into its courtyard, a boy ran out to help
Tyrion down from his horse. “Take your men back to the castle,” he
told Vylarr. “I’ll be spending the night here.”
The captain looked dubious. “Will you be safe, my lord?”
“Well, as to that, Captain, when I left the inn this morning it was
full of Black Ears. One is never quite safe when Chella daughter of
Cheyk is about.” Tyrion waddled toward the door, leaving Vylarr to
puzzle at his meaning.
A gust of merriment greeted him as he shoved into the inn’s
common room. He recognized Chella’s throaty chuckle and the
lighter music of Shae’s laughter. The girl was seated by the hearth,
sipping wine at a round wooden table with three of the Black Ears
he’d left to guard her and a plump man whose back was to him. The
innkeeper, he assumed … until Shae called Tyrion by name and the
intruder rose. “My good lord, I am so pleased to see you,” he
gushed, a soft eunuch’s smile on his powdered face.
Tyrion stumbled. “Lord Varys. I had not thought to see you here.”
The Others take him, how did he nd them so quickly?
“Forgive me if I intrude,” Varys said. “I was taken by a sudden
urge to meet your young lady.”
“Young lady,” Shae repeated, savoring the words. “You’re half
right, m’lord. I’m young.”
Eighteen, Tyrion thought. Eighteen, and a whore, but quick of wit,
nimble as a cat between the sheets, with large dark eyes and ne black
hair and a sweet, soft, hungry little mouth … and mine! Damn you,
eunuch. “I fear I’m the intruder, Lord Varys,” he said with forced

courtesy. “When I came in, you were in the midst of some
merriment.”
“M’lord Varys complimented Chella on her ears and said she must
have killed many men to have such a ne necklace,” Shae
explained. It grated on him to hear her call Varys m’lord in that
tone; that was what she called him in their pillow play. “And Chella
told him only cowards kill the vanquished.”
“Braver to leave the man alive, with a chance to cleanse his
shame by winning back his ear,” explained Chella, a small dark
woman whose grisly neckware was hung with no less than forty-six
dried, wrinkled ears. Tyrion had counted them once. “Only so can
you prove you do not fear your enemies.”
Shae hooted. “And then m’lord says if he was a Black Ear he’d
never sleep, for dreams of one-eared men.”
“A problem I will never need face,” Tyrion said. “I’m terri ed of
my enemies, so I kill them all.”
Varys giggled. “Will you take some wine with us, my lord?”
“I’ll take some wine.” Tyrion seated himself beside Shae. He
understood what was happening here, if Chella and the girl did not.
Varys was delivering a message. When he said, I was taken by a
sudden urge to meet your young lady, what he meant was, You tried to
hide her, but I knew where she was, and who she was, and here I am.
He wondered who had betrayed him. The innkeeper, that boy in the
stable, a guard on the gate … or one of his own?
“I always like to return to the city through the Gate of the Gods,”
Varys told Shae as he lled the wine cups. “The carvings on the
gatehouse are exquisite, they make me weep each time I see them.
The eyes … so expressive, don’t you think? They almost seem to
follow you as you ride beneath the portcullis.”
“I never noticed, m’lord,” Shae replied. “I’ll look again on the
morrow, if it please you.”
Don’t bother, sweetling, Tyrion thought, swirling the wine in the
cup. He cares not a whit about carvings. The eyes he boasts of are his
own. What he means is that he was watching, that he knew we were here
the moment we passed through the gates.

“Do be careful, child,” Varys urged. “King’s Landing is not wholly
safe these days. I know these streets well, and yet I almost feared to
come today, alone and unarmed as I was. Lawless men are
everywhere in this dark time, oh, yes. Men with cold steel and
colder hearts.” Where I can come alone and unarmed, others can come
with swords in their sts, he was saying.
Shae only laughed. “If they try and bother me, they’ll be one ear
short when Chella runs them o .”
Varys hooted as if that was the funniest thing he had ever heard,
but there was no laughter in his eyes when he turned them on
Tyrion. “Your young lady has an amiable way to her. I should take
very good care of her if I were you.”
“I intend to. Any man who tries to harm her—well, I’m too small
to be a Black Ear, and I make no claims to courage.” See? I speak the
same tongue you do, eunuch. Hurt her, and I’ll have your head.
“I will leave you.” Varys rose. “I know how weary you must be. I
only wished to welcome you, my lord, and tell you how very
pleased I am by your arrival. We have dire need of you on the
council. Have you seen the comet?”
“I’m short, not blind,” Tyrion said. Out on the kingsroad, it had
seemed to cover half the sky, outshining the crescent moon.
“In the streets, they call it the Red Messenger,” Varys said. “They
say it comes as a herald before a king, to warn of re and blood to
follow.” The eunuch rubbed his powdered hands together. “May I
leave you with a bit of a riddle, Lord Tyrion?” He did not wait for
an answer. “In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a
rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little
man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones
bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your
lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the
names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall
be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?” Bowing deeply, the
eunuch hurried from the common room on soft slippered feet.
When he was gone, Chella gave a snort and Shae wrinkled up her
pretty face. “The rich man lives. Doesn’t he?”

Tyrion sipped at his wine, thoughtful. “Perhaps. Or not. That
would depend on the sellsword, it seems.” He set down his cup.
“Come, let’s go upstairs.”
She had to wait for him at the top of the steps, for her legs were
slim and supple while his were short and stunted and full of aches.
But she was smiling when he reached her. “Did you miss me?” she
teased as she took his hand.
“Desperately,” Tyrion admitted. Shae only stood a shade over ve
feet, yet still he must look up to her … but in her case he found he
did not mind. She was sweet to look up at.
“You’ll miss me all the time in your Red Keep,” she said as she led
him to her room. “All alone in your cold bed in your Tower of the
Hand.”
“Too true.” Tyrion would gladly have kept her with him, but his
lord father had forbidden it. You will not take the whore to court, Lord
Tywin had commanded. Bringing her to the city was as much
de ance as he dared. All his authority derived from his father, the
girl had to understand that. “You won’t be far,” he promised.
“You’ll have a house, with guards and servants, and I’ll visit as often
as I’m able.”
Shae kicked shut the door. Through the cloudy panes of the
narrow window, he could make out the Great Sept of Baelor
crowning Visenya’s Hill, but Tyrion was distracted by a di erent
sight. Bending, Shae took her gown by the hem, drew it over her
head, and tossed it aside. She did not believe in smallclothes. “You’ll
never be able to rest,” she said as she stood before him, pink and
nude and lovely, one hand braced on her hip. “You’ll think of me
every time you go to bed. Then you’ll get hard and you’ll have no
one to help you and you’ll never be able to sleep unless you”—she
grinned that wicked grin Tyrion liked so well—“is that why they
call it the Tower of the Hand, m’lord?”
“Be quiet and kiss me,” he commanded.
He could taste the wine on her lips, and feel her small rm
breasts pressed against him as her ngers moved to the lacings of
his breeches. “My lion,” she whispered when he broke o the kiss to
undress. “My sweet lord, my giant of Lannister.” Tyrion pushed her

toward the bed. When he entered her, she screamed loud enough to
wake Baelor the Blessed in his tomb, and her nails left gouges in his
back. He’d never had a pain he liked half so well.
Fool, he thought to himself afterward, as they lay in the center of
the sagging mattress amidst the rumpled sheets. Will you never learn,
dwarf? She’s a whore, damn you, it’s your coin she loves, not your cock.
Remember Tysha? Yet when his ngers trailed lightly over one
nipple, it sti ened at the touch, and he could see the mark on her
breast where he’d bitten her in his passion.
“So what will you do, m’lord, now that you’re the Hand of the
King?” Shae asked him as he cupped that warm sweet esh.
“Something Cersei will never expect,” Tyrion murmured softly
against her slender neck. “I’ll do … justice.”

BRAN

Bran preferred the hard stone of the window seat to the comforts

of his featherbed and blankets. Abed, the walls pressed close and
the ceiling hung heavy above him; abed, the room was his cell, and
Winterfell his prison. Yet outside his window, the wide world still
called.
He could not walk, nor climb nor hunt nor ght with a wooden
sword as once he had, but he could still look. He liked to watch the
windows begin to glow all over Winterfell as candles and hearth
res were lit behind the diamond-shaped panes of tower and hall,
and he loved to listen to the direwolves sing to the stars.
Of late, he often dreamed of wolves. They are talking to me,
brother to brother, he told himself when the direwolves howled. He
could almost understand them … not quite, not truly, but
almost … as if they were singing in a language he had once known
and somehow forgotten. The Walders might be scared of them, but
the Starks had wolf blood. Old Nan told him so. “Though it is
stronger in some than in others,” she warned.
Summer’s howls were long and sad, full of grief and longing.
Shaggydog’s were more savage. Their voices echoed through the
yards and halls until the castle rang and it seemed as though some
great pack of direwolves haunted Winterfell, instead of only
two … two where there had once been six. Do they miss their brothers
and sisters too? Bran wondered. Are they calling to Grey Wind and

Ghost, to Nymeria and Lady’s Shade? Do they want them to come home
and be a pack together?
“Who can know the mind of a wolf?” Ser Rodrik Cassel said when
Bran asked him why they howled. Bran’s lady mother had named
him castellan of Winterfell in her absence, and his duties left him
little time for idle questions.
“It’s freedom they’re calling for,” declared Farlen, who was
kennelmaster and had no more love for the direwolves than his
hounds did. “They don’t like being walled up, and who’s to blame
them? Wild things belong in the wild, not in a castle.”
“They want to hunt,” agreed Gage the cook as he tossed cubes of
suet in a great kettle of stew. “A wolf smells better’n any man. Like
as not, they’ve caught the scent o’ prey.”
Maester Luwin did not think so. “Wolves often howl at the moon.
These are howling at the comet. See how bright it is, Bran?
Perchance they think it is the moon.”
When Bran repeated that to Osha, she laughed aloud. “Your
wolves have more wit than your maester,” the wildling woman
said. “They know truths the grey man has forgotten.” The way she
said it made him shiver, and when he asked what the comet meant,
she answered, “Blood and re, boy, and nothing sweet.”
Bran asked Septon Chayle about the comet while they were
sorting through some scrolls snatched from the library re. “It is the
sword that slays the season,” he replied, and soon after the white
raven came from Oldtown bringing word of autumn, so doubtless
he was right.
Though Old Nan did not think so, and she’d lived longer than any
of them. “Dragons,” she said, lifting her head and sni ng. She was
near blind and could not see the comet, yet she claimed she could
smell it. “It be dragons, boy,” she insisted. Bran got no princes from
Nan, no more than he ever had.
Hodor said only, “Hodor.” That was all he ever said.
And still the direwolves howled. The guards on the walls
muttered curses, hounds in the kennels barked furiously, horses
kicked at their stalls, the Walders shivered by their re, and even
Maester Luwin complained of sleepless nights. Only Bran did not

mind. Ser Rodrik had con ned the wolves to the godswood after
Shaggydog bit Little Walder, but the stones of Winterfell played
queer tricks with sound, and sometimes it sounded as if they were
in the yard right below Bran’s window. Other times he would have
sworn they were up on the curtain walls, loping round like sentries.
He wished that he could see them.
He could see the comet hanging above the Guards Hall and the
Bell Tower, and farther back the First Keep, squat and round, its
gargoyles black shapes against the bruised purple dusk. Once Bran
had known every stone of those buildings, inside and out; he had
climbed them all, scampering up walls as easily as other boys ran
down stairs. Their rooftops had been his secret places, and the
crows atop the broken tower his special friends.
And then he had fallen.
Bran did not remember falling, yet they said he had, so he
supposed it must be true. He had almost died. When he saw the
weatherworn gargoyles atop the First Keep where it had happened,
he got a queer tight feeling in his belly. And now he could not
climb, nor walk nor run nor sword ght, and the dreams he’d
dreamed of knighthood had soured in his head.
Summer had howled the day Bran had fallen, and for long after as
he lay broken in his bed; Robb had told him so before he went away
to war. Summer had mourned for him, and Shaggydog and Grey
Wind had joined in his grief. And the night the bloody raven had
brought word of their father’s death, the wolves had known that
too. Bran had been in the maester’s turret with Rickon talking of the
children of the forest when Summer and Shaggydog had drowned
out Luwin with their howls.
Who are they mourning now? Had some enemy slain the King in
the North, who used to be his brother Robb? Had his bastard
brother Jon Snow fallen from the Wall? Had his mother died, or one
of his sisters? Or was this something else, as maester and septon
and Old Nan seemed to think?
If I were truly a direwolf, I would understand the song, he thought
wistfully. In his wolf dreams, he could race up the sides of
mountains, jagged icy mountains taller than any tower, and stand at

the summit beneath the full moon with all the world below him, the
way it used to be.
“Oooo,” Bran cried tentatively. He cupped his hands around his
mouth and lifted his head to the comet. “Ooooooooooooooooooo,
ahooooooooooooooo,” he howled. It sounded stupid, high and hollow
and quavering, a little boy’s howl, not a wolf’s. Yet Summer gave
answer, his deep voice drowning out Bran’s thin one, and
Shaggydog made it a chorus. Bran haroooed again. They howled
together, last of their pack.
The noise brought a guard to his door, Hayhead with the wen on
his nose. He peered in, saw Bran howling out the window, and said,
“What’s this, my prince?”
It made Bran feel queer when they called him prince, though he
was Robb’s heir, and Robb was King in the North now. He turned his
head to howl at the guard. “Oooooooo. Oo-oo-oooooooooooo.”
Hayhead screwed up his face. “Now you stop that there.”
“Ooo-ooo-oooooo. Ooo-ooo-ooooooooooooooooo.”
The guardsman retreated. When he came back, Maester Luwin
was with him, all in grey, his chain tight about his neck. “Bran,
those beasts make su cient noise without your help.” He crossed
the room and put his hand on the boy’s brow. “The hour grows late,
you ought to be fast asleep.”
“I’m talking to the wolves.” Bran brushed the hand away.
“Shall I have Hayhead carry you to your bed?”
“I can get to bed myself.” Mikken had hammered a row of iron
bars into the wall, so Bran could pull himself about the room with
his arms. It was slow and hard and it made his shoulders ache, but
he hated being carried. “Anyway, I don’t have to sleep if I don’t
want to.”
“All men must sleep, Bran. Even princes.”
“When I sleep I turn into a wolf.” Bran turned his face away and
looked back out into the night. “Do wolves dream?”
“All creatures dream, I think, yet not as men do.”
“Do dead men dream?” Bran asked, thinking of his father. In the
dark crypts below Winterfell, a stonemason was chiseling out his
father’s likeness in granite.

“Some say yes, some no,” the maester answered. “The dead
themselves are silent on the matter.”
“Do trees dream?”
“Trees? No …”
“They do,” Bran said with sudden certainty. “They dream tree
dreams. I dream of a tree sometimes. A weirwood, like the one in
the godswood. It calls to me. The wolf dreams are better. I smell
things, and sometimes I can taste the blood.”
Maester Luwin tugged at his chain where it chafed his neck. “If
you would only spend more time with the other children—”
“I hate the other children,” Bran said, meaning the Walders. “I
commanded you to send them away.”
Luwin grew stern. “The Freys are your lady mother’s wards, sent
here to be fostered at her express command. It is not for you to
expel them, nor is it kind. If we turned them out, where would they
go?”
“Home. It’s their fault you won’t let me have Summer.”
“The Frey boy did not ask to be attacked,” the maester said, “no
more than I did.”
“That was Shaggydog.” Rickon’s big black wolf was so wild he
even frightened Bran at times. “Summer never bit anyone.”
“Summer ripped out a man’s throat in this very chamber, or have
you forgotten? The truth is, those sweet pups you and your brothers
found in the snow have grown into dangerous beasts. The Frey boys
are wise to be wary of them.”
“We should put the Walders in the godswood. They could play
lord of the crossing all they want, and Summer could sleep with me
again. If I’m the prince, why won’t you heed me? I wanted to ride
Dancer, but Alebelly wouldn’t let me past the gate.”
“And rightly so. The wolfswood is full of danger; your last ride
should have taught you that. Would you want some outlaw to take
you captive and sell you to the Lannisters?”
“Summer would save me,” Bran insisted stubbornly. “Princes
should be allowed to sail the sea and hunt boar in the wolfswood
and joust with lances.”

“Bran, child, why do you torment yourself so? One day you may
do some of these things, but now you are only a boy of eight.”
“I’d sooner be a wolf. Then I could live in the wood and sleep
when I wanted, and I could nd Arya and Sansa. I’d smell where
they were and go save them, and when Robb went to battle I’d ght
beside him like Grey Wind. I’d tear out the Kingslayer’s throat with
my teeth, rip, and then the war would be over and everyone would
come back to Winterfell. If I was a wolf …” He howled. “Ooo-ooooooooooooooo.”
Luwin raised his voice. “A true prince would welcome—”
“AAHOOOOOOO,” Bran howled, louder. “OOOO-OOOO-OOOO.”
The maester surrendered. “As you will, child.” With a look that
was part grief and part disgust, he left the bedchamber.
Howling lost its savor once Bran was alone. After a time he
quieted. I did welcome them, he told himself, resentful. I was the lord
in Winterfell, a true lord, he can’t say I wasn’t. When the Walders had
arrived from the Twins, it had been Rickon who wanted them gone.
A baby of four, he had screamed that he wanted Mother and Father
and Robb, not these strangers. It had been up to Bran to soothe him
and bid the Freys welcome. He had o ered them meat and mead
and a seat by the re, and even Maester Luwin had said afterward
that he’d done well.
Only that was before the game.
The game was played with a log, a sta , a body of water, and a
great deal of shouting. The water was the most important, Walder
and Walder assured Bran. You could use a plank or even a series of
stones, and a branch could be your sta . You didn’t have to shout.
But without water, there was no game. As Maester Luwin and Ser
Rodrik were not about to let the children go wandering o into the
wolfswood in search of a stream, they made do with one of the
murky pools in the godswood. Walder and Walder had never seen
hot water bubbling from the ground before, but they both allowed
how it would make the game even better.
Both of them were called Walder Frey. Big Walder said there
were bunches of Walders at the Twins, all named after the boys’

grandfather, Lord Walder Frey. “We have our own names at
Winterfell,” Rickon told them haughtily when he heard that.
The way their game was played, you laid the log across the
water, and one player stood in the middle with the stick. He was
the lord of the crossing, and when one of the other players came up,
he had to say, “I am the lord of the crossing, who goes there?” And
the other player had to make up a speech about who they were and
why they should be allowed to cross. The lord could make them
swear oaths and answer questions. They didn’t have to tell the
truth, but the oaths were binding unless they said “Mayhaps,” so the
trick was to say “Mayhaps” so the lord of the crossing didn’t notice.
Then you could try and knock the lord into the water and you got to
be lord of the crossing, but only if you’d said “Mayhaps.” Otherwise
you were out of the game. The lord got to knock anyone in the
water anytime he pleased, and he was the only one who got to use a
stick.
In practice, the game seemed to come down to mostly shoving,
hitting, and falling into the water, along with a lot of loud
arguments about whether or not someone had said “Mayhaps.”
Little Walder was lord of the crossing more often than not.
He was Little Walder even though he was tall and stout, with a
red face and a big round belly. Big Walder was sharp-faced and
skinny and half a foot shorter. “He’s fty-two days older than me,”
Little Walder explained, “so he was bigger at rst, but I grew
faster.”
“We’re cousins, not brothers,” added Big Walder, the little one.
“I’m Walder son of Jammos. My father was Lord Walder’s son by
his fourth wife. He’s Walder son of Merrett. His grandmother was
Lord Walder’s third wife, the Crakehall. He’s ahead of me in the line
of succession even though I’m older.”
“Only by fty-two days,” Little Walder objected. “And neither of
us will ever hold the Twins, stupid.”
“I will,” Big Walder declared. “We’re not the only Walders either.
Ser Stevron has a grandson, Black Walder, he’s fourth in line of
succession, and there’s Red Walder, Ser Emmon’s son, and Bastard

Walder, who isn’t in the line at all. He’s called Walder Rivers not
Walder Frey. Plus there’s girls named Walda.”
“And Tyr. You always forget Tyr.”
“He’s Waltyr, not Walder,” Big Walder said airily. “And he’s after
us, so he doesn’t matter. Anyhow, I never liked him.”
Ser Rodrik decreed that they would share Jon Snow’s old
bedchamber, since Jon was in the Night’s Watch and never coming
back. Bran hated that; it made him feel as if the Freys were trying
to steal Jon’s place.
He had watched wistfully while the Walders contested with
Turnip the cook’s boy and Joseth’s girls Bandy and Shyra. The
Walders had decreed that Bran should be the judge and decide
whether or not people had said “Mayhaps,” but as soon as they
started playing they forgot all about him.
The shouts and splashes soon drew others: Palla the kennel girl,
Cayn’s boy Calon, TomToo whose father Fat Tom had died with
Bran’s father at King’s Landing. Before very long, every one of them
was soaked and muddy. Palla was brown from head to heel, with
moss in her hair, breathless from laughter. Bran had not heard so
much laughing since the night the bloody raven came. If I had my
legs, I’d knock all of them into the water, he thought bitterly. No one
would ever be lord of the crossing but me.
Finally Rickon came running into the godswood, Shaggydog at his
heels. He watched Turnip and Little Walder struggle for the stick
until Turnip lost his footing and went in with a huge splash, arms
waving. Rickon yelled, “Me! Me now! I want to play!” Little Walder
beckoned him on, and Shaggydog started to follow. “No, Shaggy,”
his brother commanded. “Wolves can’t play. You stay with Bran.”
And he did …
… until Little Walder had smacked Rickon with the stick, square
across his belly. Before Bran could blink, the black wolf was ying
over the plank, there was blood in the water, the Walders were
shrieking red murder, Rickon sat in the mud laughing, and Hodor
came lumbering in shouting “Hodor! Hodor! Hodor!”
After that, oddly, Rickon decided he liked the Walders. They
never played lord of the crossing again, but they played other

games—monsters and maidens, rats and cats, come-into-my-castle,
all sorts of things. With Rickon by their side, the Walders plundered
the kitchens for pies and honeycombs, raced round the walls, tossed
bones to the pups in the kennels, and trained with wooden swords
under Ser Rodrik’s sharp eye. Rickon even showed them the deep
vaults under the earth where the stonemason was carving father’s
tomb. “You had no right!” Bran screamed at his brother when he
heard. “That was our place, a Stark place!” But Rickon never cared.
The door to his bedchamber opened. Maester Luwin was carrying
a green jar, and this time Osha and Hayhead came with him. “I’ve
made you a sleeping draught, Bran.”
Osha scooped him up in her bony arms. She was very tall for a
woman, and wiry strong. She bore him e ortlessly to his bed.
“This will give you dreamless sleep,” Maester Luwin said as he
pulled the stopper from the jar. “Sweet, dreamless sleep.”
“It will?” Bran said, wanting to believe.
“Yes. Drink.”
Bran drank. The potion was thick and chalky, but there was
honey in it, so it went down easy.
“Come the morn, you’ll feel better.” Luwin gave Bran a smile and
a pat as he took his leave.
Osha lingered behind. “Is it the wolf dreams again?”
Bran nodded.
“You should not ght so hard, boy. I see you talking to the heart
tree. Might be the gods are trying to talk back.”
“The gods?” he murmured, drowsy already. Osha’s face grew
blurry and grey. Sweet, dreamless sleep, Bran thought.
Yet when the darkness closed over him, he found himself in the
godswood, moving silently beneath green-grey sentinels and
gnarled oaks as old as time. I am walking, he thought, exulting. Part
of him knew that it was only a dream, but even the dream of
walking was better than the truth of his bedchamber, walls and
ceiling and door.
It was dark amongst the trees, but the comet lit his way, and his
feet were sure. He was moving on four good legs, strong and swift,
and he could feel the ground underfoot, the soft crackling of fallen

leaves, thick roots and hard stones, the deep layers of humus. It was
a good feeling.
The smells lled his head, alive and intoxicating; the green
muddy stink of the hot pools, the perfume of rich rotting earth
beneath his paws, the squirrels in the oaks. The scent of squirrel
made him remember the taste of hot blood and the way the bones
would crack between his teeth. Slaver lled his mouth. He had
eaten no more than half a day past, but there was no joy in dead
meat, even deer. He could hear the squirrels chittering and rustling
above him, safe among their leaves, but they knew better than to
come down to where his brother and he were prowling.
He could smell his brother too, a familiar scent, strong and
earthy, his scent as black as his coat. His brother was loping around
the walls, full of fury. Round and round he went, night after day
after night, tireless, searching … for prey, for a way out, for his
mother, his littermates, his pack … searching, searching, and never
nding.
Behind the trees the walls rose, piles of dead man-rock that
loomed all about this speck of living wood. Speckled grey they rose,
and moss-spotted, yet thick and strong and higher than any wolf
could hope to leap. Cold iron and splintery wood closed o the only
holes through the piled stones that hemmed them in. His brother
would stop at every hole and bare his fangs in rage, but the ways
stayed closed.
He had done the same the rst night, and learned that it was no
good. Snarls would open no paths here. Circling the walls would not
push them back. Lifting a leg and marking the trees would keep no
men away. The world had tightened around them, but beyond the
walled wood still stood the great grey caves of man-rock. Winterfell,
he remembered, the sound coming to him suddenly. Beyond its skytall man-cli s the true world was calling, and he knew he must
answer or die.

ARYA

They traveled dawn to dusk, past woods and orchards and neatly

tended elds, through small villages, crowded market towns, and
stout holdfasts. Come dark, they would make camp and eat by the
light of the Red Sword. The men took turns standing watch. Arya
would glimpse relight ickering through the trees from the camps
of other travelers. There seemed to be more camps every night, and
more tra c on the kingsroad by day.
Morn, noon, and night they came, old folks and little children, big
men and small ones, barefoot girls and women with babes at their
breasts. Some drove farm wagons or bumped along in the back of
ox carts. More rode: draft horses, ponies, mules, donkeys, anything
that would walk or run or roll. One woman led a milk cow with a
little girl on its back. Arya saw a smith pushing a wheelbarrow with
his tools inside, hammers and tongs and even an anvil, and a little
while later a di erent man with a di erent wheelbarrow, only
inside this one were two babies in a blanket. Most came on foot,
with their goods on their shoulders and weary, wary looks upon
their faces. They walked south, toward the city, toward King’s
Landing, and only one in a hundred spared so much as a word for
Yoren and his charges, traveling north. She wondered why no one
else was going the same way as them.
Many of the travelers were armed; Arya saw daggers and dirks,
scythes and axes, and here and there a sword. Some had made clubs
from tree limbs, or carved knobby sta s. They ngered their

weapons and gave lingering looks at the wagons as they rolled by,
yet in the end they let the column pass. Thirty was too many, no
matter what they had in those wagons.
Look with your eyes, Syrio had said, listen with your ears.
One day a madwoman began to scream at them from the side of
the road. “Fools! They’ll kill you, fools!” She was scarecrow thin,
with hollow eyes and bloody feet.
The next morning, a sleek merchant on a grey mare reined up by
Yoren and o ered to buy his wagons and everything in them for a
quarter of their worth. “It’s war, they’ll take what they want, you’ll
do better selling to me, my friend.” Yoren turned away with a twist
of his crooked shoulders, and spat.
Arya noticed the rst grave that same day; a small mound beside
the road, dug for a child. A crystal had been set in the soft earth,
and Lommy wanted to take it until the Bull told him he’d better
leave the dead alone. A few leagues farther on, Praed pointed out
more graves, a whole row freshly dug. After that, a day hardly
passed without one.
One time Arya woke in the dark, frightened for no reason she
could name. Above, the Red Sword shared the sky with half a
thousand stars. The night seemed oddly quiet to her, though she
could hear Yoren’s muttered snores, the crackle of the re, even the
mu ed stirrings of the donkeys. Yet somehow it felt as though the
world were holding its breath, and the silence made her shiver. She
went back to sleep clutching Needle.
Come morning, when Praed did not awaken, Arya realized that it
had been his coughing she had missed. They dug a grave of their
own then, burying the sellsword where he’d slept. Yoren stripped
him of his valuables before they threw the dirt on him. One man
claimed his boots, another his dagger. His mail shirt and helm were
parceled out. His longsword Yoren handed to the Bull. “Arms like
yours, might be you can learn to use this,” he told him. A boy called
Tarber tossed a handful of acorns on top of Praed’s body, so an oak
might grow to mark his place.
That evening they stopped in a village at an ivy-covered inn.
Yoren counted the coins in his purse and decided they had enough

for a hot meal. “We’ll sleep outside, same as ever, but they got a
bathhouse here, if any of you feels the need o’ hot water and a lick
o’ soap.”
Arya did not dare, even though she smelled as bad as Yoren by
now, all sour and stinky. Some of the creatures living in her clothes
had come all the way from Flea Bottom with her; it didn’t seem
right to drown them. Tarber and Hot Pie and the Bull joined the line
of men headed for the tubs. Others settled down in front of the
bathhouse. The rest crowded into the common room. Yoren even
sent Lommy out with tankards for the three in fetters, who’d been
left chained up in the back of their wagon.
Washed and unwashed alike supped on hot pork pies and baked
apples. The innkeeper gave them a round of beer on the house. “I
had a brother took the black, years ago. Serving boy, clever, but
one day he got seen lching pepper from m’lord’s table. He liked
the taste of it, is all. Just a pinch o’ pepper, but Ser Malcolm was a
hard man. You get pepper on the Wall?” When Yoren shook his
head, the man sighed. “Shame. Lync loved that pepper.”
Arya sipped at her tankard cautiously, between spoonfuls of pie
still warm from the oven. Her father sometimes let them have a cup
of beer, she remembered. Sansa used to make a face at the taste and
say that wine was ever so much ner, but Arya had liked it well
enough. It made her sad to think of Sansa and her father.
The inn was full of people moving south, and the common room
erupted in scorn when Yoren said they were traveling the other
way. “You’ll be back soon enough,” the innkeeper vowed. “There’s
no going north. Half the elds are burnt, and what folks are left are
walled up inside their holdfasts. One bunch rides o at dawn and
another one shows up by dusk.”
“That’s nothing to us,” Yoren insisted stubbornly. “Tully or
Lannister, makes no matter. The Watch takes no part.”
Lord Tully is my grandfather, Arya thought. It mattered to her, but
she chewed her lip and kept quiet, listening.
“It’s more than Lannister and Tully,” the innkeeper said. “There’s
wild men down from the Mountains of the Moon, try telling them

you take no part. And the Starks are in it too, the young lord’s come
down, the dead Hand’s son …”
Arya sat up straight, straining to hear. Did he mean Robb?
“I heard the boy rides to battle on a wolf,” said a yellow-haired
man with a tankard in his hand.
“Fool’s talk.” Yoren spat.
“The man I heard it from, he saw it himself. A wolf big as a
horse, he swore.”
“Swearing don’t make it true, Hod,” the innkeeper said. “You
keep swearing you’ll pay what you owe me, and I’ve yet to see a
copper.” The common room erupted in laughter, and the man with
the yellow hair turned red.
“It’s been a bad year for wolves,” volunteered a sallow man in a
travel-stained green cloak. “Around the Gods Eye, the packs have
grown bolder’n anyone can remember. Sheep, cows, dogs, makes no
matter, they kill as they like, and they got no fear of men. It’s
worth your life to go into those woods by night.”
“Ah, that’s more tales, and no more true than the other.”
“I heard the same thing from my cousin, and she’s not the sort to
lie,” an old woman said. “She says there’s this great pack, hundreds
of them, mankillers. The one that leads them is a she-wolf, a bitch
from the seventh hell.”
A she-wolf. Arya sloshed her beer, wondering. Was the Gods Eye
near the Trident? She wished she had a map. It had been near the
Trident that she’d left Nymeria. She hadn’t wanted to, but Jory said
they had no choice, that if the wolf came back with them she’d be
killed for biting Jo rey, even though he’d deserved it. They’d had
to shout and scream and throw stones, and it wasn’t until a few of
Arya’s stones struck home that the direwolf had nally stopped
following them. She probably wouldn’t even know me now, Arya
thought. Or if she did, she’d hate me.
The man in the green cloak said, “I heard how this hellbitch
walked into a village one day … a market day, people everywhere,
and she walks in bold as you please and tears a baby from his
mother’s arms. When the tale reached Lord Mooton, him and his
sons swore they’d put an end to her. They tracked her to her lair

with a pack of wolfhounds, and barely escaped with their skins. Not
one of those dogs came back, not one.”
“That’s just a story,” Arya blurted out before she could stop
herself. “Wolves don’t eat babies.”
“And what would you know about it, lad?” asked the man in the
green cloak.
Before she could think of an answer, Yoren had her by the arm.
“The boy’s greensick on beer, that’s all it is.”
“No I’m not. They don’t eat babies …”
“Outside, boy … and see that you stay there until you learn to
shut your mouth when men are talking.” He gave her a sti shove,
toward the side door that led back to the stables. “Go on now. See
that the stableboy has watered our horses.”
Arya went outside, sti with fury. “They don’t,” she muttered,
kicking at a rock as she stalked o . It went rolling and fetched up
under the wagons.
“Boy,” a friendly voice called out. “Lovely boy.”
One of the men in irons was talking to her. Warily, Arya
approached the wagon, one hand on Needle’s hilt.
The prisoner lifted an empty tankard, his chains rattling. “A man
could use another taste of beer. A man has a thirst, wearing these
heavy bracelets.” He was the youngest of the three, slender, nefeatured, always smiling. His hair was red on one side and white on
the other, all matted and lthy from cage and travel. “A man could
use a bath too,” he said, when he saw the way Arya was looking at
him. “A boy could make a friend.”
“I have friends,” Arya said.
“None I can see,” said the one without a nose. He was squat and
thick, with huge hands. Black hair covered his arms and legs and
chest, even his back. He reminded Arya of a drawing she had once
seen in a book, of an ape from the Summer Isles. The hole in his
face made it hard to look at him for long.
The bald one opened his mouth and hissed like some immense
white lizard. When Arya inched back, startled, he opened his
mouth wide and waggled his tongue at her, only it was more a
stump than a tongue. “Stop that,” she blurted.

“A man does not choose his companions in the black cells,” the
handsome one with the red-and-white hair said. Something about
the way he talked reminded her of Syrio; it was the same, yet
di erent too. “These two, they have no courtesy. A man must ask
forgiveness. You are called Arry, is that not so?”
“Lumpyhead,” said the noseless one. “Lumpyhead Lumpyface
Stickboy. Have a care, Lorath, he’ll hit you with his stick.”
“A man must be ashamed of the company he keeps, Arry,” the
handsome one said. “This man has the honor to be Jaqen H’ghar,
once of the Free City of Lorath. Would that he were home. This
man’s ill-bred companions in captivity are named Rorge”—he
waved his tankard at the noseless man—“and Biter.” Biter hissed at
her again, displaying a mouthful of yellowed teeth led into points.
“A man must have some name, is that not so? Biter cannot speak
and Biter cannot write, yet his teeth are very sharp, so a man calls
him Biter and he smiles. Are you charmed?”
Arya backed away from the wagon. “No.” They can’t hurt me, she
told herself, they’re all chained up.
He turned his tankard upside down. “A man must weep.”
Rorge, the noseless one, ung his drinking cup at her with a
curse. His manacles made him clumsy, yet even so he would have
sent the heavy pewter tankard crashing into her head if Arya hadn’t
leapt aside. “You get us some beer, pimple. Now!”
“You shut your mouth!” Arya tried to think what Syrio would
have done. She drew her wooden practice sword.
“Come closer,” Rorge said, “and I’ll shove that stick up your
bunghole and fuck you bloody.”
Fear cuts deeper than swords. Arya made herself approach the
wagon. Every step was harder than the one before. Fierce as a
wolverine, calm as still water. The words sang in her head. Syrio
would not have been afraid. She was almost close enough to touch
the wheel when Biter lurched to his feet and grabbed for her, his
irons clanking and rattling. The manacles brought his hands up
short, half a foot from her face. He hissed.
She hit him. Hard, right between his little eyes.

Screaming, Biter reeled back, and then threw all his weight
against his chains. The links slithered and turned and grew taut, and
Arya heard the creak of old dry wood as the great iron rings
strained against the oorboards of the wagon. Huge pale hands
groped for her while veins bulged along Biter’s arms, but the bonds
held, and nally the man collapsed backward. Blood ran from the
weeping sores on his cheeks.
“A boy has more courage than sense,” the one who had named
himself Jaqen H’ghar observed.
Arya edged backward away from the wagon. When she felt the
hand on her shoulder, she whirled, bringing up her stick sword
again, but it was only the Bull. “What are you doing?”
He raised his hands defensively. “Yoren said none of us should go
near those three.”
“They don’t scare me,” Arya said.
“Then you’re stupid. They scare me.” The Bull’s hand fell to the
hilt of his sword, and Rorge began to laugh. “Let’s get away from
them.”
Arya scu ed at the ground with her foot, but she let the Bull lead
her around to the front of the inn. Rorge’s laughter and Biter’s
hissing followed them. “Want to ght?” she asked the Bull. She
wanted to hit something.
He blinked at her, startled. Strands of thick black hair, still wet
from the bathhouse, fell across his deep blue eyes. “I’d hurt you.”
“You would not.”
“You don’t know how strong I am.”
“You don’t know how quick I am.”
“You’re asking for it, Arry.” He drew Praed’s longsword. “This is
cheap steel, but it’s a real sword.”
Arya unsheathed Needle. “This is good steel, so it’s realer than
yours.”
The Bull shook his head. “Promise not to cry if I cut you?”
“I’ll promise if you will.” She turned sideways, into her water
dancer’s stance, but the Bull did not move. He was looking at
something behind her. “What’s wrong?”
“Gold cloaks.” His face closed up tight.

It couldn’t be, Arya thought, but when she glanced back, they
were riding up the kingsroad, six in the black ringmail and golden
cloaks of the City Watch. One was an o cer; he wore a black
enamel breastplate ornamented with four golden disks. They drew
up in front of the inn. Look with your eyes, Syrio’s voice seemed to
whisper. Her eyes saw white lather under their saddles; the horses
had been ridden long and hard. Calm as still water, she took the
Bull by the arm and drew him back behind a tall owering hedge.
“What is it?” he asked. “What are you doing? Let go.”
“Quiet as a shadow,” she whispered, pulling him down.
Some of Yoren’s other charges were sitting in front of the
bathhouse, waiting their turn at a tub. “You men,” one of the gold
cloaks shouted. “You the ones left to take the black?”
“We might be,” came the cautious answer.
“We’d rather join you boys,” old Reysen said. “We hear it’s cold
on that Wall.”
The gold cloak o cer dismounted. “I have a warrant for a certain
boy—”
Yoren stepped out of the inn, ngering his tangled black beard.
“Who is it wants this boy?”
The other gold cloaks were dismounting to stand beside their
horses. “Why are we hiding?” the Bull whispered.
“It’s me they want,” Arya whispered back. His ear smelled of
soap. “You be quiet.”
“The queen wants him, old man, not that it’s your concern,” the
o cer said, drawing a ribbon from his belt. “Here, Her Grace’s seal
and warrant.”
Behind the hedge, the Bull shook his head doubtfully. “Why
would the queen want you, Arry?”
She punched his shoulder. “Be quiet!”
Yoren ngered the warrant ribbon with its blob of golden wax.
“Pretty.” He spit. “Thing is, the boy’s in the Night’s Watch now.
What he done back in the city don’t mean piss-all.”
“The queen’s not interested in your views, old man, and neither
am I,” the o cer said. “I’ll have the boy.”

Arya thought about running, but she knew she wouldn’t get far on
her donkey when the gold cloaks had horses. And she was so tired
of running. She’d run when Ser Meryn came for her, and again
when they killed her father. If she was a real water dancer, she
would go out there with Needle and kill all of them, and never run
from anyone ever again.
“You’ll have no one,” Yoren said stubbornly. “There’s laws on
such things.”
The gold cloak drew a shortsword. “Here’s your law.”
Yoren looked at the blade. “That’s no law, just a sword. Happens
I got one too.”
The o cer smiled. “Old fool. I have ve men with me.”
Yoren spat. “Happens I got thirty.”
The gold cloak laughed. “This lot?” said a big lout with a broken
nose. “Who’s rst?” he shouted, showing his steel.
Tarber plucked a pitchfork out of a bale of hay. “I am.”
“No, I am,” called Cutjack, the plump stonemason, pulling his
hammer o the leather apron he always wore.
“Me.” Kurz came up o the ground with his skinning knife in
hand.
“Me and him.” Koss strung his longbow.
“All of us,” said Reysen, snatching up the tall hardwood walking
sta he carried.
Dobber stepped naked out of the bathhouse with his clothes in a
bundle, saw what was happening, and dropped everything but his
dagger. “Is it a ght?” he asked.
“I guess,” said Hot Pie, scrambling on all fours for a big rock to
throw. Arya could not believe what she was seeing. She hated Hot
Pie! Why would he risk himself for her?
The one with the broken nose still thought it was funny. “You
girls put away them rocks and sticks before you get spanked. None
of you knows what end of a sword to hold.”
“I do!” Arya wouldn’t let them die for her like Syrio. She
wouldn’t! Shoving through the hedge with Needle in hand, she slid
into a water dancer’s stance.

Broken Nose gu awed. The o cer looked her up and down. “Put
the blade away, little girl, no one wants to hurt you.”
“I’m not a girl!” she yelled, furious. What was wrong with them?
They rode all this way for her and here she was and they were just
smiling at her. “I’m the one you want.”
“He’s the one we want.” The o cer jabbed his shortsword toward
the Bull, who’d come forward to stand beside her, Praed’s cheap
steel in his hand.
But it was a mistake to take his eyes o Yoren, even for an
instant. Quick as that, the black brother’s sword was pressed to the
apple of the o cer’s throat. “Neither’s the one you get, less you
want me to see if your apple’s ripe yet. I got me ten, fteen more
brothers in that inn, if you still need convincing. I was you, I’d let
loose of that gutcutter, spread my cheeks over that fat little horse,
and gallop on back to the city.” He spat, and poked harder with the
point of his sword. “Now.”
The o cer’s ngers uncurled. His sword fell in the dust.
“We’ll just keep that,” Yoren said. “Good steel’s always needed on
the Wall.”
“As you say. For now. Men.” The gold cloaks sheathed and
mounted up. “You’d best scamper up to that Wall of yours in a
hurry, old man. The next time I catch you, I believe I’ll have your
head to go with the bastard boy’s.”
“Better men than you have tried.” Yoren slapped the rump of the
o cer’s horse with the at of his sword and sent him reeling o
down the kingsroad. His men followed.
When they were out of sight, Hot Pie began to whoop, but Yoren
looked angrier than ever. “Fool! You think he’s done with us? Next
time he won’t prance up and hand me no damn ribbon. Get the rest
out o’ them baths, we need to be moving. Ride all night, maybe we
can stay ahead o’ them for a bit.” He scooped up the shortsword the
o cer had dropped. “Who wants this?”
“Me!” Hot Pie yelled.
“Don’t be using it on Arry.” He handed the boy the sword, hilt
rst, and walked over to Arya, but it was the Bull he spoke to.
“Queen wants you bad, boy.”

Arya was lost. “Why should she want him?”
The Bull scowled at her. “Why should she want you? You’re
nothing but a little gutter rat!”
“Well, you’re nothing but a bastard boy!” Or maybe he was only
pretending to be a bastard boy. “What’s your true name?”
“Gendry,” he said, like he wasn’t quite sure.
“Don’t see why no one wants neither o’ you,” Yoren said, “but
they can’t have you regardless. You ride them two coursers. First
sight of a gold cloak, make for the Wall like a dragon’s on your tail.
The rest o’ us don’t mean spit to them.”
“Except for you,” Arya pointed out. “That man said he’d take your
head too.”
“Well, as to that,” Yoren said, “if he can get it o my shoulders,
he’s welcome to it.”

JON

Sam?” Jon called softly.

The air smelled of paper and dust and years. Before him, tall
wooden shelves rose up into dimness, crammed with leatherbound
books and bins of ancient scrolls. A faint yellow glow ltered
through the stacks from some hidden lamp. Jon blew out the taper
he carried, preferring not to risk an open ame amidst so much old
dry paper. Instead he followed the light, wending his way down the
narrow aisles beneath barrel-vaulted ceilings. All in black, he was a
shadow among shadows, dark of hair, long of face, grey of eye.
Black moleskin gloves covered his hands; the right because it was
burned, the left because a man felt half a fool wearing only one
glove.
Samwell Tarly sat hunched over a table in a niche carved into the
stone of the wall. The glow came from the lamp hung over his head.
He looked up at the sound of Jon’s steps.
“Have you been here all night?”
“Have I?” Sam looked startled.
“You didn’t break your fast with us, and your bed hadn’t been
slept in.” Rast suggested that maybe Sam had deserted, but Jon
never believed it. Desertion required its own sort of courage, and
Sam had little enough of that.
“Is it morning? Down here there’s no way to know.”
“Sam, you’re a sweet fool,” Jon said. “You’ll miss that bed when
we’re sleeping on the cold hard ground, I promise you.”

Sam yawned. “Maester Aemon sent me to nd maps for the Lord
Commander. I never thought … Jon, the books, have you ever seen
their like? There are thousands!”
He gazed about him. “The library at Winterfell has more than a
hundred. Did you nd the maps?”
“Oh, yes.” Sam’s hand swept over the table, ngers plump as
sausages indicating the clutter of books and scrolls before him. “A
dozen, at the least.” He unfolded a square of parchment. “The paint
has faded, but you can see where the mapmaker marked the sites of
wildling villages, and there’s another book … where is it now? I
was reading it a moment ago.” He shoved some scrolls aside to
reveal a dusty volume bound in rotted leather. “This,” he said
reverently, “is the account of a journey from the Shadow Tower all
the way to Lorn Point on the Frozen Shore, written by a ranger
named Redwyn. It’s not dated, but he mentions a Dorren Stark as
King in the North, so it must be from before the Conquest. Jon, they
fought giants! Redwyn even traded with the children of the forest,
it’s all here.” Ever so delicately, he turned pages with a nger. “He
drew maps as well, see …”
“Maybe you could write an account of our ranging, Sam.”
He’d meant to sound encouraging, but it was the wrong thing to
say. The last thing Sam needed was to be reminded of what faced
them on the morrow. He shu ed the scrolls about aimlessly.
“There’s more maps. If I had time to search … everything’s a
jumble. I could set it all to order, though; I know I could, but it
would take time … well, years, in truth.”
“Mormont wanted those maps a little sooner than that.” Jon
plucked a scroll from a bin, blew o the worst of the dust. A corner
aked o between his ngers as he unrolled it. “Look, this one is
crumbling,” he said, frowning over the faded script.
“Be gentle.” Sam came around the table and took the scroll from
his hand, holding it as if it were a wounded animal. “The important
books used to be copied over when they needed them. Some of the
oldest have been copied half a hundred times, probably.”
“Well, don’t bother copying that one. Twenty-three barrels of
pickled cod, eighteen jars of sh oil, a cask of salt …”

“An inventory,” Sam said, “or perhaps a bill of sale.”
“Who cares how much pickled cod they ate six hundred years
ago?” Jon wondered.
“I would.” Sam carefully replaced the scroll in the bin from which
Jon had plucked it. “You can learn so much from ledgers like that,
truly you can. It can tell you how many men were in the Night’s
Watch then, how they lived, what they ate …”
“They ate food,” said Jon, “and they lived as we live.”
“You’d be surprised. This vault is a treasure, Jon.”
“If you say so.” Jon was doubtful. Treasure meant gold, silver,
and jewels, not dust, spiders, and rotting leather.
“I do,” the fat boy blurted. He was older than Jon, a man grown
by law, but it was hard to think of him as anything but a boy. “I
found drawings of the faces in the trees, and a book about the
tongue of the children of the forest … works that even the Citadel
doesn’t have, scrolls from old Valyria, counts of the seasons written
by maesters dead a thousand years …”
“The books will still be here when we return.”
“If we return …”
“The Old Bear is taking two hundred seasoned men, threequarters of them rangers. Qhorin Halfhand will be bringing another
hundred brothers from the Shadow Tower. You’ll be as safe as if
you were back in your lord father’s castle at Horn Hill.”
Samwell Tarly managed a sad little smile. “I was never very safe
in my father’s castle either.”
The gods play cruel jests, Jon thought. Pyp and Toad, all a lather to
be a part of the great ranging, were to remain at Castle Black. It
was Samwell Tarly, the self-proclaimed coward, grossly fat, timid,
and near as bad a rider as he was with a sword, who must face the
haunted forest. The Old Bear was taking two cages of ravens, so
they might send back word as they went. Maester Aemon was blind
and far too frail to ride with them, so his steward must go in his
place. “We need you for the ravens, Sam. And someone has to help
me keep Grenn humble.”
Sam’s chins quivered. “You could care for the ravens, or Grenn
could, or anyone,” he said with a thin edge of desperation in his

voice. “I could show you how. You know your letters too, you could
write down Lord Mormont’s messages as well as I.”
“I’m the Old Bear’s steward. I’ll need to squire for him, tend his
horse, set up his tent; I won’t have time to watch over birds as well.
Sam, you said the words. You’re a brother of the Night’s Watch
now.”
“A brother of the Night’s Watch shouldn’t be so scared.”
“We’re all scared. We’d be fools if we weren’t.” Too many rangers
had been lost the past two years, even Benjen Stark, Jon’s uncle.
They had found two of his uncle’s men in the wood, slain, but the
corpses had risen in the chill of night. Jon’s burnt ngers twitched
as he remembered. He still saw the wight in his dreams, dead Othor
with the burning blue eyes and the cold black hands, but that was
the last thing Sam needed to be reminded of. “There’s no shame in
fear, my father told me, what matters is how we face it. Come, I’ll
help you gather up the maps.”
Sam nodded unhappily. The shelves were so closely spaced that
they had to walk single le as they left. The vault opened onto one
of the tunnels the brothers called the wormwalks, winding
subterranean passages that linked the keeps and towers of Castle
Black under the earth. In summer the wormwalks were seldom
used, save by rats and other vermin, but winter was a di erent
matter. When the snows drifted forty and fty feet high and the ice
winds came howling out of the north, the tunnels were all that held
Castle Black together.
Soon, Jon thought as they climbed. He’d seen the harbinger that
had come to Maester Aemon with word of summer’s end, the great
raven of the Citadel, white and silent as Ghost. He had seen a
winter once, when he was very young, but everyone agreed that it
had been a short one, and mild. This one would be di erent. He
could feel it in his bones.
The steep stone steps had Sam pu ng like a blacksmith’s bellows
by the time they reached the surface. They emerged into a brisk
wind that made Jon’s cloak swirl and snap. Ghost was stretched out
asleep beneath the wattle-and-daub wall of the granary, but he

woke when Jon appeared, bushy white tail held sti y upright as he
trotted to them.
Sam squinted up at the Wall. It loomed above them, an icy cli
seven hundred feet high. Sometimes it seemed to Jon almost a
living thing, with moods of its own. The color of the ice was wont
to change with every shift of the light. Now it was the deep blue of
frozen rivers, now the dirty white of old snow, and when a cloud
passed before the sun it darkened to the pale grey of pitted stone.
The Wall stretched east and west as far as the eye could see, so
huge that it shrunk the timbered keeps and stone towers of the
castle to insigni cance. It was the end of the world.
And we are going beyond it.
The morning sky was streaked by thin grey clouds, but the pale
red line was there behind them. The black brothers had dubbed the
wanderer Mormont’s Torch, saying (only half in jest) that the gods
must have sent it to light the old man’s way through the haunted
forest.
“The comet’s so bright you can see it by day now,” Sam said,
shading his eyes with a stful of books.
“Never mind about comets, it’s maps the Old Bear wants.”
Ghost loped ahead of them. The grounds seemed deserted this
morning, with so many rangers o at the brothel in Mole’s Town,
digging for buried treasure and drinking themselves blind. Grenn
had gone with them. Pyp and Halder and Toad had o ered to buy
him his rst woman to celebrate his rst ranging. They’d wanted
Jon and Sam to come as well, but Sam was almost as frightened of
whores as he was of the haunted forest, and Jon had wanted no part
of it. “Do what you want,” he told Toad, “I took a vow.”
As they passed the sept, he heard voices raised in song. Some men
want whores on the eve of battle, and some want gods. Jon wondered
who felt better afterward. The sept tempted him no more than the
brothel; his own gods kept their temples in the wild places, where
the weirwoods spread their bone-white branches. The Seven have no
power beyond the Wall, he thought, but my gods will be waiting.
Outside the armory, Ser Endrew Tarth was working with some
raw recruits. They’d come in last night with Conwy, one of the

wandering crows who roamed the Seven Kingdoms collecting men
for the Wall. This new crop consisted of a greybeard leaning on a
sta , two blond boys with the look of brothers, a foppish youth in
soiled satin, a raggy man with a clubfoot, and some grinning loon
who must have fancied himself a warrior. Ser Endrew was showing
him the error of that presumption. He was a gentler master-at-arms
than Ser Alliser Thorne had been, but his lessons would still raise
bruises. Sam winced at every blow, but Jon Snow watched the
swordplay closely.
“What do you make of them, Snow?” Donal Noye stood in the
door of his armory, bare-chested under a leather apron, the stump
of his left arm uncovered for once. With his big gut and barrel
chest, his at nose and bristly black jaw, Noye did not make a
pretty sight, but he was a welcome one nonetheless. The armorer
had proved himself a good friend.
“They smell of summer,” Jon said as Ser Endrew bullrushed his
foe and knocked him sprawling. “Where did Conwy nd them?”
“A lord’s dungeon near Gulltown,” the smith replied. “A brigand,
a barber, a beggar, two orphans, and a boy whore. With such do we
defend the realms of men.”
“They’ll do.” Jon gave Sam a private smile. “We did.”
Noye drew him closer. “You’ve heard these tidings of your
brother?”
“Last night.” Conwy and his charges had brought the news north
with them, and the talk in the common room had been of little else.
Jon was still not certain how he felt about it. Robb a king? The
brother he’d played with, fought with, shared his rst cup of wine
with? But not mother’s milk, no. So now Robb will sip summerwine from
jeweled goblets, while I’m kneeling beside some stream sucking snowmelt
from cupped hands. “Robb will make a good king,” he said loyally.
“Will he now?” The smith eyed him frankly. “I hope that’s so,
boy, but once I might have said the same of Robert.”
“They say you forged his warhammer,” Jon remembered.
“Aye. I was his man, a Baratheon man, smith and armorer at
Storm’s End until I lost the arm. I’m old enough to remember Lord
Ste on before the sea took him, and I knew those three sons of his

since they got their names. I tell you this—Robert was never the
same after he put on that crown. Some men are like swords, made
for ghting. Hang them up and they go to rust.”
“And his brothers?” Jon asked.
The armorer considered that a moment. “Robert was the true
steel. Stannis is pure iron, black and hard and strong, yes, but
brittle, the way iron gets. He’ll break before he bends. And Renly,
that one, he’s copper, bright and shiny, pretty to look at but not
worth all that much at the end of the day.”
And what metal is Robb? Jon did not ask. Noye was a Baratheon
man; likely he thought Jo rey the lawful king and Robb a traitor.
Among the brotherhood of the Night’s Watch, there was an
unspoken pact never to probe too deeply into such matters. Men
came to the Wall from all of the Seven Kingdoms, and old loves and
loyalties were not easily forgotten, no matter how many oaths a
man swore … as Jon himself had good reason to know. Even Sam—
his father’s House was sworn to Highgarden, whose Lord Tyrell
supported King Renly. Best not to talk of such things. The Night’s
Watch took no sides. “Lord Mormont awaits us,” Jon said.
“I won’t keep you from the Old Bear.” Noye clapped him on the
shoulder and smiled. “May the gods go with you on the morrow,
Snow. You bring back that uncle of yours, you hear?”
“We will,” Jon promised him.
Lord Commander Mormont had taken up residence in the King’s
Tower after the re had gutted his own. Jon left Ghost with the
guards outside the door. “More stairs,” said Sam miserably as they
started up. “I hate stairs.”
“Well, that’s one thing we won’t face in the wood.”
When they entered the solar, the raven spied them at once.
“Snow!” the bird shrieked. Mormont broke o his conversation.
“Took you long enough with those maps.” He pushed the remains of
breakfast out of the way to make room on the table. “Put them
here. I’ll have a look at them later.”
Thoren Smallwood, a sinewy ranger with a weak chin and a
weaker mouth hidden under a thin scraggle of beard, gave Jon and
Sam a cool look. He had been one of Alliser Thorne’s henchmen,

and had no love for either of them. “The Lord Commander’s place is
at Castle Black, lording and commanding,” he told Mormont,
ignoring the newcomers, “it seems to me.”
The raven apped big black wings. “Me, me, me.”
“If you are ever Lord Commander, you may do as you please,”
Mormont told the ranger, “but it seems to me that I have not died
yet, nor have the brothers put you in my place.”
“I’m First Ranger now, with Ben Stark lost and Ser Jaremy
killed,” Smallwood said stubbornly. “The command should be
mine.”
Mormont would have none of it. “I sent out Ben Stark, and Ser
Waymar before him. I do not mean to send you after them and sit
wondering how long I must wait before I give you up for lost as
well.” He pointed. “And Stark remains First Ranger until we know
for a certainty that he is dead. Should that day come, it will be me
who names his successor, not you. Now stop wasting my time. We
ride at rst light, or have you forgotten?”
Smallwood pushed to his feet. “As my lord commands.” On the
way out, he frowned at Jon, as if it were somehow his fault.
“First Ranger!” The Old Bear’s eyes lighted on Sam. “I’d sooner
name you First Ranger. He has the e rontery to tell me to my face
that I’m too old to ride with him. Do I look old to you, boy?” The
hair that had retreated from Mormont’s spotted scalp had regrouped
beneath his chin in a shaggy grey beard that covered much of his
chest. He thumped it hard. “Do I look frail?”
Sam opened his mouth, gave a little squeak. The Old Bear
terri ed him. “No, my lord,” Jon o ered quickly. “You look strong
as a … a …”
“Don’t cozen me, Snow, you know I won’t have it. Let me have a
look at these maps.” Mormont pawed through them brusquely,
giving each no more than a glance and a grunt. “Was this all you
could nd?”
“I … m-m-my lord,” Sam stammered, “there … there were more,
b-b-but … the dis-disorder …”
“These are old,” Mormont complained, and his raven echoed him
with a sharp cry of “Old, old.”

“The villages may come and go, but the hills and rivers will be in
the same places,” Jon pointed out.
“True enough. Have you chosen your ravens yet, Tarly?”
“M-m-maester Aemon m-means to p-pick them come evenfall,
after the f-f-feeding.”
“I’ll have his best. Smart birds, and strong.”
“Strong,” his own bird said, preening. “Strong, strong.”
“If it happens that we’re all butchered out there, I mean for my
successor to know where and how we died.”
Talk of butchery reduced Samwell Tarly to speechlessness.
Mormont leaned forward. “Tarly, when I was a lad half your age,
my lady mother told me that if I stood about with my mouth open,
a weasel was like to mistake it for his lair and run down my throat.
If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise, beware of
weasels.” He waved a brusque dismissal. “O with you, I’m too
busy for folly. No doubt the maester has some work you can do.”
Sam swallowed, stepped back, and scurried out so quickly he
almost tripped over the rushes.
“Is that boy as big a fool as he seems?” the Lord Commander
asked when he’d gone. “Fool,” the raven complained. Mormont did
not wait for Jon to answer. “His lord father stands high in King
Renly’s councils, and I had half a notion to dispatch him … no, best
not. Renly is not like to heed a quaking fat boy. I’ll send Ser Arnell.
He’s a deal steadier, and his mother was one of the green-apple
Fossoways.”
“If it please my lord, what would you have of King Renly?”
“The same things I’d have of all of them, lad. Men, horses,
swords, armor, grain, cheese, wine, wool, nails … the Night’s Watch
is not proud, we take what is o ered.” His ngers drummed against
the rough-hewn planks of the table. “If the winds have been kind,
Ser Alliser should reach King’s Landing by the turn of the moon, but
whether this boy Jo rey will pay him any heed, I do not know.
House Lannister has never been a friend to the Watch.”
“Thorne has the wight’s hand to show them.” A grisly pale thing
with black ngers, it was, that twitched and stirred in its jar as if it
were still alive.

“Would that we had another hand to send to Renly.”
“Dywen says you can nd anything beyond the Wall.”
“Aye, Dywen says. And the last time he went ranging, he says he
saw a bear fteen feet tall.” Mormont snorted. “My sister is said to
have taken a bear for her lover. I’d believe that before I’d believe
one fteen feet tall. Though in a world where dead come
walking … ah, even so, a man must believe his eyes. I have seen the
dead walk. I’ve not seen any giant bears.” He gave Jon a long,
searching look. “But we were speaking of hands. How is yours?”
“Better.” Jon peeled o his moleskin glove and showed him. Scars
covered his arm halfway to the elbow, and the mottled pink esh
still felt tight and tender, but it was healing. “It itches, though.
Maester Aemon says that’s good. He gave me a salve to take with
me when we ride.”
“You can wield Longclaw despite the pain?”
“Well enough.” Jon exed his ngers, opening and closing his st
the way the maester had shown him. “I’m to work the ngers every
day to keep them nimble, as Maester Aemon said.”
“Blind he may be, but Aemon knows what he’s about. I pray the
gods let us keep him another twenty years. Do you know that he
might have been king?”
Jon was taken by surprise. “He told me his father was king, but
not … I thought him perhaps a younger son.”
“So he was. His father’s father was Daeron Targaryen, the Second
of His Name, who brought Dorne into the realm. Part of the pact
was that he wed a Dornish princess. She gave him four sons.
Aemon’s father Maekar was the youngest of those, and Aemon was
his third son. Mind you, all this happened long before I was born,
ancient as Smallwood would make me.”
“Maester Aemon was named for the Dragonknight.”
“So he was. Some say Prince Aemon was King Daeron’s true
father, not Aegon the Unworthy. Be that as it may, our Aemon
lacked the Dragonknight’s martial nature. He likes to say he had a
slow sword but quick wits. Small wonder his grandfather packed
him o to the Citadel. He was nine or ten, I believe … and ninth or
tenth in the line of succession as well.”

Maester Aemon had counted more than a hundred name days, Jon
knew. Frail, shrunken, wizened, and blind, it was hard to imagine
him as a little boy no older than Arya.
Mormont continued. “Aemon was at his books when the eldest of
his uncles, the heir apparent, was slain in a tourney mishap. He left
two sons, but they followed him to the grave not long after, during
the Great Spring Sickness. King Daeron was also taken, so the crown
passed to Daeron’s second son, Aerys.”
“The Mad King?” Jon was confused. Aerys had been king before
Robert, that wasn’t so long ago.
“No, this was Aerys the First. The one Robert deposed was the
second of that name.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Eighty years or close enough,” the Old Bear said, “and no, I still
hadn’t been born, though Aemon had forged half a dozen links of
his maester’s chain by then. Aerys wed his own sister, as the
Targaryens were wont to do, and reigned for ten or twelve years.
Aemon took his vows and left the Citadel to serve at some lordling’s
court … until his royal uncle died without issue. The Iron Throne
passed to the last of King Daeron’s four sons. That was Maekar,
Aemon’s father. The new king summoned all his sons to court and
would have made Aemon part of his councils, but he refused, saying
that would usurp the place rightly belonging to the Grand Maester.
Instead he served at the keep of his eldest brother, another Daeron.
Well, that one died too, leaving only a feeble-witted daughter as
heir. Some pox he caught from a whore, I believe. The next brother
was Aerion.”
“Aerion the Monstrous?” Jon knew that name. “The Prince Who
Thought He Was a Dragon” was one of Old Nan’s more gruesome
tales. His little brother Bran had loved it.
“The very one, though he named himself Aerion Bright ame. One
night, in his cups, he drank a jar of wild re, after telling his friends
it would transform him into a dragon, but the gods were kind and it
transformed him into a corpse. Not quite a year after, King Maekar
died in battle against an outlaw lord.”

Jon was not entirely innocent of the history of the realm; his own
maester had seen to that. “That was the year of the Great Council,”
he said. “The lords passed over Prince Aerion’s infant son and Prince
Daeron’s daughter and gave the crown to Aegon.”
“Yes and no. First they o ered it, quietly, to Aemon. And quietly
he refused. The gods meant for him to serve, not to rule, he told
them. He had sworn a vow and would not break it, though the High
Septon himself o ered to absolve him. Well, no sane man wanted
any blood of Aerion’s on the throne, and Daeron’s girl was a lackwit
besides being female, so they had no choice but to turn to Aemon’s
younger brother—Aegon, the Fifth of His Name. Aegon the
Unlikely, they called him, born the fourth son of a fourth son.
Aemon knew, and rightly, that if he remained at court those who
disliked his brother’s rule would seek to use him, so he came to the
Wall. And here he has remained, while his brother and his brother’s
son and his son each reigned and died in turn, until Jaime Lannister
put an end to the line of the Dragonkings.”
“King,” croaked the raven. The bird apped across the solar to
land on Mormont’s shoulder. “King,” it said again, strutting back
and forth.
“He likes that word,” Jon said, smiling.
“An easy word to say. An easy word to like.”
“King,” the bird said again.
“I think he means for you to have a crown, my lord.”
“The realm has three kings already, and that’s two too many for
my liking.” Mormont stroked the raven under the beak with a
nger, but all the while his eyes never left Jon Snow.
It made him feel odd. “My lord, why have you told me this, about
Maester Aemon?”
“Must I have a reason?” Mormont shifted in his seat, frowning.
“Your brother Robb has been crowned King in the North. You and
Aemon have that in common. A king for a brother.”
“And this too,” said Jon. “A vow.”
The Old Bear gave a loud snort, and the raven took ight,
apping in a circle about the room. “Give me a man for every vow
I’ve seen broken and the Wall will never lack for defenders.”

“I’ve always known that Robb would be Lord of Winterfell.”
Mormont gave a whistle, and the bird ew to him again and
settled on his arm. “A lord’s one thing, a king’s another.” He o ered
the raven a handful of corn from his pocket. “They will garb your
brother Robb in silks, satins, and velvets of a hundred di erent
colors, while you live and die in black ringmail. He will wed some
beautiful princess and father sons on her. You’ll have no wife, nor
will you ever hold a child of your own blood in your arms. Robb
will rule, you will serve. Men will call you a crow. Him they’ll call
Your Grace. Singers will praise every little thing he does, while your
greatest deeds all go unsung. Tell me that none of this troubles you,
Jon … and I’ll name you a liar, and know I have the truth of it.”
Jon drew himself up, taut as a bowstring. “And if it did trouble
me, what might I do, bastard as I am?”
“What will you do?” Mormont asked. “Bastard as you are?”
“Be troubled,” said Jon, “and keep my vows.”

CATELYN

Her son’s crown was fresh from the forge, and it seemed to Catelyn
Stark that the weight of it pressed heavy on Robb’s head.
The ancient crown of the Kings of Winter had been lost three
centuries ago, yielded up to Aegon the Conqueror when Torrhen
Stark knelt in submission. What Aegon had done with it no man
could say. Lord Hoster’s smith had done his work well, and Robb’s
crown looked much as the other was said to have looked in the tales
told of the Stark kings of old; an open circlet of hammered bronze
incised with the runes of the First Men, surmounted by nine black
iron spikes wrought in the shape of longswords. Of gold and silver
and gemstones, it had none; bronze and iron were the metals of
winter, dark and strong to ght against the cold.
As they waited in Riverrun’s Great Hall for the prisoner to be
brought before them, she saw Robb push back the crown so it rested
upon the thick auburn mop of his hair; moments later, he moved it
forward again; later he gave it a quarter turn, as if that might make
it sit more easily on his brow. It is no easy thing to wear a crown,
Catelyn thought, watching, especially for a boy of fteen years.
When the guards brought in the captive, Robb called for his
sword. Olyvar Frey o ered it up hilt rst, and her son drew the
blade and laid it bare across his knees, a threat plain for all to see.
“Your Grace, here is the man you asked for,” announced Ser Robin
Ryger, captain of the Tully household guard.

“Kneel before the king, Lannister!” Theon Greyjoy shouted. Ser
Robin forced the prisoner to his knees.
He did not look a lion, Catelyn re ected. This Ser Cleos Frey was
a son of the Lady Genna who was sister to Lord Tywin Lannister,
but he had none of the fabled Lannister beauty, the fair hair and
green eyes. Instead he had inherited the stringy brown locks, weak
chin, and thin face of his sire, Ser Emmon Frey, old Lord Walder’s
second son. His eyes were pale and watery and he could not seem to
stop blinking, but perhaps that was only the light. The cells below
Riverrun were dark and damp … and these days crowded as well.
“Rise, Ser Cleos.” Her son’s voice was not as icy as his father’s
would have been, but he did not sound a boy of fteen either. War
had made a man of him before his time. Morning light glimmered
faintly against the edge of the steel across his knees.
Yet it was not the sword that made Ser Cleos Frey anxious; it was
the beast. Grey Wind, her son had named him. A direwolf large as
any elkhound, lean and smoke-dark, with eyes like molten gold.
When the beast padded forward and sni ed at the captive knight,
every man in that hall could smell the scent of fear. Ser Cleos had
been taken during the battle in the Whispering Wood, where Grey
Wind had ripped out the throats of half a dozen men.
The knight scrambled up, edging away with such alacrity that
some of the watchers laughed aloud. “Thank you, my lord.”
“Your Grace,” barked Lord Umber, the Greatjon, ever the loudest
of Robb’s northern bannermen … and the truest and ercest as well,
or so he insisted. He had been the rst to proclaim her son King in
the North, and he would brook no slight to the honor of his newmade sovereign.
“Your Grace,” Ser Cleos corrected hastily. “Pardons.”
He is not a bold man, this one, Catelyn thought. More of a Frey
than a Lannister, in truth. His cousin the Kingslayer would have
been a much di erent matter. They would never have gotten that
honori c through Ser Jaime Lannister’s perfect teeth.
“I brought you from your cell to carry my message to your cousin
Cersei Lannister in King’s Landing. You’ll travel under a peace
banner, with thirty of my best men to escort you.”

Ser Cleos was visibly relieved. “Then I should be most glad to
bring His Grace’s message to the queen.”
“Understand,” Robb said, “I am not giving you your freedom.
Your grandfather Lord Walder pledged me his support and that of
House Frey. Many of your cousins and uncles rode with us in the
Whispering Wood, but you chose to ght beneath the lion banner.
That makes you a Lannister, not a Frey. I want your pledge, on your
honor as a knight, that after you deliver my message you’ll return
with the queen’s reply, and resume your captivity.”
Ser Cleos answered at once. “I do so vow.”
“Every man in this hall has heard you,” warned Catelyn’s brother
Ser Edmure Tully, who spoke for Riverrun and the lords of the
Trident in the place of their dying father. “If you do not return, the
whole realm will know you forsworn.”
“I will do as I pledged,” Ser Cleos replied sti y. “What is this
message?”
“An o er of peace.” Robb stood, longsword in hand. Grey Wind
moved to his side. The hall grew hushed. “Tell the Queen Regent
that if she meets my terms, I will sheath this sword, and make an
end to the war between us.”
In the back of the hall, Catelyn glimpsed the tall, gaunt gure of
Lord Rickard Karstark shove through a rank of guards and out the
door. No one else moved. Robb paid the disruption no mind.
“Olyvar, the paper,” he commanded. The squire took his longsword
and handed up a rolled parchment.
Robb unrolled it. “First, the queen must release my sisters and
provide them with transport by sea from King’s Landing to White
Harbor. It is to be understood that Sansa’s betrothal to Jo rey
Baratheon is at an end. When I receive word from my castellan that
my sisters have returned unharmed to Winterfell, I will release the
queen’s cousins, the squire Willem Lannister and your brother Tion
Frey, and give them safe escort to Casterly Rock or wheresoever
she desires them delivered.”
Catelyn Stark wished she could read the thoughts that hid behind
each face, each furrowed brow and pair of tightened lips.

“Secondly, my lord father’s bones will be returned to us, so he
may rest beside his brother and sister in the crypts beneath
Winterfell, as he would have wished. The remains of the men of his
household guard who died in his service at King’s Landing must also
be returned.”
Living men had gone south, and cold bones would return. Ned had
the truth of it, she thought. His place was at Winterfell, he said as
much, but would I hear him? No. Go, I told him, you must be Robert’s
Hand, for the good of our House, for the sake of our children … my
doing, mine, no other …
“Third, my father’s greatsword Ice will be delivered to my hand,
here at Riverrun.”
She watched her brother Ser Edmure Tully as he stood with his
thumbs hooked over his swordbelt, his face as still as stone.
“Fourth, the queen will command her father Lord Tywin to
release those knights and lords bannermen of mine that he took
captive in the battle on the Green Fork of the Trident. Once he does
so, I shall release my own captives taken in the Whispering Wood
and the Battle of the Camps, save Jaime Lannister alone, who will
remain my hostage for his father’s good behavior.”
She studied Theon Greyjoy’s sly smile, wondering what it meant.
That young man had a way of looking as though he knew some
secret jest that only he was privy to; Catelyn had never liked it.
“Lastly, King Jo rey and the Queen Regent must renounce all
claims to dominion over the north. Henceforth we are no part of
their realm, but a free and independent kingdom, as of old. Our
domain shall include all the Stark lands north of the Neck, and in
addition the lands watered by the River Trident and its vassal
streams, bounded by the Golden Tooth to the west and the
Mountains of the Moon in the east.”
“THE KING IN THE NORTH!” boomed Greatjon Umber, a hamsized st hammering at the air as he shouted. “Stark! Stark! The King
in the North!”
Robb rolled up the parchment again. “Maester Vyman has drawn
a map, showing the borders we claim. You shall have a copy for the
queen. Lord Tywin must withdraw beyond these borders, and cease

his raiding, burning, and pillage. The Queen Regent and her son
shall make no claims to taxes, incomes, nor service from my people,
and shall free my lords and knights from all oaths of fealty, vows,
pledges, debts, and obligations owed to the Iron Throne and the
Houses Baratheon and Lannister. Additionally, the Lannisters shall
deliver ten highborn hostages, to be mutually agreed upon, as a
pledge of peace. These I will treat as honored guests, according to
their station. So long as the terms of this pact are abided with
faithfully, I shall release two hostages every year, and return them
safely to their families.” Robb tossed the rolled parchment at the
knight’s feet. “There are the terms. If she meets them, I’ll give her
peace. If not”—he whistled, and Grey Wind moved forward snarling
—“I’ll give her another Whispering Wood.”
“Stark!” the Greatjon roared again, and now other voices took up
the cry. “Stark, Stark, King in the North!” The direwolf threw back his
head and howled.
Ser Cleos had gone the color of curdled milk. “The queen shall
hear your message, my—Your Grace.”
“Good,” Robb said. “Ser Robin, see that he has a good meal and
clean clothing. He’s to ride at rst light.”
“As you command, Your Grace,” Ser Robin Ryger replied.
“Then we are done.” The assembled knights and lords bannermen
bent their knees as Robb turned to leave, Grey Wind at his heels.
Olyvar Frey scrambled ahead to open the door. Catelyn followed
them out, her brother at her side.
“You did well,” she told her son in the gallery that led from the
rear of the hall, “though that business with the wolf was japery
more be tting a boy than a king.”
Robb scratched Grey Wind behind the ear. “Did you see the look
on his face, Mother?” he asked, smiling.
“What I saw was Lord Karstark, walking out.”
“As did I.” Robb lifted o his crown with both hands and gave it
to Olyvar. “Take this thing back to my bedchamber.”
“At once, Your Grace.” The squire hurried o .
“I’ll wager there were others who felt the same as Lord Karstark,”
her brother Edmure declared. “How can we talk of peace while the

Lannisters spread like a pestilence over my father’s domains,
stealing his crops and slaughtering his people? I say again, we ought
to be marching on Harrenhal.”
“We lack the strength,” Robb said, though unhappily.
Edmure persisted. “Do we grow stronger sitting here? Our host
dwindles every day.”
“And whose doing is that?” Catelyn snapped at her brother. It had
been at Edmure’s insistence that Robb had given the river lords
leave to depart after his crowning, each to defend his own lands.
Ser Marq Piper and Lord Karyl Vance had been the rst to go. Lord
Jonos Bracken had followed, vowing to reclaim the burnt shell of
his castle and bury his dead, and now Lord Jason Mallister had
announced his intent to return to his seat at Seagard, still mercifully
untouched by the ghting.
“You cannot ask my river lords to remain idle while their elds
are being pillaged and their people put to the sword,” Ser Edmure
said, “but Lord Karstark is a northman. It would be an ill thing if he
were to leave us.”
“I’ll speak with him,” said Robb. “He lost two sons in the
Whispering Wood. Who can blame him if he does not want to make
peace with their killers … with my father’s killers …”
“More bloodshed will not bring your father back to us, or Lord
Rickard’s sons,” Catelyn said. “An o er had to be made—though a
wiser man might have o ered sweeter terms.”
“Any sweeter and I would have gagged.” Her son’s beard had
grown in redder than his auburn hair. Robb seemed to think it made
him look erce, royal … older. But bearded or no, he was still a
youth of fteen, and wanted vengeance no less than Rickard
Karstark. It had been no easy thing to convince him to make even
this o er, poor as it was.
“Cersei Lannister will never consent to trade your sisters for a pair
of cousins. It’s her brother she’ll want, as you know full well.” She
had told him as much before, but Catelyn was nding that kings do
not listen half so attentively as sons.
“I can’t release the Kingslayer, not even if I wanted to. My lords
would never abide it.”

“Your lords made you their king.”
“And can unmake me just as easy.”
“If your crown is the price we must pay to have Arya and Sansa
returned safe, we should pay it willingly. Half your lords would like
to murder Lannister in his cell. If he should die while he’s your
prisoner, men will say—”
“—that he well deserved it,” Robb nished.
“And your sisters?” Catelyn asked sharply. “Will they deserve
their deaths as well? I promise you, if any harm comes to her
brother, Cersei will pay us back blood for blood—”
“Lannister won’t die,” Robb said. “No one so much as speaks to
him without my warrant. He has food, water, clean straw, more
comfort than he has any right to. But I won’t free him, not even for
Arya and Sansa.”
Her son was looking down at her, Catelyn realized. Was it war that
made him grow so fast, she wondered, or the crown they had put on his
head? “Are you afraid to have Jaime Lannister in the eld again, is
that the truth of it?”
Grey Wind growled, as if he sensed Robb’s anger, and Edmure
Tully put a brotherly hand on Catelyn’s shoulder. “Cat, don’t. The
boy has the right of this.”
“Don’t call me the boy,” Robb said, rounding on his uncle, his
anger spilling out all at once on poor Edmure, who had only meant
to support him. “I’m almost a man grown, and a king—your king,
ser. And I don’t fear Jaime Lannister. I defeated him once, I’ll defeat
him again if I must, only …” He pushed a fall of hair out of his eyes
and gave a shake of the head. “I might have been able to trade the
Kingslayer for Father, but …”
“… but not for the girls?” Her voice was icy quiet. “Girls are not
important enough, are they?”
Robb made no answer, but there was hurt in his eyes. Blue eyes,
Tully eyes, eyes she had given him. She had wounded him, but he
was too much his father’s son to admit it.
That was unworthy of me, she told herself. Gods be good, what is to
become of me? He is doing his best, trying so hard, I know it, I see it,

and yet … I have lost my Ned, the rock my life was built on, I could not
bear to lose the girls as well …
“I’ll do all I can for my sisters,” Robb said. “If the queen has any
sense, she’ll accept my terms. If not, I’ll make her rue the day she
refused me.” Plainly, he’d had enough of the subject. “Mother, are
you certain you will not consent to go to the Twins? You would be
farther from the ghting, and you could acquaint yourself with Lord
Frey’s daughters to help me choose my bride when the war is
done.”
He wants me gone, Catelyn thought wearily. Kings are not supposed
to have mothers, it would seem, and I tell him things he does not want to
hear. “You’re old enough to decide which of Lord Walder’s girls you
prefer without your mother’s help, Robb.”
“Then go with Theon. He leaves on the morrow. He’ll help the
Mallisters escort that lot of captives to Seagard and then take ship
for the Iron Islands. You could nd a ship as well, and be back at
Winterfell with a moon’s turn, if the winds are kind. Bran and
Rickon need you.”
And you do not, is that what you mean to say? “My lord father has
little enough time remaining him. So long as your grandfather lives,
my place is at Riverrun with him.”
“I could command you to go. As king. I could.”
Catelyn ignored that. “I’ll say again, I would sooner you sent
someone else to Pyke, and kept Theon close to you.”
“Who better to treat with Balon Greyjoy than his son?”
“Jason Mallister,” o ered Catelyn. “Tytos Blackwood. Stevron
Frey. Anyone … but not Theon.”
Her son squatted beside Grey Wind, ru ing the wolf’s fur and
incidentally avoiding her eyes. “Theon’s fought bravely for us. I told
you how he saved Bran from those wildlings in the wolfswood. If
the Lannisters won’t make peace, I’ll have need of Lord Greyjoy’s
longships.”
“You’ll have them sooner if you keep his son as hostage.”
“He’s been a hostage half his life.”
“For good reason,” Catelyn said. “Balon Greyjoy is not a man to
be trusted. He wore a crown himself, remember, if only for a

season. He may aspire to wear one again.”
Robb stood. “I will not grudge him that. If I’m King in the North,
let him be King of the Iron Islands, if that’s his desire. I’ll give him a
crown gladly, so long as he helps us bring down the Lannisters.”
“Robb—”
“I’m sending Theon. Good day, Mother. Grey Wind, come.” Robb
walked o briskly, the direwolf padding beside him.
Catelyn could only watch him go. Her son and now her king.
How queer that felt. Command, she had told him back in Moat
Cailin. And so he did. “I am going to visit Father,” she announced
abruptly. “Come with me, Edmure.”
“I need to have a word with those new bowmen Ser Desmond is
training. I’ll visit him later.”
If he still lives, Catelyn thought, but she said nothing. Her brother
would sooner face battle than that sickroom.
The shortest way to the central keep where her father lay dying
was through the godswood, with its grass and wild owers and thick
stands of elm and redwood. A wealth of rustling leaves still clung to
the branches of the trees, all ignorant of the word the white raven
had brought to Riverrun a fortnight past. Autumn had come, the
Conclave had declared, but the gods had not seen t to tell the
winds and woods as yet. For that Catelyn was duly grateful.
Autumn was always a fearful time, with the specter of winter
looming ahead. Even the wisest man never knew whether his next
harvest would be the last.
Hoster Tully, Lord of Riverrun, lay abed in his solar, with its
commanding view to the east where the rivers Tumblestone and
Red Fork met beyond the walls of his castle. He was sleeping when
Catelyn entered, his hair and beard as white as his featherbed, his
once portly frame turned small and frail by the death that grew
within him.
Beside the bed, still dressed in mail hauberk and travel-stained
cloak, sat her father’s brother, the Black sh. His boots were dusty
and spattered with dried mud. “Does Robb know you are returned,
Uncle?” Ser Brynden Tully was Robb’s eyes and ears, the
commander of his scouts and outriders.

“No. I came here straight from the stables, when they told me the
king was holding court. His Grace will want to hear my tidings in
private rst, I’d think.” The Black sh was a tall, lean man, grey of
hair and precise in his movements, his clean-shaven face lined and
windburnt. “How is he?” he asked, and she knew he did not mean
Robb.
“Much the same. The maester gives him dreamwine and milk of
the poppy for his pain, so he sleeps most of the time, and eats too
little. He seems weaker with each day that passes.”
“Does he speak?”
“Yes … but there is less and less sense to the things he says. He
talks of his regrets, of un nished tasks, of people long dead and
times long past. Sometimes he does not know what season it is, or
who I am. Once he called me by Mother’s name.”
“He misses her still,” Ser Brynden answered. “You have her face. I
can see it in your cheekbones, and your jaw …”
“You remember more of her than I do. It has been a long time.”
She seated herself on the bed and brushed away a strand of ne
white hair that had fallen across her father’s face.
“Each time I ride out, I wonder if I shall nd him alive or dead on
my return.” Despite their quarrels, there was a deep bond between
her father and the brother he had once disowned.
“At least you made your peace with him.”
They sat for a time in silence, until Catelyn raised her head. “You
spoke of tidings that Robb needed to hear?” Lord Hoster moaned
and rolled onto his side, almost as if he had heard.
Brynden stood. “Come outside. Best if we do not wake him.”
She followed him out onto the stone balcony that jutted threesided from the solar like the prow of a ship. Her uncle glanced up,
frowning. “You can see it by day now. My men call it the Red
Messenger … but what is the message?”
Catelyn raised her eyes, to where the faint red line of the comet
traced a path across the deep blue sky like a long scratch across the
face of god. “The Greatjon told Robb that the old gods have
unfurled a red ag of vengeance for Ned. Edmure thinks it’s an
omen of victory for Riverrun—he sees a sh with a long tail, in the

Tully colors, red against blue.” She sighed. “I wish I had their faith.
Crimson is a Lannister color.”
“That thing’s not crimson,” Ser Brynden said. “Nor Tully red, the
mud red of the river. That’s blood up there, child, smeared across
the sky.”
“Our blood or theirs?”
“Was there ever a war where only one side bled?” Her uncle gave
a shake of the head. “The riverlands are awash in blood and ame
all around the Gods Eye. The ghting has spread south to the
Blackwater and north across the Trident, almost to the Twins. Marq
Piper and Karyl Vance have won some small victories, and this
southron lordling Beric Dondarrion has been raiding the raiders,
falling upon Lord Tywin’s foraging parties and vanishing back into
the woods. It’s said that Ser Burton Crakehall was boasting that he’d
slain Dondarrion, until he led his column into one of Lord Beric’s
traps and got every man of them killed.”
“Some of Ned’s guard from King’s Landing are with this Lord
Beric,” Catelyn recalled. “May the gods preserve them.”
“Dondarrion and this red priest who rides with him are clever
enough to preserve themselves, if the tales be true,” her uncle said,
“but your father’s bannermen make a sadder tale. Robb should
never have let them go. They’ve scattered like quail, each man
trying to protect his own, and it’s folly, Cat, folly. Jonos Bracken
was wounded in the ghting amidst the ruins of his castle, and his
nephew Hendry slain. Tytos Blackwood’s swept the Lannisters o
his lands, but they took every cow and pig and speck of grain and
left him nothing to defend but Raventree Hall and a scorched
desert. Darry men recaptured their lord’s keep but held it less than a
fortnight before Gregor Clegane descended on them and put the
whole garrison to the sword, even their lord.”
Catelyn was horrorstruck. “Darry was only a child.”
“Aye, and the last of his line as well. The boy would have brought
a ne ransom, but what does gold mean to a frothing dog like
Gregor Clegane? That beast’s head would make a noble gift for all
the people of the realm, I vow.”

Catelyn knew Ser Gregor’s evil reputation, yet still … “Don’t
speak to me of heads, Uncle. Cersei has mounted Ned’s on a spike
above the walls of the Red Keep, and left it for the crows and ies.”
Even now, it was hard for her to believe that he was truly gone.
Some nights she would wake in darkness, half-asleep, and for an
instant expect to nd him there beside her. “Clegane is no more
than Lord Tywin’s catspaw.” For Tywin Lannister—Lord of Casterly
Rock, Warden of the West, father to Queen Cersei, Ser Jaime the
Kingslayer, and Tyrion the Imp, and grandfather to Jo rey
Baratheon, the new-crowned boy king—was the true danger,
Catelyn believed.
“True enough,” Ser Brynden admitted. “And Tywin Lannister is no
man’s fool. He sits safe behind the walls of Harrenhal, feeding his
host on our harvest and burning what he does not take. Gregor is
not the only dog he’s loosed. Ser Amory Lorch is in the eld as well,
and some sellsword out of Qohor who’d sooner maim a man than
kill him. I’ve seen what they leave behind them. Whole villages put
to the torch, women raped and mutilated, butchered children left
unburied to draw wolves and wild dogs … it would sicken even the
dead.”
“When Edmure hears this, he will rage.”
“And that will be just as Lord Tywin desires. Even terror has its
purpose, Cat. Lannister wants to provoke us to battle.”
“Robb is like to give him that wish,” Catelyn said, fretful. “He is
restless as a cat sitting here, and Edmure and the Greatjon and the
others will urge him on.” Her son had won two great victories,
smashing Jaime Lannister in the Whispering Wood and routing his
leaderless host outside the walls of Riverrun in the Battle of the
Camps, but from the way some of his bannermen spoke of him, he
might have been Aegon the Conqueror reborn.
Brynden Black sh arched a bushy grey eyebrow. “More fool they.
My rst rule of war, Cat—never give the enemy his wish. Lord
Tywin would like to ght on a eld of his own choosing. He wants
us to march on Harrenhal.”
“Harrenhal.” Every child of the Trident knew the tales told of
Harrenhal, the vast fortress that King Harren the Black had raised

beside the waters of Gods Eye three hundred years past, when the
Seven Kingdoms had been seven kingdoms, and the riverlands were
ruled by the ironmen from the islands. In his pride, Harren had
desired the highest hall and tallest towers in all Westeros. Forty
years it had taken, rising like a great shadow on the shore of the
lake while Harren’s armies plundered his neighbors for stone,
lumber, gold, and workers. Thousands of captives died in his
quarries, chained to his sledges, or laboring on his ve colossal
towers. Men froze by winter and sweltered in summer. Weirwoods
that had stood three thousand years were cut down for beams and
rafters. Harren had beggared the riverlands and the Iron Islands
alike to ornament his dream. And when at last Harrenhal stood
complete, on the very day King Harren took up residence, Aegon
the Conqueror had come ashore at King’s Landing.
Catelyn could remember hearing Old Nan tell the story to her
own children, back at Winterfell. “And King Harren learned that
thick walls and high towers are small use against dragons,” the tale
always ended. “For dragons y.” Harren and all his line had
perished in the res that engulfed his monstrous fortress, and every
house that held Harrenhal since had come to misfortune. Strong it
might be, but it was a dark place, and cursed.
“I would not have Robb ght a battle in the shadow of that
keep,” Catelyn admitted. “Yet we must do something, Uncle.”
“And soon,” her uncle agreed. “I have not told you the worst of it,
child. The men I sent west have brought back word that a new host
is gathering at Casterly Rock.”
Another Lannister army. The thought made her ill. “Robb must be
told at once. Who will command?”
“Ser Sta ord Lannister, it’s said.” He turned to gaze out over the
rivers, his red-and-blue cloak stirring in the breeze.
“Another nephew?” The Lannisters of Casterly Rock were a
damnably large and fertile house.
“Cousin,” Ser Brynden corrected. “Brother to Lord Tywin’s late
wife, so twice related. An old man and a bit of a dullard, but he has
a son, Ser Daven, who is more formidable.”

“Then let us hope it is the father and not the son who takes this
army into the eld.”
“We have some time yet before we must face them. This lot will
be sellswords, freeriders, and green boys from the stews of
Lannisport. Ser Sta ord must see that they are armed and drilled
before he dare risk battle … and make no mistake, Lord Tywin is
not the Kingslayer. He will not rush in heedless. He will wait
patiently for Ser Sta ord to march before he stirs from behind the
walls of Harrenhal.”
“Unless …” said Catelyn.
“Yes?” Ser Brynden prompted.
“Unless he must leave Harrenhal,” she said, “to face some other
threat.”
Her uncle looked at her thoughtfully. “Lord Renly.”
“King Renly.” If she would ask help from the man, she would
need to grant him the style he had claimed for himself.
“Perhaps.” The Black sh smiled a dangerous smile. “He’ll want
something, though.”
“He’ll want what kings always want,” she said. “Homage.”

TYRION

Janos Slynt was a butcher’s son, and he laughed like a man

chopping meat. “More wine?” Tyrion asked him.
“I should not object,” Lord Janos said, holding out his cup. He
was built like a keg, and had a similar capacity. “I should not object
at all. That’s a ne red. From the Arbor?”
“Dornish.” Tyrion gestured, and his serving man poured. But for
the servants, he and Lord Janos were alone in the Small Hall, at a
small candlelit table surrounded by darkness. “Quite the nd.
Dornish wines are not often so rich.”
“Rich,” said the big frog-faced man, taking a healthy gulp. He was
not a man for sipping, Janos Slynt. Tyrion had made note of that at
once. “Yes, rich, that’s the very word I was searching for, the very
word. You have a gift for words, Lord Tyrion, if I might say so. And
you tell a droll tale. Droll, yes.”
“I’m pleased you think so … but I’m not a lord, as you are. A
simple Tyrion will su ce for me, Lord Janos.”
“As you wish.” He took another swallow, dribbling wine on the
front of his black satin doublet. He was wearing a cloth-of-gold half
cape fastened with a miniature spear, its point enameled in dark
red. And he was well and truly drunk.
Tyrion covered his mouth and belched politely. Unlike Lord Janos
he had gone easy on the wine, but he was very full. The rst thing
he had done after taking up residence in the Tower of the Hand was
inquire after the nest cook in the city and take her into his service.

This evening they had supped on oxtail soup, summer greens tossed
with pecans, grapes, red fennel, and crumbled cheese, hot crab pie,
spiced squash, and quails drowned in butter. Each dish had come
with its own wine. Lord Janos allowed that he had never eaten half
so well. “No doubt that will change when you take your seat in
Harrenhal,” Tyrion said.
“For a certainty. Perhaps I should ask this cook of yours to enter
my service, what do you say?”
“Wars have been fought over less,” he said, and they both had a
good long laugh. “You’re a bold man to take Harrenhal for your
seat. Such a grim place, and huge … costly to maintain. And some
say cursed as well.”
“Should I fear a pile of stone?” He hooted at the notion. “A bold
man, you said. You must be bold, to rise. As I have. To Harrenhal,
yes! And why not? You know. You are a bold man too, I sense.
Small, mayhap, but bold.”
“You are too kind. More wine?”
“No. No, truly, I … oh, gods be damned, yes. Why not? A bold
man drinks his ll!”
“Truly.” Tyrion lled Lord Slynt’s cup to the brim. “I have been
glancing over the names you put forward to take your place as
Commander of the City Watch.”
“Good men. Fine men. Any of the six will do, but I’d choose Allar
Deem. My right arm. Good good man. Loyal. Pick him and you
won’t be sorry. If he pleases the king.”
“To be sure.” Tyrion took a small sip of his own wine. “I had been
considering Ser Jacelyn Bywater. He’s been captain on the Mud
Gate for three years, and he served with valor during Balon
Greyjoy’s Rebellion. King Robert knighted him at Pyke. And yet his
name does not appear on your list.”
Lord Janos Slynt took a gulp of wine and sloshed it around in his
mouth for a moment before swallowing. “Bywater. Well. Brave
man, to be sure, yet … he’s rigid, that one. A queer dog. The men
don’t like him. A cripple too, lost his hand at Pyke, that’s what got
him knighted. A poor trade, if you ask me, a hand for a ser.” He
laughed. “Ser Jacelyn thinks overmuch of himself and his honor, as

I see it. You’ll do better leaving that one where he is, my lor—
Tyrion. Allar Deem’s the man for you.”
“Deem is little loved in the streets, I am told.”
“He’s feared. That’s better.”
“What was it I heard of him? Some trouble in a brothel?”
“That. Not his fault, my lo—Tyrion. No. He never meant to kill
the woman, that was her own doing. He warned her to stand aside
and let him do his duty.”
“Still … mothers and children, he might have expected she’d try
to save the babe.” Tyrion smiled. “Have some of this cheese, it goes
splendidly with the wine. Tell me, why did you choose Deem for
that unhappy task?”
“A good commander knows his men, Tyrion. Some are good for
one job, some for another. Doing for a babe, and her still on the tit,
that takes a certain sort. Not every man’d do it. Even if it was only
some whore and her whelp.”
“I suppose that’s so,” said Tyrion, hearing only some whore and
thinking of Shae, and Tysha long ago, and all the other women who
had taken his coin and his seed over the years.
Slynt went on, oblivious. “A hard man for a hard job, is Deem.
Does as he’s told, and never a word afterward.” He cut a slice o
the cheese. “This is ne. Sharp. Give me a good sharp knife and a
good sharp cheese and I’m a happy man.”
Tyrion shrugged. “Enjoy it while you can. With the riverlands in
ame and Renly king in Highgarden, good cheese will soon be hard
to come by. So who sent you after the whore’s bastard?”
Lord Janos gave Tyrion a wary look, then laughed and wagged a
wedge of cheese at him. “You’re a sly one, Tyrion. Thought you
could trick me, did you? It takes more than wine and cheese to
make Janos Slynt tell more than he should. I pride myself. Never a
question, and never a word afterward, not with me.”
“As with Deem.”
“Just the same. You make him your Commander when I’m o to
Harrenhal, and you won’t regret it.”
Tyrion broke o a nibble of the cheese. It was sharp indeed, and
veined with wine; very choice. “Whoever the king names will not

have an easy time stepping into your armor, I can tell. Lord
Mormont faces the same problem.”
Lord Janos looked puzzled. “I thought she was a lady. Mormont.
Beds down with bears, that’s the one?”
“It was her brother I was speaking of. Jeor Mormont, the Lord
Commander of the Night’s Watch. When I was visiting with him on
the Wall, he mentioned how concerned he was about nding a good
man to take his place. The Watch gets so few good men these days.”
Tyrion grinned. “He’d sleep easier if he had a man like you, I
imagine. Or the valiant Allar Deem.”
Lord Janos roared. “Small chance of that!”
“One would think,” Tyrion said, “but life does take queer turns.
Consider Eddard Stark, my lord. I don’t suppose he ever imagined
his life would end on the steps of Baelor’s Sept.”
“There were damn few as did,” Lord Janos allowed, chuckling.
Tyrion chuckled too. “A pity I wasn’t here to see it. They say even
Varys was surprised.”
Lord Janos laughed so hard his gut shook. “The Spider,” he said.
“Knows everything, they say. Well, he didn’t know that.”
“How could he?” Tyrion put the rst hint of a chill in his tone.
“He had helped persuade my sister that Stark should be pardoned,
on the condition that he take the black.”
“Eh?” Janos Slynt blinked vaguely at Tyrion.
“My sister Cersei,” Tyrion repeated, a shade more strongly, in
case the fool had some doubt who he meant. “The Queen Regent.”
“Yes.” Slynt took a swallow. “As to that, well … the king
commanded it, m’lord. The king himself.”
“The king is thirteen,” Tyrion reminded him.
“Still. He is the king.” Slynt’s jowls quivered when he frowned.
“The Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Well, one or two of them, at least,” Tyrion said with a sour
smile. “Might I have a look at your spear?”
“My spear?” Lord Janos blinked in confusion.
Tyrion pointed. “The clasp that fastens your cape.”
Hesitantly, Lord Janos drew out the ornament and handed it to
Tyrion.

“We have goldsmiths in Lannisport who do better work,” he
opined. “The red enamel blood is a shade much, if you don’t mind
my saying. Tell me, my lord, did you drive the spear into the man’s
back yourself, or did you only give the command?”
“I gave the command, and I’d give it again. Lord Stark was a
traitor.” The bald spot in the middle of Slynt’s head was beet-red,
and his cloth-of-gold cape had slithered o his shoulders onto the
oor. “The man tried to buy me.”
“Little dreaming that you had already been sold.”
Slynt slammed down his wine cup. “Are you drunk? If you think I
will sit here and have my honor questioned …”
“What honor is that? I do admit, you made a better bargain than
Ser Jacelyn. A lordship and a castle for a spear thrust in the back,
and you didn’t even need to thrust the spear.” He tossed the golden
ornament back to Janos Slynt. It bounced o his chest and clattered
to the oor as the man rose.
“I mislike the tone of your voice, my lo—Imp. I am the Lord of
Harrenhal and a member of the king’s council, who are you to
chastise me like this?”
Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “I think you know quite well
who I am. How many sons do you have?”
“What are my sons to you, dwarf?”
“Dwarf?” His anger ashed. “You should have stopped at Imp. I
am Tyrion of House Lannister, and someday, if you have the sense
the gods gave a sea slug, you will drop to your knees in thanks that
it was me you had to deal with, and not my lord father. Now, how
many sons do you have?”
Tyrion could see the sudden fear in Janos Slynt’s eyes. “Th-three,
m’lord. And a daughter. Please, m’lord—”
“You need not beg.” He slid o his chair. “You have my word, no
harm will come to them. The younger boys will be fostered out as
squires. If they serve well and loyally, they may be knights in time.
Let it never be said that House Lannister does not reward those who
serve it. Your eldest son will inherit the title Lord Slynt, and this
appalling sigil of yours.” He kicked at the little golden spear and
sent it skittering across the oor. “Lands will be found for him, and

he can build a seat for himself. It will not be Harrenhal, but it will
be su cient. It will be up to him to make a marriage for the girl.”
Janos Slynt’s face had gone from red to white. “Wh-what … what
do you …?” His jowls were quivering like mounds of suet.
“What do I mean to do with you?” Tyrion let the oaf tremble for a
moment before he answered. “The carrack Summer’s Dream sails on
the morning tide. Her master tells me she will call at Gulltown, the
Three Sisters, the isle of Skagos, and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. When
you see Lord Commander Mormont, give him my fond regards, and
tell him that I have not forgotten the needs of the Night’s Watch. I
wish you long life and good service, my lord.”
Once Janos Slynt realized he was not to be summarily executed,
color returned to his face. He thrust his jaw out. “We will see about
this, Imp. Dwarf. Perhaps it will be you on that ship, what do you
think of that? Perhaps it will be you on the Wall.” He gave a bark
of anxious laughter. “You and your threats, well, we will see. I am
the king’s friend, you know. We shall hear what Jo rey has to say
about this. And Little nger and the queen, oh, yes. Janos Slynt has
a good many friends. We will see who goes sailing, I promise you.
Indeed we will.”
Slynt spun on his heel like the watchman he’d once been, and
strode the length of the Small Hall, boots ringing on the stone. He
clattered up the steps, threw open the door … and came face-to-face
with a tall, lantern-jawed man in black breastplate and gold cloak.
Strapped to the stump of his right wrist was an iron hand. “Janos,”
he said, deep-set eyes glinting under a prominent brow ridge and a
shock of salt-and-pepper hair. Six gold cloaks moved quietly into the
Small Hall behind him as Janos Slynt backed away.
“Lord Slynt,” Tyrion called out, “I believe you know Ser Jacelyn
Bywater, our new Commander of the City Watch.”
“We have a litter waiting for you, my lord,” Ser Jacelyn told
Slynt. “The docks are dark and distant, and the streets are not safe
by night. Men.”
As the gold cloaks ushered out their onetime commander, Tyrion
called Ser Jacelyn to his side and handed him a roll of parchment.

“It’s a long voyage, and Lord Slynt will want for company. See that
these six join him on the Summer’s Dream.”
Bywater glanced over the names and smiled. “As you will.”
“There’s one,” Tyrion said quietly. “Deem. Tell the captain it
would not be taken amiss if that one should happen to be swept
overboard before they reach Eastwatch.”
“I’m told those northern waters are very stormy, my lord.” Ser
Jacelyn bowed and took his leave, his cloak rippling behind him. He
trod on Slynt’s cloth-of-gold cape on his way.
Tyrion sat alone, sipping at what remained of the ne sweet
Dornish wine. Servants came and went, clearing the dishes from the
table. He told them to leave the wine. When they were done, Varys
came gliding into the hall, wearing owing lavender robes that
matched his smell. “Oh, sweetly done, my good lord.”
“Then why do I have this bitter taste in my mouth?” He pressed
his ngers into his temples. “I told them to throw Allar Deem into
the sea. I am sorely tempted to do the same with you.”
“You might be disappointed by the result,” Varys replied. “The
storms come and go, the waves crash overhead, the big sh eat the
little sh, and I keep on paddling. Might I trouble you for a taste of
the wine that Lord Slynt enjoyed so much?”
Tyrion waved at the agon, frowning.
Varys lled a cup. “Ah. Sweet as summer.” He took another sip.
“I hear the grapes singing on my tongue.”
“I wondered what that noise was. Tell the grapes to keep still, my
head is about to split. It was my sister. That was what the oh-soloyal Lord Janos refused to say. Cersei sent the gold cloaks to that
brothel.”
Varys tittered nervously. So he had known all along.
“You left that part out,” Tyrion said accusingly.
“Your own sweet sister,” Varys said, so grief-stricken he looked
close to tears. “It is a hard thing to tell a man, my lord. I was
fearful how you might take it. Can you forgive me?”
“No,” Tyrion snapped. “Damn you. Damn her.” He could not touch
Cersei, he knew. Not yet, not even if he’d wanted to, and he was far
from certain that he did. Yet it rankled, to sit here and make a

mummer’s show of justice by punishing the sorry likes of Janos
Slynt and Allar Deem, while his sister continued on her savage
course. “In future, you will tell me what you know, Lord Varys. All
of what you know.”
The eunuch’s smile was sly. “That might take rather a long time,
my good lord. I know quite a lot.”
“Not enough to save this child, it would seem.”
“Alas, no. There was another bastard, a boy, older. I took steps to
see him removed from harm’s way … but I confess, I never
dreamed the babe would be at risk. A baseborn girl, less than a year
old, with a whore for a mother. What threat could she pose?”
“She was Robert’s,” Tyrion said bitterly. “That was enough for
Cersei, it would seem.”
“Yes. It is grievous sad. I must blame myself for the poor sweet
babe and her mother, who was so young and loved the king.”
“Did she?” Tyrion had never seen the dead girl’s face, but in his
mind she was Shae and Tysha both. “Can a whore truly love
anyone, I wonder? No, don’t answer. Some things I would rather
not know.” He had settled Shae in a sprawling stone-and-timber
manse, with its own well and stable and garden; he had given her
servants to see to her wants, a white bird from the Summer Isles to
keep her company, silks and silver and gemstones to adorn her,
guards to protect her. And yet she seemed restive. She wanted to be
with him more, she told him; she wanted to serve him and help
him. “You help me most here, between the sheets,” he told her one
night after their loving as he lay beside her, his head pillowed
against her breast, his groin aching with a sweet soreness. She made
no reply, save with her eyes. He could see there that it was not
what she’d wanted to hear.
Sighing, Tyrion started to reach for the wine again, then
remembered Lord Janos and pushed the agon away. “It does seem
my sister was telling the truth about Stark’s death. We have my
nephew to thank for that madness.”
“King Jo rey gave the command. Janos Slynt and Ser Ilyn Payne
carried it out, swiftly, without hesitation …”

“… almost as if they had expected it. Yes, we have been over this
ground before, without pro t. A folly.”
“With the City Watch in hand, my lord, you are well placed to see
to it that His Grace commits no further … follies? To be sure, there
is still the queen’s household guard to consider …”
“The red cloaks?” Tyrion shrugged. “Vylarr’s loyalty is to Casterly
Rock. He knows I am here with my father’s authority. Cersei would
nd it hard to use his men against me … besides, they are only a
hundred. I have half again as many men of my own. And six
thousand gold cloaks, if Bywater is the man you claim.”
“You will
nd Ser Jacelyn to be courageous, honorable,
obedient … and most grateful.”
“To whom, I wonder?” Tyrion did not trust Varys, though there
was no denying his value. He knew things, beyond a doubt. “Why
are you so helpful, my lord Varys?” he asked, studying the man’s
soft hands, the bald powdered face, the slimy little smile.
“You are the Hand. I serve the realm, the king, and you.”
“As you served Jon Arryn and Eddard Stark?”
“I served Lord Arryn and Lord Stark as best I could. I was
saddened and horri ed by their most untimely deaths.”
“Think how I feel. I’m like to be next.”
“Oh, I think not,” Varys said, swirling the wine in his cup. “Power
is a curious thing, my lord. Perchance you have considered the
riddle I posed you that day in the inn?”
“It has crossed my mind a time or two,” Tyrion admitted. “The
king, the priest, the rich man—who lives and who dies? Who will
the swordsman obey? It’s a riddle without an answer, or rather, too
many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.”
“And yet he is no one,” Varys said. “He has neither crown nor
gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel.”
“That piece of steel is the power of life and death.”
“Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do
we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man
with a sword ever obey a child king like Jo rey, or a wine-sodden
oaf like his father?”

“Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong
men, with other swords.”
“Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they?
Whence came their swords? Why do they obey?” Varys smiled.
“Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes
from the gods. Others say it derives from law. Yet that day on the
steps of Baelor’s Sept, our godly High Septon and the lawful Queen
Regent and your ever-so-knowledgeable servant were as powerless
as any cobbler or cooper in the crowd. Who truly killed Eddard
Stark, do you think? Jo rey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn
Payne, who swung the sword? Or … another?”
Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your
damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?”
Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it
resides. No more and no less.”
“So power is a mummer’s trick?”
“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill.
And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
Tyrion smiled. “Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I
may kill you yet, but I think I’d feel sad about it.”
“I will take that as high praise.”
“What are you, Varys?” Tyrion found he truly wanted to know.
“A spider, they say.”
“Spies and informers are seldom loved, my lord. I am but a loyal
servant of the realm.”
“And a eunuch. Let us not forget that.”
“I seldom do.”
“People have called me a halfman too, yet I think the gods have
been kinder to me. I am small, my legs are twisted, and women do
not look upon me with any great yearning … yet I’m still a man.
Shae is not the rst to grace my bed, and one day I may take a wife
and sire a son. If the gods are good, he’ll look like his uncle and
think like his father. You have no such hope to sustain you. Dwarfs
are a jape of the gods … but men make eunuchs. Who cut you,
Varys? When and why? Who are you, truly?”

The eunuch’s smile never ickered, but his eyes glittered with
something that was not laughter. “You are kind to ask, my lord, but
my tale is long and sad, and we have treasons to discuss.” He drew
a parchment from the sleeve of his robe. “The master of the King’s
Galley White Hart plots to slip anchor three days hence to o er his
sword and ship to Lord Stannis.”
Tyrion sighed. “I suppose we must make some sort of bloody
lesson out of the man?”
“Ser Jacelyn could arrange for him to vanish, but a trial before
the king would help assure the continued loyalty of the other
captains.”
And keep my royal nephew occupied as well. “As you say. Put him
down for a dose of Jo rey’s justice.”
Varys made a mark on the parchment. “Ser Horas and Ser Hobber
Redwyne have bribed a guard to let them out a postern gate, the
night after next. Arrangements have been made for them to sail on
the Pentoshi galley Moonrunner, disguised as oarsmen.”
“Can we keep them on those oars for a few years, see how they
fancy it?” He smiled. “No, my sister would be distraught to lose
such treasured guests. Inform Ser Jacelyn. Seize the man they
bribed and explain what an honor it is to serve as a brother of the
Night’s Watch. And have men posted around the Moonrunner, in
case the Redwynes nd a second guard short of coin.”
“As you will.” Another mark on the parchment. “Your man Timett
slew a wineseller’s son this evening, at a gambling den on the Street
of Silver. He accused him of cheating at tiles.”
“Was it true?”
“Oh, beyond a doubt.”
“Then the honest men of the city owe Timett a debt of gratitude.
I shall see that he has the king’s thanks.”
The eunuch gave a nervous giggle and made another mark. “We
also have a sudden plague of holy men. The comet has brought
forth all manner of queer priests, preachers, and prophets, it would
seem. They beg in the winesinks and pot-shops and foretell doom
and destruction to anyone who stops to listen.”

Tyrion shrugged. “We are close on the three hundredth year since
Aegon’s Landing, I suppose it is only to be expected. Let them rant.”
“They are spreading fear, my lord.”
“I thought that was your job.”
Varys covered his mouth with his hand. “You are very cruel to
say so. One last matter. Lady Tanda gave a small supper last night. I
have the menu and the guest list for your inspection. When the wine
was poured, Lord Gyles rose to lift a cup to the king, and Ser Balon
Swann was heard to remark, ‘We’ll need three cups for that.’ Many
laughed …”
Tyrion raised a hand. “Enough. Ser Balon made a jest. I am not
interested in treasonous table talk, Lord Varys.”
“You are as wise as you are gentle, my lord.” The parchment
vanished up the eunuch’s sleeve. “We both have much to do. I shall
leave you.”
When the eunuch had departed, Tyrion sat for a long time
watching the candle and wondering how his sister would take the
news of Janos Slynt’s dismissal. Not happily, if he was any judge,
but beyond sending an angry protest to Lord Tywin in Harrenhal, he
did not see what Cersei could hope to do about it. Tyrion had the
City Watch now, plus a hundred-and-a-half erce clansmen and a
growing force of sellswords recruited by Bronn. He would seem
well protected.
Doubtless Eddard Stark thought the same.
The Red Keep was dark and still when Tyrion left the Small Hall.
Bronn was waiting in his solar. “Slynt?” he asked.
“Lord Janos will be sailing for the Wall on the morning tide.
Varys would have me believe that I have replaced one of Jo rey’s
men with one of my own. More likely, I have replaced Little nger’s
man with one belonging to Varys, but so be it.”
“You’d best know, Timett killed a man—”
“Varys told me.”
The sellsword seemed unsurprised. “The fool gured a one-eyed
man would be easier to cheat. Timett pinned his wrist to the table
with a dagger and ripped out his throat barehanded. He has this
trick where he sti ens his ngers—”

“Spare me the grisly details, my supper is sitting badly in my
belly,” Tyrion said. “How goes your recruiting?”
“Well enough. Three new men tonight.”
“How do you know which ones to hire?”
“I look them over. I question them, to learn where they’ve fought
and how well they lie.” Bronn smiled. “And then I give them a
chance to kill me, while I do the same for them.”
“Have you killed any?”
“No one we could have used.”
“And if one of them kills you?”
“He’ll be one you’ll want to hire.”
Tyrion was a little drunk, and very tired. “Tell me, Bronn. If I
told you to kill a babe … an infant girl, say, still at her mother’s
breast … would you do it? Without question?”
“Without question? No.” The sellsword rubbed thumb and
fore nger together. “I’d ask how much.”
And why would I ever need your Allar Deem, Lord Slynt? Tyrion
thought. I have a hundred of my own. He wanted to laugh; he wanted
to weep; most of all, he wanted Shae.

ARYA

The road was little more than two ruts through the weeds.

The good part was, with so little tra c there’d be no one to point
the nger and say which way they’d gone. The human ood that
had owed down the kingsroad was only a trickle here.
The bad part was, the road wound back and forth like a snake,
tangling with even smaller trails and sometimes seeming to vanish
entirely only to reappear half a league farther on when they had all
but given up hope. Arya hated it. The land was gentle enough,
rolling hills and terraced elds interspersed with meadows and
woodlands and little valleys where willows crowded close to slow
shallow streams. Even so, the path was so narrow and crooked that
their pace had dropped to a crawl.
It was the wagons that slowed them, lumbering along, axles
creaking under the weight of their heavy loads. A dozen times a day
they had to stop to free a wheel that had stuck in a rut, or double
up the teams to climb a muddy slope. Once, in the middle of a
dense stand of oak, they came face-to-face with three men pulling a
load of rewood in an ox cart, with no way for either to get around.
There had been nothing for it but to wait while the foresters
unhitched their ox, led him through the trees, spun the cart, hitched
the ox up again, and started back the way they’d come. The ox was
even slower than the wagons, so that day they hardly got anywhere
at all.

Arya could not help looking over her shoulder, wondering when
the gold cloaks would catch them. At night, she woke at every noise
to grab for Needle’s hilt. They never made camp without putting
out sentries now, but Arya did not trust them, especially the orphan
boys. They might have done well enough in the alleys of King’s
Landing, but out here they were lost. When she was being quiet as a
shadow, she could sneak past all of them, itting out by starlight to
make her water in the woods where no one would see. Once, when
Lommy Greenhands had the watch, she shimmied up an oak and
moved from tree to tree until she was right above his head, and he
never saw a thing. She would have jumped down on top of him, but
she knew his scream would wake the whole camp, and Yoren might
take a stick to her again.
Lommy and the other orphans all treated the Bull like someone
special now because the queen wanted his head, though he would
have none of it. “I never did nothing to no queen,” he said angrily.
“I did my work, is all. Bellows and tongs and fetch and carry. I was
s’posed to be an armorer, and one day Master Mott says I got to
join the Night’s Watch, that’s all I know.” Then he’d go o to polish
his helm. It was a beautiful helm, rounded and curved, with a slit
visor and two great metal bull’s horns. Arya would watch him
polish the metal with an oilcloth, shining it so bright you could see
the ames of the cook re re ected in the steel. Yet he never
actually put it on his head.
“I bet he’s that traitor’s bastard,” Lommy said one night, in a
hushed voice so Gendry would not hear. “The wolf lord, the one
they nicked on Baelor’s steps.”
“He is not,” Arya declared. My father only had one bastard, and
that’s Jon. She stalked o into the trees, wishing she could just
saddle her horse and ride home. She was a good horse, a chestnut
mare with a white blaze on her forehead. And Arya had always been
a good rider. She could gallop o and never see any of them, unless
she wanted to. Only then she’d have no one to scout ahead of her,
or watch behind, or stand guard while she napped, and when the
gold cloaks caught her, she’d be all alone. It was safer to stay with
Yoren and the others.

“We’re not far from Gods Eye,” the black brother said one
morning. “The kingsroad won’t be safe till we’re across the Trident.
So we’ll come up around the lake along the western shore, they’re
not like to look for us there.” At the next spot where two ruts cut
cross each other, he turned the wagons west.
Here farmland gave way to forest, the villages and holdfasts were
smaller and farther apart, the hills higher and the valleys deeper.
Food grew harder to come by. In the city, Yoren had loaded up the
wagons with salt sh, hard bread, lard, turnips, sacks of beans and
barley, and wheels of yellow cheese, but every bite of it had been
eaten. Forced to live o the land, Yoren turned to Koss and Kurz,
who’d been taken as poachers. He would send them ahead of the
column, into the woods, and come dusk they would be back with a
deer slung between them on a pole or a brace of quail swinging
from their belts. The younger boys would be set to picking
blackberries along the road, or climbing fences to ll a sack with
apples if they happened upon an orchard.
Arya was a skilled climber and a fast picker, and she liked to go
o by herself. One day she came across a rabbit, purely by
happenstance. It was brown and fat, with long ears and a twitchy
nose. Rabbits ran faster than cats, but they couldn’t climb trees half
so well. She whacked it with her stick and grabbed it by its ears,
and Yoren stewed it with some mushrooms and wild onions. Arya
was given a whole leg, since it was her rabbit. She shared it with
Gendry. The rest of them each got a spoonful, even the three in
manacles. Jaqen H’ghar thanked her politely for the treat, and Biter
licked the grease o his dirty ngers with a blissful look, but Rorge,
the noseless one, only laughed and said, “There’s a hunter now.
Lumpyface Lumpyhead Rabbitkiller.”
Outside a holdfast called Briarwhite, some eldhands surrounded
them in a corn eld, demanding coin for the ears they’d taken.
Yoren eyed their scythes and tossed them a few coppers. “Time was,
a man in black was feasted from Dorne to Winterfell, and even high
lords called it an honor to shelter him under their roofs,” he said
bitterly. “Now cravens like you want hard coin for a bite of wormy
apple.” He spat.

“It’s sweetcorn, better’n a stinking old black bird like you
deserves,” one of them answered roughly. “You get out of our eld
now, and take these sneaks and stabbers with you, or we’ll stake
you up in the corn to scare the other crows away.”
They roasted the sweetcorn in the husk that night, turning the
ears with long forked sticks, and ate it hot right o the cob. Arya
thought it tasted wonderful, but Yoren was too angry to eat. A
cloud seemed to hang over him, ragged and black as his cloak. He
paced about the camp restlessly, muttering to himself.
The next day Koss came racing back to warn Yoren of a camp
ahead. “Twenty or thirty men, in mail and halfhelms,” he said.
“Some of them are cut up bad, and one’s dying, from the sound of
him. With all the noise he was making, I got right up close. They
got spears and shields, but only one horse, and that’s lame. I think
they been there awhile, from the stink of the place.”
“See a banner?”
“Spotted treecat, yellow and black, on a mud-brown eld.”
Yoren folded a sourleaf into his mouth and chewed. “Can’t say,”
he admitted. “Might be one side, might be t’other. If they’re hurt
that bad, likely they’d take our mounts no matter who they are.
Might be they’d take more than that. I believe we’ll go wide around
them.” It took them miles out of their way, and cost them two days
at the least, but the old man said it was cheap at the price. “You’ll
have time enough on the Wall. The rest o’ your lives, most like.
Seems to me there’s no rush to get there.”
Arya saw men guarding the elds more and more when they
turned north again. Often they stood silently beside the road, giving
a cold eye to anyone who passed. Elsewhere they patrolled on
horses, riding their fence lines with axes strapped to their saddles.
At one place, she spotted a man perched up in a dead tree, with a
bow in his hand and a quiver hanging from the branch beside him.
The moment he spied them, he notched an arrow to his bowstring,
and never looked away until the last wagon was out of sight. All the
while, Yoren cursed. “Him in his tree, let’s see how well he likes it
up there when the Others come to take him. He’ll scream for the
Watch then, that he will.”

A day later Dobber spied a red glow against the evening sky.
“Either this road went and turned again, or that sun’s setting in the
north.”
Yoren climbed a rise to get a better look. “Fire,” he announced.
He licked a thumb and held it up. “Wind should blow it away from
us. Still bears watching.”
And watch it they did. As the world darkened, the re seemed to
grow brighter and brighter, until it looked as though the whole
north was ablaze. From time to time, they could even smell the
smoke, though the wind held steady and the ames never got any
closer. By dawn the re had burned itself out, but none of them
slept very well that night.
It was midday when they arrived at the place where the village
had been. The elds were a charred desolation for miles around, the
houses blackened shells. The carcasses of burnt and butchered
animals dotted the ground, under living blankets of carrion crows
that rose, cawing furiously, when disturbed. Smoke still drifted
from inside the holdfast. Its timber palisade looked strong from
afar, but had not proved strong enough.
Riding out in front of the wagons on her horse, Arya saw burnt
bodies impaled on sharpened stakes atop the walls, their hands
drawn up tight in front of their faces as if to ght o the ames that
had consumed them. Yoren called a halt when they were still some
distance o , and told Arya and the other boys to guard the wagons
while he and Murch and Cutjack went in on foot. A ock of ravens
rose from inside the walls when they climbed through the broken
gate, and the caged ravens in their wagons called out to them with
quorks and raucous shrieks.
“Should we go in after them?” Arya asked Gendry after Yoren and
the others had been gone a long time.
“Yoren said wait.” Gendry’s voice sounded hollow. When Arya
turned to look, she saw that he was wearing his helm, all shiny steel
and great curving horns.
When they nally returned, Yoren had a little girl in his arms,
and Murch and Cutjack were carrying a woman in a sling made of
an old torn quilt. The girl was no older than two and she cried all

the time, a whimpery sound, like something was caught in her
throat. Either she couldn’t talk yet or she had forgotten how. The
woman’s right arm ended in a bloody stump at her elbow, and her
eyes didn’t seem to see anything, even when she was looking right
at it. She talked, but she only said one thing. “Please,” she cried,
over and over. “Please. Please.” Rorge thought that was funny. He
laughed through the hole in his face where his nose had been, and
Biter started laughing too, until Murch cursed them and told them
to shut up.
Yoren had them x the woman a place in the back of a wagon.
“And be quick about it,” he said. “Come dark, there’ll be wolves
here, and worse.”
“I’m scared,” Hot Pie murmured when he saw the one-armed
woman thrashing in the wagon.
“Me too,” Arya confessed.
He squeezed her shoulder. “I never truly kicked no boy to death,
Arry. I just sold my mommy’s pies, is all.”
Arya rode as far ahead of the wagons as she dared, so she
wouldn’t have to hear the little girl crying or listen to the woman
whisper, “Please.” She remembered a story Old Nan had told once,
about a man imprisoned in a dark castle by evil giants. He was very
brave and smart and he tricked the giants and escaped … but no
sooner was he outside the castle than the Others took him, and
drank his hot red blood. Now she knew how he must have felt.
The one-armed woman died at evenfall. Gendry and Cutjack dug
her grave on a hillside beneath a weeping willow. When the wind
blew, Arya thought she could hear the long trailing branches
whispering, “Please. Please. Please.” The little hairs on the back of
her neck rose, and she almost ran from the graveside.
“No re tonight,” Yoren told them. Supper was a handful of wild
radishes Koss found, a cup of dry beans, water from a nearby brook.
The water had a funny taste to it, and Lommy told them it was the
taste of bodies, rotting someplace upstream. Hot Pie would have hit
him if old Reysen hadn’t pulled them apart.
Arya drank too much water, just to ll her belly with something.
She never thought she’d be able to sleep, yet somehow she did.

When she woke, it was pitch-black and her bladder was full to
bursting. Sleepers huddled all around her, wrapped in blankets and
cloaks. Arya found Needle, stood, listened. She heard the soft
footfalls of a sentry, men turning in restless sleep, Rorge’s rattling
snores, and the queer hissing sound that Biter made when he slept.
From a di erent wagon came the steady rhythmic scrape of steel on
stone as Yoren sat, chewing sourleaf and sharpening the edge of his
dirk.
Hot Pie was one of the boys on watch. “Where you going?” he
asked when he saw Arya heading for the trees.
Arya waved vaguely at the woods.
“No you’re not,” Hot Pie said. He had gotten bolder again now
that he had a sword on his belt, even though it was just a
shortsword and he handled it like a cleaver. “The old man said for
everyone to stay close tonight.”
“I need to make water,” Arya explained.
“Well, use that tree right there.” He pointed. “You don’t know
what’s out there, Arry. I heard wolves before.”
Yoren wouldn’t like it if she fought with him. She tried to look
afraid. “Wolves? For true?”
“I heard,” he assured her.
“I don’t think I need to go after all.” She went back to her blanket
and pretended to sleep until she heard Hot Pie’s footsteps going
away. Then she rolled over and slipped o into the woods on the
other side of the camp, quiet as a shadow. There were sentries out
this way too, but Arya had no trouble avoiding them. Just to make
sure, she went out twice as far as usual. When she was sure there
was no one near, she skinned down her breeches and squatted to do
her business.
She was making water, her clothing tangled about her ankles,
when she heard rustling from under the trees. Hot Pie, she thought
in panic, he followed me. Then she saw the eyes shining out from the
wood, bright with re ected moonlight. Her belly clenched tight as
she grabbed for Needle, not caring if she pissed herself, counting
eyes, two four eight twelve, a whole pack …

One of them came padding out from under the trees. He stared at
her, and bared his teeth, and all she could think was how stupid
she’d been and how Hot Pie would gloat when they found her halfeaten body the next morning. But the wolf turned and raced back
into the darkness, and quick as that the eyes were gone. Trembling,
she cleaned herself and laced up and followed a distant scraping
sound back to camp, and to Yoren. Arya climbed up into the wagon
beside him, shaken. “Wolves,” she whispered hoarsely. “In the
woods.”
“Aye. They would be.” He never looked at her.
“They scared me.”
“Did they?” He spat. “Seems to me your kind was fond o’
wolves.”
“Nymeria was a direwolf.” Arya hugged herself. “That’s di erent.
Anyhow, she’s gone. Jory and I threw rocks at her until she ran o ,
or else the queen would have killed her.” It made her sad to talk
about it. “I bet if she’d been in the city, she wouldn’t have let them
cut o Father’s head.”
“Orphan boys got no fathers,” Yoren said, “or did you forget
that?” The sourleaf had turned his spit red, so it looked like his
mouth was bleeding. “The only wolves we got to fear are the ones
wear manskin, like those who done for that village.”
“I wish I was home,” she said miserably. She tried so hard to be
brave, to be erce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt
like she was just a little girl after all.
The black brother peeled a fresh sourleaf from the bale in the
wagon and stu ed it into his mouth. “Might be I should of left you
where I found you, boy. All of you. Safer in the city, seems to me.”
“I don’t care. I want to go home.”
“Been bringing men to the Wall for close on thirty years.” Froth
shone on Yoren’s lips, like bubbles of blood. “All that time, I only
lost three. Old man died of a fever, city boy got snakebit taking a
shit, and one fool tried to kill me in my sleep and got a red smile
for his trouble.” He drew the dirk across his throat, to show her.
“Three in thirty years.” He spat out the old sourleaf. “A ship now,
might have been wiser. No chance o’ nding more men on the way,

but still … clever man, he’d go by ship, but me … thirty years I
been taking this kingsroad.” He sheathed his dirk. “Go to sleep, boy.
Hear me?”
She did try. Yet as she lay under her thin blanket, she could hear
the wolves howling … and another sound, fainter, no more than a
whisper on the wind, that might have been screams.

DAVOS

The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods.

They were all a re now, Maid and Mother, Warrior and Smith,
the Crone with her pearl eyes and the Father with his gilded beard;
even the Stranger, carved to look more animal than human. The old
dry wood and countless layers of paint and varnish blazed with a
erce hungry light. Heat rose shimmering through the chill air;
behind, the gargoyles and stone dragons on the castle walls seemed
blurred, as if Davos were seeing them through a veil of tears. Or as
if the beasts were trembling, stirring …
“An ill thing,” Allard declared, though at least he had the sense to
keep his voice low. Dale muttered agreement.
“Silence,” said Davos. “Remember where you are.” His sons were
good men, but young, and Allard especially was rash. Had I stayed a
smuggler, Allard would have ended on the Wall. Stannis spared him
from that end, something else I owe him …
Hundreds had come to the castle gates to bear witness to the
burning of the Seven. The smell in the air was ugly. Even for
soldiers, it was hard not to feel uneasy at such an a ront to the gods
most had worshiped all their lives.
The red woman walked round the re three times, praying once
in the speech of Asshai, once in High Valyrian, and once in the
Common Tongue. Davos understood only the last. “R’hllor, come to
us in our darkness,” she called. “Lord of Light, we o er you these
false gods, these seven who are one, and him the enemy. Take them

and cast your light upon us, for the night is dark and full of terrors.”
Queen Selyse echoed the words. Beside her, Stannis watched
impassively, his jaw hard as stone under the blue-black shadow of
his tight-cropped beard. He had dressed more richly than was his
wont, as if for the sept.
Dragonstone’s sept had been where Aegon the Conqueror knelt to
pray the night before he sailed. That had not saved it from the
queen’s men. They had overturned the altars, pulled down the
statues, and smashed the stained glass with warhammers. Septon
Barre could only curse them, but Ser Hubard Rambton led his three
sons to the sept to defend their gods. The Rambtons had slain four
of the queen’s men before the others overwhelmed them. Afterward
Guncer Sunglass, mildest and most pious of lords, told Stannis he
could no longer support his claim. Now he shared a sweltering cell
with the septon and Ser Hubard’s two surviving sons. The other
lords had not been slow to take the lesson.
The gods had never meant much to Davos the smuggler, though
like most men he had been known to make o erings to the Warrior
before battle, to the Smith when he launched a ship, and to the
Mother whenever his wife grew great with child. He felt ill as he
watched them burn, and not only from the smoke.
Maester Cressen would have stopped this. The old man had
challenged the Lord of Light and been struck down for his impiety,
or so the gossips told each other. Davos knew the truth. He had
seen the maester slip something into the wine cup. Poison. What else
could it be? He drank a cup of death to free Stannis from Melisandre,
but somehow her god shielded her. He would gladly have killed the
red woman for that, yet what chance would he have where a
maester of the Citadel had failed? He was only a smuggler raised
high, Davos of Flea Bottom, the Onion Knight.
The burning gods cast a pretty light, wreathed in their robes of
shifting ame, red and orange and yellow. Septon Barre had once
told Davos how they’d been carved from the masts of the ships that
had carried the rst Targaryens from Valyria. Over the centuries,
they had been painted and repainted, gilded, silvered, jeweled.
“Their beauty will make them more pleasing to R’hllor,” Melisandre

said when she told Stannis to pull them down and drag them out the
castle gates.
The Maiden lay athwart the Warrior, her arms widespread as if to
embrace him. The Mother seemed almost to shudder as the ames
came licking up her face. A longsword had been thrust through her
heart, and its leather grip was alive with ame. The Father was on
the bottom, the rst to fall. Davos watched the hand of the Stranger
writhe and curl as the ngers blackened and fell away one by one,
reduced to so much glowing charcoal. Nearby, Lord Celtigar
coughed tfully and covered his wrinkled face with a square of
linen embroidered in red crabs. The Myrmen swapped jokes as they
enjoyed the warmth of the re, but young Lord Bar Emmon had
turned a splotchy grey, and Lord Velaryon was watching the king
rather than the con agration.
Davos would have given much to know what he was thinking, but
one such as Velaryon would never con de in him. The Lord of the
Tides was of the blood of ancient Valyria, and his House had thrice
provided brides for Targaryen princes; Davos Seaworth stank of sh
and onions. It was the same with the other lordlings. He could trust
none of them, nor would they ever include him in their private
councils. They scorned his sons as well. My grandsons will joust with
theirs, though, and one day their blood may wed with mine. In time my
little black ship will y as high as Velaryon’s seahorse or Celtigar’s red
crabs.
That is, if Stannis won his throne. If he lost …
Everything I am, I owe to him. Stannis had raised him to
knighthood. He had given him a place of honor at his table, a war
galley to sail in place of a smuggler’s ski . Dale and Allard
captained galleys as well, Maric was oarmaster on the Fury, Matthos
served his father on Black Betha, and the king had taken Devan as a
royal squire. One day he would be knighted, and the two little lads
as well. Marya was mistress of a small keep on Cape Wrath, with
servants who called her m’lady, and Davos could hunt red deer in
his own woods. All this he had of Stannis Baratheon, for the price of
a few nger joints. It was just, what he did to me. I had outed the
king’s laws all my life. He has earned my loyalty. Davos touched the

little pouch that hung from the leather thong about his neck. His
ngers were his luck, and he needed luck now. As do we all. Lord
Stannis most of all.
Pale ames licked at the grey sky. Dark smoke rose, twisting and
curling. When the wind pushed it toward them, men blinked and
wept and rubbed their eyes. Allard turned his head away, coughing
and cursing. A taste of things to come, thought Davos. Many and
more would burn before this war was done.
Melisandre was robed all in scarlet satin and blood velvet, her
eyes as red as the great ruby that glistened at her throat as if it too
were a re. “In ancient books of Asshai it is written that there will
come a day after a long summer when the stars bleed and the cold
breath of darkness falls heavy on the world. In this dread hour a
warrior shall draw from the re a burning sword. And that sword
shall be Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes, and he who clasps
it shall be Azor Ahai come again, and the darkness shall ee before
him.” She lifted her voice, so it carried out over the gathered host.
“Azor Ahai, beloved of R’hllor! The Warrior of Light, the Son of Fire!
Come forth, your sword awaits you! Come forth and take it into your
hand!”
Stannis Baratheon strode forward like a soldier marching into
battle. His squires stepped up to attend him. Davos watched as his
son Devan pulled a long padded glove over the king’s right hand.
The boy wore a cream-colored doublet with a ery heart sewn on
the breast. Bryen Farring was similarly garbed as he tied a sti
leather cape around His Grace’s neck. Behind, Davos heard a faint
clank and clatter of bells. “Under the sea, smoke rises in bubbles,
and ames burn green and blue and black,” Patchface sang
somewhere. “I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”
The king plunged into the re with his teeth clenched, holding
the leather cloak before him to keep o the ames. He went
straight to the Mother, grasped the sword with his gloved hand, and
wrenched it free of the burning wood with a single hard jerk. Then
he was retreating, the sword held high, jade-green ames swirling
around cherry-red steel. Guards rushed to beat out the cinders that
clung to the king’s clothing.

“A sword of re!” shouted Queen Selyse. Ser Axell Florent and the
other queen’s men took up the cry. “A sword of re! It burns! It
burns! A sword of re!”
Melisandre lifted her hands above her head. “Behold! A sign was
promised, and now a sign is seen! Behold Lightbringer! Azor Ahai has
come again! All hail the Warrior of Light! All hail the Son of Fire!”
A ragged wave of shouts gave answer, just as Stannis’s glove
began to smolder. Cursing, the king thrust the point of the sword
into the damp earth and beat out the ames against his leg.
“Lord, cast your light upon us!” Melisandre called out.
“For the night is dark and full of terrors,” Selyse and her queen’s
men replied. Should I speak the words as well? Davos wondered. Do I
owe Stannis that much? Is this ery god truly his own? His shortened
ngers twitched.
Stannis peeled o the glove and let it fall to the ground. The gods
in the pyre were scarcely recognizable anymore. The head fell o
the Smith with a pu of ash and embers. Melisandre sang in the
tongue of Asshai, her voice rising and falling like the tides of the
sea. Stannis untied his singed leather cape and listened in silence.
Thrust in the ground, Lightbringer still glowed ruddy hot, but the
ames that clung to the sword were dwindling and dying.
By the time the song was done, only charwood remained of the
gods, and the king’s patience had run its course. He took the queen
by the elbow and escorted her back into Dragonstone, leaving
Lightbringer where it stood. The red woman remained a moment to
watch as Devan knelt with Byren Farring and rolled up the burnt
and blackened sword in the king’s leather cloak. The Red Sword of
Heroes looks a proper mess, thought Davos.
A few of the lords lingered to speak in quiet voices upwind of the
re. They fell silent when they saw Davos looking at them. Should
Stannis fall, they will pull me down in an instant. Neither was he
counted one of the queen’s men, that group of ambitious knights
and minor lordlings who had given themselves to this Lord of Light
and so won the favor and patronage of Lady—no, Queen, remember?
—Selyse.

The re had started to dwindle by the time Melisandre and the
squires departed with the precious sword. Davos and his sons joined
the crowd making its way down to the shore and the waiting ships.
“Devan acquitted himself well,” he said as they went.
“He fetched the glove without dropping it, yes,” said Dale.
Allard nodded. “That badge on Devan’s doublet, the ery heart,
what was that? The Baratheon sigil is a crowned stag.”
“A lord can choose more than one badge,” Davos said.
Dale smiled. “A black ship and an onion, Father?”
Allard kicked at a stone. “The Others take our onion … and that
aming heart. It was an ill thing to burn the Seven.”
“When did you grow so devout?” Davos said. “What does a
smuggler’s son know of the doings of gods?”
“I’m a knight’s son, Father. If you won’t remember, why should
they?”
“A knight’s son, but not a knight,” said Davos. “Nor will you ever
be, if you meddle in a airs that do not concern you. Stannis is our
rightful king, it is not for us to question him. We sail his ships and
do his bidding. That is all.”
“As to that, Father,” Dale said, “I mislike these water casks
they’ve given me for Wraith. Green pine. The water will spoil on a
voyage of any length.”
“I got the same for Lady Marya,” said Allard. “The queen’s men
have laid claim to all the seasoned wood.”
“I will speak to the king about it,” Davos promised. Better it
come from him than from Allard. His sons were good ghters and
better sailors, but they did not know how to talk to lords. They were
lowborn, even as I was, but they do not like to recall that. When they
look at our banner, all they see is a tall black ship ying on the wind.
They close their eyes to the onion.
The port was as crowded as Davos had ever known it. Every dock
teemed with sailors loading provisions, and every inn was packed
with soldiers dicing or drinking or looking for a whore … a vain
search, since Stannis permitted none on his island. Ships lined the
strand; war galleys and shing vessels, stout carracks and fatbottomed cogs. The best berths had been taken by the largest

vessels: Stannis’s agship Fury rocking between Lord Ste on and Stag
of the Sea, Lord Velaryon’s silver-hulled Pride of Driftmark and her
three sisters, Lord Celtigar’s ornate Red Claw, the ponderous
Sword sh with her long iron prow. Out to sea at anchor rode
Salladhor Saan’s great Valyrian amongst the striped hulls of two
dozen smaller Lysene galleys.
A weathered little inn sat on the end of the stone pier where Black
Betha, Wraith, and Lady Marya shared mooring space with a halfdozen other galleys of one hundred oars or less. Davos had a thirst.
He took his leave of his sons and turned his steps toward the inn.
Out front squatted a waist-high gargoyle, so eroded by rain and salt
that his features were all but obliterated. He and Davos were old
friends, though. He gave a pat to the stone head as he went in.
“Luck,” he murmured.
Across the noisy common room, Salladhor Saan sat eating grapes
from a wooden bowl. When he spied Davos, he beckoned him
closer. “Ser knight, come sit with me. Eat a grape. Eat two. They
are marvelously sweet.” The Lyseni was a sleek, smiling man whose
amboyance was a byword on both sides of the narrow sea. Today
he wore ashing cloth-of-silver, with dagged sleeves so long the
ends of them pooled on the oor. His buttons were carved jade
monkeys, and atop his wispy white curls perched a jaunty green cap
decorated with a fan of peacock feathers.
Davos threaded his way through the tables to a chair. In the days
before his knighthood, he had often bought cargoes from Salladhor
Saan. The Lyseni was a smuggler himself, as well as a trader, a
banker, a notorious pirate, and the self-styled Prince of the Narrow
Sea. When a pirate grows rich enough, they make him a prince. It had
been Davos who had made the journey to Lys to recruit the old
rogue to Lord Stannis’s cause.
“You did not see the gods burn, my lord?” he asked.
“The red priests have a great temple on Lys. Always they are
burning this and burning that, crying out to their R’hllor. They bore
me with their res. Soon they will bore King Stannis too, it is to be
hoped.” He seemed utterly unconcerned that someone might
overhear him, eating his grapes and dribbling the seeds out onto his

lip, icking them o with a nger. “My Bird of Thousand Colors
came in yesterday, good ser. She is not a warship, no, but a trader,
and she paid a call on King’s Landing. Are you sure you will not
have a grape? Children go hungry in the city, it is said.” He dangled
the grapes before Davos and smiled.
“It’s ale I need, and news.”
“The men of Westeros are ever rushing,” complained Salladhor
Saan. “What good is this, I ask you? He who hurries through life
hurries to his grave.” He belched. “The Lord of Casterly Rock has
sent his dwarf to see to King’s Landing. Perhaps he hopes that his
ugly face will frighten o attackers, eh? Or that we will laugh
ourselves dead when the Imp capers on the battlements, who can
say? The dwarf has chased o the lout who ruled the gold cloaks
and put in his place a knight with an iron hand.” He plucked a
grape, and squeezed it between thumb and fore nger until the skin
burst. Juice ran down between his ngers.
A serving girl pushed her way through, swatting at the hands that
groped her as she passed. Davos ordered a tankard of ale, turned
back to Saan, and said, “How well is the city defended?”
The other shrugged. “The walls are high and strong, but who will
man them? They are building scorpions and spit res, oh, yes, but
the men in the golden cloaks are too few and too green, and there
are no others. A swift strike, like a hawk plummeting at a hare, and
the great city will be ours. Grant us wind to ll our sails, and your
king could sit upon his Iron Throne by evenfall on the morrow. We
could dress the dwarf in motley and prick his little cheeks with the
points of our spears to make him dance for us, and mayhaps your
goodly king would make me a gift of the beautiful Queen Cersei to
warm my bed for a night. I have been too long away from my
wives, and all in his service.”
“Pirate,” said Davos. “You have no wives, only concubines, and
you have been well paid for every day and every ship.”
“Only in promises,” said Salladhor Saan mournfully. “Good ser, it
is gold I crave, not words on papers.” He popped a grape into his
mouth.

“You’ll have your gold when we take the treasury in King’s
Landing. No man in the Seven Kingdoms is more honorable than
Stannis Baratheon. He will keep his word.” Even as Davos spoke, he
thought, This world is twisted beyond hope, when lowborn smugglers
must vouch for the honor of kings.
“So he has said and said. And so I say, let us do this thing. Even
these grapes could be no more ripe than that city, my old friend.”
The serving girl returned with his ale. Davos gave her a copper.
“Might be we could take King’s Landing, as you say,” he said as he
lifted the tankard, “but how long would we hold it? Tywin
Lannister is known to be at Harrenhal with a great host, and Lord
Renly …”
“Ah, yes, the young brother,” said Salladhor Saan. “That part is
not so good, my friend. King Renly bestirs himself. No, here he is
Lord Renly, my pardons. So many kings, my tongue grows weary of
the word. The brother Renly has left Highgarden with his fair young
queen, his owered lords and shining knights, and a mighty host of
foot. He marches up your road of roses toward the very same great
city we were speaking of.”
“He takes his bride?”
The other shrugged. “He did not tell me why. Perhaps he is loath
to part with the warm burrow between her thighs, even for a night.
Or perhaps he is that certain of his victory.”
“The king must be told.”
“I have attended to it, good ser. Though His Grace frowns so
whenever he does see me that I tremble to come before him. Do
you think he would like me better if I wore a hair shirt and never
smiled? Well, I will not do it. I am an honest man, he must su er
me in silk and samite. Or else I shall take my ships where I am
better loved. That sword was not Lightbringer, my friend.”
The sudden shift in subject left Davos uneasy. “Sword?”
“A sword plucked from re, yes. Men tell me things, it is my
pleasant smile. How shall a burnt sword serve Stannis?”
“A burning sword,” corrected Davos.
“Burnt,” said Salladhor Saan, “and be glad of that, my friend. Do
you know the tale of the forging of Lightbringer? I shall tell it to

you. It was a time when darkness lay heavy on the world. To
oppose it, the hero must have a hero’s blade, oh, like none that had
ever been. And so for thirty days and thirty nights Azor Ahai
labored sleepless in the temple, forging a blade in the sacred res.
Heat and hammer and fold, heat and hammer and fold, oh, yes,
until the sword was done. Yet when he plunged it into water to
temper the steel it burst asunder.
“Being a hero, it was not for him to shrug and go in search of
excellent grapes such as these, so again he began. The second time
it took him fty days and fty nights, and this sword seemed even
ner than the rst. Azor Ahai captured a lion, to temper the blade
by plunging it through the beast’s red heart, but once more the steel
shattered and split. Great was his woe and great was his sorrow
then, for he knew what he must do.
“A hundred days and a hundred nights he labored on the third
blade, and as it glowed white-hot in the sacred res, he summoned
his wife. ‘Nissa Nissa,’ he said to her, for that was her name, ‘bare
your breast, and know that I love you best of all that is in this
world.’ She did this thing, why I cannot say, and Azor Ahai thrust
the smoking sword through her living heart. It is said that her cry of
anguish and ecstasy left a crack across the face of the moon, but her
blood and her soul and her strength and her courage all went into
the steel. Such is the tale of the forging of Lightbringer, the Red
Sword of Heroes.
“Now do you see my meaning? Be glad that it is just a burnt
sword that His Grace pulled from that re. Too much light can hurt
the eyes, my friend, and re burns.” Salladhor Saan nished the last
grape and smacked his lips. “When do you think the king will bid us
sail, good ser?”
“Soon, I think,” said Davos, “if his god wills it.”
“His god, ser friend? Not yours? Where is the god of Ser Davos
Seaworth, knight of the onion ship?”
Davos sipped his ale to give himself a moment. The inn is
crowded, and you are not Salladhor Saan, he reminded himself. Be
careful how you answer. “King Stannis is my god. He made me and
blessed me with his trust.”

“I will remember.” Salladhor Saan got to his feet. “My pardons.
These grapes have given me a hunger, and dinner awaits on my
Valyrian. Minced lamb with pepper and roasted gull stu ed with
mushrooms and fennel and onion. Soon we shall eat together in
King’s Landing, yes? In the Red Keep we shall feast, while the dwarf
sings us a jolly tune. When you speak to King Stannis, mention if
you would that he will owe me another thirty thousand dragons
come the black of the moon. He ought to have given those gods to
me. They were too beautiful to burn, and might have brought a
noble price in Pentos or Myr. Well, if he grants me Queen Cersei for
a night I shall forgive him.” The Lyseni clapped Davos on the back,
and swaggered from the inn as if he owned it.
Ser Davos Seaworth lingered over his tankard for a good while,
thinking. A year ago, he had been with Stannis in King’s Landing
when King Robert staged a tourney for Prince Jo rey’s name day.
He remembered the red priest Thoros of Myr, and the aming
sword he had wielded in the melee. The man had made for a
colorful spectacle, his red robes apping while his blade writhed
with pale green ames, but everyone knew there was no true magic
to it, and in the end his re had guttered out and Bronze Yohn
Royce had brained him with a common mace.
A true sword of re, now, that would be a wonder to behold. Yet at
such a cost … When he thought of Nissa Nissa, it was his own Marya
he pictured, a good-natured plump woman with sagging breasts and
a kindly smile, the best woman in the world. He tried to picture
himself driving a sword through her, and shuddered. I am not made
of the stu of heroes, he decided. If that was the price of a magic
sword, it was more than he cared to pay.
Davos nished his ale, pushed away the tankard, and left the inn.
On the way out he patted the gargoyle on the head and muttered,
“Luck.” They would all need it.
It was well after dark when Devan came down to Black Betha,
leading a snow-white palfrey. “My lord father,” he announced, “His
Grace commands you to attend him in the Chamber of the Painted
Table. You are to ride the horse and come at once.”

It was good to see Devan looking so splendid in his squire’s
raiment, but the summons made Davos uneasy. Will he bid us sail?
he wondered. Salladhor Saan was not the only captain who felt that
King’s Landing was ripe for an attack, but a smuggler must learn
patience. We have no hope of victory. I said as much to Maester
Cressen, the day I returned to Dragonstone, and nothing has changed.
We are too few, the foes too many. If we dip our oars, we die.
Nonetheless, he climbed onto the horse.
When Davos arrived at the Stone Drum, a dozen highborn knights
and great bannermen were just leaving. Lords Celtigar and Velaryon
each gave him a curt nod and walked on while the others ignored
him utterly, but Ser Axell Florent stopped for a word.
Queen Selyse’s uncle was a keg of a man with thick arms and
bandy legs. He had the prominent ears of a Florent, even larger
than his niece’s. The coarse hair that sprouted from his ears did not
stop him hearing most of what went on in the castle. For ten years
Ser Axell had served as castellan of Dragonstone while Stannis sat
on Robert’s council in King’s Landing, but of late he had emerged as
the foremost of the queen’s men. “Ser Davos, it is good to see you,
as ever,” he said.
“And you, my lord.”
“I made note of you this morning as well. The false gods burned
with a merry light, did they not?”
“They burned brightly.” Davos did not trust this man, for all his
courtesy. House Florent had declared for Renly.
“The Lady Melisandre tells us that sometimes R’hllor permits his
faithful servants to glimpse the future in ames. It seemed to me as
I watched the re this morning that I was looking at a dozen
beautiful dancers, maidens garbed in yellow silk spinning and
swirling before a great king. I think it was a true vision, ser. A
glimpse of the glory that awaits His Grace after we take King’s
Landing and the throne that is his by rights.”
Stannis has no taste for such dancing, Davos thought, but he dared
not o end the queen’s uncle. “I saw only re,” he said, “but the
smoke was making my eyes water. You must pardon me, ser, the

king awaits.” He pushed past, wondering why Ser Axell had
troubled himself. He is a queen’s man and I am the king’s.
Stannis sat at his Painted Table with Maester Pylos at his
shoulder, an untidy pile of papers before them. “Ser,” the king said
when Davos entered, “come have a look at this letter.”
Obediently, he selected a paper at random. “It looks handsome
enough, Your Grace, but I fear I cannot read the words.” Davos
could decipher maps and charts as well as any, but letters and other
writings were beyond his powers. But my Devan has learned his
letters, and young Ste on and Stannis as well.
“I’d forgotten.” A furrow of irritation showed between the king’s
brows. “Pylos, read it to him.”
“Your Grace.” The maester took up one of the parchments and
cleared his throat. “All men know me for the trueborn son of Ste on
Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End, by his lady wife Cassana of House
Estermont. I declare upon the honor of my House that my beloved
brother Robert, our late king, left no trueborn issue of his body, the boy
Jo rey, the boy Tommen, and the girl Myrcella being abominations born
of incest between Cersei Lannister and her brother Jaime the Kingslayer.
By right of birth and blood, I do this day lay claim to the Iron Throne of
the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Let all true men declare their loyalty.
Done in the Light of the Lord, under the sign and seal of Stannis of
House Baratheon, the First of His Name, King of the Andals, the
Rhoynar, and the First Men, and Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.” The
parchment rustled softly as Pylos laid it down.
“Make it Ser Jaime the Kingslayer henceforth,” Stannis said,
frowning. “Whatever else the man may be, he remains a knight. I
don’t know that we ought to call Robert my beloved brother either.
He loved me no more than he had to, nor I him.”
“A harmless courtesy, Your Grace,” Pylos said.
“A lie. Take it out.” Stannis turned to Davos. “The maester tells
me that we have one hundred seventeen ravens on hand. I mean to
use them all. One hundred seventeen ravens will carry one hundred
seventeen copies of my letter to every corner of the realm, from the
Arbor to the Wall. Perhaps a hundred will win through against
storm and hawk and arrow. If so, a hundred maesters will read my

words to as many lords in as many solars and bedchambers … and
then the letters will like as not be consigned to the re, and lips
pledged to silence. These great lords love Jo rey, or Renly, or Robb
Stark. I am their rightful king, but they will deny me if they can. So
I have need of you.”
“I am yours to command, my king. As ever.”
Stannis nodded. “I mean for you to sail Black Betha north, to
Gulltown, the Fingers, the Three Sisters, even White Harbor. Your
son Dale will go south in Wraith, past Cape Wrath and the Broken
Arm, all along the coast of Dorne as far as the Arbor. Each of you
will carry a chest of letters, and you will deliver one to every port
and holdfast and shing village. Nail them to the doors of septs and
inns for every man to read who can.”
Davos said, “That will be few enough.”
“Ser Davos speaks truly, Your Grace,” said Maester Pylos. “It
would be better to have the letters read aloud.”
“Better, but more dangerous,” said Stannis. “These words will not
be kindly received.”
“Give me knights to do the reading,” Davos said. “That will carry
more weight than anything I might say.”
Stannis seemed well satis ed with that. “I can give you such men,
yes. I have a hundred knights who would sooner read than ght. Be
open where you can and stealthy where you must. Use every
smuggler’s trick you know, the black sails, the hidden coves,
whatever it requires. If you run short of letters, capture a few
septons and set them to copying out more. I mean to use your
second son as well. He will take Lady Marya across the narrow sea,
to Braavos and the other Free Cities, to deliver other letters to the
men who rule there. The world will know of my claim, and of
Cersei’s infamy.”
You can tell them, Davos thought, but will they believe? He glanced
thoughtfully at Maester Pylos. The king caught the look. “Maester,
perhaps you ought get to your writing. We will need a great many
letters, and soon.”
“As you will.” Pylos bowed, and took his leave.

The king waited until he was gone before he said, “What is it you
would not say in the presence of my maester, Davos?”
“My liege, Pylos is pleasant enough, but I cannot see the chain
about his neck without mourning for Maester Cressen.”
“Is it his fault the old man died?” Stannis glanced into the re. “I
never wanted Cressen at that feast. He’d angered me, yes, he’d
given me bad counsel, but I did not want him dead. I’d hoped he
might be granted a few years of ease and comfort. He had earned
that much, at least, but”—he ground his teeth together—“but he
died. And Pylos serves me ably.”
“Pylos is the least of it. The letter … What did your lords make of
it, I wonder?”
Stannis snorted. “Celtigar pronounced it admirable. If I showed
him the contents of my privy, he would declare that admirable as
well. The others bobbed their heads up and down like a ock of
geese, all but Velaryon, who said that steel would decide the
matter, not words on parchment. As if I had never suspected. The
Others take my lords, I’ll hear your views.”
“Your words were blunt and strong.”
“And true.”
“And true. Yet you have no proof. Of this incest. No more than
you did a year ago.”
“There’s proof of a sort at Storm’s End. Robert’s bastard. The one
he fathered on my wedding night, in the very bed they’d made up
for me and my bride. Delena was a Florent, and a maiden when he
took her, so Robert acknowledged the babe. Edric Storm, they call
him. He is said to be the very image of my brother. If men were to
see him, and then look again at Jo rey and Tommen, they could not
help but wonder, I would think.”
“Yet how are men to see him, if he is at Storm’s End?”
Stannis drummed his ngers on the Painted Table. “It is a
di culty. One of many.” He raised his eyes. “You have more to say
about the letter. Well, get on with it. I did not make you a knight so
you could learn to mouth empty courtesies. I have my lords for
that. Say what you would say, Davos.”

Davos bowed his head. “There was a phrase at the end. How did
it go? Done in the Light of the Lord …”
“Yes.” The king’s jaw was clenched.
“Your people will mislike those words.”
“As you did?” said Stannis sharply.
“If you were to say instead, Done in the sight of gods and men, or
By the grace of the gods old and new …”
“Have you gone devout on me, smuggler?”
“That was to be my question for you, my liege.”
“Was it now? It sounds as though you love my new god no more
than you love my new maester.”
“I do not know this Lord of Light,” Davos admitted, “but I knew
the gods we burned this morning. The Smith has kept my ships safe,
while the Mother has given me seven strong sons.”
“Your wife has given you seven strong sons. Do you pray to her?
It was wood we burned this morning.”
“That may be so,” Davos said, “but when I was a boy in Flea
Bottom begging for a copper, sometimes the septons would feed
me.”
“I feed you now.”
“You have given me an honored place at your table. And in return
I give you truth. Your people will not love you if you take from
them the gods they have always worshiped, and give them one
whose very name sounds queer on their tongues.”
Stannis stood abruptly. “R’hllor. Why is that so hard? They will
not love me, you say? When have they ever loved me? How can I
lose something I have never owned?” He moved to the south
window to gaze out at the moonlit sea. “I stopped believing in gods
the day I saw the Windproud break up across the bay. Any gods so
monstrous as to drown my mother and father would never have my
worship, I vowed. In King’s Landing, the High Septon would prattle
at me of how all justice and goodness owed from the Seven, but all
I ever saw of either was made by men.”
“If you do not believe in gods—”
“—why trouble with this new one?” Stannis broke in. “I have
asked myself as well. I know little and care less of gods, but the red

priestess has power.”
Yes, but what sort of power? “Cressen had wisdom.”
“I trusted in his wisdom and your wiles, and what did they avail
me, smuggler? The storm lords sent you packing. I went to them a
beggar and they laughed at me. Well, there will be no more
begging, and no more laughing either. The Iron Throne is mine by
rights, but how am I to take it? There are four kings in the realm,
and three of them have more men and more gold than I do. I have
ships … and I have her. The red woman. Half my knights are afraid
even to say her name, did you know? If she can do nothing else, a
sorceress who can inspire such dread in grown men is not to be
despised. A frightened man is a beaten man. And perhaps she can do
more. I mean to nd out.
“When I was a lad I found an injured goshawk and nursed her
back to health. Proudwing, I named her. She would perch on my
shoulder and utter from room to room after me and take food
from my hand, but she would not soar. Time and again I would take
her hawking, but she never ew higher than the treetops. Robert
called her Weakwing. He owned a gyrfalcon named Thunderclap
who never missed her strike. One day our great-uncle Ser Harbert
told me to try a di erent bird. I was making a fool of myself with
Proudwing, he said, and he was right.” Stannis Baratheon turned
away from the window, and the ghosts who moved upon the
southern sea. “The Seven have never brought me so much as a
sparrow. It is time I tried another hawk, Davos. A red hawk.”

THEON

There was no safe anchorage at Pyke, but Theon Greyjoy wished to

look on his father’s castle from the sea, to see it as he had seen it
last, ten years before, when Robert Baratheon’s war galley had
borne him away to be a ward of Eddard Stark. On that day he had
stood beside the rail, listening to the stroke of the oars and the
pounding of the master’s drum while he watched Pyke dwindle in
the distance. Now he wanted to see it grow larger, to rise from the
sea before him.
Obedient to his wishes, the Myraham beat her way past the point
with her sails snapping and her captain cursing the wind and his
crew and the follies of highborn lordlings. Theon drew the hood of
his cloak up against the spray, and looked for home.
The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cli s, and the castle
seemed one with the rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried
from the same grey-black stone, wet by the same salt waves,
festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green lichen,
speckled by the droppings of the same seabirds. The point of land
on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once thrust like
a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the waves had hammered
at it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of
years past. All that remained were three bare and barren islands and
a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from the water like the
pillars of some sea god’s temple, while the angry waves foamed and
crashed among them.

Drear, dark, forbidding, Pyke stood atop those islands and pillars,
almost a part of them, its curtain wall closing o the headland
around the foot of the great stone bridge that leapt from the cli top
to the largest islet, dominated by the massive bulk of the Great
Keep. Farther out were the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody Keep, each
on its own island. Towers and outbuildings clung to the stacks
beyond, linked to each other by covered archways when the pillars
stood close, by long swaying walks of wood and rope when they did
not.
The Sea Tower rose from the outmost island at the point of the
broken sword, the oldest part of the castle, round and tall, the
sheer-sided pillar on which it stood half-eaten through by the
endless battering of the waves. The base of the tower was white
from centuries of salt spray, the upper stories green from the lichen
that crawled over it like a thick blanket, the jagged crown black
with soot from its nightly watch re.
Above the Sea Tower snapped his father’s banner. The Myraham
was too far o for Theon to see more than the cloth itself, but he
knew the device it bore: the golden kraken of House Greyjoy, arms
writhing and reaching against a black eld. The banner streamed
from an iron mast, shivering and twisting as the wind gusted, like a
bird struggling to take ight. And here at least the direwolf of Stark
did not y above, casting its shadow down upon the Greyjoy
kraken.
Theon had never seen a more stirring sight. In the sky behind the
castle, the ne red tail of the comet was visible through thin,
scuttling clouds. All the way from Riverrun to Seagard, the
Mallisters had argued about its meaning. It is my comet, Theon told
himself, sliding a hand into his fur-lined cloak to touch the oilskin
pouch snug in its pocket. Inside was the letter Robb Stark had given
him, paper as good as a crown.
“Does the castle look as you remember it, milord?” the captain’s
daughter asked as she pressed herself against his arm.
“It looks smaller,” Theon confessed, “though perhaps that is only
the distance.” The Myraham was a fat-bellied southron merchanter
up from Oldtown, carrying wine and cloth and seed to trade for iron

ore. Her captain was a fat-bellied southron merchanter as well, and
the stony sea that foamed at the feet of the castle made his plump
lips quiver, so he stayed well out, farther than Theon would have
liked. An ironborn captain in a longship would have taken them
along the cli s and under the high bridge that spanned the gap
between the gatehouse and the Great Keep, but this plump
Oldtowner had neither the craft, the crew, nor the courage to
attempt such a thing. So they sailed past at a safe distance, and
Theon must content himself with seeing Pyke from afar. Even so,
the Myraham had to struggle mightily to keep itself o those rocks.
“It must be windy there,” the captain’s daughter observed.
He laughed. “Windy and cold and damp. A miserable hard place,
in truth … but my lord father once told me that hard places breed
hard men, and hard men rule the world.”
The captain’s face was as green as the sea when he came bowing
up to Theon and asked, “May we make for port now, milord?”
“You may,” Theon said, a faint smile playing about his lips. The
promise of gold had turned the Oldtowner into a shameless
lickspittle. It would have been a much di erent voyage if a longship
from the islands had been waiting at Seagard as he’d hoped.
Ironborn captains were proud and willful, and did not go in awe of
a man’s blood. The islands were too small for awe, and a longship
smaller still. If every captain was a king aboard his own ship, as
was often said, it was small wonder they named the islands the land
of ten thousand kings. And when you have seen your kings shit over
the rail and turn green in a storm, it was hard to bend the knee and
pretend they were gods. “The Drowned God makes men,” old King
Urron Redhand had once said, thousands of years ago, “but it’s men
who make crowns.”
A longship would have made the crossing in half the time as well.
The Myraham was a wallowing tub, if truth be told, and he would
not care to be aboard her in a storm. Still, Theon could not be too
unhappy. He was here, undrowned, and the voyage had o ered
certain other amusements. He put an arm around the captain’s
daughter. “Summon me when we make Lordsport,” he told her

father. “We’ll be below, in my cabin.” He led the girl away aft,
while her father watched them go in sullen silence.
The cabin was the captain’s, in truth, but it had been turned over
to Theon’s use when they sailed from Seagard. The captain’s
daughter had not been turned over to his use, but she had come to
his bed willingly enough all the same. A cup of wine, a few
whispers, and there she was. The girl was a shade plump for his
taste, with skin as splotchy as oatmeal, but her breasts lled his
hands nicely and she had been a maiden the rst time he took her.
That was surprising at her age, but Theon found it diverting. He did
not think the captain approved, and that was amusing as well,
watching the man struggle to swallow his outrage while performing
his courtesies to the high lord, the rich purse of gold he’d been
promised never far from his thoughts.
As Theon shrugged out of his wet cloak, the girl said, “You must
be so happy to see your home again, milord. How many years have
you been away?”
“Ten, or close as makes no matter,” he told her. “I was a boy of
ten when I was taken to Winterfell as a ward of Eddard Stark.” A
ward in name, a hostage in truth. Half his days a hostage … but no
longer. His life was his own again, and nowhere a Stark to be seen.
He drew the captain’s daughter close and kissed her on her ear.
“Take o your cloak.”
She dropped her eyes, suddenly shy, but did as he bid her. When
the heavy garment, sodden with spray, fell from her shoulders to
the deck, she gave him a little bow and smiled anxiously. She
looked rather stupid when she smiled, but he had never required a
woman to be clever. “Come here,” he told her.
She did. “I have never seen the Iron Islands.”
“Count yourself fortunate.” Theon stroked her hair. It was ne
and dark, though the wind had made a tangle of it. “The islands are
stern and stony places, scant of comfort and bleak of prospect.
Death is never far here, and life is mean and meager. Men spend
their nights drinking ale and arguing over whose lot is worse, the
sherfolk who ght the sea or the farmers who try and scratch a
crop from the poor thin soil. If truth be told, the miners have it

worse than either, breaking their backs down in the dark, and for
what? Iron, lead, tin, those are our treasures. Small wonder the
ironmen of old turned to raiding.”
The stupid girl did not seem to be listening. “I could go ashore
with you,” she said. “I would, if it please you …”
“You could go ashore,” Theon agreed, squeezing her breast, “but
not with me, I fear.”
“I’d work in your castle, milord. I can clean sh and bake bread
and churn butter. Father says my peppercrab stew is the best he’s
ever tasted. You could nd me a place in your kitchens and I could
make you peppercrab stew.”
“And warm my bed by night?” He reached for the laces of her
bodice and began to undo them, his ngers deft and practiced.
“Once I might have carried you home as a prize, and kept you to
wife whether you willed it or no. The ironmen of old did such
things. A man had his rock wife, his true bride, ironborn like
himself, but he had his salt wives too, women captured on raids.”
The girl’s eyes grew wide, and not because he had bared her
breasts. “I would be your salt wife, milord.”
“I fear those days are gone.” Theon’s nger circled one heavy
teat, spiraling in toward the fat brown nipple. “No longer may we
ride the wind with re and sword, taking what we want. Now we
scratch in the ground and toss lines in the sea like other men, and
count ourselves lucky if we have salt cod and porridge enough to
get us through a winter.” He took her nipple in his mouth, and bit it
until she gasped.
“You can put it in me again, if it please you,” she whispered in his
ear as he sucked.
When he raised his head from her breast, the skin was dark red
where his mouth had marked her. “It would please me to teach you
something new. Unlace me and pleasure me with your mouth.”
“With my mouth?”
His thumb brushed lightly over her full lips. “It’s what those lips
were made for, sweetling. If you were my salt wife, you’d do as I
command.”

She was timid at rst, but learned quickly for such a stupid girl,
which pleased him. Her mouth was as wet and sweet as her cunt,
and this way he did not have to listen to her mindless prattle. Once I
would have kept her as a salt wife in truth, he thought to himself as he
slid his ngers through her tangled hair. Once. When we still kept the
Old Way, lived by the axe instead of the pick, taking what we would, be
it wealth, women, or glory. In those days, the ironborn did not work
mines; that was labor for the captives brought back from the
hostings, and so too the sorry business of farming and tending goats
and sheep. War was an ironman’s proper trade. The Drowned God
had made them to reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write
their names in re and blood and song.
Aegon the Dragon had destroyed the Old Way when he burned
Black Harren, gave Harren’s kingdom back to the weakling
rivermen, and reduced the Iron Islands to an insigni cant backwater
of a much greater realm. Yet the old red tales were still told around
driftwood res and smoky hearths all across the islands, even
behind the high stone halls of Pyke. Theon’s father numbered
among his titles the style of Lord Reaper, and the Greyjoy words
boasted that We Do Not Sow.
It had been to bring back the Old Way more than for the empty
vanity of a crown that Lord Balon had staged his great rebellion.
Robert Baratheon had written a bloody end to that hope, with the
help of his friend Eddard Stark, but both men were dead now. Mere
boys ruled in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror
had forged was smashed and sundered. This is the season, Theon
thought as the captain’s daughter slid her lips up and down the
length of him, the season, the year, the day, and I am the man. He
smiled crookedly, wondering what his father would say when Theon
told him that he, the last-born, babe and hostage, he had succeeded
where Lord Balon himself had failed.
His climax came on him sudden as a storm, and he lled the girl’s
mouth with his seed. Startled, she tried to pull away, but Theon
held her tight by the hair. Afterward, she crawled up beside him.
“Did I please milord?”
“Well enough,” he told her.

“It tasted salty,” she murmured.
“Like the sea?”
She nodded. “I have always loved the sea, milord.”
“As I have,” he said, rolling her nipple idly between his ngers. It
was true. The sea meant freedom to the men of the Iron Islands. He
had forgotten that until the Myraham had raised sail at Seagard. The
sounds brought old feelings back; the creak of wood and rope, the
captain’s shouted commands, the snap of the sails as the wind lled
them, each as familiar as the beating of his own heart, and as
comforting. I must remember this, Theon vowed to himself. I must
never go far from the sea again.
“Take me with you, milord,” the captain’s daughter begged. “I
don’t need to go to your castle. I can stay in some town, and be
your salt wife.” She reached out to stroke his cheek.
Theon Greyjoy pushed her hand aside and climbed o the bunk.
“My place is Pyke, and yours is on this ship.”
“I can’t stay here now.”
He laced up his breeches. “Why not?”
“My father,” she told him. “Once you’re gone, he’ll punish me,
milord. He’ll call me names and hit me.”
Theon swept his cloak o its peg and over his shoulders. “Fathers
are like that,” he admitted as he pinned the folds with a silver clasp.
“Tell him he should be pleased. As many times as I’ve fucked you,
you’re likely with child. It’s not every man who has the honor of
raising a king’s bastard.” She looked at him stupidly, so he left her
there.
The Myraham was rounding a wooded point. Below the pine-clad
blu s, a dozen shing boats were pulling in their nets. The big cog
stayed well out from them, tacking. Theon moved to the bow for a
better view. He saw the castle rst, the stronghold of the Botleys.
When he was a boy it had been timber and wattle, but Robert
Baratheon had razed that structure to the ground. Lord Sawane had
rebuilt in stone, for now a small square keep crowned the hill. Pale
green ags drooped from the squat corner towers, each emblazoned
with a shoal of silvery sh.

Beneath the dubious protection of the sh-ridden little castle lay
the village of Lordsport, its harbor aswarm with ships. When last
he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking wasteland, the skeletons
of burnt longships and smashed galleys littering the stony shore like
the bones of dead leviathans, the houses no more than broken walls
and cold ashes. After ten years, few traces of the war remained. The
smallfolk had built new hovels with the stones of the old, and cut
fresh sod for their roofs. A new inn had risen beside the landing,
twice the size of the old one, with a lower story of cut stone and
two upper stories of timber. The sept beyond had never been
rebuilt, though; only a seven-sided foundation remained where it
had stood. Robert Baratheon’s fury had soured the ironmen’s taste
for the new gods, it would seem.
Theon was more interested in ships than gods. Among the masts
of countless shing boats, he spied a Tyroshi trading galley o loading beside a lumbering Ibbenese cog with her black-tarred hull.
A great number of longships, fty or sixty at the least, stood out to
sea or lay beached on the pebbled shore to the north. Some of the
sails bore devices from the other islands; the blood moon of Wynch,
Lord Goodbrother’s banded black warhorn, Harlaw’s silver scythe.
Theon searched for his uncle Euron’s Silence. Of that lean and
terrible red ship he saw no sign, but his father’s Great Kraken was
there, her bow ornamented with a grey iron ram in the shape of its
namesake.
Had Lord Balon anticipated him and called the Greyjoy banners?
His hand went inside his cloak again, to the oilskin pouch. No one
knew of his letter but Robb Stark; they were no fools, to entrust
their secrets to a bird. Still, Lord Balon was no fool either. He might
well have guessed why his son was coming home at long last, and
acted accordingly.
The thought did not please him. His father’s war was long done,
and lost. This was Theon’s hour—his plan, his glory, and in time his
crown. Yet if the longships are hosting …
It might be only a caution, now that he thought on it. A defensive
move, lest the war spill out across the sea. Old men were cautious
by nature. His father was old now, and so too his uncle Victarion,

who commanded the Iron Fleet. His uncle Euron was a di erent
song, to be sure, but the Silence did not seem to be in port. It’s all for
the good, Theon told himself. This way, I shall be able to strike all the
more quickly.
As the Myraham made her way landward, Theon paced the deck
restlessly, scanning the shore. He had not thought to nd Lord
Balon himself at quayside, but surely his father would have sent
someone to meet him. Sylas Sourmouth the steward, Lord Botley,
perhaps even Dagmer Cleftjaw. It would be good to look on
Dagmer’s hideous old face again. It was not as though they had no
word of his arrival. Robb had sent ravens from Riverrun, and when
they’d found no longship at Seagard, Jason Mallister had sent his
own birds to Pyke, supposing that Robb’s were lost.
Yet he saw no familiar faces, no honor guard waiting to escort
him from Lordsport to Pyke, only smallfolk going about their small
business. Shorehands rolled casks of wine o the Tyroshi trader,
sherfolk cried the day’s catch, children ran and played. A priest in
the seawater robes of the Drowned God was leading a pair of horses
along the pebbled shore, while above him a slattern leaned out a
window in the inn, calling out to some passing Ibbenese sailors.
A handful of Lordsport merchants had gathered to meet the ship.
They shouted questions as the Myraham was tying up. “We’re out of
Oldtown,” the captain called down, “bearing apples and oranges,
wines from the Arbor, feathers from the Summer Isles. I have
pepper, woven leathers, a bolt of Myrish lace, mirrors for milady, a
pair of Oldtown woodharps sweet as any you ever heard.” The
gangplank descended with a creak and a thud. “And I’ve brought
your heir back to you.”
The Lordsport men gazed on Theon with blank, bovine eyes, and
he realized that they did not know who he was. It made him angry.
He pressed a golden dragon into the captain’s palm. “Have your
men bring my things.” Without waiting for a reply, he strode down
the gangplank. “Innkeeper,” he barked, “I require a horse.”
“As you say, m’lord,” the man responded, without so much as a
bow. He had forgotten how bold the ironborn could be. “Happens as
I have one might do. Where would you be riding, m’lord?”

“Pyke.” The fool still did not know him. He should have worn his
good doublet, with the kraken embroidered on the breast.
“You’ll want to be o soon, to reach Pyke afore dark,” the
innkeeper said. “My boy will go with you and show you the way.”
“Your boy will not be needed,” a deep voice called, “nor your
horse. I shall see my nephew back to his father’s house.”
The speaker was the priest he had seen leading the horses along
the shoreline. As the man approached, the smallfolk bent the knee,
and Theon heard the innkeeper murmur, “Damphair.”
Tall and thin, with erce black eyes and a beak of a nose, the
priest was garbed in mottled robes of green and grey and blue, the
swirling colors of the Drowned God. A waterskin hung under his
arm on a leather strap, and ropes of dried seaweed were braided
through his waist-long black hair and untrimmed beard.
A memory prodded at Theon. In one of his rare curt letters, Lord
Balon had written of his youngest brother going down in a storm,
and turning holy when he washed up safe on shore. “Uncle Aeron?”
he said doubtfully.
“Nephew Theon,” the priest replied. “Your lord father bid me
fetch you. Come.”
“In a moment, Uncle.” He turned back to the Myraham. “My
things,” he commanded the captain.
A sailor fetched him down his tall yew bow and quiver of arrows,
but it was the captain’s daughter who brought the pack with his
good clothing. “Milord.” Her eyes were red. When he took the pack,
she made as if to embrace him, there in front of her own father and
his priestly uncle and half the island.
Theon turned deftly aside. “You have my thanks.”
“Please,” she said, “I do love you well, milord.”
“I must go.” He hurried after his uncle, who was already well
down the pier. Theon caught him with a dozen long strides. “I had
not looked for you, Uncle. After ten years, I thought perhaps my
lord father and lady mother might come themselves, or send
Dagmer with an honor guard.”
“It is not for you to question the commands of the Lord Reaper of
Pyke.” The priest’s manner was chilly, most unlike the man Theon

remembered. Aeron Greyjoy had been the most amiable of his
uncles, feckless and quick to laugh, fond of songs, ale, and women.
“As to Dagmer, the Cleftjaw is gone to Old Wyk at your father’s
behest, to roust the Stonehouses and the Drumms.”
“To what purpose? Why are the longships hosting?”
“Why have longships ever hosted?” His uncle had left the horses
tied up in front of the waterside inn. When they reached them, he
turned to Theon. “Tell me true, nephew. Do you pray to the wolf
gods now?”
Theon seldom prayed at all, but that was not something you
confessed to a priest, even your father’s own brother. “Ned Stark
prayed to a tree. No, I care nothing for Stark’s gods.”
“Good. Kneel.”
The ground was all stones and mud. “Uncle, I—”
“Kneel. Or are you too proud now, a lordling of the green lands
come among us?”
Theon knelt. He had a purpose here, and might need Aeron’s help
to achieve it. A crown was worth a little mud and horseshit on his
breeches, he supposed.
“Bow your head.” Lifting the skin, his uncle pulled the cork and
directed a thin stream of seawater down upon Theon’s head. It
drenched his hair and ran over his forehead into his eyes. Sheets
washed down his cheeks, and a nger crept under his cloak and
doublet and down his back, a cold rivulet along his spine. The salt
made his eyes burn, until it was all he could do not to cry out. He
could taste the ocean on his lips. “Let Theon your servant be born
again from the sea, as you were,” Aeron Greyjoy intoned. “Bless
him with salt, bless him with stone, bless him with steel. Nephew,
do you still know the words?”
“What is dead may never die,” Theon said, remembering.
“What is dead may never die,” his uncle echoed, “but rises again,
harder and stronger. Stand.”
Theon stood, blinking back tears from the salt in his eyes.
Wordless, his uncle corked the waterskin, untied his horse, and
mounted. Theon did the same. They set o together, leaving the inn

and the harbor behind them, up past the castle of Lord Botley into
the stony hills. The priest ventured no further word.
“I have been half my life away from home,” Theon ventured at
last. “Will I nd the islands changed?”
“Men sh the sea, dig in the earth, and die. Women birth children
in blood and pain, and die. Night follows day. The winds and tides
remain. The islands are as our god made them.”
Gods, he has grown grim, Theon thought. “Will I nd my sister and
my lady mother at Pyke?”
“You will not. Your mother dwells on Harlaw, with her own
sister. It is less raw there, and her cough troubles her. Your sister
has taken Black Wind to Great Wyk, with messages from your lord
father. She will return e’er long, you may be sure.”
Theon did not need to be told that Black Wind was Asha’s
longship. He had not seen his sister in ten years, but that much he
knew of her. Odd that she would call it that, when Robb Stark had a
wolf named Grey Wind. “Stark is grey and Greyjoy’s black,” he
murmured, smiling, “but it seems we’re both windy.”
The priest had nothing to say to that.
“And what of you, Uncle?” Theon asked. “You were no priest
when I was taken from Pyke. I remember how you would sing the
old reaving songs standing on the table with a horn of ale in hand.”
“Young I was, and vain,” Aeron Greyjoy said, “but the sea washed
my follies and my vanities away. That man drowned, nephew. His
lungs lled with seawater, and the sh ate the scales o his eyes.
When I rose again, I saw clearly.”
He is as mad as he is sour. Theon had liked what he remembered of
the old Aeron Greyjoy. “Uncle, why has my father called his swords
and sails?”
“Doubtless he will tell you at Pyke.”
“I would know his plans now.”
“From me, you shall not. We are commanded not to speak of this
to any man.”
“Even to me?” Theon’s anger ared. He’d led men in war, hunted
with a king, won honor in tourney melees, ridden with Brynden
Black sh and Greatjon Umber, fought in the Whispering Wood,

bedded more girls than he could name, and yet this uncle was
treating him as though he were still a child of ten. “If my father
makes plans for war, I must know of them. I am not ‘any man,’ I am
heir to Pyke and the Iron Islands.”
“As to that,” his uncle said, “we shall see.”
The words were a slap in the face. “We shall see? My brothers are
both dead. I am my lord father’s only living son.”
“Your sister lives.”
Asha, he thought, confounded. She was three years older than
Theon, yet still … “A woman may inherit only if there is no male
heir in the direct line,” he insisted loudly. “I will not be cheated of
my rights, I warn you.”
His uncle grunted. “You warn a servant of the Drowned God, boy?
You have forgotten more than you know. And you are a great fool
if you believe your lord father will ever hand these holy islands
over to a Stark. Now be silent. The ride is long enough without your
magpie chatterings.”
Theon held his tongue, though not without struggle. So that is the
way of it, he thought. As if ten years in Winterfell could make a
Stark. Lord Eddard had raised him among his own children, but
Theon had never been one of them. The whole castle, from Lady
Stark to the lowliest kitchen scullion, knew he was hostage to his
father’s good behavior, and treated him accordingly. Even the
bastard Jon Snow had been accorded more honor than he had.
Lord Eddard had tried to play the father from time to time, but to
Theon he had always remained the man who’d brought blood and
re to Pyke and taken him from his home. As a boy, he had lived in
fear of Stark’s stern face and great dark sword. His wife was, if
anything, even more distant and suspicious.
As for their children, the younger ones had been mewling babes
for most of his years at Winterfell. Only Robb and his baseborn half
brother Jon Snow had been old enough to be worth his notice. The
bastard was a sullen boy, quick to sense a slight, jealous of Theon’s
high birth and Robb’s regard for him. For Robb himself, Theon did
have a certain a ection, as for a younger brother … but it would be
best not to mention that. In Pyke, it would seem, the old wars were

still being fought. That ought not surprise him. The Iron Islands
lived in the past; the present was too hard and bitter to be borne.
Besides, his father and uncles were old, and the old lords were like
that; they took their dusty feuds to the grave, forgetting nothing
and forgiving less.
It had been the same with the Mallisters, his companions on the
ride from Riverrun to Seagard. Patrek Mallister was not too ill a
fellow; they shared a taste for wenches, wine, and hawking. But
when old Lord Jason saw his heir growing overly fond of Theon’s
company, he had taken Patrek aside to remind him that Seagard had
been built to defend the coast against reavers from the Iron Islands,
the Greyjoys of Pyke chief among them. Their Booming Tower was
named for its immense bronze bell, rung of old to call the townsfolk
and farmhands into the castle when longships were sighted on the
western horizon.
“Never mind that the bell has been rung just once in three
hundred years,” Patrek had told Theon the day after, as he shared
his father’s cautions and a jug of green-apple wine.
“When my brother stormed Seagard,” Theon said. Lord Jason had
slain Rodrik Greyjoy under the walls of the castle, and thrown the
ironmen back into the bay. “If your father supposes I bear him some
enmity for that, it’s only because he never knew Rodrik.”
They had a laugh over that as they raced ahead to an amorous
young miller’s wife that Patrek knew. Would that Patrek were with
me now. Mallister or no, he was a more amiable riding companion
than this sour old priest that his uncle Aeron had turned into.
The path they rode wound up and up, into bare and stony hills.
Soon they were out of sight of the sea, though the smell of salt still
hung sharp in the damp air. They kept a steady plodding pace, past
a shepherd’s croft and the abandoned workings of a mine. This new,
holy Aeron Greyjoy was not much for talk. They rode in a gloom of
silence. Finally Theon could su er it no longer. “Robb Stark is Lord
of Winterfell now,” he said.
Aeron rode on. “One wolf is much like the other.”
“Robb has broken fealty with the Iron Throne and crowned
himself King in the North. There’s war.”

“The maester’s ravens y over salt as soon as rock. This news is
old and cold.”
“It means a new day, Uncle.”
“Every morning brings a new day, much like the old.”
“In Riverrun, they would tell you di erent. They say the red
comet is a herald of a new age. A messenger from the gods.”
“A sign it is,” the priest agreed, “but from our god, not theirs. A
burning brand it is, such as our people carried of old. It is the ame
the Drowned God brought from the sea, and it proclaims a rising
tide. It is time to hoist our sails and go forth into the world with
re and sword, as he did.”
Theon smiled. “I could not agree more.”
“A man agrees with god as a raindrop with the storm.”
This raindrop will one day be a king, old man. Theon had su ered
quite enough of his uncle’s gloom. He put his spurs into his horse
and trotted on ahead, smiling.
It was nigh on sunset when they reached the walls of Pyke, a
crescent of dark stone that ran from cli to cli , with the gatehouse
in the center and three square towers to either side. Theon could
still make out the scars left by the stones of Robert Baratheon’s
catapults. A new south tower had risen from the ruins of the old, its
stone a paler shade of grey, and as yet unmarred by patches of
lichen. That was where Robert had made his breach, swarming in
over the rubble and corpses with his warhammer in hand and Ned
Stark at his side. Theon had watched from the safety of the Sea
Tower, and sometimes he still saw the torches in his dreams, and
heard the dull thunder of the collapse.
The gates stood open to him, the rusted iron portcullis drawn up.
The guards atop the battlements watched with strangers’ eyes as
Theon Greyjoy came home at last.
Beyond the curtain wall were half a hundred acres of headland
hard against the sky and the sea. The stables were here, and the
kennels, and a scatter of other outbuildings. Sheep and swine
huddled in their pens while the castle dogs ran free. To the south
were the cli s, and the wide stone bridge to the Great Keep. Theon
could hear the crashing of waves as he swung down from his saddle.

A stableman came to take his horse. A pair of gaunt children and
some thralls stared at him with dull eyes, but there was no sign of
his lord father, nor anyone else he recalled from boyhood. A bleak
and bitter homecoming, he thought.
The priest had not dismounted. “Will you not stay the night and
share our meat and mead, Uncle?”
“Bring you, I was told. You are brought. Now I return to our
god’s business.” Aeron Greyjoy turned his horse and rode slowly out
beneath the muddy spikes of the portcullis.
A bentback old crone in a shapeless grey dress approached him
warily. “M’lord, I am sent to show you to chambers.”
“By whose bidding?”
“Your lord father, m’lord.”
Theon pulled o his gloves. “So you do know who I am. Why is
my father not here to greet me?”
“He awaits you in the Sea Tower, m’lord. When you are rested
from your trip.”
And I thought Ned Stark cold. “And who are you?”
“Helya, who keeps this castle for your lord father.”
“Sylas was steward here. They called him Sourmouth.” Even now,
Theon could recall the winey stench of the old man’s breath.
“Dead these ve years, m’lord.”
“And what of Maester Qalen, where is he?”
“He sleeps in the sea. Wendamyr keeps the ravens now.”
It is as if I were a stranger here, Theon thought. Nothing has changed,
and yet everything has changed. “Show me to my chambers, woman,”
he commanded. Bowing sti y, she led him across the headland to
the bridge. That at least was as he remembered; the ancient stones
slick with spray and spotted by lichen, the sea foaming under their
feet like some great wild beast, the salt wind clutching at their
clothes.
Whenever he’d imagined his homecoming, he had always pictured
himself returning to the snug bedchamber in the Sea Tower, where
he’d slept as a child. Instead the old woman led him to the Bloody
Keep. The halls here were larger and better furnished, if no less cold
nor damp. Theon was given a suite of chilly rooms with ceilings so

high that they were lost in gloom. He might have been more
impressed if he had not known that these were the very chambers
that had given the Bloody Keep its name. A thousand years before,
the sons of the River King had been slaughtered here, hacked to bits
in their beds so that pieces of their bodies might be sent back to
their father on the mainland.
But Greyjoys were not murdered in Pyke except once in a great
while by their brothers, and his brothers were both dead. It was not
fear of ghosts that made him glance about with distaste. The wall
hangings were green with mildew, the mattress musty-smelling and
sagging, the rushes old and brittle. Years had come and gone since
these chambers had last been opened. The damp went bone deep.
“I’ll have a basin of hot water and a re in this hearth,” he told the
crone. “See that they light braziers in the other rooms to drive out
some of the chill. And gods be good, get someone in here at once to
change these rushes.”
“Yes, m’lord. As you command.” She ed.
After some time, they brought the hot water he had asked for. It
was only tepid, and soon cold, and seawater in the bargain, but it
served to wash the dust of the long ride from his face and hair and
hands. While two thralls lit his braziers, Theon stripped o his
travel-stained clothing and dressed to meet his father. He chose
boots of supple black leather, soft lambswool breeches of silverygrey, a black velvet doublet with the golden kraken of the Greyjoys
embroidered on the breast. Around his throat he fastened a slender
gold chain, around his waist a belt of bleached white leather. He
hung a dirk at one hip and a longsword at the other, in scabbards
striped black-and-gold. Drawing the dirk, he tested its edge with his
thumb, pulled a whetstone from his belt pouch, and gave it a few
licks. He prided himself on keeping his weapons sharp. “When I
return, I shall expect a warm room and clean rushes,” he warned the
thralls as he drew on a pair of black gloves, the silk decorated with
a delicate scrollwork tracery in golden thread.
Theon returned to the Great Keep through a covered stone
walkway, the echoes of his footsteps mingling with the ceaseless
rumble of the sea below. To get to the Sea Tower on its crooked

pillar, he had to cross three further bridges, each narrower than the
one before. The last was made of rope and wood, and the wet salt
wind made it sway underfoot like a living thing. Theon’s heart was
in his mouth by the time he was halfway across. A long way below,
the waves threw up tall plumes of spray as they crashed against the
rock. As a boy, he used to run across this bridge, even in the black
of night. Boys believe nothing can hurt them, his doubt whispered.
Grown men know better.
The door was grey wood studded with iron, and Theon found it
barred from the inside. He hammered on it with a st, and cursed
when a splinter snagged the fabric of his glove. The wood was
damp and moldy, the iron studs rusted.
After a moment the door was opened from within by a guard in a
black iron breastplate and pothelm. “You are the son?”
“Out of my way, or you’ll learn who I am.” The man stood aside.
Theon climbed the twisting steps to the solar. He found his father
seated beside a brazier, beneath a robe of musty sealskins that
covered him foot to chin. At the sound of boots on stone, the Lord
of the Iron Islands lifted his eyes to behold his last living son. He
was smaller than Theon remembered him. And so gaunt. Balon
Greyjoy had always been thin, but now he looked as though the
gods had put him in a cauldron and boiled every spare ounce of
esh from his bones, until nothing remained but hair and skin. Bone
thin and bone hard he was, with a face that might have been
chipped from int. His eyes were inty too, black and sharp, but the
years and the salt winds had turned his hair the grey of a winter
sea, ecked with whitecaps. Unbound, it hung past the small of the
back.
“Nine years, is it?” Lord Balon said at last.
“Ten,” Theon answered, pulling o his torn gloves.
“A boy they took,” his father said. “What are you now?”
“A man,” Theon answered. “Your blood and your heir.”
Lord Balon grunted. “We shall see.”
“You shall,” Theon promised.
“Ten years, you say. Stark had you as long as I. And now you
come as his envoy.”

“Not his,” Theon said. “Lord Eddard is dead, beheaded by the
Lannister queen.”
“They are both dead, Stark and that Robert who broke my walls
with his stones. I vowed I’d live to see them both in their graves,
and I have.” He grimaced. “Yet the cold and the damp still make my
joints ache, as when they were alive. So what does it serve?”
“It serves.” Theon moved closer. “I bring a letter—”
“Did Ned Stark dress you like that?” his father interrupted,
squinting up from beneath his robe. “Was it his pleasure to garb you
in velvets and silks and make you his own sweet daughter?”
Theon felt the blood rising to his face. “I am no man’s daughter.
If you mislike my garb, I will change it.”
“You will.” Throwing o the furs, Lord Balon pushed himself to
his feet. He was not so tall as Theon remembered. “That bauble
around your neck—was it bought with gold or iron?”
Theon touched the gold chain. He had forgotten. It has been so
long … In the Old Way, women might decorate themselves with
ornaments bought with coin, but a warrior wore only the jewelry he
took o the corpses of enemies slain by his own hand. Paying the
iron price, it was called.
“You blush red as a maid, Theon. A question was asked. Is it the
gold price you paid, or the iron?”
“The gold,” Theon admitted.
His father slid his ngers under the necklace and gave it a yank
so hard it was like to take Theon’s head o , had the chain not
snapped rst. “My daughter has taken an axe for a lover,” Lord
Balon said. “I will not have my son bedeck himself like a whore.”
He dropped the broken chain onto the brazier, where it slid down
among the coals. “It is as I feared. The green lands have made you
soft, and the Starks have made you theirs.”
“You’re wrong. Ned Stark was my gaoler, but my blood is still
salt and iron.”
Lord Balon turned away to warm his bony hands over the brazier.
“Yet the Stark pup sends you to me like a well-trained raven,
clutching his little message.”

“There is nothing small about the letter I bear,” Theon said, “and
the o er he makes is one I suggested to him.”
“This wolf king heeds your counsel, does he?” The notion seemed
to amuse Lord Balon.
“He heeds me, yes. I’ve hunted with him, trained with him,
shared meat and mead with him, warred at his side. I have earned
his trust. He looks on me as an older brother, he—”
“No.” His father jabbed a nger at his face. “Not here, not in
Pyke, not in my hearing, you will not name him brother, this son of
the man who put your true brothers to the sword. Or have you
forgotten Rodrik and Maron, who were your own blood?”
“I forget nothing.” Ned Stark had killed neither of his brothers, in
truth. Rodrik had been slain by Lord Jason Mallister at Seagard,
Maron crushed in the collapse of the old south tower … but Stark
would have done for them just as quick had the tide of battle
chanced to sweep them together. “I remember my brothers very
well,” Theon insisted. Chie y he remembered Rodrik’s drunken
cu s and Maron’s cruel japes and endless lies. “I remember when
my father was a king too.” He took out Robb’s letter and thrust it
forward. “Here. Read it … Your Grace.”
Lord Balon broke the seal and unfolded the parchment. His black
eyes icked back and forth. “So the boy would give me a crown
again,” he said, “and all I need do is destroy his enemies.” His thin
lips twisted in a smile.
“By now Robb is at the Golden Tooth,” Theon said. “Once it falls,
he’ll be through the hills in a day. Lord Tywin’s host is at Harrenhal,
cut o from the west. The Kingslayer is a captive at Riverrun. Only
Ser Sta ord Lannister and the raw green levies he’s been gathering
remain to oppose Robb in the west. Ser Sta ord will put himself
between Robb’s army and Lannisport, which means the city will be
undefended when we descend on it by sea. If the gods are with us,
even Casterly Rock itself may fall before the Lannisters so much as
realize that we are upon them.”
Lord Balon grunted. “Casterly Rock has never fallen.”
“Until now.” Theon smiled. And how sweet that will be.

His father did not return the smile. “So this is why Robb Stark
sends you back to me, after so long? So you might win my consent
to this plan of his?”
“It is my plan, not Robb’s,” Theon said proudly. Mine, as the
victory will be mine, and in time the crown. “I will lead the attack
myself, if it please you. As my reward I would ask that you grant
me Casterly Rock for my own seat, once we have taken it from the
Lannisters.” With the Rock, he could hold Lannisport and the golden
lands of the west. It would mean wealth and power such as House
Greyjoy had never known.
“You reward yourself handsomely for a notion and a few lines of
scribbling.” His father read the letter again. “The pup says nothing
about a reward. Only that you speak for him, and I am to listen, and
give him my sails and swords, and in return he will give me a
crown.” His inty eyes lifted to meet his son’s. “He will give me a
crown,” he repeated, his voice growing sharp.
“A poor choice of words, what is meant is—”
“What is meant is what is said. The boy will give me a crown. And
what is given can be taken away.” Lord Balon tossed the letter onto
the brazier, atop the necklace. The parchment curled, blackened,
and took ame.
Theon was aghast. “Have you gone mad?”
His father laid a stinging backhand across his cheek. “Mind your
tongue. You are not in Winterfell now, and I am not Robb the Boy,
that you should speak to me so. I am the Greyjoy, Lord Reaper of
Pyke, King of Salt and Rock, Son of the Sea Wind, and no man gives
me a crown. I pay the iron price. I will take my crown, as Urron
Redhand did ve thousand years ago.”
Theon edged backward, away from the sudden fury in his father’s
tone. “Take it, then,” he spat, his cheek still tingling. “Call yourself
King of the Iron Islands, no one will care … until the wars are over,
and the victor looks about and spies the old fool perched o his
shore with an iron crown on his head.”
Lord Balon laughed. “Well, at the least you are no craven. No
more than I’m a fool. Do you think I gather my ships to watch them
rock at anchor? I mean to carve out a kingdom with re and

sword … but not from the west, and not at the bidding of King
Robb the Boy. Casterly Rock is too strong, and Lord Tywin too
cunning by half. Aye, we might take Lannisport, but we should
never keep it. No. I hunger for a di erent plum … not so juicy
sweet, to be sure, yet it hangs there ripe and undefended.”
Where? Theon might have asked, but by then he knew.

DAENERYS

The Dothraki named the comet shierak qiya, the Bleeding Star. The

old men muttered that it omened ill, but Daenerys Targaryen had
seen it rst on the night she had burned Khal Drogo, the night her
dragons had awakened. It is the herald of my coming, she told herself
as she gazed up into the night sky with wonder in her heart. The
gods have sent it to show me the way.
Yet when she put the thought into words, her handmaid Doreah
quailed. “That way lies the red lands, Khaleesi. A grim place and
terrible, the riders say.”
“The way the comet points is the way we must go,” Dany
insisted … though in truth, it was the only way open to her.
She dare not turn north onto the vast ocean of grass they called
the Dothraki sea. The rst khalasar they met would swallow up her
ragged band, slaying the warriors and slaving the rest. The lands of
the Lamb Men south of the river were likewise closed to them. They
were too few to defend themselves even against that unwarlike
folk, and the Lhazareen had small reason to love them. She might
have struck downriver for the ports at Meereen and Yunkai and
Astapor, but Rakharo warned her that Pono’s khalasar had ridden
that way, driving thousands of captives before them to sell in the
esh marts that festered like open sores on the shores of Slaver’s
Bay. “Why should I fear Pono?” Dany objected. “He was Drogo’s ko,
and always spoke me gently.”

“Ko Pono spoke you gently,” Ser Jorah Mormont said. “Khal Pono
will kill you. He was the rst to abandon Drogo. Ten thousand
warriors went with him. You have a hundred.”
No, Dany thought. I have four. The rest are women, old sick men,
and boys whose hair has never been braided. “I have the dragons,” she
pointed out.
“Hatchlings,” Ser Jorah said. “One swipe from an arakh would put
an end to them, though Pono is more like to seize them for himself.
Your dragon eggs were more precious than rubies. A living dragon
is beyond price. In all the world, there are only three. Every man
who sees them will want them, my queen.”
“They are mine,” she said ercely. They had been born from her
faith and her need, given life by the deaths of her husband and
unborn son and the maegi Mirri Maz Duur. Dany had walked into
the ames as they came forth, and they had drunk milk from her
swollen breasts. “No man will take them from me while I live.”
“You will not live long should you meet Khal Pono. Nor Khal
Jhaqo, nor any of the others. You must go where they do not.”
Dany had named him the rst of her Queensguard … and when
Mormont’s gru counsel and the omens agreed, her course was
clear. She called her people together and mounted her silver mare.
Her hair had burned away in Drogo’s pyre, so her handmaids garbed
her in the skin of the hrakkar Drogo had slain, the white lion of the
Dothraki sea. Its fearsome head made a hood to cover her naked
scalp, its pelt a cloak that owed across her shoulders and down her
back. The cream-colored dragon sunk sharp black claws into the
lion’s mane and coiled its tail around her arm, while Ser Jorah took
his accustomed place by her side.
“We follow the comet,” Dany told her khalasar. Once it was said,
no word was raised against it. They had been Drogo’s people, but
they were hers now. The Unburnt, they called her, and Mother of
Dragons. Her word was their law.
They rode by night, and by day took refuge from the sun beneath
their tents. Soon enough Dany learned the truth of Doreah’s words.
This was no kindly country. They left a trail of dead and dying
horses behind them as they went, for Pono, Jhaqo, and the others

had seized the best of Drogo’s herds, leaving to Dany the old and
the scrawny, the sickly and the lame, the broken animals and the illtempered. It was the same with the people. They are not strong, she
told herself, so I must be their strength. I must show no fear, no
weakness, no doubt. However frightened my heart, when they look upon
my face they must see only Drogo’s queen. She felt older than her
fourteen years. If ever she had truly been a girl, that time was done.
Three days into the march, the rst man died. A toothless oldster
with cloudy blue eyes, he fell exhausted from his saddle and could
not rise again. An hour later he was done. Blood ies swarmed
about his corpse and carried his ill luck to the living. “His time was
past,” her handmaid Irri declared. “No man should live longer than
his teeth.” The others agreed. Dany bid them kill the weakest of
their dying horses, so the dead man might go mounted into the
night lands.
Two nights later, it was an infant girl who perished. Her mother’s
anguished wailing lasted all day, but there was nothing to be done.
The child had been too young to ride, poor thing. Not for her the
endless black grasses of the night lands; she must be born again.
There was little forage in the red waste, and less water. It was a
sere and desolate land of low hills and barren windswept plains. The
rivers they crossed were dry as dead men’s bones. Their mounts
subsisted on the tough brown devilgrass that grew in clumps at the
base of rocks and dead trees. Dany sent outriders ranging ahead of
the column, but they found neither wells nor springs, only bitter
pools, shallow and stagnant, shrinking in the hot sun. The deeper
they rode into the waste, the smaller the pools became, while the
distance between them grew. If there were gods in this trackless
wilderness of stone and sand and red clay, they were hard dry gods,
deaf to prayers for rain.
Wine gave out rst, and soon thereafter the clotted mare’s milk
the horselords loved better than mead. Then their stores of atbread
and dried meat were exhausted as well. Their hunters found no
game, and only the esh of their dead horses lled their bellies.
Death followed death. Weak children, wrinkled old women, the sick
and the stupid and the heedless, the cruel land claimed them all.

Doreah grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, and her soft golden hair
turned brittle as straw.
Dany hungered and thirsted with the rest of them. The milk in her
breasts dried up, her nipples cracked and bled, and the esh fell
away from her day by day until she was lean and hard as a stick,
yet it was her dragons she feared for. Her father had been slain
before she was born, and her splendid brother Rhaegar as well. Her
mother had died bringing her into the world while the storm
screamed outside. Gentle Ser Willem Darry, who must have loved
her after a fashion, had been taken by a wasting sickness when she
was very young. Her brother Viserys, Khal Drogo who was her sunand-stars, even her unborn son, the gods had claimed them all. They
will not have my dragons, Dany vowed. They will not.
The dragons were no larger than the scrawny cats she had once
seen skulking along the walls of Magister Illyrio’s estate in
Pentos … until they unfolded their wings. Their span was three
times their length, each wing a delicate fan of translucent skin,
gorgeously colored, stretched taut between long thin bones. When
you looked hard, you could see that most of their body was neck,
tail, and wing. Such little things, she thought as she fed them by
hand. Or rather, tried to feed them, for the dragons would not eat.
They would hiss and spit at each bloody morsel of horsemeat, steam
rising from their nostrils, yet they would not take the food … until
Dany recalled something Viserys had told her when they were
children.
Only dragons and men eat cooked meat, he had said.
When she had her handmaids char the horsemeat black, the
dragons ripped at it eagerly, their heads striking like snakes. So
long as the meat was seared, they gulped down several times their
own weight every day, and at last began to grow larger and
stronger. Dany marveled at the smoothness of their scales, and the
heat that poured o them, so palpable that on cold nights their
whole bodies seemed to steam.
Each evenfall as the khalasar set out, she would choose a dragon
to ride upon her shoulder. Irri and Jhiqui carried the others in a
cage of woven wood slung between their mounts, and rode close

behind her, so Dany was never out of their sight. It was the only
way to keep them quiescent.
“Aegon’s dragons were named for the gods of Old Valyria,” she
told her bloodriders one morning after a long night’s journey.
“Visenya’s dragon was Vhagar, Rhaenys had Meraxes, and Aegon
rode Balerion, the Black Dread. It was said that Vhagar’s breath was
so hot that it could melt a knight’s armor and cook the man inside,
that Meraxes swallowed horses whole, and Balerion … his re was
as black as his scales, his wings so vast that whole towns were
swallowed up in their shadow when he passed overhead.”
The Dothraki looked at her hatchlings uneasily. The largest of her
three was shiny black, his scales slashed with streaks of vivid scarlet
to match his wings and horns. “Khaleesi,” Aggo murmured, “there
sits Balerion, come again.”
“It may be as you say, blood of my blood,” Dany replied gravely,
“but he shall have a new name for this new life. I would name them
all for those the gods have taken. The green one shall be Rhaegal,
for my valiant brother who died on the green banks of the Trident.
The cream-and-gold I call Viserion. Viserys was cruel and weak and
frightened, yet he was my brother still. His dragon will do what he
could not.”
“And the black beast?” asked Ser Jorah Mormont.
“The black,” she said, “is Drogon.”
Yet even as her dragons prospered, her khalasar withered and
died. Around them the land turned ever more desolate. Even
devilgrass grew scant; horses dropped in their tracks, leaving so few
that some of her people must trudge along on foot. Doreah took a
fever and grew worse with every league they crossed. Her lips and
hands broke with blood blisters, her hair came out in clumps, and
one evenfall she lacked the strength to mount her horse. Jhogo said
they must leave her or bind her to her saddle, but Dany
remembered a night on the Dothraki sea, when the Lysene girl had
taught her secrets so that Drogo might love her more. She gave
Doreah water from her own skin, cooled her brow with a damp
cloth, and held her hand until she died, shivering. Only then would
she permit the khalasar to press on.

They saw no sign of other travelers. The Dothraki began to
mutter fearfully that the comet had led them to some hell. Dany
went to Ser Jorah one morning as they made camp amidst a jumble
of black wind-scoured stones. “Are we lost?” she asked him. “Does
this waste have no end to it?”
“It has an end,” he answered wearily. “I have seen the maps the
traders draw, my queen. Few caravans come this way, that is so, yet
there are great kingdoms to the east, and cities full of wonders. Yi
Ti, Qarth, Asshai by the Shadow …”
“Will we live to see them?”
“I will not lie to you. The way is harder than I dared think.” The
knight’s face was grey and exhausted. The wound he had taken to
his hip the night he fought Khal Drogo’s bloodriders had never fully
healed; she could see how he grimaced when he mounted his horse,
and he seemed to slump in his saddle as they rode. “Perhaps we are
doomed if we press on … but I know for a certainty that we are
doomed if we turn back.”
Dany kissed him lightly on the cheek. It heartened her to see him
smile. I must be strong for him as well, she thought grimly. A knight he
may be, but I am the blood of the dragon.
The next pool they found was scalding hot and stinking of
brimstone, but their skins were almost empty. The Dothraki cooled
the water in jars and pots and drank it tepid. The taste was no less
foul, but water was water, and all of them thirsted. Dany looked at
the horizon with despair. They had lost a third of their number, and
still the waste stretched before them, bleak and red and endless. The
comet mocks my hopes, she thought, lifting her eyes to where it
scored the sky. Have I crossed half the world and seen the birth of
dragons only to die with them in this hard hot desert? She would not
believe it.
The next day, dawn broke as they were crossing a cracked and
ssured plain of hard red earth. Dany was about to command them
to make camp when her outriders came racing back at a gallop. “A
city, Khaleesi,” they cried. “A city pale as the moon and lovely as a
maid. An hour’s ride, no more.”
“Show me,” she said.

When the city appeared before her, its walls and towers
shimmering white behind a veil of heat, it looked so beautiful that
Dany was certain it must be a mirage. “Do you know what place
this might be?” she asked Ser Jorah.
The exile knight gave a weary shake of the head. “No, my queen.
I have never traveled this far east.”
The distant white walls promised rest and safety, a chance to heal
and grow strong, and Dany wanted nothing so much as to rush
toward them. Instead she turned to her bloodriders. “Blood of my
blood, go ahead of us and learn the name of this city, and what
manner of welcome we should expect.”
“Ai, Khaleesi,” said Aggo.
Her riders were not long in returning. Rakharo swung down from
his saddle. From his medallion belt hung the great curving arakh
that Dany had bestowed on him when she named him bloodrider.
“This city is dead, Khaleesi. Nameless and godless we found it, the
gates broken, only wind and ies moving through the streets.”
Jhiqui shuddered. “When the gods are gone, the evil ghosts feast
by night. Such places are best shunned. It is known.”
“It is known,” Irri agreed.
“Not to me.” Dany put her heels into her horse and showed them
the way, trotting beneath the shattered arch of an ancient gate and
down a silent street. Ser Jorah and her bloodriders followed, and
then, more slowly, the rest of the Dothraki.
How long the city had been deserted she could not know, but the
white walls, so beautiful from afar, were cracked and crumbling
when seen up close. Inside was a maze of narrow crooked alleys.
The buildings pressed close, their facades blank, chalky,
windowless. Everything was white, as if the people who lived here
had known nothing of color. They rode past heaps of sun-washed
rubble where houses had fallen in, and elsewhere saw the faded
scars of re. At a place where six alleys came together, Dany passed
an empty marble plinth. Dothraki had visited this place before, it
would seem. Perhaps even now the missing statue stood among the
other stolen gods in Vaes Dothrak. She might have ridden past it a
hundred times, never knowing. On her shoulder, Viserion hissed.

They made camp before the remnants of a gutted palace, on a
windswept plaza where devilgrass grew between the paving stones.
Dany sent out men to search the ruins. Some went reluctantly, yet
they went … and one scarred old man returned a brief time later,
hopping and grinning, his hands over owing with gs. They were
small, withered things, yet her people grabbed for them greedily,
jostling and pushing at each other, stu ng the fruit into their
cheeks and chewing blissfully.
Other searchers returned with tales of other fruit trees, hidden
behind closed doors in secret gardens. Aggo showed her a courtyard
overgrown with twisting vines and tiny green grapes, and Jhogo
discovered a well where the water was pure and cold. Yet they
found bones too, the skulls of the unburied dead, bleached and
broken. “Ghosts,” Irri muttered. “Terrible ghosts. We must not stay
here, Khaleesi, this is their place.”
“I fear no ghosts. Dragons are more powerful than ghosts.” And
gs are more important. “Go with Jhiqui and nd me some clean sand
for a bath, and trouble me no more with silly talk.”
In the coolness of her tent, Dany blackened horsemeat over a
brazier and re ected on her choices. There was food and water here
to sustain them, and enough grass for the horses to regain their
strength. How pleasant it would be to wake every day in the same
place, to linger among shady gardens, eat gs, and drink cool
water, as much as she might desire.
When Irri and Jhiqui returned with pots of white sand, Dany
stripped and let them scrub her clean. “Your hair is coming back,
Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said as she scraped sand o her back. Dany ran a
hand over the top of her head, feeling the new growth. Dothraki
men wore their hair in long oiled braids, and cut them only when
defeated. Perhaps I should do the same, she thought, to remind them
that Drogo’s strength lives within me now. Khal Drogo had died with
his hair uncut, a boast few men could make.
Across the tent, Rhaegal unfolded green wings to ap and utter
a half foot before thumping to the carpet. When he landed, his tail
lashed back and forth in fury, and he raised his head and screamed.
If I had wings, I would want to y too, Dany thought. The Targaryens

of old had ridden upon dragonback when they went to war. She
tried to imagine what it would feel like, to straddle a dragon’s neck
and soar high into the air. It would be like standing on a mountaintop,
only better. The whole world would be spread out below. If I ew high
enough, I could even see the Seven Kingdoms, and reach up and touch
the comet.
Irri broke her reverie to tell her that Ser Jorah Mormont was
outside, awaiting her pleasure. “Send him in,” Dany commanded,
sand-scrubbed skin tingling. She wrapped herself in the lionskin.
The hrakkar had been much bigger than Dany, so the pelt covered
everything that wanted covering.
“I’ve brought you a peach,” Ser Jorah said, kneeling. It was so
small she could almost hide it in her palm, and overripe too, but
when she took the rst bite, the esh was so sweet she almost cried.
She ate it slowly, savoring every mouthful, while Ser Jorah told her
of the tree it had been plucked from, in a garden near the western
wall.
“Fruit and water and shade,” Dany said, her cheeks sticky with
peach juice. “The gods were good to bring us to this place.”
“We should rest here until we are stronger,” the knight urged.
“The red lands are not kind to the weak.”
“My handmaids say there are ghosts here.”
“There are ghosts everywhere,” Ser Jorah said softly. “We carry
them with us wherever we go.”
Yes, she thought. Viserys, Khal Drogo, my son Rhaego, they are with
me always. “Tell me the name of your ghost, Jorah. You know all of
mine.”
His face grew very still. “Her name was Lynesse.”
“Your wife?”
“My second wife.”
It pains him to speak of her, Dany saw, but she wanted to know the
truth. “Is that all you would say of her?” The lion pelt slid o one
shoulder and she tugged it back into place. “Was she beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.” Ser Jorah lifted his eyes from her shoulder to
her face. “The rst time I beheld her, I thought she was a goddess
come to earth, the Maid herself made esh. Her birth was far above

my own. She was the youngest daughter of Lord Leyton Hightower
of Oldtown. The White Bull who commanded your father’s
Kingsguard was her great-uncle. The Hightowers are an ancient
family, very rich and very proud.”
“And loyal,” Dany said. “I remember, Viserys said the Hightowers
were among those who stayed true to my father.”
“That’s so,” he admitted.
“Did your fathers make the match?”
“No,” he said. “Our marriage … that makes a long tale and a dull
one, Your Grace. I would not trouble you with it.”
“I have nowhere to go,” she said. “Please.”
“As my queen commands.” Ser Jorah frowned. “My home … you
must understand that to understand the rest. Bear Island is
beautiful, but remote. Imagine old gnarled oaks and tall pines,
owering thornbushes, grey stones bearded with moss, little creeks
running icy down steep hillsides. The hall of the Mormonts is built
of huge logs and surrounded by an earthen palisade. Aside from a
few crofters, my people live along the coasts and sh the seas. The
island lies far to the north, and our winters are more terrible than
you can imagine, Khaleesi.
“Still, the island suited me well enough, and I never lacked for
women. I had my share of shwives and crofter’s daughters, before
and after I was wed. I married young, to a bride of my father’s
choosing, a Glover of Deepwood Motte. Ten years we were wed, or
near enough as makes no matter. She was a plain-faced woman, but
not unkind. I suppose I came to love her after a fashion, though our
relations were dutiful rather than passionate. Three times she
miscarried while trying to give me an heir. The last time she never
recovered. She died not long after.”
Dany put her hand on his and gave his ngers a squeeze. “I am
sorry for you, truly.”
Ser Jorah nodded. “By then my father had taken the black, so I
was Lord of Bear Island in my own right. I had no lack of marriage
o ers, but before I could reach a decision Lord Balon Greyjoy rose
in rebellion against the Usurper, and Ned Stark called his banners to
help his friend Robert. The nal battle was on Pyke. When Robert’s

stonethrowers opened a breach in King Balon’s wall, a priest from
Myr was the rst man through, but I was not far behind. For that I
won my knighthood.
“To celebrate his victory, Robert ordained that a tourney should
be held outside Lannisport. It was there I saw Lynesse, a maid half
my age. She had come up from Oldtown with her father to see her
brothers joust. I could not take my eyes o her. In a t of madness,
I begged her favor to wear in the tourney, never dreaming she
would grant my request, yet she did.”
“I ght as well as any man, Khaleesi, but I have never been a
tourney knight. Yet with Lynesse’s favor knotted round my arm, I
was a di erent man. I won joust after joust. Lord Jason Mallister
fell before me, and Bronze Yohn Royce. Ser Ryman Frey, his
brother Ser Hosteen, Lord Whent, Strongboar, even Ser Boros
Blount of the Kingsguard, I unhorsed them all. In the last match, I
broke nine lances against Jaime Lannister to no result, and King
Robert gave me the champion’s laurel. I crowned Lynesse queen of
love and beauty, and that very night went to her father and asked
for her hand. I was drunk, as much on glory as on wine. By rights I
should have gotten a contemptuous refusal, but Lord Leyton
accepted my o er. We were married there in Lannisport, and for a
fortnight I was the happiest man in the wide world.”
“Only a fortnight?” asked Dany. Even I was given more happiness
than that, with Drogo who was my sun-and-stars.
“A fortnight was how long it took us to sail from Lannisport back
to Bear Island. My home was a great disappointment to Lynesse. It
was too cold, too damp, too far away, my castle no more than a
wooden longhall. We had no masques, no mummer shows, no balls
or fairs. Seasons might pass without a singer ever coming to play
for us, and there’s not a goldsmith on the island. Even meals
became a trial. My cook knew little beyond his roasts and stews,
and Lynesse soon lost her taste for sh and venison.”
“I lived for her smiles, so I sent all the way to Oldtown for a new
cook, and brought a harper from Lannisport. Goldsmiths, jewelers,
dressmakers, whatever she wanted I found for her, but it was never
enough. Bear Island is rich in bears and trees, and poor in aught

else. I built a ne ship for her and we sailed to Lannisport and
Oldtown for festivals and fairs, and once even to Braavos, where I
borrowed heavily from the moneylenders. It was as a tourney
champion that I had won her hand and heart, so I entered other
tourneys for her sake, but the magic was gone. I never distinguished
myself again, and each defeat meant the loss of another charger and
another suit of jousting armor, which must needs be ransomed or
replaced. The cost could not be borne. Finally I insisted we return
home, but there matters soon grew even worse than before. I could
no longer pay the cook and the harper, and Lynesse grew wild when
I spoke of pawning her jewels.
“The rest … I did things it shames me to speak of. For gold. So
Lynesse might keep her jewels, her harper, and her cook. In the end
it cost me all. When I heard that Eddard Stark was coming to Bear
Island, I was so lost to honor that rather than stay and face his
judgment, I took her with me into exile. Nothing mattered but our
love, I told myself. We ed to Lys, where I sold my ship for gold to
keep us.”
His voice was thick with grief, and Dany was reluctant to press
him any further, yet she had to know how it ended. “Did she die
there?” she asked him gently.
“Only to me,” he said. “In half a year my gold was gone, and I
was obliged to take service as a sellsword. While I was ghting
Braavosi on the Rhoyne, Lynesse moved into the manse of a
merchant prince named Tregar Ormollen. They say she is his chief
concubine now, and even his wife goes in fear of her.”
Dany was horri ed. “Do you hate her?”
“Almost as much as I love her,” Ser Jorah answered. “Pray excuse
me, my queen. I nd I am very tired.”
She gave him leave to go, but as he was lifting the ap of her
tent, she could not stop herself calling after him with one last
question. “What did she look like, your Lady Lynesse?”
Ser Jorah smiled sadly. “Why, she looked a bit like you,
Daenerys.” He bowed low. “Sleep well, my queen.”
Dany shivered, and pulled the lionskin tight about her. She looked
like me. It explained much that she had not truly understood. He

wants me, she realized. He loves me as he loved her, not as a knight
loves his queen but as a man loves a woman. She tried to imagine
herself in Ser Jorah’s arms, kissing him, pleasuring him, letting him
enter her. It was no good. When she closed her eyes, his face kept
changing into Drogo’s.
Khal Drogo had been her sun-and-stars, her rst, and perhaps he
must be her last. The maegi Mirri Maz Duur had sworn she should
never bear a living child, and what man would want a barren wife?
And what man could hope to rival Drogo, who had died with his
hair uncut and rode now through the night lands, the stars his
khalasar?
She had heard the longing in Ser Jorah’s voice when he spoke of
his Bear Island. He can never have me, but one day I can give him back
his home and honor. That much I can do for him.
No ghosts troubled her sleep that night. She dreamed of Drogo
and the rst ride they had taken together on the night they were
wed. In the dream it was not horses they rode, but dragons.
The next morn, she summoned her bloodriders. “Blood of my
blood,” she told the three of them, “I have need of you. Each of you
is to choose three horses, the hardiest and healthiest that remain to
us. Load as much water and food as your mounts can bear, and ride
forth for me. Aggo shall strike southwest, Rakharo due south.
Jhogo, you are to follow shierak qiya on southeast.”
“What shall we seek, Khaleesi?” asked Jhogo.
“Whatever there is,” Dany answered. “Seek for other cities, living
and dead. Seek for caravans and people. Seek for rivers and lakes
and the great salt sea. Find how far this waste extends before us,
and what lies on the other side. When I leave this place, I do not
mean to strike out blind again. I will know where I am bound, and
how best to get there.”
And so they went, the bells in their hair ringing softly, while
Dany settled down with her small band of survivors in the place
they named Vaes Tolorro, the city of bones. Day followed night
followed day. Women harvested fruit from the gardens of the dead.
Men groomed their mounts and mended saddles, stirrups, and shoes.
Children wandered the twisty alleys and found old bronze coins and

bits of purple glass and stone agons with handles carved like
snakes. One woman was stung by a red scorpion, but hers was the
only death. The horses began to put on some esh. Dany tended Ser
Jorah’s wound herself, and it began to heal.
Rakharo was the rst to return. Due south the red waste stretched
on and on, he reported, until it ended on a bleak shore beside the
poison water. Between here and there lay only swirling sand, windscoured rocks, and plants bristly with sharp thorns. He had passed
the bones of a dragon, he swore, so immense that he had ridden his
horse through its great black jaws. Other than that, he had seen
nothing.
Dany gave him charge of a dozen of her strongest men, and set
them to pulling up the plaza to get to the earth beneath. If
devilgrass could grow between the paving stones, other grasses
would grow when the stones were gone. They had wells enough, no
lack of water. Given seed, they could make the plaza bloom.
Aggo was back next. The southwest was barren and burnt, he
swore. He had found the ruins of two more cities, smaller than Vaes
Tolorro but otherwise the same. One was warded by a ring of skulls
mounted on rusted iron spears, so he dared not enter, but he had
explored the second for as long as he could. He showed Dany an
iron bracelet he had found, set with a uncut re opal the size of her
thumb. There were scrolls as well, but they were dry and crumbling
and Aggo had left them where they lay.
Dany thanked him and told him to see to the repair of the gates.
If enemies had crossed the waste to destroy these cities in ancient
days, they might well come again. “If so, we must be ready,” she
declared.
Jhogo was gone so long that Dany feared him lost, but nally
when they had all but ceased to look for him, he came riding up
from the southeast. One of the guards that Aggo had posted saw
him rst and gave a shout, and Dany rushed to the walls to see for
herself. It was true. Jhogo came, yet not alone. Behind him rode
three queerly garbed strangers atop ugly humped creatures that
dwarfed any horse.

They drew rein before the city gates, and looked up to see Dany
on the wall above them. “Blood of my blood,” Jhogo called, “I have
been to the great city Qarth, and returned with three who would
look on you with their own eyes.”
Dany stared down at the strangers. “Here I stand. Look, if that is
your pleasure … but rst tell me your names.”
The pale man with the blue lips replied in guttural Dothraki, “I
am Pyat Pree, the great warlock.”
The bald man with the jewels in his nose answered in the
Valyrian of the Free Cities, “I am Xaro Xhoan Daxos of the Thirteen,
a merchant prince of Qarth.”
The woman in the lacquered wooden mask said in the Common
Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms, “I am Quaithe of the Shadow. We
come seeking dragons.”
“Seek no more,” Daenerys Targaryen told them. “You have found
them.”

JON

Whitetree, the village was named on Sam’s old maps. Jon did not

think it much of a village. Four tumbledown one-room houses of
unmortared stone surrounded an empty sheepfold and a well. The
houses were roofed with sod, the windows shuttered with ragged
pieces of hide. And above them loomed the pale limbs and dark red
leaves of a monstrous great weirwood.
It was the biggest tree Jon Snow had ever seen, the trunk near
eight feet wide, the branches spreading so far that the entire village
was shaded beneath their canopy. The size did not disturb him so
much as the face … the mouth especially, no simple carved slash,
but a jagged hollow large enough to swallow a sheep.
Those are not sheep bones, though. Nor is that a sheep’s skull in the
ashes.
“An old tree.” Mormont sat his horse, frowning. “Old,” his raven
agreed from his shoulder. “Old, old, old.”
“And powerful.” Jon could feel the power.
Thoren Smallwood dismounted beside the trunk, dark in his plate
and mail. “Look at that face. Small wonder men feared them, when
they rst came to Westeros. I’d like to take an axe to the bloody
thing myself.”
Jon said, “My lord father believed no man could tell a lie in front
of a heart tree. The old gods know when men are lying.”
“My father believed the same,” said the Old Bear. “Let me have a
look at that skull.”

Jon dismounted. Slung across his back in a black leather shoulder
sheath was Longclaw, the hand-and-a-half bastard blade the Old
Bear had given him for saving his life. A bastard sword for a bastard,
the men joked. The hilt had been fashioned new for him, adorned
with a wolf’s-head pommel in pale stone, but the blade itself was
Valyrian steel, old and light and deadly sharp.
He knelt and reached a gloved hand down into the maw. The
inside of the hollow was red with dried sap and blackened by re.
Beneath the skull he saw another, smaller, the jaw broken o . It
was half-buried in ash and bits of bone.
When he brought the skull to Mormont, the Old Bear lifted it in
both hands and stared into the empty sockets. “The wildlings burn
their dead. We’ve always known that. Now I wished I’d asked them
why, when there were still a few around to ask.”
Jon Snow remembered the wight rising, its eyes shining blue in
the pale dead face. He knew why, he was certain.
“Would that bones could talk,” the Old Bear grumbled. “This
fellow could tell us much. How he died. Who burned him, and why.
Where the wildlings have gone.” He sighed. “The children of the
forest could speak to the dead, it’s said. But I can’t.” He tossed the
skull back into the mouth of the tree, where it landed with a pu of
ne ash. “Go through all these houses. Giant, get to the top of this
tree, have a look. I’ll have the hounds brought up too. Perchance
this time the trail will be fresher.” His tone did not suggest that he
held out much hope of the last.
Two men went through each house, to make certain nothing was
missed. Jon was paired with dour Eddison Tollett, a squire grey of
hair and thin as a pike, whom the other brothers called Dolorous
Edd. “Bad enough when the dead come walking,” he said to Jon as
they crossed the village, “now the Old Bear wants them talking as
well? No good will come of that, I’ll warrant. And who’s to say the
bones wouldn’t lie? Why should death make a man truthful, or even
clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints—
the ground’s too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he
get more worms than I do …”

Jon had to stoop to pass through the low door. Within he found a
packed dirt oor. There were no furnishings, no sign that people
had lived here but for some ashes beneath the smoke hole in the
roof. “What a dismal place to live,” he said.
“I was born in a house much like this,” declared Dolorous Edd.
“Those were my enchanted years. Later I fell on hard times.” A nest
of dry straw bedding lled one corner of the room. Edd looked at it
with longing. “I’d give all the gold in Casterly Rock to sleep in a
bed again.”
“You call that a bed?”
“If it’s softer than the ground and has a roof over it, I call it a
bed.” Dolorous Edd sni ed the air. “I smell dung.”
The smell was very faint. “Old dung,” said Jon. The house felt as
though it had been empty for some time. Kneeling, he searched
through the straw with his hands to see if anything had been
concealed beneath, then made a round of the walls. It did not take
very long. “There’s nothing here.”
Nothing was what he had expected; Whitetree was the fourth
village they had passed, and it had been the same in all of them.
The people were gone, vanished with their scant possessions and
whatever animals they may have had. None of the villages showed
any signs of having been attacked. They were simply … empty.
“What do you think happened to them all?” Jon asked.
“Something worse than we can imagine,” suggested Dolorous
Edd. “Well, I might be able to imagine it, but I’d sooner not. Bad
enough to know you’re going to come to some awful end without
thinking about it aforetime.”
Two of the hounds were sni ng around the door as they
reemerged. Other dogs ranged through the village. Chett was
cursing them loudly, his voice thick with the anger he never seemed
to put aside. The light ltering through the red leaves of the
weirwood made the boils on his face look even more in amed than
usual. When he saw Jon his eyes narrowed; there was no love lost
between them.
The other houses had yielded no wisdom. “Gone,” cried
Mormont’s raven, apping up into the weirwood to perch above

them. “Gone, gone, gone.”
“There were wildlings at Whitetree only a year ago.” Thoren
Smallwood looked more a lord than Mormont did, clad in Ser
Jaremy Rykker’s gleaming black mail and embossed breastplate. His
heavy cloak was richly trimmed with sable, and clasped with the
crossed hammers of the Rykkers, wrought in silver. Ser Jaremy’s
cloak, once … but the wight had claimed Ser Jaremy, and the
Night’s Watch wasted nothing.
“A year ago Robert was king, and the realm was at peace,”
declared Jarman Buckwell, the square stolid man who commanded
the scouts. “Much can change in a year’s time.”
“One thing hasn’t changed,” Ser Mallador Locke insisted. “Fewer
wildlings means fewer worries. I won’t mourn, whatever’s become
of them. Raiders and murderers, the lot of them.”
Jon heard a rustling from the red leaves above. Two branches
parted, and he glimpsed a little man moving from limb to limb as
easily as a squirrel. Bedwyck stood no more than ve feet tall, but
the grey streaks in his hair showed his age. The other rangers called
him Giant. He sat in a fork of the tree over their heads and said,
“There’s water to the north. A lake, might be. A few int hills rising
to the west, not very high. Nothing else to see, my lords.”
“We might camp here tonight,” Smallwood suggested.
The Old Bear glanced up, searching for a glimpse of sky through
the pale limbs and red leaves of the weirwood. “No,” he declared.
“Giant, how much daylight remains to us?”
“Three hours, my lord.”
“We’ll press on north,” Mormont decided. “If we reach this lake,
we can make camp by the shore, perchance catch a few sh. Jon,
fetch me paper, it’s past time I wrote Maester Aemon.”
Jon found parchment, quill, and ink in his saddlebag and brought
them to the Lord Commander. At Whitetree, Mormont scrawled. The
fourth village. All empty. The wildlings are gone. “Find Tarly and see
that he gets this on its way,” he said as he handed Jon the message.
When he whistled, his raven came apping down to land on his
horse’s head. “Corn,” the raven suggested, bobbing. The horse
whickered.

Jon mounted his garron, wheeled him about, and trotted o .
Beyond the shade of the great weirwood the men of the Night’s
Watch stood beneath lesser trees, tending their horses, chewing
strips of salt beef, pissing, scratching, and talking. When the
command was given to move out again, the talk died, and they
climbed back into their saddles. Jarman Buckwell’s scouts rode out
rst, with the vanguard under Thoren Smallwood heading the
column proper. Then came the Old Bear with the main force, Ser
Mallador Locke with the baggage train and packhorses, and nally
Ser Ottyn Wythers and the rear guard. Two hundred men all told,
with half again as many mounts.
By day they followed game trails and streambeds, the “ranger’s
roads” that led them ever deeper into the wilderness of leaf and
root. At night they camped beneath a starry sky and gazed up at the
comet. The black brothers had left Castle Black in good spirits,
joking and trading tales, but of late the brooding silence of the
wood seemed to have sombered them all. Jests had grown fewer
and tempers shorter. No one would admit to being afraid—they
were men of the Night’s Watch, after all—but Jon could feel the
unease. Four empty villages, no wildlings anywhere, even the game
seemingly ed. The haunted forest had never seemed more haunted,
even veteran rangers agreed.
As he rode, Jon peeled o his glove to air his burned ngers. Ugly
things. He remembered suddenly how he used to muss Arya’s hair.
His little stick of a sister. He wondered how she was faring. It made
him a little sad to think that he might never muss her hair again. He
began to ex his hand, opening and closing the ngers. If he let his
sword hand sti en and grow clumsy, it well might be the end of
him, he knew. A man needed his sword beyond the Wall.
Jon found Samwell Tarly with the other stewards, watering his
horses. He had three to tend: his own mount, and two packhorses,
each bearing a large wire-and-wicker cage full of ravens. The birds
apped their wings at Jon’s approach and screamed at him through
the bars. A few shrieks sounded suspiciously like words. “Have you
been teaching them to talk?” he asked Sam.
“A few words. Three of them can say snow.”

“One bird croaking my name was bad enough,” said Jon, “and
snow’s nothing a black brother wants to hear about.” Snow often
meant death in the north.
“Was there anything in Whitetree?”
“Bones, ashes, and empty houses.” Jon handed Sam the roll of
parchment. “The Old Bear wants word sent back to Aemon.”
Sam took a bird from one of the cages, stroked its feathers,
attached the message, and said, “Fly home now, brave one. Home.”
The raven quorked something unintelligible back at him, and Sam
tossed it into the air. Flapping, it beat its way skyward through the
trees. “I wish he could carry me with him.”
“Still?”
“Well,” said Sam, “yes, but … I’m not as frightened as I was,
truly. The rst night, every time I heard someone getting up to
make water, I thought it was wildlings creeping in to slit my throat.
I was afraid that if I closed my eyes, I might never open them
again, only … well … dawn came after all.” He managed a wan
smile. “I may be craven, but I’m not stupid. I’m sore and my back
aches from riding and from sleeping on the ground, but I’m hardly
scared at all. Look.” He held out a hand for Jon to see how steady it
was. “I’ve been working on my maps.”
The world is strange, Jon thought. Two hundred brave men had left
the Wall, and the only one who was not growing more fearful was
Sam, the self-confessed coward. “We’ll make a ranger of you yet,”
he joked. “Next thing, you’ll want to be an outrider like Grenn.
Shall I speak to the Old Bear?”
“Don’t you dare!” Sam pulled up the hood of his enormous black
cloak and clambered awkwardly back onto his horse. It was a plow
horse, big and slow and clumsy, but better able to bear his weight
than the little garrons the rangers rode. “I had hoped we might stay
the night in the village,” he said wistfully. “It would be nice to sleep
under a roof again.”
“Too few roofs for all of us.” Jon mounted again, gave Sam a
parting smile, and rode o . The column was well under way, so he
swung wide around the village to avoid the worst of the congestion.
He had seen enough of Whitetree.

Ghost emerged from the undergrowth so suddenly that the garron
shied and reared. The white wolf hunted well away from the line of
march, but he was not having much better fortune than the foragers
Smallwood sent out after game. The woods were as empty as the
villages, Dywen had told him one night around the re. “We’re a
large party,” Jon had said. “The game’s probably been frightened
away by all the noise we make on the march.”
“Frightened away by something, no doubt,” Dywen said.
Once the horse had settled, Ghost loped along easily beside him.
Jon caught up to Mormont as he was wending his way around a
hawthorn thicket. “Is the bird away?” the Old Bear asked.
“Yes, my lord. Sam is teaching them to talk.”
The Old Bear snorted. “He’ll regret that. Damned things make a
lot of noise, but they never say a thing worth hearing.”
They rode in silence, until Jon said, “If my uncle found all these
villages empty as well—”
“—he would have made it his purpose to learn why,” Lord
Mormont nished for him, “and it may well be someone or
something did not want that known. Well, we’ll be three hundred
when Qhorin joins us. Whatever enemy waits out here will not nd
us so easy to deal with. We will nd them, Jon, I promise you.”
Or they will nd us, thought Jon.

ARYA

The river was a blue-green ribbon shining in the morning sun.

Reeds grew thick in the shallows along the banks, and Arya saw a
water snake skimming across the surface, ripples spreading out
behind it as it went. Overhead a hawk ew in lazy circles.
It seemed a peaceful place … until Koss spotted the dead man.
“There, in the reeds.” He pointed, and Arya saw it. The body of a
soldier, shapeless and swollen. His sodden green cloak had hung up
on a rotted log, and a school of tiny silver shes were nibbling at
his face. “I told you there was bodies,” Lommy announced. “I could
taste them in that water.”
When Yoren saw the corpse, he spat. “Dobber, see if he’s got
anything worth the taking. Mail, knife, a bit o’ coin, what have
you.” He spurred his gelding and rode out into the river, but the
horse struggled in the soft mud and beyond the reeds the water
deepened. Yoren rode back angry, his horse covered in brown slime
up to the knees. “We won’t be crossing here. Koss, you’ll come with
me upriver, look for a ford. Woth, Gerren, you go downstream. The
rest o’ you wait here. Put a guard out.”
Dobber found a leather purse in the dead man’s belt. Inside were
four coppers and a little hank of blond hair tied up with a red
ribbon. Lommy and Tarber stripped naked and went wading, and
Lommy scooped up handfuls of slimy mud and threw them at Hot
Pie, shouting, “Mud Pie! Mud Pie!” In the back of their wagon,
Rorge cursed and threatened and told them to unchain him while

Yoren was gone, but no one paid him any mind. Kurz caught a sh
with his bare hands. Arya saw how he did it, standing over a
shallow pool, calm as still water, his hand darting out quick as a
snake when the sh swam near. It didn’t look as hard as catching
cats. Fish didn’t have claws.
It was midday when the others returned. Woth reported a
wooden bridge half a mile downstream, but someone had burned it
up. Yoren peeled a sourleaf o the bale. “Might be we could swim
the horses over, maybe the donkeys, but there’s no way we’ll get
those wagons across. And there’s smoke to the north and west, more
res, could be this side o’ the river’s the place we want to be.” He
picked up a long stick and drew a circle in the mud, a line trailing
down from it. “That’s Gods Eye, with the river owing south. We’re
here.” He poked a hole beside the line of the river, under the circle.
“We can’t go round west of the lake, like I thought. East takes us
back to the kingsroad.” He moved the stick up to where the line and
circle met. “Near as I recall, there’s a town here. The holdfast’s
stone, and there’s a lordling got his seat there too, just a
towerhouse, but he’ll have a guard, might be a knight or two. We
follow the river north, should be there before dark. They’ll have
boats, so I mean to sell all we got and hire us one.” He drew the
stick up through the circle of the lake, from bottom to top. “Gods be
good, we’ll
nd a wind and sail across the Gods Eye to
Harrentown.” He thrust the point down at the top of the circle. “We
can buy new mounts there, or else take shelter at Harrenhal. That’s
Lady Whent’s seat, and she’s always been a friend o’ the Watch.”
Hot Pie’s eyes got wide. “There’s ghosts in Harrenhal …”
Yoren spat. “There’s for your ghosts.” He tossed the stick down in
the mud. “Mount up.”
Arya was remembering the stories Old Nan used to tell of
Harrenhal. Evil King Harren had walled himself up inside, so Aegon
unleashed his dragons and turned the castle into a pyre. Nan said
that ery spirits still haunted the blackened towers. Sometimes men
went to sleep safe in their beds and were found dead in the
morning, all burnt up. Arya didn’t really believe that, and anyhow it
had all happened a long time ago. Hot Pie was being silly; it

wouldn’t be ghosts at Harrenhal, it would be knights. Arya could
reveal herself to Lady Whent, and the knights would escort her
home and keep her safe. That was what knights did; they kept you
safe, especially women. Maybe Lady Whent would even help the
crying girl.
The river track was no kingsroad, yet it was not half bad for what
it was, and for once the wagons rolled along smartly. They saw the
rst house an hour shy of evenfall, a snug little thatch-roofed
cottage surrounded by elds of wheat. Yoren rode out ahead,
hallooing, but got no answer. “Dead, might be. Or hiding. Dobber,
Rey, with me.” The three men went into the cottage. “Pots is gone,
no sign o’ any coin laid by,” Yoren muttered when they returned.
“No animals. Run, most like. Might be we met ’em on the
kingsroad.” At least the house and eld had not been burned, and
there were no corpses about. Tarber found a garden out back, and
they pulled some onions and radishes and lled a sack with
cabbages before they went on their way.
A little farther up the road, they glimpsed a forester’s cabin
surrounded by old trees and neatly stacked logs ready for the
splitting, and later a ramshackle stilt-house leaning over the river
on poles ten feet tall, both deserted. They passed more elds, wheat
and corn and barley ripening in the sun, but here there were no men
sitting in trees, nor walking the rows with scythes. Finally the town
came into view; a cluster of white houses spread out around the
walls of the holdfast, a big sept with a shingled wooden roof, the
lord’s towerhouse sitting on a small rise to the west … and no sign
of any people, anywhere.
Yoren sat on his horse, frowning through his tangle of beard.
“Don’t like it,” he said, “but there it is. We’ll go have us a look. A
careful look. See maybe there’s some folk hiding. Might be they left
a boat behind, or some weapons we can use.”
The black brother left ten to guard the wagons and the whimpery
little girl, and split the rest of them into four groups of ve to
search the town. “Keep your eyes and ears open,” he warned them,
before he rode o to the towerhouse to see if there was any sign of
the lordling or his guards.

Arya found herself with Gendry, Hot Pie, and Lommy. Squat,
kettle-bellied Woth had pulled an oar on a galley once, which made
him the next best thing they had to a sailor, so Yoren told him to
take them down to the lakefront and see if they could nd a boat.
As they rode between the silent white houses, gooseprickles crawled
up Arya’s arms. This empty town frightened her almost as much as
the burnt holdfast where they’d found the crying girl and the onearmed woman. Why would people run o and leave their homes
and everything? What could scare them so much?
The sun was low to the west, and the houses cast long dark
shadows. A sudden clap of sound made Arya reach for Needle, but it
was only a shutter banging in the wind. After the open river shore,
the closeness of the town unnerved her.
When she glimpsed the lake ahead between houses and trees,
Arya put her knees into her horse, galloping past Woth and Gendry.
She burst out onto the grassy sward beside the pebbled shore. The
setting sun made the tranquil surface of the water shimmer like a
sheet of beaten copper. It was the biggest lake she had ever seen,
with no hint of a far shore. She saw a rambling inn to her left, built
out over the water on heavy wooden pilings. To her right, a long
pier jutted into the lake, and there were other docks farther east,
wooden ngers reaching out from the town. But the only boat in
view was an upside-down rowboat abandoned on the rocks beneath
the inn, its bottom thoroughly rotted out. “They’re gone,” Arya
said, dejected. What would they do now?
“There’s an inn,” Lommy said, when the others rode up. “Do you
think they left any food? Or ale?”
“Let’s go see,” Hot Pie suggested.
“Never you mind about no inn,” snapped Woth. “Yoren said we’re
to nd a boat.”
“They took the boats.” Somehow Arya knew it was true; they
could search the whole town, and they’d nd no more than the
upside-down rowboat. Despondent, she climbed o her horse and
knelt by the lake. The water lapped softly around her legs. A few
lantern bugs were coming out, their little lights blinking on and o .
The green water was warm as tears, but there was no salt in it. It

tasted of summer and mud and growing things. Arya plunged her
face down into it to wash o the dust and dirt and sweat of the day.
When she leaned back the trickles ran down the back of her neck
and under her collar. They felt good. She wished she could take o
her clothes and swim, gliding through the warm water like a skinny
pink otter. Maybe she could swim all the way to Winterfell.
Woth was shouting at her to help search, so she did, peering into
boathouses and sheds while her horse grazed along the shore. They
found some sails, some nails, buckets of tar gone hard, and a
mother cat with a litter of newborn kittens. But no boats.
The town was as dark as any forest when Yoren and the others
reappeared. “Tower’s empty,” he said. “Lord’s gone o to ght
maybe, or to get his smallfolk to safety, no telling. Not a horse or
pig left in town, but we’ll eat. Saw a goose running loose, and some
chickens, and there’s good sh in the Gods Eye.”
“The boats are gone,” Arya reported.
“We could patch the bottom of that rowboat,” said Koss.
“Might do for four o’ us,” Yoren said.
“There’s nails,” Lommy pointed out. “And there’s trees all around.
We could build us all boats.”
Yoren spat. “You know anything ’bout boat-building, dyer’s boy?”
Lommy looked blank.
“A raft,” suggested Gendry. “Anyone can build a raft, and long
poles for pushing.”
Yoren looked thoughtful. “Lake’s too deep to pole across, but if
we stayed to the shallows near shore … it’d mean leaving the
wagons. Might be that’s best. I’ll sleep on it.”
“Can we stay at the inn?” Lommy asked.
“We’ll stay in the holdfast, with the gates barred,” the old man
said. “I like the feel o’ stone walls about me when I sleep.”
Arya could not keep quiet. “We shouldn’t stay here,” she blurted.
“The people didn’t. They all ran o , even their lord.”
“Arry’s scared,” Lommy announced, braying laughter.
“I’m not,” she snapped back, “but they were.”
“Smart boy,” said Yoren. “Thing is, the folks who lived here were
at war, like it or no. We’re not. Night’s Watch takes no part, so no

man’s our enemy.”
And no man’s our friend, she thought, but this time she held her
tongue. Lommy and the rest were looking at her, and she did not
want to seem craven in front of them.
The holdfast gates were studded with iron nails. Within, they
found a pair of iron bars the size of saplings, with post holes in the
ground and metal brackets on the gate. When they slotted the bars
through the brackets, they made a huge X brace. It was no Red
Keep, Yoren announced when they’d explored the holdfast top to
bottom, but it was better than most, and should do for a night well
enough. The walls were rough unmortared stone ten feet high, with
a wooden catwalk inside the battlements. There was a postern gate
to the north, and Gerren discovered a trap under the straw in the
old wooden barn, leading to a narrow, winding tunnel. He followed
it a long way under the earth and came out by the lake. Yoren had
them roll a wagon on top of the trap, to make certain no one came
in that way. He divided them into three watches, and sent Tarber,
Kurz, and Cutjack o to the abandoned towerhouse to keep an eye
out from on high. Kurz had a hunting horn to sound if danger
threatened.
They drove their wagons and animals inside and barred the gates
behind them. The barn was a ramshackle thing, large enough to
hold half the animals in the town. The haven, where the townfolk
would shelter in times of trouble, was even larger, low and long
and built of stone, with a thatched roof. Koss went out the postern
gate and brought the goose back, and two chickens as well, and
Yoren allowed a cook re. There was a big kitchen inside the
holdfast, though all the pots and kettles had been taken. Gendry,
Dobber, and Arya drew cook duty. Dobber told Arya to pluck the
fowl while Gendry split wood. “Why can’t I split the wood?” she
asked, but no one listened. Sullenly, she set to plucking a chicken
while Yoren sat on the end of the bench sharpening the edge of his
dirk with a whetstone.
When the food was ready, Arya ate a chicken leg and a bit of
onion. No one talked much, not even Lommy. Gendry went o by
himself afterward, polishing his helm with a look on his face like he

wasn’t even there. The crying girl whimpered and wept, but when
Hot Pie o ered her a bit of goose she gobbled it down and looked
for more.
Arya drew second watch, so she found a straw pallet in the haven.
Sleep did not come easy, so she borrowed Yoren’s stone and set to
honing Needle. Syrio Forel had said that a dull blade was like a
lame horse. Hot Pie squatted on the pallet beside her, watching her
work. “Where’d you get a good sword like that?” he asked. When
he saw the look she gave him, he raised his hands defensively. “I
never said you stole it, I just wanted to know where you got it, is
all.”
“My brother gave it to me,” she muttered.
“I never knew you had no brother.”
Arya paused to scratch under her shirt. There were eas in the
straw, though she couldn’t see why a few more would bother her. “I
have lots of brothers.”
“You do? Are they bigger than you, or littler?”
I shouldn’t be talking like this. Yoren said I should keep my mouth
shut. “Bigger,” she lied. “They have swords too, big longswords, and
they showed me how to kill people who bother me.”
“I was talking, not bothering.” Hot Pie went o and let her alone
and Arya curled up on her pallet. She could hear the crying girl
from the far side of the haven. I wish she’d just be quiet. Why does she
have to cry all the time?
She must have slept, though she never remembered closing her
eyes. She dreamed a wolf was howling, and the sound was so
terrible that it woke her at once. Arya sat up on her pallet with her
heart thumping. “Hot Pie, wake up.” She scrambled to her feet.
“Woth, Gendry, didn’t you hear?” She pulled on a boot.
All around her, men and boys stirred and crawled from their
pallets. “What’s wrong?” Hot Pie asked. “Hear what?” Gendry
wanted to know. “Arry had a bad dream,” someone else said.
“No, I heard it,” she insisted. “A wolf.”
“Arry has wolves in his head,” sneered Lommy. “Let them howl,”
Gerren said, “they’re out there, we’re in here.” Woth agreed. “Never

saw no wolf could storm a holdfast.” Hot Pie was saying, “I never
heard nothing.”
“It was a wolf,” she shouted at them as she yanked on her second
boot. “Something’s wrong, someone’s coming, get up!”
Before they could hoot her down again, the sound came
shuddering through the night—only it was no wolf this time, it was
Kurz blowing his hunting horn, sounding danger. In a heartbeat, all
of them were pulling on clothes and snatching for whatever
weapons they owned. Arya ran for the gate as the horn sounded
again. As she dashed past the barn, Biter threw himself furiously
against his chains, and Jaqen H’ghar called out from the back of
their wagon. “Boy! Sweet boy! Is it war, red war? Boy, free us. A
man can ght. Boy!” She ignored him and plunged on. By then she
could hear horses and shouts beyond the wall.
She scrambled up onto the catwalk. The parapets were a bit too
high and Arya a bit too short; she had to wedge her toes into the
holes between the stones to see over. For a moment she thought the
town was full of lantern bugs. Then she realized they were men
with torches, galloping between the houses. She saw a roof go up,
ames licking at the belly of the night with hot orange tongues as
the thatch caught. Another followed, and then another, and soon
there were res blazing everywhere.
Gendry climbed up beside her, wearing his helm. “How many?”
Arya tried to count, but they were riding too fast, torches
spinning through the air as they ung them. “A hundred,” she said.
“Two hundred, I don’t know.” Over the roar of the ames, she could
hear shouts. “They’ll come for us soon.”
“There,” Gendry said, pointing.
A column of riders moved between the burning buildings toward
the holdfast. Firelight glittered o metal helms and spattered their
mail and plate with orange and yellow highlights. One carried a
banner on a tall lance. She thought it was red, but it was hard to tell
in the night, with the res roaring all around. Everything seemed
red or black or orange.
The re leapt from one house to another. Arya saw a tree
consumed, the ames creeping across its branches until it stood

against the night in robes of living orange. Everyone was awake
now, manning the catwalks or struggling with the frightened
animals below. She could hear Yoren shouting commands.
Something bumped against her leg, and she glanced down to
discover the crying girl clutching her. “Get away!” She wrenched
her leg free. “What are you doing up here? Run and hide someplace,
you stupid.” She shoved the girl away.
The riders reined up before the gates. “You in the holdfast!”
shouted a knight in a tall helm with a spiked crest. “Open, in the
name of the king!”
“Aye, and which king is that?” old Reysen yelled back down,
before Woth cu ed him into silence.
Yoren climbed the battlement beside the gate, his faded black
cloak tied to a wooden sta . “You men hold down here!” he shouted.
“The townfolk’s gone.”
“And who are you, old man? One of Lord Beric’s cravens?” called
the knight in the spiked helm. “If that fat fool Thoros is in there,
ask him how he likes these res.”
“Got no such man here,” Yoren shouted back. “Only some lads for
the Watch. Got no part o’ your war.” He hoisted up the sta , so
they could all see the color of his cloak. “Have a look. That’s black,
for the Night’s Watch.”
“Or black for House Dondarrion,” called the man who bore the
enemy banner. Arya could see its colors more clearly now in the
light of the burning town: a golden lion on red. “Lord Beric’s sigil is
a purple lightning bolt on a black eld.”
Suddenly Arya remembered the morning she had thrown the
orange in Sansa’s face and gotten juice all over her stupid ivory silk
gown. There had been some southron lordling at the tourney, her
sister’s stupid friend Jeyne was in love with him. He had a lightning
bolt on his shield and her father had sent him out to behead the
Hound’s brother. It seemed a thousand years ago now, something
that had happened to a di erent person in a di erent life … to Arya
Stark the Hand’s daughter, not Arry the orphan boy. How would
Arry know lords and such?

“Are you blind, man?” Yoren waved his sta back and forth,
making the cloak ripple. “You see a bloody lightning bolt?”
“By night all banners look black,” the knight in the spiked helm
observed. “Open, or we’ll know you for outlaws in league with the
king’s enemies.”
Yoren spat. “Who’s got your command?”
“I do.” The re ections of burning houses glimmered dully on the
armor of his warhorse as the others parted to let him pass. He was a
stout man with a manticore on his shield, and ornate scrollwork
crawling across his steel breastplate. Through the open visor of his
helm, a face pale and piggy peered up. “Ser Amory Lorch,
bannerman to Lord Tywin Lannister of Casterly Rock, the Hand of
the King. The true king, Jo rey.” He had a high, thin voice. “In his
name, I command you to open these gates.”
All around them, the town burned. The night air was full of
smoke, and the drifting red embers outnumbered the stars. Yoren
scowled. “Don’t see the need. Do what you want to the town, it’s
naught to me, but leave us be. We’re no foes to you.”
Look with your eyes, Arya wanted to shout at the men below.
“Can’t they see we’re no lords or knights?” she whispered.
“I don’t think they care, Arry,” Gendry whispered back.
And she looked at Ser Amory’s face, the way Syrio had taught her
to look, and she saw that he was right.
“If you are no traitors, open your gates,” Ser Amory called. “We’ll
make certain you’re telling it true and be on our way.”
Yoren was chewing sourleaf. “Told you, no one here but us. You
got my word on that.”
The knight in the spiked helm laughed. “The crow gives us his
word.”
“You lost, old man?” mocked one of the spearmen. “The Wall’s a
long way north o’ here.”
“I command you once more, in King Jo rey’s name, to prove the
loyalty you profess and open these gates,” said Ser Amory.
For a long moment Yoren considered, chewing. Then he spat.
“Don’t think I will.”

“So be it. You defy the king’s command, and so proclaim
yourselves rebels, black cloaks or no.”
“Got me young boys in here,” Yoren shouted down.
“Young boys and old men die the same.” Ser Amory raised a
lanquid st, and a spear came hurtling from the re-bright shadows
behind. Yoren must have been the target, but it was Woth beside
him who was hit. The spearhead went in his throat and exploded
out the back of his neck, dark and wet. Woth grabbed at the shaft,
and fell boneless from the walk.
“Storm the walls and kill them all,” Ser Amory said in a bored
voice. More spears ew. Arya yanked down Hot Pie by the back of
his tunic. From outside came the rattle of armor, the scrape of
swords on scabbards, the banging of spears on shields, mingled with
curses and the hoofbeats of racing horses. A torch sailed spinning
above their heads, trailing ngers of re as it thumped down in the
dirt of the yard.
“Blades!” Yoren shouted. “Spread apart, defend the wall wherever
they hit. Koss, Urreg, hold the postern. Lommy, pull that spear out
of Woth and get up where he was.”
Hot Pie dropped his shortsword when he tried to unsheath it.
Arya shoved the blade back into his hand. “I don’t know how to
sword ght,” he said, white-eyed.
“It’s easy,” Arya said, but the lie died in her throat as a hand
grasped the top of the parapet. She saw it by the light of the
burning town, so clear that it was as if time had stopped. The
ngers were blunt, callused, wiry black hairs grew between the
knuckles, there was dirt under the nail of the thumb. Fear cuts
deeper than swords, she remembered as the top of a pothelm loomed
up behind the hand.
She slashed down hard, and Needle’s castle-forged steel bit into
the grasping
ngers between the knuckles. “Winterfell!” she
screamed. Blood spurted, ngers ew, and the helmed face vanished
as suddenly as it had appeared. “Behind!” Hot Pie yelled. Arya
whirled. The second man was bearded and helmetless, his dirk
between his teeth to leave both hands free for climbing. As he
swung his leg over the parapet, she drove her point at his eyes.

Needle never touched him; he reeled backward and fell. I hope he
falls on his face and cuts o his tongue. “Watch them, not me!” she
screamed at Hot Pie. The next time someone tried to climb their
part of the wall, the boy hacked at his hands with his shortsword
until the man dropped away.
Ser Amory had no ladders, but the holdfast walls were rough-cut
and unmortared, easy to climb, and there seemed to be no end to
the foes. For each one Arya cut or stabbed or shoved back, another
was coming over the wall. The knight in the spiked helm reached
the rampart, but Yoren tangled his black banner around his spike,
and forced the point of his dirk through his armor while the man
was ghting the cloth. Every time Arya looked up, more torches
were ying, trailing long tongues of ame that lingered behind her
eyes. She saw a gold lion on a red banner and thought of Jo rey,
wishing he was here so she could drive Needle through his sneery
face. When four men assaulted the gate with axes, Koss shot them
down with arrows, one by one. Dobber wrestled a man o the walk,
and Lommy smashed his head with a rock before he could rise, and
hooted until he saw the knife in Dobber’s belly and realized he
wouldn’t be getting up either. Arya jumped over a dead boy no
older than Jon, lying with his arm cut o . She didn’t think she’d
done it, but she wasn’t sure. She heard Qyle beg for mercy before a
knight with a wasp on his shield smashed his face in with a spiked
mace. Everything smelled of blood and smoke and iron and piss, but
after a time it seemed like that was only one smell. She never saw
how the skinny man got over the wall, but when he did she fell on
him with Gendry and Hot Pie. Gendry’s sword shattered on the
man’s helm, tearing it o his head. Underneath he was bald and
scared-looking, with missing teeth and a speckly grey beard, but
even as she was feeling sorry for him she was killing him, shouting,
“Winterfell! Winterfell!” while Hot Pie screamed “Hot Pie!” beside her
as he hacked at the man’s scrawny neck.
When the skinny man was dead, Gendry stole his sword and leapt
down into the yard to ght some more. Arya looked past him, and
saw steel shadows running through the holdfast, relight shining o
mail and blades, and she knew that they’d gotten over the wall

somewhere, or broken through at the postern. She jumped down
beside Gendry, landing the way Syrio had taught her. The night
rang to the clash of steel and the cries of the wounded and dying.
For a moment Arya stood uncertain, not knowing which way to go.
Death was all around her.
And then Yoren was there, shaking her, screaming in her face.
“Boy!” he yelled, the way he always yelled it. “Get out, it’s done,
we’ve lost. Herd up all you can, you and him and the others, the
boys, you get them out. Now!”
“How?” Arya said.
“That trap,” he screamed. “Under the barn.”
Quick as that he was gone, o to ght, sword in hand. Arya
grabbed Gendry by the arm. “He said go,” she shouted, “the barn,
the way out.” Through the slits of his helm, the Bull’s eyes shone
with re ected re. He nodded. They called Hot Pie down from the
wall and found Lommy Greenhands where he lay bleeding from a
spear thrust through his calf. They found Gerren too, but he was
hurt too bad to move. As they were running toward the barn, Arya
spied the crying girl sitting in the middle of the chaos, surrounded
by smoke and slaughter. She grabbed her by the hand and pulled
her to her feet as the others raced ahead. The girl wouldn’t walk,
even when slapped. Arya dragged her with her right hand while she
held Needle in the left. Ahead, the night was a sullen red. The barn’s
on re, she thought. Flames were licking up its sides from where a
torch had fallen on straw, and she could hear the screaming of the
animals trapped within. Hot Pie stepped out of the barn. “Arry,
come on! Lommy’s gone, leave her if she won’t come!”
Stubbornly, Arya dragged all the harder, pulling the crying girl
along. Hot Pie scuttled back inside, abandoning them … but Gendry
came back, the re shining so bright on his polished helm that the
horns seemed to glow orange. He ran to them, and hoisted the
crying girl up over his shoulder. “Run!”
Rushing through the barn doors was like running into a furnace.
The air was swirling with smoke, the back wall a sheet of re
ground to roof. Their horses and donkeys were kicking and rearing
and screaming. The poor animals, Arya thought. Then she saw the

wagon, and the three men manacled to its bed. Biter was inging
himself against the chains, blood running down his arms from
where the irons clasped his wrists. Rorge screamed curses, kicking
at the wood. “Boy!” called Jaqen H’ghar. “Sweet boy!”
The open trap was only a few feet ahead, but the re was
spreading fast, consuming the old wood and dry straw faster than
she would have believed. Arya remembered the Hound’s horrible
burned face. “Tunnel’s narrow,” Gendry shouted. “How do we get
her through?”
“Pull her,” Arya said. “Push her.”
“Good boys, kind boys,” called Jaqen H’ghar, coughing.
“Get these fucking chains o !” Rorge screamed.
Gendry ignored them. “You go rst, then her, then me. Hurry, it’s
a long way.”
“When you split the rewood,” Arya remembered, “where did
you leave the axe?”
“Out by the haven.” He spared a glance for the chained men. “I’d
save the donkeys rst. There’s no time.”
“You take her!” she yelled. “You get her out! You do it!” The re
beat at her back with hot red wings as she ed the burning barn. It
felt blessedly cool outside, but men were dying all around her. She
saw Koss throw down his blade to yield, and she saw them kill him
where he stood. Smoke was everywhere. There was no sign of
Yoren, but the axe was where Gendry had left it, by the woodpile
outside the haven. As she wrenched it free, a mailed hand grabbed
her arm. Spinning, Arya drove the head of the axe hard between his
legs. She never saw his face, only the dark blood seeping between
the links of his hauberk. Going back into that barn was the hardest
thing she ever did. Smoke was pouring out the open door like a
writhing black snake, and she could hear the screams of the poor
animals inside, donkeys and horses and men. She chewed her lip,
and darted through the doors, crouched low where the smoke
wasn’t quite so thick.
A donkey was caught in a ring of re, shrieking in terror and
pain. She could smell the stench of burning hair. The roof was gone
up too, and things were falling down, pieces of aming wood and

bits of straw and hay. Arya put a hand over her mouth and nose.
She couldn’t see the wagon for the smoke, but she could still hear
Biter screaming. She crawled toward the sound.
And then a wheel was looming over her. The wagon jumped and
moved a half foot when Biter threw himself against his chains
again. Jaqen saw her, but it was too hard to breathe, let alone talk.
She threw the axe into the wagon. Rorge caught it and lifted it over
his head, rivers of sooty sweat pouring down his noseless face. Arya
was running, coughing. She heard the steel crash through the old
wood, and again, again. An instant later came a crack as loud as
thunder, and the bottom of the wagon came ripping loose in an
explosion of splinters.
Arya rolled head rst into the tunnel and dropped ve feet. She
got dirt in her mouth but she didn’t care, the taste was ne, the
taste was mud and water and worms and life. Under the earth the
air was cool and dark. Above was nothing but blood and roaring red
and choking smoke and the screams of dying horses. She moved her
belt around so Needle would not be in her way, and began to crawl.
A dozen feet down the tunnel she heard the sound, like the roar of
some monstrous beast, and a cloud of hot smoke and black dust
came billowing up behind her, smelling of hell. Arya held her
breath and kissed the mud on the oor of the tunnel and cried. For
whom, she could not say.

TYRION

The queen was not disposed to wait on Varys. “Treason is vile

enough,” she declared furiously, “but this is barefaced naked
villainy, and I do not need that mincing eunuch to tell me what
must be done with villains.”
Tyrion took the letters from his sister’s hand and compared them
side by side. There were two copies, the words exactly alike, though
they had been written by di erent hands.
“Maester Frenken received the
rst missive at Castle
Stokeworth,” Grand Maester Pycelle explained. “The second copy
came through Lord Gyles.”
Little nger ngered his beard. “If Stannis bothered with them, it’s
past certain every other lord in the Seven Kingdoms saw a copy as
well.”
“I want these letters burned, every one,” Cersei declared. “No
hint of this must reach my son’s ears, or my father’s.”
“I imagine Father’s heard rather more than a hint by now,”
Tyrion said dryly. “Doubtless Stannis sent a bird to Casterly Rock,
and another to Harrenhal. As for burning the letters, to what point?
The song is sung, the wine is spilled, the wench is pregnant. And
this is not as dire as it seems, in truth.”
Cersei turned on him in green-eyed fury. “Are you utterly
witless? Did you read what he says? The boy Jo rey, he calls him.
And he dares to accuse me of incest, adultery, and treason!”

Only because you’re guilty. It was astonishing to see how angry
Cersei could wax over accusations she knew perfectly well to be
true. If we lose the war, she ought to take up mummery, she has a gift
for it. Tyrion waited until she was done and said, “Stannis must have
some pretext to justify his rebellion. What did you expect him to
write? ‘Jo rey is my brother’s trueborn son and heir, but I mean to
take his throne for all that’?”
“I will not su er to be called a whore!”
Why, sister, he never claims Jaime paid you. Tyrion made a show of
glancing over the writing again. There had been some niggling
phrase … “Done in the Light of the Lord,” he read. “A queer choice
of words, that.”
Pycelle cleared his throat. “These words often appear in letters
and documents from the Free Cities. They mean no more than, let
us say, written in the sight of god. The god of the red priests. It is
their usage, I do believe.”
“Varys told us some years past that Lady Selyse had taken up with
a red priest,” Little nger reminded them.
Tyrion tapped the paper. “And now it would seem her lord
husband has done the same. We can use that against him. Urge the
High Septon to reveal how Stannis has turned against the gods as
well as his rightful king …”
“Yes, yes,” the queen said impatiently, “but rst we must stop
this lth from spreading further. The council must issue an edict.
Any man heard speaking of incest or calling Jo a bastard should
lose his tongue for it.”
“A prudent measure,” said Grand Maester Pycelle, his chain of
o ce clinking as he nodded.
“A folly,” sighed Tyrion. “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you
are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you
fear what he might say.”
“So what would you have us do?” his sister demanded.
“Very little. Let them whisper, they’ll grow bored with the tale
soon enough. Any man with a thimble of sense will see it for a
clumsy attempt to justify usurping the crown. Does Stannis o er

proof? How could he, when it never happened?” Tyrion gave his
sister his sweetest smile.
“That’s so,” she had to say. “Still …”
“Your Grace, your brother has the right of this.” Petyr Baelish
steepled his ngers. “If we attempt to silence this talk, we only lend
it credence. Better to treat it with contempt, like the pathetic lie it
is. And meantime, ght re with re.”
Cersei gave him a measuring look. “What sort of re?”
“A tale of somewhat the same nature, perhaps. But more easily
believed. Lord Stannis has spent most of his marriage apart from his
wife. Not that I fault him, I’d do the same were I married to Lady
Selyse. Nonetheless, if we put it about that her daughter is baseborn
and Stannis a cuckold, well … the smallfolk are always eager to
believe the worst of their lords, particularly those as stern, sour,
and prickly proud as Stannis Baratheon.”
“He has never been much loved, that’s true.” Cersei considered a
moment. “So we pay him back in his own coin. Yes, I like this. Who
can we name as Lady Selyse’s lover? She has two brothers, I
believe. And one of her uncles has been with her on Dragonstone all
this time …”
“Ser Axell Florent is her castellan.” Loath as Tyrion was to admit
it, Little nger’s scheme had promise. Stannis had never been
enamored of his wife, but he was bristly as a hedgehog where his
honor was concerned and mistrustful by nature. If they could sow
discord between him and his followers, it could only help their
cause. “The child has the Florent ears, I’m told.”
Little nger gestured languidly. “A trade envoy from Lys once
observed to me that Lord Stannis must love his daughter very well,
since he’d erected hundreds of statues of her all along the walls of
Dragonstone. ‘My lord,’ I had to tell him, ‘those are gargoyles.’ ” He
chuckled. “Ser Axell might serve for Shireen’s father, but in my
experience, the more bizarre and shocking a tale the more apt it is
to be repeated. Stannis keeps an especially grotesque fool, a lackwit
with a tattooed face.”
Grand Maester Pycelle gaped at him, aghast. “Surely you do not
mean to suggest that Lady Selyse would bring a fool into her bed?”

“You’d have to be a fool to want to bed Selyse Florent,” said
Little nger. “Doubtless Patchface reminded her of Stannis. And the
best lies contain within them nuggets of truth, enough to give a
listener pause. As it happens, this fool is utterly devoted to the girl
and follows her everywhere. They even look somewhat alike.
Shireen has a mottled, half-frozen face as well.”
Pycelle was lost. “But that is from the greyscale that near killed
her as a babe, poor thing.”
“I like my tale better,” said Little nger, “and so will the
smallfolk. Most of them believe that if a woman eats rabbit while
pregnant, her child will be born with long oppy ears.”
Cersei smiled the sort of smile she customarily reserved for
Jaime. “Lord Petyr, you are a wicked creature.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“And a most accomplished liar,” Tyrion added, less warmly. This
one is more dangerous than I knew, he re ected.
Little nger’s grey-green eyes met the dwarf’s mismatched stare
with no hint of unease. “We all have our gifts, my lord.”
The queen was too caught up in her revenge to take note of the
exchange. “Cuckolded by a halfwit fool! Stannis will be laughed at
in every winesink this side of the narrow sea.”
“The story should not come from us,” Tyrion said, “or it will be
seen for a self-serving lie.” Which it is, to be sure.
Once more Little nger supplied the answer. “Whores love to
gossip, and as it happens I own a brothel or three. And no doubt
Varys can plant seeds in the alehouses and pot-shops.”
“Varys,” Cersei said, frowning. “Where is Varys?”
“I have been wondering about that myself, Your Grace.”
“The Spider spins his secret webs day and night,” Grand Maester
Pycelle said ominously. “I mistrust that one, my lords.”
“And he speaks so kindly of you.” Tyrion pushed himself o his
chair. As it happened, he knew what the eunuch was about, but it
was nothing the other councillors needed to hear. “Pray excuse me,
my lords. Other business calls.”
Cersei was instantly suspicious. “King’s business?”
“Nothing you need trouble yourself about.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Would you spoil my surprise?” Tyrion said. “I’m having a gift
made for Jo rey. A little chain.”
“What does he need with another chain? He has gold chains and
silver, more than he can wear. If you think for a moment you can
buy Jo ’s love with gifts—”
“Why, surely I have the king’s love, as he has mine. And this chain
I believe he may one day treasure above all others.” The little man
bowed and waddled to the door.
Bronn was waiting outside the council chambers to escort him
back to the Tower of the Hand. “The smiths are in your audience
chamber, waiting your pleasure,” he said as they crossed the ward.
“Waiting my pleasure. I like the ring of that, Bronn. You almost
sound a proper courtier. Next you’ll be kneeling.”
“Fuck you, dwarf.”
“That’s Shae’s task.” Tyrion heard Lady Tanda calling to him
merrily from the top of the serpentine steps. Pretending not to
notice her, he waddled a bit faster. “See that my litter is readied, I’ll
be leaving the castle as soon as I’m done here.” Two of the Moon
Brothers had the door guard. Tyrion greeted them pleasantly, and
grimaced before starting up the stairs. The climb to his bedchamber
made his legs ache.
Within he found a boy of twelve laying out clothing on the bed;
his squire, such that he was. Podrick Payne was so shy he was
furtive. Tyrion had never quite gotten over the suspicion that his
father had in icted the boy on him as a joke.
“Your garb, my lord,” the boy mumbled when Tyrion entered,
staring down at his boots. Even when he worked up the courage to
speak, Pod could never quite manage to look at you. “For the
audience. And your chain. The Hand’s chain.”
“Very good. Help me dress.” The doublet was black velvet
covered with golden studs in the shape of lions’ heads, the chain a
loop of solid gold hands, the ngers of each clasping the wrist of
the next. Pod brought him a cloak of crimson silk fringed in gold,
cut to his height. On a normal man, it would be no more than a half
cape.

The Hand’s private audience chamber was not so large as the
king’s, nor a patch on the vastness of the throne room, but Tyrion
liked its Myrish rugs, wall hangings, and sense of intimacy. As he
entered, his steward cried out, “Tyrion Lannister, Hand of the
King.” He liked that too. The gaggle of smiths, armorers, and
ironmongers that Bronn had collected fell to their knees.
He hoisted himself up into the high seat under the round golden
window and bid them rise. “Goodmen, I know you are all busy, so I
will be succinct. Pod, if you please.” The boy handed him a canvas
sack. Tyrion yanked the drawstring and upended the bag. Its
contents spilled onto the rug with a mu ed thunk of metal on wool.
“I had these made at the castle forge. I want a thousand more just
like them.”
One of the smiths knelt to inspect the object: three immense steel
links, twisted together. “A mighty chain.”
“Mighty, but short,” the dwarf replied. “Somewhat like me. I
fancy one a good deal longer. Do you have a name?”
“They call me Ironbelly, m’lord.” The smith was squat and broad,
plainly dressed in wool and leather, but his arms were as thick as a
bull’s neck.
“I want every forge in King’s Landing turned to making these
links and joining them. All other work is to be put aside. I want
every man who knows the art of working metal set to this task, be
he master, journeyman, or apprentice. When I ride up the Street of
Steel, I want to hear hammers ringing, night or day. And I want a
man, a strong man, to see that all this is done. Are you that man,
Goodman Ironbelly?”
“Might be I am, m’lord. But what of the mail and swords the
queen was wanting?”
Another smith spoke up. “Her Grace commanded us to make
chainmail and armor, swords and daggers and axes, all in great
numbers. For arming her new gold cloaks, m’lord.”
“That work can wait,” Tyrion said. “The chain rst.”
“M’lord, begging your pardon, Her Grace said those as didn’t
meet their numbers would have their hands crushed,” the anxious
smith persisted. “Smashed on their own anvils, she said.”

Sweet Cersei, always striving to make the smallfolk love us. “No one
will have their hands smashed. You have my word on it.”
“Iron is grown dear,” Ironbelly declared, “and this chain will be
needing much of it, and coke beside, for the res.”
“Lord Baelish will see that you have coin as you need it,” Tyrion
promised. He could count on Little nger for that much, he hoped. “I
will command the City Watch to help you nd iron. Melt down
every horseshoe in this city if you must.”
An older man moved forward, richly dressed in a damask tunic
with silver fastenings and a cloak lined with foxfur. He knelt to
examine the great steel links Tyrion had dumped on the oor. “My
lord,” he announced gravely, “this is crude work at best. There is no
art to it. Suitable labor for common smiths, no doubt, for men who
bend horseshoes and hammer out kettles, but I am a master
armorer, as it please my lord. This is no work for me, nor my fellow
masters. We make swords as sharp as song, armor such as a god
might wear. Not this.”
Tyrion tilted his head to the side and gave the man a dose of his
mismatched eyes. “What is your name, master armorer?”
“Salloreon, as it please my lord. If the King’s Hand will permit, I
should be most honored to forge him a suit of armor suitable to his
House and high o ce.” Two of the others sniggered, but Salloreon
plunged ahead, heedless. “Plate and scale, I think. The scales gilded
bright as the sun, the plate enameled a deep Lannister crimson. I
would suggest a demon’s head for a helm, crowned with tall golden
horns. When you ride into battle, men will shrink away in fear.”
A demon’s head, Tyrion thought ruefully, now what does that say of
me? “Master Salloreon, I plan to ght the rest of my battles from
this chair. It’s links I need, not demon horns. So let me put it to you
this way. You will make chains, or you will wear them. The choice
is yours.” He rose, and took his leave with nary a backward glance.
Bronn was waiting by the gate with his litter and an escort of
mounted Black Ears. “You know where we’re bound,” Tyrion told
him. He accepted a hand up into the litter. He had done all he could
to feed the hungry city—he’d set several hundred carpenters to
building shing boats in place of catapults, opened the kingswood

to any hunter who dared to cross the river, even sent gold cloaks
foraging to the west and south—yet he still saw accusing eyes
everywhere he rode. The litter’s curtains shielded him from that,
and besides gave him leisure to think.
As they wound their slow way down twisty Shadowblack Lane to
the foot of Aegon’s High Hill, Tyrion re ected on the events of the
morning. His sister’s ire had led her to overlook the true
signi cance of Stannis Baratheon’s letter. Without proof, his
accusations were nothing; what mattered was that he had named
himself a king. And what will Renly make of that? They could not both
sit the Iron Throne.
Idly, he pushed the curtain back a few inches to peer out at the
streets. Black Ears rode on both sides of him, their grisly necklaces
looped about their throats, while Bronn went in front to clear the
way. He watched the passersby watching him, and played a little
game with himself, trying to sort the informers from the rest. The
ones who look the most suspicious are likely innocent, he decided. It’s
the ones who look innocent I need to beware.
His destination was behind the hill of Rhaenys, and the streets
were crowded. Almost an hour had passed before the litter swayed
to a stop. Tyrion was dozing, but he woke abruptly when the
motion ceased, rubbed the sand from his eyes, and accepted Bronn’s
hand to climb down.
The house was two stories tall, stone below and timber above. A
round turret rose from one corner of the structure. Many of the
windows were leaded. Over the door swung an ornate lamp, a globe
of gilded metal and scarlet glass.
“A brothel,” Bronn said. “What do you mean to do here?”
“What does one usually do in a brothel?”
The sellsword laughed. “Shae’s not enough?”
“She was pretty enough for a camp follower, but I’m no longer in
camp. Little men have big appetites, and I’m told the girls here are
t for a king.”
“Is the boy old enough?”
“Not Jo rey. Robert. This house was a great favorite of his.”
Although Jo rey may indeed be old enough. An interesting notion, that.

“If you and the Black Ears care to amuse yourselves, feel free, but
Chataya’s girls are costly. You’ll nd cheaper houses all along the
street. Leave one man here who’ll know where to nd the others
when I wish to return.”
Bronn nodded. “As you say.” The Black Ears were all grins.
Inside the door, a tall woman in owing silks was waiting for
him. She had ebon skin and sandalwood eyes. “I am Chataya,” she
announced, bowing deeply. “And you are—”
“Let us not get into the habit of names. Names are dangerous.”
The air smelled of some exotic spice, and the oor beneath his feet
displayed a mosaic of two women entwined in love. “You have a
pleasant establishment.”
“I have labored long to make it so. I am glad the Hand is
pleased.” Her voice was owing amber, liquid with the accents of
the distant Summer Isles.
“Titles can be as dangerous as names,” Tyrion warned. “Show me
a few of your girls.”
“It will be my great delight. You will nd that they are all as
sweet as they are beautiful, and skilled in every art of love.” She
swept o gracefully, leaving Tyrion to waddle after as best he could
on legs half the length of hers.
From behind an ornate Myrish screen carved with owers and
fancies and dreaming maidens, they peered unseen into a common
room where an old man was playing a cheerful air on the pipes. In a
cushioned alcove, a drunken Tyroshi with a purple beard dandled a
buxom young wench on his knee. He’d unlaced her bodice and was
tilting his cup to pour a thin trickle of wine over her breasts so he
might lap it o . Two other girls sat playing at tiles before a leaded
glass window. The freckled one wore a chain of blue owers in her
honeyed hair. The other had skin as smooth and black as polished
jet, wide dark eyes, small pointed breasts. They dressed in owing
silks cinched at the waist with beaded belts. The sunlight pouring
through the colored glass outlined their sweet young bodies through
the thin cloth, and Tyrion felt a stirring in his groin. “I would
respectfully suggest the dark-skinned girl,” said Chataya.
“She’s young.”

“She has sixteen years, my lord.”
A good age for Jo rey, he thought, remembering what Bronn had
said. His rst had been even younger. Tyrion remembered how shy
she’d seemed as he drew her dress up over her head the rst time.
Long dark hair and blue eyes you could drown in, and he had. So
long ago … What a wretched fool you are, dwarf. “Does she come
from your home lands, this girl?”
“Her blood is the blood of summer, my lord, but my daughter
was born here in King’s Landing.” His surprise must have shown on
his face, for Chataya continued, “My people hold that there is no
shame to be found in the pillow house. In the Summer Isles, those
who are skilled at giving pleasure are greatly esteemed. Many
highborn youths and maidens serve for a few years after their
owerings, to honor the gods.”
“What do the gods have to do with it?”
“The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They
give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us
hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so
we might mate and worship them in that way.”
“Remind me to tell the High Septon,” said Tyrion. “If I could pray
with my cock, I’d be much more religious.” He waved a hand. “I
will gladly accept your suggestion.”
“I shall summon my daughter. Come.”
The girl met him at the foot of the stairs. Taller than Shae, though
not so tall as her mother, she had to kneel before Tyrion could kiss
her. “My name is Alayaya,” she said, with only the slightest hint of
her mother’s accent. “Come, my lord.” She took him by the hand
and drew him up two ights of stairs, then down a long hall. Gasps
and shrieks of pleasure were coming from behind one of the closed
doors, giggles and whispers from another. Tyrion’s cock pressed
against the lacings of his breeches. This could be humiliating, he
thought as he followed Alayaya up another stair to the turret room.
There was only one door. She led him through and closed it. Within
the room was a great canopied bed, a tall wardrobe decorated with
erotic carvings, and a narrow window of leaded glass in a pattern of
red and yellow diamonds.

“You are very beautiful, Alayaya,” Tyrion told her when they
were alone. “From head to heels, every part of you is lovely. Yet
just now the part that interests me most is your tongue.”
“My lord will nd my tongue well schooled. When I was a girl I
learned when to use it, and when not.”
“That pleases me.” Tyrion smiled. “So what shall we do now?
Perchance you have some suggestion?”
“Yes,” she said. “If my lord will open the wardrobe, he will nd
what he seeks.”
Tyrion kissed her hand, and climbed inside the empty wardrobe.
Alayaya closed it after him. He groped for the back panel, felt it
slide under his ngers, and pushed it all the way aside. The hollow
space behind the walls was pitch-black, but he fumbled until he felt
metal. His hand closed around the rung of a ladder. He found a
lower rung with his foot, and started down. Well below street level,
the shaft opened onto a slanting earthen tunnel, where he found
Varys waiting with candle in hand.
Varys did not look at all like himself. A scarred face and a stubble
of dark beard showed under his spiked steel cap, and he wore mail
over boiled leather, dirk and shortsword at his belt. “Was Chataya’s
to your satisfaction, my lord?”
“Almost too much so,” admitted Tyrion. “You’re certain this
woman can be relied on?”
“I am certain of nothing in this ckle and treacherous world, my
lord. Chataya has no cause to love the queen, though, and she
knows that she has you to thank for ridding her of Allar Deem. Shall
we go?” He started down the tunnel.
Even his walk is di erent, Tyrion observed. The scent of sour wine
and garlic clung to Varys instead of lavender. “I like this new garb
of yours,” he o ered as they went.
“The work I do does not permit me to travel the streets amid a
column of knights. So when I leave the castle, I adopt more suitable
guises, and thus live to serve you longer.”
“Leather becomes you. You ought to come like this to our next
council session.”
“Your sister would not approve, my lord.”

“My sister would soil her smallclothes.” He smiled in the dark. “I
saw no signs of any of her spies skulking after me.”
“I am pleased to hear it, my lord. Some of your sister’s hirelings
are mine as well, unbeknownst to her. I should hate to think they
had grown so sloppy as to be seen.”
“Well, I’d hate to think I was climbing through wardrobes and
su ering the pangs of frustrated lust all for naught.”
“Scarcely for naught,” Varys assured him. “They know you are
here. Whether any will be bold enough to enter Chataya’s in the
guise of patrons I cannot say, but I nd it best to err on the side of
caution.”
“How is it a brothel happens to have a secret entrance?”
“The tunnel was dug for another King’s Hand, whose honor would
not allow him to enter such a house openly. Chataya has closely
guarded the knowledge of its existence.”
“And yet you knew of it.”
“Little birds y through many a dark tunnel. Careful, the steps
are steep.”
They emerged through a trap at the back of a stable, having come
perhaps a distance of three blocks under Rhaenys’s Hill. A horse
whickered in his stall when Tyrion let the door slam shut. Varys
blew out the candle and set it on a beam and Tyrion gazed about. A
mule and three horses occupied the stalls. He waddled over to the
piebald gelding and took a look at his teeth. “Old,” he said, “and I
have my doubts about his wind.”
“He is not a mount to carry you into battle, true,” Varys replied,
“but he will serve, and attract no notice. As will the others. And the
stableboys see and hear only the animals.” The eunuch took a cloak
from a peg. It was roughspun, sun-faded, and threadbare, but very
ample in its cut. “If you will permit me.” When he swept it over
Tyrion’s shoulders it enveloped him head to heel, with a cowl that
could be pulled forward to drown his face in shadows. “Men see
what they expect to see,” Varys said as he fussed and pulled.
“Dwarfs are not so common a sight as children, so a child is what
they will see. A boy in an old cloak on his father’s horse, going

about his father’s business. Though it would be best if you came
most often by night.”
“I plan to … after today. At the moment, though, Shae awaits
me.” He had put her up in a walled manse at the far northeast
corner of King’s Landing, not far from the sea, but he had not dared
visit her there for fear of being followed.
“Which horse will you have?”
Tyrion shrugged. “This one will do well enough.”
“I shall saddle him for you.” Varys took tack and saddle down
from a peg.
Tyrion adjusted the heavy cloak and paced restlessly. “You missed
a lively council. Stannis has crowned himself, it seems.”
“I know.”
“He accuses my brother and sister of incest. I wonder how he
came by that suspicion.”
“Perhaps he read a book and looked at the color of a bastard’s
hair, as Ned Stark did, and Jon Arryn before him. Or perhaps
someone whispered it in his ear.” The eunuch’s laugh was not his
usual giggle, but deeper and more throaty.
“Someone like you, perchance?”
“Am I suspected? It was not me.”
“If it had been, would you admit it?”
“No. But why should I betray a secret I have kept so long? It is
one thing to deceive a king, and quite another to hide from the
cricket in the rushes and the little bird in the chimney. Besides, the
bastards were there for all to see.”
“Robert’s bastards? What of them?”
“He fathered eight, to the best of my knowing,” Varys said as he
wrestled with the saddle. “Their mothers were copper and honey,
chestnut and butter, yet the babes were all black as ravens … and as
ill-omened, it would seem. So when Jo rey, Myrcella, and Tommen
slid out between your sister’s thighs, each as golden as the sun, the
truth was not hard to glimpse.”
Tyrion shook his head. If she had borne only one child for her
husband, it would have been enough to disarm suspicion … but then she

would not have been Cersei. “If you were not this whisperer, who
was?”
“Some traitor, doubtless.” Varys tightened the cinch.
“Little nger?”
“I named no name.”
Tyrion let the eunuch help him mount. “Lord Varys,” he said from
the saddle, “sometimes I feel as though you are the best friend I
have in King’s Landing, and sometimes I feel you are my worst
enemy.”
“How odd. I think quite the same of you.”

BRAN

Long before the

rst pale ngers of light pried apart Bran’s
shutters, his eyes were open.
There were guests in Winterfell, visitors come for the harvest
feast. This morning they would be tilting at quintains in the yard.
Once that prospect would have lled him with excitement, but that
was before.
Not now. The Walders would break lances with the squires of
Lord Manderly’s escort, but Bran would have no part of it. He must
play the prince in his father’s solar. “Listen, and it may be that you
will learn something of what lordship is all about,” Maester Luwin
had said.
Bran had never asked to be a prince. It was knighthood he had
always dreamed of; bright armor and streaming banners, lance and
sword, a warhorse between his legs. Why must he waste his days
listening to old men speak of things he only half understood?
Because you’re broken, a voice inside reminded him. A lord on his
cushioned chair might be crippled—the Walders said their
grandfather was so feeble he had to be carried everywhere in a
litter—but not a knight on his destrier. Besides, it was his duty.
“You are your brother’s heir and the Stark in Winterfell,” Ser Rodrik
said, reminding him of how Robb used to sit with their lord father
when his bannermen came to see him.
Lord Wyman Manderly had arrived from White Harbor two days
past, traveling by barge and litter, as he was too fat to sit a horse.

With him had come a long tail of retainers: knights, squires, lesser
lords and ladies, heralds, musicians, even a juggler, all aglitter with
banners and surcoats in what seemed half a hundred colors. Bran
had welcomed them to Winterfell from his father’s high stone seat
with the direwolves carved into the arms, and afterward Ser Rodrik
had said he’d done well. If that had been the end of it, he would not
have minded. But it was only the beginning.
“The feast makes a pleasant pretext,” Ser Rodrik explained, “but a
man does not cross a hundred leagues for a sliver of duck and a sip
of wine. Only those who have matters of import to set before us are
like to make the journey.”
Bran gazed up at the rough stone ceiling above his head. Robb
would tell him not to play the boy, he knew. He could almost hear
him, and their lord father as well. Winter is coming, and you are
almost a man grown, Bran. You have a duty.
When Hodor came bustling in, smiling and humming tunelessly,
he found the boy resigned to his fate. Together they got him
washed and brushed. “The white wool doublet today,” Bran
commanded. “And the silver brooch. Ser Rodrik will want me to
look lordly.” As much as he could, Bran preferred to dress himself,
but there were some tasks—pulling on breeches, lacing his boots—
that vexed him. They went quicker with Hodor’s help. Once he had
been taught to do something, he did it deftly. His hands were
always gentle, though his strength was astonishing. “You could have
been a knight too, I bet,” Bran told him. “If the gods hadn’t taken
your wits, you would have been a great knight.”
“Hodor?” Hodor blinked at him with guileless brown eyes, eyes
innocent of understanding.
“Yes,” said Bran. “Hodor.” He pointed.
On the wall beside the door hung a basket, stoutly made of
wicker and leather, with holes cut for Bran’s legs. Hodor slid his
arms through the straps and cinched the wide belt tight around his
chest, then knelt beside the bed. Bran used the bars sunk into the
wall to support himself as he swung the dead weight of his legs into
the basket and through the holes.

“Hodor,” Hodor said again, rising. The stableboy stood near seven
feet tall all by himself; on his back Bran’s head almost brushed the
ceiling. He ducked low as they passed through the door. One time
Hodor smelled bread baking and ran to the kitchens, and Bran got
such a crack that Maester Luwin had to sew up his scalp. Mikken
had given him a rusty old visorless helm from the armory, but Bran
seldom troubled to wear it. The Walders laughed whenever they
saw it on his head.
He rested his hands on Hodor’s shoulders as they descended the
winding stair. Outside, the sounds of sword and shield and horse
already rang through the yard. It made a sweet music. I’ll just have a
look, Bran thought, a quick look, that’s all.
The White Harbor lordlings would emerge later in the morning,
with their knights and men-at-arms. Until then, the yard belonged
to their squires, who ranged in age from ten to forty. Bran wished
he were one of them so badly that his stomach hurt with the
wanting.
Two quintains had been erected in the courtyard, each a stout
post supporting a spinning crossbeam with a shield at one end and a
padded butt at the other. The shields had been painted red-and-gold,
though the Lannister lions were lumpy and misshapen, and already
well scarred by the rst boys to take a tilt at them.
The sight of Bran in his basket drew stares from those who had
not seen it before, but he had learned to ignore stares. At least he
had a good view; on Hodor’s back, he towered over everyone. The
Walders were mounting up, he saw. They’d brought ne armor up
from the Twins, shining silver plate with enameled blue chasings.
Big Walder’s crest was shaped like a castle, while Little Walder
favored streamers of blue and grey silk. Their shields and surcoats
also set them apart from each other. Little Walder quartered the
twin towers of Frey with the brindled boar of his grandmother’s
House and the plowman of his mother’s: Crakehall and Darry,
respectively. Big Walder’s quarterings were the tree-and-ravens of
House Blackwood and the twining snakes of the Paeges. They must
be hungry for honor, Bran thought as he watched them take up their
lances. A Stark needs only the direwolf.

Their dappled grey coursers were swift, strong, and beautifully
trained. Side by side they charged the quintains. Both hit the shields
cleanly and were well past before the padded butts came spinning
around. Little Walder struck the harder blow, but Bran thought Big
Walder sat his horse better. He would have given both his useless
legs for the chance to ride against either.
Little Walder cast his splintered lance aside, spied Bran, and
reined up. “Now there’s an ugly horse,” he said of Hodor.
“Hodor’s no horse,” Bran said.
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
Big Walder trotted up to join his cousin. “Well, he’s not as smart
as a horse, that’s for certain.” A few of the White Harbor lads poked
each other and laughed.
“Hodor.” Beaming genially, Hodor looked from one Frey to the
other, oblivious to their taunting. “Hodor hodor?”
Little Walder’s mount whickered. “See, they’re talking to each
other. Maybe hodor means ‘I love you’ in horse.”
“You shut up, Frey.” Bran could feel his color rising.
Little Walder spurred his horse closer, giving Hodor a bump that
pushed him backward. “What will you do if I don’t?”
“He’ll set his wolf on you, cousin,” warned Big Walder.
“Let him. I always wanted a wolfskin cloak.”
“Summer would tear your fat head o ,” Bran said.
Little Walder banged a mailed st against his breastplate. “Does
your wolf have steel teeth, to bite through plate and mail?”
“Enough!” Maester Luwin’s voice cracked through the clangor of
the yard as loud as a thunderclap. How much he had overheard,
Bran could not say … but it was enough to anger him, clearly.
“These threats are unseemly, and I’ll hear no more of them. Is this
how you behave at the Twins, Walder Frey?”
“If I want to.” Atop his courser, Little Walder gave Luwin a sullen
glare, as if to say, You are only a maester, who are you to reproach a
Frey of the Crossing?
“Well, it is not how Lady Stark’s wards ought behave at
Winterfell. What’s at the root of this?” The maester looked at each
boy in turn. “One of you will tell me, I swear, or—”

“We were having a jape with Hodor,” confessed Big Walder. “I
am sorry if we o ended Prince Bran. We only meant to be
amusing.” He at least had the grace to look abashed.
Little Walder only looked peevish. “And me,” he said. “I was only
being amusing too.”
The bald spot atop the maester’s head had turned red, Bran could
see; if anything, Luwin was more angry than before. “A good lord
comforts and protects the weak and helpless,” he told the Freys. “I
will not have you making Hodor the butt of cruel jests, do you hear
me? He’s a good-hearted lad, dutiful and obedient, which is more
than I can say for either of you.” The maester wagged a nger at
Little Walder. “And you will stay out of the godswood and away
from those wolves, or answer for it.” Sleeves apping, he turned on
his heels, stalked o a few paces, and glanced back. “Bran. Come.
Lord Wyman awaits.”
“Hodor, go with the maester,” Bran commanded.
“Hodor,” said Hodor. His long strides caught up with the
maester’s furiously pumping legs on the steps of the Great Keep.
Maester Luwin held the door open, and Bran hugged Hodor’s neck
and ducked as they went through.
“The Walders—” he began.
“I’ll hear no more of that, it’s done.” Maester Luwin looked wornout and frayed. “You were right to defend Hodor, but you should
never have been there. Ser Rodrik and Lord Wyman have broken
their fast already while they waited for you. Must I come myself to
fetch you, as if you were a little child?”
“No,” Bran said, ashamed. “I’m sorry. I only wanted …”
“I know what you wanted,” Maester Luwin said, more gently.
“Would that it could be, Bran. Do you have any questions before we
begin this audience?”
“Will we talk of the war?”
“You will talk of naught.” The sharpness was back in Luwin’s
voice. “You are still a child of eight …”
“Almost nine!”
“Eight,” the maester repeated
rmly. “Speak nothing but
courtesies unless Ser Rodrik or Lord Wyman puts you a question.”

Bran nodded. “I’ll remember.”
“I will say nothing to Ser Rodrik of what passed between you and
the Frey boys.”
“Thank you.”
They put Bran in his father’s oak chair with the grey velvet
cushions, behind a long plank-and-trestle table. Ser Rodrik sat on his
right hand and Maester Luwin to his left, armed with quills and
inkpots and a sheaf of blank parchment to write down all that
transpired. Bran ran a hand across the rough wood of the table and
begged Lord Wyman’s pardons for being late.
“Why, no prince is ever late,” the Lord of White Harbor
responded amiably. “Those who arrive before him have come early,
that’s all.” Wyman Manderly had a great booming laugh. It was
small wonder he could not sit a saddle; he looked as if he
outweighed most horses. As windy as he was vast, he began by
asking Winterfell to con rm the new customs o cers he had
appointed for White Harbor. The old ones had been holding back
silver for King’s Landing rather than paying it over to the new King
in the North. “King Robb needs his own coinage as well,” he
declared, “and White Harbor is the very place to mint it.” He
o ered to take charge of the matter, as it please the king, and went
from that to speak of how he had strengthened the port’s defenses,
detailing the cost of every improvement.
In addition to a mint, Lord Manderly also proposed to build Robb
a war eet. “We have had no strength at sea for hundreds of years,
since Brandon the Burner put the torch to his father’s ships. Grant
me the gold and within the year I will oat you su cient galleys to
take Dragonstone and King’s Landing both.”
Bran’s interest pricked up at talk of warships. No one asked him,
but he thought Lord Wyman’s notion a splendid one. In his mind’s
eye he could see them already. He wondered if a cripple had ever
commanded a warship. But Ser Rodrik promised only to send the
proposal on to Robb for his consideration, while Maester Luwin
scratched at the parchment.
Midday came and went. Maester Luwin sent Poxy Tym down to
the kitchens, and they dined in the solar on cheese, capons, and

brown oatbread. While tearing apart a bird with fat ngers, Lord
Wyman made polite inquiry after Lady Hornwood, who was a
cousin of his. “She was born a Manderly, you know. Perhaps, when
her grief has run its course, she would like to be a Manderly again,
eh?” He took a bite from a wing, and smiled broadly. “As it
happens, I am a widower these past eight years. Past time I took
another wife, don’t you agree, my lords? A man does get lonely.”
Tossing the bones aside, he reached for a leg. “Or if the lady fancies
a younger lad, well, my son Wendel is unwed as well. He is o
south guarding Lady Catelyn, but no doubt he will wish to take a
bride on his return. A valiant boy, and jolly. Just the man to teach
her to laugh again, eh?” He wiped a bit of grease o his chin with
the sleeve of his tunic.
Bran could hear the distant clash of arms through the windows.
He cared nothing about marriages. I wish I was down in the yard.
His lordship waited until the table had been cleared before he
raised the matter of a letter he had received from Lord Tywin
Lannister, who held his elder son, Ser Wylis, taken captive on the
Green Fork. “He o ers him back to me without ransom, provided I
withdraw my levies from His Grace and vow to ght no more.”
“You will refuse him, of course,” said Ser Rodrik.
“Have no fear on that count,” the lord assured them. “King Robb
has no more loyal servant than Wyman Manderly. I would be loath
to see my son languish at Harrenhal any longer than he must,
however. That is an ill place. Cursed, they say. Not that I am the
sort to swallow such tales, but still, there it is. Look at what’s
befallen this Janos Slynt. Raised up to Lord of Harrenhal by the
queen, and cast down by her brother. Shipped o to the Wall, they
say. I pray some equitable exchange of captives can be arranged
before too very long. I know Wylis would not want to sit out the
rest of the war. Gallant, that son of mine, and erce as a masti .”
Bran’s shoulders were sti from sitting in the same chair by the
time the audience drew to a close. And that night, as he sat to
supper, a horn sounded to herald the arrival of another guest. Lady
Donella Hornwood brought no tail of knights and retainers; only
herself, and six tired men-at-arms with a moosehead badge on their

dusty orange livery. “We are very sorry for all you have su ered,
my lady,” Bran said when she came before him to speak her words
of greetings. Lord Hornwood had been killed in the battle on the
Green Fork, their only son cut down in the Whispering Wood.
“Winterfell will remember.”
“That is good to know.” She was a pale husk of a woman, every
line of her face etched with grief. “I am very weary, my lord. If I
might have leave to rest, I should be thankful.”
“To be sure,” Ser Rodrik said. “There is time enough for talk on
the morrow.”
When the morrow came, most of the morning was given over to
talk of grains and greens and salting meat. Once the maesters in
their Citadel had proclaimed the rst of autumn, wise men put
away a portion of each harvest … though how large a portion was a
matter that seemed to require much talk. Lady Hornwood was
storing a fth of her harvest. At Maester Luwin’s suggestion, she
vowed to increase that to a quarter.
“Bolton’s bastard is massing men at the Dreadfort,” she warned
them. “I hope he means to take them south to join his father at the
Twins, but when I sent to ask his intent, he told me that no Bolton
would be questioned by a woman. As if he were trueborn and had a
right to that name.”
“Lord Bolton has never acknowledged the boy, so far as I know,”
Ser Rodrik said. “I confess, I do not know him.”
“Few do,” she replied. “He lived with his mother until two years
past, when young Domeric died and left Bolton without an heir.
That was when he brought his bastard to the Dreadfort. The boy is a
sly creature by all accounts, and he has a servant who is almost as
cruel as he is. Reek, they call the man. It’s said he never bathes.
They hunt together, the Bastard and this Reek, and not for deer. I’ve
heard tales, things I can scarce believe, even of a Bolton. And now
that my lord husband and my sweet son have gone to the gods, the
Bastard looks at my lands hungrily.”
Bran wanted to give the lady a hundred men to defend her rights,
but Ser Rodrik only said, “He may look, but should he do more I
promise you there will be dire retribution. You will be safe enough,

my lady … though perhaps in time, when your grief is passed, you
may nd it prudent to wed again.”
“I am past my childbearing years, what beauty I had long ed,”
she replied with a tired half smile, “yet men come sni ng after me
as they never did when I was a maid.”
“You do not look favorably on these suitors?” asked Luwin.
“I shall wed again if His Grace commands it,” Lady Hornwood
replied, “but Mors Crowfood is a drunken brute, and older than my
father. As for my noble cousin of Manderly, my lord’s bed is not
large enough to hold one of his majesty, and I am surely too small
and frail to lie beneath him.”
Bran knew that men slept on top of women when they shared a
bed. Sleeping under Lord Manderly would be like sleeping under a
fallen horse, he imagined. Ser Rodrik gave the widow a sympathetic
nod. “You will have other suitors, my lady. We shall try and nd
you a prospect more to your taste.”
“Perhaps you need not look very far, ser.”
After she had taken her leave, Maester Luwin smiled. “Ser Rodrik,
I do believe my lady fancies you.”
Ser Rodrik cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable.
“She was very sad,” said Bran.
Ser Rodrik nodded. “Sad and gentle, and not at all uncomely for a
woman of her years, for all her modesty. Yet a danger to the peace
of your brother’s realm nonetheless.”
“Her?” Bran said, astonished.
Maester Luwin answered. “With no direct heir, there are sure to
be many claimants contending for the Hornwood lands. The
Tallharts, Flints, and Karstarks all have ties to House Hornwood
through the female line, and the Glovers are fostering Lord Harys’s
bastard at Deepwood Motte. The Dreadfort has no claim that I
know, but the lands adjoin, and Roose Bolton is not one to overlook
such a chance.”
Ser Rodrik tugged at his whiskers. “In such cases, her liege lord
must nd her a suitable match.”
“Why can’t you marry her?” Bran asked. “You said she was
comely, and Beth would have a mother.”

The old knight put a hand on Bran’s arm. “A kindly thought, my
prince, but I am only a knight, and besides too old. I might hold her
lands for a few years, but as soon as I died Lady Hornwood would
nd herself back in the same mire, and Beth’s prospects might be
perilous as well.”
“Then let Lord Hornwood’s bastard be the heir,” Bran said,
thinking of his half brother Jon.
Ser Rodrik said, “That would please the Glovers, and perhaps
Lord Hornwood’s shade as well, but I do not think Lady Hornwood
would love us. The boy is not of her blood.”
“Still,” said Maester Luwin, “it must be considered. Lady Donella
is past her fertile years, as she said herself. If not the bastard,
who?”
“May I be excused?” Bran could hear the squires at their
swordplay in the yard below, the ring of steel on steel.
“As you will, my prince,” said Ser Rodrik. “You did well.” Bran
ushed with pleasure. Being a lord was not so tedious as he had
feared, and since Lady Hornwood had been so much briefer than
Lord Manderly, he even had a few hours of daylight left to visit
with Summer. He liked to spend time with his wolf every day, when
Ser Rodrik and the maester allowed it.
No sooner had Hodor entered the godswood than Summer
emerged from under an oak, almost as if he had known they were
coming. Bran glimpsed a lean black shape watching from the
undergrowth as well. “Shaggy,” he called. “Here, Shaggydog. To
me.” But Rickon’s wolf vanished as swiftly as he’d appeared.
Hodor knew Bran’s favorite place, so he took him to the edge of
the pool beneath the great spread of the heart tree, where Lord
Eddard used to kneel to pray. Ripples were running across the
surface of the water when they arrived, making the re ection of the
weirwood shimmer and dance. There was no wind, though. For an
instant Bran was ba ed.
And then Osha exploded up out of the pool with a great splash, so
sudden that even Summer leapt back, snarling. Hodor jumped away,
wailing “Hodor, Hodor” in dismay until Bran patted his shoulder to

soothe his fears. “How can you swim in there?” he asked Osha.
“Isn’t it cold?”
“As a babe I suckled on icicles, boy. I like the cold.” Osha swam
to the rocks and rose dripping. She was naked, her skin bumpy with
gooseprickles. Summer crept close and sni ed at her. “I wanted to
touch the bottom.”
“I never knew there was a bottom.”
“Might be there isn’t.” She grinned. “What are you staring at,
boy? Never seen a woman before?”
“I have so.” Bran had bathed with his sisters hundreds of times
and he’d seen serving women in the hot pools too. Osha looked
di erent, though, hard and sharp instead of soft and curvy. Her legs
were all sinew, her breasts at as two empty purses. “You’ve got a
lot of scars.”
“Every one hard earned.” She picked up her brown shift, shook
some leaves o of it, and pulled it down over her head.
“Fighting giants?” Osha claimed there were still giants beyond
the Wall. One day maybe I’ll even see one …
“Fighting men.” She belted herself with a length of rope. “Black
crows, oft as not. Killed me one too,” she said, shaking out her hair.
It had grown since she’d come to Winterfell, well down past her
ears. She looked softer than the woman who had once tried to rob
and kill him in the wolfswood. “Heard some yattering in the kitchen
today about you and them Freys.”
“Who? What did they say?”
She gave him a sour grin. “That it’s a fool boy who mocks a giant,
and a mad world when a cripple has to defend him.”
“Hodor never knew they were mocking him,” Bran said. “Anyhow
he never ghts.” He remembered once when he was little, going to
the market square with his mother and Septa Mordane. They
brought Hodor to carry for them, but he had wandered away, and
when they found him some boys had him backed into an alley,
poking him with sticks. “Hodor!” he kept shouting, cringing and
covering himself, but he had never raised a hand against his
tormentors. “Septon Chayle says he has a gentle spirit.”

“Aye,” she said, “and hands strong enough to twist a man’s head
o his shoulders, if he takes a mind to. All the same, he better
watch his back around that Walder. Him and you both. The big one
they call little, it comes to me he’s well named. Big outside, little
inside, and mean down to the bones.”
“He’d never dare hurt me. He’s scared of Summer, no matter
what he says.”
“Then might be he’s not so stupid as he seems.” Osha was always
wary around the direwolves. The day she was taken, Summer and
Grey Wind between them had torn three wildlings to bloody pieces.
“Or might be he is. And that tastes of trouble too.” She tied up her
hair. “You have more of them wolf dreams?”
“No.” He did not like to talk about the dreams.
“A prince should lie better than that.” Osha laughed. “Well, your
dreams are your business. Mine’s in the kitchens, and I’d best be
getting back before Gage starts to shouting and waving that big
wooden spoon of his. By your leave, my prince.”
She should never have talked about the wolf dreams, Bran thought as
Hodor carried him up the steps to his bedchamber. He fought
against sleep as long as he could, but in the end it took him as it
always did. On this night he dreamed of the weirwood. It was
looking at him with its deep red eyes, calling to him with its twisted
wooden mouth, and from its pale branches the three-eyed crow
came apping, pecking at his face and crying his name in a voice as
sharp as swords.
The blast of horns woke him. Bran pushed himself onto his side,
grateful for the reprieve. He heard horses and boisterous shouting.
More guests have come, and half-drunk by the noise of them. Grasping
his bars he pulled himself from the bed and over to the window
seat. On their banner was a giant in shattered chains that told him
that these were Umber men, down from the northlands beyond the
Last River.
The next day two of them came together to audience; the
Greatjon’s uncles, blustery men in the winter of their days with
beards as white as the bearskin cloaks they wore. A crow had once
taken Mors for dead and pecked out his eye, so he wore a chunk of

dragonglass in its stead. As Old Nan told the tale, he’d grabbed the
crow in his st and bitten its head o , so they named him
Crowfood. She would never tell Bran why his gaunt brother Hother
was called Whoresbane.
No sooner had they been seated than Mors asked for leave to wed
Lady Hornwood. “The Greatjon’s the Young Wolf’s strong right
hand, all know that to be true. Who better to protect the widow’s
lands than an Umber, and what Umber better than me?”
“Lady Donella is still grieving,” Maester Luwin said.
“I have a cure for grief under my furs.” Mors laughed. Ser Rodrik
thanked him courteously and promised to bring the matter before
the lady and the king.
Hother wanted ships. “There’s wildlings stealing down from the
north, more than I’ve ever seen before. They cross the Bay of Seals
in little boats and wash up on our shores. The crows in Eastwatch
are too few to stop them, and they go to ground quick as weasels.
It’s longships we need, aye, and strong men to sail them. The
Greatjon took too many. Half our harvest is gone to seed for want
of arms to swing the scythes.”
Ser Rodrik pulled at his whiskers. “You have forests of tall pine
and old oak. Lord Manderly has shipwrights and sailors in plenty.
Together you ought to be able to oat enough longships to guard
both your coasts.”
“Manderly?” Mors Umber snorted. “That great waddling sack of
suet? His own people mock him as Lord Lamprey, I’ve heard. The
man can scarce walk. If you stuck a sword in his belly, ten thousand
eels would wriggle out.”
“He is fat,” Ser Rodrik admitted, “but he is not stupid. You will
work with him, or the king will know the reason why.” And to
Bran’s astonishment, the truculent Umbers agreed to do as he
commanded, though not without grumbling.
While they were sitting at audience, the Glover men arrived from
Deepwood Motte, and a large party of Tallharts from Torrhen’s
Square. Galbart and Robett Glover had left Deepwood in the hands
of Robett’s wife, but it was their steward who came to Winterfell.
“My lady begs that you excuse her absence. Her babes are still too

young for such a journey, and she was loath to leave them.” Bran
soon realized that it was the steward, not Lady Glover, who truly
ruled at Deepwood Motte. The man allowed that he was at present
setting aside only a tenth of his harvest. A hedge wizard had told
him there would be a bountiful spirit summer before the cold set in,
he claimed. Maester Luwin had a number of choice things to say
about hedge wizards. Ser Rodrik commanded the man to set aside a
fth, and questioned the steward closely about Lord Hornwood’s
bastard, the boy Larence Snow. In the north, all highborn bastards
took the surname Snow. This lad was near twelve, and the steward
praised his wits and courage.
“Your notion about the bastard may have merit, Bran,” Maester
Luwin said after. “One day you will be a good lord for Winterfell, I
think.”
“No I won’t.” Bran knew he would never be a lord, no more than
he could be a knight. “Robb’s to marry some Frey girl, you told me
so yourself, and the Walders say the same. He’ll have sons, and
they’ll be the lords of Winterfell after him, not me.”
“It may be so, Bran,” Ser Rodrik said, “but I was wed three times
and my wives gave me daughters. Now only Beth remains to me.
My brother Martyn fathered four strong sons, yet only Jory lived to
be a man. When he was slain, Martyn’s line died with him. When
we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.”
Leobald Tallhart had his turn the following day. He spoke of
weather portents and the slack wits of smallfolk, and told how his
nephew itched for battle. “Benfred has raised his own company of
lances. Boys, none older than nineteen years, but every one thinks
he’s another young wolf. When I told them they were only young
rabbits, they laughed at me. Now they call themselves the Wild
Hares and gallop about the country with rabbitskins tied to the ends
of their lances, singing songs of chivalry.”
Bran thought that sounded grand. He remembered Benfred
Tallhart, a big blu loud boy who had often visited Winterfell with
his father, Ser Helman, and had been friendly with Robb and with
Theon Greyjoy. But Ser Rodrik was clearly displeased by what he
heard. “If the king were in need of more men, he would send for

them,” he said. “Instruct your nephew that he is to remain at
Torrhen’s Square, as his lord father commanded.”
“I will, ser,” said Leobald, and only then raised the matter of
Lady Hornwood. Poor thing, with no husband to defend her lands
nor son to inherit. His own lady wife was a Hornwood, sister to the
late Lord Halys, doubtless they recalled. “An empty hall is a sad
one. I had a thought to send my younger son to Lady Donella to
foster as her own. Beren is near ten, a likely lad, and her own
nephew. He would cheer her, I am certain, and perhaps he would
even take the name Hornwood …”
“If he were named heir?” suggested Maester Luwin.
“… so the House might continue,” nished Leobald.
Bran knew what to say. “Thank you for the notion, my lord,” he
blurted out before Ser Rodrik could speak. “We will bring the
matter to my brother Robb. Oh, and Lady Hornwood.”
Leobald seemed surprised that he had spoken. “I’m grateful, my
prince,” he said, but Bran saw pity in his pale blue eyes, mingled
perhaps with a little gladness that the cripple was, after all, not his
son. For a moment he hated the man.
Maester Luwin liked him better, though. “Beren Tallhart may
well be our best answer,” he told them when Leobald had gone. “By
blood he is half Hornwood. If he takes his uncle’s name …”
“… he will still be a boy,” said Ser Rodrik, “and hard-pressed to
hold his lands against the likes of Mors Umber or this bastard of
Roose Bolton’s. We must think on this carefully. Robb should have
our best counsel before he makes his decision.”
“It may come down to practicalities,” said Maester Luwin. “Which
lord he most needs to court. The riverlands are part of his realm, he
may wish to cement the alliance by wedding Lady Hornwood to one
of the lords of the Trident. A Blackwood, perhaps, or a Frey—”
“Lady Hornwood can have one of our Freys,” said Bran. “She can
have both of them if she likes.”
“You are not kind, my prince,” Ser Rodrik chided gently.
Neither are the Walders. Scowling, Bran stared down at the table
and said nothing.

In the days that followed, ravens arrived from other lordly
houses, bearing regrets. The bastard of the Dreadfort would not be
joining them, the Mormonts and Karstarks had all gone south with
Robb, Lord Locke was too old to dare the journey, Lady Flint was
heavy with child, there was sickness at Widow’s Watch. Finally all
of the principal vassals of House Stark had been heard from save for
Howland Reed the crannogman, who had not set foot outside his
swamps for many a year, and the Cerwyns whose castle lay a half
day’s ride from Winterfell. Lord Cerwyn was a captive of the
Lannisters, but his son, a lad of fourteen, arrived one bright,
blustery morning at the head of two dozen lances. Bran was riding
Dancer around the yard when they came through the gate. He
trotted over to greet them. Cley Cerwyn had always been a friend
to Bran and his brothers.
“Good morrow, Bran,” Cley called out cheerfully. “Or must I call
you Prince Bran now?”
“Only if you want.”
Cley laughed. “Why not? Everyone else is a king or prince these
days. Did Stannis write Winterfell as well?”
“Stannis? I don’t know.”
“He’s a king now too,” Cley con ded. “He says Queen Cersei
bedded her brother, so Jo rey is a bastard.”
“Jo rey the Illborn,” one of the Cerwyn knights growled. “Small
wonder he’s faithless, with the Kingslayer for a father.”
“Aye,” said another, “the gods hate incest. Look how they
brought down the Targaryens.”
For a moment Bran felt as though he could not breathe. A giant
hand was crushing his chest. He felt as though he was falling, and
clutched desperately at Dancer’s reins.
His terror must have shown on his face. “Bran?” Cley Cerwyn
said. “Are you unwell? It’s only another king.”
“Robb will beat him too.” He turned Dancer’s head toward the
stables, oblivious to the puzzled stares the Cerwyns gave him. His
blood was roaring in his ears, and had he not been strapped onto his
saddle he might well have fallen.

That night Bran prayed to his father’s gods for dreamless sleep. If
the gods heard, they mocked his hopes, for the nightmare they sent
was worse than any wolf dream.
“Fly or die!” cried the three-eyed crow as it pecked at him. He
wept and pleaded but the crow had no pity. It put out his left eye
and then his right, and when he was blind in the dark it pecked at
his brow, driving its terrible sharp beak deep into his skull. He
screamed until he was certain his lungs must burst. The pain was an
axe splitting his head apart, but when the crow wrenched out its
beak all slimy with bits of bone and brain, Bran could see again.
What he saw made him gasp in fear. He was clinging to a tower
miles high, and his ngers were slipping, nails scrabbling at the
stone, his legs dragging him down, stupid useless dead legs. “Help
me!” he cried. A golden man appeared in the sky above him and
pulled him up. “The things I do for love,” he murmured softly as he
tossed him out kicking into empty air.

TYRION

I do not sleep as I did when I was younger,” Grand Maester Pycelle

told him, by way of apology for the dawn meeting. “I would sooner
be up, though the world be dark, than lie restless abed, fretting on
tasks undone,” he said—though his heavy-lidded eyes made him
look half-asleep as he said it.
In the airy chambers beneath the rookery, his girl served them
boiled eggs, stewed plums, and porridge, while Pycelle served the
ponti cations. “In these sad times, when so many hunger, I think it
only tting to keep my table spare.”
“Commendable,” Tyrion admitted, breaking a large brown egg
that reminded him unduly of the Grand Maester’s bald spotted head.
“I take a di erent view. If there is food I eat it, in case there is none
on the morrow.” He smiled. “Tell me, are your ravens early risers
as well?”
Pycelle stroked the snowy beard that owed down his chest. “To
be sure. Shall I send for quill and ink after we have eaten?”
“No need.” Tyrion laid the letters on the table beside his porridge,
twin parchments tightly rolled and sealed with wax at both ends.
“Send your girl away, so we can talk.”
“Leave us, child,” Pycelle commanded. The serving girl hurried
from the room. “These letters, now …”
“For the eyes of Doran Martell, Prince of Dorne.” Tyrion peeled
the cracked shell away from his egg and took a bite. It wanted salt.

“One letter, in two copies. Send your swiftest birds. The matter is of
great import.”
“I shall dispatch them as soon as we have broken our fast.”
“Dispatch them now. Stewed plums will keep. The realm may not.
Lord Renly is leading his host up the roseroad, and no one can say
when Lord Stannis will sail from Dragonstone.”
Pycelle blinked. “If my lord prefers—”
“He does.”
“I am here to serve.” The maester pushed himself ponderously to
his feet, his chain of o ce clinking softly. It was a heavy thing, a
dozen maester’s collars threaded around and through each other and
ornamented with gemstones. And it seemed to Tyrion that the gold
and silver and platinum links far outnumbered those of baser
metals.
Pycelle moved so slowly that Tyrion had time to nish his egg
and taste the plums—overcooked and watery, to his taste—before
the sound of wings prompted him to rise. He spied the raven, dark
in the dawn sky, and turned briskly toward the maze of shelves at
the far end of the room.
The maester’s medicines made an impressive display; dozens of
pots sealed with wax, hundreds of stoppered vials, as many
milkglass bottles, countless jars of dried herbs, each container
neatly labeled in Pycelle’s precise hand. An orderly mind, Tyrion
re ected, and indeed, once you puzzled out the arrangement, it was
easy to see that every potion had its place. And such interesting
things. He noted sweetsleep and nightshade, milk of the poppy, the
tears of Lys, powdered greycap, wolfsbane and demon’s dance,
basilisk venom, blindeye, widow’s blood …
Standing on his toes and straining upward, he managed to pull a
small dusty bottle o the high shelf. When he read the label, he
smiled and slipped it up his sleeve.
He was back at the table peeling another egg when Grand
Maester Pycelle came creeping down the stairs. “It is done, my
lord.” The old man seated himself. “A matter like this … best done
promptly, indeed, indeed … of great import, you say?”

“Oh, yes.” The porridge was too thick, Tyrion felt, and wanted
butter and honey. To be sure, butter and honey were seldom seen in
King’s Landing of late, though Lord Gyles kept them well supplied
in the castle. Half of the food they ate these days came from his
lands or Lady Tanda’s. Rosby and Stokeworth lay near the city to
the north, and were yet untouched by war.
“The Prince of Dorne, himself. Might I ask …”
“Best not.”
“As you say.” Pycelle’s curiosity was so ripe that Tyrion could
almost taste it. “Mayhaps … the king’s council …”
Tyrion tapped his wooden spoon against the edge of the bowl.
“The council exists to advise the king, Maester.”
“Just so,” said Pycelle, “and the king—”
“—is a boy of thirteen. I speak with his voice.”
“So you do. Indeed. The King’s Own Hand. Yet … your most
gracious sister, our Queen Regent, she …”
“… bears a great weight upon those lovely white shoulders of
hers. I have no wish to add to her burdens. Do you?” Tyrion cocked
his head and gave the Grand Maester an inquiring stare.
Pycelle dropped his gaze back to his food. Something about
Tyrion’s mismatched green-and-black eyes made men squirm;
knowing that, he made good use of them. “Ah,” the old man
muttered into his plums. “Doubtless you have the right of it, my
lord. It is most considerate of you to … spare her this … burden.”
“That’s just the sort of fellow I am.” Tyrion returned to the
unsatisfactory porridge. “Considerate. Cersei is my own sweet
sister, after all.”
“And a woman, to be sure,” Grand Maester Pycelle said. “A most
uncommon woman, and yet … it is no small thing, to tend to all the
cares of the realm, despite the frailty of her sex …”
Oh, yes, she’s a frail dove, just ask Eddard Stark. “I’m pleased you
share my concern. And I thank you for the hospitality of your table.
But a long day awaits.” He swung his legs out and clambered down
from his chair. “Be so good as to inform me at once should we
receive a reply from Dorne?”
“As you say, my lord.”

“And only me?”
“Ah … to be sure.” Pycelle’s spotted hand was clutching at his
beard the way a drowning man clutches for a rope. It made Tyrion’s
heart glad. One, he thought.
He waddled out into the lower bailey; his stunted legs complained
of the steps. The sun was well up now, and the castle was stirring.
Guardsmen walked the walls, and knights and men-at-arms were
training with blunted weapons. Nearby, Bronn sat on the lip of a
well. A pair of comely serving girls sauntered past carrying a wicker
basket of rushes between them, but the sellsword never looked.
“Bronn, I despair of you.” Tyrion gestured at the wenches. “With
sweet sights like that before you, all you see is a gaggle of louts
raising a clangor.”
“There are a hundred whorehouses in this city where a clipped
copper will buy me all the cunt I want,” Bronn answered, “but one
day my life may hang on how close I’ve watched your louts.” He
stood. “Who’s the boy in the checkered blue surcoat with the three
eyes on his shield?”
“Some hedge knight. Tallad, he names himself. Why?”
Bronn pushed a fall of hair from his eyes. “He’s the best of them.
But watch him, he falls into a rhythm, delivering the same strokes
in the same order each time he attacks.” He grinned. “That will be
the death of him, the day he faces me.”
“He’s pledged to Jo rey; he’s not like to face you.” They set o
across the bailey, Bronn matching his long stride to Tyrion’s short
one. These days the sellsword was looking almost respectable. His
dark hair was washed and brushed, he was freshly shaved, and he
wore the black breastplate of an o cer of the City Watch. From his
shoulders trailed a cloak of Lannister crimson patterned with golden
hands. Tyrion had made him a gift of it when he named him captain
of his personal guard. “How many supplicants do we have today?”
he inquired.
“Thirty odd,” answered Bronn. “Most with complaints, or wanting
something, as ever. Your pet was back.”
He groaned. “Lady Tanda?”

“Her page. She invites you to sup with her again. There’s to be a
haunch of venison, she says, a brace of stu ed geese sauced with
mulberries, and—”
“—her daughter,” Tyrion nished sourly. Since the hour he had
arrived in the Red Keep, Lady Tanda had been stalking him, armed
with a never-ending arsenal of lamprey pies, wild boars, and savory
cream stews. Somehow she had gotten the notion that a dwarf
lordling would be the perfect consort for her daughter Lollys, a
large, soft, dim-witted girl who rumor said was still a maid at
thirty-and-three. “Send her my regrets.”
“No taste for stu ed goose?” Bronn grinned evilly.
“Perhaps you should eat the goose and marry the maid. Or better
still, send Shagga.”
“Shagga’s more like to eat the maid and marry the goose,”
observed Bronn. “Anyway, Lollys outweighs him.”
“There is that,” Tyrion admitted as they passed under the shadow
of a covered walkway between two towers. “Who else wants me?”
The sellsword grew more serious. “There’s a moneylender from
Braavos, holding fancy papers and the like, requests to see the king
about payment on some loan.”
“As if Jo could count past twenty. Send the man to Little nger,
he’ll nd a way to put him o . Next?”
“A lordling down from the Trident, says your father’s men burned
his keep, raped his wife, and killed all his peasants.”
“I believe they call that war.” Tyrion smelled Gregor Clegane’s
work, or that of Ser Amory Lorch or his father’s other pet
hellhound, the Qohorik. “What does he want of Jo rey?”
“New peasants,” Bronn said. “He walked all this way to sing how
loyal he is and beg for recompense.”
“I’ll make time for him on the morrow.” Whether truly loyal or
merely desperate, a compliant river lord might have his uses. “See
that he’s given a comfortable chamber and a hot meal. Send him a
new pair of boots as well, good ones, courtesy of King Jo rey.” A
show of generosity never hurt.
Bronn gave a curt nod. “There’s also a great gaggle of bakers,
butchers, and greengrocers clamoring to be heard.”

“I told them last time, I have nothing to give them.” Only a thin
trickle of food was coming into King’s Landing, most of it
earmarked for castle and garrison. Prices had risen sickeningly high
on greens, roots, our, and fruit, and Tyrion did not want to think
about what sorts of esh might be going into the kettles of the potshops down in Flea Bottom. Fish, he hoped. They still had the river
and the sea … at least until Lord Stannis sailed.
“They want protection. Last night a baker was roasted in his own
oven. The mob claimed he charged too much for bread.”
“Did he?”
“He’s not apt to deny it.”
“They didn’t eat him, did they?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“Next time they will,” Tyrion said grimly. “I give them what
protection I can. The gold cloaks—”
“They claim there were gold cloaks in the mob,” Bronn said.
“They’re demanding to speak to the king himself.”
“Fools.” Tyrion had sent them o with regrets; his nephew would
send them o with whips and spears. He was half-tempted to allow
it … but no, he dare not. Soon or late, some enemy would march on
King’s Landing, and the last thing he wanted was willing traitors
within the city walls. “Tell them King Jo rey shares their fears and
will do all he can for them.”
“They want bread, not promises.”
“If I give them bread today, on the morrow I’ll have twice as
many at the gates. Who else?”
“A black brother down from the Wall. The steward says he
brought some rotted hand in a jar.”
Tyrion smiled wanly. “I’m surprised no one ate it. I suppose I
ought to see him. It’s not Yoren, perchance?”
“No. Some knight. Thorne.”
“Ser Alliser Thorne?” Of all the black brothers he’d met on the
Wall, Tyrion Lannister had liked Ser Alliser Thorne the least. A
bitter, mean-spirited man with too great a sense of his own worth.
“Come to think on it, I don’t believe I care to see Ser Alliser just

now. Find him a snug cell where no one has changed the rushes in a
year, and let his hand rot a little more.”
Bronn snorted laughter and went his way, while Tyrion struggled
up the serpentine steps. As he limped across the outer yard, he
heard the portcullis rattling up. His sister and a large party were
waiting by the main gate.
Mounted on her white palfrey, Cersei towered high above him, a
goddess in green. “Brother,” she called out, not warmly. The queen
had not been pleased by the way he’d dealt with Janos Slynt.
“Your Grace.” Tyrion bowed politely. “You look lovely this
morning.” Her crown was gold, her cloak ermine. Her retinue sat
their mounts behind her: Ser Boros Blount of the Kingsguard,
wearing white scale and his favorite scowl; Ser Balon Swann, bow
slung from his silver-inlay saddle; Lord Gyles Rosby, his wheezing
cough worse than ever; Hallyne the Pyromancer of the Alchemists’
Guild; and the queen’s newest favorite, their cousin Ser Lancel
Lannister, her late husband’s squire upjumped to knight at his
widow’s insistence. Vylarr and twenty guardsmen rode escort.
“Where are you bound this day, sister?” Tyrion asked.
“I’m making a round of the gates to inspect the new scorpions and
spit res. I would not have it thought that all of us are as indi erent
to the city’s defense as you seem to be.” Cersei xed him with those
clear green eyes of hers, beautiful even in their contempt. “I am
informed that Renly Baratheon has marched from Highgarden. He is
making his way up the roseroad, with all his strength behind him.”
“Varys gave me the same report.”
“He could be here by the full moon.”
“Not at his present leisurely pace,” Tyrion assured her. “He feasts
every night in a di erent castle, and holds court at every crossroads
he passes.”
“And every day, more men rally to his banners. His host is now
said to be a hundred thousand strong.”
“That seems rather high.”
“He has the power of Storm’s End and Highgarden behind him,
you little fool,” Cersei snapped down at him. “All the Tyrell
bannermen but for the Redwynes, and you have me to thank for

that. So long as I hold those poxy twins of his, Lord Paxter will
squat on the Arbor and count himself fortunate to be out of it.”
“A pity you let the Knight of Flowers slip through your pretty
ngers. Still, Renly has other concerns besides us. Our father at
Harrenhal, Robb Stark at Riverrun … were I he, I would do much as
he is doing. Make my progress, aunt my power for the realm to
see, watch, wait. Let my rivals contend while I bide my own sweet
time. If Stark defeats us, the south will fall into Renly’s hands like a
windfall from the gods, and he’ll not have lost a man. And if it goes
the other way, he can descend on us while we are weakened.”
Cersei was not appeased. “I want you to make Father bring his
army to King’s Landing.”
Where it will serve no purpose but to make you feel safe. “When have
I ever been able to make Father do anything?”
She ignored the question. “And when do you plan to free Jaime?
He’s worth a hundred of you.”
Tyrion grinned crookedly. “Don’t tell Lady Stark, I beg you. We
don’t have a hundred of me to trade.”
“Father must have been mad to send you. You’re worse than
useless.” The queen jerked on her reins and wheeled her palfrey
around. She rode out the gate at a brisk trot, ermine cloak
streaming behind her. Her retinue hastened after.
In truth, Renly Baratheon did not frighten Tyrion half so much as
his brother Stannis did. Renly was beloved of the commons, but he
had never before led men in war. Stannis was otherwise: hard, cold,
inexorable. If only they had some way of knowing what was
happening on Dragonstone … but not one of the sherfolk he had
paid to spy out the island had ever returned, and even the informers
the eunuch claimed to have placed in Stannis’s household had been
ominously silent. The striped hulls of Lysene war galleys had been
seen o shore, though, and Varys had reports from Myr of sellsail
captains taking service with Dragonstone. If Stannis attacks by sea
while his brother Renly storms the gates, they’ll soon be mounting
Jo rey’s head on a spike. Worse, mine will be beside him. A depressing
thought. He ought to make plans to get Shae safely out of the city,
should the worst seem likely.

Podrick Payne stood at the door of his solar, studying the oor.
“He’s inside,” he announced to Tyrion’s belt buckle. “Your solar. My
lord. Sorry.”
Tyrion sighed. “Look at me, Pod. It unnerves me when you talk to
my codpiece, especially when I’m not wearing one. Who is inside
my solar?”
“Lord Little nger.” Podrick managed a quick look at his face,
then hastily dropped his eyes. “I meant, Lord Petyr. Lord Baelish.
The master of coin.”
“You make him sound a crowd.” The boy hunched down as if
struck, making Tyrion feel absurdly guilty.
Lord Petyr was seated on his window seat, languid and elegant in
a plush plum-colored doublet and a yellow satin cape, one gloved
hand resting on his knee. “The king is ghting hares with a
crossbow,” he said. “The hares are winning. Come see.”
Tyrion had to stand on his toes to get a look. A dead hare lay on
the ground below; another, long ears twitching, was about to expire
from the bolt in his side. Spent quarrels lay strewn across the hardpacked earth like straws scattered by a storm. “Now!” Jo shouted.
The gamesman released the hare he was holding, and he went
bounding o . Jo rey jerked the trigger on the crossbow. The bolt
missed by two feet. The hare stood on his hind legs and twitched his
nose at the king. Cursing, Jo spun the wheel to winch back his
string, but the animal was gone before he was loaded. “Another!”
The gamesman reached into the hutch. This one made a brown
streak against the stones, while Jo rey’s hurried shot almost took
Ser Preston in the groin.
Little nger turned away. “Boy, are you fond of potted hare?” he
asked Podrick Payne.
Pod stared at the visitor’s boots, lovely things of red-dyed leather
ornamented with black scrollwork. “To eat, my lord?”
“Invest in pots,” Little nger advised. “Hares will soon overrun
the castle. We’ll be eating hare thrice a day.”
“Better than rats on a skewer,” said Tyrion. “Pod, leave us. Unless
Lord Petyr would care for some refreshment?”

“Thank you, but no.” Little nger ashed his mocking smile.
“Drink with the dwarf, it’s said, and you wake up walking the Wall.
Black brings out my unhealthy pallor.”
Have no fear, my lord, Tyrion thought, it’s not the Wall I have in
mind for you. He seated himself in a high chair piled with cushions
and said, “You look very elegant today, my lord.”
“I’m wounded. I strive to look elegant every day.”
“Is the doublet new?”
“It is. You’re most observant.”
“Plum and yellow. Are those the colors of your House?”
“No. But a man gets bored wearing the same colors day in and
day out, or so I’ve found.”
“That’s a handsome knife as well.”
“Is it?” There was mischief in Little nger’s eyes. He drew the
knife and glanced at it casually, as if he had never seen it before.
“Valyrian steel, and a dragonbone hilt. A tri e plain, though. It’s
yours, if you would like it.”
“Mine?” Tyrion gave him a long look. “No. I think not. Never
mine.” He knows, the insolent wretch. He knows and he knows that I
know, and he thinks that I cannot touch him.
If ever truly a man had armored himself in gold, it was Petyr
Baelish, not Jaime Lannister. Jaime’s famous armor was but gilded
steel, but Little nger, ah … Tyrion had learned a few things about
sweet Petyr, to his growing disquiet.
Ten years ago, Jon Arryn had given him a minor sinecure in
customs, where Lord Petyr had soon distinguished himself by
bringing in three times as much as any of the king’s other collectors.
King Robert had been a prodigious spender. A man like Petyr
Baelish, who had a gift for rubbing two golden dragons together to
breed a third, was invaluable to his Hand. Little nger’s rise had
been arrow-swift. Within three years of his coming to court, he was
master of coin and a member of the small council, and today the
crown’s revenues were ten times what they had been under his
beleaguered predecessor … though the crown’s debts had grown
vast as well. A master juggler was Petyr Baelish.

Oh, he was clever. He did not simply collect the gold and lock it
in a treasure vault, no. He paid the king’s debts in promises, and put
the king’s gold to work. He bought wagons, shops, ships, houses. He
bought grain when it was plentiful and sold bread when it was
scarce. He bought wool from the north and linen from the south and
lace from Lys, stored it, moved it, dyed it, sold it. The golden
dragons bred and multiplied, and Little nger lent them out and
brought them home with hatchlings.
And in the process, he moved his own men into place. The
Keepers of the Keys were his, all four. The King’s Counter and the
King’s Scales were men he’d named. The o cers in charge of all
three mints. Harbormasters, tax farmers, customs sergeants, wool
factors, toll collectors, pursers, wine factors; nine of every ten
belonged to Little nger. They were men of middling birth, by and
large; merchants’ sons, lesser lordlings, sometimes even foreigners,
but judging from their results, far more able than their highborn
predecessors.
No one had ever thought to question the appointments, and why
should they? Little nger was no threat to anyone. A clever, smiling,
genial man, everyone’s friend, always able to nd whatever gold
the king or his Hand required, and yet of such undistinguished birth,
one step up from a hedge knight, he was not a man to fear. He had
no banners to call, no army of retainers, no great stronghold, no
holdings to speak of, no prospects of a great marriage.
But do I dare touch him? Tyrion wondered. Even if he is a traitor?
He was not at all certain he could, least of all now, while the war
raged. Given time, he could replace Little nger’s men with his own
in key positions, but …
A shout rang up from the yard. “Ah, His Grace has killed a hare,”
Lord Baelish observed.
“No doubt a slow one,” Tyrion said. “My lord, you were fostered
at Riverrun. I’ve heard it said that you grew close to the Tullys.”
“You might say so. The girls especially.”
“How close?”
“I had their maidenhoods. Is that close enough?”

The lie—Tyrion was fairly certain it was a lie—was delivered
with such an air of nonchalance that one could almost believe it.
Could it have been Catelyn Stark who lied? About her de oration,
and the dagger as well? The longer he lived, the more Tyrion
realized that nothing was simple and little was true. “Lord Hoster’s
daughters do not love me,” he confessed. “I doubt they would listen
to any proposal I might make. Yet coming from you, the same
words might fall more sweetly on their ears.”
“That would depend on the words. If you mean to o er Sansa in
return for your brother, waste someone else’s time. Jo rey will
never surrender his plaything, and Lady Catelyn is not so great a
fool as to barter the Kingslayer for a slip of a girl.”
“I mean to have Arya as well. I have men searching.”
“Searching is not nding.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, my lord. In any case, it was Lady Lysa I
hoped you might sway. For her, I have a sweeter o er.”
“Lysa is more tractable than Catelyn, true … but also more
fearful, and I understand she hates you.”
“She believes she has good reason. When I was her guest in the
Eyrie, she insisted that I’d murdered her husband, and was not
inclined to listen to denials.” He leaned forward. “If I gave her Jon
Arryn’s true killer, she might think more kindly of me.”
That made Little nger sit up. “True killer? I confess, you make
me curious. Who do you propose?”
It was Tyrion’s turn to smile. “Gifts I give my friends, freely. Lysa
Arryn would need to understand that.”
“Is it her friendship you require, or her swords?”
“Both.”
Little nger stroked the neat spike of his beard. “Lysa has woes of
her own. Clansmen raiding out of the Mountains of the Moon, in
greater numbers than ever before … and better armed.”
“Distressing,” said Tyrion Lannister, who had armed them. “I
could help her with that. A word from me …”
“And what would this word cost her?”
“I want Lady Lysa and her son to acclaim Jo rey as king, to
swear fealty, and to—”

“—make war on the Starks and Tullys?” Little nger shook his
head. “There’s the roach in your pudding, Lannister. Lysa will never
send her knights against Riverrun.”
“Nor would I ask it. We have no lack of enemies. I’ll use her
power to oppose Lord Renly, or Lord Stannis, should he stir from
Dragonstone. In return, I will give her justice for Jon Arryn and
peace in the Vale. I will even name that appalling child of hers
Warden of the East, as his father was before him.” I want to see him
y, a boy’s voice whispered faintly in memory. “And to seal the
bargain, I will give her my niece.”
He had the pleasure of seeing a look of genuine surprise in Petyr
Baelish’s grey-green eyes. “Myrcella?”
“When she comes of age, she can wed little Lord Robert. Until
such time, she’ll be Lady Lysa’s ward at the Eyrie.”
“And what does Her Grace the queen think of this ploy?” When
Tyrion shrugged, Little nger burst into laughter. “I thought not.
You’re a dangerous little man, Lannister. Yes, I could sing this song
to Lysa.” Again the sly smile, the mischief in his glance. “If I cared
to.”
Tyrion nodded, waiting, knowing Little nger could never abide a
long silence.
“So,” Lord Petyr continued after a pause, utterly unabashed,
“what’s in your pot for me?”
“Harrenhal.”
It was interesting to watch his face. Lord Petyr’s father had been
the smallest of small lords, his grandfather a landless hedge knight;
by birth, he held no more than a few stony acres on the windswept
shore of the Fingers. Harrenhal was one of the richest plums in the
Seven Kingdoms, its lands broad and rich and fertile, its great castle
as formidable as any in the realm … and so large as to dwarf
Riverrun, where Petyr Baelish had been fostered by House Tully,
only to be brusquely expelled when he dared raise his sights to Lord
Hoster’s daughter.
Little nger took a moment to adjust the drape of his cape, but
Tyrion had seen the ash of hunger in those sly cat’s eyes. I have

him, he knew. “Harrenhal is cursed,” Lord Petyr said after a
moment, trying to sound bored.
“Then raze it to the ground and build anew to suit yourself. You’ll
have no lack of coin. I mean to make you liege lord of the Trident.
These river lords have proven they cannot be trusted. Let them do
you fealty for their lands.”
“Even the Tullys?”
“If there are any Tullys left when we are done.”
Little nger looked like a boy who had just taken a furtive bite
from a honeycomb. He was trying to watch for bees, but the honey
was so sweet. “Harrenhal and all its lands and incomes,” he mused.
“With a stroke, you’d make me one of the greatest lords in the
realm. Not that I’m ungrateful, my lord, but—why?”
“You served my sister well in the matter of the succession.”
“As did Janos Slynt. On whom this same castle of Harrenhal was
quite recently bestowed—only to be snatched away when he was no
longer of use.”
Tyrion laughed. “You have me, my lord. What can I say? I need
you to deliver the Lady Lysa. I did not need Janos Slynt.” He gave a
crooked shrug. “I’d sooner have you seated in Harrenhal than Renly
seated on the Iron Throne. What could be plainer?”
“What indeed. You realize that I may need to bed Lysa Arryn
again to get her consent to this marriage?”
“I have little doubt you’ll be equal to the task.”
“I once told Ned Stark that when you nd yourself naked with an
ugly woman, the only thing to do is close your eyes and get on with
it.” Little nger steepled his ngers and gazed into Tyrion’s
mismatched eyes. “Give me a fortnight to conclude my a airs and
arrange for a ship to carry me to Gulltown.”
“That will do nicely.”
His guest rose. “This has been quite the pleasant morning,
Lannister. And pro table … for both of us, I trust.” He bowed, his
cape a swirl of yellow as he strode out the door.
Two, thought Tyrion.
He went up to his bedchamber to await Varys, who would soon
be making an appearance. Evenfall, he guessed. Perhaps as late as

moonrise, though he hoped not. He hoped to visit Shae tonight. He
was pleasantly surprised when Galt of the Stone Crows informed
him not an hour later that the powdered man was at his door. “You
are a cruel man, to make the Grand Maester squirm so,” the eunuch
scolded. “The man cannot abide a secret.”
“Is that a crow I hear, calling the raven black? Or would you
sooner not hear what I’ve proposed to Doran Martell?”
Varys giggled. “Perhaps my little birds have told me.”
“Have they, indeed?” He wanted to hear this. “Go on.”
“The Dornishmen thus far have held aloof from these wars. Doran
Martell has called his banners, but no more. His hatred for House
Lannister is well known, and it is commonly thought he will join
Lord Renly. You wish to dissuade him.”
“All this is obvious,” said Tyrion.
“The only puzzle is what you might have o ered for his
allegiance. The prince is a sentimental man, and he still mourns his
sister Elia and her sweet babe.”
“My father once told me that a lord never lets sentiment get in
the way of ambition … and it happens we have an empty seat on
the small council, now that Lord Janos has taken the black.”
“A council seat is not to be despised,” Varys admitted, “yet will it
be enough to make a proud man forget his sister’s murder?”
“Why forget?” Tyrion smiled. “I’ve promised to deliver his sister’s
killers, alive or dead, as he prefers. After the war is done, to be
sure.”
Varys gave him a shrewd look. “My little birds tell me that
Princess Elia cried a … certain name … when they came for her.”
“Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?” In Casterly Rock,
it was common knowledge that Gregor Clegane had killed Elia and
her babe. They said he had raped the princess with her son’s blood
and brains still on his hands.
“This secret is your lord father’s sworn man.”
“My father would be the rst to tell you that fty thousand
Dornishmen are worth one rabid dog.”
Varys stroked a powdered cheek. “And if Prince Doran demands
the blood of the lord who gave the command as well as the knight

who did the deed …”
“Robert Baratheon led the rebellion. All commands came from
him, in the end.”
“Robert was not at King’s Landing.”
“Neither was Doran Martell.”
“So. Blood for his pride, a chair for his ambition. Gold and land,
that goes without saying. A sweet o er … yet sweets can be
poisoned. If I were the prince, something more would I require
before I should reach for this honeycomb. Some token of good faith,
some sure safeguard against betrayal.” Varys smiled his slimiest
smile. “Which one will you give him, I wonder?”
Tyrion sighed. “You know, don’t you?”
“Since you put it that way—yes. Tommen. You could scarcely
o er Myrcella to Doran Martell and Lysa Arryn both.”
“Remind me never to play these guessing games with you again.
You cheat.”
“Prince Tommen is a good boy.”
“If I pry him away from Cersei and Jo rey while he’s still young,
he may even grow to be a good man.”
“And a good king?”
“Jo rey is king.”
“And Tommen is heir, should anything ill befall His Grace.
Tommen, whose nature is so sweet, and notably … tractable.”
“You have a suspicious mind, Varys.”
“I shall take that as a tribute, my lord. In any case, Prince Doran
will hardly be insensible of the great honor you do him. Very deftly
done, I would say … but for one small aw.”
The dwarf laughed. “Named Cersei?”
“What avails statecraft against the love of a mother for the sweet
fruit of her womb? Perhaps, for the glory of her House and the
safety of the realm, the queen might be persuaded to send away
Tommen or Myrcella. But both of them? Surely not.”
“What Cersei does not know will never hurt me.”
“And if Her Grace were to discover your intentions before your
plans are ripe?”

“Why,” he said, “then I would know the man who told her to be
my certain enemy.” And when Varys giggled, he thought, Three.

SANSA

Come to the godswood tonight, if you want to go home.

The words were the same on the hundredth reading as they’d
been on the rst, when Sansa had discovered the folded sheet of
parchment beneath her pillow. She did not know how it had gotten
there or who had sent it. The note was unsigned, unsealed, and the
hand unfamiliar. She crushed the parchment to her chest and
whispered the words to herself. “Come to the godswood tonight, if
you want to go home,” she breathed, ever so faintly.
What could it mean? Should she take it to the queen to prove that
she was being good? Nervously, she rubbed her stomach. The angry
purple bruise Ser Meryn had given her had faded to an ugly yellow,
but still hurt. His st had been mailed when he hit her. It was her
own fault. She must learn to hide her feelings better, so as not to
anger Jo rey. When she heard that the Imp had sent Lord Slynt to
the Wall, she had forgotten herself and said, “I hope the Others get
him.” The king had not been pleased.
Come to the godswood tonight, if you want to go home.
Sansa had prayed so hard. Could this be her answer at last, a true
knight sent to save her? Perhaps it was one of the Redwyne twins,
or bold Ser Balon Swann … or even Beric Dondarrion, the young
lord her friend Jeyne Poole had loved, with his red-gold hair and
the spray of stars on his black cloak.
Come to the godswood tonight, if you want to go home.

What if it was some cruel jape of Jo rey’s, like the day he had
taken her up to the battlements to show her Father’s head? Or
perhaps it was some subtle snare to prove she was not loyal. If she
went to the godswood, would she nd Ser Ilyn Payne waiting for
her, sitting silent under the heart tree with Ice in his hand, his pale
eyes watching to see if she’d come?
Come to the godswood tonight, if you want to go home.
When the door opened, she hurriedly stu ed the note under her
sheet and sat on it. It was her bedmaid, the mousy one with the
limp brown hair. “What do you want?” Sansa demanded.
“Will milady be wanting a bath tonight?”
“A re, I think … I feel a chill.” She was shivering, though the
day had been hot.
“As you wish.”
Sansa watched the girl suspiciously. Had she seen the note? Had
she put it under the pillow? It did not seem likely; she seemed a
stupid girl, not one you’d want delivering secret notes, but Sansa
did not know her. The queen had her servants changed every
fortnight, to make certain none of them befriended her.
When a re was blazing in the hearth, Sansa thanked the maid
curtly and ordered her out. The girl was quick to obey, as ever, but
Sansa decided there was something sly about her eyes. Doubtless,
she was scurrying o to report to the queen, or maybe Varys. All
her maids spied on her, she was certain.
Once alone, she thrust the note in the ames, watching the
parchment curl and blacken. Come to the godswood tonight, if you
want to go home. She drifted to her window. Below, she could see a
short knight in moon-pale armor and a heavy white cloak pacing the
drawbridge. From his height, it could only be Ser Preston
Green eld. The queen had given her freedom of the castle, but even
so, he would want to know where she was going if she tried to
leave Maegor’s Holdfast at this time of night. What was she to tell
him? Suddenly she was glad she had burned the note.
She unlaced her gown and crawled into her bed, but she did not
sleep. Was he still there? she wondered. How long will he wait? It was

so cruel, to send her a note and tell her nothing. The thoughts went
round and round in her head.
If only she had someone to tell her what to do. She missed Septa
Mordane, and even more Jeyne Poole, her truest friend. The septa
had lost her head with the rest, for the crime of serving House
Stark. Sansa did not know what had happened to Jeyne, who had
disappeared from her rooms afterward, never to be mentioned
again. She tried not to think of them too often, yet sometimes the
memories came unbidden, and then it was hard to hold back the
tears. Once in a while, Sansa even missed her sister. By now Arya
was safe back in Winterfell, dancing and sewing, playing with Bran
and baby Rickon, even riding through the winter town if she liked.
Sansa was allowed to go riding too, but only in the bailey, and it
got boring going round in a circle all day.
She was wide awake when she heard the shouting. Distant at rst,
then growing louder. Many voices yelling together. She could not
make out the words. And there were horses as well, and pounding
feet, shouts of command. She crept to her window and saw men
running on the walls, carrying spears and torches. Go back to your
bed, Sansa told herself, this is nothing that concerns you, just some new
trouble out in the city. The talk at the wells had all been of troubles
in the city of late. People were crowding in, running from the war,
and many had no way to live save by robbing and killing each
other. Go to bed.
But when she looked, the white knight was gone, the bridge
across the dry moat down but undefended.
Sansa turned away without thinking and ran to her wardrobe. Oh,
what am I doing? she asked herself as she dressed. This is madness.
She could see the lights of many torches on the curtain walls. Had
Stannis and Renly come at last to kill Jo rey and claim their
brother’s throne? If so, the guards would raise the drawbridge,
cutting o Maegor’s Holdfast from the outer castle. Sansa threw a
plain grey cloak over her shoulders and picked up the knife she used
to cut her meat. If it is some trap, better that I die than let them hurt me
more, she told herself. She hid the blade under her cloak.

A column of red-cloaked swordsmen ran past as she slipped out
into the night. She waited until they were well past before she
darted across the undefended drawbridge. In the yard, men were
buckling on swordbelts and cinching the saddles of their horses. She
glimpsed Ser Preston near the stables with three others of the
Kingsguard, white cloaks bright as the moon as they helped Jo rey
into his armor. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the
king. Thankfully, he did not see her. He was shouting for his sword
and crossbow.
The noise receded as she moved deeper into the castle, never
daring to look back for fear that Jo rey might be watching … or
worse, following. The serpentine steps twisted ahead, striped by
bars of ickering light from the narrow windows above. Sansa was
panting by the time she reached the top. She ran down a shadowy
colonnade and pressed herself against a wall to catch her breath.
When something brushed against her leg, she almost jumped out of
her skin, but it was only a cat, a ragged black tom with a chewedo ear. The creature spit at her and leapt away.
By the time she reached the godswood, the noises had faded to a
faint rattle of steel and a distant shouting. Sansa pulled her cloak
tighter. The air was rich with the smells of earth and leaf. Lady
would have liked this place, she thought. There was something wild
about a godswood; even here, in the heart of the castle at the heart
of the city, you could feel the old gods watching with a thousand
unseen eyes.
Sansa had favored her mother’s gods over her father’s. She loved
the statues, the pictures in leaded glass, the fragrance of burning
incense, the septons with their robes and crystals, the magical play
of the rainbows over altars inlaid with mother-of-pearl and onyx
and lapis lazuli. Yet she could not deny that the godswood had a
certain power too. Especially by night. Help me, she prayed, send me
a friend, a true knight to champion me …
She moved from tree to tree, feeling the roughness of the bark
beneath her ngers. Leaves brushed at her cheeks. Had she come
too late? He would not have left so soon, would he? Or had he even

been here? Dare she risk calling out? It seemed so hushed and still
here …
“I feared you would not come, child.”
Sansa whirled. A man stepped out of the shadows, heavyset, thick
of neck, shambling. He wore a dark grey robe with the cowl pulled
forward, but when a thin sliver of moonlight touched his cheek, she
knew him at once by the blotchy skin and web of broken veins
beneath. “Ser Dontos,” she breathed, heartbroken. “Was it you?”
“Yes, my lady.” When he moved closer, she could smell the sour
stench of wine on his breath. “Me.” He reached out a hand.
Sansa shrank back. “Don’t!” She slid her hand under her cloak, to
her hidden knife. “What … what do you want with me?”
“Only to help you,” Dontos said, “as you helped me.”
“You’re drunk, aren’t you?”
“Only one cup of wine, to help my courage. If they catch me now,
they’ll strip the skin o my back.”
And what will they do to me? Sansa found herself thinking of Lady
again. She could smell out falsehood, she could, but she was dead,
Father had killed her, on account of Arya. She drew the knife and
held it before her with both hands.
“Are you going to stab me?” Dontos asked.
“I will,” she said. “Tell me who sent you.”
“No one, sweet lady. I swear it on my honor as a knight.”
“A knight?” Jo rey had decreed that he was to be a knight no
longer, only a fool, lower even than Moon Boy. “I prayed to the
gods for a knight to come save me,” she said. “I prayed and prayed.
Why would they send me a drunken old fool?”
“I deserve that, though … I know it’s queer, but … all those years
I was a knight, I was truly a fool, and now that I am a fool I
think … I think I may nd it in me to be a knight again, sweet lady.
And all because of you … your grace, your courage. You saved me,
not only from Jo rey, but from myself.” His voice dropped. “The
singers say there was another fool once who was the greatest knight
of all …”
“Florian,” Sansa whispered. A shiver went through her.

“Sweet lady, I would be your Florian,” Dontos said humbly,
falling to his knees before her.
Slowly, Sansa lowered the knife. Her head seemed terribly light,
as if she were oating. This is madness, to trust myself to this
drunkard, but if I turn away will the chance ever come again?
“How … how would you do it? Get me away?”
Ser Dontos raised his face to her. “Taking you from the castle,
that will be the hardest. Once you’re out, there are ships that would
take you home. I’d need to
nd the coin and make the
arrangements, that’s all.”
“Could we go now?” she asked, hardly daring to hope.
“This very night? No, my lady, I fear not. First I must nd a sure
way to get you from the castle when the hour is ripe. It will not be
easy, nor quick. They watch me as well.” He licked his lips
nervously. “Will you put away your blade?”
Sansa slipped the knife beneath her cloak. “Rise, ser.”
“Thank you, sweet lady.” Ser Dontos lurched clumsily to his feet,
and brushed earth and leaves from his knees. “Your lord father was
as true a man as the realm has ever known, but I stood by and let
them slay him. I said nothing, did nothing … and yet, when Jo rey
would have slain me, you spoke up. Lady, I have never been a hero,
no Ryam Redwyne or Barristan the Bold. I’ve won no tourneys, no
renown in war … but I was a knight once, and you have helped me
remember what that meant. My life is a poor thing, but it is yours.”
Ser Dontos placed a hand on the gnarled bole of the heart tree. He
was shaking, she saw. “I vow, with your father’s gods as witness,
that I shall send you home.”
He swore. A solemn oath, before the gods. “Then … I will put
myself in your hands, ser. But how will I know, when it is time to
go? Will you send me another note?”
Ser Dontos glanced about anxiously. “The risk is too great. You
must come here, to the godswood. As often as you can. This is the
safest place. The only safe place. Nowhere else. Not in your
chambers nor mine nor on the steps nor in the yard, even if it seems
we are alone. The stones have ears in the Red Keep, and only here
may we talk freely.”

“Only here,” Sansa said. “I’ll remember.”
“And if I should seem cruel or mocking or indi erent when men
are watching, forgive me, child. I have a role to play, and you must
do the same. One misstep and our heads will adorn the walls as did
your father’s.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
“You will need to be brave and strong … and patient, patient
above all.”
“I will be,” she promised, “but … please … make it as soon as
you can. I’m afraid …”
“So am I,” Ser Dontos said, smiling wanly. “And now you must
go, before you are missed.”
“You will not come with me?”
“Better if we are never seen together.”
Nodding, Sansa took a step … then spun back, nervous, and softly
laid a kiss on his cheek, her eyes closed. “My Florian,” she
whispered. “The gods heard my prayer.”
She ew along the river walk, past the small kitchen, and through
the pig yard, her hurried footsteps lost beneath the squealing of the
hogs in their pens. Home, she thought, home, he is going to take me
home, he’ll keep me safe, my Florian. The songs about Florian and
Jonquil were her very favorites. Florian was homely too, though not so
old.
She was racing headlong down the serpentine steps when a man
lurched out of a hidden doorway. Sansa caromed into him and lost
her balance. Iron ngers caught her by the wrist before she could
fall, and a deep voice rasped at her. “It’s a long roll down the
serpentine, little bird. Want to kill us both?” His laughter was rough
as a saw on stone. “Maybe you do.”
The Hound. “No, my lord, pardons, I’d never.” Sansa averted her
eyes but it was too late, he’d seen her face. “Please, you’re hurting
me.” She tried to wriggle free.
“And what’s Jo ’s little bird doing ying down the serpentine in
the black of night?” When she did not answer, he shook her. “Where
were you?”

“The g-g-godswood, my lord,” she said, not daring to lie.
“Praying … praying for my father, and … for the king, praying that
he’d not be hurt.”
“Think I’m so drunk that I’d believe that?” He let go his grip on
her arm, swaying slightly as he stood, stripes of light and darkness
falling across his terrible burnt face. “You look almost a
woman … face, teats, and you’re taller too, almost … ah, you’re
still a stupid little bird, aren’t you? Singing all the songs they taught
you … sing me a song, why don’t you? Go on. Sing to me. Some
song about knights and fair maids. You like knights, don’t you?”
He was scaring her. “T-true knights, my lord.”
“True knights,” he mocked. “And I’m no lord, no more than I’m a
knight. Do I need to beat that into you?” Clegane reeled and almost
fell. “Gods,” he swore, “too much wine. Do you like wine, little
bird? True wine? A agon of sour red, dark as blood, all a man
needs. Or a woman.” He laughed, shook his head. “Drunk as a dog,
damn me. You come now. Back to your cage, little bird. I’ll take
you there. Keep you safe for the king.” The Hound gave her a push,
oddly gentle, and followed her down the steps. By the time they
reached the bottom, he had lapsed back into a brooding silence, as
if he had forgotten she was there.
When they reached Maegor’s Holdfast, she was alarmed to see
that it was Ser Boros Blount who now held the bridge. His high
white helm turned sti y at the sound of their footsteps. Sansa
inched away from his gaze. Ser Boros was the worst of the
Kingsguard, an ugly man with a foul temper, all scowls and jowls.
“That one is nothing to fear, girl.” The Hound laid a heavy hand
on her shoulder. “Paint stripes on a toad, he does not become a
tiger.”
Ser Boros lifted his visor. “Ser, where—”
“Fuck your ser, Boros. You’re the knight, not me. I’m the king’s
dog, remember?”
“The king was looking for his dog earlier.”
“The dog was drinking. It was your night to shield him, ser. You
and my other brothers.”

Ser Boros turned to Sansa. “How is it you are not in your
chambers at this hour, lady?”
“I went to the godswood to pray for the safety of the king.” The
lie sounded better this time, almost true.
“You expect her to sleep with all the noise?” Clegane said. “What
was the trouble?”
“Fools at the gate,” Ser Boros admitted. “Some loose tongues
spread tales of the preparations for Tyrek’s wedding feast, and these
wretches got it in their heads they should be feasted too. His Grace
led a sortie and sent them scurrying.”
“A brave boy,” Clegane said, mouth twitching.
Let us see how brave he is when he faces my brother, Sansa thought.
The Hound escorted her across the drawbridge. As they were
winding their way up the steps, she said, “Why do you let people
call you a dog? You won’t let anyone call you a knight.”
“I like dogs better than knights. My father’s father was
kennelmaster at the Rock. One autumn year, Lord Tytos came
between a lioness and her prey. The lioness didn’t give a shit that
she was Lannister’s own sigil. Bitch tore into my lord’s horse and
would have done for my lord too, but my grandfather came up with
the hounds. Three of his dogs died running her o . My grandfather
lost a leg, so Lannister paid him for it with lands and a towerhouse,
and took his son to squire. The three dogs on our banner are the
three that died, in the yellow of autumn grass. A hound will die for
you, but never lie to you. And he’ll look you straight in the face.”
He cupped her under the jaw, raising her chin, his ngers pinching
her painfully. “And that’s more than little birds can do, isn’t it? I
never got my song.”
“I … I know a song about Florian and Jonquil.”
“Florian and Jonquil? A fool and his cunt. Spare me. But one day
I’ll have a song from you, whether you will it or no.”
“I will sing it for you gladly.”
Sandor Clegane snorted. “Pretty thing, and such a bad liar. A dog
can smell a lie, you know. Look around you, and take a good whi .
They’re all liars here … and every one better than you.”

ARYA

When she climbed all the way up to the highest branch, Arya could

see chimneys poking through the trees. Thatched roofs clustered
along the shore of the lake and the small stream that emptied into
it, and a wooden pier jutted out into the water beside a low long
building with a slate roof.
She shinnied farther out, until the branch began to sag under her
weight. No boats were tied to the pier, but she could see thin
tendrils of smoke rising from some of the chimneys, and part of a
wagon jutting out behind a stable.
Someone’s there. Arya chewed her lip. All the other places they’d
come upon had been empty and desolate. Farms, villages, castles,
septs, barns, it made no matter. If it could burn, the Lannisters had
burned it; if it could die, they’d killed it. They had even set the
woods ablaze where they could, though the leaves were still green
and wet from recent rains, and the res had not spread. “They
would have burned the lake if they could have,” Gendry had said,
and Arya knew he was right. On the night of their escape, the
ames of the burning town had shimmered so brightly on the water
that it had seemed that the lake was a re.
When they nally summoned the nerve to steal back into the
ruins the next night, nothing remained but blackened stones, the
hollow shells of houses, and corpses. In some places wisps of pale
smoke still rose from the ashes. Hot Pie had pleaded with them not
to go back, and Lommy called them fools and swore that Ser Amory

would catch them and kill them too, but Lorch and his men had long
gone by the time they reached the holdfast. They found the gates
broken down, the walls partly demolished, and the inside strewn
with the unburied dead. One look was enough for Gendry. “They’re
killed, every one,” he said. “And dogs have been at them too, look.”
“Or wolves.”
“Dogs, wolves, it makes no matter. It’s done here.”
But Arya would not leave until they found Yoren. They couldn’t
have killed him, she told herself, he was too hard and tough, and a
brother of the Night’s Watch besides. She said as much to Gendry as
they searched among the corpses.
The axe blow that had killed him had split his skull apart, but the
great tangled beard could be no one else’s, or the garb, patched and
unwashed and so faded it was more grey than black. Ser Amory
Lorch had given no more thought to burying his own dead than to
those he had murdered, and the corpses of four Lannister men-atarms were heaped near Yoren’s. Arya wondered how many it had
taken to bring him down.
He was going to take me home, she thought as they dug the old
man’s hole. There were too many dead to bury them all, but Yoren
at least must have a grave, Arya had insisted. He was going to bring
me safe to Winterfell, he promised. Part of her wanted to cry. The
other part wanted to kick him.
It was Gendry who thought of the lord’s towerhouse and the three
that Yoren had sent to hold it. They had come under attack as well,
but the round tower had only one entry, a second-story door
reached by a ladder. Once that had been pulled inside, Ser Amory’s
men could not get at them. The Lannisters had piled brush around
the tower’s base and set it a re, but the stone would not burn, and
Lorch did not have the patience to starve them out. Cutjack opened
the door at Gendry’s shout, and when Kurz said they’d be better
pressing on north than going back, Arya had clung to the hope that
she still might reach Winterfell.
Well, this village was no Winterfell, but those thatched roofs
promised warmth and shelter and maybe even food, if they were

bold enough to risk them. Unless it’s Lorch there. He had horses; he
would have traveled faster than us.
She watched from the tree for a long time, hoping she might see
something; a man, a horse, a banner, anything that would help her
know. A few times she glimpsed motion, but the buildings were so
far o it was hard to be certain. Once, very clearly, she heard the
whinny of a horse.
The air was full of birds, crows mostly. From afar, they were no
larger than ies as they wheeled and apped above the thatched
roofs. To the east, Gods Eye was a sheet of sun-hammered blue that
lled half the world. Some days, as they made their slow way up
the muddy shore (Gendry wanted no part of any roads, and even
Hot Pie and Lommy saw the sense in that), Arya felt as though the
lake were calling her. She wanted to leap into those placid blue
waters, to feel clean again, to swim and splash and bask in the sun.
But she dare not take o her clothes where the others could see, not
even to wash them. At the end of the day she would often sit on a
rock and dangle her feet in the cool water. She had nally thrown
away her cracked and rotted shoes. Walking barefoot was hard at
rst, but the blisters had nally broken, the cuts had healed, and
her soles had turned to leather. The mud was nice between her toes,
and she liked to feel the earth underfoot when she walked.
From up here, she could see a small wooded island o to the
northeast. Thirty yards from shore, three black swans were gliding
over the water, so serene … no one had told them that war had
come, and they cared nothing for burning towns and butchered
men. She stared at them with yearning. Part of her wanted to be a
swan. The other part wanted to eat one. She had broken her fast on
some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs weren’t so bad when
you got used to them. Worms were worse, but still not as bad as the
pain in your belly after days without food. Finding bugs was easy,
all you had to do was kick over a rock. Arya had eaten a bug once
when she was little, just to make Sansa screech, so she hadn’t been
afraid to eat another. Weasel wasn’t either, but Hot Pie retched up
the beetle he tried to swallow, and Lommy and Gendry wouldn’t
even try. Yesterday Gendry had caught a frog and shared it with

Lommy, and, a few days before, Hot Pie had found blackberries and
stripped the bush bare, but mostly they had been living on water
and acorns. Kurz had told them how to use rocks and make a kind
of acorn paste. It tasted awful.
She wished the poacher hadn’t died. He’d known more about the
woods than all the rest of them together, but he’d taken an arrow
through the shoulder pulling in the ladder at the towerhouse. Tarber
had packed it with mud and moss from the lake, and for a day or
two Kurz swore the wound was nothing, even though the esh of
his throat was turning dark while angry red welts crept up his jaw
and down his chest. Then one morning he couldn’t nd the strength
to get up, and by the next he was dead.
They buried him under a mound of stones, and Cutjack had
claimed his sword and hunting horn, while Tarber helped himself to
bow and boots and knife. They’d taken it all when they left. At rst
they thought the two had just gone hunting, that they’d soon return
with game and feed them all. But they waited and waited, until
nally Gendry made them move on. Maybe Tarber and Cutjack
gured they would stand a better chance without a gaggle of
orphan boys to herd along. They probably would too, but that didn’t
stop her hating them for leaving.
Beneath her tree, Hot Pie barked like a dog. Kurz had told them
to use animal sounds to signal to each other. An old poacher’s trick,
he’d said, but he’d died before he could teach them how to make the
sounds right. Hot Pie’s bird calls were awful. His dog was better,
but not much.
Arya hopped from the high branch to one beneath it, her hands
out for balance. A water dancer never falls. Lightfoot, her toes curled
tight around the branch, she walked a few feet, hopped down to a
larger limb, then swung hand over hand through the tangle of
leaves until she reached the trunk. The bark was rough beneath her
ngers, against her toes. She descended quickly, jumping down the
nal six feet, rolling when she landed.
Gendry gave her a hand to pull her up. “You were up there a long
time. What could you see?”

“A shing village, just a little place, north along the shore.
Twenty-six thatch roofs and one slate, I counted. I saw part of a
wagon. Someone’s there.”
At the sound of her voice, Weasel came creeping out from the
bushes. Lommy had named her that. He said she looked like a
weasel, which wasn’t true, but they couldn’t keep on calling her the
crying girl after she nally stopped crying. Her mouth was lthy.
Arya hoped she hadn’t been eating mud again.
“Did you see people?” asked Gendry.
“Mostly just roofs,” Arya admitted, “but some chimneys were
smoking, and I heard a horse.” The Weasel put her arms around her
leg, clutching tight. Sometimes she did that now.
“If there’s people, there’s food,” Hot Pie said, too loudly. Gendry
was always telling him to be more quiet, but it never did any good.
“Might be they’d give us some.”
“Might be they’d kill us too,” Gendry said.
“Not if we yielded,” Hot Pie said hopefully.
“Now you sound like Lommy.”
Lommy Greenhands sat propped up between two thick roots at
the foot of an oak. A spear had taken him through his left calf
during the ght at the holdfast. By the end of the next day, he had
to limp along one-legged with an arm around Gendry, and now he
couldn’t even do that. They’d hacked branches o trees to make a
litter for him, but it was slow, hard work carrying him along, and
he whimpered every time they jounced him.
“We have to yield,” he said. “That’s what Yoren should have
done. He should have opened the gates like they said.”
Arya was sick of Lommy going on about how Yoren should have
yielded. It was all he talked about when they carried him, that and
his leg and his empty belly.
Hot Pie agreed. “They told Yoren to open the gates, they told him
in the king’s name. You have to do what they tell you in the king’s
name. It was that stinky old man’s fault. If he’d of yielded, they
would have left us be.”
Gendry frowned. “Knights and lordlings, they take each other
captive and pay ransoms, but they don’t care if the likes of you

yield or not.” He turned to Arya. “What else did you see?”
“If it’s a shing village, they’d sell us sh, I bet,” said Hot Pie.
The lake teemed with fresh sh, but they had nothing to catch them
with. Arya had tried to use her hands, the way she’d seen Koss do,
but sh were quicker than pigeons and the water played tricks on
her eyes.
“I don’t know about sh.” Arya tugged at the Weasel’s matted
hair, thinking it might be best to hack it o . “There’s crows down
by the water. Something’s dead there.”
“Fish, washed up on shore,” Hot Pie said. “If the crows eat it, I
bet we could.”
“We should catch some crows, we could eat them,” said Lommy.
“We could make a re and roast them like chickens.”
Gendry looked erce when he scowled. His beard had grown in
thick and black as briar. “I said, no res.”
“Lommy’s hungry,” Hot Pie whined, “and I am too.”
“We’re all hungry,” said Arya.
“You’re not,” Lommy spat from the ground. “Worm breath.”
Arya could have kicked him in his wound. “I said I’d dig worms
for you too, if you wanted.”
Lommy made a disgusted face. “If it wasn’t for my leg, I’d hunt us
some boars.”
“Some boars,” she mocked. “You need a boarspear to hunt boars,
and horses and dogs, and men to ush the boar from its lair.” Her
father had hunted boar in the wolfswood with Robb and Jon. Once
he even took Bran, but never Arya, even though she was older.
Septa Mordane said boar hunting was not for ladies, and Mother
only promised that when she was older she might have her own
hawk. She was older now, but if she had a hawk she’d eat it.
“What do you know about hunting boars?” said Hot Pie.
“More than you.”
Gendry was in no mood to hear it. “Quiet, both of you, I need to
think what to do.” He always looked pained when he tried to think,
like it hurt him something erce.
“Yield,” Lommy said.

“I told you to shut up about the yielding. We don’t even know
who’s in there. Maybe we can steal some food.”
“Lommy could steal, if it wasn’t for his leg,” said Hot Pie. “He
was a thief in the city.”
“A bad thief,” Arya said, “or he wouldn’t have got caught.”
Gendry squinted up at the sun. “Evenfall will be the best time to
sneak in. I’ll go scout come dark.”
“No, I’ll go,” Arya said. “You’re too noisy.”
Gendry got that look on his face. “We’ll both go.”
“Arry should go,” said Lommy. “He’s sneakier than you are.”
“We’ll both go, I said.”
“But what if you don’t come back? Hot Pie can’t carry me by
himself, you know he can’t …”
“And there’s wolves,” Hot Pie said. “I heard them last night, when
I had the watch. They sounded close.”
Arya had heard them too. She’d been asleep in the branches of an
elm, but the howling had woken her. She’d sat awake for a good
hour, listening to them, prickles creeping up her spine.
“And you won’t even let us have a re to keep them o ,” Hot Pie
said. “It’s not right, leaving us for the wolves.”
“No one is leaving you,” Gendry said in disgust. “Lommy has his
spear if the wolves come, and you’ll be with him. We’re just going
to go see, that’s all; we’re coming back.”
“Whoever it is, you should yield to them,” Lommy whined. “I
need some potion for my leg, it hurts bad.”
“If we see any leg potion, we’ll bring it,” Gendry said. “Arry, let’s
go, I want to get near before the sun is down. Hot Pie, you keep
Weasel here, I don’t want her following.”
“Last time she kicked me.”
“I’ll kick you if you don’t keep her here.” Without waiting for an
answer, Gendry donned his steel helm and walked o .
Arya had to scamper to keep up. Gendry was ve years older and
a foot taller than she was, and long of leg as well. For a while he
said nothing, just plowed on through the trees with an angry look
on his face, making too much noise. But nally he stopped and said,
“I think Lommy’s going to die.”

She was not surprised. Kurz had died of his wound, and he’d been
a lot stronger than Lommy. Whenever it was Arya’s turn to help
carry him, she could feel how warm his skin was, and smell the
stink o his leg. “Maybe we could nd a maester …”
“You only nd maesters in castles, and even if we found one, he
wouldn’t dirty his hands on the likes of Lommy.” Gendry ducked
under a low-hanging limb.
“That’s not true.” Maester Luwin would have helped anyone who
came to him, she was certain.
“He’s going to die, and the sooner he does it, the better for the
rest of us. We should just leave him, like he says. If it was you or
me hurt, you know he’d leave us.” They scrambled down a steep cut
and up the other side, using roots for handholds. “I’m sick of
carrying him, and I’m sick of all his talk about yielding too. If he
could stand up, I’d knock his teeth in. Lommy’s no use to anyone.
That crying girl’s no use either.”
“You leave Weasel alone, she’s just scared and hungry is all.”
Arya glanced back, but the girl was not following for once. Hot Pie
must have grabbed her, like Gendry had told him.
“She’s no use,” Gendry repeated stubbornly. “Her and Hot Pie and
Lommy, they’re slowing us down, and they’re going to get us killed.
You’re the only one of the bunch who’s good for anything. Even if
you are a girl.”
Arya froze in her steps. “I’m not a girl!”
“Yes you are. Do you think I’m as stupid as they are?”
“No, you’re stupider. The Night’s Watch doesn’t take girls,
everyone knows that.”
“That’s true. I don’t know why Yoren brought you, but he must
have had some reason. You’re still a girl.”
“I am not!”
“Then pull out your cock and take a piss. Go on.”
“I don’t need to take a piss. If I wanted to I could.”
“Liar. You can’t take out your cock because you don’t have one. I
never noticed before when there were thirty of us, but you always
go o in the woods to make your water. You don’t see Hot Pie

doing that, nor me neither. If you’re not a girl, you must be some
eunuch.”
“You’re the eunuch.”
“You know I’m not.” Gendry smiled. “You want me to take out
my cock and prove it? I don’t have anything to hide.”
“Yes you do,” Arya blurted, desperate to escape the subject of the
cock she didn’t have. “Those gold cloaks were after you at the inn,
and you won’t tell us why.”
“I wish I knew. I think Yoren knew, but he never told me. Why
did you think they were after you, though?”
Arya bit her lip. She remembered what Yoren had said, the day he
had hacked o her hair. This lot, half o’ them would turn you over to
the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a few silvers. The other
half’d do the same, only they’d rape you rst. Only Gendry was
di erent, the queen wanted him too. “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me,”
she said warily.
“I would if I knew, Arry … is that really what you’re called, or do
you have some girl’s name?”
Arya glared at the gnarled root by her feet. She realized that the
pretense was done. Gendry knew, and she had nothing in her pants
to convince him otherwise. She could draw Needle and kill him
where he stood, or else trust him. She wasn’t certain she’d be able
to kill him, even if she tried; he had his own sword, and he was a lot
stronger. All that was left was the truth. “Lommy and Hot Pie can’t
know,” she said.
“They won’t,” he swore. “Not from me.”
“Arya.” She raised her eyes to his. “My name is Arya. Of House
Stark.”
“Of House …” It took him a moment before he said, “The King’s
Hand was named Stark. The one they killed for a traitor.”
“He was never a traitor. He was my father.”
Gendry’s eyes widened. “So that’s why you thought …”
She nodded. “Yoren was taking me home to Winterfell.”
“I … you’re highborn then, a … you’ll be a lady …”
Arya looked down at her ragged clothes and bare feet, all cracked
and callused. She saw the dirt under her nails, the scabs on her

elbows, the scratches on her hands. Septa Mordane wouldn’t even
know me, I bet. Sansa might, but she’d pretend not to. “My mother’s a
lady, and my sister, but I never was.”
“Yes you were. You were a lord’s daughter and you lived in a
castle, didn’t you? And you … gods be good, I never …” All of a
sudden Gendry seemed uncertain, almost afraid. “All that about
cocks, I never should have said that. And I been pissing in front of
you and everything, I … I beg your pardon, m’lady.”
“Stop that!” Arya hissed. Was he mocking her?
“I know my courtesies, m’lady,” Gendry said, stubborn as ever.
“Whenever highborn girls came into the shop with their fathers, my
master told me I was to bend the knee, and speak only when they
spoke to me, and call them m’lady.”
“If you start calling me m’lady, even Hot Pie is going to notice.
And you better keep on pissing the same way too.”
“As m’lady commands.”
Arya slammed his chest with both hands. He tripped over a stone
and sat down with a thump. “What kind of lord’s daughter are
you?” he said, laughing.
“This kind.” She kicked him in the side, but it only made him
laugh harder. “You laugh all you like. I’m going to see who’s in the
village.” The sun had already fallen below the trees; dusk would be
on them in no time at all. For once it was Gendry who had to hurry
after. “You smell that?” she asked.
He sni ed the air. “Rotten sh?”
“You know it’s not.”
“We better be careful. I’ll go around west, see if there’s some
road. There must be if you saw a wagon. You take the shore. If you
need help, bark like a dog.”
“That’s stupid. If I need help, I’ll shout help.” She darted away,
bare feet silent in the grass. When she glanced back over her
shoulder, he was watching her with that pained look on his face that
meant he was thinking. He’s probably thinking that he shouldn’t be
letting m’lady go stealing food. Arya just knew he was going to be
stupid now.

The smell grew stronger as she got closer to the village. It did not
smell like rotten sh to her. This stench was ranker, fouler. She
wrinkled her nose.
Where the trees began to thin, she used the undergrowth, slipping
from bush to bush quiet as a shadow. Every few yards she stopped
to listen. The third time, she heard horses, and a man’s voice as
well. And the smell got worse. Dead man’s stink, that’s what it is. She
had smelled it before, with Yoren and the others.
A dense thicket of brambles grew south of the village. By the
time she reached it, the long shadows of sunset had begun to fade,
and the lantern bugs were coming out. She could see thatched roofs
just beyond the hedge. She crept along until she found a gap and
squirmed through on her belly, keeping well hidden until she saw
what made the smell.
Beside the gently lapping waters of Gods Eye, a long gibbet of
raw green wood had been thrown up, and things that had once been
men dangled there, their feet in chains, while crows pecked at their
esh and apped from corpse to corpse. For every crow there were
a hundred ies. When the wind blew o the lake, the nearest corpse
twisted on its chain, ever so slightly. The crows had eaten most of
its face, and something else had been at it as well, something much
larger. Throat and chest had been torn apart, and glistening green
entrails and ribbons of ragged esh dangled from where the belly
had been opened. One arm had been ripped right o the shoulder;
Arya saw the bones a few feet away, gnawed and cracked, picked
clean of meat.
She made herself look at the next man and the one beyond him
and the one beyond him, telling herself she was hard as a stone.
Corpses all, so savaged and decayed that it took her a moment to
realize they had been stripped before they were hanged. They did
not look like naked people; they hardly looked like people at all.
The crows had eaten their eyes, and sometimes their faces. Of the
sixth in the long row, nothing remained but a single leg, still
tangled in its chains, swaying with each breeze.
Fear cuts deeper than swords. Dead men could not hurt her, but
whoever had killed them could. Well beyond the gibbet, two men in

mail hauberks stood leaning on their spears in front of the long low
building by the water, the one with the slate roof. A pair of tall
poles had been driven into the muddy ground in front of it, banners
drooping from each sta . One looked red and one paler, white or
yellow maybe, but both were limp and with the dusk settling, she
could not even be certain that red one was Lannister crimson. I don’t
need to see the lion, I can see all the dead people, who else would it be
but Lannisters?
Then there was a shout.
The two spearmen turned at the cry, and a third man came into
view, shoving a captive before him. It was growing too dark to
make out faces, but the prisoner was wearing a shiny steel helm,
and when Arya saw the horns she knew it was Gendry. You stupid
stupid stupid STUPID! she thought. If he’d been here she would have
kicked him again.
The guards were talking loudly, but she was too far away to
make out the words, especially with the crows gabbling and
apping closer to hand. One of the spearmen snatched the helm o
Gendry’s head and asked him a question, but he must not have liked
the answer, because he smashed him across the face with the butt of
his spear and knocked him down. The one who’d captured him gave
him a kick, while the second spearman was trying on the bull’s-head
helm. Finally they pulled him to his feet and marched him o
toward the storehouse. When they opened the heavy wooden doors,
a small boy darted out, but one of the guards grabbed his arm and
ung him back inside. Arya heard sobbing from inside the building,
and then a shriek so loud and full of pain that it made her bite her
lip.
The guards shoved Gendry inside with the boy and barred the
doors behind them. Just then, a breath of wind came sighing o the
lake, and the banners stirred and lifted. The one on the tall sta
bore the golden lion, as she’d feared. On the other, three sleek black
shapes ran across a eld as yellow as butter. Dogs, she thought.
Arya had seen those dogs before, but where?
It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that they had
Gendry. Even if he was stubborn and stupid, she had to get him out.

She wondered if they knew that the queen wanted him.
One of the guards took o his helm and donned Gendry’s instead.
It made her angry to see him wearing it, but she knew there was
nothing she could do to stop him. She thought she heard more
screams from inside the windowless storehouse, mu ed by the
masonry, but it was hard to be certain.
She stayed long enough to see the guard changed, and much more
besides. Men came and went. They led their horses down to the
stream to drink. A hunting party returned from the wood, carrying
a deer’s carcass slung from a pole. She watched them clean and gut
it and build a cook re on the far side of the stream, and the smell of
cooking meat mingled queerly with the stench of corruption. Her
empty belly roiled and she thought she might retch. The prospect of
food brought other men out of the houses, near all of them wearing
bits of mail or boiled leather. When the deer was cooked, the
choicest portions were carried to one of the houses.
She thought that the dark might let her crawl close and free
Gendry, but the guards kindled torches o the cook re. A squire
brought meat and bread to the two guarding the storehouse, and
later two more men joined them and they all passed a skin of wine
from hand to hand. When it was empty the others left, but the two
guards remained, leaning on their spears.
Arya’s arms and legs were sti when she nally wriggled out
from under the briar into the dark of the wood. It was a black night,
with a thin sliver of moon appearing and disappearing as the clouds
blew past. Silent as a shadow, she told herself as she moved through
the trees. In this darkness she dared not run, for fear of tripping on
some unseen root or losing her way. On her left Gods Eye lapped
calmly against its shores. On her right a wind sighed through the
branches, and leaves rustled and stirred. Far o , she heard the
howling of wolves.
Lommy and Hot Pie almost shit themselves when she stepped out
of the trees behind them. “Quiet,” she told them, putting an arm
around Weasel when the little girl came running up.
Hot Pie stared at her with big eyes. “We thought you left us.” He
had his shortsword in hand, the one Yoren had taken o the gold

cloak. “I was scared you was a wolf.”
“Where’s the Bull?” asked Lommy.
“They caught him,” Arya whispered. “We have to get him out.
Hot Pie, you got to help. We’ll sneak up and kill the guards, and
then I’ll open the door.”
Hot Pie and Lommy exchanged a look. “How many?”
“I couldn’t count,” Arya admitted. “Twenty at least, but only two
on the door.”
Hot Pie looked as if he were going to cry. “We can’t ght twenty.”
“You only need to ght one. I’ll do the other and we’ll get Gendry
out and run.”
“We should yield,” Lommy said. “Just go in and yield.”
Arya shook her head stubbornly.
“Then just leave him, Arry,” Lommy pleaded. “They don’t know
about the rest of us. If we hide, they’ll go away, you know they
will. It’s not our fault Gendry’s captured.”
“You’re stupid, Lommy,” Arya said angrily. “You’ll die if we don’t
get Gendry out. Who’s going to carry you?”
“You and Hot Pie.”
“All the time, with no one else to help? We’ll never do it. Gendry
was the strong one. Anyhow, I don’t care what you say, I’m going
back for him.” She looked at Hot Pie. “Are you coming?”
Hot Pie glanced at Lommy, at Arya, at Lommy again. “I’ll come,”
he said reluctantly.
“Lommy, you keep Weasel here.”
He grabbed the little girl by the hand and pulled her close. “What
if the wolves come?”
“Yield,” Arya suggested.
Finding their way back to the village seemed to take hours. Hot
Pie kept stumbling in the dark and losing his way, and Arya had to
wait for him and double back. Finally she took him by the hand and
led him along through the trees. “Just be quiet and follow.” When
they could make out the rst faint glow of the village res against
the sky, she said, “There’s dead men hanging on the other side of
the hedge, but they’re nothing to be scared of, just remember fear

cuts deeper than swords. We have to go real quiet and slow.” Hot
Pie nodded.
She wriggled under the briar rst and waited for him on the far
side, crouched low. Hot Pie emerged pale and panting, face and
arms bloody with long scratches. He started to say something, but
Arya put a nger to his lips. On hands and knees, they crawled
along the gibbet, beneath the swaying dead. Hot Pie never once
looked up, nor made a sound.
Until the crow landed on his back, and he gave a mu ed gasp.
“Who’s there?” a voice boomed suddenly from the dark.
Hot Pie leapt to his feet. “I yield!” He threw away his sword as
dozens of crows rose shrieking and complaining to ap about the
corpses. Arya grabbed his leg and tried to drag him back down, but
he wrenched loose and ran forward, waving his arms. “I yield, I
yield.”
She bounced up and drew Needle, but by then men were all
around her. Arya slashed at the nearest, but he blocked her with a
steel-clad arm, and someone else slammed into her and dragged her
to the ground, and a third man wrenched the sword from her grasp.
When she tried to bite, her teeth snapped shut on cold dirty
chainmail. “Oho, a erce one,” the man said, laughing. The blow
from his iron-clad st near knocked her head o .
They talked over her as she lay hurting, but Arya could not seem
to understand the words. Her ears rang. When she tried to crawl o ,
the earth moved beneath her. They took Needle. The shame of that
hurt worse than the pain, and the pain hurt a lot. Jon had given her
that sword. Syrio had taught her to use it.
Finally someone grabbed the front of her jerkin, yanked her to
her knees. Hot Pie was kneeling too, before the tallest man Arya
had ever seen, a monster from one of Old Nan’s stories. She never
saw where the giant had come from. Three black dogs raced across
his faded yellow surcoat, and his face looked as hard as if it had
been cut from stone. Suddenly Arya knew where she had seen those
dogs before. The night of the tourney at King’s Landing, all the
knights had hung their shields outside their pavilions. “That one
belongs to the Hound’s brother,” Sansa had con ded when they

passed the black dogs on the yellow eld. “He’s even bigger than
Hodor, you’ll see. They call him the Mountain That Rides.”
Arya let her head droop, only half aware of what was going on
around her. Hot Pie was yielding some more. The Mountain said,
“You’ll lead us to these others,” and walked o . Next she was
stumbling past the dead men on their gibbet, while Hot Pie told
their captors he’d bake them pies and tarts if they didn’t hurt him.
Four men went with them. One carried a torch, one a longsword;
two had spears.
They found Lommy where they’d left him, under the oak. “I
yield,” he called out at once when he saw them. He’d ung away his
own spear and raised his hands, splotchy green with old dye. “I
yield. Please.”
The man with the torch searched around under the trees. “Are
you the last? Baker boy said there was a girl.”
“She ran o when she heard you coming,” Lommy said. “You
made a lot of noise.” And Arya thought, Run, Weasel, run as far as
you can, run and hide and never come back.
“Tell us where we can nd that whoreson Dondarrion, and
there’ll be a hot meal in it for you.”
“Who?” said Lommy blankly.
“I told you, this lot don’t know no more than those cunts in the
village. Waste o’ bloody time.”
One of the spearmen drifted over to Lommy. “Something wrong
with your leg, boy?”
“It got hurt.”
“Can you walk?” He sounded concerned.
“No,” said Lommy. “You got to carry me.”
“Think so?” The man lifted his spear casually and drove the point
through the boy’s soft throat. Lommy never even had time to yield
again. He jerked once, and that was all. When the man pulled his
spear loose, blood sprayed out in a dark fountain. “Carry him, he
says,” he muttered, chuckling.

TYRION

They had warned him to dress warmly. Tyrion Lannister took them

at their word. He was garbed in heavy quilted breeches and a
woolen doublet, and over it all he had thrown the shadowskin cloak
he had acquired in the Mountains of the Moon. The cloak was
absurdly long, made for a man twice his height. When he was not
ahorse, the only way to wear the thing was to wrap it around him
several times, which made him look like a ball of striped fur.
Even so, he was glad he had listened. The chill in the long dank
vault went bone deep. Timett had chosen to retreat back up to the
cellar after a brief taste of the cold below. They were somewhere
under the hill of Rhaenys, behind the Guildhall of the Alchemists.
The damp stone walls were splotchy with nitre, and the only light
came from the sealed iron-and-glass oil lamp that Hallyne the
Pyromancer carried so gingerly.
Gingerly indeed … and these would be the ginger jars. Tyrion lifted
one for inspection. It was round and ruddy, a fat clay grapefruit. A
little big for his hand, but it would t comfortably in the grip of a
normal man, he knew. The pottery was thin, so fragile that even he
had been warned not to squeeze too tightly, lest he crush it in his
st. The clay felt roughened, pebbled. Hallyne told him that was
intentional. “A smooth pot is more apt to slip from a man’s grasp.”
The wild re oozed slowly toward the lip of the jar when Tyrion
tilted it to peer inside. The color would be a murky green, he knew,

but the poor light made that impossible to con rm. “Thick,” he
observed.
“That is from the cold, my lord,” said Hallyne, a pallid man with
soft damp hands and an obsequious manner. He was dressed in
striped black-and-scarlet robes trimmed with sable, but the fur
looked more than a little patchy and moth-eaten. “As it warms, the
substance will ow more easily, like lamp oil.”
The substance was the pyromancers’ own term for wild re. They
called each other wisdom as well, which Tyrion found almost as
annoying as their custom of hinting at the vast secret stores of
knowledge that they wanted him to think they possessed. Once
theirs had been a powerful guild, but in recent centuries the
maesters of the Citadel had supplanted the alchemists almost
everywhere. Now only a few of the older order remained, and they
no longer even pretended to transmute metals …
… but they could make wild re. “Water will not quench it, I am
told.”
“That is so. Once it takes re, the substance will burn ercely
until it is no more. More, it will seep into cloth, wood, leather, even
steel, so they take re as well.”
Tyrion remembered the red priest Thoros of Myr and his aming
sword. Even a thin coating of wild re could burn for an hour.
Thoros always needed a new sword after a melee, but Robert had
been fond of the man and ever glad to provide one. “Why doesn’t it
seep into the clay as well?”
“Oh, but it does,” said Hallyne. “There is a vault below this one
where we store the older pots. Those from King Aerys’s day. It was
his fancy to have the jars made in the shapes of fruits. Very perilous
fruits indeed, my lord Hand, and, hmmm, riper now than ever, if
you take my meaning. We have sealed them with wax and pumped
the lower vault full of water, but even so … by rights they ought to
have been destroyed, but so many of our masters were murdered
during the Sack of King’s Landing, the few acolytes who remained
were unequal to the task. And much of the stock we made for Aerys
was lost. Only last year, two hundred jars were discovered in a
storeroom beneath the Great Sept of Baelor. No one could recall

how they came there, but I’m sure I do not need to tell you that the
High Septon was beside himself with terror. I myself saw that they
were safely moved. I had a cart lled with sand, and sent our most
able acolytes. We worked only by night, we—”
“—did a splendid job, I have no doubt.” Tyrion placed the jar he’d
been holding back among its fellows. They covered the table,
standing in orderly rows of four and marching away into the
subterranean dimness. And there were other tables beyond, many
other tables. “These, ah, fruits of the late King Aerys, can they still
be used?”
“Oh, yes, most certainly … but carefully, my lord, ever so
carefully. As it ages, the substance grows ever more, hmmmm,
ckle, let us say. Any ame will set it a re. Any spark. Too much
heat and jars will blaze up of their own accord. It is not wise to let
them sit in sunlight, even for a short time. Once the re begins
within, the heat causes the substance to expand violently, and the
jars shortly y to pieces. If other jars should happen to be stored in
the same vicinity, those go up as well, and so—”
“How many jars do you have at present?”
“This morning the Wisdom Munciter told me that we had seven
thousand eight hundred and forty. That count includes four
thousand jars from King Aerys’s day, to be sure.”
“Our overripe fruits?”
Hallyne bobbed his head. “Wisdom Malliard believes we shall be
able to provide a full ten thousand jars, as was promised the queen.
I concur.” The pyromancer looked indecently pleased with that
prospect.
Assuming our enemies give you the time. The pyromancers kept
their recipe for wild re a closely guarded secret, but Tyrion knew
that it was a lengthy, dangerous, and time-consuming process. He
had assumed the promise of ten thousand jars was a wild boast, like
that of the bannerman who vows to marshal ten thousand swords
for his lord and shows up on the day of battle with a hundred and
two. If they can truly give us ten thousand …
He did not know whether he ought to be delighted or terri ed.
Perhaps a smidge of both. “I trust that your guild brothers are not

engaging in any unseemly haste, Wisdom. We do not want ten
thousand jars of defective wild re, nor even one … and we most
certainly do not want any mishaps.”
“There will be no mishaps, my lord Hand. The substance is
prepared by trained acolytes in a series of bare stone cells, and each
jar is removed by an apprentice and carried down here the instant it
is ready. Above each work cell is a room lled entirely with sand. A
protective spell has been laid on the oors, hmmm, most powerful.
Any re in the cell below causes the oors to fall away, and the
sand smothers the blaze at once.”
“Not to mention the careless acolyte.” By spell Tyrion imagined
Hallyne meant clever trick. He thought he would like to inspect one
of these false-ceilinged cells to see how it worked, but this was not
the time. Perhaps when the war was won.
“My brethren are never careless,” Hallyne insisted. “If I may be,
hmmmm, frank …”
“Oh, do.”
“The substance ows through my veins, and lives in the heart of
every pyromancer. We respect its power. But the common soldier,
hmmmm, the crew of one of the queen’s spit res, say, in the
unthinking frenzy of battle … any little mistake can bring
catastrophe. That cannot be said too often. My father often told
King Aerys as much, as his father told old King Jaehaerys.”
“They must have listened,” Tyrion said. “If they had burned the
city down, someone would have told me. So your counsel is that we
had best be careful?”
“Be very careful,” said Hallyne. “Be very very careful.”
“These clay jars … do you have an ample supply?”
“We do, my lord, and thank you for asking.”
“You won’t mind if I take some, then. A few thousand.”
“A few thousand?”
“Or however many your guild can spare, without interfering with
production. It’s empty pots I’m asking for, understand. Have them
sent round to the captains on each of the city gates.”
“I will, my lord, but why …?”

Tyrion smiled up at him. “When you tell me to dress warmly, I
dress warmly. When you tell me to be careful, well …” He gave a
shrug. “I’ve seen enough. Perhaps you would be so good as to escort
me back up to my litter?”
“It would be my great, hmmm, pleasure, my lord.” Hallyne lifted
the lamp and led the way back to the stairs. “It was good of you to
visit us. A great honor, hmmm. It has been too long since the King’s
Hand graced us with his presence. Not since Lord Rossart, and he
was of our order. That was back in King Aerys’s day. King Aerys
took a great interest in our work.”
King Aerys used you to roast the esh o his enemies. His brother
Jaime had told him a few stories of the Mad King and his pet
pyromancers. “Jo rey will be interested as well, I have no doubt.”
Which is why I’d best keep him well away from you.
“It is our great hope to have the king visit our Guildhall in his
own royal person. I have spoken of it to your royal sister. A great
feast …”
It was growing warmer as they climbed. “His Grace has
prohibited all feasting until such time as the war is won.” At my
insistence. “The king does not think it tting to banquet on choice
food while his people go without bread.”
“A most, hmmm, loving gesture, my lord. Perhaps instead some
few of us might call upon the king at the Red Keep. A small
demonstration of our powers, as it were, to distract His Grace from
his many cares for an evening. Wild re is but one of the dread
secrets of our ancient order. Many and wondrous are the things we
might show you.”
“I will take it up with my sister.” Tyrion had no objection to a
few magic tricks, but Jo ’s fondness for making men ght to the
death was trial enough; he had no intention of allowing the boy to
taste the possibilities of burning them alive.
When at last they reached the top of the steps, Tyrion shrugged
out of his shadowskin fur and folded it over his arm. The Guildhall
of the Alchemists was an imposing warren of black stone, but
Hallyne led him through the twists and turns until they reached the
Gallery of the Iron Torches, a long echoing chamber where columns

of green re danced around black metal columns twenty feet tall.
Ghostly ames shimmered o the polished black marble of the walls
and oor and bathed the hall in an emerald radiance. Tyrion would
have been more impressed if he hadn’t known that the great iron
torches had only been lit this morning in honor of his visit, and
would be extinguished the instant the doors closed behind him.
Wild re was too costly to squander.
They emerged atop the broad curving steps that fronted on the
Street of the Sisters, near the foot of Visenya’s Hill. He bid Hallyne
farewell and waddled down to where Timett son of Timett waited
with an escort of Burned Men. Given his purpose today, it had
seemed a singularly appropriate choice for his guard. Besides, their
scars struck terror in the hearts of the city rabble. That was all to
the good these days. Only three nights past, another mob had
gathered at the gates of the Red Keep, chanting for food. Jo had
unleashed a storm of arrows against them, slaying four, and then
shouted down that they had his leave to eat their dead. Winning us
still more friends.
Tyrion was surprised to see Bronn standing beside the litter as
well. “What are you doing here?”
“Delivering your messages,” Bronn said. “Ironhand wants you
urgently at the Gate of the Gods. He won’t say why. And you’ve
been summoned to Maegor’s too.”
“Summoned?” Tyrion knew of only one person who would
presume to use that word. “And what does Cersei want of me?”
Bronn shrugged. “The queen commands you to return to the
castle at once and attend her in her chambers. That stripling cousin
of yours delivered the message. Four hairs on his lip and he thinks
he’s a man.”
“Four hairs and a knighthood. He’s Ser Lancel now, never forget.”
Tyrion knew that Ser Jacelyn would not send for him unless the
matter was of import. “I’d best see what Bywater wants. Inform my
sister that I will attend her on my return.”
“She won’t like that,” Bronn warned.
“Good. The longer Cersei waits, the angrier she’ll become, and
anger makes her stupid. I much prefer angry and stupid to

composed and cunning.” Tyrion tossed his folded cloak into his
litter, and Timett helped him up after it.
The market square inside the Gate of the Gods, which in normal
times would have been thronged with farmers selling vegetables,
was near deserted when Tyrion crossed it. Ser Jacelyn met him at
the gate, and raised his iron hand in brusque salute. “My lord. Your
cousin Cleos Frey is here, come from Riverrun under a peace banner
with a letter from Robb Stark.”
“Peace terms?”
“So he says.”
“Sweet cousin. Show me to him.”
The gold cloaks had con ned Ser Cleos to a windowless
guardroom in the gatehouse. He rose when they entered. “Tyrion,
you are a most welcome sight.”
“That’s not something I hear often, cousin.”
“Has Cersei come with you?”
“My sister is otherwise occupied. Is this Stark’s letter?” He
plucked it o the table. “Ser Jacelyn, you may leave us.”
Bywater bowed and departed. “I was asked to bring the o er to
the Queen Regent,” Ser Cleos said as the door shut.
“I shall.” Tyrion glanced over the map that Robb Stark had sent
with his letter. “All in good time, cousin. Sit. Rest. You look gaunt
and haggard.” He looked worse than that, in truth.
“Yes.” Ser Cleos lowered himself onto a bench. “It is bad in the
riverlands, Tyrion. Around the Gods Eye and along the kingsroad
especially. The river lords are burning their own crops to try and
starve us, and your father’s foragers are torching every village they
take and putting the smallfolk to the sword.”
That was the way of war. The smallfolk were slaughtered, while
the highborn were held for ransom. Remind me to thank the gods that
I was born a Lannister.
Ser Cleos ran a hand through his thin brown hair. “Even with a
peace banner, we were attacked twice. Wolves in mail, hungry to
savage anyone weaker than themselves. The gods alone know what
side they started on, but they’re on their own side now. Lost three
men, and twice as many wounded.”

“What news of our foe?” Tyrion turned his attention back to
Stark’s terms. The boy does not want too much. Only half the realm,
the release of our captives, hostages, his father’s sword … oh, yes, and
his sisters.
“The boy sits idle at Riverrun,” Ser Cleos said. “I think he fears to
face your father in the eld. His strength grows less each day. The
river lords have departed, each to defend his own lands.”
Is this what Father intended? Tyrion rolled up Stark’s map. “These
terms will never do.”
“Will you at least consent to trade the Stark girls for Tion and
Willem?” Ser Cleos asked plaintively.
Tion Frey was his younger brother, Tyrion recalled. “No,” he said
gently, “but we’ll propose our own exchange of captives. Let me
consult with Cersei and the council. We shall send you back to
Riverrun with our terms.”
Clearly, the prospect did not cheer him. “My lord, I do not
believe Robb Stark will yield easily. It is Lady Catelyn who wants
this peace, not the boy.”
“Lady Catelyn wants her daughters.” Tyrion pushed himself down
from the bench, letter and map in hand. “Ser Jacelyn will see that
you have food and re. You look in dire need of sleep, cousin. I will
send for you when we know more.”
He found Ser Jacelyn on the ramparts, watching several hundred
new recruits drilling in the eld below. With so many seeking
refuge in King’s Landing, there was no lack of men willing to join
the City Watch for a full belly and a bed of straw in the barracks,
but Tyrion had no illusions about how well these ragged defenders
of theirs would ght if it came to battle.
“You did well to send for me,” Tyrion said. “I shall leave Ser
Cleos in your hands. He is to have every hospitality.”
“And his escort?” the commander wanted to know.
“Give them food and clean garb, and nd a maester to see to their
hurts. They are not to set foot inside the city, is that understood?” It
would never do to have the truth of conditions in King’s Landing
reach Robb Stark in Riverrun.
“Well understood, my lord.”

“Oh, and one more thing. The alchemists will be sending a large
supply of clay pots to each of the city gates. You’re to use them to
train the men who will work your spit res. Fill the pots with green
paint and have them drill at loading and ring. Any man who
spatters should be replaced. When they have mastered the paint
pots, substitute lamp oil and have them work at lighting the jars
and ring them while a ame. Once they learn to do that without
burning themselves, they may be ready for wild re.”
Ser Jacelyn scratched at his cheek with his iron hand. “Wise
measures. Though I have no love for that alchemist’s piss.”
“Nor I, but I use what I’m given.”
Once back inside his litter, Tyrion Lannister drew the curtains and
plumped a cushion under his elbow. Cersei would be displeased to
learn that he had intercepted Stark’s letter, but his father had sent
him here to rule, not to please Cersei.
It seemed to him that Robb Stark had given them a golden
chance. Let the boy wait at Riverrun dreaming of an easy peace.
Tyrion would reply with terms of his own, giving the King in the
North just enough of what he wanted to keep him hopeful. Let Ser
Cleos wear out his bony Frey rump riding to and fro with o ers and
counters. All the while, their cousin Ser Sta ord would be training
and arming the new host he’d raised at Casterly Rock. Once he was
ready, he and Lord Tywin could smash the Tullys and Starks
between them.
Now if only Robert’s brothers would be so accommodating. Glacial as
his progress was, still Renly Baratheon crept north and east with his
huge southron host, and scarcely a night passed that Tyrion did not
dread being awakened with the news that Lord Stannis was sailing
his eet up the Blackwater Rush. Well, it would seem I have a goodly
stock of wild re, but still …
The sound of some hubbub in the street intruded on his worries.
Tyrion peered out cautiously between the curtains. They were
passing through Cobbler’s Square, where a sizable crowd had
gathered beneath the leather awnings to listen to the rantings of a
prophet. A robe of undyed wool belted with a hempen rope marked
him for one of the begging brothers.

“Corruption!” the man cried shrilly. “There is the warning! Behold
the Father’s scourge!” He pointed at the fuzzy red wound in the sky.
From this vantage, the distant castle on Aegon’s High Hill was
directly behind him, with the comet hanging forebodingly over its
towers. A clever choice of stage, Tyrion re ected. “We have become
swollen, bloated, foul. Brother couples with sister in the bed of
kings, and the fruit of their incest capers in his palace to the piping
of a twisted little monkey demon. Highborn ladies fornicate with
fools and give birth to monsters! Even the High Septon has
forgotten the gods! He bathes in scented waters and grows fat on
lark and lamprey while his people starve! Pride comes before
prayer, maggots rule our castles, and gold is all … but no more! The
Rotten Summer is at an end, and the Whoremonger King is brought
low! When the boar did open him, a great stench rose to heaven and
a thousand snakes slid forth from his belly, hissing and biting!” He
jabbed his bony nger back at comet and castle. “There comes the
Harbinger! Cleanse yourselves, the gods cry out, lest ye be
cleansed! Bathe in the wine of righteousness, or you shall be bathed
in re! Fire!”
“Fire!” other voices echoed, but the hoots of derision almost
drowned them out. Tyrion took solace from that. He gave the
command to continue, and the litter rocked like a ship on a rough
sea as the Burned Men cleared a path. Twisted little monkey demon
indeed. The wretch did have a point about the High Septon, to be
sure. What was it that Moon Boy had said of him the other day? A
pious man who worships the Seven so fervently that he eats a meal for
each of them whenever he sits to table. The memory of the fool’s jape
made Tyrion smile.
He was pleased to reach the Red Keep without further incident.
As he climbed the steps to his chambers, Tyrion felt a deal more
hopeful than he had at dawn. Time, that’s all I truly need, time to
piece it all together. Once the chain is done … He opened the door to
his solar.
Cersei turned away from the window, her skirts swirling around
her slender hips. “How dare you ignore my summons!”
“Who admitted you to my tower?”

“Your tower? This is my son’s royal castle.”
“So they tell me.” Tyrion was not amused. Crawn would be even
less so; his Moon Brothers had the guard today. “I was about to
come to you, as it happens.”
“Were you?”
He swung the door shut behind him. “You doubt me?”
“Always, and with good reason.”
“I’m hurt.” Tyrion waddled to the sideboard for a cup of wine. He
knew no surer way to work up a thirst than talking with Cersei. “If
I’ve given you o ense, I would know how.”
“What a disgusting little worm you are. Myrcella is my only
daughter. Did you truly imagine that I would allow you to sell her
like a bag of oats?”
Myrcella, he thought. Well, that egg has hatched. Let’s see what color
the chick is. “Hardly a bag of oats. Myrcella is a princess. Some
would say this is what she was born for. Or did you plan to marry
her to Tommen?”
Her hand lashed out, knocking the wine cup from his hand to spill
on the oor. “Brother or no, I should have your tongue out for that.
I am Jo rey’s regent, not you, and I say that Myrcella will not be
shipped o to this Dornishman the way I was shipped to Robert
Baratheon.”
Tyrion shook wine o his ngers and sighed. “Why not? She’d be
a deal safer in Dorne than she is here.”
“Are you utterly ignorant or simply perverse? You know as well
as I that the Martells have no cause to love us.”
“The Martells have every cause to hate us. Nonetheless, I expect
them to agree. Prince Doran’s grievance against House Lannister
goes back only a generation, but the Dornishmen have warred
against Storm’s End and Highgarden for a thousand years, and
Renly has taken Dorne’s allegiance for granted. Myrcella is nine,
Trystane Martell eleven. I have proposed they wed when she
reaches her fourteenth year. Until such time, she would be an
honored guest at Sunspear, under Prince Doran’s protection.”
“A hostage,” Cersei said, mouth tightening.

“An honored guest,” Tyrion insisted, “and I suspect Martell will
treat Myrcella more kindly than Jo rey has treated Sansa Stark. I
had in mind to send Ser Arys Oakheart with her. With a knight of
the Kingsguard as her sworn shield, no one is like to forget who or
what she is.”
“Small good Ser Arys will do her if Doran Martell decides that my
daughter’s death would wash out his sister’s.”
“Martell is too honorable to murder a nine-year-old girl,
particularly one as sweet and innocent as Myrcella. So long as he
holds her he can be reasonably certain that we’ll keep faith on our
side, and the terms are too rich to refuse. Myrcella is the least part
of it. I’ve also o ered him his sister’s killer, a council seat, some
castles on the Marches …”
“Too much.” Cersei paced away from him, restless as a lioness,
skirts swirling. “You’ve o ered too much, and without my authority
or consent.”
“This is the Prince of Dorne we are speaking of. If I’d o ered less,
he’d likely spit in my face.”
“Too much!” Cersei insisted, whirling back.
“What would you have o ered him, that hole between your legs?”
Tyrion said, his own anger aring.
This time he saw the slap coming. His head snapped around with
a crack. “Sweet sweet sister,” he said, “I promise you, that was the
last time you will ever strike me.”
His sister laughed. “Don’t threaten me, little man. Do you think
Father’s letter keeps you safe? A piece of paper. Eddard Stark had a
piece of paper too, for all the good it did him.”
Eddard Stark did not have the City Watch, Tyrion thought, nor my
clansmen, nor the sellswords that Bronn has hired. I do. Or so he
hoped. Trusting in Varys, in Ser Jacelyn Bywater, in Bronn. Lord
Stark had probably had his delusions as well.
Yet he said nothing. A wise man did not pour wild re on a
brazier. Instead he poured a fresh cup of wine. “How safe do you
think Myrcella will be if King’s Landing falls? Renly and Stannis will
mount her head beside yours.”
And Cersei began to cry.

Tyrion Lannister could not have been more astonished if Aegon
the Conqueror himself had burst into the room, riding on a dragon
and juggling lemon pies. He had not seen his sister weep since they
were children together at Casterly Rock. Awkwardly, he took a step
toward her. When your sister cries, you were supposed to comfort
her … but this was Cersei! He reached a tentative hand for her
shoulder.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, wrenching away. It should not have
hurt, yet it did, more than any slap. Red-faced, as angry as she was
grief-stricken, Cersei struggled for breath. “Don’t look at me,
not … not like this … not you.”
Politely, Tyrion turned his back. “I did not mean to frighten you.
I promise you, nothing will happen to Myrcella.”
“Liar,” she said behind him. “I’m not a child, to be soothed with
empty promises. You told me you would free Jaime too. Well,
where is he?”
“In Riverrun, I should imagine. Safe and under guard, until I nd
a way to free him.”
Cersei sni ed. “I should have been born a man. I would have no
need of any of you then. None of this would have been allowed to
happen. How could Jaime let himself be captured by that boy? And
Father, I trusted in him, fool that I am, but where is he now that
he’s wanted? What is he doing?”
“Making war.”
“From behind the walls of Harrenhal?” she said scornfully. “A
curious way of ghting. It looks suspiciously like hiding.”
“Look again.”
“What else would you call it? Father sits in one castle, and Robb
Stark sits in another, and no one does anything.”
“There is sitting and there is sitting,” Tyrion suggested. “Each one
waits for the other to move, but the lion is still, poised, his tail
twitching, while the fawn is frozen by fear, bowels turned to jelly.
No matter which way he bounds, the lion will have him, and he
knows it.”
“And you’re quite certain that Father is the lion?”
Tyrion grinned. “It’s on all our banners.”

She ignored the jest. “If it was Father who’d been taken captive,
Jaime would not be sitting by idly, I promise you.”
Jaime would be battering his host to bloody bits against the walls of
Riverrun, and the Others take their chances. He never did have any
patience, no more than you, sweet sister. “Not all of us can be as bold
as Jaime, but there are other ways to win wars. Harrenhal is strong
and well situated.”
“And King’s Landing is not, as we both know perfectly well. While
Father plays lion and fawn with the Stark boy, Renly marches up
the roseroad. He could be at our gates any day now!”
“The city will not fall in a day. From Harrenhal it is a straight,
swift march down the kingsroad. Renly will scarce have unlimbered
his siege engines before Father takes him in the rear. His host will
be the hammer, the city walls the anvil. It makes a lovely picture.”
Cersei’s green eyes bored into him, wary, yet hungry for the
reassurance he was feeding her. “And if Robb Stark marches?”
“Harrenhal is close enough to the fords of the Trident so that
Roose Bolton cannot bring the northern foot across to join with the
Young Wolf’s horse. Stark cannot march on King’s Landing without
taking Harrenhal rst, and even with Bolton he is not strong enough
to do that.” Tyrion tried his most winning smile. “Meanwhile Father
lives o the fat of the riverlands, while our uncle Sta ord gathers
fresh levies at the Rock.”
Cersei regarded him suspiciously. “How could you know all this?
Did Father tell you his intentions when he sent you here?”
“No. I glanced at a map.”
Her look turned to disdain. “You’ve conjured up every word of
this in that grotesque head of yours, haven’t you, Imp?”
Tyrion tsked. “Sweet sister, I ask you, if we weren’t winning,
would the Starks have sued for peace?” He drew out the letter that
Ser Cleos Frey had brought. “The Young Wolf has sent us terms,
you see. Unacceptable terms, to be sure, but still, a beginning.
Would you care to see them?”
“Yes.” That fast, she was all queen again. “How do you come to
have them? They should have come to me.”

“What else is a Hand for, if not to hand you things?” Tyrion
handed her the letter. His cheek still throbbed where Cersei’s hand
had left its mark. Let her ay half my face, it will be a small price to
pay for her consent to the Dornish marriage. He would have that now,
he could sense it.
And certain knowledge of an informer too … well, that was the
plum in his pudding.

BRAN

Dancer was draped in bardings of snowy white wool emblazoned

with the grey direwolf of House Stark, while Bran wore grey
breeches and white doublet, his sleeves and collar trimmed with
vair. Over his heart was his wolf’s-head brooch of silver and
polished jet. He would sooner have had Summer than a silver wolf
on his breast, but Ser Rodrik had been unyielding.
The low stone steps balked Dancer only for a moment. When Bran
urged her on, she took them easily. Beyond the wide oak-and-iron
doors, eight long rows of trestle tables lled Winterfell’s Great Hall,
four on each side of the center aisle. Men crowded shoulder to
shoulder on the benches. “Stark!” they called as Bran trotted past,
rising to their feet. “Winterfell! Winterfell!”
He was old enough to know that it was not truly him they shouted
for—it was the harvest they cheered, it was Robb and his victories,
it was his lord father and his grandfather and all the Starks going
back eight thousand years. Still, it made him swell with pride. For
so long as it took him to ride the length of that hall he forgot that
he was broken. Yet when he reached the dais, with every eye upon
him, Osha and Hodor undid his straps and buckles, lifted him o
Dancer’s back, and carried him to the high seat of his fathers.
Ser Rodrik was seated to Bran’s left, his daughter Beth beside
him. Rickon was to his right, his mop of shaggy auburn hair grown
so long that it brushed his ermine mantle. He had refused to let
anyone cut it since their mother had gone. The last girl to try had

been bitten for her e orts. “I wanted to ride too,” he said as Hodor
led Dancer away. “I ride better than you.”
“You don’t, so hush up,” he told his brother. Ser Rodrik bellowed
for quiet. Bran raised his voice. He bid them welcome in the name
of his brother, the King in the North, and asked them to thank the
gods old and new for Robb’s victories and the bounty of the harvest.
“May there be a hundred more,” he nished, raising his father’s
silver goblet.
“A hundred more!” Pewter tankards, clay cups, and iron-banded
drinking horns clashed together. Bran’s wine was sweetened with
honey and fragrant with cinnamon and cloves, but stronger than he
was used to. He could feel its hot snaky ngers wriggling through
his chest as he swallowed. By the time he set down the goblet, his
head was swimming.
“You did well, Bran,” Ser Rodrik told him. “Lord Eddard would
have been most proud.” Down the table, Maester Luwin nodded his
agreement as the servers began to carry in the food.
Such food Bran had never seen; course after course after course,
so much that he could not manage more than a bite or two of each
dish. There were great joints of aurochs roasted with leeks, venison
pies chunky with carrots, bacon, and mushrooms, mutton chops
sauced in honey and cloves, savory duck, peppered boar, goose,
skewers of pigeon and capon, beef-and-barley stew, cold fruit soup.
Lord Wyman had brought twenty casks of sh from White Harbor
packed in salt and seaweed; white sh and winkles, crabs and
mussels, clams, herring, cod, salmon, lobster and lampreys. There
was black bread and honeycakes and oaten biscuits; there were
turnips and pease and beets, beans and squash and huge red onions;
there were baked apples and berry tarts and pears poached in
strongwine. Wheels of white cheese were set at every table, above
and below the salt, and agons of hot spice wine and chilled autumn
ale were passed up and down the tables.
Lord Wyman’s musicians played bravely and well, but harp and
ddle and horn were soon drowned beneath a tide of talk and
laughter, the clash of cup and plate, and the snarling of hounds
ghting for table scraps. The singer sang good songs, “Iron Lances”

and “The Burning of the Ships” and “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,”
but only Hodor seemed to be listening. He stood beside the piper,
hopping from one foot to the other.
The noise swelled to a steady rumbling roar, a great heady stew
of sound. Ser Rodrik talked with Maester Luwin above Beth’s curly
head, while Rickon screamed happily at the Walders. Bran had not
wanted the Freys at the high table, but the maester reminded him
that they would soon be kin. Robb was to marry one of their aunts,
and Arya one of their uncles. “She never will,” Bran said, “not
Arya,” but Maester Luwin was unyielding, so there they were beside
Rickon.
The serving men brought every dish to Bran rst, that he might
take the lord’s portion if he chose. By the time they reached the
ducks, he could eat no more. After that he nodded approval at each
course in turn, and waved it away. If the dish smelled especially
choice, he would send it to one of the lords on the dais, a gesture of
friendship and favor that Maester Luwin told him he must make. He
sent some salmon down to poor sad Lady Hornwood, the boar to
the boisterous Umbers, a dish of goose-in-berries to Cley Cerwyn,
and a huge lobster to Joseth the master of horse, who was neither
lord nor guest, but had seen to Dancer’s training and made it
possible for Bran to ride. He sent sweets to Hodor and Old Nan as
well, for no reason but he loved them. Ser Rodrik reminded him to
send something to his foster brothers, so he sent Little Walder some
boiled beets and Big Walder the buttered turnips.
On the benches below, Winterfell men mixed with smallfolk from
the winter town, friends from the nearer holdfasts, and the escorts
of their lordly guests. Some faces Bran had never seen before,
others he knew as well as his own, yet they all seemed equally
foreign to him. He watched them as from a distance, as if he still sat
in the window of his bedchamber, looking down on the yard below,
seeing everything yet a part of nothing.
Osha moved among the tables, pouring ale. One of Leobald
Tallhart’s men slid a hand up under her skirts and she broke the
agon over his head, to roars of laughter. Yet Mikken had his hand
down some woman’s bodice, and she seemed not to mind. Bran

watched Farlen make his red bitch beg for bones and smiled at Old
Nan plucking at the crust of a hot pie with wrinkled ngers. On the
dais, Lord Wyman attacked a steaming plate of lampreys as if they
were an enemy host. He was so fat that Ser Rodrik had commanded
that a special wide chair be built for him to sit in, but he laughed
loud and often, and Bran thought he liked him. Poor wan Lady
Hornwood sat beside him, her face a stony mask as she picked
listlessly at her food. At the opposite end of the high table, Hothen
and Mors were playing a drinking game, slamming their horns
together as hard as knights meeting in joust.
It is too hot here, and too noisy, and they are all getting drunk. Bran
itched under his grey and white woolens, and suddenly he wished
he were anywhere but here. It is cool in the godswood now. Steam is
rising o the hot pools, and the red leaves of the weirwood are rustling.
The smells are richer than here, and before long the moon will rise and
my brother will sing to it.
“Bran?” Ser Rodrik said. “You do not eat.”
The waking dream had been so vivid, for a moment Bran had not
known where he was. “I’ll have more later,” he said. “My belly’s
full to bursting.”
The old knight’s white mustache was pink with wine. “You have
done well, Bran. Here, and at the audiences. You will be an especial
ne lord one day, I think.”
I want to be a knight. Bran took another sip of the spiced honey
wine from his father’s goblet, grateful for something to clutch. The
lifelike head of a snarling direwolf was raised on the side of the
cup. He felt the silver muzzle pressing against his palm, and
remembered the last time he had seen his lord father drink from
this goblet.
It had been the night of the welcoming feast, when King Robert
had brought his court to Winterfell. Summer still reigned then. His
parents had shared the dais with Robert and his queen, with her
brothers beside her. Uncle Benjen had been there too, all in black.
Bran and his brothers and sisters sat with the king’s children,
Jo rey and Tommen and Princess Myrcella, who’d spent the whole
meal gazing at Robb with adoring eyes. Arya made faces across the

table when no one was looking; Sansa listened raptly while the
king’s high harper sang songs of chivalry, and Rickon kept asking
why Jon wasn’t with them. “Because he’s a bastard,” Bran nally
had to whisper to him.
And now they are all gone. It was as if some cruel god had reached
down with a great hand and swept them all away, the girls to
captivity, Jon to the Wall, Robb and Mother to war, King Robert
and Father to their graves, and perhaps Uncle Benjen as well …
Even down on the benches, there were new men at the tables.
Jory was dead, and Fat Tom, and Porther, Alyn, Desmond, Hullen
who had been master of horse, Harwin his son … all those who had
gone south with his father, even Septa Mordane and Vayon Poole.
The rest had ridden to war with Robb, and might soon be dead as
well for all Bran knew. He liked Hayhead and Poxy Tym and
Skittrick and the other new men well enough, but he missed his old
friends.
He looked up and down the benches at all the faces happy and
sad, and wondered who would be missing next year and the year
after. He might have cried then, but he couldn’t. He was the Stark
in Winterfell, his father’s son and his brother’s heir, and almost a
man grown.
At the foot of the hall, the doors opened and a gust of cold air
made the torches ame brighter for an instant. Alebelly led two
new guests into the feast. “The Lady Meera of House Reed,” the
rotund guardsman bellowed over the clamor. “With her brother,
Jojen, of Greywater Watch.”
Men looked up from their cups and trenchers to eye the
newcomers. Bran heard Little Walder mutter, “Frogeaters,” to Big
Walder beside him. Ser Rodrik climbed to his feet. “Be welcome,
friends, and share this harvest with us.” Serving men hurried to
lengthen the table on the dais, fetching trestles and chairs.
“Who are they?” Rickon asked.
“Mudmen,” answered Little Walder disdainfully. “They’re thieves
and cravens, and they have green teeth from eating frogs.”
Maester Luwin crouched beside Bran’s seat to whisper counsel in
his ear. “You must greet these ones warmly. I had not thought to

see them here, but … you know who they are?”
Bran nodded. “Crannogmen. From the Neck.”
“Howland Reed was a great friend to your father,” Ser Rodrik
told him. “These two are his, it would seem.”
As the newcomers walked the length of the hall, Bran saw that
one was indeed a girl, though he would never have known it by her
dress. She wore lambskin breeches soft with long use, and a
sleeveless jerkin armored in bronze scales. Though near Robb’s age,
she was slim as a boy, with long brown hair knotted behind her
head and only the barest suggestion of breasts. A woven net hung
from one slim hip, a long bronze knife from the other; under her
arm she carried an old iron greathelm spotted with rust; a frog
spear and round leathern shield were strapped to her back.
Her brother was several years younger and bore no weapons. All
his garb was green, even to the leather of his boots, and when he
came closer Bran saw that his eyes were the color of moss, though
his teeth looked as white as anyone else’s. Both Reeds were slight of
build, slender as swords and scarcely taller than Bran himself. They
went to one knee before the dais.
“My lords of Stark,” the girl said. “The years have passed in their
hundreds and their thousands since my folk rst swore their fealty
to the King in the North. My lord father has sent us here to say the
words again, for all our people.”
She is looking at me, Bran realized. He had to make some answer.
“My brother Robb is ghting in the south,” he said, “but you can
say your words to me, if you like.”
“To Winterfell we pledge the faith of Greywater,” they said
together. “Hearth and heart and harvest we yield up to you, my
lord. Our swords and spears and arrows are yours to command.
Grant mercy to our weak, help to our helpless, and justice to all,
and we shall never fail you.”
“I swear it by earth and water,” said the boy in green.
“I swear it by bronze and iron,” his sister said.
“We swear it by ice and re,” they nished together.
Bran groped for words. Was he supposed to swear something
back to them? Their oath was not one he had been taught. “May

your winters be short and your summers bountiful,” he said. That
was usually a good thing to say. “Rise. I’m Brandon Stark.”
The girl, Meera, got to her feet and helped her brother up. The
boy stared at Bran all the while. “We bring you gifts of sh and frog
and fowl,” he said.
“I thank you.” Bran wondered if he would have to eat a frog to be
polite. “I o er you the meat and mead of Winterfell.” He tried to
recall all he had been taught of the crannogmen, who dwelt
amongst the bogs of the Neck and seldom left their wetlands. They
were a poor folk, shers and frog-hunters who lived in houses of
thatch and woven reeds on oating islands hidden in the deeps of
the swamp. It was said that they were a cowardly people who
fought with poisoned weapons and preferred to hide from foes
rather than face them in open battle. And yet Howland Reed had
been one of Father’s staunchest companions during the war for King
Robert’s crown, before Bran was born.
The boy, Jojen, looked about the hall curiously as he took his
seat. “Where are the direwolves?”
“In the godswood,” Rickon answered. “Shaggy was bad.”
“My brother would like to see them,” the girl said.
Little Walder spoke up loudly. “He’d best watch they don’t see
him, or they’ll take a bite out of him.”
“They won’t bite if I’m there.” Bran was pleased that they wanted
to see the wolves. “Summer won’t anyway, and he’ll keep
Shaggydog away.” He was curious about these mudmen. He could
not recall ever seeing one before. His father had sent letters to the
Lord of Greywater over the years, but none of the crannogmen had
ever called at Winterfell. He would have liked to talk to them more,
but the Great Hall was so noisy that it was hard to hear anyone who
wasn’t right beside you.
Ser Rodrik was right beside Bran. “Do they truly eat frogs?” he
asked the old knight.
“Aye,” Ser Rodrik said. “Frogs and sh and lizard-lions, and all
manner of birds.”
Maybe they don’t have sheep and cattle, Bran thought. He
commanded the serving men to bring them mutton chops and a slice

o the aurochs and ll their trenchers with beef-and-barley stew.
They seemed to like that well enough. The girl caught him staring
at her and smiled. Bran blushed and looked away.
Much later, after all the sweets had been served and washed
down with gallons of summerwine, the food was cleared and the
tables shoved back against the walls to make room for the dancing.
The music grew wilder, the drummers joined in, and Hother Umber
brought forth a huge curved warhorn banded in silver. When the
singer reached the part in “The Night That Ended” where the Night’s
Watch rode forth to meet the Others in the Battle for the Dawn, he
blew a blast that set all the dogs to barking.
Two Glover men began a spinning skirl on bladder and woodharp.
Mors Umber was the rst on his feet. He seized a passing serving
girl by the arm, knocking the agon of wine out of her hands to
shatter on the oor. Amidst the rushes and bones and bits of bread
that littered the stone, he whirled her and spun her and tossed her
in the air. The girl squealed with laughter and turned red as her
skirts swirled and lifted.
Others soon joined in. Hodor began to dance all by himself, while
Lord Wyman asked little Beth Cassel to partner him. For all his size,
he moved gracefully. When he tired, Cley Cerwyn danced with the
child in his stead. Ser Rodrik approached Lady Hornwood, but she
made her excuses and took her leave. Bran watched long enough to
be polite, and then had Hodor summoned. He was hot and tired,
ushed from the wine, and the dancing made him sad. It was
something else he could never do. “I want to go.”
“Hodor,” Hodor shouted back, kneeling. Maester Luwin and
Hayhead lifted him into his basket. The folk of Winterfell had seen
this sight half a hundred times, but doubtless it looked queer to the
guests, some of whom were more curious than polite. Bran felt the
stares.
They went out the rear rather than walk the length of the hall,
Bran ducking his head as they passed through the lord’s door. In the
dim-lit gallery outside the Great Hall, they came upon Joseth the
master of horse engaged in a di erent sort of riding. He had some
woman Bran did not know shoved up against the wall, her skirts

around her waist. She was giggling until Hodor stopped to watch.
Then she screamed. “Leave them be, Hodor,” Bran had to tell him.
“Take me to my bedchamber.”
Hodor carried him up the winding steps to his tower and knelt
beside one of the iron bars that Mikken had driven into the wall.
Bran used the bars to move himself to the bed, and Hodor pulled o
his boots and breeches. “You can go back to the feast now, but don’t
go bothering Joseth and that woman,” Bran said.
“Hodor,” Hodor replied, bobbing his head.
When he blew out his bedside candle, darkness covered him like a
soft, familiar blanket. The faint sound of music drifted through his
shuttered window.
Something his father had told him once when he was little came
back to him suddenly. He had asked Lord Eddard if the Kingsguard
were truly the nest knights in the Seven Kingdoms. “No longer,”
he answered, “but once they were a marvel, a shining lesson to the
world.”
“Was there one who was best of all?”
“The nest knight I ever saw was Ser Arthur Dayne, who fought
with a blade called Dawn, forged from the heart of a fallen star.
They called him the Sword of the Morning, and he would have
killed me but for Howland Reed.” Father had gotten sad then, and
he would say no more. Bran wished he had asked him what he
meant.
He went to sleep with his head full of knights in gleaming armor,
ghting with swords that shone like star re, but when the dream
came he was in the godswood again. The smells from the kitchen
and the Great Hall were so strong that it was almost as if he had
never left the feast. He prowled beneath the trees, his brother close
behind him. This night was wildly alive, full of the howling of the
man-pack at their play. The sounds made him restless. He wanted to
run, to hunt, he wanted to—
The rattle of iron made his ears prick up. His brother heard it too.
They raced through the undergrowth toward the sound. Bounding
across the still water at the foot of the old white one, he caught the

scent of a stranger, the man-smell well mixed with leather and earth
and iron.
The intruders had pushed a few yards into the wood when he
came upon them; a female and a young male, with no taint of fear
to them, even when he showed them the white of his teeth. His
brother growled low in his throat, yet still they did not run.
“Here they come,” the female said. Meera, some part of him
whispered, some wisp of the sleeping boy lost in the wolf dream.
“Did you know they would be so big?”
“They will be bigger still before they are grown,” the young male
said, watching them with eyes large, green, and unafraid. “The
black one is full of fear and rage, but the grey is strong … stronger
than he knows … can you feel him, sister?”
“No,” she said, moving a hand to the hilt of the long brown knife
she wore. “Go careful, Jojen.”
“He won’t hurt me. This is not the day I die.” The male walked
toward them, unafraid, and reached out for his muzzle, a touch as
light as a summer breeze. Yet at the brush of those ngers the wood
dissolved and the very ground turned to smoke beneath his feet and
swirled away laughing, and then he was spinning and falling,
falling, falling …

CATELYN

As she slept amidst the rolling grasslands, Catelyn dreamt that Bran

was whole again, that Arya and Sansa held hands, that Rickon was
still a babe at her breast. Robb, crownless, played with a wooden
sword, and when all were safe asleep, she found Ned in her bed,
smiling.
Sweet it was, sweet and gone too soon. Dawn came cruel, a
dagger of light. She woke aching and alone and weary; weary of
riding, weary of hurting, weary of duty. I want to weep, she thought.
I want to be comforted. I’m so tired of being strong. I want to be foolish
and frightened for once. Just for a small while, that’s all … a day … an
hour …
Outside her tent, men were stirring. She heard the whicker of
horses, Shadd complaining of sti ness in his back, Ser Wendel
calling for his bow. Catelyn wished they would all go away. They
were good men, loyal, yet she was tired of them all. It was her
children she yearned after. One day, she promised herself as she lay
abed, one day she would allow herself to be less than strong.
But not today. It could not be today.
Her ngers seemed more clumsy than usual as she fumbled on her
clothes. She supposed she ought to be grateful that she had any use
of her hands at all. The dagger had been Valyrian steel, and
Valyrian steel bites deep and sharp. She had only to look at the
scars to remember.

Outside, Shadd was stirring oats into a kettle, while Ser Wendel
Manderly sat stringing his bow. “My lady,” he said when Catelyn
emerged. “There are birds in this grass. Would you fancy a roast
quail to break your fast this morning?”
“Oats and bread are su cient … for all of us, I think. We have
many leagues yet to ride, Ser Wendel.”
“As you will, my lady.” The knight’s moon face looked
crestfallen, the tips of his great walrus mustache twitching with
disappointment. “Oats and bread, and what could be better?” He
was one of the fattest men Catelyn had ever known, but
howevermuch he loved his food, he loved his honor more.
“Found some nettles and brewed a tea,” Shadd announced. “Will
m’lady take a cup?”
“Yes, with thanks.”
She cradled the tea in her scarred hands and blew on it to cool it.
Shadd was one of the Winterfell men. Robb had sent twenty of his
best to see her safely to Renly. He had sent ve lordlings as well,
whose names and high birth would add weight and honor to her
mission. As they made their way south, staying well clear of towns
and holdfasts, they had seen bands of mailed men more than once,
and glimpsed smoke on the eastern horizon, but none had dared
molest them. They were too weak to be a threat, too many to be
easy prey. Once across the Blackwater, the worst was behind. For
the past four days, they had seen no signs of war.
Catelyn had never wanted this. She had told Robb as much, back
in Riverrun. “When last I saw Renly, he was a boy no older than
Bran. I do not know him. Send someone else. My place is here with
my father, for whatever time he has left.”
Her son had looked at her unhappily. “There is no one else. I
cannot go myself. Your father’s too ill. The Black sh is my eyes and
ears, I dare not lose him. Your brother I need to hold Riverrun
when we march—”
“March?” No one had said a word to her of marching.
“I cannot sit at Riverrun waiting for peace. It makes me look as if
I were afraid to take the eld again. When there are no battles to

ght, men start to think of hearth and harvest, Father told me that.
Even my northmen grow restless.”
My northmen, she thought. He is even starting to talk like a king.
“No one has ever died of restlessness, but rashness is another
matter. We’ve planted seeds, let them grow.”
Robb shook his head stubbornly. “We’ve tossed some seeds in the
wind, that’s all. If your sister Lysa was coming to aid us, we would
have heard by now. How many birds have we sent to the Eyrie,
four? I want peace too, but why should the Lannisters give me
anything if all I do is sit here while my army melts away around me
swift as summer snow?”
“So rather than look craven, you will dance to Lord Tywin’s
pipes?” she threw back. “He wants you to march on Harrenhal, ask
your uncle Brynden if—”
“I said nothing of Harrenhal,” Robb said. “Now, will you go to
Renly for me, or must I send the Greatjon?”
The memory brought a wan smile to her face. Such an obvious
ploy, that, yet deft for a boy of fteen. Robb knew how ill-suited a
man like Greatjon Umber would be to treat with a man like Renly
Baratheon, and he knew that she knew it as well. What could she do
but accede, praying that her father would live until her return? Had
Lord Hoster been well, he would have gone himself, she knew. Still,
that leavetaking was hard, hard. He did not even know her when
she came to say farewell. “Minisa,” he called her, “where are the
children? My little Cat, my sweet Lysa …” Catelyn had kissed him
on the brow and told him his babes were well. “Wait for me, my
lord,” she said as his eyes closed. “I waited for you, oh, so many
times. Now you must wait for me.”
Fate drives me south and south again, Catelyn thought as she sipped
the astringent tea, when it is north I should be going, north to home.
She had written to Bran and Rickon, that last night at Riverrun. I do
not forget you, my sweet ones, you must believe that. It is only that your
brother needs me more.
“We ought to reach the upper Mander today, my lady,” Ser
Wendel announced while Shadd spooned out the porridge. “Lord
Renly will not be far, if the talk be true.”

And what do I tell him when I nd him? That my son holds him no
true king? She did not relish this meeting. They needed friends, not
more enemies, yet Robb would never bend the knee in homage to a
man he felt had no claim to the throne.
Her bowl was empty, though she could scarce remember tasting
the porridge. She laid it aside. “It is time we were away.” The
sooner she spoke to Renly, the sooner she could turn for home. She
was the rst one mounted, and she set the pace for the column. Hal
Mollen rode beside her, bearing the banner of House Stark, the grey
direwolf on an ice-white eld.
They were still a half day’s ride from Renly’s camp when they
were taken. Robin Flint had ranged ahead to scout, and he came
galloping back with word of a far-eyes watching from the roof of a
distant windmill. By the time Catelyn’s party reached the mill, the
man was long gone. They pressed on, covering not quite a mile
before Renly’s outriders came swooping down on them, twenty men
mailed and mounted, led by a grizzled greybeard of a knight with
bluejays on his surcoat.
When he saw her banners, he trotted up to her alone. “My lady,”
he called, “I am Ser Colen of Greenpools, as it please you. These are
dangerous lands you cross.”
“Our business is urgent,” she answered him. “I come as envoy
from my son, Robb Stark, the King in the North, to treat with Renly
Baratheon, the King in the South.”
“King Renly is the crowned and anointed lord of all the Seven
Kingdoms, my lady,” Ser Colen answered, though courteously
enough. “His Grace is encamped with his host near Bitterbridge,
where the roseroad crosses the Mander. It shall be my great honor
to escort you to him.” The knight raised a mailed hand, and his men
formed a double column anking Catelyn and her guard. Escort or
captor? she wondered. There was nothing to be done but trust in Ser
Colen’s honor, and Lord Renly’s.
They saw the smoke of the camp’s res when they were still an
hour from the river. Then the sound came drifting across farm and
eld and rolling plain, indistinct as the murmur of some distant sea,
but swelling as they rode closer. By the time they caught sight of

the Mander’s muddy waters glinting in the sun, they could make out
the voices of men, the clatter of steel, the whinny of horses. Yet
neither sound nor smoke prepared them for the host itself.
Thousands of cook res lled the air with a pale smoky haze. The
horse lines alone stretched out over leagues. A forest had surely
been felled to make the tall sta s that held the banners. Great siege
engines lined the grassy verge of the roseroad, mangonels and
trebuchets and rolling rams mounted on wheels taller than a man on
horseback. The steel points of pikes amed red with sunlight, as if
already blooded, while the pavilions of the knights and high lords
sprouted from the grass like silken mushrooms. She saw men with
spears and men with swords, men in steel caps and mail shirts,
camp followers strutting their charms, archers etching arrows,
teamsters driving wagons, swineherds driving pigs, pages running
messages, squires honing swords, knights riding palfreys, grooms
leading ill-tempered destriers. “This is a fearsome lot of men,” Ser
Wendel Manderly observed as they crossed the ancient stone span
from which Bitterbridge took its name.
“That it is,” Catelyn agreed.
Near all the chivalry of the south had come to Renly’s call, it
seemed. The golden rose of Highgarden was seen everywhere: sewn
on the right breast of armsmen and servants, apping and uttering
from the green silk banners that adorned lance and pike, painted
upon the shields hung outside the pavilions of the sons and brothers
and cousins and uncles of House Tyrell. As well Catelyn spied the
fox-and- owers of House Florent, Fossoway apples red and green,
Lord Tarly’s striding huntsman, oak leaves for Oakheart, cranes for
Crane, a cloud of black-and-orange butter ies for the Mullendores.
Across the Mander, the storm lords had raised their standards—
Renly’s own bannermen, sworn to House Baratheon and Storm’s
End. Catelyn recognized Bryce Caron’s nightingales, the Penrose
quills, and Lord Estermont’s sea turtle, green on green. Yet for
every shield she knew, there were a dozen strange to her, borne by
the small lords sworn to the bannermen, and by hedge knights and
freeriders who had come swarming to make Renly Baratheon a king
in fact as well as name.

Renly’s own standard ew high over all. From the top of his
tallest siege tower, a wheeled oaken immensity covered with
rawhides, streamed the largest war banner that Catelyn had ever
seen—a cloth big enough to carpet many a hall, shimmering gold,
with the crowned stag of Baratheon black upon it, prancing proud
and tall.
“My lady, do you hear that noise?” asked Hallis Mollen, trotting
close. “What is that?”
She listened. Shouts, and horses screaming, and the clash of steel,
and … “Cheering,” she said. They had been riding up a gentle slope
toward a line of brightly colored pavilions on the height. As they
passed between them, the press of men grew thicker, the sounds
louder. And then she saw.
Below, beneath the stone-and-timber battlements of a small
castle, a melee was in progress.
A eld had been cleared o , fences and galleries and tilting
barriers thrown up. Hundreds were gathered to watch, perhaps
thousands. From the looks of the grounds, torn and muddy and
littered with bits of dinted armor and broken lances, they had been
at it for a day or more, but now the end was near. Fewer than a
score of knights remained ahorse, charging and slashing at each
other as watchers and fallen combatants cheered them on. She saw
two destriers collide in full armor, going down in a tangle of steel
and horse esh. “A tourney,” Hal Mollen declared. He had a
penchant for loudly announcing the obvious.
“Oh, splendid,” Ser Wendel Manderly said as a knight in a
rainbow-striped cloak wheeled to deliver a backhand blow with a
long-handled axe that shattered the shield of the man pursuing him
and sent him reeling in his stirrups.
The press in front of them made further progress di cult. “Lady
Stark,” Ser Colen said, “if your men would be so good as to wait
here, I’ll present you to the king.”
“As you say.” She gave the command, though she had to raise her
voice to be heard above the tourney din. Ser Colen walked his horse
slowly through the throngs, with Catelyn riding in his wake. A roar
went up from the crowd as a helmetless red-bearded man with a

gri n on his shield went down before a big knight in blue armor.
His steel was a deep cobalt, even the blunt morningstar he wielded
with such deadly e ect, his mount barded in the quartered sun-andmoon heraldry of House Tarth.
“Red Ronnet’s down, gods be damned,” a man cursed.
“Loras’ll do for that blue—” a companion answered before a roar
drowned out the rest of his words.
Another man was fallen, trapped beneath his injured horse, both
of them screaming in pain. Squires rushed out to aid them.
This is madness, Catelyn thought. Real enemies on every side and
half the realm in ames, and Renly sits here playing at war like a boy
with his rst wooden sword.
The lords and ladies in the gallery were as engrossed in the melee
as the men on the ground. Catelyn marked them well. Her father
had oft treated with the southron lords, and not a few had been
guests at Riverrun. She recognized Lord Mathis Rowan, stouter and
more orid than ever, the golden tree of his House spread across his
white doublet. Below him sat Lady Oakheart, tiny and delicate, and
to her left Lord Randyll Tarly of Horn Hill, his greatsword
Heartsbane propped up against the back of his seat. Others she
knew only by their sigils, and some not at all.
In their midst, watching and laughing with his young queen by
his side, sat a ghost in a golden crown.
Small wonder the lords gather around him with such fervor, she
thought, he is Robert come again. Renly was handsome as Robert had
been handsome; long of limb and broad of shoulder, with the same
coal-black hair, ne and straight, the same deep blue eyes, the same
easy smile. The slender circlet around his brows seemed to suit him
well. It was soft gold, a ring of roses exquisitely wrought; at the
front lifted a stag’s head of dark green jade, adorned with golden
eyes and golden antlers.
The crowned stag decorated the king’s green velvet tunic as well,
worked in gold thread upon his chest; the Baratheon sigil in the
colors of Highgarden. The girl who shared the high seat with him
was also of Highgarden: his young queen, Margaery, daughter to
Lord Mace Tyrell. Their marriage was the mortar that held the great

southron alliance together, Catelyn knew. Renly was one-andtwenty, the girl no older than Robb, very pretty, with a doe’s soft
eyes and a mane of curling brown hair that fell about her shoulders
in lazy ringlets. Her smile was shy and sweet.
Out in the eld, another man lost his seat to the knight in the
rainbow-striped cloak, and the king shouted approval with the rest.
“Loras!” she heard him call. “Loras! Highgarden!” The queen clapped
her hands together in excitement.
Catelyn turned to see the end of it. Only four men were left in the
ght now, and there was small doubt whom king and commons
favored. She had never met Ser Loras Tyrell, but even in the distant
north one heard tales of the prowess of the young Knight of
Flowers. Ser Loras rode a tall white stallion in silver mail, and
fought with a long-handled axe. A crest of golden roses ran down
the center of his helm.
Two of the other survivors had made common cause. They
spurred their mounts toward the knight in the cobalt armor. As they
closed to either side, the blue knight reined hard, smashing one man
full in the face with his splintered shield while his black destrier
lashed out with a steel-shod hoof at the other. In a blink, one
combatant was unhorsed, the other reeling. The blue knight let his
broken shield drop to the ground to free his left arm, and then the
Knight of Flowers was on him. The weight of his steel seemed to
hardly diminish the grace and quickness with which Ser Loras
moved, his rainbow cloak swirling about him.
The white horse and the black one wheeled like lovers at a
harvest dance, the riders throwing steel in place of kisses. Longaxe
ashed and morningstar whirled. Both weapons were blunted, yet
still they raised an awful clangor. Shieldless, the blue knight was
getting much the worse of it. Ser Loras rained down blows on his
head and shoulders, to shouts of “Highgarden!” from the throng. The
other gave answer with his morningstar, but whenever the ball
came crashing in, Ser Loras interposed his battered green shield,
emblazoned with three golden roses. When the longaxe caught the
blue knight’s hand on the backswing and sent the morningstar ying

from his grasp, the crowd screamed like a rutting beast. The Knight
of Flowers raised his axe for the nal blow.
The blue knight charged into it. The stallions slammed together,
the blunted axehead smashed against the scarred blue
breastplate … but somehow the blue knight had the haft locked
between steel-gauntleted ngers. He wrenched it from Ser Loras’s
hand, and suddenly the two were grappling mount-to-mount, and an
instant later they were falling. As their horses pulled apart, they
crashed to the ground with bone-jarring force. Loras Tyrell, on the
bottom, took the brunt of the impact. The blue knight pulled a long
dirk free and icked open Tyrell’s visor. The roar of the crowd was
too loud for Catelyn to hear what Ser Loras said, but she saw the
word form on his split, bloody lips. Yield.
The blue knight climbed unsteady to his feet, and raised his dirk
in the direction of Renly Baratheon, the salute of a champion to his
king. Squires dashed onto the eld to help the vanquished knight to
his feet. When they got his helm o , Catelyn was startled to see
how young he was. He could not have had more than two years on
Robb. The boy might have been as comely as his sister, but the
broken lip, unfocused eyes, and blood trickling through his matted
hair made it hard to be certain.
“Approach,” King Renly called to the champion.
He limped toward the gallery. At close hand, the brilliant blue
armor looked rather less splendid; everywhere it showed scars, the
dents of mace and warhammer, the long gouges left by swords,
chips in the enameled breastplate and helm. His cloak hung in rags.
From the way he moved, the man within was no less battered. A
few voices hailed him with cries of “Tarth!” and, oddly, “A Beauty!
A Beauty!” but most were silent. The blue knight knelt before the
king. “Grace,” he said, his voice mu ed by his dented greathelm.
“You are all your lord father claimed you were.” Renly’s voice
carried over the eld. “I’ve seen Ser Loras unhorsed once or
twice … but never quite in that fashion.”
“That were no proper unhorsing,” complained a drunken archer
nearby, a Tyrell rose sewn on his jerkin. “A vile trick, pulling the
lad down.”

The press had begun to open up. “Ser Colen,” Catelyn said to her
escort, “who is this man, and why do they mislike him so?”
Ser Colen frowned. “Because he is no man, my lady. That’s
Brienne of Tarth, daughter to Lord Selwyn the Evenstar.”
“Daughter?” Catelyn was horri ed.
“Brienne the Beauty, they name her … though not to her face,
lest they be called upon to defend those words with their bodies.”
She heard King Renly declare the Lady Brienne of Tarth the victor
of the great melee at Bitterbridge, last mounted of one hundred
sixteen knights. “As champion, you may ask of me any boon that
you desire. If it lies in my power, it is yours.”
“Your Grace,” Brienne answered, “I ask the honor of a place
among your Rainbow Guard. I would be one of your seven, and
pledge my life to yours, to go where you go, ride at your side, and
keep you safe from all hurt and harm.”
“Done,” he said. “Rise, and remove your helm.”
She did as he bid her. And when the greathelm was lifted, Catelyn
understood Ser Colen’s words.
Beauty, they called her … mocking. The hair beneath the visor
was a squirrel’s nest of dirty straw, and her face … Brienne’s eyes
were large and very blue, a young girl’s eyes, trusting and guileless,
but the rest … her features were broad and coarse, her teeth
prominent and crooked, her mouth too wide, her lips so plump they
seemed swollen. A thousand freckles speckled her cheeks and brow,
and her nose had been broken more than once. Pity lled Catelyn’s
heart. Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman?
And yet, when Renly cut away her torn cloak and fastened a
rainbow in its place, Brienne of Tarth did not look unfortunate. Her
smile lit up her face, and her voice was strong and proud as she
said, “My life for yours, Your Grace. From this day on, I am your
shield, I swear it by the old gods and the new.” The way she looked
at the king—looked down at him, she was a good hand higher,
though Renly was near as tall as his brother had been—was painful
to see.
“Your Grace!” Ser Colen of Greenpools swung down o his horse
to approach the gallery. “I beg your leave.” He went to one knee. “I

have the honor to bring you the Lady Catelyn Stark, sent as envoy
by her son Robb, Lord of Winterfell.”
“Lord of Winterfell and King in the North, ser,” Catelyn corrected
him. She dismounted and moved to Ser Colen’s side.
King Renly looked surprised. “Lady Catelyn? We are most
pleased.” He turned to his young queen. “Margaery my sweet, this
is the Lady Catelyn Stark of Winterfell.”
“You are most welcome here, Lady Stark,” the girl said, all soft
courtesy. “I am sorry for your loss.”
“You are kind,” said Catelyn.
“My lady, I swear to you, I will see that the Lannisters answer for
your husband’s murder,” the king declared. “When I take King’s
Landing, I’ll send you Cersei’s head.”
And will that bring my Ned back to me? she thought. “It will be
enough to know that justice has been done, my lord.”
“Your Grace,” Brienne the Blue corrected sharply. “And you
should kneel when you approach the king.”
“The distance between a lord and a grace is a small one, my lady,”
Catelyn said. “Lord Renly wears a crown, as does my son. If you
wish, we may stand here in the mud and debate what honors and
titles are rightly due to each, but it strikes me that we have more
pressing matters to consider.”
Some of Renly’s lords bristled at that, but the king only laughed.
“Well said, my lady. There will be time enough for graces when
these wars are done. Tell me, when does your son mean to march
against Harrenhal?”
Until she knew whether this king was friend or foe, Catelyn was
not about to reveal the least part of Robb’s dispositions. “I do not sit
on my son’s war councils, my lord.”
“So long as he leaves a few Lannisters for me, I’ll not complain.
What has he done with the Kingslayer?”
“Jaime Lannister is held prisoner at Riverrun.”
“Still alive?” Lord Mathis Rowan seemed dismayed.
Bemused, Renly said, “It would seem the direwolf is gentler than
the lion.”

“Gentler than the Lannisters,” murmured Lady Oakheart with a
bitter smile, “is drier than the sea.”
“I call it weak.” Lord Randyll Tarly had a short, bristly grey beard
and a reputation for blunt speech. “No disrespect to you, Lady
Stark, but it would have been more seemly had Lord Robb come to
pay homage to the king himself, rather than hiding behind his
mother’s skirts.”
“King Robb is warring, my lord,” Catelyn replied with icy
courtesy, “not playing at tourney.”
Renly grinned. “Go softly, Lord Randyll, I fear you’re
overmatched.” He summoned a steward in the livery of Storm’s
End. “Find a place for the lady’s companions, and see that they have
every comfort. Lady Catelyn shall have my own pavilion. Since
Lord Caswell has been so kind as to give me use of his castle, I have
no need of it. My lady, when you are rested, I would be honored if
you would share our meat and mead at the feast Lord Caswell is
giving us tonight. A farewell feast. I fear his lordship is eager to see
the heels of my hungry horde.”
“Not true, Your Grace,” protested a wispy young man who must
have been Caswell. “What is mine is yours.”
“Whenever someone said that to my brother Robert, he took
them at their word,” Renly said. “Do you have daughters?”
“Yes, Your Grace. Two.”
“Then thank the gods that I am not Robert. My sweet queen is all
the woman I desire.” Renly held out his hand to help Margaery to
her feet. “We’ll talk again when you’ve had a chance to refresh
yourself, Lady Catelyn.”
Renly led his bride back toward the castle while his steward
conducted Catelyn to the king’s green silk pavilion. “If you have
need of anything, you have only to ask, my lady.”
Catelyn could scarcely imagine what she might need that had not
already been provided. The pavilion was larger than the common
rooms of many an inn and furnished with every comfort: feather
mattress and sleeping furs, a wood-and-copper tub large enough for
two, braziers to keep o the night’s chill, slung leather camp chairs,
a writing table with quills and inkpot, bowls of peaches, plums, and

pears, a agon of wine with a set of matched silver cups, cedar
chests packed full of Renly’s clothing, books, maps, game boards, a
high harp, a tall bow and a quiver of arrows, a pair of red-tailed
hunting hawks, a vertible armory of ne weapons. He does not stint
himself, this Renly, she thought as she looked about. Small wonder this
host moves so slowly.
Beside the entrance, the king’s armor stood sentry; a suit of
forest-green plate, its ttings chased with gold, the helm crowned
by a great rack of golden antlers. The steel was polished to such a
high sheen that she could see her re ection in the breastplate,
gazing back at her as if from the bottom of a deep green pond. The
face of a drowned woman, Catelyn thought. Can you drown in grief?
She turned away sharply, angry with her own frailty. She had no
time for the luxury of self-pity. She must wash the dust from her
hair and change into a gown more tting for a king’s feast.
Ser Wendel Manderly, Lucas Blackwood, Ser Perwyn Frey, and
the rest of her highborn companions accompanied her to the castle.
The great hall of Lord Caswell’s keep was great only by courtesy,
yet room was found on the crowded benches for Catelyn’s men,
amidst Renly’s own knights. Catelyn was assigned a place on the
dais between red-faced Lord Mathis Rowan and genial Ser Jon
Fossoway of the green-apple Fossoways. Ser Jon made jests, while
Lord Mathis inquired politely after the health of her father, brother,
and children.
Brienne of Tarth had been seated at the far end of the high table.
She did not gown herself as a lady, but chose a knight’s nery
instead, a velvet doublet quartered rose-and-azure, breeches and
boots and a ne-tooled swordbelt, her new rainbow cloak owing
down her back. No garb could disguise her plainness, though; the
huge freckled hands, the wide at face, the thrust of her teeth. Out
of armor, her body seemed ungainly, broad of hip and thick of limb,
with hunched muscular shoulders but no bosom to speak of. And it
was clear from her every action that Brienne knew it, and su ered
for it. She spoke only in answer, and seldom lifted her gaze from
her food.

Of food there was plenty. The war had not touched the fabled
bounty of Highgarden. While singers sang and tumblers tumbled,
they began with pears poached in wine, and went on to tiny savory
sh rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stu ed with onions
and mushrooms. There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds
of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese
and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley.
For the sweet, Lord Caswell’s servants brought down trays of
pastries from his castle kitchens, cream swans and spun-sugar
unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits
and blackberry tarts, apple crisps and wheels of buttery cheese.
The rich foods made Catelyn queasy, but it would never do to
show frailty when so much depended on her strength. She ate
sparingly, while she watched this man who would be king. Renly
sat with his young bride on his left hand and her brother on the
right. Apart from the white linen bandage around his brow, Ser
Loras seemed none the worse for the day’s misadventures. He was
indeed as comely as Catelyn had suspected he might be. When not
glazed, his eyes were lively and intelligent, his hair an artless
tumble of brown locks that many a maid might have envied. He had
replaced his tattered tourney cloak with a new one; the same
brilliantly striped silk of Renly’s Rainbow Guard, clasped with the
golden rose of Highgarden.
From time to time, King Renly would feed Margaery some choice
morsel o the point of his dagger, or lean over to plant the lightest
of kisses on her cheek, but it was Ser Loras who shared most of his
jests and con dences. The king enjoyed his food and drink, that was
plain to see, yet he seemed neither glutton nor drunkard. He
laughed often, and well, and spoke amiably to highborn lords and
lowly serving wenches alike.
Some of his guests were less moderate. They drank too much and
boasted too loudly, to her mind. Lord Willum’s sons Josua and Elyas
disputed heatedly about who would be rst over the walls of King’s
Landing. Lord Varner dandled a serving girl on his lap, nuzzling at
her neck while one hand went exploring down her bodice. Guyard
the Green, who fancied himself a singer, diddled a harp and gave

them a verse about tying lions’ tails in knots, parts of which
rhymed. Ser Mark Mullendore brought a black-and-white monkey
and fed him morsels from his own plate, while Ser Tanton of the
red-apple Fossoways climbed on the table and swore to slay Sandor
Clegane in single combat. The vow might have been taken more
solemnly if Ser Tanton had not had one foot in a gravy boat when
he made it.
The height of folly was reached when a plump fool came capering
out in gold-painted tin with a cloth lion’s head, and chased a dwarf
around the tables, whacking him over the head with a bladder.
Finally King Renly demanded to know why he was beating his
brother. “Why, Your Grace, I’m the Kinslayer,” the fool said.
“It’s Kingslayer, fool of a fool,” Renly said, and the hall rang with
laughter.
Lord Rowan beside her did not join the merriment. “They are all
so young,” he said.
It was true. The Knight of Flowers could not have reached his
second name day when Robert slew Prince Rhaegar on the Trident.
Few of the others were very much older. They had been babes
during the Sack of King’s Landing, and no more than boys when
Balon Greyjoy raised the Iron Islands in rebellion. They are still
unblooded, Catelyn thought as she watched Lord Bryce goad Ser
Robar into juggling a brace of daggers. It is all a game to them still, a
tourney writ large, and all they see is the chance for glory and honor and
spoils. They are boys drunk on song and story, and like all boys, they
think themselves immortal.
“War will make them old,” Catelyn said, “as it did us.” She had
been a girl when Robert and Ned and Jon Arryn raised their banners
against Aerys Targaryen, a woman by the time the ghting was
done. “I pity them.”
“Why?” Lord Rowan asked her. “Look at them. They’re young
and strong, full of life and laughter. And lust, aye, more lust than
they know what to do with. There will be many a bastard bred this
night, I promise you. Why pity?”
“Because it will not last,” Catelyn answered, sadly. “Because they
are the knights of summer, and winter is coming.”

“Lady Catelyn, you are wrong.” Brienne regarded her with eyes
as blue as her armor. “Winter will never come for the likes of us.
Should we die in battle, they will surely sing of us, and it’s always
summer in the songs. In the songs all knights are gallant, all maids
are beautiful, and the sun is always shining.”
Winter comes for all of us, Catelyn thought. For me, it came when
Ned died. It will come for you too, child, and sooner than you like. She
did not have the heart to say it.
The king saved her. “Lady Catelyn,” Renly called down. “I feel
the need of some air. Will you walk with me?”
Catelyn stood at once. “I should be honored.”
Brienne was on her feet as well. “Your Grace, give me but a
moment to don my mail. You should not be without protection.”
King Renly smiled. “If I am not safe in the heart of Lord Caswell’s
castle, with my own host around me, one sword will make no
matter … not even your sword, Brienne. Sit and eat. If I have need
of you, I’ll send for you.”
His words seemed to strike the girl harder than any blow she had
taken that afternoon. “As you will, Your Grace.” Brienne sat, eyes
downcast. Renly took Catelyn’s arm and led her from the hall, past
a slouching guardsman who straightened so hurriedly that he near
dropped his spear. Renly clapped the man on the shoulder and made
a jest of it.
“This way, my lady.” The king took her through a low door into a
stair tower. As they started up, he said, “Perchance, is Ser Barristan
Selmy with your son at Riverrun?”
“No,” she answered, puzzled. “Is he no longer with Jo rey? He
was the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.”
Renly shook his head. “The Lannisters told him he was too old
and gave his cloak to the Hound. I’m told he left King’s Landing
vowing to take up service with the true king. That cloak Brienne
claimed today was the one I was keeping for Selmy, in hopes that
he might o er me his sword. When he did not turn up at
Highgarden, I thought perhaps he had gone to Riverrun instead.”
“We have not seen him.”

“He was old, yes, but a good man still. I hope he has not come to
harm. The Lannisters are great fools.” They climbed a few more
steps. “On the night of Robert’s death, I o ered your husband a
hundred swords and urged him to take Jo rey into his power. Had
he listened, he would be regent today, and there would have been
no need for me to claim the throne.”
“Ned refused you.” She did not have to be told.
“He had sworn to protect Robert’s children,” Renly said. “I lacked
the strength to act alone, so when Lord Eddard turned me away, I
had no choice but to ee. Had I stayed, I knew the queen would see
to it that I did not long outlive my brother.”
Had you stayed, and lent your support to Ned, he might still be alive,
Catelyn thought bitterly.
“I liked your husband well enough, my lady. He was a loyal
friend to Robert, I know … but he would not listen and he would
not bend. Here, I wish to show you something.” They had reached
the top of the stairwell. Renly pushed open a wooden door, and
they stepped out onto the roof.
Lord Caswell’s keep was scarcely tall enough to call a tower, but
the country was low and at and Catelyn could see for leagues in all
directions. Wherever she looked, she saw res. They covered the
earth like fallen stars, and like the stars there was no end to them.
“Count them if you like, my lady,” Renly said quietly. “You will still
be counting when dawn breaks in the east. How many res burn
around Riverrun tonight, I wonder?”
Catelyn could hear faint music drifting from the Great Hall,
seeping out into the night. She dare not count the stars.
“I’m told your son crossed the Neck with twenty thousand swords
at his back,” Renly went on. “Now that the lords of the Trident are
with him, perhaps he commands forty thousand.”
No, she thought, not near so many, we have lost men in battle, and
others to the harvest.
“I have twice that number here,” Renly said, “and this is only part
of my strength. Mace Tyrell remains at Highgarden with another
ten thousand, I have a strong garrison holding Storm’s End, and
soon enough the Dornishmen will join me with all their power. And

never forget my brother Stannis, who holds Dragonstone and
commands the lords of the narrow sea.”
“It would seem that you are the one who has forgotten Stannis,”
Catelyn said, more sharply than she’d intended.
“His claim, you mean?” Renly laughed. “Let us be blunt, my lady.
Stannis would make an appalling king. Nor is he like to become
one. Men respect Stannis, even fear him, but precious few have ever
loved him.”
“He is still your elder brother. If either of you can be said to have
a right to the Iron Throne, it must be Lord Stannis.”
Renly shrugged. “Tell me, what right did my brother Robert ever
have to the Iron Throne?” He did not wait for an answer. “Oh, there
was talk of the blood ties between Baratheon and Targaryen, of
weddings a hundred years past, of second sons and elder daughters.
No one but the maesters care about any of it. Robert won the throne
with his warhammer.” He swept a hand across the camp res that
burned from horizon to horizon. “Well, there is my claim, as good
as Robert’s ever was. If your son supports me as his father
supported Robert, he’ll not nd me ungenerous. I will gladly
con rm him in all his lands, titles, and honors. He can rule in
Winterfell as he pleases. He can even go on calling himself King in
the North if he likes, so long as he bends the knee and does me
homage as his overlord. King is only a word, but fealty, loyalty,
service … those I must have.”
“And if he will not give them to you, my lord?”
“I mean to be king, my lady, and not of a broken kingdom. I
cannot say it plainer than that. Three hundred years ago, a Stark
king knelt to Aegon the Dragon, when he saw he could not hope to
prevail. That was wisdom. Your son must be wise as well. Once he
joins me, this war is good as done. We—” Renly broke o suddenly,
distracted. “What’s this now?”
The rattle of chains heralded the raising of the portcullis. Down in
the yard below, a rider in a winged helm urged his well-lathered
horse under the spikes. “Summon the king!” he called.
Renly vaulted up into a crenel. “I’m here, ser.”

“Your Grace.” The rider spurred his mount closer. “I came swift
as I could. From Storm’s End. We are besieged, Your Grace, Ser
Cortnay de es them, but …”
“But … that’s not possible. I would have been told if Lord Tywin
left Harrenhal.”
“These are no Lannisters, my liege. It’s Lord Stannis at your gates.
King Stannis, he calls himself now.”

JON

A blowing rain lashed at Jon’s face as he spurred his horse across

the swollen stream. Beside him, Lord Commander Mormont gave
the hood of his cloak a tug, muttering curses on the weather. His
raven sat on his shoulder, feathers ru ed, as soaked and grumpy as
the Old Bear himself. A gust of wind sent wet leaves apping round
them like a ock of dead birds. The haunted forest, Jon thought
ruefully. The drowned forest, more like it.
He hoped Sam was holding up, back down the column. He was
not a good rider even in fair weather, and six days of rain had made
the ground treacherous, all soft mud and hidden rocks. When the
wind blew, it drove the water right into their eyes. The Wall would
be owing o to the south, the melting ice mingling with warm rain
to wash down in sheets and rivers. Pyp and Toad would be sitting
near the re in the common room, drinking cups of mulled wine
before their supper. Jon envied them. His wet wool clung to him
sodden and itching, his neck and shoulders ached ercely from the
weight of mail and sword, and he was sick of salt cod, salt beef, and
hard cheese.
Up ahead a hunting horn sounded a quavering note, half drowned
beneath the constant patter of the rain. “Buckwell’s horn,” the Old
Bear announced. “The gods are good; Craster’s still there.” His
raven gave a single ap of his big wings, croaked “Corn,” and
ru ed his feathers up again.

Jon had often heard the black brothers tell tales of Craster and his
keep. Now he would see it with his own eyes. After seven empty
villages, they had all come to dread nding Craster’s as dead and
desolate as the rest, but it seemed they would be spared that.
Perhaps the Old Bear will nally get some answers, he thought.
Anyway, we’ll be out of the rain.
Thoren Smallwood swore that Craster was a friend to the Watch,
despite his unsavory reputation. “The man’s half-mad, I won’t deny
it,” he’d told the Old Bear, “but you’d be the same if you’d spent
your life in this cursed wood. Even so, he’s never turned a ranger
away from his re, nor does he love Mance Rayder. He’ll give us
good counsel.”
So long as he gives us a hot meal and a chance to dry our clothes, I’ll
be happy. Dywen said Craster was a kinslayer, liar, raper, and
craven, and hinted that he tra cked with slavers and demons. “And
worse,” the old forester would add, clacking his wooden teeth.
“There’s a cold smell to that one, there is.”
“Jon,” Lord Mormont commanded, “ride back along the column
and spread the word. And remind the o cers that I want no trouble
about Craster’s wives. The men are to mind their hands and speak
to these women as little as need be.”
“Aye, my lord.” Jon turned his horse back the way they’d come.
It was pleasant to have the rain out of his face, if only for a little
while. Everyone he passed seemed to be weeping. The march was
strung out through half a mile of woods.
In the midst of the baggage train, Jon passed Samwell Tarly,
slumped in his saddle under a wide oppy hat. He was riding one
dray horse and leading the others. The drumming of the rain against
the hoods of their cages had the ravens squawking and uttering.
“You put a fox in with them?” Jon called out.
Water ran o the brim of Sam’s hat as he lifted his head. “Oh,
hullo, Jon. No, they just hate the rain, the same as us.”
“How are you faring, Sam?”
“Wetly.” The fat boy managed a smile. “Nothing has killed me
yet, though.”

“Good. Craster’s Keep is just ahead. If the gods are good, he’ll let
us sleep by his re.”
Sam looked dubious. “Dolorous Edd says Craster’s a terrible
savage. He marries his daughters and obeys no laws but those he
makes himself. And Dywen told Grenn he’s got black blood in his
veins. His mother was a wildling woman who lay with a ranger, so
he’s a bas …” Suddenly he realized what he was about to say.
“A bastard,” Jon said with a laugh. “You can say it, Sam. I’ve
heard the word before.” He put the spurs to his surefooted little
garron. “I need to hunt down Ser Ottyn. Be careful around Craster’s
women.” As if Samwell Tarly needed warning on that score. “We’ll
talk later, after we’ve made camp.”
Jon carried the word back to Ser Ottyn Wythers, plodding along
with the rear guard. A small prune-faced man of an age with
Mormont, Ser Ottyn always looked tired, even at Castle Black, and
the rain had beaten him down unmercifully. “Welcome tidings,” he
said. “This wet has soaked my bones, and even my saddle sores
complain of saddle sores.”
On his way back, Jon swung wide of the column’s line of march
and took a shorter path through the thick of the wood. The sounds
of man and horse diminished, swallowed up by the wet green wild,
and soon enough he could hear only the steady wash of rain against
leaf and tree and rock. It was midafternoon, yet the forest seemed
as dark as dusk. Jon wove a path between rocks and puddles, past
great oaks, grey-green sentinels, and black-barked ironwoods. In
places the branches wove a canopy overhead and he was given a
moment’s respite from the drumming of the rain against his head.
As he rode past a lightning-blasted chestnut tree overgrown with
wild white roses, he heard something rustling in the underbrush.
“Ghost,” he called out. “Ghost, to me.”
But it was Dywen who emerged from the greenery, forking a
shaggy grey garron with Grenn ahorse beside him. The Old Bear
had deployed outriders to either side of the main column, to screen
their march and warn of the approach of any enemies, and even
there he took no chances, sending the men out in pairs.

“Ah, it’s you, Lord Snow.” Dywen smiled an oaken smile; his
teeth were carved of wood, and t badly. “Thought me and the boy
had us one o’ them Others to deal with. Lose your wolf?”
“He’s o hunting.” Ghost did not like to travel with the column,
but he would not be far. When they made camp for the night, he’d
nd his way to Jon at the Lord Commander’s tent.
“Fishing, I’d call it, in this wet,” Dywen said.
“My mother always said rain was good for growing crops,” Grenn
put in hopefully.
“Aye, a good crop of mildew,” Dywen said. “The best thing about
a rain like this, it saves a man from taking baths.” He made a
clacking sound on his wooden teeth.
“Buckwell’s found Craster,” Jon told them.
“Had he lost him?” Dywen chuckled. “See that you young bucks
don’t go nosing about Craster’s wives, you hear?”
Jon smiled. “Want them all for yourself, Dywen?”
Dywen clacked his teeth some more. “Might be I do. Craster’s got
ten ngers and one cock, so he don’t count but to eleven. He’d
never miss a couple.”
“How many wives does he have, truly?” Grenn asked.
“More’n you ever will, brother. Well, it’s not so hard when you
breed your own. There’s your beast, Snow.”
Ghost was trotting along beside Jon’s horse with tail held high,
his white fur ru ed up thick against the rain. He moved so silently
Jon could not have said just when he appeared. Grenn’s mount shied
at the scent of him; even now, after more than a year, the horses
were uneasy in the presence of the direwolf. “With me, Ghost.” Jon
spurred o to Craster’s Keep.
He had never thought to nd a stone castle on the far side of the
Wall, but he had pictured some sort of motte-and-bailey with a
wooden palisade and a timber tower keep. What they found instead
was a midden heap, a pigsty, an empty sheepfold, and a windowless
daub-and-wattle hall scarce worthy of the name. It was long and
low, chinked together from logs and roofed with sod. The
compound stood atop a rise too modest to name a hill, surrounded
by an earthen dike. Brown rivulets owed down the slope where

the rain had eaten gaping holes in the defenses, to join a rushing
brook that curved around to the north, its thick waters turned into a
murky torrent by the rains.
On the southwest, he found an open gate anked by a pair of
animal skulls on high poles: a bear to one side, a ram to the other.
Bits of esh still clung to the bear skull, Jon noted as he joined the
line riding past. Within, Jarmen Buckwell’s scouts and men from
Thoren Smallwood’s van were setting up horse lines and struggling
to raise tents. A host of piglets rooted about three huge sows in the
sty. Nearby, a small girl pulled carrots from a garden, naked in the
rain, while two women tied a pig for slaughter. The animal’s
squeals were high and horrible, almost human in their distress.
Chett’s hounds barked wildly in answer, snarling and snapping
despite his curses, with a pair of Craster’s dogs barking back. When
they saw Ghost, some of the dogs broke o and ran, while others
began to bay and growl. The direwolf ignored them, as did Jon.
Well, thirty of us will be warm and dry, Jon thought once he’d
gotten a good look at the hall. Perhaps as many as fty. The place
was much too small to sleep two hundred men, so most would need
to remain outside. And where to put them? The rain had turned half
the compound yard to ankle-deep puddles and the rest to sucking
mud. Another dismal night was in prospect.
The Lord Commander had entrusted his mount to Dolorous Edd.
He was cleaning mud out of the horse’s hooves as Jon dismounted.
“Lord Mormont’s in the hall,” he announced. “He said for you to
join him. Best leave the wolf outside, he looks hungry enough to eat
one of Craster’s children. Well, truth be told, I’m hungry enough to
eat one of Craster’s children, so long as he was served hot. Go on,
I’ll see to your horse. If it’s warm and dry inside, don’t tell me, I
wasn’t asked in.” He icked a glob of wet mud out from under a
horseshoe. “Does this mud look like shit to you? Could it be that
this whole hill is made of Craster’s shit?”
Jon smiled. “Well, I hear he’s been here a long time.”
“You cheer me not. Go see the Old Bear.”
“Ghost, stay,” he commanded. The door to Craster’s Keep was
made of two aps of deerhide. Jon shoved between them, stooping

to pass under the low lintel. Two dozen of the chief rangers had
preceded him, and were standing around the repit in the center of
the dirt oor while puddles collected about their boots. The hall
stank of soot, dung, and wet dog. The air was heavy with smoke,
yet somehow still damp. Rain leaked through the smoke hole in the
roof. It was all a single room, with a sleeping loft above reached by
a pair of splintery ladders.
Jon remembered how he’d felt the day they had left the Wall:
nervous as a maiden, but eager to glimpse the mysteries and
wonders beyond each new horizon. Well, here’s one of the wonders,
he told himself, gazing about the squalid, foul-smelling hall. The
acrid smoke was making his eyes water. A pity that Pyp and Toad
can’t see all they’re missing.
Craster sat above the re, the only man to enjoy his own chair.
Even Lord Commander Mormont must seat himself on the common
bench, with his raven muttering on his shoulder. Jarman Buckwell
stood behind, dripping from patched mail and shiny wet leather,
beside Thoren Smallwood in the late Ser Jaremy’s heavy breastplate
and sable-trimmed cloak.
Craster’s sheepskin jerkin and cloak of sewn skins made a shabby
contrast, but around one thick wrist was a heavy ring that had the
glint of gold. He looked to be a powerful man, though well into the
winter of his days now, his mane of hair grey going to white. A at
nose and a drooping mouth gave him a cruel look, and one of his
ears was missing. So this is a wildling. Jon remembered Old Nan’s
tales of the savage folk who drank blood from human skulls. Craster
seemed to be drinking a thin yellow beer from a chipped stone cup.
Perhaps he had not heard the stories.
“I’ve not seen Benjen Stark for three years,” he was telling
Mormont. “And if truth be told, I never once missed him.” A halfdozen black puppies and the odd pig or two skulked among the
benches, while women in ragged deerskins passed horns of beer,
stirred the re, and chopped carrots and onions into a kettle.
“He ought to have passed here last year,” said Thoren Smallwood.
A dog came sni ng round his leg. He kicked it and sent it o
yipping.

Lord Mormont said, “Ben was searching for Ser Waymar Royce,
who’d vanished with Gared and young Will.”
“Aye, those three I recall. The lordling no older than one of these
pups. Too proud to sleep under my roof, him in his sable cloak and
black steel. My wives give him big cow eyes all the same.” He
turned his squint on the nearest of the women. “Gared says they
were chasing raiders. I told him, with a commander that green, best
not catch ’em. Gared wasn’t half-bad, for a crow. Had less ears than
me, that one. The ’bite took ’em, same as mine.” Craster laughed.
“Now I hear he got no head neither. The ’bite do that too?”
Jon remembered a spray of red blood on white snow, and the
way Theon Greyjoy had kicked the dead man’s head. The man was a
deserter. On the way back to Winterfell, Jon and Robb had raced,
and found six direwolf pups in the snow. A thousand years ago.
“When Ser Waymar left you, where was he bound?”
Craster gave a shrug. “Happens I have better things to do than
tend to the comings and goings of crows.” He drank a pull of beer
and set the cup aside. “Had no good southron wine up here for a
bear’s night. I could use me some wine, and a new axe. Mine’s lost
its bite, can’t have that, I got me women to protect.” He gazed
around at his scurrying wives.
“You are few here, and isolated,” Mormont said. “If you like, I’ll
detail some men to escort you south to the Wall.”
The raven seemed to like the notion. “Wall,” it screamed,
spreading black wings like a high collar behind Mormont’s head.
Their host gave a nasty smile, showing a mouthful of broken
brown teeth. “And what would we do there, serve you at supper?
We’re free folk here. Craster serves no man.”
“These are bad times to dwell alone in the wild. The cold winds
are rising.”
“Let them rise. My roots are sunk deep.” Craster grabbed a
passing woman by the wrist. “Tell him, wife. Tell the Lord Crow
how well content we are.”
The woman licked at thin lips. “This is our place. Craster keeps us
safe. Better to die free than live a slave.”
“Slave,” muttered the raven.

Mormont leaned forward. “Every village we have passed has been
abandoned. Yours are the rst living faces we’ve seen since we left
the Wall. The people are gone … whether dead, ed, or taken, I
could not say. The animals as well. Nothing is left. And earlier, we
found the bodies of two of Ben Stark’s rangers only a few leagues
from the Wall. They were pale and cold, with black hands and black
feet and wounds that did not bleed. Yet when we took them back to
Castle Black they rose in the night and killed. One slew Ser Jaremy
Rykker and the other came for me, which tells me that they
remember some of what they knew when they lived, but there was
no human mercy left in them.”
The woman’s mouth hung open, a wet pink cave, but Craster only
gave a snort. “We’ve had no such troubles here … and I’ll thank you
not to tell such evil tales under my roof. I’m a godly man, and the
gods keep me safe. If wights come walking, I’ll know how to send
them back to their graves. Though I could use me a sharp new axe.”
He sent his wife scurrying with a slap on her leg and a shout of
“More beer, and be quick about it.”
“No trouble from the dead,” Jarmen Buckwell said, “but what of
the living, my lord? What of your king?”
“King!” cried Mormont’s raven. “King, king, king.”
“That Mance Rayder?” Craster spit into the re. “King-beyondthe-Wall. What do free folk want with kings?” He turned his squint
on Mormont. “There’s much I could tell you o’ Rayder and his
doings, if I had a mind. This o’ the empty villages, that’s his work.
You would have found this hall abandoned as well, if I were a man
to scrape to such. He sends a rider, tells me I must leave my own
keep to come grovel at his feet. I sent the man back, but kept his
tongue. It’s nailed to that wall there.” He pointed. “Might be that I
could tell you where to seek Mance Rayder. If I had a mind.” The
brown smile again. “But we’ll have time enough for that. You’ll be
wanting to sleep beneath my roof, belike, and eat me out of pigs.”
“A roof would be most welcome, my lord,” Mormont said. “We’ve
had hard riding, and too much wet.”
“Then you’ll guest here for a night. No longer, I’m not that fond
o’ crows. The loft’s for me and mine, but you’ll have all the oor

you like. I’ve meat and beer for twenty, no more. The rest o’ your
black crows can peck after their own corn.”
“We’ve packed in our own supplies, my lord,” said the Old Bear.
“We should be pleased to share our food and wine.”
Craster wiped his drooping mouth with the back of a hairy hand.
“I’ll taste your wine, Lord Crow, that I will. One more thing. Any
man lays a hand on my wives, he loses the hand.”
“Your roof, your rule,” said Thoren Smallwood, and Lord
Mormont nodded sti y, though he looked none too pleased.
“That’s settled, then.” Craster grudged them a grunt. “D’ya have a
man can draw a map?”
“Sam Tarly can.” Jon pushed forward. “Sam loves maps.”
Mormont beckoned him closer. “Send him here after he’s eaten.
Have him bring quill and parchment. And nd Tollett as well. Tell
him to bring my axe. A guest gift for our host.”
“Who’s this one now?” Craster said before Jon could go. “He has
the look of a Stark.”
“My steward and squire, Jon Snow.”
“A bastard, is it?” Craster looked Jon up and down. “Man wants
to bed a woman, seems like he ought to take her to wife. That’s
what I do.” He shooed Jon o with a wave. “Well, run and do your
service, bastard, and see that axe is good and sharp now, I’ve no use
for dull steel.”
Jon Snow bowed sti y and took his leave. Ser Ottyn Wythers
was coming in as he was leaving, and they almost collided at the
deerhide door. Outside, the rain seemed to have slackened. Tents
had gone up all over the compound. Jon could see the tops of others
under the trees.
Dolorous Edd was feeding the horses. “Give the wildling an axe,
why not?” He pointed out Mormont’s weapon, a short-hafted battleaxe with gold scrollwork inlaid on the black steel blade. “He’ll give
it back, I vow. Buried in the Old Bear’s skull, like as not. Why not
give him all our axes, and our swords as well? I mislike the way
they clank and rattle as we ride. We’d travel faster without them,
straight to hell’s door. Does it rain in hell, I wonder? Perhaps
Craster would like a nice hat instead.”

Jon smiled. “He wants an axe. And wine as well.”
“See, the Old Bear’s clever. If we get the wildling well and truly
drunk, perhaps he’ll only cut o an ear when he tries to slay us with
that axe. I have two ears but only one head.”
“Smallwood says Craster is a friend to the Watch.”
“Do you know the di erence between a wildling who’s a friend to
the Watch and one who’s not?” asked the dour squire. “Our enemies
leave our bodies for the crows and the wolves. Our friends bury us
in secret graves. I wonder how long that bear’s been nailed up on
that gate, and what Craster had there before we came hallooing?”
Edd looked at the axe doubtfully, the rain running down his long
face. “Is it dry in there?”
“Drier than out here.”
“If I lurk about after, not too close to the re, belike they’ll take
no note of me till morn. The ones under his roof will be the rst he
murders, but at least we’ll die dry.”
Jon had to laugh. “Craster’s one man. We’re two hundred. I doubt
he’ll murder anyone.”
“You cheer me,” said Edd, sounding utterly morose. “And besides,
there’s much to be said for a good sharp axe. I’d hate to be
murdered with a maul. I saw a man hit in the brow with a maul
once. Scarce split the skin at all, but his head turned mushy and
swelled up big as a gourd, only purply-red. A comely man, but he
died ugly. It’s good that we’re not giving them mauls.” Edd walked
away shaking his head, his sodden black cloak shedding rain behind
him.
Jon got the horses fed before he stopped to think of his own
supper. He was wondering where to nd Sam when he heard a
shout of fear. “Wolf!” He sprinted around the hall toward the cry,
the earth sucking at his boots. One of Craster’s women was backed
up against the mud-spattered wall of the keep. “Keep away,” she
was shouting at Ghost. “You keep away!” The direwolf had a rabbit
in his mouth and another dead and bloody on the ground before
him. “Get it away, m’lord,” she pleaded when she saw him.
“He won’t hurt you.” He knew at once what had happened; a
wooden hutch, its slats shattered, lay on its side in the wet grass.

“He must have been hungry. We haven’t seen much game.” Jon
whistled. The direwolf bolted down the rabbit, crunching the small
bones between his teeth, and padded over to him.
The woman regarded them with nervous eyes. She was younger
than he’d thought at rst. A girl of fteen or sixteen years, he
judged, dark hair plastered across a gaunt face by the falling rain,
her bare feet muddy to the ankles. The body under the sewn skins
was showing in the early turns of pregnancy. “Are you one of
Craster’s daughters?” he asked.
She put a hand over her belly. “Wife now.” Edging away from the
wolf, she knelt mournfully beside the broken hutch. “I was going to
breed them rabbits. There’s no sheep left.”
“The Watch will make good for them.” Jon had no coin of his
own, or he would have o ered it to her … though he was not sure
what good a few coppers or even a silver piece would do her
beyond the Wall. “I’ll speak to Lord Mormont on the morrow.”
She wiped her hands on her skirt. “M’lord—”
“I’m no lord.”
But others had come crowding round, drawn by the woman’s
scream and the crash of the rabbit hutch. “Don’t you believe him,
girl,” called out Lark the Sisterman, a ranger mean as a cur. “That’s
Lord Snow himself.”
“Bastard of Winterfell and brother to kings,” mocked Chett,
who’d left his hounds to see what the commotion was about.
“That wolf’s looking at you hungry, girl,” Lark said. “Might be it
fancies that tender bit in your belly.”
Jon was not amused. “You’re scaring her.”
“Warning her, more like.” Chett’s grin was as ugly as the boils
that covered most of his face.
“We’re not to talk to you,” the girl remembered suddenly.
“Wait,” Jon said, too late. She bolted, ran.
Lark made a grab for the second rabbit, but Ghost was quicker.
When he bared his teeth, the Sisterman slipped in the mud and went
down on his bony butt. The others laughed. The direwolf took the
rabbit in his mouth and brought it to Jon.
“There was no call to scare the girl,” he told them.

“We’ll hear no scolds from you, bastard.” Chett blamed Jon for
the loss of his comfortable position with Maester Aemon, and not
without justice. If he had not gone to Aemon about Sam Tarly,
Chett would still be tending an old blind man instead of a pack of
ill-tempered hunting hounds. “You may be the Lord Commander’s
pet, but you’re not the Lord Commander … and you wouldn’t talk
so bloody bold without that monster of yours always about.”
“I’ll not ght a brother while we’re beyond the Wall,” Jon
answered, his voice cooler than he felt.
Lark got to one knee. “He’s afraid of you, Chett. On the Sisters,
we have a name for them like him.”
“I know all the names. Save your breath.” He walked away, Ghost
at his side. The rain had dwindled to a thin drizzle by the time he
reached the gate. Dusk would be on them soon, followed by another
wet dark dismal night. The clouds would hide moon and stars and
Mormont’s Torch, turning the woods black as pitch. Every piss
would be an adventure, if not quite of the sort Jon Snow had once
envisioned.
Out under the trees, some rangers had found enough du and dry
wood to start a re beneath a slanting ridge of slate. Others had
raised tents or made rude shelters by stretching their cloaks over
low branches. Giant had crammed himself inside the hollow of a
dead oak. “How d’ye like my castle, Lord Snow?”
“It looks snug. You know where Sam is?”
“Keep on the way you were. If you come on Ser Ottyn’s pavilion,
you’ve gone too far.” Giant smiled. “Unless Sam’s found him a tree
too. What a tree that would be.”
It was Ghost who found Sam in the end. The direwolf shot ahead
like a quarrel from a crossbow. Under an outcrop of rock that gave
some small degree of shelter from the rain, Sam was feeding the
ravens. His boots squished when he moved. “My feet are soaked
through,” he admitted miserably. “When I climbed o my horse, I
stepped in a hole and went in up to my knees.”
“Take o your boots and dry your stockings. I’ll nd some dry
wood. If the ground’s not wet under the rock, we might be able to
get a re burning.” Jon showed Sam the rabbit. “And we’ll feast.”

“Won’t you be attending Lord Mormont in the hall?”
“No, but you will. The Old Bear wants you to map for him.
Craster says he’ll nd Mance Rayder for us.”
“Oh.” Sam did not look anxious to meet Craster, even if it meant
a warm re.
“He said eat rst, though. Dry your feet.” Jon went to gather
fuel, digging down under deadfalls for the drier wood beneath and
peeling back layers of sodden pine needles until he found likely
kindling. Even then, it seemed to take forever for a spark to catch.
He hung his cloak from the rock to keep the rain o his smoky little
re, making them a small snug alcove.
As he knelt to skin the rabbit, Sam pulled o his boots. “I think
there’s moss growing between my toes,” he declared mournfully,
wriggling the toes in question. “The rabbit will taste good. I don’t
even mind about the blood and all.” He looked away. “Well, only a
little …”
Jon spitted the carcass, banked the re with a pair of rocks, and
balanced their meal atop them. The rabbit had been a scrawny
thing, but as it cooked it smelled like a king’s feast. Other rangers
gave them envious looks. Even Ghost looked up hungrily, ames
shining in his red eyes as he sni ed. “You had yours before,” Jon
reminded him.
“Is Craster as savage as the rangers say?” Sam asked. The rabbit
was a shade underdone, but tasted wonderful. “What’s his castle
like?”
“A midden heap with a roof and a repit.” Jon told Sam what he
had seen and heard in Craster’s Keep.
By the time the telling was done, it was dark outside and Sam
was licking his ngers. “That was good, but now I’d like a leg of
lamb. A whole leg, just for me, sauced with mint and honey and
cloves. Did you see any lambs?”
“There was a sheepfold, but no sheep.”
“How does he feed all his men?”
“I didn’t see any men. Just Craster and his women and a few
small girls. I wonder he’s able to hold the place. His defenses were

nothing to speak of, only a muddy dike. You had better go up to the
hall and draw that map. Can you nd the way?”
“If I don’t fall in the mud.” Sam struggled back into his boots,
collected quill and parchment, and shouldered out into the night,
the rain pattering down on his cloak and oppy hat.
Ghost laid his head on his paws and went to sleep by the re. Jon
stretched out beside him, grateful for the warmth. He was cold and
wet, but not so cold and wet as he’d been a short time before.
Perhaps tonight the Old Bear will learn something that will lead us to
Uncle Benjen.
He woke to the sight of his own breath misting in the cold
morning air. When he moved, his bones ached. Ghost was gone, the
re burnt out. Jon reached to pull aside the cloak he’d hung over
the rock, and found it sti and frozen. He crept beneath it and stood
up in a forest turned to crystal.
The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and
stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of
water turned to diamond. Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats
of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through
the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were
encased in a ne glaze of ice.
So there is magic beyond the Wall after all. He found himself
thinking of his sisters, perhaps because he’d dreamed of them last
night. Sansa would call this an enchantment, and tears would ll her
eyes at the wonder of it, but Arya would run out laughing and
shouting, wanting to touch it all.
“Lord Snow?” he heard. Soft and meek. He turned.
Crouched atop the rock that had sheltered him during the night
was the rabbit keeper, wrapped in a black cloak so large it drowned
her. Sam’s cloak, Jon realized at once. Why is she wearing Sam’s
cloak? “The fat one told me I’d nd you here, m’lord,” she said.
“We ate the rabbit, if that’s what you came for.” The admission
made him feel absurdly guilty.
“Old Lord Crow, him with the talking bird, he gave Craster a
crossbow worth a hundred rabbits.” Her arms closed over the swell
of her belly. “Is it true, m’lord? Are you brother to a king?”

“A half brother,” he admitted. “I’m Ned Stark’s bastard. My
brother Robb is the King in the North. Why are you here?”
“The fat one, that Sam, he said to see you. He give me his cloak,
so no one would say I didn’t belong.”
“Won’t Craster be angry with you?”
“My father drank overmuch of the Lord Crow’s wine last night.
He’ll sleep most of the day.” Her breath frosted the air in small
nervous pu s. “They say the king gives justice and protects the
weak.” She started to climb o the rock, awkwardly, but the ice had
made it slippery and her foot went out from under her. Jon caught
her before she could fall, and helped her safely down. The woman
knelt on the icy ground. “M’lord, I beg you—”
“Don’t beg me anything. Go back to your hall, you shouldn’t be
here. We were commanded not to speak to Craster’s women.”
“You don’t have to speak with me, m’lord. Just take me with you,
when you go, that’s all I ask.”
All she asks, he thought. As if that were nothing.
“I’ll … I’ll be your wife, if you like. My father, he’s got nineteen
now, one less won’t hurt him none.”
“Black brothers are sworn never to take wives, don’t you know
that? And we’re guests in your father’s hall besides.”
“Not you,” she said. “I watched. You never ate at his board, nor
slept by his re. He never gave you guest-right, so you’re not bound
to him. It’s for the baby I have to go.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Gilly, he called me. For the gilly ower.”
“That’s pretty.” He remembered Sansa telling him once that he
should say that whenever a lady told him her name. He could not
help the girl, but perhaps the courtesy would please her. “Is it
Craster who frightens you, Gilly?”
“For the baby, not for me. If it’s a girl, that’s not so bad, she’ll
grow a few years and he’ll marry her. But Nella says it’s to be a
boy, and she’s had six and knows these things. He gives the boys to
the gods. Come the white cold, he does, and of late it comes more
often. That’s why he started giving them sheep, even though he has

a taste for mutton. Only now the sheep’s gone too. Next it will be
dogs, till …” She lowered her eyes and stroked her belly.
“What gods?” Jon was remembering that they’d seen no boys in
Craster’s Keep, nor men either, save Craster himself.
“The cold gods,” she said. “The ones in the night. The white
shadows.”
And suddenly Jon was back in the Lord Commander’s Tower
again. A severed hand was climbing his calf and when he pried it o
with the point of his longsword, it lay writhing, ngers opening and
closing. The dead man rose to his feet, blue eyes shining in that
gashed and swollen face. Ropes of torn esh hung from the great
wound in his belly, yet there was no blood.
“What color are their eyes?” he asked her.
“Blue. As bright as blue stars, and as cold.”
She has seen them, he thought. Craster lied.
“Will you take me? Just so far as the Wall—”
“We do not ride for the Wall. We ride north, after Mance Rayder
and these Others, these white shadows and their wights. We seek
them, Gilly. Your babe would not be safe with us.”
Her fear was plain on her face. “You will come back, though.
When your warring’s done, you’ll pass this way again.”
“We may.” If any of us still live. “That’s for the Old Bear to say, the
one you call the Lord Crow. I’m only his squire. I do not choose the
road I ride.”
“No.” He could hear the defeat in her voice. “Sorry to be of
trouble, m’lord. I only … they said the king keeps people safe, and I
thought …” Despairing, she ran, Sam’s cloak apping behind her
like great black wings.
Jon watched her go, his joy in the morning’s brittle beauty gone.
Damn her, he thought resentfully, and damn Sam twice for sending her
to me. What did he think I could do for her? We’re here to ght
wildlings, not save them.
Other men were crawling from their shelters, yawning and
stretching. The magic was already faded, icy brightness turning
back to common dew in the light of the rising sun. Someone had
gotten a re started; he could smell woodsmoke drifting through

the trees, and the smoky scent of bacon. Jon took down his cloak
and snapped it against the rock, shattering the thin crust of ice that
had formed in the night, then gathered up Longclaw and shrugged
an arm through a shoulder strap. A few yards away he made water
into a frozen bush, his piss steaming in the cold air and melting the
ice wherever it fell. Afterward he laced up his black wool breeches
and followed the smells.
Grenn and Dywen were among the brothers who had gathered
round the re. Hake handed Jon a hollow heel of bread lled with
burnt bacon and chunks of salt sh warmed in bacon grease. He
wolfed it down while listening to Dywen boast of having three of
Craster’s women during the night.
“You did not,” Grenn said, scowling. “I would have seen.”
Dywen whapped him up alongside his ear with the back of his
hand. “You? Seen? You’re blind as Maester Aemon. You never even
saw that bear.”
“What bear? Was there a bear?”
“There’s always a bear,” declared Dolorous Edd in his usual tone
of gloomy resignation. “One killed my brother when I was young.
Afterward it wore his teeth around its neck on a leather thong. And
they were good teeth too, better than mine. I’ve had nothing but
trouble with my teeth.”
“Did Sam sleep in the hall last night?” Jon asked him.
“I’d not call it sleeping. The ground was hard, the rushes illsmelling, and my brothers snore frightfully. Speak of bears if you
will, none ever growled so erce as Brown Bernarr. I was warm,
though. Some dogs crawled atop me during the night. My cloak was
almost dry when one of them pissed in it. Or perhaps it was Brown
Bernarr. Have you noticed that the rain stopped the instant I had a
roof above me? It will start again now that I’m back out. Gods and
dogs alike delight to piss on me.”
“I’d best go see to Lord Mormont,” said Jon.
The rain might have stopped, but the compound was still a
morass of shallow lakes and slippery mud. Black brothers were
folding their tents, feeding their horses, and chewing on strips of
salt beef. Jarman Buckwell’s scouts were tightening the girths on

their saddles before setting out. “Jon,” Buckwell greeted him from
horseback. “Keep a good edge on that bastard sword of yours. We’ll
be needing it soon enough.”
Craster’s hall was dim after daylight. Inside, the night’s torches
had burned low, and it was hard to know that the sun had risen.
Lord Mormont’s raven was the rst to spy him enter. Three lazy
aps of its great black wings, and it perched atop Longclaw’s hilt.
“Corn?” It nipped at a strand of Jon’s hair.
“Ignore that wretched beggar bird, Jon, it’s just had half my
bacon.” The Old Bear sat at Craster’s board, breaking his fast with
the other o cers on fried bread, bacon, and sheepgut sausage.
Craster’s new axe was on the table, its gold inlay gleaming faintly
in the torchlight. Its owner was sprawled unconscious in the
sleeping loft above, but the women were all up, moving about and
serving. “What sort of day do we have?”
“Cold, but the rain has stopped.”
“Very good. See that my horse is saddled and ready. I mean for us
to ride within the hour. Have you eaten? Craster serves plain fare,
but lling.”
I will not eat Craster’s food, he decided suddenly. “I broke my fast
with the men, my lord.” Jon shooed the raven o Longclaw. The
bird hopped back to Mormont’s shoulder, where it promptly shat.
“You might have done that on Snow instead of saving it for me,”
the Old Bear grumbled. The raven quorked.
He found Sam behind the hall, standing with Gilly at the broken
rabbit hutch. She was helping him back into his cloak, but when she
saw Jon she stole away. Sam gave him a look of wounded reproach.
“I thought you would help her.”
“And how was I to do that?” Jon said sharply. “Take her with us,
wrapped up in your cloak? We were commanded not to—”
“I know,” said Sam guiltily, “but she was afraid. I know what it is
to be afraid. I told her …” He swallowed.
“What? That we’d take her with us?”
Sam’s fat face blushed a deep red. “On the way home.” He could
not meet Jon’s eyes. “She’s going to have a baby.”

“Sam, have you taken leave of all your sense? We may not even
return this way. And if we do, do you think the Old Bear is going to
let you pack o one of Craster’s wives?”
“I thought … maybe by then I could think of a way …”
“I have no time for this, I have horses to groom and saddle.” Jon
walked away as confused as he was angry. Sam’s heart was as big as
the rest of him, but for all his reading he could be as thick as Grenn
at times. It was impossible, and dishonorable besides. So why do I
feel so ashamed?
Jon took his accustomed position at Mormont’s side as the Night’s
Watch streamed out past the skulls on Craster’s gate. They struck
o north and west along a crooked game trail. Melting ice dripped
down all about them, a slower sort of rain with its own soft music.
North of the compound, the brook was in full spate, choked with
leaves and bits of wood, but the scouts had found where the ford
lay and the column was able to splash across. The water ran as high
as a horse’s belly. Ghost swam, emerging on the bank with his
white fur dripping brown. When he shook, spraying mud and water
in all directions, Mormont said nothing, but on his shoulder the
raven screeched.
“My lord,” Jon said quietly as the wood closed in around them
once more. “Craster has no sheep. Nor any sons.”
Mormont made no answer.
“At Winterfell one of the serving women told us stories,” Jon
went on. “She used to say that there were wildlings who would lay
with the Others to birth half-human children.”
“Hearth tales. Does Craster seem less than human to you?”
In half a hundred ways. “He gives his sons to the wood.”
A long silence. Then: “Yes.” And “Yes,” the raven muttered,
strutting. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“You knew?”
“Smallwood told me. Long ago. All the rangers know, though few
will talk of it.”
“Did my uncle know?”
“All the rangers,” Mormont repeated. “You think I ought to stop
him. Kill him if need be.” The Old Bear sighed. “Were it only that

he wished to rid himself of some mouths, I’d gladly send Yoren or
Conwys to collect the boys. We could raise them to the black and
the Watch would be that much the stronger. But the wildlings serve
crueler gods than you or I. These boys are Craster’s o erings. His
prayers, if you will.”
His wives must o er di erent prayers, Jon thought.
“How is it you came to know this?” the Old Bear asked him.
“From one of Craster’s wives?”
“Yes, my lord,” Jon confessed. “I would sooner not tell you
which. She was frightened and wanted help.”
“The wide world is full of people wanting help, Jon. Would that
some could nd the courage to help themselves. Craster sprawls in
his loft even now, stinking of wine and lost to sense. On his board
below lies a sharp new axe. Were it me, I’d name it “Answered
Prayer’ and make an end.”
Yes. Jon thought of Gilly. She and her sisters. They were
nineteen, and Craster was one, but …
“Yet it would be an ill day for us if Craster died. Your uncle could
tell you of the times Craster’s Keep made the di erence between
life and death for our rangers.”
“My father …” He hesitated.
“Go on, Jon. Say what you would say.”
“My father once told me that some men are not worth having,”
Jon nished. “A bannerman who is brutal or unjust dishonors his
liege lord as well as himself.”
“Craster is his own man. He has sworn us no vows. Nor is he
subject to our laws. Your heart is noble, Jon, but learn a lesson
here. We cannot set the world to rights. That is not our purpose.
The Night’s Watch has other wars to ght.”
Other wars. Yes. I must remember. “Jarman Buckwell said I might
have need of my sword soon.”
“Did he?” Mormont did not seem pleased. “Craster said much and
more last night, and con rmed enough of my fears to condemn me
to a sleepless night on his oor. Mance Rayder is gathering his
people together in the Frostfangs. That’s why the villages are
empty. It is the same tale that Ser Denys Mallister had from the

wildling his men captured in the Gorge, but Craster has added the
where, and that makes all the di erence.”
“Is he making a city, or an army?”
“Now, that is the question. How many wildlings are there? How
many men of ghting age? No one knows with certainty. The
Frostfangs are cruel, inhospitable, a wilderness of stone and ice.
They will not long sustain any great number of people. I can see
only one purpose in this gathering. Mance Rayder means to strike
south, into the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Wildlings have invaded the realm before.” Jon had heard the
tales from Old Nan and Maester Luwin both, back at Winterfell.
“Raymun Redbeard led them south in the time of my grandfather’s
grandfather, and before him there was a king named Bael the Bard.”
“Aye, and long before them came the Horned Lord and the
brother kings Gendel and Gorne, and in ancient days Joramun, who
blew the Horn of Winter and woke giants from the earth. Each man
of them broke his strength on the Wall, or was broken by the power
of Winterfell on the far side … but the Night’s Watch is only a
shadow of what we were, and who remains to oppose the wildlings
besides us? The Lord of Winterfell is dead, and his heir has marched
his strength south to ght the Lannisters. The wildlings may never
again have such a chance as this. I knew Mance Rayder, Jon. He is
an oathbreaker, yes … but he has eyes to see, and no man has ever
dared to name him faintheart.”
“What will we do?” asked Jon.
“Find him,” said Mormont. “Fight him. Stop him.”
Three hundred, thought Jon, against the fury of the wild. His ngers
opened and closed.

THEON

She was undeniably a beauty. But your

rst is always beautiful,

Theon Greyjoy thought.
“Now there’s a pretty grin,” a woman’s voice said behind him.
“The lordling likes the look of her, does he?”
Theon turned to give her an appraising glance. He liked what he
saw. Ironborn, he knew at a glance; lean and long-legged, with
black hair cut short, wind-chafed skin, strong sure hands, a dirk at
her belt. Her nose was too big and too sharp for her thin face, but
her smile made up for it. He judged her a few years older than he
was, but no more than ve-and-twenty. She moved as if she were
used to a deck beneath her feet.
“Yes, she’s a sweet sight,” he told her, “though not half so sweet
as you.”
“Oho.” She grinned. “I’d best be careful. This lordling has a
honeyed tongue.”
“Taste it and see.”
“Is it that way, then?” she said, eyeing him boldly. There were
women on the Iron Islands—not many, but a few—who crewed the
longships along with their men, and it was said that salt and sea
changed them, gave them a man’s appetites. “Have you been that
long at sea, lordling? Or were there no women where you came
from?”
“Women enough, but none like you.”
“And how would you know what I’m like?”

“My eyes can see your face. My ears can hear your laughter. And
my cock’s gone hard as a mast for you.”
The woman stepped close and pressed a hand to the front of his
breeches. “Well, you’re no liar,” she said, giving him a squeeze
through the cloth. “How bad does it hurt?”
“Fiercely.”
“Poor lordling.” She released him and stepped back. “As it
happens, I’m a woman wed, and new with child.”
“The gods are good,” Theon said. “No chance I’d give you a
bastard that way.”
“Even so, my man wouldn’t thank you.”
“No, but you might.”
“And why would that be? I’ve had lords before. They’re made the
same as other men.”
“Have you ever had a prince?” he asked her. “When you’re
wrinkled and grey and your teats hang past your belly, you can tell
your children’s children that once you loved a king.”
“Oh, is it love we’re talking now? And here I thought it was just
cocks and cunts.”
“Is it love you fancy?” He’d decided that he liked this wench,
whoever she was; her sharp wit was a welcome respite from the
damp gloom of Pyke. “Shall I name my longship after you, and play
you the high harp, and keep you in a tower room in my castle with
only jewels to wear, like a princess in a song?”
“You ought to name your ship after me,” she said, ignoring all the
rest. “It was me who built her.”
“Sigrin built her. My lord father’s shipwright.”
“I’m Esgred. Ambrode’s daughter, and wife to Sigrin.”
He had not known that Ambrode had a daughter, or Sigrin a
wife … but he’d met the younger shipwright only once, and the
older one he scarce remembered. “You’re wasted on Sigrin.”
“Oho. Sigrin told me this sweet ship is wasted on you.”
Theon bristled. “Do you know who I am?”
“Prince Theon of House Greyjoy. Who else? Tell me true, my
lord, how well do you love her, this new maid of yours? Sigrin will
want to know.”

The longship was so new that she still smelled of pitch and resin.
His uncle Aeron would bless her on the morrow, but Theon had
ridden over from Pyke to get a look at her before she was launched.
She was not so large as Lord Balon’s own Great Kraken or his uncle
Victarion’s Iron Victory, but she looked swift and sweet, even sitting
in her wooden cradle on the strand; lean black hull a hundred feet
long, a single tall mast, fty long oars, deck enough for a hundred
men … and at the prow, the great iron ram in the shape of an
arrowhead. “Sigrin did me good service,” he admitted. “Is she as
fast as she looks?”
“Faster—for a master that knows how to handle her.”
“It has been a few years since I sailed a ship.” And I’ve never
captained one, if truth be told. “Still, I’m a Greyjoy, and an ironman.
The sea is in my blood.”
“And your blood will be in the sea, if you sail the way you talk,”
she told him.
“I would never mistreat such a fair maiden.”
“Fair maiden?” She laughed. “She’s a sea bitch, this one.”
“There, and now you’ve named her. Sea Bitch.”
That amused her; he could see the sparkle in her dark eyes. “And
you said you’d name her after me,” she said in a voice of wounded
reproach.
“I did.” He caught her hand. “Help me, my lady. In the green
lands, they believe a woman with child means good fortune for any
man who beds her.”
“And what would they know about ships in the green lands? Or
women, for that matter? Besides, I think you made that up.”
“If I confess, will you still love me?”
“Still? When have I ever loved you?”
“Never,” he admitted, “but I am trying to repair that lack, my
sweet Esgred. The wind is cold. Come aboard my ship and let me
warm you. On the morrow my uncle Aeron will pour seawater over
her prow and mumble a prayer to the Drowned God, but I’d sooner
bless her with the milk of my loins, and yours.”
“The Drowned God might not take that kindly.”

“Bugger the Drowned God. If he troubles us, I’ll drown him again.
We’re o to war within a fortnight. Would you send me into battle
all sleepless with longing?”
“Gladly.”
“A cruel maid. My ship is well named. If I steer her onto the rocks
in my distraction, you’ll have yourself to blame.”
“Do you plan to steer with this?” Esgred brushed the front of his
breeches once more, and smiled as a nger traced the iron outline
of his manhood.
“Come back to Pyke with me,” he said suddenly, thinking, What
will Lord Balon say? And why should I care? I am a man grown, if I
want to bring a wench to bed it is no one’s business but my own.
“And what would I do in Pyke?” Her hand stayed where it was.
“My father will feast his captains tonight.” He had them to feast
every night, while he waited for the last stragglers to arrive, but
Theon saw no need to tell all that.
“Would you make me your captain for the night, my lord prince?”
She had the wickedest smile he’d ever seen on a woman.
“I might. If I knew you’d steer me safe into port.”
“Well, I know which end of the oar goes in the sea, and there’s no
one better with ropes and knots.” One-handed, she undid the lacing
of his breeches, then grinned and stepped lightly away from him. “A
pity I’m a woman wed, and new with child.”
Flustered, Theon laced himself back up. “I need to start back to
the castle. If you do not come with me, I may lose my way for
grief, and all the islands would be poorer.”
“We couldn’t have that … but I have no horse, my lord.”
“You could take my squire’s mount.”
“And leave your poor squire to walk all the way to Pyke?”
“Share mine, then.”
“You’d like that well enough.” The smile again. “Now, would I be
behind you, or in front?”
“You would be wherever you liked.”
“I like to be on top.”
Where has this wench been all my life? “My father’s hall is dim and
dank. It needs Esgred to make the res blaze.”

“The lordling has a honeyed tongue.”
“Isn’t that where we began?”
She threw up her hands. “And where we end. Esgred is yours,
sweet prince. Take me to your castle. Let me see your proud towers
rising from the sea.”
“I left my horse at the inn. Come.” They walked down the strand
together, and when Theon took her arm, she did not pull away. He
liked the way she walked; there was a boldness to it, part saunter
and part sway, that suggested she would be just as bold beneath the
blankets.
Lordsport was as crowded as he’d ever seen it, swarming with the
crews of the longships that lined the pebbled shore and rode at
anchor well out past the breakwater. Ironmen did not bend their
knees often nor easily, but Theon noted that oarsmen and townfolk
alike grew quiet as they passed, and acknowledged him with
respectful bows of the head. They have nally learned who I am, he
thought. And past time too.
Lord Goodbrother of Great Wyk had come in the night before
with his main strength, near forty longships. His men were
everywhere, conspicuous in their striped goat’s hair sashes. It was
said about the inn that Otter Gimpknee’s whores were being fucked
bowlegged by beardless boys in sashes. The boys were welcome to
them so far as Theon was concerned. A poxier den of slatterns he
hoped he’d never see. His present companion was more to his taste.
That she was wed to his father’s shipwright and pregnant to boot
only made her more intriguing.
“Has my lord prince begun choosing his crew?” Esgred asked as
they made their way toward the stable. “Ho, Bluetooth,” she
shouted to a passing seafarer, a tall man in bearskin vest and ravenwinged helm. “How fares your bride?”
“Fat with child, and talking of twins.”
“So soon?” Esgred smiled that wicked smile. “You got your oar in
the water quickly.”
“Aye, and stroked and stroked and stroked,” roared the man.
“A big man,” Theon observed. “Bluetooth, was it? Should I choose
him for my Sea Bitch?”

“Only if you mean to insult him. Bluetooth has a sweet ship of his
own.”
“I have been too long away to know one man from another,”
Theon admitted. He’d looked for a few of the friends he’d played
with as a boy, but they were gone, dead, or grown into strangers.
“My uncle Victarion has loaned me his own steersman.”
“Rymolf Stormdrunk? A good man, so long as he’s sober.” She
saw more faces she knew, and called out to a passing trio, “Uller,
Qarl. Where’s your brother, Skyte?”
“The Drowned God needed a strong oarsman, I fear,” replied the
stocky man with the white streak in his beard.
“What he means is, Eldiss drank too much wine and his fat belly
burst,” said the pink-cheeked youth beside him.
“What’s dead may never die,” Esgred said.
“What’s dead may never die.”
Theon muttered the words with them. “You seem well known,”
he said to the woman when the men had passed on.
“Every man loves the shipwright’s wife. He had better, lest he
wants his ship to sink. If you need men to pull your oars, you could
do worse than those three.”
“Lordsport has no lack of strong arms.” Theon had given the
matter no little thought. It was ghters he wanted, and men who
would be loyal to him, not to his lord father or his uncles. He was
playing the part of a dutiful young prince for the moment, while he
waited for Lord Balon to reveal the fullness of his plans. If it turned
out that he did not like those plans or his part in them, however,
well …
“Strength is not enough. A longship’s oars must move as one if
you would have her best speed. Choose men who have rowed
together before, if you’re wise.”
“Sage counsel. Perhaps you’d help me choose them.” Let her
believe I want her wisdom, women fancy that.
“I may. If you treat me kindly.”
“How else?”
Theon quickened his stride as they neared the Myraham, rocking
high and empty by the quay. Her captain had tried to sail a

fortnight past, but Lord Balon would not permit it. None of the
merchantmen that called at Lordsport had been allowed to depart
again; his father wanted no word of the hosting to reach the
mainland before he was ready to strike.
“Milord,” a plaintive voice called down from the forecastle of the
merchanter. The captain’s daughter leaned over the rail, gazing
after him. Her father had forbidden her to come ashore, but
whenever Theon came to Lordsport he spied her wandering
forlornly about the deck. “Milord, a moment,” she called after him.
“As it please milord …”
“Did she?” Esgred asked as Theon hurried her past the cog.
“Please milord?”
He saw no sense in being coy with this one. “For a time. Now she
wants to be my salt wife.”
“Oho. Well, she’d pro t from some salting, no doubt. Too soft
and bland, that one. Or am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.” Soft and bland. Precisely. How had she known?
He had told Wex to wait at the inn. The common room was so
crowded that Theon had to push his way through the door. Not a
seat was to be had at bench nor table. Nor did he see his squire.
“Wex,” he shouted over the din and clatter. If he’s up with one of
those poxy whores, I’ll strip the hide o him, he was thinking when he
nally spied the boy, dicing near the hearth … and winning too, by
the look of the pile of coins before him.
“Time to go,” Theon announced. When the boy paid him no mind,
he seized him by the ear and pulled him from the game. Wex
grabbed up a stful of coppers and came along without a word.
That was one of the things Theon liked best about him. Most squires
have loose tongues, but Wex had been born dumb … which didn’t
seem to keep him from being clever as any twelve-year-old had a
right to be. He was a baseborn son of one of Lord Botley’s half
brothers. Taking him as squire had been part of the price Theon had
paid for his horse.
When Wex saw Esgred, his eyes went round. You’d think he’d
never seen a woman before, Theon thought. “Esgred will be riding
with me back to Pyke. Saddle the horses, and be quick about it.”

The boy had ridden in on a scrawny little garron from Lord
Balon’s stable, but Theon’s mount was quite another sort of beast.
“Where did you nd that hellhorse?” Esgred asked when she saw
him, but from the way she laughed he knew she was impressed.
“Lord Botley bought him in Lannisport a year past, but he proved
to be too much horse for him, so Botley was pleased to sell.” The
Iron Islands were too sparse and rocky for breeding good horses.
Most of the islanders were indi erent riders at best, more
comfortable on the deck of a longship than in the saddle. Even the
lords rode garrons or shaggy Harlaw ponies, and ox carts were
more common than drays. The smallfolk too poor to own either one
pulled their own plows through the thin, stony soil.
But Theon had spent ten years in Winterfell, and did not intend to
go to war without a good mount beneath him. Lord Botley’s
misjudgment was his good fortune: a stallion with a temper as black
as his hide, larger than a courser if not quite so big as most
destriers. As Theon was not quite so big as most knights, that suited
him admirably. The animal had re in his eyes. When he’d met his
new owner, he’d pulled back his lips and tried to bite o his face.
“Does he have a name?” Esgred asked Theon as he mounted.
“Smiler.” He gave her a hand, and pulled her up in front of him,
where he could put his arms around her as they rode. “I knew a
man once who told me that I smiled at the wrong things.”
“Do you?”
“Only by the lights of those who smile at nothing.” He thought of
his father and his uncle Aeron.
“Are you smiling now, my lord prince?”
“Oh, yes.” Theon reached around her to take the reins. She was
almost of a height with him. Her hair could have used a wash and
she had a faded pink scar on her pretty neck, but he liked the smell
of her, salt and sweat and woman.
The ride back to Pyke promised to be a good deal more
interesting than the ride down had been.
When they were well beyond Lordsport, Theon put a hand on her
breast. Esgred reached up and plucked it away. “I’d keep both hands

on the reins, or this black beast of yours is like to ing us both o
and kick us to death.”
“I broke him of that.” Amused, Theon behaved himself for a
while, chatting amiably of the weather (grey and overcast, as it had
been since he arrived, with frequent rains) and telling her of the
men he’d killed in the Whispering Wood. When he reached the part
about coming that close to the Kingslayer himself, he slid his hand
back up to where it had been. Her breasts were small, but he liked
the rmness of them.
“You don’t want to do that, my lord prince.”
“Oh, but I do.” Theon gave her a squeeze.
“Your squire is watching you.”
“Let him. He’ll never speak of it, I swear.”
Esgred pried his ngers o her breast. This time she kept him
rmly prisoned. She had strong hands.
“I like a woman with a good tight grip.”
She snorted. “I’d not have thought it, by that wench on the
waterfront.”
“You must not judge me by her. She was the only woman on the
ship.”
“Tell me of your father. Will he welcome me kindly to his
castle?”
“Why should he? He scarcely welcomed me, his own blood, the
heir to Pyke and the Iron Islands.”
“Are you?” she asked mildly. “It’s said that you have uncles,
brothers, a sister.”
“My brothers are long dead, and my sister … well, they say
Asha’s favorite gown is a chainmail hauberk that hangs down past
her knees, with boiled leather smallclothes beneath. Men’s garb
won’t make her a man, though. I’ll make a good marriage alliance
with her once we’ve won the war, if I can nd a man to take her. As
I recall, she had a nose like a vulture’s beak, a ripe crop of pimples,
and no more chest than a boy.”
“You can marry o your sister,” Esgred observed, “but not your
uncles.”

“My uncles …” Theon’s claim took precedence over those of his
father’s three brothers, but the woman had touched on a sore point
nonetheless. In the islands it was scarce unheard of for a strong,
ambitious uncle to dispossess a weak nephew of his rights, and
usually murder him in the bargain. But I am not weak, Theon told
himself, and I mean to be stronger yet by the time my father dies. “My
uncles pose no threat to me,” he declared. “Aeron is drunk on
seawater and sanctity. He lives only for his god—”
“His god? Not yours?”
“Mine as well. What is dead can never die.” He smiled thinly. “If I
make pious noises as required, Damphair will give me no trouble.
And my uncle Victarion—”
“Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, and a fearsome warrior. I have
heard them sing of him in the alehouses.”
“During my lord father’s rebellion, he sailed into Lannisport with
my uncle Euron and burned the Lannister eet where it lay at
anchor,” Theon recalled. “The plan was Euron’s, though. Victarion is
like some great grey bullock, strong and tireless and dutiful, but not
like to win any races. No doubt, he’ll serve me as loyally as he has
served my lord father. He has neither the wits nor the ambition to
plot betrayal.”
“Euron Croweye has no lack of cunning, though. I’ve heard men
say terrible things of that one.”
Theon shifted his seat. “My uncle Euron has not been seen in the
islands for close on two years. He may be dead.” If so, it might be
for the best. Lord Balon’s eldest brother had never given up the Old
Way, even for a day. His Silence, with its black sails and dark red
hull, was infamous in every port from Ibben to Asshai, it was said.
“He may be dead,” Esgred agreed, “and if he lives, why, he has
spent so long at sea, he’d be half a stranger here. The ironborn
would never seat a stranger in the Seastone Chair.”
“I suppose not,” Theon replied, before it occurred to him that
some would call him a stranger as well. The thought made him
frown. Ten years is a long while, but I am back now, and my father is
far from dead. I have time to prove myself.

He considered fondling Esgred’s breast again, but she would
probably only take his hand away, and all this talk of his uncles had
dampened his ardor somewhat. Time enough for such play at the
castle, in the privacy of his chambers. “I will speak to Helya when
we reach Pyke, and see that you have an honored place at the
feast,” he said. “I must sit on the dais, at my father’s right hand, but
I will come down and join you when he leaves the hall. He seldom
lingers long. He has no belly for drink these days.”
“A grievous thing when a great man grows old.”
“Lord Balon is but the father of a great man.”
“A modest lordling.”
“Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men
eager to do that job for him.” He kissed her lightly on the nape of
her neck.
“What shall I wear to this great feast?” She reached back and
pushed his face away.
“I’ll ask Helya to garb you. One of my lady mother’s gowns might
do. She is o on Harlaw, and not expected to return.”
“The cold winds have worn her away, I hear. Will you not go see
her? Harlaw is only a day’s sail, and surely Lady Greyjoy yearns for
a last sight of her son.”
“Would that I could. I am kept too busy here. My father relies on
me, now that I am returned. Come peace, perhaps …”
“Your coming might bring her peace.”
“Now you sound a woman,” Theon complained.
“I confess, I am … and new with child.”
Somehow that thought excited him. “So you say, but your body
shows no signs of it. How shall it be proven? Before I believe you, I
shall need to see your breasts grow ripe, and taste your mother’s
milk.”
“And what will my husband say to this? Your father’s own sworn
man and servant?”
“We’ll give him so many ships to build, he’ll never know you’ve
left him.”
She laughed. “It’s a cruel lordling who’s seized me. If I promise
you that one day you may watch my babe get suck, will you tell me

more of your war, Theon of House Greyjoy? There are miles and
mountains still ahead of us, and I would hear of this wolf king you
served, and the golden lions he ghts.”
Ever anxious to please her, Theon obliged. The rest of the long
ride passed swiftly as he lled her pretty head with tales of
Winterfell and war. Some of the things he said astonished him. She
is easy to talk to, gods praise her, he re ected. I feel as though I’ve
known her for years. If the wench’s pillow play is half the equal of her
wit, I’ll need to keep her … He thought of Sigrin the Shipwright, a
thick-bodied, thick-witted man, axen hair already receding from a
pimpled brow, and shook his head. A waste. A most tragic waste.
It seemed scarcely any time at all before the great curtain wall of
Pyke loomed up before them.
The gates were open. Theon put his heels into Smiler and rode
through at a brisk trot. The hounds were barking wildly as he
helped Esgred dismount. Several came bounding up, tails wagging.
They shot straight past him and almost bowled the woman over,
leaping all around her, yapping and licking. “O ,” Theon shouted,
aiming an ine ectual kick at one big brown bitch, but Esgred was
laughing and wrestling with them.
A stableman came pounding up after the dogs. “Take the horse,”
Theon commanded him, “and get these damn dogs away—”
The lout paid him no mind. His face broke into a huge gaptoothed smile and he said, “Lady Asha. You’re back.”
“Last night,” she said. “I sailed from Great Wyk with Lord
Goodbrother, and spent the night at the inn. My little brother was
kind enough to let me ride with him from Lordsport.” She kissed
one of the dogs on the nose and grinned at Theon.
All he could do was stand and gape at her. Asha. No. She cannot be
Asha. He realized suddenly that there were two Ashas in his head.
One was the little girl he had known. The other, more vaguely
imagined, looked something like her mother. Neither looked a bit
like this … this … this …
“The pimples went when the breasts came,” she explained while
she tussled with a dog, “but I kept the vulture’s beak.”
Theon found his voice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Asha let go of the hound and straightened. “I wanted to see who
you were rst. And I did.” She gave him a mocking half bow. “And
now, little brother, pray excuse me. I need to bathe and dress for
the feast. I wonder if I still have that chainmail gown I like to wear
over my boiled leather smallclothes?” She gave him that evil grin,
and crossed the bridge with that walk he’d liked so well, half
saunter and half sway.
When Theon turned away, Wex was smirking at him. He gave the
boy a clout on the ear. “That’s for enjoying this so much.” And
another, harder. “And that’s for not warning me. Next time, grow a
tongue.”
His own chambers in the Guest Keep had never seemed so chilly,
though the thralls had left a brazier burning. Theon kicked his boots
o , let his cloak fall to the oor, and poured himself a cup of wine,
remembering a gawky girl with knob knees and pimples. She
unlaced my breeches, he thought, outraged, and she said … oh, gods,
and I said … He groaned. He could not possibly have made a more
appalling fool of himself.
No, he thought then. She was the one who made me a fool. The evil
bitch must have enjoyed every moment of it. And the way she kept
reaching for my cock …
He took his cup and went to the window seat, where he sat
drinking and watching the sea while the sun darkened over Pyke. I
have no place here, he thought, and Asha is the reason, may the Others
take her! The water below turned from green to grey to black. By
then he could hear distant music, and he knew it was time to change
for the feast.
Theon chose plain boots and plainer clothes, somber shades of
black and grey to t his mood. No ornament; he had nothing bought
with iron. I might have taken something o that wildling I killed to save
Bran Stark, but he had nothing worth the taking. That’s my cursed luck,
I kill the poor.
The long smoky hall was crowded with his father’s lords and
captains when Theon entered, near four hundred of them. Dagmer
Cleftjaw had not yet returned from Old Wyk with the Stonehouses
and Drumms, but all the rest were there—Harlaws from Harlaw,

Blacktydes from Blacktyde, Sparrs, Merlyns, and Goodbrothers from
Great Wyk, Saltcli es and Sunderlies from Saltcli e, and Botleys
and Wynches from the other side of Pyke. The thralls were pouring
ale, and there was music, ddles and skins and drums. Three burly
men were doing the nger dance, spinning short-hafted axes at each
other. The trick was to catch the axe or leap over it without missing
a step. It was called the nger dance because it usually ended when
one of the dancers lost one … or two, or ve.
Neither the dancers nor the drinkers took much note of Theon
Greyjoy as he strode to the dais. Lord Balon occupied the Seastone
Chair, carved in the shape of a great kraken from an immense block
of oily black stone. Legend said that the First Men had found it
standing on the shore of Old Wyk when they came to the Iron
Islands. To the left of the high seat were Theon’s uncles. Asha was
ensconced at his right hand, in the place of honor. “You come late,
Theon,” Lord Balon observed.
“I ask your pardon.” Theon took the empty seat beside Asha.
Leaning close, he hissed in her ear, “You’re in my place.”
She turned to him with innocent eyes. “Brother, surely you are
mistaken. Your place is at Winterfell.” Her smile cut. “And where
are all your pretty clothes? I heard you fancied silk and velvet
against your skin.” She was in soft green wool herself, simply cut,
the fabric clinging to the slender lines of her body.
“Your hauberk must have rusted away, sister,” he threw back. “A
great pity. I’d like to see you all in iron.”
Asha only laughed. “You may yet, little brother … if you think
your Sea Bitch can keep up with my Black Wind.” One of their
father’s thralls came near, bearing a agon of wine. “Are you
drinking ale or wine tonight, Theon?” She leaned over close. “Or is
it still a taste of my mother’s milk you thirst for?”
He ushed. “Wine,” he told the thrall. Asha turned away and
banged on the table, shouting for ale.
Theon hacked a loaf of bread in half, hollowed out a trencher,
and summoned a cook to ll it with sh stew. The smell of the thick
cream made him a little ill, but he forced himself to eat some. He’d
drunk enough wine to oat him through two meals. If I retch, it will

be on her. “Does Father know that you’ve married his shipwright?”
he asked his sister.
“No more than Sigrin does.” She gave a shrug. “Esgred was the
rst ship he built. He named her after his mother. I would be hardpressed to say which he loves best.”
“Every word you spoke to me was a lie.”
“Not every word. Remember when I told you I like to be on top?”
Asha grinned.
That only made him angrier. “All that about being a woman wed,
and new with child …”
“Oh, that part was true enough.” Asha leapt to her feet. “Rolfe,
here,” she shouted down at one of the nger dancers, holding up a
hand. He saw her, spun, and suddenly an axe came ying from his
hand, the blade gleaming as it tumbled end over end through the
torchlight. Theon had time for a choked gasp before Asha snatched
the axe from the air and slammed it down into the table, splitting
his trencher in two and splattering his mantle with drippings.
“There’s my lord husband.” His sister reached down inside her gown
and drew a dirk from between her breasts. “And here’s my sweet
suckling babe.”
He could not imagine how he looked at that moment, but
suddenly Theon Greyjoy realized that the Great Hall was ringing
with laughter, all of it at him. Even his father was smiling, gods be
damned, and his uncle Victarion chuckled aloud. The best response
he could summon was a queasy grin. We shall see who is laughing
when all this is done, bitch.
Asha wrenched the axe out of the table and ung it back down at
the dancers, to whistles and loud cheers. “You’d do well to heed
what I told you about choosing a crew.” A thrall o ered them a
platter, and she stabbed a salted sh and ate it o the end of her
dirk. “If you had troubled to learn the rst thing of Sigrin, I could
never have fooled you. Ten years a wolf, and you land here and
think to prince about the islands, but you know nothing and no one.
Why should men ght and die for you?”
“I am their lawful prince,” Theon said sti y.

“By the laws of the green lands, you might be. But we make our
own laws here, or have you forgotten?”
Scowling, Theon turned to contemplate the leaking trencher
before him. He would have stew in his lap before long. He shouted
for a thrall to clean it up. Half my life I have waited to come home,
and for what? Mockery and disregard? This was not the Pyke he
remembered. Or did he remember? He had been so young when
they took him away to hold hostage.
The feast was a meager enough thing, a succession of sh stews,
black bread, and spiceless goat. The tastiest thing Theon found to
eat was an onion pie. Ale and wine continued to ow well after the
last of the courses had been cleared away.
Lord Balon Greyjoy rose from the Seastone Chair. “Have done
with your drink and come to my solar,” he commanded his
companions on the dais. “We have plans to lay.” He left them with
no other word, anked by two of his guards. His brothers followed
in short order. Theon rose to go after them.
“My little brother is in a rush to be o .” Asha raised her drinking
horn and beckoned for more ale.
“Our lord father is waiting.”
“And has, for many a year. It will do him no harm to wait a little
longer … but if you fear his wrath, scurry after him by all means.
You ought to have no trouble catching our uncles.” She smiled.
“One is drunk on seawater, after all, and the other is a great grey
bullock so dim he’ll probably get lost.”
Theon sat back down, annoyed. “I run after no man.”
“No man, but every woman?”
“It was not me who grabbed your cock.”
“I don’t have one, remember? You grabbed every other bit of me
quick enough.”
He could feel the ush creeping up his cheeks. “I’m a man with a
man’s hungers. What sort of unnatural creature are you?”
“Only a shy maid.” Asha’s hand darted out under the table to give
his cock a squeeze. Theon nearly jumped from his chair. “What,
don’t you want me to steer you into port, brother?”

“Marriage is not for you,” Theon decided. “When I rule, I believe
I will pack you o to the silent sisters.” He lurched to his feet and
strode o unsteadily to nd his father.
Rain was falling by the time he reached the swaying bridge out to
the Sea Tower. His stomach was crashing and churning like the
waves below, and wine had unsteadied his feet. Theon gritted his
teeth and gripped the rope tightly as he made his way across,
pretending that it was Asha’s neck he was clutching.
The solar was as damp and drafty as ever. Buried under his
sealskin robes, his father sat before the brazier with his brothers on
either side of him. Victarion was talking of tides and winds when
Theon entered, but Lord Balon waved him silent. “I have made my
plans. It is time you heard them.”
“I have some suggestions—”
“When I require your counsel I shall ask for it,” his father said.
“We have had a bird from Old Wyk. Dagmer is bringing the
Drumms and Stonehouses. If the god grants us good winds, we will
sail when they arrive … or you will. I mean for you to strike the
rst blow, Theon. You shall take eight longships north—”
“Eight?” His face reddened. “What can I hope to accomplish with
only eight longships?”
“You are to harry the Stony Shore, raiding the shing villages and
sinking any ships you chance to meet. It may be that you will draw
some of the northern lords out from behind their stone walls. Aeron
will accompany you, and Dagmer Cleftjaw.”
“May the Drowned God bless our swords,” the priest said.
Theon felt as if he’d been slapped. He was being sent to do
reaver’s work, burning shermen out of their hovels and raping
their ugly daughters, and yet it seemed Lord Balon did not trust him
su ciently to do even that much. Bad enough to have to su er the
Damphair’s scowls and chidings. With Dagmer Cleftjaw along as
well, his command would be purely nominal.
“Asha my daughter,” Lord Balon went on, and Theon turned to
see that his sister had slipped in silently, “you shall take thirty
longships of picked men round Sea Dragon Point. Land upon the

tidal ats north of Deepwood Motte. March quickly, and the castle
may fall before they even know you are upon them.”
Asha smiled like a cat in cream. “I’ve always wanted a castle,” she
said sweetly.
“Then take one.”
Theon had to bite his tongue. Deepwood Motte was the
stronghold of the Glovers. With both Robett and Galbart warring in
the south, it would be lightly held, and once the castle fell the
ironmen would have a secure base in the heart of the north. I should
be the one sent to take Deepwood. He knew Deepwood Motte, he had
visited the Glovers several times with Eddard Stark.
“Victarion,” Lord Balon said to his brother, “the main thrust shall
fall to you. When my sons have struck their blows, Winterfell must
respond. You should meet small opposition as you sail up Saltspear
and the Fever River. At the headwaters, you will be less than
twenty miles from Moat Cailin. The Neck is the key to the kingdom.
Already we command the western seas. Once we hold Moat Cailin,
the pup will not be able to win back to the north … and if he is fool
enough to try, his enemies will seal the south end of the causeway
behind him, and Robb the boy will nd himself caught like a rat in
a bottle.”
Theon could keep silent no longer. “A bold plan, Father, but the
lords in their castles—”
Lord Balon rode over him. “The lords are gone south with the
pup. Those who remained behind are the cravens, old men, and
green boys. They will yield or fall, one by one. Winterfell may defy
us for a year, but what of it? The rest shall be ours, forest and eld
and hall, and we shall make the folk our thralls and salt wives.”
Aeron Damphair raised his arms. “And the waters of wrath will
rise high, and the Drowned God will spread his dominion across the
green lands!”
“What is dead can never die,” Victarion intoned. Lord Balon and
Asha echoed his words, and Theon had no choice but to mumble
along with them. And then it was done.
Outside the rain was falling harder than ever. The rope bridge
twisted and writhed under his feet. Theon Greyjoy stopped in the

center of the span and contemplated the rocks below. The sound of
the waves was a crashing roar, and he could taste the salt spray on
his lips. A sudden gust of wind made him lose his footing, and he
stumbled to his knees.
Asha helped him rise. “You can’t hold your wine either, brother.”
Theon leaned on her shoulder and let her guide him across the
rain-slick boards. “I liked you better when you were Esgred,” he
told her accusingly.
She laughed. “That’s fair. I liked you better when you were nine.”

TYRION

Through the door came the soft sound of the high harp, mingled

with a trilling of pipes. The singer’s voice was mu ed by the thick
walls, yet Tyrion knew the verse. I loved a maid as fair as summer, he
remembered, with sunlight in her hair …
Ser Meryn Trant guarded the queen’s door this night. His
muttered “My lord” struck Tyrion as a tad grudging, but he opened
the door nonetheless. The song broke o abruptly as he strode into
his sister’s bedchamber.
Cersei was reclining on a pile of cushions. Her feet were bare, her
golden hair artfully tousled, her robe a green-and-gold samite that
caught the light of the candles and shimmered as she looked up.
“Sweet sister,” Tyrion said, “how beautiful you look tonight.” He
turned to the singer. “And you as well, cousin. I had no notion you
had such a lovely voice.”
The compliment made Ser Lancel sulky; perhaps he thought he
was being mocked. It seemed to Tyrion that the lad had grown
three inches since being knighted. Lancel had thick sandy hair,
green Lannister eyes, and a line of soft blond fuzz on his upper lip.
At sixteen, he was cursed with all the certainty of youth,
unleavened by any trace of humor or self-doubt, and wed to the
arrogance that came so naturally to those born blond and strong and
handsome. His recent elevation had only made him worse. “Did Her
Grace send for you?” the boy demanded.

“Not that I recall,” Tyrion admitted. “It grieves me to disturb
your revels, Lancel, but as it happens, I have matters of import to
discuss with my sister.”
Cersei regarded him suspiciously. “If you are here about those
begging brothers, Tyrion, spare me your reproaches. I won’t have
them spreading their lthy treasons in the streets. They can preach
to each other in the dungeons.”
“And count themselves lucky that they have such a gentle queen,”
added Lancel. “I would have had their tongues out.”
“One even dared to say that the gods were punishing us because
Jaime murdered the rightful king,” Cersei declared. “It will not be
borne, Tyrion. I gave you ample opportunity to deal with these lice,
but you and your Ser Jacelyn did nothing, so I commanded Vylarr
to attend to the matter.”
“And so he did.” Tyrion had been annoyed when the red cloaks
had dragged a half dozen of the scabrous prophets down to the
dungeons without consulting him, but they were not important
enough to battle over. “No doubt we will all be better o for a little
quiet in the streets. That is not why I came. I have tidings I know
you will be anxious to hear, sweet sister, but they are best spoken
of privily.”
“Very well.” The harpist and the piper bowed and hurried out,
while Cersei kissed her cousin chastely on the cheek. “Leave us,
Lancel. My brother’s harmless when he’s alone. If he’d brought his
pets, we’d smell them.”
The young knight gave his cousin a baleful glance and pulled the
door shut forcefully behind him. “I’ll have you know I make Shagga
bathe once a fortnight,” Tyrion said when he was gone.
“You’re very pleased with yourself, aren’t you? Why?”
“Why not?” Tyrion said. Every day, every night, hammers rang
along the Street of Steel, and the great chain grew longer. He
hopped up onto the great canopied bed. “Is this the bed where
Robert died? I’m surprised you kept it.”
“It gives me sweet dreams,” she said. “Now spit out your business
and waddle away, Imp.”
Tyrion smiled. “Lord Stannis has sailed from Dragonstone.”

Cersei bolted to her feet. “And yet you sit there grinning like a
harvest-day pumpkin? Has Bywater called out the City Watch? We
must send a bird to Harrenhal at once.” He was laughing by then.
She seized him by the shoulders and shook him. “Stop it. Are you
mad, or drunk? Stop it!”
It was all he could do to get out the words. “I can’t,” he gasped.
“It’s too … gods, too funny … Stannis …”
“What?”
“He hasn’t sailed against us,” Tyrion managed. “He’s laid siege to
Storm’s End. Renly is riding to meet him.”
His sister’s nails dug painfully into his arms. For a moment she
stared incredulous, as if he had begun to gibber in an unknown
tongue. “Stannis and Renly are ghting each other?” When he
nodded, Cersei began to chuckle. “Gods be good,” she gasped, “I’m
starting to believe that Robert was the clever one.”
Tyrion threw back his head and roared. They laughed together.
Cersei pulled him o the bed and whirled him around and even
hugged him, for a moment as giddy as a girl. By the time she let go
of him, Tyrion was breathless and dizzy. He staggered to her
sideboard and put out a hand to steady himself.
“Do you think it will truly come to battle between them? If they
should come to some accord—”
“They won’t,” Tyrion said. “They are too di erent and yet too
much alike, and neither could ever stomach the other.”
“And Stannis has always felt he was cheated of Storm’s End,”
Cersei said thoughtfully. “The ancestral seat of House Baratheon, his
by rights … if you knew how many times he came to Robert singing
that same dull song in that gloomy aggrieved tone he has. When
Robert gave the place to Renly, Stannis clenched his jaw so tight I
thought his teeth would shatter.”
“He took it as a slight.”
“It was meant as a slight,” Cersei said.
“Shall we raise a cup to brotherly love?”
“Yes,” she answered, breathless. “Oh, gods, yes.”
His back was to her as he lled two cups with sweet Arbor red. It
was the easiest thing in the world to sprinkle a pinch of ne powder

into hers. “To Stannis!” he said as he handed her the wine. Harmless
when I’m alone, am I?
“To Renly!” she replied, laughing. “May they battle long and
hard, and the Others take them both!”
Is this the Cersei that Jaime sees? When she smiled, you saw how
beautiful she was, truly. I loved a maid as fair as summer, with sunlight
in her hair. He almost felt sorry for poisoning her.
It was the next morning as he broke his fast that her messenger
arrived. The queen was indisposed and would not be able to leave
her chambers. Not able to leave her privy, more like. Tyrion made the
proper sympathetic noises and sent word to Cersei to rest easy, he
would treat with Ser Cleos as they’d planned.
The Iron Throne of Aegon the Conqueror was a tangle of nasty
barbs and jagged metal teeth waiting for any fool who tried to sit
too comfortably, and the steps made his stunted legs cramp as he
climbed up to it, all too aware of what an absurd spectacle he must
be. Yet there was one thing to be said for it. It was high.
Lannister guardsmen stood silent in their crimson cloaks and lioncrested halfhelms. Ser Jacelyn’s gold cloaks faced them across the
hall. The steps to the throne were anked by Bronn and Ser Preston
of the Kingsguard. Courtiers lled the gallery while supplicants
clustered near the towering oak-and-bronze doors. Sansa Stark
looked especially lovely this morning, though her face was as pale
as milk. Lord Gyles stood coughing, while poor cousin Tyrek wore
his bridegroom’s mantle of miniver and velvet. Since his marriage
to little Lady Ermesande three days past, the other squires had
taken to calling him “Wet Nurse” and asking him what sort of
swaddling clothes his bride wore on their wedding night.
Tyrion looked down on them all, and found he liked it. “Call forth
Ser Cleos Frey.” His voice rang o the stone walls and down the
length of the hall. He liked that too. A pity Shae could not be here to
see this, he re ected. She’d asked to come, but it was impossible.
Ser Cleos made the long walk between the gold cloaks and the
crimson, looking neither right nor left. As he knelt, Tyrion observed
that his cousin was losing his hair.

“Ser Cleos,” Little nger said from the council table, “you have
our thanks for bringing us this peace o er from Lord Stark.”
Grand Maester Pycelle cleared his throat. “The Queen Regent, the
King’s Hand, and the small council have considered the terms
o ered by this self-styled King in the North. Sad to say, they will
not do, and you must tell these northmen so, ser.”
“Here are our terms,” said Tyrion. “Robb Stark must lay down his
sword, swear fealty, and return to Winterfell. He must free my
brother unharmed, and place his host under Jaime’s command, to
march against the rebels Renly and Stannis Baratheon. Each of
Stark’s bannermen must send us a son as hostage. A daughter will
su ce where there is no son. They shall be treated gently and given
high places here at court, so long as their fathers commit no new
treasons.”
Cleos Frey looked ill. “My lord Hand,” he said, “Lord Stark will
never consent to these terms.”
We never expected he would, Cleos. “Tell him that we have raised
another great host at Casterly Rock, that soon it will march on him
from the west while my lord father advances from the east. Tell him
that he stands alone, without hope of allies. Stannis and Renly
Baratheon war against each other, and the Prince of Dorne has
consented to wed his son Trystane to the Princess Myrcella.”
Murmurs of delight and consternation alike arose from the gallery
and the back of the hall.
“As to this of my cousins,” Tyrion went on, “we o er Harrion
Karstark and Ser Wylis Manderly for Willem Lannister, and Lord
Cerwyn and Ser Donnel Locke for your brother Tion. Tell Stark that
two Lannisters are worth four northmen in any season.” He waited
for the laughter to die. “His father’s bones he shall have, as a
gesture of Jo rey’s good faith.”
“Lord Stark asked for his sisters and his father’s sword as well,”
Ser Cleos reminded him.
Ser Ilyn Payne stood mute, the hilt of Eddard Stark’s greatsword
rising over one shoulder. “Ice,” said Tyrion. “He’ll have that when
he makes his peace with us, not before.”
“As you say. And his sisters?”

Tyrion glanced toward Sansa, and felt a stab of pity as he said,
“Until such time as he frees my brother Jaime, unharmed, they shall
remain here as hostages. How well they are treated depends on
him.” And if the gods are good, Bywater will nd Arya alive, before
Robb learns she’s gone missing.
“I shall bring him your message, my lord.”
Tyrion plucked at one of the twisted blades that sprang from the
arm of the throne. And now the thrust. “Vylarr,” he called.
“My lord.”
“The men Stark sent are su cient to protect Lord Eddard’s bones,
but a Lannister should have a Lannister escort,” Tyrion declared.
“Ser Cleos is the queen’s cousin, and mine. We shall sleep more
easily if you would see him safely back to Riverrun.”
“As you command. How many men should I take?”
“Why, all of them.”
Vylarr stood like a man made of stone. It was Grand Maester
Pycelle who rose, gasping, “My lord Hand, that cannot … your
father, Lord Tywin himself, he sent these good men to our city to
protect Queen Cersei and her children …”
“The Kingsguard and the City Watch protect them well enough.
The gods speed you on your way, Vylarr.”
At the council table Varys smiled knowingly, Little nger sat
feigning boredom, and Pycelle gaped like a sh, pale and confused.
A herald stepped forward. “If any man has other matters to set
before the King’s Hand, let him speak now or go forth and hold his
silence.”
“I will be heard.” A slender man all in black pushed his way
between the Redwyne twins.
“Ser Alliser!” Tyrion exclaimed. “Why, I had no notion that you’d
come to court. You should have sent me word.”
“I have, as well you know.” Thorne was as prickly as his name, a
spare, sharp-featured man of fty, hard-eyed and hard-handed, his
black hair streaked with grey. “I have been shunned, ignored, and
left to wait like some baseborn servant.”
“Truly? Bronn, this was not well done. Ser Alliser and I are old
friends. We walked the Wall together.”

“Sweet Ser Alliser,” murmured Varys, “you must not think too
harshly of us. So many seek our Jo rey’s grace, in these troubled
and tumultuous times.”
“More troubled than you know, eunuch.”
“To his face we call him Lord Eunuch,” quipped Little nger.
“How may we be of help to you, good brother?” Grand Maester
Pycelle asked in soothing tones.
“The Lord Commander sent me to His Grace the king,” Thorne
answered. “The matter is too grave to be left to servants.”
“The king is playing with his new crossbow,” Tyrion said. Ridding
himself of Jo rey had required only an ungainly Myrish crossbow
that threw three quarrels at a time, and nothing would do but that
he try it at once. “You can speak to servants or hold your silence.”
“As you will,” Ser Alliser said, displeasure in every word. “I am
sent to tell you that we found two rangers, long missing. They were
dead, yet when we brought the corpses back to the Wall they rose
again in the night. One slew Ser Jaremy Rykker, while the second
tried to murder the Lord Commander.”
Distantly, Tyrion heard someone snigger. Does he mean to mock
me with this folly? He shifted uneasily and glanced down at Varys,
Little nger, and Pycelle, wondering if one of them had a role in
this. A dwarf enjoyed at best a tenuous hold on dignity. Once the
court and kingdom started to laugh at him, he was doomed. And
yet … and yet …
Tyrion remembered a cold night under the stars when he’d stood
beside the boy Jon Snow and a great white wolf atop the Wall at
the end of the world, gazing out at the trackless dark beyond. He
had felt—what?—something, to be sure, a dread that had cut like
that frigid northern wind. A wolf had howled o in the night, and
the sound had sent a shiver through him.
Don’t be a fool, he told himself. A wolf, a wind, a dark forest, it
meant nothing. And yet … He had come to have a liking for old Jeor
Mormont during his time at Castle Black. “I trust that the Old Bear
survived this attack?”
“He did.”
“And that your brothers killed these, ah, dead men?”

“We did.”
“You’re certain that they are dead this time?” Tyrion asked
mildly. When Bronn choked on a snort of laughter, he knew how he
must proceed. “Truly truly dead?”
“They were dead the rst time,” Ser Alliser snapped. “Pale and
cold, with black hands and feet. I brought Jared’s hand, torn from
his corpse by the bastard’s wolf.”
Little nger stirred. “And where is this charming token?”
Ser Alliser frowned uncomfortably. “It … rotted to pieces while I
waited, unheard. There’s naught left to show but bones.”
Titters echoed through the hall. “Lord Baelish,” Tyrion called
down to Little nger, “buy our brave Ser Alliser a hundred spades to
take back to the Wall with him.”
“Spades?” Ser Alliser narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“If you bury your dead, they won’t come walking,” Tyrion told
him, and the court laughed openly. “Spades will end your troubles,
with some strong backs to wield them. Ser Jacelyn, see that the
good brother has his pick of the city dungeons.”
Ser Jacelyn Bywater said, “As you will, my lord, but the cells are
near empty. Yoren took all the likely men.”
“Arrest some more, then,” Tyrion told him. “Or spread the word
that there’s bread and turnips on the Wall, and they’ll go of their
own accord.” The city had too many mouths to feed, and the Night’s
Watch a perpetual need of men. At Tyrion’s signal, the herald cried
an end, and the hall began to empty.
Ser Alliser Thorne was not so easily dismissed. He was waiting at
the foot of the Iron Throne when Tyrion descended. “Do you think I
sailed all the way from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea to be mocked by the
likes of you?” he fumed, blocking the way. “This is no jape. I saw it
with my own eyes. I tell you, the dead walk.”
“You should try to kill them more thoroughly.” Tyrion pushed
past. Ser Alliser made to grab his sleeve, but Preston Green eld
thrust him back. “No closer, ser.”
Thorne knew better than to challenge a knight of the Kingsguard.
“You are a fool, Imp,” he shouted at Tyrion’s back.

The dwarf turned to face him. “Me? Truly? Then why were they
laughing at you, I wonder?” He smiled wanly. “You came for men,
did you not?”
“The cold winds are rising. The Wall must be held.”
“And to hold it you need men, which I’ve given you … as you
might have noted, if your ears heard anything but insults. Take
them, thank me, and begone before I’m forced to take a crab fork to
you again. Give my warm regards to Lord Mormont … and to Jon
Snow as well.” Bronn seized Ser Alliser by the elbow and marched
him forcefully from the hall.
Grand Maester Pycelle had already scuttled o , but Varys and
Little nger had watched it all, start to nish. “I grow ever more
admiring of you, my lord,” confessed the eunuch. “You appease the
Stark boy with his father’s bones and strip your sister of her
protectors in one swift stroke. You give that black brother the men
he seeks, rid the city of some hungry mouths, yet make it all seem
mockery so none may say that the dwarf fears snarks and grumkins.
Oh, deftly done.”
Little nger stroked his beard. “Do you truly mean to send away
all your guards, Lannister?”
“No, I mean to send away all my sister’s guards.”
“The queen will never allow that.”
“Oh, I think she may. I am her brother, and when you’ve known
me longer, you’ll learn that I mean everything I say.”
“Even the lies?”
“Especially the lies. Lord Petyr, I sense that you are unhappy with
me.”
“I love you as much as I ever have, my lord. Though I do not
relish being played for a fool. If Myrcella weds Trystane Martell,
she can scarcely wed Robert Arryn, can she?”
“Not without causing a great scandal,” he admitted. “I regret my
little ruse, Lord Petyr, but when we spoke, I could not know the
Dornishmen would accept my o er.”
Little nger was not appeased. “I do not like being lied to, my
lord. Leave me out of your next deception.”

Only if you’ll do the same for me, Tyrion thought, glancing at the
dagger sheathed at Little nger’s hip. “If I have given o ense, I am
deeply sorry. All men know how much we love you, my lord. And
how much we need you.”
“Try and remember that.” With that Little nger left them.
“Walk with me, Varys,” said Tyrion. They left through the king’s
door behind the throne, the eunuch’s slippers whisking lightly over
the stone.
“Lord Baelish has the truth of it, you know. The queen will never
permit you to send away her guard.”
“She will. You’ll see to that.”
A smile ickered across Varys’s plump lips. “Will I?”
“Oh, for a certainty. You’ll tell her it is part of my scheme to free
Jaime.”
Varys stroked a powdered cheek. “This would doubtless involve
the four men your man Bronn searched for so diligently in all the
low places of King’s Landing. A thief, a poisoner, a mummer, and a
murderer.”
“Put them in crimson cloaks and lion helms, they’ll look no
di erent from any other guardsmen. I searched for some time for a
ruse that might get them into Riverrun before I thought to hide
them in plain sight. They’ll ride in by the main gate, ying
Lannister banners and escorting Lord Eddard’s bones.” He smiled
crookedly. “Four men alone would be watched vigilantly. Four
among a hundred can lose themselves. So I must send the true
guardsmen as well as the false … as you’ll tell my sister.”
“And for the sake of her beloved brother, she will consent,
despite her misgivings.” They made their way down a deserted
colonnade. “Still, the loss of her red cloaks will surely make her
uneasy.”
“I like her uneasy,” said Tyrion.
Ser Cleos Frey left that very afternoon, escorted by Vylarr and a
hundred red-cloaked Lannister guardsmen. The men Robb Stark had
sent joined them at the King’s Gate for the long ride west.
Tyrion found Timett dicing with his Burned Men in the barracks.
“Come to my solar at midnight.” Timett gave him a hard one-eyed

stare, a curt nod. He was not one for long speeches.
That night he feasted with the Stone Crows and Moon Brothers in
the Small Hall, though he shunned the wine for once. He wanted all
his wits about him. “Shagga, what moon is this?”
Shagga’s frown was a erce thing. “Black, I think.”
“In the west, they call that a traitor’s moon. Try not to get too
drunk tonight, and see that your axe is sharp.”
“A Stone Crow’s axe is always sharp, and Shagga’s axes are
sharpest of all. Once I cut o a man’s head, but he did not know it
until he tried to brush his hair. Then it fell o .”
“Is that why you never brush yours?” The Stone Crows roared
and stamped their feet, Shagga hooting loudest of all.
By midnight, the castle was silent and dark. Doubtless a few gold
cloaks on the walls spied them leaving the Tower of the Hand, but
no one raised a voice. He was the Hand of the King, and where he
went was his own a air.
The thin wooden door split with a thunderous crack beneath the
heel of Shagga’s boot. Pieces went ying inward, and Tyrion heard
a woman’s gasp of fear. Shagga hacked the door apart with three
great blows of his axe and kicked his way through the ruins. Timett
followed, and then Tyrion, stepping gingerly over the splinters. The
re had burned down to a few glowing embers, and shadows lay
thick across the bedchamber. When Timett ripped the heavy
curtains o the bed, the naked serving girl stared up with wide
white eyes. “Please, my lords,” she pleaded, “don’t hurt me.” She
cringed away from Shagga, ushed and fearful, trying to cover her
charms with her hands and coming up a hand short.
“Go,” Tyrion told her. “It’s not you we want.”
“Shagga wants this woman.”
“Shagga wants every whore in this city of whores,” complained
Timett son of Timett.
“Yes,” Shagga said, unabashed. “Shagga would give her a strong
child.”
“If she wants a strong child, she’ll know whom to seek,” Tyrion
said. “Timett, see her out … gently, if you would.”

The Burned Man pulled the girl from the bed and half marched,
half dragged her across the chamber. Shagga watched them go,
mournful as a puppy. The girl stumbled over the shattered door and
out into the hall, helped along by a rm shove from Timett. Above
their heads, the ravens were screeching.
Tyrion dragged the soft blanket o the bed, uncovering Grand
Maester Pycelle beneath. “Tell me, does the Citadel approve of you
bedding the serving wenches, Maester?”
The old man was as naked as the girl, though he made a markedly
less attractive sight. For once, his heavy-lidded eyes were open
wide. “W-what is the meaning of this? I am an old man, your loyal
servant …”
Tyrion hoisted himself onto the bed. “So loyal that you sent only
one of my letters to Doran Martell. The other you gave to my
sister.”
“N-no,” squealed Pycelle. “No, a falsehood, I swear it, it was not
me. Varys, it was Varys, the Spider, I warned you—”
“Do all maesters lie so poorly? I told Varys that I was giving
Prince Doran my nephew Tommen to foster. I told Little nger that I
planned to wed Myrcella to Lord Robert of the Eyrie. I told no one
that I had o ered Myrcella to the Dornish … that truth was only in
the letter I entrusted to you.”
Pycelle clutched for a corner of the blanket. “Birds are lost,
messages stolen or sold … it was Varys, there are things I might tell
you of that eunuch that would chill your blood …”
“My lady prefers my blood hot.”
“Make no mistake, for every secret the eunuch whispers in your
ear, he holds seven back. And Little nger, that one …”
“I know all about Lord Petyr. He’s almost as untrustworthy as
you. Shagga, cut o his manhood and feed it to the goats.”
Shagga hefted the huge double-bladed axe. “There are no goats,
Halfman.”
“Make do.”
Roaring, Shagga leapt forward. Pycelle shrieked and wet the bed,
urine spraying in all directions as he tried to scramble back out of
reach. The wildling caught him by the end of his billowy white

beard and hacked o three-quarters of it with a single slash of the
axe.
“Timett, do you suppose our friend will be more forthcoming
without those whiskers to hide behind?” Tyrion used a bit of the
sheet to wipe the piss o his boots.
“He will tell the truth soon.” Darkness pooled in the empty pit of
Timett’s burned eye. “I can smell the stink of his fear.”
Shagga tossed a handful of hair down to the rushes, and seized
what beard was left. “Hold still, Maester,” urged Tyrion. “When
Shagga gets angry, his hands shake.”
“Shagga’s hands never shake,” the huge man said indignantly,
pressing the great crescent blade under Pycelle’s quivering chin and
sawing through another tangle of beard.
“How long have you been spying for my sister?” Tyrion asked.
Pycelle’s breathing was rapid and shallow. “All I did, I did for
House Lannister.” A sheen of sweat covered the broad dome of the
old man’s brow, and wisps of white hair clung to his wrinkled skin.
“Always … for years … your lord father, ask him, I was ever his
true servant … ’twas I who bid Aerys open his gates …”
That took Tyrion by surprise. He had been no more than an ugly
boy at Casterly Rock when the city fell. “So the Sack of King’s
Landing was your work as well?”
“For the realm! Once Rhaegar died, the war was done. Aerys was
mad, Viserys too young, Prince Aegon a babe at the breast, but the
realm needed a king … I prayed it should be your good father, but
Robert was too strong, and Lord Stark moved too swiftly …”
“How many have you betrayed, I wonder? Aerys, Eddard Stark,
me … King Robert as well? Lord Arryn, Prince Rhaegar? Where
does it begin, Pycelle?” He knew where it ended.
The axe scratched at the apple of Pycelle’s throat and stroked the
soft wobbly skin under his jaw, scraping away the last hairs.
“You … were not here,” he gasped when the blade moved upward
to his cheeks. “Robert … his wounds … if you had seen them,
smelled them, you would have no doubt …”
“Oh, I know the boar did your work for you … but if he’d left the
job half done, doubtless you would have nished it.”

“He was a wretched king … vain, drunken, lecherous … he would
have set your sister aside, his own queen … please … Renly was
plotting to bring the Highgarden maid to court, to entice his
brother … it is the gods’ own truth …”
“And what was Lord Arryn plotting?”
“He knew,” Pycelle said. “About … about …”
“I know what he knew about,” snapped Tyrion, who was not
anxious for Shagga and Timett to know as well.
“He was sending his wife back to the Eyrie, and his son to be
fostered on Dragonstone … he meant to act …”
“So you poisoned him rst.”
“No.” Pycelle struggled feebly. Shagga growled and grabbed his
head. The clansman’s hand was so big he could have crushed the
maester’s skull like an eggshell had he squeezed.
Tyrion tsked at him. “I saw the tears of Lys among your potions.
And you sent away Lord Arryn’s own maester and tended him
yourself, so you could make certain that he died.”
“A falsehood!”
“Shave him closer,” Tyrion suggested. “The throat again.”
The axe swept back down, rasping over the skin. A thin lm of
spit bubbled on Pycelle’s lips as his mouth trembled. “I tried to save
Lord Arryn. I vow—”
“Careful now, Shagga, you’ve cut him.”
Shagga growled. “Dolf fathered warriors, not barbers.”
When he felt the blood trickling down his neck and onto his chest,
the old man shuddered, and the last strength went out of him. He
looked shrunken, both smaller and frailer than he had been when
they burst in on him. “Yes,” he whimpered, “yes, Colemon was
purging, so I sent him away. The queen needed Lord Arryn dead,
she did not say so, could not, Varys was listening, always listening,
but when I looked at her I knew. It was not me who gave him the
poison, though, I swear it.” The old man wept. “Varys will tell you,
it was the boy, his squire, Hugh he was called, he must surely have
done it, ask your sister, ask her.”
Tyrion was disgusted. “Bind him and take him away,” he
commanded. “Throw him down in one of the black cells.”

They dragged him out the splintered door. “Lannister,” he
moaned, “all I’ve done has been for Lannister …”
When he was gone, Tyrion made a leisurely search of the quarters
and collected a few more small jars from his shelves. The ravens
muttered above his head as he worked, a strangely peaceful noise.
He would need to nd someone to tend the birds until the Citadel
sent a man to replace Pycelle.
He was the one I’d hoped to trust. Varys and Little nger were no
more loyal, he suspected … only more subtle, and thus more
dangerous. Perhaps his father’s way would have been best: summon
Ilyn Payne, mount three heads above the gates, and have done. And
wouldn’t that be a pretty sight, he thought.

ARYA

Fear cuts deeper than swords, Arya would tell herself, but that did

not make the fear go away. It was as much a part of her days as
stale bread and the blisters on her toes after a long day of walking
the hard, rutted road.
She had thought she had known what it meant to be afraid, but
she learned better in that storehouse beside the Gods Eye. Eight
days she had lingered there before the Mountain gave the command
to march, and every day she had seen someone die.
The Mountain would come into the storehouse after he had
broken his fast and pick one of the prisoners for questioning. The
village folk would never look at him. Maybe they thought that if
they did not notice him, he would not notice them … but he saw
them anyway and picked whom he liked. There was no place to
hide, no tricks to play, no way to be safe.
One girl shared a soldier’s bed three nights running; the Mountain
picked her on the fourth day, and the soldier said nothing.
A smiley old man mended their clothing and babbled about his
son, o serving in the gold cloaks at King’s Landing. “A king’s man,
he is,” he would say, “a good king’s man like me, all for Jo rey.”
He said it so often the other captives began to call him All-forJo rey whenever the guards weren’t listening. All-for-Jo rey was
picked on the fth day.
A young mother with a pox-scarred face o ered to freely tell
them all she knew if they’d promise not to hurt her daughter. The

Mountain heard her out; the next morning he picked her daughter,
to be certain she’d held nothing back.
The ones chosen were questioned in full view of the other
captives, so they could see the fate of rebels and traitors. A man the
others called the Tickler asked the questions. His face was so
ordinary and his garb so plain that Arya might have thought him
one of the villagers before she had seen him at his work. “Tickler
makes them howl so hard they piss themselves,” old stoop-shoulder
Chiswyck told them. He was the man she’d tried to bite, who’d
called her a erce little thing and smashed her head with a mailed
st. Sometimes he helped the Tickler. Sometimes others did that.
Ser Gregor Clegane himself would stand motionless, watching and
listening, until the victim died.
The questions were always the same. Was there gold hidden in
the village? Silver, gems? Was there more food? Where was Lord
Beric Dondarrion? Which of the village folk had aided him? When
he rode o , where did he go? How many men were with them?
How many knights, how many bowmen, how many men-at-arms?
How were they armed? How many were horsed? How many were
wounded? What other enemy had they seen? How many? When?
What banners did they y? Where did they go? Was there gold
hidden in the village? Silver, gems? Where was Lord Beric
Dondarrion? How many men were with him? By the third day, Arya
could have asked the questions herself.
They found a little gold, a little silver, a great sack of copper
pennies, and a dented goblet set with garnets that two soldiers
almost came to blows over. They learned that Lord Beric had ten
starvelings with him, or else a hundred mounted knights; that he
had ridden west, or north, or south; that he had crossed the lake in
a boat; that he was strong as an aurochs or weak from the bloody
ux. No one ever survived the Tickler’s questioning; no man, no
woman, no child. The strongest lasted past evenfall. Their bodies
were hung beyond the res for the wolves.
By the time they marched, Arya knew she was no water dancer.
Syrio Forel would never have let them knock him down and take his
sword away, nor stood by when they killed Lommy Greenhands.

Syrio would never have sat silent in that storehouse nor shu ed
along meekly among the other captives. The direwolf was the sigil
of the Starks, but Arya felt more a lamb, surrounded by a herd of
other sheep. She hated the villagers for their sheepishness, almost as
much as she hated herself.
The Lannisters had taken everything: father, friends, home, hope,
courage. One had taken Needle, while another had broken her
wooden stick sword over his knee. They had even taken her stupid
secret. The storehouse had been big enough for her to creep o and
make her water in some corner when no one was looking, but it
was di erent on the road. She held it as long as she could, but
nally she had to squat by a bush and skin down her breeches in
front of all of them. It was that or wet herself. Hot Pie gaped at her
with big moon eyes, but no one else even troubled to look. Girl
sheep or boy sheep, Ser Gregor and his men did not seem to care.
Their captors permitted no chatter. A broken lip taught Arya to
hold her tongue. Others never learned at all. One boy of three
would not stop calling for his father, so they smashed his face in
with a spiked mace. Then the boy’s mother started screaming and
Ra the Sweetling killed her as well.
Arya watched them die and did nothing. What good did it do you
to be brave? One of the women picked for questioning had tried to
be brave, but she had died screaming like all the rest. There were
no brave people on that march, only scared and hungry ones. Most
were women and children. The few men were very old or very
young; the rest had been chained to that gibbet and left for the
wolves and the crows. Gendry was only spared because he’d
admitted to forging the horned helm himself; smiths, even
apprentice smiths, were too valuable to kill.
They were being taken to serve Lord Tywin Lannister at
Harrenhal, the Mountain told them. “You’re traitors and rebels, so
thank your gods that Lord Tywin’s giving you this chance. It’s more
than you’d get from the outlaws. Obey, serve, and live.”
“It’s not just, it’s not,” she heard one wizened old woman
complain to another when they had bedded down for the night. “We

never did no treason, the others come in and took what they
wanted, same as this bunch.”
“Lord Beric did us no hurt, though,” her friend whispered. “And
that red priest with him, he paid for all they took.”
“Paid? He took two of my chickens and gave me a bit of paper
with a mark on it. Can I eat a bit of raggy old paper, I ask you? Will
it give me eggs?” She looked about to see that no guards were near,
and spat three times. “There’s for the Tullys and there’s for the
Lannisters and there’s for the Starks.”
“It’s a sin and a shame,” an old man hissed. “When the old king
was still alive, he’d not have stood for this.”
“King Robert?” Arya asked, forgetting herself.
“King Aerys, gods grace him,” the old man said, too loudly. A
guard came sauntering over to shut them up. The old man lost both
his teeth, and there was no more talk that night.
Besides his captives, Ser Gregor was bringing back a dozen pigs, a
cage of chickens, a scrawny milk cow, and nine wagons of salt sh.
The Mountain and his men had horses, but the captives were all
afoot, and those too weak to keep up were killed out of hand, along
with anyone foolish enough to ee. The guards took women o into
the bushes at night, and most seemed to expect it and went along
meekly enough. One girl, prettier than the others, was made to go
with four or ve di erent men every night, until nally she hit one
with a rock. Ser Gregor made everyone watch while he took o her
head with a sweep of his massive two-handed greatsword. “Leave
the body for the wolves,” he commanded when the deed was done,
handing the sword to his squire to be cleaned.
Arya glanced sidelong at Needle, sheathed at the hip of a blackbearded, balding man-at-arms called Polliver. It’s good that they took
it away, she thought. Otherwise she would have tried to stab Ser
Gregor, and he would have cut her right in half, and the wolves
would eat her too.
Polliver was not so bad as some of the others, even though he’d
stolen Needle. The night she was caught, the Lannister men had
been nameless strangers with faces as alike as their nasal helms, but
she’d come to know them all. You had to know who was lazy and

who was cruel, who was smart and who was stupid. You had to
learn that even though the one they called Shitmouth had the
foulest tongue she’d ever heard, he’d give you an extra piece of
bread if you asked, while jolly old Chiswyck and soft-spoken Ra
would just give you the back of their hand.
Arya watched and listened and polished her hates the way Gendry
had once polished his horned helm. Dunsen wore those bull’s horns
now, and she hated him for it. She hated Polliver for Needle, and
she hated old Chiswyck who thought he was funny. And Ra the
Sweetling, who’d driven his spear through Lommy’s throat, she
hated even more. She hated Ser Amory Lorch for Yoren, and she
hated Ser Meryn Trant for Syrio, the Hound for killing the butcher’s
boy Mycah, and Ser Ilyn and Prince Jo rey and the queen for the
sake of her father and Fat Tom and Desmond and the rest, and even
for Lady, Sansa’s wolf. The Tickler was almost too scary to hate. At
times she could almost forget he was still with them; when he was
not asking questions, he was just another soldier, quieter than most,
with a face like a thousand other men.
Every night Arya would say their names. “Ser Gregor,” she’d
whisper to her stone pillow. “Dunsen, Polliver, Chiswyck, Ra the
Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser
Meryn, King Jo rey, Queen Cersei.” Back in Winterfell, Arya had
prayed with her mother in the sept and with her father in the
godswood, but there were no gods on the road to Harrenhal, and
her names were the only prayer she cared to remember.
Every day they marched, and every night she said her names,
until nally the trees thinned and gave way to a patchwork
landscape of rolling hills, meandering streams, and sunlit elds,
where the husks of burnt holdfasts thrust up black as rotten teeth. It
was another long day’s march before they glimpsed the towers of
Harrenhal in the distance, hard beside the blue waters of the lake.
It would be better once they got to Harrenhal, the captives told
each other, but Arya was not so certain. She remembered Old Nan’s
stories of the castle built on fear. Harren the Black had mixed
human blood in the mortar, Nan used to say, dropping her voice so
the children would need to lean close to hear, but Aegon’s dragons

had roasted Harren and all his sons within their great walls of stone.
Arya chewed her lip as she walked along on feet grown hard with
callus. It would not be much longer, she told herself; those towers
could not be more than a few miles o .
Yet they walked all that day and most of the next before at last
they reached the fringes of Lord Tywin’s army, encamped west of
the castle amidst the scorched remains of a town. Harrenhal was
deceptive from afar, because it was so huge. Its colossal curtain
walls rose beside the lake, sheer and sudden as mountain cli s,
while atop their battlements the rows of wood-and-iron scorpions
looked as small as the bugs for which they were named.
The stink of the Lannister host reached Arya well before she could
make out the devices on the banners that sprouted along the
lakeshore, atop the pavilions of the westermen. From the smell,
Arya could tell that Lord Tywin had been here some time. The
latrines that ringed the encampment were over owing and
swarming with ies, and she saw faint greenish fuzz on many of the
sharpened stakes that protected the perimeters.
Harrenhal’s gatehouse, itself as large as Winterfell’s Great Keep,
was as scarred as it was massive, its stones ssured and discolored.
From outside, only the tops of ve immense towers could be seen
beyond the walls. The shortest of them was half again as tall as the
highest tower in Winterfell, but they did not soar the way a proper
tower did. Arya thought they looked like some old man’s gnarled,
knuckly ngers groping after a passing cloud. She remembered Nan
telling how the stone had melted and owed like candlewax down
the steps and in the windows, glowing a sullen searing red as it
sought out Harren where he hid. Arya could believe every word;
each tower was more grotesque and misshapen than the last, lumpy
and runneled and cracked.
“I don’t want to go there,” Hot Pie squeaked as Harrenhal opened
its gates to them. “There’s ghosts in there.”
Chiswyck heard him, but for once he only smiled. “Baker boy,
here’s your choice. Come join the ghosts, or be one.”
Hot Pie went in with the rest of them.

In the echoing stone-and-timber bathhouse, the captives were
stripped and made to scrub and scrape themselves raw in tubs of
scalding hot water. Two erce old women supervised the process,
discussing them as bluntly as if they were newly acquired donkeys.
When Arya’s turn came round, Goodwife Amabel clucked in dismay
at the sight of her feet, while Goodwife Harra felt the callus on her
ngers that long hours of practice with Needle had earned her. “Got
those churning butter, I’ll wager,” she said. “Some farmer’s whelp,
are you? Well, never you mind, girl, you have a chance to win a
higher place in this world if you work hard. If you won’t work hard,
you’ll be beaten. And what do they call you?”
Arya dared not say her true name, but Arry was no good either, it
was a boy’s name and they could see she was no boy. “Weasel,” she
said, naming the rst girl she could think of. “Lommy called me
Weasel.”
“I can see why,” sni ed Goodwife Amabel. “That hair is a fright
and a nest for lice as well. We’ll have it o , and then you’re for the
kitchens.”
“I’d sooner tend the horses.” Arya liked horses, and maybe if she
was in the stables she’d be able to steal one and escape.
Goodwife Harra slapped her so hard that her swollen lip broke
open all over again. “And keep that tongue to yourself or you’ll get
worse. No one asked your views.”
The blood in her mouth had a salty metal tang to it. Arya dropped
her gaze and said nothing. If I still had Needle, she wouldn’t dare hit
me, she thought sullenly.
“Lord Tywin and his knights have grooms and squires to tend
their horses, they don’t need the likes of you,” Goodwife Amabel
said. “The kitchens are snug and clean, and there’s always a warm
re to sleep by and plenty to eat. You might have done well there,
but I can see you’re not a clever girl. Harra, I believe we should
give this one to Weese.”
“If you think so, Amabel.” They gave her a shift of grey
roughspun wool and a pair of ill- tting shoes, and sent her o .
Weese was understeward for the Wailing Tower, a squat man
with a eshy carbuncle of a nose and a nest of angry red boils near

one corner of his plump lips. Arya was one of six sent to him. He
looked them all over with a gimlet eye. “The Lannisters are
generous to those as serve them well, an honor none of your sort
deserve, but in war a man makes do with what’s to hand. Work
hard and mind your place and might be one day you’ll rise as high
as me. If you think to presume on his lordship’s kindness, though,
you’ll nd me waiting after m’lord has gone, y’see.” He strutted up
and down before them, telling them how they must never look the
highborn in the eye, nor speak until spoken to, nor get in his
lordship’s way. “My nose never lies,” he boasted. “I can smell
de ance, I can smell pride, I can smell disobedience. I catch a whi
of any such stinks, you’ll answer for it. When I sni you, all I want
to smell is fear.”

DAENERYS

On the walls of Qarth, men beat gongs to herald her coming, while

others blew curious horns that encircled their bodies like great
bronze snakes. A column of camelry emerged from the city as her
honor guards. The riders wore scaled copper armor and snouted
helms with copper tusks and long black silk plumes, and sat high on
saddles inlaid with rubies and garnets. Their camels were dressed in
blankets of a hundred di erent hues.
“Qarth is the greatest city that ever was or ever will be,” Pyat
Pree had told her, back amongst the bones of Vaes Tolorro. “It is
the center of the world, the gate between north and south, the
bridge between east and west, ancient beyond memory of man and
so magni cent that Saathos the Wise put out his eyes after gazing
upon Qarth for the rst time, because he knew that all he saw
thereafter should look squalid and ugly by comparison.”
Dany took the warlock’s words well salted, but the magni cence
of the great city was not to be denied. Three thick walls encircled
Qarth, elaborately carved. The outer was red sandstone, thirty feet
high and decorated with animals: snakes slithering, kites ying, sh
swimming, intermingled with wolves of the red waste and striped
zorses and monstrous elephants. The middle wall, forty feet high,
was grey granite alive with scenes of war: the clash of sword and
shield and spear, arrows in ight, heroes at battle and babes being
butchered, pyres of the dead. The innermost wall was fty feet of
black marble, with carvings that made Dany blush until she told

herself that she was being a fool. She was no maid; if she could look
on the grey wall’s scenes of slaughter, why should she avert her
eyes from the sight of men and women giving pleasure to one
another?
The outer gates were banded with copper, the middle with iron;
the innermost were studded with golden eyes. All opened at Dany’s
approach. As she rode her silver into the city, small children rushed
out to scatter owers in her path. They wore golden sandals and
bright paint, no more.
All the colors that had been missing from Vaes Tolorro had found
their way to Qarth; buildings crowded about her fantastical as a
fever dream in shades of rose, violet, and umber. She passed under
a bronze arch fashioned in the likeness of two snakes mating, their
scales delicate akes of jade, obsidian, and lapis lazuli. Slim towers
stood taller than any Dany had ever seen, and elaborate fountains
lled every square, wrought in the shapes of gri ns and dragons
and manticores.
The Qartheen lined the streets and watched from delicate
balconies that looked too frail to support their weight. They were
tall pale folk in linen and samite and tiger fur, every one a lord or
lady to her eyes. The women wore gowns that left one breast bare,
while the men favored beaded silk skirts. Dany felt shabby and
barbaric as she rode past them in her lionskin robe with black
Drogon on one shoulder. Her Dothraki called the Qartheen “Milk
Men” for their paleness, and Khal Drogo had dreamed of the day
when he might sack the great cities of the east. She glanced at her
bloodriders, their dark almond-shaped eyes giving no hint of their
thoughts. Is it only the plunder they see? she wondered. How savage
we must seem to these Qartheen.
Pyat Pree conducted her little khalasar down the center of a great
arcade where the city’s ancient heroes stood thrice life-size on
columns of white and green marble. They passed through a bazaar
in a cavernous building whose latticework ceiling was home to a
thousand gaily colored birds. Trees and owers bloomed on the
terraced walls above the stalls, while below it seemed as if
everything the gods had put into the world was for sale.

Her silver shied as the merchant prince Xaro Xhoan Daxos rode
up to her; the horses could not abide the close presence of camels,
she had found. “If you see here anything that you would desire, O
most beautiful of women, you have only to speak and it is yours,”
Xaro called down from his ornate horned saddle.
“Qarth itself is hers, she has no need of baubles,” blue-lipped Pyat
Pree sang out from her other side. “It shall be as I promised,
Khaleesi. Come with me to the House of the Undying, and you shall
drink of truth and wisdom.”
“Why should she need your Palace of Dust, when I can give her
sunlight and sweet water and silks to sleep in?” Xaro said to the
warlock. “The Thirteen shall set a crown of black jade and re opals
upon her lovely head.”
“The only palace I desire is the red castle at King’s Landing, my
lord Pyat.” Dany was wary of the warlock; the maegi Mirri Maz
Duur had soured her on those who played at sorcery. “And if the
great of Qarth would give me gifts, Xaro, let them give me ships
and swords to win back what is rightfully mine.”
Pyat’s blue lips curled upward in a gracious smile. “It shall be as
you command, Khaleesi.” He moved away, swaying with his camel’s
motion, his long beaded robes trailing behind.
“The young queen is wise beyond her years,” Xaro Xhoan Daxos
murmured down at her from his high saddle. “There is a saying in
Qarth. A warlock’s house is built of bones and lies.”
“Then why do men lower their voices when they speak of the
warlocks of Qarth? All across the east, their power and wisdom are
revered.”
“Once they were mighty,” Xaro agreed, “but now they are as
ludicrous as those feeble old soldiers who boast of their prowess
long after strength and skill have left them. They read their
crumbling scrolls, drink shade-of-the-evening until their lips turn
blue, and hint of dread powers, but they are hollow husks compared
to those who went before. Pyat Pree’s gifts will turn to dust in your
hands, I warn you.” He gave his camel a lick of his whip and sped
away.

“The crow calls the raven black,” muttered Ser Jorah in the
Common Tongue of Westeros. The exile knight rode at her right
hand, as ever. For their entrance into Qarth, he had put away his
Dothraki garb and donned again the plate and mail and wool of the
Seven Kingdoms half a world away. “You would do well to avoid
both those men, Your Grace.”
“Those men will help me to my crown,” she said. “Xaro has vast
wealth, and Pyat Pree—”
“—pretends to power,” the knight said brusquely. On his dark
green surcoat, the bear of House Mormont stood on its hind legs,
black and erce. Jorah looked no less ferocious as he scowled at the
crowd that lled the bazaar. “I would not linger here long, my
queen. I mislike the very smell of this place.”
Dany smiled. “Perhaps it’s the camels you’re smelling. The
Qartheen themselves seem sweet enough to my nose.”
“Sweet smells are sometimes used to cover foul ones.”
My great bear, Dany thought. I am his queen, but I will always be his
cub as well, and he will always guard me. It made her feel safe, but
sad as well. She wished she could love him better than she did.
Xaro Xhoan Daxos had o ered Dany the hospitality of his home
while she was in the city. She had expected something grand. She
had not expected a palace larger than many a market town. It makes
Magister Illyrio’s manse in Pentos look like a swineherd’s hovel, she
thought. Xaro swore that his home could comfortably house all of
her people and their horses besides; indeed, it swallowed them. An
entire wing was given over to her. She would have her own
gardens, a marble bathing pool, a scrying tower and warlock’s
maze. Slaves would tend her every need. In her private chambers,
the oors were green marble, the walls draped with colorful silk
hangings that shimmered with every breath of air. “You are too
generous,” she told Xaro Xhoan Daxos.
“For the Mother of Dragons, no gift is too great.” Xaro was a
languid, elegant man with a bald head and a great beak of a nose
crusted with rubies, opals, and akes of jade. “On the morrow, you
shall feast upon peacock and lark’s tongue, and hear music worthy

of the most beautiful of women. The Thirteen will come to do you
homage, and all the great of Qarth.”
All the great of Qarth will come to see my dragons, Dany thought, yet
she thanked Xaro for his kindness before she sent him on his way.
Pyat Pree took his leave as well, vowing to petition the Undying
Ones for an audience. “A honor rare as summer snows.” Before he
left he kissed her bare feet with his pale blue lips and pressed on
her a gift, a jar of ointment that he swore would let her see the
spirits of the air. Last of the three seekers to depart was Quaithe the
shadowbinder. From her Dany received only a warning. “Beware,”
the woman in the red lacquer mask said.
“Of whom?”
“Of all. They shall come day and night to see the wonder that has
been born again into the world, and when they see they shall lust.
For dragons are re made esh, and re is power.”
When Quaithe too was gone, Ser Jorah said, “She speaks truly,
my queen … though I like her no more than the others.”
“I do not understand her.” Pyat and Xaro had showered Dany
with promises from the moment they rst glimpsed her dragons,
declaring themselves her loyal servants in all things, but from
Quaithe she had gotten only the rare cryptic word. And it disturbed
her that she had never seen the woman’s face. Remember Mirri Maz
Duur, she told herself. Remember treachery. She turned to her
bloodriders. “We will keep our own watch so long as we are here.
See that no one enters this wing of the palace without my leave,
and take care that the dragons are always well guarded.”
“It shall be done, Khaleesi,” Aggo said.
“We have seen only the parts of Qarth that Pyat Pree wished us
to see,” she went on. “Rakharo, go forth and look on the rest, and
tell me what you nd. Take good men with you—and women, to go
places where men are forbidden.”
“As you say, I do, blood of my blood,” said Rakharo.
“Ser Jorah, nd the docks and see what manner of ships lay at
anchor. It has been half a year since I last heard tidings from the
Seven Kingdoms. Perhaps the gods will have blown some good
captain here from Westeros with a ship to carry us home.”

The knight frowned. “That would be no kindness. The Usurper
will kill you, sure as sunrise.” Mormont hooked his thumbs through
his swordbelt. “My place is here at your side.”
“Jhogo can guard me as well. You have more languages than my
bloodriders, and the Dothraki mistrust the sea and those who sail
her. Only you can serve me in this. Go among the ships and speak
to the crews, learn where they are from and where they are bound
and what manner of men command them.”
Reluctantly, the exile nodded. “As you say, my queen.”
When all the men had gone, her handmaids stripped o the
travel-stained silks she wore, and Dany padded out to where the
marble pool sat in the shade of a portico. The water was deliciously
cool, and the pool was stocked with tiny golden sh that nibbled
curiously at her skin and made her giggle. It felt good to close her
eyes and oat, knowing she could rest as long as she liked. She
wondered whether Aegon’s Red Keep had a pool like this, and
fragrant gardens full of lavender and mint. It must, surely. Viserys
always said the Seven Kingdoms were more beautiful than any other
place in the world.
The thought of home disquieted her. If her sun-and-stars had
lived, he would have led his khalasar across the poison water and
swept away her enemies, but his strength had left the world. Her
bloodriders remained, sworn to her for life and skilled in slaughter,
but only in the ways of the horselords. The Dothraki sacked cities
and plundered kingdoms, they did not rule them. Dany had no wish
to reduce King’s Landing to a blackened ruin full of unquiet ghosts.
She had supped enough on tears. I want to make my kingdom
beautiful, to ll it with fat men and pretty maids and laughing children. I
want my people to smile when they see me ride by, the way Viserys said
they smiled for my father.
But before she could do that she must conquer.
The Usurper will kill you, sure as sunrise, Mormont had said. Robert
had slain her gallant brother Rhaegar, and one of his creatures had
crossed the Dothraki sea to poison her and her unborn son. They
said Robert Baratheon was strong as a bull and fearless in battle, a
man who loved nothing better than war. And with him stood the

great lords her brother had named the Usurper’s dogs, cold-eyed
Eddard Stark with his frozen heart, and the golden Lannisters,
father and son, so rich, so powerful, so treacherous.
How could she hope to overthrow such men? When Khal Drogo
had lived, men trembled and made him gifts to stay his wrath. If
they did not, he took their cities, wealth and wives and all. But his
khalasar had been vast, while hers was meager. Her people had
followed her across the red waste as she chased her comet, and
would follow her across the poison water too, but they would not
be enough. Even her dragons might not be enough. Viserys had
believed that the realm would rise for its rightful king … but
Viserys had been a fool, and fools believe in foolish things.
Her doubts made her shiver. Suddenly the water felt cold to her,
and the little sh prickling at her skin annoying. Dany stood and
climbed from the pool. “Irri,” she called, “Jhiqui.”
As the handmaids toweled her dry and wrapped her in a sandsilk
robe, Dany’s thoughts went to the three who had sought her out in
the City of Bones. The Bleeding Star led me to Qarth for a purpose.
Here I will nd what I need, if I have the strength to take what is o ered,
and the wisdom to avoid the traps and snares. If the gods mean for me to
conquer, they will provide, they will send me a sign, and if not … if
not …
It was near evenfall and Dany was feeding her dragons when Irri
stepped through the silken curtains to tell her that Ser Jorah had
returned from the docks … and not alone. “Send him in, with
whomever he has brought,” she said, curious.
When they entered, she was seated on a mound of cushions, her
dragons all about her. The man he brought with him wore a cloak
of green and yellow feathers and had skin as black as polished jet.
“Your Grace,” the knight said, “I bring you Quhuru Mo, captain of
the Cinnamon Wind out of Tall Trees Town.”
The black man knelt. “I am greatly honored, my queen,” he said;
not in the tongue of the Summer Isles, which Dany did not know,
but in the liquid Valyrian of the Nine Free Cities.
“The honor is mine, Quhuru Mo,” said Dany in the same
language. “Have you come from the Summer Isles?”

“This is so, Your Grace, but before, not half a year past, we called
at Oldtown. From there I bring you a wondrous gift.”
“A gift?”
“A gift of news. Dragonmother, Stormborn, I tell you true, Robert
Baratheon is dead.”
Outside her walls, dusk was settling over Qarth, but a sun had
risen in Dany’s heart. “Dead?” she repeated. In her lap, black
Drogon hissed, and pale smoke rose before her face like a veil. “You
are certain? The Usurper is dead?”
“So it is said in Oldtown, and Dorne, and Lys, and all the other
ports where we have called.”
He sent me poisoned wine, yet I live and he is gone. “What was the
manner of his death?” On her shoulder, pale Viserion apped wings
the color of cream, stirring the air.
“Torn by a monstrous boar whilst hunting in his kingswood, or so
I heard in Oldtown. Others say his queen betrayed him, or his
brother, or Lord Stark who was his Hand. Yet all the tales agree in
this: King Robert is dead and in his grave.”
Dany had never looked upon the Usurper’s face, yet seldom a day
had passed when she had not thought of him. His great shadow had
lain across her since the hour of her birth, when she came forth
amidst blood and storm into a world where she no longer had a
place. And now this ebony stranger had lifted that shadow.
“The boy sits the Iron Throne now,” Ser Jorah said.
“King Jo rey reigns,” Quhuru Mo agreed, “but the Lannisters
rule. Robert’s brothers have ed King’s Landing. The talk is, they
mean to claim the crown. And the Hand has fallen, Lord Stark who
was King Robert’s friend. He has been seized for treason.”
“Ned Stark a traitor?” Ser Jorah snorted. “Not bloody likely. The
Long Summer will come again before that one would besmirch his
precious honor.”
“What honor could he have?” Dany said. “He was a traitor to his
true king, as were these Lannisters.” It pleased her to hear that the
Usurper’s dogs were ghting amongst themselves, though she was
unsurprised. The same thing happened when her Drogo died, and
his great khalasar tore itself to pieces. “My brother is dead as well,

Viserys who was the true king,” she told the Summer Islander.
“Khal Drogo my lord husband killed him with a crown of molten
gold.” Would her brother have been any wiser, had he known that
the vengeance he had prayed for was so close at hand?
“Then I grieve for you, Dragonmother, and for bleeding
Westeros, bereft of its rightful king.”
Beneath Dany’s gentle ngers, green Rhaegal stared at the
stranger with eyes of molten gold. When his mouth opened, his
teeth gleamed like black needles. “When does your ship return to
Westeros, Captain?”
“Not for a year or more, I fear. From here the Cinnamon Wind
sails east, to make the trader’s circle round the Jade Sea.”
“I see,” said Dany, disappointed. “I wish you fair winds and good
trading, then. You have brought me a precious gift.”
“I have been amply repaid, great queen.”
She puzzled at that. “How so?”
His eyes gleamed. “I have seen dragons.”
Dany laughed. “And will see more of them one day, I hope. Come
to me in King’s Landing when I am on my father’s throne, and you
shall have a great reward.”
The Summer Islander promised he would do so, and kissed her
lightly on the ngers as he took his leave. Jhiqui showed him out,
while Ser Jorah Mormont remained.
“Khaleesi,” the knight said when they were alone, “I should not
speak so freely of your plans, if I were you. This man will spread
the tale wherever he goes now.”
“Let him,” she said. “Let the whole world know my purpose. The
Usurper is dead, what does it matter?”
“Not every sailor’s tale is true,” Ser Jorah cautioned, “and even if
Robert be truly dead, his son rules in his place. This changes
nothing, truly.”
“This changes everything.” Dany rose abruptly. Screeching, her
dragons uncoiled and spread their wings. Drogon apped and
clawed up to the lintel over the archway. The others skittered
across the oor, wingtips scrabbling on the marble. “Before, the
Seven Kingdoms were like my Drogo’s khalasar, a hundred thousand

made as one by his strength. Now they y to pieces, even as the
khalasar did after my khal lay dead.”
“The high lords have always fought. Tell me who’s won and I’ll
tell you what it means. Khaleesi, the Seven Kingdoms are not going
to fall into your hands like so many ripe peaches. You will need a
eet, gold, armies, alliances—”
“All this I know.” She took his hands in hers and looked up into
his dark suspicious eyes. Sometimes he thinks of me as a child he must
protect, and sometimes as a woman he would like to bed, but does he
ever truly see me as his queen? “I am not the frightened girl you met
in Pentos. I have counted only fteen name days, true … but I am
as old as the crones in the dosh khaleen and as young as my dragons,
Jorah. I have borne a child, burned a khal, and crossed the red
waste and the Dothraki sea. Mine is the blood of the dragon.”
“As was your brother’s,” he said stubbornly.
“I am not Viserys.”
“No,” he admitted. “There is more of Rhaegar in you, I think, but
even Rhaegar could be slain. Robert proved that on the Trident,
with no more than a warhammer. Even dragons can die.”
“Dragons die.” She stood on her toes to kiss him lightly on an
unshaven cheek. “But so do dragonslayers.”

BRAN

Meera moved in a wary circle, her net dangling loose in her left

hand, the slender three-pronged frog spear poised in her right.
Summer followed her with his golden eyes, turning, his tail held
sti and tall. Watching, watching …
“Yai!” the girl shouted, the spear darting out. The wolf slid to the
left and leapt before she could draw back the spear. Meera cast her
net, the tangles unfolding in the air before her. Summer’s leap
carried him into it. He dragged it with him as he slammed into her
chest and knocked her over backward. Her spear went spinning
away. The damp grass cushioned her fall but the breath went out of
her in an “Oof.” The wolf crouched atop her.
Bran hooted. “You lose.”
“She wins,” her brother Jojen said. “Summer’s snared.”
He was right, Bran saw. Thrashing and growling at the net, trying
to rip free, Summer was only ensnaring himself worse. Nor could he
bite through. “Let him out.”
Laughing, the Reed girl threw her arms around the tangled wolf
and rolled them both. Summer gave a piteous whine, his legs
kicking against the cords that bound them. Meera knelt, undid a
twist, pulled at a corner, tugged deftly here and there, and suddenly
the direwolf was bounding free.
“Summer, to me.” Bran spread his arms. “Watch,” he said, an
instant before the wolf bowled into him. He clung with all his
strength as the wolf dragged him bumping through the grass. They

wrestled and rolled and clung to each other, one snarling and
yapping, the other laughing. In the end it was Bran sprawled on top,
the mud-spattered direwolf under him. “Good wolf,” he panted.
Summer licked him across the ear.
Meera shook her head. “Does he never grow angry?”
“Not with me.” Bran grabbed the wolf by his ears and Summer
snapped at him ercely, but it was all in play. “Sometimes he tears
my garb but he’s never drawn blood.”
“Your blood, you mean. If he’d gotten past my net …”
“He wouldn’t hurt you. He knows I like you.” All of the other
lords and knights had departed within a day or two of the harvest
feast, but the Reeds had stayed to become Bran’s constant
companions. Jojen was so solemn that Old Nan called him “little
grandfather,” but Meera reminded Bran of his sister Arya. She
wasn’t scared to get dirty, and she could run and ght and throw as
good as a boy. She was older than Arya, though; almost sixteen, a
woman grown. They were both older than Bran, even though his
ninth name day had nally come and gone, but they never treated
him like a child.
“I wish you were our wards instead of the Walders.” He began to
struggle toward the nearest tree. His dragging and wriggling was
unseemly to watch, but when Meera moved to lift him he said, “No,
don’t help me.” He rolled clumsily and pushed and squirmed
backward, using the strength of his arms, until he was sitting with
his back to the trunk of a tall ash. “See, I told you.” Summer lay
down with his head in Bran’s lap. “I never knew anyone who fought
with a net before,” he told Meera while he scratched the direwolf
between the ears. “Did your master-at-arms teach you net- ghting?”
“My father taught me. We have no knights at Greywater. No
master-at-arms, and no maester.”
“Who keeps your ravens?”
She smiled. “Ravens can’t nd Greywater Watch, no more than
our enemies can.”
“Why not?”
“Because it moves,” she told him.

Bran had never heard of a moving castle before. He looked at her
uncertainly, but he couldn’t tell whether she was teasing him or not.
“I wish I could see it. Do you think your lord father would let me
come visit when the war is over?”
“You would be most welcome, my prince. Then or now.”
“Now?” Bran had spent his whole life at Winterfell. He yearned to
see far places. “I could ask Ser Rodrik when he returns.” The old
knight was o east, trying to set to rights the trouble there. Roose
Bolton’s bastard had started it by seizing Lady Hornwood as she
returned from the harvest feast, marrying her that very night even
though he was young enough to be her son. Then Lord Manderly
had taken her castle. To protect the Hornwood holdings from the
Boltons, he had written, but Ser Rodrik had been almost as angry
with him as with the bastard. “Ser Rodrik might let me go. Maester
Luwin never would.”
Sitting cross-legged under the weirwood, Jojen Reed regarded
him solemnly. “It would be good if you left Winterfell, Bran.”
“It would?”
“Yes. And sooner rather than later.”
“My brother has the greensight,” said Meera. “He dreams things
that haven’t happened, but sometimes they do.”
“There is no sometimes, Meera.” A look passed between them; him
sad, her de ant.
“Tell me what’s going to happen,” Bran said.
“I will,” said Jojen, “if you’ll tell me about your dreams.”
The godswood grew quiet. Bran could hear leaves rustling, and
Hodor’s distant splashing from the hot pools. He thought of the
golden man and the three-eyed crow, remembered the crunch of
bones between his jaws and the coppery taste of blood. “I don’t
have dreams. Maester Luwin gives me sleeping draughts.”
“Do they help?”
“Sometimes.”
Meera said, “All of Winterfell knows you wake at night shouting
and sweating, Bran. The women talk of it at the well, and the
guards in their hall.”
“Tell us what frightens you so much,” said Jojen.

“I don’t want to. Anyway, it’s only dreams. Maester Luwin says
dreams might mean anything or nothing.”
“My brother dreams as other boys do, and those dreams might
mean anything,” Meera said, “but the green dreams are di erent.”
Jojen’s eyes were the color of moss, and sometimes when he
looked at you he seemed to be seeing something else. Like now. “I
dreamed of a winged wolf bound to earth with grey stone chains,”
he said. “It was a green dream, so I knew it was true. A crow was
trying to peck through the chains, but the stone was too hard and
his beak could only chip at them.”
“Did the crow have three eyes?”
Jojen nodded.
Summer raised his head from Bran’s lap, and gazed at the
mudman with his dark golden eyes.
“When I was little I almost died of greywater fever. That was
when the crow came to me.”
“He came to me after I fell,” Bran blurted. “I was asleep for a
long time. He said I had to y or die, and I woke up, only I was
broken and I couldn’t y after all.”
“You can if you want to.” Picking up her net, Meera shook out
the last tangles and began arranging it in loose folds.
“You are the winged wolf, Bran,” said Jojen. “I wasn’t sure when
we rst came, but now I am. The crow sent us here to break your
chains.”
“Is the crow at Greywater?”
“No. The crow is in the north.”
“At the Wall?” Bran had always wanted to see the Wall. His
bastard brother Jon was there now, a man of the Night’s Watch.
“Beyond the Wall.” Meera Reed hung the net from her belt.
“When Jojen told our lord father what he’d dreamed, he sent us to
Winterfell.”
“How would I break the chains, Jojen?” Bran asked.
“Open your eye.”
“They are open. Can’t you see?”
“Two are open.” Jojen pointed. “One, two.”
“I only have two.”

“You have three. The crow gave you the third, but you will not
open it.” He had a slow soft way of speaking. “With two eyes you
see my face. With three you could see my heart. With two you can
see that oak tree there. With three you could see the acorn the oak
grew from and the stump that it will one day become. With two you
see no farther than your walls. With three you would gaze south to
the Summer Sea and north beyond the Wall.”
Summer got to his feet. “I don’t need to see so far.” Bran made a
nervous smile. “I’m tired of talking about crows. Let’s talk about
wolves. Or lizard-lions. Have you ever hunted one, Meera? We
don’t have them here.”
Meera plucked her frog spear out of the bushes. “They live in the
water. In slow streams and deep swamps—”
Her brother interrupted. “Did you dream of a lizard-lion?”
“No,” said Bran. “I told you, I don’t want—”
“Did you dream of a wolf?”
He was making Bran angry. “I don’t have to tell you my dreams.
I’m the prince. I’m the Stark in Winterfell.”
“Was it Summer?”
“You be quiet.”
“The night of the harvest feast, you dreamed you were Summer in
the godswood, didn’t you?”
“Stop it!” Bran shouted. Summer slid toward the weirwood, his
white teeth bared.
Jojen Reed took no mind. “When I touched Summer, I felt you in
him. Just as you are in him now.”
“You couldn’t have. I was in bed. I was sleeping.”
“You were in the godswood, all in grey.”
“It was only a bad dream …”
Jojen stood. “I felt you. I felt you fall. Is that what scares you, the
falling?”
The falling, Bran thought, and the golden man, the queen’s brother,
he scares me too, but mostly the falling. He did not say it, though.
How could he? He had not been able to tell Ser Rodrik or Maester
Luwin, and he could not tell the Reeds either. If he didn’t talk about

it, maybe he would forget. He had never wanted to remember. It
might not even be a true remembering.
“Do you fall every night, Bran?” Jojen asked quietly.
A low rumbling growl rose from Summer’s throat, and there was
no play in it. He stalked forward, all teeth and hot eyes. Meera
stepped between the wolf and her brother, spear in hand. “Keep him
back, Bran.”
“Jojen is making him angry.”
Meera shook out her net.
“It’s your anger, Bran,” her brother said. “Your fear.”
“It isn’t. I’m not a wolf.” Yet he’d howled with them in the night,
and tasted blood in his wolf dreams.
“Part of you is Summer, and part of Summer is you. You know
that, Bran.”
Summer rushed forward, but Meera blocked him, jabbing with
the three-pronged spear. The wolf twisted aside, circling, stalking.
Meera turned to face him. “Call him back, Bran.”
“Summer!” Bran shouted. “To me, Summer!” He slapped an open
palm down on the meat of his thigh. His hand tingled, though his
dead leg felt nothing.
The direwolf lunged again, and again Meera’s spear darted out.
Summer dodged, circled back. The bushes rustled, and a lean black
shape came padding from behind the weirwood, teeth bared. The
scent was strong; his brother had smelled his rage. Bran felt hairs
rise on the back of his neck. Meera stood beside her brother, with
wolves to either side. “Bran, call them o .”
“I can’t!”
“Jojen, up the tree.”
“There’s no need. Today is not the day I die.”
“Do it!” she screamed, and her brother scrambled up the trunk of
the weirwood, using the face for his handholds. The direwolves
closed. Meera abandoned spear and net, jumped up, and grabbed
the branch above her head. Shaggy’s jaws snapped shut beneath her
ankle as she swung up and over the limb. Summer sat back on his
haunches and howled, while Shaggydog worried the net, shaking it
in his teeth.

Only then did Bran remember that they were not alone. He
cupped hands around his mouth. “Hodor!” he shouted. “Hodor!
Hodor!” He was badly frightened and somehow ashamed. “They
won’t hurt Hodor,” he assured his treed friends.
A few moments passed before they heard a tuneless humming.
Hodor arrived half-dressed and mud-spattered from his visit to the
hot pools, but Bran had never been so glad to see him. “Hodor, help
me. Chase o the wolves. Chase them o .”
Hodor went to it gleefully, waving his arms and stamping his
huge feet, shouting “Hodor, Hodor,” running rst at one wolf and
then the other. Shaggydog was the rst to ee, slinking back into
the foliage with a nal snarl. When Summer had enough, he came
back to Bran and lay down beside him.
No sooner did Meera touch ground than she snatched up her spear
and net again. Jojen never took his eyes o Summer. “We will talk
again,” he promised Bran.
It was the wolves, it wasn’t me. He did not understand why they’d
gotten so wild. Maybe Maester Luwin was right to lock them in the
godswood. “Hodor,” he said, “bring me to Maester Luwin.”
The maester’s turret below the rookery was one of Bran’s favorite
places. Luwin was hopelessly untidy, but his clutter of books and
scrolls and bottles was as familiar and comforting to Bran as his
bald spot and the apping sleeves of his loose grey robes. He liked
the ravens too.
He found Luwin perched on a high stool, writing. With Ser Rodrik
gone, all of the governance of the castle had fallen on his shoulders.
“My prince,” he said when Hodor entered, “you’re early for lessons
today.” The maester spent several hours every afternoon tutoring
Bran, Rickon, and the Walder Freys.
“Hodor, stand still.” Bran grasped a wall sconce with both hands
and used it to pull himself up and out of the basket. He hung for a
moment by his arms until Hodor carried him to a chair. “Meera says
her brother has the greensight.”
Maester Luwin scratched at the side of his nose with his writing
quill. “Does she now?”

He nodded. “You told me that the children of the forest had the
greensight. I remember.”
“Some claimed to have that power. Their wise men were called
greenseers.”
“Was it magic?”
“Call it that for want of a better word, if you must. At heart it
was only a di erent sort of knowledge.”
“What was it?”
Luwin set down his quill. “No one truly knows, Bran. The children
are gone from the world, and their wisdom with them. It had to do
with the faces in the trees, we think. The First Men believed that
the greenseers could see through the eyes of the weirwoods. That
was why they cut down the trees whenever they warred upon the
children. Supposedly the greenseers also had power over the beasts
of the wood and the birds in the trees. Even sh. Does the Reed boy
claim such powers?”
“No. I don’t think. But he has dreams that come true sometimes,
Meera says.”
“All of us have dreams that come true sometimes. You dreamed
of your lord father in the crypts before we knew he was dead,
remember?”
“Rickon did too. We dreamed the same dream.”
“Call it greensight, if you wish … but remember as well all those
tens of thousands of dreams that you and Rickon have dreamed that
did not come true. Do you perchance recall what I taught you about
the chain collar that every maester wears?”
Bran thought for a moment, trying to remember. “A maester
forges his chain in the Citadel of Oldtown. It’s a chain because you
swear to serve, and it’s made of di erent metals because you serve
the realm and the realm has di erent sorts of people. Every time
you learn something you get another link. Black iron is for ravenry,
silver for healing, gold for sums and numbers. I don’t remember
them all.”
Luwin slid a nger up under his collar and began to turn it, inch
by inch. He had a thick neck for a small man, and the chain was
tight, but a few pulls had it all the way around. “This is Valyrian

steel,” he said when the link of dark grey metal lay against the
apple of his throat. “Only one maester in a hundred wears such a
link. This signi es that I have studied what the Citadel calls the
higher mysteries—magic, for want of a better word. A fascinating
pursuit, but of small use, which is why so few maesters trouble
themselves with it.
“All those who study the higher mysteries try their own hand at
spells, soon or late. I yielded to the temptation too, I must confess
it. Well, I was a boy, and what boy does not secretly wish to nd
hidden powers in himself? I got no more for my e orts than a
thousand boys before me, and a thousand since. Sad to say, magic
does not work.”
“Sometimes it does,” Bran protested. “I had that dream, and
Rickon did too. And there are mages and warlocks in the east …”
“There are men who call themselves mages and warlocks,”
Maester Luwin said. “I had a friend at the Citadel who could pull a
rose out of your ear, but he was no more magical than I was. Oh, to
be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their
hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life
but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call
them eternal, and so they seem … but in the course of time,
mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from
the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we
think. Everything changes.
“Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no
longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that
lingers in the air after a great re has burned out, and even that is
fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons
are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest
forgotten with all their lore.
“No, my prince. Jojen Reed may have had a dream or two that he
believes came true, but he does not have the greensight. No living
man has that power.”
Bran said as much to Meera Reed when she came to him at dusk
as he sat in his window seat watching the lights icker to life. “I’m
sorry for what happened with the wolves. Summer shouldn’t have

tried to hurt Jojen, but Jojen shouldn’t have said all that about my
dreams. The crow lied when he said I could y, and your brother
lied too.”
“Or perhaps your maester is wrong.”
“He isn’t. Even my father relied on his counsel.”
“Your father listened, I have no doubt. But in the end, he decided
for himself. Bran, will you let me tell you about a dream Jojen
dreamed of you and your fosterling brothers?”
“The Walders aren’t my brothers.”
She paid that no heed. “You were sitting at supper, but instead of
a servant, Maester Luwin brought you your food. He served you the
king’s cut o the roast, the meat rare and bloody, but with a savory
smell that made everyone’s mouth water. The meat he served the
Freys was old and grey and dead. Yet they liked their supper better
than you liked yours.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will, my brother says. When you do, we’ll talk again.”
Bran was almost afraid to sit to supper that night, but when he
did, it was pigeon pie they set before him. Everyone else was
served the same, and he couldn’t see that anything was wrong with
the food they served the Walders. Maester Luwin has the truth of it,
he told himself. Nothing bad was coming to Winterfell, no matter
what Jojen said. Bran was relieved … but disappointed too. So long
as there was magic, anything could happen. Ghosts could walk,
trees could talk, and broken boys could grow up to be knights. “But
there isn’t,” he said aloud in the darkness of his bed. “There’s no
magic, and the stories are just stories.”
And he would never walk, nor y, nor be a knight.

TYRION

The rushes were scratchy under the soles of his bare feet. “My

cousin chooses a queer hour to come visiting,” Tyrion told a sleepbefuddled Podrick Payne, who’d doubtless expected to be well
roasted for waking him. “See him to my solar and tell him I’ll be
down shortly.”
It was well past midnight, he judged from the black outside the
window. Does Lancel think to nd me drowsy and slow of wit at this
hour? he wondered. No, Lancel scarce thinks at all, this is Cersei’s
doing. His sister would be disappointed. Even abed, he worked well
into the morning—reading by the ickering light of a candle,
scrutinizing the reports of Varys’s whisperers, and poring over
Little nger’s books of accounts until the columns blurred and his
eyes ached.
He splashed some tepid water on his face from the basin beside
his bed and took his time squatting in the garderobe, the night air
cold on his bare skin. Ser Lancel was sixteen, and not known for his
patience. Let him wait, and grow more anxious in the waiting.
When his bowels were empty, Tyrion slipped on a bedrobe and
roughed his thin axen hair with his ngers, all the more to look as
if he had wakened from sleep.
Lancel was pacing before the ashes of the hearth, garbed in
slashed red velvet with black silk undersleeves, a jeweled dagger
and a gilded scabbard hanging from his swordbelt. “Cousin,” Tyrion

greeted him. “Your visits are too few. To what do I owe this
undeserved pleasure?”
“Her Grace the Queen Regent has sent me to command you to
release Grand Maester Pycelle.” Ser Lancel showed Tyrion a
crimson ribbon, bearing Cersei’s lion seal impressed in golden wax.
“Here is her warrant.”
“So it is.” Tyrion waved it away. “I hope my sister is not
overtaxing her strength, so soon after her illness. It would be a
great pity if she were to su er a relapse.”
“Her Grace is quite recovered,” Ser Lancel said curtly.
“Music to my ears.” Though not a tune I’m fond of. I should have
given her a larger dose. Tyrion had hoped for a few more days
without Cersei’s interference, but he was not too terribly surprised
by her return to health. She was Jaime’s twin, after all. He made
himself smile pleasantly. “Pod, build us a re, the air is too chilly
for my taste. Will you take a cup with me, Lancel? I nd that
mulled wine helps me sleep.”
“I need no help sleeping,” Ser Lancel said. “I am come at Her
Grace’s behest, not to drink with you, Imp.”
Knighthood had made the boy bolder, Tyrion re ected—that, and
the sorry part he had played in murdering King Robert. “Wine does
have its dangers.” He smiled as he poured. “As to Grand Maester
Pycelle … if my sweet sister is so concerned for him, I would have
thought she’d come herself. Instead she sends you. What am I to
make of that?”
“Make of it what you will, so long as you release your prisoner.
The Grand Maester is a staunch friend to the Queen Regent, and
under her personal protection.” A hint of a sneer played about the
lad’s lips; he was enjoying this. He takes his lessons from Cersei. “Her
Grace will never consent to this outrage. She reminds you that she is
Jo rey’s regent.”
“As I am Jo rey’s Hand.”
“The Hand serves,” the young knight informed him airily. “The
regent rules until the king is of age.”
“Perhaps you ought write that down so I’ll remember it better.”
The re was crackling merrily. “You may leave us, Pod,” Tyrion

told his squire. Only when the boy was gone did he turn back to
Lancel. “There is more?”
“Yes. Her Grace bids me inform you that Ser Jacelyn Bywater
de ed a command issued in the king’s own name.”
Which means that Cersei has already ordered Bywater to release
Pycelle, and been rebu ed. “I see.”
“She insists that the man be removed from his o ce and placed
under arrest for treason. I warn you—”
He set aside his wine cup. “I’ll hear no warnings from you, boy.”
“Ser,” Lancel said sti y. He touched his sword, perhaps to remind
Tyrion that he wore one. “Have a care how you speak to me, Imp.”
Doubtless he meant to sound threatening, but that absurd wisp of a
mustache ruined the e ect.
“Oh, unhand your sword. One cry from me and Shagga will burst
in and kill you. With an axe, not a wineskin.”
Lancel reddened; was he such a fool as to believe his part in
Robert’s death had gone unnoted? “I am a knight—”
“So I’ve noted. Tell me—did Cersei have you knighted before or
after she took you into her bed?”
The icker in Lancel’s green eyes was all the admission Tyrion
needed. So Varys told it true. Well, no one can ever claim that my
sister does not love her family. “What, nothing to say? No more
warnings for me, ser?”
“You will withdraw these lthy accusations or—”
“Please. Have you given any thought to what Jo rey will do
when I tell him you murdered his father to bed his mother?”
“It was not like that!” Lancel protested, horri ed.
“No? What was it like, pray?”
“The queen gave me the strongwine! Your own father Lord
Tywin, when I was named the king’s squire, he told me to obey her
in everything.”
“Did he tell you to fuck her too?” Look at him. Not quite so tall, his
features not so ne, and his hair is sand instead of spun gold, yet
still … even a poor copy of Jaime is sweeter than an empty bed, I
suppose. “No, I thought not.”
“I never meant … I only did as I was bid, I …”

“… hated every instant of it, is that what you would have me
believe? A high place at court, knighthood, my sister’s legs opening
for you at night, oh, yes, it must have been terrible for you.” Tyrion
pushed himself to his feet. “Wait here. His Grace will want to hear
this.”
The de ance went from Lancel all at once. The young knight fell
to his knees a frightened boy. “Mercy, my lord, I beg you.”
“Save it for Jo rey. He likes a good beg.”
“My lord, it was your sister’s bidding, the queen, as you said, but
His Grace … he’d never understand …”
“Would you have me keep the truth from the king?”
“For my father’s sake! I’ll leave the city, it will be as if it never
happened! I swear, I will end it …”
It was hard not to laugh. “I think not.”
Now the lad looked lost. “My lord?”
“You heard me. My father told you to obey my sister? Very well,
obey her. Stay close to her side, keep her trust, pleasure her as
often as she requires it. No one need ever know … so long as you
keep faith with me. I want to know what Cersei is doing. Where she
goes, who she sees, what they talk of, what plans she is hatching.
All. And you will be the one to tell me, won’t you?”
“Yes, my lord.” Lancel spoke without a moment’s hesitation.
Tyrion liked that. “I will. I swear it. As you command.”
“Rise.” Tyrion lled the second cup and pressed it on him. “Drink
to our understanding. I promise, there are no boars in the castle that
I know of.” Lancel lifted the cup and drank, albeit sti y. “Smile,
cousin. My sister is a beautiful woman, and it’s all for the good of
the realm. You could do well out of this. Knighthood is nothing. If
you’re clever, you’ll have a lordship from me before you’re done.”
Tyrion swirled the wine in his cup. “We want Cersei to have every
faith in you. Go back and tell her I beg her forgiveness. Tell her that
you frightened me, that I want no con ict between us, that
henceforth I shall do nothing without her consent.”
“But … her demands …”
“Oh, I’ll give her Pycelle.”
“You will?” Lancel seemed astonished.

Tyrion smiled. “I’ll release him on the morrow. I could swear that
I hadn’t harmed a hair on his head, but it wouldn’t be strictly true.
In any case, he’s well enough, though I won’t vouch for his vigor.
The black cells are not a healthy place for a man his age. Cersei can
keep him as a pet or send him to the Wall, I don’t care which, but I
won’t have him on the council.”
“And Ser Jacelyn?”
“Tell my sister you believe you can win him away from me, given
time. That ought to content her for a while.”
“As you say.” Lancel nished his wine.
“One last thing. With King Robert dead, it would be most
embarrassing should his grieving widow suddenly grow great with
child.”
“My lord, I … we … the queen has commanded me not to …” His
ears had turned Lannister crimson. “I spill my seed on her belly, my
lord.”
“A lovely belly, I have no doubt. Moisten it as often as you
wish … but see that your dew falls nowhere else. I want no more
nephews, is that clear?”
Ser Lancel made a sti bow and took his leave.
Tyrion allowed himself a moment to feel sorry for the boy.
Another fool, and a weakling as well, but he does not deserve what
Cersei and I are doing to him. It was a kindness that his uncle Kevan
had two other sons; this one was unlikely to live out the year.
Cersei would have him killed out of hand if she learned he was
betraying her, and if by some grace of the gods she did not, Lancel
would never survive the day Jaime Lannister returned to King’s
Landing. The only question would be whether Jaime cut him down
in a jealous rage, or Cersei murdered him rst to keep Jaime from
nding out. Tyrion’s silver was on Cersei.
A restlessness was on him, and Tyrion knew full well he would
not get back to sleep tonight. Not here, in any case. He found
Podrick Payne asleep in a chair outside the door of the solar, and
shook him by the shoulder. “Summon Bronn, and then run down to
the stables and have two horses saddled.”
The squire’s eyes were cloudy with sleep. “Horses.”

“Those big brown animals that love apples, I’m sure you’ve seen
them. Four legs and a tail. But Bronn rst.”
The sellsword was not long in appearing. “Who pissed in your
soup?” he demanded.
“Cersei, as ever. You’d think I’d be used to the taste by now, but
never mind. My gentle sister seems to have mistaken me for Ned
Stark.”
“I hear he was taller.”
“Not after Jo took o his head. You ought to have dressed more
warmly, the night is chill.”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“Are all sellswords as clever as you?”
The city streets were dangerous, but with Bronn beside him
Tyrion felt safe enough. The guards let him out a postern gate in the
north wall, and they rode down Shadowblack Lane to the foot of
Aegon’s High Hill, and thence onto Pigrun Alley, past rows of
shuttered windows and tall timber-and-stone buildings whose upper
stories leaned out so far over the street they almost kissed. The
moon seemed to follow them as they went, playing peek-and-sneak
among the chimneys. They encountered no one but a lone old crone,
carrying a dead cat by the tail. She gave them a fearful look, as if
she were afraid they might try to steal her dinner, and slunk o into
the shadows without a word.
Tyrion re ected on the men who had been Hand before him, who
had proved no match for his sister’s wiles. How could they be? Men
like that … too honest to live, too noble to shit, Cersei devours such fools
every morning when she breaks her fast. The only way to defeat my sister
is to play her own game, and that was something the Lords Stark and
Arryn would never do. Small wonder that both of them were dead,
while Tyrion Lannister had never felt more alive. His stunted legs
might make him a comic grotesque at a harvest ball, but this dance
he knew.
Despite the hour, the brothel was crowded. Chataya greeted them
pleasantly and escorted them to the common room. Bronn went
upstairs with a dark-eyed girl from Dorne, but Alayaya was busy
entertaining. “She will be so pleased to know you’ve come,” said

Chataya. “I will see that the turret room is made ready for you. Will
my lord take a cup of wine while he waits?”
“I will,” he said.
The wine was poor stu compared to the vintages from the Arbor
the house normally served. “You must forgive us, my lord,” Chataya
said. “I cannot nd good wine at any price of late.”
“You are not alone in that, I fear.”
Chataya commiserated with him a moment, then excused herself
and glided o . A handsome woman, Tyrion re ected as he watched
her go. He had seldom seen such elegance and dignity in a whore.
Though to be sure, she saw herself more as a kind of priestess.
Perhaps that is the secret. It is not what we do, so much as why we do it.
Somehow that thought comforted him.
A few of the other patrons were giving him sideways looks. The
last time he ventured out, a man had spit on him … well, had tried
to. Instead he’d spit on Bronn, and in future would do his spitting
without teeth.
“Is milord feeling unloved?” Dancy slid into his lap and nibbled at
his ear. “I have a cure for that.”
Smiling, Tyrion shook his head. “You are too beautiful for words,
sweetling, but I’ve grown fond of Alayaya’s remedy.”
“You’ve never tried mine. Milord never chooses anyone but ’Yaya.
She’s good but I’m better, don’t you want to see?”
“Next time, perhaps.” Tyrion had no doubt that Dancy would be a
lively handful. She was pug-nosed and bouncy, with freckles and a
mane of thick red hair that tumbled down past her waist. But he had
Shae waiting for him at the manse.
Giggling, she put her hand between his thighs and squeezed him
through his breeches. “I don’t think he wants to wait till next time,”
she announced. “He wants to come out and count all my freckles, I
think.”
“Dancy.” Alayaya stood in the doorway, dark and cool in gauzy
green silk. “His lordship is come to visit me.”
Tyrion gently disentangled himself from the other girl and stood.
Dancy did not seem to mind. “Next time,” she reminded him. She
put a nger in her mouth and sucked it.

As the black-skinned girl led him up the stairs, she said, “Poor
Dancy. She has a fortnight to get my lord to choose her. Elsewise
she loses her black pearls to Marei.”
Marei was a cool, pale, delicate girl Tyrion had noticed once or
twice. Green eyes and porcelain skin, long straight silvery hair, very
lovely, but too solemn by half. “I’d hate to have the poor child lose
her pearls on account of me.”
“Then take her upstairs next time.”
“Maybe I will.”
She smiled. “I think not, my lord.”
She’s right, Tyrion thought, I won’t. Shae may be only a whore, but I
am faithful to her after my fashion.
In the turret room, as he opened the door of the wardrobe, he
looked at Alayaya curiously. “What do you do while I’m gone?”
She raised her arms and stretched like some sleek black cat.
“Sleep. I am much better rested since you began to visit us, my lord.
And Marei is teaching us to read, perhaps soon I will be able to pass
the time with a book.”
“Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.” He gave her a
quick kiss on the cheek. Then it was down the shaft and through the
tunnel.
As he left the stable on his piebald gelding, Tyrion heard the
sound of music drifting over the rooftops. It was pleasant to think
that men still sang, even in the midst of butchery and famine.
Remembered notes lled his head, and for a moment he could
almost hear Tysha as she’d sung to him half a lifetime ago. He
reined up to listen. The tune was wrong, the words too faint to
hear. A di erent song then, and why not? His sweet innocent Tysha
had been a lie start to nish, only a whore his brother Jaime had
hired to make him a man.
I’m free of Tysha now, he thought. She’s haunted me half my life, but
I don’t need her anymore, no more than I need Alayaya or Dancy or
Marei, or the hundreds like them I’ve bedded with over the years. I have
Shae now. Shae.
The gates of the manse were closed and barred. Tyrion pounded
until the ornate bronze eye clacked open. “It’s me.” The man who

admitted him was one of Varys’s prettier nds, a Braavosi
daggerman with a harelip and a lazy eye. Tyrion had wanted no
handsome young guardsmen loitering about Shae day after day.
“Find me old, ugly, scarred men, preferably impotent,” he had told
the eunuch. “Men who prefer boys. Or men who prefer sheep, for
that matter.” Varys had not managed to come up with any
sheeplovers, but he did nd a eunuch strangler and a pair of foulsmelling Ibbenese who were as fond of axes as they were of each
other. The others were as choice a lot of mercenaries as ever graced
a dungeon, each uglier than the last. When Varys had paraded them
before him, Tyrion had been afraid he’d gone too far, but Shae had
never uttered a word of complaint. And why would she? She has
never complained of me, and I’m more hideous than all her guards
together. Perhaps she does not even see ugliness.
Even so, Tyrion would sooner have used some of his mountain
clansmen to guard the manse; Chella’s Black Ears perhaps, or the
Moon Brothers. He had more faith in their iron loyalties and sense
of honor than in the greed of sellswords. The risk was too great,
however. All King’s Landing knew the wildlings were his. If he sent
the Black Ears here, it would only be a matter of time until the
whole city knew the King’s Hand was keeping a concubine.
One of the Ibbenese took his horse. “Have you woken her?”
Tyrion asked him.
“No, m’lord.”
“Good.”
The re in the bedchamber had burned down to embers, but the
room was still warm. Shae had kicked o her blankets and sheets as
she slept. She lay nude atop the featherbed, the soft curves of her
young body limned in the faint glow from the hearth. Tyrion stood
in the door and drank in the sight of her. Younger than Marei, sweeter
than Dancy, more beautiful than Alayaya, she’s all I need and more.
How could a whore look so clean and sweet and innocent, he
wondered?
He had not intended to disturb her, but the sight of her was
enough to make him hard. He let his garments fall to the oor, then
crawled onto the bed and gently pushed her legs apart and kissed

her between the thighs. Shae murmured in her sleep. He kissed her
again, and licked at her secret sweetness, on and on until his beard
and her cunt were both soaked. When she gave a soft moan and
shuddered, he climbed up and thrust himself inside her and
exploded almost at once.
Her eyes were open. She smiled and stroked his head and
whispered, “I just had the sweetest dream, m’lord.”
Tyrion nipped at her small hard nipple and nestled his head on
her shoulder. He did not pull out of her; would that he never had to
pull out of her. “This is no dream,” he promised her. It is real, all of
it, he thought, the wars, the intrigues, the great bloody game, and me in
the center of it … me, the dwarf, the monster, the one they scorned and
laughed at, but now I hold it all, the power, the city, the girl. This was
what I was made for, and gods forgive me, but I do love it …
And her. And her.

ARYA

Whatever names Harren the Black had meant to give his towers

were long forgotten. They were called the Tower of Dread, the
Widow’s Tower, the Wailing Tower, the Tower of Ghosts, and
Kingspyre Tower. Arya slept in a shallow niche in the cavernous
vaults beneath the Wailing Tower, on a bed of straw. She had water
to wash in whenever she liked, a chunk of soap. The work was hard,
but no harder than walking miles every day. Weasel did not need to
nd worms and bugs to eat, as Arry had; there was bread every
day, and barley stews with bits of carrot and turnip, and once a
fortnight even a bite of meat.
Hot Pie ate even better; he was where he belonged, in the
kitchens, a round stone building with a domed roof that was a
world unto itself. Arya took her meals at a trestle table in the
undercroft with Weese and his other charges, but sometimes she
would be chosen to help fetch their food, and she and Hot Pie could
steal a moment to talk. He could never remember that she was now
Weasel and kept calling her Arry, even though he knew she was a
girl. Once he tried to slip her a hot apple tart, but he made such a
clumsy job of it that two of the cooks saw. They took the tart away
and beat him with a big wooden spoon.
Gendry had been sent to the forge; Arya seldom saw him. As for
those she served with, she did not even want to know their names.
That only made it hurt worse when they died. Most of them were
older than she was and content to let her alone.

Harrenhal was vast, much of it far gone in decay. Lady Whent
had held the castle as bannerman to House Tully, but she’d used
only the lower thirds of two of the ve towers, and let the rest go
to ruin. Now she was ed, and the small household she’d left could
not begin to tend the needs of all the knights, lords, and highborn
prisoners Lord Tywin had brought, so the Lannisters must forage for
servants as well as for plunder and provender. The talk was that
Lord Tywin planned to restore Harrenhal to glory, and make it his
new seat once the war was done.
Weese used Arya to run messages, draw water, and fetch food,
and sometimes to serve at table in the Barracks Hall above the
armory, where the men-at-arms took their meals. But most of her
work was cleaning. The ground oor of the Wailing Tower was
given over to storerooms and granaries, and two oors above
housed part of the garrison, but the upper stories had not been
occupied for eighty years. Now Lord Tywin had commanded that
they be made t for habitation again. There were oors to be
scrubbed, grime to be washed o windows, broken chairs and
rotted beds to be carried o . The topmost story was infested with
nests of the huge black bats that House Whent had used for its sigil,
and there were rats in the cellars as well … and ghosts, some said,
the spirits of Harren the Black and his sons.
Arya thought that was stupid. Harren and his sons had died in
Kingspyre Tower, that was why it had that name, so why should
they cross the yard to haunt her? The Wailing Tower only wailed
when the wind blew from the north, and that was just the sound the
air made blowing through the cracks in the stones where they had
ssured from the heat. If there were ghosts in Harrenhal, they never
troubled her. It was the living men she feared, Weese and Ser
Gregor Clegane and Lord Tywin Lannister himself, who kept his
apartments in Kingspyre Tower, still the tallest and mightiest of all,
though lopsided beneath the weight of the slagged stone that made
it look like some giant half-melted black candle.
She wondered what Lord Tywin would do if she marched up to
him and confessed to being Arya Stark, but she knew she’d never

get near enough to talk to him, and anyhow he’d never believe her
if she did, and afterward Weese would beat her bloody.
In his own small strutting way, Weese was nearly as scary as Ser
Gregor. The Mountain swatted men like ies, but most of the time
he did not even seem to know the y was there. Weese always knew
you were there, and what you were doing, and sometimes what you
were thinking. He would hit at the slightest provocation, and he had
a dog who was near as bad as he was, an ugly spotted bitch that
smelled worse than any dog Arya had ever known. Once she saw
him set the dog on a latrine boy who’d annoyed him. She tore a big
chunk out of the boy’s calf while Weese laughed.
It took him only three days to earn the place of honor in her
nightly prayers. “Weese,” she would whisper, rst of all. “Dunsen,
Chiswyck, Polliver, Ra the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound.
Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Jo rey, Queen
Cersei.” If she let herself forget even one of them, how would she
ever nd him again to kill him?
On the road Arya had felt like a sheep, but Harrenhal turned her
into a mouse. She was grey as a mouse in her scratchy wool shift,
and like a mouse she kept to the crannies and crevices and dark
holes of the castle, scurrying out of the way of the mighty.
Sometimes she thought they were all mice within those thick
walls, even the knights and the great lords. The size of the castle
made even Gregor Clegane seem small. Harrenhal covered thrice as
much ground as Winterfell, and its buildings were so much larger
they could scarcely be compared. Its stables housed a thousand
horses, its godswood covered twenty acres, its kitchens were as
large as Winterfell’s Great Hall, and its own great hall, grandly
named the Hall of a Hundred Hearths even though it only had thirty
and some (Arya had tried to count them, twice, but she came up
with thirty-three once and thirty- ve the other time) was so
cavernous that Lord Tywin could have feasted his entire host,
though he never did. Walls, doors, halls, steps, everything was built
to an inhuman scale that made Arya remember the stories Old Nan
used to tell of the giants who lived beyond the Wall.

And as lords and ladies never notice the little grey mice under
their feet, Arya heard all sorts of secrets just by keeping her ears
open as she went about her duties. Pretty Pia from the buttery was
a slut who was working her way through every knight in the castle.
The wife of the gaoler was with child, but the real father was either
Ser Alyn Stackspear or a singer called Whitesmile Wat. Lord Le ord
made mock of ghosts at table, but always kept a candle burning by
his bed. Ser Dunaver’s squire Jodge could not hold his water when
he slept. The cooks despised Ser Harys Swyft and spit in all his food.
Once she even overheard Maester Tothmure’s serving girl con ding
to her brother about some message that said Jo rey was a bastard
and not the rightful king at all. “Lord Tywin told him to burn the
letter and never speak such lth again,” the girl whispered.
King Robert’s brothers Stannis and Renly had joined the ghting,
she heard. “And both of them kings now,” Weese said. “Realm’s got
more kings than a castle’s got rats.” Even Lannister men questioned
how long Jo rey would hold the Iron Throne. “The lad’s got no
army but them gold cloaks, and he’s ruled by a eunuch, a dwarf,
and a woman,” she heard a lordling mutter in his cups. “What good
will the likes of them be if it comes to battle?” There was always
talk of Beric Dondarrion. A fat archer once said the Bloody
Mummers had slain him, but the others only laughed. “Lorch killed
the man at Rushing Falls, and the Mountain’s slain him twice. Got
me a silver stag says he don’t stay dead this time neither.”
Arya did not know who Bloody Mummers were until a fortnight
later, when the queerest company of men she’d ever seen arrived at
Harrenhal. Beneath the standard of a black goat with bloody horns
rode copper men with bells in their braids; lancers astride striped
black-and-white horses; bowmen with powdered cheeks; squat hairy
men with shaggy shields; brown-skinned men in feathered cloaks; a
wispy fool in green-and-pink motley; swordsmen with fantastic
forked beards dyed green and purple and silver; spearmen with
colored scars that covered their cheeks; a slender man in septon’s
robes, a fatherly one in maester’s grey, and a sickly one whose
leather cloak was fringed with long blond hair.

At their head was a man stick-thin and very tall, with a drawn
emaciated face made even longer by the ropy black beard that grew
from his pointed chin nearly to his waist. The helm that hung from
his saddle horn was black steel, fashioned in the shape of a goat’s
head. About his neck he wore a chain made of linked coins of many
di erent sizes, shapes, and metals, and his horse was one of the
strange black-and-white ones.
“You don’t want to know that lot, Weasel,” Weese said when he
saw her looking at the goat-helmed man. Two of his drinking
friends were with him, men-at-arms in service to Lord Le ord.
“Who are they?” she asked.
One of the soldiers laughed. “The Footmen, girl. Toes of the Goat.
Lord Tywin’s Bloody Mummers.”
“Pease for wits. You get her ayed, you can scrub the bloody
steps,” said Weese. “They’re sellswords, Weasel girl. Call
themselves the Brave Companions. Don’t use them other names
where they can hear, or they’ll hurt you bad. The goat-helm’s their
captain, Lord Vargo Hoat.”
“He’s no fucking lord,” said the second soldier. “I heard Ser
Amory say so. He’s just some sellsword with a mouth full of slobber
and a high opinion of hisself.”
“Aye,” said Weese, “but she better call him lord if she wants to
keep all her parts.”
Arya looked at Vargo Hoat again. How many monsters does Lord
Tywin have?
The Brave Companions were housed in the Widow’s Tower, so
Arya need not serve them. She was glad of that; on the very night
they arrived, ghting broke out between the sellswords and some
Lannister men. Ser Harys Swyft’s squire was stabbed to death and
two of the Bloody Mummers were wounded. The next morning Lord
Tywin hanged them both from the gatehouse walls, along with one
of Lord Lydden’s archers. Weese said the archer had started all the
trouble by taunting the sellswords over Beric Dondarrion. After the
hanged men had stopped kicking, Vargo Hoat and Ser Harys
embraced and kissed and swore to love each other always as Lord

Tywin looked on. Arya thought it was funny the way Vargo Hoat
lisped and slobbered, but she knew better than to laugh.
The Bloody Mummers did not linger long at Harrenhal, but before
they rode out again, Arya heard one of them saying how a northern
army under Roose Bolton had occupied the ruby ford of the Trident.
“If he crosses, Lord Tywin will smash him again like he did on the
Green Fork,” a Lannister bowmen said, but his fellows jeered him
down. “Bolton’ll never cross, not till the Young Wolf marches from
Riverrun with his wild northmen and all them wolves.”
Arya had not known her brother was so near. Riverrun was much
closer than Winterfell, though she was not certain where it lay in
relation to Harrenhal. I could nd out somehow, I know I could, if
only I could get away. When she thought of seeing Robb’s face again
Arya had to bite her lip. And I want to see Jon too, and Bran and
Rickon, and Mother. Even Sansa … I’ll kiss her and beg her pardons like
a proper lady, she’ll like that.
From the courtyard talk she’d learned that the upper chambers of
the Tower of Dread housed three dozen captives taken during some
battle on the Green Fork of the Trident. Most had been given
freedom of the castle in return for their pledge not to attempt
escape. They vowed not to escape, Arya told herself, but they never
swore not to help me escape.
The captives ate at their own table in the Hall of a Hundred
Hearths, and could often be seen about the grounds. Four brothers
took their exercise together every day, ghting with staves and
wooden shields in the Flowstone Yard. Three of them were Freys of
the Crossing, the fourth their bastard brother. They were only there
a short time, though; one morning two other brothers arrived under
a peace banner with a chest of gold, and ransomed them from the
knights who’d captured them. The six Freys all left together.
No one ransomed the northmen, though. One fat lordling haunted
the kitchens, Hot Pie told her, always looking for a morsel. His
mustache was so bushy that it covered his mouth, and the clasp that
held his cloak was a silver-and-sapphire trident. He belonged to
Lord Tywin, but the erce, bearded young man who liked to walk
the battlements alone in a black cloak patterned with white suns

had been taken by some hedge knight who meant to get rich o
him. Sansa would have known who he was, and the fat one too, but
Arya had never taken much interest in titles and sigils. Whenever
Septa Mordane had gone on about the history of this house and that
house, she was inclined to drift and dream and wonder when the
lesson would be done.
She did remember Lord Cerwyn, though. His lands had been close
to Winterfell, so he and his son Cley had often visited. Yet as fate
would have it, he was the only captive who was never seen; he was
abed in a tower cell, recovering from a wound. For days and days
Arya tried to work out how she might steal past the door guards to
see him. If he knew her, he would be honor bound to help her. A
lord would have gold for a certainty, they all did; perhaps he would
pay some of Lord Tywin’s own sellswords to take her to Riverrun.
Father had always said that most sellswords would betray anyone
for enough gold.
Then one morning she spied three women in the cowled grey
robes of the silent sisters loading a corpse into their wagon. The
body was sewn into a cloak of the nest silk, decorated with a
battle-axe sigil. When Arya asked who it was, one of the guards told
her that Lord Cerwyn had died. The words felt like a kick in the
belly. He could never have helped you anyway, she thought as the
sisters drove the wagon through the gate. He couldn’t even help
himself, you stupid mouse.
After that it was back to scrubbing and scurrying and listening at
doors. Lord Tywin would soon march on Riverrun, she heard. Or he
would drive south to Highgarden, no one would ever expect that.
No, he must defend King’s Landing, Stannis was the greatest threat.
He’d sent Gregor Clegane and Vargo Hoat to destroy Roose Bolton
and remove the dagger from his back. He’d sent ravens to the Eyrie,
he meant to wed the Lady Lysa Arryn and win the Vale. He’d
bought a ton of silver to forge magic swords that would slay the
Stark wargs. He was writing Lady Stark to make a peace, the
Kingslayer would soon be freed.
Though ravens came and went every day, Lord Tywin himself
spent most of his days behind closed doors with his war council.

Arya caught glimpses of him, but always from afar—once walking
the walls in the company of three maesters and the fat captive with
the bushy mustache, once riding out with his lords bannermen to
visit the encampments, but most often standing in an arch of the
covered gallery watching men at practice in the yard below. He
stood with his hands locked together on the gold pommel of his
longsword. They said Lord Tywin loved gold most of all; he even
shit gold, she heard one squire jest. The Lannister lord was stronglooking for an old man, with sti golden whiskers and a bald head.
There was something in his face that reminded Arya of her own
father, even though they looked nothing alike. He has a lord’s face,
that’s all, she told herself. She remembered hearing her lady mother
tell Father to put on his lord’s face and go deal with some matter.
Father had laughed at that. She could not imagine Lord Tywin ever
laughing at anything.
One afternoon, while she was waiting her turn to draw a pail of
water from the well, she heard the hinges of the east gate groaning.
A party of men rode under the portcullis at a walk. When she spied
the manticore crawling across the shield of their leader, a stab of
hate shot through her.
In the light of day, Ser Amory Lorch looked less frightening than
he had by torchlight, but he still had the pig’s eyes she recalled. One
of the women said that his men had ridden all the way around the
lake chasing Beric Dondarrion and slaying rebels. We weren’t rebels,
Arya thought. We were the Night’s Watch; the Night’s Watch takes no
side. Ser Amory had fewer men than she remembered, though, and
many wounded. I hope their wounds fester. I hope they all die.
Then she saw the three near the end of the column.
Rorge had donned a black halfhelm with a broad iron nasal that
made it hard to see that he did not have a nose. Biter rode
ponderously beside him on a destrier that looked ready to collapse
under his weight. Half-healed burns covered his body, making him
even more hideous than before.
But Jaqen H’ghar still smiled. His garb was still ragged and lthy,
but he had found time to wash and brush his hair. It streamed down

across his shoulders, red and white and shiny, and Arya heard the
girls giggling to each other in admiration.
I should have let the re have them. Gendry said to, I should have
listened. If she hadn’t thrown them that axe they’d all be dead. For a
moment she was afraid, but they rode past her without a icker of
interest. Only Jaqen H’ghar so much as glanced in her direction, and
his eyes passed right over her. He does not know me, she thought.
Arry was a erce little boy with a sword, and I’m just a grey mouse girl
with a pail.
She spent the rest of that day scrubbing steps inside the Wailing
Tower. By evenfall her hands were raw and bleeding and her arms
so sore they trembled when she lugged the pail back to the cellar.
Too tired even for food, Arya begged Weese’s pardons and crawled
into her straw to sleep. “Weese,” she yawned. “Dunsen, Chiswyck,
Polliver, Ra the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor,
Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Jo rey, Queen Cersei.” She
thought she might add three more names to her prayer, but she was
too tired to decide tonight.
Arya was dreaming of wolves running wild through the wood
when a strong hand clamped down over her mouth like smooth
warm stone, solid and unyielding. She woke at once, squirming and
struggling. “A girl says nothing,” a voice whispered close behind her
ear. “A girl keeps her lips closed, no one hears, and friends may talk
in secret. Yes?”
Heart pounding, Arya managed the tiniest of nods.
Jaqen H’ghar took his hand away. The cellar was black as pitch
and she could not see his face, even inches away. She could smell
him, though; his skin smelled clean and soapy, and he had scented
his hair. “A boy becomes a girl,” he murmured.
“I was always a girl. I didn’t think you saw me.”
“A man sees. A man knows.”
She remembered that she hated him. “You scared me. You’re one
of them now, I should have let you burn. What are you doing here?
Go away or I’ll yell for Weese.”
“A man pays his debts. A man owes three.”
“Three?”

“The Red God has his due, sweet girl, and only death may pay for
life. This girl took three that were his. This girl must give three in
their places. Speak the names, and a man will do the rest.”
He wants to help me, Arya realized with a rush of hope that made
her dizzy. “Take me to Riverrun, it’s not far, if we stole some horses
we could—”
He laid a nger on her lips. “Three lives you shall have of me. No
more, no less. Three and we are done. So a girl must ponder.” He
kissed her hair softly. “But not too long.”
By the time Arya lit her stub of a candle, only a faint smell
remained of him, a whi of ginger and cloves lingering in the air.
The woman in the next niche rolled over on her straw and
complained of the light, so Arya blew it out. When she closed her
eyes, she saw faces swimming before her. Jo rey and his mother,
Ilyn Payne and Meryn Trant and Sandor Clegane … but they were
in King’s Landing hundreds of miles away, and Ser Gregor had
lingered only a few nights before departing again for more
foraging, taking Ra and Chiswyck and the Tickler with him. Ser
Amory Lorch was here, though, and she hated him almost as much.
Didn’t she? She wasn’t certain. And there was always Weese.
She thought of him again the next morning, when lack of sleep
made her yawn. “Weasel,” Weese purred, “next time I see that
mouth droop open, I’ll pull out your tongue and feed it to my
bitch.” He twisted her ear between his ngers to make certain she’d
heard, and told her to get back to those steps, he wanted them clean
down to the third landing by nightfall.
As she worked, Arya thought about the people she wanted dead.
She pretended she could see their faces on the steps, and scrubbed
harder to wipe them away. The Starks were at war with the
Lannisters and she was a Stark, so she should kill as many
Lannisters as she could, that was what you did in wars. But she
didn’t think she should trust Jaqen. I should kill them myself.
Whenever her father had condemned a man to death, he did the
deed himself with Ice, his greatsword. “If you would take a man’s
life, you owe it to him to look him in the face and hear his last
words,” she’d heard him tell Robb and Jon once.

The next day she avoided Jaqen H’ghar, and the day after that. It
was not hard. She was very small and Harrenhal was very large, full
of places where a mouse could hide.
And then Ser Gregor returned, earlier than expected, driving a
herd of goats this time in place of a herd of prisoners. She heard
he’d lost four men in one of Lord Beric’s night raids, but those Arya
hated returned unscathed and took up residence on the second oor
of the Wailing Tower. Weese saw that they were well supplied with
drink. “They always have a good thirst, that lot,” he grumbled.
“Weasel, go up and ask if they’ve got any clothes that need
mending, I’ll have the women see to it.”
Arya ran up her well-scrubbed steps. No one paid her any mind
when she entered. Chiswyck was seated by the re with a horn of
ale to hand, telling one of his funny stories. She dared not interrupt,
unless she wanted a bloody lip.
“After the Hand’s tourney, it were, before the war come,”
Chiswyck was saying. “We were on our ways back west, seven of us
with Ser Gregor. Ra was with me, and young Joss Stilwood, he’d
squired for Ser in the lists. Well, we come on this pisswater river,
running high on account there’d been rains. No way to ford, but
there’s an alehouse near, so there we repair. Ser rousts the brewer
and tells him to keep our horns full till the waters fall, and you
should see the man’s pig eyes shine at the sight o’ silver. So he’s
fetching us ale, him and his daughter, and poor thin stu it is, no
more’n brown piss, which don’t make me any happier, nor Ser
neither. And all the time this brewer’s saying how glad he is to have
us, custom being slow on account o’ them rains. The fool won’t shut
his yap, not him, though Ser is saying not a word, just brooding on
the Knight o’ Pansies and that bugger’s trick he played. You can see
how tight his mouth sits, so me and the other lads we know better’n
to say a squeak to him, but this brewer he’s got to talk, he even
asks how m’lord fared in the jousting. Ser just gave him this look.”
Chiswyck cackled, qua ed his ale, and wiped the foam away with
the back of his hand. “Meanwhile, this daughter of his has been
fetching and pouring, a fat little thing, eighteen or so—”
“Thirteen, more like,” Ra the Sweetling drawled.

“Well, be that as it may, she’s not much to look at, but Eggon’s
been drinking and gets to touching her, and might be I did a little
touching meself, and Ra ’s telling young Stilwood that he ought t’
drag the girl upstairs and make hisself a man, giving the lad
courage as it were. Finally Joss reaches up under her skirt, and she
shrieks and drops her agon and goes running o to the kitchen.
Well, it would have ended right there, only what does the old fool
do but he goes to Ser and asks him to make us leave the girl alone,
him being an anointed knight and all such.
“Ser Gregor, he wasn’t paying no mind to none of our fun, but
now he looks, you know how he does, and he commands that the
girl be brought before him. Now the old man has to drag her out of
the kitchen, and no one to blame but hisself. Ser looks her over and
says, ‘So this is the whore you’re so concerned for,’ and this
besotted old fool says, ‘My Layna’s no whore, ser,’ right to Gregor’s
face. Ser, he never blinks, just says, ‘She is now,’ tosses the old man
another silver, rips the dress o the wench, and takes her right
there on the table in front of her da, her opping and wiggling like
a rabbit and making these noises. The look on the old man’s face, I
laughed so hard ale was coming out me nose. Then this boy hears
the noise, the son I gure, and comes rushing up from the cellar, so
Ra has to stick a dirk in his belly. By then Ser’s done, so he goes
back to his drinking and we all have a turn. Tobbot, you know how
he is, he ops her over and goes in the back way. The girl was done
ghting by the time I had her, maybe she’d decided she liked it
after all, though to tell the truth I wouldn’t have minded a little
wiggling. And now here’s the best bit … when it’s all done, Ser tells
the old man that he wants his change. The girl wasn’t worth a
silver, he says … and damned if that old man didn’t fetch a stful of
coppers, beg m’lord’s pardon, and thank him for the custom!”
The men all roared, none louder than Chiswyck himself, who
laughed so hard at his own story that snot dribbled from his nose
down into his scraggy grey beard. Arya stood in the shadows of the
stairwell and watched him. She crept back down to the cellars
without saying a word. When Weese found that she hadn’t asked
about the clothes, he yanked down her breeches and caned her until

blood ran down her thighs, but Arya closed her eyes and thought of
all the sayings Syrio had taught her, so she scarcely felt it.
Two nights later, he sent her to the Barracks Hall to serve at
table. She was carrying a agon of wine and pouring when she
glimpsed Jaqen H’ghar at his trencher across the aisle. Chewing her
lip, Arya glanced around warily to make certain Weese was not in
sight. Fear cuts deeper than swords, she told herself.
She took a step, and another, and with each she felt less a mouse.
She worked her way down the bench, lling wine cups. Rorge sat to
Jaqen’s right, deep drunk, but he took no note of her. Arya leaned
close and whispered, “Chiswyck,” right in Jaqen’s ear. The Lorathi
gave no sign that he had heard.
When her agon was empty, Arya hurried down to the cellars to
re ll it from the cask, and quickly returned to her pouring. No one
had died of thirst while she was gone, nor even noted her brief
absence.
Nothing happened the next day, nor the day after, but on the
third day Arya went to the kitchens with Weese to fetch their
dinner. “One of the Mountain’s men fell o a wallwalk last night
and broke his fool neck,” she heard Weese tell a cook.
“Drunk?” the woman asked.
“No more’n usual. Some are saying it was Harren’s ghost ung
him down.” He snorted to show what he thought of such notions.
It wasn’t Harren, Arya wanted to say, it was me. She had killed
Chiswyck with a whisper, and she would kill two more before she
was through. I’m the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought. And that night,
there was one less name to hate.

CATELYN

The meeting place was a grassy sward dotted with pale grey

mushrooms and the raw stumps of felled trees.
“We are the rst, my lady,” Hallis Mollen said as they reined up
amidst the stumps, alone between the armies. The direwolf banner
of House Stark apped and uttered atop the lance he bore. Catelyn
could not see the sea from here, but she could feel how close it was.
The smell of salt was heavy on the wind gusting from the east.
Stannis Baratheon’s foragers had cut the trees down for his siege
towers and catapults. Catelyn wondered how long the grove had
stood, and whether Ned had rested here when he led his host south
to lift the last siege of Storm’s End. He had won a great victory that
day, all the greater for being bloodless.
Gods grant that I shall do the same, Catelyn prayed. Her own liege
men thought she was mad even to come. “This is no ght of ours,
my lady,” Ser Wendel Manderly had said. “I know the king would
not wish his mother to put herself at risk.”
“We are all at risk,” she told him, perhaps too sharply. “Do you
think I wish to be here, ser?” I belong at Riverrun with my dying
father, at Winterfell with my sons. “Robb sent me south to speak for
him, and speak for him I shall.” It would be no easy thing to forge a
peace between these brothers, Catelyn knew, yet for the good of
the realm, it must be tried.
Across rain-sodden elds and stony ridges, she could see the great
castle of Storm’s End rearing up against the sky, its back to the

unseen sea. Beneath that mass of pale grey stone, the encircling
army of Lord Stannis Baratheon looked as small and insigni cant as
mice with banners.
The songs said that Storm’s End had been raised in ancient days
by Durran, the rst Storm King, who had won the love of the fair
Elenei, daughter of the sea god and the goddess of the wind. On the
night of their wedding, Elenei had yielded her maidenhood to a
mortal’s love and thus doomed herself to a mortal’s death, and her
grieving parents had unleashed their wrath and sent the winds and
waters to batter down Durran’s hold. His friends and brothers and
wedding guests were crushed beneath collapsing walls or blown out
to sea, but Elenei sheltered Durran within her arms so he took no
harm, and when the dawn came at last he declared war upon the
gods and vowed to rebuild.
Five more castles he built, each larger and stronger than the last,
only to see them smashed asunder when the gale winds came
howling up Shipbreaker Bay, driving great walls of water before
them. His lords pleaded with him to build inland; his priests told
him he must placate the gods by giving Elenei back to the sea; even
his smallfolk begged him to relent. Durran would have none of it. A
seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children
of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic;
others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy
who would grow to be Bran the Builder. No matter how the tale
was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm
after storm against it, the seventh castle stood de ant, and Durran
Godsgrief and fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their
days.
Gods do not forget, and still the gales came raging up the narrow
sea. Yet Storm’s End endured, through centuries and tens of
centuries, a castle like no other. Its great curtain wall was a
hundred feet high, unbroken by arrow slit or postern, everywhere
rounded, curving, smooth, its stones t so cunningly together that
nowhere was crevice nor angle nor gap by which the wind might
enter. That wall was said to be forty feet thick at its narrowest, and
near eighty on the seaward face, a double course of stones with an

inner core of sand and rubble. Within that mighty bulwark, the
kitchens and stables and yards sheltered safe from wind and wave.
Of towers, there was but one, a colossal drum tower, windowless
where it faced the sea, so large that it was granary and barracks and
feast hall and lord’s dwelling all in one, crowned by massive
battlements that made it look from afar like a spiked st atop an
upthrust arm.
“My lady,” Hal Mollen called. Two riders had emerged from the
tidy little camp beneath the castle, and were coming toward them at
a slow walk. “That will be King Stannis.”
“No doubt.” Catelyn watched them come. Stannis it must be, yet
that is not the Baratheon banner. It was a bright yellow, not the rich
gold of Renly’s standards, and the device it bore was red, though
she could not make out its shape.
Renly would be last to arrive. He had told her as much when she
set out. He did not propose to mount his horse until he saw his
brother well on his way. The rst to arrive must wait on the other,
and Renly would do no waiting. It is a sort of game kings play, she
told herself. Well, she was no king, so she need not play it. Catelyn
was practiced at waiting.
As he neared, she saw that Stannis wore a crown of red gold with
points fashioned in the shape of ames. His belt was studded with
garnets and yellow topaz, and a great square-cut ruby was set in the
hilt of the sword he wore. Otherwise his dress was plain: studded
leather jerkin over quilted doublet, worn boots, breeches of brown
roughspun. The device on his sun-yellow banner showed a red heart
surrounded by a blaze of orange re. The crowned stag was there,
yes … shrunken and enclosed within the heart. Even more curious
was his standard bearer—a woman, garbed all in reds, face
shadowed within the deep hood of her scarlet cloak. A red priestess,
Catelyn thought, wondering. The sect was numerous and powerful
in the Free Cities and the distant east, but there were few in the
Seven Kingdoms.
“Lady Stark,” Stannis Baratheon said with chill courtesy as he
reined up. He inclined his head, balder than she remembered.
“Lord Stannis,” she returned.

Beneath the tight-trimmed beard his heavy jaw clenched hard, yet
he did not hector her about titles. For that she was duly grateful. “I
had not thought to nd you at Storm’s End.”
“I had not thought to be here.”
His deepset eyes regarded her uncomfortably. This was not a man
made for easy courtesies. “I am sorry for your lord’s death,” he said,
“though Eddard Stark was no friend to me.”
“He was never your enemy, my lord. When the Lords Tyrell and
Redwyne held you prisoned in that castle, starving, it was Eddard
Stark who broke the siege.”
“At my brother’s command, not for love of me,” Stannis
answered. “Lord Eddard did his duty, I will not deny it. Did I ever
do less? I should have been Robert’s Hand.”
“That was your brother’s will. Ned never wanted it.”
“Yet he took it. That which should have been mine. Still, I give
you my word, you shall have justice for his murder.”
How they loved to promise heads, these men who would be king.
“Your brother promised me the same. But if truth be told, I would
sooner have my daughters back, and leave justice to the gods.
Cersei still holds my Sansa, and of Arya there has been no word
since the day of Robert’s death.”
“If your children are found when I take the city, they shall be sent
to you.” Alive or dead, his tone implied.
“And when shall that be, Lord Stannis? King’s Landing is close to
your Dragonstone, but I nd you here instead.”
“You are frank, Lady Stark. Very well, I’ll answer you frankly. To
take the city, I need the power of these southron lords I see across
the eld. My brother has them. I must needs take them from him.”
“Men give their allegiance where they will, my lord. These lords
swore fealty to Robert and House Baratheon. If you and your
brother were to put aside your quarrel—”
“I have no quarrel with Renly, should he prove dutiful. I am his
elder, and his king. I want only what is mine by rights. Renly owes
me loyalty and obedience. I mean to have it. From him, and from
these other lords.” Stannis studied her face. “And what cause brings

you to this eld, my lady? Has House Stark cast its lot with my
brother, is that the way of it?”
This one will never bend, she thought, yet she must try nonetheless.
Too much was at stake. “My son reigns as King in the North, by the
will of our lords and people. He bends the knee to no man, but
holds out the hand of friendship to all.”
“Kings have no friends,” Stannis said bluntly, “only subjects and
enemies.”
“And brothers,” a cheerful voice called out behind her. Catelyn
glanced over her shoulder as Lord Renly’s palfrey picked her way
through the stumps. The younger Baratheon was splendid in his
green velvet doublet and satin cloak trimmed in vair. The crown of
golden roses girded his temples, jade stag’s head rising over his
forehead, long black hair spilling out beneath. Jagged chunks of
black diamond studded his swordbelt, and a chain of gold and
emeralds looped around his neck.
Renly had chosen a woman to carry his banner as well, though
Brienne hid face and form behind plate armor that gave no hint of
her sex. Atop her twelve-foot lance, the crowned stag pranced
black-on-gold as the wind o the sea rippled the cloth.
His brother’s greeting was curt. “Lord Renly.”
“King Renly. Can that truly be you, Stannis?”
Stannis frowned. “Who else should it be?”
Renly gave an easy shrug. “When I saw that standard, I could not
be certain. Whose banner do you bear?”
“Mine own.”
The red-clad priestess spoke up. “The king has taken for his sigil
the ery heart of the Lord of Light.”
Renly seemed amused by that. “All for the good. If we both use
the same banner, the battle will be terribly confused.”
Catelyn said, “Let us hope there will be no battle. We three share
a common foe who would destroy us all.”
Stannis studied her, unsmiling. “The Iron Throne is mine by
rights. All those who deny that are my foes.”
“The whole of the realm denies it, brother,” said Renly. “Old men
deny it with their death rattle, and unborn children deny it in their

mothers’ wombs. They deny it in Dorne and they deny it on the
Wall. No one wants you for their king. Sorry.”
Stannis clenched his jaw, his face taut. “I swore I would never
treat with you while you wore your traitor’s crown. Would that I
had kept to that vow.”
“This is folly,” Catelyn said sharply. “Lord Tywin sits at
Harrenhal with twenty thousand swords. The remnants of the
Kingslayer’s army have regrouped at the Golden Tooth, another
Lannister host gathers beneath the shadow of Casterly Rock, and
Cersei and her son hold King’s Landing and your precious Iron
Throne. You each name yourself king, yet the kingdom bleeds, and
no one lifts a sword to defend it but my son.”
Renly shrugged. “Your son has won a few battles. I shall win the
war. The Lannisters can wait my pleasure.”
“If you have proposals to make, make them,” Stannis said
brusquely, “or I will be gone.”
“Very well,” said Renly. “I propose that you dismount, bend your
knee, and swear me your allegiance.”
Stannis choked back rage. “That you shall never have.”
“You served Robert, why not me?”
“Robert was my elder brother. You are the younger.”
“Younger, bolder, and far more comely …”
“… and a thief and a usurper besides.”
Renly shrugged. “The Targaryens called Robert usurper. He
seemed to be able to bear the shame. So shall I.”
This will not do. “Listen to yourselves! If you were sons of mine, I
would bang your heads together and lock you in a bedchamber until
you remembered that you were brothers.”
Stannis frowned at her. “You presume too much, Lady Stark. I am
the rightful king, and your son no less a traitor than my brother
here. His day will come as well.”
The naked threat fanned her fury. “You are very free to name
others traitor and usurper, my lord, yet how are you any di erent?
You say you alone are the rightful king, yet it seems to me that
Robert had two sons. By all the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, Prince

Jo rey is his rightful heir, and Tommen after him … and we are all
traitors, however good our reasons.”
Renly laughed. “You must forgive Lady Catelyn, Stannis. She’s
come all the way down from Riverrun, a long way ahorse. I fear she
never saw your little letter.”
“Jo rey is not my brother’s seed,” Stannis said bluntly. “Nor is
Tommen. They are bastards. The girl as well. All three of them
abominations born of incest.”
Would even Cersei be so mad? Catelyn was speechless.
“Isn’t that a sweet story, my lady?” Renly asked. “I was camped
at Horn Hill when Lord Tarly received his letter, and I must say, it
took my breath away.” He smiled at his brother. “I had never
suspected you were so clever, Stannis. Were it only true, you would
indeed be Robert’s heir.”
“Were it true? Do you name me a liar?”
“Can you prove any word of this fable?”
Stannis ground his teeth.
Robert could never have known, Catelyn thought, or Cersei would
have lost her head in an instant. “Lord Stannis,” she asked, “if you
knew the queen to be guilty of such monstrous crimes, why did you
keep silent?”
“I did not keep silent,” Stannis declared. “I brought my suspicions
to Jon Arryn.”
“Rather than your own brother?”
“My brother’s regard for me was never more than dutiful,” said
Stannis. “From me, such accusations would have seemed peevish
and self-serving, a means of placing myself rst in the line of
succession. I believed Robert would be more disposed to listen if the
charges came from Lord Arryn, whom he loved.”
“Ah,” said Renly. “So we have the word of a dead man.”
“Do you think he died by happenstance, you purblind fool? Cersei
had him poisoned, for fear he would reveal her. Lord Jon had been
gathering certain proofs—”
“—which doubtless died with him. How inconvenient.”
Catelyn was remembering, tting pieces together. “My sister Lysa
accused the queen of killing her husband in a letter she sent me at

Winterfell,” she admitted. “Later, in the Eyrie, she laid the murder
at the feet of the queen’s brother Tyrion.”
Stannis snorted. “If you step in a nest of snakes, does it matter
which one bites you rst?”
“All this of snakes and incest is droll, but it changes nothing. You
may well have the better claim, Stannis, but I still have the larger
army.” Renly’s hand slid inside his cloak. Stannis saw, and reached
at once for the hilt of his sword, but before he could draw steel his
brother produced … a peach. “Would you like one, brother?” Renly
asked, smiling. “From Highgarden. You’ve never tasted anything so
sweet, I promise you.” He took a bite. Juice ran from the corner of
his mouth.
“I did not come here to eat fruit.” Stannis was fuming.
“My lords!” Catelyn said. “We ought to be hammering out the
terms of an alliance, not trading taunts.”
“A man should never refuse to taste a peach,” Renly said as he
tossed the stone away. “He may never get the chance again. Life is
short, Stannis. Remember what the Starks say. Winter is coming.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I did not come here to be threatened, either.”
“Nor were you,” Renly snapped back. “When I make threats,
you’ll know it. If truth be told, I’ve never liked you, Stannis, but
you are my own blood, and I have no wish to slay you. So if it is
Storm’s End you want, take it … as a brother’s gift. As Robert once
gave it to me, I give it to you.”
“It is not yours to give. It is mine by rights.”
Sighing, Renly half turned in the saddle. “What am I to do with
this brother of mine, Brienne? He refuses my peach, he refuses my
castle, he even shunned my wedding …”
“We both know your wedding was a mummer’s farce. A year ago
you were scheming to make the girl one of Robert’s whores.”
“A year ago I was scheming to make the girl Robert’s queen,”
Renly said, “but what does it matter? The boar got Robert and I got
Margaery. You’ll be pleased to know she came to me a maid.”
“In your bed she’s like to die that way.”

“Oh, I expect I’ll get a son on her within the year. Pray, how
many sons do you have, Stannis? Oh, yes—none.” Renly smiled
innocently. “As to your daughter, I understand. If my wife looked
like yours, I’d send my fool to service her as well.”
“Enough!” Stannis roared. “I will not be mocked to my face, do
you hear me? I will not!” He yanked his longsword from its
scabbard. The steel gleamed strangely bright in the wan sunlight,
now red, now yellow, now blazing white. The air around it seemed
to shimmer, as if from heat.
Catelyn’s horse whinnied and backed away a step, but Brienne
moved between the brothers, her own blade in hand. “Put up your
steel!” she shouted at Stannis.
Cersei Lannister is laughing herself breathless, Catelyn thought
wearily.
Stannis pointed his shining sword at his brother. “I am not
without mercy,” thundered he who was notoriously without mercy.
“Nor do I wish to sully Lightbringer with a brother’s blood. For the
sake of the mother who bore us both, I will give you this night to
rethink your folly, Renly. Strike your banners and come to me
before dawn, and I will grant you Storm’s End and your old seat on
the council and even name you my heir until a son is born to me.
Otherwise, I shall destroy you.”
Renly laughed. “Stannis, that’s a very pretty sword, I’ll grant you,
but I think the glow o it has ruined your eyes. Look across the
elds, brother. Can you see all those banners?”
“Do you think a few bolts of cloth will make you king?”
“Tyrell swords will make me king. Rowan and Tarly and Caron
will make me king, with axe and mace and warhammer. Tarth
arrows and Penrose lances, Fossoway, Cuy, Mullendore, Estermont,
Selmy, Hightower, Oakheart, Crane, Caswell, Blackbar, Morrigen,
Beesbury, Shermer, Dunn, Footly … even House Florent, your own
wife’s brothers and uncles, they will make me king. All the chivalry
of the south rides with me, and that is the least part of my power.
My foot is coming behind, a hundred thousand swords and spears
and pikes. And you will destroy me? With what, pray? That paltry
rabble I see there huddled under the castle walls? I’ll call them ve

thousand and be generous, cod sh lords and onion knights and
sellswords. Half of them are like to come over to me before the
battle starts. You have fewer than four hundred horse, my scouts
tell me—freeriders in boiled leather who will not stand an instant
against armored lances. I do not care how seasoned a warrior you
think you are, Stannis, that host of yours won’t survive the rst
charge of my vanguard.”
“We shall see, brother.” Some of the light seemed to go out of the
world when Stannis slid his sword back into its scabbard. “Come the
dawn, we shall see.”
“I hope your new god’s a merciful one, brother.”
Stannis snorted and galloped away, disdainful. The red priestess
lingered a moment behind. “Look to your own sins, Lord Renly,”
she said as she wheeled her horse around.
Catelyn and Lord Renly returned together to the camp where his
thousands and her few waited their return. “That was amusing, if
not terribly pro table,” he commented. “I wonder where I can get a
sword like that? Well, doubtless Loras will make me a gift of it
after the battle. It grieves me that it must come to this.”
“You have a cheerful way of grieving,” said Catelyn, whose
distress was not feigned.
“Do I?” Renly shrugged. “So be it. Stannis was never the most
cherished of brothers, I confess. Do you suppose this tale of his is
true? If Jo rey is the Kingslayer’s get—”
“—your brother is the lawful heir.”
“While he lives,” Renly admitted. “Though it’s a fool’s law,
wouldn’t you agree? Why the oldest son, and not the best- tted?
The crown will suit me, as it never suited Robert and would not suit
Stannis. I have it in me to be a great king, strong yet generous,
clever, just, diligent, loyal to my friends and terrible to my
enemies, yet capable of forgiveness, patient—”
“—humble?” Catelyn supplied.
Renly laughed. “You must allow a king some aws, my lady.”
Catelyn felt very tired. It had all been for nothing. The Baratheon
brothers would drown each other in blood while her son faced the
Lannisters alone, and nothing she could say or do would stop it. It is

past time I went back to Riverrun to close my father’s eyes, she thought.
That much at least I can do. I may be a poor envoy, but I am a good
mourner, gods save me.
Their camp was well sited atop a low stony ridge that ran from
north to south. It was far more orderly than the sprawling
encampment on the Mander, though only a quarter as large. When
he’d learned of his brother’s assault on Storm’s End, Renly had split
his forces, much as Robb had done at the Twins. His great mass of
foot he had left behind at Bitterbridge with his young queen, his
wagons, carts, draft animals, and all his cumbersome siege
machinery, while Renly himself led his knights and freeriders in a
swift dash east.
How like his brother Robert he was, even in that … only Robert
had always had Eddard Stark to temper his boldness with caution.
Ned would surely have prevailed upon Robert to bring up his whole
force, to encircle Stannis and besiege the besiegers. That choice
Renly had denied himself in his headlong rush to come to grips with
his brother. He had outdistanced his supply lines, left food and
forage days behind with all his wagons and mules and oxen. He
must come to battle soon, or starve.
Catelyn sent Hal Mollen to tend to their horses while she
accompanied Renly back to the royal pavilion at the heart of the
encampment. Inside the walls of green silk, his captains and lords
bannermen were waiting to hear word of the parley. “My brother
has not changed,” their young king told them as Brienne unfastened
his cloak and lifted the gold-and-jade crown from his brow. “Castles
and courtesies will not appease him, he must have blood. Well, I am
of a mind to grant his wish.”
“Your Grace, I see no need for battle here,” Lord Mathis Rowan
put in. “The castle is strongly garrisoned and well provisioned, Ser
Cortnay Penrose is a seasoned commander, and the trebuchet has
not been built that could breach the walls of Storm’s End. Let Lord
Stannis have his siege. He will nd no joy in it, and whilst he sits
cold and hungry and pro tless, we will take King’s Landing.”
“And have men say I feared to face Stannis?”
“Only fools will say that,” Lord Mathis argued.

Renly looked to the others. “What say you all?”
“I say that Stannis is a danger to you,” Lord Randyll Tarly
declared. “Leave him unblooded and he will only grow stronger,
while your own power is diminished by battle. The Lannisters will
not be beaten in a day. By the time you are done with them, Lord
Stannis may be as strong as you … or stronger.”
Others chorused their agreement. The king looked pleased. “We
shall ght, then.”
I have failed Robb as I failed Ned, Catelyn thought. “My lord,” she
announced. “If you are set on battle, my purpose here is done. I ask
your leave to return to Riverrun.”
“You do not have it.” Renly seated himself on a camp chair.
She sti ened. “I had hoped to help you make a peace, my lord. I
will not help you make a war.”
Renly gave a shrug. “I daresay we’ll prevail without your veand-twenty, my lady. I do not mean for you to take part in the
battle, only to watch it.”
“I was at the Whispering Wood, my lord. I have seen enough
butchery. I came here an envoy—”
“And an envoy you shall leave,” Renly said, “but wiser than you
came. You shall see what befalls rebels with your own eyes, so your
son can hear it from your own lips. We’ll keep you safe, never
fear.” He turned away to make his dispositions. “Lord Mathis, you
shall lead the center of my main battle. Bryce, you’ll have the left.
The right is mine. Lord Estermont, you shall command the reserve.”
“I shall not fail you, Your Grace,” Lord Estermont replied.
Lord Mathis Rowan spoke up. “Who shall have the van?”
“Your Grace,” said Ser Jon Fossoway, “I beg the honor.”
“Beg all you like,” said Ser Guyard the Green, “by rights it should
be one of the seven who strikes the rst blow.”
“It takes more than a pretty cloak to charge a shield wall,”
Randyll Tarly announced. “I was leading Mace Tyrell’s van when
you were still sucking on your mother’s teat, Guyard.”
A clamor lled the pavilion, as other men loudly set forth their
claims. The knights of summer, Catelyn thought. Renly raised a hand.
“Enough, my lords. If I had a dozen vans, all of you should have

one, but the greatest glory by rights belongs to the greatest knight.
Ser Loras shall strike the rst blow.”
“With a glad heart, Your Grace.” The Knight of Flowers knelt
before the king. “Grant me your blessing, and a knight to ride
beside me with your banner. Let the stag and rose go to battle side
by side.”
Renly glanced about him. “Brienne.”
“Your Grace?” She was still armored in her blue steel, though she
had taken o her helm. The crowded tent was hot, and sweat
plastered limp yellow hair to her broad, homely face. “My place is
at your side. I am your sworn shield …”
“One of seven,” the king reminded her. “Never fear, four of your
fellows will be with me in the ght.”
Brienne dropped to her knees. “If I must part from Your Grace,
grant me the honor of arming you for battle.”
Catelyn heard someone snigger behind her. She loves him, poor
thing, she thought sadly. She’d play his squire just to touch him, and
never care how great a fool they think her.
“Granted,” Renly said. “Now leave me, all of you. Even kings
must rest before a battle.”
“My lord,” Catelyn said, “there was a small sept in the last village
we passed. If you will not permit me to depart for Riverrun, grant
me leave to go there and pray.”
“As you will. Ser Robar, give Lady Stark safe escort to this
sept … but see that she returns to us by dawn.”
“You might do well to pray yourself,” Catelyn added.
“For victory?”
“For wisdom.”
Renly laughed. “Loras, stay and help me pray. It’s been so long
I’ve quite forgotten how. As to the rest of you, I want every man in
place by rst light, armed, armored, and horsed. We shall give
Stannis a dawn he will not soon forget.”
Dusk was falling when Catelyn left the pavilion. Ser Robar Royce
fell in beside her. She knew him slightly—one of Bronze Yohn’s
sons, comely in a rough-hewn way, a tourney warrior of some
renown. Renly had gifted him with a rainbow cloak and a suit of

blood red armor, and named him one of his seven. “You are a long
way from the Vale, ser,” she told him.
“And you far from Winterfell, my lady.”
“I know what brought me here, but why have you come? This is
not your battle, no more than it is mine.”
“I made it my battle when I made Renly my king.”
“The Royces are bannermen to House Arryn.”
“My lord father owes Lady Lysa fealty, as does his heir. A second
son must nd glory where he can.” Ser Robar shrugged. “A man
grows weary of tourneys.”
He could not be older than one-and-twenty, Catelyn thought, of
an age with his king … but her king, her Robb, had more wisdom at
fteen than this youth had ever learned. Or so she prayed.
In Catelyn’s small corner of the camp, Shadd was slicing carrots
into a kettle, Hal Mollen was dicing with three of his Winterfell
men, and Lucas Blackwood sat sharpening his dagger. “Lady Stark,”
Lucas said when he saw her, “Mollen says it is to be battle at
dawn.”
“Hal has the truth of it,” she answered. And a loose tongue as well,
it would seem.
“Do we ght or ee?”
“We pray, Lucas,” she answered him. “We pray.”

SANSA

The longer you keep him waiting, the worse it will go for you,”

Sandor Clegane warned her.
Sansa tried to hurry, but her ngers fumbled at buttons and
knots. The Hound was always rough-tongued, but something in the
way he had looked at her lled her with dread. Had Jo rey found
out about her meetings with Ser Dontos? Please no, she thought as
she brushed out her hair. Ser Dontos was her only hope. I have to
look pretty, Jo likes me to look pretty, he’s always liked me in this
gown, this color. She smoothed the cloth down. The fabric was tight
across her chest.
When she emerged, Sansa walked on the Hound’s left, away from
the burned side of his face. “Tell me what I’ve done.”
“Not you. Your kingly brother.”
“Robb’s a traitor.” Sansa knew the words by rote. “I had no part
in whatever he did.” Gods be good, don’t let it be the Kingslayer. If
Robb had harmed Jaime Lannister, it would mean her life. She
thought of Ser Ilyn, and how those terrible pale eyes staring
pitilessly out of that gaunt pockmarked face.
The Hound snorted. “They trained you well, little bird.” He
conducted her to the lower bailey, where a crowd had gathered
around the archery butts. Men moved aside to let them through. She
could hear Lord Gyles coughing. Loitering stablehands eyed her
insolently, but Ser Horas Redwyne averted his gaze as she passed,
and his brother Hobber pretended not to see her. A yellow cat was

dying on the ground, mewling piteously, a crossbow quarrel
through its ribs. Sansa stepped around it, feeling ill.
Ser Dontos approached on his broomstick horse; since he’d been
too drunk to mount his destrier at the tourney, the king had decreed
that henceforth he must always go horsed. “Be brave,” he
whispered, squeezing her arm.
Jo rey stood in the center of the throng, winding an ornate
crossbow. Ser Boros and Ser Meryn were with him. The sight of
them was enough to tie her insides in knots.
“Your Grace.” She fell to her knees.
“Kneeling won’t save you now,” the king said. “Stand up. You’re
here to answer for your brother’s latest treasons.”
“Your Grace, whatever my traitor brother has done, I had no part.
You know that, I beg you, please—”
“Get her up!”
The Hound pulled her to her feet, not ungently.
“Ser Lancel,” Jo said, “tell her of this outrage.”
Sansa had always thought Lancel Lannister comely and well
spoken, but there was neither pity nor kindness in the look he gave
her. “Using some vile sorcery, your brother fell upon Ser Sta ord
Lannister with an army of wargs, not three days ride from
Lannisport. Thousands of good men were butchered as they slept,
without the chance to lift sword. After the slaughter, the northmen
feasted on the esh of the slain.”
Horror coiled cold hands around Sansa’s throat.
“You have nothing to say?” asked Jo rey.
“Your Grace, the poor child is shocked witless,” murmured Ser
Dontos.
“Silence, fool.” Jo rey lifted his crossbow and pointed it at her
face. “You Starks are as unnatural as those wolves of yours. I’ve not
forgotten how your monster savaged me.”
“That was Arya’s wolf,” she said. “Lady never hurt you, but you
killed her anyway.”
“No, your father did,” Jo said, “but I killed your father. I wish
I’d done it myself. I killed a man last night who was bigger than
your father. They came to the gate shouting my name and calling

for bread like I was some baker, but I taught them better. I shot the
loudest one right through the throat.”
“And he died?” With the ugly iron head of the quarrel staring her
in the face, it was hard to think what else to say.
“Of course he died, he had my quarrel in his throat. There was a
woman throwing rocks, I got her as well, but only in the arm.”
Frowning, he lowered the crossbow. “I’d shoot you too, but if I do
Mother says they’d kill my uncle Jaime. Instead you’ll just be
punished and we’ll send word to your brother about what will
happen to you if he doesn’t yield. Dog, hit her.”
“Let me beat her!” Ser Dontos shoved forward, tin armor
clattering. He was armed with a “morningstar” whose head was a
melon. My Florian. She could have kissed him, blotchy skin and
broken veins and all. He trotted his broomstick around her,
shouting “Traitor, traitor” and whacking her over the head with the
melon. Sansa covered herself with her hands, staggering every time
the fruit pounded her, her hair sticky by the second blow. People
were laughing. The melon ew to pieces. Laugh, Jo rey, she prayed
as the juice ran down her face and the front of her blue silk gown.
Laugh and be satis ed.
Jo rey did not so much as snigger. “Boros. Meryn.”
Ser Meryn Trant seized Dontos by the arm and ung him
brusquely away. The red-faced fool went sprawling, broomstick,
melon, and all. Ser Boros seized Sansa.
“Leave her face,” Jo rey commanded. “I like her pretty.”
Boros slammed a st into Sansa’s belly, driving the air out of her.
When she doubled over, the knight grabbed her hair and drew his
sword, and for one hideous instant she was certain he meant to
open her throat. As he laid the at of the blade across her thighs,
she thought her legs might break from the force of the blow. Sansa
screamed. Tears welled in her eyes. It will be over soon. She soon lost
count of the blows.
“Enough,” she heard the Hound rasp.
“No it isn’t,” the king replied. “Boros, make her naked.”
Boros shoved a meaty hand down the front of Sansa’s bodice and
gave a hard yank. The silk came tearing away, baring her to the

waist. Sansa covered her breasts with her hands. She could hear
sniggers, far o and cruel. “Beat her bloody,” Jo rey said, “we’ll
see how her brother fancies—”
“What is the meaning of this?”
The Imp’s voice cracked like a whip, and suddenly Sansa was free.
She stumbled to her knees, arms crossed over her chest, her breath
ragged. “Is this your notion of chivalry, Ser Boros?” Tyrion
Lannister demanded angrily. His pet sellsword stood with him, and
one of his wildlings, the one with the burned eye. “What sort of
knight beats helpless maids?”
“The sort who serves his king, Imp.” Ser Boros raised his sword,
and Ser Meryn stepped up beside him, his blade scraping clear of its
scabbard.
“Careful with those,” warned the dwarf’s sellsword. “You don’t
want to get blood all over those pretty white cloaks.”
“Someone give the girl something to cover herself with,” the Imp
said. Sandor Clegane unfastened his cloak and tossed it at her. Sansa
clutched it against her chest, sts bunched hard in the white wool.
The coarse weave was scratchy against her skin, but no velvet had
ever felt so ne.
“This girl’s to be your queen,” the Imp told Jo rey. “Have you no
regard for her honor?”
“I’m punishing her.”
“For what crime? She did not ght her brother’s battle.”
“She has the blood of a wolf.”
“And you have the wits of a goose.”
“You can’t talk to me that way. The king can do as he likes.”
“Aerys Targaryen did as he liked. Has your mother ever told you
what happened to him?”
Ser Boros Blount harrumphed. “No man threatens His Grace in the
presence of the Kingsguard.”
Tyrion Lannister raised an eyebrow. “I am not threatening the
king, ser, I am educating my nephew. Bronn, Timett, the next time
Ser Boros opens his mouth, kill him.” The dwarf smiled. “Now that
was a threat, ser. See the di erence?”

Ser Boros turned a dark shade of red. “The queen will hear of
this!”
“No doubt she will. And why wait? Jo rey, shall we send for
your mother?”
The king ushed.
“Nothing to say, Your Grace?” his uncle went on. “Good. Learn to
use your ears more and your mouth less, or your reign will be
shorter than I am. Wanton brutality is no way to win your people’s
love … or your queen’s.”
“Fear is better than love, Mother says.” Jo rey pointed at Sansa.
“She fears me.”
The Imp sighed. “Yes, I see. A pity Stannis and Renly aren’t
twelve-year-old girls as well. Bronn, Timett, bring her.”
Sansa moved as if in a dream. She thought the Imp’s men would
take her back to her bedchamber in Maegor’s Holdfast, but instead
they conducted her to the Tower of the Hand. She had not set foot
inside that place since the day her father fell from grace, and it
made her feel faint to climb those steps again.
Some serving girls took charge of her, mouthing meaningless
comforts to stop her shaking. One stripped o the ruins of her gown
and smallclothes, and another bathed her and washed the sticky
juice from her face and her hair. As they scrubbed her down with
soap and sluiced warm water over her head, all she could see were
the faces from the bailey. Knights are sworn to defend the weak,
protect women, and ght for the right, but none of them did a thing.
Only Ser Dontos had tried to help, and he was no longer a knight,
no more than the Imp was, nor the Hound … the Hound hated
knights … I hate them too, Sansa thought. They are no true knights,
not one of them.
After she was clean, plump ginger-headed Maester Frenken came
to see her. He bid her lie facedown on the mattress while he spread
a salve across the angry red welts that covered the backs of her
legs. Afterward he mixed her a draught of dreamwine, with some
honey so it might go down easier. “Sleep a bit, child. When you
wake, all this will seem a bad dream.”

No it won’t, you stupid man, Sansa thought, but she drank the
dreamwine anyway, and slept.
It was dark when she woke again, not quite knowing where she
was, the room both strange and strangely familiar. As she rose, a
stab of pain went through her legs and brought it all back. Tears
lled her eyes. Someone had laid out a robe for her beside the bed.
Sansa slipped it on and opened the door. Outside stood a hard-faced
woman with leathery brown skin, three necklaces looped about her
scrawny neck. One was gold and one was silver and one was made
of human ears. “Where does she think she’s going?” the woman
asked, leaning on a tall spear.
“The godswood.” She had to nd Ser Dontos, beg him to take her
home now before it was too late.
“The halfman said you’re not to leave,” the woman said. “Pray
here, the gods will hear.”
Meekly, Sansa dropped her eyes and retreated back inside. She
realized suddenly why this place seemed so familiar. They’ve put me
in Arya’s old bedchamber, from when Father was the Hand of the King.
All her things are gone and the furnishings have been moved around, but
it’s the same …
A short time later, a serving girl brought a platter of cheese and
bread and olives, with a agon of cold water. “Take it away,” Sansa
commanded, but the girl left the food on a table. She was thirsty,
she realized. Every step sent knives through her thighs, but she
made herself cross the room. She drank two cups of water, and was
nibbling on an olive when the knock came.
Anxiously, she turned toward the door, smoothed down the folds
of her robe. “Yes?”
The door opened, and Tyrion Lannister stepped inside. “My lady.
I trust I am not disturbing you?”
“Am I your prisoner?”
“My guest.” He was wearing his chain of o ce, a necklace of
linked golden hands. “I thought we might talk.”
“As my lord commands.” Sansa found it hard not to stare; his face
was so ugly it held a queer fascination for her.

“The food and garments are to your satisfaction?” he asked. “If
there is anything else you need, you have only to ask.”
“You are most kind. And this morning … it was very good of you
to help me.”
“You have a right to know why Jo rey was so wroth. Six nights
gone, your brother fell upon my uncle Sta ord, encamped with his
host at a village called Oxcross not three days ride from Casterly
Rock. Your northerners won a crushing victory. We received word
only this morning.”
Robb will kill you all, she thought, exulting. “It’s … terrible, my
lord. My brother is a vile traitor.”
The dwarf smiled wanly. “Well, he’s no fawn, he’s made that
clear enough.”
“Ser Lancel said Robb led an army of wargs …”
The Imp gave a disdainful bark of laughter. “Ser Lancel’s a
wineskin warrior who wouldn’t know a warg from a wart. Your
brother had his direwolf with him, but I suspect that’s as far as it
went. The northmen crept into my uncle’s camp and cut his horse
lines, and Lord Stark sent his wolf among them. Even war-trained
destriers went mad. Knights were trampled to death in their
pavilions, and the rabble woke in terror and ed, casting aside their
weapons to run the faster. Ser Sta ord was slain as he chased after a
horse. Lord Rickard Karstark drove a lance through his chest. Ser
Rubert Brax is also dead, along with Ser Lymond Vikary, Lord
Crakehall, and Lord Jast. Half a hundred more have been taken
captive, including Jast’s sons and my nephew Martyn Lannister.
Those who survived are spreading wild tales and swearing that the
old gods of the north march with your brother.”
“Then … there was no sorcery?”
Lannister snorted. “Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure
to hide the avor of their own incompetence. My mutton-headed
uncle had not even troubled to post sentries, it would seem. His
host was raw—apprentice boys, miners, eldhands, sherfolk, the
sweepings of Lannisport. The only mystery is how your brother
reached him. Our forces still hold the stronghold at the Golden
Tooth, and they swear he did not pass.” The dwarf gave an irritated

shrug. “Well, Robb Stark is my father’s bane. Jo rey is mine. Tell
me, what do you feel for my kingly nephew?”
“I love him with all my heart,” Sansa said at once.
“Truly?” He did not sound convinced. “Even now?”
“My love for His Grace is greater than it has ever been.”
The Imp laughed aloud. “Well, someone has taught you to lie
well. You may be grateful for that one day, child. You are a child
still, are you not? Or have you owered?”
Sansa blushed. It was a rude question, but the shame of being
stripped before half the castle made it seem like nothing. “No, my
lord.”
“That’s all to the good. If it gives you any solace, I do not intend
that you ever wed Jo rey. No marriage will reconcile Stark and
Lannister after all that has happened, I fear. More’s the pity. The
match was one of King Robert’s better notions, if Jo rey hadn’t
mucked it up.”
She knew she ought to say something, but the words caught in
her throat.
“You grow very quiet,” Tyrion Lannister observed. “Is this what
you want? An end to your betrothal?”
“I …” Sansa did not know what to say. Is it a trick? Will he punish
me if I tell the truth? She stared at the dwarf’s brutal bulging brow,
the hard black eye and the shrewd green one, the crooked teeth and
wiry beard. “I only want to be loyal.”
“Loyal,” the dwarf mused, “and far from any Lannisters. I can
scarce blame you for that. When I was your age, I wanted the same
thing.” He smiled. “They tell me you visit the godswood every day.
What do you pray for, Sansa?”
I pray for Robb’s victory and Jo rey’s death … and for home. For
Winterfell. “I pray for an end to the ghting.”
“We’ll have that soon enough. There will be another battle,
between your brother Robb and my lord father, and that will settle
the issue.”
Robb will beat him, Sansa thought. He beat your uncle and your
brother Jaime, he’ll beat your father too.

It was as if her face were an open book, so easily did the dwarf
read her hopes. “Do not take Oxcross too much to heart, my lady,”
he told her, not unkindly. “A battle is not a war, and my lord father
is assuredly not my uncle Sta ord. The next time you visit the
godswood, pray that your brother has the wisdom to bend the knee.
Once the north returns to the king’s peace, I mean to send you
home.” He hopped down o the window seat and said, “You may
sleep here tonight. I’ll give you some of my own men as a guard,
some Stone Crows perhaps—”
“No,” Sansa blurted out, aghast. If she was locked in the Tower of
the Hand, guarded by the dwarf’s men, how would Ser Dontos ever
spirit her away to freedom?
“Would you prefer Black Ears? I’ll give you Chella if a woman
would make you more at ease.”
“Please, no, my lord, the wildlings frighten me.”
He grinned. “Me as well. But more to the point, they frighten
Jo rey and that nest of sly vipers and lickspittle dogs he calls a
Kingsguard. With Chella or Timett by your side, no one would dare
o er you harm.”
“I would sooner return to my own bed.” A lie came to her
suddenly, but it seemed so right that she blurted it out at once. “This
tower was where my father’s men were slain. Their ghosts would
give me terrible dreams, and I would see their blood wherever I
looked.”
Tyrion Lannister studied her face. “I am no stranger to
nightmares, Sansa. Perhaps you are wiser than I knew. Permit me at
least to escort you safely back to your own chambers.”

CATELYN

It was full dark before they found the village. Catelyn found herself

wondering if the place had a name. If so, its people had taken that
knowledge with them when they ed, along with all they owned,
down to the candles in the sept. Ser Wendel lit a torch and led her
through the low door.
Within, the seven walls were cracked and crooked. God is one,
Septon Osmynd had taught her when she was a girl, with seven
aspects, as the sept is a single building, with seven walls. The wealthy
septs of the cities had statues of the Seven and an altar to each. In
Winterfell, Septon Chayle hung carved masks from each wall. Here
Catelyn found only rough charcoal drawings. Ser Wendel set the
torch in a sconce near the door, and left to wait outside with Robar
Royce.
Catelyn studied the faces. The Father was bearded, as ever. The
Mother smiled, loving and protective. The Warrior had his sword
sketched in beneath his face, the Smith his hammer. The Maid was
beautiful, the Crone wizened and wise.
And the seventh face … the Stranger was neither male nor
female, yet both, ever the outcast, the wanderer from far places,
less and more than human, unknown and unknowable. Here the face
was a black oval, a shadow with stars for eyes. It made Catelyn
uneasy. She would get scant comfort there.
She knelt before the Mother. “My lady, look down on this battle
with a mother’s eyes. They are all sons, every one. Spare them if

you can, and spare my own sons as well. Watch over Robb and Bran
and Rickon. Would that I were with them.”
A crack ran down through the Mother’s left eye. It made her look
as if she were crying. Catelyn could hear Ser Wendel’s booming
voice, and now and again Ser Robar’s quiet answers, as they talked
of the coming battle. Otherwise the night was still. Not even a
cricket could be heard, and the gods kept their silence. Did your old
gods ever answer you, Ned? she wondered. When you knelt before your
heart tree, did they hear you?
Flickering torchlight danced across the walls, making the faces
seem half-alive, twisting them, changing them. The statues in the
great septs of the cities wore the faces the stonemasons had given
them, but these charcoal scratchings were so crude they might be
anyone. The Father’s face made her think of her own father, dying
in his bed at Riverrun. The Warrior was Renly and Stannis, Robb
and Robert, Jaime Lannister and Jon Snow. She even glimpsed Arya
in those lines, just for an instant. Then a gust of wind through the
door made the torch sputter, and the semblance was gone, washed
away in orange glare.
The smoke was making her eyes burn. She rubbed at them with
the heels of her scarred hands. When she looked up at the Mother
again, it was her own mother she saw. Lady Minisa Tully had died
in childbed, trying to give Lord Hoster a second son. The baby had
perished with her, and afterward some of the life had gone out of
Father. She was always so calm, Catelyn thought, remembering her
mother’s soft hands, her warm smile. If she had lived, how di erent
our lives might have been. She wondered what Lady Minisa would
make of her eldest daughter, kneeling here before her. I have come
so many thousands of leagues, and for what? Who have I served? I have
lost my daughters, Robb does not want me, and Bran and Rickon must
surely think me a cold and unnatural mother. I was not even with Ned
when he died …
Her head swam, and the sept seemed to move around her. The
shadows swayed and shifted, furtive animals racing across the
cracked white walls. Catelyn had not eaten today. Perhaps that had
been unwise. She told herself that there had been no time, but the

truth was that food had lost its savor in a world without Ned. When
they took his head o , they killed me too.
Behind her the torch spit, and suddenly it seemed to her that it
was her sister’s face on the wall, though the eyes were harder than
she recalled, not Lysa’s eyes but Cersei’s. Cersei is a mother too. No
matter who fathered those children, she felt them kick inside her, brought
them forth with her pain and blood, nursed them at her breast. If they
are truly Jaime’s …
“Does Cersei pray to you too, my lady?” Catelyn asked the
Mother. She could see the proud, cold, lovely features of the
Lannister queen etched upon the wall. The crack was still there;
even Cersei could weep for her children. “Each of the Seven
embodies all of the Seven,” Septon Osmynd had told her once.
There was as much beauty in the Crone as in the Maiden, and the
Mother could be ercer than the Warrior when her children were in
danger. Yes …
She had seen enough of Robert Baratheon at Winterfell to know
that the king did not regard Jo rey with any great warmth. If the
boy was truly Jaime’s seed, Robert would have put him to death
along with his mother, and few would have condemned him.
Bastards were common enough, but incest was a monstrous sin to
both old gods and new, and the children of such wickedness were
named abominations in sept and godswood alike. The dragon kings
had wed brother to sister, but they were the blood of old Valyria
where such practices had been common, and like their dragons the
Targaryens answered to neither gods nor men.
Ned must have known, and Lord Arryn before him. Small wonder
that the queen had killed them both. Would I do any less for my own?
Catelyn clenched her hands, feeling the tightness in her scarred
ngers where the assassin’s steel had cut to the bone as she fought
to save her son. “Bran knows too,” she whispered, lowering her
head. Gods be good, he must have seen something, heard something,
that was why they tried to kill him in his bed.
Lost and weary, Catelyn Stark gave herself over to her gods. She
knelt before the Smith, who xed things that were broken, and
asked that he give her sweet Bran his protection. She went to the

Maid and beseeched her to lend her courage to Arya and Sansa, to
guard them in their innocence. To the Father, she prayed for justice,
the strength to seek it and the wisdom to know it, and she asked the
Warrior to keep Robb strong and shield him in his battles. Lastly
she turned to the Crone, whose statues often showed her with a
lamp in one hand. “Guide me, wise lady,” she prayed. “Show me the
path I must walk, and do not let me stumble in the dark places that
lie ahead.”
Finally there were footsteps behind her, and a noise at the door.
“My lady,” Ser Robar said gently, “pardon, but our time is at an
end. We must be back before the dawn breaks.”
Catelyn rose sti y. Her knees ached, and she would have given
much for a featherbed and a pillow just then. “Thank you, ser. I am
ready.”
They rode in silence through sparse woodland where the trees
leaned drunkenly away from the sea. The nervous whinny of horses
and the clank of steel guided them back to Renly’s camp. The long
ranks of man and horse were armored in darkness, as black as if the
Smith had hammered night itself into steel. There were banners to
her right, banners to her left, and rank on rank of banners before
her, but in the predawn gloom, neither colors nor sigils could be
discerned. A grey army, Catelyn thought. Grey men on grey horses
beneath grey banners. As they sat their horses waiting, Renly’s
shadow knights pointed their lances upward, so she rode through a
forest of tall naked trees, bereft of leaves and life. Where Storm’s
End stood was only a deeper darkness, a wall of black through
which no stars could shine, but she could see torches moving across
the elds where Lord Stannis had made his camp.
The candles within Renly’s pavilion made the shimmering silken
walls seem to glow, transforming the great tent into a magical
castle alive with emerald light. Two of the Rainbow Guard stood
sentry at the door to the royal pavilion. The green light shone
strangely against the purple plums of Ser Parmen’s surcoat, and
gave a sickly hue to the sun owers that covered every inch of Ser
Emmon’s enameled yellow plate. Long silken plumes ew from
their helms, and rainbow cloaks draped their shoulders.

Within, Catelyn found Brienne armoring the king for battle while
the Lords Tarly and Rowan spoke of dispositions and tactics. It was
pleasantly warm inside, the heat shimmering o the coals in a
dozen small iron braziers. “I must speak with you, Your Grace,” she
said, granting him a king’s style for once, anything to make him
heed her.
“In a moment, Lady Catelyn,” Renly replied. Brienne t backplate
to breastplate over his quilted tunic. The king’s armor was a deep
green, the green of leaves in a summer wood, so dark it drank the
candlelight. Gold highlights gleamed from inlay and fastenings like
distant res in that wood, winking every time he moved. “Pray
continue, Lord Mathis.”
“Your Grace,” Mathis Rowan said with a sideways glance at
Catelyn. “As I was saying, our battles are well drawn up. Why wait
for daybreak? Sound the advance.”
“And have it said that I won by treachery, with an unchivalrous
attack? Dawn was the chosen hour.”
“Chosen by Stannis,” Randyll Tarly pointed out. “He’d have us
charge into the teeth of the rising sun. We’ll be half-blind.”
“Only until rst shock,” Renly said con dently. “Ser Loras will
break them, and after that it will be chaos.” Brienne tightened green
leather straps and buckled golden buckles. “When my brother falls,
see that no insult is done to his corpse. He is my own blood, I will
not have his head paraded about on a spear.”
“And if he yields?” Lord Tarly asked.
“Yields?” Lord Rowan laughed. “When Mace Tyrell laid siege to
Storm’s End, Stannis ate rats rather than open his gates.”
“Well I remember.” Renly lifted his chin to allow Brienne to
fasten his gorget in place. “Near the end, Ser Gawen Wylde and
three of his knights tried to steal out a postern gate to surrender.
Stannis caught them and ordered them ung from the walls with
catapults. I can still see Gawen’s face as they strapped him down.
He had been our master-at-arms.”
Lord Rowan appeared puzzled. “No men were hurled from the
walls. I would surely remember that.”

“Maester Cressen told Stannis that we might be forced to eat our
dead, and there was no gain in inging away good meat.” Renly
pushed back his hair. Brienne bound it with a velvet tie and pulled a
padded cap down over his ears, to cushion the weight of his helm.
“Thanks to the Onion Knight we were never reduced to dining on
corpses, but it was a close thing. Too close for Ser Gawen, who died
in his cell.”
“Your Grace.” Catelyn had waited patiently, but time grew short.
“You promised me a word.”
Renly nodded. “See to your battles, my lords … oh, and if
Barristan Selmy is at my brother’s side, I want him spared.”
“There’s been no word of Ser Barristan since Jo rey cast him
out,” Lord Rowan objected.
“I know that old man. He needs a king to guard, or who is he?
Yet he never came to me, and Lady Catelyn says he is not with
Robb Stark at Riverrun. Where else but with Stannis?”
“As you say, Your Grace. No harm will come to him.” The lords
bowed deeply and departed.
“Say your say, Lady Stark,” Renly said. Brienne swept his cloak
over his broad shoulders. It was cloth-of-gold, heavy, with the
crowned stag of Baratheon picked out in akes of jet.
“The Lannisters tried to kill my son Bran. A thousand times I have
asked myself why. Your brother gave me my answer. There was a
hunt the day he fell. Robert and Ned and most of the other men
rode out after boar, but Jaime Lannister remained at Winterfell, as
did the queen.”
Renly was not slow to take the implication. “So you believe the
boy caught them at their incest …”
“I beg you, my lord, grant me leave to go to your brother Stannis
and tell him what I suspect.”
“To what end?”
“Robb will set aside his crown if you and your brother will do the
same,” she said, hoping it was true. She would make it true if she
must; Robb would listen to her, even if his lords would not. “Let the
three of you call for a Great Council, such as the realm has not seen
for a hundred years. We will send to Winterfell, so Bran may tell his

tale and all men may know the Lannisters for the true usurpers. Let
the assembled lords of the Seven Kingdoms choose who shall rule
them.”
Renly laughed. “Tell me, my lady, do direwolves vote on who
should lead the pack?” Brienne brought the king’s gauntlets and
greathelm, crowned with golden antlers that would add a foot and a
half to his height. “The time for talk is done. Now we see who is
stronger.” Renly pulled a lobstered green-and-gold gauntlet over his
left hand, while Brienne knelt to buckle on his belt, heavy with the
weight of longsword and dagger.
“I beg you in the name of the Mother,” Catelyn began when a
sudden gust of wind ung open the door of the tent. She thought
she glimpsed movement, but when she turned her head, it was only
the king’s shadow shifting against the silken walls. She heard Renly
begin a jest, his shadow moving, lifting its sword, black on green,
candles guttering, shivering, something was queer, wrong, and then
she saw Renly’s sword still in its scabbard, sheathed still, but the
shadowsword …
“Cold,” said Renly in a small puzzled voice, a heartbeat before the
steel of his gorget parted like cheesecloth beneath the shadow of a
blade that was not there. He had time to make a small thick gasp
before the blood came gushing out of his throat.
“Your Gr—no!” cried Brienne the Blue when she saw that evil
ow, sounding as scared as any little girl. The king stumbled into
her arms, a sheet of blood creeping down the front of his armor, a
dark red tide that drowned his green and gold. More candles
guttered out. Renly tried to speak, but he was choking on his own
blood. His legs collapsed, and only Brienne’s strength held him up.
She threw back her head and screamed, wordless in her anguish.
The shadow. Something dark and evil had happened here, she
knew, something that she could not begin to understand. Renly
never cast that shadow. Death came in that door and blew the life out of
him as swift as the wind snu ed out his candles.
Only a few instants passed before Robar Royce and Emmon Cuy
came bursting in, though it felt like half the night. A pair of men-atarms crowded in behind with torches. When they saw Renly in

Brienne’s arms, and her drenched with the king’s blood, Ser Robar
gave a cry of horror. “Wicked woman!” screamed Ser Emmon, he of
the sun owered steel. “Away from him, you vile creature!”
“Gods be good, Brienne, why?” asked Ser Robar.
Brienne looked up from her king’s body. The rainbow cloak that
hung from her shoulders had turned red where the king’s blood had
soaked into the cloth. “I … I …”
“You’ll die for this.” Ser Emmon snatched up a long-handled
battle-axe from the weapons piled near the door. “You’ll pay for the
king’s life with your own!”
“NO!” Catelyn Stark screamed, nding her voice at last, but it
was too late, the blood madness was on them, and they rushed
forward with shouts that drowned her softer words.
Brienne moved faster than Catelyn would have believed. Her own
sword was not to hand, so she snatched Renly’s from its scabbard
and raised it to catch Emmon’s axe on the downswing. A spark
ashed blue-white as steel met steel with a rending crash, and
Brienne sprang to her feet, the body of the dead king thrust rudely
aside. Ser Emmon stumbled over it as he tried to close, and
Brienne’s blade sheared through the wooden haft to send his
axehead spinning. Another man thrust a aming torch at her back,
but the rainbow cloak was too sodden with blood to burn. Brienne
spun and cut, and torch and hand went ying. Flames crept across
the carpet. The maimed man began to scream. Ser Emmon dropped
the axe and fumbled for his sword. The second man-at-arms lunged,
Brienne parried, and their swords danced and clanged against each
other. When Emmon Cuy came wading back in, Brienne was forced
to retreat, yet somehow she held them both at bay. On the ground,
Renly’s head rolled sickeningly to one side, and a second mouth
yawned wide, the blood coming from him now in slow pulses.
Ser Robar had hung back, uncertain, but now he was reaching for
his hilt. “Robar, no, listen.” Catelyn seized his arm. “You do her
wrong, it was not her. Help her! Hear me, it was Stannis.” The name
was on her lips before she could think how it got there, but as she
said it, she knew that it was true. “I swear it, you know me, it was
Stannis killed him.”

The young rainbow knight stared at this madwoman with pale
and frightened eyes. “Stannis? How?”
“I do not know. Sorcery, some dark magic, there was a shadow, a
shadow.” Her own voice sounded wild and crazed to her, but the
words poured out in a rush as the blades continued to clash behind
her. “A shadow with a sword, I swear it, I saw. Are you blind, the
girl loved him! Help her!” She glanced back, saw the second
guardsman fall, his blade dropping from limp ngers. Outside there
was shouting. More angry men would be bursting in on them any
instant, she knew. “She is innocent, Robar. You have my word, on
my husband’s grave and my honor as a Stark!”
That resolved him. “I will hold them,” Ser Robar said. “Get her
away.” He turned and went out.
The re had reached the wall and was creeping up the side of the
tent. Ser Emmon was pressing Brienne hard, him in his enameled
yellow steel and her in wool. He had forgotten Catelyn, until the
iron brazier came crashing into the back of his head. Helmed as he
was, the blow did no lasting harm, but it sent him to his knees.
“Brienne, with me,” Catelyn commanded. The girl was not slow to
see the chance. A slash, and the green silk parted. They stepped out
into darkness and the chill of dawn. Loud voices came from the
other side of the pavilion. “This way,” Catelyn urged, “and slowly.
We must not run, or they will ask why. Walk easy, as if nothing
were amiss.”
Brienne thrust her sword blade through her belt and fell in beside
Catelyn. The night air smelled of rain. Behind them, the king’s
pavilion was well ablaze, ames rising high against the dark. No
one made any move to stop them. Men rushed past them, shouting
of re and murder and sorcery. Others stood in small groups and
spoke in low voices. A few were praying, and one young squire was
on his knees, sobbing openly.
Renly’s battles were already coming apart as the rumors spread
from mouth to mouth. The night res had burned low, and as the
east began to lighten the immense mass of Storm’s End emerged
like a dream of stone while wisps of pale mist raced across the eld,
ying from the sun on wings of wind. Morning ghosts, she had heard

Old Nan call them once, spirits returning to their graves. And Renly
one of them now, gone like his brother Robert, like her own dear
Ned.
“I never held him but as he died,” Brienne said quietly as they
walked through the spreading chaos. Her voice sounded as if she
might break at any instant. “He was laughing one moment, and
suddenly the blood was everywhere … my lady, I do not
understand. Did you see, did you …?”
“I saw a shadow. I thought it was Renly’s shadow at the rst, but
it was his brother’s.”
“Lord Stannis?”
“I felt him. It makes no sense, I know …”
It made sense enough for Brienne. “I will kill him,” the tall
homely girl declared. “With my lord’s own sword, I will kill him. I
swear it. I swear it. I swear it.”
Hal Mollen and the rest of her escort were waiting with the
horses. Ser Wendel Manderly was all in a lather to know what was
happening. “My lady, the camp has gone mad,” he blurted when he
saw them. “Lord Renly, is he—” He stopped suddenly, staring at
Brienne and the blood that drenched her.
“Dead, but not by our hands.”
“The battle—” Hal Mollen began.
“There will be no battle.” Catelyn mounted, and her escort
formed up about her, with Ser Wendel to her left and Ser Perwyn
Frey on her right. “Brienne, we brought mounts enough for twice
our number. Choose one, and come with us.”
“I have my own horse, my lady. And my armor—”
“Leave them. We must be well away before they think to look for
us. We were both with the king when he was killed. That will not
be forgotten.” Wordless, Brienne turned and did as she was bid.
“Ride,” Catelyn commanded her escort when they were all ahorse.
“If any man tries to stop us, cut him down.”
As the long ngers of dawn fanned across the elds, color was
returning to the world. Where grey men had sat grey horses armed
with shadow spears, the points of ten thousand lances now glinted
silverly cold, and on the myriad apping banners Catelyn saw the

blush of red and pink and orange, the richness of blues and browns,
the blaze of gold and yellow. All the power of Storm’s End and
Highgarden, the power that had been Renly’s an hour ago. They
belong to Stannis now, she realized, even if they do not know it
themselves yet. Where else are they to turn, if not to the last Baratheon?
Stannis has won all with a single evil stroke.
I am the rightful king, he had declared, his jaw clenched hard as
iron, and your son no less a traitor than my brother here. His day will
come as well.
A chill went through her.

JON

The hill jutted above the dense tangle of forest, rising solitary and

sudden, its windswept heights visible from miles o . The wildlings
called it the Fist of the First Men, rangers said. It did look like a st,
Jon Snow thought, punching up through earth and wood, its bare
brown slopes knuckled with stone.
He rode to the top with Lord Mormont and the o cers, leaving
Ghost below under the trees. The direwolf had run o three times
as they climbed, twice returning reluctantly to Jon’s whistle. The
third time, the Lord Commander lost patience and snapped, “Let
him go, boy. I want to reach the crest before dusk. Find the wolf
later.”
The way up was steep and stony, the summit crowned by a chesthigh wall of tumbled rocks. They had to circle some distance west
before they found a gap large enough to admit the horses. “This is
good ground, Thoren,” the Old Bear proclaimed when at last they
attained the top. “We could scarce hope for better. We’ll make our
camp here to await Halfhand.” The Lord Commander swung down
o his saddle, dislodging the raven from his shoulder. Complaining
loudly, the bird took to the air.
The views atop the hill were bracing, yet it was the ringwall that
drew Jon’s eye, the weathered grey stones with their white patches
of lichen, their beards of green moss. It was said that the Fist had
been a ringfort of the First Men in the Dawn Age. “An old place,
and strong,” Thoren Smallwood said.

“Old,” Mormont’s raven screamed as it apped in noisy circles
about their heads. “Old, old, old.”
“Quiet,” Mormont growled up at the bird. The Old Bear was too
proud to admit to weakness, but Jon was not deceived. The strain of
keeping up with younger men was taking its toll.
“These heights will be easy to defend, if need be,” Thoren pointed
out as he walked his horse along the ring of stones, his sabletrimmed cloak stirring in the wind.
“Yes, this place will do.” The Old Bear lifted a hand to the wind,
and raven landed on his forearm, claws scrabbling against his black
ringmail.
“What about water, my lord?” Jon wondered.
“We crossed a brook at the foot of the hill.”
“A long climb for a drink,” Jon pointed out, “and outside the ring
of stones.”
Thoren said, “Are you too lazy to climb a hill, boy?”
When Lord Mormont said, “We’re not like to nd another place as
strong. We’ll carry water, and make certain we are well supplied,”
Jon knew better than to argue. So the command was given, and the
brothers of the Night’s Watch raised their camp behind the stone
ring the First Men had made. Black tents sprouted like mushrooms
after a rain, and blankets and bedrolls covered the bare ground.
Stewards tethered the garrons in long lines, and saw them fed and
watered. Foresters took their axes to the trees in the waning
afternoon light to harvest enough wood to see them through the
night. A score of builders set to clearing brush, digging latrines, and
untying their bundles of re-hardened stakes. “I will have every
opening in the ringwall ditched and staked before dark,” the Old
Bear had commanded.
Once he’d put up the Lord Commander’s tent and seen to their
horses, Jon Snow descended the hill in search of Ghost. The
direwolf came at once, all in silence. One moment Jon was striding
beneath the trees, whistling and shouting, alone in the green,
pinecones and fallen leaves under his feet; the next, the great white
direwolf was walking beside him, pale as morning mist.

But when they reached the ringfort, Ghost balked again. He
padded forward warily to sni at the gap in the stones, and then
retreated, as if he did not like what he’d smelled. Jon tried to grab
him by the scru of his neck and haul him bodily inside the ring, no
easy task; the wolf weighed as much as he did, and was stronger by
far. “Ghost, what’s wrong with you?” It was not like him to be so
unsettled. In the end Jon had to give it up. “As you will,” he told
the wolf. “Go, hunt.” The red eyes watched him as he made his way
back through the mossy stones.
They ought to be safe here. The hill o ered commanding views,
and the slopes were precipitous to the north and west and only
slightly more gentle to the east. Yet as the dusk deepened and
darkness seeped into the hollows between the trees, Jon’s sense of
foreboding grew. This is the haunted forest, he told himself. Maybe
there are ghosts here, the spirits of the First Men. This was their place,
once.
“Stop acting the boy,” he told himself. Clambering atop the piled
rocks, Jon gazed o toward the setting sun. He could see the light
shimmering like hammered gold o the surface of the Milkwater as
it curved away to the south. Upriver the land was more rugged, the
dense forest giving way to a series of bare stony hills that rose high
and wild to the north and west. On the horizon stood the mountains
like a great shadow, range on range of them receding into the bluegrey distance, their jagged peaks sheathed eternally in snow. Even
from afar they looked vast and cold and inhospitable.
Closer at hand, it was the trees that ruled. To south and east the
wood went on as far as Jon could see, a vast tangle of root and limb
painted in a thousand shades of green, with here and there a patch
of red where a weirwood shouldered through the pines and
sentinels, or a blush of yellow where some broadleafs had begun to
turn. When the wind blew, he could hear the creak and groan of
branches older than he was. A thousand leaves uttered, and for a
moment the forest seemed a deep green sea, storm-tossed and
heaving, eternal and unknowable.
Ghost was not like to be alone down there, he thought. Anything
could be moving under that sea, creeping toward the ringfort

through the dark of the wood, concealed beneath those trees.
Anything. How would they ever know? He stood there for a long
time, until the sun vanished behind the saw-toothed mountains and
darkness began to creep through the forest.
“Jon?” Samwell Tarly called up. “I thought it looked like you. Are
you well?”
“Well enough.” Jon hopped down. “How did you fare today?”
“Well. I fared well. Truly.”
Jon was not about to share his disquiet with his friend, not when
Samwell Tarly was at last beginning to nd his courage. “The Old
Bear means to wait here for Qhorin Halfhand and the men from the
Shadow Tower.”
“It seems a strong place,” said Sam. “A ringfort of the First Men.
Do you think there were battles fought here?”
“No doubt. You’d best get a bird ready. Mormont will want to
send back word.”
“I wish I could send them all. They hate being caged.”
“You would too, if you could y.”
“If I could y, I’d be back at Castle Black eating a pork pie,” said
Sam.
Jon clapped him on the shoulder with his burned hand. They
walked back through the camp together. Cook res were being lit all
around them. Overhead, the stars were coming out. The long red
tail of Mormont’s Torch burned as bright as the moon. Jon heard
the ravens before he saw them. Some were calling his name. The
birds were not shy when it came to making noise.
They feel it too. “I’d best see to the Old Bear,” he said. “He gets
noisy when he isn’t fed as well.”
He found Mormont talking with Thoren Smallwood and half a
dozen other o cers. “There you are,” the old man said gru y.
“Bring us some hot wine, if you would. The night is chilly.”
“Yes, my lord.” Jon built a cook re, claimed a small cask of
Mormont’s favorite robust red from stores, and poured it into a
kettle. He hung the kettle above the ames while he gathered the
rest of his ingredients. The Old Bear was particular about his hot
spiced wine. So much cinnamon and so much nutmeg and so much

honey, not a drop more. Raisins and nuts and dried berries, but no
lemon, that was the rankest sort of southron heresy—which was
queer, since he always took lemon in his morning beer. The drink
must be hot to warm a man properly, the Lord Commander insisted,
but the wine must never be allowed to come to a boil. Jon kept a
careful eye on the kettle.
As he worked, he could hear the voices from inside the tent.
Jarman Buckwell said, “The easiest road up into the Frostfangs is to
follow the Milkwater back to its source. Yet if we go that path,
Rayder will know of our approach, certain as sunrise.”
“The Giant’s Stair might serve,” said Ser Mallador Locke, “or the
Skirling Pass, if it’s clear.”
The wine was steaming. Jon lifted the kettle o the re, lled
eight cups, and carried them into the tent. The Old Bear was
peering at the crude map Sam had drawn him that night back in
Craster’s Keep. He took a cup from Jon’s tray, tried a swallow of
wine, and gave a brusque nod of approval. His raven hopped down
his arm. “Corn,” it said. “Corn. Corn.”
Ser Ottyn Wythers waved the wine away. “I would not go into
the mountains at all,” he said in a thin, tired voice. “The Frostfangs
have a cruel bite even in summer, and now … if we should be
caught by a storm …”
“I do not mean to risk the Frostfangs unless I must,” said
Mormont. “Wildlings can no more live on snow and stone than we
can. They will emerge from the heights soon, and for a host of any
size, the only route is along the Milkwater. If so, we are strongly
placed here. They cannot hope to slip by us.”
“They may not wish to. They are thousands, and we will be three
hundred when the Halfhand reaches us.” Ser Mallador accepted a
cup from Jon.
“If it comes to battle, we could not hope for better ground than
here,” declared Mormont. “We’ll strengthen the defenses. Pits and
spikes, caltrops scattered on the slopes, every breach mended.
Jarman, I’ll want your sharpest eyes as watchers. A ring of them, all
around us and along the river, to warn of any approach. Hide them
up in trees. And we had best start bringing up water too, more than

we need. We’ll dig cisterns. It will keep the men occupied, and may
prove needful later.”
“My rangers—” started Thoren Smallwood.
“Your rangers will limit their ranging to this side of the river
until the Halfhand reaches us. After that, we’ll see. I will not lose
more of my men.”
“Mance Rayder might be massing his host a day’s ride from here,
and we’d never know,” Smallwood complained.
“We know where the wildlings are massing,” Mormont came
back. “We had it from Craster. I mislike the man, but I do not think
he lied to us in this.”
“As you say.” Smallwood took a sullen leave. The others nished
their wine and followed, more courteously.
“Shall I bring you supper, my lord?” Jon asked.
“Corn,” the raven cried. Mormont did not answer at once. When
he did he said only, “Did your wolf nd game today?”
“He’s not back yet.”
“We could do with fresh meat.” Mormont dug into a sack and
o ered his raven a handful of corn. “You think I’m wrong to keep
the rangers close?”
“That’s not for me to say, my lord.”
“It is if you’re asked.”
“If the rangers must stay in sight of the Fist, I don’t see how they
can hope to nd my uncle,” Jon admitted.
“They can’t.” The raven pecked at the kernels in the Old Bear’s
palm. “Two hundred men or ten thousand, the country is too vast.”
The corn gone, Mormont turned his hand over.
“You would not give up the search?”
“Maester Aemon thinks you clever.” Mormont moved the raven
to his shoulder. The bird tilted its head to one side, little eyes aglitter.
The answer was there. “Is it … it seems to me that it might be
easier for one man to nd two hundred than for two hundred to
nd one.”
The raven gave a cackling scream, but the Old Bear smiled
through the grey of his beard. “This many men and horses leave a

trail even Aemon could follow. On this hill, our res ought to be
visible as far o as the foothills of the Frostfangs. If Ben Stark is
alive and free, he will come to us, I have no doubt.”
“Yes,” said Jon, “but … what if …”
“… he’s dead?” Mormont asked, not unkindly.
Jon nodded, reluctantly.
“Dead,” the raven said. “Dead. Dead.”
“He may come to us anyway,” the Old Bear said. “As Othor did,
and Jafer Flowers. I dread that as much as you, Jon, but we must
admit the possibility.”
“Dead,” his raven cawed, ru ing its wings. Its voice grew louder
and more shrill. “Dead.”
Mormont stroked the bird’s black feathers, and sti ed a sudden
yawn with the back of his hand. “I will forsake supper, I believe.
Rest will serve me better. Wake me at rst light.”
“Sleep well, my lord.” Jon gathered up the empty cups and
stepped outside. He heard distant laughter, the plaintive sound of
pipes. A great blaze was crackling in the center of the camp, and he
could smell stew cooking. The Old Bear might not be hungry, but
Jon was. He drifted over toward the re.
Dywen was holding forth, spoon in hand. “I know this wood as
well as any man alive, and I tell you, I wouldn’t care to ride
through it alone tonight. Can’t you smell it?”
Grenn was staring at him with wide eyes, but Dolorous Edd said,
“All I smell is the shit of two hundred horses. And this stew. Which
has a similar aroma, now that I come to sni it.”
“I’ve got your similar aroma right here.” Hake patted his dirk.
Grumbling, he lled Jon’s bowl from the kettle.
The stew was thick with barley, carrot, and onion, with here and
there a ragged shred of salt beef, softened in the cooking.
“What is it you smell, Dywen?” asked Grenn.
The forester sucked on his spoon a moment. He had taken out his
teeth. His face was leathery and wrinkled, his hands gnarled as old
roots. “Seems to me like it smells … well … cold.”
“Your head’s as wooden as your teeth,” Hake told him. “There’s
no smell to cold.”

There is, thought Jon, remembering the night in the Lord
Commander’s chambers. It smells like death. Suddenly he was not
hungry anymore. He gave his stew to Grenn, who looked in need of
an extra supper to warm him against the night.
The wind was blowing briskly when he left. By morning, frost
would cover the ground, and the tent ropes would be sti and
frozen. A few ngers of spiced wine sloshed in the bottom of the
kettle. Jon fed fresh wood to the re and put the kettle over the
ames to reheat. He exed his ngers as he waited, squeezing and
spreading until the hand tingled. The rst watch had taken up their
stations around the perimeter of the camp. Torches ickered all
along the ringwall. The night was moonless, but a thousand stars
shone overhead.
A sound rose out of the darkness, faint and distant, but
unmistakable: the howling of wolves. Their voices rose and fell, a
chilly song, and lonely. It made the hairs rise along the back of his
neck. Across the re, a pair of red eyes regarded him from the
shadows. The light of the ames made them glow.
“Ghost,” Jon breathed, surprised. “So you came inside after all,
eh?” The white wolf often hunted all night; he had not expected to
see him again till daybreak. “Was the hunting so bad?” he asked.
“Here. To me, Ghost.”
The direwolf circled the re, sni ng Jon, sni ng the wind, never
still. It did not seem as if he were after meat right now. When the
dead came walking, Ghost knew. He woke me, warned me. Alarmed,
he got to his feet. “Is something out there? Ghost, do you have a
scent?” Dywen said he smelled cold.
The direwolf loped o , stopped, looked back. He wants me to
follow. Pulling up the hood of his cloak, Jon walked away from the
tents, away from the warmth of his re, past the lines of shaggy
little garrons. One of the horses whickered nervously when Ghost
padded by. Jon soothed him with a word and paused to stroke his
muzzle. He could hear the wind whistling through cracks in the
rocks as they neared the ringwall. A voice called out a challenge.
Jon stepped into the torchlight. “I need to fetch water for the Lord
Commander.”

“Go on, then,” the guard said. “Be quick about it.” Huddled
beneath his black cloak, with his hood drawn up against the wind,
the man never even looked to see if he had a bucket.
Jon slipped sideways between two sharpened stakes while Ghost
slid beneath them. A torch had been thrust down into a crevice, its
ames ying pale orange banners when the gusts came. He snatched
it up as he squeezed through the gap between the stones. Ghost
went racing down the hill. Jon followed more slowly, the torch
thrust out before him as he made his descent. The camp sounds
faded behind him. The night was black, the slope steep, stony, and
uneven. A moment’s inattention would be a sure way to break an
ankle … or his neck. What am I doing? he asked himself as he picked
his way down.
The trees stood beneath him, warriors armored in bark and leaf,
deployed in their silent ranks awaiting the command to storm the
hill. Black, they seemed … it was only when his torchlight brushed
against them that Jon glimpsed a ash of green. Faintly, he heard
the sound of water owing over rocks. Ghost vanished in the
underbrush. Jon struggled after him, listening to the call of the
brook, to the leaves sighing in the wind. Branches clutched at his
cloak, while overhead thick limbs twined together and shut out the
stars.
He found Ghost lapping from the stream. “Ghost,” he called, “to
me. Now.” When the direwolf raised his head, his eyes glowed red
and baleful, and water streamed down from his jaws like slaver.
There was something erce and terrible about him in that instant.
And then he was o , bounding past Jon, racing through the trees.
“Ghost, no, stay,” he shouted, but the wolf paid no heed. The lean
white shape was swallowed by the dark, and Jon had only two
choices—to climb the hill again, alone, or to follow.
He followed, angry, holding the torch out low so he could see the
rocks that threatened to trip him with every step, the thick roots
that seemed to grab at his feet, the holes where a man could twist
an ankle. Every few feet he called again for Ghost, but the night
wind was swirling amongst the trees and it drank the words. This is
madness, he thought as he plunged deeper into the trees. He was

about to turn back when he glimpsed a ash of white o ahead and
to the right, back toward the hill. He jogged after it, cursing under
his breath.
A quarter way around the Fist he chased the wolf before he lost
him again. Finally he stopped to catch his breath amidst the scrub,
thorns, and tumbled rocks at the base of the hill. Beyond the
torchlight, the dark pressed close.
A soft scrabbling noise made him turn. Jon moved toward the
sound, stepping carefully among boulders and thornbushes. Behind
a fallen tree, he came on Ghost again. The direwolf was digging
furiously, kicking up dirt.
“What have you found?” Jon lowered the torch, revealing a
rounded mound of soft earth. A grave, he thought. But whose?
He knelt, jammed the torch into the ground beside him. The soil
was loose, sandy. Jon pulled it out by the stful. There were no
stones, no roots. Whatever was here had been put here recently.
Two feet down, his ngers touched cloth. He had been expecting a
corpse, fearing a corpse, but this was something else. He pushed
against the fabric and felt small, hard shapes beneath, unyielding.
There was no smell, no sign of graveworms. Ghost backed o and
sat on his haunches, watching.
Jon brushed the loose soil away to reveal a rounded bundle
perhaps two feet across. He jammed his ngers down around the
edges and worked it loose. When he pulled it free, whatever was
inside shifted and clinked. Treasure, he thought, but the shapes were
wrong to be coins, and the sound was wrong for metal.
A length of frayed rope bound the bundle together. Jon
unsheathed his dagger and cut it, groped for the edges of the cloth,
and pulled. The bundle turned, and its contents spilled out onto the
ground, glittering dark and bright. He saw a dozen knives, leafshaped spearheads, numerous arrowheads. Jon picked up a dagger
blade, featherlight and shiny black, hiltless. Torchlight ran along its
edge, a thin orange line that spoke of razor sharpness. Dragonglass.
What the maesters call obsidian. Had Ghost uncovered some ancient
cache of the children of the forest, buried here for thousands of
years? The Fist of the First Men was an old place, only …

Beneath the dragonglass was an old warhorn, made from an
auroch’s horn and banded in bronze. Jon shook the dirt from inside
it, and a stream of arrowheads fell out. He let them fall, and pulled
up a corner of the cloth the weapons had been wrapped in, rubbing
it between his ngers. Good wool, thick, a double weave, damp but
not rotted. It could not have been long in the ground. And it was
dark. He seized a handful and pulled it close to the torch. Not dark.
Black.
Even before Jon stood and shook it out, he knew what he had:
the black cloak of a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch.

BRAN

Alebelly found him in the forge, working the bellows for Mikken.

“Maester wants you in the turret, m’lord prince. There’s been a bird
from the king.”
“From Robb?” Excited, Bran did not wait for Hodor, but let
Alebelly carry him up the steps. He was a big man, though not so
big as Hodor and nowhere near as strong. By the time they reached
the maester’s turret he was red-faced and pu ng. Rickon was there
before them, and both Walder Freys as well.
Maester Luwin sent Alebelly away and closed his door. “My
lords,” he said gravely, “we have had a message from His Grace,
with both good news and ill. He has won a great victory in the
west, shattering a Lannister army at a place named Oxcross, and has
taken several castles as well. He writes us from Ashemark, formerly
the stronghold of House Marbrand.”
Rickon tugged at the maester’s robe. “Is Robb coming home?”
“Not just yet, I fear. There are battles yet to ght.”
“Was it Lord Tywin he defeated?” asked Bran.
“No,” said the maester. “Ser Sta ord Lannister commanded the
enemy host. He was slain in the battle.”
Bran had never even heard of Ser Sta ord Lannister. He found
himself agreeing with Big Walder when he said, “Lord Tywin is the
only one who matters.”
“Tell Robb I want him to come home,” said Rickon. “He can bring
his wolf home too, and Mother and Father.” Though he knew Lord

Eddard was dead, sometimes Rickon forgot … willfully, Bran
suspected. His little brother was stubborn as only a boy of four can
be.
Bran was glad for Robb’s victory, but disquieted as well. He
remembered what Osha had said the day that his brother had led his
army out of Winterfell. He’s marching the wrong way, the wildling
woman had insisted.
“Sadly, no victory is without cost.” Maester Luwin turned to the
Walders. “My lords, your uncle Ser Stevron Frey was among those
who lost their lives at Oxcross. He took a wound in the battle, Robb
writes. It was not thought to be serious, but three days later he died
in his tent, asleep.”
Big Walder shrugged. “He was very old. Five-and-sixty, I think.
Too old for battles. He was always saying he was tired.”
Little Walder hooted. “Tired of waiting for our grandfather to die,
you mean. Does this mean Ser Emmon’s the heir now?”
“Don’t be stupid,” his cousin said. “The sons of the rst son come
before the second son. Ser Ryman is next in line, and then Edwyn
and Black Walder and Petyr Pimple. And then Aegon and all his
sons.”
“Ryman is old too,” said Little Walder. “Past forty, I bet. And he
has a bad belly. Do you think he’ll be lord?”
“I’ll be lord. I don’t care if he is.”
Maester Luwin cut in sharply. “You ought to be ashamed of such
talk, my lords. Where is your grief? Your uncle is dead.”
“Yes,” said Little Walder. “We’re very sad.”
They weren’t, though. Bran got a sick feeling in his belly. They
like the taste of this dish better than I do. He asked Maester Luwin to
be excused.
“Very well.” The maester rang for help. Hodor must have been
busy in the stables. It was Osha who came. She was stronger than
Alebelly, though, and had no trouble lifting Bran in her arms and
carrying him down the steps.
“Osha,” Bran asked as they crossed the yard. “Do you know the
way north? To the Wall and … and even past?”

“The way’s easy. Look for the Ice Dragon, and chase the blue star
in the rider’s eye.” She backed through a door and started up the
winding steps.
“And there are still giants there, and … the rest … the Others,
and the children of the forest too?”
“The giants I’ve seen, the children I’ve heard tell of, and the
white walkers … why do you want to know?”
“Did you ever see a three-eyed crow?”
“No.” She laughed. “And I can’t say I’d want to.” Osha kicked
open the door to his bedchamber and set him in his window seat,
where he could watch the yard below.
It seemed only a few heartbeats after she took her leave that the
door opened again, and Jojen Reed entered unbidden, with his sister
Meera behind him. “You heard about the bird?” Bran asked. The
other boy nodded. “It wasn’t a supper like you said. It was a letter
from Robb, and we didn’t eat it, but—”
“The green dreams take strange shapes sometimes,” Jojen
admitted. “The truth of them is not always easy to understand.”
“Tell me the bad thing you dreamed,” Bran said. “The bad thing
that is coming to Winterfell.”
“Does my lord prince believe me now? Will he trust my words,
no matter how queer they sound in his ears?”
Bran nodded.
“It is the sea that comes.”
“The sea?”
“I dreamed that the sea was lapping all around Winterfell. I saw
black waves crashing against the gates and towers, and then the salt
water came owing over the walls and lled the castle. Drowned
men were oating in the yard. When I rst dreamed the dream,
back at Greywater, I didn’t know their faces, but now I do. That
Alebelly is one, the guard who called our names at the feast. Your
septon’s another. Your smith as well.”
“Mikken?” Bran was as confused as he was dismayed. “But the sea
is hundreds and hundreds of leagues away, and Winterfell’s walls
are so high the water couldn’t get in even if it did come.”

“In the dark of night the salt sea will ow over these walls,” said
Jojen. “I saw the dead, bloated and drowned.”
“We have to tell them,” Bran said. “Alebelly and Mikken, and
Septon Chayle. Tell them not to drown.”
“It will not save them,” replied the boy in green.
Meera came to the window seat and put a hand on his shoulder.
“They will not believe, Bran. No more than you did.”
Jojen sat on Bran’s bed. “Tell me what you dream.”
He was scared, even then, but he had sworn to trust them, and a
Stark of Winterfell keeps his sworn word. “There’s di erent kinds,”
he said slowly. “There’s the wolf dreams, those aren’t so bad as the
others. I run and hunt and kill squirrels. And there’s dreams where
the crow comes and tells me to y. Sometimes the tree is in those
dreams too, calling my name. That frightens me. But the worst
dreams are when I fall.” He looked down into the yard, feeling
miserable. “I never used to fall before. When I climbed. I went
everyplace, up on the roofs and along the walls, I used to feed the
crows in the Burned Tower. Mother was afraid that I would fall but
I knew I never would. Only I did, and now when I sleep I fall all the
time.”
Meera gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Is that all?”
“I guess.”
“Warg,” said Jojen Reed.
Bran looked at him, his eyes wide. “What?”
“Warg. Shapechanger. Beastling. That is what they will call you,
if they should ever hear of your wolf dreams.”
The names made him afraid again. “Who will call me?”
“Your own folk. In fear. Some will hate you if they know what
you are. Some will even try to kill you.”
Old Nan told scary stories of beastlings and shapechangers
sometimes. In the stories they were always evil. “I’m not like that,”
Bran said. “I’m not. It’s only dreams.”
“The wolf dreams are no true dreams. You have your eye closed
tight whenever you’re awake, but as you drift o it utters open
and your soul seeks out its other half. The power is strong in you.”
“I don’t want it. I want to be a knight.”

“A knight is what you want. A warg is what you are. You can’t
change that, Bran, you can’t deny it or push it away. You are the
winged wolf, but you will never y.” Jojen got up and walked to
the window. “Unless you open your eye.” He put two ngers
together and poked Bran in the forehead, hard.
When he raised his hand to the spot, Bran felt only the smooth
unbroken skin. There was no eye, not even a closed one. “How can I
open it if it’s not there?”
“You will never nd the eye with your ngers, Bran. You must
search with your heart.” Jojen studied Bran’s face with those
strange green eyes. “Or are you afraid?”
“Maester Luwin says there’s nothing in dreams that a man need
fear.”
“There is,” said Jojen.
“What?”
“The past. The future. The truth.”
They left him more muddled than ever. When he was alone, Bran
tried to open his third eye, but he didn’t know how. No matter how
he wrinkled his forehead and poked at it, he couldn’t see any
di erent than he’d done before. In the days that followed, he tried
to warn others about what Jojen had seen, but it didn’t go as he
wanted. Mikken thought it was funny. “The sea, is it? Happens I
always wanted to see the sea. Never got where I could go to it,
though. So now it’s coming to me, is it? The gods are good, to take
such trouble for a poor smith.”
“The gods will take me when they see t,” Septon Chayle said
quietly, “though I scarcely think it likely that I’ll drown, Bran. I
grew up on the banks of the White Knife, you know. I’m quite the
strong swimmer.”
Alebelly was the only one who paid the warning any heed. He
went to talk to Jojen himself, and afterward stopped bathing and
refused to go near the well. Finally he stank so bad that six of the
other guards threw him into a tub of scalding water and scrubbed
him raw while he screamed that they were going to drown him like
the frogboy had said. Thereafter he scowled whenever he saw Bran
or Jojen about the castle, and muttered under his breath.

It was a few days after Alebelly’s bath that Ser Rodrik returned to
Winterfell with his prisoner, a eshy young man with fat moist lips
and long hair who smelled like a privy, even worse than Alebelly
had. “Reek, he’s called,” Hayhead said when Bran asked who it was.
“I never heard his true name. He served the Bastard of Bolton and
helped him murder Lady Hornwood, they say.”
The Bastard himself was dead, Bran learned that evening over
supper. Ser Rodrik’s men had caught him on Hornwood land doing
something horrible (Bran wasn’t quite sure what, but it seemed to
be something you did without your clothes) and shot him down
with arrows as he tried to ride away. They came too late for poor
Lady Hornwood, though. After their wedding, the Bastard had
locked her in a tower and neglected to feed her. Bran had heard
men saying that when Ser Rodrik had smashed down the door he
found her with her mouth all bloody and her ngers chewed o .
“The monster has tied us a thorny knot,” the old knight told
Maester Luwin. “Like it or no, Lady Hornwood was his wife. He
made her say the vows before both septon and heart tree, and
bedded her that very night before witnesses. She signed a will
naming him as heir and xed her seal to it.”
“Vows made at sword point are not valid,” the maester argued.
“Roose Bolton may not agree. Not with land at issue.” Ser Rodrik
looked unhappy. “Would that I could take this serving man’s head
o as well, he’s as bad as his master. But I fear I must keep him
alive until Robb returns from his wars. He is the only witness to the
worst of the Bastard’s crimes. Perhaps when Lord Bolton hears his
tale, he will abandon his claim, but meantime we have Manderly
knights and Dreadfort men killing one another in Hornwood forests,
and I lack the strength to stop them.” The old knight turned in his
seat and gave Bran a stern look. “And what have you been about
while I’ve been away, my lord prince? Commanding our guardsmen
not to wash? Do you want them smelling like this Reek, is that it?”
“The sea is coming here,” Bran said. “Jojen saw it in a green
dream. Alebelly is going to drown.”
Maester Luwin tugged at his chain collar. “The Reed boy believes
he sees the future in his dreams, Ser Rodrik. I’ve spoken to Bran

about the uncertainty of such prophecies, but if truth be told, there
is trouble along the Stony Shore. Raiders in longships, plundering
shing villages. Raping and burning. Leobald Tallhart has sent his
nephew Benfred to deal with them, but I expect they’ll take to their
ships and ee at the rst sight of armed men.”
“Aye, and strike somewhere else. The Others take all such
cowards. They would never dare, no more than the Bastard of
Bolton, if our main strength were not a thousand leagues south.” Ser
Rodrik looked at Bran. “What else did the lad tell you?”
“He said the water would ow over our walls. He saw Alebelly
drowned, and Mikken and Septon Chayle too.”
Ser Rodrik frowned. “Well, should it happen that I need to ride
against these raiders myself, I shan’t take Alebelly, then. He didn’t
see me drowned, did he? No? Good.”
It heartened Bran to hear that. Maybe they won’t drown, then, he
thought. If they stay away from the sea.
Meera thought so too, later that night when she and Jojen met
Bran in his room to play a three-sided game of tiles, but her brother
shook his head. “The things I see in green dreams can’t be changed.”
That made his sister angry. “Why would the gods send a warning
if we can’t heed it and change what’s to come?”
“I don’t know,” Jojen said sadly.
“If you were Alebelly, you’d probably jump into the well to have
done with it! He should ght, and Bran should too.”
“Me?” Bran felt suddenly afraid. “What should I ght? Am I going
to drown too?”
Meera looked at him guiltily. “I shouldn’t have said …”
He could tell that she was hiding something. “Did you see me in a
green dream?” he asked Jojen nervously. “Was I drowned?”
“Not drowned.” Jojen spoke as if every word pained him. “I
dreamed of the man who came today, the one they call Reek. You
and your brother lay dead at his feet, and he was skinning o your
faces with a long red blade.”
Meera rose to her feet. “If I went to the dungeon, I could drive a
spear right through his heart. How could he murder Bran if he was
dead?”

“The gaolers will stop you,” Jojen said. “The guards. And if you
tell them why you want him dead, they’ll never believe.”
“I have guards too,” Bran reminded them. “Alebelly and Poxy
Tym and Hayhead and the rest.”
Jojen’s mossy eyes were full of pity. “They won’t be able to stop
him, Bran. I couldn’t see why, but I saw the end of it. I saw you and
Rickon in your crypts, down in the dark with all the dead kings and
their stone wolves.”
No, Bran thought. No. “If I went away … to Greywater, or to the
crow, someplace far where they couldn’t nd me …”
“It will not matter. The dream was green, Bran, and the green
dreams do not lie.”

TYRION

Varys stood over the brazier, warming his soft hands. “It would

appear Renly was murdered most fearfully in the very midst of his
army. His throat was opened from ear to ear by a blade that passed
through steel and bone as if they were soft cheese.”
“Murdered by whose hand?” Cersei demanded.
“Have you ever considered that too many answers are the same
as no answer at all? My informers are not always as highly placed
as we might like. When a king dies, fancies sprout like mushrooms
in the dark. A groom says that Renly was slain by a knight of his
own Rainbow Guard. A washerwoman claims Stannis stole through
the heart of his brother’s army with his magic sword. Several menat-arms believe a woman did the fell deed, but cannot agree on
which woman. A maid that Renly had spurned, claims one. A camp
follower brought in to serve his pleasure on the eve of battle, says a
second. The third ventures that it might have been the Lady Catelyn
Stark.”
The queen was not pleased. “Must you waste our time with every
rumor the fools care to tell?”
“You pay me well for these rumors, my gracious queen.”
“We pay you for the truth, Lord Varys. Remember that, or this
small council may grow smaller still.”
Varys tittered nervously. “You and your noble brother will leave
His Grace with no council at all if you continue.”

“I daresay, the realm could survive a few less councillors,” said
Little nger with a smile.
“Dear dear Petyr,” said Varys, “are you not concerned that yours
might be the next name on the Hand’s little list?”
“Before you, Varys? I should never dream of it.”
“Mayhaps we will be brothers on the Wall together, you and I.”
Varys giggled again.
“Sooner than you’d like, if the next words out of your mouth are
not something useful, eunuch.” From the look of her eyes, Cersei
was prepared to castrate Varys all over again.
“Might this be some ruse?” asked Little nger.
“If so, it is a ruse of surpassing cleverness,” said Varys. “It has
certainly hoodwinked me.”
Tyrion had heard enough. “Jo will be so disappointed,” he said.
“He was saving such a nice spike for Renly’s head. But whoever did
the deed, we must assume Stannis was behind it. The gain is clearly
his.” He did not like this news; he had counted on the brothers
Baratheon decimating each other in bloody battle. He could feel his
elbow throbbing where the morningstar had laid it open. It did that
sometimes in the damp. He squeezed it uselessly in his hand and
asked, “What of Renly’s host?”
“The greater part of his foot remains at Bitterbridge.” Varys
abandoned the brazier to take his seat at the table. “Most of the
lords who rode with Lord Renly to Storm’s End have gone over
banner-and-blade to Stannis, with all their chivalry.”
“Led by the Florents, I’d wager,” said Little nger.
Varys gave him a simpering smile. “You would win, my lord.
Lord Alester was indeed the rst to bend the knee. Many others
followed.”
“Many,” Tyrion said pointedly, “but not all?”
“Not all,” agreed the eunuch. “Not Loras Tyrell, nor Randyll
Tarly, nor Mathis Rowan. And Storm’s End itself has not yielded.
Ser Cortnay Penrose holds the castle in Renly’s name, and will not
believe his liege is dead. He demands to see the mortal remains
before he opens his gates, but it seems that Renly’s corpse has
unaccountably vanished. Carried away, most likely. A fth of

Renly’s knights departed with Ser Loras rather than bend the knee
to Stannis. It’s said the Knight of Flowers went mad when he saw
his king’s body, and slew three of Renly’s guards in his wrath,
among them Emmon Cuy and Robar Royce.”
A pity he stopped at three, thought Tyrion.
“Ser Loras is likely making for Bitterbridge,” Varys went on. “His
sister is there, Renly’s queen, as well as a great many soldiers who
suddenly nd themselves kingless. Which side will they take now?
A ticklish question. Many serve the lords who remained at Storm’s
End, and those lords now belong to Stannis.”
Tyrion leaned forward. “There is a chance here, it seems to me.
Win Loras Tyrell to our cause and Lord Mace Tyrell and his
bannermen might join us as well. They may have sworn their
swords to Stannis for the moment, yet they cannot love the man, or
they would have been his from the start.”
“Is their love for us any greater?” asked Cersei.
“Scarcely,” said Tyrion. “They loved Renly, clearly, but Renly is
slain. Perhaps we can give them good and su cient reasons to
prefer Jo rey to Stannis … if we move quickly.”
“What sort of reasons do you mean to give them?”
“Gold reasons,” Little nger suggested at once.
Varys made a tsking sound. “Sweet Petyr, surely you do not mean
to suggest that these puissant lords and noble knights could be
bought like so many chickens in the market.”
“Have you been to our markets of late, Lord Varys?” asked
Little nger. “You’d nd it easier to buy a lord than a chicken, I
daresay. Of course, lords cluck prouder than chickens, and take it ill
if you o er them coin like a tradesman, but they are seldom adverse
to taking gifts … honors, lands, castles …”
“Bribes might sway some of the lesser lords,” Tyrion said, “but
never Highgarden.”
“True,” Little nger admitted. “The Knight of Flowers is the key
there. Mace Tyrell has two older sons, but Loras has always been
his favorite. Win him, and Highgarden will be yours.”
Yes, Tyrion thought. “It seems to me we should take a lesson
from the late Lord Renly. We can win the Tyrell alliance as he did.

With a marriage.”
Varys understood the quickest. “You think to wed King Jo rey to
Margaery Tyrell.”
“I do.” Renly’s young queen was no more than fteen, sixteen, he
seemed to recall … older than Jo rey, but a few years were
nothing, it was so neat and sweet he could taste it.
“Jo rey is betrothed to Sansa Stark,” Cersei objected.
“Marriage contracts can be broken. What advantage is there in
wedding the king to the daughter of a dead traitor?”
Little nger spoke up. “You might point out to His Grace that the
Tyrells are much wealthier than the Starks, and that Margaery is
said to be lovely … and beddable besides.”
“Yes,” said Tyrion, “Jo ought to like that well enough.”
“My son is too young to care about such things.”
“You think so?” asked Tyrion. “He’s thirteen, Cersei. The same
age at which I married.”
“You shamed us all with that sorry episode. Jo rey is made of
ner stu .”
“So ne that he had Ser Boros rip o Sansa’s gown.”
“He was angry with the girl.”
“He was angry with that cook’s boy who spilled the soup last
night as well, but he didn’t strip him naked.”
“This was not a matter of some spilled soup—”
No, it was a matter of some pretty teats. After that business in the
yard, Tyrion had spoken with Varys about how they might arrange
for Jo rey to visit Chataya’s. A taste of honey might sweeten the
boy, he hoped. He might even be grateful, gods forbid, and Tyrion
could do with a shade more gratitude from his sovereign. It would
need to be done secretly, of course. The tricky bit would be parting
him from the Hound. “The dog is never far from his master’s heels,”
he’d observed to Varys, “but all men sleep. And some gamble and
whore and visit winesinks as well.”
“The Hound does all these things, if that is your question.”
“No,” said Tyrion. “My question is when.”
Varys had laid a nger on his cheek, smiling enigmatically. “My
lord, a suspicious man might think you wished to nd a time when

Sandor Clegane was not protecting King Jo rey, the better to do
the boy some harm.”
“Surely you know me better than that, Lord Varys,” Tyrion said.
“Why, all I want is for Jo rey to love me.”
The eunuch had promised to look into the matter. The war made
its own demands, though; Jo rey’s initiation into manhood would
need to wait. “Doubtless you know your son better than I do,” he
made himself tell Cersei, “but regardless, there’s still much to be
said for a Tyrell marriage. It may be the only way that Jo rey lives
long enough to reach his wedding night.”
Little nger agreed. “The Stark girl brings Jo rey nothing but her
body, sweet as that may be. Margaery Tyrell brings fty thousand
swords and all the strength of Highgarden.”
“Indeed.” Varys laid a soft hand on the queen’s sleeve. “You have
a mother’s heart, and I know His Grace loves his little sweetling.
Yet kings must learn to put the needs of the realm before their own
desires. I say this o er must be made.”
The queen pulled free of the eunuch’s touch. “You would not
speak so if you were women. Say what you will, my lords, but
Jo rey is too proud to settle for Renly’s leavings. He will never
consent.”
Tyrion shrugged. “When the king comes of age in three years, he
may give or withhold his consent as he pleases. Until then, you are
his regent and I am his Hand, and he will marry whomever we tell
him to marry. Leavings or no.”
Cersei’s quiver was empty. “Make your o er then, but gods save
you all if Jo does not like this girl.”
“I’m so pleased we can agree,” Tyrion said. “Now, which of us
shall go to Bitterbridge? We must reach Ser Loras with our o er
before his blood can cool.”
“You mean to send one of the council?”
“I can scarcely expect the Knight of Flowers to treat with Bronn
or Shagga, can I? The Tyrells are proud.”
His sister wasted no time trying to twist the situation to her
advantage. “Ser Jacelyn Bywater is nobly born. Send him.”

Tyrion shook his head. “We need someone who can do more than
repeat our words and fetch back a reply. Our envoy must speak for
king and council and settle the matter quickly.”
“The Hand speaks with the king’s voice.” Candlelight gleamed
green as wild re in Cersei’s eyes. “If we send you, Tyrion, it will be
as if Jo rey went himself. And who better? You wield words as
skillfully as Jaime wields a sword.”
Are you that eager to get me out of the city, Cersei? “You are too
kind, sister, but it seems to me that a boy’s mother is better tted to
arrange his marriage than any uncle. And you have a gift for
winning friends that I could never hope to match.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Jo needs me at his side.”
“Your Grace, my lord Hand,” said Little nger, “the king needs
both of you here. Let me go in your stead.”
“You?” What gain does he see in this? Tyrion wondered.
“I am of the king’s council, yet not the king’s blood, so I would
make a poor hostage. I knew Ser Loras passing well when he was
here at court, and gave him no cause to mislike me. Mace Tyrell
bears me no enmity that I know of, and I atter myself that I am
not unskilled in negotiation.”
He has us. Tyrion did not trust Petyr Baelish, nor did he want the
man out of his sight, yet what other choice was left him? It must be
Little nger or Tyrion himself, and he knew full well that if he left
King’s Landing for any length of time, all that he had managed to
accomplish would be undone. “There is ghting between here and
Bitterbridge,” he said cautiously. “And you can be past certain that
Lord Stannis will be dispatching his own shepherds to gather in his
brother’s wayward lambs.”
“I’ve never been frightened of shepherds. It’s the sheep who
trouble me. Still, I suppose an escort might be in order.”
“I can spare a hundred gold cloaks,” Tyrion said.
“Five hundred.”
“Three hundred.”
“And forty more—twenty knights with as many squires. If I arrive
without a knightly tail, the Tyrells will think me of small account.”
That was true enough. “Agreed.”

“I’ll include Horror and Slobber in my party, and send them on to
their lord father afterward. A gesture of goodwill. We need Paxter
Redwyne, he’s Mace Tyrell’s oldest friend, and a great power in his
own right.”
“And a traitor,” the queen said, balking. “The Arbor would have
declared for Renly with all the rest, except that Redwyne knew full
well his whelps would su er for it.”
“Renly is dead, Your Grace,” Little nger pointed out, “and
neither Stannis nor Lord Paxter will have forgotten how Redwyne
galleys closed the sea during the siege of Storm’s End. Restore the
twins and perchance we may win Redwyne’s love.”
Cersei remained unconvinced. “The Others can keep his love, I
want his swords and sails. Holding tight to those twins is the best
way to make certain that we’ll have them.”
Tyrion had the answer. “Then let us send Ser Hobber back to the
Arbor and keep Ser Horas here. Lord Paxter ought to be clever
enough to riddle out the meaning of that, I should think.”
The suggestion was carried without protest, but Little nger was
not done. “We’ll want horses. Swift and strong. The ghting will
make remounts hard to come by. A goodly supply of gold will also
be needed, for those gifts we spoke of earlier.”
“Take as much as you require. If the city falls, Stannis will steal it
all anyway.”
“I’ll want my commission in writing. A document that will leave
Mace Tyrell in no doubt as to my authority, granting me full power
to treat with him concerning this match and any other arrangements
that might be required, and to make binding pledges in the king’s
name. It should be signed by Jo rey and every member of this
council, and bear all our seals.”
Tyrion shifted uncomfortably. “Done. Will that be all? I remind
you, there’s a long road between here and Bitterbridge.”
“I’ll be riding it before dawn breaks.” Little nger rose. “I trust
that on my return, the king will see that I am suitably rewarded for
my valiant e orts in his cause?”
Varys giggled. “Jo rey is such a grateful sovereign, I’m certain
you will have no cause to complain, my good brave lord.”

The queen was more direct. “What do you want, Petyr?”
Little nger glanced at Tyrion with a sly smile. “I shall need to
give that some consideration. No doubt I’ll think of something.” He
sketched an airy bow and took his leave, as casual as if he were o
to one of his brothels.
Tyrion glanced out the window. The fog was so thick that he
could not even see the curtain wall across the yard. A few dim lights
shone indistinct through that greyness. A foul day for travel, he
thought. He did not envy Petyr Baelish. “We had best see to
drawing up those documents. Lord Varys, send for parchment and
quill. And someone will need to wake Jo rey.”
It was still grey and dark when the meeting nally ended. Varys
scurried o alone, his soft slippers whisking along the oor. The
Lannisters lingered a moment by the door. “How comes your chain,
brother?” the queen asked as Ser Preston fastened a vair-lined clothof-silver cloak about her shoulders.
“Link by link, it grows longer. We should thank the gods that Ser
Cortnay Penrose is as stubborn as he is. Stannis will never march
north with Storm’s End untaken in his rear.”
“Tyrion, I know we do not always agree on policy, but it seems to
me that I was wrong about you. You are not so big a fool as I
imagined. In truth, I realize now that you have been a great help.
For that I thank you. You must forgive me if I have spoken to you
harshly in the past.”
“Must I?” He gave her a shrug, a smile. “Sweet sister, you have
said nothing that requires forgiveness.”
“Today, you mean?” They both laughed … and Cersei leaned over
and planted a quick, soft kiss on his brow.
Too astonished for words, Tyrion could only watch her stride o
down the hall, Ser Preston at her side. “Have I lost my wits, or did
my sister just kiss me?” he asked Bronn when she was gone.
“Was it so sweet?”
“It was … unanticipated.” Cersei had been behaving queerly of
late. Tyrion found it very unsettling. “I am trying to recall the last
time she kissed me. I could not have been more than six or seven.
Jaime had dared her to do it.”

“The woman’s nally taken note of your charms.”
“No,” Tyrion said. “No, the woman is hatching something. Best
nd out what, Bronn. You know I hate surprises.”

THEON

Theon wiped the spittle o

his cheek with the back of his hand.
“Robb will gut you, Greyjoy,” Benfred Tallheart screamed. “He’ll
feed your turncloak’s heart to his wolf, you piece of sheep dung.”
Aeron Damphair’s voice cut through the insults like a sword
through cheese. “Now you must kill him.”
“I have questions for him rst,” said Theon.
“Fuck your questions.” Benfred hung bleeding and helpless
between Stygg and Werlag. “You’ll choke on them before you get
any answers from me, craven. Turncloak.”
Uncle Aeron was relentless. “When he spits on you, he spits on all
of us. He spits on the Drowned God. He must die.”
“My father gave me the command here, Uncle.”
“And sent me to counsel you.”
And to watch me. Theon dare not push matters too far with his
uncle. The command was his, yes, but his men had a faith in the
Drowned God that they did not have in him, and they were terri ed
of Aeron Damphair. I cannot fault them for that.
“You’ll lose your head for this, Greyjoy. The crows will eat the
jelly of your eyes.” Benfred tried to spit again, but only managed a
little blood. “The Others bugger your wet god.”
Tallhart, you’ve spit away your life, Theon thought. “Stygg, silence
him,” he said.
They forced Benfred to his knees. Werlag tore the rabbitskin o
his belt and jammed it between his teeth to stop his shouting. Stygg

unlimbered his axe.
“No,” Aeron Damphair declared. “He must be given to the god.
The old way.”
What does it matter? Dead is dead. “Take him, then.”
“You will come as well. You command here. The o ering should
come from you.”
That was more than Theon could stomach. “You are the priest,
Uncle, I leave the god to you. Do me the same kindness and leave
the battles to me.” He waved his hand, and Werlag and Stygg began
to drag their captive o toward the shore. Aeron Damphair gave his
nephew a reproachful look, then followed. Down to the pebbled
beach they would go, to drown Benfred Tallhart in salt water. The
old way.
Perhaps it’s a kindness, Theon told himself as he stalked o in the
other direction. Stygg was hardly the most expert of headsmen, and
Benfred had a neck thick as a boar’s, heavy with muscle and fat. I
used to mock him for it, just to see how angry I could make him, he
remembered. That had been, what, three years past? When Ned
Stark had ridden to Torrhen’s Square to see Ser Helman, Theon had
accompanied him and spent a fortnight in Benfred’s company.
He could hear the rough noises of victory from the crook in the
road where the battle had been fought … if you’d go so far as to
call it a battle. More like slaughtering sheep, if truth be told. Sheep
eeced in steel, but sheep nonetheless.
Climbing a jumble of stone, Theon looked down on the dead men
and dying horses. The horses had deserved better. Tymor and his
brothers had gathered up what mounts had come through the ght
unhurt, while Urzen and Black Lorren silenced the animals too badly
wounded to be saved. The rest of his men were looting the corpses.
Gevin Harlaw knelt on a dead man’s chest, sawing o his nger to
get at a ring. Paying the iron price. My lord father would approve.
Theon thought of seeking out the bodies of the two men he’d slain
himself to see if they had any jewelry worth the taking, but the
notion left a bitter taste in his mouth. He could imagine what
Eddard Stark would have said. Yet that thought made him angry
too. Stark is dead and rotting, and naught to me, he reminded himself.

Old Botley, who was called Fishwhiskers, sat scowling by his pile
of plunder while his three sons added to it. One of them was in a
shoving match with a fat man named Todric, who was reeling
among the slain with a horn of ale in one hand and an axe in the
other, clad in a cloak of white foxfur only slightly stained by the
blood of its previous owner. Drunk, Theon decided, watching him
bellow. It was said that the ironmen of old had oft been blooddrunk in battle, so berserk that they felt no pain and feared no foe,
but this was a common ale-drunk.
“Wex, my bow and quiver.” The boy ran and fetched them. Theon
bent the bow and slipped the string into its notches as Todric
knocked down the Botley boy and ung ale into his eyes.
Fishwhiskers leapt up cursing, but Theon was quicker. He drew on
the hand that clutched the drinking horn, guring to give them a
shot to talk about, but Todric spoiled it by lurching to one side just
as he loosed. The arrow took him through the belly.
The looters stopped to gape. Theon lowered his bow. “No
drunkards, I said, and no squabbles over plunder.” On his knees,
Todric was dying noisily. “Botley, silence him.” Fishwhiskers and
his sons were quick to obey. They slit Todric’s throat as he kicked
feebly, and were stripping him of cloak and rings and weapons
before he was even dead.
Now they know I mean what I say. Lord Balon might have given
him the command, but Theon knew that some of his men saw only a
soft boy from the green lands when they looked at him. “Anyone
else have a thirst?” No one replied. “Good.” He kicked at Benfred’s
fallen banner, clutched in the dead hand of the squire who’d borne
it. A rabbitskin had been tied below the ag. Why rabbitskins? he
had meant to ask, but being spat on had made him forget his
questions. He tossed his bow back to Wex and strode o ,
remembering how elated he’d felt after the Whispering Wood, and
wondering why this did not taste as sweet. Tallhart, you bloody
overproud fool, you never even sent out a scout.
They’d been joking and even singing as they’d come on, the three
trees of Tallhart streaming above them while rabbitskins apped
stupidly from the points of their lances. The archers concealed

behind the gorse had spoiled the song with a rain of arrows, and
Theon himself had led his men-at-arms out to nish the butcher’s
work with dagger, axe, and warhammer. He had ordered their
leader spared for questioning.
Only he had not expected it to be Benfred Tallhart.
His limp body was being dragged from the surf when Theon
returned to his Sea Bitch. The masts of his longships stood outlined
against the sky along the pebbled beach. Of the shing village,
nothing remained but cold ashes that stank when it rained. The men
had been put to the sword, all but a handful that Theon had allowed
to ee to bring the word to Torrhen’s Square. Their wives and
daughters had been claimed for salt wives, those who were young
enough and fair. The crones and the ugly ones had simply been
raped and killed, or taken for thralls if they had useful skills and did
not seem likely to cause trouble.
Theon had planned that attack as well, bringing his ships up to
the shore in the chill darkness before the dawn and leaping from the
prow with a longaxe in his hand to lead his men into the sleeping
village. He did not like the taste of any of this, but what choice did
he have?
His thrice-damned sister was sailing her Black Wind north even
now, sure to win a castle of her own. Lord Balon had let no word of
the hosting escape the Iron Islands, and Theon’s bloody work along
the Stony Shore would be put down to sea raiders out for plunder.
The northmen would not realize their true peril, not until the
hammers fell on Deepwood Motte and Moat Cailin. And after all is
done and won, they will make songs for that bitch Asha, and forget that I
was even here. That is, if he allowed it.
Dagmer Cleftjaw stood by the high carved prow of his longship,
Foamdrinker. Theon had assigned him the task of guarding the ships;
otherwise men would have called it Dagmer’s victory, not his. A
more prickly man might have taken that for a slight, but the
Cleftjaw had only laughed.
“The day is won,” Dagmer called down. “And yet you do not
smile, boy. The living should smile, for the dead cannot.” He smiled
himself to show how it was done. It made for a hideous sight. Under

a snowy white mane of hair, Dagmer Cleftjaw had the most gutchurning scar Theon had ever seen, the legacy of the longaxe that
had near killed him as a boy. The blow had splintered his jaw,
shattered his front teeth, and left him four lips where other men had
but two. A shaggy beard covered his cheeks and neck, but the hair
would not grow over the scar, so a shiny seam of puckered, twisted
esh divided his face like a crevasse through a snow eld. “We could
hear them singing,” the old warrior said. “It was a good song, and
they sang it bravely.”
“They sang better than they fought. Harps would have done them
as much good as their lances did.”
“How many men are lost?”
“Of ours?” Theon shrugged. “Todric. I killed him for getting
drunk and ghting over loot.”
“Some men are born to be killed.” A lesser man might have been
afraid to show a smile as frightening as his, yet Dagmer grinned
more often and more broadly than Lord Balon ever had.
Ugly as it was, that smile brought back a hundred memories.
Theon had seen it often as a boy, when he’d jumped a horse over a
mossy wall, or ung an axe and split a target square. He’d seen it
when he blocked a blow from Dagmer’s sword, when he put an
arrow through a seagull on the wing, when he took the tiller in
hand and guided a longship safely through a snarl of foaming rocks.
He gave me more smiles than my father and Eddard Stark together.
Even Robb … he ought to have won a smile the day he’d saved Bran
from that wildling, but instead he’d gotten a scolding, as if he were
some cook who’d burned the stew.
“You and I must talk, Uncle,” Theon said. Dagmer was no true
uncle, only a sworn man with perhaps a pinch of Greyjoy blood four
or ve lives back, and that from the wrong side of the blanket. Yet
Theon had always called him uncle nonetheless.
“Come onto my deck, then.” There were no m’lords from Dagmer,
not when he stood on his own deck. On the Iron Islands, every
captain was a king aboard his own ship.
He climbed the plank to the deck of the Foamdrinker in four long
strides, and Dagmer led him back to the cramped aft cabin, where

the old man poured a horn of sour ale and o ered Theon the same.
He declined. “We did not capture enough horses. A few, but … well,
I’ll make do with what I have, I suppose. Fewer men means more
glory.”
“What need do we have of horses?” Like most ironmen, Dagmer
preferred to ght on foot or from the deck of a ship. “Horses will
only shit on our decks and get in our way.”
“If we sailed, yes,” Theon admitted. “I have another plan.” He
watched the other carefully to see how he would take that. Without
the Cleftjaw he could not hope to succeed. Command or no, the
men would never follow him if both Aeron and Dagmer opposed
him, and he had no hope of winning over the sour-faced priest.
“Your lord father commanded us to harry the coast, no more.”
Eyes pale as sea foam watched Theon from under those shaggy
white eyebrows. Was it disapproval he saw there, or a spark of
interest? The latter, he thought … hoped …
“You are my father’s man.”
“His best man, and always have been.”
Pride, Theon thought. He is proud, I must use that, his pride will be
the key. “There is no man in the Iron Islands half so skilled with
spear or sword.”
“You have been too long away, boy. When you left, it was as you
say, but I am grown old in Lord Greyjoy’s service. The singers call
Andrik best now. Andrik the Unsmiling, they name him. A giant of a
man. He serves Lord Drumm of Old Wyk. And Black Lorren and
Qarl the Maid are near as dread.”
“This Andrik may be a great ghter, but men do not fear him as
they fear you.”
“Aye, that’s so,” Dagmer said. The ngers curled around the
drinking horn were heavy with rings, gold and silver and bronze,
set with chunks of sapphire and garnet and dragonglass. He had
paid the iron price for every one, Theon knew.
“If I had a man like you in my service, I should not waste him on
this child’s business of harrying and burning. This is no work for
Lord Balon’s best man …”

Dagmer’s grin twisted his lips apart and showed the brown
splinters of his teeth. “Nor for his trueborn son?” He hooted. “I
know you too well, Theon. I saw you take your rst step, helped
you bend your rst bow. ’Tis not me who feels wasted.”
“By rights I should have my sister’s command,” he admitted,
uncomfortably aware of how peevish that sounded.
“You take this business too hard, boy. It is only that your lord
father does not know you. With your brothers dead and you taken
by the wolves, your sister was his solace. He learned to rely on her,
and she has never failed him.”
“Nor have I. The Starks knew my worth. I was one of Brynden
Black sh’s picked scouts, and I charged with the rst wave in the
Whispering Wood. I was that close to crossing swords with the
Kingslayer himself.” Theon held his hands two feet apart. “Daryn
Hornwood came between us, and died for it.”
“Why do you tell me this?” Dagmer asked. “It was me who put
your rst sword in your hand. I know you are no craven.”
“Does my father?”
The hoary old warrior looked as if he had bitten into something
he did not like the taste of. “It is only … Theon, the Boy Wolf is
your friend, and these Starks had you for ten years.”
“I am no Stark.” Lord Eddard saw to that. “I am a Greyjoy, and I
mean to be my father’s heir. How can I do that unless I prove
myself with some great deed?”
“You are young. Other wars will come, and you shall do your
great deeds. For now, we are commanded to harry the Stony
Shore.”
“Let my uncle Aeron see to it. I’ll give him six ships, all but
Foamdrinker and Sea Bitch, and he can burn and drown to his god’s
surfeit.”
“The command was given you, not Aeron Damphair.”
“So long as the harrying is done, what does it matter? No priest
could do what I mean to, nor what I ask of you. I have a task that
only Dagmer Cleftjaw can accomplish.”
Dagmer took a long draught from his horn. “Tell me.”

He is tempted, Theon thought. He likes this reaver’s work no better
than I do. “If my sister can take a castle, so can I.”
“Asha has four or ve times the men we do.”
Theon allowed himself a sly smile. “But we have four times the
wits, and ve times the courage.”
“Your father—”
“—will thank me, when I hand him his kingdom. I mean to do a
deed that the harpers will sing of for a thousand years.”
He knew that would give Dagmer pause. A singer had made a
song about the axe that cracked his jaw in half, and the old man
loved to hear it. Whenever he was in his cups he would call for a
reaving song, something loud and stormy that told of dead heroes
and deeds of wild valor. His hair is white and his teeth are rotten, but
he still has a taste for glory.
“What would my part be in this scheme of yours, boy?” Dagmer
Cleftjaw asked after a long silence, and Theon knew he had won.
“To strike terror into the heart of the foe, as only one of your
name could do. You’ll take the great part of our force and march on
Torrhen’s Square. Helman Tallhart took his best men south, and
Benfred died here with their sons. His uncle Leobald will remain,
with some small garrison.” If I had been able to question Benfred, I
would know just how small. “Make no secret of your approach. Sing
all the brave songs you like. I want them to close their gates.”
“Is this Torrhen’s Square a strong keep?”
“Strong enough. The walls are stone, thirty feet high, with square
towers at each corner and a square keep within.”
“Stone walls cannot be red. How are we to take them? We do
not have the numbers to storm even a small castle.”
“You will make camp outside their walls and set to building
catapults and siege engines.”
“That is not the Old Way. Have you forgotten? Ironmen ght
with swords and axes, not by inging rocks. There is no glory in
starving out a foeman.”
“Leobald will not know that. When he sees you raising siege
towers, his old woman’s blood will run cold, and he will bleat for
help. Stay your archers, Uncle, and let the raven y. The castellan at

Winterfell is a brave man, but age has sti ened his wits as well as
his limbs. When he learns that one of his king’s bannermen is under
attack by the fearsome Dagmer Cleftjaw, he will summon his
strength and ride to Tallhart’s aid. It is his duty. Ser Rodrik is
nothing if not dutiful.”
“Any force he summons will be larger than mine,” Dagmer said,
“and these old knights are more cunning than you think, or they
would never have lived to see their rst grey hair. You set us a
battle we cannot hope to win, Theon. This Torrhen’s Square will
never fall.”
Theon smiled. “It’s not Torrhen’s Square I mean to take.”

ARYA

Confusion and clangor ruled the castle. Men stood on the beds of

wagons loading casks of wine, sacks of our, and bundles of newetched arrows. Smiths straightened swords, knocked dents from
breastplates, and shoed destriers and pack mules alike. Mail shirts
were tossed in barrels of sand and rolled across the lumpy surface of
the Flowstone Yard to scour them clean. Weese’s women had
twenty cloaks to mend, a hundred more to wash. The high and
humble crowded into the sept together to pray. Outside the walls,
tents and pavilions were coming down. Squires tossed pails of water
over cook res, while soldiers took out their oilstones to give their
blades one last good lick. The noise was a swelling tide: horses
blowing and whickering, lords shouting commands, men-at-arms
trading curses, camp followers squabbling.
Lord Tywin Lannister was marching at last.
Ser Addam Marbrand was the rst of the captains to depart, a day
before the rest. He made a gallant show of it, riding a spirited red
courser whose mane was the same copper color as the long hair that
streamed past Ser Addam’s shoulders. The horse was barded in
bronze-colored trappings dyed to match the rider’s cloak and
emblazoned with the burning tree. Some of the castle women
sobbed to see him go. Weese said he was a great horseman and
sword ghter, Lord Tywin’s most daring commander.
I hope he dies, Arya thought as she watched him ride out the gate,
his men streaming after him in a double column. I hope they all die.

They were going to ght Robb, she knew. Listening to the talk as
she went about her work, Arya had learned that Robb had won
some great victory in the west. He’d burned Lannisport, some said,
or else he meant to burn it. He’d captured Casterly Rock and put
everyone to the sword, or he was besieging the Golden Tooth … but
something had happened, that much was certain.
Weese had her running messages from dawn to dusk. Some of
them even took her beyond the castle walls, out into the mud and
madness of the camp. I could ee, she thought as a wagon rumbled
past her. I could hop on the back of a wagon and hide, or fall in with
the camp followers, no one would stop me. She might have done it if
not for Weese. He’d told them more than once what he’d do to
anyone who tried to run o on him. “It won’t be no beating, oh, no.
I won’t lay a nger on you. I’ll just save you for the Qohorik, yes I
will, I’ll save you for the Crippler. Vargo Hoat his name is, and
when he gets back he’ll cut o your feet.” Maybe if Weese were dead,
Arya thought … but not when she was with him. He could look at
you and smell what you were thinking, he always said so.
Weese never imagined she could read, though, so he never
bothered to seal the messages he gave her. Arya peeked at them all,
but they were never anything good, just stupid stu sending this
cart to the granary and that one to the armory. One was a demand
for payment on a gambling debt, but the knight she gave it to
couldn’t read. When she told him what it said he tried to hit her, but
Arya ducked under the blow, snatched a silver-banded drinking horn
o his saddle, and darted away. The knight roared and came after
her, but she slid between two wayns, wove through a crowd of
archers, and jumped a latrine trench. In his mail he couldn’t keep
up. When she gave the horn to Weese, he told her that a smart little
Weasel like her deserved a reward. “I’ve got my eye on a plump
crisp capon to sup on tonight. We’ll share it, me and you. You’ll like
that.”
Everywhere she went, Arya searched for Jaqen H’ghar, wanting
to whisper another name to him before those she hated were all
gone out of her reach, but amidst the chaos and confusion the
Lorathi sellsword was not to be found. He still owed her two

deaths, and she was worried she would never get them if he rode
o to battle with the rest. Finally she worked up the courage to ask
one of the gate guards if he’d gone. “One of Lorch’s men, is he?” the
man said. “He won’t be going, then. His lordship’s named Ser
Amory castellan of Harrenhal. That whole lot’s staying right here,
to hold the castle. The Bloody Mummers will be left as well, to do
the foraging. That goat Vargo Hoat is like to spit, him and Lorch
have always hated each other.”
The Mountain would be leaving with Lord Tywin, though. He
would command the van in battle, which meant that Dunsen,
Polliver, and Ra would all slip between her ngers unless she
could nd Jaqen and have him kill one of them before they left.
“Weasel,” Weese said that afternoon. “Get to the armory and tell
Lucan that Ser Lyonel notched his sword in practice and needs a
new one. Here’s his mark.” He handed her a square of paper. “Be
quick about it now, he’s to ride with Ser Kevan Lannister.”
Arya took the paper and ran. The armory adjoined the castle
smithy, a long high-roofed tunnel of a building with twenty forges
built into its walls and long stone water troughs for tempering the
steel. Half of the forges were at work when she entered. The walls
rang with the sound of hammers, and burly men in leather aprons
stood sweating in the sullen heat as they bent over bellows and
anvils. When she spied Gendry, his bare chest was slick with sweat,
but the blue eyes under the heavy black hair had the stubborn look
she remembered. Arya didn’t know that she even wanted to talk to
him. It was his fault they’d all been caught. “Which one is Lucan?”
She thrust out the paper. “I’m to get a new sword for Ser Lyonel.”
“Never mind about Ser Lyonel.” He drew her aside by the arm.
“Last night Hot Pie asked me if I heard you yell Winterfell back at
the holdfast, when we were all ghting on the wall.”
“I never did!”
“Yes you did. I heard you too.”
“Everyone was yelling stu ,” Arya said defensively. “Hot Pie
yelled hot pie. He must have yelled it a hundred times.”
“It’s what you yelled that matters. I told Hot Pie he should clean
the wax out of his ears, that all you yelled was Go to hell! If he asks

you, you better say the same.”
“I will,” she said, even though she thought go to hell was a stupid
thing to yell. She didn’t dare tell Hot Pie who she really was. Maybe
I should say Hot Pie’s name to Jaqen.
“I’ll get Lucan,” Gendry said.
Lucan grunted at the writing (though Arya did not think he could
read it), and pulled down a heavy longsword. “This is too good for
that oaf, and you tell him I said so,” he said as he gave her the
blade.
“I will,” she lied. If she did any such thing, Weese would beat her
bloody. Lucan could deliver his own insults.
The longsword was a lot heavier than Needle had been, but Arya
liked the feel of it. The weight of steel in her hands made her feel
stronger. Maybe I’m not a water dancer yet, but I’m not a mouse either.
A mouse couldn’t use a sword but I can. The gates were open, soldiers
coming and going, drays rolling in empty and going out creaking
and swaying under their loads. She thought about going to the
stables and telling them that Ser Lyonel wanted a new horse. She
had the paper, the stableboys wouldn’t be able to read it any better
than Lucan had. I could take the horse and the sword and just ride out.
If the guards tried to stop me I’d show them the paper and say I was
bringing everything to Ser Lyonel. She had no notion what Ser Lyonel
looked like or where to nd him, though. If they questioned her,
they’d know, and then Weese … Weese …
As she chewed her lip, trying not to think about how it would feel
to have her feet cut o , a group of archers in leather jerkins and
iron helms went past, their bows slung across their shoulders. Arya
heard snatches of their talk.
“… giants I tell you, he’s got giants twenty foot tall come down
from beyond the Wall, follow him like dogs …”
“… not natural, coming on them so fast, in the night and all. He’s
more wolf than man, all them Starks are …”
“… shit on your wolves and giants, the boy’d piss his pants if he
knew we was coming. He wasn’t man enough to march on
Harrenhal, was he? Ran t’other way, didn’t he? He’d run now if he
knew what was best for him.”

“So you say, but might be the boy knows something we don’t,
maybe it’s us ought to be run …”
Yes, Arya thought. Yes, it’s you who ought to run, you and Lord
Tywin and the Mountain and Ser Addam and Ser Amory and stupid Ser
Lyonel whoever he is, all of you better run or my brother will kill you,
he’s a Stark, he’s more wolf than man, and so am I.
“Weasel.” Weese’s voice cracked like a whip. She never saw
where he came from, but suddenly he was right in front of her.
“Give me that. Took you long enough.” He snatched the sword from
her ngers, and dealt her a stinging slap with the back of his hand.
“Next time be quicker about it.”
For a moment she had been a wolf again, but Weese’s slap took it
all away and left her with nothing but the taste of her own blood in
her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue when he hit her. She hated him
for that.
“You want another?” Weese demanded. “You’ll get it too. I’ll
have none of your insolent looks. Get down to the brewhouse and
tell Tu eberry that I have two dozen barrels for him, but he better
send his lads to fetch them or I’ll nd someone wants ’em worse.”
Arya started o , but not quick enough for Weese. “You run if you
want to eat tonight,” he shouted, his promises of a plump crisp
capon already forgotten. “And don’t be getting lost again, or I swear
I’ll beat you bloody.”
You won’t, Arya thought. You won’t ever again. But she ran. The
old gods of the north must have been guiding her steps. Halfway to
the brewhouse, as she passing under the stone bridge that arched
between Widow’s Tower and Kingspyre, she heard harsh, growling
laughter. Rorge came around a corner with three other men, the
manticore badge of Ser Amory sewn over their hearts. When he saw
her, he stopped and grinned, showing a mouthful of crooked brown
teeth under the leather ap he wore sometimes to cover the hole in
his face. “Yoren’s little cunt,” he called her. “Guess we know why
that black bastard wanted you on the Wall, don’t we?” He laughed
again, and the others laughed with him. “Where’s your stick now?”
Rorge demanded suddenly, the smile gone as quick as it had come.
“Seems to me I promised to fuck you with it.” He took a step

toward her. Arya edged backward. “Not so brave now that I’m not
in chains, are you?”
“I saved you.” She kept a good yard between them, ready to run
quick as a snake if he made a grab for her.
“Owe you another fucking for that, seems like. Did Yoren pump
your cunny, or did he like that tight little ass better?”
“I’m looking for Jaqen,” she said. “There’s a message.”
Rorge halted. Something in his eyes … could it be that he was
scared of Jaqen H’ghar? “The bathhouse. Get out of my way.”
Arya whirled and ran, swift as a deer, her feet ying over the
cobbles all the way to the bathhouse. She found Jaqen soaking in a
tub, steam rising around him as a serving girl sluiced hot water over
his head. His long hair, red on one side and white on the other, fell
down across his shoulders, wet and heavy.
She crept up quiet as a shadow, but he opened his eyes all the
same. “She steals in on little mice feet, but a man hears,” he said.
How could he hear me? she wondered, and it seemed as if he heard
that as well. “The scu of leather on stone sings loud as warhorns to
a man with open ears. Clever girls go barefoot.”
“I have a message.” Arya eyed the serving girl uncertainly. When
she did not seem likely to go away, she leaned in until her mouth
was almost touching his ear. “Weese,” she whispered.
Jaqen H’ghar closed his eyes again, oating languid, half-asleep.
“Tell his lordship a man shall attend him at his leisure.” His hand
moved suddenly, splashing hot water at her, and Arya had to leap
back to keep from getting drenched.
When she told Tu eberry what Weese had said, the brewer
cursed loudly. “You tell Weese my lads got duties to attend to, and
you tell him he’s a pox-ridden bastard too, and the seven hells will
freeze over before he gets another horn of my ale. I’ll have them
barrels within the hour or Lord Tywin will hear of it, see if he
don’t.”
Weese cursed too when Arya brought back that message, even
though she left out the pox-ridden bastard part. He fumed and
threatened, but in the end he rounded up six men and sent them o
grumbling to fetch the barrels down to the brewhouse.

Supper that evening was a thin stew of barley, onion, and carrots,
with a wedge of stale brown bread. One of the women had taken to
sleeping in Weese’s bed, and she got a piece of ripe blue cheese as
well, and a wing o the capon that Weese had spoken of that
morning. He ate the rest himself, the grease running down in a
shiny line through the boils that festered at the corner of his mouth.
The bird was almost gone when he glanced up from his trencher and
saw Arya staring. “Weasel, come here.”
A few mouthfuls of dark meat still clung to one thigh. He forgot,
but now he’s remembered, Arya thought. It made her feel bad for
telling Jaqen to kill him. She got o the bench and went to the head
of the table.
“I saw you looking at me.” Weese wiped his ngers on the front
of her shift. Then he grabbed her throat with one hand and slapped
her with the other. “What did I tell you?” He slapped her again,
backhand. “Keep those eyes to yourself, or next time I’ll spoon one
out and feed it to my bitch.” A shove sent her stumbling to the
oor. Her hem caught on a loose nail in the splintered wooden
bench and ripped as she fell. “You’ll mend that before you sleep,”
Weese announced as he pulled the last bit of meat o the capon.
When he was nished he sucked his ngers noisily, and threw the
bones to his ugly spotted dog.
“Weese,” Arya whispered that night as she bent over the tear in
her shift. “Dunsen, Polliver, Ra the Sweetling,” she said, calling a
name every time she pushed the bone needle through the undyed
wool. “The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn,
Ser Meryn, King Jo rey, Queen Cersei.” She wondered how much
longer she would have to include Weese in her prayer, and drifted
o to sleep dreaming that on the morrow, when she woke, he’d be
dead.
But it was the sharp toe of Weese’s boot that woke her, as ever.
The main strength of Lord Tywin’s host would ride this day, he told
them as they broke their fast on oatcakes. “Don’t none of you be
thinking how easy it’ll be here once m’lord of Lannister is gone,” he
warned. “The castle won’t grow no smaller, I promise you that, only

now there’ll be fewer hands to tend to it. You lot of slugabeds are
going to learn what work is now, yes you are.”
Not from you. Arya picked at her oaten cake. Weese frowned at
her, as if he smelled her secret. Quickly she dropped her gaze to her
food, and dared not raise her eyes again.
Pale light lled the yard when Lord Tywin Lannister took his
leave of Harrenhal. Arya watched from an arched window halfway
up the Wailing Tower. His charger wore a blanket of enameled
crimson scales and gilded crinet and chamfron, while Lord Tywin
himself sported a thick ermine cloak. His brother Ser Kevan looked
near as splendid. No less than four standard-bearers went before
them, carrying huge crimson banners emblazoned with the golden
lion. Behind the Lannisters came their great lords and captains.
Their banners ared and apped, a pageant of color: red ox and
golden mountain, purple unicorn and bantam rooster, brindled boar
and badger, a silver ferret and a juggler in motley, stars and
sunbursts, peacock and panther, chevron and dagger, black hood
and blue beetle and green arrow.
Last of all came Ser Gregor Clegane in his grey plate steel, astride
a stallion as bad-tempered as his rider. Polliver rode beside him,
with the black dog standard in his hand and Gendry’s horned helm
on his head. He was a tall man, but he looked no more than a halfgrown boy when he rode in his master’s shadow.
A shiver crept up Arya’s spine as she watched them pass under the
great iron portcullis of Harrenhal. Suddenly she knew that she had
made a terrible mistake. I’m so stupid, she thought. Weese did not
matter, no more than Chiswyck had. These were the men who
mattered, the ones she ought to have killed. Last night she could
have whispered any of them dead, if only she hadn’t been so mad at
Weese for hitting her and lying about the capon. Lord Tywin, why
didn’t I say Lord Tywin?
Perhaps it was not too late to change her mind. Weese was not
killed yet. If she could nd Jaqen, tell him …
Hurriedly, Arya ran down the twisting steps, her chores
forgotten. She heard the rattle of chains as the portcullis was slowly

lowered, its spikes sinking deep into the ground … and then another
sound, a shriek of pain and fear.
A dozen people got there before her, though none was coming
any too close. Arya squirmed between them. Weese was sprawled
across the cobbles, his throat a red ruin, eyes gaping sightlessly up
at a bank of grey cloud. His ugly spotted dog stood on his chest,
lapping at the blood pulsing from his neck, and every so often
ripping a mouthful of esh out of the dead man’s face.
Finally someone brought a crossbow and shot the spotted dog
dead while she was worrying at one of Weese’s ears.
“Damnedest thing,” she heard a man say. “He had that bitch dog
since she was a pup.”
“This place is cursed,” the man with the crossbow said.
“It’s Harren’s ghost, that’s what it is,” said Goodwife Amabel. “I’ll
not sleep here another night, I swear it.”
Arya lifted her gaze from the dead man and his dead dog. Jaqen
H’ghar was leaning up against the side of the Wailing Tower. When
he saw her looking, he lifted a hand to his face and laid two ngers
casually against his cheek.

CATELYN

Two days ride from Riverrun, a scout spied them watering their

horses beside a muddy steam. Catelyn had never been so glad to see
the twin tower badge of House Frey.
When she asked him to lead them to her uncle, he said, “The
Black sh is gone west with the king, my lady. Martyn Rivers
commands the outriders in his stead.”
“I see.” She had met Rivers at the Twins; a baseborn son of Lord
Walder Frey, half brother to Ser Perwyn. It did not surprise her to
learn that Robb had struck at the heart of Lannister power; clearly
he had been contemplating just that when he sent her away to treat
with Renly. “Where is Rivers now?”
“His camp is two hours ride, my lady.”
“Take us to him,” she commanded. Brienne helped her back into
her saddle, and they set out at once.
“Have you come from Bitterbridge, my lady?” the scout asked.
“No.” She had not dared. With Renly dead, Catelyn had been
uncertain of the reception she might receive from his young widow
and her protectors. Instead she had ridden through the heart of the
war, through fertile riverlands turned to blackened desert by the
fury of the Lannisters, and each night her scouts brought back tales
that made her ill. “Lord Renly is slain,” she added.
“We’d hoped that tale was some Lannister lie, or—”
“Would that it were. My brother commands in Riverrun?”

“Yes, my lady. His Grace left Ser Edmure to hold Riverrun and
guard his rear.”
Gods grant him the strength to do so, Catelyn thought. And the
wisdom as well. “Is there word from Robb in the west?”
“You have not heard?” The man seemed surprised. “His Grace
won a great victory at Oxcross. Ser Sta ord Lannister is dead, his
host scattered.”
Ser Wendel Manderly gave a whoop of pleasure, but Catelyn only
nodded. Tomorrow’s trials concerned her more than yesterday’s
triumphs.
Martyn Rivers had made his camp in the shell of a shattered
holdfast, beside a roo ess stable and a hundred fresh graves. He
went to one knee when Catelyn dismounted. “Well met, my lady.
Your brother charged us to keep an eye out for your party, and
escort you back to Riverrun in all haste should we come upon you.”
Catelyn scarce liked the sound of that. “Is it my father?”
“No, my lady. Lord Hoster is unchanged.” Rivers was a ruddy
man with scant resemblance to his half brothers. “It is only that we
feared you might chance upon Lannister scouts. Lord Tywin has left
Harrenhal and marches west with all his power.”
“Rise,” she told Rivers, frowning. Stannis Baratheon would soon
be on the march as well, gods help them all. “How long until Lord
Tywin is upon us?”
“Three days, perhaps four, it is hard to know. We have eyes out
along all the roads, but it would be best not to linger.”
Nor did they. Rivers broke his camp quickly and saddled up
beside her, and they set o again, near fty strong now, ying
beneath the direwolf, the leaping trout, the twin towers.
Her men wanted to hear more of Robb’s victory at Oxcross, and
Rivers obliged. “There’s a singer come to Riverrun, calls himself
Rymund the Rhymer, he’s made a song of the ght. Doubtless you’ll
hear it sung tonight, my lady. ‘Wolf in the Night,’ this Rymund calls
it.” He went on to tell how the remnants of Ser Sta ord’s host had
fallen back on Lannisport. Without siege engines there was no way
to storm Casterly Rock, so the Young Wolf was paying the
Lannisters back in kind for the devastation they’d in icted on the

riverlands. Lords Karstark and Glover were raiding along the coast,
Lady Mormont had captured thousands of cattle and was driving
them back toward Riverrun, while the Greatjon had seized the gold
mines at Castamere, Nunn’s Deep, and the Pendric Hills. Ser Wendel
laughed. “Nothing’s more like to bring a Lannister running than a
threat to his gold.”
“How did the king ever take the Tooth?” Ser Perwyn Frey asked
his bastard brother. “That’s a hard strong keep, and it commands
the hill road.”
“He never took it. He slipped around it in the night. It’s said the
direwolf showed him the way, that Grey Wind of his. The beast
sni ed out a goat track that wound down a de le and up along
beneath a ridge, a crooked and stony way, yet wide enough for men
riding single le. The Lannisters in their watchtowers got not so
much a glimpse of them.” Rivers lowered his voice. “There’s some
say that after the battle, the king cut out Sta ord Lannister’s heart
and fed it to the wolf.”
“I would not believe such tales,” Catelyn said sharply. “My son is
no savage.”
“As you say, my lady. Still, it’s no more than the beast deserved.
That is no common wolf, that one. The Greatjon’s been heard to say
that the old gods of the north sent those direwolves to your
children.”
Catelyn remembered the day when her boys had found the pups
in the late summer snows. There had been ve, three male and two
female for the ve trueborn children of House Stark … and a sixth,
white of fur and red of eye, for Ned’s bastard son Jon Snow. No
common wolves, she thought. No indeed.
That night as they made their camp, Brienne sought out her tent.
“My lady, you are safely back among your own now, a day’s ride
from your brother’s castle. Give me leave to go.”
Catelyn should not have been surprised. The homely young
woman had kept to herself all through their journey, spending most
of her time with the horses, brushing out their coats and pulling
stones from their shoes. She had helped Shadd cook and clean game
as well, and soon proved that she could hunt as well as any. Any

task Catelyn asked her to turn her hand to, Brienne had performed
deftly and without complaint, and when she was spoken to she
answered politely, but she never chattered, nor wept, nor laughed.
She had ridden with them every day and slept among them every
night without ever truly becoming one of them.
It was the same when she was with Renly, Catelyn thought. At the
feast, in the melee, even in Renly’s pavilion with her brothers of the
Rainbow Guard. There are walls around this one higher than
Winterfell’s.
“If you left us, where would you go?” Catelyn asked her.
“Back,” Brienne said. “To Storm’s End.”
“Alone.” It was not a question.
The broad face was a pool of still water, giving no hint of what
might live in the depths below. “Yes.”
“You mean to kill Stannis.”
Brienne closed her thick callused ngers around the hilt of her
sword. The sword that had been his. “I swore a vow. Three times I
swore. You heard me.”
“I did,” Catelyn admitted. The girl had kept the rainbow cloak
when she discarded the rest of her bloodstained clothing, she knew.
Brienne’s own things had been left behind during their ight, and
she had been forced to clothe herself in odd bits of Ser Wendel’s
spare garb, since no one else in their party had garments large
enough to t her. “Vows should be kept, I agree, but Stannis has a
great host around him, and his own guards sworn to keep him safe.”
“I am not afraid of his guards. I am as good as any of them. I
should never have ed.”
“Is that what troubles you, that some fool might call you craven?”
She sighed. “Renly’s death was no fault of yours. You served him
valiantly, but when you seek to follow him into the earth, you serve
no one.” She stretched out a hand, to give what comfort a touch
could give. “I know how hard it is—”
Brienne shook o her hand. “No one knows.”
“You’re wrong,” Catelyn said sharply. “Every morning, when I
wake, I remember that Ned is gone. I have no skill with swords, but
that does not mean that I do not dream of riding to King’s Landing

and wrapping my hands around Cersei Lannister’s white throat and
squeezing until her face turns black.”
The Beauty raised her eyes, the only part of her that was truly
beautiful. “If you dream that, why would you seek to hold me back?
Is it because of what Stannis said at the parley?”
Was it? Catelyn glanced across the camp. Two men were walking
sentry, spears in hand. “I was taught that good men must ght evil
in this world, and Renly’s death was evil beyond all doubt. Yet I
was also taught that the gods make kings, not the swords of men. If
Stannis is our rightful king—”
“He’s not. Robert was never the rightful king either, even Renly
said as much. Jaime Lannister murdered the rightful king, after
Robert killed his lawful heir on the Trident. Where were the gods
then? The gods don’t care about men, no more than kings care
about peasants.”
“A good king does care.”
“Lord Renly … His Grace, he … he would have been the best
king, my lady, he was so good, he …”
“He is gone, Brienne,” she said, as gently as she could. “Stannis
and Jo rey remain … and so does my son.”
“He wouldn’t … you’d never make a peace with Stannis, would
you? Bend the knee? You wouldn’t …”
“I will tell you true, Brienne. I do not know. My son may be a
king, but I am no queen … only a mother who would keep her
children safe, however she could.”
“I am not made to be a mother. I need to ght.”
“Then ght … but for the living, not the dead. Renly’s enemies
are Robb’s enemies as well.”
Brienne stared at the ground and shu ed her feet. “I do not know
your son, my lady.” She looked up. “I could serve you. If you would
have me.”
Catelyn was startled. “Why me?”
The question seemed to trouble Brienne. “You helped me. In the
pavilion … when they thought that I had … that I had …”
“You were innocent.”

“Even so, you did not have to do that. You could have let them
kill me. I was nothing to you.”
Perhaps I did not want to be the only one who knew the dark truth of
what had happened there, Catelyn thought. “Brienne, I have taken
many wellborn ladies into my service over the years, but never one
like you. I am no battle commander.”
“No, but you have courage. Not battle courage perhaps but … I
don’t know … a kind of woman’s courage. And I think, when the
time comes, you will not try and hold me back. Promise me that.
That you will not hold me back from Stannis.”
Catelyn could still hear Stannis saying that Robb’s turn too would
come in time. It was like a cold breath on the back of her neck.
“When the time comes, I will not hold you back.”
The tall girl knelt awkwardly, unsheathed Renly’s longsword, and
laid it at her feet. “Then I am yours, my lady. Your liege man,
or … whatever you would have me be. I will shield your back and
keep your counsel and give my life for yours, if need be. I swear it
by the old gods and the new.”
“And I vow that you shall always have a place by my hearth and
meat and mead at my table, and pledge to ask no service of you
that might bring you into dishonor. I swear it by the old gods and
the new. Arise.” As she clasped the other woman’s hands between
her own, Catelyn could not help but smile. How many times did I
watch Ned accept a man’s oath of service? She wondered what he
would think if he could see her now.
They forded the Red Fork late the next day, upstream of Riverrun
where the river made a wide loop and the waters grew muddy and
shallow. The crossing was guarded by a mixed force of archers and
pikemen wearing the eagle badge of the Mallisters. When they saw
Catelyn’s banners, they emerged from behind their sharpened stakes
and sent a man over from the far bank to lead her party across.
“Slow and careful like, milady,” he warned as he took the bridle of
her horse. “We’ve planted iron spikes under the water, y’see, and
there’s caltrops scattered among them rocks there. It’s the same on
all the fords, by your brother’s command.”

Edmure thinks to ght here. The realization gave her a queasy
feeling in the bowels, but she held her tongue.
Between the Red Fork and the Tumblestone, they joined a stream
of smallfolk making for the safety of Riverrun. Some were driving
animals before them, others pulling wayns, but they made way as
Catelyn rode past, and cheered her with cries of “Tully!” or “Stark!”
Half a mile from the castle, she passed through a large encampment
where the scarlet banner of the Blackwoods waved above the lord’s
tent. Lucas took his leave of her there, to seek out his father, Lord
Tytos. The rest rode on.
Catelyn spied a second camp strung out along the bank north of
the Tumblestone, familiar standards apping in the wind—Marq
Piper’s dancing maiden, Darry’s plowman, the twining red-andwhite snakes of the Paeges. They were all her father’s bannermen,
lords of the Trident. Most had left Riverrun before she had, to
defend their own lands. If they were here again, it could only mean
that Edmure had called them back. Gods save us, it’s true, he means to
o er battle to Lord Tywin.
Something dark was dangling against the walls of Riverrun,
Catelyn saw from a distance. When she rode close, she saw dead
men hanging from the battlements, slumped at the ends of long
ropes with hempen nooses tight around their necks, their faces
swollen and black. The crows had been at them, but their crimson
cloaks still showed bright against the sandstone walls.
“They have hanged some Lannisters,” Hal Mollen observed.
“A pretty sight,” Ser Wendel Manderly said cheerfully.
“Our friends have begun without us,” Perwyn Frey jested. The
others laughed, all but Brienne, who gazed up at the row of bodies
unblinking, and neither spoke nor smiled.
If they have slain the Kingslayer, then my daughters are dead as well.
Catelyn spurred her horse to a canter. Hal Mollen and Robin Flint
raced past at a gallop, halooing to the gatehouse. The guards on the
walls had doubtless spied her banners some time ago, for the
portcullis was up as they approached.
Edmure rode out from the castle to meet her, surrounded by three
of her father’s sworn men—great-bellied Ser Desmond Grell the

master-at-arms, Utherydes Wayn the steward, and Ser Robin Ryger,
Riverrun’s big bald captain of guards. They were all three of an age
with Lord Hoster, men who had spent their lives in her father’s
service. Old men, Catelyn realized.
Edmure wore a blue-and-red cloak over a tunic embroidered with
silver sh. From the look of him, he had not shaved since she rode
south; his beard was a ery bush. “Cat, it is good to have you safely
back. When we heard of Renly’s death, we feared for your life. And
Lord Tywin is on the march as well.”
“So I am told. How fares our father?”
“One day he seems stronger, the next …” He shook his head.
“He’s asked for you. I did not know what to tell him.”
“I will go to him soon,” she vowed. “Has there been word from
Storm’s End since Renly died? Or from Bitterbridge?” No ravens
came to men on the road, and Catelyn was anxious to know what
had happened behind her.
“Nothing from Bitterbridge. From Storm’s End, three birds from
the castellan, Ser Cortnay Penrose, all carrying the same plea.
Stannis has him surrounded by land and sea. He o ers his allegiance
to whatsoever king will break the siege. He fears for the boy, he
says. What boy would that be, do you know?”
“Edric Storm,” Brienne told them. “Robert’s bastard son.”
Edmure looked at her curiously. “Stannis has sworn that the
garrison might go free, unharmed, provided they yield the castle
within the fortnight and deliver the boy into his hands, but Ser
Cortnay will not consent.”
He risks all for a baseborn boy whose blood is not even his own,
Catelyn thought. “Did you send him an answer?”
Edmure shook his head. “Why, when we have neither help nor
hope to o er? And Stannis is no enemy of ours.”
Ser Robin Ryger spoke. “My lady, can you tell us the manner of
Lord Renly’s death? The tales we’ve heard have been queer.”
“Cat,” her brother said, “some say you killed Renly. Others claim
it was some southron woman.” His glance lingered on Brienne.
“My king was murdered,” the girl said quietly, “and not by Lady
Catelyn. I swear it on my sword, by the gods old and new.”

“This is Brienne of Tarth, the daughter of Lord Selwyn the
Evenstar, who served in Renly’s Rainbow Guard,” Catelyn told
them. “Brienne, I am honored to acquaint you with my brother Ser
Edmure Tully, heir to Riverrun. His steward Utherydes Wayn. Ser
Robin Ryger and Ser Desmond Grell.”
“Honored,” said Ser Desmond. The others echoed him. The girl
ushed, embarrassed even at this commonplace courtesy. If Edmure
thought her a curious sort of lady, at least he had the grace not to
say so.
“Brienne was with Renly when he was killed, as was I,” said
Catelyn, “but we had no part in his death.” She did not care to
speak of the shadow, here in the open with men all around, so she
waved a hand at the bodies. “Who are these men you’ve hanged?”
Edmure glanced up uncomfortably. “They came with Ser Cleos
when he brought the queen’s answer to our peace o er.”
Catelyn was shocked. “You’ve killed envoys?”
“False envoys,” Edmure declared. “They pledged me their peace
and surrendered their weapons, so I allowed them freedom of the
castle, and for three nights they ate my meat and drank my mead
whilst I talked with Ser Cleos. On the fourth night, they tried to
free the Kingslayer.” He pointed up. “That big brute killed two
guards with naught but those ham hands of his, caught them by the
throats and smashed their skulls together while that skinny lad
beside him was opening Lannister’s cell with a bit of wire, gods
curse him. The one on the end was some sort of damned mummer.
He used my own voice to command that the River Gate be opened.
The guardsmen swear to it, Enger and Delp and Long Lew, all three.
If you ask me, the man sounded nothing like me, and yet the oafs
were raising the portcullis all the same.”
This was the Imp’s work, Catelyn suspected; it stank of the same
sort of cunning he had displayed at the Eyrie. Once, she would have
named Tyrion the least dangerous of the Lannisters. Now she was
not so certain. “How is it you caught them?”
“Ah, as it happened, I was not in the castle. I’d crossed the
Tumblestone to, ah …”
“You were whoring or wenching. Get on with the tale.”

Edmure’s cheeks amed as red as his beard. “It was the hour
before dawn, and I was only then returning. When Long Lew saw
my boat and recognized me, he nally thought to wonder who was
standing below barking commands, and raised a cry.”
“Tell me the Kingslayer was retaken.”
“Yes, though not easily. Jaime got hold of a sword, slew Poul
Pemford and Ser Desmond’s squire Myles, and wounded Delp so
badly that Maester Vyman fears he’ll soon die as well. It was a
bloody mess. At the sound of steel, some of the other red cloaks
rushed to join him, barehand or no. I hanged those beside the four
who freed him, and threw the rest in the dungeons. Jaime too. We’ll
have no more escapes from that one. He’s down in the dark this
time, chained hand and foot and bolted to the wall.”
“And Cleos Frey?”
“He swears he knew naught of the plot. Who can say? The man is
half Lannister, half Frey, and all liar. I put him in Jaime’s old tower
cell.”
“You say he brought terms?”
“If you can call them that. You’ll like them no more than I did, I
promise.”
“Can we hope for no help from the south, Lady Stark?” asked
Utherydes Wayn, her father’s steward. “This charge of
incest … Lord Tywin does not su er such slights lightly. He will
seek to wash the stain from his daughter’s name with the blood of
her accuser, Lord Stannis must see that. He has no choice but to
make common cause with us.”
Stannis has made common cause with a power greater and darker.
“Let us speak of these matters later.” Catelyn trotted over the
drawbridge, putting the grisly row of dead Lannisters behind her.
Her brother kept pace. As they rode out into the bustle of Riverrun’s
upper bailey, a naked toddler ran in front of the horses. Catelyn
jerked her reins hard to avoid him, glancing about in dismay.
Hundreds of smallfolk had been admitted to the castle, and allowed
to erect crude shelters against the walls. Their children were
everywhere underfoot, and the yard teemed with their cows, sheep,
and chickens. “Who are all these folk?”

“My people,” Edmure answered. “They were afraid.”
Only my sweet brother would crowd all these useless mouths into a
castle that might soon be under siege. Catelyn knew that Edmure had a
soft heart; sometimes she thought his head was even softer. She
loved him for it, yet still …
“Can Robb be reached by raven?”
“He’s in the eld, my lady,” Ser Desmond replied. “The bird
would have no way to nd him.”
Utherydes Wayn coughed. “Before he left us, the young king
instructed us to send you on to the Twins upon your return, Lady
Stark. He asks that you learn more of Lord Walder’s daughters, to
help him select his bride when the time comes.”
“We’ll provide you with fresh mounts and provisions,” her
brother promised. “You’ll want to refresh yourself before—”
“I’ll want to stay,” Catelyn said, dismounting. She had no
intention of leaving Riverrun and her dying father to pick Robb’s
wife for him. Robb wants me safe, I cannot fault him for that, but his
pretext is growing threadbare. “Boy,” she called, and an urchin from
the stables ran out to take the reins of her horse.
Edmure swung down from his saddle. He was a head taller than
she was, but he would always be her little brother. “Cat,” he said
unhappily, “Lord Tywin is coming—”
“He is making for the west, to defend his own lands. If we close
our gates and shelter behind the walls, we can watch him pass with
safety.”
“This is Tully land,” Edmure declared. “If Tywin Lannister thinks
to cross it unbloodied, I mean to teach him a hard lesson.”
The same lesson you taught his son? Her brother could be stubborn
as river rock when his pride was touched, but neither of them was
likely to forget how Ser Jaime had cut Edmure’s host to bloody
pieces the last time he had o ered battle. “We have nothing to gain
and everything to lose by meeting Lord Tywin in the eld,” Catelyn
said tactfully.
“The yard is not the place to discuss my battle plans.”
“As you will. Where shall we go?”

Her brother’s face darkened. For a moment she thought he was
about to lose his temper with her, but nally he snapped, “The
godswood. If you will insist.”
She followed him along a gallery to the godswood gate. Edmure’s
anger had always been a sulky, sullen thing. Catelyn was sorry she
had wounded him, but the matter was too important for her to
concern herself with his pride. When they were alone beneath the
trees, Edmure turned to face her.
“You do not have the strength to meet the Lannisters in the eld,”
she said bluntly.
“When all my strength is marshaled, I should have eight thousand
foot and three thousand horse,” Edmure said.
“Which means Lord Tywin will have near twice your numbers.”
“Robb’s won his battles against worse odds,” Edmure replied,
“and I have a plan. You’ve forgotten Roose Bolton. Lord Tywin
defeated him on the Green Fork, but failed to pursue. When Lord
Tywin went to Harrenhal, Bolton took the ruby ford and the
crossroads. He has ten thousand men. I’ve sent word to Helman
Tallhart to join him with the garrison Robb left at the Twins—”
“Edmure, Robb left those men to hold the Twins and make certain
Lord Walder keeps faith with us.”
“He has,” Edmure said stubbornly. “The Freys fought bravely in
the Whispering Wood, and old Ser Stevron died at Oxcross, we hear.
Ser Ryman and Black Walder and the rest are with Robb in the
west, Martyn has been of great service scouting, and Ser Perwyn
helped see you safe to Renly. Gods be good, how much more can
we ask of them? Robb’s betrothed to one of Lord Walder’s
daughters, and Roose Bolton wed another, I hear. And haven’t you
taken two of his grandsons to be fostered at Winterfell?”
“A ward can easily become a hostage, if need be.” She had not
known that Ser Stevron was dead, nor of Bolton’s marriage.
“If we’re two hostages to the good, all the more reason Lord
Walder dare not play us false. Bolton needs Frey’s men, and Ser
Helman’s as well. I’ve commanded him to retake Harrenhal.”
“That’s like to be a bloody business.”

“Yes, but once the castle falls, Lord Tywin will have no safe
retreat. My own levies will defend the fords of Red Fork against his
crossing. If he attacks across the river, he’ll end as Rhaegar did
when he tried to cross the Trident. If he holds back, he’ll be caught
between Riverrun and Harrenhal, and when Robb returns from the
west we can nish him for good and all.”
Her brother’s voice was full of brusque con dence, but Catelyn
found herself wishing that Robb had not taken her uncle Brynden
west with him. The Black sh was the veteran of half a hundred
battles; Edmure was the veteran of one, and that one lost.
“The plan’s a good one,” he concluded. “Lord Tytos says so, and
Lord Jonos as well. When did Blackwood and Bracken agree about
anything that was not certain, I ask you?”
“Be that as it may.” She was suddenly weary. Perhaps she was
wrong to oppose him. Perhaps it was a splendid plan, and her
misgivings only a woman’s fears. She wished Ned were here, or her
uncle Brynden, or … “Have you asked Father about this?”
“Father is in no state to weigh strategies. Two days ago he was
making plans for your marriage to Brandon Stark! Go see him
yourself if you do not believe me. This plan will work, Cat, you’ll
see.”
“I hope so, Edmure. I truly do.” She kissed him on the cheek, to
let him know she meant it, and went to nd her father.
Lord Hoster Tully was much as she had left him—abed, haggard,
esh pale and clammy. The room smelled of sickness, a cloying
odor made up in equal parts of stale sweat and medicine. When she
pulled back the drapes, her father gave a low moan, and his eyes
uttered open. He stared at her as if he could not comprehend who
she was or what she wanted.
“Father.” She kissed him. “I am returned.”
He seemed to know her then. “You’ve come,” he whispered
faintly, lips barely moving.
“Yes,” she said. “Robb sent me south, but I hurried back.”
“South … where … is the Eyrie south, sweetling? I don’t
recall … oh, dear heart, I was afraid … have you forgiven me,
child?” Tears ran down his cheeks.

“You’ve done nothing that needs forgiveness, Father.” She stroked
his limp white hair and felt his brow. The fever still burned him
from within, despite all the maester’s potions.
“It was best,” her father whispered. “Jon’s a good man,
good … strong, kind … take care of you … he will … and well
born, listen to me, you must, I’m your father … your
father … you’ll wed when Cat does, yes you will …”
He thinks I’m Lysa, Catelyn realized. Gods be good, he talks as if we
were not married yet.
Her father’s hands clutched at hers, uttering like two frightened
white birds. “That stripling … wretched boy … not speak that name
to me, your duty … your mother, she would …” Lord Hoster cried
as a spasm of pain washed over him. “Oh, gods forgive me, forgive
me, forgive me. My medicine …”
And then Maester Vyman was there, holding a cup to his lips.
Lord Hoster sucked at the thick white potion as eager as a babe at
the breast, and Catelyn could see peace settle over him once more.
“He’ll sleep now, my lady,” the maester said when the cup was
empty. The milk of the poppy had left a thick white lm around her
father’s mouth. Maester Vyman wiped it away with a sleeve.
Catelyn could watch no more. Hoster Tully had been a strong
man, and proud. It hurt her to see him reduced to this. She went out
to the terrace. The yard below was crowded with refugees and
chaotic with their noises, but beyond the walls the rivers owed
clean and pure and endless. Those are his rivers, and soon he will
return to them for his last voyage.
Maester Vyman had followed her out. “My lady,” he said softly,
“I cannot keep the end at bay much longer. We ought send a rider
after his brother. Ser Brynden would wish to be here.”
“Yes,” Catelyn said, her voice thick with her grief.
“And the Lady Lysa as well, perhaps?”
“Lysa will not come.”
“If you wrote her yourself, perhaps …”
“I will put some words to paper, if that please you.” She
wondered who Lysa’s “wretched stripling” had been. Some young
squire or hedge knight, like as not … though by the vehemence

with which Lord Hoster had opposed him, he might have been a
tradesman’s son or baseborn apprentice, even a singer. Lysa had
always been too fond of singers. I must not blame her. Jon Arryn was
twenty years older than our father, however noble.
The tower her brother had set aside for her use was the very
same that she and Lysa had shared as maids. It would feel good to
sleep on a featherbed again, with a warm re in the hearth; when
she was rested the world would seem less bleak.
But outside her chambers she found Utherydes Wayn waiting with
two women clad in grey, their faces cowled save for their eyes.
Catelyn knew at once why they were here. “Ned?”
The sisters lowered their gaze. Utherydes said, “Ser Cleos brought
him from King’s Landing, my lady.”
“Take me to him,” she commanded.
They had laid him out on a trestle table and covered him with a
banner, the white banner of House Stark with its grey direwolf sigil.
“I would look on him,” Catelyn said.
“Only the bones remain, my lady.”
“I would look on him,” she repeated.
One of the silent sisters turned down the banner.
Bones, Catelyn thought. This is not Ned, this is not the man I loved,
the father of my children. His hands were clasped together over his
chest, skeletal ngers curled about the hilt of some longsword, but
they were not Ned’s hands, so strong and full of life. They had
dressed the bones in Ned’s surcoat, the ne white velvet with the
direwolf badge over the heart, but nothing remained of the warm
esh that had pillowed her head so many nights, the arms that had
held her. The head had been rejoined to the body with ne silver
wire, but one skull looks much like another, and in those empty
hollows she found no trace of her lord’s dark grey eyes, eyes that
could be soft as a fog or hard as stone. They gave his eyes to crows,
she remembered.
Catelyn turned away. “That is not his sword.”
“Ice was not returned to us, my lady,” Utherydes said. “Only Lord
Eddard’s bones.”
“I suppose I must thank the queen for even that much.”

“Thank the Imp, my lady. It was his doing.”
One day I will thank them all. “I am grateful for your service,
sisters,” Catelyn said, “but I must lay another task upon you. Lord
Eddard was a Stark, and his bones must be laid to rest beneath
Winterfell.” They will make a statue of him, a stone likeness that will sit
in the dark with a direwolf at his feet and a sword across his knees.
“Make certain the sisters have fresh horses, and aught else they
need for the journey,” she told Utherydes Wayn. “Hal Mollen will
escort them back to Winterfell, it is his place as captain of guards.”
She gazed down at the bones that were all that remained of her lord
and love. “Now leave me, all of you. I would be alone with Ned
tonight.”
The women in grey bowed their heads. The silent sisters do not
speak to the living, Catelyn remembered dully, but some say they can
talk to the dead. And how she envied that …

DAENERYS

The drapes kept out the dust and heat of the streets, but they could

not keep out disappointment. Dany climbed inside wearily, glad for
the refuge from the sea of Qartheen eyes. “Make way,” Jhogo
shouted at the crowd from horseback, snapping his whip, “make
way, make way for the Mother of Dragons.”
Reclining on cool satin cushions, Xaro Xhoan Daxos poured rubyred wine into matched goblets of jade and gold, his hands sure and
steady despite the sway of the palanquin. “I see a deep sadness
written upon your face, my light of love.” He o ered her a goblet.
“Could it be the sadness of a lost dream?”
“A dream delayed, no more.” Dany’s tight silver collar was
cha ng against her throat. She unfastened it and ung it aside. The
collar was set with an enchanted amethyst that Xaro swore would
ward her against all poisons. The Pureborn were notorious for
o ering poisoned wine to those they thought dangerous, but they
had not given Dany so much as a cup of water. They never saw me
for a queen, she thought bitterly. I was only an afternoon’s
amusement, a horse girl with a curious pet.
Rhaegal hissed and dug sharp black claws into her bare shoulder
as Dany stretched out a hand for the wine. Wincing, she shifted him
to her other shoulder, where he could claw her gown instead of her
skin. She was garbed after the Qartheen fashion. Xaro had warned
her that the Enthroned would never listen to a Dothraki, so she had
taken care to go before them in owing green samite with one

breast bared, silvered sandals on her feet, with a belt of black-andwhite pearls about her waist. For all the help they o ered, I could have
gone naked. Perhaps I should have. She drank deep.
Descendants of the ancient kings and queens of Qarth, the
Pureborn commanded the Civic Guard and the eet of ornate
galleys that ruled the straits between the seas. Daenerys Targaryen
had wanted that eet, or part of it, and some of their soldiers as
well. She made the traditional sacri ce in the Temple of Memory,
o ered the traditional bribe to the Keeper of the Long List, sent the
traditional persimmon to the Opener of the Door, and nally
received the traditional blue silk slippers summoning her to the Hall
of a Thousand Thrones.
The Pureborn heard her pleas from the great wooden seats of
their ancestors, rising in curved tiers from a marble oor to a highdomed ceiling painted with scenes of Qarth’s vanished glory. The
chairs were immense, fantastically carved, bright with goldwork
and studded with amber, onyx, lapis, and jade, each one di erent
from all the others, and each striving to be the most fabulous. Yet
the men who sat in them seemed so listless and world-weary that
they might have been asleep. They listened, but they did not hear, or
care, she thought. They are Milk Men indeed. They never meant to help
me. They came because they were curious. They came because they
were bored, and the dragon on my shoulder interested them more than I
did.
“Tell me the words of the Pureborn,” prompted Xaro Xhoan
Daxos. “Tell me what they said to sadden the queen of my heart.”
“They said no.” The wine tasted of pomegranates and hot summer
days. “They said it with great courtesy, to be sure, but under all the
lovely words, it was still no.”
“Did you atter them?”
“Shamelessly.”
“Did you weep?”
“The blood of the dragon does not weep,” she said testily.
Xaro sighed. “You ought to have wept.” The Qartheen wept often
and easily; it was considered a mark of the civilized man. “The men
we bought, what did they say?”

“Mathos said nothing. Wendello praised the way I spoke. The
Exquisite refused me with the rest, but he wept afterward.”
“Alas, that Qartheen should be so faithless.” Xaro was not himself
of the Pureborn, but he had told her whom to bribe and how much
to o er. “Weep, weep, for the treachery of men.”
Dany would sooner have wept for her gold. The bribes she’d
tendered to Mathos Mallarawan, Wendello Qar Deeth, and Egon
Emeros the Exquisite might have bought her a ship, or hired a score
of sellswords. “Suppose I sent Ser Jorah to demand the return of my
gifts?” she asked.
“Suppose a Sorrowful Man came to my palace one night and
killed you as you slept,” said Xaro. The Sorrowful Men were an
ancient sacred guild of assassins, so named because they always
whispered, “I am so sorry,” to their victims before they killed them.
The Qartheen were nothing if not polite. “It is wisely said that it is
easier to milk the Stone Cow of Faros than to wring gold from the
Pureborn.”
Dany did not know where Faros was, but it seemed to her that
Qarth was full of stone cows. The merchant princes, grown vastly
rich o the trade between the seas, were divided into three jealous
factions: the Ancient Guild of Spicers, the Tourmaline Brotherhood,
and the Thirteen, to which Xaro belonged. Each vied with the others
for dominance, and all three contended endlessly with the Pureborn.
And brooding over all were the warlocks, with their blue lips and
dread powers, seldom seen but much feared.
She would have been lost without Xaro. The gold that she had
squandered to open the doors of the Hall of a Thousand Thrones
was largely a product of the merchant’s generosity and quick wits.
As the rumor of living dragons had spread through the east, ever
more seekers had come to learn if the tale was true—and Xaro
Xhoan Daxos saw to it that the great and the humble alike o ered
some token to the Mother of Dragons.
The trickle he started soon swelled to a ood. Trader captains
brought lace from Myr, chests of sa ron from Yi Ti, amber and
dragonglass out of Asshai. Merchants o ered bags of coin,
silversmiths rings and chains. Pipers piped for her, tumblers

tumbled, and jugglers juggled, while dyers draped her in colors she
had never known existed. A pair of Jogos Nhai presented her with
one of their striped zorses, black and white and erce. A widow
brought the dried corpse of her husband, covered with a crust of
silvered leaves; such remnants were believed to have great power,
especially if the deceased had been a sorcerer, as this one had. And
the Tourmaline Brotherhood pressed on her a crown wrought in the
shape of a three-headed dragon; the coils were yellow gold, the
wings silver, the heads carved from jade, ivory, and onyx.
The crown was the only o ering she’d kept. The rest she sold, to
gather the wealth she had wasted on the Pureborn. Xaro would
have sold the crown too—the Thirteen would see that she had a
much ner one, he swore—but Dany forbade it. “Viserys sold my
mother’s crown, and men called him a beggar. I shall keep this one,
so men will call me a queen.” And so she did, though the weight of
it made her neck ache.
Yet even crowned, I am a beggar still, Dany thought. I have become
the most splendid beggar in the world, but a beggar all the same. She
hated it, as her brother must have. All those years of running from city
to city one step ahead of the Usurper’s knives, pleading for help from
archons and princes and magisters, buying our food with attery. He
must have known how they mocked him. Small wonder he turned so
angry and bitter. In the end it had driven him mad. It will do the same
to me if I let it. Part of her would have liked nothing more than to
lead her people back to Vaes Tolorro, and make the dead city
bloom. No, that is defeat. I have something Viserys never had. I have the
dragons. The dragons are all the di erence.
She stroked Rhaegal. The green dragon closed his teeth around
the meat of her hand and nipped hard. Outside, the great city
murmured and thrummed and seethed, all its myriad voices
blending into one low sound like the surge of the sea. “Make way,
you Milk Men, make way for the Mother of Dragons,” Jhogo cried,
and the Qartheen moved aside, though perhaps the oxen had more
to do with that than his voice. Through the swaying draperies, Dany
caught glimpses of him astride his grey stallion. From time to time
he gave one of the oxen a ick with the silver-handled whip she had

given him. Aggo guarded on her other side, while Rakharo rode
behind the procession, watching the faces in the crowd for any sign
of danger. Ser Jorah she had left behind today, to guard her other
dragons; the exile knight had been opposed to this folly from the
start. He distrusts everyone, she re ected, and perhaps for good reason.
As Dany lifted her goblet to drink, Rhaegal sni ed at the wine
and drew his head back, hissing. “Your dragon has a good nose.”
Xaro wiped his lips. “The wine is ordinary. It is said that across the
Jade Sea they make a golden vintage so ne that one sip makes all
other wines taste like vinegar. Let us take my pleasure barge and go
in search of it, you and I.”
“The Arbor makes the best wine in the world,” Dany declared.
Lord Redwyne had fought for her father against the Usurper, she
remembered, one of the few to remain true to the last. Will he ght
for me as well? There was no way to be certain after so many years.
“Come with me to the Arbor, Xaro, and you’ll have the nest
vintages you ever tasted. But we’ll need to go in a warship, not a
pleasure barge.”
“I have no warships. War is bad for trade. Many times I have told
you, Xaro Xhoan Daxos is a man of peace.”
Xaro Xhoan Daxos is a man of gold, she thought, and gold will buy
me all the ships and swords I need. “I have not asked you to take up a
sword, only to lend me your ships.”
He smiled modestly. “Of trading ships I have a few, that is so.
Who can say how many? One may be sinking even now, in some
stormy corner of the Summer Sea. On the morrow, another will fall
afoul of corsairs. The next day, one of my captains may look at the
wealth in his hold and think, All this should belong to me. Such are
the perils of trade. Why, the longer we talk, the fewer ships I am
likely to have. I grow poorer by the instant.”
“Give me ships, and I will make you rich again.”
“Marry me, bright light, and sail the ship of my heart. I cannot
sleep at night for thinking of your beauty.”
Dany smiled. Xaro’s owery protestations of passion amused her,
but his manner was at odds with his words. While Ser Jorah had
scarcely been able to keep his eyes from her bare breast when he’d

helped her into the palanquin, Xaro hardly deigned to notice it,
even in these close con nes. And she had seen the beautiful boys
who surrounded the merchant prince, itting through his palace
halls in wisps of silk. “You speak sweetly, Xaro, but under your
words I hear another no.”
“This Iron Throne you speak of sounds monstrous cold and hard. I
cannot bear the thought of jagged barbs cutting your sweet skin.”
The jewels in Xaro’s nose gave him the aspect of some strange
glittery bird. His long, elegant ngers waved dismissal. “Let this be
your kingdom, most exquisite of queens, and let me be your king. I
will give you a throne of gold, if you like. When Qarth begins to
pall, we can journey round Yi Ti and search for the dreaming city of
the poets, to sip the wine of wisdom from a dead man’s skull.”
“I mean to sail to Westeros, and drink the wine of vengeance
from the skull of the Usurper.” She scratched Rhaegal under one
eye, and his jade-green wings unfolded for a moment, stirring the
still air in the palanquin.
A single perfect tear ran down the cheek of Xaro Xhoan Daxos.
“Will nothing turn you from this madness?”
“Nothing,” she said, wishing she was as certain as she sounded.
“If each of the Thirteen would lend me ten ships—”
“You would have one hundred thirty ships, and no crew to sail
them. The justice of your cause means naught to the common men
of Qarth. Why should my sailors care who sits upon the throne of
some kingdom at the edge of the world?”
“I will pay them to care.”
“With what coin, sweet star of my heaven?”
“With the gold the seekers bring.”
“That you may do,” Xaro acknowledged, “but so much caring will
cost dear. You will need to pay them far more than I do, and all of
Qarth laughs at my ruinous generosity.”
“If the Thirteen will not aid me, perhaps I should ask the Guild of
Spicers or the Tourmaline Brotherhood?”
Xaro gave a languid shrug. “They will give you nothing but
attery and lies. The Spicers are dissemblers and braggarts and the
Brotherhood is full of pirates.”

“Then I must heed Pyat Pree, and go to the warlocks.”
The merchant prince sat up sharply. “Pyat Pree has blue lips, and
it is truly said that blue lips speak only lies. Heed the wisdom of
one who loves you. Warlocks are bitter creatures who eat dust and
drink of shadows. They will give you naught. They have naught to
give.”
“I would not need to seek sorcerous help if my friend Xaro Xhoan
Daxos would give me what I ask.”
“I have given you my home and heart, do they mean nothing to
you? I have given you perfume and pomegranates, tumbling
monkeys and spitting snakes, scrolls from lost Valyria, an idol’s
head and a serpent’s foot. I have given you this palanquin of ebony
and gold, and a matched set of bullocks to bear it, one white as
ivory and one black as jet, with horns inlaid with jewels.”
“Yes,” Dany said. “But it was ships and soldiers I wanted.”
“Did I not give you an army, sweetest of women? A thousand
knights, each in shining armor.”
The armor had been made of silver and gold, the knights of jade
and beryl and onyx and tourmaline, of amber and opal and
amethyst, each as tall as her little nger. “A thousand lovely
knights,” she said, “but not the sort my enemies need fear. And my
bullocks cannot carry me across the water, I—why are we
stopping?” The oxen had slowed notably.
“Khaleesi,” Aggo called through the drapes as the palanquin jerked
to a sudden halt. Dany rolled onto an elbow to lean out. They were
on the fringes of the bazaar, the way ahead blocked by a solid wall
of people. “What are they looking at?”
Jhogo rode back to her. “A remage, Khaleesi.”
“I want to see.”
“Then you must.” The Dothraki o ered a hand down. When she
took it, he pulled her up onto his horse and sat her in front of him,
where she could see over the heads of the crowd. The remage had
conjured a ladder in the air, a crackling orange ladder of swirling
ame that rose unsupported from the oor of the bazaar, reaching
toward the high latticed roof.

Most of the spectators, she noticed, were not of the city: she saw
sailors o trading ships, merchants come by caravan, dusty men out
of the red waste, wandering soldiers, craftsmen, slavers. Jhogo slid
one hand about her waist and leaned close. “The Milk Men shun
him. Khaleesi, do you see the girl in the felt hat? There, behind the
fat priest. She is a—”
“—cutpurse,” nished Dany. She was no pampered lady, blind to
such things. She had seen cutpurses aplenty in the streets of the Free
Cities, during the years she’d spent with her brother, running from
the Usurper’s hired knives.
The mage was gesturing, urging the ames higher and higher
with broad sweeps of his arms. As the watchers craned their necks
upward, the cutpurses squirmed through the press, small blades
hidden in their palms. They relieved the prosperous of their coin
with one hand while pointing upward with the other.
When the ery ladder stood forty feet high, the mage leapt
forward and began to climb it, scrambling up hand over hand as
quick as a monkey. Each rung he touched dissolved behind him,
leaving no more than a wisp of silver smoke. When he reached the
top, the ladder was gone and so was he.
“A ne trick,” announced Jhogo with admiration.
“No trick,” a woman said in the Common Tongue.
Dany had not noticed Quaithe in the crowd, yet there she stood,
eyes wet and shiny behind the implacable red lacquer mask. “What
mean you, my lady?”
“Half a year gone, that man could scarcely wake re from
dragonglass. He had some small skill with powders and wild re,
su cient to entrance a crowd while his cutpurses did their work. He
could walk across hot coals and make burning roses bloom in the
air, but he could no more aspire to climb the ery ladder than a
common sherman could hope to catch a kraken in his nets.”
Dany looked uneasily at where the ladder had stood. Even the
smoke was gone now, and the crowd was breaking up, each man
going about his business. In a moment more than a few would nd
their purses at and empty. “And now?”
“And now his powers grow, Khaleesi. And you are the cause of it.”

“Me?” She laughed. “How could that be?”
The woman stepped closer and lay two ngers on Dany’s wrist.
“You are the Mother of Dragons, are you not?”
“She is, and no spawn of shadows may touch her.” Jhogo brushed
Quaithe’s ngers away with the handle of his whip.
The woman took a step backward. “You must leave this city soon,
Daenerys Targaryen, or you will never be permitted to leave it at
all.”
Dany’s wrist still tingled where Quaithe had touched her. “Where
would you have me go?” she asked.
“To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you
must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the
light you must pass beneath the shadow.”
Asshai, Dany thought. She would have me go to Asshai. “Will the
Asshai’i give me an army?” she demanded. “Will there be gold for
me in Asshai? Will there be ships? What is there in Asshai that I will
not nd in Qarth?”
“Truth,” said the woman in the mask. And bowing, she faded back
into the crowd.
Rakharo snorted contempt through his drooping black
mustachios. “Khaleesi, better a man should swallow scorpions than
trust in the spawn of shadows, who dare not show their face
beneath the sun. It is known.”
“It is known,” Aggo agreed.
Xaro Xhoan Daxos had watched the whole exchange from his
cushions. When Dany climbed back into the palanquin beside him,
he said, “Your savages are wiser than they know. Such truths as the
Asshai’i hoard are not like to make you smile.” Then he pressed
another cup of wine on her, and spoke of love and lust and other
tri es all the way back to his manse.
In the quiet of her chambers, Dany stripped o her nery and
donned a loose robe of purple silk. Her dragons were hungry, so she
chopped up a snake and charred the pieces over a brazier. They are
growing, she realized as she watched them snap and squabble over
the blackened esh. They must weigh twice what they had in Vaes
Tolorro. Even so, it would be years before they were large enough

to take to war. And they must be trained as well, or they will lay my
kingdom waste. For all her Targaryen blood, Dany had not the least
idea of how to train a dragon.
Ser Jorah Mormont came to her as the sun was going down. “The
Pureborn refused you?”
“As you said they would. Come, sit, give me your counsel.” Dany
drew him down to the cushions beside her, and Jhiqui brought them
a bowl of purple olives and onions drowned in wine.
“You will get no help in this city, Khaleesi.” Ser Jorah took an
onion between thumb and fore nger. “Each day I am more
convinced of that than the day before. The Pureborn see no farther
than the walls of Qarth, and Xaro …”
“He asked me to marry him again.”
“Yes, and I know why.” When the knight frowned, his heavy
black brows joined together above his deep-set eyes.
“He dreams of me, day and night.” She laughed.
“Forgive me, my queen, but it is your dragons he dreams of.”
“Xaro assures me that in Qarth, man and woman each retain their
own property after they are wed. The dragons are mine.” She
smiled as Drogon came hopping and apping across the marble oor
to crawl up on the cushion beside her.
“He tells it true as far as it goes, but there’s one thing he failed to
mention. The Qartheen have a curious wedding custom, my queen.
On the day of their union, a wife may ask a token of love from her
husband. Whatsoever she desires of his worldly goods, he must
grant. And he may ask the same of her. One thing only may be
asked, but whatever is named may not be denied.”
“One thing,” she repeated. “And it may not be denied?”
“With one dragon, Xaro Xhoan Daxos would rule this city, but
one ship will further our cause but little.”
Dany nibbled at an onion and re ected ruefully on the
faithlessness of men. “We passed through the bazaar on our way
back from the Hall of a Thousand Thrones,” she told Ser Jorah.
“Quaithe was there.” She told him of the remage and the ery
ladder, and what the woman in the red mask had told her.

“I would be glad to leave this city, if truth be told,” the knight
said when she was done. “But not for Asshai.”
“Where, then?”
“East,” he said.
“I am half a world away from my kingdom even here. If I go any
farther east I may never nd my way home to Westeros.”
“If you go west, you risk your life.”
“House Targaryen has friends in the Free Cities,” she reminded
him. “Truer friends than Xaro or the Pureborn.”
“If you mean Illyrio Mopatis, I wonder. For su cient gold, Illyrio
would sell you as quickly as he would a slave.”
“My brother and I were guests in Illyrio’s manse for half a year. If
he meant to sell us, he could have done it then.”
“He did sell you,” Ser Jorah said. “To Khal Drogo.”
Dany ushed. He had the truth of it, but she did not like the
sharpness with which he put it. “Illyrio protected us from the
Usurper’s knives, and he believed in my brother’s cause.”
“Illyrio believes in no cause but Illyrio. Gluttons are greedy men
as a rule, and magisters are devious. Illyrio Mopatis is both. What
do you truly know of him?”
“I know that he gave me my dragon eggs.”
He snorted. “If he’d known they were like to hatch, he’d would
have sat on them himself.”
That made her smile despite herself. “Oh, I have no doubt of that,
ser. I know Illyrio better than you think. I was a child when I left
his manse in Pentos to wed my sun-and-stars, but I was neither deaf
nor blind. And I am no child now.”
“Even if Illyrio is the friend you think him,” the knight said
stubbornly, “he is not powerful enough to enthrone you by himself,
no more than he could your brother.”
“He is rich,” she said. “Not so rich as Xaro, perhaps, but rich
enough to hire ships for me, and men as well.”
“Sellswords have their uses,” Ser Jorah admitted, “but you will
not win your father’s throne with sweepings from the Free Cities.
Nothing knits a broken realm together so quick as an invading army
on its soil.”

“I am their rightful queen,” Dany protested.
“You are a stranger who means to land on their shores with an
army of outlanders who cannot even speak the Common Tongue.
The lords of Westeros do not know you, and have every reason to
fear and mistrust you. You must win them over before you sail. A
few at least.”
“And how am I to do that, if I go east as you counsel?”
He ate an olive and spit out the pit into his palm. “I do not know,
Your Grace,” he admitted, “but I do know that the longer you
remain in one place, the easier it will be for your enemies to nd
you. The name Targaryen still frightens them, so much so that they
sent a man to murder you when they heard you were with child.
What will they do when they learn of your dragons?”
Drogon was curled up beneath her arm, as hot as a stone that has
soaked all day in the blazing sun. Rhaegal and Viserion were
ghting over a scrap of meat, bu eting each other with their wings
as smoke hissed from their nostrils. My furious children, she thought.
They must not come to harm. “The comet led me to Qarth for a
reason. I had hoped to nd my army here, but it seems that will not
be. What else remains, I ask myself?” I am afraid, she realized, but I
must be brave. “Come the morrow, you must go to Pyat Pree.”

TYRION

The girl never wept. Young as she was, Myrcella Baratheon was a

princess born. And a Lannister, despite her name, Tyrion reminded
himself, as much Jaime’s blood as Cersei’s.
To be sure, her smile was a shade tremulous when her brothers
took their leave of her on the deck of the Seaswift, but the girl knew
the proper words to say, and she said them with courage and
dignity. When the time came to part, it was Prince Tommen who
cried, and Myrcella who gave him comfort.
Tyrion looked down upon the farewells from the high deck of
King Robert’s Hammer, a great war galley of four hundred oars. Rob’s
Hammer, as her oarsmen called her, would form the main strength
of Myrcella’s escort. Lionstar, Bold Wind, and Lady Lyanna would sail
with her as well.
It made Tyrion more than a little uneasy to detach so great a part
of their already inadequate eet, depleted as it was by the loss of all
those ships that had sailed with Lord Stannis to Dragonstone and
never returned, but Cersei would hear of nothing less. Perhaps she
was wise. If the girl was captured before she reached Sunspear, the
Dornish alliance would fall to pieces. So far Doran Martell had done
no more than call his banners. Once Myrcella was safe in Braavos,
he had pledged to move his strength to the high passes, where the
threat might make some of the Marcher lords rethink their loyalties
and give Stannis pause about marching north. It was purely a feint,
however. The Martells would not commit to actual battle unless

Dorne itself was attacked, and Stannis was not so great a fool.
Though some of his bannermen may be, Tyrion re ected. I should think
on that.
He cleared his throat. “You know your orders, Captain.”
“I do, my lord. We are to follow the coast, staying always in sight
of land, until we reach Crackclaw Point. From there we are to strike
out across the narrow sea for Braavos. On no account are we to sail
within sight of Dragonstone.”
“And if our foes should chance upon you nonetheless?”
“If a single ship, we are to run them o or destroy them. If there
are more, the Bold Wind will cleave to the Seaswift to protect her
while the rest of the eet does battle.”
Tyrion nodded. If the worst happened, the little Seaswift ought to
be able to outrun pursuit. A small ship with big sails, she was faster
than any warship a oat, or so her captain had claimed. Once
Myrcella reached Braavos, she ought to be safe. He was sending Ser
Arys Oakheart as her sworn shield, and had engaged the Braavosi to
bring her the rest of the way to Sunspear. Even Lord Stannis would
hesitate to wake the anger of the greatest and most powerful of the
Free Cities. Traveling from King’s Landing to Dorne by way of
Braavos was scarcely the most direct of routes, but it was the
safest … or so he hoped.
If Lord Stannis knew of this sailing, he could not choose a better time
to send his eet against us. Tyrion glanced back to where the Rush
emptied out into Blackwater Bay and was relieved to see no signs of
sails on the wide green horizon. At last report, the Baratheon eet
still lay o Storm’s End, where Ser Cortnay Penrose continued to
defy the besiegers in dead Renly’s name. Meanwhile, Tyrion’s winch
towers stood three-quarters complete. Even now men were hoisting
heavy blocks of stone into place, no doubt cursing him for making
them work through the festivities. Let them curse. Another fortnight,
Stannis, that’s all I require. Another fortnight and it will be done.
Tyrion watched his niece kneel before the High Septon to receive
his blessing on her voyage. Sunlight caught in his crystal crown and
spilled rainbows across Myrcella’s upturned face. The noise from the
riverside made it impossible to hear the prayers. He hoped the gods

had sharper ears. The High Septon was as fat as a house, and more
pompous and long of wind than even Pycelle. Enough, old man,
make an end to it, Tyrion thought irritably. The gods have better things
to do than listen to you, and so do I.
When at last the droning and mumbling was done, Tyrion took
his farewell of the captain of Rob’s Hammer. “Deliver my niece
safely to Braavos, and there will be a knighthood waiting for you on
your return,” he promised.
As he made his way down the steep plank to the quay, Tyrion
could feel unkind eyes upon him. The galley rocked gently and the
movement underfoot made his waddle worse than ever. I’ll wager
they’d love to snigger. No one dared, not openly, though he heard
mutterings mingled with the creak of wood and rope and the rush
of the river around the pilings. They do not love me, he thought.
Well, small wonder. I’m well fed and ugly, and they are starving.
Bronn escorted him through the crowd to join his sister and her
sons. Cersei ignored him, preferring to lavish her smiles on their
cousin. He watched her charming Lancel with eyes as green as the
rope of emeralds around her slim white throat, and smiled a small
sly smile to himself. I know your secret, Cersei, he thought. His sister
had oft called upon the High Septon of late, to seek the blessings of
the gods in their coming struggle with Lord Stannis … or so she
would have him believe. In truth, after a brief call at the Great Sept
of Baelor, Cersei would don a plain brown traveler’s cloak and steal
o to meet a certain hedge knight with the unlikely name of Ser
Osmund Kettleblack, and his equally unsavory brothers Osney and
Osfryd. Lancel had told him all about them. Cersei meant to use the
Kettleblacks to buy her own force of sellswords.
Well, let her enjoy her plots. She was much sweeter when she
thought she was outwitting him. The Kettleblacks would charm her,
take her coin, and promise her anything she asked, and why not,
when Bronn was matching every copper penny, coin for coin?
Amiable rogues all three, the brothers were in truth much more
skilled at deceit than they’d ever been at bloodletting. Cersei had
managed to buy herself three hollow drums; they would make all

the erce booming sounds she required, but there was nothing
inside. It amused Tyrion no end.
Horns blew fanfares as Lionstar and Lady Lyanna pushed out from
shore, moving downriver to clear the way for Seaswift. A few cheers
went up from the crush along the banks, as thin and ragged as the
clouds scuttling overhead. Myrcella smiled and waved from the
deck. Behind her stood Arys Oakheart, his white cloak streaming.
The captain ordered lines cast o , and oars pushed the Seaswift out
into the lusty current of the Blackwater Rush, where her sails
blossomed in the wind—common white sails, as Tyrion had insisted,
not sheets of Lannister crimson. Prince Tommen sobbed. “You mew
like a suckling babe,” his brother hissed at him. “Princes aren’t
supposed to cry.”
“Prince Aemon the Dragonknight cried the day Princess Naerys
wed his brother Aegon,” Sansa Stark said, “and the twins Ser Arryk
and Ser Erryk died with tears on their cheeks after each had given
the other a mortal wound.”
“Be quiet, or I’ll have Ser Meryn give you a mortal wound,”
Jo rey told his betrothed. Tyrion glanced at his sister, but Cersei
was engrossed in something Ser Balon Swann was telling her. Can
she truly be so blind as to what he is? he wondered.
Out on the river, Bold Wind unshipped her oars and glided
downstream in the wake of Seaswift. Last came King Robert’s
Hammer, the might of the royal eet … or at least that portion that
had not ed to Dragonstone last year with Stannis. Tyrion had
chosen the ships with care, avoiding any whose captains might be of
doubtful loyalty, according to Varys … but as Varys himself was of
doubtful loyalty, a certain amount of apprehension remained. I rely
too much on Varys, he re ected. I need my own informers. Not that I’d
trust them either. Trust would get you killed.
He wondered again about Little nger. There had been no word
from Petyr Baelish since he had ridden o for Bitterbridge. That
might mean nothing—or everything. Even Varys could not say. The
eunuch had suggested that perhaps Little nger had met some
misfortune on the roads. He might even be slain. Tyrion had snorted
in derision. “If Little nger is dead, then I’m a giant.” More likely,

the Tyrells were balking at the proposed marriage. Tyrion could
scarcely blame them. If I were Mace Tyrell, I would sooner have
Jo rey’s head on a pike than his cock in my daughter.
The little eet was well out into the bay when Cersei indicated
that it was time to go. Bronn brought Tyrion’s horse and helped him
mount. That was Podrick Payne’s task, but they had left Pod back at
the Red Keep. The gaunt sellsword made for a much more
reassuring presence than the boy would have.
The narrow streets were lined by men of the City Watch, holding
back the crowd with the shafts of their spears. Ser Jacelyn Bywater
went in front, heading a wedge of mounted lancers in black
ringmail and golden cloaks. Behind him came Ser Aron Santagar and
Ser Balon Swann, bearing the king’s banners, the lion of Lannister
and crowned stag of Baratheon.
King Jo rey followed on a tall grey palfrey, a golden crown set
upon his golden curls. Sansa Stark rode a chesnut mare at his side,
looking neither right nor left, her thick auburn hair owing to her
shoulders beneath a net of moonstones. Two of the Kingsguard
anked the couple, the Hound on the king’s right hand and Ser
Mandon Moore to the left of the Stark girl.
Next came Tommen, snu ing, with Ser Preston Green eld in his
white armor and cloak, and then Cersei, accompanied by Ser Lancel
and protected by Meryn Trant and Boros Blount. Tyrion fell in with
his sister. After them followed the High Septon in his litter, and a
long tail of other courtiers—Ser Horas Redwyne, Lady Tanda and
her daughter, Jalabhar Xho, Lord Gyles Rosby, and the rest. A
double column of guardsmen brought up the rear.
The unshaven and the unwashed stared at the riders with dull
resentment from behind the line of spears. I like this not one speck,
Tyrion thought. Bronn had a score of sellswords scattered through
the crowd with orders to stop any trouble before it started. Perhaps
Cersei had similarly disposed her Kettleblacks. Somehow Tyrion did
not think it would help much. If the re was too hot, you could
hardly keep the pudding from scorching by tossing a handful of
raisins in the pot.

They crossed Fishmonger’s Square and rode along Muddy Way
before turning onto the narrow, curving Hook to begin their climb
up Aegon’s High Hill. A few voices raised a cry of “Jo rey! All hail,
all hail!” as the young king rode by, but for every man who picked
up the shout, a hundred kept their silence. The Lannisters moved
through a sea of ragged men and hungry women, breasting a tide of
sullen eyes. Just ahead of him, Cersei was laughing at something
Lancel had said, though he suspected her merriment was feigned.
She could not be oblivious to the unrest around them, but his sister
always believed in putting on the brave show.
Halfway along the route, a wailing woman forced her way
between two watchmen and ran out into the street in front of the
king and his companions, holding the corpse of her dead baby above
her head. It was blue and swollen, grotesque, but the real horror
was the mother’s eyes. Jo rey looked for a moment as if he meant
to ride her down, but Sansa Stark leaned over and said something to
him. The king fumbled in his purse, and ung the woman a silver
stag. The coin bounced o the child and rolled away, under the legs
of the gold cloaks and into the crowd, where a dozen men began to
ght for it. The mother never once blinked. Her skinny arms were
trembling from the dead weight of her son.
“Leave her, Your Grace,” Cersei called out to the king, “she’s
beyond our help, poor thing.”
The mother heard her. Somehow the queen’s voice cut through
the woman’s ravaged wits. Her slack face twisted in loathing.
“Whore!” she shrieked. “Kingslayer’s whore! Brotherfucker!” Her dead
child dropped from her arms like a sack of our as she pointed at
Cersei. “Brotherfucker brotherfucker brotherfucker.”
Tyrion never saw who threw the dung. He only heard Sansa’s
gasp and Jo rey’s bellowed curse, and when he turned his head, the
king was wiping brown lth from his cheek. There was more caked
in his golden hair and spattered over Sansa’s legs.
“Who threw that?” Jo rey screamed. He pushed his ngers into
his hair, made a furious face, and ung away another handful of
dung. “I want the man who threw that!” he shouted. “A hundred
golden dragons to the man who gives him up.”

“He was up there!” someone shouted from the crowd. The king
wheeled his horse in a circle to survey the rooftops and open
balconies above them. In the crowd people were pointing, shoving,
cursing one another and the king.
“Please, Your Grace, let him go,” Sansa pleaded.
The king paid her no heed. “Bring me the man who ung that
lth!” Jo rey commanded. “He’ll lick it o me or I’ll have his head.
Dog, you bring him here!”
Obedient, Sandor Clegane swung down from his saddle, but there
was no way through that wall of esh, let alone to the roof. Those
closest to him began to squirm and shove to get away, while others
pushed forward to see. Tyrion smelled disaster. “Clegane, leave o ,
the man is long ed.”
“I want him!” Jo rey pointed at the roof. “He was up there! Dog,
cut through them and bring—”
A tumult of sound drowned his last words, a rolling thunder of
rage and fear and hatred that engulfed them from all sides.
“Bastard!” someone screamed at Jo rey, “bastard monster.” Other
voices ung calls of “Whore” and “Brotherfucker” at the queen, while
Tyrion was pelted with shouts of “Freak” and “Halfman.” Mixed in
with the abuse, he heard a few cries of “Justice” and “Robb, King
Robb, the Young Wolf,” of “Stannis!” and even “Renly!” From both
sides of the street, the crowd surged against the spear shafts while
the gold cloaks struggled to hold the line. Stones and dung and
fouler things whistled overhead. “Feed us!” a woman shrieked.
“Bread!” boomed a man behind her. “We want bread, bastard!” In a
heartbeat, a thousand voices took up the chant. King Jo rey and
King Robb and King Stannis were forgotten, and King Bread ruled
alone. “Bread,” they clamored. “Bread, bread!”
Tyrion spurred to his sister’s side, yelling, “Back to the castle.
Now.” Cersei gave a curt nod, and Ser Lancel unsheathed his sword.
Ahead of the column, Jacelyn Bywater was roaring commands. His
riders lowered their lances and drove forward in a wedge. The king
was wheeling his palfrey around in anxious circles while hands
reached past the line of gold cloaks, grasping for him. One managed
to get hold of his leg, but only for an instant. Ser Mandon’s sword

slashed down, parting hand from wrist. “Ride!” Tyrion shouted at
his nephew, giving the horse a sharp smack on the rump. The animal
reared, trumpeting, and plunged ahead, the press shattering before
him.
Tyrion drove into the gap hard on the king’s hooves. Bronn kept
pace, sword in hand. A jagged rock ew past his head as he rode,
and a rotten cabbage exploded against Ser Mandon’s shield. To their
left, three gold cloaks went down under the surge, and then the
crowd was rushing forward, trampling the fallen men. The Hound
had vanished behind, though his riderless horse galloped beside
them. Tyrion saw Aron Santagar pulled from the saddle, the goldand-black Baratheon stag torn from his grasp. Ser Balon Swann
dropped the Lannister lion to draw his longsword. He slashed right
and left as the fallen banner was ripped apart, the thousand ragged
pieces swirling away like crimson leaves in a stormwind. In an
instant they were gone. Someone staggered in front of Jo rey’s
horse and shrieked as the king rode him down. Whether it had been
man, woman, or child Tyrion could not have said. Jo rey was
galloping at his side, whey-faced, with Ser Mandon Moore a white
shadow on his left.
And suddenly the madness was behind and they were clattering
across the cobbled square that fronted on the castle barbican. A line
of spearmen held the gates. Ser Jacelyn was wheeling his lances
around for another charge. The spears parted to let the king’s party
pass under the portcullis. Pale red walls loomed up about them,
reassuringly high and aswarm with crossbowmen.
Tyrion did not recall dismounting. Ser Mandon was helping the
shaken king o his horse when Cersei, Tommen, and Lancel rode
through the gates with Ser Meryn and Ser Boros close behind. Boros
had blood smeared along his blade, while Meryn’s white cloak had
been torn from his back. Ser Balon Swann rode in helmetless, his
mount lathered and bleeding at the mouth. Horas Redwyne brought
in Lady Tanda, half-crazed with fear for her daughter Lollys, who
had been knocked from the saddle and left behind. Lord Gyles,
more grey of face than ever, stammered out a tale of seeing the
High Septon spilled from his litter, screeching prayers as the crowd

swept over him. Jalabhar Xho said he thought he’d seen Ser Preston
Green eld of the Kingsguard riding back toward the High Septon’s
overturned litter, but he was not certain.
Tyrion was dimly aware of a maester asking if he was injured. He
pushed his way across the yard to where his nephew stood, his
dung-encrusted crown askew. “Traitors,” Jo rey was babbling
excitedly, “I’ll have all their heads, I’ll—”
The dwarf slapped his ushed face so hard the crown ew from
Jo rey’s head. Then he shoved him with both hands and knocked
him sprawling. “You blind bloody fool.”
“They were traitors,” Jo rey squealed from the ground. “They
called me names and attacked me!”
“You set your dog on them! What did you imagine they would do,
bend the knee meekly while the Hound lopped o some limbs? You
spoiled witless little boy, you’ve killed Clegane and gods know how
many more, and yet you come through unscratched. Damn you!”
And he kicked him. It felt so good he might have done more, but
Ser Mandon Moore pulled him o as Jo rey howled, and then
Bronn was there to take him in hand. Cersei knelt over her son,
while Ser Balon Swann restrained Ser Lancel. Tyrion wrenched free
of Bronn’s grip. “How many are still out there?” he shouted to no
one and everyone.
“My daughter,” cried Lady Tanda. “Please, someone must go back
for Lollys …”
“Ser Preston is not returned,” Ser Boros Blount reported, “nor
Aron Santagar.”
“Nor Wet Nurse,” said Ser Horas Redwyne. That was the mocking
name the other squires had hung on young Tyrek Lannister.
Tyrion glanced round the yard. “Where’s the Stark girl?”
For a moment no one answered. Finally Jo rey said, “She was
riding by me. I don’t know where she went.”
Tyrion pressed blunt ngers into his throbbing temples. If Sansa
Stark had come to harm, Jaime was as good as dead. “Ser Mandon,
you were her shield.”
Ser Mandon Moore remained untroubled. “When they mobbed the
Hound, I thought rst of the king.”

“And rightly so,” Cersei put in. “Boros, Meryn, go back and nd
the girl.”
“And my daughter,” Lady Tanda sobbed. “Please, sers …”
Ser Boros did not look pleased at the prospect of leaving the
safety of the castle. “Your Grace,” he told the queen, “the sight of
our white cloaks might enrage the mob.”
Tyrion had stomached all he cared to. “The Others take your
fucking cloaks! Take them o if you’re afraid to wear them, you
bloody oaf … but nd me Sansa Stark or I swear, I’ll have Shagga
split that ugly head of yours in two to see if there’s anything inside
but black pudding.”
Ser Boros went purple with rage. “You would call me ugly, you?”
He started to raise the bloody sword still clutched in his mailed st.
Bronn shoved Tyrion unceremoniously behind him.
“Stop it!” Cersei snapped. “Boros, you’ll do as you’re bid, or we’ll
nd someone else to wear that cloak. Your oath—”
“There she is!” Jo rey shouted, pointing.
Sandor Clegane cantered briskly through the gates astride Sansa’s
chestnut courser. The girl was seated behind, both arms tight
around the Hound’s chest.
Tyrion called to her. “Are you hurt, Lady Sansa?”
Blood was trickling down Sansa’s brow from a deep gash on her
scalp. “They … they were throwing things … rocks and lth,
eggs … I tried to tell them, I had no bread to give them. A man
tried to pull me from the saddle. The Hound killed him, I
think … his arm …” Her eyes widened and she put a hand over her
mouth. “He cut o his arm.”
Clegane lifted her to the ground. His white cloak was torn and
stained, and blood seeped through a jagged tear in his left sleeve.
“The little bird’s bleeding. Someone take her back to her cage and
see to that cut.” Maester Frenken scurried forward to obey. “They
did for Santagar,” the Hound continued. “Four men held him down
and took turns bashing at his head with a cobblestone. I gutted one,
not that it did Ser Aron much good.”
Lady Tanda approached him. “My daughter—”

“Never saw her.” The Hound glanced around the yard, scowling.
“Where’s my horse? If anything’s happened to that horse, someone’s
going to pay.”
“He was running with us for a time,” Tyrion said, “but I don’t
know what became of him after that.”
“Fire!” a voice screamed down from atop the barbican. “My lords,
there’s smoke in the city. Flea Bottom’s a re.”
Tyrion was inutterably weary, but there was no time for despair.
“Bronn, take as many men as you need and see that the water
wagons are not molested.” Gods be good, the wild re, if any blaze
should reach that … “We can lose all of Flea Bottom if we must, but
on no account must the re reach the Guildhall of the Alchemists, is
that understood? Clegane, you’ll go with him.”
For half a heartbeat, Tyrion thought he glimpsed fear in the
Hound’s dark eyes. Fire, he realized. The Others take me, of course he
hates re, he’s tasted it too well. The look was gone in an instant,
replaced by Clegane’s familiar scowl. “I’ll go,” he said, “though not
by your command. I need to nd that horse.”
Tyrion turned to the three remaining knights of the Kingsguard.
“Each of you will ride escort to a herald. Command the people to
return to their homes. Any man found on the streets after the last
peal of the evenfall bell will be killed.”
“Our place is beside the king,” Ser Meryn said, complacent.
Cersei reared up like a viper. “Your place is where my brother
says it is,” she spit. “The Hand speaks with the king’s own voice,
and disobedience is treason.”
Boros and Meryn exchanged a look. “Should we wear our cloaks,
Your Grace?” Ser Boros asked.
“Go naked for all I care. It might remind the mob that you’re
men. They’re like to have forgotten after seeing the way you
behaved out there in the street.”
Tyrion let his sister rage. His head was throbbing. He thought he
could smell smoke, though perhaps it was just the scent of his
nerves fraying. Two of the Stone Crows guarded the door of the
Tower of the Hand. “Find me Timett son of Timett.”

“Stone Crows do not run squeaking after Burned Men,” one of the
wildlings informed him haughtily.
For a moment Tyrion had forgotten who he was dealing with.
“Then nd me Shagga.”
“Shagga sleeps.”
It was an e ort not to scream. “Wake. Him.”
“It is no easy thing to wake Shagga son of Dolf,” the man
complained. “His wrath is fearsome.” He went o grumbling.
The clansman wandered in yawning and scratching. “Half the city
is rioting, the other half is burning, and Shagga lies snoring,” Tyrion
said.
“Shagga mislikes your muddy water here, so he must drink your
weak ale and sour wine, and after his head hurts.”
“I have Shae in a manse near the Iron Gate. I want you to go to
her and keep her safe, whatever may come.”
The huge man smiled, his teeth a yellow crevasse in the hairy
wilderness of his beard. “Shagga will fetch her here.”
“Just see that no harm comes to her. Tell her I will come to her as
soon as I may. This very night, perhaps, or on the morrow for a
certainty.”
Yet by evenfall the city was still in turmoil, though Bronn
reported that the res were quenched and most of the roving mobs
dispersed. Much as Tyrion yearned for the comfort of Shae’s arms,
he realized he would go nowhere that night.
Ser Jacelyn Bywater delivered the butcher’s bill as he was
supping on a cold capon and brown bread in the gloom of his solar.
Dusk had faded to darkness by then, but when his servants came to
light his candles and start a re in the hearth, Tyrion had roared at
them and sent them running. His mood was as black as the
chamber, and Bywater said nothing to lighten it.
The list of the slain was topped by the High Septon, ripped apart
as he squealed to his gods for mercy. Starving men take a hard view of
priests too fat to walk, Tyrion re ected.
Ser Preston’s corpse had been overlooked at rst; the gold cloaks
had been searching for a knight in white armor, and he had been

stabbed and hacked so cruelly that he was red-brown from head to
heel.
Ser Aron Santagar had been found in a gutter, his head a red pulp
inside a crushed helm.
Lady Tanda’s daughter had surrendered her maidenhood to half a
hundred shouting men behind a tanner’s shop. The gold cloaks
found her wandering naked on Sowbelly Row.
Tyrek was still missing, as was the High Septon’s crystal crown.
Nine gold cloaks had been slain, two score wounded. No one had
troubled to count how many of the mob had died.
“I want Tyrek found, alive or dead,” Tyrion said curtly when
Bywater was done. “He’s no more than a boy. Son to my late uncle
Tygett. His father was always kind to me.”
“We’ll nd him. The septon’s crown as well.”
“The Others can bugger each other with the septon’s crown, for
all I care.”
“When you named me to command the Watch, you told me you
wanted plain truth, always.”
“Somehow I have a feeling I am not going to like whatever you’re
about to say,” Tyrion said gloomily.
“We held the city today, my lord, but I make no promises for the
morrow. The kettle is close to boiling. So many thieves and
murderers are abroad that no man’s house is safe, the bloody ux is
spreading in the stews along Pisswater Bend, there’s no food to be
had for copper nor silver. Where before you heard only mutterings
from the gutter, now there’s open talk of treason in guildhalls and
markets.”
“Do you need more men?”
“I do not trust half the men I have now. Slynt tripled the size of
the Watch, but it takes more than a gold cloak to make a watchman.
There are good men and loyal among the new recruits, but also
more brutes, sots, cravens, and traitors than you’d care to know.
They’re half-trained and undisciplined, and what loyalty they have
is to their own skins. If it comes to battle, they’ll not hold, I fear.”
“I never expected them to,” said Tyrion. “Once our walls are
breeched, we are lost, I’ve known that from the start.”

“My men are largely drawn from the smallfolk. They walk the
same streets, drink in the same winesinks, spoon down their bowls
of brown in the same pot-shops. Your eunuch must have told you,
there is small love for the Lannisters in King’s Landing. Many still
remember how your lord father sacked the city, when Aerys opened
the gates to him. They whisper that the gods are punishing us for
the sins of your House—for your brother’s murder of King Aerys,
for the butchery of Rhaegar’s children, for the execution of Eddard
Stark and the savagery of Jo rey’s justice. Some talk openly of how
much better things were when Robert was king, and hint that times
would be better again with Stannis on the throne. In pot-shops and
winesinks and brothels, you hear these things—and in the barracks
and guardhalls as well, I fear.”
“They hate my family, is that what you are telling me?”
“Aye … and will turn on them, if the chance comes.”
“Me as well?”
“Ask your eunuch.”
“I’m asking you.”
Bywater’s deep-set eyes met the dwarf’s mismatched ones, and
did not blink. “You most of all, my lord.”
“Most of all?” The injustice was like to choke him. “It was Jo rey
who told them to eat their dead, Jo rey who set his dog on them.
How could they blame me?”
“His Grace is but a boy. In the streets, it is said that he has evil
councillors. The queen has never been known as a friend to the
commons, nor is Lord Varys called the Spider out of love … but it is
you they blame most. Your sister and the eunuch were here when
times were better under King Robert, but you were not. They say
that you’ve lled the city with swaggering sellswords and unwashed
savages, brutes who take what they want and follow no laws but
their own. They say you exiled Janos Slynt because you found him
too blu and honest for your liking. They say you threw wise and
gentle Pycelle into the dungeons when he dared raise his voice
against you. Some even claim that you mean to seize the Iron
Throne for your own.”

“Yes, and I am a monster besides, hideous and misshapen, never
forget that.” His hand coiled into a st. “I’ve heard enough. We
both have work to attend to. Leave me.”
Perhaps my lord father was right to despise me all these years, if this is
the best I can achieve, Tyrion thought when he was alone. He stared
down at the remains of his supper, his belly roiling at the sight of
the cold greasy capon. Disgusted, he pushed it away, shouted for
Pod, and sent the boy running to summon Varys and Bronn. My most
trusted advisers are a eunuch and a sellsword, and my lady’s a whore.
What does that say of me?
Bronn complained of the gloom when he arrived, and insisted on
a re in the hearth. It was blazing by the time Varys made his
appearance. “Where have you been?” Tyrion demanded.
“About the king’s business, my sweet lord.”
“Ah, yes, the king,” Tyrion muttered. “My nephew is not t to sit
a privy, let alone the Iron Throne.”
Varys shrugged. “An apprentice must be taught his trade.”
“Half the ’prentices on Reeking Lane could rule better than this
king of yours.” Bronn seated himself across the table and pulled a
wing o the capon.
Tyrion had made a practice of ignoring the sellsword’s frequent
insolences, but tonight he found it galling. “I don’t recall giving you
leave to nish my supper.”
“You didn’t look to be eating it,” Bronn said through a mouthful
of meat. “City’s starving, it’s a crime to waste food. You have any
wine?”
Next he’ll want me to pour it for him, Tyrion thought darkly. “You
go too far,” he warned.
“And you never go far enough.” Bronn tossed the wingbone to the
rushes. “Ever think how easy life would be if the other one had
been born rst?” He thrust his ngers inside the capon and tore o
a handful of breast. “The weepy one, Tommen. Seems like he’d do
whatever he was told, as a good king should.”
A chill crept down Tyrion’s spine as he realized what the
sellsword was hinting at. If Tommen was king …

There was only one way Tommen would become king. No, he
could not even think it. Jo rey was his own blood, and Jaime’s son
as much as Cersei’s. “I could have your head o for saying that,” he
told Bronn, but the sellsword only laughed.
“Friends,” said Varys, “quarreling will not serve us. I beg you
both, take heart.”
“Whose?” asked Tyrion sourly. He could think of several
tempting choices.

DAVOS

Ser Cortnay Penrose wore no armor. He sat a sorrel stallion, his

standard-bearer a dapple grey. Above them apped Baratheon’s
crowned stag and the crossed quills of Penrose, white on a russet
eld. Ser Cortnay’s spade-shaped beard was russet as well, though
he’d gone wholly bald on top. If the size and splendor of the king’s
party impressed him, it did not show on that weathered face.
They trotted up with much clinking of chain and rattle of plate.
Even Davos wore mail, though he could not have said why; his
shoulders and lower back ached from the unaccustomed weight. It
made him feel cumbered and foolish, and he wondered once more
why he was here. It is not for me to question the king’s commands, and
yet …
Every man of the party was of better birth and higher station
than Davos Seaworth, and the great lords glittered in the morning
sun. Silvered steel and gold inlay brightened their armor, and their
warhelms were crested in a riot of silken plumes, feathers, and
cunningly wrought heraldic beasts with gemstone eyes. Stannis
himself looked out of place in this rich and royal company. Like
Davos, the king was plainly garbed in wool and boiled leather,
though the circlet of red gold about his temples lent him a certain
grandeur. Sunlight ashed o its ame-shaped points whenever he
moved his head.
This was the closest Davos had come to His Grace in the eight
days since Black Betha had joined the rest of the eet o Storm’s

End. He’d sought an audience within an hour of his arrival, only to
be told that the king was occupied. The king was often occupied,
Davos learned from his son Devan, one of the royal squires. Now
that Stannis Baratheon had come into his power, the lordlings
buzzed around him like ies round a corpse. He looks half a corpse
too, years older than when I left Dragonstone. Devan said the king
scarcely slept of late. “Since Lord Renly died, he has been troubled
by terrible nightmares,” the boy had con ded to his father.
“Maester’s potions do not touch them. Only the Lady Melisandre
can soothe him to sleep.”
Is that why she shares his pavilion now? Davos wondered. To pray
with him? Or does she have another way to soothe him to sleep? It was
an unworthy question, and one he dared not ask, even of his own
son. Devan was a good boy, but he wore the aming heart proudly
on his doublet, and his father had seen him at the night res as dusk
fell, beseeching the Lord of Light to bring the dawn. He is the king’s
squire, he told himself, it is only to be expected that he would take the
king’s god.
Davos had almost forgotten how high and thick the walls of
Storm’s End loomed up close. King Stannis halted beneath them, a
few feet from Ser Cortnay and his standard-bearer. “Ser,” he said
with sti courtesy. He made no move to dismount.
“My lord.” That was less courteous, but not unexpected.
“It is customary to grant a king the style Your Grace,” announced
Lord Florent. A red gold fox poked its shining snout out from his
breastplate through a circle of lapis lazuli owers. Very tall, very
courtly, and very rich, the Lord of Brightwater Keep had been the
rst of Renly’s bannermen to declare for Stannis, and the rst to
renounce his old gods and take up the Lord of Light. Stannis had left
his queen on Dragonstone along with her uncle Axell, but the
queen’s men were more numerous and powerful than ever, and
Alester Florent was the foremost.
Ser Cortnay Penrose ignored him, preferring to address Stannis.
“This is a notable company. The great lords Estermont, Errol, and
Varner. Ser Jon of the green-apple Fossoways and Ser Bryan of the
red. Lord Caron and Ser Guyard of King Renly’s Rainbow

Guard … and the puissant Lord Alester Florent of Brightwater, to be
sure. Is that your Onion Knight I spy to the rear? Well met, Ser
Davos. I fear I do not know the lady.”
“I am named Melisandre, ser.” She alone came unarmored, but for
her owing red robes. At her throat the great ruby drank the
daylight. “I serve your king, and the Lord of Light.”
“I wish you well of them, my lady,” Ser Cortnay answered, “but I
bow to other gods, and a di erent king.”
“There is but one true king, and one true god,” announced Lord
Florent.
“Are we here to dispute theology, my lord? Had I known, I would
have brought a septon.”
“You know full well why we are here,” said Stannis. “You have
had a fortnight to consider my o er. You sent your ravens. No help
has come. Nor will it. Storm’s End stands alone, and I am out of
patience. One last time, ser, I command you to open your gates, and
deliver me that which is mine by rights.”
“And the terms?” asked Ser Cortnay.
“Remain as before,” said Stannis. “I will pardon you for your
treason, as I have pardoned these lords you see behind me. The men
of your garrison will be free to enter my service or to return
unmolested to their homes. You may keep your weapons and as
much property as a man can carry. I will require your horses and
pack animals, however.”
“And what of Edric Storm?”
“My brother’s bastard must be surrendered to me.”
“Then my answer is still no, my lord.”
The king clenched his jaw. He said nothing.
Melisandre spoke instead. “May the Lord of Light protect you in
your darkness, Ser Cortnay.”
“May the Others bugger your Lord of Light,” Penrose spat back,
“and wipe his arse with that rag you bear.”
Lord Alester Florent cleared his throat. “Ser Cortnay, mind your
tongue. His Grace means the boy no harm. The child is his own
blood, and mine as well. My niece Delena was the mother, as all

men know. If you will not trust to the king, trust to me. You know
me for a man of honor—”
“I know you for a man of ambition,” Ser Cortnay broke in. “A
man who changes kings and gods the way I change my boots. As do
these other turncloaks I see before me.”
An angry clamor went up from the king’s men. He is not far wrong,
Davos thought. Only a short time before, the Fossoways, Guyard
Morrigen, and the Lords Caron, Varner, Errol, and Estermont had
all belonged to Renly. They had sat in his pavilion, helped him
make his battle plans, plotted how Stannis might be brought low.
And Lord Florent had been with them—he might be Queen Selyse’s
own uncle, but that had not kept the Lord of Brightwater from
bending his knee to Renly when Renly’s star was rising.
Bryce Caron walked his horse forward a few paces, his long
rainbow-striped cloak twisting in the wind o the bay. “No man
here is a turncloak, ser. My fealty belongs to Storm’s End, and King
Stannis is its rightful lord … and our true king. He is the last of
House Baratheon, Robert’s heir and Renly’s.”
“If that is so, why is the Knight of Flowers not among you? And
where is Mathis Rowan? Randyll Tarly? Lady Oakheart? Why are
they not here in your company, they who loved Renly best? Where
is Brienne of Tarth, I ask you?”
“That one?” Ser Guyard Morrigen laughed harshly. “She ran. As
well she might. Hers was the hand that slew the king.”
“A lie,” Ser Cortnay said. “I knew Brienne when she was no more
than a girl playing at her father’s feet in Evenfall Hall, and I knew
her still better when the Evenstar sent her here to Storm’s End. She
loved Renly Baratheon from the rst moment she laid eyes on him,
a blind man could see it.”
“To be sure,” declared Lord Florent airily, “and she would
scarcely be the rst maid maddened to murder by a man who
spurned her. Though for my own part, I believe it was Lady Stark
who slew the king. She had journeyed all the way from Riverrun to
plead for an alliance, and Renly had refused her. No doubt she saw
him as a danger to her son, and so removed him.”

“It was Brienne,” insisted Lord Caron. “Ser Emmon Cuy swore as
much before he died. You have my oath on that, Ser Cortnay.”
Contempt thickened Ser Cortnay’s voice. “And what is that
worth? You wear your cloak of many colors, I see. The one Renly
gave you when you swore your oath to protect him. If he is dead,
how is it you are not?” He turned his scorn on Guyard Morrigen. “I
might ask the same of you, ser. Guyard the Green, yes? Of the
Rainbow Guard? Sworn to give his own life for his king’s? If I had
such a cloak, I would be ashamed to wear it.”
Morrigen bristled. “Be glad this is a parley, Penrose, or I would
have your tongue for those words.”
“And cast it in the same re where you left your manhood?”
“Enough!” Stannis said. “The Lord of Light willed that my brother
die for his treason. Who did the deed matters not.”
“Not to you, perhaps,” said Ser Cortnay. “I have heard your
proposal, Lord Stannis. Now here is mine.” He pulled o his glove
and ung it full in the king’s face. “Single combat. Sword, lance, or
any weapon you care to name. Or if you fear to hazard your magic
sword and royal skin against an old man, name you a champion,
and I shall do the same.” He gave Guyard Morrigen and Bryce
Caron a scathing look. “Either of these pups would do nicely, I
should think.”
Ser Guyard Morrigen grew dark with fury. “I will take up the
gage, if it please the king.”
“As would I.” Bryce Caron looked to Stannis.
The king ground his teeth. “No.”
Ser Cortnay did not seem surprised. “Is it the justice of your cause
you doubt, my lord, or the strength of your arm? Are you afraid I’ll
piss on your burning sword and put it out?”
“Do you take me for an utter fool, ser?” asked Stannis. “I have
twenty thousand men. You are besieged by land and sea. Why
would I choose single combat when my eventual victory is certain?”
The king pointed a nger at him. “I give you fair warning. If you
force me to take my castle by storm, you may expect no mercy. I
will hang you for traitors, every one of you.”

“As the gods will it. Bring on your storm, my lord—and recall, if
you do, the name of this castle.” Ser Cortnay gave a pull on his reins
and rode back toward the gate.
Stannis said no word, but turned his horse around and started
back toward his camp. The others followed. “If we storm these
walls thousands will die,” fretted ancient Lord Estermont, who was
the king’s grandfather on his mother’s side. “Better to hazard but a
single life, surely? Our cause is righteous, so the gods must surely
bless our champion’s arms with victory.”
God, old man, thought Davos. You forget, we have only one now,
Melisandre’s Lord of Light.
Ser Jon Fossoway said, “I would gladly take this challenge
myself, though I’m not half the swordsman Lord Caron is, or Ser
Guyard. Renly left no notable knights at Storm’s End. Garrison duty
is for old men and green boys.”
Lord Caron agreed. “An easy victory, to be sure. And what glory,
to win Storm’s End with a single stroke!”
Stannis raked them all with a look. “You chatter like magpies,
and with less sense. I will have quiet.” The king’s eyes fell on
Davos. “Ser. Ride with me.” He spurred his horse away from his
followers. Only Melisandre kept pace, bearing the great standard of
the ery heart with the crowned stag within. As if it had been
swallowed whole.
Davos saw the looks that passed between the lordlings as he rode
past them to join the king. These were no onion knights, but proud
men from houses whose names were old in honor. Somehow he
knew that Renly had never chided them in such a fashion. The
youngest of the Baratheons had been born with a gift for easy
courtesy that his brother sadly lacked.
He eased back to a slow trot when his horse came up beside the
king’s. “Your Grace.” Seen at close hand, Stannis looked worse than
Davos had realized from afar. His face had grown haggard, and he
had dark circles under his eyes.
“A smuggler must be a fair judge of men,” the king said. “What
do you make of this Ser Cortnay Penrose?”
“A stubborn man,” said Davos carefully.

“Hungry for death, I call it. He throws my pardon in my face.
Aye, and throws his life away in the bargain, and the lives of every
man inside those walls. Single combat?” The king snorted in derision.
“No doubt he mistook me for Robert.”
“More like he was desperate. What other hope does he have?”
“None. The castle will fall. But how to do it quickly?” Stannis
brooded on that for a moment. Under the steady clop-clop of hooves,
Davos could hear the faint sound of the king grinding his teeth.
“Lord Alester urges me to bring old Lord Penrose here. Ser
Cortnay’s father. You know the man, I believe?”
“When I came as your envoy, Lord Penrose received me more
courteously than most,” Davos said. “He is an old done man, sire.
Sickly and failing.”
“Florent would have him fail more visibly. In his son’s sight, with
a noose about his neck.”
It was dangerous to oppose the queen’s men, but Davos had
vowed always to tell his king the truth. “I think that would be ill
done, my liege. Ser Cortnay will watch his father die before he
would ever betray his trust. It would gain us nothing, and bring
dishonor to our cause.”
“What dishonor?” Stannis bristled. “Would you have me spare the
lives of traitors?”
“You have spared the lives of those behind us.”
“Do you scold me for that, smuggler?”
“It is not my place.” Davos feared he had said too much.
The king was relentless. “You esteem this Penrose more than you
do my lords bannermen. Why?”
“He keeps faith.”
“A misplaced faith in a dead usurper.”
“Yes,” Davos admitted, “but still, he keeps faith.”
“As those behind us do not?”
Davos had come too far with Stannis to play coy now. “Last year
they were Robert’s men. A moon ago they were Renly’s. This
morning they are yours. Whose will they be on the morrow?”
And Stannis laughed. A sudden gust, rough and full of scorn. “I
told you, Melisandre,” he said to the red woman, “my Onion Knight

tells me the truth.”
“I see you know him well, Your Grace,” the red woman said.
“Davos, I have missed you sorely,” the king said. “Aye, I have a
tail of traitors, your nose does not deceive you. My lords
bannermen are inconstant even in their treasons. I need them, but
you should know how it sickens me to pardon such as these when I
have punished better men for lesser crimes. You have every right to
reproach me, Ser Davos.”
“You reproach yourself more than I ever could, Your Grace. You
must have these great lords to win your throne—”
“Fingers and all, it seems.” Stannis smiled grimly.
Unthinking, Davos raised his maimed hand to the pouch at his
throat, and felt the ngerbones within. Luck.
The king saw the motion. “Are they still there, Onion Knight?
You have not lost them?”
“No.”
“Why do you keep them? I have often wondered.”
“They remind me of what I was. Where I came from. They
remind me of your justice, my liege.”
“It was justice,” Stannis said. “A good act does not wash out the
bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward. You
were a hero and a smuggler.” He glanced behind at Lord Florent
and the others, rainbow knights and turncloaks, who were following
at a distance. “These pardoned lords would do well to re ect on
that. Good men and true will ght for Jo rey, wrongly believing
him the true king. A northman might even say the same of Robb
Stark. But these lords who ocked to my brother’s banners knew
him for a usurper. They turned their backs on their rightful king for
no better reason than dreams of power and glory, and I have
marked them for what they are. Pardoned them, yes. Forgiven. But
not forgotten.” He fell silent for a moment, brooding on his plans
for justice. And then, abruptly, he said, “What do the smallfolk say
of Renly’s death?”
“They grieve. Your brother was well loved.”
“Fools love a fool,” grumbled Stannis, “but I grieve for him as
well. For the boy he was, not the man he grew to be.” He was silent

for a time, and then he said, “How did the commons take the news
of Cersei’s incest?”
“While we were among them they shouted for King Stannis. I
cannot speak for what they said once we had sailed.”
“So you do not think they believed?”
“When I was smuggling, I learned that some men believe
everything and some nothing. We met both sorts. And there is
another tale being spread as well—”
“Yes.” Stannis bit o the word. “Selyse has given me horns, and
tied a fool’s bells to the end of each. My daughter fathered by a
halfwit jester! A tale as vile as it is absurd. Renly threw it in my
teeth when we met to parley. You would need to be as mad as
Patchface to believe such a thing.”
“That may be so, my liege … but whether they believe the story
or no, they delight to tell it.” In many places it had come before
them, poisoning the well for their own true tale.
“Robert could piss in a cup and men would call it wine, but I o er
them pure cold water and they squint in suspicion and mutter to
each other about how queer it tastes.” Stannis ground his teeth. “If
someone said I had magicked myself into a boar to kill Robert,
likely they would believe that as well.”
“You cannot stop them talking, my liege,” Davos said, “but when
you take your vengeance on your brothers’ true killers, the realm
will know such tales for lies.”
Stannis only seemed to half hear him. “I have no doubt that
Cersei had a hand in Robert’s death. I will have justice for him. Aye,
and for Ned Stark and Jon Arryn as well.”
“And for Renly?” The words were out before Davos could stop to
consider them.
For a long time the king did not speak. Then, very softly, he said,
“I dream of it sometimes. Of Renly’s dying. A green tent, candles, a
woman screaming. And blood.” Stannis looked down at his hands. “I
was still abed when he died. Your Devan will tell you. He tried to
wake me. Dawn was nigh and my lords were waiting, fretting. I
should have been ahorse, armored. I knew Renly would attack at
break of day. Devan says I thrashed and cried out, but what does it

matter? It was a dream. I was in my tent when Renly died, and
when I woke my hands were clean.”
Ser Davos Seaworth could feel his phantom ngertips start to
itch. Something is wrong here, the onetime smuggler thought. Yet he
nodded and said, “I see.”
“Renly o ered me a peach. At our parley. Mocked me, de ed me,
threatened me, and o ered me a peach. I thought he was drawing a
blade and went for mine own. Was that his purpose, to make me
show fear? Or was it one of his pointless jests? When he spoke of
how sweet the peach was, did his words have some hidden
meaning?” The king gave a shake of his head, like a dog shaking a
rabbit to snap its neck. “Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of
fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did
love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave
thinking of my brother’s peach.”
By then they were in amongst the camp, riding past the ordered
rows of tents, the blowing banners, and the stacks of shields and
spears. The stink of horse dung was heavy in the air, mingled with
the woodsmoke and the smell of cooking meat. Stannis reined up
long enough to bark a brusque dismissal to Lord Florent and the
others, commanding them to attend him in his pavilion one hour
hence for a council of war. They bowed their heads and dispersed,
while Davos and Melisandre rode to the king’s pavilion.
The tent had to be large, since it was there his lords bannermen
came to council. Yet there was nothing grand about it. It was a
soldier’s tent of heavy canvas, dyed the dark yellow that sometimes
passed for gold. Only the royal banner that streamed atop the
center pole marked it as a king’s. That, and the guards without;
queen’s men leaning on tall spears, with the badge of the ery heart
sewn over their own.
Grooms came up to help them dismount. One of the guards
relieved Melisandre of her cumbersome standard, driving the sta
deep into the soft ground. Devan stood to one side of the door,
waiting to lift the ap for the king. An older squire waited beside
him. Stannis took o his crown and handed it to Devan. “Cold

water, cups for two. Davos, attend me. My lady, I shall send for you
when I require you.”
“As the king commands.” Melisandre bowed.
After the brightness of the morning, the interior of the pavilion
seemed cool and dim. Stannis seated himself on a plain wooden
camp stool and waved Davos to another. “One day I may make you
a lord, smuggler. If only to irk Celtigar and Florent. You will not
thank me, though. It will mean you must su er through these
councils, and feign interest in the braying of mules.”
“Why do you have them, if they serve no purpose?”
“The mules love the sound of their own braying, why else? And I
need them to haul my cart. Oh, to be sure, once in a great while
some useful notion is put forth. But not today, I think—ah, here’s
your son with our water.”
Devan set the tray on the table and lled two clay cups. The king
sprinkled a pinch of salt in his cup before he drank; Davos took his
water straight, wishing it were wine. “You were speaking of your
council?”
“Let me tell you how it will go. Lord Velaryon will urge me to
storm the castle walls at rst light, grapnels and scaling ladders
against arrows and boiling oil. The young mules will think this a
splendid notion. Estermont will favor settling down to starve them
out, as Tyrell and Redwyne once tried with me. That might take a
year, but old mules are patient. And Lord Caron and the others who
like to kick will want to take up Ser Cortnay’s gauntlet and hazard
all upon a single combat. Each one imagining he will be my
champion and win undying fame.” The king nished his water.
“What would you have me do, smuggler?”
Davos considered a moment before he answered. “Strike for
King’s Landing at once.”
The king snorted. “And leave Storm’s End untaken?”
“Ser Cortnay does not have the power to harm you. The
Lannisters do. A siege would take too long, single combat is too
chancy, and an assault would cost thousands of lives with no
certainty of success. And there is no need. Once you dethrone
Jo rey this castle must come to you with all the rest. It is said

about the camp that Lord Tywin Lannister rushes west to rescue
Lannisport from the vengeance of the northmen …”
“You have a passing clever father, Devan,” the king told the boy
standing by his elbow. “He makes me wish I had more smugglers in
my service. And fewer lords. Though you are wrong in one respect,
Davos. There is a need. If I leave Storm’s End untaken in my rear, it
will be said I was defeated here. And that I cannot permit. Men do
not love me as they loved my brothers. They follow me because
they fear me … and defeat is death to fear. The castle must fall.”
His jaw ground side to side. “Aye, and quickly. Doran Martell has
called his banners and forti ed the mountain passes. His
Dornishmen are poised to sweep down onto the Marches. And
Highgarden is far from spent. My brother left the greater part of his
power at Bitterbridge, near sixty thousand foot. I sent my wife’s
brother Ser Errol with Ser Parmen Crane to take them under my
command, but they have not returned. I fear that Ser Loras Tyrell
reached Bitterbridge before my envoys, and took that host for his
own.”
“All the more reason to take King’s Landing as soon as we may.
Salladhor Saan told me—”
“Salladhor Saan thinks only of gold!” Stannis exploded. “His head
is full of dreams of the treasure he fancies lies under the Red Keep,
so let us hear no more of Salladhor Saan. The day I need military
counsel from a Lysene brigand is the day I put o my crown and
take the black.” The king made a st. “Are you here to serve me,
smuggler? Or to vex me with arguments?”
“I am yours,” Davos said.
“Then hear me. Ser Cortnay’s lieutenant is cousin to the
Fossoways. Lord Meadows, a green boy of twenty. Should some ill
chance strike down Penrose, command of Storm’s End would pass to
this stripling, and his cousins believe he would accept my terms and
yield up the castle.”
“I remember another stripling who was given command of
Storm’s End. He could not have been much more than twenty.”
“Lord Meadows is not as stonehead stubborn as I was.”

“Stubborn or craven, what does it matter? Ser Cortnay Penrose
seemed hale and hearty to me.”
“So did my brother, the day before his death. The night is dark
and full of terrors, Davos.”
Davos Seaworth felt the small hairs rising on the back of his neck.
“My lord, I do not understand you.”
“I do not require your understanding. Only your service. Ser
Cortnay will be dead within the day. Melisandre has seen it in the
ames of the future. His death and the manner of it. He will not die
in knightly combat, needless to say.” Stannis held out his cup, and
Devan lled it again from the agon. “Her ames do not lie. She
saw Renly’s doom as well. On Dragonstone she saw it, and told
Selyse. Lord Velaryon and your friend Salladhor Saan would have
had me sail against Jo rey, but Melisandre told me that if I went to
Storm’s End, I would win the best part of my brother’s power, and
she was right.”
“B-but,” Davos stammered, “Lord Renly only came here because
you had laid siege to the castle. He was marching toward King’s
Landing before, against the Lannisters, he would have—”
Stannis shifted in his seat, frowning. “Was, would have, what is
that? He did what he did. He came here with his banners and his
peaches, to his doom … and it was well for me he did. Melisandre
saw another day in her ames as well. A morrow where Renly rode
out of the south in his green armor to smash my host beneath the
walls of King’s Landing. Had I met my brother there, it might have
been me who died in place of him.”
“Or you might have joined your strength to his to bring down the
Lannisters,” Davos protested. “Why not that? If she saw two
futures, well … both cannot be true.”
King Stannis pointed a nger. “There you err, Onion Knight.
Some lights cast more than one shadow. Stand before the night re
and you’ll see for yourself. The ames shift and dance, never still.
The shadows grow tall and short, and every man casts a dozen.
Some are fainter than others, that’s all. Well, men cast their
shadows across the future as well. One shadow or many. Melisandre
sees them all.”

“You do not love the woman. I know that, Davos, I am not blind.
My lords mislike her too. Estermont thinks the aming heart illchosen and begs to ght beneath the crowned stag as of old. Ser
Guyard says a woman should not be my standard-bearer. Others
whisper that she has no place in my war councils, that I ought to
send her back to Asshai, that it is sinful to keep her in my tent of a
night. Aye, they whisper … while she serves.”
“Serves how?” Davos asked, dreading the answer.
“As needed.” The king looked at him. “And you?”
“I …” Davos licked his lips. “I am yours to command. What would
you have me do?”
“Nothing you have not done before. Only land a boat beneath the
castle, unseen, in the black of night. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Tonight?”
The king gave a curt nod. “You will need a small boat. Not Black
Betha. No one must know what you do.”
Davos wanted to protest. He was a knight now, no longer a
smuggler, and he had never been an assassin. Yet when he opened
his mouth, the words would not come. This was Stannis, his just
lord, to whom he owed all he was. And he had his sons to consider
as well. Gods be good, what has she done to him?
“You are quiet,” Stannis observed.
And should remain so, Davos told himself, yet instead he said, “My
liege, you must have the castle, I see that now, but surely there are
other ways. Cleaner ways. Let Ser Cortnay keep the bastard boy and
he may well yield.”
“I must have the boy, Davos. Must. Melisandre has seen that in
the ames as well.”
Davos groped for some other answer. “Storm’s End holds no
knight who can match Ser Guyard or Lord Caron, or any of a
hundred others sworn to your service. This single combat … could it
be that Ser Cortnay seeks for a way to yield with honor? Even if it
means his own life?”
A troubled look crossed the king’s face like a passing cloud.
“More like he plans some treachery. There will be no combat of

champions. Ser Cortnay was dead before he ever threw that glove.
The ames do not lie, Davos.”
Yet they require me to make them true, he thought. It had been a
long time since Davos Seaworth felt so sad.
And so it was that he found himself once more crossing
Shipbreaker Bay in the dark of night, steering a tiny boat with a
black sail. The sky was the same, and the sea. The same salt smell
was in the air, and the water chuckling against the hull was just as
he remembered it. A thousand ickering camp res burned around
the castle, as the res of the Tyrells and Redwynes had sixteen
years before. But all the rest was di erent.
The last time it was life I brought to Storm’s End, shaped to look like
onions. This time it is death, in the shape of Melisandre of Asshai.
Sixteen years ago, the sails had cracked and snapped with every
shift of wind, until he’d pulled them down and gone on with
mu ed oars. Even so, his heart had been in his gullet. The men on
the Redwyne galleys had grown lax after so long, however, and
they had slipped through the cordon smooth as black satin. This
time, the only ships in sight belonged to Stannis, and the only
danger would come from watchers on the castle walls. Even so,
Davos was taut as a bowstring.
Melisandre huddled upon a thwart, lost in the folds of a dark red
cloak that covered her from head to heels, her face a paleness
beneath the cowl. Davos loved the water. He slept best when he had
a deck rocking beneath him, and the sighing of the wind in his
rigging was a sweeter sound to him than any a singer could make
with his harp strings. Even the sea brought him no comfort tonight,
though. “I can smell the fear on you, ser knight,” the red woman
said softly.
“Someone once told me the night is dark and full of terrors. And
tonight I am no knight. Tonight I am Davos the smuggler again.
Would that you were an onion.”
She laughed. “Is it me you fear? Or what we do?”
“What you do. I’ll have no part of it.”
“Your hand raised the sail. Your hand holds the tiller.”

Silent, Davos tended to his course. The shore was a snarl of rocks,
so he was taking them well out across the bay. He would wait for
the tide to turn before coming about. Storm’s End dwindled behind
them, but the red woman seemed unconcerned. “Are you a good
man, Davos Seaworth?” she asked.
Would a good man be doing this? “I am a man,” he said. “I am kind
to my wife, but I have known other women. I have tried to be a
father to my sons, to help make them a place in this world. Aye,
I’ve broken laws, but I never felt evil until tonight. I would say my
parts are mixed, m’lady. Good and bad.”
“A grey man,” she said. “Neither white nor black, but partaking
of both. Is that what you are, Ser Davos?”
“What if I am? It seems to me that most men are grey.”
“If half of an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. A man is
good, or he is evil.”
The res behind them had melted into one vague glow against
the black sky, and the land was almost out of sight. It was time to
come about. “Watch your head, my lady.” He pushed on the tiller,
and the small boat threw up a curl of black water as she turned.
Melisandre leaned under the swinging yard, one hand on the
gunwale, calm as ever. Wood creaked, canvas cracked, and water
splashed, so loudly a man might swear the castle was sure to hear.
Davos knew better. The endless crash of wave on rock was the only
sound that ever penetrated the massive seaward walls of Storm’s
End, and that but faintly.
A rippling wake spread out behind as they swung back toward the
shore. “You speak of men and onions,” Davos said to Melisandre.
“What of women? Is it not the same for them? Are you good or evil,
my lady?”
That made her chuckle. “Oh, good. I am a knight of sorts myself,
sweet ser. A champion of light and life.”
“Yet you mean to kill a man tonight,” he said. “As you killed
Maester Cressen.”
“Your maester poisoned himself. He meant to poison me, but I
was protected by a greater power and he was not.”
“And Renly Baratheon? Who was it who killed him?”

Her head turned. Beneath the shadow of the cowl, her eyes
burned like pale red candle ames. “Not I.”
“Liar.” Davos was certain now.
Melisandre laughed again. “You are lost in darkness and
confusion, Ser Davos.”
“And a good thing.” Davos gestured at the distant lights ickering
along the walls of Storm’s End. “Feel how cold the wind is? The
guards will huddle close to those torches. A little warmth, a little
light, they’re a comfort on a night like this. Yet that will blind
them, so they will not see us pass.” I hope. “The god of darkness
protects us now, my lady. Even you.”
The ames of her eyes seemed to burn a little brighter at that.
“Speak not that name, ser. Lest you draw his black eye upon us. He
protects no man, I promise you. He is the enemy of all that lives. It
is the torches that hide us, you have said so yourself. Fire. The
bright gift of the Lord of Light.”
“Have it your way.”
“His way, rather.”
The wind was shifting, Davos could feel it, see it in the way the
black canvas rippled. He reached for the halyards. “Help me bring
in the sail. I’ll row us the rest of the way.”
Together they tied o the sail as the boat rocked beneath them.
As Davos unshipped the oars and slid them into the choppy black
water, he said, “Who rowed you to Renly?”
“There was no need,” she said. “He was unprotected. But
here … this Storm’s End is an old place. There are spells woven into
the stones. Dark walls that no shadow can pass—ancient, forgotten,
yet still in place.”
“Shadow?” Davos felt his esh prickling. “A shadow is a thing of
darkness.”
“You are more ignorant than a child, ser knight. There are no
shadows in the dark. Shadows are the servants of light, the children
of re. The brightest ame casts the darkest shadows.”
Frowning, Davos hushed her then. They were coming close to
shore once more, and voices carried across the water. He rowed, the
faint sound of his oars lost in the rhythm of the waves. The seaward

side of Storm’s End perched upon a pale white cli , the chalky stone
sloping up steeply to half again the height of the massive curtain
wall. A mouth yawned in the cli , and it was that Davos steered for,
as he had sixteen years before. The tunnel opened on a cavern under
the castle, where the storm lords of old had built their landing.
The passage was navigable only during high tide, and was never
less than treacherous, but his smuggler’s skills had not deserted him.
Davos threaded their way deftly between the jagged rocks until the
cave mouth loomed up before them. He let the waves carry them
inside. They crashed around him, slamming the boat this way and
that and soaking them to the skin. A half-seen nger of rock came
rushing up out of the gloom, snarling foam, and Davos barely kept
them o it with an oar.
Then they were past, engulfed in darkness, and the waters
smoothed. The little boat slowed and swirled. The sound of their
breathing echoed until it seemed to surround them. Davos had not
expected the blackness. The last time, torches had burned all along
the tunnel, and the eyes of starving men had peered down through
the murder holes in the ceiling. The portcullis was somewhere
ahead, he knew. Davos used the oars to slow them, and they drifted
against it almost gently.
“This is as far as we go, unless you have a man inside to lift the
gate for us.” His whispers scurried across the lapping water like a
line of mice on soft pink feet.
“Have we passed within the walls?”
“Yes. Beneath. But we can go no farther. The portcullis goes all
the way to the bottom. And the bars are too closely spaced for even
a child to squeeze through.”
There was no answer but a soft rustling. And then a light bloomed
amidst the darkness.
Davos raised a hand to shield his eyes, and his breath caught in
his throat. Melisandre had thrown back her cowl and shrugged out
of the smothering robe. Beneath, she was naked, and huge with
child. Swollen breasts hung heavy against her chest, and her belly
bulged as if near to bursting. “Gods preserve us,” he whispered, and
heard her answering laugh, deep and throaty. Her eyes were hot

coals, and the sweat that dappled her skin seemed to glow with a
light of its own. Melisandre shone.
Panting, she squatted and spread her legs. Blood ran down her
thighs, black as ink. Her cry might have been agony or ecstasy or
both. And Davos saw the crown of the child’s head push its way out
of her. Two arms wriggled free, grasping, black ngers coiling
around Melisandre’s straining thighs, pushing, until the whole of the
shadow slid out into the world and rose taller than Davos, tall as the
tunnel, towering above the boat. He had only an instant to look at it
before it was gone, twisting between the bars of the portcullis and
racing across the surface of the water, but that instant was long
enough.
He knew that shadow. As he knew the man who’d cast it.

JON

The call came drifting through the black of night. Jon pushed

himself onto an elbow, his hand reaching for Longclaw by force of
habit as the camp began to stir. The horn that wakes the sleepers, he
thought.
The long low note lingered at the edge of hearing. The sentries at
the ringwall stood still in their footsteps, breath frosting and heads
turned toward the west. As the sound of the horn faded, even the
wind ceased to blow. Men rolled from their blankets and reached
for spears and swordbelts, moving quietly, listening. A horse
whickered and was hushed. For a heartbeat it seemed as if the
whole forest were holding its breath. The brothers of the Night’s
Watch waited for a second blast, praying they should not hear it,
fearing that they would.
When the silence had stretched unbearably long and the men
knew at last that the horn would not wind again, they grinned at
one another sheepishly, as if to deny that they had been anxious.
Jon Snow fed a few sticks to the re, buckled on his swordbelt,
pulled on his boots, shook the dirt and dew from the cloak, and
fastened it around his shoulders. The ames blazed up beside him,
welcome heat beating against his face as he dressed. He could hear
the Lord Commander moving inside the tent. After a moment
Mormont lifted the ap. “One blast?” On his shoulder, his raven sat
u ed and silent, looking miserable.
“One, my lord,” Jon agreed. “Brothers returning.”

Mormont moved to the re. “The Halfhand. And past time.” He
had grown more restive every day they waited; much longer and he
would have been t to whelp cubs. “See that there’s hot food for the
men and fodder for the horses. I’ll see Qhorin at once.”
“I’ll bring him, my lord.” The men from the Shadow Tower had
been expected days ago. When they had not appeared, the brothers
had begun to wonder. Jon had heard gloomy mutterings around the
cook re, and not just from Dolorous Edd. Ser Ottyn Wythers was
for retreating to Castle Black as soon as possible. Ser Mallador
Locke would strike for the Shadow Tower, hoping to pick up
Qhorin’s trail and learn what had befallen him. And Thoren
Smallwood wanted to push on into the mountains. “Mance Rayder
knows he must battle the Watch,” Thoren had declared, “but he will
never look for us so far north. If we ride up the Milkwater, we can
take him unawares and cut his host to ribbons before he knows we
are on him.”
“The numbers would be greatly against us,” Ser Ottyn had
objected. “Craster said he was gathering a great host. Many
thousands. Without Qhorin, we are only two hundred.”
“Send two hundred wolves against ten thousand sheep, ser, and
see what happens,” said Smallwood con dently.
“There are goats among these sheep, Thoren,” warned Jarman
Buckwell. “Aye, and maybe a few lions. Rattleshirt, Harma the
Dogshead, Alfyn Crowkiller …”
“I know them as well as you do, Buckwell,” Thoren Smallwood
snapped back. “And I mean to have their heads, every one. These
are wildlings. No soldiers. A few hundred heroes, drunk most like,
amidst a great horde of women, children, and thralls. We will
sweep over them and send them howling back to their hovels.”
They had argued for many hours, and reached no agreement. The
Old Bear was too stubborn to retreat, but neither would he rush
headlong up the Milkwater, seeking battle. In the end, nothing had
been decided but to wait a few more days for the men from the
Shadow Tower, and talk again if they did not appear.
And now they had, which meant that the decision could be
delayed no longer. Jon was glad of that much, at least. If they must

battle Mance Rayder, let it be soon.
He found Dolorous Edd at the re, complaining about how
di cult it was for him to sleep when people insisted on blowing
horns in the woods. Jon gave him something new to complain
about. Together they woke Hake, who received the Lord
Commander’s orders with a stream of curses, but got up all the
same and soon had a dozen brothers cutting roots for a soup.
Sam came pu ng up as Jon crossed the camp. Under the black
hood his face was as pale and round as the moon. “I heard the horn.
Has your uncle come back?”
“It’s only the men from the Shadow Tower.” It was growing
harder to cling to the hope of Benjen Stark’s safe return. The cloak
he had found beneath the Fist could well have belonged to his uncle
or one of his men, even the Old Bear admitted as much, though why
they would have buried it there, wrapped around the cache of
dragonglass, no one could say. “Sam, I have to go.”
At the ringwall, he found the guards sliding spikes from the halffrozen earth to make an opening. It was not long until the rst of
the brothers from the Shadow Tower began wending their way up
the slope. All in leather and fur they were, with here and there a bit
of steel or bronze; heavy beards covered hard lean faces, and made
them look as shaggy as their garrons. Jon was surprised to see some
of them were riding two to a horse. When he looked more closely,
it was plain that many of them were wounded. There has been
trouble on the way.
Jon knew Qhorin Halfhand the instant he saw him, though they
had never met. The big ranger was half a legend in the Watch; a
man of slow words and swift action, tall and straight as a spear,
long-limbed and solemn. Unlike his men, he was clean-shaven. His
hair fell from beneath his helm in a heavy braid touched with
hoarfrost, and the blacks he wore were so faded they might have
been greys. Only thumb and fore nger remained on the hand that
held the reins; the other ngers had been sheared o catching a
wildling’s axe that would otherwise have split his skull. It was told
that he had thrust his maimed st into the face of the axeman so the
blood spurted into his eyes, and slew him while he was blind. Since

that day, the wildlings beyond the Wall had known no foe more
implacable.
Jon hailed him. “Lord Commander Mormont would see you at
once. I’ll show you to his tent.”
Qhorin swung down from his saddle. “My men are hungry, and
our horses require tending.”
“They’ll all be seen to.”
The ranger gave his horse into the care of one of his men and
followed. “You are Jon Snow. You have your father’s look.”
“Did you know him, my lord?”
“I am no lordling. Only a brother of the Night’s Watch. I knew
Lord Eddard, yes. And his father before him.”
Jon had to hurry his steps to keep up with Qhorin’s long strides.
“Lord Rickard died before I was born.”
“He was a friend to the Watch.” Qhorin glanced behind. “It is said
that a direwolf runs with you.”
“Ghost should be back by dawn. He hunts at night.”
They found Dolorous Edd frying a rasher of bacon and boiling a
dozen eggs in a kettle over the Old Bear’s cook re. Mormont sat in
his wood-and-leather camp chair. “I had begun to fear for you. Did
you meet with trouble?”
“We met with Alfyn Crowkiller. Mance had sent him to scout
along the Wall, and we chanced on him returning.” Qhorin removed
his helm. “Alfyn will trouble the realm no longer, but some of his
company escaped us. We hunted down as many as we could, but it
may be that a few will win back to the mountains.”
“And the cost?”
“Four brothers dead. A dozen wounded. A third as many as the
foe. And we took captives. One died quickly from his wounds, but
the other lived long enough to be questioned.”
“Best talk of this inside. Jon will fetch you a horn of ale. Or
would you prefer hot spiced wine?”
“Boiled water will su ce. An egg and a bite of bacon.”
“As you wish.” Mormont lifted the ap of the tent and Qhorin
Halfhand stooped and stepped through.

Edd stood over the kettle swishing the eggs about with a spoon.
“I envy those eggs,” he said. “I could do with a bit of boiling about
now. If the kettle were larger, I might jump in. Though I would
sooner it were wine than water. There are worse ways to die than
warm and drunk. I knew a brother drowned himself in wine once. It
was a poor vintage, though, and his corpse did not improve it.”
“You drank the wine?”
“It’s an awful thing to nd a brother dead. You’d have need of a
drink as well, Lord Snow.” Edd stirred the kettle and added a pinch
more nutmeg.
Restless, Jon squatted by the re and poked at it with a stick. He
could hear the Old Bear’s voice inside the tent, punctuated by the
raven’s squawks and Qhorin Halfhand’s quieter tones, but he could
not make out the words. Alfyn Crowkiller dead, that’s good. He was
one of the bloodiest of the wildling raiders, taking his name from
the black brothers he’d slain. So why does Qhorin sound so grave, after
such a victory?
Jon had hoped that the arrival of men from the Shadow Tower
would lift the spirits in the camp. Only last night, he was coming
back through the dark from a piss when he heard ve or six men
talking in low voices around the embers of a re. When he heard
Chett muttering that it was past time they turned back, Jon stopped
to listen. “It’s an old man’s folly, this ranging,” he heard. “We’ll nd
nothing but our graves in them mountains.”
“There’s giants in the Frostfangs, and wargs, and worse things,”
said Lark the Sisterman.
“I’ll not be going there, I promise you.”
“The Old Bear’s not like to give you a choice.”
“Might be we won’t give him one,” said Chett.
Just then one of the dogs had raised his head and growled, and he
had to move away quickly, before he was seen. I was not meant to
hear that, he thought. He considered taking the tale to Mormont, but
he could not bring himself to inform on his brothers, even brothers
such as Chett and the Sisterman. It was just empty talk, he told
himself. They are cold and afraid; we all are. It was hard waiting
here, perched on the stony summit above the forest, wondering

what the morrow might bring. The unseen enemy is always the most
fearsome.
Jon slid his new dagger from its sheath and studied the ames as
they played against the shiny black glass. He had fashioned the
wooden hilt himself, and wound hempen twine around it to make a
grip. Ugly, but it served. Dolorous Edd opined that glass knives
were about as useful as nipples on a knight’s breastplate, but Jon
was not so certain. The dragonglass blade was sharper than steel,
albeit far more brittle.
It must have been buried for a reason.
He had made a dagger for Grenn as well, and another for the
Lord Commander. The warhorn he had given to Sam. On closer
examination the horn had proved cracked, and even after he had
cleaned all the dirt out, Jon had been unable to get any sound from
it. The rim was chipped as well, but Sam liked old things, even
worthless old things. “Make a drinking horn out of it,” Jon told
him, “and every time you take a drink you’ll remember how you
ranged beyond the Wall, all the way to the Fist of the First Men.”
He gave Sam a spearhead and a dozen arrowheads as well, and
passed the rest out among his other friends for luck.
The Old Bear had seemed pleased by the dagger, but he preferred
a steel knife at his belt, Jon had noticed. Mormont could o er no
answers as to who might have buried the cloak or what it might
mean. Perhaps Qhorin will know. The Halfhand had ventured deeper
into the wild than any other living man.
“You want to serve, or shall I?”
Jon sheathed the dagger. “I’ll do it.” He wanted to hear what they
were saying.
Edd cut three thick slices o a stale round of oat bread, stacked
them on a wooden platter, covered them with bacon and bacon
drippings, and lled a bowl with hard-cooked eggs. Jon took the
bowl in one hand and the platter in the other and backed into the
Lord Commander’s tent.
Qhorin was seated cross-legged on the oor, his spine as straight
as a spear. Candlelight ickered against the hard at planes of his
cheeks as he spoke. “… Rattleshirt, the Weeping Man, and every

other chief great and small,” he was saying. “They have wargs as
well, and mammoths, and more strength than we would have
dreamed. Or so he claimed. I will not swear as to the truth of it.
Ebben believes the man was telling us tales to make his life last a
little longer.”
“True or false, the Wall must be warned,” the Old Bear said as
Jon placed the platter between them. “And the king.”
“Which king?”
“All of them. The true and the false alike. If they would claim the
realm, let them defend it.”
The Halfhand helped himself to an egg and cracked it on the edge
of the bowl. “These kings will do what they will,” he said, peeling
away the shell. “Likely it will be little enough. The best hope is
Winterfell. The Starks must rally the north.”
“Yes. To be sure.” The Old Bear unrolled a map, frowned at it,
tossed it aside, opened another. He was pondering where the
hammer would fall, Jon could see it. The Watch had once manned
seventeen castles along the hundred leagues of the Wall, but they
had been abandoned one by one as the brotherhood dwindled. Only
three were now garrisoned, a fact that Mance Rayder knew as well
as they did. “Ser Alliser Thorne will bring back fresh levies from
King’s Landing, we can hope. If we man Greyguard from the
Shadow Tower and the Long Barrow from Eastwatch …”
“Greyguard has largely collapsed. Stonedoor would serve better,
if the men could be found. Icemark and Deep Lake as well,
mayhaps. With daily patrols along the battlements between.”
“Patrols, aye. Twice a day, if we can. The Wall itself is a
formidable obstacle. Undefended, it cannot stop them, yet it will
delay them. The larger the host, the longer they’ll require. From the
emptiness they’ve left behind, they must mean to bring their
women with them. Their young as well, and beasts … have you
ever seen a goat climb a ladder? A rope? They will need to build a
stair, or a great ramp … it will take a moon’s turn at the least,
perhaps longer. Mance will know his best chance is to pass beneath
the Wall. Through a gate, or …”
“A breach.”

Mormont’s head came up sharply. “What?”
“They do not plan to climb the Wall nor to burrow beneath it, my
lord. They plan to break it.”
“The Wall is seven hundred feet high, and so thick at the base
that it would take a hundred men a year to cut through it with picks
and axes.”
“Even so.”
Mormont plucked at his beard, frowning. “How?”
“How else? Sorcery.” Qhorin bit the egg in half. “Why else would
Mance choose to gather his strength in the Frostfangs? Bleak and
hard they are, and a long weary march from the Wall.”
“I’d hoped he chose the mountains to hide his muster from the
eyes of my rangers.”
“Perhaps,” said Qhorin, nishing the egg, “but there is more, I
think. He is seeking something in the high cold places. He is
searching for something he needs.”
“Something?” Mormont’s raven lifted its head and screamed. The
sound was sharp as a knife in the closeness of the tent.
“Some power. What it is, our captive could not say. He was
questioned perhaps too sharply, and died with much unsaid. I doubt
he knew in any case.”
Jon could hear the wind outside. It made a high thin sound as it
shivered through the stones of the ringwall and tugged at the tent
ropes. Mormont rubbed his mouth thoughtfully. “Some power,” he
repeated. “I must know.”
“Then you must send scouts into the mountains.”
“I am loath to risk more men.”
“We can only die. Why else do we don these black cloaks, but to
die in defense of the realm? I would send fteen men, in three
parties of ve. One to probe the Milkwater, one the Skirling Pass,
one to climb the Giant’s Stair. Jarman Buckwell, Thoren Smallwood,
and myself to command. To learn what waits in those mountains.”
“Waits,” the raven cried. “Waits.”
Lord Commander Mormont sighed deep in his chest. “I see no
other choice,” he conceded, “but if you do not return …”

“Someone will come down out of the Frostfangs, my lord,” the
ranger said. “If us, all well and good. If not, it will be Mance
Rayder, and you sit square in his path. He cannot march south and
leave you behind, to follow and harry his rear. He must attack. This
is a strong place.”
“Not that strong,” said Mormont.
“Belike we shall all die, then. Our dying will buy time for our
brothers on the Wall. Time to garrison the empty castles and freeze
shut the gates, time to summon lords and kings to their aid, time to
hone their axes and repair their catapults. Our lives will be coin
well spent.”
“Die,” the raven muttered, pacing along Mormont’s shoulders.
“Die, die, die, die.” The Old Bear sat slumped and silent, as if the
burden of speech had grown too heavy for him to bear. But at last
he said, “May the gods forgive me. Choose your men.”
Qhorin Halfhand turned his head. His eyes met Jon’s, and held
them for a long moment. “Very well. I choose Jon Snow.”
Mormont blinked. “He is hardly more than a boy. And my
steward besides. Not even a ranger.”
“Tollett can care for you as well, my lord.” Qhorin lifted his
maimed, two- ngered hand. “The old gods are still strong beyond
the Wall. The gods of the First Men … and the Starks.”
Mormont looked at Jon. “What is your will in this?”
“To go,” he said at once.
The old man smiled sadly. “I thought it might be.”
Dawn had broken when Jon stepped from the tent beside Qhorin
Halfhand. The wind swirled around them, stirring their black cloaks
and sending a scatter of red cinders ying from the re.
“We ride at noon,” the ranger told him. “Best nd that wolf of
yours.”

TYRION

The queen intends to send Prince Tommen away.” They knelt alone

in the hushed dimness of the sept, surrounded by shadows and
ickering candles, but even so Lancel kept his voice low. “Lord
Gyles will take him to Rosby, and conceal him there in the guise of
a page. They plan to darken his hair and tell everyone that he is the
son of a hedge knight.”
“Is it the mob she fears? Or me?”
“Both,” said Lancel.
“Ah.” Tyrion had known nothing of this ploy. Had Varys’s little
birds failed him for once? Even spiders must nod, he supposed … or
was the eunuch playing a deeper and more subtle game than he
knew? “You have my thanks, ser.”
“Will you grant me the boon I asked of you?”
“Perhaps.” Lancel wanted his own command in the next battle. A
splendid way to die before he nished growing that mustache, but
young knights always think themselves invincible.
Tyrion lingered after his cousin had slipped away. At the
Warrior’s altar, he used one candle to light another. Watch over my
brother, you bloody bastard, he’s one of yours. He lit a second candle
to the Stranger, for himself.
That night, when the Red Keep was dark, Bronn arrived to nd
him sealing a letter. “Take this to Ser Jacelyn Bywater.” The dwarf
dribbled hot golden wax down onto the parchment.

“What does it say?” Bronn could not read, so he asked impudent
questions.
“That he’s to take fty of his best swords and scout the roseroad.”
Tyrion pressed his seal into the soft wax.
“Stannis is more like to come up the kingsroad.”
“Oh, I know. Tell Bywater to disregard what’s in the letter and
take his men north. He’s to lay a trap along the Rosby road. Lord
Gyles will depart for his castle in a day or two, with a dozen menat-arms, some servants, and my nephew. Prince Tommen may be
dressed as a page.”
“You want the boy brought back, is that it?”
“No. I want him taken on to the castle.” Removing the boy from
the city was one of his sister’s better notions, Tyrion had decided.
At Rosby, Tommen would be safe from the mob, and keeping him
apart from his brother also made things more di cult for Stannis;
even if he took King’s Landing and executed Jo rey, he’d still have
a Lannister claimant to contend with. “Lord Gyles is too sickly to
run and too craven to ght. He’ll command his castellan to open the
gates. Once inside the walls, Bywater is to expel the garrison and
hold Tommen there safe. Ask him how he likes the sound of Lord
Bywater.”
“Lord Bronn would sound better. I could grab the boy for you just
as well. I’ll dandle him on my knee and sing him nursery songs if
there’s a lordship in it.”
“I need you here,” said Tyrion. And I don’t trust you with my
nephew. Should any ill befall Jo rey, the Lannister claim to the Iron
Throne would rest on Tommen’s young shoulders. Ser Jacelyn’s gold
cloaks would defend the boy; Bronn’s sellswords were more apt to
sell him to his enemies.
“What should the new lord do with the old one?”
“Whatever he pleases, so long as he remembers to feed him. I
don’t want him dying.” Tyrion pushed away from the table. “My
sister will send one of the Kingsguard with the prince.”
Bronn was not concerned. “The Hound is Jo rey’s dog, he won’t
leave him. Ironhand’s gold cloaks should be able to handle the
others easy enough.”

“If it comes to killing, tell Ser Jacelyn I won’t have it done in
front of Tommen.” Tyrion donned a heavy cloak of dark brown
wool. “My nephew is tenderhearted.”
“Are you certain he’s a Lannister?”
“I’m certain of nothing but winter and battle,” he said. “Come.
I’m riding with you part of the way.”
“Chataya’s?”
“You know me too well.”
They left through a postern gate in the north wall. Tyrion put his
heels into his horse and clattered down Shadowblack Lane. A few
furtive shapes darted into alleys at the sound of hoofbeats on the
cobbles, but no one dared accost them. The council had extended his
curfew; it was death to be taken on the streets after the evenfall
bells had sung. The measure had restored a degree of peace to
King’s Landing and quartered the number of corpses found in the
alleys of a morning, yet Varys said the people cursed him for it.
They should be thankful they have the breath to curse. A pair of gold
cloaks confronted them as they were making their way along
Coppersmith’s Wynd, but when they realized whom they’d
challenged they begged the Hand’s pardons and waved them on.
Bronn turned south for the Mud Gate and they parted company.
Tyrion rode on toward Chataya’s, but suddenly his patience
deserted him. He twisted in the saddle, scanning the street behind.
There were no signs of followers. Every window was dark or tightly
shuttered. He heard nothing but the wind swirling down the alleys.
If Cersei has someone stalking me tonight, he must be disguised as a rat.
“Bugger it all,” he muttered. He was sick of caution. Wheeling his
horse around, he dug in his spurs. If anyone’s after me, we’ll see how
well they ride. He ew through the moonlight streets, clattering over
cobbles, darting down narrow alleys and up twisty wynds, racing to
his love.
As he hammered on the gate he heard music wafting faintly over
the spiked stone walls. One of the Ibbenese ushered him inside.
Tyrion gave the man his horse and said, “Who is that?” The
diamond-shaped panes of the longhall windows shone with yellow
light, and he could hear a man singing.

The Ibbenese shrugged. “Fatbelly singer.”
The sound swelled as he walked from the stable to the house.
Tyrion had never been fond of singers, and he liked this one even
less than the run of the breed, sight unseen. When he pushed open
the door, the man broke o . “My lord Hand.” He knelt, balding and
kettle-bellied, murmuring, “An honor, an honor.”
“M’lord.” Shae smiled at the sight of him. He liked that smile, the
quick unthinking way it came to her pretty face. The girl wore her
purple silk, belted with a cloth-of-silver sash. The colors favored her
dark hair and the smooth cream of her skin.
“Sweetling,” he called her. “And who is this?”
The singer raised his eyes. “I am called Symon Silver Tongue, my
lord. A player, a singer, a taleteller—”
“And a great fool,” Tyrion nished. “What did you call me, when
I entered?”
“Call? I only …” The silver in Symon’s tongue seemed to have
turned to lead. “My lord Hand, I said, an honor …”
“A wiser man would have pretended not to recognize me. Not
that I would have been fooled, but you ought to have tried. What
am I to do with you now? You know of my sweet Shae, you know
where she dwells, you know that I visit by night alone.”
“I swear, I’ll tell no one …”
“On that much we agree. Good night to you.” Tyrion led Shae up
the stairs.
“My singer may never sing again now,” she teased. “You’ve
scared the voice from him.”
“A little fear will help him reach those high notes.”
She closed the door to their bedchamber. “You won’t hurt him,
will you?” She lit a scented candle and knelt to pull o his boots.
“His songs cheer me on the nights you don’t come.”
“Would that I could come every night,” he said as she rubbed his
bare feet. “How well does he sing?”
“Better than some. Not so good as others.”
Tyrion opened her robe and buried his face between her breasts.
She always smelled clean to him, even in this reeking sty of a city.

“Keep him if you like, but keep him close. I won’t have him
wandering the city spreading tales in pot-shops.”
“He won’t—” she started.
Tyrion covered her mouth with his own. He’d had talk enough; he
needed the sweet simplicity of the pleasure he found between Shae’s
thighs. Here, at least, he was welcome, wanted.
Afterward, he eased his arm out from under her head, slipped on
his tunic, and went down to the garden. A half-moon silvered the
leaves of the fruit trees and shone on the surface of the stone
bathing pond. Tyrion seated himself beside the water. Somewhere
o to his right a cricket was chirping, a curiously homey sound. It is
peaceful here, he thought, but for how long?
A whi of something rank made him turn his head. Shae stood in
the door behind him, dressed in the silvery robe he’d given her. I
loved a maid as white as winter, with moonglow in her hair. Behind her
stood one of the begging brothers, a portly man in lthy patched
robes, his bare feet crusty with dirt, a bowl hung about his neck on
a leather thong where a septon would have worn a crystal. The
smell of him would have gagged a rat.
“Lord Varys has come to see you,” Shae announced.
The begging brother blinked at her, astonished. Tyrion laughed.
“To be sure. How is it you knew him when I did not?”
She shrugged. “It’s still him. Only dressed di erent.”
“A di erent look, a di erent smell, a di erent way of walking,”
said Tyrion. “Most men would be deceived.”
“And most women, maybe. But not whores. A whore learns to see
the man, not his garb, or she turns up dead in an alley.”
Varys looked pained, and not because of the false scabs on his
feet. Tyrion chuckled. “Shae, would you bring us some wine?” He
might need a drink. Whatever brought the eunuch here in the dead
of night was not like to be good.
“I almost fear to tell you why I’ve come, my lord,” Varys said
when Shae had left them. “I bring dire tidings.”
“You ought to dress in black feathers, Varys, you’re as bad an
omen as any raven.” Awkwardly, Tyrion pushed to his feet, half

afraid to ask the next question. “Is it Jaime?” If they have harmed
him, nothing will save them.
“No, my lord. A di erent matter. Ser Cortnay Penrose is dead.
Storm’s End has opened its gates to Stannis Baratheon.”
Dismay drove all other thoughts from Tyrion’s mind. When Shae
returned with the wine, he took one sip and ung the cup away to
explode against the side of the house. She raised a hand to shield
herself from the shards as the wine ran down the stones in long
ngers, black in the moonlight. “Damn him!” Tyrion said.
Varys smiled, showing a mouth full of rotted teeth. “Who, my
lord? Ser Cortnay or Lord Stannis?”
“Both of them.” Storm’s End was strong, it should have been able
to hold out for half a year or more … time enough for his father to
nish with Robb Stark. “How did this happen?”
Varys glanced at Shae. “My lord, must we trouble your sweet
lady’s sleep with such grim and bloody talk?”
“A lady might be afraid,” said Shae, “but I’m not.”
“You should be,” Tyrion told her. “With Storm’s End fallen,
Stannis will soon turn his attention toward King’s Landing.” He
regretted inging away that wine now. “Lord Varys, give us a
moment, and I’ll ride back to the castle with you.”
“I shall wait in the stables.” He bowed and stomped o .
Tyrion drew Shae down beside him. “You are not safe here.”
“I have my walls, and the guards you gave me.”
“Sellswords,” Tyrion said. “They like my gold well enough, but
will they die for it? As for these walls, a man could stand on
another’s shoulders and be over in a heartbeat. A manse much like
this one was burned during the riots. They killed the goldsmith who
owned it for the crime of having a full larder, just as they tore the
High Septon to pieces, raped Lollys half a hundred times, and
smashed Ser Aron’s skull in. What do you think they would do if
they got their hands on the Hand’s lady?”
“The Hand’s whore, you mean?” She looked at him with those big
bold eyes of hers. “Though I would be your lady, m’lord. I’d dress in
all the beautiful things you gave me, in satin and samite and clothof-gold, and I’d wear your jewels and hold your hand and sit by you

at feasts. I could give you sons, I know I could … and I vow I’d
never shame you.”
My love for you shames me enough. “A sweet dream, Shae. Now put
it aside, I beg you. It can never be.”
“Because of the queen? I’m not afraid of her either.”
“I am.”
“Then kill her and be done with it. It’s not as if there was any love
between you.”
Tyrion sighed. “She’s my sister. The man who kills his own blood
is cursed forever in the sight of gods and men. Moreover, whatever
you and I may think of Cersei, my father and brother hold her dear.
I can scheme with any man in the Seven Kingdoms, but the gods
have not equipped me to face Jaime with swords in hand.”
“The Young Wolf and Lord Stannis have swords and they don’t
scare you.”
How little you know, sweetling. “Against them I have all the power
of House Lannister. Against Jaime or my father, I have no more
than a twisted back and a pair of stunted legs.”
“You have me.” Shae kissed him, her arms sliding around his neck
as she pressed her body to his.
The kiss aroused him, as her kisses always did, but this time
Tyrion gently disentangled himself. “Not now. Sweetling, I
have … well, call it the seed of a plan. I think I might be able to
bring you into the castle kitchens.”
Shae’s face went still. “The kitchens?”
“Yes. If I act through Varys, no one will be the wiser.”
She giggled. “M’lord, I’d poison you. Every man who’s tasted my
cooking has told me what a good whore I am.”
“The Red Keep has su cient cooks. Butchers and bakers too.
You’d need to pose as a scullion.”
“A pot girl,” she said, “in scratchy brown roughspun. Is that how
m’lord wants to see me?”
“M’lord wants to see you alive,” Tyrion said. “You can scarcely
scour pots in silk and velvet.”
“Has m’lord grown tired of me?” She reached a hand under his
tunic and found his cock. In two quick strokes she had it hard. “He

still wants me.” She laughed. “Would you like to fuck your kitchen
wench, m’lord? You can dust me with our and suck gravy o my
titties if you …”
“Stop it.” The way she was acting reminded him of Dancy, who
had tried so hard to win her wager. He yanked her hand away to
keep her from further mischief. “This is not the time for bed sport,
Shae. Your life may be at stake.”
Her grin was gone. “If I’ve displeased m’lord, I never meant it,
only … couldn’t you just give me more guards?”
Tyrion breathed a deep sigh. Remember how young she is, he told
himself. He took her hand. “Your gems can be replaced, and new
gowns can be sewn twice as lovely as the old. To me, you’re the
most precious thing within these walls. The Red Keep is not safe
either, but it’s a deal safer than here. I want you there.”
“In the kitchens.” Her voice was at. “Scouring pots.”
“For a short while.”
“My father made me his kitchen wench,” she said, her mouth
twisting. “That was why I ran o .”
“You told me you ran o because your father made you his
whore,” he reminded her.
“That too. I didn’t like scouring his pots no more than I liked his
cock in me.” She tossed her head. “Why can’t you keep me in your
tower? Half the lords at court keep bedwarmers.”
“I was expressly forbidden to take you to court.”
“By your stupid father.” Shae pouted. “You’re old enough to keep
all the whores you want. Does he take you for a beardless boy?
What could he do, spank you?”
He slapped her. Not hard, but hard enough. “Damn you,” he said.
“Damn you. Never mock me. Not you.”
For a moment Shae did not speak. The only sound was the
cricket, chirping, chirping. “Beg pardon, m’lord,” she said at last, in
a heavy wooden voice. “I never meant to be impudent.”
And I never meant to strike you. Gods be good, am I turning into
Cersei? “That was ill done,” he said. “On both our parts. Shae, you
do not understand.” Words he had never meant to speak came
tumbling out of him like mummers from a hollow horse. “When I

was thirteen, I wed a crofter’s daughter. Or so I thought her. I was
blind with love for her, and thought she felt the same for me, but
my father rubbed my face in the truth. My bride was a whore Jaime
had hired to give me my rst taste of manhood.” And I believed all of
it, fool that I was. “To drive the lesson home, Lord Tywin gave my
wife to a barracks of his guardsmen to use as they pleased, and
commanded me to watch.” And to take her one last time, after the rest
were done. One last time, with no trace of love or tenderness remaining.
“So you will remember her as she truly is,” he said, and I should have
de ed him, but my cock betrayed me, and I did as I was bid. “After he
was done with her, my father had the marriage undone. It was as if
we had never been wed, the septons said.” He squeezed her hand.
“Please, let’s have no more talk of the Tower of the Hand. You will
be in the kitchens only a little while. Once we’re done with Stannis,
you’ll have another manse, and silks as soft as your hands.”
Shae’s eyes had grown large but he could not read what lay
behind them. “My hands won’t be soft if I clean ovens and scrape
plates all day. Will you still want them touching you when they’re
all red and raw and cracked from hot water and lye soap?”
“More than ever,” he said. “When I look at them, they’ll remind
me how brave you were.”
He could not say if she believed him. She lowered her eyes. “I am
yours to command, m’lord.”
It was as much acceptance as she could give tonight, he saw that
plain enough. He kissed her cheek where he’d struck her, to take
some sting from the blow. “I will send for you.”
Varys was waiting in the stables, as promised. His horse looked
spavined and half-dead. Tyrion mounted up; one of the sellswords
opened the gates. They rode out in silence. Why did I tell her about
Tysha, gods help me? he asked himself, suddenly afraid. There were
some secrets that should never be spoken, some shames a man
should take to his grave. What did he want from her, forgiveness?
The way she had looked at him, what did that mean? Did she hate
the thought of scouring pots that much, or was it his confession?
How could I tell her that and still think she would love me? part of him

said, and another part mocked, saying, Fool of a dwarf, it is only the
gold and jewels the whore loves.
His scarred elbow was throbbing, jarred every time the horse set
down a hoof. Sometimes he could almost fancy he heard the bones
grinding together inside. Perhaps he should see a maester, get some
potion for the pain … but since Pycelle had revealed himself for
what he was, Tyrion Lannister mistrusted the maesters. The gods
only knew who they were conspiring with, or what they had mixed
in those potions they gave you. “Varys,” he said. “I need to bring
Shae into the castle without Cersei becoming aware.” Brie y, he
sketched out his kitchen scheme.
When he was done, the eunuch made a little clucking sound. “I
will do as my lord commands, of course … but I must warn you, the
kitchens are full of eyes and ears. Even if the girl falls under no
particular suspicion, she will be subject to a thousand questions.
Where was she born? Who were her parents? How did she come to
King’s Landing? The truth will never do, so she must lie … and lie,
and lie.” He glanced down at Tyrion. “And such a pretty young
kitchen wench will incite lust as well as curiosity. She will be
touched, pinched, patted, and fondled. Pot boys will crawl under
her blankets of a night. Some lonely cook may seek to wed her.
Bakers will knead her breasts with oured hands.”
“I’d sooner have her fondled than stabbed,” said Tyrion.
Varys rode on a few paces and said, “It might be that there is
another way. As it happens, the maidservant who attends Lady
Tanda’s daughter has been lching her jewels. Were I to inform
Lady Tanda, she would be forced to dismiss the girl at once. And the
daughter would require a new maidservant.”
“I see.” This had possibilities, Tyrion saw at once. A lady’s
bedmaid wore ner garb than a scullion, and often even a jewel or
two. Shae should be pleased by that. And Cersei thought Lady
Tanda tedious and hysterical, and Lollys a bovine lackwit. She was
not like to pay them any friendly calls.
“Lollys is timid and trusting,” Varys said. “She will accept any
tale she is told. Since the mob took her maidenhood she is afraid to

leave her chambers, so Shae will be out of sight … but conveniently
close, should you have need of comfort.”
“The Tower of the Hand is watched, you know as well as I. Cersei
would be certain to grow curious if Lollys’s bedmaid starting paying
me calls.”
“I might be able to slip the child into your bedchamber unseen.
Chataya’s is not the only house to boast a hidden door.”
“A secret access? To my chambers?” Tyrion was more annoyed
than surprised. Why else would Maegor the Cruel have ordered
death for all the builders who had worked on his castle, except to
preserve such secrets? “Yes, I suppose there would be. Where will I
nd the door? In my solar? My bedchamber?”
“My friend, you would not force me to reveal all my little secrets,
would you?”
“Henceforth think of them as our little secrets, Varys.” Tyrion
glanced up at the eunuch in his smelly mummer’s garb. “Assuming
you are on my side …”
“Can you doubt it?”
“Why no, I trust you implicitly.” A bitter laugh echoed o the
shuttered windows. “I trust you like one of my own blood, in truth.
Now tell me how Cortnay Penrose died.”
“It is said that he threw himself from a tower.”
“Threw himself? No, I will not believe that!”
“His guards saw no man enter his chambers, nor did they nd any
within afterward.”
“Then the killer entered earlier and hid under the bed,” Tyrion
suggested, “or he climbed down from the roof on a rope. Perhaps
the guards are lying. Who’s to say they did not do the thing
themselves?”
“Doubtless you are right, my lord.”
His smug tone said otherwise. “But you do not think so? How was
it done, then?”
For a long moment Varys said nothing. The only sound was the
stately clack of horseshoes on cobbles. Finally the eunuch cleared
his throat. “My lord, do you believe in the old powers?”

“Magic, you mean?” Tyrion said impatiently. “Bloodspells, curses,
shapeshifting, those sorts of things?” He snorted. “Do you mean to
suggest that Ser Cortnay was magicked to his death?”
“Ser Cortnay had challenged Lord Stannis to single combat on the
morning he died. I ask you, is this the act of a man lost to despair?
Then there is the matter of Lord Renly’s mysterious and most
fortuitous murder, even as his battle lines were forming up to
sweep his brother from the eld.” The eunuch paused a moment.
“My lord, you once asked me how it was that I was cut.”
“I recall,” said Tyrion. “You did not want to talk of it.”
“Nor do I, but …” This pause was longer than the one before, and
when Varys spoke again his voice was di erent somehow. “I was an
orphan boy apprenticed to a traveling folly. Our master owned a fat
little cog and we sailed up and down the narrow sea performing in
all the Free Cities and from time to time in Oldtown and King’s
Landing.
“One day at Myr, a certain man came to our folly. After the
performance, he made an o er for me that my master found too
tempting to refuse. I was in terror. I feared the man meant to use
me as I had heard men used small boys, but in truth the only part of
me he had need of was my manhood. He gave me a potion that
made me powerless to move or speak, yet did nothing to dull my
senses. With a long hooked blade, he sliced me root and stem,
chanting all the while. I watched him burn my manly parts on a
brazier. The ames turned blue, and I heard a voice answer his call,
though I did not understand the words they spoke.
“The mummers had sailed by the time he was done with me.
Once I had served his purpose, the man had no further interest in
me, so he put me out. When I asked him what I should do now, he
answered that he supposed I should die. To spite him, I resolved to
live. I begged, I stole, and I sold what parts of my body still
remained to me. Soon I was as good a thief as any in Myr, and
when I was older I learned that often the contents of a man’s letters
are more valuable than the contents of his purse.
“Yet I still dream of that night, my lord. Not of the sorcerer, nor
his blade, nor even the way my manhood shriveled as it burned. I

dream of the voice. The voice from the ames. Was it a god, a
demon, some conjurer’s trick? I could not tell you, and I know all
the tricks. All I can say for a certainty is that he called it, and it
answered, and since that day I have hated magic and all those who
practice it. If Lord Stannis is one such, I mean to see him dead.”
When he was done, they rode in silence for a time. Finally Tyrion
said, “A harrowing tale. I’m sorry.”
The eunuch sighed. “You are sorry, but you do not believe me.
No, my lord, no need to apologize. I was drugged and in pain and it
was a very long time ago and far across the sea. No doubt I
dreamed that voice. I’ve told myself as much a thousand times.”
“I believe in steel swords, gold coins, and men’s wits,” said
Tyrion. “And I believe there once were dragons. I’ve seen their
skulls, after all.”
“Let us hope that is the worst thing you ever see, my lord.”
“On that we agree.” Tyrion smiled. “And for Ser Cortnay’s death,
well, we know Stannis hired sellsails from the Free Cities. Perhaps
he bought himself a skilled assassin as well.”
“A very skilled assassin.”
“There are such. I used to dream that one day I’d be rich enough
to send a Faceless Man after my sweet sister.”
“Regardless of how Ser Cortnay died,” said Varys, “he is dead, the
castle fallen. Stannis is free to march.”
“Any chance we might convince the Dornishmen to descend on
the Marches?” asked Tyrion.
“None.”
“A pity. Well, the threat may serve to keep the Marcher lords
close to their castles, at least. What news of my father?”
“If Lord Tywin has won across the Red Fork, no word has reached
me yet. If he does not hasten, he may be trapped between his foes.
The Oakheart leaf and the Rowan tree have been seen north of the
Mander.”
“No word from Little nger?”
“Perhaps he never reached Bitterbridge. Or perhaps he’s died
there. Lord Tarly has seized Renly’s stores and put a great many to

the sword; Florents, chie y. Lord Caswell has shut himself up in his
castle.”
Tyrion threw back his head and laughed.
Varys reined up, nonplussed. “My lord?”
“Don’t you see the jest, Lord Varys?” Tyrion waved a hand at the
shuttered windows, at all the sleeping city. “Storm’s End is fallen
and Stannis is coming with re and steel and the gods alone know
what dark powers, and the good folk don’t have Jaime to protect
them, nor Robert nor Renly nor Rhaegar nor their precious Knight
of Flowers. Only me, the one they hate.” He laughed again. “The
dwarf, the evil counselor, the twisted little monkey demon. I’m all
that stands between them and chaos.”

CATELYN

Tell Father I have gone to make him proud.” Her brother swung up

into his saddle, every inch the lord in his bright mail and owing
mud-and-water cloak. A silver trout ornamented the crest of his
greathelm, twin to the one painted on his shield.
“He was always proud of you, Edmure. And he loves you ercely.
Believe that.”
“I mean to give him better reason than mere birth.” He wheeled
his warhorse about and raised a hand. Trumpets sounded, a drum
began to boom, the drawbridge descended in ts and starts, and Ser
Edmure Tully led his men out from Riverrun with lances raised and
banners streaming.
I have a greater host than yours, brother, Catelyn thought as she
watched them go. A host of doubts and fears.
Beside her, Brienne’s misery was almost palpable. Catelyn had
ordered garments sewn to her measure, handsome gowns to suit her
birth and sex, yet still she preferred to dress in oddments of mail
and boiled leather, a swordbelt cinched around her waist. She would
have been happier riding to war with Edmure, no doubt, but even
walls as strong as Riverrun’s required swords to hold them. Her
brother had taken every able-bodied man for the fords, leaving Ser
Desmond Grell to command a garrison made up of the wounded, the
old, and the sick, along with a few squires and some untrained
peasant boys still shy of manhood. This, to defend a castle crammed
full of women and children.

When the last of Edmure’s foot had shu ed under the portcullis,
Brienne asked, “What shall we do now, my lady?”
“Our duty.” Catelyn’s face was drawn as she started across the
yard. I have always done my duty, she thought. Perhaps that was why
her lord father had always cherished her best of all his children. Her
two older brothers had both died in infancy, so she had been son as
well as daughter to Lord Hoster until Edmure was born. Then her
mother had died and her father had told her that she must be the
lady of Riverrun now, and she had done that too. And when Lord
Hoster promised her to Brandon Stark, she had thanked him for
making her such a splendid match.
I gave Brandon my favor to wear, and never comforted Petyr once
after he was wounded, nor bid him farewell when Father sent him o .
And when Brandon was murdered and Father told me I must wed his
brother, I did so gladly, though I never saw Ned’s face until our wedding
day. I gave my maidenhood to this solemn stranger and sent him o to
his war and his king and the woman who bore him his bastard, because I
always did my duty.
Her steps took her to the sept, a seven-sided sandstone temple set
amidst her mother’s gardens and lled with rainbow light. It was
crowded when they entered; Catelyn was not alone in her need for
prayer. She knelt before the painted marble image of the Warrior
and lit a scented candle for Edmure and another for Robb o
beyond the hills. Keep them safe and help them to victory, she prayed,
and bring peace to the souls of the slain and comfort to those they leave
behind.
The septon entered with his censer and crystal while she was at
her prayers, so Catelyn lingered for the celebration. She did not
know this septon, an earnest young man close to Edmure’s age. He
performed his o ce well enough, and his voice was rich and
pleasant when he sang the praises to the Seven, but Catelyn found
herself yearning for the thin quavering tones of Septon Osmynd,
long dead. Osmynd would have listened patiently to the tale of
what she had seen and felt in Renly’s pavilion, and he might have
known what it meant as well, and what she must do to lay to rest
the shadows that stalked her dreams. Osmynd, my father, Uncle

Brynden, old Maester Kym, they always seemed to know everything, but
now there is only me, and it seems I know nothing, not even my duty.
How can I do my duty if I do not know where it lies?
Catelyn’s knees were sti by the time she rose, though she felt no
wiser. Perhaps she would go to the godswood tonight, and pray to
Ned’s gods as well. They were older than the Seven.
Outside, she found song of a very di erent sort. Rymund the
Rhymer sat by the brewhouse amidst a circle of listeners, his deep
voice ringing as he sang of Lord Deremond at the Bloody Meadow.
And there he stood with sword in hand,
the last of Darry’s ten …
Brienne paused to listen for a moment, broad shoulders hunched
and thick arms crossed against her chest. A mob of ragged boys
raced by, screeching and ailing at each other with sticks. Why do
boys so love to play at war? Catelyn wondered if Rymund was the
answer. The singer’s voice swelled as he neared the end of his song.
And red the grass beneath his feet,
and red his banners bright,
and red the glow of setting sun
that bathed him in its light.
“Come on, come on,” the great lord called,
“my sword is hungry still.”
And with a cry of savage rage,
They swarmed across the rill …
“Fighting is better than this waiting,” Brienne said. “You don’t
feel so helpless when you ght. You have a sword and a horse,
sometimes an axe. When you’re armored it’s hard for anyone to hurt
you.”
“Knights die in battle,” Catelyn reminded her.
Brienne looked at her with those blue and beautiful eyes. “As
ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.”

“Children are a battle of a di erent sort.” Catelyn started across
the yard. “A battle without banners or warhorns, but no less erce.
Carrying a child, bringing it into the world … your mother will
have told you of the pain …”
“I never knew my mother,” Brienne said. “My father had
ladies … a di erent lady every year, but …”
“Those were no ladies,” Catelyn said. “As hard as birth can be,
Brienne, what comes after is even harder. At times I feel as though I
am being torn apart. Would that there were ve of me, one for each
child, so I might keep them all safe.”
“And who would keep you safe, my lady?”
Her smile was wan and tired. “Why, the men of my House. Or so
my lady mother taught me. My lord father, my brother, my uncle,
my husband, they will keep me safe … but while they are away
from me, I suppose you must ll their place, Brienne.”
Brienne bowed her head. “I shall try, my lady.”
Later that day, Maester Vyman brought a letter. She saw him at
once, hoping for some word from Robb, or from Ser Rodrik in
Winterfell, but the message proved to be from one Lord Meadows,
who named himself castellan of Storm’s End. It was addressed to
her father, her brother, her son, “or whoever now holds Riverrun.”
Ser Cortnay Penrose was dead, the man wrote, and Storm’s End had
opened its gate to Stannis Baratheon, the trueborn and rightful heir.
The castle garrison had sworn their swords to his cause, one and all,
and no man of them had su ered harm.
“Save Cortnay Penrose,” Catelyn murmured. She had never met
the man, yet she grieved to hear of his passing. “Robb should know
of this at once,” she said. “Do we know where he is?”
“At last word he was marching toward the Crag, the seat of
House Westerling,” said Maester Vyman. “If I dispatched a raven to
Ashemark, it may be that they could send a rider after him.”
“Do so.”
Catelyn read the letter again after the maester was gone. “Lord
Meadows says nothing of Robert’s bastard,” she con ded to
Brienne. “I suppose he yielded the boy with the rest, though I
confess, I do not understand why Stannis wanted him so badly.”

“Perhaps he fears the boy’s claim.”
“A bastard’s claim? No, it’s something else … what does this child
look like?”
“He is seven or eight, comely, with black hair and bright blue
eyes. Visitors oft thought him Lord Renly’s own son.”
“And Renly favored Robert.” Catelyn had a glimmer of
understanding. “Stannis means to parade his brother’s bastard
before the realm, so men might see Robert in his face and wonder
why there is no such likeness in Jo rey.”
“Would that mean so much?”
“Those who favor Stannis will call it proof. Those who support
Jo rey will say it means nothing.” Her own children had more
Tully about them than Stark. Arya was the only one to show much
of Ned in her features. And Jon Snow, but he was never mine. She
found herself thinking of Jon’s mother, that shadowy secret love her
husband would never speak of. Does she grieve for Ned as I do? Or did
she hate him for leaving her bed for mine? Does she pray for her son as I
have prayed for mine?
They were uncomfortable thoughts, and futile. If Jon had been
born of Ashara Dayne of Starfall, as some whispered, the lady was
long dead; if not, Catelyn had no clue who or where his mother
might be. And it made no matter. Ned was gone now, and his loves
and his secrets had all died with him.
Still, she was struck again by how strangely men behaved when it
came to their bastards. Ned had always been ercely protective of
Jon, and Ser Cortnay Penrose had given up his life for this Edric
Storm, yet Roose Bolton’s bastard had meant less to him than one of
his dogs, to judge from the tone of the queer cold letter Edmure had
gotten from him not three days past. He had crossed the Trident and
was marching on Harrenhal as commanded, he wrote. “A strong
castle, and well garrisoned, but His Grace shall have it, if I must kill
every living soul within to make it so.” He hoped His Grace would
weigh that against the crimes of his bastard son, whom Ser Rodrik
Cassel had put to death. “A fate he no doubt earned,” Bolton had
written. “Tainted blood is ever treacherous, and Ramsay’s nature
was sly, greedy, and cruel. I count myself well rid of him. The

trueborn sons my young wife has promised me would never have
been safe while he lived.”
The sound of hurrying footsteps drove the morbid thoughts from
her head. Ser Desmond’s squire dashed panting into the room and
knelt. “My lady … Lannisters … across the river.”
“Take a long breath, lad, and tell it slowly.”
He did as she bid him. “A column of armored men,” he reported.
“Across the Red Fork. They are ying a purple unicorn below the
lion of Lannister.”
Some son of Lord Brax. Brax had come to Riverrun once when she
was a girl, to propose wedding one of his sons to her or Lysa. She
wondered whether it was this same son out there now, leading the
attack.
The Lannisters had ridden out of the southeast beneath a blaze of
banners, Ser Desmond told her when she ascended to the
battlements to join him. “A few outriders, no more,” he assured her.
“The main strength of Lord Tywin’s host is well to the south. We
are in no danger here.”
South of the Red Fork the land stretched away open and at.
From the watchtower Catelyn could see for miles. Even so, only the
nearest ford was visible. Edmure had entrusted Lord Jason Mallister
with its defense, as well as that of three others farther upriver. The
Lannister riders were milling about uncertainly near the water,
crimson and silver banners apping in the wind. “No more than
fty, my lady,” Ser Desmond estimated.
Catelyn watched the riders spread out in a long line. Lord Jason’s
men waited to receive them behind rocks and grass and hillocks. A
trumpet blast sent the horsemen forward at a ponderous walk,
splashing down into the current. For a moment they made a brave
show, all bright armor and streaming banners, the sun ashing o
the points of their lances.
“Now,” she heard Brienne mutter.
It was hard to make out what was happening, but the screams of
the horses seemed loud even at this remove, and beneath them
Catelyn heard the fainter clash of steel on steel. A banner vanished
suddenly as its bearer was swept under, and soon after the rst

dead man drifted past their walls, borne along by the current. By
then the Lannisters had pulled back in confusion. She watched as
they re-formed, conferred brie y, and galloped back the way they
had come. The men on the walls shouted taunts after them, though
they were already too far o to hear.
Ser Desmond slapped his belly. “Would that Lord Hoster could
have seen that. It would have made him dance.”
“My father’s dancing days are past, I fear,” Catelyn said, “and this
ght is just begun. The Lannisters will come again. Lord Tywin has
twice my brother’s numbers.”
“He could have ten times and it would not matter,” Ser Desmond
said. “The west bank of the Red Fork is higher than the east, my
lady, and well wooded. Our bowmen have good cover, and a clear
eld for their shafts … and should any breach occur, Edmure will
have his best knights in reserve, ready to ride wherever they are
most sorely needed. The river will hold them.”
“I pray that you are right,” Catelyn said gravely.
That night they came again. She had commanded them to wake
her at once if the enemy returned, and well after midnight a serving
girl touched her gently by the shoulder. Catelyn sat up at once.
“What is it?”
“The ford again, my lady.”
Wrapped in a bedrobe, Catelyn climbed to the roof of the keep.
From there she could see over the walls and the moonlit river to
where the battle raged. The defenders had built watch res along
the bank, and perhaps the Lannisters thought to nd them nightblind or unwary. If so, it was folly. Darkness was a chancy ally at
best. As they waded in to breast their way across, men stepped in
hidden pools and went down splashing, while others stumbled over
stones or gashed their feet on the hidden caltrops. The Mallister
bowmen sent a storm of re arrows hissing across the river,
strangely beautiful from afar. One man, pierced through a dozen
times, his clothes a re, danced and whirled in the knee-deep water
until at last he fell and was swept downstream. By the time his body
came bobbing past Riverrun, the res and his life had both been
extinguished.

A small victory, Catelyn thought when the ghting had ended and
the surviving foemen had melted back into the night, yet a victory
nonetheless. As they descended the winding turret steps, Catelyn
asked Brienne for her thoughts. “That was the brush of Lord Tywin’s
ngertip, my lady,” the girl said. “He is probing, feeling for a weak
point, an undefended crossing. If he does not nd one, he will curl
all his ngers into a st and try and make one.” Brienne hunched
her shoulders. “That’s what I’d do. Were I him.” Her hand went to
the hilt of her sword and gave it a little pat, as if to make certain it
was still there.
And may the gods help us then, Catelyn thought. Yet there was
nothing she could do for it. That was Edmure’s battle out there on
the river; hers was here inside the castle.
The next morning as she broke her fast, she sent for her father’s
aged steward, Utherydes Wayn. “Have Ser Cleos Frey brought a
agon of wine. I mean to question him soon, and I want his tongue
well loosened.”
“As you command, my lady.”
Not long after, a rider with the Mallister eagle sewn on his breast
arrived with a message from Lord Jason, telling of another skirmish
and another victory. Ser Flement Brax had tried to force a crossing
at a di erent ford six leagues to the south. This time the Lannisters
shortened their lances and advanced across the river behind on foot,
but the Mallister bowmen had rained high arcing shots down over
their shields, while the scorpions Edmure had mounted on the
riverbank sent heavy stones crashing through to break up the
formation. “They left a dozen dead in the water, only two reaching
the shallows, where we dealt with them briskly,” the rider reported.
He also told of ghting farther upstream, where Lord Karyl Vance
held the fords. “Those thrusts too were turned aside, at grievous
cost to our foes.”
Perhaps Edmure was wiser than I knew, Catelyn thought. His lords
all saw the sense in his battle plans, why was I so blind? My brother is
not the little boy I remember, no more than Robb is.
She waited until evening before going to pay her call upon Ser
Cleos Frey, reasoning that the longer she delayed, the drunker he

was likely to be. As she entered the tower cell, Ser Cleos stumbled
to his knees. “My lady, I knew naught of any escape. The Imp said a
Lannister must needs have a Lannister escort, on my oath as a
knight—”
“Arise, ser.” Catelyn seated herself. “I know no grandson of
Walder Frey would be an oathbreaker.” Unless it served his purpose.
“You brought peace terms, my brother said.”
“I did.” Ser Cleos lurched to his feet. She was pleased to see how
unsteady he was.
“Tell me,” she commanded, and he did.
When he was done, Catelyn sat frowning. Edmure had been right,
these were no terms at all, except … “Lannister will exchange Arya
and Sansa for his brother?”
“Yes. He sat on the Iron Throne and swore it.”
“Before witnesses?”
“Before all the court, my lady. And the gods as well. I said as
much to Ser Edmure, but he told me it was not possible, that His
Grace Robb would never consent.”
“He told you true.” She could not even say that Robb was wrong.
Arya and Sansa were children. The Kingslayer, alive and free, was
as dangerous as any man in the realm. That road led nowhere. “Did
you see my girls? Are they treated well?”
Ser Cleos hesitated. “I … yes, they seemed …”
He is fumbling for a lie, Catelyn realized, but the wine has fuddled
his wits. “Ser Cleos,” she said coolly, “you forfeited the protection of
your peace banner when your men played us false. Lie to me, and
you’ll hang from the walls beside them. Believe that. I shall ask you
once more—did you see my daughters?”
His brow was damp with sweat. “I saw Sansa at the court, the day
Tyrion told me his terms. She looked most beautiful, my lady.
Perhaps a, a bit wan. Drawn, as it were.”
Sansa, but not Arya. That might mean anything. Arya had always
been harder to tame. Perhaps Cersei was reluctant to parade her in
open court for fear of what she might say or do. They might have
her locked safely out of sight. Or they might have killed her. Catelyn

shoved the thought away. “His terms, you said … yet Cersei is
Queen Regent.”
“Tyrion spoke for both of them. The queen was not there. She
was indisposed that day, I was told.”
“Curious.” Catelyn thought back to that terrible trek through the
Mountains of the Moon, and the way Tyrion Lannister had somehow
seduced that sellsword from her service to his own. The dwarf is too
clever by half. She could not imagine how he had survived the high
road after Lysa had sent him from the Vale, yet it did not surprise
her. He had no part in Ned’s murder, at the least. And he came to my
defense when the clansmen attacked us. If I could trust his word …
She opened her hands to look down at the scars across her
ngers. His dagger’s marks, she reminded herself. His dagger, in the
hand of the killer he paid to open Bran’s throat. Though the dwarf
denied it, to be sure. Even after Lysa locked him in one of her sky
cells and threatened him with her moon door, he had still denied it.
“He lied,” she said, rising abruptly. “The Lannisters are liars every
one, and the dwarf is the worst of them. The killer was armed with
his own knife.”
Ser Cleos stared. “I know nothing of any—”
“You know nothing,” she agreed, sweeping from the cell. Brienne
fell in beside her, silent. It is simpler for her, Catelyn thought with a
pang of envy. She was like a man in that. For men the answer was
always the same, and never farther away than the nearest sword.
For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.
She took a late supper in the Great Hall with her garrison, to give
them what encouragement she could. Rymund the Rhymer sang
through all the courses, sparing her the need to talk. He closed with
the song he had written about Robb’s victory at Oxcross. “And the
stars in the night were the eyes of his wolves, and the wind itself was their
song.” Between the verses, Rymund threw back his head and
howled, and by the end, half of the hall was howling along with
him, even Desmond Grell, who was well in his cups. Their voices
rang o the rafters.
Let them have their songs, if it makes them brave, Catelyn thought,
toying with her silver goblet.

“There was always a singer at Evenfall Hall when I was a girl,”
Brienne said quietly. “I learned all the songs by heart.”
“Sansa did the same, though few singers ever cared to make the
long journey north to Winterfell.” I told her there would be singers at
the king’s court, though. I told her she would hear music of all sorts, that
her father could nd some master to help her learn the high harp. Oh,
gods forgive me …
Brienne said, “I remember a woman … she came from some place
across the narrow sea. I could not even say what language she sang
in, but her voice was as lovely as she was. She had eyes the color of
plums and her waist was so tiny my father could put his hands
around it. His hands were almost as big as mine.” She closed her
long, thick ngers, as if to hide them.
“Did you sing for your father?” Catelyn asked.
Brienne shook her head, staring down at her trencher as if to nd
some answer in the gravy.
“For Lord Renly?”
The girl reddened. “Never, I … his fool, he made cruel japes
sometimes, and I …”
“Someday you must sing for me.”
“I … please, I have no gift.” Brienne pushed back from the table.
“Forgive me, my lady. Do I have your leave to go?”
Catelyn nodded. The tall, ungainly girl left the hall with long
strides, almost unnoticed amidst the revelry. May the gods go with
her, she thought as she returned listlessly to her supper.
It was three days later when the hammer blow that Brienne had
foretold fell, and ve days before they heard of it. Catelyn was
sitting with her father when Edmure’s messenger arrived. The man’s
armor was dinted, his boots dusty, and he had a ragged hole in his
surcoat, but the look on his face as he knelt was enough to tell her
that the news was good. “Victory, my lady.” He handed her
Edmure’s letter. Her hand trembled as she broke the seal.
Lord Tywin had tried to force a crossing at a dozen di erent
fords, her brother wrote, but every thrust had been thrown back.
Lord Le ord had been drowned, the Crakehall knight called
Strongboar taken captive, Ser Addam Marbrand thrice forced to

retreat … but the ercest battle had been fought at Stone Mill,
where Ser Gregor Clegane had led the assault. So many of his men
had fallen that their dead horses threatened to dam the ow. In the
end the Mountain and a handful of his best had gained the west
bank, but Edmure had thrown his reserve at them, and they had
shattered and reeled away bloody and beaten. Ser Gregor himself
had lost his horse and staggered back across the Red Fork bleeding
from a dozen wounds while a rain of arrows and stones fell all
around him. “They shall not cross, Cat,” Edmure scrawled, “Lord
Tywin is marching to the southeast. A feint perhaps, or full retreat,
it matters not. They shall not cross.”
Ser Desmond Grell had been elated. “Oh, if only I might have
been with him,” the old knight said when she read him the letter.
“Where is that fool Rymund? There’s a song in this, by the gods,
and one that even Edmure will want to hear. The mill that ground
the Mountain down, I could almost make the words myself, had I
the singer’s gift.”
“I’ll hear no songs until the ghting’s done,” Catelyn said,
perhaps too sharply. Yet she allowed Ser Desmond to spread the
word, and agreed when he suggested breaking open some casks in
honor of Stone Mill. The mood within Riverrun had been strained
and somber; they would all be better for a little drink and hope.
That night the castle rang to the sounds of celebration. “Riverrun!”
the smallfolk shouted, and “Tully! Tully!” They’d come frightened
and helpless, and her brother had taken them in when most lords
would have closed their gates. Their voices oated in through the
high windows, and seeped under the heavy redwood doors. Rymund
played his harp, accompanied by a pair of drummers and a youth
with a set of reed pipes. Catelyn listened to girlish laughter, and the
excited chatter of the green boys her brother had left her for a
garrison. Good sounds … and yet they did not touch her. She could
not share their happiness.
In her father’s solar she found a heavy leatherbound book of maps
and opened it to the riverlands. Her eyes found the path of the Red
Fork and traced it by ickering candlelight. Marching to the

southeast, she thought. By now they had likely reached the
headwaters of the Blackwater Rush, she decided.
She closed the book even more uneasy than before. The gods had
granted them victory after victory. At Stone Mill, at Oxcross, in the
Battle of the Camps, at the Whispering Wood …
But if we are winning, why am I so afraid?

BRAN

The sound was the faintest of clinks, a scraping of steel over stone.

He lifted his head from his paws, listening, sni ng at the night.
The evening’s rain had woken a hundred sleeping smells and
made them ripe and strong again. Grass and thorns, blackberries
broken on the ground, mud, worms, rotting leaves, a rat creeping
through the bush. He caught the shaggy black scent of his brother’s
coat and the sharp coppery tang of blood from the squirrel he’d
killed. Other squirrels moved through the branches above, smelling
of wet fur and fear, their little claws scratching at the bark. The
noise had sounded something like that.
And he heard it again, clink and scrape. It brought him to his feet.
His ears pricked and his tail rose. He howled, a long deep shivery
cry, a howl to wake the sleepers, but the piles of man-rock were
dark and dead. A still wet night, a night to drive men into their
holes. The rain had stopped, but the men still hid from the damp,
huddled by the res in their caves of piled stone.
His brother came sliding through the trees, moving almost as
quiet as another brother he remembered dimly from long ago, the
white one with the eyes of blood. This brother’s eyes were pools of
shadow, but the fur on the back of his neck was bristling. He had
heard the sounds as well, and known they meant danger.
This time the clink and scrape were followed by a slithering and
the soft swift patter of skinfeet on stone. The wind brought the

faintest whi of a man-smell he did not know. Stranger. Danger.
Death.
He ran toward the sound, his brother racing beside him. The
stone dens rose before them, walls slick and wet. He bared his
teeth, but the man-rock took no notice. A gate loomed up, a black
iron snake coiled tight about bar and post. When he crashed against
it, the gate shuddered and the snake clanked and slithered and held.
Through the bars he could look down the long stone burrow that
ran between the walls to the stony eld beyond, but there was no
way through. He could force his muzzle between the bars, but no
more. Many a time his brother had tried to crack the black bones of
the gate between his teeth, but they would not break. They had
tried to dig under, but there were great at stones beneath, halfcovered by earth and blown leaves.
Snarling, he paced back and forth in front of the gate, then threw
himself at it once more. It moved a little and slammed him back.
Locked, something whispered. Chained. The voice he did not hear,
the scent without a smell. The other ways were closed as well.
Where doors opened in the walls of man-rock, the wood was thick
and strong. There was no way out.
There is, the whisper came, and it seemed as if he could see the
shadow of a great tree covered in needles, slanting up out of the
black earth to ten times the height of a man. Yet when he looked
about, it was not there. The other side of the godswood, the sentinel,
hurry, hurry …
Through the gloom of night came a mu ed shout, cut short.
Swiftly, swiftly, he whirled and bounded back into the trees, wet
leaves rustling beneath his paws, branches whipping at him as he
rushed past. He could hear his brother following close. They
plunged under the heart tree and around the cold pool, through the
blackberry bushes, under a tangle of oaks and ash and hawthorn
scrub, to the far side of the wood … and there it was, the shadow
he’d glimpsed without seeing, the slanting tree pointing at the
rooftops. Sentinel, came the thought.
He remembered how it was to climb it then. The needles
everywhere, scratching at his bare face and falling down the back of

his neck, the sticky sap on his hands, the sharp piney smell of it. It
was an easy tree for a boy to climb, leaning as it did, crooked, the
branches so close together they almost made a ladder, slanting right
up to the roof.
Growling, he sni ed around the base of the tree, lifted a leg and
marked it with a stream of urine. A low branch brushed his face,
and he snapped at it, twisting and pulling until the wood cracked
and tore. His mouth was full of needles and the bitter taste of the
sap. He shook his head and snarled.
His brother sat back on his haunches and lifted his voice in a
ululating howl, his song black with mourning. The way was no way.
They were not squirrels, nor the cubs of men, they could not
wriggle up the trunks of trees, clinging with soft pink paws and
clumsy feet. They were runners, hunters, prowlers.
O across the night, beyond the stone that hemmed them close,
the dogs woke and began to bark. One and then another and then
all of them, a great clamor. They smelled it too; the scent of foes
and fear.
A desperate fury lled him, hot as hunger. He sprang away from
the wall, loped o beneath the trees, the shadows of branch and leaf
dappling his grey fur … and then he turned and raced back in a
rush. His feet ew, kicking up wet leaves and pine needles, and for
a little time he was a hunter and an antlered stag was eeing before
him and he could see it, smell it, and he ran full out in pursuit. The
smell of fear made his heart thunder and slaver ran from his jaws,
and he reached the falling tree in stride and threw himself up the
trunk, claws scrabbling at the bark for purchase. Upward he
bounded, up, two bounds, three, hardly slowing, until he was
among the lower limbs. Branches tangled his feet and whipped at
his eyes, grey-green needles scattered as he shouldered through
them, snapping. He had to slow. Something snagged at his foot and
he wrenched it free, snarling. The trunk narrowed under him, the
slope steeper, almost straight up, and wet. The bark tore like skin
when he tried to claw at it. He was a third of the way up, halfway,
more, the roof was almost within reach … and then he put down a
foot and felt it slip o the curve of wet wood, and suddenly he was

sliding, stumbling. He yowled in fear and fury, falling, falling, and
twisted around while the ground rushed up to break him …
And then Bran was back abed in his lonely tower room, tangled in
his blankets, his breath coming hard. “Summer,” he cried aloud.
“Summer.” His shoulder seemed to ache, as if he had fallen on it,
but he knew it was only the ghost of what the wolf was feeling.
Jojen told it true. I am a beastling. Outside he could hear the faint
barking of dogs. The sea has come. It’s owing over the walls, just as
Jojen saw. Bran grabbed the bar overhead and pulled himself up,
shouting for help. No one came, and after a moment he
remembered that no one would. They had taken the guard o his
door. Ser Rodrik had needed every man of ghting age he could lay
his hands on, so Winterfell had been left with only a token garrison.
The rest had left eight days past, six hundred men from Winterfell
and the nearest holdfasts. Cley Cerwyn was bringing three hundred
more to join them on the march, and Maester Luwin had sent ravens
before them, summoning levies from White Harbor and the
barrowlands and even the deep places inside the wolfswood.
Torrhen’s Square was under attack by some monstrous war chief
named Dagmer Cleftjaw. Old Nan said he couldn’t be killed, that
once a foe had cut his head in two with an axe, but Dagmer was so
erce he’d just pushed the two halves back together and held them
until they healed up. Could Dagmer have won? Torrhen’s Square was
many days from Winterfell, yet still …
Bran pulled himself from the bed, moving bar to bar until he
reached the windows. His ngers fumbled a little as he swung back
the shutters. The yard was empty, and all the windows he could see
were black. Winterfell slept. “Hodor!” he shouted down, as loud as
he could. Hodor would be asleep above the stables, but maybe if he
yelled loud enough he’d hear, or somebody would. “Hodor, come
fast! Osha! Meera, Jojen, anyone!” Bran cupped his hands around his
mouth. “HOOOOODOOOOOR!”
But when the door crashed open behind him, the man who
stepped through was no one Bran knew. He wore a leather jerkin
sewn with overlapping iron disks, and carried a dirk in one hand

and an axe strapped to his back. “What do you want?” Bran
demanded, afraid. “This is my room. You get out of here.”
Theon Greyjoy followed him into the bedchamber. “We’re not
here to harm you, Bran.”
“Theon?” Bran felt dizzy with relief. “Did Robb send you? Is he
here too?”
“Robb’s far away. He can’t help you now.”
“Help me?” He was confused. “Don’t scare me, Theon.”
“I’m Prince Theon now. We’re both princes, Bran. Who would
have dreamed it? But I’ve taken your castle, my prince.”
“Winterfell?” Bran shook his head. “No, you couldn’t.”
“Leave us, Werlag.” The man with the dirk withdrew. Theon
seated himself on the bed. “I sent four men over the walls with
grappling claws and ropes, and they opened a postern gate for the
rest of us. My men are dealing with yours even now. I promise you,
Winterfell is mine.”
Bran did not understand. “But you’re Father’s ward.”
“And now you and your brother are my wards. As soon as the
ghting’s done, my men will be bringing the rest of your people
together in the Great Hall. You and I are going to speak to them.
You’ll tell them how you’ve yielded Winterfell to me, and command
them to serve and obey their new lord as they did the old.”
“I won’t,” said Bran. “We’ll ght you and throw you out. I never
yielded, you can’t make me say I did.”
“This is no game, Bran, so don’t play the boy with me, I won’t
stand for it. The castle is mine, but these people are still yours. If
the prince would keep them safe, he’d best do as he’s told.” He rose
and went to the door. “Someone will come dress you and carry you
to the Great Hall. Think carefully on what you want to say.”
The waiting made Bran feel even more helpless than before. He
sat in the window seat, staring out at dark towers and walls black as
shadow. Once he thought he heard shouting beyond the Guards
Hall, and something that might have been the clash of swords, but
he did not have Summer’s ears to hear, nor his nose to smell.
Awake, I am still broken, but when I sleep, when I’m Summer, I can run
and ght and hear and smell.

He had expected that Hodor would come for him, or maybe one
of the serving girls, but when the door next opened it was Maester
Luwin, carrying a candle. “Bran,” he said, “you … know what has
happened? You have been told?” The skin was broken above his left
eye, and blood ran down that side of his face.
“Theon came. He said Winterfell was his now.”
The maester set down the candle and wiped the blood o his
cheek. “They swam the moat. Climbed the walls with hook and
rope. Came over wet and dripping, steel in hand.” He sat on the
chair by the door, as fresh blood owed. “Alebelly was on the gate,
they surprised him in the turret and killed him. Hayhead’s wounded
as well. I had time to send o two ravens before they burst in. The
bird to White Harbor got away, but they brought down the other
with an arrow.” The maester stared at the rushes. “Ser Rodrik took
too many of our men, but I am to blame as much as he is. I never
saw this danger, I never …”
Jojen saw it, Bran thought. “You better help me dress.”
“Yes, that’s so.” In the heavy ironbound chest at the foot of Bran’s
bed the maester found smallclothes, breeches, and tunic. “You are
the Stark in Winterfell, and Robb’s heir. You must look princely.”
Together they garbed him as be t a lord.
“Theon wants me to yield the castle,” Bran said as the maester
was fastening the cloak with his favorite wolf’s-head clasp of silver
and jet.
“There is no shame in that. A lord must protect his smallfolk.
Cruel places breed cruel peoples, Bran, remember that as you deal
with these ironmen. Your lord father did what he could to gentle
Theon, but I fear it was too little and too late.”
The ironman who came for them was a squat thick-bodied man
with a coal-black beard that covered half his chest. He bore the boy
easily enough, though he looked none too happy with the task.
Rickon’s bedchamber was a half turn down the steps. The four-yearold was cranky at being woken. “I want Mother,” he said. “I want
her. And Shaggydog too.”
“Your mother is far away, my prince.” Maester Luwin pulled a
bedrobe over the child’s head. “But I’m here, and Bran.” He took

Rickon by the hand and led him out.
Below, they came on Meera and Jojen being herded from their
room by a bald man whose spear was three feet taller than he was.
When Jojen looked at Bran, his eyes were green pools full of
sorrow. Other ironmen had rousted the Freys. “Your brother’s lost
his kingdom,” Little Walder told Bran. “You’re no prince now, just a
hostage.”
“So are you,” Jojen said, “and me, and all of us.”
“No one was talking to you, frogeater.”
One of the ironmen went before them carrying a torch, but the
rain had started again and soon drowned it out. As they hurried
across the yard they could hear the direwolves howling in the
godswood. I hope Summer wasn’t hurt falling from the tree.
Theon Greyjoy was seated in the high seat of the Starks. He had
taken o his cloak. Over a shirt of ne mail he wore a black surcoat
emblazoned with the golden kraken of his House. His hands rested
on the wolves’ heads carved at the ends of the wide stone arms.
“Theon’s sitting in Robb’s chair,” Rickon said.
“Hush, Rickon.” Bran could feel the menace around them, but his
brother was too young. A few torches had been lit, and a re
kindled in the great hearth, but most of the hall remained in
darkness. There was no place to sit with the benches stacked against
the walls, so the castle folk stood in small groups, not daring to
speak. He saw Old Nan, her toothless mouth opening and closing.
Hayhead was carried in between two of the other guards, a
bloodstained bandage wrapped about his bare chest. Poxy Tym
wept inconsolably, and Beth Cassel cried with fear.
“What have we here?” Theon asked of the Reeds and Freys.
“These are Lady Catelyn’s wards, both named Walder Frey,”
Maester Luwin explained. “And this is Jojen Reed and his sister
Meera, son and daughter to Howland Reed of Greywater Watch,
who came to renew their oaths of fealty to Winterfell.”
“Some might call that ill-timed,” said Theon, “though not for me.
Here you are and here you’ll stay.” He vacated the high seat. “Bring
the prince here, Lorren.” The black-bearded man dumped Bran onto
the stone as if he were a sack of oats.

People were still being driven into the Great Hall, prodded along
with shouts and the butts of the spears. Gage and Osha arrived from
the kitchens, spotted with our from making the morning bread.
Mikken they dragged in cursing. Farlen entered limping, struggling
to support Palla. Her dress had been ripped in two; she held it up
with a clenched st and walked as if every step were agony. Septon
Chayle rushed to lend a hand, but one of the ironmen knocked him
to the oor.
The last man marched through the doors was the prisoner Reek,
whose stench preceded him, ripe and pungent. Bran felt his stomach
twist at the smell of him. “We found this one locked in a tower
cell,” announced his escort, a beardless youth with ginger-colored
hair and sodden clothing, doubtless one of those who’d swum the
moat. “He says they call him Reek.”
“Can’t think why,” Theon said, smiling. “Do you always smell so
bad, or did you just nish fucking a pig?”
“Haven’t fucked no one since they took me, m’lord. Heke’s me
true name. I was in service to the Bastard o’ the Dreadfort till the
Starks give him an arrow in the back for a wedding gift.”
Theon found that amusing. “Who did he marry?”
“The widow o’ Hornwood, m’lord.”
“That crone? Was he blind? She has teats like empty wineskins,
dry and withered.”
“It wasn’t her teats he wed her for, m’lord.”
The ironmen slammed shut the tall doors at the foot of the hall.
From the high seat, Bran could see about twenty of them. He
probably left some guards on the gates and the armory. Even so, there
couldn’t be more than thirty.
Theon raised his hands for quiet. “You all know me—”
“Aye, we know you for a sack of steaming dung!” shouted
Mikken, before the bald man drove the butt of his spear into his
gut, then smashed him across the face with the shaft. The smith
stumbled to his knees and spat out a tooth.
“Mikken, you be silent.” Bran tried to sound stern and lordly, the
way Robb did when he made a command, but his voice betrayed
him and the words came out in a shrill squeak.

“Listen to your little lordling, Mikken,” said Theon. “He has more
sense than you do.”
A good lord protects his people, he reminded himself. “I’ve yielded
Winterfell to Theon.”
“Louder, Bran. And call me prince.”
He raised his voice. “I have yielded Winterfell to Prince Theon.
All of you should do as he commands you.”
“Damned if I will!” bellowed Mikken.
Theon ignored the outburst. “My father has donned the ancient
crown of salt and rock, and declared himself King of the Iron
Islands. He claims the north as well, by right of conquest. You are
all his subjects.”
“Bugger that.” Mikken wiped the blood from his mouth. “I serve
the Starks, not some treasonous squid of—aah.” The butt of the
spear smashed him face rst into the stone oor.
“Smiths have strong arms and weak heads,” observed Theon. “But
if the rest of you serve me as loyally as you served Ned Stark, you’ll
nd me as generous a lord as you could want.”
On his hands and knees, Mikken spat blood. Please don’t, Bran
wished at him, but the blacksmith shouted, “If you think you can
hold the north with this sorry lot o’—”
The bald man drove the point of his spear into the back of
Mikken’s neck. Steel slid through esh and came out his throat in a
welter of blood. A woman screamed, and Meera wrapped her arms
around Rickon. It’s blood he drowned on, Bran thought numbly. His
own blood.
“Who else has something to say?” asked Theon Greyjoy.
“Hodor hodor hodor hodor,” shouted Hodor, eyes wide.
“Someone kindly shut that halfwit up.”
Two ironmen began to beat Hodor with the butts of their spears.
The stableboy dropped to the oor, trying to shield himself with his
hands.
“I will be as good a lord to you as Eddard Stark ever was.” Theon
raised his voice to be heard above the smack of wood on esh.
“Betray me, though, and you’ll wish you hadn’t. And don’t think the
men you see here are the whole of my power. Torrhen’s Square and

Deepwood Motte will soon be ours as well, and my uncle is sailing
up the Saltspear to seize Moat Cailin. If Robb Stark can stave o the
Lannisters, he may reign as King of the Trident hereafter, but House
Greyjoy holds the north now.”
“Stark’s lords will ght you,” the man Reek called out. “That
bloated pig at White Harbor for one, and them Umbers and
Karstarks too. You’ll need men. Free me and I’m yours.”
Theon weighed him a moment. “You’re cleverer than you smell,
but I could not su er that stench.”
“Well,” said Reek, “I could wash some. If I was free.”
“A man of rare good sense.” Theon smiled. “Bend the knee.”
One of the ironmen handed Reek a sword, and he laid it at
Theon’s feet and swore obedience to House Greyjoy and King Balon.
Bran could not look. The green dream was coming true.
“M’lord Greyjoy!” Osha stepped past Mikken’s body. “I was
brought here captive too. You were there the day I was taken.”
I thought you were a friend, Bran thought, hurt.
“I need ghters,” Theon declared, “not kitchen sluts.”
“It was Robb Stark put me in the kitchens. For the best part of a
year, I’ve been left to scour kettles, scrape grease, and warm the
straw for this one.” She threw a look at Gage. “I’ve had a bellyful of
it. Put a spear in my hand again.”
“I got a spear for you right here,” said the bald man who’d killed
Mikken. He grabbed his crotch, grinning.
Osha drove her bony knee up between his legs. “You keep that
soft pink thing.” She wrested the spear from him and used the butt
to knock him o his feet. “I’ll have me the wood and iron.” The
bald man writhed on the oor while the other reavers sent up gales
of laughter.
Theon laughed with the rest. “You’ll do,” he said. “Keep the
spear; Stygg can nd another. Now bend the knee and swear.”
When no one else rushed forward to pledge service, they were
dismissed with a warning to do their work and make no trouble.
Hodor was given the task of bearing Bran back to his bed. His face
was all ugly from the beating, his nose swollen and one eye closed.
“Hodor,” he sobbed between cracked lips as he lifted Bran in huge

strong arms and bloody hands and carried him back out into the
rain.

ARYA

There’s ghosts, I know there is.” Hot Pie was kneading bread, his

arms oured up to his elbows. “Pia saw something in the buttery
last night.”
Arya made a rude noise. Pia was always seeing things in the
buttery. Usually they were men. “Can I have a tart?” she asked.
“You baked a whole tray.”
“I need a whole tray. Ser Amory is partial to them.”
She hated Ser Amory. “Let’s spit on them.”
Hot Pie looked around nervously. The kitchens were full of
shadows and echoes, but the other cooks and scullions were all
asleep in the cavernous lofts above the ovens. “He’ll know.”
“He will not,” Arya said. “You can’t taste spit.”
“If he does, it’s me they’ll whip.” Hot Pie stopped his kneading.
“You shouldn’t even be here. It’s the black of night.”
It was, but Arya never minded. Even in the black of night, the
kitchens were never still; there was always someone rolling dough
for the morning bread, stirring a kettle with a long wooden spoon,
or butchering a hog for Ser Amory’s breakfast bacon. Tonight it was
Hot Pie.
“If Pinkeye wakes and nds you gone—” Hot Pie said.
“Pinkeye never wakes.” His true name was Mebble, but everyone
called him Pinkeye for his runny eyes. “Not once he’s passed out.”
Each morning he broke his fast with ale. Each evening he fell into a
drunken sleep after supper, wine-colored spit running down his

chin. Arya would wait until she heard him snoring, then creep
barefoot up the servant’s stair, making no more noise than the
mouse she’d been. She carried neither candle nor taper. Syrio had
told her once that darkness could be her friend, and he was right. If
she had the moon and the stars to see by, that was enough. “I bet
we could escape, and Pinkeye wouldn’t even notice I was gone,” she
told Hot Pie.
“I don’t want to escape. It’s better here than it was in them
woods. I don’t want to eat no worms. Here, sprinkle some our on
the board.”
Arya cocked her head. “What’s that?”
“What? I don’t—”
“Listen with your ears, not your mouth. That was a warhorn. Two
blasts, didn’t you hear? And there, that’s the portcullis chains,
someone’s going out or coming in. Want to go see?” The gates of
Harrenhal had not been opened since the morning Lord Tywin had
marched with his host.
“I’m making the morning bread,” Hot Pie complained. “Anyhow I
don’t like it when it’s dark, I told you.”
“I’m going. I’ll tell you after. Can I have a tart?”
“No.”
She lched one anyway, and ate it on her way out. It was stu ed
with chopped nuts and fruit and cheese, the crust aky and still
warm from the oven. Eating Ser Amory’s tart made Arya feel
daring. Barefoot surefoot lightfoot, she sang under her breath. I am the
ghost in Harrenhal.
The horn had stirred the castle from sleep; men were coming out
into the ward to see what the commotion was about. Arya fell in
with the others. A line of ox carts were rumbling under the
portcullis. Plunder, she knew at once. The riders escorting the carts
spoke in a babble of queer tongues. Their armor glinted pale in the
moonlight, and she saw a pair of striped black-and-white zorses. The
Bloody Mummers. Arya withdrew a little deeper into the shadows,
and watched as a huge black bear rolled by, caged in the back of a
wagon. Other carts were loaded down with silver plate, weapons
and shields, bags of our, pens of squealing hogs and scrawny dogs

and chickens. Arya was thinking how long it had been since she’d
had a slice o a pork roast when she saw the rst of the prisoners.
By his bearing and the proud way he held his head, he must have
been a lord. She could see mail glinting beneath his torn red
surcoat. At rst Arya took him for a Lannister, but when he passed
near a torch she saw his device was a silver st, not a lion. His
wrists were bound tightly, and a rope around one ankle tied him to
the man behind him, and him to the man behind him, so the whole
column had to shu e along in a lurching lockstep. Many of the
captives were wounded. If any halted, one of the riders would trot
up and give him a lick of the whip to get him moving again. She
tried to judge how many prisoners there were, but lost count before
she got to fty. There were twice that many at least. Their clothing
was stained with mud and blood, and in the torchlight it was hard
to make out all their badges and sigils, but some of those Arya
glimpsed she recognized. Twin towers. Sunburst. Bloody man.
Battle-axe. The battle-axe is for Cerwyn, and the white sun on black is
Karstark. They’re northmen. My father’s men, and Robb’s. She didn’t
like to think what that might mean.
The Bloody Mummers began to dismount. Stableboys emerged
sleepy from their straw to tend their lathered horses. One of the
riders was shouting for ale. The noise brought Ser Amory Lorch out
onto the covered gallery above the ward, anked by two
torchbearers. Goat-helmed Vargo Hoat reined up below him. “My
lord cathellan,” the sellsword said. He had a thick, slobbery voice,
as if his tongue was too big for his mouth.
“What’s all this, Hoat?” Ser Amory demanded, frowning.
“Captiths. Rooth Bolton thought to croth the river, but my Brafe
Companions cut his van to pieceth. Killed many, and thent Bolton
running. Thith ith their lord commander, Glover, and the one
behind ith Ther Aenyth Frey.”
Ser Amory Lorch stared down at the roped captives with his little
pig eyes. Arya did not think he was pleased. Everyone in the castle
knew that he and Vargo Hoat hated each other. “Very well,” he
said. “Ser Cadwyn, take these men to the dungeons.”

The lord with the mailed st on his surcoat raised his eyes. “We
were promised honorable treatment—” he began.
“Silenth!” Vargo Hoat screamed at him, spraying spittle.
Ser Amory addressed the captives. “What Hoat promised you is
nothing to me. Lord Tywin made me the castellan of Harrenhal, and
I shall do with you as I please.” He gestured to his guards. “The
great cell under the Widow’s Tower ought to hold them all. Any
who do not care to go are free to die here.”
As his men herded o the captives at spearpoint, Arya saw
Pinkeye emerge from the stairwell, blinking at the torchlight. If he
found her missing, he would shout and threaten to whip the bloody
hide o her, but she was not afraid. He was no Weese. He was
forever threatening to whip the bloody hide o this one or that one,
but Arya never actually knew him to hit. Still, it would be better if
he never saw her. She glanced around. The oxen were being
unharnessed, the carts unloaded, while the Brave Companions
clamored for drink and the curious gathered around the caged bear.
In the commotion, it was not hard to slip o unseen. She went back
the way she had come, wanting to be out of sight before someone
noticed her and thought to put her to work.
Away from the gates and the stables, the great castle was largely
deserted. The noise dwindled behind her. A swirling wind gusted,
drawing a high shivery scream from the cracks in the Wailing
Tower. Leaves had begun to fall from the trees in the godswood,
and she could hear them moving through the deserted courtyards
and between the empty buildings, making a faint skittery sound as
the wind drove them across the stones. Now that Harrenhal was
near empty once again, sound did queer things here. Sometimes the
stones seemed to drink up noise, shrouding the yards in a blanket of
silence. Other times, the echoes had a life of their own, so every
footfall became the tread of a ghostly army, and every distant voice
a ghostly feast. The funny sounds were one of the things that
bothered Hot Pie, but not Arya.
Quiet as a shadow, she itted across the middle bailey, around
the Tower of Dread, and through the empty mews, where people
said the spirits of dead falcons stirred the air with ghostly wings.

She could go where she would. The garrison numbered no more
than a hundred men, so small a troop that they were lost in
Harrenhal. The Hall of a Hundred Hearths was closed o , along
with many of the lesser buildings, even the Wailing Tower. Ser
Amory Lorch resided in the castellan’s chambers in Kingspyre,
themselves as spacious as a lord’s, and Arya and the other servants
had moved to the cellars beneath him so they would be close at
hand. While Lord Tywin had been in residence, there was always a
man-at-arms wanting to know your business. But now there were
only a hundred men left to guard a thousand doors, and no one
seemed to know who should be where, or care much.
As she passed the armory, Arya heard the ring of a hammer. A
deep orange glow shone through the high windows. She climbed to
the roof and peeked down. Gendry was beating out a breastplate.
When he worked, nothing existed for him but metal, bellows, re.
The hammer was like part of his arm. She watched the play of
muscles in his chest and listened to the steel music he made. He’s
strong, she thought. As he took up the long-handled tongs to dip the
breastplate into the quenching trough, Arya slithered through the
window and leapt down to the oor beside him.
He did not seem surprised to see her. “You should be abed, girl.”
The breastplate hissed like a cat as he dipped it in the cold water.
“What was all that noise?”
“Vargo Hoat’s come back with prisoners. I saw their badges.
There’s a Glover, from Deepwood Motte, he’s my father’s man. The
rest too, mostly.” All of a sudden, Arya knew why her feet had
brought her here. “You have to help me get them out.”
Gendry laughed. “And how do we do that?”
“Ser Amory sent them down to the dungeon. The one under the
Widow’s Tower, that’s just one big cell. You could smash the door
open with your hammer—”
“While the guards watch and make bets on how many swings it
will take me, maybe?”
Arya chewed her lips. “We’d need to kill the guards.”
“How are we supposed to do that?”
“Maybe there won’t be a lot of them.”

“If there’s two, that’s too many for you and me. You never
learned nothing in that village, did you? You try this and Vargo
Hoat will cut o your hands and feet, the way he does.” Gendry
took up the tongs again.
“You’re afraid.”
“Leave me alone, girl.”
“Gendry, there’s a hundred northmen. Maybe more, I couldn’t
count them all. That’s as many as Ser Amory has. Well, not counting
the Bloody Mummers. We just have to get them out and we can
take over the castle and escape.”
“Well, you can’t get them out, no more’n you could save
Lommy.” Gendry turned the breastplate with the tongs to look at it
closely. “And if we did escape, where would we go?”
“Winterfell,” she said at once. “I’d tell Mother how you helped
me, and you could stay—”
“Would m’lady permit? Could I shoe your horses for you, and
make swords for your lordly brothers?”
Sometimes he made her so angry. “You stop that!”
“Why should I wager my feet for the chance to sweat in
Winterfell in place of Harrenhal? You know old Ben Blackthumb?
He came here as a boy. Smithed for Lady Whent and her father
before her and his father before him, and even for Lord Lothston
who held Harrenhal before the Whents. Now he smiths for Lord
Tywin, and you know what he says? A sword’s a sword, a helm’s a
helm, and if you reach in the re you get burned, no matter who
you’re serving. Lucan’s a fair enough master. I’ll stay here.”
“The queen will catch you, then. She didn’t send gold cloaks after
Ben Blackthumb!”
“Likely it wasn’t even me they wanted.”
“It was too, you know it. You’re somebody.”
“I’m a ’prentice smith, and one day might be I’ll make a master
armorer … if I don’t run o and lose my feet or get myself killed.”
He turned away from her, picked up his hammer once more, and
began to bang.
Arya’s hands curled into helpless sts. “The next helm you make,
put mule’s ears on it in place of bull’s horns!” She had to ee, or else

she would have started hitting him. He probably wouldn’t even feel it
if I did. When they nd who he is and cut o his stupid mulehead, he’ll
be sorry he didn’t help. She was better o without him anyhow. He
was the one who got her caught at the village.
But thinking of the village made her remember the march, and
the storeroom, and the Tickler. She thought of the little boy who’d
been hit in the face with the mace, of stupid old All-for-Jo rey, of
Lommy Greenhands. I was a sheep, and then I was a mouse, I couldn’t
do anything but hide. Arya chewed her lip and tried to think when
her courage had come back. Jaqen made me brave again. He made me
a ghost instead of a mouse.
She had been avoiding the Lorathi since Weese’s death. Chiswyck
had been easy, anyone could push a man o the wallwalk, but
Weese had raised that ugly spotted dog from a pup, and only some
dark magic could have turned the animal against him. Yoren found
Jaqen in a black cell, the same as Rorge and Biter, she remembered.
Jaqen did something horrible and Yoren knew, that’s why he kept him in
chains. If the Lorathi was a wizard, Rorge and Biter could be
demons he called up from some hell, not men at all.
Jaqen still owed her one death. In Old Nan’s stories about men
who were given magic wishes by a grumkin, you had to be
especially careful with the third wish, because it was the last.
Chiswyck and Weese hadn’t been very important. The last death has
to count, Arya told herself every night when she whispered her
names. But now she wondered if that was truly the reason she had
hesitated. So long as she could kill with a whisper, Arya need not be
afraid of anyone … but once she used up the last death, she would
only be a mouse again.
With Pinkeye awake, she dared not go back to her bed. Not
knowing where else to hide, she made for the godswood. She liked
the sharp smell of the pines and sentinels, the feel of grass and dirt
between her toes, and the sound the wind made in the leaves. A
slow little stream meandered through the wood, and there was one
spot where it had eaten the ground away beneath a deadfall.
There, beneath rotting wood and twisted splintered branches, she
found her hidden sword.

Gendry was too stubborn to make one for her, so she had made
her own by breaking the bristles o a broom. Her blade was much
too light and had no proper grip, but she liked the sharp jagged
splintery end. Whenever she had a free hour she stole away to work
at the drills Syrio had taught her, moving barefoot over the fallen
leaves, slashing at branches and whacking down leaves. Sometimes
she even climbed the trees and danced among the upper branches,
her toes gripping the limbs as she moved back and forth, teetering a
little less every day as her balance returned to her. Night was the
best time; no one ever bothered her at night.
Arya climbed. Up in the kingdom of the leaves, she unsheathed
and for a time forgot them all, Ser Amory and the Mummers and
her father’s men alike, losing herself in the feel of rough wood
beneath the soles of her feet and the swish of sword through air. A
broken branch became Jo rey. She struck at it until it fell away.
The queen and Ser Ilyn and Ser Meryn and the Hound were only
leaves, but she killed them all as well, slashing them to wet green
ribbons. When her arm grew weary, she sat with her legs over a
high limb to catch her breath in the cool dark air, listening to the
squeak of bats as they hunted. Through the leafy canopy she could
see the bone-white branches of the heart tree. It looks just like the
one in Winterfell from here. If only it had been … then when she
climbed down she would have been home again, and maybe nd
her father sitting under the weirwood where he always sat.
Shoving her sword through her belt, she slipped down branch to
branch until she was back on the ground. The light of the moon
painted the limbs of the weirwood silvery white as she made her
way toward it, but the ve-pointed red leaves turned black by
night. Arya stared at the face carved into its trunk. It was a terrible
face, its mouth twisted, its eyes aring and full of hate. Is that what
a god looked like? Could gods be hurt, the same as people? I should
pray, she thought suddenly.
Arya went to her knees. She wasn’t sure how she should begin.
She clasped her hands together. Help me, you old gods, she prayed
silently. Help me get those men out of the dungeon so we can kill Ser

Amory, and bring me home to Winterfell. Make me a water dancer and
a wolf and not afraid again, ever.
Was that enough? Maybe she should pray aloud if she wanted the
old gods to hear. Maybe she should pray longer. Sometimes her
father had prayed a long time, she remembered. But the old gods
had never helped him. Remembering that made her angry. “You
should have saved him,” she scolded the tree. “He prayed to you all
the time. I don’t care if you help me or not. I don’t think you could
even if you wanted to.”
“Gods are not mocked, girl.”
The voice startled her. She leapt to her feet and drew her wooden
sword. Jaqen H’ghar stood so still in the darkness that he seemed
one of the trees. “A man comes to hear a name. One and two and
then comes three. A man would have done.”
Arya lowered the splintery point toward the ground. “How did
you know I was here?”
“A man sees. A man hears. A man knows.”
She regarded him suspiciously. Had the gods sent him? “How’d
you make the dog kill Weese? Did you call Rorge and Biter up from
hell? Is Jaqen H’ghar your true name?”
“Some men have many names. Weasel. Arry. Arya.”
She backed away from him, until she was pressed against the
heart tree. “Did Gendry tell?”
“A man knows,” he said again. “My lady of Stark.”
Maybe the gods had sent him in answer to her prayers. “I need
you to help me get those men out of the dungeons. That Glover and
those others, all of them. We have to kill the guards and open the
cell somehow—”
“A girl forgets,” he said quietly. “Two she has had, three were
owed. If a guard must die, she needs only speak his name.”
“But one guard won’t be enough, we need to kill them all to open
the cell.” Arya bit her lip hard to stop from crying. “I want you to
save the northmen like I saved you.”
He looked down at her pitilessly. “Three lives were snatched from
a god. Three lives must be repaid. The gods are not mocked.” His
voice was silk and steel.

“I never mocked.” She thought for a moment. “The name … can I
name anyone? And you’ll kill him?”
Jaqen H’ghar inclined his head. “A man has said.”
“Anyone?” she repeated. “A man, a woman, a little baby, or Lord
Tywin, or the High Septon, or your father?”
“A man’s sire is long dead, but did he live, and did you know his
name, he would die at your command.”
“Swear it,” Arya said. “Swear it by the gods.”
“By all the gods of sea and air, and even him of re, I swear it.”
He placed a hand in the mouth of the weirwood. “By the seven new
gods and the old gods beyond count, I swear it.”
He has sworn. “Even if I named the king …”
“Speak the name, and death will come. On the morrow, at the
turn of the moon, a year from this day, it will come. A man does
not y like a bird, but one foot moves and then another and one day
a man is there, and a king dies.” He knelt beside her, so they were
face-to-face. “A girl whispers if she fears to speak aloud. Whisper it
now. Is it Jo rey?”
Arya put her lips to his ear. “It’s Jaqen H’ghar.”
Even in the burning barn, with walls of ame towering all around
and him in chains, he had not seemed so distraught as he did now.
“A girl … she makes a jest.”
“You swore. The gods heard you swear.”
“The gods did hear.” There was a knife in his hand suddenly, its
blade thin as her little nger. Whether it was meant for her or him,
Arya could not say. “A girl will weep. A girl will lose her only
friend.”
“You’re not my friend. A friend would help me.” She stepped
away from him, balanced on the balls of her feet in case he threw
his knife. “I’d never kill a friend.”
Jaqen’s smile came and went. “A girl might … name another
name then, if a friend did help?”
“A girl might,” she said. “If a friend did help.”
The knife vanished. “Come.”
“Now?” She had never thought he would act so quickly.

“A man hears the whisper of sand in a glass. A man will not sleep
until a girl unsays a certain name. Now, evil child.”
I’m not an evil child, she thought, I am a direwolf, and the ghost in
Harrenhal. She put her broomstick back in its hiding place and
followed him from the godswood.
Despite the hour, Harrenhal stirred with tful life. Vargo Hoat’s
arrival had thrown o all the routines. Ox carts, oxen, and horses
had all vanished from the yard, but the bear cage was still there. It
had been hung from the arched span of the bridge that divided the
outer and middle wards, suspended on heavy chains, a few feet o
the ground. A ring of torches bathed the area in light. Some of the
boys from the stables were tossing stones to make the bear roar and
grumble. Across the ward, light spilled through the door of the
Barracks Hall, accompanied by the clatter of tankards and men
calling for more wine. A dozen voices took up a song in a guttural
tongue strange to Arya’s ears.
They’re drinking and eating before they sleep, she realized. Pinkeye
would have sent to wake me, to help with the serving. He’ll know I’m not
abed. But likely he was busy pouring for the Brave Companions and
those of Ser Amory’s garrison who had joined them. The noise they
were making would be a good distraction.
“The hungry gods will feast on blood tonight, if a man would do
this thing,” Jaqen said. “Sweet girl, kind and gentle. Unsay one
name and say another and cast this mad dream aside.”
“I won’t.”
“Just so.” He seemed resigned. “The thing will be done, but a girl
must obey. A man has no time for talk.”
“A girl will obey,” Arya said. “What should I do?”
“A hundred men are hungry, they must be fed, the lord
commands hot broth. A girl must run to the kitchens and tell her pie
boy.”
“Broth,” she repeated. “Where will you be?”
“A girl will help make broth, and wait in the kitchens until a man
comes for her. Go. Run.”
Hot Pie was pulling his loaves from the ovens when she burst into
the kitchen, but he was no longer alone. They’d woken the cooks to

feed Vargo Hoat and his Bloody Mummers. Serving men were
carrying o baskets of Hot Pie’s bread and tarts, the chief cook was
carving cold slices o a ham, spit boys were turning rabbits while
the pot girls basted them with honey, women were chopping onions
and carrots. “What do you want, Weasel?” the chief cook asked
when he saw her.
“Broth,” she announced. “My lord wants broth.”
He jerked his carving knife at the black iron kettles hung over the
ames. “What do you think that is? Though I’d soon as piss in it as
serve it to that goat. Can’t even let a man have a night’s sleep.” He
spat. “Well, never you mind, run back and tell him a kettle can’t be
hurried.”
“I’m to wait here until it’s done.”
“Then stay out of the way. Or better yet, make yourself of use.
Run to the buttery; his goatship will be wanting butter and cheese.
Wake up Pia and tell her she’d best be nimble for once, if she wants
to keep both of her feet.”
She ran as fast as she could. Pia was awake in the loft, moaning
under one of the Mummers, but she slipped back into her clothes
quick enough when she heard Arya shout. She lled six baskets with
crocks of butter and big wedges of stinky cheese wrapped in cloth.
“Here, help me with these,” she told Arya.
“I can’t. But you better hurry or Vargo Hoat will chop o your
foot.” She darted o before Pia could grab her. On the way back,
she wondered why none of the captives had their hands or feet
chopped o . Maybe Vargo Hoat was afraid to make Robb angry.
Though he didn’t seem the sort to be afraid of anyone.
Hot Pie was stirring the kettles with a long wooden spoon when
Arya returned to the kitchens. She grabbed up a second spoon and
started to help. For a moment she thought maybe she should tell
him, but then she remembered the village and decided not to. He’d
only yield again.
Then she heard the ugly sound of Rorge’s voice. “Cook,” he
shouted. “We’ll take your bloody broth.” Arya let go of the spoon in
dismay. I never told him to bring them. Rorge wore his iron helmet,

with the nasal that half hid his missing nose. Jaqen and Biter
followed him into the kitchen.
“The bloody broth isn’t bloody ready yet,” the cook said. “It
needs to simmer. We only now put in the onions and—”
“Shut your hole, or I’ll shove a spit up your ass and we’ll baste
you for a turn or two. I said broth and I said now.”
Hissing, Biter grabbed a handful of half-charred rabbit right o
the spit, and tore into it with his pointed teeth while honey dripped
between his ngers.
The cook was beaten. “Take your bloody broth, then, but if the
goat asks why it tastes so thin, you tell him.”
Biter licked the grease and honey o his ngers as Jaqen H’ghar
donned a pair of heavy padded mitts. He gave a second pair to
Arya. “A weasel will help.” The broth was boiling hot, and the
kettles were heavy. Arya and Jaqen wrestled one between them,
Rorge carried one by himself, and Biter grabbed two more, hissing
in pain when the handles burned his hands. Even so, he did not drop
them. They lugged the kettles out of the kitchens and across the
ward. Two guards had been posted at the door of the Widow’s
Tower. “What’s this?” one said to Rorge.
“A pot of boiling piss, want some?”
Jaqen smiled disarmingly. “A prisoner must eat too.”
“No one said nothing about—”
Arya cut him o . “It’s for them, not you.”
The second guard waved them past. “Bring it down, then.”
Inside the door a winding stair led down to the dungeons. Rorge
led the way, with Jaqen and Arya bringing up the rear. “A girl will
stay out of the way,” he told her.
The steps opened onto a dank stone vault, long, gloomy, and
windowless. A few torches burned in sconces at the near end where
a group of Ser Amory’s guards sat around a scarred wooden table,
talking and playing at tiles. Heavy iron bars separated them from
where the captives were crowded together in the dark. The smell of
the broth brought many up to the bars.
Arya counted eight guards. They smelled the broth as well.
“There’s the ugliest serving wench I ever saw,” their captain said to

Rorge. “What’s in the kettle?”
“Your cock and balls. You want to eat or not?”
One of the guards had been pacing, one standing near the bars, a
third sitting on the oor with his back to the wall, but the prospect
of food drew all of them to the table.
“About bloody time they fed us.”
“That onions I smell?”
“So where’s the bread?”
“Fuck, we need bowls, cups, spoons—”
“No you don’t.” Rorge heaved the scalding hot broth across the
table, full in their faces. Jaqen H’ghar did the same. Biter threw his
kettles too, swinging them underarm so they spun across the
dungeon, raining soup. One caught the captain in the temple as he
tried to rise. He went down like a sack of sand and lay still. The rest
were screaming in agony, praying, or trying to crawl o .
Arya pressed back against the wall as Rorge began to cut throats.
Biter preferred to grab the men behind the head and under the chin
and crack their necks with a single twist of his huge pale hands.
Only one of the guards managed to get a blade out. Jaqen danced
away from his slash, drew his own sword, drove the man back into
a corner with a urry of blows, and killed him with a thrust to the
heart. The Lorathi brought the blade to Arya still red with heart’s
blood and wiped it clean on the front of her shift. “A girl should be
bloody too. This is her work.”
The key to the cell hung from a hook on the wall above the table.
Rorge took it down and opened the door. The rst man through was
the lord with the mailed st on his surcoat. “Well done,” he said. “I
am Robett Glover.”
“My lord.” Jaqen gave him a bow.
Once freed, the captives stripped the dead guards of their
weapons and darted up the steps with steel in hand. Their fellows
crowded after them, bare-handed. They went swiftly, and with
scarcely a word. None of them seemed quite so badly wounded as
they had when Vargo Hoat had marched them through the gates of
Harrenhal. “This of the soup, that was clever,” the man Glover was
saying. “I did not expect that. Was it Lord Hoat’s idea?”

Rorge began to laugh. He laughed so hard that snot ew out the
hole where his nose had been. Biter sat on top of one of the dead
men, holding a limp hand as he gnawed at the ngers. Bones
cracked between his teeth.
“Who are you men?” A crease appeared between Robett Glover’s
brows. “You were not with Hoat when he came to Lord Bolton’s
encampment. Are you of the Brave Companions?”
Rorge wiped the snot o his chin with the back of his hand. “We
are now.”
“This man has the honor to be Jaqen H’ghar, once of the Free
City of Lorath. This man’s discourteous companions are named
Rorge and Biter. A lord will know which is Biter.” He waved a hand
toward Arya. “And here—”
“I’m Weasel,” she blurted, before he could tell who she really was.
She did not want her name said here, where Rorge might hear, and
Biter, and all these others she did not know.
She saw Glover dismiss her. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s make an
end to this bloody business.”
When they climbed back up the winding stair, they found the
door guards lying in pools of their own blood. Northmen were
running across the ward. Arya heard shouts. The door of Barracks
Hall burst open and a wounded man staggered out screaming. Three
others ran after him and silenced him with spear and sword. There
was ghting around the gatehouse as well. Rorge and Biter rushed
o with Glover, but Jaqen H’ghar knelt beside Arya. “A girl does
not understand?”
“Yes I do,” she said, though she didn’t, not truly.
The Lorathi must have seen it on her face. “A goat has no loyalty.
Soon a wolf banner is raised here, I think. But rst a man would
hear a certain name unsaid.”
“I take back the name.” Arya chewed her lip. “Do I still have a
third death?”
“A girl is greedy.” Jaqen touched one of the dead guards and
showed her his bloody ngers. “Here is three and there is four and
eight more lie dead below. The debt is paid.”

“The debt is paid,” Arya agreed reluctantly. She felt a little sad.
Now she was just a mouse again.
“A god has his due. And now a man must die.” A strange smile
touched the lips of Jaqen H’ghar.
“Die?” she said, confused. What did he mean? “But I unsaid the
name. You don’t need to die now.”
“I do. My time is done.” Jaqen passed a hand down his face from
forehead to chin, and where it went he changed. His cheeks grew
fuller, his eyes closer; his nose hooked, a scar appeared on his right
cheek where no scar had been before. And when he shook his head,
his long straight hair, half red and half white, dissolved away to
reveal a cap of tight black curls.
Arya’s mouth hung open. “Who are you?” she whispered, too
astonished to be afraid. “How did you do that? Was it hard?”
He grinned, revealing a shiny gold tooth. “No harder than taking
a new name, if you know the way.”
“Show me,” she blurted. “I want to do it too.”
“If you would learn, you must come with me.”
Arya grew hesitant. “Where?”
“Far and away, across the narrow sea.”
“I can’t. I have to go home. To Winterfell.”
“Then we must part,” he said, “for I have duties too.” He lifted
her hand and pressed a small coin into her palm. “Here.”
“What is it?”
“A coin of great value.”
Arya bit it. It was so hard it could only be iron. “Is it worth
enough to buy a horse?”
“It is not meant for the buying of horses.”
“Then what good is it?”
“As well ask what good is life, what good is death? If the day
comes when you would nd me again, give that coin to any man
from Braavos, and say these words to him—valar morghulis.”
“Valar morghulis,” Arya repeated. It wasn’t hard. Her ngers
closed tight over the coin. Across the yard, she could hear men
dying. “Please don’t go, Jaqen.”

“Jaqen is as dead as Arry,” he said sadly, “and I have promises to
keep. Valar morghulis, Arya Stark. Say it again.”
“Valar morghulis,” she said once more, and the stranger in Jaqen’s
clothes bowed to her and stalked o through the darkness, cloak
swirling. She was alone with the dead men. They deserved to die,
Arya told herself, remembering all those Ser Amory Lorch had
killed at the holdfast by the lake.
The cellars under Kingspyre were empty when she returned to her
bed of straw. She whispered her names to her pillow, and when she
was done she added, “Valar morghulis,” in a small soft voice,
wondering what it meant.
Come dawn, Pinkeye and the others were back, all but one boy
who’d been killed in the ghting for no reason that anyone could
say. Pinkeye went up alone to see how matters stood by light of
day, complaining all the while that his old bones could not abide
steps. When he returned, he told them that Harrenhal had been
taken. “Them Bloody Mummers killed some of Ser Amory’s lot in
their beds, and the rest at table after they were good and drunk.
The new lord will be here before the day’s out, with his whole host.
He’s from the wild north up where that Wall is, and they say he’s a
hard one. This lord or that lord, there’s still work to be done. Any
foolery and I’ll whip the skin o your back.” He looked at Arya
when he said that, but never said a word to her about where she
had been the night before.
All morning she watched the Bloody Mummers strip the dead of
their valuables and drag the corpses to the Flowstone Yard, where a
pyre was laid to dispose of them. Shagwell the Fool hacked the
heads o two dead knights and pranced about the castle swinging
them by the hair and making them talk. “What did you die of?” one
head asked. “Hot weasel soup,” replied the second.
Arya was set to mopping up dried blood. No one said a word to
her beyond the usual, but every so often she would notice people
looking at her strangely. Robett Glover and the other men they’d
freed must have talked about what had happened down in the
dungeon, and then Shagwell and his stupid talking heads started in
about the weasel soup. She would have told him to shut up, but she

was scared to. The fool was half-mad, and she’d heard that he’d
once killed a man for not laughing at one of his japes. He better shut
his mouth or I’ll put him on my list with the rest, she thought as she
scrubbed at a reddish-brown stain.
It was almost evenfall when the new master of Harrenhal arrived.
He had a plain face, beardless and ordinary, notable only for his
queer pale eyes. Neither plump, thin, nor muscular, he wore black
ringmail and a spotted pink cloak. The sigil on his banner looked
like a man dipped in blood. “On your knees for the Lord of the
Dreadfort!” shouted his squire, a boy no older than Arya, and
Harrenhal knelt.
Vargo Hoat came forward. “My lord, Harrenhal ith yourth.”
The lord gave answer, but too softly for Arya to hear. Robett
Glover and Ser Aenys Frey, freshly bathed and clad in clean new
doublets and cloaks, came up to join them. After some brief talk,
Ser Aenys led them over to Rorge and Biter. Arya was surprised to
see them still here; somehow she would have expected them to
vanish when Jaqen did. Arya heard the harsh sound of Rorge’s
voice, but not what he was saying. Then Shagwell pounced on her,
dragging her out across the yard. “My lord, my lord,” he sang,
tugging at her wrist, “here’s the weasel who made the soup!”
“Let go,” Arya said, wriggling out of his grasp.
The lord regarded her. Only his eyes moved; they were very pale,
the color of ice. “How old are you, child?”
She had to think for a moment to remember. “Ten.”
“Ten, my lord,” he reminded her. “Are you fond of animals?”
“Some kinds. My lord.”
A thin smile twitched across his lips. “But not lions, it would
seem. Nor manticores.”
She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing.
“They tell me you are called Weasel. That will not serve. What
name did your mother give you?”
She bit her lip, groping for another name. Lommy had called her
Lumpyhead, Sansa used Horseface, and her father’s men once
dubbed her Arya Underfoot, but she did not think any of those were
the sort of name he wanted.

“Nymeria,” she said. “Only she called me Nan for short.”
“You will call me my lord when you speak to me, Nan,” the lord
said mildly. “You are too young to be a Brave Companion, I think,
and of the wrong sex. Are you afraid of leeches, child?”
“They’re only leeches. My lord.”
“My squire could take a lesson from you, it would seem. Frequent
leechings are the secret of a long life. A man must purge himself of
bad blood. You will do, I think. For so long as I remain at
Harrenhal, Nan, you shall be my cupbearer, and serve me at table
and in chambers.”
This time she knew better than to say that she’d sooner work in
the stables. “Yes, your lord. I mean, my lord.”
The lord waved a hand. “Make her presentable,” he said to no one
in particular, “and make certain she knows how to pour wine
without spilling it.” Turning away, he lifted a hand and said, “Lord
Hoat, see to those banners above the gatehouse.”
Four Brave Companions climbed to the ramparts and hauled down
the lion of Lannister and Ser Amory’s own black manticore. In their
place they raised the ayed man of the Dreadfort and the direwolf
of Stark. And that evening, a page named Nan poured wine for
Roose Bolton and Vargo Hoat as they stood on the gallery, watching
the Brave Companions parade Ser Amory Lorch naked through the
middle ward. Ser Amory pleaded and sobbed and clung to the legs
of his captors, until Rorge pulled him loose, and Shagwell kicked
him down into the bear pit.
The bear is all in black, Arya thought. Like Yoren. She lled Roose
Bolton’s cup, and did not spill a drop.

DAENERYS

In this city of splendors, Dany had expected the House of the

Undying Ones to be the most splendid of all, but she emerged from
her palanquin to behold a grey and ancient ruin.
Long and low, without towers or windows, it coiled like a stone
serpent through a grove of black-barked trees whose inky blue
leaves made the stu of the sorcerous drink the Qartheen called
shade of the evening. No other buildings stood near. Black tiles
covered the palace roof, many fallen or broken; the mortar between
the stones was dry and crumbling. She understood now why Xaro
Xhoan Daxos called it the Palace of Dust. Even Drogon seemed
disquieted by the sight of it. The black dragon hissed, smoke seeping
out between his sharp teeth.
“Blood of my blood,” Jhogo said in Dothraki, “this is an evil
place, a haunt of ghosts and maegi. See how it drinks the morning
sun? Let us go before it drinks us as well.”
Ser Jorah Mormont came up beside them. “What power can they
have if they live in that?”
“Heed the wisdom of those who love you best,” said Xaro Xhoan
Daxos, lounging inside the palanquin. “Warlocks are bitter creatures
who eat dust and drink of shadows. They will give you naught.
They have naught to give.”
Aggo put a hand on his arakh. “Khaleesi, it is said that many go
into the Palace of Dust, but few come out.”
“It is said,” Jhogo agreed.

“We are blood of your blood,” said Aggo, “sworn to live and die
as you do. Let us walk with you in this dark place, to keep you safe
from harm.”
“Some places even a khal must walk alone,” Dany said.
“Take me, then,” Ser Jorah urged. “The risk—”
“Queen Daenerys must enter alone, or not at all.” The warlock
Pyat Pree stepped out from under the trees. Has he been there all
along? Dany wondered. “Should she turn away now, the doors of
wisdom shall be closed to her forevermore.”
“My pleasure barge awaits, even now,” Xaro Xhoan Daxos called
out. “Turn away from this folly, most stubborn of queens. I have
utists who will soothe your troubled soul with sweet music, and a
small girl whose tongue will make you sigh and melt.”
Ser Jorah Mormont gave the merchant prince a sour look. “Your
Grace, remember Mirri Maz Duur.”
“I do,” Dany said, suddenly decided. “I remember that she had
knowledge. And she was only a maegi.”
Pyat Pree smiled thinly. “The child speaks as sagely as a crone.
Take my arm, and let me lead you.”
“I am no child.” Dany took his arm nonetheless.
It was darker than she would have thought under the black trees,
and the way was longer. Though the path seemed to run straight
from the street to the door of the palace, Pyat Pree soon turned
aside. When she questioned him, the warlock said only, “The front
way leads in, but never out again. Heed my words, my queen. The
House of the Undying Ones was not made for mortal men. If you
value your soul, take care and do just as I tell you.”
“I will do as you say,” Dany promised.
“When you enter, you will nd yourself in a room with four
doors: the one you have come through and three others. Take the
door to your right. Each time, the door to your right. If you should
come upon a stairwell, climb. Never go down, and never take any
door but the rst door to your right.”
“The door to my right,” Dany repeated. “I understand. And when
I leave, the opposite?”

“By no means,” Pyat Pree said. “Leaving and coming, it is the
same. Always up. Always the door to your right. Other doors may
open to you. Within, you will see many things that disturb you.
Visions of loveliness and visions of horror, wonders and terrors.
Sights and sounds of days gone by and days to come and days that
never were. Dwellers and servitors may speak to you as you go.
Answer or ignore them as you choose, but enter no room until you
reach the audience chamber.”
“I understand.”
“When you come to the chamber of the Undying, be patient. Our
little lives are no more than a icker of a moth’s wing to them.
Listen well, and write each word upon your heart.”
When they reached the door—a tall oval mouth, set in a wall
fashioned in the likeness of a human face—the smallest dwarf Dany
had ever seen was waiting on the threshold. He stood no higher
than her knee, his faced pinched and pointed, snoutish, but he was
dressed in delicate livery of purple and blue, and his tiny pink hands
held a silver tray. Upon it rested a slender crystal glass lled with a
thick blue liquid: shade of the evening, the wine of warlocks. “Take
and drink,” urged Pyat Pree.
“Will it turn my lips blue?”
“One ute will serve only to unstop your ears and dissolve the
caul from o your eyes, so that you may hear and see the truths
that will be laid before you.”
Dany raised the glass to her lips. The rst sip tasted like ink and
spoiled meat, foul, but when she swallowed it seemed to come to
life within her. She could feel tendrils spreading through her chest,
like ngers of re coiling around her heart, and on her tongue was
a taste like honey and anise and cream, like mother’s milk and
Drogo’s seed, like red meat and hot blood and molten gold. It was
all the tastes she had ever known, and none of them … and then the
glass was empty.
“Now you may enter,” said the warlock. Dany put the glass back
on the servitor’s tray, and went inside.
She found herself in a stone anteroom with four doors, one on
each wall. With never a hesitation, she went to the door on her

right and stepped through. The second room was a twin to the rst.
Again she turned to the right-hand door. When she pushed it open
she faced yet another small antechamber with four doors. I am in the
presence of sorcery.
The fourth room was oval rather than square and walled in wormeaten wood in place of stone. Six passages led out from it in place of
four. Dany chose the rightmost, and entered a long, dim, highceilinged hall. Along the right hand was a row of torches burning
with a smoky orange light, but the only doors were to her left.
Drogon unfolded wide black wings and beat the stale air. He ew
twenty feet before thudding to an undigni ed crash. Dany strode
after him.
The mold-eaten carpet under her feet had once been gorgeously
colored, and whorls of gold could still be seen in the fabric, glinting
broken amidst the faded grey and mottled green. What remained
served to mu e her footfalls, but that was not all to the good. Dany
could hear sounds within the walls, a faint scurrying and scrabbling
that made her think of rats. Drogon heard them too. His head
moved as he followed the sounds, and when they stopped he gave
an angry scream. Other sounds, even more disturbing, came
through some of the closed doors. One shook and thumped, as if
someone were trying to break through. From another came a
dissonant piping that made the dragon lash his tail wildly from side
to side. Dany hurried quickly past.
Not all the doors were closed. I will not look, Dany told herself,
but the temptation was too strong.
In one room, a beautiful woman sprawled naked on the oor
while four little men crawled over her. They had rattish pointed
faces and tiny pink hands, like the servitor who had brought her the
glass of shade. One was pumping between her thighs. Another
savaged her breasts, worrying at the nipples with his wet red
mouth, tearing and chewing.
Farther on she came upon a feast of corpses. Savagely
slaughtered, the feasters lay strewn across overturned chairs and
hacked trestle tables, asprawl in pools of congealing blood. Some
had lost limbs, even heads. Severed hands clutched bloody cups,

wooden spoons, roast fowl, heels of bread. In a throne above them
sat a dead man with the head of a wolf. He wore an iron crown and
held a leg of lamb in one hand as a king might hold a scepter, and
his eyes followed Dany with mute appeal.
She ed from him, but only as far as the next open door. I know
this room, she thought. She remembered those great wooden beams
and the carved animal faces that adorned them. And there outside
the window, a lemon tree! The sight of it made her heart ache with
longing. It is the house with the red door, the house in Braavos. No
sooner had she thought it than old Ser Willem came into the room,
leaning heavily on his stick. “Little princess, there you are,” he said
in his gru kind voice. “Come,” he said, “come to me, my lady,
you’re home now, you’re safe now.” His big wrinkled hand reached
for her, soft as old leather, and Dany wanted to take it and hold it
and kiss it, she wanted that as much as she had ever wanted
anything. Her foot edged forward, and then she thought, He’s dead,
he’s dead, the sweet old bear, he died a long time ago. She backed
away and ran.
The long hall went on and on and on, with endless doors to her
left and only torches to her right. She ran past more doors than she
could count, closed doors and open ones, doors of wood and doors
of iron, carved doors and plain ones, doors with pulls and doors
with locks and doors with knockers. Drogon lashed against her
back, urging her on, and Dany ran until she could run no more.
Finally a great pair of bronze doors appeared to her left, grander
than the rest. They swung open as she neared, and she had to stop
and look. Beyond loomed a cavernous stone hall, the largest she had
ever seen. The skulls of dead dragons looked down from its walls.
Upon a towering barbed throne sat an old man in rich robes, an old
man with dark eyes and long silver-grey hair. “Let him be king over
charred bones and cooked meat,” he said to a man below him. “Let
him be the king of ashes.” Drogon shrieked, his claws digging
through silk and skin, but the king on his throne never heard, and
Dany moved on.
Viserys, was her rst thought the next time she paused, but a
second glance told her otherwise. The man had her brother’s hair,

but he was taller, and his eyes were a dark indigo rather than lilac.
“Aegon,” he said to a woman nursing a newborn babe in a great
wooden bed. “What better name for a king?”
“Will you make a song for him?” the woman asked.
“He has a song,” the man replied. “He is the prince that was
promised, and his is the song of ice and re.” He looked up when he
said it and his eyes met Dany’s, and it seemed as if he saw her
standing there beyond the door. “There must be one more,” he said,
though whether he was speaking to her or the woman in the bed
she could not say. “The dragon has three heads.” He went to the
window seat, picked up a harp, and ran his ngers lightly over its
silvery strings. Sweet sadness lled the room as man and wife and
babe faded like the morning mist, only the music lingering behind
to speed her on her way.
It seemed as though she walked for another hour before the long
hall nally ended in a steep stone stair, descending into darkness.
Every door, open or closed, had been to her left. Dany looked back
behind her. The torches were going out, she realized with a start of
fear. Perhaps twenty still burned. Thirty at most. One more
guttered out even as she watched, and the darkness came a little
farther down the hall, creeping toward her. And as she listened it
seemed as if she heard something else coming, shu ing and
dragging itself slowly along the faded carpet. Terror lled her. She
could not go back and she was afraid to stay here, but how could
she go on? There was no door on her right, and the steps went
down, not up.
Yet another torch went out as she stood pondering, and the
sounds grew faintly louder. Drogon’s long neck snaked out and he
opened his mouth to scream, steam rising from between his teeth.
He hears it too. Dany turned to the blank wall once more, but there
was nothing. Could there be a secret door, a door I cannot see?
Another torch went out. Another. The rst door on the right, he said,
always the rst door on the right. The rst door on the right …
It came to her suddenly. … is the last door on the left!
She ung herself through. Beyond was another small room with
four doors. To the right she went, and to the right, and to the right,

and to the right, and to the right, and to the right, and to the right,
until she was dizzy and out of breath once more.
When she stopped, she found herself in yet another dank stone
chamber … but this time the door opposite was round, shaped like
an open mouth, and Pyat Pree stood outside in the grass beneath
the trees. “Can it be that the Undying are done with you so soon?”
he asked in disbelief when he saw her.
“So soon?” she said, confused. “I’ve walked for hours, and still
not found them.”
“You have taken a wrong turning. Come, I will lead you.” Pyat
Pree held out his hand.
Dany hesitated. There was a door to her right, still closed …
“That’s not the way,” Pyat Pree said rmly, his blue lips prim
with disapproval. “The Undying Ones will not wait forever.”
“Our little lives are no more than a icker of a moth’s wing to
them,” Dany said, remembering.
“Stubborn child. You will be lost, and never found.”
She walked away from him, to the door on the right.
“No,” Pyat screeched. “No, to me, come to me, to meeeeeee.” His
face crumbled inward, changing to something pale and wormlike.
Dany left him behind, entering a stairwell. She began to climb.
Before long her legs were aching. She recalled that the House of the
Undying Ones had seemed to have no towers.
Finally the stair opened. To her right, a set of wide wooden doors
had been thrown open. They were fashioned of ebony and
weirwood, the black and white grains swirling and twisting in
strange interwoven patterns. They were very beautiful, yet
somehow frightening. The blood of the dragon must not be afraid.
Dany said a quick prayer, begging the Warrior for courage and the
Dothraki horse god for strength. She made herself walk forward.
Beyond the doors was a great hall and a splendor of wizards.
Some wore sumptuous robes of ermine, ruby velvet, and cloth of
gold. Others fancied elaborate armor studded with gemstones, or
tall pointed hats speckled with stars. There were women among
them, dressed in gowns of surpassing loveliness. Shafts of sunlight

slanted through windows of stained glass, and the air was alive with
the most beautiful music she had ever heard.
A kingly man in rich robes rose when he saw her, and smiled.
“Daenerys of House Targaryen, be welcome. Come and share the
food of forever. We are the Undying of Qarth.”
“Long have we awaited you,” said a woman beside him, clad in
rose and silver. The breast she had left bare in the Qartheen fashion
was as perfect as a breast could be.
“We knew you were to come to us,” the wizard king said. “A
thousand years ago we knew, and have been waiting all this time.
We sent the comet to show you the way.”
“We have knowledge to share with you,” said a warrior in shining
emerald armor, “and magic weapons to arm you with. You have
passed every trial. Now come and sit with us, and all your questions
shall be answered.”
She took a step forward. But then Drogon leapt from her
shoulder. He ew to the top of the ebony-and-weirwood door,
perched there, and began to bite at the carved wood.
“A willful beast,” laughed a handsome young man. “Shall we
teach you the secret speech of dragonkind? Come, come.”
Doubt seized her. The great door was so heavy it took all of
Dany’s strength to budge it, but nally it began to move. Behind
was another door, hidden. It was old grey wood, splintery and
plain … but it stood to the right of the door through which she’d
entered. The wizards were beckoning her with voices sweeter than
song. She ran from them, Drogon ying back down to her. Through
the narrow door she passed, into a chamber awash in gloom.
A long stone table lled this room. Above it oated a human
heart, swollen and blue with corruption, yet still alive. It beat, a
deep ponderous throb of sound, and each pulse sent out a wash of
indigo light. The gures around the table were no more than blue
shadows. As Dany walked to the empty chair at the foot of the
table, they did not stir, nor speak, nor turn to face her. There was
no sound but the slow, deep beat of the rotting heart.
… mother of dragons … came a voice, part
whisper and part moan … dragons … dragons … dragons … other

voices echoed in the gloom. Some were male and some female. One
spoke with the timbre of a child. The oating heart pulsed from
dimness to darkness. It was hard to summon the will to speak, to
recall the words she had practiced so assiduously. “I am Daenerys
Stormborn of House Targaryen, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms of
Westeros.” Do they hear me? Why don’t they move? She sat, folding
her hands in her lap. “Grant me your counsel, and speak to me with
the wisdom of those who have conquered death.”
Through the indigo murk, she could make out the wizened
features of the Undying One to her right, an old old man, wrinkled
and hairless. His esh was a ripe violet-blue, his lips and nails bluer
still, so dark they were almost black. Even the whites of his eyes
were blue. They stared unseeing at the ancient woman on the
opposite side of the table, whose gown of pale silk had rotted on
her body. One withered breast was left bare in the Qartheen
manner, to show a pointed blue nipple hard as leather.
She is not breathing. Dany listened to the silence. None of them are
breathing, and they do not move, and those eyes see nothing. Could it be
that the Undying Ones were dead?
Her answer was a whisper as thin as a mouse’s whisker. … we
live … live … live … it sounded. Myriad other voices whispered
echoes. … and know … know … know … know …
“I have come for the gift of truth,” Dany said. “In the long hall,
the things I saw … were they true visions, or lies? Past things, or
things to come? What did they mean?”
… the shape of shadows … morrows not yet made … drink from the
cup of ice … drink from the cup of re …
… mother of dragons … child of three …
“Three?” She did not understand.
… three heads has the dragon … the ghost chorus yammered inside
her skull with never a lip moving, never a breath stirring the still
blue air. … mother of dragons … child of storm … The whispers
became a swirling song. … three res must you light … one for life
and one for death and one to love … Her own heart was beating in
unison to the one that oated before her, blue and corrupt … three
mounts must you ride … one to bed and one to dread and one to

love … The voices were growing louder, she realized, and it seemed
her heart was slowing, and even her breath. … three treasons will you
know … once for blood and once for gold and once for love …
“I don’t …” Her voice was no more than a whisper, almost as
faint as theirs. What was happening to her? “I don’t understand,”
she said, more loudly. Why was it so hard to talk here? “Help me.
Show me.”
… help her … the whispers mocked. … show her …
Then phantoms shivered through the murk, images in indigo.
Viserys screamed as the molten gold ran down his cheeks and lled
his mouth. A tall lord with copper skin and silver-gold hair stood
beneath the banner of a ery stallion, a burning city behind him.
Rubies ew like drops of blood from the chest of a dying prince,
and he sank to his knees in the water and with his last breath
murmured a woman’s name. … mother of dragons, daughter of
death … Glowing like sunset, a red sword was raised in the hand of
a blue-eyed king who cast no shadow. A cloth dragon swayed on
poles amidst a cheering crowd. From a smoking tower, a great
stone beast took wing, breathing shadow re. … mother of dragons,
slayer of lies … Her silver was trotting through the grass, to a
darkling stream beneath a sea of stars. A corpse stood at the prow
of a ship, eyes bright in his dead face, grey lips smiling sadly. A
blue ower grew from a chink in a wall of ice, and lled the air
with sweetness. … mother of dragons, bride of re …
Faster and faster the visions came, one after the other, until it
seemed as if the very air had come alive. Shadows whirled and
danced inside a tent, boneless and terrible. A little girl ran barefoot
toward a big house with a red door. Mirri Maz Duur shrieked in the
ames, a dragon bursting from her brow. Behind a silver horse the
bloody corpse of a naked man bounced and dragged. A white lion
ran through grass taller than a man. Beneath the Mother of
Mountains, a line of naked crones crept from a great lake and knelt
shivering before her, their grey heads bowed. Ten thousand slaves
lifted bloodstained hands as she raced by on her silver, riding like
the wind. “Mother!” they cried. “Mother, mother!” They were
reaching for her, touching her, tugging at her cloak, the hem of her

skirt, her foot, her leg, her breast. They wanted her, needed her, the
re, the life, and Dany gasped and opened her arms to give herself
to them …
But then black wings bu eted her round the head, and a scream
of fury cut the indigo air, and suddenly the visions were gone,
ripped away, and Dany’s gasp turned to horror. The Undying were
all around her, blue and cold, whispering as they reached for her,
pulling, stroking, tugging at her clothes, touching her with their dry
cold hands, twining their ngers through her hair. All the strength
had left her limbs. She could not move. Even her heart had ceased
to beat. She felt a hand on her bare breast, twisting her nipple.
Teeth found the soft skin of her throat. A mouth descended on one
eye, licking, sucking, biting …
Then indigo turned to orange, and whispers turned to screams.
Her heart was pounding, racing, the hands and mouths were gone,
heat washed over her skin, and Dany blinked at a sudden glare.
Perched above her, the dragon spread his wings and tore at the
terrible dark heart, ripping the rotten esh to ribbons, and when his
head snapped forward, re ew from his open jaws, bright and hot.
She could hear the shrieks of the Undying as they burned, their high
thin papery voices crying out in tongues long dead. Their esh was
crumbling parchment, their bones dry wood soaked in tallow. They
danced as the ames consumed them; they staggered and writhed
and spun and raised blazing hands on high, their ngers bright as
torches.
Dany pushed herself to her feet and bulled through them. They
were light as air, no more than husks, and they fell at a touch. The
whole room was ablaze by the time she reached the door. “Drogon,”
she called, and he ew to her through the re.
Outside a long dim passageway stretched serpentine before her,
lit by the ickering orange glare from behind. Dany ran, searching
for a door, a door to her right, a door to her left, any door, but
there was nothing, only twisty stone walls, and a oor that seemed
to move slowly under her feet, writhing as if to trip her. She kept
her feet and ran faster, and suddenly the door was there ahead of
her, a door like an open mouth.

When she spilled out into the sun, the bright light made her
stumble. Pyat Pree was gibbering in some unknown tongue and
hopping from one foot to the other. When Dany looked behind her,
she saw thin tendrils of smoke forcing their way through cracks in
the ancient stone walls of the Palace of Dust, and rising from
between the black tiles of the roof.
Howling curses, Pyat Pree drew a knife and danced toward her,
but Drogon ew at his face. Then she heard the crack of Jhogo’s
whip, and never was a sound so sweet. The knife went ying, and
an instant later Rakharo was slamming Pyat to the ground. Ser
Jorah Mormont knelt beside Dany in the cool green grass and put
his arm around her shoulder.

TYRION

If you die stupidly, I’m going to feed your body to the goats,”

Tyrion threatened as the rst load of Stone Crows pushed o from
the quay.
Shagga laughed. “The Halfman has no goats.”
“I’ll get some just for you.”
Dawn was breaking, and pale ripples of light shimmered on the
surface of the river, shattering under the poles and re-forming when
the ferry had passed. Timett had taken his Burned Men into the
kingswood two days before. Yesterday the Black Ears and Moon
Brothers followed, today the Stone Crows.
“Whatever you do, don’t try and ght a battle,” Tyrion said.
“Strike at their camps and baggage train. Ambush their scouts and
hang the bodies from trees ahead of their line of march, loop
around and cut down stragglers. I want night attacks, so many and
so sudden that they’ll be afraid to sleep—”
Shagga laid a hand atop Tyrion’s head. “All this I learned from
Dolf son of Holger before my beard had grown. This is the way of
war in the Mountains of the Moon.”
“The kingswood is not the Mountains of the Moon, and you won’t
be ghting Milk Snakes and Painted Dogs. And listen to the guides
I’m sending, they know this wood as well as you know your
mountains. Heed their counsel and they’ll serve you well.”
“Shagga will listen to the Halfman’s pets,” the clansman promised
solemnly. And then it was time for him to lead his garron onto the

ferry. Tyrion watched them push o and pole out toward the center
of the Blackwater. He felt a queer twinge in the pit of his stomach
as Shagga faded in the morning mist. He was going to feel naked
without his clansmen.
He still had Bronn’s hirelings, near eight hundred of them now,
but sellswords were notoriously ckle. Tyrion had done what he
could to buy their continued loyalty, promising Bronn and a dozen
of his best men lands and knighthoods when the battle was won.
They’d drunk his wine, laughed at his jests, and called each other ser
until they were all staggering … all but Bronn himself, who’d only
smiled that insolent dark smile of his and afterward said, “They’ll
kill for that knighthood, but don’t ever think they’ll die for it.”
Tyrion had no such delusion.
The gold cloaks were almost as uncertain a weapon. Six thousand
men in the City Watch, thanks to Cersei, but only a quarter of them
could be relied upon. “There’s few out-and-out traitors, though
there’s some, even your spider hasn’t found them all,” Bywater had
warned him. “But there’s hundreds greener than spring grass, men
who joined for bread and ale and safety. No man likes to look
craven in the sight of his fellows, so they’ll ght brave enough at
the start, when it’s all warhorns and blowing banners. But if the
battle looks to be going sour they’ll break, and they’ll break bad.
The rst man to throw down his spear and run will have a thousand
more trodding on his heels.”
To be sure, there were seasoned men in the City Watch, the core
of two thousand who’d gotten their gold cloaks from Robert, not
Cersei. Yet even those … a watchman was not truly a soldier, Lord
Tywin Lannister had been fond of saying. Of knights and squires
and men-at-arms, Tyrion had no more than three hundred. Soon
enough, he must test the truth of another of his father’s sayings:
One man on a wall was worth ten beneath it.
Bronn and the escort were waiting at the foot of the quay, amidst
swarming beggars, strolling whores, and shwives crying the catch.
The shwives did more business than all the rest combined. Buyers
ocked around the barrels and stalls to haggle over winkles, clams,
and river pike. With no other food coming into the city, the price of

sh was ten times what it had been before the war, and still rising.
Those who had coin came to the riverfront each morning and each
evening, in hopes of bringing home an eel or a pot of red crabs;
those who did not slipped between the stalls hoping to steal, or
stood gaunt and forlorn beneath the walls.
The gold cloaks cleared a path through the press, shoving people
aside with the shafts of their spears. Tyrion ignored the muttered
curses as best he could. A sh came sailing out of the crowd, slimy
and rotten. It landed at his feet and ew to pieces. He stepped over
it gingerly and climbed into his saddle. Children with swollen
bellies were already ghting over pieces of the stinking sh.
Mounted, he gazed along the riverfront. Hammers rang in the
morning air as carpenters swarmed over the Mud Gate, extending
wooden hoardings from the battlements. Those were coming well.
He was a deal less pleased by the clutter of ramshackle structures
that had been allowed to grow up behind the quays, attaching
themselves to the city walls like barnacles on the hull of a ship; bait
shacks and pot-shops, warehouses, merchants’ stalls, alehouses, the
cribs where the cheaper sort of whores spread their legs. It has to go,
every bit of it. As it was, Stannis would hardly need scaling ladders to
storm the walls.
He called Bronn to his side. “Assemble a hundred men and burn
everything you see here between the water’s edge and the city
walls.” He waved his stubby ngers, taking in all the waterfront
squalor. “I want nothing left standing, do you understand?”
The black-haired sellsword turned his head, considering the task.
“Them as own all this won’t like that much.”
“I never imagined they would. So be it; they’ll have something
else to curse the evil monkey demon for.”
“Some may ght.”
“See that they lose.”
“What do we do with those that live here?”
“Let them have a reasonable time to remove their property, and
then move them out. Try not to kill any of them, they’re not the
enemy. And no more rapes! Keep your men in line, damn it.”

“They’re sellswords, not septons,” said Bronn. “Next you’ll be
telling me you want them sober.”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
Tyrion only wished he could as easily make city walls twice as
tall and three times as thick. Though perhaps it did not matter.
Massive walls and tall towers had not saved Storm’s End, nor
Harrenhal, nor even Winterfell.
He remembered Winterfell as he had last seen it. Not as
grotesquely huge as Harrenhal, nor as solid and impregnable to look
at as Storm’s End, yet there had been a great strength in those
stones, a sense that within those walls a man might feel safe. The
news of the castle’s fall had come as a wrenching shock. “The gods
give with one hand and take with the other,” he muttered under his
breath when Varys told him. They had given the Starks Harrenhal
and taken Winterfell, a dismal exchange.
No doubt he should be rejoicing. Robb Stark would have to turn
north now. If he could not defend his own home and hearth, he was
no sort of king at all. It meant reprieve for the west, for House
Lannister, and yet …
Tyrion had only the vaguest memory of Theon Greyjoy from his
time with the Starks. A callow youth, always smiling, skilled with a
bow; it was hard to imagine him as Lord of Winterfell. The Lord of
Winterfell would always be a Stark.
He remembered their godswood; the tall sentinels armored in
their grey-green needles, the great oaks, the hawthorn and ash and
soldier pines, and at the center the heart tree standing like some
pale giant frozen in time. He could almost smell the place, earthy
and brooding, the smell of centuries, and he remembered how dark
the wood had been even by day. That wood was Winterfell. It was the
north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much
an unwelcome intruder. He wondered if the Greyjoys would feel it
too. The castle might well be theirs, but never that godswood. Not
in a year, or ten, or fty.
Tyrion Lannister walked his horse slowly toward the Mud Gate.
Winterfell is nothing to you, he reminded himself. Be glad the place has
fallen, and look to your own walls. The gate was open. Inside, three

great trebuchets stood side by side in the market square, peering
over the battlements like three huge birds. Their throwing arms
were made from the trunks of old oaks, and banded with iron to
keep them from splitting. The gold cloaks had named them the
Three Whores, because they’d be giving Lord Stannis such a lusty
welcome. Or so we hope.
Tyrion put his heels into his horse and trotted through the Mud
Gate, breasting the human tide. Once beyond the Whores, the press
grew thinner and the street opened up around him.
The ride back to the Red Keep was uneventful, but at the Tower
of the Hand he found a dozen angry trader captains waiting in his
audience chamber to protest the seizure of their ships. He gave
them a sincere apology and promised compensation once the war
was done. That did little to appease them. “What if you should lose,
my lord?” one Braavosi asked.
“Then apply to King Stannis for your compensation.”
By the time he rid himself of them, bells were ringing and Tyrion
knew he would be late for the installation. He waddled across the
yard almost at a run and crowded into the back of the castle sept as
Jo rey fastened white silk cloaks about the shoulders of the two
newest members of his Kingsguard. The rite seemed to require that
everyone stand, so Tyrion saw nothing but a wall of courtly arses.
On the other hand, once the new High Septon was nished leading
the two knights through their solemn vows and anointing them in
the names of the Seven, he would be well positioned to be rst out
the doors.
He approved of his sister’s choice of Ser Balon Swann to take the
place of the slain Preston Green eld. The Swanns were Marcher
lords, proud, powerful, and cautious. Pleading illness, Lord Gulian
Swann had remained in his castle, taking no part in the war, but his
eldest son had ridden with Renly and now Stannis, while Balon, the
younger, served at King’s Landing. If he’d had a third son, Tyrion
suspected he’d be o with Robb Stark. It was not perhaps the most
honorable course, but it showed good sense; whoever won the Iron
Throne, the Swanns intended to survive. In addition to being well
born, young Ser Balon was valiant, courtly, and skilled at arms;

good with a lance, better with a morningstar, superb with the bow.
He would serve with honor and courage.
Alas, Tyrion could not say the same for Cersei’s second choice.
Ser Osmund Kettleblack looked formidable enough. He stood six feet
and six inches, most of it sinew and muscle, and his hook nose,
bushy eyebrows, and spade-shaped brown beard gave his face a
erce aspect, so long as he did not smile. Lowborn, no more than a
hedge knight, Kettleblack was utterly dependent on Cersei for his
advancement, which was doubtless why she’d picked him. “Ser
Osmund is as loyal as he is brave,” she’d told Jo rey when she put
forward his name. It was true, unfortunately. The good Ser Osmund
had been selling her secrets to Bronn since the day she’d hired him,
but Tyrion could scarcely tell her that.
He supposed he ought not complain. The appointment gave him
another ear close to the king, unbeknownst to his sister. And even if
Ser Osmund proved an utter craven, he would be no worse than Ser
Boros Blount, currently residing in a dungeon at Rosby. Ser Boros
had been escorting Tommen and Lord Gyles when Ser Jacelyn
Bywater and his gold cloaks had surprised them, and had yielded up
his charge with an alacrity that would have enraged old Ser
Barristan Selmy as much as it did Cersei; a knight of the Kingsguard
was supposed to die in defense of the king and royal family. His
sister had insisted that Jo rey strip Blount of his white cloak on the
grounds of treason and cowardice. And now she replaces him with
another man just as hollow.
The praying, vowing, and anointing seemed to take most of the
morning. Tyrion’s legs soon began to ache. He shifted his weight
from one foot to the other, restless. Lady Tanda stood several rows
up, he saw, but her daughter was not with her. He had been half
hoping to catch a glimpse of Shae. Varys said she was doing well,
but he would prefer to see for himself.
“Better a lady’s maid than a pot girl,” Shae had said when Tyrion
told her the eunuch’s scheme. “Can I take my belt of silver owers
and my gold collar with the black diamonds you said looked like my
eyes? I won’t wear them if you say I shouldn’t.”

Loath as he was to disappoint her, Tyrion had to point out that
while Lady Tanda was by no means a clever woman, even she might
wonder if her daughter’s bedmaid seemed to own more jewelry
than her daughter. “Choose two or three dresses, no more,” he
commanded her. “Good wool, no silk, no samite, and no fur. The
rest I’ll keep in my own chambers for when you visit me.” It was
not the answer Shae had wanted, but at least she was safe.
When the investiture was nally done Jo rey marched out
between Ser Balon and Ser Osmund in their new white cloaks, while
Tyrion lingered for a word with the new High Septon (who was his
choice, and wise enough to know who put the honey on his bread).
“I want the gods on our side,” Tyrion told him bluntly. “Tell them
that Stannis has vowed to burn the Great Sept of Baelor.”
“Is it true, my lord?” asked the High Septon, a small, shrewd man
with a wispy white beard and wizened face.
Tyrion shrugged. “It may be. Stannis burned the godswood at
Storm’s End as an o ering to the Lord of Light. If he’d o end the
old gods, why should he spare the new? Tell them that. Tell them
that any man who thinks to give aid to the usurper betrays the gods
as well as his rightful king.”
“I shall, my lord. And I shall command them to pray for the
health of the king and his Hand as well.”
Hallyne the Pyromancer was waiting on him when Tyrion
returned to his solar, and Maester Frenken had brought messages.
He let the alchemist wait a little longer while he read what the
ravens had brought him. There was an old letter from Doran
Martell, warning him that Storm’s End had fallen, and a much more
intriguing one from Balon Greyjoy on Pyke, who styled himself King
of the Isles and the North. He invited King Jo rey to send an envoy
to the Iron Islands to x the borders between their realms and
discuss a possible alliance.
Tyrion read the letter three times and set it aside. Lord Balon’s
longships would have been a great help against the eet sailing up
from Storm’s End, but they were thousands of leagues away on the
wrong side of Westeros, and Tyrion was far from certain that he

wanted to give away half the realm. Perhaps I should spill this one in
Cersei’s lap, or take it to the council.
Only then did he admit Hallyne with the latest tallies from the
alchemists. “This cannot be true,” said Tyrion as he pored over the
ledgers. “Almost thirteen thousand jars? Do you take me for a fool?
I’m not about to pay the king’s gold for empty jars and pots of
sewage sealed with wax, I warn you.”
“No, no,” Hallyne squeaked, “the sums are accurate, I swear. We
have been, hmmm, most fortunate, my lord Hand. Another cache of
Lord Rossart’s was found, more than three hundred jars. Under the
Dragonpit! Some whores have been using the ruins to entertain
their patrons, and one of them fell through a patch of rotted oor
into a cellar. When he felt the jars, he mistook them for wine. He
was so drunk he broke the seal and drank some.”
“There was a prince who tried that once,” said Tyrion dryly. “I
haven’t seen any dragons rising over the city, so it would seem it
didn’t work this time either.” The Dragonpit atop the hill of
Rhaenys had been abandoned for a century and a half. He supposed
it was as good a place as any to store wild re, and better than most,
but it would have been nice if the late Lord Rossart had told
someone. “Three hundred jars, you say? That still does not account
for these totals. You are several thousand jars ahead of the best
estimate you gave me when last we met.”
“Yes, yes, that’s so.” Hallyne mopped at his pale brow with the
sleeve of his black-and-scarlet robe. “We have been working very
hard, my lord Hand, hmmm.”
“That would doubtless explain why you are making so much more
of the substance than before.” Smiling, Tyrion xed the pyromancer
with his mismatched stare. “Though it does raise the question of
why you did not begin working hard until now.”
Hallyne had the complexion of a mushroom, so it was hard to see
how he could turn any paler, yet somehow he managed. “We were,
my lord Hand, my brothers and I have been laboring day and night
from the rst, I assure you. It is only, hmmm, we have made so
much of the substance that we have become, hmmm, more practiced
as it were, and also”—the alchemist shifted uncomfortably

—“certain spells, hmmm, ancient secrets of our order, very delicate,
very troublesome, but necessary if the substance is to be, hmmm,
all it should be …”
Tyrion was growing impatient. Ser Jacelyn Bywater was likely
here by now, and Ironhand misliked waiting. “Yes, you have secret
spells; how splendid. What of them?”
“They, hmmm, seem to be working better than they were.”
Hallyne smiled weakly. “You don’t suppose there are any dragons
about, do you?”
“Not unless you found one under the Dragonpit. Why?”
“Oh, pardon, I was just remembering something old Wisdom
Pollitor told me once, when I was an acolyte. I’d asked him why so
many of our spells seemed, well, not as e ectual as the scrolls would
have us believe, and he said it was because magic had begun to go
out of the world the day the last dragon died.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve seen no dragons. I have noticed
the King’s Justice lurking about, however. Should any of these fruits
you’re selling me turn out to be lled with anything but wild re,
you’ll be seeing him as well.”
Hallyne ed so quickly that he almost bowled over Ser Jacelyn—
no, Lord Jacelyn, he must remember that. Ironhand was mercifully
direct, as ever. He’d returned from Rosby to deliver a fresh levy of
spearmen recruited from Lord Gyles’s estates and resume his
command of the City Watch. “How does my nephew fare?” Tyrion
asked when they were done discussing the city’s defenses.
“Prince Tommen is hale and happy, my lord. He has adopted a
fawn some of my men brought home from a hunt. He had one once
before, he says, but Jo rey skinned her for a jerkin. He asks about
his mother sometimes, and often begins letters to the Princess
Myrcella, though he never seems to nish any. His brother,
however, he does not seem to miss at all.”
“You have made suitable arrangements for him, should the battle
be lost?”
“My men have their instructions.”
“Which are?”
“You commanded me to tell no one, my lord.”

That made him smile. “I’m pleased you remember.” Should King’s
Landing fall, he might well be taken alive. Better if he did not know
where Jo rey’s heir might be found.
Varys appeared not long after Lord Jacelyn had left. “Men are
such faithless creatures,” he said by way of greeting.
Tyrion sighed. “Who’s the traitor today?”
The eunuch handed him a scroll. “So much villainy, it sings a sad
song for our age. Did honor die with our fathers?”
“My father is not dead yet.” Tyrion scanned the list. “I know
some of these names. These are rich men. Traders, merchants,
craftsmen. Why should they conspire against us?”
“It seems they believe that Lord Stannis must win, and wish to
share his victory. They call themselves the Antler Men, after the
crowned stag.”
“Someone should tell them that Stannis changed his sigil. Then
they can be the Hot Hearts.” It was no matter for jests, though; it
appeared that these Antler Men had armed several hundred
followers, to seize the Old Gate once battle was joined, and admit
the enemy to the city. Among the names on the list was the master
armorer Salloreon. “I suppose this means I won’t be getting that
terrifying helm with the demon horns,” Tyrion complained as he
scrawled the order for the man’s arrest.

THEON

One moment he was asleep; the next, awake.

Kyra nestled against him, one arm draped lightly over his, her
breasts brushing his back. He could hear her breathing, soft and
steady. The sheet was tangled about them. It was the black of night.
The bedchamber was dark and still.
What is it? Did I hear something? Someone?
Wind sighed faintly against the shutters. Somewhere, far o , he
heard the yowl of a cat in heat. Nothing else. Sleep, Greyjoy, he told
himself. The castle is quiet, and you have guards posted. At your door,
at the gates, on the armory.
He might have put it down to a bad dream, but he did not
remember dreaming. Kyra had worn him out. Until Theon had sent
for her, she had lived all of her eighteen years in the winter town
without ever setting foot inside the walls of the castle. She came to
him wet and eager and lithe as a weasel, and there had been a
certain undeniable spice to fucking a common tavern wench in Lord
Eddard Stark’s own bed.
She murmured sleepily as Theon slid out from under her arm and
got to his feet. A few embers still smoldered in the hearth. Wex
slept on the oor at the foot of the bed, rolled up inside his cloak
and dead to the world. Nothing moved. Theon crossed to the
window and threw open the shutters. Night touched him with cold
ngers, and gooseprickles rose on his bare skin. He leaned against
the stone sill and looked out on dark towers, empty yards, black

sky, and more stars than a man could ever count if he lived to be a
hundred. A half-moon oated above the Bell Tower and cast its
re ection on the roof of the glass gardens. He heard no alarums, no
voices, not so much as a footfall.
All’s well, Greyjoy. Hear the quiet? You ought to be drunk with joy.
You took Winterfell with fewer than thirty men, a feat to sing of. Theon
started back to bed. He’d roll Kyra on her back and fuck her again,
that ought to banish these phantoms. Her gasps and giggles would
make a welcome respite from this silence.
He stopped. He had grown so used to the howling of the
direwolves that he scarcely heard it anymore … but some part of
him, some hunter’s instinct, heard its absence.
Urzen stood outside his door, a sinewy man with a round shield
slung over his back. “The wolves are quiet,” Theon told him. “Go
see what they’re doing, and come straight back.” The thought of the
direwolves running loose gave him a queasy feeling. He
remembered the day in the wolfswood when the wildlings had
attacked Bran. Summer and Grey Wind had torn them to pieces.
When he prodded Wex with the toe of his boot, the boy sat up
and rubbed his eyes. “Make certain Bran Stark and his little brother
are in their beds, and be quick about it.”
“M’lord?” Kyra called sleepily.
“Go back to sleep, this does not concern you.” Theon poured
himself a cup of wine and drank it down. All the time he was
listening, hoping to hear a howl. Too few men, he thought sourly. I
have too few men. If Asha does not come …
Wex returned the quickest, shaking his head side to side. Cursing,
Theon found his tunic and breeches on the oor where he had
dropped them in his haste to get at Kyra. Over the tunic he donned
a jerkin of iron-studded leather, and he belted a longsword and
dagger at his waist. His hair was wild as the wood, but he had
larger concerns.
By then Urzen was back. “The wolves be gone.”
Theon told himself he must be as cold and deliberate as Lord
Eddard. “Rouse the castle,” he said. “Herd them out into the yard,

everyone, we’ll see who’s missing. And have Lorren make a round
of the gates. Wex, with me.”
He wondered if Stygg had reached Deepwood Motte yet. The man
was not as skilled a rider as he claimed—none of the ironmen were
much good in the saddle—but there’d been time enough. Asha
might well be on her way. And if she learns that I have lost the
Starks … It did not bear thinking about.
Bran’s bedchamber was empty, as was Rickon’s half a turn below.
Theon cursed himself. He should have kept a guard on them, but
he’d deemed it more important to have men walking the walls and
protecting the gates than to nursemaid a couple of children, one a
cripple.
Outside he heard sobbing as the castle folk were pulled from their
beds and driven into the yard. I’ll give them reason to sob. I’ve used
them gently, and this is how they repay me. He’d even had two of his
own men whipped bloody for raping that kennel girl, to show them
he meant to be just. They still blame me for the rape, though. And the
rest. He deemed that unfair. Mikken had killed himself with his
mouth, just as Benfred had. As for Chayle, he had to give someone
to the Drowned God, his men expected it. “I bear you no ill will,”
he’d told the septon before they threw him down the well, “but you
and your gods have no place here now.” You’d think the others
might be grateful he hadn’t chosen one of them, but no. He
wondered how many of them were part of this plot against him.
Urzen returned with Black Lorren. “The Hunter’s Gate,” Lorren
said. “Best come see.”
The Hunter’s Gate was conveniently sited close to the kennels and
kitchens. It opened directly on elds and forests, allowing riders to
come and go without rst passing through the winter town, and so
was favored by hunting parties. “Who had the guard here?” Theon
demanded.
“Drennan and Squint.”
Drennan was one of the men who’d raped Palla. “If they’ve let the
boys escape, I’ll have more than a little skin o their back this time,
I swear it.”
“No need for that,” Black Lorren said curtly.

Nor was there. They found Squint oating facedown in the moat,
his entrails drifting behind him like a nest of pale snakes. Drennan
lay half-naked in the gatehouse, in the snug room where the
drawbridge was worked. His throat had been opened ear to ear. A
ragged tunic concealed the half-healed scars on his back, but his
boots were scattered amidst the rushes, and his breeches tangled
about his feet. There was cheese on a small table near the door,
beside an empty agon. And two cups.
Theon picked one up and sni ed at the dregs of wine in the
bottom. “Squint was up on the wallwalk, no?”
“Aye,” said Lorren.
Theon ung the cup into the hearth. “I’d say Drennan was pulling
down his breeches to stick it in the woman when she stuck it in him.
His own cheese knife, by the look of it. Someone nd a pike and
sh the other fool out of the moat.”
The other fool was in a deal worse shape than Drennan. When
Black Lorren drew him out of the water, they saw that one of his
arms had been wrenched o at the elbow, half of his neck was
missing, and there was a ragged hole where his navel and groin
once had been. The pike tore through his bowels as Lorren was
pulling him in. The stench was awful.
“The direwolves,” Theon said. “Both of them, at a guess.”
Disgusted, he walked back to the drawbridge. Winterfell was
encircled by two massive granite walls, with a wide moat between
them. The outer wall stood eighty feet high, the inner more than a
hundred. Lacking men, Theon had been forced to abandon the outer
defenses and post his guards along the higher inner walls. He dared
not risk having them on the wrong side of the moat should the
castle rise against him.
There had to be two or more, he decided. While the woman was
entertaining Drennan, the others freed the wolves.
Theon called for a torch and led them up the steps to the
wallwalk. He swept the ame low before him, looking for … there.
On the inside of the rampart and in the wide crenel between two
upthrust merlons. “Blood,” he announced, “clumsily mopped up. At
a guess, the woman killed Drennan and lowered the drawbridge.

Squint heard the clank of chains, came to have a look, and got this
far. They pushed the corpse through the crenel into the moat so he
wouldn’t be found by another sentry.”
Urzen peered along the walls. “The other watch turrets are not
far. I see torches burning—”
“Torches, but no guards,” Theon said testily. “Winterfell has more
turrets than I have men.”
“Four guards at the main gate,” said Black Lorren, “and ve
walking the walls beside Squint.”
Urzen said, “If he had sounded his horn—”
I am served by fools. “Try and imagine it was you up here, Urzen.
It’s dark and cold. You have been walking sentry for hours, looking
forward to the end of your watch. Then you hear a noise and move
toward the gate, and suddenly you see eyes at the top of the stair,
glowing green and gold in the torchlight. Two shadows come
rushing toward you faster than you can believe. You catch a glimpse
of teeth, start to level your spear, and they slam into you and open
your belly, tearing through leather as if it were cheesecloth.” He
gave Urzen a hard shove. “And now you’re down on your back,
your guts are spilling out, and one of them has his teeth around
your neck.” Theon grabbed the man’s scrawny throat, tightened his
ngers, and smiled. “Tell me, at what moment during all of this do
you stop to blow your fucking horn?” He shoved Urzen away roughly,
sending him stumbling back against a merlon. The man rubbed his
throat. I should have had those beasts put down the day we took the
castle, he thought angrily. I’d seen them kill, I knew how dangerous
they were.
“We must go after them,” Black Lorren said.
“Not in the dark.” Theon did not relish the idea of chasing
direwolves through the wood by night; the hunters could easily
become the hunted. “We’ll wait for daylight. Until then, I had best
go speak with my loyal subjects.”
Down in the yard, an uneasy crowd of men, women, and children
had been pushed up against the wall. Many had not been given time
to dress; they covered themselves with woolen blankets, or huddled
naked under cloaks or bedrobes. A dozen ironmen hemmed them in,

torches in one hand and weapons in the other. The wind was
gusting, and the ickering orange light re ected dully o steel
helms, thick beards, and unsmiling eyes.
Theon walked up and down before the prisoners, studying the
faces. They all looked guilty to him. “How many are missing?”
“Six.” Reek stepped up behind him, smelling of soap, his long hair
moving in the wind. “Both Starks, that bog boy and his sister, the
halfwit from the stables, and your wildling woman.”
Osha. He had suspected her from the moment he saw that second
cup. I should have known better than to trust that one. She’s as
unnatural as Asha. Even their names sound alike.
“Has anyone had a look at the stables?”
“Aggar says no horses are missing.”
“Dancer is still in his stall?”
“Dancer?” Reek frowned. “Aggar says the horses are all there.
Only the halfwit is missing.”
They’re afoot, then. That was the best news he’d heard since he
woke. Bran would be riding in his basket on Hodor’s back, no
doubt. Osha would need to carry Rickon; his little legs wouldn’t
take him far on their own. Theon was con dent that he’d soon have
them back in his hands. “Bran and Rickon have ed,” he told the
castle folk, watching their eyes. “Who knows where they’ve gone?”
No one answered. “They could not have escaped without help,”
Theon went on. “Without food, clothing, weapons.” He had locked
away every sword and axe in Winterfell, but no doubt some had
been hidden from him. “I’ll have the names of all those who aided
them. All those who turned a blind eye.” The only sound was the
wind. “Come rst light, I mean to bring them back.” He hooked his
thumbs through his swordbelt. “I need huntsmen. Who wants a nice
warm wolfskin to see them through the winter? Gage?” The cook
had always greeted him cheerfully when he returned from the hunt,
to ask whether he’d brought anything choice for the table, but he
had nothing to say now. Theon walked back the way he had come,
searching their faces for the least sign of guilty knowledge. “The
wild is no place for a cripple. And Rickon, young as he is, how long
will he last out there? Nan, think how frightened he must be.” The

old woman had nattered at him for ten years, telling her endless
stories, but now she gaped at him as if he were some stranger. “I
might have killed every man of you and given your women to my
soldiers for their pleasure, but instead I protected you. Is this the
thanks you o er?” Joseth who’d groomed his horses, Farlen who’d
taught him all he knew of hounds, Barth the brewer’s wife who’d
been his rst—not one of them would meet his eyes. They hate me,
he realized.
Reek stepped close. “Strip o their skins,” he urged, his thick lips
glistening. “Lord Bolton, he used to say a naked man has few
secrets, but a ayed man’s got none.”
The ayed man was the sigil of House Bolton, Theon knew; ages
past, certain of their lords had gone so far as to cloak themselves in
the skins of dead enemies. A number of Starks had ended thus.
Supposedly all that had stopped a thousand years ago, when the
Boltons had bent their knees to Winterfell. Or so they say, but old
ways die hard, as well I know.
“There will be no aying in the north so long as I rule in
Winterfell,” Theon said loudly. I am your only protection against the
likes of him, he wanted to scream. He could not be that blatant, but
perhaps some were clever enough to take the lesson.
The sky was greying over the castle walls. Dawn could not be far
o . “Joseth, saddle Smiler and a horse for yourself. Murch, Gariss,
Poxy Tym, you’ll come as well.” Murch and Gariss were the best
huntsmen in the castle, and Tym was a ne bowman. “Aggar,
Rednose, Gelmarr, Reek, Wex.” He needed his own to watch his
back. “Farlen, I’ll want hounds, and you to handle them.”
The grizzled kennelmaster crossed his arms. “And why would I
care to hunt down my own trueborn lords, and babes at that?”
Theon moved close. “I am your trueborn lord now, and the man
who keeps Palla safe.”
He saw the de ance die in Farlen’s eyes. “Aye, m’lord.”
Stepping back, Theon glanced about to see who else he might
add. “Maester Luwin,” he announced.
“I know nothing of hunting.”

No, but I don’t trust you in the castle in my absence. “Then it’s past
time you learned.”
“Let me come too. I want that wolfskin cloak.” A boy stepped
forward, no older than Bran. It took Theon a moment to remember
him. “I’ve hunted lots of times before,” Walder Frey said. “Red deer
and elk, and even boar.”
His cousin laughed at him. “He rode on a boar hunt with his
father, but they never let him near the boar.”
Theon look at the boy doubtfully. “Come if you like, but if you
can’t keep up, don’t think that I’ll nurse you along.” He turned back
to Black Lorren. “Winterfell is yours in my absence. If we do not
return, do with it as you will.” That bloody well ought to have them
praying for my success.
They assembled by the Hunter’s Gate as the rst pale rays of the
sun brushed the top of the Bell Tower, their breath frosting in the
cold morning air. Gelmarr had equipped himself with a longaxe
whose reach would allow him to strike before the wolves were on
him. The blade was heavy enough to kill with a single blow. Aggar
wore steel greaves. Reek arrived carrying a boar spear and an
overstu ed washerwoman’s sack bulging with god knows what.
Theon had his bow; he needed nothing else. Once he had saved
Bran’s life with an arrow. He hoped he would not need to take it
with another, but if it came to that, he would.
Eleven men, two boys, and a dozen dogs crossed the moat.
Beyond the outer wall, the tracks were plain to read in the soft
ground; the pawprints of the wolves, Hodor’s heavy tread, the
shallower marks left by the feet of the two Reeds. Once under the
trees, the stony ground and fallen leaves made the trail harder to
see, but by then Farlen’s red bitch had the scent. The rest of the
dogs were close behind, the hounds sni ng and barking, a pair of
monstrous masti s bringing up the rear. Their size and ferocity
might make the di erence against a cornered direwolf.
He’d have guessed that Osha might run south to Ser Rodrik, but
the trail led north by northwest, into the very heart of the
wolfswood. Theon did not like that one bit. It would be a bitter
irony if the Starks made for Deepwood Motte and delivered

themselves right into Asha’s hands. I’d sooner have them dead, he
thought bitterly. It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish.
Wisps of pale mist threaded between the trees. Sentinels and
soldier pines grew thick about here, and there was nothing as dark
and gloomy as an evergreen forest. The ground was uneven, and the
fallen needles disguised the softness of the turf and made the
footing treacherous for the horses, so they had to go slowly. Not as
slowly as a man carrying a cripple, though, or a bony harridan with a
four-year-old on her back. He told himself to be patient. He’d have
them before the day was out.
Maester Luwin trotted up to him as they were following a game
trail along the lip of a ravine. “Thus far hunting seems
indistinguishable from riding through the woods, my lord.”
Theon smiled. “There are similarities. But with hunting, there’s
blood at the end.”
“Must it be so? This ight was great folly, but will you not be
merciful? These are your foster brothers we seek.”
“No Stark but Robb was ever brotherly toward me, but Bran and
Rickon have more value to me living than dead.”
“The same is true of the Reeds. Moat Cailin sits on the edge of the
bogs. Lord Howland can make your uncle’s occupation a visit to hell
if he chooses, but so long as you hold his heirs he must stay his
hand.”
Theon had not considered that. In truth, he had scarcely
considered the mudmen at all, beyond eyeing Meera once or twice
and wondering if she was still a maiden. “You may be right. We will
spare them if we can.”
“And Hodor too, I hope. The boy is simple, you know that. He
does as he is told. How many times has he groomed your horse,
soaped your saddle, scoured your mail?”
Hodor was nothing to him. “If he does not ght us, we will let
him live.” Theon pointed a nger. “But say one word about sparing
the wildling, and you can die with her. She swore me an oath, and
pissed on it.”
The maester inclined his head. “I make no apologies for
oathbreakers. Do what you must. I thank you for your mercy.”

Mercy, thought Theon as Luwin dropped back. There’s a bloody
trap. Too much and they call you weak, too little and you’re monstrous.
Yet the maester had given him good counsel, he knew. His father
thought only in terms of conquest, but what good was it to take a
kingdom if you could not hold it? Force and fear could carry you
only so far. A pity Ned Stark had taken his daughters south;
elsewise Theon could have tightened his grip on Winterfell by
marrying one of them. Sansa was a pretty little thing too, and by
now likely even ripe for bedding. But she was a thousand leagues
away, in the clutches of the Lannisters. A shame.
The wood grew ever wilder. The pines and sentinels gave way to
huge dark oaks. Tangles of hawthorn concealed treacherous gullies
and cuts. Stony hills rose and fell. They passed a crofter’s cottage,
deserted and overgown, and skirted a ooded quarry where the still
water had a sheen as grey as steel. When the dogs began to bay,
Theon gured the fugitives were near at hand. He spurred Smiler
and followed at a trot, but what he found was only the carcass of a
young elk … or what remained of it.
He dismounted for a closer look. The kill was still fresh, and
plainly the work of wolves. The dogs sni ed round it eagerly, and
one of the masti s buried his teeth in a haunch until Farlen shouted
him o . No part of this animal has been butchered, Theon realized. The
wolves ate, but not the men. Even if Osha did not want to risk a re,
she ought to have cut them a few steaks. It made no sense to leave
so much good meat to rot. “Farlen, are you certain we’re on the
right trail?” he demanded. “Could your dogs be chasing the wrong
wolves?”
“My bitch knows the smell of Summer and Shaggy well enough.”
“I hope so. For your sake.”
Less than an hour later, the trail led down a slope toward a
muddy brook swollen by the recent rains. It was there the dogs lost
the scent. Farlen and Wex waded across with the hounds and came
back shaking their heads while the animals ranged up and down the
far bank, sni ng. “They went in here, m’lord, but I can’t see where
they come out,” the kennelmaster said.

Theon dismounted and knelt beside the stream. He dipped a hand
in it. The water was cold. “They won’t have stayed long in this,” he
said. “Take half the dogs downstream, I’ll go up—”
Wex clapped his hands together loudly.
“What is it?” Theon said.
The mute boy pointed.
The ground near the water was sodden and muddy. The tracks the
wolves had left were plain enough. “Pawprints, yes. So?”
Wex drove his heel into the mud, and pivoted his foot this way
and that. It left a deep gouge.
Joseth understood. “A man the size of Hodor ought to have left a
deep print in this mud,” he said. “More so with the weight of a boy
on his back. Yet the only boot prints here are our own. See for
yourself.”
Appalled, Theon saw it was true. The wolves had gone into the
turgid brown water alone. “Osha must have turned aside back of us.
Before the elk, most likely. She sent the wolves on by themselves,
hoping we’d chase after them.” He rounded on his huntsmen. “If
you two have played me false—”
“There’s been only the one trail, my lord, I swear it,” said Gariss
defensively. “And the direwolves would never have parted from
them boys. Not for long.”
That’s so, Theon thought. Summer and Shaggydog might have
gone o to hunt, but soon or late they would return to Bran and
Rickon. “Gariss, Murch, take four dogs and double back, nd where
we lost them. Aggar, you watch them, I’ll have no trickery. Farlen
and I will follow the direwolves. Give a blast on the horn when you
pick up the trail. Two blasts if you catch sight of the beasts
themselves. Once we nd where they went, they’ll lead us back to
their masters.”
He took Wex, the Frey boy, and Gynir Rednose to search
upstream. He and Wex rode on one side of the brook, Rednose and
Walder Frey on the other, each with a pair of hounds. The wolves
might have come out on either bank. Theon kept an eye out for
tracks, spoor, broken branches, any hint as to where the direwolves
might have left the water. He spied the prints of deer, elk, and

badger easily enough. Wex surprised a vixen drinking at the stream,
and Walder ushed three rabbits from the underbrush and managed
to put an arrow in one. They saw the claw marks where a bear had
shredded the bark of a tall birch. But of the direwolves there was no
sign.
A little farther, Theon told himself. Past that oak, over that rise, past
the next bend of the stream, we’ll nd something there. He pressed on
long after he knew he should turn back, a growing sense of anxiety
gnawing at his belly. It was midday when he wrenched Smiler’s
head round in disgust and gave up.
Somehow Osha and the wretched boys were eluding him. It
should not have been possible, not on foot, burdened with a cripple
and a young child. Every passing hour increased the likelihood that
they would make good their escape. If they reach a village … The
people of the north would never deny Ned Stark’s sons, Robb’s
brothers. They’d have mounts to speed them on their way, food.
Men would ght for the honor of protecting them. The whole
bloody north would rally around them.
The wolves went downstream, that’s all. He clung to that thought.
That red bitch will sni where they came out of the water and we’ll be
after them again.
But when they joined up with Farlen’s party, one look at the
kennelmaster’s face smashed all of Theon’s hopes to shards. “The
only thing those dogs are t for is a bear baiting,” he said angrily.
“Would that I had a bear.”
“The dogs are not at fault.” Farlen knelt between a masti and his
precious red bitch, a hand on each. “Running water don’t hold no
scents, m’lord.”
“The wolves had to come out of the stream somewhere.”
“No doubt they did. Upstream or down. We keep on, we’ll nd
the place, but which way?”
“I never knew a wolf to run up a streambed for miles,” said Reek.
“A man might. If he knew he was being hunted, he might. But a
wolf?”
Yet Theon wondered. These beasts were not as other wolves. I
should have skinned the cursed things.

It was the same tale all over again when they rejoined Gariss,
Murch, and Aggar. The huntsmen had retraced their steps halfway
to Winterfell without nding any sign of where the Starks might
have parted company with the direwolves. Farlen’s hounds seemed
as frustrated as their masters, sni ng forlornly at trees and rocks
and snapping irritably at each other.
Theon dared not admit defeat. “We’ll return to the brook. Search
again. This time we’ll go as far as we must.”
“We won’t nd them,” the Frey boy said suddenly. “Not so long
as the frogeaters are with them. Mudmen are sneaks, they won’t
ght like decent folks, they skulk and use poison arrows. You never
see them, but they see you. Those who go into the bogs after them
get lost and never come out. Their houses move, even the castles
like Greywater Watch.” He glanced nervously at greenery that
encircled them on all sides. “They might be out there right now,
listening to everything we say.”
Farlen laughed to show what he thought of that notion. “My dogs
would smell anything in them bushes. Be all over them before you
could break wind, boy.”
“Frogeaters don’t smell like men,” Frey insisted. “They have a
boggy stink, like frogs and trees and scummy water. Moss grows
under their arms in place of hair, and they can live with nothing to
eat but mud and breathe swamp water.”
Theon was about to tell him what he ought to do with his wet
nurse’s fable when Maester Luwin spoke up. “The histories say the
crannogmen grew close to the children of the forest in the days
when the greenseers tried to bring the hammer of the waters down
upon the Neck. It may be that they have secret knowledge.”
Suddenly the wood seemed a deal darker than it had a moment
before, as if a cloud had passed before the sun. It was one thing to
have some fool boy spouting folly, but maesters were supposed to
be wise. “The only children that concern me are Bran and Rickon,”
Theon said. “Back to the stream. Now.”
For a moment he did not think they were going to obey, but in
the end old habit asserted itself. They followed sullenly, but they
followed. The Frey boy was as jumpy as those rabbits he’d ushed

earlier. Theon put men on either bank and followed the current.
They rode for miles, going slow and careful, dismounting to lead
the horses over treacherous ground, letting the good-for-bear-bait
hounds sni at every bush. Where a fallen tree dammed the ow,
the hunters were forced to loop around a deep green pool, but if the
direwolves had done the same they’d left neither print nor spoor.
The beasts had taken to swimming, it seemed. When I catch them,
they’ll have all the swimming they can stomach. I’ll give them both to the
Drowned God.
When the woods began to darken, Theon Greyjoy knew he was
beaten. Either the crannogmen did know the magic of the children
of the forest, or else Osha had deceived them with some wildling
trick. He made them press on through the dusk, but when the last
light faded Joseth nally worked up the courage to say, “This is
fruitless, my lord. We will lame a horse, break a leg.”
“Joseth has the right of it,” said Maester Luwin. “Groping through
the woods by torchlight will avail us nothing.”
Theon could taste bile at the back of his throat, and his stomach
was a nest of snakes twining and snapping at each other. If he crept
back to Winterfell empty-handed, he might as well dress in motley
henceforth and wear a pointed hat; the whole north would know
him for a fool. And when my father hears, and Asha …
“M’lord prince.” Reek urged his horse near. “Might be them
Starks never came this way. If I was them, I would have gone north
and east, maybe. To the Umbers. Good Stark men, they are. But
their lands are a long way. The boys will shelter someplace nearer.
Might be I know where.”
Theon looked at him suspiciously. “Tell me.”
“You know that old mill, sitting lonely on the Acorn Water? We
stopped there when I was being dragged to Winterfell a captive.
The miller’s wife sold us hay for our horses while that old knight
clucked over her brats. Might be the Starks are hiding there.”
Theon knew the mill. He had even tumbled the miller’s wife a
time or two. There was nothing special about it, or her. “Why
there? There are a dozen villages and holdfasts just as close.”

Amusement shone in those pale eyes. “Why? Now that’s past
knowing. But they’re there, I have a feeling.”
He was growing sick of the man’s sly answers. His lips look like
two worms fucking. “What are you saying? If you’ve kept some
knowledge from me—”
“M’lord prince?” Reek dismounted, and beckoned Theon to do the
same. When they were both afoot, he pulled open the cloth sack
he’d fetched from Winterfell. “Have a look here.”
It was growing hard to see. Theon thrust his hand into the sack
impatiently, groping amongst soft fur and rough scratchy wool. A
sharp point pricked his skin, and his ngers closed around
something cold and hard. He drew out a wolf’s-head brooch, silver
and jet. Understanding came suddenly. His hand closed into a st.
“Gelmarr,” he said, wondering whom he could trust. None of them.
“Aggar. Rednose. With us. The rest of you may return to Winterfell
with the hounds. I’ll have no further need of them. I know where
Bran and Rickon are hiding now.”
“Prince Theon,” Maester Luwin entreated, “you will remember
your promise? Mercy, you said.”
“Mercy was for this morning,” said Theon. It is better to be feared
than laughed at. “Before they made me angry.”

JON

They could see the

re in the night, glimmering against the side of
the mountain like a fallen star. It burned redder than the other
stars, and did not twinkle, though sometimes it ared up bright and
sometimes dwindled down to no more than a distant spark, dull and
faint.
Half a mile ahead and two thousand feet up, Jon judged, and
perfectly placed to see anything moving in the pass below.
“Watchers in the Skirling Pass,” wondered the oldest among
them. In the spring of his youth, he had been squire to a king, so
the black brothers still called him Squire Dalbridge. “What is it
Mance Rayder fears, I wonder?”
“If he knew they’d lit a re, he’d ay the poor bastards,” said
Ebben, a squat bald man muscled like a bag of rocks.
“Fire is life up here,” said Qhorin Halfhand, “but it can be death
as well.” By his command, they’d risked no open ames since
entering the mountains. They ate cold salt beef, hard bread, and
harder cheese, and slept clothed and huddled beneath a pile of
cloaks and furs, grateful for each other’s warmth. It made Jon
remember cold nights long ago at Winterfell, when he’d shared a
bed with his brothers. These men were brothers too, though the bed
they shared was stone and earth.
“They’ll have a horn,” said Stonesnake.
The Halfhand said, “A horn they must not blow.”

“That’s a long cruel climb by night,” Ebben said as he eyed the
distant spark through a cleft in the rocks that sheltered them. The
sky was cloudless, the jagged mountains rising black on black until
the very top, where their cold crowns of snow and ice shone palely
in the moonlight.
“And a longer fall,” said Qhorin Halfhand. “Two men, I think.
There are like to be two up there, sharing the watch.”
“Me.” The ranger they called Stonesnake had already shown that
he was the best climber among them. It would have to be him.
“And me,” said Jon Snow.
Qhorin Halfhand looked at him. Jon could hear the wind keening
as it shivered through the high pass above them. One of the garrons
whickered and pawed at the thin stony soil of the hollow where
they had taken shelter. “The wolf will remain with us,” Qhorin said.
“White fur is seen too easily by moonlight.” He turned to
Stonesnake. “When it’s done, throw down a burning brand. We’ll
come when we see it fall.”
“No better time to start than now,” said Stonesnake.
They each took a long coil of rope. Stonesnake carried a bag of
iron spikes as well, and a small hammer with its head wrapped in
thick felt. Their garrons they left behind, along with their helms,
mail, and Ghost. Jon knelt and let the direwolf nuzzle him before
they set o . “Stay,” he commanded. “I’ll be back for you.”
Stonesnake took the lead. He was a short wiry man, near fty and
grey of beard but stronger than he seemed, and he had the best
night eyes of anyone Jon had ever known. He needed them tonight.
By day the mountains were blue-grey, brushed with frost, but once
the sun vanished behind the jagged peaks they turned black. Now
the rising moon had limned them in white and silver.
The black brothers moved through black shadows amidst black
rocks, working their way up a steep, twisting trail as their breath
frosted in the black air. Jon felt almost naked without his mail, but
he did not miss its weight. This was hard going, and slow. To hurry
here was to risk a broken ankle or worse. Stonesnake seemed to
know where to put his feet as if by instinct, but Jon needed to be
more careful on the broken, uneven ground.

The Skirling Pass was really a series of passes, a long twisting
course that went up around a succession of icy wind-carved peaks
and down through hidden valleys that seldom saw the sun. Apart
from his companions, Jon had glimpsed no living man since they’d
left the wood behind and begun to make their way upward. The
Frostfangs were as cruel as any place the gods had made, and as
inimical to men. The wind cut like a knife up here, and shrilled in
the night like a mother mourning her slain children. What few trees
they saw were stunted, grotesque things growing sideways out of
cracks and ssures. Tumbled shelves of rock often overhung the
trail, fringed with hanging icicles that looked like long white teeth
from a distance.
Yet even so, Jon Snow was not sorry he had come. There were
wonders here as well. He had seen sunlight ashing on icy thin
waterfalls as they plunged over the lips of sheer stone cli s, and a
mountain meadow full of autumn wild owers, blue coldsnaps and
bright scarlet frost res and stands of piper’s grass in russet and
gold. He had peered down ravines so deep and black they seemed
certain to end in some hell, and he had ridden his garron over a
wind-eaten bridge of natural stone with nothing but sky to either
side. Eagles nested in the heights and came down to hunt the
valleys, circling e ortlessly on great blue-grey wings that seemed
almost part of the sky. Once he had watched a shadowcat stalk a
ram, owing down the mountainside like liquid smoke until it was
ready to pounce.
Now it is our turn to pounce. He wished he could move as sure and
silent as that shadowcat, and kill as quickly. Longclaw was sheathed
across his back, but he might not have room to use it. He carried
dirk and dagger for closer work. They will have weapons as well, and I
am not armored. He wondered who would prove the shadowcat by
night’s end, and who the ram.
For a long way they stayed to the trail, following its twists and
turns as it snaked along the side of the mountain, upward, ever
upward. Sometimes the mountain folded back on itself and they lost
sight of the re, but soon or late it would always reappear. The
path Stonesnake chose would never have served for the horses. In

places Jon had to put his back to the cold stone and shu e along
sideways like a crab, inch by inch. Even where the track widened it
was treacherous; there were cracks big enough to swallow a man’s
leg, rubble to stumble over, hollow places where the water pooled
by day and froze hard by night. One step and then another, Jon told
himself. One step and then another, and I will not fall.
He had not shaved since leaving the Fist of the First Men, and the
hair on his lip was soon sti with frost. Two hours into the climb,
the wind kicked up so ercely that it was all he could do to hunch
down and cling to the rock, praying he would not be blown o the
mountain. One step and then another, he resumed when the gale
subsided. One step and then another, and I will not fall.
Soon they were high enough so that looking down was best not
considered. There was nothing below but yawning blackness,
nothing above but moon and stars. “The mountain is your mother,”
Stonesnake had told him during an easier climb a few days past.
“Cling to her, press your face up against her teats, and she won’t
drop you.” Jon had made a joke of it, saying how he’d always
wondered who his mother was, but never thought to nd her in the
Frostfangs. It did not seem nearly so amusing now. One step and
then another, he thought, clinging tight.
The narrow track ended abruptly where a massive shoulder of
black granite thrust out from the side of the mountain. After the
bright moonlight, its shadow was so black that it felt like stepping
into a cave. “Straight up here,” the ranger said in a quiet voice. “We
want to get above them.” He peeled o his gloves, tucked them
through his belt, tied one end of his rope around his waist, the other
end around Jon. “Follow me when the rope grows taut.” The ranger
did not wait for an answer but started at once, moving upward with
ngers and feet, faster than Jon would have believed. The long rope
unwound slowly. Jon watched him closely, making note of how he
went, and where he found each handhold, and when the last loop of
hemp uncoiled, he took o his own gloves and followed, much
more slowly.
Stonesnake had passed the rope around the smooth spike of rock
he was waiting on, but as soon as Jon reached him he shook it loose

and was o again. This time there was no convenient cleft when he
reached the end of their tether, so he took out his felt-headed
hammer and drove a spike deep into a crack in the stone with a
series of gentle taps. Soft as the sounds were, they echoed o the
stone so loudly that Jon winced with every blow, certain that the
wildlings must hear them too. When the spike was secure,
Stonesnake secured the rope to it, and Jon started after him. Suck
on the mountain’s teat, he reminded himself. Don’t look down. Keep
your weight above your feet. Don’t look down. Look at the rock in front
of you. There’s a good handhold, yes. Don’t look down. I can catch a
breath on that ledge there, all I need to do is reach it. Never look down.
Once his foot slipped as he put his weight on it and his heart
stopped in his chest, but the gods were good and he did not fall. He
could feel the cold seeping o the rock into his ngers, but he dared
not don his gloves; gloves would slip, no matter how tight they
seemed, cloth and fur moving between skin and stone, and up here
that could kill him. His burned hand was sti ening up on him, and
soon it began to ache. Then he ripped open his thumbnail somehow,
and after that he left smears of blood wherever he put his hand. He
hoped he still had all his ngers by the end of the climb.
Up they went, and up, and up, black shadows creeping across the
moonlit wall of rock. Anyone down on the oor of the pass could
have seen them easily, but the mountain hid them from the view of
the wildlings by their re. They were close now, though. Jon could
sense it. Even so, he did not think of the foes who were waiting for
him, all unknowing, but of his brother at Winterfell. Bran used to
love to climb. I wish I had a tenth part of his courage.
The wall was broken two-thirds of the way up by a crooked
ssure of icy stone. Stonesnake reached down a hand to help him
up. He had donned his gloves again, so Jon did the same. The
ranger moved his head to the left, and the two of them crawled
along the shelf three hundred yards or more, until they could see
the dull orange glow beyond the lip of the cli .
The wildlings had built their watch re in a shallow depression
above the narrowest part of the pass, with a sheer drop below and
rock behind to shelter them from the worst of the wind. That same

windbreak allowed the black brothers to crawl within a few feet of
them, creeping along on their bellies until they were looking down
on the men they must kill.
One was asleep, curled up tight and buried beneath a great
mound of skins. Jon could see nothing of him but his hair, bright
red in the relight. The second sat close to the ames, feeding them
twigs and branches and complaining of the wind in a querulous
tone. The third watched the pass, though there was little to see,
only a vast bowl of darkness ringed by the snowy shoulders of the
mountains. It was the watcher who wore the horn.
Three. For a moment Jon was uncertain. There was only supposed
to be two. One was asleep, though. And whether there was two or
three or twenty, he still must do what he had come to do.
Stonesnake touched his arm, pointed at the wildling with the horn.
Jon nodded toward the one by the re. It felt queer, picking a man
to kill. Half the days of his life had been spent with sword and
shield, training for this moment. Did Robb feel this way before his rst
battle? he wondered, but there was no time to ponder the question.
Stonesnake moved as fast as his namesake, leaping down on the
wildlings in a rain of pebbles. Jon slid Longclaw from its sheath and
followed.
It all seemed to happen in a heartbeat. Afterward Jon could
admire the courage of the wildling who reached rst for his horn
instead of his blade. He got it to his lips, but before he could sound
it Stonesnake knocked the horn aside with a swipe of his
shortsword. Jon’s man leapt to his feet, thrusting at his face with a
burning brand. He could feel the heat of the ames as he inched
back. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the sleeper stirring, and
knew he must nish his man quick. When the brand swung again,
he bulled into it, swinging the bastard sword with both hands. The
Valyrian steel sheared through leather, fur, wool, and esh, but
when the wildling fell he twisted, ripping the sword from Jon’s
grasp. On the ground the sleeper sat up beneath his furs. Jon slid his
dirk free, grabbing the man by the hair and jamming the point of
the knife up under his chin as he reached for his—no, her—
His hand froze. “A girl.”

“A watcher,” said Stonesnake. “A wildling. Finish her.”
Jon could see fear and re in her eyes. Blood ran down her white
throat from where the point of his dirk had pricked her. One thrust
and it’s done, he told himself. He was so close he could smell onion
on her breath. She is no older than I am. Something about her made
him think of Arya, though they looked nothing at all alike. “Will
you yield?” he asked, giving the dirk a half turn. And if she doesn’t?
“I yield.” Her words steamed in the cold air.
“You’re our captive, then.” He pulled the dirk away from the soft
skin of her throat.
“Qhorin said nothing of taking captives,” said Stonesnake.
“He never said not to.” Jon let go his grip on the girl’s hair, and
she scuttled backward, away from them.
“She’s a spearwife.” Stonesnake gestured at the long-hafted axe
that lay beside her sleeping furs. “She was reaching for that when
you grabbed her. Give her half a chance and she’ll bury it between
your eyes.”
“I won’t give her half a chance.” Jon kicked the axe well out of
the girl’s reach. “Do you have a name?”
“Ygritte.” Her hand rubbed at her throat and came away bloody.
She stared at the wetness.
Sheathing his dirk, he wrenched Longclaw free from the body of
the man he’d killed. “You are my captive, Ygritte.”
“I gave you my name.”
“I’m Jon Snow.”
She inched. “An evil name.”
“A bastard name,” he said. “My father was Lord Eddard Stark of
Winterfell.”
The girl watched him warily, but Stonesnake gave a mordant
chuckle. “It’s the captive supposed to tell things, remember?” The
ranger thrust a long branch into the re. “Not that she will. I’ve
known wildlings to bite o their own tongues before they’d answer
a question.” When the end of the branch was blazing merrily, he
took two steps and ung it out over the pass. It fell through the
night spinning until it was lost to sight.
“You ought to burn them you killed,” said Ygritte.

“Need a bigger re for that, and big res burn bright.”
Stonesnake turned, his eyes scanning the black distance for any
spark of light. “Are there more wildlings close by, is that it?”
“Burn them,” the girl repeated stubbornly, “or it might be you’ll
need them swords again.”
Jon remembered dead Othor and his cold black hands. “Maybe
we should do as she says.”
“There are other ways.” Stonesnake knelt beside the man he’d
slain, stripped him of cloak and boots and belt and vest, then
hoisted the body over one thin shoulder and carried it to the edge.
He grunted as he tossed it over. A moment later they heard a wet,
heavy smack well below them. By then the ranger had the second
body down to the skin and was dragging it by the arms. Jon took
the feet and together they ung the dead man out in the blackness
of the night.
Ygritte watched and said nothing. She was older than he’d
thought at rst, Jon realized; maybe as old as twenty, but short for
her age, bandy-legged, with a round face, small hands, and a pug
nose. Her shaggy mop of red hair stuck out in all directions. She
looked plump as she crouched there, but most of that was layers of
fur and wool and leather. Underneath all that she could be as skinny
as Arya.
“Were you sent to watch for us?” Jon asked her.
“You, and others.”
Stonesnake warmed his hands over the re. “What waits beyond
the pass?”
“The free folk.”
“How many?”
“Hundreds and thousands. More than you ever saw, crow.” She
smiled. Her teeth were crooked, but very white.
She doesn’t know how many. “Why come here?”
Ygritte fell silent.
“What’s in the Frostfangs that your king could want? You can’t
stay here, there’s no food.”
She turned her face away from him.
“Do you mean to march on the Wall? When?”

She stared at the ames as if she could not hear him.
“Do you know anything of my uncle, Benjen Stark?”
Ygritte ignored him. Stonesnake laughed. “If she spits out her
tongue, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
A low rumbling growl echoed o the rock. Shadowcat, Jon knew
at once. As he rose he heard another, closer at hand. He pulled his
sword and turned, listening.
“They won’t trouble us,” Ygritte said. “It’s the dead they’ve come
for. Cats can smell blood six miles o . They’ll stay near the bodies
till they’ve eaten every last stringy shred o’ meat, and cracked the
bones for the marrow.”
Jon could hear the sounds of their feeding echoing o the rocks.
It gave him an uneasy feeling. The warmth of the re made him
realize how bone-tired he was, but he dared not sleep. He had taken
a captive, and it was on him to guard her. “Were they your kin?” he
asked her quietly. “The two we killed?”
“No more than you are.”
“Me?” He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You said you were the Bastard o’ Winterfell.”
“I am.”
“Who was your mother?”
“Some woman. Most of them are.” Someone had said that to him
once. He did not remember who.
She smiled again, a ash of white teeth. “And she never sung you
the song o’ the winter rose?”
“I never knew my mother. Or any such song.”
“Bael the Bard made it,” said Ygritte. “He was King-beyond-theWall a long time back. All the free folk know his songs, but might
be you don’t sing them in the south.”
“Winterfell’s not in the south,” Jon objected.
“Yes it is. Everything below the Wall’s south to us.”
He had never thought of it that way. “I suppose it’s all in where
you’re standing.”
“Aye,” Ygritte agreed. “It always is.”
“Tell me,” Jon urged her. It would be hours before Qhorin came
up, and a story would help keep him awake. “I want to hear this

tale of yours.”
“Might be you won’t like it much.”
“I’ll hear it all the same.”
“Brave black crow,” she mocked. “Well, long before he was king
over the free folk, Bael was a great raider.”
Stonesnake gave a snort. “A murderer, robber, and raper, is what
you mean.”
“That’s all in where you’re standing too,” Ygritte said. “The Stark
in Winterfell wanted Bael’s head, but never could take him, and the
taste o’ failure galled him. One day in his bitterness he called Bael a
craven who preyed only on the weak. When word o’ that got back,
Bael vowed to teach the lord a lesson. So he scaled the Wall,
skipped down the kingsroad, and walked into Winterfell one
winter’s night with harp in hand, naming himself Sygerrik of
Skagos. Sygerrik means ‘deceiver’ in the Old Tongue, that the First
Men spoke, and the giants still speak.”
“North or south, singers always nd a ready welcome, so Bael ate
at Lord Stark’s own table, and played for the lord in his high seat
until half the night was gone. The old songs he played, and new
ones he’d made himself, and he played and sang so well that when
he was done, the lord o ered to let him name his own reward. ‘All I
ask is a ower,’ Bael answered, ‘the fairest ower that blooms in
the gardens o’ Winterfell.’ ”
“Now as it happened the winter roses had only then come into
bloom, and no ower is so rare nor precious. So the Stark sent to his
glass gardens and commanded that the most beautiful o’ the winter
roses be plucked for the singer’s payment. And so it was done. But
when morning come, the singer had vanished … and so had Lord
Brandon’s maiden daughter. Her bed they found empty, but for the
pale blue rose that Bael had left on the pillow where her head had
lain.”
Jon had never heard this tale before. “Which Brandon was this
supposed to be? Brandon the Builder lived in the Age of Heroes,
thousands of years before Bael. There was Brandon the Burner and
his father Brandon the Shipwright, but—”

“This was Brandon the Daughterless,” Ygritte said sharply.
“Would you hear the tale, or no?”
He scowled. “Go on.”
“Lord Brandon had no other children. At his behest, the black
crows ew forth from their castles in the hundreds, but nowhere
could they nd any sign o’ Bael or this maid. For most a year they
searched, till the lord lost heart and took to his bed, and it seemed
as though the line o’ Starks was at its end. But one night as he lay
waiting to die, Lord Brandon heard a child’s cry. He followed the
sound and found his daughter back in her bedchamber, asleep with
a babe at her breast.”
“Bael had brought her back?”
“No. They had been in Winterfell all the time, hiding with the
dead beneath the castle. The maid loved Bael so dearly she bore him
a son, the song says … though if truth be told, all the maids love
Bael in them songs he wrote. Be that as it may, what’s certain is
that Bael left the child in payment for the rose he’d plucked
unasked, and that the boy grew to be the next Lord Stark. So there
it is—you have Bael’s blood in you, same as me.”
“It never happened,” Jon said.
She shrugged. “Might be it did, might be it didn’t. It is a good
song, though. My mother used to sing it to me. She was a woman
too, Jon Snow. Like yours.” She rubbed her throat where his dirk
had cut her. “The song ends when they nd the babe, but there is a
darker end to the story. Thirty years later, when Bael was Kingbeyond-the-Wall and led the free folk south, it was young Lord
Stark who met him at the Frozen Ford … and killed him, for Bael
would not harm his own son when they met sword to sword.”
“So the son slew the father instead,” said Jon.
“Aye,” she said, “but the gods hate kinslayers, even when they
kill unknowing. When Lord Stark returned from the battle and his
mother saw Bael’s head upon his spear, she threw herself from a
tower in her grief. Her son did not long outlive her. One o’ his lords
peeled the skin o him and wore him for a cloak.”
“Your Bael was a liar,” he told her, certain now.

“No,” Ygritte said, “but a bard’s truth is di erent than yours or
mine. Anyway, you asked for the story, so I told it.” She turned
away from him, closed her eyes, and seemed to sleep.
Dawn and Qhorin Halfhand arrived together. The black stones
had turned to grey and the eastern sky had gone indigo when
Stonesnake spied the rangers below, wending their way upward.
Jon woke his captive and held her by the arm as they descended to
meet them. Thankfully, there was another way o the mountain to
the north and west, along paths much gentler than the one that had
brought them up here. They were waiting in a narrow de le when
their brothers appeared, leading their garrons. Ghost raced ahead at
rst scent of them. Jon squatted to let the direwolf close his jaws
around his wrist, tugging his hand back and forth. It was a game
they played. But when he glanced up, he saw Ygritte watching with
eyes as wide and white as hen’s eggs.
Qhorin Halfhand made no comment when he saw the prisoner.
“There were three,” Stonesnake told him. No more than that.
“We passed two,” Ebben said, “or what the cats had left of them.”
He eyed the girl sourly, suspicion plain on his face.
“She yielded,” Jon felt compelled to say.
Qhorin’s face was impassive. “Do you know who I am?”
“Qhorin Halfhand.” The girl looked half a child beside him, but
she faced him boldly.
“Tell me true. If I fell into the hands of your people and yielded
myself, what would it win me?”
“A slower death than elsewise.”
The big ranger looked to Jon. “We have no food to feed her, nor
can we spare a man to watch her.”
“The way before us is perilous enough, lad,” said Squire
Dalbridge. “One shout when we need silence, and every man of us
is doomed.”
Ebben drew his dagger. “A steel kiss will keep her quiet.”
Jon’s throat was raw. He looked at them all helplessly. “She
yielded herself to me.”
“Then you must do what needs be done,” Qhorin Halfhand said.
“You are the blood of Winterfell and a man of the Night’s Watch.”

He looked at the others. “Come, brothers. Leave him to it. It will go
easier for him if we do not watch.” And he led them up the steep
twisting trail toward the pale pink glow of the sun where it broke
through a mountain cleft, and before very long only Jon and Ghost
remained with the wildling girl.
He thought Ygritte might try to run, but she only stood there,
waiting, looking at him. “You never killed a woman before, did
you?” When he shook his head, she said, “We die the same as men.
But you don’t need to do it. Mance would take you, I know he
would. There’s secret ways. Them crows would never catch us.”
“I’m as much a crow as they are,” Jon said.
She nodded, resigned. “Will you burn me, after?”
“I can’t. The smoke might be seen.”
“That’s so.” She shrugged. “Well, there’s worse places to end up
than the belly of a shadowcat.”
He pulled Longclaw over a shoulder. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Last night I was,” she admitted. “But now the sun’s up.” She
pushed her hair aside to bare her neck, and knelt before him.
“Strike hard and true, crow, or I’ll come back and haunt you.”
Longclaw was not so long or heavy a sword as his father’s Ice, but
it was Valyrian steel all the same. He touched the edge of the blade
to mark where the blow must fall, and Ygritte shivered. “That’s
cold,” she said. “Go on, be quick about it.”
He raised Longclaw over his head, both hands tight around the
grip. One cut, with all my weight behind it. He could give her a quick
clean death, at least. He was his father’s son. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?
“Do it,” she urged him after a moment. “Bastard. Do it. I can’t
stay brave forever.” When the blow did not fall she turned her head
to look at him.
Jon lowered his sword. “Go,” he muttered.
Ygritte stared.
“Now,” he said, “before my wits return. Go.”
She went.

SANSA

The southern sky was black with smoke. It rose swirling o

a
hundred distant res, its sooty ngers smudging out the stars.
Across the Blackwater Rush, a line of ame burned nightly from
horizon to horizon, while on this side the Imp had red the whole
riverfront: docks and warehouses, homes and brothels, everything
outside the city walls.
Even in the Red Keep, the air tasted of ashes. When Sansa found
Ser Dontos in the quiet of the godswood, he asked if she’d been
crying. “It’s only from the smoke,” she lied. “It looks as though half
the kingswood is burning.”
“Lord Stannis wants to smoke out the Imp’s savages.” Dontos
swayed as he spoke, one hand on the trunk of a chestnut tree. A
wine stain discolored the red-and-yellow motley of his tunic. “They
kill his scouts and raid his baggage train. And the wildlings have
been lighting res too. The Imp told the queen that Stannis had
better train his horses to eat ash, since he would nd no blade of
grass. I heard him say so. I hear all sorts of things as a fool that I
never heard when I was a knight. They talk as though I am not
there, and”—he leaned close, breathing his winey breath right in
her face—“the Spider pays in gold for any little tri e. I think Moon
Boy has been his for years.”
He is drunk again. My poor Florian he names himself, and so he is.
But he is all I have. “Is it true Lord Stannis burned the godswood at
Storm’s End?”

Dontos nodded. “He made a great pyre of the trees as an o ering
to his new god. The red priestess made him do it. They say she rules
him now, body and soul. He’s vowed to burn the Great Sept of
Baelor too, if he takes the city.”
“Let him.” When Sansa had rst beheld the Great Sept with its
marble walls and seven crystal towers, she’d thought it was the
most beautiful building in the world, but that had been before
Jo rey beheaded her father on its steps. “I want it burned.”
“Hush, child, the gods will hear you.”
“Why should they? They never hear my prayers.”
“Yes they do. They sent me to you, didn’t they?”
Sansa picked at the bark of a tree. She felt light-headed, almost
feverish. “They sent you, but what good have you done? You
promised you would take me home, but I’m still here.”
Dontos patted her arm. “I’ve spoken to a certain man I know, a
good friend to me … and you, my lady. He will hire a swift ship to
take us to safety, when the time is right.”
“The time is right now,” Sansa insisted, “before the ghting
starts. They’ve forgotten about me. I know we could slip away if we
tried.”
“Child, child.” Dontos shook his head. “Out of the castle, yes, we
could do that, but the city gates are more heavily guarded than
ever, and the Imp has even closed o the river.”
It was true. The Blackwater Rush was as empty as Sansa had ever
seen it. All the ferries had been withdrawn to the north bank, and
the trading galleys had ed or been seized by the Imp to be made
over for battle. The only ships to be seen were the king’s war
galleys. They rowed endlessly up and down, staying to the deep
water in the middle of the river and exchanging ights of arrows
with Stannis’s archers on the south shore.
Lord Stannis himself was still on the march, but his vanguard had
appeared two nights ago during the black of the moon. King’s
Landing had woken to the sight of their tents and banners. They
were ve thousand, Sansa had heard, near as many as all the gold
cloaks in the city. They ew the red or green apples of House
Fossoway, the turtle of Estermont, and the fox-and- owers of

Florent, and their commander was Ser Guyard Morrigen, a famous
southron knight who men now called Guyard the Green. His
standard showed a crow in ight, its black wings spread wide
against a storm-green sky. But it was the pale yellow banners that
worried the city. Long ragged tails streamed behind them like
ickering ames, and in place of a lord’s sigil they bore the device
of a god: the burning heart of the Lord of Light.
“When Stannis comes, he’ll have ten times as many men as
Jo rey does, everyone says so.”
Dontos squeezed her shoulder. “The size of his host does not
matter, sweetling, so long as they are on the wrong side of the
river. Stannis cannot cross without ships.”
“He has ships. More than Jo rey.”
“It’s a long sail from Storm’s End, the eet will need to come up
Massey’s Hook and through the Gullet and across Blackwater Bay.
Perhaps the good gods will send a storm to sweep them from the
seas.” Dontos gave a hopeful smile. “It is not easy for you, I know.
You must be patient, child. When my friend returns to the city, we
shall have our ship. Have faith in your Florian, and try not to be
afraid.”
Sansa dug her nails into her hand. She could feel the fear in her
tummy, twisting and pinching, worse every day. Nightmares of the
day Princess Myrcella had sailed still troubled her sleep; dark
su ocating dreams that woke her in the black of night, struggling
for breath. She could hear the people screaming at her, screaming
without words, like animals. They had hemmed her in and thrown
lth at her and tried to pull her o her horse, and would have done
worse if the Hound had not cut his way to her side. They had torn
the High Septon to pieces and smashed in Ser Aron’s head with a
rock. Try not to be afraid! he said.
The whole city was afraid. Sansa could see it from the castle
walls. The smallfolk were hiding themselves behind closed shutters
and barred doors as if that would keep them safe. The last time
King’s Landing had fallen, the Lannisters looted and raped as they
pleased and put hundreds to the sword, even though the city had

opened its gates. This time the Imp meant to ght, and a city that
fought could expect no mercy at all.
Dontos was prattling on. “If I were still a knight, I should have to
put on armor and man the walls with the rest. I ought to kiss King
Jo rey’s feet and thank him sweetly.”
“If you thanked him for making you a fool, he’d make you a
knight again,” Sansa said sharply.
Dontos chuckled. “My Jonquil’s a clever girl, isn’t she?”
“Jo rey and his mother say I’m stupid.”
“Let them. You’re safer that way, sweetling. Queen Cersei and the
Imp and Lord Varys and their like, they all watch each other keen as
hawks, and pay this one and that one to spy out what the others are
doing, but no one ever troubles themselves about Lady Tanda’s
daughter, do they?” Dontos covered his mouth to sti e a burp.
“Gods preserve you, my little Jonquil.” He was growing weepy. The
wine did that to him. “Give your Florian a little kiss now. A kiss for
luck.” He swayed toward her.
Sansa dodged the wet groping lips, kissed him lightly on an
unshaven cheek, and bid him good night. It took all her strength not
to weep. She had been weeping too much of late. It was unseemly,
she knew, but she could not seem to help herself; the tears would
come, sometimes over a tri e, and nothing she did could hold them
back.
The drawbridge to Maegor’s Holdfast was unguarded. The Imp
had moved most of the gold cloaks to the city walls, and the white
knights of the Kingsguard had duties more important than dogging
her heels. Sansa could go where she would so long as she did not try
to leave the castle, but there was nowhere she wanted to go.
She crossed over the dry moat with its cruel iron spikes and made
her way up the narrow turnpike stair, but when she reached the
door of her bedchamber she could not bear to enter. The very walls
of the room made her feel trapped; even with the window opened
wide it felt as though there were no air to breathe.
Turning back to the stair, Sansa climbed. The smoke blotted out
the stars and the thin crescent of moon, so the roof was dark and
thick with shadows. Yet from here she could see everything: the

Red Keep’s tall towers and great cornerforts, the maze of city
streets beyond, to south and west the river running black, the bay
to the east, the columns of smoke and cinders, and res, res
everywhere. Soldiers crawled over the city walls like ants with
torches, and crowded the hoardings that had sprouted from the
ramparts. Down by the Mud Gate, outlined against the drifting
smoke, she could make out the vague shape of the three huge
catapults, the biggest anyone had ever seen, overtopping the walls
by a good twenty feet. Yet none of it made her feel less fearful. A
stab went through her, so sharp that Sansa sobbed and clutched at
her belly. She might have fallen, but a shadow moved suddenly, and
strong ngers grabbed her arm and steadied her.
She grabbed a merlon for support, her ngers scrabbling at the
rough stone. “Let go of me,” she cried. “Let go.”
“The little bird thinks she has wings, does she? Or do you mean
to end up crippled like that brother of yours?”
Sansa twisted in his grasp. “I wasn’t going to fall. It was
only … you startled me, that’s all.”
“You mean I scared you. And still do.”
She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I thought I was alone,
I …” She glanced away.
“The little bird still can’t bear to look at me, can she?” The Hound
released her. “You were glad enough to see my face when the mob
had you, though. Remember?”
Sansa remembered all too well. She remembered the way they
had howled, the feel of the blood running down her cheek from
where the stone had struck her, and the garlic stink on the breath of
the man who had tried to pull her from her horse. She could still
feel the cruel pinch of ngers on her wrist as she lost her balance
and began to fall.
She’d thought she was going to die then, but the ngers had
twitched, all ve at once, and the man had shrieked loud as a horse.
When his hand fell away, another hand, stronger, shoved her back
into her saddle. The man with the garlicky breath was on the
ground, blood pumping out the stump of his arm, but there were
others all around, some with clubs in hand. The Hound leapt at

them, his sword a blur of steel that trailed a red mist as it swung.
When they broke and ran before him he had laughed, his terrible
burned face for a moment transformed.
She made herself look at that face now, really look. It was only
courteous, and a lady must never forget her courtesies. The scars are
not the worst part, nor even the way his mouth twitches. It’s his eyes. She
had never seen eyes so full of anger. “I … I should have come to
you after,” she said haltingly. “To thank you, for … for saving
me … you were so brave.”
“Brave?” His laugh was half a snarl. “A dog doesn’t need courage
to chase o rats. They had me thirty to one, and not a man of them
dared face me.”
She hated the way he talked, always so harsh and angry. “Does it
give you joy to scare people?”
“No, it gives me joy to kill people.” His mouth twitched. “Wrinkle
up your face all you like, but spare me this false piety. You were a
high lord’s get. Don’t tell me Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell never
killed a man.”
“That was his duty. He never liked it.”
“Is that what he told you?” Clegane laughed again. “Your father
lied. Killing is the sweetest thing there is.” He drew his longsword.
“Here’s your truth. Your precious father found that out on Baelor’s
steps. Lord of Winterfell, Hand of the King, Warden of the North,
the mighty Eddard Stark, of a line eight thousand years old … but
Ilyn Payne’s blade went through his neck all the same, didn’t it? Do
you remember the dance he did when his head came o his
shoulders?”
Sansa hugged herself, suddenly cold. “Why are you always so
hateful? I was thanking you …”
“Just as if I was one of those true knights you love so well, yes.
What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it’s all taking
favors from ladies and looking ne in gold plate? Knights are for
killing.” He laid the edge of his longsword against her neck, just
under her ear. Sansa could feel the sharpness of the steel. “I killed
my rst man at twelve. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve killed since
then. High lords with old names, fat rich men dressed in velvet,

knights pu ed up like bladders with their honors, yes, and women
and children too—they’re all meat, and I’m the butcher. Let them
have their lands and their gods and their gold. Let them have their
sers.” Sandor Clegane spat at her feet to show what he thought of
that. “So long as I have this,” he said, lifting the sword from her
throat, “there’s no man on earth I need fear.”
Except your brother, Sansa thought, but she had better sense than
to say it aloud. He is a dog, just as he says. A half-wild, mean-tempered
dog that bites any hand that tries to pet him, and yet will savage any
man who tries to hurt his masters. “Not even the men across the
river?”
Clegane’s eyes turned toward the distant res. “All this burning.”
He sheathed his sword. “Only cowards ght with re.”
“Lord Stannis is no coward.”
“He’s not the man his brother was either. Robert never let a little
thing like a river stop him.”
“What will you do when he crosses?”
“Fight. Kill. Die, maybe.”
“Aren’t you afraid? The gods might send you down to some
terrible hell for all the evil you’ve done.”
“What evil?” He laughed. “What gods?”
“The gods who made us all.”
“All?” he mocked. “Tell me, little bird, what kind of god makes a
monster like the Imp, or a halfwit like Lady Tanda’s daughter? If
there are gods, they made sheep so wolves could eat mutton, and
they made the weak for the strong to play with.”
“True knights protect the weak.”
He snorted. “There are no true knights, no more than there are
gods. If you can’t protect yourself, die and get out of the way of
those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, don’t
ever believe any di erent.”
Sansa backed away from him. “You’re awful.”
“I’m honest. It’s the world that’s awful. Now y away, little bird,
I’m sick of you peeping at me.”
Wordless, she ed. She was afraid of Sandor Clegane … and yet,
some part of her wished that Ser Dontos had a little of the Hound’s

ferocity. There are gods, she told herself, and there are true knights
too. All the stories can’t be lies.
That night Sansa dreamed of the riot again. The mob surged
around her, shrieking, a maddened beast with a thousand faces.
Everywhere she turned she saw faces twisted into monstrous
inhuman masks. She wept and told them she had never done them
hurt, yet they dragged her from her horse all the same. “No,” she
cried, “no, please, don’t, don’t,” but no one paid her any heed. She
shouted for Ser Dontos, for her brothers, for her dead father and her
dead wolf, for gallant Ser Loras who had given her a red rose once,
but none of them came. She called for the heroes from the songs,
for Florian and Ser Ryam Redwyne and Prince Aemon the
Dragonknight, but no one heard. Women swarmed over her like
weasels, pinching her legs and kicking her in the belly, and
someone hit her in the face and she felt her teeth shatter. Then she
saw the bright glimmer of steel. The knife plunged into her belly
and tore and tore and tore, until there was nothing left of her down
there but shiny wet ribbons.
When she woke, the pale light of morning was slanting through
her window, yet she felt as sick and achy as if she had not slept at
all. There was something sticky on her thighs. When she threw back
the blanket and saw the blood, all she could think was that her
dream had somehow come true. She remembered the knives inside
her, twisting and ripping. She squirmed away in horror, kicking at
the sheets and falling to the oor, breathing raggedly, naked,
bloodied, and afraid.
But as she crouched there, on her hands and knees, understanding
came. “No, please,” Sansa whimpered, “please, no.” She didn’t want
this happening to her, not now, not here, not now, not now, not
now, not now.
Madness took hold of her. Pulling herself up by the bedpost, she
went to the basin and washed between her legs, scrubbing away all
the stickiness. By the time she was done, the water was pink with
blood. When her maidservants saw it they would know. Then she
remembered the bedclothes. She rushed back to the bed and stared
in horror at the dark red stain and the tale it told. All she could

think was that she had to get rid of it, or else they’d see. She
couldn’t let them see, or they’d marry her to Jo rey and make her
lay with him.
Snatching up her knife, Sansa hacked at the sheet, cutting out the
stain. If they ask me about the hole, what will I say? Tears ran down
her face. She pulled the torn sheet from the bed, and the stained
blanket as well. I’ll have to burn them. She balled up the evidence,
stu ed it in the replace, drenched it in oil from her bedside lamp,
and lit it a re. Then she realized that the blood had soaked through
the sheet into the featherbed, so she bundled that up as well, but it
was big and cumbersome, hard to move. Sansa could get only half
of it into the re. She was on her knees, struggling to shove the
mattress into the ames as thick grey smoke eddied around her and
lled the room, when the door burst open and she heard her maid
gasp.
In the end it took three of them to pull her away. And it was all
for nothing. The bedclothes were burnt, but by the time they
carried her o her thighs were bloody again. It was as if her own
body had betrayed her to Jo rey, unfurling a banner of Lannister
crimson for all the world to see.
When the re was out, they carried o the singed featherbed,
fanned away the worst of the smoke, and brought up a tub. Women
came and went, muttering and looking at her strangely. They lled
the tub with scalding hot water, bathed her and washed her hair and
gave her a cloth to wear between her legs. By then Sansa was calm
again, and ashamed for her folly. The smoke had ruined most of her
clothing. One of the women went away and came back with a green
wool shift that was almost her size. “It’s not as pretty as your own
things, but it will serve,” she announced when she’d pulled it down
over Sansa’s head. “Your shoes weren’t burned, so at least you
won’t need to go barefoot to the queen.”
Cersei Lannister was breaking her fast when Sansa was ushered
into her solar. “You may sit,” the queen said graciously. “Are you
hungry?” She gestured at the table. There was porridge, honey,
milk, boiled eggs, and crisp fried sh.

The sight of the food made Sansa feel ill. Her tummy was tied in
a knot. “No, thank you, Your Grace.”
“I don’t blame you. Between Tyrion and Lord Stannis, everything
I eat tastes of ash. And now you’re setting res as well. What did
you hope to accomplish?”
Sansa lowered her head. “The blood frightened me.”
“The blood is the seal of your womanhood. Lady Catelyn might
have prepared you. You’ve had your rst owering, no more.”
Sansa had never felt less owery. “My lady mother told me, but
I … I thought it would be di erent.”
“Di erent how?”
“I don’t know. Less … less messy, and more magical.”
Queen Cersei laughed. “Wait until you birth a child, Sansa. A
woman’s life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you’ll learn that
soon enough … and the parts that look like magic often turn out to
be messiest of all.” She took a sip of milk. “So now you are a
woman. Do you have the least idea of what that means?”
“It means that I am now t to be wedded and bedded,” said
Sansa, “and to bear children for the king.”
The queen gave a wry smile. “A prospect that no longer entices
you as it once did, I can see. I will not fault you for that. Jo rey has
always been di cult. Even his birth … I labored a day and a half to
bring him forth. You cannot imagine the pain, Sansa. I screamed so
loudly that I fancied Robert might hear me in the kingswood.”
“His Grace was not with you?”
“Robert? Robert was hunting. That was his custom. Whenever my
time was near, my royal husband would ee to the trees with his
huntsmen and hounds. When he returned he would present me with
some pelts or a stag’s head, and I would present him with a baby.
“Not that I wanted him to stay, mind you. I had Grand Maester
Pycelle and an army of midwives, and I had my brother. When they
told Jaime he was not allowed in the birthing room, he smiled and
asked which of them proposed to keep him out.
“Jo rey will show you no such devotion, I fear. You could thank
your sister for that, if she weren’t dead. He’s never been able to
forget that day on the Trident when you saw her shame him, so he

shames you in turn. You’re stronger than you seem, though. I expect
you’ll survive a bit of humiliation. I did. You may never love the
king, but you’ll love his children.”
“I love His Grace with all my heart,” Sansa said.
The queen sighed. “You had best learn some new lies, and
quickly. Lord Stannis will not like that one, I promise you.”
“The new High Septon said that the gods will never permit Lord
Stannis to win, since Jo rey is the rightful king.”
A half smile ickered across the queen’s face. “Robert’s trueborn
son and heir. Though Jo would cry whenever Robert picked him
up. His Grace did not like that. His bastards had always gurgled at
him happily, and sucked his nger when he put it in their little
baseborn mouths. Robert wanted smiles and cheers, always, so he
went where he found them, to his friends and his whores. Robert
wanted to be loved. My brother Tyrion has the same disease. Do
you want to be loved, Sansa?”
“Everyone wants to be loved.”
“I see owering hasn’t made you any brighter,” said Cersei.
“Sansa, permit me to share a bit of womanly wisdom with you on
this very special day. Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will
kill you all the same.”

JON

It was dark in the Skirling Pass. The great stone

anks of the
mountains hid the sun for most of the day, so they rode in shadow,
the breath of man and horse steaming in the cold air. Icy ngers of
water trickled down from the snowpack above into small frozen
pools that cracked and broke beneath the hooves of their garrons.
Sometimes they would see a few weeds struggling from some crack
in the rock or a splotch of pale lichen, but there was no grass, and
they were above the trees now.
The track was as steep as it was narrow, wending its way ever
upward. Where the pass was so constricted that rangers had to go
single le, Squire Dalbridge would take the lead, scanning the
heights as he went, his longbow ever close to hand. It was said he
had the keenest eyes in the Night’s Watch.
Ghost padded restlessly by Jon’s side. From time to time he
would stop and turn, his ears pricked, as if he heard something
behind them. Jon did not think the shadowcats would attack living
men, not unless they were starving, but he loosened Longclaw in its
scabbard even so.
A wind-carved arch of grey stone marked the highest point of the
pass. Here the way broadened as it began its long descent toward
the valley of the Milkwater. Qhorin decreed that they would rest
here until the shadows began to grow again. “Shadows are friends
to men in black,” he said.

Jon saw the sense of that. It would be pleasant to ride in the light
for a time, to let the bright mountain sun soak through their cloaks
and chase the chill from their bones, but they dared not. Where
there were three watchers there might be others, waiting to sound
the alarm.
Stonesnake curled up under his ragged fur cloak and was asleep
almost at once. Jon shared his salt beef with Ghost while Ebben and
Squire Dalbridge fed the horses. Qhorin Halfhand sat with his back
to a rock, honing the edge of his longsword with long slow strokes.
Jon watched the ranger for a few moments, then summoned his
courage and went to him. “My lord,” he said, “you never asked me
how it went. With the girl.”
“I am no lord, Jon Snow.” Qhorin slid the stone smoothly along
the steel with his two- ngered hand.
“She told me Mance would take me, if I ran with her.”
“She told you true.”
“She even claimed we were kin. She told me a story …”
“… of Bael the Bard and the rose of Winterfell. So Stonesnake
told me. It happens I know the song. Mance would sing it of old,
when he came back from a ranging. He had a passion for wildling
music. Aye, and for their women as well.”
“You knew him?”
“We all knew him.” His voice was sad.
They were friends as well as brothers, Jon realized, and now they are
sworn foes. “Why did he desert?”
“For a wench, some say. For a crown, others would have it.”
Qhorin tested the edge of his sword with the ball of his thumb. “He
liked women, Mance did, and he was not a man whose knees bent
easily, that’s true. But it was more than that. He loved the wild
better than the Wall. It was in his blood. He was wildling born,
taken as a child when some raiders were put to the sword. When he
left the Shadow Tower he was only going home again.”
“Was he a good ranger?”
“He was the best of us,” said the Halfhand, “and the worst as
well. Only fools like Thoren Smallwood despise the wildlings. They
are as brave as we are, Jon. As strong, as quick, as clever. But they

have no discipline. They name themselves the free folk, and each
one thinks himself as good as a king and wiser than a maester.
Mance was the same. He never learned how to obey.”
“No more than me,” said Jon quietly.
Qhorin’s shrewd grey eyes seemed to see right through him. “So
you let her go?” He did not sound the least surprised.
“You know?”
“Now. Tell me why you spared her.”
It was hard to put into words. “My father never used a headsman.
He said he owed it to men he killed to look into their eyes and hear
their last words. And when I looked into Ygritte’s eyes, I …” Jon
stared down at his hands helplessly. “I know she was an enemy, but
there was no evil in her.”
“No more than in the other two.”
“It was their lives or ours,” Jon said. “If they had seen us, if they
had sounded that horn …”
“The wildlings would hunt us down and slay us, true enough.”
“Stonesnake has the horn now, though, and we took Ygritte’s
knife and axe. She’s behind us, afoot, unarmed …”
“And not like to be a threat,” Qhorin agreed. “If I had needed her
dead, I would have left her with Ebben, or done the thing myself.”
“Then why did you command it of me?”
“I did not command it. I told you to do what needed to be done,
and left you to decide what that would be.” Qhorin stood and slid
his longsword back into its scabbard. “When I want a mountain
scaled, I call on Stonesnake. Should I need to put an arrow through
the eye of some foe across a windy battle eld, I summon Squire
Dalbridge. Ebben can make any man give up his secrets. To lead
men you must know them, Jon Snow. I know more of you now than
I did this morning.”
“And if I had slain her?” asked Jon.
“She would be dead, and I would know you better than I had
before. But enough talk. You ought be sleeping. We have leagues to
go, and dangers to face. You will need your strength.”
Jon did not think sleep would come easily, but he knew the
Halfhand was right. He found a place out of the wind, beneath an

overhang of rock, and took o his cloak to use it for a blanket.
“Ghost,” he called. “Here. To me.” He always slept better with the
great white wolf beside him; there was comfort in the smell of him,
and welcome warmth in that shaggy pale fur. This time, though,
Ghost did no more than look at him. Then he turned away and
padded around the garrons, and quick as that he was gone. He wants
to hunt, Jon thought. Perhaps there were goats in these mountains.
The shadowcats must live on something. “Just don’t try and bring
down a ’cat,” he muttered. Even for a direwolf, that would be
dangerous. He tugged his cloak over him and stretched out beneath
the rock.
When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of direwolves.
There were ve of them when there should have been six, and
they were scattered, each apart from the others. He felt a deep ache
of emptiness, a sense of incompleteness. The forest was vast and
cold, and they were so small, so lost. His brothers were out there
somewhere, and his sister, but he had lost their scent. He sat on his
haunches and lifted his head to the darkening sky, and his cry
echoed through the forest, a long lonely mournful sound. As it died
away, he pricked up his ears, listening for an answer, but the only
sound was the sigh of blowing snow.
Jon?
The call came from behind him, softer than a whisper, but strong
too. Can a shout be silent? He turned his head, searching for his
brother, for a glimpse of a lean grey shape moving beneath the
trees, but there was nothing, only …
A weirwood.
It seemed to sprout from solid rock, its pale roots twisting up
from a myriad of ssures and hairline cracks. The tree was slender
compared to other weirwoods he had seen, no more than a sapling,
yet it was growing as he watched, its limbs thickening as they
reached for the sky. Wary, he circled the smooth white trunk until
he came to the face. Red eyes looked at him. Fierce eyes they were,
yet glad to see him. The weirwood had his brother’s face. Had his
brother always had three eyes?
Not always, came the silent shout. Not before the crow.

He sni ed at the bark, smelled wolf and tree and boy, but behind
that there were other scents, the rich brown smell of warm earth
and the hard grey smell of stone and something else, something
terrible. Death, he knew. He was smelling death. He cringed back,
his hair bristling, and bared his fangs.
Don’t be afraid, I like it in the dark. No one can see you, but you can
see them. But rst you have to open your eyes. See? Like this. And the
tree reached down and touched him.
And suddenly he was back in the mountains, his paws sunk deep
in a drift of snow as he stood upon the edge of a great precipice.
Before him the Skirling Pass opened up into airy emptiness, and a
long vee-shaped valley lay spread beneath him like a quilt, awash in
all the colors of an autumn afternoon.
A vast blue-white wall plugged one end of the vale, squeezing
between the mountains as if it had shouldered them aside, and for a
moment he thought he had dreamed himself back to Castle Black.
Then he realized he was looking at a river of ice several thousand
feet high. Under that glittering cold cli was a great lake, its deep
cobalt waters re ecting the snowcapped peaks that ringed it. There
were men down in the valley, he saw now; many men, thousands, a
huge host. Some were tearing great holes in the half-frozen ground,
while others trained for war. He watched as a swarming mass of
riders charged a shield wall, astride horses no larger than ants. The
sound of their mock battle was a rustling of steel leaves, drifting
faintly on the wind. Their encampment had no plan to it; he saw no
ditches, no sharpened stakes, no neat rows of horse lines.
Everywhere crude earthen shelters and hide tents sprouted
haphazardly, like a pox on the face of the earth. He spied untidy
mounds of hay, smelled goats and sheep, horses and pigs, dogs in
great profusion. Tendrils of dark smoke rose from a thousand
cook res.
This is no army, no more than it is a town. This is a whole people
come together.
Across the long lake, one of the mounds moved. He watched it
more closely and saw that it was not dirt at all, but alive, a shaggy
lumbering beast with a snake for a nose and tusks larger than those

of the greatest boar that had ever lived. And the thing riding it was
huge as well, and his shape was wrong, too thick in the leg and hips
to be a man.
Then a sudden gust of cold made his fur stand up, and the air
thrilled to the sound of wings. As he lifted his eyes to the ice-white
mountain heights above, a shadow plummeted out of the sky. A
shrill scream split the air. He glimpsed blue-grey pinions spread
wide, shutting out the sun …
“Ghost!” Jon shouted, sitting up. He could still feel the talons, the
pain. “Ghost, to me!”
Ebben appeared, grabbed him, shook him. “Quiet! You mean to
bring the wildlings down on us? What’s wrong with you, boy?”
“A dream,” said Jon feebly. “I was Ghost, I was on the edge of
the mountain looking down on a frozen river, and something
attacked me. A bird … an eagle, I think …”
Squire Dalbridge smiled. “It’s always pretty women in my
dreams. Would that I dreamed more often.”
Qhorin came up beside him. “A frozen river, you say?”
“The Milkwater ows from a great lake at the foot of a glacier,”
Stonesnake put in.
“There was a tree with my brother’s face. The wildlings … there
were thousands, more than I ever knew existed. And giants riding
mammoths.” From the way the light had shifted, Jon judged that he
had been asleep for four or ve hours. His head ached, and the back
of his neck where the talons had burned through him. But that was in
the dream.
“Tell me all that you remember, from rst to last,” said Qhorin
Halfhand.
Jon was confused. “It was only a dream.”
“A wolf dream,” the Halfhand said. “Craster told the Lord
Commander that the wildlings were gathering at the source of the
Milkwater. That may be why you dreamed it. Or it may be that you
saw what waits for us, a few hours farther on. Tell me.”
It made him feel half a fool to talk of such things to Qhorin and
the other rangers, but he did as he was commanded. None of the

black brothers laughed at him, however. By the time he was done,
even Squire Dalbridge was no longer smiling.
“Skinchanger?” said Ebben grimly, looking at the Halfhand. Does
he mean the eagle? Jon wondered. Or me? Skinchangers and wargs
belonged in Old Nan’s stories, not in the world he had lived in all
his life. Yet here, in this strange bleak wilderness of rock and ice, it
was not hard to believe.
“The cold winds are rising. Mormont feared as much. Benjen
Stark felt it as well. Dead men walk and the trees have eyes again.
Why should we balk at wargs and giants?”
“Does this mean my dreams are true as well?” asked Squire
Dalbridge. “Lord Snow can keep his mammoths, I want my
women.”
“Man and boy I’ve served the Watch, and ranged as far as any,”
said Ebben. “I’ve seen the bones of giants, and heard many a queer
tale, but no more. I want to see them with my own eyes.”
“Be careful they don’t see you, Ebben,” Stonesnake said.
Ghost did not reappear as they set out again. The shadows
covered the oor of the pass by then, and the sun was sinking fast
toward the jagged twin peaks of the huge mountain the rangers
named Forktop. If the dream was true … Even the thought scared
him. Could the eagle have hurt Ghost, or knocked him o the
precipice? And what about the weirwood with his brother’s face,
that smelled of death and darkness?
The last ray of sun vanished behind the peaks of Forktop.
Twilight lled the Skirling Pass. It seemed to grow colder almost at
once. They were no longer climbing. In fact, the ground had begun
to descend, though as yet not sharply. It was littered with cracks
and broken boulders and tumbled heaps of rock. It will be dark soon,
and still no sight of Ghost. It was tearing Jon apart, yet he dare not
shout for the direwolf as he would have liked. Other things might
be listening as well.
“Qhorin,” Squire Dalbridge called softly. “There. Look.”
The eagle was perched on a spine of rock far above them,
outlined against the darkening sky. We’ve seen other eagles, Jon
thought. That need not be the one I dreamed of.

Even so, Ebben would have loosed a shaft at it, but the squire
stopped him. “The bird’s well out of bowshot.”
“I don’t like it watching us.”
The squire shrugged. “Nor me, but you won’t stop it. Only waste
a good arrow.”
Qhorin sat in his saddle, studying the eagle for a long time. “We
press on,” he nally said. The rangers resumed their descent.
Ghost, Jon wanted to shout, where are you?
He was about to follow Qhorin and the others when he glimpsed
a ash of white between two boulders. A patch of old snow, he
thought, until he saw it stir. He was o his horse at once. As he
went to his knees, Ghost lifted his head. His neck glistened wetly,
but he made no sound when Jon peeled o a glove and touched
him. The talons had torn a bloody path through fur and esh, but
the bird had not been able to snap his neck.
Qhorin Halfhand was standing over him. “How bad?”
As if in answer, Ghost struggled to his feet.
“The wolf is strong,” the ranger said. “Ebben, water. Stonesnake,
your skin of wine. Hold him still, Jon.”
Together they washed the caked blood from the direwolf’s fur.
Ghost struggled and bared his teeth when Qhorin poured the wine
into the ragged red gashes the eagle had left him, but Jon wrapped
his arms around him and murmured soothing words, and soon
enough the wolf quieted. By the time they’d ripped a strip from
Jon’s cloak to wrap the wounds, full dark had settled. Only a
dusting of stars set the black of sky apart from the black of stone.
“Do we press on?” Stonesnake wanted to know.
Qhorin went to his garron. “Back, not on.”
“Back?” Jon was taken by surprise.
“Eagles have sharper eyes than men. We are seen. So now we
run.” The Halfhand wound a long black scarf around his face and
swung up into the saddle.
The other rangers exchanged a look, but no man thought to
argue. One by one they mounted and turned their mounts toward
home. “Ghost, come,” he called, and the direwolf followed, a pale
shadow moving through the night.

All night they rode, feeling their way up the twisting pass and
through the stretches of broken ground. The wind grew stronger.
Sometimes it was so dark that they dismounted and went ahead on
foot, each man leading his garron. Once Ebben suggested that some
torches might serve them well, but Qhorin said, “No re,” and that
was the end of that. They reached the stone bridge at the summit
and began to descend again. O in the darkness a shadowcat
screamed in fury, its voice bouncing o the rocks so it seemed as
though a dozen other ’cats were giving answer. Once Jon thought
he saw a pair of glowing eyes on a ledge overhead, as big as harvest
moons.
In the black hour before dawn, they stopped to let the horses
drink and fed them each a handful of oats and a twist or two of hay.
“We are not far from the place the wildlings died,” said Qhorin.
“From there, one man could hold a hundred. The right man.” He
looked at Squire Dalbridge.
The squire bowed his head. “Leave me as many arrows as you can
spare, brothers.” He stroked his longbow. “And see my garron has
an apple when you’re home. He’s earned it, poor beastie.”
He’s staying to die, Jon realized.
Qhorin clasped the squire’s forearm with a gloved hand. “If the
eagle ies down for a look at you …”
“… he’ll sprout some new feathers.”
The last Jon saw of Squire Dalbridge was his back as he
clambered up the narrow path to the heights.
When dawn broke, Jon looked up into a cloudless sky and saw a
speck moving through the blue. Ebben saw it too, and cursed, but
Qhorin told him to be quiet. “Listen.”
Jon held his breath, and heard it. Far away and behind them, the
call of a hunting horn echoed against the mountains.
“And now they come,” said Qhorin.

TYRION

Pod dressed him for his ordeal in a plush velvet tunic of Lannister

crimson and brought him his chain of o ce. Tyrion left it on the
bedside table. His sister misliked being reminded that he was the
King’s Hand, and he did not wish to in ame the relations between
them any further.
Varys caught up with him as he was crossing the yard. “My lord,”
he said, a little out of breath. “You had best read this at once.” He
held out a parchment in a soft white hand. “A report from the
north.”
“Good news or bad?” Tyrion asked.
“That is not for me to judge.”
Tyrion unrolled the parchment. He had to squint to read the
words in the torchlit yard. “Gods be good,” he said softly. “Both of
them?”
“I fear so, my lord. It is so sad. So grievous sad. And them so
young and innocent.”
Tyrion remembered how the wolves had howled when the Stark
boy had fallen. Are they howling now, I wonder? “Have you told
anyone else?” he asked.
“Not as yet, though of course I must.”
He rolled up the letter. “I’ll tell my sister.” He wanted to see how
she took the news. He wanted that very much.
The queen looked especially lovely that night. She wore a low-cut
gown of deep green velvet that brought out the color of her eyes.

Her golden hair tumbled across her bare shoulders, and around her
waist was a woven belt studded with emeralds. Tyrion waited until
he had been seated and served a cup of wine before thrusting the
letter at her. He said not a word. Cersei blinked at him innocently
and took the parchment from his hand.
“I trust you’re pleased,” he said as she read. “You wanted the
Stark boy dead, I believe.”
Cersei made a sour face. “It was Jaime who threw him from that
window, not me. For love, he said, as if that would please me. It
was a stupid thing to do, and dangerous besides, but when did our
sweet brother ever stop to think?”
“The boy saw you,” Tyrion pointed out.
“He was a child. I could have frightened him into silence.” She
looked at the letter thoughtfully. “Why must I su er accusations
every time some Stark stubs his toe? This was Greyjoy’s work, I had
nothing to do with it.”
“Let us hope Lady Catelyn believes that.”
Her eyes widened. “She wouldn’t—”
“—kill Jaime? Why not? What would you do if Jo rey and
Tommen were murdered?”
“I still hold Sansa!” the queen declared.
“We still hold Sansa,” he corrected her, “and we had best take
good care of her. Now where is this supper you’ve promised me,
sweet sister?”
Cersei set a tasty table, that could not be denied. They started
with a creamy chestnut soup, crusty hot bread, and greens dressed
with apples and pine nuts. Then came lamprey pie, honeyed ham,
buttered carrots, white beans and bacon, and roast swan stu ed
with mushrooms and oysters. Tyrion was exceedingly courteous; he
o ered his sister the choice portions of every dish, and made certain
he ate only what she did. Not that he truly thought she’d poison
him, but it never hurt to be careful.
The news about the Starks had soured her, he could see. “We’ve
had no word from Bitterbridge?” she asked anxiously as she speared
a bit of apple on the point of her dagger and ate it with small,
delicate bites.

“None.”
“I’ve never trusted Little nger. For enough coin, he’d go over to
Stannis in a heartbeat.”
“Stannis Baratheon is too bloody righteous to buy men. Nor
would he make a comfortable lord for the likes of Petyr. This war
has made for some queer bedfellows, I agree, but those two? No.”
As he carved some slices o the ham, she said, “We have Lady
Tanda to thank for the pig.”
“A token of her love?”
“A bribe. She begs leave to return to her castle. Your leave as
well as mine. I suspect she fears you’ll arrest her on the road, as you
did Lord Gyles.”
“Does she plan to make o with the heir to the throne?” Tyrion
served his sister a cut of ham and took one for himself. “I’d sooner
she remain. If she wants to feel safe, tell her to bring down her
garrison from Stokeworth. As many men as she has.”
“If we need men so badly, why did you send away your savages?”
A certain testiness crept into Cersei’s voice.
“It was the best use I could have made of them,” he told her
truthfully. “They’re erce warriors, but not soldiers. In formal
battle, discipline is more important than courage. They’ve already
done us more good in the kingswood than they would ever have
done us on the city walls.”
As the swan was being served, the queen questioned him about
the conspiracy of the Antler Men. She seemed more annoyed than
afraid. “Why are we plagued with so many treasons? What injury
has House Lannister ever done these wretches?”
“None,” said Tyrion, “but they think to be on the winning
side … which makes them fools as well as traitors.”
“Are you certain you’ve found them all?”
“Varys says so.” The swan was too rich for his taste.
A line appeared on Cersei’s pale white brow, between those
lovely eyes. “You put too much trust in that eunuch.”
“He serves me well.”
“Or so he’d have you believe. You think you’re the only one he
whispers secrets to? He gives each of us just enough to convince us

that we’d be helpless without him. He played the same game with
me, when I rst wed Robert. For years, I was convinced I had no
truer friend at court, but now …” She studied his face for a
moment. “He says you mean to take the Hound from Jo rey.”
Damn Varys. “I need Clegane for more important duties.”
“Nothing is more important than the life of the king.”
“The life of the king is not at risk. Jo will have brave Ser
Osmund guarding him, and Meryn Trant as well.” They’re good for
nothing better. “I need Balon Swann and the Hound to lead sorties, to
make certain Stannis gets no toehold on our side of the Blackwater.”
“Jaime would lead the sorties himself.”
“From Riverrun? That’s quite a sortie.”
“Jo ’s only a boy.”
“A boy who wants to be part of this battle, and for once he’s
showing some sense. I don’t intend to put him in the thick of the
ghting, but he needs to be seen. Men ght more ercely for a king
who shares their peril than one who hides behind his mother’s
skirts.”
“He’s thirteen, Tyrion.”
“Remember Jaime at thirteen? If you want the boy to be his
father’s son, let him play the part. Jo wears the nest armor gold
can buy, and he’ll have a dozen gold cloaks around him at all times.
If the city looks to be in the least danger of falling, I’ll have him
escorted back to the Red Keep at once.”
He had thought that might reassure her, but he saw no sign of
pleasure in those green eyes. “Will the city fall?”
“No.” But if it does, pray that we can hold the Red Keep long enough
for our lord father to march to our relief.
“You’ve lied to me before, Tyrion.”
“Always with good reason, sweet sister. I want amity between us
as much as you do. I’ve decided to release Lord Gyles.” He had kept
Gyles safe for just this gesture. “You can have Ser Boros Blount back
as well.”
The queen’s mouth tightened. “Ser Boros can rot at Rosby,” she
said, “but Tommen—”

“—stays where he is. He’s safer under Lord Jacelyn’s protection
than he would ever have been with Lord Gyles.”
Serving men cleared away the swan, hardly touched. Cersei
beckoned for the sweet. “I hope you like blackberry tarts.”
“I love all sorts of tarts.”
“Oh, I’ve known that a long while. Do you know why Varys is so
dangerous?”
“Are we playing at riddles now? No.”
“He doesn’t have a cock.”
“Neither do you.” And don’t you just hate that, Cersei?
“Perhaps I’m dangerous too. You, on the other hand, are as big a
fool as every other man. That worm between your legs does half
your thinking.”
Tyrion licked the crumbs o his ngers. He did not like his
sister’s smile. “Yes, and just now my worm is thinking that perhaps
it is time I took my leave.”
“Are you unwell, brother?” She leaned forward, giving him a
good look at the top of her breasts. “Suddenly you appear
somewhat ustered.”
“Flustered?” Tyrion glanced at the door. He thought he’d heard
something outside. He was beginning to regret coming here alone.
“You’ve never shown much interest in my cock before.”
“It’s not your cock that interests me, so much as what you stick it
in. I don’t depend on the eunuch for everything, as you do. I have
my own ways of nding out things … especially things that people
don’t want me to know.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Only this—I have your little whore.”
Tyrion reached for his wine cup, buying a moment to gather his
thoughts. “I thought men were more to your taste.”
“You’re such a droll little fellow. Tell me, have you married this
one yet?” When he gave her no answer she laughed and said,
“Father will be ever so relieved.”
His belly felt as if it were full of eels. How had she found Shae?
Had Varys betrayed him? Or had all his precautions been undone by

his impatience the night he rode directly to the manse? “Why
should you care who I choose to warm my bed?”
“A Lannister always pays his debts,” she said. “You’ve been
scheming against me since the day you came to King’s Landing. You
sold Myrcella, stole Tommen, and now you plot to have Jo killed.
You want him dead so you can rule through Tommen.”
Well, I can’t say the notion isn’t tempting. “This is madness, Cersei.
Stannis will be here in days. You need me.”
“For what? Your great prowess in battle?”
“Bronn’s sellswords will never ght without me,” he lied.
“Oh, I think they will. It’s your gold they love, not your impish
wit. Have no fear, though, they won’t be without you. I won’t say I
haven’t thought of slitting your throat from time to time, but Jaime
would never forgive me if I did.”
“And the whore?” He would not call her by name. If I can
convince her Shae means nothing to me, perhaps …
“She’ll be treated gently enough, so long as no harm comes to my
sons. If Jo should be killed, however, or if Tommen should fall
into the hands of our enemies, your little cunt will die more
painfully than you can possibly imagine.”
She truly believes I mean to kill my own nephew. “The boys are
safe,” he promised her wearily. “Gods be good, Cersei, they’re my
own blood! What sort of man do you take me for?”
“A small and twisted one.”
Tyrion stared at the dregs on the bottom of his wine cup. What
would Jaime do in my place? Kill the bitch, most likely, and worry
about the consequences afterward. But Tyrion did not have a golden
sword, nor the skill to wield one. He loved his brother’s reckless
wrath, but it was their lord father he must try and emulate. Stone, I
must be stone, I must be Casterly Rock, hard and unmovable. If I fail
this test, I had as lief seek out the nearest grotesquerie. “For all I know,
you’ve killed her already,” he said.
“Would you like to see her? I thought you might.” Cersei crossed
the room and threw open the heavy oaken door. “Bring in my
brother’s whore.”

Ser Osmund’s brothers Osney and Osfryd were peas from the
same pod, tall men with hooked noses, dark hair, and cruel smiles.
She hung between them, eyes wide and white in her dark face.
Blood trickled from her broken lip, and he could see bruises through
her torn clothing. Her hands were bound with rope, and they’d
gagged her so she could not speak.
“You said she wouldn’t be hurt.”
“She fought.” Unlike his brothers, Osney Kettleblack was cleanshaven, so the scratches showed plainly on his bare cheeks. “Got
claws like a shadowcat, this one.”
“Bruises heal,” said Cersei in a bored tone. “The whore will live.
So long as Jo does.”
Tyrion wanted to laugh at her. It would have been so sweet, so
very very sweet, but it would have given the game away. You’ve
lost, Cersei, and the Kettleblacks are even bigger fools than Bronn
claimed. All he needed to do was say the words.
Instead he looked at the girl’s face and said, “You swear you’ll
release her after the battle?”
“If you release Tommen, yes.”
He pushed himself to his feet. “Keep her then, but keep her safe.
If these animals think they can use her … well, sweet sister, let me
point out that a scale tips two ways.” His tone was calm, at,
uncaring; he’d reached for his father’s voice, and found it.
“Whatever happens to her happens to Tommen as well, and that
includes the beatings and rapes.” If she thinks me such a monster, I’ll
play the part for her.
Cersei had not expected that. “You would not dare.”
Tyrion made himself smile, slow and cold. Green and black, his
eyes laughed at her. “Dare? I’ll do it myself.”
His sister’s hand ashed at his face, but he caught her wrist and
bent it back until she cried out. Osfryd moved to her rescue. “One
more step and I’ll break her arm,” the dwarf warned him. The man
stopped. “You remember when I said you’d never hit me again,
Cersei?” He shoved her to the oor and turned back to the
Kettleblacks. “Untie her and remove that gag.”

The rope had been so tight as to cut o the blood to her hands.
She cried out in pain as the circulation returned. Tyrion massaged
her ngers gently until feeling returned. “Sweetling,” he said, “you
must be brave. I am sorry they hurt you.”
“I know you’ll free me, my lord.”
“I will,” he promised, and Alayaya bent over and kissed him on
the brow. Her broken lips left a smear of blood on his forehead. A
bloody kiss is more than I deserve, Tyrion thought. She would never
have been hurt but for me.
Her blood still marked him as he looked down at the queen. “I
have never liked you, Cersei, but you were my own sister, so I
never did you harm. You’ve ended that. I will hurt you for this. I
don’t know how yet, but give me time. A day will come when you
think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to
ashes in your mouth, and you’ll know the debt is paid.”
In war, his father had told him once, the battle is over in the
instant one army breaks and ees. No matter that they’re as
numerous as they were a moment before, still armed and armored;
once they had run before you they would not turn to ght again. So
it was with Cersei. “Get out!” was all the answer she could summon.
“Get out of my sight!”
Tyrion bowed. “Good night, then. And pleasant dreams.”
He made his way back to the Tower of the Hand with a thousand
armored feet marching through his skull. I ought to have seen this
coming the rst time I slipped through the back of Chataya’s wardrobe.
Perhaps he had not wanted to see. His legs were aching badly by the
time he had made the climb. He sent Pod for a agon of wine and
pushed his way into his bedchamber.
Shae sat cross-legged in the canopied bed, nude but for the heavy
golden chain that looped across the swell of her breasts: a chain of
linked golden hands, each clasping the next.
Tyrion had not expected her. “What are you doing here?”
Laughing, she stroked the chain. “I wanted some hands on my
titties … but these little gold ones are cold.”
For a moment he did not know what to say. How could he tell her
that another woman had taken the beating meant for her, and might

well die in her place should some mischance of battle fell Jo rey?
He wiped Alayaya’s blood from his brow with the heel of his hand.
“The Lady Lollys—”
“She’s asleep. Sleep’s all she ever wants to do, the great cow. She
sleeps and she eats. Sometimes she falls asleep while she’s eating.
The food falls under the blankets and she rolls in it, and I have to
clean her.” She made a disgusted face. “All they did was fuck her.”
“Her mother says she’s sick.”
“She has a baby in her belly, that’s all.”
Tyrion gazed around the room. Everything seemed much as he
left it. “How did you enter? Show me the hidden door.”
She gave a shrug. “Lord Varys made me wear a hood. I couldn’t
see, except … there was one place, I got a peep at the oor out the
bottom of the hood. It was all tiles, you know, the kind that make a
picture?”
“A mosaic?”
Shae nodded. “They were colored red and black. I think the
picture was a dragon. Otherwise, everything was dark. We went
down a ladder and walked a long ways, until I was all twisted
around. Once we stopped so he could unlock an iron gate. I brushed
against it when we went through. The dragon was past the gate.
Then we went up another ladder, with a tunnel at the top. I had to
stoop, and I think Lord Varys was crawling.”
Tyrion made a round of the bedchamber. One of the sconces
looked loose. He stood on his toes and tried to turn it. It revolved
slowly, scraping against the stone wall. When it was upside down,
the stub of the candle fell out. The rushes scattered across the cold
stone oor did not show any particular disturbance. “Doesn’t m’lord
want to bed me?” asked Shae.
“In a moment.” Tyrion threw open his wardrobe, shoved the
clothing aside, and pushed against the rear panel. What worked for
a whorehouse might work for a castle as well … but no, the wood
was solid, unyielding. A stone beside the window seat drew his eye,
but all his tugging and prodding went for naught. He returned to
the bed frustrated and annoyed.

Shae undid his laces and threw her arms around his neck. “Your
shoulders feel as hard as rocks,” she murmured. “Hurry, I want to
feel you inside me.” Yet as her legs locked around his waist, his
manhood left him. When she felt him go soft, Shae slid down under
the sheets and took him in her mouth, but even that could not rouse
him.
After a few moments he stopped her. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
All the sweet innocence of the world was written there in the lines
of her young face.
Innocence? Fool, she’s a whore, Cersei was right, you think with your
cock, fool, fool.
“Just go to sleep, sweetling,” he urged, stroking her hair. Yet
long after Shae had taken his advice, Tyrion himself still lay awake,
his ngers cupped over one small breast as he listened to her
breathing.

CATELYN

The Great Hall of Riverrun was a lonely place for two to sit to

supper. Deep shadows draped the walls. One of the torches had
guttered out, leaving only three. Catelyn sat staring into her wine
goblet. The vintage tasted thin and sour on her tongue. Brienne was
across from her. Between them, her father’s high seat was as empty
as the rest of the hall. Even the servants were gone. She had given
them leave to join the celebration.
The walls of the keep were thick, yet even so, they could hear the
mu ed sounds of revelry from the yard outside. Ser Desmond had
brought twenty casks up from the cellars, and the smallfolk were
celebrating Edmure’s imminent return and Robb’s conquest of the
Crag by hoisting horns of nut-brown ale.
I cannot blame them, Catelyn thought. They do not know. And if
they did, why should they care? They never knew my sons. Never
watched Bran climb with their hearts in their throats, pride and terror so
mingled they seemed as one, never heard him laugh, never smiled to see
Rickon trying so ercely to be like his older brothers. She stared at the
supper set before her: trout wrapped in bacon, salad of turnip
greens and red fennel and sweetgrass, pease and onions and hot
bread. Brienne was eating methodically, as if supper were another
chore to be accomplished. I am become a sour woman, Catelyn
thought. I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have
become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and

bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was
once.
The sound of the other woman’s eating had become intolerable to
her. “Brienne, I am no t company. Go join the revels, if you
would. Drink a horn of ale and dance to Rymund’s harping.”
“I am not made for revels, my lady.” Her big hands tore apart a
heel of black bread. Brienne stared at the chunks as if she had
forgotten what they were. “If you command it, I …”
Catelyn could sense her discomfort. “I only thought you might
enjoy happier company than mine.”
“I’m well content.” The girl used the bread to sop up some of the
bacon grease the trout had been fried in.
“There was another bird this morning.” Catelyn did not know
why she said it. “The maester woke me at once. That was dutiful,
but not kind. Not kind at all.” She had not meant to tell Brienne. No
one knew but her and Maester Vyman, and she had meant to keep it
that way until … until …
Until what? Foolish woman, will holding it secret in your heart make it
any less true? If you never tell, never speak of it, will it become only a
dream, less than a dream, a nightmare half-remembered? Oh, if only the
gods would be so good.
“Is it news of King’s Landing?” asked Brienne.
“Would that it was. The bird came from Castle Cerwyn, from Ser
Rodrik, my castellan.” Dark wings, dark words. “He has gathered
what power he could and is marching on Winterfell, to take the
castle back.” How unimportant all that sounded now. “But he
said … he wrote … he told me, he …”
“My lady, what is it? Is it some news of your sons?”
Such a simple question that was; would that the answer could be
as simple. When Catelyn tried to speak, the words caught in her
throat. “I have no sons but Robb.” She managed those terrible
words without a sob, and for that much she was glad.
Brienne looked at her with horror. “My lady?”
“Bran and Rickon tried to escape, but were taken at a mill on the
Acorn Water. Theon Greyjoy has mounted their heads on the walls
of Winterfell. Theon Greyjoy, who ate at my table since he was a

boy of ten.” I have said it, gods forgive me. I have said it and made it
true.
Brienne’s face was a watery blur. She reached across the table,
but her ngers stopped short of Catelyn’s, as if the touch might be
unwelcome. “I … there are no words, my lady. My good lady. Your
sons, they … they’re with the gods now.”
“Are they?” Catelyn said sharply. “What god would let this
happen? Rickon was only a baby. How could he deserve such a
death? And Bran … when I left the north, he had not opened his
eyes since his fall. I had to go before he woke. Now I can never
return to him, or hear him laugh again.” She showed Brienne her
palms, her ngers. “These scars … they sent a man to cut Bran’s
throat as he lay sleeping. He would have died then, and me with
him, but Bran’s wolf tore out the man’s throat.” That gave her a
moment’s pause. “I suppose Theon killed the wolves too. He must
have, elsewise … I was certain the boys would be safe so long as
the direwolves were with them. Like Robb with his Grey Wind. But
my daughters have no wolves now.”
The abrupt shift of topic left Brienne bewildered. “Your
daughters …”
“Sansa was a lady at three, always so courteous and eager to
please. She loved nothing so well as tales of knightly valor. Men
would say she had my look, but she will grow into a woman far
more beautiful than I ever was, you can see that. I often sent away
her maid so I could brush her hair myself. She had auburn hair,
lighter than mine, and so thick and soft … the red in it would catch
the light of the torches and shine like copper.
“And Arya, well … Ned’s visitors would oft mistake her for a
stableboy if they rode into the yard unannounced. Arya was a trial,
it must be said. Half a boy and half a wolf pup. Forbid her anything
and it became her heart’s desire. She had Ned’s long face, and
brown hair that always looked as though a bird had been nesting in
it. I despaired of ever making a lady of her. She collected scabs as
other girls collect dolls, and would say anything that came into her
head. I think she must be dead too.” When she said that, it felt as
though a giant hand were squeezing her chest. “I want them all

dead, Brienne. Theon Greyjoy rst, then Jaime Lannister and Cersei
and the Imp, every one, every one. But my girls … my girls will …”
“The queen … she has a little girl of her own,” Brienne said
awkwardly. “And sons too, of an age with yours. When she hears,
perhaps she … she may take pity, and …”
“Send my daughters back unharmed?” Catelyn smiled sadly.
“There is a sweet innocence about you, child. I could wish … but
no. Robb will avenge his brothers. Ice can kill as dead as re. Ice
was Ned’s greatsword. Valyrian steel, marked with the ripples of a
thousand foldings, so sharp I feared to touch it. Robb’s blade is dull
as a cudgel compared to Ice. It will not be easy for him to get
Theon’s head o , I fear. The Starks do not use headsmen. Ned
always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the
blade, though he never took any joy in the duty. But I would, oh,
yes.” She stared at her scarred hands, opened and closed them, then
slowly raised her eyes. “I’ve sent him wine.”
“Wine?” Brienne was lost. “Robb? Or … Theon Greyjoy?”
“The Kingslayer.” The ploy had served her well with Cleos Frey. I
hope you’re thirsty, Jaime. I hope your throat is dry and tight. “I would
like you to come with me.”
“I am yours to command, my lady.”
“Good.” Catelyn rose abruptly. “Stay, nish your meal in peace. I
will send for you later. At midnight.”
“So late, my lady?”
“The dungeons are windowless. One hour is much like another
down there, and for me, all hours are midnight.” Her footsteps rang
hollowly when Catelyn left the hall. As she climbed to Lord Hoster’s
solar, she could hear them outside, shouting, “Tully!” and “A cup! A
cup to the brave young lord!” My father is not dead, she wanted to
shout down at them. My sons are dead, but my father lives, damn you
all, and he is your lord still.
Lord Hoster was deep in sleep. “He had a cup of dreamwine not
so long ago, my lady,” Maester Vyman said. “For the pain. He will
not know you are here.”
“It makes no matter,” Catelyn said. He is more dead than alive, yet
more alive than my poor sweet sons.

“My lady, is there aught I might do for you? A sleeping draught,
perhaps?”
“Thank you, Maester, but no. I will not sleep away my grief. Bran
and Rickon deserve better from me. Go and join the celebration, I
will sit with my father for a time.”
“As you will, my lady.” Vyman bowed and left her.
Lord Hoster lay on his back, mouth open, his breath a faint
whistling sigh. One hand hung over the edge of the mattress, a pale
frail eshless thing, but warm when she touched it. She slid her
ngers through his and closed them. No matter how tightly I hold him,
I cannot keep him here, she thought sadly. Let him go. Yet her ngers
would not seem to unbend.
“I have no one to talk with, Father,” she told him. “I pray, but the
gods do not answer.” Lightly she kissed his hand. The skin was
warm, blue veins branching like rivers beneath his pale translucent
skin. Outside the greater rivers owed, the Red Fork and the
Tumblestone, and they would ow forever, but not so the rivers in
her father’s hand. Too soon that current would grow still. “Last
night I dreamed of that time Lysa and I got lost while riding back
from Seagard. Do you remember? That strange fog came up and we
fell behind the rest of the party. Everything was grey, and I could
not see a foot past the nose of my horse. We lost the road. The
branches of the trees were like long skinny arms reaching out to
grab us as we passed. Lysa started to cry, and when I shouted the
fog seemed to swallow the sound. But Petyr knew where we were,
and he rode back and found us …”
“But there’s no one to nd me now, is there? This time I have to
nd our own way, and it is hard, so hard.”
“I keep remembering the Stark words. Winter has come, Father.
For me. For me. Robb must ght the Greyjoys now as well as the
Lannisters, and for what? For a gold hat and an iron chair? Surely
the land has bled enough. I want my girls back, I want Robb to lay
down his sword and pick some homely daughter of Walder Frey to
make him happy and give him sons. I want Bran and Rickon back, I
want …” Catelyn hung her head. “I want,” she said once more, and
then her words were gone.

After a time the candle guttered and went out. Moonlight slanted
between the slats of the shutters, laying pale silvery bars across her
father’s face. She could hear the soft whisper of his labored
breathing, the endless rush of waters, the faint chords of some love
song drifting up from the yard, so sad and sweet. “I loved a maid as
red as autumn,” Rymund sang, “with sunset in her hair.”
Catelyn never noticed when the singing ended. Hours had passed,
yet it seemed only a heartbeat before Brienne was at the door. “My
lady,” she announced softly. “Midnight has come.”
Midnight has come, Father, she thought, and I must do my duty. She
let go of his hand.
The gaoler was a furtive little man with broken veins in his nose.
They found him bent over a tankard of ale and the remains of a
pigeon pie, more than a little drunk. He squinted at them
suspiciously. “Begging your forgiveness, m’lady, but Lord Edmure
says no one is to see the Kingslayer without a writing from him,
with his seal upon it.”
“Lord Edmure? Has my father died, and no one told me?”
The gaoler licked his lips. “No, m’lady, not as I knows.”
“You will open the cell, or you will come with me to Lord
Hoster’s solar and tell him why you saw t to defy me.”
His eyes fell. “As m’lady says.” The keys were chained to the
studded leather belt that girdled his waist. He muttered under his
breath as he sorted through them, until he found the one that t the
door to the Kingslayer’s cell.
“Go back to your ale and leave us,” she commanded. An oil lamp
hung from a hook on the low ceiling. Catelyn took it down and
turned up the ame. “Brienne, see that I am not disturbed.”
Nodding, Brienne took up a position just outside the cell, her
hand resting on the pommel of her sword. “My lady will call if she
has need of me.”
Catelyn shouldered aside the heavy wood-and-iron door and
stepped into foul darkness. This was the bowels of Riverrun, and
smelled the part. Old straw crackled underfoot. The walls were
discolored with patches of nitre. Through the stone, she could hear
the faint rush of the Tumblestone. The lamplight revealed a pail

over owing with feces in one corner and a huddled shape in
another. The agon of wine stood beside the door, untouched. So
much for that ploy. I ought to be thankful that the gaoler did not drink it
himself, I suppose.
Jaime raised his hands to cover his face, the chains around his
wrists clanking. “Lady Stark,” he said, in a voice hoarse with disuse.
“I fear I am in no condition to receive you.”
“Look at me, ser.”
“The light hurts my eyes. A moment, if you would.” Jaime
Lannister had been allowed no razor since the night he was taken in
the Whispering Wood, and a shaggy beard covered his face, once so
like the queen’s. Glinting gold in the lamplight, the whiskers made
him look like some great yellow beast, magni cent even in chains.
His unwashed hair fell to his shoulders in ropes and tangles, the
clothes were rotting on his body, his face was pale and
wasted … and even so, the power and the beauty of the man were
still apparent.
“I see you had no taste for the wine I sent you.”
“Such sudden generosity seemed somewhat suspect.”
“I can have your head o anytime I want. Why would I need to
poison you?”
“Death by poison can seem natural. Harder to claim that my head
simply fell o .” He squinted up from the oor, his cat-green eyes
slowly becoming accustomed to the light. “I’d invite you to sit, but
your brother has neglected to provide me a chair.”
“I can stand well enough.”
“Can you? You look terrible, I must say. Though perhaps it’s just
the light in here.” He was fettered at wrist and ankle, each cu
chained to the others, so he could neither stand nor lie comfortably.
The ankle chains were bolted to the wall. “Are my bracelets heavy
enough for you, or did you come to add a few more? I’ll rattle them
prettily if you like.”
“You brought this on yourself,” she reminded him. “We granted
you the comfort of a tower cell be tting your birth and station. You
repaid us by trying to escape.”

“A cell is a cell. Some under Casterly Rock make this one seem a
sunlit garden. One day perhaps I’ll show them to you.”
If he is cowed, he hides it well, Catelyn thought. “A man chained
hand and foot should keep a more courteous tongue in his mouth,
ser. I did not come here to be threatened.”
“No? Then surely it was to have your pleasure of me? It’s said
that widows grow weary of their empty beds. We of the Kingsguard
vow never to wed, but I suppose I could still service you if that’s
what you need. Pour us some of that wine and slip out of that gown
and we’ll see if I’m up to it.”
Catelyn stared down at him in revulsion. Was there ever a man as
beautiful or as vile as this one? “If you said that in my son’s hearing,
he would kill you for it.”
“Only so long as I was wearing these.” Jaime Lannister rattled his
chains at her. “We both know the boy is afraid to face me in single
combat.”
“My son may be young, but if you take him for a fool, you are
sadly mistaken … and it seems to me that you were not so quick to
make challenges when you had an army at your back.”
“Did the old Kings of Winter hide behind their mothers’ skirts as
well?”
“I grow weary of this, ser. There are things I must know.”
“Why should I tell you anything?”
“To save your life.”
“You think I fear death?” That seemed to amuse him.
“You should. Your crimes will have earned you a place of torment
in the deepest of the seven hells, if the gods are just.”
“What gods are those, Lady Catelyn? The trees your husband
prayed to? How well did they serve him when my sister took his
head o ?” Jaime gave a chuckle. “If there are gods, why is the
world so full of pain and injustice?”
“Because of men like you.”
“There are no men like me. There’s only me.”
There is nothing here but arrogance and pride, and the empty courage
of a madman. I am wasting my breath with this one. If there was ever a

spark of honor in him, it is long dead. “If you will not speak with me,
so be it. Drink the wine or piss in it, ser, it makes no matter to me.”
Her hand was at the door pull when he said, “Lady Stark.” She
turned, waited. “Things go to rust in this damp,” Jaime went on.
“Even a man’s courtesies. Stay, and you shall have your
answers … for a price.”
He has no shame. “Captives do not set prices.”
“Oh, you’ll nd mine modest enough. Your turnkey tells me
nothing but vile lies, and he cannot even keep them straight. One
day he says Cersei has been ayed, and the next it’s my father.
Answer my questions and I’ll answer yours.”
“Truthfully?”
“Oh, it’s truth you want? Be careful, my lady. Tyrion says that
people often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste
when it’s served up.”
“I am strong enough to hear anything you care to say.”
“As you will, then. But rst, if you’d be so kind … the wine. My
throat is raw.”
Catelyn hung the lamp from the door and moved the cup and
agon closer. Jaime sloshed the wine around his mouth before he
swallowed. “Sour and vile,” he said, “but it will do.” He put his
back to the wall, drew his knees up to his chest, and stared at her.
“Your rst question, Lady Catelyn?”
Not knowing how long this game might continue, Catelyn wasted
no time. “Are you Jo rey’s father?”
“You would never ask unless you knew the answer.”
“I want it from your own lips.”
He shrugged. “Jo rey is mine. As are the rest of Cersei’s brood, I
suppose.”
“You admit to being your sister’s lover?”
“I’ve always loved my sister, and you owe me two answers. Do
all my kin still live?”
“Ser Sta ord Lannister was slain at Oxcross, I am told.”
Jaime was unmoved. “Uncle Dolt, my sister called him. It’s Cersei
and Tyrion who concern me. As well as my lord father.”
“They live, all three.” But not long, if the gods are good.

Jaime drank some more wine. “Ask your next.”
Catelyn wondered if he would dare answer her next question with
anything but a lie. “How did my son Bran come to fall?”
“I ung him from a window.”
The easy way he said it took her voice away for an instant. If I
had a knife, I would kill him now, she thought, until she remembered
the girls. Her throat constricted as she said, “You were a knight,
sworn to defend the weak and innocent.”
“He was weak enough, but perhaps not so innocent. He was
spying on us.”
“Bran would not spy.”
“Then blame those precious gods of yours, who brought the boy
to our window and gave him a glimpse of something he was never
meant to see.”
“Blame the gods?” she said, incredulous. “Yours was the hand that
threw him. You meant for him to die.”
His chains chinked softly. “I seldom ing children from towers to
improve their health. Yes, I meant for him to die.”
“And when he did not, you knew your danger was worse than
ever, so you gave your catspaw a bag of silver to make certain Bran
would never wake.”
“Did I now?” Jaime lifted his cup and took a long swallow. “I
won’t deny we talked of it, but you were with the boy day and
night, your maester and Lord Eddard attended him frequently, and
there were guards, even those damned direwolves … it would have
required cutting my way through half of Winterfell. And why
bother, when the boy seemed like to die of his own accord?”
“If you lie to me, this session is at an end.” Catelyn held out her
hands, to show him her ngers and palms. “The man who came to
slit Bran’s throat gave me these scars. You swear you had no part in
sending him?”
“On my honor as a Lannister.”
“Your honor as a Lannister is worth less than this.” She kicked
over the waste pail. Foul-smelling brown ooze crept across the oor
of the cell, soaking into the straw.

Jaime Lannister backed away from the spill as far as his chains
would allow. “I may indeed have shit for honor, I won’t deny it, but
I have never yet hired anyone to do my killing. Believe what you
will, Lady Stark, but if I had wanted your Bran dead I would have
slain him myself.”
Gods be merciful, he’s telling the truth. “If you did not send the
killer, your sister did.”
“If so, I’d know. Cersei keeps no secrets from me.”
“Then it was the Imp.”
“Tyrion is as innocent as your Bran. He wasn’t climbing around
outside of anyone’s window, spying.”
“Then why did the assassin have his dagger?”
“What dagger was this?”
“It was so long,” she said, holding her hands apart, “plain, but
nely made, with a blade of Valyrian steel and a dragonbone hilt.
Your brother won it from Lord Baelish at the tourney on Prince
Jo rey’s name day.”
Lannister poured, drank, poured, and stared into his wine cup.
“This wine seems to be improving as I drink it. Imagine that. I seem
to remember that dagger, now that you describe it. Won it, you
say? How?”
“Wagering on you when you tilted against the Knight of
Flowers.” Yet when she heard her own words Catelyn knew she had
gotten it wrong. “No … was it the other way?”
“Tyrion always backed me in the lists,” Jaime said, “but that day
Ser Loras unhorsed me. A mischance, I took the boy too lightly, but
no matter. Whatever my brother wagered, he lost … but that
dagger did change hands, I recall it now. Robert showed it to me
that night at the feast. His Grace loved to salt my wounds,
especially when drunk. And when was he not drunk?”
Tyrion Lannister had said much the same thing as they rode
through the Mountains of the Moon, Catelyn remembered. She had
refused to believe him. Petyr had sworn otherwise, Petyr who had
been almost a brother, Petyr who loved her so much he fought a
duel for her hand … and yet if Jaime and Tyrion told the same tale,
what did that mean? The brothers had not seen each other since

departing Winterfell more than a year ago. “Are you trying to
deceive me?” Somewhere there was a trap here.
“I’ve admitted to shoving your precious urchin out a window,
what would it gain me to lie about this knife?” He tossed down
another cup of wine. “Believe what you will, I’m past caring what
people say of me. And it’s my turn. Have Robert’s brothers taken
the eld?”
“They have.”
“Now there’s a niggardly response. Give me more than that, or
your next answer will be as poor.”
“Stannis marches against King’s Landing,” she said grudgingly.
“Renly is dead, murdered at Bitterbridge by his brother, through
some black art I do not understand.”
“A pity,” Jaime said. “I rather liked Renly, though Stannis is quite
another tale. What side have the Tyrells taken?”
“Renly, at rst. Now, I could not say.”
“Your boy must be feeling lonely.”
“Robb was sixteen a few days past … a man grown, and a king.
He’s won every battle he’s fought. The last word we had from him,
he had taken the Crag from the Westerlings.”
“He hasn’t faced my father yet, has he?”
“When he does, he’ll defeat him. As he did you.”
“He took me unawares. A craven’s trick.”
“You dare talk of tricks? Your brother Tyrion sent us cutthroats in
envoy’s garb, under a peace banner.”
“If it were one of your sons in this cell, wouldn’t his brothers do
as much for him?”
My son has no brothers, she thought, but she would not share her
pain with a creature such as this.
Jaime drank some more wine. “What’s a brother’s life when
honor is at stake, eh?” Another sip. “Tyrion is clever enough to
realize that your son will never consent to ransom me.”
Catelyn could not deny it. “Robb’s bannermen would sooner see
you dead. Rickard Karstark in particular. You slew two of his sons
in the Whispering Wood.”

“The two with the white sunburst, were they?” Jaime gave a
shrug. “If truth be told, it was your son that I was trying to slay.
The others got in my way. I killed them in fair ght, in the heat of
battle. Any other knight would have done the same.”
“How can you still count yourself a knight, when you have
forsaken every vow you ever swore?”
Jaime reached for the agon to re ll his cup. “So many
vows … they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey
the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But
obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the
weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter
what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.” He took a
healthy swallow of wine and closed his eyes for an instant, leaning
his head back against the patch of nitre on the wall. “I was the
youngest man ever to wear the white cloak.”
“And the youngest to betray all it stood for, Kingslayer.”
“Kingslayer,” he pronounced carefully. “And such a king he was!”
He lifted his cup. “To Aerys Targaryen, the Second of His Name,
Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm. And to the
sword that opened his throat. A golden sword, don’t you know. Until
his blood ran red down the blade. Those are the Lannister colors,
red and gold.”
As he laughed, she realized the wine had done its work; Jaime
had drained most of the agon, and he was drunk. “Only a man like
you would be proud of such an act.”
“I told you, there are no men like me. Answer me this, Lady Stark
—did your Ned ever tell you the manner of his father’s death? Or
his brother’s?”
“They strangled Brandon while his father watched, and then
killed Lord Rickard as well.” An ugly tale, and sixteen years old.
Why was he asking about it now?
“Killed, yes, but how?”
“The cord or the axe, I suppose.”
Jaime took a swallow, wiped his mouth. “No doubt Ned wished to
spare you. His sweet young bride, if not quite a maiden. Well, you

wanted truth. Ask me. We made a bargain, I can deny you nothing.
Ask.”
“Dead is dead.” I do not want to know this.
“Brandon was di erent from his brother, wasn’t he? He had blood
in his veins instead of cold water. More like me.”
“Brandon was nothing like you.”
“If you say so. You and he were to wed.”
“He was on his way to Riverrun when …” Strange, how telling it
still made her throat grow tight, after all these years. “… when he
heard about Lyanna, and went to King’s Landing instead. It was a
rash thing to do.” She remembered how her own father had raged
when the news had been brought to Riverrun. The gallant fool, was
what he called Brandon.
Jaime poured the last half cup of wine. “He rode into the Red
Keep with a few companions, shouting for Prince Rhaegar to come
out and die. But Rhaegar wasn’t there. Aerys sent his guards to
arrest them all for plotting his son’s murder. The others were lords’
sons too, it seems to me.”
“Ethan Glover was Brandon’s squire,” Catelyn said. “He was the
only one to survive. The others were Je ory Mallister, Kyle Royce,
and Elbert Arryn, Jon Arryn’s nephew and heir.” It was queer how
she still remembered the names, after so many years. “Aerys
accused them of treason and summoned their fathers to court to
answer the charge, with the sons as hostages. When they came, he
had them murdered without trial. Fathers and sons both.”
“There were trials. Of a sort. Lord Rickard demanded trial by
combat, and the king granted the request. Stark armored himself as
for battle, thinking to duel one of the Kingsguard. Me, perhaps.
Instead they took him to the throne room and suspended him from
the rafters while two of Aerys’s pyromancers kindled a blaze
beneath him. The king told him that re was the champion of House
Targaryen. So all Lord Rickard needed to do to prove himself
innocent of treason was … well, not burn.
“When the re was blazing, Brandon was brought in. His hands
were chained behind his back, and around his neck was a wet
leathern cord attached to a device the king had brought from

Tyrosh. His legs were left free, though, and his longsword was set
down just beyond his reach.
“The pyromancers roasted Lord Rickard slowly, banking and
fanning that re carefully to get a nice even heat. His cloak caught
rst, and then his surcoat, and soon he wore nothing but metal and
ashes. Next he would start to cook, Aerys promised … unless his son
could free him. Brandon tried, but the more he struggled, the
tighter the cord constricted around his throat. In the end he
strangled himself.
“As for Lord Rickard, the steel of his breastplate turned cherryred before the end, and his gold melted o his spurs and dripped
down into the re. I stood at the foot of the Iron Throne in my
white armor and white cloak, lling my head with thoughts of
Cersei. After, Gerold Hightower himself took me aside and said to
me, ‘You swore a vow to guard the king, not to judge him.’ That
was the White Bull, loyal to the end and a better man than me, all
agree.”
“Aerys …” Catelyn could taste bile at the back of her throat. The
story was so hideous she suspected it had to be true. “Aerys was
mad, the whole realm knew it, but if you would have me believe
you slew him to avenge Brandon Stark …”
“I made no such claim. The Starks were nothing to me. I will say,
I think it passing odd that I am loved by one for a kindness I never
did, and reviled by so many for my nest act. At Robert’s
coronation, I was made to kneel at the royal feet beside Grand
Maester Pycelle and Varys the eunuch, so that he might forgive us
our crimes before he took us into his service. As for your Ned, he
should have kissed the hand that slew Aerys, but he preferred to
scorn the arse he found sitting on Robert’s throne. I think Ned Stark
loved Robert better than he ever loved his brother or his
father … or even you, my lady. He was never unfaithful to Robert,
was he?” Jaime gave a drunken laugh. “Come, Lady Stark, don’t
you nd this all terribly amusing?”
“I nd nothing about you amusing, Kingslayer.”
“That name again. I don’t think I’ll fuck you after all, Little nger
had you rst, didn’t he? I never eat o another man’s trencher.

Besides, you’re not half so lovely as my sister.” His smile cut. “I’ve
never lain with any woman but Cersei. In my own way, I have been
truer than your Ned ever was. Poor old dead Ned. So who has shit
for honor now, I ask you? What was the name of that bastard he
fathered?”
Catelyn took a step backward. “Brienne.”
“No, that wasn’t it.” Jaime Lannister upended the agon. A trickle
ran down onto his face, bright as blood. “Snow, that was the one.
Such a white name … like the pretty cloaks they give us in the
Kingsguard when we swear our pretty oaths.”
Brienne pushed open the door and stepped inside the cell. “You
called, my lady?”
“Give me your sword.” Catelyn held out her hand.

THEON

The sky was a gloom of cloud, the woods dead and frozen. Roots

grabbed at Theon’s feet as he ran, and bare branches lashed his face,
leaving thin stripes of blood across his cheeks. He crashed through
heedless, breathless, icicles ying to pieces before him. Mercy, he
sobbed. From behind came a shuddering howl that curdled his
blood. Mercy, mercy. When he glanced back over his shoulder he
saw them coming, great wolves the size of horses with the heads of
small children. Oh, mercy, mercy. Blood dripped from their mouths
black as pitch, burning holes in the snow where it fell. Every stride
brought them closer. Theon tried to run faster, but his legs would
not obey. The trees all had faces, and they were laughing at him,
laughing, and the howl came again. He could smell the hot breath
of the beasts behind him, a stink of brimstone and corruption.
They’re dead, dead, I saw them killed, he tried to shout, I saw their
heads dipped in tar, but when he opened his mouth only a moan
emerged, and then something touched him and he whirled,
shouting …
… ailing for the dagger he kept by his bedside and managing
only to knock it to the oor. Wex danced away from him. Reek
stood behind the mute, his face lit from below by the candle he
carried. “What?” Theon cried. Mercy. “What do you want? Why are
you in my bedchamber? Why?”
“My lord prince,” said Reek, “your sister has come to Winterfell.
You asked to be informed at once if she arrived.”

“Past time,” Theon muttered, pushing his ngers through his hair.
He had begun to fear that Asha meant to leave him to his fate.
Mercy. He glanced outside the window, where the rst vague light
of dawn was just brushing the towers of Winterfell. “Where is she?”
“Lorren took her and her men to the Great Hall to break their
fast. Will you see her now?”
“Yes.” Theon pushed o the blankets. The re had burned down
to embers. “Wex, hot water.” He could not let Asha see him
disheveled and soaked with sweat. Wolves with children’s faces … He
shivered. “Close the shutters.” The bedchamber felt as cold as the
dream forest had been.
All his dreams had been cold of late, and each more hideous than
the one before. Last night he had dreamed himself back in the mill
again, on his knees dressing the dead. Their limbs were already
sti ening, so they seemed to resist sullenly as he fumbled at them
with half-frozen ngers, tugging up breeches and knotting laces,
yanking fur-trimmed boots over hard unbending feet, buckling a
studded leather belt around a waist no bigger than the span of his
hands. “This was never what I wanted,” he told them as he worked.
“They gave me no choice.” The corpses made no answer, but only
grew colder and heavier.
The night before, it had been the miller’s wife. Theon had
forgotten her name, but he remembered her body, soft pillowy
breasts and stretch marks on her belly, the way she clawed his back
when he fucked her. Last night in his dream he had been in bed
with her once again, but this time she had teeth above and below,
and she tore out his throat even as she was gnawing o his
manhood. It was madness. He’d seen her die too. Gelmarr had cut
her down with one blow of his axe as she cried to Theon for mercy.
Leave me, woman. It was him who killed you, not me. And he’s dead as
well. At least Gelmarr did not haunt Theon’s sleep.
The dream had receded by the time Wex returned with the water.
Theon washed the sweat and sleep from his body and took his own
good time dressing. Asha had let him wait long enough; now it was
her turn. He chose a satin tunic striped black and gold and a ne
leather jerkin with silver studs … and only then remembered that

his wretched sister put more stock in blades than beauty. Cursing,
he tore o the clothes and dressed again, in felted black wool and
ringmail. Around his waist he buckled sword and dagger,
remembering the night she had humiliated him at his own father’s
table. Her sweet suckling babe, yes. Well, I have a knife too, and know
how to use it.
Last of all, he donned his crown, a band of cold iron slim as a
nger, set with heavy chunks of black diamond and nuggets of gold.
It was misshapen and ugly, but there was no help for that. Mikken
lay buried in the lichyard, and the new smith was capable of little
more than nails and horseshoes. Theon consoled himself with the
reminder that it was only a prince’s crown. He would have
something much ner when he was crowned king.
Outside his door, Reek waited with Urzen and Kromm. Theon fell
in with them. These days, he took guards with him everywhere he
went, even to the privy. Winterfell wanted him dead. The very
night they had returned from Acorn Water, Gelmarr the Grim had
tumbled down some steps and broken his back. The next day, Aggar
turned up with his throat slit ear to ear. Gynir Rednose became so
wary that he shunned wine, took to sleeping in byrnie, coif, and
helm, and adopted the noisiest dog in the kennels to give him
warning should anyone try to steal up on his sleeping place. All the
same, one morning the castle woke to the sound of the little dog
barking wildly. They found the pup racing around the well, and
Rednose oating in it, drowned.
He could not let the killings go unpunished. Farlen was as likely a
suspect as any, so Theon sat in judgment, called him guilty, and
condemned him to death. Even that went sour. As he knelt to the
block, the kennelmaster said, “M’lord Eddard always did his own
killings.” Theon had to take the axe himself or look a weakling. His
hands were sweating, so the shaft twisted in his grip as he swung
and the rst blow landed between Farlen’s shoulders. It took three
more cuts to hack through all that bone and muscle and sever the
head from the body, and afterward he was sick, remembering all
the times they’d sat over a cup of mead talking of hounds and
hunting. I had no choice, he wanted to scream at the corpse. The

ironborn can’t keep secrets, they had to die, and someone had to take
the blame for it. He only wished he had killed him cleaner. Ned Stark
had never needed more than a single blow to take a man’s head.
The killings stopped after Farlen’s death, but even so his men
continued sullen and anxious. “They fear no foe in open battle,”
Black Lorren told him, “but it is another thing to dwell among
enemies, never knowing if the washerwoman means to kiss you or
kill you, or whether the serving boy is lling your cup with ale or
bale. We would do well to leave this place.”
“I am the Prince of Winterfell!” Theon had shouted. “This is my
seat, no man will drive me from it. No, nor woman either!”
Asha. It was her doing. My own sweet sister, may the Others bugger
her with a sword. She wanted him dead, so she could steal his place
as their father’s heir. That was why she had let him languish here,
ignoring the urgent commands he had sent her.
He found her in the high seat of the Starks, ripping a capon apart
with her ngers. The hall rang with the voices of her men, sharing
stories with Theon’s own as they drank together. They were so loud
that his entrance went all but unnoticed. “Where are the rest?” he
demanded of Reek. There were no more than fty men at the trestle
tables, most of them his. Winterfell’s Great Hall could have seated
ten times the number.
“This is the whole o’ the company, m’lord prince.”
“The whole—how many men did she bring?”
“Twenty, by my count.”
Theon Greyjoy strode to where his sister was sprawled. Asha was
laughing at something one of her men had said, but broke o at his
approach. “Why, ’tis the Prince of Winterfell.” She tossed a bone to
one of the dogs sni ng about the hall. Under that hawk’s beak of a
nose, her wide mouth twisted in a mocking grin. “Or is it Prince of
Fools?”
“Envy ill becomes a maid.”
Asha sucked grease from her ngers. A lock of black hair fell
across her eyes. Her men were shouting for bread and bacon. They
made a deal of noise, as few as they were. “Envy, Theon?”

“What else would you call it? With thirty men, I captured
Winterfell in a night. You needed a thousand and a moon’s turn to
take Deepwood Motte.”
“Well, I’m no great warrior like you, brother.” She qua ed half a
horn of ale and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I saw
the heads above your gates. Tell me true, which one gave you the
ercest ght, the cripple or the babe?”
Theon could feel the blood rushing to his face. He took no joy
from those heads, no more than he had in displaying the headless
bodies of the children before the castle. Old Nan stood with her soft
toothless mouth opening and closing soundlessly, and Farlen threw
himself at Theon, snarling like one of his hounds. Urzen and Cadwyl
had to beat him senseless with the butts of their spears. How did I
come to this? he remembered thinking as he stood over the yspeckled bodies.
Only Maester Luwin had the stomach to come near. Stone-faced,
the small grey man had begged leave to sew the boys’ heads back
onto their shoulders, so they might be laid in the crypts below with
the other Stark dead.
“No,” Theon had told him. “Not the crypts.”
“But why, my lord? Surely they cannot harm you now. It is where
they belong. All the bones of the Starks—”
“I said no.” He needed the heads for the wall, but he had burned
the headless bodies that very day, in all their nery. Afterward he
had knelt amongst the bones and ashes to retrieve a slag of melted
silver and cracked jet, all that remained of the wolf’s-head brooch
that had once been Bran’s. He had it still.
“I treated Bran and Rickon generously,” he told his sister. “They
brought their fate on themselves.”
“As do we all, little brother.”
His patience was at an end. “How do you expect me to hold
Winterfell if you bring me only twenty men?”
“Ten,” Asha corrected. “The others return with me. You wouldn’t
want your own sweet sister to brave the dangers of the wood
without an escort, would you? There are direwolves prowling the

dark.” She uncoiled from the great stone seat and rose to her feet.
“Come, let us go somewhere we can speak more privily.”
She was right, he knew, though it galled him that she would
make that decision. I should never have come to the hall, he realized
belatedly. I should have summoned her to me.
It was too late for that now, however. Theon had no choice but to
lead Asha to Ned Stark’s solar. There, before the ashes of a dead
re, he blurted, “Dagmer’s lost the ght at Torrhen’s Square—”
“The old castellan broke his shield wall, yes,” Asha said calmly.
“What did you expect? This Ser Rodrik knows the land intimately,
as the Cleftjaw does not, and many of the northmen were mounted.
The ironborn lack the discipline to stand a charge of armored horse.
Dagmer lives, be grateful for that much. He’s leading the survivors
back toward the Stony Shore.”
She knows more than I do, Theon realized. That only made him
angrier. “The victory has given Leobald Tallhart the courage to
come out from behind his walls and join Ser Rodrik. And I’ve had
reports that Lord Manderly has sent a dozen barges upriver packed
with knights, warhorses, and siege engines. The Umbers are
gathering beyond the Last River as well. I’ll have an army at my
gates before the moon turns, and you bring me only ten men?”
“I need not have brought you any.”
“I commanded you—”
“Father commanded me to take Deepwood Motte,” she snapped.
“He said nothing of me having to rescue my little brother.”
“Bugger Deepwood,” he said. “It’s a wooden pisspot on a hill.
Winterfell is the heart of the land, but how am I to hold it without a
garrison?”
“You might have thought of that before you took it. Oh, it was
cleverly done, I’ll grant you. If only you’d had the good sense to
raze the castle and carry the two little princelings back to Pyke as
hostages, you might have won the war in a stroke.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To see my prize reduced to ruins
and ashes.”
“Your prize will be the doom of you. Krakens rise from the sea,
Theon, or did you forget that during your years among the wolves?

Our strength is in our longships. My wooden pisspot sits close
enough to the sea for supplies and fresh men to reach me whenever
they are needful. But Winterfell is hundreds of leagues inland,
ringed by woods, hills, and hostile holdfasts and castles. And every
man in a thousand leagues is your enemy now, make no mistake.
You made certain of that when you mounted those heads on your
gatehouse.” Asha shook her head. “How could you be such a bloody
fool? Children …”
“They de ed me!” he shouted in her face. “And it was blood for
blood besides, two sons of Eddard Stark to pay for Rodrik and
Maron.” The words tumbled out heedlessly, but Theon knew at once
that his father would approve. “I’ve laid my brothers’ ghosts to
rest.”
“Our brothers,” Asha reminded him, with a half smile that
suggested she took his talk of vengeance well salted. “Did you bring
their ghosts from Pyke, brother? And here I thought they haunted
only Father.”
“When has a maid ever understood a man’s need for revenge?”
Even if his father did not appreciate the gift of Winterfell, he must
approve of Theon avenging his brothers!
Asha snorted back a laugh. “This Ser Rodrik may well feel the
same manly need, did you think of that? You are blood of my
blood, Theon, whatever else you may be. For the sake of the
mother who bore us both, return to Deepwood Motte with me. Put
Winterfell to the torch and fall back while you still can.”
“No.” Theon adjusted his crown. “I took this castle and I mean to
hold it.”
His sister looked at him a long time. “Then hold it you shall,” she
said, “for the rest of your life.” She sighed. “I say it tastes like folly,
but what would a shy maid know of such things?” At the door she
gave him one last mocking smile. “You ought to know, that’s the
ugliest crown I’ve ever laid eyes on. Did you make it yourself?”
She left him fuming, and lingered no longer than was needful to
feed and water her horses. Half the men she’d brought returned
with her as threatened, riding out the same Hunter’s Gate that Bran
and Rickon had used for their escape.

Theon watched them go from atop the wall. As his sister vanished
into the mists of the wolfswood he found himself wondering why he
had not listened and gone with her.
“Gone, has she?” Reek was at his elbow.
Theon had not heard him approach, nor smelled him either. He
could not think of anyone he wanted to see less. It made him uneasy
to see the man walking around breathing, with what he knew. I
should have had him killed after he did the others, he re ected, but the
notion made him nervous. Unlikely as it seemed, Reek could read
and write, and he was possessed of enough base cunning to have
hidden an account of what they’d done.
“M’lord prince, if you’ll pardon me saying, it’s not right for her to
abandon you. And ten men, that won’t be near enough.”
“I am well aware of that,” Theon said. So was Asha.
“Well, might be I could help you,” said Reek. “Give me a horse
and bag o’ coin, and I could nd you some good fellows.”
Theon narrowed his eyes. “How many?”
“A hundred, might be. Two hundred. Maybe more.” He smiled,
his pale eyes glinting. “I was born up north here. I know many a
man, and many a man knows Reek.”
Two hundred men were not an army, but you didn’t need
thousands to hold a castle as strong as Winterfell. So long as they
could learn which end of a spear did the killing, they might make
all the di erence. “Do as you say and you’ll not nd me ungrateful.
You can name your own reward.”
“Well, m’lord, I haven’t had no woman since I was with Lord
Ramsay,” Reek said. “I’ve had my eye on that Palla, and I hear she’s
already been had, so …”
He had gone too far with Reek to turn back now. “Two hundred
men and she’s yours. But a man less and you can go back to fucking
pigs.”
Reek was gone before the sun went down, carrying a bag of Stark
silver and the last of Theon’s hopes. Like as not, I’ll never see the
wretch again, he thought bitterly, but even so the chance had to be
taken.

That night he dreamed of the feast Ned Stark had thrown when
King Robert came to Winterfell. The hall rang with music and
laughter, though the cold winds were rising outside. At rst it was
all wine and roast meat, and Theon was making japes and eyeing
the serving girls and having himself a ne time … until he noticed
that the room was growing darker. The music did not seem so jolly
then; he heard discords and strange silences, and notes that hung in
the air bleeding. Suddenly the wine turned bitter in his mouth, and
when he looked up from his cup he saw that he was dining with the
dead.
King Robert sat with his guts spilling out on the table from the
great gash in his belly, and Lord Eddard was headless beside him.
Corpses lined the benches below, grey-brown esh sloughing o
their bones as they raised their cups to toast, worms crawling in and
out of the holes that were their eyes. He knew them, every one;
Jory Cassel and Fat Tom, Porther and Cayn and Hullen the master
of horse, and all the others who had ridden south to King’s Landing
never to return. Mikken and Chayle sat together, one dripping
blood and the other water. Benfred Tallhart and his Wild Hares
lled most of a table. The miller’s wife was there as well, and
Farlen, even the wildling Theon had killed in the wolfswood the day
he had saved Bran’s life.
But there were others with faces he had never known in life, faces
he had seen only in stone. The slim, sad girl who wore a crown of
pale blue roses and a white gown spattered with gore could only be
Lyanna. Her brother Brandon stood beside her, and their father Lord
Rickard just behind. Along the walls gures half-seen moved
through the shadows, pale shades with long grim faces. The sight of
them sent fear shivering through Theon sharp as a knife. And then
the tall doors opened with a crash, and a freezing gale blew down
the hall, and Robb came walking out of the night. Grey Wind
stalked beside, eyes burning, and man and wolf alike bled from half
a hundred savage wounds.
Theon woke with a scream, startling Wex so badly that the boy
ran naked from the room. When his guards burst in with drawn
swords, he ordered them to bring him the maester. By the time

Luwin arrived rumpled and sleepy, a cup of wine had steadied
Theon’s hands, and he was feeling ashamed of his panic. “A dream,”
he muttered, “that was all it was. It meant nothing.”
“Nothing,” Luwin agreed solemnly. He left a sleeping draught,
but Theon poured it down the privy shaft the moment he was gone.
Luwin was a man as well as a maester, and the man had no love for
him. He wants me to sleep, yes … to sleep and never wake. He’d like
that as much as Asha would.
He sent for Kyra, kicked shut the door, climbed on top of her, and
fucked the wench with a fury he’d never known was in him. By the
time he nished, she was sobbing, her neck and breasts covered
with bruises and bite marks. Theon shoved her from the bed and
threw her a blanket. “Get out.”
Yet even then, he could not sleep.
Come dawn, he dressed and went outside, to walk along the outer
walls. A brisk autumn wind was swirling through the battlements. It
reddened his cheeks and stung his eyes. He watched the forest go
from grey to green below him as light ltered through the silent
trees. On his left he could see tower tops above the inner wall, their
roofs gilded by the rising sun. The red leaves of the weirwood were
a blaze of ame among the green. Ned Stark’s tree, he thought, and
Stark’s wood, Stark’s castle, Stark’s sword, Stark’s gods. This is their
place, not mine. I am a Greyjoy of Pyke, born to paint a kraken on my
shield and sail the great salt sea. I should have gone with Asha.
On their iron spikes atop the gatehouse, the heads waited.
Theon gazed at them silently while the wind tugged on his cloak
with small ghostly hands. The miller’s boys had been of an age with
Bran and Rickon, alike in size and coloring, and once Reek had
ayed the skin from their faces and dipped their heads in tar, it was
easy to see familiar features in those misshapen lumps of rotting
esh. People were such fools. If we’d said they were rams’ heads, they
would have seen horns.

SANSA

They had been singing in the sept all morning, since the rst report

of enemy sails had reached the castle. The sound of their voices
mingled with the whicker of horses, the clank of steel, and the
groaning hinges of the great bronze gates to make a strange and
fearful music. In the sept they sing for the Mother’s mercy but on the
walls it’s the Warrior they pray to, and all in silence. She remembered
how Septa Mordane used to tell them that the Warrior and the
Mother were only two faces of the same great god. But if there is
only one, whose prayers will be heard?
Ser Meryn Trant held the blood bay for Jo rey to mount. Boy and
horse alike wore gilded mail and enameled crimson plate, with
matching golden lions on their heads. The pale sunlight ashed o
the golds and reds every time Jo moved. Bright, shining, and empty,
Sansa thought.
The Imp was mounted on a red stallion, armored more plainly
than the king in battle gear that made him look like a little boy
dressed up in his father’s clothes. But there was nothing childish
about the battle-axe slung below his shield. Ser Mandon Moore rode
at his side, white steel icy bright. When Tyrion saw her he turned
his horse her way. “Lady Sansa,” he called from the saddle, “surely
my sister has asked you to join the other highborn ladies in
Maegor’s?”
“She has, my lord, but King Jo rey sent for me to see him o . I
mean to visit the sept as well, to pray.”

“I won’t ask for whom.” His mouth twisted oddly; if that was a
smile, it was the queerest she had ever seen. “This day may change
all. For you as well as for House Lannister. I ought to have sent you
o with Tommen, now that I think on it. Still, you should be safe
enough in Maegor’s, so long as—”
“Sansa!” The boyish shout rang across the yard; Jo rey had seen
her. “Sansa, here!”
He calls me as if he were calling a dog, she thought.
“His Grace has need of you,” Tyrion Lannister observed. “We’ll
talk again after the battle, if the gods permit.”
Sansa threaded her way through a le of gold-cloaked spearmen
as Jo rey beckoned her closer. “It will be battle soon, everyone
says so.”
“May the gods have mercy on us all.”
“My uncle’s the one who will need mercy, but I won’t give him
any.” Jo rey drew his sword. The pommel was a ruby cut in the
shape of a heart, set between a lion’s jaws. Three fullers were
deeply incised in the blade. “My new blade, Hearteater.”
He’d owned a sword named Lion’s Tooth once, Sansa
remembered. Arya had taken it from him and thrown it in a river. I
hope Stannis does the same with this one. “It is beautifully wrought,
Your Grace.”
“Bless my steel with a kiss.” He extended the blade down to her.
“Go on, kiss it.”
He had never sounded more like a stupid little boy. Sansa touched
her lips to the metal, thinking that she would kiss any number of
swords sooner than Jo rey. The gesture seemed to please him,
though. He sheathed the blade with a ourish. “You’ll kiss it again
when I return, and taste my uncle’s blood.”
Only if one of your Kingsguard kills him for you. Three of the White
Swords would go with Jo rey and his uncle: Ser Meryn, Ser
Mandon, and Ser Osmund Kettleblack. “Will you lead your knights
into battle?” Sansa asked, hoping.
“I would, but my uncle the Imp says my uncle Stannis will never
cross the river. I’ll command the Three Whores, though. I’m going
to see to the traitors myself.” The prospect made Jo smile. His

plump pink lips always made him look pouty. Sansa had liked that
once, but now it made her sick.
“They say my brother Robb always goes where the ghting is
thickest,” she said recklessly. “Though he’s older than Your Grace,
to be sure. A man grown.”
That made him frown. “I’ll deal with your brother after I’m done
with my traitor uncle. I’ll gut him with Hearteater, you’ll see.” He
wheeled his horse about and spurred toward the gate. Ser Meryn
and Ser Osmund fell in to his right and left, the gold cloaks
following four abreast. The Imp and Ser Mandon Moore brought up
the rear. The guards saw them o with shouts and cheers. When the
last was gone, a sudden stillness settled over the yard, like the hush
before a storm.
Through the quiet, the singing pulled at her. Sansa turned toward
the sept. Two stableboys followed, and one of the guards whose
watch was ended. Others fell in behind them.
Sansa had never seen the sept so crowded, nor so brightly lit;
great shafts of rainbow-colored sunlight slanted down through the
crystals in the high windows, and candles burned on every side,
their little ames twinkling like stars. The Mother’s altar and the
Warrior’s swam in light, but Smith and Crone and Maid and Father
had their worshipers as well, and there were even a few ames
dancing below the Stranger’s half-human face … for what was
Stannis Baratheon, if not the Stranger come to judge them? Sansa
visited each of the Seven in turn, lighting a candle at each altar, and
then found herself a place on the benches between a wizened old
washerwoman and a boy no older than Rickon, dressed in the ne
linen tunic of a knight’s son. The old woman’s hand was bony and
hard with callus, the boy’s small and soft, but it was good to have
someone to hold on to. The air was hot and heavy, smelling of
incense and sweat, crystal-kissed and candle-bright; it made her
dizzy to breathe it.
She knew the hymn; her mother had taught it to her once, a long
time ago in Winterfell. She joined her voice to theirs.

Gentle Mother, font of mercy,
save our sons from war, we pray,
stay the swords and stay the arrows,
let them know a better day.
Gentle Mother, strength of women,
help our daughters through this fray,
soothe the wrath and tame the fury,
teach us all a kinder way.
Across the city, thousands had jammed into the Great Sept of
Baelor on Visenya’s Hill, and they would be singing too, their voices
swelling out over the city, across the river, and up into the sky.
Surely the gods must hear us, she thought.
Sansa knew most of the hymns, and followed along on those she
did not know as best she could. She sang along with grizzled old
serving men and anxious young wives, with serving girls and
soldiers, cooks and falconers, knights and knaves, squires and spit
boys and nursing mothers. She sang with those inside the castle
walls and those without, sang with all the city. She sang for mercy,
for the living and the dead alike, for Bran and Rickon and Robb, for
her sister Arya and her bastard brother Jon Snow, away o on the
Wall. She sang for her mother and her father, for her grandfather
Lord Hoster and her uncle Edmure Tully, for her friend Jeyne
Poole, for old drunken King Robert, for Septa Mordane and Ser
Dontos and Jory Cassel and Maester Luwin, for all the brave knights
and soldiers who would die today, and for the children and the
wives who would mourn them, and nally, toward the end, she
even sang for Tyrion the Imp and for the Hound. He is no true knight
but he saved me all the same, she told the Mother. Save him if you can,
and gentle the rage inside him.
But when the septon climbed on high and called upon the gods to
protect and defend their true and noble king, Sansa got to her feet.
The aisles were jammed with people. She had to shoulder through
while the septon called upon the Smith to lend strength to Jo rey’s
sword and shield, the Warrior to give him courage, the Father to
defend him in his need. Let his sword break and his shield shatter,

Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his
courage fail him and every man desert him.
A few guards paced along on the gatehouse battlements, but
otherwise the castle seemed empty. Sansa stopped and listened.
Away o , she could hear the sounds of battle. The singing almost
drowned them out, but the sounds were there if you had the ears to
hear: the deep moan of warhorns, the creak and thud of catapults
inging stones, the splashes and splinterings, the crackle of burning
pitch and thrum of scorpions loosing their yard-long iron-headed
shafts … and beneath it all, the cries of dying men.
It was another sort of song, a terrible song. Sansa pulled the hood
of her cloak up over her ears, and hurried toward Maegor’s
Holdfast, the castle-within-a-castle where the queen had promised
they would all be safe. At the foot of the drawbridge, she came
upon Lady Tanda and her two daughters. Falyse had arrived
yesterday from Castle Stokeworth with a small troop of soldiers.
She was trying to coax her sister onto the bridge, but Lollys clung to
her maid, sobbing, “I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want
to.”
“The battle is begun,” Lady Tanda said in a brittle voice.
“I don’t want to, I don’t want to.”
There was no way Sansa could avoid them. She greeted them
courteously. “May I be of help?”
Lady Tanda ushed with shame. “No, my lady, but we thank you
kindly. You must forgive my daughter, she has not been well.”
“I don’t want to.” Lollys clutched at her maid, a slender, pretty
girl with short dark hair who looked as though she wanted nothing
so much as to shove her mistress into the dry moat, onto those iron
spikes. “Please, please, I don’t want to.”
Sansa spoke to her gently. “We’ll all be thrice protected inside,
and there’s to be food and drink and song as well.”
Lollys gaped at her, mouth open. She had dull brown eyes that
always seemed to be wet with tears. “I don’t want to.”
“You have to,” her sister Falyse said sharply, “and that is the end
of it. Shae, help me.” They each took an elbow, and together half
dragged and half carried Lollys across the bridge. Sansa followed

with their mother. “She’s been sick,” Lady Tanda said. If a babe can
be termed a sickness, Sansa thought. It was common gossip that
Lollys was with child.
The two guards at the door wore the lion-crested helms and
crimson cloaks of House Lannister, but Sansa knew they were only
dressed-up sellswords. Another sat at the foot of the stair—a real
guard would have been standing, not sitting on a step with his
halberd across his knees—but he rose when he saw them and
opened the door to usher them inside.
The Queen’s Ballroom was not a tenth the size of the castle’s
Great Hall, only half as big as the Small Hall in the Tower of the
Hand, but it could still seat a hundred, and it made up in grace what
it lacked in space. Beaten silver mirrors backed every wall sconce,
so the torches burned twice as bright; the walls were paneled in
richly carved wood, and sweet-smelling rushes covered the oors.
From the gallery above drifted down the merry strains of pipes and
ddle. A line of arched windows ran along the south wall, but they
had been closed o with heavy draperies. Thick velvet hangings
admitted no thread of light, and would mu e the sound of prayer
and war alike. It makes no matter, Sansa thought. The war is with us.
Almost every highborn woman in the city sat at the long trestle
tables, along with a handful of old men and young boys. The
women were wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters. Their men had
gone out to ght Lord Stannis. Many would not return. The air was
heavy with the knowledge. As Jo rey’s betrothed, Sansa had the
seat of honor on the queen’s right hand. She was climbing the dais
when she saw the man standing in the shadows by the back wall. He
wore a long hauberk of oiled black mail, and held his sword before
him: her father’s greatsword, Ice, near as tall as he was. Its point
rested on the oor, and his hard bony ngers curled around the
crossguard on either side of the grip. Sansa’s breath caught in her
throat. Ser Ilyn Payne seemed to sense her stare. He turned his
gaunt, pox-ravaged face toward her.
“What is he doing here?” she asked Osfryd Kettleblack. He
captained the queen’s new red cloak guard.

Osfryd grinned. “Her Grace expects she’ll have need of him
before the night’s done.”
Ser Ilyn was the King’s Justice. There was only one service he
might be needed for. Whose head does she want?
“All rise for Her Grace, Cersei of House Lannister, Queen Regent
and Protector of the Realm,” the royal steward cried.
Cersei’s gown was snowy linen, white as the cloaks of the
Kingsguard. Her long dagged sleeves showed a lining of gold satin.
Masses of bright yellow hair tumbled to her bare shoulders in thick
curls. Around her slender neck hung a rope of diamonds and
emeralds. The white made her look strangely innocent, almost
maidenly, but there were points of color on her cheeks.
“Be seated,” the queen said when she had taken her place on the
dais, “and be welcome.” Osfryd Kettleblack held her chair; a page
performed the same service for Sansa. “You look pale, Sansa,”
Cersei observed. “Is your red ower still blooming?”
“Yes.”
“How apt. The men will bleed out there, and you in here.” The
queen signaled for the rst course to be served.
“Why is Ser Ilyn here?” Sansa blurted out.
The queen glanced at the mute headsman. “To deal with treason,
and to defend us if need be. He was a knight before he was a
headsman.” She pointed her spoon toward the end of the hall,
where the tall wooden doors had been closed and barred. “When the
axes smash down those doors, you may be glad of him.”
I would be gladder if it were the Hound, Sansa thought. Harsh as he
was, she did not believe Sandor Clegane would let any harm come
to her. “Won’t your guards protect us?”
“And who will protect us from my guards?” The queen gave
Osfryd a sideways look. “Loyal sellswords are rare as virgin whores.
If the battle is lost, my guards will trip on those crimson cloaks in
their haste to rip them o . They’ll steal what they can and ee,
along with the serving men, washerwomen, and stableboys, all out
to save their own worthless hides. Do you have any notion what
happens when a city is sacked, Sansa? No, you wouldn’t, would

you? All you know of life you learned from singers, and there’s such
a dearth of good sacking songs.”
“True knights would never harm women and children.” The
words rang hollow in her ears even as she said them.
“True knights.” The queen seemed to nd that wonderfully
amusing. “No doubt you’re right. So why don’t you just eat your
broth like a good girl and wait for Symeon Star-Eyes and Prince
Aemon the Dragonknight to come rescue you, sweetling. I’m sure it
won’t be very long now.”

DAVOS

Blackwater Bay was rough and choppy, whitecaps everywhere.

Black Betha rode the ood tide, her sail cracking and snapping at
each shift of wind. Wraith and Lady Marya sailed beside her, no
more than twenty yards between their hulls. His sons could keep a
line. Davos took pride in that.
Across the sea warhorns boomed, deep throaty moans like the
calls of monstrous serpents, repeated ship to ship. “Bring down the
sail,” Davos commanded. “Lower mast. Oarsmen to your oars.” His
son Matthos relayed the commands. The deck of Black Betha
churned as crewmen ran to their tasks, pushing through the soldiers
who always seemed to be in the way no matter where they stood.
Ser Imry had decreed that they would enter the river on oars alone,
so as not to expose their sails to the scorpions and spit res on the
walls of King’s Landing.
Davos could make out Fury well to the southeast, her sails
shimmering golden as they came down, the crowned stag of
Baratheon blazoned on the canvas. From her decks Stannis
Baratheon had commanded the assault on Dragonstone sixteen years
before, but this time he had chosen to ride with his army, trusting
Fury and the command of his eet to his wife’s brother Ser Imry,
who’d come over to his cause at Storm’s End with Lord Alester and
all the other Florents.
Davos knew Fury as well as he knew his own ships. Above her
three hundred oars was a deck given over wholly to scorpions, and

topside she mounted catapults fore and aft, large enough to ing
barrels of burning pitch. A most formidable ship, and very swift as
well, although Ser Imry had packed her bow to stern with armored
knights and men-at-arms, at some cost to her speed.
The warhorns sounded again, commands drifting back from the
Fury. Davos felt a tingle in his missing ngertips. “Out oars,” he
shouted. “Form line.” A hundred blades dipped down into the water
as the oarmaster’s drum began to boom. The sound was like the
beating of a great slow heart, and the oars moved at every stroke, a
hundred men pulling as one.
Wooden wings had sprouted from the Wraith and Lady Marya as
well. The three galleys kept pace, their blades churning the water.
“Slow cruise,” Davos called. Lord Velaryon’s silver-hulled Pride of
Driftmark had moved into her position to port of Wraith, and Bold
Laughter was coming up fast, but Harridan was only now getting her
oars into the water and Seahorse was still struggling to bring down
her mast. Davos looked astern. Yes, there, far to the south, that
could only be Sword sh, lagging as ever. She dipped two hundred
oars and mounted the largest ram in the eet, though Davos had
grave doubts about her captain.
He could hear soldiers shouting encouragement to each other
across the water. They’d been little more than ballast since Storm’s
End, and were eager to get at the foe, con dent of victory. In that,
they were of one mind with their admiral, Lord High Captain Ser
Imry Florent.
Three days past, he had summoned all his captains to a war
council aboard the Fury while the eet lay anchored at the mouth of
the Wendwater, in order to acquaint them with his dispositions.
Davos and his sons had been assigned a place in the second line of
battle, well out on the dangerous starboard wing. “A place of
honor,” Allard had declared, well satis ed with the chance to prove
his valor. “A place of peril,” his father had pointed out. His sons had
given him pitying looks, even young Maric. The Onion Knight has
become an old woman, he could hear them thinking, still a smuggler at
heart.

Well, the last was true enough, he would make no apologies for
it. Seaworth had a lordly ring to it, but down deep he was still Davos
of Flea Bottom, coming home to his city on its three high hills. He
knew as much of ships and sails and shores as any man in the Seven
Kingdoms, and had fought his share of desperate ghts sword to
sword on a wet deck. But to this sort of battle he came a maiden,
nervous and afraid. Smugglers do not sound warhorns and raise
banners. When they smell danger, they raise sail and run before the
wind.
Had he been admiral, he might have done it all di erently. For a
start, he would have sent a few of his swiftest ships to probe
upriver and see what awaited them, instead of smashing in
headlong. When he had suggested as much to Ser Imry, the Lord
High Captain had thanked him courteously, but his eyes were not as
polite. Who is this lowborn craven? those eyes asked. Is he the one who
bought his knighthood with an onion?
With four times as many ships as the boy king, Ser Imry saw no
need for caution or deceptive tactics. He had organized the eet
into ten lines of battle, each of twenty ships. The rst two lines
would sweep up the river to engage and destroy Jo rey’s little
eet, or “the boy’s toys” as Ser Imry dubbed them, to the mirth of
his lordly captains. Those that followed would land companies of
archers and spearmen beneath the city walls, and only then join the
ght on the river. The smaller, slower ships to the rear would ferry
over the main part of Stannis’s host from the south bank, protected
by Salladhor Saan and his Lyseni, who would stand out in the bay in
case the Lannisters had other ships hidden up along the coast,
poised to sweep down on their rear.
To be fair, there was reason for Ser Imry’s haste. The winds had
not used them kindly on the voyage up from Storm’s End. They had
lost two cogs to the rocks of Shipbreaker Bay on the very day they
set sail, a poor way to begin. One of the Myrish galleys had
foundered in the Straits of Tarth, and a storm had overtaken them
as they were entering the Gullet, scattering the eet across half the
narrow sea. All but twelve ships had nally regrouped behind the

sheltering spine of Massey’s Hook, in the calmer waters of
Blackwater Bay, but not before they had lost considerable time.
Stannis would have reached the Rush days ago. The kingsroad ran
from Storm’s End straight to King’s Landing, a much shorter route
than by sea, and his host was largely mounted; near twenty
thousand knights, light horse, and freeriders, Renly’s unwilling
legacy to his brother. They would have made good time, but
armored destriers and twelve-foot lances would avail them little
against the deep waters of the Blackwater Rush and the high stone
walls of the city. Stannis would be camped with his lords on the
south bank of the river, doubtless seething with impatience and
wondering what Ser Imry had done with his eet.
O Merling Rock two days before, they had sighted a half-dozen
shing ski s. The sherfolk had ed before them, but one by one
they had been overtaken and boarded. “A small spoon of victory is
just the thing to settle the stomach before battle,” Ser Imry had
declared happily. “It makes the men hungry for a larger helping.”
But Davos had been more interested in what the captives had to say
about the defenses at King’s Landing. The dwarf had been busy
building some sort of boom to close o the mouth of the river,
though the shermen di ered as to whether the work had been
completed or not. He found himself wishing it had. If the river was
closed to them, Ser Imry would have no choice but to pause and
take stock.
The sea was full of sound: shouts and calls, warhorns and drums
and the trill of pipes, the slap of wood on water as thousands of
oars rose and fell. “Keep line,” Davos shouted. A gust of wind tugged
at his old green cloak. A jerkin of boiled leather and a pothelm at
his feet were his only armor. At sea, heavy steel was as like to cost
a man his life as to save it, he believed. Ser Imry and the other
highborn captains did not share his view; they glittered as they
paced their decks.
Harridan and Seahorse had slipped into their places now, and Lord
Celtigar’s Red Claw beyond them. To starboard of Allard’s Lady
Marya were the three galleys that Stannis had seized from the
unfortunate Lord Sunglass, Piety, Prayer, and Devotion, their decks

crawling with archers. Even Sword sh was closing, lumbering and
rolling through a thickening sea under both oars and sail. A ship of
that many oars ought to be much faster, Davos re ected with
disapproval. It’s that ram she carries, it’s too big, she has no balance.
The wind was gusting from the south, but under oars it made no
matter. They would be sweeping in on the ood tide, but the
Lannisters would have the river current to their favor, and the
Blackwater Rush owed strong and swift where it met the sea. The
rst shock would inevitably favor the foe. We are fools to meet them
on the Blackwater, Davos thought. In any encounter on the open sea,
their battle lines would envelop the enemy eet on both anks,
driving them inward to destruction. On the river, though, the
numbers and weight of Ser Imry’s ships would count for less. They
could not dress more than twenty ships abreast, lest they risk
tangling their oars and colliding with each other.
Beyond the line of warships, Davos could see the Red Keep up on
Aegon’s High Hill, dark against a lemon sky, with the mouth of the
Rush opening out below. Across the river the south shore was black
with men and horses, stirring like angry ants as they caught sight of
the approaching ships. Stannis would have kept them busy building
rafts and etching arrows, yet even so the waiting would have been
a hard thing to bear. Trumpets sounded from among them, tiny and
brazen, soon swallowed by the roar of a thousand shouts. Davos
closed his stubby hand around the pouch that held his ngerbones,
and mouthed a silent prayer for luck.
Fury herself would center the rst line of battle, anked by the
Lord Ste on and the Stag of the Sea, each of two hundred oars. On
the port and starboard wings were the hundreds: Lady Harra,
Bright sh, Laughing Lord, Sea Demon, Horned Honor, Ragged Jenna,
Trident Three, Swift Sword, Princess Rhaenys, Dog’s Nose, Sceptre,
Faithful, Red Raven, Queen Alysanne, Cat, Courageous, and
Dragonsbane. From every stern streamed the ery heart of the Lord
of Light, red and yellow and orange. Behind Davos and his sons
came another line of hundreds commanded by knights and lordly
captains, and then the smaller, slower Myrish contingent, none
dipping more than eighty oars. Farther back would come the sailed

ships, carracks and lumbering great cogs, and last of all Salladhor
Saan in his proud Valyrian, a towering three-hundred, paced by the
rest of his galleys with their distinctive striped hulls. The
amboyant Lyseni princeling had not been pleased to be assigned
the rear guard, but it was clear that Ser Imry trusted him no more
than Stannis did. Too many complaints, and too much talk of the gold
he was owed. Davos was sorry nonetheless. Salladhor Saan was a
resourceful old pirate, and his crews were born seamen, fearless in a
ght. They were wasted in the rear.
Ahooooooooooooooooooooooooo. The call rolled across whitecaps
and churning oars from the forecastle of the Fury: Ser Imry was
sounding
the
attack.
Ahoooooooooooooooooooo,
ahooooooooooooooooooooo.
Sword sh had joined the line at last, though she still had her sail
raised. “Fast cruise,” Davos barked. The drum began to beat more
quickly, and the stroke picked up, the blades of the oars cutting
water, splash-swoosh, splash-swoosh, splash-swoosh. On deck, soldiers
banged sword against shield, while archers quietly strung their
bows and pulled the rst arrow from the quivers at their belts. The
galleys of the rst line of battle obscured his vision, so Davos paced
the deck searching for a better view. He saw no sign of any boom;
the mouth of the river was open, as if to swallow them all.
Except …
In his smuggling days, Davos had often jested that he knew the
waterfront at King’s Landing a deal better than the back of his hand,
since he had not spent a good part of his life sneaking in and out of
the back of his hand. The squat towers of raw new stone that stood
opposite one another at the mouth of the Blackwater might mean
nothing to Ser Imry Florent, but to him it was as if two extra ngers
had sprouted from his knuckles.
Shading his eyes against the westering sun, he peered at those
towers more closely. They were too small to hold much of a
garrison. The one on the north bank was built against the blu with
the Red Keep frowning above; its counterpart on the south shore
had its footing in the water. They dug a cut through the bank, he
knew at once. That would make the tower very di cult to assault;

attackers would need to wade through the water or bridge the little
channel. Stannis had posted bowmen below, to re up at the
defenders whenever one was rash enough to lift his head above the
ramparts, but otherwise had not troubled.
Something ashed down low where the dark water swirled
around the base of the tower. It was sunlight on steel, and it told
Davos Seaworth all he needed to know. A chain boom … and yet they
have not closed the river against us. Why?
He could make a guess at that as well, but there was no time to
consider the question. A shout went up from the ships ahead, and
the warhorns blew again: the enemy was before them.
Between the ashing oars of Sceptre and Faithful, Davos saw a thin
line of galleys drawn across the river, the sun glinting o the gold
paint that marked their hulls. He knew those ships as well as he
knew his own. When he had been a smuggler, he’d always felt safer
knowing whether the sail on the horizon marked a fast ship or a
slow one, and whether her captain was a young man hungry for
glory or an old one serving out his days.
Ahooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, the warhorns called. “Battle
speed,” Davos shouted. On port and starboard he heard Dale and
Allard giving the same command. Drums began to beat furiously,
oars rose and fell, and Black Betha surged forward. When he glanced
toward Wraith, Dale gave him a salute. Sword sh was lagging once
more, wallowing in the wake of the smaller ships to either side;
elsewise the line was straight as a shield wall.
The river that had seemed so narrow from a distance now
stretched wide as a sea, but the city had grown gigantic as well.
Glowering down from Aegon’s High Hill, the Red Keep commanded
the approaches. Its iron-crowned battlements, massive towers, and
thick red walls gave it the aspect of a ferocious beast hunched
above river and streets. The blu s on which it crouched were steep
and rocky, spotted with lichen and gnarled thorny trees. The eet
would have to pass below the castle to reach the harbor and city
beyond.
The rst line was in the river now, but the enemy galleys were
backing water. They mean to draw us in. They want us jammed close,

constricted, no way to sweep around their anks … and with that boom
behind us. He paced his deck, craning his neck for a better look at
Jo rey’s eet. The boy’s toys included the ponderous Godsgrace, he
saw, the old slow Prince Aemon, the Lady of Silk and her sister Lady’s
Shame, Wildwind, Kingslander, White Hart, Lance, Sea ower. But
where was the Lionstar? Where was the beautiful Lady Lyanna that
King Robert had named in honor of the maid he’d loved and lost?
And where was King Robert’s Hammer? She was the largest war
galley in the royal eet, four hundred oars, the only warship the
boy king owned capable of overmatching Fury. By rights she should
have formed the heart of any defense.
Davos tasted a trap, yet he saw no sign of any foes sweeping in
behind them, only the great eet of Stannis Baratheon in their
ordered ranks, stretching back to the watery horizon. Will they raise
the chain and cut us in two? He could not see what good that would
serve. The ships left out in the bay could still land men north of the
city; a slower crossing, but safer.
A ight of ickering orange birds took wing from the castle,
twenty or thirty of them; pots of burning pitch, arcing out over the
river trailing threads of ame. The waters ate most, but a few found
the decks of galleys in the rst line of battle, spreading ame when
they shattered. Men-at-arms were scrambling on Queen Alysanne’s
deck, and he could see smoke rising from three di erent spots on
Dragonsbane, nearest the bank. By then a second ight was on its
way, and arrows were falling as well, hissing down from the
archers’ nests that studded the towers above. A soldier tumbled over
Cat’s gunwale, crashed o the oars, and sank. The rst man to die
today, Davos thought, but he will not be the last.
Atop the Red Keep’s battlements streamed the boy king’s banners:
the crowned stag of Baratheon on its gold eld, the lion of Lannister
on crimson. More pots of pitch came ying. Davos heard men shriek
as re spread across Courageous. Her oarsmen were safe below,
protected from missiles by the half deck that sheltered them, but
the men-at-arms crowded topside were not so fortunate. The
starboard wing was taking all the damage, as he had feared. It will
be our turn soon, he reminded himself, uneasy. Black Betha was well

in range of the repots, being the sixth ship out from the north
bank. To starboard, she had only Allard’s Lady Marya, the ungainly
Sword sh—so far behind now that she was nearer the third line than
the second—and Piety, Prayer, and Devotion, who would need all the
godly intervention they could get, placed as vulnerably as they
were.
As the second line swept past the twin towers, Davos took a
closer look. He could see three links of a huge chain snaking out
from a hole no bigger than a man’s head and disappearing under the
water. The towers had a single door, set a good twenty feet o the
ground. Bowmen on the roof of the northern tower were ring
down at Prayer and Devotion. The archers on Devotion red back, and
Davos heard a man scream as the arrows found him.
“Captain ser.” His son Matthos was at his elbow. “Your helm.”
Davos took it with both hands and slid it over his head. The
pothelm was visorless; he hated having his vision impeded.
By then the pitch pots were raining down around them. He saw
one shatter on the deck of Lady Marya, but Allard’s crew quickly
beat it out. To port, warhorns sounded from the Pride of Driftmark.
The oars ung up sprays of water with every stroke. The yard-long
shaft of a scorpion came down not two feet from Matthos and sank
into the wood of the deck, thrumming. Ahead, the rst line was
within bowshot of the enemy; ights of arrows ew between the
ships, hissing like striking snakes.
South of the Blackwater, Davos saw men dragging crude rafts
toward the water while ranks and columns formed up beneath a
thousand streaming banners. The ery heart was everywhere,
though the tiny black stag imprisoned in the ames was too small to
make out. We should be ying the crowned stag, he thought. The stag
was King Robert’s sigil, the city would rejoice to see it. This stranger’s
standard serves only to set men against us.
He could not behold the ery heart without thinking of the
shadow Melisandre had birthed in the gloom beneath Storm’s End.
At least we ght this battle in the light, with the weapons of honest men,
he told himself. The red woman and her dark children would have
no part of it. Stannis had shipped her back to Dragonstone with his

bastard nephew Edric Storm. His captains and bannermen had
insisted that a battle eld was no place for a woman. Only the
queen’s men had dissented, and then not loudly. All the same, the
king had been on the point of refusing them until Lord Bryce Caron
said, “Your Grace, if the sorceress is with us, afterward men will say
it was her victory, not yours. They will say you owe your crown to
her spells.” That had turned the tide. Davos himself had held his
tongue during the arguments, but if truth be told, he had not been
sad to see the back of her. He wanted no part of Melisandre or her
god.
To starboard, Devotion drove toward shore, sliding out a plank.
Archers scrambled into the shallows, holding their bows high over
their heads to keep the strings dry. They splashed ashore on the
narrow strand beneath the blu s. Rocks came bouncing down from
the castle to crash among them, and arrows and spears as well, but
the angle was steep and the missiles seemed to do little damage.
Prayer landed two dozen yards upstream and Piety was slanting
toward the bank when the defenders came pounding down the
riverside, the hooves of their warhorses sending up gouts of water
from the shallows. The knights fell among the archers like wolves
among chickens, driving them back toward the ships and into the
river before most could notch an arrow. Men-at-arms rushed to
defend them with spear and axe, and in three heartbeats the scene
had turned to blood-soaked chaos. Davos recognized the dog’s-head
helm of the Hound. A white cloak streamed from his shoulders as he
rode his horse up the plank onto the deck of Prayer, hacking down
anyone who blundered within reach.
Beyond the castle, King’s Landing rose on its hills behind the
encircling walls. The riverfront was a blackened desolation; the
Lannisters had burned everything and pulled back within the Mud
Gate. The charred spars of sunken hulks sat in the shallows,
forbidding access to the long stone quays. We shall have no landing
there. He could see the tops of three huge trebuchets behind the
Mud Gate. High on Visenya’s Hill, sunlight blazed o the seven
crystal towers of the Great Sept of Baelor.

Davos never saw the battle joined, but he heard it; a great
rending crash as two galleys came together. He could not say which
two. Another impact echoed over the water an instant later, and
then a third. Beneath the screech of splintering wood, he heard the
deep thrum-thump of the Fury’s fore catapult. Stag of the Sea split one
of Jo rey’s galleys clean in two, but Dog’s Nose was a re and Queen
Alysanne was locked between Lady of Silk and Lady’s Shame, her
crew ghting the boarders rail-to-rail.
Directly ahead, Davos saw the enemy’s Kingslander drive between
Faithful and Sceptre. The former slid her starboard oars out of the
way before impact, but Sceptre’s portside oars snapped like so much
kindling as Kingslander raked along her side. “Loose,” Davos
commanded, and his bowmen sent a withering rain of shafts across
the water. He saw Kingslander’s captain fall, and tried to recall the
man’s name.
Ashore, the arms of the great trebuchets rose one, two, three, and
a hundred stones climbed high into the yellow sky. Each one was as
large as a man’s head; when they fell they sent up great gouts of
water, smashed through oak planking, and turned living men into
bone and pulp and gristle. All across the river the rst line was
engaged. Grappling hooks were ung out, iron rams crashed
through wooden hulls, boarders swarmed,
ights of arrows
whispered through each other in the drifting smoke, and men
died … but so far, none of his.
Black Betha swept upriver, the sound of her oarmaster’s drum
thundering in her captain’s head as he looked for a likely victim for
her ram. The beleaguered Queen Alysanne was trapped between two
Lannister warships, the three made fast by hooks and lines.
“Ramming speed!” Davos shouted.
The drumbeats blurred into a long fevered hammering, and Black
Betha ew, the water turning white as milk as it parted for her
prow. Allard had seen the same chance; Lady Marya ran beside
them. The rst line had been transformed into a confusion of
separate struggles. The three tangled ships loomed ahead, turning,
their decks a red chaos as men hacked at each other with sword and

axe. A little more, Davos Seaworth beseeched the Warrior, bring her
around a little more, show me her broadside.
The Warrior must have been listening. Black Betha and Lady
Marya slammed into the side of Lady’s Shame within an instant of
each other, ramming her fore and aft with such force that men were
thrown o the deck of Lady of Silk three boats away. Davos almost
bit his tongue o when his teeth jarred together. He spat out blood.
Next time close your mouth, you fool. Forty years at sea, and yet this
was the rst time he’d rammed another ship. His archers were
loosing arrows at will.
“Back water,” he commanded. When Black Betha reversed her
oars, the river rushed into the splintered hole she left, and Lady’s
Shame fell to pieces before his eyes, spilling dozens of men into the
river. Some of the living swam; some of the dead oated; the ones
in heavy mail and plate sank to the bottom, the quick and the dead
alike. The pleas of drowning men echoed in his ears.
A ash of green caught his eye, ahead and o to port, and a nest
of writhing emerald serpents rose burning and hissing from the
stern of Queen Alysanne. An instant later Davos heard the dread cry
of “Wild re!”
He grimaced. Burning pitch was one thing, wild re quite another.
Evil stu , and well-nigh unquenchable. Smother it under a cloak and
the cloak took re; slap at a eck of it with your palm and your
hand was a ame. “Piss on wild re and your cock burns o ,” old
seamen liked to say. Still, Ser Imry had warned them to expect a
taste of the alchemists’ vile substance. Fortunately, there were few
true pyromancers left. They will soon run out, Ser Imry had assured
them.
Davos reeled o commands; one bank of oars pushed o while
the other backed water, and the galley came about. Lady Marya had
won clear too, and a good thing; the re was spreading over Queen
Alysanne and her foes faster than he would have believed possible.
Men wreathed in green ame leapt into the water, shrieking like
nothing human. On the walls of King’s Landing, spit res were
belching death, and the great trebuchets behind the Mud Gate were
throwing boulders. One the size of an ox crashed down between

Black Betha and Wraith, rocking both ships and soaking every man
on deck. Another, not much smaller, found Bold Laughter. The
Velaryon galley exploded like a child’s toy dropped from a tower,
spraying splinters as long as a man’s arm.
Through black smoke and swirling green re, Davos glimpsed a
swarm of small boats bearing downriver: a confusion of ferries and
wherries, barges, ski s, rowboats, and hulks that looked too rotten
to oat. It stank of desperation; such driftwood could not turn the
tide of a ght, only get in the way. The lines of battle were
hopelessly ensnarled, he saw. O to port, Lord Ste on, Ragged
Jenna, and Swift Sword had broken through and were sweeping
upriver. The starboard wing was heavily engaged, however, and the
center had shattered under the stones of those trebuchets, some
captains turning downstream, others veering to port, anything to
escape that crushing rain. Fury had swung her aft catapult to re
back at the city, but she lacked the range; the barrels of pitch were
shattering under the walls. Sceptre had lost most of her oars, and
Faithful had been rammed and was starting to list. He took Black
Betha between them, and struck a glancing blow at Queen Cersei’s
ornate carved-and-gilded pleasure barge, laden with soldiers instead
of sweetmeats now. The collision spilled a dozen of them into the
river, where Betha’s archers picked them o as they tried to stay
a oat.
Matthos’s shout alerted him to the danger from port; one of the
Lannister galleys was coming about to ram. “Hard to starboard,”
Davos shouted. His men used their oars to push free of the barge,
while others turned the galley so her prow faced the onrushing
White Hart. For a moment he feared he’d been too slow, that he was
about to be sunk, but the current helped swing Black Betha, and
when the impact came it was only a glancing blow, the two hulls
scraping against each other, both ships snapping oars. A jagged
piece of wood ew past his head, sharp as any spear. Davos
inched. “Board her!” he shouted. Grappling lines were ung. He
drew his sword and led them over the rail himself.
The crew of the White Hart met them at the rail, but Black Betha’s
men-at-arms swept over them in a screaming steel tide. Davos

fought through the press, looking for the other captain, but the man
was dead before he reached him. As he stood over the body,
someone caught him from behind with an axe, but his helm turned
the blow, and his skull was left ringing when it might have been
split. Dazed, it was all he could do to roll. His attacker charged
screaming. Davos grasped his sword in both hands and drove it up
point rst into the man’s belly.
One of his crewmen pulled him back to his feet. “Captain ser, the
Hart is ours.” It was true, Davos saw. Most of the enemy were dead,
dying, or yielded. He took o his helm, wiped blood from his face,
and made his way back to his own ship, trodding carefully on
boards slimy with men’s guts. Matthos lent him a hand to help him
back over the rail.
For those few instants, Black Betha and White Hart were the calm
eye in the midst of the storm. Queen Alysanne and Lady of Silk, still
locked together, were a ranging green inferno, drifting downriver
and dragging pieces of Lady’s Shame. One of the Myrish galleys had
slammed into them and was now a re as well. Cat was taking on
men from the fast-sinking Courageous. The captain of Dragonsbane
had driven her between two quays, ripping out her bottom; her
crew poured ashore with the archers and men-at-arms to join the
assault on the walls. Red Raven, rammed, was slowly listing. Stag of
the Sea was ghting res and boarders both, but the ery heart had
been raised over Jo rey’s Loyal Man. Fury, her proud bow smashed
in by a boulder, was engaged with Godsgrace. He saw Lord
Velaryon’s Pride of Driftmark crash between two Lannister river
runners, overturning one and lighting the other up with re arrows.
On the south bank, knights were leading their mounts aboard the
cogs, and some of the smaller galleys were already making their
way across, laden with men-at-arms. They had to thread cautiously
between sinking ships and patches of drifting wild re. The whole of
King Stannis’s eet was in the river now, save for Salladhor Saan’s
Lyseni. Soon enough they would control the Blackwater. Ser Imry
will have his victory, Davos thought, and Stannis will bring his host
across, but gods be good, the cost of this …
“Captain ser!” Matthos touched his shoulder.

It was Sword sh, her two banks of oars lifting and falling. She had
never brought down her sails, and some burning pitch had caught in
her rigging. The ames spread as Davos watched, creeping out over
ropes and sails until she trailed a head of yellow ame. Her
ungainly iron ram, fashioned after the likeness of the sh from
which she took her name, parted the surface of the river before her.
Directly ahead, drifting toward her and swinging around to present
a tempting plump target, was one of the Lannister hulks, oating
low in the water. Slow green blood was leaking out between her
boards.
When he saw that, Davos Seaworth’s heart stopped beating.
“No,” he said. “No, NOOOOOO!” Above the roar and crash of
battle, no one heard him but Matthos. Certainly the captain of the
Sword sh did not, intent as he was on nally spearing something
with his ungainly fat sword. The Sword sh went to battle speed.
Davos lifted his maimed hand to clutch at the leather pouch that
held his ngerbones.
With a grinding, splintering, tearing crash, Sword sh split the
rotted hulk asunder. She burst like an overripe fruit, but no fruit
had ever screamed that shattering wooden scream. From inside her
Davos saw green gushing from a thousand broken jars, poison from
the entrails of a dying beast, glistening, shining, spreading across
the surface of the river …
“Back water,” he roared. “Away. Get us o her, back water, back
water!” The grappling lines were cut, and Davos felt the deck move
under his feet as Black Betha pushed free of White Hart. Her oars slid
down into the water.
Then he heard a short sharp woof, as if someone had blown in his
ear. Half a heartbeat later came the roar. The deck vanished
beneath him, and black water smashed him across the face, lling
his nose and mouth. He was choking, drowning. Unsure which way
was up, Davos wrestled the river in blind panic until suddenly he
broke the surface. He spat out water, sucked in air, grabbed hold of
the nearest chunk of debris, and held on.
Sword sh and the hulk were gone, blackened bodies were oating
downstream beside him, and choking men clinging to bits of

smoking wood. Fifty feet high, a swirling demon of green ame
danced upon the river. It had a dozen hands, in each a whip, and
whatever they touched burst into re. He saw Black Betha burning,
and White Hart and Loyal Man to either side. Piety, Cat, Courageous,
Sceptre, Red Raven, Harridan, Faithful, Fury, they had all gone up,
Kingslander and Godsgrace as well, the demon was eating his own.
Lord Velaryon’s shining Pride of Driftmark was trying to turn, but the
demon ran a lazy green nger across her silvery oars and they
ared up like so many tapers. For an instant she seemed to be
stroking the river with two banks of long bright torches.
The current had him in its teeth by then, spinning him around and
around. He kicked to avoid a oating patch of wild re. My sons,
Davos thought, but there was no way to look for them amidst the
roaring chaos. Another hulk heavy with wild re went up behind
him. The Blackwater itself seemed to boil in its bed, and burning
spars and burning men and pieces of broken ships lled the air.
I’m being swept out into the bay. It wouldn’t be as bad there; he
ought to be able to make shore, he was a strong swimmer.
Salladhor Saan’s galleys would be out in the bay as well, Ser Imry
had commanded them to stand o …
And then the current turned him about again, and Davos saw
what awaited him downstream.
The chain. Gods save us, they’ve raised the chain.
Where the river broadened out into Blackwater Bay, the boom
stretched taut, a bare two or three feet above the water. Already a
dozen galleys had crashed into it, and the current was pushing
others against them. Almost all were a ame, and the rest soon
would be. Davos could make out the striped hulls of Salladhor
Saan’s ships beyond, but he knew he would never reach them. A
wall of red-hot steel, blazing wood, and swirling green ame
stretched before him. The mouth of the Blackwater Rush had turned
into the mouth of hell.

TYRION

Motionless as a gargoyle, Tyrion Lannister hunched on one knee

atop a merlon. Beyond the Mud Gate and the desolation that had
once been the shmarket and wharves, the river itself seemed to
have taken re. Half of Stannis’s eet was ablaze, along with most
of Jo rey’s. The kiss of wild re turned proud ships into funeral
pyres and men into living torches. The air was full of smoke and
arrows and screams.
Downstream, commoners and highborn captains alike could see
the hot green death swirling toward their rafts and carracks and
ferries, borne on the current of the Blackwater. The long white oars
of the Myrish galleys ashed like the legs of maddened centipedes
as they fought to come about, but it was no good. The centipedes
had no place to run.
A dozen great res raged under the city walls, where casks of
burning pitch had exploded, but the wild re reduced them to no
more than candles in a burning house, their orange and scarlet
pennons uttering insigni cantly against the jade holocaust. The
low clouds caught the color of the burning river and roofed the sky
in shades of shifting green, eerily beautiful. A terrible beauty. Like
dragon re. Tyrion wondered if Aegon the Conqueror had felt like
this as he ew above his Field of Fire.
The furnace wind lifted his crimson cloak and beat at his bare
face, yet he could not turn away. He was dimly aware of the gold

cloaks cheering from the hoardings. He had no voice to join them. It
was a half victory. It will not be enough.
He saw another of the hulks he’d stu ed full of King Aerys’s ckle
fruits engulfed by the hungry ames. A fountain of burning jade
rose from the river, the blast so bright he had to shield his eyes.
Plumes of re thirty and forty feet high danced upon the waters,
crackling and hissing. For a few moments they washed out the
screams. There were hundreds in the water, drowning or burning or
doing a little of both.
Do you hear them shrieking, Stannis? Do you see them burning? This
is your work as much as mine. Somewhere in that seething mass of
men south of the Blackwater, Stannis was watching too, Tyrion
knew. He’d never had his brother Robert’s thirst for battle. He
would command from the rear, from the reserve, much as Lord
Tywin Lannister was wont to do. Like as not, he was sitting a
warhorse right now, clad in bright armor, his crown upon his head.
A crown of red gold, Varys says, its points fashioned in the shapes of
ames.
“My ships.” Jo rey’s voice cracked as he shouted up from the
wallwalk, where he huddled with his guards behind the ramparts.
The golden circlet of kingship adorned his battle helm. “My
Kingslander’s burning, Queen Cersei, Loyal Man. Look, that’s
Sea ower, there.” He pointed with his new sword, out to where the
green ames were licking at Sea ower’s golden hull and creeping up
her oars. Her captain had turned her upriver, but not quickly
enough to evade the wild re.
She was doomed, Tyrion knew. There was no other way. If we had
not come forth to meet them, Stannis would have sensed the trap. An
arrow could be aimed, and a spear, even the stone from a catapult,
but wild re had a will of its own. Once loosed, it was beyond the
control of mere men. “It could not be helped,” he told his nephew.
“Our eet was doomed in any case.”
Even from atop the merlon—he had been too short to see over
the ramparts, so he’d had them boost him up—the ames and smoke
and chaos of battle made it impossible for Tyrion to see what was
happening downriver under the castle, but he had seen it a thousand

times in his mind’s eye. Bronn would have whipped the oxen into
motion the moment Stannis’s agship passed under the Red Keep;
the chain was ponderous heavy, and the great winches turned but
slowly, creaking and rumbling. The whole of the usurper’s eet
would have passed by the time the rst glimmer of metal could be
seen beneath the water. The links would emerge dripping wet, some
glistening with mud, link by link by link, until the whole great
chain stretched taut. King Stannis had rowed his eet up the
Blackwater, but he would not row out again.
Even so, some were getting away. A river’s current was a tricky
thing, and the wild re was not spreading as evenly as he had
hoped. The main channel was all a ame, but a good many of the
Myrmen had made for the south bank and looked to escape
unscathed, and at least eight ships had landed under the city walls.
Landed or wrecked, but it comes to the same thing, they’ve put men
ashore. Worse, a good part of the south wing of the enemy’s rst
two battle lines had been well upstream of the inferno when the
hulks went up. Stannis would be left with thirty or forty galleys, at
a guess; more than enough to bring his whole host across, once they
had regained their courage.
That might take a bit of time; even the bravest would be
dismayed after watching a thousand or so of his fellows consumed
by wild re. Hallyne said that sometimes the substance burned so
hot that esh melted like tallow. Yet even so …
Tyrion had no illusions where his own men were concerned. If the
battle looks to be going sour they’ll break, and they’ll break bad, Jacelyn
Bywater had warned him, so the only way to win was to make
certain the battle stayed sweet, start to nish.
He could see dark shapes moving through the charred ruins of the
riverfront wharfs. Time for another sortie, he thought. Men were
never so vulnerable as when they rst staggered ashore. He must
not give the foe time to form up on the north bank.
He scrambled down o the merlon. “Tell Lord Jacelyn we’ve got
enemy on the riverfront,” he said to one of the runners Bywater had
assigned him. To another he said, “Bring my compliments to Ser
Arneld and ask him to swing the Whores thirty degrees west.” The

angle would allow them to throw farther, if not as far out into the
water.
“Mother promised I could have the Whores,” Jo rey said. Tyrion
was annoyed to see that the king had lifted the visor of his helm
again. Doubtless the boy was cooking inside all that heavy
steel … but the last thing he needed was some stray arrow punching
through his nephew’s eye.
He clanged the visor shut. “Keep that closed, Your Grace; your
sweet person is precious to us all.” And you don’t want to spoil that
pretty face, either. “The Whores are yours.” It was as good a time as
any; inging more repots down onto burning ships seemed
pointless. Jo had the Antler Men trussed up naked in the square
below, antlers nailed to their heads. When they’d been brought
before the Iron Throne for justice, he had promised to send them to
Stannis. A man was not as heavy as a boulder or a cask of burning
pitch, and could be thrown a deal farther. Some of the gold cloaks
had been wagering on whether the traitors would y all the way
across the Blackwater. “Be quick about it, Your Grace,” he told
Jo rey. “We’ll want the trebuchets throwing stones again soon
enough. Even wild re does not burn forever.”
Jo rey hurried o happy, escorted by Ser Meryn, but Tyrion
caught Ser Osmund by the wrist before he could follow. “Whatever
happens, keep him safe and keep him there, is that understood?”
“As you command.” Ser Osmund smiled amiably.
Tyrion had warned Trant and Kettleblack what would happen to
them should any harm come to the king. And Jo rey had a dozen
veteran gold cloaks waiting at the foot of the steps. I’m protecting
your wretched bastard as well as I can, Cersei, he thought bitterly. See
you do the same for Alayaya.
No sooner was Jo o than a runner came panting up the steps.
“My lord, hurry!” He threw himself to one knee. “They’ve landed
men on the tourney grounds, hundreds! They’re bringing a ram up
to the King’s Gate.”
Tyrion cursed and made for the steps with a rolling waddle.
Podrick Payne waited below with their horses. They galloped o
down River Row, Pod and Ser Mandon Moore coming hard behind

him. The shuttered houses were steeped in green shadow, but there
was no tra c to get in their way; Tyrion had commanded that the
street be kept clear, so the defenders could move quickly from one
gate to the next. Even so, by the time they reached the King’s Gate,
he could hear a booming crash of wood on wood that told him the
battering ram had been brought into play. The groaning of the great
hinges sounded like the moans of a dying giant. The gatehouse
square was littered with the wounded, but he saw lines of horses as
well, not all of them hurt, and sellswords and gold cloaks enough to
form a strong column. “Form up,” he shouted as he leapt to the
ground. The gate moved under the impact of another blow. “Who
commands here? You’re going out.”
“No.” A shadow detached itself from the shadow of the wall, to
become a tall man in dark grey armor. Sandor Clegane wrenched o
his helm with both hands and let it fall to the ground. The steel was
scorched and dented, the left ear of the snarling hound sheared o .
A gash above one eye had sent a wash of blood down across the
Hound’s old burn scars, masking half his face.
“Yes.” Tyrion faced him.
Clegane’s breath came ragged. “Bugger that. And you.”
A sellsword stepped up beside him. “We been out. Three times.
Half our men are killed or hurt. Wild re bursting all around us,
horses screaming like men and men like horses—”
“Did you think we hired you to ght in a tourney? Shall I bring
you a nice iced milk and a bowl of raspberries? No? Then get on
your fucking horse. You too, dog.”
The blood on Clegane’s face glistened red, but his eyes showed
white. He drew his longsword.
He is afraid, Tyrion realized, shocked. The Hound is frightened. He
tried to explain their need. “They’ve taken a ram to the gate, you
can hear them, we need to disperse them—”
“Open the gates. When they rush inside, surround them and kill
them.” The Hound thrust the point of his longsword into the ground
and leaned upon the pommel, swaying. “I’ve lost half my men.
Horse as well. I’m not taking more into that re.”

Ser Mandon Moore moved to Tyrion’s side, immaculate in his
enameled white plate. “The King’s Hand commands you.”
“Bugger the King’s Hand.” Where the Hound’s face was not sticky
with blood, it was pale as milk. “Someone bring me a drink.” A gold
cloak o cer handed him a cup. Clegane took a swallow, spit it out,
ung the cup away. “Water? Fuck your water. Bring me wine.”
He is dead on his feet. Tyrion could see it now. The wound, the
re … he’s done, I need to nd someone else, but who? Ser Mandon?
He looked at the men and knew it would not do. Clegane’s fear had
shaken them. Without a leader, they would refuse as well, and Ser
Mandon … a dangerous man, Jaime said, yes, but not a man other
men would follow.
In the distance Tyrion heard another great crash. Above the walls,
the darkening sky was awash with sheets of green and orange light.
How long could the gate hold?
This is madness, he thought, but sooner madness than defeat. Defeat
is death and shame. “Very well, I’ll lead the sortie.”
If he thought that would shame the Hound back to valor, he was
wrong. Clegane only laughed. “You?”
Tyrion could see the disbelief on their faces. “Me. Ser Mandon,
you’ll bear the king’s banner. Pod, my helm.” The boy ran to obey.
The Hound leaned on that notched and blood-streaked sword and
looked at him with those wide white eyes. Ser Mandon helped
Tyrion mount up again. “Form up!” he shouted.
His big red stallion wore crinet and chamfron. Crimson silk
draped his hindquarters, over a coat of mail. The high saddle was
gilded. Podrik Payne handed up helm and shield, heavy oak
emblazoned with a golden hand on red, surrounded by small golden
lions. He walked his horse in a circle, looking at the little force of
men. Only a handful had responded to his command, no more than
twenty. They sat their horses with eyes as white as the Hound’s. He
looked contemptuously at the others, the knights and sellswords
who had ridden with Clegane. “They say I’m half a man,” he said.
“What does that make the lot of you?”
That shamed them well enough. A knight mounted, helmetless,
and rode to join the others. A pair of sellswords followed. Then

more. The King’s Gate shuddered again. In a few moments the size
of Tyrion’s command had doubled. He had them trapped. If I ght,
they must do the same, or they are less than dwarfs.
“You won’t hear me shout out Jo rey’s name,” he told them.
“You won’t hear me yell for Casterly Rock either. This is your city
Stannis means to sack, and that’s your gate he’s bringing down. So
come with me and kill the son of a bitch!” Tyrion unsheathed his
axe, wheeled the stallion around, and trotted toward the sally port.
He thought they were following, but never dared to look.

SANSA

The torches shimmered brightly against the hammered metal of the

wall sconces, lling the Queen’s Ballroom with silvery light. Yet
there was still darkness in that hall. Sansa could see it in the pale
eyes of Ser Ilyn Payne, who stood by the back door still as stone,
taking neither food nor wine. She could hear it in Lord Gyles’s
racking cough, and the whispered voice of Osney Kettleblack when
he slipped in to bring Cersei the tidings.
Sansa was nishing her broth when he came the rst time,
entering through the back. She glimpsed him talking to his brother
Osfryd. Then he climbed the dais and knelt beside the high seat,
smelling of horse, four long thin scratches on his cheek crusted with
scabs, his hair falling down past his collar and into his eyes. For all
his whispering, Sansa could not help but hear. “The eets are locked
in battle. Some archers got ashore, but the Hound’s cut them to
pieces, Y’Grace. Your brother’s raising his chain, I heard the signal.
Some drunkards down to Flea Bottom are smashing doors and
climbing through windows. Lord Bywater’s sent the gold cloaks to
deal with them. Baelor’s Sept is jammed full, everyone praying.”
“And my son?”
“The king went to Baelor’s to get the High Septon’s blessing. Now
he’s walking the walls with the Hand, telling the men to be brave,
lifting their spirits as it were.”
Cersei beckoned to her page for another cup of wine, a golden
vintage from the Arbor, fruity and rich. The queen was drinking

heavily, but the wine only seemed to make her more beautiful; her
cheeks were ushed, and her eyes had a bright, feverish heat to
them as she looked down over the hall. Eyes of wild re, Sansa
thought.
Musicians played. Jugglers juggled. Moon Boy lurched about the
hall on stilts making mock of everyone, while Ser Dontos chased
serving girls on his broomstick horse. The guests laughed, but it was
a joyless laughter, the sort of laughter that can turn into sobbing in
half a heartbeat. Their bodies are here, but their thoughts are on the city
walls, and their hearts as well.
After the broth came a salad of apples, nuts, and raisins. At any
other time, it might have made a tasty dish, but tonight all the food
was avored with fear. Sansa was not the only one in the hall
without an appetite. Lord Gyles was coughing more than he was
eating, Lollys Stokeworth sat hunched and shivering, and the young
bride of one of Ser Lancel’s knights began to weep uncontrollably.
The queen commanded Maester Frenken to put her to bed with a
cup of dreamwine. “Tears,” she said scornfully to Sansa as the
woman was led from the hall. “The woman’s weapon, my lady
mother used to call them. The man’s weapon is a sword. And that
tells us all you need to know, doesn’t it?”
“Men must be very brave, though,” said Sansa. “To ride out and
face swords and axes, everyone trying to kill you …”
“Jaime told me once that he only feels truly alive in battle and in
bed.” She lifted her cup and took a long swallow. Her salad was
untouched. “I would sooner face any number of swords than sit
helpless like this, pretending to enjoy the company of this ock of
frightened hens.”
“You asked them here, Your Grace.”
“Certain things are expected of a queen. They will be expected of
you should you ever wed Jo rey. Best learn.” The queen studied the
wives, daughters, and mothers who
lled the benches. “Of
themselves the hens are nothing, but their cocks are important for
one reason or another, and some may survive this battle. So it
behooves me to give their women my protection. If my wretched
dwarf of a brother should somehow manage to prevail, they will

return to their husbands and fathers full of tales about how brave I
was, how my courage inspired them and lifted their spirits, how I
never doubted our victory even for a moment.”
“And if the castle should fall?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Cersei did not wait for a denial.
“If I’m not betrayed by my own guards, I may be able to hold here
for a time. Then I can go to the walls and o er to yield to Lord
Stannis in person. That will spare us the worst. But if Maegor’s
Holdfast should fall before Stannis can come up, why then, most of
my guests are in for a bit of rape, I’d say. And you should never rule
out mutilation, torture, and murder at times like these.”
Sansa was horri ed. “These are women, unarmed, and gently
born.”
“Their birth protects them,” Cersei admitted, “though not as much
as you’d think. Each one’s worth a good ransom, but after the
madness of battle, soldiers often seem to want esh more than coin.
Even so, a golden shield is better than none. Out in the streets, the
women won’t be treated near as tenderly. Nor will our servants.
Pretty things like that serving wench of Lady Tanda’s could be in
for a lively night, but don’t imagine the old and the in rm and the
ugly will be spared. Enough drink will make blind washerwomen
and reeking pig girls seem as comely as you, sweetling.”
“Me?”
“Try not to sound so like a mouse, Sansa. You’re a woman now,
remember? And betrothed to my rstborn.” The queen sipped at her
wine. “Were it anyone else outside the gates, I might hope to
beguile him. But this is Stannis Baratheon. I’d have a better chance
of seducing his horse.” She noticed the look on Sansa’s face, and
laughed. “Have I shocked you, my lady?” She leaned close. “You
little fool. Tears are not a woman’s only weapon. You’ve got
another one between your legs, and you’d best learn to use it. You’ll
nd men use their swords freely enough. Both kinds of swords.”
Sansa was spared the need to reply when two Kettleblacks
reentered the hall. Ser Osmund and his brothers had become great
favorites about the castle; they were always ready with a smile and
a jest, and got on with grooms and huntsmen as well as they did

with knights and squires. With the serving wenches they got on best
of all, it was gossiped. Of late Ser Osmund had taken Sandor
Clegane’s place by Jo rey’s side, and Sansa had heard the women at
the washing well saying he was as strong as the Hound, only
younger and faster. If that was so, she wondered why she had never
once heard of these Kettleblacks before Ser Osmund was named to
the Kingsguard.
Osney was all smiles as he knelt beside the queen. “The hulks
have gone up, Y’Grace. The whole Blackwater’s awash with
wild re. A hundred ships burning, maybe more.”
“And my son?”
“He’s at the Mud Gate with the Hand and the Kingsguard,
Y’Grace. He spoke to the archers on the hoardings before, and gave
them a few tips on handling a crossbow, he did. All agree, he’s a
right brave boy.”
“He’d best remain a right live boy.” Cersei turned to his brother
Osfryd, who was taller, sterner, and wore a drooping black
mustache. “Yes?”
Osfryd had donned a steel halfhelm over his long black hair, and
the look on his face was grim. “Y’Grace,” he said quietly, “the boys
caught a groom and two maidservants trying to sneak out a postern
with three of the king’s horses.”
“The night’s rst traitors,” the queen said, “but not the last, I
fear. Have Ser Ilyn see to them, and put their heads on pikes outside
the stables as a warning.” As they left, she turned to Sansa.
“Another lesson you should learn, if you hope to sit beside my son.
Be gentle on a night like this and you’ll have treasons popping up
all about you like mushrooms after a hard rain. The only way to
keep your people loyal is to make certain they fear you more than
they do the enemy.”
“I will remember, Your Grace,” said Sansa, though she had always
heard that love was a surer route to the people’s loyalty than fear. If
I am ever a queen, I’ll make them love me.
Crabclaw pies followed the salad. Then came mutton roasted with
leeks and carrots, served in trenchers of hollowed bread. Lollys ate
too fast, got sick, and retched all over herself and her sister. Lord

Gyles coughed, drank, coughed, drank, and passed out. The queen
gazed down in disgust to where he sprawled with his face in his
trencher and his hand in a puddle of wine. “The gods must have
been mad to waste manhood on the likes of him, and I must have
been mad to demand his release.”
Osfryd Kettleblack returned, crimson cloak swirling. “There’s
folks gathering in the square, Y’Grace, asking to take refuge in the
castle. Not a mob, rich merchants and the like.”
“Command them to return to their homes,” the queen said. “If
they won’t go, have our crossbowmen kill a few. No sorties; I won’t
have the gates opened for any reason.”
“As you command.” He bowed and moved o .
The queen’s face was hard and angry. “Would that I could take a
sword to their necks myself.” Her voice was starting to slur. “When
we were little, Jaime and I were so much alike that even our lord
father could not tell us apart. Sometimes as a lark we would dress in
each other’s clothes and spend a whole day each as the other. Yet
even so, when Jaime was given his rst sword, there was none for
me. ‘What do I get?’ I remember asking. We were so much alike, I
could never understand why they treated us so di erently. Jaime
learned to ght with sword and lance and mace, while I was taught
to smile and sing and please. He was heir to Casterly Rock, while I
was to be sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever
my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in
time for a younger lly. Jaime’s lot was to be glory and power,
while mine was birth and moonblood.”
“But you were queen of all the Seven Kingdoms,” Sansa said.
“When it comes to swords, a queen is only a woman after all.”
Cersei’s wine cup was empty. The page moved to ll it again, but
she turned it over and shook her head. “No more. I must keep a
clear head.”
The last course was goat cheese served with baked apples. The
scent of cinnamon lled the hall as Osney Kettleblack slipped in to
kneel once more between them. “Y’Grace,” he murmured. “Stannis
has landed men on the tourney grounds, and there’s more coming

across. The Mud Gate’s under attack, and they’ve brought a ram to
the King’s Gate. The Imp’s gone out to drive them o .”
“That will ll them with fear,” the queen said dryly. “He hasn’t
taken Jo , I hope.”
“No, Y’Grace, the king’s with my brother at the Whores, inging
Antler Men into the river.”
“With the Mud Gate under assault? Folly. Tell Ser Osmund I want
him out of there at once, it’s too dangerous. Fetch him back to the
castle.”
“The Imp said—”
“It’s what I said that ought concern you.” Cersei’s eyes narrowed.
“Your brother will do as he’s told, or I’ll see to it that he leads the
next sortie himself, and you’ll go with him.”
After the meal had been cleared away, many of the guests asked
leave to go to the sept. Cersei graciously granted their request.
Lady Tanda and her daughters were among those who ed. For
those who remained, a singer was brought forth to ll the hall with
the sweet music of the high harp. He sang of Jonquil and Florian, of
Prince Aemon the Dragonknight and his love for his brother’s
queen, of Nymeria’s ten thousand ships. They were beautiful songs,
but terribly sad. Several of the women began to weep, and Sansa
felt her own eyes growing moist.
“Very good, dear.” The queen leaned close. “You want to practice
those tears. You’ll need them for King Stannis.”
Sansa shifted nervously. “Your Grace?”
“Oh, spare me your hollow courtesies. Matters must have reached
a desperate strait out there if they need a dwarf to lead them, so
you might as well take o your mask. I know all about your little
treasons in the godswood.”
“The godswood?” Don’t look at Ser Dontos, don’t, don’t, Sansa told
herself. She doesn’t know, no one knows, Dontos promised me, my
Florian would never fail me. “I’ve done no treasons. I only visit the
godswood to pray.”
“For Stannis. Or your brother, it’s all the same. Why else seek
your father’s gods? You’re praying for our defeat. What would you
call that, if not treason?”

“I pray for Jo rey,” she insisted nervously.
“Why, because he treats you so sweetly?” The queen took a
agon of sweet plum wine from a passing serving girl and lled
Sansa’s cup. “Drink,” she commanded coldly. “Perhaps it will give
you the courage to deal with truth for a change.”
Sansa lifted the cup to her lips and took a sip. The wine was
cloyingly sweet, but very strong.
“You can do better than that,” Cersei said. “Drain the cup, Sansa.
Your queen commands you.”
It almost gagged her, but Sansa emptied the cup, gulping down
the thick sweet wine until her head was swimming.
“More?” Cersei asked.
“No. Please.”
The queen looked displeased. “When you asked about Ser Ilyn
earlier, I lied to you. Would you like to hear the truth, Sansa?
Would you like to know why he’s really here?”
She did not dare answer, but it did not matter. The queen raised a
hand and beckoned, never waiting for a reply. Sansa had not even
seen Ser Ilyn return to the hall, but suddenly there he was, striding
from the shadows behind the dais as silent as a cat. He carried Ice
unsheathed. Her father had always cleaned the blade in the
godswood after he took a man’s head, Sansa recalled, but Ser Ilyn
was not so fastidious. There was blood drying on the rippling steel,
the red already fading to brown. “Tell Lady Sansa why I keep you
by us,” said Cersei.
Ser Ilyn opened his mouth and emitted a choking rattle. His poxscarred face had no expression.
“He’s here for us, he says,” the queen said. “Stannis may take the
city and he may take the throne, but I will not su er him to judge
me. I do not mean for him to have us alive.”
“Us?”
“You heard me. So perhaps you had best pray again, Sansa, and
for a di erent outcome. The Starks will have no joy from the fall of
House Lannister, I promise you.” She reached out and touched
Sansa’s hair, brushing it lightly away from her neck.

TYRION

The slot in his helm limited Tyrion’s vision to what was before him,

but when he turned his head he saw three galleys beached on the
tourney grounds, and a fourth, larger than the others, standing well
out into the river, ring barrels of burning pitch from a catapult.
“Wedge,” Tyrion commanded as his men streamed out of the sally
port. They formed up in spearhead, with him at the point. Ser
Mandon Moore took the place to his right, ames shimmering
against the white enamel of his armor, his dead eyes shining
passionlessly through his helm. He rode a coal-black horse barded
all in white, with the pure white shield of the Kingsguard strapped
to his arm. On the left, Tyrion was surprised to see Podrick Payne, a
sword in his hand. “You’re too young,” he said at once. “Go back.”
“I’m your squire, my lord.”
Tyrion could spare no time for argument. “With me, then. Stay
close.” He kicked his horse into motion.
They rode knee to knee, following the line of the looming walls.
Jo rey’s standard streamed crimson and gold from Ser Mandon’s
sta , stag and lion dancing hoof to paw. They went from a walk to
a trot, wheeling wide around the base of the tower. Arrows darted
from the city walls while stones spun and tumbled overhead,
crashing down blindly onto earth and water, steel and esh. Ahead
loomed the King’s Gate and a surging mob of soldiers wrestling
with a huge ram, a shaft of black oak with an iron head. Archers o
the ships surrounded them, loosing their shafts at whatever

defenders showed themselves on the gatehouse walls. “Lances,”
Tyrion commanded. He sped to a canter.
The ground was sodden and slippery, equal parts mud and blood.
His stallion stumbled over a corpse, his hooves sliding and churning
the earth, and for an instant Tyrion feared his charge would end
with him tumbling from the saddle before he even reached the foe,
but somehow he and his horse both managed to keep their balance.
Beneath the gate men were turning, hurriedly trying to brace for
the shock. Tyrion lifted his axe and shouted, “King’s Landing!” Other
voices took up the cry, and now the arrowhead ew, a long scream
of steel and silk, pounding hooves and sharp blades kissed by re.
Ser Mandon dropped the point of his lance at the last possible
instant, and drove Jo rey’s banner through the chest of a man in a
studded jerkin, lifting him full o his feet before the shaft snapped.
Ahead of Tyrion was a knight whose surcoat showed a fox peering
through a ring of owers. Florent was his rst thought, but helmless
ran a close second. He smashed the man in the face with all the
weight of axe and arm and charging horse, taking o half his head.
The shock of impact numbed his shoulder. Shagga would laugh at me,
he thought, riding on.
A spear thudded against his shield. Pod galloped beside him,
slashing down at every foe they passed. Dimly, he heard cheers
from the men on the walls. The battering ram crashed down into
the mud, forgotten in an instant as its handlers ed or turned to
ght. Tyrion rode down an archer, opened a spearman from
shoulder to armpit, glanced a blow o a sword sh-crested helm. At
the ram his big red reared but the black stallion leapt the obstacle
smoothly and Ser Mandon ashed past him, death in snow-white
silk. His sword sheared o limbs, cracked heads, broke shields
asunder—though few enough of the enemy had made it across the
river with shields intact.
Tyrion urged his mount over the ram. Their foes were eeing. He
moved his head right to left and back again, but saw no sign of
Podrick Payne. An arrow clattered against his cheek, missing his
eye slit by an inch. His jolt of fear almost unhorsed him. If I’m to sit
here like a stump, I had as well paint a target on my breastplate.

He spurred his horse back into motion, trotting over and around a
scatter of corpses. Downriver, the Blackwater was jammed with the
hulks of burning galleys. Patches of wild re still oated atop the
water, sending ery green plumes swirling twenty feet into the air.
They had dispersed the men on the battering ram, but he could see
ghting all along the riverfront. Ser Balon Swann’s men, most like,
or Lancel’s, trying to throw the enemy back into the water as they
swarmed ashore o the burning ships. “We’ll ride for the Mud
Gate,” he commanded.
Ser Mandon shouted, “The Mud Gate!” And they were o again.
“King’s Landing!” his men cried raggedly, and “Halfman! Halfman!”
He wondered who had taught them that. Through the steel and
padding of his helm, he heard anguished screams, the hungry
crackle of ame, the shuddering of warhorns, and the brazen blast
of trumpets. Fire was everywhere. Gods be good, no wonder the
Hound was frightened. It’s the ames he fears …
A splintering crash rang across the Blackwater as a stone the size
of a horse landed square amidships on one of the galleys. Ours or
theirs? Through the roiling smoke, he could not tell. His wedge was
gone; every man was his own battle now. I should have turned back,
he thought, riding on.
The axe was heavy in his st. A handful still followed him, the
rest dead or ed. He had to wrestle his stallion to keep his head to
the east. The big destrier liked re no more than Sandor Clegane
had, but the horse was easier to cow.
Men were crawling from the river, men burned and bleeding,
coughing up water, staggering, most dying. He led his troop among
them, delivering quicker cleaner deaths to those strong enough to
stand. The war shrank to the size of his eye slit. Knights twice his
size ed from him, or stood and died. They seemed little things, and
fearful. “Lannister!” he shouted, slaying. His arm was red to the
elbow, glistening in the light o the river. When his horse reared
again, he shook his axe at the stars and heard them call out
“Halfman! Halfman!” Tyrion felt drunk.
The battle fever. He had never thought to experience it himself,
though Jaime had told him of it often enough. How time seemed to

blur and slow and even stop, how the past and the future vanished
until there was nothing but the instant, how fear ed, and thought
ed, and even your body. “You don’t feel your wounds then, or the
ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat
running down into your eyes. You stop feeling, you stop thinking,
you stop being you, there is only the ght, the foe, this man and
then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are
afraid and tired but you’re not, you’re alive, and death is all around
you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them
laughing.” Battle fever. I am half a man and drunk with slaughter, let
them kill me if they can!
They tried. Another spearman ran at him. Tyrion lopped o the
head of his spear, then his hand, then his arm, trotting around him
in a circle. An archer, bowless, thrust at him with an arrow, holding
it as if it were a knife. The destrier kicked at the man’s thigh to
send him sprawling, and Tyrion barked laughter. He rode past a
banner planted in the mud, one of Stannis’s ery hearts, and
chopped the sta in two with a swing of his axe. A knight rose up
from nowhere to hack at his shield with a two-handed greatsword,
again and again, until someone thrust a dagger under his arm. One
of Tyrion’s men, perhaps. He never saw.
“I yield, ser,” a di erent knight called out, farther down the river.
“Yield. Ser knight, I yield to you. My pledge, here, here.” The man
lay in a puddle of black water, o ering up a lobstered gauntlet in
token of submission. Tyrion had to lean down to take it from him.
As he did, a pot of wild re burst overhead, spraying green ame. In
the sudden stab of light he saw that the puddle was not black but
red. The gauntlet still had the knight’s hand in it. He ung it back.
“Yield,” the man sobbed hopelessly, helplessly. Tyrion reeled away.
A man-at-arms grabbed the bridle of his horse and thrust at
Tyrion’s face with a dagger. He knocked the blade aside and buried
the axe in the nape of the man’s neck. As he was wresting it free, a
blaze of white appeared at the edge of his vision. Tyrion turned,
thinking to nd Ser Mandon Moore beside him again, but this was a
di erent white knight. Ser Balon Swann wore the same armor, but
his horse trappings bore the battling black-and-white swans of his

House. He’s more a spotted knight than a white one, Tyrion thought
inanely. Every bit of Ser Balon was spattered with gore and
smudged by smoke. He raised his mace to point downriver. Bits of
brain and bone clung to its head. “My lord, look.”
Tyrion swung his horse about to peer down the Blackwater. The
current still owed black and strong beneath, but the surface was a
roil of blood and ame. The sky was red and orange and garish
green. “What?” he said. Then he saw.
Steel-clad men-at-arms were clambering o a broken galley that
had smashed into a pier. So many, where are they coming from?
Squinting into the smoke and glare, Tyrion followed them back out
into the river. Twenty galleys were jammed together out there,
maybe more, it was hard to count. Their oars were crossed, their
hulls locked together with grappling lines, they were impaled on
each other’s rams, tangled in webs of fallen rigging. One great hulk
oated hull up between two smaller ships. Wrecks, but packed so
closely that it was possible to leap from one deck to the other and
so cross the Blackwater.
Hundreds of Stannis Baratheon’s boldest were doing just that.
Tyrion saw one great fool of a knight trying to ride across, urging a
terri ed horse over gunwales and oars, across tilting decks slick
with blood and crackling with green re. We made them a bloody
bridge, he thought in dismay. Parts of the bridge were sinking and
other parts were a re and the whole thing was creaking and
shifting and like to burst asunder at any moment, but that did not
seem to stop them. “Those are brave men,” he told Ser Balon in
admiration. “Let’s go kill them.”
He led them through the guttering res and the soot and ash of
the riverfront, pounding down a long stone quay with his own men
and Ser Balon’s behind him. Ser Mandon fell in with them, his shield
a ragged ruin. Smoke and cinders swirled through the air, and the
foe broke before their charge, throwing themselves back into the
water, knocking over other men as they fought to climb up. The
foot of the bridge was a half-sunken enemy galley with Dragonsbane
painted on her prow, her bottom ripped out by one of the sunken
hulks Tyrion had placed between the quays. A spearman wearing

the red crab badge of House Celtigar drove the point of his weapon
up through the chest of Balon Swann’s horse before he could
dismount, spilling the knight from the saddle. Tyrion hacked at the
man’s head as he ashed by, and by then it was too late to rein up.
His stallion leapt from the end of the quay and over a splintered
gunwale, landing with a splash and a scream in ankle-deep water.
Tyrion’s axe went spinning, followed by Tyrion himself, and the
deck rose up to give him a wet smack.
Madness followed. His horse had broken a leg and was screaming
horribly. Somehow he managed to draw his dagger, and slit the
poor creature’s throat. The blood gushed out in a scarlet fountain,
drenching his arms and chest. He found his feet again and lurched to
the rail, and then he was ghting, staggering and splashing across
crooked decks awash with water. Men came at him. Some he killed,
some he wounded, and some went away, but always there were
more. He lost his knife and gained a broken spear, he could not
have said how. He clutched it and stabbed, shrieking curses. Men
ran from him and he ran after them, clambering up over the rail to
the next ship and then the next. His two white shadows were always
with him; Balon Swann and Mandon Moore, beautiful in their pale
plate. Surrounded by a circle of Velaryon spearmen, they fought
back to back; they made battle as graceful as a dance.
His own killing was a clumsy thing. He stabbed one man in the
kidney when his back was turned, and grabbed another by the leg
and upended him into the river. Arrows hissed past his head and
clattered o
his armor; one lodged between shoulder and
breastplate, but he never felt it. A naked man fell from the sky and
landed on the deck, body bursting like a melon dropped from a
tower. His blood spattered through the slit of Tyrion’s helm. Stones
began to plummet down, crashing through the decks and turning
men to pulp, until the whole bridge gave a shudder and twisted
violently underfoot, knocking him sideways.
Suddenly the river was pouring into his helm. He ripped it o and
crawled along the listing deck until the water was only neck deep. A
groaning lled the air, like the death cries of some enormous beast.
The ship, he had time to think, the ship’s about to tear loose. The

broken galleys were ripping apart, the bridge breaking apart. No
sooner had he come to that realization than he heard a sudden
crack, loud as thunder, the deck lurched beneath him, and he slid
back down into the water.
The list was so steep he had to climb back up, hauling himself
along a snapped line inch by bloody inch. Out of the corner of his
eye, he saw the hulk they’d been tangled with drifting downstream
with the current, spinning slowly as men leapt over her side. Some
wore Stannis’s aming heart, some Jo rey’s stag-and-lion, some
other badges, but it seemed to make no matter. Fires were burning
upstream and down. On one side of him was a raging battle, a great
confusion of bright banners waving above a sea of struggling men,
shield walls forming and breaking, mounted knights cutting through
the press, dust and mud and blood and smoke. On the other side,
the Red Keep loomed high on its hill, spitting re. They were on the
wrong sides, though. For a moment Tyrion thought he was going
mad, that Stannis and the castle had traded places. How could
Stannis cross to the north bank? Belatedly he realized that the deck
was turning, and somehow he had gotten spun about, so castle and
battle had changed sides. Battle, what battle, if Stannis hasn’t crossed
who is he ghting? Tyrion was too tired to make sense of it. His
shoulder ached horribly, and when he reached up to rub it he saw
the arrow, and remembered. I have to get o this ship. Downstream
was nothing but a wall of re, and if the wreck broke loose the
current would take him right into it.
Someone was calling his name faintly through the din of battle.
Tyrion tried to shout back. “Here! Here, I’m here, help me!” His
voice sounded so thin he could scarcely hear himself. He pulled
himself up the slanting deck, and grabbed for the rail. The hull
slammed into the next galley over and rebounded so violently he
was almost knocked into the water. Where had all his strength
gone? It was all he could do to hang on.
“MY LORD! TAKE MY HAND! MY LORD TYRION!”
There on the deck of the next ship, across a widening gulf of
black water, stood Ser Mandon Moore, a hand extended. Yellow and
green re shone against the white of his armor, and his lobstered

gauntlet was sticky with blood, but Tyrion reached for it all the
same, wishing his arms were longer. It was only at the very last, as
their ngers brushed across the gap, that something niggled at
him … Ser Mandon was holding out his left hand, why …
Was that why he reeled backward, or did he see the sword after
all? He would never know. The point slashed just beneath his eyes,
and he felt its cold hard touch and then a blaze of pain. His head
spun around as if he’d been slapped. The shock of the cold water
was a second slap more jolting than the rst. He ailed for
something to grab on to, knowing that once he went down he was
not like to come back up. Somehow his hand found the splintered
end of a broken oar. Clutching it tight as a desperate lover, he
shinnied up foot by foot. His eyes were full of water, his mouth was
full of blood, and his head throbbed horribly. Gods give me strength
to reach the deck … There was nothing else, only the oar, the water,
the deck.
Finally he rolled over the side and lay breathless and exhausted,
at on his back. Balls of green and orange ame crackled overhead,
leaving streaks between the stars. He had a moment to think how
pretty it was before Ser Mandon blocked out the view. The knight
was a white steel shadow, his eyes shining darkly behind his helm.
Tyrion had no more strength than a rag doll. Ser Mandon put the
point of his sword to the hollow of his throat and curled both hands
around the hilt.
And suddenly he lurched to the left, staggering into the rail.
Wood split, and Ser Mandon Moore vanished with a shout and a
splash. An instant later, the hulls came slamming together again, so
hard the deck seemed to jump. Then someone was kneeling over
him. “Jaime?” he croaked, almost choking on the blood that lled
his mouth. Who else would save him, if not his brother?
“Be still, my lord, you’re hurt bad.” A boy’s voice, that makes no
sense, thought Tyrion. It sounded almost like Pod.

SANSA

When Ser Lancel Lannister told the queen that the battle was lost,

she turned her empty wine cup in her hands and said, “Tell my
brother, ser.” Her voice was distant, as if the news were of no great
interest to her.
“Your brother’s likely dead.” Ser Lancel’s surcoat was soaked with
the blood seeping out under his arm. When he had arrived in the
hall, the sight of him had made some of the guests scream. “He was
on the bridge of boats when it broke apart, we think. Ser Mandon’s
likely gone as well, and no one can nd the Hound. Gods be
damned, Cersei, why did you have them fetch Jo rey back to the
castle? The gold cloaks are throwing down their spears and running,
hundreds of them. When they saw the king leaving, they lost all
heart. The whole Blackwater’s awash with wrecks and re and
corpses, but we could have held if—”
Osney Kettleblack pushed past him. “There’s ghting on both
sides of the river now, Y’Grace. It may be that some of Stannis’s
lords are ghting each other, no one’s sure, it’s all confused over
there. The Hound’s gone, no one knows where, and Ser Balon’s
fallen back inside the city. The riverside’s theirs. They’re ramming
at the King’s Gate again, and Ser Lancel’s right, your men are
deserting the walls and killing their own o cers. There’s mobs at
the Iron Gate and the Gate of the Gods ghting to get out, and Flea
Bottom’s one great drunken riot.”

Gods be good, Sansa thought, it is happening, Jo rey’s lost his head
and so have I. She looked for Ser Ilyn, but the King’s Justice was not
to be seen. I can feel him, though. He’s close, I’ll not escape him, he’ll
have my head.
Strangely calm, the queen turned to his brother Osfryd. “Raise the
drawbridge and bar the doors. No one enters or leaves Maegor’s
without my leave.”
“What about them women who went to pray?”
“They chose to leave my protection. Let them pray; perhaps the
gods will defend them. Where’s my son?”
“The castle gatehouse. He wanted to command the crossbowmen.
There’s a mob howling outside, half of them gold cloaks who came
with him when we left the Mud Gate.”
“Bring him inside Maegor’s now.”
“No!” Lancel was so angry he forgot to keep his voice down.
Heads turned toward them as he shouted, “We’ll have the Mud Gate
all over again. Let him stay where he is, he’s the king—”
“He’s my son.” Cersei Lannister rose to her feet. “You claim to be
a Lannister as well, cousin, prove it. Osfryd, why are you standing
there? Now means today.”
Osfryd Kettleblack hurried from the hall, his brother with him.
Many of the guests were rushing out as well. Some of the women
were weeping, some praying. Others simply remained at the tables
and called for more wine. “Cersei,” Ser Lancel pleaded, “if we lose
the castle, Jo rey will be killed in any case, you know that. Let him
stay, I’ll keep him by me, I swear—”
“Get out of my way.” Cersei slammed her open palm into his
wound. Ser Lancel cried out in pain and almost fainted as the queen
swept from the room. She spared Sansa not so much as a glance.
She’s forgotten me. Ser Ilyn will kill me and she won’t even think about
it.
“Oh, gods,” an old woman wailed. “We’re lost, the battle’s lost,
she’s running.” Several children were crying. They can smell the fear.
Sansa found herself alone on the dais. Should she stay here, or run
after the queen and plead for her life?

She never knew why she got to her feet, but she did. “Don’t be
afraid,” she told them loudly. “The queen has raised the
drawbridge. This is the safest place in the city. There’s thick walls,
the moat, the spikes …”
“What’s happened?” demanded a woman she knew slightly, the
wife of a lesser lordling. “What did Osney tell her? Is the king hurt,
has the city fallen?”
“Tell us,” someone else shouted. One woman asked about her
father, another her son.
Sansa raised her hands for quiet. “Jo rey’s come back to the
castle. He’s not hurt. They’re still ghting, that’s all I know, they’re
ghting bravely. The queen will be back soon.” The last was a lie,
but she had to soothe them. She noticed the fools standing under the
galley. “Moon Boy, make us laugh.”
Moon Boy did a cartwheel, and vaulted on top of a table. He
grabbed up four wine cups and began to juggle them. Every so
often one of them would come down and smash him in the head. A
few nervous laughs echoed through the hall. Sansa went to Ser
Lancel and knelt beside him. His wound was bleeding afresh where
the queen had struck him. “Madness,” he gasped. “Gods, the Imp
was right, was right …”
“Help him,” Sansa commanded two of the serving men. One just
looked at her and ran, agon and all. Other servants were leaving
the hall as well, but she could not help that. Together, Sansa and the
serving man got the wounded knight back on his feet. “Take him to
Maester Frenken.” Lancel was one of them, yet somehow she still
could not bring herself to wish him dead. I am soft and weak and
stupid, just as Jo rey says. I should be killing him, not helping him.
The torches had begun to burn low, and one or two had ickered
out. No one troubled to replace them. Cersei did not return. Ser
Dontos climbed the dais while all eyes were on the other fool. “Go
back to your bedchamber, sweet Jonquil,” he whispered. “Lock
yourself in, you’ll be safer there. I’ll come for you when the battle’s
done.”
Someone will come for me, Sansa thought, but will it be you, or will it
be Ser Ilyn? For a mad moment she thought of begging Dontos to

defend her. He had been a knight too, trained with the sword and
sworn to defend the weak. No. He has not the courage, or the skill. I
would only be killing him as well.
It took all the strength she had in her to walk slowly from the
Queen’s Ballroom when she wanted so badly to run. When she
reached the steps, she did run, up and around until she was
breathless and dizzy. One of the guards knocked into her on the
stair. A jeweled wine cup and a pair of silver candlesticks spilled out
of the crimson cloak he’d wrapped them in and went clattering
down the steps. He hurried after them, paying Sansa no mind once
he decided she was not going to try and take his loot.
Her bedchamber was black as pitch. Sansa barred the door and
fumbled through the dark to the window. When she ripped back the
drapes, her breath caught in her throat.
The southern sky was aswirl with glowing, shifting colors, the
re ections of the great res that burned below. Baleful green tides
moved against the bellies of the clouds, and pools of orange light
spread out across the heavens. The reds and yellows of common
ame warred against the emeralds and jades of wild re, each color
aring and then fading, birthing armies of short-lived shadows to
die again an instant later. Green dawns gave way to orange dusks in
half a heartbeat. The air itself smelled burnt, the way a soup kettle
sometimes smelled if it was left on the re too long and all the soup
boiled away. Embers drifted through the night air like swarms of
re ies.
Sansa backed away from the window, retreating toward the
safety of her bed. I’ll go to sleep, she told herself, and when I wake it
will be a new day, and the sky will be blue again. The ghting will be
done and someone will tell me whether I’m to live or die. “Lady,” she
whimpered softly, wondering if she would meet her wolf again
when she was dead.
Then something stirred behind her, and a hand reached out of the
dark and grabbed her wrist.
Sansa opened her mouth to scream, but another hand clamped
down over her face, smothering her. His ngers were rough and

callused, and sticky with blood. “Little bird. I knew you’d come.”
The voice was a drunken rasp.
Outside, a swirling lance of jade light spit at the stars, lling the
room with green glare. She saw him for a moment, all black and
green, the blood on his face dark as tar, his eyes glowing like a
dog’s in the sudden glare. Then the light faded and he was only a
hulking darkness in a stained white cloak.
“If you scream I’ll kill you. Believe that.” He took his hand from
her mouth. Her breath was coming ragged. The Hound had a agon
of wine on her bedside table. He took a long pull. “Don’t you want
to ask who’s winning the battle, little bird?”
“Who?” she said, too frightened to defy him.
The Hound laughed. “I only know who’s lost. Me.”
He is drunker than I’ve ever seen him. He was sleeping in my bed.
What does he want here? “What have you lost?”
“All.” The burnt half of his face was a mask of dried blood.
“Bloody dwarf. Should have killed him. Years ago.”
“He’s dead, they say.”
“Dead? No. Bugger that. I don’t want him dead.” He cast the
empty agon aside. “I want him burned. If the gods are good, they’ll
burn him, but I won’t be here to see. I’m going.”
“Going?” She tried to wriggle free, but his grasp was iron.
“The little bird repeats whatever she hears. Going, yes.”
“Where will you go?”
“Away from here. Away from the res. Go out the Iron Gate, I
suppose. North somewhere, anywhere.”
“You won’t get out,” Sansa said. “The queen’s closed up Maegor’s,
and the city gates are shut as well.”
“Not to me. I have the white cloak. And I have this.” He patted
the pommel of his sword. “The man who tries to stop me is a dead
man. Unless he’s on re.” He laughed bitterly.
“Why did you come here?”
“You promised me a song, little bird. Have you forgotten?”
She didn’t know what he meant. She couldn’t sing for him now,
here, with the sky aswirl with re and men dying in their hundreds

and their thousands. “I can’t,” she said. “Let me go, you’re scaring
me.”
“Everything scares you. Look at me. Look at me.”
The blood masked the worst of his scars, but his eyes were white
and wide and terrifying. The burnt corner of his mouth twitched
and twitched again. Sansa could smell him; a stink of sweat and
sour wine and stale vomit, and over it all the reek of blood, blood,
blood.
“I could keep you safe,” he rasped. “They’re all afraid of me. No
one would hurt you again, or I’d kill them.” He yanked her closer,
and for a moment she thought he meant to kiss her. He was too
strong to ght. She closed her eyes, wanting it to be over, but
nothing happened. “Still can’t bear to look, can you?” she heard him
say. He gave her arm a hard wrench, pulling her around and
shoving her down onto the bed. “I’ll have that song. Florian and
Jonquil, you said.” His dagger was out, poised at her throat. “Sing,
little bird. Sing for your little life.”
Her throat was dry and tight with fear, and every song she had
ever known had ed from her mind. Please don’t kill me, she wanted
to scream, please don’t. She could feel him twisting the point,
pushing it into her throat, and she almost closed her eyes again, but
then she remembered. It was not the song of Florian and Jonquil,
but it was a song. Her voice sounded small and thin and tremulous
in her ears.
Gentle Mother, font of mercy,
save our sons from war, we pray,
stay the swords and stay the arrows,
let them know a better day.
Gentle Mother, strength of women,
help our daughters through this fray,
soothe the wrath and tame the fury,
teach us all a kinder way.
She had forgotten the other verses. When her voice trailed o ,
she feared he might kill her, but after a moment the Hound took the

blade from her throat, never speaking.
Some instinct made her lift her hand and cup his cheek with her
ngers. The room was too dark for her to see him, but she could
feel the stickiness of the blood, and a wetness that was not blood.
“Little bird,” he said once more, his voice raw and harsh as steel on
stone. Then he rose from the bed. Sansa heard cloth ripping,
followed by the softer sound of retreating footsteps.
When she crawled out of bed, long moments later, she was alone.
She found his cloak on the oor, twisted up tight, the white wool
stained by blood and re. The sky outside was darker by then, with
only a few pale green ghosts dancing against the stars. A chill wind
was blowing, banging the shutters. Sansa was cold. She shook out
the torn cloak and huddled beneath it on the oor, shivering.
How long she stayed there she could not have said, but after a
time she heard a bell ringing, far o across the city. The sound was
a deep-throated bronze booming, coming faster with each knell.
Sansa was wondering what it might mean when a second bell joined
in, and a third, their voices calling across the hills and hollows, the
alleys and towers, to every corner of King’s Landing. She threw o
the cloak and went to her window.
The rst faint hint of dawn was visible in the east, and the Red
Keep’s own bells were ringing now, joining in the swelling river of
sound that owed from the seven crystal towers of the Great Sept of
Baelor. They had rung the bells when King Robert died, she
remembered, but this was di erent, no slow dolorous death knell
but a joyful thunder. She could hear men shouting in the streets as
well, and something that could only be cheers.
It was Ser Dontos who brought her the word. He staggered
through her open door, wrapped her in his abby arms, and whirled
her around and around the room, whooping so incoherently that
Sansa understood not a word of it. He was as drunk as the Hound
had been, but in him it was a dancing happy drunk. She was
breathless and dizzy when he let her down. “What is it?” She
clutched at a bedpost. “What’s happened? Tell me!”
“It’s done! Done! Done! The city is saved. Lord Stannis is dead,
Lord Stannis is ed, no one knows, no one cares, his host is broken,

the danger’s done. Slaughtered, scattered, or gone over, they say.
Oh, the bright banners! The banners, Jonquil, the banners! Do you
have any wine? We ought to drink to this day, yes. It means you’re
safe, don’t you see?”
“Tell me what’s happened!” Sansa shook him.
Ser Dontos laughed and hopped from one leg to the other, almost
falling. “They came up through the ashes while the river was
burning. The river, Stannis was neck deep in the river, and they
took him from the rear. Oh, to be a knight again, to have been part
of it! His own men hardly fought, they say. Some ran but more bent
the knee and went over, shouting for Lord Renly! What must
Stannis have thought when he heard that? I had it from Osney
Kettleblack who had it from Ser Osmund, but Ser Balon’s back now
and his men say the same, and the gold cloaks as well. We’re
delivered, sweetling! They came up the roseroad and along the
riverbank, through all the elds Stannis had burned, the ashes
pu ng up around their boots and turning all their armor grey, but
oh! the banners must have been bright, the golden rose and golden
lion and all the others, the Marbrand tree and the Rowan, Tarly’s
huntsman and Redwyne’s grapes and Lady Oakheart’s leaf. All the
westermen, all the power of Highgarden and Casterly Rock! Lord
Tywin himself had their right wing on the north side of the river,
with Randyll Tarly commanding the center and Mace Tyrell the left,
but the vanguard won the ght. They plunged through Stannis like
a lance through a pumpkin, every man of them howling like some
demon in steel. And do you know who led the vanguard? Do you?
Do you? Do you?”
“Robb?” It was too much to be hoped, but …
“It was Lord Renly! Lord Renly in his green armor, with the res
shimmering o his golden antlers! Lord Renly with his tall spear in
his hand! They say he killed Ser Guyard Morrigen himself in single
combat, and a dozen other great knights as well. It was Renly, it
was Renly, it was Renly! Oh! the banners, darling Sansa! Oh! to be
a knight!”

DAENERYS

She was breaking her fast on a bowl of cold shrimp-and-persimmon
soup when Irri brought her a Qartheen gown, an airy confection of
ivory samite patterned with seed pearls. “Take it away,” Dany said.
“The docks are no place for lady’s nery.”
If the Milk Men thought her such a savage, she would dress the
part for them. When she went to the stables, she wore faded
sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved
freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest, and a curved dagger hung
from her medallion belt. Jhiqui had braided her hair Dothraki
fashion, and fastened a silver bell to the end of the braid. “I have
won no victories,” she tried telling her handmaid when the bell
tinkled softly.
Jhiqui disagreed. “You burned the maegi in their house of dust
and sent their souls to hell.”
That was Drogon’s victory, not mine, Dany wanted to say, but she
held her tongue. The Dothraki would esteem her all the more for a
few bells in her hair. She chimed as she mounted her silver mare,
and again with every stride, but neither Ser Jorah nor her
bloodriders made mention of it. To guard her people and her
dragons in her absence, she chose Rakharo. Jhogo and Aggo would
ride with her to the waterfront.
They left the marble palaces and fragrant gardens behind and
made their way through a poorer part of the city where modest
brick houses turned blind walls to the street. There were fewer

horses and camels to be seen, and a dearth of palanquins, but the
streets teemed with children, beggars, and skinny dogs the color of
sand. Pale men in dusty linen skirts stood beneath arched doorways
to watch them pass. They know who I am, and they do not love me.
Dany could tell from the way they looked at her.
Ser Jorah would sooner have tucked her inside her palanquin,
safely hidden behind silken curtains, but she refused him. She had
reclined too long on satin cushions, letting oxen bear her hither and
yon. At least when she rode she felt as though she was getting
somewhere.
It was not by choice that she sought the waterfront. She was
eeing again. Her whole life had been one long ight, it seemed.
She had begun running in her mother’s womb, and never once
stopped. How often had she and Viserys stolen away in the black of
night, a bare step ahead of the Usurper’s hired knives? But it was
run or die. Xaro had learned that Pyat Pree was gathering the
surviving warlocks together to work ill on her.
Dany had laughed when he told her. “Was it not you who told me
warlocks were no more than old soldiers, vainly boasting of
forgotten deeds and lost prowess?”
Xaro looked troubled. “And so it was, then. But now? I am less
certain. It is said that the glass candles are burning in the house of
Urrathon Night-Walker, that have not burned in a hundred years.
Ghost grass grows in the Garden of Gehane, phantom tortoises have
been seen carrying messages between the windowless houses on
Warlock’s Way, and all the rats in the city are chewing o their
tails. The wife of Mathos Mallarawan, who once mocked a
warlock’s drab moth-eaten robe, has gone mad and will wear no
clothes at all. Even fresh-washed silks make her feel as though a
thousand insects were crawling on her skin. And Blind Sybassion the
Eater of Eyes can see again, or so his slaves do swear. A man must
wonder.” He sighed. “These are strange times in Qarth. And strange
times are bad for trade. It grieves me to say so, yet it might be best
if you left Qarth entirely, and sooner rather than later.” Xaro
stroked her ngers reassuringly. “You need not go alone, though.
You have seen dark visions in the Palace of Dust, but Xaro has

dreamed brighter dreams. I see you happily abed, with our child at
your breast. Sail with me around the Jade Sea, and we can yet make
it so! It is not too late. Give me a son, my sweet song of joy!”
Give you a dragon, you mean. “I will not wed you, Xaro.”
His face had grown cold at that. “Then go.”
“But where?”
“Somewhere far from here.”
Well, perhaps it was time. The people of her khalasar had
welcomed the chance to recover from the ravages of the red waste,
but now that they were plump and rested once again, they began to
grow unruly. Dothraki were not accustomed to staying long in one
place. They were a warrior people, not made for cities. Perhaps she
had lingered in Qarth too long, seduced by its comforts and its
beauties. It was a city that always promised more than it would
give you, it seemed to her, and her welcome here had turned sour
since the House of the Undying had collapsed in a great gout of
smoke and ame. Overnight the Qartheen had come to remember
that dragons were dangerous. No longer did they vie with each other
to give her gifts. Instead the Tourmaline Brotherhood had called
openly for her expulsion, and the Ancient Guild of Spicers for her
death. It was all Xaro could do to keep the Thirteen from joining
them.
But where am I to go? Ser Jorah proposed that they journey farther
east, away from her enemies in the Seven Kingdoms. Her
bloodriders would sooner have returned to their great grass sea,
even if it meant braving the red waste again. Dany herself had
toyed with the idea of settling in Vaes Tolorro until her dragons
grew great and strong. But her heart was full of doubts. Each of
these felt wrong, somehow … and even when she decided where to
go, the question of how she would get there remained troublesome.
Xaro Xhoan Daxos would be no help to her, she knew that now.
For all his professions of devotion, he was playing his own game,
not unlike Pyat Pree. The night he asked her to leave, Dany had
begged one last favor of him. “An army, is it?” Xaro asked. “A
kettle of gold? A galley, perhaps?”
Dany blushed. She hated begging. “A ship, yes.”

Xaro’s eyes had glittered as brightly as the jewels in his nose. “I
am a trader, Khaleesi. So perhaps we should speak no more of
giving, but rather of trade. For one of your dragons, you shall have
ten of the nest ships in my eet. You need only say that one sweet
word.”
“No,” she said.
“Alas,” Xaro sobbed, “that was not the word I meant.”
“Would you ask a mother to sell one of her children?”
“Whyever not? They can always make more. Mothers sell their
children every day.”
“Not the Mother of Dragons.”
“Not even for twenty ships?”
“Not for a hundred.”
His mouth curled downward. “I do not have a hundred. But you
have three dragons. Grant me one, for all my kindnesses. You will
still have two, and thirty ships as well.”
Thirty ships would be enough to land a small army on the shore
of Westeros. But I do not have a small army. “How many ships do
you own, Xaro?”
“Eighty-three, if one does not count my pleasure barge.”
“And your colleagues in the Thirteen?”
“Among us all, perhaps a thousand.”
“And the Spicers and the Tourmaline Brotherhood?”
“Their tri ing eets are of no account.”
“Even so,” she said, “tell me.”
“Twelve or thirteen hundred for the Spicers. No more than eight
hundred for the Brotherhood.”
“And the Asshai’i, the Braavosi, the Summer Islanders, the
Ibbenese, and all the other peoples who sail the great salt sea, how
many ships do they have? All together?”
“Many and more,” he said irritably. “What does this matter?”
“I am trying to set a price on one of the three living dragons in
the world.” Dany smiled at him sweetly. “It seems to me that onethird of all the ships in the world would be fair.”
Xaro’s tears ran down his cheeks on either side of his jewelencrusted nose. “Did I not warn you not to enter the Palace of Dust?

This is the very thing I feared. The whispers of the warlocks have
made you as mad as Mallarawan’s wife. A third of all the ships in
the world? Pah. Pah, I say. Pah.”
Dany had not seen him since. His seneschal brought her messages,
each cooler than the last. She must quit his house. He was done
feeding her and her people. He demanded the return of his gifts,
which she had accepted in bad faith. Her only consolation was that
at least she’d had the great good sense not to marry him.
The warlocks whispered of three treasons … once for blood and once
for gold and once for love. The rst traitor was surely Mirri Maz
Duur, who had murdered Khal Drogo and their unborn son to
avenge her people. Could Pyat Pree and Xaro Xhoan Daxos be the
second and the third? She did not think so. What Pyat did was not
for gold, and Xaro had never truly loved her.
The streets grew emptier as they passed through a district given
over to gloomy stone warehouses. Aggo went before her and Jhogo
behind, leaving Ser Jorah Mormont at her side. Her bell rang softly,
and Dany found her thoughts returning to the Palace of Dust once
more, as the tongue returns to a space left by a missing tooth. Child
of three, they had called her, daughter of death, slayer of lies, bride of
re. So many threes. Three res, three mounts to ride, three
treasons. “The dragon has three heads,” she sighed. “Do you know
what that means, Jorah?”
“Your Grace? The sigil of House Targaryen is a three-headed
dragon, red on black.”
“I know that. But there are no three-headed dragons.”
“The three heads were Aegon and his sisters.”
“Visenya and Rhaenys,” she recalled. “I am descended from
Aegon and Rhaenys through their son Aenys and their grandson
Jaehaerys.”
“Blue lips speak only lies, isn’t that what Xaro told you? Why do
you care what the warlocks whispered? All they wanted was to suck
the life from you, you know that now.”
“Perhaps,” she said reluctantly. “Yet the things I saw …”
“A dead man in the prow of a ship, a blue rose, a banquet of
blood … what does any of it mean, Khaleesi? A mummer’s dragon,

you said. What is a mummer’s dragon, pray?”
“A cloth dragon on poles,” Dany explained. “Mummers use them
in their follies, to give the heroes something to ght.”
Ser Jorah frowned.
Dany could not let it go. “His is the song of ice and re, my brother
said. I’m certain it was my brother. Not Viserys, Rhaegar. He had a
harp with silver strings.”
Ser Jorah’s frown deepened until his eyebrows came together.
“Prince Rhaegar played such a harp,” he conceded. “You saw him?”
She nodded. “There was a woman in a bed with a babe at her
breast. My brother said the babe was the prince that was promised
and told her to name him Aegon.”
“Prince Aegon was Rhaegar’s heir by Elia of Dorne,” Ser Jorah
said. “But if he was this prince that was promised, the promise was
broken along with his skull when the Lannisters dashed his head
against a wall.”
“I remember,” Dany said sadly. “They murdered Rhaegar’s
daughter as well, the little princess. Rhaenys, she was named, like
Aegon’s sister. There was no Visenya, but he said the dragon has
three heads. What is the song of ice and re?”
“It’s no song I’ve ever heard.”
“I went to the warlocks hoping for answers, but instead they’ve
left me with a hundred new questions.”
By then there were people in the streets once more. “Make way,”
Aggo shouted, while Jhogo sni ed at the air suspiciously. “I smell
it, Khaleesi,” he called. “The poison water.” The Dothraki distrusted
the sea and all that moved upon it. Water that a horse could not
drink was water they wanted no part of. They will learn, Dany
resolved. I braved their sea with Khal Drogo. Now they can brave mine.
Qarth was one of the world’s great ports, its great sheltered
harbor a riot of color and clangor and strange smells. Winesinks,
warehouses, and gaming dens lined the streets, cheek by jowl with
cheap brothels and the temples of peculiar gods. Cutpurses,
cutthroats, spellsellers, and moneychangers mingled with every
crowd. The waterfront was one great marketplace where the buying
and selling went on all day and all night, and goods might be had

for a fraction of what they cost at the bazaar, if a man did not ask
where they came from. Wizened old women bent like hunchbacks
sold avored waters and goat’s milk from glazed ceramic jugs
strapped to their shoulders. Seamen from half a hundred nations
wandered amongst the stalls, drinking spiced liquors and trading
jokes in queer-sounding tongues. The air smelled of salt and frying
sh, of hot tar and honey, of incense and oil and sperm.
Aggo gave an urchin a copper for a skewer of honey-roasted mice
and nibbled them as he rode. Jhogo bought a handful of fat white
cherries. Elsewhere they saw beautiful bronze daggers for sale,
dried squids and carved onyx, a potent magical elixir made of
virgin’s milk and shade of the evening, even dragon’s eggs which
looked suspiciously like painted rocks.
As they passed the long stone quays reserved for the ships of the
Thirteen, she saw chests of sa ron, frankincense, and pepper being
o -loaded from Xaro’s ornate Vermillion Kiss. Beside her, casks of
wine, bales of sourleaf, and pallets of striped hides were being
trundled up the gangplank onto the Bride in Azure, to sail on the
evening tide. Farther along, a crowd had gathered around the Spicer
galley Sunblaze to bid on slaves. It was well known that the
cheapest place to buy a slave was right o the ship, and the banners
oating from her masts proclaimed that the Sunblaze had just
arrived from Astapor on Slaver’s Bay.
Dany would get no help from the Thirteen, the Tourmaline
Brotherhood, or the Ancient Guild of Spicers. She rode her silver
past several miles of their quays, docks, and storehouses, all the
way out to the far end of the horseshoe-shaped harbor where the
ships from the Summer Islands, Westeros, and the Nine Free Cities
were permitted to dock.
She dismounted beside a gaming pit where a basilisk was tearing
a big red dog to pieces amidst a shouting ring of sailors. “Aggo,
Jhogo, you will guard the horses while Ser Jorah and I speak to the
captains.”
“As you say, Khaleesi. We will watch you as you go.”
It was good to hear men speaking Valyrian once more, and even
the Common Tongue, Dany thought as they approached the rst

ship. Sailors, dockworkers, and merchants alike gave way before
her, not knowing what to make of this slim young girl with silvergold hair who dressed in the Dothraki fashion and walked with a
knight at her side. Despite the heat of the day, Ser Jorah wore his
green wool surcoat over chainmail, the black bear of Mormont sewn
on his chest.
But neither her beauty nor his size and strength would serve with
the men whose ships they needed.
“You require passage for a hundred Dothraki, all their horses,
yourself and this knight, and three dragons?” said the captain of the
great cog Ardent Friend before he walked away laughing. When she
told a Lyseni on the Trumpeteer that she was Daenerys Stormborn,
Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, he gave her a deadface look and
said, “Aye, and I’m Lord Tywin Lannister and shit gold every night.”
The cargomaster of the Myrish galley Silken Spirit opined that
dragons were too dangerous at sea, where any stray breath of ame
might set the rigging a re. The owner of Lord Faro’s Belly would
risk dragons, but not Dothraki. “I’ll have no such godless savages in
my Belly, I’ll not.” The two brothers who captained the sister ships
Quicksilver and Greyhound seemed sympathetic and invited them
into the cabin for a glass of Arbor red. They were so courteous that
Dany was hopeful for a time, but in the end the price they asked
was far beyond her means, and might have been beyond Xaro’s.
Pinchbottom Petto and Sloe-Eyed Maid were too small for her needs,
Bravo was bound for the Jade Sea, and Magister Manolo scarce
looked seaworthy.
As they made their way toward the next quay, Ser Jorah laid a
hand against the small of her back. “Your Grace. You are being
followed. No, do not turn.” He guided her gently toward a brassseller’s booth. “This is a noble work, my queen,” he proclaimed
loudly, lifting a large platter for her inspection. “See how it shines
in the sun?”
The brass was polished to a high sheen. Dany could see her face
in it … and when Ser Jorah angled it to the right, she could see
behind her. “I see a fat brown man and an older man with a sta .
Which is it?”

“Both of them,” Ser Jorah said. “They have been following us
since we left Quicksilver.”
The ripples in the brass stretched the strangers queerly, making
one man seem long and gaunt, the other immensely squat and
broad. “A most excellent brass, great lady,” the merchant
exclaimed. “Bright as the sun! And for the Mother of Dragons, only
thirty honors.”
The platter was worth no more than three. “Where are my
guards?” Dany declared. “This man is trying to rob me!” For Jorah,
she lowered her voice and spoke in the Common Tongue. “They
may not mean me ill. Men have looked at women since time began,
perhaps it is no more than that.”
The brass-seller ignored their whispers. “Thirty? Did I say thirty?
Such a fool I am. The price is twenty honors.”
“All the brass in this booth is not worth twenty honors,” Dany
told him as she studied the re ections. The old man had the look of
Westeros about him, and the brown-skinned one must weigh twenty
stone. The Usurper o ered a lordship to the man who kills me, and these
two are far from home. Or could they be creatures of the warlocks,
meant to take me unawares?
“Ten, Khaleesi, because you are so lovely. Use it for a looking
glass. Only brass this ne could capture such beauty.”
“It might serve to carry nightsoil. If you threw it away, I might
pick it up, so long as I did not need to stoop. But pay for it?” Dany
shoved the platter back into his hands. “Worms have crawled up
your nose and eaten your wits.”
“Eight honors,” he cried. “My wives will beat me and call me
fool, but I am a helpless child in your hands. Come, eight, that is
less than it is worth.”
“What do I need with dull brass when Xaro Xhoan Daxos feeds me
o plates of gold?” As she turned to walk o , Dany let her glance
sweep over the strangers. The brown man was near as wide as he’d
looked in the platter, with a gleaming bald head and the smooth
cheeks of a eunuch. A long curving arakh was thrust through the
sweat-stained yellow silk of his bellyband. Above the silk, he was
naked but for an absurdly tiny iron-studded vest. Old scars

crisscrossed his tree-trunk arms, huge chest, and massive belly, pale
against his nut-brown skin.
The other man wore a traveler’s cloak of undyed wool, the hood
thrown back. Long white hair fell to his shoulders, and a silky white
beard covered the lower half of his face. He leaned his weight on a
hardwood sta as tall as he was. Only fools would stare so openly if
they meant me harm. All the same, it might be prudent to head back
toward Jhogo and Aggo. “The old man does not wear a sword,” she
said to Jorah in the Common Tongue as she drew him away.
The brass merchant came hopping after them. “Five honors, for
ve it is yours, it was meant for you.”
Ser Jorah said, “A hardwood sta can crack a skull as well as any
mace.”
“Four! I know you want it!” He danced in front of them,
scampering backward as he thrust the platter at their faces.
“Do they follow?”
“Lift that up a little higher,” the knight told the merchant. “Yes.
The old man pretends to linger at a potter’s stall, but the brown one
has eyes only for you.”
“Two honors! Two! Two!” The merchant was panting heavily
from the e ort of running backward.
“Pay him before he kills himself,” Dany told Ser Jorah,
wondering what she was going to do with a huge brass platter. She
turned back as he reached for his coins, intending to put an end to
this mummer’s farce. The blood of the dragon would not be herded
through the bazaar by an old man and a fat eunuch.
A Qartheen stepped into her path. “Mother of Dragons, for you.”
He knelt and thrust a jewel box into her face.
Dany took it almost by re ex. The box was carved wood, its
mother-of-pearl lid inlaid with jasper and chalcedony. “You are too
generous.” She opened it. Within was a glittering green scarab
carved from onyx and emerald. Beautiful, she thought. This will help
pay for our passage. As she reached inside the box, the man said, “I
am so sorry,” but she hardly heard.
The scarab unfolded with a hiss.

Dany caught a glimpse of a malign black face, almost human, and
an arched tail dripping venom … and then the box ew from her
hand in pieces, turning end over end. Sudden pain twisted her
ngers. As she cried out and clutched her hand, the brass merchant
let out a shriek, a woman screamed, and suddenly the Qartheen
were shouting and pushing each other aside. Ser Jorah slammed
past her, and Dany stumbled to one knee. She heard the hiss again.
The old man drove the butt of his sta into the ground, Aggo came
riding through an eggseller’s stall and vaulted from his saddle,
Jhogo’s whip cracked overhead, Ser Jorah slammed the eunuch over
the head with the brass platter, sailors and whores and merchants
were eeing or shouting or both …
“Your Grace, a thousand pardons.” The old man knelt. “It’s dead.
Did I break your hand?”
She closed her ngers, wincing. “I don’t think so.”
“I had to knock it away,” he started, but her bloodriders were on
him before he could nish. Aggo kicked his sta away and Jhogo
seized him round the shoulders, forced him to his knees, and
pressed a dagger to his throat. “Khaleesi, we saw him strike you.
Would you see the color of his blood?”
“Release him.” Dany climbed to her feet. “Look at the bottom of
his sta , blood of my blood.” Ser Jorah had been shoved o his feet
by the eunuch. She ran between them as arakh and longsword both
came ashing from their sheaths. “Put down your steel! Stop it!”
“Your Grace?” Mormont lowered his sword only an inch. “These
men attacked you.”
“They were defending me.” Dany snapped her hand to shake the
sting from her ngers. “It was the other one, the Qartheen.” When
she looked around he was gone. “He was a Sorrowful Man. There
was a manticore in that jewel box he gave me. This man knocked it
out of my hand.” The brass merchant was still rolling on the
ground. She went to him and helped him to his feet. “Were you
stung?”
“No, good lady,” he said, shaking, “or else I would be dead. But it
touched me, aieeee, when it fell from the box it landed on my arm.”
He had soiled himself, she saw, and no wonder.

She gave him a silver for his trouble and sent him on his way
before she turned back to the old man with the white beard. “Who
is it that I owe my life to?”
“You owe me nothing, Your Grace. I am called Arstan, though
Belwas named me Whitebeard on the voyage here.” Though Jhogo
had released him, the old man remained on one knee. Aggo picked
up his sta , turned it over, cursed softly in Dothraki, scraped the
remains of the manticore o on a stone, and handed it back.
“And who is Belwas?” she asked.
The huge brown eunuch swaggered forward, sheathing his arakh.
“I am Belwas. Strong Belwas they name me in the ghting pits of
Meereen. Never did I lose.” He slapped his belly, covered with
scars. “I let each man cut me once, before I kill him. Count the cuts
and you will know how many Strong Belwas has slain.”
Dany had no need to count his scars; there were many, she could
see at a glance. “And why are you here, Strong Belwas?”
“From Meereen I am sold to Qohor, and then to Pentos and the
fat man with sweet stink in his hair. He it was who send Strong
Belwas back across the sea, and old Whitebeard to serve him.”
The fat man with sweet stink in his hair … “Illyrio?” she said. “You
were sent by Magister Illyrio?”
“We were, Your Grace,” old Whitebeard replied. “The Magister
begs your kind indulgence for sending us in his stead, but he cannot
sit a horse as he did in his youth, and sea travel upsets his
digestion.” Earlier he had spoken in the Valyrian of the Free Cities,
but now he changed to the Common Tongue. “I regret if we caused
you alarm. If truth be told, we were not certain, we expected
someone more … more …”
“Regal?” Dany laughed. She had no dragon with her, and her
raiment was hardly queenly. “You speak the Common Tongue well,
Arstan. Are you of Westeros?”
“I am. I was born on the Dornish Marches, Your Grace. As a boy I
squired for a knight of Lord Swann’s household.” He held the tall
sta upright beside him like a lance in need of a banner. “Now I
squire for Belwas.”

“A bit old for such, aren’t you?” Ser Jorah had shouldered his way
to her side, holding the brass platter awkwardly under his arm.
Belwas’s hard head had left it badly bent.
“Not too old to serve my liege, Lord Mormont.”
“You know me as well?”
“I saw you ght a time or two. At Lannisport where you near
unhorsed the Kingslayer. And on Pyke, there as well. You do not
recall, Lord Mormont?”
Ser Jorah frowned. “Your face seems familiar, but there were
hundreds at Lannisport and thousands on Pyke. And I am no lord.
Bear Island was taken from me. I am but a knight.”
“A knight of my Queensguard.” Dany took his arm. “And my true
friend and good counselor.” She studied Arstan’s face. He had a
great dignity to him, a quiet strength she liked. “Rise, Arstan
Whitebeard. Be welcome, Strong Belwas. Ser Jorah you know. Ko
Aggo and Ko Jhogo are blood of my blood. They crossed the red
waste with me, and saw my dragons born.”
“Horse boys.” Belwas grinned toothily. “Belwas has killed many
horse boys in the ghting pits. They jingle when they die.”
Aggo’s arakh leapt to his hand. “Never have I killed a fat brown
man. Belwas will be the rst.”
“Sheath your steel, blood of my blood,” said Dany, “this man
comes to serve me. Belwas, you will accord all respect to my
people, or you will leave my service sooner than you’d wish, and
with more scars than when you came.”
The gap-toothed smile faded from the giant’s broad brown face,
replaced by a confused scowl. Men did not often threaten Belwas, it
would seem, and less so girls a third his size.
Dany gave him a smile, to take a bit of the sting from the rebuke.
“Now tell me, what would Magister Illyrio have of me, that he
would send you all the way from Pentos?”
“He would have dragons,” said Belwas gru y, “and the girl who
makes them. He would have you.”
“Belwas has the truth of us, Your Grace,” said Arstan. “We were
told to nd you and bring you back to Pentos. The Seven Kingdoms
have need of you. Robert the Usurper is dead, and the realm bleeds.

When we set sail from Pentos there were four kings in the land, and
no justice to be had.”
Joy bloomed in her heart, but Dany kept it from her face. “I have
three dragons,” she said, “and more than a hundred in my khalasar,
with all their goods and horses.”
“It is no matter,” boomed Belwas. “We take all. The fat man hires
three ships for his little silverhair queen.”
“It is so, Your Grace,” Arstan Whitebeard said. “The great cog
Saduleon is berthed at the end of the quay, and the galleys Summer
Sun and Joso’s Prank are anchored beyond the breakwater.”
Three heads has the dragon, Dany thought, wondering. “I shall tell
my people to make ready to depart at once. But the ships that bring
me home must bear di erent names.”
“As you wish,” said Arstan. “What names would you prefer?”
“Vhagar,” Daenerys told him. “Meraxes. And Balerion. Paint the
names on their hulls in golden letters three feet high, Arstan. I want
every man who sees them to know the dragons are returned.”

ARYA

The heads had been dipped in tar to slow the rot. Every morning

when Arya went to the well to draw fresh water for Roose Bolton’s
basin, she had to pass beneath them. They faced outward, so she
never saw their faces, but she liked to pretend that one of them was
Jo rey’s. She tried to picture how his pretty face would look dipped
in tar. If I was a crow I could y down and peck o his stupid fat pouty
lips.
The heads never lacked for attendants. The carrion crows wheeled
about the gatehouse in raucous unkindness and quarreled upon the
ramparts over every eye, screaming and cawing at each other and
taking to the air whenever a sentry passed along the battlements.
Sometimes the maester’s ravens joined the feast as well, apping
down from the rookery on wide black wings. When the ravens came
the crows would scatter, only to return the moment the larger birds
were gone.
Do the ravens remember Maester Tothmure? Arya wondered. Are
they sad for him? When they quork at him, do they wonder why he
doesn’t answer? Perhaps the dead could speak to them in some secret
tongue the living could not hear.
Tothmure had been sent to the axe for dispatching birds to
Casterly Rock and King’s Landing the night Harrenhal had fallen,
Lucan the armorer for making weapons for the Lannisters,
Goodwife Harra for telling Lady Whent’s household to serve them,
the steward for giving Lord Tywin the keys to the treasure vault.

The cook was spared (some said because he’d made the weasel
soup), but stocks were hammered together for pretty Pia and the
other women who’d shared their favors with Lannister soldiers.
Stripped and shaved, they were left in the middle ward beside the
bear pit, free for the use of any man who wanted them.
Three Frey men-at-arms were using them that morning as Arya
went to the well. She tried not to look, but she could hear the men
laughing. The pail was very heavy once full. She was turning to
bring it back to Kingspyre when Goodwife Amabel seized her arm.
The water went sloshing over the side onto Amabel’s legs. “You did
that on purpose,” the woman screeched.
“What do you want?” Arya squirmed in her grasp. Amabel had
been half-crazed since they’d cut Harra’s head o .
“See there?” Amabel pointed across the yard at Pia. “When this
northman falls you’ll be where she is.”
“Let me go.” She tried to wrench free, but Amabel only tightened
her ngers.
“He will fall too, Harrenhal pulls them all down in the end. Lord
Tywin’s won now, he’ll be marching back with all his power, and
then it will be his turn to punish the disloyal. And don’t think he
won’t know what you did!” The old woman laughed. “I may have a
turn at you myself. Harra had an old broom, I’ll save it for you. The
handle’s cracked and splintery—”
Arya swung the bucket. The weight of the water made it turn in
her hands, so she didn’t smash Amabel’s head in as she wanted, but
the woman let go of her anyway when the water came out and
drenched her. “Don’t ever touch me,” Arya shouted, “or I’ll kill you.
You get away.”
Sopping, Goodwife Amabel jabbed a thin nger at the ayed man
on the front of Arya’s tunic. “You think you’re safe with that little
bloody man on your teat, but you’re not! The Lannisters are
coming! See what happens when they get here.”
Three-quarters of the water had splashed out on the ground, so
Arya had to return to the well. If I told Lord Bolton what she said, her
head would be up next to Harra’s before it got dark, she thought as she
drew up the bucket again. She wouldn’t, though.

Once, when there had been only half as many heads, Gendry had
caught Arya looking at them. “Admiring your work?” he asked.
He was angry because he’d liked Lucan, she knew, but it still
wasn’t fair. “It’s Steelshanks Walton’s work,” she said defensively.
“And the Mummers, and Lord Bolton.”
“And who gave us all them? You and your weasel soup.”
Arya punched his arm. “It was just hot broth. You hated Ser
Amory too.”
“I hate this lot worse. Ser Amory was ghting for his lord, but the
Mummers are sellswords and turncloaks. Half of them can’t even
speak the Common Tongue. Septon Utt likes little boys, Qyburn
does black magic, and your friend Biter eats people.”
The worst thing was, she couldn’t even say he was wrong. The
Brave Companions did most of the foraging for Harrenhal, and
Roose Bolton had given them the task of rooting out Lannisters.
Vargo Hoat had divided them into four bands, to visit as many
villages as possible. He led the largest group himself, and gave the
others to his most trusted captains. She had heard Rorge laughing
over Lord Vargo’s way of nding traitors. All he did was return to
places he had visited before under Lord Tywin’s banner and seize
those who had helped him. Many had been bought with Lannister
silver, so the Mummers often returned with bags of coin as well as
baskets of heads. “A riddle!” Shagwell would shout gleefully. “If
Lord Bolton’s goat eats the men who fed Lord Lannister’s goat, how
many goats are there?”
“One,” Arya said when he asked her.
“Now there’s a weasel clever as a goat!” the fool tittered.
Rorge and Biter were as bad as the others. Whenever Lord Bolton
took a meal with the garrison, Arya would see them there among
the rest. Biter gave o a stench like bad cheese, so the Brave
Companions made him sit down near the foot of the table where he
could grunt and hiss to himself and tear his meat apart with ngers
and teeth. He would sni at Arya when she passed, but it was Rorge
who scared her most. He sat up near Faithful Urswyck, but she
could feel his eyes crawling over her as she went about her duties.

Sometimes she wished she had gone o across the narrow sea
with Jaqen H’ghar. She still had the stupid coin he’d given her, a
piece of iron no larger than a penny and rusted along the rim. One
side had writing on it, queer words she could not read. The other
showed a man’s head, but so worn that all his features had rubbed
o . He said it was of great value, but that was probably a lie too, like his
name and even his face. That made her so angry that she threw the
coin away, but after an hour she got to feeling bad and went and
found it again, even though it wasn’t worth anything.
She was thinking about the coin as she crossed the Flowstone
Yard, struggling with the weight of the water in her pail. “Nan,” a
voice called out. “Put down that pail and come help me.”
Elmar Frey was no older than she was, and short for his age
besides. He had been rolling a barrel of sand across the uneven
stone, and was red-faced from exertion. Arya went to help him.
Together they pushed the barrel all the way to the wall and back
again, then stood it upright. She could hear the sand shifting around
inside as Elmar pried open the lid and pulled out a chainmail
hauberk. “Do you think it’s clean enough?” As Roose Bolton’s
squire, it was his task to keep his mail shiny bright.
“You need to shake out the sand. There’s still spots of rust. See?”
She pointed. “You’d best do it again.”
“You do it.” Elmar could be friendly when he needed help, but
afterward he would always remember that he was a squire and she
was only a serving girl. He liked to boast how he was the son of the
Lord of the Crossing, not a nephew or a bastard or a grandson but a
trueborn son, and on account of that he was going to marry a
princess.
Arya didn’t care about his precious princess, and didn’t like him
giving her commands. “I have to bring m’lord water for his basin.
He’s in his bedchamber being leeched. Not the regular black leeches
but the big pale ones.”
Elmar’s eyes got as big as boiled eggs. Leeches terri ed him,
especially the big pale ones that looked like jelly until they lled up
with blood. “I forgot, you’re too skinny to push such a heavy
barrel.”

“I forgot, you’re stupid.” Arya picked up the pail. “Maybe you
should get leeched too. There’s leeches in the Neck as big as pigs.”
She left him there with his barrel.
The lord’s bedchamber was crowded when she entered. Qyburn
was in attendance, and dour Walton in his mail shirt and greaves,
plus a dozen Freys, all brothers, half brothers, and cousins. Roose
Bolton lay abed, naked. Leeches clung to the inside of his arms and
legs and dotted his pallid chest, long translucent things that turned a
glistening pink as they fed. Bolton paid them no more mind than he
did Arya.
“We must not allow Lord Tywin to trap us here at Harrenhal,” Ser
Aenys Frey was saying as Arya lled the washbasin. A grey stooped
giant of a man with watery red eyes and huge gnarled hands, Ser
Aenys had brought fteen hundred Frey swords south to Harrenhal,
yet it often seemed as if he were helpless to command even his own
brothers. “The castle is so large it requires an army to hold it, and
once surrounded we cannot feed an army. Nor can we hope to lay in
su cient supplies. The country is ash, the villages given over to
wolves, the harvest burnt or stolen. Autumn is on us, yet there is no
food in store and none being planted. We live on forage, and if the
Lannisters deny that to us, we will be down to rats and shoe leather
in a moon’s turn.”
“I do not mean to be besieged here.” Roose Bolton’s voice was so
soft that men had to strain to hear it, so his chambers were always
strangely hushed.
“What, then?” demanded Ser Jared Frey, who was lean, balding,
and pockmarked. “Is Edmure Tully so drunk on his victory that he
thinks to give Lord Tywin battle in the open eld?”
If he does he’ll beat them, Arya thought. He’ll beat them as he did on
the Red Fork, you’ll see. Unnoticed, she went to stand by Qyburn.
“Lord Tywin is many leagues from here,” Bolton said calmly. “He
has many matters yet to settle at King’s Landing. He will not march
on Harrenhal for some time.”
Ser Aenys shook his head stubbornly. “You do not know the
Lannisters as we do, my lord. King Stannis thought that Lord Tywin
was a thousand leagues away as well, and it undid him.”

The pale man in the bed smiled faintly as the leeches nursed of
his blood. “I am not a man to be undone, ser.”
“Even if Riverrun marshals all its strength and the Young Wolf
wins back from the west, how can we hope to match the numbers
Lord Tywin can send against us? When he comes, he will come with
far more power than he commanded on the Green Fork. Highgarden
has joined itself to Jo rey’s cause, I remind you!”
“I had not forgotten.”
“I have been Lord Tywin’s captive once,” said Ser Hosteen, a
husky man with a square face who was said to be the strongest of
the Freys. “I have no wish to enjoy Lannister hospitality again.”
Ser Harys Haigh, who was a Frey on his mother’s side, nodded
vigorously. “If Lord Tywin could defeat a seasoned man like Stannis
Baratheon, what chance will our boy king have against him?” He
looked round to his brothers and cousins for support, and several of
them muttered agreement.
“Someone must have the courage to say it,” Ser Hosteen said.
“The war is lost. King Robb must be made to see that.”
Roose Bolton studied him with pale eyes. “His Grace has defeated
the Lannisters every time he has faced them in battle.”
“He has lost the north,” insisted Hosteen Frey. “He has lost
Winterfell! His brothers are dead …”
For a moment Arya forgot to breathe. Dead? Bran and Rickon,
dead? What does he mean? What does he mean about Winterfell,
Jo rey could never take Winterfell, never, Robb would never let him.
Then she remembered that Robb was not at Winterfell. He was
away in the west, and Bran was crippled, and Rickon only four. It
took all her strength to remain still and silent, the way Syrio Forel
had taught her, to stand there like a stick of furniture. She felt tears
gathering in her eyes, and willed them away. It’s not true, it can’t be
true, it’s just some Lannister lie.
“Had Stannis won, all might have been di erent,” Ronel Rivers
said wistfully. He was one of Lord Walder’s bastards.
“Stannis lost,” Ser Hosteen said bluntly. “Wishing it were
otherwise will not make it so. King Robb must make his peace with

the Lannisters. He must put o his crown and bend the knee, little
as he may like it.”
“And who will tell him so?” Roose Bolton smiled. “It is a ne
thing to have so many valiant brothers in such troubled times. I
shall think on all you’ve said.”
His smile was dismissal. The Freys made their courtesies and
shu ed out, leaving only Qyburn, Steelshanks Walton, and Arya.
Lord Bolton beckoned her closer. “I am bled su ciently. Nan, you
may remove the leeches.”
“At once, my lord.” It was best never to make Roose Bolton ask
twice. Arya wanted to ask him what Ser Hosteen had meant about
Winterfell, but she dared not. I’ll ask Elmar, she thought. Elmar will
tell me. The leeches wriggled slowly between her ngers as she
plucked them carefully from the lord’s body, their pale bodies moist
to the touch and distended with blood. They’re only leeches, she
reminded herself. If I closed my hand, they’d squish between my
ngers.
“There is a letter from your lady wife.” Qyburn pulled a roll of
parchment from his sleeve. Though he wore maester’s robes, there
was no chain about his neck; it was whispered that he had lost it for
dabbling in necromancy.
“You may read it,” Bolton said.
The Lady Walda wrote from the Twins almost every day, but all
the letters were the same. “I pray for you morn, noon, and night,
my sweet lord,” she wrote, “and count the days until you share my
bed again. Return to me soon, and I will give you many trueborn
sons to take the place of your dear Domeric and rule the Dreadfort
after you.” Arya pictured a plump pink baby in a cradle, covered
with plump pink leeches.
She brought Lord Bolton a damp washcloth to wipe down his soft
hairless body. “I will send a letter of my own,” he told the onetime
maester.
“To the Lady Walda?”
“To Ser Helman Tallhart.”
A rider from Ser Helman had come two days past. Tallhart men
had taken the castle of the Darrys, accepting the surrender of its

Lannister garrison after a brief siege.
“Tell him to put the captives to the sword and the castle to the
torch, by command of the king. Then he is to join forces with
Robett Glover and strike east toward Duskendale. Those are rich
lands, and hardly touched by the ghting. It is time they had a
taste. Glover has lost a castle, and Tallhart a son. Let them take
their vengeance on Duskendale.”
“I shall prepare the message for your seal, my lord.”
Arya was glad to hear that the castle of the Darrys would be
burned. That was where they’d brought her when she’d been caught
after her ght with Jo rey, and where the queen had made her
father kill Sansa’s wolf. It deserves to burn. She wished that Robett
Glover and Ser Helman Tallhart would come back to Harrenhal,
though; they had marched too quickly, before she’d been able to
decide whether to trust them with her secret.
“I will hunt today,” Roose Bolton announced as Qyburn helped
him into a quilted jerkin.
“Is it safe, my lord?” Qyburn asked. “Only three days past, Septon
Utt’s men were attacked by wolves. They came right into his camp,
not ve yards from the re, and killed two horses.”
“It is wolves I mean to hunt. I can scarcely sleep at night for the
howling.” Bolton buckled on his belt, adjusting the hang of sword
and dagger. “It’s said that direwolves once roamed the north in
great packs of a hundred or more, and feared neither man nor
mammoth, but that was long ago and in another land. It is queer to
see the common wolves of the south so bold.”
“Terrible times breed terrible things, my lord.”
Bolton showed his teeth in something that might have been a
smile. “Are these times so terrible, Maester?”
“Summer is gone and there are four kings in the realm.”
“One king may be terrible, but four?” He shrugged. “Nan, my fur
cloak.” She brought it to him. “My chambers will be clean and
orderly upon my return,” he told her as she fastened it. “And tend
to Lady Walda’s letter.”
“As you say, my lord.”

The lord and maester swept from the room, giving her not so
much as a backward glance. When they were gone, Arya took the
letter and carried it to the hearth, stirring the logs with a poker to
wake the ames anew. She watched the parchment twist, blacken,
and are up. If the Lannisters hurt Bran and Rickon, Robb will kill them
every one. He’ll never bend the knee, never, never, never. He’s not
afraid of any of them. Curls of ash oated up the chimney. Arya
squatted beside the re, watching them rise through a veil of hot
tears. If Winterfell is truly gone, is this my home now? Am I still Arya,
or only Nan the serving girl, for forever and forever and forever?
She spent the next few hours tending to the lord’s chambers. She
swept out the old rushes and scattered fresh sweet-smelling ones,
laid a fresh re in the hearth, changed the linens and u ed the
featherbed, emptied the chamber pots down the privy shaft and
scrubbed them out, carried an armload of soiled clothing to the
washerwomen, and brought up a bowl of crisp autumn pears from
the kitchen. When she was done with the bedchamber, she went
down half a ight of stairs to do the same in the great solar, a spare
drafty room as large as the halls of many a smaller castle. The
candles were down to stubs, so Arya changed them out. Under the
windows was a huge oaken table where the lord wrote his letters.
She stacked the books, changed the candles, put the quills and inks
and sealing wax in order.
A large ragged sheepskin was tossed across the papers. Arya had
started to roll it up when the colors caught her eye: the blue of
lakes and rivers, the red dots where castles and cities could be
found, the green of woods. She spread it out instead. THE LANDS OF
THE TRIDENT, said the ornate script beneath the map. The drawing
showed everything from the Neck to the Blackwater Rush. There’s
Harrenhal at the top of the big lake, she realized, but where’s Riverrun?
Then she saw. It’s not so far …
The afternoon was still young by the time she was done, so Arya
took herself o to the godswood. Her duties were lighter as Lord
Bolton’s cupbearer than they had been under Weese or even
Pinkeye, though they required dressing like a page and washing

more than she liked. The hunt would not return for hours, so she
had a little time for her needlework.
She slashed at birch leaves till the splintery point of the broken
broomstick was green and sticky. “Ser Gregor,” she breathed.
“Dunsen, Polliver, Ra the Sweetling.” She spun and leapt and
balanced on the balls of her feet, darting this way and that,
knocking pinecones ying. “The Tickler,” she called out one time,
“the Hound,” the next. “Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei.” The
bole of an oak loomed before her, and she lunged to drive her point
through it, grunting “Jo rey, Jo rey, Jo rey.” Her arms and legs
were dappled by sunlight and the shadows of leaves. A sheen of
sweat covered her skin by the time she paused. The heel of her right
foot was bloody where she’d skinned it, so she stood one-legged
before the heart tree and raised her sword in salute. “Valar
morghulis,” she told the old gods of the north. She liked how the
words sounded when she said them.
As Arya crossed the yard to the bathhouse, she spied a raven
circling down toward the rookery, and wondered where it had come
from and what message it carried. Might be it’s from Robb, come to
say it wasn’t true about Bran and Rickon. She chewed on her lip,
hoping. If I had wings I could y back to Winterfell and see for myself.
And if it was true, I’d just y away, y up past the moon and the shining
stars, and see all the things in Old Nan’s stories, dragons and sea
monsters and the Titan of Braavos, and maybe I wouldn’t ever y back
unless I wanted to.
The hunting party returned near evenfall with nine dead wolves.
Seven were adults, big grey-brown beasts, savage and powerful,
their mouths drawn back over long yellow teeth by their dying
snarls. But the other two had only been pups. Lord Bolton gave
orders for the skins to be sewn into a blanket for his bed. “Cubs still
have that soft fur, my lord,” one of his men pointed out. “Make you
a nice warm pair of gloves.”
Bolton glanced up at the banners waving above the gatehouse
towers. “As the Starks are wont to remind us, winter is coming.
Have it done.” When he saw Arya looking on, he said, “Nan, I’ll
want a agon of hot spice wine, I took a chill in the woods. See that

it doesn’t get cold. I’m of a mind to sup alone. Barley bread, butter,
and boar.”
“At once, my lord.” That was always the best thing to say.
Hot Pie was making oatcakes when she entered the kitchen.
Three other cooks were boning sh, while a spit boy turned a boar
over the ames. “My lord wants his supper, and hot spice wine to
wash it down,” Arya announced, “and he doesn’t want it cold.” One
of the cooks washed his hands, took out a kettle, and lled it with a
heavy, sweet red. Hot Pie was told to crumble in the spices as the
wine heated. Arya went to help.
“I can do it,” he said sullenly. “I don’t need you to show me how
to spice wine.”
He hates me too, or else he’s scared of me. She backed away, more
sad than angry. When the food was ready, the cooks covered it with
a silver cover and wrapped the agon in a thick towel to keep it
warm. Dusk was settling outside. On the walls the crows muttered
round the heads like courtiers round a king. One of the guards held
the door to Kingspyre. “Hope that’s not weasel soup,” he jested.
Roose Bolton was seated by the hearth reading from a thick
leatherbound book when she entered. “Light some candles,” he
commanded her as he turned a page. “It grows gloomy in here.”
She placed the food at his elbow and did as he bid her, lling the
room with ickering light and the scent of cloves. Bolton turned a
few more pages with his nger, then closed the book and placed it
carefully in the re. He watched the ames consume it, pale eyes
shining with re ected light. The old dry leather went up with a
whoosh, and the yellow pages stirred as they burned, as if some
ghost were reading them. “I will have no further need of you
tonight,” he said, never looking at her.
She should have gone, silent as a mouse, but something had hold
of her. “My lord,” she asked, “will you take me with you when you
leave Harrenhal?”
He turned to stare at her, and from the look in his eyes it was as
if his supper had just spoken to him. “Did I give you leave to
question me, Nan?”
“No, my lord.” She lowered her eyes.

“You should not have spoken, then. Should you?”
“No. My lord.”
For a moment he looked amused. “I will answer you, just this
once. I mean to give Harrenhal to Lord Vargo when I return to the
north. You will remain here, with him.”
“But I don’t—” she started.
He cut her o . “I am not in the habit of being questioned by
servants, Nan. Must I have your tongue out?”
He would do it as easily as another man might cu a dog, she
knew. “No, my lord.”
“Then I’ll hear no more from you?”
“No, my lord.”
“Go, then. I shall forget this insolence.”
Arya went, but not to her bed. When she stepped out into the
darkness of the yard, the guard on the door nodded at her and said,
“Storm coming. Smell the air?” The wind was gusting, ames
swirling o the torches mounted atop the walls beside the rows of
heads. On her way to the godswood, she passed the Wailing Tower
where once she had lived in fear of Weese. The Freys had taken it
for their own since Harrenhal’s fall. She could hear angry voices
coming from a window, many men talking and arguing all at once.
Elmar was sitting on the steps outside, alone.
“What’s wrong?” Arya asked him when she saw the tears shining
on his cheeks.
“My princess,” he sobbed. “We’ve been dishonored, Aenys says.
There was a bird from the Twins. My lord father says I’ll need to
marry someone else, or be a septon.”
A stupid princess, she thought, that’s nothing to cry over. “My
brothers might be dead,” she con ded.
Elmar gave her a scornful look. “No one cares about a serving
girl’s brothers.”
It was hard not to hit him when he said that. “I hope your
princess dies,” she said, and ran o before he could grab her.
In the godswood she found her broomstick sword where she had
left it, and carried it to the heart tree. There she knelt. Red leaves

rustled. Red eyes peered inside her. The eyes of the gods. “Tell me
what to do, you gods,” she prayed.
For a long moment there was no sound but the wind and the
water and the creak of leaf and limb. And then, far far o , beyond
the godswood and the haunted towers and the immense stone walls
of Harrenhal, from somewhere out in the world, came the long
lonely howl of a wolf. Gooseprickles rose on Arya’s skin, and for an
instant she felt dizzy. Then, so faintly, it seemed as if she heard her
father’s voice. “When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the
lone wolf dies, but the pack survives,” he said.
“But there is no pack,” she whispered to the weirwood. Bran and
Rickon were dead, the Lannisters had Sansa, Jon had gone to the
Wall. “I’m not even me now, I’m Nan.”
“You are Arya of Winterfell, daughter of the north. You told me
you could be strong. You have the wolf blood in you.”
“The wolf blood.” Arya remembered now. “I’ll be as strong as
Robb. I said I would.” She took a deep breath, then lifted the
broomstick in both hands and brought it down across her knee. It
broke with a loud crack, and she threw the pieces aside. I am a
direwolf, and done with wooden teeth.
That night she lay in her narrow bed upon the scratchy straw,
listening to the voices of the living and the dead whisper and argue
as she waited for the moon to rise. They were the only voices she
trusted anymore. She could hear the sound of her own breath, and
the wolves as well, a great pack of them now. They are closer than
the one I heard in the godswood, she thought. They are calling to me.
Finally she slipped from under the blanket, wriggled into a tunic,
and padded barefoot down the stairs. Roose Bolton was a cautious
man, and the entrance to Kingspyre was guarded day and night, so
she had to slip out of a narrow cellar window. The yard was still,
the great castle lost in haunted dreams. Above, the wind keened
through the Wailing Tower.
At the forge she found the res extinguished and the doors closed
and barred. She crept in a window, as she had once before. Gendry
shared a mattress with two other apprentice smiths. She crouched in
the loft for a long time before her eyes adjusted enough for her to

be sure that he was the one on the end. Then she put a hand over
his mouth and pinched him. His eyes opened. He could not have
been very deeply asleep. “Please,” she whispered. She took her hand
o his mouth and pointed.
For a moment she did not think he understood, but then he slid
out from under the blankets. Naked, he padded across the room,
shrugged into a loose roughspun tunic, and climbed down from the
loft after her. The other sleepers did not stir. “What do you want
now?” Gendry said in a low angry voice.
“A sword.”
“Blackthumb keeps all the blades locked up, I told you that a
hundred times. Is this for Lord Leech?”
“For me. Break the lock with your hammer.”
“They’ll break my hand,” he grumbled. “Or worse.”
“Not if you run o with me.”
“Run, and they’ll catch you and kill you.”
“They’ll do you worse. Lord Bolton is giving Harrenhal to the
Bloody Mummers, he told me so.”
Gendry pushed black hair out of his eyes. “So?”
She looked right at him, fearless. “So when Vargo Hoat’s the lord,
he’s going to cut o the feet of all the servants to keep them from
running away. The smiths too.”
“That’s only a story,” he said scornfully.
“No, it’s true, I heard Lord Vargo say so,” she lied. “He’s going to
cut one foot o everyone. The left one. Go to the kitchens and wake
Hot Pie, he’ll do what you say. We’ll need bread or oakcakes or
something. You get the swords and I’ll do the horses. We’ll meet
near the postern in the east wall, behind the Tower of Ghosts. No
one ever comes there.”
“I know that gate. It’s guarded, same as the rest.”
“So? You won’t forget the swords?”
“I never said I’d come.”
“No. But if you do, you won’t forget the swords?”
He frowned. “No,” he said at last. “I guess I won’t.”
Arya reentered Kingspyre the same way she had left it, and stole
up the winding steps listening for footfalls. In her cell, she stripped

to the skin and dressed herself carefully, in two layers of
smallclothes, warm stockings, and her cleanest tunic. It was Lord
Bolton’s livery. On the breast was sewn his sigil, the ayed man of
the Dreadfort. She tied her shoes, threw a wool cloak over her
skinny shoulders, and knotted it under her throat. Quiet as a
shadow, she moved back down the stairs. Outside the lord’s solar
she paused to listen at the door, easing it open slowly when she
heard only silence.
The sheepskin map was on the table, beside the remains of Lord
Bolton’s supper. She rolled it up tight and thrust it through her belt.
He’d left his dagger on the table as well, so she took that too, just in
case Gendry lost his courage.
A horse neighed softly as she slipped into the darkened stables.
The grooms were all asleep. She prodded one with her toe until he
sat up groggily and said, “Eh? Whas?”
“Lord Bolton requires three horses saddled and bridled.”
The boy got to his feet, pushing straw from his hair. “Wha, at this
hour? Horses, you say?” He blinked at the sigil on her tunic. “Whas
he want horses for, in the dark?”
“Lord Bolton is not in the habit of being questioned by servants.”
She crossed her arms.
The stableboy was still looking at the ayed man. He knew what
it meant. “Three, you say?”
“One two three. Hunting horses. Fast and surefoot.” Arya helped
him with the bridles and saddles, so he would not need to wake any
of the others. She hoped they would not hurt him afterward, but she
knew they probably would.
Leading the horses across the castle was the worst part. She
stayed in the shadow of the curtain wall whenever she could, so the
sentries walking their rounds on the ramparts above would have
needed to look almost straight down to see her. And if they do, what
of it? I’m my lord’s own cupbearer. It was a chill dank autumn night.
Clouds were blowing in from the west, hiding the stars, and the
Wailing Tower screamed mournfully at every gust of wind. It smells
like rain. Arya did not know whether that would be good or bad for
their escape.

No one saw her, and she saw no one, only a grey and white cat
creeping along atop the godswood wall. It stopped and spit at her,
waking memories of the Red Keep and her father and Syrio Forel. “I
could catch you if I wanted,” she called to it softly, “but I have to
go, cat.” The cat hissed again and ran o .
The Tower of Ghosts was the most ruinous of Harrenhal’s ve
immense towers. It stood dark and desolate behind the remains of a
collapsed sept where only rats had come to pray for near three
hundred years. It was there she waited to see if Gendry and Hot Pie
would come. It seemed as though she waited a long time. The
horses nibbled at the weeds that grew up between the broken stones
while the clouds swallowed the last of the stars. Arya took out the
dagger and sharpened it to keep her hands busy. Long smooth
strokes, the way Syrio had taught her. The sound calmed her.
She heard them coming long before she saw them. Hot Pie was
breathing heavily, and once he stumbled in the dark, barked his
shin, and cursed loud enough to wake half of Harrenhal. Gendry
was quieter, but the swords he was carrying rang together as he
moved. “Here I am.” She stood. “Be quiet or they’ll hear you.”
The boys picked their way toward her over tumbled stones.
Gendry was wearing oiled chainmail under his cloak, she saw, and
he had his blacksmith’s hammer slung across his back. Hot Pie’s red
round face peered out from under a hood. He had a sack of bread
dangling from his right hand and a big wheel of cheese under his
left arm. “There’s a guard on that postern,” said Gendry quietly. “I
told you there would be.”
“You stay here with the horses,” said Arya. “I’ll get rid of him.
Come quick when I call.”
Gendry nodded. Hot Pie said, “Hoot like an owl when you want
us to come.”
“I’m not an owl,” said Arya. “I’m a wolf. I’ll howl.”
Alone, she slid through the shadow of the Tower of Ghosts. She
walked fast, to keep ahead of her fear, and it felt as though Syrio
Forel walked beside her, and Yoren, and Jaqen H’ghar, and Jon
Snow. She had not taken the sword Gendry had brought her, not
yet. For this the dagger would be better. It was good and sharp.

This postern was the least of Harrenhal’s gates, a narrow door of
stout oak studded with iron nails, set in an angle of the wall
beneath a defensive tower. Only one man was set to guard it, but
she knew there would be sentries up in that tower as well, and
others nearby walking the walls. Whatever happened, she must be
quiet as a shadow. He must not call out. A few scattered raindrops
had begun to fall. She felt one land on her brow and run slowly
down her nose.
She made no e ort to hide, but approached the guard openly, as
if Lord Bolton himself had sent her. He watched her come, curious
as to what might bring a page here at this black hour. When she got
closer, she saw that he was a northman, very tall and thin, huddled
in a ragged fur cloak. That was bad. She might have been able to
trick a Frey or one of the Brave Companions, but the Dreadfort men
had served Roose Bolton their whole life, and they knew him better
than she did. If I tell him I am Arya Stark and command him to stand
aside … No, she dare not. He was a northman, but not a Winterfell
man. He belonged to Roose Bolton.
When she reached him she pushed back her cloak so he would see
the ayed man on her breast. “Lord Bolton sent me.”
“At this hour? Why for?”
She could see the gleam of steel under the fur, and she did not
know if she was strong enough to drive the point of the dagger
through chainmail. His throat, it must be his throat, but he’s too tall, I’ll
never reach it. For a moment she did not know what to say. For a
moment she was a little girl again, and scared, and the rain on her
face felt like tears.
“He told me to give all his guards a silver piece, for their good
service.” The words seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Silver, you say?” He did not believe her, but he wanted to; silver
was silver, after all. “Give it over, then.”
Her ngers dug down beneath her tunic and came out clutching
the coin Jaqen had given her. In the dark the iron could pass for
tarnished silver. She held it out … and let it slip through her
ngers.

Cursing her softly, the man went to a knee to grope for the coin
in the dirt, and there was his neck right in front of her. Arya slid her
dagger out and drew it across his throat, as smooth as summer silk.
His blood covered her hands in a hot gush and he tried to shout but
there was blood in his mouth as well.
“Valar morghulis,” she whispered as he died.
When he stopped moving, she picked up the coin. Outside the
walls of Harrenhal, a wolf howled long and loud. She lifted the bar,
set it aside, and pulled open the heavy oak door. By the time Hot
Pie and Gendry came up with the horses, the rain was falling hard.
“You killed him!” Hot Pie gasped.
“What did you think I would do?” Her ngers were sticky with
blood, and the smell was making her mare skittish. It’s no matter,
she thought, swinging up into the saddle. The rain will wash them
clean again.

SANSA

The throne room was a sea of jewels, furs, and bright fabrics. Lords

and ladies lled the back of the hall and stood beneath the high
windows, jostling like shwives on a dock.
The denizens of Jo rey’s court had striven to outdo each other
today. Jalabhar Xho was all in feathers, a plumage so fantastic and
extravagant that he seemed like to take ight. The High Septon’s
crystal crown red rainbows through the air every time he moved
his head. At the council table, Queen Cersei shimmered in a clothof-gold gown slashed in burgundy velvet, while beside her Varys
fussed and simpered in a lilac brocade. Moon Boy and Ser Dontos
wore new suits of motley, clean as a spring morning. Even Lady
Tanda and her daughters looked pretty in matching gowns of
turquoise silk and vair, and Lord Gyles was coughing into a square
of scarlet silk trimmed with golden lace. King Jo rey sat above
them all, amongst the blades and barbs of the Iron Throne. He was
in crimson samite, his black mantle studded with rubies, on his head
his heavy golden crown.
Squirming through a press of knights, squires, and rich townfolk,
Sansa reached the front of the gallery just as a blast of trumpets
announced the entry of Lord Tywin Lannister.
He rode his warhorse down the length of the hall and dismounted
before the Iron Throne. Sansa had never seen such armor; all
burnished red steel, inlaid with golden scrollwork and
ornamentation. His rondels were sunbursts, the roaring lion that

crowned his helm had ruby eyes, and a lioness on each shoulder
fastened a cloth-of-gold cloak so long and heavy that it draped the
hindquarters of his charger. Even the horse’s armor was gilded, and
his bardings were shimmering crimson silk emblazoned with the
lion of Lannister.
The Lord of Casterly Rock made such an impressive gure that it
was a shock when his destrier dropped a load of dung right at the
base of the throne. Jo rey had to step gingerly around it as he
descended to embrace his grandfather and proclaim him Savior of
the City. Sansa covered her mouth to hide a nervous smile.
Jo made a show of asking his grandfather to assume governance
of the realm, and Lord Tywin solemnly accepted the responsibility,
“until Your Grace does come of age.” Then squires removed his
armor and Jo fastened the Hand’s chain of o ce around his neck.
Lord Tywin took a seat at the council table beside the queen. After
the destrier was led o and his homage removed, Cersei nodded for
the ceremonies to continue.
A fanfare of brazen trumpets greeted each of the heroes as he
stepped between the great oaken doors. Heralds cried his name and
deeds for all to hear, and the noble knights and highborn ladies
cheered as lustily as cutthroats at a cock ght. Pride of place was
given to Mace Tyrell, the Lord of Highgarden, a once-powerful man
gone to fat, yet still handsome. His sons followed him in; Ser Loras
and his older brother Ser Garlan the Gallant. The three dressed
alike, in green velvet trimmed with sable.
The king descended the throne once more to greet them, a great
honor. He fastened about the throat of each a chain of roses
wrought in soft yellow gold, from which hung a golden disc with
the lion of Lannister picked out in rubies. “The roses support the
lion, as the might of Highgarden supports the realm,” proclaimed
Jo rey. “If there is any boon you would ask of me, ask and it shall
be yours.”
And now it comes, thought Sansa.
“Your Grace,” said Ser Loras, “I beg the honor of serving in your
Kingsguard, to defend you against your enemies.”

Jo rey drew the Knight of Flowers to his feet and kissed him on
his cheek. “Done, brother.”
Lord Tyrell bowed his head. “There is no greater pleasure than to
serve the King’s Grace. If I was deemed worthy to join your royal
council, you would nd none more loyal or true.”
Jo put a hand on Lord Tyrell’s shoulder and kissed him when he
stood. “Your wish is granted.”
Ser Garlan Tyrell, ve years senior to Ser Loras, was a taller
bearded version of his more famous younger brother. He was
thicker about the chest and broader at the shoulders, and though his
face was comely enough, he lacked Ser Loras’s startling beauty.
“Your Grace,” Garlan said when the king approached him, “I have a
maiden sister, Margaery, the delight of our House. She was wed to
Renly Baratheon, as you know, but Lord Renly went to war before
the marriage could be consummated, so she remains innocent.
Margaery has heard tales of your wisdom, courage, and chivalry,
and has come to love you from afar. I beseech you to send for her,
to take her hand in marriage, and to wed your House to mine for all
time.”
King Jo rey made a show of looking surprised. “Ser Garlan, your
sister’s beauty is famed throughout the Seven Kingdoms, but I am
promised to another. A king must keep his word.”
Queen Cersei got to her feet in a rustle of skirts. “Your Grace, in
the judgment of your small council, it would be neither proper nor
wise for you to wed the daughter of a man beheaded for treason, a
girl whose brother is in open rebellion against the throne even now.
Sire, your councillors beg you, for the good of your realm, set Sansa
Stark aside. The Lady Margaery will make you a far more suitable
queen.”
Like a pack of trained dogs, the lords and ladies in the hall began
to shout their pleasure. “Margaery,” they called. “Give us
Margaery!” and “No traitor queens! Tyrell! Tyrell!”
Jo rey raised a hand. “I would like to heed the wishes of my
people, Mother, but I took a holy vow.”
The High Septon stepped forward. “Your Grace, the gods hold
bethrothal solemn, but your father, King Robert of blessed memory,

made this pact before the Starks of Winterfell had revealed their
falseness. Their crimes against the realm have freed you from any
promise you might have made. So far as the Faith is concerned,
there is no valid marriage contract ’twixt you and Sansa Stark.”
A tumult of cheering lled the throne room, and cries of
“Margaery, Margaery” erupted all around her. Sansa leaned forward,
her hands tight around the gallery’s wooden rail. She knew what
came next, but she was still frightened of what Jo rey might say,
afraid that he would refuse to release her even now, when his
whole kingdom depended upon it. She felt as if she were back again
on the marble steps outside the Great Sept of Baelor, waiting for her
prince to grant her father mercy, and instead hearing him command
Ilyn Payne to strike o his head. Please, she prayed fervently, make
him say it, make him say it.
Lord Tywin was looking at his grandson. Jo gave him a sullen
glance, shifted his feet, and helped Ser Garlan Tyrell to rise. “The
gods are good. I am free to heed my heart. I will wed your sweet
sister, and gladly, ser.” He kissed Ser Garlan on a bearded cheek as
the cheers rose all around them.
Sansa felt curiously light-headed. I am free. She could feel eyes
upon her. I must not smile, she reminded herself. The queen had
warned her; no matter what she felt inside, the face she showed the
world must look distraught. “I will not have my son humiliated,”
Cersei said. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes. But if I’m not to be queen, what will become of me?”
“That will need to be determined. For the moment, you shall
remain here at court, as our ward.”
“I want to go home.”
The queen was irritated by that. “You should have learned by
now, none of us get the things we want.”
I have, though, Sansa thought. I am free of Jo rey. I will not have to
kiss him, nor give him my maidenhood, nor bear him children. Let
Margaery Tyrell have all that, poor girl.
By the time the outburst died down, the Lord of Highgarden had
been seated at the council table, and his sons had joined the other
knights and lordlings beneath the windows. Sansa tried to look

forlorn and abandoned as other heroes of the Battle of the
Blackwater were summoned forth to receive their rewards.
Paxter Redwyne, Lord of the Arbor, marched down the length of
the hall anked by his twin sons Horror and Slobber, the former
limping from a wound taken in the battle. After them followed Lord
Mathis Rowan in a snowy doublet with a great tree worked upon
the breast in gold thread; Lord Randyll Tarly, lean and balding, a
greatsword across his back in a jeweled scabbard; Ser Kevan
Lannister, a thickset balding man with a close-trimmed beard; Ser
Addam Marbrand, coppery hair streaming to his shoulders; the great
western lords Lydden, Crakehall, and Brax.
Next came four of lesser birth who had distinguished themselves
in the ghting: the one-eyed knight Ser Philip Foote, who had slain
Lord Bryce Caron in single combat; the freerider Lothor Brune,
who’d cut his way through half a hundred Fossoway men-at-arms to
capture Ser Jon of the green apple and kill Ser Bryan and Ser Edwyd
of the red, thereby winning himself the name Lothor Apple-Eater;
Willit, a grizzled man-at-arms in the service of Ser Harys Swyft,
who’d pulled his master from beneath his dying horse and defended
him against a dozen attackers; and a downy-cheeked squire named
Josmyn Peckledon, who had killed two knights, wounded a third,
and captured two more, though he could not have been more than
fourteen. Willit was borne in on a litter, so grievous were his
wounds.
Ser Kevan had taken a seat beside his brother Lord Tywin. When
the heralds had nished telling of each hero’s deeds, he rose. “It is
His Grace’s wish that these good men be rewarded for their valor.
By his decree, Ser Philip shall henceforth be Lord Philip of House
Foote, and to him shall go all the lands, rights, and incomes of
House Caron. Lothor Brune to be raised to the estate of knighthood,
and granted land and keep in the riverlands at war’s end. To
Josmyn Peckledon, a sword and suit of plate, his choice of any
warhorse in the royal stables, and knighthood as soon as he shall
come of age. And lastly, for Goodman Willit, a spear with a silverbanded haft, a hauberk of new-forged ringmail, and a full helm with
visor. Further, the goodman’s sons shall be taken into the service of

House Lannister at Casterly Rock, the elder as a squire and the
younger as a page, with the chance to advance to knighthood if they
serve loyally and well. To all this, the King’s Hand and the small
council consent.”
The captains of the king’s warships Wildwind, Prince Aemon, and
River Arrow were honored next, along with some under o cers from
Godsgrace, Lance, Lady of Silk, and Ramshead. As near as Sansa could
tell, their chief accomplishment had been surviving the battle on the
river, a feat that few enough could boast. Hallyne the Pyromancer
and the masters of the Alchemists’ Guild received the king’s thanks
as well, and Hallyne was raised to the style of lord, though Sansa
noted that neither lands nor castle accompanied the title, which
made the alchemist no more a true lord than Varys was. A more
signi cant lordship by far was granted to Ser Lancel Lannister.
Jo rey awarded him the lands, castle, and rights of House Darry,
whose last child lord had perished during the ghting in the
riverlands, “leaving no trueborn heirs of lawful Darry blood, but
only a bastard cousin.”
Ser Lancel did not appear to accept the title; the talk was, his
wound might cost him his arm or even his life. The Imp was said to
be dying as well, from a terrible cut to the head.
When the herald called, “Lord Petyr Baelish,” he came forth
dressed all in shades of rose and plum, his cloak patterned with
mockingbirds. She could see him smiling as he knelt before the Iron
Throne. He looks so pleased. Sansa had not heard of Little nger
doing anything especially heroic during the battle, but it seemed he
was to be rewarded all the same.
Ser Kevan got back to his feet. “It is the wish of the King’s Grace
that his loyal councillor Petyr Baelish be rewarded for faithful
service to crown and realm. Be it known that Lord Baelish is
granted the castle of Harrenhal with all its attendant lands and
incomes, there to make his seat and rule henceforth as Lord
Paramount of the Trident. Petyr Baelish and his sons and grandsons
shall hold and enjoy these honors until the end of time, and all the
lords of the Trident shall do him homage as their rightful liege. The
King’s Hand and the small council consent.”

On his knees, Little nger raised his eyes to King Jo rey. “I thank
you humbly, Your Grace. I suppose this means I’ll need to see about
getting some sons and grandsons.”
Jo rey laughed, and the court with him. Lord Paramount of the
Trident, Sansa thought, and Lord of Harrenhal as well. She did not
understand why that should make him so happy; the honors were as
empty as the title granted to Hallyne the Pyromancer. Harrenhal
was cursed, everyone knew that, and the Lannisters did not even
hold it at present. Besides, the lords of the Trident were sworn to
Riverrun and House Tully, and to the King in the North; they would
never accept Little nger as their liege. Unless they are made to.
Unless my brother and my uncle and my grandfather are all cast down
and killed. The thought made Sansa anxious, but she told herself she
was being silly. Robb has beaten them every time. He’ll beat Lord
Baelish too, if he must.
More than six hundred new knights were made that day. They
had held their vigil in the Great Sept of Baelor all through the night
and crossed the city barefoot that morning to prove their humble
hearts. Now they came forward dressed in shifts of undyed wool to
receive their knighthoods from the Kingsguard. It took a long time,
since only three of the Brothers of the White Sword were on hand to
dub them. Mandon Moore had perished in the battle, the Hound had
vanished, Aerys Oakheart was in Dorne with Princess Myrcella, and
Jaime Lannister was Robb’s captive, so the Kingsguard had been
reduced to Balon Swann, Meryn Trant, and Osmund Kettleblack.
Once knighted, each man rose, buckled on his swordbelt, and stood
beneath the windows. Some had bloody feet from their walk
through the city, but they stood tall and proud all the same, it
seemed to Sansa.
By the time all the new knights had been given their sers the hall
was growing restive, and none more so than Jo rey. Some of those
in the gallery had begun to slip quietly away, but the notables on
the oor were trapped, unable to depart without the king’s leave.
Judging by the way he was dgeting atop the Iron Throne, Jo
would willingly have granted it, but the day’s work was far from

done. For now the coin was turned over, and the captives were
ushered in.
There were great lords and noble knights in that company too:
sour old Lord Celtigar, the Red Crab; Ser Bonifer the Good; Lord
Estermont, more ancient even than Celtigar; Lord Varner, who
hobbled the length of the hall on a shattered knee, but would accept
no help; Ser Mark Mullendore, grey-faced, his left arm gone to the
elbow; erce Red Ronnet of Gri n Roost; Ser Dermot of the
Rainwood; Lord Willum and his sons Josua and Elyas; Ser Jon
Fossoway; Ser Timon the Scrapesword; Aurane, the bastard of
Driftmark; Lord Staedmon, called Pennylover; hundreds of others.
Those who had changed their allegiance during the battle needed
only to swear fealty to Jo rey, but the ones who had fought for
Stannis until the bitter end were compelled to speak. Their words
decided their fate. If they begged forgiveness for their treasons and
promised to serve loyally henceforth, Jo rey welcomed them back
into the king’s peace and restored them to all their lands and rights.
A handful remained de ant, however. “Do not imagine this is done,
boy,” warned one, the bastard son of some Florent or other. “The
Lord of Light protects King Stannis, now and always. All your
swords and all your scheming shall not save you when his hour
comes.”
“Your hour is come right now.” Jo rey beckoned to Ser Ilyn
Payne to take the man out and strike his head o . But no sooner
had that one been dragged away than a knight of solemn mien with
a ery heart on his surcoat shouted out, “Stannis is the true king! A
monster sits the Iron Throne, an abomination born of incest!”
“Be silent,” Ser Kevan Lannister bellowed.
The knight raised his voice instead. “Jo rey is the black worm
eating the heart of the realm! Darkness was his father, and death his
mother! Destroy him before he corrupts you all! Destroy them all,
queen whore and king worm, vile dwarf and whispering spider, the
false owers. Save yourselves!” One of the gold cloaks knocked the
man o his feet, but he continued to shout. “The scouring re will
come! King Stannis will return!”

Jo rey lurched to his feet. “I’m king! Kill him! Kill him now! I
command it.” He chopped down with his hand, a furious, angry
gesture … and screeched in pain when his arm brushed against one
of the sharp metal fangs that surrounded him. The bright crimson
samite of his sleeve turned a darker shade of red as his blood
soaked through it. “Mother!” he wailed.
With every eye on the king, somehow the man on the oor
wrested a spear away from one of the gold cloaks, and used it to
push himself back to his feet. “The throne denies him!” he cried.
“He is no king!”
Cersei was running toward the throne, but Lord Tywin remained
still as stone. He had only to raise a nger, and Ser Meryn Trant
moved forward with drawn sword. The end was quick and brutal.
The gold cloaks seized the knight by the arms. “No king!” he cried
again as Ser Meryn drove the point of his longsword through his
chest.
Jo fell into his mother’s arms. Three maesters came hurrying
forward, to bundle him out through the king’s door. Then everyone
began talking at once. When the gold cloaks dragged o the dead
man, he left a trail of bright blood across the stone oor. Lord
Baelish stroked his beard while Varys whispered in his ear. Will they
dismiss us now? Sansa wondered. A score of captives still waited,
though whether to pledge fealty or shout curses, who could say?
Lord Tywin rose to his feet. “We continue,” he said in a clear
strong voice that silenced the murmurs. “Those who wish to ask
pardon for their treasons may do so. We will have no more follies.”
He moved to the Iron Throne and there seated himself on a step, a
mere three feet o the oor.
The light outside the windows was fading by the time the session
drew to a close. Sansa felt limp with exhaustion as she made her
way down from the gallery. She wondered how badly Jo rey had
cut himself. They say the Iron Throne can be perilous cruel to those who
were not meant to sit it.
Back in the safety of her own chambers, she hugged a pillow to
her face to mu e a squeal of joy. Oh, gods be good, he did it, he put
me aside in front of everyone. When a serving girl brought her

supper, she almost kissed her. There was hot bread and freshchurned butter, a thick beef soup, capon and carrots, and peaches in
honey. Even the food tastes sweeter, she thought.
Come dark, she slipped into a cloak and left for the godswood.
Ser Osmund Kettleblack was guarding the drawbridge in his white
armor. Sansa tried her best to sound miserable as she bid him a
good evening. From the way he leered at her, she was not sure she
had been wholly convincing.
Dontos waited in the leafy moonlight. “Why so sadface?” Sansa
asked him gaily. “You were there, you heard. Jo put me aside, he’s
done with me, he’s …”
He took her hand. “Oh, Jonquil, my poor Jonquil, you do not
understand. Done with you? They’ve scarcely begun.”
Her heart sank. “What do you mean?”
“The queen will never let you go, never. You are too valuable a
hostage. And Jo rey … sweetling, he is still king. If he wants you
in his bed, he will have you, only now it will be bastards he plants
in your womb instead of trueborn sons.”
“No,” Sansa said, shocked. “He let me go, he …”
Ser Dontos planted a slobbery kiss on her ear. “Be brave. I swore
to see you home, and now I can. The day has been chosen.”
“When?” Sansa asked. “When will we go?”
“The night of Jo rey’s wedding. After the feast. All the necessary
arrangements have been made. The Red Keep will be full of
strangers. Half the court will be drunk and the other half will be
helping Jo rey bed his bride. For a little while, you will be
forgotten, and the confusion will be our friend.”
“The wedding won’t be for a moon’s turn yet. Margaery Tyrell is
at Highgarden, they’ve only now sent for her.”
“You’ve waited so long, be patient awhile longer. Here, I have
something for you.” Ser Dontos fumbled in his pouch and drew out
a silvery spiderweb, dangling it between his thick ngers.
It was a hair net of ne-spun silver, the strands so thin and
delicate the net seemed to weigh no more than a breath of air when
Sansa took it in her ngers. Small gems were set wherever two

strands crossed, so dark they drank the moonlight. “What stones are
these?”
“Black amethysts from Asshai. The rarest kind, a deep true purple
by daylight.”
“It’s very lovely,” Sansa said, thinking, It is a ship I need, not a net
for my hair.
“Lovelier than you know, sweet child. It’s magic, you see. It’s
justice you hold. It’s vengeance for your father.” Dontos leaned
close and kissed her again. “It’s home.”

THEON

Maester Luwin came to him when the rst scouts were seen outside

the walls. “My lord prince,” he said, “you must yield.”
Theon stared at the platter of oakcakes, honey, and blood sausage
they’d brought him to break his fast. Another sleepless night had
left his nerves raw, and the very sight of food sickened him. “There
has been no reply from my uncle?”
“None,” the maester said. “Nor from your father on Pyke.”
“Send more birds.”
“It will not serve. By the time the birds reach—”
“Send them!” Knocking the platter of food aside with a swipe of
his arm, he pushed o the blankets and rose from Ned Stark’s bed
naked and angry. “Or do you want me dead? Is that it, Luwin? The
truth now.”
The small grey man was unafraid. “My order serves.”
“Yes, but whom?”
“The realm,” Maester Luwin said, “and Winterfell. Theon, once I
taught you sums and letters, history and warcraft. And might have
taught you more, had you wished to learn. I will not claim to bear
you any great love, no, but I cannot hate you either. Even if I did,
so long as you hold Winterfell I am bound by oath to give you
counsel. So now I counsel you to yield.”
Theon stooped to scoop a puddled cloak o the oor, shook o
the rushes, and draped it over his shoulders. A re, I’ll have a re,
and clean garb. Where’s Wex? I’ll not go to my grave in dirty clothes.

“You have no hope of holding here,” the maester went on. “If
your lord father meant to send you aid, he would have done so by
now. It is the Neck that concerns him. The battle for the north will
be fought amidst the ruins of Moat Cailin.”
“That may be so,” said Theon. “And so long as I hold Winterfell,
Ser Rodrik and Stark’s lords bannermen cannot march south to take
my uncle in the rear.” I am not so innocent of warcraft as you think,
old man. “I have food enough to stand a year’s siege, if need be.”
“There will be no siege. Perhaps they will spend a day or two
fashioning ladders and tying grapnels to the ends of ropes. But soon
enough they will come over your walls in a hundred places at once.
You may be able to hold the keep for a time, but the castle will fall
within the hour. You would do better to open your gates and ask for
—”
“—mercy? I know what kind of mercy they have for me.”
“There is a way.”
“I am ironborn,” Theon reminded him. “I have my own way.
What choice have they left me? No, don’t answer, I’ve heard enough
of your counsel. Go and send those birds as I commanded, and tell
Lorren I want to see him. And Wex as well. I’ll have my mail
scoured clean, and my garrison assembled in the yard.”
For a moment he thought the maester was going to defy him. But
nally Luwin bowed sti y. “As you command.”
They made a pitifully small assembly; the ironmen were few, the
yard large. “The northmen will be on us before nightfall,” he told
them. “Ser Rodrik Cassel and all the lords who have come to his
call. I will not run from them. I took this castle and I mean to hold
it, to live or die as Prince of Winterfell. But I will not command any
man to die with me. If you leave now, before Ser Rodrik’s main
force is upon us, there’s still a chance you may win free.” He
unsheathed his longsword and drew a line in the dirt. “Those who
would stay and ght, step forward.”
No one spoke. The men stood in their mail and fur and boiled
leather, as still as if they were made of stone. A few exchanged
looks. Urzen shu ed his feet. Dykk Harlaw hawked and spat. A
nger of wind ru ed Endehar’s long fair hair.

Theon felt as though he were drowning. Why am I surprised? he
thought bleakly. His father had forsaken him, his uncles, his sister,
even that wretched creature Reek. Why should his men prove any
more loyal? There was nothing to say, nothing to do. He could only
stand there beneath the great grey walls and the hard white sky,
sword in hand, waiting, waiting …
Wex was the rst to cross the line. Three quick steps and he stood
at Theon’s side, slouching. Shamed by the boy, Black Lorren
followed, all scowls. “Who else?” he demanded. Red Rolfe came
forward. Kromm. Werlag. Tymor and his brothers. Ulf the Ill.
Harrag Sheepstealer. Four Harlaws and two Botleys. Kenned the
Whale was the last. Seventeen in all.
Urzen was among those who did not move, and Stygg, and every
man of the ten that Asha had brought from Deepwood Motte. “Go,
then,” Theon told them. “Run to my sister. She’ll give you all a
warm welcome, I have no doubt.”
Stygg had the grace at least to look ashamed. The rest moved o
without a word. Theon turned to the seventeen who remained.
“Back to the walls. If the gods should spare us, I shall remember
every man of you.”
Black Lorren stayed when the others had gone. “The castle folk
will turn on us soon as the ght begins.”
“I know that. What would you have me do?”
“Put them out,” said Lorren. “Every one.”
Theon shook his head. “Is the noose ready?”
“It is. You mean to use it?”
“Do you know a better way?”
“Aye. I’ll take my axe and stand on that drawbridge, and let them
come try me. One at a time, two, three, it makes no matter. None
will pass the moat while I still draw breath.”
He means to die, thought Theon. It’s not victory he wants, it’s an end
worthy of a song. “We’ll use the noose.”
“As you say,” Lorren replied, contempt in his eyes.
Wex helped garb him for battle. Beneath his black surcoat and
golden mantle was a shirt of well-oiled ringmail, and under that a
layer of sti boiled leather. Once armed and armored, Theon

climbed the watchtower at the angle where the eastern and
southern walls came together to have a look at his doom. The
northmen were spreading out to encircle the castle. It was hard to
judge their numbers. A thousand at least; perhaps twice that many.
Against seventeen. They’d brought catapults and scorpions. He saw
no siege towers rumbling up the kingsroad, but there was timber
enough in the wolfswood to build as many as were required.
Theon studied their banners through Maester Luwin’s Myrish lens
tube. The Cerwyn battle-axe apped bravely wherever he looked,
and there were Tallhart trees as well, and mermen from White
Harbor. Less common were the sigils of Flint and Karstark. Here
and there he even saw the bull moose of the Hornwoods. But no
Glovers, Asha saw to them, no Boltons from the Dreadfort, no Umbers
come down from the shadow of the Wall. Not that they were needed.
Soon enough the boy Cley Cerwyn appeared before the gates
carrying a peace banner on a tall sta , to announce that Ser Rodrik
Cassel wished to parley with Theon Turncloak.
Turncloak. The name was bitter as bile. He had gone to Pyke to
lead his father’s longships against Lannisport, he remembered. “I
shall be out shortly,” he shouted down. “Alone.”
Black Lorren disapproved. “Only blood can wash out blood,” he
declared. “Knights may keep their truces with other knights, but
they are not so careful of their honor when dealing with those they
deem outlaw.”
Theon bristled. “I am the Prince of Winterfell and heir to the Iron
Islands. Now go nd the girl and do as I told you.”
Black Lorren gave him a murderous look. “Aye, Prince.”
He’s turned against me too, Theon realized. Of late it seemed to
him as if the very stones of Winterfell had turned against him. If I
die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him,
but to live?
He rode to the gatehouse with his crown on his head. A woman
was drawing water from the well, and Gage the cook stood in the
door of the kitchens. They hid their hatred behind sullen looks and
faces blank as slate, yet he could feel it all the same.

When the drawbridge was lowered, a chill wind sighed across the
moat. The touch of it made him shiver. It is the cold, nothing more,
Theon told himself, a shiver, not a tremble. Even brave men shiver.
Into the teeth of that wind he rode, under the portcullis, over the
drawbridge. The outer gates swung open to let him pass. As he
emerged beneath the walls, he could sense the boys watching from
the empty sockets where their eyes had been.
Ser Rodrik waited in the market astride his dappled gelding.
Beside him, the direwolf of Stark apped from a sta borne by
young Cley Cerwyn. They were alone in the square, though Theon
could see archers on the roofs of surrounding houses, spearmen to
his right, and to his left a line of mounted knights beneath the
merman-and-trident of House Manderly. Every one of them wants me
dead. Some were boys he’d drunk with, diced with, even wenched
with, but that would not save him if he fell into their hands.
“Ser Rodrik.” Theon reined to a halt. “It grieves me that we must
meet as foes.”
“My own grief is that I must wait a while to hang you.” The old
knight spat onto the muddy ground. “Theon Turncloak.”
“I am a Greyjoy of Pyke,” Theon reminded him. “The cloak my
father swaddled me in bore a kraken, not a direwolf.”
“For ten years you have been a ward of Stark.”
“Hostage and prisoner, I call it.”
“Then perhaps Lord Eddard should have kept you chained to a
dungeon wall. Instead he raised you among his own sons, the sweet
boys you have butchered, and to my undying shame I trained you in
the arts of war. Would that I had thrust a sword through your belly
instead of placing one in your hand.”
“I came out to parley, not to su er your insults. Say what you
have to say, old man. What would you have of me?”
“Two things,” the old man said. “Winterfell, and your life.
Command your men to open the gates and lay down their arms.
Those who murdered no children shall be free to walk away, but
you shall be held for King Robb’s justice. May the gods take pity on
you when he returns.”

“Robb will never look on Winterfell again,” Theon promised. “He
will break himself on Moat Cailin, as every southron army has done
for ten thousand years. We hold the north now, ser.”
“You hold three castles,” replied Ser Rodrik, “and this one I mean
to take back, Turncloak.”
Theon ignored that. “Here are my terms. You have until evenfall
to disperse. Those who swear fealty to Balon Greyjoy as their king
and to myself as Prince of Winterfell will be con rmed in their
rights and properties and su er no harm. Those who defy us will be
destroyed.”
Young Cerwyn was incredulous. “Are you mad, Greyjoy?”
Ser Rodrik shook his head. “Only vain, lad. Theon has always had
too lofty an opinion of himself, I fear.” The old man jabbed a nger
at him. “Do not imagine that I need wait for Robb to ght his way
up the Neck to deal with the likes of you. I have near two thousand
men with me … and if the tales be true, you have no more than
fty.”
Seventeen, in truth. Theon made himself smile. “I have something
better than men.” And he raised a st over his head, the signal
Black Lorren had been told to watch for.
The walls of Winterfell were behind him, but Ser Rodrik faced
them squarely and could not fail to see. Theon watched his face.
When his chin quivered under those sti white whiskers, he knew
just what the old man was seeing. He is not surprised, he thought
with sadness, but the fear is there.
“This is craven,” Ser Rodrik said. “To use a child so … this is
despicable.”
“Oh, I know,” said Theon. “It’s a dish I tasted myself, or have you
forgotten? I was ten when I was taken from my father’s house, to
make certain he would raise no more rebellions.”
“It is not the same!”
Theon’s face was impassive. “The noose I wore was not made of
hempen rope, that’s true enough, but I felt it all the same. And it
chafed, Ser Rodrik. It chafed me raw.” He had never quite realized
that until now, but as the words came spilling out he saw the truth
of them.

“No harm was ever done you.”
“And no harm will be done your Beth, so long as you—”
Ser Rodrik never gave him the chance to nish. “Viper,” the
knight declared, his face red with rage beneath those white
whiskers. “I gave you the chance to save your men and die with
some small shred of honor, Turncloak. I should have known that
was too much to ask of a childkiller.” His hand went to the hilt of
his sword. “I ought cut you down here and now and put an end to
your lies and deceits. By the gods, I should.”
Theon did not fear a doddering old man, but those watching
archers and that line of knights were a di erent matter. If the
swords came out his chances of getting back to the castle alive were
small to none. “Forswear your oath and murder me, and you will
watch your little Beth strangle at the end of a rope.”
Ser Rodrik’s knuckles had gone white, but after a moment he took
his hand o the swordhilt. “Truly, I have lived too long.”
“I will not disagree, ser. Will you accept my terms?”
“I have a duty to Lady Catelyn and House Stark.”
“And your own House? Beth is the last of your blood.”
The old knight drew himself up straight. “I o er myself in my
daughter’s place. Release her, and take me as your hostage. Surely
the castellan of Winterfell is worth more than a child.”
“Not to me.” A valiant gesture, old man, but I am not that great a
fool. “Not to Lord Manderly or Leobald Tallhart either, I’d wager.”
Your sorry old skin is worth no more to them than any other man’s. “No,
I’ll keep the girl … and keep her safe, so long as you do as I’ve
commanded you. Her life is in your hands.”
“Gods be good, Theon, how can you do this? You know I must
attack, have sworn …”
“If this host is still in arms before my gate when the sun sets,
Beth will hang,” said Theon. “Another hostage will follow her to the
grave at rst light, and another at sunset. Every dawn and every
dusk will mean a death, until you are gone. I have no lack of
hostages.” He did not wait for a reply, but wheeled Smiler around
and rode back toward the castle. He went slowly at rst, but the
thought of those archers at his back soon drove him to a canter. The

small heads watched him come from their spikes, their tarred and
ayed faces looming larger with every yard; between them stood
little Beth Cassel, noosed and crying. Theon put his heel into Smiler
and broke into a hard gallop. Smiler’s hooves clattered on the
drawbridge, like drumbeats.
In the yard he dismounted and handed his reins to Wex. “It may
stay them,” he told Black Lorren. “We’ll know by sunset. Take the
girl in till then, and keep her somewhere safe.” Under the layers of
leather, steel, and wool, he was slick with sweat. “I need a cup of
wine. A vat of wine would do even better.”
A re had been laid in Ned Stark’s bedchamber. Theon sat beside
it and lled a cup with a heavy-bodied red from the castle vaults, a
wine as sour as his mood. They will attack, he thought gloomily,
staring at the ames. Ser Rodrik loves his daughter, but he is still
castellan, and most of all a knight. Had it been Theon with a noose
around his neck and Lord Balon commanding the army without, the
warhorns would already have sounded the attack, he had no doubt.
He should thank the gods that Ser Rodrik was not ironborn. The
men of the green lands were made of softer stu , though he was not
certain they would prove soft enough.
If not, if the old man gave the command to storm the castle
regardless, Winterfell would fall; Theon entertained no delusions on
that count. His seventeen might kill three, four, ve times their
own number, but in the end they would be overwhelmed.
Theon stared at the ames over the rim of his wine goblet,
brooding on the injustice of it all. “I rode beside Robb Stark in the
Whispering Wood,” he muttered. He had been frightened that night,
but not like this. It was one thing to go into battle surrounded by
friends, and another to perish alone and despised. Mercy, he thought
miserably.
When the wine brought no solace, Theon sent Wex to fetch his
bow and took himself to the old inner ward. There he stood, loosing
shaft after shaft at the archery butts until his shoulders ached and
his ngers were bloody, pausing only long enough to pull the
arrows from the targets for another round. I saved Bran’s life with this
bow, he reminded himself. Would that I could save my own. Women

came to the well, but did not linger; whatever they saw on Theon’s
face sent them away quickly.
Behind him the broken tower stood, its summit as jagged as a
crown where re had collapsed the upper stories long ago. As the
sun moved, the shadow of the tower moved as well, gradually
lengthening, a black arm reaching out for Theon Greyjoy. By the
time the sun touched the wall, he was in its grasp. If I hang the girl,
the northmen will attack at once, he thought as he loosed a shaft. If I
do not hang her, they will know my threats are empty. He knocked
another arrow to his bow. There is no way out, none.
“If you had a hundred archers as good as yourself, you might
have a chance to hold the castle,” a voice said softly.
When he turned, Maester Luwin was behind him. “Go away,”
Theon told him. “I have had enough of your counsel.”
“And life? Have you had enough of that, my lord prince?”
He raised the bow. “One more word and I’ll put this shaft through
your heart.”
“You won’t.”
Theon bent the bow, drawing the grey goose feathers back to his
cheek. “Care to make a wager?”
“I am your last hope, Theon.”
I have no hope, he thought. Yet he lowered the bow half an inch
and said, “I will not run.”
“I do not speak of running. Take the black.”
“The Night’s Watch?” Theon let the bow unbend slowly and
pointed the arrow at the ground.
“Ser Rodrik has served House Stark all his life, and House Stark
has always been a friend to the Watch. He will not deny you. Open
your gates, lay down your arms, accept his terms, and he must let
you take the black.”
A brother of the Night’s Watch. It meant no crown, no sons, no
wife … but it meant life, and life with honor. Ned Stark’s own
brother had chosen the Watch, and Jon Snow as well.
I have black garb aplenty, once I tear the krakens o . Even my horse
is black. I could rise high in the Watch—chief of rangers, likely even Lord
Commander. Let Asha keep the bloody islands, they’re as dreary as she

is. If I served at Eastwatch, I could command my own ship, and there’s
ne hunting beyond the Wall. As for women, what wildling woman
wouldn’t want a prince in her bed? A slow smile crept across his face.
A black cloak can’t be turned. I’d be as good as any man …
“PRINCE THEON!” The sudden shout shattered his daydream.
Kromm was loping across the ward. “The northmen—”
He felt a sudden sick sense of dread. “Is it the attack?”
Maester Luwin clutched his arm. “There’s still time. Raise a peace
banner—”
“They’re ghting,” Kromm said urgently. “More men came up,
hundreds of them, and at rst they made to join the others. But now
they’ve fallen on them!”
“Is it Asha?” Had she come to save him after all?
But Kromm gave a shake of his head. “No. These are northmen, I
tell you. With a bloody man on their banner.”
The ayed man of the Dreadfort. Reek had belonged to the Bastard
of Bolton before his capture, Theon recalled. It was hard to believe
that a vile creature like him could sway the Boltons to change their
allegiance, but nothing else made sense. “I’ll see this for myself,”
Theon said.
Maester Luwin trailed after him. By the time they reached the
battlements, dead men and dying horses were strewn about the
market square outside the gates. He saw no battle lines, only a
swirling chaos of banners and blades. Shouts and screams rang
through the cold autumn air. Ser Rodrik seemed to have the
numbers, but the Dreadfort men were better led, and had taken the
others unawares. Theon watched them charge and wheel and charge
again, chopping the larger force to bloody pieces every time they
tried to form up between the houses. He could hear the crash of
iron axeheads on oaken shields over the terri ed trumpeting of a
maimed horse. The inn was burning, he saw.
Black Lorren appeared beside him and stood silently for a time.
The sun was low in the west, painting the elds and houses all a
glowing red. A thin wavering cry of pain drifted over the walls, and
a warhorn sounded o beyond the burning houses. Theon watched a
wounded man drag himself painfully across the ground, smearing

his life’s blood in the dirt as he struggled to reach the well that
stood at the center of the market square. He died before he got
there. He wore a leather jerkin and conical halfhelm, but no badge
to tell which side he’d fought on.
The crows came in the blue dusk, with the evening stars. “The
Dothraki believe the stars are spirits of the valiant dead,” Theon
said. Maester Luwin had told him that, a long time ago.
“Dothraki?”
“The horselords across the narrow sea.”
“Oh. Them.” Black Lorren frowned through his beard. “Savages
believe all manner of foolish things.”
As the night grew darker and the smoke spread it was harder to
make out what was happening below, but the din of steel gradually
diminished to nothing, and the shouts and warhorns gave way to
moans and piteous wailing. Finally a column of mounted men rode
out of the drifting smoke. At their head was a knight in dark armor.
His rounded helm gleamed a sullen red, and a pale pink cloak
streamed from his shoulders. Outside the main gate he reined up,
and one of his men shouted for the castle to open.
“Are you friend or foe?” Black Lorren bellowed down.
“Would a foe bring such ne gifts?” Red Helm waved a hand, and
three corpses were dumped in front of the gates. A torch was waved
above the bodies, so the defenders upon the walls might see the
faces of the dead.
“The old castellan,” said Black Lorren.
“With Leobald Tallhart and Cley Cerwyn.” The boy lord had
taken an arrow in the eye, and Ser Rodrik had lost his left arm at
the elbow. Maester Luwin gave a wordless cry of dismay, turned
away from the battlements, and fell to his knees sick.
“The great pig Manderly was too craven to leave White Harbor,
or we would have brought him as well,” shouted Red Helm.
I am saved, Theon thought. So why did he feel so empty? This was
victory, sweet victory, the deliverance he had prayed for. He
glanced at Maester Luwin. To think how close I came to yielding, and
taking the black …

“Open the gates for our friends.” Perhaps tonight Theon would
sleep without fear of what his dreams might bring.
The Dreadfort men made their way across the moat and through
the inner gates. Theon descended with Black Lorren and Maester
Luwin to meet them in the yard. Pale red pennons trailed from the
ends of a few lances, but many more carried battle-axes and
greatswords and shields hacked half to splinters. “How many men
did you lose?” Theon asked Red Helm as he dismounted.
“Twenty or thirty.” The torchlight glittered o the chipped
enamel of his visor. His helm and gorget were wrought in the shape
of a man’s face and shoulders, skinless and bloody, mouth open in a
silent howl of anguish.
“Ser Rodrik had you ve-to-one.”
“Aye, but he thought us friends. A common mistake. When the
old fool gave me his hand, I took half his arm instead. Then I let
him see my face.” The man put both hands to his helm and lifted it
o his head, holding it in the crook of his arm.
“Reek,” Theon said, disquieted. How did a serving man get such ne
armor?
The man laughed. “The wretch is dead.” He stepped closer. “The
girl’s fault. If she had not run so far, his horse would not have
lamed, and we might have been able to ee. I gave him mine when
I saw the riders from the ridge. I was done with her by then, and he
liked to take his turn while they were still warm. I had to pull him
o her and shove my clothes into his hands—calfskin boots and
velvet doublet, silver-chased swordbelt, even my sable cloak. Ride
for the Dreadfort, I told him, bring all the help you can. Take my
horse, he’s swifter, and here, wear the ring my father gave me, so
they’ll know you came from me. He’d learned better than to
question me. By the time they put that arrow through his back, I’d
smeared myself with the girl’s lth and dressed in his rags. They
might have hanged me anyway, but it was the only chance I saw.”
He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “And now, my
sweet prince, there was a woman promised me, if I brought two
hundred men. Well, I brought three times as many, and no green
boys nor eldhands neither, but my father’s own garrison.”

Theon had given his word. This was not the time to inch. Pay
him his pound of esh and deal with him later. “Harrag,” he said, “go
to the kennels and bring Palla out for …?”
“Ramsay.” There was a smile on his plump lips, but none in those
pale pale eyes. “Snow, my wife called me before she ate her ngers,
but I say Bolton.” His smile curdled. “So you’d o er me a kennel
girl for my good service, is that the way of it?”
There was a tone in his voice Theon did not like, no more than he
liked the insolent way the Dreadfort men were looking at him. “She
was what was promised.”
“She smells of dogshit. I’ve had enough of bad smells, as it
happens. I think I’ll have your bedwarmer instead. What do you call
her? Kyra?”
“Are you mad?” Theon said angrily. “I’ll have you—”
The Bastard’s backhand caught him square, and his cheekbone
shattered with a sickening crunch beneath the lobstered steel. The
world vanished in a red roar of pain.
Sometime later, Theon found himself on the ground. He rolled
onto his stomach and swallowed a mouthful of blood. Close the
gates! he tried to shout, but it was too late. The Dreadfort men had
cut down Red Rolfe and Kenned, and more were pouring through, a
river of mail and sharp swords. There was a ringing in his ears, and
horror all around him. Black Lorren had his sword out, but there
were already four of them pressing in on him. He saw Ulf go down
with a crossbow bolt through the belly as he ran for the Great Hall.
Maester Luwin was trying to reach him when a knight on a
warhorse planted a spear between his shoulders, then swung back to
ride over him. Another man whipped a torch round and round his
head and then lofted it toward the thatched roof of the stables.
“Save me the Freys,” the Bastard was shouting as the ames roared
upward, “and burn the rest. Burn it, burn it all.”
The last thing Theon Greyjoy saw was Smiler, kicking free of the
burning stables with his mane ablaze, screaming, rearing …

TYRION

He dreamed of a cracked stone ceiling and the smells of blood and

shit and burnt esh. The air was full of acrid smoke. Men were
groaning and whimpering all around him, and from time to time a
scream would pierce the air, thick with pain. When he tried to
move, he found that he had fouled his own bedding. The smoke in
the air made his eyes water. Am I crying? He must not let his father
see. He was a Lannister of Casterly Rock. A lion, I must be a lion, live
a lion, die a lion. He hurt so much, though. Too weak to groan, he
lay in his own lth and shut his eyes. Nearby someone was cursing
the gods in a heavy, monotonous voice. He listened to the
blasphemies and wondered if he was dying. After a time the room
faded.
He found himself outside the city, walking through a world
without color. Ravens soared through a grey sky on wide black
wings, while carrion crows rose from their feasts in furious clouds
wherever he set his steps. White maggots burrowed through black
corruption. The wolves were grey, and so were the silent sisters;
together they stripped the esh from the fallen. There were corpses
strewn all over the tourney elds. The sun was a hot white penny,
shining down upon the grey river as it rushed around the charred
bones of sunken ships. From the pyres of the dead rose black
columns of smoke and white-hot ashes. My work, thought Tyrion
Lannister. They died at my command.

At rst there was no sound in the world, but after a time he
began to hear the voices of the dead, soft and terrible. They wept
and moaned, they begged for an end to pain, they cried for help and
wanted their mothers. Tyrion had never known his mother. He
wanted Shae, but she was not there. He walked alone amidst grey
shadows, trying to remember …
The silent sisters were stripping the dead men of their armor and
clothes. All the bright dyes had leached out from the surcoats of the
slain; they were garbed in shades of white and grey, and their blood
was black and crusty. He watched their naked bodies lifted by arm
and leg, to be carried swinging to the pyres to join their fellows.
Metal and cloth were thrown in the back of a white wooden wagon,
pulled by two tall black horses.
So many dead, so very many. Their corpses hung limply, their faces
slack or sti or swollen with gas, unrecognizable, hardly human.
The garments the sisters took from them were decorated with black
hearts, grey lions, dead owers, and pale ghostly stags. Their armor
was all dented and gashed, the chainmail riven, broken, slashed.
Why did I kill them all? He had known once, but somehow he had
forgotten.
He would have asked one of the silent sisters, but when he tried
to speak he found he had no mouth. Smooth seamless skin covered
his teeth. The discovery terri ed him. How could he live without a
mouth? He began to run. The city was not far. He would be safe
inside the city, away from all these dead. He did not belong with
the dead. He had no mouth, but he was still a living man. No, a lion,
a lion, and alive. But when he reached the city walls, the gates were
shut against him.
It was dark when he woke again. At rst he could see nothing,
but after a time the vague outlines of a bed appeared around him.
The drapes were drawn, but he could see the shape of carved
bedposts, and the droop of the velvet canopy over his head. Under
him was the yielding softness of a featherbed, and the pillow
beneath his head was goose down. My own bed, I am in my own bed,
in my own bedchamber.

It was warm inside the drapes, under the great heap of furs and
blankets that covered him. He was sweating. Fever, he thought
groggily. He felt so weak, and the pain stabbed through him when
he struggled to lift his hand. He gave up the e ort. His head felt
enormous, as big as the bed, too heavy to raise from the pillow. His
body he could scarcely feel at all. How did I come here? He tried to
remember. The battle came back in ts and ashes. The ght along
the river, the knight who’d o ered up his gauntlet, the bridge of
ships …
Ser Mandon. He saw the dead empty eyes, the reaching hand, the
green re shining against the white enamel plate. Fear swept over
him in a cold rush; beneath the sheets he could feel his bladder
letting go. He would have cried out, if he’d had a mouth. No, that
was the dream, he thought, his head pounding. Help me, someone help
me. Jaime, Shae, Mother, someone … Tysha …
No one heard. No one came. Alone in the dark, he fell back into
piss-scented sleep. He dreamed his sister was standing over his bed,
with their lord father beside her, frowning. It had to be a dream,
since Lord Tywin was a thousand leagues away, ghting Robb Stark
in the west. Others came and went as well. Varys looked down on
him and sighed, but Little nger made a quip. Bloody treacherous
bastard, Tyrion thought venomously, we sent you to Bitterbridge and
you never came back. Sometimes he could hear them talking to one
another, but he did not understand the words. Their voices buzzed
in his ears like wasps mu ed in thick felt.
He wanted to ask if they’d won the battle. We must have, else I’d
be a head on a spike somewhere. If I live, we won. He did not know
what pleased him more: the victory, or the fact he had been able to
reason it out. His wits were coming back to him, however slowly.
That was good. His wits were all he had.
The next time he woke, the draperies had been pulled back, and
Podrick Payne stood over him with a candle. When he saw Tyrion
open his eyes he ran o . No, don’t go, help me, help, he tried to call,
but the best he could do was a mu ed moan. I have no mouth. He
raised a hand to his face, his every movement pained and fumbling.
His ngers found sti cloth where they should have found esh,

lips, teeth. Linen. The lower half of his face was bandaged tightly, a
mask of hardened plaster with holes for breathing and feeding.
A short while later Pod reappeared. This time a stranger was with
him, a maester chained and robed. “My lord, you must be still,” the
man murmured. “You are grievous hurt. You will do yourself great
injury. Are you thirsty?”
He managed an awkward nod. The maester inserted a curved
copper funnel through the feeding hole over his mouth and poured a
slow trickle down his throat. Tyrion swallowed, scarcely tasting.
Too late he realized the liquid was milk of the poppy. By the time
the maester removed the funnel from his mouth, he was already
spiraling back to sleep.
This time he dreamed he was at a feast, a victory feast in some
great hall. He had a high seat on the dais, and men were lifting
their goblets and hailing him as hero. Marillion was there, the
singer who’d journeyed with them through the Mountains of the
Moon. He played his woodharp and sang of the Imp’s daring deeds.
Even his father was smiling with approval. When the song was
over, Jaime rose from his place, commanded Tyrion to kneel, and
touched him rst on one shoulder and then on the other with his
golden sword, and he rose up a knight. Shae was waiting to
embrace him. She took him by the hand, laughing and teasing,
calling him her giant of Lannister.
He woke in darkness to a cold empty room. The draperies had
been drawn again. Something felt wrong, turned around, though he
could not have said what. He was alone once more. Pushing back
the blankets, he tried to sit, but the pain was too much and he soon
subsided, breathing raggedly. His face was the least part of it. His
right side was one huge ache, and a stab of pain went through his
chest whenever he lifted his arm. What’s happened to me? Even the
battle seemed half a dream when he tried to think back on it. I was
hurt more badly than I knew. Ser Mandon …
The memory frightened him, but Tyrion made himself hold it,
turn it in his head, stare at it hard. He tried to kill me, no mistake.
That part was not a dream. He would have cut me in half if Pod had
not … Pod, where’s Pod?

Gritting his teeth, he grabbed hold of the bed hangings and
yanked. The drapes ripped free of the canopy overhead and tumbled
down, half on the rushes and half on him. Even that small e ort had
dizzied him. The room whirled around him, all bare walls and dark
shadows, with a single narrow window. He saw a chest he’d owned,
an untidy pile of his clothing, his battered armor. This is not my
bedchamber, he realized. Not even the Tower of the Hand. Someone
had moved him. His shout of anger came out as a mu ed moan.
They have moved me here to die, he thought as he gave up the
struggle and closed his eyes once more. The room was dank and
cold, and he was burning.
He dreamed of a better place, a snug little cottage by the sunset
sea. The walls were lopsided and cracked and the oor had been
made of packed earth, but he had always been warm there, even
when they let the re go out. She used to tease me about that, he
remembered. I never thought to feed the re, that had always been a
servant’s task. “We have no servants,” she would remind me, and I
would say, “You have me, I’m your servant,” and she would say, “A
lazy servant. What do they do with lazy servants in Casterly Rock,
my lord?” and he would tell her, “They kiss them.” That would
always make her giggle. “They do not neither. They beat them, I
bet,” she would say, but he would insist, “No, they kiss them, just
like this.” He would show her how. “They kiss their ngers rst,
every one, and they kiss their wrists, yes, and inside their elbows.
Then they kiss their funny ears, all our servants have funny ears.
Stop laughing! And they kiss their cheeks and they kiss their noses
with the little bump in them, there, so, like that, and they kiss their
sweet
brows
and
their
hair
and
their
lips,
their … mmmm … mouths … so …”
They would kiss for hours, and spend whole days doing no more
than lolling in bed, listening to the waves, and touching each other.
Her body was a wonder to him, and she seemed to nd delight in
his. Sometimes she would sing to him. I loved a maid as fair as
summer, with sunlight in her hair. “I love you, Tyrion,” she would
whisper before they went to sleep at night. “I love your lips. I love

your voice, and the words you say to me, and how you treat me
gentle. I love your face.”
“My face?”
“Yes. Yes. I love your hands, and how you touch me. Your cock, I
love your cock, I love how it feels when it’s in me.”
“It loves you too, my lady.”
“I love to say your name. Tyrion Lannister. It goes with mine.
Not the Lannister, t’other part. Tyrion and Tysha. Tysha and Tyrion.
Tyrion. My lord Tyrion …”
Lies, he thought, all feigned, all for gold, she was a whore, Jaime’s
whore, Jaime’s gift, my lady of the lie. Her face seemed to fade away,
dissolving behind a veil of tears, but even after she was gone he
could still hear the faint, far-o sound of her voice, calling his
name. “… my lord, can you hear me? My lord? Tyrion? My lord?
My lord?”
Through a haze of poppied sleep, he saw a soft pink face leaning
over him. He was back in the dank room with the torn bed
hangings, and the face was wrong, not hers, too round, with a
brown fringe of beard. “Do you thirst, my lord? I have your milk,
your good milk. You must not ght, no, don’t try to move, you
need your rest.” He had the copper funnel in one damp pink hand
and a ask in the other.
As the man leaned close, Tyrion’s ngers slid underneath his
chain of many metals, grabbed, pulled. The maester dropped the
ask, spilling milk of the poppy all over the blanket. Tyrion twisted
until he could feel the links digging into the esh of the man’s fat
neck. “No. More,” he croaked, so hoarse he was not certain he had
even spoken. But he must have, for the maester choked out a reply.
“Unhand, please, my lord … need your milk, the pain … the chain,
don’t, unhand, no …”
The pink face was beginning to purple when Tyrion let go. The
maester reeled back, sucking in air. His reddened throat showed
deep white gouges where the links had pressed. His eyes were
white too. Tyrion raised a hand to his face and made a ripping
motion over the hardened mask. And again. And again.

“You … you want the bandages o , is that it?” the maester said at
last. “But I’m not to … that would be … be most unwise, my lord.
You are not yet healed, the queen would …”
The mention of his sister made Tyrion growl. Are you one of hers,
then? He pointed a nger at the maester, then coiled his hand into a
st. Crushing, choking, a promise, unless the fool did as he was bid.
Thankfully, he understood. “I … I will do as my lord commands,
to be sure, but … this is unwise, your wounds …”
“Do. It.” Louder that time.
Bowing, the man left the room, only to return a few moments
later, bearing a long knife with a slender sawtooth blade, a basin of
water, a pile of soft cloths, and several asks. By then Tyrion had
managed to squirm backward a few inches, so he was half sitting
against his pillow. The maester bade him be very still as he slid the
tip of the knife in under his chin, beneath the mask. A slip of the
hand here, and Cersei will be free of me, he thought. He could feel the
blade sawing through the sti ened linen, only inches above his
throat.
Fortunately this soft pink man was not one of his sister’s braver
creatures. After a moment he felt cool air on his cheeks. There was
pain as well, but he did his best to ignore that. The maester
discarded the bandages, still crusty with potion. “Be still now, I
must wash out the wound.” His touch was gentle, the water warm
and soothing. The wound, Tyrion thought, remembering a sudden
ash of bright silver that seemed to pass just below his eyes. “This
is like to sting some,” the maester warned as he wet a cloth with
wine that smelled of crushed herbs. It did more than sting. It traced
a line of re all the way across Tyrion’s face, and twisted a burning
poker up his nose. His ngers clawed the bedclothes and he sucked
in his breath, but somehow he managed not to scream. The maester
was clucking like an old hen. “It would have been wiser to leave the
mask in place until the esh had knit, my lord. Still, it looks clean,
good, good. When we found you down in that cellar among the
dead and dying, your wounds were lthy. One of your ribs was
broken, doubtless you can feel it, the blow of some mace perhaps,
or a fall, it’s hard to say. And you took an arrow in the arm, there

where it joins the shoulder. It showed signs of morti cation, and for
a time I feared you might lose the limb, but we treated it with
boiling wine and maggots, and now it seems to be healing clean …”
“Name,” Tyrion breathed up at him. “Name.”
The maester blinked. “Why, you are Tyrion Lannister, my lord.
Brother to the queen. Do you remember the battle? Sometimes with
head wounds—”
“Your name.” His throat was raw, and his tongue had forgotten
how to shape the words.
“I am Maester Ballabar.”
“Ballabar,” Tyrion repeated. “Bring me. Looking glass.”
“My lord,” the maester said, “I would not counsel … that might
be, ah, unwise, as it were … your wound …”
“Bring it,” he had to say. His mouth was sti and sore, as if a
punch had split his lip. “And drink. Wine. No poppy.”
The maester rose ush-faced and hurried o . He came back with a
agon of pale amber wine and a small silvered looking glass in an
ornate golden frame. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he poured half
a cup of wine and held it to Tyrion’s swollen lips. The trickle went
down cool, though he could hardly taste it. “More,” he said when
the cup was empty. Maester Ballabar poured again. By the end of
the second cup, Tyrion Lannister felt strong enough to face his face.
He turned over the glass, and did not know whether he ought to
laugh or cry. The gash was long and crooked, starting a hair under
his left eye and ending on the right side of his jaw. Three-quarters
of his nose was gone, and a chunk of his lip. Someone had sewn the
torn esh together with catgut, and their clumsy stitches were still
in place across the seam of raw, red, half-healed esh. “Pretty,” he
croaked, inging the glass aside.
He remembered now. The bridge of boats, Ser Mandon Moore, a
hand, a sword coming at his face. If I had not pulled back, that cut
would have taken o the top of my head. Jaime had always said that
Ser Mandon was the most dangerous of the Kingsguard, because his
dead empty eyes gave no hint to his intentions. I should never have
trusted any of them. He’d known that Ser Meryn and Ser Boros were
his sister’s, and Ser Osmund later, but he had let himself believe

that the others were not wholly lost to honor. Cersei must have paid
him to see that I never came back from the battle. Why else? I never did
Ser Mandon any harm that I know of. Tyrion touched his face,
plucking at the proud esh with blunt thick ngers. Another gift from
my sweet sister.
The maester stood beside the bed like a goose about to take
ight. “My lord, there, there will most like be a scar …”
“Most like?” His snort of laughter turned into a wince of pain.
There would be a scar, to be sure. Nor was it likely that his nose
would be growing back anytime soon. It was not as if his face had
ever been t to look at. “Teach me, not to, play with, axes.” His
grin felt tight. “Where, are we? What, what place?” It hurt to talk,
but Tyrion had been too long in silence.
“Ah, you are in Maegor’s Holdfast, my lord. A chamber over the
Queen’s Ballroom. Her Grace wanted you kept close, so she might
watch over you herself.”
I’ll wager she did. “Return me,” Tyrion commanded. “Own bed.
Own chambers.” Where I will have my own men about me, and my
own maester too, if I nd one I can trust.
“Your own … my lord, that would not be possible. The King’s
Hand has taken up residence in your former chambers.”
“I. Am. King’s Hand.” He was growing exhausted by the e ort of
speaking, and confused by what he was hearing.
Maester Ballabar looked distressed. “No, my lord, I … you were
wounded, near death. Your lord father has taken up those duties
now. Lord Tywin, he …”
“Here?”
“Since the night of the battle. Lord Tywin saved us all. The
smallfolk say it was King Renly’s ghost, but wiser men know better.
It was your father and Lord Tyrell, with the Knight of Flowers and
Lord Little nger. They rode through the ashes and took the usurper
Stannis in the rear. It was a great victory, and now Lord Tywin has
settled into the Tower of the Hand to help His Grace set the realm
to rights, gods be praised.”
“Gods be praised,” Tyrion repeated hollowly. His bloody father
and bloody Little nger and Renly’s ghost? “I want …” Who do I

want? He could not tell pink Ballabar to fetch him Shae. Who could
he send for, who could he trust? Varys? Bronn? Ser Jacelyn? “… my
squire,” he nished. “Pod. Payne.” It was Pod on the bridge of boats,
the lad saved my life.
“The boy? The odd boy?”
“Odd boy. Podrick. Payne. You go. Send him.”
“As you will, my lord.” Maester Ballabar bobbed his head and
hurried out. Tyrion could feel the strength seeping out of him as he
waited. He wondered how long he had been here, asleep. Cersei
would have me sleep forever, but I won’t be so obliging.
Podrick Payne entered the bedchamber timid as a mouse. “My
lord?” He crept close to the bed. How can a boy so bold in battle be so
frightened in a sickroom? Tyrion wondered. “I meant to stay by you,
but the maester sent me away.”
“Send him away. Hear me. Talk’s hard. Need dreamwine.
Dreamwine, not milk of the poppy. Go to Frenken. Frenken, not
Ballabar. Watch him make it. Bring it here.” Pod stole a glance at
Tyrion’s face, and just as quickly averted his eyes. Well, I cannot
blame him for that. “I want,” Tyrion went on, “mine own. Guard.
Bronn. Where’s Bronn?”
“They made him a knight.”
Even frowning hurt. “Find him. Bring him.”
“As you say. My lord. Bronn.”
Tyrion seized the lad’s wrist. “Ser Mandon?”
The boy inched. “I n-never meant to k-k-k-k-”
“Dead? You’re, certain? Dead?”
He shu ed his feet, sheepish. “Drowned.”
“Good. Say nothing. Of him. Of me. Any of it. Nothing.”
By the time his squire left, the last of Tyrion’s strength was gone
as well. He lay back and closed his eyes. Perhaps he would dream of
Tysha again. I wonder how she’d like my face now, he thought
bitterly.

JON

When Qhorin Halfhand told him to

nd some brush for a re, Jon

knew their end was near.
It will be good to feel warm again, if only for a little while, he told
himself while he hacked bare branches from the trunk of a dead
tree. Ghost sat on his haunches watching, silent as ever. Will he howl
for me when I’m dead, as Bran’s wolf howled when he fell? Jon
wondered. Will Shaggydog howl, far o in Winterfell, and Grey Wind
and Nymeria, wherever they might be?
The moon was rising behind one mountain and the sun sinking
behind another as Jon struck sparks from int and dagger, until
nally a wisp of smoke appeared. Qhorin came and stood over him
as the rst ame rose up ickering from the shavings of bark and
dead dry pine needles. “As shy as a maid on her wedding night,” the
big ranger said in a soft voice, “and near as fair. Sometimes a man
forgets how pretty a re can be.”
He was not a man you’d expect to speak of maids and wedding
nights. So far as Jon knew, Qhorin had spent his whole life in the
Watch. Did he ever love a maid or have a wedding? He could not ask.
Instead he fanned the re. When the blaze was all acrackle, he
peeled o his sti gloves to warm his hands, and sighed, wondering
if ever a kiss had felt as good. The warmth spread through his
ngers like melting butter.
The Halfhand eased himself to the ground and sat cross-legged by
the re, the ickering light playing across the hard planes of his

face. Only the two of them remained of the ve rangers who had
ed the Skirling Pass, back into the blue-grey wilderness of the
Frostfangs.
At rst Jon had nursed the hope that Squire Dalbridge would
keep the wildlings bottled up in the pass. But when they’d heard the
call of a far-o horn every man of them knew the squire had fallen.
Later they spied the eagle soaring through the dusk on great bluegrey wings and Stonesnake unslung his bow, but the bird ew out
of range before he could so much as string it. Ebben spat and
muttered darkly of wargs and skinchangers.
They glimpsed the eagle twice more the day after, and heard the
hunting horn behind them echoing against the mountains. Each time
it seemed a little louder, a little closer. When night fell, the
Halfhand told Ebben to take the squire’s garron as well as his own,
and ride east for Mormont with all haste, back the way they had
come. The rest of them would draw o the pursuit. “Send Jon,”
Ebben had urged. “He can ride as fast as me.”
“Jon has a di erent part to play.”
“He is half a boy still.”
“No,” said Qhorin, “he is a man of the Night’s Watch.”
When the moon rose, Ebben parted from them. Stonesnake went
east with him a short way, then doubled back to obscure their
tracks, and the three who remained set o toward the southwest.
After that the days and nights blurred one into the other. They
slept in their saddles and stopped only long enough to feed and
water the garrons, then mounted up again. Over bare rock they
rode, through gloomy pine forests and drifts of old snow, over icy
ridges and across shallow rivers that had no names. Sometimes
Qhorin or Stonesnake would loop back to sweep away their tracks,
but it was a futile gesture. They were watched. At every dawn and
every dusk they saw the eagle soaring between the peaks, no more
than a speck in the vastness of the sky.
They were scaling a low ridge between two snowcapped peaks
when a shadowcat came snarling from its lair, not ten yards away.
The beast was gaunt and half-starved, but the sight of it sent
Stonesnake’s mare into a panic; she reared and ran, and before the

ranger could get her back under control she had stumbled on the
steep slope and broken a leg.
Ghost ate well that day, and Qhorin insisted that the rangers mix
some of the garron’s blood with their oats, to give them strength.
The taste of that foul porridge almost choked Jon, but he forced it
down. They each cut a dozen strips of raw stringy meat from the
carcass to chew on as they rode, and left the rest for the
shadowcats.
There was no question of riding double. Stonesnake o ered to lay
in wait for the pursuit and surprise them when they came. Perhaps
he could take a few of them with him down to hell. Qhorin refused.
“If any man in the Night’s Watch can make it through the Frostfangs
alone and afoot, it is you, brother. You can go over mountains that
a horse must go around. Make for the Fist. Tell Mormont what Jon
saw, and how. Tell him that the old powers are waking, that he
faces giants and wargs and worse. Tell him that the trees have eyes
again.”
He has no chance, Jon thought when he watched Stonesnake
vanish over a snow-covered ridge, a tiny black bug crawling across
a rippling expanse of white.
After that, every night seemed colder than the night before, and
more lonely. Ghost was not always with them, but he was never far
either. Even when they were apart, Jon sensed his nearness. He was
glad for that. The Halfhand was not the most companionable of
men. Qhorin’s long grey braid swung slowly with the motion of his
horse. Often they would ride for hours without a word spoken, the
only sounds the soft scrape of horseshoes on stone and the keening
of the wind, which blew endlessly through the heights. When he
slept, he did not dream; not of wolves, nor his brothers, nor
anything. Even dreams cannot live up here, he told himself.
“Is your sword sharp, Jon Snow?” asked Qhorin Halfhand across
the ickering re.
“My sword is Valyrian steel. The Old Bear gave it to me.”
“Do you remember the words of your vow?”
“Yes.” They were not words a man was like to forget. Once said,
they could never be unsaid. They changed your life forever.

“Say them again with me, Jon Snow.”
“If you like.” Their voices blended as one beneath the rising
moon, while Ghost listened and the mountains themselves bore
witness. “Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end
until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no
children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and
die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on
the walls. I am the re that burns against the cold, the light that
brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that
guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s
Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”
When they were done, there was no sound but the faint crackle of
the ames and a distant sigh of wind. Jon opened and closed his
burnt ngers, holding tight to the words in his mind, praying that
his father’s gods would give him the strength to die bravely when
his hour came. It would not be long now. The garrons were near the
end of their strength. Qhorin’s mount would not last another day,
Jon suspected.
The ames were burning low by then, the warmth fading. “The
re will soon go out,” Qhorin said, “but if the Wall should ever fall,
all the res will go out.”
There was nothing Jon could say to that. He nodded.
“We may escape them yet,” the ranger said. “Or not.”
“I’m not afraid to die.” It was only half a lie.
“It may not be so easy as that, Jon.”
He did not understand. “What do you mean?”
“If we are taken, you must yield.”
“Yield?” He blinked in disbelief. The wildlings did not make
captives of the men they called the crows. They killed them, except
for … “They only spare oathbreakers. Those who join them, like
Mance Rayder.”
“And you.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Never. I won’t.”
“You will. I command it of you.”
“Command it? But …”

“Our honor means no more than our lives, so long as the realm is
safe. Are you a man of the Night’s Watch?”
“Yes, but—”
“There is no but, Jon Snow. You are, or you are not.”
Jon sat up straight. “I am.”
“Then hear me. If we are taken, you will go over to them, as the
wildling girl you captured once urged you. They may demand that
you cut your cloak to ribbons, that you swear them an oath on your
father’s grave, that you curse your brothers and your Lord
Commander. You must not balk, whatever is asked of you. Do as
they bid you … but in your heart, remember who and what you are.
Ride with them, eat with them, ght with them, for as long as it
takes. And watch.”
“For what?” Jon asked.
“Would that I knew,” said Qhorin. “Your wolf saw their diggings
in the valley of the Milkwater. What did they seek, in such a bleak
and distant place? Did they nd it? That is what you must learn,
before you return to Lord Mormont and your brothers. That is the
duty I lay on you, Jon Snow.”
“I’ll do as you say,” Jon said reluctantly, “but … you will tell
them, won’t you? The Old Bear, at least? You’ll tell him that I never
broke my oath.”
Qhorin Halfhand gazed at him across the re, his eyes lost in
pools of shadow. “When I see him next. I swear it.” He gestured at
the re. “More wood. I want it bright and hot.”
Jon went to cut more branches, snapping each one in two before
tossing it into the ames. The tree had been dead a long time, but it
seemed to live again in the re, as ery dancers woke within each
stick of wood to whirl and spin in their glowing gowns of yellow,
red, and orange.
“Enough,” Qhorin said abruptly. “Now we ride.”
“Ride?” It was dark beyond the re, and the night was cold. “Ride
where?”
“Back.” Qhorin mounted his weary garron one more time. “The
re will draw them past, I hope. Come, brother.”

Jon pulled on his gloves again and raised his hood. Even the
horses seemed reluctant to leave the re. The sun was long gone,
and only the cold silver shine of the half-moon remained to light
their way over the treacherous ground that lay behind them. He did
not know what Qhorin had in mind, but perhaps it was a chance. He
hoped so. I do not want to play the oathbreaker, even for good reason.
They went cautiously, moving as silent as man and horse could
move, retracing their steps until they reached the mouth of a
narrow de le where an icy little stream emerged from between two
mountains. Jon remembered the place. They had watered the horses
here before the sun went down.
“The water’s icing up,” Qhorin observed as he turned aside, “else
we’d ride in the streambed. But if we break the ice, they are like to
see. Keep close to the cli s. There’s a crook a half mile on that will
hide us.” He rode into the de le. Jon gave one last wistful look to
their distant re, and followed.
The farther in they went, the closer the cli s pressed to either
side. They followed the moonlit ribbon of stream back toward its
source. Icicles bearded its stony banks, but Jon could still hear the
sound of rushing water beneath the thin hard crust.
A great jumble of fallen rock blocked their way partway up,
where a section of the cli face had fallen, but the surefooted little
garrons were able to pick their way through. Beyond, the walls
pinched in sharply, and the stream led them to the foot of a tall
twisting waterfall. The air was full of mist, like the breath of some
vast cold beast. The tumbling waters shone silver in the moonlight.
Jon looked about in dismay. There is no way out. He and Qhorin
might be able to climb the cli s, but not with the horses. He did not
think they would last long afoot.
“Quickly now,” the Halfhand commanded. The big man on the
small horse rode over the ice-slick stones, right into the curtain of
water, and vanished. When he did not reappear, Jon put his heels
into his horse and went after. His garron did his best to shy away.
The falling water slapped at them with frozen sts, and the shock of
the cold seemed to stop Jon’s breath.
Then he was through; drenched and shivering, but through.

The cleft in the rock was barely large enough for man and horse
to pass, but beyond, the walls opened up and the oor turned to soft
sand. Jon could feel the spray freezing in his beard. Ghost burst
through the waterfall in an angry rush, shook droplets from his fur,
sni ed at the darkness suspiciously, then lifted a leg against one
rocky wall. Qhorin had already dismounted. Jon did the same. “You
knew this place was here.”
“When I was no older than you, I heard a brother tell how he
followed a shadowcat through these falls.” He unsaddled his horse,
removed her bit and bridle, and ran his ngers through her shaggy
mane. “There is a way through the heart of the mountain. Come
dawn, if they have not found us, we will press on. The rst watch is
mine, brother.” Qhorin seated himself on the sand, his back to a
wall, no more than a vague black shadow in the gloom of the cave.
Over the rush of falling waters, Jon heard a soft sound of steel on
leather that could only mean that the Halfhand had drawn his
sword.
He took o his wet cloak, but it was too cold and damp here to
strip down any further. Ghost stretched out beside him and licked
his glove before curling up to sleep. Jon was grateful for his
warmth. He wondered if the re was still burning outside, or if it
had gone out by now. If the Wall should ever fall, all the res will go
out. The moon shone through the curtain of falling water to lay a
shimmering pale stripe across the sand, but after a time that too
faded and went dark.
Sleep came at last, and with it nightmares. He dreamed of
burning castles and dead men rising unquiet from their graves. It
was still dark when Qhorin woke him. While the Halfhand slept,
Jon sat with his back to the cave wall, listening to the water and
waiting for the dawn.
At break of day, they each chewed a half-frozen strip of
horsemeat, then saddled their garrons once again, and fastened their
black cloaks around their shoulders. During his watch the Halfhand
had made a half-dozen torches, soaking bundles of dry moss with
the oil he carried in his saddlebag. He lit the rst one now and led
the way down into the dark, holding the pale ame up before him.

Jon followed with the horses. The stony path twisted and turned,
rst down, then up, then down more steeply. In spots it grew so
narrow it was hard to convince the garrons they could squeeze
through. By the time we come out we will have lost them, he told
himself as they went. Not even an eagle can see through solid stone.
We will have lost them, and we will ride hard for the Fist, and tell the
Old Bear all we know.
But when they emerged back into the light long hours later, the
eagle was waiting for them, perched on a dead tree a hundred feet
up the slope. Ghost went bounding up the rocks after it, but the bird
apped its wings and took to the air.
Qhorin’s mouth tightened as he followed its ight with his eyes.
“Here is as good a place as any to make a stand,” he declared. “The
mouth of the cave shelters us from above, and they cannot get
behind us without passing through the mountain. Is your sword
sharp, Jon Snow?”
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ll feed the horses. They’ve served us bravely, poor beasts.”
Jon gave his garron the last of the oats and stroked his shaggy
mane while Ghost prowled restlessly amongst the rocks. He pulled
his gloves on tighter and exed his burnt ngers. I am the shield that
guards the realms of men.
A hunting horn echoed through the mountains, and a moment
later Jon heard the baying of hounds. “They will be with us soon,”
announced Qhorin. “Keep your wolf in hand.”
“Ghost, to me,” Jon called. The direwolf returned reluctantly to
his side, tail held sti y behind him.
The wildlings came boiling over a ridge not half a mile away.
Their hounds ran before them, snarling grey-brown beasts with
more than a little wolf in their blood. Ghost bared his teeth, his fur
bristling. “Easy,” Jon murmured. “Stay.” Overhead he heard a rustle
of wings. The eagle landed on an outcrop of rock and screamed in
triumph.
The hunters approached warily, perhaps fearing arrows. Jon
counted fourteen, with eight dogs. Their large round shields were
made of skins stretched over woven wicker and painted with skulls.

About half of them hid their faces behind crude helms of wood and
boiled leather. On either wing, archers notched shafts to the strings
of small wood-and-horn bows, but did not loose. The rest seemed to
be armed with spears and mauls. One had a chipped stone axe. They
wore only what bits of armor they had looted from dead rangers or
stolen during raids. Wildlings did not mine or smelt, and there were
few smiths and fewer forges north of the Wall.
Qhorin drew his longsword. The tale of how he had taught
himself to ght with his left hand after losing half of his right was
part of his legend; it was said that he handled a blade better now
than he ever had before. Jon stood shoulder to shoulder with the
big ranger and pulled Longclaw from its sheath. Despite the chill in
the air, sweat stung his eyes.
Ten yards below the cave mouth the hunters halted. Their leader
came on alone, riding a beast that seemed more goat than horse,
from the surefooted way it climbed the uneven slope. As man and
mount grew nearer Jon could hear them clattering; both were
armored in bones. Cow bones, sheep bones, the bones of goats and
aurochs and elk, the great bones of the hairy mammoths … and
human bones as well.
“Rattleshirt,” Qhorin called down, icy-polite.
“To crows I be the Lord o’ Bones.” The rider’s helm was made
from the broken skull of a giant, and all up and down his arms
bearclaws had been sewn to his boiled leather.
Qhorin snorted. “I see no lord. Only a dog dressed in
chickenbones, who rattles when he rides.”
The wildling hissed in anger, and his mount reared. He did rattle,
Jon could hear it; the bones were strung together loosely, so they
clacked and clattered when he moved. “It’s your bones I’ll be
rattling soon, Halfhand. I’ll boil the esh o you and make a byrnie
from your ribs. I’ll carve your teeth to cast me runes, and eat me
oaten porridge from your skull.”
“If you want my bones, come get them.”
That, Rattleshirt seemed reluctant to do. His numbers meant little
in the close con nes of the rocks where the black brothers had
taken their stand; to winkle them out of the cave the wildlings

would need to come up two at a time. But another of his company
edged a horse up beside him, one of the ghting women called
spearwives. “We are four-and-ten to two, crows, and eight dogs to
your wolf,” she called. “Fight or run, you are ours.”
“Show them,” commanded Rattleshirt.
The woman reached into a bloodstained sack and drew out a
trophy. Ebben had been bald as an egg, so she dangled the head by
an ear. “He died brave,” she said.
“But he died,” said Rattleshirt, “same like you.” He freed his
battle-axe, brandishing it above his head. Good steel it was, with a
wicked gleam to both blades; Ebben was never a man to neglect his
weapons. The other wildlings crowded forward beside him, yelling
taunts. A few chose Jon for their mockery. “Is that your wolf, boy?”
a skinny youth called, unlimbering a stone ail. “He’ll be my cloak
before the sun is down.” On the other side of the line, another
spearwife opened her ragged furs to show Jon a heavy white breast.
“Does the baby want his momma? Come, have a suck o’ this, boy.”
The dogs were barking too.
“They would shame us into folly.” Qhorin gave Jon a long look.
“Remember your orders.”
“Belike we need to ush the crows,” Rattleshirt bellowed over the
clamor. “Feather them!”
“No!” The word burst from Jon’s lips before the bowmen could
loose. He took two quick steps forward. “We yield!”
“They warned me bastard blood was craven,” he heard Qhorin
Halfhand say coldly behind him. “I see it is so. Run to your new
masters, coward.”
Face reddening, Jon descended the slope to where Rattleshirt sat
his horse. The wildling stared at him through the eyeholes of his
helm, and said, “The free folk have no need of cravens.”
“He is no craven.” One of the archers pulled o her sewn
sheepskin helm and shook out a head of shaggy red hair. “This is
the Bastard o’ Winterfell, who spared me. Let him live.”
Jon met Ygritte’s eyes, and had no words.
“Let him die,” insisted the Lord of Bones. “The black crow is a
tricksy bird. I trust him not.”

On a rock above them, the eagle apped its wings and split the
air with a scream of fury.
“The bird hates you, Jon Snow,” said Ygritte. “And well he might.
He was a man, before you killed him.”
“I did not know,” said Jon truthfully, trying to remember the face
of the man he had slain in the pass. “You told me Mance would take
me.”
“And he will,” Ygritte said.
“Mance is not here,” said Rattleshirt. “Ragwyle, gut him.”
The big spearwife narrowed her eyes and said, “If the crow would
join the free folk, let him show us his prowess and prove the truth
of him.”
“I’ll do whatever you ask.” The words came hard, but Jon said
them.
Rattleshirt’s bone armor clattered loudly as he laughed. “Then kill
the Halfhand, bastard.”
“As if he could,” said Qhorin. “Turn, Snow, and die.”
And then Qhorin’s sword was coming at him and somehow
Longclaw leapt upward to block. The force of impact almost
knocked the bastard blade from Jon’s hand, and sent him staggering
backward. You must not balk, whatever is asked of you. He shifted to
a two-hand grip, quick enough to deliver a stroke of his own, but
the big ranger brushed it aside with contemptuous ease. Back and
forth they went, black cloaks swirling, the youth’s quickness against
the savage strength of Qhorin’s left-hand cuts. The Halfhand’s
longsword seemed to be everywhere at once, raining down from
one side and then the other, driving him where he would, keeping
him o balance. Already he could feel his arms growing numb.
Even when Ghost’s teeth closed savagely around the ranger’s calf,
somehow Qhorin kept his feet. But in that instant, as he twisted, the
opening was there. Jon planted and pivoted. The ranger was leaning
away, and for an instant it seemed that Jon’s slash had not touched
him. Then a string of red tears appeared across the big man’s throat,
bright as a ruby necklace, and the blood gushed out of him, and
Qhorin Halfhand fell.

Ghost’s muzzle was dripping red, but only the point of the bastard
blade was stained, the last half inch. Jon pulled the direwolf away
and knelt with one arm around him. The light was already fading in
Qhorin’s eyes. “… sharp,” he said, lifting his maimed ngers. Then
his hand fell, and he was gone.
He knew, he thought numbly. He knew what they would ask of me.
He thought of Samwell Tarly then, of Grenn and Dolorous Edd, of
Pyp and Toad back at Castle Black. Had he lost them all, as he had
lost Bran and Rickon and Robb? Who was he now? What was he?
“Get him up.” Rough hands dragged him to his feet. Jon did not
resist. “Do you have a name?”
Ygritte answered for him. “His name is Jon Snow. He is Eddard
Stark’s blood, of Winterfell.”
Ragwyle laughed. “Who would have thought it? Qhorin Halfhand
slain by some lordling’s byblow.”
“Gut him.” That was Rattleshirt, still ahorse. The eagle ew to
him and perched atop his bony helm, screeching.
“He yielded,” Ygritte reminded them.
“Aye, and slew his brother,” said a short homely man in a rusteaten iron halfhelm.
Rattleshirt rode closer, bones clattering. “The wolf did his work
for him. It were foully done. The Halfhand’s death was mine.”
“We all saw how eager you were to take it,” mocked Ragwyle.
“He is a warg,” said the Lord of Bones, “and a crow. I like him
not.”
“A warg he may be,” Ygritte said, “but that has never frightened
us.” Others shouted agreement. Behind the eyeholes of his yellowed
skull Rattleshirt’s stare was malignant, but he yielded grudgingly.
These are a free folk indeed, thought Jon.
They burned Qhorin Halfhand where he’d fallen, on a pyre made
of pine needles, brush, and broken branches. Some of the wood was
still green, and it burned slow and smoky, sending a black plume up
into the bright hard blue of the sky. Afterward Rattleshirt claimed
some charred bones, while the others threw dice for the ranger’s
gear. Ygritte won his cloak.

“Will we return by the Skirling Pass?” Jon asked her. He did not
know if he could face those heights again, or if his garron could
survive a second crossing.
“No,” she said. “There’s nothing behind us.” The look she gave
him was sad. “By now Mance is well down the Milkwater, marching
on your Wall.”

BRAN

The ashes fell like a soft grey snow.

He padded over dry needles and brown leaves, to the edge of the
wood where the pines grew thin. Beyond the open elds he could
see the great piles of man-rock stark against the swirling ames.
The wind blew hot and rich with the smell of blood and burnt meat,
so strong he began to slaver.
Yet as one smell drew them onward, others warned them back.
He sni ed at the drifting smoke. Men, many men, many horses, and
re, re, re. No smell was more dangerous, not even the hard cold
smell of iron, the stu of man-claws and hardskin. The smoke and
ash clouded his eyes, and in the sky he saw a great winged snake
whose roar was a river of ame. He bared his teeth, but then the
snake was gone. Behind the cli s tall res were eating up the stars.
All through the night the res crackled, and once there was a
great roar and a crash that made the earth jump under his feet.
Dogs barked and whined and horses screamed in terror. Howls
shuddered through the night; the howls of the man-pack, wails of
fear and wild shouts, laughter and screams. No beast was as noisy as
man. He pricked up his ears and listened, and his brother growled at
every sound. They prowled under the trees as a piney wind blew
ashes and embers through the sky. In time the ames began to
dwindle, and then they were gone. The sun rose grey and smoky
that morning.

Only then did he leave the trees, stalking slow across the elds.
His brother ran with him, drawn to the smell of blood and death.
They padded silent through the dens the men had built of wood and
grass and mud. Many and more were burned and many and more
were collapsed; others stood as they had before. Yet nowhere did
they see or scent a living man. Crows blanketed the bodies and
leapt into the air screeching when his brother and he came near.
The wild dogs slunk away before them.
Beneath the great grey cli s a horse was dying noisily, struggling
to rise on a broken leg and screaming when he fell. His brother
circled round him, then tore out his throat while the horse kicked
feebly and rolled his eyes. When he approached the carcass his
brother snapped at him and laid back his ears, and he cu ed him
with a forepaw and bit his leg. They fought amidst the grass and
dirt and falling ashes beside the dead horse, until his brother rolled
on his back in submission, tail tucked low. One more bite at his
upturned throat; then he fed, and let his brother feed, and licked the
blood o his black fur.
The dark place was pulling at him by then, the house of whispers
where all men were blind. He could feel its cold ngers on him. The
stony smell of it was a whisper up the nose. He struggled against
the pull. He did not like the darkness. He was wolf. He was hunter
and stalker and slayer, and he belonged with his brothers and sisters
in the deep woods, running free beneath a starry sky. He sat on his
haunches, raised his head, and howled. I will not go, he cried. I am
wolf, I will not go. Yet even so the darkness thickened, until it
covered his eyes and lled his nose and stopped his ears, so he
could not see or smell or hear or run, and the grey cli s were gone
and the dead horse was gone and his brother was gone and all was
black and still and black and cold and black and dead and black …
“Bran,” a voice was whispering softly. “Bran, come back. Come
back now, Bran. Bran …”
He closed his third eye and opened the other two, the old two,
the blind two. In the dark place all men were blind. But someone
was holding him. He could feel arms around him, the warmth of a

body snuggled close. He could hear Hodor singing “Hodor, hodor,
hodor,” quietly to himself.
“Bran?” It was Meera’s voice. “You were thrashing, making
terrible noises. What did you see?”
“Winterfell.” His tongue felt strange and thick in his mouth. One
day when I come back I won’t know how to talk anymore. “It was
Winterfell. It was all on re. There were horse smells, and steel,
and blood. They killed everyone, Meera.”
He felt her hand on his face, stroking back his hair. “You’re all
sweaty,” she said. “Do you need a drink?”
“A drink,” he agreed. She held a skin to his lips, and Bran
swallowed so fast the water ran out of the corner of his mouth. He
was always weak and thirsty when he came back. And hungry too.
He remembered the dying horse, the taste of blood in his mouth,
the smell of burnt esh in the morning air. “How long?”
“Three days,” said Jojen. The boy had come up softfoot, or
perhaps he had been there all along; in this blind black world, Bran
could not have said. “We were afraid for you.”
“I was with Summer,” Bran said.
“Too long. You’ll starve yourself. Meera dribbled a little water
down your throat, and we smeared honey on your mouth, but it is
not enough.”
“I ate,” said Bran. “We ran down an elk and had to drive o a
treecat that tried to steal him.” The cat had been tan-and-brown,
only half the size of the direwolves, but erce. He remembered the
musky smell of him, and the way he had snarled down at them from
the limb of the oak.
“The wolf ate,” Jojen said. “Not you. Take care, Bran. Remember
who you are.”
He remembered who he was all too well; Bran the boy, Bran the
broken. Better Bran the beastling. Was it any wonder he would sooner
dream his Summer dreams, his wolf dreams? Here in the chill damp
darkness of the tomb his third eye had nally opened. He could
reach Summer whenever he wanted, and once he had even touched
Ghost and talked to Jon. Though maybe he had only dreamed that.
He could not understand why Jojen was always trying to pull him

back now. Bran used the strength of his arms to squirm to a sitting
position. “I have to tell Osha what I saw. Is she here? Where did she
go?”
The wildling woman herself gave answer. “Nowhere, m’lord. I’ve
had my ll o’ blundering in the black.” He heard the scrape of a
heel on stone, turned his head toward the sound, but saw nothing.
He thought he could smell her, but he wasn’t sure. All of them stank
alike, and he did not have Summer’s nose to tell one from the other.
“Last night I pissed on a king’s foot,” Osha went on. “Might be it
was morning, who can say? I was sleeping, but now I’m not.” They
all slept a lot, not only Bran. There was nothing else to do. Sleep
and eat and sleep again, and sometimes talk a little … but not too
much, and only in whispers, just to be safe. Osha might have liked
it better if they had never talked at all, but there was no way to
quiet Rickon, or to stop Hodor from muttering, “Hodor, hodor,
hodor,” endlessly to himself.
“Osha,” Bran said, “I saw Winterfell burning.” O to his left, he
could hear the soft sound of Rickon’s breathing.
“A dream,” said Osha.
“A wolf dream,” said Bran. “I smelled it too. Nothing smells like
re, or blood.”
“Whose blood?”
“Men, horses, dogs, everyone. We have to go see.”
“This scrawny skin of mine’s the only one I got,” said Osha. “That
squid prince catches hold o’ me, they’ll strip it o my back with a
whip.”
Meera’s hand found Bran’s in the darkness and gave his ngers a
squeeze. “I’ll go if you’re afraid.”
Bran heard ngers fumbling at leather, followed by the sound of
steel on int. Then again. A spark ew, caught. Osha blew softly. A
long pale ame awoke, stretching upward like a girl on her toes.
Osha’s face oated above it. She touched the ame with the head of
a torch. Bran had to squint as the pitch began to burn, lling the
world with orange glare. The light woke Rickon, who sat up
yawning.

When the shadows moved, it looked for an instant as if the dead
were rising as well. Lyanna and Brandon, Lord Rickard Stark their
father, Lord Edwyle his father, Lord Willam and his brother Artos
the Implacable, Lord Donnor and Lord Beron and Lord Rodwell,
one-eyed Lord Jonnel, Lord Barth and Lord Brandon and Lord
Cregan who had fought the Dragonknight. On their stone chairs
they sat with stone wolves at their feet. This was where they came
when the warmth had seeped out of their bodies; this was the dark
hall of the dead, where the living feared to tread.
And in the mouth of the empty tomb that waited for Lord Eddard
Stark, beneath his stately granite likeness, the six fugitives huddled
round their little cache of bread and water and dried meat. “Little
enough left,” Osha muttered as she blinked down on their stores.
“I’d need to go up soon to steal food in any case, or we’d be down
to eating Hodor.”
“Hodor,” Hodor said, grinning at her.
“Is it day or night up there?” Osha wondered. “I’ve lost all count
o’ such.”
“Day,” Bran told her, “but it’s dark from all the smoke.”
“M’lord is certain?”
Never moving his broken body, he reached out all the same, and
for an instant he was seeing double. There stood Osha holding the
torch, and Meera and Jojen and Hodor, and the double row of tall
granite pillars and long dead lords behind them stretching away into
darkness … but there was Winterfell as well, grey with drifting
smoke, the massive oak-and-iron gates charred and askew, the
drawbridge down in a tangle of broken chains and missing planks.
Bodies oated in the moat, islands for the crows.
“Certain,” he declared.
Osha chewed on that a moment. “I’ll risk a look then. I want the
lot o’ you close behind. Meera, get Bran’s basket.”
“Are we going home?” Rickon asked excitedly. “I want my horse.
And I want applecakes and butter and honey, and Shaggy. Are we
going where Shaggydog is?”
“Yes,” Bran promised, “but you have to be quiet.”

Meera strapped the wicker basket to Hodor’s back and helped lift
Bran into it, easing his useless legs through the holes. He had a
queer utter in his belly. He knew what awaited them above, but
that did not make it any less fearful. As they set o , he turned to
give his father one last look, and it seemed to Bran that there was a
sadness in Lord Eddard’s eyes, as if he did not want them to go. We
have to, he thought. It’s time.
Osha carried her long oaken spear in one hand and the torch in
the other. A naked sword hung down her back, one of the last to
bear Mikken’s mark. He had forged it for Lord Eddard’s tomb, to
keep his ghost at rest. But with Mikken slain and the ironmen
guarding the armory, good steel had been hard to resist, even if it
meant grave-robbing. Meera had claimed Lord Rickard’s blade,
though she complained that it was too heavy. Brandon took his
namesake’s, the sword made for the uncle he had never known. He
knew he would not be much use in a ght, but even so the blade
felt good in his hand.
But it was only a game, and Bran knew it.
Their footsteps echoed through the cavernous crypts. The
shadows behind them swallowed his father as the shadows ahead
retreated to unveil other statues; no mere lords, these, but the old
Kings in the North. On their brows they wore stone crowns. Torrhen
Stark, the King Who Knelt. Edwyn the Spring King. Theon Stark, the
Hungry Wolf. Brandon the Burner and Brandon the Shipwright.
Jorah and Jonos, Brandon the Bad, Walton the Moon King, Edderion
the Bridegroom, Eyron, Benjen the Sweet and Benjen the Bitter,
King Edrick Snowbeard. Their faces were stern and strong, and
some of them had done terrible things, but they were Starks every
one, and Bran knew all their tales. He had never feared the crypts;
they were part of his home and who he was, and he had always
known that one day he would lie here too.
But now he was not so certain. If I go up, will I ever come back
down? Where will I go when I die?
“Wait,” Osha said when they reached the twisting stone stairs that
led up to the surface, and down to the deeper levels where kings
more ancient still sat their dark thrones. She handed Meera the

torch. “I’ll grope my way up.” For a time they could hear the sound
of her footfalls, but they grew softer and softer until they faded
away entirely. “Hodor,” said Hodor nervously.
Bran had told himself a hundred times how much he hated hiding
down here in the dark, how much he wanted to see the sun again,
to ride his horse through wind and rain. But now that the moment
was upon him, he was afraid. He’d felt safe in the darkness; when
you could not even nd your own hand in front of your face, it was
easy to believe that no enemies could ever nd you either. And the
stone lords had given him courage. Even when he could not see
them, he had known they were there.
It seemed a long while before they heard anything again. Bran
had begun to fear that something had happened to Osha. His
brother was squirming restlessly. “I want to go home!” he said
loudly. Hodor bobbed his head and said, “Hodor.” Then they heard
the footsteps again, growing louder, and after a few minutes Osha
emerged into the light, looking grim. “Something is blocking the
door. I can’t move it.”
“Hodor can move anything,” said Bran.
Osha gave the huge stableboy an appraising look. “Might be he
can. Come on, then.”
The steps were narrow, so they had to climb in single le. Osha
led. Behind came Hodor, with Bran crouched low on his back so his
head wouldn’t hit the ceiling. Meera followed with the torch, and
Jojen brought up the rear, leading Rickon by the hand. Around and
around they went, and up and up. Bran thought he could smell
smoke now, but perhaps that was only the torch.
The door to the crypts was made of ironwood. It was old and
heavy, and lay at a slant to the ground. Only one person could
approach it at a time. Osha tried once more when she reached it,
but Bran could see that it was not budging. “Let Hodor try.”
They had to pull Bran from his basket rst, so he would not get
squished. Meera squatted beside him on the steps, one arm thrown
protectively across his shoulders, as Osha and Hodor traded places.
“Open the door, Hodor,” Bran said.

The huge stableboy put both hands at on the door, pushed, and
grunted. “Hodor?” He slammed a st against the wood, and it did
not so much as jump. “Hodor.”
“Use your back,” urged Bran. “And your legs.”
Turning, Hodor put his back to the wood and shoved. Again.
Again. “Hodor!” He put one foot on a higher step so he was bent
under the slant of the door and tried to rise. This time the wood
groaned and creaked. “Hodor!” The other foot came up a step, and
Hodor spread his legs apart, braced, and straightened. His face
turned red, and Bran could see cords in his neck bulging as he
strained against the weight above him. “Hodor hodor hodor hodor
hodor HODOR!” From above came a dull rumble. Then suddenly the
door jerked upward and a shaft of daylight fell across Bran’s face,
blinding him for a moment. Another shove brought the sound of
shifting stone, and then the way was open. Osha poked her spear
through and slid out after it, and Rickon squirmed through Meera’s
legs to follow. Hodor shoved the door open all the way and stepped
to the surface. The Reeds had to carry Bran up the last few steps.
The sky was a pale grey, and smoke eddied all around them. They
stood in the shadow of the First Keep, or what remained of it. One
whole side of the building had torn loose and fallen away. Stone
and shattered gargoyles lay strewn across the yard. They fell just
where I did, Bran thought when he saw them. Some of the gargoyles
had broken into so many pieces it made him wonder how he was
alive at all. Nearby some crows were pecking at a body crushed
beneath the tumbled stone, but he lay facedown and Bran could not
say who he was.
The First Keep had not been used for many hundreds of years, but
now it was more of a shell than ever. The oors had burned inside
it, and all the beams. Where the wall had fallen away, they could
see right into the rooms, even into the privy. Yet behind, the
broken tower still stood, no more burned than before. Jojen Reed
was coughing from the smoke. “Take me home!” Rickon demanded.
“I want to be home!” Hodor stomped in a circle. “Hodor,” he
whimpered in a small voice. They stood huddled together with ruin
and death all around them.

“We made noise enough to wake a dragon,” Osha said, “but
there’s no one come. The castle’s dead and burned, just as Bran
dreamed, but we had best—” She broke o suddenly at a noise
behind them, and whirled with her spear at the ready.
Two lean dark shapes emerged from behind the broken tower,
padding slowly through the rubble. Rickon gave a happy shout of
“Shaggy!” and the black direwolf came bounding toward him.
Summer advanced more slowly, rubbed his head up against Bran’s
arm, and licked his face.
“We should go,” said Jojen. “So much death will bring other
wolves besides Summer and Shaggydog, and not all on four feet.”
“Aye, soon enough,” Osha agreed, “but we need food, and there
may be some survived this. Stay together. Meera, keep your shield
up and guard our backs.”
It took the rest of the morning to make a slow circuit of the
castle. The great granite walls remained, blackened here and there
by re but otherwise untouched. But within, all was death and
destruction. The doors of the Great Hall were charred and
smoldering, and inside the rafters had given way and the whole roof
had crashed down onto the oor. The green and yellow panes of the
glass gardens were all in shards, the trees and fruits and owers
torn up or left exposed to die. Of the stables, made of wood and
thatch, nothing remained but ashes, embers, and dead horses. Bran
thought of his Dancer, and wanted to weep. There was a shallow
steaming lake beneath the Library Tower, and hot water gushing
from a crack in its side. The bridge between the Bell Tower and the
rookery had collapsed into the yard below, and Maester Luwin’s
turret was gone. They saw a dull red glow shining up through the
narrow cellar windows beneath the Great Keep, and a second re
still burning in one of the storehouses.
Osha called softly through the blowing smoke as they went, but
no one answered. They saw one dog worrying at a corpse, but he
ran when he caught the scents of the direwolves; the rest had been
slain in the kennels. The maester’s ravens were paying court to
some of the corpses, while the crows from the broken tower
attended others. Bran recognized Poxy Tym, even though someone

had taken an axe to his face. One charred corpse, outside the ashen
shell of Mother’s sept, sat with his arms drawn up and his hands
balled into hard black sts, as if to punch anyone who dared
approach him. “If the gods are good,” Osha said in a low angry
voice, “the Others will take them that did this work.”
“It was Theon,” Bran said blackly.
“No. Look.” She pointed across the yard with her spear. “That’s
one of his ironmen. And there. And that’s Greyjoy’s warhorse, see?
The black one with the arrows in him.” She moved among the dead,
frowning. “And here’s Black Lorren.” He had been hacked and cut so
badly that his beard looked a reddish-brown now. “Took a few with
him, he did.” Osha turned over one of the other corpses with her
foot. “There’s a badge. A little man, all red.”
“The ayed man of the Dreadfort,” said Bran.
Summer howled, and darted away.
“The godswood.” Meera Reed ran after the direwolf, her shield
and frog spear to hand. The rest of them trailed after, threading
their way through smoke and fallen stones. The air was sweeter
under the trees. A few pines along the edge of the wood had been
scorched, but deeper in the damp soil and green wood had defeated
the ames. “There is a power in living wood,” said Jojen Reed,
almost as if he knew what Bran was thinking, “a power strong as
re.”
On the edge of the black pool, beneath the shelter of the heart
tree, Maester Luwin lay on his belly in the dirt. A trail of blood
twisted back through damp leaves where he had crawled. Summer
stood over him, and Bran thought he was dead at rst, but when
Meera touched his throat, the maester moaned. “Hodor?” Hodor
said mournfully. “Hodor?”
Gently, they eased Luwin onto his back. He had grey eyes and
grey hair, and once his robes had been grey as well, but they were
darker now where the blood had soaked through. “Bran,” he said
softly when he saw him sitting tall on Hodor’s back. “And Rickon
too.” He smiled. “The gods are good. I knew …”
“Knew?” said Bran uncertainly.

“The legs, I could tell … the clothes t, but the muscles in his
legs … poor lad …” He coughed, and blood came up from inside
him. “You vanished … in the woods … how, though?”
“We never went,” said Bran. “Well, only to the edge, and then
doubled back. I sent the wolves on to make a trail, but we hid in
Father’s tomb.”
“The crypts.” Luwin chuckled, a froth of blood on his lips. When
the maester tried to move, he gave a sharp gasp of pain.
Tears lled Bran’s eyes. When a man was hurt you took him to
the maester, but what could you do when your maester was hurt?
“We’ll need to make a litter to carry him,” said Osha.
“No use,” said Luwin. “I’m dying, woman.”
“You can’t,” said Rickon angrily. “No you can’t.” Beside him,
Shaggydog bared his teeth and growled.
The maester smiled. “Hush now, child, I’m much older than you. I
can … die as I please.”
“Hodor, down,” said Bran. Hodor went to his knees beside the
maester.
“Listen,” Luwin said to Osha, “the princes … Robb’s heirs.
Not … not together … do you hear?”
The wildling woman leaned on her spear. “Aye. Safer apart. But
where to take them? I’d thought, might be these Cerwyns …”
Maester Luwin shook his head, though it was plain to see what
the e ort cost him. “Cerwyn boy’s dead. Ser Rodrik, Leobald
Tallhart, Lady Hornwood … all slain. Deepwood fallen, Moat Cailin,
soon Torrhen’s Square. Ironmen on the Stony Shore. And east, the
Bastard of Bolton.”
“Then where?” asked Osha.
“White Harbor … the Umbers … I do not know … war
everywhere … each man against his neighbor, and winter
coming … such folly, such black mad folly …” Maester Luwin
reached up and grasped Bran’s forearm, his ngers closing with a
desperate strength. “You must be strong now. Strong.”
“I will be,” Bran said, though it was hard. Ser Rodrik killed and
Maester Luwin, everyone, everyone …

“Good,” the maester said. “A good boy. Your … your father’s son,
Bran. Now go.”
Osha gazed up at the weirwood, at the red face carved in the pale
trunk. “And leave you for the gods?”
“I beg …” The maester swallowed. “… a … a drink of water,
and … another boon. If you would …”
“Aye.” She turned to Meera. “Take the boys.”
Jojen and Meera led Rickon out between them. Hodor followed.
Low branches whipped at Bran’s face as they pushed between the
trees, and the leaves brushed away his tears. Osha joined them in
the yard a few moments later. She said no word of Maester Luwin.
“Hodor must stay with Bran, to be his legs,” the wildling woman
said briskly. “I will take Rickon with me.”
“We’ll go with Bran,” said Jojen Reed.
“Aye, I thought you might,” said Osha. “Believe I’ll try the East
Gate, and follow the kingsroad a ways.”
“We’ll take the Hunter’s Gate,” said Meera.
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
They stopped at the kitchens rst. Osha found some loaves of
burned bread that were still edible, and even a cold roast fowl that
she ripped in half. Meera unearthed a crock of honey and a big sack
of apples. Outside, they made their farewells. Rickon sobbed and
clung to Hodor’s leg until Osha gave him a smack with the butt end
of her spear. Then he followed her quick enough. Shaggydog
stalked after them. The last Bran saw of them was the direwolf’s tail
as it vanished behind the broken tower.
The iron portcullis that closed the Hunter’s Gate had been warped
so badly by heat it could not be raised more than a foot. They had
to squeeze beneath its spikes, one by one.
“Will we go to your lord father?” Bran asked as they crossed the
drawbridge between the walls. “To Greywater Watch?”
Meera looked to her brother for the answer. “Our road is north,”
Jojen announced.
At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one
last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still
rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from

Winterfell’s chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains
marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a
missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed
little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and
towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard
to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is
strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the
ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained,
Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he
thought. I’m not dead either.

APPENDIX

THE KINGS AND THEIR COURTS

THE KING ON THE IRON THRONE
JOFFREY BARATHEON, the First of His Name, a boy of thirteen years, the
eldest son of King Robert I Baratheon and Queen Cersei of House
Lannister,
—his mother, QUEEN CERSEI, Queen Regent and Protector of the
Realm,
—his sister, PRINCESS MYRCELLA, a girl of nine,
—his brother, PRINCE TOMMEN, a boy of eight, heir to the Iron Throne,
—his uncles, on his father’s side:
—STANNIS BARATHEON, Lord of Dragonstone, styling himself King
Stannis the First,
—RENLY BARATHEON, Lord of Storm’s End, styling himself King
Renly the First,
—his uncles, on his mother’s side:
—SER JAIME LANNISTER, the Kingslayer, Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard, a captive at Riverrun,
—TYRION LANNISTER, acting Hand of the King,
—Tyrion’s squire, PODRICK PAYNE,

—Tyrion’s guards and sworn swords:
—BRONN, a sellsword, black of hair and heart,
—SHAGGA SON OF DOLF, of the Stone Crows,

—TIMETT SON OF TIMETT, of the Burned Men,

—CHELLA DAUGHTER OF CHEYK, of the Black Ears,
—CRAWN SON OF CALOR, of the Moon Brothers,

—Tyrion’s concubine, SHAE, a camp follower,eighteen,

—his small council:

—GRAND MAESTER PYCELLE,

—LORD PETYR BAELISH, called LITTLEFINGER, master of coin,

—LORD JANOS SLYNT, Commander of the City Watch of King’s
Landing (the “gold cloaks”),
—VARYS, a eunuch, called the SPIDER, master of whisperers,

—his Kingsguard:
—SER JAIME LANNISTER, called theKINGSLAYER, Lord Commander, a
captive at Riverrun,
—SANDOR CLEGANE, called theHOUND,
—SER BOROS BLOUNT,
—SER MERYN TRANT,

—SER ARYS OAKHEART,

—SER PRESTON GREENFIELD,
—SER MANDON MOORE,

—his court and retainers:

—SER ILYN PAYNE, the King’s Justice, a headsman,

—VYLARR, captain of the Lannister household guards at King’s
Landing (the “red cloaks”),

—SER LANCEL LANNISTER, formerly squire to King Robert, recently
knighted,
—TYREK LANNISTER, formerly squire to King Robert,
—SER ARON SANTAGAR, master-at-arms,

—SER BALON SWANN, second son to Lord Gulian Swann of
Stonehelm,

—LADY ERMESANDE HAYFORD, a babe at the breast,
—SER DONTOS HOLLARD, called the RED, a drunk,

—JALABHAR XHO, an exiled prince from the Summer Isles,
—MOON BOY, a jester and fool,
—LADY TANDA STOKEWORTH,

—FALYSE, her elder daughter,

—LOLLYS, her younger daughter, a maiden of thirty-three
years,

—LORD GYLES ROSBY,

—SER HORAS REDWYNE and his twin SER HOBBER REDWYNE, sons of the
Lord of the Arbor,

—the people of King’s Landing:
—the City Watch (the “gold cloaks”):
—JANOS SLYNT, Lord of Harrenhal, Lord Commander,
—MORROS, his eldest son and heir,

—ALLAR DEEM, Slynt’s chief sergeant,

—SER JACELYN BYWATER, called IRONHAND, captain of the River
Gate,

—HALLYNE THE PYROMANCER, a Wisdom of the Guild of Alchemists,
—CHATAYA, owner of an expensive brothel,

—ALAYAYA, DANCY, MAREI, some of her girls,

—TOBHO MOTT, a master armorer,
—SALLOREON, a master armorer,
—IRONBELLY, a blacksmith,

—LOTHAR BRUNE, a freerider,

—SER OSMUND KETTLEBLACK, a hedge knight of unsavory
reputation,
—OSFRYD and OSNEY KETTLEBLACK, his brothers,

—SYMON SILVER TONGUE, a singer.

King Jo rey’s banner shows the crowned stag of Baratheon, black
on gold, and the lion of Lannister, gold on crimson, combatant.

THE KING IN THE NARROW SEA
STANNIS BARATHEON, the First of His Name, the older of King Robert’s
brothers, formerly Lord of Dragonstone, secondborn son of Lord
Ste on Baratheon and Lady Cassana of House Estermont,
—his wife, LADY SELYSE of House Florent,
—SHIREEN, their only child, a girl of ten,

—his uncle and cousins:
—SER LOMAS ESTERMONT, an uncle,

—his son, SER ANDREW ESTERMONT, a cousin,

—his court and retainers:
—MAESTER CRESSEN, healer and tutor, an old man,
—MAESTER PYLOS, his young successor,
—SEPTON BARRE,

—SER AXELL FLORENT, castellan of Dragonstone, and uncle to
Queen Selyse,
—PATCHFACE, a lackwit fool,

—LADY MELISANDRE OF ASSHAI, called the RED WOMAN, a priestess of
R’hllor, the Heart of Fire,
—SER DAVOS SEAWORTH, called the ONION KNIGHT and sometimes
SHORTHAND, once a smuggler, captain of Black Betha,
—his wife MARYA, a carpenter’s daughter,
—their seven sons:
—DALE, captain of the Wraith,

—ALLARD, captain of the Lady Marya,
—MATTHOS, second of Black Betha,

—MARIC, oarmaster of Fury,

—DEVAN, squire to King Stannis,
—STANNIS, a boy of nine years,
—STEFFON, a boy of six years,

—BRYEN FARRING, squire to King Stannis,

—his lords bannermen and sworn swords,

—ARDRIAN CELTIGAR, Lord of Claw Isle, an old man,

—MONFORD VELARYON, Lord of the Tides and Master of Driftmark,
—DURAM BAR EMMON, Lord of Sharp Point, a boy of fourteen
years,
—GUNCER SUNGLASS, Lord of Sweetport Sound,
—SER HUBARD RAMBTON,

—SALLADHOR SAAN, of the Free City of Lys, styled Prince of the
Narrow Sea,
—MOROSH THE MYRMAN, a sellsail admiral. King Stannis has taken for
his banner the ery heart of the Lord of Light; a red heart
surrounded by orange ames upon a bright yellow eld. Within
the heart is pictured the crowned stag of House Baratheon, in
black.

THE KING IN HIGHGARDEN
RENLY BARATHEON, the First of His Name, the younger of King Robert’s
brothers, formerly Lord of Storm’s End, thirdborn son of Lord
Ste on Baratheon and Lady Cassana of House Estermont,
—his new bride, LADY MARGAERY of House Tyrell, a maid of fteen
years,
—his uncle and cousins:
—SER ELDON ESTERMONT, an uncle,
—Ser Eldon’s son, SER AEMON ESTERMONT, a cousin,
—Ser Aemon’s son, SER ALYN ESTERMONT,

—his lords bannermen:
—MACE TYRELL, Lord of Highgarden and Hand of the King,
—RANDYLL TARLY, Lord of Horn Hill,

—MATHIS ROWAN, Lord of Goldengrove,
—BRYCE CARON, Lord of the Marches,

—SHYRA ERROL, Lady of Haystack Hall,
—ARWYN OAKHEART, Lady of Old Oak,

—ALESTER FLORENT, Lord of Brightwater Keep,
LORD SELWYN OF TARTH, called the EVENSTAR,

—LEYTON HIGHTOWER, Voice of Oldtown, Lord of the Port,
—LORD STEFFON VARNER,

—his Rainbow Guard:
—SER LORAS TYRELL, the Knight of Flowers, Lord Commander,
—LORD BRYCE CARON, the Orange,

—SER GUYARD MORRIGEN, the Green,
—SER PARMEN CRANE, the Purple,
—SER ROBAR ROYCE, the Red,

—SER EMMON CUY, the Yellow,

—BRIENNE OF TARTH, the Blue, also called BRIENNE THE BEAUTY,
daughter to Lord Selwyn the Evenstar,

—his knights and sworn swords:

—SER CORTNAY PENROSE, castellan of Storm’s End,

—Ser Cortnay’s ward, EDRIC STORM, a bastard son of King
Robert by Lady Delena of House Florent,
—SER DONNEL SWANN, heir to Stonehelm,
—SER JON FOSSOWAY, of the green-apple Fossoways,

—SER BRYAN FOSSOWAY, SER TANTON FOSSOWAY, and SER EDWYD
FOSSOWAY, of the red-apple Fossoways,
—SER COLEN OF GREENPOOLS,
—SER MARK MULLENDORE,

—RED RONNET, the Knight of Gri n’s Roost,

—his household,

—MAESTER JURNE, counselor, healer, and tutor.

King Renly’s banner is the crowned stag of House Baratheon of
Storm’s End, black upon a gold eld, the same banner own by
his brother King Robert.

THE KING IN THE NORTH
ROBB STARK, Lord of Winterfell and King in the North, eldest son of
Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, and Lady Catelyn of House
Tully, a boy of fteen years,
—his direwolf, GREY WIND,
—his mother, LADY CATELYN, of House Tully,
—his siblings:
—PRINCESS SANSA, a maid of twelve,
—Sansa’s direwolf, {lady}, killed at Castle Darry,
—PRINCESS ARYA, a girl of ten,
—Arya’s direwolf, NYMERIA, driven o a year past,

—PRINCE BRANDON, called Bran, heir to Winterfell and the North,
a boy of eight,
—Bran’s direwolf, SUMMER,
—PRINCE RICKON, a boy of four,

—Rickon’s direwolf, SHAGGYDOG,

—his half brother, JON SNOW, a bastard of fteen years, a man
of the Night’s Watch,
—Jon’s direwolf, GHOST,

—his uncles and aunts:
—{BRANDON STARK}, Lord Eddard’s elder brother, slain at the
command of King Aerys II Targaryen,
—BENJEN STARK, Lord Eddard’s younger brother, a man of the
Night’s Watch, lost beyond the Wall,
—LYSA ARRYN, Lady Catelyn’s younger sister, widow of {Lord
Jon Arryn}, Lady of the Eyrie,

—SER EDMURE TULLY, Lady Catelyn’s younger brother, heir to
Riverrun,

—SER BRYNDEN TULLY, called the BLACKFISH, Lady Catelyn’s uncle,

—his sworn swords and battle companions:

—THEON GREYJOY, Lord Eddard’s ward, heir to Pyke and the
Iron Islands,
—HALLIS MOLLEN, captain of guards for Winterfell,

—JACKS, QUENT, SHADD, guardsmen under Mollen’s command,
—SER WENDEL MANDERLY, second son to the Lord of White
Harbor,
—PATREK MALLISTER, heir to Seagard,

—DACEY MORMONT, eldest daughter of Lady Maege and heir to
Bear Island,
—JON UMBER, called the SMALLJON,
—ROBIN FLINT, SER PERWYN FREY, LUCAS BLACKWOOD,
—his squire, OLYVAR FREY, eighteen,

—the household at Riverrun:
—MAESTER VYMAN, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER DESMOND GRELL, master-at-arms,

—SER ROBIN RYGER, captain of the guard,

—UTHERYDES WAYN, steward of Riverrun,
—RYMUND THE RHYMER, a singer,

—the household at Winterfell:

—MAESTER LUWIN, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER RODRIK CASSEL, master-at-arms,
—BETH, his young daughter,

—WALDER FREY, called BIG WALDER, a ward of Lady Catelyn,
eight years of age,

—WALDER FREY, called LITTLE WALDER, a ward of Lady Catelyn,
also eight,
—SEPTON CHAYLE, keeper of the castle sept and library,
—JOSETH, master of horse,

—BANDY and SHYRA, his twin daughters,

—FARLEN, kennelmaster,

—PALLA, a kennel girl,

—OLD NAN, storyteller, once a wet nurse, now very aged,

—HODOR, her great-grandson, a simpleminded stableboy,

—GAGE, the cook,

—TURNIP, a pot girl and scullion,

—OSHA, a wildling woman taken captive in the wolfswood,
serving as kitchen drudge,

—MIKKEN, smith and armorer,

—HAYHEAD, SKITTRICK, POXY TYM, ALEBELLY, guardsmen,
—CALON, TOM, children of guardsmen,

—his lords bannermen and commanders:
—(with Robb at Riverrun)
—JON UMBER, called the GREATJON,

—RICKARD KARSTARK, Lord of Karhold,

—GALBART GLOVER, of Deepwood Motte,
—MAEGE MORMONT, Lady of Bear Island,

—SER STEVRON FREY, eldest son of Lord Walder Frey and heir to
the Twins,
—Ser Stevron’s eldest son, SER RYMAN FREY,
—Ser Ryman’s son, BLACK WALDER FREY,

—MARTYN RIVERS, a bastard son of Lord Walder Frey,
—(with Roose Bolton’s host at the Twins),

—ROOSE BOLTON, Lord of the Dreadfort, commanding the larger
part of the northern host,
—ROBETT GLOVER, of Deepwood Motte,
—WALDER FREY, Lord of the Crossing,

—SER HELMAN TALLHART, of Torrhen’s Square,
—SER AENYS FREY,

—(prisoners of Lord Tywin Lannister),
—LORD MEDGER CERWYN,

—HARRION KARSTARK, sole surviving son of Lord Rickard,
—SER WYLIS MANDERLY, heir to White Harbor,

—SER JARED FREY, SER HOSTEEN FREY, SER DANWELL FREY, and their
bastard half brother, RONEL RIVERS,
—(in the eld or at their own castles),
—LYMAN DARRY, a boy of eight,

—SHELLA WHENT, Lady of Harrenhal, dispossessed of her castle by
Lord Tywin Lannister,
—JASON MALLISTER, Lord of Seagard,

—JONOS BRACKEN, Lord of the Stone Hedge,
—TYTOS BLACKWOOD, Lord of Raventree,
—LORD KARYL VANCE,
—SER MARQ PIPER,

—SER HALMON PAEGE,

—his lord bannermen and castellans in the north:
—WYMAN MANDERLY, Lord of White Harbor,

—HOWLAND REED of Greywater Watch, a crannogman,
—Howland’s daughter, MEERA, a maid of fteen,
—Howland’s son, JOJEN, a boy of thirteen,

—LADY DONELLA HORNWOOD, a widow and grieving mother,

—CLEY CERWYN, Lord Medger’s heir, a boy of fourteen,

—LEOBALD TALLHART, younger brother to Ser Helman, castellan at
Torrhen’s Square,
—Leobald’s wife, BERENA of House Hornwood,
—Leobald’s son, BRANDON, a boy of fourteen,
—Leobald’s son, BEREN, a boy of ten,

—Ser Helman’s son, BENFRED, heir to Torrhen’s Square,
—Ser Helman’s daughter, EDDARA, a maid of nine,

—LADY SYBELLE, wife to Robett Glover, holding Deepwood Motte
in his absence,
—Robett’s son, GAWEN, three, heir to Deepwood,
—Robett’s daughter, ERENA, a babe of one,

—LARENCE SNOW, a bastard son of Lord Hornwood, aged
twelve, ward of Galbart Glover,

—MORS CROWFOOD and HOTHER WHORESBANE of House Umber,
uncles to the Greatjon,
—LADY LYESSA FLINT, mother to Robin,

—ONDREW LOCKE, Lord of Oldcastle, an old man.

The banner of the King in the North remains as it has for thousands
of years: the grey direwolf of the Starks of Winterfell, running
across an ice-white eld.

THE QUEEN ACROSS THE WATER

called Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt,
Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Dothraki, and First of Her
Name, sole surviving child of King Aerys II Targaryen by his
sister/wife, Queen Rhaella, a widow at fourteen years,
—her new-hatched dragons, DROGON, VISERION, RHAEGAL,

DAENERYS

TARGARYEN,

—her brothers:
—{RHAEGAR}, Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron
Throne, slain by King Robert on the Trident,
—{RHAENYS}, Rhaegar’s daughter by Elia of Dorne, murdered
during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—{AEGON}, Rhaegar’s son by Elia of Dorne, murdered during
the Sack of King’s Landing,
—{VISERYS}, styling himself King Viserys, the Third of His
Name, called the Beggar King, slain in Vaes Dothrak by the
hand of Khal Drogo,
—her husband {DROGO}, a khal of the Dothraki, died of wounds
gone bad,
—{RHAEGO}, stillborn son of Daenerys and Khal Drogo, slain in
the womb by Mirri Maz Duur,
—her Queensguard:
—SER JORAH MORMONT, an exile knight, once Lord of Bear Island,
—JHOGO, ko and bloodrider, the whip,
—AGGO, ko and bloodrider, the bow,

—RAKHARO, ko and bloodrider, the arakh,

—her handmaids:

—IRRI, a Dothraki girl,

—JHIQUI, a Dothraki girl,

—DOREAH, a Lyseni slave, formerly a whore,

—the three seekers:

—XARO XHOAN DAXOS, a merchant prince of Qarth,
—PYAT PREE, a warlock of Qarth,

—QUAITHE, a masked shadowbinder of Asshai,

—ILLYRIO MOPATIS, a magister of the Free City of Pentos, who
arranged to wed Daenerys to Khal Drogo and conspired to
restore Viserys to the Iron Throne.
The banner of the Targaryens is the banner of Aegon the Conqueror,
who conquered six of Seven Kingdoms, founded the dynasty, and
made the Iron Throne from the swords of his conquered enemies:
a three-headed dragon, red on black.

OTHER HOUSES GREAT AND SMALL

HOUSE ARRYN

House Arryn declared for none of the rival claimants at the
outbreak of the war, and kept its strength back to protect the Eyrie
and the Vale of Arryn. The Arryn sigil is the moon-and-falcon,
white, upon a sky-blue eld. Their Arryn words are As High As
Honor.
ROBERT ARRYN, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale, Warden of the
East, a sickly boy of eight years,
—his mother, LADY LYSA, of House Tully, third wife and widow of
{Lord Jon Arryn}, late Hand of the King, and sister to Catelyn
Stark,
—his household:
—MAESTER COLEMON, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER MARWYN BELMORE, captain of guards,

—LORD NESTOR ROYCE, High Steward of the Vale,
—Lord Nestor’s son, SER ALBAR,

—MYA STONE, a bastard girl in his service, natural daughter of
King Robert,
—MORD, a brutal gaoler,
—MARILLION, a young singer,

—his lords bannermen, suitors, and retainers:
—LORD YOHN ROYCE, called BRONZE YOHN,
—Lord Yohn’s eldest son, SER ANDAR,

—Lord Yohn’s second son, SER ROBAR, in service to King Renly,
Robar the Red of the Rainbow Guard,
—Lord Yohn’s youngest son, {SER WAYMAR}, a man of the
Night’s Watch, lost beyond the Wall,

—LORD NESTOR ROYCE, cousin of Lord Yohn, High Steward of the
Vale,
—Lord Nestor’s son and heir, SER ALBAR,
—Lord Nestor’s daughter, MYRANDA,

—SER LYN CORBRAY, a suitor to Lady Lysa,
—MYCHEL REDFORT, his squire,

—LADY ANYA WAYNWOOD,

—Lady Anya’s eldest son and heir, SER MORTON, a suitor to
Lady Lysa,
—Lady Anya’s second son, SER DONNEL, the Knight of the Gate,

—EON HUNTER, Lord of Longbow Hall, an old man, and a suitor
to Lady Lysa.

HOUSE FLORENT

The Florents of Brightwater Keep are sworn bannermen to
Highgarden, and followed the Tyrells in declaring for King Renly.
They also kept a foot in the other camp, however, since Stannis’s
queen is a Florent, and her uncle the castellan of Dragonstone. The
sigil of House Florent shows a fox head in a circle of owers.
ALESTER FLORENT, Lord of Brightwater,
—his wife, LADY MELARA, of House Crane,
—their children:
—ALEKYNE, heir to Brightwater,

—MELESSA, wed to Lord Randyll Tarly,

—RHEA, wed to Lord Leyton Hightower,

—his siblings:
—SER AXELL, castellan of Dragonstone,

—{SER RYAM}, died in a fall from a horse,

—Ser Ryam’s daughter, QUEEN SELYSE, wed to King Stannis,
—Ser Ryam’s eldest son and heir, SER IMRY,
—Ser Ryam’s second son, SER ERREN,

—SER COLIN,

—Colin’s daughter, DELENA, wed to SER HOSMAN NORCROSS,

—Delena’s son, EDRIC STORM, a bastard fathered by King
Robert,
—Delena’s son, ALESTER NORCROSS,
—Delena’s son, RENLY NORCROSS,

—Colin’s son, MAESTER OMER, in service at Old Oak,

—Colin’s son, MERRELL, a squire on the Arbor,

—his sister, RYLENE, wed to Ser Rycherd Crane.

HOUSE FREY
Powerful, wealthy, and numerous, the Freys are bannermen to
House Tully, their swords sworn to the service of Riverrun, but they
have not always been diligent in performing their duty. When
Robert Baratheon met Rhaegar Targaryen on the Trident, the Freys
did not arrive until the battle was done, and thereafter Lord Hoster
Tully always called Lord Walder “the Late Lord Frey.” Lord Frey
agreed to support the cause of the King in the North only after Robb
Stark agreed to a betrothal, promising to marry one of his daughters
or granddaughters after the war was done. Lord Walder has known
ninety-one name days, but only recently took his eighth wife, a girl
seventy years his junior. It is said of him that he is the only lord in
the Seven Kingdoms who could eld an army out of his breeches.
WALDER FREY, Lord of the Crossing,
—by his rst wife, {LADY PERRA, of House Royce}:
—SER STEVRON, heir to the Twins,

—m. {Corenna Swann, died of a wasting illness},
—Stevron’s eldest son, SER RYMAN,
—Ryman’s son, EDWYN, wed to Janyce Hunter,
—Edwyn’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of eight,

—Ryman’s son, WALDER, called BLACK WALDER,
—Ryman’s son, PETYR, called PETYR PIMPLE,

—m. Mylenda Caron,
—Petyr’s daughter, PERRA, a girl of ve,

—m. {Jeyne Lydden, died in a fall from a horse},
—Stevron’s son, AEGON, a halfwit called JINGLEBELL,

—Stevron’s daughter, {MAEGELLE, died in childbed},

—m. Ser Dafyn Vance,
—Maegelle’s daughter, MARIANNE, a maiden,
—Maegelle’s son, WALDER VANCE, a squire,
—Maegelle’s son, PATREK VANCE,

—m. {Marsella Waynwood, died in childbed},
—Stevron’s son, WALTON, w. Deana Hardyng,
—Walton’s son, STEFFON, called THE SWEET,

—Walton’s daughter, WALDA, called FAIR WALDA,
—Walton’s son, BRYAN, a squire,

—SER EMMON, m. Genna of House Lannister,

—Emmon’s son, SER CLEOS, m. Jeyne Darry,
—Cleos’s son, TYWIN, a squire of eleven,

—Cleos’s son, WILLEM, a page at Ashemark,

—Emmon’s son, SER LYONEL, m. Melesa Crakehall,

—Emmon’s son, TION, a squire captive at Riverrun,

—Emmon’s son, WALDER, called RED WALDER, a page at Casterly
Rock,
—SER AENYS, m. {Tyana Wylde, died in childbed},
—Aenys’s son, AEGON BLOODBORN, an outlaw,

—Aenys’s son, RHAEGAR, m. Jeyne Beesbury,

—Rhaegar’s son, ROBERT, a boy of thirteen,

—Rhaegar’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of ten, called WHITE
WALDA,

—Rhaegar’s son, JONOS, a boy of eight,

—PERRIANE, m. Ser Leslyn Haigh,

—Perriane’s son, SER HARYS HAIGH,

—Harys’s son, WALDER HAIGH, a boy of four,

—Perriane’s son, SER DONNEL HAIGH,

—Perriane’s son, ALYN HAIGH, a squire,

—by his second wife, {LADY CYRENNA, of House Swann}:
—SER JARED, their eldest son, m. {Alys Frey},

—Jared’s son, SER TYTOS, m. Zhoe Blanetree,

—Tytos’s daughter, ZIA, a maid of fourteen,

—Tytos’s son, ZACHERY, a boy of twelve, training at the Sept
of Oldtown,
—Jared’s daughter, KYRA, m. Ser Garse Goodbrook,
—Kyra’s son, WALDER GOODBROOK, a boy of nine,
—Kyra’s daughter, JEYNE GOODBROOK, six,

—SEPTON LUCEON, in service at the Great Sept of Baelor in
King’s Landing,

—by his third wife, {LADY AMAREI of House Crakehall}:
—SER HOSTEEN, their eldest son, m. Bellena Hawick,
—Hosteen’s son, SER ARWOOD, m. Ryella Royce,
—Arwood’s daughter, RYELLA, a girl of ve,

—Arwood’s twin sons, ANDROW and ALYN, three,

—LADY LYTHENE, m. Lord Lucias Vypren,

—Lythene’s daughter, ELYANA, m. Ser Jon Wylde,
—Elyana’s son, RICKARD WYLDE, four,

—Lythene’s son, SER DAMON VYPREN,

—SYMOND, m. Betharios of Braavos,

—Symond’s son, ALESANDER, a singer,

—Symond’s daughter, ALYX, a maid of seventeen,

—Symond’s son, BRADAMAR, a boy of ten, fostered on Braavos
as a ward of Oro Tendyris, a merchant of that city,

—SER DANWELL, m. Wynafrei Whent,

—{many stillbirths and miscarriages},

—MERRETT, m. Mariya Darry,

—Merrett’s daughter, AMEREI, called AMI, a widow of sixteen,
m. {Ser Pate of the Blue Fork},
—Merrett’s daughter, WALDA, called FAT WALDA, a maid of
fteen years,
—Merrett’s daughter, MARISSA, a maid of thirteen,

—Merrett’s son, WALDER, called LITTLE WALDER, a boy of eight,
fostered at Winterfell as a ward of Lady Catelyn Stark,
—{SER GEREMY, drowned}, m. Carolei Waynwood,

—Geremy’s son, SANDOR, a boy of twelve, a squire to Ser
Donnel Waynwood,
—Geremy’s daughter, CYNTHEA, a girl of nine, a ward of Lady
Anya Waynwood,

—SER RAYMUND, m. Beony Beesbury,

—Raymund’s son, ROBERT, sixteen, in training at the Citadel in
Oldtown,
—Raymund’s son, MALWYN, fteen, apprenticed to an
alchemist in Lys,

—Raymund’s twin daughters, SERRA and SARRA, maiden girls
of fourteen,
—Raymund’s daughter, CERSEI, six, called LITTLE BEE,

—by his fourth wife, {LADY ALYSSA, of House Blackwood}:

—LOTHAR, their eldest son, called LAME LOTHAR, m. Leonella
Le ord,
—Lothar’s daughter, TYSANE, a girl of seven,
—Lothar’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of four,

—Lothar’s daughter, EMBERLEI, a girl of two,

—SER JAMMOS, m. Sallei Paege,

—Jammos’s son, WALDER, called BIG WALDER, a boy of eight,
fostered at Winterfell as a ward of Lady Catelyn Stark,
—Jammos’s twin sons, DICKON and MATHIS, ve,

—SER WHALEN, m. Sylwa Paege,

—Whalen’s son, HOSTER, a boy of twelve, a squire to Ser
Damon Paege,

—Whalen’s daughter, MERIANNE, called MERRY, a girl of eleven,

—LADY MORYA, m. Ser Flement Brax,

—Morya’s son, ROBERT BRAX, nine, fostered at Casterly Rock as
a page,
—Morya’s son, WALDER BRAX, a boy of six,
—Morya’s son, JON BRAX, a babe of three,

—TYTA, called TYTA THE MAID, a maid of twenty-nine,

—by his fth wife, {LADY SARYA of House Whent}:

—no progeny,
—by his sixth wife, {LADY BETHANY of House Rosby}:
—SER PERWYN, their eldest son,

—SER BENFREY, m. Jyanna Frey, a cousin,

—Benfrey’s daughter, DELLA, called DEAF DELLA, a girl of three,
—Benfrey’s son, OSMUND, a boy of two,

—MAESTER WILLAMEN, in service at Longbow Hall,
—OLYVAR, a squire in the service of Robb Stark,
—ROSLIN, a maid of sixteen,

—by his seventh wife, {LADY ANNARA of House Farring}:
—ARWYN, a maid of fourteen,

—WENDEL, their eldest son, a boy of thirteen, fostered at
Seagard as a page,

—COLMAR, promised to the Faith, eleven,
—WALTYR, called TYR, a boy of ten,

—ELMAR, betrothed to Arya Stark, a boy of nine,
—SHIREI, a girl of six,

—his eighth wife, LADY JOYEUSE of House Erenford,
—no progeny as yet,

—Lord Walder’s natural children, by sundry mothers,
—WALDER RIVERS, called BASTARD WALDER,
—Bastard Walder’s son, SER AEMON RIVERS,

—Bastard Walder’s daughter, WALDA RIVERS,

—MAESTER MELWYS, in service at Rosby,

—JEYNE RIVERS, MARTYN RIVERS, RYGER RIVERS, RONEL RIVERS, MELLARA
RIVERS, others.

HOUSE GREYJOY

Balon Greyjoy, Lord of the Iron Islands, previously led a rebellion
against the Iron Throne, put down by King Robert and Lord Eddard
Stark. Though his son Theon, raised at Winterfell, was one of Robb
Stark’s supporters and closest companions, Lord Balon did not join
the northmen when they marched south into the riverlands.
The Greyjoy sigil is a golden kraken upon a black eld. Their words
are We Do Not Sow.
BALON GREYJOY, Lord of the Iron Islands, King of Salt and Rock, Son of
the Sea Wind, Lord Reaper of Pyke, captain of the Great Kraken,
—his wife, LADY ALANNYS, of House Harlaw,
—their children:
—{RODRIK}, slain at Seagard during Greyjoy’s Rebellion,
—{MARON}, slain at Pyke during Greyjoy’s Rebellion,
—ASHA, captain of the Black Wind,

—THEON, a ward of Lord Eddard Stark at Winterfell,

—his brothers:

—EURON, called CROW’S EYE, captain of the Silence, an outlaw,
pirate, and raider,
—VICTARION, Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, master of the Iron
Victory,
—AERON, called DAMPHAIR, a priest of the Drowned God,

—his household on Pyke:
—DAGMER called CLEFTJAW, master-at-arms, captain of the
Foamdrinker,
—MAESTER WENDAMYR, healer and counselor,

—HELYA, keeper of the castle,

—people of Lordsport:

—SIGRIN, a shipwright,

—his lords bannermen,
—LORD BOTLEY, of Lordsport,
—LORD WYNCH, of Iron Holt,
—LORD HARLAW, of Harlaw,

—STONEHOUSE, of Old Wyk,
—DRUMM, of Old Wyk,

—GOODBROTHER, of Old Wyk,

—GOODBROTHER, of Great Wyk,
—LORD MERLYN, of Great Wyk,
—SPARR, of Great Wyk,

—LORD BLACKTYDE, of Blacktyde,
—LORD SALTCLIFFE, of Saltcli e,
—LORD SUNDERLY, of Saltcli e.

HOUSE LANNISTER
The Lannisters of Casterly Rock remain the principal support of
King Jo rey’s claim to the Iron Throne. Their sigil is a golden lion
upon a crimson eld. The Lannister words are Hear Me Roar!
TYWIN LANNISTER, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West, Shield
of Lannisport, and Hand of the King, commanding the Lannister
host at Harrenhal,
—his wife, {LADY JOANNA}, a cousin, died in childbed,
—their children:
—SER JAIME, called the Kingslayer, Warden of the East and Lord
Commander of the Kingsguard, a twin to Queen Cersei,
—QUEEN CERSEI, widow of King Robert, twin to Jaime, Queen
Regent and Protector of the Realm,
—TYRION, called the IMP, a dwarf,
—his siblings:
—SER KEVAN, his eldest brother,

—Ser Kevan’s wife, DORNA, of House Swyft,
—Lady Dorna’s father, SER HARYS SWYFT,

—their children:
—SER LANCEL, formerly a squire to King Robert, knighted after
his death,
—WILLEM, twin to Martyn, a squire, taken captive at the
Whispering Wood,
—MARTYN, twin to Willem, a squire,
—JANEI, a girl of two,

—GENNA, his sister, wed to Ser Emmon Frey,

—Genna’s son, SER CLEOS FREY, taken captive at the Whispering
Wood,
—Genna’s son, TION FREY, a squire, taken captive at the
Whispering Wood,

—{SER TYGETT}, his second brother, died of a pox,

—Tygett’s widow, DARLESSA, of House Marbrand,
—Tygett’s son, TYREK, squire to the king,

—{GERION}, his youngest brother, lost at sea,
—Gerion’s bastard daughter, JOY, eleven,

—his cousin, SER STAFFORD LANNISTER, brother to the late Lady
Joanna,
—Ser Sta ord’s daughters, CERENNA and MYRIELLE,
—Ser Sta ord’s son, SER DAVEN,

—his lord bannermen, captains, and commanders:
—SER ADDAM MARBRAND, heir to Ashemark, commander of Lord
Tywin’s outriders and scouts,
—SER GREGOR CLEGANE, the Mountain That Rides,

—POLLIVER, CHISWYCK, RAFF THE SWEETLING, DUNSEN, and THE TICKLER,
soldiers in his service,

—LORD LEO LEFFORD,

—SER AMORY LORCH, a captain of foragers,
—LEWYS LYDDEN, Lord of the Deep Den,

—GAWEN WESTERLING, Lord of the Crag, taken captive in the
Whispering Wood and held at Seagard,
—SER ROBERT BRAX, and his brother, SER FLEMENT BRAX,
—SER FORLEY PRESTER, of the Golden Tooth,

—VARGO HOAT, of the Free City of Qohor, captain of the
sellsword company called the Brave Companions,

—MAESTER CREYLEN, his counselor.

HOUSE MARTELL
DORNE was the last of the Seven Kingdoms to swear fealty to the
Iron Throne. Blood, custom, and history all set the Dornishmen
apart from the other kingdoms. When the war of succession broke
out, the Prince of Dorne kept his silence and took no part.
The Martell banner is a red sun pierced by a golden spear. Their
words are Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.
DORAN NYMEROS MARTELL, Lord of Sunspear, Prince of Dorne,
—his wife, MELLARIO, of the Free City of Norvos,

—their children:
—PRINCESS ARIANNE, their eldest daughter, heir to Sunspear,
—PRINCE QUENTYN, their eldest son,

—PRINCE TRYSTANE, their younger son,

—his siblings:
—his sister, {PRINCESS ELIA}, wed to Prince Rhaegar Targaryen,
slain during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—Elia’s daughter, {PRINCESS RHAENYS}, a young girl murdered
during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—Elia’s son, {PRINCE AEGON}, a babe, murdered during the
Sack of King’s Landing,
—his brother, PRINCE OBERYN, the Red Viper,
—his household:
—AREO HOTAH, a Norvoshi sellsword, captain of guards,
—MAESTER CALEOTTE, counselor, healer, and tutor,

—his lords bannermen:

—EDRIC DAYNE, Lord of Starfall.

The principal houses sworn to Sunspear include Jordayne, Santagar,
Allyrion, Toland, Yronwood, Wyl, Fowler, and Dayne.

HOUSE TYRELL
Lord Tyrell of Highgarden declared his support for King Renly after
Renly’s marriage to his daughter Margaery, and brought most of his
principal bannermen to Renly’s cause. The Tyrell sigil is a golden
rose on a grass-green eld. Their words are Growing Strong.
MACE TYRELL, Lord of Highgarden, Warden of the South, Defender of

the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach, and Hand of the King,
—his wife, LADY ALERIE, of House Hightower of Oldtown,
—their children:
—WILLAS, their eldest son, heir to Highgarden,

—SER GARLAN, called the GALLANT, their second son,

—SER LORAS, the Knight of Flowers, their youngest son, Lord
Commander of the Rainbow Guard,
—MARGAERY, their daughter, a maid of fteen years, recently
wed to Renly Baratheon,
—his widowed mother, LADY OLENNA of House Redwyne, called the
QUEEN OF THORNS,

—his sisters:
—MINA, wed to Paxter Redwyne, Lord of the Arbor,

—their children:
—SER HORAS REDWYNE, twin to Hobber, mocked as HORROR,
—SER HOBBER REDWYNE, twin to Horas, mocked as SLOBBER,
—DESMERA REDWYNE, a maid of sixteen,

—JANNA, wed to Ser Jon Fossoway,

—his uncles:
—GARTH, called the GROSS, Lord Seneschal of Highgarden,

—Garth’s bastard sons, GARSE and GARRETT FLOWERS,

—SER MORYN, Lord Commander of the City Watch of Oldtown,
—MAESTER GORMON, a scholar of the Citadel,

—his household:

—MAESTER LOMYS, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—IGON VYRWEL, captain of the guard,

—SER VORTIMER CRANE, master-at-arms,

—BUTTERBUMPS, fool and jester, hugely fat.

THE MEN OF THE NIGHT’S WATCH
The Night’s Watch protects the realm, and is sworn to take no part
in civil wars and contests for the throne. Traditionally, in times of
rebellion, they do honor to all kings and obey none.
At Castle Black
JEOR MORMONT, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, called the OLD
BEAR,

—his steward and squire, JON SNOW, the bastard of Winterfell,
called LORD SNOW,
—Jon’s white direwolf, GHOST,

—MAESTER AEMON (TARGARYEN), counselor and healer,
—SAMWELL TARLY and CLYDAS, his stewards,

—BENJEN STARK, First Ranger, lost beyond the Wall,
—THOREN SMALLWOOD, a senior ranger,
—JARMEN BUCKWELL, a senior ranger,

—SER OTTYN WYTHERS, SER ALADALE WYNCH, GRENN, PYPAR, MATTHAR,
ELRON, LARK called the SISTERMAN, rangers,

—OTHELL YARWYCK, First Builder,
—HALDER, ALBETT, builders,

—BOWEN MARSH, Lord Steward

—CHETT, steward and dog handler,

—EDDISON TOLLETT, called DOLOROUS EDD, a dour squire,

—SEPTON CELLADAR, a drunken devout,
—SER ENDREW TARTH, master-at-arms,
—brothers of Castle Black:

—DONAL NOYE, armorer and smith, one-armed,
—THREE-FINGER HOBB, cook,

—JEREN, RAST, CUGEN, recruits still in training,

—CONWY, GUEREN, “wandering crows,” recruiters who collect
orphan boys and criminals for the Wall,
—YOREN, the senior of the “wandering crows,”

—PRAED, CUTJACK, WOTH, REYSEN, QYLE, recruits bound for the
Wall,
—KOSS, GERREN, DOBBER, KURZ, BITER, RORGE, JAQEN H’GHAR,
criminals bound for the Wall,

—LOMMY GREENHANDS, GENDRY, TARBER, HOT PIE, ARRY, orphan boys
bound for the Wall.
At Eastwatch-by-the-Sea
COTTER PYKE, Commander, Eastwatch,
—SER ALLISER THORNE, master-at-arms,
—brothers of Eastwatch:
—DAREON, steward and singer.

At the Shadow Tower

SER DENYS MALLISTER, Commander, Shadow Tower,

—QHORIN called HALFHAND, a senior ranger,

—DALBRIDGE, an elderly squire and senior ranger,
—EBBEN, STONESNAKE, rangers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

More details, more devils.
This time around, the angels who helped me put them to rest
included Walter Jon Williams, Sage Walker, Melinda Snodgrass, and
Carl Keim.
Thanks as well to my patient editors and publishers: Anne Groell,
Nita Taublib, Joy Chamberlain, Jane Johnson, and Malcolm
Edwards.
And nally, a tip o’ the tilting helm to Parris for her Magic Co ee,
the fuel that built the Seven Kingdoms.

Praise for George R. R. Martin’s
A GAME OF THRONES
“Grabs hold and won’t let go. It’s brilliant.”
—Robert Jordan

“Reminiscent of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, this novel
is an absorbing combination of the mythic, the sweepingly
historical, and the intensely personal.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Perhaps the best of the epic fantasies—readable and realistic.”
—Marion Zimmer Bradley
“The major fantasy of the decade.”
—The Denver Post
“I would be very surprised if this is not the major fantasy publishing
event of 1996, and I’m already impatient for the next installment.”
—Science Fiction Chronicle
“Such a splendid tale and such a fantistorical! I read my eyes out.”
—Ann McCa rey
“Martin makes a triumphant return to high fantasy with this
extraordinary rich new novel …Martin’s trophy case is already
stu ed with major prizes, including Hugos, Nebulas, Locus awards
and a Bram Stoker. He’s probably going to have to add another
shelf, at least.”
—Publishers Weekly
“George R. R. Martin is one of our very best science ction writers,
and this is one of his very best books.”
—Raymond E. Feist
“A colorful, majestic tapestry of characters, action and plot that
deserves a spot on any reader’s wall … the pages seem to pass in a
blur as you read.”

—Albuquerque Journal
“George Martin is assuredly a new master craftsman in the guild of
heroic fantasy.”
—Katharine Kerr

A STORM OF SWORDS

A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam Spectra hardcover edition published November 2000

Bantam Spectra trade paperback edition published June 2002
Bantam Spectra mass market edition / March 2003
Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2000 by George R. R. Martin
Maps by James Sinclair
Heraldic crests by Virginia Norey
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-60827
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without the written permission of the publisher except where
permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New
York, New York.

Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a
boxed “s” are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-89787-6
v3.0

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Note on Chronology
Maps
Prologue

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20

Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50

Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80

Epilogue
Appendix
The Kings and Their Courts
The King on the Iron Throne
The King in the North The King of the Trident
The King in the Narrow Sea
The Queen Across the Water
King of the Isles and the North
Other Houses Great and Small
House Arryn
House Florent
House Frey
House Lannister
House Martell
House Tully
House Tyrell
Rebels, Rogues, and Sworn Brothers
The Sworn Brothers of the Night’s Watch
The Brotherhood Without Banners: An Outlaw Fellowship
The Wildlings, or the Free Folk
Acknowledgments

for Phyllis
who made me put the dragons in

A NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY
A Song of Ice and Fire is told through the eyes of characters who
are sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles apart from one
another. Some chapters cover a day, some only an hour; others
might span a fortnight, a month, half a year. With such a structure,
the narrative cannot be strictly sequential; sometimes important
things are happening simultaneously, a thousand leagues apart.
In the case of the volume now in hand, the reader should realize
that the opening chapters of A Storm of Swords do not follow the
closing chapters of A Clash of Kings so much as overlap them. I open
with a look at some of the things that were happening on the Fist of
the First Men, at Riverrun, Harrenhal, and on the Trident while the
Battle of the Blackwater was being fought at King’s Landing, and
during its aftermath …
George R. R. Martin

Click here to view the maps in greater detail:
http://atrandom.com/sosmaps

PROLOGUE

The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dogs would not take the

scent.
The big black bitch had taken one sni at the bear tracks, backed
o , and skulked back to the pack with her tail between her legs.
The dogs huddled together miserably on the riverbank as the wind
snapped at them. Chett felt it too, biting through his layers of black
wool and boiled leather. It was too bloody cold for man or beast,
but here they were. His mouth twisted, and he could almost feel the
boils that covered his cheeks and neck growing red and angry. I
should be safe back at the Wall, tending the bloody ravens and making
res for old Maester Aemon. It was the bastard Jon Snow who had
taken that from him, him and his fat friend Sam Tarly. It was their
fault he was here, freezing his bloody balls o with a pack of
hounds deep in the haunted forest.
“Seven hells.” He gave the leashes a hard yank to get the dogs’
attention. “Track, you bastards. That’s a bear print. You want some
meat or no? Find!” But the hounds only huddled closer, whining.
Chett snapped his short lash above their heads, and the black bitch
snarled at him. “Dog meat would taste as good as bear,” he warned
her, his breath frosting with every word.
Lark the Sisterman stood with his arms crossed over his chest and
his hands tucked up into his armpits. He wore black wool gloves,
but he was always complaining how his ngers were frozen. “It’s

too bloody cold to hunt,” he said. “Bugger this bear, he’s not worth
freezing over.”
“We can’t go back emptyhand, Lark,” rumbled Small Paul through
the brown whiskers that covered most of his face. “The Lord
Commander wouldn’t like that.” There was ice under the big man’s
squashed pug nose, where his snot had frozen. A huge hand in a
thick fur glove clenched tight around the shaft of a spear.
“Bugger that Old Bear too,” said the Sisterman, a thin man with
sharp features and nervous eyes. “Mormont will be dead before
daybreak, remember? Who cares what he likes?”
Small Paul blinked his black little eyes. Maybe he had forgotten,
Chett thought; he was stupid enough to forget most anything. “Why
do we have to kill the Old Bear? Why don’t we just go o and let
him be?”
“You think he’ll let us be?” said Lark. “He’ll hunt us down. You
want to be hunted, you great muttonhead?”
“No,” said Small Paul. “I don’t want that. I don’t.”
“So you’ll kill him?” said Lark.
“Yes.” The huge man stamped the butt of his spear on the frozen
riverbank. “I will. He shouldn’t hunt us.”
The Sisterman took his hands from his armpits and turned to
Chett. “We need to kill all the o cers, I say.”
Chett was sick of hearing it. “We been over this. The Old Bear
dies, and Blane from the Shadow Tower. Grubbs and Aethan as well,
their ill luck for drawing the watch, Dywen and Bannen for their
tracking, and Ser Piggy for the ravens. That’s all. We kill them
quiet, while they sleep. One scream and we’re wormfood, every one
of us.” His boils were red with rage. “Just do your bit and see that
your cousins do theirs. And Paul, try and remember, it’s third watch,
not second.”
“Third watch,” the big man said, through hair and frozen snot.
“Me and Softfoot. I remember, Chett.”
The moon would be black tonight, and they had jiggered the
watches so as to have eight of their own standing sentry, with two
more guarding the horses. It wasn’t going to get much riper than
that. Besides, the wildlings could be upon them any day now. Chett

meant to be well away from here before that happened. He meant
to live.
Three hundred sworn brothers of the Night’s Watch had ridden
north, two hundred from Castle Black and another hundred from the
Shadow Tower. It was the biggest ranging in living memory, near a
third of the Watch’s strength. They meant to nd Ben Stark, Ser
Waymar Royce, and the other rangers who’d gone missing, and
discover why the wildlings were leaving their villages. Well, they
were no closer to Stark and Royce than when they’d left the Wall,
but they’d learned where all the wildlings had gone—up into the icy
heights of the godsforsaken Frostfangs. They could squat up there
till the end of time and it wouldn’t prick Chett’s boils none.
But no. They were coming down. Down the Milkwater.
Chett raised his eyes and there it was. The river’s stony banks
were bearded by ice, its pale milky waters owing endlessly down
out of the Frostfangs. And now Mance Rayder and his wildlings
were owing down the same way. Thoren Smallwood had returned
in a lather three days past. While he was telling the Old Bear what
his scouts had seen, his man Kedge Whiteye told the rest of them.
“They’re still well up the foothills, but they’re coming,” Kedge said,
warming his hands over the re. “Harma the Dogshead has the van,
the poxy bitch. Goady crept up on her camp and saw her plain by
the re. That fool Tumberjon wanted to pick her o with an arrow,
but Smallwood had better sense.”
Chett spat. “How many were there, could you tell?”
“Many and more. Twenty, thirty thousand, we didn’t stay to
count. Harma had ve hundred in the van, every one ahorse.”
The men around the re exchanged uneasy looks. It was a rare
thing to nd even a dozen mounted wildlings, and ve hundred …
“Smallwood sent Bannen and me wide around the van to catch a
peek at the main body,” Kedge went on. “There was no end of
them. They’re moving slow as a frozen river, four, ve miles a day,
but they don’t look like they mean to go back to their villages
neither. More’n half were women and children, and they were
driving their animals before them, goats, sheep, even aurochs
dragging sledges. They’d loaded up with bales of fur and sides of

meat, cages of chickens, butter churns and spinning wheels, every
damn thing they own. The mules and garrons was so heavy laden
you’d think their backs would break. The women as well.”
“And they follow the Milkwater?” Lark the Sisterman asked.
“I said so, didn’t I?”
The Milkwater would take them past the Fist of the First Men, the
ancient ringfort where the Night’s Watch had made its camp. Any
man with a thimble of sense could see that it was time to pull up
stakes and fall back on the Wall. The Old Bear had strengthened the
Fist with spikes and pits and caltrops, but against such a host all
that was pointless. If they stayed here, they would be engulfed and
overwhelmed.
And Thoren Smallwood wanted to attack. Sweet Donnel Hill was
squire to Ser Mallador Locke, and the night before last Smallwood
had come to Locke’s tent. Ser Mallador had been of the same mind
as old Ser Ottyn Wythers, urging a retreat on the Wall, but
Smallwood wanted to convince him otherwise. “This King-beyondthe-Wall will never look for us so far north,” Sweet Donnel reported
him saying. “And this great host of his is a shambling horde, full of
useless mouths who won’t know what end of a sword to hold. One
blow will take all the ght out of them and send them howling back
to their hovels for another fty years.”
Three hundred against thirty thousand. Chett called that rank
madness, and what was madder still was that Ser Mallador had been
persuaded, and the two of them together were on the point of
persuading the Old Bear. “If we wait too long, this chance may be
lost, never to come again,” Smallwood was saying to anyone who
would listen. Against that, Ser Ottyn Wythers said, “We are the
shield that guards the realms of men. You do not throw away your
shield for no good purpose,” but to that Thoren Smallwood said, “In
a sword ght, a man’s surest defense is the swift stroke that slays his
foe, not cringing behind a shield.”
Neither Smallwood nor Wythers had the command, though. Lord
Mormont did, and Mormont was waiting for his other scouts, for
Jarman Buckwell and the men who’d climbed the Giant’s Stair, and
for Qhorin Halfhand and Jon Snow, who’d gone to probe the

Skirling Pass. Buckwell and the Halfhand were late in returning,
though. Dead, most like. Chett pictured Jon Snow lying blue and
frozen on some bleak mountaintop with a wildling spear up his
bastard’s arse. The thought made him smile. I hope they killed his
bloody wolf as well.
“There’s no bear here,” he decided abruptly. “Just an old print,
that’s all. Back to the Fist.” The dogs almost yanked him o his feet,
as eager to get back as he was. Maybe they thought they were
going to get fed. Chett had to laugh. He hadn’t fed them for three
days now, to turn them mean and hungry. Tonight, before slipping
o into the dark, he’d turn them loose among the horse lines, after
Sweet Donnel Hill and Clubfoot Karl cut the tethers. They’ll have
snarling hounds and panicked horses all over the Fist, running through
res, jumping the ringwall, and trampling down tents. With all the
confusion, it might be hours before anyone noticed that fourteen
brothers were missing.
Lark had wanted to bring in twice that number, but what could
you expect from some stupid shbreath Sisterman? Whisper a word
in the wrong ear and before you knew it you’d be short a head. No,
fourteen was a good number, enough to do what needed doing but
not so many that they couldn’t keep the secret. Chett had recruited
most of them himself. Small Paul was one of his; the strongest man
on the Wall, even if he was slower than a dead snail. He’d once
broken a wildling’s back with a hug. They had Dirk as well, named
for his favorite weapon, and the little grey man the brothers called
Softfoot, who’d raped a hundred women in his youth, and liked to
boast how none had ever seen nor heard him until he shoved it up
inside them.
The plan was Chett’s. He was the clever one; he’d been steward to
old Maester Aemon for four good years before that bastard Jon
Snow had done him out so his job could be handed to his fat pig of a
friend. When he killed Sam Tarly tonight, he planned to whisper,
“Give my love to Lord Snow,” right in his ear before he sliced Ser
Piggy’s throat open to let the blood come bubbling out through all
those layers of suet. Chett knew the ravens, so he wouldn’t have no
trouble there, no more than he would with Tarly. One touch of the

knife and that craven would piss his pants and start blubbering for
his life. Let him beg, it won’t do him no good. After he opened his
throat, he’d open the cages and shoo the birds away, so no messages
reached the Wall. Softfoot and Small Paul would kill the Old Bear,
Dirk would do Blane, and Lark and his cousins would silence Bannen
and old Dywen, to keep them from sni ng after their trail. They’d
been caching food for a fortnight, and Sweet Donnel and Clubfoot
Karl would have the horses ready. With Mormont dead, command
would pass to Ser Ottyn Wythers, an old done man, and failing.
He’ll be running for the Wall before sundown, and he won’t waste no
men sending them after us neither.
The dogs pulled at him as they made their way through the trees.
Chett could see the Fist punching its way up through the green. The
day was so dark that the Old Bear had the torches lit, a great circle
of them burning all along the ringwall that crowned the top of the
steep stony hill. The three of them waded across a brook. The water
was icy cold, and patches of ice were spreading across its surface.
“I’m going to make for the coast,” Lark the Sisterman con ded. “Me
and my cousins. We’ll build us a boat, sail back home to the
Sisters.”
And at home they’ll know you for deserters and lop o your fool
heads, thought Chett. There was no leaving the Night’s Watch, once
you said your words. Anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms, they’d take
you and kill you.
Ollo Lophand now, he was talking about sailing back to Tyrosh,
where he claimed men didn’t lose their hands for a bit of honest
thievery, nor get sent o to freeze their life away for being found in
bed with some knight’s wife. Chett had weighed going with him,
but he didn’t speak their wet girly tongue. And what could he do in
Tyrosh? He had no trade to speak of, growing up in Hag’s Mire. His
father had spent his life grubbing in other men’s elds and
collecting leeches. He’d strip down bare but for a thick leather
clout, and go wading in the murky waters. When he climbed out
he’d be covered from nipple to ankle. Sometimes he made Chett
help pull the leeches o . One had attached itself to his palm once,
and he’d smashed it against a wall in revulsion. His father beat him

bloody for that. The maesters bought the leeches at twelve-for-apenny.
Lark could go home if he liked, and the damn Tyroshi too, but not
Chett. If he never saw Hag’s Mire again, it would be too bloody
soon. He had liked the look of Craster’s Keep, himself. Craster lived
high as a lord there, so why shouldn’t he do the same? That would
be a laugh. Chett the leechman’s son, a lord with a keep. His banner
could be a dozen leeches on a eld of pink. But why stop at lord?
Maybe he should be a king. Mance Rayder started out a crow. I could
be a king same as him, and have me some wives. Craster had nineteen,
not even counting the young ones, the daughters he hadn’t gotten
around to bedding yet. Half them wives were as old and ugly as
Craster, but that didn’t matter. The old ones Chett could put to
work cooking and cleaning for him, pulling carrots and slopping
pigs, while the young ones warmed his bed and bore his children.
Craster wouldn’t object, not once Small Paul gave him a hug.
The only women Chett had ever known were the whores he’d
bought in Mole’s Town. When he’d been younger, the village girls
took one look at his face, with its boils and its wen, and turned
away sickened. The worst was that slattern Bessa. She’d spread her
legs for every boy in Hag’s Mire so he’d gured why not him too?
He even spent a morning picking wild owers when he heard she
liked them, but she’d just laughed in his face and told him she’d
crawl in a bed with his father’s leeches before she’d crawl in one
with him. She stopped laughing when he put his knife in her. That
was sweet, the look on her face, so he pulled the knife out and put
it in her again. When they caught him down near Sevenstreams, old
Lord Walder Frey hadn’t even bothered to come himself to do the
judging. He’d sent one of his bastards, that Walder Rivers, and the
next thing Chett had known he was walking to the Wall with that
foul-smelling black devil Yoren. To pay for his one sweet moment,
they took his whole life.
But now he meant to take it back, and Craster’s women too. That
twisted old wildling has the right of it. If you want a woman to wife you
take her, and none of this giving her owers so that maybe she don’t

notice your bloody boils. Chett didn’t mean to make that mistake
again.
It would work, he promised himself for the hundredth time. So
long as we get away clean. Ser Ottyn would strike south for the
Shadow Tower, the shortest way to the Wall. He won’t bother with
us, not Wythers, all he’ll want is to get back whole. Thoren Smallwood
now, he’d want to press on with the attack, but Ser Ottyn’s caution
ran too deep, and he was senior. It won’t matter anyhow. Once we’re
gone, Smallwood can attack anyone he likes. What do we care? If none
of them ever returns to the Wall, no one will ever come looking for us,
they’ll think we died with the rest. That was a new thought, and for a
moment it tempted him. But they would need to kill Ser Ottyn and
Ser Mallador Locke as well to give Smallwood the command, and
both of them were well-attended day and night … no, the risk was
too great.
“Chett,” said Small Paul as they trudged along a stony game trail
through sentinels and soldier pines, “what about the bird?”
“What bloody bird?” The last thing he needed now was some
mutton-head going on about a bird.
“The Old Bear’s raven,” Small Paul said. “If we kill him, who’s
going to feed his bird?”
“Who bloody well cares? Kill the bird too if you like.”
“I don’t want to hurt no bird,” the big man said. “But that’s a
talking bird. What if it tells what we did?”
Lark the Sisterman laughed. “Small Paul, thick as a castle wall,”
he mocked.
“You shut up with that,” said Small Paul dangerously.
“Paul,” said Chett, before the big man got too angry, “when they
nd the old man lying in a pool of blood with his throat slit, they
won’t need no bird to tell them someone killed him.”
Small Paul chewed on that a moment. “That’s true,” he allowed.
“Can I keep the bird, then? I like that bird.”
“He’s yours,” said Chett, just to shut him up.
“We can always eat him if we get hungry,” o ered Lark.
Small Paul clouded up again. “Best not try and eat my bird, Lark.
Best not.”

Chett could hear voices drifting through the trees. “Close your
bloody mouths, both of you. We’re almost to the Fist.”
They emerged near the west face of the hill, and walked around
south where the slope was gentler. Near the edge of the forest a
dozen men were taking archery practice. They had carved outlines
on the trunks of trees, and were loosing shafts at them. “Look,” said
Lark. “A pig with a bow.”
Sure enough, the nearest bowman was Ser Piggy himself, the fat
boy who had stolen his place with Maester Aemon. Just the sight of
Samwell Tarly lled him with anger. Stewarding for Maester
Aemon had been as good a life as he’d ever known. The old blind
man was undemanding, and Clydas had taken care of most of his
wants anyway. Chett’s duties were easy: cleaning the rookery, a
few res to build, a few meals to fetch … and Aemon never once hit
him. Thinks he can just walk in and shove me out, on account of being
highborn and knowing how to read. Might be I’ll ask him to read my
knife before I open his throat with it. “You go on,” he told the others,
“I want to watch this.” The dogs were pulling, anxious to go with
them, to the food they thought would be waiting at the top. Chett
kicked the bitch with the toe of his boot, and that settled them
down some.
He watched from the trees as the fat boy wrestled with a
longbow as tall as he was, his red moon face screwed up with
concentration. Three arrows stood in the ground before him. Tarly
nocked and drew, held the draw a long moment as he tried to aim,
and let y. The shaft vanished into the greenery. Chett laughed
loudly, a snort of sweet disgust.
“We’ll never nd that one, and I’ll be blamed,” announced Edd
Tollett, the dour grey-haired squire everyone called Dolorous Edd.
“Nothing ever goes missing that they don’t look at me, ever since
that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white
and it was snowing, what did they expect?”
“The wind took that one,” said Grenn, another friend of Lord
Snow’s. “Try to hold the bow steady, Sam.”
“It’s heavy,” the fat boy complained, but he pulled the second
arrow all the same. This one went high, sailing through the

branches ten feet above the target.
“I believe you knocked a leaf o that tree,” said Dolorous Edd.
“Fall is falling fast enough, there’s no need to help it.” He sighed.
“And we all know what follows fall. Gods, but I am cold. Shoot the
last arrow, Samwell, I believe my tongue is freezing to the roof of
my mouth.”
Ser Piggy lowered the bow, and Chett thought he was going to
start bawling. “It’s too hard.”
“Notch, draw, and loose,” said Grenn. “Go on.”
Dutifully, the fat boy plucked his nal arrow from the earth,
notched it to his longbow, drew, and released. He did it quickly,
without squinting along the shaft painstakingly as he had the rst
two times. The arrow struck the charcoal outline low in the chest
and hung quivering. “I hit him.” Ser Piggy sounded shocked.
“Grenn, did you see? Edd, look, I hit him!”
“Put it between his ribs, I’d say,” said Grenn.
“Did I kill him?” the fat boy wanted to know.
Tollett shrugged. “Might have punctured a lung, if he had a lung.
Most trees don’t, as a rule.” He took the bow from Sam’s hand. “I’ve
seen worse shots, though. Aye, and made a few.”
Ser Piggy was beaming. To look at him you’d think he’d actually
done something. But when he saw Chett and the dogs, his smile
curled up and died squeaking.
“You hit a tree,” Chett said. “Let’s see how you shoot when it’s
Mance Rayder’s lads. They won’t stand there with their arms out
and their leaves rustling, oh no. They’ll come right at you,
screaming in your face, and I bet you’ll piss those breeches. One o’
them will plant his axe right between those little pig eyes. The last
thing you’ll hear will be the thunk it makes when it bites into your
skull.”
The fat boy was shaking. Dolorous Edd put a hand on his
shoulder. “Brother,” he said solemnly, “just because it happened
that way for you doesn’t mean Samwell will su er the same.”
“What are you talking about, Tollett?”
“The axe that split your skull. Is it true that half your wits leaked
out on the ground and your dogs ate them?”

The big lout Grenn laughed, and even Samwell Tarly managed a
weak little smile. Chett kicked the nearest dog, yanked on their
leashes, and started up the hill. Smile all you want, Ser Piggy. We’ll
see who laughs tonight. He only wished he had time to kill Tollett as
well. Gloomy horsefaced fool, that’s what he is.
The climb was steep, even on this side of the Fist, which had the
gentlest slope. Partway up the dogs started barking and pulling at
him, guring that they’d get fed soon. He gave them a taste of his
boot instead, and a crack of the whip for the big ugly one that
snapped at him. Once they were tied up, he went to report. “The
prints were there like Giant said, but the dogs wouldn’t track,” he
told Mormont in front of his big black tent. “Down by the river like
that, could be old prints.”
“A pity.” Lord Commander Mormont had a bald head and a great
shaggy grey beard, and sounded as tired as he looked. “We might
all have been better for a bit of fresh meat.” The raven on his
shoulder bobbed its head and echoed, “Meat. Meat. Meat.”
We could cook the bloody dogs, Chett thought, but he kept his
mouth shut until the Old Bear sent him on his way. And that’s the
last time I’ll need to bow my head to that one, he thought to himself
with satisfaction. It seemed to him that it was growing even colder,
which he would have sworn wasn’t possible. The dogs huddled
together miserably in the hard frozen mud, and Chett was half
tempted to crawl in with them. Instead he wrapped a black wool
scarf round the lower part of his face, leaving a slit for his mouth
between the winds. It was warmer if he kept moving, he found, so
he made a slow circuit of the perimeter with a wad of sourleaf,
sharing a chew or two with the black brothers on guard and hearing
what they had to say. None of the men on the day watch were part
of his scheme; even so, he gured it was good to have some sense
of what they were thinking.
Mostly what they were thinking was that it was bloody cold.
The wind was rising as the shadows lengthened. It made a high
thin sound as it shivered through the stones of the ringwall. “I hate
that sound,” little Giant said. “It sounds like a babe in the brush,
wailing away for milk.”

When he nished the circuit and returned to the dogs, he found
Lark waiting for him. “The o cers are in the Old Bear’s tent again,
talking something erce.”
“That’s what they do,” said Chett. “They’re highborn, all but
Blane, they get drunk on words instead of wine.”
Lark sidled closer. “Cheese-for-wits keeps going on about the
bird,” he warned, glancing about to make certain no one was close.
“Now he’s asking if we cached any seed for the damn thing.”
“It’s a raven,” said Chett. “It eats corpses.”
Lark grinned. “His, might be?”
Or yours. It seemed to Chett that they needed the big man more
than they needed Lark. “Stop fretting about Small Paul. You do your
part, he’ll do his.”
Twilight was creeping through the woods by the time he rid
himself of the Sisterman and sat down to edge his sword. It was
bloody hard work with his gloves on, but he wasn’t about to take
them o . Cold as it was, any fool that touched steel with a bare
hand was going to lose a patch of skin.
The dogs whimpered when the sun went down. He gave them
water and curses. “Half a night more, and you can nd your own
feast.” By then he could smell supper.
Dywen was holding forth at the cook re as Chett got his heel of
hardbread and a bowl of bean and bacon soup from Hake the cook.
“The wood’s too silent,” the old forester was saying. “No frogs near
that river, no owls in the dark. I never heard no deader wood than
this.”
“Them teeth of yours sound pretty dead,” said Hake.
Dywen clacked his wooden teeth. “No wolves neither. There was,
before, but no more. Where’d they go, you gure?”
“Someplace warm,” said Chett.
Of the dozen odd brothers who sat by the re, four were his. He
gave each one a hard squinty look as he ate, to see if any showed
signs of breaking. Dirk seemed calm enough, sitting silent and
sharpening his blade, the way he did every night. And Sweet Donnel
Hill was all easy japes. He had white teeth and fat red lips and
yellow locks that he wore in an artful tumble about his shoulders,

and he claimed to be the bastard of some Lannister. Maybe he was
at that. Chett had no use for pretty boys, nor for bastards neither,
but Sweet Donnel seemed like to hold his own.
He was less certain about the forester the brothers called
Sawwood, more for his snoring than for anything to do with trees.
Just now he looked so restless he might never snore again. And
Maslyn was worse. Chett could see sweat trickling down his face,
despite the frigid wind. The beads of moisture sparkled in the
relight, like so many little wet jewels. Maslyn wasn’t eating
neither, only staring at his soup as if the smell of it was about to
make him sick. I’ll need to watch that one, Chett thought.
“Assemble!” The shout came suddenly, from a dozen throats, and
quickly spread to every part of the hilltop camp. “Men of the
Night’s Watch! Assemble at the central re!”
Frowning, Chett nished his soup and followed the rest.
The Old Bear stood before the re with Smallwood, Locke,
Wythers, and Blane ranged behind him in a row. Mormont wore a
cloak of thick black fur, and his raven perched upon his shoulder,
preening its black feathers. This can’t be good. Chett squeezed
between Brown Bernarr and some Shadow Tower men. When
everyone was gathered, save for the watchers in the woods and the
guards on the ringwall, Mormont cleared his throat and spat. The
spittle was frozen before it hit the ground. “Brothers,” he said, “men
of the Night’s Watch.”
“Men!” his raven screamed. “Men! Men!”
“The wildlings are on the march, following the course of the
Milkwater down out of the mountains. Thoren believes their van
will be upon us ten days hence. Their most seasoned raiders will be
with Harma Dogshead in that van. The rest will likely form a
rearguard, or ride in close company with Mance Rayder himself.
Elsewhere their ghters will be spread thin along the line of march.
They have oxen, mules, horses … but few enough. Most will be
afoot, and ill-armed and untrained. Such weapons as they carry are
more like to be stone and bone than steel. They are burdened with
women, children, herds of sheep and goats, and all their worldly
goods besides. In short, though they are numerous, they are

vulnerable … and they do not know that we are here. Or so we must
pray.”
They know, thought Chett. You bloody old pus bag, they know,
certain as sunrise. Qhorin Halfhand hasn’t come back, has he? Nor
Jarman Buckwell. If any of them got caught, you know damned well the
wildlings will have wrung a song or two out of them by now.
Smallwood stepped forward. “Mance Rayder means to break the
Wall and bring red war to the Seven Kingdoms. Well, that’s a game
two can play. On the morrow we’ll bring the war to him.”
“We ride at dawn with all our strength,” the Old Bear said as a
murmur went through the assembly. “We will ride north, and loop
around to the west. Harma’s van will be well past the Fist by the
time we turn. The foothills of the Frostfangs are full of narrow
winding valleys made for ambush. Their line of march will stretch
for many miles. We shall fall on them in several places at once, and
make them swear we were three thousand, not three hundred.”
“We’ll hit hard and be away before their horsemen can form up to
face us,” Thoren Smallwood said. “If they pursue, we’ll lead them a
merry chase, then wheel and hit again farther down the column.
We’ll burn their wagons, scatter their herds, and slay as many as we
can. Mance Rayder himself, if we nd him. If they break and return
to their hovels, we’ve won. If not, we’ll harry them all the way to
the Wall, and see to it that they leave a trail of corpses to mark
their progress.”
“There are thousands,” someone called from behind Chett.
“We’ll die.” That was Maslyn’s voice, green with fear.
“Die,” screamed Mormont’s raven, apping its black wings. “Die,
die, die.”
“Many of us,” the Old Bear said. “Mayhaps even all of us. But as
another Lord Commander said a thousand years ago, that is why
they dress us in black. Remember your words, brothers. For we are
the swords in the darkness, the watchers on the walls …”
“The re that burns against the cold.” Ser Mallador Locke drew
his longsword.
“The light that brings the dawn,” others answered, and more
swords were pulled from scabbards.

Then all of them were drawing, and it was near three hundred
upraised swords and as many voices crying, “The horn that wakes the
sleepers! The shield that guards the realms of men!” Chett had no
choice but to join his voice to the others. The air was misty with
their breath, and relight glinted o the steel. He was pleased to
see Lark and Softfoot and Sweet Donnel Hill joining in, as if they
were as big fools as the rest. That was good. No sense to draw
attention, when their hour was so close.
When the shouting died away, once more he heard the sound of
the wind picking at the ringwall. The ames swirled and shivered,
as if they too were cold, and in the sudden quiet the Old Bear’s
raven cawed loudly and once again said, “Die.”
Clever bird, thought Chett as the o cers dismissed them, warning
everyone to get a good meal and a long rest tonight. Chett crawled
under his furs near the dogs, his head full of things that could go
wrong. What if that bloody oath gave one of his a change of heart?
Or Small Paul forgot and tried to kill Mormont during the second
watch in place of the third? Or Maslyn lost his courage, or someone
turned informer, or …
He found himself listening to the night. The wind did sound like a
wailing child, and from time to time he could hear men’s voices, a
horse’s whinny, a log spitting in the re. But nothing else. So quiet.
He could see Bessa’s face oating before him. It wasn’t the knife I
wanted to put in you, he wanted to tell her. I picked you owers, wild
roses and tansy and goldencups, it took me all morning. His heart was
thumping like a drum, so loud he feared it might wake the camp.
Ice caked his beard all around his mouth. Where did that come from,
with Bessa? Whenever he’d thought of her before, it had only been
to remember the way she’d looked, dying. What was wrong with
him? He could hardly breathe. Had he gone to sleep? He got to his
knees, and something wet and cold touched his nose. Chett looked
up.
Snow was falling.
He could feel tears freezing to his cheeks. It isn’t fair, he wanted
to scream. Snow would ruin everything he’d worked for, all his
careful plans. It was a heavy fall, thick white akes coming down

all about him. How would they nd their food caches in the snow,
or the game trail they meant to follow east? They won’t need Dywen
nor Bannen to hunt us down neither, not if we’re tracking through fresh
snow. And snow hid the shape of the ground, especially by night. A
horse could stumble over a root, break a leg on a stone. We’re done,
he realized. Done before we began. We’re lost. There’d be no lord’s
life for the leechman’s son, no keep to call his own, no wives nor
crowns. Only a wildling’s sword in his belly, and then an unmarked
grave. The snow’s taken it all from me … the bloody snow …
Snow had ruined him once before. Snow and his pet pig.
Chett got to his feet. His legs were sti , and the falling
snow akes turned the distant torches to vague orange glows. He
felt as though he were being attacked by a cloud of pale cold bugs.
They settled on his shoulders, on his head, they ew at his nose and
his eyes. Cursing, he brushed them o . Samwell Tarly, he
remembered. I can still deal with Ser Piggy. He wrapped his scarf
around his face, pulled up his hood, and went striding through the
camp to where the coward slept.
The snow was falling so heavily that he got lost among the tents,
but nally he spotted the snug little windbreak the fat boy had
made for himself between a rock and the raven cages. Tarly was
buried beneath a mound of black wool blankets and shaggy furs.
The snow was drifting in to cover him. He looked like some kind of
soft round mountain. Steel whispered on leather faint as hope as
Chett eased his dagger from its sheath. One of the ravens quorked.
“Snow,” another muttered, peering through the bars with black
eyes. The rst added a “Snow” of its own. He edged past them,
placing each foot carefully. He would clap his left hand down over
the fat boy’s mouth to mu e his cries, and then …
Uuuuuuuhoooooooooo.
He stopped midstep, swallowing his curse as the sound of the
horn shuddered through the camp, faint and far, yet unmistakable.
Not now. Gods be damned, not NOW! The Old Bear had hidden fareyes in a ring of trees around the Fist, to give warning of any
approach. Jarman Buckwell’s back from the Giant’s Stair, Chett
gured, or Qhorin Half-hand from the Skirling Pass. A single blast of

the horn meant brothers returning. If it was the Halfhand, Jon Snow
might be with him, alive.
Sam Tarly sat up pu y-eyed and stared at the snow in confusion.
The ravens were cawing noisily, and Chett could hear his dogs
baying. Half the bloody camp’s awake. His gloved ngers clenched
around the dagger’s hilt as he waited for the sound to die away. But
no sooner had it gone than it came again, louder and longer.
Uuuuuuuuuuuuhooooooooooooooo.
“Gods,” he heard Sam Tarly whimper. The fat boy lurched to his
knees, his feet tangled in his cloak and blankets. He kicked them
away and reached for a chainmail hauberk he’d hung on the rock
nearby. As he slipped the huge tent of a garment down over his
head and wriggled into it, he spied Chett standing there. “Was it
two?” he asked. “I dreamed I heard two blasts …”
“No dream,” said Chett. “Two blasts to call the Watch to arms.
Two blasts for foes approaching. There’s an axe out there with Piggy
writ on it, fat boy. Two blasts means wildlings.” The fear on that big
moon face made him want to laugh. “Bugger them all to seven
hells. Bloody Harma. Bloody Mance Rayder. Bloody Smallwood, he
said they wouldn’t be on us for another—”
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
The sound went on and on and on, until it seemed it would never
die. The ravens were apping and screaming, ying about their
cages and banging o the bars, and all about the camp the brothers
of the Night’s Watch were rising, donning their armor, buckling on
swordbelts, reaching for battleaxes and bows. Samwell Tarly stood
shaking, his face the same color as the snow that swirled down all
around them. “Three,” he squeaked to Chett, “that was three, I
heard three. They never blow three. Not for hundreds and
thousands of years. Three means—”
“—Others.” Chett made a sound that was half a laugh and half a
sob, and suddenly his smallclothes were wet, and he could feel the
piss running down his leg, see steam rising o the front of his
breeches.

JAIME

An east wind blew through his tangled hair, as soft and fragrant as

Cersei’s ngers. He could hear birds singing, and feel the river
moving beneath the boat as the sweep of the oars sent them toward
the pale pink dawn. After so long in darkness, the world was so
sweet that Jaime Lannister felt dizzy. I am alive, and drunk on
sunlight. A laugh burst from his lips, sudden as a quail ushed from
cover.
“Quiet,” the wench grumbled, scowling. Scowls suited her broad
homely face better than a smile. Not that Jaime had ever seen her
smiling. He amused himself by picturing her in one of Cersei’s
silken gowns in place of her studded leather jerkin. As well dress a
cow in silk as this one.
But the cow could row. Beneath her roughspun brown breeches
were calves like cords of wood, and the long muscles of her arms
stretched and tightened with each stroke of the oars. Even after
rowing half the night, she showed no signs of tiring, which was
more than could be said for his cousin Ser Cleos, laboring on the
other oar. A big strong peasant wench to look at her, yet she speaks like
one highborn and wears longsword and dagger. Ah, but can she use
them? Jaime meant to nd out, as soon as he rid himself of these
fetters.
He wore iron manacles on his wrists and a matching pair about
his ankles, joined by a length of heavy chain no more than a foot
long. “You’d think my word as a Lannister was not good enough,”

he’d japed as they bound him. He’d been very drunk by then, thanks
to Catelyn Stark. Of their escape from Riverrun, he recalled only
bits and pieces. There had been some trouble with the gaoler, but
the big wench had overcome him. After that they had climbed an
endless stair, around and around. His legs were weak as grass, and
he’d stumbled twice or thrice, until the wench lent him an arm to
lean on. At some point he was bundled into a traveler’s cloak and
shoved into the bottom of a ski . He remembered listening to Lady
Catelyn command someone to raise the portcullis on the Water
Gate. She was sending Ser Cleos Frey back to King’s Landing with
new terms for the queen, she’d declared in a tone that brooked no
argument.
He must have drifted o then. The wine had made him sleepy,
and it felt good to stretch, a luxury his chains had not permitted him
in the cell. Jaime had long ago learned to snatch sleep in the saddle
during a march. This was no harder. Tyrion is going to laugh himself
sick when he hears how I slept through my own escape. He was awake
now, though, and the fetters were irksome. “My lady,” he called
out, “if you’ll strike o these chains, I’ll spell you at those oars.”
She scowled again, her face all horse teeth and glowering
suspicion. “You’ll wear your chains, Kingslayer.”
“You gure to row all the way to King’s Landing, wench?”
“You will call me Brienne. Not wench.”
“My name is Ser Jaime. Not Kingslayer.”
“Do you deny that you slew a king?”
“No. Do you deny your sex? If so, unlace those breeches and show
me.” He gave her an innocent smile. “I’d ask you to open your
bodice, but from the look of you that wouldn’t prove much.”
Ser Cleos fretted. “Cousin, remember your courtesies.”
The Lannister blood runs thin in this one. Cleos was his Aunt
Genna’s son by that dullard Emmon Frey, who had lived in terror of
Lord Tywin Lannister since the day he wed his sister. When Lord
Walder Frey had brought the Twins into the war on the side of
Riverrun, Ser Emmon had chosen his wife’s allegiance over his
father’s. Casterly Rock got the worst of that bargain, Jaime re ected.
Ser Cleos looked like a weasel, fought like a goose, and had the

courage of an especially brave ewe. Lady Stark had promised him
release if he delivered her message to Tyrion, and Ser Cleos had
solemnly vowed to do so.
They’d all done a deal of vowing back in that cell, Jaime most of
all. That was Lady Catelyn’s price for loosing him. She had laid the
point of the big wench’s sword against his heart and said, “Swear
that you will never again take up arms against Stark nor Tully.
Swear that you will compel your brother to honor his pledge to
return my daughters safe and unharmed. Swear on your honor as a
knight, on your honor as a Lannister, on your honor as a Sworn
Brother of the Kingsguard. Swear it by your sister’s life, and your
father’s, and your son’s, by the old gods and the new, and I’ll send
you back to your sister. Refuse, and I will have your blood.” He
remembered the prick of the steel through his rags as she twisted
the point of the sword.
I wonder what the High Septon would have to say about the sanctity of
oaths sworn while dead drunk, chained to a wall, with a sword pressed
to your chest? Not that Jaime was truly concerned about that fat
fraud, or the gods he claimed to serve. He remembered the pail
Lady Catelyn had kicked over in his cell. A strange woman, to trust
her girls to a man with shit for honor. Though she was trusting him
as little as she dared. She is putting her hope in Tyrion, not in me.
“Perhaps she is not so stupid after all,” he said aloud.
His captor took it wrong. “I am not stupid. Nor deaf.”
He was gentle with her; mocking this one would be so easy there
would be no sport to it. “I was speaking to myself, and not of you.
It’s an easy habit to slip into in a cell.”
She frowned at him, pushing the oars forward, pulling them back,
pushing them forward, saying nothing.
As glib of tongue as she is fair of face. “By your speech, I’d judge
you nobly born.”
“My father is Selwyn of Tarth, by the grace of the gods Lord of
Evenfall.” Even that was given grudgingly.
“Tarth,” Jaime said. “A ghastly large rock in the narrow sea, as I
recall. And Evenfall is sworn to Storm’s End. How is it that you
serve Robb of Winterfell?”

“It is Lady Catelyn I serve. And she commanded me to deliver
you safe to your brother Tyrion at King’s Landing, not to bandy
words with you. Be silent.”
“I’ve had a bellyful of silence, woman.”
“Talk with Ser Cleos then. I have no words for monsters.”
Jaime hooted. “Are there monsters hereabouts? Hiding beneath
the water, perhaps? In that thick of willows? And me without my
sword!”
“A man who would violate his own sister, murder his king, and
ing an innocent child to his death deserves no other name.”
Innocent? The wretched boy was spying on us. All Jaime had wanted
was an hour alone with Cersei. Their journey north had been one
long torment; seeing her every day, unable to touch her, knowing
that Robert stumbled drunkenly into her bed every night in that
great creaking wheelhouse. Tyrion had done his best to keep him in
a good humor, but it had not been enough. “You will be courteous
as concerns Cersei, wench,” he warned her.
“My name is Brienne, not wench.”
“What do you care what a monster calls you?”
“My name is Brienne,” she repeated, dogged as a hound.
“Lady Brienne?” She looked so uncomfortable that Jaime sensed a
weakness. “Or would Ser Brienne be more to your taste?” He
laughed. “No, I fear not. You can trick out a milk cow in crupper,
crinet, and chamfron, and bard her all in silk, but that doesn’t mean
you can ride her into battle.”
“Cousin Jaime, please, you ought not speak so roughly.” Under
his cloak, Ser Cleos wore a surcoat quartered with the twin towers
of House Frey and the golden lion of Lannister. “We have far to go,
we should not quarrel amongst ourselves.”
“When I quarrel I do it with a sword, coz. I was speaking to the
lady. Tell me, wench, are all the women on Tarth as homely as you?
I pity the men, if so. Perhaps they do not know what real women
look like, living on a dreary mountain in the sea.”
“Tarth is beautiful,” the wench grunted between strokes. “The
Sapphire Isle, it’s called. Be quiet, monster, unless you mean to
make me gag you.”

“She’s rude as well, isn’t she, coz?” Jaime asked Ser Cleos.
“Though she has steel in her spine, I’ll grant you. Not many men
dare name me monster to my face.” Though behind my back they
speak freely enough, I have no doubt.
Ser Cleos coughed nervously. “Lady Brienne had those lies from
Catelyn Stark, no doubt. The Starks cannot hope to defeat you with
swords, ser, so now they make war with poisoned words.”
They did defeat me with swords, you chinless cretin. Jaime smiled
knowingly. Men will read all sorts of things into a knowing smile, if
you let them. Has cousin Cleos truly swallowed this kettle of dung, or is
he striving to ingratiate himself? What do we have here, an honest
muttonhead or a lickspittle?
Ser Cleos prattled blithely on. “Any man who’d believe that a
Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard would harm a child does not know
the meaning of honor.”
Lickspittle. If truth be told, Jaime had come to rue heaving
Brandon Stark out that window. Cersei had given him no end of
grief afterward, when the boy refused to die. “He was seven,
Jaime,” she’d berated him. “Even if he understood what he saw, we
should have been able to frighten him into silence.”
“I didn’t think you’d want—”
“You never think. If the boy should wake and tell his father what
he saw—”
“If if if.” He had pulled her into his lap. “If he wakes we’ll say he
was dreaming, we’ll call him a liar, and should worse come to worst
I’ll kill Ned Stark.”
“And then what do you imagine Robert will do?”
“Let Robert do as he pleases. I’ll go to war with him if I must.
The War for Cersei’s Cunt, the singers will call it.”
“Jaime, let go of me!” she raged, struggling to rise.
Instead he had kissed her. For a moment she resisted, but then
her mouth opened under his. He remembered the taste of wine and
cloves on her tongue. She gave a shudder. His hand went to her
bodice and yanked, tearing the silk so her breasts spilled free, and
for a time the Stark boy had been forgotten.

Had Cersei remembered him afterward and hired this man Lady
Catelyn spoke of, to make sure the boy never woke? If she wanted
him dead she would have sent me. And it is not like her to chose a
catspaw who would make such a royal botch of the killing.
Downriver, the rising sun shimmered against the wind-whipped
surface of the river. The south shore was red clay, smooth as any
road. Smaller streams fed into the greater, and the rotting trunks of
drowned trees clung to the banks. The north shore was wilder. High
rocky blu s rose twenty feet above them, crowned by stands of
beech, oak, and chestnut. Jaime spied a watchtower on the heights
ahead, growing taller with every stroke of the oars. Long before
they were upon it, he knew that it stood abandoned, its weathered
stones overgrown with climbing roses.
When the wind shifted, Ser Cleos helped the big wench run up the
sail, a sti triangle of striped red-and-blue canvas. Tully colors, sure
to cause them grief if they encountered any Lannister forces on the
river, but it was the only sail they had. Brienne took the rudder.
Jaime threw out the leeboard, his chains rattling as he moved. After
that, they made better speed, with wind and current both favoring
their ight. “We could save a deal of traveling if you delivered me
to my father instead of my brother,” he pointed out.
“Lady Catelyn’s daughters are in King’s Landing. I will return
with the girls or not at all.”
Jaime turned to Ser Cleos. “Cousin, lend me your knife.”
“No.” The woman tensed. “I will not have you armed.” Her voice
was as unyielding as stone.
She fears me, even in irons. “Cleos, it seems I must ask you to
shave me. Leave the beard, but take the hair o my head.”
“You’d be shaved bald?” asked Cleos Frey.
“The realm knows Jaime Lannister as a beardless knight with
long golden hair. A bald man with a lthy yellow beard may pass
unnoticed. I’d sooner not be recognized while I’m in irons.”
The dagger was not as sharp as it might have been. Cleos hacked
away manfully, sawing and ripping his way through the mats and
tossing the hair over the side. The golden curls oated on the
surface of the water, gradually falling astern. As the tangles

vanished, a louse went crawling down his neck. Jaime caught it and
crushed it against his thumbnail. Ser Cleos picked others from his
scalp and icked them into the water. Jaime doused his head and
made Ser Cleos whet the blade before he let him scrape away the
last inch of yellow stubble. When that was done, they trimmed back
his beard as well.
The re ection in the water was a man he did not know. Not only
was he bald, but he looked as though he had aged ve years in that
dungeon; his face was thinner, with hollows under his eyes and lines
he did not remember. I don’t look as much like Cersei this way. She’ll
hate that.
By midday, Ser Cleos had fallen asleep. His snores sounded like
ducks mating. Jaime stretched out to watch the world ow past;
after the dark cell, every rock and tree was a wonder.
A few one-room shacks came and went, perched on tall poles that
made them look like cranes. Of the folk who lived there they saw
no sign. Birds ew overhead, or cried out from the trees along the
shore, and Jaime glimpsed silvery sh kni ng through the water.
Tully trout, there’s a bad omen, he thought, until he saw a worse—
one of the oating logs they passed turned out to be a dead man,
bloodless and swollen. His cloak was tangled in the roots of a fallen
tree, its color unmistakably Lannister crimson. He wondered if the
corpse had been someone he knew.
The forks of the Trident were the easiest way to move goods or
men across the riverlands. In times of peace, they would have
encountered sherfolk in their ski s, grain barges being poled
downstream, merchants selling needles and bolts of cloth from
oating shops, perhaps even a gaily painted mummer’s boat with
quilted sails of half a hundred colors, making its way upriver from
village to village and castle to castle.
But the war had taken its toll. They sailed past villages, but saw
no villagers. An empty net, slashed and torn and hanging from some
trees, was the only sign of sherfolk. A young girl watering her
horse rode o as soon as she glimpsed their sail. Later they passed a
dozen peasants digging in a eld beneath the shell of a burnt

towerhouse. The men gazed at them with dull eyes, and went back
to their labors once they decided the ski was no threat.
The Red Fork was wide and slow, a meandering river of loops
and bends dotted with tiny wooded islets and frequently choked by
sandbars and snags that lurked just below the water’s surface.
Brienne seemed to have a keen eye for the dangers, though, and
always seemed to nd the channel. When Jaime complimented her
on her knowledge of the river, she looked at him suspiciously and
said, “I do not know the river. Tarth is an island. I learned to
manage oars and sail before I ever sat a horse.”
Ser Cleos sat up and rubbed at his eyes. “Gods, my arms are sore.
I hope the wind lasts.” He sni ed at it. “I smell rain.”
Jaime would welcome a good rain. The dungeons of Riverrun
were not the cleanest place in the Seven Kingdoms. By now he must
smell like an overripe cheese.
Cleos squinted downriver. “Smoke.”
A thin grey nger crooked them on. It was rising from the south
bank several miles on, twisting and curling. Below, Jaime made out
the smouldering remains of a large building, and a live oak full of
dead women.
The crows had scarcely started on their corpses. The thin ropes
cut deeply into the soft esh of their throats, and when the wind
blew they twisted and swayed. “This was not chivalrously done,”
said Brienne when they were close enough to see it clearly. “No true
knight would condone such wanton butchery.”
“True knights see worse every time they ride to war, wench,”
said Jaime. “And do worse, yes.”
Brienne turned the rudder toward the shore. “I’ll leave no
innocents to be food for crows.”
“A heartless wench. Crows need to eat as well. Stay to the river
and leave the dead alone, woman.”
They landed upstream of where the great oak leaned out over the
water. As Brienne lowered the sail, Jaime climbed out, clumsy in his
chains. The Red Fork lled his boots and soaked through the ragged
breeches. Laughing, he dropped to his knees, plunged his head
under the water, and came up drenched and dripping. His hands

were caked with dirt, and when he rubbed them clean in the current
they seemed thinner and paler than he remembered. His legs were
sti as well, and unsteady when he put his weight upon them. I was
too bloody long in Hoster Tully’s dungeon.
Brienne and Cleos dragged the ski onto the bank. The corpses
hung above their heads, ripening in death like foul fruit. “One of us
will need to cut them down,” the wench said.
“I’ll climb.” Jaime waded ashore, clanking. “Just get these chains
o .”
The wench was staring up at one of the dead women. Jaime
shu ed closer with small stutter steps, the only kind the foot-long
chain permitted. When he saw the crude sign hung about the neck
of the highest corpse, he smiled. “They Lay With Lions,” he read.
“Oh, yes, woman, this was most unchivalrously done … but by your
side, not mine. I wonder who they were, these women?”
“Tavern wenches,” said Ser Cleos Frey. “This was an inn, I
remember it now. Some men of my escort spent the night here
when we last returned to Riverrun.” Nothing remained of the
building but the stone foundation and a tangle of collapsed beams,
charred black. Smoke still rose from the ashes.
Jaime left brothels and whores to his brother Tyrion; Cersei was
the only woman he had ever wanted. “The girls pleasured some of
my lord father’s soldiers, it would seem. Perhaps served them food
and drink. That’s how they earned their traitors’ collars, with a kiss
and a cup of ale.” He glanced up and down the river, to make
certain they were quite alone. “This is Bracken land. Lord Jonos
might have ordered them killed. My father burned his castle, I fear
he loves us not.”
“It might be Marq Piper’s work,” said Ser Cleos. “Or that wisp o’
the wood Beric Dondarrion, though I’d heard he kills only soldiers.
Perhaps a band of Roose Bolton’s northmen?”
“Bolton was defeated by my father on the Green Fork.”
“But not broken,” said Ser Cleos. “He came south again when
Lord Tywin marched against the fords. The word at Riverrun was
that he’d taken Harrenhal from Ser Amory Lorch.”

Jaime liked the sound of that not at all. “Brienne,” he said,
granting her the courtesy of the name in the hopes that she might
listen, “if Lord Bolton holds Harrenhal, both the Trident and the
kingsroad are likely watched.”
He thought he saw a touch of uncertainty in her big blue eyes.
“You are under my protection. They’d need to kill me.”
“I shouldn’t think that would trouble them.”
“I am as good a ghter as you,” she said defensively. “I was one
of King Renly’s chosen seven. With his own hands, he cloaked me
with the striped silk of the Rainbow Guard.”
“The Rainbow Guard? You and six other girls, was it? A singer
once said that all maids are fair in silk … but he never met you, did
he?”
The woman turned red. “We have graves to dig.” She went to
climb the tree.
The lower limbs of the oak were big enough for her to stand upon
once she’d gotten up the trunk. She walked amongst the leaves,
dagger in hand, cutting down the corpses. Flies swarmed around the
bodies as they fell, and the stench grew worse with each one she
dropped. “This is a deal of trouble to take for whores,” Ser Cleos
complained. “What are we supposed to dig with? We have no
spades, and I will not use my sword, I—”
Brienne gave a shout. She jumped down rather than climbing. “To
the boat. Be quick. There’s a sail.”
They made what haste they could, though Jaime could hardly
run, and had to be pulled back up into the ski by his cousin.
Brienne shoved o with an oar and raised sail hurriedly. “Ser Cleos,
I’ll need you to row as well.”
He did as she bid. The ski began to cut the water a bit faster;
current, wind, and oars all worked for them. Jaime sat chained,
peering upriver. Only the top of the other sail was visible. With the
way the Red Fork looped, it looked to be across the elds, moving
north behind a screen of trees while they moved south, but he knew
that was deceptive. He lifted both hands to shade his eyes. “Mud
red and watery blue,” he announced.

Brienne’s big mouth worked soundlessly, giving her the look of a
cow chewing its cud. “Faster, ser.”
The inn soon vanished behind them, and they lost sight of the top
of the sail as well, but that meant nothing. Once the pursuers swung
around the loop they would become visible again. “We can hope the
noble Tullys will stop to bury the dead whores, I suppose.” The
prospect of returning to his cell did not appeal to Jaime. Tyrion
could think of something clever now, but all that occurs to me is to go at
them with a sword.
For the good part of an hour they played peek-and-seek with the
pursuers, sweeping around bends and between small wooded isles.
Just when they were starting to hope that somehow they might
have left behind the pursuit, the distant sail became visible again.
Ser Cleos paused in his stroke. “The Others take them.” He wiped
sweat from his brow.
“Row!” Brienne said.
“That is a river galley coming after us,” Jaime announced after
he’d watched for a while. With every stroke, it seemed to grow a
little larger. “Nine oars on each side, which means eighteen men.
More, if they crowded on ghters as well as rowers. And larger sails
than ours. We cannot outrun her.”
Ser Cleos froze at his oars. “Eighteen, you said?”
“Six for each of us. I’d want eight, but these bracelets hinder me
somewhat.” Jaime held up his wrists. “Unless the Lady Brienne
would be so kind as to unshackle me?”
She ignored him, putting all her e ort into her stroke.
“We had half a night’s start on them,” Jaime said. “They’ve been
rowing since dawn, resting two oars at a time. They’ll be exhausted.
Just now the sight of our sail has given them a burst of strength,
but that will not last. We ought to be able to kill a good many of
them.”
Ser Cleos gaped. “But … there are eighteen.”
“At the least. More likely twenty or twenty- ve.”
His cousin groaned. “We can’t hope to defeat eighteen.”
“Did I say we could? The best we can hope for is to die with
swords in our hands.” He was perfectly sincere. Jaime Lannister had

never been afraid of death.
Brienne broke o rowing. Sweat had stuck strands of her axcolored hair to her forehead, and her grimace made her look
homelier than ever. “You are under my protection,” she said, her
voice so thick with anger that it was almost a growl.
He had to laugh at such erceness. She’s the Hound with teats, he
thought. Or would be, if she had any teats to speak of. “Then protect
me, wench. Or free me to protect myself.”
The galley was skimming downriver, a great wooden dragon y.
The water around her was churned white by the furious action of
her oars. She was gaining visibly, the men on her deck crowding
forward as she came on. Metal glinted in their hands, and Jaime
could see bows as well. Archers. He hated archers.
At the prow of the onrushing galley stood a stocky man with a
bald head, bushy grey eyebrows, and brawny arms. Over his mail
he wore a soiled white surcoat with a weeping willow embroidered
in pale green, but his cloak was fastened with a silver trout.
Riverrun’s captain of guards. In his day Ser Robin Ryger had been a
notably tenacious ghter, but his day was done; he was of an age
with Hoster Tully, and had grown old with his lord.
When the boats were fty yards apart, Jaime cupped his hands
around his mouth and shouted back over the water. “Come to wish
me godspeed, Ser Robin?”
“Come to take you back, Kingslayer,” Ser Robin Ryger bellowed.
“How is it that you’ve lost your golden hair?”
“I hope to blind my enemies with the sheen o my head. It’s worked
well enough for you.”
Ser Robin was unamused. The distance between ski and galley
had shrunk to forty yards. “Throw your oars and your weapons into
the river, and no one need be harmed.”
Ser Cleos twisted around. “Jaime, tell him we were freed by Lady
Catelyn … an exchange of captives, lawful …”
Jaime told him, for all the good it did. “Catelyn Stark does not rule
in Riverrun,” Ser Robin shouted back. Four archers crowded into
position on either side of him, two standing and two kneeling. “Cast
your swords into the water.”

“I have no sword,” he returned, “but if I did, I’d stick it through your
belly and hack the balls o those four cravens.”
A ight of arrows answered him. One thudded into the mast, two
pierced the sail, and the fourth missed Jaime by a foot.
Another of the Red Fork’s broad loops loomed before them.
Brienne angled the ski across the bend. The yard swung as they
turned, their sail cracking as it lled with wind. Ahead a large
island sat in midstream. The main channel owed right. To the left
a cuto ran between the island and the high blu s of the north
shore. Brienne moved the tiller and the ski sheared left, sail
rippling. Jaime watched her eyes. Pretty eyes, he thought, and calm.
He knew how to read a man’s eyes. He knew what fear looked like.
She is determined, not desperate.
Thirty yards behind, the galley was entering the bend. “Ser Cleos,
take the tiller,” the wench commanded. “Kingslayer, take an oar
and keep us o the rocks.”
“As my lady commands.” An oar was not a sword, but the blade
could break a man’s face if well swung, and the shaft could be used
to parry.
Ser Cleos shoved the oar into Jaime’s hand and scrambled aft.
They crossed the head of the island and turned sharply down the
cuto , sending a wash of water against the face of the blu as the
boat tilted. The island was densely wooded, a tangle of willows,
oaks, and tall pines that cast deep shadows across the rushing water,
hiding snags and the rotted trunks of drowned trees. To their left
the blu rose sheer and rocky, and at its foot the river foamed
whitely around broken boulders and tumbles of rock fallen from the
cli face.
They passed from sunlight into shadow, hidden from the galley’s
view between the green wall of the trees and the stony grey-brown
blu . A few moments’ respite from the arrows, Jaime thought, pushing
them o a half-submerged boulder.
The ski rocked. He heard a soft splash, and when he glanced
around, Brienne was gone. A moment later he spied her again,
pulling herself from the water at the base of the blu . She waded
through a shallow pool, scrambled over some rocks, and began to

climb. Ser Cleos goggled, mouth open. Fool, thought Jaime. “Ignore
the wench,” he snapped at his cousin. “Steer.”
They could see the sail moving behind the trees. The river galley
came into full view at the top of the cuto , twenty- ve yards
behind. Her bow swung hard as she came around, and a half-dozen
arrows took ight, but all went well wide. The motion of the two
boats was giving the archers di culty, but Jaime knew they’d soon
enough learn to compensate. Brienne was halfway up the cli face,
pulling herself from handhold to handhold. Ryger’s sure to see her,
and once he does he’ll have those bowmen bring her down. Jaime
decided to see if the old man’s pride would make him stupid. “Ser
Robin,” he shouted, “hear me for a moment.”
Ser Robin raised a hand, and his archers lowered their bows. “Say
what you will, Kingslayer, but say it quickly.”
The ski swung through a litter of broken stones as Jaime called
out, “I know a better way to settle this—single combat. You and I.”
“I was not born this morning, Lannister.”
“No, but you’re like to die this afternoon.” Jaime raised his hands so
the other could see the manacles. “I’ll ght you in chains. What could
you fear?”
“Not you, ser. If the choice were mine, I’d like nothing better, but I am
commanded to bring you back alive if possible. Bowmen.” He signaled
them on. “Notch. Draw. Loo—”
The range was less than twenty yards. The archers could scarcely
have missed, but as they pulled on their longbows a rain of pebbles
cascaded down around them. Small stones rattled on their deck,
bounced o their helms, and made splashes on both sides of the
bow. Those who had wits enough to understand raised their eyes
just as a boulder the size of a cow detached itself from the top of
the blu . Ser Robin shouted in dismay. The stone tumbled through
the air, struck the face of the cli , cracked in two, and smashed
down on them. The larger piece snapped the mast, tore through the
sail, sent two of the archers ying into the river, and crushed the
leg of a rower as he bent over his oar. The rapidity with which the
galley began to ll with water suggested that the smaller fragment
had punched right through her hull. The oarsman’s screams echoed

o the blu while the archers ailed wildly in the current. From the
way they were splashing, neither man could swim. Jaime laughed.
By the time they emerged from the cuto , the galley was
foundering amongst pools, eddies, and snags, and Jaime Lannister
had decided that the gods were good. Ser Robin and his thricedamned archers would have a long wet walk back to Riverrun, and
he was rid of the big homely wench as well. I could not have planned
it better myself. Once I’m free of these irons …
Ser Cleos raised a shout. When Jaime looked up, Brienne was
lumbering along the cli top well ahead of them, having cut across a
nger of land while they were following the bend in the river. She
threw herself o the rock, and looked almost graceful as she folded
into a dive. It would have been ungracious to hope that she would
smash her head on a stone. Ser Cleos turned the ski toward her.
Thankfully, Jaime still had his oar. One good swing when she comes
paddling up and I’ll be free of her.
Instead he found himself stretching the oar out over the water.
Brienne grabbed hold, and Jaime pulled her in. As he helped her
into the ski , water ran from her hair and dripped from her sodden
clothing to pool on the deck. She’s even uglier wet. Who would have
thought it possible? “You’re a bloody stupid wench,” he told her. “We
could have sailed on without you. I suppose you expect me to thank
you?”
“I want none of your thanks, Kingslayer. I swore an oath to bring
you safe to King’s Landing.”
“And you actually mean to keep it?” Jaime gave her his brightest
smile. “Now there’s a wonder.”

CATELYN

Ser Desmond Grell had served House Tully all his life. He had been

a squire when Catelyn was born, a knight when she learned to walk
and ride and swim, master-at-arms by the day that she was wed. He
had seen Lord Hoster’s little Cat become a young woman, a great
lord’s lady, mother to a king. And now he has seen me become a
traitor as well.
Her brother Edmure had named Ser Desmond castellan of
Riverrun when he rode o to battle, so it fell to him to deal with
her crime. To ease his discomfort he brought her father’s steward
with him, dour Utherydes Wayn. The two men stood and looked at
her; Ser Desmond stout, red-faced, embarrassed, Utherydes grave,
gaunt, melancholy. Each waited for the other to speak. They have
given their lives to my father’s service, and I have repaid them with
disgrace, Catelyn thought wearily.
“Your sons,” Ser Desmond said at last. “Maester Vyman told us.
The poor lads. Terrible. Terrible. But …”
“We share your grief, my lady,” said Utherydes Wayn. “All
Riverrun mourns with you, but …”
“The news must have driven you mad,” Ser Desmond broke in, “a
madness of grief, a mother’s madness, men will understand. You did
not know …”
“I did,” Catelyn said rmly. “I understood what I was doing and
knew it was treasonous. If you fail to punish me, men will believe
that we connived together to free Jaime Lannister. It was mine own

act and mine alone, and I alone must answer for it. Put me in the
Kingslayer’s empty irons, and I will wear them proudly, if that is
how it must be.”
“Fetters?” The very word seemed to shock poor Ser Desmond.
“For the king’s mother, my lord’s own daughter? Impossible.”
“Mayhaps,” said the steward Utherydes Wayn, “my lady would
consent to be con ned to her chambers until Ser Edmure returns. A
time alone, to pray for her murdered sons?”
“Con ned, aye,” Ser Desmond said. “Con ned to a tower cell,
that would serve.”
“If I am to be con ned, let it be in my father’s chambers, so I
might comfort him in his last days.”
Ser Desmond considered a moment. “Very well. You shall lack no
comfort nor courtesy, but freedom of the castle is denied you. Visit
the sept as you need, but elsewise remain in Lord Hoster’s chambers
until Lord Edmure returns.”
“As you wish.” Her brother was no lord while their father lived,
but Catelyn did not correct him. “Set a guard on me if you must, but
I give you my pledge that I shall attempt no escape.”
Ser Desmond nodded, plainly glad to be done with his distasteful
task, but sad-eyed Utherydes Wayn lingered a moment after the
castellan took his leave. “It was a grave thing you did, my lady, but
for naught. Ser Desmond has sent Ser Robin Ryger after them, to
bring back the Kingslayer … or failing that, his head.”
Catelyn had expected no less. May the Warrior give strength to your
sword arm, Brienne, she prayed. She had done all she could; nothing
remained but to hope.
Her things were moved into her father’s bedchamber, dominated
by the great canopied bed she had been born in, its pillars carved in
the shapes of leaping trout. Her father himself had been moved half
a turn down the stair, his sickbed placed to face the triangular
balcony that opened o his solar, from whence he could see the
rivers that he had always loved so well.
Lord Hoster was sleeping when Catelyn entered. She went out to
the balcony and stood with one hand on the rough stone balustrade.
Beyond the point of the castle the swift Tumblestone joined the

placid Red Fork, and she could see a long way downriver. If a striped
sail comes from the east, it will be Ser Robin returning. For the moment
the surface of the waters was empty. She thanked the gods for that,
and went back inside to sit with her father.
Catelyn could not say if Lord Hoster knew that she was there, or
if her presence brought him any comfort, but it gave her solace to
be with him. What would you say if you knew my crime, Father? she
wondered. Would you have done as I did, if it were Lysa and me in the
hands of our enemies? Or would you condemn me too, and call it
mother’s madness?
There was a smell of death about that room; a heavy smell, sweet
and foul, clinging. It reminded her of the sons that she had lost, her
sweet Bran and her little Rickon, slain at the hand of Theon
Greyjoy, who had been Ned’s ward. She still grieved for Ned, she
would always grieve for Ned, but to have her babies taken as
well … “It is a monstrous cruel thing to lose a child,” she whispered
softly, more to herself than to her father.
Lord Hoster’s eyes opened. “Tansy,” he husked in a voice thick
with pain.
He does not know me. Catelyn had grown accustomed to him
taking her for her mother or her sister Lysa, but Tansy was a name
strange to her. “It’s Catelyn,” she said. “It’s Cat, Father.”
“Forgive me … the blood … oh, please … Tansy …”
Could there have been another woman in her father’s life? Some
village maiden he had wronged when he was young, perhaps? Could
he have found comfort in some serving wench’s arms after Mother died?
It was a queer thought, unsettling. Suddenly she felt as though she
had not known her father at all. “Who is Tansy, my lord? Do you
want me to send for her, Father? Where would I nd the woman?
Does she still live?”
Lord Hoster groaned. “Dead.” His hand groped for hers. “You’ll
have others … sweet babes, and trueborn.”
Others? Catelyn thought. Has he forgotten that Ned is gone? Is he still
talking to Tansy, or is it me now, or Lysa, or Mother?
When he coughed, the sputum came up bloody. He clutched her
ngers. “… be a good wife and the gods will bless

you … sons … trueborn sons … aaahhh.” The sudden spasm of pain
made Lord Hoster’s hand tighten. His nails dug into her hand, and
he gave a mu ed scream.
Maester Vyman came quickly, to mix another dose of milk of the
poppy and help his lord swallow it down. Soon enough, Lord Hoster
Tully had fallen back into a heavy sleep.
“He was asking after a woman,” said Cat. “Tansy.”
“Tansy?” The maester looked at her blankly.
“You know no one by that name? A serving girl, a woman from
some nearby village? Perhaps someone from years past?” Catelyn
had been gone from Riverrun for a very long time.
“No, my lady. I can make inquiries, if you like. Utherydes Wayn
would surely know if any such person ever served at Riverrun.
Tansy, did you say? The smallfolk often name their daughters after
owers and herbs.” The maester looked thoughtful. “There was a
widow, I recall, she used to come to the castle looking for old shoes
in need of new soles. Her name was Tansy, now that I think on it.
Or was it Pansy? Some such. But she has not come for many
years …”
“Her name was Violet,” said Catelyn, who remembered the old
woman very well.
“Was it?” The maester looked apologetic. “My pardons, Lady
Catelyn, but I may not stay. Ser Desmond has decreed that we are
to speak to you only so far as our duties require.”
“Then you must do as he commands.” Catelyn could not blame
Ser Desmond; she had given him small reason to trust her, and no
doubt he feared that she might use the loyalty that many of the folk
of Riverrun would still feel toward their lord’s daughter to work
some further mischief. I am free of the war, at least, she told herself,
if only for a little while.
After the maester had gone, she donned a woolen cloak and
stepped out onto the balcony once more. Sunlight shimmered on the
rivers, gilding the surface of the waters as they rolled past the
castle. Catelyn shaded her eyes against the glare, searching for a
distant sail, dreading the sight of one. But there was nothing, and
nothing meant that her hopes were still alive.

All that day she watched, and well into the night, until her legs
ached from the standing. A raven came to the castle in late
afternoon, apping down on great black wings to the rookery. Dark
wings, dark words, she thought, remembering the last bird that had
come and the horror it had brought.
Maester Vyman returned at evenfall to minister to Lord Tully and
bring Catelyn a modest supper of bread, cheese, and boiled beef
with horseradish. “I spoke to Utherydes Wayn, my lady. He is quite
certain that no woman by the name of Tansy has ever been at
Riverrun during his service.”
“There was a raven today, I saw. Has Jaime been taken again?”
Or slain, gods forbid?
“No, my lady, we’ve had no word of the Kingslayer.”
“Is it another battle, then? Is Edmure in di culty? Or Robb?
Please, be kind, put my fears at rest.”
“My lady, I should not …” Vyman glanced about, as if to make
certain no one else was in the room. “Lord Tywin has left the
riverlands. All’s quiet on the fords.”
“Whence came the raven, then?”
“From the west,” he answered, busying himself with Lord
Hoster’s bedclothes and avoiding her eyes.
“Was it news of Robb?”
He hesitated. “Yes, my lady.”
“Something is wrong.” She knew it from his manner. He was
hiding something from her. “Tell me. Is it Robb? Is he hurt?” Not
dead, gods be good, please do not tell me that he is dead.
“His Grace took a wound storming the Crag,” Maester Vyman
said, still evasive, “but writes that it is no cause for concern, and
that he hopes to return soon.”
“A wound? What sort of wound? How serious?”
“No cause for concern, he writes.”
“All wounds concern me. Is he being cared for?”
“I am certain of it. The maester at the Crag will tend to him, I
have no doubt.”
“Where was he wounded?”

“My lady, I am commanded not to speak with you. I am sorry.”
Gathering up his potions, Vyman made a hurried exit, and once
again Catelyn was left alone with her father. The milk of the poppy
had done its work, and Lord Hoster was sunk in heavy sleep. A thin
line of spittle ran down from one corner of his open mouth to
dampen his pillow. Catelyn took a square of linen and wiped it
away gently. When she touched him, Lord Hoster moaned. “Forgive
me,” he said, so softly she could scarcely hear the words.
“Tansy … blood … the blood … gods be kind …”
His words disturbed her more than she could say, though she
could make no sense of them. Blood, she thought. Must it all come
back to blood? Father, who was this woman, and what did you do to her
that needs so much forgiveness?
That night Catelyn slept tfully, haunted by formless dreams of
her children, the lost and the dead. Well before the break of day,
she woke with her father’s words echoing in her ears. Sweet babes,
and trueborn … why would he say that, unless … could he have
fathered a bastard on this woman Tansy? She could not believe it. Her
brother Edmure, yes; it would not have surprised her to learn that
Edmure had a dozen natural children. But not her father, not Lord
Hoster Tully, never.
Could Tansy be some pet name he called Lysa, the way he called me
Cat? Lord Hoster had mistaken her for her sister before. You’ll have
others, he said. Sweet babes, and trueborn. Lysa had miscarried ve
times, twice in the Eyrie, thrice at King’s Landing … but never at
Riverrun, where Lord Hoster would have been at hand to comfort
her. Never, unless … unless she was with child, that rst time …
She and her sister had been married on the same day, and left in
their father’s care when their new husbands had ridden o to rejoin
Robert’s rebellion. Afterward, when their moon blood did not come
at the accustomed time, Lysa had gushed happily of the sons she
was certain they carried. “Your son will be heir to Winterfell and
mine to the Eyrie. Oh, they’ll be the best of friends, like your Ned
and Lord Robert. They’ll be more brothers than cousins, truly, I just
know it.” She was so happy.

But Lysa’s blood had come not long after, and all the joy had
gone out of her. Catelyn had always thought that Lysa had simply
been a little late, but if she had been with child …
She remembered the rst time she gave her sister Robb to hold;
small, red-faced, and squalling, but strong even then, full of life. No
sooner had Catelyn placed the babe in her sister’s arms than Lysa’s
face dissolved into tears. Hurriedly she had thrust the baby back at
Catelyn and ed.
If she had lost a child before, that might explain Father’s words, and
much else besides … Lysa’s match with Lord Arryn had been hastily
arranged, and Jon was an old man even then, older than their
father. An old man without an heir. His rst two wives had left him
childless, his brother’s son had been murdered with Brandon Stark
in King’s Landing, his gallant cousin had died in the Battle of the
Bells. He needed a young wife if House Arryn was to continue … a
young wife known to be fertile.
Catelyn rose, threw on a robe, and descended the steps to the
darkened solar to stand over her father. A sense of helpless dread
lled her. “Father,” she said, “Father, I know what you did.” She
was no longer an innocent bride with a head full of dreams. She was
a widow, a traitor, a grieving mother, and wise, wise in the ways of
the world. “You made him take her,” she whispered. “Lysa was the
price Jon Arryn had to pay for the swords and spears of House
Tully.”
Small wonder her sister’s marriage had been so loveless. The
Arryns were proud, and prickly of their honor. Lord Jon might wed
Lysa to bind the Tullys to the cause of the rebellion, and in hopes of
a son, but it would have been hard for him to love a woman who
came to his bed soiled and unwilling. He would have been kind, no
doubt; dutiful, yes; but Lysa needed warmth.
The next day, as she broke her fast, Catelyn asked for quill and
paper and began a letter to her sister in the Vale of Arryn. She told
Lysa of Bran and Rickon, struggling with the words, but mostly she
wrote of their father. His thoughts are all of the wrong he did you, now
that his time grows short. Maester Vyman says he dare not make the milk
of the poppy any stronger. It is time for Father to lay down his sword and

shield. It is time for him to rest. Yet he ghts on grimly, will not yield. It
is for your sake, I think. He needs your forgiveness. The war has made
the road from the Eyrie to Riverrun dangerous to travel, I know, but
surely a strong force of knights could see you safely through the
Mountains of the Moon? A hundred men, or a thousand? And if you
cannot come, will you not write him at least? A few words of love, so he
might die in peace? Write what you will, and I shall read it to him, and
ease his way.
Even as she set the quill aside and asked for sealing wax, Catelyn
sensed that the letter was like to be too little and too late. Maester
Vyman did not believe Lord Hoster would linger long enough for a
raven to reach the Eyrie and return. Though he has said much the
same before … Tully men did not surrender easily, no matter the
odds. After she entrusted the parchment to the maester’s care,
Catelyn went to the sept and lit a candle to the Father Above for her
own father’s sake, a second to the Crone, who had let the rst raven
into the world when she peered through the door of death, and a
third to the Mother, for Lysa and all the children they had both lost.
Later that day, as she sat at Lord Hoster’s bedside with a book,
reading the same passage over and over, she heard the sound of
loud voices and a trumpet’s blare. Ser Robin, she thought at once,
inching. She went to the balcony, but there was nothing to be seen
out on the rivers, but she could hear the voices more clearly from
outside, the sound of many horses, the clink of armor, and here and
there a cheer. Catelyn made her way up the winding stairs to the
roof of the keep. Ser Desmond did not forbid me the roof, she told
herself as she climbed.
The sounds were coming from the far side of the castle, by the
main gate. A knot of men stood before the portcullis as it rose in
jerks and starts, and in the elds beyond, outside the castle, were
several hundred riders. When the wind blew, it lifted their banners,
and she trembled in relief at the sight of the leaping trout of
Riverrun. Edmure.
It was two hours before he saw t to come to her. By then the
castle rang to the sound of noisy reunions as men embraced the
women and children they had left behind. Three ravens had risen

from the rookery, black wings beating at the air as they took ight.
Catelyn watched them from her father’s balcony. She had washed
her hair, changed her clothing, and prepared herself for her
brother’s reproaches … but even so, the waiting was hard.
When at last she heard sounds outside her door, she sat and
folded her hands in her lap. Dried red mud spattered Edmure’s
boots, greaves, and surcoat. To look at him, you would never know
he had won his battle. He was thin and drawn, with pale cheeks,
unkempt beard, and too-bright eyes.
“Edmure,” Catelyn said, worried, “you look unwell. Has
something happened? Have the Lannisters crossed the river?”
“I threw them back. Lord Tywin, Gregor Clegane, Addam
Marbrand, I turned them away. Stannis, though …” He grimaced.
“Stannis? What of Stannis?”
“He lost the battle at King’s Landing,” Edmure said unhappily.
“His eet was burned, his army routed.”
A Lannister victory was ill tidings, but Catelyn could not share
her brother’s obvious dismay. She still had nightmares about the
shadow she had seen slide across Renly’s tent and the way the blood
had come owing out through the steel of his gorget. “Stannis was
no more a friend than Lord Tywin.”
“You do not understand. Highgarden has declared for Jo rey.
Dorne as well. All the south.” His mouth tightened. “And you see t
to loose the Kingslayer. You had no right.”
“I had a mother’s right.” Her voice was calm, though the news
about Highgarden was a savage blow to Robb’s hopes. She could not
think about that now, though.
“No right,” Edmure repeated. “He was Robb’s captive, your king’s
captive, and Robb charged me to keep him safe.”
“Brienne will keep him safe. She swore it on her sword.”
“That woman?”
“She will deliver Jaime to King’s Landing, and bring Arya and
Sansa back to us safely.”
“Cersei will never give them up.”
“Not Cersei. Tyrion. He swore it, in open court. And the
Kingslayer swore it as well.”

“Jaime’s word is worthless. As for the Imp, it’s said he took an
axe in the head during the battle. He’ll be dead before your Brienne
reaches King’s Landing, if she ever does.”
“Dead?” Could the gods truly be so merciless? She had made Jaime
swear a hundred oaths, but it was his brother’s promise she had
pinned her hopes on.
Edmure was blind to her distress. “Jaime was my charge, and I
mean to have him back. I’ve sent ravens—”
“Ravens to whom? How many?”
“Three,” he said, “so the message will be certain to reach Lord
Bolton. By river or road, the way from Riverrun to King’s Landing
must needs take them close by Harrenhal.”
“Harrenhal.” The very word seemed to darken the room. Horror
thickened her voice as she said, “Edmure, do you know what you
have done?”
“Have no fear, I left your part out. I wrote that Jaime had
escaped, and o ered a thousand dragons for his recapture.”
Worse and worse, Catelyn thought in despair. My brother is a fool.
Unbidden, unwanted, tears lled her eyes. “If this was an escape,”
she said softly, “and not an exchange of hostages, why should the
Lannisters give my daughters to Brienne?”
“It will never come to that. The Kingslayer will be returned to us,
I have made certain of it.”
“All you have made certain is that I shall never see my daughters
again. Brienne might have gotten him to King’s Landing safely … so
long as no one was hunting for them. But now …” Catelyn could not
go on. “Leave me, Edmure.” She had no right to command him,
here in the castle that would soon be his, yet her tone would brook
no argument. “Leave me to Father and my grief, I have no more to
say to you. Go. Go.” All she wanted was to lie down, to close her
eyes and sleep, and pray no dreams would come.

ARYA

The sky was as black as the walls of Harrenhal behind them, and

the rain fell soft and steady, mu ing the sound of their horses’
hooves and running down their faces.
They rode north, away from the lake, following a rutted farm
road across the torn elds and into the woods and streams. Arya
took the lead, kicking her stolen horse to a brisk heedless trot until
the trees closed in around her. Hot Pie and Gendry followed as best
they could. Wolves howled o in the distance, and she could hear
Hot Pie’s heavy breathing. No one spoke. From time to time Arya
glanced over her shoulder, to make sure the two boys had not fallen
too far behind, and to see if they were being pursued.
They would be, she knew. She had stolen three horses from the
stables and a map and a dagger from Roose Bolton’s own solar, and
killed a guard on the postern gate, slitting his throat when he knelt
to pick up the worn iron coin that Jaqen H’ghar had given her.
Someone would nd him lying dead in his own blood, and then the
hue and cry would go up. They would wake Lord Bolton and search
Harrenhal from crenel to cellar, and when they did they would nd
the map and the dagger missing, along with some swords from the
armory, bread and cheese from the kitchens, a baker boy, a
’prentice smith, and a cupbearer called Nan … or Weasel, or Arry,
depending on who you asked.
The Lord of the Dreadfort would not come after them himself.
Roose Bolton would stay abed, his pasty esh dotted with leeches,

giving commands in his whispery soft voice. His man Walton might
lead the hunt, the one they called Steelshanks for the greaves he
always wore on his long legs. Or perhaps it would be slobbery
Vargo Hoat and his sellswords, who named themselves the Brave
Companions. Others called them Bloody Mummers (though never to
their faces), and sometimes the Footmen, for Lord Vargo’s habit of
cutting o the hands and feet of men who displeased him.
If they catch us, he’ll cut o our hands and feet, Arya thought, and
then Roose Bolton will peel the skin o us. She was still dressed in her
page’s garb, and on the breast over her heart was sewn Lord
Bolton’s sigil, the ayed man of the Dreadfort.
Every time she looked back, she half expected to see a blaze of
torches pouring out the distant gates of Harrenhal or rushing along
the tops of its huge high walls, but there was nothing. Harrenhal
slept on, until it was lost in darkness and hidden behind the trees.
When they crossed the rst stream, Arya turned her horse aside
and led them o the road, following the twisting course of the
water for a quarter-mile before nally scrambling out and up a
stony bank. If the hunters brought dogs, that might throw them o
the scent, she hoped. They could not stay on the road. There is death
on the road, she told herself, death on all the roads.
Gendry and Hot Pie did not question her choice. She had the map,
after all, and Hot Pie seemed almost as terri ed of her as of the
men who might be coming after them. He had seen the guard she’d
killed. It’s better if he’s scared of me, she told herself. That way he’ll do
like I say, instead of something stupid.
She should be more frightened herself, she knew. She was only
ten, a skinny girl on a stolen horse with a dark forest ahead of her
and men behind who would gladly cut o her feet. Yet somehow
she felt calmer than she ever had in Harrenhal. The rain had washed
the guard’s blood o her ngers, she wore a sword across her back,
wolves were prowling through the dark like lean grey shadows, and
Arya Stark was unafraid. Fear cuts deeper than swords, she whispered
under her breath, the words that Syrio Forel had taught her, and
Jaqen’s words too, valar morghulis.

The rain stopped and started again and stopped once more and
started, but they had good cloaks to keep the water o . Arya kept
them moving at a slow steady pace. It was too black beneath the
trees to ride any faster; the boys were no horsemen, neither one,
and the soft broken ground was treacherous with half-buried roots
and hidden stones. They crossed another road, its deep ruts lled
with runo , but Arya shunned it. Up and down the rolling hills she
took them, through brambles and briars and tangles of underbrush,
along the bottoms of narrow gullies where branches heavy with wet
leaves slapped at their faces as they passed.
Gendry’s mare lost her footing in the mud once, going down hard
on her hindquarters and spilling him from the saddle, but neither
horse nor rider was hurt, and Gendry got that stubborn look on his
face and mounted right up again. Not long after, they came upon
three wolves devouring the corpse of a fawn. When Hot Pie’s horse
caught the scent, he shied and bolted. Two of the wolves ed as
well, but the third raised his head and bared his teeth, prepared to
defend his kill. “Back o ,” Arya told Gendry. “Slow, so you don’t
spook him.” They edged their mounts away, until the wolf and his
feast were no longer in sight. Only then did she swing about to ride
after Hot Pie, who was clinging desperately to the saddle as he
crashed through the trees.
Later they passed through a burned village, threading their way
carefully between the shells of blackened hovels and past the bones
of a dozen dead men hanging from a row of apple trees. When Hot
Pie saw them he began to pray, a thin whispered plea for the
Mother’s mercy, repeated over and over. Arya looked up at the
eshless dead in their wet rotting clothes and said her own prayer.
Ser Gregor, it went, Dunsen, Polliver, Ra the Sweetling. The Tickler
and the Hound. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Jo rey, Queen Cersei. She
ended it with valar morghulis, touched Jaqen’s coin where it nestled
under her belt, and then reached up and plucked an apple from
among the dead men as she rode beneath them. It was mushy and
overripe, but she ate it worms and all.
That was the day without a dawn. Slowly the sky lightened
around them, but they never saw the sun. Black turned to grey, and

colors crept timidly back into the world. The soldier pines were
dressed in somber greens, the broadleafs in russets and faded golds
already beginning to brown. They stopped long enough to water the
horses and eat a cold, quick breakfast, ripping apart a loaf of the
bread that Hot Pie had stolen from the kitchens and passing chunks
of hard yellow cheese from hand to hand.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Gendry asked her.
“North,” said Arya.
Hot Pie peered around uncertainly. “Which way is north?”
She used her cheese to point. “That way.”
“But there’s no sun. How do you know?”
“From the moss. See how it grows mostly on one side of the
trees? That’s south.”
“What do we want with the north?” Gendry wanted to know.
“The Trident.” Arya unrolled the stolen map to show them. “See?
Once we reach the Trident, all we need to do is follow it upstream
till we come to Riverrun, here.” Her nger traced the path. “It’s a
long way, but we can’t get lost so long as we keep to the river.”
Hot Pie blinked at the map. “Which one is Riverrun?”
Riverrun was painted as a castle tower, in the fork between the
owing blue lines of two rivers, the Tumblestone and the Red Fork.
“There.” She touched it. “Riverrun, it reads.”
“You can read writing?” he said to her, wonderingly, as if she’d
said she could walk on water.
She nodded. “We’ll be safe once we reach Riverrun.”
“We will? Why?”
Because Riverrun is my grandfather’s castle, and my brother Robb will
be there, she wanted to say. She bit her lip and rolled up the map.
“We just will. But only if we get there.” She was the rst one back
in the saddle. It made her feel bad to hide the truth from Hot Pie,
but she did not trust him with her secret. Gendry knew, but that
was di erent. Gendry had his own secret, though even he didn’t
seem to know what it was.
That day Arya quickened their pace, keeping the horses to a trot
as long as she dared, and sometimes spurring to a gallop when she
spied a at stretch of eld before them. That was seldom enough,

though; the ground was growing hillier as they went. The hills were
not high, nor especially steep, but there seemed to be no end of
them, and they soon grew tired of climbing up one and down the
other, and found themselves following the lay of the land, along
streambeds and through a maze of shallow wooded valleys where
the trees made a solid canopy overhead.
From time to time she sent Hot Pie and Gendry on while she
doubled back to try to confuse their trail, listening all the while for
the rst sign of pursuit. Too slow, she thought to herself, chewing
her lip, we’re going too slow, they’ll catch us for certain. Once, from
the crest of a ridge, she spied dark shapes crossing a stream in the
valley behind them, and for half a heartbeat she feared that Roose
Bolton’s riders were on them, but when she looked again she
realized they were only a pack of wolves. She cupped her hands
around her mouth and howled down at them, “Ahooooooooo,
ahooooooooo.” When the largest of the wolves lifted its head and
howled back, the sound made Arya shiver.
By midday Hot Pie had begun to complain. His arse was sore, he
told them, and the saddle was rubbing him raw inside his legs, and
besides he had to get some sleep. “I’m so tired I’m going to fall o
the horse.”
Arya looked at Gendry. “If he falls o , who do you think will nd
him rst, the wolves or the Mummers?”
“The wolves,” said Gendry. “Better noses.”
Hot Pie opened his mouth and closed it. He did not fall o his
horse. The rain began again a short time later. They still had not
seen so much as a glimpse of the sun. It was growing colder, and
pale white mists were threading between the pines and blowing
across the bare burned elds.
Gendry was having almost as bad a time of it as Hot Pie, though
he was too stubborn to complain. He sat awkwardly in the saddle, a
determined look on his face beneath his shaggy black hair, but Arya
could tell he was no horseman. I should have remembered, she
thought to herself. She had been riding as long as she could
remember, ponies when she was little and later horses, but Gendry
and Hot Pie were city-born, and in the city smallfolk walked. Yoren

had given them mounts when he took them from King’s Landing,
but sitting on a donkey and plodding up the kingsroad behind a
wagon was one thing. Guiding a hunting horse through wild woods
and burned elds was something else.
She would make much better time on her own, Arya knew, but
she could not leave them. They were her pack, her friends, the only
living friends that remained to her, and if not for her they would
still be safe at Harrenhal, Gendry sweating at his forge and Hot Pie
in the kitchens. If the Mummers catch us, I’ll tell them that I’m Ned
Stark’s daughter and sister to the King in the North. I’ll command them
to take me to my brother, and to do no harm to Hot Pie and Gendry.
They might not believe her, though, and even if they did … Lord
Bolton was her brother’s bannerman, but he frightened her all the
same. I won’t let them take us, she vowed silently, reaching back
over her shoulder to touch the hilt of the sword that Gendry had
stolen for her. I won’t.
Late that afternoon, they emerged from beneath the trees and
found themselves on the banks of a river. Hot Pie gave a whoop of
delight. “The Trident! Now all we have to do is go upstream, like
you said. We’re almost there!”
Arya chewed her lip. “I don’t think this is the Trident.” The river
was swollen by the rain, but even so it couldn’t be much more than
thirty feet across. She remembered the Trident as being much
wider. “It’s too little to be the Trident,” she told them, “and we
didn’t come far enough.”
“Yes we did,” Hot Pie insisted. “We rode all day, and hardly
stopped at all. We must have come a long way.”
“Let’s have a look at that map again,” said Gendry.
Arya dismounted, took out the map, unrolled it. The rain pattered
against the sheepskin and ran o in rivulets. “We’re someplace here,
I think,” she said, pointing, as the boys peered over her shoulders.
“But,” said Hot Pie, “that’s hardly any ways at all. See,
Harrenhal’s there by your nger, you’re almost touching it. And we
rode all day!”
“There’s miles and miles before we reach the Trident,” she said.
“We won’t be there for days. This must be some di erent river, one

of these, see.” She showed him some of the thinner blue lines the
mapmaker had painted in, each with a name painted in ne script
beneath it. “The Darry, the Greenapple, the Maiden … here, this
one, the Little Willow, it might be that.”
Hot Pie looked from the line to the river. “It doesn’t look so little
to me.”
Gendry was frowning as well. “The one you’re pointing at runs
into that other one, see.”
“The Big Willow,” she read.
“The Big Willow, then. See, and the Big Willow runs into the
Trident, so we could follow the one to the other, but we’d need to
go downstream, not up. Only if this river isn’t the Little Willow, if
it’s this other one here …”
“Rippledown Rill,” Arya read.
“See, it loops around and ows down toward the lake, back to
Harrenhal.” He traced the line with a nger.
Hot Pie’s eyes grew wide. “No! They’ll kill us for sure.”
“We have to know which river this is,” declared Gendry, in his
stubbornest voice. “We have to know.”
“Well, we don’t.” The map might have names written beside the
blue lines, but no one had written a name on the riverbank. “We
won’t go up or downstream,” she decided, rolling up the map.
“We’ll cross and keep going north, like we were.”
“Can horses swim?” asked Hot Pie. “It looks deep, Arry. What if
there are snakes?”
“Are you sure we’re going north?” asked Gendry. “All these
hills … if we got turned around …”
“The moss on the trees—”
He pointed to a nearby tree. “That tree’s got moss on three sides,
and that next one has no moss at all. We could be lost, just riding
around in a circle.”
“We could be,” said Arya, “but I’m going to cross the river
anyway. You can come or you can stay here.” She climbed back into
the saddle, ignoring the both of them. If they didn’t want to follow,
they could nd Riverrun on their own, though more likely the
Mummers would just nd them.

She had to ride a good half mile along the bank before she nally
found a place where it looked as though it might be safe to cross,
and even then her mare was reluctant to enter the water. The river,
whatever its name, was running brown and fast, and the deep part
in the middle came up past the horse’s belly. Water lled her boots,
but she pressed in her heels all the same and climbed out on the far
bank. From behind she heard splashing, and a mare’s nervous
whinny. They followed, then. Good. She turned to watch as the boys
struggled across and emerged dripping beside her. “It wasn’t the
Trident,” she told them. “It wasn’t.”
The next river was shallower and easier to ford. That one wasn’t
the Trident either, and no one argued with her when she told them
they would cross it.
Dusk was settling as they stopped to rest the horses once more
and share another meal of bread and cheese. “I’m cold and wet,”
Hot Pie complained. “We’re a long way from Harrenhal now, for
sure. We could have us a re—”
“NO!” Arya and Gendry both said, at the exact same instant. Hot
Pie quailed a little. Arya gave Gendry a sideways look. He said it
with me, like Jon used to do, back in Winterfell. She missed Jon Snow
the most of all her brothers.
“Could we sleep at least?” Hot Pie asked. “I’m so tired, Arry, and
my arse is sore. I think I’ve got blisters.”
“You’ll have more than that if you’re caught,” she said. “We’ve
got to keep going. We’ve got to.”
“But it’s almost dark, and you can’t even see the moon.”
“Get back on your horse.”
Plodding along at a slow walking pace as the light faded around
them, Arya found her own exhaustion weighing heavy on her. She
needed sleep as much as Hot Pie, but they dare not. If they slept,
they might open their eyes to nd Vargo Hoat standing over them
with Shagwell the Fool and Faithful Urswyck and Rorge and Biter
and Septon Utt and all his other monsters.
Yet after a while the motion of her horse became as soothing as
the rocking of a cradle, and Arya found her eyes growing heavy.
She let them close, just for an instant, then snapped them wide

again. I can’t go to sleep, she screamed at herself silently, I can’t, I
can’t. She knuckled at her eye and rubbed it hard to keep it open,
clutching the reins tightly and kicking her mount to a canter. But
neither she nor the horse could sustain the pace, and it was only a
few moments before they fell back to a walk again, and a few more
until her eyes closed a second time. This time they did not open
quite so quickly.
When they did, she found that her horse had come to a stop and
was nibbling at a tuft of grass, while Gendry was shaking her arm.
“You fell asleep,” he told her.
“I was just resting my eyes.”
“You were resting them a long while, then. Your horse was
wandering in a circle, but it wasn’t till she stopped that I realized
you were sleeping. Hot Pie’s just as bad, he rode into a tree limb
and got knocked o , you should have heard him yell. Even that
didn’t wake you up. You need to stop and sleep.”
“I can keep going as long as you can.” She yawned.
“Liar,” he said. “You keep going if you want to be stupid, but I’m
stopping. I’ll take the rst watch. You sleep.”
“What about Hot Pie?”
Gendry pointed. Hot Pie was already on the ground, curled up
beneath his cloak on a bed of damp leaves and snoring softly. He
had a big wedge of cheese in one st, but it looked as though he
had fallen asleep between bites.
It was no good arguing, Arya realized; Gendry had the right of it.
The Mummers will need to sleep too, she told herself, hoping it was
true. She was so weary it was a struggle even to get down from the
saddle, but she remembered to hobble her horse before nding a
place beneath a beech tree. The ground was hard and damp. She
wondered how long it would be before she slept in a bed again,
with hot food and a re to warm her. The last thing she did before
closing her eyes was unsheathe her sword and lay it down beside
her. “Ser Gregor,” she whispered, yawning. “Dunsen, Polliver, Ra
the Sweetling. The Tickler and … the Tickler … the Hound …”
Her dreams were red and savage. The Mummers were in them,
four at least, a pale Lyseni and a dark brutal axeman from Ib, the

scarred Dothraki horse lord called Iggo and a Dornishman whose
name she never knew. On and on they came, riding through the rain
in rusting mail and wet leather, swords and axe clanking against
their saddles. They thought they were hunting her, she knew with
all the strange sharp certainty of dreams, but they were wrong. She
was hunting them.
She was no little girl in the dream; she was a wolf, huge and
powerful, and when she emerged from beneath the trees in front of
them and bared her teeth in a low rumbling growl, she could smell
the rank stench of fear from horse and man alike. The Lyseni’s
mount reared and screamed in terror, and the others shouted at one
another in mantalk, but before they could act the other wolves
came hurtling from the darkness and the rain, a great pack of them,
gaunt and wet and silent.
The ght was short but bloody. The hairy man went down as he
unslung his axe, the dark one died stringing an arrow, and the pale
man from Lys tried to bolt. Her brothers and sisters ran him down,
turning him again and again, coming at him from all sides, snapping
at the legs of his horse and tearing the throat from the rider when
he came crashing to the earth.
Only the belled man stood his ground. His horse kicked in the
head of one of her sisters, and he cut another almost in half with his
curved silvery claw as his hair tinkled softly.
Filled with rage, she leapt onto his back, knocking him head- rst
from his saddle. Her jaws locked on his arm as they fell, her teeth
sinking through the leather and wool and soft esh. When they
landed she gave a savage jerk with her head and ripped the limb
loose from his shoulder. Exulting, she shook it back and forth in her
mouth, scattering the warm red droplets amidst the cold black rain.

TYRION

He woke to the creak of old iron hinges.

“Who?” he croaked. At least he had his voice back, raw and
hoarse though it was. The fever was still on him, and Tyrion had no
notion of the hour. How long had he slept this time? He was so
weak, so damnably weak. “Who?” he called again, more loudly.
Torchlight spilled through the open door, but within the chamber
the only light came from the stub of a candle beside his bed.
When he saw a shape moving toward him, Tyrion shivered. Here
in Maegor’s Holdfast, every servant was in the queen’s pay, so any
visitor might be another of Cersei’s catspaws, sent to nish the
work Ser Mandon had begun.
Then the man stepped into the candlelight, got a good look at the
dwarf’s pale face, and chortled. “Cut yourself shaving, did you?”
Tyrion’s ngers went to the great gash that ran from above one
eye down to his jaw, across what remained of his nose. The proud
esh was still raw and warm to the touch. “With a fearful big razor,
yes.”
Bronn’s coal-black hair was freshly washed and brushed straight
back from the hard lines of his face, and he was dressed in high
boots of soft, tooled leather, a wide belt studded with nuggets of
silver, and a cloak of pale green silk. Across the dark grey wool of
his doublet, a burning chain was embroidered diagonally in bright
green thread.

“Where have you been?” Tyrion demanded of him. “I sent for
you … it must have been a fortnight ago.”
“Four days ago, more like,” the sellsword said, “and I’ve been
here twice, and found you dead to the world.”
“Not dead. Though my sweet sister did try.” Perhaps he should
not have said that aloud, but Tyrion was past caring. Cersei was
behind Ser Mandon’s attempt to kill him, he knew that in his gut.
“What’s that ugly thing on your chest?”
Bronn grinned. “My knightly sigil. A aming chain, green, on a
smoke-grey eld. By your lord father’s command, I’m Ser Bronn of
the Blackwater now, Imp. See you don’t forget it.”
Tyrion put his hands on the featherbed and squirmed back a few
inches, against the pillows. “I was the one who promised you
knighthood, remember?” He had liked that “by your lord father’s
command” not at all. Lord Tywin had wasted little time. Moving his
son from the Tower of the Hand to claim it for himself was a
message anyone could read, and this was another. “I lose half my
nose and you gain a knighthood. The gods have a deal to answer
for.” His voice was sour. “Did my father dub you himself?”
“No. Them of us as survived the ght at the winch towers got
ourselves dabbed by the High Septon and dubbed by the
Kingsguard. Took half the bloody day, with only three of the White
Swords left to do the honors.”
“I knew Ser Mandon died in the battle.” Shoved into the river by
Pod, half a heartbeat before the treacherous bastard could drive his
sword through my heart. “Who else was lost?”
“The Hound,” said Bronn. “Not dead, only gone. The gold cloaks
say he turned craven and you led a sortie in his place.”
Not one of my better notions. Tyrion could feel the scar tissue pull
tight when he frowned. He waved Bronn toward a chair. “My sister
has mistaken me for a mushroom. She keeps me in the dark and
feeds me shit. Pod’s a good lad, but the knot in his tongue is the size
of Casterly Rock, and I don’t trust half of what he tells me. I sent
him to bring Ser Jacelyn and he came back and told me he’s dead.”
“Him, and thousands more.” Bronn sat.
“How?” Tyrion demanded, feeling that much sicker.

“During the battle. Your sister sent the Kettleblacks to fetch the
king back to the Red Keep, the way I hear it. When the gold cloaks
saw him leaving, half of them decided they’d leave with him.
Ironhand put himself in their path and tried to order them back to
the walls. They say Bywater was blistering them good and almost
had ’em ready to turn when someone put an arrow through his
neck. He didn’t seem so fearsome then, so they dragged him o his
horse and killed him.”
Another debt to lay at Cersei’s door. “My nephew,” he said,
“Jo rey. Was he in any danger?”
“No more’n some, and less than most.”
“Had he su ered any harm? Taken a wound? Mussed his hair,
stubbed his toe, cracked a nail?”
“Not as I heard.”
“I warned Cersei what would happen. Who commands the gold
cloaks now?”
“Your lord father’s given them to one of his westermen, some
knight named Addam Marbrand.”
In most cases the gold cloaks would have resented having an
outsider placed over them, but Ser Addam Marbrand was a shrewd
choice. Like Jaime, he was the sort of man other men liked to
follow. I have lost the City Watch. “I sent Pod looking for Shagga, but
he’s had no luck.”
“The Stone Crows are still in the kingswood. Shagga seems to
have taken a fancy to the place. Timett led the Burned Men home,
with all the plunder they took from Stannis’s camp after the
ghting. Chella turned up with a dozen Black Ears at the River Gate
one morning, but your father’s red cloaks chased them o while the
Kingslanders threw dung and cheered.”
Ingrates. The Black Ears died for them. Whilst Tyrion lay drugged
and dreaming, his own blood had pulled his claws out, one by one.
“I want you to go to my sister. Her precious son made it through
the battle unscathed, so Cersei has no more need of a hostage. She
swore to free Alayaya once—”
“She did. Eight, nine days ago, after the whipping.”

Tyrion shoved himself up higher, ignoring the sudden stab of pain
through his shoulder. “Whipping?”
“They tied her to a post in the yard and scourged her, then
shoved her out the gate naked and bloody.”
She was learning to read, Tyrion thought, absurdly. Across his face
the scar stretched tight, and for a moment it felt as though his head
would burst with rage. Alayaya was a whore, true enough, but a
sweeter, braver, more innocent girl he had seldom met. Tyrion had
never touched her; she had been no more than a veil, to hide Shae.
In his carelessness, he had never thought what the role might cost
her. “I promised my sister I would treat Tommen as she treated
Alayaya,” he remembered aloud. He felt as though he might retch.
“How can I scourge an eight-year-old boy?” But if I don’t, Cersei
wins.
“You don’t have Tommen,” Bronn said bluntly. “Once she learned
that Ironhand was dead, the queen sent the Kettleblacks after him,
and no one at Rosby had the balls to say them nay.”
Another blow; yet a relief as well, he must admit it. He was fond
of Tommen. “The Kettleblacks were supposed to be ours,” he
reminded Bronn with more than a touch of irritation.
“They were, so long as I could give them two of your pennies for
every one they had from the queen, but now she’s raised the stakes.
Osney and Osfryd were made knights after the battle, same as me.
Gods know what for, no one saw them do any ghting.”
My hirelings betray me, my friends are scourged and shamed, and I lie
here rotting, Tyrion thought. I thought I won the bloody battle. Is this
what triumph tastes like? “Is it true that Stannis was put to rout by
Renly’s ghost?”
Bronn smiled thinly. “From the winch towers, all we saw was
banners in the mud and men throwing down their spears to run, but
there’s hundreds in the pot shops and brothels who’ll tell you how
they saw Lord Renly kill this one or that one. Most of Stannis’s host
had been Renly’s to start, and they went right back over at the sight
of him in that shiny green armor.”
After all his planning, after the sortie and the bridge of ships,
after getting his face slashed in two, Tyrion had been eclipsed by a

dead man. If indeed Renly is dead. Something else he would need to
look into. “How did Stannis escape?”
“His Lyseni kept their galleys out in the bay, beyond your chain.
When the battle turned bad, they put in along the bay shore and
took o as many as they could. Men were killing each other to get
aboard, toward the end.”
“What of Robb Stark, what has he been doing?”
“There’s some of his wolves burning their way down toward
Duskendale. Your father’s sending this Lord Tarly to sort them out.
I’d half a mind to join him. It’s said he’s a good soldier, and
openhanded with the plunder.”
The thought of losing Bronn was the nal straw. “No. Your place
is here. You’re the captain of the Hand’s guard.”
“You’re not the Hand,” Bronn reminded him sharply. “Your father
is, and he’s got his own bloody guard.”
“What happened to all the men you hired for me?”
“Some died at the winch towers. That uncle of yours, Ser Kevan,
he paid the rest of us and tossed us out.”
“How good of him,” Tyrion said acidly. “Does that mean you’ve
lost your taste for gold?”
“Not bloody likely.”
“Good,” said Tyrion, “because as it happens, I still have need of
you. What do you know of Ser Mandon Moore?”
Bronn laughed. “I know he’s bloody well drowned.”
“I owe him a great debt, but how to pay it?” He touched his face,
feeling the scar. “I know precious little of the man, if truth be told.”
“He had eyes like a sh and he wore a white cloak. What else do
you need to know?”
“Everything,” said Tyrion, “for a start.” What he wanted was
proof that Ser Mandon had been Cersei’s, but he dare not say so
aloud. In the Red Keep a man did best to hold his tongue. There
were rats in the walls, and little birds who talked too much, and
spiders. “Help me up,” he said, struggling with the bedclothes. “It’s
time I paid a call on my father, and past time I let myself be seen
again.”
“Such a pretty sight,” mocked Bronn.

“What’s half a nose, on a face like mine? But speaking of pretty,
is Margaery Tyrell in King’s Landing yet?”
“No. She’s coming, though, and the city’s mad with love for her.
The Tyrells have been carting food up from Highgarden and giving
it away in her name. Hundreds of wayns each day. There’s
thousands of Tyrell men swaggering about with little golden roses
sewn on their doublets, and not a one is buying his own wine. Wife,
widow, or whore, the women are all giving up their virtue to every
peach-fuzz boy with a gold rose on his teat.”
They spit on me, and buy drinks for the Tyrells. Tyrion slid from the
bed to the oor. His legs turned wobbly beneath him, the room
spun, and he had to grasp Bronn’s arm to keep from pitching
headlong into the rushes. “Pod!” he shouted. “Podrick Payne! Where
in the seven hells are you?” Pain gnawed at him like a toothless
dog. Tyrion hated weakness, especially his own. It shamed him, and
shame made him angry. “Pod, get in here!”
The boy came running. When he saw Tyrion standing and
clutching Bronn’s arm, he gaped at them. “My lord. You stood. Is
that … do you … do you need wine? Dreamwine? Should I get the
maester? He said you must stay. Abed, I mean.”
“I have stayed abed too long. Bring me some clean garb.”
“Garb?”
How the boy could be so clearheaded and resourceful in battle
and so confused at all other times Tyrion could never comprehend.
“Clothing,” he repeated. “Tunic, doublet, breeches, hose. For me. To
dress in. So I can leave this bloody cell.”
It took all three of them to clothe him. Hideous though his face
might be, the worst of his wounds was the one at the juncture of
shoulder and arm, where his own mail had been driven back into his
armpit by an arrow. Pus and blood still seeped from the discolored
esh whenever Maester Frenken changed his dressing, and any
movement sent a stab of agony through him.
In the end, Tyrion settled for a pair of breeches and an oversized
bed robe that hung loosely about his shoulders. Bronn yanked his
boots onto his feet while Pod went in search of a stick for him to
lean on. He drank a cup of dreamwine to fortify himself. The wine

was sweetened with honey, with just enough of the poppy to make
his wounds bearable for a time.
Even so, he was dizzy by the time he turned the latch, and the
descent down the twisting stone steps made his legs tremble. He
walked with the stick in one hand and the other on Pod’s shoulder.
A serving girl was coming up as they were going down. She stared
at them with wide white eyes, as if she were looking at a ghost. The
dwarf has risen from the dead, Tyrion thought. And look, he’s uglier
than ever, run tell your friends.
Maegor’s Holdfast was the strongest place in the Red Keep, a
castle within the castle, surrounded by a deep dry moat lined with
spikes. The drawbridge was up for the night when they reached the
door. Ser Meryn Trant stood before it in his pale armor and white
cloak. “Lower the bridge,” Tyrion commanded him.
“The queen’s orders are to raise the bridge at night.” Ser Meryn
had always been Cersei’s creature.
“The queen’s asleep, and I have business with my father.”
There was magic in the name of Lord Tywin Lannister.
Grumbling, Ser Meryn Trant gave the command, and the
drawbridge was lowered. A second Kingsguard knight stood sentry
across the moat. Ser Osmund Kettleblack managed a smile when he
saw Tyrion waddling toward him. “Feeling stronger, m’lord?”
“Much. When’s the next battle? I can scarcely wait.”
When Pod and he reached the serpentine steps, however, Tyrion
could only gape at them in dismay. I will never climb those by myself,
he confessed to himself. Swallowing his dignity, he asked Bronn to
carry him, hoping against hope that at this hour there would be no
one to see and smile, no one to tell the tale of the dwarf being
carried up the steps like a babe in arms.
The outer ward was crowded with tents and pavilions, dozens of
them. “Tyrell men,” Podrick Payne explained as they threaded their
way through a maze of silk and canvas. “Lord Rowan’s too, and
Lord Redwyne’s. There wasn’t room enough for all. In the castle, I
mean. Some took rooms. Rooms in the city. In inns and all. They’re
here for the wedding. The king’s wedding, King Jo rey’s. Will you
be strong enough to attend, my lord?”

“Ravening weasels could not keep me away.” There was this to be
said for weddings over battles, at least; it was less likely that
someone would cut o your nose.
Lights still burned dimly behind shuttered windows in the Tower
of the Hand. The men on the door wore the crimson cloaks and lioncrested helms of his father’s household guard. Tyrion knew them
both, and they admitted him on sight … though neither could bear
to look long at his face, he noted.
Within, they came upon Ser Addam Marbrand, descending the
turnpike stair in the ornate black breastplate and cloth-of-gold cloak
of an o cer in the City Watch. “My lord,” he said, “how good to
see you on your feet. I’d heard—”
“—rumors of a small grave being dug? Me too. Under the
circumstances it seemed best to get up. I hear you’re commander of
the City Watch. Shall I o er congratulations or condolences?”
“Both, I fear.” Ser Addam smiled. “Death and desertion have left
me with some forty-four hundred. Only the gods and Little nger
know how we are to go on paying wages for so many, but your
sister forbids me to dismiss any.”
Still anxious, Cersei? The battle’s done, the gold cloaks won’t help you
now. “Do you come from my father?” he asked.
“Aye. I fear I did not leave him in the best of moods. Lord Tywin
feels forty-four hundred guardsmen more than su cient to nd one
lost squire, but your cousin Tyrek remains missing.”
Tyrek was the son of his late Uncle Tygett, a boy of thirteen. He
had vanished in the riot, not long after wedding the Lady
Ermesande, a suckling babe who happened to be the last surviving
heir of House Hayford. And likely the rst bride in the history of the
Seven Kingdoms to be widowed before she was weaned. “I couldn’t nd
him either,” confessed Tyrion.
“He’s feeding worms,” said Bronn with his usual tact. “Ironhand
looked for him, and the eunuch rattled a nice fat purse. They had no
more luck than we did. Give it up, ser.”
Ser Addam gazed at the sellsword with distaste. “Lord Tywin is
stubborn where his blood is concerned. He will have the lad, alive

or dead, and I mean to oblige him.” He looked back to Tyrion. “You
will nd your father in his solar.”
My solar, thought Tyrion. “I believe I know the way.”
The way was up more steps, but this time he climbed under his
own power, with one hand on Pod’s shoulder. Bronn opened the
door for him. Lord Tywin Lannister was seated beneath the
window, writing by the glow of an oil lamp. He raised his eyes at
the sound of the latch. “Tyrion.” Calmly, he laid his quill aside.
“I’m pleased you remember me, my lord.” Tyrion released his
grip on Pod, leaned his weight on the stick, and waddled closer.
Something is wrong, he knew at once.
“Ser Bronn,” Lord Tywin said, “Podrick. Perhaps you had best
wait without until we are done.”
The look Bronn gave the Hand was little less than insolent;
nonetheless, he bowed and withdrew, with Pod on his heels. The
heavy door swung shut behind them, and Tyrion Lannister was
alone with his father. Even with the windows of the solar shuttered
against the night, the chill in the room was palpable. What sort of
lies has Cersei been telling him?
The Lord of Casterly Rock was as lean as a man twenty years
younger, even handsome in his austere way. Sti blond whiskers
covered his cheeks, framing a stern face, a bald head, a hard mouth.
About his throat he wore a chain of golden hands, the ngers of
each clasping the wrist of the next. “That’s a handsome chain,”
Tyrion said. Though it looked better on me.
Lord Tywin ignored the sally. “You had best be seated. Is it wise
for you to be out of your sickbed?”
“I am sick of my sickbed.” Tyrion knew how much his father
despised weakness. He claimed the nearest chair. “Such pleasant
chambers you have. Would you believe it, while I was dying,
someone moved me to a dark little cell in Maegor’s?”
“The Red Keep is overcrowded with wedding guests. Once they
depart, we will nd you more suitable accommodations.”
“I rather liked these accommodations. Have you set a date for this
great wedding?”

“Jo rey and Margaery shall marry on the rst day of the new
year, which as it happens is also the rst day of the new century.
The ceremony will herald the dawn of a new era.”
A new Lannister era, thought Tyrion. “Oh, bother, I fear I’ve made
other plans for that day.”
“Did you come here just to complain of your bedchamber and
make your lame japes? I have important letters to nish.”
“Important letters. To be sure.”
“Some battles are won with swords and spears, others with quills
and ravens. Spare me these coy reproaches, Tyrion. I visited your
sickbed as often as Maester Ballabar would allow it, when you
seemed like to die.” He steepled his ngers under his chin. “Why
did you dismiss Ballabar?”
Tyrion shrugged. “Maester Frenken is not so determined to keep
me insensate.”
“Ballabar came to the city in Lord Redwyne’s retinue. A gifted
healer, it’s said. It was kind of Cersei to ask him to look after you.
She feared for your life.”
Feared that I might keep it, you mean. “Doubtless that’s why she’s
never once left my bedside.”
“Don’t be impertinent. Cersei has a royal wedding to plan, I am
waging a war, and you have been out of danger for at least a
fortnight.” Lord Tywin studied his son’s dis gured face, his pale
green eyes un inching. “Though the wound is ghastly enough, I’ll
grant you. What madness possessed you?”
“The foe was at the gates with a battering ram. If Jaime had led
the sortie, you’d call it valor.”
“Jaime would never be so foolish as to remove his helm in battle.
I trust you killed the man who cut you?”
“Oh, the wretch is dead enough.” Though it had been Podrick
Payne who’d killed Ser Mandon, shoving him into the river to
drown beneath the weight of his armor. “A dead enemy is a joy
forever,” Tyrion said blithely, though Ser Mandon was not his true
enemy. The man had no reason to want him dead. He was only a
catspaw, and I believe I know the cat. She told him to make certain I did
not survive the battle. But without proof Lord Tywin would never

listen to such a charge. “Why are you here in the city, Father?” he
asked. “Shouldn’t you be o
ghting Lord Stannis or Robb Stark or
someone?” And the sooner the better.
“Until Lord Redwyne brings his eet up, we lack the ships to
assail Dragonstone. It makes no matter. Stannis Baratheon’s sun set
on the Blackwater. As for Stark, the boy is still in the west, but a
large force of northmen under Helman Tallhart and Robett Glover
are descending toward Duskendale. I’ve sent Lord Tarly to meet
them, while Ser Gregor drives up the kingsroad to cut o their
retreat. Tallhart and Glover will be caught between them, with a
third of Stark’s strength.”
“Duskendale?” There was nothing at Duskendale worth such a
risk. Had the Young Wolf nally blundered?
“It’s nothing you need trouble yourself with. Your face is pale as
death, and there’s blood seeping through your dressings. Say what
you want and take yourself back to bed.”
“What I want …” His throat felt raw and tight. What did he want?
More than you can ever give me, Father. “Pod tells me that
Little nger’s been made Lord of Harrenhal.”
“An empty title, so long as Roose Bolton holds the castle for Robb
Stark, yet Lord Baelish was desirous of the honor. He did us good
service in the matter of the Tyrell marriage. A Lannister pays his
debts.”
The Tyrell marriage had been Tyrion’s notion, in point of fact, but
it would seem churlish to try to claim that now. “That title may not
be as empty as you think,” he warned. “Little nger does nothing
without good reason. But be that as it may. You said something
about paying debts, I believe?”
“And you want your own reward, is that it? Very well. What is it
you would have of me? Lands, castle, some o ce?”
“A little bloody gratitude would make a nice start.”
Lord Tywin stared at him, unblinking. “Mummers and monkeys
require applause. So did Aerys, for that matter. You did as you were
commanded, and I am sure it was to the best of your ability. No one
denies the part you played.”

“That part I played?” What nostrils Tyrion had left must surely
have ared. “I saved your bloody city, it seems to me.”
“Most people seem to feel that it was my attack on Lord Stannis’s
ank that turned the tide of battle. Lords Tyrell, Rowan, Redwyne,
and Tarly fought nobly as well, and I’m told it was your sister
Cersei who set the pyromancers to making the wild re that
destroyed the Baratheon eet.”
“While all I did was get my nosehairs trimmed, is that it?” Tyrion
could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.
“Your chain was a clever stroke, and crucial to our victory. Is that
what you wanted to hear? I am told we have you to thank for our
Dornish alliance as well. You may be pleased to learn that Myrcella
has arrived safely at Sunspear. Ser Arys Oakheart writes that she
has taken a great liking to Princess Arianne, and that Prince
Trystane is enchanted with her. I mislike giving House Martell a
hostage, but I suppose that could not be helped.”
“We’ll have our own hostage,” Tyrion said. “A council seat was
also part of the bargain. Unless Prince Doran brings an army when
he comes to claim it, he’ll be putting himself in our power.”
“Would that a council seat were all Martell came to claim,” Lord
Tywin said. “You promised him vengeance as well.”
“I promised him justice.”
“Call it what you will. It still comes down to blood.”
“Not an item in short supply, surely? I splashed through lakes of
it during the battle.” Tyrion saw no reason not to cut to the heart of
the matter. “Or have you grown so fond of Gregor Clegane that you
cannot bear to part with him?”
“Ser Gregor has his uses, as did his brother. Every lord has need
of a beast from time to time … a lesson you seem to have learned,
judging from Ser Bronn and those clansmen of yours.”
Tyrion thought of Timett’s burned eye, Shagga with his axe,
Chella in her necklace of dried ears. And Bronn. Bronn most of all.
“The woods are full of beasts,” he reminded his father. “The
alleyways as well.”
“True. Perhaps other dogs would hunt as well. I shall think on it.
If there is nothing else …”

“You have important letters, yes.” Tyrion rose on unsteady legs,
closed his eyes for an instant as a wave of dizziness washed over
him, and took a shaky step toward the door. Later, he would re ect
that he should have taken a second, and then a third. Instead he
turned. “What do I want, you ask? I’ll tell you what I want. I want
what is mine by rights. I want Casterly Rock.”
His father’s mouth grew hard. “Your brother’s birthright?”
“The knights of the Kingsguard are forbidden to marry, to father
children, and to hold land, you know that as well as I. The day
Jaime put on that white cloak, he gave up his claim to Casterly
Rock, but never once have you acknowledged it. It’s past time. I
want you to stand up before the realm and proclaim that I am your
son and your lawful heir.”
Lord Tywin’s eyes were a pale green ecked with gold, as
luminous as they were merciless. “Casterly Rock,” he declared in a
at cold dead tone. And then, “Never.”
The word hung between them, huge, sharp, poisoned.
I knew the answer before I asked, Tyrion said. Eighteen years since
Jaime joined the Kingsguard, and I never once raised the issue. I must
have known. I must always have known. “Why?” he made himself ask,
though he knew he would rue the question.
“You ask that? You, who killed your mother to come into the
world? You are an ill-made, devious, disobedient, spiteful little
creature full of envy, lust, and low cunning. Men’s laws give you
the right to bear my name and display my colors, since I cannot
prove that you are not mine. To teach me humility, the gods have
condemned me to watch you waddle about wearing that proud lion
that was my father’s sigil and his father’s before him. But neither
gods nor men shall ever compel me to let you turn Casterly Rock
into your whorehouse.”
“My whorehouse?” The dawn broke; Tyrion understood all at once
where this bile had come from. He ground his teeth together and
said, “Cersei told you about Alayaya.”
“Is that her name? I confess, I cannot remember the names of all
your whores. Who was the one you married as a boy?”
“Tysha.” He spat out the answer, de ant.

“And that camp follower on the Green Fork?”
“Why do you care?” he asked, unwilling even to speak Shae’s
name in his presence.
“I don’t. No more than I care if they live or die.”
“It was you who had Yaya whipped.” It was not a question.
“Your sister told me of your threats against my grandsons.” Lord
Tywin’s voice was colder than ice. “Did she lie?”
Tyrion would not deny it. “I made threats, yes. To keep Alayaya
safe. So the Kettleblacks would not misuse her.”
“To save a whore’s virtue, you threatened your own House, your
own kin? Is that the way of it?”
“You were the one who taught me that a good threat is often
more telling than a blow. Not that Jo rey hasn’t tempted me sore a
few hundred times. If you’re so anxious to whip people, start with
him. But Tommen … why would I harm Tommen? He’s a good lad,
and mine own blood.”
“As was your mother.” Lord Tywin rose abruptly, to tower over
his dwarf son. “Go back to your bed, Tyrion, and speak to me no
more of your rights to Casterly Rock. You shall have your reward,
but it shall be one I deem appropriate to your service and station.
And make no mistake—this was the last time I will su er you to
bring shame onto House Lannister. You are done with whores. The
next one I nd in your bed, I’ll hang.”

DAVOS

He watched the sail grow for a long time, trying to decide

whether he would sooner live or die.
Dying would be easier, he knew. All he had to do was crawl
inside his cave and let the ship pass by, and death would nd him.
For days now the fever had been burning through him, turning his
bowels to brown water and making him shiver in his restless sleep.
Each morning found him weaker. It will not be much longer, he had
taken to telling himself.
If the fever did not kill him, thirst surely would. He had no fresh
water here, but for the occasional rainfall that pooled in hollows on
the rock. Only three days past (or had it been four? On his rock, it
was hard to tell the days apart) his pools had been dry as old bone,
and the sight of the bay rippling green and grey all around him had
been almost more than he could bear. Once he began to drink
seawater the end would come swiftly, he knew, but all the same he
had almost taken that rst swallow, so parched was his throat. A
sudden squall had saved him. He had grown so feeble by then that it
was all he could do to lie in the rain with his eyes closed and his
mouth open, and let the water splash down on his cracked lips and
swollen tongue. But afterward he felt a little stronger, and the
island’s pools and cracks and crevices once more had brimmed with
life.
But that had been three days ago (or maybe four), and most of
the water was gone now. Some had evaporated, and he had sucked

up the rest. By the morrow he would be tasting the mud again, and
licking the damp cold stones at the bottom of the depressions.
And if not thirst or fever, starvation would kill him. His island
was no more than a barren spire jutting up out of the immensity of
Blackwater Bay. When the tide was low, he could sometimes nd
tiny crabs along the stony strand where he had washed ashore after
the battle. They nipped his ngers painfully before he smashed
them apart on the rocks to suck the meat from their claws and the
guts from their shells.
But the strand vanished whenever the tide came rushing in, and
Davos had to scramble up the rock to keep from being swept out
into the bay once more. The point of the spire was fteen feet
above the water at high tide, but when the bay grew rough the
spray went even higher, so there was no way to keep dry, even in
his cave (which was really no more than a hollow in the rock
beneath an overhang). Nothing grew on the rock but lichen, and
even the seabirds shunned the place. Now and again some gulls
would land atop the spire and Davos would try to catch one, but
they were too quick for him to get close. He took to inging stones
at them, but he was too weak to throw with much force, so even
when his stones hit, the gulls would only scream at him in
annoyance and then take to the air.
There were other rocks visible from his refuge, distant stony
spires taller than his own. The nearest stood a good forty feet above
the water, he guessed, though it was hard to be sure at this
distance. A cloud of gulls swirled about it constantly, and often
Davos thought of crossing over to raid their nests. But the water
was cold here, the currents strong and treacherous, and he knew he
did not have the strength for such a swim. That would kill him as
sure as drinking seawater.
Autumn in the narrow sea could often be wet and rainy, he
remembered from years past. The days were not bad so long as the
sun was shining, but the nights were growing colder and sometimes
the wind would come gusting across the bay, driving a line of
whitecaps before it, and before long Davos would be soaked and

shivering. Fever and chills assaulted him in turn, and of late he had
developed a persistent racking cough.
His cave was all the shelter he had, and that was little enough.
Driftwood and bits of charred debris would wash up on the strand
during low tide, but he had no way to strike a spark or start a re.
Once, in desperation, he had tried rubbing two pieces of driftwood
against each other, but the wood was rotted, and his e orts earned
him only blisters. His clothes were sodden as well, and he had lost
one of his boots somewhere in the bay before he washed up here.
Thirst; hunger; exposure. They were his companions, with him
every hour of every day, and in time he had come to think of them
as his friends. Soon enough, one or the other of his friends would
take pity on him and free him from this endless misery. Or perhaps
he would simply walk into the water one day, and strike out for the
shore that he knew lay somewhere to the north, beyond his sight. It
was too far to swim, as weak as he was, but that did not matter.
Davos had always been a sailor; he was meant to die at sea. The
gods beneath the waters have been waiting for me, he told himself. It’s
past time I went to them.
But now there was a sail; only a speck on the horizon, but
growing larger. A ship where no ship should be. He knew where his
rock lay, more or less; it was one of a series of sea monts that rose
from the oor of Blackwater Bay. The tallest of them jutted a
hundred feet above the tide, and a dozen lesser monts stood thirty
to sixty feet high. Sailors called them spears of the merling king, and
knew that for every one that broke the surface, a dozen lurked
treacherously just below it. Any captain with sense kept his course
well away from them.
Davos watched the sail swell through pale red-rimmed eyes, and
tried to hear the sound of the wind caught in the canvas. She is
coming this way. Unless she changed course soon, she would pass
within hailing distance of his meager refuge. It might mean life. If
he wanted it. He was not sure he did.
Why should I live? he thought as tears blurred his vision. Gods be
good, why? My sons are dead, Dale and Allard, Maric and Matthos,
perhaps Devan as well. How can a father outlive so many strong young

sons? How would I go on? I am a hollow shell, the crab’s died, there’s
nothing left inside. Don’t they know that?
They had sailed up the Blackwater Rush ying the ery heart of
the Lord of Light. Davos and Black Betha had been in the second line
of battle, between Dale’s Wraith and Allard on Lady Marya. Maric
his third-born was oarmaster on Fury, at the center of the rst line,
while Matthos served as his father’s second. Beneath the walls of
the Red Keep Stannis Baratheon’s galleys had joined in battle with
the boy king Jo rey’s smaller eet, and for a few moments the
river had rung to the thrum of bowstrings and the crash of iron
rams shattering oars and hulls alike.
And then some vast beast had let out a roar, and green ames
were all around them: wild re, pyromancer’s piss, the jade demon.
Matthos had been standing at his elbow on the deck of Black Betha
when the ship seemed to lift from the water. Davos found himself in
the river, ailing as the current took him and spun him around and
around. Upstream, the ames had ripped at the sky, fty feet high.
He had seen Black Betha a re, and Fury, and a dozen other ships,
had seen burning men leaping into the water to drown. Wraith and
Lady Marya were gone, sunk or shattered or vanished behind a veil
of wild re, and there was no time to look for them, because the
mouth of the river was almost upon him, and across the mouth of
the river the Lannisters had raised a great iron chain. From bank to
bank there was nothing but burning ships and wild re. The sight of
it seemed to stop his heart for a moment, and he could still
remember the sound of it, the crackle of ames, the hiss of steam,
the shrieks of dying men, and the beat of that terrible heat against
his face as the current swept him down toward hell.
All he needed to do was nothing. A few moments more, and he
would be with his sons now, resting in the cool green mud on the
bottom of the bay, with sh nibbling at his face.
Instead he sucked in a great gulp of air and dove, kicking for the
bottom of the river. His only hope was to pass under the chain and
the burning ships and the wild re that oated on the surface of the
water, to swim hard for the safety of the bay beyond. Davos had
always been a strong swimmer, and he’d worn no steel that day, but

for the helm he’d lost when he’d lost Black Betha. As he knifed
through the green murk, he saw other men struggling beneath the
water, pulled down to drown beneath the weight of plate and mail.
Davos swam past them, kicking with all the strength left in his legs,
giving himself up to the current, the water lling his eyes. Deeper
he went, and deeper, and deeper still. With every stroke it grew
harder to hold his breath. He remembered seeing the bottom, soft
and dim, as a stream of bubbles burst from his lips. Something
touched his leg … a snag or a sh or a drowning man, he could not
tell.
He needed air by then, but he was afraid. Was he past the chain
yet, was he out in the bay? If he came up under a ship he would
drown, and if he surfaced amidst the oating patches of wild re his
rst breath would sear his lungs to ash. He twisted in the water to
look up, but there was nothing to see but green darkness and then
he spun too far and suddenly he could no longer tell up from down.
Panic took hold of him. His hands ailed against the bottom of the
river and sent up a cloud of mud that blinded him. His chest was
growing tighter by the instant. He clawed at the water, kicking,
pushing himself, turning, his lungs screaming for air, kicking,
kicking, lost now in the river murk, kicking, kicking, kicking until
he could kick no longer. When he opened his mouth to scream, the
water came rushing in, tasting of salt, and Davos Seaworth knew
that he was drowning.
The next he knew the sun was up, and he lay upon a stony strand
beneath a spire of naked stone, with the empty bay all around and a
broken mast, a burned sail, and a swollen corpse beside him. The
mast, the sail, and the dead man vanished with the next high tide,
leaving Davos alone on his rock amidst the spears of the merling
king.
His long years as a smuggler had made the waters around King’s
Landing more familiar to him than any home he’d ever had, and he
knew his refuge was no more than a speck on the charts, in a place
that honest sailors steered away from, not toward … though Davos
himself had come by it once or twice in his smuggling days, the
better to stay unseen. When they nd me dead here, if ever they do,

perhaps they will name the rock for me, he thought. Onion Rock, they’ll
call it; it will be my tombstone and my legacy. He deserved no more.
The Father protects his children, the septons taught, but Davos had led
his boys into the re. Dale would never give his wife the child they
had prayed for, and Allard, with his girl in Oldtown and his girl in
King’s Landing and his girl in Braavos, they would all be weeping
soon. Matthos would never captain his own ship, as he’d dreamed.
Maric would never have his knighthood.
How can I live when they are dead? So many brave knights and
mighty lords have died, better men than me, and highborn. Crawl inside
your cave, Davos. Crawl inside and shrink up small and the ship will go
away, and no one will trouble you ever again. Sleep on your stone
pillow, and let the gulls peck out your eyes while the crabs feast on your
esh. You’ve feasted on enough of them, you owe them. Hide, smuggler.
Hide, and be quiet, and die.
The sail was almost on him. A few moments more, and the ship
would be safely past, and he could die in peace.
His hand reached for his throat, fumbling for the small leather
pouch he always wore about his neck. Inside he kept the bones of
the four ngers his king had shortened for him, on the day he made
Davos a knight. My luck. His shortened ngers patted at his chest,
groping, nding nothing. The pouch was gone, and the ngerbones
with them. Stannis could never understand why he’d kept the bones.
“To remind me of my king’s justice,” he whispered through cracked
lips. But now they were gone. The re took my luck as well as my
sons. In his dreams the river was still a ame and demons danced
upon the waters with ery whips in their hands, while men
blackened and burned beneath the lash. “Mother, have mercy,”
Davos prayed. “Save me, gentle Mother, save us all. My luck is
gone, and my sons.” He was weeping freely now, salt tears
streaming down his cheeks. “The re took it all … the re …”
Perhaps it was only wind blowing against the rock, or the sound
of the sea on the shore, but for an instant Davos Seaworth heard her
answer. “You called the re,” she whispered, her voice as faint as
the sound of waves in a seashell, sad and soft. “You burned
us … burned us … burrrrned usssssss.”

“It was her!” Davos cried. “Mother, don’t forsake us. It was her
who burned you, the red woman, Melisandre, her!” He could see
her; the heart-shaped face, the red eyes, the long coppery hair, her
red gowns moving like ames as she walked, a swirl of silk and
satin. She had come from Asshai in the east, she had come to
Dragonstone and won Selsye and her queen’s men for her alien god,
and then the king, Stannis Baratheon himself. He had gone so far as
to put the ery heart on his banners, the ery heart of R’hllor, Lord
of Light and God of Flame and Shadow. At Melisandre’s urging, he
had dragged the Seven from their sept at Dragonstone and burned
them before the castle gates, and later he had burned the godswood
at Storm’s End as well, even the heart tree, a huge white weirwood
with a solemn face.
“It was her work,” Davos said again, more weakly. Her work, and
yours, onion knight. You rowed her into Storm’s End in the black of
night, so she might loose her shadow child. You are not guiltless, no. You
rode beneath her banner and ew it from your mast. You watched the
Seven burn at Dragonstone, and did nothing. She gave the Father’s
justice to the re, and the Mother’s mercy, and the wisdom of the Crone.
Smith and Stranger, Maid and Warrior, she burnt them all to the glory of
her cruel god, and you stood and held your tongue. Even when she killed
old Maester Cressen, even then, you did nothing.
The sail was a hundred yards away and moving fast across the
bay. In a few more moments it would be past him, and dwindling.
Ser Davos Seaworth began to climb his rock.
He pulled himself up with trembling hands, his head swimming
with fever. Twice his maimed ngers slipped on the damp stone and
he almost fell, but somehow he managed to cling to his perch. If he
fell he was dead, and he had to live. For a little while more, at
least. There was something he had to do.
The top of the rock was too small to stand on safely, as weak as
he was, so he crouched and waved his eshless arms. “Ship,” he
screamed into the wind. “Ship, here, here!” From up here, he could
see her more clearly; the lean striped hull, the bronze gurehead,
the billowing sail. There was a name painted on her hull, but Davos

had never learned to read. “Ship,” he called again, “help me, HELP
ME!”
A crewman on her forecastle saw him and pointed. He watched as
other sailors moved to the gunwale to gape at him. A short while
later the galley’s sail came down, her oars slid out, and she swept
around toward his refuge. She was too big to approach the rock
closely, but thirty yards away she launched a small boat. Davos
clung to his rock and watched it creep toward him. Four men were
rowing, while a fth sat in the prow. “You,” the fth man called out
when they were only a few feet from his island, “you up on the
rock. Who are you?”
A smuggler who rose above himself, thought Davos, a fool who loved
his king too much, and forgot his gods. “I …” His throat was parched,
and he had forgotten how to talk. The words felt strange on his
tongue and sounded stranger in his ears. “I was in the battle. I
was … a captain, a … a knight, I was a knight.”
“Aye, ser,” the man said, “and serving which king?”
The galley might be Jo rey’s, he realized suddenly. If he spoke
the wrong name now, she would abandon him to his fate. But no,
her hull was striped. She was Lysene, she was Salladhor Saan’s. The
Mother sent her here, the Mother in her mercy. She had a task for
him. Stannis lives, he knew then. I have a king still. And sons, I have
other sons, and a wife loyal and loving. How could he have forgotten?
The Mother was merciful indeed.
“Stannis,” he shouted back at the Lyseni. “Gods be good, I serve
King Stannis.”
“Aye,” said the man in the boat, “and so do we.”

SANSA

The invitation seemed innocent enough, but every time Sansa read

it her tummy tightened into a knot. She’s to be queen now, she’s
beautiful and rich and everyone loves her, why would she want to sup
with a traitor’s daughter? It could be curiosity, she supposed; perhaps
Margaery Tyrell wanted to get the measure of the rival she’d
displaced. Does she resent me, I wonder? Does she think I bear her ill
will …
Sansa had watched from the castle walls as Margaery Tyrell and
her escort made their way up Aegon’s High Hill. Jo rey had met his
new bride-to-be at the King’s Gate to welcome her to the city, and
they rode side by side through cheering crowds, Jo glittering in
gilded armor and the Tyrell girl splendid in green with a cloak of
autumn owers blowing from her shoulders. She was sixteen,
brown-haired and brown-eyed, slender and beautiful. The people
called out her name as she passed, held up their children for her
blessing, and scattered owers under the hooves of her horse. Her
mother and grandmother followed close behind, riding in a tall
wheelhouse whose sides were carved into the shape of a hundred
twining roses, every one gilded and shining. The smallfolk cheered
them as well.
The same smallfolk who pulled me from my horse and would have
killed me, if not for the Hound. Sansa had done nothing to make the
commons hate her, no more than Margaery Tyrell had done to win
their love. Does she want me to love her too? She studied the

invitation, which looked to be written in Margaery’s own hand.
Does she want my blessing? Sansa wondered if Jo rey knew of this
supper. For all she knew, it might be his doing. That thought made
her fearful. If Jo was behind the invitation, he would have some
cruel jape planned to shame her in the older girl’s eyes. Would he
command his Kingsguard to strip her naked once again? The last
time he had done that his uncle Tyrion had stopped him, but the
Imp could not save her now.
No one can save me but my Florian. Ser Dontos had promised he
would help her escape, but not until the night of Jo rey’s wedding.
The plans had been well laid, her dear devoted knight-turned-fool
assured her; there was nothing to do until then but endure, and
count the days.
And sup with my replacement …
Perhaps she was doing Margaery Tyrell an injustice. Perhaps the
invitation was no more than a simple kindness, an act of courtesy. It
might be just a supper. But this was the Red Keep, this was King’s
Landing, this was the court of King Jo rey Baratheon, the First of
His Name, and if there was one thing that Sansa Stark had learned
here, it was mistrust.
Even so, she must accept. She was nothing now, the discarded
daughter of a traitor and disgraced sister of a rebel lord. She could
scarcely refuse Jo rey’s queen-to-be.
I wish the Hound were here. The night of the battle, Sandor
Clegane had come to her chambers to take her from the city, but
Sansa had refused. Sometimes she lay awake at night, wondering if
she’d been wise. She had his stained white cloak hidden in a cedar
chest beneath her summer silks. She could not say why she’d kept it.
The Hound had turned craven, she heard it said; at the height of the
battle, he got so drunk the Imp had to take his men. But Sansa
understood. She knew the secret of his burned face. It was only the
re he feared. That night, the wild re had set the river itself ablaze,
and lled the very air with green ame. Even in the castle, Sansa
had been afraid. Outside … she could scarcely imagine it.
Sighing, she got out quill and ink, and wrote Margaery Tyrell a
gracious note of acceptance.

When the appointed night arrived, another of the Kingsguard
came for her, a man as di erent from Sandor Clegane as … well, as
a ower from a dog. The sight of Ser Loras Tyrell standing on her
threshold made Sansa’s heart beat a little faster. This was the rst
time she had been so close to him since he had returned to King’s
Landing, leading the vanguard of his father’s host. For a moment
she did not know what to say. “Ser Loras,” she nally managed,
“you … you look so lovely.”
He gave her a puzzled smile. “My lady is too kind. And beautiful
besides. My sister awaits you eagerly.”
“I have so looked forward to our supper.”
“As has Margaery, and my lady grandmother as well.” He took
her arm and led her toward the steps.
“Your grandmother?” Sansa was nding it hard to walk and talk
and think all at the same time, with Ser Loras touching her arm. She
could feel the warmth of his hand through the silk.
“Lady Olenna. She is to sup with you as well.”
“Oh,” said Sansa. I am talking to him, and he’s touching me, he’s
holding my arm and touching me. “The Queen of Thorns, she’s called.
Isn’t that right?”
“It is.” Ser Loras laughed. He has the warmest laugh, she thought as
he went on, “You’d best not use that name in her presence, though,
or you’re like to get pricked.”
Sansa reddened. Any fool would have realized that no woman
would be happy about being called “the Queen of Thorns.” Maybe I
truly am as stupid as Cersei Lannister says. Desperately she tried to
think of something clever and charming to say to him, but her wits
had deserted her. She almost told him how beautiful he was, until
she remembered that she’d already done that.
He was beautiful, though. He seemed taller than he’d been when
she’d rst met him, but still so lithe and graceful, and Sansa had
never seen another boy with such wonderful eyes. He’s no boy,
though, he’s a man grown, a knight of the Kingsguard. She thought he
looked even ner in white than in the greens and golds of House
Tyrell. The only spot of color on him now was the brooch that

clasped his cloak; the rose of Highgarden wrought in soft yellow
gold, nestled in a bed of delicate green jade leaves.
Ser Balon Swann held the door of Maegor’s for them to pass. He
was all in white as well, though he did not wear it half so well as
Ser Loras. Beyond the spiked moat, two dozen men were taking
their practice with sword and shield. With the castle so crowded,
the outer ward had been given over to guests to raise their tents
and pavilions, leaving only the smaller inner yards for training. One
of the Redwyne twins was being driven backward by Ser Tallad,
with the eyes on his shield. Chunky Ser Kennos of Kayce, who
chu ed and pu ed every time he raised his longsword, seemed to
be holding his own against Osney Kettleblack, but Osney’s brother
Ser Osfryd was savagely punishing the frog-faced squire Morros
Slynt. Blunted swords or no, Slynt would have a rich crop of bruises
by the morrow. It made Sansa wince just to watch. They have
scarcely nished burying the dead from the last battle, and already they
are practicing for the next one.
On the edge of the yard, a lone knight with a pair of golden roses
on his shield was holding o three foes. Even as they watched, he
caught one of them alongside the head, knocking him senseless. “Is
that your brother?” Sansa asked.
“It is, my lady,” said Ser Loras. “Garlan often trains against three
men, or even four. In battle it is seldom one against one, he says, so
he likes to be prepared.”
“He must be very brave.”
“He is a great knight,” Ser Loras replied. “A better sword than
me, in truth, though I’m the better lance.”
“I remember,” said Sansa. “You ride wonderfully, ser.”
“My lady is gracious to say so. When has she seen me ride?”
“At the Hand’s tourney, don’t you remember? You rode a white
courser, and your armor was a hundred di erent kinds of owers.
You gave me a rose. A red rose. You threw white roses to the other
girls that day.” It made her ush to speak of it. “You said no victory
was half as beautiful as me.”
Ser Loras gave her a modest smile. “I spoke only a simple truth,
that any man with eyes could see.”

He doesn’t remember, Sansa realized, startled. He is only being kind
to me, he doesn’t remember me or the rose or any of it. She had been so
certain that it meant something, that it meant everything. A red rose,
not a white. “It was after you unhorsed Ser Robar Royce,” she said,
desperately.
He took his hand from her arm. “I slew Robar at Storm’s End, my
lady.” It was not a boast; he sounded sad.
Him, and another of King Renly’s Rainbow Guard as well, yes. Sansa
had heard the women talking of it round the well, but for a moment
she’d forgotten. “That was when Lord Renly was killed, wasn’t it?
How terrible for your poor sister.”
“For Margaery?” His voice was tight. “To be sure. She was at
Bitterbridge, though. She did not see.”
“Even so, when she heard …”
Ser Loras brushed the hilt of his sword lightly with his hand. Its
grip was white leather, its pommel a rose in alabaster. “Renly is
dead. Robar as well. What use to speak of them?”
The sharpness in his tone took her aback. “I … my lord, I … I did
not mean to give o ense, ser.”
“Nor could you, Lady Sansa,” Ser Loras replied, but all the
warmth had gone from his voice. Nor did he take her arm again.
They ascended the serpentine steps in a deepening silence.
Oh, why did I have to mention Ser Robar? Sansa thought. I’ve ruined
everything. He is angry with me now. She tried to think of something
she might say to make amends, but all the words that came to her
were lame and weak. Be quiet, or you will only make it worse, she told
herself.
Lord Mace Tyrell and his entourage had been housed behind the
royal sept, in the long slate-roofed keep that had been called the
Maidenvault since King Baelor the Blessed had con ned his sisters
therein, so the sight of them might not tempt him into carnal
thoughts. Outside its tall carved doors stood two guards in gilded
halfhelms and green cloaks edged in gold satin, the golden rose of
Highgarden sewn on their breasts. Both were seven-footers, wide of
shoulder and narrow of waist, magni cently muscled. When Sansa
got close enough to see their faces, she could not tell one from the

other. They had the same strong jaws, the same deep blue eyes, the
same thick red mustaches. “Who are they?” she asked Ser Loras, her
discom t forgotten for a moment.
“My grandmother’s personal guard,” he told her. “Their mother
named them Erryk and Arryk, but Grandmother can’t tell them
apart, so she calls them Left and Right.”
Left and Right opened the doors, and Margaery Tyrell herself
emerged and swept down the short ight of steps to greet them.
“Lady Sansa,” she called, “I’m so pleased you came. Be welcome.”
Sansa knelt at the feet of her future queen. “You do me great
honor, Your Grace.”
“Won’t you call me Margaery? Please, rise. Loras, help the Lady
Sansa to her feet. Might I call you Sansa?”
“If it please you.” Ser Loras helped her up.
Margaery dismissed him with a sisterly kiss, and took Sansa by
the hand. “Come, my grandmother awaits, and she is not the most
patient of ladies.”
A re was crackling in the hearth, and sweet-swelling rushes had
been scattered on the oor. Around the long trestle table a dozen
women were seated.
Sansa recognized only Lord Tyrell’s tall, digni ed wife, Lady
Alerie, whose long silvery braid was bound with jeweled rings.
Margaery performed the other introductions. There were three
Tyrell cousins, Megga and Alla and Elinor, all close to Sansa’s age.
Buxom Lady Janna was Lord Tyrell’s sister, and wed to one of the
green-apple Fossoways; dainty, bright-eyed Lady Leonette was a
Fossoway as well, and wed to Ser Garlan. Septa Nysterica had a
homely pox-scarred face but seemed jolly. Pale, elegant Lady
Graceford was with child, and Lady Bulwer was a child, no more
than eight. And “Merry” was what she was to call boisterous plump
Meredyth Crane, but most de nitely not Lady Merryweather, a
sultry black-eyed Myrish beauty.
Last of all, Margaery brought her before the wizened whitehaired doll of a woman at the head of the table. “I am honored to
present my grandmother the Lady Olenna, widow to the late Luthor
Tyrell, Lord of Highgarden, whose memory is a comfort to us all.”

The old woman smelled of rosewater. Why, she’s just the littlest bit
of a thing. There was nothing the least bit thorny about her. “Kiss
me, child,” Lady Olenna said, tugging at Sansa’s wrist with a soft
spotted hand. “It is so kind of you to sup with me and my foolish
ock of hens.”
Dutifully, Sansa kissed the old woman on the cheek. “It is kind of
you to have me, my lady.”
“I knew your grandfather, Lord Rickard, though not well.”
“He died before I was born.”
“I am aware of that, child. It’s said that your Tully grandfather is
dying too. Lord Hoster, surely they told you? An old man, though
not so old as me. Still, night falls for all of us in the end, and too
soon for some. You would know that more than most, poor child.
You’ve had your share of grief, I know. We are sorry for your
losses.”
Sansa glanced at Margaery. “I was saddened when I heard of Lord
Renly’s death, Your Grace. He was very gallant.”
“You are kind to say so,” answered Margaery.
Her grandmother snorted. “Gallant, yes, and charming, and very
clean. He knew how to dress and he knew how to smile and he
knew how to bathe, and somehow he got the notion that this made
him t to be king. The Baratheons have always had some queer
notions, to be sure. It comes from their Targaryen blood, I should
think.” She sni ed. “They tried to marry me to a Targaryen once,
but I soon put an end to that.”
“Renly was brave and gentle, Grandmother,” said Margaery.
“Father liked him as well, and so did Loras.”
“Loras is young,” Lady Olenna said crisply, “and very good at
knocking men o horses with a stick. That does not make him wise.
As to your father, would that I’d been born a peasant woman with a
big wooden spoon, I might have been able to beat some sense into
his fat head.”
“Mother,” Lady Alerie scolded.
“Hush, Alerie, don’t take that tone with me. And don’t call me
Mother. If I’d given birth to you, I’m sure I’d remember. I’m only to
blame for your husband, the lord oaf of Highgarden.”

“Grandmother,” Margaery said, “mind your words, or what will
Sansa think of us?”
“She might think we have some wits about us. One of us, at any
rate.” The old woman turned back to Sansa. “It’s treason, I warned
them, Robert has two sons, and Renly has an older brother, how can
he possibly have any claim to that ugly iron chair? Tut-tut, says my
son, don’t you want your sweetling to be queen? You Starks were
kings once, the Arryns and the Lannisters as well, and even the
Baratheons through the female line, but the Tyrells were no more
than stewards until Aegon the Dragon came along and cooked the
rightful King of the Reach on the Field of Fire. If truth be told, even
our claim to Highgarden is a bit dodgy, just as those dreadful
Florents are always whining. ‘What does it matter?’ you ask, and of
course it doesn’t, except to oafs like my son. The thought that one
day he may see his grandson with his arse on the Iron Throne makes
Mace pu up like … now, what do you call it? Margaery, you’re
clever, be a dear and tell your poor old half-daft grandmother the
name of that queer sh from the Summer Isles that pu s up to ten
times its own size when you poke it.”
“They call them pu
sh, Grandmother.”
“Of course they do. Summer Islanders have no imagination. My
son ought to take the pu
sh for his sigil, if truth be told. He could
put a crown on it, the way the Baratheons do their stag, mayhap
that would make him happy. We should have stayed well out of all
this bloody foolishness if you ask me, but once the cow’s been
milked there’s no squirting the cream back up her udder. After Lord
Pu Fish put that crown on Renly’s head, we were into the pudding
up to our knees, so here we are to see things through. And what do
you say to that, Sansa?”
Sansa’s mouth opened and closed. She felt very like a pu
sh
herself. “The Tyrells can trace their descent back to Garth
Greenhand,” was the best she could manage at short notice.
The Queen of Thorns snorted. “So can the Florents, the Rowans,
the Oakhearts, and half the other noble houses of the south. Garth
liked to plant his seed in fertile ground, they say. I shouldn’t
wonder that more than his hands were green.”

“Sansa,” Lady Alerie broke in, “you must be very hungry. Shall
we have a bite of boar together, and some lemon cakes?”
“Lemon cakes are my favorite,” Sansa admitted.
“So we have been told,” declared Lady Olenna, who obviously
had no intention of being hushed. “That Varys creature seemed to
think we should be grateful for the information. I’ve never been
quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to
me they’re only men with the useful bits cut o . Alerie, will you
have them bring the food, or do you mean to starve me to death?
Here, Sansa, sit here next to me, I’m much less boring than these
others. I hope that you’re fond of fools.”
Sansa smoothed down her skirts and sat. “I think … fools, my
lady? You mean … the sort in motley?”
“Feathers, in this case. What did you imagine I was speaking of?
My son? Or these lovely ladies? No, don’t blush, with your hair it
makes you look like a pomegranate. All men are fools, if truth be
told, but the ones in motley are more amusing than ones with
crowns. Margaery, child, summon Butterbumps, let us see if we
can’t make Lady Sansa smile. The rest of you be seated, do I have to
tell you everything? Sansa must think that my granddaughter is
attended by a ock of sheep.”
Butterbumps arrived before the food, dressed in a jester’s suit of
green and yellow feathers with a oppy coxcomb. An immense
round fat man, as big as three Moon Boys, he came cartwheeling
into the hall, vaulted onto the table, and laid a gigantic egg right in
front of Sansa. “Break it, my lady,” he commanded. When she did, a
dozen yellow chicks escaped and began running in all directions.
“Catch them!” Butterbumps exclaimed. Little Lady Bulwer snagged
one and handed it to him, whereby he tilted back his head, popped
it into his huge rubbery mouth, and seemed to swallow it whole.
When he belched, tiny yellow feathers ew out his nose. Lady
Bulwer began to wail in distress, but her tears turned into a sudden
squeal of delight when the chick came squirming out of the sleeve
of her gown and ran down her arm.
As the servants brought out a broth of leeks and mushrooms,
Butterbumps began to juggle and Lady Olenna pushed herself

forward to rest her elbows on the table. “Do you know my son,
Sansa? Lord Pu Fish of Highgarden?”
“A great lord,” Sansa answered politely.
“A great oaf,” said the Queen of Thorns. “His father was an oaf as
well. My husband, the late Lord Luthor. Oh, I loved him well
enough, don’t mistake me. A kind man, and not unskilled in the
bedchamber, but an appalling oaf all the same. He managed to ride
o a cli whilst hawking. They say he was looking up at the sky
and paying no mind to where his horse was taking him.
“And now my oaf son is doing the same, only he’s riding a lion
instead of a palfrey. It is easy to mount a lion and not so easy to get
o , I warned him, but he only chuckles. Should you ever have a
son, Sansa, beat him frequently so he learns to mind you. I only had
the one boy and I hardly beat him at all, so now he pays more heed
to Butterbumps than he does to me. A lion is not a lap cat, I told
him, and he gives me a ‘tut-tut-Mother.’ There is entirely too much
tut-tutting in this realm, if you ask me. All these kings would do a
deal better if they would put down their swords and listen to their
mothers.”
Sansa realized that her mouth was open again. She lled it with a
spoon of broth while Lady Alerie and the other women were
giggling at the spectacle of Butterbumps bouncing oranges o his
head, his elbows, and his ample rump.
“I want you to tell me the truth about this royal boy,” said Lady
Olenna abruptly. “This Jo rey.”
Sansa’s ngers tightened round her spoon. The truth? I can’t. Don’t
ask it, please, I can’t. “I … I … I …”
“You, yes. Who would know better? The lad seems kingly
enough, I’ll grant you. A bit full of himself, but that would be his
Lannister blood. We have heard some troubling tales, however. Is
there any truth to them? Has this boy mistreated you?”
Sansa glanced about nervously. Butterbumps popped a whole
orange into his mouth, chewed and swallowed, slapped his cheek,
and blew seeds out of his nose. The women giggled and laughed.
Servants were coming and going, and the Maidenvault echoed to
the clatter of spoons and plates. One of the chicks hopped back onto

the table and ran through Lady Graceford’s broth. No one seemed to
be paying them any mind, but even so, she was frightened.
Lady Olenna was growing impatient. “Why are you gaping at
Butterbumps? I asked a question, I expect an answer. Have the
Lannisters stolen your tongue, child?”
Ser Dontos had warned her to speak freely only in the godswood.
“Jo … King Jo rey, he’s … His Grace is very fair and handsome,
and … and as brave as a lion.”
“Yes, all the Lannisters are lions, and when a Tyrell breaks wind
it smells just like a rose,” the old woman snapped. “But how kind is
he? How clever? Has he a good heart, a gentle hand? Is he
chivalrous as be ts a king? Will he cherish Margaery and treat her
tenderly, protect her honor as he would his own?”
“He will,” Sansa lied. “He is very … very comely.”
“You said that. You know, child, some say that you are as big a
fool as Butterbumps here, and I am starting to believe them.
Comely? I have taught my Margaery what comely is worth, I hope.
Somewhat less than a mummer’s fart. Aerion Bright re was comely
enough, but a monster all the same. The question is, what is
Jo rey?” She reached to snag a passing servant. “I am not fond of
leeks. Take this broth away, and bring me some cheese.”
“The cheese will be served after the cakes, my lady.”
“The cheese will be served when I want it served, and I want it
served now.” The old woman turned back to Sansa. “Are you
frightened, child? No need for that, we’re only women here. Tell me
the truth, no harm will come to you.”
“My father always told the truth.” Sansa spoke quietly, but even
so, it was hard to get the words out.
“Lord Eddard, yes, he had that reputation, but they named him
traitor and took his head o even so.” The old woman’s eyes bore
into her, sharp and bright as the points of swords.
“Jo rey,” Sansa said. “Jo rey did that. He promised me he would
be merciful, and cut my father’s head o . He said that was mercy,
and he took me up on the walls and made me look at it. The head.
He wanted me to weep, but …” She stopped abruptly, and covered

her mouth. I’ve said too much, oh gods be good, they’ll know, they’ll
hear, someone will tell on me.
“Go on.” It was Margaery who urged. Jo rey’s own queen-to-be.
Sansa did not know how much she had heard.
“I can’t.” What if she tells him, what if she tells? He’ll kill me for
certain then, or give me to Ser Ilyn. “I never meant … my father was a
traitor, my brother as well, I have the traitor’s blood, please, don’t
make me say more.”
“Calm yourself, child,” the Queen of Thorns commanded.
“She’s terri ed, Grandmother, just look at her.”
The old woman called to Butterbumps. “Fool! Give us a song. A
long one, I should think. ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’ will do
nicely.”
“It will!” the huge jester replied. “It will do nicely indeed! Shall I
sing it standing on my head, my lady?”
“Will that make it sound better?”
“No.”
“Stand on your feet, then. We wouldn’t want your hat to fall o .
As I recall, you never wash your hair.”
“As my lady commands.” Butterbumps bowed low, let loose of an
enormous belch, then straightened, threw out his belly, and
bellowed. “A bear there was, a bear, a BEAR! All black and brown, and
covered with hair …”
Lady Olenna squirmed forward. “Even when I was a girl younger
than you, it was well known that in the Red Keep the very walls
have ears. Well, they will be the better for a song, and meanwhile
we girls shall speak freely.”
“But,” Sansa said, “Varys … he knows, he always …”
“Sing louder!” the Queen of Thorns shouted at Butterbumps.
“These old ears are almost deaf, you know. Are you whispering at
me, you fat fool? I don’t pay you for whispers. Sing!”
“… THE BEAR!” thundered Butterbumps, his great deep voice
echoing o the rafters. “OH, COME, THEY SAID, OH COME TO THE
FAIR! THE FAIR? SAID HE, BUT I’M A BEAR! ALL BLACK AND
BROWN, AND COVERED WITH HAIR!”

The wrinkled old lady smiled. “At Highgarden we have many
spiders amongst the owers. So long as they keep to themselves we
let them spin their little webs, but if they get underfoot we step on
them.” She patted Sansa on the back of the hand. “Now, child, the
truth. What sort of man is this Jo rey, who calls himself Baratheon
but looks so very Lannister?”
“AND DOWN THE ROAD FROM HERE TO THERE. FROM HERE!
TO THERE! THREE BOYS, A GOAT, AND A DANCING BEAR!”
Sansa felt as though her heart had lodged in her throat. The
Queen of Thorns was so close she could smell the old woman’s sour
breath. Her gaunt thin ngers were pinching her wrist. To her other
side, Margaery was listening as well. A shiver went through her. “A
monster,” she whispered, so tremulously she could scarcely hear her
own voice. “Jo rey is a monster. He lied about the butcher’s boy
and made Father kill my wolf. When I displease him, he has the
Kingsguard beat me. He’s evil and cruel, my lady, it’s so. And the
queen as well.”
Lady Olenna Tyrell and her granddaughter exchanged a look.
“Ah,” said the old woman, “that’s a pity.”
Oh, gods, thought Sansa, horri ed. If Margaery won’t marry him,
Jo will know that I’m to blame. “Please,” she blurted, “don’t stop the
wedding …”
“Have no fear, Lord Pu Fish is determined that Margaery shall
be queen. And the word of a Tyrell is worth more than all the gold
in Casterly Rock. At least it was in my day. Even so, we thank you
for the truth, child.”
“… DANCED AND SPUN, ALL THE WAY TO THE FAIR! THE FAIR!
THE FAIR!” Butterbumps hopped and roared and stomped his feet.
“Sansa, would you like to visit Highgarden?” When Margaery
Tyrell smiled, she looked very like her brother Loras. “All the
autumn owers are in bloom just now, and there are groves and
fountains, shady courtyards, marble colonnades. My lord father
always keeps singers at court, sweeter ones than Butters here, and
pipers and ddlers and harpers as well. We have the best horses,
and pleasure boats to sail along the Mander. Do you hawk, Sansa?”
“A little,” she admitted.

“OH, SWEET SHE WAS, AND PURE, AND FAIR! THE MAID WITH
HONEY IN HER HAIR!”
“You will love Highgarden as I do, I know it.” Margaery brushed
back a loose strand of Sansa’s hair. “Once you see it, you’ll never
want to leave. And perhaps you won’t have to.”
“HER HAIR! HER HAIR! THE MAID WITH HONEY IN HER HAIR!”
“Shush, child,” the Queen of Thorns said sharply. “Sansa hasn’t
even told us that she would like to come for a visit.”
“Oh, but I would,” Sansa said. Highgarden sounded like the place
she had always dreamed of, like the beautiful magical court she had
once hoped to nd at King’s Landing.
“… SMELLED THE SCENT ON THE SUMMER AIR. THE BEAR! THE
BEAR! ALL BLACK AND BROWN AND COVERED WITH HAIR.”
“But the queen,” Sansa went on, “she won’t let me go …”
“She will. Without Highgarden, the Lannisters have no hope of
keeping Jo rey on his throne. If my son the lord oaf asks, she will
have no choice but to grant his request.”
“Will he?” asked Sansa. “Will he ask?”
Lady Olenna frowned. “I see no need to give him a choice. Of
course, he has no hint of our true purpose.”
“HE SMELLED THE SCENT ON THE SUMMER AIR!”
Sansa wrinkled her brow. “Our true purpose, my lady?”
“HE SNIFFED AND ROARED AND SMELLED IT THERE! HONEY ON
THE SUMMER AIR!”
“To see you safely wed, child,” the old woman said, as
Butterbumps bellowed out the old, old song, “to my grandson.”
Wed to Ser Loras, oh … Sansa’s breath caught in her throat. She
remembered Ser Loras in his sparkling sapphire armor, tossing her a
rose. Ser Loras in white silk, so pure, innocent, beautiful. The
dimples at the corner of his mouth when he smiled. The sweetness
of his laugh, the warmth of his hand. She could only imagine what
it would be like to pull up his tunic and caress the smooth skin
underneath, to stand on her toes and kiss him, to run her ngers
through those thick brown curls and drown in his deep brown eyes.
A ush crept up her neck.

“OH, I’M A MAID, AND I’M PURE AND FAIR! I’LL NEVER DANCE
WITH A HAIRY BEAR! A BEAR! A BEAR! I’LL NEVER DANCE WITH
A HAIRY BEAR!”
“Would you like that, Sansa?” asked Margaery. “I’ve never had a
sister, only brothers. Oh, please say yes, please say that you will
consent to marry my brother.”
The words came tumbling out of her. “Yes. I will. I would like
that more than anything. To wed Ser Loras, to love him …”
“Loras?” Lady Olenna sounded annoyed. “Don’t be foolish, child.
Kingsguard never wed. Didn’t they teach you anything in
Winterfell? We were speaking of my grandson Willas. He is a bit
old for you, to be sure, but a dear boy for all that. Not the least bit
oa sh, and heir to Highgarden besides.”
Sansa felt dizzy; one instant her head was full of dreams of Loras,
and the next they had all been snatched away. Willas? Willas? “I,”
she said stupidly. Courtesy is a lady’s armor. You must not o end
them, be careful what you say. “I do not know Ser Willas. I have
never had the pleasure, my lady. Is he … is he as great a knight as
his brothers?”
“… LIFTED HER HIGH INTO THE AIR! THE BEAR! THE BEAR!”
“No,” Margaery said. “He has never taken vows.”
Her grandmother frowned. “Tell the girl the truth. The poor lad is
crippled, and that’s the way of it.”
“He was hurt as a squire, riding in his rst tourney,” Margaery
con ded. “His horse fell and crushed his leg.”
“That snake of a Dornishman was to blame, that Oberyn Martell.
And his maester as well.”
“I CALLED FOR A KNIGHT, BUT YOU’RE A BEAR! A BEAR! A
BEAR! ALL BLACK AND BROWN AND COVERED WITH HAIR!”
“Willas has a bad leg but a good heart,” said Margaery. “He used
to read to me when I was a little girl, and draw me pictures of the
stars. You will love him as much as we do, Sansa.”
“SHE KICKED AND WAILED, THE MAID SO FAIR, BUT HE LICKED
THE HONEY FROM HER HAIR. HER HAIR! HER HAIR! HE LICKED
THE HONEY FROM HER HAIR!”
“When might I meet him?” asked Sansa, hesitantly.

“Soon,” promised Margaery. “When you come to Highgarden,
after Jo rey and I are wed. My grandmother will take you.”
“I will,” said the old woman, patting Sansa’s hand and smiling a
soft wrinkly smile. “I will indeed.”
“THEN SHE SIGHED AND SQUEALED AND KICKED THE AIR! MY
BEAR! SHE SANG. MY BEAR SO FAIR! AND OFF THEY WENT, FROM
HERE TO THERE, THE BEAR, THE BEAR, AND THE MAIDEN FAIR.”
Butterbumps roared the last line, leapt into the air, and came down
on both feet with a crash that shook the wine cups on the table. The
women laughed and clapped.
“I thought that dreadful song would never end,” said the Queen
of Thorns. “But look, here comes my cheese.”

JON

The world was grey darkness, smelling of pine and moss and cold.

Pale mists rose from the black earth as the riders threaded their
way through the scatter of stones and scraggly trees, down toward
the welcoming res strewn like jewels across the oor of the river
valley below. There were more res than Jon Snow could count,
hundreds of res, thousands, a second river of ickery lights along
the banks of the icy white Milkwater. The ngers of his sword hand
opened and closed.
They descended the ridge without banners or trumpets, the quiet
broken only by the distant murmur of the river, the clop of hooves,
and the clacking of Rattleshirt’s bone armor. Somewhere above an
eagle soared on great blue-grey wings, while below came men and
dogs and horses and one white direwolf.
A stone bounced down the slope, disturbed by a passing hoof, and
Jon saw Ghost turn his head at the sudden sound. He had followed
the riders at a distance all day, as was his custom, but when the
moon rose over the soldier pines he’d come bounding up, red eyes
aglow. Rattleshirt’s dogs greeted him with a chorus of snarls and
growls and wild barking, as ever, but the direwolf paid them no
mind. Six days ago, the largest hound had attacked him from behind
as the wildlings camped for the night, but Ghost had turned and
lunged, sending the dog eeing with a bloody haunch. The rest of
the pack maintained a healthy distance after that.

Jon Snow’s garron whickered softly, but a touch and a soft word
soon quieted the animal. Would that his own fears could be calmed
so easily. He was all in black, the black of the Night’s Watch, but
the enemy rode before and behind. Wildlings, and I am with them.
Ygritte wore the cloak of Qhorin Halfhand. Lenyl had his hauberk,
the big spearwife Ragwyle his gloves, one of the bowmen his boots.
Qhorin’s helm had been won by the short homely man called
Longspear Ryk, but it t poorly on his narrow head, so he’d given
that to Ygritte as well. And Rattleshirt had Qhorin’s bones in his
bag, along with the bloody head of Ebben, who set out with Jon to
scout the Skirling Pass. Dead, all dead but me, and I am dead to the
world.
Ygritte rode just behind him. In front was Longspear Ryk. The
Lord of Bones had made the two of them his guards. “If the crow
ies, I’ll boil your bones as well,” he warned them when they had
set out, smiling through the crooked teeth of the giant’s skull he
wore for a helm.
Ygritte hooted at him. “You want to guard him? If you want us to
do it, leave us be and we’ll do it.”
These are a free folk indeed, Jon saw. Rattleshirt might lead them,
but none of them were shy in talking back to him.
The wildling leader xed him with an unfriendly stare. “Might be
you fooled these others, crow, but don’t think you’ll be fooling
Mance. He’ll take one look a’ you and know you’re false. And when
he does, I’ll make a cloak o’ your wolf there, and open your soft
boy’s belly and sew a weasel up inside.”
Jon’s sword hand opened and closed, exing the burned ngers
beneath the glove, but Longspear Ryk only laughed. “And where
would you nd a weasel in the snow?”
That rst night, after a long day ahorse, they made camp in a
shallow stone bowl atop a nameless mountain, huddling close to the
re while the snow began to fall. Jon watched the akes melt as
they drifted over the ames. Despite his layers of wool and fur and
leather, he’d felt cold to the bone. Ygritte sat beside him after she
had eaten, her hood pulled up and her hands tucked into her sleeves

for warmth. “When Mance hears how you did for Halfhand, he’ll
take you quick enough,” she told him.
“Take me for what?”
The girl laughed scornfully. “For one o’ us. D’ya think you’re the
rst crow ever ew down o the Wall? In your hearts you all want
to y free.”
“And when I’m free,” he said slowly, “will I be free to go?”
“Sure you will.” She had a warm smile, despite her crooked teeth.
“And we’ll be free to kill you. It’s dangerous being free, but most
come to like the taste o’ it.” She put her gloved hand on his leg, just
above the knee. “You’ll see.”
I will, thought Jon. I will see, and hear, and learn, and when I have I
will carry the word back to the Wall. The wildlings had taken him for
an oathbreaker, but in his heart he was still a man of the Night’s
Watch, doing the last duty that Qhorin Halfhand had laid on him.
Before I killed him.
At the bottom of the slope they came upon a little stream owing
down from the foothills to join the Milkwater. It looked all stones
and glass, though they could hear the sound of water running
beneath the frozen surface. Rattleshirt led them across, shattering
the thin crust of ice.
Mance Rayder’s outriders closed in as they emerged. Jon took
their measure with a glance: eight riders, men and women both,
clad in fur and boiled leather, with here and there a helm or bit of
mail. They were armed with spears and re-hardened lances, all but
their leader, a eshy blond man with watery eyes who bore a great
curved scythe of sharpened steel. The Weeper, he knew at once. The
black brothers told tales of this one. Like Rattleshirt and Harma
Dogshead and Alfyn Crowkiller, he was a known raider.
“The Lord o’ Bones,” the Weeper said when he saw them. He eyed
Jon and his wolf. “Who’s this, then?”
“A crow come over,” said Rattleshirt, who preferred to be called
the Lord of Bones, for the clattering armor he wore. “He was afraid
I’d take his bones as well as Halfhand’s.” He shook his sack of
trophies at the other wildlings.

“He slew Qhorin Halfhand,” said Longspear Ryk. “Him and that
wolf o’ his.”
“And did for Orell too,” said Rattleshirt.
“The lad’s a warg, or close enough,” put in Ragwyle, the big
spearwife. “His wolf took a piece o’ Halfhand’s leg.”
The Weeper’s red rheumy eyes gave Jon another look. “Aye?
Well, he has a wol sh cast to him, now as I look close. Bring him to
Mance, might be he’ll keep him.” He wheeled his horse around and
galloped o , his riders hard behind him.
The wind was blowing wet and heavy as they crossed the valley
of the Milkwater and rode single le through the river camp. Ghost
kept close to Jon, but the scent of him went before them like a
herald, and soon there were wildling dogs all around them,
growling and barking. Lenyl screamed at them to be quiet, but they
paid him no heed. “They don’t much care for that beast o’ yours,”
Longspear Ryk said to Jon.
“They’re dogs and he’s a wolf,” said Jon. “They know he’s not
their kind.” No more than I am yours. But he had his duty to be
mindful of, the task Qhorin Halfhand had laid upon him as they
shared that nal re—to play the part of turncloak, and nd
whatever it was that the wildlings had been seeking in the bleak
cold wilderness of the Frostfangs. “Some power,” Qhorin had named
it to the Old Bear, but he had died before learning what it was, or
whether Mance Rayder had found it with his digging.
There were cook res all along the river, amongst wayns and carts
and sleds. Many of the wildlings had thrown up tents, of hide and
skin and felted wool. Others sheltered behind rocks in crude leantos, or slept beneath their wagons. At one re Jon saw a man
hardening the points of long wooden spears and tossing them in a
pile. Elsewhere two bearded youths in boiled leather were sparring
with sta s, leaping at each other over the ames, grunting each
time one landed a blow. A dozen women sat nearby in a circle,
etching arrows.
Arrows for my brothers, Jon thought. Arrows for my father’s folk, for
the people of Winterfell and Deepwood Motte and the Last Hearth.
Arrows for the north.

But not all he saw was warlike. He saw women dancing as well,
and heard a baby crying, and a little boy ran in front of his garron,
all bundled up in fur and breathless from play. Sheep and goats
wandered freely, while oxen plodded along the riverbank in search
of grass. The smell of roast mutton drifted from one cook re, and at
another he saw a boar turning on a wooden spit.
In an open space surrounded by tall green soldier pines,
Rattleshirt dismounted. “We’ll make camp here,” he told Lenyl and
Ragwyle and the others. “Feed the horses, then the dogs, then
yourself. Ygritte, Longspear, bring the crow so Mance can have his
look. We’ll gut him after.”
They walked the rest of the way, past more cook res and more
tents, with Ghost following at their heels. Jon had never seen so
many wildlings. He wondered if anyone ever had. The camp goes on
forever, he re ected, but it’s more a hundred camps than one, and each
more vulnerable than the last. Stretched out over long leagues, the
wildlings had no defenses to speak of, no pits nor sharpened stakes,
only small groups of outriders patrolling their perimeters. Each
group or clan or village had simply stopped where they wanted, as
soon as they saw others stopping or found a likely spot. The free
folk. If his brothers were to catch them in such disarray, many of
them would pay for that freedom with their life’s blood. They had
numbers, but the Night’s Watch had discipline, and in battle
discipline beats numbers nine times of every ten, his father had
once told him.
There was no doubting which tent was the king’s. It was thrice
the size of the next largest he’d seen, and he could hear music
drifting from within. Like many of the lesser tents it was made of
sewn hides with the fur still on, but Mance Rayder’s hides were the
shaggy white pelts of snow bears. The peaked roof was crowned
with a huge set of antlers from one of the giant elks that had once
roamed freely throughout the Seven Kingdoms, in the times of the
First Men.
Here at least they found defenders; two guards at the ap of the
tent, leaning on tall spears with round leather shields strapped to

their arms. When they caught sight of Ghost, one of them lowered
his spearpoint and said, “That beast stays here.”
“Ghost, stay,” Jon commanded. The direwolf sat.
“Longspear, watch the beast.” Rattleshirt yanked open the tent
and gestured Jon and Ygritte inside.
The tent was hot and smoky. Baskets of burning peat stood in all
four corners, lling the air with a dim reddish light. More skins
carpeted the ground. Jon felt utterly alone as he stood there in his
blacks, awaiting the pleasure of the turncloak who called himself
King-beyond-the-Wall. When his eyes had adjusted to the smoky red
gloom, he saw six people, none of whom paid him any mind. A dark
young man and a pretty blonde woman were sharing a horn of
mead. A pregnant woman stood over a brazier cooking a brace of
hens, while a grey-haired man in a tattered cloak of black and red
sat crosslegged on a pillow, playing a lute and singing:
The Dornishman’s wife was as fair as the sun,
and her kisses were warmer than spring.
But the Dornishman’s blade was made of black steel,
and its kiss was a terrible thing.
Jon knew the song, though it was strange to hear it here, in a
shaggy hide tent beyond the Wall, ten thousand leagues from the
red mountains and warm winds of Dorne.
Rattleshirt took o his yellowed helm as he waited for the song
to end. Beneath his bone-and-leather armor he was a small man, and
the face under the giant’s skull was ordinary, with a knobby chin,
thin mustache, and sallow, pinched cheeks. His eyes were close-set,
one eyebrow creeping all the way across his forehead, dark hair
thinning back from a sharp widow’s peak.
The Dornishman’s wife would sing as she bathed,
in a voice that was sweet as a peach,
But the Dornishman’s blade had a song of its own,
and a bite sharp and cold as a leech.

Beside the brazier, a short but immensely broad man sat on a
stool, eating a hen o a skewer. Hot grease was running down his
chin and into his snow-white beard, but he smiled happily all the
same. Thick gold bands graven with runes bound his massive arms,
and he wore a heavy shirt of black ringmail that could only have
come from a dead ranger. A few feet away, a taller, leaner man in a
leather shirt sewn with bronze scales stood frowning over a map, a
two-handed greatsword slung across his back in a leather sheath. He
was straight as a spear, all long wiry muscle, clean-shaved, bald,
with a strong straight nose and deepset grey eyes. He might even
have been comely if he’d had ears, but he had lost both along the
way, whether to frostbite or some enemy’s knife Jon could not tell.
Their lack made the man’s head seem narrow and pointed.
Both the white-bearded man and the bald one were warriors, that
was plain to Jon at a glance. These two are more dangerous than
Rattleshirt by far. He wondered which was Mance Rayder.
As he lay on the ground with the darkness around,
and the taste of his blood on his tongue,
His brothers knelt by him and prayed him a prayer,
and he smiled and he laughed and he sung,
“Brothers, oh brothers, my days here are done,
the Dornishman’s taken my life,
But what does it matter, for all men must die,
and I’ve tasted the Dornishman’s wife!”
As the last strains of “The Dornishman’s Wife” faded, the bald
earless man glanced up from his map and scowled ferociously at
Rattleshirt and Ygritte, with Jon between them. “What’s this?” he
said. “A crow?”
“The black bastard what gutted Orell,” said Rattleshirt, “and a
bloody warg as well.”
“You were to kill them all.”
“This one come over,” explained Ygritte. “He slew Qhorin
Halfhand with his own hand.”

“This boy?” The earless man was angered by the news. “The
Halfhand should have been mine. Do you have a name, crow?”
“Jon Snow, Your Grace.” He wondered whether he was expected
to bend the knee as well.
“Your Grace?” The earless man looked at the big white-bearded
one. “You see. He takes me for a king.”
The bearded man laughed so hard he sprayed bits of chicken
everywhere. He rubbed the grease from his mouth with the back of
a huge hand. “A blind boy, must be. Who ever heard of a king
without ears? Why, his crown would fall straight down to his neck!
Har!” He grinned at Jon, wiping his ngers clean on his breeches.
“Close your beak, crow. Spin yourself around, might be you’d nd
who you’re looking for.”
Jon turned.
The singer rose to his feet. “I’m Mance Rayder,” he said as he put
aside the lute. “And you are Ned Stark’s bastard, the Snow of
Winterfell.”
Stunned, Jon stood speechless for a moment, before he recovered
enough to say, “How … how could you know …”
“That’s a tale for later,” said Mance Rayder. “How did you like
the song, lad?”
“Well enough. I’d heard it before.”
“But what does it matter, for all men must die,” the King-beyondthe-Wall said lightly, “and I’ve tasted the Dornishman’s wife. Tell me,
does my Lord of Bones speak truly? Did you slay my old friend the
Halfhand?”
“I did.” Though it was his doing more than mine.
“The Shadow Tower will never again seem as fearsome,” the king
said with sadness in his voice. “Qhorin was my enemy. But also my
brother, once. So … shall I thank you for killing him, Jon Snow? Or
curse you?” He gave Jon a mocking smile.
The King-beyond-the-Wall looked nothing like a king, nor even
much a wildling. He was of middling height, slender, sharp-faced,
with shrewd brown eyes and long brown hair that had gone mostly
to grey. There was no crown on his head, no gold rings on his arms,
no jewels at his throat, not even a gleam of silver. He wore wool

and leather, and his only garment of note was his ragged black wool
cloak, its long tears patched with faded red silk.
“You ought to thank me for killing your enemy,” Jon said nally,
“and curse me for killing your friend.”
“Har!” boomed the white-bearded man. “Well answered!”
“Agreed.” Mance Rayder beckoned Jon closer. “If you would join
us, you’d best know us. The man you took for me is Styr, Magnar of
Thenn. Magnar means ‘lord’ in the Old Tongue.” The earless man
stared at Jon coldly as Mance turned to the white-bearded one.
“Our ferocious chicken-eater here is my loyal Tormund. The woman
—”
Tormund rose to his feet. “Hold. You gave Styr his style, give me
mine.”
Mance Rayder laughed. “As you wish. Jon Snow, before you
stands Tormund Giantsbane, Tall-talker, Horn-blower, and Breaker
of Ice. And here also Tormund Thunder st, Husband to Bears, the
Mead-king of Ruddy Hall, Speaker to Gods and Father of Hosts.”
“That sounds more like me,” said Tormund. “Well met, Jon Snow.
I am fond o’ wargs, as it happens, though not o’ Starks.”
“The good woman at the brazier,” Mance Rayder went on, “is
Dalla.” The pregnant woman smiled shyly. “Treat her like you
would any queen, she is carrying my child.” He turned to the last
two. “This beauty is her sister Val. Young Jarl beside her is her
latest pet.”
“I am no man’s pet,” said Jarl, dark and erce.
“And Val’s no man,” white-bearded Tormund snorted. “You ought
to have noticed that by now, lad.”
“So there you have us, Jon Snow,” said Mance Rayder. “The Kingbeyond-the-Wall and his court, such as it is. And now some words
from you, I think. Where did you come from?”
“Winterfell,” he said, “by way of Castle Black.”
“And what brings you up the Milkwater, so far from the res of
home?” He did not wait for Jon’s answer, but looked at once to
Rattleshirt. “How many were they?”
“Five. Three’s dead and the boy’s here. T’other went up a
mountainside where no horse could follow.”

Rayder’s eyes met Jon’s again. “Was it only the ve of you? Or
are more of your brothers skulking about?”
“We were four and the Halfhand. Qhorin was worth twenty
common men.”
The King-beyond-the-Wall smiled at that. “Some thought so.
Still … a boy from Castle Black with rangers from the Shadow
Tower? How did that come to be?”
Jon had his lie all ready. “The Lord Commander sent me to the
Halfhand for seasoning, so he took me on his ranging.”
Styr the Magnar frowned at that. “Ranging, you call it … why
would crows come ranging up the Skirling Pass?”
“The villages were deserted,” Jon said, truthfully. “It was as if all
the free folk had vanished.”
“Vanished, aye,” said Mance Rayder. “And not just the free folk.
Who told you where we were, Jon Snow?”
Tormund snorted. “It were Craster, or I’m a blushing maid. I told
you, Mance, that creature needs to be shorter by a head.”
The king gave the older man an irritated look. “Tormund, some
day try thinking before you speak. I know it was Craster. I asked
Jon to see if he would tell it true.”
“Har.” Tormund spat. “Well, I stepped in that!” He grinned at
Jon. “See, lad, that’s why he’s king and I’m not. I can outdrink,
out ght, and outsing him, and my member’s thrice the size o’ his,
but Mance has cunning. He was raised a crow, you know, and the
crow’s a tricksy bird.”
“I would speak with the lad alone, my Lord of Bones,” Mance
Rayder said to Rattleshirt. “Leave us, all of you.”
“What, me as well?” said Tormund.
“No, you especially,” said Mance.
“I eat in no hall where I’m not welcome.” Tormund got to his
feet. “Me and the hens are leaving.” He snatched another chicken
o the brazier, shoved it into a pocket sewn in the lining of his
cloak, said “Har,” and left licking his ngers. The others followed
him out, all but the woman Dalla.
“Sit, if you like,” Rayder said when they were gone. “Are you
hungry? Tormund left us two birds at least.”

“I would be pleased to eat, Your Grace. And thank you.”
“Your Grace?” The king smiled. “That’s not a style one often
hears from the lips of free folk. I’m Mance to most, The Mance to
some. Will you take a horn of mead?”
“Gladly,” said Jon.
The king poured himself as Dalla cut the well-crisped hens apart
and brought them each a half. Jon peeled o his gloves and ate with
his ngers, sucking every morsel of meat o the bones.
“Tormund spoke truly,” said Mance Rayder as he ripped apart a
loaf of bread. “The black crow is a tricksy bird, that’s so … but I
was a crow when you were no bigger than the babe in Dalla’s belly,
Jon Snow. So take care not to play tricksy with me.”
“As you say, Your—Mance.”
The king laughed. “Your Mance! Why not? I promised you a tale
before, of how I knew you. Have you puzzled it out yet?”
Jon shook his head. “Did Rattleshirt send word ahead?”
“By wing? We have no trained ravens. No, I knew your face. I’ve
seen it before. Twice.”
It made no sense at rst, but as Jon turned it over in his mind,
dawn broke. “When you were a brother of the Watch …”
“Very good! Yes, that was the rst time. You were just a boy, and
I was all in black, one of a dozen riding escort to old Lord
Commander Qorgyle when he came down to see your father at
Winterfell. I was walking the wall around the yard when I came on
you and your brother Robb. It had snowed the night before, and the
two of you had built a great mountain above the gate and were
waiting for someone likely to pass underneath.”
“I remember,” said Jon with a startled laugh. A young black
brother on the wallwalk, yes … “You swore not to tell.”
“And kept my vow. That one, at least.”
“We dumped the snow on Fat Tom. He was Father’s slowest
guardsman.” Tom had chased them around the yard afterward, until
all three were red as autumn apples. “But you said you saw me
twice. When was the other time?”
“When King Robert came to Winterfell to make your father
Hand,” the King-beyond-the-Wall said lightly.

Jon’s eyes widened in disbelief. “That can’t be so.”
“It was. When your father learned the king was coming, he sent
word to his brother Benjen on the Wall, so he might come down for
the feast. There is more commerce between the black brothers and
the free folk than you know, and soon enough word came to my
ears as well. It was too choice a chance to resist. Your uncle did not
know me by sight, so I had no fear from that quarter, and I did not
think your father was like to remember a young crow he’d met
brie y years before. I wanted to see this Robert with my own eyes,
king to king, and get the measure of your uncle Benjen as well. He
was First Ranger by then, and the bane of all my people. So I
saddled my eetest horse, and rode.”
“But,” Jon objected, “the Wall …”
“The Wall can stop an army, but not a man alone. I took a lute
and a bag of silver, scaled the ice near Long Barrow, walked a few
leagues south of the New Gift, and bought a horse. All in all I made
much better time than Robert, who was traveling with a ponderous
great wheelhouse to keep his queen in comfort. A day south of
Winterfell I came up on him and fell in with his company.
Freeriders and hedge knights are always attaching themselves to
royal processions, in hopes of nding service with the king, and my
lute gained me easy acceptance.” He laughed. “I know every bawdy
song that’s ever been made, north or south of the Wall. So there you
are. The night your father feasted Robert, I sat in the back of his
hall on a bench with the other freeriders, listening to Orland of
Oldtown play the high harp and sing of dead kings beneath the sea.
I betook of your lord father’s meat and mead, had a look at
Kingslayer and Imp … and made passing note of Lord Eddard’s
children and the wolf pups that ran at their heels.”
“Bael the Bard,” said Jon, remembering the tale that Ygritte had
told him in the Frostfangs, the night he’d almost killed her.
“Would that I were. I will not deny that Bael’s exploit inspired
mine own … but I did not steal either of your sisters that I recall.
Bael wrote his own songs, and lived them. I only sing the songs that
better men have made. More mead?”
“No,” said Jon. “If you had been discovered … taken …”

“Your father would have had my head o .” The king gave a
shrug. “Though once I had eaten at his board I was protected by
guest right. The laws of hospitality are as old as the First Men, and
sacred as a heart tree.” He gestured at the board between them, the
broken bread and chicken bones. “Here you are the guest, and safe
from harm at my hands … this night, at least. So tell me truly, Jon
Snow. Are you a craven who turned your cloak from fear, or is
there another reason that brings you to my tent?”
Guest right or no, Jon Snow knew he walked on rotten ice here.
One false step and he might plunge through, into water cold enough
to stop his heart. Weigh every word before you speak it, he told
himself. He took a long draught of mead to buy time for his answer.
When he set the horn aside he said, “Tell me why you turned your
cloak, and I’ll tell you why I turned mine.”
Mance Rayder smiled, as Jon had hoped he would. The king was
plainly a man who liked the sound of his own voice. “You will have
heard stories of my desertion, I have no doubt.”
“Some say it was for a crown. Some say for a woman. Others that
you had the wildling blood.”
“The wildling blood is the blood of the First Men, the same blood
that ows in the veins of the Starks. As to a crown, do you see
one?”
“I see a woman.” He glanced at Dalla.
Mance took her by the hand and pulled her close. “My lady is
blameless. I met her on my return from your father’s castle. The
Halfhand was carved of old oak, but I am made of esh, and I have
a great fondness for the charms of women … which makes me no
di erent from three-quarters of the Watch. There are men still
wearing black who have had ten times as many women as this poor
king. You must guess again, Jon Snow.”
Jon considered a moment. “The Halfhand said you had a passion
for wildling music.”
“I did. I do. That’s closer to the mark, yes. But not a hit.” Mance
Rayder rose, unfastened the clasp that held his cloak, and swept it
over the bench. “It was for this.”
“A cloak?”

“The black wool cloak of a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch,”
said the King-beyond-the-Wall. “One day on a ranging we brought
down a ne big elk. We were skinning it when the smell of blood
drew a shadow-cat out of its lair. I drove it o , but not before it
shredded my cloak to ribbons. Do you see? Here, here, and here?”
He chuckled. “It shredded my arm and back as well, and I bled
worse than the elk. My brothers feared I might die before they got
me back to Maester Mullin at the Shadow Tower, so they carried
me to a wildling village where we knew an old wisewoman did
some healing. She was dead, as it happened, but her daughter saw
to me. Cleaned my wounds, sewed me up, and fed me porridge and
potions until I was strong enough to ride again. And she sewed up
the rents in my cloak as well, with some scarlet silk from Asshai
that her grandmother had pulled from the wreck of a cog washed up
on the Frozen Shore. It was the greatest treasure she had, and her
gift to me.” He swept the cloak back over his shoulders. “But at the
Shadow Tower, I was given a new wool cloak from stores, black
and black, and trimmed with black, to go with my black breeches
and black boots, my black doublet and black mail. The new cloak
had no frays nor rips nor tears … and most of all, no red. The men
of the Night’s Watch dressed in black, Ser Denys Mallister reminded
me sternly, as if I had forgotten. My old cloak was t for burning
now, he said.
“I left the next morning … for a place where a kiss was not a
crime, and a man could wear any cloak he chose.” He closed the
clasp and sat back down again. “And you, Jon Snow?”
Jon took another swallow of mead. There is only one tale that he
might believe. “You say you were at Winterfell, the night my father
feasted King Robert.”
“I did say it, for I was.”
“Then you saw us all. Prince Jo rey and Prince Tommen, Princess
Myrcella, my brothers Robb and Bran and Rickon, my sisters Arya
and Sansa. You saw them walk the center aisle with every eye upon
them and take their seats at the table just below the dais where the
king and queen were seated.”
“I remember.”

“And did you see where I was seated, Mance?” He leaned
forward. “Did you see where they put the bastard?”
Mance Rayder looked at Jon’s face for a long moment. “I think
we had best nd you a new cloak,” the king said, holding out his
hand.

DAENERYS

Across the still blue water came the slow steady beat of drums and

the soft swish of oars from the galleys. The great cog groaned in
their wake, the heavy lines stretched taut between. Balerion’s sails
hung limp, drooping forlorn from the masts. Yet even so, as she
stood upon the forecastle watching her dragons chase each other
across a cloudless blue sky, Daenerys Targaryen was as happy as she
could ever remember being.
Her Dothraki called the sea the poison water, distrusting any liquid
that their horses could not drink. On the day the three ships had
lifted anchor at Quarth, you would have thought they were sailing
to hell instead of Pentos. Her brave young bloodriders had stared
o at the dwindling coastline with huge white eyes, each of the
three determined to show no fear before the other two, while her
handmaids Irri and Jhiqui clutched the rail desperately and retched
over the side at every little swell. The rest of Dany’s tiny khalasar
remained below decks, preferring the company of their nervous
horses to the terrifying landless world about the ships. When a
sudden squall had enveloped them six days into the voyage, she
heard them through the hatches; the horses kicking and screaming,
the riders praying in thin quavery voices each time Balerion heaved
or swayed.
No squall could frighten Dany, though. Daenerys Stormborn, she
was called, for she had come howling into the world on distant
Dragonstone as the greatest storm in the memory of Westeros

howled outside, a storm so erce that it ripped gargoyles from the
castle walls and smashed her father’s eet to kindling.
The narrow sea was often stormy, and Dany had crossed it half a
hundred times as a girl, running from one Free City to the next half
a step ahead of the Usurper’s hired knives. She loved the sea. She
liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons
bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small,
but free as well. She liked the dolphins that sometimes swam along
beside Balerion, slicing through the waves like silvery spears, and
the ying sh they glimpsed now and again. She even liked the
sailors, with all their songs and stories. Once on a voyage to
Braavos, as she’d watched the crew wrestle down a great green sail
in a rising gale, she had even thought how ne it would be to be a
sailor. But when she told her brother, Viserys had twisted her hair
until she cried. “You are blood of the dragon,” he had screamed at
her. “A dragon, not some smelly sh.”
He was a fool about that, and so much else, Dany thought. If he had
been wiser and more patient, it would be him sailing west to take the
throne that was his by rights. Viserys had been stupid and vicious, she
had come to realize, yet sometimes she missed him all the same.
Not the cruel weak man he had become by the end, but the brother
who had sometimes let her creep into his bed, the boy who told her
tales of the Seven Kingdoms, and talked of how much better their
lives would be once he claimed his crown.
The captain appeared at her elbow. “Would that this Balerion
could soar as her namesake did, Your Grace,” he said in bastard
Valyrian heavily avored with accents of Pentos. “Then we should
not need to row, nor tow, nor pray for wind.”
“Just so, Captain,” she answered with a smile, pleased to have
won the man over. Captain Groleo was an old Pentoshi like his
master, Illyrio Mopatis, and he had been nervous as a maiden about
carrying three dragons on his ship. Half a hundred buckets of
seawater still hung from the gunwales, in case of res. At rst
Groleo had wanted the dragons caged and Dany had consented to
put his fears at ease, but their misery was so palpable that she soon
changed her mind and insisted they be freed.

Even Captain Groleo was glad of that, now. There had been one
small re, easily extinguished; against that, Balerion suddenly
seemed to have far fewer rats than she’d had before, when she
sailed under the name Saduleon. And her crew, once as fearful as
they were curious, had begun to take a queer erce pride in “their”
dragons. Every man of them, from captain to cook’s boy, loved to
watch the three y … though none so much as Dany.
They are my children, she told herself, and if the maegi spoke truly,
they are the only children I am ever like to have.
Viserion’s scales were the color of fresh cream, his horns, wing
bones, and spinal crest a dark gold that ashed bright as metal in
the sun. Rhaegal was made of the green of summer and the bronze
of fall. They soared above the ships in wide circles, higher and
higher, each trying to climb above the other.
Dragons always preferred to attack from above, Dany had
learned. Should either get between the other and the sun, he would
fold his wings and dive screaming, and they would tumble from the
sky locked together in a tangled scaly ball, jaws snapping and tails
lashing. The rst time they had done it, she feared that they meant
to kill each other, but it was only sport. No sooner would they
splash into the sea than they would break apart and rise again,
shrieking and hissing, the salt water steaming o them as their
wings clawed at the air. Drogon was aloft as well, though not in
sight; he would be miles ahead, or miles behind, hunting.
He was always hungry, her Drogon. Hungry and growing fast.
Another year, or perhaps two, and he may be large enough to ride. Then
I shall have no need of ships to cross the great salt sea.
But that time was not yet come. Rhaegal and Viserion were the
size of small dogs, Drogon only a little larger, and any dog would
have outweighed them; they were all wings and neck and tail,
lighter than they looked. And so Daenerys Targaryen must rely on
wood and wind and canvas to bear her home.
The wood and the canvas had served her well enough so far, but
the ckle wind had turned traitor. For six days and six nights they
had been becalmed, and now a seventh day had come, and still no
breath of air to ll their sails. Fortunately, two of the ships that

Magister Illyrio had sent after her were trading galleys, with two
hundred oars apiece and crews of strong-armed oarsmen to row
them. But the great cog Balerion was a song of a di erent key; a
ponderous broad-beamed sow of a ship with immense holds and
huge sails, but helpless in a calm. Vhagar and Meraxes had let out
lines to tow her, but it made for painfully slow going. All three
ships were crowded, and heavily laden.
“I cannot see Drogon,” said Ser Jorah Mormont as he joined her
on the forecastle. “Is he lost again?”
“We are the ones who are lost, ser. Drogon has no taste for this
wet creeping, no more than I do.” Bolder than the other two, her
black dragon had been the rst to try his wings above the water,
the rst to utter from ship to ship, the rst to lose himself in a
passing cloud … and the rst to kill. The ying sh no sooner broke
the surface of the water than they were enveloped in a lance of
ame, snatched up, and swallowed. “How big will he grow?” Dany
asked curiously. “Do you know?”
“In the Seven Kingdoms, there are tales of dragons who grew so
huge that they could pluck giant krakens from the seas.”
Dany laughed. “That would be a wondrous sight to see.”
“It is only a tale, Khaleesi,” said her exile knight. “They talk of
wise old dragons living a thousand years as well.”
“Well, how long does a dragon live?” She looked up as Viserion
swooped low over the ship, his wings beating slowly and stirring
the limp sails.
Ser Jorah shrugged. “A dragon’s natural span of days is many
times as long as a man’s, or so the songs would have us
believe … but the dragons the Seven Kingdoms knew best were
those of House Targaryen. They were bred for war, and in war they
died. It is no easy thing to slay a dragon, but it can be done.”
The squire Whitebeard, standing by the gurehead with one lean
hand curled about his tall hardwood sta , turned toward them and
said, “Balerion the Black Dread was two hundred years old when he
died during the reign of Jaehaerys the Conciliator. He was so large
he could swallow an aurochs whole. A dragon never stops growing,
Your Grace, so long as he has food and freedom.” His name was

Arstan, but Strong Belwas had named him Whitebeard for his pale
whiskers, and most everyone called him that now. He was taller
than Ser Jorah, though not so muscular; his eyes were a pale blue,
his long beard as white as snow and as ne as silk.
“Freedom?” asked Dany, curious. “What do you mean?”
“In King’s Landing, your ancestors raised an immense domed
castle for their dragons. The Dragonpit, it is called. It still stands
atop the Hill of Rhaenys, though all in ruins now. That was where
the royal dragons dwelt in days of yore, and a cavernous dwelling it
was, with iron doors so wide that thirty knights could ride through
them abreast. Yet even so, it was noted that none of the pit dragons
ever reached the size of their ancestors. The maesters say it was
because of the walls around them, and the great dome above their
heads.”
“If walls could keep us small, peasants would all be tiny and kings
as large as giants,” said Ser Jorah. “I’ve seen huge men born in
hovels, and dwarfs who dwelt in castles.”
“Men are men,” Whitebeard replied. “Dragons are dragons.”
Ser Jorah snorted his disdain. “How profound.” The exile knight
had no love for the old man, he’d made that plain from the rst.
“What do you know of dragons, anyway?”
“Little enough, that’s true. Yet I served for a time in King’s
Landing in the days when King Aerys sat the Iron Throne, and
walked beneath the dragonskulls that looked down from the walls
of his throne room.”
“Viserys talked of those skulls,” said Dany. “The Usurper took
them down and hid them away. He could not bear them looking
down on him upon his stolen throne.” She beckoned Whitebeard
closer. “Did you ever meet my royal father?” King Aerys II had died
before his daughter was born.
“I had that great honor, Your Grace.”
“Did you nd him good and gentle?”
Whitebeard did his best to hide his feelings, but they were there,
plain on his face. “His Grace was … often pleasant.”
“Often?” Dany smiled. “But not always?”
“He could be very harsh to those he thought his enemies.”

“A wise man never makes an enemy of a king,” said Dany. “Did
you know my brother Rhaegar as well?”
“It was said that no man ever knew Prince Rhaegar, truly. I had
the privilege of seeing him in tourney, though, and often heard him
play his harp with its silver strings.”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Along with a thousand others at some harvest
feast. Next you’ll claim you squired for him.”
“I make no such claim, ser. Myles Mooton was Prince Rhaegar’s
squire, and Richard Lonmouth after him. When they won their
spurs, he knighted them himself, and they remained his close
companions. Young Lord Connington was dear to the prince as well,
but his oldest friend was Arthur Dayne.”
“The Sword of the Morning!” said Dany, delighted. “Viserys used
to talk about his wondrous white blade. He said Ser Arthur was the
only knight in the realm who was our brother’s peer.”
Whitebeard bowed his head. “It is not my place to question the
words of Prince Viserys.”
“King,” Dany corrected. “He was a king, though he never reigned.
Viserys, the Third of His Name. But what do you mean?” His answer
had not been one that she’d expected. “Ser Jorah named Rhaegar
the last dragon once. He had to have been a peerless warrior to be
called that, surely?”
“Your Grace,” said Whitebeard, “the Prince of Dragonstone was a
most puissant warrior, but …”
“Go on,” she urged. “You may speak freely to me.”
“As you command.” The old man leaned upon his hardwood sta ,
his brow furrowed. “A warrior without peer … those are ne
words, Your Grace, but words win no battles.”
“Swords win battles,” Ser Jorah said bluntly. “And Prince Rhaegar
knew how to use one.”
“He did, ser, but … I have seen a hundred tournaments and more
wars than I would wish, and however strong or fast or skilled a
knight may be, there are others who can match him. A man will win
one tourney, and fall quickly in the next. A slick spot in the grass
may mean defeat, or what you ate for supper the night before. A

change in the wind may bring the gift of victory.” He glanced at Ser
Jorah. “Or a lady’s favor knotted round an arm.”
Mormont’s face darkened. “Be careful what you say, old man.”
Arstan had seen Ser Jorah ght at Lannisport, Dany knew, in the
tourney Mormont had won with a lady’s favor knotted round his
arm. He had won the lady too; Lynesse of House Hightower, his
second wife, highborn and beautiful … but she had ruined him, and
abandoned him, and the memory of her was bitter to him now. “Be
gentle, my knight.” She put a hand on Jorah’s arm. “Arstan had no
wish to give o ense, I’m certain.”
“As you say, Khaleesi.” Ser Jorah’s voice was grudging.
Dany turned back to the squire. “I know little of Rhaegar. Only
the tales Viserys told, and he was a little boy when our brother
died. What was he truly like?”
The old man considered a moment. “Able. That above all.
Determined, deliberate, dutiful, single-minded. There is a tale told
of him … but doubtless Ser Jorah knows it as well.”
“I would hear it from you.”
“As you wish,” said Whitebeard. “As a young boy, the Prince of
Dragonstone was bookish to a fault. He was reading so early that
men said Queen Rhaella must have swallowed some books and a
candle whilst he was in her womb. Rhaegar took no interest in the
play of other children. The maesters were awed by his wits, but his
father’s knights would jest sourly that Baelor the Blessed had been
born again. Until one day Prince Rhaegar found something in his
scrolls that changed him. No one knows what it might have been,
only that the boy suddenly appeared early one morning in the yard
as the knights were donning their steel. He walked up to Ser Willem
Darry, the master-at-arms, and said, ‘I will require sword and
armor. It seems I must be a warrior.’ ”
“And he was!” said Dany, delighted.
“He was indeed.” Whitebeard bowed. “My pardons, Your Grace.
We speak of warriors, and I see that Strong Belwas has arisen. I
must attend him.”
Dany glanced aft. The eunuch was climbing through the hold
amidships, nimble for all his size. Belwas was squat but broad, a

good fteen stone of fat and muscle, his great brown gut
crisscrossed by faded white scars. He wore baggy pants, a yellow
silk bellyband, and an absurdly tiny leather vest dotted with iron
studs. “Strong Belwas is hungry!” he roared at everyone and no one
in particular. “Strong Belwas will eat now!” Turning, he spied
Arstan on the forecastle. “Whitebeard! You will bring food for
Strong Belwas!”
“You may go,” Dany told the squire. He bowed again, and moved
o to tend the needs of the man he served.
Ser Jorah watched with a frown on his blunt honest face.
Mormont was big and burly, strong of jaw and thick of shoulder.
Not a handsome man by any means, but as true a friend as Dany
had ever known. “You would be wise to take that old man’s words
well salted,” he told her when Whitebeard was out of earshot.
“A queen must listen to all,” she reminded him. “The highborn
and the low, the strong and the weak, the noble and the venal. One
voice may speak you false, but in many there is always truth to be
found.” She had read that in a book.
“Hear my voice then, Your Grace,” the exile said. “This Arstan
Whitebeard is playing you false. He is too old to be a squire, and
too well spoken to be serving that oaf of a eunuch.”
That does seem queer, Dany had to admit. Strong Belwas was an
ex-slave, bred and trained in the ghting pits of Meereen. Magister
Illyrio had sent him to guard her, or so Belwas claimed, and it was
true that she needed guarding. The Usurper on his Iron Throne had
o ered land and lordship to any man who killed her. One attempt
had been made already, with a cup of poisoned wine. The closer she
came to Westeros, the more likely another attack became. Back in
Qarth, the warlock Pyat Pree had sent a Sorrowful Man after her to
avenge the Undying she’d burned in their House of Dust. Warlocks
never forgot a wrong, it was said, and the Sorrowful Men never
failed to kill. Most of the Dothraki would be against her as well.
Khal Drogo’s kos led khalasars of their own now, and none of them
would hesitate to attack her own little band on sight, to slay and
slave her people and drag Dany herself back to Vaes Dothrak to
take her proper place among the withered crones of the dosh

khaleen. She hoped that Xaro Xhoan Daxos was not an enemy, but
the Quartheen merchant had coveted her dragons. And there was
Quaithe of the Shadow, that strange woman in the red lacquer mask
with all her cryptic counsel. Was she an enemy too, or only a
dangerous friend? Dany could not say.
Ser Jorah saved me from the poisoner, and Arstan Whitebeard from
the manticore. Perhaps Strong Belwas will save me from the next. He
was huge enough, with arms like small trees and a great curved
arakh so sharp he might have shaved with it, in the unlikely event
of hair sprouting on those smooth brown cheeks. Yet he was
childlike as well. As a protector, he leaves much to be desired.
Thankfully, I have Ser Jorah and my bloodriders. And my dragons,
never forget. In time, the dragons would be her most formidable
guardians, just as they had been for Aegon the Conqueror and his
sisters three hundred years ago. Just now, though, they brought her
more danger than protection. In all the world there were but three
living dragons, and those were hers; they were a wonder, and a
terror, and beyond price.
She was pondering her next words when she felt a cool breath on
the back of her neck, and a loose strand of her silver-gold hair
stirred against her brow. Above, the canvas creaked and moved, and
suddenly a great cry went up from all over Balerion. “Wind!” the
sailors shouted. “The wind returns, the wind!”
Dany looked up to where the great cog’s sails rippled and belled
as the lines thrummed and tightened and sang the sweet song they
had missed so for six long days. Captain Groleo rushed aft, shouting
commands. The Pentoshi were scrambling up the masts, those that
were not cheering. Even Strong Belwas let out a great bellow and
did a little dance. “The gods are good!” Dany said. “You see, Jorah?
We are on our way once more.”
“Yes,” he said, “but to what, my queen?”
All day the wind blew, steady from the east at rst, and then in
wild gusts. The sun set in a blaze of red. I am still half a world from
Westeros, Dany reminded herself, but every hour brings me closer. She
tried to imagine what it would feel like, when she rst caught sight

of the land she was born to rule. It will be as fair a shore as I have ever
seen, I know it. How could it be otherwise?
But later that night, as Balerion plunged onward through the dark
and Dany sat crosslegged on her bunk in the captain’s cabin, feeding
her dragons—“Even upon the sea,” Groleo had said, so graciously,
“queens take precedence over captains”—a sharp knock came upon
the door.
Irri had been sleeping at the foot of her bunk (it was too narrow
for three, and tonight was Jhiqui’s turn to share the soft featherbed
with her khaleesi), but the handmaid roused at the knock and went
to the door. Dany pulled up a coverlet and tucked it in under her
arms. She was naked, and had not expected a caller at this hour.
“Come,” she said when she saw Ser Jorah standing without, beneath
a swaying lantern.
The exile knight ducked his head as he entered. “Your Grace. I am
sorry to disturb your sleep.”
“I was not sleeping, ser. Come and watch.” She took a chunk of
salt pork out of the bowl in her lap and held it up for her dragons to
see. All three of them eyed it hungrily. Rhaegal spread green wings
and stirred the air, and Viserion’s neck swayed back and forth like a
long pale snake’s as he followed the movement of her hand.
“Drogon,” Dany said softly, “dracarys.” And she tossed the pork in
the air.
Drogon moved quicker than a striking cobra. Flame roared from
his mouth, orange and scarlet and black, searing the meat before it
began to fall. As his sharp black teeth snapped shut around it,
Rhaegal’s head darted close, as if to steal the prize from his
brother’s jaws, but Drogon swallowed and screamed, and the
smaller green dragon could only hiss in frustration.
“Stop that, Rhaegal,” Dany said in annoyance, giving his head a
swat. “You had the last one. I’ll have no greedy dragons.” She
smiled at Ser Jorah. “I won’t need to char their meat over a brazier
any longer.”
“So I see. Dracarys?”
All three dragons turned their heads at the sound of that word,
and Viserion let loose with a blast of pale gold ame that made Ser

Jorah take a hasty step backward. Dany giggled. “Be careful with
that word, ser, or they’re like to singe your beard o . It means
‘dragon re’ in High Valyrian. I wanted to choose a command that
no one was like to utter by chance.”
Mormont nodded. “Your Grace,” he said, “I wonder if I might
have a few private words?”
“Of course. Irri, leave us for a bit.” She put a hand on Jhiqui’s
bare shoulder and shook the other handmaid awake. “You as well,
sweetling. Ser Jorah needs to talk to me.”
“Yes, Khaleesi.” Jhiqui tumbled from the bunk, naked and
yawning, her thick black hair tumbled about her head. She dressed
quickly and left with Irri, closing the door behind them.
Dany gave the dragons the rest of the salt pork to squabble over,
and patted the bed beside her. “Sit, good ser, and tell me what is
troubling you.”
“Three things.” Ser Jorah sat. “Strong Belwas. This Arstan
Whitebeard. And Illyrio Mopatis, who sent them.”
Again? Dany pulled the coverlet higher and tugged one end over
her shoulder. “And why is that?”
“The warlocks in Qarth told you that you would be betrayed
three times,” the exile knight reminded her, as Viserion and Rhaegal
began to snap and claw at each other.
“Once for blood and once for gold and once for love.” Dany was
not like to forget. “Mirri Maz Duur was the rst.”
“Which means two traitors yet remain … and now these two
appear. I nd that troubling, yes. Never forget, Robert o ered a
lordship to the man who slays you.”
Dany leaned forward and yanked Viserion’s tail, to pull him o
his green brother. Her blanket fell away from her chest as she
moved. She grabbed it hastily and covered herself again. “The
Usurper is dead,” she said.
“But his son rules in his place.” Ser Jorah lifted his gaze, and his
dark eyes met her own. “A dutiful son pays his father’s debts. Even
blood debts.”
“This boy Jo rey might want me dead … if he recalls that I’m
alive. What has that to do with Belwas and Arstan Whitebeard? The

old man does not even wear a sword. You’ve seen that.”
“Aye. And I have seen how deftly he handles that sta of his.
Recall how he killed that manticore in Qarth? It might as easily
have been your throat he crushed.”
“Might have been, but was not,” she pointed out. “It was a
stinging manticore meant to slay me. He saved my life.”
“Khaleesi, has it occurred to you that Whitebeard and Belwas
might have been in league with the assassin? It might all have been
a ploy to win your trust.”
Her sudden laughter made Drogon hiss, and sent Viserion apping
to his perch above the porthole. “The ploy worked well.”
The exile knight did not return her smile. “These are Illyrio’s
ships, Illyrio’s captains, Illyrio’s sailors … and Strong Belwas and
Arstan are his men as well, not yours.”
“Magister Illyrio has protected me in the past. Strong Belwas says
that he wept when he heard my brother was dead.”
“Yes,” said Mormont, “but did he weep for Viserys, or for the
plans he had made with him?”
“His plans need not change. Magister Illyrio is a friend to House
Targaryen, and wealthy …”
“He was not born wealthy. In the world as I have seen it, no man
grows rich by kindness. The warlocks said the second treason would
be for gold. What does Illyrio Mopatis love more than gold?”
“His skin.” Across the cabin Drogon stirred restlessly, steam rising
from his snout. “Mirri Maz Duur betrayed me. I burned her for it.”
“Mirri Maz Duur was in your power. In Pentos, you shall be in
Illyrio’s power. It is not the same. I know the magister as well as
you. He is a devious man, and clever—”
“I need clever men about me if I am to win the Iron Throne.”
Ser Jorah snorted. “That wineseller who tried to poison you was a
clever man as well. Clever men hatch ambitious schemes.”
Dany drew her legs up beneath the blanket. “You will protect me.
You, and my bloodriders.”
“Four men? Khaleesi, you believe you know Illyrio Mopatis, very
well. Yet you insist on surrounding yourself with men you do not

know, like this pu ed-up eunuch and the world’s oldest squire. Take
a lesson from Pyat Pree and Xaro Xhoan Daxos.”
He means well, Dany reminded herself. He does all he does for love.
“It seems to me that a queen who trusts no one is as foolish as a
queen who trusts everyone. Every man I take into my service is a
risk, I understand that, but how am I to win the Seven Kingdoms
without such risks? Am I to conquer Westeros with one exile knight
and three Dothraki bloodriders?”
His jaw set stubbornly. “Your path is dangerous, I will not deny
that. But if you blindly trust in every liar and schemer who crosses
it, you will end as your brothers did.”
His obstinacy made her angry. He treats me like some child.
“Strong Belwas could not scheme his way to breakfast. And what
lies has Arstan Whitebeard told me?”
“He is not what he pretends to be. He speaks to you more boldly
than any squire would dare.”
“He spoke frankly at my command. He knew my brother.”
“A great many men knew your brother. Your Grace, in Westeros
the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard sits on the small council,
and serves the king with his wits as well as his steel. If I am the rst
of your Queensguard, I pray you, hear me out. I have a plan to put
to you.”
“What plan? Tell me.”
“Illyrio Mopatis wants you back in Pentos, under his roof. Very
well, go to him … but in your own time, and not alone. Let us see
how loyal and obedient these new subjects of yours truly are.
Command Groleo to change course for Slaver’s Bay.”
Dany was not certain she liked the sound of that at all.
Everything she’d ever heard of the esh marts in the great slave
cities of Yunkai, Meereen, and Astapor was dire and frightening.
“What is there for me in Slaver’s Bay?”
“An army,” said Ser Jorah. “If Strong Belwas is so much to your
liking you can buy hundreds more like him out of the ghting pits
of Meereen … but it is Astapor I’d set my sails for. In Astapor you
can buy Unsullied.”

“The slaves in the spiked bronze hats?” Dany had seen Unsullied
guards in the Free Cities, posted at the gates of magisters, archons,
and dynasts. “Why should I want Unsullied? They don’t even ride
horses, and most of them are fat.”
“The Unsullied you may have seen in Pentos and Myr were
household guards. That’s soft service, and eunuchs tend to
plumpness in any case. Food is the only vice allowed them. To
judge all Unsullied by a few old household slaves is like judging all
squires by Arstan Whitebeard, Your Grace. Do you know the tale of
the Three Thousand of Qohor?”
“No.” The coverlet slipped o Dany’s shoulder, and she tugged it
back into place.
“It was four hundred years ago or more, when the Dothraki rst
rode out of the east, sacking and burning every town and city in
their path. The khal who led them was named Temmo. His khalasar
was not so big as Drogo’s, but it was big enough. Fifty thousand, at
the least. Half of them braided warriors with bells ringing in their
hair.
“The Qohorik knew he was coming. They strengthened their
walls, doubled the size of their own guard, and hired two free
companies besides, the Bright Banners and the Second Sons. And
almost as an afterthought, they sent a man to Astapor to buy three
thousand Unsullied. It was a long march back to Qohor, however,
and as they approached they saw the smoke and dust and heard the
distant din of battle.
“By the time the Unsullied reached the city the sun had set. Crows
and wolves were feasting beneath the walls on what remained of
the Qohorik heavy horse. The Bright Banners and Second Sons had
ed, as sellswords are wont to do in the face of hopeless odds. With
dark falling, the Dothraki had retired to their own camps to drink
and dance and feast, but none doubted that they would return on
the morrow to smash the city gates, storm the walls, and rape, loot,
and slave as they pleased.
“But when dawn broke and Temmo and his bloodriders led their
khalasar out of camp, they found three thousand Unsullied drawn up
before the gates with the Black Goat standard ying over their

heads. So small a force could easily have been anked, but you
know Dothraki. These were men on foot, and men on foot are t
only to be ridden down.
“The Dothraki charged. The Unsullied locked their shields,
lowered their spears, and stood rm. Against twenty thousand
screamers with bells in their hair, they stood rm.
“Eighteen times the Dothraki charged, and broke themselves on
those shields and spears like waves on a rocky shore. Thrice Temmo
sent his archers wheeling past and arrows fell like rain upon the
Three Thousand, but the Unsullied merely lifted their shields above
their heads until the squall had passed. In the end only six hundred
of them remained … but more than twelve thousand Dothraki lay
dead upon that eld, including Khal Temmo, his bloodriders, his
kos, and all his sons. On the morning of the fourth day, the new khal
led the survivors past the city gates in a stately procession. One by
one, each man cut o his braid and threw it down before the feet of
the Three Thousand.
“Since that day, the city guard of Qohor has been made up solely
of Unsullied, every one of whom carries a tall spear from which
hangs a braid of human hair.
“That is what you will nd in Astapor, Your Grace. Put ashore
there, and continue on to Pentos overland. It will take longer,
yes … but when you break bread with Magister Illyrio, you will
have a thousand swords behind you, not just four.”
There is wisdom in this, yes, Dany thought, but … “How am I to
buy a thousand slave soldiers? All I have of value is the crown the
Tourmaline Brotherhood gave me.”
“Dragons will be as great a wonder in Astapor as they were in
Qarth. It may be that the slavers will shower you with gifts, as the
Qartheen did. If not … these ships carry more than your Dothraki
and their horses. They took on trade goods at Qarth, I’ve been
through the holds and seen for myself. Bolts of silk and bales of
tiger skin, amber and jade carvings, sa ron, myrrh … slaves are
cheap, Your Grace. Tiger skins are costly.”
“Those are Illyrio’s tiger skins,” she objected.
“And Illyrio is a friend to House Targaryen.”

“All the more reason not to steal his goods.”
“What use are wealthy friends if they will not put their wealth at
your disposal, my queen? If Magister Illyrio would deny you, he is
only Xaro Xhoan Daxos with four chins. And if he is sincere in his
devotion to your cause, he will not begrudge you three shiploads of
trade goods. What better use for his tiger skins than to buy you the
beginnings of an army?”
That’s true. Dany felt a rising excitement. “There will be dangers
on such a long march …”
“There are dangers at sea as well. Corsairs and pirates hunt the
southern route, and north of Valyria the Smoking Sea is demonhaunted. The next storm could sink or scatter us, a kraken could
pull us under … or we might nd ourselves becalmed again, and die
of thirst as we wait for the wind to rise. A march will have di erent
dangers, my queen, but none greater.”
“What if Captain Groleo refuses to change course, though? And
Arstan, Strong Belwas, what will they do?”
Ser Jorah stood. “Perhaps it’s time you found that out.”
“Yes,” she decided. “I’ll do it!” Dany threw back the coverlets and
hopped from the bunk. “I’ll see the captain at once, command him
to set course for Astapor.” She bent over her chest, threw open the
lid, and seized the rst garment to hand, a pair of loose sandsilk
trousers. “Hand me my medallion belt,” she commanded Jorah as
she pulled the sandsilk up over her hips. “And my vest—” she
started to say, turning.
Ser Jorah slid his arms around her.
“Oh,” was all Dany had time to say as he pulled her close and
pressed his lips down on hers. He smelled of sweat and salt and
leather, and the iron studs on his jerkin dug into her naked breasts
as he crushed her hard against him. One hand held her by the
shoulder while the other slid down her spine to the small of her
back, and her mouth opened for his tongue, though she never told it
to. His beard is scratchy, she thought, but his mouth is sweet. The
Dothraki wore no beards, only long mustaches, and only Khal Drogo
had ever kissed her before. He should not be doing this. I am his
queen, not his woman.

It was a long kiss, though how long Dany could not have said.
When it ended, Ser Jorah let go of her, and she took a quick step
backward. “You … you should not have …”
“I should not have waited so long,” he nished for her. “I should
have kissed you in Qarth, in Vaes Tolorru. I should have kissed you
in the red waste, every night and every day. You were made to be
kissed, often and well.” His eyes were on her breasts.
Dany covered them with her hands, before her nipples could
betray her. “I … that was not tting. I am your queen.”
“My queen,” he said, “and the bravest, sweetest, and most
beautiful woman I have ever seen. Daenerys—”
“Your Grace!”
“Your Grace,” he conceded, “the dragon has three heads,
remember? You have wondered at that, ever since you heard it
from the warlocks in the House of Dust. Well, here’s your meaning:
Balerion, Meraxes, and Vhagar, ridden by Aegon, Rhaenys, and
Visenya. The three-headed dragon of House Targaryen—three
dragons, and three riders.”
“Yes,” said Dany, “but my brothers are dead.”
“Rhaenys and Visenya were Aegon’s wives as well as his sisters.
You have no brothers, but you can take husbands. And I tell you
truly, Daenerys, there is no man in all the world who will ever be
half so true to you as me.”

BRAN

The ridge slanted sharply from the earth, a long fold of stone and

soil shaped like a claw. Trees clung to its lower slopes, pines and
hawthorn and ash, but higher up the ground was bare, the ridgeline
stark against the cloudy sky.
He could feel the high stone calling him. Up he went, loping easy
at rst, then faster and higher, his strong legs eating up the incline.
Birds burst from the branches overhead as he raced by, clawing and
apping their way into the sky. He could hear the wind sighing up
amongst the leaves, the squirrels chittering to one another, even the
sound a pinecone made as it tumbled to the forest oor. The smells
were a song around him, a song that lled the good green world.
Gravel ew from beneath his paws as he gained the last few feet
to stand upon the crest. The sun hung above the tall pines huge and
red, and below him the trees and hills went on and on as far as he
could see or smell. A kite was circling far above, dark against the
pink sky.
Prince. The man-sound came into his head suddenly, yet he could
feel the rightness of it. Prince of the green, prince of the wolfswood. He
was strong and swift and erce, and all that lived in the good green
world went in fear of him.
Far below, at the base of the woods, something moved amongst
the trees. A ash of grey, quick-glimpsed and gone again, but it was
enough to make his ears prick up. Down there beside a swift green
brook, another form slipped by, running. Wolves, he knew. His little

cousins, chasing down some prey. Now the prince could see more of
them, shadows on eet grey paws. A pack.
He had a pack as well, once. Five they had been, and a sixth who
stood aside. Somewhere down inside him were the sounds the men
had given them to tell one from the other, but it was not by their
sounds he knew them. He remembered their scents, his brothers and
his sisters. They all had smelled alike, had smelled of pack, but each
was di erent too.
His angry brother with the hot green eyes was near, the prince
felt, though he had not seen him for many hunts. Yet with every sun
that set he grew more distant, and he had been the last. The others
were far scattered, like leaves blown by the wild wind.
Sometimes he could sense them, though, as if they were still with
him, only hidden from his sight by a boulder or a stand of trees. He
could not smell them, nor hear their howls by night, yet he felt
their presence at his back … all but the sister they had lost. His tail
drooped when he remembered her. Four now, not ve. Four and one
more, the white who has no voice.
These woods belonged to them, the snowy slopes and stony hills,
the great green pines and the golden leaf oaks, the rushing streams
and blue lakes fringed with ngers of white frost. But his sister had
left the wilds, to walk in the halls of man-rock where other hunters
ruled, and once within those halls it was hard to nd the path back
out. The wolf prince remembered.
The wind shifted suddenly.
Deer, and fear, and blood. The scent of prey woke the hunger in
him. The prince sni ed the air again, turning, and then he was o ,
bounding along the ridgetop with jaws half-parted. The far side of
the ridge was steeper than the one he’d come up, but he ew
surefoot over stones and roots and rotting leaves, down the slope
and through the trees, long strides eating up the ground. The scent
pulled him onward, ever faster.
The deer was down and dying when he reached her, ringed by
eight of his small grey cousins. The heads of the pack had begun to
feed, the male rst and then his female, taking turns tearing esh
from the red underbelly of their prey. The others waited patiently,

all but the tail, who paced in a wary circle a few strides from the
rest, his own tail tucked low. He would eat the last of all, whatever
his brothers left him.
The prince was downwind, so they did not sense him until he
leapt up upon a fallen log six strides from where they fed. The tail
saw him rst, gave a piteous whine, and slunk away. His pack
brothers turned at the sound and bared their teeth, snarling, all but
the head male and female.
The direwolf answered the snarls with a low warning growl and
showed them his own teeth. He was bigger than his cousins, twice
the size of the scrawny tail, half again as large as the two pack
heads. He leapt down into their midst, and three of them broke,
melting away into the brush. Another came at him, teeth snapping.
He met the attack head on, caught the wolf’s leg in his jaws when
they met, and ung him aside yelping and limping.
And then there was only the head wolf to face, the great grey
male with his bloody muzzle fresh from the prey’s soft belly. There
was white on his muzzle as well, to mark him as an old wolf, but
when his mouth opened, red slaver ran from his teeth.
He has no fear, the prince thought, no more than me. It would be a
good ght. They went for each other.
Long they fought, rolling together over roots and stones and
fallen leaves and the scattered entrails of the prey, tearing at each
other with tooth and claw, breaking apart, circling each round the
other, and bolting in to ght again. The prince was larger, and
much the stronger, but his cousin had a pack. The female prowled
around them closely, snu ng and snarling, and would interpose
herself whenever her mate broke o bloodied. From time to time
the other wolves would dart in as well, to snap at a leg or an ear
when the prince was turned the other way. One angered him so
much that he whirled in a black fury and tore out the attacker’s
throat. After that the others kept their distance.
And as the last red light was ltering through green boughs and
golden, the old wolf lay down weary in the dirt, and rolled over to
expose his throat and belly. It was submission.

The prince sni ed at him and licked the blood from fur and torn
esh. When the old wolf gave a soft whimper, the direwolf turned
away. He was very hungry now, and the prey was his.
“Hodor.”
The sudden sound made him stop and snarl. The wolves regarded
him with green and yellow eyes, bright with the last light of day.
None of them had heard it. It was a queer wind that blew only in
his ears. He buried his jaws in the deer’s belly and tore o a
mouthful of esh.
“Hodor, hodor.”
No, he thought. No, I won’t. It was a boy’s thought, not a
direwolf’s. The woods were darkening all about him, until only the
shadows of the trees remained, and the glow of his cousins’ eyes.
And through those and behind those eyes, he saw a big man’s
grinning face, and a stone vault whose walls were spotted with
niter. The rich warm taste of blood faded on his tongue. No, don’t,
don’t, I want to eat, I want to, I want …
“Hodor, hodor, hodor, hodor, hodor,” Hodor chanted as he shook
him softly by the shoulders, back and forth and back and forth. He
was trying to be gentle, he always tried, but Hodor was seven feet
tall and stronger than he knew, and his huge hands rattled Bran’s
teeth together. “NO!” he shouted angrily. “Hodor, leave o , I’m
here, I’m here.”
Hodor stopped, looking abashed. “Hodor?”
The woods and wolves were gone. Bran was back again, down in
the damp vault of some ancient watchtower that must have been
abandoned thousands of years before. It wasn’t much of a tower
now. Even the tumbled stones were so overgrown with moss and
ivy that you could hardly see them until you were right on top of
them. “Tumbledown Tower,” Bran had named the place; it was
Meera who found the way down into the vault, however.
“You were gone too long.” Jojen Reed was thirteen, only four
years older than Bran. Jojen wasn’t much bigger either, no more
than two inches or maybe three, but he had a solemn way of talking
that made him seem older and wiser than he really was. At
Winterfell, Old Nan had dubbed him “little grandfather.”

Bran frowned at him. “I wanted to eat.”
“Meera will be back soon with supper.”
“I’m sick of frogs.” Meera was a frogeater from the Neck, so Bran
couldn’t really blame her for catching so many frogs, he supposed,
but even so … “I wanted to eat the deer.” For a moment he
remembered the taste of it, the blood and the raw rich meat, and his
mouth watered. I won the ght for it. I won.
“Did you mark the trees?”
Bran ushed. Jojen was always telling him to do things when he
opened his third eye and put on Summer’s skin. To claw the bark of
a tree, to catch a rabbit and bring it back in his jaws uneaten, to
push some rocks in a line. Stupid things. “I forgot,” he said.
“You always forget.”
It was true. He meant to do the things that Jojen asked, but once
he was a wolf they never seemed important. There were always
things to see and things to smell, a whole green world to hunt. And
he could run! There was nothing better than running, unless it was
running after prey. “I was a prince, Jojen,” he told the older boy. “I
was the prince of the woods.”
“You are a prince,” Jojen reminded him softly. “You remember,
don’t you? Tell me who you are.”
“You know.” Jojen was his friend and his teacher, but sometimes
Bran just wanted to hit him.
“I want you to say the words. Tell me who you are.”
“Bran,” he said sullenly. Bran the Broken. “Brandon Stark.” The
cripple boy. “The Prince of Winterfell.” Of Winterfell burned and
tumbled, its people scattered and slain. The glass gardens were
smashed, and hot water gushed from the cracked walls to steam
beneath the sun. How can you be the prince of someplace you might
never see again?
“And who is Summer?” Jojen prompted.
“My direwolf.” He smiled. “Prince of the green.”
“Bran the boy and Summer the wolf. You are two, then?”
“Two,” he sighed, “and one.” He hated Jojen when he got stupid
like this. At Winterfell he wanted me to dream my wolf dreams, and
now that I know how he’s always calling me back.

“Remember that, Bran. Remember yourself, or the wolf will
consume you. When you join, it is not enough to run and hunt and
howl in Summer’s skin.”
It is for me, Bran thought. He liked Summer’s skin better than his
own. What good is it to be a skinchanger if you can’t wear the skin you
like?
“Will you remember? And next time, mark the tree. Any tree, it
doesn’t matter, so long as you do it.”
“I will. I’ll remember. I could go back and do it now, if you like. I
won’t forget this time.” But I’ll eat my deer rst, and ght with those
little wolves some more.
Jojen shook his head. “No. Best stay, and eat. With your own
mouth. A warg cannot live on what his beast consumes.”
How would you know? Bran thought resentfully. You’ve never been
a warg, you don’t know what it’s like.
Hodor jerked suddenly to his feet, almost hitting his head on the
barrel-vaulted ceiling. “HODOR!” he shouted, rushing to the door.
Meera pushed it open just before he reached it, and stepped through
into their refuge. “Hodor, hodor,” the huge stableboy said, grinning.
Meera Reed was sixteen, a woman grown, but she stood no
higher than her brother. All the crannogmen were small, she told
Bran once when he asked why she wasn’t taller. Brown-haired,
green-eyed, and at as a boy, she walked with a supple grace that
Bran could only watch and envy. Meera wore a long sharp dagger,
but her favorite way to ght was with a slender three-pronged frog
spear in one hand and a woven net in the other.
“Who’s hungry?” she asked, holding up her catch: two small
silvery trout and six fat green frogs.
“I am,” said Bran. But not for frogs. Back at Winterfell before all
the bad things had happened, the Walders used to say that eating
frogs would turn your teeth green and make moss grow under your
arms. He wondered if the Walders were dead. He hadn’t seen their
corpses at Winterfell … but there had been a lot of corpses, and they
hadn’t looked inside the buildings.
“We’ll just have to feed you, then. Will you help me clean the
catch, Bran?”

He nodded. It was hard to sulk with Meera. She was much more
cheerful than her brother, and always seemed to know how to make
him smile. Nothing ever scared her or made her angry. Well, except
Jojen, sometimes … Jojen Reed could scare most anyone. He dressed
all in green, his eyes were murky as moss, and he had green
dreams. What Jojen dreamed came true. Except he dreamed me dead,
and I’m not. Only he was, in a way.
Jojen sent Hodor out for wood and built them a small re while
Bran and Meera were cleaning the sh and frogs. They used Meera’s
helm for a cooking pot, chopping up the catch into little cubes and
tossing in some water and some wild onions Hodor had found to
make a froggy stew. It wasn’t as good as deer, but it wasn’t bad
either, Bran decided as he ate. “Thank you, Meera,” he said. “My
lady.”
“You are most welcome, Your Grace.”
“Come the morrow,” Jojen announced, “we had best move on.”
Bran could see Meera tense. “Have you had a green dream?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Why leave, then?” his sister demanded. “Tumbledown Tower’s a
good place for us. No villages near, the woods are full of game,
there’s sh and frogs in the streams and lakes … and who is ever
going to nd us here?”
“This is not the place we are meant to be.”
“It is safe, though.”
“It seems safe, I know,” said Jojen, “but for how long? There was
a battle at Winterfell, we saw the dead. Battles mean wars. If some
army should take us unawares …”
“It might be Robb’s army,” said Bran. “Robb will come back from
the south soon, I know he will. He’ll come back with all his banners
and chase the ironmen away.”
“Your maester said naught of Robb when he lay dying,” Jojen
reminded him. “Ironmen on the Stony Shore, he said, and, east, the
Bastard of Bolton. Moat Cailin and Deepwood Motte fallen, the heir
to Cerwyn dead, and the castellan of Torrhen’s Square. War
everywhere, he said, each man against his neighbor.”

“We have plowed this eld before,” his sister said. “You want to
make for the Wall, and your three-eyed crow. That’s well and good,
but the Wall is a very long way and Bran has no legs but Hodor. If
we were mounted …”
“If we were eagles we might y,” said Jojen sharply, “but we
have no wings, no more than we have horses.”
“There are horses to be had,” said Meera. “Even in the deep of
the wolfswood there are foresters, crofters, hunters. Some will have
horses.”
“And if they do, should we steal them? Are we thieves? The last
thing we need is men hunting us.”
“We could buy them,” she said. “Trade for them.”
“Look at us, Meera. A crippled boy with a direwolf, a
simpleminded giant, and two crannogmen a thousand leagues from
the Neck. We will be known. And word will spread. So long as Bran
remains dead, he is safe. Alive, he becomes prey for those who want
him dead for good and true.” Jojen went to the re to prod the
embers with a stick. “Somewhere to the north, the three-eyed crow
awaits us. Bran has need of a teacher wiser than me.”
“How, Jojen?” his sister asked. “How?”
“Afoot,” he answered. “A step at a time.”
“The road from Greywater to Winterfell went on forever, and we
were mounted then. You want us to travel a longer road on foot,
without even knowing where it ends. Beyond the Wall, you say. I
haven’t been there, no more than you, but I know that Beyond the
Wall’s a big place, Jojen. Are there many three-eyed crows, or only
one? How do we nd him?”
“Perhaps he will nd us.”
Before Meera could nd a reply to that, they heard the sound; the
distant howl of a wolf, drifting through the night. “Summer?” asked
Jojen, listening.
“No.” Bran knew the voice of his direwolf.
“Are you certain?” said the little grandfather.
“Certain.” Summer had wandered far a eld today, and would not
be back till dawn. Maybe Jojen dreams green, but he can’t tell a wolf
from a direwolf. He wondered why they all listened to Jojen so

much. He was not a prince like Bran, nor big and strong like Hodor,
nor as good a hunter as Meera, yet somehow it was always Jojen
telling them what to do. “We should steal horses like Meera wants,”
Bran said, “and ride to the Umbers up at Last Hearth.” He thought a
moment. “Or we could steal a boat and sail down the White Knife to
White Harbor town. That fat Lord Manderly rules there, he was
friendly at the harvest feast. He wanted to build ships. Maybe he
built some, and we could sail to Riverrun and bring Robb home
with all his army. Then it wouldn’t matter who knew I was alive.
Robb wouldn’t let anyone hurt us.”
“Hodor!” burped Hodor. “Hodor, hodor.”
He was the only one who liked Bran’s plan, though. Meera just
smiled at him and Jojen frowned. They never listened to what he
wanted, even though Bran was a Stark and a prince besides, and the
Reeds of the Neck were Stark bannermen.
“Hoooodor,” said Hodor, swaying. “Hooooooodor, hoooooodor,
hoDOR, hoDOR, hoDOR.” Sometimes he liked to do this, just saying
his name di erent ways, over and over and over. Other times, he
would stay so quiet you forgot he was there. There was never any
knowing with Hodor. “HODOR, HODOR, HODOR!” he shouted.
He is not going to stop, Bran realized. “Hodor,” he said, “why don’t
you go outside and train with your sword?”
The stableboy had forgotten about his sword, but now he
remembered. “Hodor!” he burped. He went for his blade. They had
three tomb swords taken from the crypts of Winterfell where Bran
and his brother Rickon had hidden from Theon Greyjoy’s ironmen.
Bran claimed his uncle Brandon’s sword, Meera the one she found
upon the knees of his grandfather Lord Rickard. Hodor’s blade was
much older, a huge heavy piece of iron, dull from centuries of
neglect and well spotted with rust. He could swing it for hours at a
time. There was a rotted tree near the tumbled stones that he had
hacked half to pieces.
Even when he went outside they could hear him through the
walls, bellowing “HODOR!” as he cut and slashed at his tree.
Thankfully the wolfswood was huge, and there was not like to be
anyone else around to hear.

“Jojen, what did you mean about a teacher?” Bran asked. “You’re
my teacher. I know I never marked the tree, but I will the next
time. My third eye is open like you wanted …”
“So wide open that I fear you may fall through it, and live all the
rest of your days as a wolf of the woods.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
“The boy promises. Will the wolf remember? You run with
Summer, you hunt with him, kill with him … but you bend to his
will more than him to yours.”
“I just forget,” Bran complained. “I’m only nine. I’ll be better
when I’m older. Even Florian the Fool and Prince Aemon the
Dragonknight weren’t great knights when they were nine.”
“That is true,” said Jojen, “and a wise thing to say, if the days
were still growing longer … but they aren’t. You are a summer
child, I know. Tell me the words of House Stark.”
“Winter is coming.” Just saying it made Bran feel cold.
Jojen gave a solemn nod. “I dreamed of a winged wolf bound to
earth by chains of stone, and came to Winterfell to free him. The
chains are o you now, yet still you do not y.”
“Then you teach me.” Bran still feared the three-eyed crow who
haunted his dreams sometimes, pecking endlessly at the skin
between his eyes and telling him to y. “You’re a greenseer.”
“No,” said Jojen, “only a boy who dreams. The greenseers were
more than that. They were wargs as well, as you are, and the
greatest of them could wear the skins of any beast that ies or
swims or crawls, and could look through the eyes of the weirwoods
as well, and see the truth that lies beneath the world.
“The gods give many gifts, Bran. My sister is a hunter. It is given
to her to run swiftly, and stand so still she seems to vanish. She has
sharp ears, keen eyes, a steady hand with net and spear. She can
breathe mud and y through trees. I could not do these things, no
more than you could. To me the gods gave the green dreams, and to
you … you could be more than me, Bran. You are the winged wolf,
and there is no saying how far and high you might y … if you had
someone to teach you. How can I help you master a gift I do not
understand? We remember the First Men in the Neck, and the

children of the forest who were their friends … but so much is
forgotten, and so much we never knew.”
Meera took Bran by the hand. “If we stay here, troubling no one,
you’ll be safe until the war ends. You will not learn, though, except
what my brother can teach you, and you’ve heard what he says. If
we leave this place to seek refuge at Last Hearth or beyond the
Wall, we risk being taken. You are only a boy, I know, but you are
our prince as well, our lord’s son and our king’s true heir. We have
sworn you our faith by earth and water, bronze and iron, ice and
re. The risk is yours, Bran, as is the gift. The choice should be
yours too, I think. We are your servants to command.” She grinned.
“At least in this.”
“You mean,” Bran said, “you’ll do what I say? Truly?”
“Truly, my prince,” the girl replied, “so consider well.”
Bran tried to think it through, the way his father might have. The
Greatjon’s uncles Hother Whoresbane and Mors Crowfood were
erce men, but he thought they would be loyal. And the Karstarks,
them too. Karhold was a strong castle, Father always said. We would
be safe with the Umbers or the Karstarks.
Or they could go south to fat Lord Manderly. At Winterfell, he’d
laughed a lot, and never seemed to look at Bran with so much pity
as the other lords. Castle Cerwyn was closer than White Harbor, but
Maester Luwin had said that Cley Cerwyn was dead. The Umbers
and the Karstarks and the Manderlys may all be dead as well, he
realized. As he would be, if he was caught by the ironmen or the
Bastard of Bolton.
If they stayed here, hidden down beneath Tumbledown Tower, no
one would nd them. He would stay alive. And crippled.
Bran realized he was crying. Stupid baby, he thought at himself.
No matter where he went, to Karhold or White Harbor or
Greywater Watch, he’d be a cripple when he got there. He balled
his hands into sts. “I want to y,” he told them. “Please. Take me
to the crow.”

DAVOS

When he came up on deck, the long point of Driftmark was

dwindling behind them while Dragonstone rose from the sea ahead.
A pale grey wisp of smoke blew from the top of the mountain to
mark where the island lay. Dragonmont is restless this morning, Davos
thought, or else Melisandre is burning someone else.
Melisandre had been much in his thoughts as Shayala’s Dance
made her way across Blackwater Bay and through the Gullet,
tacking against perverse contrary winds. The great re that burned
atop the Sharp Point watchtower at the end of Massey’s Hook
reminded him of the ruby she wore at her throat, and when the
world turned red at dawn and sunset the drifting clouds turned the
same color as the silks and satins of her rustling gowns.
She would be waiting on Dragonstone as well, waiting in all her
beauty and all her power, with her god and her shadows and his
king. The red priestess had always seemed loyal to Stannis, until
now. She has broken him, as a man breaks a horse. She would ride him
to power if she could, and for that she gave my sons to the re. I will cut
the living heart from her breast and see how it burns. He touched the
hilt of the ne long Lysene dirk that the captain had given him.
The captain had been very kind to him. His name was Khorane
Sathmantes, a Lyseni like Salladhor Saan, whose ship this was. He
had the pale blue eyes you often saw on Lys, set in a bony
weatherworn face, but he had spent many years trading in the
Seven Kingdoms. When he learned that the man he had plucked

from the sea was the celebrated onion knight, he gave him the use
of his own cabin and his own clothes, and a pair of new boots that
almost t. He insisted that Davos share his provisions as well,
though that turned out badly. His stomach could not tolerate the
snails and lampreys and other rich food Captain Khorane so
relished, and after his rst meal at the captain’s table he spent the
rest of the day with one end or the other dangling over the rail.
Dragonstone loomed larger with every stroke of the oars. Davos
could see the shape of the mountain now, and on its side the great
black citadel with its gargoyles and dragon towers. The bronze
gurehead at the bow of Shayala’s Dance sent up wings of salt spray
as it cut the waves. He leaned his weight against the rail, grateful
for its support. His ordeal had weakened him. If he stood too long
his legs shook, and sometimes he fell prey to uncontrollable ts of
coughing and brought up gobs of bloody phlegm. It is nothing, he
told himself. Surely the gods did not bring me safe through re and sea
only to kill me with a ux.
As he listened to the pounding of the oarmaster’s drum, the thrum
of the sail, and the rhythmic swish and creak of the oars, he thought
back to his younger days, when these same sounds woke dread in
his heart on many a misty morn. They heralded the approach of old
Ser Tristimun’s sea watch, and the sea watch was death to
smugglers when Aerys Targaryen sat the Iron Throne.
But that was another lifetime, he thought. That was before the onion
ship, before Storm’s End, before Stannis shortened my ngers. That was
before the war or the red comet, before I was a Seaworth or a knight. I
was a di erent man in those days, before Lord Stannis raised me high.
Captain Khorane had told him of the end of Stannis’s hopes, on
the night the river burned. The Lannisters had taken him from the
ank, and his ckle bannermen had abandoned him by the hundreds
in the hour of his greatest need. “King Renly’s shade was seen as
well,” the captain said, “slaying right and left as he led the lion
lord’s van. It’s said his green armor took a ghostly glow from the
wild re, and his antlers ran with golden ames.”
Renly’s shade. Davos wondered if his sons would return as shades
as well. He had seen too many queer things on the sea to say that

ghosts did not exist. “Did none keep faith?” he asked.
“Some few,” the captain said. “The queen’s kin, them in chief. We
took o many who wore the fox-and- owers, though many more
were left ashore, with all manner of badges. Lord Florent is the
King’s Hand on Dragonstone now.”
The mountain grew taller, crowned all in pale smoke. The sail
sang, the drum beat, the oars pulled smoothly, and before very long
the mouth of the harbor opened before them. So empty, Davos
thought, remembering how it had been before, with the ships
crowding every quay and rocking at anchor o the breakwater. He
could see Salladhor Saan’s agship Valyrian moored at the quay
where Fury and her sisters had once tied up. The ships on either side
of her had striped Lysene hulls as well. In vain he looked for any
sign of Lady Marya or Wraith.
They pulled down the sail as they entered the harbor, to dock on
oars alone. The captain came to Davos as they were tying up. “My
prince will wish to see you at once.”
A t of coughing seized Davos as he tried to answer. He clutched
the rail for support and spat over the side. “The king,” he wheezed.
“I must go to the king.” For where the king is, I will nd Melisandre.
“No one goes to the king,” Khorane Sathmantes replied rmly.
“Salladhor Saan will tell you. Him rst.”
Davos was too weak to defy him. He could only nod.
Salladhor Saan was not aboard his Valyrian. They found him at
another quay a quarter mile distant, down in the hold of a bigbellied Pentoshi cog named Bountiful Harvest, counting cargo with
two eunuchs. One held a lantern, the other a wax tablet and stylus.
“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” the old rogue was saying
when Davos and the captain came down the hatch. Today he wore a
wine-colored tunic and high boots of bleached white leather inlaid
with silver scrollwork. Pulling the stopper from a jar, he sni ed,
sneezed, and said, “A coarse grind, and of the second quality, my
nose declares. The bill of lading is saying forty-three jars. Where
have the others gotten to, I am wondering? These Pentoshi, do they
think I am not counting?” When he saw Davos he stopped suddenly.
“Is it pepper stinging my eyes, or tears? Is this the knight of the

onions who stands before me? No, how can it be, my dear friend
Davos died on the burning river, all agree. Why has he come to
haunt me?”
“I am no ghost, Salla.”
“What else? My onion knight was never so thin or so pale as
you.” Salladhor Saan threaded his way between the jars of spice and
bolts of cloth that lled the hold of the merchanter, wrapped Davos
in a erce embrace, then kissed him once on each cheek and a third
time on his forehead. “You are still warm, ser, and I feel your heart
thumpety-thumping. Can it be true? The sea that swallowed you has
spit you up again.”
Davos was reminded of Patchface, Princess Shireen’s lackwit fool.
He had gone into the sea as well, and when he came out he was
mad. Am I mad as well? He coughed into a gloved hand and said, “I
swam beneath the chain and washed ashore on a spear of the
merling king. I would have died there, if Shayala’s Dance had not
come upon me.”
Salladhor Saan threw an arm around the captain’s shoulders. “This
was well done, Khorane. You will be having a ne reward, I am
thinking. Meizo Mahr, be a good eunuch and take my friend Davos
to the owner’s cabin. Fetch him some hot wine with cloves, I am
misliking the sound of that cough. Squeeze some lime in it as well.
And bring white cheese and a bowl of those cracked green olives we
counted earlier! Davos, I will join you soon, once I have bespoken
our good captain. You will be forgiving me, I know. Do not eat all
the olives, or I must be cross with you!”
Davos let the elder of the two eunuchs escort him to a large and
lavishly furnished cabin at the stern of the ship. The carpets were
deep, the windows stained glass, and any of the great leather chairs
would have seated three of Davos quite comfortably. The cheese
and olives arrived shortly, and a cup of steaming hot red wine. He
held it between his hands and sipped it gratefully. The warmth felt
soothing as it spread through his chest.
Salladhor Saan appeared not long after. “You must be forgiving
me for the wine, my friend. These Pentoshi would drink their own
water if it were purple.”

“It will help my chest,” said Davos. “Hot wine is better than a
compress, my mother used to say.”
“You shall be needing compresses as well, I am thinking. Sitting
on a spear all this long time, oh my. How are you nding that
excellent chair? He has fat cheeks, does he not?”
“Who?” asked Davos, between sips of hot wine.
“Illyrio Mopatis. A whale with whiskers, I am telling you truly.
These chairs were built to his measure, though he is seldom
bestirring himself from Pentos to sit in them. A fat man always sits
comfortably, I am thinking, for he takes his pillow with him
wherever he goes.”
“How is it you come by a Pentoshi ship?” asked Davos. “Have
you gone pirate again, my lord?” He set his empty cup aside.
“Vile calumny. Who has su ered more from pirates than
Salladhor Saan? I ask only what is due me. Much gold is owed, oh
yes, but I am not without reason, so in place of coin I have taken a
handsome parchment, very crisp. It bears the name and seal of Lord
Alester Florent, the Hand of the King. I am made Lord of
Blackwater Bay, and no vessel may be crossing my lordly waters
without my lordly leave, no. And when these outlaws are trying to
steal past me in the night to avoid my lawful duties and customs,
why, they are no better than smugglers, so I am well within my
rights to seize them.” The old pirate laughed. “I cut o no man’s
ngers, though. What good are bits of ngers? The ships I am
taking, the cargoes, a few ransoms, nothing unreasonable.” He gave
Davos a sharp look. “You are unwell, my friend. That cough … and
so thin, I am seeing your bones through your skin. And yet I am not
seeing your little bag of ngerbones …”
Old habit made Davos reach for the leather pouch that was no
longer there. “I lost it in the river.” My luck.
“The river was terrible,” Salladhor Saan said solemnly. “Even
from the bay, I was seeing, and shuddering.”
Davos coughed, spat, and coughed again. “I saw Black Betha
burning, and Fury as well,” he nally managed, hoarsely. “Did none
of our ships escape the re?” Part of him still hoped.

“Lord Ste on, Ragged Jenna, Swift Sword, Laughing Lord, and some
others were upstream of the pyromancers’ pissing, yes. They did not
burn, but with the chain raised, neither could they be ying. Some
few were surrendering. Most rowed far up the Blackwater, away
from the battling, and then were sunk by their crews so they would
not be falling into Lannister hands. Ragged Jenna and Laughing Lord
are still playing pirate on the river, I have heard, but who can say if
it is so?”
“Lady Marya?” Davos asked. “Wraith?”
Salladhor Saan put a hand on Davos’s forearm and gave a
squeeze. “No. Of them, no. I am sorry, my friend. They were good
men, your Dale and Allard. But this comfort I can give you—your
young Devan was among those we took o at the end. The brave
boy never once left the king’s side, or so they say.”
For a moment he felt almost dizzy, his relief was so palpable. He
had been afraid to ask about Devan. “The Mother is merciful. I must
go to him, Salla. I must see him.”
“Yes,” said Salladhor Saan. “And you will be wanting to sail to
Cape Wrath, I know, to see your wife and your two little ones. You
must be having a new ship, I am thinking.”
“His Grace will give me a ship,” said Davos.
The Lyseni shook his head. “Of ships, His Grace has none, and
Salladhor Saan has many. The king’s ships burned up on the river,
but not mine. You shall have one, old friend. You will sail for me,
yes? You will dance into Braavos and Myr and Volantis in the black
of night, all unseen, and dance out again with silks and spices. We
will be having fat purses, yes.”
“You are kind, Salla, but my duty’s to my king, not your purse.
The war will go on. Stannis is still the rightful heir by all the laws
of the Seven Kingdoms.”
“All the laws are not helping when all the ships burn up, I am
thinking. And your king, well, you will be nding him changed, I
am fearing. Since the battle, he sees no one, but broods in his Stone
Drum. Queen Selyse keeps court for him with her uncle the Lord
Alester, who is naming himself the Hand. The king’s seal she has
given to this uncle, to x to the letters he writes, even to my pretty

parchment. But it is a little kingdom they are ruling, poor and
rocky, yes. There is no gold, not even a little bit to pay faithful
Salladhor Saan what is owed him, and only those knights that we
took o at the end, and no ships but my little brave few.”
A sudden racking cough bent Davos over. Salladhor Saan moved
to help him, but he waved him o , and after a moment he
recovered. “No one?” he wheezed. “What do you mean, he sees no
one?” His voice sounded wet and thick, even in his own ears, and
for a moment the cabin swam dizzily around him.
“No one but her,” said Salladhor Saan, and Davos did not have to
ask who he meant. “My friend, you tire yourself. It is a bed you are
needing, not Salladhor Saan. A bed and many blankets, with a hot
compress for your chest and more wine and cloves.”
Davos shook his head. “I will be ne. Tell me, Salla, I must know.
No one but Melisandre?”
The Lyseni gave him a long doubtful look, and continued
reluctantly. “The guards keep all others away, even his queen and
his little daughter. Servants bring meals that no one eats.” He
leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Queer talking I have heard,
of hungry res within the mountain, and how Stannis and the red
woman go down together to watch the ames. There are shafts,
they say, and secret stairs down into the mountain’s heart, into hot
places where only she may walk unburned. It is enough and more to
give an old man such terrors that sometimes he can scarcely nd the
strength to eat.”
Melisandre. Davos shivered. “The red woman did this to him,” he
said. “She sent the re to consume us, to punish Stannis for setting
her aside, to teach him that he could not hope to win without her
sorceries.”
The Lyseni chose a plump olive from the bowl between them.
“You are not the rst to be saying this, my friend. But if I am you, I
am not saying it so loudly. Dragonstone crawls with these queen’s
men, oh yes, and they have sharp ears and sharper knives.” He
popped the olive into his mouth.
“I have a knife myself. Captain Khorane made me a gift of it.” He
pulled out the dirk and laid it on the table between them. “A knife

to cut out Melisandre’s heart. If she has one.”
Salladhor Saan spit out an olive pit. “Davos, good Davos, you
must not be saying such things, even in jest.”
“No jest. I mean to kill her.” If she can be killed by mortal weapons.
Davos was not certain that she could. He had seen old Maester
Cressen slip poison into her wine, with his own eyes he had seen it,
but when they both drank from the poisoned cup it was the maester
who died, not the red priestess. A knife in the heart, though … even
demons can be killed by cold iron, the singers say.
“These are dangerous talkings, my friend,” Salladhor Saan warned
him. “I am thinking you are still sick from the sea. The fever has
cooked your wits, yes. Best you are taking to your bed for a long
resting, until you are stronger.”
Until my resolve weakens, you mean. Davos got to his feet. He did
feel feverish and a little dizzy, but it did not matter. “You are a
treacherous old rogue, Salladhor Saan, but a good friend all the
same.”
The Lyseni stroked his pointed silver beard. “So with this great
friend you will be staying, yes?”
“No, I will be going.” He coughed.
“Go? Look at you! You cough, you tremble, you are thin and
weak. Where will you be going?”
“To the castle. My bed is there, and my son.”
“And the red woman,” Salladhor Saan said suspiciously. “She is in
the castle also.”
“Her too.” Davos slid the dirk back into its sheath.
“You are an onion smuggler, what do you know of skulkings and
stabbings? And you are ill, you cannot even hold the dirk. Do you
know what will be happening to you, if you are caught? While we
were burning on the river, the queen was burning traitors. Servants
of the dark, she named them, poor men, and the red woman sang as
the res were lit.”
Davos was unsurprised. I knew, he thought, I knew before he told
me. “She took Lord Sunglass from the dungeons,” he guessed, “and
Hubard Rambton’s sons.”

“Just so, and burned them, as she will burn you. If you kill the
red woman, they will burn you for revenge, and if you fail to kill
her, they will burn you for the trying. She will sing and you will
scream, and then you will die. And you have only just come back to
life!”
“And this is why,” said Davos. “To do this thing. To make an end
of Melisandre of Asshai and all her works. Why else would the sea
have spit me out? You know Blackwater Bay as well as I do, Salla.
No sensible captain would ever take his ship through the spears of
the merling king and risk ripping out his bottom. Shayala’s Dance
should never have come near me.”
“A wind,” insisted Salladhor Saan loudly, “an ill wind, is all. A
wind drove her too far to the south.”
“And who sent the wind? Salla, the Mother spoke to me.”
The old Lyseni blinked at him. “Your mother is dead …”
“The Mother. She blessed me with seven sons, and yet I let them
burn her. She spoke to me. We called the re, she said. We called
the shadows too. I rowed Melisandre into the bowels of Storm’s End
and watched her birth a horror.” He saw it still in his nightmares,
the gaunt black hands pushing against her thighs as it wriggled free
of her swollen womb. “She killed Cressen and Lord Renly and a
brave man named Cortnay Penrose, and she killed my sons as well.
Now it is time someone killed her.”
“Someone,” said Salladhor Saan. “Yes, just so, someone. But not
you. You are weak as a child, and no warrior. Stay, I beg you, we
will talk more and you will eat, and perhaps we will sail to Braavos
and hire a Faceless Man to do this thing, yes? But you, no, you must
sit and eat.”
He is making this much harder, thought Davos wearily, and it was
perishingly hard to begin with. “I have vengeance in my belly, Salla. It
leaves no room for food. Let me go now. For our friendship, wish
me luck and let me go.”
Salladhor Saan pushed himself to his feet. “You are no true friend,
I am thinking. When you are dead, who will be bringing your ashes
and bones back to your lady wife and telling her that she has lost a
husband and four sons? Only sad old Salladhor Saan. But so be it,

brave ser knight, go rushing to your grave. I will gather your bones
in a sack and give them to the sons you leave behind, to wear in
little bags around their necks.” He waved an angry hand, with rings
on every nger. “Go, go, go, go, go.”
Davos did not want to leave like this. “Salla—”
“GO. Or stay, better, but if you are going, go.”
He went.
His walk up from the Bountiful Harvest to the gates of
Dragonstone was long and lonely. The dockside streets where
soldiers and sailors and smallfolk had thronged were empty and
deserted. Where once he had stepped around squealing pigs and
naked children, rats scurried. His legs felt like pudding beneath him,
and thrice the coughing racked him so badly that he had to stop and
rest. No one came to help him, nor even peered through a window
to see what was the matter. The windows were shuttered, the doors
barred, and more than half the houses displayed some mark of
mourning. Thousands sailed up the Blackwater Rush, and hundreds
came back, Davos re ected. My sons did not die alone. May the
Mother have mercy on them all.
When he reached the castle gates, he found them shut as well.
Davos pounded on the iron-studded wood with his st. When there
was no answer, he kicked at it, again and again. Finally a
crossbowman appeared atop the barbican, peering down between
two towering gargoyles. “Who goes there?”
He craned his head back and cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Ser Davos Seaworth, to see His Grace.”
“Are you drunk? Go away and stop that pounding.”
Salladhor Saan had warned him. Davos tried a di erent tack.
“Send for my son, then. Devan, the king’s squire.”
The guard frowned. “Who did you say you were?”
“Davos,” he shouted. “The onion knight.”
The head vanished, to return a moment later. “Be o with you.
The onion knight died on the river. His ship burned.”
“His ship burned,” Davos agreed, “but he lived, and here he
stands. Is Jate still captain of the gate?”
“Who?”

“Jate Blackberry. He knows me well enough.”
“I never heard of him. Most like he’s dead.”
“Lord Chyttering, then.”
“That one I know. He burned on the Blackwater.”
“Hookface Will? Hal the Hog?”
“Dead and dead,” the crossbowman said, but his face betrayed a
sudden doubt. “You wait there.” He vanished again.
Davos waited. Gone, all gone, he thought dully, remembering how
fat Hal’s white belly always showed beneath his grease-stained
doublet, the long scar the sh hook had left across Will’s face, the
way Jate always do ed his cap at the women, be they ve or fty,
highborn or low. Drowned or burned, with my sons and a thousand
others, gone to make a king in hell.
Suddenly the crossbowman was back. “Go round to the sally port
and they’ll admit you.”
Davos did as he was bid. The guards who ushered him inside were
strangers to him. They carried spears, and on their breasts they
wore the fox-and- owers sigil of House Florent. They escorted him
not to the Stone Drum, as he’d expected, but under the arch of the
Dragon’s Tail and down to Aegon’s Garden. “Wait here,” their
sergeant told him.
“Does His Grace know that I’ve returned?” asked Davos.
“Bugger all if I know. Wait, I said.” The man left, taking his
spearmen with him.
Aegon’s Garden had a pleasant piney smell to it, and tall dark
trees rose on every side. There were wild roses as well, and
towering thorny hedges, and a boggy spot where cranberries grew.
Why have they brought me here? Davos wondered.
Then he heard a faint ringing of bells, and a child’s giggle, and
suddenly the fool Patchface popped from the bushes, shambling
along as fast as he could go with the Princess Shireen hot on his
heels. “You come back now,” she was shouting after him. “Patches,
you come back.”
When the fool saw Davos, he jerked to a sudden halt, the bells on
his antlered tin helmet going ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling. Hopping from
one foot to the other, he sang, “Fool’s blood, king’s blood, blood on

the maiden’s thigh, but chains for the guests and chains for the
bridegroom, aye aye aye.” Shireen almost caught him then, but at the
last instant he hopped over a patch of bracken and vanished among
the trees. The princess was right behind him. The sight of them
made Davos smile.
He had turned to cough into his gloved hand when another small
shape crashed out of the hedge and bowled right into him, knocking
him o his feet.
The boy went down as well, but he was up again almost at once.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded as he brushed himself o .
Jet-black hair fell to his collar, and his eyes were a startling blue.
“You shouldn’t get in my way when I’m running.”
“No,” Davos agreed. “I shouldn’t.” Another t of coughing seized
him as he struggled to his knees.
“Are you unwell?” The boy took him by the arm and pulled him
to his feet. “Should I summon the maester?”
Davos shook his head. “A cough. It will pass.”
The boy took him at his word. “We were playing monsters and
maidens,” he explained. “I was the monster. It’s a childish game but
my cousin likes it. Do you have a name?”
“Ser Davos Seaworth.”
The boy looked him up and down dubiously. “Are you certain?
You don’t look very knightly.”
“I am the knight of the onions, my lord.”
The blue eyes blinked. “The one with the black ship?”
“You know that tale?”
“You brought my uncle Stannis sh to eat before I was born,
when Lord Tyrell had him under siege.” The boy drew himself up
tall. “I am Edric Storm,” he announced. “King Robert’s son.”
“Of course you are.” Davos had known that almost at once. The
lad had the prominent ears of a Florent, but the hair, the eyes, the
jaw, the cheekbones, those were all Baratheon.
“Did you know my father?” Edric Storm demanded.
“I saw him many a time while calling on your uncle at court, but
we never spoke.”

“My father taught me to ght,” the boy said proudly. “He came
to see me almost every year, and sometimes we trained together.
On my last name day he sent me a warhammer just like his, only
smaller. They made me leave it at Storm’s End, though. Is it true
my uncle Stannis cut o your ngers?”
“Only the last joint. I still have ngers, only shorter.”
“Show me.”
Davos peeled his glove o . The boy studied his hand carefully.
“He did not shorten your thumb?”
“No.” Davos coughed. “No, he left me that.”
“He should not have chopped any of your ngers,” the lad
decided. “That was ill done.”
“I was a smuggler.”
“Yes, but you smuggled him sh and onions.”
“Lord Stannis knighted me for the onions, and took my ngers for
the smuggling.” He pulled his glove back on.
“My father would not have chopped your ngers.”
“As you say, my lord.” Robert was a di erent man than Stannis, true
enough. The boy is like him. Aye, and like Renly as well. That thought
made him anxious.
The boy was about to say something more when they heard steps.
Davos turned. Ser Axell Florent was coming down the garden path
with a dozen guards in quilted jerkins. On their breasts they wore
the ery heart of the Lord of Light. Queen’s men, Davos thought. A
cough came on him suddenly.
Ser Axell was short and muscular, with a barrel chest, thick arms,
bandy legs, and hair growing from his ears. The queen’s uncle, he
had served as castellan of Dragonstone for a decade, and had always
treated Davos courteously, knowing he enjoyed the favor of Lord
Stannis. But there was neither courtesy nor warmth in his tone as he
said, “Ser Davos, and undrowned. How can that be?”
“Onions oat, ser. Have you come to take me to the king?”
“I have come to take you to the dungeon.” Ser Axell waved his
men forward. “Seize him, and take his dirk. He means to use it on
our lady.”

JAIME

Jaime was the rst to spy the inn. The main building hugged the

south shore where the river bent, its long low wings outstretched
along the water as if to embrace travelers sailing downstream. The
lower story was grey stone, the upper whitewashed wood, the roof
slate. He could see stables as well, and an arbor heavy with vines.
“No smoke from the chimneys,” he pointed out as they approached.
“Nor lights in the windows.”
“The inn was still open when last I passed this way,” said Ser
Cleos Frey. “They brewed a ne ale. Perhaps there is still some to
be had in the cellars.”
“There may be people,” Brienne said. “Hiding. Or dead.”
“Frightened of a few corpses, wench?” Jaime said.
She glared at him. “My name is—”
“—Brienne, yes. Wouldn’t you like to sleep in a bed for a night,
Brienne? We’d be safer than on the open river, and it might be
prudent to nd what’s happened here.”
She gave no answer, but after a moment she pushed at the tiller
to angle the ski in toward the weathered wooden dock. Ser Cleos
scrambled to take down the sail. When they bumped softly against
the pier, he climbed out to tie them up. Jaime clambered after him,
made awkward by his chains.
At the end of the dock, a aking shingle swung from an iron post,
painted with the likeness of a king upon his knees, his hands pressed

together in the gesture of fealty. Jaime took one look and laughed
aloud. “We could not have found a better inn.”
“Is this some special place?” the wench asked, suspicious.
Ser Cleos answered. “This is the Inn of the Kneeling Man, my
lady. It stands upon the very spot where the last King in the North
knelt before Aegon the Conqueror to o er his submission. That’s
him on the sign, I suppose.”
“Torrhen had brought his power south after the fall of the two
kings on the Field of Fire,” said Jaime, “but when he saw Aegon’s
dragon and the size of his host, he chose the path of wisdom and
bent his frozen knees.” He stopped at the sound of a horse’s whinny.
“Horses in the stable. One at least.” And one is all I need to put the
wench behind me. “Let’s see who’s home, shall we?” Without waiting
for an answer, Jaime went clinking down the dock, put a shoulder
to the door, shoved it open …
… and found himself eye to eye with a loaded crossbow.
Standing behind it was a chunky boy of fteen. “Lion, sh, or
wolf?” the lad demanded.
“We were hoping for capon.” Jaime heard his companions
entering behind him. “The crossbow is a coward’s weapon.”
“It’ll put a bolt through your heart all the same.”
“Perhaps. But before you can wind it again my cousin here will
spill your entrails on the oor.”
“Don’t be scaring the lad, now,” Ser Cleos said.
“We mean no harm,” the wench said. “And we have coin to pay
for food and drink.” She dug a silver piece from her pouch.
The boy looked suspiciously at the coin, and then at Jaime’s
manacles. “Why’s this one in irons?”
“Killed some crossbowmen,” said Jaime. “Do you have ale?”
“Yes.” The boy lowered the crossbow an inch. “Undo your
swordbelts and let them fall, and might be we’ll feed you.” He
edged around to peer through the thick, diamond-shaped
windowpanes and see if any more of them were outside. “That’s a
Tully sail.”
“We come from Riverrun.” Brienne undid the clasp on her belt
and let it clatter to the oor. Ser Cleos followed suit.

A sallow man with a pocked doughy face stepped through the
cellar door, holding a butcher’s heavy cleaver. “Three, are you? We
got horsemeat enough for three. The horse was old and tough, but
the meat’s still fresh.”
“Is there bread?” asked Brienne.
“Hardbread and stale oatcakes.”
Jaime grinned. “Now there’s an honest innkeep. They’ll all serve
you stale bread and stringy meat, but most don’t own up to it so
freely.”
“I’m no innkeep. I buried him out back, with his women.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Would I tell you if I did?” The man spat. “Likely it were wolves’
work, or maybe lions, what’s the di erence? The wife and I found
them dead. The way we see it, the place is ours now.”
“Where is this wife of yours?” Ser Cleos asked.
The man gave him a suspicious squint. “And why would you be
wanting to know that? She’s not here … no more’n you three will
be, unless I like the taste of your silver.”
Brienne tossed the coin to him. He caught it in the air, bit it, and
tucked it away.
“She’s got more,” the boy with the crossbow announced.
“So she does. Boy, go down and nd me some onions.”
The lad raised the crossbow to his shoulder, gave them one last
sullen look, and vanished into the cellar.
“Your son?” Ser Cleos asked.
“Just a boy the wife and me took in. We had two sons, but the
lions killed one and the other died of the ux. The boy lost his
mother to the Bloody Mummers. These days, a man needs someone
to keep watch while he sleeps.” He waved the cleaver at the tables.
“Might as well sit.”
The hearth was cold, but Jaime picked the chair nearest the ashes
and stretched out his long legs under the table. The clink of his
chains accompanied his every movement. An irritating sound. Before
this is done, I’ll wrap these chains around the wench’s throat, see how she
likes them then.

The man who wasn’t an innkeep charred three huge horse steaks
and fried the onions in bacon grease, which almost made up for the
stale oatcakes. Jaime and Cleos drank ale, Brienne a cup of cider.
The boy kept his distance, perching atop the cider barrel with his
crossbow across his knees, cocked and loaded. The cook drew a
tankard of ale and sat with them. “What news from Riverrun?” he
asked Ser Cleos, taking him for their leader.
Ser Cleos glanced at Brienne before answering. “Lord Hoster is
failing, but his son holds the fords of the Red Fork against the
Lannisters. There have been battles.”
“Battles everywhere. Where are you bound, ser?”
“King’s Landing.” Ser Cleos wiped grease o his lips.
Their host snorted. “Then you’re three fools. Last I heard, King
Stannis was outside the city walls. They say he has a hundred
thousand men and a magic sword.”
Jaime’s hands wrapped around the chain that bound his wrists,
and he twisted it taut, wishing for the strength to snap it in two.
Then I’d show Stannis where to sheathe his magic sword.
“I’d stay well clear of that kingsroad, if I were you,” the man
went on. “It’s worse than bad, I hear. Wolves and lions both, and
bands of broken men preying on anyone they can catch.”
“Vermin,” declared Ser Cleos with contempt. “Such would never
dare to trouble armed men.”
“Begging your pardon, ser, but I see one armed man, traveling
with a woman and a prisoner in chains.”
Brienne gave the cook a dark look. The wench does hate being
reminded that she’s a wench, Jaime re ected, twisting at the chains
again. The links were cold and hard against his esh, the iron
implacable. The manacles had chafed his wrists raw.
“I mean to follow the Trident to the sea,” the wench told their
host. “We’ll nd mounts at Maidenpool and ride by way of
Duskendale and Rosby. That should keep us well away from the
worst of the ghting.”
Their host shook his head. “You’ll never reach Maidenpool by
river. Not thirty miles from here a couple boats burned and sank,
and the channel’s been silting up around them. There’s a nest of

outlaws there preying on anyone tries to come by, and more of the
same downriver around the Skipping Stones and Red Deer Island.
And the lightning lord’s been seen in these parts as well. He crosses
the river wherever he likes, riding this way and that way, never
still.”
“And who is this lightning lord?” demanded Ser Cleos Frey.
“Lord Beric, as it please you, ser. They call him that ’cause he
strikes so sudden, like lightning from a clear sky. It’s said he cannot
die.”
They all die when you shove a sword through them, Jaime thought.
“Does Thoros of Myr still ride with him?”
“Aye. The red wizard. I’ve heard tell he has strange powers.”
Well, he had the power to match Robert Baratheon drink for drink,
and there were few enough who could say that. Jaime had once heard
Thoros tell the king that he became a red priest because the robes
hid the winestains so well. Robert had laughed so hard he’d spit ale
all over Cersei’s silken mantle. “Far be it from me to make
objection,” he said, “but perhaps the Trident is not our safest
course.”
“I’d say that’s so,” their cook agreed. “Even if you get past Red
Deer Island and don’t meet up with Lord Beric and the red wizard,
there’s still the ruby ford before you. Last I heard, it was the Leech
Lord’s wolves held the ford, but that was some time past. By now it
could be lions again, or Lord Beric, or anyone.”
“Or no one,” Brienne suggested.
“If m’lady cares to wager her skin on that I won’t stop her … but
if I was you, I’d leave this here river, cut overland. If you stay o
the main roads and shelter under the trees of a night, hidden as it
were … well, I still wouldn’t want to go with you, but you might
stand a mummer’s chance.”
The big wench was looking doubtful. “We would need horses.”
“There are horses here,” Jaime pointed out. “I heard one in the
stable.”
“Aye, there are,” said the innkeep, who wasn’t an innkeep. “Three
of them, as it happens, but they’re not for sale.”

Jaime had to laugh. “Of course not. But you’ll show them to us
anyway.”
Brienne scowled, but the man who wasn’t an innkeep met her
eyes without blinking, and after a moment, reluctantly, she said,
“Show me,” and they all rose from the table.
The stables had not been mucked out in a long while, from the
smell of them. Hundreds of fat black ies swarmed amongst the
straw, buzzing from stall to stall and crawling over the mounds of
horse dung that lay everywhere, but there were only the three
horses to be seen. They made an unlikely trio; a lumbering brown
plow horse, an ancient white gelding blind in one eye, and a
knight’s palfrey, dapple grey and spirited. “They’re not for sale at
any price,” their alleged owner announced.
“How did you come by these horses?” Brienne wanted to know.
“The dray was stabled here when the wife and me come on the
inn,” the man said, “along with the one you just ate. The gelding
come wandering up one night, and the boy caught the palfrey
running free, still saddled and bridled. Here, I’ll show you.”
The saddle he showed them was decorated with silver inlay. The
saddlecloth had originally been checkered pink and black, but now
it was mostly brown. Jaime did not recognize the original colors,
but he recognized bloodstains easily enough. “Well, her owner
won’t be coming to claim her anytime soon.” He examined the
palfrey’s legs, counted the gelding’s teeth. “Give him a gold piece
for the grey, if he’ll include the saddle,” he advised Brienne. “A
silver for the plow horse. He ought to pay us for taking the white
o his hands.”
“Don’t speak discourteously of your horse, ser.” The wench
opened the purse Lady Catelyn had given her and took out three
golden coins. “I will pay you a dragon for each.”
He blinked and reached for the gold, then hesitated and drew his
hand back. “I don’t know. I can’t ride no golden dragon if I need to
get away. Nor eat one if I’m hungry.”
“You can have our ski as well,” she said. “Sail up the river or
down, as you like.”

“Let me have a taste o’ that gold.” The man took one of the coins
from her palm and bit it. “Hm. Real enough, I’d say. Three dragons
and the ski ?”
“He’s robbing you blind, wench,” Jaime said amiably.
“I’ll want provisions too,” Brienne told their host, ignoring Jaime.
“Whatever you have that you can spare.”
“There’s more oatcakes.” The man scooped the other two dragons
from her palm and jingled them in his st, smiling at the sound they
made. “Aye, and smoked salt sh, but that will cost you silver. My
beds will be costing as well. You’ll be wanting to stay the night.”
“No,” Brienne said at once.
The man frowned at her. “Woman, you don’t want to go riding at
night through strange country on horses you don’t know. You’re
like to blunder into some bog or break your horse’s leg.”
“The moon will be bright tonight,” Brienne said. “We’ll have no
trouble nding our way.”
Their host chewed on that. “If you don’t have the silver, might be
some coppers would buy you them beds, and a coverlet or two to
keep you warm. It’s not like I’m turning travelers away, if you get
my meaning.”
“That sounds more than fair,” said Ser Cleos.
“The coverlets is fresh washed, too. My wife saw to that before
she had to go o . Not a ea to be found neither, you have my word
on that.” He jingled the coins again, smiling.
Ser Cleos was plainly tempted. “A proper bed would do us all
good, my lady,” he said to Brienne. “We’d make better time on the
morrow once refreshed.” He looked to his cousin for support.
“No, coz, the wench is right. We have promises to keep, and long
leagues before us. We ought ride on.”
“But,” said Cleos, “you said yourself—”
“Then.” When I thought the inn deserted. “Now I have a full belly,
and a moonlight ride will be just the thing.” He smiled for the
wench. “But unless you mean to throw me over the back of that
plow horse like a sack of our, someone had best do something
about these irons. It’s di cult to ride with your ankles chained
together.”

Brienne frowned at the chain. The man who wasn’t an innkeep
rubbed his jaw. “There’s a smithy round back of the stable.”
“Show me,” Brienne said.
“Yes,” said Jaime, “and the sooner the better. There’s far too
much horse shit about here for my taste. I would hate to step in it.”
He gave the wench a sharp look, wondering if she was bright
enough to take his meaning.
He hoped she might strike the irons o his wrists as well, but
Brienne was still suspicious. She split the ankle chain in the center
with a half-dozen sharp blows from the smith’s hammer delivered to
the blunt end of a steel chisel. When he suggested that she break the
wrist chain as well, she ignored him.
“Six miles downriver you’ll see a burned village,” their host said
as he was helping them saddle the horses and load their packs. This
time he directed his counsel at Brienne. “The road splits there. If
you turn south, you’ll come on Ser Warren’s stone towerhouse. Ser
Warren went o and died, so I couldn’t say who holds it now, but
it’s a place best shunned. You’d do better to follow the track
through the woods, south by east.”
“We shall,” she answered. “You have my thanks.”
More to the point, he has your gold. Jaime kept the thought to
himself. He was tired of being disregarded by this huge ugly cow of
a woman.
She took the plow horse for herself and assigned the palfrey to
Ser Cleos. As threatened, Jaime drew the one-eyed gelding, which
put an end to any thoughts he might have had of giving his horse a
kick and leaving the wench in his dust.
The man and the boy came out to watch them leave. The man
wished them luck and told them to come back in better times, while
the lad stood silent, his crossbow under his arm. “Take up the spear
or maul,” Jaime told him, “they’ll serve you better.” The boy stared
at him distrustfully. So much for friendly advice. He shrugged, turned
his horse, and never looked back.
Ser Cleos was all complaints as they rode out, still in mourning
for his lost featherbed. They rode east, along the bank of the
moonlit river. The Red Fork was very broad here, but shallow, its

banks all mud and reeds. Jaime’s mount plodded along placidly,
though the poor old thing had a tendency to want to drift o to the
side of his good eye. It felt good to be mounted once more. He had
not been on a horse since Robb Stark’s archers had killed his
destrier under him in the Whispering Wood.
When they reached the burned village, a choice of equally
unpromising roads confronted them; narrow tracks, deeply rutted
by the carts of farmers hauling their grain to the river. One
wandered o toward the southeast and soon vanished amidst the
trees they could see in the distance, while the other, straighter and
stonier, arrowed due south. Brienne considered them brie y, and
then swung her horse onto the southern road. Jaime was pleasantly
surprised; it was the same choice he would have made.
“But this is the road the innkeep warned us against,” Ser Cleos
objected.
“He was no innkeep.” She hunched gracelessly in the saddle, but
seemed to have a sure seat nonetheless. “The man took too great an
interest in our choice of route, and those woods … such places are
notorious haunts of outlaws. He may have been urging us into a
trap.”
“Clever wench.” Jaime smiled at his cousin. “Our host has friends
down that road, I would venture. The ones whose mounts gave that
stable such a memorable aroma.”
“He may have been lying about the river as well, to put us on
these horses,” the wench said, “but I could not take the risk. There
will be soldiers at the ruby ford and the crossroads.”
Well, she may be ugly but she’s not entirely stupid. Jaime gave her a
grudging smile.
The ruddy light from the upper windows of the stone towerhouse
gave them warning of its presence a long way o , and Brienne led
them o into the elds. Only when the stronghold was well to the
rear did they angle back and nd the road again.
Half the night passed before the wench allowed that it might be
safe to stop. By then all three of them were drooping in their
saddles. They sheltered in a small grove of oak and ash beside a
sluggish stream. The wench would allow no re, so they shared a

midnight supper of stale oatcakes and salt sh. The night was
strangely peaceful. The half-moon sat overhead in a black felt sky,
surrounded by stars. O in the distance, some wolves were howling.
One of their horses whickered nervously. There was no other sound.
The war has not touched this place, Jaime thought. He was glad to be
here, glad to be alive, glad to be on his way back to Cersei.
“I’ll take the rst watch,” Brienne told Ser Cleos, and Frey was
soon snoring softly.
Jaime sat against the bole of an oak and wondered what Cersei
and Tyrion were doing just now. “Do you have any siblings, my
lady?” he asked.
Brienne squinted at him suspiciously. “No. I was my father’s only
s—child.”
Jaime chuckled. “Son, you meant to say. Does he think of you as
a son? You make a queer sort of daughter, to be sure.”
Wordless, she turned away from him, her knuckles tight on her
sword hilt. What a wretched creature this one is. She reminded him of
Tyrion in some queer way, though at rst blush two people could
scarcely be any more dissimilar. Perhaps it was that thought of his
brother that made him say, “I did not intend to give o ense,
Brienne. Forgive me.”
“Your crimes are past forgiving, Kingslayer.”
“That name again.” Jaime twisted idly at his chains. “Why do I
enrage you so? I’ve never done you harm that I know of.”
“You’ve harmed others. Those you were sworn to protect. The
weak, the innocent …”
“… the king?” It always came back to Aerys. “Don’t presume to
judge what you do not understand, wench.”
“My name is—”
“—Brienne, yes. Has anyone ever told you that you’re as tedious
as you are ugly?”
“You will not provoke me to anger, Kingslayer.”
“Oh, I might, if I cared enough to try.”
“Why did you take the oath?” she demanded. “Why don the white
cloak if you meant to betray all it stood for?”

Why? What could he say that she might possibly understand? “I
was a boy. Fifteen. It was a great honor for one so young.”
“That is no answer,” she said scornfully.
You would not like the truth. He had joined the Kingsguard for
love, of course.
Their father had summoned Cersei to court when she was twelve,
hoping to make her a royal marriage. He refused every o er for her
hand, preferring to keep her with him in the Tower of the Hand
while she grew older and more womanly and ever more beautiful.
No doubt he was waiting for Prince Viserys to mature, or perhaps
for Rhaegar’s wife to die in childbed. Elia of Dorne was never the
healthiest of women.
Jaime, meantime, had spent four years as squire to Ser Sumner
Crakehall and earned his spurs against the Kingswood Brotherhood.
But when he made a brief call at King’s Landing on his way back to
Casterly Rock, chie y to see his sister, Cersei took him aside and
whispered that Lord Tywin meant to marry him to Lysa Tully, had
gone so far as to invite Lord Hoster to the city to discuss dower. But
if Jaime took the white, he could be near her always. Old Ser
Harlan Grandison had died in his sleep, as was only appropriate for
one whose sigil was a sleeping lion. Aerys would want a young man
to take his place, so why not a roaring lion in place of a sleepy one?
“Father will never consent,” Jaime objected.
“The king won’t ask him. And once it’s done, Father can’t object,
not openly. Aerys had Ser Ilyn Payne’s tongue torn out just for
boasting that it was the Hand who truly ruled the Seven Kingdoms.
The captain of the Hand’s guard, and yet Father dared not try and
stop it! He won’t stop this, either.”
“But,” Jaime said, “there’s Casterly Rock …”
“Is it a rock you want? Or me?”
He remembered that night as if it were yesterday. They spent it
in an old inn on Eel Alley, well away from watchful eyes. Cersei
had come to him dressed as a simple serving wench, which
somehow excited him all the more. Jaime had never seen her more
passionate. Every time he went to sleep, she woke him again. By

morning Casterly Rock seemed a small price to pay to be near her
always. He gave his consent, and Cersei promised to do the rest.
A moon’s turn later, a royal raven arrived at Casterly Rock to
inform him that he had been chosen for the Kingsguard. He was
commanded to present himself to the king during the great tourney
at Harrenhal to say his vows and don his cloak.
Jaime’s investiture freed him from Lysa Tully. Elsewise, nothing
went as planned. His father had never been more furious. He could
not object openly—Cersei had judged that correctly—but he
resigned the Handship on some thin pretext and returned to
Casterly Rock, taking his daughter with him. Instead of being
together, Cersei and Jaime just changed places, and he found
himself alone at court, guarding a mad king while four lesser men
took their turns dancing on knives in his father’s ill- tting shoes. So
swiftly did the Hands rise and fall that Jaime remembered their
heraldry better than their faces. The horn-of-plenty Hand and the
dancing gri ns Hand had both been exiled, the mace-and-dagger
Hand dipped in wild re and burned alive. Lord Rossart had been
the last. His sigil had been a burning torch; an unfortunate choice,
given the fate of his predecessor, but the alchemist had been
elevated largely because he shared the king’s passion for re. I
ought to have drowned Rossart instead of gutting him.
Brienne was still awaiting his answer. Jaime said, “You are not
old enough to have known Aerys Targaryen …”
She would not hear it. “Aerys was mad and cruel, no one has ever
denied that. He was still king, crowned and anointed. And you had
sworn to protect him.”
“I know what I swore.”
“And what you did.” She loomed above him, six feet of freckled,
frowning, horse-toothed disapproval.
“Yes, and what you did as well. We’re both kingslayers here, if
what I’ve heard is true.”
“I never harmed Renly. I’ll kill the man who says I did.”
“Best start with Cleos, then. And you’ll have a deal of killing to
do after that, the way he tells the tale.”

“Lies. Lady Catelyn was there when His Grace was murdered, she
saw. There was a shadow. The candles guttered and the air grew
cold, and there was blood—”
“Oh, very good.” Jaime laughed. “Your wits are quicker than
mine, I confess it. When they found me standing over my dead king,
I never thought to say, ‘No, no, it wasn’t me, it was a shadow, a
terrible cold shadow.’ ” He laughed again. “Tell me true, one
kingslayer to another—did the Starks pay you to slit his throat, or
was it Stannis? Had Renly spurned you, was that the way of it? Or
perhaps your moon’s blood was on you. Never give a wench a
sword when she’s bleeding.”
For a moment Jaime thought Brienne might strike him. A step
closer, and I’ll snatch that dagger from her sheath and bury it up her
womb. He gathered a leg under him, ready to spring, but the wench
did not move. “It is a rare and precious gift to be a knight,” she
said, “and even more so a knight of the Kingsguard. It is a gift given
to few, a gift you scorned and soiled.”
A gift you want desperately, wench, and can never have. “I earned
my knighthood. Nothing was given to me. I won a tourney mêlée at
thirteen, when I was yet a squire. At fteen, I rode with Ser Arthur
Dayne against the Kingswood Brotherhood, and he knighted me on
the battle eld. It was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other
way around. So spare me your envy. It was the gods who neglected
to give you a cock, not me.”
The look Brienne gave him then was full of loathing. She would
gladly hack me to pieces, but for her precious vow, he re ected. Good.
I’ve had enough of feeble pieties and maidens’ judgments. The wench
stalked o without saying a word. Jaime curled up beneath his
cloak, hoping to dream of Cersei.
But when he closed his eyes, it was Aerys Targaryen he saw,
pacing alone in his throne room, picking at his scabbed and bleeding
hands. The fool was always cutting himself on the blades and barbs
of the Iron Throne. Jaime had slipped in through the king’s door,
clad in his golden armor, sword in hand. The golden armor, not the
white, but no one ever remembers that. Would that I had taken o that
damned cloak as well.

When Aerys saw the blood on his blade, he demanded to know if
it was Lord Tywin’s. “I want him dead, the traitor. I want his head,
you’ll bring me his head, or you’ll burn with all the rest. All the
traitors. Rossart says they are inside the walls! He’s gone to make
them a warm welcome. Whose blood? Whose?”
“Rossart’s,” answered Jaime.
Those purple eyes grew huge then, and the royal mouth drooped
open in shock. He lost control of his bowels, turned, and ran for the
Iron Throne. Beneath the empty eyes of the skulls on the walls,
Jaime hauled the last dragonking bodily o the steps, squealing like
a pig and smelling like a privy. A single slash across his throat was
all it took to end it. So easy, he remembered thinking. A king should
die harder than this. Rossart at least had tried to make a ght of it,
though if truth be told he fought like an alchemist. Queer that they
never ask who killed Rossart … but of course, he was no one, lowborn,
Hand for a fortnight, just another mad fancy of the Mad King.
Ser Elys Westerling and Lord Crakehall and others of his father’s
knights burst into the hall in time to see the last of it, so there was
no way for Jaime to vanish and let some braggart steal the praise or
blame. It would be blame, he knew at once when he saw the way
they looked at him … though perhaps that was fear. Lannister or
no, he was one of Aerys’s seven.
“The castle is ours, ser, and the city,” Roland Crakehall told him,
which was half true. Targaryen loyalists were still dying on the
serpentine steps and in the armory, Gregor Clegane and Amory
Lorch were scaling the walls of Maegor’s Holdfast, and Ned Stark
was leading his northmen through the King’s Gate even then, but
Crakehall could not have known that. He had not seemed surprised
to nd Aerys slain; Jaime had been Lord Tywin’s son long before he
had been named to the Kingsguard.
“Tell them the Mad King is dead,” he commanded. “Spare all
those who yield and hold them captive.”
“Shall I proclaim a new king as well?” Crakehall asked, and Jaime
read the question plain: Shall it be your father, or Robert Baratheon,
or do you mean to try to make a new dragonking? He thought for a
moment of the boy Viserys, ed to Dragonstone, and of Rhaegar’s

infant son Aegon, still in Maegor’s with his mother. A new Targaryen
king, and my father as Hand. How the wolves will howl, and the storm
lord choke with rage. For a moment he was tempted, until he glanced
down again at the body on the oor, in its spreading pool of blood.
His blood is in both of them, he thought. “Proclaim who you bloody
well like,” he told Crakehall. Then he climbed the Iron Throne and
seated himself with his sword across his knees, to see who would
come to claim the kingdom. As it happened, it had been Eddard
Stark.
You had no right to judge me either, Stark.
In his dreams the dead came burning, gowned in swirling green
ames. Jaime danced around them with a golden sword, but for
every one he struck down two more arose to take his place.
Brienne woke him with a boot in the ribs. The world was still
black, and it had begun to rain. They broke their fast on oatcakes,
salt sh, and some blackberries that Ser Cleos had found, and were
back in the saddle before the sun came up.

TYRION

The eunuch was humming tunelessly to himself as he came

through the door, dressed in owing robes of peach-colored silk and
smelling of lemons. When he saw Tyrion seated by the hearth, he
stopped and grew very still. “My lord Tyrion,” came out in a
squeak, punctuated by a nervous giggle.
“So you do remember me? I had begun to wonder.”
“It is so very good to see you looking so strong and well.” Varys
smiled his slimiest smile. “Though I confess, I had not thought to
nd you in mine own humble chambers.”
“They are humble. Excessively so, in truth.” Tyrion had waited
until Varys was summoned by his father before slipping in to pay
him a visit. The eunuch’s apartments were sparse and small, three
snug windowless chambers under the north wall. “I’d hoped to
discover bushel baskets of juicy secrets to while away the waiting,
but there’s not a paper to be found.” He’d searched for hidden
passages too, knowing the Spider must have ways of coming and
going unseen, but those had proved equally elusive. “There was
water in your agon, gods have mercy,” he went on, “your sleeping
cell is no wider than a co n, and that bed … is it actually made of
stone, or does it only feel that way?”
Varys closed the door and barred it. “I am plagued with
backaches, my lord, and prefer to sleep upon a hard surface.”
“I would have taken you for a featherbed man.”

“I am full of surprises. Are you cross with me for abandoning you
after the battle?”
“It made me think of you as one of my family.”
“It was not for want of love, my good lord. I have such a delicate
disposition, and your scar is so dreadful to look upon …” He gave
an exaggerated shudder. “Your poor nose …”
Tyrion rubbed irritably at the scab. “Perhaps I should have a new
one made of gold. What sort of nose would you suggest, Varys? One
like yours, to smell out secrets? Or should I tell the goldsmith that I
want my father’s nose?” He smiled. “My noble father labors so
diligently that I scarce see him anymore. Tell me, is it true that he’s
restoring Grand Maester Pycelle to the small council?”
“It is, my lord.”
“Do I have my sweet sister to thank for that?” Pycelle had been
his sister’s creature; Tyrion had stripped the man of o ce, beard,
and dignity, and ung him down into a black cell.
“Not at all, my lord. Thank the archmaesters of Oldtown, those
who wished to insist on Pycelle’s restoration on the grounds that
only the Conclave may make or unmake a Grand Maester.”
Bloody fools, thought Tyrion. “I seem to recall that Maegor the
Cruel’s headsman unmade three with his axe.”
“Quite true,” Varys said. “And the second Aegon fed Grand
Maester Gerardys to his dragon.”
“Alas, I am quite dragonless. I suppose I could have dipped
Pycelle in wild re and set him ablaze. Would the Citadel have
preferred that?”
“Well, it would have been more in keeping with tradition.” The
eunuch tittered. “Thankfully, wiser heads prevailed, and the
Conclave accepted the fact of Pycelle’s dismissal and set about
choosing his successor. After giving due consideration to Maester
Turquin the cordwainer’s son and Maester Erreck the hedge knight’s
bastard, and thereby demonstrating to their own satisfaction that
ability counts for more than birth in their order, the Conclave was
on the verge of sending us Maester Gormon, a Tyrell of
Highgarden. When I told your lord father, he acted at once.”

The Conclave met in Oldtown behind closed doors, Tyrion knew;
its deliberations were supposedly a secret. So Varys has little birds in
the Citadel too. “I see. So my father decided to nip the rose before it
bloomed.” He had to chuckle. “Pycelle is a toad. But better a
Lannister toad than a Tyrell toad, no?”
“Grand Maester Pycelle has always been a good friend to your
House,” Varys said sweetly. “Perhaps it will console you to learn
that Ser Boros Blount is also being restored.”
Cersei had stripped Ser Boros of his white cloak for failing to die
in the defense of Prince Tommen when Bronn had seized the boy on
the Rosby road. The man was no friend of Tyrion’s, but after that he
likely hated Cersei almost as much. I suppose that’s something.
“Blount is a blustering coward,” he said amiably.
“Is he? Oh dear. Still, the knights of the Kingsguard do serve for
life, traditionally. Perhaps Ser Boros will prove braver in future. He
will no doubt remain very loyal.”
“To my father,” said Tyrion pointedly.
“While we are on the subject of the Kingsguard … I wonder,
could this delightfully unexpected visit of yours happen to concern
Ser Boros’s fallen brother, the gallant Ser Mandon Moore?” The
eunuch stroked a powdered cheek. “Your man Bronn seems most
interested in him of late.”
Bronn had turned up all he could on Ser Mandon, but no doubt
Varys knew a deal more … should he choose to share it. “The man
seems to have been quite friendless,” Tyrion said carefully.
“Sadly,” said Varys, “oh, sadly. You might nd some kin if you
turned over enough stones back in the Vale, but here … Lord Arryn
brought him to King’s Landing and Robert gave him his white cloak,
but neither loved him much, I fear. Nor was he the sort the
smallfolk cheer in tourneys, despite his undoubted prowess. Why,
even his brothers of the Kingsguard never warmed to him. Ser
Barristan was once heard to say that the man had no friend but his
sword and no life but duty … but you know, I do not think Selmy
meant it altogether as praise. Which is queer when you consider it,
is it not? Those are the very qualities we seek in our Kingsguard, it
could be said—men who live not for themselves, but for their king.

By those lights, our brave Ser Mandon was the perfect white knight.
And he died as a knight of the Kingsguard ought, with sword in
hand, defending one of the king’s own blood.” The eunuch gave him
a slimy smile and watched him sharply.
Trying to murder one of the king’s own blood, you mean. Tyrion
wondered if Varys knew rather more than he was saying. Nothing
he’d just heard was new to him; Bronn had brought back much the
same reports. He needed a link to Cersei, some sign that Ser
Mandon had been his sister’s catspaw. What we want is not always
what we get, he re ected bitterly, which reminded him …
“It is not Ser Mandon who brings me here.”
“To be sure.” The eunuch crossed the room to his agon of water.
“May I serve you, my lord?” he asked as he lled a cup.
“Yes. But not with water.” He folded his hands together. “I want
you to bring me Shae.”
Varys took a drink. “Is that wise, my lord? The dear sweet child.
It would be such a shame if your father hanged her.”
It did not surprise him that Varys knew. “No, it’s not wise, it’s
bloody madness. I want to see her one last time, before I send her
away. I cannot abide having her so close.”
“I understand.”
How could you? Tyrion had seen her only yesterday, climbing the
serpentine steps with a pail of water. He had watched as a young
knight had o ered to carry the heavy pail. The way she had touched
his arm and smiled for him had tied Tyrion’s guts into knots. They
passed within inches of each other, him descending and her
climbing, so close that he could smell the clean fresh scent of her
hair. “M’lord,” she’d said to him, with a little curtsy, and he wanted
to reach out and grab her and kiss her right there, but all he could
do was nod sti y and waddle on past. “I have seen her several
times,” he told Varys, “but I dare not speak to her. I suspect that all
my movements are being watched.”
“You are wise to suspect so, my good lord.”
“Who?” He cocked his head.
“The Kettleblacks report frequently to your sweet sister.”

“When I think of how much coin I paid those wretched … do you
think there’s any chance that more gold might win them away from
Cersei?”
“There is always a chance, but I should not care to wager on the
likelihood. They are knights now, all three, and your sister has
promised them further advancement.” A wicked little titter burst
from the eunuch’s lips. “And the eldest, Ser Osmund of the
Kingsguard, dreams of certain other … favors … as well. You can
match the queen coin for coin, I have no doubt, but she has a second
purse that is quite inexhaustible.”
Seven hells, thought Tyrion. “Are you suggesting that Cersei’s
fucking Osmund Kettleblack?”
“Oh, dear me, no, that would be dreadfully dangerous, don’t you
think? No, the queen only hints … perhaps on the morrow, or when
the wedding’s done … and then a smile, a whisper, a ribald jest … a
breast brushing lightly against his sleeve as they pass … and yet it
seems to serve. But what would a eunuch know of such things?” The
tip of his tongue ran across his lower lip like a shy pink animal.
If I could somehow push them beyond sly fondling, arrange for Father
to catch them abed together … Tyrion ngered the scab on his nose.
He did not see how it could be done, but perhaps some plan would
come to him later. “Are the Kettleblacks the only ones?”
“Would that were true, my lord. I fear there are many eyes upon
you. You are … how shall we say? Conspicuous? And not well loved,
it grieves me to tell you. Janos Slynt’s sons would gladly inform on
you to avenge their father, and our sweet Lord Petyr has friends in
half the brothels of King’s Landing. Should you be so unwise as to
visit any of them, he will know at once, and your lord father soon
thereafter.”
It’s even worse than I feared. “And my father? Who does he have
spying on me?”
This time the eunuch laughed aloud. “Why, me, my lord.”
Tyrion laughed as well. He was not so great a fool as to trust
Varys any further than he had to—but the eunuch already knew
enough about Shae to get her well and thoroughly hanged. “You

will bring Shae to me through the walls, hidden from all these eyes.
As you have done before.”
Varys wrung his hands. “Oh, my lord, nothing would please me
more, but … King Maegor wanted no rats in his own walls, if you
take my meaning. He did require a means of secret egress, should
he ever be trapped by his enemies, but that door does not connect
with any other passages. I can steal your Shae away from Lady
Lollys for a time, to be sure, but I have no way to bring her to your
bedchamber without us being seen.”
“Then bring her somewhere else.”
“But where? There is no safe place.”
“There is.” Tyrion grinned. “Here. It’s time to put that rock-hard
bed of yours to better use, I think.”
The eunuch’s mouth opened. Then he giggled. “Lollys tires easily
these days. She is great with child. I imagine she will be safely
asleep by moonrise.”
Tyrion hopped down from the chair. “Moonrise, then. See that
you lay in some wine. And two clean cups.”
Varys bowed. “It shall be as my lord commands.”
The rest of the day seemed to creep by as slow as a worm in
molasses. Tyrion climbed to the castle library and tried to distract
himself with Beldecar’s History of the Rhoynish Wars, but he could
hardly see the elephants for imagining Shae’s smile. Come the
afternoon, he put the book aside and called for a bath. He scrubbed
himself until the water grew cool, and then had Pod even out his
whiskers. His beard was a trial to him; a tangle of yellow, white,
and black hairs, patchy and coarse, it was seldom less than
unsightly, but it did serve to conceal some of his face, and that was
all to the good.
When he was as clean and pink and trimmed as he was like to
get, Tyrion looked over his wardrobe, and chose a pair of tight satin
breeches in Lannister crimson and his best doublet, the heavy black
velvet with the lion’s head studs. He would have donned his chain
of golden hands as well, if his father hadn’t stolen it while he lay
dying. It was not until he was dressed that he realized the depths of
his folly. Seven hells, dwarf, did you lose all your sense along with your

nose? Anyone who sees you is going to wonder why you’ve put on your
court clothes to visit the eunuch. Cursing, Tyrion stripped and dressed
again, in simpler garb; black woolen breeches, an old white tunic,
and a faded brown leather jerkin. It doesn’t matter, he told himself as
he waited for moonrise. Whatever you wear, you’re still a dwarf. You’ll
never be as tall as that knight on the steps, him with his long straight legs
and hard stomach and wide manly shoulders.
The moon was peeping over the castle wall when he told Podrick
Payne that he was going to pay a call on Varys. “Will you be long,
my lord?” the boy asked.
“Oh, I hope so.”
With the Red Keep so crowded, Tyrion could not hope to go
unnoticed. Ser Balon Swann stood guard on the door, and Ser Loras
Tyrell on the drawbridge. He stopped to exchange pleasantries with
both of them. It was strange to see the Knight of Flowers all in
white when before he had always been as colorful as a rainbow.
“How old are you, Ser Loras?” Tyrion asked him.
“Seventeen, my lord.”
Seventeen, and beautiful, and already a legend. Half the girls in the
Seven Kingdoms want to bed him, and all the boys want to be him. “If
you will pardon my asking, ser—why would anyone choose to join
the Kingsguard at seventeen?”
“Prince Aemon the Dragonknight took his vows at seventeen,” Ser
Loras said, “and your brother Jaime was younger still.”
“I know their reasons. What are yours? The honor of serving
beside such paragons as Meryn Trant and Boros Blount?” He gave
the boy a mocking grin. “To guard the king’s life, you surrender
your own. You give up your lands and titles, give up hope of
marriage, children …”
“House Tyrell continues through my brothers,” Ser Loras said. “It
is not necessary for a third son to wed, or breed.”
“Not necessary, but some nd it pleasant. What of love?”
“When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.”
“Is that from a song?” Tyrion cocked his head, smiling. “Yes, you
are seventeen, I see that now.”
Ser Loras tensed. “Do you mock me?”

A prickly lad. “No. If I’ve given o ense, forgive me. I had my own
love once, and we had a song as well.” I loved a maid as fair as
summer, with sunlight in her hair. He bid Ser Loras a good evening
and went on his way.
Near the kennels a group of men-at-arms were ghting a pair of
dogs. Tyrion stopped long enough to see the smaller dog tear half
the face o the larger one, and earned a few coarse laughs by
observing that the loser now resembled Sandor Clegane. Then,
hoping he had disarmed their suspicions, he proceeded to the north
wall and down the short ight of steps to the eunuch’s meager
abode. The door opened as he was lifting his hand to knock.
“Varys?” Tyrion slipped inside. “Are you there?” A single candle
lit the gloom, spicing the air with the scent of jasmine.
“My lord.” A woman sidled into the light; plump, soft, matronly,
with a round pink moon of a face and heavy dark curls. Tyrion
recoiled. “Is something amiss?” she asked.
Varys, he realized with annoyance. “For one horrid moment I
thought you’d brought me Lollys instead of Shae. Where is she?”
“Here, m’lord.” She put her hands over his eyes from behind.
“Can you guess what I’m wearing?”
“Nothing?”
“Oh, you’re so smart,” she pouted, snatching her hands away.
“How did you know?”
“You’re very beautiful in nothing.”
“Am I?” she said. “Am I truly?”
“Oh yes.”
“Then shouldn’t you be fucking me instead of talking?”
“We need to rid ourselves of Lady Varys rst. I am not the sort of
dwarf who likes an audience.”
“He’s gone,” Shae said.
Tyrion turned to look. It was true. The eunuch had vanished,
skirts and all. The hidden doors are here somewhere, they have to be.
That was as much as he had time to think, before Shae turned his
head to kiss him. Her mouth was wet and hungry, and she did not
even seem to see his scar, or the raw scab where his nose had been.
Her skin was warm silk beneath his ngers. When his thumb

brushed against her left nipple, it hardened at once. “Hurry,” she
urged, between kisses, as his ngers went to his laces, “oh, hurry,
hurry, I want you in me, in me, in me.” He did not even have time
to undress properly. Shae pulled his cock out of his breeches, then
pushed him down onto the oor and climbed atop him. She
screamed as he pushed past her lips, and rode him wildly, moaning,
“My giant, my giant, my giant,” every time she slammed down on
him. Tyrion was so eager that he exploded on the fth stroke, but
Shae did not seem to mind. She smiled wickedly when she felt him
spurting, and leaned forward to kiss the sweat from his brow. “My
giant of Lannister,” she murmured. “Stay inside me, please. I like to
feel you there.”
So Tyrion did not move, except to put his arms around her. It feels
so good to hold her, and to be held, he thought. How can something this
sweet be a crime worth hanging her for? “Shae,” he said, “sweetling,
this must be our last time together. The danger is too great. If my
lord father should nd you …”
“I like your scar.” She traced it with her nger. “It makes you
look very erce and strong.”
He laughed. “Very ugly, you mean.”
“M’lord will never be ugly in my eyes.” She kissed the scab that
covered the ragged stub of his nose.
“It’s not my face that need concern you, it’s my father—”
“He does not frighten me. Will m’lord give me back my jewels
and silks now? I asked Varys if I could have them when you were
hurt in the battle, but he wouldn’t give them to me. What would
have become of them if you’d died?”
“I didn’t die. Here I am.”
“I know.” Shae wriggled atop him, smiling. “Just where you
belong.” Her mouth turned pouty. “But how long must I go on with
Lollys, now that you’re well?”
“Have you been listening?” Tyrion said. “You can stay with Lollys
if you like, but it would be best if you left the city.”
“I don’t want to leave. You promised you’d move me into a
manse again after the battle.” Her cunt gave him a little squeeze,

and he started to sti en again inside her. “A Lannister always pays
his debts, you said.”
“Shae, gods be damned, stop that. Listen to me. You have to go
away. The city’s full of Tyrells just now, and I am closely watched.
You don’t understand the dangers.”
“Can I come to the king’s wedding feast? Lollys won’t go. I told
her no one’s like to rape her in the king’s own throne room, but
she’s so stupid.” When Shae rolled o , his cock slid out of her with a
soft wet sound. “Symon says there’s to be a singers’ tourney, and
tumblers, even a fools’ joust.”
Tyrion had almost forgotten about Shae’s thrice-damned singer.
“How is it you spoke to Symon?”
“I told Lady Tanda about him, and she hired him to play for
Lollys. The music calms her when the baby starts to kick. Symon
says there’s to be a dancing bear at the feast, and wines from the
Arbor. I’ve never seen a bear dance.”
“They do it worse than I do.” It was the singer who concerned
him, not the bear. One careless word in the wrong ear, and Shae
would hang.
“Symon says there’s to be seventy-seven courses and a hundred
doves baked into a great pie,” Shae gushed. “When the crust’s
opened, they’ll all burst out and y.”
“After which they will roost in the rafters and rain down birdshit
on the guests.” Tyrion had su ered such wedding pies before. The
doves liked to shit on him especially, or so he had always suspected.
“Couldn’t I dress in my silks and velvets and go as a lady instead
of a maidservant? No one would know I wasn’t.”
Everyone would know you weren’t, thought Tyrion. “Lady Tanda
might wonder where Lollys’s bedmaid found so many jewels.”
“There’s to be a thousand guests, Symon says. She’d never even
see me. I’d nd a place in some dark corner below the salt, but
whenever you got up to go to the privy I could slip out and meet
you.” She cupped his cock and stroked it gently. “I won’t wear any
smallclothes under my gown, so m’lord won’t even need to unlace
me.” Her ngers teased him, up and down. “Or if he liked, I could
do this for him.” She took him in her mouth.

Tyrion was soon ready again. This time he lasted much longer.
When he nished Shae crawled back up him and curled up naked
under his arm. “You’ll let me come, won’t you?”
“Shae,” he groaned, “it is not safe.”
For a time she said nothing at all. Tyrion tried to speak of other
things, but he met a wall of sullen courtesy as icy and unyielding as
the Wall he’d once walked in the north. Gods be good, he thought
wearily as he watched the candle burn down and begin to gutter,
how could I let this happen again, after Tysha? Am I as great a fool as
my father thinks? Gladly would he have given her the promise she
wanted, and gladly walked her back to his own bedchamber on his
arm to let her dress in the silks and velvets she loved so much. Had
the choice been his, she could have sat beside him at Jo rey’s
wedding feast, and danced with all the bears she liked. But he could
not see her hang.
When the candle burned out, Tyrion disentangled himself and lit
another. Then he made a round of the walls, tapping on each in
turn, searching for the hidden door. Shae sat with her legs drawn up
and her arms wrapped around them, watching him. Finally she said,
“They’re under the bed. The secret steps.”
He looked at her, incredulous. “The bed? The bed is solid stone. It
weighs half a ton.”
“There’s a place where Varys pushes, and it oats right up. I
asked him how, and he said it was magic.”
“Yes.” Tyrion had to grin. “A counterweight spell.”
Shae stood. “I should go back. Sometimes the baby kicks and
Lollys wakes and calls for me.”
“Varys should return shortly. He’s probably listening to every
word we say.” Tyrion set the candle down. There was a wet spot on
the front of his breeches, but in the darkness it ought to go
unnoticed. He told Shae to dress and wait for the eunuch.
“I will,” she promised. “You are my lion, aren’t you? My giant of
Lannister?”
“I am,” he said. “And you’re—”
“—your whore.” She laid a nger to his lips. “I know. I’d be your
lady, but I never can. Else you’d take me to the feast. It doesn’t

matter. I like being a whore for you, Tyrion. Just keep me, my lion,
and keep me safe.”
“I shall,” he promised. Fool, fool, the voice inside him screamed.
Why did you say that? You came here to send her away! Instead he
kissed her once more.
The walk back seemed long and lonely. Podrick Payne was asleep
in his trundle bed at the foot of Tyrion’s, but he woke the boy.
“Bronn,” he said.
“Ser Bronn?” Pod rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Oh. Should I
get him? My lord?”
“Why no, I woke you up so we could have a little chat about the
way he dresses,” said Tyrion, but his sarcasm was wasted. Pod only
gaped at him in confusion until he threw up his hands and said,
“Yes, get him. Bring him. Now.”
The lad dressed hurriedly and all but ran from the room. Am I
really so terrifying? Tyrion wondered, as he changed into a bedrobe
and poured himself some wine.
He was on his third cup and half the night was gone before Pod
nally returned, with the sellsword knight in tow. “I hope the boy
had a damn good reason dragging me out of Chataya’s,” Bronn said
as he seated himself.
“Chataya’s?” Tyrion said, annoyed.
“It’s good to be a knight. No more looking for the cheaper
brothels down the street.” Bronn grinned. “Now it’s Alayaya and
Marei in the same featherbed, with Ser Bronn in the middle.”
Tyrion had to bite back his annoyance. Bronn had as much right
to bed Alayaya as any other man, but still … I never touched her,
much as I wanted to, but Bronn could not know that. He should have
kept his cock out of her. He dare not visit Chataya’s himself. If he did,
Cersei would see that his father heard of it, and ’Yaya would su er
more than a whipping. He’d sent the girl a necklace of silver and
jade and a pair of matching bracelets by way of apology, but other
than that …
This is fruitless. “There is a singer who calls himself Symon Silver
Tongue,” Tyrion said wearily, pushing his guilt aside. “He plays for
Lady Tanda’s daughter sometimes.”

“What of him?”
Kill him, he might have said, but the man had done nothing but
sing a few songs. And ll Shae’s sweet head with visions of doves and
dancing bears. “Find him,” he said instead. “Find him before
someone else does.”

ARYA

She was grubbing for vegetables in a dead man’s garden when she

heard the singing.
Arya sti ened, still as stone, listening, the three stringy carrots in
her hand suddenly forgotten. She thought of the Bloody Mummers
and Roose Bolton’s men, and a shiver of fear went down her back.
It’s not fair, not when we nally found the Trident, not when we thought
we were almost safe.
Only why would the Mummers be singing?
The song came drifting up the river from somewhere beyond the
little rise to the east. “O to Gulltown to see the fair maid, heigh-ho,
heigh-ho …”
Arya rose, carrots dangling from her hand. It sounded like the
singer was coming up the river road. Over among the cabbages, Hot
Pie had heard it too, to judge by the look on his face. Gendry had
gone to sleep in the shade of the burned cottage, and was past
hearing anything.
“I’ll steal a sweet kiss with the point of my blade, heigh-ho, heigh-ho.”
She thought she heard a woodharp too, beneath the soft rush of the
river.
“Do you hear?” Hot Pie asked in a hoarse whisper, as he hugged
an armful of cabbages. “Someone’s coming.”
“Go wake Gendry,” Arya told him. “Just shake him by the
shoulder, don’t make a lot of noise.” Gendry was easy to wake,
unlike Hot Pie, who needed to be kicked and shouted at.

“I’ll make her my love and we’ll rest in the shade, heigh-ho, heigh-ho.”
The song swelled louder with every word.
Hot Pie opened his arms. The cabbages fell to the ground with
soft thumps. “We have to hide.”
Where? The burned cottage and its overgrown garden stood hard
beside the banks of the Trident. There were a few willows growing
along the river’s edge and reed beds in the muddy shallows beyond,
but most of the ground hereabouts was painfully open. I knew we
should never have left the woods, she thought. They’d been so hungry,
though, and the garden had been too much a temptation. The bread
and cheese they had stolen from Harrenhal had given out six days
ago, back in the thick of the woods. “Take Gendry and the horses
behind the cottage,” she decided. There was part of one wall still
standing, big enough, maybe, to conceal two boys and three horses.
If the horses don’t whinny, and that singer doesn’t come poking around
the garden.
“What about you?”
“I’ll hide by the tree. He’s probably alone. If he bothers me, I’ll
kill him. Go!”
Hot Pie went, and Arya dropped her carrots and drew the stolen
sword from over her shoulder. She had strapped the sheath across
her back; the longsword was made for a man grown, and it bumped
against the ground when she wore it on her hip. It’s too heavy
besides, she thought, missing Needle the way she did every time she
took this clumsy thing in her hand. But it was a sword and she could
kill with it, that was enough.
Lightfoot, she moved to the big old willow that grew beside the
bend in the road and went to one knee in the grass and mud, within
the veil of trailing branches. You old gods, she prayed as the singer’s
voice grew louder, you tree gods, hide me, and make him go past.
Then a horse whickered, and the song broke o suddenly. He’s
heard, she knew, but maybe he’s alone, or if he’s not, maybe they’ll be
as scared of us as we are of them.
“Did you hear that?” a man’s voice said. “There’s something
behind that wall, I would say.”

“Aye,” replied a second voice, deeper. “What do you think it
might be, Archer?”
Two, then. Arya bit her lip. She could not see them from where
she knelt, on account of the willow. But she could hear.
“A bear.” A third voice, or the rst one again?
“A lot of meat on a bear,” the deep voice said. “A lot of fat as
well, in fall. Good to eat, if it’s cooked up right.”
“Could be a wolf. Maybe a lion.”
“With four feet, you think? Or two?”
“Makes no matter. Does it?”
“Not so I know. Archer, what do you mean to do with all them
arrows?”
“Drop a few shafts over the wall. Whatever’s hiding back there
will come out quick enough, watch and see.”
“What if it’s some honest man back there, though? Or some poor
woman with a little babe at her breast?”
“An honest man would come out and show us his face. Only an
outlaw would skulk and hide.”
“Aye, that’s so. Go on and loose your shafts, then.”
Arya sprang to her feet. “Don’t!” She showed them her sword.
There were three, she saw. Only three. Syrio could ght more than
three, and she had Hot Pie and Gendry to stand with her, maybe.
But they’re boys, and these are men.
They were men afoot, travel-stained and mud-specked. She knew
the singer by the woodharp he cradled against his jerkin, as a
mother might cradle a babe. A small man, fty from the look of
him, he had a big mouth, a sharp nose, and thinning brown hair. His
faded greens were mended here and there with old leather patches,
and he wore a brace of throwing knives on his hip and a woodman’s
axe slung across his back.
The man beside him stood a good foot taller, and had the look of
a soldier. A longsword and dirk hung from his studded leather belt,
rows of overlapping steel rings were sewn onto his shirt, and his
head was covered by a black iron halfhelm shaped like a cone. He
had bad teeth and a bushy brown beard, but it was his hooded
yellow cloak that drew the eye. Thick and heavy, stained here with

grass and there with blood, frayed along the bottom and patched
with deerskin on the right shoulder, the greatcloak gave the big
man the look of some huge yellow bird.
The last of the three was a youth as skinny as his longbow, if not
quite as tall. Red-haired and freckled, he wore a studded brigantine,
high boots, ngerless leather gloves, and a quiver on his back. His
arrows were etched with grey goose feathers, and six of them
stood in the ground before him, like a little fence.
The three men looked at her, standing there in the road with her
blade in hand. Then the singer idly plucked a string. “Boy,” he said,
“put up that sword now, unless you’re wanting to be hurt. It’s too
big for you, lad, and besides, Anguy here could put three shafts
through you before you could hope to reach us.”
“He could not,” Arya said, “and I’m a girl.”
“So you are.” The singer bowed. “My pardons.”
“You go on down the road. Just walk right past here, and you
keep on singing, so we’ll know where you are. Go away and leave
us be and I won’t kill you.”
The freckle-faced archer laughed. “Lem, she won’t kill us, did you
hear?”
“I heard,” said Lem, the big soldier with the deep voice.
“Child,” said the singer, “put up that sword, and we’ll take you to
a safe place and get some food in that belly. There are wolves in
these parts, and lions, and worse things. No place for a little girl to
be wandering alone.”
“She’s not alone.” Gendry rode out from behind the cottage wall,
and behind him Hot Pie, leading her horse. In his chainmail shirt
with a sword in his hand, Gendry looked almost a man grown, and
dangerous. Hot Pie looked like Hot Pie. “Do like she says, and leave
us be,” warned Gendry.
“Two and three,” the singer counted, “and is that all of you? And
horses too, lovely horses. Where did you steal them?”
“They’re ours.” Arya watched them carefully. The singer kept
distracting her with his talk, but it was the archer who was the
danger. If he should pull an arrow from the ground …

“Will you give us your names like honest men?” the singer asked
the boys.
“I’m Hot Pie,” Hot Pie said at once.
“Aye, and good for you.” The man smiled. “It’s not every day I
meet a lad with such a tasty name. And what would your friends be
called, Mutton Chop and Squab?”
Gendry scowled down from his saddle. “Why should I tell you my
name? I haven’t heard yours.”
“Well, as to that, I’m Tom of Sevenstreams, but Tom Sevenstrings
is what they call me, or Tom o’ Sevens. This great lout with the
brown teeth is Lem, short for Lemoncloak. It’s yellow, you see, and
Lem’s a sour sort. And young fellow me lad over there is Anguy, or
Archer as we like to call him.”
“Now who are you?” demanded Lem, in the deep voice that Arya
had heard through the branches of the willow.
She was not about to give up her true name as easy as that.
“Squab, if you want,” she said. “I don’t care.”
The big man laughed. “A squab with a sword,” he said. “Now
there’s something you don’t often see.”
“I’m the Bull,” said Gendry, taking his lead from Arya. She could
not blame him for preferring Bull to Mutton Chop.
Tom Sevenstrings strummed his harp. “Hot Pie, Squab, and the
Bull. Escaped from Lord Bolton’s kitchen, did you?”
“How did you know?” Arya demanded, uneasy.
“You bear his sigil on your chest, little one.”
She had forgotten that for an instant. Beneath her cloak, she still
wore her ne page’s doublet, with the ayed man of the Dreadfort
sewn on her breast. “Don’t call me little one!”
“Why not?” said Lem. “You’re little enough.”
“I’m bigger than I was. I’m not a child.” Children didn’t kill
people, and she had.
“I can see that, Squab. You’re none of you children, not if you
were Bolton’s.”
“We never were.” Hot Pie never knew when to keep quiet. “We
were at Harrenhal before he came, that’s all.”
“So you’re lion cubs, is that the way of it?” said Tom.

“Not that either. We’re nobody’s men. Whose men are you?”
Anguy the Archer said, “We’re king’s men.”
Arya frowned. “Which king?”
“King Robert,” said Lem, in his yellow cloak.
“That old drunk?” said Gendry scornfully. “He’s dead, some boar
killed him, everyone knows that.”
“Aye, lad,” said Tom Sevenstrings, “and more’s the pity.” He
plucked a sad chord from his harp.
Arya didn’t think they were king’s men at all. They looked more
like outlaws, all tattered and ragged. They didn’t even have horses
to ride. King’s men would have had horses.
But Hot Pie piped up eagerly. “We’re looking for Riverrun,” he
said. “How many days’ ride is it, do you know?”
Arya could have killed him. “You be quiet, or I’ll stu rocks in
your big stupid mouth.”
“Riverrun is a long way upstream,” said Tom. “A long hungry
way. Might be you’d like a hot meal before you set out? There’s an
inn not far ahead kept by some friends of ours. We could share
some ale and a bite of bread, instead of ghting one another.”
“An inn?” The thought of hot food made Arya’s belly rumble, but
she didn’t trust this Tom. Not everyone who spoke you friendly was
really your friend. “It’s near, you say?”
“Two miles upstream,” said Tom. “A league at most.”
Gendry looked as uncertain as she felt. “What do you mean,
friends?” he asked warily.
“Friends. Have you forgotten what friends are?”
“Sharna is the innkeep’s name,” Tom put in. “She has a sharp
tongue and a erce eye, I’ll grant you that, but her heart’s a good
one, and she’s fond of little girls.”
“I’m not a little girl,” she said angrily. “Who else is there? You
said friends.”
“Sharna’s husband, and an orphan boy they took in. They won’t
harm you. There’s ale, if you think you’re old enough. Fresh bread
and maybe a bit of meat.” Tom glanced toward the cottage. “And
whatever you stole from Old Pate’s garden besides.”
“We never stole,” said Arya.

“Are you Old Pate’s daughter, then? A sister? A wife? Tell me no
lies, Squab. I buried Old Pate myself, right there under that willow
where you were hiding, and you don’t have his look.” He drew a
sad sound from his harp. “We’ve buried many a good man this past
year, but we’ve no wish to bury you, I swear it on my harp. Archer,
show her.”
The archer’s hand moved quicker than Arya would have believed.
His shaft went hissing past her head within an inch of her ear and
buried itself in the trunk of the willow behind her. By then the
bowman had a second arrow notched and drawn. She’d thought she
understood what Syrio meant by quick as a snake and smooth as
summer silk, but now she knew she hadn’t. The arrow thrummed
behind her like a bee. “You missed,” she said.
“More fool you if you think so,” said Anguy. “They go where I
send them.”
“That they do,” agreed Lem Lemoncloak.
There were a dozen steps between the archer and the point of her
sword. We have no chance, Arya realized, wishing she had a bow
like his, and the skill to use it. Glumly, she lowered her heavy
longsword till the point touched the ground. “We’ll come see this
inn,” she conceded, trying to hide the doubt in her heart behind
bold words. “You walk in front and we’ll ride behind, so we can see
what you’re doing.”
Tom Sevenstrings bowed deeply and said, “Before, behind, it
makes no matter. Come along, lads, let’s show them the way.
Anguy, best pull up those arrows, we won’t be needing them here.”
Arya sheathed her sword and crossed the road to where her
friends sat on their horses, keeping her distance from the three
strangers. “Hot Pie, get those cabbages,” she said as she vaulted
into her saddle. “And the carrots too.”
For once he did not argue. They set o as she had wanted,
walking their horses slowly down the rutted road a dozen paces
behind the three on foot. But before very long, somehow they were
riding right on top of them. Tom Sevenstrings walked slowly, and
liked to strum his woodharp as he went. “Do you know any songs?”
he asked them. “I’d dearly love someone to sing with, that I would.

Lem can’t carry a tune, and our longbow lad only knows marcher
ballads, every one of them a hundred verses long.”
“We sing real songs in the marches,” Anguy said mildly.
“Singing is stupid,” said Arya. “Singing makes noise. We heard
you a long way o . We could have killed you.”
Tom’s smile said he did not think so. “There are worse things than
dying with a song on your lips.”
“If there were wolves hereabouts, we’d know it,” groused Lem.
“Or lions. These are our woods.”
“You never knew we were there,” said Gendry.
“Now, lad, you shouldn’t be so certain of that,” said Tom.
“Sometimes a man knows more than he says.”
Hot Pie shifted his seat. “I know the song about the bear,” he
said. “Some of it, anyhow.”
Tom ran his ngers down his strings. “Then let’s hear it, pie boy.”
He threw back his head and sang, “A bear there was, a bear, a bear!
All black and brown, and covered with hair …”
Hot Pie joined in lustily, even bouncing in his saddle a little on
the rhymes. Arya stared at him in astonishment. He had a good
voice and he sang well. He never did anything well, except bake, she
thought to herself.
A small brook owed into the Trident a little farther on. As they
waded across, their singing ushed a duck from among the reeds.
Anguy stopped where he stood, unslung his bow, notched an arrow,
and brought it down. The bird fell in the shallows not far from the
bank. Lem took o his yellow cloak and waded in knee-deep to
retrieve it, complaining all the while. “Do you think Sharna might
have lemons down in that cellar of hers?” said Anguy to Tom as
they watched Lem splash around, cursing. “A Dornish girl once
cooked me duck with lemons.” He sounded wistful.
Tom and Hot Pie resumed their song on the other side of the
brook, with the duck hanging from Lem’s belt beneath his yellow
cloak. Somehow the singing made the miles seem shorter. It was
not very long at all until the inn appeared before them, rising from
the riverbank where the Trident made a great bend to the north.
Arya squinted at it suspiciously as they neared. It did not look like

an outlaws’ lair, she had to admit; it looked friendly, even homey,
with its whitewashed upper story and slate roof and the smoke
curling up lazy from its chimney. Stables and other outbuildings
surrounded it, and there was an arbor in back, and apple trees, a
small garden. The inn even had its own dock, thrusting out into the
river, and …
“Gendry,” she called, her voice low and urgent. “They have a
boat. We could sail the rest of the way up to Riverrun. It would be
faster than riding, I think.”
He looked dubious. “Did you ever sail a boat?”
“You put up the sail,” she said, “and the wind pushes it.”
“What if the wind is blowing the wrong way?”
“Then there’s oars to row.”
“Against the current?” Gendry frowned. “Wouldn’t that be slow?
And what if the boat tips over and we fall into the water? It’s not
our boat anyway, it’s the inn’s.”
We could take it. Arya chewed her lip and said nothing. They
dismounted in front of stables. There were no other horses to be
seen, but Arya noticed fresh manure in many of the stalls. “One of
us should watch the horses,” she said, wary.
Tom overheard her. “There’s no need for that, Squab. Come eat,
they’ll be safe enough.”
“I’ll stay,” Gendry said, ignoring the singer. “You can come get
me after you’ve had some food.”
Nodding, Arya set o after Hot Pie and Lem. Her sword was still
in its sheath across her back, and she kept a hand close to the hilt of
the dagger she had stolen from Roose Bolton, in case she didn’t like
whatever they found within.
The painted sign above the door showed a picture of some old
king on his knees. Inside was the common room, where a very tall
ugly woman with a knobby chin stood with her hands on her hips,
glaring. “Don’t just stand there, boy,” she snapped. “Or are you a
girl? Either one, you’re blocking my door. Get in or get out. Lem,
what did I tell you about my oor? You’re all mud.”
“We shot a duck.” Lem held it out like a peace banner.

The woman snatched it from his hand. “Anguy shot a duck, is
what you’re meaning. Get your boots o , are you deaf or just
stupid?” She turned away. “Husband!” she called loudly. “Get up
here, the lads are back. Husband!”
Up the cellar steps came a man in a stained apron, grumbling. He
was a head shorter than the woman, with a lumpy face and loose
yellowish skin that still showed the marks of some pox. “I’m here,
woman, quit your bellowing. What is it now?”
“Hang this,” she said, handing him the duck.
Anguy shu ed his feet. “We were thinking we might eat it,
Sharna. With lemons. If you had some.”
“Lemons. And where would we get lemons? Does this look like
Dorne to you, you freckled fool? Why don’t you hop out back to the
lemon trees and pick us a bushel, and some nice olives and
pomegranates too.” She shook a nger at him. “Now, I suppose I
could cook it with Lem’s cloak, if you like, but not till it’s hung for
a few days. You’ll eat rabbit, or you won’t eat. Roast rabbit on a
spit would be quickest, if you’ve got a hunger. Or might be you’d
like it stewed, with ale and onions.”
Arya could almost taste the rabbit. “We have no coin, but we
brought some carrots and cabbages we could trade you.”
“Did you now? And where would they be?”
“Hot Pie, give her the cabbages,” Arya said, and he did, though
he approached the old woman as gingerly as if she were Rorge or
Biter or Vargo Hoat.
The woman gave the vegetables a close inspection, and the boy a
closer one. “Where is this hot pie?”
“Here. Me. It’s my name. And she’s … ah … Squab.”
“Not under my roof. I give my diners and my dishes di erent
names, so as to tell them apart. Husband!”
Husband had stepped outside, but at her shout he hurried back.
“The duck’s hung. What is it now, woman?”
“Wash these vegetables,” she commanded. “The rest of you, sit
down while I start the rabbits. The boy will bring you drink.” She
looked down her long nose at Arya and Hot Pie. “I am not in the
habit of serving ale to children, but the cider’s run out, there’s no

cows for milk, and the river water tastes of war, with all the dead
men drifting downstream. If I served you a cup of soup full of dead
ies, would you drink it?”
“Arry would,” said Hot Pie. “I mean, Squab.”
“So would Lem,” o ered Anguy with a sly smile.
“Never you mind about Lem,” Sharna said. “It’s ale for all.” She
swept o toward the kitchen.
Anguy and Tom Sevenstrings took the table near the hearth while
Lem was hanging his big yellow cloak on a peg. Hot Pie plopped
down heavily on a bench at the table by the door, and Arya wedged
herself in beside him.
Tom unslung his harp. “A lonely inn on a forest road,” he sang,
slowly picking out a tune to go with the words. “The innkeep’s wife
was plain as a toad.”
“Shut up with that now or we won’t be getting no rabbit,” Lem
warned him. “You know how she is.”
Arya leaned close to Hot Pie. “Can you sail a boat?” she asked.
Before he could answer, a thickset boy of fteen or sixteen
appeared with tankards of ale. Hot Pie took his reverently in both
hands, and when he sipped he smiled wider than Arya had ever seen
him smile. “Ale,” he whispered, “and rabbit.”
“Well, here’s to His Grace,” Anguy the Archer called out
cheerfully, lifting a toast. “Seven save the king!”
“All twelve o’ them,” Lem Lemoncloak muttered. He drank, and
wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand.
Husband came bustling in through the front door, with an apron
full of washed vegetables. “There’s strange horses in the stable,” he
announced, as if they hadn’t known.
“Aye,” said Tom, setting the woodharp aside, “and better horses
than the three you gave away.”
Husband dropped the vegetables on a table, annoyed. “I never
gave them away. I sold them for a good price, and got us a ski as
well. Anyways, you lot were supposed to get them back.”
I knew they were outlaws, Arya thought, listening. Her hand went
under the table to touch the hilt of her dagger, and make sure it was
still there. If they try to rob us, they’ll be sorry.

“They never came our way,” said Lem.
“Well, I sent them. You must have been drunk, or asleep.”
“Us? Drunk?” Tom drank a long draught of ale. “Never.”
“You could have taken them yourself,” Lem told Husband.
“What, with only the boy here? I told you twice, the old woman
was up to Lambswold helping that Fern birth her babe. And like as
not it was one o’ you planted the bastard in the poor girl’s belly.”
He gave Tom a sour look. “You, I’d wager, with that harp o’ yours,
singing all them sad songs just to get poor Fern out of her
smallclothes.”
“If a song makes a maid want to slip o her clothes and feel the
good warm sun kiss her skin, why, is that the singer’s fault?” asked
Tom. “And ’twas Anguy she fancied, besides. ‘Can I touch your
bow?’ I heard her ask him. ‘Ooohh, it feels so smooth and hard.
Could I give it a little pull, do you think?’ ”
Husband snorted. “You and Anguy, makes no matter which.
You’re as much to blame as me for them horses. They was three,
you know. What can one man do against three?”
“Three,” said Lem scornfully, “but one a woman and t’other in
chains, you said so yourself.”
Husband made a face. “A big woman, dressed like a man. And the
one in chains … I didn’t fancy the look of his eyes.”
Anguy smiled over his ale. “When I don’t fancy a man’s eyes, I
put an arrow through one.”
Arya remembered the shaft that had brushed by her ear. She
wished she knew how to shoot arrows.
Husband was not impressed. “You be quiet when your elders are
talking. Drink your ale and mind your tongue, or I’ll have the old
woman take a spoon to you.”
“My elders talk too much, and I don’t need you to tell me to drink
my ale.” He took a big swallow, to show that it was so.
Arya did the same. After days of drinking from brooks and
puddles, and then the muddy Trident, the ale tasted as good as the
little sips of wine her father used to allow her. A smell was drifting
out from the kitchen that made her mouth water, but her thoughts

were still full of that boat. Sailing it will be harder than stealing it. If
we wait until they’re all asleep …
The serving boy reappeared with big round loaves of bread. Arya
broke o a chunk hungrily and tore into it. It was hard to chew,
though, sort of thick and lumpy, and burned on the bottom.
Hot Pie made a face as soon as he tasted it. “That’s bad bread,” he
said. “It’s burned, and tough besides.”
“It’s better when there’s stew to sop up,” said Lem.
“No, it isn’t,” said Anguy, “but you’re less like to break your
teeth.”
“You can eat it or go hungry,” said Husband. “Do I look like some
bloody baker? I’d like to see you make better.”
“I could,” said Hot Pie. “It’s easy. You kneaded the dough too
much, that’s why it’s so hard to chew.” He took another sip of ale,
and began talking lovingly of breads and pies and tarts, all the
things he loved. Arya rolled her eyes.
Tom sat down across from her. “Squab,” he said, “or Arry, or
whatever your true name might be, this is for you.” He placed a
dirty scrap of parchment on the wooden tabletop between them.
She looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?”
“Three golden dragons. We need to buy those horses.”
Arya looked at him warily. “They’re our horses.”
“Meaning you stole them yourselves, is that it? No shame in that,
girl. War makes thieves of many honest folk.” Tom tapped the
folded parchment with his nger. “I’m paying you a handsome
price. More than any horse is worth, if truth be told.”
Hot Pie grabbed the parchment and unfolded it. “There’s no
gold,” he complained loudly. “It’s only writing.”
“Aye,” said Tom, “and I’m sorry for that. But after the war, we
mean to make that good, you have my word as a king’s man.”
Arya pushed back from the table and got to her feet. “You’re no
king’s men, you’re robbers.”
“If you’d ever met a true robber, you’d know they do not pay, not
even in paper. It’s not for us we take your horses, child, it’s for the
good of the realm, so we can get about more quickly and ght the

ghts that need ghting. The king’s ghts. Would you deny the
king?”
They were all watching her; the Archer, big Lem, Husband with
his sallow face and shifty eyes. Even Sharna, who stood in the door
to the kitchen squinting. They are going to take our horses no matter
what I say, she realized. We’ll need to walk to Riverrun, unless … “We
don’t want paper.” Arya slapped the parchment out of Hot Pie’s
hand. “You can have our horses for that boat outside. But only if
you show us how to work it.”
Tom Sevenstrings stared at her a moment, and then his wide
homely mouth quirked into a rueful grin. He laughed aloud. Anguy
joined in, and then they were all laughing, Lem Lemoncloak, Sharna
and Husband, even the serving boy, who had stepped out from
behind the casks with a crossbow under one arm. Arya wanted to
scream at them, but instead she started to smile …
“Riders!” Gendry’s shout was shrill with alarm. The door burst
open and there he was. “Soldiers,” he panted. “Coming down the
river road, a dozen of them.”
Hot Pie leapt up, knocking over his tankard, but Tom and the
others were unpertubed. “There’s no cause for spilling good ale on
my oor,” said Sharna. “Sit back down and calm yourself, boy,
there’s rabbit coming. You too, girl. Whatever harm’s been done
you, it’s over and it’s done and you’re with king’s men now. We’ll
keep you safe as best we can.”
Arya’s only answer was to reach over her shoulder for her sword,
but before she had it halfway drawn Lem grabbed her wrist. “We’ll
have no more of that, now.” He twisted her arm until her hand
opened. His ngers were hard with callus and fearsomely strong.
Again! Arya thought. It’s happening again, like it happened in the
village, with Chiswyck and Ra and the Mountain That Rides. They
were going to steal her sword and turn her back into a mouse. Her
free hand closed around her tankard, and she swung it at Lem’s
face. The ale sloshed over the rim and splashed into his eyes, and
she heard his nose break and saw the spurt of blood. When he
roared his hands went to his face, and she was free. “Run!” she
screamed, bolting.

But Lem was on her again at once, with his long legs that made
one of his steps equal to three of hers. She twisted and kicked, but
he yanked her o her feet e ortlessly and held her dangling while
the blood ran down his face.
“Stop it, you little fool,” he shouted, shaking her back and forth.
“Stop it now!” Gendry moved to help her, until Tom Sevenstrings
stepped in front of him with a dagger.
By then it was too late to ee. She could hear horses outside, and
the sound of men’s voices. A moment later a man came swaggering
through the open door, a Tyroshi even bigger than Lem with a great
thick beard, bright green at the ends but growing out grey. Behind
came a pair of crossbowmen helping a wounded man between them,
and then others …
A more ragged band Arya had never seen, but there was nothing
ragged about the swords, axes, and bows they carried. One or two
gave her curious glances as they entered, but no one said a word. A
one-eyed man in a rusty pothelm sni ed the air and grinned, while
an archer with a head of sti yellow hair was shouting for ale. After
them came a spearman in a lion-crested helm, an older man with a
limp, a Braavosi sellsword, a …
“Harwin?” Arya whispered. It was! Under the beard and the
tangled hair was the face of Hullen’s son, who used to lead her pony
around the yard, ride at quintain with Jon and Robb, and drink too
much on feast days. He was thinner, harder somehow, and at
Winterfell he had never worn a beard, but it was him—her father’s
man. “Harwin!” Squirming, she threw herself forward, trying to
wrench free of Lem’s iron grip. “It’s me,” she shouted, “Harwin, it’s
me, don’t you know me, don’t you?” The tears came, and she found
herself weeping like a baby, just like some stupid little girl.
“Harwin, it’s me!”
Harwin’s eyes went from her face to the ayed man on her
doublet. “How do you know me?” he said, frowning suspiciously.
“The ayed man … who are you, some serving boy to Lord Leech?”
For a moment she did not know how to answer. She’d had so
many names. Had she only dreamed Arya Stark? “I’m a girl,” she
sni ed. “I was Lord Bolton’s cupbearer but he was going to leave

me for the goat, so I ran o with Gendry and Hot Pie. You have to
know me! You used to lead my pony, when I was little.”
His eyes went wide, “Gods be good,” he said in a choked voice.
“Arya Underfoot? Lem, let go of her.”
“She broke my nose.” Lem dumped her unceremoniously to the
oor. “Who in seven hells is she supposed to be?”
“The Hand’s daughter.” Harwin went to one knee before her.
“Arya Stark, of Winterfell.”

CATELYN

Robb, she knew, the moment she heard the kennels erupt.

Her son had returned to Riverrun, and Grey Wind with him. Only
the scent of the great grey direwolf could send the hounds into such
a frenzy of baying and barking. He will come to me, she knew.
Edmure had not returned after his rst visit, preferring to spend his
days with Marq Piper and Patrek Mallister, listening to Rymund the
Rhymer’s verses about the battle at the Stone Mill. Robb is not
Edmure, though. Robb will see me.
It had been raining for days now, a cold grey downpour that well
suited Catelyn’s mood. Her father was growing weaker and more
delirious with every passing day, waking only to mutter, “Tansy,”
and beg forgiveness. Edmure shunned her, and Ser Desmond Grell
still denied her freedom of the castle, however unhappy it seemed
to make him. Only the return of Ser Robin Ryger and his men,
footweary and drenched to the bone, served to lighten her spirits.
They had walked back, it seemed. Somehow the Kingslayer had
contrived to sink their galley and escape, Maester Vyman con ded.
Catelyn asked if she might speak with Ser Robin to learn more of
what had happened, but that was refused her.
Something else was wrong as well. On the day her brother
returned, a few hours after their argument, she had heard angry
voices from the yard below. When she climbed to the roof to see,
there were knots of men gathered across the castle beside the main
gate. Horses were being led from the stables, saddled and bridled,

and there was shouting, though Catelyn was too far away to make
out the words. One of Robb’s white banners lay on the ground, and
one of the knights turned his horse and trampled over the direwolf
as he spurred toward the gate. Several others did the same. Those
are men who fought with Edmure on the fords, she thought. What could
have made them so angry? Has my brother slighted them somehow, given
them some insult? She thought she recognized Ser Perwyn Frey, who
had traveled with her to Bitterbridge and Storm’s End and back, and
his bastard half brother Martyn Rivers as well, but from this
vantage it was hard to be certain. Close to forty men poured out
through the castle gates, to what end she did not know.
They did not come back. Nor would Maester Vyman tell her who
they had been, where they had gone, or what had made them so
angry. “I am here to see to your father, and only that, my lady,” he
said. “Your brother will soon be Lord of Riverrun. What he wishes
you to know, he must tell you.”
But now Robb was returned from the west, returned in triumph.
He will forgive me, Catelyn told herself. He must forgive me, he is my
own son, and Arya and Sansa are as much his blood as mine. He will
free me from these rooms and then I will know what has happened.
By the time Ser Desmond came for her, she had bathed and
dressed and combed out her auburn hair. “King Robb has returned
from the west, my lady,” the knight said, “and commands that you
attend him in the Great Hall.”
It was the moment she had dreamt of and dreaded. Have I lost two
sons, or three? She would know soon enough.
The hall was crowded when they entered. Every eye was on the
dais, but Catelyn knew their backs: Lady Mormont’s patched
ringmail, the Greatjon and his son looming above every other head
in the hall, Lord Jason Mallister white-haired with his winged helm
in the crook of his arm, Tytos Blackwood in his magni cent ravenfeather cloak … Half of them will want to hang me now. The other half
may only turn their eyes away. She had the uneasy feeling that
someone was missing, too.
Robb stood on the dais. He is a boy no longer, she realized with a
pang. He is sixteen now, a man grown. Just look at him. War had

melted all the softness from his face and left him hard and lean. He
had shaved his beard away, but his auburn hair fell uncut to his
shoulders. The recent rains had rusted his mail and left brown stains
on the white of his cloak and surcoat. Or perhaps the stains were
blood. On his head was the sword crown they had fashioned him of
bronze and iron. He bears it more comfortably now. He bears it like a
king.
Edmure stood below the crowded dais, head bowed modestly as
Robb praised his victory. “… fell at the Stone Mill shall never be
forgotten. Small wonder Lord Tywin ran o to ght Stannis. He’d
had his ll of northmen and rivermen both.” That brought laughter
and approving shouts, but Robb raised a hand for quiet. “Make no
mistake, though. The Lannisters will march again, and there will be
other battles to win before the kingdom is secure.”
The Greatjon roared out, “King in the North!” and thrust a mailed
st into the air. The river lords answered with a shout of “King of
the Trident!” The hall grew thunderous with pounding sts and
stamping feet.
Only a few noted Catelyn and Ser Desmond amidst the tumult,
but they elbowed their fellows, and slowly a hush grew around her.
She held her head high and ignored the eyes. Let them think what
they will. It is Robb’s judgment that matters.
The sight of Ser Brynden Tully’s craggy face on the dais gave her
comfort. A boy she did not know seemed to be acting as Robb’s
squire. Behind him stood a young knight in a sand-colored surcoat
blazoned with seashells, and an older one who wore three black
pepperpots on a sa ron bend, across a eld of green and silver
stripes. Between them were a handsome older lady and a pretty
maid who looked to be her daughter. There was another girl as
well, near Sansa’s age. The seashells were the sigil of some lesser
house, Catelyn knew; the older man’s she did not recognize.
Prisoners? Why would Robb bring captives onto the dais?
Utherydes Wayn banged his sta on the oor as Ser Desmond
escorted her forward. If Robb looks at me as Edmure did, I do not
know what I will do. But it seemed to her that it was not anger she
saw in her son’s eyes, but something else … apprehension, perhaps?

No, that made no sense. What should he fear? He was the Young
Wolf, King of the Trident and the North.
Her uncle was the rst to greet her. As black a sh as ever, Ser
Brynden had no care for what others might think. He leapt o the
dais and pulled Catelyn into his arms. When he said, “It is good to
see you home, Cat,” she had to struggle to keep her composure.
“And you,” she whispered.
“Mother.”
Catelyn looked up at her tall kingly son. “Your Grace, I have
prayed for your safe return. I had heard you were wounded.”
“I took an arrow through the arm while storming the Crag,” he
said. “It’s healed well, though. I had the best of care.”
“The gods are good, then.” Catelyn took a deep breath. Say it. It
cannot be avoided. “They will have told you what I did. Did they tell
you my reasons?”
“For the girls.”
“I had ve children. Now I have three.”
“Aye, my lady.” Lord Rickard Karstark pushed past the Greatjon,
like some grim specter with his black mail and long ragged grey
beard, his narrow face pinched and cold. “And I have one son, who
once had three. You have robbed me of my vengeance.”
Catelyn faced him calmly. “Lord Rickard, the Kingslayer’s dying
would not have bought life for your children. His living may buy
life for mine.”
The lord was unappeased. “Jaime Lannister has played you for a
fool. You’ve bought a bag of empty words, no more. My Torrhen
and my Eddard deserved better of you.”
“Leave o , Karstark,” rumbled the Greatjon, crossing his huge
arms against his chest. “It was a mother’s folly. Women are made
that way.”
“A mother’s folly?” Lord Karstark rounded on Lord Umber. “I
name it treason.”
“Enough.” For just an instant Robb sounded more like Brandon
than his father. “No man calls my lady of Winterfell a traitor in my
hearing, Lord Rickard.” When he turned to Catelyn, his voice
softened. “If I could wish the Kingslayer back in chains I would. You

freed him without my knowledge or consent … but what you did, I
know you did for love. For Arya and Sansa, and out of grief for
Bran and Rickon. Love’s not always wise, I’ve learned. It can lead us
to great folly, but we follow our hearts … wherever they take us.
Don’t we, Mother?”
Is that what I did? “If my heart led me into folly, I would gladly
make whatever amends I can to Lord Karstark and yourself.”
Lord Rickard’s face was implacable. “Will your amends warm
Torrhen and Eddard in the cold graves where the Kingslayer laid
them?” He shouldered between the Greatjon and Maege Mormont
and left the hall.
Robb made no move to detain him. “Forgive him, Mother.”
“If you will forgive me.”
“I have. I know what it is to love so greatly you can think of
nothing else.”
Catelyn bowed her head. “Thank you.” I have not lost this child, at
least.
“We must talk,” Robb went on. “You and my uncles. Of this
and … other things. Steward, call an end.”
Utherydes Wayn slammed his sta on the oor and shouted the
dismissal, and river lords and northerners alike moved toward the
doors. It was only then that Catelyn realized what was amiss. The
wolf. The wolf is not here. Where is Grey Wind? She knew the direwolf
had returned with Robb, she had heard the dogs, but he was not in
the hall, not at her son’s side where he belonged.
Before she could think to question Robb, however, she found
herself surrounded by a circle of well-wishers. Lady Mormont took
her hand and said, “My lady, if Cersei Lannister held two of my
daughters, I would have done the same.” The Greatjon, no respecter
of proprieties, lifted her o her feet and squeezed her arms with his
huge hairy hands. “Your wolf pup mauled the Kingslayer once, he’ll
do it again if need be.” Galbart Glover and Lord Jason Mallister
were cooler, and Jonos Bracken almost icy, but their words were
courteous enough. Her brother was the last to approach her. “I pray
for your girls as well, Cat. I hope you do not doubt that.”
“Of course not.” She kissed him. “I love you for it.”

When all the words were done, the Great Hall of Riverrun was
empty save for Robb, the three Tullys, and the six strangers Catelyn
could not place. She eyed them curiously. “My lady, sers, are you
new to my son’s cause?”
“New,” said the younger knight, him of the seashells, “but erce
in our courage and rm in our loyalties, as I hope to prove to you,
my lady.”
Robb looked uncomfortable. “Mother,” he said, “may I present
the Lady Sybell, the wife of Lord Gawen Westerling of the Crag.”
The older woman came forward with solemn mien. “Her husband
was one of those we took captive in the Whispering Wood.”
Westerling, yes, Catelyn thought. Their banner is six seashells, white
on sand. A minor house sworn to the Lannisters.
Robb beckoned the other strangers forward, each in turn. “Ser
Rolph Spicer, Lady Sybell’s brother. He was castellan at the Crag
when we took it.” The pepperpot knight inclined his head. A squarebuilt man with a broken nose and a close-cropped grey beard, he
looked doughty enough. “The children of Lord Gawen and Lady
Sybell. Ser Raynald Westerling.” The seashell knight smiled beneath
a bushy mustache. Young, lean, rough-hewn, he had good teeth and
a thick mop of chestnut hair. “Elenya.” The little girl did a quick
curtsy. “Rollam Westerling, my squire.” The boy started to kneel,
saw no one else was kneeling, and bowed instead.
“The honor is mine,” Catelyn said. Can Robb have won the Crag’s
allegiance? If so, it was no wonder the Westerlings were with him.
Casterly Rock did not su er such betrayals gently. Not since Tywin
Lannister had been old enough to go to war …
The maid came forward last, and very shy. Robb took her hand.
“Mother,” he said, “I have the great honor to present you the Lady
Jeyne
Westerling.
Lord Gawen’s elder
daughter,
and
my … ah … my lady wife.”
The rst thought that ew across Catelyn’s mind was, No, that
cannot be, you are only a child.
The second was, And besides, you have pledged another.
The third was, Mother have mercy, Robb, what have you done?

Only then came her belated remembrance. Follies done for love?
He has bagged me neat as a hare in a snare. I seem to have already
forgiven him. Mixed with her annoyance was a rueful admiration; the
scene had been staged with the cunning worthy of a master
mummer … or a king. Catelyn saw no choice but to take Jeyne
Westerling’s hands. “I have a new daughter,” she said, more sti y
than she’d intended. She kissed the terri ed girl on both cheeks. “Be
welcome to our hall and hearth.”
“Thank you, my lady. I shall be a good and true wife to Robb, I
swear. And as wise a queen as I can.”
Queen. Yes, this pretty little girl is a queen, I must remember that. She
was pretty, undeniably, with her chestnut curls and heart-shaped
face, and that shy smile. Slender, but with good hips, Catelyn noted.
She should have no trouble bearing children, at least.
Lady Sybell took a hand before any more was said. “We are
honored to be joined to House Stark, my lady, but we are also very
weary. We have come a long way in a short time. Perhaps we might
retire to our chambers, so you may visit with your son?”
“That would be best.” Robb kissed his Jeyne. “The steward will
nd you suitable accommodations.”
“I’ll take you to him,” Ser Edmure Tully volunteered.
“You are most kind,” said Lady Sybell.
“Must I go too?” asked the boy, Rollam. “I’m your squire.”
Robb laughed. “But I’m not in need of squiring just now.”
“Oh.”
“His Grace has gotten along for sixteen years without you,
Rollam,” said Ser Raynald of the seashells. “He will survive a few
hours more, I think.” Taking his little brother rmly by the hand, he
walked him from the hall.
“Your wife is lovely,” Catelyn said when they were out of
earshot, “and the Westerlings seem worthy … though Lord Gawen
is Tywin Lannister’s sworn man, is he not?”
“Yes. Jason Mallister captured him in the Whispering Wood and
has been holding him at Seagard for ransom. Of course I’ll free him
now, though he may not wish to join me. We wed without his

consent, I fear, and this marriage puts him in dire peril. The Crag is
not strong. For love of me, Jeyne may lose all.”
“And you,” she said softly, “have lost the Freys.”
His wince told all. She understood the angry voices now, why
Perwyn Frey and Martyn Rivers had left in such haste, trampling
Robb’s banner into the ground as they went.
“Dare I ask how many swords come with your bride, Robb?”
“Fifty. A dozen knights.” His voice was glum, as well it might be.
When the marriage contract had been made at the Twins, old Lord
Walder Frey had sent Robb o with a thousand mounted knights
and near three thousand foot. “Jeyne is bright as well as beautiful.
And kind as well. She has a gentle heart.”
It is swords you need, not gentle hearts. How could you do this, Robb?
How could you be so heedless, so stupid? How could you be so … so
very … young. Reproaches would not serve here, however. All she
said was, “Tell me how this came to be.”
“I took her castle and she took my heart.” Robb smiled. “The
Crag was weakly garrisoned, so we took it by storm one night.
Black Walder and the Smalljon led scaling parties over the walls,
while I broke the main gate with a ram. I took an arrow in the arm
just before Ser Rolph yielded us the castle. It seemed nothing at
rst, but it festered. Jeyne had me taken to her own bed, and she
nursed me until the fever passed. And she was with me when the
Greatjon brought me the news of … of Winterfell. Bran and
Rickon.” He seemed to have trouble saying his brothers’ names.
“That night, she … she comforted me, Mother.”
Catelyn did not need to be told what sort of comfort Jeyne
Westerling had o ered her son. “And you wed her the next day.”
He looked her in the eyes, proud and miserable all at once. “It
was the only honorable thing to do. She’s gentle and sweet, Mother,
she will make me a good wife.”
“Perhaps. That will not appease Lord Frey.”
“I know,” her son said, stricken. “I’ve made a botch of everything
but the battles, haven’t I? I thought the battles would be the hard
part, but … if I had listened to you and kept Theon as my hostage,

I’d still rule the north, and Bran and Rickon would be alive and safe
in Winterfell.”
“Perhaps. Or not. Lord Balon might still have chanced war. The
last time he reached for a crown, it cost him two sons. He might
have thought it a bargain to lose only one this time.” She touched
his arm. “What happened with the Freys, after you wed?”
Robb shook his head. “With Ser Stevron, I might have been able
to make amends, but Ser Ryman is dull-witted as a stone, and Black
Walder … that one was not named for the color of his beard, I
promise you. He went so far as to say that his sisters would not be
loath to wed a widower. I would have killed him for that if Jeyne
had not begged me to be merciful.”
“You have done House Frey a grievous insult, Robb.”
“I never meant to. Ser Stevron died for me, and Olyvar was as
loyal a squire as any king could want. He asked to stay with me, but
Ser Ryman took him with the rest. All their strength. The Greatjon
urged me to attack them …”
“Fighting your own in the midst of your enemies?” she said. “It
would have been the end of you.”
“Yes. I thought perhaps we could arrange other matches for Lord
Walder’s daughters. Ser Wendel Manderly has o ered to take one,
and the Greatjon tells me his uncles wish to wed again. If Lord
Walder will be reasonable—”
“He is not reasonable,” said Catelyn. “He is proud, and prickly to
a fault. You know that. He wanted to be grandfather to a king. You
will not appease him with the o er of two hoary old brigands and
the second son of the fattest man in the Seven Kingdoms. Not only
have you broken your oath, but you’ve slighted the honor of the
Twins by choosing a bride from a lesser house.”
Robb bristled at that. “The Westerlings are better blood than the
Freys. They’re an ancient line, descended from the First Men. The
Kings of the Rock sometimes wed Westerlings before the Conquest,
and there was another Jeyne Westerling who was queen to King
Maegor three hundred years ago.”
“All of which will only salt Lord Walder’s wounds. It has always
rankled him that older houses look down on the Freys as upstarts.

This insult is not the rst he’s borne, to hear him tell it. Jon Arryn
was disinclined to foster his grandsons, and my father refused the
o er of one of his daughters for Edmure.” She inclined her head
toward her brother as he rejoined them.
“Your Grace,” Brynden Black sh said, “perhaps we had best
continue this in private.”
“Yes.” Robb sounded tired. “I would kill for a cup of wine. The
audience chamber, I think.”
As they started up the steps, Catelyn asked the question that had
been troubling her since she entered the hall. “Robb, where is Grey
Wind?”
“In the yard, with a haunch of mutton. I told the kennelmaster to
see that he was fed.”
“You always kept him with you before.”
“A hall is no place for a wolf. He gets restless, you’ve seen.
Growling and snapping. I should never have taken him into battle
with me. He’s killed too many men to fear them now. Jeyne’s
anxious around him, and he terri es her mother.”
And there’s the heart of it, Catelyn thought. “He is part of you,
Robb. To fear him is to fear you.”
“I am not a wolf, no matter what they call me.” Robb sounded
cross. “Grey Wind killed a man at the Crag, another at Ashemark,
and six or seven at Oxcross. If you had seen—”
“I saw Bran’s wolf tear out a man’s throat at Winterfell,” she said
sharply, “and loved him for it.”
“That’s di erent. The man at the Crag was a knight Jeyne had
known all her life. You can’t blame her for being afraid. Grey Wind
doesn’t like her uncle either. He bares his teeth every time Ser
Rolph comes near him.”
A chill went through her. “Send Ser Rolph away. At once.”
“Where? Back to the Crag, so the Lannisters can mount his head
on a spike? Jeyne loves him. He’s her uncle, and a fair knight
besides. I need more men like Rolph Spicer, not fewer. I am not
going to banish him just because my wolf doesn’t seem to like the
way he smells.”

“Robb.” She stopped and held his arm. “I told you once to keep
Theon Greyjoy close, and you did not listen. Listen now. Send this
man away. I am not saying you must banish him. Find some task
that requires a man of courage, some honorable duty, what it is
matters not … but do not keep him near you.”
He frowned. “Should I have Grey Wind sni all my knights?
There might be others whose smell he mislikes.”
“Any man Grey Wind mislikes is a man I do not want close to
you. These wolves are more than wolves, Robb. You must know
that. I think perhaps the gods sent them to us. Your father’s gods,
the old gods of the north. Five wolf pups, Robb, ve for ve Stark
children.”
“Six,” said Robb. “There was a wolf for Jon as well. I found them,
remember? I know how many there were and where they came
from. I used to think the same as you, that the wolves were our
guardians, our protectors, until …”
“Until?” she prompted.
Robb’s mouth tightened. “.… until they told me that Theon had
murdered Bran and Rickon. Small good their wolves did them. I am
no longer a boy, Mother. I’m a king, and I can protect myself.” He
sighed. “I will nd some duty for Ser Rolph, some pretext to send
him away. Not because of his smell, but to ease your mind. You
have su ered enough.”
Relieved, Catelyn kissed him lightly on the cheek before the
others could come around the turn of the stair, and for a moment he
was her boy again, and not her king.
Lord Hoster’s private audience chamber was a small room above
the Great Hall, better suited to intimate discussions. Robb took the
high seat, removed his crown, and set it on the oor beside him as
Catelyn rang for wine. Edmure was lling his uncle’s ear with the
whole story of the ght at the Stone Mill. It was only after the
servants had come and gone that the Black sh cleared his throat
and said, “I think we’ve all heard su cient of your boasting,
Nephew.”
Edmure was taken aback. “Boasting? What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said the Black sh, “that you owe His Grace your thanks
for his forbearance. He played out that mummer’s farce in the Great
Hall so as not to shame you before your own people. Had it been
me I would have ayed you for your stupidity rather than praising
this folly of the fords.”
“Good men died to defend those fords, Uncle.” Edmure sounded
outraged. “What, is no one to win victories but the Young Wolf?
Did I steal some glory meant for you, Robb?”
“Your Grace,” Robb corrected, icy. “You took me for your king,
Uncle. Or have you forgotten that as well?”
The Black sh said, “You were commanded to hold Riverrun,
Edmure, no more.”
“I held Riverrun, and I bloodied Lord Tywin’s nose—”
“So you did,” said Robb. “But a bloody nose won’t win the war,
will it? Did you ever think to ask yourself why we remained in the
west so long after Oxcross? You knew I did not have enough men to
threaten Lannisport or Casterly Rock.”
“Why … there were other castles … gold, cattle …”
“You think we stayed for plunder?” Robb was incredulous. “Uncle,
I wanted Lord Tywin to come west.”
“We were all horsed,” Ser Brynden said. “The Lannister host was
mainly foot. We planned to run Lord Tywin a merry chase up and
down the coast, then slip behind him to take up a strong defensive
position athwart the gold road, at a place my scouts had found
where the ground would have been greatly in our favor. If he had
come at us there, he would have paid a grievous price. But if he did
not attack, he would have been trapped in the west, a thousand
leagues from where he needed to be. All the while we would have
lived o his land, instead of him living o ours.”
“Lord Stannis was about to fall upon King’s Landing,” Robb said.
“He might have rid us of Jo rey, the queen, and the Imp in one red
stroke. Then we might have been able to make a peace.”
Edmure looked from uncle to nephew. “You never told me.”
“I told you to hold Riverrun,” said Robb. “What part of that
command did you fail to comprehend?”

“When you stopped Lord Tywin on the Red Fork,” said the
Black sh, “you delayed him just long enough for riders out of
Bitterbridge to reach him with word of what was happening to the
east. Lord Tywin turned his host at once, joined up with Matthis
Rowan and Randyll Tarly near the headwaters of the Blackwater,
and made a forced march to Tumbler’s Falls, where he found Mace
Tyrell and two of his sons waiting with a huge host and a eet of
barges. They oated down the river, disembarked half a day’s ride
from the city, and took Stannis in the rear.”
Catelyn remembered King Renly’s court, as she had seen it at
Bitterbridge. A thousand golden roses streaming in the wind, Queen
Margaery’s shy smile and soft words, her brother the Knight of
Flowers with the bloody linen around his temples. If you had to fall
into a woman’s arms, my son, why couldn’t they have been Margaery
Tyrell’s? The wealth and power of Highgarden could have made all
the di erence in the ghting yet to come. And perhaps Grey Wind
would have liked the smell of her as well.
Edmure looked ill. “I never meant … never, Robb, you must let
me make amends. I will lead the van in the next battle!”
For amends, Brother? Or for glory? Catelyn wondered.
“The next battle,” Robb said. “Well, that will be soon enough.
Once Jo rey is wed, the Lannisters will take the eld against me
once more, I don’t doubt, and this time the Tyrells will march
beside them. And I may need to ght the Freys as well, if Black
Walder has his way …”
“So long as Theon Greyjoy sits in your father’s seat with your
brothers’ blood on his hands, these other foes must wait,” Catelyn
told her son. “Your rst duty is to defend your own people, win
back Winterfell, and hang Theon in a crow’s cage to die slowly. Or
else put o that crown for good, Robb, for men will know that you
are no true king at all.”
From the way Robb looked at her, she could tell that it had been
a long while since anyone had dared speak to him so bluntly. “When
they told me Winterfell had fallen, I wanted to go north at once,”
he said, with a hint of defensiveness. “I wanted to free Bran and

Rickon, but I thought … I never dreamed that Theon could harm
them, truly. If I had …”
“It is too late for ifs, and too late for rescues,” Catelyn said. “All
that remains is vengeance.”
“The last word we had from the north, Ser Rodrik had defeated a
force of ironmen near Torrhen’s Square, and was assembling a host
at Castle Cerwyn to retake Winterfell,” said Robb. “By now he may
have done it. There has been no news for a long while. And what of
the Trident, if I turn north? I can’t ask the river lords to abandon
their own people.”
“No,” said Catelyn. “Leave them to guard their own, and win
back the north with northmen.”
“How will you get the northmen to the north?” her brother
Edmure asked. “The ironmen control the sunset sea. The Greyjoys
hold Moat Cailin as well. No army has ever taken Moat Cailin from
the south. Even to march against it is madness. We could be trapped
on the causeway, with the ironborn before us and angry Freys at
our backs.”
“We must win back the Freys,” said Robb. “With them, we still
have some chance of success, however small. Without them, I see
no hope. I am willing to give Lord Walder whatever he
requires … apologies, honors, lands, gold … there must be
something that would soothe his pride …”
“Not something,” said Catelyn. “Someone.”

JON

Big enough for you?” Snow akes speckled Tormund’s broad face,

melting in his hair and beard.
The giants swayed slowly atop the mammoths as they rode past
two by two. Jon’s garron shied, frightened by such strangeness, but
whether it was the mammoths or their riders that scared him it was
hard to say. Even Ghost backed o a step, baring his teeth in a
silent snarl. The direwolf was big, but the mammoths were a deal
bigger, and there were many and more of them.
Jon took the horse in hand and held him still, so he could count
the giants emerging from the blowing snow and pale mists that
swirled along the Milkwater. He was well beyond fty when
Tormund said something and he lost the count. There must be
hundreds. No matter how many went past, they just seemed to keep
coming.
In Old Nan’s stories, giants were outsized men who lived in
colossal castles, fought with huge swords, and walked about in
boots a boy could hide in. These were something else, more
bearlike than human, and as wooly as the mammoths they rode.
Seated, it was hard to say how big they truly were. Ten feet tall
maybe, or twelve, Jon thought. Maybe fourteen, but no taller. Their
sloping chests might have passed for those of men, but their arms
hung down too far, and their lower torsos looked half again as wide
as their upper. Their legs were shorter than their arms, but very
thick, and they wore no boots at all; their feet were broad splayed

things, hard and horny and black. Neckless, their huge heavy heads
thrust forward from between their shoulder blades, and their faces
were squashed and brutal. Rats’ eyes no larger than beads were
almost lost within folds of horny esh, but they snu ed constantly,
smelling as much as they saw.
They’re not wearing skins, Jon realized. That’s hair. Shaggy pelts
covered their bodies, thick below the waist, sparser above. The
stink that came o them was choking, but perhaps that was the
mammoths. And Joramun blew the Horn of Winter, and woke giants
from the earth. He looked for great swords ten feet long, but saw
only clubs. Most were just the limbs of dead trees, some still
trailing shattered branches. A few had stone balls lashed to the ends
to make colossal mauls. The song never says if the horn can put them
back to sleep.
One of the giants coming up on them looked older than the rest.
His pelt was grey and streaked with white, and the mammoth he
rode, larger than any of the others, was grey and white as well.
Tormund shouted something up to him as he passed, harsh clanging
words in a tongue that Jon did not comprehend. The giant’s lips
split apart to reveal a mouth full of huge square teeth, and he made
a sound half belch and half rumble. After a moment Jon realized he
was laughing. The mammoth turned its massive head to regard the
two of them brie y, one huge tusk passing over the top of Jon’s
head as the beast lumbered by, leaving huge footprints in the soft
mud and fresh snow along the river. The giant shouted down
something in the same coarse tongue that Tormund had used.
“Was that their king?” asked Jon.
“Giants have no kings, no more’n mammoths do, nor snow bears,
nor the great whales o’ the grey sea. That was Mag Mar Tun Doh
Weg. Mag the Mighty. You can kneel to him if you like, he won’t
mind. I know your kneeler’s knees must be itching, for want of
some king to bend to. Watch out he don’t step on you, though.
Giants have bad eyes, and might be he wouldn’t see some little
crow all the way down there by his feet.”
“What did you say to him? Was that the Old Tongue?”

“Aye. I asked him if that was his father he was forking, they
looked so much alike, except his father had a better smell.”
“And what did he say to you?”
Tormund Thunder st cracked a gap-toothed smile. “He asked me
if that was my daughter riding there beside me, with her smooth
pink cheeks.” The wildling shook snow from his arm and turned his
horse about. “It may be he never saw a man without a beard before.
Come, we start back. Mance grows sore wroth when I’m not found
in my accustomed place.”
Jon wheeled and followed Tormund back toward the head of the
column, his new cloak hanging heavy from his shoulders. It was
made of unwashed sheepskins, worn eece side in, as the wildlings
suggested. It kept the snow o well enough, and at night it was
good and warm, but he kept his black cloak as well, folded up
beneath his saddle. “Is it true you killed a giant once?” he asked
Tormund as they rode. Ghost loped silently beside them, leaving
paw prints in the new-fallen snow.
“Now why would you doubt a mighty man like me? It was winter
and I was half a boy, and stupid the way boys are. I went too far
and my horse died and then a storm caught me. A true storm, not no
little dusting such as this. Har! I knew I’d freeze to death before it
broke. So I found me a sleeping giant, cut open her belly, and
crawled up right inside her. Kept me warm enough, she did, but the
stink near did for me. The worst thing was, she woke up when the
spring come and took me for her babe. Suckled me for three whole
moons before I could get away. Har! There’s times I miss the taste
o’ giant’s milk, though.”
“If she nursed you, you couldn’t have killed her.”
“I never did, but see you don’t go spreading that about. Tormund
Giantsbane has a better ring to it than Tormund Giantsbabe, and
that’s the honest truth o’ it.”
“So how did you come by your other names?” Jon asked. “Mance
called you the Horn-Blower, didn’t he? Mead-king of Ruddy Hall,
Husband to Bears, Father to Hosts?” It was the horn blowing he
particularly wanted to hear about, but he dared not ask too plainly.
And Joramun blew the Horn of Winter, and woke giants from the earth.

Is that where they had come from, them and their mammoths? Had
Mance Rayder found the Horn of Joramun, and given it to Tormund
Thunder st to blow?
“Are all crows so curious?” asked Tormund. “Well, here’s a tale
for you. It were another winter, colder even than the one I spent
inside that giant, and snowing day and night, snow akes as big as
your head, not these little things. It snowed so hard the whole
village was half buried. I was in me Ruddy Hall, with only a cask o’
mead to keep me company and nothing to do but drink it. The more
I drank the more I got to thinking about this woman lived close by,
a ne strong woman with the biggest pair of teats you ever saw.
She had a temper on her, that one, but oh, she could be warm too,
and in the deep of winter a man needs his warmth.
“The more I drank the more I thought about her, and the more I
thought the harder me member got, till I couldn’t su er it no more.
Fool that I was, I bundled meself up in furs from head to heels,
wrapped a winding wool around me face, and set o to nd her.
The snow was coming down so hard I got turned around once or
twice, and the wind blew right through me and froze me bones, but
nally I come on her, all bundled up like I was.
“The woman had a terrible temper, and she put up quite the ght
when I laid hands on her. It was all I could do to carry her home
and get her out o’ them furs, but when I did, oh, she was hotter
even than I remembered, and we had a ne old time, and then I
went to sleep. Next morning when I woke the snow had stopped
and the sun was shining, but I was in no t state to enjoy it. All
ripped and torn I was, and half me member bit right o , and there
on me oor was a she-bear’s pelt. And soon enough the free folk
were telling tales o’ this bald bear seen in the woods, with the
queerest pair o’ cubs behind her. Har!” He slapped a meaty thigh.
“Would that I could nd her again. She was ne to lay with, that
bear. Never was a woman gave me such a ght, nor such strong
sons neither.”
“What could you do if you did nd her?” Jon asked, smiling. “You
said she bit your member o .”

“Only half. And half me member is twice as long as any other
man’s.” Tormund snorted. “Now as to you … is it true they cut your
members o when they take you for the Wall?”
“No,” Jon said, a ronted.
“I think it must be true. Else why refuse Ygritte? She’d hardly
give you any ght at all, seems to me. The girl wants you in her,
that’s plain enough to see.”
Too bloody plain, thought Jon, and it seems that half the column has
seen it. He studied the falling snow so Tormund might not see him
redden. I am a man of the Night’s Watch, he reminded himself. So
why did he feel like some blushing maid?
He spent most of his days in Ygritte’s company, and most nights
as well. Mance Rayder had not been blind to Rattleshirt’s mistrust
of the “crow-come-over,” so after he had given Jon his new
sheepskin cloak he had suggested that he might want to ride with
Tormund Giantsbane instead. Jon had happily agreed, and the very
next day Ygritte and Longspear Ryk left Rattleshirt’s band for
Tormund’s as well. “Free folk ride with who they want,” the girl
told him, “and we had a bellyful of Bag o’ Bones.”
Every night when they made camp, Ygritte threw her sleeping
skins down beside his own, no matter if he was near the re or well
away from it. Once he woke to nd her nestled against him, her
arm across his chest. He lay listening to her breathe for a long time,
trying to ignore the tension in his groin. Rangers often shared skins
for warmth, but warmth was not all Ygritte wanted, he suspected.
After that he had taken to using Ghost to keep her away. Old Nan
used to tell stories about knights and their ladies who would sleep
in a single bed with a blade between them for honor’s sake, but he
thought this must be the rst time where a direwolf took the place
of the sword.
Even then, Ygritte persisted. The day before last, Jon had made
the mistake of wishing he had hot water for a bath. “Cold is better,”
she had said at once, “if you’ve got someone to warm you up after.
The river’s only part ice yet, go on.”
Jon laughed. “You’d freeze me to death.”

“Are all crows afraid of gooseprickles? A little ice won’t kill you.
I’ll jump in with you t’prove it so.”
“And ride the rest of the day with wet clothes frozen to our
skins?” he objected.
“Jon Snow, you know nothing. You don’t go in with clothes.”
“I don’t go in at all,” he said rmly, just before he heard Tormund
Thunder st bellowing for him (he hadn’t, but never mind).
The wildlings seemed to think Ygritte a great beauty because of
her hair; red hair was rare among the free folk, and those who had
it were said to be kissed by re, which was supposed to be lucky.
Lucky it might be, and red it certainly was, but Ygritte’s hair was
such a tangle that Jon was tempted to ask her if she only brushed it
at the changing of the seasons.
At a lord’s court the girl would never have been considered
anything but common, he knew. She had a round peasant face, a
pug nose, and slightly crooked teeth, and her eyes were too far
apart. Jon had noticed all that the rst time he’d seen her, when his
dirk had been at her throat. Lately, though, he was noticing some
other things. When she grinned, the crooked teeth didn’t seem to
matter. And maybe her eyes were too far apart, but they were a
pretty blue-grey color, and lively as any eyes he knew. Sometimes
she sang in a low husky voice that stirred him. And sometimes by
the cook re when she sat hugging her knees with the ames waking
echoes in her red hair, and looked at him, just smiling … well, that
stirred some things as well.
But he was a man of the Night’s Watch, he had taken a vow. I
shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. He had said the
words before the weirwood, before his father’s gods. He could not
unsay them … no more than he could admit the reason for his
reluctance to Tormund Thunder st, Father to Bears.
“Do you mislike the girl?” Tormund asked him as they passed
another twenty mammoths, these bearing wildlings in tall wooden
towers instead of giants.
“No, but I …” What can I say that he will believe? “I am still too
young to wed.”

“Wed?” Tormund laughed. “Who spoke of wedding? In the south,
must a man wed every girl he beds?”
Jon could feel himself turning red again. “She spoke for me when
Rattleshirt would have killed me. I would not dishonor her.”
“You are a free man now, and Ygritte is a free woman. What
dishonor if you lay together?”
“I might get her with child.”
“Aye, I’d hope so. A strong son or a lively laughing girl kissed by
re, and where’s the harm in that?”
Words failed him for a moment. “The boy … the child would be a
bastard.”
“Are bastards weaker than other children? More sickly, more like
to fail?”
“No, but—”
“You’re bastard-born yourself. And if Ygritte does not want a
child, she will go to some woods witch and drink a cup o’ moon tea.
You do not come into it, once the seed is planted.”
“I will not father a bastard.”
Tormund shook his shaggy head. “What fools you kneelers be.
Why did you steal the girl if you don’t want her?”
“Steal? I never …”
“You did,” said Tormund. “You slew the two she was with and
carried her o , what do you call it?”
“I took her prisoner.”
“You made her yield to you.”
“Yes, but … Tormund, I swear, I’ve never touched her.”
“Are you certain they never cut your member o ?” Tormund gave
a shrug, as if to say he would never understand such madness.
“Well, you are a free man now, but if you will not have the girl,
best nd yourself a she-bear. If a man does not use his member it
grows smaller and smaller, until one day he wants to piss and
cannot nd it.”
Jon had no answer for that. Small wonder that the Seven
Kingdoms thought the free folk scarcely human. They have no laws,
no honor, not even simple decency. They steal endlessly from each other,
breed like beasts, prefer rape to marriage, and ll the world with

baseborn children. Yet he was growing fond of Tormund Giantsbane,
great bag of wind and lies though he was. Longspear as well. And
Ygritte … no, I will not think about Ygritte.
Along with the Tormunds and the Longspears rode other sorts of
wildlings, though; men like Rattleshirt and the Weeper who would
as soon slit you as spit on you. There was Harma Dogshead, a squat
keg of a woman with cheeks like slabs of white meat, who hated
dogs and killed one every fortnight to make a fresh head for her
banner; earless Styr, Magnar of Thenn, whose own people thought
him more god than lord; Varamyr Sixskins, a small mouse of a man
whose steed was a savage white snow bear that stood thirteen feet
tall on its hind legs. And wherever the bear and Varamyr went,
three wolves and a shadowcat came following. Jon had been in his
presence only once, and once had been enough; the mere sight of
the man had made him bristle, even as the fur on the back of
Ghost’s neck had bristled at the sight of the bear and that long
black-and-white ’cat.
And there were folks ercer even than Varamyr, from the
northernmost reaches of the haunted forest, the hidden valleys of
the Frostfangs, and even queerer places: the men of the Frozen
Shore who rode in chariots made of walrus bones pulled along by
packs of savage dogs, the terrible ice-river clans who were said to
feast on human esh, the cave dwellers with their faces dyed blue
and purple and green. With his own eyes Jon had beheld the
Hornfoot men trotting along in column on bare soles as hard as
boiled leather. He had not seen any snarks or grumpkins, but for all
he knew Tormund would be having some to supper.
Half the wildling host had lived all their lives without so much as
a glimpse of the Wall, Jon judged, and most of those spoke no word
of the Common Tongue. It did not matter. Mance Rayder spoke the
Old Tongue, even sang in it, ngering his lute and lling the night
with strange wild music.
Mance had spent years assembling this vast plodding host, talking
to this clan mother and that magnar, winning one village with
sweet words and another with a song and a third with the edge of
his sword, making peace between Harma Dogshead and the Lord o’

Bones, between the Hornfoots and the Nightrunners, between the
walrus men of the Frozen Shore and the cannibal clans of the great
ice rivers, hammering a hundred di erent daggers into one great
spear, aimed at the heart of the Seven Kingdoms. He had no crown
nor scepter, no robes of silk and velvet, but it was plain to Jon that
Mance Rayder was a king in more than name.
Jon had joined the wildlings at Qhorin Halfhand’s command.
“Ride with them, eat with them, ght with them,” the ranger had
told him, the night before he died. “And watch.” But all his watching
had learned him little. The Halfhand had suspected that the
wildlings had gone up into the bleak and barren Frostfangs in search
of some weapon, some power, some fell sorcery with which to
break the Wall … but if they had found any such, no one was
boasting of it openly, or showing it to Jon. Nor had Mance Rayder
con ded any of his plans or strategies. Since that rst night, he had
hardly seen the man save at a distance.
I will kill him if I must. The prospect gave Jon no joy; there would
be no honor in such a killing, and it would mean his own death as
well. Yet he could not let the wildlings breach the Wall, to threaten
Winterfell and the north, the barrowlands and the Rills, White
Harbor and the Stony Shore, even the Neck. For eight thousand
years the men of House Stark had lived and died to protect their
people against such ravagers and reavers … and bastard-born or no,
the same blood ran in his veins. Bran and Rickon are still at Winterfell
besides. Maester Luwin, Ser Rodrik, Old Nan, Farlen the kennelmaster,
Mikken at his forge and Gage by his ovens … everyone I ever knew,
everyone I ever loved. If Jon must slay a man he half admired and
almost liked to save them from the mercies of Rattleshirt and
Harma Dogshead and the earless Magnar of Thenn, that was what
he meant to do.
Still, he prayed his father’s gods might spare him that bleak task.
The host moved but slowly, burdened as it was by all the wildlings’
herds and children and mean little treasures, and the snows had
slowed its progress even more. Most of the column was out of the
foothills now, oozing down along the west bank of the Milkwater

like honey on a cold winter’s morning, following the course of the
river into the heart of the haunted forest.
And somewhere close ahead, Jon knew, the Fist of the First Men
loomed above the trees, home to three hundred black brothers of
the Night’s Watch, armed, mounted, and waiting. The Old Bear had
sent out other scouts besides the Halfhand, and surely Jarman
Buckwell or Thoren Smallwood would have returned by now with
word of what was coming down out of the mountains.
Mormont will not run, Jon thought. He is too old and he has come
too far. He will strike, and damn the numbers. One day soon he would
hear the sound of warhorns, and see a column of riders pounding
down on them with black cloaks apping and cold steel in their
hands. Three hundred men could not hope to kill a hundred times
their number, of course, but Jon did not think they would need to.
He need not slay a thousand, only one. Mance is all that keeps them
together.
The King-beyond-the-Wall was doing all he could, yet the
wildlings remained hopelessly undisciplined, and that made them
vulnerable. Here and there within the leagues-long snake that was
their line of march were warriors as erce as any in the Watch, but
a good third of them were grouped at either end of the column, in
Harma Dogshead’s van and the savage rearguard with its giants,
aurochs, and re ingers. Another third rode with Mance himself
near the center, guarding the wayns and sledges and dog carts that
held the great bulk of the host’s provisions and supplies, all that
remained of the last summer harvest. The rest, divided into small
bands under the likes of Rattleshirt, Jarl, Tormund Giantsbane, and
the Weeper, served as outriders, foragers, and whips, galloping up
and down the column endlessly to keep it moving in a more or less
orderly fashion.
And even more telling, only one in a hundred wildlings was
mounted. The Old Bear will go through them like an axe through
porridge. And when that happened, Mance must give chase with his
center, to try and blunt the threat. If he should fall in the ght that
must follow, the Wall would be safe for another hundred years, Jon
judged. And if not …

He exed the burned ngers of his sword hand. Longclaw was
slung to his saddle, the carved stone wolf’s-head pommel and soft
leather grip of the great bastard sword within easy reach.
The snow was falling heavily by the time they caught Tormund’s
band, several hours later. Ghost departed along the way, melting
into the forest at the scent of prey. The direwolf would return when
they made camp for the night, by dawn at the latest. However far
he prowled, Ghost always came back … and so, it seemed, did
Ygritte.
“So,” the girl called when she saw him, “d’you believe us now,
Jon Snow? Did you see the giants on their mammoths?”
“Har!” shouted Tormund, before Jon could reply. “The crow’s in
love! He means to marry one!”
“A giantess?” Longspear Ryk laughed.
“No, a mammoth!” Tormund bellowed. “Har!”
Ygritte trotted beside Jon as he slowed his garron to a walk. She
claimed to be three years older than him, though she stood half a
foot shorter; however old she might be, the girl was a tough little
thing. Stonesnake had called her a “spearwife” when they’d
captured her in the Skirling Pass. She wasn’t wed and her weapon of
choice was a short curved bow of horn and weirwood, but
“spearwife” t her all the same. She reminded him a little of his
sister Arya, though Arya was younger and probably skinnier. It was
hard to tell how plump or thin Ygritte might be, with all the furs
and skins she wore.
“Do you know ‘The Last of the Giants’?” Without waiting for an
answer Ygritte said, “You need a deeper voice than mine to do it
proper.” Then she sang, “Ooooooh, I am the last of the giants, my
people are gone from the earth.”
Tormund Giantsbane heard the words and grinned. “The last of the
great mountain giants, who ruled all the world at my birth,” he
bellowed back through the snow.
Longspear Ryk joined in, singing, “Oh, the smallfolk have stolen my
forests, they’ve stolen my rivers and hills.”
“And they’ve built a great wall through my valleys, and shed all the
sh from my rills,” Ygritte and Tormund sang back at him in turn, in

suitably gigantic voices.
Tormund’s sons Toregg and Dormund added their deep voices as
well, then his daughter Munda and all the rest. Others began to
bang their spears on leathern shields to keep rough time, until the
whole war band was singing as they rode.
In stone halls they burn their great res,
in stone halls they forge their sharp spears.
Whilst I walk alone in the mountains,
with no true companion but tears.
They hunt me with dogs in the daylight,
they hunt me with torches by night.
For these men who are small can never stand tall,
whilst giants still walk in the light.
Oooooooh, I am the LAST of the giants,
so learn well the words of my song.
For when I am gone the singing will fade,
and the silence shall last long and long.
There were tears on Ygritte’s cheeks when the song ended.
“Why are you weeping?” Jon asked. “It was only a song. There
are hundreds of giants, I’ve just seen them.”
“Oh, hundreds,” she said furiously. “You know nothing, Jon
Snow. You—JON!”
Jon turned at the sudden sound of wings. Blue-grey feathers lled
his eyes, as sharp talons buried themselves in his face. Red pain
lanced through him sudden and erce as pinions beat round his
head. He saw the beak, but there was no time to get a hand up or
reach for a weapon. Jon reeled backward, his foot lost the stirrup,
his garron broke in panic, and then he was falling. And still the
eagle clung to his face, its talons tearing at him as it apped and
shrieked and pecked. The world turned upside down in a chaos of
feathers and horse esh and blood, and then the ground came up to
smash him.
The next he knew, he was on his face with the taste of mud and
blood in his mouth and Ygritte kneeling over him protectively, a

bone dagger in her hand. He could still hear wings, though the
eagle was not in sight. Half his world was black. “My eye,” he said
in sudden panic, raising a hand to his face.
“It’s only blood, Jon Snow. He missed the eye, just ripped your
skin up some.”
His face was throbbing. Tormund stood over them bellowing, he
saw from his right eye as he rubbed blood from his left. Then there
were hoofbeats, shouts, and the clacking of old dry bones.
“Bag o’ Bones,” roared Tormund, “call o your hellcrow!”
“There’s your hellcrow!” Rattleshirt pointed at Jon. “Bleeding in
the mud like a faithless dog!” The eagle came apping down to land
atop the broken giant’s skull that served him for his helm. “I’m here
for him.”
“Come take him then,” said Tormund, “but best come with sword
in hand, for that’s where you’ll nd mine. Might be I’ll boil your
bones, and use your skull to piss in. Har!”
“Once I prick you and let the air out, you’ll shrink down smaller’n
that girl. Stand aside, or Mance will hear o’ this.”
Ygritte stood. “What, is it Mance who wants him?”
“I said so, didn’t I? Get him up on those black feet.”
Tormund frowned down at Jon. “Best go, if it’s the Mance who’s
wanting you.”
Ygritte helped pull him up. “He’s bleeding like a butchered boar.
Look what Orell did t’ his sweet face.”
Can a bird hate? Jon had slain the wilding Orell, but some part of
the man remained within the eagle. The golden eyes looked out on
him with cold malevolence. “I’ll come,” he said. The blood kept
running down into his right eye, and his cheek was a blaze of pain.
When he touched it his black gloves came away stained with red.
“Let me catch my garron.” It was not the horse he wanted so much
as Ghost, but the direwolf was nowhere to be seen. He could be
leagues away by now, ripping out the throat of some elk. Perhaps that
was just as well.
The garron shied away from him when he approached, no doubt
frightened by the blood on his face, but Jon calmed him with a few
quiet words and nally got close enough to take the reins. As he

swung back into the saddle his head whirled. I will need to get this
tended, he thought, but not just now. Let the King-beyond-the-Wall see
what his eagle did to me. His right hand opened and closed, and he
reached down for Longclaw and slung the bastard sword over a
shoulder before he wheeled to trot back to where the Lord of Bones
and his band were waiting.
Ygritte was waiting too, sitting on her horse with a erce look on
her face. “I am coming too.”
“Be gone.” The bones of Rattleshirt’s breastplate clattered
together. “I was sent for the crow-come-down, none other.”
“A free woman rides where she will,” Ygritte said.
The wind was blowing snow into Jon’s eyes. He could feel the
blood freezing on his face. “Are we talking or riding?”
“Riding,” said the Lord of Bones.
It was a grim gallop. They rode two miles down the column
through swirling snows, then cut through a tangle of baggage
wayns to splash across the Milkwater where it took a great loop
toward the east. A crust of thin ice covered the river shallows; with
every step their horses’ hooves crashed through, until they reached
the deeper water ten yards out. The snow seemed be falling even
faster on the eastern bank, and the drifts were deeper too. Even the
wind is colder. And night was falling too.
But even through the blowing snow, the shape of the great white
hill that loomed above the trees was unmistakable. The Fist of the
First Men. Jon heard the scream of the eagle overhead. A raven
looked down from a soldier pine and quorked as he went past. Had
the Old Bear made his attack? Instead of the clash of steel and the
thrum of arrows taking ight, Jon heard only the soft crunch of
frozen crust beneath his garron’s hooves.
In silence they circled round to the south slope, where the
approach was easiest. It was there at the bottom that Jon saw the
dead horse, sprawled at the base of the hill, half buried in the snow.
Entrails spilled from the belly of the animal like frozen snakes, and
one of its legs was gone. Wolves, was Jon’s rst thought, but that
was wrong. Wolves eat their kill.

More garrons were strewn across the slope, legs twisted
grotesquely, blind eyes staring in death. The wildlings crawled over
them like ies, stripping them of saddles, bridles, packs, and armor,
and hacking them apart with stone axes.
“Up,” Rattleshirt told Jon. “Mance is up top.”
Outside the ringwall they dismounted to squeeze through a
crooked gap in the stones. The carcass of a shaggy brown garron
was impaled upon the sharpened stakes the Old Bear had placed
inside every entrance. He was trying to get out, not in. There was no
sign of a rider.
Inside was more, and worse. Jon had never seen pink snow
before. The wind gusted around him, pulling at his heavy sheepskin
cloak. Ravens apped from one dead horse to the next. Are those
wild ravens, or our own? Jon could not tell. He wondered where poor
Sam was now. And what he was.
A crust of frozen blood crunched beneath the heel of his boot. The
wildlings were stripping the dead horses of every scrap of steel and
leather, even prying the horseshoes o their hooves. A few were
going through packs they’d turned up, looking for weapons and
food. Jon passed one of Chett’s dogs, or what remained of him,
lying in a sludgy pool of half-frozen blood.
A few tents were still standing on the far side of the camp, and it
was there they found Mance Rayder. Beneath his slashed cloak of
black wool and red silk he wore black ringmail and shaggy fur
breeches, and on his head was a great bronze-and-iron helm with
raven wings at either temple. Jarl was with him, and Harma the
Dogshead; Styr as well, and Varamyr Sixskins with his wolves and
his shadowcat.
The look Mance gave Jon was grim and cold. “What happened to
your face?”
Ygritte said, “Orell tried to take his eye out.”
“It was him I asked. Has he lost his tongue? Perhaps he should, to
spare us further lies.”
Styr the Magnar drew a long knife. “The boy might see more
clear with one eye, instead of two.”

“Would you like to keep your eye, Jon?” asked the King-beyondthe-Wall. “If so, tell me how many they were. And try and speak the
truth this time, Bastard of Winterfell.”
Jon’s throat was dry. “My lord … what …”
“I am not your lord,” said Mance. “And the what is plain enough.
Your brothers died. The question is, how many?”
Jon’s face was throbbing, the snow kept coming down, and it was
hard to think. You must not balk, whatever is asked of you, Qhorin had
told him. The words stuck in his throat, but he made himself say,
“There were three hundred of us.”
“Us?” Mance said sharply.
“Them. Three hundred of them.” Whatever is asked, the Halfhand
said. So why do I feel so craven? “Two hundred from Castle Black,
and one hundred from the Shadow Tower.”
“There’s a truer song than the one you sang in my tent.” Mance
looked to Harma Dogshead. “How many horses have we found?”
“More’n a hundred,” that huge woman replied, “less than two.
There’s more dead to the east, under the snow, hard t’ know how
many.” Behind her stood her banner bearer, holding a pole with a
dog’s head on it, fresh enough to still be leaking blood.
“You should never have lied to me, Jon Snow,” said Mance.
“I … I know that.” What could he say?
The wildling king studied his face. “Who had the command here?
And tell me true. Was it Rykker? Smallwood? Not Wythers, he’s too
feeble. Whose tent was this?”
I have said too much. “You did not nd his body?”
Harma snorted, her disdain frosting from her nostrils. “What fools
these black crows be.”
“The next time you answer me with a question, I will give you to
my Lord of Bones,” Mance Rayder promised Jon. He stepped closer.
“Who led here?”
One more step, thought Jon. Another foot. He moved his hand
closer to Longclaw’s hilt. If I hold my tongue …
“Reach up for that bastard sword and I’ll have your bastard head
o before it clears the scabbard,” said Mance. “I am fast losing
patience with you, crow.”

“Say it,” Ygritte urged. “He’s dead, whoever he was.”
His frown cracked the blood on his cheek. This is too hard, Jon
thought in despair. How do I play the turncloak without becoming one?
Qhorin had not told him that. But the second step is always easier
than the rst. “The Old Bear.”
“That old man?” Harma’s tone said she did not believe it. “He
came himself? Then who commands at Castle Black?”
“Bowen Marsh.” This time Jon answered at once. You must not
balk, whatever is asked of you.
Mance laughed. “If so, our war is won. Bowen knows a deal more
about counting swords than he’s ever known about using them.”
“The Old Bear commanded,” said Jon. “This place was high and
strong, and he made it stronger. He dug pits and planted stakes, laid
up food and water. He was ready for …”
“… me?” nished Mance Rayder. “Aye, he was. Had I been fool
enough to storm this hill, I might have lost ve men for every crow
I slew and still counted myself lucky.” His mouth grew hard. “But
when the dead walk, walls and stakes and swords mean nothing.
You cannot ght the dead, Jon Snow. No man knows that half so
well as me.” He gazed up at the darkening sky and said, “The crows
may have helped us more than they know. I’d wondered why we’d
su ered no attacks. But there’s still a hundred leagues to go, and the
cold is rising. Varamyr, send your wolves sni ng after the wights, I
won’t have them taking us unawares. My Lord of Bones, double all
the patrols, and make certain every man has torch and int. Styr,
Jarl, you ride at rst light.”
“Mance,” Rattleshirt said, “I want me some crow bones.”
Ygritte stepped in front of Jon. “You can’t kill a man for lying to
protect them as was his brothers.”
“They are still his brothers,” declared Styr.
“They’re not,” insisted Ygritte. “He never killed me, like they told
him. And he slew the Halfhand, we all saw.”
Jon’s breath misted the air. If I lie to him, he’ll know. He looked
Mance Rayder in the eyes, opened and closed his burned hand. “I
wear the cloak you gave me, Your Grace.”

“A sheepskin cloak!” said Ygritte. “And there’s many a night we
dance beneath it, too!”
Jarl laughed, and even Harma Dogshead smirked. “Is that the
way of it, Jon Snow?” asked Mance Rayder, mildly. “Her and you?”
It was easy to lose your way beyond the Wall. Jon did not know
that he could tell honor from shame anymore, or right from wrong.
Father forgive me. “Yes,” he said.
Mance nodded. “Good. You’ll go with Jarl and Styr on the
morrow, then. Both of you. Far be it from me to separate two
hearts that beat as one.”
“Go where?” said Jon.
“Over the Wall. It’s past time you proved your faith with
something more than words, Jon Snow.”
The Magnar was not pleased. “What do I want with a crow?”
“He knows the Watch and he knows the Wall,” said Mance, “and
he knows Castle Black better than any raider ever could. You’ll nd
a use for him, or you’re a fool.”
Styr scowled. “His heart may still be black.”
“Then cut it out.” Mance turned to Rattleshirt. “My Lord of
Bones, keep the column moving at all costs. If we reach the Wall
before Mormont, we’ve won.”
“They’ll move.” Rattleshirt’s voice was thick and angry.
Mance nodded, and walked away, Harma and Sixskins beside him.
Varamyr’s wolves and shadowcat followed behind. Jon and Ygritte
were left with Jarl, Rattleshirt, and the Magnar. The two older
wildlings looked at Jon with ill-concealed rancor as Jarl said, “You
heard, we ride at daybreak. Bring all the food you can, there’ll be
no time to hunt. And have your face seen to, crow. You look a
bloody mess.”
“I will,” said Jon.
“You best not be lying, girl,” Rattleshirt said to Ygritte, his eyes
shiny behind the giant’s skull.
Jon drew Longsclaw. “Get away from us, unless you want what
Qhorin got.”
“You got no wolf to help you here, boy.” Rattleshirt reached for
his own sword.

“Sure o’ that, are you?” Ygritte laughed.
Atop the stones of the ringwall, Ghost hunched with white fur
bristling. He made no sound, but his dark red eyes spoke blood. The
Lord of Bones moved his hand slowly away from his sword, backed
o a step, and left them with a curse.
Ghost padded beside their garrons as Jon and Ygritte descended
the Fist. It was not until they were halfway across the Milkwater
that Jon felt safe enough to say, “I never asked you to lie for me.”
“I never did,” she said. “I left out part, is all.”
“You said—”
“—that we fuck beneath your cloak many a night. I never said
when we started, though.” The smile she gave him was almost shy.
“Find another place for Ghost to sleep tonight, Jon Snow. It’s like
Mance said. Deeds is truer than words.”

SANSA

A new gown?” she said, as wary as she was astonished.

“More lovely than any you have worn, my lady,” the old woman
promised. She measured Sansa’s hips with a length of knotted
string. “All silk and Myrish lace, with satin linings. You will be very
beautiful. The queen herself has commanded it.”
“Which queen?” Margaery was not yet Jo ’s queen, but she had
been Renly’s. Or did she mean the Queen of Thorns? Or …
“The Queen Regent, to be sure.”
“Queen Cersei?”
“None other. She has honored me with her custom for many a
year.” The old woman laid her string along the inside of Sansa’s leg.
“Her Grace said to me that you are a woman now, and should not
dress like a little girl. Hold out your arm.”
Sansa lifted her arm. She needed a new gown, that was true. She
had grown three inches in the past year, and most of her old
wardrobe had been ruined by the smoke when she’d tried to burn
her mattress on the day of her rst owering
“Your bosom will be as lovely as the queen’s,” the old woman
said as she looped her string around Sansa’s chest. “You should not
hide it so.”
The comment made her blush. Yet the last time she’d gone riding,
she could not lace her jerkin all the way to the top, and the
stableboy gaped at her as he helped her mount. Sometimes she

caught grown men looking at her chest as well, and some of her
tunics were so tight she could scarce breathe in them.
“What color will it be?” she asked the seamstress.
“Leave the colors to me, my lady. You will be pleased, I know
you will. You shall have smallclothes and hose as well, kirtles and
mantles and cloaks, and all else be tting a … a lovely young lady of
noble birth.”
“Will they be ready in time for the king’s wedding?”
“Oh, sooner, much sooner, Her Grace insists. I have six
seamstresses and twelve apprentice girls, and we have set all our
other work aside for this. Many ladies will be cross with us, but it
was the queen’s command.”
“Thank Her Grace kindly for her thoughtfulness,” Sansa said
politely. “She is too good to me.”
“Her Grace is most generous,” the seamstress agreed, as she
gathered up her things and took her leave.
But why? Sansa wondered when she was alone. It made her
uneasy. I’ll wager this gown is Margaery’s doing somehow, or her
grandmother’s.
Margaery’s kindness had been unfailing, and her presence
changed everything. Her ladies welcomed Sansa as well. It had been
so long since she had enjoyed the company of other women, she had
almost forgotten how pleasant it could be. Lady Leonette gave her
lessons on the high harp, and Lady Janna shared all the choice
gossip. Merry Crane always had an amusing story, and little Lady
Bulwer reminded her of Arya, though not so erce.
Closest to Sansa’s own age were the cousins Elinor, Alla, and
Megga, Tyrells from junior branches of the House. “Roses from
lower on the bush,” quipped Elinor, who was witty and willowy.
Megga was round and loud, Alla shy and pretty, but Elinor ruled the
three by right of womanhood; she was a maiden owered, whereas
Megga and Alla were mere girls.
The cousins took Sansa into their company as if they had known
her all their lives. They spent long afternoons doing needlework and
talking over lemon cakes and honeyed wine, played at tiles of an
evening, sang together in the castle sept … and often one or two of

them would be chosen to share Margaery’s bed, where they would
whisper half the night away. Alla had a lovely voice, and when
coaxed would play the woodharp and sing songs of chivalry and lost
loves. Megga couldn’t sing, but she was mad to be kissed. She and
Alla played a kissing game sometimes, she confessed, but it wasn’t
the same as kissing a man, much less a king. Sansa wondered what
Megga would think about kissing the Hound, as she had. He’d come
to her the night of the battle stinking of wine and blood. He kissed
me and threatened to kill me, and made me sing him a song.
“King Jo rey has such beautiful lips,” Megga gushed, oblivious,
“oh, poor Sansa, how your heart must have broken when you lost
him. Oh, how you must have wept!”
Jo rey made me weep more often than you know, she wanted to
say, but Butterbumps was not on hand to drown out her voice, so
she pressed her lips together and held her tongue.
As for Elinor, she was promised to a young squire, a son of Lord
Ambrose; they would be wed as soon as he won his spurs. He had
worn her favor in the Battle of the Blackwater, where he’d slain a
Myrish crossbowman and a Mullendore man-at-arms. “Alyn said her
favor made him fearless,” said Megga. “He says he shouted her
name for his battle cry, isn’t that ever so gallant? Someday I want
some champion to wear my favor, and kill a hundred men.” Elinor
told her to hush, but looked pleased all the same.
They are children, Sansa thought. They are silly little girls, even
Elinor. They’ve never seen a battle, they’ve never seen a man die, they
know nothing. Their dreams were full of songs and stories, the way
hers had been before Jo rey cut her father’s head o . Sansa pitied
them. Sansa envied them.
Margaery was di erent, though. Sweet and gentle, yet there was
a little of her grandmother in her, too. The day before last she’d
taken Sansa hawking. It was the rst time she had been outside the
city since the battle. The dead had been burned or buried, but the
Mud Gate was scarred and splintered where Lord Stannis’s rams had
battered it, and the hulls of smashed ships could be seen along both
sides of the Blackwater, charred masts poking from the shallows
like gaunt black ngers. The only tra c was the at-bottomed ferry

that took them across the river, and when they reached the
kingswood they found a wilderness of ash and charcoal and dead
trees. But the waterfowl teemed in the marshes along the bay, and
Sansa’s merlin brought down three ducks while Margaery’s
peregrine took a heron in full ight.
“Willas has the best birds in the Seven Kingdoms,” Margaery said
when the two of them were brie y alone. “He ies an eagle
sometimes. You will see, Sansa.” She took her by the hand and gave
it a squeeze. “Sister.”
Sister. Sansa had once dreamt of having a sister like Margaery;
beautiful and gentle, with all the world’s graces at her command.
Arya had been entirely unsatisfactory as sisters went. How can I let
my sister marry Jo rey? she thought, and suddenly her eyes were full
of tears. “Margaery, please,” she said, “you mustn’t.” It was hard to
get the words out. “You mustn’t marry him. He’s not like he seems,
he’s not. He’ll hurt you.”
“I shouldn’t think so.” Margaery smiled con dently. “It’s brave of
you to warn me, but you need not fear. Jo ’s spoiled and vain and I
don’t doubt that he’s as cruel as you say, but Father forced him to
name Loras to his Kingsguard before he would agree to the match. I
shall have the nest knight in the Seven Kingdoms protecting me
night and day, as Prince Aemon protected Naerys. So our little lion
had best behave, hadn’t he?” She laughed, and said, “Come, sweet
sister, let’s race back to the river. It will drive our guards quite
mad.” And without waiting for an answer, she put her heels into her
horse and ew.
She is so brave, Sansa thought, galloping after her … and yet, her
doubts still gnawed at her. Ser Loras was a great knight, all agreed.
But Jo rey had other Kingsguard, and gold cloaks and red cloaks
besides, and when he was older he would command armies of his
own. Aegon the Unworthy had never harmed Queen Naerys,
perhaps for fear of their brother the Dragonknight … but when
another of his Kingsguard fell in love with one of his mistresses, the
king had taken both their heads.
Ser Loras is a Tyrell, Sansa reminded herself. That other knight was
only a Toyne. His brothers had no armies, no way to avenge him but

with swords. Yet the more she thought about it all, the more she
wondered. Jo might restrain himself for a few turns, perhaps as long as
a year, but soon or late he will show his claws, and when he does … The
realm might have a second Kingslayer, and there would be war
inside the city, as the men of the lion and the men of the rose made
the gutters run red.
Sansa was surprised that Margaery did not see it too. She is older
than me, she must be wiser. And her father, Lord Tyrell, he knows what
he is doing, surely. I am just being silly.
When she told Ser Dontos that she was going to Highgarden to
marry Willas Tyrell, she thought he would be relieved and pleased
for her. Instead he had grabbed her arm and said, “You cannot!” in a
voice as thick with horror as with wine. “I tell you, these Tyrells are
only Lannisters with owers. I beg of you, forget this folly, give
your Florian a kiss, and promise you’ll go ahead as we have
planned. The night of Jo rey’s wedding, that’s not so long, wear the
silver hair net and do as I told you, and afterward we make our
escape.” He tried to plant a kiss on her cheek.
Sansa slipped from his grasp and stepped away from him. “I
won’t. I can’t. Something would go wrong. When I wanted to escape
you wouldn’t take me, and now I don’t need to.”
Dontos stared at her stupidly. “But the arrangements are made,
sweetling. The ship to take you home, the boat to take you to the
ship, your Florian did it all for his sweet Jonquil.”
“I am sorry for all the trouble I put you to,” she said, “but I have
no need of boats and ships now.”
“But it’s all to see you safe.”
“I will be safe in Highgarden. Willas will keep me safe.”
“But he does not know you,” Dontos insisted, “and he will not
love you. Jonquil, Jonquil, open your sweet eyes, these Tyrells care
nothing for you. It’s your claim they mean to wed.”
“My claim?” She was lost for a moment.
“Sweetling,” he told her, “you are heir to Winterfell.” He grabbed
her again, pleading that she must not do this thing, and Sansa
wrenched free and left him swaying beneath the heart tree. She had
not visited the godswood since.

But she had not forgotten his words, either. The heir to Winterfell,
she would think as she lay abed at night. It’s your claim they mean to
wed. Sansa had grown up with three brothers. She never thought to
have a claim, but with Bran and Rickon dead … It doesn’t matter,
there’s still Robb, he’s a man grown now, and soon he’ll wed and have a
son. Anyway, Willas Tyrell will have Highgarden, what would he want
with Winterfell?
Sometimes she would whisper his name into her pillow just to
hear the sound of it. “Willas, Willas, Willas.” Willas was as good a
name as Loras, she supposed. They even sounded the same, a little.
What did it matter about his leg? Willas would be Lord of
Highgarden and she would be his lady.
She pictured the two of them sitting together in a garden with
puppies in their laps, or listening to a singer strum upon a lute
while they oated down the Mander on a pleasure barge. If I give
him sons, he may come to love me. She would name them Eddard and
Brandon and Rickon, and raise them all to be as valiant as Ser Loras.
And to hate Lannisters, too. In Sansa’s dreams, her children looked
just like the brothers she had lost. Sometimes there was even a girl
who looked like Arya.
She could never hold a picture of Willas long in her head, though;
her imaginings kept turning him back into Ser Loras, young and
graceful and beautiful. You must not think of him like that, she told
herself. Or else he may see the disappointment in your eyes when you
meet, and how could he marry you then, knowing it was his brother you
loved? Willas Tyrell was twice her age, she reminded herself
constantly, and lame as well, and perhaps even plump and red-faced
like his father. But comely or no, he might be the only champion
she would ever have.
Once she dreamed it was still her marrying Jo , not Margaery,
and on their wedding night he turned into the headsman Ilyn Payne.
She woke trembling. She did not want Margaery to su er as she
had, but she dreaded the thought that the Tyrells might refuse to go
ahead with the wedding. I warned her, I did, I told her the truth of
him. Perhaps Margaery did not believe her. Jo always played the
perfect knight with her, as once he had with Sansa. She will see his

true nature soon enough. After the wedding if not before. Sansa decided
that she would light a candle to the Mother Above the next time she
visited the sept, and ask her to protect Margaery from Jo rey’s
cruelty. And perhaps a candle to the Warrior as well, for Loras.
She would wear her new gown for the ceremony at the Great Sept
of Baelor, she decided as the seamstress took her last measurement.
That must be why Cersei is having it made for me, so I will not look
shabby at the wedding. She really ought to have a di erent gown for
the feast afterward but she supposed one of her old ones would do.
She did not want to risk getting food or wine on the new one. I must
take it with me to Highgarden. She wanted to look beautiful for Willas
Tyrell. Even if Dontos was right, and it is Winterfell he wants and not
me, he still may come to love me for myself. Sansa hugged herself
tightly, wondering how long it would be before the gown was
ready. She could scarcely wait to wear it.

ARYA

The rains came and went, but there was more grey sky than blue,

and all the streams were running high. On the morning of the third
day, Arya noticed that the moss was growing mostly on the wrong
side of the trees. “We’re going the wrong way,” she said to Gendry,
as they rode past an especially mossy elm. “We’re going south. See
how the moss is growing on the trunk?”
He pushed thick black hair from eyes and said, “We’re following
the road, that’s all. The road goes south here.”
We’ve been going south all day, she wanted to tell him. And
yesterday too, when we were riding along that streambed. But she
hadn’t been paying close attention yesterday, so she couldn’t be
certain. “I think we’re lost,” she said in a low voice. “We shouldn’t
have left the river. All we had to do was follow it.”
“The river bends and loops,” said Gendry. “This is just a shorter
way, I bet. Some secret outlaw way. Lem and Tom and them have
been living here for years.”
That was true. Arya bit her lip. “But the moss …”
“The way it’s raining, we’ll have moss growing from our ears
before long,” Gendry complained.
“Only from our south ear,” Arya declared stubbornly. There was
no use trying to convince the Bull of anything. Still, he was the only
true friend she had, now that Hot Pie had left them.
“Sharna says she needs me to bake bread,” he’d told her, the day
they rode. “Anyhow I’m tired of rain and saddlesores and being

scared all the time. There’s ale here, and rabbit to eat, and the
bread will be better when I make it. You’ll see, when you come
back. You will come back, won’t you? When the war’s done?” He
remembered who she was then, and added, “My lady,” reddening.
Arya didn’t know if the war would ever be done, but she had
nodded. “I’m sorry I beat you that time,” she said. Hot Pie was
stupid and craven, but he’d been with her all the way from King’s
Landing and she’d gotten used to him. “I broke your nose.”
“You broke Lem’s too.” Hot Pie grinned. “That was good.”
“Lem didn’t think so,” Arya said glumly. Then it was time to go.
When Hot Pie asked if he might kiss milady’s hand, she punched his
shoulder. “Don’t call me that. You’re Hot Pie, and I’m Arry.”
“I’m not Hot Pie here. Sharna just calls me Boy. The same as she
calls the other boy. It’s going to be confusing.”
She missed him more than she thought she would, but Harwin
made up for it some. She had told him about his father Hullen, and
how she’d found him dying by the stables in the Red Keep, the day
she ed. “He always said he’d die in a stable,” Harwin said, “but we
all thought some bad-tempered stallion would be his death, not a
pack of lions.” Arya told of Yoren and their escape from King’s
Landing as well, and much that had happened since, but she left out
the stableboy she’d stabbed with Needle, and the guard whose
throat she’d cut to get out of Harrenhal. Telling Harwin would be
almost like telling her father, and there were some things that she
could not bear having her father know.
Nor did she speak of Jaqen H’ghar and the three deaths he’d owed
and paid. The iron coin he’d given her Arya kept tucked away
beneath her belt, but sometimes at night she would take it out and
remember how his face had melted and changed when he ran his
hand across it. “Valar morghulis,” she would say under her breath.
“Ser Gregor, Dunsen, Polliver, Ra the Sweetling. The Tickler and
the Hound. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei, King Jo rey.”
Only six Winterfell men remained of the twenty her father had
sent west with Beric Dondarrion, Harwin told her, and they were
scattered. “It was a trap, milady. Lord Tywin sent his Mountain
across the Red Fork with re and sword, hoping to draw your lord

father. He planned for Lord Eddard to come west himself to deal
with Gregor Clegane. If he had he would have been killed, or taken
prisoner and traded for the Imp, who was your lady mother’s
captive at the time. Only the Kingslayer never knew Lord Tywin’s
plan, and when he heard about his brother’s capture he attacked
your father in the streets of King’s Landing.”
“I remember,” said Arya. “He killed Jory.” Jory had always
smiled at her, when he wasn’t telling her to get from underfoot.
“He killed Jory,” Harwin agreed, “and your father’s leg was
broken when his horse fell on him. So Lord Eddard couldn’t go west.
He sent Lord Beric instead, with twenty of his own men and twenty
from Winterfell, me among them. There were others besides.
Thoros and Ser Raymun Darry and their men, Ser Gladden Wylde, a
lord named Lothar Mallery. But Gregor was waiting for us at the
Mummer’s Ford, with men concealed on both banks. As we crossed
he fell upon us from front and rear.
“I saw the Mountain slay Raymun Darry with a single blow so
terrible that it took Darry’s arm o at the elbow and killed the
horse beneath him too. Gladden Wylde died there with him, and
Lord Mallery was ridden down and drowned. We had lions on every
side, and I thought I was doomed with the rest, but Alyn shouted
commands and restored order to our ranks, and those still ahorse
rallied around Thoros and cut our way free. Six score we’d been that
morning. By dark no more than two score were left, and Lord Beric
was gravely wounded. Thoros drew a foot of lance from his chest
that night, and poured boiling wine into the hole it left.
“Every man of us was certain his lordship would be dead by
daybreak. But Thoros prayed with him all night beside the re, and
when dawn came, he was still alive, and stronger than he’d been. It
was a fortnight before he could mount a horse, but his courage kept
us strong. He told us that our war had not ended at the Mummer’s
Ford, but only begun there, and that every man of ours who’d fallen
would be avenged tenfold.
“By then the ghting had passed by us. The Mountain’s men were
only the van of Lord Tywin’s host. They crossed the Red Fork in
strength and swept up into the riverlands, burning everything in

their path. We were so few that all we could do was harry their
rear, but we told each other that we’d join up with King Robert
when he marched west to crush Lord Tywin’s rebellion. Only then
we heard that Robert was dead, and Lord Eddard as well, and Cersei
Lannister’s whelp had ascended the Iron Throne.
“That turned the whole world on its head. We’d been sent out by
the King’s Hand to deal with outlaws, you see, but now we were the
outlaws, and Lord Tywin was the Hand of the King. There was some
wanted to yield then, but Lord Beric wouldn’t hear of it. We were
still king’s men, he said, and these were the king’s people the lions
were savaging. If we could not ght for Robert, we would ght for
them, until every man of us was dead. And so we did, but as we
fought something queer happened. For every man we lost, two
showed up to take his place. A few were knights or squires, of
gentle birth, but most were common men— eldhands and ddlers
and innkeeps, servants and shoemakers, even two septons. Men of
all sorts, and women too, children, dogs …”
“Dogs?” said Arya.
“Aye.” Harwin grinned. “One of our lads keeps the meanest dogs
you’d ever want to see.”
“I wish I had a good mean dog,” said Arya wistfully. “A lionkilling dog.” She’d had a direwolf once, Nymeria, but she’d thrown
rocks at her until she ed, to keep the queen from killing her. Could
a direwolf kill a lion? she wondered.
It rained again that afternoon, and long into the evening.
Thankfully the outlaws had secret friends all over, so they did not
need to camp out in the open or seek shelter beneath some leaky
bower, as she and Hot Pie and Gendry had done so often.
That night they sheltered in a burned, abandoned village. At least
it seemed to be abandoned, until Jack-Be-Lucky blew two short
blasts and two long ones on his hunting horn. Then all sorts of
people came crawling out of the ruins and up from secret cellars.
They had ale and dried apples and some stale barley bread, and the
outlaws had a goose that Anguy had brought down on the ride, so
supper that night was almost a feast.

Arya was sucking the last bit of meat o a wing when one of the
villagers turned to Lem Lemoncloak and said, “There were men
through here not two days past, looking for the Kingslayer.”
Lem snorted. “They’d do better looking in Riverrun. Down in the
deepest dungeons, where it’s nice and damp.” His nose looked like a
squashed apple, red and raw and swollen, and his mood was foul.
“No,” another villager said. “He’s escaped.”
The Kingslayer. Arya could feel the hair on the back of her neck
prickling. She held her breath to listen.
“Could that be true?” Tom o’ Sevens said.
“I’ll not believe it,” said the one-eyed man in the rusty pothelm.
The other outlaws called him Jack-Be-Lucky, though losing an eye
didn’t seem very lucky to Arya. “I’ve had me a taste o’ them
dungeons. How could he escape?”
The villagers could only shrug at that. Greenbeard stroked his
thick grey-and-green whiskers and said, “The wolves will drown in
blood if the Kingslayer’s loose again. Thoros must be told. The Lord
of Light will show him Lannister in the ames.”
“There’s a ne re burning here,” said Anguy, smiling.
Greenbeard laughed, and cu ed the archer’s ear. “Do I look a
priest to you, Archer? When Pello of Tyrosh peers into the re, the
cinders singe his beard.”
Lem cracked his knuckles and said, “Wouldn’t Lord Beric love to
capture Jaime Lannister, though …”
“Would he hang him, Lem?” one of the village women asked.
“It’d be half a shame to hang a man as pretty as that one.”
“A trial rst!” said Anguy. “Lord Beric always gives them a trial,
you know that.” He smiled. “Then he hangs them.”
There was laughter all around. Then Tom drew his ngers across
the strings of his woodharp and broke into soft song.
The brothers of the Kingswood,
they were an outlaw band.
The forest was their castle,
but they roamed across the land.
No man’s gold was safe from them,

nor any maiden’s hand.
Oh, the brothers of the Kingswood,
that fearsome outlaw band …
Warm and dry in a corner between Gendry and Harwin, Arya
listened to the singing for a time, then closed her eyes and drifted
o to sleep. She dreamt of home; not Riverrun, but Winterfell. It
was not a good dream, though. She was alone outside the castle, up
to her knees in mud. She could see the grey walls ahead of her, but
when she tried to reach the gates every step seemed harder than the
one before, and the castle faded before her, until it looked more
like smoke than granite. And there were wolves as well, gaunt grey
shapes stalking through the trees all around her, their eyes shining.
Whenever she looked at them, she remembered the taste of blood.
The next morning they left the road to cut across the elds. The
wind was gusting, sending dry brown leaves swirling around the
hooves of their horses, but for once it did not rain. When the sun
came out from behind a cloud, it was so bright Arya had to pull her
hood forward to keep it out of her eyes.
She reined up very suddenly. “We are going the wrong way!”
Gendry groaned. “What is it, moss again?”
“Look at the sun,” she said. “We’re going south!” Arya rummaged
in her saddlebag for the map, so she could show them. “We should
never have left the Trident. See.” She unrolled the map on her leg.
All of them were looking at her now. “See, there’s Riverrun,
between the rivers.”
“As it happens,” said Jack-Be-Lucky, “we know where Riverrun is.
Every man o’ us.”
“You’re not going to Riverrun,” Lem told her bluntly.
I was almost there, Arya thought. I should have let them take our
horses. I could have walked the rest of the way. She remembered her
dream then, and bit her lip.
“Ah, don’t look so hurt, child,” said Tom Sevenstrings. “No harm
will come to you, you have my word on that.”
“The word of a liar!”

“No one lied,” said Lem. “We made no promises. It’s not for us to
say what’s to be done with you.”
Lem was not the leader, though, no more than Tom; that was
Greenbeard, the Tyroshi. Arya turned to face him. “Take me to
Riverrun and you’ll be rewarded,” she said desperately.
“Little one,” Greenbeard answered, “a peasant may skin a
common squirrel for his pot, but if he nds a gold squirrel in his
tree he takes it to his lord, or he will wish he did.”
“I’m not a squirrel,” Arya insisted.
“You are.” Greenbeard laughed. “A little gold squirrel who’s o to
see the lightning lord, whether she wills it or not. He’ll know what’s
to be done with you. I’ll wager he sends you back to your lady
mother, just as you wish.”
Tom Sevenstrings nodded. “Aye, that’s like Lord Beric. He’ll do
right by you, see if he don’t.”
Lord Beric Dondarrion. Arya remembered all she’d heard at
Harrenhal, from the Lannisters and the Bloody Mummers alike.
Lord Beric the wisp o’ the wood. Lord Beric who’d been killed by
Vargo Hoat and before that by Ser Amory Lorch, and twice by the
Mountain That Rides. If he won’t send me home maybe I’ll kill him too.
“Why do I have to see Lord Beric?” she asked quietly.
“We bring him all our highborn captives,” said Anguy.
Captive. Arya took a breath to still her soul. Calm as still water. She
glanced at the outlaws on their horses, and turned her horse’s head.
Now, quick as a snake, she thought, as she slammed her heels into
the courser’s ank. Right between Greenbeard and Jack-Be-Lucky
she ew, and caught one glimpse of Gendry’s startled face as his
mare moved out of her way. And then she was in the open eld,
and running.
North or south, east or west, that made no matter now. She could
nd the way to Riverrun later, once she’d lost them. Arya leaned
forward in the saddle and urged the horse to a gallop. Behind her
the outlaws were cursing and shouting at her to come back. She
shut her ears to the calls, but when she glanced back over her
shoulder four of them were coming after her, Anguy and Harwin
and Greenbeard racing side by side with Lem farther back, his big

yellow cloak apping behind him as he rode. “Swift as a deer,” she
told her mount. “Run, now, run.”
Arya dashed across brown weedy elds, through waist-high grass
and piles of dry leaves that urried and ew when her horse
galloped past. There were woods to her left, she saw. I can lose them
there. A dry ditch ran along one side of the eld, but she leapt it
without breaking stride, and plunged in among the stand of elm and
yew and birch trees. A quick peek back showed Anguy and Harwin
still hard on her heels. Greenbeard had fallen behind, though, and
she could not see Lem at all. “Faster,” she told her horse, “you can,
you can.”
Between two elms she rode, and never paused to see which side
the moss was growing on. She leapt a rotten log and swung wide
around a monstrous deadfall, jagged with broken branches. Then up
a gentle slope and down the other side, slowing and speeding up
again, her horse’s shoes striking sparks o the intstones underfoot.
At the top of the hill she glanced back. Harwin had pushed ahead of
Anguy, but both were coming hard. Greenbeard had fallen further
back and seemed to be agging.
A stream barred her way. She splashed down into it, through
water choked with wet brown leaves. Some clung to her horse’s legs
as they climbed the other side. The undergrowth was thicker here,
the ground so full of roots and rocks that she had to slow, but she
kept as good a pace as she dared. Another hill before her, this one
steeper. Up she went, and down again. How big are these woods? she
wondered. She had the faster horse, she knew that, she had stolen
one of Roose Bolton’s best from the stables at Harrenhal, but his
speed was wasted here. I need to nd the elds again. I need to nd a
road. Instead she found a game trail. It was narrow and uneven, but
it was something. She raced along it, branches whipping at her face.
One snagged her hood and yanked it back, and for half a heartbeat
she feared they had caught her. A vixen burst from the brush as she
passed, startled by the fury of her ight. The game trail brought her
to another stream. Or was it the same one? Had she gotten turned
around? There was no time to puzzle it out, she could hear their
horses crashing through the trees behind her. Thorns scratched at

her face like the cats she used to chase in King’s Landing. Sparrows
exploded from the branches of an alder. But the trees were thinning
now, and suddenly she was out of them. Broad level elds stretched
before her, all weeds and wild wheat, sodden and trampled. Arya
kicked her horse back to a gallop. Run, she thought, run for
Riverrun, run for home. Had she lost them? She took one quick look,
and there was Harwin six yards back and gaining. No, she thought,
no, he can’t, not him, it isn’t fair.
Both horses were lathered and agging by the time he came up
beside her, reached over, and grabbed her bridle. Arya was
breathing hard herself then. She knew the ght was done. “You ride
like a northman, milady,” Harwin said when he’d drawn them to a
halt. “Your aunt was the same. Lady Lyanna. But my father was
master of horse, remember.”
The look she gave him was full of hurt. “I thought you were my
father’s man.”
“Lord Eddard’s dead, milady. I belong to the lightning lord now,
and to my brothers.”
“What brothers?” Old Hullen had fathered no other sons that Arya
could remember.
“Anguy, Lem, Tom o’ Sevens, Jack and Greenbeard, all of them.
We mean your brother Robb no ill, milady … but it’s not him we
ght for. He has an army all his own, and many a great lord to bend
the knee. The smallfolk have only us.” He gave her a searching
look. “Can you understand what I am telling you?”
“Yes.” That he was not Robb’s man, she understood well enough.
And that she was his captive. I could have stayed with Hot Pie. We
could have taken the little boat and sailed it up to Riverrun. She had
been better o as Squab. No one would take Squab captive, or Nan,
or Weasel, or Arry the orphan boy. I was a wolf, she thought, but
now I’m just some stupid little lady again.
“Will you ride back peaceful now,” Harwin asked her, “or must I
tie you up and throw you across your horse?”
“I’ll ride peaceful,” she said sullenly. For now.

SAMWELL

Sobbing, Sam took another step. This is the last one, the very last, I

can’t go on, I can’t. But his feet moved again. One and then the
other. They took a step, and then another, and he thought, They’re
not my feet, they’re someone else’s, someone else is walking, it can’t be
me.
When he looked down he could see them stumbling through the
snow; shapeless things, and clumsy. His boots had been black, he
seemed to remember, but the snow had caked around them, and
now they were misshapen white balls. Like two clubfeet made of
ice.
It would not stop, the snow. The drifts were up past his knees,
and a crust covered his lower legs like a pair of white greaves. His
steps were dragging, lurching. The heavy pack he carried made him
look like some monstrous hunchback. And he was tired, so tired. I
can’t go on. Mother have mercy, I can’t.
Every fourth or fth step he had to reach down and tug up his
swordbelt. He had lost the sword on the Fist, but the scabbard still
weighed down the belt. He did have two knives; the dragonglass
dagger Jon had given him and the steel one he cut his meat with.
All that weight dragged heavy, and his belly was so big and round
that if he forgot to tug the belt slipped right o and tangled round
his ankles, no matter how tight he cinched it. He had tried belting it
above his belly once, but then it came almost to his armpits. Grenn
had laughed himself sick at the sight of it, and Dolorous Edd had

said, “I knew a man once who wore his sword on a chain around his
neck like that. One day he stumbled, and the hilt went up his nose.”
Sam was stumbling himself. There were rocks beneath the snow,
and the roots of trees, and sometimes deep holes in the frozen
ground. Black Bernarr had stepped in one and broken his ankle
three days past, or maybe four, or … he did not know how long it
had been, truly. The Lord Commander had put Bernarr on a horse
after that.
Sobbing, Sam took another step. It felt more like he was falling
down than walking, falling endlessly but never hitting the ground,
just falling forward and forward. I have to stop, it hurts too much. I’m
so cold and tired, I need to sleep, just a little sleep beside a re, and a
bite to eat that isn’t frozen.
But if he stopped he died. He knew that. They all knew that, the
few who were left. They had been fty when they ed the Fist,
maybe more, but some had wandered o in the snow, a few
wounded had bled to death … and sometimes Sam heard shouts
behind him, from the rear guard, and once an awful scream. When
he heard that he had run, twenty yards or thirty, as fast and as far
as he could, his half-frozen feet kicking up the snow. He would be
running still if his legs were stronger. They are behind us, they are
still behind us, they are taking us one by one.
Sobbing, Sam took another step. He had been cold so long he was
forgetting what it was like to feel warm. He wore three pairs of
hose, two layers of smallclothes beneath a double lambswool tunic,
and over that a thick quilted coat that padded him against the cold
steel of his chainmail. Over the hauberk he had a loose surcoat,
over that a triple-thick cloak with a bone button that fastened tight
under his chins. Its hood opped forward over his forehead. Heavy
fur mitts covered his hands over thin wool-and-leather gloves, a
scarf was wrapped snugly about the lower half of his face, and he
had a tight- tting eece-lined cap to pull down over his ears
beneath the hood. And still the cold was in him. His feet especially.
He couldn’t even feel them now, but only yesterday they had hurt
so bad he could hardly bear to stand on them, let alone walk. Every
step made him want to scream. Was that yesterday? He could not

remember. He had not slept since the Fist, not once since the horn
had blown. Unless it was while he was walking. Could a man walk
while he was sleeping? Sam did not know, or else he had forgotten.
Sobbing, he took another step. The snow swirled down around
him. Sometimes it fell from a white sky, and sometimes from a
black, but that was all that remained of day and night. He wore it
on his shoulders like a second cloak, and it piled up high atop the
pack he carried and made it even heavier and harder to bear. The
small of his back hurt abominably, as if someone had shoved a knife
in there and was wiggling it back and forth with every step. His
shoulders were in agony from the weight of the mail. He would
have given most anything to take it o , but he was afraid to.
Anyway he would have needed to remove his cloak and surcoat to
get at it, and then the cold would have him.
If only I was stronger … He wasn’t, though, and it was no good
wishing. Sam was weak, and fat, so very fat, he could hardly bear
his own weight, the mail was much too much for him. It felt as
though it was rubbing his shoulders raw, despite the layers of cloth
and quilt between the steel and skin. The only thing he could do
was cry, and when he cried the tears froze on his cheeks.
Sobbing, he took another step. The crust was broken where he set
his feet, otherwise he did not think he could have moved at all. O
to the left and right, half-seen through the silent trees, torches
turned to vague orange haloes in the falling snow. When he turned
his head he could see them, slipping silent through the wood,
bobbing up and down and back and forth. The Old Bear’s ring of re,
he reminded himself, and woe to him who leaves it. As he walked, it
seemed as if he were chasing the torches ahead of him, but they had
legs as well, longer and stronger than his, so he could never catch
them.
Yesterday he begged for them to let him be one of the
torchbearers, even if it meant walking outside of the column with
the darkness pressing close. He wanted the re, dreamed of the re.
If I had the re, I would not be cold. But someone reminded him that
he’d had a torch at the start, but he’d dropped it in the snow and
snu ed the re out. Sam didn’t remember dropping any torch, but

he supposed it was true. He was too weak to hold his arm up for
long. Was it Edd who reminded him about the torch, or Grenn? He
couldn’t remember that either. Fat and weak and useless, even my
wits are freezing now. He took another step.
He had wrapped his scarf over his nose and mouth, but it was
covered with snot now, and so sti he feared it must be frozen to
his face. Even breathing was hard, and the air was so cold it hurt to
swallow it. “Mother have mercy,” he muttered in a hushed husky
voice beneath the frozen mask. “Mother have mercy, Mother have
mercy, Mother have mercy.” With each prayer he took another step,
dragging his legs through the snow. “Mother have mercy, Mother
have mercy, Mother have mercy.”
His own mother was a thousand leagues south, safe with his
sisters and his little brother Dickon in the keep at Horn Hill. She
can’t hear me, no more than the Mother Above. The Mother was
merciful, all the septons agreed, but the Seven had no power
beyond the Wall. This was where the old gods ruled, the nameless
gods of the trees and the wolves and the snows. “Mercy,” he
whispered then, to whatever might be listening, old gods or new, or
demons too, “oh, mercy, mercy me, mercy me.”
Maslyn screamed for mercy. Why had he suddenly remembered
that? It was nothing he wanted to remember. The man had
stumbled backward, dropping his sword, pleading, yielding, even
yanking o his thick black glove and thrusting it up before him as if
it were a gauntlet. He was still shrieking for quarter as the wight
lifted him in the air by the throat and near ripped the head o him.
The dead have no mercy left in them, and the Others … no, I mustn’t
think of that, don’t think, don’t remember, just walk, just walk, just
walk.
Sobbing, he took another step.
A root beneath the crust caught his toe, and Sam tripped and fell
heavily to one knee, so hard he bit his tongue. He could taste the
blood in his mouth, warmer than anything he had tasted since the
Fist. This is the end, he thought. Now that he had fallen he could not
seem to nd the strength to rise again. He groped for a tree branch
and clutched it tight, trying to pull himself back to his feet, but his

sti legs would not support him. The mail was too heavy, and he
was too fat besides, and too weak, and too tired.
“Back on your feet, Piggy,” someone growled as he went past,
but Sam paid him no mind. I’ll just lie down in the snow and close my
eyes. It wouldn’t be so bad, dying here. He couldn’t possibly be any
colder, and after a little while he wouldn’t be able to feel the ache
in his lower back or the terrible pain in his shoulders, no more than
he could feel his feet. I won’t be the rst to die, they can’t say I was.
Hundreds had died on the Fist, they had died all around him, and
more had died after, he’d seen them. Shivering, Sam released his
grip on the tree and eased himself down in the snow. It was cold
and wet, he knew, but he could scarcely feel it through all his
clothing. He stared upward at the pale white sky as snow akes
drifted down upon his stomach and his chest and his eyelids. The
snow will cover me like a thick white blanket. It will be warm under the
snow, and if they speak of me they’ll have to say I died a man of the
Night’s Watch. I did. I did. I did my duty. No one can say I forswore
myself. I’m fat and I’m weak and I’m craven, but I did my duty.
The ravens had been his responsibility. That was why they had
brought him along. He hadn’t wanted to go, he’d told them so, he’d
told them all what a big coward he was. But Maester Aemon was
very old and blind besides, so they had to send Sam to tend to the
ravens. The Lord Commander had given him his orders when they
made their camp on the Fist. “You’re no ghter. We both know
that, boy. If it happens that we’re attacked, don’t go trying to prove
otherwise, you’ll just get in the way. You’re to send a message. And
don’t come running to ask what the letter should say. Write it out
yourself, and send one bird to Castle Black and another to the
Shadow Tower.” The Old Bear pointed a gloved nger right in
Sam’s face. “I don’t care if you’re so scared you foul your breeches,
and I don’t care if a thousand wildlings are coming over the walls
howling for your blood, you get those birds o , or I swear I’ll hunt
you through all seven hells and make you damn sorry that you
didn’t.” And Mormont’s own raven had bobbed its head up and
down and croaked, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Sam was sorry; sorry he hadn’t been braver, or stronger, or good
with swords, that he hadn’t been a better son to his father and a
better brother to Dickon and the girls. He was sorry to die too, but
better men had died on the Fist, good men and true, not squeaking
fat boys like him. At least he would not have the Old Bear hunting
him through hell, though. I got the birds o . I did that right, at least.
He had written out the messages ahead of time, short messages and
simple, telling of an attack on the Fist of the First Men, and then he
had tucked them away safe in his parchment pouch, hoping he
would never need to send them.
When the horns blew Sam had been sleeping. He thought he was
dreaming them at rst, but when he opened his eyes snow was
falling on the camp and the black brothers were all grabbing bows
and spears and running toward the ringwall. Chett was the only one
nearby, Maester Aemon’s old steward with the face full of boils and
the big wen on his neck. Sam had never seen so much fear on a
man’s face as he saw on Chett’s when that third blast came moaning
through the trees. “Help me get the birds o ,” he pleaded, but the
other steward had turned and run o , dagger in hand. He has the
dogs to care for, Sam remembered. Probably the Lord Commander
had given him some orders as well.
His ngers had been so sti and clumsy in the gloves, and he was
shaking from fear and cold, but he found the parchment pouch and
dug out the messages he’d written. The ravens were shrieking
furiously, and when he opened the Castle Black cage one of them
ew right in his face. Two more escaped before Sam could catch
one, and when he did it pecked him through his glove, drawing
blood. Yet somehow he held on long enough to attach the little roll
of parchment. The warhorn had fallen silent by then, but the Fist
rang with shouted commands and the clatter of steel. “Fly!” Sam
called as he tossed the raven into the air.
The birds in the Shadow Tower cage were screaming and
uttering about so madly that he was afraid to open the door, but
he made himself do it anyway. This time he caught the rst raven
that tried to escape. A moment later, it was clawing its way up
through the falling snow, bearing word of the attack.

His duty done, he nished dressing with clumsy, frightened
ngers, donning his cap and surcoat and hooded cloak and buckling
on his swordbelt, buckling it real tight so it wouldn’t fall down.
Then he found his pack and stu ed all his things inside, spare
smallclothes and dry socks, the dragonglass arrowheads and
spearhead Jon had given him and the old horn too, his parchments,
inks, and quills, the maps he’d been drawing, and a rock-hard garlic
sausage he’d been saving since the Wall. He tied it all up and
shouldered the pack onto his back. The Lord Commander said I wasn’t
to rush to the ringwall, he recalled, but he said I shouldn’t come running
to him either. Sam took a deep breath and realized that he did not
know what to do next.
He remembered turning in a circle, lost, the fear growing inside
him as it always did. There were dogs barking and horses
trumpeting, but the snow mu ed the sounds and made them seem
far away. Sam could see nothing beyond three yards, not even the
torches burning along the low stone wall that ringed the crown of
the hill. Could the torches have gone out? That was too scary to think
about. The horn blew thrice long, three long blasts means Others. The
white walkers of the wood, the cold shadows, the monsters of the
tales that made him squeak and tremble as a boy, riding their giant
ice-spiders, hungry for blood …
Awkwardly he drew his sword, and plodded heavily through the
snow holding it. A dog ran past barking, and he saw some of the
men from the Shadow Tower, big bearded men with longaxes and
eight-foot spears. He felt safer for their company, so he followed
them to the wall. When he saw the torches still burning atop the
ring of stones a shudder of relief went through him.
The black brothers stood with swords and spears in hand,
watching the snow fall, waiting. Ser Mallador Locke went by on his
horse, wearing a snow-speckled helm. Sam stood well back behind
the others, looking for Grenn or Dolorous Edd. If I have to die, let me
die beside my friends, he remembered thinking. But all the men
around him were strangers, Shadow Tower men under the command
of the ranger named Blane.
“Here they come,” he heard a brother say.

“Notch,” said Blane, and twenty black arrows were pulled from as
many quivers, and notched to as many bowstrings.
“Gods be good, there’s hundreds,” a voice said softly.
“Draw,” Blane said, and then, “hold.” Sam could not see and did
not want to see. The men of the Night’s Watch stood behind their
torches, waiting with arrows pulled back to their ears, as something
came up that dark, slippery slope through the snow. “Hold,” Blane
said again, “hold, hold.” And then, “Loose.”
The arrows whispered as they ew.
A ragged cheer went up from the men along the ringwall, but it
died quickly. “They’re not stopping, m’lord,” a man said to Blane,
and another shouted, “More! Look there, coming from the trees,”
and yet another said, “Gods ha’ mercy, they’s crawling. They’s
almost here, they’s on us!” Sam had been backing away by then,
shaking like the last leaf on the tree when the wind kicks up, as
much from cold as from fear. It had been very cold that night. Even
colder than now. The snow feels almost warm. I feel better now. A little
rest was all I needed. Maybe in a little while I’ll be strong enough to walk
again. In a little while.
A horse stepped past his head, a shaggy grey beast with snow in
its mane and hooves crusted with ice. Sam watched it come and
watched it go. Another appeared from out of the falling snow, with
a man in black leading it. When he saw Sam in his path he cursed
him and led the horse around. I wish I had a horse, he thought. If I
had a horse I could keep going. I could sit, and even sleep some in the
saddle. Most of their mounts had been lost at the Fist, though, and
those that remained carried their food, their torches, and their
wounded. Sam wasn’t wounded. Only fat and weak, and the greatest
craven in the Seven Kingdoms.
He was such a coward. Lord Randyll, his father, had always said
so, and he had been right. Sam was his heir, but he had never been
worthy, so his father had sent him away to the Wall. His little
brother Dickon would inherit the Tarly lands and castle, and the
greatsword Heartsbane that the lords of Horn Hill had borne so
proudly for centuries. He wondered whether Dickon would shed a
tear for his brother who died in the snow, somewhere o beyond

the edge of the world. Why should he? A coward’s not worth weeping
over. He had heard his father tell his mother as much, half a
hundred times. The Old Bear knew it too.
“Fire arrows,” the Lord Commander roared that night on the Fist,
when he appeared suddenly astride his horse, “give them ame.” It
was then he noticed Sam there quaking. “Tarly! Get out of here!
Your place is with the ravens.”
“I … I … I got the messages away.”
“Good.” On Mormont’s shoulder his own raven echoed, “Good,
good.” The Lord Commander looked huge in fur and mail. Behind
his black iron visor, his eyes were erce. “You’re in the way here.
Go back to your cages. If I need to send another message, I don’t
want to have to nd you rst. See that the birds are ready.” He did
not wait for a response, but turned his horse and trotted around the
ring, shouting, “Fire! Give them re!”
Sam did not need to be told twice. He went back to the birds, as
fast as his fat legs could carry him. I should write the message ahead
of time, he thought, so we can get the birds away as fast as need be. It
took him longer than it should have to light his little re, to warm
the frozen ink. He sat beside it on a rock with quill and parchment,
and wrote his messages.
Attacked amidst snow and cold, but we’ve thrown them back with re
arrows, he wrote, as he heard Thoren Smallwood’s voice ring out
with a command of, “Notch, draw … loose.” The ight of arrows
made a sound as sweet as a mother’s prayer. “Burn, you dead
bastards, burn,” Dywen sang out, cackling. The brothers cheered
and cursed. All safe, he wrote. We remain on the Fist of the First Men.
Sam hoped they were better archers than him.
He put that note aside and found another blank parchment. Still
ghting on the Fist, amidst heavy snow, he wrote when someone
shouted, “They’re still coming.” Result uncertain. “Spears,” someone
said. It might have been Ser Mallador, but Sam could not swear to
it. Wights attacked us on the Fist, in snow, he wrote, but we drove them
o with re. He turned his head. Through the drifting snow, all he
could see was the huge re at the center of the camp, with mounted
men moving restlessly around it. The reserve, he knew, ready to

ride down anything that breached the ringwall. They had armed
themselves with torches in place of swords, and were lighting them
in the ames.
Wights all around us, he wrote, when he heard the shouts from the
north face. Coming up from north and south at once. Spears and swords
don’t stop them, only re. “Loose, loose, loose,” a voice screamed in
the night, and another shouted, “Bloody huge,” and a third voice
said, “A giant!” and a fourth insisted, “A bear, a bear!” A horse
shrieked and the hounds began to bay, and there was so much
shouting that Sam couldn’t make out the voices anymore. He wrote
faster, note after note. Dead wildlings, and a giant, or maybe a bear,
on us, all around. He heard the crash of steel on wood, which could
only mean one thing. Wights over the ringwall. Fighting inside the
camp. A dozen mounted brothers pounded past him toward the east
wall, burning brands streaming ames in each rider’s hand. Lord
Commander Mormont is meeting them with re. We’ve won. We’re
winning. We’re holding our own. We’re cutting our way free and
retreating for the Wall. We’re trapped on the Fist, hard pressed.
One of the Shadow Tower men came staggering out of the
darkness to fall at Sam’s feet. He crawled within a foot of the re
before he died. Lost, Sam wrote, the battle’s lost. We’re all lost.
Why must he remember the ght at the Fist? He didn’t want to
remember. Not that. He tried to make himself remember his
mother, or his little sister Talla, or that girl Gilly at Craster’s Keep.
Someone was shaking him by the shoulder. “Get up,” a voice said.
“Sam, you can’t go to sleep here. Get up and keep walking.”
I wasn’t asleep, I was remembering. “Go away,” he said, his words
frosting in the cold air. “I’m well. I want to rest.”
“Get up.” Grenn’s voice, harsh and husky. He loomed over Sam,
his blacks crusty with snow. “There’s no resting, the Old Bear said.
You’ll die.”
“Grenn.” He smiled. “No, truly, I’m good here. You just go on. I’ll
catch you after I’ve rested a bit longer.”
“You won’t.” Grenn’s thick brown beard was frozen all around his
mouth. It made him look like some old man. “You’ll freeze, or the
Others will get you. Sam, get up!”

The night before they left the Wall, Pyp had teased Grenn the
way he did, Sam remembered, smiling and saying how Grenn was a
good choice for the ranging, since he was too stupid to be terri ed.
Grenn hotly denied it until he realized what he was saying. He was
stocky and thick-necked and strong—Ser Alliser Thorne had called
him “Aurochs,” the same way he called Sam “Ser Piggy” and Jon
“Lord Snow”—but he had always treated Sam nice enough. That was
only because of Jon, though. If it weren’t for Jon, none of them would
have liked me. And now Jon was gone, lost in the Skirling Pass with
Qhorin Halfhand, most likely dead. Sam would have cried for him,
but those tears would only freeze as well, and he could scarcely
keep his eyes open now.
A tall brother with a torch stopped beside them, and for a
wonderful moment Sam felt the warmth on his face. “Leave him,”
the man said to Grenn. “If they can’t walk, they’re done. Save your
strength for yourself, Grenn.”
“He’ll get up,” Grenn replied. “He only needs a hand.”
The man moved on, taking the blessed warmth with him. Grenn
tried to pull Sam to his feet. “That hurts,” he complained. “Stop it.
Grenn, you’re hurting my arm. Stop it.”
“You’re too bloody heavy.” Grenn jammed his hands into Sam’s
armpits, gave a grunt, and hauled him upright. But the moment he
let go, the fat boy sat back down in the snow. Grenn kicked him, a
solid thump that cracked the crust of snow around his boot and sent
it ying everywhere. “Get up!” He kicked him again. “Get up and
walk. You have to walk.”
Sam fell over sideways, curling up into a tight ball to protect
himself from the kicks. He hardly felt them through all his wool and
leather and mail, but even so, they hurt. I thought Grenn was my
friend. You shouldn’t kick your friends. Why won’t they let me be? I just
need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.
“If you take the torch, I can take the fat boy.”
Suddenly he was jerked up into the cold air, away from his sweet
soft snow; he was oating. There was an arm under his knees, and
another one under his back. Sam raised his head and blinked. A face
loomed close, a broad brutal face with a at nose and small dark

eyes and a thicket of coarse brown beard. He had seen the face
before, but it took him a moment to remember. Paul. Small Paul.
Melting ice ran down into his eyes from the heat of the torch. “Can
you carry him?” he heard Grenn ask.
“I carried a calf once was heavier than him. I carried him down to
his mother so he could get a drink of milk.”
Sam’s head bobbed up and down with every step that Small Paul
took. “Stop it,” he muttered, “put me down, I’m not a baby. I’m a
man of the Night’s Watch.” He sobbed. “Just let me die.”
“Be quiet, Sam,” said Grenn. “Save your strength. Think about
your sisters and brother. Maester Aemon. Your favorite foods. Sing
a song if you like.”
“Aloud?”
“In your head.”
Sam knew a hundred songs, but when he tried to think of one he
couldn’t. The words had all gone from his head. He sobbed again
and said, “I don’t know any songs, Grenn. I did know some, but
now I don’t.”
“Yes you do,” said Grenn. “How about ‘The Bear and the Maiden
Fair,’ everybody knows that one. A bear there was, a bear, a bear! All
black and brown and covered with hair!”
“No, not that one,” Sam pleaded. The bear that had come up the
Fist had no hair left on its rotted esh. He didn’t want to think
about bears. “No songs. Please, Grenn.”
“Think about your ravens, then.”
“They were never mine.” They were the Lord Commander’s ravens,
the ravens of the Night’s Watch. “They belonged to Castle Black and
the Shadow Tower.”
Small Paul frowned. “Chett said I could have the Old Bear’s
raven, the one that talks. I saved food for it and everything.” He
shook his head. “I forgot, though. I left the food where I hid it.” He
plodded onward, pale white breath coming from his mouth with
every step, then suddenly said, “Could I have one of your ravens?
Just the one. I’d never let Lark eat it.”
“They’re gone,” said Sam. “I’m sorry.” So sorry. “They’re ying
back to the Wall now.” He had set the birds free when he’d heard

the warhorns sound once more, calling the Watch to horse. Two
short blasts and a long one, that was the call to mount up. But there
was no reason to mount, unless to abandon the Fist, and that meant
the battle was lost. The fear bit him so strong then that it was all
Sam could do to open the cages. Only as he watched the last raven
ap up into the snowstorm did he realize that he had forgotten to
send any of the messages he’d written.
“No,” he’d squealed, “oh, no, oh, no.” The snow fell and the horns
blew; ahooo ahooo ahooooooooooooooooooo, they cried, to horse, to
horse, to horse. Sam saw two ravens perched on a rock and ran
after them, but the birds apped o lazily through the swirling
snow, in opposite directions. He chased one, his breath pu ng out
his nose in thick white clouds, stumbled, and found himself ten feet
from the ringwall.
After that … he remembered the dead coming over the stones
with arrows in their faces and through their throats. Some were all
in ringmail and some were almost naked … wildings, most of them,
but a few wore faded blacks. He remembered one of the Shadow
Tower men shoving his spear through a wight’s pale soft belly and
out his back, and how the thing staggered right up the shaft and
reached out his black hands and twisted the brother’s head around
until blood came out his mouth. That was when his bladder let go
the rst time, he was almost sure.
He did not remember running, but he must have, because the next
he knew he was near the re half a camp away, with old Ser Ottyn
Wythers and some archers. Ser Ottyn was on his knees in the snow,
staring at the chaos around them, until a riderless horse came by
and kicked him in the face. The archers paid him no mind. They
were loosing re arrows at shadows in the dark. Sam saw one wight
hit, saw the ames engulf it, but there were a dozen more behind it,
and a huge pale shape that must have been the bear, and soon
enough the bowmen had no arrows.
And then Sam found himself on a horse. It wasn’t his own horse,
and he never recalled mounting up either. Maybe it was the horse
that had smashed Ser Ottyn’s face in. The horns were still blowing,
so he kicked the horse and turned him toward the sound.

In the midst of carnage and chaos and blowing snow, he found
Dolorous Edd sitting on his garron with a plain black banner on a
spear. “Sam,” Edd said when he saw him, “would you wake me,
please? I am having this terrible nightmare.”
More men were mounting up every moment. The warhorns called
them back. Ahooo ahooo ahooooooooooooooooooo. “They’re over the
west wall, m’lord,” Thoren Smallwood screamed at the Old Bear, as
he fought to control his horse. “I’ll send reserves …”
“NO!” Mormont had to bellow at the top of his lungs to be heard
over the horns. “Call them back, we have to cut our way out.” He
stood in his stirrups, his black cloak snapping in the wind, the re
shining o his armor. “Spearhead!” he roared. “Form wedge, we
ride. Down the south face, then east!”
“My lord, the south slope’s crawling with them!”
“The others are too steep,” Mormont said. “We have—”
His garron screamed and reared and almost threw him as the bear
came staggering through the snow. Sam pissed himself all over
again. I didn’t think I had any more left inside me. The bear was dead,
pale and rotting, its fur and skin all sloughed o and half its right
arm burned to bone, yet still it came on. Only its eyes lived. Bright
blue, just as Jon said. They shone like frozen stars. Thoren
Smallwood charged, his longsword shining all orange and red from
the light of the re. His swing near took the bear’s head o . And
then the bear took his.
“RIDE!” the Lord Commander shouted, wheeling.
They were at the gallop by the time they reached the ring. Sam
had always been too frightened to jump a horse before, but when
the low stone wall loomed up before him he knew he had no choice.
He kicked and closed his eyes and whimpered, and the garron took
him over, somehow, somehow, the garron took him over. The rider
to his right came crashing down in a tangle of steel and leather and
screaming horse esh, and then the wights were swarming over him
and the wedge was closing up. They plunged down the hillside at a
run, through clutching black hands and burning blue eyes and
blowing snow. Horses stumbled and rolled, men were swept from
their saddles, torches spun through the air, axes and swords hacked

at dead esh, and Samwell Tarly sobbed, clutching desperately to
his horse with a strength he never knew he had.
He was in the middle of the ying spearhead with brothers on
either side, and before and behind him as well. A dog ran with them
for a ways, bounding down the snowy slope and in and out among
the horses, but it could not keep up. The wights stood their ground
and were ridden down and trampled underhoof. Even as they fell
they clutched at swords and stirrups and the legs of passing horses.
Sam saw one claw open a garron’s belly with its right hand while it
clung to the saddle with its left.
Suddenly the trees were all about them, and Sam was splashing
through a frozen stream with the sounds of slaughter dwindling
behind. He turned, breathless with relief … until a man in black
leapt from the brush and yanked him out of the saddle. Who he
was, Sam never saw; he was up in an instant, and galloping away
the next. When he tried to run after the horse, his feet tangled in a
root and he fell hard on his face and lay weeping like a baby until
Dolorous Edd found him there.
That was his last coherent memory of the Fist of the First Men.
Later, hours later, he stood shivering among the other survivors,
half mounted and half afoot. They were miles from the Fist by then,
though Sam did not remember how. Dywen had led down ve
packhorses, heavy laden with food and oil and torches, and three
had made it this far. The Old Bear made them redistribute the loads,
so the loss of any one horse and its provisions would not be such a
catastrophe. He took garrons from the healthy men and gave them
to the wounded, organized the walkers, and set torches to guard
their anks and rear. All I need do is walk, Sam told himself, as he
took that rst step toward home. But before an hour was gone he
had begun to struggle, and to lag …
They were lagging now as well, he saw. He remembered Pyp
saying once how Small Paul was the strongest man in the Watch. He
must be, to carry me. Yet even so, the snow was growing deeper, the
ground more treacherous, and Paul’s strides had begun to shorten.
More horsemen passed, wounded men who looked at Sam with dull
incurious eyes. Some torch bearers went by as well. “You’re falling

behind,” one told them. The next agreed. “No one’s like to wait for
you, Paul. Leave the pig for the dead men.”
“He promised I could have a bird,” Small Paul said, even though
Sam hadn’t, not truly. They aren’t mine to give. “I want me a bird
that talks, and eats corn from my hand.”
“Bloody fool,” the torch man said. Then he was gone.
It was a while after when Grenn stopped suddenly. “We’re alone,”
he said in a hoarse voice. “I can’t see the other torches. Was that the
rear guard?”
Small Paul had no answer for him. The big man gave a grunt and
sank to his knees. His arms trembled as he lay Sam gently in the
snow. “I can’t carry you no more. I would, but I can’t.” He shivered
violently.
The wind sighed through the trees, driving a ne spray of snow
into their faces. The cold was so bitter that Sam felt naked. He
looked for the other torches, but they were gone, every one of
them. There was only the one Grenn carried, the ames rising from
it like pale orange silks. He could see through them, to the black
beyond. That torch will burn out soon, he thought, and we are all
alone, without food or friends or re.
But that was wrong. They weren’t alone at all.
The lower branches of the great green sentinel shed their burden
of snow with a soft wet plop. Grenn spun, thrusting out his torch.
“Who goes there?” A horse’s head emerged from the darkness. Sam
felt a moment’s relief, until he saw the horse. Hoarfrost covered it
like a sheen of frozen sweat, and a nest of sti black entrails
dragged from its open belly. On its back was a rider pale as ice.
Sam made a whimpery sound deep in his throat. He was so scared
he might have pissed himself all over again, but the cold was in
him, a cold so savage that his bladder felt frozen solid. The Other
slid gracefully from the saddle to stand upon the snow. Sword-slim
it was, and milky white. Its armor rippled and shifted as it moved,
and its feet did not break the crust of the new-fallen snow.
Small Paul unslung the long-hafted axe strapped across his back.
“Why’d you hurt that horse? That was Mawney’s horse.”

Sam groped for the hilt of his sword, but the scabbard was empty.
He had lost it on the Fist, he remembered too late.
“Get away!” Grenn took a step, thrusting the torch out before
him. “Away, or you burn.” He poked at it with the ames.
The Other’s sword gleamed with a faint blue glow. It moved
toward Grenn, lightning quick, slashing. When the ice blue blade
brushed the ames, a screech stabbed Sam’s ears sharp as a needle.
The head of the torch tumbled sideways to vanish beneath a deep
drift of snow, the re snu ed out at once. And all Grenn held was a
short wooden stick. He ung it at the Other, cursing, as Small Paul
charged in with his axe.
The fear that lled Sam then was worse than any fear he had ever
felt before, and Samwell Tarly knew every kind of fear. “Mother
have mercy,” he wept, forgetting the old gods in his terror. “Father
protect me, oh oh …” His ngers found his dagger and he lled his
hand with that.
The wights had been slow clumsy things, but the Other was light
as snow on the wind. It slid away from Paul’s axe, armor rippling,
and its crystal sword twisted and spun and slipped between the iron
rings of Paul’s mail, through leather and wool and bone and esh. It
came out his back with a hissssssssssss and Sam heard Paul say, “Oh,”
as he lost the axe. Impaled, his blood smoking around the sword,
the big man tried to reach his killer with his hands and almost had
before he fell. The weight of him tore the strange pale sword from
the Other’s grip.
Do it now. Stop crying and ght, you baby. Fight, craven. It was his
father he heard, it was Alliser Thorne, it was his brother Dickon and
the boy Rast. Craven, craven, craven. He giggled hysterically,
wondering if they would make a wight of him, a huge fat white
wight always tripping over its own dead feet. Do it, Sam. Was that
Jon, now? Jon was dead. You can do it, you can, just do it. And then
he was stumbling forward, falling more than running, really, closing
his eyes and shoving the dagger blindly out before him with both
hands. He heard a crack, like the sound ice makes when it breaks
beneath a man’s foot, and then a screech so shrill and sharp that he

went staggering backward with his hands over his mu ed ears, and
fell hard on his arse.
When he opened his eyes the Other’s armor was running down its
legs in rivulets as pale blue blood hissed and steamed around the
black dragonglass dagger in its throat. It reached down with two
bone-white hands to pull out the knife, but where its ngers
touched the obsidian they smoked.
Sam rolled onto his side, eyes wide as the Other shrank and
puddled, dissolving away. In twenty heartbeats its esh was gone,
swirling away in a ne white mist. Beneath were bones like
milkglass, pale and shiny, and they were melting too. Finally only
the dragonglass dagger remained, wreathed in steam as if it were
alive and sweating. Grenn bent to scoop it up and ung it down
again at once. “Mother, that’s cold.”
“Obsidian.” Sam struggled to his knees. “Dragonglass, they call it.
Dragonglass. Dragon glass.” He giggled, and cried, and doubled over
to heave his courage out onto the snow.
Grenn pulled Sam to his feet, checked Small Paul for a pulse and
closed his eyes, then snatched up the dagger again. This time he was
able to hold it.
“You keep it,” Sam said. “You’re not craven like me.”
“So craven you killed an Other.” Grenn pointed with the knife.
“Look there, through the trees. Pink light. Dawn, Sam. Dawn. That
must be east. If we head that way, we should catch Mormont.”
“If you say.” Sam kicked his left foot against a tree, to knock o
all the snow. Then the right. “I’ll try.” Grimacing, he took a step.
“I’ll try hard.” And then another.

TYRION

Lord Tywin’s chain of hands made a golden glitter against the deep

wine velvet of his tunic. The Lords Tyrell, Redwyne, and Rowan
gathered round him as he entered. He greeted each in turn, spoke a
quiet word to Varys, kissed the High Septon’s ring and Cersei’s
cheek, clasped the hand of Grand Maester Pycelle, and seated
himself in the king’s place at the head of the long table, between his
daughter and his brother.
Tyrion had claimed Pycelle’s old place at the foot, propped up by
cushions so he could gaze down the length of the table.
Dispossessed, Pycelle had moved up next to Cersei, about as far
from the dwarf as he could get without claiming the king’s seat. The
Grand Maester was a shambling skeleton, leaning heavily on a
twisted cane and shaking as he walked, a few white hairs sprouting
from his long chicken’s neck in place of his once-luxuriant white
beard. Tyrion gazed at him without remorse.
The others had to scramble for seats: Lord Mace Tyrell, a heavy,
robust man with curling brown hair and a spade-shaped beard well
salted with white; Paxter Redwyne of the Arbor, stoop-shouldered
and thin, his bald head fringed by tufts of orange hair; Mathis
Rowan, Lord of Goldengrove, clean-shaven, stout, and sweating; the
High Septon, a frail man with wispy white chin hair. Too many
strange faces, Tyrion thought, too many new players. The game
changed while I lay rotting in my bed, and no one will tell me the rules.

Oh, the lords had been courteous enough, though he could tell
how uncomfortable it made them to look at him. “That chain of
yours, that was cunning,” Mace Tyrell had said in a jolly tone, and
Lord Redwyne nodded and said, “Quite so, quite so, my lord of
Highgarden speaks for all of us,” and very cheerfully too.
Tell it to the people of this city, Tyrion thought bitterly. Tell it to the
bloody singers, with their songs of Renly’s ghost.
His uncle Kevan had been the warmest, going so far as to kiss his
cheek and say, “Lancel has told me how brave you were, Tyrion. He
speaks very highly of you.”
He’d better, or I’ll have a few things to say of him. He made himself
smile and say, “My good cousin is too kind. His wound is healing, I
trust?”
Ser Kevan frowned. “One day he seems stronger, the next … it is
worrisome. Your sister often visits his sickbed, to lift his spirits and
pray for him.”
But is she praying that he lives, or dies? Cersei had made shameless
use of their cousin, both in and out of bed; a little secret she no
doubt hoped Lancel would carry to his grave now that Father was
here and she no longer had need of him. Would she go so far as to
murder him, though? To look at her today, you would never suspect
Cersei was capable of such ruthlessness. She was all charm, irting
with Lord Tyrell as they spoke of Jo rey’s wedding feast,
complimenting Lord Redwyne on the valor of his twins, softening
gru Lord Rowan with jests and smiles, making pious noises at the
High Septon. “Shall we begin with the wedding arrangements?” she
asked as Lord Tywin took his seat.
“No,” their father said. “With the war. Varys.”
The eunuch smiled a silken smile. “I have such delicious tidings for
you all, my lords. Yesterday at dawn our brave Lord Randyll caught
Robett Glover outside Duskendale and trapped him against the sea.
Losses were heavy on both sides, but in the end our loyal men
prevailed. Ser Helman Tallhart is reported dead, with a thousand
others. Robett Glover leads the survivors back toward Harrenhal in
bloody disarray, little dreaming he will nd valiant Ser Gregor and
his stalwarts athwart his path.”

“Gods be praised!” said Paxter Redwyne. “A great victory for
King Jo rey!”
What did Jo rey have to do with it? thought Tyrion.
“And a terrible defeat for the north, certainly,” observed
Little nger, “yet one in which Robb Stark played no part. The
Young Wolf remains unbeaten in the eld.”
“What do we know of Stark’s plans and movements?” asked
Mathis Rowan, ever blunt and to the point.
“He has run back to Riverrun with his plunder, abandoning the
castles he took in the west,” announced Lord Tywin. “Our cousin
Ser Daven is reforming the remnants of his late father’s army at
Lannisport. When they are ready he shall join Ser Forley Prester at
the Golden Tooth. As soon as the Stark boy starts north, Ser Forley
and Ser Daven will descend on Riverrun.”
“You are certain Lord Stark means to go north?” Lord Rowan
asked. “Even with the ironmen at Moat Cailin?”
Mace Tyrell spoke up. “Is there anything as pointless as a king
without a kingdom? No, it’s plain, the boy must abandon the
riverlands, join his forces to Roose Bolton’s once more, and throw
all his strength against Moat Cailin. That is what I would do.”
Tyrion had to bite his tongue at that. Robb Stark had won more
battles in a year than the Lord of Highgarden had in twenty. Tyrell’s
reputation rested on one indecisive victory over Robert Baratheon
at Ashford, in a battle largely won by Lord Tarly’s van before the
main host had even arrived. The siege of Storm’s End, where Mace
Tyrell actually did hold the command, had dragged on a year to no
result, and after the Trident was fought, the Lord of Highgarden had
meekly dipped his banners to Eddard Stark.
“I ought to write Robb Stark a stern letter,” Little nger was
saying. “I understand his man Bolton is stabling goats in my high
hall, it’s really quite unconscionable.”
Ser Kevan Lannister cleared his throat. “As regards the
Starks … Balon Greyjoy, who now styles himself King of the Isles
and the North, has written to us o ering terms of alliance.”
“He ought to be o ering fealty,” snapped Cersei. “By what right
does he call himself king?”

“By right of conquest,” Lord Tywin said. “King Balon has
strangler’s ngers round the Neck. Robb Stark’s heirs are dead,
Winterfell is fallen, and the ironmen hold Moat Cailin, Deepwood
Motte, and most of the Stony Shore. King Balon’s longships
command the sunset sea, and are well placed to menace Lannisport,
Fair Isle, and even Highgarden, should we provoke him.”
“And if we accept this alliance?” inquired Lord Mathis Rowan.
“What terms does he propose?”
“That we recognize his kingship and grant him everything north
of the Neck.”
Lord Redwyne laughed. “What is there north of the Neck that any
sane man would want? If Greyjoy will trade swords and sails for
stone and snow, I say do it, and count ourselves lucky.”
“Truly,” agreed Mace Tyrell. “That’s what I would do. Let King
Balon nish the northmen whilst we nish Stannis.”
Lord Tywin’s face gave no hint as to his feelings. “There is Lysa
Arryn to deal with as well. Jon Arryn’s widow, Hoster Tully’s
daughter, Catelyn Stark’s sister … whose husband was conspiring
with Stannis Baratheon at the time of his death.”
“Oh,” said Mace Tyrell cheerfully, “women have no stomach for
war. Let her be, I say, she’s not like to trouble us.”
“I agree,” said Redwyne. “The Lady Lysa took no part in the
ghting, nor has she committed any overt acts of treason.”
Tyrion stirred. “She did throw me in a cell and put me on trial for
my life,” he pointed out, with a certain amount of rancor. “Nor has
she returned to King’s Landing to swear fealty to Jo , as she was
commanded. My lords, grant me the men, and I will sort out Lysa
Arryn.” He could think of nothing he would enjoy more, except
perhaps strangling Cersei. Sometimes he still dreamed of the Eyrie’s
sky cells, and woke drenched in cold sweat.
Mace Tyrell’s smile was jovial, but behind it Tyrion sensed
contempt. “Perhaps you’d best leave the ghting to ghters,” said
the Lord of Highgarden. “Better men than you have lost great
armies in the Mountains of the Moon, or shattered them against the
Bloody Gate. We know your worth, my lord, no need to tempt
fate.”

Tyrion pushed o his cushions, bristling, but his father spoke
before he could lash back. “I have other tasks in mind for Tyrion. I
believe Lord Petyr may hold the key to the Eyrie.”
“Oh, I do,” said Little nger, “I have it here between my legs.”
There was mischief in his grey-green eyes. “My lords, with your
leave, I propose to travel to the Vale and there woo and win Lady
Lysa Arryn. Once I am her consort, I shall deliver you the Vale of
Arryn without a drop of blood being spilled.”
Lord Rowan looked doubtful. “Would Lady Lysa have you?”
“She’s had me a few times before, Lord Mathis, and voiced no
complaints.”
“Bedding,” said Cersei, “is not wedding. Even a cow like Lysa
Arryn might be able to grasp the di erence.”
“To be sure. It would not have been tting for a daughter of
Riverrun to marry one so far below her.” Little nger spread his
hands. “Now, though … a match between the Lady of the Eyrie and
the Lord of Harrenhal is not so unthinkable, is it?”
Tyrion noted the look that passed between Paxter Redwyne and
Mace Tyrell. “It might serve,” Lord Rowan said, “if you are certain
that you can keep the woman loyal to the King’s Grace.”
“My lords,” pronounced the High Septon, “autumn is upon us, and
all men of good heart are weary of war. If Lord Baelish can bring
the Vale back into the king’s peace without more shedding of blood,
the gods will surely bless him.”
“But can he?” asked Lord Redwyne. “Jon Arryn’s son is Lord of
the Eyrie now. The Lord Robert.”
“Only a boy,” said Little nger. “I will see that he grows to be
Jo rey’s most loyal subject, and a fast friend to us all.”
Tyrion studied the slender man with the pointed beard and
irreverent grey-green eyes. Lord of Harrenhal an empty honor? Bugger
that, Father. Even if he never sets foot in the castle, the title makes this
match possible, as he’s known all along.
“We have no lack of foes,” said Ser Kevan Lannister. “If the Eyrie
can be kept out of the war, all to the good. I am of a mind to see
what Lord Petyr can accomplish.”

Ser Kevan was his brother’s vanguard in council, Tyrion knew
from long experience; he never had a thought that Lord Tywin had
not had rst. It has all been settled beforehand, he concluded, and this
discussion’s no more than show.
The sheep were bleating their agreement, unaware of how neatly
they’d been shorn, so it fell to Tyrion to object. “How will the
crown pay its debts without Lord Petyr? He is our wizard of coin,
and we have no one to replace him.”
Little nger smiled. “My little friend is too kind. All I do is count
coppers, as King Robert used to say. Any clever tradesman could do
as well … and a Lannister, blessed with the golden touch of Casterly
Rock, will no doubt far surpass me.”
“A Lannister?” Tyrion had a bad feeling about this.
Lord Tywin’s gold- ecked eyes met his son’s mismatched ones.
“You are admirably suited to the task, I believe.”
“Indeed!” Ser Kevan said heartily. “I’ve no doubt you’ll make a
splendid master of coin, Tyrion.”
Lord Tywin turned back to Little nger. “If Lysa Arryn will take
you for a husband and return to the king’s peace, we shall restore
the Lord Robert to the honor of Warden of the East. How soon
might you leave?”
“On the morrow, if the winds permit. There’s a Braavosi galley
standing out past the chain, taking on cargo by boat. The Merling
King. I’ll see her captain about a berth.”
“You will miss the king’s wedding,” said Mace Tyrell.
Petyr Baelish gave a shrug. “Tides and brides wait on no man, my
lord. Once the autumn storms begin the voyage will be much more
hazardous. Drowning would de nitely diminish my charms as a
bridegroom.”
Lord Tyrell chuckled. “True. Best you do not linger.”
“May the gods speed you on your way,” the High Septon said.
“All King’s Landing shall pray for your success.”
Lord Redwyne pinched at his nose. “May we return to the matter
of the Greyjoy alliance? In my view, there is much to be said for it.
Greyjoy’s longships will augment my own eet and give us

su cient strength at sea to assault Dragonstone and end Stannis
Baratheon’s pretensions.”
“King Balon’s longships are occupied for the nonce,” Lord Tywin
said politely, “as are we. Greyjoy demands half the kingdom as the
price of alliance, but what will he do to earn it? Fight the Starks?
He is doing that already. Why should we pay for what he has given
us for free? The best thing to do about our lord of Pyke is nothing,
in my view. Granted enough time, a better option may well present
itself. One that does not require the king to give up half his
kingdom.”
Tyrion watched his father closely. There’s something he’s not saying.
He remembered those important letters Lord Tywin had been
writing, the night Tyrion had demanded Casterly Rock. What was it
he said? Some battles are won with swords and spears, others with quills
and ravens … He wondered who the “better option” was, and what
sort of price he was demanding.
“Perhaps we ought move on to the wedding,” Ser Kevan said.
The High Septon spoke of the preparations being made at the
Great Sept of Baelor, and Cersei detailed the plans she had been
making for the feast. They would feed a thousand in the throne
room, but many more outside in the yards. The outer and middle
wards would be tented in silk, with tables of food and casks of ale
for all those who could not be accommodated within the hall.
“Your Grace,” said Grand Maester Pycelle, “in regard to the
number of guests … we have had a raven from Sunspear. Three
hundred Dornishmen are riding toward King’s Landing as we speak,
and hope to arrive before the wedding.”
“How do they come?” asked Mace Tyrell gru y. “They have not
asked leave to cross my lands.” His thick neck had turned a dark
red, Tyrion noted. Dornishmen and Highgardeners had never had
great love for one another; over the centuries, they had fought
border wars beyond count, and raided back and forth across
mountains and marches even when at peace. The enmity had waned
a bit after Dorne had become part of the Seven Kingdoms … until
the Dornish prince they called the Red Viper had crippled the young

heir of Highgarden in a tourney. This could be ticklish, the dwarf
thought, waiting to see how his father would handle it.
“Prince Doran comes at my son’s invitation,” Lord Tywin said
calmly, “not only to join in our celebration, but to claim his seat on
this council, and the justice Robert denied him for the murder of his
sister Elia and her children.”
Tyrion watched the faces of the Lords Tyrell, Redwyne, and
Rowan, wondering if any of the three would be bold enough to say,
“But Lord Tywin, wasn’t it you who presented the bodies to Robert,
all wrapped up in Lannister cloaks?” None of them did, but it was
there on their faces all the same. Redwyne does not give a g, he
thought, but Rowan looks t to gag.
“When the king is wed to your Margaery and Myrcella to Prince
Trystane, we shall all be one great House,” Ser Kevan reminded
Mace Tyrell. “The enmities of the past should remain there, would
you not agree, my lord?”
“This is my daughter’s wedding—”
“—and my grandson’s,” said Lord Tywin rmly. “No place for old
quarrels, surely?”
“I have no quarrel with Doran Martell,” insisted Lord Tyrell,
though his tone was more than a little grudging. “If he wishes to
cross the Reach in peace, he need only ask my leave.”
Small chance of that, thought Tyrion. He’ll climb the Boneway, turn
east near Summerhall, and come up the kingsroad.
“Three hundred Dornishmen need not trouble our plans,” said
Cersei. “We can feed the men-at-arms in the yard, squeeze some
extra benches into the throne room for the lordlings and highborn
knights, and nd Prince Doran a place of honor on the dais.”
Not by me, was the message Tyrion saw in Mace Tyrell’s eyes, but
the Lord of Highgarden made no reply but a curt nod.
“Perhaps we can move to a more pleasant task,” said Lord Tywin.
“The fruits of victory await division.”
“What could be sweeter?” said Little nger, who had already
swallowed his own fruit, Harrenhal.
Each lord had his own demands; this castle and that village, tracts
of lands, a small river, a forest, the wardship of certain minors left

fatherless by the battle. Fortunately, these fruits were plentiful, and
there were orphans and castles for all. Varys had lists. Forty-seven
lesser lordlings and six hundred nineteen knights had lost their lives
beneath the ery heart of Stannis and his Lord of Light, along with
several thousand common men-at-arms. Traitors all, their heirs were
disinherited, their lands and castles granted to those who had
proved more loyal.
Highgarden reaped the richest harvest. Tyrion eyed Mace Tyrell’s
broad belly and thought, He has a prodigious appetite, this one. Tyrell
demanded the lands and castles of Lord Alester Florent, his own
bannerman, who’d had the singular ill judgment to back rst Renly
and then Stannis. Lord Tywin was pleased to oblige. Brightwater
Keep and all its lands and incomes were granted to Lord Tyrell’s
second son, Ser Garlan, transforming him into a great lord in the
blink of an eye. His elder brother, of course, stood to inherit
Highgarden itself.
Lesser tracts were granted to Lord Rowan, and set aside for Lord
Tarly, Lady Oakheart, Lord Hightower, and other worthies not
present. Lord Redwyne asked only for thirty years’ remission of the
taxes that Little nger and his wine factors had levied on certain of
the Arbor’s nest vintages. When that was granted, he pronounced
himself well satis ed and suggested that they send for a cask of
Arbor gold, to toast good King Jo rey and his wise and benevolent
Hand. At that Cersei lost patience. “It’s swords Jo needs, not
toasts,” she snapped. “His realm is still plagued with would-be
usurpers and self-styled kings.”
“But not for long, I think,” said Varys unctuously.
“A few more items remain, my lords.” Ser Kevan consulted his
papers. “Ser Addam has found some crystals from the High Septon’s
crown. It appears certain now that the thieves broke up the crystals
and melted down the gold.”
“Our Father Above knows their guilt and will sit in judgment on
them all,” the High Septon said piously.
“No doubt he will,” said Lord Tywin. “All the same, you must be
crowned at the king’s wedding. Cersei, summon your goldsmiths,

we must see to a replacement.” He did not wait for her reply, but
turned at once to Varys. “You have reports?”
The eunuch drew a parchment from his sleeve. “A kraken has
been seen o the Fingers.” He giggled. “Not a Greyjoy, mind you, a
true kraken. It attacked an Ibbenese whaler and pulled it under.
There is ghting on the Stepstones, and a new war between Tyrosh
and Lys seems likely. Both hope to win Myr as ally. Sailors back
from the Jade Sea report that a three-headed dragon has hatched in
Qarth, and is the wonder of that city—”
“Dragons and krakens do not interest me, regardless of the
number of their heads,” said Lord Tywin. “Have your whisperers
perchance found some trace of my brother’s son?”
“Alas, our beloved Tyrek has quite vanished, the poor brave lad.”
Varys sounded close to tears.
“Tywin,” Ser Kevan said, before Lord Tywin could vent his
obvious displeasure, “some of the gold cloaks who deserted during
the battle have drifted back to barracks, thinking to take up duty
once again. Ser Addam wishes to know what to do with them.”
“They might have endangered Jo with their cowardice,” Cersei
said at once. “I want them put to death.”
Varys sighed. “They have surely earned death, Your Grace, none
can deny it. And yet, perhaps we might be wiser to send them to the
Night’s Watch. We have had disturbing messages from the Wall of
late. Of wildlings astir …”
“Wildlings, krakens, and dragons.” Mace Tyrell chuckled. “Why,
is there anyone not stirring?”
Lord Tywin ignored that. “The deserters serve us best as a lesson.
Break their knees with hammers. They will not run again. Nor will
any man who sees them begging in the streets.” He glanced down
the table to see if any of the other lords disagreed.
Tyrion remembered his own visit to the Wall, and the crabs he’d
shared with old Lord Mormont and his o cers. He remembered the
Old Bear’s fears as well. “Perhaps we might break the knees of a
few to make our point. Those who killed Ser Jacelyn, say. The rest
we can send to Marsh. The Watch is grievously under strength. If
the Wall should fail …”

“… the wildlings will ood the north,” his father nished, “and
the Starks and Greyjoys will have another enemy to contend with.
They no longer wish to be subject to the Iron Throne, it would
seem, so by what right do they look to the Iron Throne for aid?
King Robb and King Balon both claim the north. Let them defend it,
if they can. And if not, this Mance Rayder might even prove a useful
ally.” Lord Tywin looked to his brother. “Is there more?”
Ser Kevan shook his head. “We are done. My lords, His Grace
King Jo rey would no doubt wish to thank you all for your wisdom
and good counsel.”
“I should like private words with my children,” said Lord Tywin
as the others rose to leave. “You as well, Kevan.”
Obediently, the other councillors made their farewells, Varys the
rst to depart and Tyrell and Redwyne the last. When the chamber
was empty but for the four Lannisters, Ser Kevan closed the door.
“Master of coin?” said Tyrion in a thin strained voice. “Whose
notion was that, pray?”
“Lord Petyr’s,” his father said, “but it serves us well to have the
treasury in the hands of a Lannister. You have asked for important
work. Do you fear you might be incapable of the task?”
“No,” said Tyrion, “I fear a trap. Little nger is subtle and
ambitious. I do not trust him. Nor should you.”
“He won Highgarden to our side …” Cersei began.
“… and sold you Ned Stark, I know. He will sell us just as quick.
A coin is as dangerous as a sword in the wrong hands.”
His uncle Kevan looked at him oddly. “Not to us, surely. The gold
of Casterly Rock …”
“… is dug from the ground. Little nger’s gold is made from thin
air, with a snap of his ngers.”
“A more useful skill than any of yours, sweet brother,” purred
Cersei, in a voice sweet with malice.
“Little nger is a liar—”
“—and black as well, said the raven of the crow.”
Lord Tywin slammed his hand down on the table. “Enough! I will
have no more of this unseemly squabbling. You are both Lannisters,
and will comport yourselves as such.”

Ser Kevan cleared his throat. “I would sooner have Petyr Baelish
ruling the Eyrie than any of Lady Lysa’s other suitors. Yohn Royce,
Lyn Corbray, Horton Redfort … these are dangerous men, each in
his own way. And proud. Little nger may be clever, but he has
neither high birth nor skill at arms. The lords of the Vale will never
accept such as their liege.” He looked to his brother. When Lord
Tywin nodded, he continued. “And there is this—Lord Petyr
continues to demonstrate his loyalty. Only yesterday he brought us
word of a Tyrell plot to spirit Sansa Stark o to Highgarden for a
‘visit,’ and there marry her to Lord Mace’s eldest son, Willas.”
“Little nger brought you word?” Tyrion leaned against the table.
“Not our master of whisperers? How interesting.”
Cersei looked at their uncle in disbelief. “Sansa is my hostage. She
goes nowhere without my leave.”
“Leave you must perforce grant, should Lord Tyrell ask,” their
father pointed out. “To refuse him would be tantamount to
declaring that we did not trust him. He would take o ense.”
“Let him. What do we care?”
Bloody fool, thought Tyrion. “Sweet sister,” he explained
patiently, “o end Tyrell and you o end Redwyne, Tarly, Rowan,
and Hightower as well, and perhaps start them wondering whether
Robb Stark might not be more accommodating of their desires.”
“I will not have the rose and the direwolf in bed together,”
declared Lord Tywin. “We must forestall him.”
“How?” asked Cersei.
“By marriage. Yours, to begin with.”
It came so suddenly that Cersei could only stare for a moment.
Then her cheeks reddened as if she had been slapped. “No. Not
again. I will not.”
“Your Grace,” said Ser Kevan, courteously, “you are a young
woman, still fair and fertile. Surely you cannot wish to spend the
rest of your days alone? And a new marriage would put to rest this
talk of incest for good and all.”
“So long as you remain unwed, you allow Stannis to spread his
disgusting slander,” Lord Tywin told his daughter. “You must have a
new husband in your bed, to father children on you.”

“Three children is quite su cient. I am Queen of the Seven
Kingdoms, not a brood mare! The Queen Regent!”
“You are my daughter, and will do as I command.”
She stood. “I will not sit here and listen to this—”
“You will if you wish to have any voice in the choice of your next
husband,” Lord Tywin said calmly.
When she hesitated, then sat, Tyrion knew she was lost, despite
her loud declaration of, “I will not marry again!”
“You will marry and you will breed. Every child you birth makes
Stannis more a liar.” Their father’s eyes seemed to pin her to her
chair. “Mace Tyrell, Paxter Redwyne, and Doran Martell are wed to
younger women likely to outlive them. Balon Greyjoy’s wife is
elderly and failing, but such a match would commit us to an alliance
with the Iron Islands, and I am still uncertain whether that would be
our wisest course.”
“No,” Cersei said from between white lips. “No, no, no.”
Tyrion could not quite suppress the grin that came to his lips at
the thought of packing his sister o to Pyke. Just when I was about to
give up praying, some sweet god gives me this.
Lord Tywin went on. “Oberyn Martell might suit, but the Tyrells
would take that very ill. So we must look to the sons. I assume you
do not object to wedding a man younger than yourself?”
“I object to wedding any—”
“I have considered the Redwyne twins, Theon Greyjoy, Quentyn
Martell, and a number of others. But our alliance with Highgarden
was the sword that broke Stannis. It should be tempered and made
stronger. Ser Loras has taken the white and Ser Garlan is wed to one
of the Fossoways, but there remains the eldest son, the boy they
scheme to wed to Sansa Stark.”
Willas Tyrell. Tyrion was taking a wicked pleasure in Cersei’s
helpless fury. “That would be the cripple,” he said.
Their father chilled him with a look. “Willas is heir to
Highgarden, and by all reports a mild and courtly young man, fond
of reading books and looking at the stars. He has a passion for
breeding animals as well, and owns the nest hounds, hawks, and
horses in the Seven Kingdoms.”

A perfect match, mused Tyrion. Cersei also has a passion for
breeding. He pitied poor Willas Tyrell, and did not know whether he
wanted to laugh at his sister or weep for her.
“The Tyrell heir would be my choice,” Lord Tywin concluded,
“but if you would prefer another, I will hear your reasons.”
“That is so very kind of you, Father,” Cersei said with icy
courtesy. “It is such a di cult choice you give me. Who would I
sooner take to bed, the old squid or the crippled dog boy? I shall
need a few days to consider. Do I have your leave to go?”
You are the queen, Tyrion wanted to tell her. He ought to be
begging leave of you.
“Go,” their father said. “We shall talk again after you have
composed yourself. Remember your duty.”
Cersei swept sti y from the room, her rage plain to see. Yet in
the end she will do as Father bid. She had proved that with Robert.
Though there is Jaime to consider. Their brother had been much
younger when Cersei wed the rst time; he might not acquiesce to a
second marriage quite so easily. The unfortunate Willas Tyrell was
like to contract a sudden fatal case of sword-through-bowels, which
could rather sour the alliance between Highgarden and Casterly
Rock. I should say something, but what? Pardon me, Father, but it’s our
brother she wants to marry?
“Tyrion.”
He gave a resigned smile. “Do I hear the herald summoning me to
the lists?”
“Your whoring is a weakness in you,” Lord Tywin said without
preamble, “but perhaps some share of the blame is mine. Since you
stand no taller than a boy, I have found it easy to forget that you
are in truth a man grown, with all of a man’s baser needs. It is past
time you were wed.”
I was wed, or have you forgotten? Tyrion’s mouth twisted, and the
noise emerged that was half laugh and half snarl.
“Does the prospect of marriage amuse you?”
“Only imagining what a bugger-all handsome bridegroom I’ll
make.” A wife might be the very thing he needed. If she brought

him lands and a keep, it would give him a place in the world apart
from Jo rey’s court … and away from Cersei and their father.
On the other hand, there was Shae. She will not like this, for all she
swears that she is content to be my whore.
That was scarcely a point to sway his father, however, so Tyrion
squirmed higher in his seat and said, “You mean to wed me to Sansa
Stark. But won’t the Tyrells take the match as an a ront, if they
have designs on the girl?”
“Lord Tyrell will not broach the matter of the Stark girl until
after Jo rey’s wedding. If Sansa is wed before that, how can he
take o ense, when he gave us no hint of his intentions?”
“Quite so,” said Ser Kevan, “and any lingering resentments should
be soothed by the o er of Cersei for his Willas.”
Tyrion rubbed at the raw stub of his nose. The scar tissue itched
abominably sometimes. “His Grace the royal pustule has made
Sansa’s life a misery since the day her father died, and now that she
is nally rid of Jo rey you propose to marry her to me. That seems
singularly cruel. Even for you, Father.”
“Why, do you plan to mistreat her?” His father sounded more
curious than concerned. “The girl’s happiness is not my purpose, nor
should it be yours. Our alliances in the south may be as solid as
Casterly Rock, but there remains the north to win, and the key to
the north is Sansa Stark.”
“She is no more than a child.”
“Your sister swears she’s owered. If so, she is a woman, t to be
wed. You must needs take her maidenhead, so no man can say the
marriage was not consummated. After that, if you prefer to wait a
year or two before bedding her again, you would be within your
rights as her husband.”
Shae is all the woman I need just now, he thought, and Sansa’s a girl,
no matter what you say. “If your purpose here is to keep her from the
Tyrells, why not return her to her mother? Perhaps that would
convince Robb Stark to bend the knee.”
Lord Tywin’s look was scornful. “Send her to Riverrun and her
mother will match her with a Blackwood or a Mallister to shore up
her son’s alliances along the Trident. Send her north, and she will be

wed to some Manderly or Umber before the moon turns. Yet she is
no less dangerous here at court, as this business with the Tyrells
should prove. She must marry a Lannister, and soon.”
“The man who weds Sansa Stark can claim Winterfell in her
name,” his uncle Kevan put in. “Had that not occurred to you?”
“If you will not have the girl, we shall give her to one of your
cousins,” said his father. “Kevan, is Lancel strong enough to wed, do
you think?”
Ser Kevan hesitated. “If we bring the girl to his bedside, he could
say the words … but to consummate, no … I would suggest one of
the twins, but the Starks hold them both at Riverrun. They have
Genna’s boy Tion as well, else he might serve.”
Tyrion let them have their byplay; it was all for his bene t, he
knew. Sansa Stark, he mused. Soft-spoken sweet-smelling Sansa,
who loved silks, songs, chivalry and tall gallant knights with
handsome faces. He felt as though he was back on the bridge of
boats, the deck shifting beneath his feet.
“You asked me to reward you for your e orts in the battle,” Lord
Tywin reminded him forcefully. “This is a chance for you, Tyrion,
the best you are ever likely to have.” He drummed his ngers
impatiently on the table. “I once hoped to marry your brother to
Lysa Tully, but Aerys named Jaime to his Kingsguard before the
arrangements were complete. When I suggested to Lord Hoster that
Lysa might be wed to you instead, he replied that he wanted a
whole man for his daughter.”
So he wed her to Jon Arryn, who was old enough to be her
grandfather. Tyrion was more inclined to be thankful than angry,
considering what Lysa Arryn had become.
“When I o ered you to Dorne I was told that the suggestion was
an insult,” Lord Tywin continued. “In later years I had similar
answers from Yohn Royce and Leyton Hightower. I nally stooped
so low as to suggest you might take the Florent girl Robert
de owered in his brother’s wedding bed, but her father preferred to
give her to one of his own household knights.
“If you will not have the Stark girl, I shall nd you another wife.
Somewhere in the realm there is doubtless some little lordling

who’d gladly part with a daughter to win the friendship of Casterly
Rock. Lady Tanda has o ered Lollys …”
Tyrion gave a shudder of dismay. “I’d sooner cut it o and feed it
to the goats.”
“Then open your eyes. The Stark girl is young, nubile, tractable,
of the highest birth, and still a maid. She is not uncomely. Why
would you hesitate?”
Why indeed? “A quirk of mine. Strange to say, I would prefer a
wife who wants me in her bed.”
“If you think your whores want you in their bed, you are an even
greater fool than I suspected,” said Lord Tywin. “You disappoint
me, Tyrion. I had hoped this match would please you.”
“Yes, we all know how important my pleasure is to you, Father.
But there’s more to this. The key to the north, you say? The
Greyjoys hold the north now, and King Balon has a daughter. Why
Sansa Stark, and not her?” He looked into his father’s cool green
eyes with their bright ecks of gold.
Lord Tywin steepled his ngers beneath his chin. “Balon Greyjoy
thinks in terms of plunder, not rule. Let him enjoy an autumn crown
and su er a northern winter. He will give his subjects no cause to
love him. Come spring, the northmen will have had a bellyful of
krakens. When you bring Eddard Stark’s grandson home to claim his
birthright, lords and little folk alike will rise as one to place him on
the high seat of his ancestors. You are capable of getting a woman
with child, I hope?”
“I believe I am,” he said, bristling. “I confess, I cannot prove it.
Though no one can say I have not tried. Why, I plant my little seeds
just as often as I can …”
“In the gutters and the ditches,” nished Lord Tywin, “and in
common ground where only bastard weeds take root. It is past time
you kept your own garden.” He rose to his feet. “You shall never
have Casterly Rock, I promise you. But wed Sansa Stark, and it is
just possible that you might win Winterfell.”
Tyrion Lannister, Lord Protector of Winterfell. The prospect gave
him a queer chill. “Very good, Father,” he said slowly, “but there’s a
big ugly roach in your rushes. Robb Stark is as capable as I am,

presumably, and sworn to marry one of those fertile Freys. And
once the Young Wolf sires a litter, any pups that Sansa births are
heirs to nothing.”
Lord Tywin was unconcerned. “Robb Stark will father no children
on his fertile Frey, you have my word. There is a bit of news I have
not yet seen t to share with the council, though no doubt the good
lords will hear it soon enough. The Young Wolf has taken Gawen
Westerling’s eldest daughter to wife.”
For a moment Tyrion could not believe he’d heard his father
right. “He broke his sworn word?” he said, incredulous. “He threw
away the Freys for …” Words failed him.
“A maid of sixteen years, named Jeyne,” said Ser Kevan. “Lord
Gawen once suggested her to me for Willem or Martyn, but I had to
refuse him. Gawen is a good man, but his wife is Sybell Spicer. He
should never have wed her. The Westerlings always did have more
honor than sense. Lady Sybell’s grandfather was a trader in sa ron
and pepper, almost as lowborn as that smuggler Stannis keeps. And
the grandmother was some woman he’d brought back from the east.
A frightening old crone, supposed to be a priestess. Maegi, they
called her. No one could pronounce her real name. Half of
Lannisport used to go to her for cures and love potions and the
like.” He shrugged. “She’s long dead, to be sure. And Jeyne seemed
a sweet child, I’ll grant you, though I only saw her once. But with
such doubtful blood …”
Having once married a whore, Tyrion could not entirely share his
uncle’s horror at the thought of wedding a girl whose great
grandfather sold cloves. Even so … A sweet child, Ser Kevan had
said, but many a poison was sweet as well. The Westerlings were
old blood, but they had more pride than power. It would not
surprise him to learn that Lady Sybell had brought more wealth to
the marriage than her highborn husband. The Westerling mines had
failed years ago, their best lands had been sold o or lost, and the
Crag was more ruin than stronghold. A romantic ruin, though, jutting
up so brave above the sea. “I am surprised,” Tyrion had to confess. “I
thought Robb Stark had better sense.”

“He is a boy of sixteen,” said Lord Tywin. “At that age, sense
weighs for little, against lust and love and honor.”
“He forswore himself, shamed an ally, betrayed a solemn
promise. Where is the honor in that?”
Ser Kevan answered. “He chose the girl’s honor over his own.
Once he had de owered her, he had no other course.”
“It would have been kinder to leave her with a bastard in her
belly,” said Tyrion bluntly. The Westerlings stood to lose everything
here; their lands, their castle, their very lives. A Lannister always
pays his debts.
“Jeyne Westerling is her mother’s daughter,” said Lord Tywin,
“and Robb Stark is his father’s son.”
This Westerling betrayal did not seem to have enraged his father
as much as Tyrion would have expected. Lord Tywin did not su er
disloyalty in his vassals. He had extinguished the proud Reynes of
Castamere and the ancient Tarbecks of Tarbeck Hall root and
branch when he was still half a boy. The singers had even made a
rather gloomy song of it. Some years later, when Lord Farman of
Faircastle grew truculent, Lord Tywin sent an envoy bearing a lute
instead of a letter. But once he’d heard “The Rains of Castamere”
echoing through his hall, Lord Farman gave no further trouble. And
if the song were not enough, the shattered castles of the Reynes and
Tarbecks still stood as mute testimony to the fate that awaited those
who chose to scorn the power of Casterly Rock. “The Crag is not so
far from Tarbeck Hall and Castamere,” Tyrion pointed out. “You’d
think the Westerlings might have ridden past and seen the lesson
there.”
“Mayhaps they have,” Lord Tywin said. “They are well aware of
Castamere, I promise you.”
“Could the Westerlings and Spicers be such great fools as to
believe the wolf can defeat the lion?”
Every once in a very long while, Lord Tywin Lannister would
actually threaten to smile; he never did, but the threat alone was
terrible to behold. “The greatest fools are ofttimes more clever than
the men who laugh at them,” he said, and then, “You will marry
Sansa Stark, Tyrion. And soon.”

CATELYN

They carried the corpses in upon their shoulders and laid them

beneath the dais. A silence fell across the torchlit hall, and in the
quiet Catelyn could hear Grey Wind howling half a castle away. He
smells the blood, she thought, through stone walls and wooden doors,
through night and rain, he still knows the scent of death and ruin.
She stood at Robb’s left hand beside the high seat, and for a
moment felt almost as if she were looking down at her own dead, at
Bran and Rickon. These boys had been much older, but death had
shrunken them. Naked and wet, they seemed such little things, so
still it was hard to remember them living.
The blond boy had been trying to grow a beard. Pale yellow
peach fuzz covered his cheeks and jaw above the red ruin the knife
had made of his throat. His long golden hair was still wet, as if he
had been pulled from a bath. By the look of him, he had died
peacefully, perhaps in sleep, but his brown-haired cousin had fought
for life. His arms bore slashes where he’d tried to block the blades,
and red still trickled slowly from the stab wounds that covered his
chest and belly and back like so many tongueless mouths, though
the rain had washed him almost clean.
Robb had donned his crown before coming to the hall, and the
bronze shone darkly in the torchlight. Shadows hid his eyes as he
looked upon the dead. Does he see Bran and Rickon as well? She
might have wept, but there were no tears left in her. The dead boys
were pale from long imprisonment, and both had been fair; against

their smooth white skin, the blood was shockingly red, unbearable
to look upon. Will they lay Sansa down naked beneath the Iron Throne
after they have killed her? Will her skin seem as white, her blood as red?
From outside came the steady wash of rain and the restless howling
of a wolf.
Her brother Edmure stood to Robb’s right, one hand upon the
back of his father’s seat, his face still pu y from sleep. They had
woken him as they had her, pounding on his door in the black of
night to yank him rudely from his dreams. Were they good dreams,
brother? Do you dream of sunlight and laughter and a maiden’s kisses? I
pray you do. Her own dreams were dark and laced with terrors.
Robb’s captains and lords bannermen stood about the hall, some
mailed and armed, others in various states of dishevelment and
undress. Ser Raynald and his uncle Ser Rolph were among them, but
Robb had seen t to spare his queen this ugliness. The Crag is not far
from Casterly Rock, Catelyn recalled. Jeyne may well have played with
these boys when all of them were children.
She looked down again upon the corpses of the squires Tion Frey
and Willem Lannister, and waited for her son to speak.
It seemed a very long time before Robb lifted his eyes from the
bloody dead. “Smalljon,” he said, “tell your father to bring them
in.” Wordless, Smalljon Umber turned to obey, his steps echoing in
the great stone hall.
As the Greatjon marched his prisoners through the doors, Catelyn
made note of how some other men stepped back to give them room,
as if treason could somehow be passed by a touch, a glance, a
cough. The captors and the captives looked much alike; big men,
every one, with thick beards and long hair. Two of the Greatjon’s
men were wounded, and three of their prisoners. Only the fact that
some had spears and others empty scabbards served to set them
apart. All were clad in mail hauberks or shirts of sewn rings, with
heavy boots and thick cloaks, some of wool and some of fur. The
north is hard and cold, and has no mercy, Ned had told her when she
rst came to Winterfell a thousand years ago.
“Five,” said Robb when the prisoners stood before him, wet and
silent. “Is that all of them?”

“There were eight,” rumbled the Greatjon. “We killed two taking
them, and a third is dying now.”
Robb studied the faces of the captives. “It required eight of you to
kill two unarmed squires.”
Edmure Tully spoke up. “They murdered two of my men as well,
to get into the tower. Delp and Elwood.”
“It was no murder, ser,” said Lord Rickard Karstark, no more
discom ted by the ropes about his wrists than by the blood that
trickled down his face. “Any man who steps between a father and
his vengeance asks for death.”
His words rang against Catelyn’s ears, harsh and cruel as the
pounding of a war drum. Her throat was dry as bone. I did this.
These two boys died so my daughters might live.
“I saw your sons die, that night in the Whispering Wood,” Robb
told Lord Karstark. “Tion Frey did not kill Torrhen. Willem
Lannister did not slay Eddard. How then can you call this
vengeance? This was folly, and bloody murder. Your sons died
honorably on a battle eld, with swords in their hands.”
“They died,” said Rickard Karstark, yielding no inch of ground.
“The Kingslayer cut them down. These two were of his ilk. Only
blood can pay for blood.”
“The blood of children?” Robb pointed at the corpses. “How old
were they? Twelve, thirteen? Squires.”
“Squires die in every battle.”
“Die ghting, yes. Tion Frey and Willem Lannister gave up their
swords in the Whispering Wood. They were captives, locked in a
cell, asleep, unarmed … boys. Look at them!”
Lord Karstark looked instead at Catelyn. “Tell your mother to
look at them,” he said. “She slew them, as much as I.”
Catelyn put a hand on the back of Robb’s seat. The hall seemed to
spin about her. She felt as though she might retch.
“My mother had naught to do with this,” Robb said angrily. “This
was your work. Your murder. Your treason.”
“How can it be treason to kill Lannisters, when it is not treason to
free them?” asked Karstark harshly. “Has Your Grace forgotten that

we are at war with Casterly Rock? In war you kill your enemies.
Didn’t your father teach you that, boy?”
“Boy?” The Greatjon dealt Rickard Karstark a bu et with a mailed
st that sent the other lord to his knees.
“Leave him!” Robb’s voice rang with command. Umber stepped
back away from the captive.
Lord Karstark spit out a broken tooth. “Yes, Lord Umber, leave
me to the king. He means to give me a scolding before he forgives
me. That’s how he deals with treason, our King in the North.” He
smiled a wet red smile. “Or should I call you the King Who Lost the
North, Your Grace?”
The Greatjon snatched a spear from the man beside him and
jerked it to his shoulder. “Let me spit him, sire. Let me open his
belly so we can see the color of his guts.”
The doors of the hall crashed open, and the Black sh entered with
water running from his cloak and helm. Tully men-at-arms followed
him in, while outside lightning cracked across the sky and a hard
black rain pounded against the stones of Riverrun. Ser Brynden
removed his helm and went to one knee. “Your Grace,” was all he
said, but the grimness of his tone spoke volumes.
“I will hear Ser Brynden privily, in the audience chamber.” Robb
rose to his feet. “Greatjon, keep Lord Karstark here till I return, and
hang the other seven.”
The Greatjon lowered the spear. “Even the dead ones?”
“Yes. I will not have such fouling my lord uncle’s rivers. Let them
feed the crows.”
One of the captives dropped to his knees. “Mercy, sire. I killed no
one, I only stood at the door to watch for guards.”
Robb considered that a moment. “Did you know what Lord
Rickard intended? Did you see the knives drawn? Did you hear the
shouts, the screams, the cries for mercy?”
“Aye, I did, but I took no part. I was only the watcher, I swear
it …”
“Lord Umber,” said Robb, “this one was only the watcher. Hang
him last, so he may watch the others die. Mother, Uncle, with me, if
you please.” He turned away as the Greatjon’s men closed upon the

prisoners and drove them from the hall at spearpoint. Outside the
thunder crashed and boomed, so loud it sounded as if the castle
were coming down about their ears. Is this the sound of a kingdom
falling? Catelyn wondered.
It was dark within the audience chamber, but at least the sound of
the thunder was mu ed by another thickness of wall. A servant
entered with an oil lamp to light the re, but Robb sent him away
and kept the lamp. There were tables and chairs, but only Edmure
sat, and he rose again when he realized that the others had
remainded standing. Robb took o his crown and placed it on the
table before him.
The Black sh shut the door. “The Karstarks are gone.”
“All?” Was it anger or despair that thickened Robb’s voice like
that? Even Catelyn was not certain.
“All the ghting men,” Ser Brynden replied. “A few camp
followers and serving men were left with their wounded. We
questioned as many as we needed, to be certain of the truth. They
started leaving at nightfall, stealing o in ones and twos at rst,
and then in larger groups. The wounded men and servants were told
to keep the camp res lit so no one would know they’d gone, but
once the rains began it didn’t matter.”
“Will they re-form, away from Riverrun?” asked Robb.
“No. They’ve scattered, hunting. Lord Karstark has sworn to give
the hand of his maiden daughter to any man highborn or low who
brings him the head of the Kingslayer.”
Gods be good. Catelyn felt ill again.
“Near three hundred riders and twice as many mounts, melted
away in the night.” Robb rubbed his temples, where the crown had
left its mark in the soft skin above his ears. “All the mounted
strength of Karhold, lost.”
Lost by me. By me, may the gods forgive me. Catelyn did not need to
be a soldier to grasp the trap Robb was in. For the moment he held
the riverlands, but his kingdom was surrounded by enemies to
every side but east, where Lysa sat aloof on her mountaintop. Even
the Trident was scarce secure so long as the Lord of the Crossing
withheld his allegiance. And now to lose the Karstarks as well …

“No word of this must leave Riverrun,” her brother Edmure said.
“Lord Tywin would … the Lannisters pay their debts, they are
always saying that. Mother have mercy, when he hears.”
Sansa. Catelyn’s nails dug into the soft esh of her palms, so hard
did she close her hand.
Robb gave Edmure a look that chilled. “Would you make me a
liar as well as a murderer, Uncle?”
“We need speak no falsehood. Only say nothing. Bury the boys
and hold our tongues till the war’s done. Willem was son to Ser
Kevan Lannister, and Lord Tywin’s nephew. Tion was Lady Genna’s,
and a Frey. We must keep the news from the Twins as well,
until …”
“Until we can bring the murdered dead back to life?” said
Brynden Black sh sharply. “The truth escaped with the Karstarks,
Edmure. It is too late for such games.”
“I owe their fathers truth,” said Robb. “And justice. I owe them
that as well.” He gazed at his crown, the dark gleam of bronze, the
circle of iron swords. “Lord Rickard de ed me. Betrayed me. I have
no choice but to condemn him. Gods know what the Karstark foot
with Roose Bolton will do when they hear I’ve executed their liege
for a traitor. Bolton must be warned.”
“Lord Karstark’s heir was at Harrenhal as well,” Ser Brynden
reminded him. “The eldest son, the one the Lannisters took captive
on the Green Fork.”
“Harrion. His name is Harrion.” Robb laughed bitterly. “A king
had best know the names of his enemies, don’t you think?”
The Black sh looked at him shrewdly. “You know that for a
certainty? That this will make young Karstark your enemy?”
“What else would he be? I am about to kill his father, he’s not
like to thank me.”
“He might. There are sons who hate their fathers, and in a stroke
you will make him Lord of Karhold.”
Robb shook his head. “Even if Harrion were that sort, he could
never openly forgive his father’s killer. His own men would turn on
him. These are northmen, Uncle. The north remembers.”
“Pardon him, then,” urged Edmure Tully.

Robb stared at him in frank disbelief.
Under that gaze, Edmure’s face reddened. “Spare his life, I mean.
I don’t like the taste of it any more than you, sire. He slew my men
as well. Poor Delp had only just recovered from the wound Ser
Jaime gave him. Karstark must be punished, certainly. Keep him in
chains, I say.”
“A hostage?” said Catelyn. It might be best …
“Yes, a hostage!” Her brother seized on her musing as agreement.
“Tell the son that so long as he remains loyal, his father will not be
harmed. Otherwise … we have no hope of the Freys now, not if I
o ered to marry all Lord Walder’s daughters and carry his litter
besides. If we should lose the Karstarks as well, what hope is
there?”
“What hope …” Robb let out a breath, pushed his hair back from
his eyes, and said, “We’ve had naught from Ser Rodrik in the north,
no response from Walder Frey to our new o er, only silence from
the Eyrie.” He appealed to his mother. “Will your sister never
answer us? How many times must I write her? I will not believe
that none of the birds have reached her.”
Her son wanted comfort, Catelyn realized; he wanted to hear that
it would be all right. But her king needed truth. “The birds have
reached her. Though she may tell you they did not, if it ever comes
to that. Expect no help from that quarter, Robb.
“Lysa was never brave. When we were girls together, she would
run and hide whenever she’d done something wrong. Perhaps she
thought our lord father would forget to be wroth with her if he
could not nd her. It is no di erent now. She ran from King’s
Landing for fear, to the safest place she knows, and she sits on her
mountain hoping everyone will forget her.”
“The knights of the Vale could make all the di erence in this
war,” said Robb, “but if she will not ght, so be it. I’ve asked only
that she open the Bloody Gate for us, and provide ships at Gulltown
to take us north. The high road would be hard, but not so hard as
ghting our way up the Neck. If I could land at White Harbor I
could ank Moat Cailin and drive the ironmen from the north in
half a year.”

“It will not happen, sire,” said the Black sh. “Cat is right. Lady
Lysa is too fearful to admit an army to the Vale. Any army. The
Bloody Gate will remain closed.”
“The Others can take her, then,” Robb cursed, in a fury of
despair. “Bloody Rickard Karstark as well. And Theon Greyjoy,
Walder Frey, Tywin Lannister, and all the rest of them. Gods be
good, why would any man ever want to be king? When everyone
was shouting King in the North, King in the North, I told
myself … swore to myself … that I would be a good king, as
honorable as Father, strong, just, loyal to my friends and brave
when I faced my enemies … now I can’t even tell one from the
other. How did it all get so confused? Lord Rickard’s fought at my
side in half a dozen battles. His sons died for me in the Whispering
Wood. Tion Frey and Willem Lannister were my enemies. Yet now I
have to kill my dead friends’ father for their sakes.” He looked at
them all. “Will the Lannisters thank me for Lord Rickard’s head?
Will the Freys?”
“No,” said Brynden Black sh, blunt as ever.
“All the more reason to spare Lord Rickard’s life and keep him
hostage,” Edmure urged.
Robb reached down with both hands, lifted the heavy bronze-andiron crown, and set it back atop his head, and suddenly he was a
king again. “Lord Rickard dies.”
“But why?” said Edmure. “You said yourself—”
“I know what I said, Uncle. It does not change what I must do.”
The swords in his crown stood stark and black against his brow. “In
battle I might have slain Tion and Willem myself, but this was no
battle. They were asleep in their beds, naked and unarmed, in a cell
where I put them. Rickard Karstark killed more than a Frey and a
Lannister. He killed my honor. I shall deal with him at dawn.”
When day broke, grey and chilly, the storm had diminished to a
steady, soaking rain, yet even so the godswood was crowded. River
lords and northmen, highborn and low, knights and sellswords and
stableboys, they stood amongst the trees to see the end of the
night’s dark dance. Edmure had given commands, and a headsman’s
block had been set up before the heart tree. Rain and leaves fell all

around them as the Greatjon’s men led Lord Rickard Karstark
through the press, hands still bound. His men already hung from
Riverrun’s high walls, slumping at the end of long ropes as the rain
washed down their darkening faces.
Long Lew waited beside the block, but Robb took the poleaxe
from his hand and ordered him to step aside. “This is my work,” he
said. “He dies at my word. He must die by my hand.”
Lord Rickard Karstark dipped his head sti y. “For that much, I
thank you. But for naught else.” He had dressed for death in a long
black wool surcoat emblazoned with the white sunburst of his
House. “The blood of the First Men ows in my veins as much as
yours, boy. You would do well to remember that. I was named for
your grandfather. I raised my banners against King Aerys for your
father, and against King Jo rey for you. At Oxcross and the
Whispering Wood and in the Battle of the Camps, I rode beside you,
and I stood with Lord Eddard on the Trident. We are kin, Stark and
Karstark.”
“This kinship did not stop you from betraying me,” Robb said.
“And it will not save you now. Kneel, my lord.”
Lord Rickard had spoken truly, Catelyn knew. The Karstarks
traced their descent to Karlon Stark, a younger son of Winterfell
who had put down a rebel lord a thousand years ago, and been
granted lands for his valor. The castle he built had been named
Karl’s Hold, but that soon became Karhold, and over the centuries
the Karhold Starks had become Karstarks.
“Old gods or new, it makes no matter,” Lord Rickard told her son,
“no man is so accursed as the kinslayer.”
“Kneel, traitor,” Robb said again. “Or must I have them force
your head onto the block?”
Lord Karstark knelt. “The gods shall judge you, as you have
judged me.” He laid his head upon the block.
“Rickard Karstark, Lord of Karhold.” Robb lifted the heavy axe
with both hands. “Here in sight of gods and men, I judge you guilty
of murder and high treason. In mine own name I condemn you.
With mine own hand I take your life. Would you speak a nal
word?”

“Kill me, and be cursed. You are no king of mine.”
The axe crashed down. Heavy and well-honed, it killed at a single
blow, but it took three to sever the man’s head from his body, and
by the time it was done both living and dead were drenched in
blood. Robb ung the poleaxe down in disgust, and turned wordless
to the heart tree. He stood shaking with his hands half-clenched and
the rain running down his cheeks. Gods forgive him, Catelyn prayed
in silence. He is only a boy, and he had no other choice.
That was the last she saw of her son that day. The rain continued
all through the morning, lashing the surface of the rivers and
turning the godswood grass into mud and puddles. The Black sh
assembled a hundred men and rode out after Karstarks, but no one
expected he would bring back many. “I only pray I do not need to
hang them,” he said as he departed. When he was gone, Catelyn
retreated to her father’s solar, to sit once more beside Lord Hoster’s
bed.
“It will not be much longer,” Maester Vyman warned her, when
he came that afternoon. “His last strength is going, though still he
tries to ght.”
“He was ever a ghter,” she said. “A sweet stubborn man.”
“Yes,” the maester said, “but this battle he cannot win. It is time
he lay down his sword and shield. Time to yield.”
To yield, she thought, to make a peace. Was it her father the
maester was speaking of, or her son?
At evenfall, Jeyne Westerling came to see her. The young queen
entered the solar timidly. “Lady Catelyn, I do not mean to disturb
you …”
“You are most welcome here, Your Grace.” Catelyn had been
sewing, but she put the needle aside now.
“Please. Call me Jeyne. I don’t feel like a Grace.”
“You are one, nonetheless. Please, come sit, Your Grace.”
“Jeyne.” She sat by the hearth and smoothed her skirt out
anxiously.
“As you wish. How might I serve you, Jeyne?”
“It’s Robb,” the girl said. “He’s so miserable, so … so angry and
disconsolate. I don’t know what to do.”

“It is a hard thing to take a man’s life.”
“I know. I told him, he should use a headsman. When Lord Tywin
sends a man to die, all he does is give the command. It’s easier that
way, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Catelyn, “but my lord husband taught his sons that
killing should never be easy.”
“Oh.” Queen Jeyne wet her lips. “Robb has not eaten all day. I
had Rollam bring him a nice supper, boar’s ribs and stewed onions
and ale, but he never touched a bite of it. He spent all morning
writing a letter and told me not to disturb him, but when the letter
was done he burned it. Now he is sitting and looking at maps. I
asked him what he was looking for, but he never answered. I don’t
think he ever heard me. He wouldn’t even change out of his clothes.
They were damp all day, and bloody. I want to be a good wife to
him, I do, but I don’t know how to help. To cheer him, or comfort
him. I don’t know what he needs. Please, my lady, you’re his
mother, tell me what I should do.”
Tell me what I should do. Catelyn might have asked the same, if
her father had been well enough to ask. But Lord Hoster was gone,
or near enough. Her Ned as well. Bran and Rickon too, and Mother,
and Brandon so long ago. Only Robb remained to her, Robb and the
fading hope of her daughters.
“Sometimes,” Catelyn said slowly, “the best thing you can do is
nothing. When I rst came to Winterfell, I was hurt whenever Ned
went to the godswood to sit beneath his heart tree. Part of his soul
was in that tree, I knew, a part I would never share. Yet without
that part, I soon realized, he would not have been Ned. Jeyne, child,
you have wed the north, as I did … and in the north, the winters
will come.” She tried to smile. “Be patient. Be understanding. He
loves you and he needs you, and he will come back to you soon
enough. This very night, perhaps. Be there when he does. That is all
I can tell you.”
The young queen listened raptly. “I will,” she said when Catelyn
was done. “I’ll be there.” She got to her feet. “I should go back. He
might have missed me. I’ll see. But if he’s still at his maps, I’ll be
patient.”

“Do,” said Catelyn, but when the girl was at the door, she thought
of something else. “Jeyne,” she called after, “there’s one more thing
Robb needs from you, though he may not know it yet himself. A
king must have an heir.”
The girl smiled at that. “My mother says the same. She makes a
posset for me, herbs and milk and ale, to help make me fertile. I
drink it every morning. I told Robb I’m sure to give him twins. An
Eddard and a Brandon. He liked that, I think. We … we try most
every day, my lady. Sometimes twice or more.” The girl blushed
very prettily. “I’ll be with child soon, I promise. I pray to our
Mother Above, every night.”
“Very good. I will add my prayers as well. To the old gods and
the new.”
When the girl had gone, Catelyn turned back to her father and
smoothed the thin white hair across his brow. “An Eddard and a
Brandon,” she sighed softly. “And perhaps in time a Hoster. Would
you like that?” He did not answer, but she had never expected that
he would. As the sound of the rain on the roof mingled with her
father’s breathing, she thought about Jeyne. The girl did seem to
have a good heart, just as Robb had said. And good hips, which might
be more important.

JAIME

Two days’ ride to either side of the kingsroad, they passed through
a wide swath of destruction, miles of blackened elds and orchards
where the trunks of dead trees jutted into the air like archers’
stakes. The bridges were burnt as well, and the streams swollen by
autumn rains, so they had to range along the banks in search of
fords. The nights were alive with howling of wolves, but they saw
no people.
At Maidenpool, Lord Mooton’s red salmon still ew above the
castle on its hill, but the town walls were deserted, the gates
smashed, half the homes and shops burned or plundered. They saw
nothing living but a few feral dogs that went slinking away at the
sound of their approach. The pool from which the town took its
name, where legend said that Florian the Fool had rst glimpsed
Jonquil bathing with her sisters, was so choked with rotting corpses
that the water had turned into a murky grey-green soup.
Jaime took one look and burst into song. “Six maids there were in
a spring-fed pool …”
“What are you doing?” Brienne demanded.
“Singing. ‘Six Maids in a Pool,’ I’m sure you’ve heard it. And shy
little maids they were, too. Rather like you. Though somewhat
prettier, I’ll warrant.”
“Be quiet,” the wench said, with a look that suggested she would
love to leave him oating in the pool among the corpses.

“Please, Jaime,” pleaded cousin Cleos. “Lord Mooton is sworn to
Riverrun, we don’t want to draw him out of his castle. And there
may be other enemies hiding in the rubble …”
“Hers or ours? They are not the same, coz. I have a yen to see if
the wench can use that sword she wears.”
“If you won’t be quiet, you leave me no choice but to gag you,
Kingslayer.”
“Unchain my hands and I’ll play mute all the way to King’s
Landing. What could be fairer than that, wench?”
“Brienne! My name is Brienne!” Three crows went apping into
the air, startled at the sound.
“Care for a bath, Brienne?” He laughed. “You’re a maiden and
there’s the pool. I’ll wash your back.” He used to scrub Cersei’s
back, when they were children together at Casterly Rock.
The wench turned her horse’s head and trotted away. Jaime and
Ser Cleos followed her out of the ashes of Maidenpool. A half mile
on, green began to creep back into the world once more. Jaime was
glad. The burned lands reminded him too much of Aerys.
“She’s taking the Duskendale road,” Ser Cleos muttered. “It would
be safer to follow the coast.”
“Safer but slower. I’m for Duskendale, coz. If truth be told, I’m
bored with your company.” You may be half Lannister, but you’re a
far cry from my sister.
He could never bear to be long apart from his twin. Even as
children, they would creep into each other’s beds and sleep with
their arms entwined. Even in the womb. Long before his sister’s
owering or the advent of his own manhood, they had seen mares
and stallions in the elds and dogs and bitches in the kennels and
played at doing the same. Once their mother’s maid had caught
them at it … he did not recall just what they had been doing, but
whatever it was had horri ed Lady Joanna. She’d sent the maid
away, moved Jaime’s bedchamber to the other side of Casterly
Rock, set a guard outside Cersei’s, and told them that they must
never do that again or she would have no choice but to tell their
lord father. They need not have feared, though. It was not long

after that she died birthing Tyrion. Jaime barely remembered what
his mother had looked like.
Perhaps Stannis Baratheon and the Starks had done him a
kindness. They had spread their tale of incest all over the Seven
Kingdoms, so there was nothing left to hide. Why shouldn’t I marry
Cersei openly and share her bed every night? The dragons always
married their sisters. Septons, lords, and smallfolk had turned a blind
eye to the Targaryens for hundreds of years, let them do the same
for House Lannister. It would play havoc with Jo rey’s claim to the
crown, to be sure, but in the end it had been swords that had won
the Iron Throne for Robert, and swords could keep Jo rey there as
well, regardless of whose seed he was. We could marry him to
Myrcella, once we’ve sent Sansa Stark back to her mother. That would
show the realm that the Lannisters are above their laws, like gods and
Targaryens.
Jaime had decided that he would return Sansa, and the younger
girl as well if she could be found. It was not like to win him back
his lost honor, but the notion of keeping faith when they all
expected betrayal amused him more than he could say.
They were riding past a trampled wheat eld and a low stone wall
when Jaime heard a soft thrum from behind, as if a dozen birds had
taken ight at once. “Down!” he shouted, throwing himself against
the neck of his horse. The gelding screamed and reared as an arrow
took him in the rump. Other shafts went hissing past. Jaime saw Ser
Cleos lurch from the saddle, twisting as his foot caught in the
stirrup. His palfrey bolted, and Frey was dragged past shouting,
head bouncing against the ground.
Jaime’s gelding lumbered o ponderously, blowing and snorting
in pain. He craned around to look for Brienne. She was still ahorse,
an arrow lodged in her back and another in her leg, but she seemed
not to feel them. He saw her pull her sword and wheel in a circle,
searching for the bowmen. “Behind the wall,” Jaime called, ghting
to turn his half-blind mount back toward the ght. The reins were
tangled in his damned chains, and the air was full of arrows again.
“At them!” he shouted, kicking to show her how it was done. The
old sorry horse found a burst of speed from somewhere. Suddenly

they were racing across the wheat eld, throwing up clouds of cha .
Jaime had just enough time to think, The wench had better follow
before they realize they’re being charged by an unarmed man in chains.
Then he heard her coming hard behind. “Evenfall!” she shouted as
her plow horse thundered by. She brandished her longsword.
“Tarth! Tarth!”
A few last arrows sped harmlessly past; then the bowmen broke
and ran, the way unsupported bowmen always broke and ran before
the charge of knights. Brienne reined up at the wall. By the time
Jaime reached her, they had all melted into the wood twenty yards
away. “Lost your taste for battle?”
“They were running.”
“That’s the best time to kill them.”
She sheathed her sword. “Why did you charge?”
“Bowmen are fearless so long as they can hide behind walls and
shoot at you from afar, but if you come at them, they run. They
know what will happen when you reach them. You have an arrow
in your back, you know. And another in your leg. You ought to let
me tend them.”
“You?”
“Who else? The last I saw of cousin Cleos, his palfrey was using
his head to plow a furrow. Though I suppose we ought to nd him.
He is a Lannister of sorts.”
They found Cleos still tangled in his stirrup. He had an arrow
through his right arm and a second in his chest, but it was the
ground that had done for him. The top of his head was matted with
blood and mushy to the touch, pieces of broken bone moving under
the skin beneath the pressure of Jaime’s hand.
Brienne knelt and held his hand. “He’s still warm.”
“He’ll cool soon enough. I want his horse and his clothes. I’m
weary of rags and eas.”
“He was your cousin.” The wench was shocked.
“Was,” Jaime agreed. “Have no fear, I am amply provisioned in
cousins. I’ll have his sword as well. You need someone to share the
watches.”
“You can stand a watch without weapons.” She rose.

“Chained to a tree? Perhaps I could. Or perhaps I could make my
own bargain with the next lot of outlaws and let them slit that thick
neck of yours, wench.”
“I will not arm you. And my name is—”
“—Brienne, I know. I’ll swear an oath not to harm you, if that
will ease your girlish fears.”
“Your oaths are worthless. You swore an oath to Aerys.”
“You haven’t cooked anyone in their armor so far as I know. And
we both want me safe and whole in King’s Landing, don’t we?” He
squatted beside Cleos and began to undo his swordbelt.
“Step away from him. Now. Stop that.”
Jaime was tired. Tired of her suspicions, tired of her insults, tired
of her crooked teeth and her broad spotty face and that limp thin
hair of hers. Ignoring her protests, he grasped the hilt of his cousin’s
longsword with both hands, held the corpse down with his foot, and
pulled. As the blade slid from the scabbard, he was already
pivoting, bringing the sword around and up in a swift deadly arc.
Steel met steel with a ringing, bone-jarring clang. Somehow Brienne
had gotten her own blade out in time. Jaime laughed. “Very good,
wench.”
“Give me the sword, Kingslayer.”
“Oh, I will.” He sprang to his feet and drove at her, the
longsword alive in his hands. Brienne jumped back, parrying, but he
followed, pressing the attack. No sooner did she turn one cut than
the next was upon her. The swords kissed and sprang apart and
kissed again. Jaime’s blood was singing. This was what he was
meant for; he never felt so alive as when he was ghting, with
death balanced on every stroke. And with my wrists chained together,
the wench may even give me a contest for a time. His chains forced him
to use a two-handed grip, though of course the weight and reach
were less than if the blade had been a true two-handed greatsword,
but what did it matter? His cousin’s sword was long enough to write
an end to this Brienne of Tarth.
High, low, overhand, he rained down steel upon her. Left, right,
backslash, swinging so hard that sparks ew when the swords came
together, upswing, sideslash, overhand, always attacking, moving

into her, step and slide, strike and step, step and strike, hacking,
slashing, faster, faster, faster …
… until, breathless, he stepped back and let the point of the
sword fall to the ground, giving her a moment of respite. “Not half
bad,” he acknowledged. “For a wench.”
She took a slow deep breath, her eyes watching him warily. “I
would not hurt you, Kingslayer.”
“As if you could.” He whirled the blade back up above his head
and ew at her again, chains rattling.
Jaime could not have said how long he pressed the attack. It
might have been minutes or it might have been hours; time slept
when swords woke. He drove her away from his cousin’s corpse,
drove her across the road, drove her into the trees. She stumbled
once on a root she never saw, and for a moment he thought she was
done, but she went to one knee instead of falling, and never lost a
beat. Her sword leapt up to block a downcut that would have
opened her from shoulder to groin, and then she cut at him, again
and again, ghting her way back to her feet stroke by stroke.
The dance went on. He pinned her against an oak, cursed as she
slipped away, followed her through a shallow brook half-choked
with fallen leaves. Steel rang, steel sang, steel screamed and
sparked and scraped, and the woman started grunting like a sow at
every crash, yet somehow he could not reach her. It was as if she
had an iron cage around her that stopped every blow.
“Not bad at all,” he said when he paused for a second to catch his
breath, circling to her right.
“For a wench?”
“For a squire, say. A green one.” He laughed a ragged, breathless
laugh. “Come on, come on, my sweetling, the music’s still playing.
Might I have this dance, my lady?”
Grunting, she came at him, blade whirling, and suddenly it was
Jaime struggling to keep steel from skin. One of her slashes raked
across his brow, and blood ran down into his right eye. The Others
take her, and Riverrun as well! His skills had gone to rust and rot in
that bloody dungeon, and the chains were no great help either. His
eye closed, his shoulders were going numb from the jarring they’d

taken, and his wrists ached from the weight of chains, manacles,
and sword. His longsword grew heavier with every blow, and Jaime
knew he was not swinging it as quickly as he’d done earlier, nor
raising it as high.
She is stronger than I am.
The realization chilled him. Robert had been stronger than him,
to be sure. The White Bull Gerold Hightower as well, in his heyday,
and Ser Arthur Dayne. Amongst the living, Greatjon Umber was
stronger, Strongboar of Crakehall most likely, both Cleganes for a
certainty. The Mountain’s strength was like nothing human. It did
not matter. With speed and skill, Jaime could beat them all. But this
was a woman. A huge cow of a woman, to be sure, but even
so … by rights, she should be the one wearing down.
Instead she forced him back into the brook again, shouting,
“Yield! Throw down the sword!”
A slick stone turned under Jaime’s foot. As he felt himself falling,
he twisted the mischance into a diving lunge. His point scraped past
her parry and bit into her upper thigh. A red ower blossomed, and
Jaime had an instant to savor the sight of her blood before his knee
slammed into a rock. The pain was blinding. Brienne splashed into
him and kicked away his sword. “YIELD!”
Jaime drove his shoulder into her legs, bringing her down on top
of him. They rolled, kicking and punching until nally she was
sitting astride him. He managed to jerk her dagger from its sheath,
but before he could plunge it into her belly she caught his wrist and
slammed his hands back on a rock so hard he thought she’d
wrenched an arm from its socket. Her other hand spread across his
face. “Yield!” She shoved his head down, held it under, pulled it up.
“Yield!” Jaime spit water into her face. A shove, a splash, and he
was under again, kicking uselessly, ghting to breathe. Up again.
“Yield, or I’ll drown you!”
“And break your oath?” he snarled. “Like me?”
She let him go, and he went down with a splash.
And the woods rang with coarse laughter.
Brienne lurched to her feet. She was all mud and blood below the
waist, her clothing askew, her face red. She looks as if they caught us

fucking instead of ghting. Jaime crawled over the rocks to shallow
water, wiping the blood from his eye with his chained hands. Armed
men lined both sides of the brook. Small wonder, we were making
enough noise to wake a dragon. “Well met, friends,” he called to them
amiably. “My pardons if I disturbed you. You caught me chastising
my wife.”
“Seemed to me she was doing the chastising.” The man who spoke
was thick and powerful, and the nasal bar of his iron halfhelm did
not wholly conceal his lack of a nose.
These were not the outlaws who had killed Ser Cleos, Jaime
realized suddenly. The scum of the earth surrounded them: swarthy
Dornishmen and blond Lyseni, Dothraki with bells in their braids,
hairy Ibbenese, coal-black Summer Islanders in feathered cloaks. He
knew them. The Brave Companions.
Brienne found her voice. “I have a hundred stags—”
A cadaverous man in a tattered leather cloak said, “We’ll take
that for a start, m’lady.”
“Then we’ll have your cunt,” said the noseless man. “It can’t be as
ugly as the rest of you.”
“Turn her over and rape her arse, Rorge,” urged a Dornish
spearman with a red silk scarf wound about his helm. “That way
you won’t need to look at her.”
“And rob her o’ the pleasure o’ looking at me?” Noseless said, and
the others laughed.
Ugly and stubborn though she might be, the wench deserved
better than to be gang raped by such refuse as these. “Who
commands here?” Jaime demanded loudly.
“I have that honor, Ser Jaime.” The cadaver’s eyes were rimmed
in red, his hair thin and dry. Dark blue veins could be seen through
the pallid skin of his hands and face. “Urswyck I am. Called
Urswyck the Faithful.”
“You know who I am?”
The sellsword inclined his head. “It takes more than a beard and a
shaved head to deceive the Brave Companions.”
The Bloody Mummers, you mean. Jaime had no more use for these
than he did for Gregor Clegane or Amory Lorch. Dogs, his father

called them all, and he used them like dogs, to hound his prey and
put fear in their hearts. “If you know me, Urswyck, you know you’ll
have your reward. A Lannister always pays his debts. As for the
wench, she’s highborn, and worth a good ransom.”
The other cocked his head. “Is it so? How fortunate.”
There was something sly about the way Urswyck was smiling that
Jaime did not like. “You heard me. Where’s the goat?”
“A few hours distant. He will be pleased to see you, I have no
doubt, but I would not call him a goat to his face. Lord Vargo grows
prickly about his dignity.”
Since when has that slobbering savage had dignity? “I’ll be sure and
remember that, when I see him. Lord of what, pray?”
“Harrenhal. It has been promised.”
Harrenhal? Has my father taken leave of his senses? Jaime raised his
hands. “I’ll have these chains o .”
Urswyck’s chuckle was papery dry.
Something is very wrong here. Jaime gave no sign of his
discom ture, but only smiled. “Did I say something amusing?”
Noseless grinned. “You’re the funniest thing I seen since Biter
chewed that septa’s teats o .”
“You and your father lost too many battles,” o ered the
Dornishman. “We had to trade our lion pelts for wolfskins.”
Urswyck spread his hands. “What Timeon means to say is that the
Brave Companions are no longer in the hire of House Lannister. We
now serve Lord Bolton, and the King in the North.”
Jaime gave him a cold, contemptuous smile. “And men say I have
shit for honor?”
Urswyck was unhappy with that comment. At his signal, two of
the Mummers grasped Jaime by the arms and Rorge drove a mailed
st into his stomach. As he doubled over grunting, he heard the
wench protesting, “Stop, he’s not to be harmed! Lady Catelyn sent
us, an exchange of captives, he’s under my protection …” Rorge hit
him again, driving the air from his lungs. Brienne dove for her
sword beneath the waters of the brook, but the Mummers were on
her before she could lay hands on it. Strong as she was, it took four
of them to beat her into submission.

By the end the wench’s face was as swollen and bloody as Jaime’s
must have been, and they had knocked out two of her teeth. It did
nothing to improve her appearance. Stumbling and bleeding, the
two captives were dragged back through the woods to the horses,
Brienne limping from the thigh wound he’d given her in the brook.
Jaime felt sorry for her. She would lose her maidenhood tonight, he
had no doubt. That noseless bastard would have her for a certainty,
and some of the others would likely take a turn.
The Dornishman bound them back to back atop Brienne’s plow
horse while the other Mummers were stripping Cleos Frey to his
skin to divvy up his possessions. Rorge won the bloodstained
surcoat with its proud Lannister and Frey quarterings. The arrows
had punched holes through lions and towers alike.
“I hope you’re pleased, wench,” Jaime whispered at Brienne. He
coughed, and spat out a mouthful of blood. “If you’d armed me,
we’d never have been taken.” She made no answer. There’s a pigstubborn bitch, he thought. But brave, yes. He could not take that
from her. “When we make camp for the night, you’ll be raped, and
more than once,” he warned her. “You’d be wise not to resist. If you
ght them, you’ll lose more than a few teeth.”
He felt Brienne’s back sti en against his. “Is that what you would
do, if you were a woman?”
If I were a woman I’d be Cersei. “If I were a woman, I’d make them
kill me. But I’m not.” Jaime kicked their horse to a trot. “Urswyck!
A word!”
The cadaverous sellsword in the ragged leather cloak reined up a
moment, then fell in beside him. “What would you have of me, ser?
And mind your tongue, or I’ll chastise you again.”
“Gold,” said Jaime. “You do like gold?”
Urswyck studied him through reddened eyes. “It has its uses, I do
confess.”
Jaime gave Urswyck a knowing smile. “All the gold in Casterly
Rock. Why let the goat enjoy it? Why not take us to King’s Landing,
and collect my ransom for yourself? Hers as well, if you like. Tarth
is called the Sapphire Isle, a maiden told me once.” The wench
squirmed at that, but said nothing.

“Do you take me for a turncloak?”
“Certainly. What else?”
For half a heartbeat Urswyck considered the proposition. “King’s
Landing is a long way, and your father is there. Lord Tywin may
resent us for selling Harrenhal to Lord Bolton.”
He’s cleverer than he looks. Jaime had been been looking forward
to hanging the wretch while his pockets bulged with gold. “Leave
me to deal with my father. I’ll get you a royal pardon for any
crimes you have committed. I’ll get you a knighthood.”
“Ser Urswyck,” the man said, savoring the sound. “How proud my
dear wife would be to hear it. If only I hadn’t killed her.” He
sighed. “And what of brave Lord Vargo?”
“Shall I sing you a verse of ‘The Rains of Castamere’? The goat
won’t be quite so brave when my father gets hold of him.”
“And how will he do that? Are your father’s arms so long that
they can reach over the walls of Harrenhal and pluck us out?”
“If need be.” King Harren’s monstrous folly had fallen before, and
it could fall again. “Are you such a fool as to think the goat can
out ght the lion?”
Urswyck leaned over and slapped him lazily across the face. The
sheer casual insolence of it was worse than the blow itself. He does
not fear me, Jaime realized, with a chill. “I have heard enough,
Kingslayer. I would have to be a great fool indeed to believe the
promises of an oathbreaker like you.” He kicked his horse and
galloped smartly ahead.
Aerys, Jaime thought resentfully. It always turns on Aerys. He
swayed with the motion of his horse, wishing for a sword. Two
swords would be even better. One for the wench and one for me. We’d
die, but we’d take half of them down to hell with us. “Why did you tell
him Tarth was the Sapphire Isle?” Brienne whispered when Urswyck
was out of earshot. “He’s like to think my father’s rich in
gemstones …”
“You best pray he does.”
“Is every word you say a lie, Kingslayer? Tarth is called the
Sapphire Isle for the blue of its waters.”

“Shout it a little louder, wench, I don’t think Urswyck heard you.
The sooner they know how little you’re worth in ransom, the sooner
the rapes begin. Every man here will mount you, but what do you
care? Just close your eyes, open your legs, and pretend they’re all
Lord Renly.”
Mercifully, that shut her mouth for a time.
The day was almost done by the time they found Vargo Hoat,
sacking a small sept with another dozen of his Brave Companions.
The leaded windows had been smashed, the carved wooden gods
dragged out into the sunlight. The fattest Dothraki Jaime had ever
seen was sitting on the Mother’s chest when they rode up, prying
out her chalcedony eyes with the point of his knife. Nearby, a
skinny balding septon hung upside down from the limb of a
spreading chestnut tree. Three of the Brave Companions were using
his corpse for an archery butt. One of them must have been good;
the dead man had arrows through both of his eyes.
When the sellswords spied Urswyck and the captives, a cry went
up in half a dozen tongues. The goat was seated by a cook re eating
a half-cooked bird o a skewer, grease and blood running down his
ngers into his long stringy beard. He wiped his hands on his tunic
and rose. “Kingthlayer,” he slobbered. “You are my captifth.”
“My lord, I am Brienne of Tarth,” the wench called out. “Lady
Catelyn Stark commanded me to deliver Ser Jaime to his brother at
King’s Landing.”
The goat gave her a disinterested glance. “Thilence her.”
“Hear me,” Brienne entreated as Rorge cut the ropes that bound
her to Jaime, “in the name of the King in the North, the king you
serve, please, listen—”
Rorge dragged her o the horse and began to kick her. “See that
you don’t break any bones,” Urswyck called out to him. “The horsefaced bitch is worth her weight in sapphires.”
The Dornishman Timeon and a foul-smelling Ibbenese pulled
Jaime down from the saddle and shoved him roughly toward the
cook re. It would not have been hard for him to have grasped one
of their sword hilts as they manhandled him, but there were too
many, and he was still in fetters. He might cut down one or two,

but in the end he would die for it. Jaime was not ready to die just
yet, and certainly not for the likes of Brienne of Tarth.
“Thith ith a thweet day,” Vargo Hoat said. Around his neck hung
a chain of linked coins, coins of every shape and size, cast and
hammered, bearing the likenesses of kings, wizards, gods and
demons, and all manner of fanciful beasts.
Coins from every land where he has fought, Jaime remembered.
Greed was the key to this man. If he was turned once, he can be
turned again. “Lord Vargo, you were foolish to leave my father’s
service, but it is not too late to make amends. He will pay well for
me, you know it.”
“Oh yeth,” said Vargo Hoat. “Half the gold in Cathterly Rock, I
thall have. But rth I mutht thend him a methage.” He said
something in his slithery goatish tongue.
Urswyck shoved him in the back, and a jester in green and pink
motley kicked his legs out from under him. When he hit the ground
one of the archers grabbed the chain between Jaime’s wrists and
used it to yank his arms out in front of him. The fat Dothraki put
aside his knife to unsheathe a huge curved arakh, the wickedly sharp
scythe-sword the horselords loved.
They mean to scare me. The fool hopped on Jaime’s back, giggling,
as the Dothraki swaggered toward him. The goat wants me to piss my
breeches and beg his mercy, but he’ll never have that pleasure. He was a
Lannister of Casterly Rock, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard; no
sellsword would make him scream.
Sunlight ran silver along the edge of the arakh as it came
shivering down, almost too fast to see. And Jaime screamed.

ARYA

The small square keep was half a ruin, and so too the great grey

knight who lived there. He was so old he did not understand their
questions. No matter what was said to him, he would only smile and
mutter, “I held the bridge against Ser Maynard. Red hair and a
black temper, he had, but he could not move me. Six wounds I took
before I killed him. Six!”
The maester who cared for him was a young man, thankfully.
After the old knight had drifted to sleep in his chair, he took them
aside and said, “I fear you seek a ghost. We had a bird, ages ago,
half a year at least. The Lannisters caught Lord Beric near the Gods
Eye. He was hanged.”
“Aye, hanged he was, but Thoros cut him down before he died.”
Lem’s broken nose was not so red or swollen as it had been, but it
was healing crooked, giving his face a lopsided look. “His lordship’s
a hard man to kill, he is.”
“And a hard man to nd, it would seem,” the maester said. “Have
you asked the Lady of the Leaves?”
“We shall,” said Greenbeard.
The next morning, as they crossed the little stone bridge behind
the keep, Gendry wondered if this was the bridge the old man had
fought over. No one knew. “Most like it is,” said Jack-Be-Lucky.
“Don’t see no other bridges.”
“You’d know for certain if there was a song,” said Tom
Sevenstrings. “One good song, and we’d know who Ser Maynard

used to be and why he wanted to cross this bridge so bad. Poor old
Lychester might be as far famed as the Dragonknight if he’d only
had sense enough to keep a singer.”
“Lord Lychester’s sons died in Robert’s Rebellion,” grumbled Lem.
“Some on one side, some on t’other. He’s not been right in the head
since. No bloody song’s like to help any o’ that.”
“What did the maester mean, about asking the Lady of the
Leaves?” Arya asked Anguy as they rode.
The archer smiled. “Wait and see.”
Three days later, as they rode through a yellow wood, Jack-BeLucky unslung his horn and blew a signal, a di erent one than
before. The sounds had scarcely died away when rope ladders
unrolled from the limbs of trees. “Hobble the horses and up we go,”
said Tom, half singing the words. They climbed to a hidden village
in the upper branches, a maze of rope walkways and little mosscovered houses concealed behind walls of red and gold, and were
taken to the Lady of the Leaves, a stick-thin white-haired woman
dressed in roughspun. “We cannot stay here much longer, with
autumn on us,” she told them. “A dozen wolves went down the
Hayford road nine days past, hunting. If they’d chanced to look up
they might have seen us.”
“You’ve not seen Lord Beric?” asked Tom Sevenstrings.
“He’s dead.” The woman sounded sick. “The Mountain caught
him, and drove a dagger through his eye. A begging brother told us.
He had it from the lips of a man who saw it happen.”
“That’s an old stale tale, and false,” said Lem. “The lightning
lord’s not so easy to kill. Ser Gregor might have put his eye out, but
a man don’t die o’ that. Jack could tell you.”
“Well, I never did,” said one-eyed Jack-Be-Lucky. “My father got
himself good and hanged by Lord Piper’s baili , my brother Wat
got sent to the Wall, and the Lannisters killed my other brothers. An
eye, that’s nothing.”
“You swear he’s not dead?” The woman clutched Lem’s arm.
“Bless you, Lem, that’s the best tidings we’ve had in half a year.
May the Warrior defend him, and the red priest too.”

The next night they found shelter beneath the scorched shell of a
sept, in a burned village called Sallydance. Only shards remained of
its windows of leaded glass, and the aged septon who greeted them
said the looters had even made o with the Mother’s costly robes,
the Crone’s gilded lantern, and the silver crown the Father had
worn. “They hacked the Maiden’s breasts o too, though those were
only wood,” he told them. “And the eyes, the eyes were jet and
lapis and mother-of-pearl, they pried them out with their knives.
May the Mother have mercy on them all.”
“Whose work was this?” said Lem Lemoncloak. “Mummers?”
“No,” the old man said. “Northmen, they were. Savages who
worship trees. They wanted the Kingslayer, they said.”
Arya heard him, and chewed her lip. She could feel Gendry
looking at her. It made her angry and ashamed.
There were a dozen men living in the vault beneath the sept,
amongst cobwebs and roots and broken wine casks, but they had no
word of Beric Dondarrion either. Not even their leader, who wore
soot-blackened armor and a crude lightning bolt on his cloak. When
Greenbeard saw Arya staring at him, he laughed and said, “The
lightning lord is everywhere and nowhere, skinny squirrel.”
“I’m not a squirrel,” she said. “I’ll almost be a woman soon. I’ll be
one-and-ten.”
“Best watch out I don’t marry you, then!” He tried to tickle her
under the chin, but Arya slapped his stupid hand away.
Lem and Gendry played tiles with their hosts that night, while
Tom Sevenstrings sang a silly song about Big Belly Ben and the
High Septon’s goose. Anguy let Arya try his longbow, but no matter
how hard she bit her lip she could not draw it. “You need a lighter
bow, milady,” the freckled bowman said. “If there’s seasoned wood
at Riverrun, might be I’ll make you one.”
Tom overheard him, and broke o his song. “You’re a young fool,
Archer. If we go to Riverrun it will only be to collect her ransom,
won’t be no time for you to sit about making bows. Be thankful if
you get out with your hide. Lord Hoster was hanging outlaws
before you were shaving. And that son of his … a man who hates
music can’t be trusted, I always say.”

“It’s not music he hates,” said Lem. “It’s you, fool.”
“Well, he has no cause. The wench was willing to make a man of
him, is it my fault he drank too much to do the deed?”
Lem snorted through his broken nose. “Was it you who made a
song of it, or some other bloody arse in love with his own voice?”
“I only sang it the once,” Tom complained. “And who’s to say the
song was about him? ’Twas a song about a sh.”
“A oppy sh,” said Anguy, laughing.
Arya didn’t care what Tom’s stupid songs were about. She turned
to Harwin. “What did he mean about ransom?”
“We have sore need of horses, milady. Armor as well. Swords,
shields, spears. All the things coin can buy. Aye, and seed for
planting. Winter is coming, remember?” He touched her under the
chin. “You will not be the rst highborn captive we’ve ransomed.
Nor the last, I’d hope.”
That much was true, Arya knew. Knights were captured and
ransomed all the time, and sometimes women were too. But what if
Robb won’t pay their price? She wasn’t a famous knight, and kings
were supposed to put the realm before their sisters. And her lady
mother, what would she say? Would she still want her back, after
all the things she’d done? Arya chewed her lip and wondered.
The next day they rode to a place called High Heart, a hill so
lofty that from atop it Arya felt as though she could see half the
world. Around its brow stood a ring of huge pale stumps, all that
remained of a circle of once-mighty weirwoods. Arya and Gendry
walked around the hill to count them. There were thirty-one, some
so wide that she could have used them for a bed.
High Heart had been sacred to the children of the forest, Tom
Sevenstrings told her, and some of their magic lingered here still.
“No harm can ever come to those as sleep here,” the singer said.
Arya thought that must be true; the hill was so high and the
surrounding lands so at that no enemy could approach unseen.
The smallfolk hereabouts shunned the place, Tom told her; it was
said to be haunted by the ghosts of the children of the forest who
had died here when the Andal king named Erreg the Kinslayer had
cut down their grove. Arya knew about the children of the forest,

and about the Andals too, but ghosts did not frighten her. She used
to hide in the crypts of Winterfell when she was little, and play
games of come-into-my-castle and monsters and maidens amongst
the stone kings on their thrones.
Yet even so, the hair on the back of her neck stood up that night.
She had been asleep, but the storm woke her. The wind pulled the
coverlet right o her and sent it swirling into the bushes. When she
went after it she heard voices.
Beside the embers of their camp re, she saw Tom, Lem, and
Greenbeard talking to a tiny little woman, a foot shorter than Arya
and older than Old Nan, all stooped and wrinkled and leaning on a
gnarled black cane. Her white hair was so long it came almost to
the ground. When the wind gusted it blew about her head in a ne
cloud. Her esh was whiter, the color of milk, and it seemed to
Arya that her eyes were red, though it was hard to tell from the
bushes. “The old gods stir and will not let me sleep,” she heard the
woman say. “I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart
butchering a golden stag, aye. I dreamt of a man without a face,
waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung. On his shoulder
perched a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings. I
dreamt of a roaring river and a woman that was a sh. Dead she
drifted, with red tears on her cheeks, but when her eyes did open,
oh, I woke from terror. All this I dreamt, and more. Do you have
gifts for me, to pay me for my dreams?”
“Dreams,” grumbled Lem Lemoncloak, “what good are dreams?
Fish women and drowned crows. I had a dream myself last night. I
was kissing this tavern wench I used to know. Are you going to pay
me for that, old woman?”
“The wench is dead,” the woman hissed. “Only worms may kiss
her now.” And then to Tom Sevenstrings she said, “I’ll have my
song or I’ll have you gone.”
So the singer played for her, so soft and sad that Arya only heard
snatches of the words, though the tune was half-familiar. Sansa
would know it, I bet. Her sister had known all the songs, and she
could even play a little, and sing so sweetly. All I could ever do was
shout the words.

The next morning the little white woman was nowhere to be
seen. As they saddled their horses, Arya asked Tom Sevenstrings if
the children of the forest still dwelled on High Heart. The singer
chuckled. “Saw her, did you?”
“Was she a ghost?”
“Do ghosts complain of how their joints creak? No, she’s only an
old dwarf woman. A queer one, though, and evil-eyed. But she
knows things she has no business knowing, and sometimes she’ll tell
you if she likes the look of you.”
“Did she like the looks of you?” Arya asked doubtfully.
The singer laughed. “The sound of me, at least. She always makes
me sing the same bloody song, though. Not a bad song, mind you,
but I know others just as good.” He shook his head. “What matters
is, we have the scent now. You’ll soon be seeing Thoros and the
lightning lord, I’ll wager.”
“If you’re their men, why do they hide from you?”
Tom Sevenstrings rolled his eyes at that, but Harwin gave her an
answer. “I wouldn’t call it hiding, milady, but it’s true, Lord Beric
moves about a lot, and seldom lets on what his plans are. That way
no one can betray him. By now there must be hundreds of us sworn
to him, maybe thousands, but it wouldn’t do for us all to trail along
behind him. We’d eat the country bare, or get butchered in a battle
by some bigger host. The way we’re scattered in little bands, we
can strike in a dozen places at once, and be o somewhere else
before they know. And when one of us is caught and put to the
question, well, we can’t tell them where to nd Lord Beric no
matter what they do to us.” He hesitated. “You know what it
means, to be put to the question?”
Arya nodded. “Tickling, they called it. Polliver and Ra and all.”
She told them about the village by the Gods Eye where she and
Gendry had been caught, and the questions that the Tickler had
asked. “Is there gold hidden in the village?” he would always begin.
“Silver, gems? Is there food? Where is Lord Beric? Which of you
village folk helped him? Where did he go? How many men did he
have with him? How many knights? How many bowmen? How
many were horsed? How are they armed? How many wounded?

Where did they go, did you say?” Just thinking of it, she could hear
the shrieks again, and smell the stench of blood and shit and
burning esh. “He always asked the same questions,” she told the
outlaws solemnly, “but he changed the tickling every day.”
“No child should be made to su er that,” Harwin said when she
was done. “The Mountain lost half his men at the Stone Mill, we
hear. Might be this Tickler’s oating down the Red Fork even now,
with sh biting at his face. If not, well, it’s one more crime they’ll
answer for. I’ve heard his lordship say this war began when the
Hand sent him out to bring the king’s justice to Gregor Clegane, and
that’s how he means for it to end.” He gave her shoulder a
reassuring pat. “You best mount up, milady. It’s a long day’s ride to
Acorn Hall, but at the end of it we’ll have a roof above our heads
and a hot supper in our bellies.”
It was a long day’s ride, but as dusk was settling they forded a
brook and came up on Acorn Hall, with its stone curtain walls and
great oaken keep. Its master was away ghting in the retinue of his
master, Lord Vance, the castle gates closed and barred in his
absence. But his lady wife was an old friend of Tom Sevenstrings,
and Anguy said they’d once been lovers. Anguy often rode beside
her; he was closer to her in age than any of them but Gendry, and
he told her droll tales of the Dornish Marches. He never fooled her,
though. He’s not my friend. He’s only staying close to watch me and
make sure I don’t ride o again. Well, Arya could watch as well. Syrio
Forel had taught her how.
Lady Smallwood welcomed the outlaws kindly enough, though
she gave them a tongue lashing for dragging a young girl through
the war. She became even more wroth when Lem let slip that Arya
was highborn. “Who dressed the poor child in those Bolton rags?”
she demanded of them. “That badge … there’s many a man who
would hang her in half a heartbeat for wearing a ayed man on her
breast.” Arya promptly found herself marched upstairs, forced into a
tub, and doused with scalding hot water. Lady Smallwood’s
maidservants scrubbed her so hard it felt like they were aying her
themselves. They even dumped in some stinky-sweet stu that
smelled like owers.

And afterward, they insisted she dress herself in girl’s things,
brown woolen stockings and a light linen shift, and over that a light
green gown with acorns embroidered all over the bodice in brown
thread, and more acorns bordering the hem. “My great-aunt is a
septa at a motherhouse in Oldtown,” Lady Smallwood said as the
women laced the gown up Arya’s back. “I sent my daughter there
when the war began. She’ll have outgrown these things by the time
she returns, no doubt. Are you fond of dancing, child? My Carellen’s
a lovely dancer. She sings beautifully as well. What do you like to
do?”
She scu ed a toe amongst the rushes. “Needlework.”
“Very restful, isn’t it?”
“Well,” said Arya, “not the way I do it.”
“No? I have always found it so. The gods give each of us our little
gifts and talents, and it is meant for us to use them, my aunt always
says. Any act can be a prayer, if done as well as we are able. Isn’t
that a lovely thought? Remember that the next time you do your
needlework. Do you work at it every day?”
“I did till I lost Needle. My new one’s not as good.”
“In times like these, we all must make do as best we can.” Lady
Smallwood fussed at the bodice of the gown. “Now you look a
proper young lady.”
I’m not a lady, Arya wanted to tell her, I’m a wolf.
“I do not know who you are, child,” the woman said, “and it may
be that’s for the best. Someone important, I fear.” She smoothed
down Arya’s collar. “In times like these, it is better to be
insigni cant. Would that I could keep you here with me. That
would not be safe, though. I have walls, but too few men to hold
them.” She sighed.
Supper was being served in the hall by the time Arya was all
washed and combed and dressed. Gendry took one look and laughed
so hard that wine came out his nose, until Harwin gave him a
thwack alongside his ear. The meal was plain but lling; mutton and
mushrooms, brown bread, pease pudding, and baked apples with
yellow cheese. When the food had been cleared and the servants

sent away, Greenbeard lowered his voice to ask if her ladyship had
word of the lightning lord.
“Word?” She smiled. “They were here not a fortnight past. Them
and a dozen more, driving sheep. I could scarcely believe my eyes.
Thoros gave me three as thanks. You’ve eaten one tonight.”
“Thoros herding sheep?” Anguy laughed aloud.
“I grant you it was an odd sight, but Thoros claimed that as a
priest he knew how to tend a ock.”
“Aye, and shear them too,” chuckled Lem Lemoncloak.
“Someone could make a rare ne song of that.” Tom plucked a
string on his woodharp.
Lady Smallwood gave him a withering look. “Someone who
doesn’t rhyme carry on with Dondarrion, perhaps. Or play ‘Oh, Lay
My Sweet Lass Down in the Grass’ to every milkmaid in the shire
and leave two of them with big bellies.”
“It was ‘Let Me Drink Your Beauty,’ ” said Tom defensively, “and
milkmaids are always glad to hear it. As was a certain highborn
lady I do recall. I play to please.”
Her nostrils ared. “The riverlands are full of maids you’ve
pleased, all drinking tansy tea. You’d think a man as old as you
would know to spill his seed on their bellies. Men will be calling
you Tom Sevensons before much longer.”
“As it happens,” said Tom, “I passed seven many years ago. And
ne boys they are too, with voices sweet as nightingales.” Plainly
he did not care for the subject.
“Did his lordship say where he was bound, milady?” asked
Harwin.
“Lord Beric never shares his plans, but there’s hunger down near
Stoney Sept and the Threepenny Wood. I should look for him
there.” She took a sip of wine. “You’d best know, I’ve had less
pleasant callers as well. A pack of wolves came howling around my
gates, thinking I might have Jaime Lannister in here.”
Tom stopped his plucking. “Then it’s true, the Kingslayer is loose
again?”
Lady Smallwood gave him a scornful look. “I hardly think they’d
be hunting him if he was chained up under Riverrun.”

“What did m’lady tell them?” asked Jack-Be-Lucky.
“Why, that I had Ser Jaime naked in my bed, but I’d left him
much too exhausted to come down. One of them had the e rontery
to call me a liar, so we saw them o with a few quarrels. I believe
they made for Blackbottom Bend.”
Arya squirmed restlessly in her seat. “What northmen was it, who
came looking after the Kingslayer?”
Lady Smallwood seemed surprised that she’d spoken. “They did
not give their names, child, but they wore black, with the badge of
a white sun on the breast.”
A white sun on black was the sigil of Lord Karstark, Arya thought.
Those were Robb’s men. She wondered if they were still close. If she
could give the outlaws the slip and nd them, maybe they would
take her to her mother at Riverrun …
“Did they say how Lannister came to escape?” Lem asked.
“They did,” said Lady Smallwood. “Not that I believe a word of it.
They claimed that Lady Catelyn set him free.”
That startled Tom so badly he snapped a string. “Go on with
you,” he said. “That’s madness.”
It’s not true, thought Arya. It couldn’t be true.
“I thought the same,” said Lady Smallwood.
That was when Harwin remembered Arya. “Such talk is not for
your ears, milady.”
“No, I want to hear.”
The outlaws were adamant. “Go on with you, skinny squirrel,”
said Greenbeard. “Be a good little lady and go play in the yard
while we talk, now.”
Arya stalked away angry, and would have slammed the door if it
hadn’t been so heavy. Darkness had settled over Acorn Hall. A few
torches burned along the walls, but that was all. The gates of the
little castle were closed and barred. She had promised Harwin that
she would not try and run away again, she knew, but that was
before they started telling lies about her mother.
“Arya?” Gendry had followed her out. “Lady Smallwood said
there’s a smithy. Want to have a look?”
“If you want.” She had nothing else to do.

“This Thoros,” Gendry said as they walked past the kennels, “is he
the same Thoros who lived in the castle at King’s Landing? A red
priest, fat, with a shaved head?”
“I think so.” Arya had never spoken to Thoros at King’s Landing
that she could recall, but she knew who he was. He and Jalabhar
Xho had been the most colorful gures at Robert’s court, and
Thoros was a great friend of the king as well.
“He won’t remember me, but he used to come to our forge.” The
Smallwood forge had not been used in some time, though the smith
had hung his tools neatly on the wall. Gendry lit a candle and set it
on the anvil while he took down a pair of tongs. “My master always
scolded him about his aming swords. It was no way to treat good
steel, he’d say, but this Thoros never used good steel. He’d just dip
some cheap sword in wild re and set it alight. It was only an
alchemist’s trick, my master said, but it scared the horses and some
of the greener knights.”
She screwed up her face, trying to remember if her father had
ever talked about Thoros. “He isn’t very priestly, is he?”
“No,” Gendry admitted. “Master Mott said Thoros could outdrink
even King Robert. They were pease in a pod, he told me, both
gluttons and sots.”
“You shouldn’t call the king a sot.” Maybe King Robert had drunk
a lot, but he’d been her father’s friend.
“I was talking about Thoros.” Gendry reached out with the tongs
as if to pinch her face, but Arya swatted them away. “He liked
feasts and tourneys, that was why King Robert was so fond of him.
And this Thoros was brave. When the walls of Pyke crashed down,
he was the rst through the breach. He fought with one of his
aming swords, setting ironmen a re with every slash.”
“I wish I had a aming sword.” Arya could think of lots of people
she’d like to set on re.
“It’s only a trick, I told you. The wild re ruins the steel. My
master sold Thoros a new sword after every tourney. Every time
they would have a ght about the price.” Gendry hung the tongs
back up and took down the heavy hammer. “Master Mott said it
was time I made my rst longsword. He gave me a sweet piece of

steel, and I knew just how I wanted to shape the blade. Only Yoren
came, and took me away for the Night’s Watch.”
“You can still make swords if you want,” said Arya. “You can
make them for my brother Robb when we get to Riverrun.”
“Riverrun.” Gendry put the hammer down and looked at her.
“You look di erent now. Like a proper little girl.”
“I look like an oak tree, with all these stupid acorns.”
“Nice, though. A nice oak tree.” He stepped closer, and sni ed at
her. “You even smell nice for a change.”
“You don’t. You stink.” Arya shoved him back against the anvil
and made to run, but Gendry caught her arm. She stuck a foot
between his legs and tripped him, but he yanked her down with
him, and they rolled across the oor of the smithy. He was very
strong, but she was quicker. Every time he tried to hold her still she
wriggled free and punched him. Gendry only laughed at the blows,
which made her mad. He nally caught both her wrists in one hand
and started to tickle her with the other, so Arya slammed her knee
between his legs, and wrenched free. Both of them were covered in
dirt, and one sleeve was torn on her stupid acorn dress. “I bet I
don’t look so nice now,” she shouted.
Tom was singing when they returned to the hall.
My featherbed is deep and soft,
and there I’ll lay you down,
I’ll dress you all in yellow silk,
and on your head a crown.
For you shall be my lady love,
and I shall be your lord.
I’ll always keep you warm and safe,
and guard you with my sword.
Harwin took one look at them and burst out laughing, and Anguy
smiled one of his stupid freckly smiles and said, “Are we certain this
one is a highborn lady?” But Lem Lemoncloak gave Gendry a clout
alongside the head. “You want to ght, ght with me! She’s a girl,
and half your age! You keep your hands o o’ her, you hear me?”

“I started it,” said Arya. “Gendry was just talking.”
“Leave the boy, Lem,” said Harwin. “Arya did start it, I have no
doubt. She was much the same at Winterfell.”
Tom winked at her as he sang:
And how she smiled and how she laughed,
the maiden of the tree.
She spun away and said to him,
no featherbed for me.
I’ll wear a gown of golden leaves,
and bind my hair with grass,
But you can be my forest love,
and me your forest lass.
“I have no gowns of leaves,” said Lady Smallwood with a small
fond smile, “but Carellen left some other dresses that might serve.
Come, child, let us go upstairs and see what we can nd.”
It was even worse than before; Lady Smallwood insisted that Arya
take another bath, and cut and comb her hair besides; the dress she
put her in this time was sort of lilac-colored, and decorated with
little baby pearls. The only good thing about it was that it was so
delicate that no one could expect her to ride in it. So the next
morning as they broke their fast, Lady Smallwood gave her
breeches, belt, and tunic to wear, and a brown doeskin jerkin dotted
with iron studs. “They were my son’s things,” she said. “He died
when he was seven.”
“I’m sorry, my lady.” Arya suddenly felt bad for her, and
ashamed. “I’m sorry I tore the acorn dress too. It was pretty.”
“Yes, child. And so are you. Be brave.”

DAENERYS

In the center of the Plaza of Pride stood a red brick fountain whose

waters smelled of brimstone, and in the center of the fountain a
monstrous harpy made of hammered bronze. Twenty feet tall she
reared. She had a woman’s face, with gilded hair, ivory eyes, and
pointed ivory teeth. Water gushed yellow from her heavy breasts.
But in place of arms she had the wings of a bat or a dragon, her legs
were the legs of an eagle, and behind she wore a scorpion’s curled
and venomous tail.
The harpy of Ghis, Dany thought. Old Ghis had fallen ve thousand
years ago, if she remembered true; its legions shattered by the
might of young Valyria, its brick walls pulled down, its streets and
buildings turned to ash and cinder by dragon ame, its very elds
sown with salt, sulfur, and skulls. The gods of Ghis were dead, and
so too its people; these Astapori were mongrels, Ser Jorah said.
Even the Ghiscari tongue was largely forgotten; the slave cities
spoke the High Valyrian of their conquerors, or what they had made
of it.
Yet the symbol of the Old Empire still endured here, though this
bronze monster had a heavy chain dangling from her talons, an
open manacle at either end. The harpy of Ghis had a thunderbolt in her
claws. This is the harpy of Astapor.
“Tell the Westerosi whore to lower her eyes,” the slaver Kraznys
mo Nakloz complained to the slave girl who spoke for him. “I deal
in meat, not metal. The bronze is not for sale. Tell her to look at the

soldiers. Even the dim purple eyes of a sunset savage can see how
magni cent my creatures are, surely.”
Kraznys’s High Valyrian was twisted and thickened by the
characteristic growl of Ghis, and avored here and there with words
of slaver argot. Dany understood him well enough, but she smiled
and looked blankly at the slave girl, as if wondering what he might
have said.
“The Good Master Kraznys asks, are they not magni cent?” The
girl spoke the Common Tongue well, for one who had never been to
Westeros. No older than ten, she had the round at face, dusky skin,
and golden eyes of Naath. The Peaceful People, her folk were called.
All agreed that they made the best slaves.
“They might be adequate to my needs,” Dany answered. It had
been Ser Jorah’s suggestion that she speak only Dothraki and the
Common Tongue while in Astapor. My bear is more clever than he
looks. “Tell me of their training.”
“The Westerosi woman is pleased with them, but speaks no
praise, to keep the price down,” the translator told her master. “She
wishes to know how they were trained.”
Kraznys mo Nakloz bobbed his head. He smelled as if he’d bathed
in raspberries, this slaver, and his jutting red-black beard glistened
with oil. He has larger breasts than I do, Dany re ected. She could see
them through the thin sea-green silk of the gold-fringed tokar he
wound about his body and over one shoulder. His left hand held the
tokar in place as he walked, while his right clasped a short leather
whip. “Are all Westerosi pigs so ignorant?” he complained. “All the
world knows that the Unsullied are masters of spear and shield and
shortsword.” He gave Dany a broad smile. “Tell her what she would
know, slave, and be quick about it. The day is hot.”
That much at least is no lie. A matched pair of slave girls stood
behind them, holding a striped silk awning over their heads, but
even in the shade Dany felt light-headed, and Kraznys was
perspiring freely. The Plaza of Pride had been baking in the sun
since dawn. Even through the thickness of her sandals, she could
feel the warmth of the red bricks underfoot. Waves of heat rose o

them shimmering to make the stepped pyramids of Astapor around
the plaza seem half a dream.
If the Unsullied felt the heat, however, they gave no hint of it.
They could be made of brick themselves, the way they stand there. A
thousand had been marched out of their barracks for her inspection;
drawn up in ten ranks of one hundred before the fountain and its
great bronze harpy, they stood sti y at attention, their stony eyes
xed straight ahead. They wore nought but white linen clouts
knotted about their loins, and conical bronze helms topped with a
sharpened spike a foot tall. Kraznys had commanded them to lay
down their spears and shields, and do their swordbelts and quilted
tunics, so the Queen of Westeros might better inspect the lean
hardness of their bodies.
“They are chosen young, for size and speed and strength,” the
slave told her. “They begin their training at ve. Every day they
train from dawn to dusk, until they have mastered the shortsword,
the shield, and the three spears. The training is most rigorous, Your
Grace. Only one boy in three survives it. This is well known. Among
the Unsullied it is said that on the day they win their spiked cap, the
worst is done with, for no duty that will ever fall to them could be
as hard as their training.”
Kraznys mo Nakloz supposedly spoke no word of the Common
Tongue, but he bobbed his head as he listened, and from time to
time gave the slave girl a poke with the end of his lash. “Tell her
that these have been standing here for a day and a night, with no
food nor water. Tell her that they will stand until they drop if I
should command it, and when nine hundred and ninety-nine have
collapsed to die upon the bricks, the last will stand there still, and
never move until his own death claims him. Such is their courage.
Tell her that.”
“I call that madness, not courage,” said Arstan Whitebeard, when
the solemn little scribe was done. He tapped the end of his
hardwood sta against the bricks, tap tap, as if to tell his
displeasure. The old man had not wanted to sail to Astapor; nor did
he favor buying this slave army. A queen should hear all sides
before reaching a decision. That was why Dany had brought him

with her to the Plaza of Pride, not to keep her safe. Her bloodriders
would do that well enough. Ser Jorah Mormont she had left aboard
Balerion to guard her people and her dragons. Much against her
inclination, she had locked the dragons belowdecks. It was too
dangerous to let them y freely over the city; the world was all too
full of men who would gladly kill them for no better reason than to
name themselves dragonslayer.
“What did the smelly old man say?” the slaver demanded of his
translator. When she told him, he smiled and said, “Inform the
savages that we call this obedience. Others may be stronger or
quicker or larger than the Unsullied. Some few may even equal
their skill with sword and spear and shield. But nowhere between
the seas will you ever nd any more obedient.”
“Sheep are obedient,” said Arstan when the words had been
translated. He had some Valyrian as well, though not so much as
Dany, but like her he was feigning ignorance.
Kraznys mo Nakloz showed his big white teeth when that was
rendered back to him. “A word from me and these sheep would spill
his stinking old bowels on the bricks,” he said, “but do not say that.
Tell them that these creatures are more dogs than sheep. Do they
eat dogs or horse in these Seven Kingdoms?”
“They prefer pigs and cows, your worship.”
“Beef. Pfag. Food for unwashed savages.”
Ignoring them all, Dany walked slowly down the line of slave
soldiers. The girls followed close behind with the silk awning, to
keep her in the shade, but the thousand men before her enjoyed no
such protection. More than half had the copper skins and almond
eyes of Dothraki and Lhazerene, but she saw men of the Free Cities
in the ranks as well, along with pale Qartheen, ebon-faced Summer
Islanders, and others whose origins she could not guess. And some
had skins of the same amber hue as Kraznys mo Nakloz, and the
bristly red-black hair that marked the ancient folk of Ghis, who
named themselves the harpy’s sons. They sell even their own kind. It
should not have surprised her. The Dothraki did the same, when
khalasar met khalasar in the sea of grass.

Some of the soldiers were tall and some were short. They ranged
in age from fourteen to twenty, she judged. Their cheeks were
smooth, and their eyes all the same, be they black or brown or blue
or grey or amber. They are like one man, Dany thought, until she
remembered that they were no men at all. The Unsullied were
eunuchs, every one of them. “Why do you cut them?” she asked
Kraznys through the slave girl. “Whole men are stronger than
eunuchs, I have always heard.”
“A eunuch who is cut young will never have the brute strength of
one of your Westerosi knights, this is true,” said Kraznys mo Nakloz
when the question was put to him. “A bull is strong as well, but
bulls die every day in the ghting pits. A girl of nine killed one not
three days past in Jothiel’s Pit. The Unsullied have something better
than strength, tell her. They have discipline. We ght in the fashion
of the Old Empire, yes. They are the lockstep legions of Old Ghis
come again, absolutely obedient, absolutely loyal, and utterly
without fear.”
Dany listened patiently to the translation.
“Even the bravest men fear death and maiming,” Arstan said
when the girl was done.
Kraznys smiled again when he heard that. “Tell the old man that
he smells of piss, and needs a stick to hold him up.”
“Truly, your worship?”
He poked her with his lash. “No, not truly, are you a girl or a
goat, to ask such folly? Say that Unsullied are not men. Say that
death means nothing to them, and maiming less than nothing.” He
stopped before a thickset man who had the look of Lhazar about
him and brought his whip up sharply, laying a line of blood across
one copper cheek. The eunuch blinked, and stood there, bleeding.
“Would you like another?” asked Kraznys.
“If it please your worship.”
It was hard to pretend not to understand. Dany laid a hand on
Kraznys’s arm before he could raise the whip again. “Tell the Good
Master that I see how strong his Unsullied are, and how bravely
they su er pain.”

Kraznys chuckled when he heard her words in Valyrian. “Tell this
ignorant whore of a westerner that courage has nothing to do with
it.”
“The Good Master says that was not courage, Your Grace.”
“Tell her to open those slut’s eyes of hers.”
“He begs you attend this carefully, Your Grace.”
Kraznys moved to the next eunuch in line, a towering youth with
the blue eyes and axen hair of Lys. “Your sword,” he said. The
eunuch knelt, unsheathed the blade, and o ered it up hilt rst. It
was a short-sword, made more for stabbing than for slashing, but
the edge looked razor-sharp. “Stand,” Kraznys commanded.
“Your worship.” The eunuch stood, and Kraznys mo Nakloz slid
the sword slowly up his torso, leaving a thin red line across his
belly and between his ribs. Then he jabbed the swordpoint in
beneath a wide pink nipple and began to work it back and forth.
“What is he doing?” Dany demanded of the girl, as the blood ran
down the man’s chest.
“Tell the cow to stop her bleating,” said Kraznys, without waiting
for the translation. “This will do him no great harm. Men have no
need of nipples, eunuchs even less so.” The nipple hung by a thread
of skin. He slashed, and sent it tumbling to the bricks, leaving
behind a round red eye copiously weeping blood. The eunuch did
not move, until Kraznys o ered him back his sword, hilt rst.
“Here, I’m done with you.”
“This one is pleased to have served you.”
Kraznys turned back to Dany. “They feel no pain, you see.”
“How can that be?” she demanded through the scribe.
“The wine of courage,” was the answer he gave her. “It is no true
wine at all, but made from deadly nightshade, blood y larva, black
lotus root, and many secret things. They drink it with every meal
from the day they are cut, and with each passing year feel less and
less. It makes them fearless in battle. Nor can they be tortured. Tell
the savage her secrets are safe with the Unsullied. She may set them
to guard her councils and even her bedchamber, and never a worry
as to what they might overhear.

“In Yunkai and Meereen, eunuchs are often made by removing a
boy’s testicles, but leaving the penis. Such a creature is infertile, yet
often still capable of erection. Only trouble can come of this. We
remove the penis as well, leaving nothing. The Unsullied are the
purest creatures on the earth.” He gave Dany and Arstan another of
his broad white smiles. “I have heard that in the Sunset Kingdoms
men take solemn vows to keep chaste and father no children, but
live only for their duty. Is it not so?”
“It is,” Arstan said, when the question was put. “There are many
such orders. The maesters of the Citadel, the septons and septas
who serve the Seven, the silent sisters of the dead, the Kingsguard
and the Night’s Watch …”
“Poor things,” growled the slaver, after the translation. “Men
were not made to live thus. Their days are a torment of temptation,
any fool must see, and no doubt most succumb to their baser selves.
Not so our Unsullied. They are wed to their swords in a way that
your Sworn Brothers cannot hope to match. No woman can ever
tempt them, nor any man.”
His girl conveyed the essence of his speech, more politely. “There
are other ways to tempt men, besides the esh,” Arstan Whitebeard
objected, when she was done.
“Men, yes, but not Unsullied. Plunder interests them no more
than rape. They own nothing but their weapons. We do not even
permit them names.”
“No names?” Dany frowned at the little scribe. “Can that be what
the Good Master said? They have no names?”
“It is so, Your Grace.”
Kraznys stopped in front of a Ghiscari who might have been his
taller tter brother, and icked his lash at a small bronze disk on
the swordbelt at his feet. “There is his name. Ask the whore of
Westeros whether she can read Ghiscari glyphs.” When Dany
admitted that she could not, the slaver turned to the Unsullied.
“What is your name?” he demanded.
“This one’s name is Red Flea, your worship.”
The girl repeated their exchange in the Common Tongue.
“And yesterday, what was it?”

“Black Rat, your worship.”
“The day before?”
“Brown Flea, your worship.”
“Before that?”
“This one does not recall, your worship. Blue Toad, perhaps. Or
Blue Worm.”
“Tell her all their names are such,” Kraznys commanded the girl.
“It reminds them that by themselves they are vermin. The name
disks are thrown in an empty cask at duty’s end, and each dawn
plucked up again at random.”
“More madness,” said Arstan, when he heard. “How can any man
possibly remember a new name every day?”
“Those who cannot are culled in training, along with those who
cannot run all day in full pack, scale a mountain in the black of
night, walk across a bed of coals, or slay an infant.”
Dany’s mouth surely twisted at that. Did he see, or is he blind as
well as cruel? She turned away quickly, trying to keep her face a
mask until she heard the translation. Only then did she allow herself
to say, “Whose infants do they slay?”
“To win his spiked cap, an Unsullied must go to the slave marts
with a silver mark, nd some wailing newborn, and kill it before its
mother’s eyes. In this way, we make certain that there is no
weakness left in them.”
She was feeling faint. The heat, she tried to tell herself. “You take
a babe from its mother’s arms, kill it as she watches, and pay for
her pain with a silver coin?”
When the translation was made for him, Kraznys mo Nakloz
laughed aloud. “What a soft mewling fool this one is. Tell the whore
of Westeros that the mark is for the child’s owner, not the mother.
The Unsullied are not permitted to steal.” He tapped his whip
against his leg. “Tell her that few ever fail that test. The dogs are
harder for them, it must be said. We give each boy a puppy on the
day that he is cut. At the end of the rst year, he is required to
strangle it. Any who cannot are killed, and fed to the surviving
dogs. It makes for a good strong lesson, we nd.”

Arstan Whitebeard tapped the end of his sta on the bricks as he
listened to that. Tap tap tap. Slow and steady. Tap tap tap. Dany saw
him turn his eyes away, as if he could not bear to look at Kraznys
any longer.
“The Good Master has said that these eunuchs cannot be tempted
with coin or esh,” Dany told the girl, “but if some enemy of mine
should o er them freedom for betraying me …”
“They would kill him out of hand and bring her his head, tell her
that,” the slaver answered. “Other slaves may steal and hoard up
silver in hopes of buying freedom, but an Unsullied would not take
it if the little mare o ered it as a gift. They have no life outside
their duty. They are soldiers, and that is all.”
“It is soldiers I need,” Dany admitted.
“Tell her it is well she came to Astapor, then. Ask her how large
an army she wishes to buy.”
“How many Unsullied do you have to sell?”
“Eight thousand fully trained and available at present. We sell
them only by the unit, she should know. By the thousand or the
century. Once we sold by the ten, as household guards, but that
proved unsound. Ten is too few. They mingle with other slaves,
even freemen, and forget who and what they are.” Kraznys waited
for that to be rendered in the Common Tongue, and then continued.
“This beggar queen must understand, such wonders do not come
cheaply. In Yunkai and Meereen, slave swordsmen can be had for
less than the price of their swords, but Unsullied are the nest foot
in all the world, and each represents many years of training. Tell
her they are like Valyrian steel, folded over and over and
hammered for years on end, until they are stronger and more
resilient than any metal on earth.”
“I know of Valyrian steel,” said Dany. “Ask the Good Master if
the Unsullied have their own o cers.”
“You must set your own o cers over them. We train them to
obey, not to think. If it is wits she wants, let her buy scribes.”
“And their gear?”
“Sword, shield, spear, sandals, and quilted tunic are included,”
said Kraznys. “And the spiked caps, to be sure. They will wear such

armor as you wish, but you must provide it.”
Dany could think of no other questions. She looked at Arstan.
“You have lived long in the world, Whitebeard. Now that you have
seen them, what do you say?”
“I say no, Your Grace,” the old man answered at once.
“Why?” she asked. “Speak freely.” Dany thought she knew what
he would say, but she wanted the slave girl to hear, so Kraznys mo
Nakloz might hear later.
“My queen,” said Arstan, “there have been no slaves in the Seven
Kingdoms for thousands of years. The old gods and the new alike
hold slavery to be an abomination. Evil. If you should land in
Westeros at the head of a slave army, many good men will oppose
you for no other reason than that. You will do great harm to your
cause, and to the honor of your House.”
“Yet I must have some army,” Dany said. “The boy Jo rey will
not give me the Iron Throne for asking politely.”
“When the day comes that you raise your banners, half of
Westeros will be with you,” Whitebeard promised. “Your brother
Rhaegar is still remembered, with great love.”
“And my father?” Dany said.
The old man hesitated before saying, “King Aerys is also
remembered. He gave the realm many years of peace. Your Grace,
you have no need of slaves. Magister Illyrio can keep you safe while
your dragons grow, and send secret envoys across the narrow sea
on your behalf, to sound out the high lords for your cause.”
“Those same high lords who abandoned my father to the
Kingslayer and bent the knee to Robert the Usurper?”
“Even those who bent their knees may yearn in their hearts for
the return of the dragons.”
“May,” said Dany. That was such a slippery word, may. In any
language. She turned back to Kraznys mo Nakloz and his slave girl.
“I must consider carefully.”
The slaver shrugged. “Tell her to consider quickly. There are
many other buyers. Only three days past I showed these same
Unsullied to a corsair king who hopes to buy them all.”

“The corsair wanted only a hundred, your worship,” Dany heard
the slave girl say.
He poked her with the end of the whip. “Consairs are all liars.
He’ll buy them all. Tell her that, girl.”
Dany knew she would take more than a hundred, if she took any
at all. “Remind your Good Master of who I am. Remind him that I
am Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons, the Unburnt, trueborn
queen of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. My blood is the blood of
Aegon the Conqueror, and of old Valyria before him.”
Yet her words did not move the plump perfumed slaver, even
when rendered in his own ugly tongue. “Old Ghis ruled an empire
when the Valyrians were still fucking sheep,” he growled at the
poor little scribe, “and we are the sons of the harpy.” He gave a
shrug. “My tongue is wasted wagging at women. East or west, it
makes no matter, they cannot decide until they have been pampered
and attered and stu ed with sweetmeats. Well, if this is my fate,
so be it. Tell the whore that if she requires a guide to our sweet
city, Kraznys mo Nakloz will gladly serve her … and service her as
well, if she is more woman than she looks.”
“Good Master Kraznys would be most pleased to show you
Astapor while you ponder, Your Grace,” the translator said.
“I will feed her jellied dog brains, and a ne rich stew of red
octopus and unborn puppy.” He wiped his lips.
“Many delicious dishes can be had here, he says.”
“Tell her how pretty the pyramids are at night,” the slaver
growled. “Tell her I will lick honey o her breasts, or allow her to
lick honey o mine if she prefers.”
“Astapor is most beautiful at dusk, Your Grace,” said the slave
girl. “The Good Masters light silk lanterns on every terrace, so all
the pyramids glow with colored lights. Pleasure barges ply the
Worm, playing soft music and calling at the little islands for food
and wine and other delights.”
“Ask her if she wishes to view our ghting pits,” Kraznys added.
“Douquor’s Pit has a ne folly scheduled for the evening. A bear
and three small boys. One boy will be rolled in honey, one in blood,

and one in rotting sh, and she may wager on which the bear will
eat rst.”
Tap tap tap, Dany heard. Arstan Whitebeard’s face was still, but
his sta beat out his rage. Tap tap tap. She made herself smile. “I
have my own bear on Balerion,” she told the translator, “and he may
well eat me if I do not return to him.”
“See,” said Kraznys when her words were translated. “It is not the
woman who decides, it is this man she runs to. As ever!”
“Thank the Good Master for his patient kindness,” Dany said,
“and tell him that I will think on all I learned here.” She gave her
arm to Arstan Whitebeard, to lead her back across the plaza to her
litter. Aggo and Jhogo fell in to either side of them, walking with
the bowlegged swagger all the horselords a ected when forced to
dismount and stride the earth like common mortals.
Dany climbed into her litter frowning, and beckoned Arstan to
climb in beside her. A man as old as him should not be walking in
such heat. She did not close the curtains as they got under way.
With the sun beating down so ercely on this city of red brick,
every stray breeze was to be cherished, even if it did come with a
swirl of ne red dust. Besides, I need to see.
Astapor was a queer city, even to the eyes of one who had walked
within the House of Dust and bathed in the Womb of the World
beneath the Mother of Mountains. All the streets were made of the
same red brick that had paved the plaza. So too were the stepped
pyramids, the deep-dug ghting pits with their rings of descending
seats, the sulfurous fountains and gloomy wine caves, and the
ancient walls that encircled them. So many bricks, she thought, and
so old and crumbling. Their ne red dust was everywhere, dancing
down the gutters at each gust of wind. Small wonder so many
Astapori women veiled their faces; the brick dust stung the eyes
worse than sand.
“Make way!” Jhogo shouted as he rode before her litter. “Make
way for the Mother of Dragons!” But when he uncoiled the great
silver-handled whip that Dany had given him, and made to crack it
in the air, she leaned out and told him nay. “Not in this place, blood

of my blood,” she said, in his own tongue. “These bricks have heard
too much of the sound of whips.”
The streets had been largely deserted when they had set out from
the port that morning, and scarcely seemed more crowded now. An
elephant lumbered past with a latticework litter on its back. A
naked boy with peeling skin sat in a dry brick gutter, picking his
nose and staring sullenly at some ants in the street. He lifted his
head at the sound of hooves, and gaped as a column of mounted
guards trotted by in a cloud of red dust and brittle laughter. The
copper disks sewn to their cloaks of yellow silk glittered like so
many suns, but their tunics were embroidered linen, and below the
waist they wore sandals and pleated linen skirts. Bareheaded, each
man had teased and oiled and twisted his sti red-black hair into
some fantastic shape, horns and wings and blades and even grasping
hands, so they looked like some troupe of demons escaped from the
seventh hell. The naked boy watched them for a bit, along with
Dany, but soon enough they were gone, and he went back to his
ants, and a knuckle up his nose.
An old city, this, she re ected, but not so populous as it was in its
glory, nor near so crowded as Qarth or Pentos or Lys.
Her litter came to a sudden halt at the cross street, to allow a
co e of slaves to shu e across her path, urged along by the crack
of an overseer’s lash. These were no Unsullied, Dany noted, but a
more common sort of men, with pale brown skins and black hair.
There were women among them, but no children. All were naked.
Two Astapori rode behind them on white asses, a man in a red silk
tokar and a veiled woman in sheer blue linen decorated with akes
of lapis lazuli. In her red-black hair she wore an ivory comb. The
man laughed as he whispered to her, paying no more mind to Dany
than to his slaves, nor the overseer with his twisted ve-thonged
lash, a squat broad Dothraki who had the harpy and chains tattooed
proudly across his muscular chest.
“Bricks and blood built Astapor,” Whitebeard murmured at her
side, “and bricks and blood her people.”
“What is that?” Dany asked him, curious.

“An old rhyme a maester taught me, when I was a boy. I never
knew how true it was. The bricks of Astapor are red with the blood
of the slaves who make them.”
“I can well believe that,” said Dany.
“Then leave this place before your heart turns to brick as well.
Sail this very night, on the evening tide.”
Would that I could, thought Dany. “When I leave Astapor it must
be with an army, Ser Jorah says.”
“Ser Jorah was a slaver himself, Your Grace,” the old man
reminded her. “There are sellswords in Pentos and Myr and Tyrosh
you can hire. A man who kills for coin has no honor, but at least
they are no slaves. Find your army there, I beg you.”
“My brother visited Pentos, Myr, Braavos, near all the Free
Cities. The magisters and archons fed him wine and promises, but
his soul was starved to death. A man cannot sup from the beggar’s
bowl all his life and stay a man. I had my taste in Qarth, that was
enough. I will not come to Pentos bowl in hand.”
“Better to come a beggar than a slaver,” Arstan said.
“There speaks one who has been neither.” Dany’s nostrils ared.
“Do you know what it is like to be sold, squire? I do. My brother
sold me to Khal Drogo for the promise of a golden crown. Well,
Drogo crowned him in gold, though not as he had wished, and
I … my sun-and-stars made a queen of me, but if he had been a
di erent man, it might have been much otherwise. Do you think I
have forgotten how it felt to be afraid?”
Whitebeard bowed his head. “Your Grace, I did not mean to give
o ense.”
“Only lies o end me, never honest counsel.” Dany patted Arstan’s
spotted hand to reassure him. “I have a dragon’s temper, that’s all.
You must not let it frighten you.”
“I shall try and remember.” Whitebeard smiled.
He has a good face, and great strength to him, Dany thought. She
could not understand why Ser Jorah mistrusted the old man so.
Could he be jealous that I have found another man to talk to?
Unbidden, her thoughts went back to the night on Balerion when the
exile knight had kissed her. He should never have done that. He is

thrice my age, and of too low a birth for me, and I never gave him leave.
No true knight would ever kiss a queen without her leave. She had taken
care never to be alone with Ser Jorah after that, keeping her
handmaids with her aboard ship, and sometimes her bloodriders. He
wants to kiss me again, I see it in his eyes.
What Dany wanted she could not begin to say, but Jorah’s kiss
had woken something in her, something that had been sleeping
since Khal Drogo died. Lying abed in her narrow bunk, she found
herself wondering how it would be to have a man squeezed in
beside her in place of her handmaid, and the thought was more
exciting than it should have been. Sometimes she would close her
eyes and dream of him, but it was never Jorah Mormont she
dreamed of; her lover was always younger and more comely,
though his face remained a shifting shadow.
Once, so tormented she could not sleep, Dany slid a hand down
between her legs, and gasped when she felt how wet she was.
Scarce daring to breathe, she moved her ngers back and forth
between her lower lips, slowly so as not to wake Irri beside her,
until she found one sweet spot and lingered there, touching herself
lightly, timidly at rst and then faster. Still, the relief she wanted
seemed to recede before her, until her dragons stirred, and one
screamed out across the cabin, and Irri woke and saw what she was
doing.
Dany knew her face was ushed, but in the darkness Irri surely
could not tell. Wordless, the handmaid put a hand on her breast,
then bent to take a nipple in her mouth. Her other hand drifted
down across the soft curve of belly, through the mound of ne
silvery-gold hair, and went to work between Dany’s thighs. It was
no more than a few moments until her legs twisted and her breasts
heaved and her whole body shuddered. She screamed then. Or
perhaps that was Drogon. Irri never said a thing, only curled back
up and went back to sleep the instant the thing was done.
The next day, it all seemed a dream. And what did Ser Jorah have
to do with it, if anything? It is Drogo I want, my sun-and-stars, Dany
reminded herself. Not Irri, and not Ser Jorah, only Drogo. Drogo was
dead, though. She’d thought these feelings had died with him there

in the red waste, but one treacherous kiss had somehow brought
them back to life. He should never have kissed me. He presumed too
much, and I permitted it. It must never happen again. She set her
mouth grimly and gave her head a shake, and the bell in her braid
chimed softly.
Closer to the bay, the city presented a fairer face. The great brick
pyramids lined the shore, the largest four hundred feet high. All
manner of trees and vines and owers grew on their broad terraces,
and the winds that swirled around them smelled green and fragrant.
Another gigantic harpy stood atop the gate, this one made of baked
red clay and crumbling visibly, with no more than a stub of her
scorpion’s tail remaining. The chain she grasped in her clay claws
was old iron, rotten with rust. It was cooler down by the water,
though. The lapping of the waves against the rotting pilings made a
curiously soothing sound.
Aggo helped Dany down from her litter. Strong Belwas was
seated on a massive piling, eating a great haunch of brown roasted
meat. “Dog,” he said happily when he saw Dany. “Good dog in
Astapor, little queen. Eat?” He o ered it with a greasy grin.
“That is kind of you, Belwas, but no.” Dany had eaten dog in
other places, at other times, but just now all she could think of was
the Unsullied and their stupid puppies. She swept past the huge
eunuch and up the plank onto the deck of Balerion.
Ser Jorah Mormont stood waiting for her. “Your Grace,” he said,
bowing his head. “The slavers have come and gone. Three of them,
with a dozen scribes and as many slaves to lift and fetch. They
crawled over every foot of our holds and made note of all we had.”
He walked her aft. “How many men do they have for sale?”
“None.” Was it Mormont she was angry with, or this city with its
sullen heat, its stinks and sweats and crumbling bricks? “They sell
eunuchs, not men. Eunuchs made of brick, like the rest of Astapor.
Shall I buy eight thousand brick eunuchs with dead eyes that never
move, who kill suckling babes for the sake of a spiked hat and
strangle their own dogs? They don’t even have names. So don’t call
them men, ser.”

“Khaleesi,” he said, taken aback by her fury, “the Unsullied are
chosen as boys, and trained—”
“I have heard all I care to of their training.” Dany could feel tears
welling in her eyes, sudden and unwanted. Her hand ashed up and
cracked Ser Jorah hard across the face. It was either that, or cry.
Mormont touched the cheek she’d slapped. “If I have displeased
my queen—”
“You have. You’ve displeased me greatly, ser. If you were my true
knight, you would never have brought me to this vile sty.” If you
were my true knight, you would never have kissed me, or looked at my
breasts the way you did, or …
“As Your Grace commands. I shall tell Captain Groleo to make
ready to sail on the evening tide, for some sty less vile.”
“No,” said Dany. Groleo watched them from the forecastle, and
his crew was watching too. Whitebeard, her bloodriders, Jhiqui,
every one had stopped what they were doing at the sound of the
slap. “I want to sail now, not on the tide, I want to sail far and fast
and never look back. But I can’t, can I? There are eight thousand
brick eunuchs for sale, and I must nd some way to buy them.” And
with that she left him, and went below.
Behind the carved wooden door of the captain’s cabin, her
dragons were restless. Drogon raised his head and screamed, pale
smoke venting from his nostrils, and Viserion apped at her and
tried to perch on her shoulder, as he had when he was smaller.
“No,” Dany said, trying to shrug him o gently. “You’re too big for
that now, sweetling.” But the dragon coiled his white and gold tail
around one arm and dug black claws into the fabric of her sleeve,
clinging tightly. Helpless, she sank into Groleo’s great leather chair,
giggling.
“They have been wild while you were gone, Khaleesi,” Irri told
her. “Viserion clawed splinters from the door, do you see? And
Drogon made to escape when the slaver men came to see them.
When I grabbed his tail to hold him back, he turned and bit me.”
She showed Dany the marks of his teeth on her hand.
“Did any of them try to burn their way free?” That was the thing
that frightened Dany the most.

“No, Khaleesi. Drogon breathed his re, but in the empty air. The
slaver men feared to come near him.”
She kissed Irri’s hand where Drogon had bitten it. “I’m sorry he
hurt you. Dragons are not meant to be locked up in a small ship’s
cabin.”
“Dragons are like horses in this,” Irri said. “And riders, too. The
horses scream below, Khaleesi, and kick at the wooden walls. I hear
them. And Jhiqui says the old women and the little ones scream too,
when you are not here. They do not like this water cart. They do
not like the black salt sea.”
“I know,” Dany said. “I do, I know.”
“My khaleesi is sad?”
“Yes,” Dany admitted. Sad and lost.
“Should I pleasure the khaleesi?”
Dany stepped away from her. “No. Irri, you do not need to do
that. What happened that night, when you woke … you’re no bed
slave, I freed you, remember? You …”
“I am handmaid to the Mother of Dragons,” the girl said. “It is
great honor to please my khaleesi.”
“I don’t want that,” she insisted. “I don’t.” She turned away
sharply. “Leave me now. I want to be alone. To think.”
Dusk had begun to settle over the waters of Slaver’s Bay before
Dany returned to the deck. She stood by the rail and looked out
over Astapor. From here it looks almost beautiful, she thought. The
stars were coming out above, and the silk lanterns below, just as
Kraznys’s translator had promised. The brick pyramids were all
glimmery with light. But it is dark below, in the streets and plazas and
ghting pits. And it is darkest of all in the barracks, where some little boy
is feeding scraps to the puppy they gave him when they took away his
manhood.
There was a soft step behind her. “Khaleesi.” His voice. “Might I
speak frankly?”
Dany did not turn. She could not bear to look at him just now. If
she did, she might well slap him again. Or cry. Or kiss him. And
never know which was right and which was wrong and which was
madness. “Say what you will, ser.”

“When Aegon the Dragon stepped ashore in Westeros, the kings
of Vale and Rock and Reach did not rush to hand him their crowns.
If you mean to sit his Iron Throne, you must win it as he did, with
steel and dragon re. And that will mean blood on your hands
before the thing is done.”
Blood and re, thought Dany. The words of House Targaryen. She
had known them all her life. “The blood of my enemies I will shed
gladly. The blood of innocents is another matter. Eight thousand
Unsullied they would o er me. Eight thousand dead babes. Eight
thousand strangled dogs.”
“Your Grace,” said Jorah Mormont, “I saw King’s Landing after
the Sack. Babes were butchered that day as well, and old men, and
children at play. More women were raped than you can count.
There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man
a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs. The
scent of blood is all it takes to wake him. Yet I have never heard of
these Unsullied raping, nor putting a city to the sword, nor even
plundering, save at the express command of those who lead them.
Brick they may be, as you say, but if you buy them henceforth the
only dogs they’ll kill are those you want dead. And you do have
some dogs you want dead, as I recall.”
The Usurper’s dogs. “Yes.” Dany gazed o at the soft colored lights
and let the cool salt breeze caress her. “You speak of sacking cities.
Answer me this, ser—why have the Dothraki never sacked this
city?” She pointed. “Look at the walls. You can see where they’ve
begun to crumble. There, and there. Do you see any guards on those
towers? I don’t. Are they hiding, ser? I saw these sons of the harpy
today, all their proud highborn warriors. They dressed in linen
skirts, and the ercest thing about them was their hair. Even a
modest khalasar could crack this Astapor like a nut and spill out the
rotted meat inside. So tell me, why is that ugly harpy not sitting
beside the godsway in Vaes Dothrak among the other stolen gods?”
“You have a dragon’s eye, Khaleesi, that’s plain to see.”
“I wanted an answer, not a compliment.”
“There are two reasons. Astapor’s brave defenders are so much
cha , it’s true. Old names and fat purses who dress up as Ghiscari

scourges to pretend they still rule a vast empire. Every one is a high
o cer. On feastdays they
ght mock wars in the pits to
demonstrate what brilliant commanders they are, but it’s the
eunuchs who do the dying. All the same, any enemy wanting to sack
Astapor would have to know that they’d be facing Unsullied. The
slavers would turn out the whole garrison in the city’s defense. The
Dothraki have not ridden against Unsullied since they left their
braids at the gates of Qohor.”
“And the second reason?” Dany asked.
“Who would attack Astapor?” Ser Jorah asked. “Meereen and
Yunkai are rivals but not enemies, the Doom destroyed Valyria, the
folk of the eastern hinterlands are all Ghiscari, and beyond the hills
lies Lhazar. The Lamb Men, as your Dothraki call them, a notably
unwarlike people.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “but north of the slave cities is the Dothraki
sea, and two dozen mighty khals who like nothing more than
sacking cities and carrying o their people into slavery.”
“Carrying them o where? What good are slaves once you’ve
killed the slavers? Valyria is no more, Qarth lies beyond the red
waste, and the Nine Free Cities are thousands of leagues to the
west. And you may be sure the sons of the harpy give lavishly to
every passing khal, just as the magisters do in Pentos and Norvos
and Myr. They know that if they feast the horselords and give them
gifts, they will soon ride on. It’s cheaper than ghting, and a deal
more certain.”
Cheaper than ghting, Dany thought. Yes, it might be. If only it
could be that easy for her. How pleasant it would be to sail to
King’s Landing with her dragons, and pay the boy Jo rey a chest of
gold to make him go away.
“Khaleesi?” Ser Jorah prompted, when she had been silent for a
long time. He touched her elbow lightly.
Dany shrugged him o . “Viserys would have bought as many
Unsullied as he had the coin for. But you once said I was like
Rhaegar …”
“I remember, Daenerys.”

“Your Grace,” she corrected. “Prince Rhaegar led free men into
battle, not slaves. Whitebeard said he dubbed his squires himself,
and made many other knights as well.”
“There was no higher honor than to receive your knighthood
from the Prince of Dragonstone.”
“Tell me, then—when he touched a man on the shoulder with his
sword, what did he say? ‘Go forth and kill the weak’? Or ‘Go forth
and defend them’? At the Trident, those brave men Viserys spoke of
who died beneath our dragon banners—did they give their lives
because they believed in Rhaegar’s cause, or because they had been
bought and paid for?” Dany turned to Mormont, crossed her arms,
and waited for an answer.
“My queen,” the big man said slowly, “all you say is true. But
Rhaegar lost on the Trident. He lost the battle, he lost the war, he
lost the kingdom, and he lost his life. His blood swirled downriver
with the rubies from his breastplate, and Robert the Usurper rode
over his corpse to steal the Iron Throne. Rhaegar fought valiantly,
Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar
died.”

BRAN

No roads ran through the twisted mountain valleys where they

walked now. Between the grey stone peaks lay still blue lakes, long
and deep and narrow, and the green gloom of endless piney woods.
The russet and gold of autumn leaves grew less common when they
left the wolfswood to climb amongst the old int hills, and vanished
by the time those hills had turned to mountains. Giant grey-green
sentinels loomed above them now, and spruce and r and soldier
pines in endless profusion. The undergrowth was sparse beneath
them, the forest oor carpeted in dark green needles.
When they lost their way, as happened once or twice, they need
only wait for a clear cold night when the clouds did not intrude, and
look up in the sky for the Ice Dragon. The blue star in the dragon’s
eye pointed the way north, as Osha told him once. Thinking of Osha
made Bran wonder where she was. He pictured her safe in White
Harbor with Rickon and Shaggydog, eating eels and sh and hot
crab pie with fat Lord Manderly. Or maybe they were warming
themselves at the Last Hearth before the Greatjon’s res. But Bran’s
life had turned into endless chilly days on Hodor’s back, riding his
basket up and down the slopes of mountains.
“Up and down,” Meera would sigh sometimes as they walked,
“then down and up. Then up and down again. I hate these stupid
mountains of yours, Prince Bran.”
“Yesterday you said you loved them.”

“Oh, I do. My lord father told me about mountains, but I never
saw one till now. I love them more than I can say.”
Bran made a face at her. “But you just said you hated them.”
“Why can’t it be both?” Meera reached up to pinch his nose.
“Because they’re di erent,” he insisted. “Like night and day, or ice
and re.”
“If ice can burn,” said Jojen in his solemn voice, “then love and
hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no matter. The land is
one.”
“One,” his sister agreed, “but over wrinkled.”
The high glens seldom did them the courtesy of running north and
south, so often they found themselves going long leagues in the
wrong direction, and sometimes they were forced to double back
the way they’d come. “If we took the kingsroad we could be at the
Wall by now,” Bran would remind the Reeds. He wanted to nd the
three-eyed crow, so he could learn to y. Half a hundred times he
said it if he said it once, until Meera started teasing by saying it
along with him.
“If we took the kingsroad we wouldn’t be so hungry either,” he
started saying then. Down in the hills they’d had no lack of food.
Meera was a ne huntress, and even better at taking sh from
streams with her three-pronged frog spear. Bran liked to watch her,
admiring her quickness, the way she sent the spear lancing down
and pulled it back with a silvery trout wriggling on the end of it.
And they had Summer hunting for them as well. The direwolf
vanished most every night as the sun went down, but he was always
back again before dawn, most often with something in his jaws, a
squirrel or a hare.
But here in the mountains, the streams were smaller and more
icy, and the game scarcer. Meera still hunted and shed when she
could, but it was harder, and some nights even Summer found no
prey. Often they went to sleep with empty bellies.
But Jojen remained stubbornly determined to stay well away
from roads. “Where you nd roads you nd travelers,” he said in
that way he had, “and travelers have eyes to see, and mouths to
spread tales of the crippled boy, his giant, and the wolf that walks

beside them.” No one could get as stubborn as Jojen, so they
struggled on through the wild, and every day climbed a little
higher, and moved a little farther north.
Some days it rained, some days were windy, and once they were
caught in a sleet storm so erce that even Hodor bellowed in
dismay. On the clear days, it often seemed as if they were the only
living things in all the world. “Does no one live up here?” Meera
Reed asked once, as they made their way around a granite upthrust
as large as Winterfell.
“There’s people,” Bran told her. “The Umbers are mostly east of
the kingsroad, but they graze their sheep in the high meadows in
summer. There are Wulls west of the mountains along the Bay of
Ice, Harclays back behind us in the hills, and Knotts and Liddles and
Norreys and even some Flints up here in the high places.” His
father’s mother’s mother had been a Flint of the mountains. Old Nan
once said that it was her blood in him that made Bran such a fool
for climbing before his fall. She had died years and years and years
before he was born, though, even before his father had been born.
“Wull?” said Meera. “Jojen, wasn’t there a Wull who rode with
Father during the war?”
“Theo Wull.” Jojen was breathing hard from the climb. “Buckets,
they used to call him.”
“That’s their sigil,” said Bran. “Three brown buckets on a blue
eld, with a border of white and grey checks. Lord Wull came to
Winterfell once, to do his fealty and talk with Father, and he had
the buckets on his shield. He’s no true lord, though. Well, he is, but
they call him just the Wull, and there’s the Knott and the Norrey and
the Liddle too. At Winterfell we called them lords, but their own
folk don’t.”
Jojen Reed stopped to catch his breath. “Do you think these
mountain folk know we’re here?”
“They know.” Bran had seen them watching; not with his own
eyes, but with Summer’s sharper ones, that missed so little. “They
won’t bother us so long as we don’t try and make o with their
goats or horses.”

Nor did they. Only once did they encounter any of the mountain
people, when a sudden burst of freezing rain sent them looking for
shelter. Summer found it for them, sni ng out a shallow cave
behind the grey-green branches of a towering sentinel tree, but
when Hodor ducked beneath the stony overhang, Bran saw the
orange glow of re farther back and realized they were not alone.
“Come in and warm yourselves,” a man’s voice called out. “There’s
stone enough to keep the rain o all our heads.”
He o ered them oatcakes and blood sausage and a swallow of ale
from a skin he carried, but never his name; nor did he ask theirs.
Bran gured him for a Liddle. The clasp that fastened his
squirrelskin cloak was gold and bronze and wrought in the shape of
a pinecone, and the Liddles bore pinecones on the white half of
their green-and-white shields.
“Is it far to the Wall?” Bran asked him as they waited for the rain
to stop.
“Not so far as the raven ies,” said the Liddle, if that was who he
was. “Farther, for them as lacks wings.”
Bran started, “I’d bet we’d be there if …”
“… we took the kingsroad,” Meera nished with him.
The Liddle took out a knife and whittled at a stick. “When there
was a Stark in Winterfell, a maiden girl could walk the kingsroad in
her name-day gown and still go unmolested, and travelers could
nd re, bread, and salt at many an inn and holdfast. But the nights
are colder now, and doors are closed. There’s squids in the
wolfswood, and ayed men ride the kingsroad asking after
strangers.”
The Reeds exchanged a look. “Flayed men?” said Jojen.
“The Bastard’s boys, aye. He was dead, but now he’s not. And
paying good silver for wolfskins, a man hears, and maybe gold for
word of certain other walking dead.” He looked at Bran when he
said that, and at Summer stretched out beside him. “As to that
Wall,” the man went on, “it’s not a place that I’d be going. The Old
Bear took the Watch into the haunted woods, and all that come back
was his ravens, with hardly a message between them. Dark wings,
dark words, me mother used to say, but when the birds y silent,

seems to me that’s even darker.” He poked at the re with his stick.
“It was di erent when there was a Stark in Winterfell. But the old
wolf’s dead and young one’s gone south to play the game of
thrones, and all that’s left us is the ghosts.”
“The wolves will come again,” said Jojen solemnly.
“And how would you be knowing, boy?”
“I dreamed it.”
“Some nights I dream of me mother that I buried nine years past,”
the man said, “but when I wake, she’s not come back to us.”
“There are dreams and dreams, my lord.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
They spent that night together, for the rain did not let up till well
past dark, and only Summer seemed to want to leave the cave.
When the re had burned down to embers, Bran let him go. The
direwolf did not feel the damp as people did, and the night was
calling him. Moonlight painted the wet woods in shades of silver
and turned the grey peaks white. Owls hooted through the dark and
ew silently between the pines, while pale goats moved along the
mountainsides. Bran closed his eyes and gave himself up to the wolf
dream, to the smells and sounds of midnight.
When they woke the next morning, the re had gone out and the
Liddle was gone, but he’d left a sausage for them, and a dozen
oatcakes folded up neatly in a green and white cloth. Some of the
cakes had pinenuts baked in them and some had blackberries. Bran
ate one of each, and still did not know which sort he liked the best.
One day there would be Starks in Winterfell again, he told himself,
and then he’d send for the Liddles and pay them back a hundredfold
for every nut and berry.
The trail they followed was a little easier that day, and by noon
the sun came breaking through the clouds. Bran sat in his basket up
on Hodor’s back and felt almost content. He dozed o once, lulled
to sleep by the smooth swing of the big stableboy’s stride and the
soft humming sound he made sometimes when he walked. Meera
woke him up with a light touch on his arm. “Look,” she said,
pointing at the sky with her frog spear, “an eagle.”

Bran lifted his head and saw it, its grey wings spread and still as
it oated on the wind. He followed it with his eyes as it circled
higher, wondering what it would be like to soar about the world so
e ortless. Better than climbing, even. He tried to reach the eagle, to
leave his stupid crippled body and rise into the sky to join it, the
way he joined with Summer. The greenseers could do it. I should be
able to do it too. He tried and tried, until the eagle vanished in the
golden haze of the afternoon. “It’s gone,” he said, disappointed.
“We’ll see others,” said Meera. “They live up here.”
“I suppose.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
“Hodor,” Bran agreed.
Jojen kicked a pinecone. “Hodor likes it when you say his name, I
think.”
“Hodor’s not his true name,” Bran explained. “It’s just some word
he says. His real name is Walder, Old Nan told me. She was his
grandmother’s grandmother or something.” Talking about Old Nan
made him sad. “Do you think the ironmen killed her?” They hadn’t
seen her body at Winterfell. He didn’t remember seeing any women
dead, now that he thought back. “She never hurt no one, not even
Theon. She just told stories. Theon wouldn’t hurt someone like that.
Would he?”
“Some people hurt others just because they can,” said Jojen.
“And it wasn’t Theon who did the killing at Winterfell,” said
Meera. “Too many of the dead were ironmen.” She shifted her frog
spear to her other hand. “Remember Old Nan’s stories, Bran.
Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long
as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.”
“I’ll remember,” he promised. They climbed without speaking for
a long time, following a crooked game trail over the high saddle
between two stony peaks. Scrawny soldier pines clung to the slopes
around them. Far ahead Bran could see the icy glitter of a stream
where it tumbled down a mountainside. He found himself listening
to Jojen’s breathing and the crunch of pine needles under Hodor’s
feet. “Do you know any stories?” he asked the Reeds all of a
sudden.

Meera laughed. “Oh, a few.”
“A few,” her brother admitted.
“Hodor,” said Hodor, humming.
“You could tell one,” said Bran. “While we walked. Hodor likes
stories about knights. I do, too.”
“There are no knights in the Neck,” said Jojen.
“Above the water,” his sister corrected. “The bogs are full of dead
ones, though.”
“That’s true,” said Jojen. “Andals and ironmen, Freys and other
fools, all those proud warriors who set out to conquer Greywater.
Not one of them could nd it. They ride into the Neck, but not back
out. And sooner or later they blunder into the bogs and sink beneath
the weight of all that steel and drown there in their armor.”
The thought of drowned knights under the water gave Bran the
shivers. He didn’t object, though; he liked the shivers.
“There was one knight,” said Meera, “in the year of the false
spring. The Knight of the Laughing Tree, they called him. He might
have been a crannogman, that one.”
“Or not.” Jojen’s face was dappled with green shadows. “Prince
Bran has heard that tale a hundred times, I’m sure.”
“No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I have it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she’d told before, but
we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old
friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.”
“That’s true.” Meera walked with her shield on her back, pushing
an occasional branch out of the way with her frog spear. Just when
Bran began to think that she wasn’t going to tell the story after all,
she began, “Once there was a curious lad who lived in the Neck. He
was small like all crannogmen, but brave and smart and strong as
well. He grew up hunting and shing and climbing trees, and
learned all the magics of my people.”
Bran was almost certain he had never heard this story. “Did he
have green dreams like Jojen?”
“No,” said Meera, “but he could breathe mud and run on leaves,
and change earth to water and water to earth with no more than a

whispered word. He could talk to trees and weave words and make
castles appear and disappear.”
“I wish I could,” Bran said plaintively. “When does he meet the
tree knight?”
Meera made a face at him. “Sooner if a certain prince would be
quiet.”
“I was just asking.”
“The lad knew the magics of the crannogs,” she continued, “but
he wanted more. Our people seldom travel far from home, you
know. We’re a small folk, and our ways seem queer to some, so the
big people do not always treat us kindly. But this lad was bolder
than most, and one day when he had grown to manhood he decided
he would leave the crannogs and visit the Isle of Faces.”
“No one visits the Isle of Faces,” objected Bran. “That’s where the
green men live.”
“It was the green men he meant to nd. So he donned a shirt
sewn with bronze scales, like mine, took up a leathern shield and a
three-pronged spear, like mine, and paddled a little skin boat down
the Green Fork.”
Bran closed his eyes to try and see the man in his little skin boat.
In his head, the crannogman looked like Jojen, only older and
stronger and dressed like Meera.
“He passed beneath the Twins by night so the Freys would not
attack him, and when he reached the Trident he climbed from the
river and put his boat on his head and began to walk. It took him
many a day, but nally he reached the Gods Eye, threw his boat in
the lake, and paddled out to the Isle of Faces.”
“Did he meet the green men?”
“Yes,” said Meera, “but that’s another story, and not for me to
tell. My prince asked for knights.”
“Green men are good too.”
“They are,” she agreed, but said no more about them. “All that
winter the crannogman stayed on the isle, but when the spring
broke he heard the wide world calling and knew the time had come
to leave. His skin boat was just where he’d left it, so he said his
farewells and paddled o toward shore. He rowed and rowed, and

nally saw the distant towers of a castle rising beside the lake. The
towers reached ever higher as he neared shore, until he realized
that this must be the greatest castle in all the world.”
“Harrenhal!” Bran knew at once. “It was Harrenhal!”
Meera smiled. “Was it? Beneath its walls he saw tents of many
colors, bright banners cracking in the wind, and knights in mail and
plate on barded horses. He smelled roasting meats, and heard the
sound of laughter and the blare of heralds’ trumpets. A great
tourney was about to commence, and champions from all over the
land had come to contest it. The king himself was there, with his
son the dragon prince. The White Swords had come, to welcome a
new brother to their ranks. The storm lord was on hand, and the
rose lord as well. The great lion of the rock had quarreled with the
king and stayed away, but many of his bannermen and knights
attended all the same. The crannogman had never seen such
pageantry, and knew he might never see the like again. Part of him
wanted nothing so much as to be part of it.”
Bran knew that feeling well enough. When he’d been little, all he
had ever dreamed of was being a knight. But that had been before
he fell and lost his legs.
“The daughter of the great castle reigned as queen of love and
beauty when the tourney opened. Five champions had sworn to
defend her crown; her four brothers of Harrenhal, and her famous
uncle, a white knight of the Kingsguard.”
“Was she a fair maid?”
“She was,” said Meera, hopping over a stone, “but there were
others fairer still. One was the wife of the dragon prince, who’d
brought a dozen lady companions to attend her. The knights all
begged them for favors to tie about their lances.”
“This isn’t going to be one of those love stories, is it?” Bran asked
suspiciously. “Hodor doesn’t like those so much.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor agreeably.
“He likes the stories where the knights ght monsters.”
“Sometimes the knights are the monsters, Bran. The little
crannogman was walking across the eld, enjoying the warm spring
day and harming none, when he was set upon by three squires.

They were none older than fteen, yet even so they were bigger
than him, all three. This was their world, as they saw it, and he had
no right to be there. They snatched away his spear and knocked him
to the ground, cursing him for a frogeater.”
“Were they Walders?” It sounded like something Little Walder
Frey might have done.
“None o ered a name, but he marked their faces well so he could
revenge himself upon them later. They shoved him down every
time he tried to rise, and kicked him when he curled up on the
ground. But then they heard a roar. ‘That’s my father’s man you’re
kicking,’ howled the she-wolf.”
“A wolf on four legs, or two?”
“Two,” said Meera. “The she-wolf laid into the squires with a
tourney sword, scattering them all. The crannogman was bruised
and bloodied, so she took him back to her lair to clean his cuts and
bind them up with linen. There he met her pack brothers: the wild
wolf who led them, the quiet wolf beside him, and the pup who was
youngest of the four.
“That evening there was to be a feast in Harrenhal, to mark the
opening of the tourney, and the she-wolf insisted that the lad
attend. He was of high birth, with as much a right to a place on the
bench as any other man. She was not easy to refuse, this wolf maid,
so he let the young pup nd him garb suitable to a king’s feast, and
went up to the great castle.
“Under Harren’s roof he ate and drank with the wolves, and many
of their sworn swords besides, barrowdown men and moose and
bears and mermen. The dragon prince sang a song so sad it made
the wolf maid sni e, but when her pup brother teased her for
crying she poured wine over his head. A black brother spoke, asking
the knights to join the Night’s Watch. The storm lord drank down
the knight of skulls and kisses in a wine-cup war. The crannogman
saw a maid with laughing purple eyes dance with a white sword, a
red snake, and the lord of gri ns, and lastly with the quiet
wolf … but only after the wild wolf spoke to her on behalf of a
brother too shy to leave his bench.

“Amidst all this merriment, the little crannogman spied the three
squires who’d attacked him. One served a pitchfork knight, one a
porcupine, while the last attended a knight with two towers on his
surcoat, a sigil all crannogmen know well.”
“The Freys,” said Bran. “The Freys of the Crossing.”
“Then, as now,” she agreed. “The wolf maid saw them too, and
pointed them out to her brothers. ‘I could nd you a horse, and
some armor that might t,’ the pup o ered. The little crannogman
thanked him, but gave no answer. His heart was torn. Crannogmen
are smaller than most, but just as proud. The lad was no knight, no
more than any of his people. We sit a boat more often than a horse,
and our hands are made for oars, not lances. Much as he wished to
have his vengeance, he feared he would only make a fool of himself
and shame his people. The quiet wolf had o ered the little
crannogman a place in his tent that night, but before he slept he
knelt on the lakeshore, looking across the water to where the Isle of
Faces would be, and said a prayer to the old gods of north and
Neck …”
“You never heard this tale from your father?” asked Jojen.
“It was Old Nan who told the stories. Meera, go on, you can’t
stop there.”
Hodor must have felt the same. “Hodor,” he said, and then,
“Hodor hodor hodor hodor.”
“Well,” said Meera, “if you would hear the rest …”
“Yes. Tell it.”
“Five days of jousting were planned,” she said. “There was a
great seven-sided mêlée as well, and archery and axe-throwing, a
horse race and tourney of singers …”
“Never mind about all that.” Bran squirmed impatiently in his
basket on Hodor’s back. “Tell about the jousting.”
“As my prince commands. The daughter of the castle was the
queen of love and beauty, with four brothers and an uncle to defend
her, but all four sons of Harrenhal were defeated on the rst day.
Their conquerors reigned brie y as champions, until they were
vanquished in turn. As it happened, the end of the rst day saw the
porcupine knight win a place among the champions, and on the

morning of the second day the pitchfork knight and the knight of
the two towers were victorious as well. But late on the afternoon of
that second day, as the shadows grew long, a mystery knight
appeared in the lists.”
Bran nodded sagely. Mystery knights would oft appear at
tourneys, with helms concealing their faces, and shields that were
either blank or bore some strange device. Sometimes they were
famous champions in disguise. The Dragonknight once won a
tourney as the Knight of Tears, so he could name his sister the
queen of love and beauty in place of the king’s mistress. And
Barristan the Bold twice donned a mystery knight’s armor, the rst
time when he was only ten. “It was the little crannogman, I bet.”
“No one knew,” said Meera, “but the mystery knight was short of
stature, and clad in ill- tting armor made up of bits and pieces. The
device upon his shield was a heart tree of the old gods, a white
weirwood with a laughing red face.”
“Maybe he came from the Isle of Faces,” said Bran. “Was he
green?” In Old Nan’s stories, the guardians had dark green skin and
leaves instead of hair. Sometimes they had antlers too, but Bran
didn’t see how the mystery knight could have worn a helm if he had
antlers. “I bet the old gods sent him.”
“Perhaps they did. The mystery knight dipped his lance before the
king and rode to the end of the lists, where the ve champions had
their pavilions. You know the three he challenged.”
“The porcupine knight, the pitchfork knight, and the knight of the
twin towers.” Bran had heard enough stories to know that. “He was
the little crannogman, I told you.”
“Whoever he was, the old gods gave strength to his arm. The
porcupine knight fell rst, then the pitchfork knight, and lastly the
knight of the two towers. None were well loved, so the common
folk cheered lustily for the Knight of the Laughing Tree, as the new
champion soon was called. When his fallen foes sought to ransom
horse and armor, the Knight of the Laughing Tree spoke in a
booming voice through his helm, saying, ‘Teach your squires honor,
that shall be ransom enough.’ Once the defeated knights chastised
their squires sharply, their horses and armor were returned. And so

the little crannogman’s prayer was answered … by the green men,
or the old gods, or the children of the forest, who can say?”
It was a good story, Bran decided after thinking about it a
moment or two. “Then what happened? Did the Knight of the
Laughing Tree win the tourney and marry a princess?”
“No,” said Meera. “That night at the great castle, the storm lord
and the knight of skulls and kisses each swore they would unmask
him, and the king himself urged men to challenge him, declaring
that the face behind that helm was no friend of his. But the next
morning, when the heralds blew their trumpets and the king took
his seat, only two champions appeared. The Knight of the Laughing
Tree had vanished. The king was wroth, and even sent his son the
dragon prince to seek the man, but all they ever found was his
painted shield, hanging abandoned in a tree. It was the dragon
prince who won that tourney in the end.”
“Oh.” Bran thought about the tale awhile. “That was a good story.
But it should have been the three bad knights who hurt him, not
their squires. Then the little crannogman could have killed them all.
The part about the ransoms was stupid. And the mystery knight
should win the tourney, defeating every challenger, and name the
wolf maid the queen of love and beauty.”
“She was,” said Meera, “but that’s a sadder story.”
“Are you certain you never heard this tale before, Bran?” asked
Jojen. “Your lord father never told it to you?”
Bran shook his head. The day was growing old by then, and long
shadows were creeping down the mountainsides to send black
ngers through the pines. If the little crannogman could visit the Isle of
Faces, maybe I could too. All the tales agreed that the green men had
strange magic powers. Maybe they could help him walk again, even
turn him into a knight. They turned the little crannogman into a
knight, even if it was only for a day, he thought. A day would be
enough.

DAVOS

The cell was warmer than any cell had a right to be.

It was dark, yes. Flickering orange light fell through the ancient
iron bars from the torch in the sconce on the wall outside, but the
back half of the cell remained drenched in gloom. It was dank as
well, as might be expected on an isle such as Dragonstone, where
the sea was never far. And there were rats, as many as any dungeon
could expect to have and a few more besides.
But Davos could not complain of chill. The smooth stony passages
beneath the great mass of Dragonstone were always warm, and
Davos had often heard it said they grew warmer the farther down
one went. He was well below the castle, he judged, and the wall of
his cell often felt warm to his touch when he pressed a palm against
it. Perhaps the old tales were true, and Dragonstone was built with
the stones of hell.
He was sick when they rst brought him here. The cough that had
plagued him since the battle grew worse, and a fever took hold of
him as well. His lips broke with blood blisters, and the warmth of
the cell did not stop his shivering. I will not linger long, he
remembered thinking. I will die soon, here in the dark.
Davos soon found that he was wrong about that, as about so
much else. Dimly he remembered gentle hands and a rm voice,
and young Maester Pylos looking down on him. He was given hot
garlic broth to drink, and milk of the poppy to take away his aches
and shivers. The poppy made him sleep and while he slept they

leeched him to drain o the bad blood. Or so he surmised, by the
leech marks on his arms when he woke. Before very long the
coughing stopped, the blisters vanished, and his broth had chunks of
white sh in it, and carrots and onions as well. And one day he
realized that he felt stronger than he had since Black Betha shattered
beneath him and ung him in the river.
He had two gaolers to tend him. One was broad and squat, with
thick shoulders and huge strong hands. He wore a leather brigantine
dotted with iron studs, and once a day brought Davos a bowl of
oaten porridge. Sometimes he sweetened it with honey or poured in
a bit of milk. The other gaoler was older, stooped and sallow, with
greasy unwashed hair and pebbled skin. He wore a doublet of white
velvet with a ring of stars worked upon the breast in golden thread.
It t him badly, being both too short and too loose, and was soiled
and torn besides. He would bring Davos plates of meat and mash, or
sh stew, and once even half a lamprey pie. The lamprey was so
rich he could not keep it down, but even so, it was a rare treat for a
prisoner in a dungeon.
Neither sun nor moon shone in the dungeons; no windows pierced
the thick stone walls. The only way to tell day from night was by
his gaolers. Neither man would speak to him, though he knew they
were no mutes; sometimes he heard them exchange a few brusque
words as the watch was changing. They would not even tell him
their names, so he gave them names of his own. The short strong
one he called Porridge, the stooped sallow one Lamprey, for the
pie. He marked the passage of days by the meals they brought, and
by the changing of the torches in the sconce outside his cell.
A man grows lonely in the dark, and hungers for the sound of a
human voice. Davos would talk to the gaolers whenever they came
to his cell, whether to bring him food or change his slops pail. He
knew they would be deaf to pleas for freedom or mercy; instead he
asked them questions, hoping perhaps one day one might answer.
“What news of the war?” he asked, and “Is the king well?” He asked
after his son Devan, and the Princess Shireen, and Salladhor Saan.
“What is the weather like?” he asked, and “Have the autumn storms
begun yet? Do ships still sail the narrow sea?”

It made no matter what he asked; they never answered, though
sometimes Porridge gave him a look, and for half a heartbeat Davos
would think that he was about to speak. With Lamprey there was
not even that much. I am not a man to him, Davos thought, only a
stone that eats and shits and speaks. He decided after a while that he
liked Porridge much the better. Porridge at least seemed to know
he was alive, and there was a queer sort of kindness to the man.
Davos suspected that he fed the rats; that was why there were so
many. Once he thought he heard the gaoler talking to them as if
they were children, but perhaps he’d only dreamed that.
They do not mean to let me die, he realized. They are keeping me
alive, for some purpose of their own. He did not like to think what that
might be. Lord Sunglass had been con ned in the cells beneath
Dragonstone for a time, as had Ser Hubard Rambton’s sons; all of
them had ended on the pyre. I should have given myself to the sea,
Davos thought as he sat staring at the torch beyond the bars. Or let
the sail pass me by, to perish on my rock. I would sooner feed crabs than
ames.
Then one night as he was nishing his supper, Davos felt a queer
ush come over him. He glanced up through the bars, and there she
stood in shimmering scarlet with her great ruby at her throat, her
red eyes gleaming as bright as the torch that bathed her.
“Melisandre,” he said, with a calm he did not feel.
“Onion Knight,” she replied, just as calmly, as if the two of them
had met on a stair or in the yard, and were exchanging polite
greetings. “Are you well?”
“Better than I was.”
“Do you lack for anything?”
“My king. My son. I lack for them.” He pushed the bowl aside
and stood. “Have you come to burn me?”
Her strange red eyes studied him through the bars. “This is a bad
place, is it not? A dark place, and foul. The good sun does not shine
here, nor the bright moon.” She lifted a hand toward the torch in
the wall sconce. “This is all that stands between you and the
darkness, Onion Knight. This little re, this gift of R’hllor. Shall I
put it out?”

“No.” He moved toward the bars. “Please.” He did not think he
could bear that, to be left alone in utter blackness with no one but
the rats for company.
The red woman’s lips curved upward in a smile. “So you have
come to love the re, it would seem.”
“I need the torch.” His hands opened and closed. I will not beg her.
I will not.
“I am like this torch, Ser Davos. We are both instruments of
R’hllor. We were made for a single purpose—to keep the darkness
at bay. Do you believe that?”
“No.” Perhaps he should have lied, and told her what she wanted
to hear, but Davos was too accustomed to speaking truth. “You are
the mother of darkness. I saw that under Storm’s End, when you
gave birth before my eyes.”
“Is the brave Ser Onions so frightened of a passing shadow? Take
heart, then. Shadows only live when given birth by light, and the
king’s res burn so low I dare not draw o any more to make
another son. It might well kill him.” Melisandre moved closer.
“With another man, though … a man whose ames still burn hot
and high … if you truly wish to serve your king’s cause, come to my
chamber one night. I could give you pleasure such as you have
never known, and with your life- re I could make …”
“… a horror.” Davos retreated from her. “I want no part of you,
my lady. Or your god. May the Seven protect me.”
Melisandre sighed. “They did not protect Guncer Sunglass. He
prayed thrice each day, and bore seven seven-pointed stars upon his
shield, but when R’hllor reached out his hand his prayers turned to
screams, and he burned. Why cling to these false gods?”
“I have worshiped them all my life.”
“All your life, Davos Seaworth? As well say it was so yesterday.”
She shook her head sadly. “You have never feared to speak the truth
to kings, why do you lie to yourself? Open your eyes, ser knight.”
“What is it you would have me see?”
“The way the world is made. The truth is all around you, plain to
behold. The night is dark and full of terrors, the day bright and
beautiful and full of hope. One is black, the other white. There is ice

and there is re. Hate and love. Bitter and sweet. Male and female.
Pain and pleasure. Winter and summer. Evil and good.” She took a
step toward him. “Death and life. Everywhere, opposites.
Everywhere, the war.”
“The war?” asked Davos.
“The war,” she a rmed. “There are two, Onion Knight. Not seven,
not one, not a hundred or a thousand. Two! Do you think I crossed
half the world to put yet another vain king on yet another empty
throne? The war has been waged since time began, and before it is
done, all men must choose where they will stand. On one side is
R’hllor, the Lord of Light, the Heart of Fire, the God of Flame and
Shadow. Against him stands the Great Other whose name may not
be spoken, the Lord of Darkness, the Soul of Ice, the God of Night
and Terror. Ours is not a choice between Baratheon and Lannister,
between Greyjoy and Stark. It is death we choose, or life. Darkness,
or light.” She clasped the bars of his cell with her slender white
hands. The great ruby at her throat seemed to pulse with its own
radiance. “So tell me, Ser Davos Seaworth, and tell me truly—does
your heart burn with the shining light of R’hllor? Or is it black and
cold and full of worms?” She reached through the bars and laid
three ngers upon his breast, as if to feel the truth of him through
esh and wool and leather.
“My heart,” Davos said slowly, “is full of doubts.”
Melisandre sighed. “Ahhhh, Davos. The good knight is honest to
the last, even in his day of darkness. It is well you did not lie to me.
I would have known. The Other’s servants oft hide black hearts in
gaudy light, so R’hllor gives his priests the power to see through
falsehoods.” She stepped lightly away from the cell. “Why did you
mean to kill me?”
“I will tell you,” said Davos, “if you will tell me who betrayed
me.” It could only have been Salladhor Saan, and yet even now he
prayed it was not so.
The red woman laughed. “No one betrayed you, onion knight. I
saw your purpose in my ames.”
The ames. “If you can see the future in these ames, how is it
that we burned upon the Blackwater? You gave my sons to the

re … my sons, my ship, my men, all burning …”
Melisandre shook her head. “You wrong me, onion knight. Those
were no res of mine. Had I been with you, your battle would have
had a di erent ending. But His Grace was surrounded by
unbelievers, and his pride proved stronger than his faith. His
punishment was grievous, but he has learned from his mistake.”
Were my sons no more than a lesson for a king, then? Davos felt his
mouth tighten.
“It is night in your Seven Kingdoms now,” the red woman went
on, “but soon the sun will rise again. The war continues, Davos
Seaworth, and some will soon learn that even an ember in the ashes
can still ignite a great blaze. The old maester looked at Stannis and
saw only a man. You see a king. You are both wrong. He is the
Lord’s chosen, the warrior of re. I have seen him leading the ght
against the dark, I have seen it in the ames. The ames do not lie,
else you would not be here. It is written in prophecy as well. When
the red star bleeds and the darkness gathers, Azor Ahai shall be born
again amidst smoke and salt to wake dragons out of stone. The
bleeding star has come and gone, and Dragonstone is the place of
smoke and salt. Stannis Baratheon is Azor Ahai reborn!” Her red
eyes blazed like twin res, and seemed to stare deep into his soul.
“You do not believe me. You doubt the truth of R’hllor even
now … yet have served him all the same, and will serve him again.
I shall leave you here to think on all that I have told you. And
because R’hllor is the source of all good, I shall leave the torch as
well.”
With a smile and swirl of scarlet skirts, she was gone. Only her
scent lingered after. That, and the torch. Davos lowered himself to
the oor of the cell and wrapped his arms about his knees. The
shifting torchlight washed over him. Once Melisandre’s footsteps
faded away, the only sound was the scrabbling of rats. Ice and re,
he thought. Black and white. Dark and light. Davos could not deny
the power of her god. He had seen the shadow crawling from
Melisandre’s womb, and the priestess knew things she had no way
of knowing. She saw my purpose in her ames. It was good to learn
that Salla had not sold him, but the thought of the red woman

spying out his secrets with her res disquieted him more than he
could say. And what did she mean when she said that I had served her
god and would serve him again? He did not like that either.
He lifted his eyes to stare up at the torch. He looked for a long
time, never blinking, watching the ames shift and shimmer. He
tried to see beyond them, to peer through the ery curtain and
glimpse whatever lived back there … but there was nothing, only
re, and after a time his eyes began to water.
God-blind and tired, Davos curled up on the straw and gave
himself to sleep.
Three days later—well, Porridge had come thrice, and Lamprey
twice—Davos heard voices outside his cell. He sat up at once, his
back to the stone wall, listening to the sounds of struggle. This was
new, a change in his unchanging world. The noise was coming from
the left, where the steps led up to daylight. He could hear a man’s
voice, pleading and shouting.
“… madness!” the man was saying as he came into view, dragged
along between two guardsmen with ery hearts on their breasts.
Porridge went before them, jangling a ring of keys, and Ser Axell
Florent walked behind. “Axell,” the prisoner said desperately, “for
the love you bear me, unhand me! You cannot do this, I’m no
traitor.” He was an older man, tall and slender, with silvery grey
hair, a pointed beard, and a long elegant face twisted in fear.
“Where is Selyse, where is the queen? I demand to see her. The
Others take you all! Release me!”
The guards paid no mind to his outcries. “Here?” Porridge asked
in front of the cell. Davos got to his feet. For an instant he
considered trying to rush them when the door was opened, but that
was madness. There were too many, the guards wore swords, and
Porridge was strong as a bull.
Ser Axell gave the gaoler a curt nod. “Let the traitors enjoy each
other’s company.”
“I am no traitor!” screeched the prisoner as Porridge was
unlocking the door. Though he was plainly dressed, in grey wool
doublet and black breeches, his speech marked him as highborn. His
birth will not serve him here, thought Davos.

Porridge swung the bars wide, Ser Axell gave a nod, and the
guards ung their charge in headlong. The man stumbled and might
have fallen, but Davos caught him. At once he wrenched away and
staggered back toward the door, only to have it slammed in his
pale, pampered face. “No,” he shouted. “Nooooo.” All the strength
suddenly left his legs, and he slid slowly to the oor, clutching at
the iron bars. Ser Axell, Porridge, and the guards had already turned
to leave. “You cannot do this,” the prisoner shouted at their
retreating backs. “I am the King’s Hand!”
It was then that Davos knew him. “You are Alester Florent.”
The man turned his head. “Who …?”
“Ser Davos Seaworth.”
Lord Alester blinked. “Seaworth … the onion knight. You tried to
murder Melisandre.”
Davos did not deny it. “At Storm’s End you wore red-gold armor,
with inlaid lapis owers on your breastplate.” He reached down a
hand to help the other man to his feet.
Lord Alester brushed the lthy straw from his clothing. “I … I
must apologize for my appearance, ser. My chests were lost when
the Lannisters overran our camp. I escaped with no more than the
mail on my back and the rings on my ngers.”
He still wears those rings, noted Davos, who had lacked even all of
his ngers.
“No doubt some cook’s boy or groom is prancing around King’s
Landing just now in my slashed velvet doublet and jeweled cloak,”
Lord Alester went on, oblivious. “But war has its horrors, as all men
know. No doubt you su ered your own losses.”
“My ship,” said Davos. “All my men. Four of my sons.”
“May the … may the Lord of Light lead them through the
darkness to a better world,” the other man said.
May the Father judge them justly, and the Mother grant them mercy,
Davos thought, but he kept his prayer to himself. The Seven had no
place on Dragonstone now.
“My own son is safe at Brightwater,” the lord went on, “but I lost
a nephew on the Fury. Ser Imry, my brother Ryam’s son.”

It had been Ser Imry Florent who led them blindly up the
Blackwater Rush with all oars pulling, paying no heed to the small
stone towers at the mouth of the river. Davos was not like to forget
him. “My son Maric was your nephew’s oarmaster.” He
remembered his last sight of Fury, engulfed in wild re. “Has there
been any word of survivors?”
“The Fury burned and sank with all hands,” his lordship said.
“Your son and my nephew were lost, with countless other good
men. The war itself was lost that day, ser.”
This man is defeated. Davos remembered Melisandre’s talk of
embers in the ashes igniting great blazes. Small wonder he ended
here. “His Grace will never yield, my lord.”
“Folly, that’s folly.” Lord Alester sat on the oor again, as if the
e ort of standing for a moment had been too much for him.
“Stannis Baratheon will never sit the Iron Throne. Is it treason to
say the truth? A bitter truth, but no less true for that. His eet is
gone, save for the Lyseni, and Salladhor Saan will ee at the rst
sight of a Lannister sail. Most of the lords who supported Stannis
have gone over to Jo rey or died …”
“Even the lords of the narrow sea? The lords sworn to
Dragonstone?”
Lord Alester waved his hand feebly. “Lord Celtigar was captured
and bent the knee. Monford Velaryon died with his ship, the red
woman burned Sunglass, and Lord Bar Emmon is fteen, fat, and
feeble. Those are your lords of the narrow sea. Only the strength of
House Florent is left to Stannis, against all the might of Highgarden,
Sunspear, and Casterly Rock, and now most of the storm lords as
well. The best hope that remains is to try and salvage something
with a peace. That is all I meant to do. Gods be good, how can they
call it treason?”
Davos stood frowning. “My lord, what did you do?”
“Not treason. Never treason. I love His Grace as much as any
man. My own niece is his queen, and I remained loyal to him when
wiser men ed. I am his Hand, the Hand of the King, how can I be a
traitor? I only meant to save our lives, and … honor … yes.” He
licked his lips. “I penned a letter. Salladhor Saan swore that he had

a man who could get it to King’s Landing, to Lord Tywin. His
lordship is a … a man of reason, and my terms … the terms were
fair … more than fair.”
“What terms were these, my lord?”
“It is lthy here,” Lord Alester said suddenly. “And that
odor … what is that odor?”
“The pail,” said Davos, gesturing. “We have no privy here. What
terms?”
His lordship stared at the pail in horror. “That Lord Stannis give
up his claim to the Iron Throne and retract all he said of Jo rey’s
bastardy, on the condition that he be accepted back into the king’s
peace and con rmed as Lord of Dragonstone and Storm’s End. I
vowed to do the same, for the return of Brightwater Keep and all
our lands. I thought … Lord Tywin would see the sense in my
proposal. He still has the Starks to deal with, and the ironmen as
well. I o ered to seal the bargain by wedding Shireen to Jo rey’s
brother Tommen.” He shook his head. “The terms … they are as
good as we are ever like to get. Even you can see that, surely?”
“Yes,” said Davos, “even me.” Unless Stannis should father a son,
such a marriage would mean that Dragonstone and Storm’s End
would one day pass to Tommen, which would doubtless please Lord
Tywin. Meanwhile, the Lannisters would have Shireen as hostage to
make certain Stannis raised no new rebellions. “And what did His
Grace say when you proposed these terms to him?”
“He is always with the red woman, and … he is not in his right
mind, I fear. This talk of a stone dragon … madness, I tell you,
sheer madness. Did we learn nothing from Aerion Bright re, from
the nine mages, from the alchemists? Did we learn nothing from
Summerhall? No good has ever come from these dreams of dragons,
I told Axell as much. My way was better. Surer. And Stannis gave
me his seal, he gave me leave to rule. The Hand speaks with the
king’s voice.”
“Not in this.” Davos was no courtier, and he did not even try to
blunt his words. “It is not in Stannis to yield, so long as he knows
his claim is just. No more than he can unsay his words against
Jo rey, when he believes them true. As for the marriage, Tommen

was born of the same incest as Jo rey, and His Grace would sooner
see Shireen dead than wed to such.”
A vein throbbed in Florent’s forehead. “He has no choice.”
“You are wrong, my lord. He can choose to die a king.”
“And us with him? Is that what you desire, Onion Knight?”
“No. But I am the king’s man, and I will make no peace without
his leave.”
Lord Alester stared at him helplessly for a long moment, and then
began to weep.

JON

The last night fell black and moonless, but for once the sky was

clear. “I am going up the hill to look for Ghost,” he told the Thenns
at the cave mouth, and they grunted and let him pass.
So many stars, he thought as he trudged up the slope through
pines and rs and ash. Maester Luwin had taught him his stars as a
boy in Winterfell; he had learned the names of the twelve houses of
heaven and the rulers of each; he could nd the seven wanderers
sacred to the Faith; he was old friends with the Ice Dragon, the
Shadowcat, the Moonmaid, and the Sword of the Morning. All those
he shared with Ygritte, but not some of the others. We look up at the
same stars, and see such di erent things. The King’s Crown was the
Cradle, to hear her tell it; the Stallion was the Horned Lord; the red
wanderer that septons preached was sacred to their Smith up here
was called the Thief. And when the Thief was in the Moonmaid, that
was a propitious time for a man to steal a woman, Ygritte insisted.
“Like the night you stole me. The Thief was bright that night.”
“I never meant to steal you,” he said. “I never knew you were a
girl until my knife was at your throat.”
“If you kill a man, and never mean t’, he’s just as dead,” Ygritte
said stubbornly. Jon had never met anyone so stubborn, except
maybe for his little sister Arya. Is she still my sister? he wondered.
Was she ever? He had never truly been a Stark, only Lord Eddard’s
motherless bastard, with no more place at Winterfell than Theon
Greyjoy. And even that he’d lost. When a man of the Night’s Watch

said his words, he put aside his old family and joined a new one, but
Jon Snow had lost those brothers too.
He found Ghost atop the hill, as he thought he might. The white
wolf never howled, yet something drew him to the heights all the
same, and he would squat there on his hindquarters, hot breath
rising in a white mist as his red eyes drank the stars.
“Do you have names for them as well?” Jon asked, as he went to
one knee beside the direwolf and scratched the thick white fur on
his neck. “The Hare? The Doe? The She-Wolf?” Ghost licked his
face, his rough wet tongue rasping against the scabs where the
eagle’s talons had ripped Jon’s cheek. The bird marked both of us, he
thought. “Ghost,” he said quietly, “on the morrow we go over.
There’s no steps here, no cage-and-crane, no way for me to get you
to the other side. We have to part. Do you understand?”
In the dark, the direwolf’s red eyes looked black. He nuzzled at
Jon’s neck, silent as ever, his breath a hot mist. The wildlings called
Jon Snow a warg, but if so he was a poor one. He did not know
how to put on a wolf skin, the way Orell had with his eagle before
he’d died. Once Jon had dreamed that he was Ghost, looking down
upon the valley of the Milkwater where Mance Rayder had gathered
his people, and that dream had turned out to be true. But he was
not dreaming now, and that left him only words.
“You cannot come with me,” Jon said, cupping the wolf’s head in
his hands and looking deep into those eyes. “You have to go to
Castle Black. Do you understand? Castle Black. Can you nd it? The
way home? Just follow the ice, east and east, into the sun, and
you’ll nd it. They will know you at Castle Black, and maybe your
coming will warn them.” He had thought of writing out a warning
for Ghost to carry, but he had no ink, no parchment, not even a
writing quill, and the risk of discovery was too great. “I will meet
you again at Castle Black, but you have to get there by yourself. We
must each hunt alone for a time. Alone.”
The direwolf twisted free of Jon’s grasp, his ears pricked up. And
suddenly he was bounding away. He loped through a tangle of
brush, leapt a deadfall, and raced down the hillside, a pale streak
among the trees. O to Castle Black? Jon wondered. Or o after a

hare? He wished he knew. He feared he might prove just as poor a
warg as a sworn brother and a spy.
A wind sighed through the trees, rich with the smell of pine
needles, tugging at his faded blacks. Jon could see the Wall looming
high and dark to the south, a great shadow blocking out the stars.
The rough hilly ground made him think they must be somewhere
between the Shadow Tower and Castle Black, and likely closer to
the former. For days they had been wending their way south
between deep lakes that stretched like long thin ngers along the
oors of narrow valleys, while int ridges and pine-clad hills jostled
against one another to either side. Such ground made for slow
riding, but o ered easy concealment for those wishing to approach
the Wall unseen.
For wildling raiders, he thought. Like us. Like me.
Beyond that Wall lay the Seven Kingdoms, and everything he had
sworn to protect. He had said the words, had pledged his life and
honor, and by rights he should be up there standing sentry. He
should be raising a horn to his lips to rouse the Night’s Watch to
arms. He had no horn, though. It would not be hard to steal one
from the wildlings, he suspected, but what would that accomplish?
Even if he blew it, there was no one to hear. The Wall was a
hundred leagues long and the Watch sadly dwindled. All but three
of the strongholds had been abandoned; there might not be a
brother within forty miles of here, but for Jon. If he was a brother
still …
I should have tried to kill Mance Rayder on the Fist, even if it meant
my life. That was what Qhorin Halfhand would have done. But Jon
had hesitated, and the chance passed. The next day he had ridden
o with Styr the Magnar, Jarl, and more than a hundred picked
Thenns and raiders. He told himself that he was only biding his
time, that when the moment came he would slip away and ride for
Castle Black. The moment never came. They rested most nights in
empty wildling villages, and Styr always set a dozen of his Thenns
to guard the horses. Jarl watched him suspiciously. And Ygritte was
never far, day or night.

Two hearts that beat as one. Mance Rayder’s mocking words rang
bitter in his head. Jon had seldom felt so confused. I have no choice,
he’d told himself the rst time, when she slipped beneath his
sleeping skins. If I refuse her, she will know me for a turncloak. I am
playing the part the Halfhand told me to play.
His body had played the part eagerly enough. His lips on hers, his
hand sliding under her doeskin shirt to nd a breast, his manhood
sti ening when she rubbed her mound against it through their
clothes. My vows, he’d thought, remembering the weirwood grove
where he had said them, the nine great white trees in a circle, the
carved red faces watching, listening. But her ngers were undoing
his laces and her tongue was in his mouth and her hand slipped
inside his smallclothes and brought him out, and he could not see
the weirwoods anymore, only her. She bit his neck and he nuzzled
hers, burying his nose in her thick red hair. Lucky, he thought, she is
lucky, re-kissed. “Isn’t that good?” she whispered as she guided him
inside her. She was sopping wet down there, and no maiden, that
was plain, but Jon did not care. His vows, her maidenhood, none of
it mattered, only the heat of her, the mouth on his, the nger that
pinched at his nipple. “Isn’t that sweet?” she said again. “Not so
fast, oh, slow, yes, like that. There now, there now, yes, sweet,
sweet. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but I can show you. Harder
now. Yessss.”
A part, he tried to remind himself afterward. I am playing a part. I
had to do it once, to prove I’d abandoned my vows. I had to make her
trust me. It need never happen again. He was still a man of the
Night’s Watch, and a son of Eddard Stark. He had done what needed
to be done, proved what needed to be proven.
The proving had been so sweet, though, and Ygritte had gone to
sleep beside him with her head against his chest, and that was sweet
as well, dangerously sweet. He thought of the weirwoods again, and
the words he’d said before them. It was only once, and it had to be.
Even my father stumbled once, when he forgot his marriage vows and
sired a bastard. Jon vowed to himself that it would be the same with
him. It will never happen again.

It happened twice more that night, and again in the morning,
when she woke to nd him hard. The wildlings were stirring by
then, and several could not help but notice what was going on
beneath the pile of furs. Jarl told them to be quick about it, before
he had to throw a pail of water over them. Like a pair of rutting dogs,
Jon thought afterward. Was that what he’d become? I am a man of
the Night’s Watch, a small voice inside insisted, but every night it
seemed a little fainter, and when Ygritte kissed his ears or bit his
neck, he could not hear it at all. Was this how it was for my father? he
wondered. Was he as weak as I am, when he dishonored himself in my
mother’s bed?
Something was coming up the hill behind him, he realized
suddenly. For half a heartbeat he thought it might be Ghost come
back, but the direwolf never made so much noise. Jon drew
Longclaw in a single smooth motion, but it was only one of the
Thenns, a broad man in a bronze helm. “Snow,” the intruder said.
“Come. Magnar wants.” The men of Thenn spoke the Old Tongue,
and most had only a few words of the Common.
Jon did not much care what the Magnar wanted, but there was no
use arguing with someone who could scarcely understand him, so he
followed the man back down the hill.
The mouth of the cave was a cleft in the rock barely wide enough
for a horse, half concealed behind a soldier pine. It opened to the
north, so the glows of the res within would not be visible from the
Wall. Even if by some mischance a patrol should happen to pass
atop the Wall tonight, they would see nothing but hills and pines
and the icy sheen of starlight on a half-frozen lake. Mance Rayder
had planned his thrust well.
Within the rock, the passage descended twenty feet before it
opened out onto a space as large as Winterfell’s Great Hall.
Cook res burned amongst the columns, their smoke rising to
blacken the stony ceiling. The horses had been hobbled along one
wall, beside a shallow pool. A sinkhole in the center of the oor
opened on what might have been an even greater cavern below,
though the darkness made it hard to tell. Jon could hear the soft
rushing sound of an underground stream somewhere below as well.

Jarl was with the Magnar; Mance had given them the joint
command. Styr was none too pleased by that, Jon had noted early
on. Mance Rayder had called the dark youth a “pet” of Val, who
was sister to Dalla, his own queen, which made Jarl a sort of good
brother once removed to the King-beyond-the-Wall. The Magnar
plainly resented sharing his authority. He had brought a hundred
Thenns, ve times as many men as Jarl, and often acted as if he had
the sole command. But it would be the younger man who got them
over the ice, Jon knew. Though he could not have been older than
twenty, Jarl had been raiding for eight years, and had gone over the
Wall a dozen times with the likes of Alfyn Crowkiller and the
Weeper, and more recently with his own band.
The Magnar was direct. “Jarl has warned me of crows, patrolling
on high. Tell me all you know of these patrols.”
Tell me, Jon noted, not tell us, though Jarl stood right beside him.
He would have liked nothing better than to refuse the brusque
demand, but he knew Styr would put him to death at the slightest
disloyalty, and Ygritte as well, for the crime of being his. “There
are four men in each patrol, two rangers and two builders,” he said.
“The builders are supposed to make note of cracks, melting, and
other structural problems, while the rangers look for signs of foes.
They ride mules.”
“Mules?” The earless man frowned. “Mules are slow.”
“Slow, but more surefooted on the ice. The patrols often ride atop
the Wall, and aside from Castle Black, the paths up there have not
been graveled for long years. The mules are bred at Eastwatch, and
specially trained to their duty.”
“They often ride atop the Wall? Not always?”
“No. One patrol in four follows the base instead, to search for
cracks in the foundation ice or signs of tunneling.”
The Magnar nodded. “Even in far Thenn we know the tale of
Arson Iceaxe and his tunnel.”
Jon knew the tale as well. Arson Iceaxe had been halfway
through the Wall when his tunnel was found by rangers from the
Nightfort. They did not trouble to disturb him at his digging, only
sealed the way behind with ice and stone and snow. Dolorous Edd

used to say that if you pressed your ear at to the Wall, you could
still hear Arson chipping away with his axe.
“When do these patrols go out? How often?”
Jon shrugged. “It changes. I’ve heard that Lord Commander
Qorgyle used to send them out every third day from Castle Black to
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, and every second day from Castle Black to
the Shadow Tower. The Watch had more men in his day, though.
Lord Commander Mormont prefers to vary the number of patrols
and the days of their departure, to make it more di cult for anyone
to know their comings and goings. And sometimes the Old Bear will
even send a larger force to one of the abandoned castles for a
fortnight or a moon’s turn.” His uncle had originated that tactic, Jon
knew. Anything to make the enemy unsure.
“Is Stonedoor manned at present?” asked Jarl. “Greyguard?”
So we’re between those two, are we? Jon kept his face carefully
blank. “Only Eastwatch, Castle Black, and the Shadow Tower were
manned when I left the Wall. I can’t speak to what Bowen Marsh or
Ser Denys might have done since.”
“How many crows remain within the castles?” asked Styr.
“Five hundred at Castle Black. Two hundred at Shadow Tower,
perhaps three hundred at Eastwatch.” Jon added three hundred men
to the count. If only it were that easy …
Jarl was not fooled, however. “He’s lying,” he told Styr. “Or else
including those they lost on the Fist.”
“Crow,” the Magnar warned, “do not take me for Mance Rayder.
If you lie to me, I will have your tongue.”
“I’m no crow, and won’t be called a liar.” Jon exed the ngers of
his sword hand.
The Magnar of Thenn studied Jon with his chilly grey eyes. “We
shall learn their numbers soon enough,” he said after a moment.
“Go. I will send for you if I have further questions.”
Jon bowed his head sti y, and went. If all the wildlings were like
Styr, it would be easier to betray them. The Thenns were not like other
free folk, though. The Magnar claimed to be the last of the First
Men, and ruled with an iron hand. His little land of Thenn was a
high mountain valley hidden amongst the northernmost peaks of the

Frostfangs, surrounded by cave dwellers, Hornfoot men, giants, and
the cannibal clans of the ice rivers. Ygritte said the Thenns were
savage ghters, and that their Magnar was a god to them. Jon could
believe that. Unlike Jarl and Harma and Rattleshirt, Styr
commanded absolute obedience from his men, and that discipline
was no doubt part of why Mance had chosen him to go over the
Wall.
He walked past the Thenns, sitting atop their rounded bronze
helms about their cook res. Where did Ygrette get herself to? He
found her gear and his together, but no sign of the girl herself. “She
took a torch and went o that way,” Grigg the Goat told him,
pointing toward the back of the cavern.
Jon followed his nger, and found himself in a dim back room
wandering through a maze of columns and stalactites. She can’t be
here, he was thinking, when he heard her laugh. He turned toward
the sound, but within ten paces he was in a dead end, facing a blank
wall of rose and white owstone. Ba ed, he made his way back the
way he’d come, and then he saw it: a dark hole under an outthrust
of wet stone. He knelt, listened, heard the faint sound of water.
“Ygritte?”
“In here,” her voice came back, echoing faintly.
Jon had to crawl a dozen paces before the cave opened up around
him. When he stood again, it took his eyes a moment to adjust.
Ygritte had brought a torch, but there was no other light. She stood
beside a little waterfall that fell from a cleft in the rock down into a
wide dark pool. The orange and yellow ames shone against the
pale green water.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“I heard water. I wanted t’see how deep the cave went.” She
pointed with the torch. “There’s a passage goes down further. I
followed it a hundred paces before I turned back.”
“A dead end?”
“You know nothing, Jon Snow. It went on and on and on. There
are hundreds o’ caves in these hills, and down deep they all connect.
There’s even a way under your Wall. Gorne’s Way.”
“Gorne,” said Jon. “Gorne was King-beyond-the-Wall.”

“Aye,” said Ygritte. “Together with his brother Gendel, three
thousand years ago. They led a host o’ free folk through the caves,
and the Watch was none the wiser. But when they come out, the
wolves o’ Winterfell fell upon them.”
“There was a battle,” Jon recalled. “Gorne slew the King in the
North, but his son picked up his banner and took the crown from his
head, and cut down Gorne in turn.”
“And the sound o’ swords woke the crows in their castles, and
they rode out all in black to take the free folk in the rear.”
“Yes. Gendel had the king to the south, the Umbers to the east,
and the Watch to the north of him. He died as well.”
“You know nothing, Jon Snow. Gendel did not die. He cut his
way free, through the crows, and led his people back north with the
wolves howling at their heels. Only Gendel did not know the caves
as Gorne had, and took a wrong turn.” She swept the torch back and
forth, so the shadows jumped and moved. “Deeper he went, and
deeper, and when he tried t’ turn back the ways that seemed
familiar ended in stone rather than sky. Soon his torches began t’
fail, one by one, till nally there was naught but dark. Gendel’s folk
were never seen again, but on a still night you can hear their
children’s children’s children sobbing under the hills, still looking
for the way back up. Listen? Do you hear them?”
All Jon could hear was the falling water and the faint crackle of
ames. “This way under the Wall was lost as well?”
“Some have searched for it. Them that go too deep nd Gendel’s
children, and Gendel’s children are always hungry.” Smiling, she set
the torch carefully in a notch of rock, and came toward him.
“There’s naught to eat in the dark but esh,” she whispered, biting
at his neck.
Jon nuzzled her hair and lled his nose with the smell of her.
“You sound like Old Nan, telling Bran a monster story.”
Ygritte punched his shoulder. “An old woman, am I?”
“You’re older than me.”
“Aye, and wiser. You know nothing, Jon Snow.” She pushed away
from him, and shrugged out of her rabbitskin vest.
“What are you doing?”

“Showing you how old I am.” She unlaced her doeskin shirt,
tossed it aside, pulled her three woolen undershirts up over her
head all at once. “I want you should see me.”
“We shouldn’t—”
“We should.” Her breasts bounced as she stood on one leg to pull
one boot, then hopped onto her other foot to attend to the other.
Her nipples were wide pink circles. “You as well,” Ygritte said as
she yanked down her sheepskin breeches. “If you want to look you
have to show. You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
“I know I want you,” he heard himself say, all his vows and all
his honor forgotten. She stood before him naked as her name day,
and he was as hard as the rock around them. He had been in her
half a hundred times by now, but always beneath the furs, with
others all around them. He had never seen how beautiful she was.
Her legs were skinny but well muscled, the hair at the juncture of
her thighs a brighter red than that on her head. Does that make it
even luckier? He pulled her close. “I love the smell of you,” he said.
“I love your red hair. I love your mouth, and the way you kiss me. I
love your smile. I love your teats.” He kissed them, one and then
the other. “I love your skinny legs, and what’s between them.” He
knelt to kiss her there, lightly on her mound at rst, but Ygritte
moved her legs apart a little, and he saw the pink inside and kissed
that as well, and tasted her. She gave a little gasp. “If you love me
all so much, why are you still dressed?” she whispered. “You know
nothing, Jon Snow. Noth—oh. Oh. OHHH.”
Afterward, she was almost shy, or as shy as Ygritte ever got.
“That thing you did,” she said, when they lay together on their piled
clothes. “With your … mouth.” She hesitated. “Is that … is it what
lords do to their ladies, down in the south?”
“I don’t think so.” No one had ever told Jon just what lords did
with their ladies. “I only … wanted to kiss you there, that’s all. You
seemed to like it.”
“Aye. I … I liked it some. No one taught you such?”
“There’s been no one,” he confessed. “Only you.”
“A maid,” she teased. “You were a maid.”

He gave her closest nipple a playful pinch. “I was a man of the
Night’s Watch.” Was, he heard himself say. What was he now? He
did not want to look at that. “Were you a maid?”
Ygritte pushed herself onto an elbow. “I am nineteen, and a
spearwife, and kissed by re. How could I be maiden?”
“Who was he?”
“A boy at a feast, ve years past. He’d come trading with his
brothers, and he had hair like mine, kissed by re, so I thought he
would be lucky. But he was weak. When he came back t’ try and
steal me, Longspear broke his arm and ran him o , and he never
tried again, not once.”
“It wasn’t Longspear, then?” Jon was relieved. He liked
Longspear, with his homely face and friendly ways.
She punched him. “That’s vile. Would you bed your sister?”
“Longspear’s not your brother.”
“He’s of my village. You know nothing, Jon Snow. A true man
steals a woman from afar, t’ strengthen the clan. Women who bed
brothers or fathers or clan kin o end the gods, and are cursed with
weak and sickly children. Even monsters.”
“Craster weds his daughters,” Jon pointed out.
She punched him again. “Craster’s more your kind than ours. His
father was a crow who stole a woman out of Whitetree village, but
after he had her he ew back t’ his Wall. She went t’ Castle Black
once t’ show the crow his son, but the brothers blew their horns and
run her o . Craster’s blood is black, and he bears a heavy curse.”
She ran her ngers lightly across his stomach. “I feared you’d do the
same once. Fly back to the Wall. You never knew what t’ do after
you stole me.”
Jon sat up. “Ygritte, I never stole you.”
“Aye, you did. You jumped down the mountain and killed Orell,
and afore I could get my axe you had a knife at my throat. I thought
you’d have me then, or kill me, or maybe both, but you never did.
And when I told you the tale o’ Bael the Bard and how he plucked
the rose o’ Winterfell, I thought you’d know to pluck me then for
certain, but you didn’t. You know nothing, Jon Snow.” She gave him
a shy smile. “You might be learning some, though.”

The light was shifting all about her, Jon noticed suddenly. He
looked around. “We had best go up. The torch is almost done.”
“Is the crow afeared o’ Gendel’s children?” she said, with a grin.
“It’s only a little way up, and I’m not done with you, Jon Snow.”
She pushed him back down on the clothes and straddled him.
“Would you …” She hesitated.
“What?” he prompted, as the torch began to gutter.
“Do it again?” Ygritte blurted. “With your mouth? The lord’s
kiss? And I … I could see if you liked it any.”
By the time the torch burned out, Jon Snow no longer cared.
His guilt came back afterward, but weaker than before. If this is so
wrong, he wondered, why did the gods make it feel so good?
The grotto was pitch-dark by the time they nished. The only
light was the dim glow of the passage back up to the larger cavern,
where a score of res burned. They were soon fumbling and
bumping into each other as they tried to dress in the dark. Ygritte
stumbled into the pool and screeched at the cold of the water. When
Jon laughed, she pulled him in too. They wrestled and splashed in
the dark, and then she was in his arms again, and it turned out they
were not nished after all.
“Jon Snow,” she told him, when he’d spent his seed inside her,
“don’t move now, sweet. I like the feel of you in there, I do. Let’s
not go back t’ Styr and Jarl. Let’s go down inside, and join up with
Gendel’s children. I don’t ever want t’ leave this cave, Jon Snow.
Not ever.”

DAENERYS

All?” The slave girl sounded wary. “Your Grace, did this one’s

worthless ears mishear you?”
Cool green light ltered down through the diamond-shaped panes
of colored glass set in the sloping triangular walls, and a breeze was
blowing gently through the terrace doors, carrying the scents of
fruit and owers from the garden beyond. “Your ears heard true,”
said Dany. “I want to buy them all. Tell the Good Masters, if you
will.”
She had chosen a Qartheen gown today. The deep violet silk
brought out the purple of her eyes. The cut of it bared her left
breast. While the Good Masters of Astapor conferred among
themselves in low voices, Dany sipped tart persimmon wine from a
tall silver ute. She could not quite make out all that they were
saying, but she could hear the greed.
Each of the eight brokers was attended by two or three body
slaves … though one Grazdan, the eldest, had six. So as not to seem
a beggar, Dany had brought her own attendants; Irri and Jhiqui in
their sandsilk trousers and painted vests, old Whitebeard and
mighty Belwas, her bloodriders. Ser Jorah stood behind her
sweltering in his green surcoat with the black bear of Mormont
embroidered upon it. The smell of his sweat was an earthy answer
to the sweet perfumes that drenched the Astapori.
“All,” growled Kraznys mo Nakloz, who smelled of peaches today.
The slave girl repeated the word in the Common Tongue of

Westeros. “Of thousands, there are eight. Is this what she means by
all? There are also six centuries, who shall be part of a ninth
thousand when complete. Would she have them too?”
“I would,” said Dany when the question was put to her. “The
eight thousands, the six centuries … and the ones still in training as
well. The ones who have not earned the spikes.”
Kraznys turned back to his fellows. Once again they conferred
among themselves. The translator had told Dany their names, but it
was hard to keep them straight. Four of the men seemed to be
named Grazdan, presumably after Grazdan the Great who had
founded Old Ghis in the dawn of days. They all looked alike; thick
eshy men with amber skin, broad noses, dark eyes. Their wiry hair
was black, or a dark red, or that queer mixture of red and black that
was peculiar to Ghiscari. All wrapped themselves in tokars, a
garment permitted only to freeborn men of Astapor.
It was the fringe on the tokar that proclaimed a man’s status,
Dany had been told by Captain Groleo. In this cool green room atop
the pyramid, two of the slavers wore tokars fringed in silver, ve
had gold fringes, and one, the oldest Grazdan, displayed a fringe of
fat white pearls that clacked together softly when he shifted in his
seat or moved an arm.
“We cannot sell half-trained boys,” one of the silver-fringe
Grazdans was saying to the others.
“We can, if her gold is good,” said a fatter man whose fringe was
gold.
“They are not Unsullied. They have not killed their sucklings. If
they fail in the eld, they will shame us. And even if we cut ve
thousand raw boys tomorrow, it would be ten years before they are
t for sale. What would we tell the next buyer who comes seeking
Unsullied?”
“We will tell him that he must wait,” said the fat man. “Gold in
my purse is better than gold in my future.”
Dany let them argue, sipping the tart persimmon wine and trying
to keep her face blank and ignorant. I will have them all, no matter
the price, she told herself. The city had a hundred slave traders, but
the eight before her were the greatest. When selling bed slaves,

eldhands, scribes, craftsmen, and tutors, these men were rivals,
but their ancestors had allied one with the other for the purpose of
making and selling the Unsullied. Brick and blood built Astapor, and
brick and blood her people.
It was Kraznys who nally announced their decision. “Tell her
that the eight thousands she shall have, if her gold proves su cient.
And the six centuries, if she wishes. Tell her to come back in a year,
and we will sell her another two thousand.”
“In a year I shall be in Westeros,” said Dany when she had heard
the translation. “My need is now. The Unsullied are well trained, but
even so, many will fall in battle. I shall need the boys as
replacements to take up the swords they drop.” She put her wine
aside and leaned toward the slave girl. “Tell the Good Masters that I
will want even the little ones who still have their puppies. Tell them
that I will pay as much for the boy they cut yesterday as for an
Unsullied in a spiked helm.”
The girl told them. The answer was still no.
Dany frowned in annoyance. “Very well. Tell them I will pay
double, so long as I get them all.”
“Double?” The fat one in the gold fringe all but drooled.
“This little whore is a fool, truly,” said Khaznys mo Nakloz. “Ask
her for triple, I say. She is desperate enough to pay. Ask for ten
times the price of every slave, yes.”
The tall Grazdan with the spiked beard spoke in the Common
Tongue, though not so well as the slave girl. “Your Grace,” he
growled, “Westeros is being wealthy, yes, but you are not being
queen now. Perhaps will never being queen. Even Unsullied may be
losing battles to savage steel knights of Seven Kingdoms. I am
reminding, the Good Masters of Astapor are not selling esh for
promisings. Are you having gold and trading goods su cient to be
paying for all these eunuchs you are wanting?”
“You know the answer to that better than I, Good Master,” Dany
replied. “Your men have gone through my ships and tallied every
bead of amber and jar of sa ron. How much do I have?”
“Su cient to be buying one of thousands,” the Good Master said,
with a contemptuous smile. “Yet you are paying double, you are

saying. Five centuries, then, is all you buy.”
“Your pretty crown might buy another century,” said the fat one
in Valyrian. “Your crown of the three dragons.”
Dany waited for his words to be translated. “My crown is not for
sale.” When Viserys sold their mother’s crown, the last joy had gone
from him, leaving only rage. “Nor will I enslave my people, nor sell
their goods and horses. But my ships you can have. The great cog
Balerion and the galleys Vhagar and Meraxes.” She had warned
Groleo and the other captains it might come to this, though they
had protested the necessity of it furiously. “Three good ships should
be worth more than a few paltry eunuchs.”
The fat Grazdan turned to the others. They conferred in low
voices once again. “Two of the thousands,” the one with the spiked
beard said when he turned back. “It is too much, but the Good
Masters are being generous and your need is being great.”
Two thousand would never serve for what she meant to do. I must
have them all. Dany knew what she must do now, though the taste of
it was so bitter that even the persimmon wine could not cleanse it
from her mouth. She had considered long and hard and found no
other way. It is my only choice. “Give me all,” she said, “and you
may have a dragon.”
There was the sound of indrawn breath from Jhiqui beside her.
Kraznys smiled at his fellows. “Did I not tell you? Anything, she
would give us.”
Whitebeard stared in shocked disbelief. His hand trembled where
it grasped the sta . “No.” He went to one knee before her. “Your
Grace, I beg you, win your throne with dragons, not slaves. You
must not do this thing—”
“You must not presume to instruct me. Ser Jorah, remove
Whitebeard from my presence.”
Mormont seized the old man roughly by an elbow, yanked him
back to his feet, and marched him out onto the terrace.
“Tell the Good Masters I regret this interruption,” said Dany to
the slave girl. “Tell them I await their answer.”
She knew the answer, though; she could see it in the glitter of
their eyes and the smiles they tried so hard to hide. Astapor had

thousands of eunuchs, and even more slave boys waiting to be cut,
but there were only three living dragons in all the great wide
world. And the Ghiscari lust for dragons. How could they not? Five
times had Old Ghis contended with Valyria when the world was
young, and ve times gone down to bleak defeat. For the Freehold
had dragons, and the Empire had none.
The oldest Grazdan stirred in his seat, and his pearls clacked
together softly. “A dragon of our choice,” he said in a thin, hard
voice. “The black one is largest and healthiest.”
“His name is Drogon.” She nodded.
“All your goods, save your crown and your queenly raiment,
which we will allow you to keep. The three ships. And Drogon.”
“Done,” she said, in the Common Tongue.
“Done,” the old Grazdan answered in his thick Valyrian.
The others echoed that old man of the pearl fringe. “Done,” the
slave girl translated, “and done, and done, eight times done.”
“The Unsullied will learn your savage tongue quick enough,”
added Kraznys mo Nakloz, when all the arrangements had been
made, “but until such time you will need a slave to speak to them.
Take this one as our gift to you, a token of a bargain well struck.”
“I shall,” said Dany.
The slave girl rendered his words to her, and hers to him. If she
had feelings about being given for a token, she took care not to let
them show.
Arstan Whitebeard held his tongue as well, when Dany swept by
him on the terrace. He followed her down the steps in silence, but
she could hear his hardwood sta tap tapping on the red bricks as
they went. She did not blame him for his fury. It was a wretched
thing she did. The Mother of Dragons has sold her strongest child. Even
the thought made her ill.
Yet down in the Plaza of Pride, standing on the hot red bricks
between the slavers’ pyramid and the barracks of the eunuchs, Dany
turned on the old man. “Whitebeard,” she said, “I want your
counsel, and you should never fear to speak your mind with
me … when we are alone. But never question me in front of
strangers. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” he said unhappily.
“I am not a child,” she told him. “I am a queen.”
“Yet even queens can err. The Astapori have cheated you, Your
Grace. A dragon is worth more than any army. Aegon proved that
three hundred years ago, upon the Field of Fire.”
“I know what Aegon proved. I mean to prove a few things of my
own.” Dany turned away from him, to the slave girl standing
meekly beside her litter. “Do you have a name, or must you draw a
new one every day from some barrel?”
“That is only for Unsullied,” the girl said. Then she realized the
question had been asked in High Valyrian. Her eyes went wide.
“Oh.”
“Your name is Oh?”
“No. Your Grace, forgive this one her outburst. Your slave’s name
is Missandei, but …”
“Missandei is no longer a slave. I free you, from this instant.
Come ride with me in the litter, I wish to talk.” Rakharo helped
them in, and Dany drew the curtains shut against the dust and heat.
“If you stay with me you will serve as one of my handmaids,” she
said as they set o . “I shall keep you by my side to speak for me as
you spoke for Kraznys. But you may leave my service whenever you
choose, if you have father or mother you would sooner return to.”
“This one will stay,” the girl said. “This one … I … there is no
place for me to go. This … I will serve you, gladly.”
“I can give you freedom, but not safety,” Dany warned. “I have a
world to cross and wars to ght. You may go hungry. You may
grow sick. You may be killed.”
“Valar morghulis,” said Missandei, in High Valyrian.
“All men must die,” Dany agreed, “but not for a long while, we
may pray.” She leaned back on the pillows and took the girl’s hand.
“Are these Unsullied truly fearless?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“You serve me now. Is it true they feel no pain?”
“The wine of courage kills such feelings. By the time they slay
their sucklings, they have been drinking it for years.”
“And they are obedient?”

“Obedience is all they know. If you told them not to breathe, they
would nd that easier than not to obey.”
Dany nodded. “And when I am done with them?”
“Your Grace?”
“When I have won my war and claimed the throne that was my
father’s, my knights will sheathe their swords and return to their
keeps, to their wives and children and mothers … to their lives. But
these eunuchs have no lives. What am I to do with eight thousand
eunuchs when there are no more battles to be fought?”
“The Unsullied make ne guards and excellent watchmen, Your
Grace,” said Missandei. “And it is never hard to nd a buyer for
such ne well-blooded troops.”
“Men are not bought and sold in Westeros, they tell me.”
“With all respect, Your Grace, Unsullied are not men.”
“If I did resell them, how would I know they could not be used
against me?” Dany asked pointedly. “Would they do that? Fight
against me, even do me harm?”
“If their master commanded. They do not question, Your Grace.
All the questions have been culled from them. They obey.” She
looked troubled. “When you are … when you are done with
them … Your Grace might command them to fall upon their
swords.”
“And even that, they would do?”
“Yes.” Missandei’s voice had grown soft. “Your Grace.”
Dany squeezed her hand. “You would sooner I did not ask it of
them, though. Why is that? Why do you care?”
“This one does not … I … Your Grace …”
“Tell me.”
The girl lowered her eyes. “Three of them were my brothers
once, Your Grace.”
Then I hope your brothers are as brave and clever as you. Dany
leaned back into her pillow, and let the litter bear her onward, back
to Balerion one last time to set her world in order. And back to
Drogon. Her mouth set grimly.
It was a long, dark, windy night that followed. Dany fed her
dragons as she always did, but found she had no appetite herself.

She cried awhile, alone in her cabin, then dried her tears long
enough for yet another argument with Groleo. “Magister Illyrio is
not here,” she nally had to tell him, “and if he was, he could not
sway me either. I need the Unsullied more than I need these ships,
and I will hear no more about it.”
The anger burned the grief and fear from her, for a few hours at
the least. Afterward she called her bloodriders to her cabin, with Ser
Jorah. They were the only ones she truly trusted.
She meant to sleep afterward, to be well rested for the morrow,
but an hour of restless tossing in the stu y con nes of the cabin
soon convinced her that was hopeless. Outside her door she found
Aggo tting a new string to his bow by the light of a swinging oil
lamp. Rakharo sat crosslegged on the deck beside him, sharpening
his arakh with a whetstone. Dany told them both to keep on with
what they were doing, and went up on deck for a taste of the cool
night air. The crew left her alone as they went about their business,
but Ser Jorah soon joined her by the rail. He is never far, Dany
thought. He knows my moods too well.
“Khaleesi. You ought to be asleep. Tomorrow will be hot and
hard, I promise you. You’ll need your strength.”
“Do you remember Eroeh?” she asked him.
“The Lhazareen girl?”
“They were raping her, but I stopped them and took her under
my protection. Only when my sun-and-stars was dead Mago took
her back, used her again, and killed her. Aggo said it was her fate.”
“I remember,” Ser Jorah said.
“I was alone for a long time, Jorah. All alone but for my brother.
I was such a small scared thing. Viserys should have protected me,
but instead he hurt me and scared me worse. He shouldn’t have
done that. He wasn’t just my brother, he was my king. Why do the
gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can’t
protect themselves?”
“Some kings make themselves. Robert did.”
“He was no true king,” Dany said scornfully. “He did no justice.
Justice … that’s what kings are for.”

Ser Jorah had no answer. He only smiled, and touched her hair,
so lightly. It was enough.
That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the
Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she
saw the Usurper’s rebel host across the river they were armored all
in ice, but she bathed them in dragon re and they melted away like
dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her
knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it
was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now
awakened.
She woke suddenly in the darkness of her cabin, still ush with
triumph. Balerion seemed to wake with her, and she heard the faint
creak of wood, water lapping against the hull, a football on the
deck above her head. And something else.
Someone was in the cabin with her.
“Irri? Jhiqui? Where are you?” Her handmaids did not respond. It
was too black to see, but she could hear them breathing. “Jorah, is
that you?”
“They sleep,” a woman said. “They all sleep.” The voice was very
close. “Even dragons must sleep.”
She is standing over me. “Who’s there?” Dany peered into the
darkness. She thought she could see a shadow, the faintest outline
of a shape. “What do you want to me?”
“Remember. To go north, you must journey south. To reach the
west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to
touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”
“Quaithe?” Dany sprung from the bed and threw open the door.
Pale yellow lantern light ooded the cabin, and Irri and Jhiqui sat
up sleepily. “Khaleesi?” murmured Jhiqui, rubbing her eyes. Viserion
woke and opened his jaws, and a pu of ame brightened even the
darkest corners. There was no sign of a woman in a red lacquer
mask. “Khaleesi, are you unwell?” asked Jhiqui.
“A dream.” Dany shook her head. “I dreamed a dream, no more.
Go back to sleep. All of us, go back to sleep.” Yet try as she might,
sleep would not come again.

If I look back I am lost, Dany told herself the next morning as she
entered Astapor through the harbor gates. She dared not remind
herself how small and insigni cant her following truly was, or she
would lose all courage. Today she rode her silver, clad in horsehair
pants and painted leather vest, a bronze medallion belt about her
waist and two more crossed between her breasts. Irri and Jhiqui had
braided her hair and hung it with a tiny silver bell whose chime
sang of the Undying of Qarth, burned in their Palace of Dust.
The red brick streets of Astapor were almost crowded this
morning. Slaves and servants lined the ways, while the slavers and
their women donned their tokars to look down from their stepped
pyramids. They are not so di erent from Qartheen after all, she
thought. They want a glimpse of dragons to tell their children of, and
their children’s children. It made her wonder how many of them
would ever have children.
Aggo went before her with his great Dothraki bow. Strong Belwas
walked to the right of her mare, the girl Missandei to her left. Ser
Jorah Mormont was behind in mail and surcoat, glowering at
anyone who came too near. Rakharo and Jhogo protected the litter.
Dany had commanded that the top be removed, so her three
dragons might be chained to the platform. Irri and Jhiqui rode with
them, to try and keep them calm. Yet Viserion’s tail lashed back and
forth, and smoke rose angry from his nostrils. Rhaegal could sense
something wrong as well. Thrice he tried to take wing, only to be
pulled down by the heavy chain in Jhiqui’s hand. Drogon coiled into
a ball, wings and tail tucked tight. Only his eyes remained to tell
that he was not asleep.
The rest of her people followed: Groleo and the other captains
and their crews, and the eighty-three Dothraki who remained to her
of the hundred thousand who had once ridden in Drogo’s khalasar.
She put the oldest and weakest on the inside of the column, with the
nursing women and those with child, and the little girls, and the
boys too young to braid their hair. The rest—her warriors, such as
they were—rode outside and moved their dismal herd along, the
hundred-odd gaunt horses that had survived both red waste and
black salt sea.

I ought to have a banner sewn, she thought as she led her tattered
band up along Astapor’s meandering river. She closed her eyes to
imagine how it would look: all owing black silk, and on it the red
three-headed dragon of Targaryen, breathing golden ames. A
banner such as Rhaegar might have borne. The river’s banks were
strangely tranquil. The Worm, the Astapori called the stream. It was
wide and slow and crooked, dotted with tiny wooded islands. She
glimpsed children playing on one of them, darting amongst elegant
marble statues. On another island two lovers kissed in the shade of
tall green trees, with no more shame than Dothraki at a wedding.
Without clothing, she could not tell if they were slave or free.
The Plaza of Pride with its great bronze harpy was too small to
hold all the Unsullied she had bought. Instead they had been
assembled in the Plaza of Punishment, fronting on Astapor’s main
gate, so they might be marched directly from the city once
Daenerys had taken them in hand. There were no bronze statues
here; only a wooden platform where rebellious slaves were racked,
and ayed, and hanged. “The Good Masters place them so they will
be the rst thing a new slave sees upon entering the city,”
Missandei told her as they came to the plaza.
At rst glimpse, Dany thought their skin was striped like the
zorses of the Jogos Nhai. Then she rode her silver nearer and saw
the raw red esh beneath the crawling black stripes. Flies. Flies and
maggots. The rebellious slaves had been peeled like a man might
peel an apple, in a long curling strip. One man had an arm black
with ies from ngers to elbow, and red and white beneath. Dany
reined in beneath him. “What did this one do?”
“He raised a hand against his owner.”
Her stomach roiling, Dany wheeled her silver about and trotted
toward the center of the plaza, and the army she had bought so
dear. Rank on rank on rank they stood, her stone halfmen with their
hearts of brick; eight thousand and six hundred in the spiked bronze
caps of fully trained Unsullied, and ve thousand odd behind them,
bareheaded, yet armed with spears and shortswords. The ones
farthest to the back were only boys, she saw, but they stood as
straight and still as all the rest.

Kraznys mo Nakloz and his fellows were all there to greet her.
Other well-born Astapori stood in knots behind them, sipping wine
from silver utes as slaves circulated among them with trays of
olives and cherries and gs. The elder Grazdan sat in a sedan chair
supported by four huge copper-skinned slaves. Half a dozen
mounted lancers rode along the edges of the plaza, keeping back the
crowds who had come to watch. The sun ashed blinding bright o
the polished copper disks sewn to their cloaks, but she could not
help but notice how nervous their horses seemed. They fear the
dragons. And well they might.
Kraznys had a slave help her from her saddle. His own hands
were full; one clutched his tokar, while the other held an ornate
whip. “Here they are.” He looked at Missandei. “Tell her they are
hers … if she can pay.”
“She can,” the girl said.
Ser Jorah barked a command, and the trade goods were brought
forward. Six bales of tiger skins, three hundred bolts of ne silk.
Jars of sa ron, jars of myrrh, jars of pepper and curry and
cardamom, an onyx mask, twelve jade monkeys, casks of ink in red
and black and green, a box of rare black amethysts, a box of pearls,
a cask of pitted olives stu ed with maggots, a dozen casks of
pickled cave sh, a great brass gong and a hammer to beat it with,
seventeen ivory eyes, and a huge chest full of books written in
tongues that Dany could not read. And more, and more, and more.
Her people stacked it all before the slavers.
While the payment was being made, Kraznys mo Nakloz favored
her with a few nal words on the handling of her troops. “They are
green as yet,” he said through Missandei. “Tell the whore of
Westeros she would be wise to blood them early. There are many
small cities between here and there, cities ripe for sacking.
Whatever plunder she takes will be hers alone. Unsullied have no
lust for gold or gems. And should she take captives, a few guards
will su ce to march them back to Astapor. We’ll buy the healthy
ones, and for a good price. And who knows? In ten years, some of
the boys she sends us may be Unsullied in their turn. Thus all shall
prosper.”

Finally there were no more trade goods to add to the pile. Her
Dothraki mounted their horses once more, and Dany said, “This was
all we could carry. The rest awaits you on the ships, a great
quantity of amber and wine and black rice. And you have the ships
themselves. So all that remains is …”
“… the dragon,” nished the Grazdan with the spiked beard, who
spoke the Common Tongue so thickly.
“And here he waits.” Ser Jorah and Belwas walked beside her to
the litter, where Drogon and his brothers lay basking in the sun.
Jhiqui unfastened one end of the chain, and handed it down to her.
When she gave a yank, the black dragon raised his head, hissing,
and unfolded wings of night and scarlet. Kraznys mo Nakloz smiled
broadly as their shadow fell across him.
Dany handed the slaver the end of Drogon’s chain. In return he
presented her with the whip. The handle was black dragonbone,
elaborately carved and inlaid with gold. Nine long thin leather
lashes trailed from it, each one tipped by a gilded claw. The gold
pommel was a woman’s head, with pointed ivory teeth. “The
harpy’s ngers,” Kraznys named the scourge.
Dany turned the whip in her hand. Such a light thing, to bear such
weight. “Is it done, then? Do they belong to me?”
“It is done,” he agreed, giving the chain a sharp pull to bring
Drogon down from the litter.
Dany mounted her silver. She could feel her heart thumping in
her chest. She felt desperately afraid. Was this what my brother would
have done? She wondered if Prince Rhaegar had been this anxious
when he saw the Usurper’s host formed up across the Trident with
all their banners oating on the wind.
She stood in her stirrups and raised the harpy’s ngers above her
head for all the Unsullied to see. “IT IS DONE!” she cried at the top
of her lungs. “YOU ARE MINE!” She gave the mare her heels and
galloped along the rst rank, holding the ngers high. “YOU ARE
THE DRAGON’S NOW! YOU’RE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR! IT IS
DONE! IT IS DONE!”
She glimpsed old Grazdan turn his grey head sharply. He hears me
speak Valyrian. The other slavers were not listening. They crowded

around Kraznys and the dragon, shouting advice. Though the
Astapori yanked and tugged, Drogon would not budge o the litter.
Smoke rose grey from his open jaws, and his long neck curled and
straightened as he snapped at the slaver’s face.
It is time to cross the Trident, Dany thought, as she wheeled and
rode her silver back. Her bloodriders moved in close around her.
“You are in di culty,” she observed.
“He will not come,” Kraznys said.
“There is a reason. A dragon is no slave.” And Dany swept the
lash down as hard as she could across the slaver’s face. Kraznys
screamed and staggered back, the blood running red down his
cheeks into his perfumed beard. The harpy’s ngers had torn his
features half to pieces with one slash, but she did not pause to
contemplate the ruin. “Drogon,” she sang out loudly, sweetly, all
her fear forgotten. “Dracarys.”
The black dragon spread his wings and roared.
A lance of swirling dark ame took Kraznys full in the face. His
eyes melted and ran down his cheeks, and the oil in his hair and
beard burst so ercely into re that for an instant the slaver wore a
burning crown twice as tall as his head. The sudden stench of
charred meat overwhelmed even his perfume, and his wail seemed
to drown all other sound.
Then the Plaza of Punishment blew apart into blood and chaos.
The Good Masters were shrieking, stumbling, shoving one another
aside and tripping over the fringes of their tokars in their haste.
Drogon ew almost lazily at Kraznys, black wings beating. As he
gave the slaver another taste of re, Irri and Jhiqui unchained
Viserion and Rhaegal, and suddenly there were three dragons in the
air. When Dany turned to look, a third of Astapor’s proud demonhorned warriors were ghting to stay atop their terri ed mounts,
and another third were eeing in a bright blaze of shiny copper.
One man kept his saddle long enough to draw a sword, but Jhogo’s
whip coiled about his neck and cut o his shout. Another lost a hand
to Rakharo’s arakh and rode o reeling and spurting blood. Aggo sat
calmly notching arrows to his bowstring and sending them at tokars.

Silver, gold, or plain, he cared nothing for the fringe. Strong Belwas
had his arakh out as well, and he spun it as he charged.
“Spears!” Dany heard one Astapori shout. It was Grazdan, old
Grazdan in his tokar heavy with pearls. “Unsullied! Defend us, stop
them, defend your masters! Spears! Swords!”
When Rakharo put an arrow through his mouth, the slaves
holding his sedan chair broke and ran, dumping him
unceremoniously on the ground. The old man crawled to the rst
rank of eunuchs, his blood pooling on the bricks. The Unsullied did
not so much as look down to watch him die. Rank on rank on rank,
they stood.
And did not move. The gods have heard my prayer.
“Unsullied!” Dany galloped before them, her silver-gold braid
ying behind her, her bell chiming with every stride. “Slay the
Good Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a tokar
or holds a whip, but harm no child under twelve, and strike the
chains o every slave you see.” She raised the harpy’s ngers in the
air … and then she ung the scourge aside. “Freedom!” she sang out.
“Dracarys! Dracarys!”
“Dracarys!” they shouted back, the sweetest word she’d ever
heard. “Dracarys! Dracarys!” And all around them slavers ran and
sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was lled with
spears and re.

SANSA

On the morning her new gown was to be ready, the serving girls

lled Sansa’s tub with steaming hot water and scrubbed her head to
toe until she glowed pink. Cersei’s own bedmaid trimmed her nails
and brushed and curled her auburn hair so it fell down her back in
soft ringlets. She brought a dozen of the queen’s favorite scents as
well. Sansa chose a sharp sweet fragrance with a hint of lemon in it
under the smell of owers. The maid dabbed some on her nger and
touched Sansa behind each ear, and under her chin, and then lightly
on her nipples.
Cersei herself arrived with the seamstress, and watched as they
dressed Sansa in her new clothes. The smallclothes were all silk, but
the gown itself was ivory samite and cloth-of-silver, and lined with
silvery satin. The points of the long dagged sleeves almost touched
the ground when she lowered her arms. And it was a woman’s
gown, not a little girl’s, there was no doubt of that. The bodice was
slashed in front almost to her belly, the deep vee covered over with
a panel of ornate Myrish lace in dove-grey. The skirts were long and
full, the waist so tight that Sansa had to hold her breath as they
laced her into it. They brought her new shoes as well, slippers of
soft grey doeskin that hugged her feet like lovers. “You are very
beautiful, my lady,” the seamstress said when she was dressed.
“I am, aren’t I?” Sansa giggled, and spun, her skirts swirling
around her. “Oh, I am.” She could not wait for Willas to see her like

this. He will love me, he will, he must … he will forget Winterfell when
he sees me, I’ll see that he does.
Queen Cersei studied her critically. “A few gems, I think. The
moonstones Jo rey gave her.”
“At once, Your Grace,” her maid replied.
When the moonstones hung from Sansa’s ears and about her neck,
the queen nodded. “Yes. The gods have been kind to you, Sansa.
You are a lovely girl. It seems almost obscene to squander such
sweet innocence on that gargoyle.”
“What gargoyle?” Sansa did not understand. Did she mean Willas?
How could she know? No one knew, but her and Margaery and the
Queen of Thorns … oh, and Dontos, but he didn’t count.
Cersei Lannister ignored the question. “The cloak,” she
commanded, and the women brought it out: a long cloak of white
velvet heavy with pearls. A erce direwolf was embroidered upon it
in silver thread. Sansa looked at it with sudden dread. “Your father’s
colors,” said Cersei, as they fastened it about her neck with a
slender silver chain.
A maiden’s cloak. Sansa’s hand went to her throat. She would have
torn the thing away if she had dared.
“You’re prettier with your mouth closed, Sansa,” Cersei told her.
“Come along now, the septon is waiting. And the wedding guests as
well.”
“No,” Sansa blurted. “No.”
“Yes. You are a ward of the crown. The king stands in your
father’s place, since your brother is an attainted traitor. That means
he has every right to dispose of your hand. You are to marry my
brother Tyrion.”
My claim, she thought, sickened. Dontos the Fool was not so
foolish after all; he had seen the truth of it. Sansa backed away from
the queen. “I won’t.” I’m to marry Willas, I’m to be the lady of
Highgarden, please …
“I understand your reluctance. Cry if you must. In your place, I
would likely rip my hair out. He’s a loathsome little imp, no doubt
of it, but marry him you shall.”
“You can’t make me.”

“Of course we can. You may come along quietly and say your
vows as be ts a lady, or you may struggle and scream and make a
spectacle for the stableboys to titter over, but you will end up
wedded and bedded all the same.” The queen opened the door. Ser
Meryn Trant and Ser Osmund Kettleblack were waiting without, in
the white scale armor of the Kingsguard. “Escort Lady Sansa to the
sept,” she told them. “Carry her if you must, but try not to tear the
gown, it was very costly.”
Sansa tried to run, but Cersei’s handmaid caught her before she’d
gone a yard. Ser Meryn Trant gave her a look that made her cringe,
but Kettleblack touched her almost gently and said, “Do as you’re
told, sweetling, it won’t be so bad. Wolves are supposed to be
brave, aren’t they?”
Brave. Sansa took a deep breath. I am a Stark, yes, I can be brave.
They were all looking at her, the way they had looked at her that
day in the yard when Ser Boros Blount had torn her clothes o . It
had been the Imp who saved her from a beating that day, the same
man who was waiting for her now. He is not so bad as the rest of
them, she told herself. “I’ll go.”
Cersei smiled. “I knew you would.”
Afterward, she could not remember leaving the room or
descending the steps or crossing the yard. It seemed to take all her
attention just to put one foot down in front of the other. Ser Meryn
and Ser Osmund walked beside her, in cloaks as pale as her own,
lacking only the pearls and the direwolf that had been her father’s.
Jo rey himself was waiting for her on the steps of the castle sept.
The king was resplendent in crimson and gold, his crown on his
head. “I’m your father today,” he announced.
“You’re not,” she ared. “You’ll never be.”
His face darkened. “I am. I’m your father, and I can marry you to
whoever I like. To anyone. You’ll marry the pig boy if I say so, and
bed down with him in the sty.” His green eyes glittered with
amusement. “Or maybe I should give you to Ilyn Payne, would you
like him better?”
Her heart lurched. “Please, Your Grace,” she begged. “If you ever
loved me even a little bit, don’t make me marry your—”

“—uncle?” Tyrion Lannister stepped through the doors of the
sept. “Your Grace,” he said to Jo rey. “Grant me a moment alone
with Lady Sansa, if you would be so kind?”
The king was about to refuse, but his mother gave him a sharp
look. They drew o a few feet.
Tyrion wore a doublet of black velvet covered with golden
scrollwork, thigh-high boots that added three inches to his height, a
chain of rubies and lions’ heads. But the gash across his face was
raw and red, and his nose was a hideous scab. “You are very
beautiful, Sansa,” he told her.
“It is good of you to say so, my lord.” She did not know what else
to say. Should I tell him he is handsome? He’ll think me a fool or a liar.
She lowered her gaze and held her tongue.
“My lady, this is no way to bring you to your wedding. I am sorry
for that. And for making this so sudden, and so secret. My lord
father felt it necessary, for reasons of state. Else I would have come
to you sooner, as I wished.” He waddled closer. “You did not ask for
this marriage, I know. No more than I did. If I had refused you,
however, they would have wed you to my cousin Lancel. Perhaps
you would prefer that. He is nearer your age, and fairer to look
upon. If that is your wish, say so, and I will end this farce.”
I don’t want any Lannister, she wanted to say. I want Willas, I want
Highgarden and the puppies and the barge, and sons named Eddard and
Bran and Rickon. But then she remembered what Dontos had told
her in the godswood. Tyrell or Lannister, it makes no matter, it’s not
me they want, only my claim. “You are kind, my lord,” she said,
defeated. “I am a ward of the throne and my duty is to marry as the
king commands.”
He studied her with his mismatched eyes. “I know I am not the
sort of husband young girls dream of, Sansa,” he said softly, “but
neither am I Jo rey.”
“No,” she said. “You were kind to me. I remember.”
Tyrion o ered her a thick, blunt- ngered hand. “Come, then. Let
us do our duty.”
So she put her hand in his, and he led her to the marriage altar,
where the septon waited between the Mother and the Father to join

their lives together. She saw Dontos in his fool’s motley, looking at
her with big round eyes. Ser Balon Swann and Ser Boros Blount
were there in Kingsguard white, but not Ser Loras. None of the
Tyrells are here, she realized suddenly. But there were other
witnesses aplenty; the eunuch Varys, Ser Addam Marbrand, Lord
Philip Foote, Ser Bronn, Jalabhar Xho, a dozen others. Lord Gyles
was coughing, Lady Ermesande was at the breast, and Lady Tanda’s
pregnant daughter was sobbing for no apparent reason. Let her sob,
Sansa thought. Perhaps I shall do the same before this day is done.
The ceremony passed as in a dream. Sansa did all that was
required of her. There were prayers and vows and singing, and tall
candles burning, a hundred dancing lights that the tears in her eyes
transformed into a thousand. Thankfully no one seemed to notice
that she was crying as she stood there, wrapped in her father’s
colors; or if they did, they pretended not to. In what seemed no
time at all, they came to the changing of the cloaks.
As father of the realm, Jo rey took the place of Lord Eddard
Stark. Sansa stood sti as a lance as his hands came over her
shoulders to fumble with the clasp of her cloak. One of them
brushed her breast and lingered to give it a little squeeze. Then the
clasp opened, and Jo swept her maiden’s cloak away with a kingly
ourish and a grin.
His uncle’s part went less well. The bride’s cloak he held was
huge and heavy, crimson velvet richly worked with lions and
bordered with gold satin and rubies. No one had thought to bring a
stool, however, and Tyrion stood a foot and a half shorter than his
bride. As he moved behind her, Sansa felt a sharp tug on her skirt.
He wants me to kneel, she realized, blushing. She was morti ed. It
was not supposed to be this way. She had dreamed of her wedding a
thousand times, and always she had pictured how her betrothed
would stand behind her tall and strong, sweep the cloak of his
protection over her shoulders, and tenderly kiss her cheek as he
leaned forward to fasten the clasp.
She felt another tug at her skirt, more insistent. I won’t. Why
should I spare his feelings, when no one cares about mine?

The dwarf tugged at her a third time. Stubbornly she pressed her
lips together and pretended not to notice. Someone behind them
tittered. The queen, she thought, but it didn’t matter. They were all
laughing by then, Jo rey the loudest. “Dontos, down on your hands
and knees,” the king commanded. “My uncle needs a boost to climb
his bride.”
And so it was that her lord husband cloaked her in the colors of
House Lannister whilst standing on the back of a fool.
When Sansa turned, the little man was gazing up at her, his
mouth tight, his face as red as her cloak. Suddenly she was ashamed
of her stubbornness. She smoothed her skirts and knelt in front of
him, so their heads were on the same level. “With this kiss I pledge
my love, and take you for my lord and husband.”
“With this kiss I pledge my love,” the dwarf replied hoarsely,
“and take you for my lady and wife.” He leaned forward, and their
lips touched brie y.
He is so ugly, Sansa thought when his face was close to hers. He is
even uglier than the Hound.
The septon raised his crystal high, so the rainbow light fell down
upon them. “Here in the sight of gods and men,” he said, “I do
solemnly proclaim Tyrion of House Lannister and Sansa of House
Stark to be man and wife, one esh, one heart, one soul, now and
forever, and cursed be the one who comes between them.”
She had to bite her lip to keep from sobbing.
The wedding feast was held in the Small Hall. There were perhaps
fty guests; Lannister retainers and allies for the most part, joining
those who had been at the wedding. And here Sansa found the
Tyrells. Margaery gave her such a sad look, and when the Queen of
Thorns tottered in between Left and Right, she never looked at her
at all. Elinor, Alla, and Megga seemed determined not to know her.
My friends, Sansa thought bitterly.
Her husband drank heavily and ate but little. He listened
whenever someone rose to make a toast and sometimes nodded a
curt acknowledgment, but otherwise his face might have been made
of stone. The feast seemed to go on forever, though Sansa tasted
none of the food. She wanted it to be done, and yet she dreaded its

end. For after the feast would come the bedding. The men would
carry her up to her wedding bed, undressing her on the way and
making rude jokes about the fate that awaited her between the
sheets, while the women did Tyrion the same honors. Only after
they had been bundled naked into bed would they be left alone, and
even then the guests would stand outside the bridal chamber,
shouting ribald suggestions through the door. The bedding had
seemed wonderfully wicked and exciting when Sansa was a girl, but
now that the moment was upon her she felt only dread. She did not
think she could bear for them to rip o her clothes, and she was
certain she would burst into tears at the rst randy jape.
When the musicians began to play, she timidly laid her hand on
Tyrion’s and said, “My lord, should we lead the dance?”
His mouth twisted. “I think we have already given them su cent
amusement for one day, don’t you?”
“As you say, my lord.” She pulled her hand back.
Jo rey and Margaery led in their place. How can a monster dance
so beautifully? Sansa wondered. She had often daydreamed of how
she would dance at her wedding, with every eye upon her and her
handsome lord. In her dreams they had all been smiling. Not even
my husband is smiling.
Other guests soon joined the king and his betrothed on the oor.
Elinor danced with her young squire, and Megga with Prince
Tommen. Lady Merryweather, the Myrish beauty with the black
hair and the big dark eyes, spun so provocatively that every man in
the hall was soon watching her. Lord and Lady Tyrell moved more
sedately. Ser Kevan Lannister begged the honor of Lady Janna
Fossoway, Lord Tyrell’s sister. Merry Crane took the oor with the
exile prince Jalabhar Xho, gorgeous in his feathered nery. Cersei
Lannister partnered rst Lord Redwyne, then Lord Rowan, and
nally her own father, who danced with smooth unsmiling grace.
Sansa sat with her hands in her lap, watching how the queen
moved and laughed and tossed her blonde curls. She charms them all,
she thought dully. How I hate her. She looked away, to where Moon
Boy danced with Dontos.

“Lady Sansa.” Ser Garlan Tyrell stood beside the dais. “Would you
honor me? If your lord consents?”
The Imp’s mismatched eyes narrowed. “My lady can dance with
whomever she pleases.”
Perhaps she ought to have remained beside her husband, but she
wanted to dance so badly … and Ser Garlan was brother to
Margaery, to Willas, to her Knight of Flowers. “I see why they
name you Garlan the Gallant, ser,” she said, as she took his hand.
“My lady is gracious to say so. My brother Willas gave me that
name, as it happens. To protect me.”
“To protect you?” She gave him a puzzled look.
Ser Garlan laughed. “I was a plump little boy, I fear, and we do
have an uncle called Garth the Gross. So Willas struck rst, though
not before threatening me with Garlan the Greensick, Garlan the
Galling, and Garlan the Gargoyle.”
It was so sweet and silly that Sansa had to laugh, despite
everything. Afterward she was absurdly grateful. Somehow the
laughter made her hopeful again, if only for a little while. Smiling,
she let the music take her, losing herself in the steps, in the sound
of ute and pipes and harp, in the rhythm of the drum … and from
time to time in Ser Garlan’s arms, when the dance brought them
together. “My lady wife is most concerned for you,” he said quietly,
one such time.
“Lady Leonette is too sweet. Tell her I am well.”
“A bride at her wedding should be more than well.” His voice was
not unkind. “You seemed close to tears.”
“Tears of joy, ser.”
“Your eyes give the lie to your tongue.” Ser Garlan turned her,
drew her close to his side. “My lady, I have seen how you look at
my brother. Loras is valiant and handsome, and we all love him
dearly … but your Imp will make a better husband. He is a bigger
man than he seems, I think.”
The music spun them apart before Sansa could think of a reply. It
was Mace Tyrell opposite her, red-faced and sweaty, and then Lord
Merryweather, and then Prince Tommen. “I want to be married

too,” said the plump little princeling, who was all of nine. “I’m
taller than my uncle!”
“I know you are,” said Sansa, before the partners changed again.
Ser Kevan told her she was beautiful, Jalabhar Xho said something
she did not understand in the Summer Tongue, and Lord Redwyne
wished her many fat children and long years of joy. And then the
dance brought her face-to-face with Jo rey.
Sansa sti ened as his hand touched hers, but the king tightened
his grip and drew her closer. “You shouldn’t look so sad. My uncle
is an ugly little thing, but you’ll still have me.”
“You’re to marry Margaery!”
“A king can have other women. Whores. My father did. One of
the Aegons did too. The third one, or the fourth. He had lots of
whores and lots of bastards.” As they whirled to the music, Jo
gave her a moist kiss. “My uncle will bring you to my bed
whenever I command it.”
Sansa shook her head. “He won’t.”
“He will, or I’ll have his head. That King Aegon, he had any
woman he wanted, whether they were married or no.”
Thankfully, it was time to change again. Her legs had turned to
wood, though, and Lord Rowan, Ser Tallad, and Elinor’s squire all
must have thought her a very clumsy dancer. And then she was back
with Ser Garlan once more, and soon, blessedly, the dance was
over.
Her relief was short-lived. No sooner had the music died than she
heard Jo rey say, “It’s time to bed them! Let’s get the clothes o
her, and have a look at what the she-wolf’s got to give my uncle!”
Other men took up the cry, loudly.
Her dwarf husband lifted his eyes slowly from his wine cup. “I’ll
have no bedding.”
Jo rey seized Sansa’s arm. “You will if I command it.”
The Imp slammed his dagger down in the table, where it stood
quivering. “Then you’ll service your own bride with a wooden
prick. I’ll geld you, I swear it.”
A shocked silence fell. Sansa pulled away from Jo rey, but he had
a grip on her, and her sleeve ripped. No one even seemed to hear.

Queen Cersei turned to her father. “Did you hear him?”
Lord Tywin rose from his seat. “I believe we can dispense with
the bedding. Tyrion, I am certain you did not mean to threaten the
king’s royal person.”
Sansa saw a spasm of rage pass across her husband’s face. “I
misspoke,” he said. “It was a bad jape, sire.”
“You threatened to geld me!” Jo rey said shrilly.
“I did, Your Grace,” said Tyrion, “but only because I envied your
royal manhood. Mine own is so small and stunted.” His face twisted
into a leer. “And if you take my tongue, you will leave me no way
at all to pleasure this sweet wife you gave me.”
Laughter burst from the lips of Ser Osmund Kettleblack. Someone
else sniggered. But Jo did not laugh, nor Lord Tywin. “Your
Grace,” he said, “my son is drunk, you can see that.”
“I am,” the Imp confessed, “but not so drunk that I cannot attend
to my own bedding.” He hopped down from the dais and grabbed
Sansa roughly. “Come, wife, time to smash your portcullis. I want
to play come-into-the-castle.”
Red-faced, Sansa went with him from the Small Hall. What choice
do I have? Tyrion waddled when he walked, especially when he
walked as quickly as he did now. The gods were merciful, and
neither Jo rey nor any of the others moved to follow.
For their wedding night, they had been granted the use of an airy
bedchamber high in the Tower of the Hand. Tyrion kicked the door
shut behind them. “There is a agon of good Arbor gold on the
sideboard, Sansa. Will you be so kind as to pour me a cup?”
“Is that wise, my lord?”
“Nothing was ever wiser. I am not truly drunk, you see. But I
mean to be.”
Sansa lled a goblet for each of them. It will be easier if I am drunk
as well. She sat on the edge of the great curtained bed and drained
half her cup in three long swallows. No doubt it was very ne wine,
but she was too nervous to taste it. It made her head swim. “Would
you have me undress, my lord?”
“Tyrion.” He cocked his head. “My name is Tyrion, Sansa.”

“Tyrion. My lord. Should I take o my gown, or do you want to
undress me?” She took another swallow of wine.
The Imp turned away from her. “The rst time I wed, there was
us and a drunken septon, and some pigs to bear witness. We ate one
of our witnesses at our wedding feast. Tysha fed me crackling and I
licked the grease o her ngers, and we were laughing when we
fell into bed.”
“You were wed before? I … I had forgotten.”
“You did not forget. You never knew.”
“Who was she, my lord?” Sansa was curious despite herself.
“Lady Tysha.” His mouth twisted. “Of House Silver st. Their
arms have one gold coin and a hundred silver, upon a bloody sheet.
Ours was a very short marriage … as be ts a very short man, I
suppose.”
Sansa stared down at her hands and said nothing.
“How old are you, Sansa?” asked Tyrion, after a moment.
“Thirteen,” she said, “when the moon turns.”
“Gods have mercy.” The dwarf took another swallow of wine.
“Well, talk won’t make you older. Shall we get on with this, my
lady? If it please you?”
“It will please me to please my lord husband.”
That seemed to anger him. “You hide behind courtesy as if it
were a castle wall.”
“Courtesy is a lady’s armor,” Sansa said. Her septa had always
told her that.
“I am your husband. You can take o your armor now.”
“And my clothing?”
“That too.” He waved his wine cup at her. “My lord father has
commanded me to consummate this marriage.”
Her hands trembled as she began fumbling at her clothes. She had
ten thumbs instead of ngers, and all of them were broken. Yet
somehow she managed the laces and buttons, and her cloak and
gown and girdle and undersilk slid to the oor, until nally she was
stepping out of her smallclothes. Gooseprickles covered her arms
and legs. She kept her eyes on the oor, too shy to look at him, but
when she was done she glanced up and found him staring. There

was hunger in his green eye, it seemed to her, and fury in the black.
Sansa did not know which scared her more.
“You’re a child,” he said.
She covered her breasts with her hands. “I’ve owered.”
“A child,” he repeated, “but I want you. Does that frighten you,
Sansa?”
“Yes.”
“Me as well. I know I am ugly—”
“No, my—”
He pushed himself to his feet. “Don’t lie, Sansa. I am malformed,
scarred, and small, but …” she could see him groping “… abed,
when the candles are blown out, I am made no worse than other
men. In the dark, I am the Knight of Flowers.” He took a draught of
wine. “I am generous. Loyal to those who are loyal to me. I’ve
proven I’m no craven. And I am cleverer than most, surely wits
count for something. I can even be kind. Kindness is not a habit
with us Lannisters, I fear, but I know I have some somewhere. I
could be … I could be good to you.”
He is as frightened as I am, Sansa realized. Perhaps that should
have made her feel more kindly toward him, but it did not. All she
felt was pity, and pity was death to desire. He was looking at her,
waiting for her to say something, but all her words had withered.
She could only stand there trembling.
When he nally realized that she had no answer for him, Tyrion
Lannister drained the last of his wine. “I understand,” he said
bitterly. “Get in the bed, Sansa. We need to do our duty.”
She climbed onto the featherbed, conscious of his stare. A scented
beeswax candle burned on the bedside table and rose petals had
been strewn between the sheets. She had started to pull up a
blanket to cover herself when she heard him say, “No.”
The cold made her shiver, but she obeyed. Her eyes closed, and
she waited. After a moment she heard the sound of her husband
pulling o his boots, and the rustle of clothing as he undressed
himself. When he hopped up on the bed and put his hand on her
breast, Sansa could not help but shudder. She lay with her eyes
closed, every muscle tense, dreading what might come next. Would

he touch her again? Kiss her? Should she open her legs for him
now? She did not know what was expected of her.
“Sansa.” The hand was gone. “Open your eyes.”
She had promised to obey; she opened her eyes. He was sitting by
her feet, naked. Where his legs joined, his man’s sta poked up sti
and hard from a thicket of coarse yellow hair, but it was the only
thing about him that was straight.
“My lady,” Tyrion said, “you are lovely, make no mistake,
but … I cannot do this. My father be damned. We will wait. The
turn of a moon, a year, a season, however long it takes. Until you
have come to know me better, and perhaps to trust me a little.” His
smile might have been meant to be reassuring, but without a nose it
only made him look more grotesque and sinister.
Look at him, Sansa told herself, look at your husband, at all of him,
Septa Mordane said all men are beautiful, nd his beauty, try. She
stared at the stunted legs, the swollen brutish brow, the green eye
and the black one, the raw stump of his nose and crooked pink scar,
the coarse tangle of black and gold hair that passed for his beard.
Even his manhood was ugly, thick and veined, with a bulbous
purple head. This is not right, this is not fair, how have I sinned that the
gods would do this to me, how?
“On my honor as a Lannister,” the Imp said, “I will not touch you
until you want me to.”
It took all the courage that was in her to look in those
mismatched eyes and say, “And if I never want you to, my lord?”
His mouth jerked as if she had slapped him. “Never?”
Her neck was so tight she could scarcely nod.
“Why,” he said, “that is why the gods made whores for imps like
me.” He closed his short blunt ngers into a st, and climbed down
o the bed.

ARYA

Stoney Sept was the biggest town Arya had seen since King’s

Landing, and Harwin said her father had won a famous battle here.
“The Mad King’s men had been hunting Robert, trying to catch
him before he could rejoin your father,” he told her as they rode
toward the gate. “He was wounded, being tended by some friends,
when Lord Connington the Hand took the town with a mighty force
and started searching house by house. Before they could nd him,
though, Lord Eddard and your grandfather came down on the town
and stormed the walls. Lord Connington fought back erce. They
battled in the streets and alleys, even on the rooftops, and all the
septons rang their bells so the smallfolk would know to lock their
doors. Robert came out of hiding to join the ght when the bells
began to ring. He slew six men that day, they say. One was Myles
Mooton, a famous knight who’d been Prince Rhaegar’s squire. He
would have slain the Hand too, but the battle never brought them
together. Connington wounded your grandfather Tully sore, though,
and killed Ser Denys Arryn, the darling of the Vale. But when he
saw the day was lost, he ew o as fast as the gri ns on his shield.
The Battle of the Bells, they called it after. Robert always said your
father won it, not him.”
More recent battles had been fought here as well, Arya thought
from the look of the place. The town gates were made of raw new
wood; outside the walls a pile of charred planks remained to tell
what had happened to the old ones.

Stoney Sept was closed up tight, but when the captain of the gate
saw who they were, he opened a sally port for them. “How you
xed for food?” Tom asked as they entered.
“Not so bad as we were. The Huntsman brought in a ock o’
sheep, and there’s been some trading across the Blackwater. The
harvest wasn’t burned south o’ the river. Course, there’s plenty
want to take what we got. Wolves one day, Mummers the next.
Them that’s not looking for food are looking for plunder, or women
to rape, and them that’s not out for gold or wenches are looking for
the bloody Kingslayer. Talk is, he slipped right through Lord
Edmure’s ngers.”
“Lord Edmure?” Lem frowned. “Is Lord Hoster dead, then?”
“Dead or dying. Think Lannister might be making for the
Blackwater? It’s the quickest way to King’s Landing, the Huntsman
swears.” The captain did not wait for an answer. “He took his dogs
out for a sni round. If Ser Jaime’s hereabouts, they’ll nd him. I’ve
seen them dogs rip bears apart. Think they’ll like the taste of lion
blood?”
“A chewed-up corpse’s no good to no one,” said Lem. “The
Huntsman bloody well knows that, too.”
“When the westermen came through they raped the Huntsman’s
wife and sister, put his crops to the torch, ate half his sheep, and
killed the other half for spite. Killed six dogs too, and threw the
carcasses down his well. A chewed-up corpse would be plenty good
enough for him, I’d say. Me as well.”
“He’d best not,” said Lem. “That’s all I got to say. He’d best not,
and you’re a bloody fool.”
Arya rode between Harwin and Anguy as the outlaws moved
down the streets where her father once had fought. She could see
the sept on its hill, and below it a stout strong holdfast of grey
stone that looked much too small for such a big town. But every
third house they passed was a blackened shell, and she saw no
people. “Are all the townfolk dead?”
“Only shy.” Anguy pointed out two bowmen on a roof, and some
boys with sooty faces crouched in the rubble of an alehouse. Farther
on, a baker threw open a shuttered window and shouted down to

Lem. The sound of his voice brought more people out of hiding, and
Stoney Sept slowly seemed to come to life around them.
In the market square at the town’s heart stood a fountain in the
shape of a leaping trout, spouting water into a shallow pool.
Women were lling pails and agons there. A few feet away, a
dozen iron cages hung from creaking wooden posts. Crow cages,
Arya knew. The crows were mostly outside the cages, splashing in
the water or perched atop the bars; inside were men. Lem reined up
scowling. “What’s this, now?”
“Justice,” answered a woman at the fountain.
“What, did you run short o’ hempen rope?”
“Was this done at Ser Wilbert’s decree?” asked Tom.
A man laughed bitterly. “The lions killed Ser Wilbert a year ago.
His sons are all o with the Young Wolf, getting fat in the west.
You think they give a damn for the likes of us? It was the Mad
Huntsman caught these wolves.”
Wolves. Arya went cold. Robb’s men, and my father’s. She felt
drawn toward the cages. The bars allowed so little room that
prisoners could neither sit nor turn; they stood naked, exposed to
sun and wind and rain. The rst three cages held dead men. Carrion
crows had eaten out their eyes, yet the empty sockets seemed to
follow her. The fourth man in the row stirred as she passed. Around
his mouth his ragged beard was thick with blood and ies. They
exploded when he spoke, buzzing around his head. “Water.” The
word was a croak. “Please … water …”
The man in the next cage opened his eyes at the sound. “Here,”
he said. “Here, me.” An old man, he was; his beard was grey and his
scalp was bald and mottled brown with age.
There was another dead man beyond the old one, a big redbearded man with a rotting grey bandage covering his left ear and
part of his temple. But the worst thing was between his legs, where
nothing remained but a crusted brown hole crawling with maggots.
Farther down was a fat man. The crow cage was so cruelly narrow
it was hard to see how they’d ever gotten him inside. The iron dug
painfully into his belly, squeezing bulges out between the bars.
Long days baking in the sun had burned him a painful red from

head to heel. When he shifted his weight, his cage creaked and
swayed, and Arya could see pale white stripes where the bars had
shielded his esh from the sun.
“Whose men were you?” she asked them.
At the sound of her voice, the fat man opened his eyes. The skin
around them was so red they looked like boiled eggs oating in a
dish of blood. “Water … a drink …”
“Whose?” she said again.
“Pay them no mind, boy,” the townsman told her. “They’re none
o’ your concern. Ride on by.”
“What did they do?” she asked him.
“They put eight people to the sword at Tumbler’s Falls,” he said.
“They wanted the Kingslayer, but he wasn’t there so they did some
rape and murder.” He jerked a thumb toward the corpse with
maggots where his manhood ought to be. “That one there did the
raping. Now move along.”
“A swallow,” the fat one called down. “Ha’ mercy, boy, a
swallow.” The old one slid an arm up to grasp the bars. The motion
made his cage swing violently. “Water,” gasped the one with the
ies in his beard.
She looked at their lthy hair and scraggly beards and reddened
eyes, at their dry, cracked, bleeding lips. Wolves, she thought again.
Like me. Was this her pack? How could they be Robb’s men? She
wanted to hit them. She wanted to hurt them. She wanted to cry.
They all seemed to be looking at her, the living and the dead alike.
The old man had squeezed three ngers out between the bars.
“Water,” he said, “water.”
Arya swung down from her horse. They can’t hurt me, they’re
dying. She took her cup from her bedroll and went to the fountain.
“What do you think you’re doing, boy?” the townsman snapped.
“They’re no concern o’ yours.” She raised the cup to the sh’s
mouth. The water splashed across her ngers and down her sleeve,
but Arya did not move until the cup was brimming over. When she
turned back toward the cages, the townsman moved to stop her.
“You get away from them, boy—”
“She’s a girl,” said Harwin. “Leave her be.”

“Aye,” said Lem. “Lord Beric don’t hold with caging men to die of
thirst. Why don’t you hang them decent?”
“There was nothing decent ’bout them things they did at
Tumbler’s Falls,” the townsman growled right back at him.
The bars were too narrow to pass a cup through, but Harwin and
Gendry o ered her a leg up. She planted a foot in Harwin’s cupped
hands, vaulted onto Gendry’s shoulders, and grabbed the bars on
top of the cage. The fat man turned his face up and pressed his
cheek to the iron, and Arya poured the water over him. He sucked
at it eagerly and let it run down over his head and cheeks and
hands, and then he licked the dampness o the bars. He would have
licked Arya’s ngers if she hadn’t snatched them back. By the time
she served the other two the same, a crowd had gathered to watch
her. “The Mad Huntsman will hear of this,” a man threatened. “He
won’t like it. No, he won’t.”
“He’ll like this even less, then.” Anguy strung his longbow, slid an
arrow from his quiver, nocked, drew, loosed. The fat man
shuddered as the shaft drove up between his chins, but the cage
would not let him fall. Two more arrows ended the other two
northmen. The only sound in the market square was the splash of
falling water and the buzzing of ies.
Valar morghulis, Arya thought.
On the east side of the market square stood a modest inn with
whitewashed walls and broken windows. Half its roof had burnt o
recently, but the hole had been patched over. Above the door hung
a wooden shingle painted as a peach, with a big bite taken out of it.
They dismounted at the stables sitting catty-corner, and Greenbeard
bellowed for grooms.
The buxom red-haired innkeep howled with pleasure at the sight
of them, then promptly set to tweaking them. “Greenbeard, is it? Or
Greybeard? Mother take mercy, when did you get so old? Lem, is
that you? Still wearing the same ratty cloak, are you? I know why
you never wash it, I do. You’re afraid all the piss will wash out and
we’ll see you’re really a knight o’ the Kingsguard! And Tom o’
Sevens, you randy old goat! You come to see that son o’ yours?

Well, you’re too late, he’s o riding with that bloody Huntsman.
And don’t tell me he’s not yours!”
“He hasn’t got my voice,” Tom protested weakly.
“He’s got your nose, though. Aye, and t’other parts as well, to
hear the girls talk.” She spied Gendry then, and pinched him on the
cheek. “Look at this ne young ox. Wait till Alyce sees those arms.
Oh, and he blushes like a maid, too. Well, Alyce will x that for
you, boy, see if she don’t.”
Arya had never seen Gendry turn so red. “Tansy, you leave the
Bull alone, he’s a good lad,” said Tom Sevenstrings. “All we need
from you is safe beds for a night.”
“Speak for yourself, singer.” Anguy slid his arm around a
strapping young serving girl as freckly as he was.
“Beds we got,” said red-haired Tansy. “There’s never been no lack
o’ beds at the Peach. But you’ll all climb in a tub rst. Last time you
lot stayed under my roof you left your eas behind.” She poked
Greenbeard in the chest. “And yours was green, too. You want
food?”
“If you can spare it, we won’t say no,” Tom conceded.
“Now when did you ever say no to anything, Tom?” the woman
hooted. “I’ll roast some mutton for your friends, and an old dry rat
for you. It’s more than you deserve, but if you gargle me a song or
three, might be I’ll weaken. I always pity the a icted. Come on,
come on. Cass, Lanna, put some kettles on. Jyzene, help me get the
clothes o them, we’ll need to boil those too.”
She made good on all her threats. Arya tried to tell them that
she’d been bathed twice at Acorn Hall, not a fortnight past, but the
red-haired woman was having none of it. Two serving wenches
carried her up the stairs bodily, arguing about whether she was a
girl or a boy. The one called Helly won, so the other had to fetch
the hot water and scrub Arya’s back with a sti bristly brush that
almost took her skin o . Then they stole all the clothes that Lady
Smallwood had given her and dressed her up like one of Sansa’s
dolls in linen and lace. But at least when they were done she got to
go down and eat.

As she sat in the common room in her stupid girl clothes, Arya
remembered what Syrio Forel had told her, the trick of looking and
seeing what was there. When she looked, she saw more serving
wenches than any inn could want, and most of them young and
comely. And come evenfall, lots of men started coming and going at
the Peach. They did not linger long in the common room, not even
when Tom took out his woodharp and began to sing “Six Maids in a
Pool.” The wooden steps were old and steep, and creaked
something erce whenever one of the men took a girl upstairs. “I
bet this is a brothel,” she whispered to Gendry.
“You don’t even know what a brothel is.”
“I do so,” she insisted. “It’s like an inn, with girls.”
He was turning red again. “What are you doing here, then?” he
demanded. “A brothel’s no t place for no bloody highborn lady,
everybody knows that.”
One of the girls sat down on the bench beside him. “Who’s a
highborn lady? The little skinny one?” She looked at Arya and
laughed. “I’m a king’s daughter myself.”
Arya knew she was being mocked. “You are not.”
“Well, I might be.” When the girl shrugged, her gown slipped o
one shoulder. “They say King Robert fucked my mother when he
hid here, back before the battle. Not that he didn’t have all the
other girls too, but Leslyn says he liked my ma the best.”
The girl did have hair like the old king’s, Arya thought; a great
thick mop of it, as black as coal. That doesn’t mean anything, though.
Gendry has the same kind of hair too. Lots of people have black hair.
“I’m named Bella,” the girl told Gendry. “For the battle. I bet I
could ring your bell, too. You want to?”
“No,” he said gru y.
“I bet you do.” She ran a hand along his arm. “I don’t cost nothing
to friends of Thoros and the lightning lord.”
“No, I said.” Gendry rose abruptly and stalked away from the
table out into the night.
Bella turned to Arya. “Don’t he like girls?”
Arya shrugged. “He’s just stupid. He likes to polish helmets and
beat on swords with hammers.”

“Oh.” Bella tugged her gown back over her shoulder and went to
talk with Jack-Be-Lucky. Before long she was sitting in his lap,
giggling and drinking wine from his cup. Greenbeard had two girls,
one on each knee. Anguy had vanished with his freckle-faced
wench, and Lem was gone as well. Tom Sevenstrings sat by the re,
singing. “The Maids that Bloom in Spring.” Arya sipped at the cup
of watered wine the red-haired woman had allowed her, listening.
Across the square the dead men were rotting in their crow cages,
but inside the Peach everyone was jolly. Except it seemed to her
that some of them were laughing too hard, somehow.
It would have been a good time to sneak away and steal a horse,
but Arya couldn’t see how that would help her. She could only ride
as far as the city gates. That captain would never let me pass, and if he
did, Harwin would come after me, or that Huntsman with his dogs. She
wished she had her map, so she could see how far Stoney Sept was
from Riverrun.
By the time her cup was empty, Arya was yawning. Gendry
hadn’t come back. Tom Sevenstrings was singing “Two Hearts that
Beat as One,” and kissing a di erent girl at the end of every verse.
In the corner by the window Lem and Harwin sat talking to redhaired Tansy in low voices. “… spent the night in Jaime’s cell,” she
heard the woman say. “Her and this other wench, the one who slew
Renly. All three o’ them together, and come the morn Lady Catelyn
cut him loose for love.” She gave a throaty chuckle.
It’s not true, Arya thought. She never would. She felt sad and angry
and lonely, all at once.
An old man sat down beside her. “Well, aren’t you a pretty little
peach?” His breath smelled near as foul as the dead men in the
cages, and his little pig eyes were crawling up and down her. “Does
my sweet peach have a name?”
For half a heartbeat she forgot who she was supposed to be. She
wasn’t any peach, but she couldn’t be Arya Stark either, not here
with some smelly drunk she did not know. “I’m …”
“She’s my sister.” Gendry put a heavy hand on the old man’s
shoulder, and squeezed. “Leave her be.”

The man turned, spoiling for a quarrel, but when he saw Gendry’s
size he thought better of it. “Your sister, is she? What kind of
brother are you? I’d never bring no sister of mine to the Peach, that
I wouldn’t.” He got up from the bench and moved o muttering, in
search of a new friend.
“Why did you say that?” Arya hopped to her feet. “You’re not my
brother.”
“That’s right,” he said angrily. “I’m too bloody lowborn to be kin
to m’lady high.”
Arya was taken aback by the fury in his voice. “That’s not the
way I meant it.”
“Yes it is.” He sat down on the bench, cradling a cup of wine
between his hands. “Go away. I want to drink this wine in peace.
Then maybe I’ll go nd that black-haired girl and ring her bell for
her.”
“But …”
“I said, go away. M’lady.”
Arya whirled and left him there. A stupid bullheaded bastard boy,
that’s all he is. He could ring all the bells he wanted, it was nothing
to her.
Their sleeping room was at the top of the stairs, under the eaves.
Maybe the Peach had no lack of beds, but there was only one to
spare for the likes of them. It was a big bed, though. It lled the
whole room, just about, and the musty straw-stu ed mattress
looked large enough for all of them. Just now, though, she had it to
herself. Her real clothes were hanging from a peg on the wall,
between Gendry’s stu and Lem’s. Arya took o the linen and lace,
pulled her tunic over her head, climbed up into the bed, and
burrowed under the blankets. “Queen Cersei,” she whispered into
the pillow. “King Jo rey, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn. Dunsen, Ra , and
Polliver. The Tickler, the Hound, and Ser Gregor the Mountain.”
She liked to mix up the order of the names sometimes. It helped her
remember who they were and what they’d done. Maybe some of
them are dead, she thought. Maybe they’re in iron cages someplace,
and the crows are picking out their eyes.

Sleep came as quick as she closed her eyes. She dreamed of
wolves that night, stalking through a wet wood with the smell of
rain and rot and blood thick in the air. Only they were good smells
in the dream, and Arya knew she had nothing to fear. She was
strong and swift and erce, and her pack was all around her, her
brothers and her sisters. They ran down a frightened horse together,
tore its throat out, and feasted. And when the moon broke through
the clouds, she threw back her head and howled.
But when the day came, she woke to the barking of dogs.
Arya sat up yawning. Gendry was stirring on her left and Lem
Lemoncloak snoring loudly to her right, but the baying outside all
but drowned him out. There must be half a hundred dogs out there.
She crawled from under the blankets and hopped over Lem, Tom,
and Jack-Be-Lucky to the window. When she opened the shutters
wide, wind and wet and cold all came ooding in together. The day
was grey and overcast. Down below, in the square, the dogs were
barking, running in circles, growling and howling. There was a pack
of them, great black masti s and lean wolfhounds and black-andwhite sheepdogs and kinds Arya did not know, shaggy brindled
beasts with long yellow teeth. Between the inn and the fountain, a
dozen riders sat astride their horses, watching the townsmen open
the fat man’s cage and tug his arm until his swollen corpse spilled
out onto the ground. The dogs were at him at once, tearing chunks
of esh o his bones.
Arya heard one of the riders laugh. “Here’s your new castle, you
bloody Lannister bastard,” he said. “A little snug for the likes o’
you, but we’ll squeeze you in, never fret.” Beside him a prisoner sat
sullen, with coils of hempen rope tight around his wrists. Some of
the townsmen were throwing dung at him, but he never inched.
“You’ll rot in them cages,” his captor was shouting. “The crows will
be picking out your eyes while we’re spending all that good
Lannister gold o’ yours! And when them crows are done, we’ll send
what’s left o’ you to your bloody brother. Though I doubt he’ll
know you.”
The noise had woken half the Peach. Gendry squeezed into the
window beside Arya, and Tom stepped up behind them naked as his

name day. “What’s all that bloody shouting?” Lem complained from
bed. “A man’s trying to get some bloody sleep.”
“Where’s Greenbeard?” Tom asked him.
“Abed with Tansy,” Lem said. “Why?”
“Best nd him. Archer too. The Mad Huntsman’s come back, with
another man for the cages.”
“Lannister,” said Arya. “I heard him say Lannister.”
“Have they caught the Kingslayer?” Gendry wanted to know.
Down in the square, a thrown stone caught the captive on the
cheek, turning his head. Not the Kingslayer, Arya thought, when she
saw his face. The gods had heard her prayers after all.

JON

Ghost was gone when the wildings led their horses from the cave.

Did he understand about Castle Black? Jon took a breath of the crisp
morning air and allowed himself to hope. The eastern sky was pink
near the horizon and pale grey higher up. The Sword of the
Morning still hung in the south, the bright white star in its hilt
blazing like a diamond in the dawn, but the blacks and greys of the
darkling forest were turning once again to greens and golds, reds
and russets. And above the soldier pines and oaks and ash and
sentinels stood the Wall, the ice pale and glimmering beneath the
dust and dirt that pocked its surface.
The Magnar sent a dozen men riding west and a dozen more east,
to climb the highest hills they could nd and watch for any sign of
rangers in the wood or riders on the high ice. The Thenns carried
bronze-banded warhorns to give warning should the Watch be
sighted. The other wildlings fell in behind Jarl, Jon and Ygritte with
the rest. This was to be the young raider’s hour of glory.
The Wall was often said to stand seven hundred feet high, but
Jarl had found a place where it was both higher and lower. Before
them, the ice rose sheer from out of the trees like some immense
cli , crowned by wind-carved battlements that loomed at least eight
hundred feet high, perhaps nine hundred in spots. But that was
deceptive, Jon realized as they drew closer. Brandon the Builder
had laid his huge foundation blocks along the heights wherever
feasible, and hereabouts the hills rose wild and rugged.

He had once heard his uncle Benjen say that the Wall was a sword
east of Castle Black, but a snake to the west. It was true. Sweeping
in over one huge humped hill, the ice dipped down into a valley,
climbed the knife edge of a long granite ridgeline for a league or
more, ran along a jagged crest, dipped again into a valley deeper
still, and then rose higher and higher, leaping from hill to hill as far
as the eye could see, into the mountainous west.
Jarl had chosen to assault the stretch of ice along the ridge. Here,
though the top of the Wall loomed eight hundred feet above the
forest oor, a good third of that height was earth and stone rather
than ice; the slope was too steep for their horses, almost as di cult
a scramble as the Fist of the First Men, but still vastly easier to
ascend than the sheer vertical face of the Wall itself. And the ridge
was densely wooded as well, o ering easy concealment. Once
brothers in black had gone out every day with axes to cut back the
encroaching trees, but those days were long past, and here the
forest grew right up to the ice.
The day promised to be damp and cold, and damper and colder by
the Wall, beneath those tons of ice. The closer they got, the more
the Thenns held back. They have never seen the Wall before, not even
the Magnar, Jon realized. It frightens them. In the Seven Kingdoms it
was said that the Wall marked the end of the world. That is true for
them as well. It was all in where you stood.
And where do I stand? Jon did not know. To stay with Ygritte, he
would need to become a wildling heart and soul. If he abandoned
her to return to his duty, the Magnar might cut her heart out. And if
he took her with him … assuming she would go, which was far
from certain … well, he could scarcely bring her back to Castle
Black to live among the brothers. A deserter and a wildling could
expect no welcome anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms. We could go
look for Gendel’s children, I suppose. Though they’d be more like to eat
us than to take us in.
The Wall did not awe Jarl’s raiders, Jon saw. They have done this
before, every man of them. Jarl called out names when they
dismounted beneath the ridge, and eleven gathered round him. All
were young. The oldest could not have been more than ve-and-

twenty, and two of the ten were younger than Jon. Every one was
lean and hard, though; they had a look of sinewy strength that
reminded him of Stonesnake, the brother the Halfhand had sent o
afoot when Rattleshirt was hunting them.
In the very shadow of the Wall the wildlings made ready,
winding thick coils of hempen rope around one shoulder and down
across their chests, and lacing on queer boots of supple doeskin. The
boots had spikes jutting from the toes; iron, for Jarl and two others,
bronze for some, but most often jagged bone. Small stone-headed
hammers hung from one hip, a leathern bag of stakes from the
other. Their ice axes were antlers with sharpened tines, bound to
wooden hafts with strips of hide. The eleven climbers sorted
themselves into three teams of four; Jarl himself made the twelfth
man. “Mance promises swords for every man of the rst team to
reach the top,” he told them, his breath misting in the cold air.
“Southron swords of castle-forged steel. And your name in the song
he’ll make of this, that too. What more could a free man ask? Up,
and the Others take the hindmost!”
The Others take them all, thought Jon, as he watched them
scramble up the steep slope of the ridge and vanish beneath the
trees. It would not be the rst time wildlings had scaled the Wall,
not even the hundred and rst. The patrols stumbled on climbers
two or three times a year, and rangers sometimes came on the
broken corpses of those who had fallen. Along the east coast the
raiders most often built boats to slip across the Bay of Seals. In the
west they would descend into the black depths of the Gorge to
make their way around the Shadow Tower. But in between the only
way to defeat the Wall was to go over it, and many a raider had.
Fewer come back, though, he thought with a certain grim pride.
Climbers must of necessity leave their mounts behind, and many
younger, greener raiders began by taking the rst horses they
found. Then a hue and cry would go up, ravens would y, and as
often as not the Night’s Watch would hunt them down and hang
them before they could get back with their plunder and stolen
women. Jarl would not make that mistake, Jon knew, but he

wondered about Styr. The Magnar is a ruler, not a raider. He may not
know how the game is played.
“There they are,” Ygritte said, and Jon glanced up to see the rst
climber emerge above the treetops. It was Jarl. He had found a
sentinel tree that leaned against the Wall, and led his men up the
trunk to get a quicker start. The wood should never have been allowed
to creep so close. They’re three hundred feet up, and they haven’t
touched the ice itself yet.
He watched the wildling move carefully from wood to Wall,
hacking out a handhold with short sharp blows of his ice axe, then
swinging over. The rope around his waist tied him to the second
man in line, still edging up the tree. Step by slow step, Jarl moved
higher, kicking out toeholds with his spiked boots when there were
no natural ones to be found. When he was ten feet above the
sentinel, he stopped upon a narrow icy ledge, slung his axe from his
belt, took out his hammer, and drove an iron stake into a cleft. The
second man moved onto the Wall behind him while the third was
scrambling to the top of the tree.
The other two teams had no happily placed trees to give them a
leg up, and before long the Thenns were wondering whether they
had gotten lost climbing the ridge. Jarl’s party were all on the Wall
and eighty feet up before the leading climbers from the other
groups came into view. The teams were spaced a good twenty yards
apart. Jarl’s four were in the center. To the right of them was a
team headed up by Grigg the Goat, whose long blond braid made
him easy to spot from below. To the left a very thin man named
Errok led the climbers.
“So slow,” the Magnar complained loudly, as he watched them
edge their way upward. “Has he forgotten the crows? He should
climb faster, afore we are discovered.”
Jon had to hold his tongue. He remembered the Skirling Pass all
too well, and the moonlight climb he’d made with Stonesnake. He
had swallowed his heart a half-dozen times that night, and by the
end his arms and legs had been aching and his ngers were half
frozen. And that was stone, not ice. Stone was solid. Ice was
treacherous stu at the best of times, and on a day like this, when

the Wall was weeping, the warmth of a climber’s hand might be
enough to melt it. The huge blocks could be frozen rock-hard inside,
but their outer surface would be slick, with runnels of water
trickling down, and patches of rotten ice where the air had gotten
in. Whatever else the wildlings are, they’re brave.
All the same, Jon found himself hoping that Styr’s fears proved
well founded. If the gods are good, a patrol will chance by and put an
end to this. “No wall can keep you safe,” his father had told him
once, as they walked the walls of Winterfall. “A wall is only as
strong as the men who defend it.” The wildlings might have a
hundred and twenty men, but four defenders would be enough to
see them o , with a few well-placed arrows and perhaps a pail of
stones.
No defenders appeared, however; not four, not even one. The sun
climbed the sky and the wildlings climbed the Wall. Jarl’s four
remained well ahead till noon, when they hit a pitch of bad ice. Jarl
had looped his rope around a wind-carved pinnace and was using it
to support his weight when the whole jagged thing suddenly
crumbled and came crashing down, and him with it. Chunks of ice
as big as a man’s head bombarded the three below, but they clung
to the handholds and the stakes held, and Jarl jerked to a sudden
halt at the end of the rope.
By the time his team had recovered from that mischance, Grigg
the Goat had almost drawn even with them. Errok’s four remained
well behind. The face where they were climbing looked smooth and
unpitted, covered with a sheet of icemelt that glistened wetly where
the sun brushed it. Grigg’s section was darker to the eye, with more
obvious features; long horizontal ledges where a block had been
imperfectly positioned atop the block below, cracks and crevices,
even chimneys along the vertical joins, where wind and water had
eaten holes large enough for a man to hide in.
Jarl soon had his men edging upward again. His four and Grigg’s
moved almost side by side, with Errok’s fty feet below. Deerhorn
axes chopped and hacked, sending showers of glittery shards
cascading down onto the trees. Stone hammers pounded stakes deep
into the ice to serve as anchors for the ropes; the iron stakes ran out

before they were halfway up, and after that the climbers used horn
and sharpened bone. And the men kicked, driving the spikes on
their boots against the hard unyielding ice again and again and
again and again to make one foothold. Their legs must be numb, Jon
thought by the fourth hour. How long can they keep on with that? He
watched as restless as the Magnar, listening for the distant moan of
a Thenn warhorn. But the horns stayed silent, and there was no sign
of the Night’s Watch.
By the sixth hour, Jarl had moved ahead of Grigg the Goat again,
and his men were widening the gap. “The Mance’s pet must want a
sword,” the Magnar said, shading his eyes. The sun was high in the
sky, and the upper third of the Wall was a crystalline blue from
below, re ecting so brilliantly that it hurt the eyes to look on it.
Jarl’s four and Grigg’s were all but lost in the glare, though Errok’s
team was still in shadow. Instead of moving upward they were
edging their way sideways at about ve hundred feet, making for a
chimney. Jon was watching them inch along when he heard the
sound—a sudden crack that seemed to roll along the ice, followed
by a shout of alarm. And then the air was full of shards and shrieks
and falling men, as a sheet of ice a foot thick and fty feet square
broke o from the Wall and came tumbling, crumbling, rumbling,
sweeping all before it. Even down at the foot of the ridge, some
chunks came spinning through the trees and rolling down the slope.
Jon grabbed Ygritte and pulled her down to shield her, and one of
the Thenns was struck in the face by a chunk that broke his nose.
And when they looked up Jarl and his team were gone. Men,
ropes, stakes, all gone; nothing remained above six hundred feet.
There was a wound in the Wall where the climbers had clung half a
heartbeat before, the ice within as smooth and white as polished
marble and shining in the sun. Far far below there was a faint red
smear where someone had smashed against a frozen pinnace.
The Wall defends itself, Jon thought as he pulled Ygritte back to
her feet.
They found Jarl in a tree, impaled upon a splintered branch and
still roped to the three men who lay broken beneath him. One was
still alive, but his legs and spine were shattered, and most of his ribs

as well. “Mercy,” he said when they came upon him. One of the
Thenns smashed his head in with a big stone mace. The Magnar
gave orders, and his men began to gather fuel for a pyre.
The dead were burning when Grigg the Goat reached the top of
the Wall. By the time Errok’s four had joined them, nothing
remained of Jarl and his team but bone and ash.
The sun had begun to sink by then, so the climbers wasted little
time. They unwound the long coils of hemp they’d had looped
around their chests, tied them all together, and tossed down one
end. The thought of trying to climb ve hundred feet up that rope
lled Jon with dread, but Mance had planned better than that. The
raiders Jarl had left below uncasked a huge ladder, with rungs of
woven hemp as thick as a man’s arm, and tied it to the climbers’
rope. Errok and Grigg and their men grunted and heaved, pulled it
up, staked it to the top, then lowered the rope again to haul up a
second ladder. There were ve altogether.
When all of them were in place, the Magnar shouted a brusque
command in the Old Tongue, and ve of his Thenns started up
together. Even with the ladders, it was no easy climb. Ygritte
watched them struggle for a while. “I hate this Wall,” she said in a
low angry voice. “Can you feel how cold it is?”
“It’s made of ice,” Jon pointed out.
“You know nothing, Jon Snow. This wall is made o’ blood.”
Nor had it drunk its ll. By sunset, two of the Thenns had fallen
from the ladder to their deaths, but they were the last. It was near
midnight before Jon reached the top. The stars were out again, and
Ygritte was trembling from the climb. “I almost fell,” she said, with
tears in her eyes. “Twice. Thrice. The Wall was trying t’ shake me
o , I could feel it.” One of the tears broke free and trickled slowly
down her cheek.
“The worst is behind us.” Jon tried to sound con dent. “Don’t be
frightened.” He tried to put an arm around her.
Ygritte slammed the heel of her hand into his chest, so hard it
stung even through his layers of wool, mail, and boiled leather. “I
wasn’t frightened. You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
“Why are you crying, then?”

“Not for fear!” She kicked savagely at the ice beneath her with a
heel, chopping out a chunk. “I’m crying because we never found the
Horn of Winter. We opened half a hundred graves and let all those
shades loose in the world, and never found the Horn of Joramun to
bring this cold thing down!”

JAIME

His hand burned.

Still, still, long after they had snu ed out the torch they’d used to
sear his bloody stump, days after, he could still feel the re lancing
up his arm, and his ngers twisting in the ames, the ngers he no
longer had.
He had taken wounds before, but never like this. He had never
known there could be such pain. Sometimes, unbidden, old prayers
bubbled from his lips, prayers he learned as a child and never
thought of since, prayers he had rst prayed with Cersei kneeling
beside him in the sept at Casterly Rock. Sometimes he even wept,
until he heard the Mummers laughing. Then he made his eyes go
dry and his heart go dead, and prayed for his fever to burn away his
tears. Now I know how Tyrion has felt, all those times they laughed at
him.
After the second time he fell from the saddle, they bound him
tight to Brienne of Tarth and made them share a horse again. One
day, instead of back to front, they bound them face-to-face. “The
lovers,” Shagwell sighed loudly, “and what a lovely sight they are.
’Twould be cruel to separate the good knight and his lady.” Then he
laughed that high shrill laugh of his, and said, “Ah, but which one is
the knight and which one is the lady?”
If I had my hand, you’d learn that soon enough, Jaime thought. His
arms ached and his legs were numb from the ropes, but after a
while none of that mattered. His world shrunk to the throb of agony

that was his phantom hand, and Brienne pressed against him. She’s
warm, at least, he consoled himself, though the wench’s breath was
as foul as his own.
His hand was always between them. Urswyck had hung it about
his neck on a cord, so it dangled down against his chest, slapping
Brienne’s breasts as Jaime slipped in and out of consciousness. His
right eye was swollen shut, the wound in amed where Brienne had
cut him during their ght, but it was his hand that hurt the most.
Blood and pus seeped from his stump, and the missing hand
throbbed every time the horse took a step.
His throat was so raw that he could not eat, but he drank wine
when they gave it to him, and water when that was all they o ered.
Once they handed him a cup and he qua ed it straight away,
trembling, and the Brave Companions burst into laughter so loud
and harsh it hurt his ears. “That’s horse piss you’re drinking,
Kingslayer,” Rorge told him. Jaime was so thirsty he drank it
anyway, but afterward he retched it all back up. They made Brienne
wash the vomit out of his beard, just as they made her clean him up
when he soiled himself in the saddle.
One damp cold morning when he was feeling slightly stronger, a
madness took hold of him and he reached for the Dornishman’s
sword with his left hand and wrenched it clumsily from its
scabbard. Let them kill me, he thought, so long as I die ghting, a blade
in hand. But it was no good. Shagwell came hopping from leg to leg,
dancing nimbly aside when Jaime slashed at him. Unbalanced, he
staggered forward, hacking wildly at the fool, but Shagwell spun
and ducked and darted until all the Mummers were laughing at
Jaime’s futile e orts to land a blow. When he tripped over a rock
and stumbled to his knees, the fool leapt in and planted a wet kiss
atop his head.
Rorge nally ung him aside and kicked the sword from Jaime’s
feeble ngers as he tried to bring it up. “That wath amuthing,
Kingthlayer,” said Vargo Hoat, “but if you try it again, I thall take
your other hand, or perhapth a foot.”
Jaime lay on his back afterward, staring at the night sky, trying
not to feel the pain that snaked up his right arm every time he

moved it. The night was strangely beautiful. The moon was a
graceful crescent, and it seemed as though he had never seen so
many stars. The King’s Crown was at the zenith, and he could see
the Stallion rearing, and there the Swan. The Moonmaid, shy as
ever, was half-hidden behind a pine tree. How can such a night be
beautiful? he asked himself. Why would the stars want to look down on
such as me?
“Jaime,” Brienne whispered, so faintly he thought he was
dreaming it. “Jaime, what are you doing?”
“Dying,” he whispered back.
“No,” she said, “no, you must live.”
He wanted to laugh. “Stop telling me what do, wench. I’ll die if it
pleases me.”
“Are you so craven?”
The word shocked him. He was Jaime Lannister, a knight of the
Kingsguard, he was the Kingslayer. No man had ever called him
craven. Other things they called him, yes; oathbreaker, liar,
murderer. They said he was cruel, treacherous, reckless. But never
craven. “What else can I do, but die?”
“Live,” she said, “live, and ght, and take revenge.” But she
spoke too loudly. Rorge heard her voice, if not her words, and came
over to kick her, shouting at her to hold her bloody tongue if she
wanted to keep it.
Craven, Jaime thought, as Brienne fought to sti e her moans. Can
it be? They took my sword hand. Was that all I was, a sword hand?
Gods be good, is it true?
The wench had the right of it. He could not die. Cersei was
waiting for him. She would have need of him. And Tyrion, his little
brother, who loved him for a lie. And his enemies were waiting too;
the Young Wolf who had beaten him in the Whispering Wood and
killed his men around him, Edmure Tully who had kept him in
darkness and chains, these Brave Companions.
When morning came, he made himself eat. They fed him a mush
of oats, horse food, but he forced down every spoon. He ate again
at evenfall, and the next day. Live, he told himself harshly, when the
mush was like to gag him, live for Cersei, live for Tyrion. Live for

vengeance. A Lannister always pays his debts. His missing hand
throbbed and burned and stank. When I reach King’s Landing I’ll have
a new hand forged, a golden hand, and one day I’ll use it to rip out
Vargo Hoat’s throat.
The days and the nights blurred together in a haze of pain. He
would sleep in the saddle, pressed against Brienne, his nose full of
the stink of his rotting hand, and then at night he would lie awake
on the hard ground, caught in a waking nightmare. Weak as he was,
they always bound him to a tree. It gave him some cold consolation
to know that they feared him that much, even now.
Brienne was always bound beside him. She lay there in her bonds
like a big dead cow, saying not a word. The wench has built a fortress
inside herself. They will rape her soon enough, but behind her walls they
cannot touch her. But Jaime’s walls were gone. They had taken his
hand, they had taken his sword hand, and without it he was nothing.
The other was no good to him. Since the time he could walk, his left
arm had been his shield arm, no more. It was his right hand that
made him a knight; his right arm that made him a man.
One day, he heard Urswyck say something about Harrenhal, and
remembered that was to be their destination. That made him laugh
aloud, and that made Timeon slash his face with a long thin whip.
The cut bled, but beside his hand he scarcely felt it. “Why did you
laugh?” the wench asked him that night, in a whisper.
“Harrenhal was where they gave me the white cloak,” he
whispered back. “Whent’s great tourney. He wanted to show us all
his big castle and his ne sons. I wanted to show them too. I was
only fteen, but no one could have beaten me that day. Aerys never
let me joust.” He laughed again. “He sent me away. But now I’m
coming back.”
They heard the laugh. That night it was Jaime who got the kicks
and punches. He hardly felt them either, until Rorge slammed a
boot into his stump, and then he fainted.
It was the next night when they nally came, three of the worst;
Shagwell, noseless Rorge, and the fat Dothraki Zollo, the one who’d
cut his hand o . Zollo and Rorge were arguing about who would go
rst as they approached; there seemed to be no question but that

the fool would be going last. Shagwell suggested that they should
both go rst, and take her front and rear. Zollo and Rorge liked that
notion, only then they began to ght about who would get the front
and who the rear.
They will leave her a cripple too, but inside, where it does not show.
“Wench,” he whispered as Zollo and Rorge were cursing one
another, “let them have the meat, and you go far away. It will be
over quicker, and they’ll get less pleasure from it.”
“They’ll get no pleasure from what I’ll give them,” she whispered
back, de ant.
Stupid stubborn brave bitch. She was going to get herself good and
killed, he knew it. And what do I care if she does? If she hadn’t been so
pigheaded, I’d still have a hand. Yet he heard himself whisper, “Let
them do it, and go away inside.” That was what he’d done, when
the Starks had died before him, Lord Rickard cooking in his armor
while his son Brandon strangled himself trying to save him. “Think
of Renly, if you loved him. Think of Tarth, mountains and seas,
pools, waterfalls, whatever you have on your Sapphire Isle,
think …”
But Rorge had won the argument by then. “You’re the ugliest
woman I ever seen,” he told Brienne, “but don’t think I can’t make
you uglier. You want a nose like mine? Fight me, and you’ll get
one. And two eyes, that’s too many. One scream out o’ you, and I’ll
pop one out and make you eat it, and then I’ll pull your fucking
teeth out one by one.”
“Oh, do it, Rorge,” pleaded Shagwell. “Without her teeth, she’ll
look just like my dear old mother.” He cackled. “And I always
wanted to fuck my dear old mother up the arse.”
Jaime chuckled. “There’s a funny fool. I have a riddle for you,
Shagwell. Why do you care if she screams? Oh, wait, I know.” He
shouted, “SAPPHIRES,” as loudly as he could.
Cursing, Rorge kicked at his stump again. Jaime howled. I never
knew there was such agony in the world, was the last thing he
remembered thinking. It was hard to say how long he was gone, but
when the pain spit him out, Urswyck was there, and Vargo Hoat
himself. “Thee’th not to be touched,” the goat screamed, spraying

spittle all over Zollo. “Thee hath to be a maid, you foolth! Thee’th
worth a bag of thapphireth!” And from then on, every night Hoat
put guards on them, to protect them from his own.
Two nights passed in silence before the wench nally found the
courage to whisper, “Jaime? Why did you shout out?”
“Why did I shout ‘sapphires,’ you mean? Use your wits, wench.
Would this lot have cared if I shouted ‘rape’?”
“You did not need to shout at all.”
“You’re hard enough to look at with a nose. Besides, I wanted to
make the goat say ‘thapphireth.’ ” He chuckled. “A good thing for
you I’m such a liar. An honorable man would have told the truth
about the Sapphire Isle.”
“All the same,” she said. “I thank you, ser.”
His hand was throbbing again. He ground his teeth and said, “A
Lannister pays his debts. That was for the river, and those rocks you
dropped on Robin Ryger.”
The goat wanted to make a show of parading him in, so Jaime
was made to dismount a mile from the gates of Harrenhal. A rope
was looped around his waist, a second around Brienne’s wrists; the
ends were tied to the pommel of Vargo Hoat’s saddle. They
stumbled along side by side behind the Qohorik’s striped zorse.
Jaime’s rage kept him walking. The linen that covered the stump
was grey and stinking with pus. His phantom ngers screamed with
every step. I am stronger than they know, he told himself. I am still a
Lannister. I am still a knight of the Kingsguard. He would reach
Harrenhal, and then King’s Landing. He would live. And I will pay
this debt with interest.
As they approached the cli ike walls of Black Harren’s monstrous
castle, Brienne squeezed his arm. “Lord Bolton holds this castle. The
Boltons are bannermen to the Starks.”
“The Boltons skin their enemies.” Jaime remembered that much
about the northman. Tyrion would have known all there was to
know about the Lord of the Dreadfort, but Tyrion was a thousand
leagues away, with Cersei. I cannot die while Cersei lives, he told
himself. We will die together as we were born together.

The castleton outside the walls had been burned to ash and
blackened stone, and many men and horses had recently encamped
beside the lakeshore, where Lord Whent had staged his great
tourney in the year of the false spring. A bitter smile touched
Jaime’s lips as they crossed that torn ground. Someone had dug a
privy trench in the very spot where he’d once knelt before the king
to say his vows. I never dreamed how quick the sweet would turn to
sour. Aerys would not even let me savor that one night. He honored me,
and then he spat on me.
“The banners,” Brienne observed. “Flayed man and twin towers,
see. King Robb’s sworn men. There, above the gatehouse, grey on
white. They y the direwolf.”
Jaime twisted his head upward for a look. “That’s your bloody
wolf, true enough,” he granted her. “And those are heads to either
side of it.”
Soldiers, servants, and camp followers gathered to hoot at them.
A spotted bitch followed them through the camps barking and
growling until one of the Lyseni impaled her on a lance and
galloped to the front of the column. “I am bearing Kingslayer’s
banner,” he shouted, shaking the dead dog above Jaime’s head.
The walls of Harrenhal were so thick that passing beneath them
was like passing through a stone tunnel. Vargo Hoat had sent two of
his Dothraki ahead to inform Lord Bolton of their coming, so the
outer ward was full of the curious. They gave way as Jaime
staggered past, the rope around his waist jerking and pulling at him
whenever he slowed. “I give you the Kingthlayer,” Vargo Hoat
proclaimed in that thick slobbery voice of his. A spear jabbed at the
small of Jaime’s back, sending him sprawling.
Instinct made him put out his hands to stop his fall. When his
stump smashed against the ground the pain was blinding, yet
somehow he managed to ght his way back to one knee. Before
him, a ight of broad stone steps led up to the entrance of one of
Harrenhal’s colossal round towers. Five knights and a northman
stood looking down on him; the one paleeyed in wool and fur, the
ve erce in mail and plate, with the twin towers sigil on their
surcoats. “A fury of Freys,” Jaime declared. “Ser Danwell, Ser

Aenys, Ser Hosteen.” He knew Lord Walder’s sons by sight; his aunt
had married one, after all. “You have my condolences.”
“For what, ser?” Ser Danwell Frey asked.
“Your brother’s son, Ser Cleos,” said Jaime. “He was with us until
outlaws lled him full of arrows. Urswyck and this lot took his
goods and left him for the wolves.”
“My lords!” Brienne wrenched herself free and pushed forward. “I
saw your banners. Hear me for your oath!”
“Who speaks?” demanded Ser Aenys Frey.
“Lannither’th wet nurth.”
“I am Brienne of Tarth, daughter to Lord Selwyn the Evenstar,
and sworn to House Stark even as you are.”
Ser Aenys spit at her feet. “That’s for your oaths. We trusted the
word of Robb Stark, and he repaid our faith with betrayal.”
Now this is interesting. Jaime twisted to see how Brienne might
take the accusation, but the wench was as singleminded as a mule
with a bit between his teeth. “I know of no betrayal.” She chafed at
the ropes around her wrists. “Lady Catelyn commanded me to
deliver Lannister to his brother at King’s Landing—”
“She was trying to drown him when we found them,” said
Urswyck the Faithful.
She reddened. “In anger I forgot myself, but I would never have
killed him. If he dies the Lannisters will put my lady’s daughters to
the sword.”
Ser Aenys was unmoved. “Why should that trouble us?”
“Ransom him back to Riverrun,” urged Ser Danwell.
“Casterly Rock has more gold,” one brother objected.
“Kill him!” said another. “His head for Ned Stark’s!”
Shagwell the Fool somersaulted to the foot of the steps in his grey
and pink motley and began to sing. “There once was a lion who
danced with a bear, oh my, oh my …”
“Thilenth, fool.” Vargo Hoat cu ed the man. “The Kingthlayer ith
not for the bear. He ith mine.”
“He is no one’s should he die.” Roose Bolton spoke so softly that
men quieted to hear him. “And pray recall, my lord, you are not
master of Harrenhal till I march north.”

Fever made Jaime as fearless as he was lightheaded. “Can this be
the Lord of the Dreadfort? When last I heard, my father had sent
you scampering o with your tail betwixt your legs. When did you
stop running, my lord?”
Bolton’s silence was a hundred times more threatening than Vargo
Hoat’s slobbering malevolence. Pale as morning mist, his eyes
concealed more than they told. Jaime misliked those eyes. They
reminded him of the day at King’s Landing when Ned Stark had
found him seated on the Iron Throne. The Lord of the Dreadfort
nally pursed his lips and said, “You have lost a hand.”
“No,” said Jaime, “I have it here, hanging round my neck.”
Roose Bolton reached down, snapped the cord, and ung the hand
at Hoat. “Take this away. The sight of it o ends me.”
“I will thend it to hith lord father. I will tell him he muth pay one
hundred thouthand dragonth, or we thall return the Kingthlayer to
him pieth by pieth. And when we hath hith gold, we thall deliver
Ther Jaime to Karthark, and collect a maiden too!” A roar of
laughter went up from the Brave Companions.
“A ne plan,” said Roose Bolton, the same way he might say, “A
ne wine,” to a dinner companion, “though Lord Karstark will not
be giving you his daughter. King Robb has shortened him by a head,
for treason and murder. As to Lord Tywin, he remains at King’s
Landing, and there he will stay till the new year, when his grandson
takes for bride a daughter of Highgarden.”
“Winterfell,” said Brienne. “You mean Winterfell. King Jo rey is
betrothed to Sansa Stark.”
“No longer. The Battle of the Blackwater changed all. The rose
and the lion joined there, to shatter Stannis Baratheon’s host and
burn his eet to ashes.”
I warned you, Urswyck, Jaime thought, and you, goat. When you
bet against the lions, you lose more than your purse. “Is there word of
my sister?” he asked.
“She is well. As is your … nephew.” Bolton paused before he said
nephew, a pause that said I know. “Your brother also lives, though
he took a wound in the battle.” He beckoned to a dour northman in
a studded brigantine. “Escort Ser Jaime to Qyburn. And unbind this

woman’s hands.” As the rope between Brienne’s wrists was slashed
in two, he said, “Pray forgive us, my lady. In such troubled times it
is hard to know friend from foe.”
Brienne rubbed inside her wrist where the hemp had scraped her
skin bloody. “My lord, these men tried to rape me.”
“Did they?” Lord Bolton turned his pale eyes on Vargo Hoat. “I
am displeased. By that, and this of Ser Jaime’s hand.”
There were ve northmen and as many Freys in the yard for
every Brave Companion. The goat might not be as clever as some,
but he could count that high at least. He held his tongue.
“They took my sword,” Brienne said, “my armor …”
“You shall have no need of armor here, my lady,” Lord Bolton
told her. “In Harrenhal, you are under my protection. Amabel, nd
suitable rooms for the Lady Brienne. Walton, you will see to Ser
Jaime at once.” He did not wait for an answer, but turned and
climbed the steps, his fur-trimmed cloak swirling behind. Jaime had
only enough time to exchange a quick look with Brienne before
they were marched away, separately.
In the maester’s chambers beneath the rookery, a grey-haired,
fatherly man named Qyburn sucked in his breath when he cut away
the linen from the stump of Jaime’s hand.
“That bad? Will I die?”
Qyburn pushed at the wound with a nger, and wrinkled his nose
at the gush of pus. “No. Though in a few more days …” He sliced
away Jaime’s sleeve. “The corruption has spread. See how tender
the esh is? I must cut it all away. The safest course would be to
take the arm o .”
“Then you’ll die,” Jaime promised. “Clean the stump and sew it
up. I’ll take my chances.”
Qyburn frowned. “I can leave you the upper arm, make the cut at
your elbow, but …”
“Take any part of my arm, and you’d best chop o the other one
as well, or I’ll strangle you with it afterward.”
Qyburn looked in his eyes. Whatever he saw there gave him
pause. “Very well. I will cut away the rotten esh, no more. Try to
burn out the corruption with boiling wine and a poultice of nettle,

mustard seed, and bread mold. Mayhaps that will su ce. It is on
your head. You will want milk of the poppy—”
“No.” Jaime dare not let himself be put to sleep; he might be
short an arm when he woke, no matter what the man said.
Qyburn was taken aback. “There will be pain.”
“I’ll scream.”
“A great deal of pain.”
“I’ll scream very loudly.”
“Will you take some wine at least?”
“Does the High Septon ever pray?”
“Of that I am not certain. I shall bring the wine. Lie back, I must
needs strap down your arm.”
With a bowl and a sharp blade, Qyburn cleaned the stump while
Jaime gulped down strongwine, spilling it all over himself in the
process. His left hand did not seem to know how to nd his mouth,
but there was something to be said for that. The smell of wine in his
sodden beard helped disguise the stench of pus.
Nothing helped when the time came to pare away the rotten
esh. Jaime did scream then, and pounded his table with his good
st, over and over and over again. He screamed again when Qyburn
poured boiling wine over what remained of his stump. Despite all
his vows and all his fears, he lost consciousness for a time. When he
woke, the maester was sewing at his arm with needle and catgut. “I
left a ap of skin to fold back over your wrist.”
“You have done this before,” muttered Jaime, weakly. He could
taste blood in his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue.
“No man who serves with Vargo Hoat is a stranger to stumps. He
makes them wherever he goes.”
Qyburn did not look a monster, Jaime thought. He was spare and
soft-spoken, with warm brown eyes. “How does a maester come to
ride with the Brave Companions?”
“The Citadel took my chain.” Qyburn put away his needle. “I
should do something about that wound above your eye as well. The
esh is badly in amed.”
Jaime closed his eyes and let the wine and Qyburn do their work.
“Tell me of the battle.” As keeper of Harrenhal’s ravens, Qyburn

would have been the rst to hear the news.
“Lord Stannis was caught between your father and the re. It’s
said the Imp set the river itself a ame.”
Jaime saw green ames reaching up into the sky higher than the
tallest towers, as burning men screamed in the streets. I have
dreamed this dream before. It was almost funny, but there was no one
to share the joke.
“Open your eye.” Qyburn soaked a cloth in warm water and
dabbed at the crust of dried blood. The eyelid was swollen, but
Jaime found he could force it open halfway. Qyburn’s face loomed
above. “How did you come by this one?” the maester asked.
“A wench’s gift.”
“Rough wooing, my lord?”
“This wench is bigger than me and uglier than you. You’d best see
to her as well. She’s still limping on the leg I pricked when we
fought.”
“I will ask after her. What is this woman to you?”
“My protector.” Jaime had to laugh, no matter how it hurt.
“I’ll grind some herbs you can mix with wine to bring down your
fever. Come back on the morrow and I’ll put a leech on your eye to
drain the bad blood.”
“A leech. Lovely.”
“Lord Bolton is very fond of leeches,” Qyburn said primly.
“Yes,” said Jaime. “He would be.”

TYRION

Nothing remained beyond the King’s Gate but mud and ashes and

bits of burned bone, yet already there were people living in the
shadow of the city walls, and others selling sh from barrows and
barrels. Tyrion felt their eyes on him as he rode past; chilly eyes,
angry and unsympathetic. No one dared speak to him, or try to bar
his way; not with Bronn beside him in oiled black mail. If I were
alone, though, they would pull me down and smash my face in with a
cobblestone, as they did for Preston Green eld.
“They come back quicker than the rats,” he complained. “We
burned them out once, you’d think they’d take that as a lesson.”
“Give me a few dozen gold cloaks and I’ll kill them all,” said
Bronn. “Once they’re dead they don’t come back.”
“No, but others come in their places. Leave them be … but if they
start throwing up hovels against the wall again, pull them down at
once. The war’s not done yet, no matter what these fools may
think.” He spied the Mud Gate up ahead. “I have seen enough for
now. We’ll return on the morrow with the guild masters to go over
their plans.” He sighed. Well, I burned most of this, I suppose it’s only
just that I rebuild it.
That task was to have been his uncle’s, but solid, steady, tireless
Ser Kevan Lannister had not been himself since the raven had come
from Riverrun with word of his son’s murder. Willem’s twin Martyn
had been taken captive by Robb Stark as well, and their elder
brother Lancel was still abed, beset by an ulcerating wound that

would not heal. With one son dead and two more in mortal danger,
Ser Kevan was consumed by grief and fear. Lord Tywin had always
relied on his brother, but now he had no choice but to turn again to
his dwarf son.
The cost of rebuilding was going to be ruinous, but there was no
help for that. King’s Landing was the realm’s principal harbor,
rivaled only by Oldtown. The river had to be reopened, and the
sooner the better. And where am I going to nd the bloody coin? It
was almost enough to make him miss Little nger, who had sailed
north a fortnight past. While he beds Lysa Arryn and rules the Vale
beside her, I get to clean up the mess he left behind him. Though at
least his father was giving him signi cant work to do. He won’t
name me heir to Casterly Rock, but he’ll make use of me wherever he
can, Tyrion thought, as a captain of gold cloaks waved them
through the Mud Gate.
The Three Whores still dominated the market square inside the
gate, but they stood idle now, and the boulders and barrels of pitch
had all been trundled away. There were children climbing the
towering wooden structures, swarming up like monkeys in
roughspun to perch on the throwing arms and hoot at each other.
“Remind me to tell Ser Addam to post some gold cloaks here,”
Tyrion told Bronn as they rode between two of the trebuchets.
“Some fool boy’s like to fall o and break his back.” There was a
shout from above, and a clod of manure exploded on the ground a
foot in front of them. Tyrion’s mare reared and almost threw him.
“On second thoughts,” he said when he had the horse in hand, “let
the poxy brats splatter on the cobbles like overripe melons.”
He was in a black mood, and not just because a few street urchins
wanted to pelt him with dung. His marriage was a daily agony.
Sansa Stark remained a maiden, and half the castle seemed to know
it. When they had saddled up this morning, he’d heard two of the
stableboys sniggering behind his back. He could almost imagine that
the horses were sniggering as well. He’d risked his skin to avoid the
bedding ritual, hoping to preserve the privacy of his bedchamber,
but that hope had been dashed quick enough. Either Sansa had been
stupid enough to con de in one of her bedmaids, every one of

whom was a spy for Cersei, or Varys and his little birds were to
blame.
What di erence did it make? They were laughing at him all the
same. The only person in the Red Keep who didn’t seem to nd his
marriage a source of amusement was his lady wife.
Sansa’s misery was deepening every day. Tyrion would gladly
have broken through her courtesy to give her what solace he might,
but it was no good. No words would ever make him fair in her eyes.
Or any less a Lannister. This was the wife they had given him, for all
the rest of his life, and she hated him.
And their nights together in the great bed were another source of
torment. He could no longer bear to sleep naked, as had been his
custom. His wife was too well trained ever to say an unkind word,
but the revulsion in her eyes whenever she looked on his body was
more than he could bear. Tyrion had commanded Sansa to wear a
sleeping shift as well. I want her, he realized. I want Winterfell, yes,
but I want her as well, child or woman or whatever she is. I want to
comfort her. I want to hear her laugh. I want her to come to me
willingly, to bring me her joys and her sorrows and her lust. His mouth
twisted in a bitter smile. Yes, and I want to be tall as Jaime and as
strong as Ser Gregor the Mountain too, for all the bloody good it does.
Unbidden, his thoughts went to Shae. Tyrion had not wanted her
to hear the news from any lips but his own, so he had commanded
Varys to bring her to him the night before his wedding. They met
again in the eunuch’s chambers, and when Shae began to undo the
laces of his jerkin, he’d caught her by the wrist and pushed her
away. “Wait,” he said, “there is something you must hear. On the
morrow I am to be wed …”
“… to Sansa Stark. I know.”
He was speechless for an instant. Even Sansa did not know, not
then. “How could you know? Did Varys tell you?”
“Some page was telling Ser Tallad about it when I took Lollys to
the sept. He had it from this serving girl who heard Ser Kevan
talking to your father.” She wriggled free of his grasp and pulled
her dress up over her head. As ever, she was naked underneath. “I

don’t care. She’s only a little girl. You’ll give her a big belly and
come back to me.”
Some part of him had hoped for less indi erence. Had hoped, he
jeered bitterly, but now you know better, dwarf. Shae is all the love
you’re ever like to have.
Muddy Way was crowded, but soldiers and townfolk alike made
way for the Imp and his escort. Hollow-eyed children swarmed
underfoot, some looking up in silent appeal whilst others begged
noisily. Tyrion pulled a big stful of coppers from his purse and
tossed them in the air, and the children went running for them,
shoving and shouting. The lucky ones might be able to buy a heel of
stale bread tonight. He had never seen markets so crowded, and for
all the food the Tyrells were bringing in, prices remained
shockingly high. Six coppers for a melon, a silver stag for a bushel
of corn, a dragon for a side of beef or six skinny piglets. Yet there
seemed no lack of buyers. Gaunt men and haggard women crowded
around every wagon and stall, while others even more ragged
looked on sullenly from the mouths of alleys.
“This way,” Bronn said, when they reached the foot of the Hook.
“If you still mean to …?”
“I do.” The riverfront had made a convenient excuse, but Tyrion
had another purpose today. It was not a task he relished, but it must
be done. They turned away from Aegon’s High Hill, into the maze
of smaller streets that clustered around the foot of Visenya’s. Bronn
led the way. Once or twice Tyrion glanced back over his shoulder to
see if they were being followed, but there was nothing to be seen
except the usual rabble: a carter beating his horse, an old woman
throwing nightsoil from her window, two little boys ghting with
sticks, three gold cloaks escorting a captive … they all looked
innocent, but any one of them could be his undoing. Varys had
informers everywhere.
They turned at a corner, and again at the next, and rode slowly
through a crowd of women at a well. Bronn led him along a curving
wynd, through an alley, under a broken archway. They cut through
the rubble where a house had burned and walked their horses up a
shallow ight of stone steps. The buildings were close and poor.

Bronn halted at the mouth of a crooked alley, too narrow for two to
ride abreast. “There’s two jags and then a dead end. The sink is in
the cellar of the last building.”
Tyrion swung down o his horse. “See that no one enters or
leaves till I return. This won’t take long.” His hand went into his
cloak, to make certain the gold was still there in the hidden pocket.
Thirty dragons. A bloody fortune, for a man like him. He waddled up
the alley quickly, anxious to be done with this.
The wine sink was a dismal place, dark and damp, walls pale with
niter, the ceiling so low that Bronn would have had to duck to keep
from hitting his head on the beams. Tyrion Lannister had no such
problem. At this hour, the front room was empty but for a deadeyed woman who sat on a stool behind a rough plank bar. She
handed him a cup of sour wine and said, “In the back.”
The back room was even darker. A ickering candle burned on a
low table, beside a agon of wine. The man behind it scarce looked
a danger; a short man—though all men were tall to Tyrion—with
thinning brown hair, pink cheeks, and a little pot pushing at the
bone buttons of his doeskin jerkin. In his soft hands he held a
twelve-stringed woodharp more deadly than a longsword.
Tyrion sat across from him. “Symon Silver Tongue.”
The man inclined his head. He was bald on top. “My lord Hand,”
he said.
“You mistake me. My father is the King’s Hand. I am no longer
even a nger, I fear.”
“You shall rise again, I am sure. A man like you. My sweet lady
Shae tells me you are newly wed. Would that you had sent for me
earlier. I should have been honored to sing at your feast.”
“The last thing my wife needs is more songs,” said Tyrion. “As for
Shae, we both know she is no lady, and I would thank you never to
speak her name aloud.”
“As the Hand commands,” Symon said.
The last time Tyrion had seen the man, a sharp word had been
enough to set him sweating, but it seemed the singer had found
some courage somewhere. Most like in that agon. Or perhaps Tyrion
himself was to blame for this new boldness. I threatened him, but

nothing ever came of the threat, so now he believes me toothless. He
sighed. “I am told you are a very gifted singer.”
“You are most kind to say so, my lord.”
Tyrion gave him a smile. “I think it is time you brought your
music to the Free Cities. They are great lovers of song in Braavos
and Pentos and Lys, and generous with those who please them.” He
took a sip of wine. It was foul stu , but strong. “A tour of all nine
cities would be best. You wouldn’t want to deny anyone the joy of
hearing you sing. A year in each should su ce.” He reached inside
his cloak, to where the gold was hidden. “With the port closed, you
will need to go to Duskendale to take ship, but my man Bronn will
nd a horse for you, and I would be honored if you would let me
pay your passage …”
“But my lord,” the man objected, “you have never heard me sing.
Pray listen a moment.” His ngers moved deftly over the strings of
the woodharp, and soft music lled the cellar. Symon began to sing.
He rode through the streets of the city,
down from his hill on high,
O’er the wynds and the steps and the cobbles,
he rode to a woman’s sigh.
For she was his secret treasure,
she was his shame and his bliss.
And a chain and a keep are nothing,
compared to a woman’s kiss.
“There’s more,” the man said as he broke o . “Oh, a good deal
more. The refrain is especially nice, I think. For hands of gold are
always cold, but a woman’s hands are warm …”
“Enough.” Tyrion slid his ngers from his cloak, empty. “That’s
not a song I would care to hear again. Ever.”
“No?” Symon Silver Tongue put his harp aside and took a sip of
wine. “A pity. Still, each man has his song, as my old master used to
say when he was teaching me to play. Others might like my tune
better. The queen, perhaps. Or your lord father.”

Tyrion rubbed the scar over his nose, and said, “My father has no
time for singers, and my sister is not as generous as one might
think. A wise man could earn more from silence than from song.”
He could not put it much plainer than that.
Symon seemed to take his meaning quick enough. “You will nd
my price modest, my lord.”
“That’s good to know.” This would not be a matter of thirty
golden dragons, Tyrion feared. “Tell me.”
“At King Jo rey’s wedding feast,” the man said, “there is to be a
tournament of singers.”
“And jugglers, and jesters, and dancing bears.”
“Only one dancing bear, my lord,” said Symon, who had plainly
attended Cersei’s arrangements with far more interest than Tyrion
had, “but seven singers. Galyeon of Cuy, Bethany Fair- ngers,
Aemon Costayne, Alaric of Eysen, Hamish the Harper, Collio
Quaynis, and Orland of Oldtown will compete for a gilded lute with
silver strings … yet unaccountably, no invitation has been
forthcoming for one who is master of them all.”
“Let me guess. Symon Silver Tongue?”
Symon smiled modestly. “I am prepared to prove the truth of my
boast before king and court. Hamish is old, and oft forgets what he
is singing. And Collio, with that absurd Tyroshi accent! If you
understand one word in three, count yourself fortunate.”
“My sweet sister has arranged the feast. Even if I could secure
you this invitation, it might look queer. Seven kingdoms, seven
vows, seven challenges, seventy-seven dishes … but eight singers?
What would the High Septon think?”
“You did not strike me as a pious man, my lord.”
“Piety is not the point. Certain forms must be observed.”
Symon took a sip of wine. “Still … a singer’s life is not without
peril. We ply our trade in alehouses and wine sinks, before unruly
drunkards. If one of your sister’s seven should su er some mishap, I
hope you might consider me to ll his place.” He smiled slyly,
inordinately pleased with himself.
“Six singers would be as unfortunate as eight, to be sure. I will
inquire after the health of Cersei’s seven. If any of them should be

indisposed, my man Bronn will nd you.”
“Very good, my lord.” Symon might have left it at that, but
ushed with triumph, he added, “I shall sing the night of King
Jo rey’s wedding. Should it happen that I am called to court, why, I
will want to o er the king my very best compositions, songs I have
sung a thousand times that are certain to please. If I should nd
myself singing in some dreary winesink, though … well, that would
be an apt occasion to try my new song. For hands of gold are always
cold, but a woman’s hands are warm.”
“That will not be necessary,” said Tyrion. “You have my word as
a Lannister, Bronn will call upon you soon.”
“Very good, my lord.” The balding kettle-bellied singer took up
his woodharp again.
Bronn was waiting with the horses at the mouth of the alley. He
helped Tyrion into his saddle. “When do I take the man to
Duskendale?”
“You don’t.” Tyrion turned his horse. “Give him three days, then
inform him that Hamish the Harper has broken his arm. Tell him
that his clothes will never serve for court, so he must be tted for
new garb at once. He’ll come with you quick enough.” He grimaced.
“You may want his tongue, I understand it’s made of silver. The rest
of him should never be found.”
Bronn grinned. “There’s a pot shop I know in Flea Bottom makes
a savory bowl of brown. All kinds of meat in it, I hear.”
“Make certain I never eat there.” Tyrion spurred to a trot. He
wanted a bath, and the hotter the better.
Even that modest pleasure was denied him, however; no sooner
had he returned to his chambers than Podrick Payne informed him
that he had been summoned to the Tower of the Hand. “His lordship
wants to see you. The Hand. Lord Tywin.”
“I recall who the Hand is, Pod,” Tyrion said. “I lost my nose, not
my wits.”
Bronn laughed. “Don’t bite the boy’s head o now.”
“Why not? He never uses it.” Tyrion wondered what he’d done
now. Or more like, what I have failed to do. A summons from Lord

Tywin always had teeth; his father never sent for him just to share a
meal or a cup of wine, that was for certain.
As he entered his lord father’s solar a few moments later, he
heard a voice saying, “… cherrywood for the scabbards, bound in
red leather and ornamented with a row of lion’s-head studs in pure
gold. Perhaps with garnets for the eyes …”
“Rubies,” Lord Tywin said. “Garnets lack the re.”
Tyrion cleared his throat. “My lord. You sent for me?”
His father glanced up. “I did. Come have a look at this.” A bundle
of oilcloth lay on the table between them, and Lord Tywin had a
longsword in his hand. “A wedding gift for Jo rey,” he told Tyrion.
The light streaming through the diamond-shaped panes of glass
made the blade shimmer black and red as Lord Tywin turned it to
inspect the edge, while the pommel and crossguard amed gold.
“With this fool’s jabber of Stannis and his magic sword, it seemed to
me that we had best give Jo rey something extraordinary as well.
A king should bear a kingly weapon.”
“That’s much too much sword for Jo ,” Tyrion said.
“He will grow into it. Here, feel the weight of it.” He o ered the
weapon hilt rst.
The sword was much lighter than he had expected. As he turned it
in his hand he saw why. Only one metal could be beaten so thin and
still have strength enough to ght with, and there was no mistaking
those ripples, the mark of steel that has been folded back on itself
many thousands of times. “Valyrian steel?”
“Yes,” Lord Tywin said, in a tone of deep satisfaction.
At long last, Father? Valyrian steel blades were scarce and costly,
yet thousands remained in the world, perhaps two hundred in the
Seven Kingdoms alone. It had always irked his father that none
belonged to House Lannister. The old Kings of the Rock had owned
such a weapon, but the greatsword Brightroar had been lost when
the second King Tommen carried it back to Valyria on his fool’s
quest. He had never returned; nor had Uncle Gery, the youngest and
most reckless of his father’s brothers, who had gone seeking after
the lost sword some eight years past.

Thrice at least Lord Tywin had o ered to buy Valyrian
longswords from impoverished lesser houses, but his advances had
always been rmly rebu ed. The little lordlings would gladly part
with their daughters should a Lannister come asking, but they
cherished their old family swords.
Tyrion wondered where the metal for this one had come from. A
few master armorers could rework old Valyrian steel, but the
secrets of its making had been lost when the Doom came to old
Valyria. “The colors are strange,” he commented as he turned the
blade in the sunlight. Most Valyrian steel was a grey so dark it
looked almost black, as was true here as well. But blended into the
folds was a red as deep as the grey. The two colors lapped over one
another without ever touching, each ripple distinct, like waves of
night and blood upon some steely shore. “How did you get this
patterning? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor I, my lord,” said the armorer. “I confess, these colors were
not what I intended, and I do not know that I could duplicate them.
Your lord father had asked for the crimson of your House, and it
was that color I set out to infuse into the metal. But Valyrian steel is
stubborn. These old swords remember, it is said, and they do not
change easily. I worked half a hundred spells and brightened the red
time and time again, but always the color would darken, as if the
blade was drinking the sun from it. And some folds would not take
the red at all, as you can see. If my lords of Lannister are
displeased, I will of course try again, as many times as you should
require, but—”
“No need,” Lord Tywin said. “This will serve.”
“A crimson sword might ash prettily in the sun, but if truth be
told I like these colors better,” said Tyrion. “They have an ominous
beauty … and they make this blade unique. There is no other sword
like it in all the world, I should think.”
“There is one.” The armorer bent over the table and unfolded the
bundle of oilcloth, to reveal a second longsword.
Tyrion put down Jo rey’s sword and took up the other. If not
twins, the two were at least close cousins. This one was thicker and
heavier, a half-inch wider and three inches longer, but they shared

the same ne clean lines and the same distinctive color, the ripples
of blood and night. Three fullers, deeply incised, ran down the
second blade from hilt to point; the king’s sword had only two.
Jo ’s hilt was a good deal more ornate, the arms of its crossguard
done as lions’ paws with ruby claws unsheathed, but both swords
had grips of nely tooled red leather and gold lions’ heads for
pommels.
“Magni cent.” Even in hands as unskilled as Tyrion’s, the blade
felt alive. “I have never felt better balance.”
“It is meant for my son.”
No need to ask which son. Tyrion placed Jaime’s sword back on the
table beside Jo rey’s, wondering if Robb Stark would let his
brother live long enough to wield it. Our father must surely think so,
else why have this blade forged?
“You have done good work, Master Mott,” Lord Tywin told the
armorer. “My steward will see to your payment. And remember,
rubies for the scabbards.”
“I shall, my lord. You are most generous.” The man folded the
swords up in the oilcloth, tucked the bundle under one arm, and
went to his knee. “It is an honor to serve the King’s Hand. I shall
deliver the swords the day before the wedding.”
“See that you do.”
When the guards had seen the armorer out, Tyrion clambered up
onto a chair. “So … a sword for Jo , a sword for Jaime, and not
even a dagger for the dwarf. Is that the way of it, Father?”
“The steel was su cient for two blades, not three. If you have
need of a dagger, take one from the armory. Robert left a hundred
when he died. Gerion gave him a gilded dagger with an ivory grip
and a sapphire pommel for a wedding gift, and half the envoys who
came to court tried to curry favor by presenting His Grace with
jewel-encrusted knives and silver inlay swords.”
Tyrion smiled. “They’d have pleased him more if they’d presented
him with their daughters.”
“No doubt. The only blade he ever used was the hunting knife he
had from Jon Arryn, when he was a boy.” Lord Tywin waved a

hand, dismissing King Robert and all his knives. “What did you nd
at the riverfront?”
“Mud,” said Tyrion, “and a few dead things no one’s bothered to
bury. Before we can open the port again, the Blackwater’s going to
have to be dredged, the sunken ships broken up or raised. Threequarters of the quays need repair, and some may have to be torn
down and rebuilt. The entire sh market is gone, and both the River
Gate and the King’s Gate are splintered from the battering Stannis
gave them and should be replaced. I shudder to think of the cost.” If
you do shit gold, Father, nd a privy and get busy, he wanted to say,
but he knew better.
“You will nd whatever gold is required.”
“Will I? Where? The treasury is empty, I’ve told you that. We’re
not done paying the alchemists for all that wild re, or the smiths
for my chain, and Cersei’s pledged the crown to pay half the costs
of Jo ’s wedding—seventy-seven bloody courses, a thousand guests,
a pie full of doves, singers, jugglers …”
“Extravagance has its uses. We must demonstrate the power and
wealth of Casterly Rock for all the realm to see.”
“Then perhaps Casterly Rock should pay.”
“Why? I have seen Little nger’s accounts. Crown incomes are ten
times higher than they were under Aerys.”
“As are the crown’s expenses. Robert was as generous with his
coin as he was with his cock. Little nger borrowed heavily. From
you, amongst others. Yes, the incomes are considerable, but they
are barely su cient to cover the usury on Little nger’s loans. Will
you forgive the throne’s debt to House Lannister?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Then perhaps seven courses would su ce. Three hundred guests
instead of a thousand. I understand that a marriage can be just as
binding without a dancing bear.”
“The Tyrells would think us niggardly. I will have the wedding
and the waterfront. If you cannot pay for them, say so, and I shall
nd a master of coin who can.”
The disgrace of being dismissed after so short a time was not
something Tyrion cared to su er. “I will nd your money.”

“You will,” his father promised, “and while you are about it, see
if you can nd your wife’s bed as well.”
So the talk has reached even him. “I have, thank you. It’s that piece
of furniture between the window and the hearth, with the velvet
canopy and the mattress stu ed with goose down.”
“I am pleased you know of it. Now perhaps you ought to try and
know the woman who shares it with you.”
Woman? Child, you mean. “Has a spider been whispering in your
ear, or do I have my sweet sister to thank?” Considering the things
that went on beneath Cersei’s blankets, you would think she’d have
the decency to keep her nose out of his. “Tell me, why is it that all
of Sansa’s maids are women in Cersei’s service? I am sick of being
spied upon in my own chambers.”
“If you mislike your wife’s servants, dismiss them and hire ones
more to your liking. That is your right. It is your wife’s maidenhood
that concerns me, not her maids. This … delicacy puzzles me. You
seem to have no di culty bedding whores. Is the Stark girl made
di erently?”
“Why do you take so much bloody interest in where I put my
cock?” Tyrion demanded. “Sansa is too young.”
“She is old enough to be Lady of Winterfell once her brother is
dead. Claim her maidenhood and you will be one step closer to
claiming the north. Get her with child, and the prize is all but won.
Do I need to remind you that a marriage that has not been
consummated can be set aside?”
“By the High Septon or a Council of Faith. Our present High
Septon is a trained seal who barks prettily on command. Moon Boy
is more like to annul my marriage than he is.”
“Perhaps I should have married Sansa Stark to Moon Boy. He
might have known what to do with her.”
Tyrion’s hands clenched on the arms of his chair. “I have heard all
I mean to hear on the subject of my wife’s maidenhead. But so long
as we are discussing marriage, why is it that I hear nothing of my
sister’s impending nuptials? As I recall—”
Lord Tywin cut him o . “Mace Tyrell has refused my o er to
marry Cersei to his heir Willas.”

“Refused our sweet Cersei?” That put Tyrion in a much better
mood.
“When I rst broached the match to him, Lord Tyrell seemed well
enough disposed,” his father said. “A day later, all was changed. The
old woman’s work. She hectors her son unmercifully. Varys claims
she told him that your sister was too old and too used for this
precious one-legged grandson of hers.”
“Cersei must have loved that.” He laughed.
Lord Tywin gave him a chilly look. “She does not know. Nor will
she. It is better for all of us if the o er was never made. See that
you remember that, Tyrion. The o er was never made.”
“What o er?” Tyrion rather suspected that Lord Tyrell might
come to regret this rebu .
“Your sister will be wed. The question is, to whom? I have several
thoughts—” Before he could get to them, there was a rap at the
door and a guardsman stuck in his head to announce Grand Maester
Pycelle. “He may enter,” said Lord Tywin.
Pycelle tottered in on a cane, and stopped long enough to give
Tyrion a look that would curdle milk. His once-magni cent white
beard, which someone had unaccountably shaved o , was growing
back sparse and wispy, leaving him with unsightly pink wattles to
dangle beneath his neck. “My lord Hand,” the old man said, bowing
as deeply as he could without falling, “there has been another bird
from Castle Black. Mayhaps we could consult privily?”
“There’s no need for that.” Lord Tywin waved Grand Maester
Pycelle to a seat. “Tyrion may stay.”
Oooooh, may I? He rubbed his nose, and waited.
Pycelle cleared his throat, which involved a deal of coughing and
hawking. “The letter is from the same Bowen Marsh who sent the
last. The castellan. He writes that Lord Mormont has sent word of
wildlings moving south in vast numbers.”
“The lands beyond the Wall cannot support vast numbers,” said
Lord Tywin rmly. “This warning is not new.”
“This last is, my lord. Mormont sent a bird from the haunted
forest, to report that he was under attack. More ravens have

returned since, but none with letters. This Bowen Marsh fears Lord
Mormont slain, with all his strength.”
Tyrion had rather liked old Jeor Mormont, with his gru manner
and talking bird. “Is this certain?” he asked.
“It is not,” Pycelle admitted, “but none of Mormont’s men have
returned as yet. Marsh fears the wildlings have killed them, and
that the Wall itself may be attacked next.” He fumbled in his robe
and found the paper. “Here is his letter, my lord, a plea to all ve
kings. He wants men, as many men as we can send him.”
“Five kings?” His father was annoyed. “There is one king in
Westeros. Those fools in black might try and remember that if they
wish His Grace to heed them. When you reply, tell him that Renly is
dead and the others are traitors and pretenders.”
“No doubt they will be glad to learn it. The Wall is a world apart,
and news oft reaches them late.” Pycelle bobbed his head up and
down. “What shall I tell Marsh concerning the men he begs for?
Shall we convene the council …”
“There is no need. The Night’s Watch is a pack of thieves, killers,
and baseborn churls, but it occurs to me that they could prove
otherwise, given proper discipline. If Mormont is indeed dead, the
black brothers must choose a new Lord Commander.”
Pycelle gave Tyrion a sly glance. “An excellent thought, my lord.
I know the very man. Janos Slynt.”
Tyrion liked that notion not at all. “The black brothers choose
their own commander,” he reminded them. “Lord Slynt is new to
the Wall. I know, I sent him there. Why should they pick him over a
dozen more senior men?”
“Because,” his father said, in a tone that suggested Tyrion was
quite the simpleton, “if they do not vote as they are told, their Wall
will melt before it sees another man.”
Yes, that would work. Tyrion hitched forward. “Janos Slynt is the
wrong man, Father. We’d do better with the commander of the
Shadow Tower. Or Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.”
“The commander of the Shadow Tower is a Mallister of Seagard.
Eastwatch is held by an ironman.” Neither would serve his
purposes, Lord Tywin’s tone said clear enough.

“Janos Slynt is a butcher’s son,” Tyrion reminded his father
forcefully. “You yourself told me—”
“I recall what I told you. Castle Black is not Harrenhal, however.
The Night’s Watch is not the king’s council. There is a tool for every
task, and a task for every tool.”
Tyrion’s anger ashed. “Lord Janos is a hollow suit of armor who
will sell himself to the highest bidder.”
“I count that a point in his favor. Who is like to bid higher than
us?” He turned to Pycelle. “Send a raven. Write that King Jo rey
was deeply saddened to hear of Lord Commander Mormont’s death,
but regrets that he can spare no men just now, whilst so many
rebels and usurpers remain in the eld. Suggest that matters might
be quite di erent once the throne is secure … provided the king has
full con dence in the leadership of the Watch. In closing, ask Marsh
to pass along His Grace’s fondest regards to his faithful friend and
servant, Lord Janos Slynt.”
“Yes, my lord.” Pycelle bobbed his withered head once more. “I
shall write as the Hand commands. With great pleasure.”
I should have trimmed his head, not his beard, Tyrion re ected. And
Slynt should have gone for a swim with his dear friend Allar Deem. At
least he had not made the same foolish mistake with Symon Silver
Tongue. See there, Father? he wanted to shout. See how fast I learn my
lessons?

SAMWELL

Up in the loft a woman was giving birth noisily, while below a

man lay dying by the re. Samwell Tarly could not say which
frightened him more.
They’d covered poor Bannen with a pile of furs and stoked the
re high, yet all he could say was, “I’m cold. Please. I’m so cold.”
Sam was trying to feed him onion broth, but he could not swallow.
The broth dribbled over his lips and down his chin as fast as Sam
could spoon it in.
“That one’s dead.” Craster eyed the man with indi erence as he
worried at a sausage. “Be kinder to stick a knife in his chest than
that spoon down his throat, you ask me.”
“I don’t recall as we did.” Giant was no more than ve feet tall—
his true name was Bedwyck—but a erce little man for all that.
“Slayer, did you ask Craster for his counsel?”
Sam cringed at the name, but shook his head. He lled another
spoon, brought it to Bannen’s mouth, and tried to ease it between
his lips.
“Food and re,” Giant was saying, “that was all we asked of you.
And you grudge us the food.”
“Be glad I didn’t grudge you re too.” Craster was a thick man
made thicker by the ragged smelly sheepskins he wore day and
night. He had a broad at nose, a mouth that drooped to one side,
and a missing ear. And though his matted hair and tangled beard
might be grey going white, his hard knuckly hands still looked

strong enough to hurt. “I fed you what I could, but you crows are
always hungry. I’m a godly man, else I would have chased you o .
You think I need the likes of him, dying on my oor? You think I
need all your mouths, little man?” The wildling spat. “Crows. When
did a black bird ever bring good to a man’s hall, I ask you? Never.
Never.”
More broth ran from the corner of Bannen’s mouth. Sam dabbed
it away with a corner of his sleeve. The ranger’s eyes were open but
unseeing. “I’m cold,” he said again, so faintly. A maester might have
known how to save him, but they had no maester. Kedge Whiteye
had taken Bannen’s mangled foot o nine days past, in a gout of pus
and blood that made Sam sick, but it was too little, too late. “I’m so
cold,” the pale lips repeated.
About the hall, a ragged score of black brothers squatted on the
oor or sat on rough-hewn benches, drinking cups of the same thin
onion broth and gnawing on chunks of hardbread. A couple were
wounded worse than Bannen, to look at them. Fornio had been
delirious for days, and Ser Byam’s shoulder was oozing a foul
yellow pus. When they’d left Castle Black, Brown Bernarr had been
carrying bags of Myrish re, mustard salve, ground garlic, tansy,
poppy, kingscopper, and other healing herbs. Even sweetsleep,
which gave the gift of painless death. But Brown Bernarr had died
on the Fist and no one had thought to search for Maester Aemon’s
medicines. Hake had known some herblore as well, being a cook,
but Hake was also lost. So it was left to the surviving stewards to
do what they could for the wounded, which was little enough. At
least they are dry here, with a re to warm them. They need more food,
though.
They all needed more food. The men had been grumbling for
days. Clubfoot Karl kept saying how Craster had to have a hidden
larder, and Garth of Oldtown had begun to echo him, when he was
out of the Lord Commander’s hearing. Sam had thought of begging
for something more nourishing for the wounded men at least, but
he did not have the courage. Craster’s eyes were cold and mean,
and whenever the wildling looked his way his hands twitched a
little, as if they wanted to curl up into sts. Does he know I spoke to

Gilly, the last time we were here? he wondered. Did she tell him I said
we’d take her? Did he beat it out of her?
“I’m cold,” said Bannen. “Please. I’m cold.”
For all the heat and smoke in Craster’s hall, Sam felt cold himself.
And tired, so tired. He needed sleep, but whenever he closed his eyes
he dreamed of blowing snow and dead men shambling toward him
with black hands and bright blue eyes.
Up in the loft, Gilly let out a shuddering sob that echoed down
the long low windowless hall. “Push,” he heard one of Craster’s
older wives tell her. “Harder. Harder. Scream if it helps.” She did, so
loud it made Sam wince.
Craster turned his head to glare. “I’ve had a bellyful o’ that
shrieking,” he shouted up. “Give her a rag to bite down on, or I’ll
come up there and give her a taste o’ my hand.”
He would too, Sam knew. Craster had nineteen wives, but none
who’d dare interfere once he started up that ladder. No more than
the black brothers had two nights past, when he was beating one of
the younger girls. There had been mutterings, to be sure. “He’s
killing her,” Garth of Greenaway had said, and Clubfoot Karl
laughed and said, “If he don’t want the little sweetmeat he could
give her to me.” Black Bernarr cursed in a low angry voice, and
Alan of Rosby got up and went outside so he wouldn’t have to hear.
“His roof, his rule,” the ranger Ronnel Harclay had reminded them.
“Craster’s a friend to the Watch.”
A friend, thought Sam, as he listened to Gilly’s mu ed shrieks.
Craster was a brutal man who ruled his wives and daughters with
an iron hand, but his keep was a refuge all the same. “Frozen
crows,” Craster sneered when they straggled in, those few who had
survived the snow, the wights, and the bitter cold. “And not so big a
ock as went north, neither.” Yet he had given them space on his
oor, a roof to keep the snow o , a re to dry them out, and his
wives had brought them cups of hot wine to put some warmth in
their bellies. “Bloody crows,” he called them, but he’d fed them too,
meager though the fare might be.
We are guests, Sam reminded himself. Gilly is his. His daughter, his
wife. His roof, his rule.

The rst time he’d seen Craster’s Keep, Gilly had come begging
for help, and Sam had lent her his black cloak to conceal her belly
when she went to nd Jon Snow. Knights are supposed to defend
women and children. Only a few of the black brothers were knights,
but even so … We all say the words, Sam thought. I am the shield that
guards the realms of men. A woman was a woman, even a wildling
woman. We should help her. We should. It was her child Gilly feared
for; she was frightened that it might be a boy. Craster raised up his
daughters to be his wives, but there were neither men nor boys to
be seen about his compound. Gilly had told Jon that Craster gave
his sons to the gods. If the gods are good, they will send her a daughter,
Sam prayed.
Up in the loft, Gilly choked back a scream. “That’s it,” a woman
said. “Another push, now. Oh, I see his head.”
Hers, Sam thought miserably. Her head, hers.
“Cold,” said Bannen, weakly. “Please. I’m so cold.” Sam put the
bowl and spoon aside, tossed another fur across the dying man, put
another stick on the re. Gilly gave a shriek, and began to pant.
Craster gnawed on his hard black sausage. He had sausages for
himself and his wives, he said, but none for the Watch. “Women,”
he complained. “The way they wail … I had me a fat sow once
birthed a litter of eight with no more’n a grunt.” Chewing, he
turned his head to squint contemptuously at Sam. “She was near as
fat as you, boy. Slayer.” He laughed.
It was more than Sam could stand. He stumbled away from the
repit, stepping awkwardly over and around the men sleeping and
squatting and dying upon the hard-packed earthen oor. The smoke
and screams and moans were making him feel faint. Bending his
head, he pushed through the hanging deerhide aps that served
Craster for a door and stepped out into the afternoon.
The day was cloudy, but still bright enough to blind him after the
gloom of the hall. Some patches of snow weighed down the limbs of
surrounding trees and blanketed the gold and russet hills, but fewer
than there had been. The storm had passed on, and the days at
Craster’s Keep had been … well, not warm perhaps, but not so
bitter cold. Sam could hear the soft drip-drip-drip of water melting

o the icicles that bearded the edge of the thick sod roof. He took a
deep shuddering breath and looked around.
To the west Ollo Lophand and Tim Stone were moving through
the horselines, feeding and watering the remaining garrons.
Downwind, other brothers were skinning and butchering the
animals deemed too weak to go on. Spearmen and archers walked
sentry behind the earthen dikes that were Craster’s only defense
against whatever hid in the wood beyond, while a dozen repits
sent up thick ngers of blue-grey smoke. Sam could hear the distant
echoes of axes at work in the forest, where a work detail was
harvesting enough wood to keep the blazes burning all through the
night. Nights were the bad time. When it got dark. And cold.
There had been no attacks while they had been at Craster’s,
neither wights nor Others. Nor would there be, Craster said. “A
godly man got no cause to fear such. I said as much to that Mance
Rayder once, when he come sni ng round. He never listened, no
more’n you crows with your swords and your bloody res. That
won’t help you none when the white cold comes. Only the gods will
help you then. You best get right with the gods.”
Gilly had spoken of the white cold as well, and she’d told them
what sort of o erings Craster made to his gods. Sam had wanted to
kill him when he heard. There are no laws beyond the Wall, he
reminded himself, and Craster’s a friend to the Watch.
A ragged shout went up from behind the daub-and-wattle hall.
Sam went to take a look. The ground beneath his feet was a slush of
melting snow and soft mud that Dolorous Edd insisted was made of
Craster’s shit. It was thicker than shit, though; it sucked at Sam’s
boots so hard he felt one pull loose.
Back of a vegetable garden and empty sheepfold, a dozen black
brothers were loosing arrows at a butt they’d built of hay and
straw. The slender blond steward they called Sweet Donnel had laid
a shaft just o the bull’s eye at fty yards. “Best that, old man,” he
said.
“Aye. I will.” Ulmer, stooped and grey-bearded and loose of skin
and limb, stepped to the mark and pulled an arrow from the quiver
at his waist. In his youth he had been an outlaw, a member of the

infamous Kingswood Brotherhood. He claimed he’d once put an
arrow through the hand of the White Bull of the Kingsguard to steal
a kiss from the lips of a Dornish princess. He had stolen her jewels
too, and a chest of golden dragons, but it was the kiss he liked to
boast of in his cups.
He notched and drew, all smooth as summer silk, then let y. His
shaft struck the butt an inch inside of Donnel Hill’s. “Will that do,
lad?” he asked, stepping back.
“Well enough,” said the younger man, grudgingly. “The
crosswind helped you. It blew more strongly when I loosed.”
“You ought to have allowed for it, then. You have a good eye and
a steady hand, but you’ll need a deal more to best a man of the
kingswood. Fletcher Dick it was who showed me how to bend the
bow, and no ner archer ever lived. Have I told you about old Dick,
now?”
“Only three hundred times.” Every man at Castle Black had heard
Ulmer’s tales of the great outlaw band of yore; of Simon Toyne and
the Smiling Knight, Oswyn Longneck the Thrice-Hanged, Wenda the
White Fawn, Fletcher Dick, Big Belly Ben, and all the rest.
Searching for escape, Sweet Donnel looked about and spied Sam
standing in the muck. “Slayer,” he called. “Come, show us how you
slew the Other.” He held out the tall yew longbow.
Sam turned red. “It wasn’t an arrow, it was a dagger,
dragonglass …” He knew what would happen if he took the bow.
He would miss the butt and send the arrow sailing over the dike o
into the trees. Then he’d hear the laughter.
“No matter,” said Alan of Rosby, another ne bowman. “We’re all
keen to see the Slayer shoot. Aren’t we, lads?”
He could not face them; the mocking smiles, the mean little jests,
the contempt in their eyes. Sam turned to go back the way he’d
come, but his right foot sank deep in the muck, and when he tried
to pull it out his boot came o . He had to kneel to wrench it free,
laughter ringing in his ears. Despite all his socks, the snowmelt had
soaked through to his toes by the time he made his escape. Useless,
he thought miserably. My father saw me true. I have no right to be
alive when so many brave men are dead.

Grenn was tending the repit south of the compound gate,
stripped to the waist as he split logs. His face was red with exertion,
the sweat steaming o his skin. But he grinned as Sam came
chu ng up. “The Others get your boot, Slayer?”
Him too? “It was the mud. Please don’t call me that.”
“Why not?” Grenn sounded honestly puzzled. “It’s a good name,
and you came by it fairly.”
Pyp always teased Grenn about being thick as a castle wall, so
Sam explained patiently. “It’s just a di erent way of calling me a
coward,” he said, standing on his left leg and wriggling back into
his muddy boot. “They’re mocking me, the same way they mock
Bedwyck by calling him ‘Giant.’ ”
“He’s not a giant, though,” said Grenn, “and Paul was never
small. Well, maybe when he was a babe at the breast, but not after.
You did slay the Other, though, so it’s not the same.”
“I just … I never … I was scared!”
“No more than me. It’s only Pyp who says I’m too dumb to be
frightened. I get as frightened as anyone.” Grenn bent to scoop up a
split log, and tossed it into the re. “I used to be scared of Jon,
whenever I had to ght him. He was so quick, and he fought like he
meant to kill me.” The green damp wood sat in the ames, smoking
before it took re. “I never said, though. Sometimes I think
everyone is just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are.
Maybe pretending is how you get brave, I don’t know. Let them call
you Slayer, who cares?”
“You never liked Ser Alliser to call you Aurochs.”
“He was saying I was big and stupid.” Grenn scratched at his
beard. “If Pyp wanted to call me Aurochs, though, he could. Or you,
or Jon. An aurochs is a erce strong beast, so that’s not so bad, and
I am big, and getting bigger. Wouldn’t you rather be Sam the Slayer
than Ser Piggy?”
“Why can’t I just be Samwell Tarly?” He sat down heavily on a
wet log that Grenn had yet to split. “It was the dragonglass that
slew it. Not me, the dragonglass.”
He had told them. He had told them all. Some of them didn’t
believe him, he knew. Dirk had shown Sam his dirk and said, “I got

iron, what do I want with glass?” Black Bernarr and the three
Garths made it plain that they doubted his whole story, and Rolley
of Sisterton came right out and said, “More like you stabbed some
rustling bushes and it turned out to be Small Paul taking a shit, so
you came up with a lie.”
But Dywen listened, and Dolorous Edd, and they made Sam and
Grenn tell the Lord Commander. Mormont frowned all through the
tale and asked pointed questions, but he was too cautious a man to
shun any possible advantage. He asked Sam for all the dragonglass
in his pack, though that was little enough. Whenever Sam thought
of the cache Jon had found buried beneath the Fist, it made him
want to cry. There’d been dagger blades and spearheads, and two or
three hundred arrowheads at least. Jon had made daggers for
himself, Sam, and Lord Commander Mormont, and he’d given Sam a
spearhead, an old broken horn, and some arrowheads. Grenn had
taken a handful of arrowheads as well, but that was all.
So now all they had was Mormont’s dagger and the one Sam had
given Grenn, plus nineteen arrows and a tall hardwood spear with a
black dragonglass head. The sentries passed the spear along from
watch to watch, while Mormont had divided the arrows among his
best bowmen. Muttering Bill, Garth Greyfeather, Ronnel Harclay,
Sweet Donnel Hill, and Alan of Rosby had three apiece, and Ulmer
had four. But even if they made every shaft tell, they’d soon be
down to re arrows like all the rest. They had loosed hundreds of
re arrows on the Fist, yet still the wights kept coming.
It will not be enough, Sam thought. Craster’s sloping palisades of
mud and melting snow would hardly slow the wights, who’d
climbed the much steeper slopes of the Fist to swarm over the
ringwall. And instead of three hundred brothers drawn up in
disciplined ranks to meet them, the wights would nd forty-one
ragged survivors, nine too badly hurt to ght. Forty-four had come
straggling into Craster’s out of the storm, out of the sixty-odd who’d
cut their way free of the Fist, but three of those had died of their
wounds, and Bannen would soon make four.
“Do you think the wights are gone?” Sam asked Grenn. “Why
don’t they come nish us?”

“They only come when it’s cold.”
“Yes,” said Sam, “but is it the cold that brings the wights, or the
wights that bring the cold?”
“Who cares?” Grenn’s axe sent wood chips ying. “They come
together, that’s what matters. Hey, now that we know that
dragonglass kills them, maybe they won’t come at all. Maybe
they’re frightened of us now!”
Sam wished he could believe that, but it seemed to him that when
you were dead, fear had no more meaning than pain or love or
duty. He wrapped his hands around his legs, sweating under his
layers of wool and leather and fur. The dragonglass dagger had
melted the pale thing in the woods, true … but Grenn was talking
like it would do the same to the wights. We don’t know that, he
thought. We don’t know anything, really. I wish Jon was here. He liked
Grenn, but he couldn’t talk to him the same way. Jon wouldn’t call
me Slayer, I know. And I could talk to him about Gilly’s baby. Jon had
ridden o with Qhorin Halfhand, though, and they’d had no word of
him since. He had a dragonglass dagger too, but did he think to use it?
Is he lying dead and frozen in some ravine … or worse, is he dead and
walking?
He could not understand why the gods would want to take Jon
Snow and Bannen and leave him, craven and clumsy as he was. He
should have died on the Fist, where he’d pissed himself three times
and lost his sword besides. And he would have died in the woods if
Small Paul had not come along to carry him. I wish it was all a
dream. Then I could wake up. How ne that would be, to wake back
on the Fist of the First Men with all his brothers still around him,
even Jon and Ghost. Or even better, to wake in Castle Black behind
the Wall and go to the common room for a bowl of Three-Finger
Hobb’s thick cream of wheat, with a big spoon of butter melting in
the middle and a dollop of honey besides. Just the thought of it
made his empty stomach rumble.
“Snow.”
Sam glanced up at the sound. Lord Commander Mormont’s raven
was circling the re, beating the air with wide black wings.
“Snow,” the bird cawed. “Snow, snow.”

Wherever the raven went, Mormont soon followed. The Lord
Commander emerged from beneath the trees, mounted on his
garron between old Dywen and the fox-faced ranger Ronnel
Harclay, who’d been raised to Thoren Smallwood’s place. The
spearmen at the gate shouted a challenge, and the Old Bear
returned a gru , “Who in seven hells do you think goes there? Did
the Others take your eyes?” He rode between the gateposts, one
bearing a ram’s skull and the other the skull of a bear, then reined
up, raised a st, and whistled. The raven came apping down at his
call.
“My lord,” Sam heard Ronnel Harclay say, “we have only twentytwo mounts, and I doubt half will reach the Wall.”
“I know that,” Mormont grumbled. “We must go all the same.
Craster’s made that plain.” He glanced to the west, where a bank of
dark clouds hid the sun. “The gods gave us a respite, but for how
long?” Mormont swung down from the saddle, jolting his raven
back into the air. He saw Sam then, and bellowed, “Tarly!”
“Me?” Sam got awkwardly to his feet.
“Me?” The raven landed on the old man’s head. “Me?”
“Is your name Tarly? Do you have a brother hereabouts? Yes,
you. Close your mouth and come with me.”
“With you?” The words tumbled out in a squeak.
Lord Commander Mormont gave him a withering look. “You are
a man of the Night’s Watch. Try not to soil your smallclothes every
time I look at you. Come, I said.” His boots made squishing sounds
in the mud, and Sam had to hurry to keep up. “I’ve been thinking
about this dragonglass of yours.”
“It’s not mine,” Sam said.
“Jon Snow’s dragonglass, then. If dragonglass daggers are what
we need, why do we have only two of them? Every man on the
Wall should be armed with one the day he says his words.”
“We never knew …”
“We never knew! But we must have known once. The Night’s
Watch has forgotten its true purpose, Tarly. You don’t build a wall
seven hundred feet high to keep savages in skins from stealing
women. The Wall was made to guard the realms of men … and not

against other men, which is all the wildlings are when you come
right down to it. Too many years, Tarly, too many hundreds and
thousands of years. We lost sight of the true enemy. And now he’s
here, but we don’t know how to ght him. Is dragonglass made by
dragons, as the smallfolk like to say?”
“The m-maesters think not,” Sam stammered. “The maesters say it
comes from the res of the earth. They call it obsidian.”
Mormont snorted. “They can call it lemon pie for all I care. If it
kills as you claim, I want more of it.”
Sam stumbled. “Jon found more, on the Fist. Hundreds of
arrowheads, spearheads as well …”
“So you said. Small good it does us there. To reach the Fist again
we’d need to be armed with the weapons we won’t have until we
reach the bloody Fist. And there are still the wildlings to deal with.
We need to nd dragonglass someplace else.”
Sam had almost forgotten about the wildlings, so much had
happened since. “The children of the forest used dragonglass
blades,” he said. “They’d know where to nd obsidian.”
“The children of the forest are all dead,” said Mormont. “The First
Men killed half of them with bronze blades, and the Andals nished
the job with iron. Why a glass dagger should—”
The Old Bear broke o as Craster emerged from between the
deerhide aps of his door. The wildling smiled, revealing a mouth
of brown rotten teeth. “I have a son.”
“Son,” cawed Mormont’s raven. “Son, son, son.”
The Lord Commander’s face was sti . “I’m glad for you.”
“Are you, now? Me, I’ll be glad when you and yours are gone.
Past time, I’m thinking.”
“As soon as our wounded are strong enough …”
“They’re strong as they’re like to get, old crow, and both of us
know it. Them that’s dying, you know them too, cut their bloody
throats and be done with it. Or leave them, if you don’t have the
stomach, and I’ll sort them out myself.”
Lord Commander Mormont bristled. “Thoren Smallwood claimed
you were a friend to the Watch—”

“Aye,” said Craster. “I gave you all I could spare, but winter’s
coming on, and now the girl’s stuck me with another squalling
mouth to feed.”
“We could take him,” someone squeaked.
Craster’s head turned. His eyes narrowed. He spat on Sam’s foot.
“What did you say, Slayer?”
Sam opened and closed his mouth. “I … I … I only meant … if
you didn’t want him … his mouth to feed … with winter coming on,
we … we could take him, and …”
“My son. My blood. You think I’d give him to you crows?”
“I only thought …” You have no sons, you expose them, Gilly said as
much, you leave them in the woods, that’s why you have only wives
here, and daughters who grow up to be wives.
“Be quiet, Sam,” said Lord Commander Mormont. “You’ve said
enough. Too much. Inside.”
“M-my lord—”
“Inside!”
Red-faced, Sam pushed through the deerhides, back into the
gloom of the hall. Mormont followed. “How great a fool are you?”
the old man said within, his voice choked and angry. “Even if
Craster gave us the child, he’d be dead before we reached the Wall.
We need a newborn babe to care for near as much as we need more
snow. Do you have milk to feed him in those big teats of yours? Or
did you mean to take the mother too?”
“She wants to come,” Sam said. “She begged me …”
Mormont raised a hand. “I will hear no more of this, Tarly.
You’ve been told and told to stay well away from Craster’s wives.”
“She’s his daughter,” Sam said feebly.
“Go see to Bannen. Now. Before you make me wroth.”
“Yes, my lord.” Sam hurried o quivering.
But when he reached the re, it was only to nd Giant pulling a
fur cloak up over Bannen’s head. “He said he was cold,” the small
man said. “I hope he’s gone someplace warm, I do.”
“His wound …” said Sam.
“Bugger his wound.” Dirk prodded the corpse with his foot. “His
foot was hurt. I knew a man back in my village lost a foot. He lived

to nine-and-forty.”
“The cold,” said Sam. “He was never warm.”
“He was never fed,” said Dirk. “Not proper. That bastard Craster
starved him dead.”
Sam looked around anxiously, but Craster had not returned to the
hall. If he had, things might have grown ugly. The wildling hated
bastards, though the rangers said he was baseborn himself, fathered
on a wildling woman by some long-dead crow.
“Craster’s got his own to feed,” said Giant. “All these women.
He’s given us what he can.”
“Don’t you bloody believe it. The day we leave, he’ll tap a keg o’
mead and sit down to feast on ham and honey. And laugh at us, out
starving in the snow. He’s a bloody wildling, is all he is. There’s
none o’ them friends of the Watch.” He kicked at Bannen’s corpse.
“Ask him if you don’t believe me.”
They burned the ranger’s corpse at sunset, in the re that Grenn
had been feeding earlier that day. Tim Stone and Garth of Oldtown
carried out the naked corpse and swung him twice between them
before heaving him into the ames. The surviving brothers divided
up his clothes, his weapons, his armor, and everything else he
owned. At Castle Black, the Night’s Watch buried its dead with all
due ceremony. They were not at Castle Black, though. And bones do
not come back as wights.
“His name was Bannen,” Lord Commander Mormont said, as the
ames took him. “He was a brave man, a good ranger. He came to
us from … where did he come from?”
“Down White Harbor way,” someone called out.
Mormont nodded. “He came to us from White Harbor, and never
failed in his duty. He kept his vows as best he could, rode far,
fought ercely. We shall never see his like again.”
“And now his watch is ended,” the black brothers said, in solemn
chant.
“And now his watch is ended,” Mormont echoed.
“Ended,” cried his raven. “Ended.”
Sam was red-eyed and sick from the smoke. When he looked at
the re, he thought he saw Bannen sitting up, his hands coiling into

sts as if to ght o the ames that were consuming him, but it was
only for an instant, before the swirling smoke hid all. The worst
thing was the smell, though. If it had been a foul unpleasant smell
he might have stood it, but his burning brother smelled so much
like roast pork that Sam’s mouth began to water, and that was so
horrible that as soon as the bird squawked “Ended” he ran behind
the hall to throw up in the ditch.
He was there on his knees in the mud when Dolorous Edd came
up. “Digging for worms, Sam? Or are you just sick?”
“Sick,” said Sam weakly, wiping his mouth with the back of his
hand. “The smell …”
“Never knew Bannen could smell so good.” Edd’s tone was as
morose as ever. “I had half a mind to carve a slice o him. If we
had some applesauce, I might have done it. Pork’s always best with
applesauce, I nd.” Edd undid his laces and pulled out his cock.
“You best not die, Sam, or I fear I might succumb. There’s bound to
be more crackling on you than Bannen ever had, and I never could
resist a bit of crackling.” He sighed as his piss arced out, yellow and
steaming. “We ride at rst light, did you hear? Sun or snow, the Old
Bear tells me.”
Sun or snow. Sam glanced up anxiously at the sky. “Snow?” he
squeaked. “We … ride? All of us?”
“Well, no, some will need to walk.” He shook himself. “Dywen
now, he says we need to learn to ride dead horses, like the Others
do. He claims it would save on feed. How much could a dead horse
eat?” Edd laced himself back up. “Can’t say I fancy the notion. Once
they gure a way to work a dead horse, we’ll be next. Likely I’ll be
the rst too. ‘Edd,’ they’ll say, ‘dying’s no excuse for lying down no
more, so get on up and take this spear, you’ve got the watch
tonight.’ Well, I shouldn’t be so gloomy. Might be I’ll die before
they work it out.”
Might be we’ll all die, and sooner than we’d like, Sam thought, as he
climbed awkwardly to his feet.
When Craster learned that his unwanted guests would be
departing on the morrow, the wildling became almost amiable, or
as close to amiable as Craster ever got. “Past time,” he said, “you

don’t belong here, I told you that. All the same, I’ll see you o
proper, with a feast. Well, a feed. My wives can roast them horses
you slaughtered, and I’ll nd some beer and bread.” He smiled his
brown smile. “Nothing better than beer and horsemeat. If you can’t
ride ’em, eat ’em, that’s what I say.”
His wives and daughters dragged out the benches and the long
log tables, and cooked and served as well. Except for Gilly, Sam
could hardly tell the women apart. Some were old and some were
young and some were only girls, but a lot of them were Craster’s
daughters as well as his wives, and they all looked sort of alike. As
they went about their work, they spoke in soft voices to each other,
but never to the men in black.
Craster owned but one chair. He sat in it, clad in a sleeveless
sheepskin jerkin. His thick arms were covered with white hair, and
about one wrist was a twisted ring of gold. Lord Commander
Mormont took the place at the top of the bench to his right, while
the brothers crowded in knee to knee; a dozen remained outside to
guard the gate and tend the res.
Sam found a place between Grenn and Orphan Oss, his stomach
rumbling. The charred horsemeat dripped with grease as Craster’s
wives turned the spits above the repit, and the smell of it set his
mouth to watering again, but that reminded him of Bannen. Hungry
as he was, Sam knew he would retch if he so much as tried a bite.
How could they eat the poor faithful garrons who had carried them
so far? When Craster’s wives brought onions, he seized one eagerly.
One side was black with rot, but he cut that part o with his dagger
and ate the good half raw. There was bread as well, but only two
loaves. When Ulmer asked for more, the woman only shook her
head. That was when the trouble started.
“Two loaves?” Clubfoot Karl complained from down the bench.
“How stupid are you women? We need more bread than this!”
Lord Commander Mormont gave him a hard look. “Take what
you’re given, and be thankful. Would you sooner be out in the
storm eating snow?”
“We’ll be there soon enough.” Clubfoot Karl did not inch from
the Old Bear’s wrath. “I’d sooner eat what Craster’s hiding, my

lord.”
Craster narrowed his eyes. “I gave you crows enough. I got me
women to feed.”
Dirk speared a chunk of horsemeat. “Aye. So you admit you got a
secret larder. How else to make it through a winter?”
“I’m a godly man …” Craster started.
“You’re a niggardly man,” said Karl, “and a liar.”
“Hams,” Garth of Oldtown said, in a reverent voice. “There were
pigs, last time we come. I bet he’s got hams hid someplace. Smoked
and salted hams, and bacon too.”
“Sausage,” said Dirk. “Them long black ones, they’re like rocks,
they keep for years. I bet he’s got a hundred hanging in some
cellar.”
“Oats,” suggested Ollo Lophand. “Corn. Barley.”
“Corn,” said Mormont’s raven, with a ap of the wings. “Corn,
corn, corn, corn, corn.”
“Enough,” said Lord Commander Mormont over the bird’s raucous
calls. “Be quiet, all of you. This is folly.”
“Apples,” said Garth of Greenaway. “Barrels and barrels of crisp
autumn apples. There are apple trees out there, I saw ’em.”
“Dried berries. Cabbages. Pine nuts.”
“Corn. Corn. Corn.”
“Salt mutton. There’s a sheepfold. He’s got casks and casks of
mutton laid by, you know he does.”
Craster looked t to spit them all by then. Lord Commander
Mormont rose. “Silence. I’ll hear no more such talk.”
“Then stu bread in your ears, old man.” Clubfoot Karl pushed
back from the table. “Or did you swallow your bloody crumb
already?”
Sam saw the Old Bear’s face go red. “Have you forgotten who I
am? Sit, eat, and be silent. That is a command.”
No one spoke. No one moved. All eyes were on the Lord
Commander and the big clubfooted ranger, as the two of them
stared at each other across the table. It seemed to Sam that Karl
broke rst, and was about to sit, though sullenly …

… but Craster stood, and his axe was in his hand. The big black
steel axe that Mormont had given him as a guest gift. “No,” he
growled. “You’ll not sit. No one who calls me niggard will sleep
beneath my roof nor eat at my board. Out with you, cripple. And
you and you and you.” He jabbed the head of the axe toward Dirk
and Garth and Garth in turn. “Go sleep in the cold with empty
bellies, the lot o’ you, or …”
“Bloody bastard!” Sam heard one of the Garths curse. He never
saw which one.
“Who calls me bastard?” Craster roared, sweeping platter and meat
and wine cups from the table with his left hand while lifting the axe
with his right.
“It’s no more than all men know,” Karl answered.
Craster moved quicker than Sam would have believed possible,
vaulting across the table with axe in hand. A woman screamed,
Garth Greenaway and Orphan Oss drew knives, Karl stumbled back
and tripped over Ser Byam lying wounded on the oor. One instant
Craster was coming after him spitting curses. The next he was
spitting blood. Dirk had grabbed him by the hair, yanked his head
back, and opened his throat ear to ear with one long slash. Then he
gave him a rough shove, and the wildling fell forward, crashing face
rst across Ser Byam. Byam screamed in agony as Craster drowned
in his own blood, the axe slipping from his ngers. Two of Craster’s
wives were wailing, a third cursed, a fourth ew at Sweet Donnel
and tried to scratch his eyes out. He knocked her to the oor. The
Lord Commander stood over Craster’s corpse, dark with anger. “The
gods will curse us,” he cried. “There is no crime so foul as for a
guest to bring murder into a man’s hall. By all the laws of the
hearth, we—”
“There are no laws beyond the Wall, old man. Remember?” Dirk
grabbed one of Craster’s wives by the arm, and shoved the point of
his bloody dirk up under her chin. “Show us where he keeps the
food, or you’ll get the same as he did, woman.”
“Unhand her.” Mormont took a step. “I’ll have your head for this,
you—”

Garth of Greenaway blocked his path, and Ollo Lophand yanked
him back. They both had blades in hand. “Hold your tongue,” Ollo
warned. Instead the Lord Commander grabbed for his dagger. Ollo
had only one hand, but that was quick. He twisted free of the old
man’s grasp, shoved the knife into Mormont’s belly, and yanked it
out again, all red. And then the world went mad.
Later, much later, Sam found himself sitting crosslegged on the
oor, with Mormont’s head in his lap. He did not remember how
they’d gotten there, or much of anything else that had happened
after the Old Bear was stabbed. Garth of Greenaway had killed
Garth of Oldtown, he recalled, but not why. Rolley of Sisterton had
fallen from the loft and broken his neck after climbing the ladder to
have a taste of Craster’s wives. Grenn …
Grenn had shouted and slapped him, and then he’d run away with
Giant and Dolorous Edd and some others. Craster still sprawled
across Ser Byam, but the wounded knight no longer moaned. Four
men in black sat on the bench eating chunks of burned horsemeat
while Ollo coupled with a weeping woman on the table.
“Tarly.” When he tried to speak, the blood dribbled from the Old
Bear’s mouth down into his beard. “Tarly, go. Go.”
“Where, my lord?” His voice was at and lifeless. I am not afraid.
It was a queer feeling. “There’s no place to go.”
“The Wall. Make for the Wall. Now.”
“Now,” squawked the raven. “Now. Now.” The bird walked up the
old man’s arm to his chest, and plucked a hair from his beard.
“You must. Must tell them.”
“Tell them what, my lord?” Sam asked politely.
“All. The Fist. The wildlings. Dragonglass. This. All.” His
breathing was very shallow now, his voice a whisper. “Tell my son.
Jorah. Tell him, take the black. My wish. Dying wish.”
“Wish?” The raven cocked its head, beady black eyes shining.
“Corn?” the bird asked.
“No corn,” said Mormont feebly. “Tell Jorah. Forgive him. My
son. Please. Go.”
“It’s too far,” said Sam. “I’ll never reach the Wall, my lord.” He
was so very tired. All he wanted was to sleep, to sleep and sleep

and never wake, and he knew that if he just stayed here soon
enough Dirk or Ollo Lophand or Clubfoot Karl would get angry with
him and grant his wish, just to see him die. “I’d sooner stay with
you. See, I’m not frightened anymore. Of you, or … of anything.”
“You should be,” said a woman’s voice.
Three of Craster’s wives were standing over them. Two were
haggard old women he did not know, but Gilly was between them,
all bundled up in skins and cradling a bundle of brown and white
fur that must have held her baby. “We’re not supposed to talk to
Craster’s wives,” Sam told them. “We have orders.”
“That’s done now,” said the old woman on the right.
“The blackest crows are down in the cellar, gorging,” said the old
woman on the left, “or up in the loft with the young ones. They’ll
be back soon, though. Best you be gone when they do. The horses
run o , but Dyah’s caught two.”
“You said you’d help me,” Gilly reminded him.
“I said Jon would help you. Jon’s brave, and he’s a good ghter,
but I think he’s dead now. I’m a craven. And fat. Look how fat I am.
Besides, Lord Mormont’s hurt. Can’t you see? I couldn’t leave the
Lord Commander.”
“Child,” said the other old woman, “that old crow’s gone before
you. Look.”
Mormont’s head was still in his lap, but his eyes were open and
staring and his lips no longer moved. The raven cocked its head and
squawked, then looked up at Sam. “Corn?”
“No corn. He has no corn.” Sam closed the Old Bear’s eyes and
tried to think of a prayer, but all that came to mind was, “Mother
have mercy. Mother have mercy. Mother have mercy.”
“Your mother can’t help you none,” said the old woman on the
left. “That dead old man can’t neither. You take his sword and you
take that big warm fur cloak o’ his and you take his horse if you can
nd him. And you go.”
“The girl don’t lie,” the old woman on the right said. “She’s my
girl, and I beat the lying out of her early on. You said you’d help
her. Do what Ferny says, boy. Take the girl and be quick about it.”
“Quick,” the raven said. “Quick quick quick.”

“Where?” asked Sam, puzzled. “Where should I take her?”
“Someplace warm,” the two old women said as one.
Gilly was crying. “Me and the babe. Please. I’ll be your wife, like
I was Craster’s. Please, ser crow. He’s a boy, just like Nella said he’d
be. If you don’t take him, they will.”
“They?” said Sam, and the raven cocked its black head and
echoed, “They. They. They.”
“The boy’s brothers,” said the old woman on the left. “Craster’s
sons. The white cold’s rising out there, crow. I can feel it in my
bones. These poor old bones don’t lie. They’ll be here soon, the
sons.”

ARYA

Her eyes had grown accustomed to blackness. When Harwin
pulled the hood o her head, the ruddy glare inside the hollow hill
made Arya blink like some stupid owl.
A huge repit had been dug in the center of the earthen oor, and
its ames rose swirling and crackling toward the smoke-stained
ceiling. The walls were equal parts stone and soil, with huge white
roots twisting through them like a thousand slow pale snakes.
People were emerging from between those roots as she watched;
edging out from the shadows for a look at the captives, stepping
from the mouths of pitch-black tunnels, popping out of crannies and
crevices on all sides. In one place on the far side of the re, the
roots formed a kind of stairway up to a hollow in the earth where a
man sat almost lost in the tangle of weirwood.
Lem unhooded Gendry. “What is this place?” he asked.
“An old place, deep and secret. A refuge where neither wolves
nor lions come prowling.”
Neither wolves nor lions. Arya’s skin prickled. She remembered the
dream she’d had, and the taste of blood when she tore the man’s
arm from his shoulder.
Big as the re was, the cave was bigger; it was hard to tell where
it began and where it ended. The tunnel mouths might have been
two feet deep or gone on two miles. Arya saw men and women and
little children, all of them watching her warily.

Greenbeard said, “Here’s the wizard, skinny squirrel. You’ll get
your answers now.” He pointed toward the re, where Tom
Sevenstrings stood talking to a tall thin man with oddments of old
armor buckled on over his ratty pink robes. That can’t be Thoros of
Myr. Arya remembered the red priest as fat, with a smooth face and
a shiny bald head. This man had a droopy face and a full head of
shaggy grey hair. Something Tom said made him look at her, and
Arya thought he was about to come over to her. Only then the Mad
Huntsman appeared, shoving his captive down into the light, and
she and Gendry were forgotten.
The Huntsman had turned out to be a stocky man in patched tan
leathers, balding and weak-chinned and quarrelsome. At Stoney Sept
she had thought that Lem and Greenbeard might be torn to pieces
when they faced him at the crow cages to claim his captive for the
lightning lord. The hounds had been all around them, sni ng and
snarling. But Tom o’ Sevens soothed them with his playing, Tansy
marched across the square with her apron full of bones and fatty
mutton, and Lem pointed out Anguy in the brothel window,
standing with an arrow notched. The Mad Huntsman had cursed
them all for lickspittles, but nally he had agreed to take his prize
to Lord Beric for judgment.
They had bound his wrists with hempen rope, strung a noose
around his neck, and pulled a sack down over his head, but even so
there was danger in the man. Arya could feel it across the cave.
Thoros—if that was Thoros—met captor and captive halfway to the
re. “How did you take him?” the priest asked.
“The dogs caught the scent. He was sleeping o a drunk under a
willow tree, if you believe it.”
“Betrayed by his own kind.” Thoros turned to the prisoner and
yanked his hood o . “Welcome to our humble hall, dog. It is not so
grand as Robert’s throne room, but the company is better.”
The shifting ames painted Sandor Clegane’s burned face with
orange shadows, so he looked even more terrible than he did in
daylight. When he pulled at the rope that bound his wrists, akes of
dry blood fell o . The Hound’s mouth twitched. “I know you,” he
said to Thoros.

“You did. In mêlées, you’d curse my aming sword, though thrice
I overthrew you with it.”
“Thoros of Myr. You used to shave your head.”
“To betoken a humble heart, but in truth my heart was vain.
Besides, I lost my razor in the woods.” The priest slapped his belly.
“I am less than I was, but more. A year in the wild will melt the
esh o a man. Would that I could nd a tailor to take in my skin. I
might look young again, and pretty maids would shower me with
kisses.”
“Only the blind ones, priest.”
The outlaws hooted, none so loud as Thoros. “Just so. Yet I am
not the false priest you knew. The Lord of Light has woken in my
heart. Many powers long asleep are waking, and there are forces
moving in the land. I have seen them in my ames.”
The Hound was unimpressed. “Bugger your ames. And you as
well.” He looked around at the others. “You keep queer company
for a holy man.”
“These are my brothers,” Thoros said simply.
Lem Lemoncloak pushed forward. He and Greenbeard were the
only men there tall enough to look the Hound in the eye. “Be
careful how you bark, dog. We hold your life in our hands.”
“Best wipe the shit o your ngers, then.” The Hound laughed.
“How long have you been hiding in this hole?”
Anguy the Archer bristled at the suggestion of cowardice. “Ask
the goat if we’ve hidden, Hound. Ask your brother. Ask the lord of
leeches. We’ve bloodied them all.”
“You lot? Don’t make me laugh. You look more swineherds than
soldiers.”
“Some of us was swineherds,” said a short man Arya did not
know. “And some was tanners or singers or masons. But that was
before the war come.”
“When we left King’s Landing we were men of Winterfell and
men of Darry and men of Blackhaven, Mallery men and Wylde men.
We were knights and squires and men-at-arms, lords and
commoners, bound together only by our purpose.” The voice came
from the man seated amongst the weirwood roots halfway up the

wall. “Six score of us set out to bring the king’s justice to your
brother.” The speaker was descending the tangle of steps toward the
oor. “Six score brave men and true, led by a fool in a starry cloak.”
A scarecrow of a man, he wore a ragged black cloak speckled with
stars and an iron breastplate dinted by a hundred battles. A thicket
of red-gold hair hid most of his face, save for a bald spot above his
left ear where his head had been smashed in. “More than eighty of
our company are dead now, but others have taken up the swords
that fell from their hands.” When he reached the oor, the outlaws
moved aside to let him pass. One of his eyes was gone, Arya saw,
the esh about the socket scarred and puckered, and he had a dark
black ring all around his neck. “With their help, we ght on as best
we can, for Robert and the realm.”
“Robert?” rasped Sandor Clegane, incredulous.
“Ned Stark sent us out,” said pothelmed Jack-Be-Lucky, “but he
was sitting the Iron Throne when he gave us our commands, so we
were never truly his men, but Robert’s.”
“Robert is the king of the worms now. Is that why you’re down in
the earth, to keep his court for him?”
“The king is dead,” the scarecrow knight admitted, “but we are
still king’s men, though the royal banner we bore was lost at the
Mummer’s Ford when your brother’s butchers fell upon us.” He
touched his breast with a st. “Robert is slain, but his realm
remains. And we defend her.”
“Her?” The Hound snorted. “Is she your mother, Dondarrion? Or
your whore?”
Dondarrion? Beric Dondarrion had been handsome; Sansa’s friend
Jeyne had fallen in love with him. Even Jeyne Poole was not so
blind as to think this man was fair. Yet when Arya looked at him
again, she saw it; the remains of a forked purple lightning bolt on
the cracked enamel of his breastplate.
“Rocks and trees and rivers, that’s what your realm is made of,”
the Hound was saying. “Do the rocks need defending? Robert
wouldn’t have thought so. If he couldn’t fuck it, ght it, or drink it,
it bored him, and so would you … you brave companions.”

Outrage swept the hollow hill. “Call us that name again, dog, and
you’ll swallow that tongue.” Lem drew his longsword.
The Hound stared at the blade with contempt. “Here’s a brave
man, baring steel on a bound captive. Untie me, why don’t you?
We’ll see how brave you are then.” He glanced at the Mad
Huntsman behind him. “How about you? Or did you leave all your
courage in your kennels?”
“No, but I should have left you in a crow cage.” The Huntsman
drew a knife. “I might still.”
The Hound laughed in his face.
“We are brothers here,” Thoros of Myr declared. “Holy brothers,
sworn to the realm, to our god, and to each other.”
“The brotherhood without banners.” Tom Sevenstrings plucked a
string. “The knights of the hollow hill.”
“Knights?” Clegane made the word a sneer. “Dondarrion’s a
knight, but the rest of you are the sorriest lot of outlaws and broken
men I’ve ever seen. I shit better men than you.”
“Any knight can make a knight,” said the scarecrow that was
Beric Dondarrion, “and every man you see before you has felt a
sword upon his shoulder. We are the forgotten fellowship.”
“Send me on my way and I’ll forget you too,” Clegane rasped.
“But if you mean to murder me, then bloody well get on with it.
You took my sword, my horse, and my gold, so take my life and be
done with it … but spare me this pious bleating.”
“You will die soon enough, dog,” promised Thoros, “but it shan’t
be murder, only justice.”
“Aye,” said the Mad Huntsman, “and a kinder fate than you
deserve for all your kind have done. Lions, you call yourselves. At
Sherrer and the Mummer’s Ford, girls of six and seven years were
raped, and babes still on the breast were cut in two while their
mothers watched. No lion ever killed so cruel.”
“I was not at Sherrer, nor the Mummer’s Ford,” the Hound told
him. “Lay your dead children at some other door.”
Thoros answered him. “Do you deny that House Clegane was
built upon dead children? I saw them lay Prince Aegon and Princess

Rhaenys before the Iron Throne. By rights your arms should bear
two bloody infants in place of those ugly dogs.”
The Hound’s mouth twitched. “Do you take me for my brother? Is
being born Clegane a crime?”
“Murder is a crime.”
“Who did I murder?”
“Lord Lothar Mallery and Ser Gladden Wylde,” said Harwin.
“My brothers Lister and Lennocks,” declared Jack-Be-Lucky.
“Goodman Beck and Mudge the miller’s son, from Donnelwood,”
an old woman called from the shadows.
“Merriman’s widow, who loved so sweet,” added Greenbeard.
“Them septons at Sludgy Pond.”
“Ser Andrey Charlton. His squire Lucas Roote. Every man,
woman, and child in Fieldstone and Mousedown Mill.”
“Lord and Lady Deddings, that was so rich.”
Tom Sevenstrings took up the count. “Alyn of Winterfell, Joth
Quick-bow, Little Matt and his sister Randa, Anvil Ryn. Ser
Ormond. Ser Dudley. Pate of Mory, Pate of Lancewood, Old Pate,
and Pate of Shermer’s Grove. Blind Wyl the Whittler. Goodwife
Maerie. Maerie the Whore. Becca the Baker. Ser Raymun Darry,
Lord Darry, young Lord Darry. The Bastard of Bracken. Fletcher
Will. Harsley. Goodwife Nolla—”
“Enough.” The Hound’s face was tight with anger. “You’re making
noise. These names mean nothing. Who were they?”
“People,” said Lord Beric. “People great and small, young and
old. Good people and bad people, who died on the points of
Lannister spears or saw their bellies opened by Lannister swords.”
“It wasn’t my sword in their bellies. Any man who says it was is a
bloody liar.”
“You serve the Lannisters of Casterly Rock,” said Thoros.
“Once. Me and thousands more. Is each of us guilty of the crimes
of the others?” Clegane spat. “Might be you are knights after all.
You lie like knights, maybe you murder like knights.”
Lem and Jack-Be-Lucky began to shout at him, but Dondarrion
raised a hand for silence. “Say what you mean, Clegane.”

“A knight’s a sword with a horse. The rest, the vows and the
sacred oils and the lady’s favors, they’re silk ribbons tied round the
sword. Maybe the sword’s prettier with ribbons hanging o it, but it
will kill you just as dead. Well, bugger your ribbons, and shove
your swords up your arses. I’m the same as you. The only di erence
is, I don’t lie about what I am. So kill me, but don’t call me a
murderer while you stand there telling each other that your shit
don’t stink. You hear me?”
Arya squirted past Greenbeard so fast he never saw her. “You are
a murderer!” she screamed. “You killed Mycah, don’t say you never
did. You murdered him!”
The Hound stared at her with no icker of recognition. “And who
was this Mycah, boy?”
“I’m not a boy! But Mycah was. He was a butcher’s boy and you
killed him. Jory said you cut him near in half, and he never even
had a sword.” She could feel them looking at her now, the women
and the children and the men who called themselves the knights of
the hollow hill. “Who’s this now?” someone asked.
The Hound answered. “Seven hells. The little sister. The brat who
tossed Jo ’s pretty sword in the river.” He gave a bark of laughter.
“Don’t you know you’re dead?”
“No, you’re dead,” she threw back at him.
Harwin took her arm to draw her back as Lord Beric said, “The
girl has named you a murderer. Do you deny killing this butcher’s
boy, Mycah?”
The big man shrugged. “I was Jo rey’s sworn shield. The
butcher’s boy attacked a prince of the blood.”
“That’s a lie!” Arya squirmed in Harwin’s grip. “It was me. I hit
Jo rey and threw Lion’s Paw in the river. Mycah just ran away, like
I told him.”
“Did you see the boy attack Prince Jo rey?” Lord Beric
Dondarrion asked the Hound.
“I heard it from the royal lips. It’s not my place to question
princes.” Clegane jerked his hands toward Arya. “This one’s own
sister told the same tale when she stood before your precious
Robert.”

“Sansa’s just a liar,” Arya said, furious at her sister all over again.
“It wasn’t like she said. It wasn’t.”
Thoros drew Lord Beric aside. The two men stood talking in low
whispers while Arya seethed. They have to kill him. I prayed for him to
die, hundreds and hundreds of times.
Beric Dondarrion turned back to the Hound. “You stand accused
of murder, but no one here knows the truth or falsehood of the
charge, so it is not for us to judge you. Only the Lord of Light may
do that now. I sentence you to trial by battle.”
The Hound frowned suspiciously, as if he did not trust his ears.
“Are you a fool or a madman?”
“Neither. I am a just lord. Prove your innocence with a blade, and
you shall be free to go.”
“No,” Arya cried, before Harwin covered her mouth. No, they
can’t, he’ll go free. The Hound was deadly with a sword, everyone
knew that. He’ll laugh at them, she thought.
And so he did, a long rasping laugh that echoed o the cave
walls, a laugh choking with contempt. “So who will it be?” He
looked at Lem Lemoncloak. “The brave man in the piss-yellow
cloak? No? How about you, Huntsman? You’ve kicked dogs before,
try me.” He saw Greenbeard. “You’re big enough, Tyrosh, step
forward. Or do you mean to make the little girl ght me herself?”
He laughed again. “Come on, who wants to die?”
“It’s me you’ll face,” said Lord Beric Dondarrion.
Arya remembered all the tales. He can’t be killed, she thought,
hoping against hope. The Mad Huntsman sliced apart the ropes that
bound Sandor Clegane’s hands together. “I’ll need sword and
armor.” The Hound rubbed a torn wrist.
“Your sword you shall have,” declared Lord Beric, “but your
innocence must be your armor.”
Clegane’s mouth twitched. “My innocence against your
breastplate, is that the way of it?”
“Ned, help me remove my breastplate.”
Arya got goosebumps when Lord Beric said her father’s name, but
this Ned was only a boy, a fair-haired squire no more than ten or
twelve. He stepped up quickly to undo the clasps that fastened the

battered steel about the Marcher lord. The quilting beneath was
rotten with age and sweat, and fell away when the metal was pulled
loose. Gendry sucked in his breath. “Mother have mercy.”
Lord Beric’s ribs were outlined starkly beneath his skin. A
puckered crater scarred his breast just above his left nipple, and
when he turned to call for sword and shield, Arya saw a matching
scar upon his back. The lance went through him. The Hound had seen
it too. Is he scared? Arya wanted him to be scared before he died, as
scared as Mycah must have been.
Ned fetched Lord Beric his swordbelt and a long black surcoat. It
was meant to be worn over armor, so it draped his body loosely,
but across it crackled the forked purple lightning of his House. He
unsheathed his sword and gave the belt back to his squire.
Thoros brought the Hound his swordbelt. “Does a dog have
honor?” the priest asked. “Lest you think to cut your way free of
here, or seize some child for a hostage … Anguy, Dennet, Kyle,
feather him at the rst sign of treachery.” Only when the three
bowmen had notched their shafts did Thoros hand Clegane the belt.
The Hound ripped the sword free and threw away the scabbard.
The Mad Huntsman gave him his oaken shield, all studded with iron
and painted yellow, the three black dogs of Clegane emblazoned
upon it. The boy Ned helped Lord Beric with his own shield, so
hacked and battered that the purple lightning and the scatter of
stars upon it had almost been obliterated.
But when the Hound made to step toward his foe, Thoros of Myr
stopped him. “First we pray.” He turned toward the re and lifted
his arms. “Lord of Light, look down upon us.”
All around the cave, the brotherhood without banners lifted their
own voices in response. “Lord of Light, defend us.”
“Lord of Light, protect us in the darkness.”
“Lord of Light, shine your face upon us.”
“Light your ame among us, R’hllor,” said the red priest. “Show
us the truth or falseness of this man. Strike him down if he is guilty,
and give strength to his sword if he is true. Lord of Light, give us
wisdom.”

“For the night is dark,” the others chanted, Harwin and Anguy loud
as all the rest, “and full of terrors.”
“This cave is dark too,” said the Hound, “but I’m the terror here. I
hope your god’s a sweet one, Dondarrion. You’re going to meet him
shortly.”
Unsmiling, Lord Beric laid the edge of his longsword against the
palm of his left hand, and drew it slowly down. Blood ran dark from
the gash he made, and washed over the steel.
And then the sword took re.
Arya heard Gendry whisper a prayer.
“Burn in seven hells,” the Hound cursed. “You, and Thoros too.”
He threw a glance at the red priest. “When I’m done with him you’ll
be next, Myr.”
“Every word you say proclaims your guilt, dog,” answered
Thoros, while Lem and Greenbeard and Jack-Be-Lucky shouted
threats and curses. Lord Beric himself waited silent, calm as still
water, his shield on his left arm and his sword burning in his right
hand. Kill him, Arya thought, please, you have to kill him. Lit from
below, his face was a death mask, his missing eye a red and angry
wound. The sword was a ame from point to crossguard, but
Dondarrion seemed not to feel the heat. He stood so still he might
have been carved of stone.
But when the Hound charged him, he moved fast enough.
The aming sword leapt up to meet the cold one, long streamers
of re trailing in its wake like the ribbons the Hound had spoken of.
Steel rang on steel. No sooner was his rst slash blocked than
Clegane made another, but this time Lord Beric’s shield got in the
way, and wood chips ew from the force of the blow. Hard and fast
the cuts came, from low and high, from right and left, and each one
Dondarrion blocked. The ames swirled about his sword and left
red and yellow ghosts to mark its passage. Each move Lord Beric
made fanned them and made them burn the brighter, until it
seemed as though the lightning lord stood within a cage of re. “Is
it wild re?” Arya asked Gendry.
“No. This is di erent. This is …”

“… magic?” she nished as the Hound edged back. Now it was
Lord Beric attacking, lling the air with ropes of re, driving the
bigger man back on his heels. Clegane caught one blow high on his
shield, and a painted dog lost a head. He countercut, and
Dondarrion interposed his own shield and launched a
ery
backslash. The outlaw brotherhood shouted on their leader. “He’s
yours!” Arya heard, and “At him! At him! At him!” The Hound parried
a cut at his head, grimacing as the heat of the ames beat against
his face. He grunted and cursed and reeled away.
Lord Beric gave him no respite. Hard on the big man’s heels he
followed, his arm never still. The swords clashed and sprang apart
and clashed again, splinters ew from the lightning shield while
swirling ames kissed the dogs once, and twice, and thrice. The
Hound moved to his right, but Dondarrion blocked him with a quick
sidestep and drove him back the other way … toward the sullen red
blaze of the repit. Clegane gave ground until he felt the heat at his
back. A quick glance over his shoulder showed him what was
behind him, and almost cost him his head when Lord Beric attacked
anew.
Arya could see the whites of Sandor Clegane’s eyes as he bulled
his way forward again. Three steps up and two back, a move to the
left that Lord Beric blocked, two more forward and one back, clang
and clang, and the big oaken shields took blow after blow after
blow. The Hound’s lank dark hair was plastered to his brow in a
sheen of sweat. Wine sweat, Arya thought, remembering that he’d
been taken drunk. She thought she could see the beginnings of fear
wake in his eyes. He’s going to lose, she told herself, exulting, as
Lord Beric’s aming sword whirled and slashed. In one wild urry,
the lightning lord took back all the ground the Hound had gained,
sending Clegane staggering to the very edge of the repit once
more. He is, he is, he’s going to die. She stood on her toes for a better
look.
“Bloody bastard!” the Hound screamed as he felt the re licking
against the back of his thighs. He charged, swinging the heavy
sword harder and harder, trying to smash the smaller man down
with brute force, to break blade or shield or arm. But the ames of

Dondarrion’s parries snapped at his eyes, and when the Hound
jerked away from them, his foot went out from under him and he
staggered to one knee. At once Lord Beric closed, his downcut
screaming through the air trailing pennons of re. Panting from
exertion, Clegane jerked his shield up over his head just in time,
and the cave rang with the loud crack of splintering oak.
“His shield is a re,” Gendry said in a hushed voice. Arya saw it in
the same instant. The ames had spread across the chipped yellow
paint, and the three black dogs were engulfed.
Sandor Clegane had fought his way back to his feet with a
reckless counterattack. Not until Lord Beric retreated a pace did the
Hound seem to realize that the re that roared so near his face was
his own shield, burning. With a shout of revulsion, he hacked down
savagely on the broken oak, completing its destruction. The shield
shattered, one piece of it spinning away, still a re, while the other
clung stubbornly to his forearm. His e orts to free himself only
fanned the ames. His sleeve caught, and now his whole left arm
was ablaze. “Finish him!” Greenbeard urged Lord Beric, and other
voices took up the chant of “Guilty!” Arya shouted with the rest.
“Guilty, guilty, kill him, guilty!”
Smooth as summer silk, Lord Beric slid close to make an end of
the man before him. The Hound gave a rasping scream, raised his
sword in both hands and brought it crashing down with all his
strength. Lord Beric blocked the cut easily …
“Noooooo,” Arya shrieked.
… but the burning sword snapped in two, and the Hound’s cold
steel plowed into Lord Beric’s esh where his shoulder joined his
neck and clove him clean down to the breastbone. The blood came
rushing out in a hot black gush.
Sandor Clegane jerked backward, still burning. He ripped the
remnants of his shield o and ung them away with a curse, then
rolled in the dirt to smother the re running along his arm.
Lord Beric’s knees folded slowly, as if for prayer. When his mouth
opened only blood came out. The Hound’s sword was still in him as
he toppled face forward. The dirt drank his blood. Beneath the
hollow hill there was no sound but the soft crackling of ames and

the whimper the Hound made when he tried to rise. Arya could only
think of Mycah and all the stupid prayers she’d prayed for the
Hound to die. If there were gods, why didn’t Lord Beric win? She knew
the Hound was guilty.
“Please,” Sandor Clegane rasped, cradling his arm. “I’m burned.
Help me. Someone. Help me.” He was crying. “Please.”
Arya looked at him in astonishment. He’s crying like a little baby,
she thought.
“Melly, see to his burns,” said Thoros. “Lem, Jack, help me with
Lord Beric. Ned, you’d best come too.” The red priest wrenched the
Hound’s sword from the body of his fallen lord and thrust the point
of it down in the blood-soaked earth. Lem slid his big hands under
Dondarrion’s arms, while Jack-Be-Lucky took his feet. They carried
him around the repit, into the darkness of one of the tunnels.
Thoros and the boy Ned followed after.
The Mad Huntsman spat. “I say we take him back to Stoney Sept
and put him in a crow cage.”
“Yes,” Arya said. “He murdered Mycah. He did.”
“Such an angry squirrel,” murmured Greenbeard.
Harwin sighed. “R’hllor has judged him innocent.”
“Who’s Rulore?” She couldn’t even say it.
“The Lord of Light. Thoros has taught us—”
She didn’t care what Thoros had taught them. She yanked
Greenbeard’s dagger from its sheath and spun away before he could
catch her. Gendry made a grab for her as well, but she had always
been too fast for Gendry.
Tom Sevenstrings and some woman were helping the Hound to
his feet. The sight of his arm shocked her speechless. There was a
strip of pink where the leather strap had clung, but above and
below the esh was cracked and red and bleeding from elbow to
wrist. When his eyes met hers, his mouth twitched. “You want me
dead that bad? Then do it, wolf girl. Shove it in. It’s cleaner than
re.” Clegane tried to stand, but as he moved a piece of burned
esh sloughed right o his arm, and his knees went out from under
him. Tom caught him by his good arm and held him up.

His arm, Arya thought, and his face. But he was the Hound. He
deserved to burn in a ery hell. The knife felt heavy in her hand.
She gripped it tighter. “You killed Mycah,” she said once more,
daring him to deny it. “Tell them. You did. You did.”
“I did.” His whole face twisted. “I rode him down and cut him in
half, and laughed. I watched them beat your sister bloody too,
watched them cut your father’s head o .”
Lem grabbed her wrist and twisted, wrenching the dagger away.
She kicked at him, but he would not give it back. “You go to hell,
Hound,” she screamed at Sandor Clegane in helpless empty-handed
rage. “You just go to hell!”
“He has,” said a voice scarce stronger than a whisper.
When Arya turned, Lord Beric Dondarrion was standing behind
her, his bloody hand clutching Thoros by the shoulder.

CATELYN

Let the kings of winter have their cold crypt under the earth, Catelyn

thought. The Tullys drew their strength from the river, and it was
to the river they returned when their lives had run their course.
They laid Lord Hoster in a slender wooden boat, clad in shining
silver armor, plate-and-mail. His cloak was spread beneath him,
rippling blue and red. His surcoat was divided blue-and-red as well.
A trout, scaled in silver and bronze, crowned the crest of the
greathelm they placed beside his head. On his chest they placed a
painted wooden sword, his ngers curled about its hilt. Mail
gauntlets hid his wasted hands, and made him look almost strong
again. His massive oak-and-iron shield was set by his left side, his
hunting horn to his right. The rest of the boat was lled with
driftwood and kindling and scraps of parchment, and stones to make
it heavy in the water. His banner ew from the prow, the leaping
trout of Riverrun.
Seven were chosen to push the funereal boat to the water, in
honor of the seven faces of god. Robb was one, Lord Hoster’s liege
lord. With him were the Lords Bracken, Blackwood, Vance, and
Mallister, Ser Marq Piper … and Lame Lothar Frey, who had come
down from the Twins with the answer they had awaited. Forty
soldiers rode in his escort, commanded by Walder Rivers, the eldest
of Lord Walder’s bastard brood, a stern, grey-haired man with a
formidable reputation as a warrior. Their arrival, coming within
hours of Lord Hoster’s passing, had sent Edmure into a rage.

“Walder Frey should be ayed and quartered!” he’d shouted. “He
sends a cripple and a bastard to treat with us, tell me there is no
insult meant by that.”
“I have no doubt that Lord Walder chose his envoys with care,”
she replied. “It was a peevish thing to do, a petty sort of revenge,
but remember who we are dealing with. The Late Lord Frey, Father
used to call him. The man is ill-tempered, envious, and above all
prideful.”
Blessedly, her son had shown better sense than her brother. Robb
had greeted the Freys with every courtesy, found barracks space for
the escort, and quietly asked Ser Desmond Grell to stand aside so
Lothar might have the honor of helping to send Lord Hoster on his
last voyage. He has learned a rough wisdom beyond his years, my son.
House Frey might have abandoned the King in the North, but the
Lord of the Crossing remained the most powerful of Riverrun’s
bannermen, and Lothar was here in his stead.
The seven launched Lord Hoster from the water stair, wading
down the steps as the portcullis was winched upward. Lothar Frey,
a soft-bodied portly man, was breathing heavily as they shoved the
boat out into the current. Jason Mallister and Tytos Blackwood, at
the prow, stood chest deep in the river to guide it on its way.
Catelyn watched from the battlements, waiting and watching as
she had waited and watched so many times before. Beneath her, the
swift wild Tumblestone plunged like a spear into the side of the
broad Red Fork, its blue-white current churning the muddy redbrown ow of the greater river. A morning mist hung over the
water, as thin as gossamer and the wisps of memory.
Bran and Rickon will be waiting for him, Catelyn thought sadly, as
once I used to wait.
The slim boat drifted out from under the red stone arch of the
Water Gate, picking up speed as it was caught in the headlong rush
of the Tumblestone and pushed out into the tumult where the
waters met. As the boat emerged from beneath the high sheltering
walls of the castle, its square sail lled with wind, and Catelyn saw
sunlight ashing on her father’s helm. Lord Hoster Tully’s rudder

held true, and he sailed serenely down the center of the channel,
into the rising sun.
“Now,” her uncle urged. Beside him, her brother Edmure—Lord
Edmure now in truth, and how long would that take to grow used
to?—nocked an arrow to his bowstring. His squire held a brand to
its point. Edmure waited until the ame caught, then lifted the
great bow, drew the string to his ear, and let y. With a deep thrum,
the arrow sped upward. Catelyn followed its ight with her eyes
and heart, until it plunged into the water with a soft hiss, well
astern of Lord Hoster’s boat.
Edmure cursed softly. “The wind,” he said, pulling a second
arrow. “Again.” The brand kissed the oil-soaked rag behind the
arrowhead, the ames went licking up, Edmure lifted, pulled, and
released. High and far the arrow ew. Too far. It vanished in the
river a dozen yards beyond the boat, its re winking out in an
instant. A ush was creeping up Edmure’s neck, red as his beard.
“Once more,” he commanded, taking a third arrow from the quiver.
He is as tight as his bowstring, Catelyn thought.
Ser Brynden must have seen the same thing. “Let me, my lord,”
he o ered.
“I can do it,” Edmure insisted. He let them light the arrow, jerked
the bow up, took a deep breath, drew back the arrow. For a long
moment he seemed to hesitate while the re crept up the shaft,
crackling. Finally he released. The arrow ashed up and up, and
nally curved down again, falling, falling … and hissing past the
billowing sail.
A narrow miss, no more than a handspan, and yet a miss. “The
Others take it!” her brother swore. The boat was almost out of
range, drifting in and out among the river mists. Wordless, Edmure
thrust the bow at his uncle.
“Swiftly,” Ser Brynden said. He nocked an arrow, held it steady
for the brand, drew and released before Catelyn was quite sure that
the re had caught … but as the shot rose, she saw the ames
trailing through the air, a pale orange pennon. The boat had
vanished in the mists. Falling, the aming arrow was swallowed up
as well … but only for a heartbeat. Then, sudden as hope, they saw

the red bloom ower. The sails took re, and the fog glowed pink
and orange. For a moment Catelyn saw the outline of the boat
clearly, wreathed in leaping ames.
Watch for me, little cat, she could hear him whisper.
Catelyn reached out blindly, groping for her brother’s hand, but
Edmure had moved away, to stand alone on the highest point of the
battlements. Her uncle Brynden took her hand instead, twining his
strong ngers through hers. Together they watched the little re
grow smaller as the burning boat receded in the distance.
And then it was gone … drifting downriver still, perhaps, or
broken up and sinking. The weight of his armor would carry Lord
Hoster down to rest in the soft mud of the riverbed, in the watery
halls where the Tullys held eternal court, with schools of sh their
last attendants.
No sooner had the burning boat vanished from their sight than
Edmure walked o . Catelyn would have liked to embrace him, if
only for a moment; to sit for an hour or a night or the turn of a
moon to speak of the dead and mourn. Yet she knew as well as he
that this was not the time; he was Lord of Riverrun now, and his
knights were falling in around him, murmuring condolences and
promises of fealty, walling him o from something as small as a
sister’s grief. Edmure listened, hearing none of the words.
“It is no disgrace to miss your shot,” her uncle told her quietly.
“Edmure should hear that. The day my own lord father went
downriver, Hoster missed as well.”
“With his rst shaft.” Catelyn had been too young to remember,
but Lord Hoster had often told the tale. “His second found the sail.”
She sighed. Edmure was not as strong as he seemed. Their father’s
death had been a mercy when it came at last, but even so her
brother had taken it hard.
Last night in his cups he had broken down and wept, full of
regrets for things undone and words unsaid. He ought never to have
ridden o to ght his battle on the fords, he told her tearfully; he
should have stayed at their father’s bedside. “I should have been
with him, as you were,” he said. “Did he speak of me at the end?
Tell me true, Cat. Did he ask for me?”

Lord Hoster’s last word had been “Tansy,” but Catelyn could not
bring herself to tell him that. “He whispered your name,” she lied,
and her brother had nodded gratefully and kissed her hand. If he had
not tried to drown his grief and guilt, he might have been able to bend a
bow, she thought to herself, sighing, but that was something else
she dare not say.
The Black sh escorted her down from the battlements to where
Robb stood among his bannermen, his young queen at his side.
When he saw her, her son took her silently in his arms.
“Lord Hoster looked as noble as a king, my lady,” murmured
Jeyne. “Would that I had been given the chance to know him.”
“And I to know him better,” added Robb.
“He would have wished that too,” said Catelyn. “There were too
many leagues between Riverrun and Winterfell.” And too many
mountains and rivers and armies between Riverrun and the Eyrie, it
would seem. Lysa had made no reply to her letter.
And from King’s Landing came only silence as well. By now she
had hoped that Brienne and Ser Cleos would have reached the city
with their captive. It might even be that Brienne was on her way
back, and the girls with her. Ser Cleos swore he would make the Imp
send a raven once the trade was made. He swore it! Ravens did not
always win through. Some bowman could have brought the bird
down and roasted him for supper. The letter that would have set her
heart at ease might even now be lying by the ashes of some
camp re beside a pile of raven bones.
Others were waiting to o er Robb their consolations, so Catelyn
stood aside patiently while Lord Jason Mallister, the Greatjon, and
Ser Rolph Spicer spoke to him each in turn. But when Lothar Frey
approached, she gave his sleeve a tug. Robb turned, and waited to
hear what Lothar would say.
“Your Grace.” A plump man in his middle thirties, Lothar Frey
had close-set eyes, a pointed beard, and dark hair that fell to his
shoulders in ringlets. A leg twisted at birth had earned him the
name Lame Lothar. He had served as his father’s steward for the past
dozen years. “We are loath to intrude upon your grief, but perhaps
you might grant us audience tonight?”

“It would be my pleasure,” said Robb. “It was never my wish to
sow enmity between us.”
“Nor mine to be the cause of it,” said Queen Jeyne.
Lothar Frey smiled. “I understand, as does my lord father. He
instructed me to say that he was young once, and well remembers
what it is like to lose one’s heart to beauty.”
Catelyn doubted very much that Lord Walder had said any such
thing, or that he had ever lost his heart to beauty. The Lord of the
Crossing had outlived seven wives and was now wed to his eighth,
but he spoke of them only as bedwarmers and brood mares. Still,
the words were fairly spoken, and she could scarce object to the
compliment. Nor did Robb. “Your father is most gracious,” he said.
“I shall look forward to our talk.”
Lothar bowed, kissed the queen’s hand, and withdrew. By then a
dozen others had gathered for a word. Robb spoke with them each,
giving a thanks here, a smile there, as needed. Only when the last
of them was done did he turn back to Catelyn. “There is something
we must speak of. Will you walk with me?”
“As you command, Your Grace.”
“That wasn’t a command, Mother.”
“It will be my pleasure, then.” Her son had treated her kindly
enough since returning to Riverrun, yet he seldom sought her out. If
he was more comfortable with his young queen, she could scarcely
blame him. Jeyne makes him smile, and I have nothing to share with
him but grief. He seemed to enjoy the company of his bride’s
brothers, as well; young Rollam his squire and Ser Raynald his
standard-bearer. They are standing in the boots of those he’s lost,
Catelyn realized when she watched them together. Rollam has taken
Bran’s place, and Raynald is part Theon and part Jon Snow. Only with
the Westerlings did she see Robb smile, or hear him laugh like the
boy he was. To the others he was always the King in the North,
head bowed beneath the weight of the crown even when his brows
were bare.
Robb kissed his wife gently, promised to see her in their
chambers, and went o with his lady mother. His steps led them

toward the godswood. “Lothar seemed amiable, that’s a hopeful
sign. We need the Freys.”
“That does not mean we shall have them.”
He nodded, and there was glumness to his face and a slope to his
shoulders that made her heart go out to him. The crown is crushing
him, she thought. He wants so much to be a good king, to be brave and
honorable and clever, but the weight is too much for a boy to bear. Robb
was doing all he could, yet still the blows kept falling, one after the
other, relentless. When they brought him word of the battle at
Duskendale, where Lord Randyll Tarly had shattered Robett Glover
and Ser Helman Tallhart, he might have been expected to rage.
Instead he’d stared in dumb disbelief and said, “Duskendale, on the
narrow sea? Why would they go to Duskendale?” He’d shook his
head, bewildered. “A third of my foot, lost for Duskendale?”
“The ironmen have my castle and now the Lannisters hold my
brother,” Galbart Glover said, in a voice thick with despair. Robett
Glover had survived the battle, but had been captured near the
kingsroad not long after.
“Not for long,” her son promised. “I will o er them Martyn
Lannister in exchange. Lord Tywin will have to accept, for his
brother’s sake.” Martyn was Ser Kevan’s son, a twin to the Willem
that Lord Karstark had butchered. Those murders still haunted her
son, Catelyn knew. He had tripled the guard around Martyn, but
still feared for his safety.
“I should have traded the Kingslayer for Sansa when you rst
urged it,” Robb said as they walked the gallery. “If I’d o ered to
wed her to the Knight of Flowers, the Tyrells might be ours instead
of Jo rey’s. I should have thought of that.”
“Your mind was on your battles, and rightly so. Even a king
cannot think of everything.”
“Battles,” muttered Robb as he led her out beneath the trees. “I
have won every battle, yet somehow I’m losing the war.” He looked
up, as if the answer might be written on the sky. “The ironmen hold
Winterfell, and Moat Cailin too. Father’s dead, and Bran and
Rickon, maybe Arya. And now your father too.”

She could not let him despair. She knew the taste of that draught
too well herself. “My father has been dying for a long time. You
could not have changed that. You have made mistakes, Robb, but
what king has not? Ned would have been proud of you.”
“Mother, there is something you must know.”
Catelyn’s heart skipped a beat. This is something he hates.
Something he dreads to tell me. All she could think of was Brienne and
her mission. “Is it the Kingslayer?”
“No. It’s Sansa.”
She’s dead, Catelyn thought at once. Brienne failed, Jaime is dead,
and Cersei has killed my sweet girl in retribution. For a moment she
could barely speak. “Is … is she gone, Robb?”
“Gone?” He looked startled. “Dead? Oh, Mother, no, not that,
they haven’t harmed her, not that way, only … a bird came last
night, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, not until your father
was sent to his rest.” Robb took her hand. “They married her to
Tyrion Lannister.”
Catelyn’s ngers clutched at his. “The Imp.”
“Yes.”
“He swore to trade her for his brother,” she said numbly. “Sansa
and Arya both. We would have them back if we returned his
precious Jaime, he swore it before the whole court. How could he
marry her, after saying that in sight of gods and men?”
“He’s the Kingslayer’s brother. Oathbreaking runs in their blood.”
Robb’s ngers brushed the pommel of his sword. “If I could I’d take
his ugly head o . Sansa would be a widow then, and free. There’s
no other way that I can see. They made her speak the vows before a
septon and don a crimson cloak.”
Catelyn remembered the twisted little man she had seized at the
crossroads inn and carried all the way to the Eyrie. “I should have
let Lysa push him out her Moon Door. My poor sweet Sansa … why
would anyone do this to her?”
“For Winterfell,” Robb said at once. “With Bran and Rickon dead,
Sansa is my heir. If anything should happen to me …”
She clutched tight at his hand. “Nothing will happen to you.
Nothing. I could not stand it. They took Ned, and your sweet

brothers. Sansa is married, Arya is lost, my father’s dead … if
anything befell you, I would go mad, Robb. You are all I have left.
You are all the north has left.”
“I am not dead yet, Mother.”
Suddenly Catelyn was full of dread. “Wars need not be fought
until the last drop of blood.” Even she could hear the desperation in
her voice. “You would not be the rst king to bend the knee, nor
even the rst Stark.”
His mouth tightened. “No. Never.”
“There is no shame in it. Balon Greyjoy bent the knee to Robert
when his rebellion failed. Torrhen Stark bent the knee to Aegon the
Conqueror rather than see his army face the res.”
“Did Aegon kill King Torrhen’s father?” He pulled his hand from
hers. “Never, I said.”
He is playing the boy now, not the king. “The Lannisters do not need
the north. They will require homage and hostages, no more … and
the Imp will keep Sansa no matter what we do, so they have their
hostage. The ironmen will prove a more implacable enemy, I
promise you. To have any hope of holding the north, the Greyjoys
must leave no single sprig of House Stark alive to dispute their
right. Theon’s murdered Bran and Rickon, so now all they need do
is kill you … and Jeyne, yes. Do you think Lord Balon can a ord to
let her live to bear you heirs?”
Robb’s face was cold. “Is that why you freed the Kingslayer? To
make a peace with the Lannisters?”
“I freed Jaime for Sansa’s sake … and Arya’s, if she still lives. You
know that. But if I nurtured some hope of buying peace as well, was
that so ill?”
“Yes,” he said. “The Lannisters killed my father.”
“Do you think I have forgotten that?”
“I don’t know. Have you?”
Catelyn had never struck her children in anger, but she almost
struck Robb then. It was an e ort to remind herself how frightened
and alone he must feel. “You are King in the North, the choice is
yours. I only ask that you think on what I’ve said. The singers make
much of kings who die valiantly in battle, but your life is worth

more than a song. To me at least, who gave it to you.” She lowered
her head. “Do I have your leave to go?”
“Yes.” He turned away and drew his sword. What he meant to do
with it, she could not say. There was no enemy there, no one to
ght. Only her and him, amongst tall trees and fallen leaves. There
are ghts no sword can win, Catelyn wanted to tell him, but she
feared the king was deaf to such words.
Hours later, she was sewing in her bedchamber when young
Rollam Westerling came running with the summons to supper.
Good, Catelyn thought, relieved. She had not been certain that her
son would want her there, after their quarrel. “A dutiful squire,” she
said to Rollam gravely. Bran would have been the same.
If Robb seemed cool at table and Edmure surly, Lame Lothar
made up for them both. He was the model of courtesy, reminiscing
warmly about Lord Hoster, o ering Catelyn gentle condolences on
the loss of Bran and Rickon, praising Edmure for the victory at
Stone Mill, and thanking Robb for the “swift sure justice” he had
meted out to Rickard Karstark. Lothar’s bastard brother Walder
Rivers was another matter; a harsh sour man with old Lord Walder’s
suspicious face, he spoke but seldom and devoted most of his
attention to the meat and mead that was set before him.
When all the empty words were said, the queen and the other
Westerlings excused themselves, the remains of the meal were
cleared away, and Lothar Frey cleared his throat. “Before we turn to
the business that brings us here, there is another matter,” he said
solemnly. “A grave matter, I fear. I had hoped it would not fall to
me to bring you these tidings, but it seems I must. My lord father
has had a letter from his grandsons.”
Catelyn had been so lost in grief for her own that she had almost
forgotten the two Freys she had agreed to foster. No more, she
thought. Mother have mercy, how many more blows can we bear?
Somehow she knew the next words she heard would plunge yet
another blade into her heart. “The grandsons at Winterfell?” she
made herself ask. “My wards?”
“Walder and Walder, yes. But they are presently at the Dreadfort,
my lady. I grieve to tell you this, but there has been a battle.

Winterfell is burned.”
“Burned?” Robb’s voice was incredulous.
“Your northern lords tried to retake it from the ironmen. When
Theon Greyjoy saw that his prize was lost, he put the castle to the
torch.”
“We have heard naught of any battle,” said Ser Brynden.
“My nephews are young, I grant you, but they were there. Big
Walder wrote the letter, though his cousin signed as well. It was a
bloody bit of business, by their account. Your castellan was slain.
Ser Rodrik, was that his name?”
“Ser Rodrik Cassel,” said Catelyn numbly. That dear brave loyal old
soul. She could almost see him, tugging on his erce white whiskers.
“What of our other people?”
“The ironmen put many of them to the sword, I fear.”
Wordless with rage, Robb slammed a st down on the table and
turned his face away, so the Freys would not see his tears.
But his mother saw them. The world grows a little darker every day.
Catelyn’s thoughts went to Ser Rodrik’s little daughter Beth, to
tireless Maester Luwin and cheerful Septon Chayle, Mikken at the
forge, Farlen and Palla in the kennels, Old Nan and simple Hodor.
Her heart was sick. “Please, not all.”
“No,” said Lame Lothar. “The women and children hid, my
nephews Walder and Walder among them. With Winterfell in ruins,
the survivors were carried back to the Dreadfort by this son of Lord
Bolton’s.”
“Bolton’s son?” Robb’s voice was strained.
Walder Rivers spoke up. “A bastard son, I believe.”
“Not Ramsay Snow? Does Lord Roose have another bastard?”
Robb scowled. “This Ramsay was a monster and a murderer, and he
died a coward. Or so I was told.”
“I cannot speak to that. There is much confusion in any war.
Many false reports. All I can tell you is that my nephews claim it
was this bastard son of Bolton’s who saved the women of
Winterfell, and the little ones. They are safe at the Dreadfort now,
all those who remain.”

“Theon,” Robb said suddenly. “What happened to Theon Greyjoy?
Was he slain?”
Lame Lothar spread his hands. “That I cannot say, Your Grace.
Walder and Walder made no mention of his fate. Perhaps Lord
Bolton might know, if he has had word from this son of his.”
Ser Brynden said, “We will be certain to ask him.”
“You are all distraught, I see. I am sorry to have brought you
such fresh grief. Perhaps we should adjourn until the morrow. Our
business can wait until you have composed yourselves …”
“No,” said Robb, “I want the matter settled.”
Her brother Edmure nodded. “Me as well. Do you have an answer
to our o er, my lord?”
“I do.” Lothar smiled. “My lord father bids me tell Your Grace
that he will agree to this new marriage alliance between our houses
and renew his fealty to the King in the North, upon the condition
that the King’s Grace apologize for the insult done to House Frey, in
his royal person, face to face.”
An apology was a small enough price to pay, but Catelyn misliked
this petty condition of Lord Walder’s at once.
“I am pleased,” Robb said cautiously. “It was never my wish to
cause this rift between us, Lothar. The Freys have fought valiantly
for my cause. I would have them at my side once more.”
“You are too kind, Your Grace. As you accept these terms, I am
then instructed to o er Lord Tully the hand of my sister, the Lady
Roslin, a maid of sixteen years. Roslin is my lord father’s youngest
daughter by Lady Bethany of House Rosby, his sixth wife. She has a
gentle nature and a gift for music.”
Edmure shifted in his seat. “Might not it be better if I rst met—”
“You’ll meet when you’re wed,” said Walder Rivers curtly.
“Unless Lord Tully feels a need to count her teeth rst?”
Edmure kept his temper. “I will take your word so far as her
teeth are concerned, but it would be pleasant if I might gaze upon
her face before I espoused her.”
“You must accept her now, my lord,” said Walder Rivers. “Else
my father’s o er is withdrawn.”

Lame Lothar spread his hands. “My brother has a soldier’s
bluntness, but what he says is true. It is my lord father’s wish that
this marriage take place at once.”
“At once?” Edmure sounded so unhappy that Catelyn had the
unworthy thought that perhaps he had been entertaining notions of
breaking the betrothal after the ghting was done.
“Has Lord Walder forgotten that we are ghting a war?” Brynden
Black sh asked sharply.
“Scarcely,” said Lothar. “That is why he insists that the marriage
take place now, ser. Men die in war, even men who are young and
strong. What would become of our alliance should Lord Edmure fall
before he took Roslin to bride? And there is my father’s age to
consider as well. He is past ninety and not like to see the end of this
struggle. It would put his noble heart at peace if he could see his
dear Roslin safely wed before the gods take him, so he might die
with the knowledge that the girl had a strong husband to cherish
and protect her.”
We all want Lord Walder to die happy. Catelyn was growing less
and less comfortable with this arrangement. “My brother has just
lost his own father. He needs time to mourn.”
“Roslin is a cheerful girl,” said Lothar. “She may be the very thing
Lord Edmure needs to help him through his grief.”
“And my grandfather has come to mislike lengthy betrothals,” the
bastard Walder Rivers added. “I cannot imagine why.”
Robb gave him a chilly look. “I take your meaning, Rivers. Pray
excuse us.”
“As Your Grace commands.” Lame Lothar rose, and his bastard
brother helped him hobble from the room.
Edmure was seething. “They’re as much as saying that my
promise is worthless. Why should I let that old weasel choose my
bride? Lord Walder has other daughters besides this Roslin.
Granddaughters as well. I should be o ered the same choice you
were. I’m his liege lord, he should be overjoyed that I’m willing to
wed any of them.”
“He is a proud man, and we’ve wounded him,” said Catelyn.

“The Others take his pride! I will not be shamed in my own hall.
My answer is no.”
Robb gave him a weary look. “I will not command you. Not in
this. But if you refuse, Lord Frey will take it for another slight, and
any hope of putting this arights will be gone.”
“You cannot know that,” Edmure insisted. “Frey has wanted me
for one of his daughters since the day I was born. He will not let a
chance like this slip between those grasping ngers of his. When
Lothar brings him our answer, he’ll come wheedling back and
accept a betrothal … and to a daughter of my choosing.”
“Perhaps, in time,” said Brynden Black sh. “But can we wait,
while Lothar rides back and forth with o ers and counters?”
Robb’s hands curled into sts. “I must get back to the north. My
brothers dead, Winterfell burned, my smallfolk put to the
sword … the gods only know what this bastard of Bolton’s is about,
or whether Theon is still alive and on the loose. I can’t sit here
waiting for a wedding that might or might not happen.”
“It must happen,” said Catelyn, though not gladly. “I have no
more wish to su er Walder Frey’s insults and complaints than you
do, Brother, but I see little choice here. Without this wedding,
Robb’s cause is lost. Edmure, we must accept.”
“We must accept?” he echoed peevishly. “I don’t see you o ering
to become the ninth Lady Frey, Cat.”
“The eighth Lady Frey is still alive and well, so far as I know,”
she replied. Thankfully. Otherwise it might well have come to that,
knowing Lord Walder.
The Black sh said, “I am the last man in the Seven Kingdoms to
tell anyone who they must wed, Nephew. Nonetheless, you did say
something of making amends for your Battle of the Fords.”
“I had in mind a di erent sort of amends. Single combat with the
Kingslayer. Seven years of penace as a begging brother. Swimming
the sunset sea with my legs tied.” When he saw that no one was
smiling, Edmure threw up his hands. “The Others take you all! Very
well, I’ll wed the wench. As amends.”

DAVOS

Lord Alester looked up sharply. “Voices,” he said. “Do you hear,

Davos? Someone is coming for us.”
“Lamprey,” said Davos. “It’s time for our supper, or near
enough.” Last night Lamprey had brought them half a beef-andbacon pie, and a agon of mead as well. Just the thought of it made
his belly start to rumble.
“No, there’s more than one.”
He’s right. Davos heard two voices at least, and footsteps, growing
louder. He got to his feet and moved to the bars.
Lord Alester brushed the straw from his clothes. “The king has
sent for me. Or the queen, yes, Selyse would never let me rot here,
her own blood.”
Outside the cell, Lamprey appeared with a ring of keys in hand.
Ser Axell Florent and four guardsmen followed close behind him.
They waited beneath the torch while Lamprey searched for the
correct key.
“Axell,” Lord Alester said. “Gods be good. Is it the king who sends
for me, or the queen?”
“No one has sent for you, traitor,” Ser Axell said.
Lord Alester recoiled as if he’d been slapped. “No, I swear to you,
I committed no treason. Why won’t you listen? If His Grace would
only let me explain—”
Lamprey thrust a great iron key into the lock, turned it, and
pulled open the cell. The rusted hinges screamed in protest. “You,”

he said to Davos. “Come.”
“Where?” Davos looked to Ser Axell. “Tell me true, ser, do you
mean to burn me?”
“You are sent for. Can you walk?”
“I can walk.” Davos stepped from the cell. Lord Alester gave a cry
of dismay as Lamprey slammed the door shut once more.
“Take the torch,” Ser Axell commanded the gaoler. “Leave the
traitor to the darkness.”
“No,” his brother said. “Axell, please, don’t take the light … gods
have mercy …”
“Gods? There is only R’hllor, and the Other.” Ser Axell gestured
sharply, and one of his guardsmen pulled the torch from its sconce
and led the way to the stair.
“Are you taking me to Melisandre?” Davos asked.
“She will be there,” Ser Axell said. “She is never far from the
king. But it is His Grace himself who asked for you.”
Davos lifted his hand to his chest, where once his luck had hung
in a leather bag on a thong. Gone now, he remembered, and the ends
of four ngers as well. But his hands were still long enough to wrap
about a woman’s throat, he thought, especially a slender throat like
hers.
Up they went, climbing the turnpike stair in single le. The walls
were rough dark stone, cool to the touch. The light of the torches
went before them, and their shadows marched beside them on the
walls. At the third turn they passed an iron gate that opened on
blackness, and another at the fth turn. Davos guessed that they
were near the surface by then, perhaps even above it. The next door
they came to was made of wood, but still they climbed. Now the
walls were broken by arrow slits, but no shafts of sunlight pried
their way through the thickness of the stone. It was night outside.
His legs were aching by the time Ser Axell thrust open a heavy
door and gestured him through. Beyond, a high stone bridge arched
over emptiness to the massive central tower called the Stone Drum.
A sea wind blew restlessly through the arches that supported the
roof, and Davos could smell the salt water as they crossed. He took
a deep breath, lling his lungs with the clean cold air. Wind and

water, give me strength, he prayed. A huge night re burned in the
yard below, to keep the terrors of the dark at bay, and the queen’s
men were gathered around it, singing praises to their new red god.
They were in the center of the bridge when Ser Axell stopped
suddenly. He made a brusque gesture with his hand, and his men
moved out of earshot. “Were it my choice, I would burn you with
my brother Alester,” he told Davos. “You are both traitors.”
“Say what you will. I would never betray King Stannis.”
“You would. You will. I see it in your face. And I have seen it in
the ames as well. R’hllor has blessed me with that gift. Like Lady
Melisandre, he shows me the future in the re. Stannis Baratheon
will sit the Iron Throne. I have seen it. And I know what must be
done. His Grace must make me his Hand, in place of my traitor
brother. And you will tell him so.”
Will I? Davos said nothing.
“The queen has urged my appointment,” Ser Axell went on. “Even
your old friend from Lys, the pirate Saan, he says the same. We
have made a plan together, him and me. Yet His Grace does not act.
The defeat gnaws inside him, a black worm in his soul. It is up to us
who love him to show him what to do. If you are as devoted to his
cause as you claim, smuggler, you will join your voice to ours. Tell
him that I am the only Hand he needs. Tell him, and when we sail I
shall see that you have a new ship.”
A ship. Davos studied the other man’s face. Ser Axell had big
Florent ears, much like the queen’s. Coarse hair grew from them, as
from his nostrils; more sprouted in tufts and patches beneath his
double chin. His nose was broad, his brow beetled, his eyes close-set
and hostile. He would sooner give me a pyre than a ship, he said as
much, but if I do him this favor …
“If you think to betray me,” Ser Axell said, “pray remember that I
have been castellan of Dragonstone a good long time. The garrison
is mine. Perhaps I cannot burn you without the king’s consent, but
who is to say you might not su er a fall.” He laid a meaty hand on
the back of Davos’s neck and shoved him bodily against the waisthigh side of the bridge, then shoved a little harder to force his face
out over the yard. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear,” said Davos. And you dare name me traitor?
Ser Axell released him. “Good.” He smiled. “His Grace awaits.
Best we do not keep him.”
At the very top of Stone Drum, within the great round room
called the Chamber of the Painted Table, they found Stannis
Baratheon standing behind the artifact that gave the hall its name, a
massive slab of wood carved and painted in the shape of Westeros
as it had been in the time of Aegon the Conqueror. An iron brazier
stood beside the king, its coals glowing a ruddy orange. Four tall
pointed windows looked out to north, south, east, and west. Beyond
was the night and the starry sky. Davos could hear the wind
moving, and fainter, the sounds of the sea.
“Your Grace,” Ser Axell said, “as it please you, I have brought the
onion knight.”
“So I see.” Stannis wore a grey wool tunic, a dark red mantle, and
a plain black leather belt from which his sword and dagger hung. A
red-gold crown with ame-shaped points encircled his brows. The
look of him was a shock. He seemed ten years older than the man
that Davos had left at Storm’s End when he set sail for the
Blackwater and the battle that would be their undoing. The king’s
close-cropped beard was spiderwebbed with grey hairs, and he had
dropped two stone or more of weight. He had never been a eshy
man, but now the bones moved beneath his skin like spears,
ghting to cut free. Even his crown seemed too large for his head.
His eyes were blue pits lost in deep hollows, and the shape of a
skull could be seen beneath his face.
Yet when he saw Davos, a faint smile brushed his lips. “So the sea
has returned me my knight of the sh and onions.”
“It did, Your Grace.” Does he know that he had me in his dungeon?
Davos went to one knee.
“Rise, Ser Davos,” Stannis commanded. “I have missed you, ser. I
have need of good counsel, and you never gave me less. So tell me
true—what is the penalty for treason?”
The word hung in the air. A frightful word, thought Davos. Was he
being asked to condemn his cellmate? Or himself, perchance? Kings

know the penalty for treason better than any man. “Treason?” he
nally managed, weakly.
“What else would you call it, to deny your king and seek to steal
his rightful throne. I ask you again—what is the penalty for treason
under the law?”
Davos had no choice but to answer. “Death,” he said. “The
penalty is death, Your Grace.”
“It has always been so. I am not … I am not a cruel man, Ser
Davos. You know me. Have known me long. This is not my decree.
It has always been so, since Aegon’s day and before. Daemon
Blackfyre, the brothers Toyne, the Vulture King, Grand Maester
Hareth … traitors have always paid with their lives … even
Rhaenyra Targaryen. She was daughter to one king and mother to
two more, yet she died a traitor’s death for trying to usurp her
brother’s crown. It is law. Law, Davos. Not cruelty.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” He does not speak of me. Davos felt a moment’s
pity for his cellmate down in the dark. He knew he should keep
silent, but he was tired and sick of heart, and he heard himself say,
“Sire, Lord Florent meant no treason.”
“Do smugglers have another name for it? I made him Hand, and
he would have sold my rights for a bowl of pease porridge. He
would even have given them Shireen. Mine only child, he would
have wed to a bastard born of incest.” The king’s voice was thick
with anger. “My brother had a gift for inspiring loyalty. Even in his
foes. At Summerhall he won three battles in a single day, and
brought Lords Grandison and Ca eren back to Storm’s End as
prisoners. He hung their banners in the hall as trophies. Ca eren’s
white fawns were spotted with blood and Grandison’s sleeping lion
was torn near in two. Yet they would sit beneath those banners of a
night, drinking and feasting with Robert. He even took them
hunting. ‘These men meant to deliver you to Aerys to be burned,’ I
told him after I saw them throwing axes in the yard. ‘You should
not be putting axes in their hands.’ Robert only laughed. I would
have thrown Grandison and Ca eren into a dungeon, but he turned
them into friends. Lord Ca eren died at Ashford Castle, cut down
by Randyll Tarly whilst ghting for Robert. Lord Grandison was

wounded on the Trident and died of it a year after. My brother
made them love him, but it would seem that I inspire only betrayal.
Even in mine own blood and kin. Brother, grandfather, cousins,
good uncle …”
“Your Grace,” said Ser Axell, “I beg you, give me the chance to
prove to you that not all Florents are so feeble.”
“Ser Axell would have me resume the war,” King Stannis told
Davos. “The Lannisters think I am done and beaten, and my sworn
lords have forsaken me, near every one. Even Lord Estermont, my
own mother’s father, has bent his knee to Jo rey. The few loyal
men who remain to me are losing heart. They waste their days
drinking and gambling, and lick their wounds like beaten curs.”
“Battle will set their hearts ablaze once more, Your Grace,” Ser
Axell said. “Defeat is a disease, and victory is the cure.”
“Victory.” The king’s mouth twisted. “There are victories and
victories, ser. But tell your plan to Ser Davos. I would hear his
views on what you propose.”
Ser Axell turned to Davos, with a look on his face much like the
look that proud Lord Belgrave must have worn, the day King Baelor
the Blessed had commanded him to wash the beggar’s ulcerous feet.
Nonetheless, he obeyed.
The plan Ser Axell had devised with Salladhor Saan was simple. A
few hours’ sail from Dragonstone lay Claw Isle, ancient sea-girt seat
of House Celtigar. Lord Ardrian Celtigar had fought beneath the
ery heart on the Blackwater, but once taken, he had wasted no
time in going over to Jo rey. He remained in King’s Landing even
now. “Too frightened of His Grace’s wrath to come near
Dragonstone, no doubt,” Ser Axell declared. “And wisely so. The
man has betrayed his rightful king.”
Ser Axell proposed to use Salladhor Saan’s eet and the men who
had escaped the Blackwater—Stannis still had some fteen hundred
on Dragonstone, more than half of them Florents—to exact
retribution for Lord Celtigar’s defection. Claw Isle was but lightly
garrisoned, its castle reputedly stu ed with Myrish carpets,
Volantene glass, gold and silver plate, jeweled cups, magni cent
hawks, an axe of Valyrian steel, a horn that could summon monsters

from the deep, chests of rubies, and more wines than a man could
drink in a hundred years. Though Celtigar had shown the world a
niggardly face, he had never stinted on his own comforts. “Put his
castle to the torch and his people to the sword, I say,” Ser Axell
concluded. “Leave Claw Isle a desolation of ash and bone, t only
for carrion crows, so the realm might see the fate of those who bed
with Lannisters.”
Stannis listened to Ser Axell’s recitation in silence, grinding his
jaw slowly from side to side. When it was done, he said, “It could
be done, I believe. The risk is small. Jo rey has no strength at sea
until Lord Redwyne sets sail from the Arbor. The plunder might
serve to keep that Lysene pirate Salladhor Saan loyal for a time. By
itself Claw Isle is worthless, but its fall would serve notice to Lord
Tywin that my cause is not yet done.” The king turned back to
Davos. “Speak truly, ser. What do you make of Ser Axell’s
proposal?”
Speak truly, ser. Davos remembered the dark cell he had shared
with Lord Alester, remembered Lamprey and Porridge. He thought
of the promises that Ser Axell had made on the bridge above the
yard. A ship or a shove, what shall it be? But this was Stannis asking.
“Your Grace,” he said slowly, “I make it folly … aye, and
cowardice.”
“Cowardice?” Ser Axell all but shouted. “No man calls me craven
before my king!”
“Silence,” Stannis commanded. “Ser Davos, speak on, I would
hear your reasons.”
Davos turned to face Ser Axell. “You say we ought show the
realm we are not done. Strike a blow. Make war, aye … but on
what enemy? You will nd no Lannisters on Claw Isle.”
“We will nd traitors,” said Ser Axell, “though it may be I could
nd some closer to home. Even in this very room.”
Davos ignored the jibe. “I don’t doubt Lord Celtigar bent the knee
to the boy Jo rey. He is an old done man, who wants no more than
to end his days in his castle, drinking his ne wine out of his
jeweled cups.” He turned back to Stannis. “Yet he came when you
called, sire. Came, with his ships and swords. He stood by you at

Storm’s End when Lord Renly came down on us, and his ships sailed
up the Blackwater. His men fought for you, killed for you, burned
for you. Claw Isle is weakly held, yes. Held by women and children
and old men. And why is that? Because their husbands and sons and
fathers died on the Blackwater, that’s why. Died at their oars, or
with swords in their hands, ghting beneath our banners. Yet Ser
Axell proposes we swoop down on the homes they left behind, to
rape their windows and put their children to the sword. These
smallfolk are no traitors …”
“They are,” insisted Ser Axell. “Not all of Celtigar’s men were
slain on the Blackwater. Hundreds were taken with their lord, and
bent the knee when he did.”
“When he did,” Davos repeated. “They were his men. His sworn
men. What choice were they given?”
“Every man has choices. They might have refused to kneel. Some
did, and died for it. Yet they died true men, and loyal.”
“Some men are stronger than others.” It was a feeble answer, and
Davos knew it. Stannis Baratheon was a man of iron will who
neither understood nor forgave weakness in others. I am losing, he
thought, despairing.
“It is every man’s duty to remain loyal to his rightful king, even if
the lord he serves proves false,” Stannis declared in a tone that
brooked no argument.
A desperate folly took hold of Davos, a recklessness akin to
madness. “As you remained loyal to King Aerys when your brother
raised his banners?” he blurted.
Shocked silence followed, until Ser Axell cried, “Treason!” and
snatched his dagger from its sheath. “Your Grace, he speaks his
infamy to your face!”
Davos could hear Stannis grinding his teeth. A vein bulged, blue
and swollen, in the king’s brow. Their eyes met. “Put up your knife,
Ser Axell. And leave us.”
“As it please Your Grace—”
“It would please me for you to leave,” said Stannis. “Take
yourself from my presence, and send me Melisandre.”

“As you command.” Ser Axell slid the knife away, bowed, and
hurried toward the door. His boots rang against the oor, angry.
“You have always presumed on my forbearance,” Stannis warned
Davos when they were alone. “I can shorten your tongue as easy as
I did your ngers, smuggler.”
“I am your man, Your Grace. So it is your tongue, to do with as
you please.”
“It is,” he said, calmer. “And I would have it speak the truth.
Though the truth is a bitter draught at times. Aerys? If you only
knew … that was a hard choosing. My blood or my liege. My
brother or my king.” He grimaced. “Have you ever seen the Iron
Throne? The barbs along the back, the ribbons of twisted steel, the
jagged ends of swords and knives all tangled up and melted? It is
not a comfortable seat, ser. Aerys cut himself so often men took to
calling him King Scab, and Maegor the Cruel was murdered in that
chair. By that chair, to hear some tell it. It is not a seat where a man
can rest at ease. Ofttimes I wonder why my brothers wanted it so
desperately.”
“Why would you want it, then?” Davos asked him.
“It is not a question of wanting. The throne is mine, as Robert’s
heir. That is law. After me, it must pass to my daughter, unless
Selyse should nally give me a son.” He ran three ngers lightly
down the table, over the layers of smooth hard varnish, dark with
age. “I am king. Wants do not enter into it. I have a duty to my
daughter. To the realm. Even to Robert. He loved me but little, I
know, yet he was my brother. The Lannister woman gave him horns
and made a motley fool of him. She may have murdered him as
well, as she murdered Jon Arryn and Ned Stark. For such crimes
there must be justice. Starting with Cersei and her abominations.
But only starting. I mean to scour that court clean. As Robert should
have done, after the Trident. Ser Barristan once told me that the rot
in King Aerys’s reign began with Varys. The eunuch should never
have been pardoned. No more than the Kingslayer. At the least,
Robert should have stripped the white cloak from Jaime and sent
him to the Wall, as Lord Stark urged. He listened to Jon Arryn
instead. I was still at Storm’s End, under siege and unconsulted.” He

turned abruptly, to give Davos a hard shrewd look. “The truth, now.
Why did you wish to murder Lady Melisandre?”
So he does know. Davos could not lie to him. “Four of my sons
burned on the Blackwater. She gave them to the ames.”
“You wrong her. Those res were no work of hers. Curse the
Imp, curse the pyromancers, curse that fool of Florent who sailed
my eet into the jaws of a trap. Or curse me for my stubborn pride,
for sending her away when I needed her most. But not Melisandre.
She remains my faithful servant.”
“Maester Cressen was your faithful servant. She slew him, as she
killed Ser Cortnay Penrose and your brother Renly.”
“Now you sound a fool,” the king complained. “She saw Renly’s
end in the ames, yes, but she had no more part in it than I did. The
priestess was with me. Your Devan would tell you so. Ask him, if
you doubt me. She would have spared Renly if she could. It was
Melisandre who urged me to meet with him, and give him one last
chance to amend his treason. And it was Melisandre who told me to
send for you when Ser Axell wished to give you to R’hllor.” He
smiled thinly. “Does that surprise you?”
“Yes. She knows I am no friend to her or her red god.”
“But you are a friend to me. She knows that as well.” He
beckoned Davos closer. “The boy is sick. Maester Pylos has been
leeching him.”
“The boy?” His thoughts went to his Devan, the king’s squire.
“My son, sire?”
“Devan? A good boy. He has much of you in him. It is Robert’s
bastard who is sick, the boy we took at Storm’s End.”
Edric Storm. “I spoke with him in Aegon’s Garden.”
“As she wished. As she saw.” Stannis sighed. “Did the boy charm
you?” He has that gift. He got it from his father, with the blood. He
knows he is a king’s son, but chooses to forget that he is bastardborn. And he worships Robert, as Renly did when he was young. My
royal brother played the fond father on his visits to Storm’s End,
and there were gifts … swords and ponies and fur-trimmed cloaks.
The eunuch’s work, every one. The boy would write the Red Keep
full of thanks, and Robert would laugh and ask Varys what he’d sent

this year. Renly was no better. He left the boy’s upbringing to
castellans and maesters, and every one fell victim to his charm.
Penrose chose to die rather than give him up.” The king ground his
teeth together. “It still angers me. How could he think I would hurt
the boy? I chose Robert, did I not? When that hard day came. I
chose blood over honor.”
He does not use the boy’s name. That made Davos very uneasy. “I
hope young Edric will recover soon.”
Stannis waved a hand, dismissing his concern. “It is a chill, no
more. He coughs, he shivers, he has a fever. Maester Pylos will
soon set him right. By himself the boy is nought, you understand,
but in his veins ows my brother’s blood. There is power in a king’s
blood, she says.”
Davos did not have to ask who she was.
Stannis touched the Painted Table. “Look at it, onion knight. My
realm, by rights. My Westeros.” He swept a hand across it. “This
talk of Seven Kingdoms is a folly. Aegon saw that three hundred
years ago when he stood where we are standing. They painted this
table at his command. Rivers and bays they painted, hills and
mountains, castles and cities and market towns, lakes and swamps
and forests … but no borders. It is all one. One realm, for one king
to rule alone.”
“One king,” agreed Davos. “One king means peace.”
“I shall bring justice to Westeros. A thing Ser Axell understands as
little as he does war. Claw Isle would gain me naught … and it was
evil, just as you said. Celtigar must pay the traitor’s price himself,
in his own person. And when I come into my kingdom, he shall.
Every man shall reap what he has sown, from the highest lord to
the lowest gutter rat. And some will lose more than the tips o their
ngers, I promise you. They have made my kingdom bleed, and I
do not forget that.” King Stannis turned from the table. “On your
knees, Onion Knight.”
“Your Grace?”
“For your onions and sh, I made you a knight once. For this, I
am of a mind to raise you to lord.”

This? Davos was lost. “I am content to be your knight, Your
Grace. I would not know how to begin being lordly.”
“Good. To be lordly is to be false. I have learned that lesson hard.
Now, kneel. Your king commands.”
Davos knelt, and Stannis drew his longsword. Lightbringer,
Melisandre had named it; the red sword of heroes, drawn from the
res where the seven gods were consumed. The room seemed to
grow brighter as the blade slid from its scabbard. The steel had a
glow to it; now orange, now yellow, now red. The air shimmered
around it, and no jewel had ever sparkled so brilliantly. But when
Stannis touched it to Davos’s shoulder, it felt no di erent than any
other longsword. “Ser Davos of House Seaworth,” the king said,
“are you my true and honest liege man, now and forever?”
“I am, Your Grace.”
“And do you swear to serve me loyally all your days, to give me
honest counsel and swift obedience, to defend my rights and my
realm against all foes in battles great and small, to protect my
people and punish my enemies?”
“I do, Your Grace.”
“Then rise again, Davos Seaworth, and rise as Lord of the
Rainwood, Admiral of the Narrow Sea, and Hand of the King.”
For a moment Davos was too stunned to move. I woke this morning
in his dungeon. “Your Grace, you cannot … I am no t man to be a
King’s Hand.”
“There is no man tter.” Stannis sheathed Lightbringer, gave
Davos his hand, and pulled him to his feet.
“I am lowborn,” Davos reminded him. “An upjumped smuggler.
Your lords will never obey me.”
“Then we will make new lords.”
“But … I cannot read … nor write …”
“Maester Pylos can read for you. As to writing, my last Hand
wrote the head o his shoulders. All I ask of you are the things
you’ve always given me. Honesty. Loyalty. Service.”
“Surely there is someone better … some great lord …”
Stannis snorted. “Bar Emmon, that boy? My faithless grandfather?
Celtigar has abandoned me, the new Velaryon is six years old, and

the new Sunglass sailed for Volantis after I burned his brother.” He
made an angry gesture. “A few good men remain, it’s true. Ser
Gilbert Farring holds Storm’s End for me still, with two hundred
loyal men. Lord Morrigen, the Bastard of Nightsong, young
Chyttering, my cousin Andrew … but I trust none of them as I trust
you, my lord of Rainwood. You will be my Hand. It is you I want
beside me for the battle.”
Another battle will be the end of all of us, thought Davos. Lord
Alester saw that much true enough. “Your Grace asked for honest
counsel. In honesty then … we lack the strength for another battle
against the Lannisters.”
“It is the great battle His Grace is speaking of,” said a woman’s
voice, rich with the accents of the east. Melisandre stood at the door
in her red silks and shimmering satins, holding a covered silver dish
in her hands. “These little wars are no more than a scu e of
children before what is to come. The one whose name may not be
spoken is marshaling his power, Davos Seaworth, a power fell and
evil and strong beyond measure. Soon comes the cold, and the night
that never ends.” She placed the silver dish on the Painted Table.
“Unless true men nd the courage to ght it. Men whose hearts are
re.”
Stannis stared at the silver dish. “She has shown it to me, Lord
Davos. In the ames.”
“You saw it, sire?” It was not like Stannis Baratheon to lie about
such a thing.
“With mine own eyes. After the battle, when I was lost to despair,
the Lady Melisandre bid me gaze into the hearth re. The chimney
was drawing strongly, and bits of ash were rising from the re. I
stared at them, feeling half a fool, but she bid me look deeper,
and … the ashes were white, rising in the updraft, yet all at once it
seemed as if they were falling. Snow, I thought. Then the sparks in
the air seemed to circle, to become a ring of torches, and I was
looking through the re down on some high hill in a forest. The
cinders had become men in black behind the torches, and there
were shapes moving through the snow. For all the heat of the re, I
felt a cold so terrible I shivered, and when I did the sight was gone,

the re but a re once again. But what I saw was real, I’d stake my
kingdom on it.”
“And have,” said Melisandre.
The conviction in the king’s voice frightened Davos to the core.
“A hill in a forest … shapes in the snow … I don’t …”
“It means that the battle is begun,” said Melisandre. “The sand is
running through the glass more quickly now, and man’s hour on
earth is almost done. We must act boldly, or all hope is lost.
Westeros must unite beneath her one true king, the prince that was
promised, Lord of Dragonstone and chosen of R’hllor.”
“R’hllor chooses queerly, then.” The king grimaced, as if he’d
tasted something foul. “Why me, and not my brothers? Renly and
his peach. In my dreams I see the juice running from his mouth, the
blood from his throat. If he had done his duty by his brother, we
would have smashed Lord Tywin. A victory even Robert could be
proud of. Robert …” His teeth ground side to side. “He is in my
dreams as well. Laughing. Drinking. Boasting. Those were the
things he was best at. Those, and ghting. I never bested him at
anything. The Lord of Light should have made Robert his champion.
Why me?”
“Because you are a righteous man,” said Melisandre.
“A righteous man.” Stannis touched the covered silver platter
with a nger. “With leeches.”
“Yes,” said Melisandre, “but I must tell you once more, this is not
the way.”
“You swore it would work.” The king looked angry.
“It will … and it will not.”
“Which?”
“Both.”
“Speak sense to me, woman.”
“When the res speak more plainly, so shall I. There is truth in
the ames, but it is not always easy to see.” The great ruby at her
throat drank re from the glow of the brazier. “Give me the boy,
Your Grace. It is the surer way. The better way. Give me the boy
and I shall wake the stone dragon.”
“I have told you, no.”

“He is only one baseborn boy, against all the boys of Westeros,
and all the girls as well. Against all the children that might ever be
born, in all the kingdoms of the world.”
“The boy is innocent.”
“The boy de led your marriage bed, else you would surely have
sons of your own. He shamed you.”
“Robert did that. Not the boy. My daughter has grown fond of
him. And he is mine own blood.”
“Your brother’s blood,” Melisandre said. “A king’s blood. Only a
king’s blood can wake the stone dragon.”
Stannis ground his teeth. “I’ll hear no more of this. The dragons
are done. The Targaryens tried to bring them back half a dozen
times. And made fools of themselves, or corpses. Patchface is the
only fool we need on this godsforsaken rock. You have the leeches.
Do your work.”
Melisandre bowed her head sti y, and said, “As my king
commands.” Reaching up her left sleeve with her right hand, she
ung a handful of powder into the brazier. The coals roared. As pale
ames writhed atop them, the red woman retrieved the silver dish
and brought it to the king. Davos watched her lift the lid. Beneath
were three large black leeches, fat with blood.
The boy’s blood, Davos knew. A king’s blood.
Stannis stretched forth a hand, and his ngers closed around one
of the leeches.
“Say the name,” Melisandre commanded.
The leech was twisting in the king’s grip, trying to attach itself to
one of his ngers. “The usurper,” he said. “Jo rey Baratheon.”
When he tossed the leech into the re, it curled up like an autumn
leaf amidst the coals, and burned.
Stannis grasped the second. “The usurper,” he declared, louder
this time. “Balon Greyjoy.” He ipped it lightly onto the brazier,
and its esh split and cracked. The blood burst from it, hissing and
smoking.
The last was in the king’s hand. This one he studied a moment as
it writhed between his ngers. “The usurper,” he said at last. “Robb
Stark.” And he threw it on the ames.

JAIME

Harrenhal’s bathhouse was a dim, steamy, low-ceilinged room

lled with great stone tubs. When they led Jaime in, they found
Brienne seated in one of them, scrubbing her arm almost angrily.
“Not so hard, wench,” he called. “You’ll scrub the skin o .” She
dropped her brush and covered her teats with hands as big as
Gregor Clegane’s. The pointy little buds she was so intent on hiding
would have looked more natural on some ten-year-old than they did
on her thick muscular chest.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Lord Bolton insists I sup with him, but he neglected to invite my
eas.” Jaime tugged at his guard with his left hand. “Help me out of
these stinking rags.” One-handed, he could not so much as unlace
his breeches. The man obeyed grudgingly, but he obeyed. “Now
leave us,” Jaime said when his clothes lay in a pile on the wet stone
oor. “My lady of Tarth doesn’t want the likes of you scum gaping
at her teats.” He pointed his stump at the hatchet-faced woman
attending Brienne. “You too. Wait without. There’s only the one
door, and the wench is too big to try and shinny up a chimney.”
The habit of obedience went deep. The woman followed his guard
out, leaving the bathhouse to the two of them. The tubs were large
enough to hold six or seven, after the fashion of the Free Cities, so
Jaime climbed in with the wench, awkward and slow. Both his eyes
were open, though the right remained somewhat swollen, despite
Qyburn’s leeches. Jaime felt a hundred and nine years old, which

was a deal better than he had been feeling when he came to
Harrenhal.
Brienne shrunk away from him. “There are other tubs.”
“This one suits me well enough.” Gingerly, he immersed himself
up to the chin in the steaming water. “Have no fear, wench. Your
thighs are purple and green, and I’m not interested in what you’ve
got between them.” He had to rest his right arm on the rim, since
Qyburn had warned him to keep the linen dry. He could feel the
tension drain from his legs, but his head spun. “If I faint, pull me
out. No Lannister has ever drowned in his bath and I don’t mean to
be the rst.”
“Why should I care how you die?”
“You swore a solemn vow.” He smiled as a red ush crept up the
thick white column of her neck. She turned her back to him. “Still
the shy maiden? What is it that you think I haven’t seen?” He
groped for the brush she had dropped, caught it with his ngers,
and began to scrub himself desultorily. Even that was di cult,
awkward. My left hand is good for nothing.
Still, the water darkened as the caked dirt dissolved o his skin.
The wench kept her back to him, the muscles in her great shoulders
hunched and hard.
“Does the sight of my stump distress you so?” Jaime asked. “You
ought to be pleased. I’ve lost the hand I killed the king with. The
hand that ung the Stark boy from that tower. The hand I’d slide
between my sister’s thighs to make her wet.” He thrust his stump at
her face. “No wonder Renly died, with you guarding him.”
She jerked to her feet as if he’d struck her, sending a wash of hot
water across the tub. Jaime caught a glimpse of the thick blonde
bush at the juncture of her thighs as she climbed out. She was much
hairier than his sister. Absurdly, he felt his cock stir beneath the
bathwater. Now I know I have been too long away from Cersei. He
averted his eyes, troubled by his body’s response. “That was
unworthy,” he mumbled. “I’m a maimed man, and bitter. Forgive
me, wench. You protected me as well as any man could have, and
better than most.”
She wrapped her nakedness in a towel. “Do you mock me?”

That pricked him back to anger. “Are you as thick as a castle
wall? That was an apology. I am tired of ghting with you. What
say we make a truce?”
“Truces are built on trust. Would you have me trust—”
“The Kingslayer, yes. The oathbreaker who murdered poor sad
Aerys Targaryen.” Jaime snorted. “It’s not Aerys I rue, it’s Robert. ‘I
hear they’ve named you Kingslayer,’ he said to me at his coronation
feast. ‘Just don’t think to make it a habit.’ And he laughed. Why is it
that no one names Robert oathbreaker? He tore the realm apart, yet
I am the one with shit for honor.”
“Robert did all he did for love.” Water ran down Brienne’s legs
and pooled beneath her feet.
“Robert did all he did for pride, a cunt, and a pretty face.” He
made a st … or would have, if he’d had a hand. Pain lanced up his
arm, cruel as laughter.
“He rode to save the realm,” she insisted.
To save the realm. “Did you know that my brother set the
Blackwater Rush a re? Wild re will burn on water. Aerys would
have bathed in it if he’d dared. The Targaryens were all mad for
re.” Jaime felt light-headed. It is the heat in here, the poison in my
blood, the last of my fever. I am not myself. He eased himself down
until the water reached his chin. “Soiled my white cloak … I wore
my gold armor that day, but …”
“Gold armor?” Her voice sounded far o , faint.
He oated in heat, in memory. “After dancing gri ns lost the
Battle of the Bells, Aerys exiled him.” Why am I telling this absurd
ugly child? “He had nally realized that Robert was no mere outlaw
lord to be crushed at whim, but the greatest threat House Targaryen
had faced since Daemon Blackfyre. The king reminded Lewyn
Martell gracelessly that he held Elia and sent him to take command
of the ten thousand Dornishmen coming up the kingsroad. Jon
Darry and Barristan Selmy rode to Stoney Sept to rally what they
could of gri ns’ men, and Prince Rhaegar returned from the south
and persuaded his father to swallow his pride and summon my
father. But no raven returned from Casterly Rock, and that made
the king even more afraid. He saw traitors everywhere, and Varys

was always there to point out any he might have missed. So His
Grace commanded his alchemists to place caches of wild re all over
King’s Landing. Beneath Baelor’s Sept and the hovels of Flea
Bottom, under stables and storehouses, at all seven gates, even in
the cellars of the Red Keep itself.
“Everything was done in the utmost secrecy by a handful of
master pyromancers. They did not even trust their own acolytes to
help. The queen’s eyes had been closed for years, and Rhaegar was
busy marshaling an army. But Aerys’s new mace-and-dagger Hand
was not utterly stupid, and with Rossart, Belis, and Garigus coming
and going night and day, he became suspicious. Chelsted, that was
his name, Lord Chelsted.” It had come back to him suddenly, with
the telling. “I’d thought the man craven, but the day he confronted
Aerys he found some courage somewhere. He did all he could to
dissuade him. He reasoned, he jested, he threatened, and nally he
begged. When that failed he took o his chain of o ce and ung it
down on the oor. Aerys burnt him alive for that, and hung his
chain about the neck of Rossart, his favorite pyromancer. The man
who had cooked Lord Rickard Stark in his own armor. And all the
time, I stood by the foot of the Iron Throne in my white plate, still
as a corpse, guarding my liege and all his sweet secrets.
“My Sworn Brothers were all away, you see, but Aerys liked to
keep me close. I was my father’s son, so he did not trust me. He
wanted me where Varys could watch me, day and night. So I heard
it all.” He remembered how Rossart’s eyes would shine when he
unrolled his maps to show where the substance must be placed.
Garigus and Belis were the same. “Rhaegar met Robert on the
Trident, and you know what happened there. When the word
reached court, Aerys packed the queen o to Dragonstone with
Prince Viserys. Princess Elia would have gone as well, but he
forbade it. Somehow he had gotten it in his head that Prince Lewyn
must have betrayed Rhaegar on the Trident, but he thought he
could keep Dorne loyal so long as he kept Elia and Aegon by his
side. The traitors want my city, I heard him tell Rossart, but I’ll give
them naught but ashes. Let Robert be king over charred bones and
cooked meat. The Targaryens never bury their dead, they burn them.

Aerys meant to have the greatest funeral pyre of them all. Though if
truth be told, I do not believe he truly expected to die. Like Aerion
Bright re before him, Aerys thought the re would transform
him … that he would rise again, reborn as a dragon, and turn all his
enemies to ash.
“Ned Stark was racing south with Robert’s van, but my father’s
forces reached the city rst. Pycelle convinced the king that his
Warden of the West had come to defend him, so he opened the
gates. The one time he should have heeded Varys, and he ignored
him. My father had held back from the war, brooding on all the
wrongs Aerys had done him and determined that House Lannister
should be on the winning side. The Trident decided him.
“It fell to me to hold the Red Keep, but I knew we were lost. I
sent to Aerys asking his leave to make terms. My man came back
with a royal command. ‘Bring me your father’s head, if you are no
traitor.’ Aerys would have no yielding. Lord Rossart was with him,
my messenger said. I knew what that meant.
“When I came on Rossart, he was dressed as a common man-atarms, hurrying to a postern gate. I slew him rst. Then I slew
Aerys, before he could nd someone else to carry his message to the
pyromancers. Days later, I hunted down the others and slew them
as well. Belis o ered me gold, and Garigus wept for mercy. Well, a
sword’s more merciful than re, but I don’t think Garigus much
appreciated the kindness I showed him.”
The water had grown cool. When Jaime opened his eyes, he
found himself staring at the stump of his sword hand. The hand that
made me Kingslayer. The goat had robbed him of his glory and his
shame, both at once. Leaving what? Who am I now?
The wench looked ridiculous, clutching her towel to her meager
teats with her thick white legs sticking out beneath. “Has my tale
turned you speechless? Come, curse me or kiss me or call me a liar.
Something.”
“If this is true, how is it no one knows?”
“The knights of the Kingsguard are sworn to keep the king’s
secrets. Would you have me break my oath?” Jaime laughed. “Do
you think the noble Lord of Winterfell wanted to hear my feeble

explanations? Such an honorable man. He only had to look at me to
judge me guilty.” Jaime lurched to his feet, the water running cold
down his chest. “By what right does the wolf judge the lion? By
what right?” A violent shiver took him, and he smashed his stump
against the rim of the tub as he tried to climb out.
Pain shuddered through him … and suddenly the bathhouse was
spinning. Brienne caught him before he could fall. Her arm was all
goose esh, clammy and chilled, but she was strong, and gentler
than he would have thought. Gentler than Cersei, he thought as she
helped him from the tub, his legs wobbly as a limp cock. “Guards!”
he heard the wench shout. “The Kingslayer!”
Jaime, he thought, my name is Jaime.
The next he knew, he was lying on the damp oor with the
guards and the wench and Qyburn all standing over him looking
concerned. Brienne was naked, but she seemed to have forgotten
that for the moment. “The heat of the tubs will do it,” Maester
Qyburn was telling them. No, he’s not a maester, they took his chain.
“There’s still poison in his blood as well, and he’s malnourished.
What have you been feeding him?”
“Worms and piss and grey vomit,” o ered Jaime.
“Hardbread and water and oat porridge,” insisted the guard. “He
don’t hardly eat it, though. What should we do with him?”
“Scrub him and dress him and carry him to Kingspyre, if need
be,” Qyburn said. “Lord Bolton insists he will sup with him tonight.
The time is growing short.”
“Bring me clean garb for him,” Brienne said, “I’ll see that he’s
washed and dressed.”
The others were all too glad to give her the task. They lifted him
to his feet and sat him on a stone bench by the wall. Brienne went
away to retrieve her towel, and returned with a sti brush to nish
scrubbing him. One of the guards gave her a razor to trim his beard.
Qyburn returned with roughspun smallclothes, clean black woolen
breeches, a loose green tunic, and a leather jerkin that laced up the
front. Jaime was feeling less dizzy by then, though no less clumsy.
With the wench’s help he managed to dress himself. “Now all I need
is a silver looking glass.”

The Bloody Maester had brought fresh clothing for Brienne as
well; a stained pink satin gown and a linen undertunic. “I am sorry,
my lady. These were the only women’s garments in Harrenhal large
enough to t you.”
It was obvious at once that the gown had been cut for someone
with slimmer arms, shorter legs, and much fuller breasts. The ne
Myrish lace did little to conceal the bruising that mottled Brienne’s
skin. All in all, the garb made the wench look ludicrous. She has
thicker shoulders than I do, and a bigger neck, Jaime thought. Small
wonder she prefers to dress in mail. Pink was not a kind color for her
either. A dozen cruel japes leaped into his head, but for once he
kept them there. Best not to make her angry; he was no match for
her one-handed.
Qyburn had brought a ask as well. “What is it?” Jaime
demanded when the chainless maester pressed him to drink.
“Licorice steeped in vinegar, with honey and cloves. It will give
you some strength and clear your head.”
“Bring me the potion that grows new hands,” said Jaime. “That’s
the one I want.”
“Drink it,” Brienne said, unsmiling, and he did.
It was half an hour before he felt strong enough to stand. After
the dim wet warmth of the bathhouse, the air outside was a slap
across the face. “M’lord will be looking for him by now,” a guard
told Qyburn. “Her too. Do I need to carry him?”
“I can still walk. Brienne, give me your arm.”
Clutching her, Jaime let them herd him across the yard to a vast
draughty hall, larger even than the throne room in King’s Landing.
Huge hearths lined the walls, one every ten feet or so, more than he
could count, but no res had been lit, so the chill between the walls
went bone-deep. A dozen spearmen in fur cloaks guarded the doors
and the steps that led up to the two galleries above. And in the
center of that immense emptiness, at a trestle table surrounded by
what seemed like acres of smooth slate oor, the Lord of the
Dreadfort waited, attended only by a cupbearer.
“My lord,” said Brienne, when they stood before him.

Roose Bolton’s eyes were paler than stone, darker than milk, and
his voice was spider soft. “I am pleased that you are strong enough
to attend me, ser. My lady, do be seated.” He gestured at the spread
of cheese, bread, cold meat, and fruit that covered the table. “Will
you drink red or white? Of indi erent vintage, I fear. Ser Amory
drained Lady Whent’s cellars nearly dry.”
“I trust you killed him for it.” Jaime slid into the o ered seat
quickly, so Bolton could not see how weak he was. “White is for
Starks. I’ll drink red like a good Lannister.”
“I would prefer water,” said Brienne.
“Elmar, the red for Ser Jaime, water for the Lady Brienne, and
hippocras for myself.” Bolton waved a hand at their escort,
dismissing them, and the men beat a silent retreat.
Habit made Jaime reach for his wine with his right hand. His
stump rocked the goblet, spattering his clean linen bandages with
bright red spots and forcing him to catch the cup with his left hand
before it fell, but Bolton pretended not to notice his clumsiness. The
northman helped himself to a prune and ate it with small sharp
bites. “Do try these, Ser Jaime. They are most sweet, and help move
the bowels as well. Lord Vargo took them from an inn before he
burnt it.”
“My bowels move ne, that goat’s no lord, and your prunes don’t
interest me half so much as your intentions.”
“Regarding you?” A faint smile touched Roose Bolton’s lips. “You
are a perilous prize, ser. You sow dissension wherever you go. Even
here, in my happy house of Harrenhal.” His voice was a whisker
above a whisper. “And in Riverrun as well, it seems. Do you know,
Edmure Tully has o ered a thousand golden dragons for your
recapture?”
Is that all? “My sister will pay ten times as much.”
“Will she?” That smile again, there for an instant, gone as quick.
“Ten thousand dragons is a formidable sum. Of course, there is Lord
Karstark’s o er to consider as well. He promises the hand of his
daughter to the man who brings him your head.”
“Leave it to your goat to get it backward,” said Jaime.

Bolton gave a soft chuckle. “Harrion Karstark was captive here
when we took the castle, did you know? I gave him all the Karhold
men still with me and sent him o with Glover. I do hope nothing
ill befell him at Duskendale … else Alys Karstark would be all that
remains of Lord Rickard’s progeny.” He chose another prune.
“Fortunately for you, I have no need of a wife. I wed the Lady
Walda Frey whilst I was at the Twins.”
“Fair Walda?” Awkwardly, Jaime tried to hold the bread with his
stump while tearing it with his left hand.
“Fat Walda. My lord of Frey o ered me my bride’s weight in
silver for a dowry, so I chose accordingly. Elmar, break o some
bread for Ser Jaime.”
The boy tore a st-sized chunk o one end of the loaf and handed
it to Jaime. Brienne tore her own bread. “Lord Bolton,” she asked,
“it’s said you mean to give Harrenhal to Vargo Hoat.”
“That was his price,” Lord Bolton said. “The Lannisters are not the
only men who pay their debts. I must take my leave soon in any
case. Edmure Tully is to wed the Lady Roslin Frey at the Twins, and
my king commands my attendance.”
“Edmure weds?” said Jaime. “Not Robb Stark?”
“His Grace King Robb is wed.” Bolton spit a prune pit into his
hand and put it aside. “To a Westerling of the Crag. I am told her
name is Jeyne. No doubt you know her, ser. Her father is your
father’s bannerman.”
“My father has a good many bannermen, and most of them have
daughters.” Jaime groped one-handed for his goblet, trying to recall
this Jeyne. The Westerlings were an old house, with more pride
than power.
“This cannot be true,” Brienne said stubbornly. “King Robb was
sworn to wed a Frey. He would never break faith, he—”
“His Grace is a boy of sixteen,” said Roose Bolton mildly. “And I
would thank you not to question my word, my lady.”
Jaime felt almost sorry for Robb Stark. He won the war on the
battle eld and lost it in a bedchamber, poor fool. “How does Lord
Walder relish dining on trout in place of wolf?” he asked.

“Oh, trout makes for a tasty supper.” Bolton lifted a pale nger
toward his cupbearer. “Though my poor Elmar is bereft. He was to
wed Arya Stark, but my good father of Frey had no choice but to
break the betrothal when King Robb betrayed him.”
“Is there word of Arya Stark?” Brienne leaned forward. “Lady
Catelyn had feared that … is the girl still alive?”
“Oh, yes,” said the Lord of the Dreadfort.
“You have certain knowledge of that, my lord?”
Roose Bolton shrugged. “Arya Stark was lost for a time, it was
true, but now she has been found. I mean to see her returned safely
to the north.”
“Her and her sister both,” said Brienne. “Tyrion Lannister has
promised us both girls for his brother.”
That seemed to amuse the Lord of the Dreadfort. “My lady, has
no one told you? Lannisters lie.”
“Is that a slight on the honor of my House?” Jaime picked up the
cheese knife with his good hand. “A rounded point, and dull,” he
said, sliding his thumb along the edge of the blade, “but it will go
through your eye all the same.” Sweat beaded his brow. He could
only hope he did not look as feeble as he felt.
Lord Bolton’s little smile paid another visit to his lips. “You speak
boldly for a man who needs help to break his bread. My guards are
all around us, I remind you.”
“All around us, and half a league away.” Jaime glanced down the
vast length of the hall. “By the time they reach us, you’ll be as dead
as Aerys.”
“ ’Tis scarcely chivalrous to threaten your host over his own
cheese and olives,” the Lord of the Dreadfort scolded. “In the north,
we hold the laws of hospitality sacred still.”
“I’m a captive here, not a guest. Your goat cut o my hand. If you
think some prunes will make me overlook that, you’re bloody well
mistaken.”
That took Roose Bolton aback. “Perhaps I am. Perhaps I ought to
make a wedding gift of you to Edmure Tully … or strike your head
o , as your sister did for Eddard Stark.”
“I would not advise it. Casterly Rock has a long memory.”

“A thousand leagues of mountain, sea, and bog lie between my
walls and your rock. Lannister enmity means little to Bolton.”
“Lannister friendship could mean much.” Jaime thought he knew
the game they were playing now. But does the wench know as well?
He dare not look to see.
“I am not certain you are the sort of friends a wise man would
want.” Roose Bolton beckoned to the boy. “Elmar, carve our guests
a slice o the roast.”
Brienne was served rst, but made no move to eat. “My lord,”
she said, “Ser Jaime is to be exchanged for Lady Catelyn’s
daughters. You must free us to continue on our way.”
“The raven that came from Riverrun told of an escape, not an
exchange. And if you helped this captive slip his bonds, you are
guilty of treason, my lady.”
The big wench rose to her feet. “I serve Lady Stark.”
“And I the King in the North. Or the King Who Lost the North, as
some now call him. Who never wished to trade Ser Jaime back to
the Lannisters.”
“Sit down and eat, Brienne,” Jaime urged, as Elmar placed a slice
of roast before him, dark and bloody. “If Bolton meant to kill us, he
wouldn’t be wasting his precious prunes on us, at such peril to his
bowels.” He stared at the meat and realized there was no way to cut
it, one-handed. I am worth less than a girl now, he thought. The goat’s
evened the trade, though I doubt Lady Catelyn will thank him when
Cersei returns her whelps in like condition. The thought made him
grimace. I will get the blame for that as well, I’ll wager.
Roose Bolton cut his meat methodically, the blood running across
his plate. “Lady Brienne, will you sit if I tell you that I hope to send
Ser Jaime on, just as you and Lady Stark desire?”
“I … you’d send us on?” The wench sounded wary, but she sat.
“That is good, my lord.”
“It is. However, Lord Vargo has created me one
small … di culty.” He turned his pale eyes on Jaime. “Do you
know why Hoat cut o your hand?”
“He enjoys cutting o hands.” The linen that covered Jaime’s
stump was spotted with blood and wine. “He enjoys cutting o feet

as well. He doesn’t seem to need a reason.”
“Nonetheless, he had one. Hoat is more cunning than he appears.
No man commands a company such as the Brave Companions for
long unless he has some wits about him.” Bolton stabbed a chunk of
meat with the point of his dagger, put it in his mouth, chewed
thoughtfully, swallowed. “Lord Vargo abandoned House Lannister
because I o ered him Harrenhal, a reward a thousand times greater
than any he could hope to have from Lord Tywin. As a stranger to
Westeros, he did not know the prize was poisoned.”
“The curse of Harren the Black?” mocked Jaime.
“The curse of Tywin Lannister.” Bolton held out his goblet and
Elmar re lled it silently. “Our goat should have consulted the
Tarbecks or the Reynes. They might have warned him how your
lord father deals with betrayal.”
“There are no Tarbecks or Reynes,” said Jaime.
“My point precisely. Lord Vargo doubtless hoped that Lord
Stannis would triumph at King’s Landing, and thence con rm him in
his possession of this castle in gratitude for his small part in the
downfall of House Lannister.” He gave a dry chuckle. “He knows
little of Stannis Baratheon either, I fear. That one might have given
him Harrenhal for his service … but he would have given him a
noose for his crimes as well.”
“A noose is kinder than what he’ll get from my father.”
“By now he has come to the same realization. With Stannis
broken and Renly dead, only a Stark victory can save him from Lord
Tywin’s vengeance, but the chances of that grow perishingly slim.”
“King Robb has won every battle,” Brienne said stoutly, as
stubbornly loyal of speech as she was of deed.
“Won every battle, while losing the Freys, the Karstarks,
Winterfell, and the north. A pity the wolf is so young. Boys of
sixteen always believe they are immortal and invincible. An older
man would bend the knee, I’d think. After a war there is always a
peace, and with peace there are pardons … for the Robb Starks, at
least. Not for the likes of Vargo Hoat.” Bolton gave him a small
smile. “Both sides have made use of him, but neither will shed a

tear at his passing. The Brave Companions did not ght in the Battle
of the Blackwater, yet they died there all the same.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t mourn?”
“You have no pity for our wretched doomed goat? Ah, but the
gods must … else why deliver you into his hands?” Bolton chewed
another chunk of meat. “Karhold is smaller and meaner than
Harrenhal, but it lies well beyond the reach of the lion’s claws.
Once wed to Alys Karstark, Hoat might be a lord in truth. If he
could collect some gold from your father so much the better, but he
would have delivered you to Lord Rickard no matter how much
Lord Tywin paid. His price would be the maid, and safe refuge.
“But to sell you he must keep you, and the riverlands are full of
those who would gladly steal you away. Glover and Tallhart were
broken at Duskendale, but remnants of their host are still abroad,
with the Mountain slaughtering the stragglers. A thousand Karstarks
prowl the lands south and east of Riverrun, hunting you. Elsewhere
are Darry men left lordless and lawless, packs of four-footed
wolves, and the lightning lord’s outlaw bands. Dondarrion would
gladly hang you and the goat together from the same tree.” The
Lord of the Dreadfort sopped up some of the blood with a chunk of
bread. “Harrenhal was the only place Lord Vargo could hope to hold
you safe, but here his Brave Companions are much outnumbered by
my own men, and by Ser Aenys and his Freys. No doubt he feared I
might return you to Ser Edmure at Riverrun … or worse, send you
on to your father.
“By maiming you, he meant to remove your sword as a threat,
gain himself a grisly token to send to your father, and diminish your
value to me. For he is my man, as I am King Robb’s man. Thus his
crime is mine, or may seem so in your father’s eyes. And therein lies
my … small di culty.” He gazed at Jaime, his pale eyes unblinking,
expectant, chill.
I see. “You want me to absolve you of blame. To tell my father
that this stump is no work of yours.” Jaime laughed. “My lord, send
me to Cersei, and I’ll sing as sweet a song as you could want, of
how gently you treated me.” Any other answer, he knew, and
Bolton would give him back to the goat. “Had I a hand, I’d write it

out. How I was maimed by the sellsword my own father brought to
Westeros, and saved by the noble Lord Bolton.”
“I will trust to your word, ser.”
There’s something I don’t often hear. “How soon might we be
permitted to leave? And how do you mean to get me past all these
wolves and brigands and Karstarks?”
“You will leave when Qyburn says you are strong enough, with a
strong escort of picked men under the command of my captain,
Walton. Steelshanks, he is called. A soldier of iron loyalty. Walton
will see you safe and whole to King’s Landing.”
“Provided Lady Catelyn’s daughters are delivered safe and whole
as well,” said the wench. “My lord, your man Walton’s protection is
welcome, but the girls are my charge.”
The Lord of the Dreadfort gave her an uninterested glance. “The
girls need not concern you any further, my lady. The Lady Sansa is
the dwarf’s wife, only the gods can part them now.”
“His wife?” Brienne said, appalled. “The Imp? But … he swore,
before the whole court, in sight of gods and men …”
She is such an innocent. Jaime was almost as surprised, if truth be
told, but he hid it better. Sansa Stark, that ought to put a smile on
Tyrion’s face. He remembered how happy his brother had been with
his little crofter’s daughter … for a fortnight.
“What the Imp did or did nor swear scarcely matters now,” said
Lord Bolton. “Least of all to you.” The wench looked almost
wounded. Perhaps she nally felt the steel jaws of the trap when
Roose Bolton beckoned to his guards. “Ser Jaime will continue on to
King’s Landing. I said nothing about you, I fear. It would be
unconscionable of me to deprive Lord Vargo of both his prizes.” The
Lord of the Dreadfort reached out to pick another prune. “Were I
you, my lady, I should worry less about Starks and rather more
about sapphires.”

TYRION

A horse whickered impatiently behind him, from amidst the ranks

of gold cloaks drawn up across the road. Tyrion could hear Lord
Gyles coughing as well. He had not asked for Gyles, no more than
he’d asked for Ser Addam or Jalabhar Xho or any of the rest, but his
lord father felt Doran Martell might take it ill if only a dwarf came
out to escort him across the Blackwater.
Jo rey should have met the Dornishmen himself, he re ected as he
sat waiting, but he would have mucked it up, no doubt. Of late the
king had been repeating little jests about the Dornish that he’d
picked up from Mace Tyrell’s men-at-arms. How many Dornishmen
does it take to shoe a horse? Nine. One to do the shoeing, and eight to
lift the horse up. Somehow Tyrion did not think Doran Martell would
nd that amusing.
He could see their banners ying as the riders emerged from the
green of the living wood in a long dusty column. From here to the
river, only bare black trees remained, a legacy of his battle. Too
many banners, he thought sourly, as he watched the ashes kick up
under the hooves of the approaching horses, as they had beneath
the hooves of the Tyrell van as it smashed Stannis in the ank.
Martell’s brought half the lords of Dorne, by the look of it. He tried to
think of some good that might come of that, and failed. “How many
banners do you count?” he asked Bronn.
The sellsword knight shaded his eyes. “Eight … no, nine.”

Tyrion turned in his saddle. “Pod, come up here. Describe the
arms you see, and tell me which houses they represent.”
Podrick Payne edged his gelding closer. He was carrying the
royal standard, Jo rey’s great stag-and-lion, and struggling with its
weight. Bronn bore Tyrion’s own banner, the lion of Lannister gold
on crimson.
He’s getting taller, Tyrion realized as Pod stood in his stirrups for a
better look. He’ll soon tower over me like all the rest. The lad had been
making a diligent study of Dornish heraldry, at Tyrion’s command,
but as ever he was nervous. “I can’t see. The wind is apping them.”
“Bronn, tell the boy what you see.”
Bronn looked very much the knight today, in his new doublet and
cloak, the aming chain across his chest. “A red sun on orange,” he
called, “with a spear through its back.”
“Martell,” Podrick Payne said at once, visibly relieved. “House
Martell of Sunspear, my lord. The Prince of Dorne.”
“My horse would have known that one,” said Tyrion dryly. “Give
him another, Bronn.”
“There’s a purple ag with yellow balls.”
“Lemons?” Pod said hopefully. “A purple eld strewn with
lemons? For House Dalt? Of, of Lemonwood.”
“Might be. Next’s a big black bird on yellow. Something pink or
white in its claws, hard to say with the banner apping.”
“The vulture of Blackmont grasps a baby in its talons,” said Pod.
“House Blackmont of Blackmont, ser.”
Bronn laughed. “Reading books again? Books will ruin your
sword eye, boy. I see a skull too. A black banner.”
“The crowned skull of House Manwoody, bone and gold on
black.” Pod sounded more con dent with every correct answer.
“The Manwoodys of Kingsgrave.”
“Three black spiders?”
“They’re scorpions, ser. House Qorgyle of Sandstone, three
scorpions black on red.”
“Red and yellow, a jagged line between.”
“The ames of Hellholt. House Uller.”

Tyrion was impressed. The boy’s not half stupid, once he gets his
tongue untied. “Go on, Pod,” he urged. “If you get them all, I’ll
make you a gift.”
“A pie with red and black slices,” said Bronn. “There’s a gold hand
in the middle.”
“House Allyrion of Godsgrace.”
“A red chicken eating a snake, looks like.”
“The Gargalens of Salt Shore. A cockatrice. Ser. Pardon. Not a
chicken. Red, with a black snake in its beak.”
“Very good!” exclaimed Tyrion. “One more, lad.”
Bronn scanned the ranks of the approaching Dornishmen. “The
last’s a golden feather on green checks.”
“A golden quill, ser. Jordayne of the Tor.”
Tyrion laughed. “Nine, and well done. I could not have named
them all myself.” That was a lie, but it would give the boy some
pride, and that he badly needed.
Martell brings some formidable companions, it would seem. Not one
of the houses Pod had named was small or insigni cant. Nine of the
greatest lords of Dorne were coming up the kingsroad, them or
their heirs, and somehow Tyrion did not think they had come all
this way just to see the dancing bear. There was a message here.
And not one I like. He wondered if it had been a mistake to ship
Myrcella down to Sunspear.
“My lord,” Pod said, a little timidly, “there’s no litter.”
Tyrion turned his head sharply. The boy was right.
“Doran Martell always travels in a litter,” the boy said. “A carved
litter with silk hangings, and suns on the drapes.”
Tyrion had heard the same talk. Prince Doran was past fty, and
gouty. He may have wanted to make faster time, he told himself. He
may have feared his litter would make too tempting a target for brigands,
or that it would prove too cumbersome in the high passes of the
Boneway. Perhaps his gout is better.
So why did he have such a bad feeling about this?
This waiting was intolerable. “Banners forward,” he snapped.
“We’ll meet them.” He kicked his horse. Bronn and Pod followed,
one to either side. When the Dornishmen saw them coming, they

spurred their own mounts, banners rippling as they rode. From their
ornate saddles were slung the round metal shields they favored, and
many carried bundles of short throwing spears, or the doublecurved Dornish bows they used so well from horseback.
There were three sorts of Dornishmen, the rst King Daeron had
observed. There were the salty Dornishmen who lived along the
coasts, the sandy Dornishmen of the deserts and long river valleys,
and the stony Dornishmen who made their fastnesses in the passes
and heights of the Red Mountains. The salty Dornishmen had the
most Rhoynish blood, the stony Dornishmen the least.
All three sorts seemed well represented in Doran’s retinue. The
salty Dornishmen were lithe and dark, with smooth olive skin and
long black hair streaming in the wind. The sandy Dornishmen were
even darker, their faces burned brown by the hot Dornish sun. They
wound long bright scarfs around their helms to ward o sunstroke.
The stony Dornishmen were biggest and fairest, sons of the Andals
and the First Men, brown-haired or blond, with faces that freckled
or burned in the sun instead of browning.
The lords wore silk and satin robes with jeweled belts and
owing sleeves. Their armor was heavily enameled and inlaid with
burnished copper, shining silver, and soft red gold. They came
astride red horses and golden ones and a few as pale as snow, all
slim and swift, with long necks and narrow beautiful heads. The
fabled sand steeds of Dorne were smaller than proper warhorses and
could not bear such weight of armor, but it was said that they could
run for a day and night and another day, and never tire.
The Dornish leader forked a stallion black as sin with a mane and
tail the color of re. He sat his saddle as if he’d been born there,
tall, slim, graceful. A cloak of pale red silk uttered from his
shoulders, and his shirt was armored with overlapping rows of
copper disks that glittered like a thousand bright new pennies as he
rode. His high gilded helm displayed a copper sun on its brow, and
the round shield slung behind him bore the sun-and-spear of House
Martell on its polished metal surface.
A Martell sun, but ten years too young, Tyrion thought as he reined
up, too t as well, and far too erce. He knew what he must deal with

by then. How many Dornishmen does it take to start a war? he asked
himself. Only one. Yet he had no choice but to smile. “Well met, my
lords. We had word of your approach, and His Grace King Jo rey
bid me ride out to welcome you in his name. My lord father the
King’s Hand sends his greetings as well.” He feigned an amiable
confusion. “Which of you is Prince Doran?”
“My brother’s health requires he remain at Sunspear.” The
princeling removed his helm. Beneath, his face was lined and
saturnine, with thin arched brows above large eyes as black and
shiny as pools of coal oil. Only a few streaks of silver marred the
lustrous black hair that receded from his brow in a widow’s peak as
sharply pointed as his nose. A salty Dornishmen for certain. “Prince
Doran has sent me to join King Jo rey’s council in his stead, as it
please His Grace.”
“His Grace will be most honored to have the counsel of a warrior
as renowned as Prince Oberyn of Dorne,” said Tyrion, thinking, This
will mean blood in the gutters. “And your noble companions are most
welcome as well.”
“Permit me to acquaint you with them, my lord of Lannister. Ser
Deziel Dalt, of Lemonwood. Lord Tremond Gargalen. Lord Harmen
Uller and his brother Ser Ulwyck. Ser Ryon Allyrion and his natural
son Ser Daemon Sand, the Bastard of Godsgrace. Lord Dagos
Manwoody, his brother Ser Myles, his sons Mors and Dickon. Ser
Arron Qorgyle. And never let it be thought that I would neglect the
ladies. Myria Jordayne, heir to the Tor. Lady Larra Blackmont, her
daughter Jynessa, her son Perros.” He raised a slender hand toward
a black-haired woman to the rear, beckoning her forward. “And this
is Ellaria Sand, mine own paramour.”
Tyrion swallowed a groan. His paramour, and bastard-born, Cersei
will pitch a holy t if he wants her at the wedding. If she consigned the
woman to some dark corner below the salt, his sister would risk the
Red Viper’s wrath. Seat her beside him at the high table, and every
other lady on the dais was like to take o ense. Did Prince Doran
mean to provoke a quarrel?
Prince Oberyn wheeled his horse about to face his fellow
Dornishmen. “Ellaria, lords and ladies, sers, see how well King

Jo rey loves us. His Grace has been so kind as to send his own
Uncle Imp to bring us to his court.”
Bronn snorted back laughter, and Tyrion perforce must feign
amusement as well. “Not alone, my lords. That would be too
enormous a task for a little man like me.” His own party had come
up on them, so it was his turn to name the names. “Let me present
Ser Flement Brax, heir to Hornvale. Lord Gyles of Rosby. Ser
Addam Marbrand, Lord Commander of the City Watch. Jalabhar
Xho, Prince of the Red Flower Vale. Ser Harys Swyft, my uncle
Kevan’s good father by marriage. Ser Merlon Crakehall. Ser Philip
Foote and Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, two heroes of our recent
battle against the rebel Stannis Baratheon. And mine own squire,
young Podrick of House Payne.” The names had a nice ringing
sound as Tyrion reeled them o , but the bearers were nowise near
as distinguished nor formidable a company as those who
accompanied Prince Oberyn, as both of them knew full well.
“My lord of Lannister,” said Lady Blackmont, “we have come a
long dusty way, and rest and refreshment would be most welcome.
Might we continue on to the city?”
“At once, my lady.” Tyrion turned his horse’s head, and called to
Ser Addam Marbrand. The mounted gold cloaks who formed the
greatest part of his honor guard turned their horses crisply at Ser
Addam’s command, and the column set o for the river and King’s
Landing beyond.
Oberyn Nymeros Martell, Tyrion muttered under his breath as he
fell in beside the man. The Red Viper of Dorne. And what in the seven
hells am I supposed to do with him?
He knew the man only by reputation, to be sure … but the
reputation was fearsome. When he was no more than sixteen, Prince
Oberyn had been found abed with the paramour of old Lord
Yronwood, a huge man of erce repute and short temper. A duel
ensued, though in view of the prince’s youth and high birth, it was
only to rst blood. Both men took cuts, and honor was satis ed. Yet
Prince Oberyn soon recovered, while Lord Yronwood’s wounds
festered and killed him. Afterward men whispered that Oberyn had

fought with a poisoned sword, and ever thereafter friends and foes
alike called him the Red Viper.
That was many years ago, to be sure. The boy of sixteen was a
man past forty now, and his legend had grown a deal darker. He
had traveled in the Free Cities, learning the poisoner’s trade and
perhaps arts darker still, if rumors could be believed. He had
studied at the Citadel, going so far as to forge six links of a
maester’s chain before he grew bored. He had soldiered in the
Disputed Lands across the narrow sea, riding with the Second Sons
for a time before forming his own company. His tourneys, his
battles, his duels, his horses, his carnality … it was said that he
bedded men and women both, and had begotten bastard girls all
over Dorne. The sand snakes, men called his daughters. So far as
Tyrion had heard, Prince Oberyn had never fathered a son.
And of course, he had crippled the heir to Highgarden.
There is no man in the Seven Kingdoms who will be less welcome at a
Tyrell wedding, thought Tyrion. To send Prince Oberyn to King’s
Landing while the city still hosted Lord Mace Tyrell, two of his
sons, and thousands of their men-at-arms was a provocation as
dangerous as Prince Oberyn himself. A wrong word, an ill-timed jest,
a look, that’s all it will take, and our noble allies will be at one another’s
throats.
“We have met before,” the Dornish prince said lightly to Tyrion
as they rode side by side along the kingsroad, past ashen elds and
the skeletons of trees. “I would not expect you to remember,
though. You were even smaller than you are now.”
There was a mocking edge to his voice that Tyrion misliked, but
he was not about to let the Dornishman provoke him. “When was
this, my lord?” he asked in tones of polite interest.
“Oh, many and many a year ago, when my mother ruled in Dorne
and your lord father was Hand to a di erent king.”
Not so di erent as you might think, re ected Tyrion.
“It was when I visited Casterly Rock with my mother, her
consort, and my sister Elia. I was, oh, fourteen, fteen, thereabouts,
Elia a year older. Your brother and sister were eight or nine, as I
recall, and you had just been born.”

A queer time to come visiting. His mother had died giving him
birth, so the Martells would have found the Rock deep in mourning.
His father especially. Lord Tywin seldom spoke of his wife, but
Tyrion had heard his uncles talk of the love between them. In those
days, his father had been Aerys’s Hand, and many people said that
Lord Tywin Lannister ruled the Seven Kingdoms, but Lady Joanna
ruled Lord Tywin. “He was not the same man after she died, Imp,”
his Uncle Gery told him once. “The best part of him died with her.”
Gerion had been the youngest of Lord Tytos Lannister’s four sons,
and the uncle Tyrion liked best.
But he was gone now, lost beyond the seas, and Tyrion himself
had put Lady Joanna in her grave. “Did you nd Casterly Rock to
your liking, my lord?”
“Scarcely. Your father ignored us the whole time we were there,
after commanding Ser Kevan to see to our entertainment. The cell
they gave me had a featherbed to sleep in and Myrish carpets on the
oor, but it was dark and windowless, much like a dungeon when
you come down to it, as I told Elia at the time. Your skies were too
grey, your wines too sweet, your women too chaste, your food too
bland … and you yourself were the greatest disappointment of all.”
“I had just been born. What did you expect of me?”
“Enormity,” the black-haired prince replied. “You were small, but
far-famed. We were in Oldtown at your birth, and all the city talked
of was the monster that had been born to the King’s Hand, and what
such an omen might foretell for the realm.”
“Famine, plague, and war, no doubt.” Tyrion gave a sour smile.
“It’s always famine, plague, and war. Oh, and winter, and the long
night that never ends.”
“All that,” said Prince Oberyn, “and your father’s fall as well.
Lord Tywin had made himself greater than King Aerys, I heard one
begging brother preach, but only a god is meant to stand above a
king. You were his curse, a punishment sent by the gods to teach
him that he was no better than any other man.”
“I try, but he refuses to learn.” Tyrion gave a sigh. “But do go on,
I pray you. I love a good tale.”

“And well you might, since you were said to have one, a sti
curly tail like a swine’s. Your head was monstrous huge, we heard,
half again the size of your body, and you had been born with thick
black hair and a beard besides, an evil eye, and lion’s claws. Your
teeth were so long you could not close your mouth, and between
your legs were a girl’s privates as well as a boy’s.”
“Life would be much simpler if men could fuck themselves, don’t
you agree? And I can think of a few times when claws and teeth
might have proved useful. Even so, I begin to see the nature of your
complaint.”
Bronn gave out with a chuckle, but Oberyn only smiled. “We
might never have seen you at all but for your sweet sister. You
were never seen at table or hall, though sometimes at night we
could hear a baby howling down in the depths of the Rock. You did
have a monstrous great voice, I must grant you that. You would
wail for hours, and nothing would quiet you but a woman’s teat.”
“Still true, as it happens.”
This time Prince Oberyn did laugh. “A taste we share. Lord
Gargalen once told me he hoped to die with a sword in his hand, to
which I replied that I would sooner go with a breast in mine.”
Tyrion had to grin. “You were speaking of my sister?”
“Cersei promised Elia to show you to us. The day before we were
to sail, whilst my mother and your father were closeted together,
she and Jaime took us down to your nursery. Your wet nurse tried
to send us o , but your sister was having none of that. ‘He’s mine,’
she said, ‘and you’re just a milk cow, you can’t tell me what to do.
Be quiet or I’ll have my father cut your tongue out. A cow doesn’t
need a tongue, only udders.’ ”
“Her Grace learned charm at an early age,” said Tyrion, amused
by the notion of his sister claiming him as hers. “She’s never been in
any rush to claim me since, the gods know.
“Cersei even undid your swaddling clothes to give us a better
look,” the Dornish prince continued. “You did have one evil eye,
and some black fuzz on your scalp. Perhaps your head was larger
than most … but there was no tail, no beard, neither teeth nor
claws, and nothing between your legs but a tiny pink cock. After all

the wonderful whispers, Lord Tywin’s Doom turned out to be just a
hideous red infant with stunted legs. Elia even made the noise that
young girls make at the sight of infants, I’m sure you’ve heard it.
The same noise they make over cute kittens and playful puppies. I
believe she wanted to nurse you herself, ugly as you were. When I
commented that you seemed a poor sort of monster, your sister
said, ‘He killed my mother,’ and twisted your little cock so hard I
thought she was like to pull it o . You shrieked, but it was only
when your brother Jaime said, ‘Leave him be, you’re hurting him,’
that Cersei let go of you. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she told us. ‘Everyone
says he’s like to die soon. He shouldn’t even have lived this long.’ ”
The sun was shining bright above them, and the day was
pleasantly warm for autumn, but Tyrion Lannister went cold all
over when he heard that. My sweet sister. He scratched at the scar of
his nose and gave the Dornishman a taste of his “evil eye.” Now why
would he tell such a tale? Is he testing me, or simply twisting my cock as
Cersei did, so he can hear me scream? “Be sure and tell that story to
my father. It will delight him as much as it did me. The part about
my tail, especially. I did have one, but he had it lopped o .”
Prince Oberyn had a chuckle. “You’ve grown more amusing since
last we met.”
“Yes, but I meant to grow taller.”
“While we are speaking of amusement, I heard a curious tale
from Lord Buckler’s steward. He claimed that you had put a tax on
women’s privy purses.”
“It is a tax on whoring,” said Tyrion, irritated all over again. And
it was my bloody father’s notion. “Only a penny for each, ah … act.
The King’s Hand felt it might help improve the morals of the city.”
And pay for Jo rey’s wedding besides. Needless to say, as master of
coin, Tyrion had gotten all the blame for it. Bronn said they were
calling it the dwarf’s penny in the streets. “Spread your legs for the
Halfman, now,” they were shouting in the brothels and wine sinks,
if the sellsword could be believed.
“I will make certain to keep my pouch full of pennies. Even a
prince must pay his taxes.”

“Why should you need to go whoring?” He glanced back to where
Ellaria Sand rode among the other women. “Did you tire of your
paramour on the road?”
“Never. We share too much.” Prince Oberyn shrugged. “We have
never shared a beautiful blonde woman, however, and Ellaria is
curious. Do you know of such a creature?”
“I am a man wedded.” Though not yet bedded. “I no longer
frequent whores.” Unless I want to see them hanged.
Oberyn abruptly changed the subject. “It’s said there are to be
seventy-seven dishes served at the king’s wedding feast.”
“Are you hungry, my prince?”
“I have hungered for a long time. Though not for food. Pray tell
me, when will the justice be served?”
“Justice.” Yes, that is why he’s here, I should have seen that at once.
“You were close to your sister?”
“As children Elia and I were inseparable, much like your own
brother and sister.”
Gods, I hope not. “Wars and weddings have kept us well occupied,
Prince Oberyn. I fear no one has yet had the time to look into
murders sixteen years stale, dreadful as they were. We shall, of
course, just as soon as we may. Any help that Dorne might be able
to provide to restore the king’s peace would only hasten the
beginning of my lord father’s inquiry—”
“Dwarf,” said the Red Viper, in a tone grown markedly less
cordial, “spare me your Lannister lies. Is it sheep you take us for, or
fools? My brother is not a bloodthirsty man, but neither has he been
asleep for sixteen years. Jon Arryn came to Sunspear the year after
Robert took the throne, and you can be sure that he was questioned
closely. Him, and a hundred more. I did not come for some
mummer’s show of an inquiry. I came for justice for Elia and her
children, and I will have it. Starting with this lummox Gregor
Clegane … but not, I think, ending there. Before he dies, the
Enormity That Rides will tell me whence came his orders, please
assure your lord father of that.” He smiled. “An old septon once
claimed I was living proof of the goodness of the gods. Do you
know why that is, Imp?”

“No,” Tyrion admitted warily.
“Why, if the gods were cruel, they would have made me my
mother’s rstborn, and Doran her third. I am a bloodthirsty man,
you see. And it is me you must contend with now, not my patient,
prudent, and gouty brother.”
Tyrion could see the sun shining on the Blackwater Rush half a
mile ahead, and on the walls and towers and hills of King’s Landing
beyond. He glanced over his shoulder, at the glittering column
following them up the kingsroad. “You speak like a man with a
great host at his back,” he said, “yet all I see are three hundred. Do
you spy that city there, north of the river?”
“The midden heap you call King’s Landing?”
“That’s the very one.”
“Not only do I see it, I believe I smell it now.”
“Then take a good sni , my lord. Fill up your nose. Half a million
people stink more than three hundred, you’ll nd. Do you smell the
gold cloaks? There are near ve thousand of them. My father’s own
sworn swords must account for another twenty thousand. And then
there are the roses. Roses smell so sweet, don’t they? Especially
when there are so many of them. Fifty, sixty, seventy thousand
roses, in the city or camped outside it, I can’t really say how many
are left, but there’s more than I care to count, anyway.”
Martell gave a shrug. “In Dorne of old before we married Daeron,
it was said that all owers bow before the sun. Should the roses
seek to hinder me I’ll gladly trample them underfoot.”
“As you trampled Willas Tyrell?”
The Dornishman did not react as expected. “I had a letter from
Willas not half a year past. We share an interest in ne horse esh.
He has never borne me any ill will for what happened in the lists. I
struck his breastplate clean, but his foot caught in a stirrup as he fell
and his horse came down on top of him. I sent a maester to him
afterward, but it was all he could do to save the boy’s leg. The knee
was far past mending. If any were to blame, it was his fool of a
father. Willas Tyrell was green as his surcoat and had no business
riding in such company. The Fat Flower thrust him into tourneys at

too tender an age, just as he did with the other two. He wanted
another Leo Longthorn, and made himself a cripple.”
“There are those who say Ser Loras is better than Leo Longthorn
ever was,” said Tyrion.
“Renly’s little rose? I doubt that.”
“Doubt it all you wish,” said Tyrion, “but Ser Loras has defeated
many good knights, including my brother Jaime.”
“By defeated, you mean unhorsed, in tourney. Tell me who he’s
slain in battle if you mean to frighten me.”
“Ser Robar Royce and Ser Emmon Cuy, for two. And men say he
performed prodigious feats of valor on the Blackwater, ghting
beside Lord Renly’s ghost.”
“So these same men who saw the prodigious feats saw the ghost
as well, yes?” The Dornishman laughed lightly.
Tyrion gave him a long look. “Chataya’s on the Street of Silk has
several girls who might suit your needs. Dancy has hair the color of
honey. Marie’s is pale white-gold. I would advise you to keep one
or the other by your side at all times, my lord.”
“At all times?” Prince Oberyn lifted a thin black eyebrow. “And
why is that, my good Imp?”
“You want to die with a breast in hand, you said.” Tyrion
cantered on ahead to where the ferry barges waited on the south
bank of the Blackwater. He had su ered all he meant to su er of
what passed for Dornish wit. Father should have sent Jo rey after all.
He could have asked Prince Oberyn if he knew how a Dornishman
di ered from a cow op. That made him grin despite himself. He
would have to make a point of being on hand when the Red Viper
was presented to the king.

ARYA

The man on the roof was the rst to die. He was crouched down

by the chimney two hundred yards away, no more than a vague
shadow in the predawn gloom, but as the sky began to lighten he
stirred, stretched, and stood. Anguy’s arrow took him in the chest.
He tumbled bonelessly down the steep slate pitch, and fell in front
of the septry door.
The Mummers had posted two guards there, but their torch left
them night blind, and the outlaws had crept in close. Kyle and
Notch let y together. One man went down with an arrow through
his throat, the other through his belly. The second man dropped the
torch, and the ames licked up at him. He screamed as his clothes
took re, and that was the end of stealth. Thoros gave a shout, and
the outlaws attacked in earnest.
Arya watched from atop her horse, on the crest of the wooded
ridge that overlooked the septry, mill, brewhouse, and stables and
the desolation of weeds, burnt trees, and mud that surrounded
them. The trees were mostly bare now, and the few withered brown
leaves that still clung to the branches did little to obstruct her view.
Lord Beric had left Beardless Dick and Mudge to guard them. Arya
hated being left behind like she was some stupid child, but at least
Gendry had been kept back as well. She knew better than to try and
argue. This was battle, and in battle you had to obey.
The eastern horizon glowed gold and pink, and overhead a half
moon peeked out through low scuttling clouds. The wind blew cold,

and Arya could hear the rush of water and the creak of the mill’s
great wooden waterwheel. There was a smell of rain in the dawn
air, but no drops were falling yet. Flaming arrows ew through the
morning mists, trailing pale ribbons of re, and thudded into the
wooden walls of the septry. A few smashed through shuttered
windows, and soon enough thin tendrils of smoke were rising
between the broken shutters.
Two Mummers came bursting from the septry side by side, axes
in their hands. Anguy and the other archers were waiting. One
axeman died at once. The other managed to duck, so the shaft
ripped through his shoulder. He staggered on, till two more arrows
found him, so quickly it was hard to say which had struck rst. The
long shafts punched through his breastplate as if it had been made
of silk instead of steel. He fell heavily. Anguy had arrows tipped
with bodkins as well as broadheads. A bodkin could pierce even
heavy plate. I’m going to learn to shoot a bow, Arya thought. She
loved sword ghting, but she could see how arrows were good too.
Flames were creeping up the west wall of the septry, and thick
smoke poured through a broken window. A Myrish crossbowman
poked his head out a di erent window, got o a bolt, and ducked
down to rewind. She could hear ghting from the stables as well,
shouts well mingled with the screams of horses and the clang of
steel. Kill them all, she thought ercely. She bit her lip so hard she
tasted blood. Kill every single one.
The crossbowman appeared again, but no sooner had he loosed
than three arrows hissed past his head. One rattled o his helm. He
vanished, bow and all. Arya could see ames in several of the
second-story windows. Between the smoke and the morning mists,
the air was a haze of blowing black and white. Anguy and the other
bowmen were creeping closer, the better to nd targets.
Then the septry erupted, the Mummers boiling out like angry
ants. Two Ibbenese rushed through the door with shaggy brown
shields held high before them, and behind them came a Dothraki
with a great curved arakh and bells in his braid, and behind him
three Volantene sellswords covered with erce tattoos. Others were
climbing out windows and leaping to the ground. Arya saw a man

take an arrow through the chest with one leg across a windowsill,
and heard his scream as he fell. The smoke was thickening. Quarrels
and arrows sped back and forth. Watty fell with a grunt, his bow
slipping from his hand. Kyle was trying to nock another shaft to his
string when a man in black mail ung a spear through his belly. She
heard Lord Beric shout. From out of the ditches and trees the rest of
his band came pouring, steel in hand. Arya saw Lem’s bright yellow
cloak apping behind him as he rode down the man who’d killed
Kyle. Thoros and Lord Beric were everywhere, their swords swirling
re. The red priest hacked at a hide shield until it ew to pieces,
while his horse kicked the man in the face. A Dothraki screamed
and charged the lightning lord, and the aming sword leapt out to
meet his arakh. The blades kissed and spun and kissed again. Then
the Dothraki’s hair was ablaze, and a moment later he was dead.
She spied Ned too, ghting at the lightning lord’s side. It’s not fair,
he’s only a little older than me, they should have let me ght.
The battle did not last very long. The Brave Companions still on
their feet soon died, or threw down their swords. Two of the
Dothraki managed to regain their horses and ee, but only because
Lord Beric let them go. “Let them carry the word back to
Harrenhal,” he said, with aming sword in hand. “It will give the
Leech Lord and his goat a few more sleepless nights.”
Jack-Be-Lucky, Harwin, and Merrit o’ Moontown braved the
burning septry to search for captives. They emerged from the
smoke and ames a few moments later with eight brown brothers,
one so weak that Merrit had to carry him across a shoulder. There
was a septon with them as well, round-shouldered and balding, but
he wore black chainmail over his grey robes. “Found him hiding
under the cellar steps,” said Jack, coughing.
Thoros smiled to see him. “You are Utt.”
“Septon Utt. A man of god.”
“What god would want the likes o’ you?” growled Lem.
“I have sinned,” the septon wailed. “I know, I know. Forgive me,
Father. Oh, grievously have I sinned.”
Arya remembered Septon Utt from her time at Harrenhal.
Shagwell the Fool said he always wept and prayed for forgiveness

after he’d killed his latest boy. Sometimes he even made the other
Mummers scourge him. They all thought that was very funny.
Lord Beric slammed his sword into its scabbard, quenching the
ames. “Give the dying the gift of mercy and bind the others hand
and foot for trial,” he commanded, and it was done.
The trials went swiftly. Various of the outlaws came forward to
tell of things the Brave Companions had done; towns and villages
sacked, crops burned, women raped and murdered, men maimed
and tortured. A few spoke of the boys that Septon Utt had carried
o . The septon wept and prayed through it all. “I am a weak reed,”
he told Lord Beric. “I pray to the Warrior for strength, but the gods
made me weak. Have mercy on my weakness. The boys, the sweet
boys … I never mean to hurt them …”
Septon Utt soon dangled beneath a tall elm, swinging slowly by
the neck, as naked as his name day. The other Brave Companions
followed one by one. A few fought, kicking and struggling as the
noose was tightened round their throats. One of the crossbowmen
kept shouting, “I soldier, I soldier,” in a thick Myrish accent.
Another o ered to lead his captors to gold; a third told them what a
good outlaw he would make. Each was stripped and bound and
hanged in turn. Tom Sevenstrings played a dirge for them on his
woodharp, and Thoros implored the Lord of Light to roast their
souls until the end of time.
A mummer tree, Arya thought as she watched them dangle, their
pale skins painted a sullen red by the ames of the burning septry.
Already the crows were coming, appearing out of nowhere. She
heard them croaking and cackling at one another, and wondered
what they were saying. Arya had not feared Septon Utt as much as
she did Rorge and Biter and some of the others still at Harrenhal,
but she was glad that he was dead all the same. They should have
hanged the Hound too, or chopped his head o . Instead, to her disgust,
the outlaws had treated Sandor Clegane’s burned arm, restored his
sword and horse and armor, and set him free a few miles from the
hollow hill. All they’d taken was his gold.
The septry soon collapsed in a roar of smoke and ame, its walls
no longer able to support the weight of its heavy slate roof. The

eight brown brothers watched with resignation. They were all that
remained, explained the eldest, who wore a small iron hammer on a
thong about his neck to signify his devotion to the Smith. “Before
the war we were four-and-forty, and this was a prosperous place.
We had a dozen milk cows and a bull, a hundred beehives, a
vineyard and an apple arbor. But when the lions came through they
took all our wine and milk and honey, slaughtered the cows, and
put our vineyard to the torch. After that … I have lost count of our
visitors. This false septon was only the latest. There was one
monster … we gave him all our silver, but he was certain we were
hiding gold, so his men killed us one by one to make Elder Brother
talk.”
“How did the eight of you survive?” asked Anguy the Archer.
“I am ashamed,” the old man said. “It was me. When it came my
turn to die, I told them where our gold was hidden.”
“Brother,” said Thoros of Myr, “the only shame was not telling
them at once.”
The outlaws sheltered that night in the brewhouse beside the
little river. Their hosts had a cache of food hidden beneath the oor
of the stables, so they shared a simple supper; oaten bread, onions,
and a watery cabbage soup tasting faintly of garlic. Arya found a
slice of carrot oating in her bowl, and counted herself lucky. The
brothers never asked the outlaws for names. They know, Arya
thought. How could they not? Lord Beric wore the lightning bolt on
breastplate, shield, and cloak, and Thoros his red robes, or what
remained of them. One brother, a young novice, was bold enough
to tell the red priest not to pray to his false god so long as he was
under their roof. “Bugger that,” said Lem Lemoncloak. “He’s our
god too, and you owe us for your bloody lives. And what’s false
about him? Might be your Smith can mend a broken sword, but can
he heal a broken man?”
“Enough, Lem,” Lord Beric commanded. “Beneath their roof we
will honor their rules.”
“The sun will not cease to shine if we miss a prayer or two,”
Thoros agreed mildly. “I am one who would know.”

Lord Beric himself did not eat. Arya had never seen him eat,
though from time to time he took a cup of wine. He did not seem to
sleep, either. His good eye would often close, as if from weariness,
but when you spoke to him it would ick open again at once. The
Marcher lord was still clad in his ratty black cloak and dented
breastplate with its chipped enamel lightning. He even slept in that
breastplate. The dull black steel hid the terrible wound the Hound
had given him, the same way his thick woolen scarf concealed the
dark ring about his throat. But nothing hid his broken head, all
caved in at the temple, or the raw red pit that was his missing eye,
or the shape of the skull beneath his face.
Arya looked at him warily, remembering all the tales told of him
in Harrenhal. Lord Beric seemed to sense her fear. He turned his
head, and beckoned her closer. “Do I frighten you, child?”
“No.” She chewed her lip. “Only … well … I thought the Hound
had killed you, but …”
“A wound,” said Lem Lemoncloak. “A grievous wound, aye, but
Thoros healed it. There’s never been no better healer.”
Lord Beric gazed at Lem with a queer look in his good eye and no
look at all in the other, only scars and dried blood. “No better
healer,” he agreed wearily. “Lem, past time to change the watch, I’d
think. See to it, if you’d be so good.”
“Aye, m’lord.” Lem’s big yellow cloak swirled behind him as he
strode out into the windy night.
“Even brave men blind themselves sometimes, when they are
afraid to see,” Lord Beric said when Lem was gone. “Thoros, how
many times have you brought me back now?”
The red priest bowed his head. “It is R’hllor who brings you back,
my lord. The Lord of Light. I am only his instrument.”
“How many times?” Lord Beric insisted.
“Six,” Thoros said reluctantly. “And each time is harder. You have
grown reckless, my lord. Is death so very sweet?”
“Sweet? No, my friend. Not sweet.”
“Then do not court it so. Lord Tywin leads from the rear. Lord
Stannis as well. You would be wise to do the same. A seventh death
might mean the end of both of us.”

Lord Beric touched the spot above his left ear where his temple
was caved in. “Here is where Ser Burton Crakehall broke helm and
head with a blow of his mace.” He unwound his scarf, exposing the
black bruise that encircled his neck. “Here the mark the manticore
made at Rushing Falls. He seized a poor beekeeper and his wife,
thinking they were mine, and let it be known far and wide that he
would hang them both unless I gave myself up to him. When I did
he hanged them anyway, and me on the gibbet between them.” He
lifted a nger to the raw red pit of his eye. “Here is where the
Mountain thrust his dirk through my visor.” A weary smile brushed
his lips. “That’s thrice I have died at the hands of House Clegane.
You would think that I might have learned …”
It was a jest, Arya knew, but Thoros did not laugh. He put a hand
on Lord Beric’s shoulder. “Best not to dwell on it.”
“Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the
Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but
I could not nd that castle today, nor tell you the color of that
woman’s hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my
favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the
bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of re in my mouth
and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?”
Arya stared at the Myrish priest, all shaggy hair and pink rags and
bits of old armor. Grey stubble covered his cheeks and the sagging
skin beneath his chin. He did not look much like the wizards in Old
Nan’s stories, but even so …
“Could you bring back a man without a head?” Arya asked. “Just
the once, not six times. Could you?”
“I have no magic, child. Only prayers. That rst time, his lordship
had a hole right through him and blood in his mouth, I knew there
was no hope. So when his poor torn chest stopped moving, I gave
him the good god’s own kiss to send him on his way. I lled my
mouth with re and breathed the ames inside him, down his throat
to lungs and heart and soul. The last kiss it is called, and many a
time I saw the old priests bestow it on the Lord’s servants as they
died. I had given it a time or two myself, as all priests must. But
never before had I felt a dead man shudder as the re lled him,

nor seen his eyes come open. It was not me who raised him, my
lady. It was the Lord. R’hllor is not done with him yet. Life is
warmth, and warmth is re, and re is God’s and God’s alone.”
Arya felt tears well in her eyes. Thoros used a lot of words, but
all they meant was no, that much she understood.
“Your father was a good man,” Lord Beric said. “Harwin has told
me much of him. For his sake, I would gladly forgo your ransom,
but we need the gold too desperately.”
She chewed her lip. That’s true, I guess. He had given the Hound’s
gold to Greenbeard and the Huntsman to buy provisions south of
the Mander, she knew. “The last harvest burned, this one is
drowning, and winter will soon be on us,” she had heard him say
when he sent them o . “The smallfolk need grain and seed, and we
need blades and horses. Too many of my men ride rounseys, drays,
and mules against foes mounted on coursers and destriers.”
Arya didn’t know how much Robb would pay for her, though. He
was a king now, not the boy she’d left at Winterfell with snow
melting in his hair. And if he knew the things she’d done, the
stableboy and the guard at Harrenhal and all … “What if my
brother doesn’t want to ransom me?”
“Why would you think that?” asked Lord Beric.
“Well,” Arya said, “my hair’s messy and my nails are dirty and
my feet are all hard.” Robb wouldn’t care about that, probably, but
her mother would. Lady Catelyn always wanted her to be like
Sansa, to sing and dance and sew and mind her courtesies. Just
thinking of it made Arya try to comb her hair with her ngers, but
it was all tangles and mats, and all she did was tear some out. “I
ruined that gown that Lady Smallwood gave me, and I don’t sew so
good.” She chewed her lip. “I don’t sew very well, I mean. Septa
Mordane used to say I had a blacksmith’s hands.”
Gendry hooted. “Those soft little things?” he called out. “You
couldn’t even hold a hammer.”
“I could if I wanted!” she snapped at him.
Thoros chuckled. “Your brother will pay, child. Have no fear on
that count.”
“Yes, but what if he won’t?” she insisted.

Lord Beric sighed. “Then I will send you to Lady Smallwood for a
time, or perhaps to mine own castle of Blackhaven. But that will not
be necessary, I’m certain. I do not have the power to give you back
your father, no more than Thoros does, but I can at least see that
you are returned safely to your mother’s arms.”
“Do you swear?” she asked him. Yoren had promised to take her
home too, only he’d gotten killed instead.
“On my honor as a knight,” the lightning lord said solemnly.
It was raining when Lem returned to the brewhouse, muttering
curses as water ran o his yellow cloak to puddle on the oor.
Anguy and Jack-Be-Lucky sat by the door rolling dice, but no matter
which game they played one-eyed Jack had no luck at all. Tom
Sevenstrings replaced a string on his woodharp, and sang “The
Mother’s Tears,” “When Willum’s Wife Was Wet,” “Lord Harte Rode
Out on a Rainy Day,” and then “The Rains of Castamere.”
And who are you, the proud lord said,
that I must bow so low?
Only a cat of a di erent coat,
that’s all the truth I know.
In a coat of gold or a coat of red,
a lion still has claws,
And mine are long and sharp, my lord,
as long and sharp as yours.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
that lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
with no one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
and not a soul to hear.
Finally Tom ran out of rain songs and put away his harp. Then
there was only the sound of the rain itself beating down on the slate
roof of the brewhouse. The dice game ended, and Arya stood on one
leg and then the other listening to Merrit complain about his horse
throwing a shoe.

“I could shoe him for you,” said Gendry, all of a sudden. “I was
only a ’prentice, but my master said my hand was made to hold a
hammer. I can shoe horses, close up rents in mail, and beat the
dents from plate. I bet I could make swords too.”
“What are you saying, lad?” asked Harwin.
“I’ll smith for you.” Gendry went to one knee before Lord Beric.
“If you’ll have me, m’lord, I could be of use. I’ve made tools and
knives and once I made a helmet that wasn’t so bad. One of the
Mountain’s men stole it from me when we was taken.”
Arya bit her lip. He means to leave me too.
“You would do better serving Lord Tully at Riverrun,” said Lord
Beric. “I cannot pay for your work.”
“No one ever did. I want a forge, and food to eat, some place I
can sleep. That’s enough, m’lord.”
“A smith can nd a welcome most anywhere. A skilled armorer
even more so. Why would you choose to stay with us?”
Arya watched Gendry screw up his stupid face, thinking. “At the
hollow hill, what you said about being King Robert’s men, and
brothers, I liked that. I liked that you gave the Hound a trial. Lord
Bolton just hanged folk or took o their heads, and Lord Tywin and
Ser Amory were the same. I’d sooner smith for you.”
“We got plenty of mail needs mending, m’lord,” Jack reminded
Lord Beric. “Most we took o the dead, and there’s holes where the
death came through.”
“You must be a lackwit, boy,” said Lem. “We’re outlaws. Lowborn
scum, most of us, excepting his lordship. Don’t think it’ll be like
Tom’s fool songs neither. You won’t be stealing no kisses from a
princess, nor riding in no tourneys in stolen armor. You join us,
you’ll end with your neck in a noose, or your head mounted up
above some castle gate.”
“It’s no more than they’d do for you,” said Gendry.
“Aye, that’s so,” said Jack-Be-Lucky cheerfully. “The crows await
us all. M’lord, the boy seems brave enough, and we do have need of
what he brings us. Take him, says Jack.”
“And quick,” suggested Harwin, chuckling, “before the fever
passes and he comes back to his senses.”

A wan smile crossed Lord Beric’s lips. “Thoros, my sword.”
This time the lightning lord did not set the blade a re, but merely
laid it light on Gendry’s shoulder. “Gendry, do you swear before the
eyes of gods and men to defend those who cannot defend
themselves, to protect all women and children, to obey your
captains, your liege lord, and your king, to ght bravely when
needed and do such other tasks as are laid upon you, however hard
or humble or dangerous they may be?”
“I do, m’lord.”
The marcher lord moved the sword from the right shoulder to the
left, and said, “Arise Ser Gendry, knight of the hollow hill, and be
welcome to our brotherhood.”
From the door came rough, rasping laughter.
The rain was running o him. His burned arm was wrapped in
leaves and linen and bound tight against his chest by a crude rope
sling, but the older burns that marked his face glistened black and
slick in the glow of their little re. “Making more knights,
Dondarrion?” the intruder said in a growl. “I ought to kill you all
over again for that.”
Lord Beric faced him coolly. “I’d hoped we’d seen the last of you,
Clegane. How did you come to nd us?”
“It wasn’t hard. You made enough bloody smoke to be seen in
Oldtown.”
“What’s become of the sentries I posted?”
Clegane’s mouth twitched. “Those two blind men? Might be I
killed them both. What would you do if I had?”
Anguy strung his bow. Notch was doing the same. “Do you wish
to die so very much, Sandor?” asked Thoros. “You must be mad or
drunk to follow us here.”
“Drunk on rain? You didn’t leave me enough gold to buy a cup of
wine, you whoresons.”
Anguy drew an arrow. “We’re outlaws. Outlaws steal. It’s in the
songs, if you ask nice Tom may sing you one. Be thankful we didn’t
kill you.”
“Come try it, Archer. I’ll take that quiver o you and shove those
arrows up your freckly little arse.”

Anguy raised his longbow, but Lord Beric lifted a hand before he
could loose. “Why did you come here, Clegane?”
“To get back what’s mine.”
“Your gold?”
“What else? It wasn’t for the pleasure of looking at your face,
Dondarrion, I’ll tell you that. You’re uglier than me now. And a
robber knight besides, it seems.”
“I gave you a note for your gold,” Lord Beric said calmly. “A
promise to pay, when the war’s done.”
“I wiped my arse with your paper. I want the gold.”
“We don’t have it. I sent it south with Greenbeard and the
Huntsman, to buy grain and seed across the Mander.”
“To feed all them whose crops you burned,” said Gendry.
“Is that the tale, now?” Sandor Clegane laughed again. “As it
happens, that’s just what I meant to do with it. Feed a bunch of ugly
peasants and their poxy whelps.”
“You’re lying,” said Gendry.
“The boy has a mouth on him, I see. Why believe them and not
me? Couldn’t be my face, could it?” Clegane glanced at Arya. “You
going to make her a knight too, Dondarrion? The rst eight-yearold girl knight?”
“I’m twelve,” Arya lied loudly, “and I could be a knight if I
wanted. I could have killed you too, only Lem took my knife.”
Remembering that still made her angry.
“Complain to Lem, not me. Then tuck your tail between your legs
and run. Do you know what dogs do to wolves?”
“Next time I will kill you. I’ll kill your brother too!”
“No.” His dark eyes narrowed. “That you won’t.” He turned back
to Lord Beric. “Say, make my horse a knight. He never shits in the
hall and doesn’t kick more than most, he deserves to be knighted.
Unless you meant to steal him too.”
“Best climb on that horse and go,” warned Lem.
“I’ll go with my gold. Your own god said I’m guiltless—”
“The Lord of Light gave you back your life,” declared Thoros of
Myr. “He did not proclaim you Baelor the Blessed come again.” The
red priest unsheathed his sword, and Arya saw that Jack and Merrit

had drawn as well. Lord Beric still held the blade he’d used to dub
Gendry. Maybe this time they’ll kill him.
The Hound’s mouth gave another twitch. “You’re no more than
common thieves.”
Lem glowered. “Your lion friends ride into some village, take all
the food and every coin they nd, and call it foraging. The wolves as
well, so why not us? No one robbed you, dog. You just been good
and foraged.”
Sandor Clegane looked at their faces, every one, as if he were
trying to commit them all to memory. Then he walked back out into
the darkness and the pouring rain from whence he’d come, with
never another word. The outlaws waited, wondering …
“I best go see what he did to our sentries.” Harwin took a wary
look out the door before he left, to make certain the Hound was not
lurking just outside.
“How’d that bloody bastard get all that gold anyhow?” Lem
Lemoncloak said, to break the tension.
Anguy shrugged. “He won the Hand’s tourney. In King’s
Landing.” The bowman grinned. “I won a fair fortune myself, but
then I met Dancy, Jayde, and Alayaya. They taught me what roast
swan tastes like, and how to bathe in Arbor wine.”
“Pissed it all away, did you?” laughed Harwin.
“Not all. I bought these boots, and this excellent dagger.”
“You ought t’have bought some land and made one o’ them roast
swan girls an honest woman,” said Jack-Be-Lucky. “Raised yourself
a crop o’ turnips and a crop o’ sons.”
“Warrior defend me! What a waste that would have been, to turn
my gold to turnips.”
“I like turnips,” said Jack, aggrieved. “I could do with some
mashed turnips right now.”
Thoros of Myr paid no heed to the banter. “The Hound has lost
more than a few bags of coin,” he mused. “He has lost his master
and kennel as well. He cannot go back to the Lannisters, the Young
Wolf would never have him, nor would his brother be like to
welcome him. That gold was all he had left, it seems to me.”

“Bloody hell,” said Watty the Miller. “He’ll come murder us in
our sleep for sure, then.”
“No.” Lord Beric had sheathed his sword. “Sandor Clegane would
kill us all gladly, but not in our sleep. Anguy, on the morrow, take
the rear with Beardless Dick. If you see Clegane still sni ng after
us, kill his horse.”
“That’s a good horse,” Anguy protested.
“Aye,” said Lem. “It’s the bloody rider we should be killing. We
could use that horse.”
“I’m with Lem,” Notch said. “Let me feather the dog a few times,
discourage him some.”
Lord Beric shook his head. “Clegane won his life beneath the
hollow hill. I will not rob him of it.”
“My lord is wise,” Thoros told the others. “Brothers, a trial by
battle is a holy thing. You heard me ask R’hllor to take a hand, and
you saw his ery nger snap Lord Beric’s sword, just as he was
about to make an end of it. The Lord of Light is not yet done with
Jo rey’s Hound, it would seem.”
Harwin soon returned to the brewhouse. “Puddingfoot was sound
asleep, but unharmed.”
“Wait till I get hold of him,” said Lem. “I’ll cut him a new
bunghole. He could have gotten every one of us killed.”
No one rested very comfortably that night, knowing that Sandor
Clegane was out there in the dark, somewhere close. Arya curled up
near the re, warm and snug, yet sleep would not come. She took
out the coin that Jaqen H’ghar had given her and curled her ngers
around it as she lay beneath her cloak. It made her feel strong to
hold it, remembering how she’d seen the ghost in Harrenhal. She
could kill with a whisper then.
Jaqen was gone, though. He’d left her. Hot Pie left me too, and
now Gendry is leaving. Lommy had died, Yoren had died, Syrio Forel
had died, even her father had died, and Jaqen had given her a
stupid iron penny and vanished. “Valar morghulis,” she whispered
softly, tightening her st so the hard edges of the coin dug into her
palm. “Ser Gregor, Dunsen, Polliver, Ra the Sweetling. The Tickler
and the Hound. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Jo rey, Queen Cersei.”

Arya tried to imagine how they would look when they were dead,
but it was hard to bring their faces to mind. The Hound she could
see, and his brother the Mountain, and she would never forget
Jo rey’s face, or his mother’s … but Ra and Dunsen and Polliver
were all fading, and even the Tickler, whose looks had been so
commonplace.
Sleep took her at last, but in the black of night Arya woke again,
tingling. The re had burned down to embers. Mudge stood by the
door, and another guard was pacing outside. The rain had stopped,
and she could hear wolves howling. So close, she thought, and so
many. They sounded as if they were all around the stable, dozens of
them, maybe hundreds. I hope they eat the Hound. She remembered
what he’d said, about wolves and dogs.
Come morning, Septon Utt still swung beneath the tree, but the
brown brothers were out in the rain with spades, digging shallow
graves for the other dead. Lord Beric thanked them for the night’s
lodging and the meal, and gave them a bag of silver stags to help
rebuild. Harwin, Likely Luke, and Watty the Miller went out
scouting, but neither wolves nor hounds were found.
As Arya was cinching her saddle girth, Gendry came up to say
that he was sorry. She put a foot in the stirrup and swung up into
her saddle, so she could look down on him instead of up. You could
have made swords at Riverrun for my brother, she thought, but what
she said was, “If you want to be some stupid outlaw knight and get
hanged, why should I care? I’ll be at Riverrun, ransomed, with my
brother.”
There was no rain that day, thankfully, and for once they made
good time.

BRAN

The tower stood upon an island, its twin re ected on the still blue

waters. When the wind blew, ripples moved across the surface of
the lake, chasing one another like boys at play. Oak trees grew
thick along the lakeshore, a dense stand of them with a litter of
fallen acorns on the ground beneath. Beyond them was the village,
or what remained of it.
It was the rst village they had seen since leaving the foothills.
Meera had scouted ahead to make certain there was no one lurking
amongst the ruins. Sliding in and amongst oaks and apple trees with
her net and spear in hand, she startled three red deer and sent them
bounding away through the brush. Summer saw the ash of motion
and was after them at once. Bran watched the direwolf lope o , and
for a moment wanted nothing so much as to slip his skin and run
with him, but Meera was waving for them to come ahead.
Reluctantly, he turned away from Summer and urged Hodor on,
into the village. Jojen walked with them.
The ground from here to the Wall was grasslands, Bran knew;
fallow elds and low rolling hills, high meadows and lowland bogs.
It would be much easier going than the mountains behind, but so
much open space made Meera uneasy. “I feel naked,” she confessed.
“There’s no place to hide.”
“Who holds this land?” Jojen asked Bran.
“The Night’s Watch,” he answered. “This is the Gift. The New
Gift, and north of that Brandon’s Gift.” Maester Luwin had taught

him the history. “Brandon the Builder gave all the land south of the
Wall to the black brothers, to a distance of twenty- ve leagues. For
their … for their sustenance and support.” He was proud that he still
remembered that part. “Some maesters say it was some other
Brandon, not the Builder, but it’s still Brandon’s Gift. Thousands of
years later, Good Queen Alysanne visited the Wall on her dragon
Silverwing, and she thought the Night’s Watch was so brave that she
had the Old King double the size of their lands, to fty leagues. So
that was the New Gift.” He waved a hand. “Here. All this.”
No one had lived in the village for long years, Bran could see. All
the houses were falling down. Even the inn. It had never been much
of an inn, to look at it, but now all that remained was a stone
chimney and two cracked walls, set amongst a dozen apple trees.
One was growing up through the common room, where a layer of
wet brown leaves and rotting apples carpeted the oor. The air was
thick with the smell of them, a cloying cidery scent that was almost
overwhelming. Meera stabbed a few apples with her frog spear,
trying to nd some still good enough to eat, but they were all too
brown and wormy.
It was a peaceful spot, still and tranquil and lovely to behold, but
Bran thought there was something sad about an empty inn, and
Hodor seemed to feel it too. “Hodor?” he said in a confused sort of
way. “Hodor? Hodor?”
“This is good land.” Jojen picked up a handful of dirt, rubbing it
between his ngers. “A village, an inn, a stout holdfast in the lake,
all these apple trees … but where are the people, Bran? Why would
they leave such a place?”
“They were afraid of the wildlings,” said Bran. “Wildlings come
over the Wall or through the mountains, to raid and steal and carry
o women. If they catch you, they make your skull into a cup to
drink blood, Old Nan used to say. The Night’s Watch isn’t so strong
as it was in Brandon’s day or Queen Alysanne’s, so more get
through. The places nearest the Wall got raided so much the
smallfolk moved south, into the mountains or onto the Umber lands
east of the kingsroad. The Greatjon’s people get raided too, but not
so much as the people who used to live in the Gift.”

Jojen Reed turned his head slowly, listening to music only he
could hear. “We need to shelter here. There’s a storm coming. A bad
one.”
Bran looked up at the sky. It had been a beautiful crisp clear
autumn day, sunny and almost warm, but there were dark clouds o
to the west now, that was true, and the wind seemed to be picking
up. “There’s no roof on the inn and only the two walls,” he pointed
out. “We should go out to the holdfast.”
“Hodor,” said Hodor. Maybe he agreed.
“We have no boat, Bran.” Meera poked through the leaves idly
with her frog spear.
“There’s a causeway. A stone causeway, hidden under the water.
We could walk out.” They could, anyway; he would have to ride on
Hodor’s back, but at least he’d stay dry that way.
The Reeds exchanged a look. “How do you know that?” asked
Jojen. “Have you been here before, my prince?”
“No. Old Nan told me. The holdfast has a golden crown, see?” He
pointed across the lake. You could see patches of aking gold paint
up around the crenellations. “Queen Alysanne slept there, so they
painted the merlons gold in her honor.”
“A causeway?” Jojen studied the lake. “You are certain?”
“Certain,” said Bran.
Meera found the foot of it easily enough, once she knew to look;
a stone pathway three feet wide, leading right out into the lake. She
took them out step by careful step, probing ahead with her frog
spear. They could see where the path emerged again, climbing from
the water onto the island and turning into a short ight of stone
steps that led to the holdfast door.
Path, steps, and door were in a straight line, which made you
think the causeway ran straight, but that wasn’t so. Under the lake
it zigged and zagged, going a third of a way around the island
before jagging back. The turns were treacherous, and the long path
meant that anyone approaching would be exposed to arrow re
from the tower for a long time. The hidden stones were slimy and
slippery too; twice Hodor almost lost his footing and shouted
“HODOR!” in alarm before regaining his balance. The second time

scared Bran badly. If Hodor fell into the lake with him in his basket,
he could well drown, especially if the huge stableboy panicked and
forgot that Bran was there, the way he did sometimes. Maybe we
should have stayed at the inn, under the apple tree, he thought, but by
then it was too late.
Thankfully there was no third time, and the water never got up
past Hodor’s waist, though the Reeds were in it up to their chests.
And before long they were on the island, climbing the steps to the
holdfast. The door was still stout, though its heavy oak planks had
warped over the years and it could no longer be closed completely.
Meera shoved it open all the way, the rusted iron hinges screaming.
The lintel was low. “Duck down, Hodor,” Bran said, and he did, but
not enough to keep Bran from hitting his head. “That hurt,” he
complained.
“Hodor,” said Hodor, straightening.
They found themselves in a gloomy strongroom, barely large
enough to hold the four of them. Steps built into the inner wall of
the tower curved away upward to their left, downward to their
right, behind iron grates. Bran looked up and saw another grate just
above his head. A murder hole. He was glad there was no one up
there now to pour boiling oil down on them.
The grates were locked, but the iron bars were red with rust.
Hodor grabbed hold of the lefthand door and gave it a pull,
grunting with e ort. Nothing happened. He tried pushing with no
more success. He shook the bars, kicked, shoved against them and
rattled them and punched the hinges with a huge hand until the air
was lled with akes of rust, but the iron door would not budge.
The one down to the undervault was no more accommodating. “No
way in,” said Meera, shrugging.
The murder hole was just above Bran’s head, as he sat in his
basket on Hodor’s back. He reached up and grabbed the bars to give
them a try. When he pulled down the grating came out of the
ceiling in a cascade of rust and crumbling stone. “HODOR!” Hodor
shouted. The heavy iron grate gave Bran another bang in the head,
and crashed down near Jojen’s feet when he shoved it o of him.

Meera laughed. “Look at that, my prince,” she said, “you’re stronger
than Hodor.” Bran blushed.
With the grate gone, Hodor was able to boost Meera and Jojen up
through the gaping murder hole. The crannogmen took Bran by the
arms and drew him up after them. Getting Hodor inside was the
hard part. He was too heavy for the Reeds to lift the way they’d
lifted Bran. Finally Bran told him to go look for some big rocks. The
island had no lack of those, and Hodor was able to pile them high
enough to grab the crumbling edges of the hole and climb through.
“Hodor,” he panted happily, grinning at all of them.
They found themselves in a maze of small cells, dark and empty,
but Meera explored until she found the way back to the steps. The
higher they climbed, the better the light; on the third story the thick
outer wall was pierced by arrow slits, the fourth had actual
windows, and the fth and highest was one big round chamber with
arched doors on three sides opening onto small stone balconies. On
the fourth side was a privy chamber perched above a sewer chute
that dropped straight down into the lake.
By the time they reached the roof the sky was completely
overcast, and the clouds to the west were black. The wind was
blowing so strong it lifted up Bran’s cloak and made it ap and
snap. “Hodor,” Hodor said at the noise.
Meera spun in a circle. “I feel almost a giant, standing high above
the world.”
“There are trees in the Neck that stand twice as tall as this,” her
brother reminded her.
“Aye, but they have other trees around them just as high,” said
Meera. “The world presses close in the Neck, and the sky is so much
smaller. Here … feel that wind, Brother? And look how large the
world has grown.”
It was true, you could see a long ways from up here. To the south
the foothills rose, with the mountains grey and green beyond them.
The rolling plains of the New Gift stretched away to all the other
directions, as far as the eye could see. “I was hoping we could see
the Wall from here,” said Bran, disappointed. “That was stupid, we
must still be fty leagues away.” Just speaking of it made him feel

tired, and cold as well. “Jojen, what will we do when we reach the
Wall? My uncle always said how big it was. Seven hundred feet
high, and so thick at the base that the gates are more like tunnels
through the ice. How are we going to get past to nd the three-eyed
crow?”
“There are abandoned castles along the Wall, I’ve heard,” Jojen
answered. “Fortresses built by the Night’s Watch but now left
empty. One of them may give us our way through.”
The ghost castles, Old Nan had called them. Maester Luwin had
once made Bran learn the names of every one of the forts along the
Wall. That had been hard; there were nineteen of them all told,
though no more than seventeen had ever been manned at any one
time. At the feast in honor of King Robert’s visit to Winterfell, Bran
had recited the names for his uncle Benjen, east to west and then
west to east. Benjen Stark had laughed and said, “You know them
better than I do, Bran. Perhaps you should be First Ranger. I’ll stay
here in your place.” That was before Bran fell, though. Before he
was broken. By the time he’d woken crippled from his sleep, his
uncle had gone back to Castle Black.
“My uncle said the gates were sealed with ice and stone whenever
a castle had to be abandoned,” said Bran.
“Then we’ll have to open them again,” said Meera.
That made him uneasy. “We shouldn’t do that. Bad things might
come through from the other side. We should just go to Castle Black
and tell the Lord Commander to let us pass.”
“Your Grace,” said Jojen, “we must avoid Castle Black, just as we
avoided the kingsroad. There are hundreds of men there.”
“Men of the Night’s Watch,” said Bran. “They say vows, to take
no part in wars and stu .”
“Aye,” said Jojen, “but one man willing to forswear himself
would be enough to sell your secret to the ironmen or the Bastard
of Bolton. And we cannot be certain that the Watch would agree to
let us pass. They might decide to hold us or send us back.”
“But my father was a friend of the Night’s Watch, and my uncle is
First Ranger. He might know where the three-eyed crow lives. And
Jon’s at Castle Black too.” Bran had been hoping to see Jon again,

and their uncle too. The last black brothers to visit Winterfell said
that Benjen Stark had vanished on a ranging, but surely he would
have made his way back by now. “I bet the Watch would even give
us horses,” he went on.
“Quiet.” Jojen shaded his eyes with a hand and gazed o toward
the setting sun. “Look. There’s something … a rider, I think. Do you
see him?”
Bran shaded his eyes as well, and even so he had to squint. He
saw nothing at rst, till some movement made him turn. At rst he
thought it might be Summer, but no. A man on a horse. He was too
far away to see much else.
“Hodor?” Hodor had put a hand over his eyes as well, only he
was looking the wrong way. “Hodor?”
“He is in no haste,” said Meera, “but he’s making for this village,
it seems to me.”
“We had best go inside, before we’re seen,” said Jojen.
“Summer’s near the village,” Bran objected.
“Summer will be ne,” Meera promised. “It’s only one man on a
tired horse.”
A few fat wet drops began to patter against the stone as they
retreated to the oor below. That was well timed; the rain began to
fall in earnest a short time later. Even through the thick walls they
could hear it lashing against the surface of the lake. They sat on the
oor in the round empty room, amidst gathering gloom. The northfacing balcony looked out toward the abandoned village. Meera
crept out on her belly to peer across the lake and see what had
become of the horseman. “He’s taken shelter in the ruins of the
inn,” she told them when she came back. “It looks as though he’s
making a re in the hearth.”
“I wish we could have a re,” Bran said. “I’m cold. There’s broken
furniture down the stairs, I saw it. We could have Hodor chop it up
and get warm.”
Hodor liked that idea. “Hodor,” he said hopefully.
Jojen shook his head. “Fire means smoke. Smoke from this tower
could be seen a long way o .”
“If there were anyone to see,” his sister argued.

“There’s a man in the village.”
“One man.”
“One man would be enough to betray Bran to his enemies, if he’s
the wrong man. We still have half a duck from yesterday. We
should eat and rest. Come morning the man will go on his way, and
we will do the same.”
Jojen had his way; he always did. Meera divided the duck
between the four of them. She’d caught it in her net the day before,
as it tried to rise from the marsh where she’d surprised it. It wasn’t
as tasty cold as it had been hot and crisp from the spit, but at least
they did not go hungry. Bran and Meera shared the breast while
Jojen ate the thigh. Hodor devoured the wing and leg, muttering
“Hodor” and licking the grease o his ngers after every bite. It
was Bran’s turn to tell a story, so he told them about another
Brandon Stark, the one called Brandon the Shipwright, who had
sailed o beyond the Sunset Sea.
Dusk was settling by the time duck and tale were done, and the
rain still fell. Bran wondered how far Summer had roamed and
whether he had caught one of the deer.
Grey gloom lled the tower, and slowly changed to darkness.
Hodor grew restless and walked awhile, striding round and round
the walls and stopping to peer into the privy on every circuit, as if
he had forgotten what was in there. Jojen stood by the north
balcony, hidden by the shadows, looking out at the night and the
rain. Somewhere to the north a lightning bolt crackled across the
sky, brightening the inside of the tower for an instant. Hodor
jumped and made a frightened noise. Bran counted to eight, waiting
for the thunder. When it came, Hodor shouted, “Hodor!”
I hope Summer isn’t scared too, Bran thought. The dogs in
Winterfell’s kennels had always been spooked by thunderstorms,
just like Hodor. I should go see, to calm him …
The lightning ashed again, and this time the thunder came at six.
“Hodor!” Hodor yelled again. “HODOR! HODOR!” He snatched up
his sword, as if to ght the storm.
Jojen said, “Be quiet, Hodor. Bran, tell him not to shout. Can you
get the sword away from him, Meera?”

“I can try.”
“Hodor, hush,” said Bran. “Be quiet now. No more stupid
hodoring. Sit down.”
“Hodor?” He gave the longsword to Meera meekly enough, but
his face was a mask of confusion.
Jojen turned back to the darkness, and they all heard him suck in
his breath. “What is it?” Meera asked.
“Men in the village.”
“The man we saw before?”
“Other men. Armed. I saw an axe, and spears as well.” Jojen had
never sounded so much like the boy he was. “I saw them when the
lightning ashed, moving under the trees.”
“How many?”
“Many and more. Too many to count.”
“Mounted?”
“No.”
“Hodor.” Hodor sounded frightened. “Hodor. Hodor.”
Bran felt a little scared himself, though he didn’t want to say so in
front of Meera. “What if they come out here?”
“They won’t.” She sat down beside him. “Why should they?”
“For shelter.” Jojen’s voice was grim. “Unless the storm lets up.
Meera, could you go down and bar the door?”
“I couldn’t even close it. The wood’s too warped. They won’t get
past those iron gates, though.”
“They might. They could break the lock, or the hinges. Or climb
up through the murder hole as we did.”
Lightning slashed the sky, and Hodor whimpered. Then a clap of
thunder rolled across the lake. “HODOR!” he roared, clapping his
hands over his ears and stumbling in a circle through the darkness.
“HODOR! HODOR! HODOR!”
“NO!” Bran shouted back. “NO HODORING!”
It did no good. “HOOOODOR!” moaned Hodor. Meera tried to
catch him and calm him, but he was too strong. He ung her aside
with no more than a shrug. “HOOOOOODOOOOOOOR!” the
stableboy screamed as lightning lled the sky again, and even Jojen
was shouting now, shouting at Bran and Meera to shut him up.

“Be quiet!” Bran said in a shrill scared voice, reaching up uselessly
for Hodor’s leg as he crashed past, reaching, reaching.
Hodor staggered, and closed his mouth. He shook his head slowly
from side to side, sank back to the oor, and sat crosslegged. When
the thunder boomed, he scarcely seemed to hear it. The four of
them sat in the dark tower, scarce daring to breathe.
“Bran, what did you do?” Meera whispered.
“Nothing.” Bran shook his head. “I don’t know.” But he did. I
reached for him, the way I reach for Summer. He had been Hodor for
half a heartbeat. It scared him.
“Something is happening across the lake,” said Jojen. “I thought I
saw a man pointing at the tower.”
I won’t be afraid. He was the Prince of Winterfell, Eddard Stark’s
son, almost a man grown and a warg too, not some little baby boy
like Rickon. Summer would not be afraid. “Most like they’re just
some Umbers,” he said. “Or they could be Knotts or Norreys or
Flints come down from the mountains, or even brothers from the
Night’s Watch. Were they wearing black cloaks, Jojen?”
“By night all cloaks are black, Your Grace. And the ash came and
went too fast for me to tell what they were wearing.”
Meera was wary. “If they were black brothers, they’d be
mounted, wouldn’t they?”
Bran had thought of something else. “It doesn’t matter,” he said
con dently. “They couldn’t get out to us even if they wanted. Not
unless they had a boat, or knew about the causeway.”
“The causeway!” Meera mussed Bran’s hair and kissed him on the
forehead. “Our sweet prince! He’s right, Jojen, they won’t know
about the causeway. Even if they did they could never nd the way
across at night in the rain.”
“The night will end, though. If they stay till morning …” Jojen
left the rest unsaid. After a few moments he said, “They are feeding
the re the rst man started.” Lightning crashed through the sky,
and light lled the tower and etched them all in shadow. Hodor
rocked back and forth, humming.
Bran could feel Summer’s fear in that bright instant. He closed
two eyes and opened a third, and his boy’s skin slipped o him like

a cloak as he left the tower behind …
… and found himself out in the rain, his belly full of deer,
cringing in the brush as the sky broke and boomed above him. The
smell of rotten apples and wet leaves almost drowned the scent of
man, but it was there. He heard the clink and slither of hardskin,
saw men moving under the trees. A man with a stick blundered by,
a skin pulled up over his head to make him blind and deaf. The wolf
went wide around him, behind a dripping thornbush and beneath
the bare branches of an apple tree. He could hear them talking, and
there beneath the scents of rain and leaves and horse came the
sharp red stench of fear …

JON

The ground was littered with pine needles and blown leaves, a

carpet of green and brown still damp from the recent rains. It
squished beneath their feet. Huge bare oaks, tall sentinels, and hosts
of soldier pines stood all around them. On a hill above them was
another roundtower, ancient and empty, thick green moss crawling
up its side almost to the summit. “Who built that, all of stone like
that?” Ygritte asked him. “Some king?”
“No. Just the men who used to live here.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died or went away.” Brandon’s Gift had been farmed for
thousands of years, but as the Watch dwindled there were fewer
hands to plow the elds, tend the bees, and plant the orchards, so
the wild had reclaimed many a eld and hall. In the New Gift there
had been villages and holdfasts whose taxes, rendered in goods and
labor, helped feed and clothe the black brothers. But those were
largely gone as well.
“They were fools to leave such a castle,” said Ygritte.
“It’s only a towerhouse. Some little lordling lived there once,
with his family and a few sworn men. When raiders came he would
light a beacon from the roof. Winterfell has towers three times the
size of that.”
She looked as if she thought he was making that up. “How could
men build so high, with no giants to lift the stones?”

In legend, Brandon the Builder had used giants to help raise
Winterfell, but Jon did not want to confuse the issue. “Men can
build a lot higher than this. In Oldtown there’s a tower taller than
the Wall.” He could tell she did not believe him. If I could show her
Winterfell … give her a ower from the glass gardens, feast her in the
Great Hall, and show her the stone kings on their thrones. We could
bathe in the hot pools, and love beneath the heart tree while the old gods
watched over us.
The dream was sweet … but Winterfell would never be his to
show. It belonged to his brother, the King in the North. He was a
Snow, not a Stark. Bastard, oathbreaker, and turncloak …
“Might be after we could come back here, and live in that tower,”
she said. “Would you want that, Jon Snow? After?”
After. The word was a spear thrust. After the war. After the
conquest. After the wildlings break the Wall …
His lord father had once talked about raising new lords and
settling them in the abandoned holdfasts as a shield against
wildlings. The plan would have required the Watch to yield back a
large part of the Gift, but his uncle Benjen believed the Lord
Commander could be won around, so long as the new lordlings paid
taxes to Castle Black rather than Winterfell. “It is a dream for
spring, though,” Lord Eddard had said. “Even the promise of land
will not lure men north with a winter coming on.”
If winter had come and gone more quickly and spring had followed in
its turn, I might have been chosen to hold one of these towers in my
father’s name. Lord Eddard was dead, however, his brother Benjen
lost; the shield they dreamt together would never be forged. “This
land belongs to the Watch,” Jon said.
Her nostrils ared. “No one lives here.”
“Your raiders drove them o .”
“They were cowards, then. If they wanted the land they should
have stayed and fought.”
“Maybe they were tired of ghting. Tired of barring their doors
every night and wondering if Rattleshirt or someone like him would
break them down to carry o their wives. Tired of having their
harvests stolen, and any valuables they might have. It’s easier to

move beyond the reach of raiders.” But if the Wall should fail, all the
north will lie within the reach of raiders.
“You know nothing, Jon Snow. Daughters are taken, not wives.
You’re the ones who steal. You took the whole world, and built the
Wall t’ keep the free folk out.”
“Did we?” Sometimes Jon forgot how wild she was, and then she
would remind him. “How did that happen?”
“The gods made the earth for all men t’ share. Only when the
kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was
all theirs. My trees, they said, you can’t eat them apples. My stream,
you can’t sh here. My wood, you’re not t’ hunt. My earth, my water,
my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I’ll chop ’em o , but
maybe if you kneel t’ me I’ll let you have a sni . You call us thieves,
but at least a thief has t’ be brave and clever and quick. A kneeler
only has t’ kneel.”
“Harma and the Bag of Bones don’t come raiding for sh and
apples. They steal swords and axes. Spices, silks, and furs. They
grab every coin and ring and jeweled cup they can nd, casks of
wine in summer and casks of beef in winter, and they take women
in any season and carry them o beyond the Wall.”
“And what if they do? I’d sooner be stolen by a strong man than
be given t’ some weakling by my father.”
“You say that, but how can you know? What if you were stolen
by someone you hated?”
“He’d have t’ be quick and cunning and brave t’ steal me. So his
sons would be strong and smart as well. Why would I hate such a
man as that?”
“Maybe he never washes, so he smells as rank as a bear.”
“Then I’d push him in a stream or throw a bucket o’ water on
him. Anyhow, men shouldn’t smell sweet like owers.”
“What’s wrong with owers?”
“Nothing, for a bee. For bed I want one o’ these.” Ygritte made to
grab the front of his breeches.
Jon caught her wrist. “What if the man who stole you drank too
much?” he insisted. “What if he was brutal or cruel?” He tightened

his grip to make a point. “What if he was stronger than you, and
liked to beat you bloody?”
“I’d cut his throat while he slept. You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
Ygritte twisted like an eel and wrenched away from him.
I know one thing. I know that you are wildling to the bone. It was
easy to forget that sometimes, when they were laughing together,
or kissing. But then one of them would say something, or do
something, and he would suddenly be reminded of the wall between
their worlds.
“A man can own a woman or a man can own a knife,” Ygritte told
him, “but no man can own both. Every little girl learns that from
her mother.” She raised her chin de antly and gave her thick red
hair a shake. “And men can’t own the land no more’n they can own
the sea or the sky. You kneelers think you do, but Mance is going t’
show you di erent.”
It was a ne brave boast, but it rang hollow. Jon glanced back to
make certain the Magnar was not in earshot. Errok, Big Boil, and
Hempen Dan were walking a few yards behind them, but paying no
attention. Big Boil was complaining of his arse. “Ygritte,” he said in
a low voice, “Mance cannot win this war.”
“He can!” she insisted. “You know nothing, Jon Snow. You have
never seen the free folk ght!”
Wildlings fought like heroes or demons, depending on who you
talked to, but it came down to the same thing in the end. They ght
with reckless courage, every man out for glory. “I don’t doubt that
you’re all very brave, but when it comes to battle, discipline beats
valor every time. In the end Mance will fail as all the Kings-beyondthe-Wall have failed before him. And when he does, you’ll die. All
of you.”
Ygritte had looked so angry he thought she was about to strike
him. “All of us,” she said. “You too. You’re no crow now, Jon Snow.
I swore you weren’t, so you better not be.” She pushed him back
against the trunk of a tree and kissed him, full on the lips right
there in the midst of the ragged column. Jon heard Grigg the Goat
urging her on. Someone else laughed. He kissed her back despite all
that. When they nally broke apart, Ygritte was ushed. “You’re

mine,” she whispered. “Mine, as I’m yours. And if we die, we die.
All men must die, Jon Snow. But rst we’ll live.”
“Yes.” His voice was thick. “First we’ll live.”
She grinned at that, showing Jon the crooked teeth that he had
somehow come to love. Wildling to the bone, he thought again, with
a sick sad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He exed the ngers of
his sword hand, and wondered what Ygritte would do if she knew
his heart. Would she betray him if he sat her down and told her that
he was still Ned Stark’s son and a man of the Night’s Watch? He
hoped not, but he dare not take that risk. Too many lives depended
on
his
somehow
reaching
Castle
Black
before
the
Magnar … assuming he found a chance to escape the wildlings.
They had descended the south face of the Wall at Greyguard,
abandoned for two hundred years. A section of the huge stone steps
had collapsed a century before, but even so the descent was a good
deal easier than the climb. From there Styr marched them deep into
the Gift, to avoid the Watch’s customary patrols. Grigg the Goat led
them past the few inhabited villages that remained in these lands.
Aside from a few scattered roundtowers poking the sky like stone
ngers, they saw no sign of man. Through cold wet hills and windy
plains they marched, unwatched, unseen.
You must not balk, whatever is asked of you, the Halfhand had said.
Ride with them, eat with them, ght with them, for as long as it takes.
He’d ridden many leagues and walked for more, had shared their
bread and salt, and Ygritte’s blankets as well, but still they did not
trust him. Day and night the Thenns watched him, alert for any
signs of betrayal. He could not get away, and soon it would be too
late.
Fight with them, Qhorin had said, before he surrendered his own
life to Longclaw … but it had not come to that, till now. Once I shed
a brother’s blood I am lost. I cross the Wall for good then, and there is no
crossing back.
After each day’s march the Magnar summoned him to ask shrewd
sharp questions about Castle Black, its garrison and defenses. Jon
lied where he dared and feigned ignorance a few times, but Grigg

the Goat and Errok listened as well, and they knew enough to make
Jon careful. Too blatant a lie would betray him.
But the truth was terrible. Castle Black had no defenses, but for
the Wall itself. It lacked even wooden palisades or earthen dikes.
The “castle” was nothing more than a cluster of towers and keeps,
two-thirds of them falling into ruin. As for the garrison, the Old
Bear had taken two hundred on his ranging. Had any returned? Jon
could not know. Perhaps four hundred remained at the castle, but
most of those were builders or stewards, not rangers.
The Thenns were hardened warriors, and more disciplined than
the common run of wildling; no doubt that was why Mance had
chosen them. The defenders of Castle Black would include blind
Maester Aemon and his half-blind steward Clydas, one-armed Donal
Noye, drunken Septon Cellador, Deaf Dick Follard, Three-Finger
Hobb the cook, old Ser Wynton Stout, as well as Halder and Toad
and Pyp and Albett and the rest of the boys who’d trained with Jon.
And commanding them would be red-faced Bowen Marsh, the
plump Lord Steward who had been made castellan in Lord
Mormont’s absence. Dolorous Edd sometimes called Marsh “the Old
Pomegranate,” which t him just as well as “the Old Bear” t
Mormont. “He’s the man you want in front when the foes are in the
eld,” Edd would say in his usual dour voice. “He’ll count them
right up for you. A regular demon for counting, that one.”
If the Magnar takes Castle Black unawares, it will be red slaughter,
boys butchered in their beds before they know they are under attack.
Jon had to warn them, but how? He was never sent out to forage or
hunt, nor allowed to stand a watch alone. And he feared for Ygritte
as well. He could not take her, but if he left her, would the Magnar
make her answer for his treachery? Two hearts that beat as one …
They shared the same sleeping skins every night, and he went to
sleep with her head against his chest and her red hair tickling his
chin. The smell of her had become a part of him. Her crooked teeth,
the feel of her breast when he cupped it in his hand, the taste of her
mouth … they were his joy and his despair. Many a night he lay
with Ygritte warm beside him, wondering if his lord father had felt

this confused about his mother, whoever she had been. Ygritte set the
trap and Mance Rayder pushed me into it.
Every day he spent among the wildlings made what he had to do
that much harder. He was going to have to nd some way to betray
these men, and when he did they would die. He did not want their
friendship, any more than he wanted Ygritte’s love. And yet … the
Thenns spoke the Old Tongue and seldom talked to Jon at all, but it
was di erent with Jarl’s raiders, the men who’d climbed the Wall.
Jon was coming to know them despite himself: gaunt, quiet Errok
and gregarious Grigg the Goat, the boys Quort and Bodger, Hempen
Dan the ropemaker. The worst of the lot was Del, a horsefaced
youth near Jon’s own age, who would talk dreamily of this wildling
girl he meant to steal. “She’s lucky, like your Ygritte. She’s kissed
by re.”
Jon had to bite his tongue. He didn’t want to know about Del’s
girl or Bodger’s mother, the place by the sea that Henk the Helm
came from, how Grigg yearned to visit the green men on the Isle of
Faces, or the time a moose had chased Toe nger up a tree. He
didn’t want to hear about the boil on Big Boil’s arse, how much ale
Stone Thumbs could drink, or how Quort’s little brother had begged
him not to go with Jarl. Quort could not have been older than
fourteen, though he’d already stolen himself a wife and had a child
on the way. “Might be he’ll be born in some castle,” the boy
boasted. “Born in a castle like a lord!” He was very taken with the
“castles” they’d seen, by which he meant watchtowers.
Jon wondered where Ghost was now. Had he gone to Castle
Black, or was he running with some wolfpack in the woods? He had
no sense of the direwolf, not even in his dreams. It made him feel as
if part of himself had been cut o . Even with Ygritte sleeping beside
him, he felt alone. He did not want to die alone.
By that afternoon the trees had begun to thin, and they marched
east over gently rolling plains. Grass rose waist high around them,
and stands of wild wheat swayed gently when the wind came
gusting, but for the most part the day was warm and bright. Toward
sunset, however, clouds began to threaten in the west. They soon
engulfed the orange sun, and Lenn foretold a bad storm coming. His

mother was a woods witch, so all the raiders agreed he had a gift
for foretelling the weather. “There’s a village close,” Grigg the Goat
told the Magnar. “Two miles, three. We could shelter there.” Styr
agreed at once.
It was well past dark and the storm was raging by the time they
reached the place. The village sat beside a lake, and had been so
long abandoned that most of the houses had collapsed. Even the
small timber inn that must once have been a welcome sight for
travelers stood half-fallen and roo ess. We will nd scant shelter here,
Jon thought gloomily. Whenever the lightning ashed he could see
a stone roundtower rising from an island out in the lake, but
without boats they had no way to reach it.
Errok and Del had crept ahead to scout the ruins, but Del was
back almost at once. Styr halted the column and sent a dozen of his
Thenns trotting forward, spears in hand. By then Jon had seen it
too: the glimmer of a re, reddening the chimney of the inn. We are
not alone. Dread coiled inside him like a snake. He heard a horse
neigh, and then shouts. Ride with them, eat with them, ght with them,
Qhorin had said.
But the ghting was done. “There’s only one of them,” Errok said
when he came back. “An old man with a horse.”
The Magnar shouted commands in the Old Tongue and a score of
his Thenns spread out to establish a perimeter around the village,
whilst others went prowling through the houses to make certain no
one else was hiding amongst the weeds and tumbled stones. The
rest crowded into the roo ess inn, jostling each other to get closer
to the hearth. The broken branches the old man had been burning
seemed to generate more smoke than heat, but any warmth was
welcome on such a wild rainy night. Two of the Thenns had thrown
the man to the ground and were going through his things. Another
held his horse, while three more looted his saddlebags.
Jon walked away. A rotten apple squished beneath his heel. Styr
will kill him. The Magnar had said as much at Greyguard; any
kneelers they met were to be put to death at once, to make certain
they could not raise the alarm. Ride with them, eat with them, ght

with them. Did that mean he must stand mute and helpless while
they slit an old man’s throat?
Near the edge of the village, Jon came face-to-face with one of
the guards Styr had posted. The Thenn growled something in the
Old Tongue and pointed his spear back toward the inn. Get back
where you belong, Jon guessed. But where is that?
He walked towards the water, and discovered an almost dry spot
beneath the leaning daub-and-wattle wall of a tumbledown cottage
that had mostly tumbled down. That was where Ygritte found him
sitting, staring o across the rain-whipped lake. “I know this place,”
he told her when she sat beside him. “That tower … look at the top
of it the next time the lightning ashes, and tell me what you see.”
“Aye, if you like,” she said, and then, “Some o’ the Thenns are
saying they heard noises out there. Shouting, they say.”
“Thunder.”
“They say shouting. Might be it’s ghosts.”
The holdfast did have a grim haunted look, standing there black
against the storm on its rocky island with the rain lashing at the
lake all around it. “We could go out and take a look,” he suggested.
“I doubt we could get much wetter than we are.”
“Swimming? In the storm?” She laughed at the notion. “Is this a
trick t’ get the clothes o me, Jon Snow?”
“Do I need a trick for that now?” he teased. “Or is that you can’t
swim a stroke?” Jon was a strong swimmer himself, having learned
the art as a boy in Winterfell’s great moat.
Ygritte punched his arm. “You know nothing, Jon Snow. I’m half
a sh, I’ll have you know.”
“Half sh, half goat, half horse … there’s too many halves to you,
Ygritte.” He shook his head. “We wouldn’t need to swim, if this is
the place I think. We could walk.”
She pulled back and gave him a look. “Walk on water? What
southron sorcery is that?”
“No sorc—” he began, as a huge bolt of lightning stabbed down
from the sky and touched the surface of the lake. For half a
heartbeat the world was noonday bright. The clap of thunder was so
loud that Ygritte gasped and covered her ears.

“Did you look?” Jon asked, as the sound rolled away and the
night turned black again. “Did you see?”
“Yellow,” she said. “Is that what you meant? Some o’ them
standing stones on top were yellow.”
“We call them merlons. They were painted gold a long time ago.
This is Queenscrown.”
Across the lake, the tower was black again, a dim shape dimly
seen. “A queen lived there?” asked Ygritte.
“A queen stayed there for a night.” Old Nan had told him the
story, but Maester Luwin had con rmed most of it. “Alysanne, the
wife of King Jaehaerys the Conciliator. He’s called the Old King
because he reigned so long, but he was young when he rst came to
the Iron Throne. In those days, it was his wont to travel all over the
realm. When he came to Winterfell, he brought his queen, six
dragons, and half his court. The king had matters to discuss with his
Warden of the North, and Alysanne grew bored, so she mounted her
dragon Silverwing and ew north to see the Wall. This village was
one of the places where she stopped. Afterward the smallfolk
painted the top of their holdfast to look like the golden crown she’d
worn when she spent the night among them.”
“I have never seen a dragon.”
“No one has. The last dragons died a hundred years ago or more.
But this was before that.”
“Queen Alysanne, you say?”
“Good Queen Alysanne, they called her later. One of the castles
on the Wall was named for her as well. Queensgate. Before her visit
they called it Snowgate.”
“If she was so good, she should have torn that Wall down.”
No, he thought. The Wall protects the realm. From the Others … and
from you and your kind as well, sweetling. “I had another friend who
dreamed of dragons. A dwarf. He told me—”
“JON SNOW!” One of the Thenns loomed above them, frowning.
“Magnar wants.” Jon thought it might have been the same man
who’d found him outside the cave, the night before they climbed
the Wall, but he could not be sure. He got to his feet. Ygritte came
with him, which always made Styr frown, but whenever he tried to

dismiss her she would remind him that she was a free woman, not a
kneeler. She came and went as she pleased.
They found the Magnar standing beneath the tree that grew
through the oor of the common room. His captive knelt before the
hearth, encircled by wooden spears and bronze swords. He watched
Jon approach, but did not speak. The rain was running down the
walls and pattering against the last few leaves that still clung to the
tree, while smoke swirled thick from the re.
“He must die,” Styr the Magnar said. “Do it, crow.”
The old man said no word. He only looked at Jon, standing
amongst the wildlings. Amidst the rain and smoke, lit only by the
re, he could not have seen that Jon was all in black, but for his
sheepskin cloak. Or could he?
Jon drew Longclaw from its sheath. Rain washed the steel, and
the relight traced a sullen orange line along the edge. Such a small
re, to cost a man his life. He remembered what Qhorin Halfhand had
said when they spied the re in the Skirling Pass. Fire is life up here,
he told them, but it can be death as well. That was high in the
Frostfangs, though, in the lawless wild beyond the Wall. This was
the Gift, protected by the Night’s Watch and the power of
Winterfell. A man should have been free to build a re here,
without dying for it.
“Why do you hesitate?” Styr said. “Kill him, and be done.”
Even then the captive did not speak. “Mercy,” he might have said,
or “You have taken my horse, my coin, my food, let me keep my
life,” or “No, please, I have done you no harm.” He might have said
a thousand things, or wept, or called upon his gods. No words
would save him now, though. Perhaps he knew that. So he held his
tongue, and looked at Jon in accusation and appeal.
You must not balk, whatever is asked of you. Ride with them, eat with
them, ght with them … But this old man had o ered no resistance.
He had been unlucky, that was all. Who he was, where he came
from, where he meant to go on his sorry sway-backed horse … none
of it mattered.
He is an old man, Jon told himself. Fifty, maybe even sixty. He lived
a longer life than most. The Thenns will kill him anyway, nothing I can

say or do will save him. Longclaw seemed heavier than lead in his
hand, too heavy to lift. The man kept staring at him, with eyes as
big and black as wells. I will fall into those eyes and drown. The
Magnar was looking at him too, and he could almost taste the
mistrust. The man is dead. What matter if it is my hand that slays him?
One cut would do it, quick and clean. Longclaw was forged of
Valyrian steel. Like Ice. Jon remembered another killing; the
deserter on his knees, his head rolling, the brightness of blood on
snow … his father’s sword, his father’s words, his father’s face …
“Do it, Jon Snow,” Ygritte urged. “You must. T’ prove you are no
crow, but one o’ the free folk.”
“An old man sitting by a re?”
“Orell was sitting by a re too. You killed him quick enough.”
The look she gave him then was hard. “You meant t’ kill me too, till
you saw I was a woman. And I was asleep.”
“That was di erent. You were soldiers … sentries.”
“Aye, and you crows didn’t want t’ be seen. No more’n we do,
now. It’s just the same. Kill him.”
He turned his back on the man. “No.”
The Magnar moved closer, tall, cold, and dangerous. “I say yes. I
command here.”
“You command Thenns,” Jon told him, “not free folk.”
“I see no free folk. I see a crow and a crow wife.”
“I’m no crow wife!” Ygritte snatched her knife from its sheath.
Three quick strides, and she yanked the old man’s head back by the
hair and opened his throat from ear to ear. Even in death, the man
did not cry out. “You know nothing, Jon Snow!” she shouted at him,
and ung the bloody blade at his feet.
The Magnar said something in the Old Tongue. He might have
been telling the Thenns to kill Jon where he stood, but he would
never know the truth of that. Lightning crashed down from the sky,
a searing blue-white bolt that touched the top of the tower in the
lake. They could smell the fury of it, and when the thunder came it
seemed to shake the night.
And death leapt down amongst them.

The lightning ash left Jon night-blind, but he glimpsed the
hurtling shadow half a heartbeat before he heard the shriek. The
rst Thenn died as the old man had, blood gushing from his torn
throat. Then the light was gone and the shape was spinning away,
snarling, and another man went down in the dark. There were
curses, shouts, howls of pain. Jon saw Big Boil stumble backward
and knock down three men behind him. Ghost, he thought for one
mad instant. Ghost leapt the Wall. Then the lightning turned the
night to day, and he saw the wolf standing on Del’s chest, blood
running black from his jaws. Grey. He’s grey.
Darkness descended with the thunderclap. The Thenns were
jabbing with their spears as the wolf darted between them. The old
man’s mare reared, maddened by the smell of slaughter, and lashed
out with her hooves. Longclaw was still in his hand. All at once Jon
Snow knew he would never get a better chance.
He cut down the rst man as he turned toward the wolf, shoved
past a second, slashed at a third. Through the madness he heard
someone call his name, but whether it was Ygritte or the Magnar he
could not say. The Thenn ghting to control the horse never saw
him. Longclaw was feather-light. He swung at the back of the man’s
calf, and felt the steel bite down to the bone. When the wildling fell
the mare bolted, but somehow Jon managed to grab her mane with
his o hand and vault himself onto her back. A hand closed round
his ankle, and he hacked down and saw Bodger’s face dissolve in a
welter of blood. The horse reared, lashing out. One hoof caught a
Thenn in the temple, with a crunch.
And then they were running. Jon made no e ort to guide the
horse. It was all he could do to stay on her as they plunged through
mud and rain and thunder. Wet grass whipped at his face and a
spear ew past his ear. If the horse stumbles and breaks a leg, they will
run me down and kill me, he thought, but the old gods were with
him and the horse did not stumble. Lightning shivered through the
black dome of sky, and thunder rolled across the plains. The shouts
dwindled and died behind him.
Long hours later, the rain stopped. Jon found himself alone in a
sea of tall black grass. There was a deep throbbing ache in his right

thigh. When he looked down, he was surprised to see an arrow
jutting out the back of it. When did that happen? He grabbed hold of
the shaft and gave it a tug, but the arrowhead was sunk deep in the
meat of his leg, and the pain when he pulled on it was excruciating.
He tried to think back on the madness at the inn, but all he could
remember was the beast, gaunt and grey and terrible. It was too
large to be a common wolf. A direwolf, then. It had to be. He had never
seen an animal move so fast. Like a grey wind … Could Robb have
returned to the north?
Jon shook his head. He had no answers. It was too hard to
think … about the wolf, the old man, Ygritte, any of it …
Clumsily, he slid down o the mare’s back. His wounded leg
buckled under him, and he had to swallow a scream. This is going to
be agony. The arrow had to come out, though, and nothing good
could come of waiting. Jon curled his hand around the etching,
took a deep breath, and shoved the arrow forward. He grunted,
then cursed. It hurt so much he had to stop. I am bleeding like a
butchered pig, he thought, but there was nothing to be done for it
until the arrow was out. He grimaced and tried again … and soon
stopped again, trembling. Once more. This time he screamed, but
when he was done the arrowhead was poking through the front of
his thigh. Jon pushed back his bloody breeches to get a better grip,
grimaced, and slowly drew the shaft through his leg. How he got
through that without fainting he never knew.
He lay on the ground afterward, clutching his prize and bleeding
quietly, too weak to move. After a while, he realized that if he did
not make himself move he was like to bleed to death. Jon crawled
to the shallow stream where the mare was drinking, washed his
thigh in the cold water, and bound it tight with a strip of cloth torn
from his cloak. He washed the arrow too, turning it in his hands.
Was the etching grey, or white? Ygritte etched her arrows with
pale grey goose feathers. Did she loose a shaft at me as I ed? Jon
could not blame her for that. He wondered if she’d been aiming for
him or the horse. If the mare had gone down, he would have been
doomed. “A lucky thing my leg got in the way,” he muttered.

He rested for a while to let the horse graze. She did not wander
far. That was good. Hobbled with a bad leg, he could never have
caught her. It was all he could do to force himself back to his feet
and climb onto her back. How did I ever mount her before, without
saddle or stirrups, and a sword in one hand? That was another
question he could not answer.
Thunder rumbled softly in the distance, but above him the clouds
were breaking up. Jon searched the sky until he found the Ice
Dragon, then turned the mare north for the Wall and Castle Black.
The throb of pain in his thigh muscle made him wince as he put his
heels into the old man’s horse. I am going home, he told himself. But
if that was true, why did he feel so hollow?
He rode till dawn, while the stars stared down like eyes.

DAENERYS

Her Dothraki scouts had told her how it was, but Dany wanted to

see for herself. Ser Jorah Mormont rode with her through a
birchwood forest and up a slanting sandstone ridge. “Near enough,”
he warned her at the crest.
Dany reined in her mare and looked across the elds, to where
the Yunkish host lay athwart her path. Whitebeard had been
teaching her how best to count the numbers of a foe. “Five
thousand,” she said after a moment.
“I’d say so.” Ser Jorah pointed. “Those are sellswords on the
anks. Lances and mounted bowmen, with swords and axes for the
close work. The Second Sons on the left wing, the Stormcrows to
the right. About ve hundred men apiece. See the banners?”
Yunkai’s harpy grasped a whip and iron collar in her talons
instead of a length of chain. But the sellswords ew their own
standards beneath those of the city they served: on the right four
crows between crossed thunderbolts, on the left a broken sword.
“The Yunkai’s hold the center themselves,” Dany noted. Their
o cers looked indistinguishable from Astapor’s at a distance; tall
bright helms and cloaks sewn with ashing copper disks. “Are those
slave soldiers they lead?”
“In large part. But not the equal of Unsullied. Yunkai is known for
training bed slaves, not warriors.”
“What say you? Can we defeat this army?”
“Easily,” Ser Jorah said.

“But not bloodlessly.” Blood aplenty had soaked into the bricks of
Astapor the day that city fell, though little of it belonged to her or
hers. “We might win a battle here, but at such cost we cannot take
the city.”
“That is ever a risk, Khaleesi. Astapor was complacent and
vulnerable. Yunkai is forewarned.”
Dany considered. The slaver host seemed small compared to her
own numbers, but the sellswords were ahorse. She’d ridden too long
with Dothraki not to have a healthy respect for what mounted
warriors could do to foot. The Unsullied could withstand their charge,
but my freedmen will be slaughtered. “The slavers like to talk,” she
said. “Send word that I will hear them this evening in my tent. And
invite the captains of the sellsword companies to call on me as well.
But not together. The Stormcrows at midday, the Second Sons two
hours later.”
“As you wish,” Ser Jorah said. “But if they do not come—”
“They’ll come. They will be curious to see the dragons and hear
what I might have to say, and the clever ones will see it for a
chance to gauge my strength.” She wheeled her silver mare about.
“I’ll await them in my pavilion.”
Slate skies and brisk winds saw Dany back to her host. The deep
ditch that would encircle her camp was already half dug, and the
woods were full of Unsullied lopping branches o birch trees to
sharpen into stakes. The eunuchs could not sleep in an unforti ed
camp, or so Grey Worm insisted. He was there watching the work.
Dany halted a moment to speak with him. “Yunkai has girded up
her loins for battle.”
“This is good, Your Grace. These ones thirst for blood.”
When she had commanded the Unsullied to choose o cers from
amongst themselves, Grey Worm had been their overwhelming
choice for the highest rank. Dany had put Ser Jorah over him to
train him for command, and the exile knight said that so far the
young eunuch was hard but fair, quick to learn, tireless, and utterly
unrelenting in his attention to detail.
“The Wise Masters have assembled a slave army to meet us.”

“A slave in Yunkai learns the way of seven sighs and the sixteen
seats of pleasure, Your Grace. The Unsullied learn the way of the
three spears. Your Grey Worm hopes to show you.”
One of the rst things Dany had done after the fall of Astapor was
abolish the custom of giving the Unsullied new slave names every
day. Most of those born free had returned to their birth names;
those who still remembered them, at least. Others had called
themselves after heroes or gods, and sometimes weapons, gems,
and even owers, which resulted in soldiers with some very
peculiar names, to Dany’s ears. Grey Worm had remained Grey
Worm. When she asked him why, he said, “It is a lucky name. The
name this one was born to was accursed. That was the name he had
when he was taken for a slave. But Grey Worm is the name this one
drew the day Daenerys Stormborn set him free.”
“If battle is joined, let Grey Worm show wisdom as well as
valor,” Dany told him. “Spare any slave who runs or throws down
his weapon. The fewer slain, the more remain to join us after.”
“This one will remember.”
“I know he will. Be at my tent by midday. I want you there with
my other o cers when I treat with the sellsword captains.” Dany
spurred her silver on to camp.
Within the perimeter the Unsullied had established, the tents
were going up in orderly rows, with her own tall golden pavilion at
the center. A second encampment lay close beyond her own; ve
times the size, sprawling and chaotic, this second camp had no
ditches, no tents, no sentries, no horselines. Those who had horses
or mules slept beside them, for fear they might be stolen. Goats,
sheep, and half-starved dogs wandered freely amongst hordes of
women, children, and old men. Dany had left Astapor in the hands
of a council of former slaves led by a healer, a scholar, and a priest.
Wise men all, she thought, and just. Yet even so, tens of thousands
preferred to follow her to Yunkai, rather than remain behind in
Astapor. I gave them the city, and most of them were too frightened to
take it.
The raggle-taggle host of freedmen dwarfed her own, but they
were more burden than bene t. Perhaps one in a hundred had a

donkey, a camel, or an ox; most carried weapons looted from some
slaver’s armory, but only one in ten was strong enough to ght, and
none was trained. They ate the land bare as they passed, like locusts
in sandals. Yet Dany could not bring herself to abandon them as Ser
Jorah and her bloodriders urged. I told them they were free. I cannot
tell them now they are not free to join me. She gazed at the smoke
rising from their cook res and swallowed a sigh. She might have
the best footsoldiers in the world, but she also had the worst.
Arstan Whitebeard stood outside the entrance of her tent, while
Strong Belwas sat crosslegged on the grass nearby, eating a bowl of
gs. On the march, the duty of guarding her fell upon their
shoulders. She had made Jhogo, Aggo, and Rakharo her kos as well
as her bloodriders, and just now she needed them more to command
her Dothraki than to protect her person. Her khalasar was tiny, some
thirty-odd mounted warriors, and most of them braidless boys and
bentback old men. Yet they were all the horse she had, and she
dared not go without them. The Unsullied might be the nest
infantry in all the world, as Ser Jorah claimed, but she needed
scouts and outriders as well.
“Yunkai will have war,” Dany told Whitebeard inside the
pavilion. Irri and Jhiqui had covered the oor with carpets while
Missandei lit a stick of incense to sweeten the dusty air. Drogon and
Rhaegal were asleep atop some cushions, curled about each other,
but Viserion perched on the edge of her empty bath. “Missandei,
what language will these Yunkai’i speak, Valyrian?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” the child said. “A di erent dialect than
Astapor’s, yet close enough to understand. The slavers name
themselves the Wise Masters.”
“Wise?” Dany sat crosslegged on a cushion, and Viserion spread
his white-and-gold wings and apped to her side. “We shall see how
wise they are,” she said as she scratched the dragon’s scaly head
behind the horns.
Ser Jorah Mormont returned an hour later, accompanied by three
captains of the Stormcrows. They wore black feathers on their
polished helms, and claimed to be all equal in honor and authority.
Dany studied them as Irri and Jhiqui poured the wine. Prendahl na

Ghezn was a thickset Ghiscari with a broad face and dark hair going
grey; Sallor the Bald had a twisting scar across his pale Qartheen
cheek; and Daario Naharis was amboyant even for a Tyroshi. His
beard was cut into three prongs and dyed blue, the same color as his
eyes and the curly hair that fell to his collar. His pointed mustachios
were painted gold. His clothes were all shades of yellow; a foam of
Myrish lace the color of butter spilled from his collar and cu s, his
doublet was sewn with brass medallions in the shape of dandelions,
and ornamental goldwork crawled up his high leather boots to his
thighs. Gloves of soft yellow suede were tucked into a belt of gilded
rings, and his ngernails were enameled blue.
But it was Prendahl na Ghezn who spoke for the sellswords. “You
would do well to take your rabble elsewhere,” he said. “You took
Astapor by treachery, but Yunkai shall not fall so easily.”
“Five hundred of your Stormcrows against ten thousand of my
Unsullied,” said Dany. “I am only a young girl and do not
understand the ways of war, yet these odds seem poor to me.”
“The Stormcrows do not stand alone,” said Prendahl.
“Stormcrows do not stand at all. They y, at the rst sign of
thunder. Perhaps you should be ying now. I have heard that
sellswords are notoriously unfaithful. What will it avail you to be
staunch, when the Second Sons change sides?”
“That will not happen,” Prendahl insisted, unmoved. “And if it
did, it would not matter. The Second Sons are nothing. We ght
beside the stalwart men of Yunkai.”
“You ght beside bed-boys armed with spears.” When she turned
her head, the twin bells in her braid rang softly. “Once battle is
joined, do not think to ask for quarter. Join me now, however, and
you shall keep the gold the Yunkai’i paid you and claim a share of
the plunder besides, with greater rewards later when I come into
my kingdom. Fight for the Wise Masters, and your wages will be
death. Do you imagine that Yunkai will open its gates when my
Unsullied are butchering you beneath the walls?”
“Woman, you bray like an ass, and make no more sense.”
“Woman?” She chuckled. “Is that meant to insult me? I would
return the slap, if I took you for a man.” Dany met his stare. “I am

Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the Unburnt, Mother of
Dragons, khaleesi to Drogo’s riders, and queen of the Seven
Kingdoms of Westeros.”
“What you are,” said Prendahl na Ghezn, “is a horselord’s whore.
When we break you, I will breed you to my stallion.”
Strong Belwas drew his arakh. “Strong Belwas will give his ugly
tongue to the little queen, if she likes.”
“No, Belwas. I have given these men my safe conduct.” She
smiled. “Tell me this—are the Stormcrows slave or free?”
“We are a brotherhood of free men,” Sallor declared.
“Good.” Dany stood. “Go back and tell your brothers what I said,
then. It may be that some of them would sooner sup on gold and
glory than on death. I shall want your answer on the morrow.”
The Stormcrow captains rose in unison. “Our answer is no,” said
Prendahl na Ghezn. His fellows followed him out of the tent … but
Daario Naharis glanced back as he left, and inclined his head in
polite farewell.
Two hours later the commander of the Second Sons arrived alone.
He proved to be a towering Braavosi with pale green eyes and a
bushy red-gold beard that reached nearly to his belt. His name was
Mero, but he called himself the Titan’s Bastard.
Mero tossed down his wine straightaway, wiped his mouth with
the back of his hand, and leered at Dany. “I believe I fucked your
twin sister in a pleasure house back home. Or was it you?”
“I think not. I would remember a man of such magni cence, I
have no doubt.”
“Yes, that is so. No woman has ever forgotten the Titan’s
Bastard.” The Braavosi held out his cup to Jhiqui. “What say you
take those clothes o and come sit on my lap? If you please me, I
might bring the Second Sons over to your side.”
“If you bring the Second Sons over to my side, I might not have
you gelded.”
The big man laughed. “Little girl, another woman once tried to
geld me with her teeth. She has no teeth now, but my sword is as
long and thick as ever. Shall I take it out and show you?”

“No need. After my eunuchs cut it o , I can examine it at my
leisure.” Dany took a sip of wine. “It is true that I am only a young
girl, and do not know the ways of war. Explain to me how you
propose to defeat ten thousand Unsullied with your ve hundred.
Innocent as I am, these odds seem poor to me.”
“The Second Sons have faced worse odds and won.”
“The Second Sons have faced worse odds and run. At Qohor,
when the Three Thousand made their stand. Or do you deny it?”
“That was many and more years ago, before the Second Sons
were led by the Titan’s Bastard.”
“So it is from you they get their courage?” Dany turned to Ser
Jorah. “When the battle is joined, kill this one rst.”
The exile knight smiled. “Gladly, Your Grace.”
“Of course,” she said to Mero, “you could run again. We will not
stop you. Take your Yunkish gold and go.”
“Had you ever seen the Titan of Braavos, foolish girl, you would
know that it has no tail to turn.”
“Then stay, and ght for me.”
“You are worth ghting for, it is true,” the Braavosi said, “and I
would gladly let you kiss my sword, if I were free. But I have taken
Yunkai’s coin and pledged my holy word.”
“Coins can be returned,” she said. “I will pay you as much and
more. I have other cities to conquer, and a whole kingdom awaiting
me half a world away. Serve me faithfully, and the Second Sons
need never seek hire again.”
The Braavosi tugged on his thick red beard. “As much and more,
and perhaps a kiss besides, eh? Or more than a kiss? For a man as
magni cent as me?”
“Perhaps.”
“I will like the taste of your tongue, I think.”
She could sense Ser Jorah’s anger. My black bear does not like this
talk of kissing. “Think on what I’ve said tonight. Can I have your
answer on the morrow?”
“You can.” The Titan’s Bastard grinned. “Can I have a agon of
this ne wine to take back to my captains?”

“You may have a tun. It is from the cellars of the Good Masters of
Astapor, and I have wagons full of it.”
“Then give me a wagon. A token of your good regard.”
“You have a big thirst.”
“I am big all over. And I have many brothers. The Titan’s Bastard
does not drink alone, Khaleesi.”
“A wagon it is, if you promise to drink to my health.”
“Done!” he boomed. “And done, and done! Three toasts we’ll
drink you, and bring you an answer when the sun comes up.”
But when Mero was gone, Arstan Whitebeard said, “That one has
an evil reputation, even in Westeros. Do not be misled by his
manner, Your Grace. He will drink three toasts to your health
tonight, and rape you on the morrow.”
“The old man’s right for once,” Ser Jorah said. “The Second Sons
are an old company, and not without valor, but under Mero they’ve
turned near as bad as the Brave Companions. The man is as
dangerous to his employers as to his foes. That’s why you nd him
out here. None of the Free Cities will hire him any longer.”
“It is not his reputation that I want, it’s his ve hundred horse.
What of the Stormcrows, is there any hope there?”
“No,” Ser Jorah said bluntly. “That Prendahl is Ghiscari by blood.
Likely he had kin in Astapor.”
“A pity. Well, perhaps we will not need to ght. Let us wait and
hear what the Yunkai’i have to say.”
The envoys from Yunkai arrived as the sun was going down; fty
men on magni cent black horses and one on a great white camel.
Their helms were twice as tall as their heads, so as not to crush the
bizarre twists and towers and shapes of their oiled hair beneath.
They dyed their linen skirts and tunics a deep yellow, and sewed
copper disks to their cloaks.
The man on the white camel named himself Grazdan mo Eraz.
Lean and hard, he had a white smile such as Kraznys had worn until
Drogon burned o his face. His hair was drawn up in a unicorn’s
horn that jutted from his brow, and his tokar was fringed with
golden Myrish lace. “Ancient and glorious is Yunkai, the queen of
cities,” he said when Dany welcomed him to her tent. “Our walls

are strong, our nobles proud and erce, our common folk without
fear. Ours is the blood of ancient Ghis, whose empire was old when
Valyria was yet a squalling child. You were wise to sit and speak,
Khaleesi. You shall nd no easy conquest here.”
“Good. My Unsullied will relish a bit of a ght.” She looked to
Grey Worm, who nodded.
Grazdan shrugged expansively. “If blood is what you wish, let it
ow. I am told you have freed your eunuchs. Freedom means as
much to an Unsullied as a hat to a haddock.” He smiled at Grey
Worm, but the eunuch might have been made of stone. “Those who
survive we shall enslave again, and use to retake Astapor from the
rabble. We can make a slave of you as well, do not doubt it. There
are pleasure houses in Lys and Tyrosh where men would pay
handsomely to bed the last Targaryen.”
“It is good to see you know who I am,” said Dany mildly.
“I pride myself on my knowledge of the savage senseless west.”
Grazdan spread his hands, a gesture of conciliation. “And yet, why
should we speak thus harshly to one another? It is true that you
committed savageries in Astapor, but we Yunkai’i are a most
forgiving people. Your quarrel is not with us, Your Grace. Why
squander your strength against our mighty walls when you will
need every man to regain your father’s throne in far Westeros?
Yunkai wishes you only well in that endeavor. And to prove the
truth of that, I have brought you a gift.” He clapped his hands, and
two of his escort came forward bearing a heavy cedar chest bound
in bronze and gold. They set it at her feet. “Fifty thousand golden
marks,” Grazdan said smoothly. “Yours, as a gesture of friendship
from the Wise Masters of Yunkai. Gold given freely is better than
plunder bought with blood, surely? So I say to you, Daenerys
Targaryen, take this chest, and go.”
Dany pushed open the lid of the chest with a small slippered foot.
It was full of gold coins, just as the envoy said. She grabbed a
handful and let them run through her ngers. They shone brightly
as they tumbled and fell; new minted, most of them, stamped with a
stepped pyramid on one face and the harpy of Ghis on the other.

“Very pretty. I wonder how many chests like this I shall nd when I
take your city?”
He chuckled. “None, for that you shall never do.”
“I have a gift for you as well.” She slammed the chest shut.
“Three days. On the morning of the third day, send out your slaves.
All of them. Every man, woman, and child shall be given a weapon,
and as much food, clothing, coin, and goods as he or she can carry.
These they shall be allowed to choose freely from among their
masters’ possessions, as payment for their years of servitude. When
all the slaves have departed, you will open your gates and allow my
Unsullied to enter and search your city, to make certain none
remain in bondage. If you do this, Yunkai will not be burned or
plundered, and none of your people shall be molested. The Wise
Masters will have the peace they desire, and will have proved
themselves wise indeed. What say you?”
“I say, you are mad.”
“Am I?” Dany shrugged, and said, “Dracarys.”
The dragons answered. Rhaegal hissed and smoked, Viserion
snapped, and Drogon spat swirling red-black ame. It touched the
drape of Grazdan’s tokar, and the silk caught in half a heartbeat.
Golden marks spilled across the carpets as the envoy stumbled over
the chest, shouting curses and beating at his arm until Whitebeard
ung a agon of water over him to douse the ames. “You swore I
should have safe conduct!” the Yunkish envoy wailed.
“Do all the Yunkai’i whine so over a singed tokar? I shall buy you
a new one … if you deliver up your slaves within three days.
Elsewise, Drogon shall give you a warmer kiss.” She wrinkled her
nose. “You’ve soiled yourself. Take your gold and go, and see that
the Wise Masters hear my message.”
Grazdan mo Eraz pointed a nger. “You shall rue this arrogance,
whore. These little lizards will not keep you safe, I promise you. We
will ll the air with arrows if they come within a league of Yunkai.
Do you think it is so hard to kill a dragon?”
“Harder than to kill a slaver. Three days, Grazdan. Tell them. By
the end of the third day, I will be in Yunkai, whether you open your
gates for me or no.”

Full dark had fallen by the time the Yunkai’i departed from her
camp. It promised to be a gloomy night; moonless, starless, with a
chill wet wind blowing from the west. A ne black night, thought
Dany. The res burned all around her, small orange stars strewn
across hill and
eld. “Ser Jorah,” she said, “summon my
bloodriders.” Dany seated herself on a mound of cushions to await
them, her dragons all about her. When they were assembled, she
said, “An hour past midnight should be time enough.”
“Yes, Khaleesi,” said Rakharo. “Time for what?”
“To mount our attack.”
Ser Jorah Mormont scowled. “You told the sellswords—”
“—that I wanted their answers on the morrow. I made no
promises about tonight. The Stormcrows will be arguing about my
o er. The Second Sons will be drunk on the wine I gave Mero. And
the Yunkai’i believe they have three days. We will take them under
cover of this darkness.”
“They will have scouts watching for us.”
“And in the dark, they will see hundreds of camp res burning,”
said Dany. “If they see anything at all.”
“Khaleesi,” said Jhogo, “I will deal with these scouts. They are no
riders, only slavers on horses.”
“Just so,” she agreed. “I think we should attack from three sides.
Grey Worm, your Unsullied shall strike at them from right and left,
while my kos lead my horse in wedge for a thrust through their
center. Slave soldiers will never stand before mounted Dothraki.”
She smiled. “To be sure, I am only a young girl and know little of
war. What do you think, my lords?”
“I think you are Rhaegar Targaryen’s sister,” Ser Jorah said with
a rueful half smile.
“Aye,” said Arstan Whitebeard, “and a queen as well.”
It took an hour to work out all the details. Now begins the most
dangerous time, Dany thought as her captains departed to their
commands. She could only pray that the gloom of the night would
hide her preparations from the foe.
Near midnight, she got a scare when Ser Jorah bulled his way
past Strong Belwas. “The Unsullied caught one of the sellswords

trying to sneak into the camp.”
“A spy?” That frightened her. If they’d caught one, how many
others might have gotten away?
“He claims to come bearing gifts. It’s the yellow fool with the
blue hair.”
Daario Naharis. “That one. I’ll hear him, then.”
When the exile knight delivered him, she asked herself whether
two men had ever been so di erent. The Tyroshi was fair where Ser
Jorah was swarthy; lithe where the knight was brawny; graced with
owing locks where the other was balding, yet smooth-skinned
where Mormont was hairy. And her knight dressed plainly while
this other made a peacock look drab, though he had thrown a heavy
black cloak over his bright yellow nery for this visit. He carried a
heavy canvas sack slung over one shoulder.
“Khaleesi,” he cried, “I bring gifts and glad tidings. The
Stormcrows are yours.” A golden tooth gleamed in his mouth when
he smiled. “And so is Daario Naharis!”
Dany was dubious. If this Tyroshi had come to spy, this
declaration might be no more than a desperate plot to save his
head. “What do Prendahl na Ghezn and Sallor say of this?”
“Little.” Daario upended the sack, and the heads of Sallor the Bald
and Prendahl na Ghezn spilled out upon her carpets. “My gifts to
the dragon queen.”
Viserion sni ed the blood leaking from Prendahl’s neck, and let
loose a gout of ame that took the dead man full in the face,
blackening and blistering his bloodless cheeks. Drogon and Rhaegal
stirred at the smell of roasted meat.
“You did this?” Dany asked queasily.
“None other.” If her dragons discom ted Daario Naharis, he hid it
well. For all the mind he paid them, they might have been three
kittens playing with a mouse.
“Why?”
“Because you are so beautiful.” His hands were large and strong,
and there was something in his hard blue eyes and great curving
nose that suggested the erceness of some splendid bird of prey.
“Prendahl talked too much and said too little.” His garb, rich as it

was, had seen hard wear; salt stains patterned his boots, the enamel
of his nails was chipped, his lace was soiled by sweat, and she could
see where the end of his cloak was fraying. “And Sallor picked his
nose as if his snot was gold.” He stood with his hands crossed at the
wrists, his palms resting on the pommels of his blades; a curving
Dothraki arakh on his left hip, a Myrish stiletto on his right. Their
hilts were a matched pair of golden women, naked and wanton.
“Are you skilled in the use of those handsome blades?” Dany
asked him.
“Prendahl and Sallor would tell you so, if dead men could talk. I
count no day as lived unless I have loved a woman, slain a foeman,
and eaten a ne meal … and the days that I have lived are as
numberless as the stars in the sky. I make of slaughter a thing of
beauty, and many a tumbler and re dancer has wept to the gods
that they might be half so quick, a quarter so graceful. I would tell
you the names of all the men I have slain, but before I could nish
your dragons would grow large as castles, the walls of Yunkai
would crumble into yellow dust, and winter would come and go and
come again.”
Dany laughed. She liked the swagger she saw in this Daario
Naharis. “Draw your sword and swear it to my service.”
In a blink, Daario’s arakh was free of its sheath. His submission
was as outrageous as the rest of him, a great swoop that brought his
face down to her toes. “My sword is yours. My life is yours. My
love is yours. My blood, my body, my songs, you own them all. I
live and die at your command, fair queen.”
“Then live,” Dany said, “and ght for me tonight.”
“That would not be wise, my queen.” Ser Jorah gave Daario a
cold, hard stare. “Keep this one here under guard until the battle’s
fought and won.”
She considered a moment, then shook her head. “If he can give us
the Stormcrows, surprise is certain.”
“And if he betrays you, surprise is lost.”
Dany looked down at the sellsword again. He gave her such a
smile that she ushed and turned away. “He won’t.”
“How can you know that?”

She pointed to the lumps of blackened esh the dragons were
consuming, bite by bloody bite. “I would call that proof of his
sincerity. Daario Naharis, have your Stormcrows ready to strike the
Yunkish rear when my attack begins. Can you get back safely?”
“If they stop me, I will say I have been scouting, and saw
nothing.” The Tyroshi rose to his feet, bowed, and swept out.
Ser Jorah Mormont lingered. “Your Grace,” he said, too bluntly,
“that was a mistake. We know nothing of this man—”
“We know that he is a great ghter.”
“A great talker, you mean.”
“He brings us the Stormcrows.” And he has blue eyes.
“Five hundred sellswords of uncertain loyalty.”
“All loyalties are uncertain in such times as these,” Dany
reminded him. And I shall be betrayed twice more, once for gold and
once for love.
“Daenerys, I am thrice your age,” Ser Jorah said. “I have seen
how false men are. Very few are worthy of trust, and Daario
Naharis is not one of them. Even his beard wears false colors.”
That angered her. “Whilst you have an honest beard, is that what
you are telling me? You are the only man I should ever trust?”
He sti ened. “I did not say that.”
“You say it every day. Pyat Pree’s a liar, Xaro’s a schemer,
Belwas a braggart, Arstan an assassin … do you think I’m still some
virgin girl, that I cannot hear the words behind the words?”
“Your Grace—”
She bulled over him. “You have been a better friend to me than
any I have known, a better brother than Viserys ever was. You are
the rst of my Queensguard, the commander of my army, my most
valued counselor, my good right hand. I honor and respect and
cherish you—but I do not desire you, Jorah Mormont, and I am
weary of your trying to push every other man in the world away
from me, so I must needs rely on you and you alone. It will not
serve, and it will not make me love you any better.”
Mormont had ushed red when she rst began, but by the time
Dany was done his face was pale again. He stood still as stone. “If
my queen commands,” he said, curt and cold.

Dany was warm enough for both of them. “She does,” she said.
“She commands. Now go see to your Unsullied, ser. You have a
battle to ght and win.”
When he was gone, Dany threw herself down on her pillows
beside her dragons. She had not meant to be so sharp with Ser
Jorah, but his endless suspicion had nally woken her dragon.
He will forgive me, she told herself. I am his liege. Dany found
herself wondering whether he was right about Daario. She felt very
lonely all of a sudden. Mirri Maz Duur had promised that she would
never bear a living child. House Targaryen will end with me. That
made her sad. “You must be my children,” she told the dragons,
“my three erce children. Arstan says dragons live longer than men,
so you will go on after I am dead.”
Drogon looped his neck around to nip at her hand. His teeth were
very sharp, but he never broke her skin when they played like this.
Dany laughed, and rolled him back and forth until he roared, his tail
lashing like a whip. It is longer than it was, she saw, and tomorrow it
will be longer still. They grow quickly now, and when they are grown I
shall have my wings. Mounted on a dragon, she could lead her own
men into battle, as she had in Astapor, but as yet they were still too
small to bear her weight.
A stillness settled over her camp when midnight came and went.
Dany remained in her pavilion with her maids, while Arstan
Whitebeard and Strong Belwas kept the guard. The waiting is the
hardest part. To sit in her tent with idle hands while her battle was
being fought without her made Dany feel half a child again.
The hours crept by on turtle feet. Even after Jhiqui rubbed the
knots from her shoulders, Dany was too restless for sleep. Missandei
o ered to sing her a lullaby of the Peaceful People, but Dany shook
her head. “Bring me Arstan,” she said.
When the old man came, she was curled up inside her hrakkar
pelt, whose musty smell still reminded her of Drogo. “I cannot sleep
when men are dying for me, Whitebeard,” she said. “Tell me more
of my brother Rhaegar, if you would. I liked the tale you told me
on the ship, of how he decided that he must be a warrior.”
“Your Grace is kind to say so.”

“Viserys said that our brother won many tourneys.”
Arstan bowed his white head respectfully. “It is not meet for me
to deny His Grace’s words …”
“But?” said Dany sharply. “Tell me. I command it.”
“Prince Rhaegar’s prowess was unquestioned, but he seldom
entered the lists. He never loved the song of swords the way that
Robert did, or Jaime Lannister. It was something he had to do, a
task the world had set him. He did it well, for he did everything
well. That was his nature. But he took no joy in it. Men said that he
loved his harp much better than his lance.”
“He won some tourneys, surely,” said Dany, disappointed.
“When he was young, His Grace rode brilliantly in a tourney at
Storm’s End, defeating Lord Ste on Baratheon, Lord Jason
Mallister, the Red Viper of Dorne, and a mystery knight who proved
to be the infamous Simon Toyne, chief of the kingswood outlaws.
He broke twelve lances against Ser Arthur Dayne that day.”
“Was he the champion, then?”
“No, Your Grace. That honor went to another knight of the
Kingsguard, who unhorsed Prince Rhaegar in the nal tilt.”
Dany did not want to hear about Rhaegar being unhorsed. “But
what tourneys did my brother win?”
“Your Grace.” The old man hesitated. “He won the greatest
tourney of them all.”
“Which was that?” Dany demanded.
“The tourney Lord Whent staged at Harrenhal beside the Gods
Eye, in the year of the false spring. A notable event. Besides the
jousting, there was a mêlée in the old style fought between seven
teams of knights, as well as archery and axe-throwing, a horse race,
a tournament of singers, a mummer show, and many feasts and
frolics. Lord Whent was as open handed as he was rich. The lavish
purses he proclaimed drew hundreds of challengers. Even your
royal father came to Harrenhal, when he had not left the Red Keep
for long years. The greatest lords and mightiest champions of the
Seven Kingdoms rode in that tourney, and the Prince of
Dragonstone bested them all.”

“But that was the tourney when he crowned Lyanna Stark as
queen of love and beauty!” said Dany. “Princess Elia was there, his
wife, and yet my brother gave the crown to the Stark girl, and later
stole her away from her betrothed. How could he do that? Did the
Dornish woman treat him so ill?”
“It is not for such as me to say what might have been in your
brother’s heart, Your Grace. The Princess Elia was a good and
gracious lady, though her health was ever delicate.”
Dany pulled the lion pelt tighter about her shoulders. “Viserys
said once that it was my fault, for being born too late.” She had
denied it hotly, she remembered, going so far as to tell Viserys that
it was his fault for not being born a girl. He beat her cruelly for that
insolence. “If I had been born more timely, he said, Rhaegar would
have married me instead of Elia, and it would all have come out
di erent. If Rhaegar had been happy in his wife, he would not have
needed the Stark girl.”
“Perhaps so, Your Grace.” Whitebeard paused a moment. “But I
am not certain it was in Rhaegar to be happy.”
“You make him sound so sour,” Dany protested.
“Not sour, no, but … there was a melancholy to Prince Rhaegar, a
sense …” The old man hesitated again.
“Say it,” she urged. “A sense …?”
“… of doom. He was born in grief, my queen, and that shadow
hung over him all his days.”
Viserys had spoken of Rhaegar’s birth only once. Perhaps the tale
saddened him too much. “It was the shadow of Summerhall that
haunted him, was it not?”
“Yes. And yet Summerhall was the place the prince loved best. He
would go there from time to time, with only his harp for company.
Even the knights of the Kingsguard did not attend him there. He
liked to sleep in the ruined hall, beneath the moon and stars, and
whenever he came back he would bring a song. When you heard
him play his high harp with the silver strings and sing of twilights
and tears and the death of kings, you could not but feel that he was
singing of himself and those he loved.”
“What of the Usurper? Did he play sad songs as well?”

Arstan chuckled. “Robert? Robert liked songs that made him
laugh, the bawdier the better. He only sang when he was drunk,
and then it was like to be ‘A Cask of Ale’ or ‘Fifty-Four Tuns’ or ‘The
Bear and the Maiden Fair.’ Robert was much—”
As one, her dragons lifted their heads and roared.
“Horses!” Dany leapt to her feet, clutching the lion pelt. Outside,
she heard Strong Belwas bellow something, and then other voices,
and the sounds of many horses. “Irri, go see who …”
The tent ap pushed open, and Ser Jorah Mormont entered. He
was dusty, and spattered with blood, but otherwise none the worse
for battle. The exile knight went to one knee before Dany and said,
“Your Grace, I bring you victory. The Stormcrows turned their
cloaks, the slaves broke, and the Second Sons were too drunk to
ght, just as you said. Two hundred dead, Yunkai’i for the most
part. Their slaves threw down their spears and ran, and their
sellswords yielded. We have several thousand captives.”
“Our own losses?”
“A dozen. If that many.”
Only then did she allow herself to smile. “Rise, my good brave
bear. Was Grazdan taken? Or the Titan’s Bastard?”
“Grazdan went to Yunkai to deliver your terms.” Ser Jorah got to
his feet. “Mero ed, once he realized the Stormcrows had turned. I
have men hunting him. He shouldn’t escape us long.”
“Very well,” Dany said. “Sellsword or slave, spare all those who
will pledge me their faith. If enough of the Second Sons will join us,
keep the company intact.”
The next day they marched the last three leagues to Yunkai. The
city was built of yellow bricks instead of red; elsewise it was
Astapor all over again, with the same crumbling walls and high
stepped pyramids, and a great harpy mounted above its gates. The
wall and towers swarmed with crossbowmen and slingers. Ser Jorah
and Grey Worm deployed her men, Irri and Jhiqui raised her
pavilion, and Dany sat down to wait.
On the morning of the third day, the city gates swung open and a
line of slaves began to emerge. Dany mounted her silver to greet
them. As they passed, little Missandei told them that they owed

their freedom to Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Queen of the
Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and Mother of Dragons.
“Mhysa!” a brown-skinned man shouted out at her. He had a child
on his shoulder, a little girl, and she screamed the same word in her
thin voice. “Mhysa! Mhysa!”
Dany looked at Missandei. “What are they shouting?”
“It is Ghiscari, the old pure tongue. It means ‘Mother.’ ”
Dany felt a lightness in her chest. I will never bear a living child, she
remembered. Her hand trembled as she raised it. Perhaps she
smiled. She must have, because the man grinned and shouted again,
and others took up the cry. “Mhysa!” they called. “Mhysa! MHYSA!”
They were all smiling at her, reaching for her, kneeling before her.
“Maela,” some called her, while others cried “Aelalla” or “Qathei” or
“Tato,” but whatever the tongue it all meant the same thing. Mother.
They are calling me Mother.
The chant grew, spread, swelled. It swelled so loud that it
frightened her horse, and the mare backed and shook her head and
lashed her silver-grey tail. It swelled until it seemed to shake the
yellow walls of Yunkai. More slaves were streaming from the gates
every moment, and as they came they took up the call. They were
running toward her now, pushing, stumbling, wanting to touch her
hand, to stroke her horse’s mane, to kiss her feet. Her poor
bloodriders could not keep them all away, and even Strong Belwas
grunted and growled in dismay.
Ser Jorah urged her to go, but Dany remembered a dream she had
dreamed in the House of the Undying. “They will not hurt me,” she
told him. “They are my children, Jorah.” She laughed, put her heels
into her horse, and rode to them, the bells in her hair ringing sweet
victory. She trotted, then cantered, then broke into a gallop, her
braid streaming behind. The freed slaves parted before her.
“Mother,” they called from a hundred throats, a thousand, ten
thousand. “Mother,” they sang, their ngers brushing her legs as
she ew by. “Mother, Mother, Mother!”

ARYA

When Arya saw the shape of a great hill looming in the distance,

golden in the afternoon sun, she knew it at once. They had come all
the way back to High Heart.
By sunset they were at the top, making camp where no harm
could come to them. Arya walked around the circle of weirwood
stumps with Lord Beric’s squire Ned, and they stood on top of one
watching the last light fade in the west. From up here she could see
a storm raging to the north, but High Heart stood above the rain. It
wasn’t above the wind, though; the gusts were blowing so strongly
that it felt like someone was behind her, yanking on her cloak. Only
when she turned, no one was there.
Ghosts, she remembered. High Heart is haunted.
They built a great re atop the hill, and Thoros of Myr sat
crosslegged beside it, gazing deep into the ames as if there was
nothing else in all the world.
“What is he doing?” Arya asked Ned.
“Sometimes he sees things in the ames,” the squire told her.
“The past. The future. Things happening far away.”
Arya squinted at the re to see if she could see what the red
priest was seeing, but it only made her eyes water and before long
she turned away. Gendry was watching the red priest as well. “Can
you truly see the future there?” he asked suddenly.
Thoros turned from the re, sighing. “Not here. Not now. But
some days, yes, the Lord of Light grants me visions.”

Gendry looked dubious. “My master said you were a sot and a
fraud, as bad a priest as there ever was.”
“That was unkind.” Thoros chuckled. “True, but unkind. Who was
this master of yours? Did I know you, boy?”
“I was ’prenticed to the master armorer Tobho Mott, on the Street
of Steel. You used to buy your swords from him.”
“Just so. He charged me twice what they were worth, then
scolded me for setting them a re.” Thoros laughed. “Your master
had it right. I was no very holy priest. I was born youngest of eight,
so my father gave me over to the Red Temple, but it was not the
path I would have chosen. I prayed the prayers and I spoke the
spells, but I would also lead raids on the kitchens, and from time to
time they found girls in my bed. Such wicked girls, I never knew
how they got there.
“I had a gift for tongues, though. And when I gazed into the
ames, well, from time to time I saw things. Even so, I was more
bother than I was worth, so they sent me nally to King’s Landing
to bring the Lord’s light to seven-besotted Westeros. King Aerys so
loved re it was thought he might make a convert. Alas, his
pyromancers knew better tricks than I did.
“King Robert was fond of me, though. The rst time I rode into a
mêlée with a aming sword, Kevan Lannister’s horse reared and
threw him and His Grace laughed so hard I thought he might
rupture.” The red priest smiled at the memory. “It was no way to
treat a blade, though, your master had the right of that too.”
“Fire consumes.” Lord Beric stood behind them, and there was
something in his voice that silenced Thoros at once. “It consumes,
and when it is done there is nothing left. Nothing.”
“Beric. Sweet friend.” The priest touched the lightning lord on the
forearm. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing I have not said before. Six times, Thoros? Six times is
too many.” He turned away abruptly.
That night the wind was howling almost like a wolf and there
were some real wolves o to the west giving it lessons. Notch,
Anguy, and Merrit o’ Moontown had the watch. Ned, Gendry, and
many of the others were fast asleep when Arya spied the small pale

shape creeping behind the horses, thin white hair ying wild as she
leaned upon a gnarled cane. The woman could not have been more
than three feet tall. The relight made her eyes gleam as red as the
eyes of Jon’s wolf. He was a ghost too. Arya stole closer, and knelt to
watch.
Thoros and Lem were with Lord Beric when the dwarf woman sat
down uninvited by the re. She squinted at them with eyes like hot
coals. “The Ember and the Lemon come to honor me again, and His
Grace the Lord of Corpses.”
“An ill-omened name. I have asked you not to use it.”
“Aye, you have. But the stink of death is fresh on you, my lord.”
She had but a single tooth remaining. “Give me wine or I will go.
My bones are old. My joints ache when the winds do blow, and up
here the winds are always blowing.”
“A silver stag for your dreams, my lady,” Lord Beric said, with
solemn courtesy. “Another if you have news for us.”
“I cannot eat a silver stag, nor ride one. A skin of wine for my
dreams, and for my news a kiss from the great oaf in the yellow
cloak.” The little woman cackled. “Aye, a sloppy kiss, a bit of
tongue. It has been too long, too long. His mouth will taste of
lemons, and mine of bones. I am too old.”
“Aye,” Lem complained. “Too old for wine and kisses. All you’ll
get from me is the at of my sword, crone.”
“My hair comes out in handfuls and no one has kissed me for a
thousand years. It is hard to be so old. Well, I will have a song then.
A song from Tom o’ Sevens, for my news.”
“You will have your song from Tom,” Lord Beric promised. He
gave her the wineskin himself.
The dwarf woman drank deep, the wine running down her chin.
When she lowered the skin, she wiped her mouth with the back of a
wrinkled hand and said, “Sour wine for sour tidings, what could be
more tting? The king is dead, is that sour enough for you?”
Arya’s heart caught in her throat.
“Which bloody king is dead, crone?” Lem demanded.
“The wet one. The kraken king, m’lords. I dreamt him dead and
he died, and the iron squids now turn on one another. Oh, and Lord

Hoster Tully’s died too, but you know that, don’t you? In the hall of
kings, the goat sits alone and fevered as the great dog descends on
him.” The old woman took another long gulp of wine, squeezing the
skin as she raised it to her lips.
The great dog. Did she mean the Hound? Or maybe his brother,
the Mountain That Rides? Arya was not certain. They bore the same
arms, three black dogs on a yellow eld. Half the men whose deaths
she prayed for belonged to Ser Gregor Clegane; Polliver, Dunsen,
Ra the Sweetling, the Tickler, and Ser Gregor himself. Maybe Lord
Beric will hang them all.
“I dreamt a wolf howling in the rain, but no one heard his grief,”
the dwarf woman was saying. “I dreamt such a clangor I thought
my head might burst, drums and horns and pipes and screams, but
the saddest sound was the little bells. I dreamt of a maid at a feast
with purple serpents in her hair, venom dripping from their fangs.
And later I dreamt that maid again, slaying a savage giant in a
castle built of snow.” She turned her head sharply and smiled
through the gloom, right at Arya. “You cannot hide from me, child.
Come closer, now.”
Cold ngers walked down Arya’s neck. Fear cuts deeper than
swords, she reminded herself. She stood and approached the re
warily, light on the balls of her feet, poised to ee.
The dwarf woman studied her with dim red eyes. “I see you,” she
whispered. “I see you, wolf child. Blood child. I thought it was the
lord who smelled of death …” She began to sob, her little body
shaking. “You are cruel to come to my hill, cruel. I gorged on grief
at Summerhall, I need none of yours. Begone from here, dark heart.
Begone!”
There was such fear in her voice that Arya took a step backward,
wondering if the woman was mad. “Don’t frighten the child,”
Thoros protested. “There’s no harm in her.”
Lem Lemoncloak’s nger went to his broken nose. “Don’t be so
bloody sure of that.”
“She will leave on the morrow, with us,” Lord Beric assured the
little woman. “We’re taking her to Riverrun, to her mother.”

“Nay,” said the dwarf. “You’re not. The black sh holds the rivers
now. If it’s the mother you want, seek her at the Twins. For there’s
to be a wedding.” She cackled again. “Look in your res, pink priest,
and you will see. Not now, though, not here, you’ll see nothing
here. This place belongs to the old gods still … they linger here as I
do, shrunken and feeble but not yet dead. Nor do they love the
ames. For the oak recalls the acorn, the acorn dreams the oak, the
stump lives in them both. And they remember when the First Men
came with re in their sts.” She drank the last of the wine in four
long swallows, ung the skin aside, and pointed her stick at Lord
Beric. “I’ll have my payment now. I’ll have the song you promised
me.”
And so Lem woke Tom Sevenstrings beneath his furs, and brought
him yawning to the reside with his woodharp in hand. “The same
song as before?” he asked.
“Oh, aye. My Jenny’s song. Is there another?”
And so he sang, and the dwarf woman closed her eyes and rocked
slowly back and forth, murmuring the words and crying. Thoros
took Arya rmly by the hand and drew her aside. “Let her savor her
song in peace,” he said. “It is all she has left.”
I wasn’t going to hurt her, Arya thought. “What did she mean about
the Twins? My mother’s at Riverrun, isn’t she?”
“She was.” The red priest rubbed beneath his chin. “A wedding,
she said. We shall see. Wherever she is, Lord Beric will nd her,
though.”
Not long after, the sky opened. Lightning cracked and thunder
rolled across the hills, and the rain fell in blinding sheets. The dwarf
woman vanished as suddenly as she had appeared, while the
outlaws gathered branches and threw up crude shelters.
It rained all through that night, and come morning Ned, Lem, and
Watty the Miller awoke with chills. Watty could not keep his
breakfast down, and young Ned was feverish and shivering by
turns, with skin clammy to the touch. There was an abandoned
village half a day’s ride to the north, Notch told Lord Beric; they’d
nd better shelter there, a place to wait out the worst of the rains.

So they dragged themselves back into the saddles and urged their
horses down the great hill.
The rains did not let up. They rode through woods and elds,
fording swollen streams where the rushing water came up to the
bellies of their horses. Arya pulled up the hood of her cloak and
hunched down, sodden and shivering but determined not to falter.
Merrit and Mudge were soon coughing as bad as Watty, and poor
Ned seemed to grow more miserable with every mile. “When I wear
my helm, the rain beats against the steel and gives me headaches,”
he complained. “But when I take it o , my hair gets soaked and
sticks to my face and in my mouth.”
“You have a knife,” Gendry suggested. “If your hair annoys you
so much, shave your bloody head.”
He doesn’t like Ned. The squire seemed nice enough to Arya;
maybe a little shy, but good-natured. She had always heard that
Dornishmen were small and swarthy, with black hair and small
black eyes, but Ned had big blue eyes, so dark that they looked
almost purple. And his hair was a pale blond, more ash than honey.
“How long have you been Lord Beric’s squire?” she asked, to take
his mind from his misery.
“He took me for his page when he espoused my aunt.” He
coughed. “I was seven, but when I turned ten he raised me to
squire. I won a prize once, riding at rings.”
“I never learned the lance, but I could beat you with a sword,”
said Arya. “Have you killed anyone?”
That seemed to startle him. “I’m only twelve.”
I killed a boy when I was eight, Arya almost said, but she thought
she’d better not. “You’ve been in battles, though.”
“Yes.” He did not sound very proud of it. “I was at the Mummer’s
Ford. When Lord Beric fell into the river, I dragged him up onto the
bank so he wouldn’t drown and stood over him with my sword. I
never had to ght, though. He had a broken lance sticking out of
him, so no one bothered us. When we regrouped, Green Gergen
helped pull his lordship back onto a horse.”
Arya was remembering the stableboy at King’s Landing. After him
there’d been that guard whose throat she cut at Harrenhal, and Ser

Amory’s men at that holdfast by the lake. She didn’t know if Weese
and Chiswyck counted, or the ones who’d died on account of the
weasel soup … all of a sudden, she felt very sad. “My father was
called Ned too,” she said.
“I know. I saw him at the Hand’s tourney. I wanted to go up and
speak with him, but I couldn’t think what to say.” Ned shivered
beneath his cloak, a sodden length of pale purple. “Were you at the
tourney? I saw your sister there. Ser Loras Tyrell gave her a rose.”
“She told me.” It all seemed so long ago. “Her friend Jeyne Poole
fell in love with your Lord Beric.”
“He’s promised to my aunt.” Ned looked uncomfortable. “That
was before, though. Before he …”
… died? she thought, as Ned’s voice trailed o into an awkward
silence. Their horses’ hooves made sucking sounds as they pulled
free of the mud.
“My lady?” Ned said at last. “You have a baseborn brother … Jon
Snow?”
“He’s with the Night’s Watch on the Wall.” Maybe I should go to
the Wall instead of Riverrun. Jon wouldn’t care who I killed or whether I
brushed my hair … “Jon looks like me, even though he’s bastardborn. He used to muss my hair and call me ‘little sister.’ ” Arya
missed Jon most of all. Just saying his name made her sad. “How do
you know about Jon?”
“He is my milk brother.”
“Brother?” Arya did not understand. “But you’re from Dorne.
How could you and Jon be blood?”
“Milk brothers. Not blood. My lady mother had no milk when I
was little, so Wylla had to nurse me.”
Arya was lost. “Who’s Wylla?”
“Jon Snow’s mother. He never told you? She’s served us for years
and years. Since before I was born.”
“Jon never knew his mother. Not even her name.” Arya gave Ned
a wary look. “You know her? Truly?” Is he making mock of me? “If
you lie I’ll punch your face.”
“Wylla was my wetnurse,” he repeated solemnly. “I swear it on
the honor of my House.”

“You have a House?” That was stupid; he was a squire, of course
he had a House. “Who are you?”
“My lady?” Ned looked embarrassed. “I’m Edric Dayne, the … the
Lord of Starfall.”
Behind them, Gendry groaned. “Lords and ladies,” he proclaimed
in a disgusted tone. Arya plucked a withered crabapple o a passing
branch and whipped it at him, bouncing it o his thick bull head.
“Ow,” he said. “That hurt.” He felt the skin above his eye. “What
kind of lady throws crabapples at people?”
“The bad kind,” said Arya, suddenly contrite. She turned back to
Ned. “I’m sorry I didn’t know who you were. My lord.”
“The fault is mine, my lady.” He was very polite.
Jon has a mother. Wylla, her name is Wylla. She would need to
remember so she could tell him, the next time she saw him. She
wondered if he would still call her “little sister.” I’m not so little
anymore. He’d have to call me something else. Maybe once she got to
Riverrun she could write Jon a letter and tell him what Ned Dayne
had said. “There was an Arthur Dayne,” she remembered. “The one
they called the Sword of the Morning.”
“My father was Ser Arthur’s elder brother. Lady Ashara was my
aunt. I never knew her, though. She threw herself into the sea from
atop the Palestone Sword before I was born.”
“Why would she do that?” said Arya, startled.
Ned looked wary. Maybe he was afraid that she was going to
throw something at him. “Your lord father never spoke of her?” he
said. “The Lady Ashara Dayne, of Starfall?”
“No. Did he know her?”
“Before Robert was king. She met your father and his brothers at
Harrenhal, during the year of the false spring.”
“Oh.” Arya did not know what else to say. “Why did she jump in
the sea, though?”
“Her heart was broken.”
Sansa would have sighed and shed a tear for true love, but Arya
just thought it was stupid. She couldn’t say that to Ned, though, not
about his own aunt. “Did someone break it?”
He hesitated. “Perhaps it’s not my place …”

“Tell me.”
He looked at her uncomfortably. “My aunt Allyria says Lady
Ashara and your father fell in love at Harrenhal—”
“That’s not so. He loved my lady mother.”
“I’m sure he did, my lady, but—”
“She was the only one he loved.”
“He must have found that bastard under a cabbage leaf, then,”
Gendry said behind them.
Arya wished she had another crabapple to bounce o his face.
“My father had honor,” she said angrily. “And we weren’t talking to
you anyway. Why don’t you go back to Stoney Sept and ring that
girl’s stupid bells?”
Gendry ignored that. “At least your father raised his bastard, not
like mine. I don’t even know my father’s name. Some smelly drunk,
I’d wager, like the others my mother dragged home from the
alehouse. Whenever she got mad at me, she’d say, ‘If your father
was here, he’d beat you bloody.’ That’s all I know of him.” He spat.
“Well, if he was here now, might be I’d beat him bloody. But he’s
dead, I gure, and your father’s dead too, so what does it matter
who he lay with?”
It mattered to Arya, though she could not have said why. Ned was
trying to apologize for upsetting her, but she did not want to hear
it. She pressed her heels into her horse and left them both. Anguy
the Archer was riding a few yards ahead. When she caught up with
him, she said, “Dornishmen lie, don’t they?”
“They’re famous for it.” The bowman grinned. “Of course, they
say the same of us marchers, so there you are. What’s the trouble
now? Ned’s a good lad …”
“He’s just a stupid liar.” Arya left the trail, leapt a rotten log and
splashed across a streambed, ignoring the shouts of the outlaws
behind her. They just want to tell me more lies. She thought about
trying to get away from them, but there were too many and they
knew these lands too well. What was the use of running if they
caught you?
It was Harwin who rode up beside her, in the end. “Where do you
think you’re going, milady? You shouldn’t run o . There are wolves

in these woods, and worse things.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “That boy Ned said …”
“Aye, he told me. Lady Ashara Dayne. It’s an old tale, that one. I
heard it once at Winterfell, when I was no older than you are now.”
He took hold of her bridle rmly and turned her horse around. “I
doubt there’s any truth to it. But if there is, what of it? When Ned
met this Dornish lady, his brother Brandon was still alive, and it
was him betrothed to Lady Catelyn, so there’s no stain on your
father’s honor. There’s nought like a tourney to make the blood run
hot, so maybe some words were whispered in a tent of a night, who
can say? Words or kisses, maybe more, but where’s the harm in
that? Spring had come, or so they thought, and neither one of them
was pledged.”
“She killed herself, though,” said Arya uncertainly. “Ned says she
jumped from a tower into the sea.”
“So she did,” Harwin admitted, as he led her back, “but that was
for grief, I’d wager. She’d lost a brother, the Sword of the
Morning.” He shook his head. “Let it lie, my lady. They’re dead, all
of them. Let it lie … and please, when we come to Riverrun, say
naught of this to your mother.”
The village was just where Notch had promised it would be. They
took shelter in a grey stone stable. Only half a roof remained, but
that was half a roof more than any other building in the village. It’s
not a village, it’s only black stones and old bones. “Did the Lannisters
kill the people who lived here?” Arya asked as she helped Anguy
dry the horses.
“No.” He pointed. “Look at how thick the moss grows on the
stones. No one’s moved them for a long time. And there’s a tree
growing out of the wall there, see? This place was put to the torch a
long time ago.”
“Who did it, then?” asked Gendry.
“Hoster Tully.” Notch was a stooped thin grey-haired man, born
in these parts. “This was Lord Goodbrook’s village. When Riverrun
declared for Robert, Goodbrook stayed loyal to the king, so Lord
Tully came down on him with re and sword. After the Trident,

Goodbrook’s son made his peace with Robert and Lord Hoster, but
that didn’t help the dead none.”
A silence fell. Gendry gave Arya a queer look, then turned away
to brush his horse. Outside the rain came down and down. “I say we
need a re,” Thoros declared. “The night is dark and full of terrors.
And wet too, eh? Too very wet.”
Jack-Be-Lucky hacked some dry wood from a stall, while Notch
and Merrit gathered straw for kindling. Thoros himself struck the
spark, and Lem fanned the ames with his big yellow cloak until
they roared and swirled. Soon it grew almost hot inside the stable.
Thoros sat before it crosslegged, devouring the ames with his eyes
just as he had atop High Heart. Arya watched him closely, and once
his lips moved, and she thought she heard him mutter, “Riverrun.”
Lem paced back and forth, coughing, a long shadow matching him
stride for stride, while Tom o’ Sevens pulled o his boots and
rubbed his feet. “I must be mad, to be going back to Riverrun,” the
singer complained. “The Tullys have never been lucky for old Tom.
It was that Lysa sent me up the high road, when the moon men took
my gold and my horse and all my clothes as well. There’s knights in
the Vale still telling how I came walking up to the Bloody Gate with
only my harp to keep me modest. They made me sing ‘The Name
Day Boy’ and ‘The King Without Courage’ before they opened that
gate. My only solace was that three of them died laughing. I haven’t
been back to the Eyrie since, and I won’t sing ‘The King Without
Courage’ either, not for all the gold in Casterly—”
“Lannisters,” Thoros said. “Roaring red and gold.” He lurched to
his feet and went to Lord Beric. Lem and Tom wasted no time
joining them. Arya could not make out what they were saying, but
the singer kept glancing at her, and one time Lem got so angry he
pounded a st against the wall. That was when Lord Beric gestured
for her to come closer. It was the last thing she wanted to do, but
Harwin put a hand in the small of her back and pushed her forward.
She took two steps and hesitated, full of dread. “My lord.” She
waited to hear what Lord Beric would say.
“Tell her,” the lightning lord commanded Thoros.

The red priest squatted down beside her. “My lady,” he said, “the
Lord granted me a view of Riverrun. An island in a sea of re, it
seemed. The ames were leaping lions with long crimson claws.
And how they roared! A sea of Lannisters, my lady. Riverrun will
soon come under attack.”
Arya felt as though he’d punched her in the belly. “No!”
“Sweetling,” said Thoros, “the ames do not lie. Sometimes I read
them wrongly, blind fool that I am. But not this time, I think. The
Lannisters will soon have Riverrun under siege.”
“Robb will beat them.” Arya got a stubborn look. “He’ll beat
them like he did before.”
“Your brother may be gone,” said Thoros. “Your mother as well. I
did not see them in the ames. This wedding the old one spoke of, a
wedding on the Twins … she has her own ways of knowing things,
that one. The weirwoods whisper in her ear when she sleeps. If she
says your mother is gone to the Twins …”
Arya turned on Tom and Lem. “If you hadn’t caught me, I would
have been there. I would have been home.”
Lord Beric paid no heed to her outburst. “My lady,” he said with
weary courtesy, “would you know your grandfather’s brother by
sight? Ser Brynden Tully, called the Black sh? Would he know you,
perchance?”
Arya shook her head miserably. She had heard her mother speak
of Ser Brynden Black sh, but if she had ever met him herself it had
been when she was too little to remember.
“Small chance the Black sh will pay good coin for a girl he
doesn’t know,” said Tom. “Those Tullys are a sour, suspicious lot,
he’s like to think we’re selling him false goods.”
“We’ll convince him,” Lem Lemoncloak insisted. “She will, or
Harwin. Riverrun is closest. I say we take her there, get the gold,
and be bloody well done with her.”
“And if the lions catch us inside the castle?” said Tom. “They’d
like nothing better than to hang his lordship in a cage from the top
of Casterly Rock.”
“I do not mean to be taken,” said Lord Beric. A nal word hung
unspoken in the air. Alive. They all heard it, even Arya, though it

never passed his lips. “Still, we dare not go blindly here. I want to
know where the armies are, the wolves and lions both. Sharna will
know something, and Lord Vance’s maester will know more. Acorn
Hall’s not far. Lady Smallwood will shelter us for a time while we
send scouts ahead to learn …”
His words beat at her ears like the pounding of a drum, and
suddenly it was more than Arya could stand. She wanted Riverrun,
not Acorn Hall; she wanted her mother and her brother Robb, not
Lady Smallwood or some uncle she never knew. Whirling, she broke
for the door, and when Harwin tried to grab her arm she spun away
from him quick as a snake.
Outside the stables the rain was still falling, and distant lightning
ashed in the west. Arya ran as fast as she could. She did not know
where she was going, only that she wanted to be alone, away from
all the voices, away from their hollow words and broken promises.
All I wanted was to go to Riverrun. It was her own fault, for taking
Gendry and Hot Pie with her when she left Harrenhal. She would
have been better alone. If she had been alone, the outlaws would
never have caught her, and she’d be with Robb and her mother by
now. They were never my pack. If they had been, they wouldn’t leave
me. She splashed through a puddle of muddy water. Someone was
shouting her name, Harwin probably, or Gendry, but the thunder
drowned them out as it rolled across the hills, half a heartbeat
behind the lightning. The lightning lord, she thought angrily. Maybe
he couldn’t die, but he could lie.
Somewhere o to her left a horse whinnied. Arya couldn’t have
gone more than fty yards from the stables, yet already she was
soaked to the bone. She ducked around the corner of one of the
tumbledown houses, hoping the mossy walls would keep the rain
o , and almost bowled right into one of the sentries. A mailed hand
closed hard around her arm.
“You’re hurting me,” she said, twisting in his grasp. “Let go, I was
going to go back, I …”
“Back?” Sandor Clegane’s laughter was iron scraping over stone.
“Bugger that, wolf girl. You’re mine.” He needed only one hand to
yank her o her feet and drag her kicking toward his waiting horse.

The cold rain lashed them both and washed away her shouts, and all
that Arya could think of was the question he had asked her. Do you
know what dogs do to wolves?

JAIME

Though his fever lingered stubbornly, the stump was healing clean,

and Qyburn said his arm was no longer in danger. Jaime was
anxious to be gone, to put Harrenhal, the Bloody Mummers, and
Brienne of Tarth all behind him. A real woman waited for him in
the Red Keep.
“I am sending Qyburn with you, to look after you on the way to
King’s Landing,” Roose Bolton said on the morn of their departure.
“He has a fond hope that your father will force the Citadel to give
him back his chain, in gratitude.”
“We all have fond hopes. If he grows me back a hand, my father
will make him Grand Maester.”
Steelshanks Walton commanded Jaime’s escort; blunt, brusque,
brutal, at heart a simple soldier. Jaime had served with his sort all
his life. Men like Walton would kill at their lord’s command, rape
when their blood was up after battle, and plunder wherever they
could, but once the war was done they would go back to their
homes, trade their spears for hoes, wed their neighbors’ daughters,
and raise a pack of squalling children. Such men obeyed without
question, but the deep malignant cruelty of the Brave Companions
was not a part of their nature.
Both parties left Harrenhal the same morning, beneath a cold
grey sky that promised rain. Ser Aenys Frey had marched three days
before, striking northeast for the kingsroad. Bolton meant to follow
him. “The Trident is in ood,” he told Jaime. “Even at the ruby

ford, the crossing will be di cult. You will give my warm regards
to your father?”
“So long as you give mine to Robb Stark.”
“That I shall.”
Some Brave Companions had gathered in the yard to watch them
leave. Jaime trotted over to where they stood. “Zollo. How kind of
you to see me o . Pyg. Timeon. Will you miss me? No last jest to
share, Shagwell? To lighten my way down the road? And Rorge, did
you come to kiss me goodbye?”
“Bugger o , cripple,” said Rorge.
“If you insist. Rest assured, though, I will be back. A Lannister
always pays his debts.” Jaime wheeled his horse around and
rejoined Steelshanks Walton and his two hundred.
Lord Bolton had accoutred him as a knight, preferring to ignore
the missing hand that made such warlike garb a travesty. Jaime
rode with sword and dagger on his belt, shield and helm hung from
his saddle, chainmail under a dark brown surcoat. He was not such a
fool as to show the lion of Lannister on his arms, though, nor the
plain white blazon that was his right as a Sworn Brother of the
Kingsguard. He found an old shield in the armory, battered and
splintered, the chipped paint still showing most of the great black
bat of House Lothston upon a eld of silver and gold. The Lothstons
held Harrenhal before the Whents and had been a powerful family
in their day, but they had died out ages ago, so no one was likely to
object to him bearing their arms. He would be no one’s cousin, no
one’s enemy, no one’s sworn sword … in sum, no one.
They left through Harrenhal’s smaller eastern gate, and took their
leave of Roose Bolton and his host six miles farther on, turning
south to follow along the lake road for a time. Walton meant to
avoid the kingsroad as long as he could, preferring the farmer’s
tracks and game trails near the Gods Eye.
“The kingsroad would be faster.” Jaime was anxious to return to
Cersei as quickly as he could. If they made haste, he might even
arrive in time for Jo rey’s wedding.
“I want no trouble,” said Steelshanks. “Gods know who we’d meet
along that kingsroad.”

“No one you need fear, surely? You have two hundred men.”
“Aye. But others might have more. M’lord said to bring you safe
to your lord father, and that’s what I mean to do.”
I have come this way before, Jaime re ected a few miles further on,
when they passed a deserted mill beside the lake. Weeds now grew
where once the miller’s daughter had smiled shyly at him, and the
miller himself had shouted out, “The tourney’s back the other way,
ser.” As if I had not known.
King Aerys made a great show of Jaime’s investiture. He said his
vows before the king’s pavilion, kneeling on the green grass in
white armor while half the realm looked on. When Ser Gerold
Hightower raised him up and put the white cloak about his
shoulders, a roar went up that Jaime still remembered, all these
years later. But that very night Aerys had turned sour, declaring
that he had no need of seven Kingsguard here at Harrenhal. Jaime
was commanded to return to King’s Landing to guard the queen and
little Prince Viserys, who’d remained behind. Even when the White
Bull o ered to take that duty himself, so Jaime might compete in
Lord Whent’s tourney, Aerys had refused. “He’ll win no glory here,”
the king had said. “He’s mine now, not Tywin’s. He’ll serve as I see
t. I am the king. I rule, and he’ll obey.”
That was the rst time that Jaime understood. It was not his skill
with sword and lance that had won him his white cloak, nor any
feats of valor he’d performed against the Kingswood Brotherhood.
Aerys had chosen him to spite his father, to rob Lord Tywin of his
heir.
Even now, all these years later, the thought was bitter. And that
day, as he’d ridden south in his new white cloak to guard an empty
castle, it had been almost too much to stomach. He would have
ripped the cloak o then and there if he could have, but it was too
late. He had said the words whilst half the realm looked on, and a
Kingsguard served for life.
Qyburn fell in beside him. “Is your hand troubling you?”
“The lack of my hand is troubling me.” The mornings were the
hardest. In his dreams Jaime was a whole man, and each dawn he
would lie half-awake and feel his ngers move. It was a nightmare,

some part of him would whisper, refusing to believe even now, only
a nightmare. But then he would open his eyes.
“I understand you had a visitor last night,” said Qyburn. “I trust
that you enjoyed her?”
Jaime gave him a cool look. “She did not say who sent her.”
The maester smiled modestly. “Your fever was largely gone, and I
thought you might enjoy a bit of exercise. Pia is quite skilled, would
you not agree? And so … willing.”
She had been that, certainly. She had slipped in his door and out
of her clothes so quickly that Jaime had thought he was still
dreaming.
It hadn’t been until the woman slid in under his blankets and put
his good hand on her breast that he roused. She was a pretty little
thing, too. “I was a slip of a girl when you came for Lord Whent’s
tourney and the king gave you your cloak,” she confessed. “You
were so handsome all in white, and everyone said what a brave
knight you were. Sometimes when I’m with some man, I close my
eyes and pretend it’s you on top of me, with your smooth skin and
gold curls. I never truly thought I’d have you, though.”
Sending her away had not been easy after that, but Jaime had
done it all the same. I have a woman, he reminded himself. “Do you
send girls to everyone you leech?” he asked Qyburn.
“More often Lord Vargo sends them to me. He likes me to
examine them, before … well, su ce it to say that once he loved
unwisely, and he has no wish to do so again. But have no fear, Pia is
quite healthy. As is your maid of Tarth.”
Jaime gave him a sharp look. “Brienne?”
“Yes. A strong girl, that one. And her maidenhead is still intact.
As of last night, at least.” Qyburn gave a chuckle.
“He sent you to examine her?”
“To be sure. He is … fastidious, shall we say?”
“Does this concern the ransom?” Jaime asked. “Does her father
require proof she is still maiden?”
“You have not heard?” Qyburn gave a shrug. “We had a bird from
Lord Selwyn. In answer to mine. The Evenstar o ers three hundred
dragons for his daughter’s safe return. I had told Lord Vargo there

were no sapphires on Tarth, but he will not listen. He is convinced
the Evenstar intends to cheat him.”
“Three hundred dragons is a fair ransom for a knight. The goat
should take what he can get.”
“The goat is Lord of Harrenhal, and the Lord of Harrenhal does
not haggle.”
The news irritated him, though he supposed he should have seen
it coming. The lie spared you awhile, wench. Be grateful for that much.
“If her maidenhead’s as hard as the rest of her, the goat will break
his cock o trying to get in,” he jested. Brienne was tough enough
to survive a few rapes, Jaime judged, though if she resisted too
vigorously Vargo Hoat might start lopping o her hands and feet.
And if he does, why should I care? I might still have a hand if she had let
me have my cousin’s sword without getting stupid. He had almost taken
o her leg himself with that rst stroke of his, but after that she
had given him more than he wanted. Hoat may not know how
freakish strong she is. He had best be careful, or she’ll snap that skinny
neck of his, and wouldn’t that be sweet?
Qyburn’s companionship was wearing on him. Jaime trotted
toward the head of the column. A round little tick of a northman
name of Nage went before Steelshanks with the peace banner; a
rainbow-striped ag with seven long tails, on a sta topped by a
seven-pointed star. “Shouldn’t you northmen have a di erent sort of
peace banner?” he asked Walton. “What are the Seven to you?”
“Southern gods,” the man said, “but it’s a southron peace we
need, to get you safe to your father.”
My father. Jaime wondered whether Lord Tywin had received the
goat’s demand for ransom, with or without his rotted hand. What is
a swordsman worth without his sword hand? Half the gold in Casterly
Rock? Three hundred dragons? Or nothing? His father had never been
unduly swayed by sentiment. Tywin Lannister’s own father Lord
Tytos had once imprisoned an unruly bannerman, Lord Tarbeck. The
redoubtable Lady Tarbeck responded by capturing three Lannisters,
including young Sta ord, whose sister was betrothed to cousin
Tywin. “Send back my lord and love, or these three shall answer for
any harm that comes him,” she had written to Casterly Rock. Young

Tywin suggested his father oblige by sending back Lord Tarbeck in
three pieces. Lord Tytos was a gentler sort of lion, however, so
Lady Tarbeck won a few more years for her muttonheaded lord, and
Sta ord wed and bred and blundered on till Oxcross. But Tywin
Lannister endured, eternal as Casterly Rock. And now you have a
cripple for a son as well as a dwarf, my lord. How you will hate that …
The road led them through a burned village. It must have been a
year or more since the place had been put to torch. The hovels
stood blackened and roo ess, but weeds were growing waist high in
all the surrounding elds. Steelshanks called a halt to allow them to
water the horses. I know this place too, Jaime thought as he waited
by the well. There had been a small inn where only a few
foundation stones and a chimney now stood, and he had gone in for
a cup of ale. A dark-eyed serving wench brought him cheese and
apples, but the innkeep had refused his coin. “It’s an honor to have
a knight of the Kingsguard under my roof, ser,” the man had said.
“It’s a tale I’ll tell my grandchildren.” Jaime looked at the chimney
poking out of the weeds and wondered whether he had ever gotten
those grandchildren. Did he tell them the Kingslayer once drank his ale
and ate his cheese and apples, or was he ashamed to admit he fed the
likes of me? Not that he would ever know; whoever burned the inn
had likely killed the grandchildren as well.
He could feel his phantom ngers clench. When Steelshanks said
that perhaps they should have a re and a bit of food, Jaime shook
his head. “I mislike this place. We’ll ride on.”
By evenfall they had left the lake to follow a rutted track through
a wood of oak and elm. Jaime’s stump was throbbing dully when
Steelshanks decided to make camp. Qyburn had brought a skin of
dreamwine, thankfully. While Walton set the watches, Jaime
stretched out near the re and propped a rolled-up bearskin against
a stump as a pillow for his head. The wench would have told him he
had to eat before he slept, to keep his strength up, but he was more
tired than hungry. He closed his eyes, and hoped to dream of
Cersei. The fever dreams were all so vivid …
Naked and alone he stood, surrounded by enemies, with stone
walls all around him pressing close. The Rock, he knew. He could

feel the immense weight of it above his head. He was home. He was
home and whole.
He held his right hand up and exed his ngers to feel the
strength in them. It felt as good as sex. As good as swordplay. Four
ngers and a thumb. He had dreamed that he was maimed, but it
wasn’t so. Relief made him dizzy. My hand, my good hand. Nothing
could hurt him so long as he was whole.
Around him stood a dozen tall dark gures in cowled robes that
hid their faces. In their hands were spears. “Who are you?” he
demanded of them. “What business do you have in Casterly Rock?”
They gave no answer, only prodded him with the points of their
spears. He had no choice but to descend. Down a twisting
passageway he went, narrow steps carved from the living rock,
down and down. I must go up, he told himself. Up, not down. Why
am I going down? Below the earth his doom awaited, he knew with
the certainty of dream; something dark and terrible lurked there,
something that wanted him. Jaime tried to halt, but their spears
prodded him on. If only I had my sword, nothing could harm me.
The steps ended abruptly on echoing darkness. Jaime had the
sense of vast space before him. He jerked to a halt, teetering on the
edge of nothingness. A spearpoint jabbed at the small of the back,
shoving him into the abyss. He shouted, but the fall was short. He
landed on his hands and knees, upon soft sand and shallow water.
There were watery caverns deep below Casterly Rock, but this one
was strange to him. “What place is this?”
“Your place.” The voice echoed; it was a hundred voices, a
thousand, the voices of all the Lannisters since Lann the Clever,
who’d lived at the dawn of days. But most of all it was his father’s
voice, and beside Lord Tywin stood his sister, pale and beautiful, a
torch burning in her hand. Jo rey was there as well, the son they’d
made together, and behind them a dozen more dark shapes with
golden hair.
“Sister, why has Father brought us here?”
“Us? This is your place, Brother. This is your darkness.” Her torch
was the only light in the cavern. Her torch was the only light in the
world. She turned to go.

“Stay with me,” Jaime pleaded. “Don’t leave me here alone.” But
they were leaving. “Don’t leave me in the dark!” Something terrible
lived down here. “Give me a sword, at least.”
“I gave you a sword,” Lord Tywin said.
It was at his feet. Jaime groped under the water until his hand
closed upon the hilt. Nothing can hurt me so long as I have a sword. As
he raised the sword a nger of pale ame ickered at the point and
crept up along the edge, stopping a hand’s breath from the hilt. The
re took on the color of the steel itself so it burned with a silveryblue light, and the gloom pulled back. Crouching, listening, Jaime
moved in a circle, ready for anything that might come out of the
darkness. The water owed into his boots, ankle deep and bitterly
cold. Beware the water, he told himself. There may be creatures living
in it, hidden deeps …
From behind came a great splash. Jaime whirled toward the
sound … but the faint light revealed only Brienne of Tarth, her
hands bound in heavy chains. “I swore to keep you safe,” the wench
said stubbornly. “I swore an oath.” Naked, she raised her hands to
Jaime. “Ser. Please. If you would be so good.”
The steel links parted like silk. “A sword,” Brienne begged, and
there it was, scabbard, belt, and all. She buckled it around her thick
waist. The light was so dim that Jaime could scarcely see her,
though they stood a scant few feet apart. In this light she could almost
be a beauty, he thought. In this light she could almost be a knight.
Brienne’s sword took ame as well, burning silvery blue. The
darkness retreated a little more.
“The ames will burn so long as you live,” he heard Cersei call.
“When they die, so must you.”
“Sister!” he shouted. “Stay with me. Stay!” There was no reply but
the soft sound of retreating footsteps.
Brienne moved her longsword back and forth, watching the
silvery ames shift and shimmer. Beneath her feet, a re ection of
the burning blade shone on the surface of the at black water. She
was as tall and strong as he remembered, yet it seemed to Jaime
that she had more of a woman’s shape now.

“Do they keep a bear down here?” Brienne was moving, slow and
wary, sword to hand; step, turn, and listen. Each step made a little
splash. “A cave lion? Direwolves? Some bear? Tell me, Jaime. What
lives here? What lives in the darkness?”
“Doom.” No bear, he knew. No lion. “Only doom.”
In the cool silvery-blue light of the swords, the big wench looked
pale and erce. “I mislike this place.”
“I’m not fond of it myself.” Their blades made a little island of
light, but all around them stretched a sea of darkness, unending.
“My feet are wet.”
“We could go back the way they brought us. If you climbed on
my shoulders you’d have no trouble reaching that tunnel mouth.”
Then I could follow Cersei. He could feel himself growing hard at
the thought, and turned away so Brienne would not see.
“Listen.” She put a hand on his shoulder, and he trembled at the
sudden touch. She’s warm. “Something comes.” Brienne lifted her
sword to point o to his left. “There.”
He peered into the gloom until he saw it too. Something was
moving through the darkness, he could not quite make it out …
“A man on a horse. No, two. Two riders, side by side.”
“Down here, beneath the Rock?” It made no sense. Yet there
came two riders on pale horses, men and mounts both armored. The
destriers emerged from the blackness at a slow walk. They make no
sound, Jaime realized. No splashing, no clink of mail nor clop of hoof.
He remembered Eddard Stark, riding the length of Aerys’s throne
room wrapped in silence. Only his eyes had spoken; a lord’s eyes,
cold and grey and full of judgment.
“Is it you, Stark?” Jaime called. “Come ahead. I never feared you
living, I do not fear you dead.”
Brienne touched his arm. “There are more.”
He saw them too. They were armored all in snow, it seemed to
him, and ribbons of mist swirled back from their shoulders. The
visors of their helms were closed, but Jaime Lannister did not need
to look upon their faces to know them.
Five had been his brothers. Oswell Whent and Jon Darry. Lewyn
Martell, a prince of Dorne. The White Bull, Gerold Hightower. Ser

Arthur Dayne, Sword of the Morning. And beside them, crowned in
mist and grief with his long hair streaming behind him, rode
Rhaegar Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone and rightful heir to the
Iron Throne.
“You don’t frighten me,” he called, turning as they split to either
side of him. He did not know which way to face. “I will ght you
one by one or all together. But who is there for the wench to duel?
She gets cross when you leave her out.”
“I swore an oath to keep him safe,” she said to Rhaegar’s shade.
“I swore a holy oath.”
“We all swore oaths,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, so sadly.
The shades dismounted from their ghostly horses. When they
drew their longswords, it made not a sound. “He was going to burn
the city,” Jaime said. “To leave Robert only ashes.”
“He was your king,” said Darry.
“You swore to keep him safe,” said Whent.
“And the children, them as well,” said Prince Lewyn.
Prince Rhaegar burned with a cold light, now white, now red,
now dark. “I left my wife and children in your hands.”
“I never thought he’d hurt them.” Jaime’s sword was burning less
brightly now. “I was with the king …”
“Killing the king,” said Ser Arthur.
“Cutting his throat,” said Prince Lewyn.
“The king you had sworn to die for,” said the White Bull.
The res that ran along the blade were guttering out, and Jaime
remembered what Cersei had said. No. Terror closed a hand about
his throat. Then his sword went dark, and only Brienne’s burned, as
the ghosts came rushing in.
“No,” he said, “no, no, no. Nooooooooo!”
Heart pounding, he jerked awake, and found himself in starry
darkness amidst a grove of trees. He could taste bile in his mouth,
and he was shivering with sweat, hot and cold at once. When he
looked down for his sword hand, his wrist ended in leather and
linen, wrapped snug around an ugly stump. He felt sudden tears
well up in his eyes. I felt it, I felt the strength in my ngers, and the
rough leather of the sword’s grip. My hand …

“My lord.” Qyburn knelt beside him, his fatherly face all crinkly
with concern. “What is it? I heard you cry out.”
Steelshanks Walton stood above them, tall and dour. “What is it?
Why did you scream?”
“A dream … only a dream.” Jaime stared at the camp around
him, lost for a moment. “I was in the dark, but I had my hand
back.” He looked at the stump and felt sick all over again. There’s no
place like that beneath the Rock, he thought. His stomach was sour
and empty, and his head was pounding where he’d pillowed it
against the stump.
Qyburn felt his brow. “You still have a touch of fever.”
“A fever dream.” Jaime reached up. “Help me.” Steelshanks took
him by his good hand and pulled him to his feet.
“Another cup of dreamwine?” asked Qyburn.
“No. I’ve dreamt enough this night.” He wondered how long it
was till dawn. Somehow he knew that if he closed his eyes, he
would be back in that dark wet place again.
“Milk of the poppy, then? And something for your fever? You are
still weak, my lord. You need to sleep. To rest.”
That is the last thing I mean to do. The moonlight glimmered pale
upon the stump where Jaime had rested his head. The moss covered
it so thickly he had not noticed before, but now he saw that the
wood was white. It made him think of Winterfell, and Ned Stark’s
heart tree. It was not him, he thought. It was never him. But the
stump was dead and so was Stark and so were all the others, Prince
Rhaegar and Ser Arthur and the children. And Aerys. Aerys is most
dead of all. “Do you believe in ghosts, Maester?” he asked Qyburn.
The man’s face grew strange. “Once, at the Citadel, I came into
an empty room and saw an empty chair. Yet I knew a woman had
been there, only a moment before. The cushion was dented where
she’d sat, the cloth was still warm, and her scent lingered in the air.
If we leave our smells behind us when we leave a room, surely
something of our souls must remain when we leave this life?”
Qyburn spread his hands. “The archmaesters did not like my
thinking, though. Well, Marwyn did, but he was the only one.”

Jaime ran his ngers through his hair. “Walton,” he said, “saddle
the horses. I want to go back.”
“Back?” Steelshanks regarded him dubiously.
He thinks I’ve gone mad. And perhaps I have. “I left something at
Harrenhal.”
“Lord Vargo holds it now. Him and his Bloody Mummers.”
“You have twice the men he does.”
“If I don’t serve you up to your father as commanded, Lord
Bolton will have my hide. We press on to King’s Landing.”
Once Jaime might have countered with a smile and a threat, but
one-handed cripples do not inspire much fear. He wondered what
his brother would do. Tyrion would nd a way. “Lannisters lie,
Steelshanks. Didn’t Lord Bolton tell you that?”
The man frowned suspiciously. “What if he did?”
“Unless you take me back to Harrenhal, the song I sing my father
may not be one the Lord of the Dreadfort would wish to hear. I
might even say it was Bolton ordered my hand cut o , and
Steelshanks Walton who swung the blade.”
Walton gaped at him. “That isn’t so.”
“No, but who will my father believe?” Jaime made himself smile,
the way he used to smile when nothing in the world could frighten
him. “It will be so much easier if we just go back. We’d be on our
way again soon enough, and I’d sing such a sweet song in King’s
Landing you’ll never believe your ears. You’d get the girl, and a
nice fat purse of gold as thanks.”
“Gold?” Walton liked that well enough. “How much gold?”
I have him. “Why, how much would you want?”
And by the time the sun came up, they were halfway back to
Harrenhal.
Jaime pushed his horse much harder than he had the day before,
and Steelshanks and the northmen were forced to match his pace.
Even so, it was midday before they reached the castle on the lake.
Beneath a darkening sky that threatened rain, the immense walls
and ve great towers stood black and ominous. It looks so dead. The
walls were empty, the gates closed and barred. But high above the
barbican, a single banner hung limp. The black goat of Qohor, he

knew. Jaime cupped his hands to shout. “You in there! Open your
gates, or I’ll kick them down!”
It was not until Qyburn and Steelshanks added their voices that a
head nally appeared on the battlements above them. He goggled
down at them, then vanished. A short time later, they heard the
portcullis being drawn upward. The gates swung open, and Jaime
Lannister spurred his horse through the walls, scarcely glancing at
the murder holes as he passed beneath them. He had been worried
that the goat might not admit them, but it seemed as if the Brave
Companions still thought of them as allies. Fools.
The outer ward was deserted; only the long slate-roofed stables
showed any signs of life, and it was not horses that interested Jaime
just then. He reined up and looked about. He could hear sounds
from somewhere behind the Tower of Ghosts, and men shouting in
half a dozen tongues. Steelshanks and Qyburn rode up on either
side. “Get what you came back for, and we’ll be gone again,” said
Walton. “I want no trouble with the Mummers.”
“Tell your men to keep their hands on their sword hilts, and the
Mummers will want no trouble with you. Two to one, remember?”
Jaime’s head jerked round at the sound of a distant roar, faint but
ferocious. It echoed o the walls of Harrenhal, and the laughter
swelled up like the sea. All of a sudden, he knew what was
happening. Have we come too late? His stomach did a lurch, and he
slammed his spurs into his horse, galloping across the outer ward,
beneath an arched stone bridge, around the Wailing Tower, and
through the Flowstone Yard.
They had her in the bear pit.
King Harren the Black had wished to do even his bear-baiting in
lavish style. The pit was ten yards across and ve yards deep,
walled in stone, oored with sand, and encircled by six tiers of
marble benches. The Brave Companions lled only a quarter of the
seats, Jaime saw as he swung down clumsily from his horse. The
sellswords were so xed on the spectacle beneath that only those
across the pit noticed their arrival.
Brienne wore the same ill- tting gown she’d worn to supper with
Roose Bolton. No shield, no breastplate, no chainmail, not even

boiled leather, only pink satin and Myrish lace. Maybe the goat
thought she was more amusing when dressed as a woman. Half her
gown was hanging o in tatters, and her left arm dripped blood
where the bear had raked her.
At least they gave her a sword. The wench held it one-handed,
moving sideways, trying to put some distance between her and the
bear. That’s no good, the ring’s too small. She needed to attack, to
make a quick end to it. Good steel was a match for any bear. But
the wench seemed afraid to close. The Mummers showered her with
insults and obscene suggestions.
“This is none of our concern,” Steelshanks warned Jaime. “Lord
Bolton said the wench was theirs, to do with as they liked.”
“Her name’s Brienne.” Jaime descended the steps, past a dozen
startled sellswords. Vargo Hoat had taken the lord’s box in the
lowest tier. “Lord Vargo,” he called over the shouts.
The Qohorik almost spilt his wine. “Kingthlayer?” The left side of
his face was bandaged clumsily, the linen over his ear spotted with
blood.
“Pull her out of there.”
“Thay out of thith, Kingthlayer, unleth you’d like another thump.”
He waved a wine cup. “Your thee-mooth bit oth my ear. Thmall
wonder her father will not ranthom thuch a freak.”
A roar turned Jaime back around. The bear was eight feet tall.
Gregor Clegane with a pelt, he thought, though likely smarter. The
beast did not have the reach the Mountain had with that monster
greatsword of his, though.
Bellowing in fury, the bear showed a mouth full of great yellow
teeth, then fell back to all fours and went straight at Brienne.
There’s your chance, Jaime thought. Strike! Now!
Instead, she poked out ine ectually with the point of her blade.
The bear recoiled, then came on, rumbling. Brienne slid to her left
and poked again at the bear’s face. This time he lifted a paw to swat
the sword aside.
He’s wary, Jaime realized. He’s gone up against other men. He
knows swords and spears can hurt him. But that won’t keep him o her
long. “Kill him!” he shouted, but his voice was lost amongst all the

other shouts. If Brienne heard, she gave no sign. She moved around
the pit, keeping the wall at her back. Too close. If the bear pins her by
the wall …
The beast turned clumsily, too far and too fast. Quick as a cat,
Brienne changed direction. There’s the wench I remember. She leapt in
to land a cut across the bear’s back. Roaring, the beast went up on
his hind legs again. Brienne scrambled back away. Where’s the
blood? Then suddenly he understood. Jaime rounded on Hoat. “You
gave her a tourney sword.”
The goat brayed laughter, spraying him with wine and spittle. “Of
courth.”
“I’ll pay her bloody ransom. Gold, sapphires, whatever you want.
Pull her out of there.”
“You want her? Go get her.”
So he did.
He put his good hand on the marble rail and vaulted over, rolling
as he hit the sand. The bear turned at the thump, sni ng, watching
this new intruder warily. Jaime scrambled to one knee. Well, what
in seven hells do I do now? He lled his st with sand. “Kingslayer?”
he heard Brienne say, astonished.
“Jaime.” He uncoiled, inging the sand at the bear’s face. The
bear mauled the air and roared like blazes.
“What are you doing here?”
“Something stupid. Get behind me.” He circled toward her,
putting himself between Brienne and the bear.
“You get behind. I have the sword.”
“A sword with no point and no edge. Get behind me!” He saw
something half-buried in the sand, and snatched it up with his good
hand. It proved to be a human jawbone, with some greenish esh
still clinging to it, crawling with maggots. Charming, he thought,
wondering whose face he held. The bear was edging closer, so
Jaime whipped his arm around and ung bone, meat, and maggots
at the beast’s head. He missed by a good yard. I ought to lop my left
hand o as well, for all the good it does me.
Brienne tried to dart around, but he kicked her legs out from
under her. She fell in the sand, clutching the useless sword. Jaime

straddled her, and the bear came charging.
There was a deep twang, and a feathered shaft sprouted suddenly
beneath the beast’s left eye. Blood and slaver ran from his open
mouth, and another bolt took him in the leg. The bear roared,
reared. He saw Jaime and Brienne again and lumbered toward
them. More crossbows red, the quarrels ripping through fur and
esh. At such short range, the bowmen could hardly miss. The
shafts hit as hard as maces, but the bear took another step. The poor
dumb brave brute. When the beast swiped at him, he danced aside,
shouting, kicking sand. The bear turned to follow his tormentor,
and took another two quarrels in the back. He gave one last
rumbling growl, settled back onto his haunches, stretched out on
the bloodstained sand, and died.
Brienne got back to her knees, clutching the sword and breathing
short ragged breaths. Steelshanks’s archers were winding their
crossbows and reloading while the Bloody Mummers shouted curses
and threats at them. Rorge and Three Toes had swords out, Jaime
saw, and Zollo was uncoiling his whip.
“You thlew my bear!” Vargo Hoat shrieked.
“And I’ll serve you the same if you give me trouble,” Steelshanks
threw back. “We’re taking the wench.”
“Her name is Brienne,” Jaime said. “Brienne, the maid of Tarth.
You are still maiden, I hope?”
Her broad homely face turned red. “Yes.”
“Oh, good,” Jaime said. “I only rescue maidens.” To Hoat he said,
“You’ll have your ransom. For both of us. A Lannister pays his
debts. Now fetch some ropes and get us out of here.”
“Bugger that,” Rorge growled. “Kill them, Hoat. Or you’ll bloody
well wish you had!”
The Qohorik hesitated. Half his men were drunk, the northmen
stone sober, and there were twice as many. Some of the
crossbowmen had reloaded by now. “Pull them out,” Hoat said, and
then, to Jaime, “I hath chothen to be merthiful. Tell your lord
father.”
“I will, my lord.” Not that it will do you any good.

Not until they were half a league from Harrenhal and out of
range of archers on the walls did Steelshanks Walton let his anger
show. “Are you mad, Kingslayer? Did you mean to die? No man can
ght a bear with his bare hands!”
“One bare hand and one bare stump,” Jaime corrected. “But I
hoped you’d kill the beast before the beast killed me. Elsewise, Lord
Bolton would have peeled you like an orange, no?”
Steelshanks cursed him roundly for a fool of Lannister, spurred
his horse, and galloped away up the column.
“Ser Jaime?” Even in soiled pink satin and torn lace, Brienne
looked more like a man in a gown than a proper woman. “I am
grateful, but … you were well away. Why come back?”
A dozen quips came to mind, each crueler than the one before,
but Jaime only shrugged. “I dreamed of you,” he said.

CATELYN

Robb bid farewell to his young queen thrice. Once in the

godswood before the heart tree, in sight of gods and men. The
second time beneath the portcullis, where Jeyne sent him forth with
a long embrace and a longer kiss. And nally an hour beyond the
Tumblestone, when the girl came galloping up on a well-lathered
horse to plead with her young king to take her along.
Robb was touched by that, Catelyn saw, but abashed as well. The
day was damp and grey, a drizzle had begun to fall, and the last
thing he wanted was to call a halt to his march so he could stand in
the wet and console a tearful young wife in front of half his army.
He speaks her gently, she thought as she watched them together, but
there is anger underneath.
All the time the king and queen were talking, Grey Wind prowled
around them, stopping only to shake the water from his coat and
bare his teeth at the rain. When at last Robb gave Jeyne one nal
kiss, dispatched a dozen men to take her back to Riverrun, and
mounted his horse once more, the direwolf raced o ahead as swift
as an arrow loosed from a longbow.
“Queen Jeyne has a loving heart, I see,” said Lame Lothar Frey to
Catelyn. “Not unlike my own sisters. Why, I would wager a guess
that even now Roslin in dancing round the Twins chanting ‘Lady
Tully, Lady Tully, Lady Roslin Tully.’ By the morrow she’ll be
holding swatches of Riverrun red-and-blue to her cheek to picture
how she’ll look in her bride’s cloak.” He turned in the saddle to

smile at Edmure. “But you are strangely quiet, Lord Tully. How do
you feel, I wonder?”
“Much as I did at the Stone Mill just before the warhorns
sounded,” Edmure said, only half in jest.
Lothar gave a good-natured laugh. “Let us pray your marriage
ends as happily, my lord.”
And may the gods protect us if it does not. Catelyn pressed her heels
into her horse, leaving her brother and Lame Lothar to each other’s
company.
It had been her who had insisted that Jeyne remain at Riverrun,
when Robb would sooner have kept her by his side. Lord Walder
might well construe the queen’s absence from the wedding as
another slight, yet her presence would have been a di erent sort of
insult, salt in the old man’s wound. “Walder Frey has a sharp tongue
and a long memory,” she had warned her son. “I do not doubt that
you are strong enough to su er an old man’s rebukes as the price of
his allegiance, but you have too much of your father in you to sit
there while he insults Jeyne to her face.”
Robb could not deny the sense of that. Yet all the same, he resents
me for it, Catelyn thought wearily. He misses Jeyne already, and some
part of him blames me for her absence, though he knows it was good
counsel.
Of the six Westerlings who had come with her son from the Crag,
only one remained by his side; Ser Raynald, Jeyne’s brother, the
royal banner-bearer. Robb had dispatched Jeyne’s uncle Rolph
Spicer to deliver young Martyn Lannister to the Golden Tooth the
very day he received Lord Tywin’s assent to the exchange of
captives. It was deftly done. Her son was relieved of his fear for
Martyn’s safety, Galbart Glover was relieved to hear that his
brother Robett had been put on a ship at Duskendale, Ser Rolph had
important and honorable employment … and Grey Wind was at the
king’s side once more. Where he belongs.
Lady Westerling had remained at Riverrun with her children;
Jeyne, her little sister Eleyna, and young Rollam, Robb’s squire,
who complained bitterly about being left. Yet that was wise as well.
Olyvar Frey had squired for Robb previously, and would doubtless

be present for his sister’s wedding; to parade his replacement before
him would be as unwise as it was unkind. As for Ser Raynald, he
was a cheerful young knight who swore that no insult of Walder
Frey’s could possibly provoke him. And let us pray that insults are all
we need to contend with.
Catelyn had her fears on that score, though. Her lord father had
never trusted Walder Frey after the Trident, and she was ever
mindful of that. Queen Jeyne would be safest behind the high,
strong walls of Riverrun, with the Black sh to protect her. Robb
had even created him a new title, Warden of the Southern Marches.
Ser Brynden would hold the Trident if any man could.
All the same, Catelyn would miss her uncle’s craggy face, and
Robb would miss his counsel. Ser Brynden had played a part in
every victory her son had won. Galbart Glover had taken command
of the scouts and outriders in his place; a good man, loyal and
steady, but without the Black sh’s brilliance.
Behind Glover’s screen of scouts, Robb’s line of march stretched
several miles. The Greatjon led the van. Catelyn traveled in the
main column, surrounded by plodding warhorses with steelclad men
on their backs. Next came the baggage train, a procession of wayns
laden with food, fodder, camp supplies, wedding gifts, and the
wounded too weak to walk, under the watchful eye of Ser Wendel
Manderly and his White Harbor knights. Herds of sheep and goats
and scrawny cattle trailed behind, and then a little trail of footsore
camp followers. Even farther back was Robin Flint and the
rearguard. There was no enemy in back of them for hundreds of
leagues, but Robb would take no chances.
Thirty- ve hundred they were, thirty- ve hundred who had been
blooded in the Whispering Wood, who had reddened their swords at
the Battle of the Camps, at Oxcross, Ashemark, and the Crag, and
all through the gold-rich hills of the Lannister west. Aside from her
brother Edmure’s modest retinue of friends, the lords of the Trident
had remained to hold the riverlands while the king retook the
north. Ahead awaited Edmure’s bride and Robb’s next battle … and
for me, two dead sons, an empty bed, and a castle full of ghosts. It was

a cheerless prospect. Brienne, where are you? Bring my girls back to
me, Brienne. Bring them back safe.
The drizzle that had sent them o turned into a soft steady rain
by midday, and continued well past nightfall. The next day the
northmen never saw the sun at all, but rode beneath leaden skies
with their hoods pulled up to keep the water from their eyes. It was
a heavy rain, turning roads to mud and elds to quagmires, swelling
the rivers and stripping the trees of their leaves. The constant patter
made idle chatter more bother than it was worth, so men spoke
only when they had something to say, and that was seldom enough.
“We are stronger than we seem, my lady,” Lady Maege Mormont
said as they rode. Catelyn had grown fond of Lady Maege and her
eldest daughter, Dacey; they were more understanding than most in
the matter of Jaime Lannister, she had found. The daughter was tall
and lean, the mother short and stout, but they dressed alike in mail
and leather, with the black bear of House Mormont on shield and
surcoat. By Catelyn’s lights, that was queer garb for a lady, yet
Dacey and Lady Maege seemed more comfortable, both as warriors
and as women, than ever the girl from Tarth had been.
“I have fought beside the Young Wolf in every battle,” Dacey
Mormont said cheerfully. “He has not lost one yet.”
No, but he has lost everything else, Catelyn thought, but it would
not do to say it aloud. The northmen did not lack for courage, but
they were far from home, with little enough to sustain them but for
their faith in their young king. That faith must be protected, at all
costs. I must be stronger, she told herself. I must be strong for Robb. If
I despair, my grief will consume me. Everything would turn on this
marriage. If Edmure and Roslin were happy in one another, if the
Late Lord Frey could be appeased and his power once more wedded
to Robb’s … Even then, what chance will we have, caught between
Lannister and Greyjoy? It was a question Catelyn dared not dwell on,
though Robb dwelt on little else. She saw how he studied his maps
whenever they made camp, searching for some plan that might win
back the north.
Her brother Edmure had other cares. “You don’t suppose all Lord
Walder’s daughters look like him, do you?” he wondered, as he sat

in his tall striped pavilion with Catelyn and his friends.
“With so many di erent mothers, a few of the maids are bound to
turn up comely,” said Ser Marq Piper, “but why should the old
wretch give you a pretty one?”
“No reason at all,” said Edmure in a glum tone.
It was more than Catelyn could stand. “Cersei Lannister is
comely,” she said sharply. “You’d be wiser to pray that Roslin is
strong and healthy, with a good head and a loyal heart.” And with
that she left them.
Edmure did not take that well. The next day he avoided her
entirely on the march, preferring the company of Marq Piper,
Lymond Goodbrook, Patrek Mallister, and the young Vances. They
do not scold him, except in jest, Catelyn told herself when they raced
by her that afternoon with nary a word. I have always been too hard
with Edmure, and now grief sharpens my every word. She regretted her
rebuke. There was rain enough falling from the sky without her
making more. And was it really such a terrible thing, to want a
pretty wife? She remembered her own childish disappointment, the
rst time she had laid eyes on Eddard Stark. She had pictured him
as a younger version of his brother Brandon, but that was wrong.
Ned was shorter and plainer of face, and so somber. He spoke
courteously enough, but beneath the words she sensed a coolness
that was all at odds with Brandon, whose mirths had been as wild as
his rages. Even when he took her maidenhood, their love had more
of duty to it than of passion. We made Robb that night, though; we
made a king together. And after the war, at Winterfell, I had love enough
for any woman, once I found the good sweet heart beneath Ned’s solemn
face. There is no reason Edmure should not nd the same, with his
Roslin.
As the gods would have it, their route took them through the
Whispering Wood where Robb had won his rst great victory. They
followed the course of the twisting stream on the oor of that
pinched narrow valley, much as Jaime Lannister’s men had done
that fateful night. It was warmer then, Catelyn remembered, the trees
were still green, and the stream did not over ow its banks. Fallen leaves
choked the ow now and lay in sodden snarls among the rocks and

roots, and the trees that had once hidden Robb’s army had
exchanged their green raiment for leaves of dull gold spotted with
brown, and a red that reminded her of rust and dry blood. Only the
spruce and the soldier pines still showed green, thrusting up at the
belly of the clouds like tall dark spears.
More than the trees have died since then, she re ected. On the night
of the Whispering Wood, Ned was still alive in his cell beneath
Aegon’s High Hill, Bran and Rickon were safe behind the walls of
Winterfell. And Theon Greyjoy fought at Robb’s side, and boasted of
how he had almost crossed swords with the Kingslayer. Would that he
had. If Theon had died in place of Lord Karstark’s sons, how much ill
would have been undone?
As they passed through the battleground, Catelyn glimpsed signs
of the carnage that had been; an overturned helm lling with rain, a
splintered lance, the bones of a horse. Stone cairns had been raised
over some of the men who had fallen here, but scavengers had
already been at them. Amidst the tumbles of rock, she spied
brightly colored cloth and bits of shiny metal. Once she saw a face
peering out at her, the shape of the skull beginning to emerge from
beneath the melting brown esh.
It made her wonder where Ned had come to rest. The silent
sisters had taken his bones north, escorted by Hallis Mollen and a
small honor guard. Had Ned ever reached Winterfell, to be interred
beside his brother Brandon in the dark crypts beneath the castle? Or
did the door slam shut at Moat Cailin before Hal and the sisters
could pass?
Thirty- ve hundred riders wound their way along the valley oor
through the heart of the Whispering Wood, but Catelyn Stark had
seldom felt lonelier. Every league she crossed took her farther from
Riverrun, and she found herself wondering whether she would ever
see the castle again. Or was it lost to her forever, like so much else?
Five days later, their scouts rode back to warn them that the
rising waters had washed out the wooden bridge at Fairmarket.
Galbart Glover and two of his bolder men had tried swimming their
mounts across the turbulent Blue Fork at Ramsford. Two of the
horses had been swept under and drowned, and one of the riders;

Glover himself managed to cling to a rock until they could pull him
in. “The river hasn’t run this high since spring,” Edmure said. “And
if this rain keeps falling, it will go higher yet.”
“There’s a bridge further upstream, near Oldstones,” remembered
Catelyn, who had often crossed these lands with her father. “It’s
older and smaller, but if it still stands—”
“It’s gone, my lady,” Galbart Glover said. “Washed away even
before the one at Fairmarket.”
Robb looked to Catelyn. “Is there another bridge?”
“No. And the fords will be impassable.” She tried to remember.
“If we cannot cross the Blue Fork, we’ll have to go around it,
through Sevenstreams and Hag’s Mire.”
“Bogs and bad roads, or none at all,” warned Edmure. “The going
will be slow, but we’ll get there, I suppose.”
“Lord Walder will wait, I’m sure,” said Robb. “Lothar sent him a
bird from Riverrun, he knows we are coming.”
“Yes, but the man is prickly, and suspicious by nature,” said
Catelyn. “He may take this delay as a deliberate insult.”
“Very well, I’ll beg his pardon for our tardiness as well. A sorry
king I’ll be, apologizing with every second breath.” Robb made a
wry face. “I hope Bolton got across the Trident before the rains
began. The kingsroad runs straight north, he’ll have an easy march.
Even afoot, he should reach the Twins before us.”
“And when you’ve joined his men to yours and seen my brother
married, what then?” Catelyn asked him.
“North.” Robb scratched Grey Wind behind an ear.
“By the causeway? Against Moat Cailin?”
He gave her an enigmatic smile. “That’s one way to go,” he said,
and she knew from his tone that he would say no more. A wise king
keeps his own counsel, she reminded herself.
They reached Oldstones after eight more days of steady rain, and
made their camp upon the hill overlooking the Blue Fork, within a
ruined stronghold of the ancient river kings. Its foundations
remained amongst the weeds to show where the walls and keeps
had stood, but the local smallfolk had long ago made o with most
of the stones to raise their barns and septs and holdfasts. Yet in the

center of what once would have been the castle’s yard, a great
carved sepulcher still rested, half hidden in waist-high brown grass
amongst a stand of ash.
The lid of the sepulcher had been carved into a likeness of the
man whose bones lay beneath, but the rain and the wind had done
their work. The king had worn a beard, they could see, but
otherwise his face was smooth and featureless, with only vague
suggestions of a mouth, a nose, eyes, and the crown about the
temples. His hands folded over the shaft of a stone warhammer that
lay upon his chest. Once the warhammer would have been carved
with runes that told its name and history, but all that the centuries
had worn away. The stone itself was cracked and crumbling at the
corners, discolored here and there by spreading white splotches of
lichen, while wild roses crept up over the king’s feet almost to his
chest.
It was there that Catelyn found Robb, standing somber in the
gathering dusk with only Grey Wind beside him. The rain had
stopped for once, and he was bareheaded. “Does this castle have a
name?” he asked quietly, when she came up to him.
“Oldstones, all the smallfolk called it when I was a girl, but no
doubt it had some other name when it was still a hall of kings.” She
had camped here once with her father, on their way to Seagard.
Petyr was with us too …
“There’s a song,” he remembered. “ ‘Jenny of Oldstones, with the
owers in her hair.’ ”
“We’re all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.” She had played
at being Jenny that day, had even wound owers in her hair. And
Petyr had pretended to be her Prince of Dragon ies. Catelyn could
not have been more than twelve, Petyr just a boy.
Robb studied the sepulcher. “Whose grave is this?”
“Here lies Tristifer, the Fourth of His Name, King of the Rivers
and the Hills.” Her father had told her his story once. “He ruled
from the Trident to the Neck, thousands of years before Jenny and
her prince, in the days when the kingdoms of the First Men were
falling one after the other before the onslaught of the Andals. The
Hammer of Justice, they called him. He fought a hundred battles

and won nine-and-ninety, or so the singers say, and when he raised
this castle it was the strongest in Westeros.” She put a hand on her
son’s shoulder. “He died in his hundredth battle, when seven Andal
kings joined forces against him. The fth Tristifer was not his equal,
and soon the kingdom was lost, and then the castle, and last of all
the line. With Tristifer the Fifth died House Mudd, that had ruled
the riverlands for a thousand years before the Andals came.”
“His heir failed him.” Robb ran a hand over the rough weathered
stone. “I had hoped to leave Jeyne with child … we tried often
enough, but I’m not certain …”
“It does not always happen the rst time.” Though it did with you.
“Nor even the hundredth. You are very young.”
“Young, and a king,” he said. “A king must have an heir. If I
should die in my next battle, the kingdom must not die with me. By
law Sansa is next in line of succession, so Winterfell and the north
would pass to her.” His mouth tightened. “To her, and her lord
husband. Tyrion Lannister. I cannot allow that. I will not allow that.
That dwarf must never have the north.”
“No,” Catelyn agreed. “You must name another heir, until such
time as Jeyne gives you a son.” She considered a moment. “Your
father’s father had no siblings, but his father had a sister who
married a younger son of Lord Raymar Royce, of the junior branch.
They had three daughters, all of whom wed Vale lordlings. A
Waynwood and a Corbray, for certain. The youngest … it might
have been a Templeton, but …”
“Mother.” There was a sharpness in Robb’s tone. “You forget. My
father had four sons.”
She had not forgotten; she had not wanted to look at it, yet there
it was. “A Snow is not a Stark.”
“Jon’s more a Stark than some lordlings from the Vale who have
never so much as set eyes on Winterfell.”
“Jon is a brother of the Night’s Watch, sworn to take no wife and
hold no lands. Those who take the black serve for life.”
“So do the knights of the Kingsguard. That did not stop the
Lannisters from stripping the white cloaks from Ser Barristan Selmy
and Ser Boros Blount when they had no more use for them. If I send

the Watch a hundred men in Jon’s place, I’ll wager they nd some
way to release him from his vows.”
He is set on this. Catelyn knew how stubborn her son could be. “A
bastard cannot inherit.”
“Not unless he’s legitimized by a royal decree,” said Robb. “There
is more precedent for that than for releasing a Sworn Brother from
his oath.”
“Precedent,” she said bitterly. “Yes, Aegon the Fourth legitimized
all his bastards on his deathbed. And how much pain, grief, war,
and murder grew from that? I know you trust Jon. But can you trust
his sons? Or their sons? The Blackfyre pretenders troubled the
Targaryens for ve generations, until Barristan the Bold slew the
last of them on the Stepstones. If you make Jon legitimate, there is
no way to turn him bastard again. Should he wed and breed, any
sons you may have by Jeyne will never be safe.”
“Jon would never harm a son of mine.”
“No more than Theon Greyjoy would harm Bran or Rickon?”
Grey Wind leapt up atop King Tristifer’s crypt, his teeth bared.
Robb’s own face was cold. “That is as cruel as it is unfair. Jon is no
Theon.”
“So you pray. Have you considered your sisters? What of their
rights? I agree that the north must not be permitted to pass to the
Imp, but what of Arya? By law, she comes after Sansa … your own
sister, trueborn …”
“… and dead. No one has seen or heard of Arya since they cut
Father’s head o . Why do you lie to yourself? Arya’s gone, the same
as Bran and Rickon, and they’ll kill Sansa too once the dwarf gets a
child from her. Jon is the only brother that remains to me. Should I
die without issue, I want him to succeed me as King in the North. I
had hoped you would support my choice.”
“I cannot,” she said. “In all else, Robb. In everything. But not in
this … this folly. Do not ask it.”
“I don’t have to. I’m the king.” Robb turned and walked o , Grey
Wind bounding down from the tomb and loping after him.
What have I done? Catelyn thought wearily, as she stood alone by
Tristifer’s stone sepulcher. First I anger Edmure, and now Robb, but all

I have done is speak the truth. Are men so fragile they cannot bear to
hear it? She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it
for her. It was all she could do to walk back to her tent, and sit
there in the silence.
In the days that followed, Robb was everywhere and anywhere;
riding at the head of the van with the Greatjon, scouting with Grey
Wind, racing back to Robin Flint and the rearguard. Men said
proudly that the Young Wolf was the rst to rise each dawn and the
last to sleep at night, but Catelyn wondered whether he was
sleeping at all. He grows as lean and hungry as his direwolf.
“My lady,” Maege Mormont said to her one morning as they rode
through a steady rain, “you seem so somber. Is aught amiss?”
My lord husband is dead, as is my father. Two of my sons have been
murdered, my daughter has been given to a faithless dwarf to bear his
vile children, my other daughter is vanished and likely dead, and my last
son and my only brother are both angry with me. What could possibly be
amiss? That was more truth than Lady Maege would wish to hear,
however. “This is an evil rain,” she said instead. “We have su ered
much, and there is more peril and more grief ahead. We need to
face it boldly, with horns blowing and banners ying bravely. But
this rain beats us down. The banners hang limp and sodden, and the
men huddle under their cloaks and scarcely speak to one another.
Only an evil rain would chill our hearts when most we need them to
burn hot.”
Dacey Mormont looked up at the sky. “I would sooner have water
raining down on me than arrows.”
Catelyn smiled despite herself. “You are braver than I am, I fear.
Are all your Bear Island women such warriors?”
“She-bears, aye,” said Lady Maege. “We have needed to be. In
olden days the ironmen would come raiding in their longboats, or
wildlings from the Frozen Shore. The men would be o
shing, like
as not. The wives they left behind had to defend themselves and
their children, or else be carried o .”
“There’s a carving on our gate,” said Dacey. “A woman in a
bearskin, with a child in one arm suckling at her breast. In the other

hand she holds a battleaxe. She’s no proper lady, that one, but I
always loved her.”
“My nephew Jorah brought home a proper lady once,” said Lady
Maege. “He won her in a tourney. How she hated that carving.”
“Aye, and all the rest,” said Dacey. “She had hair like spun gold,
that Lynesse. Skin like cream. But her soft hands were never made
for axes.”
“Nor her teats for giving suck,” her mother said bluntly.
Catelyn knew of whom they spoke; Jorah Mormont had brought
his second wife to Winterfell for feasts, and once they had guested
for a fortnight. She remembered how young the Lady Lynesse had
been, how fair, and how unhappy. One night, after several cups of
wine, she had confessed to Catelyn that the north was no place for a
Hightower of Oldtown. “There was a Tully of Riverrun who felt the
same once,” she had answered gently, trying to console, “but in
time she found much here she could love.”
All lost now, she re ected. Winterfell and Ned, Bran and Rickon,
Sansa, Arya, all gone. Only Robb remains. Had there been too much of
Lynesse Hightower in her after all, and too little of the Starks?
Would that I had known how to wield an axe, perhaps I might have been
able to protect them better.
Day followed day, and still the rain kept falling. All the way up
the Blue Fork they rode, past Sevenstreams where the river
unraveled into a confusion of rills and brooks, then through Hag’s
Mire, where glistening green pools waited to swallow the unwary
and the soft ground sucked at the hooves of their horses like a
hungry babe at its mother’s breast. The going was worse than slow.
Half the wayns had to be abandoned to the muck, their loads
distributed amongst mules and draft horses.
Lord Jason Mallister caught up with them amidst the bogs of
Hag’s Mire. There was more than an hour of daylight remaining
when he rode up with his column, but Robb called a halt at once,
and Ser Raynald Westerling came to escort Catelyn to the king’s
tent. She found her son seated beside a brazier, a map across his lap.
Grey Wind slept at his feet. The Greatjon was with him, along with
Galbart Glover, Maege Mormont, Edmure, and a man that Catelyn

did not know, a eshy balding man with a cringing look to him. No
lordling, this one, she knew the moment she laid eyes on the
stranger. Not even a warrior.
Jason Mallister rose to o er Catelyn his seat. His hair had almost
as much white in it as brown, but the Lord of Seagard was still a
handsome man; tall and lean, with a chiseled clean-shaven face,
high cheekbones, and erce blue-grey eyes. “Lady Stark, it is ever a
pleasure. I bring good tidings, I hope.”
“We are in sore need of some, my lord.” She sat, listening to the
rain patter down noisily against the canvas overhead.
Robb waited for Ser Raynald to close the tent ap. “The gods
have heard our prayers, my lords. Lord Jason has brought us the
captain of the Myraham, a merchanter out of Oldtown. Captain, tell
them what you told me.”
“Aye, Your Grace.” He licked his thick lips nervously. “My last
port of call afore Seagard, that was Lordsport on Pyke. The ironmen
kept me there more’n half a year, they did. King Balon’s command.
Only, well, the long and the short of it is, he’s dead.”
“Balon Greyjoy?” Catelyn’s heart skipped a beat. “You are telling
us that Balon Greyjoy is dead?”
The shabby little captain nodded. “You know how Pyke’s built on
a headland, and part on rocks and islands o the shore, with bridges
between? The way I heard it in Lordsport, there was a blow coming
in from the west, rain and thunder, and old King Balon was crossing
one of them bridges when the wind got hold of it and just tore the
thing to pieces. He washed up two days later, all bloated and
broken. Crabs ate his eyes, I hear.”
The Greatjon laughed. “King crabs, I hope, to sup upon such royal
jelly, eh?”
The captain bobbed his head. “Aye, but that’s not all of it, no!” He
leaned forward. “The brother’s back.”
“Victarion?” asked Galbart Glover, surprised.
“Euron. Crow’s Eye, they call him, as black a pirate as ever raised
a sail. He’s been gone for years, but Lord Balon was no sooner cold
than there he was, sailing into Lordsport in his Silence. Black sails
and a red hull, and crewed by mutes. He’d been to Asshai and back,

I heard. Wherever he was, though, he’s home now, and he marched
right into Pyke and sat his arse in the Seastone Chair, and drowned
Lord Botley in a cask of seawater when he objected. That was when
I ran back to Myraham and slipped anchor, hoping I could get away
whilst things were confused. And so I did, and here I am.”
“Captain,” said Robb when the man was done, “you have my
thanks, and you will not go unrewarded. Lord Jason will take you
back to your ship when we are done. Pray wait outside.”
“That I will, Your Grace. That I will.”
No sooner had he left the king’s pavilion than the Greatjon began
to laugh, but Robb silenced him with a look. “Euron Greyjoy is no
man’s notion of a king, if half of what Theon said of him was true.
Theon is the rightful heir, unless he’s dead … but Victarion
commands the Iron Fleet. I can’t believe he would remain at Moat
Cailin while Euron Crow’s Eye holds the Seastone Chair. He has to
go back.”
“There’s a daughter as well,” Galbart Glover reminded him. “The
one who holds Deepwood Motte, and Robett’s wife and child.”
“If she stays at Deepwood Motte that’s all she can hope to hold,”
said Robb. “What’s true for the brothers is even more true for her.
She will need to sail home to oust Euron and press her own claim.”
Her son turned to Lord Jason Mallister. “You have a eet at
Seagard?”
“A eet, Your Grace? Half a dozen longships and two war galleys.
Enough to defend my own shores against raiders, but I could not
hope to meet the Iron Fleet in battle.”
“Nor would I ask it of you. The ironborn will be setting sail
toward Pyke, I expect. Theon told me how his people think. Every
captain a king on his own deck. They will all want a voice in the
succession. My lord, I need two of your longships to sail around the
Cape of Eagles and up the Neck to Greywater Watch.”
Lord Jason hesitated. “A dozen streams drain the wetwood, all
shallow, silty, and uncharted. I would not even call them rivers. The
channels are ever drifting and changing. There are endless sandbars,
deadfalls, and tangles of rotting trees. And Greywater Watch moves.
How are my ships to nd it?”

“Go upriver ying my banner. The crannogmen will nd you. I
want two ships to double the chances of my message reaching
Howland Reed. Lady Maege shall go on one, Galbart on the
second.” He turned to the two he’d named. “You’ll carry letters for
those lords of mine who remain in the north, but all the commands
within will be false, in case you have the misfortune to be taken. If
that happens, you must tell them that you were sailing for the
north. Back to Bear Island, or for the Stony Shore.” He tapped a
nger on the map. “Moat Cailin is the key. Lord Balon knew that,
which is why he sent his brother Victarion there with the hard heart
of the Greyjoy strength.”
“Succession squabbles or no, the ironborn are not such fools as to
abandon Moat Cailin,” said Lady Maege.
“No,” Robb admitted. “Victarion will leave the best part of his
garrison, I’d guess. Every man he takes will be one less man we
need to ght, however. And he will take many of his captains, count
on that. The leaders. He will need such men to speak for him if he
hopes to sit the Seastone Chair.”
“You cannot mean to attack up the causeway, Your Grace,” said
Galbart Glover. “The approaches are too narrow. There is no way to
deploy. No one has ever taken the Moat.”
“From the south,” said Robb. “But if we can attack from the north
and west simultaneously, and take the ironmen in the rear while
they are beating o what they think is my main thrust up the
causeway, then we have a chance. Once I link up with Lord Bolton
and the Freys, I will have more than twelve thousand men. I mean
to divide them into three battles and start up the causeway a halfday apart. If the Greyjoys have eyes south of the Neck, they will see
my whole strength rushing headlong at Moat Cailin.
“Roose Bolton will have the rearguard, while I command the
center. Greatjon, you shall lead the van against Moat Cailin. Your
attack must be so erce that the ironborn have no leisure to wonder
if anyone is creeping down on them from the north.”
The Greatjon chuckled. “Your creepers best come fast, or my men
will swarm those walls and win the Moat before you show your
face. I’ll make a gift of it to you when you come dawdling up.”

“That’s a gift I should be glad to have,” said Robb.
Edmure was frowning. “You talk of attacking the ironmen in the
rear, sire, but how do you mean to get north of them?”
“There are ways through the Neck that are not on any map,
Uncle. Ways known only to the crannogmen—narrow trails between
the bogs, and wet roads through the reeds that only boats can
follow.” He turned to his two messengers. “Tell Howland Reed that
he is to send guides to me, two days after I have started up the
causeway. To the center battle, where my own standard ies. Three
hosts will leave the Twins, but only two will reach Moat Cailin.
Mine own battle will melt away into the Neck, to reemerge on the
Fever. If we move swiftly once my uncle’s wed, we can all be in
position by year’s end. We will fall upon the Moat from three sides
on the rst day of the new century, as the ironmen are waking with
hammers beating at their heads from the mead they’ll qua the
night before.”
“I like this plan,” said the Greatjon. “I like it well.”
Galbart Glover rubbed his mouth. “There are risks. If the
crannogmen should fail you …”
“We will be no worse than before. But they will not fail. My
father knew the worth of Howland Reed.” Robb rolled up the map,
and only then looked at Catelyn. “Mother.”
She tensed. “Do you have some part in this for me?”
“Your part is to stay safe. Our journey through the Neck will be
dangerous, and naught but battle awaits us in the north. But Lord
Mallister has kindly o ered to keep you safe at Seagard until the
war is done. You will be comfortable there, I know.”
Is this my punishment for opposing him about Jon Snow? Or for being
a woman, and worse, a mother? It took her a moment to realize that
they were all watching her. They had known, she realized. Catelyn
should not have been surprised. She had won no friends by freeing
the Kingslayer, and more than once she had heard the Greatjon say
that women had no place on a battle eld.
Her anger must have blazed across her face, because Galbart
Glover spoke up before she said a word. “My lady, His Grace is
wise. It’s best you do not come with us.”

“Seagard will be brightened by your presence, Lady Catelyn,”
said Lord Jason Mallister.
“You would make me a prisoner,” she said.
“An honored guest,” Lord Jason insisted.
Catelyn turned to her son. “I mean no o ense to Lord Jason,” she
said sti y, “but if I cannot continue on with you, I would sooner
return to Riverrun.”
“I left my wife at Riverrun. I want my mother elsewhere. If you
keep all your treasures in one purse, you only make it easier for
those who would rob you. After the wedding, you shall go to
Seagard, that is my royal command.” Robb stood, and as quick as
that, her fate was settled. He picked up a sheet of parchment. “One
more matter. Lord Balon has left chaos in his wake, we hope. I
would not do the same. Yet I have no son as yet, my brothers Bran
and Rickon are dead, and my sister is wed to a Lannister. I’ve
thought long and hard about who might follow me. I command you
now as my true and loyal lords to x your seals to this document as
witnesses to my decision.”
A king indeed, Catelyn thought, defeated. She could only hope
that the trap he’d planned for Moat Cailin worked as well as the one
in which he’d just caught her.

SAMWELL

Whitetree, Sam thought. Please, let this be Whitetree. He

remembered Whitetree. Whitetree was on the maps he’d drawn, on
their way north. If this village was Whitetree, he knew where they
were. Please, it has to be. He wanted that so badly that he forgot his
feet for a little bit, he forgot the ache in his calves and his lower
back and the sti frozen ngers he could scarcely feel. He even
forgot about Lord Mormont and Craster and the wights and the
Others. Whitetree, Sam prayed, to any god that might be listening.
All wildling villages looked much alike, though. A huge weirwood
grew in the center of this one … but a white tree did not mean
Whitetree, necessarily. Hadn’t the weirwood at Whitetree been
bigger than this one? Maybe he was remembering it wrong. The
face carved into the bone pale trunk was long and sad; red tears of
dried sap leaked from its eyes. Was that how it looked when we came
north? Sam couldn’t recall.
Around the tree stood a handful of one-room hovels with sod
roofs, a longhall built of logs and grown over with moss, a stone
well, a sheepfold … but no sheep, nor any people. The wildlings
had gone to join Mance Rayder in the Frostfangs, taking all they
owned except their houses. Sam was thankful for that. Night was
coming on, and it would be good to sleep beneath a roof for once.
He was so tired. It seemed as though he had been walking half his
life. His boots were falling to pieces, and all the blisters on his feet

had burst and turned to callus, but now he had new blisters under
the callus, and his toes were getting frostbitten.
But it was either walk or die, Sam knew. Gilly was still weak
from childbirth and carrying the babe besides; she needed the horse
more than he did. The second horse had died on them three days
out from Craster’s Keep. It was a wonder she lasted that long, poor
half-starved thing. Sam’s weight had probably done for her. They
might have tried riding double, but he was afraid the same thing
would happen again. It’s better that I walk.
Sam left Gilly in the longhall to make a re while he poked his
head into the hovels. She was better at making res; he could never
seem to get the kindling to catch, and the last time he’d tried to
strike a spark o
int and steel he managed to cut himself on his
knife. Gilly bound up the gash for him, but his hand was sti and
sore, even clumsier than it had been before. He knew he should
wash the wound and change the binding, but he was afraid to look
at it. Besides, it was so cold that he hated taking o his gloves.
Sam did not know what he hoped to nd in the empty houses.
Maybe the wildlings had left some food behind. He had to take a
look. Jon had searched the huts at Whitetree, on their way north.
Inside one hovel Sam heard a rustling of rats from a dark corner,
but otherwise there was nothing in any of them but old straw, old
smells, and some ashes beneath the smoke hole.
He turned back to the weirwood and studied the carved face a
moment. It is not the face we saw, he admitted to himself. The tree’s
not half as big as the one at Whitetree. The red eyes wept blood, and
he didn’t remember that either. Clumsily, Sam sank to his knees.
“Old gods, hear my prayer. The Seven were my father’s gods but I
said my words to you when I joined the Watch. Help us now. I fear
we might be lost. We’re hungry too, and so cold. I don’t know what
gods I believe in now, but … please, if you’re there, help us. Gilly
has a little son.” That was all that he could think to say. The dusk
was deepening, the leaves of the weirwood rustling softly, waving
like a thousand blood-red hands. Whether Jon’s gods had heard him
or not he could not say.

By the time he returned to the longhall, Gilly had the re going.
She sat close to it with her furs opened, the babe at her breast. He’s
as hungry as we are, Sam thought. The old women had smuggled out
food for them from Craster’s, but they had eaten most of it by now.
Sam had been a hopeless hunter even at Horn Hill, where game was
plentiful and he had hounds and huntsmen to help him; here in this
endless empty forest, the chances of him catching anything were
remote. His e orts at shing the lakes and half-frozen streams had
been dismal failures as well.
“How much longer, Sam?” Gilly asked. “Is it far, still?”
“Not so far. Not so far as it was.” Sam shrugged out of his pack,
eased himself awkwardly to the oor, and tried to cross his legs. His
back ached so abominably from the walking that he would have
liked to lean up against one of the carved wooden pillars that
supported the roof, but the re was in the center of the hall beneath
the smoke hole and he craved warmth even more than comfort.
“Another few days should see us there.”
Sam had his maps, but if this wasn’t Whitetree then they weren’t
going to be much use. We went too far east to get around that lake, he
fretted, or maybe too far west when I tried to double back. He was
coming to hate lakes and rivers. Up here there was never a ferry or
bridge, which meant walking all the way around the lakes and
searching for places to ford the rivers. It was easier to follow a
game trail than to struggle through the brush, easier to circle a
ridge instead of climbing it. If Bannen or Dywen were with us we’d be
at Castle Black by now, warming our feet in the common room. Bannen
was dead, though, and Dywen gone with Grenn and Dolorous Edd
and the others.
The Wall is three hundred miles long and seven hundred feet high,
Sam reminded himself. If they kept going south, they had to nd it,
sooner or later. And he was certain that they had been going south.
By day he took directions from the sun, and on clear nights they
could follow the Ice Dragon’s tail, though they hadn’t traveled much
by night since the second horse had died. Even when the moon was
full it was too dark beneath the trees, and it would have been so

easy for Sam or the last garron to break a leg. We have to be well
south by now, we have to be.
What he wasn’t so certain of was how far east or west they might
have strayed. They would reach the Wall, yes … in a day or a
fortnight, it couldn’t be farther than that, surely, surely … but
where? It was the gate at Castle Black they needed to nd; the only
way through the Wall for a hundred leagues.
“Is the Wall as big as Craster used to say?” Gilly asked.
“Bigger.” Sam tried to sound cheerful. “So big you can’t even see
the castles hidden behind it. But they’re there, you’ll see. The Wall
is all ice, but the castles are stone and wood. There are tall towers
and deep vaults and a huge longhall with a great re burning in the
hearth, day and night. It’s so hot in there, Gilly, you’ll hardly
believe it.”
“Could I stand by the re? Me and the boy? Not for a long time,
just till we’re good and warm?”
“You can stand by the re as long as you like. You’ll have food
and drink, too. Hot mulled wine and a bowl of venison stewed with
onions, and Hobb’s bread right out of the oven, so hot it will burn
your ngers.” Sam peeled a glove o to wriggle his own ngers
near the ames, and soon regretted it. They had been numb with
cold, but as feeling returned they hurt so much he almost cried.
“Sometimes one of the brothers will sing,” he said, to take his mind
o the pain. “Dareon sang best, but they sent him to Eastwatch.
There’s still Halder, though. And Toad. His real name is Todder, but
he looks like a toad, so we call him that. He likes to sing, but he has
an awful voice.”
“Do you sing?” Gilly rearranged her furs, and she moved the babe
from one breast to the other.
Sam blushed. “I … I know some songs. When I was little I liked
to sing. I danced too, but my lord father never liked me to. He said
if I wanted to prance around I should do it in the yard with a sword
in my hand.”
“Could you sing some southron song? For the babe?”
“If you like.” Sam thought for a moment. “There’s a song our
septon used to sing to me and my sisters, when we were little and it

was time for us to go to sleep. ‘The Song of the Seven,’ it’s called.”
He cleared his throat and softly sang:
The Father’s face is stern and strong,
he sits and judges right from wrong.
He weighs our lives, the short and long,
and loves the little children.
The Mother gives the gift of life,
and watches over every wife.
Her gentle smile ends all strife,
and she loves her little children.
The Warrior stands before the foe,
protecting us where e’er we go.
With sword and shield and spear and bow,
he guards the little children.
The Crone is very wise and old,
and sees our fates as they unfold.
She lifts her lamp of shining gold,
to lead the little children.
The Smith, he labors day and night,
to put the world of men to right.
With hammer, plow, and re bright,
he builds for little children.
The Maiden dances through the sky,
she lives in every lover’s sigh,
Her smiles teach the birds to y,
and give dreams to little children.
The Seven Gods who made us all,
are listening if we should call.
So close your eyes, you shall not fall,
they see you, little children,
Just close your eyes, you shall not fall,
they see you, little children.
Sam remembered the last time he’d sung the song with his
mother, to lull baby Dickon to sleep. His father had heard their

voices and come barging in, angry. “I will have no more of that,”
Lord Randyll told his wife harshly. “You ruined one boy with those
soft septon’s songs, do you mean to do the same to this babe?” Then
he looked at Sam and said, “Go sing to your sisters, if you must
sing. I don’t want you near my son.”
Gilly’s babe had gone to sleep. He was such a tiny thing, and so
quiet that Sam feared for him. He didn’t even have a name. He had
asked Gilly about that, but she said it was bad luck to name a child
before he was two. So many of them died.
She tucked her nipple back inside her furs. “That was pretty, Sam.
You sing good.”
“You should hear Dareon. His voice is sweet as mead.”
“We drank the sweetest mead the day Craster made me a wife. It
was summer then, and not so cold.” Gilly gave him a puzzled look.
“Did you only sing of six gods? Craster always told us you
southrons had seven.”
“Seven,” he agreed, “but no one sings of the Stranger.” The
Stranger’s face was the face of death. Even talking of him made Sam
uncomfortable. “We should eat something. A bite or two.”
Nothing was left but a few black sausages, as hard as wood. Sam
sawed o a few thin slices for each of them. The e ort made his
wrist ache, but he was hungry enough to persist. If you chewed the
slices long enough they softened up, and tasted good. Craster’s
wives seasoned them with garlic.
After they had nished, Sam begged her pardon and went out to
relieve himself and look after the horse. A biting wind was blowing
from the north, and the leaves in the trees rattled at him as he
passed. He had to break the thin scum of ice on top of the stream so
the horse could get a drink. I had better bring her inside. He did not
want to wake up at break of day to nd that their horse had frozen
to death during the night. Gilly would keep going even if that
happened. The girl was very brave, not like him. He wished he knew
what he was going to do with her back at Castle Black. She kept
saying how she’d be his wife if he wanted, but black brothers didn’t
keep wives; besides, he was a Tarly of Horn Hill, he could never

wed a wildling. I’ll have to think of something. So long as we reach the
Wall alive, the rest doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter one little bit.
Leading the horse to the longhall was simple enough. Getting her
through the door was not, but Sam persisted. Gilly was already
dozing by the time he got the garron inside. He hobbled the horse
in a corner, fed some fresh wood to the re, took o his heavy
cloak, and wriggled down under the furs beside the wildling
woman. His cloak was big enough to cover all three of them and
keep in the warmth of their bodies.
Gilly smelled of milk and garlic and musty old fur, but he was
used to that by now. They were good smells, so far as Sam was
concerned. He liked sleeping next to her. It made him remember
times long past, when he had shared a huge bed at Horn Hill with
two of his sisters. That had ended when Lord Randyll decided it was
making him soft as a girl. Sleeping alone in my own cold cell never
made me any harder or braver, though. He wondered what his father
would say if he could see him now. I killed one of the Others, my lord,
he imagined saying. I stabbed him with an obsidian dagger, and my
Sworn Brothers call me Sam the Slayer now. But even in his fancies,
Lord Randyll only scowled, disbelieving.
His dreams were strange that night. He was back at Horn Hill, at
the castle, but his father was not there. It was Sam’s castle now. Jon
Snow was with him. Lord Mormont too, the Old Bear, and Grenn
and Dolorous Edd and Pyp and Toad and all his other brothers from
the Watch, but they wore bright colors instead of black. Sam sat at
the high table and feasted them all, cutting thick slices o a roast
with his father’s greatsword Heartsbane. There were sweet cakes to
eat and honeyed wine to drink, there was singing and dancing, and
everyone was warm. When the feast was done he went up to sleep;
not to the lord’s bedchamber where his mother and father lived but
to the room he had once shared with his sisters. Only instead of his
sisters it was Gilly waiting in the huge soft bed, wearing nothing
but a big shaggy fur, milk leaking from her breasts.
He woke suddenly, in cold and dread.
The re had burned down to smouldering red embers. The air
itself seemed frozen, it was so cold. In the corner the garron was

whinnying and kicking the logs with her hind legs. Gilly sat beside
the re, hugging her babe. Sam sat up groggy, his breath pu ng
pale from his open mouth. The longhall was dark with shadows,
black and blacker. The hair on his arms was standing up.
It’s nothing, he told himself. I’m cold, that’s all.
Then, by the door, one of the shadows moved. A big one.
This is still a dream, Sam prayed. Oh, make it that I’m still asleep,
make it a nightmare. He’s dead, he’s dead, I saw him die. “He’s come
for the babe,” Gilly wept. “He smells him. A babe fresh-born stinks
o’ life. He’s come for the life.”
The huge dark shape stooped under the lintel, into the hall, and
shambled toward them. In the dim light of the re, the shadow
became Small Paul.
“Go away,” Sam croaked. “We don’t want you here.”
Paul’s hands were coal, his face was milk, his eyes shone a bitter
blue. Hoarfrost whitened his beard, and on one shoulder hunched a
raven, pecking at his cheek, eating the dead white esh. Sam’s
bladder let go, and he felt the warmth running down his legs.
“Gilly, calm the horse and lead her out. You do that.”
“You—” she started.
“I have the knife. The dragonglass dagger.” He fumbled it out as
he got to his feet. He’d given the rst knife to Grenn, but thankfully
he’d remembered to take Lord Mormont’s dagger before eeing
Craster’s Keep. He clutched it tight, moving away from the re,
away from Gilly and the babe. “Paul?” He meant to sound brave,
but it came out in a squeak. “Small Paul. Do you know me? I’m
Sam, fat Sam, Sam the Scared, you saved me in the woods. You
carried me when I couldn’t walk another step. No one else could
have done that, but you did.” Sam backed away, knife in hand,
sniveling. I am such a coward. “Don’t hurt us, Paul. Please. Why
would you want to hurt us?”
Gilly scrabbled backward across the hard dirt oor. The wight
turned his head to look at her, but Sam shouted “NO!” and he
turned back. The raven on his shoulder ripped a strip of esh from
his pale ruined cheek. Sam held the dagger before him, breathing
like a blacksmith’s bellows. Across the longhall, Gilly reached the

garron. Gods give me courage, Sam prayed. For once, give me a little
courage. Just long enough for her to get away.
Small Paul moved toward him. Sam backed o until he came up
against a rough log wall. He clutched the dagger with both hands to
hold it steady. The wight did not seem to fear the dragonglass.
Perhaps he did not know what it was. He moved slowly, but Small
Paul had never been quick even when he’d been alive. Behind him,
Gilly murmured to calm the garron and tried to urge it toward the
door. But the horse must have caught a whi of the wight’s queer
cold scent. Suddenly she balked, rearing, her hooves lashing at the
frosty air. Paul swung toward the sound, and seemed to lose all
interest in Sam.
There was no time to think or pray or be afraid. Samwell Tarly
threw himself forward and plunged the dagger down into Small
Paul’s back. Half-turned, the wight never saw him coming. The
raven gave a shriek and took to the air. “You’re dead!” Sam
screamed as he stabbed. “You’re dead, you’re dead.” He stabbed and
screamed, again and again, tearing huge rents in Paul’s heavy black
cloak. Shards of dragonglass ew everywhere as the blade shattered
on the iron mail beneath the wool.
Sam’s wail made a white mist in the black air. He dropped the
useless hilt and took a hasty step backwards as Small Paul twisted
around. Before he could get out his other knife, the steel knife that
every brother carried, the wight’s black hands locked beneath his
chins. Paul’s ngers were so cold they seemed to burn. They
burrowed deep into the soft esh of Sam’s throat. Run, Gilly, run, he
wanted to scream, but when he opened his mouth only a choking
sound emerged.
His fumbling ngers nally found the dagger, but when he
slammed it up into the wight’s belly the point skidded o the iron
links, and the blade went spinning from Sam’s hand. Small Paul’s
ngers tightened inexorably, and began to twist. He’s going to rip my
head o , Sam thought in despair. His throat felt frozen, his lungs on
re. He punched and pulled at the wight’s wrists, to no avail. He
kicked Paul between the legs, uselessly. The world shrank to two
blue stars, a terrible crushing pain, and a cold so erce that his tears

froze over his eyes. Sam squirmed and pulled, desperate … and then
he lurched forward.
Small Paul was big and powerful, but Sam still outweighed him,
and the wights were clumsy, he had seen that on the Fist. The
sudden shift sent Paul staggering back a step, and the living man
and the dead one went crashing down together. The impact knocked
one hand from Sam’s throat, and he was able to suck in a quick
breath of air before the icy black ngers returned. The taste of
blood lled his mouth. He twisted his neck around, looking for his
knife, and saw a dull orange glow. The re! Only ember and ashes
remained, but still … he could not breathe, or think … Sam
wrenched himself sideways, pulling Paul with him … his arms
ailed against the dirt oor, groping, reaching, scattering the ashes,
until at last they found something hot … a chunk of charred wood,
smouldering red and orange within the black … his ngers closed
around it, and he smashed it into Paul’s mouth, so hard he felt teeth
shatter.
Yet even so the wight’s grip did not loosen. Sam’s last thoughts
were for the mother who had loved him and the father he had
failed. The longhall was spinning around him when he saw the wisp
of smoke rising from between Paul’s broken teeth. Then the dead
man’s face burst into ame, and the hands were gone.
Sam sucked in air, and rolled feebly away. The wight was
burning, hoarfrost dripping from his beard as the esh beneath
blackened. Sam heard the raven shriek, but Paul himself made no
sound. When his mouth opened, only ames came out. And his
eyes … It’s gone, the blue glow is gone.
He crept to the door. The air was so cold that it hurt to breathe,
but such a ne sweet hurt. He ducked from the longhall. “Gilly?” he
called. “Gilly, I killed it. Gil—”
She stood with her back against the weirwood, the boy in her
arms. The wights were all around her. There were a dozen of them,
a score, more … some had been wildlings once, and still wore skins
and hides … but more had been his brothers. Sam saw Lark the
Sisterman, Softfoot, Ryles. The wen on Chett’s neck was black, his
boils covered with a thin lm of ice. And that one looked like Hake,

though it was hard to know for certain with half his head missing.
They had torn the poor garron apart, and were pulling out her
entrails with dripping red hands. Pale steam rose from her belly.
Sam made a whimpery sound. “It’s not fair …”
“Fair.” The raven landed on his shoulder. “Fair, far, fear.” It
apped its wings, and screamed along with Gilly. The wights were
almost on her. He heard the dark red leaves of the weirwood
rustling, whispering to one another in a tongue he did not know.
The starlight itself seemed to stir, and all around them the trees
groaned and creaked. Sam Tarly turned the color of curdled milk,
and his eyes went wide as plates. Ravens! They were in the
weirwood, hundreds of them, thousands, perched on the bone-white
branches, peering between the leaves. He saw their beaks open as
they screamed, saw them spread their black wings. Shrieking,
apping, they descended on the wights in angry clouds. They
swarmed round Chett’s face and pecked at his blue eyes, they
covered the Sisterman like ies, they plucked gobbets from inside
Hake’s shattered head. There were so many that when Sam looked
up, he could not see the moon.
“Go,” said the bird on his shoulder. “Go, go, go.”
Sam ran, pu s of frost exploding from his mouth. All around him
the wights ailed at the black wings and sharp beaks that assailed
them, falling in an eerie silence with never a grunt nor cry. But the
ravens ignored Sam. He took Gilly by the hand and pulled her away
from the weirwood. “We have to go.”
“But where?” Gilly hurried after him, holding her baby. “They
killed our horse, how will we …”
“Brother!” The shout cut through the night, through the shrieks of
a thousand ravens. Beneath the trees, a man mu ed head to heels
in mottled blacks and greys sat astride an elk. “Here,” the rider
called. A hood shadowed his face.
He’s wearing blacks. Sam urged Gilly toward him. The elk was
huge, a great elk, ten feet tall at the shoulder, with a rack of antlers
near as wide. The creature sank to his knees to let them mount.
“Here,” the rider said, reaching down with a gloved hand to pull
Gilly up behind him. Then it was Sam’s turn. “My thanks,” he

pu ed. Only when he grasped the o ered hand did he realize that
the rider wore no glove. His hand was black and cold, with ngers
hard as stone.

ARYA

When they reached the top of the ridge and saw the river, Sandor

Clegane reined up hard and cursed.
The rain was falling from a black iron sky, pricking the green and
brown torrent with ten thousand swords. It must be a mile across,
Arya thought. The tops of half a hundred trees poked up out the
swirling waters, their limbs clutching for the sky like the arms of
drowning men. Thick mats of sodden leaves choked the shoreline,
and farther out in the channel she glimpsed something pale and
swollen, a deer or perhaps a dead horse, moving swiftly
downstream. There was a sound too, a low rumble at the edge of
hearing, like the sound a dog makes just before he growls.
Arya squirmed in the saddle and felt the links of the Hound’s mail
digging into her back. His arms encircled her; on the left, the
burned arm, he’d donned a steel vambrace for protection, but she’d
seen him change the dressings, and the esh beneath was still raw
and seeping. If the burns pained him, though, Sandor Clegane gave
no hint of it.
“Is this the Blackwater Rush?” They had ridden so far in rain and
darkness, through trackless woods and nameless villages, that Arya
had lost all sense of where they were.
“It’s a river we need to cross, that’s all you need to know.”
Clegane would answer her from time to time, but he had warned
her not to talk back. He had given her a lot of warnings that rst
day. “The next time you hit me, I’ll tie your hands behind your

back,” he’d said. “The next time you try and run o , I’ll bind your
feet together. Scream or shout or bite me again, and I’ll gag you.
We can ride double, or I can throw you across the back of the horse
trussed up like a sow for slaughter. Your choice.”
She had chosen to ride, but the rst time they made camp she’d
waited until she thought he was asleep, and found a big jagged rock
to smash his ugly head in. Quiet as a shadow, she told herself as she
crept toward him, but that wasn’t quiet enough. The Hound hadn’t
been asleep after all. Or maybe he’d woken. Whichever it was, his
eyes opened, his mouth twitched, and he took the rock away from
her as if she were a baby. The best she could do was kick him. “I’ll
give you that one,” he said, when he ung the rock into the bushes.
“But if you’re stupid enough to try again, I’ll hurt you.”
“Why don’t you just kill me like you did Mycah?” Arya had
screamed at him. She was still de ant then, more angry than scared.
He answered by grabbing the front of her tunic and yanking her
within an inch of his burned face. “The next time you say that name
I’ll beat you so bad you’ll wish I killed you.”
After that, he rolled her in his horse blanket every night when he
went to sleep, and tied ropes around her top and bottom so she was
bound up as tight as a babe in swaddling clothes.
It has to be the Blackwater, Arya decided as she watched the rain
lash the river. The Hound was Jo rey’s dog; he was taking her back
to the Red Keep, to hand to Jo rey and the queen. She wished that
the sun would come out, so she could tell which way they were
going. The more she looked at the moss on the trees the more
confused she got. The Blackwater wasn’t so wide at King’s Landing, but
that was before the rains.
“The fords will all be gone,” Sandor Clegane said, “and I wouldn’t
care to try and swim over neither.”
There’s no way across, she thought. Lord Beric will catch us for sure.
Clegane had pushed his big black stallion hard, doubling back thrice
to throw o pursuit, once even riding half a mile up the center of a
swollen stream … but Arya still expected to see the outlaws every
time she looked back. She had tried to help them by scratching her
name on the trunks of trees when she went in the bushes to make

water, but the fourth time she did it he caught her, and that was the
end of that. It doesn’t matter, Arya told herself, Thoros will nd me in
his ames. Only he hadn’t. Not yet, anyway, and once they crossed
the river …
“Harroway town shouldn’t be far,” the Hound said. “Where Lord
Roote stables Old King Andahar’s two-headed water horse. Maybe
we’ll ride across.”
Arya had never heard of Old King Andahar. She’d never seen a
horse with two heads either, especially not one who could run on
water, but she knew better than to ask. She held her tongue and sat
sti as the Hound turned the stallion’s head and trotted along the
ridgeline, following the river downstream. At least the rain was at
their backs this way. She’d had enough of it stinging her eyes halfblind and washing down her cheeks like she was crying. Wolves
never cry, she reminded herself again.
It could not have been much past noon, but the sky was dark as
dusk. They had not seen the sun in more days than she could count.
Arya was soaked to the bone, saddle-sore, sni ing, and achy. She
had a fever too, and sometimes shivered uncontrollably, but when
she’d told the Hound that she was sick he’d only snarled at her.
“Wipe your nose and shut your mouth,” he told her. Half the time
he slept in the saddle now, trusting his stallion to follow whatever
rutted farm track or game trail they were on. The horse was a
heavy courser, almost as big as a destrier but much faster. Stranger,
the Hound called him. Arya had tried to steal him once, when
Clegane was taking a piss against a tree, thinking she could ride o
before he could catch her. Stranger had almost bitten her face o .
He was gentle as an old gelding with his master, but otherwise he
had a temper as black as he was. She had never known a horse so
quick to bite or kick.
They rode beside the river for hours, splashing across two muddy
vassal streams before they reached the place that Sandor Clegane
had spoken of. “Lord Harroway’s Town,” he said, and then, when he
saw it, “Seven hells!” The town was drowned and desolate. The
rising waters had over owed the riverbanks. All that remained of
Harroway town was the upper story of a daub-and-wattle inn, the

seven-sided dome of a sunken sept, two-thirds of a stone
roundtower, some moldy thatch roofs, and a forest of chimneys.
But there was smoke coming from the tower, Arya saw, and
below one arched window a wide at-bottomed boat was chained
up tight. The boat had a dozen oarlocks and a pair of great carved
wooden horse heads mounted fore and aft. The two-headed horse, she
realized. There was a wooden house with a sod roof right in the
middle of the deck, and when the Hound cupped his hands around
his mouth and shouted two men came spilling out. A third appeared
in the window of the roundtower, clutching a loaded crossbow.
“What do you want?” he shouted across the swirling brown waters.
“Take us over,” the Hound shouted back.
The men in the boat conferred with one another. One of them, a
grizzled grey-haired man with thick arms and a bent back, stepped
to the rail. “It will cost you.”
“Then I’ll pay.”
With what? Arya wondered. The outlaws had taken Clegane’s
gold, but maybe Lord Beric had left him some silver and copper. A
ferry ride shouldn’t cost more than a few coppers …
The ferrymen were talking again. Finally the bent-backed one
turned away and gave a shout. Six more men appeared, pulling up
hoods to keep the rain o their heads. Still more squirmed out the
holdfast window and leapt down onto the deck. Half of them looked
enough like the bent-backed man to be his kin. Some of them undid
the chains and took up long poles, while the others slid heavy widebladed oars through the locks. The ferry swung about and began to
creep slowly toward the shallows, oars stroking smoothly on either
side. Sandor Clegane rode down the hill to meet it.
When the aft end of the boat slammed into the hillside, the
ferrymen opened a wide door beneath the carved horse’s head, and
extended a heavy oaken plank. Stranger balked at the water’s edge,
but the Hound put his heels into the courser’s ank and urged him
up the gangway. The bent-backed man was waiting for them on
deck. “Wet enough for you, ser?” he asked, smiling.
The Hound’s mouth gave a twitch. “I need your boat, not your
bloody wit.” He dismounted, and pulled Arya down beside him. One

of the boatmen reached for Stranger’s bridle. “I wouldn’t,” Clegane
said, as the horse kicked. The man leapt back, slipped on the rainslick deck, and crashed onto his arse, cursing.
The ferryman with the bent back wasn’t smiling any longer. “We
can get you across,” he said sourly. “It will cost you a gold piece.
Another for the horse. A third for the boy.”
“Three dragons?” Clegane gave a bark of laughter. “For three
dragons I should own the bloody ferry.”
“Last year, might be you could. But with this river, I’ll need extra
hands on the poles and oars just to see we don’t get swept a
hundred miles out to sea. Here’s your choice. Three dragons, or you
teach that hellhorse how to walk on water.”
“I like an honest brigand. Have it your way. Three
dragons … when you put us ashore safe on the north bank.”
“I’ll have them now, or we don’t go.” The man thrust out a thick,
callused hand, palm up.
Clegane rattled his longsword to loosen the blade in the scabbard.
“Here’s your choice. Gold on the north bank, or steel on the south.”
The ferryman looked up at the Hound’s face. Arya could tell that
he didn’t like what he saw there. He had a dozen men behind him,
strong men with oars and hardwood poles in their hands, but none
of them were rushing forward to help him. Together they could
overwhelm Sandor Clegane, though he’d likely kill three or four of
them before they took him down. “How do I know you’re good for
it?” the bent-backed man asked, after a moment.
He’s not, she wanted to shout. Instead she bit her lip.
“Knight’s honor,” the Hound said, unsmiling.
He’s not even a knight. She did not say that either.
“That will do.” The ferryman spat. “Come on then, we can have
you across before dark. Tie the horse up, I don’t want him spooking
when we’re under way. There’s a brazier in the cabin if you and
your son want to get warm.”
“I’m not his stupid son!” said Arya furiously. That was even worse
than being taken for a boy. She was so angry that she might have
told them who she really was, only Sandor Clegane grabbed her by
the back of the collar and hoisted her one-handed o the deck.

“How many times do I need to tell you to shut your bloody mouth?”
He shook her so hard her teeth rattled, then let her fall. “Get in
there and get dry, like the man said.”
Arya did as she was told. The big iron brazier was glowing red,
lling the room with a sullen su ocating heat. It felt pleasant to
stand beside it, to warm her hands and dry o a little bit, but as
soon as she felt the deck move under her feet she slipped back out
through the forward door.
The two-headed horse eased slowly through the shallows, picking
its way between the chimneys and rooftops of drowned Harroway.
A dozen men labored at the oars while four more used the long
poles to push o whenever they came too close to a rock, a tree, or
a sunken house. The bent-backed man had the rudder. Rain pattered
against the smooth planks of the deck and splashed o the tall
carved horseheads fore and aft. Arya was getting soaked again, but
she didn’t care. She wanted to see. The man with the crossbow still
stood in the window of the roundtower, she saw. His eyes followed
her as the ferry slid by underneath. She wondered if he was this
Lord Roote that the Hound had mentioned. He doesn’t look much like
a lord. But then, she didn’t look much like a lady either.
Once they were beyond the town and out in the river proper, the
current grew much stronger. Through the grey haze of rain Arya
could make out a tall stone pillar on the far shore that surely
marked the ferry landing, but no sooner had she seen it than she
realized that they were being pushed away from it, downstream.
The oarsmen were rowing more vigorously now, ghting the rage
of the river. Leaves and broken branches swirled past as fast as if
they’d been red from a scorpion. The men with the poles leaned
out and shoved away anything that came too close. It was windier
out here, too. Whenever she turned to look upstream, Arya got a
face full of blowing rain. Stranger was screaming and kicking as the
deck moved underfoot.
If I jumped over the side, the river would wash me away before the
Hound even knew that I was gone. She looked back over a shoulder,
and saw Sandor Clegane struggling with his frightened horse, trying
to calm him. She would never have a better chance to get away

from him. I might drown, though. Jon used to say that she swam like
a sh, but even a sh might have trouble in this river. Still,
drowning might be better than King’s Landing. She thought about
Jo rey and crept up to the prow. The river was murky brown with
mud and lashed by rain, looking more like soup than water. Arya
wondered how cold it would be. I couldn’t get much wetter than I am
now. She put a hand on the rail.
But a sudden shout snapped her head about before she could leap.
The ferrymen were rushing forward, poles in hand. For a moment
she did not understand what was happening. Then she saw it: an
uprooted tree, huge and dark, coming straight at them. A tangle of
roots and limbs poked up out of the water as it came, like the
reaching arms of a great kraken. The oarsmen were backing water
frantically, trying to avoid a collision that could capsize them or
stove their hull in. The old man had wrenched the rudder about, and
the horse at the prow was swinging downstream, but too slowly.
Glistening brown and black, the tree rushed toward them like a
battering ram.
It could not have been more than ten feet from their prow when
two of the boatmen somehow caught it with their long poles. One
snapped, and the long splintering craaaack made it sound as if the
ferry were breaking up beneath them. But the second man managed
to give the trunk a hard shove, just enough to de ect it away from
them. The tree swept past the ferry with inches to spare, its
branches scrabbling like claws against the horsehead. Only just
when it seemed as if they were clear, one of the monster’s upper
limbs dealt them a glancing thump. The ferry seemed to shudder,
and Arya slipped, landing painfully on one knee. The man with the
broken pole was not so lucky. She heard him shout as he stumbled
over the side. Then the raging brown water closed over him, and he
was gone in the time it took Arya to climb back to her feet. One of
the other boatmen snatched up a coil of rope, but there was no one
to throw it to.
Maybe he’ll wash up someplace downstream, Arya tried to tell
herself, but the thought had a hollow ring. She had lost all desire to
go swimming. When Sandor Clegane shouted at her to get back

inside before he beat her bloody, she went meekly. The ferry was
ghting to turn back on course by then, against a river that wanted
nothing more than to carry it down to the sea.
When they nally came ashore, it was a good two miles
downriver of their usual landing. The boat slammed into the bank
so hard that another pole snapped, and Arya almost lost her feet
again. Sandor Clegane lifted her onto Stranger’s back as if she
weighed no more than a doll. The boatmen stared at them with dull,
exhausted eyes, all but the bent-backed man, who held his hand out.
“Six dragons,” he demanded. “Three for the passage, and three for
the man I lost.”
Sandor Clegane rummaged in his pouch and shoved a crumpled
wad of parchment into the boatman’s palm. “There. Take ten.”
“Ten?” The ferryman was confused. “What’s this, now?”
“A dead man’s note, good for nine thousand dragons or
nearabouts.” The Hound swung up into the saddle behind Arya, and
smiled down unpleasantly. “Ten of it is yours. I’ll be back for the
rest one day, so see you don’t go spending it.”
The man squinted down at the parchment. “Writing. What good’s
writing? You promised gold. Knight’s honor, you said.”
“Knights have no bloody honor. Time you learned that, old man.”
The Hound gave Stranger the spur and galloped o through the
rain. The ferrymen threw curses at their backs, and one or two
threw stones. Clegane ignored rocks and words alike, and before
long they were lost in the gloom of the trees, the river a dwindling
roar behind them. “The ferry won’t cross back till morning,” he
said, “and that lot won’t be taking paper promises from the next
fools to come along. If your friends are chasing us, they’re going to
need to be bloody strong swimmers.”
Arya huddled down and held her tongue. Valar morghulis, she
thought sullenly. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Jo rey, Queen Cersei.
Dunsen, Poliver, Ra the Sweetling, Ser Gregor and the Tickler. And
the Hound, the Hound, the Hound.
By the time the rain stopped and the clouds broke, she was
shivering and sneezing so badly that Clegane called a halt for the
night, and even tried to make a re. The wood they gathered

proved too wet, though. Nothing he tried was enough to make the
spark catch. Finally he kicked it all apart in disgust. “Seven bloody
hells,” he swore. “I hate res.”
They sat on damp rocks beneath an oak tree, listening to the slow
patter of water dripping from the leaves as they ate a cold supper of
hardbread, moldy cheese, and smoked sausage. The Hound sliced
the meat with his dagger, and narrowed his eyes when he caught
Arya looking at the knife. “Don’t even think about it.”
“I wasn’t,” she lied.
He snorted to show what he thought of that, but he gave her a
thick slice of sausage. Arya worried it with her teeth, watching him
all the while. “I never beat your sister,” the Hound said. “But I’ll
beat you if you make me. Stop trying to think up ways to kill me.
None of it will do you a bit of good.”
She had nothing to say to that. She gnawed on the sausage and
stared at him coldly. Hard as stone, she thought.
“At least you look at my face. I’ll give you that, you little shewolf. How do you like it?”
“I don’t. It’s all burned and ugly.”
Clegane o ered her a chunk of cheese on the point of his dagger.
“You’re a little fool. What good would it do you if you did get
away? You’d just get caught by someone worse.”
“I would not,” she insisted. “There is no one worse.”
“You never knew my brother. Gregor once killed a man for
snoring. His own man.” When he grinned, the burned side of his
face pulled tight, twisting his mouth in a queer unpleasant way. He
had no lips on that side, and only the stump of an ear.
“I did so know your brother.” Maybe the Mountain was worse,
now that Arya thought about it. “Him and Dunsen and Polliver, and
Ra the Sweetling and the Tickler.”
The Hound seemed surprised. “And how would Ned Stark’s
precious little daughter come to know the likes of them? Gregor
never brings his pet rats to court.”
“I know them from the village.” She ate the cheese, and reached
for a hunk of hardbread. “The village by the lake where they caught

Gendry, me, and Hot Pie. They caught Lommy Greenhands too, but
Ra the Sweetling killed him because his leg was hurt.”
Clegane’s mouth twitched. “Caught you? My brother caught you?”
That made him laugh, a sour sound, part rumble and part snarl.
“Gregor never knew what he had, did he? He couldn’t have, or he
would have dragged you back kicking and screaming to King’s
Landing and dumped you in Cersei’s lap. Oh, that’s bloody sweet.
I’ll be sure and tell him that, before I cut his heart out.”
It wasn’t the rst time he had talked of killing the Mountain. “But
he’s your brother,” Arya said dubiously.
“Didn’t you ever have a brother you wanted to kill?” He laughed
again. “Or maybe a sister?” He must have seen something in her
face then, for he leaned closer. “Sansa. That’s it, isn’t it? The wolf
bitch wants to kill the pretty bird.”
“No,” Arya spat back at him. “I’d like to kill you.”
“Because I hacked your little friend in two? I’ve killed a lot more
than him, I promise you. You think that makes me some monster.
Well, maybe it does, but I saved your sister’s life too. The day the
mob pulled her o her horse, I cut through them and brought her
back to the castle, else she would have gotten what Lollys
Stokeworth got. And she sang for me. You didn’t know that, did
you? Your sister sang me a sweet little song.”
“You’re lying,” she said at once.
“You don’t know half as much as you think you do. The
Blackwater? Where in seven hells do you think we are? Where do
you think we’re going?”
The scorn in his voice made her hesitate. “Back to King’s
Landing,” she said. “You’re bringing me to Jo rey and the queen.”
That was wrong, she realized all of a sudden, just from the way he
asked the questions. But she had to say something.
“Stupid blind little wolf bitch.” His voice was rough and hard as
an iron rasp. “Bugger Jo rey, bugger the queen, and bugger that
twisted little gargoyle she calls a brother. I’m done with their city,
done with their Kingsguard, done with Lannisters. What’s a dog to
do with lions, I ask you?” He reached for his waterskin, took a long
pull. As he wiped his mouth, he o ered the skin to Arya and said,

“The river was the Trident, girl. The Trident, not the Blackwater.
Make the map in your head, if you can. On the morrow we should
reach the kingsroad. We’ll make good time after that, straight up to
the Twins. It’s going to be me who hands you over to that mother
of yours. Not the noble lightning lord or that aming fraud of a
priest, the monster.” He grinned at the look on her face. “You think
your outlaw friends are the only ones can smell a ransom?
Dondarrion took my gold, so I took you. You’re worth twice what
they stole from me, I’d say. Maybe even more if I sold you back to
the Lannisters like you fear, but I won’t. Even a dog gets tired of
being kicked. If this Young Wolf has the wits the gods gave a toad,
he’ll make me a lordling and beg me to enter his service. He needs
me, though he may not know it yet. Maybe I’ll even kill Gregor for
him, he’d like that.”
“He’ll never take you,” she spat back. “Not you.”
“Then I’ll take as much gold as I can carry, laugh in his face, and
ride o . If he doesn’t take me, he’d be wise to kill me, but he won’t.
Too much his father’s son, from what I hear. Fine with me. Either
way I win. And so do you, she-wolf. So stop whimpering and
snapping at me, I’m sick of it. Keep your mouth shut and do as I tell
you, and maybe we’ll even be in time for your uncle’s bloody
wedding.”

JON

The mare was blown, but Jon could not let up on her. He had to

reach the Wall before the Magnar. He would have slept in the
saddle if he’d had one; lacking that, it was hard enough to stay
ahorse while awake. His wounded leg grew ever more painful. He
dare not rest long enough to let it heal. Instead he ripped it open
anew each time he mounted up.
When he crested a rise and saw the brown rutted kingsroad
before him wending its way north through hill and plain, he patted
the mare’s neck and said, “Now all we need do is follow the road,
girl. Soon the Wall.” His leg had gone as sti as wood by then, and
fever had made him so light-headed that twice he found himself
riding in the wrong direction.
Soon the Wall. He pictured his friends drinking mulled wine in the
common hall. Hobb would be with his kettles, Donal Noye at his
forge, Maester Aemon in his rooms beneath the rookery. And the
Old Bear? Sam, Grenn, Dolorous Edd, Dywen with his wooden
teeth … Jon could only pray that some had escaped the Fist.
Ygritte was much in his thoughts as well. He remembered the
smell of her hair, the warmth of her body … and the look on her
face as she slit the old man’s throat. You were wrong to love her, a
voice whispered. You were wrong to leave her, a di erent voice
insisted. He wondered if his father had been torn the same way,
when he’d left Jon’s mother to return to Lady Catelyn. He was
pledged to Lady Stark, and I am pledged to the Night’s Watch.

He almost rode through Mole’s Town, so feverish that he did not
know where he was. Most of the village was hidden underground,
only a handful of small hovels to be seen by the light of the waning
moon. The brothel was a shed no bigger than a privy, its red lantern
creaking in the wind, a bloodshot eye peering through the
blackness. Jon dismounted at the adjoining stable, half-stumbling
from the mare’s back as he shouted two boys awake. “I need a fresh
mount, with saddle and bridle,” he told them, in a tone that
brooked no argument. They brought him that; a skin of wine as
well, and half a loaf of brown bread. “Wake the village,” he told
them. “Warn them. There are wildlings south of the Wall. Gather
your goods and make for Castle Black.” He pulled himself onto the
black gelding they’d given him, gritting his teeth at the pain in his
leg, and rode hard for the north.
As the stars began to fade in the eastern sky, the Wall appeared
before him, rising above the trees and the morning mists. Moonlight
glimmered pale against the ice. He urged the gelding on, following
the muddy slick road until he saw the stone towers and timbered
halls of Castle Black huddled like broken toys beneath the great cli
of ice. By then the Wall glowed pink and purple with the rst light
of dawn.
No sentries challenged him as he rode past the outbuildings. No
one came forth to bar his way. Castle Black seemed as much a ruin
as Greyguard. Brown brittle weeds grew between cracks in the
stones of the courtyards. Old snow covered the roof of the Flint
Barracks and lay in drifts against the north side of Hardin’s Tower,
where Jon used to sleep before being made the Old Bear’s steward.
Fingers of soot streaked the Lord Commander’s Tower where the
smoke had boiled from the windows. Mormont had moved to the
King’s Tower after the re, but Jon saw no lights there either. From
the ground he could not tell if there were sentries walking the Wall
seven hundred feet above, but he saw no one on the huge
switchback stair that climbed the south face of the ice like some
great wooden thunderbolt.
There was smoke rising from the chimney of the armory, though;
only a wisp, almost invisible against the grey northern sky, but it

was enough. Jon dismounted and limped toward it. Warmth poured
out the open door like the hot breath of summer. Within, one-armed
Donal Noye was working his bellows at the re. He looked up at
the noise. “Jon Snow?”
“None else.” Despite fever, exhaustion, his leg, the Magnar, the
old man, Ygritte, Mance, despite it all, Jon smiled. It was good to
be back, good to see Noye with his big belly and pinned-up sleeve,
his jaw bristling with black stubble.
The smith released his grip on the bellows. “Your face …”
He had almost forgotten about his face. “A skinchanger tried to
rip out my eye.”
Noye frowned. “Scarred or smooth, it’s a face I thought I’d seen
the last of. We heard you’d gone over to Mance Raydar.”
Jon grasped the door to stay upright. “Who told you that?”
“Jarman Buckwell. He returned a fortnight past. His scouts claim
they saw you with their own eyes, riding along beside the wildling
column and wearing a sheepskin cloak.” Noye eyed him. “I see the
last part’s true.”
“It’s all true,” Jon confessed. “As far as it goes.”
“Should I be pulling down a sword to gut you, then?”
“No. I was acting on orders. Qhorin Halfhand’s last command.
Noye, where is the garrison?”
“Defending the Wall against your wildling friends.”
“Yes, but where?”
“Everywhere. Harma Dogshead was seen at Woodswatch-by-thePool, Rattleshirt at Long Barrow, the Weeper near Icemark. All
along the Wall … they’re here, they’re there, they’re climbing near
Queensgate, they’re hacking at the gates of Greyguard, they’re
massing against Eastwatch … but one glimpse of a black cloak and
they’re gone. Next day they’re somewhere else.”
Jon swallowed a groan. “Feints. Mance wants us to spread
ourselves thin, don’t you see?” And Bowen Marsh has obliged him.
“The gate is here. The attack is here.”
Noye crossed the room. “Your leg is drenched in blood.”
Jon looked down dully. It was true. His wound had opened again.
“An arrow wound …”

“A wildling arrow.” It was not a question. Noye had only one
arm, but that was thick with muscle. He slid it under Jon’s to help
support him. “You’re white as milk, and burning hot besides. I’m
taking you to Aemon.”
“There’s no time. There are wildlings south of the Wall, coming
up from Queenscrown to open the gate.”
“How many?” Noye half-carried Jon out the door.
“A hundred and twenty, and well armed for wildlings. Bronze
armor, some bits of steel. How many men are left here?”
“Forty odd,” said Donal Noye. “The crippled and in rm, and some
green boys still in training.”
“If Marsh is gone, who did he name as castellan?”
The armorer laughed. “Ser Wynton, gods preserve him. Last
knight in the castle and all. The thing is, Stout seems to have
forgotten and no one’s been rushing to remind him. I suppose I’m as
much a commander as we have now. The meanest of the cripples.”
That was for the good, at least. The one-armed armorer was hard
headed, tough, and well seasoned in war. Ser Wynton Stout, on the
other hand … well, he had been a good man once, everyone agreed,
but he had been eighty years a ranger, and both strength and wits
were gone. Once he’d fallen asleep at supper and almost drowned in
a bowl of pea soup.
“Where’s your wolf?” Noye asked as they crossed the yard.
“Ghost. I had to leave him when I climbed the Wall. I’d hoped
he’d make his way back here.”
“I’m sorry, lad. There’s been no sign of him.” They limped up to
the maester’s door, in the long wooden keep beneath the rookery.
The armorer gave it a kick. “Clydas!”
After a moment a stooped, round-shouldered little man in black
peered out. His small pink eyes widened at the sight of Jon. “Lay
the lad down, I’ll fetch the maester.”
A re was burning in the hearth, and the room was almost stu y.
The warmth made Jon sleepy. As soon as Noye eased him down
onto his back, he closed his eyes to stop the world from spinning.
He could hear the ravens quorking and complaining in the rookery
above. “Snow,” one bird was saying. “Snow, snow, snow.” That was

Sam’s doing, Jon remembered. Had Samwell Tarly made it home
safely, he wondered, or only the birds?
Maester Aemon was not long in coming. He moved slowly, one
spotted hand on Clydas’s arm as he shu ed forward with small
careful steps. Around his thin neck his chain hung heavy, gold and
silver links glinting amongst iron, lead, tin, and other base metals.
“Jon Snow,” he said, “you must tell me all you’ve seen and done
when you are stronger. Donal, put a kettle of wine on the re, and
my irons as well. I will want them red-hot. Clydas, I shall need that
good sharp knife of yours.” The maester was more than a hundred
years old; shrunken, frail, hairless, and quite blind. But if his milky
eyes saw nothing, his wits were still as sharp as they had ever been.
“There are wildlings coming,” Jon told him, as Clydas ran a blade
up the leg of his breeches, slicing the heavy black cloth, crusty with
old blood and sodden with new. “From the south. We climbed the
Wall …”
Maester Aemon gave Jon’s crude bandage a sni when Clydas cut
it away. “We?”
“I was with them. Qhorin Halfhand commanded me to join them.”
Jon winced as the maester’s nger explored his wound, poking and
prodding. “The Magnar of Thenn—aaaaah, that hurts.” He clenched
his teeth. “Where is the Old Bear?”
“Jon … it grieves me to say, but Lord Commander Mormont was
murdered at Craster’s Keep, at the hands of his Sworn Brothers.”
“Bro … our own men?” Aemon’s words hurt a hundred times
worse than his ngers. Jon remembered the Old Bear as last he’d
seen him, standing before his tent with his raven on his arm
croaking for corn. Mormont gone? He had feared it ever since he’d
seen the aftermath of battle on the Fist, yet it was no less a blow.
“Who was it? Who turned on him?”
“Garth of Oldtown, Ollo Lophand, Dirk … thieves, cowards and
killers, the lot of them. We should have seen it coming. The Watch
is not what it was. Too few honest men to keep the rogues in line.”
Donal Noye turned the maester’s blades in the re. “A dozen true
men made it back. Dolorous Edd, Giant, your friend the Aurochs.
We had the tale from them.”

Only a dozen? Two hundred men had left Castle Black with Lord
Commander Mormont, two hundred of the Watch’s best. “Does this
mean Marsh is Lord Commander, then?” The Old Pomegranate was
amiable, and a diligent First Steward, but he was woefully ill-suited
to face a wildling host.
“For the nonce, until we can hold a choosing,” said Maester
Aemon. “Clydas, bring me the ask.”
A choosing. With Qhorin Halfhand and Ser Jaremy Rykker both
dead and Ben Stark still missing, who was there? Not Bowen Marsh
or Ser Wynton Stout, that was certain. Had Thoren Smallwood
survived the Fist, or Ser Ottyn Wythers? No, it will be Cotter Pyke or
Ser Denys Mallister. Which, though? The commanders at the Shadow
Tower and Eastwatch were good men, but very di erent; Ser Denys
courtly and cautious, as chivalrous as he was elderly, Pyke younger,
bastard-born, rough-tongued, and bold to a fault. Worse, the two
men despised each other. The Old Bear had always kept them far
apart, at opposite ends of the Wall. The Mallisters had a bone-deep
mistrust of the ironborn, Jon knew.
A stab of pain reminded him of his own woes. The maester
squeezed his hand. “Clydas is bringing milk of the poppy.”
Jon tried to rise. “I don’t need—”
“You do,” Aemon said rmly. “This will hurt.”
Donal Noye crossed the room and shoved Jon back onto his back.
“Be still, or I’ll tie you down.” Even with only one arm, the smith
handled him as if he were a child. Clydas returned with a green
ask and a rounded stone cup. Maester Aemon poured it full. “Drink
this.”
Jon had bitten his lip in his struggles. He could taste blood
mingled with the thick, chalky potion. It was all he could do not to
retch it back up.
Clydas brought a basin of warm water, and Maester Aemon
washed the pus and blood from his wound. Gentle as he was, even
the lightest touch made Jon want to scream. “The Magnar’s men are
disciplined, and they have bronze armor,” he told them. Talking
helped keep his mind o his leg.

“The Magnar’s a lord on Skagos,” Noye said. “There were
Skagossons at Eastwatch when I rst came to the Wall, I remember
hearing them talk of him.”
“Jon was using the word in its older sense, I think,” Maester
Aemon said, “not as a family name but as a title. It derives from the
Old Tongue.”
“It means lord,” Jon agreed. “Styr is the Magnar of some place
called Thenn, in the far north of the Frostfangs. He has a hundred of
his own men, and a score of raiders who know the Gift almost as
well as we do. Mance never found the horn, though, that’s
something. The Horn of Winter, that’s what he was digging for up
along the Milkwater.”
Maester Aemon paused, washcloth in hand. “The Horn of Winter
is an ancient legend. Does the King-beyond-the-Wall truly believe
that such a thing exists?”
“They all do,” said Jon. “Ygritte said they opened a hundred
graves … graves of kings and heroes, all over the valley of the
Milkwater, but they never …”
“Who is Ygritte?” Donal Noye asked pointedly.
“A woman of the free folk.” How could he explain Ygritte to
them? She’s warm and smart and funny and she can kiss a man or slit
his throat. “She’s with Styr, but she’s not … she’s young, only a girl,
in truth, wild, but she …” She killed an old man for building a re. His
tongue felt thick and clumsy. The milk of the poppy was clouding
his wits. “I broke my vows with her. I never meant to, but …” It
was wrong. Wrong to love her, wrong to leave her … “I wasn’t strong
enough. The Halfhand commanded me, ride with them, watch, I
must not balk, I …” His head felt as if it were packed with wet
wool.
Maester Aemon sni ed Jon’s wound again. Then he put the
bloody cloth back in the basin and said, “Donal, the hot knife, if you
please. I shall need you to hold him still.”
I will not scream, Jon told himself when he saw the blade glowing
red hot. But he broke that vow as well. Donal Noye held him down,
while Clydas helped guide the maester’s hand. Jon did not move,
except to pound his st against the table, again and again and again.

The pain was so huge he felt small and weak and helpless inside it,
a child whimpering in the dark. Ygritte, he thought, when the stench
of burning esh was in his nose and his own shriek echoing in her
ears. Ygritte, I had to. For half a heartbeat the agony started to ebb.
But then the iron touched him once again, and he fainted.
When his eyelids uttered open, he was wrapped in thick wool
and oating. He could not seem to move, but that did not matter.
For a time he dreamed that Ygritte was with him, tending him with
gentle hands. Finally he closed his eyes and slept.
The next waking was not so gentle. The room was dark, but
under the blankets the pain was back, a throbbing in his leg that
turned into a hot knife at the least motion. Jon learned that the
hard way when he tried to see if he still had a leg. Gasping, he
swallowed a scream and made another st.
“Jon?” A candle appeared, and a well-remembered face was
looking down on him, big ears and all. “You shouldn’t move.”
“Pyp?” Jon reached up, and the other boy clasped his hand and
gave it a squeeze. “I thought you’d gone …”
“… with the Old Pomegranate? No, he thinks I’m too small and
green. Grenn’s here too.”
“I’m here too.” Grenn stepped to the other side of the bed. “I fell
asleep.”
Jon’s throat was dry. “Water,” he gasped. Grenn brought it, and
held it to his lips. “I saw the Fist,” he said, after a long swallow.
“The blood, and the dead horses … Noye said a dozen made it
back … who?”
“Dywen did. Giant, Dolorous Edd, Sweet Donnel Hill, Ulmer, Left
Hand Lew, Garth Greyfeather. Four or ve more. Me.”
“Sam?”
Grenn looked away. “He killed one of the Others, Jon. I saw it.
He stabbed him with that dragonglass knife you made him, and we
started calling him Sam the Slayer. He hated that.”
Sam the Slayer. Jon could hardly imagine a less likely warrior than
Sam Tarly. “What happened to him?”
“We left him.” Grenn sounded miserable. “I shook him and
screamed at him, even slapped his face. Giant tried to drag him to

his feet, but he was too heavy. Remember in training how he’d curl
up on the ground and lie there whimpering? At Craster’s he
wouldn’t even whimper. Dirk and Ollo were tearing up the walls
looking for food, Garth and Garth were ghting, some of the others
were raping Craster’s wives. Dolorous Edd gured Dirk’s bunch
would kill all the loyal men to keep us from telling what they’d
done, and they had us two to one. We left Sam with the Old Bear.
He wouldn’t move, Jon.”
You were his brother, he almost said. How could you leave him
amongst wildlings and murderers?
“He might still be alive,” said Pyp. “He might surprise us all and
come riding up tomorrow.”
“With Mance Rayder’s head, aye.” Grenn was trying to sound
cheerful, Jon could tell. “Sam the Slayer!”
Jon tried to sit again. It was as much a mistake as the rst time.
He cried out, cursing.
“Grenn, go wake Maester Aemon,” said Pyp. “Tell him Jon needs
more milk of the poppy.”
Yes, Jon thought. “No,” he said. “The Magnar …”
“We know,” said Pyp. “The sentries on the Wall have been told to
keep one eye on the south, and Donal Noye dispatched some men to
Weatherback Ridge to watch the kingsroad. Maester Aemon’s sent
birds to Eastwatch and the Shadow Tower too.”
Maester Aemon shu ed to the bedside, one hand on Grenn’s
shoulder. “Jon, be gentle with yourself. It is good that you have
woken, but you must give yourself time to heal. We drowned the
wound with boiling wine, and closed you up with a poultice of
nettle, mustard seed and moldy bread, but unless you rest …”
“I can’t.” Jon fought through the pain to sit. “Mance will be here
soon … thousands of men, giants, mammoths … has word been sent
to Winterfell? To the king?” Sweat dripped o his brow. He closed
his eyes a moment.
Grenn gave Pyp a strange look. “He doesn’t know.”
“Jon,” said Maester Aemon, “much and more happened while you
were away, and little of it good. Balon Greyjoy has crowned himself
again and sent his longships against the north. Kings sprout like

weeds at every hand and we have sent appeals to all of them, yet
none will come. They have more pressing uses for their swords, and
we are far o
and forgotten. And Winterfell … Jon, be
strong … Winterfell is no more …”
“No more?” Jon stared at Aemon’s white eyes and wrinkled face.
“My brothers are at Winterfell. Bran and Rickon …”
The maester touched his brow. “I am so very sorry, Jon. Your
brothers died at the command of Theon Greyjoy, after he took
Winterfell in his father’s name. When your father’s bannermen
threatened to retake it, he put the castle to the torch.”
“Your brothers were avenged,” Grenn said. “Bolton’s son killed all
the ironmen, and it’s said he’s aying Theon Greyjoy inch by inch
for what he did.”
“I’m sorry, Jon.” Pyp squeezed his shoulder. “We are all.”
Jon had never liked Theon Greyjoy, but he had been their father’s
ward. Another spasm of pain twisted up his leg, and the next he
knew he was at on his back again. “There’s some mistake,” he
insisted. “At Queenscrown I saw a direwolf, a grey
direwolf … grey … it knew me.” If Bran was dead, could some part
of him live on in his wolf, as Orell lived within his eagle?
“Drink this.” Grenn held a cup to his lips. Jon drank. His head
was full of wolves and eagles, the sound of his brothers’ laughter.
The faces above him began to blur and fade. They can’t be dead.
Theon would never do that. And Winterfell … grey granite, oak and
iron, crows wheeling around the towers, steam rising o the hot pools in
the godswood, the stone kings sitting on their thrones … how could
Winterfell be gone?
When the dreams took him, he found himself back home once
more, splashing in the hot pools beneath a huge white weirwood
that had his father’s face. Ygritte was with him, laughing at him,
shedding her skins till she was naked as her name day, trying to kiss
him, but he couldn’t, not with his father watching. He was the blood
of Winterfell, a man of the Night’s Watch. I will not father a bastard,
he told her. I will not. I will not. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she
whispered, her skin dissolving in the hot water, the esh beneath

sloughing o her bones until only skull and skeleton remained, and
the pool bubbled thick and red.

CATELYN

They heard the Green Fork before they saw it, an endless susurrus,

like the growl of some great beast. The river was a boiling torrent,
half again as wide as it had been last year, when Robb had divided
his army here and vowed to take a Frey to bride as the price of his
crossing. He needed Lord Walder and his bridge then, and he needs
them even more now. Catelyn’s heart was full of misgivings as she
watched the murky green waters swirl past. There is no way we will
ford this, nor swim across, and it could be a moon’s turn before these
waters fall again.
As they neared the Twins, Robb donned his crown and summoned
Catelyn and Edmure to ride beside him. Ser Raynald Westerling
bore his banner, the direwolf of Stark on its ice-white eld.
The gatehouse towers emerged from the rain like ghosts, hazy
grey apparitions that grew more solid the closer they rode. The
Frey stronghold was not one castle but two; mirror images in wet
stone standing on opposite sides of the water, linked by a great
arched bridge. From the center of its span rose the Water Tower,
the river running straight and swift below. Channels had been cut
from the banks, to form moats that made each twin an island. The
rains had turned the moats to shallow lakes.
Across the turbulent waters, Catelyn could see several thousand
men encamped around the eastern castle, their banners hanging like
so many drowned cats from the lances outside their tents. The rain
made it impossible to distinguish colors and devices. Most were

grey, it seemed to her, though beneath such skies the whole world
seemed grey.
“Tread lightly here, Robb,” she cautioned her son. “Lord Walder
has a thin skin and a sharp tongue, and some of these sons of his
will doubtless take after their father. You must not let yourself be
provoked.”
“I know the Freys, Mother. I know how much I wronged them,
and how much I need them. I shall be as sweet as a septon.”
Catelyn shifted her seat uncomfortably. “If we are o ered
refreshment when we arrive, on no account refuse. Take what is
o ered, and eat and drink where all can see. If nothing is o ered,
ask for bread and cheese and a cup of wine.”
“I’m more wet than hungry …”
“Robb, listen to me. Once you have eaten of his bread and salt,
you have the guest right, and the laws of hospitality protect you
beneath his roof.”
Robb looked more amused than afraid. “I have an army to protect
me, Mother, I don’t need to trust in bread and salt. But if it pleases
Lord Walder to serve me stewed crow smothered in maggots, I’ll
eat it and ask for a second bowl.”
Four Freys rode out from the western gatehouse, wrapped in
heavy cloaks of thick grey wool. Catelyn recognized Ser Ryman, son
of the late Ser Stevron, Lord Walder’s rstborn. With his father
dead, Ryman was heir to the Twins. The face she saw beneath his
hood was eshy, broad, and stupid. The other three were likely his
own sons, Lord Walder’s great grandsons.
Edmure con rmed as much. “Edwyn is eldest, the pale slender
man with the constipated look. The wiry one with the beard is Black
Walder, a nasty bit of business. Petyr is on the bay, the lad with the
unfortunate face. Petyr Pimple, his brothers call him. Only a year or
two older than Robb, but Lord Walder married him o at ten to a
woman thrice his age. Gods, I hope Roslin doesn’t take after him.”
They halted to let their hosts come to them. Robb’s banner
drooped on its sta , and the steady sound of rainfall mingled with
the rush of the swollen Green Fork on their right. Grey Wind edged
forward, tail sti , watching through slitted eyes of dark gold. When

the Freys were a half-dozen yards away Catelyn heard him growl, a
deep rumble that seemed almost one with rush of the river. Robb
looked startled. “Grey Wind, to me. To me!”
Instead the direwolf leapt forward, snarling.
Ser Ryman’s palfrey shied o with a whinny of fear, and Petyr
Pimple’s reared and threw him. Only Black Walder kept his mount
in hand. He reached for the hilt of his sword. “No!” Robb was
shouting. “Grey Wind, here. Here.” Catelyn spurred between the
direwolf and the horses. Mud spattered from the hooves of her mare
as she cut in front of Grey Wind. The wolf veered away, and only
then seemed to hear Robb calling.
“Is this how a Stark makes amends?” Black Walder shouted, with
naked steel in hand. “A poor greeting I call it, to set your wolf upon
us. Is this why you’ve come?”
Ser Ryman had dismounted to help Petyr Pimple back to his feet.
The lad was muddy, but unhurt.
“I’ve come to make my apology for the wrong I did your House,
and to see my uncle wed.” Robb swung down from the saddle.
“Petyr, take my horse. Yours is almost back to the stable.”
Petyr looked to his father and said, “I can ride behind one of my
brothers.”
The Freys made no sign of obeisance. “You come late,” Ser
Ryman declared.
“The rains delayed us,” said Robb. “I sent a bird.”
“I do not see the woman.”
By the woman Ser Ryman meant Jeyne Westerling, all knew. Lady
Catelyn smiled apologetically. “Queen Jeyne was weary after so
much travel, sers. No doubt she will be pleased to visit when times
are more settled.”
“My grandfather will be displeased.” Though Black Walder had
sheathed his sword, his tone was no friendlier. “I’ve told him much
of the lady, and he wished to behold her with his own eyes.”
Edwyn cleared his throat. “We have chambers prepared for you in
the Water Tower, Your Grace,” he told Robb with careful courtesy,
“as well as for Lord Tully and Lady Stark. Your lords bannermen are

also welcome to shelter under our roof and partake of the wedding
feast.”
“And my men?” asked Robb.
“My lord grandfather regrets that he cannot feed nor house so
large a host. We have been sore pressed to nd fodder and
provender for our own levies. Nonetheless, your men shall not be
neglected. If they will cross and set up their camp beside our own,
we will bring out enough casks of wine and ale for all to drink the
health of Lord Edmure and his bride. We have thrown up three
great feast tents on the far bank, to provide them with some shelter
from the rains.”
“Your lord father is most kind. My men will thank him. They
have had a long wet ride.”
Edmure Tully edged his horse forward. “When shall I meet my
betrothed?”
“She waits for you within,” promised Edwyn Frey. “You will
forgive her if she seems shy, I know. She has been awaiting this day
most anxiously, poor maid. But perhaps we might continue this out
of the rain?”
“Truly.” Ser Ryman mounted up again, pulling Petyr Pimple up
behind him. “If you would follow me, my father awaits.” He turned
the palfrey’s head back towrd the Twins.
Edmure fell in beside Catelyn. “The Late Lord Frey might have
seen t to welcome us in person,” he complained. “I am his liege
lord as well as his son-to-be, and Robb’s his king.”
“When you are one-and-ninety, Brother, see how eager you are to
go riding in the rain.” Yet she wondered if that was the whole truth
of it. Lord Walder normally went about in a covered litter, which
would have kept the worst of the rain o him. A deliberate slight? If
so, it might be the rst of many yet to come.
There was more trouble at the gatehouse. Grey Wind balked in
the middle of the drawbridge, shook the rain o , and howled at the
portcullis. Robb whistled impatiently. “Grey Wind. What is it? Grey
Wind, with me.” But the direwolf only bared his teeth. He does not
like this place, Catelyn thought. Robb had to squat and speak softly
to the wolf before he would consent to pass beneath the portcullis.

By then Lame Lothar and Walder Rivers had come up. “It’s the
sound of the water he fears,” Rivers said. “Beasts know to avoid the
river in ood.”
“A dry kennel and a leg of mutton will see him right again,” said
Lothar cheerfully. “Shall I summon our master of hounds?”
“He’s a direwolf, not a dog,” said Robb, “and dangerous to men
he does not trust. Ser Raynald, stay with him. I won’t take him into
Lord Walder’s hall like this.”
Deftly done, Catelyn decided. Robb keeps the Westerling out of Lord
Walder’s sight as well.
Gout and brittle bones had taken their toll of old Walder Frey.
They found him propped up in his high seat with a cushion beneath
him and an ermine robe across his lap. His chair was black oak, its
back carved into the semblance of two stout towers joined by an
arched bridge, so massive that its embrace turned the old man into
a grotesque child. There was something of the vulture about Lord
Walder, and rather more of the weasel. His bald head, spotted with
age, thrust out from his scrawny shoulders on a long pink neck.
Loose skin dangled beneath his receding chin, his eyes were runny
and clouded, and his toothless mouth moved constantly, sucking at
the empty air as a babe sucks at his mother’s breast.
The eighth Lady Frey stood beside Lord Walder’s high seat. At his
feet sat a somewhat younger version of himself, a stooped thin man
of fty whose costly garb of blue wool and grey satin was strangely
accented by a crown and collar ornamented with tiny brass bells.
The likeness between him and his lord was striking, save for their
eyes; Lord Frey’s small, dim, and suspicious, the other’s large,
amiable, and vacant. Catelyn recalled that one of Lord Walder’s
brood had fathered a halfwit long years ago. During past visits, the
Lord of the Crossing had always taken care to hide this one away.
Did he always wear a fool’s crown, or is that meant as mockery of Robb?
It was a question she dare not ask.
Frey sons, daughters, children, grandchildren, husbands, wives
and servants crowded the rest of the hall. But it was the old man
who spoke. “You will forgive me if I do not kneel, I know. My legs
no longer work as they did, though that which hangs between ’em

serves well enough, heh.” His mouth split in a toothless smile as he
eyed Robb’s crown. “Some would say it’s a poor king who crowns
himself with bronze, Your Grace.”
“Bronze and iron are stronger than gold and silver,” Robb
answered. “The old Kings of Winter wore such a sword-crown.”
“Small good it did them when the dragons came. Heh.” That heh
seemed to please the lackwit, who bobbed his head from side to
side, jingling crown and collar. “Sire,” Lord Walder said, “forgive
my Aegon the noise. He has less wits than a crannogman, and he’s
never met a king before. One of Stevron’s boys. We call him
Jinglebell.”
“Ser Stevron mentioned him, my lord.” Robb smiled at the
lackwit. “Well met, Aegon. Your father was a brave man.”
Jinglebell jingled his bells. A thin line of spit ran from one corner
of his mouth when he smiled.
“Save your royal breath. You’d do as well talking to a
chamberpot.” Lord Walder shifted his gaze to the others. “Well,
Lady Catelyn, I see you have returned to us. And young Ser
Edmure, the victor of the Stone Mill. Lord Tully now, I’ll need to
remember that. You’re the fth Lord Tully I’ve known. I outlived
the other four, heh. Your bride’s about here somewhere. I suppose
you want a look at her.”
“I would, my lord.”
“Then you’ll have it. But clothed. She’s a modest girl, and a maid.
You won’t see her naked till the bedding.” Lord Walder cackled.
“Heh. Soon enough, soon enough.” He craned his head about.
“Benfrey, go fetch your sister. Be quick about it, Lord Tully’s come
all the way from Riverrun.” A young knight in a quartered surcoat
bowed and took his leave, and the old man turned back to Robb.
“And where’s your bride, Your Grace? The fair Queen Jeyne. A
Westerling of the Crag, I’m told, heh.”
“I left her at Riverrun, my lord. She was too weary for more
travel, as we told Ser Ryman.”
“That makes me grievous sad. I wanted to behold her with mine
own weak eyes. We all did, heh. Isn’t that so, my lady?”

Pale wispy Lady Frey seemed startled that she would be called
upon to speak. “Y-yes, my lord. We all so wanted to pay homage to
Queen Jeyne. She must be fair to look on.”
“She is most fair, my lady.” There was an icy stillness in Robb’s
voice that reminded Catelyn of his father.
The old man either did not hear it or refused to pay it any heed.
“Fairer than my own get, heh? Elsewise how could her face and
form have made the King’s Grace forget his solemn promise.”
Robb su ered the rebuke with dignity. “No words can set that
right, I know, but I have come to make my apologies for the wrong
I did your House, and to beg for your forgiveness, my lord.”
“Apologies, heh. Yes, you vowed to make one, I recall. I’m old,
but I don’t forget such things. Not like some kings, it seems. The
young remember nothing when they see a pretty face and a nice
rm pair of teats, isn’t that so? I was the same. Some might say I
still am, heh heh. They’d be wrong, though, wrong as you were. But
now you’re here to make amends. It was my girls you spurned,
though. Mayhaps it’s them should hear you beg for pardon, Your
Grace. My maiden girls. Here, have a look at them.” When he
waggled his ngers, a urry of femininity left their places by the
walls to line up beneath the dais. Jinglebell started to rise as well,
his bells ringing merrily, but Lady Frey grabbed the lackwit’s sleeve
and tugged him back down.
Lord Walder named the names. “My daughter Arwyn,” he said of
a girl of fourteen. “Shirei, my youngest trueborn daughter. Ami and
Marianne are granddaughters. I married Ami to Ser Pate of
Sevenstreams, but the Mountain killed the oaf so I got her back.
That’s a Cersei, but we call her Little Bee, her mother’s a Beesbury.
More granddaughters. One’s a Walda, and the others … well, they
have names, whatever they are …”
“I’m Merry, Lord Grandfather,” one girl said.
“You’re noisy, that’s for certain. Next to Noisy is my daughter
Tyta. Then another Walda. Alyx, Marissa … are you Marissa? I
thought you were. She’s not always bald. The maester shaved her
hair o , but he swears it will soon grow back. The twins are Serra

and Sarra.” He squinted down at one of the younger girls. “Heh, are
you another Walda?”
The girl could not have been more than four. “I’m Ser Aemon
Rivers’s Walda, lord great grandfather.” She curtsied.
“How long have you been talking? Not that you’re like to have
anything sensible to say, your father never did. He’s a bastard’s son
besides, heh. Go away, I wanted only Freys up here. The King in the
North has no interest in base stock.” Lord Walder glanced to Robb,
as Jinglebell bobbed his head and chimed. “There they are, all
maidens. Well, and one widow, but there’s some who like a woman
broken in. You might have had any one of them.”
“It would have been an impossible choice, my lord,” said Robb
with careful courtesy. “They’re all too lovely.”
Lord Walder snorted. “And they say my eyes are bad. Some will
do well enough, I suppose. Others … well, it makes no matter. They
weren’t good enough for the King in the North, heh. Now what is it
you have to say?”
“My ladies.” Robb looked desperately uncomfortable, but he had
known this moment must come, and he faced it without inching.
“All men should keep their word, kings most of all. I was pledged to
marry one of you and I broke that vow. The fault is not in you.
What I did was not done to slight you, but because I loved another.
No words can set it right, I know, yet I come before you to ask
forgiveness, that the Freys of the Crossing and the Starks of
Winterfell may once again be friends.”
The smaller girls dgeted anxiously. Their older sisters waited for
Lord Walder on his black oak throne. Jinglebell rocked back and
forth, bells chiming on collar and crown.
“Good,” the Lord of the Crossing said. “That was very good, Your
Grace. ‘No words can set it right,’ heh. Well said, well said. At the
wedding feast I hope you will not refuse to dance with my
daughters. It would please an old man’s heart, heh.” He bobbed his
wrinkled pink head up and down, in much the same way his lackwit
grandson did, though Lord Walder wore no bells. “And here she is,
Lord Edmure. My daughter Roslin, my most precious little blossom,
heh.”

Ser Benfrey led her into the hall. They looked enough alike to be
full siblings. Judging from their age, both were children of the sixth
Lady Frey; a Rosby, Catelyn seemed to recall.
Roslin was small for her years, her skin as white as if she had just
risen from a milk bath. Her face was comely, with a small chin,
delicate nose, and big brown eyes. Thick chestnut hair fell in loose
waves to a waist so tiny that Edmure would be able to put his hands
around it. Beneath the lacy bodice of her pale blue gown, her
breasts looked small but shapely.
“Your Grace.” The girl went to her knees. “Lord Edmure, I hope I
am not a disappointment to you.”
Far from it, thought Catelyn. Her brother’s face had lit up at the
sight of her. “You are a delight to me, my lady,” Edmure said. “And
ever will be, I know.”
Roslin had a small gap between two of her front teeth that made
her shy with her smiles, but the aw was almost endearing. Pretty
enough, Catelyn thought, but so small, and she comes of Rosby stock.
The Rosbys had never been robust. She much preferred the frames
of some of the older girls in the hall; daughters or granddaughters,
she could not be sure. They had a Crakehall look about them, and
Lord Walder’s third wife had been of that House. Wide hips to bear
children, big breasts to nurse them, strong arms to carry them. The
Crakehalls have always been a big-boned family, and strong.
“My lord is kind,” the Lady Roslin said to Edmure.
“My lady is beautiful.” Edmure took her hand and drew her to her
feet. “But why are you crying?”
“For joy,” Roslin said. “I weep for joy, my lord.”
“Enough,” Lord Walder broke in. “You may weep and whisper
after you’re wed, heh. Benfrey, see your sister back to her
chambers, she has a wedding to prepare for. And a bedding, heh, the
sweetest part. For all, for all.” His mouth moved in and out. “We’ll
have music, such sweet music, and wine, heh, the red will run, and
we’ll put some wrongs aright. But now you’re weary, and wet as
well, dripping on my oor. There’s res waiting for you, and hot
mulled wine, and baths if you want ’em. Lothar, show our guests to
their quarters.”

“I need to see my men across the river, my lord,” Robb said.
“They shan’t get lost,” Lord Walder complained. “They’re crossed
before, haven’t they? When you came down from the north. You
wanted crossing and I gave it to you, and you never said mayhaps,
heh. But suit yourself. Lead each man across by the hand if you like,
it’s naught to me.”
“My lord!” Catelyn had almost forgotten. “Some food would be
most welcome. We have ridden many leagues in the rain.”
Walder Frey’s mouth moved in and out. “Food, heh. A loaf of
bread, a bite of cheese, mayhaps a sausage.”
“Some wine to wash it down,” Robb said. “And salt.”
“Bread and salt. Heh. Of course, of course.” The old man clapped
his hands together, and servants came into the hall, bearing agons
of wine and trays of bread, cheese, and butter. Lord Walder took a
cup of red himself, and raised it high with a spotted hand. “My
guests,” he said. “My honored guests. Be welcome beneath my roof,
and at my table.”
“We thank you for your hospitality, my lord,” Robb replied.
Edmure echoed him, along with the Greatjon, Ser Marq Piper, and
the others. They drank his wine and ate his bread and butter.
Catelyn tasted the wine and nibbled at some bread, and felt much
the better for it. Now we should be safe, she thought.
Knowing how petty the old man could be, she had expected their
rooms to be bleak and cheerless. But the Freys had made more than
ample provision for them, it seemed. The bridal chamber was large
and richly appointed, dominated by a great featherbed with corner
posts carved in the likeness of castle towers. Its draperies were
Tully red and blue, a nice courtesy. Sweet-smelling carpets covered
a plank oor, and a tall shuttered window opened to the south.
Catelyn’s own room was smaller, but handsomely furnished and
comfortable, with a re burning in the hearth. Lame Lothar assured
them that Robb would have an entire suite, as be t a king. “If there
is anything you require, you need only tell one of the guards.” He
bowed and withdrew, limping heavily as he made his way down the
curving steps.

“We should post our own guards,” Catelyn told her brother. She
would rest easier with Stark and Tully men outside her door. The
audience with Lord Walder had not been as painful as she feared,
yet all the same she would be glad to be done with this. A few more
days, and Robb will be o to battle, and me to a comfortable captivity at
Seagard. Lord Jason would show her every courtesy, she had no
doubt, but the prospect still depressed her.
She could hear the sounds of horses below as the long column of
mounted men wound their way across the bridge from castle to
castle. The stones rumbled to the passage of heavy-laden wayns.
Catelyn went to the window and gazed out, to watch Robb’s host
emerge from the eastern twin. “The rain seems to be lessening.”
“Now that we’re inside.” Edmure stood before the re, letting the
warmth wash over him. “What did you make of Roslin?”
Too small and delicate. Childbirth will go hard on her. But her
brother seemed well pleased with the girl, so all she said was,
“Sweet.”
“I believe she liked me. Why was she crying?”
“She’s a maid on the eve of her wedding. A few tears are to be
expected.” Lysa had wept lakes the morning of their own wedding,
though she had managed to be dry-eyed and radiant when Jon
Arryn swept his cream-and-blue cloak about her shoulders.
“She’s prettier than I dared hope.” Edmure raised a hand before
she could speak. “I know there are more important things, spare me
the sermon, septa. Even so … did you see some of those other
maids Frey trotted out? The one with the twitch? Was that the
shaking sickness? And those twins had more craters and eruptions
on their faces than Petyr Pimple. When I saw that lot, I knew Roslin
would be bald and one-eyed, with Jinglebell’s wits and Black
Walder’s temper. But she seems gentle as well as fair.” He looked
perplexed. “Why would the old weasel refuse to let me choose
unless he meant to foist o someone hideous?”
“Your fondness for a pretty face is well known,” Catelyn
reminded him. “Perhaps Lord Walder actually wants you to be
happy with your bride.” Or more like, he did not want you balking
over a boil and upsetting all his plans. “Or it may be that Roslin is the

old man’s favorite. The Lord of Riverrun is a much better match
than most of his daughters can hope for.”
“True.” Her brother still seemed uncertain, however. “Is it
possible the girl is barren?”
“Lord Walder wants his grandson to inherit Riverrun. How would
it serve him to give you a barren wife?”
“It rids him of a daughter no one else would take.”
“Small good that will do him. Walder Frey is a peevish man, not a
stupid one.”
“Still … it is possible?”
“Yes,” Catelyn conceded, reluctantly. “There are illnesses a girl
can have in childhood that leave her unable to conceive. There’s no
reason to believe that Lady Roslin was so a icted, though.” She
looked round the room. “The Freys have received us more kindly
than I had anticipated, if truth be told.”
Edmure laughed. “A few barbed words and some unseemly
gloating. From him that’s courtesy. I expected the old weasel to piss
in our wine and make us praise the vintage.”
The jest left Catelyn strangely disquieted. “If you will excuse me,
I should change from these wet clothes.
“As you wish.” Edmure yawned. “I may nap an hour.”
She retreated to her own room. The chest of clothes she’d brought
from Riverrun had been carried up and laid at the foot of the bed.
After she’d undressed and hung her wet clothing by the re, she
donned a warm wool dress of Tully red and blue, washed and
brushed her hair and let it dry, and went in search of Freys.
Lord Walder’s black oak throne was empty when she entered the
hall, but some of his sons were drinking by the re. Lame Lothar
rose clumsily when he saw her. “Lady Catelyn, I thought you would
be resting. How may I be of service?”
“Are these your brothers?” she asked.
“Brothers, half-brothers, good brothers, and nephews. Raymund
and I shared a mother. Lord Lucias Vypren is my half-sister
Lythene’s husband, and Ser Damon is their son. My half-brother Ser
Hosteen I believe you know. And this is Ser Leslyn Haigh and his
sons, Ser Harys and Ser Donnel.”

“Well met, sers. Is Ser Perwyn about? He helped escort me to
Storm’s End and back, when Robb sent me to speak with Lord
Renly. I was looking forward to seeing him again.”
“Perwyn is away,” Lame Lothar said. “I shall give him your
regards. I know he will regret having missed you.”
“Surely he will return in time for Lady Roslin’s wedding?”
“He had hoped to,” said Lame Lothar, “but with this rain … you
saw how the rivers ran, my lady.”
“I did indeed,” said Catelyn. “I wonder if you would be so good
as to direct me to your maester?”
“Are you unwell, my lady?” asked Ser Hosteen, a powerful man
with a square strong jaw.
“A woman’s complaint. Nothing to concern you, ser.”
Lothar, ever gracious, escorted her from the hall, up some steps,
and across a covered bridge to another stair. “You should nd
Maester Brenett in the turret on the top, my lady.”
Catelyn half expected that the maester would be yet another son
of Walder Frey’s, but Brenett did not have the look. He was a great
fat man, bald and double-chinned and none too clean, to judge from
the raven droppings that stained the sleeves of his robes, yet he
seemed amiable enough. When she told him of Edmure’s concerns
about Lady Roslin’s fertility, he chuckled. “Your lord brother need
have no fear, Lady Catelyn. She’s small, I’ll grant you, and narrow
in the hips, but her mother was the same, and Lady Bethany gave
Lord Walder a child every year.”
“How many lived past infancy?” she asked bluntly.
“Five.” He ticked them o on ngers plump as sausages. “Ser
Perwyn. Ser Benfrey. Maester Willamen, who took his vows last
year and now serves Lord Hunter in the Vale. Olyvar, who squired
for your son. And Lady Roslin, the youngest. Four boys to one girl.
Lord Edmure will have more sons than he knows what to do with.”
“I am sure that will please him.” So the girl was like to be fertile
as well as fair of face. That should put Edmure’s mind at ease. Lord
Walder had left her brother no cause for complaint, so far as she
could see.

Catelyn did not return to her own room after leaving the maester;
instead she went to Robb. She found Robin Flint and Ser Wendel
Manderly with him, along with the Greatjon and his son, who was
still called the Smalljon though he threatened to overtop his father.
They were all damp. Another man, still wetter, stood before the re
in a pale pink cloak trimmed with white fur. “Lord Bolton,” she
said.
“Lady Catelyn,” he replied, his voice faint, “it is a pleasure to
look on you again, even in such trying times.”
“You are kind to say so.” Catelyn could feel gloom in the room.
Even the Greatjon seemed somber and subdued. She looked at their
grim faces and said, “What’s happened?”
“Lannisters on the Trident,” said Ser Wendel unhappily. “My
brother is taken again.”
“And Lord Bolton has brought us further word of Winterfell,”
Robb added. “Ser Rodrik was not the only good man to die. Cley
Cerwyn and Leobald Tallhart were slain as well.”
“Cley Cerwyn was only a boy,” she said, saddened. “Is this true,
then? All dead, and Winterfell gone?”
Bolton’s pale eyes met her own. “The ironmen burned both castle
and winter town. Some of your people were taken back to the
Dreadfort by my son, Ramsay.”
“Your bastard was accused of grievous crimes,” Catelyn reminded
him sharply. “Of murder, rape, and worse.”
“Yes,” Roose Bolton said. “His blood is tainted, that cannot be
denied. Yet he is a good ghter, as cunning as he is fearless. When
the ironmen cut down Ser Rodrik, and Leobald Tallhart soon after,
it fell to Ramsay to lead the battle, and he did. He swears that he
shall not sheathe his sword so long as a single Greyjoy remains in
the north. Perhaps such service might atone in some small measure
for whatever crimes his bastard blood has led him to commit.” He
shrugged. “Or not. When the war is done, His Grace must weigh
and judge. By then I hope to have a trueborn son by Lady Walda.”
This is a cold man, Catelyn realized, not for the rst time.
“Did Ramsay mention Theon Greyjoy?” Robb demanded. “Was he
slain as well, or did he ee?”

Roose Bolton removed a ragged strip of leather from the pouch at
his belt. “My son sent this with his letter.”
Ser Wendel turned his fat face away. Robin Flint and Smalljon
Umber exchanged a look, and the Greatjon snorted like a bull. “Is
that … skin?” said Robb.
“The skin from the little nger of Theon Greyjoy’s left hand. My
son is cruel, I confess it. And yet … what is a little skin, against the
lives of two young princes? You were their mother, my lady. May I
o er you this … small token of revenge?”
Part of Catelyn wanted to clutch the grisly trophy to her heart,
but she made herself resist. “Put it away. Please.”
“Flaying Theon will not bring my brothers back,” Robb said. “I
want his head, not his skin.”
“He is Balon Greyjoy’s only living son,” Lord Bolton said softly,
as if they had forgotten, “and now rightful King of the Iron Islands.
A captive king has great value as a hostage.”
“Hostage?” The word raised Catelyn’s hackles. Hostages were oft
exchanged. “Lord Bolton, I hope you are not suggesting that we free
the man who killed my sons.”
“Whoever wins the Seastone Chair will want Theon Greyjoy
dead,” Bolton pointed out. “Even in chains, he has a better claim
than any of his uncles. Hold him, I say, and demand concessions
from the ironborn as the price of his execution.”
Robb considered that reluctantly, but in the end he nodded. “Yes.
Very well. Keep him alive, then. For the present. Hold him secure at
the Dreadfort till we’ve retaken the north.”
Catelyn turned back to Roose Bolton. “Ser Wendel said something
of Lannisters on the Trident?”
“He did, my lady. I blame myself. I delayed too long before
leaving Harrenhal. Aenys Frey departed several days before me and
crossed the Trident at the ruby ford, though not without di culty.
But by the time we came up the river was a torrent. I had no choice
but to ferry my men across in small boats, of which we had too few.
Two-thirds of my strength was on the north side when the
Lannisters attacked those still waiting to cross. Norrey, Locke, and
Burley men chie y, with Ser Wylis Manderly and his White Harbor

knights as rear guard. I was on the wrong side of the Trident,
powerless to help them. Ser Wylis rallied our men as best he could,
but Gregor Clegane attacked with heavy horse and drove them into
the river. As many drowned as were cut down. More ed, and the
rest were taken captive.”
Gregor Clegane was always ill news, Catelyn re ected. Would
Robb need to march south again to deal with him? Or was the
Mountain coming here? “Is Clegane across the river, then?”
“No.” Bolton’s voice was soft, but certain. “I left six hundred men
at the ford. Spearmen from the rills, the mountains, and the White
Knife, a hundred Hornwood longbows, some freeriders and hedge
knights, and a strong force of Stout and Cerwyn men to sti en
them. Ronnel Stout and Ser Kyle Condon have the command. Ser
Kyle was the late Lord Cerwyn’s right hand, as I’m sure you know;
my lady. Lions swim no better than wolves. So long as the river
runs high, Ser Gregor will not cross.”
“The last thing we need is the Mountain at our backs when we
start up the causeway,” said Robb. “You did well, my lord.”
“Your Grace is too kind. I su ered grievous losses on the Green
Fork, and Glover and Tallhart worse at Duskendale.”
“Duskendale.” Robb made the word a curse. “Robett Glover will
answer for that when I see him, I promise you.”
“A folly,” Lord Bolton agreed, “but Glover was heedless after he
learned that Deepwood Motte had fallen. Grief and fear will do that
to a man.”
Duskendale was done and cold; it was the battles still to come
that worried Catelyn. “How many men have you brought my son?”
she asked Roose Bolton pointedly.
His queer colorless eyes studied her face a moment before he
answered. “Some ve hundred horse and three thousand foot, my
lady. Dreadfort men, in chief, and some from Karhold. With the
loyalty of the Karstarks so doubtful now, I thought it best to keep
them close. I regret there are not more.”
“It should be enough,” said Robb. “You will have command of my
rear guard, Lord Bolton. I mean to start for the Neck as soon as my
uncle has been wedded and bedded. We’re going home.”

ARYA

The outriders came on them an hour from the Green Fork, as the

wayn was slogging down a muddy road.
“Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” the Hound warned
her as the three spurred toward them; a knight and two squires,
lightly armored and mounted on fast palfreys. Clegane cracked his
whip at the team, a pair of old drays that had known better days.
The wayn was creaking and swaying, its two huge wooden wheels
squeezing mud up out of the deep ruts in the road with every turn.
Stranger followed, tied to the wagon.
The big bad-tempered courser wore neither armor, barding, nor
harness, and the Hound himself was garbed in splotchy green
roughspun and a soot-grey mantle with a hood that swallowed his
head. So long as he kept his eyes down you could not see his face,
only the whites of his eyes peering out. He looked like some downat-heels farmer. A big farmer, though. And under the roughspun was
boiled leather and oiled mail, Arya knew. She looked like a farmer’s
son, or maybe a swineherd. And behind them were four squat casks
of salt pork and one of pickled pigs’ feet.
The riders split and circled them for a look before they came up
close. Clegane drew the wayn to a halt and waited patiently on
their pleasure. The knight bore spear and sword while his squires
carried longbows. The badges on their jerkins were smaller versions
of the sigil sewn on their master’s surcoat; a black pitchfork on a
golden bar sinister, upon a russet eld. Arya had thought of

revealing herself to the rst outriders they encountered, but she had
always pictured grey-cloaked men with the direwolf on their
breasts. She might have risked it even if they’d worn the Umber
giant or the Glover st, but she did not know this pitchfork knight
or whom he served. The closest thing to a pitchfork she had ever
seen at Winterfell was the trident in the hand of Lord Manderly’s
merman.
“You have business at the Twins?” the knight asked.
“Salt pork for the wedding feast, if it please you, ser.” The Hound
mumbled his reply, his eyes down, his face hidden.
“Salt pork never pleases me.” The pitchfork knight gave Clegane
only the most cursory glance, and paid no attention at all to Arya,
but he looked long and hard at Stranger. The stallion was no plow
horse, that was plain at a glance. One of the squires almost wound
up in the mud when the big black courser bit at his own mount.
“How did you come by this beast?” the pitchfork knight demanded.
“M’lady told me to bring him, ser,” Clegane said humbly. “He’s a
wedding gift for young Lord Tully.”
“What lady? Who is it you serve?”
“Old Lady Whent, ser.”
“Does she think she can buy Harrenhal back with a horse?” the
knight asked. “Gods, is there any fool like an old fool?” Yet he
waved them down the road. “Go on with you, then.”
“Aye, m’lord.” The Hound snapped his whip again, and the old
drays resumed their weary trek. The wheels had settled deep into
the mud during the halt, and it took several moments for the team
to pull them free again. By then the outriders were riding o .
Clegane gave them one last look and snorted. “Ser Donnel Haigh,”
he said. “I’ve taken more horses o him than I can count. Armor as
well. Once I near killed him in a mêlée.”
“How come he didn’t know you, then?” Arya asked.
“Because knights are fools, and it would have been beneath him
to look twice at some poxy peasant.” He gave the horses a lick with
the whip. “Keep your eyes down and your tone respectful and say
ser a lot, and most knights will never see you. They pay more mind

to horses than to smallfolk. He might have known Stranger if he’d
ever seen me ride him.”
He would have known your face, though. Arya had no doubt of that.
Sandor Clegane’s burns would not be easy to forget, once you saw
them. He couldn’t hide the scars behind a helm, either; not so long
as the helm was made in the shape of a snarling dog.
That was why they’d needed the wayn and the pickled pigs’ feet.
“I’m not going to be dragged before your brother in chains,” the
Hound had told her, “and I’d just as soon not have to cut through
his men to get to him. So we play a little game.”
A farmer chance-met on the kingsroad had provided them with
wayn, horses, garb, and casks, though not willingly. The Hound had
taken them at swordpoint. When the farmer cursed him for a
robber, he said, “No, a forager. Be grateful you get to keep your
smallclothes. Now take those boots o . Or I’ll take your legs o .
Your choice.” The farmer was as big as Clegane, but all the same he
chose to give up his boots and keep his legs.
Evenfall found them still trudging toward the Green Fork and
Lord Frey’s twin castles. I am almost there, Arya thought. She knew
she ought to be excited, but her belly was all knotted up tight.
Maybe that was just the fever she’d been ghting, but maybe not.
Last night she’d had a bad dream, a terrible dream. She couldn’t
remember what she’d dreamed of now, but the feeling had lingered
all day. If anything, it had only gotten stronger. Fear cuts deeper
than swords. She had to be strong now, the way her father told her.
There was nothing between her and her mother but a castle gate, a
river, and an army … but it was Robb’s army, so there was no real
danger there. Was there?
Roose Bolton was one of them, though. The Leech Lord, as the
outlaws called him. That made her uneasy. She had ed Harrenhal
to get away from Bolton as much as from the Bloody Mummers, and
she’d had to cut the throat of one of his guards to escape. Did he
know she’d done that? Or did he blame Gendry or Hot Pie? Would
he have told her mother? What would he do if he saw her? He
probably won’t even know me. She looked more like a drowned rat
than a lord’s cupbearer these days. A drowned boy rat. The Hound

had hacked handfuls of her hair o only two days past. He was an
even worse barber than Yoren, and he’d left her half bald on one
side. Robb won’t know me either, I bet. Or even Mother. She had been
a little girl the last time she saw them, the day Lord Eddard Stark
left Winterfell.
They heard the music before they saw the castle; the distant rattle
of drums, the brazen blare of horns, the thin skirling of pipes faint
beneath the growl of the river and the sound of the rain beating on
their heads. “We’ve missed the wedding,” the Hound said, “but it
sounds as though the feast is still going. I’ll be rid of you soon.”
No, I’ll be rid of you, Arya thought.
The road had been running mostly northwest, but now it turned
due west between an apple orchard and a eld of drowned corn
beaten down by the rain. They passed the last of the apple trees and
crested a rise, and the castles, river, and camps all appeared at once.
There were hundreds of horses and thousands of men, most of them
milling about the three huge feast tents that stood side by side
facing the castle gates, like three great canvas longhalls. Robb had
made his camp well back from the walls, on higher, drier ground,
but the Green Fork had over own its bank and even claimed a few
carelessly placed tents.
The music from the castles was louder here. The sound of the
drums and horns rolled across the camp. The musicians in the nearer
castle were playing a di erent song than the ones in the castle on
the far bank, though, so it sounded more like a battle than a song.
“They’re not very good,” Arya observed.
The Hound made a sound that might have been a laugh. “There’s
old deaf women in Lannisport complaining of the din, I’ll warrant.
I’d heard Walder Frey’s eyes were failing, but no one mentioned his
bloody ears.”
Arya found herself wishing it were day. If the sun was out and the
wind was blowing, she would have been able to see the banners
better. She would have looked for the direwolf of Stark, or maybe
the Cerwyn battleaxe or the Glover st. But in the gloom of night
all the colors looked grey. The rain had dwindled down to a ne

drizzle, almost a mist, but an earlier downpour had left the banners
wet as dishrags, sodden and unreadable.
A hedge of wagons and carts had been drawn up along the
perimeter to make a crude wooden wall against any attack. That
was where the guards stopped them. The lantern their sergeant
carried shed enough light for Arya to see that his cloak was a pale
pink, spotted with red teardrops. The men under him had the Leech
Lord’s badge sewn over their hearts, the ayed man of the
Dreadfort. Sandor Clegane gave them the same tale he’d used on the
outriders, but the Bolton sergeant was a harder sort of nut than Ser
Donnel Haigh had been. “Salt pork’s no t meat for a lord’s
wedding feast,” he said scornfully.
“Got pickled pigs’ feet too, ser.”
“Not for the feast, you don’t. The feast’s half done. And I’m a
northman, not some milksuck southron knight.”
“I was told to see the steward, or the cook …”
“Castle’s closed. The lordlings are not to be disturbed.” The
sergeant considered a moment. “You can unload by the feast tents,
there.” He pointed with a mailed hand. “Ale makes a man hungry,
and old Frey won’t miss a few pigs’ feet. He don’t have the teeth for
such anyhow. Ask for Sedgekins, he’ll know what’s to be done with
you.” He barked a command, and his men rolled one of the wagons
aside for them to enter.
The Hound’s whip spurred the team toward the tents. No one
seemed to pay them any mind. They splashed past rows of brightly
colored pavilions, their walls of wet silk lit up like magic lanterns
by lamps and braziers inside; pink and gold and green they
glimmered, striped and fretty and chequy, emblazoned with birds
and beasts, chevrons and stars, wheels and weapons. Arya spotted a
yellow tent with six acrons on its panels, three over two over one.
Lord Smallwood, she knew, remembering Acorn Hall so far away,
and the lady who’d said she was pretty.
But for every shimmering silk pavilion there were two dozen of
felt or canvas, opaque and dark. There were barracks tents too, big
enough to shelter two score footsoldiers, though even those were
dwarfed by the three great feast tents. The drinking had been going

on for hours, it seemed. Arya heard shouted toasts and the clash of
cups, mixed in with all the usual camp sounds, horses whinnying
and dogs barking, wagons rumbling through the dark, laughter and
curses, the clank and clatter of steel and wood. The music grew still
louder as they approached the castle, but under that was a deeper,
darker sound: the river, the swollen Green Fork, growling like a
lion in its den.
Arya twisted and turned, trying to look everywhere at once,
hoping for a glimpse of a direwolf badge, for a tent done up in grey
and white, for a face she knew from Winterfell. All she saw were
strangers. She stared at a man relieving himself in the reeds, but he
wasn’t Alebelly. She saw a half-dressed girl burst from a tent
laughing, but the tent was pale blue, not grey like she’d thought at
rst, and the man who went running after her wore a treecat on his
doublet, not a wolf. Beneath a tree, four archers were slipping
waxed strings over the notches of their longbows, but they were not
her father’s archers. A maester crossed their path, but he was too
young and thin to be Maester Luwin. Arya gazed up at the Twins,
their high tower windows glowing softly wherever a light was
burning. Through the haze of rain, the castles looked spooky and
mysterious, like something from one of Old Nan’s tales, but they
weren’t Winterfell.
The press was thickest at the feast tents. The wide aps were tied
back, and men were pushing in and out with drinking horns and
tankards in their hands, some with camp followers. Arya glanced
inside as the Hound drove past the rst of the three, and saw
hundreds of men crowding the benches and jostling around the
casks of mead and ale and wine. There was hardly room to move
inside, but none of them seemed to mind. At least they were warm
and dry. Cold wet Arya envied them. Some were even singing. The
ne misty rain was steaming all around the door from the heat
escaping from inside. “Here’s to Lord Edmure and Lady Roslin,” she
heard a voice shout. They all drank, and someone yelled, “Here’s to
the Young Wolf and Queen Jeyne.”
Who is Queen Jeyne? Arya wondered brie y. The only queen she
knew was Cersei.

Firepits had been dug outside the feast tents, sheltered beneath
rude canopies of woven wood and hides that kept the rain out, so
long as it fell straight down. The wind was blowing o the river,
though, so the drizzle came in anyway, enough to make the res
hiss and swirl. Serving men were turning joints of meat on spits
above the ames. The smells made Arya’s mouth water. “Shouldn’t
we stop?” she asked Sandor Clegane. “There’s northmen in the
tents.” She knew them by their beards, by their faces, by their
cloaks of bearskin and sealskin, by their half-heard toasts and the
songs they sang; Karstarks and Umbers and men of the mountain
clans. “I bet there are Winterfell men too.” Her father’s men, the
Young Wolf’s men, the direwolves of Stark.
“Your brother will be in the castle,” he said. “Your mother too.
You want them or not?”
“Yes,” she said. “What about Sedgekins?” The sergeant had told
them to ask for Sedgekins.
“Sedgekins can bugger himself with a hot poker.” Clegane shook
out his whip, and sent it hissing through the soft rain to bite at a
horse’s ank. “It’s your bloody brother I want.”

CATELYN

The drums were pounding, pounding, pounding, and her head with
them. Pipes wailed and utes trilled from the musicians’ gallery at
the foot of the hall; ddles screeched, horns blew, the skins skirled
a lively tune, but the drumming drove them all. The sounds echoed
o the rafters, whilst the guests ate, drank, and shouted at one
another below. Walder Frey must be deaf as a stone to call this music.
Catelyn sipped a cup of wine and watched Jinglebell prance to the
sounds of “Alysanne.” At least she thought it was meant to be
“Alysanne.” With these players, it might as easily have been “The
Bear and the Maiden Fair.”
Outside the rain still fell, but within the Twins the air was thick
and hot. A re roared in the hearth and rows of torches burned
smokily from iron sconces on the walls. Yet most of the heat came
o the bodies of the wedding guests, jammed in so thick along the
benches that every man who tried to lift his cup poked his neighbor
in the ribs.
Even on the dais they were closer than Catelyn would have liked.
She had been placed between Ser Ryman Frey and Roose Bolton,
and had gotten a good noseful of both. Ser Ryman drank as if
Westeros was about to run short of wine, and sweated it all out
under his arms. He had bathed in lemonwater, she judged, but no
lemon could mask so much sour sweat. Roose Bolton had a sweeter
smell to him, yet no more pleasant. He sipped hippocras in
preference to wine or mead, and ate but little.

Catelyn could not fault him for his lack of appetite. The wedding
feast began with a thin leek soup, followed by a salad of green
beans, onions, and beets, river pike poached in almond milk,
mounds of mashed turnips that were cold before they reached the
table, jellied calves’ brains, and a leche of stringy beef. It was poor
fare to set before a king, and the calves’ brains turned Catelyn’s
stomach. Yet Robb ate it uncomplaining, and her brother was too
caught up with his bride to pay much attention.
You would never guess Edmure complained of Roslin all the way from
Riverrun to the Twins. Husband and wife ate from a single plate,
drank from a single cup, and exchanged chaste kisses between sips.
Most of the dishes Edmure waved away. She could not blame him
for that. She remembered little of the food served at her own
wedding feast. Did I even taste it? Or spend the whole time gazing at
Ned’s face, wondering who he was?
Poor Roslin’s smile had a xed quality to it, as if someone had
sewn it onto her face. Well, she is a maid wedded, but the bedding’s
yet to come. No doubt she’s as terri ed as I was. Robb was seated
between Alyx Frey and Fair Walda, two of the more nubile Frey
maidens. “At the wedding feast I hope you will not refuse to dance
with my daughters,” Walder Frey had said. “It would please an old
man’s heart.” His heart should be well pleased, then; Robb had done
his duty like a king. He had danced with each of the girls, with
Edmure’s bride and the eighth Lady Frey, with the widow Ami and
Roose Bolton’s wife Fat Walda, with the pimply twins Serra and
Sarra, even with Shirei, Lord Walder’s youngest, who must have
been all of six. Catelyn wondered whether the Lord of the Crossing
would be satis ed, or if he would nd cause for complaint in all the
other daughters and granddaughters who had not had a turn with
the king. “Your sisters dance very well,” she said to Ser Ryman
Frey, trying to be pleasant.
“They’re aunts and cousins.” Ser Ryman drank a swallow of wine,
the sweat trickling down his cheek into his beard.
A sour man, and in his cups, Catelyn thought. The Late Lord Frey
might be niggardly when it came to feeding his guests, but he did
not stint on the drink. The ale, wine, and mead were owing as fast

as the river outside. The Greatjon was already roaring drunk. Lord
Walder’s son Merrett was matching him cup for cup, but Ser Whalen
Frey had passed out trying to keep up with the two of them.
Catelyn would sooner Lord Umber had seen t to stay sober, but
telling the Greatjon not to drink was like telling him not to breathe
for a few hours.
Smalljon Umber and Robin Flint sat near Robb, to the other side
of Fair Walda and Alyx, respectively. Neither of them was drinking;
along with Patrek Mallister and Dacey Mormont, they were her
son’s guards this evening. A wedding feast was not a battle, but
there were always dangers when men were in their cups, and a king
should never be unguarded. Catelyn was glad of that, and even
more glad of the swordbelts hanging on pegs along the walls. No
man needs a longsword to deal with jellied calves’ brains.
“Everyone thought my lord would choose Fair Walda,” Lady
Walda Bolton told Ser Wendel, shouting to be heard above the
music. Fat Walda was a round pink butterball of a girl with watery
blue eyes, limp yellow hair, and a huge bosom, yet her voice was a
uttering squeak. It was hard to picture her in the Dreadfort in her
pink lace and cape of vair. “My lord grandfather o ered Roose his
bride’s weight in silver as a dowry, though, so my lord of Bolton
picked me.” The girl’s chins jiggled when she laughed. “I weigh six
stone more than Fair Walda, but that was the rst time I was glad
of it. I’m Lady Bolton now and my cousin’s still a maid, and she’ll be
nineteen soon, poor thing.”
The Lord of the Dreadfort paid the chatter no mind, Catelyn saw.
Sometimes he tasted a bite of this, a spoon of that, tearing bread
from the loaf with short strong ngers, but the meal could not
distract him. Bolton had made a toast to Lord Walder’s grandsons
when the wedding feast began, pointedly mentioning that Walder
and Walder were in the care of his bastard son. From the way the
old man had squinted at him, his mouth sucking at the air, Catelyn
knew he had heard the unspoken threat.
Was there ever a wedding less joyful? she wondered, until she
remembered her poor Sansa and her marriage to the Imp. Mother
take mercy on her. She has a gentle soul. The heat and smoke and

noise were making her sick. The musicians in the gallery might be
numerous and loud, but they were not especially gifted. Catelyn
took another swallow of wine and allowed a page to re ll her cup.
A few more hours, and the worst will be over. By this hour tomorrow
Robb would be o to another battle, this time with the ironmen at
Moat Cailin. Strange, how that prospect seemed almost a relief. He
will win his battle. He wins all his battles, and the ironborn are without a
king. Besides, Ned taught him well. The drums were pounding.
Jinglebell hopped past her once again, but the music was so loud
she could scarcely hear his bells.
Above the din came a sudden snarling as two dogs fell upon each
other over a scrap of meat. They rolled across the oor, snapping
and biting, as a howl of mirth went up. Someone doused them with
a agon of ale and they broke apart. One limped toward the dais.
Lord Walder’s toothless mouth opened in a bark of laughter as the
dripping wet dog shook ale and hair all over three of his grandsons.
The sight of the dogs made Catelyn wish once more for Grey
Wind, but Robb’s direwolf was nowhere to be seen. Lord Walder
had refused to allow him in the hall. “Your wild beast has a taste for
human esh, I hear, heh,” the old man had said. “Rips out throats,
yes. I’ll have no such creature at my Roslin’s feast, amongst women
and little ones, all my sweet innocents.”
“Grey Wind is no danger to them, my lord,” Robb protested. “Not
so long as I am there.”
“You were there at my gates, were you not? When the wolf
attacked the grandsons I sent to greet you? I heard all about that,
don’t think I didn’t, heh.”
“No harm was done—”
“No harm, the king says? No harm? Petyr fell from his horse, fell.
I lost a wife the same way, falling.” His mouth worked in and out.
“Or was she just some strumpet? Bastard Walder’s mother, yes, now
I recall. She fell o her horse and cracked her head. What would
Your Grace do if Petyr had broken his neck, heh? Give me another
apology in place of a grandson? No, no, no. Might be you’re king, I
won’t say you’re not, the King in the North, heh, but under my roof,

my rule. Have your wolf or have your wedding, sire. You’ll not
have both.”
Catelyn could tell that her son was furious, but he yielded with as
much courtesy as he could summon. If it pleases Lord Walder to serve
me stewed crow smothered in maggots, he’d told her, I’ll eat it and ask
for a second bowl. And so he had.
The Greatjon had drunk another of Lord Walder’s brood under the
table, Petyr Pimple this time. The lad has a third his capacity, what
did he expect? Lord Umber wiped his mouth, stood, and began to
sing. “A bear there was, a bear, a BEAR! All black and brown and
covered with hair!” His voice was not at all bad, though somewhat
thick from drink. Unfortunately the ddlers and drummers and
utists up above were playing “Flowers of Spring,” which suited the
words of “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” as well as snails might suit
a bowl of porridge. Even poor Jinglebell covered his ears at the
cacophony.
Roose Bolton murmured some words too soft to hear and went o
in search of a privy. The cramped hall was in a constant uproar of
guests and servants coming and going. A second feast, for knights
and lords of somewhat lesser rank, was roaring along in the other
castle, she knew. Lord Walder had exiled his baseborn children and
their o spring to that side of the river, so that Robb’s northmen had
taken to referring to it as “the bastard feast.” Some guests were no
doubt stealing o to see if the bastards were having a better time
than they were. Some might even be venturing as far as the camps.
The Freys had provided wagons of wine, ale, and mead, so the
common soldiers could drink to the wedding of Riverrun and the
Twins.
Robb sat down in Bolton’s vacant place. “A few more hours and
this farce is done, Mother,” he said in a low voice, as the Greatjon
sang of the maid with honey in her hair. “Black Walder’s been mild
as a lamb for once. And Uncle Edmure seems well content in his
bride.” He leaned across her. “Ser Ryman?”
Ser Ryman Frey blinked and said, “Sire. Yes?”
“I’d hoped to ask Olyvar to squire for me when we march north,”
said Robb, “but I do not see him here. Would he be at the other

feast?”
“Olyvar?” Ser Ryman shook his head. “No. Not Olyvar.
Gone … gone from the castles. Duty.”
“I see.” Robb’s tone suggested otherwise. When Ser Ryman
o ered nothing more, the king got to his feet again. “Would you
care for a dance, Mother?”
“Thank you, but no.” A dance was the last thing she needed, the
way her head was throbbing. “No doubt one of Lord Walder’s
daughters would be pleased to partner you.”
“Oh, no doubt.” His smile was resigned.
The musicians were playing “Iron Lances” by then, while the
Greatjon sang “The Lusty Lad.” Someone should acquaint them with
each other, it might improve the harmony. Catelyn turned back to Ser
Ryman. “I had heard that one of your cousins was a singer.”
“Alesander. Symond’s son. Alyx is his sister.” He raised a cup
toward where she danced with Robin Flint.
“Will Alesander be playing for us tonight?”
Ser Ryman squinted at her. “Not him. He’s away.” He wiped
sweat from his brow and lurched to his feet. “Pardons, my lady.
Pardons.” Catelyn watched him stagger toward the door.
Edmure was kissing Roslin and squeezing her hand. Elsewhere in
the hall, Ser Marq Piper and Ser Danwell Frey played a drinking
game, Lame Lothar said something amusing to Ser Hosteen, one of
the younger Freys juggled three daggers for a group of giggly girls,
and Jinglebell sat on the oor sucking wine o his ngers. The
servers were bringing out huge silver platters piled high with cuts
of juicy pink lamb, the most appetizing dish they’d seen all evening.
And Robb was leading Dacey Mormont in a dance.
When she wore a dress in place of a hauberk, Lady Maege’s eldest
daughter was quite pretty; tall and willowy, with a shy smile that
made her long face light up. It was pleasant to see that she could be
as graceful on the dance oor as in the training yard. Catelyn
wondered if Lady Maege had reached the Neck as yet. She had
taken her other daughters with her, but as one of Robb’s battle
companions Dacey had chosen to remain by his side. He has Ned’s
gift for inspiring loyalty. Olyvar Frey had been devoted to her son as

well. Hadn’t Robb said that Olyvar wanted to remain with him even
after he’d married Jeyne?
Seated betwixt his black oak towers, the Lord of the Crossing
clapped his spotted hands together. The noise they made was so
faint that even those on the dais scarce heard it, but Ser Aenys and
Ser Hosteen saw and began to pound their cups on the table. Lame
Lothar joined them, then Marq Piper and Ser Danwell and Ser
Raymund. Half the guests were soon pounding. Finally even the
mob of musicians in the gallery took note. The piping, drumming,
and ddling trailed o into quiet.
“Your Grace,” Lord Walder called out to Robb, “the septon has
prayed his prayers, some words have been said, and Lord Edmure’s
wrapped my sweetling in a sh cloak, but they are not yet man and
wife. A sword needs a sheath, heh, and a wedding needs a bedding.
What does my sire say? Is it meet that we should bed them?”
A score or more of Walder Frey’s sons and grandsons began to
bang their cups again, shouting, “To bed! To bed! To bed with them!”
Roslin had gone white. Catelyn wondered whether it was the
prospect of losing her maidenhead that frightened the girl, or the
bedding itself. With so many siblings, she was not like to be a
stranger to the custom, but it was di erent when you were the one
being bedded. On Catelyn’s own wedding night, Jory Cassell had
torn her gown in his haste to get her out of it, and drunken
Desmond Grell kept apologizing for every bawdy joke, only to
make another. When Lord Dustin had beheld her naked, he’d told
Ned that her breasts were enough to make him wish he’d never
been weaned. Poor man, she thought. He had ridden south with Ned,
never to return. Catelyn wondered how many of the men here
tonight would be dead before the year was done. Too many, I fear.
Robb raised a hand. “If you think the time is meet, Lord Walder,
by all means let us bed them.”
A roar of approval greeted his pronouncement. Up in the gallery
the musicians took up their pipes and horns and ddles again, and
began to play “The Queen Took O Her Sandal, the King Took O
His Crown.” Jinglebell hopped from foot to foot, his own crown
ringing. “I hear Tully men have trout between their legs instead of

cocks,” Alyx Frey called out boldly. “Does it take a worm to make
them rise?” To which Ser Marq Piper threw back, “I hear that Frey
women have two gates in place of one!” and Alyx said, “Aye, but
both are closed and barred to little things like you!” A gust of
laughter followed, until Patrek Mallister climbed up onto a table to
propose a toast to Edmure’s one-eyed sh. “And a mighty pike it
is!” he proclaimed. “Nay, I’ll wager it’s a minnow,” Fat Walda
Bolton shouted out from Catelyn’s side. Then the general cry of
“Bed them! Bed them!” went up again.
The guests swarmed the dais, the drunkest in the forefront as
ever. The men and boys surrounded Roslin and lifted her into the
air whilst the maids and mothers in the hall pulled Edmure to his
feet and began tugging at his clothing. He was laughing and
shouting bawdy jokes back at them, though the music was too loud
for Catelyn to hear. She heard the Greatjon, though. “Give this little
bride to me,” he bellowed as he shoved through the other men and
threw Roslin over one shoulder. “Look at this little thing! No meat
on her at all!”
Catelyn felt sorry for the girl. Most brides tried to return the
banter, or at least pretended to enjoy it, but Roslin was sti with
terror, clutching the Greatjon as if she feared he might drop her.
She’s crying too, Catelyn realized as she watched Ser Marq Piper pull
o one of the bride’s shoes. I hope Edmure is gentle with the poor
child. Jolly, bawdy music still poured down from the gallery; the
queen was taking o her kirtle now, and the king his tunic.
She knew she should join the throng of women round her brother,
but she would only ruin their fun. The last thing she felt just now
was bawdy. Edmure would forgive her absence, she did not doubt;
much jollier to be stripped and bedded by a score of lusty, laughing
Freys than by a sour, stricken sister.
As man and maid were carried from the hall, a trail of clothing
behind them, Catelyn saw that Robb had also remained. Walder
Frey was prickly enough to see some insult to his daughter in that.
He should join in Roslin’s bedding, but is it my place to tell him so? She
tensed, until she saw that others had stayed as well. Petyr Pimple
and Ser Whalen Frey slept on, their heads on the table. Merrett Frey

poured himself another cup of wine, while Jinglebell wandered
about stealing bites o the plates of those who’d left. Ser Wendel
Manderly was lustily attacking a leg of lamb. And of course Lord
Walder was far too feeble to leave his seat without help. He will
expect Robb to go, though. She could almost hear the old man asking
why His Grace did not want to see his daughter naked. The drums
were pounding again, pounding and pounding and pounding.
Dacey Mormont, who seemed to be the only woman left in the
hall besides Catelyn, stepped up behind Edwyn Frey, and touched
him lightly on the arm as she said something in his ear. Edwyn
wrenched himself away from her with unseemly violence. “No,” he
said, too loudly. “I’m done with dancing for the nonce.” Dacey
paled and turned away. Catelyn got slowly to her feet. What just
happened there? Doubt gripped her heart, where an instant before
had been only weariness. It is nothing, she tried to tell herself, you
are seeing grumkins in the woodpile, you are become an old silly woman
sick with grief and fear. But something must have shown on her face.
Even Ser Wendel Manderly took note. “Is something amiss?” he
asked, the leg of lamb in his hands.
She did not answer him. Instead she went after Edwyn Frey. The
players in the gallery had nally gotten both king and queen down
to their name-day suits. With scarcely a moment’s respite, they
began to play a very di erent sort of song. No one sang the words,
but Catelyn knew “The Rains of Castamere” when she heard it.
Edwyn was hurrying toward a door. She hurried faster, driven by
the music. Six quick strides and she caught him. And who are you,
the proud lord said, that I must bow so low? She grabbed Edwyn by
the arm to turn him and went cold all over when she felt the iron
rings beneath his silken sleeve.
Catelyn slapped him so hard she broke his lip. Olyvar, she
thought, and Perwyn, Alesander, all absent. And Roslin wept …
Edwyn Frey shoved her aside. The music drowned all other
sound, echoing o the walls as if the stones themselves were
playing. Robb gave Edwyn an angry look and moved to block his
way … and staggered suddenly as a quarrel sprouted from his side,
just beneath the shoulder. If he screamed then, the sound was

swallowed by the pipes and horns and ddles. Catelyn saw a second
bolt pierce his leg, saw him fall. Up in the gallery, half the
musicians had crossbows in their hands instead of drums or lutes.
She ran toward her son, until something punched in the small of the
back and the hard stone oor came up to slap her. “Robb!” she
screamed. She saw Smalljon Umber wrestle a table o its trestles.
Crossbow bolts thudded into the wood, one two three, as he ung it
down on top of his king. Robin Flint was ringed by Freys, their
daggers rising and falling. Ser Wendel Manderly rose ponderously
to his feet, holding his leg of lamb. A quarrel went in his open
mouth and came out the back of his neck. Ser Wendel crashed
forward, knocking the table o its trestles and sending cups,
agons, trenchers, platters, turnips, beets, and wine bouncing,
spilling, and sliding across the oor.
Catelyn’s back was on re. I have to reach him. The Smalljon
bludgeoned Ser Raymund Frey across the face with a leg of mutton.
But when he reached for his swordbelt a crossbow bolt drove him to
his knees. In a coat of gold or a coat of red, a lion still has claws. She
saw Lucas Blackwood cut down by Ser Hosteen Frey. One of the
Vances was hamstrung by Black Walder as he was wrestling with
Ser Harys Haigh. And mine are long and sharp, my lord, as long and
sharp as yours. The crossbows took Donnel Locke, Owen Norrey, and
half a dozen more. Young Ser Benfrey had seized Dacey Mormont
by the arm, but Catelyn saw her grab up a agon of wine with her
other hand, smash it full in his face, and run for the door. It ew
open before she reached it. Ser Ryman Frey pushed into the hall,
clad in steel from helm to heel. A dozen Frey men-at-arms packed
the door behind him. They were armed with heavy longaxes.
“Mercy!” Catelyn cried, but horns and drums and the clash of steel
smothered her plea. Ser Ryman buried the head of his axe in
Dacey’s stomach. By then men were pouring in the other doors as
well, mailed men in shaggy fur cloaks with steel in their hands.
Northmen! She took them for rescue for half a heartbeat, till one of
them struck the Smalljon’s head o with two huge blows of his axe.
Hope blew out like a candle in a storm.

In the midst of slaughter, the Lord of the Crossing sat on his
carved oaken throne, watching greedily.
There was a dagger on the oor a few feet away. Perhaps it had
skittered there when the Smalljon knocked the table o its trestles,
or perhaps it had fallen from the hand of some dying man. Catelyn
crawled toward it. Her limbs were leaden, and the taste of blood
was in her mouth. I will kill Walder Frey, she told herself. Jinglebell
was closer to the knife, hiding under a table, but he only cringed
away as she snatched up the blade. I will kill the old man, I can do
that much at least.
Then the tabletop that the Smalljon had ung over Robb shifted,
and her son struggled to his knees. He had an arrow in his side, a
second in his leg, a third through his chest. Lord Walder raised a
hand, and the music stopped, all but one drum. Catelyn heard the
crash of distant battle, and closer the wild howling of a wolf. Grey
Wind, she remembered too late. “Heh,” Lord Walder cackled at
Robb, “the King in the North arises. Seems we killed some of your
men, Your Grace. Oh, but I’ll make you an apology, that will mend
them all again, heh.”
Catelyn grabbed a handful of Jinglebell Frey’s long grey hair and
dragged him out of his hiding place. “Lord Walder!” she shouted.
“LORD WALDER!” The drum beat slow and sonorous, doom boom
doom. “Enough,” said Catelyn. “Enough, I say. You have repaid
betrayal with betrayal, let it end.” When she pressed her dagger to
Jinglebell’s throat, the memory of Bran’s sickroom came back to
her, with the feel of steel at her own throat. The drum went boom
doom boom doom boom doom. “Please,” she said. “He is my son. My
rst son, and my last. Let him go. Let him go and I swear we will
forget this … forget all you’ve done here. I swear it by the old gods
and new, we … we will take no vengeance …”
Lord Walder peered at her in mistrust. “Only a fool would believe
such blather. D’you take me for a fool, my lady?”
“I take you for a father. Keep me for a hostage, Edmure as well if
you haven’t killed him. But let Robb go.”
“No.” Robb’s voice was whisper faint. “Mother, no …”

“Yes. Robb, get up. Get up and walk out, please, please. Save
yourself … if not for me, for Jeyne.”
“Jeyne?” Robb grabbed the edge of the table and forced himself
to stand. “Mother,” he said, “Grey Wind …”
“Go to him. Now. Robb, walk out of here.”
Lord Walder snorted. “And why would I let him do that?”
She pressed the blade deeper into Jinglebell’s throat. The lackwit
rolled his eyes at her in mute appeal. A foul stench assailed her
nose, but she paid it no more mind than she did the sullen ceaseless
pounding of that drum, boom doom boom doom boom doom. Ser
Ryman and Black Walder were circling round her back, but Catelyn
did not care. They could do as they wished with her; imprison her,
rape her, kill her, it made no matter. She had lived too long, and
Ned was waiting. It was Robb she feared for. “On my honor as a
Tully,” she told Lord Walder, “on my honor as a Stark, I will trade
your boy’s life for Robb’s. A son for a son.” Her hand shook so
badly she was ringing Jinglebell’s head.
Boom, the drum sounded, boom doom boom doom. The old man’s
lips went in and out. The knife trembled in Catelyn’s hand, slippery
with sweat. “A son for a son, heh,” he repeated. “But that’s a
grandson … and he never was much use.”
A man in dark armor and a pale pink cloak spotted with blood
stepped up to Robb. “Jaime Lannister sends his regards.” He thrust
his longsword through her son’s heart, and twisted.
Robb had broken his word, but Catelyn kept hers. She tugged
hard on Aegon’s hair and sawed at his neck until the blade grated on
bone. Blood ran hot over her ngers. His little bells were ringing,
ringing, ringing, and the drum went boom doom boom.
Finally someone took the knife away from her. The tears burned
like vinegar as they ran down her cheeks. Ten erce ravens were
raking her face with sharp talons and tearing o strips of esh,
leaving deep furrows that ran red with blood. She could taste it on
her lips.
It hurts so much, she thought. Our children, Ned, all our sweet babes.
Rickon, Bran, Arya, Sansa, Robb … Robb … please, Ned, please, make
it stop, make it stop hurting … The white tears and the red ones ran

together until her face was torn and tattered, the face that Ned had
loved. Catelyn Stark raised her hands and watched the blood run
down her long ngers, over her wrists, beneath the sleeves of her
gown. Slow red worms crawled along her arms and under her
clothes. It tickles. That made her laugh until she screamed. “Mad,”
someone said, “she’s lost her wits,” and someone else said, “Make
an end,” and a hand grabbed her scalp just as she’d done with
Jinglebell, and she thought, No, don’t, don’t cut my hair, Ned loves
my hair. Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and
cold.

ARYA

The feast tents were behind them now. They squished over wet

clay and torn grass, out of the light and back into the gloom. Ahead
loomed the castle gatehouse. She could see torches moving on the
walls, their ames dancing and blowing in the wind. The light shone
dully against the wet mail and helms. More torches were moving on
the dark stone bridge that joined the Twins, a column of them
streaming from the west bank to the east.
“The castle’s not closed,” Arya said suddenly. The sergeant had
said it would be, but he was wrong. The portcullis was being drawn
upward even as she watched, and the drawbridge had already been
lowered to span the swollen moat. She had been afraid that Lord
Frey’s guardsmen would refuse to let them in. For half a heartbeat
she chewed her lip, too anxious to smile.
The Hound reined up so suddenly that she almost fell o the
wayn. “Seven bloody buggering hells,” Arya heard him curse, as
their left wheel began to sink in soft mud. The wayn tilted slowly.
“Get down,” Clegane roared at her, slamming the heel of his hand
into her shoulder to knock her sideways. She landed light, the way
Syrio had taught her, and bounced up at once with a face full of
mud. “Why did you do that?” she screamed. The Hound had leapt
down as well. He tore the seat o the front of the wayn and reached
in for the swordbelt he’d hidden beneath it.
It was only then that she heard the riders pouring out the castle
gate in a river of steel and re, the thunder of their destriers

crossing the drawbridge almost lost beneath the drumming from the
castles. Men and mounts wore plate armor, and one in every ten
carried a torch. The rest had axes, longaxes with spiked heads and
heavy bone-crushing armor-smashing blades.
Somewhere far o she heard a wolf howling. It wasn’t very loud
compared to the camp noise and the music and the low ominous
growl of the river running wild, but she heard it all the same. Only
maybe it wasn’t her ears that heard it. The sound shivered through
Arya like a knife, sharp with rage and grief. More and more riders
were emerging from the castle, a column four wide with no end to
it, knights and squires and freeriders, torches and longaxes. And
there was noise coming from behind as well.
When Arya looked around, she saw that there were only two of
the huge feast tents where once there had been three. The one in
the middle had collapsed. For a moment she did not understand
what she was seeing. Then the ames went licking up from the
fallen tent, and now the other two were collapsing, heavy oiled
cloth settling down on the men beneath. A ight of re arrows
streaked through the air. The second tent took re, and then the
third. The screams grew so loud she could hear words through the
music. Dark shapes moved in front of the ames, the steel of their
armor shining orange from afar.
A battle, Arya knew. It’s a battle. And the riders …
She had no more time to watch the tents then. With the river
over owing its banks, the dark swirling waters at the end of the
drawbridge reached as high as a horse’s belly, but the riders
splashed through them all the same, spurred on by the music. For
once the same song was coming from both castles. I know this song,
Arya realized suddenly. Tom o’ Sevens had sung it for them, that
rainy night the outlaws had sheltered in the brewhouse with the
brothers. And who are you, the proud lord said, that I must bow so low?
The Frey riders were struggling through the mud and reeds, but
some of them had seen the wayn. She watched as three riders left
the main column, pounding through the shallows. Only a cat of a
di erent coat, that’s all the truth I know.

Clegane cut Stranger loose with a single slash of his sword and
leapt onto his back. The courser knew what was wanted of him. He
pricked up his ears and wheeled toward the charging destriers. In a
coat of gold or a coat of red, a lion still has claws. And mine are long
and sharp, my lord, as long and sharp as yours. Arya had prayed a
hundred hundred times for the Hound to die, but now … there was
a rock in her hand, slimy with mud, and she didn’t even remember
picking it up. Who do I throw it at?
She jumped at the clash of metal as Clegane turned aside the rst
longaxe. While he was engaged with the rst man, the second
circled behind him and aimed a blow for the small of his back.
Stranger was wheeling, so the Hound took only a glancing blow,
enough to rip a great gash in his baggy peasant’s blouse and expose
the mail below. He is one against three. Arya still clutched her rock.
They’re sure to kill him. She thought of Mycah, the butcher’s boy who
had been her friend so brie y.
Then she saw the third rider coming her way. Arya moved behind
the wayn. Fear cuts deeper than swords. She could hear drums and
warhorns and pipes, stallions trumpeting, the shriek of steel on
steel, but all the sounds seemed so far away. There was only the
oncoming horseman and the longaxe in his hand. He wore a surcoat
over his armor and she saw the two towers that marked him for a
Frey. She did not understand. Her uncle was marrying Lord Frey’s
daughter, the Freys were her brother’s friends. “Don’t!” she
screamed as he rode around the wayn, but he paid no mind.
When he charged Arya threw the rock, the way she’d once thrown
a crabapple at Gendry. She’d gotten Gendry right between the eyes,
but this time her aim was o , and the stone caromed sideways o
his temple. It was enough to break his charge, but no more. She
retreated, darting across the muddy ground on the balls of her feet,
putting the wayn between them once more. The knight followed at
a trot, only darkness behind his eyeslit. She hadn’t even dented his
helm. They went round once, twice, a third time. The knight cursed
her. “You can’t run for—”
The axehead caught him square in the back of the head, crashing
through his helm and the skull beneath and sending him ying face

rst from his saddle. Behind him was the Hound, still mounted on
Stranger. How did you get an axe? she almost asked, before she saw.
One of the other Freys was trapped beneath his dying horse,
drowning in a foot of water. The third man was sprawled on his
back, unmoving. He hadn’t worn a gorget, and a foot of broken
sword jutted from beneath his chin.
“Get my helm,” Clegane growled at her.
It was stu ed at the bottom of a sack of dried apples, in the back
of the wayn behind the pickled pigs’ feet. Arya upended the sack
and tossed it to him. He snatched it one-handed from the air and
lowered it over his head, and where the man had sat only a steel
dog remained, snarling at the res.
“My brother …”
“Dead,” he shouted back at her. “Do you think they’d slaughter
his men and leave him alive?” He turned his head back toward the
camp. “Look. Look, damn you.”
The camp had become a battle eld. No, a butcher’s den. The
ames from the feasting tents reached halfway up the sky. Some of
the barracks tents were burning too, and half a hundred silk
pavilions. Everywhere swords were singing. And now the rains weep
o’er his hall, with not a soul to hear. She saw two knights ride down a
running man. A wooden barrel came crashing onto one of the
burning tents and burst apart, and the ames leapt twice as high. A
catapult, she knew. The castle was inging oil or pitch or something.
“Come with me.” Sandor Clegane reached down a hand. “We
have to get away from here, and now.” Stranger tossed his head
impatiently, his nostrils aring at the scent of blood. The song was
done. There was only one solitary drum, its slow monotonous beats
echoing across the river like the pounding of some monstrous heart.
The black sky wept, the river grumbled, men cursed and died. Arya
had mud in her teeth and her face was wet. Rain. It’s only rain. That’s
all it is. “We’re here,” she shouted. Her voice sounded thin and
scared, a little girl’s voice. “Robb’s just in the castle, and my
mother. The gate’s even open.” There were no more Freys riding
out. I came so far. “We have to go get my mother.”

“Stupid little bitch.” Fires glinted o the snout of his helm, and
made the steel teeth shine. “You go in there, you won’t come out.
Maybe Frey will let you kiss your mother’s corpse.”
“Maybe we can save her …”
“Maybe you can. I’m not done living yet.” He rode toward her,
crowding her back toward the wayn. “Stay or go, she-wolf. Live or
die. Your—”
Arya spun away from him and darted for the gate. The portcullis
was coming down, but slowly. I have to run faster. The mud slowed
her, though, and then the water. Run fast as a wolf. The drawbridge
had begun to lift, the water running o it in a sheet, the mud falling
in heavy clots. Faster. She heard loud splashing and looked back to
see Stranger pounding after her, sending up gouts of water with
every stride. She saw the longaxe too, still wet with blood and
brains. And Arya ran. Not for her brother now, not even for her
mother, but for herself. She ran faster than she had ever run before,
her head down and her feet churning up the river, she ran from him
as Mycah must have run.
His axe took her in the back of the head.

TYRION

They supped alone, as they did so often.

“The pease are overcooked,” his wife ventured once.
“No matter,” he said. “So is the mutton.”
It was a jest, but Sansa took it for criticism. “I am sorry, my
lord.”
“Why? Some cook should be sorry. Not you. The pease are not
your province, Sansa.”
“I … I am sorry that my lord husband is displeased.”
“Any displeasure I’m feeling has naught to do with pease. I have
Jo rey and my sister to displease me, and my lord father, and three
hundred bloody Dornishmen.” He had settled Prince Oberyn and his
lords in a cornerfort facing the city, as far from the Tyrells as he
could put them without evicting them from the Red Keep entirely.
It was not nearly far enough. Already there had been a brawl in a
Flea Bottom pot-shop that left one Tyrell man-at-arms dead and two
of Lord Gargalen’s scalded, and an ugly confrontation in the yard
when Mace Tyrell’s wizened little mother called Ellaria Sand “the
serpent’s whore.” Every time he chanced to see Oberyn Martell the
prince asked when the justice would be served. Overcooked pease
were the least of Tyrion’s troubles, but he saw no point in
burdening his young wife with any of that. Sansa had enough griefs
of her own.
“The pease su ce,” he told her curtly. “They are green and
round, what more can one expect of pease? Here, I’ll have another

serving, if it please my lady.” He beckoned, and Podrick Payne
spooned so many pease onto his plate that Tyrion lost sight of his
mutton. That was stupid, he told himself. Now I have to eat them all,
or she’ll be sorry all over again.
The supper ended in a strained silence, as so many of their
suppers did. Afterward, as Pod was removing the cups and platters,
Sansa asked Tyrion for leave to visit the godswood.
“As you wish.” He had become accustomed to his wife’s nightly
devotions. She prayed at the royal sept as well, and often lit candles
to Mother, Maid, and Crone. Tyrion found all this piety excessive, if
truth be told, but in her place he might want the help of the gods as
well. “I confess, I know little of the old gods,” he said, trying to be
pleasant. “Perhaps someday you might enlighten me. I could even
accompany you.”
“No,” Sansa said at once. “You … you are kind to o er,
but … there are no devotions, my lord. No priests or songs or
candles. Only trees, and silent prayer. You would be bored.”
“No doubt you’re right.” She knows me better than I thought.
“Though the sound of rustling leaves might be a pleasant change
from some septon droning on about the seven aspects of grace.”
Tyrion waved her o . “I won’t intrude. Dress warmly, my lady, the
wind is brisk out there.” He was tempted to ask what she prayed
for, but Sansa was so dutiful she might actually tell him, and he
didn’t think he wanted to know.
He went back to work after she left, trying to track some golden
dragons through the labyrinth of Little nger’s ledgers. Petyr Baelish
had not believed in letting gold sit about and grow dusty, that was
for certain, but the more Tyrion tried to make sense of his accounts
the more his head hurt. It was all very well to talk of breeding
dragons instead of locking them up in the treasury, but some of
these ventures smelled worse than week-old sh. I wouldn’t have
been so quick to let Jo rey ing the Antler Men over the walls if I’d
known how many of the bloody bastards had taken loans from the
crown. He would have to send Bronn to nd their heirs, but he
feared that would prove as fruitful as trying to squeeze silver from
a silver sh.

When the summons from his lord father arrived, it was the rst
time Tyrion could ever recall being pleased to see Ser Boros Blount.
He closed the ledgers gratefully, blew out the oil lamp, tied a cloak
around his shoulders, and waddled across the castle to the Tower of
the Hand. The wind was brisk, just as he’d warned Sansa, and there
was a smell of rain in the air. Perhaps when Lord Tywin was done
with him he should go to the godswood and fetch her home before
she got soaked.
But all that went straight out of his head when he entered the
Hand’s solar to nd Cersei, Ser Kevan, and Grand Maester Pycelle
gathered about Lord Tywin and the king. Jo rey was almost
bouncing, and Cersei was savoring a smug little smile, though Lord
Tywin looked as grim as ever. I wonder if he could smile even if he
wanted to. “What’s happened?” Tyrion asked.
His father o ered him a roll of parchment. Someone had attened
it, but it still wanted to curl. “Roslin caught a ne fat trout,” the
message read. “Her brothers gave her a pair of wolf pelts for her
wedding.” Tyrion turned it over to inspect the broken seal. The wax
was silvery-grey, and pressed into it were the twin towers of House
Frey. “Does the Lord of the Crossing imagine he’s being poetic? Or
is this meant to confound us?” Tyrion snorted. “The trout would be
Edmure Tully, the pelts …”
“He’s dead!” Jo rey sounded so proud and happy you might have
thought he’d skinned Robb Stark himself.
First Greyjoy and now Stark. Tyrion thought of his child wife,
praying in the godswood even now. Praying to her father’s gods to
bring her brother victory and keep her mother safe, no doubt. The old
gods paid no more heed to prayer than the new ones, it would
seem. Perhaps he should take comfort in that. “Kings are falling like
leaves this autumn,” he said. “It would seem our little war is
winning itself.”
“Wars do not win themselves, Tyrion,” Cersei said with poisonous
sweetness. “Our lord father won this war.”
“Nothing is won so long as we have enemies in the eld,” Lord
Tywin warned them.

“The river lords are no fools,” the queen argued. “Without the
northmen they cannot hope to stand against the combined power of
Highgarden, Casterly Rock, and Dorne. Surely they will choose
submission rather than destruction.”
“Most,” agreed Lord Tywin. “Riverrun remains, but so long as
Walder Frey holds Edmure Tully hostage, the Black sh dare not
mount a threat. Jason Mallister and Tytos Blackwood will ght on
for honor’s sake, but the Freys can keep the Mallisters penned up at
Seagard, and with the right inducement Jonos Bracken can be
persuaded to change his allegiance and attack the Blackwoods. In
the end they will bend the knee, yes. I mean to o er generous
terms. Any castle that yields to us will be spared, save one.”
“Harrenhal?” said Tyrion, who knew his sire.
“The realm is best rid of these Brave Companions. I have
commanded Ser Gregor to put the castle to the sword.”
Gregor Clegane. It appeared as if his lord father meant to mine the
Mountain for every last nugget of ore before turning him over to
Dornish justice. The Brave Companions would end as heads on
spikes, and Little nger would stroll into Harrenhal without so much
as a spot of blood on those ne clothes of his. He wondered if Petyr
Baelish had reached the Vale yet. If the gods are good, he ran into a
storm at sea and sank. But when had the gods ever been especially
good?
“They should all be put to the sword,” Jo rey declared suddenly.
“The Mallisters and Blackwoods and Brackens … all of them.
They’re traitors. I want them killed, Grandfather. I won’t have any
generous terms.” The king turned to Grand Maester Pycelle. “And I
want Robb Stark’s head too. Write to Lord Frey and tell him. The
king commands. I’m going to have it served to Sansa at my wedding
feast.”
“Sire,” Ser Kevan said, in a shocked voice, “the lady is now your
aunt by marriage.”
“A jest.” Cersei smiled. “Jo did not mean it.”
“Yes I did,” Jo rey insisted. “He was a traitor, and I want his
stupid head. I’m going to make Sansa kiss it.”

“No.” Tyrion’s voice was hoarse. “Sansa is no longer yours to
torment. Understand that, monster.”
Jo rey sneered. “You’re the monster, Uncle.”
“Am I?” Tyrion cocked his head. “Perhaps you should speak more
softly to me, then. Monsters are dangerous beasts, and just now
kings seem to be dying like ies.”
“I could have your tongue out for saying that,” the boy king said,
reddening. “I’m the king.”
Cersei put a protective hand on her son’s shoulder. “Let the dwarf
make all the threats he likes, Jo . I want my lord father and my
uncle to see what he is.”
Lord Tywin ignored that; it was Jo rey he addressed. “Aerys also
felt the need to remind men that he was king. And he was passing
fond of ripping tongues out as well. You could ask Ser Ilyn Payne
about that, though you’ll get no reply.”
“Ser Ilyn never dared provoke Aerys the way your Imp provokes
Jo ,” said Cersei. “You heard him. ‘Monster,’ he said. To the King’s
Grace. And he threatened him …”
“Be quiet, Cersei. Jo rey, when your enemies defy you, you must
serve them steel and re. When they go to their knees, however,
you must help them back to their feet. Elsewise no man will ever
bend the knee to you. And any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is
no true king at all. Aerys never understood that, but you will. When
I’ve won your war for you, we will restore the king’s peace and the
king’s justice. The only head that need concern you is Margaery
Tyrell’s maidenhead.”
Jo rey had that sullen, sulky look he got. Cersei had him rmly
by the shoulder, but perhaps she should have had him by the throat.
The boy surprised them all. Instead of scuttling safely back under
his rock, Jo drew himself up de antly and said, “You talk about
Aerys, Grandfather, but you were scared of him.”
Oh, my, hasn’t this gotten interesting? Tyrion thought.
Lord Tywin studied his grandchild in silence, gold ecks shining
in his pale green eyes. “Jo rey, apologize to your grandfather,” said
Cersei.

He wrenched free of her. “Why should I? Everyone knows it’s
true. My father won all the battles. He killed Prince Rhaegar and
took the crown, while your father was hiding under Casterly Rock.”
The boy gave his grandfather a de ant look. “A strong king acts
boldly, he doesn’t just talk.”
“Thank you for that wisdom, Your Grace,” Lord Tywin said, with
a courtesy so cold it was like to freeze their ears o . “Ser Kevan, I
can see the king is tired. Please see him safely back to his
bedchamber. Pycelle, perhaps some gentle potion to help His Grace
sleep restfully?”
“Dreamwine, my lord?”
“I don’t want any dreamwine,” Jo rey insisted.
Lord Tywin would have paid more heed to a mouse squeaking in
the corner. “Dreamwine will serve. Cersei, Tyrion, remain.”
Ser Kevan took Jo rey rmly by the arm and marched him out
the door, where two of the Kingsguard were waiting. Grand
Maester Pycelle scurried after them as fast as his shaky old legs
could take him. Tyrion remained where he was.
“Father, I am sorry,” Cersei said, when the door was shut. “Jo
has always been willful, I did warn you …”
“There is a long league’s worth of di erence between willful and
stupid. ‘A strong king acts boldly?’ Who told him that?”
“Not me, I promise you,” said Cersei. “Most like it was something
he heard Robert say …”
“The part about you hiding under Casterly Rock does sound like
Robert.” Tyrion didn’t want Lord Tywin forgetting that bit.
“Yes, I recall now,” Cersei said, “Robert often told Jo that a king
must be bold.”
“And what were you telling him, pray? I did not ght a war to
seat Robert the Second on the Iron Throne. You gave me to
understand the boy cared nothing for his father.”
“Why would he? Robert ignored him. He would have beat him if
I’d allowed it. That brute you made me marry once hit the boy so
hard he knocked out two of his baby teeth, over some mischief with
a cat. I told him I’d kill him in his sleep if he ever did it again, and
he never did, but sometimes he would say things …”

“It appears things needed to be said.” Lord Tywin waved two
ngers at her, a brusque dismissal. “Go.”
She went, seething.
“Not Robert the Second,” Tyrion said. “Aerys the Third.”
“The boy is thirteen. There is time yet.” Lord Tywin paced to the
window. That was unlike him; he was more upset than he wished to
show. “He requires a sharp lesson.”
Tyrion had gotten his own sharp lesson at thirteen. He felt almost
sorry for his nephew. On the other hand, no one deserved it more.
“Enough of Jo rey,” he said. “Wars are won with quills and ravens,
wasn’t that what you said? I must congratulate you. How long have
you and Walder Frey been plotting this?”
“I mislike that word,” Lord Tywin said sti y.
“And I mislike being left in the dark.”
“There was no reason to tell you. You had no part in this.”
“Was Cersei told?” Tyrion demanded to know.
“No one was told, save those who had a part to play. And they
were only told as much as they needed to know. You ought to know
that there is no other way to keep a secret—here, especially. My
object was to rid us of a dangerous enemy as cheaply as I could, not
to indulge your curiosity or make your sister feel important.” He
closed the shutters, frowning. “You have a certain cunning, Tyrion,
but the plain truth is you talk too much. That loose tongue of yours
will be your undoing.”
“You should have let Jo tear it out,” suggested Tyrion.
“You would do well not to tempt me,” Lord Tywin said. “I’ll hear
no more of this. I have been considering how best to appease
Oberyn Martell and his entourage.”
“Oh? Is this something I’m allowed to know, or should I leave so
you can discuss it with yourself?”
His father ignored the sally. “Prince Oberyn’s presence here is
unfortunate. His brother is a cautious man, a reasoned man, subtle,
deliberate, even indolent to a degree. He is a man who weighs the
consequences of every word and every action. But Oberyn has
always been half-mad.”
“Is it true he tried to raise Dorne for Viserys?”

“No one speaks of it, but yes. Ravens ew and riders rode, with
what secret messages I never knew. Jon Arryn sailed to Sunspear to
return Prince Lewyn’s bones, sat down with Prince Doran, and
ended all the talk of war. But Robert never went to Dorne
thereafter, and Prince Oberyn seldom left it.”
“Well, he’s here now, with half the nobility of Dorne in his tail,
and he grows more impatient every day,” said Tyrion. “Perhaps I
should show him the brothels of King’s Landing, that might distract
him. A tool for every task, isn’t that how it works? My tool is yours,
Father. Never let it be said that House Lannister blew its trumpets
and I did not respond.”
Lord Tywin’s mouth tightened. “Very droll. Shall I have them sew
you a suit of motley, and a little hat with bells on it?”
“If I wear it, do I have leave to say anything I want about His
Grace King Jo rey?”
Lord Tywin seated himself again and said, “I was made to su er
my father’s follies. I will not su er yours. Enough.”
“Very well, as you ask so pleasantly. The Red Viper is not going
to be pleasant, I fear … nor will he content himself with Ser
Gregor’s head alone.”
“All the more reason not to give it to him.”
“Not to …?” Tyrion was shocked. “I thought we were agreed that
the woods were full of beasts.”
“Lesser beasts.” Lord Tywin’s ngers laced together under his
chin. “Ser Gregor has served us well. No other knight in the realm
inspires such terror in our enemies.”
“Oberyn knows that Gregor was the one who …”
“He knows nothing. He has heard tales. Stable gossip and kitchen
calumnies. He has no crumb of proof. Ser Gregor is certainly not
about to confess to him. I mean to keep him well away for so long
as the Dornishmen are in King’s Landing.”
“And when Oberyn demands the justice he’s come for?”
“I will tell him that Ser Amory Lorch killed Elia and her children,”
Lord Tywin said calmly. “So will you, if he asks.”
“Ser Amory Lorch is dead,” Tyrion said atly.

“Precisely. Vargo Hoat had Ser Amory torn apart by a bear after
the fall of Harrenhal. That ought to be su ciently grisly to appease
even Oberyn Martell.”
“You may call that justice …”
“It is justice. It was Ser Amory who brought me the girl’s body, if
you must know. He found her hiding under her father’s bed, as if
she believed Rhaegar could still protect her. Princess Elia and the
babe were in the nursery a oor below.”
“Well, it’s a tale, and Ser Amory’s not like to deny it. What will
you tell Oberyn when he asks who gave Lorch his orders?”
“Ser Amory acted on his own in the hope of winning favor from
the new king. Robert’s hatred for Rhaegar was scarcely a secret.”
It might serve, Tyrion had to concede, but the snake will not be
happy. “Far be it from me to question your cunning, Father, but in
your place I do believe I’d have let Robert Baratheon bloody his
own hands.”
Lord Tywin stared at him as if he had lost his wits. “You deserve
that motley, then. We had come late to Robert’s cause. It was
necessary to demonstrate our loyalty. When I laid those bodies
before the throne, no man could doubt that we had forsaken House
Targaryen forever. And Robert’s relief was palpable. As stupid as he
was, even he knew that Rhaegar’s children had to die if his throne
was ever to be secure. Yet he saw himself as a hero, and heroes do
not kill children.” His father shrugged. “I grant you, it was done too
brutally. Elia need not have been harmed at all, that was sheer
folly. By herself she was nothing.”
“Then why did the Mountain kill her?”
“Because I did not tell him to spare her. I doubt I mentioned her
at all. I had more pressing concerns. Ned Stark’s van was rushing
south from the Trident, and I feared it might come to swords
between us. And it was in Aerys to murder Jaime, with no more
cause than spite. That was the thing I feared most. That, and what
Jaime himself might do.” He closed a st. “Nor did I yet grasp what
I had in Gregor Clegane, only that he was huge and terrible in
battle. The rape … even you will not accuse me of giving that
command, I would hope. Ser Amory was almost as bestial with

Rhaenys. I asked him afterward why it had required half a hundred
thrusts to kill a girl of … two? Three? He said she’d kicked him and
would not stop screaming. If Lorch had half the wits the gods gave
a turnip, he would have calmed her with a few sweet words and
used a soft silk pillow.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “The blood
was in him.”
But not in you, Father. There is no blood in Tywin Lannister. “Was it
a soft silk pillow that slew Robb Stark?”
“It was to be an arrow, at Edmure Tully’s wedding feast. The boy
was too wary in the eld. He kept his men in good order, and
surrounded himself with outriders and bodyguards.”
“So Lord Walder slew him under his own roof, at his own table?”
Tyrion made a st. “What of Lady Catelyn?”
“Slain as well, I’d say. A pair of wolfskins. Frey had intended to
keep her captive, but perhaps something went awry.”
“So much for guest right.”
“The blood is on Walder Frey’s hands, not mine.”
“Walder Frey is a peevish old man who lives to fondle his young
wife and brood over all the slights he’s su ered. I have no doubt he
hatched this ugly chicken, but he would never have dared such a
thing without a promise of protection.”
“I suppose you would have spared the boy and told Lord Frey you
had no need of his allegiance? That would have driven the old fool
right back into Stark’s arms and won you another year of war.
Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in
battle than a dozen at dinner.” When Tyrion had no reply to that,
his father continued. “The price was cheap by any measure. The
crown shall grant Riverrun to Ser Emmon Frey once the Black sh
yields. Lancel and Daven must marry Frey girls, Joy is to wed one
of Lord Walder’s natural sons when she’s old enough, and Roose
Bolton becomes Warden of the North and takes home Arya Stark.”
“Arya Stark?” Tyrion cocked his head. “And Bolton? I might have
known Frey would not have the stomach to act alone. But
Arya … Varys and Ser Jacelyn searched for her for more than half a
year. Arya Stark is surely dead.”
“So was Renly, until the Blackwater.”

“What does that mean?”
“Perhaps Little nger succeeded where you and Varys failed. Lord
Bolton will wed the girl to his bastard son. We shall allow the
Dreadfort to ght the ironborn for a few years, and see if he can
bring Stark’s other bannermen to heel. Come spring, all of them
should be at the end of their strength and ready to bend the knee.
The north will go to your son by Sansa Stark … if you ever nd
enough manhood in you to breed one. Lest you forget, it is not only
Jo rey who must needs take a maidenhead.”
I had not forgotten, though I’d hoped you had. “And when do you
imagine Sansa will be at her most fertile?” Tyrion asked his father
in tones that dripped acid. “Before or after I tell her how we
murdered her mother and her brother?”

DAVOS

For a moment it seemed as though the king had not heard. Stannis

showed no pleasure at the news, no anger, no disbelief, not even
relief. He stared at his Painted Table with teeth clenched hard. “You
are certain?” he asked.
“I am not seeing the body, no, Your Kingliness,” said Salladhor
Saan. “Yet in the city, the lions prance and dance. The Red Wedding,
the smallfolk are calling it. They swear Lord Frey had the boy’s
head hacked o , sewed the head of his direwolf in its place, and
nailed a crown about his ears. His lady mother was slain as well,
and thrown naked in the river.”
At a wedding, thought Davos. As he sat at his slayer’s board, a guest
beneath his roof. These Freys are cursed. He could smell the burning
blood again, and hear the leech hissing and spitting on the brazier’s
hot coals.
“It was the Lord’s wrath that slew him,” Ser Axell Florent
declared. “It was the hand of R’hllor!”
“Praise the Lord of Light!” sang out Queen Selyse, a pinched thin
hard woman with large ears and a hairy upper lip.
“Is the hand of R’hllor spotted and palsied?” asked Stannis. “This
sounds more Walder Frey’s handiwork than any god’s.”
“R’hllor chooses such instruments as he requires.” The ruby at
Melisandre’s throat shone redly. “His ways are mysterious, but no
man may withstand his ery will.”
“No man may withstand him!” the queen cried.

“Be quiet, woman. You are not at a night re now.” Stannis
considered the Painted Table. “The wolf leaves no heirs, the kraken
too many. The lions will devour them unless … Saan, I will require
your fastest ships to carry envoys to the Iron Islands and White
Harbor. I shall o er pardons.” The way he snapped his teeth showed
how little he liked that word. “Full pardons, for all those who
repent of treason and swear fealty to their rightful king. They must
see …”
“They will not.” Melisandre’s voice was soft. “I am sorry, Your
Grace. This is not an end. More false kings will soon rise to take up
the crowns of those who’ve died.”
“More?” Stannis looked as though he would gladly have throttled
her. “More usurpers? More traitors?”
“I have seen it in the ames.”
Queen Selyse went to the king’s side. “The Lord of Light sent
Melisandre to guide you to your glory. Heed her, I beg you.
R’hllor’s holy ames do not lie.”
“There are lies and lies, woman. Even when these ames speak
truly, they are full of tricks, it seems to me.”
“An ant who hears the words of a king may not comprehend what
he is saying,” Melisandre said, “and all men are ants before the ery
face of god. If sometimes I have mistaken a warning for a prophecy
or a prophecy for a warning, the fault lies in the reader, not the
book. But this I know for a certainty—envoys and pardons will not
serve you now, no more than leeches. You must show the realm a
sign. A sign that proves your power!”
“Power?” The king snorted. “I have thirteen hundred men on
Dragonstone, another three hundred at Storm’s End.” His hand
swept over the Painted Table. “The rest of Westeros is in the hands
of my foes. I have no eet but Salladhor Saan’s. No coin to hire
sellswords. No prospect of plunder or glory to lure freeriders to my
cause.”
“Lord husband,” said Queen Selyse, “you have more men than
Aegon did three hundred years ago. All you lack are dragons.”
The look Stannis gave her was dark. “Nine mages crossed the sea
to hatch Aegon the Third’s cache of eggs. Baelor the Blessed prayed

over his for half a year. Aegon the Fourth built dragons of wood
and iron. Aerion Bright ame drank wild re to transform himself.
The mages failed, King Baelor’s prayers went unanswered, the
wooden dragons burned, and Prince Aerion died screaming.”
Queen Selyse was adamant. “None of these was the chosen of
R’hllor. No red comet blazed across the heavens to herald their
coming. None wielded Lightbringer, the red sword of heroes. And
none of them paid the price. Lady Melisandre will tell you, my lord.
Only death can pay for life.”
“The boy?” The king almost spat the words.
“The boy,” agreed the queen.
“The boy,” Ser Axell echoed.
“I was sick unto death of this wretched boy before he was even
born,” the king complained. “His very name is a roaring in my ears
and a dark cloud upon my soul.”
“Give the boy to me and you need never hear his name spoken
again,” Melisandre promised.
No, but you’ll hear him screaming when she burns him. Davos held
his tongue. It was wiser not to speak until the king commanded it.
“Give me the boy for R’hllor,” the red woman said, “and the
ancient prophecy shall be ful lled. Your dragon shall awaken and
spread his stony wings. The kingdom shall be yours.”
Ser Axell went to one knee. “On bended knee I beg you, sire.
Wake the stone dragon and let the traitors tremble. Like Aegon you
begin as Lord of Dragonstone. Like Aegon you shall conquer. Let
the false and the ckle feel your ames.”
“Your own wife begs as well, lord husband.” Queen Selyse went
down on both knees before the king, hands clasped as if in prayer.
“Robert and Delena de led our bed and laid a curse upon our union.
This boy is the foul fruit of their fornications. Lift his shadow from
my womb and I will bear you many trueborn sons, I know it.” She
threw her arms around his legs. “He is only one boy, born of your
brother’s lust and my cousin’s shame.”
“He is mine own blood. Stop clutching me, woman.” King Stannis
put a hand on her shoulder, awkwardly untangling himself from her
grasp. “Perhaps Robert did curse our marriage bed. He swore to me

that he never meant to shame me, that he was drunk and never
knew which bedchamber he entered that night. But does it matter?
The boy was not at fault, whatever the truth.”
Melisandre put her hand on the king’s arm. “The Lord of Light
cherishes the innocent. There is no sacri ce more precious. From his
king’s blood and his untainted re, a dragon shall be born.”
Stannis did not pull away from Melisandre’s touch as he had from
his queen’s. The red woman was all Selyse was not; young, fullbodied, and strangely beautiful, with her heart-shaped face, coppery
hair, and unearthly red eyes. “It would be a wondrous thing to see
stone come to life,” he admitted, grudging. “And to mount a
dragon … I remember the rst time my father took me to court,
Robert had to hold my hand. I could not have been older than four,
which would have made him ve or six. We agreed afterward that
the king had been as noble as the dragons were fearsome.” Stannis
snorted. “Years later, our father told us that Aerys had cut himself
on the throne that morning, so his Hand had taken his place. It was
Tywin Lannister who’d so impressed us.” His ngers touched the
surface of the table, tracing a path lightly across the varnished hills.
“Robert took the skulls down when he donned the crown, but he
could not bear to have them destroyed. Dragon wings over
Westeros … there would be such a …”
“Your Grace!” Davos edged forward. “Might I speak?”
Stannis closed his mouth so hard his teeth snapped. “My lord of
the Rainwood. Why do you think I made you Hand, if not to
speak?” The king waved a hand. “Say what you will.”
Warrior, make me brave. “I know little of dragons and less of
gods … but the queen spoke of curses. No man is as cursed as the
kinslayer, in the eyes of gods and men.”
“There are no gods save R’hllor and the Other, whose name must
not be spoken.” Melisandre’s mouth made a hard red line. “And
small men curse what they cannot understand.”
“I am a small man,” Davos admitted, “so tell me why you need
this boy Edric Storm to wake your great stone dragon, my lady.” He
was determined to say the boy’s name as often as he could.

“Only death can pay for life, my lord. A great gift requires a great
sacri ce.”
“Where is the greatness in a baseborn child?”
“He has kings’ blood in his veins. You have seen what even a
little of that blood could do—”
“I saw you burn some leeches.”
“And two false kings are dead.”
“Robb Stark was murdered by Lord Walder of the Crossing, and
we have heard that Balon Greyjoy fell from a bridge. Who did your
leeches kill?”
“Do you doubt the power of R’hllor?”
No. Davos remembered too well the living shadow that had
squirmed from out her womb that night beneath Storm’s End, its
black hands pressing at her thighs. I must go carefully here, or some
shadow may come seeking me as well. “Even an onion smuggler
knows two onions from three. You are short a king, my lady.”
Stannis gave a snort of laughter. “He has you there, my lady. Two
is not three.”
“To be sure, Your Grace. One king might die by chance, even
two … but three? If Jo rey should die in the midst of all his power,
surrounded by his armies and his Kingsguard, would not that show
the power of the Lord at work?”
“It might.” The king spoke as if he grudged each word.
“Or not.” Davos did his best to hide his fear.
“Jo rey shall die,” Queen Selyse declared, serene in her
con dence.
“It may be that he is dead already,” Ser Axell added.
Stannis looked at them with annoyance. “Are you trained crows,
to croak at me in turns? Enough.”
“Husband, hear me—” the queen entreated.
“Why? Two is not three. Kings can count as well as smugglers.
You may go.” Stannis turned his back on them.
Melisandre helped the queen to her feet. Selyse swept sti y from
the chamber, the red woman trailing behind. Ser Axell lingered long
enough to give Davos one last look. An ugly look on an ugly face, he
thought as he met the stare.

After the others had gone, Davos cleared his throat. The king
looked up. “Why are you still here?”
“Sire, about Edric Storm …”
Stannis made a sharp gesture. “Spare me.”
Davos persisted. “Your daughter takes her lessons with him, and
plays with him every day in Aegon’s Garden.”
“I know that.”
“Her heart would break if anything ill should—”
“I know that as well.”
“If you would only see him—”
“I have seen him. He looks like Robert. Aye, and worships him.
Shall I tell him how often his beloved father ever gave him a
thought? My brother liked the making of children well enough, but
after birth they were a bother.”
“He asks after you every day, he—”
“You are making me angry, Davos. I will hear no more of this
bastard boy.”
“His name is Edric Storm, sire.”
“I know his name. Was there ever a name so apt? It proclaims his
bastardy, his high birth, and the turmoil he brings with him. Edric
Storm. There, I have said it. Are you satis ed, my lord Hand?”
“Edric—” he started.
“—is one boy! He may be the best boy who ever drew breath and
it would not matter. My duty is to the realm.” His hand swept
across the Painted Table. “How many boys dwell in Westeros? How
many girls? How many men, how many women? The darkness will
devour them all, she says. The night that never ends. She talks of
prophecies … a hero reborn in the sea, living dragons hatched from
dead stone … she speaks of signs and swears they point to me. I
never asked for this, no more than I asked to be king. Yet dare I
disregard her?” He ground his teeth. “We do not choose our
destinies. Yet we must … we must do our duty, no? Great or small,
we must do our duty. Melisandre swears that she has seen me in her
ames, facing the dark with Lightbringer raised on high.
Lightbringer!” Stannis gave a derisive snort. “It glimmers prettily, I’ll
grant you, but on the Blackwater this magic sword served me no

better than any common steel. A dragon would have turned that
battle. Aegon once stood here as I do, looking down on this table.
Do you think we would name him Aegon the Conqueror today if he
had not had dragons?”
“Your Grace,” said Davos, “the cost …”
“I know the cost! Last night, gazing into that hearth, I saw things
in the ames as well. I saw a king, a crown of re on his brows,
burning … burning, Davos. His own crown consumed his esh and
turned him into ash. Do you think I need Melisandre to tell me what
that means? Or you?” The king moved, so his shadow fell upon
King’s Landing. “If Jo rey should die … what is the life of one
bastard boy against a kingdom?”
“Everything,” said Davos, softly.
Stannis looked at him, jaw clenched. “Go,” the king said at last,
“before you talk yourself back into the dungeon.”
Sometimes the storm winds blow so strong a man has no choice
but to furl his sails. “Aye, Your Grace.” Davos bowed, but Stannis
had seemingly forgotten him already.
It was chilly in the yard when he left the Stone Drum. A wind
blew briskly from the east, making the banners snap and ap noisily
along the walls. Davos could smell salt in the air. The sea. He loved
that smell. It made him want to walk a deck again, to raise his
canvas and sail o south to Marya and his two small ones. He
thought of them most every day now, and even more at night. Part
of him wanted nothing so much as to take Devan and go home. I
cannot. Not yet. I am a lord now, and the King’s Hand, I must not fail
him.
He raised his eyes to gaze up at the walls. In place of merlons, a
thousand grotesques and gargoyles looked down on him, each
di erent from all the others; wyverns, gri ns, demons, manticores,
minotaurs, basilisks, hellhounds, cockatrices, and a thousand
queerer creatures sprouted from the castle’s battlements as if they’d
grown there. And the dragons were everywhere. The Great Hall was
a dragon lying on its belly. Men entered through its open mouth.
The kitchens were a dragon curled up in a ball, with the smoke and
steam of the ovens vented through its nostrils. The towers were

dragons hunched above the walls or poised for ight; the
Windwyrm seemed to scream de ance, while Sea Dragon Tower
gazed serenely out across the waves. Smaller dragons framed the
gates. Dragon claws emerged from walls to grasp at torches, great
stone wings enfolded the smith and armory, and tails formed
arches, bridges, and exterior stairs.
Davos had often heard it said that the wizards of Valyria did not
cut and chisel as common masons did, but worked stone with re
and magic as a potter might work clay. But now he wondered. What
if they were real dragons, somehow turned to stone?
“If the red woman brings them to life, the castle will come
crashing down, I am thinking. What kind of dragons are full of
rooms and stairs and furniture? And windows. And chimneys. And
privy shafts.”
Davos turned to nd Salladhor Saan beside him. “Does this mean
you have forgiven my treachery, Salla?”
The old pirate wagged a nger at him. “Forgiving, yes.
Forgetting, no. All that good gold on Claw Isle that might have
been mine, it makes me old and tired to think of it. When I die
impoverished, my wives and concubines will curse you, Onion Lord.
Lord Celtigar had many ne wines that now I am not tasting, a sea
eagle he had trained to y from the wrist, and a magic horn to
summon krakens from the deep. Very useful such a horn would be,
to pull down Tyroshi and other vexing creatures. But do I have this
horn to blow? No, because the king made my old friend his Hand.”
He slipped his arm through Davos’s and said, “The queen’s men love
you not, old friend. I am hearing that a certain Hand has been
making friends of his own. This is true, yes?”
You hear too much, you old pirate. A smuggler had best know men
as well as tides, or he would not live to smuggle long. The queen’s
men might remain fervent followers of the Lord of Light, but the
lesser folk of Dragonstone were drifting back to the gods they’d
known all their lives. They said Stannis was ensorceled, that
Melisandre had turned him away from the Seven to bow before
some demon out of shadow, and … worst sin of all … that she and
her god had failed him. And there were knights and lordlings who

felt the same. Davos had sought them out, choosing them with the
same care with which he’d once picked his crews. Ser Gerald Gower
fought stoutly on the Blackwater, but afterward had been heard to
say that R’hllor must be a feeble god to let his followers be chased
o by a dwarf and a dead man. Ser Andrew Estermont was the
king’s cousin, and had served as his squire years ago. The Bastard of
Nightsong had commanded the rearguard that allowed Stannis to
reach the safety of Salladhor Saan’s galleys, but he worshiped the
Warrior with a faith as erce as he was. King’s men, not queen’s men.
But it would not do to boast of them.
“A certain Lysene pirate once told me that a good smuggler stays
out of sight,” Davos replied carefully. “Black sails, mu ed oars, and
a crew that knows how to hold their tongues.”
The Lyseni laughed. “A crew with no tongues is even better. Big
strong mutes who cannot read or write.” But then he grew more
somber. “But I am glad to know that someone watches your back,
old friend. Will the king give the boy to the red priestess, do you
think? One little dragon could end this great big war.”
Old habit made him reach for his luck, but his ngerbones no
longer hung about his neck, and he found nothing. “He will not do
it,” said Davos. “He could not harm his own blood.”
“Lord Renly will be glad to hear this.”
“Renly was a traitor in arms. Edric Storm is innocent of any
crime. His Grace is a just man.”
Salla shrugged. “We shall be seeing. Or you shall. For myself, I
am returning to sea. Even now, rascally smugglers may be sailing
across the Blackwater Bay, hoping to avoid paying their lord’s
lawful duties.” He slapped Davos on the back. “Take care. You with
your mute friends. You are grown so very great now, yet the higher
a man climbs the farther he has to fall.”
Davos re ected on those words as he climbed the steps of Sea
Dragon Tower to the maester’s chambers below the rookery. He did
not need Salla to tell him that he had risen too high. I cannot read, I
cannot write, the lords despise me, I know nothing of ruling, how can I
be the King’s Hand? I belong on the deck of a ship, not in a castle tower.

He had said as much to Maester Pylos. “You are a notable
captain,” the maester replied. “A captain rules his ship, does he not?
He must navigate treacherous waters, set his sails to catch the rising
wind, know when a storm is coming and how best to weather it.
This is much the same.”
Pylos meant it kindly, but his assurances rang hollow. “It is not at
all the same!” Davos had protested. “A kingdom’s not a ship … and
a good thing, or this kingdom would be sinking. I know wood and
rope and water, yes, but how will that serve me now? Where do I
nd the wind to blow King Stannis to his throne?”
The maester laughed at that. “And there you have it, my lord.
Words are wind, you know, and you’ve blown mine away with your
good sense. His Grace knows what he has in you, I think.”
“Onions,” said Davos glumly. “That is what he has in me. The
King’s Hand should be a highborn lord, someone wise and learned, a
battle commander or a great knight …”
“Ser Ryam Redwyne was the greatest knight of his day, and one
of the worst Hands ever to serve a king. Septon Murmison’s prayers
worked miracles, but as Hand he soon had the whole realm praying
for his death. Lord Butterwell was renowned for wit, Myles
Smallwood for courage, Ser Otto Hightower for learning, yet they
failed as Hands, every one. As for birth, the dragonkings oft chose
Hands from amongst their own blood, with results as various as
Baelor Breakspear and Maegor the Cruel. Against this, you have
Septon Barth, the blacksmith’s son the Old King plucked from the
Red Keep’s library, who gave the realm forty years of peace and
plenty.” Pylos smiled. “Read your history, Lord Davos, and you will
see that your doubts are groundless.”
“How can I read history, when I cannot read?”
“Any man can read, my lord,” said Maester Pylos. “There is no
magic needed, nor high birth. I am teaching the art to your son, at
the king’s command. Let me teach you as well.”
It was a kindly o er, and not one that Davos could refuse. And so
every day he repaired to the maester’s chambers high atop Sea
Dragon Tower, to frown over scrolls and parchments and great
leather tomes and try to puzzle out a few more words. His e orts

often gave him headaches, and made him feel as big a fool as
Patchface besides. His son Devan was not yet twelve, yet he was
well ahead of his father, and for Princess Shireen and Edric Storm
reading seemed as natural as breathing. When it came to books,
Davos was more a child than any of them. Yet he persisted. He was
the King’s Hand now, and a King’s Hand should read.
The narrow twisting steps of Sea Dragon Tower had been a sore
trial to Maester Cressen after he broke his hip. Davos still found
himself missing the old man. He thought Stannis must as well. Pylos
seemed clever and diligent and well-meaning, but he was so young,
and the king did not con de in him as he had in Cressen. The old
man had been with Stannis so long … Until he ran afoul of
Melisandre, and died for it.
At the top of the steps Davos heard a soft jingle of bells that could
only herald Patchface. The princess’s fool was waiting outside the
maester’s door for her like a faithful hound. Dough-soft and slumpshouldered, his broad face tattooed in a motley pattern of red and
green squares, Patchface wore a helm made of a rack of deer antlers
strapped to a tin bucket. A dozen bells hung from the tines and rang
when he moved … which meant constantly, since the fool seldom
stood still. He jingled and jangled his way everywhere he went;
small wonder that Pylos had exiled him from Shireen’s lessons.
“Under the sea the old sh eat the young sh,” the fool muttered at
Davos. He bobbed his head, and his bells clanged and chimed and
sang. “I know, I know, oh oh oh.”
“Up here the young sh teach the old sh,” said Davos, who
never felt so ancient as when he sat down to try and read. It might
have been di erent if aged Master Cressen had been the one
teaching him, but Pylos was young enough to be his son.
He found the maester seated at his long wooden table covered
with books and scrolls, across from the three children. Princess
Shireen sat between the two boys. Even now Davos could take great
pleasure in the sight of his own blood keeping company with a
princess and a king’s bastard. Devan will be a lord now, not merely a
knight. The Lord of the Rainwood. Davos took more pride in that than
in wearing the title himself. He reads too. He reads and he writes, as if

he had been born to it. Pylos had naught but praise for his diligence,
and the master-at-arms said Devan was showing promise with sword
and lance as well. And he is a godly lad, too. “My brothers have
ascended to the Hall of Light, to sit beside the Lord,” Devan had
said when his father told him how his four elder brothers had died.
“I will pray for them at the night res, and for you as well, Father,
so you might walk in the Light of the Lord till the end of your
days.”
“Good morrow to you, Father,” the boy greeted him. He looks so
much like Dale did at his age, Davos thought. His eldest had never
dressed so ne as Devan in his squire’s raiment, to be sure, but they
shared the same square plain face, the same forthright brown eyes,
the same thin brown yaway hair. Devan’s cheeks and chin were
dusted with blond hair, a fuzz that would have shamed a proper
peach, though the boy was ercely proud of his “beard.” Just as Dale
was proud of his, once. Devan was the oldest of the three children at
the table.
Yet Edric Storm was three inches taller and broader in the chest
and shoulders. He was his father’s son in that; nor did he ever miss
a morning’s work with sword and shield. Those old enough to have
known Robert and Renly as children said that the bastard boy had
more of their look than Stannis had ever shared; the coal-black hair,
the deep blue eyes, the mouth, the jaw, the cheekbones. Only his
ears reminded you that his mother had been a Florent.
“Yes, good morrow, my lord,” Edric echoed. The boy could be
erce and proud, but the maesters and castellans and masters-atarms who’d raised him had schooled him well in courtesy. “Do you
come from my uncle? How fares His Grace?”
“Well,” Davos lied. If truth be told, the king had a haggard,
haunted look about him, but he saw no need to burden the boy with
his fears. “I hope I have not disturbed your lesson.”
“We had just nished, my lord,” Maester Pylos said.
“We were reading about King Daeron the First.” Princess Shireen
was a sad, sweet, gentle child, far from pretty. Stannis had given
her his square jaw and Selyse her Florent ears, and the gods in their
cruel wisdom had seen t to compound her homeliness by a icting

her with greyscale in the cradle. The disease had left one cheek and
half her neck grey and cracked and hard, though it had spared both
her life and her sight. “He went to war and conquered Dorne. The
Young Dragon, they called him.”
“He worshiped false gods,” said Devan, “but he was a great king
otherwise, and very brave in battle.”
“He was,” agreed Edric Storm, “but my father was braver. The
Young Dragon never won three battles in a day.”
The princess looked at him wide-eyed. “Did Uncle Robert win
three battles in a day?”
The bastard nodded. “It was when he’d rst come home to call his
banners. Lords Grandison, Ca eren, and Fell planned to join their
strength at Summerhall and march on Storm’s End, but he learned
their plans from an informer and rode at once with all his knights
and squires. As the plotters came up on Summerhall one by one, he
defeated each of them in turn before they could join up with the
others. He slew Lord Fell in single combat and captured his son
Silveraxe.”
Devan looked to Pylos. “Is that how it happened?”
“I said so, didn’t I?” Edric Storm said before the maester could
reply. “He smashed all three of them, and fought so bravely that
Lord Grandison and Lord Ca eren became his men afterward, and
Silveraxe too. No one ever beat my father.”
“Edric, you ought not boast,” Maester Pylos said. “King Robert
su ered defeats like any other man. Lord Tyrell bested him at
Ashford, and he lost many a tourney tilt as well.”
“He won more than he lost, though. And he killed Prince Rhaegar
on the Trident.”
“That he did,” the maester agreed. “But now I must give my
attention to Lord Davos, who has waited so patiently. We will read
more of King Daeron’s Conquest of Dorne on the morrow.”
Princess Shireen and the boys said their farewells courteously.
When they had taken their leaves, Maester Pylos moved closer to
Davos. “My lord, perhaps you would like to try a bit of Conquest of
Dorne as well?” He slid the slender leather-bound book across the
table. “King Daeron wrote with an elegant simplicity, and his

history is rich with blood, battle, and bravery. Your son is quite
engrossed.”
“My son is not quite twelve. I am the King’s Hand. Give me
another letter, if you would.”
“As you wish, my lord.” Maester Pylos rummaged about his table,
unrolling and then discarding various scraps of parchment. “There
are no new letters. Perhaps an old one …”
Davos enjoyed a good story as well as any man, but Stannis had
not named him Hand for his enjoyment, he felt. His rst duty was
to help his king rule, and for that he must needs understand the
words the ravens brought. The best way to learn a thing was to do
it, he had found; sails or scrolls, it made no matter.
“This might serve our purpose.” Pylos passed him a letter.
Davos attened down the little square of crinkled parchment and
squinted at the tiny crabbed letters. Reading was hard on the eyes,
that much he had learned early. Sometimes he wondered if the
Citadel o ered a champion’s purse to the maester who wrote the
smallest hand. Pylos had laughed at the notion, but …
“To the … ve kings,” read Davos, hesitating brie y over ve,
which he did not often see written out. “The king … be … the
king … beware?”
“Beyond,” the maester corrected.
Davos grimaced. “The King beyond the Wall comes … comes
south. He leads a … a … fast …”
“Vast.”
“… a vast host of wil … wild … wildlings. Lord
M … Mmmor … Mormont sent a … raven from the … ha … ha …”
“Haunted. The haunted forest.” Pylos underlined the words with
the point of his nger.
“… the haunted forest. He is … under a … attack?”
“Yes.”
Pleased, he plowed onward. “Oth … other birds have come since,
with no words. We … fear … Mormont slain with all … with all
his … stench … no, strength. We fear Mormont slain with all his
strength …” Davos suddenly realized just what he was reading. He
turned the letter over, and saw that the wax that had sealed it had

been black. “This is from the Night’s Watch. Maester, has King
Stannis seen this letter?”
“I brought it to Lord Alester when it rst arrived. He was the
Hand then. I believed he discussed it with the queen. When I asked
him if he wished to send a reply, he told me not to be a fool. ‘His
Grace lacks the men to ght his own battles, he has none to waste
on wildlings,’ he said to me.”
That was true enough. And this talk of ve kings would certainly
have angered Stannis. “Only a starving man begs bread from a
beggar,” he muttered.
“Pardon, my lord?”
“Something my wife said once.” Davos drummed his shortened
ngers against the tabletop. The rst time he had seen the Wall he
had been younger than Devan, serving aboard the Cobblecat under
Roro Uhoris, a Tyroshi known up and down the narrow sea as the
Blind Bastard, though he was neither blind nor baseborn. Roro had
sailed past Skagos into the Shivering Sea, visiting a hundred little
coves that had never seen a trading ship before. He brought steel;
swords, axes, helms, good chainmail hauberks, to trade for furs,
ivory, amber, and obsidian. When the Cobblecat turned back south
her holds were stu ed, but in the Bay of Seals three black galleys
came out to herd her into Eastwatch. They lost their cargo and the
Bastard lost his head, for the crime of trading weapons to the
wildlings.
Davos had traded at Eastwatch in his smuggling days. The black
brothers made hard enemies but good customers, for a ship with the
right cargo. But while he might have taken their coin, he had never
forgotten how the Blind Bastard’s head had rolled across the
Cobblecat’s deck. “I met some wildlings when I was a boy,” he told
Maester Pylos. “They were fair thieves but bad hagglers. One made
o with our cabin girl. All in all, they seemed men like any other
men, some fair, some foul.”
“Men are men,” Maester Pylos agreed. “Shall we return to our
reading, my lord Hand?”
I am the Hand of the King, yes. Stannis might be the King of
Westeros in name, but in truth he was the King of the Painted

Table. He held Dragonstone and Storm’s End, and had an ever-moreuneasy alliance with Salladhor Saan, but that was all. How could the
Watch have looked to him for help? They may not know how weak he
is, how lost his cause. “King Stannis never saw this letter, you are
quite certain? Nor Melisandre?”
“No. Should I bring it to them? Even now?”
“No,” Davos said at once. “You did your duty when you brought
it to Lord Alester.” If Melisandre knew of this letter … What was it she
had said? One whose name may not be spoken is marshaling his power,
Davos Seaworth. Soon comes the cold, and the night that never
ends … And Stannis had seen a vision in the ames, a ring of torches
in the snow with terror all around.
“My lord, are you unwell?” asked Pylos.
I am frightened, Maester, he might have said. Davos was
remembering a tale Salladhor Saan had told him, of how Azor Ahai
tempered Lightbringer by thrusting it through the heart of the wife
he loved. He slew his wife to ght the dark. If Stannis is Azor Ahai come
again, does that mean Edric Storm must play the part of Nissa Nissa? “I
was thinking, Maester. My pardons.” What harm if some wildling king
conquers the north? It was not as though Stannis held the north. His
Grace could scarcely be expected to defend people who refused to
acknowledge him as king. “Give me another letter,” he said
abruptly. “This one is too …”
“… di cult?” suggested Pylos.
Soon comes the cold, whispered Melisandre, and the night that never
ends. “Troubling,” said Davos. “Too … troubling. A di erent letter,
please.”

JON

They woke to the smoke of Mole’s Town burning.

Atop the King’s Tower, Jon Snow leaned on the padded crutch
that Maester Aemon had given him and watched the grey plume
rise. Styr had lost all hope of taking Castle Black unawares when
Jon escaped him, yet even so, he need not have warned of his
approach so bluntly. You may kill us, he re ected, but no one will be
butchered in their beds. That much I did, at least.
His leg still hurt like blazes when he put his weight on it. He’d
needed Clydas to help him don his fresh-washed blacks and lace up
his boots that morning, and by the time they were done he’d
wanted to drown himself in the milk of the poppy. Instead he had
settled for half a cup of dreamwine, a chew of willow bark, and the
crutch. The beacon was burning on Weatherback Ridge, and the
Night’s Watch had need of every man.
“I can ght,” he insisted when they tried to stop him.
“Your leg’s healed, is it?” Noye snorted. “You won’t mind me
giving it a little kick, then?”
“I’d sooner you didn’t. It’s sti , but I can hobble around well
enough, and stand and ght if you have need of me.”
“I have need of every man who knows which end of the spear to
stab into the wildlings.”
“The pointy end.” Jon had told his little sister something like that
once, he remembered.

Noye rubbed the bristle on his chin. “Might be you’ll do. We’ll put
you on a tower with a longbow, but if you bloody well fall o don’t
come crying to me.”
He could see the kingsroad wending its way south through stony
brown elds and over windswept hills. The Magnar would be
coming up that road before the day was done, his Thenns marching
behind him with axes and spears in their hands and their bronzeand-leather shields on their backs. Grigg the Goat, Quort, Big Boil, and
the rest will be coming as well. And Ygritte. The wildlings had never
been his friends, he had not allowed them to be his friends, but
her …
He could feel the throb of pain where her arrow had gone
through the meat and muscle of his thigh. He remembered the old
man’s eyes too, and the black blood rushing from his throat as the
storm cracked overhead. But he remembered the grotto best of all,
the look of her naked in the torchlight, the taste of her mouth when
it opened under his. Ygritte, stay away. Go south and raid, go hide in
one of those roundtowers you liked so well. You’ll nd nothing here but
death.
Across the yard, one of the bowmen on the roof of the old Flint
Barracks had unlaced his breeches and was pissing through a crenel.
Mully, he knew from the man’s greasy orange hair. Men in black
cloaks were visible on other roofs and tower tops as well, though
nine of every ten happened to be made of straw. “The scarecrow
sentinels,” Donal Noye called them. Only we’re the crows, Jon mused,
and most of us were scared enough.
Whatever you called them, the straw soldiers had been Maester
Aemon’s notion. They had more breeches and jerkins and tunics in
the storerooms than they’d had men to ll them, so why not stu
some with straw, drape a cloak around their shoulders, and set them
to standing watches? Noye had placed them on every tower and in
half the windows. Some were even clutching spears, or had
crossbows cocked under their arms. The hope was that the Thenns
would see them from afar and decide that Castle Black was too well
defended to attack.

Jon had six scarecrows sharing the roof of the King’s Tower with
him, along with two actual breathing brothers. Deaf Dick Follard sat
in a crenel, methodically cleaning and oiling the mechanism of his
crossbow to make sure the wheel turned smoothly, while the
Oldtown boy wandered restlessly around the parapets, fussing with
the clothes on straw men. Maybe he thinks they will ght better if
they’re posed just right. Or maybe this waiting is fraying his nerves the
way it’s fraying mine.
The boy claimed to be eighteen, older than Jon, but he was green
as summer grass for all that. Satin, they called him, even in the
wool and mail and boiled leather of the Night’s Watch; the name
he’d gotten in the brothel where he’d been born and raised. He was
pretty as a girl with his dark eyes, soft skin, and raven’s ringlets.
Half a year at Castle Black had toughened up his hands, however,
and Noye said he was passable with a crossbow. Whether he had the
courage to face what was coming, though …
Jon used the crutch to limp across the tower top. The King’s
Tower was not the castle’s tallest—the high, slim, crumbling Lance
held that honor, though Othell Yarwyck had been heard to say it
might topple any day. Nor was the King’s Tower strongest—the
Tower of Guards beside the kingsroad would be a tougher nut to
crack. But it was tall enough, strong enough, and well placed beside
the Wall, overlooking the gate and the foot of the wooden stair.
The rst time he had seen Castle Black with his own eyes, Jon
had wondered why anyone would be so foolish as to build a castle
without walls. How could it be defended?
“It can’t,” his uncle told him. “That is the point. The Night’s
Watch is pledged to take no part in the quarrels of the realm. Yet
over the centuries certain Lords Commander, more proud than wise,
forgot their vows and near destroyed us all with their ambitions.
Lord Commander Runcel Hightower tried to bequeathe the Watch
to his bastard son. Lord Commander Rodrik Flint thought to make
himself King-beyond-the-Wall. Tristan Mudd, Mad Marq Rankenfell,
Robin Hill … did you know that six hundred years ago, the
commanders at Snowgate and the Nightfort went to war against each
other? And when the Lord Commander tried to stop them, they

joined forces to murder him? The Stark in Winterfell had to take a
hand … and both their heads. Which he did easily, because their
strongholds were not defensible. The Night’s Watch had nine hundred
and ninety-six Lords Commander before Jeor Mormont, most of
them men of courage and honor … but we have had cowards and
fools as well, our tyrants and our madmen. We survive because the
lords and kings of the Seven Kingdoms know that we pose no threat
to them, no matter who should lead us. Our only foes are to the
north, and to the north we have the Wall.”
Only now those foes have gotten past the Wall to come up from the
south, Jon re ected, and the lords and kings of the Seven Kingdoms
have forgotten us. We are caught between the hammer and the anvil.
Without a wall Castle Black could not be held; Donal Noye knew
that as well as any. “The castle does them no good,” the armorer
told his little garrison. “Kitchens, common hall, stables, even the
towers … let them take it all. We’ll empty the armory and move
what stores we can to the top of the Wall, and make our stand
around the gate.”
So Castle Black had a wall of sorts at last, a crescent-shaped
barricade ten feet high made of stores; casks of nails and barrels of
salt mutton, crates, bales of black broadcloth, stacked logs, sawn
timbers, re-hardened stakes, and sacks and sacks of grain. The
crude rampart enclosed the two things most worth defending; the
gate to the north, and the foot of the great wooden switchback stair
that clawed and climbed its way up the face of the Wall like a
drunken thunderbolt, supported by wooden beams as big as tree
trunks driven deep into the ice.
The last few moles were still making the long climb, Jon saw,
urged on by his brothers. Grenn was carrying a little boy in his
arms, while Pyp, two ights below, let an old man lean upon his
shoulder. The oldest villagers still waited below for the cage to
make its way back down to them. He saw a mother pulling along
two children, one on either hand, as an older boy ran past her up
the steps. Two hundred feet above them, Sky Blue Su and Lady
Meliana (who was no lady, all her friends agreed) stood on a
landing, looking south. They had a better view of the smoke than he

did, no doubt. Jon wondered about the villagers who had chosen
not to ee. There were always a few, too stubborn or too stupid or
too brave to run, a few who preferred to ght or hide or bend the
knee. Maybe the Thenns would spare them.
The thing to do would be to take the attack to them, he thought. With
fty rangers well mounted, we could cut them apart on the road. They
did not have fty rangers, though, nor half as many horses. The
garrison had not returned, and there was no way to know just
where they were, or even whether the riders that Noye had sent out
had reached them.
We are the garrison, Jon told himself, and look at us. The brothers
Bowen Marsh had left behind were old men, cripples, and green
boys, just as Donal Noye had warned him. He could see some
wrestling barrels up the steps, others on the barricade; stout old
Kegs, as slow as ever, Spare Boot hopping along briskly on his
carved wooden leg, half-mad Easy who fancied himself Florian the
Fool reborn, Dornish Dilly, Red Alyn of the Rosewood, Young Henly
(well past fty), Old Henly (well past seventy), Hairy Hal, Spotted
Pate of Maidenpool. A couple of them saw Jon looking down from
atop the King’s Tower and waved up at him. Others turned away.
They still think me a turncloak. That was a bitter draft to drink, but
Jon could not blame them. He was a bastard, after all. Everyone
knew that bastards were wanton and treacherous by nature, having
been born of lust and deceit. And he had made as many enemies as
friends at Castle Black … Rast, for one. Jon had once threatened to
have Ghost rip his throat out unless he stopped tormenting Samwell
Tarly, and Rast did not forget things like that. He was raking dry
leaves into piles under the stairs just now, but every so often he
stopped long enough to give Jon a nasty look.
“No,” Donal Noye roared at three of the Mole’s Town men, down
below. “The pitch goes to the hoist, the oil up the steps, crossbow
bolts to the fourth, fth, and sixth landings, spears to rst and
second. Stack the lard under the stair, yes, there, behind the planks.
The casks of meat are for the barricade. Now, you poxy plow
pushers, NOW!”

He has a lord’s voice, Jon thought. His father had always said that
in battle a captain’s lungs were as important as his sword arm. “It
does not matter how brave or brilliant a man is, if his commands
cannot be heard,” Lord Eddard told his sons, so Robb and he used to
climb the towers of Winterfell to shout at each other across the
yard. Donal Noye could have drowned out both of them. The moles
all went in terror of him, and rightfully so, since he was always
threatening to rip their heads o .
Three-quarters of the village had taken Jon’s warning to heart
and come to Castle Black for refuge. Noye had decreed that every
man still spry enough to hold a spear or swing an axe would help
defend the barricade, else they could damn well go home and take
their chances with the Thenns. He had emptied the armory to put
good steel in their hands; big double-bladed axes, razor-sharp
daggers, longswords, maces, spiked morningstars. Clad in studded
leather jerkins and mail hauberks, with greaves for their legs and
gorgets to keep their heads on their shoulders, a few of them even
looked like soldiers. In a bad light. If you squint.
Noye had put the women and children to work as well. Those too
young to ght would carry water and tend the res, the Mole’s
Town midwife would assist Clydas and Maester Aemon with any
wounded, and Three-Finger Hobb suddenly had more spit boys,
kettle stirrers, and onion choppers than he knew what to do with.
Two of the whores had even o ered to ght, and had shown enough
skill with the crossbow to be given a place on the steps forty feet
up.
“It’s cold.” Satin stood with his hands tucked into his armpits
under his cloak. His cheeks were bright red.
Jon made himself smile. “The Frostfangs are cold. This is a brisk
autumn day.”
“I hope I never see the Frostfangs then. I knew a girl in Oldtown
who liked to ice her wine. That’s the best place for ice, I think. In
wine.” Satin glanced south, frowned. “You think the scarecrow
sentinels scared them o , my lord?”
“We can hope.” It was possible, Jon supposed … but more likely
the wildlings had simply paused for a bit of rape and plunder in

Mole’s Town. Or maybe Styr was waiting for nightfall, to move up
under cover of darkness.
Midday came and went, with still no sign of Thenns on the
kingsroad. Jon heard footsteps inside the tower, though, and Owen
the Oaf popped up out of the trapdoor, red-faced from the climb. He
had a basket of buns under one arm, a wheel of cheese under the
other, a bag of onions dangling from one hand. “Hobb said to feed
you, in case you’re stuck up here awhile.”
That, or for our last meal. “Thank him for us, Owen.”
Dick Follard was deaf as a stone, but his nose worked well
enough. The buns were still warm from the oven when he went
digging in the basket and plucked one out. He found a crock of
butter as well, and spread some with his dagger. “Raisins,” he
announced happily. “Nuts, too.” His speech was thick, but easy
enough to understand once you got used to it.
“You can have mine too,” said Satin. “I’m not hungry.”
“Eat,” Jon told him. “There’s no knowing when you’ll have
another chance.” He took two buns himself. The nuts were pine
nuts, and besides the raisins there were bits of dried apple.
“Will the wildlings come today, Lord Snow?” Owen asked.
“You’ll know if they do,” said Jon. “Listen for the horns.”
“Two. Two is for wildlings.” Owen was tall, towheaded, and
amiable, a tireless worker and surprisingly deft when it came to
working wood and xing catapults and the like, but as he’d gladly
tell you, his mother had dropped him on his head when he was a
baby, and half his wits had leaked out through his ear.
“You remember where to go?” Jon asked him.
“I’m to go to the stairs, Donal Noye says. I’m to go up to the third
landing and shoot my crossbow down at the wildlings if they try to
climb over the barrier. The third landing, one two three.” His head
bobbed up and down. “If the wildlings attack, the king will come
and help us, won’t he? He’s a mighty warrior, King Robert. He’s
sure to come. Maester Aemon sent him a bird.”
There was no use telling him that Robert Baratheon was dead. He
would forget it, as he’d forgotten it before. “Maester Aemon sent
him a bird,” Jon agreed. That seemed to make Owen happy.

Maester Aemon had sent a lot of birds … not to one king, but to
four. Wildlings at the gate, the message ran. The realm in danger. Send
all the help you can to Castle Black. Even as far as Oldtown and the
Citadel the ravens ew, and to half a hundred mighty lords in their
castles. The northern lords o ered their best hope, so to them
Aemon had sent two birds. To the Umbers and the Boltons, to Castle
Cerwyn and Torrhen’s Square, Karhold and Deepwood Motte, to
Bear Island, Oldcastle, Widow’s Watch, White Harbor, Barrowton,
and the Rills, to the mountain fastnesses of the Liddles, the Burleys,
the Norreys, the Harclays, and the Wulls, the black birds brought
their plea. Wildlings at the gate. The north in danger. Come with all
your strength.
Well, ravens might have wings, but lords and kings do not. If help
was coming, it would not come today.
As morning turned to afternoon, the smoke of Mole’s Town blew
away and the southern sky was clear again. No clouds, thought Jon.
That was good. Rain or snow could doom them all.
Clydas and Maester Aemon rode the winch cage up to safety at
the top of the Wall, and most of the Mole’s Town wives as well.
Men in black cloaks paced restlessly on the tower tops and shouted
back and forth across the courtyards. Septon Cellador led the men
on the barricade in a prayer, beseeching the Warrior to give them
strength. Deaf Dick Follard curled up beneath his cloak and went to
sleep. Satin walked a hundred leagues in circles, round and round
the crenellations. The Wall wept and the sun crept across a hard
blue sky. Near evenfall, Owen the Oaf returned with a loaf of black
bread and a pail of Hobb’s best mutton, cooked in a thick broth of
ale and onions. Even Dick woke up for that. They ate every bit of it,
using chunks of bread to wipe the bottom of the pail. By the time
they were done the sun was low in the west, the shadows sharp and
black throughout the castle. “Light the re,” Jon told Satin, “and ll
the kettle with oil.”
He went downstairs himself to bar the door, to try and work
some of the sti ness from his leg. That was a mistake, and Jon soon
knew it, but he clutched the crutch and saw it through all the same.
The door to the King’s Tower was oak studded with iron. It might

delay the Thenns, but it would not stop them if they wanted to
come in. Jon slammed the bar down in its notches, paid a visit to
the privy—it might well be his last chance—and hobbled back up to
the roof, grimacing at the pain.
The west had gone the color of a blood bruise, but the sky above
was cobalt blue, deepening to purple, and the stars were coming
out. Jon sat between two merlons with only a scarecrow for
company and watched the Stallion gallop up the sky. Or was it the
Horned Lord? He wondered where Ghost was now. He wondered
about Ygritte as well, and told himself that way lay madness.
They came in the night, of course. Like thieves, Jon thought. Like
murderers.
Satin pissed himself when the horns blew, but Jon pretended not
to notice. “Go shake Dick by the shoulder,” he told the Oldtown
boy, “else he’s liable to sleep through the ght.”
“I’m frightened.” Satin’s face was a ghastly white.
“So are they.” Jon leaned his crutch up against a merlon and took
up his longbow, bending the smooth thick Dornish yew to slip a
bowstring through the notches. “Don’t waste a quarrel unless you
know you have a good clean shot,” he said when Satin returned
from waking Dick. “We have an ample supply up here, but ample
doesn’t mean inexhaustible. And step behind a merlon to reload,
don’t try and hide in back of a scarecrow. They’re made of straw, an
arrow will punch through them.” He did not bother telling Dick
Follard anything. Dick could read your lips if there was enough
light and he gave a damn what you were saying, but he knew it all
already.
The three of them took up positions on three sides of the round
tower. Jon hung a quiver from his belt and pulled an arrow. The
shaft was black, the etching grey. As he notched it to his string, he
remembered something that Theon Greyjoy had once said after a
hunt. “The boar can keep his tusks and the bear his claws,” he had
declared, smiling that way he did. “There’s nothing half so mortal as
a grey goose feather.”
Jon had never been half the hunter that Theon was, but he was no
stranger to the longbow either. There were dark shapes slipping

around the armory, backs against the stone, but he could not see
them well enough to waste an arrow. He heard distant shouts, and
saw the archers on the Tower of Guards loosing shafts at the
ground. That was too far o to concern Jon. But when he glimpsed
three shadows detach themselves from the old stables fty yards
away, he stepped up to the crenel, raised his bow, and drew. They
were running, so he led them, waiting, waiting …
The arrow made a soft hiss as it left his string. A moment later
there was a grunt, and suddenly only two shadows were loping
across the yard. They ran all the faster, but Jon had already pulled a
second arrow from his quiver. This time he hurried the shot too
much, and missed. The wildlings were gone by the time he nocked
again. He searched for another target, and found four, rushing
around the empty shell of the Lord Commander’s Keep. The
moonlight glimmered o their spears and axes, and the gruesome
devices on their round leathern shields; skulls and bones, serpents,
bear claws, twisted demonic faces. Free folk, he knew. The Thenns
carried shields of black boiled leather with bronze rims and bosses,
but theirs were plain and unadorned. These were the lighter wicker
shields of raiders.
Jon pulled the goose feather back to his ear, aimed, and loosed
the arrow, then nocked and drew and loosed again. The rst shaft
pierced the bearclaw shield, the second one a throat. The wildling
screamed as he went down. He heard the deep thrum of Deaf Dick’s
crossbow to his left, and Satin’s a moment later. “I got one!” the
boy cried hoarsely. “I got one in the chest.”
“Get another,” Jon called.
He did not have to search for targets now; only choose them. He
dropped a wildling archer as he was tting an arrow to his string,
then sent a shaft toward the axeman hacking at the door of Hardin’s
Tower. That time he missed, but the arrow quivering in the oak
made the wildling reconsider. It was only as he was running o that
Jon recognized Big Boil. Half a heartbeat later, old Mully put an
arrow through his leg from the roof of the Flint Barracks, and he
crawled o bleeding. That will stop him bitching about his boil, Jon
thought.

When his quiver was empty, he went to get another, and moved
to a di erent crenel, side by side with Deaf Dick Follard. Jon got o
three arrows for every bolt Deaf Dick discharged, but that was the
advantage of the longbow. The crossbow penetrated better, some
insisted, but it was slow and cumbersome to reload. He could hear
the wildlings shouting to each other, and somewhere to the west a
warhorn blew. The world was moonlight and shadow, and time
became an endless round of notch and draw and loose. A wildling
arrow ripped through the throat of the straw sentinel beside him,
but Jon Snow scarcely noticed. Give me one clean shot at the Magnar
of Thenn, he prayed to his father’s gods. The Magnar at least was a
foe that he could hate. Give me Styr.
His ngers were growing sti and his thumb was bleeding, but
still Jon notched and drew and loosed. A gout of ame caught his
eye, and he turned to see the door of the common hall a re. It was
only a few moments before the whole great timbered hall was
burning. Three-Finger Hobb and his Mole’s Town helpers were safe
atop the Wall, he knew, but it felt like a punch in the belly all the
same. “JON,” Deaf Dick yelled in his thick voice, “the armory.” They
were on the roof, he saw. One had a torch. Dick hopped up on the
crenel for a better shot, jerked his crossbow to his shoulder, and
sent a quarrel thrumming toward the torch man. He missed.
The archer down below him didn’t.
Follard never made a sound, only toppled forward headlong over
the parapet. It was a hundred feet to the yard below. Jon heard the
thump as he was peering round a straw soldier, trying to see where
the arrow had come from. Not ten feet from Deaf Dick’s body, he
glimpsed a leather shield, a ragged cloak, a mop of thick red hair.
Kissed by re, he thought, lucky. He brought his bow up, but his
ngers would not part, and she was gone as suddenly as she’d
appeared. He swiveled, cursing, and loosed a shaft at the men on
the armory roof instead, but he missed them as well.
By then the east stables were a re too, black smoke and wisps of
burning hay pouring from the stalls. When the roof collapsed,
ames rose up roaring, so loud they almost drowned out the
warhorns of the Thenns. Fifty of them were pounding up the

kingsroad in tight column, their shields held up above their heads.
Others were swarming through the vegetable garden, across the
agstone yard, around the old dry well. Three had hacked their way
through the doors of Maester Aemon’s apartments in the timber
keep below the rookery, and a desperate ght was going on atop
the Silent Tower, longswords against bronze axes. None of that
mattered. The dance has moved on, he thought.
Jon hobbled across to Satin and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“With me,” he shouted. Together they moved to the north parapet,
where the King’s Tower looked down on the gate and Donal Noye’s
makeshift wall of logs and barrels and sacks of corn. The Thenns
were there before them. They wore halfhelms, and had thin bronze
disks sewn to their long leather shirts. Many wielded bronze axes,
though a few were chipped stone. More had short stabbing spears
with leaf-shaped heads that gleamed redly in the light from the
burning stables. They were screaming in the Old Tongue as they
stormed the barricade, jabbing with their spears, swinging their
bronze axes, spilling corn and blood with equal abandon while
crossbow quarrels and arrows rained down on them from the
archers that Donal Noye had posted on the stair.
“What do we do?” Satin shouted.
“We kill them,” Jon shouted back, a black arrow in his hand.
No archer could have asked for an easier shot. The Thenns had
their backs to the King’s Tower as they charged the crescent,
clambering over bags and barrels to reach the men in black. Both
Jon and Satin chanced to choose the same target. He had just
reached the top of the barricade when an arrow sprouted from his
neck and a quarrel between his shoulder blades. Half a heartbeat
later a longsword took him in the belly and he fell back onto the
man behind him. Jon reached down to his quiver and found it
empty again. Satin was winding back his crossbow. He left him to it
and went for more arrows, but he hadn’t taken more than three
steps before the trap slammed open three feet in front of him.
Bloody hell, I never even heard the door break.
There was no time to think or plan or shout for help. Jon dropped
his bow, reached back over his shoulder, ripped Longclaw from its

sheath, and buried the blade in the middle of the rst head to pop
out of the tower. Bronze was no match for Valyrian steel. The blow
sheared right through the Thenn’s helm and deep into his skull, and
he went crashing back down where he’d come from. There were
more behind him, Jon knew from the shouting. He fell back and
called to Satin. The next man to make the climb got a quarrel
through his cheek. He vanished too. “The oil,” Jon said. Satin
nodded. Together they snatched up the thick quilted pads they’d left
beside the re, lifted the heavy kettle of boiling oil, and dumped it
down the hole on the Thenns below. The shrieks were as bad as
anything he had ever heard, and Satin looked as though he was
going to be sick. Jon kicked the trapdoor shut, set the heavy iron
kettle on top of it, and gave the boy with the pretty face a hard
shake. “Retch later,” Jon yelled. “Come.”
They had only been gone from the parapets for a few moments,
but everything below had changed. A dozen black brothers and a
few Mole’s Town men still stood atop the crates and barrels, but the
wildlings were swarming over all along the crescent, pushing them
back. Jon saw one shove his spear up through Rast’s belly so hard
he lifted him into the air. Young Henly was dead and Old Henly was
dying, surrounded by foes. He could see Easy spinning and slashing,
laughing like a loon, his cloak apping as he leapt from cask to
cask. A bronze axe caught him just below the knee and the laughter
turned into a bubbling shriek.
“They’re breaking,” Satin said.
“No,” said Jon, “they’re broken.”
It happened quickly. One mole ed and then another, and
suddenly all the villagers were throwing down their weapons and
abandoning the barricade. The brothers were too few to hold alone.
Jon watched them try and form a line to fall back in order, but the
Thenns washed over them with spear and axe, and then they were
eeing too. Dornish Dilly slipped and went down on his face, and a
wildling planted a spear between his shoulder blades. Kegs, slow
and short of breath, had almost reached the bottom step when a
Thenn caught the end of his cloak and yanked him around … but a
crossbow quarrel dropped the man before his axe could fall. “Got

him,” Satin crowed, as Kegs staggered to the stair and began to
crawl up the steps on hands and knees.
The gate is lost. Donal Noye had closed and chained it, but it was
there for the taking, the iron bars glimmering red with re ected
relight, the cold black tunnel behind. No one had fallen back to
defend it; the only safety was on top of the Wall, seven hundred
feet up the crooked wooden stairs.
“What gods do you pray to?” Jon asked Satin.
“The Seven,” the boy from Oldtown said.
“Pray, then,” Jon told him. “Pray to your new gods, and I’ll pray
to my old ones.” It all turned here.
With the confusion at the trapdoor, Jon had forgotten to ll his
quiver. He limped back across the roof and did that now, and picked
up his bow as well. The kettle had not moved from where he’d left
it, so it seemed as though they were safe enough for the nonce. The
dance has moved on, and we’re watching from the gallery, he thought
as he hobbled back. Satin was loosing quarrels at the wildlings on
the steps, then ducking down behind a merlon to cock the crossbow.
He may be pretty, but he’s quick.
The real battle was on the steps. Noye had put spearmen on the
two lowest landings, but the headlong ight of the villagers had
panicked them and they had joined the ight, racing up toward the
third landing with the Thenns killing anyone who fell behind. The
archers and crossbowmen on the higher landings were trying to
drop shafts over their heads. Jon nocked an arrow, drew, and
loosed, and was pleased when one of the wildlings went rolling
down the steps. The heat of the res was making the Wall weep,
and the ames danced and shimmered against the ice. The steps
shook to the footsteps of men running for their lives.
Again Jon notched and drew and loosed, but there was only one
of him and one of Satin, and a good sixty or seventy Thenns
pounding up the stairs, killing as they went, drunk on victory. On
the fourth landing, three brothers in black cloaks stood shoulder to
shoulder with longswords in their hands, and battle was joined
again, brie y. But there were only three and soon enough the
wildling tide washed over them, and their blood dripped down the

steps. “A man is never so vulnerable in battle as when he ees,”
Lord Eddard had told Jon once. “A running man is like a wounded
animal to a soldier. It gets his bloodlust up.” The archers on the
fth landing ed before the battle even reached them. It was a rout,
a red rout.
“Fetch the torches,” Jon told Satin. There were four of them
stacked beside the re, their heads wrapped in oily rags. There
were a dozen re arrows too. The Oldtown boy thrust one torch
into the re until it was blazing brightly, and brought the rest back
under his arm, unlit. He looked frightened again, as well he might.
Jon was frightened too.
It was then that he saw Styr. The Magnar was climbing up the
barricade, over the gutted corn sacks and smashed barrels and the
bodies of friends and foe alike. His bronze scale armor gleamed
darkly in the relight. Styr had taken o his helm to survey the
scene of his triumph, and the bald earless whoreson was smiling. In
his hand was a long weirwood spear with an ornate bronze head.
When he saw the gate, he pointed the spear at it and barked
something in the Old Tongue to the half-dozen Thenns around him.
Too late, Jon thought. You should have led your men over the
barricade, you might have been able to save a few.
Up above, a warhorn sounded, long and low. Not from the top of
the Wall, but from the ninth landing, some two hundred feet up,
where Donal Noye was standing.
Jon notched a re arrow to his bowstring, and Satin lit it from
the torch. He stepped to the parapet, drew, aimed, loosed. Ribbons
of ame trailed behind as the shaft sped downward and thudded
into its target, crackling.
Not Styr. The steps. Or more precisely, the casks and kegs and
sacks that Donal Noye had piled up beneath the steps, as high as the
rst landing; the barrels of lard and lamp oil, the bags of leaves and
oily rags, the split logs, bark, and wood shavings. “Again,” said Jon,
and, “Again,” and, “Again.” Other longbowmen were ring too,
from every tower top in range, some sending their arrows up in
high arcs to drop before the Wall. When Jon ran out of re arrows,

he and Satin began to light the torches and ing them from the
crenels.
Up above another re was blooming. The old wooden steps had
drunk up oil like a sponge, and Donal Noye had drenched them
from the ninth landing all the way down to the seventh. Jon could
only hope that most of their own people had staggered up to safety
before Noye threw the torches. The black brothers at least had
known the plan, but the villagers had not.
Wind and re did the rest. All Jon had to do was watch. With
ames below and ames above, the wildlings had nowhere to go.
Some continued upward, and died. Some went downward, and died.
Some stayed where they were. They died as well. Many leapt from
the steps before they burned, and died from the fall. Twenty-odd
Thenns were still huddled together between the res when the ice
cracked from the heat, and the whole lower third of the stair broke
o , along with several tons of ice. That was the last that Jon Snow
saw of Styr, the Magnar of Thenn. The Wall defends itself, he
thought.
Jon asked Satin to help him down to the yard. His wounded leg
hurt so badly that he could hardly walk, even with the crutch.
“Bring the torch,” he told the boy from Oldtown. “I need to look for
someone.” It had been mostly Thenns on the steps. Surely some of
the free folk had escaped. Mance’s people, not the Magnar’s. She
might have been one. So they climbed down past the bodies of the
men who’d tried the trapdoor, and Jon wandered through the dark
with his crutch under one arm, and the other around the shoulders
of a boy who’d been a whore in Oldtown.
The stables and the common hall had burned down to smoking
cinders by then, but the re still raged along the wall, climbing step
by step and landing by landing. From time to time they’d hear a
groan and then a craaaack, and another chunk would come crashing
o the Wall. The air was full of ash and ice crystals.
He found Quort dead, and Stone Thumbs dying. He found some
dead and dying Thenns he had never truly known. He found Big
Boil, weak from all the blood he’d lost but still alive.

He found Ygritte sprawled across a patch of old snow beneath the
Lord Commander’s Tower, with an arrow between her breasts. The
ice crystals had settled over her face, and in the moonlight it looked
as though she wore a glittering silver mask.
The arrow was black, Jon saw, but it was etched with white
duck feathers. Not mine, he told himself, not one of mine. But he felt
as if it were.
When he knelt in the snow beside her, her eyes opened. “Jon
Snow,” she said, very softly. It sounded as though the arrow had
found a lung. “Is this a proper castle now? Not just a tower?”
“It is.” Jon took her hand.
“Good,” she whispered. “I wanted t’ see one proper castle,
before … before I …”
“You’ll see a hundred castles,” he promised her. “The battle’s
done. Maester Aemon will see to you.” He touched her hair. “You’re
kissed by re, remember? Lucky. It will take more than an arrow to
kill you. Aemon will draw it out and patch you up, and we’ll get
you some milk of the poppy for the pain.”
She just smiled at that. “D’you remember that cave? We should
have stayed in that cave. I told you so.”
“We’ll go back to the cave,” he said. “You’re not going to die,
Ygritte. You’re not.”
“Oh.” Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand. “You know
nothing, Jon Snow,” she sighed, dying.

BRAN

It is only another empty castle,” Meera Reed said as she gazed

across the desolation of rubble, ruins, and weeds.
No, thought Bran, it is the Nightfort, and this is the end of the world.
In the mountains, all he could think of was reaching the Wall and
nding the three-eyed crow, but now that they were here he was
lled with fears. The dream he’d had … the dream Summer had
had … No, I mustn’t think about that dream. He had not even told the
Reeds, though Meera at least seemed to sense that something was
wrong. If he never talked of it maybe he could forget he ever
dreamed it, and then it wouldn’t have happened and Robb and Grey
Wind would still be …
“Hodor.” Hodor shifted his weight, and Bran with it. He was
tired. They had been walking for hours. At least he’s not afraid. Bran
was scared of this place, and almost as scared of admitting it to the
Reeds. I’m a prince of the north, a Stark of Winterfell, almost a man
grown, I have to be as brave as Robb.
Jojen gazed up at him with his dark green eyes. “There’s nothing
here to hurt us, Your Grace.”
Bran wasn’t so certain. The Nightfort had gured in some of Old
Nan’s scariest stories. It was here that Night’s King had reigned,
before his name was wiped from the memory of man. This was
where the Rat Cook had served the Andal king his prince-and-bacon
pie, where the seventy-nine sentinels stood their watch, where
brave young Danny Flint had been raped and murdered. This was

the castle where King Sherrit had called down his curse on the
Andals of old, where the ’prentice boys had faced the thing that
came in the night, where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the
hellhounds ghting. Mad Axe had once walked these yards and
climbed these towers, butchering his brothers in the dark.
All that had happened hundreds and thousands of years ago, to be
sure, and some maybe never happened at all. Maester Luwin always
said that Old Nan’s stories shouldn’t be swallowed whole. But once
his uncle came to see Father, and Bran asked about the Nightfort.
Benjen Stark never said the tales were true, but he never said they
weren’t; he only shrugged and said, “We left the Nightfort two
hundred years ago,” as if that was an answer.
Bran forced himself to look around. The morning was cold but
bright, the sun shining down from a hard blue sky, but he did not
like the noises. The wind made a nervous whistling sound as it
shivered through the broken towers, the keeps groaned and settled,
and he could hear rats scrabbling under the oor of the great hall.
The Rat Cook’s children running from their father. The yards were
small forests where spindly trees rubbed their bare branches
together and dead leaves scuttled like roaches across patches of old
snow. There were trees growing where the stables had been, and a
twisted white weirwood pushing up through the gaping hole in the
roof of the domed kitchen. Even Summer was not at ease here. Bran
slipped inside his skin, just for an instant, to get the smell of the
place. He did not like that either.
And there was no way through.
Bran had told them there wouldn’t be. He had told them and told
them, but Jojen Reed had insisted on seeing for himself. He had had
a green dream, he said, and his green dreams did not lie. They don’t
open any gates either, thought Bran.
The gate the Nightfort guarded had been sealed since the day the
black brothers had loaded up their mules and garrons and departed
for Deep Lake; its iron portcullis lowered, the chains that raised it
carried o , the tunnel packed with stone and rubble all frozen
together until they were as impenetrable as the Wall itself. “We
should have followed Jon,” Bran said when he saw it. He thought of

his bastard brother often, since the night that Summer had watched
him ride o through the storm. “We should have found the
kingsroad and gone to Castle Black.”
“We dare not, my prince,” Jojen said. “I’ve told you why.”
“But there are wildlings. They killed some man and they wanted to
kill Jon too. Jojen, there were a hundred of them.”
“So you said. We are four. You helped your brother, if that was
him in truth, but it almost cost you Summer.”
“I know,” said Bran miserably. The direwolf had killed three of
them, maybe more, but there had been too many. When they
formed a tight ring around the tall earless man, he had tried to slip
away through the rain, but one of their arrows had come ashing
after him, and the sudden stab of pain had driven Bran out of the
wolf’s skin and back into his own. After the storm nally died, they
had huddled in the dark without a re, talking in whispers if they
talked at all, listening to Hodor’s heavy breathing and wondering if
the wildlings might try and cross the lake in the morning. Bran had
reached out for Summer time and time again, but the pain he found
drove him back, the way a red-hot kettle makes you pull your hand
back even when you mean to grab it. Only Hodor slept that night,
muttering “Hodor, hodor,” as he tossed and turned. Bran was
terri ed that Summer was o dying in the darkness. Please, you old
gods, he prayed, you took Winterfell, and my father, and my legs,
please don’t take Summer too. And watch over Jon Snow too, and make
the wildlings go away.
No weirwoods grew on that stony island in the lake, yet somehow
the old gods must have heard. The wildlings took their sweet time
about departing the next morning, stripping the bodies of their dead
and the old man they’d killed, even pulling a few sh from the lake,
and there was a scary moment when three of them found the
causeway and started to walk out … but the path turned and they
didn’t, and two of them nearly drowned before the others pulled
them out. The tall bald man yelled at them, his words echoing
across the water in some tongue that even Jojen did not know, and
a little while later they gathered up their shields and spears and
marched o north by east, the same way Jon had gone. Bran

wanted to leave too, to look for Summer, but the Reeds said no.
“We will stay another night,” said Jojen, “put some leagues
between us and the wildlings. You don’t want to meet them again,
do you?” Late that afternoon Summer returned from wherever he’d
been hiding, dragging his back leg. He ate parts of the bodies in the
inn, driving o the crows, then swam out to the island. Meera had
drawn the broken arrow from his leg and rubbed the wound with
the juice of some plants she found growing around the base of the
tower. The direwolf was still limping, but a little less each day, it
seemed to Bran. The gods had heard.
“Maybe we should try another castle,” Meera said to her brother.
“Maybe we could get through the gate somewhere else. I could go
scout if you wanted, I’d make better time by myself.”
Bran shook his head. “If you go east there’s Deep Lake, then
Queensgate. West is Icemark. But they’ll be the same, only smaller.
All the gates are sealed except the ones at Castle Black, Eastwatch,
and the Shadow Tower.”
Hodor said, “Hodor,” to that, and the Reeds exchanged a look.
“At least I should climb to the top of the Wall,” Meera decided.
“Maybe I’ll see something up there.”
“What could you hope to see?” Jojen asked.
“Something,” said Meera, and for once she was adamant.
It should be me. Bran raised his head to look up at the Wall, and
imagined himself climbing inch by inch, squirming his ngers into
cracks in the ice and kicking footholds with his toes. That made him
smile in spite of everything, the dreams and the wildlings and Jon
and everything. He had climbed the walls of Winterfell when he was
little, and all the towers too, but none of them had been so high,
and they were only stone. The Wall could look like stone, all grey
and pitted, but then the clouds would break and the sun would hit it
di erently, and all at once it would transform, and stand there
white and blue and glittering. It was the end of the world, Old Nan
always said. On the other side were monsters and giants and ghouls,
but they could not pass so long as the Wall stood strong. I want to
stand on top with Meera, Bran thought. I want to stand on top and see.

But he was a broken boy with useless legs, so all he could do was
watch from below as Meera went up in his stead.
She wasn’t really climbing, the way he used to climb. She was only
walking up some steps that the Night’s Watch had hewn hundreds
and thousands of years ago. He remembered Maester Luwin saying
the Nightfort was the only castle where the steps had been cut from
the ice of the Wall itself. Or maybe it had been Uncle Benjen. The
newer castles had wooden steps, or stone ones, or long ramps of
earth and gravel. Ice is too treacherous. It was his uncle who’d told
him that. He said that the outer surface of the Wall wept icy tears
sometimes, though the core inside stayed frozen hard as rock. The
steps must have melted and refrozen a thousand times since the last
black brothers left the castle, and every time they did they shrunk a
little and got smoother and rounder and more treacherous.
And smaller. It’s almost like the Wall was swallowing them back into
itself. Meera Reed was very surefooted, but even so she was going
slowly, moving from nub to nub. In two places where the steps
were hardly there at all she got down on all fours. It will be worse
when she comes down, Bran thought, watching. Even so, he wished it
was him up there. When she reached the top, crawling up the icy
knobs that were all that remained of the highest steps, Meera
vanished from his sight.
“When will she come down?” Bran asked Jojen.
“When she is ready. She will want to have a good look … at the
Wall and what’s beyond. We should do the same down here.”
“Hodor?” said Hodor, doubtfully.
“We might nd something,” Jojen insisted.
Or something might nd us. Bran couldn’t say it, though; he did not
want Jojen to think he was craven.
So they went exploring, Jojen Reed leading, Bran in his basket on
Hodor’s back, Summer padding by their side. Once the direwolf
bolted through a dark door and returned a moment later with a
grey rat between his teeth. The Rat Cook, Bran thought, but it was
the wrong color, and only as big as a cat. The Rat Cook was white,
and almost as huge as a sow …

There were a lot of dark doors in the Nightfort, and a lot of rats.
Bran could hear them scurrying through the vaults and cellars, and
the maze of pitch-black tunnels that connected them. Jojen wanted
to go poking around down there, but Hodor said “Hodor” to that,
and Bran said “No.” There were worse things than rats down in the
dark beneath the Nightfort.
“This seems an old place,” Jojen said as they walked down a
gallery where the sunlight fell in dusty shafts through empty
windows.
“Twice as old as Castle Black,” Bran said, remembering. “It was
the rst castle on the Wall, and the largest.” But it had also been the
rst abandoned, all the way back in the time of the Old King. Even
then it had been three-quarters empty and too costly to maintain.
Good Queen Alysanne had suggested that the Watch replace it with
a smaller, newer castle at a spot only seven miles east, where the
Wall curved along the shore of a beautiful green lake. Deep Lake
had been paid for by the queen’s jewels and built by the men the
Old King had sent north, and the black brothers had abandoned the
Nightfort to the rats.
That was two centuries past, though. Now Deep Lake stood as
empty as the castle it had replaced, and the Nightfort …
“There are ghosts here,” Bran said. Hodor had heard all the
stories before, but Jojen might not have. “Old ghosts, from before
the Old King, even before Aegon the Dragon, seventy-nine deserters
who went south to be outlaws. One was Lord Ryswell’s youngest
son, so when they reached the barrowlands they sought shelter at
his castle, but Lord Ryswell took them captive and returned them to
the Nightfort. The Lord Commander had holes hewn in the top of
the Wall and he put the deserters in them and sealed them up alive
in the ice. They have spears and horns and they all face north. The
seventy-nine sentinels, they’re called. They left their posts in life, so
in death their watch goes on forever. Years later, when Lord
Ryswell was old and dying, he had himself carried to the Nightfort
so he could take the black and stand beside his son. He’d sent him
back to the Wall for honor’s sake, but he loved him still, so he came
to share his watch.”

They spent half the day poking through the castle. Some of the
towers had fallen down and others looked unsafe, but they climbed
the bell tower (the bells were gone) and the rookery (the birds
were gone). Beneath the brewhouse they found a vault of huge
oaken casks that boomed hollowly when Hodor knocked on them.
They found a library (the shelves and bins had collapsed, the books
were gone, and rats were everywhere). They found a dank and dimlit dungeon with cells enough to hold ve hundred captives, but
when Bran grabbed hold of one of the rusted bars it broke o in his
hand. Only one crumbling wall remained of the great hall, the
bathhouse seemed to be sinking into the ground, and a huge
thornbush had conquered the practice yard outside the armory
where black brothers had once labored with spear and shield and
sword. The armory and the forge still stood, however, though
cobwebs, rats, and dust had taken the places of blades, bellows, and
anvil. Sometimes Summer would hear sounds that Bran seemed deaf
to, or bare his teeth at nothing, the fur on the back of his neck
bristling … but the Rat Cook never put in an appearance, nor the
seventy-nine sentinels, nor Mad Axe. Bran was much relieved.
Maybe it is only a ruined empty castle.
By the time Meera returned, the sun was only a sword’s breath
above the western hills. “What did you see?” her brother Jojen
asked her.
“I saw the haunted forest,” she said in a wistful tone. “Hills rising
wild as far as the eye can see, covered with trees that no axe has
ever touched. I saw the sunlight glinting o a lake, and clouds
sweeping in from the west. I saw patches of old snow, and icicles
long as pikes. I even saw an eagle circling. I think he saw me too. I
waved at him.”
“Did you see a way down?” asked Jojen.
She shook her head. “No. It’s a sheer drop, and the ice is so
smooth … I might be able to make the descent if I had a good rope
and an axe to chop out handholds, but …”
“… but not us,” Jojen nished.
“No,” his sister agreed. “Are you sure this is the place you saw in
your dream? Maybe we have the wrong castle.”

“No. This is the castle. There is a gate here.”
Yes, thought Bran, but it’s blocked by stone and ice.
As the sun began to set the shadows of the towers lengthened and
the wind blew harder, sending gusts of dry dead leaves rattling
through the yards. The gathering gloom put Bran in mind of another
of Old Nan’s stories, the tale of Night’s King. He had been the
thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who
knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for
all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman
glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and
eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her
and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave
his seed to her he gave his soul as well.
He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen
and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn
Brothers to his will. For thirteen years they had ruled, Night’s King
and his corpse queen, till nally the Stark of Winterfell and
Joramun of the wildlings had joined to free the Watch from
bondage. After his fall, when it was found he had been sacri cing to
the Others, all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very
name forbidden.
“Some say he was a Bolton,” Old Nan would always end. “Some
say a Magnar out of Skagos, some say Umber, Flint, or Norrey.
Some would have you think he was a Woodfoot, from them who
ruled Bear Island before the ironmen came. He never was. He was a
Stark, the brother of the man who brought him down.” She always
pinched Bran on the nose then, he would never forget it. “He was a
Stark of Winterfell, and who can say? Mayhaps his name was
Brandon. Mayhaps he slept in this very bed in this very room.”
No, Bran thought, but he walked in this castle, where we’ll sleep
tonight. He did not like that notion very much at all. Night’s King
was only a man by light of day, Old Nan would always say, but the
night was his to rule. And it’s getting dark.
The Reeds decided that they would sleep in the kitchens, a stone
octagon with a broken dome. It looked to o er better shelter than
most of the other buildings, even though a crooked weirwood had

burst up through the slate oor beside the huge central well,
stretching slantwise toward the hole in the roof, its bone-white
branches reaching for the sun. It was a queer kind of tree, skinnier
than any other weirwood that Bran had ever seen and faceless as
well, but it made him feel as if the old gods were with him here, at
least.
That was the only thing he liked about the kitchens, though. The
roof was mostly there, so they’d be dry if it rained again, but he
didn’t think they would ever get warm here. You could feel the cold
seeping up through the slate oor. Bran did not like the shadows
either, or the huge brick ovens that surrounded them like open
mouths, or the rusted meat hooks, or the scars and stains he saw in
the butcher’s block along one wall. That was where the Rat Cook
chopped the prince to pieces, he knew, and he baked the pie in one of
these ovens.
The well was the thing he liked the least, though. It was a good
twelve feet across, all stone, with steps built into its side, circling
down and down into darkness. The walls were damp and covered
with niter, but none of them could see the water at the bottom, not
even Meera with her sharp hunter’s eyes. “Maybe it doesn’t have a
bottom,” Bran said uncertainly.
Hodor peered over the knee-high lip of the well and said,
“HODOR!”
The
word
echoed
down
the
well,
“Hodorhodorhodorhodor,”
fainter
and
fainter,
“hodorhodorhodorhodor,” until it was less than a whisper. Hodor
looked startled. Then he laughed, and bent to scoop a broken piece
of slate o the oor.
“Hodor, don’t!” said Bran, but too late. Hodor tossed the slate
over the edge. “You shouldn’t have done that. You don’t know
what’s down there. You might have hurt something, or … or woken
something up.”
Hodor looked at him innocently. “Hodor?”
Far, far, far below, they heard the sound as the stone found
water. It wasn’t a splash, not truly. It was more a gulp, as if
whatever was below had opened a quivering gelid mouth to
swallow Hodor’s stone. Faint echoes traveled up the well, and for a

moment Bran thought he heard something moving, thrashing about
in the water. “Maybe we shouldn’t stay here,” he said uneasily.
“By the well?” asked Meera. “Or in the Nightfort?”
“Yes,” said Bran.
She laughed, and sent Hodor out to gather wood. Summer went
too. It was almost dark by then, and the direwolf wanted to hunt.
Hodor returned alone with both arms full of deadwood and
broken branches. Jojen Reed took his int and knife and set about
lighting a re while Meera boned the sh she’d caught at the last
stream they’d crossed. Bran wondered how many years had passed
since there had last been a supper cooked in the kitchens of the
Nightfort. He wondered who had cooked it too, though maybe it
was better not to know.
When the ames were blazing nicely Meera put the sh on. At
least it’s not a meat pie. The Rat Cook had cooked the son of the
Andal king in a big pie with onions, carrots, mushrooms, lots of
pepper and salt, a rasher of bacon, and a dark red Dornish wine.
Then he served him to his father, who praised the taste and had a
second slice. Afterward the gods transformed the cook into a
monstrous white rat who could only eat his own young. He had
roamed the Nightfort ever since, devouring his children, but still his
hunger was not sated. “It was not for murder that the gods cursed
him,” Old Nan said, “nor for serving the Andal king his son in a pie.
A man has a right to vengeance. But he slew a guest beneath his
roof, and that the gods cannot forgive.”
“We should sleep,” Jojen said solemnly, after they were full. The
re was burning low. He stirred it with a stick. “Perhaps I’ll have
another green dream to show us the way.”
Hodor was already curled up and snoring lightly. From time to
time he thrashed beneath his cloak, and whimpered something that
might have been “Hodor.” Bran wriggled closer to the re. The
warmth felt good, and the soft crackling of ames soothed him, but
sleep would not come. Outside the wind was sending armies of dead
leaves marching across the courtyards to scratch faintly at the doors
and windows. The sounds made him think of Old Nan’s stories. He
could almost hear the ghostly sentinels calling to each other atop

the Wall and winding their ghostly warhorns. Pale moonlight
slanted down through the hole in the dome, painting the branches
of the weirwood as they strained up toward the roof. It looked as if
the tree was trying to catch the moon and drag it down into the
well. Old gods, Bran prayed, if you hear me, don’t send a dream
tonight. Or if you do, make it a good dream. The gods made no
answer.
Bran made himself close his eyes. Maybe he even slept some, or
maybe he was just drowsing, oating the way you do when you are
half awake and half asleep, trying not to think about Mad Axe or
the Rat Cook or the thing that came in the night.
Then he heard the noise.
His eyes opened. What was that? He held his breath. Did I dream
it? Was I having a stupid nightmare? He didn’t want to wake Meera
and Jojen for a bad dream, but … there … a soft scu ing sound, far
o … Leaves, it’s leaves rattling o the walls outside and rustling
together … or the wind, it could be the wind … The sound wasn’t
coming from outside, though. Bran felt the hairs on his arm start to
rise. The sound’s inside, it’s in here with us, and it’s getting louder. He
pushed himself up onto an elbow, listening. There was wind, and
blowing leaves as well, but this was something else. Footsteps.
Someone was coming this way. Something was coming this way.
It wasn’t the sentinels, he knew. The sentinels never left the Wall.
But there might be other ghosts in the Nightfort, ones even more
terrible. He remembered what Old Nan had said of Mad Axe, how
he took his boots o and prowled the castle halls barefoot in the
dark, with never a sound to tell you where he was except for the
drops of blood that fell from his axe and his elbows and the end of
his wet red beard. Or maybe it wasn’t Mad Axe at all, maybe it was
the thing that came in the night. The ’prentice boys all saw it, Old
Nan said, but afterward when they told their Lord Commander
every description had been di erent. And three died within the year,
and the fourth went mad, and a hundred years later when the thing had
come again, the ’prentice boys were seen shambling along behind it, all
in chains.

That was only a story, though. He was just scaring himself. There
was no thing that comes in the night, Maester Luwin had said so. If
there had ever been such a thing, it was gone from the world now,
like giants and dragons. It’s nothing, Bran thought.
But the sounds were louder now.
It’s coming from the well, he realized. That made him even more
afraid. Something was coming up from under the ground, coming
up out of the dark. Hodor woke it up. He woke it up with that stupid
piece of slate, and now it’s coming. It was hard to hear over Hodor’s
snores and the thumping of his own heart. Was that the sound blood
made dripping from an axe? Or was it the faint, far-o rattling of
ghostly chains? Bran listened harder. Footsteps. It was de nitely
footsteps, each one a little louder than the one before. He couldn’t
tell how many, though. The well made the sounds echo. He didn’t
hear any dripping, or chains either, but there was something
else … a high thin whimpering sound, like someone in pain, and
heavy mu ed breathing. But the footsteps were loudest. The
footsteps were coming closer.
Bran was too frightened to shout. The re had burned down to a
few faint embers and his friends were all asleep. He almost slipped
his skin and reached out for his wolf, but Summer might be miles
away. He couldn’t leave his friends helpless in the dark to face
whatever was coming up out of the well. I told them not to come
here, he thought miserably. I told them there were ghosts. I told them
that we should go to Castle Black.
The footfalls sounded heavy to Bran, slow, ponderous, scraping
against the stone. It must be huge. Mad Axe had been a big man in
Old Nan’s story, and the thing that came in the night had been
monstrous. Back in Winterfell, Sansa had told him that the demons
of the dark couldn’t touch him if he hid beneath his blanket. He
almost did that now, before he remembered that he was a prince,
and almost a man grown.
Bran wriggled across the oor, dragging his dead legs behind him
until he could reach out and touch Meera on the foot. She woke at
once. He had never known anyone to wake as quick as Meera Reed,
or to be so alert so fast. Bran pressed a nger to his mouth so she’d

know not to speak. She heard the sound at once, he could see that
on her face; the echoing footfalls, the faint whimpering, the heavy
breathing.
Meera rose to her feet without a word and reclaimed her
weapons. With her three-pronged frog spear in her right hand and
the folds of her net dangling from her left, she slipped barefoot
toward the well. Jojen dozed on, oblivious, while Hodor muttered
and thrashed in restless sleep. She kept to the shadows as she
moved, stepped around the shaft of moonlight as quiet as a cat.
Bran was watching her all the while, and even he could barely see
the faint sheen of her spear. I can’t let her ght the thing alone, he
thought. Summer was far away, but …
… he slipped his skin, and reached for Hodor.
It was not like sliding into Summer. That was so easy now that
Bran hardly thought about it. This was harder, like trying to pull a
left boot on your right foot. It t all wrong, and the boot was scared
too, the boot didn’t know what was happening, the boot was
pushing the foot away. He tasted vomit in the back of Hodor’s
throat, and that was almost enough to make him ee. Instead he
squirmed and shoved, sat up, gathered his legs under him—his huge
strong legs—and rose. I’m standing. He took a step. I’m walking. It
was such a strange feeling that he almost fell. He could see himself
on the cold stone oor, a little broken thing, but he wasn’t broken
now. He grabbed Hodor’s longsword. The breathing was as loud as
a blacksmith’s bellows.
From the well came a wail, a piercing creech that went through
him like a knife. A huge black shape heaved itself up into the
darkness and lurched toward the moonlight, and the fear rose up in
Bran so thick that before he could even think of drawing Hodor’s
sword the way he’d meant to, he found himself back on the oor
again with Hodor roaring “Hodor hodor HODOR,” the way he had in
the lake tower whenever the lightning ashed. But the thing that
came in the night was screaming too, and thrashing wildly in the
folds of Meera’s net. Bran saw her spear dart out of the darkness to
snap at it, and the thing staggered and fell, struggling with the net.
The wailing was still coming from the well, even louder now. On

the oor the black thing opped and fought, screeching, “No, no,
don’t, please, DON’T …”
Meera stood over him, the moonlight shining silver o the prongs
of her frog spear. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m SAM,” the black thing sobbed. “Sam, Sam, I’m Sam, let me
out, you stabbed me …” He rolled through the puddle of moonlight,
ailing and opping in the tangles of Meera’s net. Hodor was still
shouting, “Hodor hodor hodor.”
It was Jojen who fed the sticks to the re and blew on them until
the ames leapt up crackling. Then there was light, and Bran saw
the pale thin-faced girl by the lip of the well, all bundled up in furs
and skins beneath an enormous black cloak, trying to shush the
screaming baby in her arms. The thing on the oor was pushing an
arm through the net to reach his knife, but the loops wouldn’t let
him. He wasn’t any monster beast, or even Mad Axe drenched in
gore; only a big fat man dressed up in black wool, black fur, black
leather, and black mail. “He’s a black brother,” said Bran. “Meera,
he’s from the Night’s Watch.”
“Hodor?” Hodor squatted down on his haunches to peer at the
man in the net. “Hodor,” he said again, hooting.
“The Night’s Watch, yes.” The fat man was still breathing like a
bellows. “I’m a brother of the Watch.” He had one cord under his
chins, forcing his head up, and others digging deep into his cheeks.
“I’m a crow, please. Let me out of this.”
Bran was suddenly uncertain. “Are you the three-eyed crow?” He
can’t be the three-eyed crow.
“I don’t think so.” The fat man rolled his eyes, but there were
only two of them. “I’m only Sam. Samwell Tarly. Let me out, it’s
hurting me.” He began to struggle again.
Meera made a disgusted sound. “Stop opping around. If you tear
my net I’ll throw you back down the well. Just lie still and I’ll
untangle you.”
“Who are you?” Jojen asked the girl with the baby.
“Gilly,” she said. “For the gilly ower. He’s Sam. We never meant
to scare you.” She rocked her baby and murmured at it, and nally
it stopped crying.

Meera was untangling the fat brother. Jojen went to the well and
peered down. “Where did you come from?”
“From Craster’s,” the girl said. “Are you the one?”
Jojen turned to look at her. “The one?”
“He said that Sam wasn’t the one,” she explained. “There was
someone else, he said. The one he was sent to nd.”
“Who said?” Bran demanded.
“Coldhands,” Gilly answered softly.
Meera peeled back one end of her net, and the fat man managed
to sit up. He was shaking, Bran saw, and still struggling to catch his
breath. “He said there would be people,” he hu ed. “People in the
castle. I didn’t know you’d be right at the top of the steps, though. I
didn’t know you’d throw a net on me or stab me in the stomach.”
He touched his belly with a black-gloved hand. “Am I bleeding? I
can’t see.”
“It was just a poke to get you o your feet,” said Meera. “Here,
let me have a look.” She went to one knee, and felt around his
navel. “You’re wearing mail. I never got near your skin.”
“Well, it hurt all the same,” Sam complained.
“Are you really a brother of the Night’s Watch?” Bran asked.
The fat man’s chins jiggled when he nodded. His skin looked pale
and saggy. “Only a steward. I took care of Lord Mormont’s ravens.”
For a moment he looked like he was going to cry. “I lost them at
the Fist, though. It was my fault. I got us lost too. I couldn’t even
nd the Wall. It’s a hundred leagues long and seven hundred feet
high and I couldn’t nd it!”
“Well, you’ve found it now,” said Meera. “Lift your rump o the
ground, I want my net back.”
“How did you get through the Wall?” Jojen demanded as Sam
struggled to his feet. “Does the well lead to an underground river, is
that where you came from? You’re not even wet …”
“There’s a gate,” said fat Sam. “A hidden gate, as old as the Wall
itself. The Black Gate, he called it.”
The Reeds exchanged a look. “We’ll nd this gate at the bottom
of the well?” asked Jojen.
Sam shook his head. “You won’t. I have to take you.”

“Why?” Meera demanded. “If there’s a gate …”
“You won’t nd it. If you did it wouldn’t open. Not for you. It’s
the Black Gate.” Sam plucked at the faded black wool of his sleeve.
“Only a man of the Night’s Watch can open it, he said. A Sworn
Brother who has said his words.”
“He said.” Jojen frowned. “This … Coldhands?”
“That wasn’t his true name,” said Gilly, rocking. “We only called
him that, Sam and me. His hands were cold as ice, but he saved us
from the dead men, him and his ravens, and he brought us here on
his elk.”
“His elk?” said Bran, wonderstruck.
“His elk?” said Meera, startled.
“His ravens?” said Jojen.
“Hodor?” said Hodor.
“Was he green?” Bran wanted to know. “Did he have antlers?”
The fat man was confused. “The elk?”
“Coldhands,” said Bran impatiently. “The green men ride on elks,
Old Nan used to say. Sometimes they have antlers too.”
“He wasn’t a green man. He wore blacks, like a brother of the
Watch, but he was pale as a wight, with hands so cold that at rst I
was afraid. The wights have blue eyes, though, and they don’t have
tongues, or they’ve forgotten how to use them.” The fat man turned
to Jojen. “He’ll be waiting. We should go. Do you have anything
warmer to wear? The Black Gate is cold, and the other side of the
Wall is even colder. You—”
“Why didn’t he come with you?” Meera gestured toward Gilly
and her babe. “They came with you, why not him? Why didn’t you
bring him through this Black Gate too?”
“He … he can’t.”
“Why not?”
“The Wall. The Wall is more than just ice and stone, he said.
There are spells woven into it … old ones, and strong. He cannot
pass beyond the Wall.”
It grew very quiet in the castle kitchen then. Bran could hear the
soft crackle of the ames, the wind stirring the leaves in the night,
the creak of the skinny weirwood reaching for the moon. Beyond the

gates the monsters live, and the giants and the ghouls, he remembered
Old Nan saying, but they cannot pass so long as the Wall stands strong.
So go to sleep, my little Brandon, my baby boy. You needn’t fear. There
are no monsters here.
“I am not the one you were told to bring,” Jojen Reed told fat
Sam in his stained and baggy blacks. “He is.”
“Oh.” Sam looked down at him uncertainly. It might have been
just then that he realized Bran was crippled. “I don’t … I’m not
strong enough to carry you, I …”
“Hodor can carry me.” Bran pointed at his basket. “I ride in that,
up on his back.”
Sam was staring at him. “You’re Jon Snow’s brother. The one who
fell …”
“No,” said Jojen. “That boy is dead.”
“Don’t tell,” Bran warned. “Please.”
Sam looked confused for a moment, but nally he said, “I … I can
keep a secret. Gilly too.” When he looked at her, the girl nodded.
“Jon … Jon was my brother too. He was the best friend I ever had,
but he went o with Qhorin Halfhand to scout the Frostfangs and
never came back. We were waiting for him on the Fist
when … when …”
“Jon’s here,” Bran said. “Summer saw him. He was with some
wildlings, but they killed a man and Jon took his horse and escaped.
I bet he went to Castle Black.”
Sam turned big eyes on Meera. “You’re certain it was Jon? You
saw him?”
“I’m Meera,” Meera said with a smile. “Summer is …”
A shadow detached itself from the broken dome above and leapt
down through the moonlight. Even with his injured leg, the wolf
landed as light and quiet as a snowfall. The girl Gilly made a
frightened sound and clutched her babe so hard against her that it
began to cry again.
“He won’t hurt you,” Bran said. “That’s Summer.”
“Jon said you all had wolves.” Sam pulled o a glove. “I know
Ghost.” He held out a shaky hand, the ngers white and soft and fat

as little sausages. Summer padded closer, sni ed them, and gave the
hand a lick.
That was when Bran made up his mind. “We’ll go with you.”
“All of you?” Sam seemed surprised by that.
Meera ru ed Bran’s hair. “He’s our prince.”
Summer circled the well, sni ng. He paused by the top step and
looked back at Bran. He wants to go.
“Will Gilly be safe if I leave her here till I come back?” Sam asked
them.
“She should be,” said Meera. “She’s welcome to our re.”
Jojen said, “The castle is empty.”
Gilly looked around. “Craster used to tell us tales of castles, but I
never knew they’d be so big.”
It’s only the kitchens. Bran wondered what she’d think when she
saw Winterfell, if she ever did.
It took them a few minutes to gather their things and hoist Bran
into his wicker seat on Hodor’s back. By the time they were ready
to go, Gilly sat nursing her babe by the re. “You’ll come back for
me,” she said to Sam.
“As soon as I can,” he promised, “then we’ll go somewhere
warm.” When he heard that, part of Bran wondered what he was
doing. Will I ever go someplace warm again?
“I’ll go rst, I know the way.” Sam hesitated at the top. “There’s
just so many steps,” he sighed, before he started down. Jojen
followed, then Summer, then Hodor with Bran riding on his back.
Meera took the rear, with her spear and net in hand.
It was a long way down. The top of the well was bathed in
moonlight, but it grew smaller and dimmer every time they went
around. Their footsteps echoed o the damp stones, and the water
sounds grew louder. “Should we have brought torches?” Jojen
asked.
“Your eyes will adjust,” said Sam. “Keep one hand on the wall
and you won’t fall.”
The well grew darker and colder with every turn. When Bran
nally lifted his head around to look back up the shaft, the top of
the well was no bigger than a half-moon. “Hodor,” Hodor

whispered, “Hodorhodorhodorhodorhodorhodor,” the well whispered
back. The water sounds were close, but when Bran peered down he
saw only blackness.
A turn or two later Sam stopped suddenly. He was a quarter of
the way around the well from Bran and Hodor and six feet farther
down, yet Bran could barely see him. He could see the door,
though. The Black Gate, Sam had called it, but it wasn’t black at all.
It was white weirwood, and there was a face on it.
A glow came from the wood, like milk and moonlight, so faint it
scarcely seemed to touch anything beyond the door itself, not even
Sam standing right before it. The face was old and pale, wrinkled
and shrunken. It looks dead. Its mouth was closed, and its eyes; its
cheeks were sunken, its brow withered, its chin sagging. If a man
could live for a thousand years and never die but just grow older, his
face might come to look like that.
The door opened its eyes.
They were white too, and blind. “Who are you?” the door asked,
and the well whispered, “Who-who-who-who-who-who-who.”
“I am the sword in the darkness,” Samwell Tarly said. “I am the
watcher on the walls. I am the re that burns against the cold, the
light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers. I am
the shield that guards the realms of men.”
“Then pass,” the door said. Its lips opened, wide and wider and
wider still, until nothing at all remained but a great gaping mouth
in a ring of wrinkles. Sam stepped aside and waved Jojen through
ahead of him. Summer followed, sni ng as he went, and then it
was Bran’s turn. Hodor ducked, but not low enough. The door’s
upper lip brushed softly against the top of Bran’s head, and a drop
of water fell on him and ran slowly down his nose. It was strangely
warm, and salty as a tear.

DAENERYS

Meereen was as large as Astapor and Yunkai combined. Like her

sister cities she was built of brick, but where Astapor had been red
and Yunkai yellow, Meereen was made with bricks of many colors.
Her walls were higher than Yunkai’s and in better repair, studded
with bastions and anchored by great defensive towers at every
angle. Behind them, huge against the sky, could be seen the top of
the Great Pyramid, a monstrous thing eight hundred feet tall with a
towering bronze harpy at its top.
“The harpy is a craven thing,” Daario Naharis said when he saw
it. “She has a woman’s heart and a chicken’s legs. Small wonder her
sons hide behind their walls.”
But the hero did not hide. He rode out the city gates, armored in
scales of copper and jet and mounted upon a white charger whose
striped pink-and-white barding matched the silk cloak owing from
the hero’s shoulders. The lance he bore was fourteen feet long,
swirled in pink and white, and his hair was shaped and teased and
lacquered into two great curling ram’s horns. Back and forth he
rode beneath the walls of multicolored bricks, challenging the
besiegers to send a champion forth to meet him in single combat.
Her bloodriders were in such a fever to go meet him that they
almost came to blows. “Blood of my blood,” Dany told them, “your
place is here by me. This man is a buzzing y, no more. Ignore him,
he will soon be gone.” Aggo, Jhogo, and Rakharo were brave

warriors, but they were young, and too valuable to risk. They kept
her khalasar together, and were her best scouts too.
“That was wisely done,” Ser Jorah said as they watched from the
front of her pavilion. “Let the fool ride back and forth and shout
until his horse goes lame. He does us no harm.”
“He does,” Arstan Whitebeard insisted. “Wars are not won with
swords and spears alone, ser. Two hosts of equal strength may come
together, but one will break and run whilst the other stands. This
hero builds courage in the hearts of his own men and plants the
seeds of doubt in ours.”
Ser Jorah snorted. “And if our champion were to lose, what sort
of seed would that plant?”
“A man who fears battle wins no victories, ser.”
“We’re not speaking of battle. Meereen’s gates will not open if
that fool falls. Why risk a life for naught?”
“For honor, I would say.”
“I have heard enough.” Dany did not need their squabbling on top
of all the other troubles that plagued her. Meereen posed dangers
far more serious than one pink-and-white hero shouting insults, and
she could not let herself be distracted. Her host numbered more
than eighty thousand after Yunkai, but fewer than a quarter of them
were soldiers. The rest … well, Ser Jorah called them mouths with
feet, and soon they would be starving.
The Great Masters of Meereen had withdrawn before Dany’s
advance, harvesting all they could and burning what they could not
harvest. Scorched elds and poisoned wells had greeted her at every
hand. Worst of all, they had nailed a slave child up on every
milepost along the coast road from Yunkai, nailed them up still
living with their entrails hanging out and one arm always
outstretched to point the way to Meereen. Leading her van, Daario
had given orders for the children to be taken down before Dany had
to see them, but she had countermanded him as soon as she was
told. “I will see them,” she said. “I will see every one, and count
them, and look upon their faces. And I will remember.”
By the time they came to Meereen sitting on the salt coast beside
her river, the count stood at one hundred and sixty-three. I will have

this city, Dany pledged to herself once more.
The pink-and-white hero taunted the besiegers for an hour,
mocking their manhood, mothers, wives, and gods. Meereen’s
defenders cheered him on from the city walls. “His name is Oznak
zo Pahl,” Brown Ben Plumm told her when he arrived for the war
council. He was the new commander of the Second Sons, chosen by
a vote of his fellow sellswords. “I was bodyguard to his uncle once,
before I joined the Second Sons. The Great Masters, what a ripe lot
o’ maggots. The women weren’t so bad, though it was worth your
life to look at the wrong one the wrong way. I knew a man, Scarb,
this Oznak cut his liver out. Claimed to be defending a lady’s honor,
he did, said Scarb had raped her with his eyes. How do you rape a
wench with eyes, I ask you? But his uncle is the richest man in
Meereen and his father commands the city guard, so I had to run
like a rat before he killed me too.”
They watched Oznak zo Pahl dismount his white charger, undo
his robes, pull out his manhood, and direct a stream of urine in the
general direction of the olive grove where Dany’s gold pavilion
stood among the burnt trees. He was still pissing when Daario
Naharis rode up, arakh in hand. “Shall I cut that o for you and stu
it down his mouth, Your Grace?” His tooth shone gold amidst the
blue of his forked beard.
“It’s his city I want, not his meager manhood.” She was growing
angry, however. If I ignore this any longer, my own people will think
me weak. Yet who could she send? She needed Daario as much as
she did her bloodriders. Without the amboyant Tyroshi, she had no
hold on the Stormcrows, many of whom had been followers of
Prendahl na Ghezn and Sallor the Bald.
High on the walls of Meereen, the jeers had grown louder, and
now hundreds of the defenders were taking their lead from the hero
and pissing down through the ramparts to show their contempt for
the besiegers. They are pissing on slaves, to show how little they fear us,
she thought. They would never dare such a thing if it were a Dothraki
khalasar outside their gates.
“This challenge must be met,” Arstan said again.

“It will be.” Dany said, as the hero tucked his penis away again.
“Tell Strong Belwas I have need of him.”
They found the huge brown eunuch sitting in the shade of her
pavilion, eating a sausage. He nished it in three bites, wiped his
greasy hands clean on his trousers, and sent Arstan Whitebeard to
fetch him his steel. The aged squire honed Belwas’s arakh every
evening and rubbed it down with bright red oil.
When Whitebeard brought the sword, Strong Belwas squinted
down the edge, grunted, slid the blade back into its leather sheath,
and tied the swordbelt about his vast waist. Arstan had brought his
shield as well: a round steel disk no larger than a pie plate, which
the eunuch grasped with his o hand rather than strapping to his
forearm in the manner of Westeros. “Find liver and onions,
Whitebeard,” Belwas said. “Not for now, for after. Killing makes
Strong Belwas hungry.” He did not wait for a reply, but lumbered
from the olive grove toward Oznak zo Pahl.
“Why that one, Khaleesi?” Rakharo demanded of her. “He is fat
and stupid.”
“Strong Belwas was a slave here in the ghting pits. If this
highborn Oznak should fall to such the Great Masters will be
shamed, while if he wins … well, it is a poor victory for one so
noble, one that Meereen can take no pride in.” And unlike Ser
Jorah, Daario, Brown Ben, and her three bloodriders, the eunuch
did not lead troops, plan battles, or give her counsel. He does
nothing but eat and boast and bellow at Arstan. Belwas was the man
she could most easily spare. And it was time she learned what sort
of protector Magister Illyrio had sent her.
A thrum of excitement went through the siege lines when Belwas
was seen plodding toward the city, and from the walls and towers
of Meereen came shouts and jeers. Oznak zo Pahl mounted up
again, and waited, his striped lance held upright. The charger tossed
his head impatiently and pawed the sandy earth. As massive as he
was, the eunuch looked small beside the hero on his horse.
“A chivalrous man would dismount,” said Arstan.
Oznak zo Pahl lowered his lance and charged.

Belwas stopped with legs spread wide. In one hand was his small
round shield, in the other the curved arakh that Arstan tended with
such care. His great brown stomach and sagging chest were bare
above the yellow silk sash knotted about his waist, and he wore no
armor but his studded leather vest, so absurdly small that it did not
even cover his nipples. “We should have given him chainmail,”
Dany said, suddenly anxious.
“Mail would only slow him,” said Ser Jorah. “They wear no
armor in the ghting pits. It’s blood the crowds come to see.”
Dust ew from the hooves of the white charger. Oznak thundered
toward Strong Belwas, his striped cloak streaming from his
shoulders. The whole city of Meereen seemed to be screaming him
on. The besiegers’ cheers seemed few and thin by comparison; her
Unsullied stood in silent ranks, watching with stone faces. Belwas
might have been made of stone as well. He stood in the horse’s
path, his vest stretched tight across his broad back. Oznak’s lance
was leveled at the center of his chest. Its bright steel point winked
in the sunlight. He’s going to be impaled, she thought … as the
eunuch spun sideways. And quick as the blink of an eye the
horseman was beyond him, wheeling, raising the lance. Belwas
made no move to strike at him. The Meereenese on the walls
screamed even louder. “What is he doing?” Dany demanded.
“Giving the mob a show,” Ser Jorah said.
Oznak brought the horse around Belwas in a wide circle, then dug
in with his spurs and charged again. Again Belwas waited, then spun
and knocked the point of the lance aside. She could hear the
eunuch’s booming laughter echoing across the plain as the hero
went past him. “The lance is too long,” Ser Jorah said. “All Belwas
needs do is avoid the point. Instead of trying to spit him so prettily,
the fool should ride right over him.”
Oznak zo Pahl charged a third time, and now Dany could see
plainly that he was riding past Belwas, the way a Westerosi knight
might ride at an opponent in a tilt, rather than at him, like a
Dothraki riding down a foe. The at level ground allowed the
charger to get up a good speed, but it also made it easy for the
eunuch to dodge the cumbersome fourteen-foot lance.

Meereen’s pink-and-white hero tried to anticipate this time, and
swung his lance sideways at the last second to catch Strong Belwas
when he dodged. But the eunuch had anticipated too, and this time
he dropped down instead of spinning sideways. The lance passed
harmlessly over his head. And suddenly Belwas was rolling, and
bringing the razor-sharp arakh around in a silver arc. They heard the
charger scream as the blade bit into his legs, and then the horse was
falling, the hero tumbling from the saddle.
A sudden silence swept along the brick parapets of Meereen. Now
it was Dany’s people who were screaming and cheering.
Oznak leapt clear of his horse and managed to draw his sword
before Strong Belwas was on him. Steel sang against steel, too fast
and furious for Dany to follow the blows. It could not have been a
dozen heartbeats before Belwas’s chest was awash in blood from a
slice below his breasts, and Oznak zo Pahl had an arakh planted
right between his ram’s horns. The eunuch wrenched the blade loose
and parted the hero’s head from his body with three savage blows
to the neck. He held it up high for the Meereenese to see, then ung
it toward the city gates and let it bounce and roll across the sand.
“So much for the hero of Meereen,” said Daario, laughing.
“A victory without meaning,” Ser Jorah cautioned. “We will not
win Meereen by killing its defenders one at a time.”
“No,” Dany agreed, “but I’m pleased we killed this one.”
The defenders on the walls began ring their crossbows at
Belwas, but the bolts fell short or skittered harmlessly along the
ground. The eunuch turned his back on the steel-tipped rain,
lowered his trousers, squatted, and shat in the direction of the city.
He wiped himself with Oznak’s striped cloak, and paused long
enough to loot the hero’s corpse and put the dying horse out of his
agony before trudging back to the olive grove.
The besiegers gave him a raucous welcome as soon as he reached
the camp. Her Dothraki hooted and screamed, and the Unsullied
sent up a great clangor by banging their spears against their shields.
“Well done,” Ser Jorah told him, and Brown Ben tossed the eunuch
a ripe plum and said, “A sweet fruit for a sweet ght.” Even her
Dothraki handmaids had words of praise. “We would braid your

hair and hang a bell in it, Strong Belwas,” said Jhiqui, “but you
have no hair to braid.”
“Strong Belwas needs no tinkly bells.” The eunuch ate Brown
Ben’s plum in four big bites and tossed aside the stone. “Strong
Belwas needs liver and onions.”
“You shall have it,” said Dany. “Strong Belwas is hurt.” His
stomach was red with the blood sheeting down from the meaty gash
beneath his breasts.
“It is nothing. I let each man cut me once, before I kill him.” He
slapped his bloody belly. “Count the cuts and you will know how
many Strong Belwas has slain.”
But Dany had lost Khal Drogo to a similar wound, and she was
not willing to let it go untreated. She sent Missandei to nd a
certain Yunkish freedman renowned for his skill in the healing arts.
Belwas howled and complained, but Dany scolded him and called
him a big bald baby until he let the healer stanch the wound with
vinegar, sew it shut, and bind his chest with strips of linen soaked in
re wine. Only then did she lead her captains and commanders
inside her pavilion for their council.
“I must have this city,” she told them, sitting crosslegged on a
pile of cushions, her dragons all about her. Irri and Jhiqui poured
wine. “Her granaries are full to bursting. There are gs and dates
and olives growing on the terraces of her pyramids, and casks of
salt sh and smoked meat buried in her cellars.”
“And fat chests of gold, silver, and gemstones as well,” Daario
reminded them. “Let us not forget the gemstones.”
“I’ve had a look at the landward walls, and I see no point of
weakness,” said Ser Jorah Mormont. “Given time, we might be able
to mine beneath a tower and make a breach, but what do we eat
while we’re digging? Our stores are all but exhausted.”
“No weakness in the landward walls?” said Dany. Meereen stood
on a jut of sand and stone where the slow brown Skahazadhan
owed into Slaver’s Bay. The city’s north wall ran along the
riverbank, its west along the bay shore. “Does that mean we might
attack from the river or the sea?”

“With three ships? We’ll want to have Captain Groleo take a good
look at the wall along the river, but unless it’s crumbling that’s just
a wetter way to die.”
“What if we were to build siege towers? My brother Viserys told
tales of such, I know they can be made.”
“From wood, Your Grace,” Ser Jorah said. “The slavers have
burnt every tree within twenty leagues of here. Without wood, we
have no trebuchets to smash the walls, no ladders to go over them,
no siege towers, no turtles, and no rams. We can storm the gates
with axes, to be sure, but …”
“Did you see them bronze heads above the gates?” asked Brown
Ben Plumm. “Rows of harpy heads with open mouths? The
Meereenese can squirt boiling oil out them mouths, and cook your
axemen where they stand.”
Daario Naharis gave Grey Worm a smile. “Perhaps the Unsullied
should wield the axes. Boiling oil feels like no more than a warm
bath to you, I have heard.”
“This is false.” Grey Worm did not return the smile. “These ones
do not feel burns as men do, yet such oil blinds and kills. The
Unsullied do not fear to die, though. Give these ones rams, and we
will batter down these gates or die in the attempt.”
“You would die,” said Brown Ben. At Yunkai, when he took
command of the Second Sons, he claimed to be the veteran of a
hundred battles. “Though I will not say I fought bravely in all of
them. There are old sellswords and bold sellswords, but no old bold
sellswords.” She saw that it was true.
Dany sighed. “I will not throw away Unsullied lives, Grey Worm.
Perhaps we can starve the city out.”
Ser Jorah looked unhappy. “We’ll starve long before they do,
Your Grace. There’s no food here, nor fodder for our mules and
horses. I do not like this river water either. Meereen shits into the
Skahazadhan but draws its drinking water from deep wells. Already
we’ve had reports of sickness in the camps, fever and brownleg and
three cases of the bloody ux. There will be more if we remain. The
slaves are weak from the march.”
“Freedmen,” Dany corrected. “They are slaves no longer.”

“Slave or free, they are hungry and they’ll soon be sick. The city
is better provisioned than we are, and can be resupplied by water.
Your three ships are not enough to deny them access to both the
river and the sea.”
“Then what do you advise, Ser Jorah?”
“You will not like it.”
“I would hear it all the same.”
“As you wish. I say, let this city be. You cannot free every slave
in the world, Khaleesi. Your war is in Westeros.”
“I have not forgotten Westeros.” Dany dreamt of it some nights,
this fabled land that she had never seen. “If I let Meereen’s old brick
walls defeat me so easily, though, how will I ever take the great
stone castles of Westeros?”
“As Aegon did,” Ser Jorah said, “with re. By the time we reach
the Seven Kingdoms, your dragons will be grown. And we will have
siege towers and trebuchets as well, all the things we lack
here … but the way across the Lands of the Long Summer is long
and grueling, and there are dangers we cannot know. You stopped
at Astapor to buy an army, not to start a war. Save your spears and
swords for the Seven Kingdoms, my queen. Leave Meereen to the
Meereenese and march west for Pentos.”
“Defeated?” said Dany, bristling.
“When cowards hide behind great walls, it is they who are
defeated, Khaleesi,” Ko Jhogo said.
Her other bloodriders concurred. “Blood of my blood,” said
Rakharo, “when cowards hide and burn the food and fodder, great
khals must seek for braver foes. This is known.”
“It is known,” Jhiqui agreed, as she poured.
“Not to me.” Dany set great store by Ser Jorah’s counsel, but to
leave Meereen untouched was more than she could stomach. She
could not forget the children on their posts, the birds tearing at
their entrails, their skinny arms pointing up the coast road. “Ser
Jorah, you say we have no food left. If I march west, how can I feed
my freedmen?”
“You can’t. I am sorry, Khaleesi. They must feed themselves or
starve. Many and more will die along the march, yes. That will be

hard, but there is no way to save them. We need to put this
scorched earth well behind us.”
Dany had left a trail of corpses behind her when she crossed the
red waste. It was a sight she never meant to see again. “No,” she
said. “I will not march my people o to die.” My children. “There
must be some way into this city.”
“I know a way.” Brown Ben Plumm stroked his speckled greyand-white beard. “Sewers.”
“Sewers? What do you mean?”
“Great brick sewers empty into the Skahazadhan, carrying the
city’s wastes. They might be a way in, for a few. That was how I
escaped Meereen, after Scarb lost his head.” Brown Ben made a
face. “The smell has never left me. I dream of it some nights.”
Ser Jorah looked dubious. “Easier to go out than in, it would
seem to me. These sewers empty into the river, you say? That
would mean the mouths are right below the walls.”
“And closed with iron grates,” Brown Ben admitted, “though
some have rusted through, else I would have drowned in shit. Once
inside, it is a long foul climb in pitch-dark through a maze of brick
where a man could lose himself forever. The lth is never lower
than waist high, and can rise over your head from the stains I saw
on the walls. There’s things down there too. Biggest rats you ever
saw, and worse things. Nasty.”
Daario Naharis laughed. “As nasty as you, when you came
crawling out? If any man were fool enough to try this, every slaver
in Meereen would smell them the moment they emerged.”
Brown Ben shrugged. “Her Grace asked if there was a way in, so I
told her … but Ben Plumm isn’t going down in them sewers again,
not for all the gold in the Seven Kingdoms. If there’s others want to
try it, though, they’re welcome.”
Aggo, Jhogo, and Grey Worm all tried to speak at once, but Dany
raised her hand for silence. “These sewers do not sound promising.”
Grey Worm would lead his Unsullied down the sewers if she
commanded it, she knew; her bloodriders would do no less. But
none of them was suited to the task. The Dothraki were horsemen,
and the strength of the Unsullied was their discipline on the

battle eld. Can I send men to die in the dark on such a slender hope?
“I must think on this some more. Return to your duties.”
Her captains bowed and left her with her handmaids and her
dragons. But as Brown Ben was leaving, Viserion spread his pale
white wings and apped lazily at his head. One of the wings
bu eted the sellsword in his face. The white dragon landed
awkwardly with one foot on the man’s head and one on his
shoulder, shrieked, and ew o again. “He likes you, Ben,” said
Dany.
“And well he might.” Brown Ben laughed. “I have me a drop of
the dragon blood myself, you know.”
“You?” Dany was startled. Plumm was a creature of the free
companies, an amiable mongrel. He had a broad brown face with a
broken nose and a head of nappy grey hair, and his Dothraki mother
had bequeathed him large, dark, almond-shaped eyes. He claimed to
be part Braavosi, part Summer Islander, part Ibbenese, part
Qohorik, part Dothraki, part Dornish, and part Westerosi, but this
was the rst she had heard of Targaryen blood. She gave him a
searching look and said, “How could that be?”
“Well,” said Brown Ben, “there was some old Plumm in the
Sunset Kingdoms who wed a dragon princess. My grandmama told
me the tale. He lived in King Aegon’s day.”
“Which King Aegon?” Dany asked. “Five Aegons have ruled in
Westeros.” Her brother’s son would have been the sixth, but the
Usurper’s men had dashed his head against a wall.
“Five, were there? Well, that’s a confusion. I could not give you a
number, my queen. This old Plumm was a lord, though, must have
been a famous fellow in his day, the talk of all the land. The thing
was, begging your royal pardon, he had himself a cock six foot
long.”
The three bells in Dany’s braid tinkled when she laughed. “You
mean inches, I think.”
“Feet,” Brown Ben said rmly. “If it was inches, who’d want to
talk about it, now? Your Grace.”
Dany giggled like a little girl. “Did your grandmother claim she’d
actually seen this prodigy?”

“That the old crone never did. She was half-Ibbenese and halfQohorik, never been to Westeros, my grandfather must have told
her. Some Dothraki killed him before I was born.”
“And where did your grandfather’s knowledge come from?”
“One of them tales told at the teat, I’d guess.” Brown Ben
shrugged. “That’s all I know about Aegon the Unnumbered or old
Lord Plumm’s mighty manhood, I fear. I best see to my Sons.”
“Go do that,” Dany told him.
When Brown Ben left, she lay back on her cushions. “If you were
grown,” she told Drogon, scratching him between the horns, “I’d y
you over the walls and melt that harpy down to slag.” But it would
be years before her dragons were large enough to ride. And when
they are, who shall ride them? The dragon has three heads, but I have
only one. She thought of Daario. If ever there was a man who could
rape a woman with his eyes …
To be sure, she was just as guilty. Dany found herself stealing
looks at the Tyroshi when her captains came to council, and
sometimes at night she remembered the way his gold tooth glittered
when he smiled. That, and his eyes. His bright blue eyes. On the road
from Yunkai, Daario had brought her a ower or a sprig of some
plant every evening when he made his report … to help her learn
the land, he said. Waspwillow, dusky roses, wild mint, lady’s lace,
daggerleaf, broom, prickly ben, harpy’s gold … He tried to spare me
the sight of the dead children too. He should not have done that, but
he meant it kindly. And Daario Naharis made her laugh, which Ser
Jorah never did.
Dany tried to imagine what it would be like if she allowed Daario
to kiss her, the way Jorah had kissed her on the ship. The thought
was exciting and disturbing, both at once. It is too great a risk. The
Tyroshi sellsword was not a good man, no one needed to tell her
that. Under the smiles and the jests he was dangerous, even cruel.
Sallor and Prendahl had woken one morning as his partners; that
very night he’d given her their heads. Khal Drogo could be cruel as
well, and there was never a man more dangerous. She had come to
love him all the same. Could I love Daario? What would it mean, if I
took him into my bed? Would that make him one of the heads of the

dragon? Ser Jorah would be angry, she knew, but he was the one
who’d said she had to take two husbands. Perhaps I should marry
them both and be done with it.
But these were foolish thoughts. She had a city to take, and
dreaming of kisses and some sellsword’s bright blue eyes would not
help her breach the walls of Meereen. I am the blood of the dragon,
Dany reminded herself. Her thoughts were spinning in circles, like a
rat chasing its tail. Suddenly she could not stand the close con nes
of the pavilion another moment. I want to feel the wind on my face,
and smell the sea. “Missandei,” she called, “have my silver saddled.
Your own mount as well.”
The little scribe bowed. “As Your Grace commands. Shall I
summon your bloodriders to guard you?”
“We’ll take Arstan. I do not mean to leave the camps.” She had no
enemies among her children. And the old squire would not talk too
much as Belwas would, or look at her like Daario.
The grove of burnt olive trees in which she’d raised her pavilion
stood beside the sea, between the Dothraki camp and that of the
Unsullied. When the horses had been saddled, Dany and her
companions set out along the shoreline, away from the city. Even
so, she could feel Meereen at her back, mocking her. When she
looked over one shoulder, there it stood, the afternoon sun blazing
o the bronze harpy atop the Great Pyramid. Inside Meereen the
slavers would soon be reclining in their fringed tokars to feast on
lamb and olives, unborn puppies, honeyed dormice and other such
delicacies, whilst outside her children went hungry. A sudden wild
anger lled her. I will bring you down, she swore.
As they rode past the stakes and pits that surrounded the eunuch
encampment, Dany could hear Grey Worm and his sergeants
running one company through a series of drills with shield,
shortsword, and heavy spear. Another company was bathing in the
sea, clad only in white linen breechclouts. The eunuchs were very
clean, she had noticed. Some of her sellswords smelled as if they
had not washed or changed their clothes since her father lost the
Iron Throne, but the Unsullied bathed each evening, even if they’d

marched all day. When no water was available they cleansed
themselves with sand, the Dothraki way.
The eunuchs knelt as she passed, raising clenched sts to their
breasts. Dany returned the salute. The tide was coming in, and the
surf foamed about the feet of her silver. She could see her ships
standing out to sea. Balerion oated nearest; the great cog once
known as Saduleon, her sails furled. Further out were the galleys
Meraxes and Vhagar, formerly Joso’s Prank and Summer Sun. They
were Magister Illyrio’s ships, in truth, not hers at all, and yet she
had given them new names with hardly a thought. Dragon names,
and more; in old Valyria before the Doom, Balerion, Meraxes, and
Vhagar had been gods.
South of the ordered realm of stakes, pits, drills, and bathing
eunuchs lay the encampments of her freedmen, a far noisier and
more chaotic place. Dany had armed the former slaves as best she
could with weapons from Astapor and Yunkai, and Ser Jorah had
organized the ghting men into four strong companies, yet she saw
no one drilling here. They passed a driftwood re where a hundred
people had gathered to roast the carcass of a horse. She could smell
the meat and hear the fat sizzling as the spit boys turned, but the
sight only made her frown.
Children ran behind their horses, skipping and laughing. Instead
of salutes, voices called to her on every side in a babble of tongues.
Some of the freedmen greeted her as “Mother,” while others begged
for boons or favors. Some prayed for strange gods to bless her, and
some asked her to bless them instead. She smiled at them, turning
right and left, touching their hands when they raised them, letting
those who knelt reach up to touch her stirrup or her leg. Many of
the freedmen believed there was good fortune in her touch. If it
helps give them courage, let them touch me, she thought. There are hard
trials yet ahead …
Dany had stopped to speak to a pregnant woman who wanted the
Mother of Dragons to name her baby when someone reached up and
grabbed her left wrist. Turning, she glimpsed a tall ragged man
with a shaved head and a sunburnt face. “Not so hard,” she started
to say, but before she could nish he’d yanked her bodily from the

saddle. The ground came up and knocked the breath from her, as
her silver whinnied and backed away. Stunned, Dany rolled to her
side and pushed herself onto one elbow …
… and then she saw the sword.
“There’s the treacherous sow,” he said. “I knew you’d come to get
your feet kissed one day.” His head was bald as a melon, his nose
red and peeling, but she knew that voice and those pale green eyes.
“I’m going to start by cutting o your teats.” Dany was dimly aware
of Missandei shouting for help. A freedman edged forward, but only
a step. One quick slash, and he was on his knees, blood running
down his face. Mero wiped his sword on his breeches. “Who’s
next?”
“I am.” Arstan Whitebeard leapt from his horse and stood over
her, the salt wind ri ing through his snowy hair, both hands on his
tall hardwood sta .
“Grandfather,” Mero said, “run o before I break your stick in
two and bugger you with—”
The old man feinted with one end of the sta , pulled it back, and
whipped the other end about faster than Dany would have believed.
The Titan’s Bastard staggered back into the surf, spitting blood and
broken teeth from the ruin of his mouth. Whitebeard put Dany
behind him. Mero slashed at his face. The old man jerked back, catquick. The sta thumped Mero’s ribs, sending him reeling. Arstan
splashed sideways, parried a looping cut, danced away from a
second, checked a third mid-swing. The moves were so fast she
could hardly follow. Missandei was pulling Dany to her feet when
she heard a crack. She thought Arstan’s sta had snapped until she
saw the jagged bone jutting from Mero’s calf. As he fell, the Titan’s
Bastard twisted and lunged, sending his point straight at the old
man’s chest. Whitebeard swept the blade aside almost
contemptuously and smashed the other end of his sta against the
big man’s temple. Mero went sprawling, blood bubbling from his
mouth as the waves washed over him. A moment later the freedmen
washed over him too, knives and stones and angry sts rising and
falling in a frenzy.

Dany turned away, sickened. She was more frightened now than
when it had been happening. He would have killed me.
“Your Grace.” Arstan knelt. “I am an old man, and shamed. He
should never have gotten close enough to seize you. I was lax. I did
not know him without his beard and hair.”
“No more than I did.” Dany took a deep breath to stop her
shaking. Enemies everywhere. “Take me back to my tent. Please.”
By the time Mormont arrived, she was huddled in her lion pelt,
drinking a cup of spice wine. “I had a look at the river wall,” Ser
Jorah started. “It’s a few feet higher than the others, and just as
strong. And the Meereenese have a dozen re hulks tied up beneath
the ramparts—”
She cut him o . “You might have warned me that the Titan’s
Bastard had escaped.”
He frowned. “I saw no need to frighten you, Your Grace. I have
o ered a reward for his head—”
“Pay it to Whitebeard. Mero has been with us all the way from
Yunkai. He shaved his beard o and lost himself amongst the
freedmen, waiting for a chance for vengeance. Arstan killed him.”
Ser Jorah gave the old man a long look. “A squire with a stick
slew Mero of Braavos, is that the way of it?”
“A stick,” Dany con rmed, “but no longer a squire. Ser Jorah, it’s
my wish that Arstan be knighted.”
“No.”
The loud refusal was surprise enough. Stranger still, it came from
both men at once.
Ser Jorah drew his sword. “The Titan’s Bastard was a nasty piece
of work. And good at killing. Who are you, old man?”
“A better knight than you, ser,” Arstan said coldly.
Knight? Dany was confused. “You said you were a squire.”
“I was, Your Grace.” He dropped to one knee. “I squired for Lord
Swann in my youth, and at Magister Illyrio’s behest I have served
Strong Belwas as well. But during the years between, I was a knight
in Westeros. I have told you no lies, my queen. Yet there are truths
I have withheld, and for that and all my other sins I can only beg
your forgiveness.”

“What truths have you withheld?” Dany did not like this. “You
will tell me. Now.”
He bowed his head. “At Qarth, when you asked my name, I said I
was called Arstan. That much was true. Many men had called me by
that name while Belwas and I were making our way east to nd
you. But it is not my true name.”
She was more confused than angry. He has played me false, just as
Jorah warned me, yet he saved my life just now.
Ser Jorah ushed red. “Mero shaved his beard, but you grew one,
didn’t you? No wonder you looked so bloody familiar …”
“You know him?” Dany asked the exile knight, lost.
“I saw him perhaps a dozen times … from afar most often,
standing with his brothers or riding in some tourney. But every man
in the Seven Kingdoms knew Barristan the Bold.” He laid the point
of his sword against the old man’s neck. “Khaleesi, before you kneels
Ser Barristan Selmy, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, who
betrayed your House to serve the Usurper Robert Baratheon.”
The old knight did not so much as blink. “The crow calls the
raven black, and you speak of betrayal.”
“Why are you here?” Dany demanded of him. “If Robert sent you
to kill me, why did you save my life?” He served the Usurper. He
betrayed Rhaegar’s memory, and abandoned Viserys to live and die in
exile. Yet if he wanted me dead, he need only have stood aside … “I
want the whole truth now, on your honor as a knight. Are you the
Usurper’s man, or mine?”
“Yours, if you will have me.” Ser Barristan had tears in his eyes.
“I took Robert’s pardon, aye. I served him in Kingsguard and
council. Served with the Kingslayer and others near as bad, who
soiled the white cloak I wore. Nothing will excuse that. I might be
serving in King’s Landing still if the vile boy upon the Iron Throne
had not cast me aside, it shames me to admit. But when he took the
cloak that the White Bull had draped about my shoulders, and sent
men to kill me that selfsame day, it was as though he’d ripped a
caul o my eyes. That was when I knew I must nd my true king,
and die in his service—”
“I can grant that wish,” Ser Jorah said darkly.

“Quiet,” said Dany. “I’ll hear him out.”
“It may be that I must die a traitor’s death,” Ser Barristan said. “If
so, I should not die alone. Before I took Robert’s pardon I fought
against him on the Trident. You were on the other side of that
battle, Mormont, were you not?” He did not wait for an answer.
“Your Grace, I am sorry I misled you. It was the only way to keep
the Lannisters from learning that I had joined you. You are
watched, as your brother was. Lord Varys reported every move
Viserys made, for years. Whilst I sat on the small council, I heard a
hundred such reports. And since the day you wed Khal Drogo, there
has been an informer by your side selling your secrets, trading
whispers to the Spider for gold and promises.”
He cannot mean … “You are mistaken.” Dany looked at Jorah
Mormont. “Tell him he’s mistaken. There’s no informer. Ser Jorah,
tell him. We crossed the Dothraki sea together, and the red
waste …” Her heart uttered like a bird in a trap. “Tell him, Jorah.
Tell him how he got it wrong.”
“The Others take you, Selmy.” Ser Jorah ung his longsword to
the carpet. “Khaleesi, it was only at the start, before I came to know
you … before I came to love …”
“Do not say that word!” She backed away from him. “How could
you? What did the Usurper promise you? Gold, was it gold?” The
Undying had said she would be betrayed twice more, once for gold
and once for love. “Tell me what you were promised?”
“Varys said … I might go home.” He bowed his head.
I was going to take you home! Her dragons sensed her fury.
Viserion roared, and smoke rose grey from his snout. Drogon beat
the air with black wings, and Rhaegal twisted his head back and
belched ame. I should say the word and burn the two of them. Was
there no one she could trust, no one to keep her safe? “Are all the
knights of Westeros so false as you two? Get out, before my
dragons roast you both. What does roast liar smell like? As foul as
Brown Ben’s sewers? Go!”
Ser Barristan rose sti and slow. For the rst time, he looked his
age. “Where shall we go, Your Grace?”

“To hell, to serve King Robert.” Dany felt hot tears on her cheeks.
Drogon screamed, lashing his tail back and forth. “The Others can
have you both.” Go, go away forever, both of you, the next time I see
your faces I’ll have your traitors’ heads o . She could not say the
words, though. They betrayed me. But they saved me. But they lied.
“You go …” My bear, my erce strong bear, what will I do without
him? And the old man, my brother’s friend. “You go … go …” Where?
And then she knew.

TYRION

Tyrion dressed himself in darkness, listening to his wife’s soft

breathing from the bed they shared. She dreams, he thought, when
Sansa murmured something softly—a name, perhaps, though it was
too faint to say—and turned onto her side. As man and wife they
shared a marriage bed, but that was all. Even her tears she hoards to
herself.
He had expected anguish and anger when he told her of her
brother’s death, but Sansa’s face had remained so still that for a
moment he feared she had not understood. It was only later, with a
heavy oaken door between them, that he heard her sobbing. Tyrion
had considered going to her then, to o er what comfort he could.
No, he had to remind himself, she will not look for solace from a
Lannister. The most he could do was to shield her from the uglier
details of the Red Wedding as they came down from the Twins.
Sansa did not need to hear how her brother’s body had been hacked
and mutilated, he decided; nor how her mother’s corpse had been
dumped naked into the Green Fork in a savage mockery of House
Tully’s funeral customs. The last thing the girl needed was more
fodder for her nightmares.
It was not enough, though. He had wrapped his cloak around her
shoulders and sworn to protect her, but that was as cruel a jape as
the crown the Freys had placed atop the head of Robb Stark’s
direwolf after they’d sewn it onto his headless corpse. Sansa knew
that as well. The way she looked at him, her sti ness when she

climbed into their bed … when he was with her, never for an
instant could he forget who he was, or what he was. No more than
she did. She still went nightly to the godswood to pray, and Tyrion
wondered if she were praying for his death. She had lost her home,
her place in the world, and everyone she had ever loved or trusted.
Winter is coming, warned the Stark words, and truly it had come for
them with a vengeance. But it is high summer for House Lannister. So
why am I so bloody cold?
He pulled on his boots, fastened his cloak with a lion’s head
brooch, and slipped out into the torchlit hall. There was this much
to be said for his marriage; it had allowed him to escape Maegor’s
Holdfast. Now that he had a wife and household, his lord father had
agreed that more suitable accommodations were required, and Lord
Gyles had found himself abruptly dispossessed of his spacious
apartments atop the Kitchen Keep. And splendid apartments they
were too, with a large bedchamber and adequate solar, a bath and
dressing room for his wife, and small adjoining chambers for Pod
and Sansa’s maids. Even Bronn’s cell by the stair had a window of
sorts. Well, more an arrow slit, but it lets in light. The castle’s main
kitchen was just across the courtyard, true, but Tyrion found those
sounds and smells in nitely preferable to sharing Maegor’s with his
sister. The less he had to see of Cersei the happier he was like to be.
Tyrion could hear Brella’s snoring as he passed her cell. Shae
complained of that, but it seemed a small enough price to pay.
Varys had suggested the woman to him; in former days, she had run
Lord Renly’s household in the city, which had given her a deal of
practice at being blind, deaf, and mute.
Lighting a taper, he made his way back to the servants’ steps and
descended. The oors below his own were still, and he heard no
footsteps but his own. Down he went, to the ground oor and
beyond, to emerge in a gloomy cellar with a vaulted stone ceiling.
Much of the castle was connected underground, and the Kitchen
Keep was no exception. Tyrion waddled along a long dark
passageway until he found the door he wanted, and pushed through.
Within, the dragon skulls were waiting, and so was Shae. “I
thought m’lord had forgotten me.” Her dress was draped over a

black tooth near as tall as she was, and she stood within the
dragon’s jaws, nude. Balerion, he thought. Or was it Vhagar? One
dragon skull looked much like another.
Just the sight of her made him hard. “Come out of there.”
“I won’t.” She smiled her wickedest smile. “M’lord will pluck me
from the dragon’s jaws, I know.” But when he waddled closer she
leaned forward and blew out the taper.
“Shae …” He reached, but she spun and slipped free.
“You have to catch me.” Her voice came from his left. “M’lord
must have played monsters and maidens when he was little.”
“Are you calling me a monster?”
“No more than I’m a maiden.” She was behind him, her steps soft
against the oor. “You need to catch me all the same.”
He did, nally, but only because she let herself be caught. By the
time she slipped into his arms, he was ushed and out of breath
from stumbling into dragon skulls. All that was forgotten in an
instant when he felt her small breasts pressed against his face in the
dark, her sti little nipples brushing lightly over his lips and the
scar where his nose had been. Tyrion pulled her down onto the
oor. “My giant,” she breathed as he entered her. “My giant’s come
to save me.”
After, as they lay entwined amongst the dragon skulls, he rested
his head against her, inhaling the smooth clean smell of her hair.
“We should go back,” he said reluctantly. “It must be near dawn.
Sansa will be waking.”
“You should give her dreamwine,” Shae said, “like Lady Tanda
does with Lollys. A cup before she goes to sleep, and we could fuck
in bed beside her without her waking.” She giggled. “Maybe we
should, some night. Would m’lord like that?” Her hand found his
shoulder, and began to knead the muscles there. “Your neck is hard
as stone. What troubles you?”
Tyrion could not see his ngers in front of his face, but he ticked
his woes o on them all the same. “My wife. My sister. My nephew.
My father. The Tyrells.” He had to move to his other hand. “Varys.
Pycelle. Little nger. The Red Viper of Dorne.” He had come to his

last nger. “The face that stares back out of the water when I
wash.”
Shae kissed his maimed scarred nose. “A brave face. A kind and
good face. I wish I could see it now.”
All the sweet innocence of the world was in her voice. Innocence?
Fool, she’s a whore, all she knows of men is the bit between their legs.
Fool, fool. “Better you than me.” Tyrion sat. “We have a long day
before us, both of us. You shouldn’t have blown out that taper. How
are we to nd our clothing?”
She laughed. “Maybe we’ll have to go naked.”
And if we’re seen, my lord father will hang you. Hiring Shae as one
of Sansa’s maids had given him an excuse to be seen talking with
her, but Tyrion did not delude himself that they were safe. Varys
had warned him. “I gave Shae a false history, but it was meant for
Lollys and Lady Tanda. Your sister is of a more suspicious mind. If
she should ask me what I know …”
“You will tell her some clever lie.”
“No. I will tell her that the girl is a common camp follower that
you acquired before the battle on the Green Fork and brought to
King’s Landing against your lord father’s express command. I will
not lie to the queen.”
“You have lied to her before. Shall I tell her that?”
The eunuch sighed. “That cuts more deeply than a knife, my lord.
I have served you loyally, but I must also serve your sister when I
can. How long do you think she would let me live if I were of no
further use to her whatsoever? I have no erce sellsword to protect
me, no valiant brother to avenge me, only some little birds who
whisper in my ear. With those whisperings I must buy my life anew
each day.”
“Pardon me if I do not weep for you.”
“I shall, but you must pardon me if I do not weep for Shae. I
confess, I do not understand what there is in her to make a clever
man like you act such a fool.”
“You might, if you were not a eunuch.”
“Is that the way of it? A man may have wits, or a bit of meat
between his legs, but not both?” Varys tittered. “Perhaps I should

be grateful I was cut, then.”
The Spider was right. Tyrion groped through the dragon-haunted
darkness for his smallclothes, feeling wretched. The risk he was
taking left him tight as a drumhead, and there was guilt as well. The
Others can take my guilt, he thought as he slipped his tunic over his
head. Why should I be guilty? My wife wants no part of me, and most
especially not the part that seems to want her. Perhaps he ought to tell
her about Shae. It was not as though he was the rst man ever to
keep a concubine. Sansa’s own oh-so-honorable father had given her
a bastard brother. For all he knew, his wife might be thrilled to
learn that he was fucking Shae, so long as it spared her his
unwelcome touch.
No, I dare not. Vows or no, his wife could not be trusted. She
might be maiden between the legs, but she was hardly innocent of
betrayal; she had once spilled her own father’s plans to Cersei. And
girls her age were not known for keeping secrets.
The only safe course was to rid himself of Shae. I might send her to
Chataya, Tyrion re ected, reluctantly. In Chataya’s brothel, Shae
would have all the silks and gems she could wish for, and the
gentlest highborn patrons. It would be a better life by far than the
one she had been living when he’d found her.
Or, if she was tired of earning her bread on her back, he might
arrange a marriage for her. Bronn, perhaps? The sellsword had never
balked at eating o his master’s plate, and he was a knight now, a
better match than she could elsewise hope for. Or Ser Tallad? Tyrion
had noticed that one gazing wistfully at Shae more than once. Why
not? He’s tall, strong, not hard to look upon, every inch the gifted young
knight. Of course, Tallad knew Shae only as a pretty young lady’s
maid in service at the castle. If he wed her and then learned she was a
whore …
“M’lord, where are you? Did the dragons eat you up?”
“No. Here.” He groped at a dragon skull. “I have found a shoe,
but I believe it’s yours.”
“M’lord sounds very solemn. Have I displeased you?”
“No,” he said, too curtly. “You always please me.” And therein is
our danger. He might dream of sending her away at times like this,

but that never lasted long. Tyrion saw her dimly through the gloom,
pulling a woolen sock up a slender leg. I can see. A vague light was
leaking through the row of long narrow windows set high in the
cellar wall. The skulls of the Targaryen dragons were emerging
from the darkness around them, black amidst grey. “Day comes too
soon.” A new day. A new year. A new century. I survived the Green
Fork and the Blackwater, I can bloody well survive King Jo rey’s
wedding.
Shae snatched her dress down o the dragon’s tooth and slipped it
over her head. “I’ll go up rst. Brella will want help with the
bathwater.” She bent over to give him one last kiss, upon the brow.
“My giant of Lannister. I love you so.”
And I love you as well, sweetling. A whore she might well be, but
she deserved better than what he had to give her. I will wed her to
Ser Tallad. He seems a decent man. And tall …

SANSA

That was such a sweet dream, Sansa thought drowsily. She had been
back in Winterfell, running through the godswood with her Lady.
Her father had been there, and her brothers, all of them warm and
safe. If only dreaming could make it so …
She threw back the coverlets. I must be brave. Her torments would
soon be ended, one way or the other. If Lady was here, I would not be
afraid. Lady was dead, though; Robb, Bran, Rickon, Arya, her father,
her mother, even Septa Mordane. All of them are dead but me. She
was alone in the world now.
Her lord husband was not beside her, but she was used to that.
Tyrion was a bad sleeper and often rose before the dawn. Usually
she found him in the solar, hunched beside a candle, lost in some
old scroll or leatherbound book. Sometimes the smell of the
morning bread from the ovens took him to the kitchens, and
sometimes he would climb up to the roof garden or wander all
alone down Traitor’s Walk.
She threw back the shutters and shivered as gooseprickles rose
along her arms. There were clouds massing in the eastern sky,
pierced by shafts of sunlight. They look like two huge castles a oat in
the morning sky. Sansa could see their walls of tumbled stone, their
mighty keeps and barbicans. Wispy banners swirled from atop their
towers and reached for the fast-fading stars. The sun was coming up
behind them, and she watched them go from black to grey to a
thousand shades of rose and gold and crimson. Soon the wind

mushed them together, and there was only one castle where there
had been two.
She heard the door open as her maids brought the hot water for
her bath. They were both new to her service; Tyrion said the
women who’d tended to her previously had all been Cersei’s spies,
just as Sansa had always suspected. “Come see,” she told them.
“There’s a castle in the sky.”
They came to have a look. “It’s made of gold.” Shae had short
dark hair and bold eyes. She did all that was asked of her, but
sometimes she gave Sansa the most insolent looks. “A castle all of
gold, there’s a sight I’d like to see.”
“A castle, is it?” Brella had to squint. “That tower’s tumbling
over, looks like. It’s all ruins, that is.”
Sansa did not want to hear about falling towers and ruined
castles. She closed the shutters and said, “We are expected at the
queen’s breakfast. Is my lord husband in the solar?”
“No, m’lady,” said Brella. “I have not seen him.”
“Might be he went to see his father,” Shae declared. “Might be
the King’s Hand had need of his counsel.”
Brella gave a sni . “Lady Sansa, you’ll be wanting to get into the
tub before the water gets too cool.”
Sansa let Shae pull her shift up over her head and climbed into
the big wooden tub. She was tempted to ask for a cup of wine, to
calm her nerves. The wedding was to be at midday in the Great Sept
of Baelor across the city. And come evenfall the feast would be held
in the throne room; a thousand guests and seventy-seven courses,
with singers and jugglers and mummers. But rst came breakfast in
the Queen’s Ballroom, for the Lannisters and the Tyrell men—the
Tyrell women would be breaking their fast with Margaery—and a
hundred odd knights and lordlings. They have made me a Lannister,
Sansa thought bitterly.
Brella sent Shae to fetch more hot water while she washed Sansa’s
back. “You are trembling, m’lady.”
“The water is not hot enough,” Sansa lied.
Her maids were dressing her when Tyrion appeared, Podrick
Payne in tow. “You look lovely, Sansa.” He turned to his squire.

“Pod, be so good as to pour me a cup of wine.”
“There will be wine at the breakfast, my lord,” Sansa said.
“There’s wine here. You don’t expect me to face my sister sober,
surely? It’s a new century, my lady. The three hundredth year since
Aegon’s Conquest.” The dwarf took a cup of red from Podrick and
raised it high. “To Aegon. What a fortunate fellow. Two sisters, two
wives, and three big dragons, what more could a man ask for?” He
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
The Imp’s clothing was soiled and unkempt, Sansa noticed; it
looked as though he’d slept in it. “Will you be changing into fresh
garb, my lord? Your new doublet is very handsome.”
“The doublet is handsome, yes.” Tyrion put the cup aside. “Come,
Pod, let us see if we can nd some garments to make me look less
dwar sh. I would not want to shame my lady wife.”
When the Imp returned a short time later, he was presentable
enough, and even a little taller. Podrick Payne had changed as well,
and looked almost a proper squire for once, although a rather large
red pimple in the fold beside his nose spoiled the e ect of his
splendid purple, white, and gold raiment. He is such a timid boy.
Sansa had been wary of Tyrion’s squire at rst; he was a Payne,
cousin to Ser Ilyn Payne who had taken her father’s head o .
However, she’d soon come to realize that Pod was as frightened of
her as she was of his cousin. Whenever she spoke to him, he turned
the most alarming shade of red.
“Are purple, gold, and white the colors of House Payne,
Podrick?” she asked him politely.
“No. I mean, yes.” He blushed. “The colors. Our arms are purple
and white chequy, my lady. With gold coins. In the checks. Purple
and white. Both.” He studied her feet.
“There’s a tale behind those coins,” said Tyrion. “No doubt Pod
will con de it to your toes one day. Just now we are expected at
the Queen’s Ballroom, however. Shall we?”
Sansa was tempted to beg o . I could tell him that my tummy was
upset, or that my moon’s blood had come. She wanted nothing more
than to crawl back in bed and pull the drapes. I must be brave, like

Robb, she told herself, as she took her lord husband sti y by the
arm.
In the Queen’s Ballroom they broke their fast on honeycakes
baked with blackberries and nuts, gammon steaks, bacon, nger sh
crisped in breadcrumbs, autumn pears, and a Dornish dish of onions,
cheese, and chopped eggs cooked up with ery peppers. “Nothing
like a hearty breakfast to whet one’s appetite for the seventy-sevencourse feast to follow,” Tyrion commented as their plates were
lled. There were agons of milk and agons of mead and agons
of a light sweet golden wine to wash it down. Musicians strolled
among the tables, piping and uting and ddling, while Ser Dontos
galloped about on his broomstick horse and Moon Boy made farting
sounds with his cheeks and sang rude songs about the guests.
Tyrion scarce touched his food, Sansa noticed, though he drank
several cups of the wine. For herself, she tried a little of the Dornish
eggs, but the peppers burned her mouth. Otherwise she only
nibbled at the fruit and sh and honeycakes. Every time Jo rey
looked at her, her tummy got so uttery that she felt as though
she’d swallowed a bat.
When the food had been cleared away, the queen solemnly
presented Jo with the wife’s cloak that he would drape over
Margaery’s shoulders. “It is the cloak I donned when Robert took
me for his queen, the same cloak my mother Lady Joanna wore
when wed to my lord father.” Sansa thought it looked threadbare, if
truth be told, but perhaps because it was so used.
Then it was time for gifts. It was traditional in the Reach to give
presents to bride and groom on the morning of their wedding; on
the morrow they would receive more presents as a couple, but
today’s tokens were for their separate persons.
From Jalabhar Xho, Jo rey received a great bow of golden wood
and quiver of long arrows etched with green and scarlet feathers;
from Lady Tanda a pair of supple riding boots; from Ser Kevan a
magni cent red leather jousting saddle; a red gold brooch wrought
in the shape of a scorpion from the Dornishman, Prince Oberyn;
silver spurs from Ser Addam Marbrand; a red silk tourney pavilion
from Lord Mathis Rowan. Lord Paxter Redwyne brought forth a

beautiful wooden model of the war galley of two hundred oars
being built even now on the Arbor. “If it please Your Grace, she will
be called King Jo rey’s Valor,” he said, and Jo allowed that he was
very pleased indeed. “I will make it my agship when I sail to
Dragonstone to kill my traitor uncle Stannis,” he said.
He plays the gracious king today. Jo rey could be gallant when it
suited him, Sansa knew, but it seemed to suit him less and less.
Indeed, all his courtesy vanished at once when Tyrion presented
him with their own gift: a huge old book called Lives of Four Kings,
bound in leather and gorgeously illuminated. The king leafed
through it with no interest. “And what is this, Uncle?”
A book. Sansa wondered if Jo rey moved those fat wormy lips of
his when he read.
“Grand Maester Kaeth’s history of the reigns of Daeron the Young
Dragon, Baelor the Blessed, Aegon the Unworthy, and Daeron the
Good,” her small husband answered.
“A book every king should read, Your Grace,” said Ser Kevan.
“My father had no time for books.” Jo rey shoved the tome
across the table. “If you read less, Uncle Imp, perhaps Lady Sansa
would have a baby in her belly by now.” He laughed … and when
the king laughs, the court laughs with him. “Don’t be sad, Sansa,
once I’ve gotten Queen Margaery with child I’ll visit your
bedchamber and show my little uncle how it’s done.”
Sansa reddened. She glanced nervously at Tyrion, afraid of what
he might say. This could turn as nasty as the bedding had at their
own feast. But for once the dwarf lled his mouth with wine instead
of words.
Lord Mace Tyrell came forward to present his gift: a golden
chalice three feet tall, with two ornate curved handles and seven
faces glittering with gemstones. “Seven faces for Your Grace’s seven
kingdoms,” the bride’s father explained. He showed them how each
face bore the sigil of one of the great houses: ruby lion, emerald
rose, onyx stag, silver trout, blue jade falcon, opal sun, and pearl
direwolf.
“A splendid cup,” said Jo rey, “but we’ll need to chip the wolf o
and put a squid in its place, I think.”

Sansa pretended that she had not heard.
“Margaery and I shall drink deep at the feast, good father.”
Jo rey lifted the chalice above his head, for everyone to admire.
“The damned thing’s as tall as I am,” Tyrion muttered in a low
voice. “Half a chalice and Jo will be falling down drunk.”
Good, she thought. Perhaps he’ll break his neck.
Lord Tywin waited until last to present the king with his own
gift: a longsword. Its scabbard was made of cherrywood, gold, and
oiled red leather, studded with golden lions’ heads. The lions had
ruby eyes, she saw. The ballroom fell silent as Jo rey unsheathed
the blade and thrust the sword above his head. Red and black
ripples in the steel shimmered in the morning light.
“Magni cent,” declared Mathis Rowan.
“A sword to sing of, sire,” said Lord Redwyne.
“A king’s sword,” said Ser Kevan Lannister.
King Jo rey looked as if he wanted to kill someone right then
and there, he was so excited. He slashed at the air and laughed. “A
great sword must have a great name, my lords! What shall I call it?”
Sansa remembered Lion’s Tooth, the sword Arya had ung into
the Trident, and Hearteater, the one he’d made her kiss before the
battle. She wondered if he’d want Margaery to kiss this one.
The guests were shouting out names for the new blade. Jo
dismissed a dozen before he heard one he liked. “Widow’s Wail!” he
cried. “Yes! It shall make many a widow, too!” He slashed again.
“And when I face my uncle Stannis it will break his magic sword
clean in two.” Jo tried a downcut, forcing Ser Balon Swann to take
a hasty step backward. Laughter rang through the hall at the look
on Ser Balon’s face.
“Have a care, Your Grace,” Ser Addam Marbrand warned the
king. “Valyrian steel is perilously sharp.”
“I remember.” Jo rey brought Widow’s Wail down in a savage
two-handed slice, onto the book that Tyrion had given him. The
heavy leather cover parted at a stroke. “Sharp! I told you, I am no
stranger to Valyrian steel.” It took him half a dozen further cuts to
hack the thick tome apart, and the boy was breathless by the time
he was done. Sansa could feel her husband struggling with his fury

as Ser Osmund Kettleblack shouted, “I pray you never turn that
wicked edge on me, sire.”
“See that you never give me cause, ser.” Jo rey icked a chunk
of Lives of Four Kings o the table at swordpoint, then slid Widow’s
Wail back into its scabbard.
“Your Grace,” Ser Garlan Tyrell said. “Perhaps you did not know.
In all of Westeros there were but four copies of that book
illuminated in Kaeth’s own hand.”
“Now there are three.” Jo rey undid his old swordbelt to don his
new one. “You and Lady Sansa owe me a better present, Uncle Imp.
This one is all chopped to pieces.”
Tyrion was staring at his nephew with his mismatched eyes.
“Perhaps a knife, sire. To match your sword. A dagger of the same
ne Valyrian steel … with a dragonbone hilt, say?”
Jo gave him a sharp look. “You … yes, a dagger to match my
sword, good.” He nodded. “A … a gold hilt with rubies in it.
Dragonbone is too plain.”
“As you wish, Your Grace.” Tyrion drank another cup of wine. He
might have been all alone in his solar for all the attention he paid
Sansa. But when the time came to leave for the wedding, he took
her by the hand.
As they were crossing the yard, Prince Oberyn of Dorne fell in
beside them, his black-haired paramour on his arm. Sansa glanced at
the woman curiously. She was baseborn and unwed, and had borne
two bastard daughters for the prince, but she did not fear to look
even the queen in the eye. Shae had told her that this Ellaria
worshiped some Lysene love goddess. “She was almost a whore
when he found her, m’lady,” her maid con ded, “and now she’s
near a princess.” Sansa had never been this close to the
Dornishwoman before. She is not truly beautiful, she thought, but
something about her draws the eye.
“I once had the great good fortune to see the Citadel’s copy of
Lives of Four Kings,” Prince Oberyn was telling her lord husband.
“The illuminations were wondrous to behold, but Kaeth was too
kind by half to King Viserys.”

Tyrion gave him a sharp look. “Too kind? He scants Viserys
shamefully, in my view. It should have been Lives of Five Kings.”
The prince laughed. “Viserys hardly reigned a fortnight.”
“He reigned more than a year,” said Tyrion.
Oberyn gave a shrug. “A year or a fortnight, what does it matter?
He poisoned his own nephew to gain the throne and then did
nothing once he had it.”
“Baelor starved himself to death, fasting,” said Tyrion. “His uncle
served him loyally as Hand, as he had served the Young Dragon
before him. Viserys might only have reigned a year, but he ruled for
fteen, while Daeron warred and Baelor prayed.” He made a sour
face. “And if he did remove his nephew, can you blame him?
Someone had to save the realm from Baelor’s follies.”
Sansa was shocked. “But Baelor the Blessed was a great king. He
walked the Boneway barefoot to make peace with Dorne, and
rescued the Dragonknight from a snakepit. The vipers refused to
strike him because he was so pure and holy.”
Prince Oberyn smiled. “If you were a viper, my lady, would you
want to bite a bloodless stick like Baelor the Blessed? I’d sooner
save my fangs for someone juicier …”
“My prince is playing with you, Lady Sansa,” said the woman
Ellaria Sand. “The septons and singers like to say that the snakes did
not bite Baelor, but the truth is very di erent. He was bitten half a
hundred times, and should have died from it.”
“If he had, Viserys would have reigned a dozen years,” said
Tyrion, “and the Seven Kingdoms might have been better served.
Some believe Baelor was deranged by all that venom.”
“Yes,” said Prince Oberyn, “but I’ve seen no snakes in this Red
Keep of yours. So how do you account for Jo rey?”
“I prefer not to.” Tyrion inclined his head sti y. “If you will
excuse us. Our litter awaits.” The dwarf helped Sansa up inside and
clambered awkwardly after her. “Close the curtains, my lady, if
you’d be so good.”
“Must we, my lord?” Sansa did not want to be shut behind the
curtains. “The day is so lovely.”

“The good people of King’s Landing are like to throw dung at the
litter if they see me inside it. Do us both a kindness, my lady. Close
the curtains.”
She did as he bid her. They sat for a time, as the air grew warm
and stu y around them. “I was sorry about your book, my lord,”
she made herself say.
“It was Jo rey’s book. He might have learned a thing or two if
he’d read it.” He sounded distracted. “I should have known better. I
should have seen … a good many things.”
“Perhaps the dagger will please him more.”
When the dwarf grimaced, his scar tightened and twisted. “The
boy’s earned himself a dagger, wouldn’t you say?” Thankfully
Tyrion did not wait for her reply. “Jo quarreled with your brother
Robb at Winterfell. Tell me, was there ill feeling between Bran and
His Grace as well?”
“Bran?” The question confused her. “Before he fell, you mean?”
She had to try and think back. It was all so long ago. “Bran was a
sweet boy. Everyone loved him. He and Tommen fought with
wooden swords, I remember, but just for play.”
Tyrion lapsed back into moody silence. Sansa heard the distant
clank of chains from outside; the portcullis was being drawn up. A
moment later there was a shout, and their litter swayed into
motion. Deprived of the passing scenery, she chose to stare at her
folded hands, uncomfortably aware of her husband’s mismatched
eyes. Why is he looking at me that way?
“You loved your brothers, much as I love Jaime.”
Is this some Lannister trap to make me speak treason? “My brothers
were traitors, and they’ve gone to traitors’ graves. It is treason to
love a traitor.”
Her little husband snorted. “Robb rose in arms against his rightful
king. By law, that made him a traitor. The others died too young to
know what treason was.” He rubbed his nose. “Sansa, do you know
what happened to Bran at Winterfell?”
“Bran fell. He was always climbing things, and nally he fell. We
always feared he would. And Theon Greyjoy killed him, but that
was later.”

“Theon Greyjoy.” Tyrion sighed. “Your lady mother once accused
me … well, I will not burden you with the ugly details. She accused
me falsely. I never harmed your brother Bran. And I mean no harm
to you.”
What does he want me to say? “That is good to know, my lord.” He
wanted something from her, but Sansa did not know what it was.
He looks like a starving child, but I have no food to give him. Why won’t
he leave me be?
Tyrion rubbed at his scarred, scabby nose yet again, an ugly habit
that drew the eye to his ugly face. “You have never asked me how
Robb died, or your lady mother.”
“I … would sooner not know. It would give me bad dreams.”
“Then I will say no more.”
“That … that’s kind of you.”
“Oh, yes,” said Tyrion. “I am the very soul of kindness. And I
know about bad dreams.”

TYRION

The new crown that his father had given the Faith stood twice as

tall as the one the mob had smashed, a glory of crystal and spun
gold. Rainbow light ashed and shimmered every time the High
Septon moved his head, but Tyrion had to wonder how the man
could bear the weight. And even he had to concede that Jo rey and
Margaery made a regal couple, as they stood side-by-side between
the towering gilded statues of the Father and the Mother.
The bride was lovely in ivory silk and Myrish lace, her skirts
decorated with oral patterns picked out in seed pearls. As Renly’s
widow, she might have worn the Baratheon colors, gold and black,
yet she came to them a Tyrell, in a maiden’s cloak made of a
hundred cloth-of-gold roses sewn to green velvet. He wondered if
she really was a maiden. Not that Jo rey is like to know the di erence.
The king looked near as splendid as his bride, in his doublet of
dusky rose, beneath a cloak of deep crimson velvet blazoned with
his stag and lion. The crown rested easily on his curls, gold on gold.
I saved that bloody crown for him. Tyrion shifted his weight
uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He could not stand still.
Too much wine. He should have thought to relieve himself before
they set out from the Red Keep. The sleepless night he’d spent with
Shae was making itself felt too, but most of all he wanted to
strangle his bloody royal nephew.
I am no stranger to Valyrian steel, the boy had boasted. The septons
were always going on about how the Father Above judges us all. If

the Father would be so good as to topple over and crush Jo like a dung
beetle, I might even believe it.
He ought to have seen it long ago. Jaime would never send
another man to do his killing, and Cersei was too cunning to use a
knife that could be traced back to her, but Jo , arrogant vicious
stupid little wretch that he was …
He remembered a cold morning when he’d climbed down the
steep exterior steps from Winterfell’s library to nd Prince Jo rey
jesting with the Hound about killing wolves. Send a dog to kill a
wolf, he said. Even Jo rey was not so foolish as to command Sandor
Clegane to slay a son of Eddard Stark, however; the Hound would
have gone to Cersei. Instead the boy found his catspaw among the
unsavory lot of freeriders, merchants, and camp followers who’d
attached themselves to the king’s party as they made their way
north. Some poxy lackwit willing to risk his life for a prince’s favor and a
little coin. Tyrion wondered whose idea it had been to wait until
Robert left Winterfell before opening Bran’s throat. Jo ’s, most like.
No doubt he thought it was the height of cunning.
The prince’s own dagger had a jeweled pommel and inlaid
goldwork on the blade, Tyrion seemed to recall. At least Jo had
not been stupid enough to use that. Instead he went poking among
his father’s weapons. Robert Baratheon was a man of careless
generosity, and would have given his son any dagger he
wanted … but Tyrion guessed that the boy had just taken it. Robert
had come to Winterfell with a long tail of knights and retainers, a
huge wheelhouse, and a baggage train. No doubt some diligent
servant had made certain that the king’s weapons went with him, in
case he should desire any of them.
The blade Jo chose was nice and plain. No goldwork, no jewels
in the hilt, no silver inlay on the blade. King Robert never wore it,
had likely forgotten he owned it. Yet the Valyrian steel was deadly
sharp … sharp enough to slice through skin, esh, and muscle in
one quick stroke. I am no stranger to Valyrian steel. But he had been,
hadn’t he? Else he would never have been so foolish as to pick
Little nger’s knife.

The why of it still eluded him. Simple cruelty, perhaps? His nephew
had that in abundance. It was all Tyrion could do not to retch up all
the wine he’d drunk, piss in his breeches, or both. He squirmed
uncomfortably. He ought to have held his tongue at breakfast. The
boy knows I know now. My big mouth will be the death of me, I swear it.
The seven vows were made, the seven blessings invoked, and the
seven promises exchanged. When the wedding song had been sung
and the challenge had gone unanswered, it was time for the
exchange of cloaks. Tyrion shifted his weight from one stunted leg
to the other, trying to see between his father and his uncle Kevan. If
the gods are just, Jo will make a hash of this. He made certain not to
look at Sansa, lest his bitterness show in his eyes. You might have
knelt, damn you. Would it have been so bloody hard to bend those sti
Stark knees of yours and let me keep a little dignity?
Mace Tyrell removed his daughter’s maiden cloak tenderly, while
Jo rey accepted the folded bride’s cloak from his brother Tommen
and shook it out with a ourish. The boy king was as tall at thirteen
as his bride was at sixteen; he would not require a fool’s back to
climb upon. He draped Margaery in the crimson-and-gold and
leaned close to fasten it at her throat. And that easily she passed
from her father’s protection to her husband’s. But who will protect her
from Jo ? Tyrion glanced at the Knight of Flowers, standing with
the other Kingsguard. You had best keep your sword well honed, Ser
Loras.
“With this kiss I pledge my love!” Jo rey declared in ringing
tones. When Margaery echoed the words he pulled her close and
kissed her long and deep. Rainbow lights danced once more about
the High Septon’s crown as he solemnly declared Jo rey of the
Houses Baratheon and Lannister and Margaery of House Tyrell to be
one esh, one heart, one soul.
Good, that’s done with. Now let’s get back to the bloody castle so I can
have a piss.
Ser Loras and Ser Meryn led the procession from the sept in their
white scale armor and snowy cloaks. Then came Prince Tommen,
scattering rose petals from a basket before the king and queen.
After the royal couple followed Queen Cersei and Lord Tyrell, then

the bride’s mother arm-in-arm with Lord Tywin. The Queen of
Thorns tottered after them with one hand on Ser Kevan Lannister’s
arm and the other on her cane, her twin guardsmen close behind her
in case she fell. Next came Ser Garlan Tyrell and his lady wife, and
nally it was their turn.
“My lady.” Tyrion o ered Sansa his arm. She took it dutifully, but
he could feel her sti ness as they walked up the aisle together. She
never once looked down at him.
He heard them cheering outside even before he reached the
doors. The mob loved Margaery so much they were even willing to
love Jo rey again. She had belonged to Renly, the handsome young
prince who had loved them so well he had come back from beyond
the grave to save them. And the bounty of Highgarden had come
with her, owing up the roseroad from the south. The fools didn’t
seem to remember that it had been Mace Tyrell who closed the
roseroad to begin with, and made the bloody famine.
They stepped out into the crisp autumn air. “I feared we’d never
escape,” Tyrion quipped.
Sansa had no choice but to look at him then. “I … yes, my lord.
As you say.” She looked sad. “It was such a beautiful ceremony,
though.”
As ours was not. “It was long, I’ll say that much. I need to return
to the castle for a good piss.” Tyrion rubbed the stump of his nose.
“Would that I’d contrived some mission to take me out of the city.
Little nger was the clever one.”
Jo rey and Margaery stood surrounded by Kingsguard atop the
steps that fronted on the broad marble plaza. Ser Addam and his
gold cloaks held back the crowd, while the statue of King Baelor the
Blessed gazed down on them benevolently. Tyrion had no choice
but to queue up with the rest to o er congratulations. He kissed
Margaery’s ngers and wished her every happiness. Thankfully,
there were others behind them waiting their turn, so they did not
need to linger long.
Their litter had been sitting in the sun, and it was very warm
inside the curtains. As they lurched into motion, Tyrion reclined on
an elbow while Sansa sat staring at her hands. She is just as comely as

the Tyrell girl. Her hair was a rich autumn auburn, her eyes a deep
Tully blue. Grief had given her a haunted, vulnerable look; if
anything, it had only made her more beautiful. He wanted to reach
her, to break through the armor of her courtesy. Was that what
made him speak? Or just the need to distract himself from the
fullness in his bladder?
“I had been thinking that when the roads are safe again, we might
journey to Casterly Rock.” Far from Jo rey and my sister. The more
he thought about what Jo had done to Lives of Four Kings, the more
it troubled him. There was a message there, oh yes. “It would please
me to show you the Golden Gallery and the Lion’s Mouth, and the
Hall of Heroes where Jaime and I played as boys. You can hear
thunder from below where the sea comes in …”
She raised her head slowly. He knew what she was seeing; the
swollen brutish brow, the raw stump of his nose, his crooked pink
scar and mismatched eyes. Her own eyes were big and blue and
empty. “I shall go wherever my lord husband wishes.”
“I had hoped it might please you, my lady.”
“It will please me to please my lord.”
His mouth tightened. What a pathetic little man you are. Did you
think babbling about the Lion’s Mouth would make her smile? When
have you ever made a woman smile but with gold? “No, it was a foolish
notion. Only a Lannister can love the Rock.”
“Yes, my lord. As you wish.”
Tyrion could hear the commons shouting out King Jo rey’s name.
In three years that cruel boy will be a man, ruling in his own
right … and every dwarf with half his wits will be a long way from King’s
Landing. Oldtown, perhaps. Or even the Free Cities. He had always
had a yen to see the Titan of Braavos. Perhaps that would please
Sansa. Gently, he spoke of Braavos, and met a wall of sullen
courtesy as icy and unyielding as the Wall he had walked once in
the north. It made him weary. Then and now.
They passed the rest of the journey in silence. After a while,
Tyrion found himself hoping that Sansa would say something,
anything, the merest word, but she never spoke. When the litter
halted in the castle yard, he let one of the grooms help her down.

“We will be expected at the feast an hour hence, my lady. I will join
you shortly.” He walked o sti -legged. Across the yard, he could
hear Margaery’s breathless laugh as Jo rey swept her from the
saddle. The boy will be as tall and strong as Jaime one day, he thought,
and I’ll still be a dwarf beneath his feet. And one day he’s like to make
me even shorter …
He found a privy and sighed gratefully as he relieved himself of
the morning’s wine. There were times when a piss felt near as good
as a woman, and this was one. He wished he could relieve himself
of his doubts and guilts half as easily.
Podrick Payne was waiting outside his chambers. “I laid out your
new doublet. Not here. On your bed. In the bedchamber.”
“Yes, that’s where we keep the bed.” Sansa would be in there,
dressing for the feast. Shae as well. “Wine, Pod.”
Tyrion drank it in his window seat, brooding over the chaos of
the kitchens below. The sun had not yet touched the top of the
castle wall, but he could smell breads baking and meats roasting.
The guests would soon be pouring into the throne room, full of
anticipation; this would be an evening of song and splendor,
designed not only to unite Highgarden and Casterly Rock but to
trumpet their power and wealth as a lesson to any who might still
think to oppose Jo rey’s rule.
But who would be mad enough to contest Jo rey’s rule now,
after what had befallen Stannis Baratheon and Robb Stark? There
was still ghting in the riverlands, but everywhere the coils were
tightening. Ser Gregor Clegane had crossed the Trident and seized
the ruby ford, then captured Harrenhal almost e ortlessly. Seagard
had yielded to Black Walder Frey, Lord Randyll Tarly held
Maidenpool, Duskendale, and the kingsroad. In the west, Ser Daven
Lannister had linked up with Ser Forley Prester at the Golden Tooth
for a march on Riverrun. Ser Ryman Frey was leading two thousand
spears down from the Twins to join them. And Paxter Redwyne
claimed his eet would soon set sail from the Arbor, to begin the
long voyage around Dorne and through the Stepstones. Stannis’s
Lyseni pirates would be outnumbered ten to one. The struggle that
the maesters were calling the War of the Five Kings was all but at

an end. Mace Tyrell had been heard complaining that Lord Tywin
had left no victories for him.
“My lord?” Pod was at his side. “Will you be changing? I laid out
the doublet. On your bed. For the feast.”
“Feast?” said Tyrion sourly. “What feast?”
“The wedding feast.” Pod missed the sarcasm, of course. “King
Jo rey and Lady Margaery. Queen Margaery, I mean.”
Tyrion resolved to get very, very drunk tonight. “Very well,
young Podrick, let us go make me festive.”
Shae was helping Sansa with her hair when they entered the
bedchamber. Joy and grief, he thought when he beheld them there
together. Laughter and tears. Sansa wore a gown of silvery satin
trimmed in vair, with dagged sleeves that almost touched the oor,
lined in soft purple felt. Shae had arranged her hair artfully in a
delicate silver net winking with dark purple gemstones. Tyrion had
never seen her look more lovely, yet she wore sorrow on those long
satin sleeves. “Lady Sansa,” he told her, “you shall be the most
beautiful woman in the hall tonight.”
“My lord is too kind.”
“My lady,” said Shae wistfully. “Couldn’t I come serve at table? I
so want to see the pigeons y out of the pie.”
Sansa looked at her uncertainly. “The queen has chosen all the
servers.”
“And the hall will be too crowded.” Tyrion had to bite back his
annoyance. “There will be musicians strolling all through the castle,
though, and tables in the outer ward with food and drink for all.”
He inspected his new doublet, crimson velvet with padded shoulders
and pu ed sleeves slashed to show the black satin underlining. A
handsome garment. All it wants is a handsome man to wear it. “Come,
Pod, help me into this.”
He had another cup of wine as he dressed, then took his wife by
the arm and escorted her from the Kitchen Keep to join the river of
silk, satin, and velvet owing toward the throne room. Some guests
had gone inside to nd their places on the benches. Others were
milling in front of the doors, enjoying the unseasonable warmth of

the afternoon. Tyrion led Sansa around the yard, to perform the
necessary courtesies.
She is good at this, he thought, as he watched her tell Lord Gyles
that his cough was sounding better, compliment Elinor Tyrell on her
gown, and question Jalabhar Xho about wedding customs in the
Summer Isles. His cousin Ser Lancel had been brought down by Ser
Kevan, the rst time he’d left his sickbed since the battle. He looks
ghastly. Lancel’s hair had turned white and brittle, and he was thin
as a stick. Without his father beside him holding him up, he would
surely have collapsed. Yet when Sansa praised his valor and said
how good it was to see him getting strong again, both Lancel and
Ser Kevan beamed. She would have made Jo rey a good queen and a
better wife if he’d had the sense to love her. He wondered if his
nephew was capable of loving anyone.
“You do look quite exquisite, child,” Lady Olenna Tyrell told
Sansa when she tottered up to them in a cloth-of-gold gown that
must have weighed more than she did. “The wind has been at your
hair, though.” The little old woman reached up and fussed at the
loose strands, tucking them back into place and straightening
Sansa’s hair net. “I was very sorry to hear about your losses,” she
said as she tugged and ddled. “Your brother was a terrible traitor,
I know, but if we start killing men at weddings they’ll be even more
frightened of marriage than they are presently. There, that’s
better.” Lady Olenna smiled. “I am pleased to say I shall be leaving
for Highgarden the day after next. I have had quite enough of this
smelly city, thank you. Perhaps you would like to accompany me
for a little visit, whilst the men are o having their war? I shall
miss my Margaery so dreadfully, and all her lovely ladies. Your
company would be such sweet solace.”
“You are too kind, my lady,” said Sansa, “but my place is with my
lord husband.”
Lady Olenna gave Tyrion a wrinkled, toothless smile. “Oh?
Forgive a silly old woman, my lord, I did not mean to steal your
lovely wife. I assumed you would be o leading a Lannister host
against some wicked foe.”

“A host of dragons and stags. The master of coin must remain at
court to see that all the armies are paid for.”
“To be sure. Dragons and stags, that’s very clever. And dwarf’s
pennies as well. I have heard of these dwarf’s pennies. No doubt
collecting those is such a dreadful chore.”
“I leave the collecting to others, my lady.”
“Oh, do you? I would have thought you might want to tend to it
yourself. We can’t have the crown being cheated of its dwarf’s
pennies, now. Can we?”
“Gods forbid.” Tyrion was beginning to wonder whether Lord
Luthor Tyrell had ridden o that cli intentionally. “If you will
excuse us, Lady Olenna, it is time we were in our places.”
“Myself as well. Seventy-seven courses, I daresay. Don’t you nd
that a bit excessive, my lord? I shan’t eat more than three or four
bites myself, but you and I are very little, aren’t we?” She patted
Sansa’s hair again and said, “Well, o with you, child, and try to be
merrier. Now where have my guardsmen gone? Left, Right, where
are you? Come help me to the dais.”
Although evenfall was still an hour away, the throne room was
already a blaze of light, with torches burning in every sconce. The
guests stood along the tables as heralds called out the names and
titles of the lords and ladies making their entrance. Pages in the
royal livery escorted them down the broad central aisle. The gallery
above was packed with musicians; drummers and pipers and
ddlers, strings and horns and skins.
Tyrion clutched Sansa’s arm and made the walk with a heavy
waddling stride. He could feel their eyes on him, picking at the
fresh new scar that had left him even uglier than he had been
before. Let them look, he thought as he hopped up onto his seat. Let
them stare and whisper until they’ve had their ll, I will not hide myself
for their sake. The Queen of Thorns followed them in, shu ing along
with tiny little steps. Tyrion wondered which of them looked more
absurd, him with Sansa or the wizened little woman between her
seven-foot-tall twin guardsmen.
Jo rey and Margaery rode into the throne room on matched
white chargers. Pages ran before them, scattering rose petals under

their hooves. The king and queen had changed for the feast as well.
Jo rey wore striped black-and-crimson breeches and a cloth-of-gold
doublet with black satin sleeves and onyx studs. Margaery had
exchanged the demure gown that she had worn in the sept for one
much more revealing, a confection in pale green samite with a
tight-laced bodice that bared her shoulders and the tops of her small
breasts. Unbound, her soft brown hair tumbled over her white
shoulders and down her back almost to her waist. Around her brows
was a slim golden crown. Her smile was shy and sweet. A lovely girl,
thought Tyrion, and a kinder fate than my nephew deserves.
The Kingsguard escorted them onto the dais, to the seats of honor
beneath the shadow of the Iron Throne, draped for the occasion in
long silk streamers of Baratheon gold, Lannister crimson, and Tyrell
green. Cersei embraced Margaery and kissed her cheeks. Lord
Tywin did the same, and then Lancel and Ser Kevan. Jo rey
received loving kisses from the bride’s father and his two new
brothers, Loras and Garlan. No one seemed in any great rush to kiss
Tyrion. When the king and queen had taken their seats, the High
Septon rose to lead a prayer. At least he does not drone as badly as the
last one, Tyrion consoled himself.
He and Sansa had been seated far to the king’s right, beside Ser
Garlan Tyrell and his wife, the Lady Leonette. A dozen others sat
closer to Jo rey, which a pricklier man might have taken for a
slight, given that he had been the King’s Hand only a short time
past. Tyrion would have been glad if there had been a hundred.
“Let the cups be lled!” Jo rey proclaimed, when the gods had
been given their due. His cupbearer poured a whole agon of dark
Arbor red into the golden wedding chalice that Lord Tyrell had
given him that morning. The king had to use both hands to lift it.
“To my wife the queen!”
“Margaery!” the hall shouted back at him. “Margaery! Margaery! To
the queen!” A thousand cups rang together, and the wedding feast
was well and truly begun. Tyrion Lannister drank with the rest,
emptying his cup on that rst toast and signaling for it to be re lled
as soon as he was seated again.

The rst dish was a creamy soup of mushrooms and buttered
snails, served in gilded bowls. Tyrion had scarcely touched the
breakfast, and the wine had already gone to his head, so the food
was welcome. He nished quickly. One done, seventy-six to come.
Seventy-seven dishes, while there are still starving children in this city,
and men who would kill for a radish. They might not love the Tyrells half
so well if they could see us now.
Sansa tasted a spoonful of soup and pushed the bowl away. “Not
to your liking, my lady?” Tyrion asked.
“There’s to be so much, my lord. I have a little tummy.” She
ddled nervously with her hair and looked down the table to where
Jo rey sat with his Tyrell queen.
Does she wish it were her in Margaery’s place? Tyrion frowned. Even
a child should have better sense. He turned away, wanting distraction,
but everywhere he looked were women, fair ne beautiful happy
women who belonged to other men. Margaery, of course, smiling
sweetly as she and Jo rey shared a drink from the great seven-sided
wedding chalice. Her mother Lady Alerie, silver-haired and
handsome, still proud beside Mace Tyrell. The queen’s three young
cousins, bright as birds. Lord Merryweather’s dark-haired Myrish
wife with her big black sultry eyes. Ellaria Sand among the
Dornishmen (Cersei had placed them at their own table, just below
the dais in a place of high honor but as far from the Tyrells as the
width of the hall would allow), laughing at something the Red Viper
had told her.
And there was one woman, sitting almost at the foot of the third
table on the left … the wife of one of the Fossoways, he thought,
and heavy with his child. Her delicate beauty was in no way
diminished by her belly, nor was her pleasure in the food and
frolics. Tyrion watched as her husband fed her morsels o his plate.
They drank from the same cup, and would kiss often and
unpredictably. Whenever they did, his hand would gently rest upon
her stomach, a tender and protective gesture.
He wondered what Sansa would do if he leaned over and kissed
her right now. Flinch away, most likely. Or be brave and su er
through it, as was her duty. She is nothing if not dutiful, this wife of

mine. If he told her that he wished to have her maidenhead tonight,
she would su er that dutifully as well, and weep no more than she
had to.
He called for more wine. By the time he got it, the second course
was being served, a pastry co yn lled with pork, pine nuts, and
eggs. Sansa ate no more than a bite of hers, as the heralds were
summoning the rst of the seven singers.
Grey-bearded Hamish the Harper announced that he would
perform “for the ears of gods and men, a song ne’er heard before in
all the Seven Kingdoms.” He called it “Lord Renly’s Ride.”
His ngers moved across the strings of the high harp, lling the
throne room with sweet sound. “From his throne of bones the Lord of
Death looked down on the murdered lord,” Hamish began, and went
on to tell how Renly, repenting his attempt to usurp his nephew’s
crown, had de ed the Lord of Death himself and crossed back to the
land of the living to defend the realm against his brother.
And for this poor Symon wound up in a bowl of brown, Tyrion
mused. Queen Margaery was teary-eyed by the end, when the shade
of brave Lord Renly ew to Highgarden to steal one last look at his
true love’s face. “Renly Baratheon never repented of anything in his
life,” the Imp told Sansa, “but if I’m any judge, Hamish just won
himself a gilded lute.”
The Harper also gave them several more familiar songs. “A Rose
of Gold” was for the Tyrells, no doubt, as “The Rains of Castamere”
was meant to atter his father. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone”
delighted the High Septon, and “My Lady Wife” pleased all the little
girls with romance in their hearts, and no doubt some little boys as
well. Tyrion listened with half a ear, as he sampled sweetcorn
fritters and hot oatbread baked with bits of date, apple, and orange,
and gnawed on the rib of a wild boar.
Thereafter dishes and diversions succeeded one another in a
staggering profusion, buoyed along upon a ood of wine and ale.
Hamish left them, his place taken by a smallish elderly bear who
danced clumsily to pipe and drum while the wedding guests ate
trout cooked in a crust of crushed almonds. Moon Boy mounted his
stilts and strode around the tables in pursuit of Lord Tyrell’s

ludicrously fat fool Butterbumps, and the lords and ladies sampled
roast herons and cheese-and-onion pies. A troupe of Pentoshi
tumblers performed cartwheels and handstands, balanced platters
on their bare feet, and stood upon each other’s shoulders to form a
pyramid. Their feats were accompanied by crabs boiled in ery
eastern spices, trenchers lled with chunks of chopped mutton
stewed in almond milk with carrots, raisins, and onions, and sh
tarts fresh from the ovens, served so hot they burned the ngers.
Then the heralds summoned another singer; Collio Quaynis of
Tyrosh, who had a vermilion beard and an accent as ludicrous as
Symon had promised. Collio began with his version of “The Dance
of the Dragons,” which was more properly a song for two singers,
male and female. Tyrion su ered through it with a double helping
of honey-ginger partridge and several cups of wine. A haunting
ballad of two dying lovers amidst the Doom of Valyria might have
pleased the hall more if Collio had not sung it in High Valyrian,
which most of the guests could not speak. But “Bessa the Barmaid”
won them back with its ribald lyrics. Peacocks were served in their
plumage, roasted whole and stu ed with dates, while Collio
summoned a drummer, bowed low before Lord Tywin, and
launched into “The Rains of Castamere.”
If I have to hear seven versions of that, I may go down to Flea Bottom
and apologize to the stew. Tyrion turned to his wife. “So which did
you prefer?”
Sansa blinked at him. “My lord?”
“The singers. Which did you prefer?”
“I … I’m sorry, my lord. I was not listening.”
She was not eating, either. “Sansa, is aught amiss?” He spoke
without thinking, and instantly felt the fool. All her kin are
slaughtered and she’s wed to me, and I wonder what’s amiss.
“No, my lord.” She looked away from him, and feigned an
unconvincing interest in Moon Boy pelting Ser Dontos with dates.
Four master pyromancers conjured up beasts of living ame to
tear at each other with ery claws whilst the serving men ladeled
out bowls of blandissory, a mixture of beef broth and boiled wine
sweetened with honey and dotted with blanched almonds and

chunks of capon. Then came some strolling pipers and clever dogs
and sword swallowers, with buttered pease, chopped nuts, and
slivers of swan poached in a sauce of sa ron and peaches. (“Not
swan again,” Tyrion muttered, remembering his supper with his
sister on the eve of battle.) A juggler kept a half-dozen swords and
axes whirling through the air as skewers of blood sausage were
brought sizzling to the tables, a juxtaposition that Tyrion thought
passing clever, though not perhaps in the best of taste.
The heralds blew their trumpets. “To sing for the golden lute,”
one cried, “we give you Galyeon of Cuy.”
Galyeon was a big barrel-chested man with a black beard, a bald
head, and a thunderous voice that lled every corner of the throne
room. He brought no fewer than six musicians to play for him.
“Noble lords and ladies fair, I sing but one song for you this night,”
he announced. “It is the song of the Blackwater, and how a realm
was saved.” The drummer began a slow ominous beat.
“The dark lord brooded high in his tower,” Galyeon began, “in a
castle as black as the night.”
“Black was his hair and black was his soul,” the musicians chanted in
unison. A ute came in.
“He feasted on bloodlust and envy, and lled his cup full up with
spite,” sang Galyeon. “My brother once ruled seven kingdoms, he said
to his harridan wife. I’ll take what was his and make it all mine. Let his
son feel the point of my knife.”
“A brave young boy with hair of gold,” his players chanted, as a
woodharp and a ddle began to play.
“If I am ever Hand again, the rst thing I’ll do is hang all the
singers,” said Tyrion, too loudly.
Lady Leonette laughed lightly beside him, and Ser Garlan leaned
over to say, “A valiant deed unsung is no less valiant.”
“The dark lord assembled his legions, they gathered around him like
crows. And thirsty for blood they boarded their ships …”
“… and cut o poor Tyrion’s nose,” Tyrion nished.
Lady Leonette giggled. “Perhaps you should be a singer, my lord.
You rhyme as well as this Galyeon.”

“No, my lady,” Ser Garlan said. “My lord of Lannister was made
to do great deeds, not to sing of them. But for his chain and his
wild re, the foe would have been across the river. And if Tyrion’s
wildlings had not slain most of Lord Stannis’s scouts, we would
never have been able to take him unawares.”
His words made Tyrion feel absurdly grateful, and helped to
mollify him as Galyeon sang endless verses about the valor of the
boy king and his mother, the golden queen.
“She never did that,” Sansa blurted out suddenly.
“Never believe anything you hear in a song, my lady.” Tyrion
summoned a serving man to re ll their wine cups.
Soon it was full night outside the tall windows, and still Galyeon
sang on. His song had seventy-seven verses, though it seemed more
like a thousand. One for every guest in the hall. Tyrion drank his way
through the last twenty or so, to help resist the urge to stu
mushrooms in his ears. By the time the singer had taken his bows,
some of the guests were drunk enough to begin providing
unintentional entertainments of their own. Grand Maester Pycelle
fell asleep while dancers from the Summer Isles swirled and spun in
robes made of bright feathers and smoky silk. Roundels of elk
stu ed with ripe blue cheese were being brought out when one of
Lord Rowan’s knights stabbed a Dornishman. The gold cloaks
dragged them both away, one to a cell to rot and the other to get
sewn up by Maester Ballabar.
Tyrion was toying with a leche of brawn, spiced with cinnamon,
cloves, sugar, and almond milk, when King Jo rey lurched suddenly
to his feet. “Bring on my royal jousters!” he shouted in a voice thick
with wine, clapping his hands together.
My nephew is drunker than I am, Tyrion thought as the gold cloaks
opened the great doors at the end of the hall. From where he sat, he
could only see the tops of two striped lances as a pair of riders
entered side by side. A wave of laughter followed them down the
center aisle toward the king. They must be riding ponies, he
concluded … until they came into full view.
The jousters were a pair of dwarfs. One was mounted on an ugly
grey dog, long of leg and heavy of jaw. The other rode an immense

spotted sow. Painted wooden armor clattered and clacked as the
little knights bounced up and down in their saddles. Their shields
were bigger than they were, and they wrestled manfully with their
lances as they clomped along, swaying this way and that and
eliciting gusts of mirth. One knight was all in gold, with a black
stag painted on his shield; the other wore grey and white, and bore
a wolf device. Their mounts were barded likewise.
Tyrion glanced along the dais at all the laughing faces. Jo rey
was red and breathless, Tommen was hooting and hopping up and
down in his seat, Cersei was chuckling politely, and even Lord
Tywin looked mildly amused. Of all those at the high table, only
Sansa Stark was not smiling. He could have loved her for that, but if
truth be told the Stark girl’s eyes were far away, as if she had not
even seen the ludicrous riders loping toward her.
The dwarfs are not to blame, Tyrion decided. When they are done, I
shall compliment them and give them a fat purse of silver. And come the
morrow, I will nd whoever planned this little diversion and arrange for
a di erent sort of thanks.
When the dwarfs reined up beneath the dais to salute the king,
the wolf knight dropped his shield. As he leaned over to grab for it,
the stag knight lost control of his heavy lance and slammed him
across the back. The wolf knight fell o his pig, and his lance
tumbled over and boinked his foe on the head. They both wound up
on the oor in a great tangle. When they rose, both tried to mount
the dog. Much shouting and shoving followed. Finally they regained
their saddles, only mounted on each other’s steed, holding the
wrong shield and facing backward.
It took some time to sort that out, but in the end they spurred to
opposite ends of the hall, and wheeled about for the tilt. As the
lords and ladies gu awed and giggled, the little men came together
with a crash and a clatter, and the wolf knight’s lance struck the
helm of the stag knight and knocked his head clean o . It spun
through the air spattering blood to land in the lap of Lord Gyles.
The headless dwarf careened around the tables, ailing his arms.
Dogs barked, women shrieked, and Moon Boy made a great show of
swaying perilously back and forth on his stilts, until Lord Gyles

pulled a dripping red melon out of the shattered helm, at which
point the stag knight poked his face up out of his armor, and
another storm of laughter rocked the hall. The knights waited for it
to die, circled around each other trading colorful insults, and were
about to separate for another joust when the dog threw its rider to
the oor and mounted the sow. The huge pig squealed in distress,
while the wedding guests squealed with laughter, especially when
the stag knight leapt onto the wolf knight, let down his wooden
breeches, and started to pump away frantically at the other’s nether
portions.
“I yield, I yield,” the dwarf on the bottom screamed. “Good ser,
put up your sword!”
“I would, I would, if you’ll stop moving the sheath!” the dwarf on
the top replied, to the merriment of all.
Jo rey was snorting wine from both nostrils. Gasping, he lurched
to his feet, almost knocking over his tall two-handed chalice. “A
champion,” he shouted. “We have a champion!” The hall began to
quiet when it was seen that the king was speaking. The dwarfs
untangled, no doubt anticipating the royal thanks. “Not a true
champion, though,” said Jo . “A true champion defeats all
challengers.” The king climbed up on the table. “Who else will
challenge our tiny champion?” With a gleeful smile, he turned
toward Tyrion. “Uncle! You’ll defend the honor of my realm, won’t
you? You can ride the pig!”
The laughter crashed over him like a wave. Tyrion Lannister did
not remember rising, nor climbing on his chair, but he found
himself standing on the table. The hall was a torchlit blur of leering
faces. He twisted his face into the most hideous mockery of a smile
the Seven Kingdoms had ever seen. “Your Grace,” he called, “I’ll
ride the pig … but only if you ride the dog!”
Jo scowled, confused. “Me? I’m no dwarf. Why me?”
Stepped right into the cut, Jo . “Why, you’re the only man in the
hall that I’m certain of defeating!”
He could not have said which was sweeter; the instant of shocked
silence, the gale of laughter that followed, or the look of blind rage
on his nephew’s face. The dwarf hopped back to the oor well

satis ed, and by the time he looked back Ser Osmund and Ser
Meryn were helping Jo climb down as well. When he noticed
Cersei glaring at him, Tyrion blew her a kiss.
It was a relief when the musícians began to play. The tiny
jousters led dog and sow from the hall, the guests returned to their
trenchers of brawn, and Tyrion called for another cup of wine. But
suddenly he felt Ser Garlan’s hand on his sleeve. “My lord, beware,”
the knight warned. “The king.”
Tyrion turned in his seat. Jo rey was almost upon him, red-faced
and staggering, wine slopping over the rim of the great golden
wedding chalice he carried in both hands. “Your Grace,” was all he
had time to say before the king upended the chalice over his head.
The wine washed down over his face in a red torrent. It drenched
his hair, stung his eyes, burned in his wound, ran down his cheeks,
and soaked the velvet of his new doublet. “How do you like that,
Imp?” Jo rey mocked.
Tyrion’s eyes were on re. He dabbed at his face with the back of
a sleeve and tried to blink the world back into clarity. “That was ill
done, Your Grace,” he heard Ser Garlan say quietly.
“Not at all, Ser Garlan.” Tyrion dare not let this grow any uglier
than it was, not here, with half the realm looking on. “Not every
king would think to honor a humble subject by serving him from his
own royal chalice. A pity the wine spilled.”
“It didn’t spill,” said Jo rey, too graceless to take the retreat
Tyrion o ered him. “And I wasn’t serving you, either.”
Queen Margaery appeared suddenly at Jo rey’s elbow. “My
sweet king,” the Tyrell girl entreated, “come, return to your place,
there’s another singer waiting.”
“Alaric of Eysen,” said Lady Olenna Tyrell, leaning on her cane
and taking no more notice of the wine-soaked dwarf than her
granddaughter had done. “I do so hope he plays us ‘The Rains of
Castamere.’ It has been an hour, I’ve forgotten how it goes.”
“Ser Addam has a toast he wants to make as well,” said Margaery.
“Your Grace, please.”
“I have no wine,” Jo rey declared. “How can I drink a toast if I
have no wine? Uncle Imp, you can serve me. Since you won’t joust

you’ll be my cupbearer.”
“I would be most honored.”
“It’s not meant to be an honor!” Jo rey screamed. “Bend down and
pick up my chalice.” Tyrion did as he was bid, but as he reached for
the handle Jo kicked the chalice through his legs. “Pick it up! Are
you as clumsy as you are ugly?” He had to crawl under the table to
nd the thing. “Good, now ll it with wine.” He claimed a agon
from a serving girl and lled the goblet three-quarters full. “No, on
your knees, dwarf.” Kneeling, Tyrion raised up the heavy cup,
wondering if he was about to get a second bath. But Jo rey took
the wedding chalice one-handed, drank deep, and set it on the table.
“You can get up now, Uncle.”
His legs cramped as he tried to rise, and almost spilled him again.
Tyrion had to grab hold of a chair to steady himself. Ser Garlan lent
him a hand. Jo rey laughed, and Cersei as well. Then others. He
could not see who, but he heard them.
“Your Grace.” Lord Tywin’s voice was impeccably correct. “They
are bringing in the pie. Your sword is needed.”
“The pie?” Jo rey took his queen by the hand. “Come, my lady,
it’s the pie.”
The guests stood, shouting and applauding and smashing their
wine cups together as the great pie made its slow way down the
length of the hall, wheeled along by a half-dozen beaming cooks.
Two yards across it was, crusty and golden brown, and they could
hear squeaks and thumpings coming from inside it.
Tyrion pulled himself back into his chair. All he needed now was
for a dove to shit on him and his day would be complete. The wine
had soaked through his doublet and smallclothes, and he could feel
the wetness against his skin. He ought to change, but no one was
permitted to leave the feast until the time came for the bedding
ceremony. That was still a good twenty or thirty dishes o , he
judged.
King Jo rey and his queen met the pie below the dais. As Jo
drew his sword, Margaery laid a hand on his arm to restrain him.
“Widow’s Wail was not meant for slicing pies.”
“True.” Jo rey lifted his voice. “Ser Ilyn, your sword!”

From the shadows at the back of the hall, Ser Ilyn Payne
appeared. The specter at the feast, thought Tyrion as he watched the
King’s Justice stride forward, gaunt and grim. He had been too
young to have known Ser Ilyn before he’d lost his tongue. He would
have been a di erent man in those days, but now the silence is as much
a part of him as those hollow eyes, that rusty chainmail shirt, and the
greatsword on his back.
Ser Ilyn bowed before the king and queen, reached back over his
shoulder, and drew forth six feet of ornate silver bright with runes.
He knelt to o er the huge blade to Jo rey, hilt rst; points of red
re winked from ruby eyes on the pommel, a chunk of dragonglass
carved in the shape of a grinning skull.
Sansa stirred in her seat. “What sword is that?”
Tyrion’s eyes still stung from the wine. He blinked and looked
again. Ser Ilyn’s greatsword was as long and wide as Ice, but it was
too silvery-bright; Valyrian steel had a darkness to it, a smokiness in
its soul. Sansa clutched his arm. “What has Ser Ilyn done with my
father’s sword?”
I should have sent Ice back to Robb Stark, Tyrion thought. He
glanced at his father, but Lord Tywin was watching the king.
Jo rey and Margaery joined hands to lift the greatsword and
swung it down together in a silvery arc. When the piecrust broke,
the doves burst forth in a swirl of white feathers, scattering in every
direction, apping for the windows and the rafters. A roar of delight
went up from the benches, and the ddlers and pipers in the gallery
began to play a sprightly tune. Jo took his bride in his arms, and
whirled her around merrily.
A serving man placed a slice of hot pigeon pie in front of Tyrion
and covered it with a spoon of lemon cream. The pigeons were well
and truly cooked in this pie, but he found them no more appetizing
than the white ones uttering about the hall. Sansa was not eating
either. “You’re deathly pale, my lady,” Tyrion said. “You need a
breath of cool air, and I need a fresh doublet.” He stood and o ered
her his hand. “Come.”
But before they could make their retreat, Jo rey was back.
“Uncle, where are you going? You’re my cupbearer, remember?”

“I need to change into fresh garb, Your Grace. May I have your
leave?”
“No. I like the look of you this way. Serve me my wine.”
The king’s chalice was on the table where he’d left it. Tyrion had
to climb back onto his chair to reach it. Jo yanked it from his
hands and drank long and deep, his throat working as the wine ran
purple down his chin. “My lord,” Margaery said, “we should return
to our places. Lord Buckler wants to toast us.”
“My uncle hasn’t eaten his pigeon pie.” Holding the chalice onehanded, Jo jammed his other into Tyrion’s pie. “It’s ill luck not to
eat the pie,” he scolded as he lled his mouth with hot spiced
pigeon. “See, it’s good.” Spitting out akes of crust, he coughed and
helped himself to another stful. “Dry, though. Needs washing
down.” Jo took a swallow of wine and coughed again, more
violently. “I want to see, kof, see you ride that, kof kof, pig, Uncle. I
want …” His words broke up in a t of coughing.
Margaery looked at him with concern. “Your Grace?”
“It’s, kof, the pie, noth—kof, pie.” Jo took another drink, or
tried to, but all the wine came spewing back out when another
spate of coughing doubled him over. His face was turning red. “I,
kof, I can’t, kof kof kof kof …” The chalice slipped from his hand and
dark red wine went running across the dais.
“He’s choking,” Queen Margaery gasped.
Her grandmother moved to her side. “Help the poor boy!” the
Queen of Thorns screeched, in a voice ten times her size. “Dolts!
Will you all stand about gaping? Help your king!”
Ser Garlan shoved Tyrion aside and began to pound Jo rey on the
back. Ser Osmund Kettleblack ripped open the king’s collar. A
fearful high thin sound emerged from the boy’s throat, the sound of
a man trying to suck a river through a reed; then it stopped, and
that was more terrible still. “Turn him over!” Mace Tyrell bellowed
at everyone and no one. “Turn him over, shake him by his heels!” A
di erent voice was calling, “Water, give him some water!” The High
Septon began to pray loudly. Grand Maester Pycelle shouted for
someone to help him back to his chambers, to fetch his potions.
Jo rey began to claw at his throat, his nails tearing bloody gouges

in the esh. Beneath the skin, the muscles stood out hard as stone.
Prince Tommen was screaming and crying.
He is going to die, Tyrion realized. He felt curiously calm, though
pandemonium raged all about him. They were pounding Jo on the
back again, but his face was only growing darker. Dogs were
barking, children were wailing, men were shouting useless advice at
each other. Half the wedding guests were on their feet, some
shoving at each other for a better view, others rushing for the doors
in their haste to get away.
Ser Meryn pried the king’s mouth open to jam a spoon down his
throat. As he did, the boy’s eyes met Tyrion’s. He has Jaime’s eyes.
Only he had never seen Jaime look so scared. The boy’s only thirteen.
Jo rey was making a dry clacking noise, trying to speak. His eyes
bulged white with terror, and he lifted a hand … reaching for his
uncle, or pointing … Is he begging my forgiveness, or does he think I
can save him? “Noooo,” Cersei wailed, “Father help him, someone
help him, my son, my son …”
Tyrion found himself thinking of Robb Stark. My own wedding is
looking much better in hindsight. He looked to see how Sansa was
taking this, but there was so much confusion in the hall that he
could not nd her. But his eyes fell on the wedding chalice,
forgotten on the oor. He went and scooped it up. There was still a
half-inch of deep purple wine in the bottom of it. Tyrion considered
it a moment, then poured it on the oor.
Margaery Tyrell was weeping in her grandmother’s arms as the
old lady said, “Be brave, be brave.” Most of the musicians had ed,
but one last utist in the gallery was blowing a dirge. In the rear of
the throne room scu ing had broken out around the doors, and the
guests were trampling on each other. Ser Addam’s gold cloaks
moved in to restore order. Guests were rushing headlong out into
the night, some weeping, some stumbling and retching, others
white with fear. It occurred to Tyrion belatedly that it might be
wise to leave himself.
When he heard Cersei’s scream, he knew that it was over.
I should leave. Now. Instead he waddled toward her.

His sister sat in a puddle of wine, cradling her son’s body. Her
gown was torn and stained, her face white as chalk. A thin black
dog crept up beside her, sni ng at Jo rey’s corpse. “The boy is
gone, Cersei,” Lord Tywin said. He put his gloved hand on his
daughter’s shoulder as one of his guardsmen shooed away the dog.
“Unhand him now. Let him go.” She did not hear. It took two
Kingsguard to pry loose her ngers, so the body of King Jo rey
Baratheon could slide limp and lifeless to the oor.
The High Septon knelt beside him. “Father Above, judge our good
King Jo rey justly,” he intoned, beginning the prayer for the dead.
Margaery Tyrell began to sob, and Tyrion heard her mother Lady
Alerie saying, “He choked, sweetling. He choked on the pie. It was
naught to do with you. He choked. We all saw.”
“He did not choke.” Cersei’s voice was sharp as Ser Ilyn’s sword.
“My son was poisoned.” She looked to the white knights standing
helplessly around her. “Kingsguard, do your duty.”
“My lady?” said Ser Loras Tyrell, uncertain.
“Arrest my brother,” she commanded him. “He did this, the
dwarf. Him and his little wife. They killed my son. Your king. Take
them! Take them both!”

SANSA

Far across the city, a bell began to toll.

Sansa felt as though she were in a dream. “Jo rey is dead,” she
told the trees, to see if that would wake her.
He had not been dead when she left the throne room. He had
been on his knees, though, clawing at his throat, tearing at his own
skin as he fought to breathe. The sight of it had been too terrible to
watch, and she had turned and ed, sobbing. Lady Tanda had been
eeing as well. “You have a good heart, my lady,” she said to Sansa.
“Not every maid would weep so for a man who set her aside and
wed her to a dwarf.”
A good heart. I have a good heart. Hysterical laughter rose up her
gullet, but Sansa choked it back down. The bells were ringing, slow
and mournful. Ringing, ringing, ringing. They had rung for King
Robert the same way. Jo rey was dead, he was dead, he was dead,
dead, dead. Why was she crying, when she wanted to dance? Were
they tears of joy?
She found her clothes where she had hidden them, the night
before last. With no maids to help her, it took her longer than it
should have to undo the laces of her gown. Her hands were
strangely clumsy, though she was not as frightened as she ought to
have been. “The gods are cruel to take him so young and handsome,
at his own wedding feast,” Lady Tanda had said to her.
The gods are just, thought Sansa. Robb had died at a wedding feast
as well. It was Robb she wept for. Him and Margaery. Poor

Margaery, twice wed and twice widowed. Sansa slid her arm from a
sleeve, pushed down the gown, and wriggled out of it. She balled it
up and shoved it into the bole of an oak, shook out the clothing she
had hidden there. Dress warmly, Ser Dontos had told her, and dress
dark. She had no blacks, so she chose a dress of thick brown wool.
The bodice was decorated with freshwater pearls, though. The cloak
will cover them. The cloak was a deep green, with a large hood. She
slipped the dress over her head, and donned the cloak, though she
left the hood down for the moment. There were shoes as well,
simple and sturdy, with at heels and square toes. The gods heard
my prayer, she thought. She felt so numb and dreamy. My skin has
turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel. Her hands moved sti y,
awkwardly, as if they had never let down her hair before. For a
moment she wished Shae was there, to help her with the net.
When she pulled it free, her long auburn hair cascaded down her
back and across her shoulders. The web of spun silver hung from
her ngers, the ne metal glimmering softly, the stones black in the
moonlight. Black amethysts from Asshai. One of them was missing.
Sansa lifted the net for a closer look. There was a dark smudge in
the silver socket where the stone had fallen out.
A sudden terror lled her. Her heart hammered against her ribs,
and for an instant she held her breath. Why am I so scared, it’s only
an amethyst, a black amethyst from Asshai, no more than that. It must
have been loose in the setting, that’s all. It was loose and it fell out, and
now it’s lying somewhere in the throne room, or in the yard, unless …
Ser Dontos had said the hair net was magic, that it would take her
home. He told her she must wear it tonight at Jo rey’s wedding
feast. The silver wire stretched tight across her knuckles. Her thumb
rubbed back and forth against the hole where the stone had been.
She tried to stop, but her ngers were not her own. Her thumb was
drawn to the hole as the tongue is drawn to a missing tooth. What
kind of magic? The king was dead, the cruel king who had been her
gallant prince a thousand years ago. If Dontos had lied about the
hair net, had he lied about the rest as well? What if he never comes?
What if there is no ship, no boat on the river, no escape? What would
happen to her then?

She heard a faint rustle of leaves, and stu ed the silver hair net
down deep in the pocket of her cloak. “Who’s there?” she cried.
“Who is it?” The godswood was dim and dark, and the bells were
ringing Jo into his grave.
“Me.” He staggered out from under the trees, reeling drunk. He
caught her arm to steady himself. “Sweet Jonquil, I’ve come. Your
Florian has come, don’t be afraid.”
Sansa pulled away from his touch. “You said I must wear the hair
net. The silver net with … what sort of stones are those?”
“Amethysts. Black amethysts from Asshai, my lady.”
“They’re no amethysts. Are they? Are they? You lied.”
“Black amethysts,” he swore. “There was magic in them.”
“There was murder in them!”
“Softly, my lady, softly. No murder. He choked on his pigeon
pie.” Dontos chortled. “Oh, tasty tasty pie. Silver and stones, that’s
all it was, silver and stone and magic.”
The bells were tolling, and the wind was making a noise like he
had made as he tried to suck a breath of air. “You poisoned him.
You did. You took a stone from my hair …”
“Hush, you’ll be the death of us. I did nothing. Come, we must
away, they’ll search for you. Your husband’s been arrested.”
“Tyrion?” she said, shocked.
“Do you have another husband? The Imp, the dwarf uncle, she
thinks he did it.” He grabbed her hand and pulled at her. “This way,
we must away, quickly now, have no fear.”
Sansa followed unresisting. I could never abide the weeping of
women, Jo once said, but his mother was the only woman weeping
now. In Old Nan’s stories the grumkins crafted magic things that
could make a wish come true. Did I wish him dead? she wondered,
before she remembered that she was too old to believe in grumkins.
“Tyrion poisoned him?” Her dwarf husband had hated his nephew,
she knew. Could he truly have killed him? Did he know about my
hair net, about the black amethysts? He brought Jo wine. How could
you make someone choke by putting an amethyst in their wine? If
Tyrion did it, they will think I was part of it as well, she realized with a
start of fear. How not? They were man and wife, and Jo had killed

her father and mocked her with her brother’s death. One esh, one
heart, one soul.
“Be quiet now, my sweetling,” said Dontos. “Outside the
godswood, we must make no sound. Pull up your hood and hide
your face.” Sansa nodded, and did as he said.
He was so drunk that sometimes Sansa had to lend him her arm to
keep him from falling. The bells were ringing out across the city,
more and more of them joining in. She kept her head down and
stayed in the shadows, close behind Dontos. While descending the
serpentine steps he stumbled to his knees and retched. My poor
Florian, she thought, as he wiped his mouth with a oppy sleeve.
Dress dark, he’d said, yet under his brown hooded cloak he was
wearing his old surcoat; red and pink horizontal stripes beneath a
black chief bearing three gold crowns, the arms of House Hollard.
“Why are you wearing your surcoat? Jo decreed it was death if
you were caught dressed as a knight again, he … oh …” Nothing
Jo had decreed mattered any longer.
“I wanted to be a knight. For this, at least.” Dontos lurched back
to his feet and took her arm. “Come. Be quiet now, no questions.”
They continued down the serpentine and across a small sunken
courtyard. Ser Dontos shoved open a heavy door and lit a taper.
They were inside a long gallery. Along the walls stood empty suits
of armor, dark and dusty, their helms crested with rows of scales
that continued down their backs. As they hurried past, the taper’s
light made the shadows of each scale stretch and twist. The hollow
knights are turning into dragons, she thought.
One more stair took them to an oaken door banded with iron. “Be
strong now, my Jonquil, you are almost there.” When Dontos lifted
the bar and pulled open the door, Sansa felt a cold breeze on her
face. She passed through twelve feet of wall, and then she was
outside the castle, standing at the top of the cli . Below was the
river, above the sky, and one was as black as the other.
“We must climb down,” Ser Dontos said. “At the bottom, a man is
waiting to row us out to the ship.”
“I’ll fall.” Bran had fallen, and he had loved to climb.

“No you won’t. There’s a sort of ladder, a secret ladder, carved
into the stone. Here, you can feel it, my lady.” He got down on his
knees with her and made her lean over the edge of the cli , groping
with her ngers until she found the handhold cut into the face of
the blu . “Almost as good as rungs.”
Even so, it was a long way down. “I can’t.”
“You must.”
“Isn’t there another way?”
“This is the way. It won’t be so hard for a strong young girl like
you. Hold on tight and never look down and you’ll be at the bottom
in no time at all.” His eyes were shiny. “Your poor Florian is fat and
old and drunk, I’m the one should be afraid. I used to fall o my
horse, don’t you remember? That was how we began. I was drunk
and fell o my horse and Jo rey wanted my fool head, but you
saved me. You saved me, sweetling.”
He’s weeping, she realized. “And now you have saved me.”
“Only if you go. If not, I have killed us both.”
It was him, she thought. He killed Jo rey. She had to go, for him as
much as for herself. “You go rst, ser.” If he did fall, she did not
want him falling down on her head and knocking both of them o
the cli .
“As you wish, my lady.” He gave her a sloppy kiss and swung his
legs clumsily over the precipice, kicking about until he found a
foothold. “Let me get down a bit, and come after. You will come
now? You must swear it.”
“I’ll come,” she promised.
Ser Dontos disappeared. She could hear him hu ng and pu ng as
he began the descent. Sansa listened to the tolling of the bell,
counting each ring. At ten, gingerly, she eased herself over the edge
of the cli , poking with her toes until they found a place to rest.
The castle walls loomed large above her, and for a moment she
wanted nothing so much as to pull herself up and run back to her
warm rooms in the Kitchen Keep. Be brave, she told herself. Be
brave, like a lady in a song.
Sansa dared not look down. She kept her eyes on the face of the
cli , making certain of each step before reaching for the next. The

stone was rough and cold. Sometimes she could feel her ngers
slipping, and the handholds were not as evenly spaced as she would
have liked. The bells would not stop ringing. Before she was
halfway down her arms were trembling and she knew that she was
going to fall. One more step, she told herself, one more step. She had
to keep moving. If she stopped, she would never start again, and
dawn would nd her still clinging to the cli , frozen in fear. One
more step, and one more step.
The ground took her by surprise. She stumbled and fell, her heart
pounding. When she rolled onto her back and stared up at from
where she had come, her head swam dizzily and her ngers clawed
at the dirt. I did it. I did it, I didn’t fall, I made the climb and now I’m
going home.
Ser Dontos pulled her back onto her feet. “This way. Quiet now,
quiet, quiet.” He stayed close to the shadows that lay black and
thick beneath the cli s. Thankfully they did not have to go far. Fifty
yards downriver, a man sat in a small ski , half-hidden by the
remains of a great galley that had gone aground there and burned.
Dontos limped up to him, pu ng. “Oswell?”
“No names,” the man said. “In the boat.” He sat hunched over his
oars, an old man, tall and gangling, with long white hair and a great
hooked nose, with eyes shaded by a cowl. “Get in, be quick about
it,” he muttered. “We need to be away.”
When both of them were safe aboard, the cowled man slid the
blades into the water and put his back into the oars, rowing them
out toward the channel. Behind them the bells were still tolling the
boy king’s death. They had the dark river all to themselves.
With slow, steady, rhythmic strokes, they threaded their way
downstream, sliding above the sunken galleys, past broken masts,
burned hulls, and torn sails. The oarlocks had been mu ed, so they
moved almost soundlessly. A mist was rising over the water. Sansa
saw the embattled ramparts of one of the Imp’s winch towers
looming above, but the great chain had been lowered, and they
rowed unimpeded past the spot where a thousand men had burned.
The shore fell away, the fog grew thicker, the sound of the bells
began to fade. Finally even the lights were gone, lost somewhere

behind them. They were out in Blackwater Bay, and the world
shrank to dark water, blowing mist, and their silent companion
stooped over the oars. “How far must we go?” she asked.
“No talk.” The oarsman was old, but stronger than he looked, and
his voice was erce. There was something oddly familiar about his
face, though Sansa could not say what it was.
“Not far.” Ser Dontos took her hand in his own and rubbed it
gently. “Your friend is near, waiting for you.”
“No talk!” the oarsman growled again. “Sound carries over water,
Ser Fool.”
Abashed, Sansa bit her lip and huddled down in silence. The rest
was rowing, rowing, rowing.
The eastern sky was vague with the rst hint of dawn when Sansa
nally saw a ghostly shape in the darkness ahead; a trading galley,
her sails furled, moving slowly on a single bank of oars. As they
drew closer, she saw the ship’s gurehead, a merman with a golden
crown blowing on a great seashell horn. She heard a voice cry out,
and the galley swung slowly about.
As they came alongside, the galley dropped a rope ladder over
the rail. The rower shipped the oars and helped Sansa to her feet.
“Up now. Go on, girl, I got you.” Sansa thanked him for his
kindness, but received no answer but a grunt. It was much easier
going up the rope ladder than it had been coming down the cli .
The oarsman Oswell followed close behind her, while Ser Dontos
remained in the boat.
Two sailors were waiting by the rail to help her onto the deck.
Sansa was trembling. “She’s cold,” she heard someone say. He took
o his cloak and put it around her shoulders. “There, is that better,
my lady? Rest easy, the worst is past and done.”
She knew the voice. But he’s in the Vale, she thought. Ser Lothor
Brune stood beside him with a torch.
“Lord Petyr,” Dontos called from the boat. “I must needs row
back, before they think to look for me.”
Petyr Baelish put a hand on the rail. “But rst you’ll want your
payment. Ten thousand dragons, was it?”

“Ten thousand.” Dontos rubbed his mouth with the back of his
hand. “As you promised, my lord.”
“Ser Lothor, the reward.”
Lothor Brune dipped his torch. Three men stepped to the
gunwale, raised crossbows, red. One bolt took Dontos in the chest
as he looked up, punching through the left crown on his surcoat.
The others ripped into throat and belly. It happened so quickly
neither Dontos nor Sansa had time to cry out. When it was done,
Lothor Brune tossed the torch down on top of the corpse. The little
boat was blazing ercely as the galley moved away.
“You killed him.” Clutching the rail, Sansa turned away and
retched. Had she escaped the Lannisters to tumble into worse?
“My lady,” Little nger murmured, “your grief is wasted on such a
man as that. He was a sot, and no man’s friend.”
“But he saved me.”
“He sold you for a promise of ten thousand dragons. Your
disappearance will make them suspect you in Jo rey’s death. The
gold cloaks will hunt, and the eunuch will jingle his purse.
Dontos … well, you heard him. He sold you for gold, and when he’d
drunk it up he would have sold you again. A bag of dragons buys a
man’s silence for a while, but a well-placed quarrel buys it forever.”
He smiled sadly. “All he did he did at my behest. I dared not
befriend you openly. When I heard how you saved his life at Jo ’s
tourney, I knew he would be the perfect catspaw.”
Sansa felt sick. “He said he was my Florian.”
“Do you perchance recall what I said to you that day your father
sat the Iron Throne?”
The moment came back to her vividly. “You told me that life was
not a song. That I would learn that one day, to my sorrow.” She felt
tears in her eyes, but whether she wept for Ser Dontos Hollard, for
Jo , for Tyrion, or for herself, Sansa could not say. “Is it all lies,
forever and ever, everyone and everything?”
“Almost everyone. Save you and I, of course.” He smiled. “Come
to the godswood tonight if you want to go home.”
“The note … it was you?”

“It had to be the godswood. No other place in the Red Keep is
safe from the eunuch’s little birds … or little rats, as I call them.
There are trees in the godswood instead of walls. Sky above instead
of ceiling. Roots and dirt and rock in place of oor. The rats have
no place to scurry. Rats need to hide, lest men skewer them with
swords.” Lord Petyr took her arm. “Let me show you to your cabin.
You have had a long and trying day, I know. You must be weary.”
Already the little boat was no more than a swirl of smoke and re
behind them, almost lost in the immensity of the dawn sea. There
was no going back; her only road was forward. “Very weary,” she
admitted.
As he led her below, he said, “Tell me of the feast. The queen
took such pains. The singers, the jugglers, the dancing bear … did
your little lord husband enjoy my jousting dwarfs?”
“Yours?”
“I had to send to Braavos for them and hide them away in a
brothel until the wedding. The expense was exceeded only by the
bother. It is surprisingly di cult to hide a dwarf, and Jo rey … you
can lead a king to water, but with Jo one had to splash it about
before he realized he could drink it. When I told him about my little
surprise, His Grace said, ‘Why would I want some ugly dwarfs at
my feast? I hate dwarfs.’ I had to take him by the shoulder and
whisper, ‘Not as much as your uncle will.’ ”
The deck rocked beneath her feet, and Sansa felt as if the world
itself had grown unsteady. “They think Tyrion poisoned Jo rey. Ser
Dontos said they seized him.”
Little nger smiled. “Widowhood will become you, Sansa.”
The thought made her tummy utter. She might never need to
share a bed with Tyrion again. That was what she’d
wanted … wasn’t it?
The cabin was low and cramped, but a featherbed had been laid
upon the narrow sleeping shelf to make it more comfortable, and
thick furs piled atop it. “It will be snug, I know, but you shouldn’t
be too uncomfortable.” Little nger pointed out a cedar chest under
the porthole. “You’ll nd fresh garb within. Dresses, smallclothes,
warm stockings, a cloak. Wool and linen only, I fear. Unworthy of a

maid so beautiful, but they’ll serve to keep you dry and clean until
we can nd you something ner.”
He had this all prepared for me. “My lord, I … I do not
understand … Jo rey gave you Harrenhal, made you Lord
Paramount of the Trident … why …”
“Why should I wish him dead?” Little nger shrugged. “I had no
motive. Besides, I am a thousand leagues away in the Vale. Always
keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or
what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next.
Sometimes the best way to ba e them is to make moves that have
no purpose, or even seem to work against you. Remember that,
Sansa, when you come to play the game.”
“What … what game?”
“The only game. The game of thrones.” He brushed back a strand
of her hair. “You are old enough to know that your mother and I
were more than friends. There was a time when Cat was all I
wanted in this world. I dared to dream of the life we might make
and the children she would give me … but she was a daughter of
Riverrun, and Hoster Tully. Family, Duty, Honor, Sansa. Family,
Duty, Honor meant I could never have her hand. But she gave me
something ner, a gift a woman can give but once. How could I
turn my back upon her daughter? In a better world, you might have
been mine, not Eddard Stark’s. My loyal loving daughter … Put
Jo rey from your mind, sweetling. Dontos, Tyrion, all of them.
They will never trouble you again. You are safe now, that’s all that
matters. You are safe with me, and sailing home.”

JAIME

The king is dead, they told him, never knowing that Jo rey was his

son as well as his sovereign.
“The Imp opened his throat with a dagger,” a costermonger
declared at the roadside inn where they spent the night. “He drank
his blood from a big gold chalice.” The man did not recognize the
bearded one-handed knight with the big bat on his shield, no more
than any of them, so he said things he might otherwise have
swallowed, had he known who was listening.
“It was poison did the deed,” the innkeep insisted. “The boy’s face
turned black as a plum.”
“May the Father judge him justly,” murmured a septon.
“The dwarf’s wife did the murder with him,” swore an archer in
Lord Rowan’s livery. “Afterward, she vanished from the hall in a
pu of brimstone, and a ghostly direwolf was seen prowling the
Red Keep, blood dripping from his jaws.”
Jaime sat silent through it all, letting the words wash over him, a
horn of ale forgotten in his one good hand. Jo rey. My blood. My
rstborn. My son. He tried to bring the boy’s face to mind, but his
features kept turning into Cersei’s. She will be in mourning, her hair in
disarray and her eyes red from crying, her mouth trembling as she tries
to speak. She will cry again when she sees me, though she’ll ght the
tears. His sister seldom wept but when she was with him. She could
not stand for others to think her weak. Only to her twin did she
show her wounds. She will look to me for comfort and revenge.

They rode hard the next day, at Jaime’s insistence. His son was
dead, and his sister needed him.
When he saw the city before him, its watchtowers dark against
the gathering dusk, Jaime Lannister cantered up to Steelshanks
Walton, behind Nage with the peace banner.
“What’s that awful stink?” the northman complained.
Death, thought Jaime, but he said, “Smoke, sweat, and shit. King’s
Landing, in short. If you have a good nose you can smell the
treachery too. You’ve never smelled a city before?”
“I smelled White Harbor. It never stank like this.”
“White Harbor is to King’s Landing as my brother Tyrion is to Ser
Gregor Clegane.”
Nage led them up a low hill, the seven-tailed peace banner lifting
and turning in the wind, the polished seven-pointed star shining
bright upon its sta . He would see Cersei soon, and Tyrion, and
their father. Could my brother truly have killed the boy? Jaime found
that hard to believe.
He was curiously calm. Men were supposed to go mad with grief
when their children died, he knew. They were supposed to tear
their hair out by the roots, to curse the gods and swear red
vengeance. So why was it that he felt so little? The boy lived and
died believing Robert Baratheon his sire.
Jaime had seen him born, that was true, though more for Cersei
than the child. But he had never held him. “How would it look?” his
sister warned him when the women nally left them. “Bad enough
Jo looks like you without you mooning over him.” Jaime yielded
with hardly a ght. The boy had been a squalling pink thing who
demanded too much of Cersei’s time, Cersei’s love, and Cersei’s
breasts. Robert was welcome to him.
And now he’s dead. He pictured Jo lying still and cold with a
face black from poison, and still felt nothing. Perhaps he was the
monster they claimed. If the Father Above came down to o er him
back his son or his hand, Jaime knew which he would choose. He
had a second son, after all, and seed enough for many more. If
Cersei wants another child I’ll give her one … and this time I’ll hold him,

and the Others take those who do not like it. Robert was rotting in his
grave, and Jaime was sick of lies.
He turned abruptly and galloped back to nd Brienne. Gods know
why I bother. She is the least companionable creature I’ve ever had the
misfortune to meet. The wench rode well behind and a few feet o to
the side, as if to proclaim that she was no part of them. They had
found men’s garb for her along the way; a tunic here, a mantle
there, a pair of breeches and a cowled cloak, even an old iron
breastplate. She looked more comfortable dressed as a man, but
nothing would ever make her look handsome. Nor happy. Once out
of Harrenhal, her usual pighead stubbornness had soon reasserted
itself. “I want my arms and armor back,” she had insisted. “Oh, by
all means, let us have you back in steel,” Jaime replied. “A helm,
especially. We’ll all be happier if you keep your mouth shut and
your visor down.”
That much Brienne could do, but her sullen silences soon began to
fray his good humor almost as much as Qyburn’s endless attempts
to be ingratiating. I never thought I would nd myself missing the
company of Cleos Frey, gods help me. He was beginning to wish he
had left her for the bear after all.
“King’s Landing,” Jaime announced when he found her. “Our
journey’s done, my lady. You’ve kept your vow, and delivered me
to King’s Landing. All but a few ngers and a hand.”
Brienne’s eyes were listless. “That was only half my vow. I told
Lady Catelyn I would bring her back her daughters. Or Sansa, at the
least. And now …”
She never met Robb Stark, yet her grief for him runs deeper than mine
for Jo . Or perhaps it was Lady Catelyn she mourned. They had
been at Brindlewood when they had that news, from a red-faced tub
of a knight named Ser Bertram Beesbury, whose arms were three
beehives on a eld striped black and yellow. A troop of Lord Piper’s
men had passed through Brindlewood only yesterday, Beesbury told
them, rushing to King’s Landing beneath a peace banner of their
own. “With the Young Wolf dead Piper saw no point to ghting on.
His son is captive at the Twins.” Brienne gaped like a cow about to

choke on her cud, so it fell to Jaime to draw out the tale of the Red
Wedding.
“Every great lord has unruly bannermen who envy him his place,”
he told her afterward. “My father had the Reynes and Tarbecks, the
Tyrells have the Florents, Hoster Tully had Walder Frey. Only
strength keeps such men in their place. The moment they smell
weakness … during the Age of Heroes, the Boltons used to ay the
Starks and wear their skins as cloaks.” She looked so miserable that
Jaime almost found himself wanting to comfort her.
Since that day Brienne had been like one half-dead. Even calling
her “wench” failed to provoke any response. The strength is gone
from her. The woman had dropped a rock on Robin Ryger, battled a
bear with a tourney sword, bitten o Vargo Hoat’s ear, and fought
Jaime to exhaustion … but she was broken now, done. “I’ll speak to
my father about returning you to Tarth, if it please you,” he told
her. “Or if you would rather stay, I could perchance nd some place
for you at court.”
“As a lady companion to the queen?” she said dully.
Jaime remembered the sight of her in that pink satin gown, and
tried not to imagine what his sister might say of such a companion.
“Perhaps a post with the City Watch …”
“I will not serve with oathbreakers and murderers.”
Then why did you ever bother putting on a sword? he might have
said, but he bit back the words. “As you will, Brienne.” One-handed,
he wheeled his horse about and left her.
The Gate of the Gods was open when they reached it, but two
dozen wayns were lined up along the roadside, loaded with casks of
cider, barrels of apples, bales of hay, and some of the biggest
pumpkins Jaime had ever seen. Almost every wagon had its guards;
men-at-arms wearing the badges of small lordlings, sellswords in
mail and boiled leather, sometimes only a pink-cheeked farmer’s
son clutching a homemade spear with a re-hardened point. Jaime
smiled at them all as he trotted past. At the gate, the gold cloaks
were collecting coin from each driver before waving the wagons
through. “What’s this?” Steelshanks demanded.

“They got to pay for the right to sell inside the city. By command
of the King’s Hand and the master of coin.”
Jaime looked at the long line of wayns, carts, and laden horses.
“Yet they still line up to pay?”
“There’s good coin to be made here now that the ghting’s done,”
the miller in the nearest wagon told them cheerfully. “It’s the
Lannisters hold the city now, old Lord Tywin of the Rock. They say
he shits silver.”
“Gold,” Jaime corrected dryly. “And Little nger mints the stu
from goldenrod, I vow.”
“The Imp is master of coin now,” said the captain of the gate. “Or
was, till they arrested him for murdering the king.” The man looked
the northmen over suspiciously. “Who are you lot?”
“Lord Bolton’s men, come to see the King’s Hand.”
The captain glanced at Nage with his peace banner. “Come to
bend the knee, you mean. You’re not the rst. Go straight up to the
castle, and see you make no trouble.” He waved them through and
turned back to the wagons.
If King’s Landing mourned its dead boy king, Jaime would never
have known it. On the Street of Seeds a begging brother in
threadbare robes was praying loudly for Jo rey’s soul, but the
passersby paid him no more heed than they would a loose shutter
banging in the wind. Elsewhere milled the usual crowds; gold cloaks
in their black mail, bakers’ boys selling tarts and breads and hot
pies, whores leaning out of windows with their bodices half
unlaced, gutters redolent of nightsoil. They passed ve men trying
to drag a dead horse from the mouth of an alley, and elsewhere a
juggler spinning knives through the air to delight a throng of
drunken Tyrell soldiers and small children.
Riding down familiar streets with two hundred northmen, a
chainless maester, and an ugly freak of a woman at his side, Jaime
found he scarcely drew a second look. He did not know whether he
ought to be amused or annoyed. “They do not know me,” he said to
Steelshanks as they rode through Cobbler’s Square.
“Your face is changed, and your arms as well,” the northman said,
“and they have a new Kingslayer now.”

The gates to the Red Keep were open, but a dozen gold cloaks
armed with pikes barred the way. They lowered their points as
Steelshanks came trotting up, but Jaime recognized the white
knight commanding them. “Ser Meryn.”
Ser Meryn Trant’s droopy eyes went wide. “Ser Jaime?”
“How nice to be remembered. Move these men aside.”
It had been a long time since anyone had leapt to obey him quite
so fast. Jaime had forgotten how well he liked it.
They found two more Kingsguard in the outer ward; two who had
not worn white cloaks when Jaime last served here. How like Cersei
to name me Lord Commander and then choose my colleagues without
consulting me. “Someone has given me two new brothers, I see,” he
said as he dismounted.
“We have that honor, ser.” The Knight of Flowers shone so ne
and pure in his white scales and silk that Jaime felt a tattered and
tawdry thing by contrast.
Jaime turned to Meryn Trant. “Ser, you’ve been remiss in
teaching our new brothers their duties.”
“What duties?” said Meryn Trant defensively.
“Keeping the king alive. How many monarchs have you lost since
I left the city? Two, is it?”
Then Ser Balon saw the stump. “Your hand …”
Jaime made himself smile. “I ght with my left now. It makes for
more of a contest. Where will I nd my lord father?”
“In the solar with Lord Tyrell and Prince Oberyn.”
Mace Tyrell and the Red Viper breaking bread together? Strange and
stranger. “Is the queen with them as well?”
“No, my lord,” Ser Balon answered. “You’ll nd her in the sept,
praying over King Jo —”
“You!”
The last of the northmen had dismounted, Jaime saw, and now
Loras Tyrell had seen Brienne.
“Ser Loras.” She stood stupidly, holding her bridle.
Loras Tyrell strode toward her. “Why?” he said. “You will tell me
why. He treated you kindly, gave you a rainbow cloak. Why would
you kill him?”

“I never did. I would have died for him.”
“You will.” Ser Loras drew his longsword.
“It was not me.”
“Emmon Cuy swore it was, with his dying breath.”
“He was outside the tent, he never saw—”
“There was no one in the tent but you and Lady Stark. Do you
claim that old woman could cut through hardened steel?”
“There was a shadow. I know how mad it sounds, but … I was
helping Renly into his armor, and the candles blew out and there
was blood everywhere. It was Stannis, Lady Catelyn said. His … his
shadow. I had no part in it, on my honor …”
“You have no honor. Draw your sword. I won’t have it said that I
slew you while your hand was empty.”
Jaime stepped between them. “Put the sword away, ser.”
Ser Loras edged around him. “Are you a craven as well as a killer,
Brienne? Is that why you ran, with his blood on your hands? Draw
your sword, woman!”
“Best hope she doesn’t.” Jaime blocked his path again. “Or it’s
like to be your corpse we carry out. The wench is as strong as
Gregor Clegane, though not so pretty.”
“This is no concern of yours.” Ser Loras shoved him aside.
Jaime grabbed the boy with his good hand and yanked him
around. “I am the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, you arrogant
pup. Your commander, so long as you wear that white cloak. Now
sheathe your bloody sword, or I’ll take it from you and shove it up
some place even Renly never found.”
The boy hesitated half a heartbeat, long enough for Ser Balon
Swann to say, “Do as the Lord Commander says, Loras.” Some of
the gold cloaks drew their steel then, and that made some Dreadfort
men do the same. Splendid, thought Jaime, no sooner do I climb down
o my horse than we have a bloodbath in the yard.
Ser Loras Tyrell slammed his sword back into its sheath.
“That wasn’t so di cult, was it?”
“I want her arrested.” Ser Loras pointed. “Lady Brienne, I charge
you with the murder of Lord Renly Baratheon.”

“For what it’s worth,” said Jaime, “the wench does have honor.
More than I have seen from you. And it may even be she’s telling it
true. I’ll grant you, she’s not what you’d call clever, but even my
horse could come up with a better lie, if it was a lie she meant to
tell. As you insist, however … Ser Balon, escort Lady Brienne to a
tower cell and hold her there under guard. And nd some suitable
quarters for Steelshanks and his men, until such time as my father
can see them.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Brienne’s big blue eyes were full of hurt as Balon Swann and a
dozen gold cloaks led her away. You ought to be blowing me kisses,
wench, he wanted to tell her. Why must they misunderstand every
bloody thing he did? Aerys. It all grows from Aerys. Jaime turned his
back on the wench and strode across the yard.
Another knight in white armor was guarding the doors of the
royal sept; a tall man with a black beard, broad shoulders, and a
hooked nose. When he saw Jaime he gave a sour smile and said,
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“Into the sept.” Jaime lifted his stump to point. “That one right
there. I mean to see the queen.”
“Her Grace is in mourning. And why would she be wanting to see
the likes of you?”
Because I’m her lover, and the father of her murdered son, he wanted
to say. “Who in seven hells are you?”
“A knight of the Kingsguard, and you’d best learn some respect,
cripple, or I’ll have that other hand and leave you to suck up your
porridge of a morning.”
“I am the queen’s brother, ser.”
The white knight thought that funny. “Escaped, have you? And
grown a bit as well, m’lord?”
“Her other brother, dolt. And the Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard. Now stand aside, or you’ll wish you had.”
The dolt took a long look this time. “Is it … Ser Jaime.” He
straightened. “My pardons, milord. I did not know you. I have the
honor to be Ser Osmund Kettleblack.”

Where’s the honor in that? “I want some time alone with my sister.
See that no one else enters the sept, ser. If we’re disturbed, I’ll have
your bloody head.”
“Aye, ser. As you say.” Ser Osmund opened the door.
Cersei was kneeling before the altar of the Mother. Jo rey’s bier
had been laid out beneath the Stranger, who led the newly dead to
the other world. The smell of incense hung heavy in the air, and a
hundred candles burned, sending up a hundred prayers. Jo ’s like to
need every one of them, too.
His sister looked over her shoulder. “Who?” she said, then,
“Jaime?” She rose, her eyes brimming with tears. “Is it truly you?”
She did not come to him, however. She has never come to me, he
thought. She has always waited, letting me come to her. She gives, but I
must ask. “You should have come sooner,” she murmured, when he
took her in his arms. “Why couldn’t you have come sooner, to keep
him safe? My boy …”
Our boy. “I came as fast I could.” He broke from the embrace, and
stepped back a pace. “It’s war out there, Sister.”
“You look so thin. And your hair, your golden hair …”
“The hair will grow back.” Jaime lifted his stump. She needs to
see. “This won’t.”
Her eyes went wide. “The Starks …”
“No. This was Vargo Hoat’s work.”
The name meant nothing to her. “Who?”
“The Goat of Harrenhal. For a little while.”
Cersei turned to gaze at Jo rey’s bier. They had dressed the dead
king in gilded armor, eerily similar to Jaime’s own. The visor of the
helm was closed, but the candles re ected softly o the gold, so the
boy shimmered bright and brave in death. The candlelight woke
res in the rubies that decorated the bodice of Cersei’s mourning
dress as well. Her hair fell to her shoulders, undressed and
unkempt. “He killed him, Jaime. Just as he’d warned me. One day
when I thought myself safe and happy he would turn my joy to
ashes in my mouth, he said.”
“Tyrion said that?” Jaime had not wanted to believe it. Kinslaying
was worse than kingslaying, in the eyes of gods and men. He knew

the boy was mine. I loved Tyrion. I was good to him. Well, but for that
one time … but the Imp did not know the truth of that. Or did he?
“Why would he kill Jo ?”
“For a whore.” She clutched his good hand and held it tight in
hers. “He told me he was going to do it. Jo knew. As he was dying,
he pointed at his murderer. At our twisted little monster of a
brother.” She kissed Jaime’s ngers. “You’ll kill him for me, won’t
you? You’ll avenge our son.”
Jaime pulled away. “He is still my brother.” He shoved his stump
at her face, in case she failed to see it. “And I am in no t state to
be killing anyone.”
“You have another hand, don’t you? I am not asking you to best
the Hound in battle. Tyrion is a dwarf, locked in a cell. The guards
would stand aside for you.”
The thought turned his stomach. “I must know more of this. Of
how it happened.”
“You shall,” Cersei promised. “There’s to be a trial. When you
hear all he did, you’ll want him dead as much as I do.” She touched
his face. “I was lost without you, Jaime. I was afraid the Starks
would send me your head. I could not have borne that.” She kissed
him. A light kiss, the merest brush of her lips on his, but he could
feel her tremble as he slid his arms around her. “I am not whole
without you.”
There was no tenderness in the kiss he returned to her, only
hunger. Her mouth opened for his tongue. “No,” she said weakly
when his lips moved down her neck, “not here. The septons …”
“The Others can take the septons.” He kissed her again, kissed her
silent, kissed her until she moaned. Then he knocked the candles
aside and lifted her up onto the Mother’s altar, pushing up her skirts
and the silken shift beneath. She pounded on his chest with feeble
sts, murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father,
about the septons, about the wrath of gods. He never heard her. He
undid his breeches and climbed up and pushed her bare white legs
apart. One hand slid up her thigh and underneath her smallclothes.
When he tore them away, he saw that her moon’s blood was on her,
but it made no di erence.

“Hurry,” she was whispering now, “quickly, quickly, now, do it
now, do me now. Jaime Jaime Jaime.” Her hands helped guide him.
“Yes,” Cersei said as he thrust, “my brother, sweet brother, yes, like
that, yes, I have you, you’re home now, you’re home now, you’re
home.” She kissed his ear and stroked his short bristly hair. Jaime
lost himself in her esh. He could feel Cersei’s heart beating in time
with his own, and the wetness of blood and seed where they were
joined.
But no sooner were they done than the queen said, “Let me up. If
we are discovered like this …”
Reluctantly he rolled away and helped her o the altar. The pale
marble was smeared with blood. Jaime wiped it clean with his
sleeve, then bent to pick up the candles he had knocked over.
Fortunately they had all gone out when they fell. If the sept had
caught re I might never have noticed.
“This was folly.” Cersei pulled her gown straight. “With Father in
the castle … Jaime, we must be careful.”
“I am sick of being careful. The Targaryens wed brother to sister,
why shouldn’t we do the same? Marry me, Cersei. Stand up before
the realm and say it’s me you want. We’ll have our own wedding
feast, and make another son in place of Jo rey.”
She drew back. “That’s not funny.”
“Do you hear me chuckling?”
“Did you leave your wits at Riverrun?” Her voice had an edge to
it. “Tommen’s throne derives from Robert, you know that.”
“He’ll have Casterly Rock, isn’t that enough? Let Father sit the
throne. All I want is you.” He made to touch her cheek. Old habits
die hard, and it was his right arm he lifted.
Cersei recoiled from his stump. “Don’t … don’t talk like this.
You’re scaring me, Jaime. Don’t be stupid. One wrong word and
you’ll cost us everything. What did they do to you?”
“They cut o my hand.”
“No, it’s more, you’re changed.” She backed o a step. “We’ll talk
later. On the morrow. I have Sansa Stark’s maids in a tower cell, I
need to question them … you should go to Father.”

“I crossed a thousand leagues to come to you, and lost the best
part of me along the way. Don’t tell me to leave.”
“Leave me,” she repeated, turning away.
Jaime laced up his breeches and did as she commanded. Weary as
he was, he could not seek a bed. By now his lord father knew that
he was back in the city.
The Tower of the Hand was guarded by Lannister household
guards, who knew him at once. “The gods are good, to give you
back to us, ser,” one said, as he held the door.
“The gods had no part in it. Catelyn Stark gave me back. Her, and
the Lord of the Dreadfort.”
He climbed the stairs and pushed into the solar unannounced, to
nd his father sitting by the re. Lord Tywin was alone, for which
Jaime was thankful. He had no desire to aunt his maimed hand for
Mace Tyrell or the Red Viper just now, much less the two of them
together.
“Jaime,” Lord Tywin said, as if they’d last seen each other at
breakfast. “Lord Bolton led me to expect you earlier. I had hoped
you’d be here for the wedding.”
“I was delayed.” Jaime closed the door softly. “My sister outdid
herself, I’m told. Seventy-seven courses and a regicide, never a
wedding like it. How long have you known I was free?”
“The eunuch told me a few days after your escape. I sent men
into the riverlands to look for you. Gregor Clegane, Samwell Spicer,
the brothers Plumm. Varys put out the word as well, but quietly.
We agreed that the fewer people who knew you were free, the
fewer would be hunting you.”
“Did Varys mention this?” He moved closer to the re, to let his
father see.
Lord Tywin pushed himself out of his chair, breath hissing
between his teeth. “Who did this? If Lady Catelyn thinks—”
“Lady Catelyn held a sword to my throat and made me swear to
return her daughters. This was your goat’s work. Vargo Hoat, the
Lord of Harrenhal!”
Lord Tywin looked away, disgusted. “No longer. Ser Gregor’s
taken the castle. The sellswords deserted their erstwhile captain

almost to a man, and some of Lady Whent’s old people opened a
postern gate. Clegane found Hoat sitting alone in the Hall of a
Hundred Hearths, half-mad with pain and fever from a wound that
festered. His ear, I’m told.”
Jaime had to laugh. Too sweet! His ear! He could scarcely wait to
tell Brienne, though the wench wouldn’t nd it half so funny as he
did. “Is he dead yet?”
“Soon. They have taken o his hands and feet, but Clegane seems
amused by the way the Qohorik slobbers.”
Jaime’s smile curdled. “What about his Brave Companions?”
“The few who stayed at Harrenhal are dead. The others scattered.
They’ll make for ports, I’ll warrant, or try and lose themselves in
the woods.” His eyes went back to Jaime’s stump, and his mouth
grew taut with fury. “We’ll have their heads. Every one. Can you
use a sword with your left hand?”
I can hardly dress myself in the morning. Jaime held up the hand in
question for his father’s inspection. “Four ngers, a thumb, much
like the other. Why shouldn’t it work as well?”
“Good.” His father sat. “That is good. I have a gift for you. For
your return. After Varys told me …”
“Unless it’s a new hand, let it wait.” Jaime took the chair across
from him. “How did Jo rey die?”
“Poison. It was meant to appear as though he choked on a morsel
of food, but I had his throat slit open and the maesters could nd no
obstruction.”
“Cersei claims that Tyrion did it.”
“Your brother served the king the poisoned wine, with a thousand
people looking on.”
“That was rather foolish of him.”
“I have taken Tyrion’s squire into custody. His wife’s maids as
well. We shall see if they have anything to tell us. Ser Addam’s gold
cloaks are searching for the Stark girl, and Varys has o ered a
reward. The king’s justice will be done.”
The king’s justice. “You would execute your own son?”
“He stands accused of regicide and kinslaying. If he is innocent,
he has nothing to fear. First we must needs consider the evidence

for and against him.”
Evidence. In this city of liars, Jaime knew what sort of evidence
would be found. “Renly died strangely as well, when Stannis needed
him to.”
“Lord Renly was murdered by one of his own guards, some
woman from Tarth.”
“That woman from Tarth is the reason I’m here. I tossed her into
a cell to appease Ser Loras, but I’ll believe in Renly’s ghost before I
believe she did him any harm. But Stannis—”
“It was poison that killed Jo rey, not sorcery.” Lord Tywin
glanced at Jaime’s stump again. “You cannot serve in the
Kingsguard without a sword hand—”
“I can,” he interrupted. “And I will. There’s precedent. I’ll look in
the White Book and nd it, if you like. Crippled or whole, a knight
of the Kingsguard serves for life.”
“Cersei ended that when she replaced Ser Barristan on grounds of
age. A suitable gift to the Faith will persuade the High Septon to
release you from your vows. Your sister was foolish to dismiss
Selmy, admittedly, but now that she has opened the gates—”
“—someone needs to close them again.” Jaime stood. “I am tired
of having highborn women kicking pails of shit at me, Father. No
one ever asked me if I wanted to be Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard, but it seems I am. I have a duty—”
“You do.” Lord Tywin rose as well. “A duty to House Lannister.
You are the heir to Casterly Rock. That is where you should be.
Tommen should accompany you, as your ward and squire. The Rock
is where he’ll learn to be a Lannister, and I want him away from his
mother. I mean to nd a new husband for Cersei. Oberyn Martell
perhaps, once I convince Lord Tyrell that the match does not
threaten Highgarden. And it is past time you were wed. The Tyrells
are now insisting that Margaery be wed to Tommen, but if I were to
o er you instead—”
“NO!” Jaime had heard all that he could stand. No, more than he
could stand. He was sick of it, sick of lords and lies, sick of his
father, his sister, sick of the whole bloody business. “No. No. No.
No. No. How many times must I say no before you’ll hear it? Oberyn

Martell? The man’s infamous, and not just for poisoning his sword.
He has more bastards than Robert, and beds with boys as well. And
if you think for one misbegotten moment that I would wed Jo rey’s
widow …”
“Lord Tyrell swears the girl’s still maiden.”
“She can die a maiden as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want her,
and I don’t want your Rock!”
“You are my son—”
“I am a knight of the Kingsguard. The Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard! And that’s all I mean to be!”
Firelight gleamed golden in the sti whiskers that framed Lord
Tywin’s face. A vein pulsed in his neck, but he did not speak. And
did not speak. And did not speak.
The strained silence went on until it was more than Jaime could
endure. “Father …” he began.
“You are not my son.” Lord Tywin turned his face away. “You say
you are the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and only that. Very
well, ser. Go do your duty.”

DAVOS

Their voices rose like cinders, swirling up into purple evening sky.

“Lead us from the darkness, O my Lord. Fill our hearts with re, so
we may walk your shining path.”
The night re burned against the gathering dark, a great bright
beast whose shifting orange light threw shadows twenty feet tall
across the yard. All along the walls of Dragonstone the army of
gargoyles and grotesques seemed to stir and shift.
Davos looked down from an arched window in the gallery above.
He watched Melisandre lift her arms, as if to embrace the shivering
ames. “R’hllor,” she sang in a voice loud and clear, “you are the
light in our eyes, the re in our hearts, the heat in our loins. Yours
is the sun that warms our days, yours the stars that guard us in the
dark of night.”
“Lord of Light, defend us. The night is dark and full of terrors.” Queen
Selyse led the responses, her pinched face full of fervor. King
Stannis stood beside her, jaw clenched hard, the points of his redgold crown shimmering whenever he moved his head. He is with
them, but not of them, Davos thought. Princess Shireen was between
them, the mottled grey patches on her face and neck almost black in
the relight.
“Lord of Light, protect us,” the queen sang. The king did not
respond with the others. He was staring into the ames. Davos
wondered what he saw there. Another vision of the war to come? Or
something closer to home?

“R’hllor who gave us breath, we thank you,” sang Melisandre.
“R’hllor who gave us day, we thank you.”
“We thank you for the sun that warms us,” Queen Selyse and the
other worshipers replied. “We thank you for the stars that watch us.
We thank you for our hearths and for our torches, that keep the savage
dark at bay.” There were fewer voices saying the responses than
there had been the night before, it seemed to Davos; fewer faces
ushed with orange light about the re. But would there be fewer
still on the morrow … or more?
The voice of Ser Axell Florent rang loud as a trumpet. He stood
barrel-chested and bandy-legged, the relight washing his face like
a monstrous orange tongue. Davos wondered if Ser Axell would
thank him, after. The work they did tonight might well make him
the King’s Hand, as he dreamed.
Melisandre cried, “We thank you for Stannis, by your grace our
king. We thank you for the pure white re of his goodness, for the
red sword of justice in his hand, for the love he bears his leal
people. Guide him and defend him, R’hllor, and grant him strength
to smite his foes.”
“Grant him strength,” answered Queen Selyse, Ser Axell, Devan,
and the rest. “Grant him courage. Grant him wisdom.”
When he was a boy, the septons had taught Davos to pray to the
Crone for wisdom, to the Warrior for courage, to the Smith for
strength. But it was the Mother he prayed to now, to keep his sweet
son Devan safe from the red woman’s demon god.
“Lord Davos? We’d best be about it.” Ser Andrew touched his
elbow gently. “My lord?”
The title still rang queer in his ears, yet Davos turned away from
the window. “Aye. It’s time.” Stannis, Melisandre, and the queen’s
men would be at their prayers an hour or more. The red priests lit
their res every day at sunset, to thank R’hllor for the day just
ending, and beg him to send his sun back on the morrow to banish
the gathering darkness. A smuggler must know the tides and when to
seize them. That was all he was at the end of the day; Davos the
smuggler. His maimed hand rose to his throat for his luck, and
found nothing. He snatched it down and walked a bit more quickly.

His companions kept pace, matching their strides to his own. The
Bastard of Nightsong had a pox-ravaged face and an air of tattered
chivalry; Ser Gerald Gower was broad, blu , and blond; Ser Andrew
Estermont stood a head taller, with a spade-shaped beard and
shaggy brown eyebrows. They were all good men in their own
ways, Davos thought. And they will all be dead men soon, if this night’s
work goes badly.
“Fire is a living thing,” the red woman told him, when he asked
her to teach him how to see the future in the ames. “It is always
moving, always changing … like a book whose letters dance and
shift even as you try to read them. It takes years of training to see
the shapes beyond the ames, and more years still to learn to tell
the shapes of what will be from what may be or what was. Even
then it comes hard, hard. You do not understand that, you men of
the sunset lands.” Davos asked her then how it was that Ser Axell
had learned the trick of it so quickly, but to that she only smiled
enigmatically and said, “Any cat may stare into a re and see red
mice at play.”
He had not lied to his king’s men, about that or any of it. “The
red woman may see what we intend,” he warned them.
“We should start by killing her, then,” urged Lewys the Fishwife.
“I know a place where we could waylay her, four of us with sharp
swords …”
“You’d doom us all,” said Davos. “Maester Cressen tried to kill
her, and she knew at once. From her ames, I’d guess. It seems to
me that she is very quick to sense any threat to her own person, but
surely she cannot see everything. If we ignore her, perhaps we might
escape her notice.”
“There is no honor in hiding and sneaking,” objected Ser Triston
of Tally Hill, who had been a Sunglass man before Lord Guncer
went to Melisandre’s res.
“Is it so honorable to burn?” Davos asked him. “You saw Lord
Sunglass die. Is that what you want? I don’t need men of honor
now. I need smugglers. Are you with me, or no?”
They were. Gods be good, they were.

Maester Pylos was leading Edric Storm through his sums when
Davos pushed open the door. Ser Andrew was close behind him; the
others had been left to guard the steps and cellar door. The maester
broke o . “That will be enough for now, Edric.”
The boy was puzzled by the intrusion. “Lord Davos, Ser Andrew.
We were doing sums.”
Ser Andrew smiled. “I hated sums when I was your age, coz.”
“I don’t mind them so much. I like history best, though. It’s full of
tales.”
“Edric,” said Maester Pylos, “run and get your cloak now. You’re
to go with Lord Davos.”
“I am?” Edric got to his feet. “Where are we going?” His mouth
set stubbornly. “I won’t go pray to the Lord of Light. I am a
Warrior’s man, like my father.”
“We know,” Davos said. “Come, lad, we must not dawdle.”
Edric donned a thick hooded cloak of undyed wool. Maester Pylos
helped him fasten it, and pulled the hood up to shadow his face.
“Are you coming with us, Maester?” the boy asked.
“No.” Pylos touched the chain of many metals he wore about his
neck. “My place is here on Dragonstone. Go with Lord Davos now,
and do as he says. He is the King’s Hand, remember. What did I tell
you about the King’s Hand?”
“The Hand speaks with the king’s voice.”
The young maester smiled. “That’s so. Go now.”
Davos had been uncertain of Pylos. Perhaps he resented him for
taking old Cressen’s place. But now he could only admire the man’s
courage. This could mean his life as well.
Outside the maester’s chambers, Ser Gerald Gower waited by the
steps. Edric Storm looked at him curiously. As they made their
descent he asked, “Where are we going, Lord Davos?”
“To the water. A ship awaits you.”
The boy stopped suddenly. “A ship?”
“One of Salladhor Saan’s. Salla is a good friend of mine.”
“I shall go with you, Cousin,” Ser Andrew assured him. “There’s
nothing to be frightened of.”

“I am not frightened,” Edric said indignantly. “Only … is Shireen
coming too?”
“No,” said Davos. “The princess must remain here with her father
and mother.”
“I have to see her then,” Edric explained. “To say my farewells.
Otherwise she’ll be sad.”
Not so sad as if she sees you burn. “There is no time,” Davos said. “I
will tell the princess that you were thinking of her. And you can
write her, when you get to where you’re going.”
The boy frowned. “Are you sure I must go? Why would my uncle
send me from Dragonstone? Did I displease him? I never meant to.”
He got that stubborn look again. “I want to see my uncle. I want to
see King Stannis.”
Ser Andrew and Ser Gerald exchanged a look. “There’s no time
for that, Cousin,” Ser Andrew said.
“I want to see him!” Edric insisted, louder.
“He does not want to see you.” Davos had to say something, to
get the boy moving. “I am his Hand, I speak with his voice. Must I
go to the king and tell him that you would not do as you were told?
Do you know how angry that will make him? Have you ever seen
your uncle angry?” He pulled o his glove and showed the boy the
four ngers that Stannis had shortened. “I have.”
It was all lies; there had been no anger in Stannis Baratheon when
he cut the ends o his onion knight’s ngers, only an iron sense of
justice. But Edric Storm had not been born then, and could not
know that. And the threat had the desired e ect. “He should not
have done that,” the boy said, but he let Davos take him by the
hand and draw him down the steps.
The Bastard of Nightsong joined them at the cellar door. They
walked quickly, across a shadowed yard and down some steps,
under the stone tail of a frozen dragon. Lewys the Fishwife and
Omer Blackberry waited at the postern gate, two guards bound and
trussed at their feet. “The boat?” Davos asked them.
“It’s there,” Lewys said. “Four oarsmen. The galley is anchored
just past the point. Mad Prendos.”

Davos chuckled. A ship named after a madman. Yes, that’s tting.
Salla had a streak of the pirate’s black humor.
He went to one knee before Edric Storm. “I must leave you now,”
he said. “There’s a boat waiting, to row you out to a galley. Then
it’s o across the sea. You are Robert’s son so I know you will be
brave, no matter what happens.”
“I will. Only …” The boy hesitated.
“Think of this as an adventure, my lord.” Davos tried to sound
hale and cheerful. “It’s the start of your life’s great adventure. May
the Warrior defend you.”
“And may the Father judge you justly, Lord Davos.” The boy went
with his cousin Ser Andrew out the postern gate. The others
followed, all but the Bastard of Nightsong. May the Father judge me
justly, Davos thought ruefully. But it was the king’s judgment that
concerned him now.
“These two?” asked Ser Rolland of the guards, when he had
closed and barred the gate.
“Drag them into a cellar,” said Davos. “You can cut them free
when Edric’s safely under way.”
The Bastard gave a curt nod. There were no more words to say;
the easy part was done. Davos pulled his glove on, wishing he had
not lost his luck. He had been a better man and a braver one with
that bag of bones around his neck. He ran his shortened ngers
through thinning brown hair, and wondered if it needed to be cut.
He must look presentable when he stood before the king.
Dragonstone had never seemed so dark and fearsome. He walked
slowly, his footsteps echoing o black walls and dragons. Stone
dragons who will never wake, I pray. The Stone Drum loomed huge
ahead of him. The guards at the door uncrossed their spears as he
approached. Not for the onion knight, but for the King’s Hand. Davos
was the Hand going in, at least. He wondered what he would be
coming out. If I ever do …
The steps seemed longer and steeper than before, or perhaps it
was just that he was tired. The Mother never made me for tasks like
this. He had risen too high and too fast, and up here on the
mountain the air was too thin for him to breathe. As a boy he’d

dreamed of riches, but that was long ago. Later, grown, all he had
wanted was a few acres of good land, a hall to grow old in, a better
life for his sons. The Blind Bastard used to tell him that a clever
smuggler did not overreach, nor draw too much attention to
himself. A few acres, a timbered roof, a “ser” before my name, I should
have been content. If he survived this night, he would take Devan
and sail home to Cape Wrath and his gentle Marya. We will grieve
together for our dead sons, raise the living ones to be good men, and
speak no more of kings.
The Chamber of the Painted Table was dark and empty when
Davos entered; the king would still be at the night re, with
Melisandre and the queen’s men. He knelt and made a re in the
hearth, to drive the chill from the round chamber and chase the
shadows back into their corners. Then he went around the room to
each window in turn, opening the heavy velvet curtains and
unlatching the wooden shutters. The wind came in, strong with the
smell of salt and sea, and pulled at his plain brown cloak.
At the north window, he leaned against the sill for a breath of the
cold night air, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mad Prendos raising sail,
but the sea seemed black and empty as far as the eye could see. Is
she gone already? He could only pray that she was, and the boy with
her. A half moon was sliding in and out amongst thin high clouds,
and Davos could see familiar stars. There was the Galley, sailing
west; there the Crone’s Lantern, four bright stars that enclosed a
golden haze. The clouds hid most of the Ice Dragon, all but the
bright blue eye that marked due north. The sky is full of smugglers’
stars. They were old friends, those stars; Davos hoped that meant
good luck.
But when he lowered his gaze from the sky to the castle ramparts,
he was not so certain. The wings of the stone dragons cast great
black shadows in the light from the night re. He tried to tell
himself that they were no more than carvings, cold and lifeless. This
was their place, once. A place of dragons and dragonlords, the seat of
House Targaryen. The Targaryens were the blood of old Valyria …
The wind sighed through the chamber, and in the hearth the
ames gusted and swirled. He listened to the logs crackle and spit.

When Davos left the window his shadow went before him, tall and
thin, and fell across the Painted Table like a sword. And there he
stood for a long time, waiting. He heard their boots on the stone
steps as they ascended. The king’s voice went before him. “… is not
three,” he was saying.
“Three is three,” came Melisandre’s answer. “I swear to you, Your
Grace, I saw him die and heard his mother’s wail.”
“In the night re.” Stannis and Melisandre came through the door
together. “The ames are full of tricks. What is, what will be, what
may be. You cannot tell me for a certainty …”
“Your Grace.” Davos stepped forward. “Lady Melisandre saw it
true. Your nephew Jo rey is dead.”
If the king was surprised to nd him at the Painted Table, he
gave no sign. “Lord Davos,” he said. “He was not my nephew.
Though for years I believed he was.”
“He choked on a morsel of food at his wedding feast,” Davos said.
“It may be that he was poisoned.”
“He is the third,” said Melisandre.
“I can count, woman.” Stannis walked along the table, past
Oldtown and the Arbor, up toward the Shield Islands and the mouth
of the Mander. “Weddings have become more perilous than battles,
it would seem. Who was the poisoner? Is it known?”
“His uncle, it’s said. The Imp.”
Stannis ground his teeth. “A dangerous man. I learned that on the
Blackwater. How do you come by this report?”
“The Lyseni still trade at King’s Landing. Salladhor Saan has no
reason to lie to me.”
“I suppose not.” The king ran his ngers across the table.
“Jo rey … I remember once, this kitchen cat … the cooks were
wont to feed her scraps and sh heads. One told the boy that she
had kittens in her belly, thinking he might want one. Jo rey opened
up the poor thing with a dagger to see if it were true. When he
found the kittens, he brought them to show to his father. Robert hit
the boy so hard I thought he’d killed him.” The king took o his
crown and placed it on the table. “Dwarf or leech, this killer served
the kingdom well. They must send for me now.”

“They will not,” said Melisandre. “Jo rey has a brother.”
“Tommen.” The king said the name grudgingly.
“They will crown Tommen, and rule in his name.”
Stannis made a st. “Tommen is gentler than Jo rey, but born of
the same incest. Another monster in the making. Another leech
upon the land. Westeros needs a man’s hand, not a child’s.”
Melisandre moved closer. “Save them, sire. Let me wake the
stone dragons. Three is three. Give me the boy.”
“Edric Storm,” Davos said.
Stannis rounded on him in a cold fury. “I know his name. Spare me
your reproaches. I like this no more than you do, but my duty is to
the realm. My duty …” He turned back to Melisandre. “You swear
there is no other way? Swear it on your life, for I promise, you shall
die by inches if you lie.”
“You are he who must stand against the Other. The one whose
coming was prophesied ve thousand years ago. The red comet was
your herald. You are the prince that was promised, and if you fail
the world fails with you.” Melisandre went to him, her red lips
parted, her ruby throbbing. “Give me this boy,” she whispered, “and
I will give you your kingdom.”
“He can’t,” said Davos. “Edric Storm is gone.”
“Gone?” Stannis turned. “What do you mean, gone?”
“He is aboard a Lyseni galley, safely out to sea.” Davos watched
Melisandre’s pale, heart-shaped face. He saw the icker of dismay
there, the sudden uncertainty. She did not see it!
The king’s eyes were dark blue bruises in the hollows of his face.
“The bastard was taken from Dragonstone without my leave? A
galley, you say? If that Lysene pirate thinks to use the boy to
squeeze gold from me—”
“This is your Hand’s work, sire.” Melisandre gave Davos a
knowing look. “You will bring him back, my lord. You will.”
“The boy is out of my reach,” said Davos. “And out of your reach
as well, my lady.”
Her red eyes made him squirm. “I should have left you to the
dark, ser. Do you know what you have done?”
“My duty.”

“Some might call it treason.” Stannis went to the window to stare
out into the night. Is he looking for the ship? “I raised you up from
dirt, Davos.” He sounded more tired than angry. “Was loyalty too
much to hope for?”
“Four of my sons died for you on the Blackwater. I might have
died myself. You have my loyalty, always.” Davos Seaworth had
thought long and hard about the words he said next; he knew his
life depended on them. “Your Grace, you made me swear to give
you honest counsel and swift obedience, to defend your realm
against your foes, to protect your people. Is not Edric Storm one of
your people? One of those I swore to protect? I kept my oath. How
could that be treason?”
Stannis ground his teeth again. “I never asked for this crown.
Gold is cold and heavy on the head, but so long as I am the king, I
have a duty … If I must sacri ce one child to the ames to save a
million from the dark … Sacri ce … is never easy, Davos. Or it is no
true sacri ce. Tell him, my lady.”
Melisandre said, “Azor Ahai tempered Lightbringer with the
heart’s blood of his own beloved wife. If a man with a thousand
cows gives one to god, that is nothing. But a man who o ers the
only cow he owns …”
“She talks of cows,” Davos told the king. “I am speaking of a boy,
your daughter’s friend, your brother’s son.”
“A king’s son, with the power of kingsblood in his veins.”
Melisandre’s ruby glowed like a red star at her throat. “Do you
think you’ve saved this boy, Onion Knight? When the long night
falls, Edric Storm shall die with the rest, wherever he is hidden.
Your own sons as well. Darkness and cold will cover the earth. You
meddle in matters you do not understand.”
“There’s much I don’t understand,” Davos admitted. “I have never
pretended elsewise. I know the seas and rivers, the shapes of the
coasts, where the rocks and shoals lie. I know hidden coves where a
boat can land unseen. And I know that a king protects his people, or
he is no king at all.”
Stannis’s face darkened. “Do you mock me to my face? Must I
learn a king’s duty from an onion smuggler?”

Davos knelt. “If I have o ended, take my head. I’ll die as I lived,
your loyal man. But hear me rst. Hear me for the sake of the
onions I brought you, and the ngers you took.”
Stannis slid Lightbringer from its scabbard. Its glow lled the
chamber. “Say what you will, but say it quickly.” The muscles in the
king’s neck stood out like cords.
Davos fumbled inside his cloak and drew out the crinkled sheet of
parchment. It seemed a thin and imsy thing, yet it was all the
shield he had. “A King’s Hand should be able to read and write.
Maester Pylos has been teaching me.” He smoothed the letter at
upon his knee and began to read by the light of the magic sword.

JON

He dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings

on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he
passed, and their grey granite ngers tightened on the hilts of the
rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them
mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here. Go
away. He walked deeper into the darkness. “Father?” he called.
“Bran? Rickon?” No one answered. A chill wind was blowing on his
neck. “Uncle?” he called. “Uncle Benjen? Father? Please, Father,
help me.” Up above he heard drums. They are feasting in the Great
Hall, but I am not welcome there. I am no Stark, and this is not my
place. His crutch slipped and he fell to his knees. The crypts were
growing darker. A light has gone out somewhere. “Ygritte?” he
whispered. “Forgive me. Please.” But it was only a direwolf, grey
and ghastly, spotted with blood, his golden eyes shining sadly
through the dark …
The cell was dark, the bed hard beneath him. His own bed, he
remembered, his own bed in his steward’s cell beneath the Old
Bear’s chambers. By rights it should have brought him sweeter
dreams. Even beneath the furs, he was cold. Ghost had shared his
cell before the ranging, warming it against the chill of night. And in
the wild, Ygritte had slept beside him. Both gone now. He had
burned Ygritte himself, as he knew she would have wanted, and
Ghost … Where are you? Was he dead as well, was that what his
dream had meant, the bloody wolf in the crypts? But the wolf in the

dream had been grey, not white. Grey, like Bran’s wolf. Had the
Thenns hunted him down and killed him after Queenscrown? If so,
Bran was lost to him for good and all.
Jon was trying to make sense of that when the horn blew.
The Horn of Winter, he thought, still confused from sleep. But
Mance never found Joramun’s horn, so that couldn’t be. A second
blast followed, as long and deep as the rst. Jon had to get up and
go to the Wall, he knew, but it was so hard …
He shoved aside his furs and sat. The pain in his leg seemed
duller, nothing he could not stand. He had slept in his breeches and
tunic and smallclothes, for the added warmth, so he had only to pull
on his boots and don leather and mail and cloak. The horn blew
again, two long blasts, so he slung Longclaw over one shoulder,
found his crutch, and hobbled down the steps.
It was the black of night outside, bitter cold and overcast. His
brothers were spilling out of towers and keeps, buckling their
swordbelts and walking toward the Wall. Jon looked for Pyp and
Grenn, but could not nd them. Perhaps one of them was the sentry
blowing the horn. It is Mance, he thought. He has come at last. That
was good. We will ght a battle, and then we’ll rest. Alive or dead, we’ll
rest.
Where the stair had been, only an immense tangle of charred
wood and broken ice remained below the Wall. The winch raised
them up now, but the cage was only big enough for ten men at a
time, and it was already on its way up by the time Jon arrived. He
would need to wait for its return. Others waited with him; Satin,
Mully, Spare Boot, Kegs, big blond Hareth with his buck teeth.
Everyone called him Horse. He had been a stablehand in Mole’s
Town, one of the few moles who had stayed at Castle Black. The
rest had run back to their elds and hovels, or their beds in the
underground brothel. Horse wanted to take the black, though, the
great buck-toothed fool. Zei remained as well, the whore who’d
proved so handy with a crossbow, and Noye had kept three orphan
boys whose father had died on the steps. They were young—nine
and eight and ve—but no one else seemed to want them.

As they waited for the cage to come back, Clydas brought them
cups of hot mulled wine, while Three-Finger Hobb passed out
chunks of black bread. Jon took a heel from him and gnawed on it.
“Is it Mance Rayder?” Satin asked anxiously.
“We can hope so.” There were worse things than wildlings in the
dark. Jon remembered the words the wildling king had spoken on
the Fist of the First Men, as they stood amidst that pink snow. When
the dead walk, walls and stakes and swords mean nothing. You cannot
ght the dead, Jon Snow. No man knows that half so well as me. Just
thinking of it made the wind seem a little colder.
Finally the cage came clanking back down, swaying at the end of
the long chain, and they crowded in silently and shut the door.
Mully yanked the bell rope three times. A moment later they
began to rise, by ts and starts at rst, then more smoothly. No one
spoke. At the top the cage swung sideways and they clambered out
one by one. Horse gave Jon a hand down onto the ice. The cold hit
him in the teeth like a st.
A line of res burned along the top of the Wall, contained in iron
baskets on poles taller than a man. The cold knife of the wind
stirred and swirled the ames, so the lurid orange light was always
shifting. Bundles of quarrels, arrows, spears, and scorpion bolts
stood ready on every hand. Rocks were piled ten feet high, big
wooden barrels of pitch and lamp oil lined up beside them. Bowen
Marsh had left Castle Black well supplied in everything save men.
The wind was whipping at the black cloaks of the scarecrow
sentinels who stood along the ramparts, spears in hand. “I hope it
wasn’t one of them who blew the horn,” Jon said to Donal Noye
when he limped up beside him.
“Did you hear that?” Noye asked.
There was the wind, and horses, and something else. “A
mammoth,” Jon said. “That was a mammoth.”
The armorer’s breath was frosting as it blew from his broad, at
nose. North of the Wall was a sea of darkness that seemed to stretch
forever. Jon could make out the faint red glimmer of distant res
moving through the wood. It was Mance, certain as sunrise. The
Others did not light torches.

“How do we ght them if we can’t see them?” Horse asked.
Donal Noye turned toward the two great trebuchets that Bowen
Marsh had restored to working order. “Give me light!” he roared.
Barrels of pitch were loaded hastily into the slings and set a re
with a torch. The wind fanned the ames to a brisk red fury.
“NOW!” Noye bellowed. The counterweights plunged downward,
the throwing arms rose to thud against the padded crossbars. The
burning pitch went tumbling through the darkness, casting an eerie
ickering light upon the ground below. Jon caught a glimpse of
mammoths moving ponderously through the half-light, and just as
quickly lost them again. A dozen, maybe more. The barrels struck the
earth and burst. They heard a deep bass trumpeting, and a giant
roared something in the Old Tongue, his voice an ancient thunder
that sent shivers up Jon’s spine.
“Again!” Noye shouted, and the trebuchets were loaded once
more. Two more barrels of burning pitch went crackling through
the gloom to come crashing down amongst the foe. This time one of
them struck a dead tree, enveloping it in ame. Not a dozen
mammoths, Jon saw, a hundred.
He stepped to the edge of the precipice. Careful, he reminded
himself, it is a long way down. Red Alyn sounded his sentry’s horn
once
more,
Aaaaahoooooooooooooooooooooooooo,
aaaaahoooooooooooooooooooo. And now the wildlings answered, not
with one horn but with a dozen, and with drums and pipes as well.
We are come, they seemed to say, we are come to break your Wall, to
take your lands and steal your daughters. The wind howled, the
trebuchets creaked and thumped, the barrels ew. Behind the giants
and the mammoths, Jon saw men advancing on the Wall with bows
and axes. Were there twenty or twenty thousand? In the dark there
was no way to tell. This is a battle of blind men, but Mance has a few
thousand more of them than we do.
“The gate!” Pyp cried out. “They’re at the GATE!”
The Wall was too big to be stormed by any conventional means;
too high for ladders or siege towers, too thick for battering rams.
No catapult could throw a stone large enough to breach it, and if
you tried to set it on re, the icemelt would quench the ames. You

could climb over, as the raiders did near Greyguard, but only if you
were strong and t and sure-handed, and even then you might end
up like Jarl, impaled on a tree. They must take the gate, or they
cannot pass.
But the gate was a crooked tunnel through the ice, smaller than
any castle gate in the Seven Kingdoms, so narrow that rangers must
lead their garrons through single le. Three iron grates closed the
inner passage, each locked and chained and protected by a murder
hole. The outer door was old oak, nine inches thick and studded
with iron, not easy to break through. But Mance has mammoths, he
reminded himself, and giants as well.
“Must be cold down there,” said Noye. “What say we warm them
up, lads?” A dozen jars of lamp oil had been lined up on the
precipice. Pyp ran down the line with a torch, setting them alight.
Owen the Oaf followed, shoving them over the edge one by one.
Tongues of pale yellow re swirled around the jars as they plunged
downward. When the last was gone, Grenn kicked loose the chocks
on a barrel of pitch and sent it rumbling and rolling over the edge
as well. The sounds below changed to shouts and screams, sweet
music to their ears.
Yet still the drums beat on, the trebuchets shuddered and
thumped, and the sound of skinpipes came wafting through the
night like the songs of strange erce birds. Septon Cellador began
to sing as well, his voice tremulous and thick with wine.
Gentle Mother, font of mercy,
save our sons from war, we pray,
stay the swords and stay the arrows,
let them know …
Donal Noye rounded on him. “Any man here stays his sword, I’ll
chuck his puckered arse right o this Wall … starting with you,
Septon. Archers! Do we have any bloody archers?”
“Here,” said Satin.
“And here,” said Mully. “But how can I nd a target? It’s black as
the inside of a pig’s belly. Where are they?”

Noye pointed north. “Loose enough arrows, might be you’ll nd a
few. At least you’ll make them fretful.” He looked around the ring
of relit faces. “I need two bows and two spears to help me hold
the tunnel if they break the gate.” More than ten stepped forward,
and the smith picked his four. “Jon, you have the Wall till I return.”
For a moment Jon thought he had misheard. It had sounded as if
Noye were leaving him in command. “My lord?”
“Lord? I’m a blacksmith. I said, the Wall is yours.”
There are older men, Jon wanted to say, better men. I am still as
green as summer grass. I’m wounded, and I stand accused of desertion.
His mouth had gone bone dry. “Aye,” he managed.
Afterward it would seem to Jon Snow as if he’d dreamt that
night. Side by side with the straw soldiers, with longbows or
crossbows clutched in half-frozen hands, his archers launched a
hundred ights of arrows against men they never saw. From time to
time a wildling arrow came ying back in answer. He sent men to
the smaller catapults and lled the air with jagged rocks the size of
a giant’s st, but the darkness swallowed them as a man might
swallow a handful of nuts. Mammoths trumpeted in the gloom,
strange voices called out in stranger tongues, and Septon Cellador
prayed so loudly and drunkenly for the dawn to come that Jon was
tempted to chuck him over the edge himself. They heard a
mammoth dying at their feet and saw another lurch burning
through the woods, trampling down men and trees alike. The wind
blew cold and colder. Hobb rode up the chain with cups of onion
broth, and Owen and Clydas served them to the archers where they
stood, so they could gulp them down between arrows. Zei took a
place among them with her crossbow. Hours of repeated jars and
shocks knocked something loose on the right-hand trebuchet, and its
counterweight came crashing free, suddenly and catastrophically,
wrenching the throwing arm sideways with a splintering crash. The
left-hand trebuchet kept throwing, but the wildlings had quickly
learned to shun the place where its loads were landing.
We should have twenty trebuchets, not two, and they should be
mounted on sledges and turntables so we could move them. It was a

futile thought. He might as well wish for another thousand men,
and maybe a dragon or three.
Donal Noye did not return, nor any of them who’d gone down
with him to hold that black cold tunnel. The Wall is mine, Jon
reminded himself whenever he felt his strength agging. He had
taken up a longbow himself, and his ngers felt crabbed and sti ,
half-frozen. His fever was back as well, and his leg would tremble
uncontrollably, sending a white-hot knife of pain right through him.
One more arrow, and I’ll rest, he told himself, half a hundred times.
Just one more. Whenever his quiver was empty, one of the orphaned
moles would bring him another. One more quiver, and I’m done. It
couldn’t be long until the dawn.
When morning came, none of them quite realized it at rst. The
world was still dark, but the black had turned to grey and shapes
were beginning to emerge half-seen from the gloom. Jon lowered
his bow to stare at the mass of heavy clouds that covered the
eastern sky. He could see a glow behind them, but perhaps he was
only dreaming. He notched another arrow.
Then the rising sun broke through to send pale lances of light
across the battleground. Jon found himself holding his breath as he
looked out over the half-mile swath of cleared land that lay
between the Wall and the edge of the forest. In half a night they
had turned it into a wasteland of blackened grass, bubbling pitch,
shattered stone, and corpses. The carcass of the burned mammoth
was already drawing crows. There were giants dead on the ground
as well, but behind them …
Someone moaned to his left, and he heard Septon Cellador say,
“Mother have mercy, oh. Oh, oh, oh, Mother have mercy.”
Beneath the trees were all the wildlings in the world; raiders and
giants, wargs and skinchangers, mountain men, salt sea sailors, ice
river cannibals, cave dwellers with dyed faces, dog chariots from
the Frozen Shore, Hornfoot men with their soles like boiled leather,
all the queer wild folk Mance had gathered to break the Wall. This is
not your land, Jon wanted to shout at them. There is no place for you
here. Go away. He could hear Tormund Giantsbane laughing at that.
“You know nothing, Jon Snow,” Ygritte would have said. He exed

his sword hand, opening and closing the ngers, though he knew
full well that swords would not come into it up here.
He was chilled and feverish, and suddenly the weight of the
longbow was too much. The battle with the Magnar had been
nothing, he realized, and the night ght less than nothing, only a
probe, a dagger in the dark to try and catch them unprepared. The
real battle was only now beginning.
“I never knew there would be so many,” Satin said.
Jon had. He had seen them before, but not like this, not drawn up
in battle array. On the march the wildling column had sprawled
over long leagues like some enormous worm, but you never saw all
of it at once. But now …
“Here they come,” someone said in a hoarse voice.
Mammoths centered the wildling line, he saw, a hundred or more
with giants on their backs clutching mauls and huge stone axes.
More giants loped beside them, pushing along a tree trunk on great
wooden wheels, its end sharpened to a point. A ram, he thought
bleakly. If the gate still stood below, a few kisses from that thing
would soon turn it into splinters. On either side of the giants came a
wave of horsemen in boiled leather harness with re-hardened
lances, a mass of running archers, hundreds of foot with spears,
slings, clubs, and leathern shields. The bone chariots from the
Frozen Shore clattered forward on the anks, bouncing over rocks
and roots behind teams of huge white dogs. The fury of the wild, Jon
thought as he listened to the skirl of skins, to the dogs barking and
baying, the mammoths trumpeting, the free folk whistling and
screaming, the giants roaring in the Old Tongue. Their drums
echoed o the ice like rolling thunder.
He could feel the despair all around him. “There must be a
hundred thousand,” Satin wailed. “How can we stop so many?”
“The Wall will stop them,” Jon heard himself say. He turned and
said it again, louder. “The Wall will stop them. The Wall defends
itself.” Hollow words, but he needed to say them, almost as much as
his brothers needed to hear them. “Mance wants to unman us with
his numbers. Does he think we’re stupid?” He was shouting now, his
leg forgotten, and every man was listening. “The chariots, the

horsemen, all those fools on foot … what are they going to do to us
up here? Any of you ever see a mammoth climb a wall?” He
laughed, and Pyp and Owen and half a dozen more laughed with
him. “They’re nothing, they’re less use than our straw brothers here,
they can’t reach us, they can’t hurt us, and they don’t frighten us, do
they?”
“NO!” Grenn shouted.
“They’re down there and we’re up here,” Jon said, “and so long as
we hold the gate they cannot pass. They cannot pass!” They were all
shouting then, roaring his own words back at him, waving swords
and longbows in the air as their cheeks ushed red. Jon saw Kegs
standing there with a warhorn slung beneath his arm. “Brother,” he
told him, “sound for battle.”
Grinning, Kegs lifted the horn to his lips, and blew the two long
blasts that meant wildlings. Other horns took up the call until the
Wall itself seemed to shudder, and the echo of those great deepthroated moans drowned all other sound.
“Archers,” Jon said when the horns had died away, “you’ll aim for
the giants with that ram, every bloody one of you. Loose at my
command, not before. THE GIANTS AND THE RAM. I want arrows
raining on them with every step, but we’ll wait till they’re in range.
Any man who wastes an arrow will need to climb down and fetch it
back, do you hear me?”
“I do,” shouted Owen the Oaf. “I hear you, Lord Snow.”
Jon laughed, laughed like a drunk or a madman, and his men
laughed with him. The chariots and the racing horsemen on the
anks were well ahead of the center now, he saw. The wildlings had
not crossed a third of the half mile, yet their battle line was
dissolving. “Load the trebuchet with caltrops,” Jon said. “Owen,
Kegs, angle the catapults toward the center. Scorpions, load with
re spears and loose at my command.” He pointed at the Mole’s
Town boys. “You, you, and you, stand by with torches.”
The wildling archers shot as they advanced; they would dash
forward, stop, loose, then run another ten yards. There were so
many that the air was constantly full of arrows, all falling woefully
short. A waste, Jon thought. Their want of discipline is showing. The

smaller horn-and-wood bows of the free folk were outranged by the
great yew longbows of the Night’s Watch, and the wildlings were
trying to shoot at men seven hundred feet above them. “Let them
shoot,” Jon said. “Wait. Hold.” Their cloaks were apping behind
them. “The wind is in our faces, it will cost us range. Wait.” Closer,
closer. The skins wailed, the drums thundered, the wildling arrows
uttered and fell.
“DRAW.” Jon lifted his own bow and pulled the arrow to his ear.
Satin did the same, and Grenn, Owen the Oaf, Spare Boot, Black
Jack Bulwer, Arron and Emrick. Zei hoisted her crossbow to her
shoulder. Jon was watching the ram come on and on, the
mammoths and giants lumbering forward on either side. They were
so small he could have crushed them all in one hand, it seemed. If
only my hand was big enough. Through the killing ground they came.
A hundred crows rose from the carcass of the dead mammoth as the
wildlings thundered past to either side of them. Closer and closer,
until …
“LOOSE!”
The black arrows hissed downward, like snakes on feathered
wings. Jon did not wait to see where they struck. He reached for a
second arrow as soon as the rst left his bow. “NOTCH. DRAW.
LOOSE.” As soon as the arrow ew he found another. “NOTCH.
DRAW. LOOSE.” Again, and then again. Jon shouted for the
trebuchet, and heard the creak and heavy thud as a hundred spiked
steel caltrops went spinning through the air. “Catapults,” he called,
“scorpions. Bowmen, loose at will.” Wildling arrows were striking the
Wall now, a hundred feet below them. A second giant spun and
staggered. Notch, draw, loose. A mammoth veered into another
beside it, spilling giants on the ground. Notch, draw, loose. The ram
was down and done, he saw, the giants who’d pushed it dead or
dying. “Fire arrows,” he shouted. “I want that ram burning.” The
screams of wounded mammoths and the booming cries of giants
mingled with the drums and pipes to make an awful music, yet still
his archers drew and loosed, as if they’d all gone as deaf as dead
Dick Follard. They might be the dregs of the order, but they were

men of the Night’s Watch, or near enough as made no matter. That’s
why they shall not pass.
One of the mammoths was running berserk, smashing wildlings
with his trunk and crushing archers underfoot. Jon pulled back his
bow once more, and launched another arrow at the beast’s shaggy
back to urge him on. To east and west, the anks of the wildling
host had reached the Wall unopposed. The chariots drew in or
turned while the horsemen milled aimlessly beneath the looming
cli of ice. “At the gate!” a shout came. Spare Boot, maybe.
“Mammoth at the gate!”
“Fire,” Jon barked. “Grenn, Pyp.”
Grenn thrust his bow aside, wrestled a barrel of oil onto its side,
and rolled it to the edge of the Wall, where Pyp hammered out the
plug that sealed it, stu ed in a twist of cloth, and set it alight with a
torch. They shoved it over together. A hundred feet below it struck
the Wall and burst, lling the air with shattered staves and burning
oil. Grenn was rolling a second barrel to the precipice by then, and
Kegs had one as well. Pyp lit them both. “Got him!” Satin shouted,
his head sticking out so far that Jon was certain he was about to
fall. “Got him, got him, GOT him!” He could hear the roar of re. A
aming giant lurched into view, stumbling and rolling on the
ground.
Then suddenly the mammoths were eeing, running from the
smoke and ames and smashing into those behind them in their
terror. Those went backward too, the giants and wildlings behind
them scrambling to get out of their way. In half a heartbeat the
whole center was collapsing. The horsemen on the anks saw
themselves being abandoned and decided to fall back as well, not
one so much as blooded. Even the chariots rumbled o , having done
nothing but look fearsome and make a lot of noise. When they break,
they break hard, Jon Snow thought as he watched them reel away.
The drums had all gone silent. How do you like that music, Mance?
How do you like the taste of the Dornishman’s wife? “Do we have
anyone hurt?” he asked.
“The bloody buggers got my leg.” Spare Boot plucked the arrow
out and waved it above his head. “The wooden one!”

A ragged cheer went up. Zei grabbed Owen by the hands, spun
him around in a circle, and gave him a long wet kiss right there for
all to see. She tried to kiss Jon too, but he held her by the shoulder
and pushed her gently but rmly away. “No,” he said. I am done
with kissing. Suddenly he was too weary to stand, and his leg was
agony from knee to groin. He fumbled for his crutch. “Pyp, help me
to the cage. Grenn, you have the Wall.”
“Me?” said Grenn. “Him?” said Pyp. It was hard to tell which of
them was more horri ed. “But,” Grenn stammered, “b-but what do I
do if the wildlings attack again?”
“Stop them,” Jon told him.
As they rode down in the cage, Pyp took o his helm and wiped
his brow. “Frozen sweat. Is there anything as disgusting as frozen
sweat?” He laughed. “Gods, I don’t think I have ever been so
hungry. I could eat an aurochs whole, I swear it. Do you think Hobb
will cook up Grenn for us?” When he saw Jon’s face, his smile died.
“What’s wrong? Is it your leg?”
“My leg,” Jon agreed. Even the words were an e ort.
“Not the battle, though? We won the battle.”
“Ask me when I’ve seen the gate,” Jon said grimly. I want a re, a
hot meal, a warm bed, and something to make my leg stop hurting, he
told himself. But rst he had to check the tunnel and nd what had
become of Donal Noye.
After the battle with the Thenns it had taken them almost a day
to clear the ice and broken beams away from the inner gate.
Spotted Pate and Kegs and some of the other builders had argued
heatedly that they ought just leave the debris there, another
obstacle for Mance. That would have meant abandoning the defense
of the tunnel, though, and Noye was having none of it. With men in
the murder holes and archers and spears behind each inner grate, a
few determined brothers could hold o a hundred times as many
wildlings and clog the way with corpses. He did not mean to give
Mance Rayder free passage through the ice. So with pick and spade
and ropes, they had moved the broken steps aside and dug back
down to the gate.

Jon waited by the cold iron bars while Pyp went to Maester
Aemon for the spare key. Surprisingly, the maester himself returned
with him, and Clydas with a lantern. “Come see me when we are
done,” the old man told Jon while Pyp was fumbling with the
chains. “I need to change your dressing and apply a fresh poultice,
and you will want some more dreamwine for the pain.”
Jon nodded weakly. The door swung open. Pyp led them in,
followed by Clydas and the lantern. It was all Jon could do to keep
up with Maester Aemon. The ice pressed close around them, and he
could feel the cold seeping into his bones, the weight of the Wall
above his head. It felt like walking down the gullet of an ice
dragon. The tunnel took a twist, and then another. Pyp unlocked a
second iron gate. They walked farther, turned again, and saw light
ahead, faint and pale through the ice. That’s bad, Jon knew at once.
That’s very bad.
Then Pyp said, “There’s blood on the oor.”
The last twenty feet of the tunnel was where they’d fought and
died. The outer door of studded oak had been hacked and broken
and nally torn o its hinges, and one of the giants had crawled in
through the splinters. The lantern bathed the grisly scene in a sullen
reddish light. Pyp turned aside to retch, and Jon found himself
envying Maester Aemon his blindness.
Noye and his men had been waiting within, behind a gate of
heavy iron bars like the two Pyp had just unlocked. The two
crossbows had gotten o a dozen quarrels as the giant struggled
toward them. Then the spearmen must have come to the fore,
stabbing through the bars. Still the giant found the strength to reach
through, twist the head o Spotted Pate, seize the iron gate, and
wrench the bars apart. Links of broken chain lay strewn across the
oor. One giant. All this was the work of one giant.
“Are they all dead?” Maester Aemon asked softly.
“Yes. Donal was the last.” Noye’s sword was sunk deep in the
giant’s throat, halfway to the hilt. The armorer had always seemed
such a big man to Jon, but locked in the giant’s massive arms he
looked almost like a child. “The giant crushed his spine. I don’t
know who died rst.” He took the lantern and moved forward for a

better look. “Mag.” I am the last of the giants. He could feel the
sadness there, but he had no time for sadness. “It was Mag the
Mighty. The king of the giants.”
He needed sun then. It was too cold and dark inside the tunnel,
and the stench of blood and death was su ocating. Jon gave the
lantern back to Clydas, squeezed around the bodies and through the
twisted bars, and walked toward the daylight to see what lay
beyond the splintered door.
The huge carcass of a dead mammoth partially blocked the way.
One of the beast’s tusks snagged his cloak and tore it as he edged
past. Three more giants lay outside, half buried beneath stone and
slush and hardened pitch. He could see where the re had melted
the Wall, where great sheets of ice had come sloughing o in the
heat to shatter on the blackened ground. He looked up at where
they’d come from. When you stand here it seems immense, as if it were
about to crush you.
Jon went back inside to where the others waited. “We need to
repair the outer gate as best we can and then block up this section
of the tunnel. Rubble, chunks of ice, anything. All the way to the
second gate, if we can. Ser Wynton will need to take command, he’s
the last knight left, but he needs to move now, the giants will be
back before we know it. We have to tell him—”
“Tell him what you will,” said Maester Aemon, gently. “He will
smile, nod, and forget. Thirty years ago Ser Wynton Stout came
within a dozen votes of being Lord Commander. He would have
made a ne one. Ten years ago he would still have been capable.
No longer. You know that as well as Donal did, Jon.”
It was true. “You give the order, then,” Jon told the maester.
“You have been on the Wall your whole life, the men will follow
you. We have to close the gate.”
“I am a maester chained and sworn. My order serves, Jon. We
give counsel, not commands.”
“Someone must—”
“You. You must lead.”
“No.”

“Yes, Jon. It need not be for long. Only until such time as the
garrison returns. Donal chose you, and Qhorin Halfhand before him.
Lord Commander Mormont made you his steward. You are a son of
Winterfell, a nephew of Benjen Stark. It must be you or no one. The
Wall is yours, Jon Snow.”

ARYA

She could feel the hole inside her every morning when she woke.

It wasn’t hunger, though sometimes there was that too. It was a
hollow place, an emptiness where her heart had been, where her
brothers had lived, and her parents. Her head hurt too. Not as bad
as it had at rst, but still pretty bad. Arya was used to that, though,
and at least the lump was going down. But the hole inside her
stayed the same. The hole will never feel any better, she told herself
when she went to sleep.
Some mornings Arya did not want to wake at all. She would
huddle beneath her cloak with her eyes squeezed shut and try to
will herself back to sleep. If the Hound would only have left her
alone, she would have slept all day and all night.
And dreamed. That was the best part, the dreaming. She dreamed
of wolves most every night. A great pack of wolves, with her at the
head. She was bigger than any of them, stronger, swifter, faster.
She could outrun horses and out ght lions. When she bared her
teeth even men would run from her, her belly was never empty
long, and her fur kept her warm even when the wind was blowing
cold. And her brothers and sisters were with her, many and more of
them, erce and terrible and hers. They would never leave her.
But if her nights were full of wolves, her days belonged to the
dog. Sandor Clegane made her get up every morning, whether she
wanted to or not. He would curse at her in his raspy voice, or yank
her to her feet and shake her. Once he dumped a helm full of cold

water all over her head. She bounced up sputtering and shivering
and tried to kick him, but he only laughed. “Dry o and feed the
bloody horses,” he told her, and she did.
They had two now, Stranger and a sorrel palfrey mare Arya had
named Craven, because Sandor said she’d likely run o from the
Twins the same as them. They’d found her wandering riderless
through a eld the morning after the slaughter. She was a good
enough horse, but Arya could not love a coward. Stranger would have
fought. Still, she tended the mare as best she knew. It was better
than riding double with the Hound. And Craven might have been a
coward, but she was young and strong as well. Arya thought that
she might be able to outrun Stranger, if it came to it.
The Hound no longer watched her as closely as he had.
Sometimes he did not seem to care whether she stayed or went, and
he no longer bound her up in a cloak at night. One night I’ll kill him
in his sleep, she told herself, but she never did. One day I’ll ride away
on Craven, and he won’t be able to catch me, she thought, but she
never did that either. Where would she go? Winterfell was gone.
Her grandfather’s brother was at Riverrun, but he didn’t know her,
no more than she knew him. Maybe Lady Smallwood would take
her in at Acorn Hall, but maybe she wouldn’t. Besides, Arya wasn’t
even sure she could nd Acorn Hall again. Sometimes she thought
she might go back to Sharna’s inn, if the oods hadn’t washed it
away. She could stay with Hot Pie, or maybe Lord Beric would nd
her there. Anguy would teach her to use a bow, and she could ride
with Gendry and be an outlaw, like Wenda the White Fawn in the
songs.
But that was just stupid, like something Sansa might dream. Hot
Pie and Gendry had left her just as soon as they could, and Lord
Beric and the outlaws only wanted to ransom her, just like the
Hound. None of them wanted her around. They were never my pack,
not even Hot Pie and Gendry. I was stupid to think so, just a stupid little
girl, and no wolf at all.
So she stayed with the Hound. They rode every day, never
sleeping twice in the same place, avoiding towns and villages and
castles as best they could. Once she asked Sandor Clegane where

they were going. “Away,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.
You’re not worth spit to me now, and I don’t want to hear your
whining. I should have let you run into that bloody castle.”
“You should have,” she agreed, thinking of her mother.
“You’d be dead if I had. You ought to thank me. You ought to
sing me a pretty little song, the way your sister did.”
“Did you hit her with an axe too?”
“I hit you with the at of the axe, you stupid little bitch. If I’d hit
you with the blade there’d still be chunks of your head oating
down the Green Fork. Now shut your bloody mouth. If I had any
sense I’d give you to the silent sisters. They cut the tongues out of
girls who talk too much.”
That wasn’t fair of him to say. Aside from that one time, Arya
hardly talked at all. Whole days passed when neither of them said
anything. She was too empty to talk, and the Hound was too angry.
She could feel the fury in him; she could see it on his face, the way
his mouth would tighten and twist, the looks he gave her.
Whenever he took his axe to chop some wood for a re, he would
slide into a cold rage, hacking savagely at the tree or the deadfall or
the broken limb, until they had twenty times as much kindling and
rewood as they’d needed. Sometimes he would be so sore and
tired afterward that he would lie down and go right to sleep
without even lighting a re. Arya hated it when that happened, and
hated him too. Those were the nights when she stared the longest at
the axe. It looks awfully heavy, but I bet I could swing it. She wouldn’t
hit him with the at, either.
Sometimes in their wanderings they glimpsed other people;
farmers in their elds, swineherds with their pigs, a milkmaid
leading a cow, a squire carrying a message down a rutted road. She
never wanted to speak to them either. It was as if they lived in
some distant land and spoke a queer alien tongue; they had nothing
to do with her, or her with them.
Besides, it wasn’t safe to be seen. From time to time columns of
horsemen passed down the winding farm roads, the twin towers of
Frey ying before them. “Hunting for stray northmen,” the Hound

said when they had passed. “Any time you hear hooves, get your
head down fast, it’s not like to be a friend.”
One day, in an earthen hollow made by the roots of a fallen oak,
they came face to face with another survivor of the Twins. The
badge on his breast showed a pink maiden dancing in a swirl of silk,
and he told them he was Ser Marq Piper’s man; a bowman, though
he’d lost his bow. His left shoulder was all twisted and swollen
where it met his arm; a blow from a mace, he said, it had broken
his shoulder and smashed his chainmail deep into his esh. “A
northman, it was,” he wept. “His badge was a bloody man, and he
saw mine and made a jape, red man and pink maiden, maybe they
should get together. I drank to his Lord Bolton, he drank to Ser
Marq, and we drank together to Lord Edmure and Lady Roslin and
the King in the North. And then he killed me.” His eyes were fever
bright when he said that, and Arya could tell that it was true. His
shoulder was swollen grotesquely, and pus and blood had stained
his whole left side. There was a stink to him too. He smells like a
corpse. The man begged them for a drink of wine.
“If I’d had any wine, I’d have drunk it myself,” the Hound told
him. “I can give you water, and the gift of mercy.”
The archer looked at him a long while before he said, “You’re
Jo rey’s dog.”
“My own dog now. Do you want the water?”
“Aye.” The man swallowed. “And the mercy. Please.”
They had passed a small pond a short ways back. Sandor gave
Arya his helm and told her to ll it, so she trudged back to the
water’s edge. Mud squished over the toe of her boots. She used the
dog’s head as a pail. Water ran out through the eyeholes, but the
bottom of the helm still held a lot.
When she came back, the archer turned his face up and she
poured the water into his mouth. He gulped it down as fast as she
could pour, and what he couldn’t gulp ran down his cheeks into the
brown blood that crusted his whiskers, until pale pink tears dangled
from his beard. When the water was gone he clutched the helm and
licked the steel. “Good,” he said. “I wish it was wine, though. I
wanted wine.”

“Me too.” The Hound eased his dagger into the man’s chest
almost tenderly, the weight of his body driving the point through
his surcoat, ringmail, and the quilting beneath. As he slid the blade
back out and wiped it on the dead man, he looked at Arya. “That’s
where the heart is, girl. That’s how you kill a man.”
That’s one way. “Will we bury him?”
“Why?” Sandor said. “He don’t care, and we’ve got no spade.
Leave him for the wolves and wild dogs. Your brothers and mine.”
He gave her a hard look. “First we rob him, though.”
There were two silver stags in the archer’s purse, and almost
thirty coppers. His dagger had a pretty pink stone in the hilt. The
Hound hefted the knife in his hand, then ipped it toward Arya. She
caught it by the hilt, slid it through her belt, and felt a little better.
It wasn’t Needle, but it was steel. The dead man had a quiver of
arrows too, but arrows weren’t much good without a bow. His
boots were too big for Arya and too small for the Hound, so those
they left. She took his kettle helm as well, even though it came
down almost past her nose, so she had to tilt it back to see. “He
must have had a horse as well, or he wouldn’t have got away,”
Clegane said, peering about, “but it’s bloody well gone, I’d say. No
telling how long he’s been here.”
By the time they found themselves in the foothills of the
Mountains of the Moon, the rains had mostly stopped. Arya could
see the sun and moon and stars, and it seemed to her that they were
heading eastward. “Where are we going?” she asked again.
This time the Hound answered her. “You have an aunt in the
Eyrie. Might be she’ll want to ransom your scrawny arse, though
the gods know why. Once we nd the high road, we can follow it
all the way to the Bloody Gate.”
Aunt Lysa. The thought left Arya feeling empty. It was her mother
she wanted, not her mother’s sister. She didn’t know her mother’s
sister any more than she knew her great uncle Black sh. We should
have gone into the castle. They didn’t really know that her mother
was dead, or Robb either. It wasn’t like they’d seen them die or
anything. Maybe Lord Frey had just taken them captive. Maybe
they were chained up in his dungeon, or maybe the Freys were

taking them to King’s Landing so Jo rey could chop their heads o .
They didn’t know. “We should go back,” she suddenly decided. “We
should go back to the Twins and get my mother. She can’t be dead.
We have to help her.”
“I thought your sister was the one with a head full of songs,” the
Hound growled. “Frey might have kept your mother alive to
ransom, that’s true. But there’s no way in seven hells I’m going to
pluck her out of his castle all by my bloody self.”
“Not by yourself. I’d come too.”
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “That will scare the
piss out of the old man.”
“You’re just afraid to die!” she said scornfully.
Now Clegane did laugh. “Death don’t scare me. Only re. Now be
quiet, or I’ll cut your tongue out myself and save the silent sisters
the bother. It’s the Vale for us.”
Arya didn’t think he’d really cut her tongue out; he was just saying
that the way Pinkeye used to say he’d beat her bloody. All the
same, she wasn’t going to try him. Sandor Clegane was no Pinkeye.
Pinkeye didn’t cut people in half or hit them with axes. Not even
with the at of axes.
That night she went to sleep thinking of her mother, and
wondering if she should kill the Hound in his sleep and rescue Lady
Catelyn herself. When she closed her eyes she saw her mother’s face
against the back of her eyelids. She’s so close I could almost smell
her …
… and then she could smell her. The scent was faint beneath the
other smells, beneath moss and mud and water, and the stench of
rotting reeds and rotting men. She padded slowly through the soft
ground to the river’s edge, lapped up a drink, then lifted her head to
sni . The sky was grey and thick with cloud, the river green and
full of oating things. Dead men clogged the shallows, some still
moving as the water pushed them, others washed up on the banks.
Her brothers and sisters swarmed around them, tearing at the rich
ripe esh.
The crows were there too, screaming at the wolves and lling the
air with feathers. Their blood was hotter, and one of her sisters had

snapped at one as it took ight and caught it by the wing. It made
her want a crow herself. She wanted to taste the blood, to hear the
bones crunch between her teeth, to ll her belly with warm esh
instead of cold. She was hungry and the meat was all around, but
she knew she could not eat.
The scent was stronger now. She pricked her ears up and listened
to the grumbles of her pack, the shriek of angry crows, the whirr of
wings and sound of running water. Somewhere far o she could
hear horses and the calls of living men, but they were not what
mattered. Only the scent mattered. She sni ed the air again. There
it was, and now she saw it too, something pale and white drifting
down the river, turning where it brushed against a snag. The reeds
bowed down before it.
She splashed noisily through the shallows and threw herself into
the deeper water, her legs churning. The current was strong but she
was stronger. She swam, following her nose. The river smells were
rich and wet, but those were not the smells that pulled her. She
paddled after the sharp red whisper of cold blood, the sweet cloying
stench of death. She chased them as she had often chased a red deer
through the trees, and in the end she ran them down, and her jaw
closed around a pale white arm. She shook it to make it move, but
there was only death and blood in her mouth. By now she was
tiring, and it was all she could do to pull the body back to shore. As
she dragged it up the muddy bank, one of her little brothers came
prowling, his tongue lolling from his mouth. She had to snarl to
drive him o , or else he would have fed. Only then did she stop to
shake the water from her fur. The white thing lay facedown in the
mud, her dead esh wrinkled and pale, cold blood trickling from
her throat. Rise, she thought. Rise and eat and run with us.
The sound of horses turned her head. Men. They were coming
from downwind, so she had not smelled them, but now they were
almost here. Men on horses, with apping black and yellow and
pink wings and long shiny claws in hand. Some of her younger
brothers bared their teeth to defend the food they’d found, but she
snapped at them until they scattered. That was the way of the wild.
Deer and hares and crows ed before wolves, and wolves ed from

men. She abandoned the cold white prize in the mud where she had
dragged it, and ran, and felt no shame.
When morning came, the Hound did not need to shout at Arya or
shake her awake. She had woken before him for a change, and even
watered the horses. They broke their fast in silence, until Sandor
said, “This thing about your mother …”
“It doesn’t matter,” Arya said in a dull voice. “I know she’s dead.
I saw her in a dream.”
The Hound looked at her a long time, then nodded. No more was
said of it. They rode on toward the mountains.
In the higher hills, they came upon a tiny isolated village
surrounded by grey-green sentinels and tall blue soldier pines, and
Clegane decided to risk going in. “We need food,” he said, “and a
roof over our heads. They’re not like to know what happened at the
Twins, and with any luck they won’t know me.”
The villagers were building a wooden palisade around their
homes, and when they saw the breadth of the Hound’s shoulders
they o ered them food and shelter and even coin for work. “If
there’s wine as well, I’ll do it,” he growled at them. In the end, he
settled for ale, and drank himself to sleep each night.
His dream of selling Arya to Lady Arryn died there in the hills,
though. “There’s frost above us and snow in the high passes,” the
village elder said. “If you don’t freeze or starve, the shadowcats will
get you, or the cave bears. There’s the clans as well. The Burned
Men are fearless since Timett One-Eye came back from the war.
And half a year ago, Gunthor son of Gurn led the Stone Crows down
on a village not eight miles from here. They took every woman and
every scrap of grain, and killed half the men. They have steel now,
good swords and mail hauberks, and they watch the high road—the
Stone Crows, the Milk Snakes, the Sons of the Mist, all of them.
Might be you’d take a few with you, but in the end they’d kill you
and make o with your daughter.”
I’m not his daughter, Arya might have shouted, if she hadn’t felt so
tired. She was no one’s daughter now. She was no one. Not Arya,
not Weasel, not Nan nor Arry nor Squab, not even Lumpyhead. She

was only some girl who ran with a dog by day, and dreamed of
wolves by night.
It was quiet in the village. They had beds stu ed with straw and
not too many lice, the food was plain but lling, and the air smelled
of pines. All the same, Arya soon decided that she hated it. The
villagers were cowards. None of them would even look at the
Hound’s face, at least not for long. Some of the women tried to put
her in a dress and make her do needlework, but they weren’t Lady
Smallwood and she was having none of it. And there was one girl
who took to following her, the village elder’s daughter. She was of
an age with Arya, but just a child; she cried if she skinned a knee,
and carried a stupid cloth doll with her everywhere she went. The
doll was made up to look like a man-at-arms, sort of, so the girl
called him Ser Soldier and bragged how he kept her safe. “Go
away,” Arya told her half a hundred times. “Just leave me be.” She
wouldn’t, though, so nally Arya took the doll away from her,
ripped it open, and pulled the rag stu ng out of its belly with a
nger. “Now he really looks like a soldier!” she said, before she
threw the doll in a brook. After that the girl stopped pestering her,
and Arya spent her days grooming Craven and Stranger or walking
in the woods. Sometimes she would nd a stick and practice her
needlework, but then she would remember what had happened at
the Twins and smash it against a tree until it broke.
“Might be we should stay here awhile,” the Hound told her, after
a fortnight. He was drunk on ale, but more brooding than sleepy.
“We’d never reach the Eyrie, and the Freys will still be hunting
survivors in the riverlands. Sounds like they need swords here, with
these clansmen raiding. We can rest up, maybe nd a way to get a
letter to your aunt.” Arya’s face darkened when she heard that. She
didn’t want to stay, but there was nowhere to go, either. The next
morning, when the Hound went o to chop down trees and haul
logs, she crawled back into bed.
But when the work was done and the tall wooden palisade was
nished, the village elder made it plain that there was no place for
them. “Come winter, we will be hard pressed to feed our own,” he
explained. “And you … a man like you brings blood with him.”

Sandor’s mouth tightened. “So you do know who I am.”
“Aye. We don’t get travelers here, that’s so, but we go to market,
and to fairs. We know about King Jo rey’s dog.”
“When these Stone Crows come calling, you might be glad to
have a dog.”
“Might be.” The man hesitated, then gathered up his courage.
“But they say you lost your belly for ghting at the Blackwater.
They say—”
“I know what they say.” Sandor’s voice sounded like two
woodsaws grinding together. “Pay me, and we’ll be gone.”
When they left, the Hound had a pouch full of coppers, a skin of
sour ale, and a new sword. It was a very old sword, if truth be told,
though new to him. He swapped its owner the longaxe he’d taken at
the Twins, the one he’d used to raise the lump on Arya’s head. The
ale was gone in less than a day, but Clegane sharpened the sword
every night, cursing the man he’d swapped with for every nick and
spot of rust. If he lost his belly for ghting, why does he care if his sword
is sharp? It was not a question Arya dared ask him, but she thought
on it a lot. Was that why he’d run from the Twins and carried her
o ?
Back in the riverlands, they found that the rains had ebbed away,
and the ood waters had begun to recede. The Hound turned south,
back toward the Trident. “We’ll make for Riverrun,” he told Arya as
they roasted a hare he’d killed. “Maybe the Black sh wants to buy
himself a she-wolf.”
“He doesn’t know me. He won’t even know I’m really me.” Arya
was tired of making for Riverrun. She had been making for
Riverrun for years, it seemed, without ever getting there. Every
time she made for Riverrun, she ended up someplace worse. “He
won’t give you any ransom. He’ll probably just hang you.”
“He’s free to try.” He turned the spit.
He doesn’t talk like he’s lost his belly for ghting. “I know where we
could go,” Arya said. She still had one brother left. Jon will want me,
even if no one else does. He’ll call me “little sister” and muss my hair. It
was a long way, though, and she didn’t think she could get there by

herself. She hadn’t even been able to reach Riverrun. “We could go
to the Wall.”
Sandor’s laugh was half a growl. “The little wolf bitch wants to
join the Night’s Watch, does she?”
“My brother’s on the Wall,” she said stubbornly.
His mouth gave a twitch. “The Wall’s a thousand leagues from
here. We’d need to ght through the bloody Freys just to reach the
Neck. There’s lizard lions in those swamps that eat wolves every
day for breakfast. And if we did reach the north with our skins
intact, there’s ironborn in half the castles, and thousands of bloody
buggering northmen as well.”
“Are you scared of them?” she asked. “Have you lost your belly
for ghting?”
For a moment she thought he was going to hit her. By then the
hare was brown, though, skin crackling and grease popping as it
dripped down into the cook re. Sandor took it o the stick, ripped
it apart with his big hands, and tossed half of it into Arya’s lap.
“There’s nothing wrong with my belly,” he said as he pulled o a
leg, “but I don’t give a rat’s arse for you or your brother. I have a
brother too.”

TYRION

Tyrion,” Ser Kevan Lannister said wearily, “if you are indeed

innocent of Jo rey’s death, you should have no di culty proving it
at trial.”
Tyrion turned from the window. “Who is to judge me?”
“Justice belongs to the throne. The king is dead, but your father
remains Hand. Since it is his own son who stands accused and his
grandson who was the victim, he has asked Lord Tyrell and Prince
Oberyn to sit in judgment with him.”
Tyrion was scarcely reassured. Mace Tyrell had been Jo rey’s
good-father, however brie y, and the Red Viper was … well, a
snake. “Will I be allowed to demand trial by battle?”
“I would not advise that.”
“Why not?” It had saved him in the Vale, why not here? “Answer
me, Uncle. Will I be allowed a trial by battle, and a champion to
prove my innocence?”
“Certainly, if such is your wish. However, you had best know that
your sister means to name Ser Gregor Clegane as her champion, in
the event of such a trial.”
The bitch checks my moves before I make them. A pity she didn’t
choose a Kettleblack. Bronn would make short work of any of the
three brothers, but the Mountain That Rides was a kettle of a
di erent color. “I shall need to sleep on this.” I need to speak with
Bronn, and soon. He didn’t want to think about what this was like to

cost him. Bronn had a lofty notion of what his skin was worth.
“Does Cersei have witnesses against me?”
“More every day.”
“Then I must have witnesses of my own.”
“Tell me who you would have, and Ser Addam will send the
Watch to bring them to the trial.”
“I would sooner nd them myself.”
“You stand accused of regicide and kinslaying. Do you truly
imagine you will be allowed to come and go as you please?” Ser
Kevan waved at the table. “You have quill, ink, and parchment.
Write the names of such witnesses as you require, and I shall do all
in my power to produce them, you have my word as a Lannister.
But you shall not leave this tower, except to go to trial.”
Tyrion would not demean himself by begging. “Will you permit
my squire to come and go? The boy Podrick Payne?”
“Certainly, if that is your wish. I shall send him to you.”
“Do so. Sooner would be better than later, and now would be
better than sooner.” He waddled to the writing table. But when he
heard the door open, he turned back and said, “Uncle?”
Ser Kevan paused. “Yes?”
“I did not do this.”
“I wish I could believe that, Tyrion.”
When the door closed, Tyrion Lannister pulled himself up into the
chair, sharpened a quill, and pulled a blank parchment. Who will
speak for me? He dipped his quill in the inkpot.
The sheet was still maiden when Podrick Payne appeared,
sometime later. “My lord,” the boy said.
Tyrion put down the quill. “Find Bronn and bring him at once.
Tell him there’s gold in it, more gold than he’s ever dreamt of, and
see that you don’t return without him.”
“Yes, my lord. I mean, no. I won’t. Return.” He went.
He had not returned by sunset, nor by moonrise. Tyrion fell
asleep in the window seat to wake sti and sore at dawn. A serving
man brought porridge and apples to break his fast, with a horn of
ale. He ate at the table, the blank parchment before him. An hour

later, the serving man returned for the bowl. “Have you seen my
squire?” Tyrion asked him. The man shook his head.
Sighing, he turned back to the table, and dipped the quill again.
Sansa, he wrote upon the parchment. He sat staring at the name, his
teeth clenched so hard they hurt.
Assuming Jo rey had not simply choked to death on a bit of food,
which even Tyrion found hard to swallow, Sansa must have
poisoned him. Jo practically put his cup down in her lap, and he’d
given her ample reason. Any doubts Tyrion might have had vanished
when his wife did. One esh, one heart, one soul. His mouth twisted.
She wasted no time proving how much those vows meant to her, did she?
Well, what did you expect, dwarf?
And yet … where would Sansa have gotten poison? He could not
believe the girl had acted alone in this. Do I really want to nd her?
Would the judges believe that Tyrion’s child bride had poisoned a
king without her husband’s knowledge? I wouldn’t. Cersei would
insist that they had done the deed together.
Even so, he gave the parchment to his uncle the next day. Ser
Kevan frowned at it. “Lady Sansa is your only witness?”
“I will think of others in time.”
“Best think of them now. The judges mean to begin the trial three
days hence.”
“That’s too soon. You have me shut up here under guard, how am
I to nd witnesses to my innocence?”
“Your sister’s had no di culty nding witnesses to your guilt.”
Ser Kevan rolled up the parchment. “Ser Addam has men hunting
for your wife. Varys has o ered a hundred stags for word of her
whereabouts, and a hundred dragons for the girl herself. If the girl
can be found she will be found, and I shall bring her to you. I see no
harm in husband and wife sharing the same cell and giving comfort
to one another.”
“You are too kind. Have you seen my squire?”
“I sent him to you yesterday. Did he not come?”
“He came,” Tyrion admitted, “and then he went.”
“I shall send him to you again.”

But it was the next morning before Podrick Payne returned. He
stepped inside the room hesitantly, with fear written all over his
face. Bronn came in behind him. The sellsword knight wore a jerkin
studded with silver and a heavy riding cloak, with a pair of netooled leather gloves thrust through his swordbelt.
One look at Bronn’s face gave Tyrion a queasy feeling in the pit
of his stomach. “It took you long enough.”
“The boy begged, or I wouldn’t have come at all. I am expected at
Castle Stokeworth for supper.”
“Stokeworth?” Tyrion hopped from the bed. “And pray, what is
there for you in Stokeworth?”
“A bride.” Bronn smiled like a wolf contemplating a lost lamb.
“I’m to wed Lollys the day after next.”
“Lollys.” Perfect, bloody perfect. Lady Tanda’s lackwit daughter
gets a knightly husband and a father of sorts for the bastard in her
belly, and Ser Bronn of the Blackwater climbs another rung. It had
Cersei’s stinking ngers all over it. “My bitch sister has sold you a
lame horse. The girl’s dim-witted.”
“If I wanted wits, I’d marry you.”
“Lollys is big with another man’s child.”
“And when she pops him out, I’ll get her big with mine.”
“She’s not even heir to Stokeworth,” Tyrion pointed out. “She has
an elder sister. Falyse. A married sister.”
“Married ten years, and still barren,” said Bronn. “Her lord
husband shuns her bed. It’s said he prefers virgins.”
“He could prefer goats and it wouldn’t matter. The lands will still
pass to his wife when Lady Tanda dies.”
“Unless Falyse should die before her mother.”
Tyrion wondered whether Cersei had any notion of the sort of
serpent she’d given Lady Tanda to suckle. And if she does, would she
care? “Why are you here, then?”
Bronn shrugged. “You once told me that if anyone ever asked me
to sell you out, you’d double the price.”
Yes. “Is it two wives you want, or two castles?”
“One of each would serve. But if you want me to kill Gregor
Clegane for you, it had best be a damned big castle.”

The Seven Kingdoms were full of highborn maidens, but even the
oldest, poorest, and ugliest spinster in the realm would balk at
wedding such lowborn scum as Bronn. Unless she was soft of body
and soft of head, with a fatherless child in her belly from having been
raped half a hundred times. Lady Tanda had been so desperate to nd
a husband for Lollys that she had even pursued Tyrion for a time,
and that had been before half of King’s Landing enjoyed her. No
doubt Cersei had sweetened the o er somehow, and Bronn was a
knight now, which made him a suitable match for a younger
daughter of a minor house.
“I nd myself woefully short of both castles and highborn
maidens at the moment,” Tyrion admitted. “But I can o er you gold
and gratitude, as before.”
“I have gold. What can I buy with gratitude?”
“You might be surprised. A Lannister pays his debts.”
“Your sister is a Lannister too.”
“My lady wife is heir to Winterfell. Should I emerge from this
with my head still on my shoulders, I may one day rule the north in
her name. I could carve you out a big piece of it.”
“If and when and might be,” said Bronn. “And it’s bloody cold up
there. Lollys is soft, warm, and close. I could be poking her two
nights hence.”
“Not a prospect I would relish.”
“Is that so?” Bronn grinned. “Admit it, Imp. Given a choice
between fucking Lollys and ghting the Mountain, you’d have your
breeches down and cock up before a man could blink.”
He knows me too bloody well. Tyrion tried a di erent tack. “I’d
heard that Ser Gregor was wounded on the Red Fork, and again at
Duskendale. The wounds are bound to slow him.”
Bronn looked annoyed. “He was never fast. Only freakish big and
freakish strong. I’ll grant you, he’s quicker than you’d expect for a
man that size. He has a monstrous long reach, and doesn’t seem to
feel blows the way a normal man would.”
“Does he frighten you so much?” asked Tyrion, hoping to provoke
him.

“If he didn’t frighten me, I’d be a bloody fool.” Bronn gave a
shrug. “Might be I could take him. Dance around him until he was
so tired of hacking at me that he couldn’t lift his sword. Get him o
his feet somehow. When they’re at on their backs it don’t matter
how tall they are. Even so, it’s chancy. One misstep and I’m dead.
Why should I risk it? I like you well enough, ugly little whoreson
that you are … but if I ght your battle, I lose either way. Either
the Mountain spills my guts, or I kill him and lose Stokeworth. I sell
my sword, I don’t give it away. I’m not your bloody brother.”
“No,” said Tyrion sadly. “You’re not.” He waved a hand. “Begone,
then. Run to Stokeworth and Lady Lollys. May you nd more joy in
your marriage bed than I ever found in mine.”
Bronn hesitated at the door. “What will you do, Imp?”
“Kill Gregor myself. Won’t that make for a jolly song?”
“I hope I hear them sing it.” Bronn grinned one last time, and
walked out of the door, the castle, and his life.
Pod shu ed his feet. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? Is it your fault that Bronn’s an insolent black-hearted
rogue? He’s always been an insolent black-hearted rogue. That’s
what I liked about him.” Tyrion poured himself a cup of wine and
took it to the window seat. Outside the day was grey and rainy, but
the prospect was still more cheerful than his. He could send Podrick
Payne questing after Shagga, he supposed, but there were so many
hiding places in the deep of the kingswood that outlaws often
evaded capture for decades. And Pod sometimes has di culty nding
the kitchens when I sent him down for cheese. Timett son of Timett
would likely be back in the Mountains of the Moon by now. And
despite what he’d told Bronn, going up against Ser Gregor Clegane
in his own person would be a bigger farce than Jo rey’s jousting
dwarfs. He did not intend to die with gales of laughter ringing in his
ears. So much for trial by combat.
Ser Kevan paid him another call later that day, and again the day
after. Sansa had not been found, his uncle informed him politely.
Nor the fool Ser Dontos, who’d vanished the same night. Did Tyrion
have any more witnesses he wished to summon? He did not. How do

I bloody well prove I didn’t poison the wine, when a thousand people saw
me ll Jo ’s cup?
He did not sleep at all that night.
Instead he lay in the dark, staring up at the canopy and counting
his ghosts. He saw Tysha smiling as she kissed him, saw Sansa
naked and shivering in fear. He saw Jo rey clawing his throat, the
blood running down his neck as his face turned black. He saw
Cersei’s eyes, Bronn’s wol sh smile, Shae’s wicked grin. Even
thought of Shae could not arouse him. He fondled himself, thinking
that perhaps if he woke his cock and satis ed it, he might rest more
easily afterward, but it was no good.
And then it was dawn, and time for his trial to begin.
It was not Ser Kevan who came for him that morning, but Ser
Addam Marbrand with a dozen gold cloaks. Tyrion had broken his
fast on boiled eggs, burned bacon, and fried bread, and dressed in
his nest. “Ser Addam,” he said. “I had thought my father might
send the Kingsguard to escort me to trial. I am still a member of the
royal family, am I not?”
“You are, my lord, but I fear that most of the Kingsguard stand
witness against you. Lord Tywin felt it would not be proper for
them to serve as your guards.”
“Gods forbid we do anything improper. Please, lead on.”
He was to be tried in the throne room, where Jo rey had died. As
Ser Addam marched him through the towering bronze doors and
down the long carpet, he felt the eyes upon him. Hundreds had
crowded in to see him judged. At least he hoped that was why they
had come. For all I know, they’re all witnesses against me. He spied
Queen Margaery up in the gallery, pale and beautiful in her
mourning. Twice wed and twice widowed, and only sixteen. Her
mother stood tall to one side of her, her grandmother small on the
other, with her ladies in waiting and her father’s household knights
packing the rest of the gallery.
The dais still stood beneath the empty Iron Throne, though all but
one table had been removed. Behind it sat stout Lord Mace Tyrell in
a gold mantle over green, and slender Prince Oberyn Martell in
owing robes of striped orange, yellow, and scarlet. Lord Tywin

Lannister sat between them. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet. The
Dornishman and the Highgardener despised each other. If I can nd
a way to use that …
The High Septon began with a prayer, asking the Father Above to
guide them to justice. When he was done the father below leaned
forward to say, “Tyrion, did you kill King Jo rey?”
He would not waste a heartbeat. “No.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Oberyn Martell dryly.
“Did Sansa Stark do it, then?” Lord Tyrell demanded.
I would have, if I’d been her. Yet wherever Sansa was and whatever
her part in this might have been, she remained his wife. He had
wrapped the cloak of his protection about her shoulders, though
he’d had to stand on a fool’s back to do it. “The gods killed Jo rey.
He choked on his pigeon pie.”
Lord Tyrell reddened. “You would blame the bakers?”
“Them, or the pigeons. Just leave me out of it.” Tyrion heard
nervous laughter, and knew he’d made a mistake. Guard your
tongue, you little fool, before it digs your grave.
“There are witnesses against you,” Lord Tywin said. “We shall
hear them rst. Then you may present your own witnesses. You are
to speak only with our leave.”
There was naught that Tyrion could do but nod.
Ser Addam had told it true; the rst man ushered in was Ser Balon
Swann of the Kingsguard. “Lord Hand,” he began, after the High
Septon had sworn him to speak only truth, “I had the honor to ght
beside your son on the bridge of ships. He is a brave man for all his
size, and I will not believe he did this thing.”
A murmur went through the hall, and Tyrion wondered what mad
game Cersei was playing. Why o er a witness that believes me
innocent? He soon learned. Ser Balon spoke reluctantly of how he
had pulled Tyrion away from Jo rey on the day of the riot. “He did
strike His Grace, that’s so. It was a t of wroth, no more. A summer
storm. The mob near killed us all.”
“In the days of the Targaryens, a man who struck one of the
blood royal would lose the hand he struck him with,” observed the

Red Viper of Dorne. “Did the dwarf regrow his little hand, or did
you White Swords forget your duty?”
“He was of the blood royal himself,” Ser Balon answered. “And
the King’s Hand beside.”
“No,” Lord Tywin said. “He was acting Hand, in my stead.”
Ser Meryn Trant was pleased to expand on Ser Balon’s account,
when he took his place as witness. “He knocked the king to the
ground and began kicking him. He shouted that it was unjust that
His Grace had escaped unharmed from the mobs.”
Tyrion began to grasp his sister’s plan. She began with a man
known to be honest, and milked him for all he would give. Every witness
to follow will tell a worse tale, until I seem as bad as Maegor the Cruel
and Aerys the Mad together, with a pinch of Aegon the Unworthy for
spice.
Ser Meryn went on to relate how Tyrion had stopped Jo rey’s
chastisement of Sansa Stark. “The dwarf asked His Grace if he knew
what had happened to Aerys Targaryen. When Ser Boros spoke up
in defense of the king, the Imp threatened to have him killed.”
Blount himself came next, to echo that sorry tale. Whatever
mislike Ser Boros might harbor toward Cersei for dismissing him
from the Kingsguard, he said the words she wanted all the same.
Tyrion could no longer hold his tongue. “Tell the judges what
Jo rey was doing, why don’t you?”
The big jowly man glared at him. “You told your savages to kill
me if I opened my mouth, that’s what I’ll tell them.”
“Tyrion,” Lord Tywin said. “You are to speak only when we call
upon you. Take this for a warning.”
Tyrion subsided, seething.
The Kettleblacks came next, all three of them in turn. Osney and
Osfryd told the tale of his supper with Cersei before the Battle of
the Blackwater, and of the threats he’d made.
“He told Her Grace that he meant to do her harm,” said Ser
Osfryd. “To hurt her.” His brother Osney elaborated. “He said he
would wait for a day when she was happy, and make her joy turn to
ashes in her mouth.” Neither mentioned Alayaya.

Ser Osmund Kettleblack, a vision of chivalry in immaculate scale
armor and white wool cloak, swore that King Jo rey had long
known that his uncle Tyrion meant to murder him. “It was the day
they gave me the white cloak, my lords,” he told the judges. “That
brave boy said to me, ‘Good Ser Osmund, guard me well, for my
uncle loves me not. He means to be king in my place.’ ”
That was more than Tyrion could stomach. “Liar!” He took two
steps forward before the gold cloaks dragged him back.
Lord Tywin frowned. “Must we have you chained hand and foot
like a common brigand?”
Tyrion gnashed his teeth. A second mistake, fool, fool, fool of a
dwarf. Keep your calm or you’re doomed. “No. I beg your pardons,
my lords. His lies angered me.”
“His truths, you mean,” said Cersei. “Father, I beg you to put him
in fetters, for your own protection. You see how he is.”
“I see he’s a dwarf,” said Prince Oberyn. “The day I fear a dwarf’s
wrath is the day I drown myself in a cask of red.”
“We need no fetters.” Lord Tywin glanced at the windows, and
rose. “The hour grows late. We shall resume on the morrow.”
That night, alone in his tower cell with a blank parchment and a
cup of wine, Tyrion found himself thinking of his wife. Not Sansa;
his rst wife, Tysha. The whore wife, not the wolf wife. Her love for
him had been pretense, and yet he had believed, and found joy in
that belief. Give me sweet lies, and keep your bitter truths. He drank
his wine and thought of Shae. Later, when Ser Kevan paid his
nightly visit, Tyrion asked for Varys.
“You believe the eunuch will speak in your defense?”
“I won’t know until I have talked with him. Send him here, Uncle,
if you would be so good.”
“As you wish.”
Maesters Ballabar and Frenken opened the second day of trial.
They had opened King Jo rey’s noble corpse as well, they swore,
and found no morsel of pigeon pie nor any other food lodged in the
royal throat. “It was poison that killed him, my lords,” said
Ballabar, as Frenken nodded gravely.

Then they brought forth Grand Maester Pycelle, leaning heavily
on a twisted cane and shaking as he walked, a few white hairs
sprouting from his long chicken’s neck. He had grown too frail to
stand, so the judges permitted a chair to be brought in for him, and
a table as well. On the table were laid a number of small jars.
Pycelle was pleased to put a name to each.
“Greycap,” he said in a quavery voice, “from the toadstool.
Nightshade, sweetsleep, demon’s dance. This is blindeye. Widow’s
blood, this one is called, for the color. A cruel potion. It shuts down
a man’s bladder and bowels, until he drowns in his own poisons.
This wolfsbane, here basilisk venom, and this one the tears of Lys.
Yes. I know them all. The Imp Tyrion Lannister stole them from my
chambers, when he had me falsely imprisoned.”
“Pycelle,” Tyrion called out, risking his father’s wrath, “could any
of these poisons choke o a man’s breath?”
“No. For that, you must turn to a rarer poison. When I was a boy
at the Citadel, my teachers named it simply the strangler.”
“But this rare poison was not found, was it?”
“No, my lord.” Pycelle blinked at him. “You used it all to kill the
noblest child the gods ever put on this good earth.”
Tyrion’s anger overwhelmed his sense. “Jo rey was cruel and
stupid, but I did not kill him. Have my head o if you like, I had no
hand in my nephew’s death.”
“Silence!” Lord Tywin said. “I have told you thrice. The next time,
you shall be gagged and chained.”
After Pycelle came the procession, endless and wearisome. Lords
and ladies and noble knights, highborn and humble alike, they had
all been present at the wedding feast, had all seen Jo rey choke, his
face turning as black as a Dornish plum. Lord Redwyne, Lord
Celtigar, and Ser Flement Brax had heard Tyrion threaten the king;
two serving men, a juggler, Lord Gyles, Ser Hobber Redwyne, and
Ser Philip Foote had observed him ll the wedding chalice; Lady
Merryweather swore that she had seen the dwarf drop something
into the king’s wine while Jo and Margaery were cutting the pie;
old Estermont, young Peckledon, the singer Galyeon of Cuy, and
the squires Morros and Jothos Slynt told how Tyrion had picked up

the chalice as Jo was dying and poured out the last of the poisoned
wine onto the oor.
When did I make so many enemies? Lady Merryweather was all but
a stranger. Tyrion wondered if she was blind or bought. At least
Galyeon of Cuy had not set his account to music, or else there might
have been seventy-seven bloody verses to it.
When his uncle called that night after supper, his manner was
cold and distant. He thinks I did it too. “Do you have witnesses for
us?” Ser Kevan asked him.
“Not as such, no. Unless you’ve found my wife.”
His uncle shook his head. “It would seem the trial is going very
badly for you.”
“Oh, do you think so? I hadn’t noticed.” Tyrion ngered his scar.
“Varys has not come.”
“Nor will he. On the morrow he testi es against you.”
Lovely. “I see.” He shifted in his seat. “I am curious. You were
always a fair man, Uncle. What convinced you?”
“Why steal Pycelle’s poisons, if not to use them?” Ser Kevan said
bluntly. “And Lady Merryweather saw—”
“—nothing! There was nothing to see. But how do I prove that?
How do I prove anything, penned up here?”
“Perhaps the time has come for you to confess.”
Even through the thick stone walls of the Red Keep, Tyrion could
hear the steady wash of rain. “Say that again, Uncle? I could swear
you urged me to confess.”
“If you were to admit your guilt before the throne and repent of
your crime, your father would withhold the sword. You would be
permitted to take the black.”
Tyrion laughed in his face. “Those were the same terms Cersei
o ered Eddard Stark. We all know how that ended.”
“Your father had no part in that.”
That much was true, at least. “Castle Black teems with murderers,
thieves and rapists,” Tyrion said, “but I don’t recall meeting many
regicides while I was there. You expect me to believe that if I admit
to being a kinslayer and kingslayer, my father will simply nod,

forgive me, and pack me o to the Wall with some warm woolen
smallclothes.” He hooted rudely.
“Naught was said of forgiveness,” Ser Kevan said sternly. “A
confession would put this matter to rest. It is for that reason your
father sends me with this o er.”
“Thank him kindly for me, Uncle,” said Tyrion, “but tell him I am
not presently in a confessing mood.”
“Were I you, I’d change my mood. Your sister wants your head,
and Lord Tyrell at least is inclined to give it to her.”
“So one of my judges has already condemned me, without hearing
a word in my defense?” It was no more than he expected. “Will I
still be allowed to speak and present witnesses?”
“You have no witnesses,” his uncle reminded him. “Tyrion, if you
are guilty of this enormity, the Wall is a kinder fate than you
deserve. And if you are blameless … there is ghting in the north, I
know, but even so it will be a safer place for you than King’s
Landing, whatever the outcome of this trial. The mob is convinced
of your guilt. Were you so foolish as to venture out into the streets,
they would tear you limb from limb.”
“I can see how much that prospect upsets you.”
“You are my brother’s son.”
“You might remind him of that.”
“Do you think he would allow you to take the black if you were
not his own blood, and Joanna’s? Tywin seems a hard man to you, I
know, but he is no harder than he’s had to be. Our own father was
gentle and amiable, but so weak his bannermen mocked him in their
cups. Some saw t to defy him openly. Other lords borrowed our
gold and never troubled to repay it. At court they japed of toothless
lions. Even his mistress stole from him. A woman scarcely one step
above a whore, and she helped herself to my mother’s jewels! It fell
to Tywin to restore House Lannister to its proper place. Just as it
fell to him to rule this realm, when he was no more than twenty. He
bore that heavy burden for twenty years, and all it earned him was a
mad king’s envy. Instead of the honor he deserved, he was made to
su er slights beyond count, yet he gave the Seven Kingdoms peace,

plenty, and justice. He is a just man. You would be wise to trust
him.”
Tyrion blinked in astonishment. Ser Kevan had always been solid,
stolid, pragmatic; he had never heard him speak with such fervor
before. “You love him.”
“He is my brother.”
“I … I will think on what you’ve said.”
“Think carefully, then. And quickly.”
He thought of little else that night, but come morning was no
closer to deciding if his father could be trusted. A servant brought
him porridge and honey to break his fast, but all he could taste was
bile at the thought of confession. They will call me kinslayer till the
end of my days. For a thousand years or more, if I am remembered at
all, it will be as the monstrous dwarf who poisoned his young nephew at
his wedding feast. The thought made him so bloody angry that he
ung the bowl and spoon across the room and left a smear of
porridge on the wall. Ser Addam Marbrand looked at it curiously
when he came to escort Tyrion to trial, but had the good grace not
to inquire.
“Lord Varys,” the herald said, “master of whisperers.”
Powdered, primped, and smelling of rosewater, the Spider rubbed
his hands one over the other all the time he spoke. Washing my life
away, Tyrion thought, as he listened to the eunuch’s mournful
account of how the Imp had schemed to part Jo rey from the
Hound’s protection and spoken with Bronn of the bene ts of having
Tommen as king. Half-truths are worth more than outright lies. And
unlike the others, Varys had documents; parchments painstakingly
lled with notes, details, dates, whole conversations. So much
material that its recitation took all day, and so much of it damning.
Varys con rmed Tyrion’s midnight visit to Grand Maester Pycelle’s
chambers and the theft of his poisons and potions, con rmed the
threat he’d made to Cersei the night of their supper, con rmed
every bloody thing but the poisoning itself. When Prince Oberyn
asked him how he could possibly know all this, not having been
present at any of these events, the eunuch only giggled and said,
“My little birds told me. Knowing is their purpose, and mine.”

How do I question a little bird? thought Tyrion. I should have had the
eunuch’s head o my rst day in King’s Landing. Damn him. And damn
me for whatever trust I put in him.
“Have we heard it all?” Lord Tywin asked his daughter as Varys
left the hall.
“Almost,” said Cersei. “I beg your leave to bring one nal witness
before you, on the morrow.”
“As you wish,” Lord Tywin said.
Oh, good, thought Tyrion savagely. After this farce of a trial,
execution will almost come as a relief.
That night, as he sat by his window drinking, he heard voices
outside his door. Ser Kevan, come for my answer, he thought at once,
but it was not his uncle who entered.
Tyrion rose to give Prince Oberyn a mocking bow. “Are judges
permitted to visit the accused?”
“Princes are permitted to go where they will. Or so I told your
guards.” The Red Viper took a seat.
“My father will be displeased with you.”
“The happiness of Tywin Lannister has never been high on my list
of concerns. Is it Dornish wine you’re drinking?”
“From the Arbor.”
Oberyn made a face. “Red water. Did you poison him?”
“No. Did you?”
The prince smiled. “Do all dwarfs have tongues like yours?
Someone is going to cut it out one of these days.”
“You are not the rst to tell me that. Perhaps I should cut it out
myself, it seems to make no end of trouble.”
“So I’ve seen. I think I may drink some of Lord Redwyne’s grape
juice after all.”
“As you like.” Tyrion served him a cup.
The man took a sip, sloshed it about in his mouth, and swallowed.
“It will serve, for the moment. I will send you up some strong
Dornish wine on the morrow.” He took another sip. “I have turned
up that golden-haired whore I was hoping for.”
“So you found Chataya’s?”

“At Chataya’s I bedded the black-skinned girl. Alayaya, I believe
she is called. Exquisite, despite the stripes on her back. But the
whore I referred to is your sister.”
“Has she seduced you yet?” Tyrion asked, unsurprised.
Oberyn laughed aloud. “No, but she will if I meet her price. The
queen has even hinted at marriage. Her Grace needs another
husband, and who better than a prince of Dorne? Ellaria believes I
should accept. Just the thought of Cersei in our bed makes her wet,
the randy wench. And we should not even need to pay the dwarf’s
penny. All your sister requires from me is one head, somewhat
overlarge and missing a nose.”
“And?” said Tyrion, waiting.
By way of answer Prince Oberyn swirled his wine, and said,
“When the Young Dragon conquered Dorne so long ago, he left the
Lord of Highgarden to rule us after the Submission of Sunspear. This
Tyrell moved with his tail from keep to keep, chasing rebels and
making certain that our knees stayed bent. He would arrive in
force, take a castle for his own, stay a moon’s turn, and ride on to
the next castle. It was his custom to turn the lords out of their own
chambers and take their beds for himself. One night he found
himself beneath a heavy velvet canopy. A sash hung down near the
pillows, should he wish to summon a wench. He had a taste for
Dornish women, this Lord Tyrell, and who can blame him? So he
pulled upon the sash, and when he did the canopy above him split
open, and a hundred red scorpions fell down upon his head. His
death lit a re that soon swept across Dorne, undoing all the Young
Dragon’s victories in a fortnight. The kneeling men stood up, and
we were free again.”
“I know the tale,” said Tyrion. “What of it?”
“Just this. If I should ever nd a sash beside my own bed, and
pull on it, I would sooner have the scorpions fall upon me than the
queen in all her naked beauty.”
Tyrion grinned. “We have that much in common, then.”
“To be sure, I have much to thank your sister for. If not for her
accusation at the feast, it might well be you judging me instead of
me judging you.” The prince’s eyes were dark with amusement.

“Who knows more of poison than the Red Viper of Dorne, after all?
Who has better reason to want to keep the Tyrells far from the
crown? And with Jo rey in his grave, by Dornish law the Iron
Throne should pass next to his sister Myrcella, who as it happens is
betrothed to mine own nephew, thanks to you.”
“Dornish law does not apply.” Tyrion had been so ensnared in his
own troubles that he’d never stopped to consider the succession.
“My father will crown Tommen, count on that.”
“He may indeed crown Tommen, here in King’s Landing. Which is
not to say that my brother may not crown Myrcella, down in
Sunspear. Will your father make war on your niece on behalf of
your nephew? Will your sister?” He gave a shrug. “Perhaps I should
marry Queen Cersei after all, on the condition that she support her
daughter over her son. Do you think she would?”
Never, Tyrion wanted to say, but the word caught in his throat.
Cersei always resented being excluded from power on account of
her sex. If Dornish law applied in the west, she would be the heir to
Casterly Rock in her own right. She and Jaime were twins, but Cersei
had come rst into the world, and that was all it took. By
championing Myrcella’s cause she would be championing her own.
“I do not know how my sister would choose, between Tommen and
Myrcella,” he admitted. “It makes no matter. My father will never
give her that choice.”
“Your father,” said Prince Oberyn, “may not live forever.”
Something about the way he said it made the hairs on the back of
Tyrion’s neck bristle. Suddenly he was mindful of Elia again, and all
that Oberyn had said as they crossed the eld of ashes. He wants the
head that spoke the words, not just the hand that swung the sword. “It is
not wise to speak such treasons in the Red Keep, my prince. The
little birds are listening.”
“Let them. Is it treason to say a man is mortal? Valar morghulis
was how they said it in Valyria of old. All men must die. And the
Doom came and proved it true.” The Dornishman went to the
window to gaze out into the night. “It is being said that you have no
witnesses for us.”

“I was hoping one look at this sweet face of mine would be
enough to persuade you all of my innocence.”
“You are mistaken, my lord. The Fat Flower of Highgarden is
quite convinced of your guilt, and determined to see you die. His
precious Margaery was drinking from that chalice too, as he has
reminded us half a hundred times.”
“And you?” said Tyrion.
“Men are seldom as they appear. You look so very guilty that I
am convinced of your innocence. Still, you will likely be
condemned. Justice is in short supply this side of the mountains.
There has been none for Elia, Aegon, or Rhaenys. Why should there
be any for you? Perhaps Jo rey’s real killer was eaten by a bear.
That seems to happen quite often in King’s Landing. Oh, wait, the
bear was at Harrenhal, now I remember.”
“Is that the game we are playing?” Tyrion rubbed at his scarred
nose. He had nothing to lose by telling Oberyn the truth. “There was
a bear at Harrenhal, and it did kill Ser Amory Lorch.”
“How sad for him,” said the Red Viper. “And for you. Do all
noseless men lie so badly, I wonder?”
“I am not lying. Ser Amory dragged Princess Rhaenys out from
under her father’s bed and stabbed her to death. He had some menat-arms with him, but I do not know their names.” He leaned
forward. “It was Ser Gregor Clegane who smashed Prince Aegon’s
head against a wall and raped your sister Elia with his blood and
brains still on his hands.”
“What is this, now? Truth, from a Lannister?” Oberyn smiled
coldly. “Your father gave the commands, yes?”
“No.” He spoke the lie without hesitation, and never stopped to
ask himself why he should.
The Dornishman raised one thin black eyebrow. “Such a dutiful
son. And such a very feeble lie. It was Lord Tywin who presented
my sister’s children to King Robert all wrapped up in crimson
Lannister cloaks.”
“Perhaps you ought to have this discussion with my father. He
was there. I was at the Rock, and still so young that I thought the
thing between my legs was only good for pissing.”

“Yes, but you are here now, and in some di culty, I would say.
Your innocence may be as plain as the scar on your face, but it will
not save you. No more than your father will.” The Dornish prince
smiled. “But I might.”
“You?” Tyrion studied him. “You are one judge in three. How
could you save me?”
“Not as your judge. As your champion.”

JAIME

A white book sat on a white table in a white room.

The room was round, its walls of whitewashed stone hung with
white woolen tapestries. It formed the rst oor of White Sword
Tower, a slender structure of four stories built into an angle of the
castle wall overlooking the bay. The undercroft held arms and
armor, the second and third oors the small spare sleeping cells of
the six brothers of the Kingsguard.
One of those cells had been his for eighteen years, but this
morning he had moved his things to the topmost oor, which was
given over entirely to the Lord Commander’s apartments. Those
rooms were spare as well, though spacious; and they were above
the outer walls, which meant he would have a view of the sea. I will
like that, he thought. The view, and all the rest.
As pale as the room, Jaime sat by the book in his Kingsguard
whites, waiting for his Sworn Brothers. A longsword hung from his
hip. From the wrong hip. Before he had always worn his sword on his
left, and drawn it across his body when he unsheathed. He had
shifted it to his right hip this morning, so as to be able to draw it
with his left hand in the same manner, but the weight of it felt
strange there, and when he had tried to pull the blade from the
scabbard the whole motion seemed clumsy and unnatural. His
clothing t badly as well. He had donned the winter raiment of the
Kingsguard, a tunic and breeches of bleached white wool and a
heavy white cloak, but it all seemed to hang loose on him.

Jaime had spent his days at his brother’s trial, standing well to
the back of the hall. Either Tyrion never saw him there or he did
not know him, but that was no surprise. Half the court no longer
seemed to know him. I am a stranger in my own House. His son was
dead, his father had disowned him, and his sister … she had not
allowed him to be alone with her once, after that rst day in the
royal sept where Jo rey lay amongst the candles. Even when they
bore him across the city to his tomb in the Great Sept of Baelor,
Cersei kept a careful distance.
He looked about the Round Room once more. White wool
hangings covered the walls, and there was a white shield and two
crossed longswords mounted above the hearth. The chair behind the
table was old black oak, with cushions of blanched cowhide, the
leather worn thin. Worn by the bony arse of Barristan the Bold and Ser
Gerold Hightower before him, by Prince Aemon the Dragonknight, Ser
Ryam Redwyne, and the Demon of Darry, by Ser Duncan the Tall and
the Pale Gri n Alyn Connington. How could the Kingslayer belong in
such exalted company?
Yet here he was.
The table itself was old weirwood, pale as bone, carved in the
shape of a huge shield supported by three white stallions. By
tradition the Lord Commander sat at the top of the shield, and the
brothers three to a side, on the rare occasions when all seven were
assembled. The book that rested by his elbow was massive; two feet
tall and a foot and a half wide, a thousand pages thick, ne white
vellum bound between covers of bleached white leather with gold
hinges and fastenings. The Book of the Brothers was its formal name,
but more often it was simply called the White Book.
Within the White Book was the history of the Kingsguard. Every
knight who’d ever served had a page, to record his name and deeds
for all time. On the top left-hand corner of each page was drawn the
shield the man had carried at the time he was chosen, inked in rich
colors. Down in the bottom right corner was the shield of the
Kingsguard; snow-white, empty, pure. The upper shields were all
di erent; the lower shields were all the same. In the space between
were written the facts of each man’s life and service. The heraldic

drawings and illuminations were done by septons sent from the
Great Sept of Baelor three times a year, but it was the duty of the
Lord Commander to keep the entries up to date.
My duty, now. Once he learned to write with his left hand, that is.
The White Book was well behind. The deaths of Ser Mandon Moore
and Ser Preston Green eld needed to be entered, and the brief
bloody Kingsguard service of Sandor Clegane as well. New pages
must be started for Ser Balon Swann, Ser Osmund Kettleblack, and
the Knight of Flowers. I will need to summon a septon to draw their
shields.
Ser Barristan Selmy had preceded Jaime as Lord Commander. The
shield atop his page showed the arms of House Selmy: three stalks
of wheat, yellow, on a brown eld. Jaime was amused, though
unsurprised, to nd that Ser Barristan had taken the time to record
his own dismissal before leaving the castle.
Ser Barristan of House Selmy. Firstborn son of Ser Lyonel Selmy of
Harvest Hall. Served as squire to Ser Manfred Swann. Named “the Bold”
in his 10th year, when he donned borrowed armor to appear as a
mystery knight in the tourney at Blackhaven, where he was defeated and
unmasked by Duncan, Prince of Dragon ies. Knighted in his 16th year
by King Aegon V Targaryen, after performing great feats of prowess as a
mystery knight in the winter tourney at King’s Landing, defeating Prince
Duncan the Small and Ser Duncan the Tall, Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard. Slew Maelys the Monstrous, last of the Blackfyre Pretenders,
in single combat during the War of the Ninepenny Kings. Defeated
Lormelle Long Lance and Cedrik Storm, the Bastard of Bronzegate.
Named to the Kingsguard in his 23rd year, by Lord Commander Ser
Gerold Hightower. Defended the passage against all challengers in the
tourney of the Silver Bridge. Victor in the mêlée at Maidenpool. Brought
King Aerys II to safety during the De ance of Duskendale, despite an
arrow wound in the chest. Avenged the murder of his Sworn Brother, Ser
Gwayne Gaunt. Rescued Lady Jeyne Swann and her septa from the
Kingswood Brotherhood, defeating Simon Toyne and the Smiling Knight,
and slaying the former. In the Oldtown tourney, defeated and unmasked
the mystery knight Blackshield, revealing him as the Bastard of Uplands.
Sole champion of Lord Ste on’s tourney at Storm’s End, whereat he

unhorsed Lord Robert Baratheon, Prince Oberyn Martell, Lord Leyton
Hightower, Lord Jon Connington, Lord Jason Mallister, and Prince
Rhaegar Targaryen. Wounded by arrow, spear, and sword at the Battle
of the Trident whilst ghting beside his Sworn Brothers and Rhaegar
Prince of Dragonstone. Pardoned, and named Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard, by King Robert I Baratheon. Served in the honor guard that
brought Lady Cersei of House Lannister to King’s Landing to wed King
Robert. Led the attack on Old Wyk during Balon Greyjoy’s Rebellion.
Champion of the tourney at King’s Landing, in his 57th year. Dismissed
from service by King Jo rey I baratheon in his 61st year, for reasons of
advanced age.
The earlier part of Ser Barristan’s storied career had been entered
by Ser Gerold Hightower in a big forceful hand. Selmy’s own
smaller and more elegant writing took over with the account of his
wounding on the Trident.

Jaime’s own page was scant by comparison.
Ser Jaime of House Lannister. Firstborn son of Lord Tywin and Lady
Joanna of Casterly Rock. Served against the Kingswood Brotherhood as
squire to Lord Summer Crakehall. Knighted in his 15th year by Ser
Arthur Dayne of the Kingsguard, for valor in the eld. Chosen for the
Kingsguard in his 15th year by King Aerys II Targaryen. During the Sack
of King’s Landing, slew King Aerys II at the foot of the Iron Throne.
Thereafter known as the “Kingslayer.” Pardoned for his crime by King
Robert I Baratheon. Served in the honor guard that brought his sister the
Lady Cersei Lannister to King’s Landing to wed King Robert. Champion
in the tourney held at King’s Landing on the occasion of their wedding.
Summed up like that, his life seemed a rather scant and mingy
thing. Ser Barristan could have recorded a few of his other tourney
victories, at least. And Ser Gerold might have written a few more
words about the deeds he’d performed when Ser Arthur Dayne
broke the Kingswood Brotherhood. He had saved Lord Sumner’s life
as Big Belly Ben was about to smash his head in, though the outlaw
had escaped him. And he’d held his own against the Smiling Knight,
though it was Ser Arthur who slew him. What a ght that was, and
what a foe. The Smiling Knight was a madman, cruelty and chivalry

all jumbled up together, but he did not know the meaning of fear.
And Dayne, with Dawn in hand … The outlaw’s longsword had so
many notches by the end that Ser Arthur had stopped to let him
fetch a new one. “It’s that white sword of yours I want,” the robber
knight told him as they resumed, though he was bleeding from a
dozen wounds by then. “Then you shall have it, ser,” the Sword of
the Morning replied, and made an end of it.

The world was simpler in those days, Jaime thought, and men as well
as swords were made of ner steel. Or was it only that he had been
fteen? They were all in their graves now, the Sword of the
Morning and the Smiling Knight, the White Bull and Prince Lewyn,
Ser Oswell Whent with his black humor, earnest Jon Darry, Simon
Toyne and his Kingswood Brotherhood, blu old Sumner Crakehall.
And me, that boy I was … when did he die, I wonder? When I donned
the white cloak? When I opened Aerys’s throat? That boy had wanted
to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but someplace along the way he had
become the Smiling Knight instead.
When he heard the door open, he closed the White Book and
stood to receive his Sworn Brothers. Ser Osmund Kettleblack was
the rst to arrive. He gave Jaime a grin, as if they were old
brothers-in-arms. “Ser Jaime,” he said, “had you looked like this
t’other night, I’d have known you at once.”
“Would you indeed?” Jaime doubted that. The servants had
bathed him, shaved him, and washed and brushed his hair. When he
looked in a glass, he no longer saw the man who had crossed the
riverlands with Brienne … but he did not see himself either. His
face was thin and hollow, and he had lines under his eyes. I look like
some old man. “Stand by your seat, ser.”
Kettleblack complied. The other Sworn Brothers led in one by
one. “Sers,” Jaime said in a formal tone when all ve had
assembled, “who guards the king?”
“My brothers Ser Osney and Ser Osfryd,” Ser Osmund replied.
“And my brother Ser Garlan,” said the Knight of Flowers.
“Will they keep him safe?”
“They will, my lord.”

“Be seated, then.” The words were ritual. Before the seven could
meet in session, the king’s safety must be assured.
Ser Boros and Ser Meryn sat to his right, leaving an empty chair
between them for Ser Arys Oakheart, o in Dorne. Ser Osmund, Ser
Balon, and Ser Loras took the seats to his left. The old and the new.
Jaime wondered if that meant anything. There had been times
during its history where the Kingsguard had been divided against
itself, most notably and bitterly during the Dance of the Dragons.
Was that something he needed to fear as well?
It seemed queer to him to sit in the Lord Commander’s seat where
Barristan the Bold had sat for so many years. And even queerer to sit
here crippled. Nonetheless, it was his seat, and this was his
Kingsguard now. Tommen’s seven.
Jaime had served with Meryn Trant and Boros Blount for years;
adequate ghters, but Trant was sly and cruel, and Blount a bag of
growly air. Ser Balon Swann was better suited to his cloak, and of
course the Knight of Flowers was supposedly all a knight should be.
The fth man was a stranger to him, this Osmund Kettleblack.
He wondered what Ser Arthur Dayne would have to say of this
lot. “How is it that the Kingsguard has fallen so low,” most like. “It was
my doing,” I would have to answer. “I opened the door, and did nothing
when the vermin began to crawl inside.”
“The king is dead,” Jaime began. “My sister’s son, a boy of
thirteen, murdered at his own wedding feast in his own hall. All ve
of you were present. All ve of you were protecting him. And yet
he’s dead.” He waited to see what they would say to that, but none
of them so much as cleared a throat. The Tyrell boy is angry, and
Balon Swann’s ashamed, he judged. From the other three Jaime
sensed only indi erence. “Did my brother do this thing?” he asked
them bluntly. “Did Tyrion poison my nephew?”
Ser Balon shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Ser Boros made a st.
Ser Osmund gave a lazy shrug. It was Meryn Trant who nally
answered. “He lled Jo rey’s cup with wine. That must have been
when he slipped the poison in.”
“You are certain it was the wine that was poisoned?”

“What else?” said Ser Boros Blount. “The Imp emptied the dregs
on the oor. Why, but to spill the wine that might have proved him
guilty?”
“He knew the wine was poisoned,” said Ser Meryn.
Ser Balon Swann frowned. “The Imp was not alone on the dais.
Far from it. That late in the feast, we had people standing and
moving about, changing places, slipping o to the privy, servants
were coming and going … the king and queen had just opened the
wedding pie, every eye was on them or those thrice-damned doves.
No one was watching the wine cup.”
“Who else was on the dais?” asked Jaime.
Ser Meryn answered. “The king’s family, the bride’s family,
Grand Maester Pycelle, the High Septon …”
“There’s your poisoner,” suggested Ser Oswald Kettleblack with a
sly grin. “Too holy by half, that old man. Never liked the look o’
him, myself.” He laughed.
“No,” the Knight of Flowers said, unamused. “Sansa Stark was the
poisoner. You all forget, my sister was drinking from that chalice as
well. Sansa Stark was the only person in the hall who had reason to
want Margaery dead, as well as the king. By poisoning the wedding
cup, she could hope to kill both of them. And why did she run
afterward, unless she was guilty?”
The boy makes sense. Tyrion might yet be innocent. No one was any
closer to nding the girl, however. Perhaps Jaime should look into
that himself. For a start, it would be good to know how she had
gotten out of the castle. Varys may have a notion or two about that.
No one knew the Red Keep better than the eunuch.
That could wait, however. Just now Jaime had more immediate
concerns. You say you are the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, his
father had said. Go do your duty. These ve were not the brothers
he would have chosen, but they were the brothers he had; the time
had come to take them in hand.
“Whoever did it,” he told them, “Jo rey is dead, and the Iron
Throne belongs to Tommen now. I mean for him to sit on it until his
hair turns white and his teeth fall out. And not from poison.” Jaime
turned to Ser Boros Blount. The man had grown stout in recent

years, though he was big-boned enough to carry it. “Ser Boros, you
look like a man who enjoys his food. Henceforth you’ll taste
everything Tommen eats or drinks.”
Ser Osmund Kettleblack laughed aloud and the Knight of Flowers
smiled, but Ser Boros turned a deep beet red. “I am no food taster! I
am a knight of the Kingsguard!”
“Sad to say, you are.” Cersei should never have stripped the man
of his white cloak. But their father had only compounded the shame
by restoring it. “My sister has told me how readily you yielded my
nephew to Tyrion’s sellswords. You will nd carrots and pease less
threatening, I hope. When your Sworn Brothers are training in the
yard with sword and shield, you may train with spoon and trencher.
Tommen loves applecakes. Try not to let any sellswords make o
with them.”
“You speak to me thus? You?”
“You should have died before you let Tommen be taken.”
“As you died protecting Aerys, ser?” Ser Boros lurched to his feet,
and clasped the hilt of his sword. “I won’t … I won’t su er this. You
should be the food taster, it seems to me. What else is a cripple
good for?”
Jaime smiled. “I agree. I am as un t to guard the king as you are.
So draw that sword you’re fondling, and we shall see how your two
hands fare against my one. At the end one of us will be dead, and
the Kingsguard will be improved.” He rose. “Or, if you prefer, you
may return to your duties.”
“Bah!” Ser Boros hawked up a glob of green phlegm, spat it at
Jaime’s feet, and walked out, his sword still in its sheath.
The man is craven, and a good thing. Though fat, aging, and never
more than ordinary, Ser Boros could still have hacked him into
bloody pieces. But Boros does not know that, and neither must the rest.
They feared the man I was; the man I am they’d pity.
Jaime seated himself again and turned to Kettleblack. “Ser
Osmund. I do not know you. I nd that curious. I’ve fought in
tourneys, mêlées, and battles throughout the Seven Kingdoms. I
know of every hedge knight, freerider, and upjumped squire of any

skill who has ever presumed to break a lance in the lists. So how is
it that I have never heard of you, Ser Osmund?”
“That I couldn’t say, my lord.” He had a great wide smile on his
face, did Ser Osmund, as if he and Jaime were old comrades in arms
playing some jolly little game. “I’m a soldier, though, not no
tourney knight.”
“Where had you served, before my sister found you?”
“Here and there, my lord.”
“I have been to Oldtown in the south and Winterfell in the north.
I have been to Lannisport in the west, and King’s Landing in the
east. But I have never been to Here. Nor There.” For want of a
nger, Jaime pointed his stump at Ser Osmund’s beak of a nose. “I
will ask once more. Where have you served?”
“In the Stepstones. Some in the Disputed Lands. There’s always
ghting there. I rode with the Gallant Men. We fought for Lys, and
some for Tyrosh.”
You fought for anyone who would pay you. “How did you come by
your knighthood?”
“On a battle eld.”
“Who knighted you?”
“Ser Robert … Stone. He’s dead now, my lord.”
“To be sure.” Ser Robert Stone might have been some bastard
from the Vale, he supposed, selling his sword in the Disputed Lands.
On the other hand, he might be no more than a name Ser Osmund
cobbled together from a dead king and a castle wall. What was
Cersei thinking when she gave this one a white cloak?
At least Kettleblack would likely know how to use a sword and
shield. Sellswords were seldom the most honorable of men, but they
had to have a certain skill at arms to stay alive. “Very well, ser,”
Jaime said. “You may go.”
The man’s grin returned. He left swaggering.
“Ser Meryn.” Jaime smiled at the sour knight with the rust-red
hair and the pouches under his eyes. “I have heard it said that
Jo rey made use of you to chastise Sansa Stark.” He turned the
White Book around one-handed. “Here, show me where it is in our
vows that we swear to beat women and children.”

“I did as His Grace commanded me. We are sworn to obey.”
“Henceforth you will temper that obedience. My sister is Queen
Regent. My father is the King’s Hand. I am Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard. Obey us. None other.”
Ser Meryn got a stubborn look on his face. “Are you telling us not
to obey the king?”
“The king is eight. Our rst duty is to protect him, which includes
protecting him from himself. Use that ugly thing you keep inside
your helm. If Tommen wants you to saddle his horse, obey him. If
he tells you to kill his horse, come to me.”
“Aye. As you command, my lord.”
“Dismissed.” As he left, Jaime turned to Ser Balon Swann. “Ser
Balon, I have watched you tilt many a time, and fought with and
against you in mêlées. I’m told you proved your valor a hundred
times over during the Battle of the Blackwater. The Kingsguard is
honored by your presence.”
“The honor’s mine, my lord.” Ser Balon sounded wary.
“There is only one question I would put to you. You served us
loyally, it’s true … but Varys tells me that your brother rode with
Renly and then Stannis, whilst your lord father chose not to call his
banners at all and remained behind the walls of Stonehelm all
through the ghting.”
“My father is an old man, my lord. Well past forty. His ghting
days are done.”
“And your brother?”
“Donnel was wounded in the battle and yielded to Ser Elwood
Harte. He was ransomed afterward and pledged his fealty to King
Jo rey, as did many other captives.”
“So he did,” said Jaime. “Even so … Renly, Stannis, Jo rey,
Tommen … how did he come to omit Balon Greyjoy and Robb
Stark? He might have been the rst knight in the realm to swear
fealty to all six kings.”
Ser Balon’s unease was plain. “Donnel erred, but he is Tommen’s
man now. You have my word.”
“It’s not Ser Donnel the Constant who concerns me. It’s you.”
Jaime leaned forward. “What will you do if brave Ser Donnel gives

his sword to yet another usurper, and one day comes storming into
the throne room? And there you stand all in white, between your
king and your blood. What will you do?”
“I … my lord, that will never happen.”
“It happened to me,” Jaime said.
Swann wiped his brow with the sleeve of his white tunic.
“You have no answer?”
“My lord.” Ser Balon drew himself up. “On my sword, on my
honor, on my father’s name, I swear … I shall not do as you did.”
Jaime laughed. “Good. Return to your duties … and tell Ser
Donnel to add a weathervane to his shield.”
And then he was alone with the Knight of Flowers.
Slim as a sword, lithe and t, Ser Loras Tyrell wore a snowy linen
tunic and white wool breeches, with a gold belt around his waist
and a gold rose clasping his ne silk cloak. His hair was a soft
brown tumble, and his eyes were brown as well, and bright with
insolence. He thinks this is a tourney, and his tilt has just been called.
“Seventeen and a knight of the Kingsguard,” said Jaime. “You must
be proud. Prince Aemon the Dragonknight was seventeen when he
was named. Did you know that?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And did you know that I was fteen?”
“That as well, my lord.” He smiled.
Jaime hated that smile. “I was better than you, Ser Loras. I was
bigger, I was stronger, and I was quicker.”
“And now you’re older,” the boy said. “My lord.”
He had to laugh. This is too absurd. Tyrion would mock me
unmercifully if he could hear me now, comparing cocks with this green
boy. “Older and wiser, ser. You should learn from me.”
“As you learned from Ser Boros and Ser Meryn?”
That arrow hit too close to the mark. “I learned from the White
Bull and Barristan the Bold,” Jaime snapped. “I learned from Ser
Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, who could have slain all
ve of you with his left hand while he was taking a piss with the
right. I learned from Prince Lewyn of Dorne and Ser Oswell Whent
and Ser Jonothor Darry, good men every one.”

“Dead men, every one.”
He’s me, Jaime realized suddenly. I am speaking to myself, as I was,
all cocksure arrogance and empty chivalry. This is what it does to you, to
be too good too young.
As in a sword ght, sometimes it is best to try a di erent stroke.
“It’s said you fought magni cently in the battle … almost as well as
Lord Renly’s ghost beside you. A Sworn Brother has no secrets from
his Lord Commander. Tell me, ser. Who was wearing Renly’s
armor?”
For a moment Loras Tyrell looked as though he might refuse, but
in the end he remembered his vows. “My brother,” he said sullenly.
“Renly was taller than me, and broader in the chest. His armor was
too loose on me, but it suited Garlan well.”
“Was the masquerade your notion, or his?”
“Lord Little nger suggested it. He said it would frighten Stannis’s
ignorant men-at-arms.”
“And so it did.” And some knights and lordlings too. “Well, you
gave the singers something to make rhymes about, I suppose that’s
not to be despised. What did you do with Renly?”
“I buried him with mine own hands, in a place he showed me
once when I was a squire at Storm’s End. No one shall ever nd him
there to disturb his rest.” He looked at Jaime de antly. “I will
defend King Tommen with all my strength, I swear it. I will give
my life for his if need be. But I will never betray Renly, by word or
deed. He was the king that should have been. He was the best of
them.”
The best dressed perhaps, Jaime thought, but for once he did not
say it. The arrogance had gone out of Ser Loras the moment he
began to speak of Renly. He answered truly. He is proud and reckless
and full of piss, but he is not false. Not yet. “As you say. One more
thing, and you may return to your duties.”
“Yes, my lord?”
“I still have Brienne of Tarth in a tower cell.”
The boy’s mouth hardened. “A black cell would be better.”
“You are certain that’s what she deserves?”

“She deserves death. I told Renly that a woman had no place in
the Rainbow Guard. She won the mêlée with a trick.”
“I seem to recall another knight who was fond of tricks. He once
rode a mare in heat against a foe mounted on a bad-tempered
stallion. What sort of trickery did Brienne use?”
Ser Loras ushed. “She leapt … it makes no matter. She won, I
grant her that. His Grace put a rainbow cloak around her shoulders.
And she killed him. Or let him die.”
“A large di erence there.” The di erence between my crime and the
shame of Boros Blount.
“She had sworn to protect him. Ser Emmon Cuy, Ser Robar
Royce, Ser Parmen Crane, they’d sworn as well. How could anyone
have hurt him, with her inside his tent and the others just outside?
Unless they were part of it.”
“There were ve of you at the wedding feast,” Jaime pointed out.
“How could Jo rey die? Unless you were part of it?”
Ser Loras drew himself up sti y. “There was nothing we could
have done.”
“The wench says the same. She grieves for Renly as you do. I
promise you, I never grieve for Aerys. Brienne’s ugly, and pighead
stubborn. But she lacks the wits to be a liar, and she is loyal past the
point of sense. She swore an oath to bring me to King’s Landing,
and here I sit. This hand I lost … well, that was my doing as much
as hers. Considering all she did to protect me, I have no doubt that
she would have fought for Renly, had there been a foe to ght. But
a shadow?” Jaime shook his head. “Draw your sword, Ser Loras.
Show me how you’d ght a shadow. I should like to see that.”
Ser Loras made no move to rise. “She ed,” he said. “She and
Catelyn Stark, they left him in his blood and ran. Why would they,
if it was not their work?” He stared at the table. “Renly gave me
the van. Otherwise it would have been me helping him don his
armor. He often entrusted that task to me. We had … we had
prayed together that night. I left him with her. Ser Parmen and Ser
Emmon were guarding the tent, and Ser Robar Royce was there as
well. Ser Emmon swore Brienne had … although …”
“Yes?” Jaime prompted, sensing a doubt.

“The gorget was cut through. One clean stroke, through a steel
gorget. Renly’s armor was the best, the nest steel. How could she
do that? I tried myself, and it was not possible. She’s freakish strong
for a woman, but even the Mountain would have needed a heavy
axe. And why armor him and then cut his throat?” He gave Jaime a
confused look. “If not her, though … how could it be a shadow?”
“Ask her.” Jaime came to a decision. “Go to her cell. Ask your
questions and hear her answers. If you are still convinced that she
murdered Lord Renly, I will see that she answers for it. The choice
will be yours. Accuse her, or release her. All I ask is that you judge
her fairly, on your honor as a knight.”
Ser Loras stood. “I shall. On my honor.”
“We are done, then.”
The younger man started for the door. But there he turned back.
“Renly thought she was absurd. A woman dressed in man’s mail,
pretending to be a knight.”
“If he’d ever seen her in pink satin and Myrish lace, he would not
have complained.”
“I asked him why he kept her close, if he thought her so
grotesque. He said that all his other knights wanted things of him,
castles or honors or riches, but all that Brienne wanted was to die
for him. When I saw him all bloody, with her ed and the three of
them unharmed … if she’s innocent, then Robar and Emmon …” He
could not seem to say the words.
Jaime had not stopped to consider that aspect of it. “I would have
done the same, ser.” The lie came easy, but Ser Loras seemed
grateful for it.
When he was gone, the Lord Commander sat alone in the white
room, wondering. The Knight of Flowers had been so mad with
grief for Renly that he had cut down two of his own Sworn
Brothers, but it had never occurred to Jaime to do the same with
the ve who had failed Jo rey. He was my son, my secret
son … What am I, if I do not lift the hand I have left to avenge mine
own blood and seed? He ought to kill Ser Boros at least, just to be rid
of him.

He looked at his stump and grimaced. I must do something about
that. If the late Ser Jacelyn Bywater could wear an iron hand, he
should have a gold one. Cersei might like that. A golden hand to stroke
her golden hair, and hold her hard against me.
His hand could wait, though. There were other things to tend to
rst. There were other debts to pay.

SANSA

The ladder to the forecastle was steep and splintery, so Sansa

accepted a hand up from Lothor Brune. Ser Lothor, she had to
remind herself; the man had been knighted for his valor in the
Battle of the Blackwater. Though no proper knight would wear
those patched brown breeches and scu ed boots, nor that cracked
and water-stained leather jerkin. A square-faced stocky man with a
squashed nose and a mat of nappy grey hair, Brune spoke seldom.
He is stronger than he looks, though. She could tell by the ease with
which he lifted her, as if she weighed nothing at all.
O the bow of the Merling King stretched a bare and stony strand,
windswept, treeless, and uninviting. Even so, it made a welcome
sight. They had been a long while clawing their way back on
course. The last storm had swept them out of sight of land, and sent
such waves crashing over the sides of the galley that Sansa had been
certain they were all going to drown. Two men had been swept
overboard, she had heard old Oswell saying, and another had fallen
from the mast and broken his neck.
She had seldom ventured out on deck herself. Her little cabin was
dank and cold, but Sansa had been sick for most of the
voyage … sick with terror, sick with fever, or seasick … she could
keep nothing down, and even sleep came hard. Whenever she closed
her eyes she saw Jo rey tearing at his collar, clawing at the soft
skin of his throat, dying with akes of pie crust on his lips and wine
stains on his doublet. And the wind keening in the lines reminded

her of the terrible thin sucking sound he’d made as he fought to
draw in air. Sometimes she dreamed of Tyrion as well. “He did
nothing,” she told Little nger once, when he paid a visit to her
cabin to see if she were feeling any better.
“He did not kill Jo rey, true, but the dwarf’s hands are far from
clean. He had a wife before you, did you know that?”
“He told me.”
“And did he tell you that when he grew bored with her, he made
a gift of her to his father’s guardsmen? He might have done the
same to you, in time. Shed no tears for the Imp, my lady.”
The wind ran salty ngers through her hair, and Sansa shivered.
Even this close to shore, the rolling of the ship made her tummy
queasy. She desperately needed a bath and a change of clothes. I
must look as haggard as a corpse, and smell of vomit.
Lord Petyr came up beside her, cheerful as ever. “Good morrow.
The salt air is bracing, don’t you think? It always sharpens my
appetite.” He put a sympathetic arm about her shoulders. “Are you
quite well? You look so pale.”
“It’s only my tummy. The seasickness.”
“A little wine will be good for that. We’ll get you a cup, as soon
as we’re ashore.” Petyr pointed to where an old int tower stood
outlined against a bleak grey sky, the breakers crashing on the
rocks beneath it. “Cheerful, is it not? I fear there’s no safe
anchorage here. We’ll put ashore in a boat.”
“Here?” She did not want to go ashore here. The Fingers were a
dismal place, she’d heard, and there was something forlorn and
desolate about the little tower. “Couldn’t I stay on the ship until we
make sail for White Harbor?”
“From here the King turns east for Braavos. Without us.”
“But … my lord, you said … you said we were sailing home.”
“And there it stands, miserable as it is. My ancestral home. It has
no name, I fear. A great lord’s seat ought to have a name, wouldn’t
you agree? Winterfell, the Eyrie, Riverrun, those are castles. Lord of
Harrenhal now, that has a sweet ring to it, but what was I before?
Lord of Sheepshit and Master of the Drearfort? It lacks a certain
something.” His grey-green eyes regarded her innocently. “You look

distraught. Did you think we were making for Winterfell,
sweetling? Winterfell has been taken, burned, and sacked. All those
you knew and loved are dead. What northmen who have not fallen
to the ironmen are warring amongst themselves. Even the Wall is
under attack. Winterfell was the home of your childhood, Sansa, but
you are no longer a child. You’re a woman grown, and you need to
make your own home.”
“But not here,” she said, dismayed. “It looks so …”
“… small and bleak and mean? It’s all that, and less. The Fingers
are a lovely place, if you happen to be a stone. But have no fear, we
shan’t stay more than a fortnight. I expect your aunt is already
riding to meet us.” He smiled. “The Lady Lysa and I are to be wed.”
“Wed?” Sansa was stunned. “You and my aunt?”
“The Lord of Harrenhal and the Lady of the Eyrie.”
You said it was my mother you loved. But of course Lady Catelyn
was dead, so even if she had loved Petyr secretly and given him her
maidenhood, it made no matter now.
“So silent, my lady?” said Petyr. “I was certain you would wish to
give me your blessing. It is a rare thing for a boy born heir to
stones and sheep pellets to wed the daughter of Hoster Tully and
the widow of Jon Arryn.”
“I … I pray you will have long years together, and many children,
and be very happy in one another.” It had been years since Sansa
last saw her mother’s sister. She will be kind to me for my mother’s
sake, surely. She’s my own blood. And the Vale of Arryn was
beautiful, all the songs said so. Perhaps it would not be so terrible
to stay here for a time.
Lothor and old Oswell rowed them ashore. Sansa huddled in the
bow under her cloak with the hood drawn up against the wind,
wondering what awaited her. Servants emerged from the tower to
meet them; a thin old woman and a fat middle-aged one, two
ancient white-haired men, and a girl of two or three with a sty on
one eye. When they recognized Lord Petyr they knelt on the rocks.
“My household,” he said. “I don’t know the child. Another of Kella’s
bastards, I suppose. She pops one out every few years.”

The two old men waded out up to their thighs to lift Sansa from
the boat so she would not get her skirts wet. Oswell and Lothor
splashed their way ashore, as did Little nger himself. He gave the
old woman a kiss on the cheek and grinned at the younger one.
“Who fathered this one, Kella?”
The fat woman laughed. “I can’t rightly say, m’lord. I’m not one
for telling them no.”
“And all the local lads are grateful, I am quite sure.”
“It is good to have you home, my lord,” said one old man. He
looked to be at least eighty, but he wore a studded brigantine and a
longsword at his side. “How long will you be in residence?”
“As short a time as possible, Bryen, have no fear. Is the place
habitable just now, would you say?”
“If we knew you was coming we would have laid down fresh
rushes, m’lord,” said the crone. “There’s a dung re burning.”
“Nothing says home like the smell of burning dung.” Petyr turned
to Sansa. “Grisel was my wet nurse, but she keeps my castle now.
Umfred’s my steward, and Bryen—didn’t I name you captain of the
guard the last time I was here?”
“You did, my lord. You said you’d be getting some more men too,
but you never did. Me and the dogs stand all the watches.”
“And very well, I’m sure. No one has made o with any of my
rocks or sheep pellets, I see that plainly.” Petyr gestured toward the
fat woman. “Kella minds my vast herds. How many sheep do I have
at present, Kella?”
She had to think a moment. “Three and twenty, m’lord. There
was nine and twenty, but Bryen’s dogs killed one and we butchered
some others and salted down the meat.”
“Ah, cold salt mutton. I must be home. When I break my fast on
gulls’ eggs and seaweed soup, I’ll be certain of it.”
“If you like, m’lord,” said the old woman Grisel.
Lord Petyr made a face. “Come, let’s see if my hall is as dreary as
I recall.” He led them up the strand over rocks slick with rotting
seaweed. A handful of sheep were wandering about the base of the
int tower, grazing on the thin grass that grew between the

sheepfold and thatched stable. Sansa had to step carefully; there
were pellets everywhere.
Within, the tower seemed even smaller. An open stone stair
wound round the inside wall, from undercroft to roof. Each oor
was but a single room. The servants lived and slept in the kitchen at
ground level, sharing the space with a huge brindled masti and a
half-dozen sheep-dogs. Above that was a modest hall, and higher
still the bedchamber. There were no windows, but arrowslits were
embedded in the outer wall at intervals along the curve of the stair.
Above the hearth hung a broken longsword and a battered oaken
shield, its paint cracked and aking.
The device painted on the shield was one Sansa did not know; a
grey stone head with ery eyes, upon a light green eld. “My
grandfather’s shield,” Petyr explained when he saw her gazing at it.
“His own father was born in Braavos and came to the Vale as a
sellsword in the hire of Lord Corbray, so my grandfather took the
head of the Titan as his sigil when he was knighted.”
“It’s very erce,” said Sansa.
“Rather too erce, for an amiable fellow like me,” said Petyr. “I
much prefer my mockingbird.”
Oswell made two more trips out to the Merling King to o oad
provisions. Among the loads he brought ashore were several casks
of wine. Petyr poured Sansa a cup, as promised. “Here, my lady,
that should help your tummy, I would hope.”
Having solid ground beneath her feet had helped already, but
Sansa dutifully lifted the goblet with both hands and took a sip. The
wine was very ne; an Arbor vintage, she thought. It tasted of oak
and fruit and hot summer nights, the avors blossoming in her
mouth like owers opening to the sun. She only prayed that she
could keep it down. Lord Petyr was being so kind, she did not want
to spoil it all by retching on him.
He was studying her over his own goblet, his bright grey-green
eyes full of … was it amusement? Or something else? Sansa was not
certain. “Grisel,” he called to the old woman, “bring some food up.
Nothing too heavy, my lady has a tender tummy. Some fruit might

serve, perhaps. Oswell’s brought some oranges and pomegranates
from the King.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
“Might I have a hot bath as well?” asked Sansa.
“I’ll have Kella draw some water, m’lady.”
Sansa took another sip of wine and tried to think of some polite
conversation, but Lord Petyr saved her the e ort. When Grisel and
the other servants had gone, he said, “Lysa will not come alone.
Before she arrives, we must be clear on who you are.”
“Who I … I don’t understand.”
“Varys has informers everywhere. If Sansa Stark should be seen in
the Vale, the eunuch will know within a moon’s turn, and that
would create unfortunate … complications. It is not safe to be a
Stark just now. So we shall tell Lysa’s people that you are my
natural daughter.”
“Natural?” Sansa was aghast. “You mean, a bastard?”
“Well, you can scarcely be my trueborn daughter. I’ve never
taken a wife, that’s well known. What should you be called?”
“I … I could call myself after my mother …”
“Catelyn? A bit too obvious … but after my mother, that would
serve. Alayne. Do you like it?”
“Alayne is pretty.” Sansa hoped she would remember. “But
couldn’t I be the trueborn daughter of some knight in your service?
Perhaps he died gallantly in the battle, and …”
“I have no gallant knights in my service, Alayne. Such a tale
would draw unwanted questions as a corpse draws crows. It is rude
to pry into the origins of a man’s natural children, however.” He
cocked his head. “So, who are you?”
“Alayne … Stone, would it be?” When he nodded, she said, “But
who is my mother?”
“Kella?”
“Please no,” she said, morti ed.
“I was teasing. Your mother was a gentlewoman of Braavos,
daughter of a merchant prince. We met in Gulltown when I had
charge of the port. She died giving you birth, and entrusted you to
the Faith. I have some devotional books you can look over. Learn to

quote from them. Nothing discourages unwanted questions as much
as a ow of pious bleating. In any case, at your owering you
decided you did not wish to be a septa and wrote to me. That was
the rst I knew of your existence.” He ngered his beard. “Do you
think you can remember all that?”
“I hope. It will be like playing a game, won’t it?”
“Are you fond of games, Alayne?”
The new name would take some getting used to. “Games? I … I
suppose it would depend …”
Grisel reappeared before he could say more, balancing a large
platter. She set it down between them. There were apples and pears
and pomegranates, some sad-looking grapes, a huge blood orange.
The old woman had brought a round of bread as well, and a crock
of butter. Petyr cut a pomegranate in two with his dagger, o ering
half to Sansa. “You should try and eat, my lady.”
“Thank you, my lord.” Pomegranate seeds were so messy; Sansa
chose a pear instead, and took a small delicate bite. It was very
ripe. The juice ran down her chin.
Lord Petyr loosened a seed with the point of his dagger. “You
must miss your father terribly, I know. Lord Eddard was a brave
man, honest and loyal … but quite a hopeless player.” He brought
the seed to his mouth with the knife. “In King’s Landing, there are
two sorts of people. The players and the pieces.”
“And I was a piece?” She dreaded the answer.
“Yes, but don’t let that trouble you. You’re still half a child. Every
man’s a piece to start with, and every maid as well. Even some who
think they are players.” He ate another seed. “Cersei, for one. She
thinks herself sly, but in truth she is utterly predictable. Her
strength rests on her beauty, birth, and riches. Only the rst of
those is truly her own, and it will soon desert her. I pity her then.
She wants power, but has no notion what to do with it when she
gets it. Everyone wants something, Alayne. And when you know
what a man wants you know who he is, and how to move him.”
“As you moved Ser Dontos to poison Jo rey?” It had to have been
Dontos, she had concluded.

Little nger laughed. “Ser Dontos the Red was a skin of wine with
legs. He could never have been trusted with a task of such
enormity. He would have bungled it or betrayed me. No, all Dontos
had to do was lead you from the castle … and make certain you
wore your silver hair net.”
The black amethysts. “But … if not Dontos, who? Do you have
other … pieces?”
“You could turn King’s Landing upside down and not nd a single
man with a mockingbird sewn over his heart, but that does not
mean I am friendless.” Petyr went to the steps. “Oswell, come up
here and let the Lady Sansa have a look at you.”
The old man appeared a few moments later, grinning and bowing.
Sansa eyed him uncertainly. “What am I supposed to see?”
“Do you know him?” asked Petyr.
“No.”
“Look closer.”
She studied the old man’s lined windburnt face, hook nose, white
hair, and huge knuckly hands. There was something familiar about
him, yet Sansa had to shake her head. “I don’t. I never saw Oswell
before I got into his boat, I’m certain.”
Oswell grinned, showing a mouth of crooked teeth. “No, but
m’lady might of met my three sons.”
It was the “three sons,” and that smile too. “Kettleblack!” Sansa’s
eyes went wide. “You’re a Kettleblack!”
“Aye, m’lady, as it please you.”
“She’s beside herself with joy.” Lord Petyr dismissed him with a
wave, and returned to the pomegranate again as Oswell shu ed
down the steps. “Tell me, Alayne—which is more dangerous, the
dagger brandished by an enemy, or the hidden one pressed to your
back by someone you never even see?”
“The hidden dagger.”
“There’s a clever girl.” He smiled, his thin lips bright red from the
pomegranate seeds. “When the Imp sent o her guards, the queen
had Ser Lancel hire sellswords for her. Lancel found her the
Kettleblacks, which delighted your little lord husband, since the lads
were in his pay through his man Bronn.” He chuckled. “But it was

me who told Oswell to get his sons to King’s Landing when I
learned that Bronn was looking for swords. Three hidden daggers,
Alayne, now perfectly placed.”
“So one of the Kettleblacks put the poison in Jo ’s cup?” Ser
Osmund had been near the king all night, she remembered.
“Did I say that?” Lord Petyr cut the blood orange in two with his
dagger and o ered half to Sansa. “The lads are far too treacherous
to be part of any such scheme … and Osmund has become especially
unreliable since he joined the Kingsguard. That white cloak does
things to a man, I nd. Even a man like him.” He tilted his chin
back and squeezed the blood orange, so the juice ran down into his
mouth. “I love the juice but I loathe the sticky ngers,” he
complained, wiping his hands. “Clean hands, Sansa. Whatever you
do, make certain your hands are clean.”
Sansa spooned up some juice from her own orange. “But if it
wasn’t the Kettleblacks and it wasn’t Ser Dontos … you weren’t
even in the city, and it couldn’t have been Tyrion …”
“No more guesses, sweetling?”
She shook her head. “I don’t …”
Petyr smiled. “I will wager you that at some point during the
evening someone told you that your hair net was crooked and
straightened it for you.”
Sansa raised a hand to her mouth. “You cannot mean … she
wanted to take me to Highgarden, to marry me to her grandson …”
“Gentle, pious, good-hearted Willas Tyrell. Be grateful you were
spared, he would have bored you spitless. The old woman is not
boring, though, I’ll grant her that. A fearsome old harridan, and not
near as frail as she pretends. When I came to Highgarden to dicker
for Margaery’s hand, she let her lord son bluster while she asked
pointed questions about Jo rey’s nature. I praised him to the skies,
to be sure … whilst my men spread disturbing tales amongst Lord
Tyrell’s servants. That is how the game is played.
“I also planted the notion of Ser Loras taking the white. Not that I
suggested it, that would have been too crude. But men in my party
supplied grisly tales about how the mob had killed Ser Preston
Green eld and raped the Lady Lollys, and slipped a few silvers to

Lord Tyrell’s army of singers to sing of Ryam Redwyne, Serwyn of
the Mirror Shield, and Prince Aemon the Dragonknight. A harp can
be as dangerous as a sword, in the right hands.
“Mace Tyrell actually thought it was his own idea to make Ser
Loras’s inclusion in the Kingsguard part of the marriage contract.
Who better to protect his daughter than her splendid knightly
brother? And it relieved him of the di cult task of trying to nd
lands and a bride for a third son, never easy, and doubly di cult in
Ser Loras’s case.
“Be that as it may. Lady Olenna was not about to let Jo harm
her precious darling granddaughter, but unlike her son she also
realized that under all his owers and nery, Ser Loras is as hottempered as Jaime Lannister. Toss Jo rey, Margaery, and Loras in a
pot, and you’ve got the makings for kingslayer stew. The old
woman understood something else as well. Her son was determined
to make Margaery a queen, and for that he needed a king … but he
did not need Jo rey. We shall have another wedding soon, wait and
see. Margaery will marry Tommen. She’ll keep her queenly crown
and her maidenhead, neither of which she especially wants, but
what does that matter? The great western alliance will be
preserved … for a time, at least.”
Margaery and Tommen. Sansa did not know what to say. She had
liked Margaery Tyrell, and her small sharp grandmother as well.
She thought wistfully of Highgarden with its courtyards and
musicians, and the pleasure barges on the Mander; a far cry from
this bleak shore. At least I am safe here. Jo rey is dead, he cannot hurt
me anymore, and I am only a bastard girl now. Alayne Stone has no
husband and no claim. And her aunt would soon be here as well. The
long nightmare of King’s Landing was behind her, and her mockery
of a marriage as well. She could make herself a new home here, just
as Petyr said.
It was eight long days until Lysa Arryn arrived. On ve of them it
rained, while Sansa sat bored and restless by the re, beside the old
blind dog. He was too sick and toothless to walk guard with Bryen
anymore, and mostly all he did was sleep, but when she patted him
he whined and licked her hand, and after that they were fast

friends. When the rains let up, Petyr walked with her around his
holdings, which took less than half a day. He owned a lot of rocks,
just as he had said. There was one place where the tide came jetting
up out of a blowhole to shoot thirty feet into the air, and another
where someone had chiseled the seven-pointed star of the new gods
upon a boulder. Petyr said that marked one of the places the Andals
had landed, when they came across the sea to wrest the Vale from
the First Men.
Farther inland a dozen families lived in huts of piled stone beside
a peat bog. “Mine own smallfolk,” Petyr said, though only the
oldest seemed to know him. There was a hermit’s cave on his land
as well, but no hermit. “He’s dead now, but when I was a boy my
father took me to see him. The man had not washed in forty years,
so you can imagine how he smelled, but supposedly he had the gift
of prophecy. He groped me a bit and said I would be a great man,
and for that my father gave him a skin of wine.” Petyr snorted. “I
would have told him the same thing for half a cup.”
Finally, on a grey windy afternoon, Bryen came running back to
the tower with his dogs barking at his heels, to announce that riders
were approaching from the southwest. “Lysa,” Lord Petyr said.
“Come, Alayne, let us greet her.”
They put on their cloaks and waited outside. The riders numbered
no more than a score; a very modest escort, for the Lady of the
Eyrie. Three maids rode with her, and a dozen household knights in
mail and plate. She brought a septon as well, and a handsome singer
with a wisp of a mustache and long sandy curls.
Could that be my aunt? Lady Lysa was two years younger than
Mother, but this woman looked ten years older. Thick auburn
tresses fell down past her waist, but beneath the costly velvet gown
and jeweled bodice her body sagged and bulged. Her face was pink
and painted, her breasts heavy, her limbs thick. She was taller than
Little nger, and heavier; nor did she show any grace in the clumsy
way she climbed down o her horse.
Petyr knelt to kiss her ngers. “The king’s small council
commanded me to woo and win you, my lady. Do you think you
might have me for your lord and husband?”

Lady Lysa pooched her lips and pulled him up to plant a kiss upon
his cheek. “Oh, mayhaps I could be persuaded.” She giggled. “Have
you brought gifts to melt my heart?”
“The king’s peace.”
“Oh, poo to the peace, what else have you brought me?”
“My daughter.” Little nger beckoned Sansa forward with a hand.
“My lady, allow me to present you Alayne Stone.”
Lysa Arryn did not seem greatly pleased to see her. Sansa did a
deep curtsy, her head bowed. “A bastard?” she heard her aunt say.
“Petyr, have you been wicked? Who was her mother?”
“The wench is dead. I’d hoped to take Alayne to the Eyrie.”
“What am I to do with her there?”
“I have a few notions,” said Lord Petyr. “But just now I am more
interested in what I might do with you, my lady.”
All the sternness melted o her aunt’s round pink face, and for a
moment Sansa thought Lysa Arryn was about to cry. “Sweet Petyr,
I’ve missed you so, you don’t know, you can’t know. Yohn Royce
has been stirring up all sorts of trouble, demanding that I call my
banners and go to war. And the others all swarm around me, Hunter
and Corbray and that dreadful Nestor Royce, all wanting to wed me
and take my son to ward, but none of them truly love me. Only
you, Petyr. I’ve dreamed of you so long.”
“And I of you, my lady.” He slid an arm around behind her and
kissed her on the neck. “How soon can we be wed?”
“Now,” said Lady Lysa, sighing. “I’ve brought my own septon,
and a singer, and mead for the wedding feast.”
“Here?” That did not please him. “I’d sooner wed you at the
Eyrie, with your whole court in attendance.”
“Poo to my court. I have waited so long, I could not bear to wait
another moment.” She put her arms around him. “I want to share
your bed tonight, my sweet. I want us to make another child, a
brother for Robert or a sweet little daughter.”
“I dream of that as well, sweetling. Yet there is much to be
gained from a great public wedding, with all the Vale—”
“No.” She stamped a foot. “I want you now, this very night. And I
must warn you, after all these years of silence and whisperings, I

mean to scream when you love me. I am going to scream so loud
they’ll hear me in the Eyrie!”
“Perhaps I could bed you now, and wed you later?”
The Lady Lysa giggled like a girl. “Oh, Petyr Baelish, you are so
wicked. No, I say no, I am the Lady of the Eyrie, and I command
you to wed me this very moment!”
Petyr gave a shrug. “As my lady commands, then. I am helpless
before you, as ever.”
They said their vows within the hour, standing beneath a sky-blue
canopy as the sun sank in the west. Afterward trestle tables were set
up beneath the small int tower, and they feasted on quail, venison,
and roast boar, washing it down with a ne light mead. Torches
were lit as dusk crept in. Lysa’s singer played “The Vow Unspoken”
and “Seasons of My Love” and “Two Hearts That Beat as One.”
Several younger knights even asked Sansa to dance. Her aunt
danced as well, her skirts whirling when Petyr spun her in his arms.
Mead and marriage had taken years o Lady Lysa. She laughed at
everything so long as she held her husband’s hand, and her eyes
seemed to glow whenever she looked at him.
When it was time for the bedding, her knights carried her up to
the tower, stripping her as they went and shouting bawdy jests.
Tyrion spared me that, Sansa remembered. It would not have been so
bad being undressed for a man she loved, by friends who loved
them both. By Jo rey, though … She shuddered.
Her aunt had brought only three ladies with her, so they pressed
Sansa to help them undress Lord Petyr and march him up to his
marriage bed. He submitted with good grace and a wicked tongue,
giving as good as he got. By the time they had gotten him into the
tower and out of his clothes, the other women were ushed, with
laces unlaced, kirtles crooked, and skirts in disarray. But Little nger
only smiled at Sansa as they marched him up to the bedchamber
where his lady wife was waiting.
Lady Lysa and Lord Petyr had the third-story bedchamber to
themselves, but the tower was small … and true to her word, her
aunt screamed. It had begun to rain outside, driving the feasters
into the hall one oor below, so they heard most every word.

“Petyr,” her aunt moaned. “Oh, Petyr, Petyr, sweet Petyr, oh oh oh.
There, Petyr, there. That’s where you belong.” Lady Lysa’s singer
launched into a bawdy version of “Milady’s Supper,” but even his
singing and playing could not drown out Lysa’s cries. “Make me a
baby, Petyr,” she screamed, “make me another sweet little baby.
Oh, Petyr, my precious, my precious, PEEEEEETYR!” Her last shriek
was so loud that it set the dogs to barking, and two of her aunt’s
ladies could scarce contain their mirth.
Sansa went down the steps and out into the night. A light rain
was falling on the remains of the feast, but the air smelled fresh and
clean. The memory of her own wedding night with Tyrion was
much with her. In the dark, I am the Knight of Flowers, he had said. I
could be good to you. But that was only another Lannister lie. A dog
can smell a lie, you know, the Hound had told her once. She could
almost hear the rough rasp of his voice. Look around you, and take a
good whi . They’re all liars here, and every one better than you. She
wondered what had become of Sandor Clegane. Did he know that
they’d killed Jo rey? Would he care? He had been the prince’s
sworn shield for years.
She stayed outside for a long time. When at last she sought her
own bed, wet and chilled, only the dim glow of a peat re lit the
darkened hall. There was no sound from above. The young singer
sat in a corner, playing a slow song to himself. One of her aunt’s
maids was kissing a knight in Lord Petyr’s chair, their hands busy
beneath each other’s clothing. Several men had drunk themselves to
sleep, and one was in the privy, being noisily sick. Sansa found
Bryen’s old blind dog in her little alcove beneath the steps, and lay
down next to him. He woke and licked her face. “You sad old
hound,” she said, ru ing his fur.
“Alayne.” Her aunt’s singer stood over her. “Sweet Alayne. I am
Marillion. I saw you come in from the rain. The night is chill and
wet. Let me warm you.”
The old dog raised his head and growled, but the singer gave him
a cu and sent him slinking o , whimpering.
“Marillion?” she said, uncertain. “You are … kind to think of me,
but … pray forgive me. I am very tired.”

“And very beautiful. All night I have been making songs for you
in my head. A lay for your eyes, a ballad for your lips, a duet to
your breasts. I will not sing them, though. They were poor things,
unworthy of such beauty.” He sat on her bed and put his hand on
her leg. “Let me sing to you with my body instead.”
She caught a whi of his breath. “You’re drunk.”
“I never get drunk. Mead only makes me merry. I am on re.”
His hand slipped up to her thigh. “And you as well.”
“Unhand me. You forget yourself.”
“Mercy. I have been singing love songs for hours. My blood is
stirred. And yours, I know … there’s no wench half so lusty as one
bastard born. Are you wet for me?”
“I’m a maiden,” she protested.
“Truly? Oh, Alayne, Alayne, my fair maid, give me the gift of
your innocence. You will thank the gods you did. I’ll have you
singing louder than the Lady Lysa.”
Sansa jerked away from him, frightened. “If you don’t leave me,
my au—my father will hang you. Lord Petyr.”
“Little nger?” He chuckled. “Lady Lysa loves me well, and I am
Lord Robert’s favorite. If your father o ends me, I will destroy him
with a verse.” He put a hand on her breast, and squeezed. “Let’s get
you out of these wet clothes. You wouldn’t want them ripped, I
know. Come, sweet lady, heed your heart—”
Sansa heard the soft sound of steel on leather. “Singer,” a rough
voice said, “best go, if you want to sing again.” The light was dim,
but she saw a faint glimmer of a blade.
The singer saw it too. “Find your own wench—” The knife
ashed, and he cried out. “You cut me!”
“I’ll do worse, if you don’t go.”
And quick as that, Marillion was gone. The other remained,
looming over Sansa in the darkness. “Lord Petyr said watch out for
you.” It was Lothor Brune’s voice, she realized. Not the Hound’s, no,
how could it be? Of course it had to be Lothor …
That night Sansa scarcely slept at all, but tossed and turned just as
she had aboard the Merling King. She dreamt of Jo rey dying, but as
he clawed at his throat and the blood ran down across his ngers

she saw with horror that it was her brother Robb. And she dreamed
of her wedding night too, of Tyrion’s eyes devouring her as she
undressed. Only then he was bigger than Tyrion had any right to be,
and when he climbed into the bed his face was scarred only on one
side. “I’ll have a song from you,” he rasped, and Sansa woke and
found the old blind dog beside her once again. “I wish that you
were Lady,” she said.
Come the morning, Grisel climbed up to the bedchamber to serve
the lord and lady a tray of morning bread, with butter, honey, fruit,
and cream. She returned to say that Alayne was wanted. Sansa was
still drowsy from sleep. It took her a moment to remember that she
was Alayne.
Lady Lysa was still abed, but Lord Petyr was up and dressed.
“Your aunt wishes to speak with you,” he told Sansa, as he pulled
on a boot. “I’ve told her who you are.”
Gods be good. “I … I thank you, my lord.”
Petyr yanked on the other boot. “I’ve had about as much home as
I can stomach. We’ll leave for the Eyrie this afternoon.” He kissed
his lady wife and licked a smear of honey o her lips, then headed
down the steps.
Sansa stood by the foot of the bed while her aunt ate a pear and
studied her. “I see it now,” the Lady Lysa said, as she set the core
aside. “You look so much like Catelyn.”
“It’s kind of you to say so.”
“It was not meant as attery. If truth be told, you look too much
like Catelyn. Something must be done. We shall darken your hair
before we bring you back to the Eyrie, I think.”
Darken my hair? “If it please you, Aunt Lysa.”
“You must not call me that. No word of your presence here must
be allowed to reach King’s Landing. I do not mean to have my son
endangered.” She nibbled the corner of a honeycomb. “I have kept
the Vale out of this war. Our harvest has been plentiful, the
mountains protect us, and the Eyrie is impregnable. Even so, it
would not do to draw Lord Tywin’s wroth down upon us.” Lysa set
the comb down and licked honey from her ngers. “You were wed
to Tyrion Lannister, Petyr says. That vile dwarf.”

“They made me marry him. I never wanted it.”
“No more than I did,” her aunt said. “Jon Arryn was no dwarf,
but he was old. You may not think so to see me now, but on the day
we wed I was so lovely I put your mother to shame. But all Jon
desired was my father’s swords, to aid his darling boys. I should
have refused him, but he was such an old man, how long could he
live? Half his teeth were gone, and his breath smelled like bad
cheese. I cannot abide a man with foul breath. Petyr’s breath is
always fresh … he was the rst man I ever kissed, you know. My
father said he was too lowborn, but I knew how high he’d rise. Jon
gave him the customs for Gulltown to please me, but when he
increased the incomes tenfold my lord husband saw how clever he
was and gave him other appointments, even brought him to King’s
Landing to be master of coin. That was hard, to see him every day
and still be wed to that old cold man. Jon did his duty in the
bedchamber, but he could no more give me pleasure than he could
give me children. His seed was old and weak. All my babies died
but Robert, three girls and two boys. All my sweet little babies
dead, and that old man just went on and on with his stinking breath.
So you see, I have su ered too.” Lady Lysa sni ed. “You do know
that your poor mother is dead?”
“Tyrion told me,” said Sansa. “He said the Freys murdered her at
The Twins, with Robb.”
Tears welled suddenly in Lady Lysa’s eyes. “We are women alone
now, you and I. Are you afraid, child? Be brave. I would never turn
away Cat’s daughter. We are bound by blood.” She beckoned Sansa
closer. “You may come kiss my cheek, Alayne.”
Dutifully she approached and knelt beside the bed. Her aunt was
drenched in sweet scent, though under that was a sour milky smell.
Her cheek tasted of paint and powder.
As Sansa stepped back, Lady Lysa caught her wrist. “Now tell
me,” she said sharply. “Are you with child? The truth now, I will
know if you lie.”
“No,” she said, startled by the question.
“You are a woman owered, are you not?”

“Yes.” Sansa knew the truth of her owering could not be long
hidden in the Eyrie. “Tyrion didn’t … he never …” She could feel
the blush creeping up her cheeks. “I am still a maid.”
“Was the dwarf incapable?”
“No. He was only … he was …” Kind? She could not say that, not
here, not to this aunt who hated him so. “He … he had whores, my
lady. He told me so.”
“Whores.” Lysa released her wrist. “Of course he did. What
woman would bed such a creature, but for gold? I should have
killed the Imp when he was in my power, but he tricked me. He is
full of low cunning, that one. His sellsword slew my good Ser
Vardis Egen. Catelyn should not have brought him here, I told her
that. She made o with our uncle too. That was wrong of her. The
Black sh was my Knight of the Gate, and since he left us the
mountain clans are growing very bold. Petyr will soon set all that to
rights, though. I shall make him Lord Protector of the Vale.” Her
aunt smiled for the rst time, almost warmly. “He may not look as
tall or strong as some, but he is worth more than all of them. Trust
in him and do as he says.”
“I shall, Aunt … my lady.”
Lady Lysa seemed pleased by that. “I knew that boy Jo rey. He
used to call my Robert cruel names, and once he slapped him with a
wooden sword. A man will tell you poison is dishonorable, but a
woman’s honor is di erent. The Mother shaped us to protect our
children, and our only dishonor is in failure. You’ll know that, when
you have a child.”
“A child?” said Sansa, uncertainly.
Lysa waved a hand negligently. “Not for many years. You are too
young to be a mother. One day you shall want children, though.
Just as you will want to marry.”
“I … I am married, my lady.”
“Yes, but soon a widow. Be glad the Imp preferred his whores. It
would not be tting for my son to take that dwarf’s leavings, but as
he never touched you … How would you like to marry your cousin,
the Lord Robert?”

The thought made Sansa weary. All she knew of Robert Arryn
was that he was a little boy, and sickly. It is not me she wants her son
to marry, it is my claim. No one will ever marry me for love. But lying
came easy to her now. “I … can scarcely wait to meet him, my lady.
But he is still a child, is he not?”
“He is eight. And not robust. But such a good boy, so bright and
clever. He will be a great man, Alayne. The seed is strong, my lord
husband said before he died. His last words. The gods sometimes let
us glimpse the future as we lay dying. I see no reason why you
should not be wed as soon as we know that your Lannister husband
is dead. A secret wedding, to be sure. The Lord of the Eyrie could
scarcely be thought to have married a bastard, that would not be
tting. The ravens should bring us the word from King’s Landing
once the Imp’s head rolls. You and Robert can be wed the next day,
won’t that be joyous? It will be good for him to have a little
companion. He played with Vardis Egen’s boy when we rst
returned to the Eyrie, and my steward’s sons as well, but they were
much too rough and I had no choice but to send them away. Do you
read well, Alayne?”
“Septa Mordane was good enough to say so.”
“Robert has weak eyes, but he loves to be read to,” Lady Lysa
con ded. “He likes stories about animals the best. Do you know the
little song about the chicken who dressed as a fox? I sing him that
all the time, he never grows tired of it. And he likes to play hopfrog
and spin-the-sword and come-into-my-castle, but you must always
let him win. That’s only proper, don’t you think? He is the Lord of
the Eyrie, after all, you must never forget that. You are well born,
and the Starks of Winterfell were always proud, but Winterfell has
fallen and you are really just a beggar now, so put that pride aside.
Gratitude will better become you, in your present circumstances.
Yes, and obedience. My son will have a grateful and obedient wife.”

JON

Day and night the axes rang.

Jon could not remember the last time he had slept. When he
closed his eyes he dreamed of ghting; when he woke he fought.
Even in the King’s Tower he could hear the ceaseless thunk of
bronze and int and stolen steel biting into wood, and it was louder
when he tried to rest in the warming shed atop the Wall. Mance had
sledgehammers at work as well, and long saws with teeth of bone
and int. Once, as he was drifting o into an exhausted sleep, there
came a great cracking from the haunted forest, and a sentinel tree
came crashing down in a cloud of dirt and needles.
He was awake when Owen came to him, lying restless under a
pile of furs on the oor of the warming shed. “Lord Snow,” said
Owen, shaking his shoulder, “the dawn.” He gave Jon a hand to
help pull him back onto his feet. Others were waking as well,
jostling one another as they pulled on their boots and buckled their
swordbelts in the close con nes of the shed. No one spoke. They
were all too tired for talk. Few of them ever left the Wall these
days. It took too long to ride up and down in the cage. Castle Black
had been abandoned to Maester Aemon, Ser Wynton Stout, and a
few others too old or ill to ght.
“I had a dream that the king had come,” Owen said happily.
“Maester Aemon sent a raven, and King Robert came with all his
strength. I dreamed I saw his golden banners.”

Jon made himself smile. “That would be a welcome sight to see,
Owen.” Ignoring the twinge of pain in his leg, he swept a black fur
cloak about his shoulders, gathered up his crutch, and went out onto
the Wall to face another day.
A gust of wind sent icy tendrils wending through his long brown
hair. Half a mile north, the wildling encampments were stirring,
their camp res sending up smoky ngers to scratch against the pale
dawn sky. Along the edge of the forest they had raised their tents of
hide and fur, even a crude longhall of logs and woven branches;
there were horselines to the east, mammoths to the west, and men
everywhere, sharpening their swords, putting points on crude
spears, donning makeshift armor of hide and horn and bone. For
every man that he could see, Jon knew there were a score unseen in
the wood. The brush gave them some shelter from the elements and
hid them from the eyes of the hated crows.
Already their archers were stealing forward, pushing their rolling
mantlets. “Here come our breakfast arrows,” Pyp announced
cheerfully, as he did every morning. It’s good that he can make a jape
of it, Jon thought. Someone has to. Three days ago, one of those
breakfast arrows had caught Red Alyn of the Rosewood in the leg.
You could still see his body at the foot of the Wall, if you cared to
lean out far enough. Jon had to think that it was better for them to
smile at Pyp’s jest than to brood over Alyn’s corpse.
The mantlets were slanting wooden shields, wide enough for ve
of the free folk to hide behind. The archers pushed them close, then
knelt behind them to loose their arrows through slits in the wood.
The rst time the wildlings rolled them out, Jon had called for re
arrows and set a half-dozen ablaze, but after that Mance started
covering them with raw hides. All the re arrows in the world
couldn’t make them catch now. The brothers had even started
wagering as to which of the straw sentinels would collect the most
arrows before they were done. Dolorous Edd was leading with four,
but Othell Yarwyck, Tumberjon, and Watt of Long Lake had three
apiece. It was Pyp who’d started naming the scarecrows after their
missing brothers, too. “It makes it seem as if there’s more of us,” he
said.

“More of us with arrows in our bellies,” Grenn complained, but
the custom did seem to give his brothers heart, so Jon let the names
stand and the wagering continue.
On the edge of the Wall an ornate brass Myrish eye stood on
three spindly legs. Maester Aemon had once used it to peer at the
stars, before his own eyes had failed him. Jon swung the tube down
to have a look at the foe. Even at this distance there was no
mistaking Mance Rayder’s huge white tent, sewn together from the
pelts of snow bears. The Myrish lenses brought the wildlings close
enough for him to make out faces. Of Mance himself he saw no sign
this morning, but his woman Dalla was outside tending the re,
while her sister Val milked a she-goat beside the tent. Dalla looked
so big it was a wonder she could move. The child must be coming
very soon, Jon thought. He swiveled the eye east and searched
amongst the tents and trees till he found the turtle. That will be
coming very soon as well. The wildlings had skinned one of the dead
mammoths during the night, and they were lashing the raw bloody
hide over the turtle’s roof, one more layer on top of the sheepskins
and pelts. The turtle had a rounded top and eight huge wheels, and
under the hides was a stout wooden frame. When the wildlings had
begun knocking it together, Satin thought they were building a ship.
Not far wrong. The turtle was a hull turned upside down and opened
fore and aft; a longhall on wheels.
“It’s done, isn’t it?” asked Grenn.
“Near enough.” Jon shoved away the eye. “It will come today,
most like. Did you ll the barrels?”
“Every one. They froze hard during the night, Pyp checked.”
Grenn had changed a great deal from the big, clumsy, red-necked
boy Jon had rst befriended. He had grown half a foot, his chest
and shoulders had thickened, and he had not cut his hair nor
trimmed his beard since the Fist of the First Men. It made him look
as huge and shaggy as an aurochs, the mocking name that Ser
Alliser Thorne had hung on him during training. He looked weary
now, though. When Jon said as much, he nodded. “I heard their
axes all night. Couldn’t sleep for all the chopping.”
“Then go sleep now.”

“I don’t need—”
“You do. I want you rested. Go on, I’m not going to let you sleep
through the ght.” He made himself smile. “You’re the only one
who can move those bloody barrels.”
Grenn went o muttering, and Jon returned to the far eye,
searching the wildling camp. From time to time an arrow would sail
past overhead, but he had learned to ignore those. The range was
long and the angle was bad, the chances of being hit were small. He
still saw no sign of Mance Rayder in the camp, but he spied
Tormund Giantsbane and two of his sons around the turtle. The sons
were struggling with the mammoth hide while Tormund gnawed on
the roast leg of a goat and bellowed orders. Elsewhere he found the
wildling skinchanger, Varamyr Sixskins, walking through the trees
with his shadowcat dogging his heels.
When he heard the rattle of the winch chains and the iron groan
of the cage door opening, he knew it would be Hobb bringing their
breakfast as he did every morning. The sight of Mance’s turtle had
robbed Jon of his appetite. Their oil was all but gone, and the last
barrel of pitch had been rolled o the Wall two nights ago. They
would soon run short of arrows as well, and there were no etchers
making more. And the night before last, a raven had come from the
west, from Ser Denys Mallister. Bowen Marsh had chased the
wildlings all the way to the Shadow Tower, it seemed, and then
farther, down into the gloom of the Gorge. At the Bridge of Skulls
he had met the Weeper and three hundred wildlings and won a
bloody battle. But the victory had been a costly one. More than a
hundred brothers slain, among them Ser Endrew Tarth and Ser
Aladale Wynch. The Old Pomegranate himself had been carried
back to the Shadow Tower sorely wounded. Maester Mullin was
tending him, but it would be some time before he was t to return
to Castle Black.
When he had read that, Jon had dispatched Zei to Mole’s Town on
their best horse to plead with the villagers to help man the Wall.
She never returned. When he sent Mully after her, he came back to
report the whole village deserted, even the brothel. Most likely Zei

had followed them, straight down the kingsroad. Maybe we should
all do the same, Jon re ected glumly.
He made himself eat, hungry or no. Bad enough he could not
sleep, he could not go on without food as well. Besides, this might be
my last meal. It might be the last meal for all of us. So it was that Jon
had a belly full of bread, bacon, onions, and cheese when he heard
Horse shout, “IT’S COMING!”
No one needed to ask what “it” was. Nor did Jon need the
maester’s Myrish eye to see it creeping out from amongst the tents
and trees. “It doesn’t really look much like a turtle,” Satin
commented. “Turtles don’t have fur.”
“Most of them don’t have wheels either,” said Pyp.
“Sound the warhorn,” Jon commanded, and Kegs blew two long
blasts, to wake Grenn and the other sleepers who’d had the watch
during the night. If the wildlings were coming, the Wall would need
every man. Gods know, we have few enough. Jon looked at Pyp and
Kegs and Satin, Horse and Owen the Oaf, Tim Tangletongue, Mully,
Spare Boot, and the rest, and tried to imagine them going belly to
belly and blade to blade against a hundred screaming wildlings in
the freezing darkness of that tunnel, with only a few iron bars
between them. That was what it would come down to, unless they
could stop the turtle before the gate was breached.
“It’s big,” Horse said.
Pyp smacked his lips. “Think of all the soup it will make.” The
jape was stillborn. Even Pyp sounded tired. He looks half dead,
thought Jon, but so do we all. The King-beyond-the-Wall had so
many men that he could throw fresh attackers at them every time,
but the same handful of black brothers had to meet every assault,
and it had worn them ragged.
The men beneath the wood and hides would be pulling hard, Jon
knew, putting their shoulders into it, straining to keep the wheels
turning, but once the turtle was ush against the gate they would
exchange their ropes for axes. At least Mance was not sending his
mammoths today. Jon was glad of that. Their awesome strength
was wasted on the Wall, and their size only made them easy targets.

The last had been a day and a half in the dying, its mournful
trumpetings terrible to hear.
The turtle crept slowly through stones and stumps and brush. The
earlier attacks had cost the free folk a hundred lives or more. Most
still lay where they had fallen. In the lulls the crows would come
and pay them court, but now the birds ed screeching. They liked
the look of that turtle no more than he did.
Satin, Horse, and the others were looking to him, Jon knew,
waiting for his orders. He was so tired, he hardly knew any more.
The Wall is mine, he reminded himself. “Owen, Horse, to the
catapults. Kegs, you and Spare Boot on the scorpions. The rest of
you string your bows. Fire arrows. Let’s see if we can burn it.” It
was likely to be a futile gesture, Jon knew, but it had to be better
than standing helpless.
Cumbersome and slow-moving, the turtle made for an easy shot,
and his archers and crossbowmen soon turned it into a lumbering
wooden hedgehog … but the wet hides protected it, just as they had
the mantlets, and the aming arrows guttered out almost as soon as
they struck. Jon cursed under his breath. “Scorpions,” he
commanded. “Catapults.”
The scorpions bolts punched deep into the pelts, but did no more
damage than the re arrows. The rocks went bouncing o the
turtle’s roof, leaving dimples in the thick layers of hides. A stone
from one of the trebuchets might have crushed it, but the one
machine was still broken, and the wildlings had gone wide around
the area where the other dropped its loads.
“Jon, it’s still coming,” said Owen the Oaf.
He could see that for himself. Inch by inch, yard by yard, the
turtle crept closer, rolling, rumbling and rocking as it crossed the
killing ground. Once the wildlings got it ush against the Wall, it
would give them all the shelter they needed while their axes
crashed through the hastily-repaired outer gates. Inside, under the
ice, they would clear the loose rubble from the tunnel in a matter of
hours, and then there would be nothing to stop them but two iron
gates, a few half-frozen corpses, and whatever brothers Jon cared to
throw in their path, to ght and die down in the dark.

To his left, the catapult made a thunk and lled the air with
spinning stones. They plonked down on the turtle like hail, and
caromed harmlessly aside. The wildling archers were still loosing
arrows from behind their mantlets. One thudded into the face of a
straw man, and Pyp said, “Four for Watt of Long Lake! We have a
tie!” The next shaft whistled past his own ear, however. “Fie!” he
shouted down. “I’m not in the tourney!”
“The hides won’t burn,” Jon said, as much to himself as to the
others. Their only hope was to try and crush the turtle when it
reached the Wall. For that, they needed boulders. No matter how
stoutly built the turtle was, a huge chunk of rock crashing straight
down on top of it from seven hundred feet was bound to do some
damage. “Grenn, Owen, Kegs, it’s time.”
Alongside the warming shed a dozen stout oaken barrels were
lined up in a row. They were full of crushed rock; the gravel that
the black brothers customarily spread on the footpaths to give
themselves better footing atop the Wall. Yesterday, after he’d seen
the free folk covering the turtle with sheepskins, Jon told Grenn to
pour water into the barrels, as much as they would take. The water
would seep down through the crushed stone, and overnight the
whole thing would freeze solid. It was the nearest thing to a
boulder they were going to get.
“Why do we need to freeze it?” Grenn had asked him. “Why don’t
we just roll the barrels o the way they are?”
Jon answered, “If they crash against the Wall on the way down
they’ll burst, and loose gravel will spray everywhere. We don’t
want to rain pebbles on the whoresons.”
He put his shoulder to the one barrel with Grenn, while Kegs and
Owen were wrestling with another. Together they rocked it back
and forth to break the grip of the ice that had formed around its
bottom. “The bugger weighs a ton,” said Grenn.
“Tip it over and roll it,” Jon said. “Careful, if it rolls over your
foot you’ll end up like Spare Boot.”
Once the barrel was on its side, Jon grabbed a torch and waved it
above the surface of the Wall, back and forth, just enough to melt
the ice a little. The thin lm of water helped the barrel roll more

easily. Too easily, in fact; they almost lost it. But nally, with four
of them pooling their e orts, they rolled their boulder to the edge
and stood it up again.
They had four of the big oak barrels lined up above the gate by
the time Pyp shouted, “There’s a turtle at our door!” Jon braced his
injured leg and leaned out for a look. Hoardings, Marsh should have
built hoardings. So many things they should have done. The wildlings
were dragging the dead giants away from the gate. Horse and Mully
were dropping rocks down on them, and Jon thought he saw one
man go down, but the stones were too small to have any e ect on
the turtle itself. He wondered what the free folk would do about the
dead mammoth in the path, but then he saw. The turtle was almost
as wide as a longhall, so they simply pushed it over the carcass. His
leg twitched, but Horse caught his arm and drew him back to
safety. “You shouldn’t lean out like that,” the boy said.
“We should have built hoardings.” Jon thought he could hear the
crash of axes on wood, but that was probably just fear ringing in his
ears. He looked to Grenn. “Do it.”
Grenn got behind a barrel, put his shoulder against it, grunted,
and began to push. Owen and Mully moved to help him. They
shoved the barrel out a foot, and then another. And suddenly it was
gone.
They heard the thump as it struck the Wall on the way down, and
then, much louder, the crash and crack of splintering wood,
followed by shouts and screams. Satin whooped and Owen the Oaf
danced in circles, while Pyp leaned out and called, “The turtle was
stu ed full of rabbits! Look at them hop away!”
“Again,” Jon barked, and Grenn and Kegs slammed their shoulders
against the next barrel, and sent it tottering out into empty air.
By the time they were done, the front of Mance’s turtle was a
crushed and splintered ruin, and wildlings were spilling out the
other end and scrambling for their camp. Satin scooped up his
crossbow and sent a few quarrels after them as they ran, to see
them o the faster. Grenn was grinning through his beard, Pyp was
making japes, and none of them would die today.

On the morrow, though … Jon glanced toward the shed. Eight
barrels of gravel remained where twelve had stood a few moments
before. He realized how tired he was then, and how much his
wound was hurting. I need to sleep. A few hours, at least. He could go
to Maester Aemon for some dreamwine, that would help. “I am
going down to the King’s Tower,” he told them. “Call me if Mance
gets up to anything. Pyp, you have the Wall.”
“Me?” said Pyp.
“Him?” said Grenn.
Smiling, he left them to it and rode down in the cage.
A cup of dreamwine did help, as it happened. No sooner had he
stretched out on the narrow bed in his cell than sleep took him. His
dreams were strange and formless, full of strange voices, shouts and
cries, and the sound of a warhorn, blowing low and loud, a single
deep booming note that lingered in the air.
When he awoke the sky was black outside the arrow slit that
served him for a window, and four men he did not know were
standing over him. One held a lantern. “Jon Snow,” the tallest of
them said brusquely, “pull on your boots and come with us.”
His rst groggy thought was that somehow the Wall had fallen
whilst he slept, that Mance Rayder had sent more giants or another
turtle and broken through the gate. But when he rubbed his eyes he
saw that the strangers were all in black. They’re men of the Night’s
Watch, Jon realized. “Come where? Who are you?”
The tall man gestured, and two of the others pulled Jon from the
bed. With the lantern leading the way they marched him from his
cell and up a half turn of stair, to the Old Bear’s solar. He saw
Maester Aemon standing by the re, his hands folded around the
head of a blackthorn cane. Septon Cellador was half drunk as usual,
and Ser Wynton Stout was asleep in a window seat. The other
brothers were strangers to him. All but one.
Immaculate in his fur-trimmed cloak and polished boots, Ser
Alliser Thorne turned to say, “Here’s the turncloak now, my lord.
Ned Stark’s bastard, of Winterfell.”
“I’m no turncloak, Thorne,” Jon said coldly.

“We shall see.” In the leather chair behind the table where the
Old Bear wrote his letters sat a big, broad, jowly man Jon did not
know. “Yes, we shall see,” he said again. “You will not deny that
you are Jon Snow, I hope? Stark’s bastard?”
“Lord Snow, he likes to call himself.” Ser Alliser was a spare, slim
man, compact and sinewy, and just now his inty eyes were dark
with amusement.
“You’re the one who named me Lord Snow,” said Jon. Ser Alliser
had been fond of naming the boys he trained, during his time as
Castle Black’s master-at-arms. The Old Bear had sent Thorne to
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. These others must be Eastwatch men. The bird
reached Cotter Pyke and he’s sent us help. “How many men have you
brought?” he asked the man behind the table.
“It’s me who’ll ask the questions,” the jowly man replied. “You’ve
been charged with oathbreaking, cowardice, and desertion, Jon
Snow. Do you deny that you abandoned your brothers to die on the
Fist of the First Men and joined the wildling Mance Rayder, this
self-styled King-beyond-the-Wall?”
“Abandoned …?” Jon almost choked on the word.
Maester Aemon spoke up then. “My lord, Donal Noye and I
discussed these issues when Jon Snow rst returned to us, and were
satis ed by Jon’s explanations.”
“Well, I am not satis ed, Maester,” said the jowly man. “I will
hear these explanations for myself. Yes I will!”
Jon swallowed his anger. “I abandoned no one. I left the Fist with
Qhorin Halfhand to scout the Skirling Pass. I joined the wildlings
under orders. The Halfhand feared that Mance might have found the
Horn of Winter …”
“The Horn of Winter?” Ser Alliser chuckled. “Were you
commanded to count their snarks as well, Lord Snow?”
“No, but I counted their giants as best I could.”
“Ser,” snapped the jowly man. “You will address Ser Alliser as ser,
and myself as m’lord. I am Janos Slynt, Lord of Harrenhal, and
commander here at Castle Black until such time as Bowen Marsh
returns with his garrison. You will grant us our courtesies, yes. I
will not su er to hear an anointed knight like the good Ser Alliser

mocked by a traitor’s bastard.” He raised a hand and pointed a
meaty nger at Jon’s face. “Do you deny that you took a wildling
woman into your bed?”
“No.” Jon’s grief over Ygritte was too fresh for him to deny her
now. “No, my lord.”
“I suppose it was also the Halfhand who commanded you to fuck
this unwashed whore?” Ser Alliser asked with a smirk.
“Ser. She was no whore, ser. The Halfhand told me not to balk,
whatever the wildlings asked of me, but … I will not deny that I
went beyond what I had to do, that I … cared for her.”
“You admit to being an oathbreaker, then,” said Janos Slynt.
Half the men at Castle Black visited Mole’s Town from time to
time to dig for buried treasures in the brothel, Jon knew, but he
would not dishonor Ygritte by equating her with the Mole’s Town
whores. “I broke my vows with a woman. I admit that. Yes.”
“Yes, m’lord!” When Slynt scowled, his jowls quivered. He was as
broad as the Old Bear had been, and no doubt would be as bald if he
lived to Mormont’s age. Half his hair was gone already, though he
could not have been more than forty.
“Yes, my lord,” Jon said. “I rode with the wildlings and ate with
them, as the Halfhand commanded me, and I shared my furs with
Ygritte. But I swear to you, I never turned my cloak. I escaped the
Magnar as soon as I could, and never took up arms against my
brothers or the realm.”
Lord Slynt’s small eyes studied him. “Ser Glendon,” he
commanded, “bring in the other prisoner.”
Ser Glendon was the tall man who had dragged Jon from his bed.
Four other men went with him when he left the room, but they
were back soon enough with a captive, a small, sallow, battered
man fettered hand and foot. He had a single eyebrow, a widow’s
peak, and a mustache that looked like a smear of dirt on his upper
lip, but his face was swollen and mottled with bruises, and most of
his front teeth had been knocked out.
The Eastwatch men threw the captive roughly to the oor. Lord
Slynt frowned down at him. “Is this the one you spoke of?”

The captive blinked yellow eyes. “Aye.” Not until that instant did
Jon recognize Rattleshirt. He is a di erent man without his armor, he
thought. “Aye,” the wildling repeated, “he’s the craven killed the
Halfhand. Up in the Frostfangs, it were, after we hunted down
t’other crows and killed them, every one. We would have done for
this one too, only he begged f’ his worthless life, o ered t’ join us if
we’d have him. The Halfhand swore he’d see the craven dead rst,
but the wolf ripped Qhorin half t’ pieces and this one opened his
throat.” He gave Jon a cracktooth smile then, and spat blood on his
foot.
“Well?” Janos Slynt demanded of Jon harshly. “Do you deny it?
Or will you claim Qhorin commanded you to kill him?”
“He told me …” The words came hard. “He told me to do
whatever they asked of me.”
Slynt looked about the solar, at the other Eastwatch men. “Does
this boy think I fell o a turnip wagon onto my head?”
“Your lies won’t save you now, Lord Snow,” warned Ser Alliser
Thorne. “We’ll have the truth from you, bastard.”
“I’ve told you the truth. Our garrons were failing, and Rattleshirt
was close behind us. Qhorin told me to pretend to join the
wildlings. ‘You must not balk, whatever is asked of you,’ he said. He
knew they would make me kill him. Rattleshirt was going to kill
him anyway, he knew that too.”
“So now you claim the great Qhorin Halfhand feared this
creature?” Slynt looked at Rattleshirt, and snorted.
“All men fear the Lord o’ Bones,” the wildling grumbled. Ser
Glendon kicked him, and he lapsed back into silence.
“I never said that,” Jon insisted.
Slynt slammed a st on the table. “I heard you! Ser Alliser had
your measure true enough, it seems. You lie through your bastard’s
teeth. Well, I will not su er it. I will not! You might have fooled
this crippled blacksmith, but not Janos Slynt! Oh, no. Janos Slynt
does not swallow lies so easily. Did you think my skull was stu ed
with cabbage?”
“I don’t know what your skull is stu ed with. My lord.”

“Lord Snow is nothing if not arrogant,” said Ser Alliser. “He
murdered Qhorin just as his fellow turncloaks did Lord Mormont. It
would not surprise me to learn that it was all part of the same fell
plot. Benjen Stark may well have a hand in all this as well. For all
we know, he is sitting in Mance Rayder’s tent even now. You know
these Starks, my lord.”
“I do,” said Janos Slynt. “I know them too well.”
Jon peeled o his glove and showed them his burned hand. “I
burned my hand defending Lord Mormont from a wight. And my
uncle was a man of honor. He would never have betrayed his
vows.”
“No more than you?” mocked Ser Alliser.
Septon Cellador cleared his throat. “Lord Slynt,” he said, “this boy
refused to swear his vows properly in the sept, but went beyond the
Wall to say his words before a heart tree. His father’s gods, he said,
but they are wildling gods as well.”
“They are the gods of the north, Septon.” Maester Aemon was
courteous, but rm. “My lords, when Donal Noye was slain, it was
this young man Jon Snow who took the Wall and held it, against all
the fury of the north. He has proved himself valiant, loyal, and
resourceful. Were it not for him, you would have found Mance
Rayder sitting here when you arrived, Lord Slynt. You are doing
him a great wrong. Jon Snow was Lord Mormont’s own steward and
squire. He was chosen for that duty because the Lord Commander
saw much promise in him. As do I.”
“Promise?” said Slynt. “Well, promise may turn false. Qhorin
Halfhand’s blood is on his hands. Mormont trusted him, you say, but
what of that? I know what it is to be betrayed by men you trusted.
Oh, yes. And I know the ways of wolves as well.” He pointed at
Jon’s face. “Your father died a traitor.”
“My father was murdered.” Jon was past caring what they did to
him, but he would not su er any more lies about his father.
Slynt purpled. “Murder? You insolent pup. King Robert was not
even cold when Lord Eddard moved against his son.” He rose to his
feet; a shorter man than Mormont, but thick about the chest and
arms, with a gut to match. A small gold spear tipped with red

enamel pinned his cloak at the shoulder. “Your father died by the
sword, but he was highborn, a King’s Hand. For you, a noose will
serve. Ser Alliser, take this turncloak to an ice cell.”
“My lord is wise.” Ser Alliser seized Jon by the arm.
Jon yanked away and grabbed the knight by the throat with such
ferocity that he lifted him o the oor. He would have throttled
him if the Eastwatch men had not pulled him o . Thorne staggered
back, rubbing the marks Jon’s ngers had left on his neck. “You see
for yourselves, brothers. The boy is a wildling.”

TYRION

When dawn broke, he found he could not face the thought of

food. By evenfall I may stand condemned. His belly was acid with
bile, and his nose itched. Tyrion scratched at it with the point of his
knife. One last witness to endure, then my turn. But what to do? Deny
everything? Accuse Sansa and Ser Dontos? Confess, in the hope of
spending the rest of his days on the Wall? Let the dice y and pray
the Red Viper could defeat Ser Gregor Clegane?
Tyrion stabbed listlessly at a greasy grey sausage, wishing it were
his sister. It is bloody cold on the Wall, but at least I would be shut of
Cersei. He did not think he would make much of a ranger, but the
Night’s Watch needed clever men as well as strong ones. Lord
Commander Mormont had said as much, when Tyrion had visited
Castle Black. There are those inconvenient vows, though. It would
mean the end of his marriage and whatever claim he might ever
have made for Casterly Rock, but he did not seem destined to enjoy
either in any case. And he seemed to recall that there was a brothel
in a nearby village.
It was not a life he’d ever dreamed of, but it was life. And all he
had to do to earn it was trust in his father, stand up on his little
stunted legs, and say, “Yes, I did it, I confess.” That was the part
that tied his bowels in knots. He almost wished he had done it, since
it seemed he must su er for it anyway.
“My lord?” said Podrick Payne. “They’re here, my lord. Ser
Addam. And the gold cloaks. They wait without.”

“Pod, tell me true … do you think I did it?”
The boy hesitated. When he tried to speak, all he managed to
produce was a weak sputter.
I am doomed. Tyrion sighed. “No need to answer. You’ve been a
good squire to me. Better than I deserved. Whatever happens, I
thank you for your leal service.”
Ser Addam Marbrand waited at the door with six gold cloaks. He
had nothing to say this morning, it seemed. Another good man who
thinks me a kinslayer. Tyrion summoned all the dignity he could nd
and waddled down the steps. He could feel them all watching him
as he crossed the yard; the guards on the walls, the grooms by the
stables, the scullions and washerwomen and serving girls. Inside the
throne room, knights and lordlings moved aside to let them
through, and whispered to their ladies.
No sooner had Tyrion taken his place before the judges than
another group of gold cloaks led in Shae.
A cold hand tightened round his heart. Varys betrayed her, he
thought. Then he remembered. No. I betrayed her myself. I should
have left her with Lollys. Of course they’d question Sansa’s maids, I’d do
the same. Tyrion rubbed at the slick scar where his nose had been,
wondering why Cersei had bothered. Shae knows nothing that can
hurt me.
“They plotted it together,” she said, this girl he’d loved. “The Imp
and Lady Sansa plotted it after the Young Wolf died. Sansa wanted
revenge for her brother and Tyrion meant to have the throne. He
was going to kill his sister next, and then his own lord father, so he
could be Hand for Prince Tommen. But after a year or so, before
Tommen got too old, he would have killed him too, so as to take
the crown for his own head.”
“How could you know all this?” demanded Prince Oberyn. “Why
would the Imp divulge such plans to his wife’s maid?”
“I overheard some, m’lord,” said Shae, “and m’lady let things slip
too. But most I had from his own lips. I wasn’t only Lady Sansa’s
maid. I was his whore, all the time he was here in King’s Landing.
On the morning of the wedding, he dragged me down where they
keep the dragon skulls and fucked me there with the monsters all

around. And when I cried, he said I ought to be more grateful, that
it wasn’t every girl who got to be the king’s whore. That was when
he told me how he meant to be king. He said that poor boy Jo rey
would never know his bride the way he was knowing me.” She
started sobbing then. “I never meant to be a whore, m’lords. I was
to be married. A squire, he was, and a good brave boy, gentle born.
But the Imp saw me at the Green Fork and put the boy I meant to
marry in the front rank of the van, and after he was killed he sent
his wildlings to bring me to his tent. Shagga, the big one, and
Timett with the burned eye. He said if I didn’t pleasure him, he’d
give me to them, so I did. Then he brought me to the city, so I’d be
close when he wanted me. He made me do such shameful things …”
Prince Oberyn looked curious. “What sorts of things?”
“Unspeakable things.” As the tears rolled slowly down that pretty
face, no doubt every man in the hall wanted to take Shae in his
arms and comfort her. “With my mouth and … other parts, m’lord.
All my parts. He used me every way there was, and … he used to
make me tell him how big he was. My giant, I had to call him, my
giant of Lannister.”
Oswald Kettleblack was the rst to laugh. Boros and Meryn
joined in, then Cersei, Ser Loras, and more lords and ladies than he
could count. The sudden gale of mirth made the rafters ring and
shook the Iron Throne. “It’s true,” Shae protested. “My giant of
Lannister.” The laughter swelled twice as loud. Their mouths were
twisted in merriment, their bellies shook. Some laughed so hard
that snot ew from their nostrils.
I saved you all, Tyrion thought. I saved this vile city and all your
worthless lives. There were hundreds in the throne room, every one
of them laughing but his father. Or so it seemed. Even the Red
Viper chortled, and Mace Tyrell looked like to bust a gut, but Lord
Tywin Lannister sat between them as if made of stone, his ngers
steepled beneath his chin.
Tyrion pushed forward. “MY LORDS!” he shouted. He had to
shout, to have any hope of being heard.
His father raised a hand. Bit by bit, the hall grew silent.

“Get this lying whore out of my sight,” said Tyrion, “and I will
give you your confession.”
Lord Tywin nodded, gestured. Shae looked half in terror as the
gold cloaks formed up around her. Her eyes met Tyrion’s as they
marched her from the wall. Was it shame he saw there, or fear? He
wondered what Cersei had promised her. You will get the gold or
jewels, whatever it was you asked for, he thought as he watched her
back recede, but before the moon has turned she’ll have you
entertaining the gold cloaks in their barracks.
Tyrion stared up at his father’s hard green eyes with their ecks
of cold bright gold. “Guilty,” he said, “so guilty. Is that what you
wanted to hear?”
Lord Tywin said nothing. Mace Tyrell nodded. Prince Oberyn
looked mildly disappointed. “You admit you poisoned the king?”
“Nothing of the sort,” said Tyrion. “Of Jo rey’s death I am
innocent. I am guilty of a more monstrous crime.” He took a step
toward his father. “I was born. I lived. I am guilty of being a dwarf,
I confess it. And no matter how many times my good father forgave
me, I have persisted in my infamy.”
“This is folly, Tyrion,” declared Lord Tywin. “Speak to the matter
at hand. You are not on trial for being a dwarf.”
“That is where you err, my lord. I have been on trial for being a
dwarf my entire life.”
“Have you nothing to say in your defense?”
“Nothing but this: I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had.” He
turned to face the hall, that sea of pale faces. “I wish I had enough
poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster
you would have me be, yet there it is. I am innocent, but I will get
no justice here. You leave me no choice but to appeal to the gods. I
demand trial by battle.”
“Have you taken leave of your wits?” his father said.
“No, I’ve found them. I demand trial by battle!”
His sweet sister could not have been more pleased. “He has that
right, my lords,” she reminded the judges. “Let the gods judge. Ser
Gregor Clegane will stand for Jo rey. He returned to the city the
night before last, to put his sword at my service.”

Lord Tywin’s face was so dark that for half a heartbeat Tyrion
wondered if he’d drunk some poisoned wine as well. He slammed
his st down on the table, too angry to speak. It was Mace Tyrell
who turned to Tyrion and asked the question. “Do you have a
champion to defend your innocence?”
“He does, my lord.” Prince Oberyn of Dorne rose to his feet. “The
dwarf has quite convinced me.”
The uproar was deafening. Tyrion took especial pleasure in the
sudden doubt he glimpsed in Cersei’s eyes. It took a hundred gold
cloaks pounding the butts of their spears against the oor to quiet
the throne room again. By then Lord Tywin Lannister had recovered
himself. “Let the issue be decided on the morrow,” he declared in
iron tones. “I wash my hands of it.” He gave his dwarf son a cold
angry look, then strode from the hall, out the king’s door behind the
Iron Throne, his brother Kevan at his side.
Later, back in his tower cell, Tyrion poured himself a cup of wine
and sent Podrick Payne o for cheese, bread, and olives. He
doubted whether he could keep down anything heavier just now.
Did you think I would go meekly, Father? he asked the shadow his
candles etched upon the wall. I have too much of you in me for that.
He felt strangely at peace, now that he had snatched the power of
life and death from his father’s hands and placed it in the hands of
the gods. Assuming there are gods, and they give a mummer’s fart. If
not, then I’m in Dornish hands. No matter what happened, Tyrion had
the satisfaction of knowing that he’d kicked Lord Tywin’s plans to
splinters. If Prince Oberyn won, it would further in ame
Highgarden against the Dornish; Mace Tyrell would see the man
who crippled his son helping the dwarf who almost poisoned his
daughter to escape his rightful punishment. And if the Mountain
triumphed, Doran Martell might well demand to know why his
brother had been served with death instead of the justice Tyrion had
promised him. Dorne might crown Myrcella after all.
It was almost worth dying to know all the trouble he’d made. Will
you come to see the end, Shae? Will you stand there with the rest,
watching as Ser Ilyn lops my ugly head o ? Will you miss your giant of

Lannister when he’s dead? He drained his wine,
and sang lustily.

ung the cup aside,

He rode through the streets of the city,
down from his hill on high,
O’er the wynds and the steps and the cobbles,
he rode to a woman’s sigh.
For she was his secret treasure,
she was his shame and his bliss.
And a chain and a keep are nothing,
compared to a woman’s kiss.
Ser Kevan did not visit him that night. He was probably with Lord
Tywin, trying to placate the Tyrells. I have seen the last of that uncle,
I fear. He poured another cup of wine. A pity he’d had Symon Silver
Tongue killed before learning all the words of that song. It wasn’t a
bad song, if truth be told. Especially compared to the ones that
would be written about him henceforth. “For hands of gold are always
cold, but a woman’s hands are warm,” he sang. Perhaps he should
write the other verses himself. If he lived so long.
That night, surprisingly, Tyrion Lannister slept long and deep. He
rose at rst light, well rested and with a hearty appetite, and broke
his fast on fried bread, blood sausage, applecakes, and a double
helping of eggs cooked with onions and ery Dornish peppers. Then
he begged leave of his guards to attend his champion. Ser Addam
gave his consent.
Tyrion found Prince Oberyn drinking a cup of red wine as he
donned his armor. He was attended by four of his younger Dornish
lordlings. “Good morrow to you, my lord,” the prince said. “Will
you take a cup of wine?”
“Should you be drinking before battle?”
“I always drink before battle.”
“That could get you killed. Worse, it could get me killed.”
Prince Oberyn laughed. “The gods defend the innocent. You are
innocent, I trust?”

“Only of killing Jo rey,” Tyrion admitted. “I do hope you know
what you are about to face. Gregor Clegane is—”
“—large? So I have heard.”
“He is almost eight feet tall and must weigh thirty stone, all of it
muscle. He ghts with a two-handed greatsword, but needs only
one hand to wield it. He has been known to cut men in half with a
single blow. His armor is so heavy that no lesser man could bear the
weight, let alone move in it.”
Prince Oberyn was unimpressed. “I have killed large men before.
The trick is to get them o their feet. Once they go down, they’re
dead.” The Dornishman sounded so blithely con dent that Tyrion
felt almost reassured, until he turned and said, “Daemon, my
spear!” Ser Daemon tossed it to him, and the Red Viper snatched it
from the air.
“You mean to face the Mountain with a spear?” That made Tyrion
uneasy all over again. In battle, ranks of massed spears made for a
formidable front, but single combat against a skilled swordsman
was a very di erent matter.
“We are fond of spears in Dorne. Besides, it is the only way to
counter his reach. Have a look, Lord Imp, but see you do not
touch.” The spear was turned ash eight feet long, the shaft smooth,
thick, and heavy. The last two feet of that was steel: a slender leafshaped spearhead narrowing to a wicked spike. The edges looked
sharp enough to shave with. When Oberyn spun the haft between
the palms of his hand, they glistened black. Oil? Or poison? Tyrion
decided that he would sooner not know. “I hope you are good with
that,” he said doubtfully.
“You will have no cause for complaint. Though Ser Gregor may.
However thick his plate, there will be gaps at the joints. Inside the
elbow and knee, beneath the arms … I will nd a place to tickle
him, I promise you.” He set the spear aside. “It is said that a
Lannister always pays his debts. Perhaps you will return to Sunspear
with me when the day’s bloodletting is done. My brother Doran
would be most pleased to meet the rightful heir to Casterly
Rock … especially if he brought his lovely wife, the Lady of
Winterfell.”

Does the snake think I have Sansa squirreled away somewhere, like a
nut I’m hoarding for winter? If so, Tyrion was not about to disabuse
him. “A trip to Dorne might be very pleasant, now that I re ect on
it.”
“Plan on a lengthy visit.” Prince Oberyn sipped his wine. “You
and Doran have many matters of mutual interest to discuss. Music,
trade, history, wine, the dwarf’s penny … the laws of inheritance
and succession. No doubt an uncle’s counsel would be of bene t to
Queen Myrcella in the trying times ahead.”
If Varys had his little birds listening, Oberyn was giving them a
ripe earful. “I believe I will have that cup of wine,” said Tyrion.
Queen Myrcella? It would have been more tempting if only he did
have Sansa tucked beneath his cloak. If she declared for Myrcella over
Tommen, would the north follow? What the Red Viper was hinting at
was treason. Could Tyrion truly take up arms against Tommen,
against his own father? Cersei would spit blood. It might be worth it
for that alone.
“Do you recall the tale I told you of our rst meeting, Imp?”
Prince Oberyn asked, as the Bastard of Godsgrace knelt before him
to fasten his greaves. “It was not for your tail alone that my sister
and I came to Casterly Rock. We were on a quest of sorts. A quest
that took us to Starfall, the Arbor, Oldtown, the Shield Islands,
Crakehall, and nally Casterly Rock … but our true destination was
marriage. Doran was betrothed to Lady Mellario of Norvos, so he
had been left behind as castellan of Sunspear. My sister and I were
yet unpromised.
“Elia found it all exciting. She was of that age, and her delicate
health had never permitted her much travel. I preferred to amuse
myself by mocking my sister’s suitors. There was Little Lord
Lazyeye, Squire Squishlips, one I named the Whale That Walks, that
sort of thing. The only one who was even halfway presentable was
young Baelor Hightower. A pretty lad, and my sister was half in
love with him until he had the misfortune to fart once in our
presence. I promptly named him Baelor Breakwind, and after that
Elia couldn’t look at him without laughing. I was a monstrous
young fellow, someone should have sliced out my vile tongue.”

Yes, Tyrion agreed silently. Baelor Hightower was no longer
young, but he remained Lord Leyton’s heir; wealthy, handsome, and
a knight of splendid repute. Baelor Brightsmile, they called him now.
Had Elia wed him in place of Rhaegar Targaryen, she might be in
Oldtown with her children growing tall around her. He wondered
how many lives had been snu ed out by that fart.
“Lannisport was the end of our voyage,” Prince Oberyn went on,
as Ser Arron Qorgyle helped him into a padded leather tunic and
began lacing it up the back. “Were you aware that our mothers
knew each other of old?”
“They had been at court together as girls, I seem to recall.
Companions to Princess Rhaella?”
“Just so. It was my belief that the mothers had cooked up this
plot between them. Squire Squishlips and his ilk and the various
pimply young maidens who’d been paraded before me were the
almonds before the feast, meant only to whet our appetites. The
main course was to be served at Casterly Rock.”
“Cersei and Jaime.”
“Such a clever dwarf. Elia and I were older, to be sure. Your
brother and sister could not have been more than eight or nine.
Still, a di erence of ve or six years is little enough. And there was
an empty cabin on our ship, a very nice cabin, such as might be kept
for a person of high birth. As if it were intended that we take
someone back to Sunspear. A young page, perhaps. Or a companion
for Elia. Your lady mother meant to betroth Jaime to my sister, or
Cersei to me. Perhaps both.”
“Perhaps,” said Tyrion, “but my father—”
“—ruled the Seven Kingdoms, but was ruled at home by his lady
wife, or so my mother always said.” Prince Oberyn raised his arms,
so Lord Dagos Manwoody and the Bastard of Godsgrace could slip a
chainmail byrnie down over his head. “At Oldtown we learned of
your mother’s death, and the monstrous child she had borne. We
might have turned back there, but my mother chose to sail on. I
told you of the welcome we found at Casterly Rock.
“What I did not tell you was that my mother waited as long as
was decent, and then broached your father about our purpose. Years

later, on her deathbed, she told me that Lord Tywin had refused us
brusquely. His daughter was meant for Prince Rhaegar, he informed
her. And when she asked for Jaime, to espouse Elia, he o ered her
you instead.”
“Which o er she took for an outrage.”
“It was. Even you can see that, surely?”
“Oh, surely.” It all goes back and back, Tyrion thought, to our
mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on
the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children
will take up our strings and dance on in our steads. “Well, Prince
Rhaegar married Elia of Dorne, not Cersei Lannister of Casterly
Rock. So it would seem your mother won that tilt.”
“She thought so,” Prince Oberyn agreed, “but your father is not a
man to forget such slights. He taught that lesson to Lord and Lady
Tarbeck once, and to the Reynes of Castamere. And at King’s
Landing, he taught it to my sister. My helm, Dagos.” Manwoody
handed it to him; a high golden helm with a copper disk mounted
on the brow, the sun of Dorne. The visor had been removed, Tyrion
saw. “Elia and her children have waited long for justice.” Prince
Oberyn pulled on soft red leather gloves, and took up his spear
again. “But this day they shall have it.”
The outer ward had been chosen for the combat. Tyrion had to
skip and run to keep up with Prince Oberyn’s long strides. The snake
is eager, he thought. Let us hope he is venomous as well. The day was
grey and windy. The sun was struggling to break through the
clouds, but Tyrion could no more have said who was going to win
that ght than the one on which his life depended.
It looked as though a thousand people had come to see if he
would live or die. They lined the castle wallwalks and elbowed one
another on the steps of keeps and towers. They watched from the
stable doors, from windows and bridges, from balconies and roofs.
And the yard was packed with them, so many that the gold cloaks
and the knights of the Kingsguard had to shove them back to make
enough room for the ght. Some had dragged out chairs to watch
more comfortably, while others perched on barrels. We should have
done this in the Dragonpit, Tyrion thought sourly. We could have

charged a penny a head and paid for Jo rey’s wedding and funeral
both. Some of the onlookers even had small children sitting on their
shoulders, to get a better view. They shouted and pointed at the
sight of Tyrion.
Cersei seemed half a child herself beside Ser Gregor. In his armor,
the Mountain looked bigger than any man had any right to be.
Beneath a long yellow surcoat bearing the three black dogs of
Clegane, he wore heavy plate over chainmail, dull grey steel dinted
and scarred in battle. Beneath that would be boiled leather and a
layer of quilting. A at-topped greathelm was bolted to his gorget,
with breaths around the mouth and nose and a narrow slit for
vision. The crest atop it was a stone st.
If Ser Gregor was su ering from wounds, Tyrion could see no
sign of it from across the yard. He looks as though he was chiseled out
of rock, standing there. His greatsword was planted in the ground
before him, six feet of scarred metal. Ser Gregor’s huge hands, clad
in gauntlets of lobstered steel, clasped the crosshilt to either side of
the grip. Even Prince Oberyn’s paramour paled at the sight of him.
“You are going to ght that?” Ellaria Sand said in a hushed voice.
“I am going to kill that,” her lover replied carelessly.
Tyrion had his own doubts, now that they stood on the brink.
When he looked at Prince Oberyn, he found himself wishing he had
Bronn defending him … or even better, Jaime. The Red Viper was
lightly armored; greaves, vambraces, gorget, spaulder, steel
codpiece. Elsewise Oberyn was clad in supple leather and owing
silks. Over his byrnie he wore his scales of gleaming copper, but
mail and scale together would not give him a quarter the protection
of Gregor’s heavy plate. With its visor removed, the prince’s helm
was e ectively no better than a half-helm, lacking even a nasal. His
round steel shield was brightly polished, and showed the sun-andspear in red gold, yellow gold, white gold, and copper.
Dance around him until he’s so tired he can hardly lift his arm, then
put him on his back. The Red Viper seemed to have the same notion
as Bronn. But the sellsword had been blunt about the risks of such
tactics. I hope to seven hells that you know what you are doing, snake.

A platform had been erected beside the Tower of the Hand,
halfway between the two champions. That was where Lord Tywin
sat with his brother Ser Kevan. King Tommen was not in evidence;
for that, at least, Tyrion was grateful.
Lord Tywin glanced brie y at his dwarf son, then lifted his hand.
A dozen trumpeters blew a fanfare to quiet the crowd. The High
Septon shu ed forward in his tall crystal crown, and prayed that
the Father Above would help them in this judgment, and that the
Warrior would lend his strength to the arm of the man whose cause
was just. That would be me, Tyrion almost shouted, but they would
only laugh, and he was sick unto death of laughter.
Ser Osmund Kettleblack brought Clegane his shield, a massive
thing of heavy oak rimmed in black iron. As the Mountain slid his
left arm through the straps, Tyrion saw that the hounds of Clegane
had been painted over. This morning Ser Gregor bore the sevenpointed star the Andals had brought to Westeros when they crossed
the narrow sea to overwhelm the First Men and their gods. Very
pious of you, Cersei, but I doubt the gods will be impressed.
There were fty yards between them. Prince Oberyn advanced
quickly, Ser Gregor more ominously. The ground does not shake when
he walks, Tyrion told himself. That is only my heart uttering. When
the two men were ten yards apart, the Red Viper stopped and called
out, “Have they told you who I am?”
Ser Gregor grunted through his breaths. “Some dead man.” He
came on, inexorable.
The Dornishman slid sideways. “I am Oberyn Martell, a prince of
Dorne,” he said, as the Mountain turned to keep him in sight.
“Princess Elia was my sister.”
“Who?” asked Gregor Clegane.
Oberyn’s long spear jabbed, but Ser Gregor took the point on his
shield, shoved it aside, and bulled back at the prince, his great
sword ashing. The Dornishman spun away untouched. The spear
darted forward. Clegane slashed at it, Martell snapped it back, then
thrust again. Metal screamed on metal as the spearhead slid o the
Mountain’s chest, slicing through the surcoat and leaving a long
bright scratch on the steel beneath. “Elia Martell, Princess of

Dorne,” the Red Viper hissed. “You raped her. You murdered her.
You killed her children.”
Ser Gregor grunted. He made a ponderous charge to hack at the
Dornishman’s head. Prince Oberyn avoided him easily. “You raped
her. You murdered her. You killed her children.”
“Did you come to talk or to ght?”
“I came to hear you confess.” The Red Viper landed a quick thrust
on the Mountain’s belly, to no e ect. Gregor cut at him, and missed.
The long spear lanced in above his sword. Like a serpent’s tongue it
ickered in and out, feinting low and landing high, jabbing at groin,
shield, eyes. The Mountain makes for a big target, at the least, Tyrion
thought. Prince Oberyn could scarcely miss, though none of his
blows was penetrating Ser Gregor’s heavy plate. The Dornishman
kept circling, jabbing, then darting back again, forcing the bigger
man to turn and turn again. Clegane is losing sight of him. The
Mountain’s helm had a narrow eyeslit, severely limiting his vision.
Oberyn was making good use of that, and the length of his spear,
and his quickness.
It went on that way for what seemed a long time. Back and forth
they moved across the yard, and round and round in spirals, Ser
Gregor slashing at the air while Oberyn’s spear struck at arm, and
leg, twice at his temple. Gregor’s big wooden shield took its share
of hits as well, until a dog’s head peeped out from under the star,
and elsewhere the raw oak showed through. Clegane would grunt
from time to time, and once Tyrion heard him mutter a curse, but
otherwise he fought in a sullen silence.
Not Oberyn Martell. “You raped her,” he called, feinting. “You
murdered her,” he said, dodging a looping cut from Gregor’s
greatsword. “You killed her children,” he shouted, slamming the
spearpoint into the giant’s throat, only to have it glance o the
thick steel gorget with a screech.
“Oberyn is toying with him,” said Ellaria Sand.
That is fool’s play, thought Tyrion. “The Mountain is too bloody
big to be any man’s toy.”
All around the yard, the throng of spectators was creeping in
toward the two combatants, edging forward inch by inch to get a

better view. The Kingsguard tried to keep them back, shoving at the
gawkers forcefully with their big white shields, but there were
hundreds of gawkers and only six of the men in white armor.
“You raped her.” Prince Oberyn parried a savage cut with his
spearhead. “You murdered her.” He sent the spearpoint at Clegane’s
eyes, so fast the huge man inched back. “You killed her children.”
The spear ickered sideways and down, scraping against the
Mountain’s breastplate. “You raped her. You murdered her. You
killed her children.” The spear was two feet longer than Ser
Gregor’s sword, more than enough to keep him at an awkward
distance. He hacked at the shaft whenever Oberyn lunged at him,
trying to lop o the spearhead, but he might as well have been
trying to hack the wings o a y. “You raped her. You murdered
her. You killed her children.” Gregor tried to bull rush, but Oberyn
skipped aside and circled round his back. “You raped her. You
murdered her. You killed her children.”
“Be quiet.” Ser Gregor seemed to be moving a little slower, and
his greatsword no longer rose quite so high as it had when the
contest began. “Shut your bloody mouth.”
“You raped her,” the prince said, moving to the right.
“Enough!” Ser Gregor took two long strides and brought his sword
down at Oberyn’s head, but the Dornishman backstepped once
more. “You murdered her,” he said.
“SHUT UP!” Gregor charged headlong, right at the point of the
spear, which slammed into his right breast then slid aside with a
hideous steel shriek. Suddenly the Mountain was close enough to
strike, his huge sword ashing in a steel blur. The crowd was
screaming as well. Oberyn slipped the rst blow and let go of the
spear, useless now that Ser Gregor was inside it. The second cut the
Dornishman caught on his shield. Metal met metal with an earsplitting clang, sending the Red Viper reeling. Ser Gregor followed,
bellowing. He doesn’t use words, he just roars like an animal, Tyrion
thought. Oberyn’s retreat became a headlong backward ight mere
inches ahead of the greatsword as it slashed at his chest, his arms,
his head.

The stable was behind him. Spectators screamed and shoved at
each other to get out of the way. One stumbled into Oberyn’s back.
Ser Gregor hacked down with all his savage strength. The Red Viper
threw himself sideways, rolling. The luckless stableboy behind him
was not so quick. As his arm rose to protect his face, Gregor’s sword
took it o between elbow and shoulder. “Shut UP!” the Mountain
howled at the stableboy’s scream, and this time he swung the blade
sideways, sending the top half of the lad’s head across the yard in a
spray of blood and brains. Hundreds of spectators suddenly seemed
to lose all interest in the guilt or innocence of Tyrion Lannister,
judging by the way they pushed and shoved at each other to escape
the yard.
But the Red Viper of Dorne was back on his feet, his long spear in
hand. “Elia,” he called at Ser Gregor. “You raped her. You murdered
her. You killed her children. Now say her name.”
The Mountain whirled. Helm, shield, sword, surcoat; he was
spattered with gore from head to heels. “You talk too much,” he
grumbled. “You make my head hurt.”
“I will hear you say it. She was Elia of Dorne.”
The Mountain snorted contemptuously, and came on … and in
that moment, the sun broke through the low clouds that had hidden
the sky since dawn.
The sun of Dorne, Tyrion told himself, but it was Gregor Clegane
who moved rst to put the sun at his back. This is a dim and brutal
man, but he has a warrior’s instincts.
The Red Viper crouched, squinting, and sent his spear darting
forward again. Ser Gregor hacked at it, but the thrust had only been
a feint. O balance, he stumbled forward a step.
Prince Oberyn tilted his dinted metal shield. A shaft of sunlight
blazed blindingly o polished gold and copper, into the narrow slit
of his foe’s helm. Clegane lifted his own shield against the glare.
Prince Oberyn’s spear ashed like lightning and found the gap in
the heavy plate, the joint under the arm. The point punched through
mail and boiled leather. Gregor gave a choked grunt as the
Dornishman twisted his spear and yanked it free.“Elia. Say it! Elia
of Dorne!” He was circling, spear poised for another thrust. “Say it!”

Tyrion had his own prayer. Fall down and die, was how it went.
Damn you, fall down and die! The blood trickling from the
Mountain’s armpit was his own now, and he must be bleeding even
more heavily inside the breastplate. When he tried to take a step,
one knee buckled. Tyrion thought he was going down.
Prince Oberyn had circled behind him. “ELIA OF DORNE!” he
shouted. Ser Gregor started to turn, but too slow and too late. The
spearhead went through the back of the knee this time, through the
layers of chain and leather between the plates on thigh and calf. The
Mountain reeled, swayed, then collapsed face rst on the ground.
His huge sword went ying from his hand. Slowly, ponderously, he
rolled onto his back.
The Dornishman ung away his ruined shield, grasped the spear
in both hands, and sauntered away. Behind him the Mountain let
out a groan, and pushed himself onto an elbow. Oberyn whirled catquick, and ran at his fallen foe. “EEEEELLLLLLIIIIIAAAAA!” he
screamed, as he drove the spear down with the whole weight of his
body behind it. The crack of the ashwood shaft snapping was almost
as sweet a sound as Cersei’s wail of fury, and for an instant Prince
Oberyn had wings. The snake has vaulted over the Mountain. Four feet
of broken spear jutted from Clegane’s belly as Prince Oberyn rolled,
rose, and dusted himself o . He tossed aside the splintered spear
and claimed his foe’s greatsword. “If you die before you say her
name, ser, I will hunt you through all seven hells,” he promised.
Ser Gregor tried to rise. The broken spear had gone through him,
and was pinning him to the ground. He wrapped both hands about
the shaft, grunting, but could not pull it out. Beneath him was a
spreading pool of red. “I am feeling more innocent by the instant,”
Tyrion told Ellaria Sand beside him.
Prince Oberyn moved closer. “Say the name!” He put a foot on the
Mountain’s chest and raised the greatsword with both hands.
Whether he intended to hack o Gregor’s head or shove the point
through his eyeslit was something Tyrion would never know.
Clegane’s hand shot up and grabbed the Dornishman behind the
knee. The Red Viper brought down the greatsword in a wild slash,
but he was o -balance, and the edge did no more than put another

dent in the Mountain’s vambrace. Then the sword was forgotten as
Gregor’s hand tightened and twisted, yanking the Dornishman down
on top of him. They wrestled in the dust and blood, the broken
spear wobbling back and forth. Tyrion saw with horror that the
Mountain had wrapped one huge arm around the prince, drawing
him tight against his chest, like a lover.
“Elia of Dorne,” they all heard Ser Gregor say, when they were
close enough to kiss. His deep voice boomed within the helm. “I
killed her screaming whelp.” He thrust his free hand into Oberyn’s
unprotected face, pushing steel ngers into his eyes. “Then I raped
her.” Clegane slammed his st into the Dornishman’s mouth,
making splinters of his teeth. “Then I smashed her fucking head in.
Like this.” As he drew back his huge st, the blood on his gauntlet
seemed to smoke in the cold dawn air. There was a sickening
crunch. Ellaria Sand wailed in terror, and Tyrion’s breakfast came
boiling back up. He found himself on his knees retching bacon and
sausage and applecakes, and that double helping of fried eggs
cooked up with onions and ery Dornish peppers.
He never heard his father speak the words that condemned him.
Perhaps no words were necessary. I put my life in the Red Viper’s
hands, and he dropped it. When he remembered, too late, that snakes
had no hands, Tyrion began to laugh hysterically.
He was halfway down the serpentine steps before he realized that
the gold cloaks were not taking him back to his tower room. “I’ve
been consigned to the black cells,” he said. They did not bother to
answer. Why waste your breath on the dead?

DAENERYS

Dany broke her fast under the persimmon tree that grew in the

terrace garden, watching her dragons chase each other about the
apex of the Great Pyramid where the huge bronze harpy once stood.
Meereen had a score of lesser pyramids, but none stood even half as
tall. From here she could see the whole city: the narrow twisty
alleys and wide brick streets, the temples and granaries, hovels and
palaces, brothels and baths, gardens and fountains, the great red
circles of the ghting pits. And beyond the walls was the pewter
sea, the winding Skahazadhan, the dry brown hills, burnt orchards,
and blackened elds. Up here in her garden Dany sometimes felt
like a god, living atop the highest mountain in the world.
Do all gods feel so lonely? Some must, surely. Missandei had told
her of the Lord of Harmony, worshiped by the Peaceful People of
Naath; he was the only true god, her little scribe said, the god who
always was and always would be, who made the moon and stars
and earth, and all the creatures that dwelt upon them. Poor Lord of
Harmony. Dany pitied him. It must be terrible to be alone for all
time, attended by hordes of butter y women you could make or
unmake at a word. Westeros had seven gods at least, though Viserys
had told her that some septons said the seven were only aspects of a
single god, seven facets of a single crystal. That was just confusing.
The red priests believed in two gods, she had heard, but two who
were eternally at war. Dany liked that even less. She would not
want to be eternally at war.

Missandei served her duck eggs and dog sausage, and half a cup
of sweetened wine mixed with the juice of a lime. The honey drew
ies, but a scented candle drove them o . The ies were not so
troublesome up here as they were in the rest of her city, she had
found, something else she liked about the pyramid. “I must
remember to do something about the ies,” Dany said. “Are there
many ies on Naath, Missandei?”
“On Naath there are butter ies,” the scribe responded in the
Common Tongue. “More wine?”
“No. I must hold court soon.” Dany had grown very fond of
Missandei. The little scribe with the big golden eyes was wise
beyond her years. She is brave as well. She had to be, to survive the life
she’s lived. One day she hoped to see this fabled isle of Naath.
Missandei said the Peaceful People made music instead of war. They
did not kill, not even animals; they ate only fruit and never esh.
The butter y spirits sacred to their Lord of Harmony protected their
isle against those who would do them harm. Many conquerors had
sailed on Naath to blood their swords, only to sicken and die. The
butter ies do not help them when the slave ships come raiding, though.
“I am going to take you home one day, Missandei,” Dany promised.
If I had made the same promise to Jorah, would he still have sold me? “I
swear it.”
“This one is content to stay with you, Your Grace. Naath will be
there, always. You are good to this—to me.”
“And you to me.” Dany took the girl by the hand. “Come help me
dress.”
Jhiqui helped Missandei bathe her while Irri was laying out her
clothes. Today she wore a robe of purple samite and a silver sash,
and on her head the three-headed dragon crown the Tourmaline
Brotherhood had given her in Qarth. Her slippers were silver as
well, with heels so high that she was always half afraid she was
about to topple over. When she was dressed, Missandei brought her
a polished silver glass so she could see how she looked. Dany stared
at herself in silence. Is this the face of a conqueror? So far as she
could tell, she still looked like a little girl.

No one was calling her Daenerys the Conqueror yet, but perhaps
they would. Aegon the Conqueror had won Westeros with three
dragons, but she had taken Meereen with sewer rats and a wooden
cock, in less than a day. Poor Groleo. He still grieved for his ship,
she knew. If a war galley could ram another ship, why not a gate?
That had been her thought when she commanded the captains to
drive their ships ashore. Their masts had become her battering
rams, and swarms of freedmen had torn their hulls apart to build
mantlets, turtles, catapults, and ladders. The sellswords had given
each ram a bawdy name, and it had been the mainmast of Meraxes
—formerly Joso’s Prank—that had broken the eastern gate. Joso’s
Cock, they called it. The ghting had raged bitter and bloody for
most of a day and well into the night before the wood began to
splinter and Meraxes’ iron gurehead, a laughing jester’s face, came
crashing through.
Dany had wanted to lead the attack herself, but to a man her
captains said that would be madness, and her captains never agreed
on anything. Instead she remained in the rear, sitting atop her silver
in a long shirt of mail. She heard the city fall from half a league
away, though, when the defenders’ shouts of de ance changed to
cries of fear. Her dragons had roared as one in that moment, lling
the night with ame. The slaves are rising, she knew at once. My
sewer rats have gnawed o their chains.
When the last resistance had been crushed by the Unsullied and
the sack had run its course, Dany entered her city. The dead were
heaped so high before the broken gate that it took her freedmen
near an hour to make a path for her silver. Joso’s Cock and the
great wooden turtle that had protected it, covered with horsehides,
lay abandoned within. She rode past burned buildings and broken
windows, through brick streets where the gutters were choked with
the sti and swollen dead. Cheering slaves lifted bloodstained hands
to her as she went by, and called her “Mother.”
In the plaza before the Great Pyramid, the Meereenese huddled
forlorn. The Great Masters had looked anything but great in the
morning light. Stripped of their jewels and their fringed tokars, they
were contemptible; a herd of old men with shriveled balls and

spotted skin and young men with ridiculous hair. Their women were
either soft and eshy or as dry as old sticks, their face paint
streaked by tears. “I want your leaders,” Dany told them. “Give
them up, and the rest of you shall be spared.”
“How many?” one old woman had asked, sobbing. “How many
must you have to spare us?”
“One hundred and sixty-three,” she answered.
She had them nailed to wooden posts around the plaza, each man
pointing at the next. The anger was erce and hot inside her when
she gave the command; it made her feel like an avenging dragon.
But later, when she passed the men dying on the posts, when she
heard their moans and smelled their bowels and blood …
Dany put the glass aside, frowning. It was just. It was. I did it for
the children.
Her audience chamber was on the level below, an echoing highceilinged room with walls of purple marble. It was a chilly place for
all its grandeur. There had been a throne there, a fantastic thing of
carved and gilded wood in the shape of a savage harpy. She had
taken one long look and commanded it be broken up for rewood.
“I will not sit in the harpy’s lap,” she told them. Instead she sat
upon a simple ebony bench. It served, though she had heard the
Meereenese muttering that it did not be t a queen.
Her bloodriders were waiting for her. Silver bells tinkled in their
oiled braids, and they wore the gold and jewels of dead men.
Meereen had been rich beyond imagining. Even her sellswords
seemed sated, at least for now. Across the room, Grey Worm wore
the plain uniform of the Unsullied, his spiked bronze cap beneath
one arm. These at least she could rely on, or so she hoped … and
Brown Ben Plumm as well, solid Ben with his grey-white hair and
weathered face, so beloved of her dragons. And Daario beside him,
glittering in gold. Daario and Ben Plumm, Grey Worm, Irri, Jhiqui,
Missandei … as she looked at them Dany found herself wondering
which of them would betray her next.
The dragon has three heads. There are two men in the world who I
can trust, if I can nd them. I will not be alone then. We will be three
against the world, like Aegon and his sisters.

“Was the night as quiet as it seemed?” Dany asked.
“It seems it was, Your Grace,” said Brown Ben Plumm.
She was pleased. Meereen had been sacked savagely, as newfallen cities always were, but Dany was determined that should end
now that the city was hers. She had decreed that murderers were to
be hanged, that looters were to lose a hand, and rapists their
manhood. Eight killers swung from the walls, and the Unsullied had
lled a bushel basket with bloody hands and soft red worms, but
Meereen was calm again. But for how long?
A y buzzed her head. Dany waved it o , irritated, but it returned
almost at once. “There are too many ies in this city.”
Ben Plumm gave a bark of laughter. “There were ies in my ale
this morning. I swallowed one of them.”
“Flies are the dead man’s revenge.” Daario smiled, and stroked
the center prong of his beard. “Corpses breed maggots, and maggots
breed ies.”
“We will rid ourselves of the corpses, then. Starting with those in
the plaza below. Grey Worm, will you see to it?”
“The queen commands, these ones obey.”
“Best bring sacks as well as shovels, Worm,” Brown Ben
counseled. “Well past ripe, those ones. Falling o those poles in bits
and pieces, and crawling with …”
“He knows. So do I.” Dany remembered the horror she had felt
when she had seen the Plaza of Punishment in Astapor. I made a
horror just as great, but surely they deserved it. Harsh justice is still
justice.
“Your Grace,” said Missandei, “Ghiscari inter their honored dead
in crypts below their manses. If you would boil the bones clean and
return them to their kin, it would be a kindness.”
The widows will curse me all the same. “Let it be done.” Dany
beckoned to Daario. “How many seek audience this morning?”
“Two have presented themselves to bask in your radiance.”
Daario had plundered himself a whole new wardrobe in Meereen,
and to match it he had redyed his trident beard and curly hair a
deep rich purple. It made his eyes look almost purple too, as if he

were some lost Valyrian. “They arrived in the night on the Indigo
Star, a trading galley out of Qarth.”
A slaver, you mean. Dany frowned. “Who are they?”
“The Star’s master and one who claims to speak for Astapor.”
“I will see the envoy rst.”
He proved to be a pale ferret-faced man with ropes of pearls and
spun gold hanging heavy about his neck. “Your Worship!” he cried.
“My name is Ghael. I bring greetings to the Mother of Dragons from
King Cleon of Astapor, Cleon the Great.”
Dany sti ened. “I left a council to rule Astapor. A healer, a
scholar, and a priest.”
“Your Worship, those sly rogues betrayed your trust. It was
revealed that they were scheming to restore the Good Masters to
power and the people to chains. Great Cleon exposed their plots and
hacked their heads o with a cleaver, and the grateful folk of
Astapor have crowned him for his valor.”
“Noble Ghael,” said Missandei, in the dialect of Astapor, “is this
the same Cleon once owned by Grazdan mo Ullhor?”
Her voice was guileless, yet the question plainly made the envoy
anxious. “The same,” he admitted. “A great man.”
Missandei leaned close to Dany. “He was a butcher in Grazdan’s
kitchen,” the girl whispered in her ear. “It was said he could
slaughter a pig faster than any man in Astapor.”
I have given Astapor a butcher king. Dany felt ill, but she knew she
must not let the envoy see it. “I will pray that King Cleon rules well
and wisely. What would he have of me?”
Ghael rubbed his mouth. “Perhaps we should speak more privily,
Your Grace?”
“I have no secrets from my captains and commanders.”
“As you wish. Great Cleon bids me declare his devotion to the
Mother of Dragons. Your enemies are his enemies, he says, and
chief among them are the Wise Masters of Yunkai. He proposes a
pact between Astapor and Meereen, against the Yunkai’i.”
“I swore no harm would come to Yunkai if they released their
slaves,” said Dany.

“These Yunkish dogs cannot be trusted, Your Worship. Even now
they plot against you. New levies have been raised and can be seen
drilling outside the city walls, warships are being built, envoys have
been sent to New Ghis and Volantis in the west, to make alliances
and hire sellswords. They have even dispatched riders to Vaes
Dothrak to bring a khalasar down upon you. Great Cleon bid me tell
you not to be afraid. Astapor remembers. Astapor will not forsake
you. To prove his faith, Great Cleon o ers to seal your alliance with
a marriage.”
“A marriage? To me?”
Ghael smiled. His teeth were brown and rotten. “Great Cleon will
give you many strong sons.”
Dany found herself bereft of words, but little Missandei came to
her rescue. “Did his rst wife give him sons?”
The envoy looked at her unhappily. “Great Cleon has three
daughters by his rst wife. Two of his newer wives are with child.
But he means to put all of them aside if the Mother of Dragons will
consent to wed him.”
“How noble of him,” said Dany. “I will consider all you’ve said,
my lord.” She gave orders that Ghael be given chambers for the
night, somewhere lower in the pyramid.
All my victories turn to dross in my hands, she thought. Whatever I
do, all I make is death and horror. When word of what had befallen
Astapor reached the streets, as it surely would, tens of thousands of
newly freed Meereenese slaves would doubtless decide to follow
her when she went west, for fear of what awaited them if they
stayed … yet it might well be that worse would await them on the
march. Even if she emptied every granary in the city and left
Meereen to starve, how could she feed so many? The way before
her was fraught with hardship, bloodshed, and danger. Ser Jorah
had warned her of that. He’d warned her of so many
things … he’d … No, I will not think of Jorah Mormont. Let him keep a
little longer. “I shall see this trader captain,” she announced. Perhaps
he would have some better tidings.
That proved to be a forlorn hope. The master of the Indigo Star
was Qartheen, so he wept copiously when asked about Astapor.

“The city bleeds. Dead men rot unburied in the streets, each
pyramid is an armed camp, and the markets have neither food nor
slaves for sale. And the poor children! King Cleaver’s thugs have
seized every highborn boy in Astapor to make new Unsullied for the
trade, though it will be years before they are trained.”
The thing that surprised Dany most was how unsurprised she was.
She found herself remembering Eroeh, the Lhazarene girl she had
once tried to protect, and what had happened to her. It will be the
same in Meereen once I march, she thought. The slaves from the
ghting pits, bred and trained to slaughter, were already proving
themselves unruly and quarrelsome. They seemed to think they
owned the city now, and every man and woman in it. Two of them
had been among the eight she’d hanged. There is no more I can do,
she told herself. “What do you want of me, Captain?”
“Slaves,” he said. “My holds are full to bursting with ivory,
ambergris, zorse hides, and other ne goods. I would trade them
here for slaves, to sell in Lys and Volantis.”
“We have no slaves for sale,” said Dany.
“My queen?” Daario stepped forward. “The riverside is full of
Meereenese, begging leave to be allowed to sell themselves to this
Qartheen. They are thicker than the ies.”
Dany was shocked. “They want to be slaves?”
“The ones who come are well spoken and gently born, sweet
queen. Such slaves are prized. In the Free Cities they will be tutors,
scribes, bed slaves, even healers and priests. They will sleep in soft
beds, eat rich foods, and dwell in manses. Here they have lost all,
and live in fear and squalor.”
“I see.” Perhaps it was not so shocking, if these tales of Astapor
were true. Dany thought a moment. “Any man who wishes to sell
himself into slavery may do so. Or woman.” She raised a hand. “But
they may not sell their children, nor a man his wife.”
“In Astapor the city took a tenth part of the price, each time a
slave changed hands,” Missandei told her.
“We’ll do the same,” Dany decided. Wars were won with gold as
much as swords. “A tenth part. In gold or silver coin, or ivory.
Meereen has no need of sa ron, cloves, or zorse hides.”

“It shall be done as you command, glorious queen,” said Daario.
“My Stormcrows will collect your tenth.”
If the Stormcrows saw to the collections at least half the gold
would somehow go astray, Dany knew. But the Second Sons were
just as bad, and the Unsullied were as unlettered as they were
incorruptible. “Records must be kept,” she said. “Seek among the
freedmen for men who can read, write, and do sums.”
His business done, the captain of the Indigo Star bowed and took
his leave. Dany shifted uncomfortably on the ebony bench. She
dreaded what must come next, yet she knew she had put it o too
long already. Yunkai and Astapor, threats of war, marriage
proposals, the march west looming over all … I need my knights. I
need their swords, and I need their counsel. Yet the thought of seeing
Jorah Mormont again made her feel as if she’d swallowed a
spoonful of ies; angry, agitated, sick. She could almost feel them
buzzing round her belly. I am the blood of the dragon. I must be
strong. I must have re in my eyes when I face them, not tears. “Tell
Belwas to bring my knights,” Dany commanded, before she could
change her mind. “My good knights.”
Strong Belwas was pu ng from the climb when he marched them
through the doors, one meaty hand wrapped tight around each
man’s arm. Ser Barristan walked with his head held high, but Ser
Jorah stared at the marble oor as he approached. The one is proud,
the other guilty. The old man had shaved o his white beard. He
looked ten years younger without it. But her balding bear looked
older than he had. They halted before the bench. Strong Belwas
stepped back and stood with his arms crossed across his scarred
chest. Ser Jorah cleared his throat. “Khaleesi …”
She had missed his voice so much, but she had to be stern. “Be
quiet. I will tell you when to speak.” She stood. “When I sent you
down into the sewers, part of me hoped I’d seen the last of you. It
seemed a tting end for liars, to drown in slavers’ lth. I thought
the gods would deal with you, but instead you returned to me. My
gallant knights of Westeros, an informer and a turncloak. My
brother would have hanged you both.” Viserys would have,

anyway. She did not know what Rhaegar would have done. “I will
admit you helped win me this city …”
Ser Jorah’s mouth tightened. “We won you this city. We sewer
rats.”
“Be quiet,” she said again … though there was truth to what he
said. While Joso’s Cock and the other rams were battering the city
gates and her archers were ring ights of aming arrows over the
walls, Dany had sent two hundred men along the river under cover
of darkness to re the hulks in the harbor. But that was only to hide
their true purpose. As the aming ships drew the eyes of the
defenders on the walls, a few half-mad swimmers found the sewer
mouths and pried loose a rusted iron grating. Ser Jorah, Ser
Barristan, Strong Belwas, and twenty brave fools slipped beneath
the brown water and up the brick tunnel, a mixed force of
sellswords, Unsullied, and freedmen. Dany had told them to choose
only men who had no families … and preferably no sense of smell.
They had been lucky as well as brave. It had been a moon’s turn
since the last good rain, and the sewers were only thigh-high. The
oilcloth they’d wrapped around their torches kept them dry, so they
had light. A few of the freedmen were frightened of the huge rats
until Strong Belwas caught one and bit it in two. One man was
killed by a great pale lizard that reared up out of the dark water to
drag him o by the leg, but when next ripples were spied Ser Jorah
butchered the beast with his blade. They took some wrong turnings,
but once they found the surface Strong Belwas led them to the
nearest ghting pit, where they surprised a few guards and struck
the chains o the slaves. Within an hour, half the ghting slaves in
Meereen had risen.
“You helped win this city,” she repeated stubbornly. “And you
have served me well in the past. Ser Barristan saved me from the
Titan’s Bastard, and from the Sorrowful Man in Qarth. Ser Jorah
saved me from the poisoner in Vaes Dothrak, and again from
Drogo’s bloodriders after my sun-and-stars had died.” So many
people wanted her dead, sometimes she lost count. “And yet you
lied, deceived me, betrayed me.” She turned to Ser Barristan. “You
protected my father for many years, fought beside my brother on

the Trident, but you abandoned Viserys in his exile and bent your
knee to the Usurper instead. Why? And tell it true.”
“Some truths are hard to hear. Robert was a … a good
knight … chivalrous, brave … he spared my life, and the lives of
many others … Prince Viserys was only a boy, it would have been
years before he was t to rule, and … forgive me, my queen, but
you asked for truth … even as a child, your brother Viserys oft
seemed to be his father’s son, in ways that Rhaegar never did.”
“His father’s son?” Dany frowned. “What does that mean?”
The old knight did not blink. “Your father is called ‘the Mad King’
in Westeros. Has no one ever told you?”
“Viserys did.” The Mad King. “The Usurper called him that, the
Usurper and his dogs.” The Mad King. “It was a lie.”
“Why ask for truth,” Ser Barristan said softly, “if you close your
ears to it?” He hesitated, then continued. “I told you before that I
used a false name so the Lannisters would not know that I’d joined
you. That was less than half of it, Your Grace. The truth is, I wanted
to watch you for a time before pledging you my sword. To make
certain that you were not …”
“… my father’s daughter?” If she was not her father’s daughter,
who was she?
“… mad,” he nished. “But I see no taint in you.”
“Taint?” Dany bristled.
“I am no maester to quote history at you, Your Grace. Swords
have been my life, not books. But every child knows that the
Targaryens have always danced too close to madness. Your father
was not the rst. King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and
greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new
Targaryen is born, he said, the gods toss the coin in the air and the
world holds its breath to see how it will land.”
Jaehaerys. This old man knew my grandfather. The thought gave her
pause. Most of what she knew of Westeros had come from her
brother, and the rest from Ser Jorah. Ser Barristan would have
forgotten more than the two of them had ever known. This man can
tell me what I came from. “So I am a coin in the hands of some god,
is that what you are saying, ser?”

“No,” Ser Barristan replied. “You are the trueborn heir of
Westeros. To the end of my days I shall remain your faithful knight,
should you nd me worthy to bear a sword again. If not, I am
content to serve Strong Belwas as his squire.”
“What if I decide you’re only worthy to be my fool?” Dany asked
scornfully. “Or perhaps my cook?”
“I would be honored, Your Grace,” Selmy said with quiet dignity.
“I can bake apples and boil beef as well as any man, and I’ve
roasted many a duck over a camp re. I hope you like them greasy,
with charred skin and bloody bones.”
That made her smile. “I’d have to be mad to eat such fare. Ben
Plumm, come give Ser Barristan your longsword.”
But Whitebeard would not take it. “I ung my sword at Jo rey’s
feet and have not touched one since. Only from the hand of my
queen will I accept a sword again.”
“As you wish.” Dany took the sword from Brown Ben and o ered
it hilt rst. The old man took it reverently. “Now kneel,” she told
him, “and swear it to my service.”
He went to one knee and lay the blade before her as he said the
words. Dany scarcely heard them. He was the easy one, she thought.
The other will be harder. When Ser Barristan was done, she turned to
Jorah Mormont. “And now you, ser. Tell me true.”
The big man’s neck was red; whether from anger or shame she
did not know. “I have tried to tell you true, half a hundred times. I
told you Arstan was more than he seemed. I warned you that Xaro
and Pyat Pree were not to be trusted. I warned you—”
“You warned me against everyone except yourself.” His insolence
angered her. He should be humbler. He should beg for my forgiveness.
“Trust no one but Jorah Mormont, you said … and all the time you
were the Spider’s creature!”
“I am no man’s creature. I took the eunuch’s gold, yes. I learned
some ciphers and wrote some letters, but that was all—”
“All? You spied on me and sold me to my enemies!”
“For a time.” He said it grudgingly. “I stopped.”
“When? When did you stop?”
“I made one report from Qarth, but—”

“From Qarth?” Dany had been hoping it had ended much earlier.
“What did you write from Quarth? That you were my man now,
that you wanted no more of their schemes?” Ser Jorah could not
meet her eyes. “When Khal Drogo died, you asked me to go with
you to Yi Ti and the Jade Sea. Was that your wish or Robert’s?”
“That was to protect you,” he insisted. “To keep you away from
them. I knew what snakes they were …”
“Snakes? And what are you, ser?” Something unspeakable
occurred to her. “You told them I was carrying Drogo’s child …”
“Khaleesi …”
“Do not think to deny it, ser,” Ser Barristan said sharply. “I was
there when the eunuch told the council, and Robert decreed that
Her Grace and her child must die. You were the source, ser. There
was even talk that you might do the deed, for a pardon.”
“A lie.” Ser Jorah’s face darkened. “I would never … Daenerys, it
was me who stopped you from drinking the wine.”
“Yes. And how was it you knew the wine was poisoned?”
“I … I but suspected … the caravan brought a letter from Varys,
he warned me there would be attempts. He wanted you watched,
yes, but not harmed.” He went to his knees. “If I had not told them
someone else would have. You know that.”
“I know you betrayed me.” She touched her belly, where her son
Rhaego had perished. “I know a poisoner tried to kill my son,
because of you. That’s what I know.”
“No … no.” He shook his head. “I never meant … forgive me.
You have to forgive me.”
“Have to?” It was too late. He should have begun by begging
forgiveness. She could not pardon him as she’d intended. She had
dragged the wineseller behind her horse until there was nothing left
of him. Didn’t the man who brought him deserve the same? This is
Jorah, my erce bear, the right arm that never failed me. I would be
dead without him, but … “I can’t forgive you,” she said. “I can’t.”
“You forgave the old man …”
“He lied to me about his name. You sold my secrets to the men
who killed my father and stole my brother’s throne.”
“I protected you. I fought for you. Killed for you.”

Kissed me, she thought, betrayed me.
“I went down into the sewers like a rat. For you.”
It might have been kinder if you’d died there. Dany said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
“Daenerys,” he said, “I have loved you.”
And there it was. Three treasons will you know. Once for blood and
once for gold and once for love. “The gods do nothing without a
purpose, they say. You did not die in battle, so it must be they still
have some use for you. But I don’t. I will not have you near me.
You are banished, ser. Go back to your masters in King’s Landing
and collect your pardon, if you can. Or to Astapor. No doubt the
butcher king needs knights.”
“No.” He reached for her. “Daenerys, please, hear me …”
She slapped his hand away. “Do not ever presume to touch me
again, or to speak my name. You have until dawn to collect your
things and leave this city. If you’re found in Meereen past break of
day, I will have Strong Belwas twist your head o . I will. Believe
that.” She turned her back on him, her skirts swirling. I cannot bear
to see his face. “Remove this liar from my sight,” she commanded. I
must not weep. I must not. If I weep I will forgive him. Strong Belwas
seized Ser Jorah by the arm and dragged him out. When Dany
glanced back, the knight was walking as if drunk, stumbling and
slow. She looked away until she heard the doors open and close.
Then she sank back onto the ebony bench. He’s gone, then. My father
and my mother, my brothers, Ser Willem Darry, Drogo who was my sunand-stars, his son who died inside me, and now Ser Jorah …
“The queen has a good heart,” Daario purred through his deep
purple whiskers, “but that one is more dangerous than all the
Oznaks and Meros rolled up in one.” His strong hands caressed the
hilts of his matched blades, those wanton golden women. “You need
not even say the word, my radiance. Only give the tiniest nod, and
your Daario shall fetch you back his ugly head.”
“Leave him be. The scales are balanced now. Let him go home.”
Dany pictured Jorah moving amongst old gnarled oaks and tall
pines, past owering thornbushes, grey stones bearded with moss,
and little creeks running icy down steep hillsides. She saw him

entering a hall built of huge logs, where dogs slept by the hearth
and the smell of meat and mead hung thick in the smoky air. “We
are done for now,” she told her captains.
It was all she could do not to run back up the wide marble stairs.
Irri helped her slip from her court clothes and into more
comfortable garb; baggy woolen breeches, a loose felted tunic, a
painted Dothraki vest. “You are trembling, Khaleesi,” the girl said as
she knelt to lace up Dany’s sandals.
“I’m cold,” Dany lied. “Bring me the book I was reading last
night.” She wanted to lose herself in the words, in other times and
other places. The fat leather-bound volume was full of songs and
stories from the Seven Kingdoms. Children’s stories, if truth be told;
too simple and fanciful to be true history. All the heroes were tall
and handsome, and you could tell the traitors by their shifty eyes.
Yet she loved them all the same. Last night she had been reading of
the three princesses in the red tower, locked away by the king for
the crime of being beautiful.
When her handmaid brought the book, Dany had no trouble
nding the page where she had left o , but it was no good. She
found herself reading the same passage half a dozen times. Ser Jorah
gave me this book as a bride’s gift, the day I wed Khal Drogo. But Daario
is right, I shouldn’t have banished him. I should have kept him, or I
should have killed him. She played at being a queen, yet sometimes
she still felt like a scared little girl. Viserys always said what a dolt I
was. Was he truly mad? She closed the book. She could still recall Ser
Jorah, if she wished. Or send Daario to kill him.
Dany ed from the choice, out onto the terrace. She found
Rhaegal asleep beside the pool, a green and bronze coil basking in
the sun. Drogon was perched up atop the pyramid, in the place
where the huge bronze harpy had stood before she had commanded
it to be pulled down. He spread his wings and roared when he spied
her. There was no sign of Viserion, but when she went to the
parapet and scanned the horizon she saw pale wings in the far
distance, sweeping above the river. He is hunting. They grow bolder
every day. Yet it still made her anxious when they ew too far
away. One day one of them may not return, she thought.

“Your Grace?”
She turned to nd Ser Barristan behind her. “What more would
you have of me, ser? I spared you, I took you into my service, now
give me some peace.”
“Forgive me, Your Grace. It was only … now that you know who
I am …” The old man hesitated. “A knight of the Kingsguard is in
the king’s presence day and night. For that reason, our vows require
us to protect his secrets as we would his life. But your father’s
secrets by rights belong to you now, along with his throne, and … I
thought perhaps you might have questions for me.”
Questions? She had a hundred questions, a thousand, ten thousand.
Why couldn’t she think of one? “Was my father truly mad?” she
blurted out. Why do I ask that? “Viserys said this talk of madness
was a ploy of the Usurper’s …”
“Viserys was a child, and the queen sheltered him as much as she
could. Your father always had a little madness in him, I now
believe. Yet he was charming and generous as well, so his lapses
were forgiven. His reign began with such promise … but as the
years passed, the lapses grew more frequent, until …”
Dany stopped him. “Do I want to hear this now?”
Ser Barristan considered a moment. “Perhaps not. Not now.”
“Not now,” she agreed. “One day. One day you must tell me all.
The good and the bad. There is some good to be said of my father,
surely?”
“There is, Your Grace. Of him, and those who came before him.
Your grandfather Jaehaerys and his brother, their father Aegon,
your mother … and Rhaegar. Him most of all.”
“I wish I could have known him.” Her voice was wistful.
“I wish he could have known you,” the old knight said. “When
you are ready, I will tell you all.”
Dany kissed him on the cheek and sent him on his way.
That night her handmaids brought her lamb, with a salad of
raisins and carrots soaked in wine, and a hot aky bread dripping
with honey. She could eat none of it. Did Rhaegar ever grow so
weary? she wondered. Did Aegon, after his conquest?

Later, when the time came for sleep, Dany took Irri into bed with
her, for the rst time since the ship. But even as she shuddered in
release and wound her ngers through her handmaid’s thick black
hair, she pretended it was Drogo holding her … only somehow his
face kept turning into Daario’s. If I want Daario I need only say so.
She lay with Irri’s legs entangled in her own. His eyes looked almost
purple today …
Dany’s dreams were dark that night, and she woke three times
from half-remembered nightmares. After the third time she was too
restless to return to sleep. Moonlight streamed through the slanting
windows, silvering the marble oors. A cool breeze was blowing
through the open terrace doors. Irri slept soundly beside her, her
lips slightly parted, one dark brown nipple peeping out above the
sleeping silks. For a moment Dany was tempted, but it was Drogo
she wanted, or perhaps Daario. Not Irri. The maid was sweet and
skillful, but all her kisses tasted of duty.
She rose, leaving Irri asleep in the moonlight. Jhiqui and
Missandei slept in their own beds. Dany slipped on a robe and
padded barefoot across the marble oor, out onto the terrace. The
air was chilly, but she liked the feel of grass between her toes and
the sound of the leaves whispering to one another. Wind ripples
chased each other across the surface of the little bathing pool and
made the moon’s re ection dance and shimmer.
She leaned against a low brick parapet to look down upon the
city. Meereen was sleeping too. Lost in dreams of kinder days,
perhaps. Night covered the streets like a black blanket, hiding the
corpses and the grey rats that came up from the sewers to feast on
them, the swarms of stinging ies. Distant torches glimmered red
and yellow where her sentries walked their rounds, and here and
there she saw the faint glow of lanterns bobbing down an alley.
Perhaps one was Ser Jorah, leading his horse slowly toward the
gate. Farewell, old bear. Farewell, betrayer.
She was Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, khaleesi and queen,
Mother of Dragons, slayer of warlocks, breaker of chains, and there
was no one in the world that she could trust.

“Your Grace?” Missandei stood at her elbow wrapped in a
bedrobe, wooden sandals on her feet. “I woke, and saw that you
were gone. Did you sleep well? What are you looking at?”
“My city,” said Dany. “I was looking for a house with a red door,
but by night all the doors are black.”
“A red door?” Missandei was puzzled. “What house is this?”
“No house. It does not matter.” Dany took the younger girl by the
hand. “Never lie to me, Missandei. Never betray me.”
“I never would,” Missandei promised. “Look, dawn comes.”
The sky had turned a cobalt blue from the horizon to the zenith,
and behind the line of low hills to the east a glow could be seen,
pale gold and oyster pink. Dany held Missandei’s hand as they
watched the sun come up. All the grey bricks became red and
yellow and blue and green and orange. The scarlet sands of the
ghting pits transformed them into bleeding sores before her eyes.
Elsewhere the golden dome of the Temple of the Graces blazed
bright, and bronze stars winked along the walls where the light of
the rising sun touched the spikes on the helms of the Unsullied. On
the terrace, a few ies stirred sluggishly. A bird began to chirp in
the persimmon tree, and then two more. Dany cocked her head to
hear their song, but it was not long before the sounds of the waking
city drowned them out.
The sounds of my city.
That morning she summoned her captains and commanders to the
garden, rather than descending to the audience chamber. “Aegon
the Conqueror brought re and blood to Westeros, but afterward he
gave them peace, prosperity, and justice. But all I have brought to
Slaver’s Bay is death and ruin. I have been more khal than queen,
smashing and plundering, then moving on.”
“There is nothing to stay for,” said Brown Ben Plumm.
“Your Grace, the slavers brought their doom on themselves,” said
Daario Naharis.
“You have brought freedom as well,” Missandei pointed out.
“Freedom to starve?” asked Dany sharply. “Freedom to die? Am I
a dragon, or a harpy?” Am I mad? Do I have the taint?

“A dragon,” Ser Barristan said with certainty. “Meereen is not
Westeros, Your Grace.”
“But how can I rule seven kingdoms if I cannot rule a single
city?” He had no answer to that. Dany turned away from them, to
gaze out over the city once again. “My children need time to heal
and learn. My dragons need time to grow and test their wings. And
I need the same. I will not let this city go the way of Astapor. I will
not let the harpy of Yunkai chain up those I’ve freed all over again.”
She turned back to look at their faces. “I will not march.”
“What will you do then, Khaleesi?” asked Rakharo.
“Stay,” she said. “Rule. And be a queen.”

JAIME

The king sat at the head of the table, a stack of cushions under his

arse, signing each document as it was presented to him.
“Only a few more, Your Grace,” Ser Kevan Lannister assured him.
“This is a bill of attainder against Lord Edmure Tully, stripping him
of Riverrun and all its lands and incomes, for rebelling against his
lawful king. This is a similar attainder, against his uncle Ser
Brynden Tully, the Black sh.” Tommen signed them one after the
other, dipping the quill carefully and writing his name in a broad
childish hand.
Jaime watched from the foot of the table, thinking of all those
lords who aspired to a seat on the king’s small council. They can
bloody well have mine. If this was power, why did it taste like
tedium? He did not feel especially powerful, watching Tommen dip
his quill in the inkpot again. He felt bored.
And sore. Every muscle in his body ached, and his ribs and
shoulders were bruised from the battering they’d gotten, courtesy of
Ser Addam Marbrand. Just thinking of it made him wince. He could
only hope the man would keep his mouth shut. Jaime had known
Marbrand since he was a boy, serving as a page at Casterly Rock; he
trusted him as much as he trusted anyone. Enough to ask him to
take up shields and tourney swords. He had wanted to know if he
could ght with his left hand.
And now I do. The knowledge was more painful than the beating
that Ser Addam had given him, and the beating was so bad he could

hardly dress himself this morning. If they had been ghting in
earnest, Jaime would have died two dozen deaths. It seemed so
simple, changing hands. It wasn’t. Every instinct he had was wrong.
He had to think about everything, where once he’d just moved. And
while he was thinking, Marbrand was thumping him. His left hand
couldn’t even seem to hold a longsword properly; Ser Addam had
disarmed him thrice, sending his blade spinning.
“This grants said lands, incomes, and castle to Ser Emmon Frey
and his lady wife, Lady Genna.” Ser Kevan presented another sheaf
of parchments to the king. Tommen dipped and signed. “This is a
decree of legitimacy for a natural son of Lord Roose Bolton of the
Dreadfort. And this names Lord Bolton your Warden of the North.”
Tommen dipped, signed, dipped, signed. “This grants Ser Rolph
Spicer title to the castle Castamere and raises him to the rank of
lord.” Tommen scrawled his name.
I should have gone to Ser Ilyn Payne, Jaime re ected. The King’s
Justice was not a friend as Marbrand was, and might well have beat
him bloody … but without a tongue, he was not like to boast of it
afterward. All it would take would be one chance remark by Ser
Addam in his cups, and the whole world would soon know how
useless he’d become. Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. It was a
cruel jape, that … though not quite so cruel as the gift his father
had sent him.
“This is your royal pardon for Lord Gawen Westerling, his lady
wife, and his daughter Jeyne, welcoming them back into the king’s
peace,” Ser Kevan said. “This is a pardon for Lord Jonos Bracken of
Stone Hedge. This is a pardon for Lord Vance. This for Lord
Goodbrook. This for Lord Mooton of Maidenpool.”
Jaime pushed himself to his feet. “You seem to have these
matters well in hand, Uncle. I shall leave His Grace to you.”
“As you wish.” Ser Kevan rose as well. “Jaime, you should go to
your father. This breach between you—”
“—is his doing. Nor will he mend it by sending me mocking gifts.
Tell him that, if you can pry him away from the Tyrells long
enough.”

His uncle looked distressed. “The gift was heartfelt. We thought
that it might encourage you—”
“—to grow a new hand?” Jaime turned to Tommen. Though he
had Jo rey’s golden curls and green eyes, the new king shared little
else with his late brother. He inclined to plumpness, his face was
pink and round, and he even liked to read. He is still shy of nine, this
son of mine. The boy is not the man. It would be seven years before
Tommen was ruling in his own right. Until then the realm would
remain rmly in the hands of his lord grandfather. “Sire,” he asked,
“do I have your leave to go?”
“As you like, Ser Uncle.” Tommen looked back to Ser Kevan. “Can
I seal them now, Great-Uncle?” Pressing his royal seal into the hot
wax was his favorite part of being king, so far.
Jaime strode from the council chamber. Outside the door he
found Ser Meryn Trant standing sti at guard in white scale armor
and snowy cloak. If this one should learn how feeble I am, or
Kettleblack or Blount should hear of it … “Remain here until His Grace
is done,” he said, “then escort him back to Maegor’s.”
Trant inclined his head. “As you say, my lord.”
The outer ward was crowded and noisy that morning. Jaime
made for the stables, where a large group of men were saddling
their horses. “Steelshanks!” he called. “Are you o , then?”
“As soon as m’lady is mounted,” said Steelshanks Walton. “My
lord of Bolton expects us. Here she is now.”
A groom led a ne grey mare out the stable door. On her back
was mounted a skinny hollow-eyed girl wrapped in a heavy cloak.
Grey, it was, like the dress beneath it, and trimmed with white
satin. The clasp that pinned it to her breast was wrought in the
shape of a wolf’s head with slitted opal eyes. The girl’s long brown
hair blew wild in the wind. She had a pretty face, he thought, but
her eyes were sad and wary.
When she saw him, she inclined her head. “Ser Jaime,” she said in
a thin anxious voice. “You are kind to see me o .”
Jaime studied her closely. “You know me, then?”
She bit her lip. “You may not recall, my lord, as I was littler
then … but I had the honor to meet you at Winterfell when King

Robert came to visit my father Lord Eddard.” She lowered her big
brown eyes and mumbled, “I’m Arya Stark.”
Jaime had never paid much attention to Arya Stark, but it seemed
to him that this girl was older. “I understand you’re to be married.”
“I am to wed Lord Bolton’s son, Ramsay. He used to be a Snow,
but His Grace has made him a Bolton. They say he’s very brave. I
am so happy.”
Then why do you sound so frightened? “I wish you joy, my lady.”
Jaime turned back to Steelshanks. “You have the coin you were
promised?”
“Aye, and we’ve shared it out. You have my thanks.” The
northman grinned. “A Lannister always pays his debts.”
“Always,” said Jaime, with a last glance at the girl. He wondered
if there was much resemblance. Not that it mattered. The real Arya
Stark was buried in some unmarked grave in Flea Bottom in all
likelihood. With her brothers dead, and both parents, who would
dare name this one a fraud? “Good speed,” he told Steelshanks.
Nage raised his peace banner, and the northmen formed a column as
ragged as their fur cloaks and trotted out the castle gate. The thin
girl on the grey mare looked small and forlorn in their midst.
A few of the horses still shied away from the dark splotch on the
hard-packed ground where the earth had drunk the life’s blood of
the stableboy Gregor Clegane had killed so clumsily. The sight of it
made Jaime angry all over again. He had told his Kingsguard to
keep the crowd out of the way, but that oaf Ser Boros had let
himself be distracted by the duel. The fool boy himself shared some
of the blame, to be sure; the dead Dornishman as well. And Clegane
most of all. The blow that took the boy’s arm o had been
mischance, but that second cut …
Well, Gregor is paying for it now. Grand Maester Pycelle was
tending to the man’s wounds, but the howls heard ringing from the
maester’s chambers suggested that the healing was not going as
well as it might. “The esh morti es and the wounds ooze pus,”
Pycelle told the council. “Even maggots will not touch such
foulness. His convulsions are so violent that I have had to gag him
to prevent him from biting o his tongue. I have cut away as much

tissue as I dare, and treated the rot with boiling wine and bread
mold, to no avail. The veins in his arm are turning black. When I
leeched him, all the leeches died. My lords, I must know what
malignant substance Prince Oberyn used on his spear. Let us detain
these other Dornishmen until they are more forthcoming.”
Lord Tywin had refused him. “There will be trouble enough with
Sunspear over Prince Oberyn’s death. I do not mean to make
matters worse by holding his companions captive.”
“Then I fear Ser Gregor may die.”
“Undoubtedly. I swore as much in the letter I sent to Prince
Doran with his brother’s body. But it must be seen to be the sword
of the King’s Justice that slays him, not a poisoned spear. Heal
him.”
Grand Maester Pycelle blinked in dismay. “My lord—”
“Heal him,” Lord Tywin said again, vexed. “You are aware that
Lord Varys has sent shermen into the waters around Dragonstone.
They report that only a token force remains to defend the island.
The Lyseni are gone from the bay, and the great part of Lord
Stannis’s strength with them.”
“Well and good,” announced Pycelle. “Let Stannis rot in Lys, I
say. We are well rid of the man and his ambitions.”
“Did you turn into an utter fool when Tyrion shaved your beard?
This is Stannis Baratheon. The man will ght to the bitter end and
then some. If he is gone, it can only mean he intends to resume the
war. Most likely he will land at Storm’s End and try and rouse the
storm lords. If so, he’s nished. But a bolder man might roll the dice
for Dorne. If he should win Sunspear to his cause, he might prolong
this war for years. So we will not o end the Martells any further,
for any reason. The Dornishmen are free to go, and you will heal Ser
Gregor.”
And so the Mountain screamed, day and night. Lord Tywin
Lannister could cow even the Stranger, it would seem.
As Jaime climbed the winding steps of White Sword Tower, he
could hear Ser Boros snoring in his cell. Ser Balon’s door was shut as
well; he had the king tonight, and would sleep all day. Aside from
Blount’s snores, the tower was very quiet. That suited Jaime well

enough. I ought to rest myself. Last night, after his dance with Ser
Addam, he’d been too sore to sleep.
But when he stepped into his bedchamber, he found his sister
waiting for him.
She stood beside the open window, looking over the curtain walls
and out to sea. The bay wind swirled around her, attening her
gown against her body in a way that quickened Jaime’s pulse. It
was white, that gown, like the hangings on the wall and the
draperies on his bed. Swirls of tiny emeralds brightened the ends of
her wide sleeves and spiraled down her bodice. Larger emeralds
were set in the golden spiderweb that bound her golden hair. The
gown was cut low, to bare her shoulders and the tops of her breasts.
She is so beautiful. He wanted nothing more than to take her in his
arms.
“Cersei.” He closed the door softly. “Why are you here?”
“Where else could I go?” When she turned to him there were
tears in her eyes. “Father’s made it clear that I am no longer wanted
on the council. Jaime, won’t you talk to him?”
Jaime took o his cloak and hung it from a peg on the wall. “I
talk to Lord Tywin every day.”
“Must you be so stubborn? All he wants …”
“… is to force me from the Kingsguard and send me back to
Casterly Rock.”
“That need not be so terrible. He is sending me back to Casterly
Rock as well. He wants me far away, so he’ll have a free hand with
Tommen. Tommen is my son, not his!”
“Tommen is the king.”
“He is a boy! A frightened little boy who saw his brother
murdered at his own wedding. And now they are telling him that he
must marry. The girl is twice his age and twice a widow!”
He eased himself into a chair, trying to ignore the ache of bruised
muscles. “The Tyrells are insisting. I see no harm in it. Tommen’s
been lonely since Myrcella went to Dorne. He likes having
Margaery and her ladies about. Let them wed.”
“He is your son …”

“He is my seed. He’s never called me Father. No more than
Jo rey ever did. You warned me a thousand times never to show
any undue interest in them.”
“To keep them safe! You as well. How would it have looked if my
brother had played the father to the king’s children? Even Robert
might have grown suspicious.”
“Well, he’s beyond suspicion now.” Robert’s death still left a
bitter taste in Jaime’s mouth. It should have been me who killed him,
not Cersei. “I only wished he’d died at my hands.” When I still had
two of them. “If I’d let kingslaying become a habit, as he liked to
say, I could have taken you as my wife for all the world to see. I’m
not ashamed of loving you, only of the things I’ve done to hide it.
That boy at Winterfell …”
“Did I tell you to throw him out the window? If you’d gone
hunting as I begged you, nothing would have happened. But no, you
had to have me, you could not wait until we returned to the city.”
“I’d waited long enough. I hated watching Robert stumble to your
bed every night, always wondering if maybe this night he’d decide
to claim his rights as husband.” Jaime suddenly remembered
something else that troubled him about Winterfell. “At Riverrun,
Catelyn Stark seemed convinced I’d sent some footpad to slit her
son’s throat. That I’d given him a dagger.”
“That,” she said scornfully. “Tyrion asked me about that.”
“There was a dagger. The scars on Lady Catelyn’s hands were real
enough, she showed them to me. Did you …?”
“Oh, don’t be absurd.” Cersei closed the window. “Yes, I hoped
the boy would die. So did you. Even Robert thought that would have
been for the best. ‘We kill our horses when they break a leg, and
our dogs when they go blind, but we are too weak to give the same
mercy to crippled children,’ he told me. He was blind himself at the
time, from drink.”
Robert? Jaime had guarded the king long enough to know that
Robert Baratheon said things in his cups that he would have denied
angrily the next day. “Were you alone when Robert said this?”
“You don’t think he said it to Ned Stark, I hope? Of course we
were alone. Us and the children.” Cersei removed her hairnet and

draped it over a bedpost, then shook out her golden curls. “Perhaps
Myrcella sent this man with the dagger, do you think so?”
It was meant as mockery, but she’d cut right to the heart of it,
Jaime saw at once. “Not Myrcella. Jo rey.”
Cersei frowned. “Jo rey had no love for Robb Stark, but the
younger boy was nothing to him. He was only a child himself.”
“A child hungry for a pat on the head from that sot you let him
believe was his father.” He had an uncomfortable thought. “Tyrion
almost died because of this bloody dagger. If he knew the whole
thing was Jo rey’s work, that might be why …”
“I don’t care why,” Cersei said. “He can take his reasons down to
hell with him. If you had seen how Jo died … he fought, Jaime, he
fought for every breath, but it was as if some malign spirit had its
hands about his throat. He had such terror in his eyes … When he
was little, he’d run to me when he was scared or hurt and I would
protect him. But that night there was nothing I could do. Tyrion
murdered him in front of me, and there was nothing I could do.”
Cersei sank to her knees before his chair and took Jaime’s good
hand between both of hers. “Jo is dead and Myrcella’s in Dorne.
Tommen’s all I have left. You mustn’t let Father take him from me.
Jaime, please.”
“Lord Tywin has not asked for my approval. I can talk to him, but
he will not listen …”
“He will if you agree to leave the Kingsguard.”
“I’m not leaving the Kingsguard.”
His sister fought back tears. “Jaime, you’re my shining knight.
You cannot abandon me when I need you most! He is stealing my
son, sending me away … and unless you stop him, Father is going
to force me to wed again!”
Jaime should not have been surprised, but he was. The words
were a blow to his gut harder than any that Ser Addam Marbrand
had dealt him. “Who?”
“Does it matter? Some lord or other. Someone Father thinks he
needs. I don’t care. I will not have another husband. You are the
only man I want in my bed, ever again.”
“Then tell him that!”

She pulled her hands away. “You are talking madness again.
Would you have us ripped apart, as Mother did that time she caught
us playing? Tommen would lose the throne, Myrcella her
marriage … I want to be your wife, we belong to each other, but it
can never be, Jaime. We are brother and sister.”
“The Targaryens …”
“We are not Targaryens!”
“Quiet,” he said, scornfully. “So loud, you’ll wake my Sworn
Brothers. We can’t have that, now, can we? People might learn that
you had come to see me.”
“Jaime,” she sobbed, “don’t you think I want it as much as you
do? It makes no matter who they wed me to, I want you at my side,
I want you in my bed, I want you inside me. Nothing has changed
between us. Let me prove it to you.” She pushed up his tunic and
began to fumble with the laces of his breeches.
Jaime felt himself responding. “No,” he said, “not here.” They
had never done it in White Sword Tower, much less in the Lord
Commander’s chambers. “Cersei, this is not the place.”
“You took me in the sept. This is no di erent.” She drew out his
cock and bent her head over it.
Jaime pushed her away with the stump of his right hand. “No.
Not here, I said.” He forced himself to stand.
For an instant he could see confusion in her bright green eyes,
and fear as well. Then rage replaced it. Cersei gathered herself
together, got to her feet, straightened her skirts. “Was it your hand
they hacked o in Harrenhal, or your manhood?” As she shook her
head, her hair tumbled around her bare white shoulders. “I was a
fool to come. You lacked the courage to avenge Jo rey, why would
I think that you’d protect Tommen? Tell me, if the Imp had killed
all three of your children, would that have made you wroth?”
“Tyrion is not going to harm Tommen or Myrcella. I am still not
certain he killed Jo rey.”
Her mouth twisted in anger. “How can you say that? After all his
threats—”
“Threats mean nothing. He swears he did not do it.”

“Oh, he swears, is that it? And dwarfs don’t lie, is that what you
think?”
“Not to me. No more than you would.”
“You great golden fool. He’s lied to you a thousand times, and so
have I.” She bound up her hair again, and scooped up the hairnet
from the bedpost where she’d hung it. “Think what you will. The
little monster is in a black cell, and soon Ser Ilyn will have his head
o . Perhaps you’d like it for a keepsake.” She glanced at the pillow.
“He can watch over you as you sleep alone in that cold white bed.
Until his eyes rot out, that is.”
“You had best go, Cersei. You’re making me angry.”
“Oh, an angry cripple. How terrifying.” She laughed. “A pity Lord
Tywin Lannister never had a son. I could have been the heir he
wanted, but I lacked the cock. And speaking of such, best tuck yours
away, brother. It looks rather sad and small, hanging from your
breeches like that.”
When she was gone Jaime took her advice, fumbling one-handed
at his laces. He felt a bone-deep ache in his phantom ngers. I’ve lost
a hand, a father, a son, a sister, and a lover, and soon enough I will lose
a brother. And yet they keep telling me House Lannister won this war.
Jaime donned his cloak and went downstairs, where he found Ser
Boros Blount having a cup of wine in the common room. “When
you’re done with your drink, tell Ser Loras I’m ready to see her.”
Ser Boros was too much of a coward to do much more than
glower. “You are ready to see who?”
“Just tell Loras.”
“Aye.” Ser Boros drained his cup. “Aye, Lord Commander.”
He took his own good time about it, though, or else the Knight of
Flowers proved hard to nd. Several hours had passed by the time
they arrived, the slim handsome youth and the big ugly maid. Jaime
was sitting alone in the round room, lea ng idly through the White
Book. “Lord Commander,” Ser Loras said, “you wished to see the
Maid of Tarth?”
“I did.” Jaime waved them closer with his left hand. “You have
talked with her, I take it?”
“As you commanded, my lord.”

“And?”
The lad tensed. “I … it may be it happened as she says, ser. That
it was Stannis. I cannot be certain.”
“Varys tells me that the castellan of Storm’s End perished
strangely as well,” said Jaime.
“Ser Cortnay Penrose,” said Brienne sadly. “A good man.”
“A stubborn man. One day he stood square in the way of the King
of Dragonstone. The next he leapt from a tower.” Jaime stood. “Ser
Loras, we will talk more of this later. You may leave Brienne with
me.”
The wench looked as ugly and awkward as ever, he decided when
Tyrell left them. Someone had dressed her in woman’s clothes
again, but this dress t much better than that hideous pink rag the
goat had made her wear. “Blue is a good color on you, my lady,”
Jaime observed. “It goes well with your eyes.” She does have
astonishing eyes.
Brienne glanced down at herself, ustered. “Septa Donyse padded
out the bodice, to give it that shape. She said you sent her to me.”
She lingered by the door, as if she meant to ee at any second. “You
look …”
“Di erent?” He managed a half-smile. “More meat on the ribs and
fewer lice in my hair, that’s all. The stump’s the same. Close the
door and come here.”
She did as he bid her. “The white cloak …”
“… is new, but I’m sure I’ll soil it soon enough.”
“That wasn’t … I was about to say that it becomes you.”
She came closer, hesitant. “Jaime, did you mean what you told
Ser Loras? About … about King Renly, and the shadow?”
Jaime shrugged. “I would have killed Renly myself if we’d met in
battle, what do I care who cut his throat?”
“You said I had honor …”
“I’m the bloody Kingslayer, remember? When I say you have
honor, that’s like a whore vouchsa ng your maidenhood.” He
leaned back and looked up at her. “Steelshanks is on his way back
north, to deliver Arya Stark to Roose Bolton.”

“You gave her to him?” she cried, dismayed. “You swore an oath
to Lady Catelyn …”
“With a sword at my throat, but never mind. Lady Catelyn’s dead.
I could not give her back her daughters even if I had them. And the
girl my father sent with Steelshanks was not Arya Stark.”
“Not Arya Stark?”
“You heard me. My lord father found some skinny northern girl
more or less the same age with more or less the same coloring. He
dressed her up in white and grey, gave her a silver wolf to pin her
cloak, and sent her o to wed Bolton’s bastard.” He lifted his stump
to point at her. “I wanted to tell you that before you went galloping
o to rescue her and got yourself killed for no good purpose. You’re
not half bad with a sword, but you’re not good enough to take on
two hundred men by yourself.”
Brienne shook her head. “When Lord Bolton learns that your
father paid him with false coin …”
“Oh, he knows. Lannisters lie, remember? It makes no matter, this
girl serves his purpose just as well. Who is going to say that she isn’t
Arya Stark? Everyone the girl was close to is dead except for her
sister, who has disappeared.”
“Why would you tell me all this, if it’s true? You are betraying
your father’s secrets.”
The Hand’s secrets, he thought. I no longer have a father. “I pay my
debts like every good little lion. I did promise Lady Stark her
daughters … and one of them is still alive. My brother may know
where she is, but if so he isn’t saying. Cersei is convinced that Sansa
helped him murder Jo rey.”
The wench’s mouth got stubborn. “I will not believe that gentle
girl a poisoner. Lady Catelyn said that she had a loving heart. It was
your brother. There was a trial, Ser Loras said.”
“Two trials, actually. Words and swords both failed him. A bloody
mess. Did you watch from your window?”
“My cell faces the sea. I heard the shouting, though.”
“Prince Oberyn of Dorne is dead, Ser Gregor Clegane lies dying,
and Tyrion stands condemned before the eyes of gods and men.
They’re keeping him in a black cell till they kill him.”

Brienne looked at him. “You do not believe he did it.”
Jaime gave her a hard smile. “See, wench? We know each other
too well. Tyrion’s wanted to be me since he took his rst step, but
he’d never follow me in kingslaying. Sansa Stark killed Jo rey. My
brother’s kept silent to protect her. He gets these ts of gallantry
from time to time. The last one cost him a nose. This time it will
mean his head.”
“No,” Brienne said. “It was not my lady’s daughter. It could not
have been her.”
“There’s the stubborn stupid wench that I remember.”
She reddened. “My name is …”
“Brienne of Tarth.” Jaime sighed. “I have a gift for you.” He
reached down under the Lord Commander’s chair and brought it
out, wrapped in folds of crimson velvet.
Brienne approached as if the bundle was like to bite her, reached
out a huge freckled hand, and ipped back a fold of cloth. Rubies
glimmered in the light. She picked the treasure up gingerly, curled
her ngers around the leather grip, and slowly slid the sword free
of its scabbard. Blood and black the ripples shone. A nger of
re ected light ran red along the edge. “Is this Valyrian steel? I have
never seen such colors.”
“Nor I. There was a time that I would have given my right hand
to wield a sword like that. Now it appears I have, so the blade is
wasted on me. Take it.” Before she could think to refuse, he went
on. “A sword so ne must bear a name. It would please me if you
would call this one Oathkeeper. One more thing. The blade comes
with a price.”
Her face darkened. “I told you, I will never serve …”
“… such foul creatures as us. Yes, I recall. Hear me out, Brienne.
Both of us swore oaths concerning Sansa Stark. Cersei means to see
that the girl is found and killed, wherever she has gone to
ground …”
Brienne’s homely face twisted in fury. “If you believe that I
would harm my lady’s daughter for a sword, you—”
“Just listen,” he snapped, angered by her assumption. “I want you
to nd Sansa rst, and get her somewhere safe. How else are the

two of us going to make good our stupid vows to your precious
dead Lady Catelyn?”
The wench blinked. “I … I thought …”
“I know what you thought.” Suddenly Jaime was sick of the sight
of her. She bleats like a bloody sheep. “When Ned Stark died, his
greatsword was given to the King’s Justice,” he told her. “But my
father felt that such a ne blade was wasted on a mere headsman.
He gave Ser Ilyn a new sword, and had Ice melted down and
reforged. There was enough metal for two new blades. You’re
holding one. So you’ll be defending Ned Stark’s daughter with Ned
Stark’s own steel, if that makes any di erence to you.”
“Ser, I … I owe you an apolo …”
He cut her o . “Take the bloody sword and go, before I change
my mind. There’s a bay mare in the stables, as homely as you are
but somewhat better trained. Chase after Steelshanks, search for
Sansa, or ride home to your isle of sapphires, it’s naught to me. I
don’t want to look at you anymore.”
“Jaime …”
“Kingslayer,” he reminded her. “Best use that sword to clean the
wax out of your ears, wench. We’re done.”
Stubbornly, she persisted. “Jo rey was your …”
“My king. Leave it at that.”
“You say Sansa killed him. Why protect her?”
Because Jo was no more to me than a squirt of seed in Cersei’s cunt.
And because he deserved to die. “I have made kings and unmade
them. Sansa Stark is my last chance for honor.” Jaime smiled thinly.
“Besides, kingslayers should band together. Are you ever going to
go?”
Her big hand wrapped tight around Oathkeeper. “I will. And I
will nd the girl and keep her safe. For her lady mother’s sake. And
for yours.” She bowed sti y, whirled, and went.
Jaime sat alone at the table while the shadows crept across the
room. As dusk began to settle, he lit a candle and opened the White
Book to his own page. Quill and ink he found in a drawer. Beneath
the last line Ser Barristan had entered, he wrote in an awkward

hand that might have done credit to a six-year-old being taught his
rst letters by a maester:
Defeated in the Whispering Wood by the Young Wolf Robb Stark
during the War of the Five Kings. Held captive at Riverrun and
ransomed for a promise unful lled. Captured again by the Brave
Companions, and maimed at the word of Vargo Hoat their captain,
losing his sword hand to the blade of Zollo the Fat. Returned safely to
King’s Landing by Brienne, the Maid of Tarth.
When he was done, more than three-quarters of his page still
remained to be lled between the gold lion on the crimson shield on
top and the blank white shield at the bottom. Ser Gerold Hightower
had begun his history, and Ser Barristan Selmy had continued it, but
the rest Jaime Lannister would need to write for himself. He could
write whatever he chose, henceforth.
Whatever he chose …

JON

The wind was blowing wild from the east, so strong the heavy

cage would rock whenever a gust got it in its teeth. It skirled along
the Wall, shivering o the ice, making Jon’s cloak ap against the
bars. The sky was slate grey, the sun no more than a faint patch of
brightness behind the clouds. Across the killing ground, he could see
the glimmer of a thousand camp res burning, but their lights
seemed small and powerless against such gloom and cold.
A grim day. Jon Snow wrapped gloved hands around the bars and
held tight as the wind hammered at the cage once more. When he
looked straight down past his feet, the ground was lost in shadow,
as if he were being lowered into some bottomless pit. Well, death is
a bottomless pit of sorts, he re ected, and when this day’s work is done
my name will be shadowed forever.
Bastard children were born from lust and lies, men said; their
nature was wanton and treacherous. Once Jon had meant to prove
them wrong, to show his lord father that he could be as good and
true a son as Robb. I made a botch of that. Robb had become a hero
king; if Jon was remembered at all, it would be as a turncloak, an
oathbreaker, and a murderer. He was glad that Lord Eddard was not
alive to see his shame.
I should have stayed in that cave with Ygritte. If there was a life
beyond this one, he hoped to tell her that. She will claw my face the
way the eagle did, and curse me for a coward, but I’ll tell her all the
same. He exed his sword hand, as Maester Aemon had taught him.

The habit had become part of him, and he would need his ngers to
be limber to have even half a chance of murdering Mance Rayder.
They had pulled him out this morning, after four days in the ice,
locked up in a cell ve by ve by ve, too low for him to stand, too
tight for him to stretch out on his back. The stewards had long ago
discovered that food and meat kept longer in the icy storerooms
carved from the base of the Wall … but prisoners did not. “You will
die in here, Lord Snow,” Ser Alliser had said just before he closed
the heavy wooden door, and Jon had believed it. But this morning
they had come and pulled him out again, and marched him cramped
and shivering back to the King’s Tower, to stand before jowly Janos
Slynt once more
“That old maester says I cannot hang you,” Slynt declared. “He
has written Cotter Pyke, and even had the bloody gall to show me
the letter. He says you are no turncloak.”
“Aemon’s lived too long, my lord,” Ser Alliser assured him. “His
wits have gone dark as his eyes.”
“Aye,” Slynt said. “A blind man with a chain about his neck, who
does he think he is?”
Aemon Targaryen, Jon thought, a king’s son and a king’s brother and
a king who might have been. But he said nothing.
“Still,” Slynt said, “I will not have it said that Janos Slynt hanged
a man unjustly. I will not. I have decided to give you one last
chance to prove you are as loyal as you claim, Lord Snow. One last
chance to do your duty, yes!” He stood. “Mance Rayder wants to
parley with us. He knows he has no chance now that Janos Slynt has
come, so he wants to talk, this King-beyond-the-Wall. But the man is
craven, and will not come to us. No doubt he knows I’d hang him.
Hang him by his feet from the top of the Wall, on a rope two
hundred feet long! But he will not come. He asks that we send an
envoy to him.”
“We’re sending you, Lord Snow.” Ser Alliser smiled.
“Me.” Jon’s voice was at. “Why me?”
“You rode with these wildlings,” said Thorne. “Mance Rayder
knows you. He will be more inclined to trust you.”

That was so wrong Jon might have laughed. “You’ve got it
backward. Mance suspected me from the rst. If I show up in his
camp wearing a black cloak again and speaking for the Night’s
Watch, he’ll know that I betrayed him.”
“He asked for an envoy, we are sending one,” said Slynt. “If you
are too craven to face this turncloak king, we can return you to
your ice cell. This time without the furs, I think. Yes.”
“No need for that, my lord,” said Ser Alliser. “Lord Snow will do
as we ask. He wants to show us that he is no turncloak. He wants to
prove himself a loyal man of the Night’s Watch.”
Thorne was much the more clever of the two, Jon realized; this
had his stink all over it. He was trapped. “I’ll go,” he said in a
clipped, curt voice.
“M’lord,” Janos Slynt reminded him. “You’ll address me—”
“I’ll go, my lord. But you are making a mistake, my lord. You are
sending the wrong man, my lord. Just the sight of me is going to
anger Mance. My lord would have a better chance of reaching terms
if he sent—”
“Terms?” Ser Alliser chuckled.
“Janos Slynt does not make terms with lawless savages, Lord
Snow. No, he does not.”
“We’re not sending you to talk with Mance Rayder,” Ser Alliser
said. “We’re sending you to kill him.”
The wind whistled through the bars, and Jon Snow shivered. His
leg was throbbing, and his head. He was not t to kill a kitten, yet
here he was. The trap had teeth. With Maester Aemon insisting on
Jon’s innocence, Lord Janos had not dared to leave him in the ice to
die. This was better. “Our honor means no more than our lives, so
long as the realm is safe,” Qhorin Halfhand had said in the
Frostfangs. He must remember that. Whether he slew Mance or
only tried and failed, the free folk would kill him. Even desertion
was impossible, if he’d been so inclined; to Mance he was a proven
liar and betrayer.
When the cage jerked to a halt, Jon swung down onto the ground
and rattled Longclaw’s hilt to loosen the bastard blade in its
scabbard. The gate was a few yards to his left, still blocked by the

splintered ruins of the turtle, the carcass of a mammoth ripening
within. There were other corpses too, strewn amidst broken barrels,
hardened pitch, and patches of burnt grass, all shadowed by the
Wall. Jon had no wish to linger here. He started walking toward the
wildling camp, past the body of a dead giant whose head had been
crushed by a stone. A raven was pulling out bits of brain from the
giant’s shattered skull. It looked up as he walked by. “Snow,” it
screamed at him. “Snow, snow.” Then it opened its wings and ew
away.
No sooner had he started out than a lone rider emerged from the
wildling camp and came toward him. He wondered if Mance was
coming out to parley in no-man’s-land. That might make it easier,
though nothing will make it easy. But as the distance between them
diminished Jon saw that the horseman was short and broad, with
gold rings glinting on thick arms and a white beard spreading out
across his massive chest.
“Har!” Tormund boomed when they came together. “Jon Snow
the crow. I feared we’d seen the last o’ you.”
“I never knew you feared anything, Tormund.”
That made the wildling grin. “Well said, lad. I see your cloak is
black. Mance won’t like that. If you’ve come to change sides again,
best climb back on that Wall o’ yours.”
“They’ve sent me to treat with the King-beyond-the-Wall.”
“Treat?” Tormund laughed. “Now there’s a word. Har! Mance
wants to talk, that’s true enough. Can’t say he’d want to talk with
you, though.”
“I’m the one they’ve sent.”
“I see that. Best come along, then. You want to ride?”
“I can walk.”
“You fought us hard here.” Tormund turned his garron back
toward the wildling camp. “You and your brothers. I give you that.
Two hundred dead, and a dozen giants. Mag himself went in that
gate o’ yours and never did come out.”
“He died on the sword of a brave man named Donal Noye.”
“Aye? Some great lord was he, this Donal Noye? One of your
shiny knights in their steel smallclothes?”

“A blacksmith. He only had one arm.”
“A one-armed smith slew Mag the Mighty? Har! That must o’
been a ght to see. Mance will make a song of it, see if he don’t.”
Tormund took a waterskin o his saddle and pulled the cork. “This
will warm us some. To Donal Noye, and Mag the Mighty.” He took
a swing, and handed it down to Jon.
“To Donal Noye, and Mag the Mighty.” The skin was full of
mead, but a mead so potent that it made Jon’s eyes water and sent
tendrils of re snaking through his chest. After the ice cell and the
cold ride down in the cage, the warmth was welcome.
Tormund took the skin back and downed another swig, then
wiped his mouth. “The Magnar of Thenn swore t’us that he’d have
the gate wide open, so all we’d need to do was stroll through
singing. He was going to bring the whole Wall down.”
“He brought down part,” Jon said. “On his head.”
“Har!” said Tormund. “Well, I never had much use for Styr. When
a man’s got no beard nor hair nor ears, you can’t get a good grip on
him when you ght.” He kept his horse at a slow walk so Jon could
limp beside him. “What happened to that leg?”
“An arrow. One of Ygritte’s, I think.”
“That’s a woman for you. One day she’s kissing you, the next
she’s lling you with arrows.”
“She’s dead.”
“Aye?” Tormund gave a sad shake of the head. “A waste. If I’d
been ten years younger, I’d have stolen her meself. That hair she
had. Well, the hottest res burn out quickest.” He lifted the skin of
mead. “To Ygritte, kissed by re!” He drank deep.
“To Ygritte, kissed by re,” Jon repeated when Tormund handed
him back the skin. He drank even deeper.
“Was it you killed her?”
“My brother.” Jon had never learned which one, and hoped he
never would.
“You bloody crows.” Tormund’s tone was gru , yet strangely
gentle. “That Longspear stole me daughter. Munda, me little
autumn apple. Took her right out o’ my tent with all four o’ her
brothers about. Toregg slept through it, the great lout, and

Torwynd … well, Torwynd the Tame, that says all that needs
saying, don’t it? The young ones gave the lad a ght, though.”
“And Munda?” asked Jon.
“She’s my own blood,” said Tormund proudly. “She broke his lip
for him and bit one ear half o , and I hear he’s got so many
scratches on his back he can’t wear a cloak. She likes him well
enough, though. And why not? He don’t ght with no spear, you
know. Never has. So where do you think he got that name? Har!”
Jon had to laugh. Even now, even here. Ygritte had been fond of
Longspear Ryk. He hoped he found some joy with Tormund’s
Munda. Someone needed to nd some joy somewhere.
“You know nothing, Jon Snow,” Ygritte would have told him. I
know that I am going to die, he thought. I know that much, at least.
“All men die,” he could almost hear her say, “and women too, and
every beast that ies or swims or runs. It’s not the when o’ dying
that matters, it’s the how of it, Jon Snow.” Easy for you to say, he
thought back. You died brave in battle, storming the castle of a foe. I’m
going to die a turncloak and a killer. Nor would his death be quick,
unless it came on the end of Mance’s sword.
Soon they were among the tents. It was the usual wildling camp;
a sprawling jumble of cook res and piss pits, children and goats
wandering freely, sheep bleating among the trees, horse hides
pegged up to dry. There was no plan to it, no order, no defenses.
But there were men and women and animals everywhere.
Many ignored him, but for every one who went about his
business there were ten who stopped to stare; children squatting by
the res, old women in dog carts, cave dwellers with painted faces,
raiders with claws and snakes and severed heads painted on their
shields, all turned to have a look. Jon saw spearwives too, their
long hair streaming in the piney wind that sighed between the trees.
There were no true hills here, but Mance Rayder’s white fur tent
had been raised on a spot of high stony ground right on the edge of
the trees. The King-beyond-the-Wall was waiting outside, his ragged
red-and-black cloak blowing in the wind. Harma Dogshead was with
him, Jon saw, back from her raids and feints along the Wall, and

Varamyr Sixskins as well, attended by his shadowcat and two lean
grey wolves.
When they saw who the Watch had sent, Harma turned her head
and spat, and one of Varamyr’s wolves bared its teeth and growled.
“You must be very brave or very stupid, Jon Snow,” Mance Rayder
said, “to come back to us wearing a black cloak.”
“What else would a man of the Night’s Watch wear?”
“Kill him,” urged Harma. “Send his body back up in that cage o’
theirs and tell them to send us someone else. I’ll keep his head for
my standard. A turncloak’s worse than a dog.”
“I warned you he was false.” Varamyr’s tone was mild, but his
shadow-cat was staring at Jon hungrily through slitted grey eyes. “I
never did like the smell o’ him.”
“Pull in your claws, beastling.” Tormund Giantsbane swung down
o his horse. “The lad’s here to hear. You lay a paw on him, might
be I’ll take me that shadowskin cloak I been wanting.”
“Tormund Crowlover,” Harma sneered. “You are a great sack o’
wind, old man.”
The skinchanger was grey-faced, round-shouldered, and bald, a
mouse of a man with a wol ing’s eyes. “Once a horse is broken to
the saddle, any man can mount him,” he said in a soft voice. “Once
a beast’s been joined to a man, any skinchanger can slip inside and
ride him. Orell was withering inside his feathers, so I took the eagle
for my own. But the joining works both ways, warg. Orell lives
inside me now, whispering how much he hates you. And I can soar
above the Wall, and see with eagle eyes.”
“So we know,” said Mance. “We know how few you were, when
you stopped the turtle. We know how many came from Eastwatch.
We know how your supplies have dwindled. Pitch, oil, arrows,
spears. Even your stair is gone, and that cage can only lift so many.
We know. And now you know we know.” He opened the ap of the
tent. “Come inside. The rest of you, wait here.”
“What, even me?” said Tormund.
“Particularly you. Always.”
It was warm within. A small re burned beneath the smoke holes,
and a brazier smouldered near the pile of furs where Dalla lay, pale

and sweating. Her sister was holding her hand. Val, Jon
remembered. “I was sorry when Jarl fell,” he told her.
Val looked at him with pale grey eyes. “He always climbed too
fast.” She was as fair as he’d remembered, slender, full-breasted,
graceful even at rest, with high sharp cheekbones and a thick braid
of honey-colored hair that fell to her waist.
“Dalla’s time is near,” Mance explained. “She and Val will stay.
They know what I mean to say.”
Jon kept his face as still as ice. Foul enough to slay a man in his
own tent under truce. Must I murder him in front of his wife as their
child is being born? He closed the ngers of his sword hand. Mance
was not wearing armor, but his own sword was sheathed on his left
hip. And there were other weapons in the tent, daggers and dirks, a
bow and a quiver of arrows, a bronze-headed spear lying beside that
big black …
… horn.
Jon sucked in his breath.
A warhorn, a bloody great warhorn.
“Yes,” Mance said. “The Horn of Winter, that Joramun once blew
to wake giants from the earth.”
The horn was huge, eight feet along the curve and so wide at the
mouth that he could have put his arm inside up to the elbow. If this
came from an aurochs, it was the biggest that ever lived. At rst he
thought the bands around it were bronze, but when he moved closer
he realized they were gold. Old gold, more brown than yellow, and
graven with runes.
“Ygritte said you never found the horn.”
“Did you think only crows could lie? I liked you well enough, for
a bastard … but I never trusted you. A man needs to earn my trust.”
Jon faced him. “If you’ve had the Horn of Joramun all along, why
haven’t you used it? Why bother building turtles and sending
Thenns to kill us in our beds? If this horn is all the songs say, why
not just sound it and be done?”
It was Dalla who answered him, Dalla great with child, lying on
her pile of furs beside the brazier. “We free folk know things you
kneelers have forgotten. Sometimes the short road is not the safest,

Jon Snow. The Horned Lord once said that sorcery is a sword
without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it.”
Mance ran a hand along the curve of the great horn. “No man
goes hunting with only one arrow in his quiver,” he said. “I had
hoped that Styr and Jarl would take your brothers unawares, and
open the gate for us. I drew your garrison away with feints and
raids and secondary attacks. Bowen Marsh swallowed that lure as I
knew he would, but your band of cripples and orphans proved to be
more stubborn than anticipated. Don’t think you’ve stopped us,
though. The truth is, you are too few and we are too many. I could
continue the attack here and still send ten thousand men to cross the
Bay of Seals on rafts and take Eastwatch from the rear. I could
storm the Shadow Tower too, I know the approaches as well as any
man alive. I could send men and mammoths to dig out the gates at
the castles you’ve abandoned, all of them at once.”
“Why don’t you, then?” Jon could have drawn Longclaw then, but
he wanted to hear what the wildling had to say.
“Blood,” said Mance Rayder. “I’d win in the end, yes, but you’d
bleed me, and my people have bled enough.”
“Your losses haven’t been that heavy.”
“Not at your hands.” Mance studied Jon’s face. “You saw the Fist
of the First Men. You know what happened there. You know what
we are facing.”
“The Others …”
“They grow stronger as the days grow shorter and the nights
colder. First they kill you, then they send your dead against you.
The giants have not been able to stand against them, nor the
Thenns, the ice river clans, the Hornfoots.”
“Nor you?”
“Nor me.” There was anger in that admission, and bitterness too
deep for words. “Raymun Redbeard, Bael the Bard, Gendel and
Gorne, the Horned Lord, they all came south to conquer, but I’ve
come with my tail between my legs to hide behind your Wall.” He
touched the horn again. “If I sound the Horn of Winter, the Wall
will fall. Or so the songs would have me believe. There are those
among my people who want nothing more …”

“But once the Wall is fallen,” Dalla said, “what will stop the
Others?”
Mance gave her a fond smile. “It’s a wise woman I’ve found. A
true queen.” He turned back to Jon. “Go back and tell them to open
their gate and let us pass. If they do, I will give them the horn, and
the Wall will stand until the end of days.”
Open the gate and let them pass. Easy to say, but what must
follow? Giants camping in the ruins of Winterfell? Cannibals in the
wolfswood, chariots sweeping across the barrowlands, free folk
stealing the daughters of shipwrights and silversmiths from White
Harbor and shwives o the Stony Shore? “Are you a true king?”
Jon asked suddenly.
“I’ve never had a crown on my head or sat my arse on a bloody
throne, if that’s what you’re asking,” Mance replied. “My birth is as
low as a man’s can get, no septon’s ever smeared my head with oils,
I don’t own any castles, and my queen wears furs and amber, not
silk and sapphires. I am my own champion, my own fool, and my
own harpist. You don’t become King-beyond-the-Wall because your
father was. The free folk won’t follow a name, and they don’t care
which brother was born rst. They follow ghters. When I left the
Shadow Tower there were ve men making noises about how they
might be the stu of kings. Tormund was one, the Magnar another.
The other three I slew, when they made it plain they’d sooner ght
than follow.”
“You can kill your enemies,” Jon said bluntly, “but can you rule
your friends? If we let your people pass, are you strong enough to
make them keep the king’s peace and obey the laws?”
“Whose laws? The laws of Winterfell and King’s Landing?” Mance
laughed. “When we want laws we’ll make our own. You can keep
your king’s justice too, and your king’s taxes. I’m o ering you the
horn, not our freedom. We will not kneel to you.”
“What if we refuse the o er?” Jon had no doubt that they would.
The Old Bear might at least have listened, though he would have
balked at the notion of letting thirty or forty thousand wildlings
loose on the Seven Kingdoms. But Alliser Thorne and Janos Slynt
would dismiss the notion out of hand.

“If you refuse,” Mance Rayder said, “Tormund Giantsbane will
sound the Horn of Winter three days hence, at dawn.”
He could carry the message back to Castle Black and tell them of
the horn, but if he left Mance still alive Lord Janos and Ser Alliser
would seize on that as proof that he was a turncloak. A thousand
thoughts ickered through Jon’s head. If I can destroy the horn, smash
it here and now … but before he could begin to think that through,
he heard the low moan of some other horn, made faint by the tent’s
hide walls. Mance heard it too. Frowning, he went to the door. Jon
followed.
The warhorn was louder outside. Its call had stirred the wildling
camp. Three Hornfoot men jogged past, carrying long spears.
Horses were whinnying and snorting, giants roaring in the Old
Tongue, and even the mammoths were restless.
“Outrider’s horn,” Tormund told Mance.
“Something’s coming.” Varamyr sat crosslegged on the half-frozen
ground, his wolves circled restlessly around him. A shadow swept
over him, and Jon looked up to see the eagle’s blue-grey wings.
“Coming, from the east.”
When the dead walk, walls and stakes and swords mean nothing, he
remembered. You cannot ght the dead, Jon Snow. No man knows that
half so well as me.
Harma scowled. “East? The wights should be behind us.”
“East,” the skinchanger repeated. “Something’s coming.”
“The Others?” Jon asked.
Mance shook his head. “The Others never come when the sun is
up.” Chariots were rattling across the killing ground, jammed with
riders waving spears of sharpened bone. The king groaned. “Where
the bloody hell do they think they’re going? Quenn, get those fools
back where they belong. Someone bring my horse. The mare, not
the stallion. I’ll want my armor too.” Mance glanced suspiciously at
the Wall. Atop the icy parapets, the straw soldiers stood collecting
arrows, but there was no sign of any other activity. “Harma, mount
up your raiders. Tormund, nd your sons and give me a triple line
of spears.”
“Aye,” said Tormund, striding o .

The mousy little skinchanger closed his eyes and said, “I see
them. They’re coming along the streams and game trails …”
“Who?”
“Men. Men on horses. Men in steel and men in black.”
“Crows.” Mance made the word a curse. He turned on Jon. “Did
my old brothers think they’d catch me with my breeches down if
they attacked while we were talking?”
“If they planned an attack they never told me about it.” Jon did
not believe it. Lord Janos lacked the men to attack the wildling
camp. Besides, he was on the wrong side of the Wall, and the gate
was sealed with rubble. He had a di erent sort of treachery in mind,
this can’t be his work.
“If you’re lying to me again, you won’t be leaving here alive,”
Mance warned. His guards brought him his horse and armor.
Elsewhere around the camp, Jon saw people running at cross
purposes, some men forming up as if to storm the Wall while others
slipped into the woods, women driving dog carts east, mammoths
wandering west. He reached back over his shoulder and drew
Longclaw just as a thin line of rangers emerged from the fringes of
the wood three hundred yards away. They wore black mail, black
halfhelms, and black cloaks. Half-armored, Mance drew his sword.
“You knew nothing of this, did you?” he said to Jon, coldly.
Slow as honey on a cold morning, the rangers swept down on the
wildling camp, picking their way through clumps of gorse and
stands of trees, over roots and rocks. Wildlings ew to meet them,
shouting war cries and waving clubs and bronze swords and axes
made of int, galloping headlong at their ancient enemies. A shout,
a slash, and a ne brave death, Jon had heard brothers say of the free
folk’s way of ghting.
“Believe what you will,” Jon told the King-beyond-the-Wall, “but
I knew nothing of any attack.”
Harma thundered past before Mance could reply, riding at the
head of thirty raiders. Her standard went before her; a dead dog
impaled on a spear, raining blood at every stride. Mance watched as
she smashed into the rangers. “Might be you’re telling it true,” he
said. “Those look like Eastwatch men. Sailors on horses. Cotter

Pyke always had more guts than sense. He took the Lord of Bones
at Long Barrow, he might have thought to do the same with me. If
so, he’s a fool. He doesn’t have the men, he—”
“Mance!” the shout came. It was a scout, bursting from the trees
on a lathered horse. “Mance, there’s more, they’re all around us,
iron men, iron, a host of iron men.”
Cursing, Mance swung up into the saddle. “Varamyr, stay and see
that no harm comes to Dalla.” The King-beyond-the-Wall pointed his
sword at Jon. “And keep a few extra eyes on this crow. If he runs,
rip out his throat.”
“Aye, I’ll do that.” The skinchanger was a head shorter than Jon,
slumped and soft, but that shadowcat could disembowel him with
one paw. “They’re coming from the north too,” Varamyr told
Mance. “You best go.”
Mance donned his helm with its raven wings. His men were
mounted up as well. “Arrowhead,” Mance snapped, “to me, form
wedge.” Yet when he slammed his heels into the mare and ew
across the eld at the rangers, the men who raced to catch him lost
all semblance of formation.
Jon took a step toward the tent, thinking of the Horn of Winter,
but the shadowcat blocked him, tail lashing. The beast’s nostrils
ared, and slaver ran from his curved front teeth. He smells my fear.
He missed Ghost more than ever then. The two wolves were behind
him, growling.
“Banners,” he heard Varamyr murmur, “I see golden banners,
oh …” A mammoth lumbered by, trumpeting, a half-dozen bowmen
in the wooden tower on its back. “The king … no …”
Then the skinchanger threw back his head and screamed.
The sound was shocking, ear-piercing, thick with agony. Varamyr
fell, writhing, and the ’cat was screaming too … and high, high in
the eastern sky, against the wall of cloud, Jon saw the eagle
burning. For a heartbeat it amed brighter than a star, wreathed in
red and gold and orange, its wings beating wildly at the air as if it
could y from the pain. Higher it ew, and higher, and higher still.
The scream brought Val out of the tent, white-faced. “What is it,
what’s happened?” Varamyr’s wolves were ghting each other, and

the shadowcat had raced o into the trees, but the man was still
twisting on the ground. “What’s wrong with him?” Val demanded,
horri ed. “Where’s Mance?”
“There.” Jon pointed. “Gone to ght.” The king led his ragged
wedge into a knot of rangers, his sword ashing.
“Gone? He can’t be gone, not now. It’s started.”
“The battle?” He watched the rangers scatter before Harma’s
bloody dog’s head. The raiders screamed and hacked and chased the
men in black back into the trees. But there were more men coming
from the wood, a column of horse. Knights on heavy horse, Jon saw.
Harma had to regroup and wheel to meet them, but half of her men
had raced too far ahead.
“The birth!” Val was shouting at him.
Trumpets were blowing all around, loud and brazen. The wildlings
have no trumpets, only warhorns. They knew that as well as he did;
the sound sent free folk running in confusion, some toward the
ghting, others away. A mammoth was stomping through a ock of
sheep that three men were trying to herd o west. The drums were
beating as the wildlings ran to form squares and lines, but they
were too late, too disorganized, too slow. The enemy was emerging
from the forest, from the east, the northeast, the north; three great
columns of heavy horse, all dark glinting steel and bright wool
surcoats. Not the men of Eastwatch, those had been no more than a
line of scouts. An army. The king? Jon was as confused as the
wildlings. Could Robb have returned? Had the boy on the Iron
Throne nally bestirred himself? “You best get back inside the
tent,” he told Val.
Across the eld one column had washed over Harma Dogshead.
Another smashed into the ank of Tormund’s spearmen as he and
his sons desperately tried to turn them. The giants were climbing
onto their mammoths, though, and the knights on their barded
horses did not like that at all; he could see how the coursers and
destriers screamed and scattered at the sight of those lumbering
mountains. But there was fear on the wildling side as well, hundreds
of women and children rushing away from the battle, some of them
blundering right under the hooves of garrons. He saw an old

woman’s dog cart veer into the path of three chariots, to send them
crashing into each other.
“Gods,” Val whispered, “gods, why are they doing this?”
“Go inside the tent and stay with Dalla. It’s not safe out here.” It
wouldn’t be a great deal safer inside, but she didn’t need to hear
that.
“I need to nd the midwife,” Val said.
“You’re the midwife. I’ll stay here until Mance comes back.” He
had lost sight of Mance but now he found him again, cutting his
way through a knot of mounted men. The mammoths had shattered
the center column, but the other two were closing like pincers. On
the eastern edge of the camps, some archers were loosing re
arrows at the tents. He saw a mammoth pluck a knight from his
saddle and ing him forty feet with a ick of its trunk. Wildlings
streamed past, women and children running from the battle, some
with men hurrying them along. A few of them gave Jon dark looks
but Longclaw was in his hand, and no one troubled him. Even
Varamyr ed, crawling o on his hands and knees.
More and more men were pouring from the trees, not only
knights now but freeriders and mounted bowmen and men-at-arms
in jacks and kettle helms, dozens of men, hundreds of men. A blaze
of banners ew above them. The wind was whipping them too
wildly for Jon to see the sigils, but he glimpsed a seahorse, a eld
of birds, a ring of owers. And yellow, so much yellow, yellow
banners with a red device, whose arms were those?
East and north and northeast, he saw bands of wildlings trying to
stand and ght, but the attackers rode right over them. The free
folk still had the numbers, but the attackers had steel armor and
heavy horses. In the thickest part of the fray, Jon saw Mance
standing tall in his stirrups. His red-and-black cloak and ravenwinged helm made him easy to pick out. He had his sword raised
and men were rallying to him when a wedge of knights smashed
into them with lance and sword and longaxe. Mance’s mare went up
on her hind legs, kicking, and a spear took her through the breast.
Then the steel tide washed over him.

It’s done, Jon thought, they’re breaking. The wildlings were
running, throwing down their weapons, Hornfoot men and cave
dwellers and Thenns in bronze scales, they were running. Mance
was gone, someone was waving Harma’s head on a pole, Tormund’s
lines had broken. Only the giants on their mammoths were holding,
hairy islands in a red steel sea. The res were leaping from tent to
tent and some of the tall pines were going up as well. And through
the smoke another wedge of armored riders came, on barded
horses. Floating above them were the largest banners yet, royal
standards as big as sheets; a yellow one with long pointed tongues
that showed a aming heart, and another like a sheet of beaten
gold, with a black stag prancing and rippling in the wind.
Robert, Jon thought for one mad moment, remembering poor
Owen, but when the trumpets blew again and the knights charged,
the name they cried was “Stannis! Stannis! STANNIS!”
Jon turned away, and went inside the tent.

ARYA

Outside the inn on a weathered gibbet, a woman’s bones were

twisting and rattling at every gust of wind.
I know this inn. There hadn’t been a gibbet outside the door when
she had slept here with her sister Sansa under the watchful eye of
Septa Mordane, though. “We don’t want to go in,” Arya decided
suddenly, “there might be ghosts.”
“You know how long it’s been since I had a cup of wine?” Sandor
swung down from the saddle. “Besides, we need to learn who holds
the ruby ford. Stay with the horses if you want, it’s no hair o my
arse.”
“What if they know you?” Sandor no longer troubled to hide his
face. He no longer seemed to care who knew him. “They might
want to take you captive.”
“Let them try.” He loosened his longsword in its scabbard, and
pushed through the door.
Arya would never have a better chance to escape. She could ride
o on Craven and take Stranger too. She chewed her lip. Then she
led the horses to the stables, and went in after him.
They know him. The silence told her that. But that wasn’t the
worst thing. She knew them too. Not the skinny innkeep, nor the
women, nor the eldhands by the hearth. But the others. The
soldiers. She knew the soldiers.
“Looking for your brother, Sandor?” Polliver’s hand was down
the bodice of the girl on his lap, but now he slid it out.

“Looking for a cup of wine. Innkeep, a agon of red.” Clegane
threw a handful of coppers on the oor.
“I don’t want no trouble, ser,” the innkeep said.
“Then don’t call me ser.” His mouth twitched. “Are you deaf,
fool? I ordered wine.” As the man ran o , Clegane shouted after
him, “Two cups! The girl’s thirsty too!”
There are only three, Arya thought. Polliver gave her a eeting
glance and the boy beside him never looked at her at all, but the
third one gazed long and hard. He was a man of middling height
and build, with a face so ordinary that it was hard to say how old he
was. The Tickler. The Tickler and Polliver both. The boy was a squire,
judging by his age and dress. He had a big white pimple on one side
of his nose, and some red ones on his forehead. “Is this the lost
puppy Ser Gregor spoke of?” he asked the Tickler. “The one who
piddled in the rushes and ran o ?”
The Tickler put a warning hand on the boy’s arm, and gave a
short sharp shake of his head. Arya read that plain enough.
The squire didn’t, or else he didn’t care. “Ser said his puppy
brother tucked his tail between his legs when the battle got too
warm at King’s Landing. He said he ran o whimpering.” He gave
the Hound a stupid mocking grin.
Clegane studied the boy and never said a word. Polliver shoved
the girl o his lap and got to his feet. “The lad’s drunk,” he said.
The man-at-arms was almost as tall as the Hound, though not so
heavily muscled. A spade-shaped beard covered his jaws and jowls,
thick and black and neatly trimmed, but his head was more bald
than not. “He can’t hold his wine, is all.”
“Then he shouldn’t drink.”
“The puppy doesn’t scare …” the boy began, till the Tickler
casually twisted his ear between thumb and fore nger. The words
became a squeal of pain.
The innkeep came scurrying back with two stone cups and a
agon on a pewter platter. Sandor lifted the agon to his mouth.
Arya could see the muscles in his neck working as he gulped. When
he slammed it back down on the table, half the wine was gone.

“Now you can pour. Best pick up those coppers too, it’s the only
coin you’re like to see today.”
“We’ll pay when we’re done drinking,” said Polliver.
“When you’re done drinking you’ll tickle the innkeep to see
where he keeps his gold. The way you always do.”
The innkeep suddenly remembered something in the kitchen. The
locals were leaving too, and the girls were gone. The only sound in
the common room was the faint crackling of the re in the hearth.
We should go too, Arya knew.
“If you’re looking for Ser, you come too late,” Polliver said. “He
was at Harrenhal, but now he’s not. The queen sent for him.” He
wore three blades on his belt, Arya saw; a longsword on his left hip,
and on his right a dagger and a slimmer blade, too long to be a dirk
and too short to be a sword. “King Jo rey’s dead, you know,” he
added. “Poisoned at his own wedding feast.”
Arya edged farther into the room. Jo rey’s dead. She could almost
see him, with his blond curls and his mean smile and his fat soft
lips. Jo rey’s dead! She knew it ought to make her happy, but
somehow she still felt empty inside. Jo rey was dead, but if Robb
was dead too, what did it matter?
“So much for my brave brothers of the Kingsguard.” The Hound
gave a snort of contempt. “Who killed him?”
“The Imp, it’s thought. Him and his little wife.”
“What wife?”
“I forgot, you’ve been hiding under a rock. The northern girl.
Winterfell’s daughter. We heard she killed the king with a spell, and
afterward changed into a wolf with big leather wings like a bat, and
ew out a tower window. But she left the dwarf behind and Cersei
means to have his head.”
That’s stupid, Arya thought. Sansa only knows songs, not spells, and
she’d never marry the Imp.
The Hound sat on the bench closest to the door. His mouth
twitched, but only the burned side. “She ought to dip him in
wild re and cook him. Or tickle him till the moon turns black.” He
raised his wine cup and drained it straightaway.

He’s one of them, Arya thought when she saw that. She bit her lip
so hard she tasted blood. He’s just like they are. I should kill him when
he sleeps.
“So Gregor took Harrenhal?” Sandor said.
“Didn’t require much taking,” said Polliver. “The sellswords ed
as soon as they knew we were coming, all but a few. One of the
cooks opened a postern gate for us, to get back at Hoat for cutting
o his foot.” He chuckled. “We kept him to cook for us, a couple
wenches to warm our beds, and put all the rest to the sword.”
“All the rest?” Arya blurted out.
“Well, Ser kept Hoat to pass the time.”
Sandor said, “The Black sh is still in Riverrun?”
“Not for long,” said Polliver. “He’s under siege. Old Frey’s going
to hang Edmure Tully unless he yields the castle. The only real
ghting’s around Raventree. Blackwoods and Brackens. The
Brackens are ours now.”
The Hound poured a cup of wine for Arya and another for
himself, and drank it down while staring at the hearth re. “The
little bird ew away, did she? Well, bloody good for her. She shit
on the Imp’s head and ew o .”
“They’ll nd her,” said Polliver. “If it takes half the gold in
Casterly Rock.”
“A pretty girl, I hear,” said the Tickler. “Honey sweet.” He
smacked his lips and smiled.
“And courteous,” the Hound agreed. “A proper little lady. Not like
her bloody sister.”
“They found her too,” said Polliver. “The sister. She’s for Bolton’s
bastard, I hear.”
Arya sipped her wine so they could not see her mouth. She didn’t
understand what Polliver was talking about. Sansa has no other sister.
Sandor Clegane laughed aloud.
“What’s so bloody funny?” asked Polliver.
The Hound never icked an eye at Arya. “If I’d wanted you to
know, I’d have told you. Are there ships at Saltpans?”
“Saltpans? How should I know? The traders are back at
Maidenpool, I heard. Randyll Tarly took the castle and locked

Mooton in a tower cell. I haven’t heard shit about Saltpans.”
The Tickler leaned forward. “Would you put to sea without
bidding farewell to your brother?” It gave Arya chills to hear him
ask a question. “Ser would sooner you returned to Harrenhal with
us, Sandor. I bet he would. Or King’s Landing …”
“Bugger that. Bugger him. Bugger you.”
The Tickler shrugged, straightened, and reached a hand behind
his head to rub the back of his neck. Everything seemed to happen
at once then; Sandor lurched to his feet, Polliver drew his
longsword, and the Tickler’s hand whipped around in a blur to send
something silver ashing across the common room. If the Hound
had not been moving, the knife might have cored the apple of his
throat; instead it only grazed his ribs, and wound up quivering in
the wall near the door. He laughed then, a laugh as cold and hollow
as if it had come from the bottom of a deep well. “I was hoping
you’d do something stupid.” His sword slid from its scabbard just in
time to knock aside Polliver’s rst cut.
Arya took a step backward as the long steel song began. The
Tickler came o the bench with a shortsword in one hand and a
dagger in the other. Even the chunky brown-haired squire was up,
fumbling for his swordhilt. She snatched her wine cup o the table
and threw it at his face. Her aim was better than it had been at the
Twins. The cup hit him right on his big white pimple and he went
down hard on his tail.
Polliver was a grim, methodical ghter, and he pressed Sandor
steadily backward, his heavy longsword moving with brutal
precision. The Hound’s own cuts were sloppier, his parries rushed,
his feet slow and clumsy. He’s drunk, Arya realized with dismay. He
drank too much too fast, with no food in his belly. And the Tickler was
sliding around the wall to get behind him. She grabbed the second
wine cup and ung it at him, but he was quicker than the squire had
been and ducked his head in time. The look he gave her then was
cold with promise. Is there gold hidden in the village? she could hear
him ask. The stupid squire was clutching the edge of a table and
pulling himself to his knees. Arya could taste the beginnings of

panic in the back of her throat. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fears
cuts deeper …
Sandor gave a grunt of pain. The burned side of his face ran red
from temple to cheek, and the stub of his ear was gone. That
seemed to make him angry. He drove back Polliver with a furious
attack, hammering at him with the old nicked longsword he had
swapped for in the hills. The bearded man gave way, but none of
the cuts so much as touched him. And then the Tickler leapt over a
bench quick as a snake, and slashed at the back of the Hound’s neck
with the edge of his short sword.
They’re killing him. Arya had no more cups, but there was
something better to throw. She drew the dagger they’d robbed o
the dying archer and tried to ing it at the Tickler the way he’d
done. It wasn’t the same as throwing a rock or a crabapple, though.
The knife wobbled, and hit him in the arm hilt rst. He never even
felt it. He was too intent on Clegane.
As he stabbed, Clegane twisted violently aside, winning himself
half a heartbeat’s respite. Blood ran down his face and from the
gash in his neck. Both of the Mountain’s men came after him hard,
Polliver hacking at his head and shoulders while the Tickler darted
in to stab at back and belly. The heavy stone agon was still on the
table. Arya grabbed it with two hands, but as she lifted it someone
grabbed her arm. The agon slipped from her ngers and crashed to
the oor. Wrenched around, she found herself nose to nose with the
squire. You stupid, you forgot all about him. His big white pimple had
burst, she saw.
“Are you the puppy’s puppy?” He had his sword in his right hand
and her arm in his left, but her own hands were free, so she jerked
his knife from its sheath and sheathed it again in his belly, twisting.
He wasn’t wearing mail or even boiled leather, so it went right in,
the same way Needle had when she killed the stableboy at King’s
Landing. The squire’s eyes got big and he let go of her arm. Arya
spun to the door and wrenched the Tickler’s knife from the wall.
Polliver and the Tickler had driven the Hound into a corner
behind a bench, and one of them had given him an ugly red gash on
his upper thigh to go with his other wounds. Sandor was leaning

against the wall, bleeding and breathing noisily. He looked as
though he could barely stand, let alone ght. “Throw down the
sword, and we’ll take you back to Harrenhal,” Polliver told him.
“So Gregor can nish me himself?”
The Tickler said, “Maybe he’ll give you to me.”
“If you want me, come get me.” Sandor pushed away from the
wall and stood in a half-crouch behind the bench, his sword held
across his body.
“You think we won’t?” said Polliver. “You’re drunk.”
“Might be,” said the Hound, “but you’re dead.” His foot lashed
out and caught the bench, driving it hard into Polliver’s shins.
Somehow the bearded man kept his feet, but the Hound ducked
under his wild slash and brought his own sword up in a vicious
backhand cut. Blood spattered on the ceiling and walls. The blade
caught in the middle of Polliver’s face, and when the Hound
wrenched it loose half his head came with it.
The Tickler backed away. Arya could smell his fear. The
shortsword in his hand suddenly seemed almost a toy against the
long blade the Hound was holding, and he wasn’t armored either.
He moved swiftly, light on his feet, never taking his eyes o Sandor
Clegane. It was the easiest thing in the world for Arya to step up
behind him and stab him.
“Is there gold hidden in the village?” she shouted as she drove the
blade up through his back. “Is there silver? Gems?” She stabbed
twice more. “Is there food? Where is Lord Beric?” She was on top of
him by then, still stabbing. “Where did he go? How many men were
with him? How many knights? How many bowmen? How many,
how many, how many, how many, how many, how many? Is there
gold in the village?”
Her hands were red and sticky when Sandor dragged her o him.
“Enough,” was all he said. He was bleeding like a butchered pig
himself, and dragging one leg when he walked.
“There’s one more,” Arya reminded him.
The squire had pulled the knife out of his belly and was trying to
stop the blood with his hands. When the Hound yanked him upright,

he screamed and started to blubber like a baby. “Mercy,” he wept,
“please. Don’t kill me. Mother have mercy.”
“Do I look like your bloody mother?” The Hound looked like
nothing human. “You killed this one too,” he told Arya. “Pricked
him in his bowels, that’s the end of him. He’ll be a long time dying,
though.”
The boy didn’t seemed to hear him. “I came for the girls,” he
whimpered. “… make me a man, Polly said … oh, gods, please,
take me to a castle … a maester, take me to a maester, my father’s
got gold … it was only for the girls … mercy, ser.”
The Hound gave him a crack across the face that made him
scream again. “Don’t call me ser.” He turned back to Arya. “This
one is yours, she-wolf. You do it.”
She knew what he meant. Arya went to Polliver and knelt in his
blood long enough to undo his swordbelt. Hanging beside his
dagger was a slimmer blade, too long to be a dirk, too short to be a
man’s sword … but it felt just right in her hand.
“You remember where the heart is?” the Hound asked.
She nodded. The squire rolled his eyes. “Mercy.”
Needle slipped between his ribs and gave it to him.
“Good.” Sandor’s voice was thick with pain. “If these three were
whoring here, Gregor must hold the ford as well as Harrenhal. More
of his pets could ride up any moment, and we’ve killed enough of
the bloody buggers for one day.”
“Where will we go?” she asked.
“Saltpans.” He put a big hand on her shoulder to keep from
falling. “Get some wine, she-wolf. And take whatever coin they
have as well, we’ll need it. If there’s ships at Saltpans, we can reach
the Vale by sea.” His mouth twitched at her, as more blood ran
down from where his ear had been. “Maybe Lady Lysa will marry
you to her little Robert. There’s a match I’d like to see.” He started
to laugh, then groaned instead.
When the time came to leave, he needed Arya’s help to get back
up on Stranger. He had tied a strip of cloth about his neck and
another around his thigh, and taken the squire’s cloak o its peg by
the door. The cloak was green, with a green arrow on a white bend,

but when the Hound wadded it up and pressed it to his ear it soon
turned red. Arya was afraid he would collapse the moment they set
out, but somehow he stayed in the saddle.
They could not risk meeting whoever held the ruby ford, so
instead of following the kingsroad they angled south by east,
through weedy elds, woods, and marshes. It was hours before they
reached the banks of the Trident. The river had returned meekly to
its accustomed channel, Arya saw, all its wet brown rage vanished
with the rains. It’s tired too, she thought.
Close by the water’s edge, they found some willows rising from a
jumble of weathered rocks. Together the rocks and trees formed a
sort of natural fort where they could hide from both river and trail.
“Here will do,” the Hound said. “Water the horses and gather some
deadwood for a re.” When he dismounted, he had to catch himself
on a tree limb to keep from falling.
“Won’t the smoke be seen?”
“Anyone wants to nd us, all they need to do is follow my blood.
Water and wood. But bring me that wineskin rst.”
When he got the re going, Sandor propped up his helm in the
ames, emptied half the wineskin into it, and collapsed back against
a jut of moss-covered stone as if he never meant to rise again. He
made Arya wash out the squire’s cloak and cut it into strips. Those
went into his helm as well. “If I had more wine, I’d drink till I was
dead to the world. Maybe I ought to send you back to that bloody
inn for another skin or three.”
“No,” Arya said. He wouldn’t, would he? If he does, I’ll just leave him
and ride o .
Sandor laughed at the fear on her face. “A jest, wolf girl. A
bloody jest. Find me a stick, about so long and not too big around.
And wash the mud o it. I hate the taste of mud.”
He didn’t like the rst two sticks she brought him. By the time
she found one that suited him, the ames had scorched his dog’s
snout black all the way to the eyes. Inside the wine was boiling
madly. “Get the cup from my bedroll and dip it half full,” he told
her. “Be careful. You knock the damn thing over, I will send you
back for more. Take the wine and pour it on my wounds. Think you

can do that?” Arya nodded. “Then what are you waiting for?” he
growled.
Her knuckles brushed the steel the rst time she lled the cup,
burning her so badly she got blisters. Arya had to bite her lip to
keep from screaming. The Hound used the stick for the same
purpose, clamping it between his teeth as she poured. She did the
gash in his thigh rst, then the shallower cut on the back of his
neck. Sandor coiled his right hand into a st and beat against the
ground when she did his leg. When it came to his neck, he bit the
stick so hard it broke, and she had to nd him a new one. She could
see the terror in his eyes. “Turn your head.” She trickled the wine
down over the raw red esh where his ear had been, and ngers of
brown blood and red wine crept over his jaw. He did scream then,
despite the stick. Then he passed out from the pain.
Arya gured the rest out by herself. She shed the strips they’d
made of the squire’s cloak out of the bottom of the helm and used
them to bind the cuts. When she came to his ear, she had to wrap up
half his head to stop the bleeding. By then dusk was settling over
the Trident. She let the horses graze, then hobbled them for the
night and made herself as comfortable as she could in a niche
between two rocks. The re burned a while and died. Arya watched
the moon through the branches overhead.
“Ser Gregor the Mountain,” she said softly. “Dunsen, Ra the
Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei.” It made her feel
queer to leave out Polliver and the Tickler. And Jo rey too. She
was glad he was dead, but she wished she could have been there to
see him die, or maybe kill him herself. Polliver said that Sansa killed
him, and the Imp. Could that be true? The Imp was a Lannister, and
Sansa … I wish I could change into a wolf and grow wings and y away.
If Sansa was gone too, there were no more Starks but her. Jon
was on the Wall a thousand leagues away, but he was a Snow, and
these di erent aunts and uncles the Hound wanted to sell her to,
they weren’t Starks either. They weren’t wolves.
Sandor moaned, and she rolled onto her side to look at him. She
had left his name out too, she realized. Why had she done that? She
tried to think of Mycah, but it was hard to remember what he’d

looked like. She hadn’t known him long. All he ever did was play at
swords with me. “The Hound,” she whispered, and, “Valar morghulis.”
Maybe he’d be dead by morning …
But when the pale dawn light came ltering through the trees, it
was him who woke her with the toe of his boot. She had dreamed
she was a wolf again, chasing a riderless horse up a hill with a pack
behind her, but his foot brought her back just as they were closing
for the kill.
The Hound was still weak, every movement slow and clumsy. He
slumped in the saddle, and sweated, and his ear began to bleed
through the bandage. He needed all his strength just to keep from
falling o Stranger. Had the Mountain’s men come hunting them,
she doubted if he would even be able to lift a sword. Arya glanced
over her shoulder, but there was nothing behind them but a crow
itting from tree to tree. The only sound was the river.
Long before noon, Sandor Clegane was reeling. There were hours
of daylight still remaining when he called a halt. “I need to rest,”
was all he said. This time when he dismounted he did fall. Instead of
trying to get back up he crawled weakly under a tree, and leaned up
against the trunk. “Bloody hell,” he cursed. “Bloody hell.” When he
saw Arya staring at him, he said, “I’d skin you alive for a cup of
wine, girl.”
She brought him water instead. He drank a little of it, complained
that it tasted of mud, and slid into a noisy fevered sleep. When she
touched him, his skin was burning up. Arya sni ed at his bandages
the way Maester Luwin had done sometimes when treating her cut
or scrape. His face had bled the worst, but it was the wound on his
thigh that smelled funny to her.
She wondered how far this Saltpans was, and whether she could
nd it by herself. I wouldn’t have to kill him. If I just rode o and left
him, he’d die all by himself. He’ll die of fever, and lie there beneath that
tree until the end of days. But maybe it would be better if she killed
him herself. She had killed the squire at the inn and he hadn’t done
anything except grab her arm. The Hound had killed Mycah. Mycah
and more. I bet he’s killed a hundred Mycahs. He probably would have
killed her too, if not for the ransom.

Needle glinted as she drew it. Polliver had kept it nice and sharp,
at least. She turned her body sideways in a water dancer’s stance
without even thinking about it. Dead leaves crunched beneath her
feet. Quick as a snake, she thought. Smooth as summer silk.
His eyes opened. “You remember where the heart is?” he asked in
a hoarse whisper.
As still as stone she stood. “I … I was only …”
“Don’t lie,” he growled. “I hate liars. I hate gutless frauds even
worse. Go on, do it.” When Arya did not move, he said, “I killed
your butcher’s boy. I cut him near in half, and laughed about it
after.” He made a queer sound, and it took her a moment to realize
he was sobbing. “And the little bird, your pretty sister, I stood there
in my white cloak and let them beat her. I took the bloody song, she
never gave it. I meant to take her too. I should have. I should have
fucked her bloody and ripped her heart out before leaving her for
that dwarf.” A spasm of pain twisted his face. “Do you mean to
make me beg, bitch? Do it! The gift of mercy … avenge your little
Michael …”
“Mycah.” Arya stepped away from him. “You don’t deserve the
gift of mercy.”
The Hound watched her saddle Craven through eyes bright with
fever. Not once did he attempt to rise and stop her. But when she
mounted, he said, “A real wolf would nish a wounded animal.”
Maybe some real wolves will nd you, Arya thought. Maybe they’ll
smell you when the sun goes down. Then he would learn what wolves
did to dogs. “You shouldn’t have hit me with an axe,” she said. “You
should have saved my mother.” She turned her horse and rode away
from him, and never looked back once.
On a bright morning six days later, she came to a place where the
Trident began to widen out and the air smelled more of salt than
trees. She stayed close to the water, passing elds and farms, and a
little after midday a town appeared before her. Saltpans, she hoped.
A small castle dominated the town; no more than a holdfast, really,
a single tall square keep with a bailey and a curtain wall. Most of
the shops and inns and alehouses around the harbor had been
plundered or burned, though some looked still inhabited. But the

port was there, and eastward spread the Bay of Crabs, its waters
shimmering blue and green in the sun.
And there were ships.
Three, thought Arya, there are three. Two were only river galleys,
shallow draft boats made to ply the waters of the Trident. The third
was bigger, a salt sea trader with two banks of oars, a gilded prow,
and three tall masts with furled purple sails. Her hull was painted
purple too. Arya rode Craven down to the docks to get a better
look. Strangers are not so strange in a port as they are in little
villages, and no one seemed to care who she was or why she was
here.
I need silver. The realization made her bite her lip. They had found
a stag and a dozen coppers on Polliver, eight silvers on the pimply
squire she’d killed, and only a couple of pennies in the Tickler’s
purse. But the Hound had told her to pull o his boots and slice
open his blood-drenched clothes, and she’d turned up a stag in each
toe, and three golden dragons sewn in the lining of his jerkin.
Sandor had kept it all, though. That wasn’t fair. It was mine as much
as his. If she had given him the gift of mercy … she hadn’t, though.
She couldn’t go back, no more than she could beg for help. Begging
for help never gets you any. She would have to sell Craven, and hope
she brought enough.
The stable had been burnt, she learned from a boy by the docks,
but the woman who’d owned it was still trading behind the sept.
Arya found her easily; a big, robust woman with a good horsey
smell to her. She liked Craven at rst look, asked Arya how she’d
come by her, and grinned at her answer. “She’s a well-bred horse,
that’s plain enough, and I don’t doubt she belonged to a knight,
sweetling,” she said. “But the knight wasn’t no dead brother o’
yours. I been dealing with the castle there many a year, so I know
what gentleborn folk is like. This mare is well-bred, but you’re not.”
She poked a nger at Arya’s chest. “Found her or stole her, never
mind which, that’s how it was. Only way a scru y little thing like
you comes to ride a palfrey.”
Arya bit her lip. “Does that mean you won’t buy her?”

The woman chuckled. “It means you’ll take what I give you,
sweetling. Else we go down to the castle, and maybe you get
nothing. Or even hanged, for stealing some good knight’s horse.”
A half-dozen other Saltpans folks were around, going about their
business, so Arya knew she couldn’t kill the woman. Instead she had
to bite her lip and let herself be cheated. The purse she got was
pitifully at, and when she asked for more for the saddle and bridle
and blanket, the woman just laughed at her.
She would never have cheated the Hound, she thought during the
long walk back to the docks. The distance seemed to have grown by
miles since she’d ridden it.
The purple galley was still there. If the ship had sailed while she
was being robbed, that would have been too much to bear. A cask
of mead was being rolled up the plank when she arrived. When she
tried to follow, a sailor up on deck shouted down at her in a tongue
she did not know. “I want to see the captain,” Arya told him. He
only shouted louder. But the commotion drew the attention of a
stout grey-haired man in a coat of purple wool, and he spoke the
Common Tongue. “I am captain here,” he said. “What is your wish?
Be quick, child, we have a tide to catch.”
“I want to go north, to the Wall. Here, I can pay.” She gave him
the purse. “The Night’s Watch has a castle on the sea.”
“Eastwatch.” The captain spilled out the silver onto his palm and
frowned. “Is this all you have?”
It is not enough, Arya knew without being told. She could see it on
his face. “I wouldn’t need a cabin or anything,” she said. “I could
sleep down in the hold, or …”
“Take her on as cabin girl,” said a passing oarsman, a bolt of wool
over one shoulder. “She can sleep with me.”
“Mind your tongue,” the captain snapped.
“I could work,” said Arya. “I could scrub the decks. I scrubbed a
castle steps once. Or I could row …”
“No,” he said, “you couldn’t.” He gave her back her coins. “It
would make no di erence if you could, child. The north has nothing
for us. Ice and war and pirates. We saw a dozen pirate ships making
north as we rounded Crackclaw Point, and I have no wish to meet

them again. From here we bend our oars for home, and I suggest
you do the same.”
I have no home, Arya thought. I have no pack. And now I don’t even
have a horse.
The captain was turning away when she said, “What ship is this,
my lord?”
He paused long enough to give her a weary smile. “This is the
galleas Titan’s Daughter, of the Free City of Braavos.”
“Wait,” Arya said suddenly. “I have something else.” She had
stu ed it down inside her smallclothes to keep it safe, so she had to
dig deep to nd it, while the oarsmen laughed and the captain
lingered with obvious impatience. “One more silver will make no
di erence, child,” he nally said.
“It’s not silver.” Her ngers closed on it. “It’s iron. Here.” She
pressed it into his hand, the small black iron coin that Jaqen H’ghar
had given her, so worn the man whose head it bore had no features.
It’s probably worthless, but …
The captain turned it over and blinked at it, then looked at her
again. “This … how …?”
Jaqen said to say the words too. Arya crossed her arms against her
chest. “Valar morghulis,” she said, as loud as if she’d known what it
meant.
“Valar dohaeris,” he replied, touching his brow with two ngers.
“Of course you shall have a cabin.”

SAMWELL

He sucks harder than mine.” Gilly stroked the babe’s head as she

held him to her nipple.
“He’s hungry,” said the blonde woman Val, the one the black
brothers called the wildling princess. “He’s lived on goats’ milk up
to now, and potions from that blind maester.”
The boy did not have a name yet, no more than Gilly’s did. That
was the wildling way. Not even Mance Rayder’s son would get a
name till his third year, it would seem, though Sam had heard the
brothers calling him “the little prince” and “born-in-battle.”
He watched the child nurse at Gilly’s breast, and then he watched
Jon watch. Jon is smiling. A sad smile, still, but de nitely a smile of
sorts. Sam was glad to see it. It is the rst time I’ve seen him smile
since I got back.
They had walked from the Nightfort to Deep Lake, and from Deep
Lake to Queensgate, following a narrow track from one castle to the
next, never out of sight of the Wall. A day and a half from Castle
Black, as they trudged along on callused feet, Gilly heard horses
behind them, and turned to see a column of black riders coming
from the west. “My brothers,” Sam assured her. “No one uses this
road but the Night’s Watch.” It had turned out to be Ser Denys
Mallister from the Shadow Tower, along with the wounded Bowen
Marsh and the survivors from the ght at the Bridge of Skulls.
When Sam saw Dywen, Giant, and Dolorous Edd Tollett, he broke
down and wept.

It was from them that he learned about the battle beneath the
Wall. “Stannis landed his knights at Eastwatch, and Cotter Pyke led
him along the ranger’s roads, to take the wildlings unawares,” Giant
told him. “He smashed them. Mance Rayder was taken captive, a
thousand of his best slain, including Harma Dogshead. The rest
scattered like leaves before a storm, we heard.” The gods are good,
Sam thought. If he had not gotten lost as he made his way south
from Craster’s Keep, he and Gilly might have walked right into the
battle … or into Mance Rayder’s camp, at the very least. That might
have been well enough for Gilly and the boy, but not for him. Sam
had heard all the stories about what wildlings did with captured
crows. He shuddered.
Nothing that his brothers told him prepared him for what he
found at Castle Black, however. The common hall had burned to the
ground and the great wooden stair was a mound of broken ice and
scorched timbers. Donal Noye was dead, along with Rast, Deaf Dick,
Red Alyn, and so many more, yet the castle was more crowded than
Sam had ever seen; not with black brothers, but with the king’s
soldiers, more than a thousand of them. There was a king in the
King’s Tower for the rst time in living memory, and banners ew
from the Lance, Hardin’s Tower, the Grey Keep, the Shieldhall, and
other buildings that had stood empty and abandoned for long years.
“The big one, the gold with the black stag, that’s the royal standard
of House Baratheon,” he told Gilly, who had never seen banners
before. “The fox-and- owers is House Florent. The turtle is
Estermont, the sword sh is Bar Emmon, and the crossed trumpets
are for Wensington.”
“They’re all bright as owers.” Gilly pointed. “I like those yellow
ones, with the re. Look, and some of the ghters have the same
thing on their blouses.”
“A ery heart. I don’t know whose sigil that is.”
He found out soon enough. “Queen’s men,” Pyp told him—after he
let out a whoop, and shouted, “Run and bar the doors, lads, it’s Sam
the Slayer come back from the grave,” while Grenn was hugging
Sam so hard he thought his ribs might break—“but best you don’t

go asking where the queen is. Stannis left her at Eastwatch, with
their daughter and his eet. He brought no woman but the red one.”
“The red one?” said Sam uncertainly.
“Melisandre of Asshai,” said Grenn. “The king’s sorceress. They
say she burned a man alive at Dragonstone so Stannis would have
favorable winds for his voyage north. She rode beside him in the
battle too, and gave him his magic sword. Lightbringer, they call it.
Wait till you see it. It glows like it had a piece of sun inside it.” He
looked at Sam again and grinned a big helpless stupid grin. “I still
can’t believe you’re here.”
Jon Snow had smiled to see him too, but it was a tired smile, like
the one he wore now. “You made it back after all,” he said. “And
brought Gilly out as well. You’ve done well, Sam.”
Jon had done more than well himself, to hear Grenn tell it. Yet
even capturing the Horn of Winter and a wildling prince had not
been enough for Ser Alliser Thorne and his friends, who still named
him turncloak. Though Maester Aemon said his wound was healing
well, Jon bore other scars, deeper than the ones around his eye. He
grieves for his wildling girl, and for his brothers.
“It’s strange,” he said to Sam. “Craster had no love for Mance, nor
Mance for Craster, but now Craster’s daughter is feeding Mance’s
son.”
“I have the milk,” Gilly said, her voice soft and shy. “Mine takes
only a little. He’s not so greedy as this one.”
The wildling woman Val turned to face them. “I’ve heard the
queen’s men saying that the red woman means to give Mance to the
re, as soon as he is strong enough.”
Jon gave her a weary look. “Mance is a deserter from the Night’s
Watch. The penalty for that is death. If the Watch had taken him, he
would have been hanged by now, but he’s the king’s captive, and no
one knows the king’s mind but the red woman.”
“I want to see him,” Val said. “I want to show him his son. He
deserves that much, before you kill him.”
Sam tried to explain. “No one is permitted to see him but Maester
Aemon, my lady.”

“If it were in my power, Mance could hold his son.” Jon’s smile
was gone. “I’m sorry, Val.” He turned away. “Sam and I have duties
to return to. Well, Sam does, anyway. We’ll ask about your seeing
Mance. That’s all I can promise.”
Sam lingered long enough to give Gilly’s hand a squeeze and
promise to return again after supper. Then he hurried after. There
were guards outside the door, queen’s men with spears. Jon was
halfway down the steps, but he waited when he heard Sam pu ng
after him. “You’re more than fond of Gilly, aren’t you?”
Sam reddened. “Gilly’s good. She’s good and kind.” He was glad
that his long nightmare was done, glad to be back with his brothers
at Castle Black … but some nights, alone in his cell, he thought of
how warm Gilly had been when they’d curled up beneath the furs
with the babe between them. “She … she made me braver, Jon. Not
brave, but … braver.”
“You know you cannot keep her,” Jon said gently, “no more than
I could stay with Ygritte. You said the words, Sam, the same as I
did. The same as all of us.”
“I know. Gilly said she’d be a wife to me, but … I told her about
the words, and what they meant. I don’t know if that made her sad
or glad, but I told her.” He swallowed nervously and said, “Jon,
could there be honor in a lie, if it were told for a … a good
purpose?”
“It would depend on the lie and the purpose, I suppose.” Jon
looked at Sam. “I wouldn’t advise it. You’re not made to lie, Sam.
You blush and squeak and stammer.”
“I do,” said Sam, “but I could lie in a letter. I’m better with a quill
in hand. I had a … a thought. When things are more settled here, I
thought maybe the best thing for Gilly … I thought I might send her
to Horn Hill. To my mother and sisters and my … my f-f-father. If
Gilly were to say the babe was m-mine …” He was blushing again.
“My mother would want him, I know. She would nd some place
for Gilly, some kind of service, it wouldn’t be as hard as serving
Craster. And Lord R-Randyll, he … he would never say so, but he
might be pleased to believe I got a bastard on some wildling girl. At
least it would prove I was man enough to lie with a woman and

father a child. He told me once that I was sure to die a maiden, that
no woman would ever … you know … Jon, if I did this, wrote this
lie … would that be a good thing? The life the boy would have …”
“Growing up a bastard in his grandfather’s castle?” Jon shrugged.
“That depends in great part on your father, and what sort of boy
this is. If he takes after you …”
“He won’t. Craster’s his real father. You saw him, he was hard as
an old tree stump, and Gilly is stronger than she looks.”
“If the boy shows any skill with sword or lance, he should have a
place with your father’s household guard at the least,” Jon said. “It’s
not unknown for bastards to be trained as squires and raised to
knighthood. But you’d best be sure Gilly can play this game
convincingly. From what you’ve told me of Lord Randyll, I doubt he
would take kindly to being deceived.”
More guards were posted on the steps outside the tower. These
were king’s men, though; Sam had quickly learned the di erence.
The king’s men were as earthy and impious as any other soldiers,
but the queen’s men were fervid in their devotion to Melisandre of
Asshai and her Lord of Light. “Are you going to the practice yard
again?” Sam asked as they crossed the yard. “Is it wise to train so
hard before your leg’s done healing?”
Jon shrugged. “What else is there for me to do? Marsh has
removed me from duty, for fear that I’m still a turncloak.”
“It’s only a few who believe that,” Sam assured him. “Ser Alliser
and his friends. Most of the brothers know better. King Stannis
knows as well, I’ll wager. You brought him the Horn of Winter and
captured Mance Rayder’s son.”
“All I did was protect Val and the babe against looters when the
wildlings ed, and keep them there until the rangers found us. I
never captured anyone. King Stannis keeps his men well in hand,
that’s plain. He lets them plunder some, but I’ve only heard of three
wildling women being raped, and the men who did it have all been
gelded. I suppose I should have been killing the free folk as they
ran. Ser Alliser has been putting it about that the only time I bared
my sword was to defend our foes. I failed to kill Mance Rayder
because I was in league with him, he says.”

“That’s only Ser Alliser,” said Sam. “Everyone knows the sort of
man he is.” With his noble birth, his knighthood, and his long years
in the Watch, Ser Alliser Thorne might have been a strong
challenger for the Lord Commander’s title, but almost all the men
he’d trained during his years as master-at-arms despised him. His
name had been o ered, of course, but after running a weak sixth on
the rst day and actually losing votes on the second, Thorne had
withdrawn to support Lord Janos Slynt.
“What everyone knows is that Ser Alliser is a knight from a noble
line, and trueborn, while I’m the bastard who killed Qhorin
Halfhand and bedded with a spearwife. The warg, I’ve heard them
call me. How can I be a warg without a wolf, I ask you?” His mouth
twisted. “I don’t even dream of Ghost anymore. All my dreams are
of the crypts, of the stone kings on their thrones. Sometimes I hear
Robb’s voice, and my father’s, as if they were at a feast. But there’s
a wall between us, and I know that no place has been set for me.”
The living have no place at the feasts of the dead. It tore the heart
from Sam to hold his silence then. Bran’s not dead, Jon, he wanted
to stay. He’s with friends, and they’re going north on a giant elk to nd
a three-eyed crow in the depths of the haunted forest. It sounded so
mad that there were times Sam Tarly thought he must have dreamt
it all, conjured it whole from fever and fear and hunger … but he
would have blurted it out anyway, if he had not given his word.
Three times he had sworn to keep the secret; once to Bran
himself, once to that strange boy Jojen Reed, and last of all to
Coldhands. “The world believes the boy is dead,” his rescuer had
said as they parted. “Let his bones lie undisturbed. We want no
seekers coming after us. Swear it, Samwell of the Night’s Watch.
Swear it for the life you owe me.”
Miserable, Sam shifted his weight and said, “Lord Janos will
never be chosen Lord Commander.” It was the best comfort he had
to o er Jon, the only comfort. “That won’t happen.”
“Sam, you’re a sweet fool. Open your eyes. It’s been happening
for days.” Jon pushed his hair back out of his eyes and said, “I may
know nothing, but I know that. Now pray excuse me, I need to hit
someone very hard with a sword.”

There was naught that Sam could do but watch him stride o
toward the armory and the practice yard. That was where Jon Snow
spent most of his waking hours. With Ser Endrew dead and Ser
Alliser disinterested, Castle Black had no master-at-arms, so Jon had
taken it on himself to work with some of the rawer recruits; Satin,
Horse, Hop-Robin with his clubfoot, Arron and Emrick. And when
they had duties, he would train alone for hours with sword and
shield and spear, or match himself against anyone who cared to take
him on.
Sam, you’re a sweet fool, he could hear Jon saying, all the way
back to the maester’s keep. Open your eyes. It’s been happening for
days. Could he be right? A man needed the votes of two-thirds of
the Sworn Brothers to become the Lord Commander of the Night’s
Watch, and after nine days and nine votes no one was even close to
that. Lord Janos had been gaining, true, creeping up past rst
Bowen Marsh and then Othell Yarwyck, but he was still well behind
Ser Denys Mallister of the Shadow Tower and Cotter Pyke of
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. One of them will be the new Lord Commander,
surely, Sam told himself.
Stannis had posted guards outside the maester’s door too. Within,
the rooms were hot and crowded with the wounded from the battle;
black brothers, king’s men, and queen’s men, all three. Clydas was
shu ing amongst them with agons of goats’ milk and dreamwine,
but Maester Aemon had not yet returned from his morning call on
Mance Rayder. Sam hung his cloak upon a peg and went to lend a
hand. But even as he fetched and poured and changed dressings,
Jon’s words nagged at him. Sam, you’re a sweet fool. Open your eyes.
It’s been happening for days.
It was a good hour before he could excuse himself to feed the
ravens. On the way up to the rookery, he stopped to check the tally
he had made of last night’s count. At the start of the choosing, more
than thirty names had been o ered, but most had withdrawn once it
became clear they could not win. Seven remained as of last night.
Ser Denys Mallister had collected two hundred and thirteen tokens,
Cotter Pyke one hundred and eighty-seven, Lord Slynt seventy-four,
Othell Yarwyck sixty, Bowen Marsh forty-nine, Three-Finger Hobb

ve, and Dolorous Edd Tollett one. Pyp and his stupid japes. Sam
shu ed through the earlier counts. Ser Denys, Cotter Pyke, and
Bowen Marsh had all been falling since the third day, Othell
Yarwyck since the sixth. Only Lord Janos Slynt was climbing, day
after day after day.
He could hear the birds quorking in the rookery, so he put the
papers away and climbed the steps to feed them. Three more ravens
had come in, he saw with pleasure. “Snow,” they cried at him.
“Snow, snow, snow.” He had taught them that. Even with the
newcomers, the ravenry seemed dismally empty. Few of the birds
that Aemon had sent o had returned as yet. One reached Stannis,
though. One found Dragonstone, and a king who still cared. A thousand
leagues south, Sam knew, his father had joined House Tarly to the
cause of the boy on the Iron Throne, but neither King Jo rey nor
little King Tommen had bestirred himself when the Watch cried out
for help. What good is a king who will not defend his realm? he
thought angrily, remembering the night on the Fist of the First Men
and the terrible trek to Craster’s Keep through darkness, fear, and
falling snow. The queen’s men made him uneasy, it was true, but at
least they had come.
That night at supper Sam looked for Jon Snow, but did not see
him anywhere in the cavernous stone vault where the brothers now
took their meals. He nally took a place on the bench near his other
friends. Pyp was telling Dolorous Edd about the contest they’d had
to see which of the straw soldiers could collect the most wildling
arrows. “You were leading most of the way, but Watt of Long Lake
got three in the last day and passed you.”
“I never win anything,” Dolorous Edd complained. “The gods
always smiled on Watt, though. When the wildlings knocked him o
the Bridge of Skulls, somehow he landed in a nice deep pool of
water. How lucky was that, missing all those rocks?”
“Was it a long fall?” Grenn wanted to know. “Did landing in the
pool of water save his life?”
“No,” said Dolorous Edd. “He was dead already, from that axe in
his head. Still, it was pretty lucky, missing the rocks.”

Three-Finger Hobb had promised the brothers roast haunch of
mammoth that night, maybe in hopes of cadging a few more votes.
If that was his notion, he should have found a younger mammoth, Sam
thought, as he pulled a string of gristle out from between his teeth.
Sighing, he pushed the food away.
There would be another vote shortly, and the tensions in the air
were thicker than the smoke. Cotter Pyke sat by the re,
surrounded by rangers from Eastwatch. Ser Denys Mallister was
near the door with a smaller group of Shadow Tower men. Janos
Slynt has the best place, Sam realized, halfway between the ames and
the drafts. He was alarmed to see Bowen Marsh beside him, wanfaced and haggard, his head still wrapped in linen, but listening to
all that Lord Janos had to say. When he pointed that out to his
friends, Pyp said, “And look down there, that’s Ser Alliser
whispering with Othell Yarwyck.”
After the meal Maester Aemon rose to ask if any of the brothers
wished to speak before they cast their tokens. Dolorous Edd got up,
stone-faced and glum as ever. “I just want to say to whoever is
voting for me that I would certainly make an awful Lord
Commander. But so would all these others.” He was followed by
Bowen Marsh, who stood with one hand on Lord Slynt’s shoulder.
“Brothers and friends, I am asking that my name be withdrawn
from this choosing. My wound still troubles me, and the task is too
large for me, I fear … but not for Lord Janos here, who commanded
the gold cloaks of King’s Landing for many years. Let us all give
him our support.”
Sam heard angry mutters from Cotter Pyke’s end of the room,
and Ser Denys looked at one of his companions and shook his head.
It is too late, the damage is done. He wondered where Jon was, and
why he had stayed away.
Most of the brothers were unlettered, so by tradition the choosing
was done by dropping tokens into a big potbellied iron kettle that
Three-Finger Hobb and Owen the Oaf had dragged over from the
kitchens. The barrels of tokens were o in a corner behind a heavy
drape, so the voters could make their choice unseen. You were
allowed to have a friend cast your token if you had duty, so some

men took two tokens, three, or four, and Ser Denys and Cotter Pyke
voted for the garrisons they had left behind.
When the hall was nally empty, save for them, Sam and Clydas
upended the kettle in front of Maester Aemon. A cascade of
seashells, stones, and copper pennies covered the table. Aemon’s
wrinkled hands sorted with surprising speed, moving the shells
here, the stones there, the pennies to one side, the occasional
arrowhead, nail, and acorn o to themselves. Sam and Clydas
counted the piles, each of them keeping his own tally.
Tonight it was Sam’s turn to give his results rst. “Two hundred
and three for Ser Denys Mallister,” he said. “One hundred and sixtynine for Cotter Pyke. One hundred and thirty-seven for Lord Janos
Slynt, seventy-two for Othell Yarwyck, ve for Three-Finger Hobb,
and two for Dolorous Edd.”
“I had one hundred and sixty-eight for Pyke,” Clydas said. “We
are two votes short by my count, and one by Sam’s.”
“Sam’s count is correct,” said Maester Aemon. “Jon Snow did not
cast a token. It makes no matter. No one is close.”
Sam was more relieved than disappointed. Even with Bowen
Marsh’s support, Lord Janos was still only third. “Who are these
ve who keep voting for Three-Finger Hobb?” he wondered.
“Brothers who want him out of the kitchens?” said Clydas.
“Ser Denys is down ten votes since yesterday,” Sam pointed out.
“And Cotter Pyke is down almost twenty. That’s not good.”
“Not good for their hopes of becoming Lord Commander,
certainly,” said Maester Aemon. “Yet it may be good for the Night’s
Watch, in the end. That is not for us to say. Ten days is not unduly
long. There was once a choosing that lasted near two years, some
seven hundred votes. The brothers will come to a decision in their
own time.”
Yes, Sam thought, but what decision?
Later, over cups of watered wine in the privacy of Pyp’s cell,
Sam’s tongue loosened and he found himself thinking aloud. “Cotter
Pyke and Ser Denys Mallister have been losing ground, but between
them they still have almost two-thirds,” he told Pyp and Grenn.

“Either one would be ne as Lord Commander. Someone needs to
convince one of them to withdraw and support the other.”
“Someone?” said Grenn, doubtfully. “What someone?”
“Grenn is so dumb he thinks someone might be him,” said Pyp.
“Maybe when someone is done with Pyke and Mallister, he should
convince King Stannis to marry Queen Cersei too.”
“King Stannis is married,” Grenn objected.
“What am I going to do with him, Sam?” sighed Pyp.
“Cotter Pyke and Ser Denys don’t like each other much,” Grenn
argued stubbornly. “They ght about everything.”
“Yes, but only because they have di erent ideas about what’s best
for the Watch,” said Sam. “If we explained—”
“We?” said Pyp. “How did someone change to we? I’m the
mummer’s monkey, remember? And Grenn is, well, Grenn.” He
smiled at Sam, and wiggled his ears. “You, now … you’re a lord’s
son, and the maester’s steward …”
“And Sam the Slayer,” said Grenn. “You slew an Other.”
“It was the dragonglass that killed it,” Sam told him for the
hundredth time.
“A lord’s son, the maester’s steward, and Sam the Slayer,” Pyp
mused. “You could talk to them, might be …”
“I could,” said Sam, sounding as gloomy as Dolorous Edd, “if I
wasn’t too craven to face them.”

JON

Jon prowled around Satin in a slow circle, sword in hand, forcing

him to turn. “Get your shield up,” he said.
“It’s too heavy,” the Oldtown boy complained.
“It’s as heavy as it needs to be to stop a sword,” Jon said. “Now
get it up.” He stepped forward, slashing. Satin jerked the shield up
in time to catch the sword on its rim, and swung his own blade at
Jon’s ribs. “Good,” Jon said, when he felt the impact on his own
shield. “That was good. But you need to put your body into it. Get
your weight behind the steel and you’ll do more damage than with
arm strength alone. Come, try it again, drive at me, but keep the
shield up or I’ll ring your head like a bell …”
Instead Satin took a step backward and raised his visor. “Jon,” he
said, in an anxious voice.
When he turned, she was standing behind him, with half a dozen
queen’s men around her. Small wonder the yard grew so quiet. He had
glimpsed Melisandre at her night res, and coming and going about
the castle, but never so close. She’s beautiful, he thought … but there
was something more than a little unsettling about red eyes. “My
lady.”
“The king would speak with you, Jon Snow.”
Jon thrust the practice sword into the earth. “Might I be allowed
to change? I am in no t state to stand before a king.”
“We shall await you atop the Wall,” said Melisandre. We, Jon
heard, not he. It’s as they say. This is his true queen, not the one he left

at Eastwatch.
He hung his mail and plate inside the armory, returned to his own
cell, discarded his sweat-stained clothes, and donned a fresh set of
blacks. It would be cold and windy in the cage, he knew, and colder
and windier still on top of the ice, so he chose a heavy hooded
cloak. Last of all he collected Longclaw, and slung the bastard
sword across his back.
Melisandre was waiting for him at the base of the Wall. She had
sent her queen’s men away. “What does His Grace want of me?” Jon
asked her as they entered the cage.
“All you have to give, Jon Snow. He is a king.”
He shut the door and pulled the bell cord. The winch began to
turn. They rose. The day was bright and the Wall was weeping, long
ngers of water trickling down its face and glinting in the sun. In
the close con nes of the iron cage, he was acutely aware of the red
woman’s presence. She even smells red. The scent reminded him of
Mikken’s forge, of the way iron smelled when red-hot; the scent
was smoke and blood. Kissed by re, he thought, remembering
Ygritte. The wind got in amongst Melisandre’s long red robes and
sent them apping against Jon’s legs as he stood beside her. “You
are not cold, my lady?” he asked her.
She laughed. “Never.” The ruby at her throat seemed to pulse, in
time with the beating of her heart. “The Lord’s re lives within me,
Jon Snow. Feel.” She put her hand on his cheek, and held it there
while he felt how warm she was. “That is how life should feel,” she
told him. “Only death is cold.”
They found Stannis Baratheon standing alone at the edge of the
Wall, brooding over the eld where he had won his battle, and the
great green forest beyond. He was dressed in the same black
breeches, tunic, and boots that a brother of the Night’s Watch might
wear. Only his cloak set him apart; a heavy golden cloak trimmed
in black fur, and pinned with a brooch in the shape of a aming
heart. “I have brought you the Bastard of Winterfell, Your Grace,”
said Melisandre.
Stannis turned to study him. Beneath his heavy brow were eyes
like bottomless blue pools. His hollow cheeks and strong jaw were

covered with a short-cropped blue-black beard that did little to
conceal the gauntness of his face, and his teeth were clenched. His
neck and shoulders were clenched as well, and his right hand. Jon
found himself remembering something Donal Noye once said about
the Baratheon brothers. Robert was the true steel. Stannis is pure iron,
black and hard and strong, but brittle, the way iron gets. He’ll break
before he bends. Uneasily, he knelt, wondering why this brittle king
had need of him.
“Rise. I have heard much and more of you, Lord Snow.”
“I am no lord, sire.” Jon rose. “I know what you have heard. That
I am a turncloak, and craven. That I slew my brother Qhorin
Halfhand so the wildlings would spare my life. That I rode with
Mance Rayder, and took a wildling wife.”
“Aye. All that, and more. You are a warg too, they say, a
skinchanger who walks at night as a wolf.” King Stannis had a hard
smile. “How much of it is true?”
“I had a direwolf, Ghost. I left him when I climbed the Wall near
Greyguard, and have not seen him since. Qhorin Halfhand
commanded me to join the wildlings. He knew they would make me
kill him to prove myself, and told me to do whatever they asked of
me. The woman was named Ygritte. I broke my vows with her, but
I swear to you on my father’s name that I never turned my cloak.”
“I believe you,” the king said.
That startled him. “Why?”
Stannis snorted. “I know Janos Slynt. And I knew Ned Stark as
well. Your father was no friend of mine, but only a fool would
doubt his honor or his honesty. You have his look.” A big man,
Stannis Baratheon towered over Jon, but he was so gaunt that he
looked ten years older than he was. “I know more than you might
think, Jon Snow. I know it was you who found the dragonglass
dagger that Randyll Tarly’s son used to slay the Other.”
“Ghost found it. The blade was wrapped in a ranger’s cloak and
buried beneath the Fist of the First Men. There were other blades as
well … spearheads, arrowheads, all dragonglass.”
“I know you held the gate here,” King Stannis said. “If not, I
would have come too late.”

“Donal Noye held the gate. He died below in the tunnel, ghting
the king of the giants.”
Stannis grimaced. “Noye made my rst sword for me, and
Robert’s warhammer as well. Had the god seen t to spare him, he
would have made a better Lord Commander for your order than any
of these fools who are squabbling over it now.”
“Cotter Pyke and Ser Denys Mallister are no fools, sire,” Jon said.
“They’re good men, and capable. Othell Yarwyck as well, in his own
way. Lord Mormont trusted each of them.”
“Your Lord Mormont trusted too easily. Else he would not have
died as he did. But we were speaking of you. I have not forgotten
that it was you who brought us this magic horn, and captured
Mance Rayder’s wife and son.”
“Dalla died.” Jon was saddened by that still. “Val is her sister. She
and the babe did not require much capturing, Your Grace. You had
put the wildlings to ight, and the skinchanger Mance had left to
guard his queen went mad when the eagle burned.” Jon looked at
Melisandre. “Some say that was your doing.”
She smiled, her long copper hair tumbling across her face. “The
Lord of Light has ery talons, Jon Snow.”
Jon nodded, and turned back to the king. “Your Grace, you spoke
of Val. She has asked to see Mance Rayder, to bring his son to him.
It would be a … a kindness.”
“The man is a deserter from your order. Your brothers are all
insisting on his death. Why should I do him a kindness?”
Jon had no answer for that. “If not for him, for Val. For her
sister’s sake, the child’s mother.”
“You are fond of this Val?”
“I scarcely know her.”
“They tell me she is comely.”
“Very,” Jon admitted.
“Beauty can be treacherous. My brother learned that lesson from
Cersei Lannister. She murdered him, do not doubt it. Your father
and Jon Arryn as well.” He scowled. “You rode with these
wildlings. Is there any honor in them, do you think?”
“Yes,” Jon said, “but their own sort of honor, sire.”

“In Mance Rayder?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“In the Lord of Bones?”
Jon hesitated. “Rattleshirt, we called him. Treacherous and bloodthirsty. If there’s honor in him, he hides it down beneath his suit of
bones.”
“And this other man, this Tormund of the many names who
eluded us after the battle? Answer me truly.”
“Tormund Giantsbane seemed to me the sort of man who would
make a good friend and a bad enemy, Your Grace.”
Stannis gave a curt nod. “Your father was a man of honor. He was
no friend to me, but I saw his worth. Your brother was a rebel and a
traitor who meant to steal half my kingdom, but no man can
question his courage. What of you?”
Does he want me to say I love him? Jon’s voice was sti and formal
as he said, “I am a man of the Night’s Watch.”
“Words. Words are wind. Why do you think I abandoned
Dragonstone and sailed to the Wall, Lord Snow?”
“I am no lord, sire. You came because we sent for you, I hope.
Though I could not say why you took so long about it.”
Surprisingly, Stannis smiled at that. “You’re bold enough to be a
Stark. Yes, I should have come sooner. If not for my Hand, I might
not have come at all. Lord Seaworth is a man of humble birth, but
he reminded me of my duty, when all I could think of was my
rights. I had the cart before the horse, Davos said. I was trying to
win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been
trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.” Stannis pointed
north. “There is where I’ll nd the foe that I was born to ght.”
“His name may not be spoken,” Melisandre added softly. “He is
the God of Night and Terror, Jon Snow, and these shapes in the
snow are his creatures.”
“They tell me that you slew one of these walking corpses to save
Lord Mormont’s life,” Stannis said. “It may be that this is your war
as well, Lord Snow. If you will give me your help.”
“My sword is pledged to the Night’s Watch, Your Grace,” Jon
Snow answered carefully.

That did not please the king. Stannis ground his teeth and said, “I
need more than a sword from you.”
Jon was lost. “My lord?”
“I need the north.”
The north. “I … my brother Robb was King in the North …”
“Your brother was the rightful Lord of Winterfell. If he had
stayed home and done his duty, instead of crowning himself and
riding o to conquer the riverlands, he might be alive today. Be
that as it may. You are not Robb, no more than I am Robert.”
The harsh words had blown away whatever sympathy Jon might
have had for Stannis. “I loved my brother,” he said.
“And I mine. Yet they were what they were, and so are we. I am
the only true king in Westeros, north or south. And you are Ned
Stark’s bastard.” Stannis studied him with those dark blue eyes.
“Tywin Lannister has named Roose Bolton his Warden of the North,
to reward him for betraying your brother. The ironmen are ghting
amongst themselves since Balon Greyjoy’s death, yet they still hold
Moat Cailin, Deepwood Motte, Torrhen’s Square, and most of the
Stony Shore. Your father’s lands are bleeding, and I have neither the
strength nor the time to stanch the wounds. What is needed is a
Lord of Winterfell. A loyal Lord of Winterfell.”
He is looking at me, Jon thought, stunned. “Winterfell is no more.
Theon Greyjoy put it to the torch.”
“Granite does not burn easily,” Stannis said. “The castle can be
rebuilt, in time. It’s not the walls that make a lord, it’s the man.
Your northmen do not know me, have no reason to love me, yet I
will need their strength in the battles yet to come. I need a son of
Eddard Stark to win them to my banner.”
He would make me Lord of Winterfell. The wind was gusting, and
Jon felt so light-headed he was half afraid it would blow him o the
Wall. “Your Grace,” he said, “you forget. I am a Snow, not a Stark.”
“It’s you who are forgetting,” King Stannis replied.
Melisandre put a warm hand on Jon’s arm. “A king can remove
the taint of bastardy with a stroke, Lord Snow.”
Lord Snow. Ser Alliser Thorne had named him that, to mock his
bastard birth. Many of his brothers had taken to using it as well,

some with a ection, others to wound. But suddenly it had a
di erent sound to it in Jon’s ears. It sounded … real. “Yes,” he said,
hesitantly, “kings have legitimized bastards before, but … I am still
a brother of the Night’s Watch. I knelt before a heart tree and swore
to hold no lands and father no children.”
“Jon.” Melisandre was so close he could feel the warmth of her
breath. “R’hllor is the only true god. A vow sworn to a tree has no
more power than one sworn to your shoes. Open your heart and let
the light of the Lord come in. Burn these weirwoods, and accept
Winterfell as a gift of the Lord of Light.”
When Jon had been very young, too young to understand what it
meant to be a bastard, he used to dream that one day Winterfell
might be his. Later, when he was older, he had been ashamed of
those dreams. Winterfell would go to Robb and then his sons, or to
Bran or Rickon should Robb die childless. And after them came
Sansa and Arya. Even to dream otherwise seemed disloyal, as if he
were betraying them in his heart, wishing for their deaths. I never
wanted this, he thought as he stood before the blue-eyed king and
the red woman. I loved Robb, loved all of them … I never wanted any
harm to come to any of them, but it did. And now there’s only me. All
he had to do was say the word, and he would be Jon Stark, and
nevermore a Snow. All he had to do was pledge this king his fealty,
and Winterfell was his. All he had to do …
… was forswear his vows again.
And this time it would not be a ruse. To claim his father’s castle, he
must turn against his father’s gods.
King Stannis gazed o north again, his gold cloak streaming from
his shoulders. “It may be that I am mistaken in you, Jon Snow. We
both know the things that are said of bastards. You may lack your
father’s honor, or your brother’s skill in arms. But you are the
weapon the Lord has given me. I have found you here, as you found
the cache of dragonglass beneath the Fist, and I mean to make use
of you. Even Azor Ahai did not win his war alone. I killed a
thousand wildlings, took another thousand captive, and scattered
the rest, but we both know they will return. Melisandre has seen
that in her res. This Tormund Thunder st is likely re-forming them

even now, and planning some new assault. And the more we bleed
each other, the weaker we shall all be when the real enemy falls
upon us.”
Jon had come to that same realization. “As you say, Your Grace.”
He wondered where this king, was going.
“Whilst your brothers have been struggling to decide who shall
lead them, I have been speaking with this Mance Rayder.” He
ground his teeth. “A stubborn man, that one, and prideful. He will
leave me no choice but to give him to the ames. But we took other
captives as well, other leaders. The one who calls himself the Lord
of Bones, some of their clan chiefs, the new Magnar of Thenn. Your
brothers will not like it, no more than your father’s lords, but I
mean to allow the wildlings through the Wall … those who will
swear me their fealty, pledge to keep the king’s peace and the
king’s laws, and take the Lord of Light as their god. Even the giants,
if those great knees of theirs can bend. I will settle them on the
Gift, once I have wrested it away from your new Lord Commander.
When the cold winds rise, we shall live or die together. It is time
we made alliance against our common foe.” He looked at Jon.
“Would you agree?”
“My father dreamed of resettling the Gift,” Jon admitted. “He and
my uncle Benjen used to talk of it.” He never thought of settling it with
wildlings, though … but he never rode with wildlings, either. He did not
fool himself; the free folk would make for unruly subjects and
dangerous neighbors. Yet when he weighed Ygritte’s red hair
against the cold blue eyes of the wights, the choice was easy. “I
agree.”
“Good,” King Stannis said, “for the surest way to seal a new
alliance is with a marriage. I mean to wed my Lord of Winterfell to
this wildling princess.”
Perhaps Jon had ridden with the free folk too long; he could not
help but laugh. “Your Grace,” he said, “captive or no, if you think
you can just give Val to me, I fear you have a deal to learn about
wildling women. Whoever weds her had best be prepared to climb
in her tower window and carry her o at swordpoint …”

“Whoever?” Stannis gave him a measuring look. “Does this mean
you will not wed the girl? I warn you, she is part of the price you
must pay, if you want your father’s name and your father’s castle.
This match is necessary, to help assure the loyalty of our new
subjects. Are you refusing me, Jon Snow?”
“No,” Jon said, too quickly. It was Winterfell the king was
speaking of, and Winterfell was not to be lightly refused. “I
mean … this has all come very suddenly, Your Grace. Might I beg
you for some time to consider?”
“As you wish. But consider quickly. I am not a patient man, as
your black brothers are about to discover.” Stannis put a thin,
eshless hand on Jon’s shoulder. “Say nothing of what we’ve
discussed here today. To anyone. But when you return, you need
only bend your knee, lay your sword at my feet, and pledge
yourself to my service, and you shall rise again as Jon Stark, the
Lord of Winterfell.”

TYRION

When he heard noises through the thick wooden door of his cell,

Tyrion Lannister prepared to die.
Past time, he thought. Come on, come on, make an end to it. He
pushed himself to his feet. His legs were asleep from being folded
under him. He bent down and rubbed the knives from them. I will
not go stumbling and waddling to the headsman’s block.
He wondered whether they would kill him down here in the dark
or drag him through the city so Ser Ilyn Payne could lop his head
o . After his mummer’s farce of a trial, his sweet sister and loving
father might prefer to dispose of him quietly, rather than risk a
public execution. I could tell the mob a few choice things, if they let me
speak. But would they be that foolish?
As the keys rattled and the door to his cell pushed inward,
creaking, Tyrion pressed back against the dampness of the wall,
wishing for a weapon. I can still bite and kick. I’ll die with the taste of
blood in my mouth, that’s something. He wished he’d been able to
think of some rousing last words. “Bugger you all” was not like to
earn him much of a place in the histories.
Torchlight fell across his face. He shielded his eyes with a hand.
“Come on, are you frightened of a dwarf? Do it, you son of a poxy
whore.” His voice had grown hoarse from disuse.
“Is that any way to speak about our lady mother?” The man
moved forward, a torch in his left hand. “This is even more ghastly
than my cell at Riverrun, though not quite so dank.”

For a moment Tyrion could not breathe. “You?”
“Well, most of me.” Jaime was gaunt, his hair hacked short. “I
left a hand at Harrenhal. Bringing the Brave Companions across the
narrow sea was not one of Father’s better notions.” He lifted his
arm, and Tyrion saw the stump.
A bark of hysterical laughter burst from his lips. “Oh, gods,” he
said. “Jaime, I am so sorry, but … gods be good, look at the two of
us. Handless and Noseless, the Lannister boys.”
“There were days when my hand smelled so bad I wished I was
noseless.” Jaime lowered the torch, so the light bathed his brother’s
face. “An impressive scar.”
Tyrion turned away from the glare. “They made me ght a battle
without my big brother to protect me.”
“I heard tell you almost burned the city down.”
“A lthy lie. I only burned the river.” Abruptly, Tyrion
remembered where he was, and why. “Are you here to kill me?”
“Now that’s ungrateful. Perhaps I should leave you here to rot if
you’re going to be so discourteous.”
“Rotting is not the fate Cersei has in mind for me.”
“Well no, if truth be told. You’re to be beheaded on the morrow,
out on the old tourney grounds.”
Tyrion laughed again. “Will there be food? You’ll have to help me
with my last words, my wits have been running about like a rat in a
root cellar.”
“You won’t need last words. I’m rescuing you.” Jaime’s voice was
strangely solemn.
“Who said I required rescue?”
“You know, I’d almost forgotten what an annoying little man you
are. Now that you’ve reminded me, I do believe I’ll let Cersei cut
your head o after all.”
“Oh no you won’t.” He waddled out of the cell. “Is it day or night
up above? I’ve lost all sense of time.”
“Three hours past midnight. The city sleeps.” Jaime slid the torch
back into its sconce, on the wall between the cells.
The corridor was so poorly lit that Tyrion almost stumbled on the
turnkey, sprawled across the cold stone oor. He prodded him with

a toe. “Is he dead?”
“Asleep. The other three as well. The eunuch dosed their wine
with sweetsleep, but not enough to kill them. Or so he swears. He is
waiting back at the stair, dressed up in a septon’s robe. You’re going
down into the sewers, and from there to the river. A galley is
waiting in the bay. Varys has agents in the Free Cities who will see
that you do not lack for funds … but try not to be conspicuous.
Cersei will send men after you, I have no doubt. You might do well
to take another name.”
“Another name? Oh, certainly. And when the Faceless Men come
to kill me, I’ll say, ‘No, you have the wrong man, I’m a di erent
dwarf with a hideous facial scar.’ ” Both Lannisters laughed at the
absurdity of it all. Then Jaime went to one knee and kissed him
quickly once on each cheek, his lips brushing against the puckered
ribbon of scar tissue.
“Thank you, Brother,” Tyrion said. “For my life.”
“It was … a debt I owed you.” Jaime’s voice was strange.
“A debt?” He cocked his head. “I do not understand.”
“Good. Some doors are best left closed.”
“Oh, dear,” said Tyrion. “Is there something grim and ugly behind
it? Could it be that someone said something cruel about me once?
I’ll try not to weep. Tell me.”
“Tyrion …”
Jaime is afraid. “Tell me,” Tyrion said again.
His brother looked away. “Tysha,” he said softly.
“Tysha?” His stomach tightened. “What of her?”
“She was no whore. I never bought her for you. That was a lie
that Father commanded me to tell. Tysha was … she was what she
seemed to be. A crofter’s daughter, chance met on the road.”
Tyrion could hear the faint sound of his own breath whistling
hollowly through the scar of his nose. Jaime could not meet his
eyes. Tysha. He tried to remember what she had looked like. A girl,
she was only a girl, no older than Sansa. “My wife,” he croaked. “She
wed me.”
“For your gold, Father said. She was lowborn, you were a
Lannister of Casterly Rock. All she wanted was the gold, which

made her no di erent from a whore, so … so it would not be a lie,
not truly, and … he said that you required a sharp lesson. That you
would learn from it, and thank me later …”
“Thank you?” Tyrion’s voice was choked. “He gave her to his
guards. A barracks full of guards. He made me … watch.” Aye, and
more than watch. I took her too … my wife …
“I never knew he would do that. You must believe me.”
“Oh, must I?” Tyrion snarled. “Why should I believe you about
anything, ever? She was my wife!”
“Tyrion—”
He hit him. It was a slap, backhanded, but he put all his strength
into it, all his fear, all his rage, all his pain. Jaime was squatting,
unbalanced. The blow sent him tumbling backward to the oor.
“I … I suppose I earned that.”
“Oh, you’ve earned more than that, Jaime. You and my sweet
sister and our loving father, yes, I can’t begin to tell you what
you’ve earned. But you’ll have it, that I swear to you. A Lannister
always pays his debts.” Tyrion waddled away, almost stumbling
over the turnkey again in his haste. Before he had gone a dozen
yards, he bumped up against an iron gate that closed the passage.
Oh, gods. It was all he could do not to scream.
Jaime came up behind him. “I have the gaoler’s keys.”
“Then use them.” Tyrion stepped aside.
Jaime unlocked the gate, pushed it open, and stepped through. He
looked back over his shoulder. “Are you coming?”
“Not with you.” Tyrion stepped through. “Give me the keys and
go. I will nd Varys on my own.” He cocked his head and stared up
at his brother with his mismatched eyes. “Jaime, can you ght lefthanded?”
“Rather less well than you,” Jaime said bitterly.
“Good. Then we will be well matched if we should ever meet
again. The cripple and the dwarf.”
Jaime handed him the ring of keys. “I gave you the truth. You
owe me the same. Did you do it? Did you kill him?”
The question was another knife, twisting in his guts. “Are you
sure you want to know?” asked Tyrion. “Jo rey would have been a

worse king than Aerys ever was. He stole his father’s dagger and
gave it to a footpad to slit the throat of Brandon Stark, did you
know that?”
“I … I thought he might have.”
“Well, a son takes after his father. Jo would have killed me as
well, once he came into his power. For the crime of being short and
ugly, of which I am so conspicuously guilty.”
“You have not answered my question.”
“You poor stupid blind crippled fool. Must I spell every little
thing out for you? Very well. Cersei is a lying whore, she’s been
fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and probably Moon Boy for
all I know. And I am the monster they all say I am. Yes, I killed
your vile son.” He made himself grin. It must have been a hideous
sight to see, there in the torchlit gloom.
Jaime turned without a word and walked away.
Tyrion watched him go, striding on his long strong legs, and part
of him wanted to call out, to tell him that it wasn’t true, to beg for
his forgiveness. But then he thought of Tysha, and he held his
silence. He listened to the receding footsteps until he could hear
them no longer, then waddled o to look for Varys.
The eunuch was lurking in the dark of a twisting turnpike stair,
garbed in a moth-eaten brown robe with a hood that hid the
paleness of his face. “You were so long, I feared that something had
gone amiss,” he said when he saw Tyrion.
“Oh, no,” Tyrion assured him, in poisonous tones. “What could
possibly have gone amiss?” He twisted his head back to stare up. “I
sent for you during my trial.”
“I could not come. The queen had me watched, night and day. I
dared not help you.”
“You’re helping me now.”
“Am I? Ah.” Varys giggled. It seemed strangely out of place in
this place of cold stone and echoing darkness. “Your brother can be
most persuasive.”
“Varys, you are as cold and slimy as a slug, has anyone ever told
you? You did your best to kill me. Perhaps I ought to return the
favor.”

The eunuch sighed. “The faithful dog is kicked, and no matter
how the spider weaves, he is never loved. But if you slay me here, I
fear for you, my lord. You may never nd your way back to
daylight.” His eyes glittered in the shifting torchlight, dark and wet.
“These tunnels are full of traps for the unwary.”
Tyrion snorted. “Unwary? I’m the wariest man who ever lived,
you helped see to that.” He rubbed at his nose. “So tell me, wizard,
where is my innocent maiden wife?”
“I have found no trace of Lady Sansa in King’s Landing, sad to
say. Nor of Ser Dontos Hollard, who by rights should have turned
up somewhere drunk by now. They were seen together on the
serpentine steps the night she vanished. After that, nothing. There
was much confusion that night. My little birds are silent.” Varys
gave a gentle tug at the dwarf’s sleeve and pulled him into the stair.
“My lord, we must away. Your path is down.”
That’s no lie, at least. Tyrion waddled along in the eunuch’s wake,
his heels scraping against the rough stone as they descended. It was
very cold within the stairwell, a damp bone-chilling cold that set
him to shivering at once. “What part of the dungeons are these?” he
asked.
“Maegor the Cruel decreed four levels of dungeons for his castle,”
Varys replied. “On the upper level, there are large cells where
common criminals may be con ned together. They have narrow
windows set high in the walls. The second level has the smaller cells
where highborn captives are held. They have no windows, but
torches in the halls cast light through the bars. On the third level
the cells are smaller and the doors are wood. The black cells, men
call them. That was where you were kept, and Eddard Stark before
you. But there is a level lower still. Once a man is taken down to
the fourth level, he never sees the sun again, nor hears a human
voice, nor breathes a breath free of agonizing pain. Maegor had the
cells on the fourth level built for torment.” They had reached the
bottom of the steps. An unlighted door opened before them. “This is
the fourth level. Give me your hand, my lord. It is safer to walk in
darkness here. There are things you would not wish to see.”

Tyrion hung back a moment. Varys had already betrayed him
once. Who knew what game the eunuch was playing? And what
better place to murder a man than down in the darkness, in a place
that no one knew existed? His body might never be found.
On the other hand, what choice did he have? To go back up the
steps and walk out the main gate? No, that would not serve.
Jaime would not be afraid, he thought, before he remembered
what Jaime had done to him. He took the eunuch by the hand and
let himself be led through the black, following the soft scrape of
leather on stone. Varys walked quickly, from time to time
whispering, “Careful, there are three steps ahead,” or, “The tunnel
slopes downward here, my lord.” I arrived here a King’s Hand, riding
through the gates at the head of my own sworn men, Tyrion re ected,
and I leave like a rat scuttling through the dark, holding hands with a
spider.
A light appeared ahead of them, too dim to be daylight, and grew
as they hurried toward it. After a while he could see it was an
arched doorway, closed o by another iron gate. Varys produced a
key. They stepped through into a small round chamber. Five other
doors opened o the room, each barred in iron. There was an
opening in the ceiling as well, and a series of rungs set in the wall
below, leading upward. An ornate brazier stood to one side,
fashioned in the shape of a dragon’s head. The coals in the beast’s
yawning mouth had burnt down to embers, but they still glowed
with a sullen orange light. Dim as it was, the light was welcome
after the blackness of the tunnel.
The juncture was otherwise empty, but on the oor was a mosaic
of a three-headed dragon wrought in red and black tiles. Something
niggled at Tyrion for a moment. Then it came to him. This is the
place Shae told me of, when Varys rst led her to my bed. “We are
below the Tower of the Hand.”
“Yes.” Frozen hinges screamed in protest as Varys pulled open a
long-closed door. Flakes of rust drifted to the oor. “This will take
us out to the river.”
Tyrion walked slowly to the ladder, ran his hand across the
lowest rung. “This will take me up to my bedchamber.”

“Your lord father’s bedchamber now.”
He looked up the shaft. “How far must I climb?”
“My lord, you are too weak for such follies, and there is besides
no time. We must go.”
“I have business above. How far?”
“Two hundred and thirty rungs, but whatever you intend—”
“Two hundred and thirty rungs, and then?”
“The tunnel to the left, but hear me—”
“How far along to the bedchamber?” Tyrion lifted a foot to the
lowest rung of the ladder.
“No more than sixty feet. Keep one hand on the wall as you go.
You will feel the doors. The bedchamber is the third.” He sighed.
“This is folly, my lord. Your brother has given you your life back.
Would you cast it away, and mine with it?”
“Varys, the only thing I value less than my life just now is yours.
Wait for me here.” He turned his back on the eunuch and began to
climb, counting silently as he went.
Rung by rung, he ascended into darkness. At rst he could see the
dim outline of each rung as he grasped it, and the rough grey
texture of the stone behind, but as he climbed the black grew
thicker. Thirteen fourteen fteen sixteen. By thirty, his arms trembled
with the strain of pulling. He paused a moment to catch his breath
and glanced down. A circle of faint light shone far below, half
obscured by his own feet. Tyrion resumed his ascent. Thirty-nine
forty forty-one. By fty, his legs burned. The ladder was endless,
numbing. Sixty-eight sixty-nine seventy. By eighty, his back was a dull
agony. Yet still he climbed. He could not have said why. One
thirteen one fourteen one fteen.
At two hundred and thirty, the shaft was black as pitch, but he
could feel the warm air owing from the tunnel to his left, like the
breath of some great beast. He poked about awkwardly with a foot
and edged o the ladder. The tunnel was even more cramped than
the shaft. Any man of normal size would have had to crawl on
hands and knees, but Tyrion was short enough to walk upright. At
last, a place made for dwarfs. His boots scu ed softly against the
stone. He walked slowly, counting steps, feeling for gaps in the

walls. Soon he began to hear voices, mu ed and indistinct at rst,
then clearer. He listened more closely. Two of his father’s
guardsmen were joking about the Imp’s whore, saying how sweet it
would be to fuck her, and how bad she must want a real cock in
place of the dwarf’s stunted little thing. “Most like it’s got a crook
in it,” said Lum. That led him into a discussion of how Tyrion would
die on the morrow. “He’ll weep like a woman and beg for mercy,
you’ll see,” Lum insisted. Lester gured he’d face the axe brave as a
lion, being a Lannister, and he was willing to bet his new boots on
it. “Ah, shit in your boots,” said Lum, “you know they’d never t
these feet o’mine. Tell you what, if I win you can scour my bloody
mail for a fortnight.”
For the space of a few feet, Tyrion could hear every word of their
haggling, but when he moved on, the voices faded quickly. Small
wonder Varys did not want me to climb the bloody ladder, Tyrion
thought, smiling in the dark. Little birds indeed.
He came to the third door and fumbled about for a long time
before his ngers brushed a small iron hook set between two
stones. When he pulled down on it, there was a soft rumble that
sounded loud as an avalanche in the stillness, and a square of dull
orange light opened a foot to his left.
The hearth! He almost laughed. The replace was full of hot ash,
and a black log with a hot orange heart burning within. He edged
past gingerly, taking quick steps so as not to burn his boots, the
warm cinders crunching softly under his heels. When he found
himself in what had once been his bedchamber, he stood a long
moment, breathing the silence. Had his father heard? Would he
reach for his sword, raise the hue and cry?
“M’lord?” a woman’s voice called.
That might have hurt me once, when I still felt pain. The rst step
was the hardest. When he reached the bed Tyrion pulled the
draperies aside and there she was, turning toward him with a sleepy
smile on her lips. It died when she saw him. She pulled the blankets
up to her chin, as if that would protect her.
“Were you expecting someone taller, sweetling?”

Big wet tears lled her eyes. “I never meant those things I said,
the queen made me. Please. Your father frightens me so.” She sat
up, letting the blanket slide down to her lap. Beneath it she was
naked, but for the chain about her throat. A chain of linked golden
hands, each holding the next.
“My lady Shae,” Tyrion said softly. “All the time I sat in the black
cell waiting to die, I kept remembering how beautiful you were. In
silk or roughspun or nothing at all …”
“M’lord will be back soon. You should go, or … did you come to
take me away?”
“Did you ever like it?” He cupped her cheek, remembering all the
times he had done this before. All the times he’d slid his hands
around her waist, squeezed her small rm breasts, stroked her short
dark hair, touched her lips, her cheeks, her ears. All the times he
had opened her with a nger to probe her secret sweetness and
make her moan. “Did you ever like my touch?”
“More than anything,” she said, “my giant of Lannister.”
That was the worst thing you could have said, sweetling.
Tyrion slid a hand under his father’s chain, and twisted. The links
tightened, digging into her neck. “For hands of gold are always
cold, but a woman’s hands are warm,” he said. He gave cold hands
another twist as the warm ones beat away his tears.
Afterward he found Lord Tywin’s dagger on the bedside table and
shoved it through his belt. A lion-headed mace, a poleaxe, and a
crossbow had been hung on the walls. The poleaxe would be clumsy
to wield inside a castle, and the mace was too high to reach, but a
large wood-and-iron chest had been placed against the wall directly
under the crossbow. He climbed up, pulled down the bow and a
leather quiver packed with quarrels, jammed a foot into the stirrup,
and pushed down until the bowstring cocked. Then he slipped a bolt
into the notch.
Jaime had lectured him more than once on the drawbacks of
crossbows. If Lum and Lester emerged from wherever they were
talking, he’d never have time to reload, but at least he’d take one
down to hell with him. Lum, if he had a choice. You’ll have to clean
your own mail, Lum. You lose.

Waddling to the door, he listened a moment, then eased it open
slowly. A lamp burned in a stone niche, casting wan yellow light
over the empty hallway. Only the ame was moving. Tyrion slid
out, holding the crossbow down against his leg.
He found his father where he knew he’d nd him, seated in the
dimness of the privy tower, bedrobe hiked up around his hips. At
the sound of steps, Lord Tywin raised his eyes.
Tyrion gave him a mocking half bow. “My lord.”
“Tyrion.” If he was afraid, Tywin Lannister gave no hint of it.
“Who released you from your cell?”
“I’d love to tell you, but I swore a holy oath.”
“The eunuch,” his father decided. “I’ll have his head for this. Is
that my crossbow? Put it down.”
“Will you punish me if I refuse, Father?”
“This escape is folly. You are not to be killed, if that is what you
fear. It’s still my intent to send you to the Wall, but I could not do it
without Lord Tyrell’s consent. Put down the crossbow and we will
go back to my chambers and talk of it.”
“We can talk here just as well. Perhaps I don’t choose to go to the
Wall, Father. It’s bloody cold up there, and I believe I’ve had
enough coldness from you. So just tell me something, and I’ll be on
my way. One simple question, you owe me that much.”
“I owe you nothing.”
“You’ve given me less than that, all my life, but you’ll give me
this. What did you do with Tysha?”
“Tysha?”
He does not even remember her name. “The girl I married.”
“Oh, yes. Your rst whore.”
Tyrion took aim at his father’s chest. “The next time you say that
word, I’ll kill you.”
“You do not have the courage.”
“Shall we nd out? It’s a short word, and it seems to come so
easily to your lips.” Tyrion gestured impatiently with the bow.
“Tysha. What did you do with her, after my little lesson?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Try harder. Did you have her killed?”

His father pursed his lips. “There was no reason for that, she’d
learned her place … and had been well paid for her day’s work, I
seem to recall. I suppose the steward sent her on her way. I never
thought to inquire.”
“On her way where?”
“Wherever whores go.”
Tyrion’s nger clenched. The crossbow whanged just as Lord
Tywin started to rise. The bolt slammed into him above the groin
and he sat back down with a grunt. The quarrel had sunk deep,
right to the etching. Blood seeped out around the shaft, dripping
down into his pubic hair and over his bare thighs. “You shot me,” he
said incredulously, his eyes glassy with shock.
“You always were quick to grasp a situation, my lord,” Tyrion
said. “That must be why you’re the Hand of the King.”
“You … you are no … no son of mine.”
“Now that’s where you’re wrong, Father. Why, I believe I’m you
writ small. Do me a kindness now, and die quickly. I have a ship to
catch.”
For once, his father did what Tyrion asked him. The proof was
the sudden stench, as his bowels loosened in the moment of death.
Well, he was in the right place for it, Tyrion thought. But the stink that
lled the privy gave ample evidence that the oft-repeated jape
about his father was just another lie.
Lord Tywin Lannister did not, in the end, shit gold.

SAMWELL

The king was angry. Sam saw that at once.

As the black brothers entered one by one and knelt before him,
Stannis shoved away his breakfast of hardbread, salt beef, and
boiled eggs, and eyed them coldly. Beside him, the red woman
Melisandre looked as if she found the scene amusing.
I have no place here, Sam thought anxiously, when her red eyes
fell upon him. Someone had to help Maester Aemon up the steps. Don’t
look at me, I’m just the maester’s steward. The others were contenders
for the Old Bear’s command, all but Bowen Marsh, who had
withdrawn from the contest but remained castellan and Lord
Steward. Sam did not understand why Melisandre should seem so
interested in him.
King Stannis kept the black brothers on their knees for an
extraordinarily long time. “Rise,” he said at last. Sam gave Maester
Aemon his shoulder to help him back up.
The sound of Lord Janos Slynt clearing his throat broke the
strained silence. “Your Grace, let me say how pleased we are to be
summoned here. When I saw your banners from the Wall, I knew
the realm was saved. ‘There comes a man who ne’er forgets his
duty,’ I said to good Ser Alliser. ‘A strong man, and a true king.’ May
I congratulate you on your victory over the savages? The singers
will make much of it, I know—”
“The singers may do as they like,” Stannis snapped. “Spare me
your fawning, Janos, it will not serve you.” He rose to his feet and

frowned at them all. “Lady Melisandre tells me that you have not
yet chosen a Lord Commander. I am displeased. How much longer
must this folly last?”
“Sire,” said Bowen Marsh in a defensive tone, “no one has
achieved two-thirds of the vote yet. It has only been ten days.”
“Nine days too long. I have captives to dispose of, a realm to
order, a war to ght. Choices must be made, decisions that involve
the Wall and the Night’s Watch. By rights your Lord Commander
should have a voice in those decisions.”
“He should, yes,” said Janos Slynt. “But it must be said. We
brothers are only simple soldiers. Soldiers, yes! And Your Grace will
know that soldiers are most comfortable taking orders. They would
bene t from your royal guidance, it seems to me. For the good of
the realm. To help them choose wisely.”
The suggestion outraged some of the others. “Do you want the
king to wipe our arses for us too?” said Cotter Pyke angrily. “The
choice of a Lord Commander belongs to the Sworn Brothers, and to
them alone,” insisted Ser Denys Mallister. “If they choose wisely
they won’t be choosing me,” moaned Dolorous Edd. Maester
Aemon, calm as always, said, “Your Grace, the Night’s Watch has
been choosing its own leader since Brandon the Builder raised the
Wall. Through Jeor Mormont we have had nine hundred and ninetyseven Lords Commander in unbroken succession, each chosen by the
men he would lead, a tradition many thousands of years old.”
Stannis ground his teeth. “It is not my wish to tamper with your
rights and traditions. As to royal guidance, Janos, if you mean that I
ought to tell your brothers to choose you, have the courage to say
so.”
That took Lord Janos aback. He smiled uncertainly and began to
sweat, but Bowen Marsh beside him said, “Who better to command
the black cloaks than a man who once commanded the gold, sire?”
“Any of you, I would think. Even the cook.” The look the king
gave Slynt was cold. “Janos was hardly the rst gold cloak ever to
take a bribe, I grant you, but he may have been the rst
commander to fatten his purse by selling places and promotions. By

the end he must have had half the o cers in the City Watch paying
him part of their wages. Isn’t that so, Janos?”
Slynt’s neck was purpling. “Lies, all lies! A strong man makes
enemies, Your Grace knows that, they whisper lies behind your
back. Naught was ever proven, not a man came forward …”
“Two men who were prepared to come forward died suddenly on
their rounds.” Stannis narrowed his eyes. “Do not tri e with me, my
lord. I saw the proof Jon Arryn laid before the small council. If I
had been king you would have lost more than your o ce, I promise
you, but Robert shrugged away your little lapses. ‘They all steal,’ I
recall him saying. ‘Better a thief we know than one we don’t, the
next man might be worse.’ Lord Petyr’s words in my brother’s
mouth, I’ll warrant. Little nger had a nose for gold, and I’m certain
he arranged matters so the crown pro ted as much from your
corruption as you did yourself.”
Lord Slynt’s jowls were quivering, but before he could frame a
further protest Maester Aemon said, “Your Grace, by law a man’s
past crimes and transgressions are wiped clean when he says his
words and becomes a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch.”
“I am aware of that. If it happens that Lord Janos here is the best
the Night’s Watch can o er, I shall grit my teeth and choke him
down. It is naught to me which man of you is chosen, so long as you
make a choice. We have a war to ght.”
“Your Grace,” said Ser Denys Mallister, in tones of wary courtesy.
“If you are speaking of the wildlings …”
“I am not. And you know that, ser.”
“And you must know that whilst we are thankful for the aid you
rendered us against Mance Rayder, we can o er you no help in your
contest for the throne. The Night’s Watch takes no part in the wars
of the Seven Kingdoms. For eight thousand years—”
“I know your history, Ser Denys,” the king said brusquely. “I give
you my word, I shall not ask you to lift your swords against any of
the rebels and usurpers who plague me. I do expect that you will
continue to defend the Wall as you always have.”
“We’ll defend the Wall to the last man,” said Cotter Pyke.
“Probably me,” said Dolorous Edd, in a resigned tone.

Stannis crossed his arms. “I shall require a few other things from
you as well. Things that you may not be so quick to give. I want
your castles. And I want the Gift.”
Those blunt words burst among the black brothers like a pot of
wild re tossed onto a brazier. Marsh, Mallister, and Pyke all tried
to speak at once. King Stannis let them talk. When they were done,
he said, “I have three times the men you do. I can take the lands if I
wish, but I would prefer to do this legally, with your consent.”
“The Gift was given to the Night’s Watch in perpetuity, Your
Grace,” Bowen Marsh insisted.
“Which means it cannot be lawfully seized, attained, or taken
from you. But what was given once can be given again.”
“What will you do with the Gift?” demanded Cotter Pyke.
“Make better use of it than you have. As to the castles, Eastwatch,
Castle Black, and the Shadow Tower shall remain yours. Garrison
them as you always have, but I must take the others for my
garrisons if we are to hold the Wall.”
“You do not have the men,” objected Bowen Marsh.
“Some of the abandoned castles are scarce more than ruins,” said
Othell Yarwyck, the First Builder.
“Ruins can be rebuilt.”
“Rebuilt?” Yarwyck said. “But who will do the work?”
“That is my concern. I shall require a list from you, detailing the
present state of every castle and what might be required to restore
it. I mean to have them all garrisoned again within the year, and
night res burning before their gates.”
“Night res?” Bowen Marsh gave Melisandre an uncertain look.
“We’re to light night res now?”
“You are.” The woman rose in a swirl of scarlet silk, her long
copper-bright hair tumbling about her shoulders. “Swords alone
cannot hold this darkness back. Only the light of the Lord can do
that. Make no mistake, good sers and valiant brothers, the war
we’ve come to ght is no petty squabble over lands and honors.
Ours is a war for life itself, and should we fail the world dies with
us.”

The o cers did not know how to take that, Sam could see. Bowen
Marsh and Othell Yarwyck exchanged a doubtful look, Janos Slynt
was fuming, and Three-Finger Hobb looked as though he would
sooner be back chopping carrots. But all of them seemed surprised
to hear Maester Aemon murmur, “It is the war for the dawn you
speak of, my lady. But where is the prince that was promised?”
“He stands before you,” Melisandre declared, “though you do not
have the eyes to see. Stannis Baratheon is Azor Ahai come again, the
warrior of re. In him the prophecies are ful lled. The red comet
blazed across the sky to herald his coming, and he bears
Lightbringer, the red sword of heroes.”
Her words seemed to make the king desperately uncomfortable,
Sam saw. Stannis ground his teeth, and said, “You called and I
came, my lords. Now you must live with me, or die with me. Best
get used to that.” He made a brusque gesture. “That’s all. Maester,
stay a moment. And you, Tarly. The rest of you may go.”
Me? Sam thought, stricken, as his brothers were bowing and
making their way out. What does he want with me?
“You are the one that killed the creature in the snow,” King
Stannis said, when only the four of them remained.
“Sam the Slayer.” Melisandre smiled.
Sam felt his face turning red. “No, my lady. Your Grace. I mean, I
am, yes. I’m Samwell Tarly, yes.”
“Your father is an able soldier,” King Stannis said. “He defeated
my brother once, at Ashford. Mace Tyrell has been pleased to claim
the honors for that victory, but Lord Randyll had decided matters
before Tyrell ever found the battle eld. He slew Lord Ca eren with
that great Valyrian sword of his and sent his head to Aerys.” The
king rubbed his jaw with a nger. “You are not the sort of son I
would expect such a man to have.”
“I … I am not the sort of son he wanted, sire.”
“If you had not taken the black, you would make a useful
hostage,” Stannis mused.
“He has taken the black, sire,” Maester Aemon pointed out.
“I am well aware of that,” the king said. “I am aware of more
than you know, Aemon Targaryen.”

The old man inclined his head. “I am only Aemon, sire. We give
up our House names when we forge our maester’s chains.”
The king gave that a curt nod, as if to say he knew and did not
care. “You slew this creature with an obsidian dagger, I am told,”
he said to Sam.
“Y-yes, Your Grace. Jon Snow gave it to me.”
“Dragonglass.” The red woman’s laugh was music. “Frozen re, in
the tongue of old Valyria. Small wonder it is anathema to these cold
children of the Other.”
“On Dragonstone, where I had my seat, there is much of this
obsidian to be seen in the old tunnels beneath the mountain,” the
king told Sam. “Chunks of it, boulders, ledges. The great part of it
was black, as I recall, but there was some green as well, some red,
even purple. I have sent word to Ser Rolland my castellan to begin
mining it. I will not hold Dragonstone for very much longer, I fear,
but perhaps the Lord of Light shall grant us enough frozen re to
arm ourselves against these creatures, before the castle falls.”
Sam cleared his throat. “S-sire. The dagger … the dragonglass
only shattered when I tried to stab a wight.”
Melisandre smiled. “Necromancy animates these wights, yet they
are still only dead esh. Steel and re will serve for them. The ones
you call the Others are something more.”
“Demons made of snow and ice and cold,” said Stannis Baratheon.
“The ancient enemy. The only enemy that matters.” He considered
Sam again. “I am told that you and this wildling girl passed beneath
the Wall, through some magic gate.”
“The B-black Gate,” Sam stammered. “Below the Nightfort.”
“The Nightfort is the largest and oldest of the castles on the
Wall,” the king said. “That is where I intend to make my seat,
whilst I ght this war. You will show me this gate.”
“I,” said Sam, “I w-will, if …” If it is still there. If it will open for a
man not of the black. If …
“You will,” snapped Stannis. “I shall tell you when.”
Maester Aemon smiled. “Your Grace,” he said, “before we go, I
wonder if you would do us the great honor of showing us this
wondrous blade we have all heard so very much of.”

“You want to see Lightbringer? A blind man?”
“Sam shall be my eyes.”
The king frowned. “Everyone else has seen the thing, why not a
blind man?” His swordbelt and scabbard hung from a peg near the
hearth. He took the belt down and drew the longsword out. Steel
scraped against wood and leather, and radiance lled the solar;
shimmering, shifting, a dance of gold and orange and red light, all
the bright colors of re.
“Tell me, Samwell.” Maester Aemon touched his arm.
“It glows,” said Sam, in a hushed voice. “As if it were on re.
There are no ames, but the steel is yellow and red and orange, all
ashing and glimmering, like sunshine on water, but prettier. I wish
you could see it, Maester.”
“I see it now, Sam. A sword full of sunlight. So lovely to behold.”
The old man bowed sti y. “Your Grace. My lady. This was most
kind of you.”
When King Stannis sheathed the shining sword, the room seemed
to grow very dark, despite the sunlight streaming through the
window. “Very well, you’ve seen it. You may return to your duties
now. And remember what I said. Your brothers will choose a Lord
Commander tonight, or I shall make them wish they had.”
Maester Aemon was lost in thought as Sam helped him down the
narrow turnpike stair. But as they were crossing the yard, he said,
“I felt no heat. Did you, Sam?”
“Heat? From the sword?” He thought back. “The air around it
was shimmering, the way it does above a hot brazier.”
“Yet you felt no heat, did you? And the scabbard that held this
sword, it is wood and leather, yes? I heard the sound when His
Grace drew out the blade. Was the leather scorched, Sam? Did the
wood seem burnt or blackened?”
“No,” Sam admitted. “Not that I could see.”
Maester Aemon nodded. Back in his own chambers, he asked Sam
to set a re and help him to his chair beside the hearth. “It is hard
to be so old,” he sighed as he settled onto the cushion. “And harder
still to be so blind. I miss the sun. And books. I miss books most of

all.” Aemon waved a hand. “I shall have no more need of you till
the choosing.”
“The choosing … Maester, isn’t there something you could do?
What the king said of Lord Janos …”
“I recall,” Maester Aemon said, “but Sam, I am a maester, chained
and sworn. My duty is to counsel the Lord Commander, whoever he
might be. It would not be proper for me to be seen to favor one
contender over another.”
“I’m not a maester,” said Sam. “Could I do something?”
Aemon turned his blind white eyes toward Sam’s face, and smiled
softy. “Why, I don’t know, Samwell. Could you?”
I could, Sam thought. I have to. He had to do it right away, too. If
he hesitated he was certain to lose his courage. I am a man of the
Night’s Watch, he reminded himself as he hurried across the yard. I
am. I can do this. There had been a time when he had quaked and
squeaked if Lord Mormont so much as looked at him, but that was
the old Sam, before the Fist of the First Men and Craster’s Keep,
before the wights and Coldhands and the Other on his dead horse.
He was braver now. Gilly made me braver, he’d told Jon. It was true.
It had to be true.
Cotter Pyke was the scarier of the two commanders, so Sam went
to him rst, while his courage was still hot. He found him in the old
Shieldhall, dicing with three of his Eastwatch men and a red-headed
sergeant who had come from Dragonstone with Stannis.
When Sam begged leave to speak with him, though, Pyke barked
an order, and the others took the dice and coins and left them.
No man would ever call Cotter Pyke handsome, though the body
under his studded brigantine and roughspun breeches was lean and
hard and wiry strong. His eyes were small and close-set, his nose
broken, his widow’s peak as sharply pointed as the head of a spear.
The pox had ravaged his face badly, and the beard he’d grown to
hide the scars was thin and scraggly.
“Sam the Slayer!” he said, by way of greeting. “Are you sure you
stabbed an Other, and not some child’s snow knight?”
This isn’t starting well. “It was the dragonglass that killed it, my
lord,” Sam explained feebly.

“Aye, no doubt. Well, out with it, Slayer. Did the maester send
you to me?”
“The maester?” Sam swallowed. “I … I just left him, my lord.”
That wasn’t truly a lie, but if Pyke chose to read it wrong, it might
make him more inclined to listen. Sam took a deep breath and
launched into his plea.
Pyke cut him o before he’d said twenty words. “You want me to
kneel down and kiss the hem of Mallister’s pretty cloak, is that it? I
might have known. You lordlings all ock like sheep. Well, tell
Aemon that he’s wasted your breath and my time. If anyone
withdraws it should be Mallister. The man’s too bloody old for the
job, maybe you ought to go tell him that. We choose him, and we’re
like to be back here in a year, choosing someone else.”
“He’s old,” Sam agreed, “but he’s well ex-experienced.”
“At sitting in his tower and fussing over maps, maybe. What does
he plan to do, write letters to the wights? He’s a knight, well and
good, but he’s not a ghter, and I don’t give a kettle of piss who he
unhorsed in some fool tourney fty years ago. The Halfhand fought
all his battles, even an old blind man should see that. And we need a
ghter more than ever with this bloody king on top of us. Today it’s
ruins and empty elds, well and good, but what will His Grace want
come the morrow? You think Mallister has the belly to stand up to
Stannis Baratheon and that red bitch?” He laughed. “I don’t.”
“You won’t support him, then?” said Sam, dismayed.
“Are you Sam the Slayer or Deaf Dick? No, I won’t support him.”
Pyke jabbed a nger at his face. “Understand this, boy. I don’t want
the bloody job, and never did. I ght best with a deck beneath me,
not a horse, and Castle Black is too far from the sea. But I’ll be
buggered with a red-hot sword before I turn the Night’s Watch over
to that preening eagle from the Shadow Tower. And you can run
back to the old man and tell him I said so, if he asks.” He stood.
“Get out of my sight.”
It took all the courage Sam had left in him to say, “W-what if
there was someone else? Could you s-support someone else?”
“Who? Bowen Marsh? The man counts spoons. Othell’s a
follower, does what he’s told and does it well, but no more’n that.

Slynt … well, his men like him, I’ll grant you, and it would almost
be worth it to stick him down the royal craw and see if Stannis
gagged, but no. There’s too much of King’s Landing in that one. A
toad grows wings and thinks he’s a bloody dragon.” Pyke laughed.
“Who does that leave, Hobb? We could pick him, I suppose, only
then who’s going to boil your mutton, Slayer? You look like a man
who likes his bloody mutton.”
There was nothing more to say. Defeated, Sam could only
stammer out his thanks and take his leave. I will do better with Ser
Denys, he tried to tell himself as he walked through the castle. Ser
Denys was a knight, highborn and well-spoken, and he had treated
Sam most courteously when he’d found him and Gilly on the road.
Ser Denys will listen to me, he has to.
The commander of the Shadow Tower had been born beneath the
Booming Tower of Seagard, and looked every inch a Mallister.
Sable trimmed his collar and accented the sleeves of his black velvet
doublet. A silver eagle fastened its claws in the gathered folds of his
cloak. His beard was white as snow, his hair was largely gone, and
his face was deeply lined, it was true. Yet he still had grace in his
movements and teeth in his mouth, and the years had dimmed
neither his blue-grey eyes nor his courtesy.
“My lord of Tarly,” he said, when his steward brought Sam to him
in the Lance, where the Shadow Tower men were staying. “I am
pleased to see that you’ve recovered from your ordeal. Might I o er
you a cup of wine? Your lady mother is a Florent, I recall. One day
I must tell you about the time I unhorsed both of your grandfathers
in the same tourney. Not today, though, I know we have more
pressing concerns. You come from Maester Aemon, to be sure. Does
he have counsel to o er me?”
Sam took a sip of wine, and chose his words with care. “A
maester chained and sworn … it would not be proper for him to be
seen as having in uenced the choice of Lord Commander …”
The old knight smiled. “Which is why he has not come to me
himself. Yes, I quite understand, Samwell. Aemon and I are both old
men, and wise in such matters. Say what you came to say.”

The wine was sweet, and Ser Denys listened to Sam’s plea with
grave courtesy, unlike Cotter Pyke. But when he was done, the old
knight shook his head. “I agree that it would be a dark day in our
history if a king were to name our Lord Commander. This king
especially. He is not like to keep his crown for long. But truly,
Samwell, it ought to be Pyke who withdraws. I have more support
than he does, and I am better suited to the o ce.”
“You are,” Sam agreed, “but Cotter Pyke might serve. It’s said he
has oft proved himself in battle.” He did not mean to o end Ser
Denys by praising his rival, but how else could he convince him to
withdraw?
“Many of my brothers have proved themselves in battle. It is not
enough. Some matters cannot be settled with a battleaxe. Maester
Aemon will understand that, though Cotter Pyke does not. The Lord
Commander of the Night’s Watch is a lord, rst and foremost. He
must be able to treat with other lords … and with kings as well. He
must be a man worthy of respect.” Ser Denys leaned forward. “We
are the sons of great lords, you and I. We know the importance of
birth, blood, and that early training that can ne’er be replaced. I
was a squire at twelve, a knight at eighteen, a champion at two-andtwenty. I have been the commander at the Shadow Tower for thirtythree years. Blood, birth, and training have tted me to deal with
kings. Pyke … well, did you hear him this morning, asking if His
Grace would wipe his bottom? Samwell, it is not my habit to speak
unkindly of my brothers, but let us be frank … the ironborn are a
race of pirates and thieves, and Cotter Pyke was raping and
murdering when he was still half a boy. Maester Harmune reads and
writes his letters, and has for years. No, loath as I am to disappoint
Maester Aemon, I could not in honor stand aside for Pyke of
Eastwatch.”
This time Sam was ready. “Might you for someone else? If it was
someone more suitable?”
Ser Denys considered a moment. “I have never desired the honor
for its own sake. At the last choosing, I stepped aside gratefully
when Lord Mormont’s name was o ered, just as I had for Lord
Qorgyle at the choosing before that. So long as the Night’s Watch

remains in good hands, I am content. But Bowen Marsh is not equal
to the task, no more than Othell Yarwyck. And this so-called Lord of
Harrenhal is a butcher’s whelp unjumped by the Lannisters. Small
wonder he is venal and corrupt.”
“There’s another man,” Sam blurted out. “Lord Commander
Mormont trusted him. So did Donal Noye and Qhorin Halfhand.
Though he’s not as highly born as you, he comes from old blood. He
was castle-born and castle-raised, and he learned sword and lance
from a knight and letters from a maester of the Citadel. His father
was a lord, and his brother a king.”
Ser Denys stroked his long white beard. “Mayhaps,” he said, after
a long moment. “He is very young, but … mayhaps. He might
serve, I grant you, though I would be more suitable. I have no
doubt of that. I would be the wiser choice.”
Jon said there could be honor in a lie, if it were told for the right
reason. Sam said, “If we do not choose a Lord Commander tonight,
King Stannis means to name Cotter Pyke. He said as much to
Maester Aemon this morning, after all of you had left.”
“I see.” Ser Denys rose. “I must think on this. Thank you,
Samwell. And give my thanks to Maester Aemon as well.”
Sam was trembling by the time he left the Lance. What have I
done? he thought. What have I said? If they caught him in his lie,
they would … what? Send me to the Wall? Rip my entrails out? Turn
me into a wight? Suddenly it all seemed absurd. How could he be so
frightened of Cotter Pyke and Ser Denys Mallister, when he had
seen a raven eating Small Paul’s face?
Pyke was not pleased by his return. “You again? Make it quick,
you are starting to annoy me.”
“I only need a moment more,” Sam promised. “You won’t
withdraw for Ser Denys, you said, but you might for someone else.”
“Who is it this time, Slayer? You?”
“No. A ghter. Donal Noye gave him the Wall when the wildlings
came, and he was the Old Bear’s squire. The only thing is, he’s
bastard-born.”
Cotter Pyke laughed. “Bloody hell. That would shove a spear up
Mallister’s arse, wouldn’t it? Might be worth it just for that. How

bad could the boy be?” He snorted. “I’d be better, though. I’m
what’s needed, any fool can see that.”
“Any fool,” Sam agreed, “even me. But … well, I shouldn’t be
telling you, but … King Stannis means to force Ser Denys on us, if
we do not choose a man tonight. I heard him tell Maester Aemon
that, after the rest of you were sent away.”

JON

Iron Emmett was a long, lanky young ranger whose endurance,

strength, and swordsmanship were the pride of Eastwatch. Jon
always came away from their sessions sti and sore, and woke the
next day covered with bruises, which was just the way he wanted it.
He would never get any better going up against the likes of Satin
and Horse, or even Grenn.
Most days he gave as good as he got, Jon liked to think, but not
today. He had hardly slept last night, and after an hour of restless
tossing he had given up even the attempt, dressed, and walked the
top of the Wall till the sun came up, wrestling with Stannis
Baratheon’s o er. The lack of sleep was catching up with him now,
and Emmett was hammering him mercilessly across the yard,
driving him back on his heels with one long looping cut after
another, and slamming him with his shield from time to time for
good measure. Jon’s arm had gone numb from the shock of impact,
and the edgeless practice sword seemed to be growing heavier with
every passing moment.
He was almost ready to lower his blade and call a halt when
Emmett feinted low and came in over his shield with a savage
forehand slash that caught Jon on the temple. He staggered, his
helm and head both ringing from the force of the blow. For half a
heartbeat the world beyond his eyeslit was a blur.
And then the years were gone, and he was back at Winterfell once
more, wearing a quilted leather coat in place of mail and plate. His

sword was made of wood, and it was Robb who stood facing him,
not Iron Emmett.
Every morning they had trained together, since they were big
enough to walk; Snow and Stark, spinning and slashing about the
wards of Winterfell, shouting and laughing, sometimes crying when
there was no one else to see. They were not little boys when they
fought, but knights and mighty heroes. “I’m Prince Aemon the
Dragonknight,” Jon would call out, and Robb would shout back,
“Well, I’m Florian the Fool.” Or Robb would say, “I’m the Young
Dragon,” and Jon would reply, “I’m Ser Ryam Redwyne.”
That morning he called it rst. “I’m Lord of Winterfell!” he cried,
as he had a hundred times before. Only this time, this time, Robb
had answered, “You can’t be Lord of Winterfell, you’re bastardborn. My lady mother says you can’t ever be the Lord of
Winterfell.”
I thought I had forgotten that. Jon could taste blood in his mouth,
from the blow he’d taken.
In the end Halder and Horse had to pull him away from Iron
Emmett, one man on either arm. The ranger sat on the ground
dazed, his shield half in splinters, the visor of his helm knocked
askew, and his sword six yards away. “Jon, enough,” Halder was
shouting, “he’s down, you disarmed him. Enough!”
No. Not enough. Never enough. Jon let his sword drop. “I’m sorry,”
he muttered. “Emmett, are you hurt?”
Iron Emmett pulled his battered helm o . “Was there some part
of yield you could not comprehend, Lord Snow?” It was said
amiably, though. Emmett was an amiable man, and he loved the
song of swords. “Warrior defend me,” he groaned, “now I know
how Qhorin Halfhand must have felt.”
That was too much. Jon wrenched free of his friends and
retreated to the armory, alone. His ears were still ringing from the
blow Emmett had dealt him. He sat on the bench and buried his
head in his hands. Why am I so angry? he asked himself, but it was a
stupid question. Lord of Winterfell. I could be the Lord of Winterfell.
My father’s heir.

It was not Lord Eddard’s face he saw oating before him, though;
it was Lady Catelyn’s. With her deep blue eyes and hard cold
mouth, she looked a bit like Stannis. Iron, he thought, but brittle. She
was looking at him the way she used to look at him at Winterfell,
whenever he had bested Robb at swords or sums or most anything.
Who are you? that look had always seemed to say. This is not your
place. Why are you here?
His friends were still out in the practice yard, but Jon was in no
t state to face them. He left the armory by the back, descending a
steep ight of stone steps to the wormways, the tunnels that linked
the castle’s keeps and towers below the earth. It was short walk to
the bathhouse, where he took a cold plunge to wash the sweat o
and soaked in a hot stone tub. The warmth took some of the ache
from his muscles and made him think of Winterfell’s muddy pools,
steaming and bubbling in the godswood. Winterfell, he thought.
Theon left it burned and broken, but I could restore it. Surely his father
would have wanted that, and Robb as well. They would never have
wanted the castle left in ruins.
You can’t be the Lord of Winterfell, you’re bastard-born, he heard
Robb say again. And the stone kings were growling at him with
granite tongues. You do not belong here. This is not your place. When
Jon closed his eyes he saw the heart tree, with its pale limbs, red
leaves, and solemn face. The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell,
Lord Eddard always said … but to save the castle Jon would have to
tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red
woman’s hungry re god. I have no right, he thought. Winterfell
belongs to the old gods.
The sound of voices echoing o the vaulted ceiling brought him
back to Castle Black. “I don’t know,” a man was saying, in a voice
thick with doubts. “Maybe if I knew the man better … Lord Stannis
didn’t have much good to say of him, I’ll tell you that.”
“When has Stannis Baratheon ever had much good to say of
anyone?” Ser Alliser’s inty voice was unmistakable. “If we let
Stannis choose our Lord Commander, we become his bannermen in
all but name. Tywin Lannister is not like to forget that, and you

know it will be Lord Tywin who wins in the end. He’s already
beaten Stannis once, on the Blackwater.”
“Lord Tywin favors Slynt,” said Bowen Marsh, in a fretful,
anxious voice. “I can show you his letter, Othell. ‘Our faithful friend
and servant,’ he called him.”
Jon Snow sat up suddenly, and the three men froze at the sound
of the slosh. “My lords,” he said with cold courtesy.
“What are you doing here, bastard?” Thorne asked.
“Bathing. But don’t let me spoil your plotting.” Jon climbed from
the water, dried, dressed, and left them to conspire.
Outside, he found he had no idea where he was going. He walked
past the shell of the Lord Commander’s Tower, where once he’d
saved the Old Bear from a dead man; past the spot where Ygritte
had died with that sad smile on her face; past the King’s Tower
where he and Satin and Deaf Dick Follard had waited for the
Magnar and his Thenns; past the heaped and charred remains of the
great wooden stair. The inner gate was open, so Jon went down the
tunnel, through the Wall. He could feel the cold around him, the
weight of all the ice above his head. He walked past the place
where Donal Noye and Mag the Mighty had fought and died
together, through the new outer gate, and back into the pale cold
sunlight.
Only then did he permit himself to stop, to take a breath, to
think. Othell Yarwyck was not a man of strong convictions, except
when it came to wood and stone and mortar. The Old Bear had
known that. Thorne and Marsh will sway him, Yarwyck will support
Lord Janos, and Lord Janos will be chosen Lord Commander. And what
does that leave me, if not Winterfell?
A wind swirled against the Wall, tugging at his cloak. He could
feel the cold coming o the ice the way heat comes o a re. Jon
pulled up his hood and began to walk again. The afternoon was
growing old, and the sun was low in the west. A hundred yards
away was the camp where King Stannis had con ned his wildling
captives within a ring of ditches, sharpened stakes, and high
wooden fences. To his left were three great repits, where the
victors had burned the bodies of all the free folk to die beneath the

Wall, huge pelted giants and little Hornfoot men alike. The killing
ground was still a desolation of scorched weeds and hardened pitch,
but Mance’s people had left traces of themselves everywhere; a torn
hide that might have been part of a tent, a giant’s maul, the wheel
of a chariot, a broken spear, a pile of mammoth dung. On the edge
of the haunted forest, where the tents had been, Jon found an
oakwood stump and sat.
Ygritte wanted me to be a wildling. Stannis wants me to be the Lord of
Winterfell. But what do I want? The sun crept down the sky to dip
behind the Wall where it curved through the western hills. Jon
watched as that towering expanse of ice took on the reds and pinks
of sunset. Would I sooner be hanged for a turncloak by Lord Janos, or
forswear my vows, marry Val, and become the Lord of Winterfell? It
seemed an easy choice when he thought of it in those
terms … though if Ygritte had still been alive, it might have been
even easier. Val was a stranger to him. She was not hard on the
eyes, certainly, and she had been sister to Mance Rayder’s queen,
but still …
I would need to steal her if I wanted her love, but she might give me
children. I might someday hold a son of my own blood in my arms. A
son was something Jon Snow had never dared dream of, since he
decided to live his life on the Wall. I could name him Robb. Val
would want to keep her sister’s son, but we could foster him at
Winterfell, and Gilly’s boy as well. Sam would never need to tell his lie.
We’d nd a place for Gilly too, and Sam could come visit her once a
year or so. Mance’s son and Craster’s would grow up brothers, as I once
did with Robb.
He wanted it, Jon knew then. He wanted it as much as he had
ever wanted anything. I have always wanted it, he thought, guiltily.
May the gods forgive me. It was a hunger inside him, sharp as a
dragonglass blade. A hunger … he could feel it. It was food he
needed, prey, a red deer that stank of fear or a great elk proud and
de ant. He needed to kill and ll his belly with fresh meat and hot
dark blood. His mouth began to water with the thought.
It was a long moment before he understood what was happening.
When he did, he bolted to his feet. “Ghost?” He turned toward the

wood, and there he came, padding silently out of the green dusk,
the breath coming warm and white from his open jaws. “Ghost!” he
shouted, and the direwolf broke into a run. He was leaner than he
had been, but bigger as well, and the only sound he made was the
soft crunch of dead leaves beneath his paws. When he reached Jon
he leapt, and they wrestled amidst brown grass and long shadows as
the stars came out above them. “Gods, wolf, where have you been?”
Jon said when Ghost stopped worrying at his forearm. “I thought
you’d died on me, like Robb and Ygritte and all the rest. I’ve had no
sense of you, not since I climbed the Wall, not even in dreams.” The
direwolf had no answer, but he licked Jon’s face with a tongue like
a wet rasp, and his eyes caught the last light and shone like two
great red suns.
Red eyes, Jon realized, but not like Melisandre’s. He had a
weirwood’s eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like
a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one. And he alone of all
the direwolves was white. Six pups they’d found in the late summer
snows, him and Robb; ve that were grey and black and brown, for
the ve Starks, and one white, as white as Snow.
He had his answer then.
Beneath the Wall, the queen’s men were kindling their night re.
He saw Melisandre emerge from the tunnel with the king beside
her, to lead the prayers she believed would keep the dark away.
“Come, Ghost,” Jon told the wolf. “With me. You’re hungry, I
know. I could feel it.” They ran together for the gate, circling wide
around the night re, where reaching ames clawed at the black
belly of the night.
The king’s men were much in evidence in the yards of Castle
Black. They stopped as Jon went by, and gaped at him. None of
them had ever seen a direwolf before, he realized, and Ghost was
twice as large as the common wolves that prowled their southron
greenwoods. As he walked toward the armory, Jon chanced to look
up and saw Val standing in her tower window. I’m sorry, he thought.
I’m not the man to steal you out of there.
In the practice yard he came upon a dozen king’s men with
torches and long spears in their hands. Their sergeant looked at

Ghost and scowled, and a couple of his men lowered their spears
until the knight who led them said, “Move aside and let them pass.”
To Jon he said, “You’re late for your supper.”
“Then get out of my way, ser,” Jon replied, and he did.
He could hear the noise even before he reached the bottom of the
steps; raised voices, curses, someone pounding on a table. Jon
stepped into the vault all but unnoticed. His brothers crowded the
benches and the tables, but more were standing and shouting than
were sitting, and no one was eating. There was no food. What’s
happening here? Lord Janos Slynt was bellowing about turncloaks
and treason, Iron Emmett stood on a table with a naked sword in
his st, Three-Finger Hobb was cursing a ranger from the Shadow
Tower … some Eastwatch man slammed his st onto the table again
and again, demanding quiet, but all that did was add to the din
echoing o the vaulted ceiling.
Pyp was the rst to see Jon. He grinned at the sight of Ghost, put
two ngers in his mouth, and whistled as only a mummer’s boy
could whistle. The shrill sound cut through the clamor like a sword.
As Jon walked toward the tables, more of the brothers took note,
and fell quiet. A hush spread across the cellar, until the only sounds
were Jon’s heels clicking on the stone oor, and the soft crackle of
the logs in the hearth.
Ser Alliser Thorne shattered the silence. “The turncloak graces us
with his presence at last.”
Lord Janos was red-faced and quivering. “The beast,” he gasped.
“Look! The beast that tore the life from Halfhand. A warg walks
among us, brothers. A WARG! This … this creature is not t to lead
us! This beastling is not t to live!”
Ghost bared his teeth, but Jon put a hand on his head. “My lord,”
he said, “will you tell me what’s happened here?”
Maester Aemon answered, from the far end of the hall. “Your
name has been put forth as Lord Commander, Jon.”
That was so absurd Jon had to smile. “By who?” he said, looking
for his friends. This had to be one of Pyp’s japes, surely. But Pyp
shrugged at him, and Grenn shook his head. It was Dolorous Edd

Tollett who stood. “By me. Aye, it’s a terrible cruel thing to do to a
friend, but better you than me.”
Lord Janos started sputtering again. “This, this is an outrage. We
ought to hang this boy. Yes! Hang him, I say, hang him for a
turncloak and a warg, along with his friend Mance Rayder. Lord
Commander? I will not have it, I will not su er it!”
Cotter Pyke stood up. “You won’t su er it? Might be you had
those gold cloaks trained to lick your bloody arse, but you’re
wearing a black cloak now.”
“Any brother may o er any name for our consideration, so long
as the man has said his vows,” Ser Denys Mallister said. “Tollett is
well within his rights, my lord.”
A dozen men started to talk at once, each trying to drown out the
others, and before long half the hall was shouting once more. This
time it was Ser Alliser Thorne who leapt up on the table, and raised
his hands for quiet. “Brothers!” he cried, “this gains us naught. I say
we vote. This king who has taken the King’s Tower has posted men
at all the doors to see that we do not eat nor leave till we have
made a choice. So be it! We will choose, and choose again, all night
if need be, until we have our lord … but before we cast our tokens,
I believe our First Builder has something to say to us.”
Othell Yarwyck stood up slowly, frowning. The big builder
rubbed his long lantern jaw and said, “Well, I’m pulling my name
out. If you wanted me, you had ten chances to choose me, and you
didn’t. Not enough of you, anyway. I was going to say that those
who were casting a token for me ought to choose Lord Janos …”
Ser Alliser nodded. “Lord Slynt is the best possible—”
“I wasn’t done, Alliser,” Yarwyck complained. “Lord Slynt
commanded the City Watch in King’s Landing, we all know, and he
was Lord of Harrenhal …”
“He’s never seen Harrenhal,” Cotter Pyke shouted out.
“Well, that’s so,” said Yarwyck. “Anyway, now that I’m standing
here, I don’t recall why I thought Slynt would be such a good
choice. That would be sort of kicking King Stannis in the mouth,
and I don’t see how that serves us. Might be Snow would be better.
He’s been longer on the Wall, he’s Ben Stark’s nephew, and he

served the Old Bear as squire.” Yarwyck shrugged. “Pick who you
want, just so it’s not me.” He sat down.
Janos Slynt had turned from red to purple, Jon saw, but Ser
Alliser Thorne had gone pale. The Eastwatch man was pounding his
st on the table again, but now he was shouting for the kettle.
Some of his friends took up the cry. “Kettle!” they roared, as one.
“Kettle, kettle, KETTLE!”
The kettle was in the corner by the hearth, a big black potbellied
thing with two huge handles and a heavy lid. Maester Aemon said a
word to Sam and Clydas and they went and grabbed the handles and
dragged the kettle over to the table. A few of the brothers were
already queueing up by the token barrels as Clydas took the lid o
and almost dropped it on his foot. With a raucous scream and a clap
of wings, a huge raven burst out of the kettle. It apped upward,
seeking the rafters perhaps, or a window to make its escape, but
there were no rafters in the vault, nor windows either. The raven
was trapped. Cawing loudly, it circled the hall, once, twice, three
times. And Jon heard Samwell Tarly shout, “I know that bird! That’s
Lord Mormont’s raven!”
The raven landed on the table nearest Jon. “Snow,” it cawed. It
was an old bird, dirty and bedraggled. “Snow,” it said again, “Snow,
snow, snow.” It walked to the end of the table, spread its wings
again, and ew to Jon’s shoulder.
Lord Janos Slynt sat down so heavily he made a thump, but Ser
Alliser lled the vault with mocking laughter. “Ser Piggy thinks
we’re all fools, brothers,” he said. “He’s taught the bird this little
trick. They all say snow, go up to the rookery and hear for
yourselves. Mormont’s bird had more words than that.”
The raven cocked its head and looked at Jon. “Corn?” it said
hopefully. When it got neither corn nor answer, it quorked and
muttered, “Kettle? Kettle? Kettle?”
The rest was arrowheads, a torrent of arrowheads, a ood of
arrowheads, arrowheads enough to drown the last few stones and
shells, and all the copper pennies too.
When the count was done, Jon found himself surrounded. Some
clapped him on the back, whilst others bent the knee to him as if he

were a lord in truth. Satin, Owen the Oaf, Halder, Toad, Spare Boot,
Giant, Mully, Ulmer of the Kingswood, Sweet Donnel Hill, and half
a hundred more pressed around him. Dywen clacked his wooden
teeth and said, “Gods be good, our Lord Commander’s still in
swaddling clothes.” Iron Emmett said, “I hope this don’t mean I
can’t beat the bloody piss out of you next time we train, my lord.”
Three-Finger Hobb wanted to know if he’d still be eating with the
men, or if he’d want his meals sent up to his solar. Even Bowen
Marsh came up to say he would be glad to continue as Lord Steward
if that was Lord Snow’s wish.
“Lord Snow,” said Cotter Pyke, “if you muck this up, I’m going to
rip your liver out and eat it raw with onions.”
Ser Denys Mallister was more courteous. “It was a hard thing
young Samwell asked of me,” the old knight confessed. “When Lord
Qorgyle was chosen, I told myself, ‘No matter, he has been longer
on the Wall than you have, your time will come.’ When it was Lord
Mormont, I thought, ‘He is strong and erce, but he is old, your
time may yet come.’ But you are half a boy, Lord Snow, and now I
must return to the Shadow Tower knowing that my time will never
come.” He smiled a tired smile. “Do not make me die regretful.
Your uncle was a great man. Your lord father and his father as well.
I shall expect full as much of you.”
“Aye,” said Cotter Pyke. “And you can start by telling those king’s
men that it’s done, and we want our bloody supper.”
“Supper,” screamed the raven. “Supper, supper.”
The king’s men cleared the door when they told them of the
choosing, and Three-Finger Hobb and half a dozen helpers went
trotting o to the kitchen to fetch the food. Jon did not wait to eat.
He walked across the castle, wondering if he were dreaming, with
the raven on his shoulder and Ghost at his heels. Pyp, Grenn, and
Sam trailed after him, chattering, but he hardly heard a word until
Grenn whispered, “Sam did it,” and Pyp said, “Sam did it!” Pyp had
brought a wineskin with him, and he took a long drink and chanted,
“Sam, Sam, Sam the wizard, Sam the wonder, Sam Sam the marvel
man, he did it. But when did you hide the raven in the kettle, Sam,
and how in seven hells could you be certain it would y to Jon? It

would have mucked up everything if the bird had decided to perch
on Janos Slynt’s fat head.”
“I had nothing to do with the bird,” Sam insisted. “When it ew
out of the kettle I almost wet myself.”
Jon laughed, half amazed that he still remembered how. “You’re
all a bunch of mad fools, do you know that?”
“Us?” said Pyp. “You call us fools? We’re not the ones who got
chosen as the nine-hundredth-and-ninety-eighth Lord Commander of
the Night’s Watch. You best have some wine, Lord Jon. I think
you’re going to need a lot of wine.”
So Jon Snow took the wineskin from his hand and had a swallow.
But only one. The Wall was his, the night was dark, and he had a
king to face.

SANSA

She awoke all at once, every nerve atingle. For a moment she did

not remember where she was. She had dreamt that she was little,
still sharing a bedchamber with her sister Arya. But it was her maid
she heard tossing in sleep, not her sister, and this was not
Winterfell, but the Eyrie. And I am Alayne Stone, a bastard girl. The
room was cold and black, though she was warm beneath the
blankets. Dawn had not yet come. Sometimes she dreamed of Ser
Ilyn Payne and woke with her heart thumping, but this dream had
not been like that. Home. It was a dream of home.
The Eyrie was no home. It was no bigger than Maegor’s Holdfast,
and outside its sheer white walls was only the mountain and the
long treacherous descent past Sky and Snow and Stone to the Gates
of the Moon on the valley oor. There was no place to go and little
to do. The older servants said these halls rang with laughter when
her father and Robert Baratheon had been Jon Arryn’s wards, but
those days were many years gone. Her aunt kept a small household,
and seldom permitted any guests to ascend past the Gates of the
Moon. Aside from her aged maid, Sansa’s only companion was the
Lord Robert, eight going on three.
And Marillion. There is always Marillion. When he played for them
at supper, the young singer often seemed to be singing directly at
her. Her aunt was far from pleased. Lady Lysa doted on Marillion,
and had banished two serving girls and even a page for telling lies
about him.

Lysa was as lonely as she was. Her new husband seemed to spend
more time at the foot of the mountain than he did atop it. He was
gone now, had been gone the past four days, meeting with the
Corbrays. From bits and pieces of overheard conversations Sansa
knew that Jon Arryn’s bannermen resented Lysa’s marriage and
begrudged Petyr his authority as Lord Protector of the Vale. The
senior branch of House Royce was close to open revolt over her
aunt’s failure to aid Robb in his war, and the Waynwoods, Redforts,
Belmores, and Templetons were giving them every support. The
mountain clans were being troublesome as well, and old Lord
Hunter had died so suddenly that his two younger sons were
accusing their elder brother of having murdered him. The Vale of
Arryn might have been spared the worst of the war, but it was
hardly the idyllic place that Lady Lysa had made it out to be.
I am not going back to sleep, Sansa realized. My head is all a tumult.
She pushed her pillow away reluctantly, threw back the blankets,
went to her window, and opened the shutters.
Snow was falling on the Eyrie.
Outside the akes drifted down as soft and silent as memory. Was
this what woke me? Already the snowfall lay thick upon the garden
below, blanketing the grass, dusting the shrubs and statues with
white and weighing down the branches of the trees. The sight took
Sansa back to cold nights long ago, in the long summer of her
childhood.
She had last seen snow the day she’d left Winterfell. That was a
lighter fall than this, she remembered. Robb had melting akes in his
hair when he hugged me, and the snowball Arya tried to make kept
coming apart in her hands. It hurt to remember how happy she had
been that morning. Hullen had helped her mount, and she’d ridden
out with the snow akes swirling around her, o to see the great
wide world. I thought my song was beginning that day, but it was
almost done.
Sansa left the shutters open as she dressed. It would be cold, she
knew, though the Eyrie’s towers encircled the garden and protected
it from the worst of the mountain winds. She donned silken
smallclothes and a linen shift, and over that a warm dress of blue

lambswool. Two pairs of hose for her legs, boots that laced up to
her knees, heavy leather gloves, and nally a hooded cloak of soft
white fox fur.
Her maid rolled herself more tightly in her blanket as the snow
began to drift in the window. Sansa eased open the door, and made
her way down the winding stair. When she opened the door to the
garden, it was so lovely that she held her breath, unwilling to
disturb such perfect beauty. The snow drifted down and down, all in
ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. All color
had ed the world outside. It was a place of whites and blacks and
greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black
shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world,
Sansa thought. I do not belong here.
Yet she stepped out all the same. Her boots tore ankle-deep holes
into the smooth white surface of the snow, yet made no sound.
Sansa drifted past frosted shrubs and thin dark trees, and wondered
if she were still dreaming. Drifting snow akes brushed her face as
light as lover’s kisses, and melted on her cheeks. At the center of
the garden, beside the statue of the weeping woman that lay broken
and half-buried on the ground, she turned her face up to the sky and
closed her eyes. She could feel the snow on her lashes, taste it on
her lips. It was the taste of Winterfell. The taste of innocence. The
taste of dreams.
When Sansa opened her eyes again, she was on her knees. She did
not remember falling. It seemed to her that the sky was a lighter
shade of grey. Dawn, she thought. Another day. Another new day. It
was the old days she hungered for. Prayed for. But who could she
pray to? The garden had been meant for a godswood once, she
knew, but the soil was too thin and stony for a weirwood to take
root. A godswood without gods, as empty as me.
She scooped up a handful of snow and squeezed it between her
ngers. Heavy and wet, the snow packed easily. Sansa began to
make snowballs, shaping and smoothing them until they were round
and white and perfect. She remembered a summer’s snow in
Winterfell when Arya and Bran had ambushed her as she emerged
from the keep one morning. They’d each had a dozen snowballs to

hand, and she’d had none. Bran had been perched on the roof of the
covered bridge, out of reach, but Sansa had chased Arya through the
stables and around the kitchen until both of them were breathless.
She might even have caught her, but she’d slipped on some ice. Her
sister came back to see if she was hurt. When she said she wasn’t,
Arya hit her in the face with another snowball, but Sansa grabbed
her leg and pulled her down and was rubbing snow in her hair when
Jory came along and pulled them apart, laughing.
What do I want with snowballs? She looked at her sad little arsenal.
There’s no one to throw them at. She let the one she was making drop
from her hand. I could build a snow knight instead, she thought. Or
even …
She pushed two of her snowballs together, added a third, packed
more snow in around them, and patted the whole thing into the
shape of a cylinder. When it was done, she stood it on end and used
the tip of her little nger to poke holes in it for windows. The
crenellations around the top took a little more care, but when they
were done she had a tower. I need some walls now, Sansa thought,
and then a keep. She set to work.
The snow fell and the castle rose. Two walls ankle-high, the inner
taller than the outer. Towers and turrets, keeps and stairs, a round
kitchen, a square armory, the stables along the inside of the west
wall. It was only a castle when she began, but before very long
Sansa knew it was Winterfell. She found twigs and fallen branches
beneath the snow and broke o the ends to make the trees for the
godswood. For the gravestones in the lichyard she used bits of bark.
Soon her gloves and her boots were crusty white, her hands were
tingling, and her feet were soaked and cold, but she did not care.
The castle was all that mattered. Some things were hard to
remember, but most came back to her easily, as if she had been
there only yesterday. The Library Tower, with the steep stonework
stair twisting about its exterior. The gatehouse, two huge bulwarks,
the arched gate between them, crenellations all along the top …
And all the while the snow kept falling, piling up in drifts around
her buildings as fast as she raised them. She was patting down the
pitched roof of the Great Hall when she heard a voice, and looked

up to see her maid calling from her window. Was my lady well? Did
she wish to break her fast? Sansa shook her head, and went back to
shaping snow, adding a chimney to one end of the Great Hall,
where the hearth would stand inside.
Dawn stole into her garden like a thief. The grey of the sky grew
lighter still, and the trees and shrubs turned a dark green beneath
their stoles of snow. A few servants came out and watched her for a
time, but she paid them no mind and they soon went back inside
where it was warmer. Sansa saw Lady Lysa gazing down from her
balcony, wrapped up in a blue velvet robe trimmed with fox fur,
but when she looked again her aunt was gone. Maester Colemon
popped out of the rookery and peered down for a while, skinny and
shivering but curious.
Her bridges kept falling down. There was a covered bridge
between the armory and the main keep, and another that went from
the fourth oor of the bell tower to the second oor of the rookery,
but no matter how carefully she shaped them, they would not hold
together. The third time one collapsed on her, she cursed aloud and
sat back in helpless frustration.
“Pack the snow around a stick, Sansa.”
She did not know how long he had been watching her, or when
he had returned from the Vale. “A stick?” she asked.
“That will give it strength enough to stand, I’d think,” Petyr said.
“May I come into your castle, my lady?”
Sansa was wary. “Don’t break it. Be …”
“… gentle?” He smiled. “Winterfell has withstood ercer enemies
than me. It is Winterfell, is it not?”
“Yes,” Sansa admitted.
He walked along outside the walls. “I used to dream of it, in
those years after Cat went north with Eddard Stark. In my dreams it
was ever a dark place, and cold.”
“No. It was always warm, even when it snowed. Water from the
hot springs is piped through the walls to warm them, and inside the
glass gardens it was always like the hottest day of summer.” She
stood, towering over the great white castle. “I can’t think how to do
the glass roof over the gardens.”

Little nger stroked his chin, where his beard had been before
Lysa had asked him to shave it o . “The glass was locked in frames,
no? Twigs are your answer. Peel them and cross them and use bark
to tie them together into frames. I’ll show you.” He moved through
the garden, gathering up twigs and sticks and shaking the snow
from them. When he had enough, he stepped over both walls with a
single long stride and squatted on his heels in the middle of the
yard. Sansa came closer to watch what he was doing. His hands
were deft and sure, and before long he had a crisscrossing
latticework of twigs, very like the one that roofed the glass gardens
of Winterfell. “We will need to imagine the glass, to be sure,” he
said when he gave it to her.
“This is just right,” she said.
He touched her face. “And so is that.”
Sansa did not understand. “And so is what?”
“Your smile, my lady. Shall I make another for you?”
“If you would.”
“Nothing could please me more.”
She raised the walls of the glass gardens while Little nger roofed
them over, and when they were done with that he helped her
extend the walls and build the guardshall. When she used sticks for
the covered bridges, they stood, just as he had said they would. The
First Keep was simple enough, an old round drum tower, but Sansa
was stymied again when it came to putting the gargoyles around
the top. Again he had the answer. “It’s been snowing on your castle,
my lady,” he pointed out. “What do the gargoyles look like when
they’re covered with snow?”
Sansa closed her eyes to see them in memory. “They’re just white
lumps.”
“Well, then. Gargoyles are hard, but white lumps should be easy.”
And they were.
The Broken Tower was easier still. They made a tall tower
together, kneeling side by side to roll it smooth, and when they’d
raised it Sansa stuck her ngers through the top, grabbed a handful
of snow, and ung it full in his face. Petyr yelped, as the snow slid
down under his collar. “That was unchivalrously done, my lady.”

“As was bringing me here, when you swore to take me home.”
She wondered where this courage had come from, to speak to him
so frankly. From Winterfell, she thought. I am stronger within the walls
of Winterfell.
His face grew serious. “Yes, I played you false in that … and in
one other thing as well.”
Sansa’s stomach was a utter. “What other thing?”
“I told you that nothing could please me more than to help you
with your castle. I fear that was a lie as well. Something else would
please me more.” He stepped closer. “This.”
Sansa tried to step back, but he pulled her into his arms and
suddenly he was kissing her. Feebly, she tried to squirm, but only
succeeded in pressing herself more tightly against him. His mouth
was on hers, swallowing her words. He tasted of mint. For half a
heartbeat she yielded to his kiss … before she turned her face away
and wrenched free. “What are you doing?”
Petyr straightened his cloak. “Kissing a snow maid.”
“You’re supposed to kiss her.” Sansa glanced up at Lysa’s balcony,
but it was empty now. “Your lady wife.”
“I do. Lysa has no cause for complaint.” He smiled. “I wish you
could see yourself, my lady. You are so beautiful. You’re crusted
over with snow like some little bear cub, but your face is ushed
and you can scarcely breathe. How long have you been out here?
You must be very cold. Let me warm you, Sansa. Take o those
gloves, give me your hands.”
“I won’t.” He sounded almost like Marillion, the night he’d gotten
so drunk at the wedding. Only this time Lothor Brune would not
appear to save her; Ser Lothor was Petyr’s man. “You shouldn’t kiss
me. I might have been your own daughter …”
“Might have been,” he admitted, with a rueful smile. “But you’re
not, are you? You are Eddard Stark’s daughter, and Cat’s. But I
think you might be even more beautiful than your mother was,
when she was your age.”
“Petyr, please.” Her voice sounded so weak. “Please …”
“A castle!”

The voice was loud, shrill, and childish. Little nger turned away
from her. “Lord Robert.” He sketched a bow. “Should you be out in
the snow without your gloves?”
“Did you make the snow castle, Lord Little nger?”
“Alayne did most of it, my lord.”
Sansa said, “It’s meant to be Winterfell.”
“Winterfell?” Robert was small for eight, a stick of a boy with
splotchy skin and eyes that were always runny. Under one arm he
clutched the threadbare cloth doll he carried everywhere.
“Winterfell is the seat of House Stark,” Sansa told her husband-tobe. “The great castle of the north.”
“It’s not so great.” The boy knelt before the gatehouse. “Look,
here comes a giant to knock it down.” He stood his doll in the snow
and moved it jerkily. “Tromp tromp I’m a giant, I’m a giant,” he
chanted. “Ho ho ho, open your gates or I’ll mash them and smash
them.” Swinging the doll by the legs, he knocked the top o one
gatehouse tower and then the other.
It was more than Sansa could stand. “Robert, stop that.” Instead he
swung the doll again, and a foot of wall exploded. She grabbed for
his hand but she caught the doll instead. There was a loud ripping
sound as the thin cloth tore. Suddenly she had the doll’s head,
Robert had the legs and body, and the rag-and-sawdust stu ng was
spilling in the snow.
Lord Robert’s mouth trembled. “You killlllllllled him,” he wailed.
Then he began to shake. It started with no more than a little
shivering, but within a few short heartbeats he had collapsed across
the castle, his limbs ailing about violently. White towers and
snowy bridges shattered and fell on all sides. Sansa stood horri ed,
but Petyr Baelish seized her cousin’s wrists and shouted for the
maester.
Guards and serving girls arrived within instants to help restrain
the boy, Maester Colemon a short time later. Robert Arryn’s
shaking sickness was nothing new to the people of the Eyrie, and
Lady Lysa had trained them all to come rushing at the boy’s rst
cry. The maester held the little lord’s head and gave him half a cup
of dreamwine, murmuring soothing words. Slowly the violence of

the t seemed to ebb away, till nothing remained but a small
shaking of the hands. “Help him to my chambers,” Colemon told the
guards. “A leeching will help calm him.”
“It was my fault.” Sansa showed them the doll’s head. “I ripped
his doll in two. I never meant to, but …”
“His lordship was destroying the castle,” said Petyr.
“A giant,” the boy whispered, weeping. “It wasn’t me, it was a
giant hurt the castle. She killed him! I hate her! She’s a bastard and I
hate her! I don’t want to be leeched!”
“My lord, your blood needs thinning,” said Maester Colemon. “It
is the bad blood that makes you angry, and the rage that brings on
the shaking. Come now.”
They led the boy away. My lord husband, Sansa thought, as she
contemplated the ruins of Winterfell. The snow had stopped, and it
was colder than before. She wondered if Lord Robert would shake
all through their wedding. At least Jo rey was sound of body. A mad
rage seized hold of her. She picked up a broken branch and smashed
the torn doll’s head down on top of it, then pushed it down atop the
shattered gatehouse of her snow castle. The servants looked aghast,
but when Little nger saw what she’d done he laughed. “If the tales
be true, that’s not the rst giant to end up with his head on
Winterfell’s walls.”
“Those are only stories,” she said, and left him there.
Back in her bedchamber, Sansa took o her cloak and her wet
boots and sat beside the re. She had no doubt that she would be
made to answer for Lord Robert’s t. Perhaps Lady Lysa will send me
away. Her aunt was quick to banish anyone who displeased her, and
nothing displeased her quite so much as people she suspected of
mistreating her son.
Sansa would have welcomed banishment. The Gates of the Moon
was much larger than the Eyrie, and livelier as well. Lord Nestor
Royce seemed gru and stern, but his daughter Myranda kept his
castle for him, and everyone said how frolicsome she was. Even
Sansa’s supposed bastardy might not count too much against her
below. One of King Robert’s baseborn daughters was in service to

Lord Nestor, and she and the Lady Myranda were said to be fast
friends, as close as sisters.
I will tell my aunt that I don’t want to marry Robert. Not even the
High Septon himself could declare a woman married if she refused
to say the vows. She wasn’t a beggar, no matter what her aunt said.
She was thirteen, a woman owered and wed, the heir to
Winterfell. Sansa felt sorry for her little cousin sometimes, but she
could not imagine ever wanting to be his wife. I would sooner be
married to Tyrion again. If Lady Lysa knew that, surely she’d send
her away … away from Robert’s pouts and shakes and runny eyes,
away from Marillion’s lingering looks, away from Petyr’s kisses. I
will tell her. I will!
It was late that afternoon when Lady Lysa summoned her. Sansa
had been marshaling her courage all day, but no sooner did
Marillion appear at her door than all her doubts returned. “Lady
Lysa requires your presence in the High Hall.” The singer’s eyes
undressed her as he spoke, but she was used to that.
Marillion was comely, there was no denying it; boyish and
slender, with smooth skin, sandy hair, a charming smile. But he had
made himself well hated in the Vale, by everyone but her aunt and
little Lord Robert. To hear the servants talk, Sansa was not the rst
maid to su er his advances, and the others had not had Lothor
Brune to defend them. But Lady Lysa would hear no complaints
against him. Since coming to the Eyrie, the singer had become her
favorite. He sang Lord Robert to sleep every night, and tweaked the
noses of Lady Lysa’s suitors with verses that made mock of their
foibles. Her aunt had showered him with gold and gifts; costly
clothes, a gold arm ring, a belt studded with moonstones, a ne
horse. She had even given him her late husband’s favorite falcon. It
all served to make Marillion unfailingly courteous in Lady Lysa’s
presence, and unfailingly arrogant outside it.
“Thank you,” Sansa told him sti y. “I know the way.”
He would not leave. “My lady said to bring you.”
Bring me? She did not like the sound of that. “Are you a
guardsman now?” Little nger had dismissed the Eyrie’s captain of
guards and put Ser Lothor Brune in his place.

“Do you require guarding?” Marillion said lightly. “I am
composing a new song, you should know. A song so sweet and sad
it will melt even your frozen heart. ‘The Roadside Rose,’ I mean to
call it. About a baseborn girl so beautiful she bewitched every man
who laid eyes upon her.”
I am a Stark of Winterfell, she longed to tell him. Instead she
nodded, and let him escort her down the tower steps and along a
bridge. The High Hall had been closed as long as she’d been at the
Eyrie. Sansa wondered why her aunt had opened it. Normally she
preferred the comfort of her solar, or the cozy warmth of Lord
Arryn’s audience chamber with its view of the waterfall.
Two guards in sky-blue cloaks anked the carved wooden doors
of the High Hall, spears in hand. “No one is to enter so long as
Alayne is with Lady Lysa,” Marillion told them.
“Aye.” The men let them pass, then crossed their spears. Marillion
swung the doors shut and barred them with a third spear, longer
and thicker than those the guards had borne.
Sansa felt a prickle of unease. “Why did you do that?”
“My lady awaits you.”
She looked about uncertainly. Lady Lysa sat on the dais in a highbacked chair of carved weirwood, alone. To her right was a second
chair, taller than her own, with a stack of blue cushions piled on the
seat, but Lord Robert was not in it. Sansa hoped he’d recovered.
Marillion was not like to tell her, though.
Sansa walked down the blue silk carpet between rows of uted
pillars slim as lances. The oors and walls of the High Hall were
made of milk-white marble veined with blue. Shafts of pale daylight
slanted down through narrow arched windows along the eastern
wall. Between the windows were torches, mounted in high iron
sconces, but none of them was lit. Her footsteps fell softly on the
carpet. Outside the wind blew cold and lonely.
Amidst so much white marble even the sunlight looked chilly,
somehow … though not half so chilly as her aunt. Lady Lysa had
dressed in a gown of cream-colored velvet and a necklace of
sapphires and moon-stones. Her auburn hair had been done up in a
thick braid, and fell across one shoulder. She sat in the high seat

watching her niece approach, her face red and pu y beneath the
paint and powder. On the wall behind her hung a huge banner, the
moon-and-falcon of House Arryn in cream and blue.
Sansa stopped before the dais, and curtsied. “My lady. You sent
for me.” She could still hear the sound of the wind, and the soft
chords Marillion was playing at the foot of the hall.
“I saw what you did,” the Lady Lysa said.
Sansa smoothed down the folds of her skirt. “I trust Lord Robert
is better? I never meant to rip his doll. He was smashing my snow
castle, I only …”
“Will you play the coy deceiver with me?” her aunt said. “I was
not speaking of Robert’s doll. I saw you kissing him.”
The High Hall seemed to grow a little colder. The walls and oor
and columns might have turned to ice. “He kissed me.”
Lysa’s nostrils ared. “And why would he do that? He has a wife
who loves him. A woman grown, not a little girl. He has no need
for the likes of you. Confess, child. You threw yourself at him. That
was the way of it.”
Sansa took a step backward. “That’s not true.”
“Where are you going? Are you afraid? Such wanton behavior
must be punished, but I will not be hard on you. We keep a
whipping boy for Robert, as is the custom in the Free Cities. His
health is too delicate for him to bear the rod himself. I shall nd
some common girl to take your whipping, but rst you must own
up to what you’ve done. I cannot abide a liar, Alayne.”
“I was building a snow castle,” Sansa said. “Lord Petyr was
helping me, and then he kissed me. That’s what you saw.”
“Have you no honor?” her aunt said sharply. “Or do you take me
for a fool? You do, don’t you? You take me for a fool. Yes, I see
that now. I am not a fool. You think you can have any man you
want because you’re young and beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t seen
the looks you give Marillion. I know everything that happens in the
Eyrie, little lady. And I have known your like before, too. But you
are mistaken if you think big eyes and strumpet’s smiles will win
you Petyr. He is mine.” She rose to her feet. “They all tried to take

him from me. My lord father, my husband, your mother … Catelyn
most of all. She liked to kiss my Petyr too, oh yes she did.”
Sansa retreated another step. “My mother?”
“Yes, your mother, your precious mother, my own sweet sister
Catelyn. Don’t you think to play the innocent with me, you vile
little liar. All those years in Riverrun, she played with Petyr as if he
were her little toy. She teased him with smiles and soft words and
wanton looks, and made his nights a torment.”
“No.” My mother is dead, she wanted to shriek. She was your own
sister, and she’s dead. “She didn’t. She wouldn’t.”
“How would you know? Were you there?” Lysa descended from
the high seat, her skirts swirling. “Did you come with Lord Bracken
and Lord Blackwood, the time they visited to lay their feud before
my father? Lord Bracken’s singer played for us, and Catelyn danced
six dances with Petyr that night, six, I counted. When the lords
began to argue my father took them up to his audience chamber, so
there was no one to stop us drinking. Edmure got drunk, young as
he was … and Petyr tried to kiss your mother, only she pushed him
away. She laughed at him. He looked so wounded I thought my
heart would burst, and afterward he drank until he passed out at the
table. Uncle Brynden carried him up to bed before my father could
nd him like that. But you remember none of it, do you?” She
looked down angrily. “Do you?”
Is she drunk, or mad? “I was not born, my lady.”
“You were not born. But I was, so do not presume to tell what is
true. I know what is true. You kissed him!”
“He kissed me,” Sansa insisted again. “I never wanted—”
“Be quiet, I haven’t given you leave to speak. You enticed him,
just as your mother did that night in Riverrun, with her smiles and
her dancing. You think I could forget? That was the night I stole up
to his bed to give him comfort. I bled, but it was the sweetest hurt.
He told me he loved me then, but he called me Cat, just before he
fell back to sleep. Even so, I stayed with him until the sky began to
lighten. Your mother did not deserve him. She would not even give
him her favor to wear when he fought Brandon Stark. I would have

given him my favor. I gave him everything. He is mine now. Not
Catelyn’s and not yours.”
All of Sansa’s resolve had withered in the face of her aunt’s
onslaught. Lysa Arryn was frightening her as much as Queen Cersei
ever had. “He’s yours, my lady,” she said, trying to sound meek and
contrite. “May I have your leave to go?”
“You may not.” Her aunt’s breath smelled of wine. “If you were
anyone else, I would banish you. Send you down to Lord Nestor at
the Gates of the Moon, or back to the Fingers. How would you like
to spend your life on that bleak shore, surrounded by slatterns and
sheep pellets? That was what my father meant for Petyr. Everyone
thought it was because of that stupid duel with Brandon Stark, but
that wasn’t so. Father said I ought to thank the gods that so great a
lord as Jon Arryn was willing to take me soiled, but I knew it was
only for the swords. I had to marry Jon, or my father would have
turned me out as he did his brother, but it was Petyr I was meant
for. I am telling you all this so you will understand how much we
love each other, how long we have su ered and dreamed of one
another. We made a baby together, a precious little baby.” Lysa put
her hands at against her belly, as if the child was still there. “When
they stole him from me, I made a promise to myself that I would
never let it happen again. Jon wished to send my sweet Robert to
Dragonstone, and that sot of a king would have given him to Cersei
Lannister, but I never let them … no more than I’ll let you steal my
Petyr Little nger. Do you hear me, Alayne or Sansa or whatever
you call yourself? Do you hear what I am telling you?”
“Yes. I swear, I won’t ever kiss him again, or … or entice him.”
Sansa thought that was what her aunt wanted to hear.
“So you admit it now? It was you, just as I thought. You are as
wanton as your mother.” Lysa grabbed her by the wrist. “Come
with me now. There is something I want to show you.”
“You’re hurting me.” Sansa squirmed. “Please, Aunt Lysa, I
haven’t done anything. I swear it.”
Her aunt ignored her protests. “Marillion!” she shouted. “I need
you, Marillion! I need you!”

The singer had remained discreetly in the rear of the hall, but at
Lady Arryn’s shout he came at once. “My lady?”
“Play us a song. Play ‘The False and the Fair.’ ”
Marillion’s ngers brushed the strings. “The lord he came a-riding
upon a rainy day, hey-nonny, hey-nonny, hey-nonny-hey …”
Lady Lysa pulled at Sansa’s arm. It was either walk or be
dragged, so she chose to walk, halfway down the hall and between
a pair of pillars, to a white weirwood door set in the marble wall.
The door was rmly closed, with three heavy bronze bars to hold it
in place, but Sansa could hear the wind outside worrying at its
edges. When she saw the crescent moon carved in the wood, she
planted her feet. “The Moon Door.” She tried to yank free. “Why
are you showing me the Moon Door?”
“You squeak like a mouse now, but you were bold enough in the
garden, weren’t you? You were bold enough in the snow.”
“The lady sat a-sewing upon a rainy day,” Marillion sang. “Heynonny, hey-nonny, hey-nonny-hey.”
“Open the door,” Lysa commanded. “Open it, I say. You will do it,
or I’ll send for my guards.” She shoved Sansa forward. “Your
mother was brave, at least. Lift o the bars.”
If I do as she says, she will let me go. Sansa grabbed one of the
bronze bars, yanked it loose, and tossed it down. The second bar
clattered to the marble, then the third. She had barely touched the
latch when the heavy wooden door ew inward and slammed back
against the wall with a bang. Snow had piled up around the frame,
and it all came blowing in at them, borne on a blast of cold air that
left Sansa shivering. She tried to step backward, but her aunt was
behind her. Lysa seized her by the wrist and put her other hand
between her shoulder blades, propelling her forcefully toward the
open door.
Beyond was white sky, falling snow, and nothing else.
“Look down,” said Lady Lysa. “Look down.”
She tried to wrench free, but her aunt’s ngers were digging into
her arm like claws. Lysa gave her another shove, and Sansa
shrieked. Her left foot broke through a crust of snow and knocked it
loose. There was nothing in front of her but empty air, and a

waycastle six hundred feet below clinging to the side of the
mountain. “Don’t!” Sansa screamed. “You’re scaring me!” Behind
her, Marillion was still playing his woodharp and singing, “Heynonny, hey-nonny, hey-nonny-hey.”
“Do you still want my leave to go? Do you?”
“No.” Sansa planted her feet and tried to squirm backward, but
her aunt did not budge. “Not this way. Please …” She put a hand
up, her ngers scrabbling at the doorframe, but she could not get a
grip, and her feet were sliding on the wet marble oor. Lady Lysa
pressed her forward inexorably. Her aunt outweighed her by three
stone. “The lady lay a-kissing, upon a mound of hay,” Marillion was
singing. Sansa twisted sideways, hysterical with fear, and one foot
slipped out over the void. She screamed. “Hey-nonny, hey-nonny,
hey-nonny-hey.” The wind apped her skirts up and bit at her bare
legs with cold teeth. She could feel snow akes melting on her
cheeks. Sansa ailed, found Lysa’s thick auburn braid, and clutched
it tight. “My hair!” her aunt shrieked. “Let go of my hair!” She was
shaking, sobbing. They teetered on the edge. Far o , she heard the
guards pounding on the door with their spears, demanding to be let
in. Marillion broke o his song.
“Lysa! What’s the meaning of this?” The shout cut through the
sobs and heavy breathing. Footsteps echoed down the High Hall.
“Get back from there! Lysa, what are you doing?” The guards were
still beating at the door; Little nger had come in the back way,
through the lords’ entrance behind the dais.
As Lysa turned, her grip loosened enough for Sansa to rip free.
She stumbled to her knees, where Petyr Baelish saw her. He stopped
suddenly. “Alayne. What is the trouble here?”
“Her.” Lady Lysa grabbed a handful of Sansa’s hair. “She’s the
trouble. She kissed you.”
“Tell her,” Sansa begged. “Tell her we were just building a
castle …”
“Be quiet!” her aunt screamed. “I never gave you leave to speak.
No one cares about your castle.”
“She’s a child, Lysa. Cat’s daughter. What did you think you were
doing?”

“I was going to marry her to Robert! She has no gratitude.
No … no decency. You are not hers to kiss. Not hers! I was teaching
her a lesson, that was all.”
“I see.” He stroked his chin. “I think she understands now. Isn’t
that so, Alayne?”
“Yes,” sobbed Sansa. “I understand.”
“I don’t want her here.” Her aunt’s eyes were shiny with tears.
“Why did you bring her to the Vale, Petyr? This isn’t her place. She
doesn’t belong here.”
“We’ll send her away, then. Back to King’s Landing, if you like.”
He took a step toward them. “Let her up, now. Let her away from
the door.”
“NO!” Lysa gave Sansa’s head another wrench. Snow eddied
around them, making their skirts snap noisily. “You can’t want her.
You can’t. She’s a stupid empty-headed little girl. She doesn’t love
you the way I have. I’ve always loved you. I’ve proved it, haven’t
I?” Tears ran down her aunt’s pu y red face. “I gave you my
maiden’s gift. I would have given you a son too, but they murdered
him with moon tea, with tansy and mint and wormwood, a spoon of
honey and a drop of pennyroyal. It wasn’t me, I never knew, I only
drank what Father gave me …”
“That’s past and done, Lysa. Lord Hoster’s dead, and his old
maester as well.” Little nger moved closer. “Have you been at the
wine again? You ought not to talk so much. We don’t want Alayne
to know more than she should, do we? Or Marillion?”
Lady Lysa ignored that. “Cat never gave you anything. It was me
who got you your rst post, who made Jon bring you to court so
we could be close to one another. You promised me you would
never forget that.”
“Nor have I. We’re together, just as you always wanted, just as
we always planned. Just let go of Sansa’s hair …”
“I won’t! I saw you kissing in the snow. She’s just like her
mother. Catelyn kissed you in the godswood, but she never meant
it, she never wanted you. Why did you love her best? It was me, it
was always meeee!”

“I know, love.” He took another step. “And I am here. All you
need to do is take my hand, come on.” He held it out to her.
“There’s no cause for all these tears.”
“Tears, tears, tears,” she sobbed hysterically. “No need for
tears … but that’s not what you said in King’s Landing. You told me
to put the tears in Jon’s wine, and I did. For Robert, and for us! And
I wrote Catelyn and told her the Lannisters had killed my lord
husband, just as you said. That was so clever … you were always
clever, I told Father that, I said Petyr’s so clever, he’ll rise high, he
will, he will, and he’s sweet and gentle and I have his little baby in
my belly … Why did you kiss her? Why? We’re together now, we’re
together after so long, so very long, why would you want to kiss
herrrrrr?”
“Lysa,” Petyr sighed, “after all the storms we’ve su ered, you
should trust me better. I swear, I shall never leave your side again,
for as long as we both shall live.”
“Truly?” she asked, weeping. “Oh, truly?”
“Truly. Now unhand the girl and come give me a kiss.”
Lysa threw herself into Little nger’s arms, sobbing. As they
hugged, Sansa crawled from the Moon Door on hands and knees and
wrapped her arms around the nearest pillar. She could feel her heart
pounding. There was snow in her hair and her right shoe was
missing. It must have fallen. She shuddered, and hugged the pillar
tighter.
Little nger let Lysa sob against his chest for a moment, then put
his hands on her arms and kissed her lightly. “My sweet silly jealous
wife,” he said, chuckling. “I’ve only loved one woman, I promise
you.”
Lysa Arryn smiled tremulously. “Only one? Oh, Petyr, do you
swear it? Only one?”
“Only Cat.” He gave her a short, sharp shove.
Lysa stumbled backward, her feet slipping on the wet marble.
And then she was gone. She never screamed. For the longest time
there was no sound but the wind.
Marillion gasped, “You … you …”

The guards were shouting outside the door, pounding with the
butts of their heavy spears. Lord Petyr pulled Sansa to her feet.
“You’re not hurt?” When she shook her head, he said, “Run let my
guards in, then. Quick now, there’s no time to lose. This singer’s
killed my lady wife.”

EPILOGUE

The road up to Oldstones went twice around the hill before

reaching the summit. Overgrown and stony, it would have been
slow going even in the best of times, and last night’s snow had left
it muddy as well. Snow in autumn in the riverlands, it’s unnatural,
Merrett thought gloomily. It had not been much of a snow, true;
just enough to blanket the ground for a night. Most of it had started
melting away as soon as the sun came up. Still, Merrett took it for a
bad omen. Between rains, oods, re, and war, they had lost two
harvests and a good part of a third. An early winter would mean
famine all across the riverlands. A great many people would go
hungry, and some of them would starve. Merrett only hoped he
wouldn’t be one of them. I may, though. With my luck, I just may. I
never did have any luck.
Beneath the castle ruins, the lower slopes of the hill were so
thickly forested that half a hundred outlaws could well have been
lurking there. They could be watching me even now. Merrett glanced
about, and saw nothing but gorse, bracken, thistle, sedge, and
blackberry bushes between the pines and grey-green sentinels.
Elsewhere skeletal elm and ash and scrub oaks choked the ground
like weeds. He saw no outlaws, but that meant little. Outlaws were
better at hiding than honest men.
Merrett hated the woods, if truth be told, and he hated outlaws
even more. “Outlaws stole my life,” he had been known to complain
when in his cups. He was too often in his cups, his father said, often

and loudly. Too true, he thought ruefully. You needed some sort of
distinction in the Twins, else they were liable to forget you were
alive, but a reputation as the biggest drinker in the castle had done
little to enhance his prospects, he’d found. I once hoped to be the
greatest knight who ever couched a lance. The gods took that away from
me. Why shouldn’t I have a cup of wine from time to time? It helps my
headaches. Besides, my wife is a shrew, my father despises me, my
children are worthless. What do I have to stay sober for?
He was sober now, though. Well, he’d had two horns of ale when
he broke his fast, and a small cup of red when he set out, but that
was just to keep his head from pounding. Merrett could feel the
headache building behind his eyes, and he knew that if he gave it
half a chance he would soon feel as if he had a thunderstorm raging
between his ears. Sometimes his headaches got so bad that it even
hurt too much to weep. Then all he could do was rest on his bed in
a dark room with a damp cloth over his eyes, and curse his luck and
the nameless outlaw who had done this to him.
Just thinking about it made him anxious. He could no wise a ord
a headache now. If I bring Petyr back home safely, all my luck will
change. He had the gold, all he needed to do was climb to the top of
Oldstones, meet the bloody outlaws in the ruined castle, and make
the exchange. A simple ransom. Even he could not muck it
up … unless he got a headache, one so bad that it left him unable to
ride. He was supposed to be at the ruins by sunset, not weeping in a
huddle at the side of the road. Merrett rubbed two ngers against
his temple. Once more around the hill, and there I am. When the
message had come in and he had stepped forward to o er to carry
the ransom, his father had squinted down and said, “You, Merrett?”
and started laughing through his nose, that hideous heh heh heh
laugh of his. Merrett practically had to beg before they’d give him
the bloody bag of gold.
Something moved in the underbrush along the side of the road.
Merrett reined up hard and reached for his sword, but it was only a
squirrel. “Stupid,” he told himself, shoving the sword back in its
scabbard without ever having gotten it out. “Outlaws don’t have
tails. Bloody hell, Merrett, get hold of yourself.” His heart was

thumping in his chest as if he were some green boy on his rst
campaign. As if this were the kingswood and it was the old Brotherhood
I was going to face, not the lightning lord’s sorry lot of brigands. For a
moment he was tempted to trot right back down the hill and nd
the nearest alehouse. That bag of gold would buy a lot of ale,
enough for him to forget all about Petyr Pimple. Let them hang him,
he brought this on himself. It’s no more than he deserves, wandering o
with some bloody camp follower like a stag in rut.
His head had begun to pound; soft now, but he knew it would get
worse. Merrett rubbed the bridge of his nose. He really had no right
to think so ill of Petyr. I did the same myself when I was his age. In his
case all it got him was a pox, but still, he shouldn’t condemn.
Whores did have charms, especially if you had a face like Petyr’s.
The poor lad had a wife, to be sure, but she was half the problem.
Not only was she twice his age, but she was bedding his brother
Walder too, if the talk was true. There was always lots of talk
around the Twins, and only a little was ever true, but in this case
Merrett believed it. Black Walder was a man who took what he
wanted, even his brother’s wife. He’d had Edwyn’s wife too, that
was common knowledge, Fair Walda had been known to slip into
his bed from time to time, and some even said he’d known the
seventh Lady Frey a deal better than he should have. Small wonder
he refused to marry. Why buy a cow when there were udders all
around begging to be milked?
Cursing under his breath, Merrett jammed his heels into his
horse’s anks and rode on up the hill. As tempting as it was to drink
the gold away, he knew that if he didn’t come back with Petyr
Pimple, he had as well not come back at all.
Lord Walder would soon turn two-and-ninety. His ears had started
to go, his eyes were almost gone, and his gout was so bad that he
had to be carried everywhere. He could not possibly last much
longer, all his sons agreed. And when he goes, everything will change,
and not for the better. His father was querulous and stubborn, with
an iron will and a wasp’s tongue, but he did believe in taking care
of his own. All of his own, even the ones who had displeased and

disappointed him. Even the ones whose names he can’t remember.
Once he was gone, though …
When Ser Stevron had been heir, that was one thing. The old man
had been grooming Stevron for sixty years, and had pounded it into
his head that blood was blood. But Stevron had died whilst
campaigning with the Young Wolf in the west—“of waiting, no
doubt,” Lame Lothar had quipped when the raven brought them the
news—and his sons and grandsons were a di erent sort of Frey.
Stevron’s son Ser Ryman stood to inherit now; a thick-witted,
stubborn, greedy man. And after Ryman came his own sons, Edwyn
and Black Walder, who were even worse. “Fortunately,” Lame
Lothar once said, “they hate each other even more than they hate
us.”
Merrett wasn’t certain that was fortunate at all, and for that
matter Lothar himself might be more dangerous than either of
them. Lord Walder had ordered the slaughter of the Starks at
Roslin’s wedding, but it had been Lame Lothar who had plotted it
out with Roose Bolton, all the way down to which songs would be
played. Lothar was a very amusing fellow to get drunk with, but
Merrett would never be so foolish as to turn his back on him. In the
Twins, you learned early that only full blood siblings could be
trusted, and them not very far.
It was like to be every son for himself when the old man died,
and every daughter as well. The new Lord of the Crossing would
doubtless keep on some of his uncles, nephews, and cousins at the
Twins, the ones he happened to like or trust, or more likely the
ones he thought would prove useful to him. The rest of us he’ll shove
out to fend for ourselves.
The prospect worried Merrett more than words could say. He
would be forty in less than three years, too old to take up the life of
a hedge knight … even if he’d been a knight, which as it happened
he wasn’t. He had no land, no wealth of his own. He owned the
clothes on his back but not much else, not even the horse he was
riding. He wasn’t clever enough to be a maester, pious enough to be
a septon, or savage enough to be a sellsword. The gods gave me no
gift but birth, and they stinted me there. What good was it to be the

son of a rich and powerful House if you were the ninth son? When
you took grandsons and great-grandsons into account, Merrett stood
a better chance of being chosen High Septon than he did of
inheriting the Twins.
I have no luck, he thought bitterly. I have never had any bloody
luck. He was a big man, broad around the chest and shoulders if
only of middling height. In the last ten years he had grown soft and
eshy, he knew, but when he’d been younger Merrett had been
almost as robust as Ser Hosteen, his eldest full brother, who was
commonly regarded as the strongest of Lord Walder Frey’s brood.
As a boy he’d been packed o to Crakehall to serve his mother’s
family as a page. When old Lord Sumner had made him a squire,
everyone had assumed he would be Ser Merrett in no more than a
few years, but the outlaws of the Kingswood Brotherhood had
pissed on those plans. While his fellow squire Jaime Lannister was
covering himself in glory, Merrett had rst caught the pox from a
camp follower, then managed to get captured by a woman, the one
called the White Fawn. Lord Sumner had ransomed him back from
the outlaws, but in the very next ght he’d been felled by a blow
from a mace that had broken his helm and left him insensible for a
fortnight. Everyone gave him up for dead, they told him later.
Merrett hadn’t died, but his ghting days were done. Even the
lightest blow to his head brought on blinding pain and reduced him
to tears. Under these circumstances knighthood was out of the
question, Lord Sumner told him, not unkindly. He was sent back to
the Twins to face Lord Walder’s poisonous disdain.
After that, Merrett’s luck had only grown worse. His father had
managed to make a good marriage for him, somehow; he wed one
of Lord Darry’s daughters, back when the Darrys stood high in King
Aerys’s favor. But it seemed as if he no sooner had de owered his
bride than Aerys lost his throne. Unlike the Freys, the Darrys had
been prominent Targaryen loyalists, which cost them half their
lands, most of their wealth, and almost all their power. As for his
lady wife, she found him a great disappointment from the rst, and
insisted on popping out nothing but girls for years; three live ones,
a stillbirth, and one that died in infancy before she nally produced

a son. His eldest daughter had turned out to be a slut, his second a
glutton. When Ami was caught in the stables with no fewer than
three grooms, he’d been forced to marry her o to a bloody hedge
knight. That situation could not possibly get any worse, he’d
thought … until Ser Pate decided he could win renown by defeating
Ser Gregor Clegane. Ami had come running back a widow, to
Merrett’s dismay and the undoubted delight of every stablehand in
the Twins.
Merrett had dared to hope that his luck was nally changing
when Roose Bolton chose to wed his Walda instead of one of her
slimmer, comelier cousins. The Bolton alliance was important for
House Frey and his daughter had helped secure it; he thought that
must surely count for something. The old man had soon disabused
him. “He picked her because she’s fat,” Lord Walder said. “You
think Bolton gave a mummer’s fart that she was your whelp? Think
he sat about thinking, ‘Heh, Merrett Muttonhead, that’s the very
man I need for a good-father’? Your Walda’s a sow in silk, that’s
why he picked her, and I’m not like to thank you for it. We’d have
had the same alliance at half the price if your little porkling put
down her spoon from time to time.”
The nal humiliation had been delivered with a smile, when
Lame Lothar had summoned him to discuss his role in Roslin’s
wedding. “We must each play our part, according to our gifts,” his
half-brother told him. “You shall have one task and one task only,
Merrett, but I believe you are well suited to it. I want you to see to
it that Greatjon Umber is so bloody drunk that he can hardly stand,
let alone ght.”
And even that I failed at. He’d cozened the huge northman into
drinking enough wine to kill any three normal men, yet after Roslin
had been bedded the Greatjon still managed to snatch the sword of
the rst man to accost him and break his arm in the snatching. It
had taken eight of them to get him into chains, and the e ort had
left two men wounded, one dead, and poor old Ser Leslyn Haigh
short half an ear. When he couldn’t ght with his hands any longer,
Umber had fought with his teeth.

Merrett paused a moment and closed his eyes. His head was
throbbing like that bloody drum they’d played at the wedding, and
for a moment it was all he could do to stay in the saddle. I have to
go on, he told himself. If he could bring back Petyr Pimple, surely it
would put him in Ser Ryman’s good graces. Petyr might be a
whisker on the hapless side, but he wasn’t as cold as Edwyn, nor as
hot as Black Walder. The boy will be grateful for my part, and his
father will see that I’m loyal, a man worth having about.
But only if he was there by sunset with the gold. Merrett glanced
at the sky. Right on time. He needed something to steady his hands.
He pulled up the waterskin hung from his saddle, uncorked it, and
took a long swallow. The wine was thick and sweet, so dark it was
almost black, but gods it tasted good.
The curtain wall of Oldstones had once encircled the brow of the
hill like the crown on a king’s head. Only the foundation remained,
and a few waist-high piles of crumbling stone spotted with lichen.
Merrett rode along the line of the wall until he came to the place
where the gatehouse would have stood. The ruins were more
extensive here, and he had to dismount to lead his palfrey through
them. In the west, the sun had vanished behind a bank of low
clouds. Gorse and bracken covered the slopes, and once inside the
vanished walls the weeds were chest high. Merrett loosened his
sword in its scabbard and looked about warily, but saw no outlaws.
Could I have come on the wrong day? He stopped and rubbed his
temples with his thumbs, but that did nothing to ease the pressure
behind his eyes. Seven bloody hells …
From somewhere deep within the castle, faint music came drifting
through the trees.
Merrett found himself shivering, despite his cloak. He pulled open
his waterskin and had another drink of wine. I could just get back on
my horse, ride to Oldtown, and drink the gold away. No good ever came
from dealing with outlaws. That vile little bitch Wenda had burned a
fawn into the cheek of his arse while she had him captive. No
wonder his wife despised him. I have to go through with this. Petyr
Pimple might be Lord of the Crossing one day, Edwyn has no sons and
Black Walder’s only got bastards. Petyr will remember who came to get

him. He took another swallow, corked the skin up, and led his
palfrey through broken stones, gorse, and thin wind-whipped trees,
following the sounds to what had been the castle ward.
Fallen leaves lay thick upon the ground, like soldiers after some
great slaughter. A man in patched, faded greens was sitting
crosslegged atop a weathered stone sepulcher, ngering the strings
of a woodharp. The music was soft and sad. Merrett knew the song.
High in the halls of the kings who are gone, Jenny would dance with her
ghosts …
“Get o there,” Merrett said. “You’re sitting on a king.”
“Old Tristifer don’t mind my bony arse. The Hammer of Justice,
they called him. Been a long while since he heard any new songs.”
The outlaw hopped down. Trim and slim, he had a narrow face and
foxy features, but his mouth was so wide that his smile seemed to
touch his ears. A few strands of thin brown hair were blowing
across his brow. He pushed them back with his free hand and said,
“Do you remember me, my lord?”
“No.” Merrett frowned. “Why would I?”
“I sang at your daughter’s wedding. And passing well, I thought.
That Pate she married was a cousin. We’re all cousins in
Sevenstreams. Didn’t stop him from turning niggard when it was
time to pay me.” He shrugged. “Why is it your lord father never has
me play at the Twins? Don’t I make enough noise for his lordship?
He likes it loud, I have been hearing.”
“You bring the gold?” asked a harsher voice, behind him.
Merrett’s throat was dry. Bloody outlaws, always hiding in the
bushes. It had been the same in the kingswood. you’d think you’d
caught ve of them, and ten more would spring from nowhere.
When he turned, they were all around him; an ill-favored gaggle
of leathery old men and smooth-cheeked lads younger than Petyr
Pimple, the lot of them clad in roughspun rags, boiled leather, and
bits of dead men’s armor. There was one woman with them,
bundled up in a hooded cloak three times too big for her. Merrett
was too ustered to count them, but there seemed to be a dozen at
the least, maybe a score.

“I asked a question.” The speaker was a big bearded man with
crooked green teeth and a broken nose; taller than Merrett, though
not so heavy in the belly. A halfhelm covered his head, a patched
yellow cloak his broad shoulders. “Where’s our gold?”
“In my saddlebag. A hundred golden dragons.” Merrett cleared
his throat. “You’ll get it when I see that Petyr—”
A squat one-eyed outlaw strode forward before he could nish,
reached into the saddlebag bold as you please, and found the sack.
Merrett started to grab him, then thought better of it. The outlaw
opened the drawstring, removed a coin, and bit it. “Tastes right.”
He hefted the sack. “Feels right too.”
They’re going to take the gold and keep Petyr too, Merrett thought in
sudden panic. “That’s the whole ransom. All you asked for.” His
palms were sweating. He wiped them on his breeches. “Which one
of you is Beric Dondarrion?” Dondarrion had been a lord before he
turned outlaw, he might still be a man of honor.
“Why, that would be me,” said the one-eyed man.
“You’re a bloody liar, Jack,” said the big bearded man in the
yellow cloak. “It’s my turn to be Lord Beric.”
“Does that mean I have to be Thoros?” The singer laughed. “My
lord, sad to say, Lord Beric was needed elsewhere. The times are
troubled, and there are many battles to ght. But we’ll sort you out
just as he would, have no fear.”
Merrett had plenty of fear. His head was pounding too. Much
more of this and he’d be sobbing. “You have your gold,” he said.
“Give me my nephew, and I’ll be gone.” Petyr was actually more a
great half-nephew, but there was no need to go into that.
“He’s in the godswood,” said the man in the yellow cloak. “We’ll
take you to him. Notch, you hold his horse.”
Merrett handed over the bridle reluctantly. He did not see what
other choice he had. “My water skin,” he heard himself say. “A
swallow of wine, to settle my—”
“We don’t drink with your sort,” yellow cloak said curtly. “It’s
this way. Follow me.”
Leaves crunched beneath their heels, and every step sent a spike
of pain through Merrett’s temple. They walked in silence, the wind

gusting around them. The last light of the setting sun was in his
eyes as he clambered over the mossy hummocks that were all that
remained of the keep. Behind was the godswood.
Petyr Pimple was hanging from the limb of an oak, a noose tight
around his long thin neck. His eyes bulged from a black face,
staring down at Merrett accusingly. You came too late, they seemed
to say. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t! He had come when they told him.
“You killed him,” he croaked.
“Sharp as a blade, this one,” said the one-eyed man.
An aurochs was thundering through Merrett’s head. Mother have
mercy, he thought. “I brought the gold.”
“That was good of you,” said the singer amiably. “We’ll see that
it’s put to good use.”
Merrett turned away from Petyr. He could taste the bile in the
back of his throat. “You … you had no right.”
“We had a rope,” said yellow cloak. “That’s right enough.”
Two of the outlaws seized Merrett’s arms and bound them tight
behind his back. He was too deep in shock to struggle. “No,” was all
he could manage. “I only came to ransom Petyr. You said if you had
the gold by sunset he wouldn’t be harmed …”
“Well,” said the singer, “you’ve got us there, my lord. That was a
lie of sorts, as it happens.”
The one-eyed outlaw came forward with a long coil of hempen
rope. He looped one end around Merrett’s neck, pulled it tight, and
tied a hard knot under his ear. The other end he threw over the
limb of the oak. The big man in the yellow cloak caught it.
“What are you doing?” Merrett knew how stupid that sounded,
but he could not believe what was happening, even then. “You’d
never dare hang a Frey.”
Yellow cloak laughed. “That other one, the pimply boy, he said
the same thing.”
He doesn’t mean it. He cannot mean it. “My father will pay you.
I’m worth a good ransom, more than Petyr, twice as much.”
The singer sighed. “Lord Walder might be half-blind and gouty,
but he’s not so stupid as to snap at the same bait twice. Next time
he’ll send a hundred swords instead of a hundred dragons, I fear.”

“He will!” Merrett tried to sound stern, but his voice betrayed
him. “He’ll send a thousand swords, and kill you all.”
“He has to catch us rst.” The singer glanced up at poor Petyr.
“And he can’t hang us twice, now can he?” He drew a melancholy
air from the strings of his woodharp. “Here now, don’t soil yourself.
All you need to do is answer me a question, and I’ll tell them to let
you go.”
Merrett would tell them anything if it meant his life. “What do
you want to know? I’ll tell you true, I swear it.”
The outlaw gave him an encouraging smile. “Well, as it happens,
we’re looking for a dog that ran away.”
“A dog?” Merrett was lost. “What kind of dog?”
“He answers to the name Sandor Clegane. Thoros says he was
making for the Twins. We found the ferrymen who took him across
the Trident, and the poor sod he robbed on the kingsroad. Did you
see him at the wedding, perchance?”
“The Red Wedding?” Merrett’s skull felt as if it were about to
split, but he did his best to recall. There had been so much
confusion, but surely someone would have mentioned Jo rey’s dog
sni ng round the Twins. “He wasn’t in the castle. Not at the main
feast … he might have been at the bastard feast, or in the camps,
but … no, someone would have said …”
“He would have had a child with him,” said the singer. “A skinny
girl, about ten. Or perhaps a boy the same age.”
“I don’t think so,” said Merrett. “Not that I knew.”
“No? Ah, that’s a pity. Well, up you go.”
“No,” Merrett squealed loudly. “No, don’t, I gave you your
answer, you said you’d let me go.”
“Seems to me that what I said was I’d tell them to let you go.”
The singer looked at yellow cloak. “Lem, let him go.”
“Go bugger yourself,” the big outlaw replied brusquely.
The singer gave Merrett a helpless shrug and began to play, “The
Day They Hanged Black Robin.”
“Please.” The last of Merrett’s courage was running down his leg.
“I’ve done you no harm. I brought the gold, the way you said. I
answered your question. I have children.”

“That Young Wolf never will,” said the one-eyed outlaw.
Merrett could hardly think for the pounding in his head. “He
shamed us, the whole realm was laughing, we had to cleanse the
stain on our honor.” His father had said all that and more.
“Maybe so. What do a bunch o’ bloody peasants know about a
lord’s honor?” Yellow cloak wrapped the end of the rope around his
hand three times. “We know some about murder, though.”
“Not murder.” His voice was shrill. “It was vengeance, we had a
right to our vengeance. It was war. Aegon, we called him Jinglebell,
a poor lackwit never hurt anyone, Lady Stark cut his throat. We lost
half a hundred men in the camps. Ser Garse Goodbrook, Kyra’s
husband, and Ser Tytos, Jared’s son … someone smashed his head in
with an axe … Stark’s direwolf killed four of our wolfhounds and
tore the kennelmaster’s arm o his shoulder, even after we’d lled
him full of quarrels …”
“So you sewed his head on Robb Stark’s neck after both o’ them
were dead,” said yellow cloak.
“My father did that. All I did was drink. You wouldn’t kill a man
for drinking.” Merrett remembered something then, something that
might be the saving of him. “They say Lord Beric always gives a
man a trial, that he won’t kill a man unless something’s proved
against him. You can’t prove anything against me. The Red
Wedding was my father’s work, and Ryman’s and Lord Bolton’s.
Lothar rigged the tents to collapse and put the crossbowmen in the
gallery with the musicians, Bastard Walder led the attack on the
camps … they’re the ones you want, not me, I only drank some
wine … you have no witness.”
“As it happens, you’re wrong there.” The singer turned to the
hooded woman. “Milady?”
The outlaws parted as she came forward, saying no word. When
she lowered her hood, something tightened inside Merrett’s chest,
and for a moment he could not breathe. No. No, I saw her die. She
was dead for a day and night before they stripped her naked and threw
her body in the river. Raymund opened her throat from ear to ear. She
was dead.

Her cloak and collar hid the gash his brother’s blade had made,
but her face was even worse than he remembered. The esh had
gone pudding soft in the water and turned the color of curdled milk.
Half her hair was gone and the rest had turned as white and brittle
as a crone’s. Beneath her ravaged scalp, her face was shredded skin
and black blood where she had raked herself with her nails. But her
eyes were the most terrible thing. Her eyes saw him, and they
hated.
“She don’t speak,” said the big man in the yellow cloak. “You
bloody bastards cut her throat too deep for that. But she
remembers.” He turned to the dead woman and said, “What do you
say, m’lady? Was he part of it?”
Lady Catelyn’s eyes never left him. She nodded.
Merrett Frey opened his mouth to plead, but the noose choked o
his words. His feet left the ground, the rope cutting deep into the
soft esh beneath his chin. Up into the air he jerked, kicking and
twisting, up and up and up.

APPENDIX

THE KINGS AND THEIR COURTS

THE KING ON THE IRON THRONE
JOFFREY BARATHEON, the First of His Name, a boy of thirteen
years, the eldest son of King Robert I Baratheon and Queen Cersei
of House Lannister,
—his mother, QUEEN CERSEI, of House Lannister, Queen Regent
and Protector of the Realm,
—Cersei’s sworn swords:
—SER OSFRYD KETTLEBLACK, younger brother to Ser
Osmund Kettleblack of the Kingsguard,
—SER OSNEY KETTLEBLACK, youngest brother of Ser
Osmund and Ser Osfryd,
—his sister, PRINCESS MYRCELLA, a girl of nine, a ward of
Prince Doran Martell at Sunspear,
—his brother, PRINCE TOMMEN, a boy of eight, next heir to the
Iron Throne,
—his grandfather, TYWIN LANNISTER, Lord of Casterly Rock,
Warden of the West, and Hand of the King,
—his uncles and cousins, paternal,
—his father’s brother, STANNIS BARATHEON, rebel Lord of
Dragonstone, styling himself King Stannis the First,

—Stannis’s daughter, SHIREEN, a girl of eleven,
—his father’s brother, {RENLY BARATHEON}, rebel Lord of
Storm’s End, murdered in the midst of his army,
—his grandmother’s brother, SER ELDON ESTERMONT,
—Ser Eldon’s son, SER AEMON ESTERMONT,
—Ser Aemon’s son, SER ALYN ESTERMONT,

—his uncles and cousins, maternal,

—his mother’s brother, SER JAIME LANNISTER, called THE
KINGSLAYER, a captive at Riverrun,
—his mother’s brother, TYRION LANNISTER, called THE IMP,
a dwarf, wounded in the Battle of the Blackwater,
—Tyrion’s squire, PODRICK PAYNE,
—Tyrion’s captain of guards, SER BRONN OF THE
BLACKWATER, a former sellsword,
—Tyrion’s concubine, SHAE, a camp follower now serving as
bedmaid to Lollys Stokeworth,
—his grandfather’s brother, SER KEVAN LANNISTER,
—Ser Kevan’s son, SER LANCEL LANNISTER, formerly squire
to King Robert, wounded in the Battle of the Blackwater,
near death,
—his grandfather’s brother, {TYGETT LANNISTER}, died of a
pox,

—Tygett’s son, TYREK LANNISTER, a squire, missing since the
great riot,
—Tyrek’s infant wife, LADY ERMESANDE HAYFORD,

—his baseborn siblings, King Robert’s bastards:
—MYA STONE, a maid of nineteen, in the service of Lord
Nestor Royce, of the Gates of the Moon,

—GENDRY, an apprentice smith, a fugitive in the riverlands
and ignorant of his heritage,

—EDRIC STORM, King Robert’s only acknowledged bastard
son, a ward of his uncle Stannis on Dragonstone,
—his Kingsguard:
—SER JAIME LANNISTER, Lord Commander,
—SER MERYN TRANT,

—SER BALON SWANN,
—SER OSMUND KETTLEBLACK,
—SER LORAS TYRELL, the Knight of Flowers,

—SER ARYS OAKHEART,
—his small council:

—LORD TYWIN LANNISTER, Hand of the King,
—SER KEVAN LANNISTER, master of laws,

—LORD PETYR BAELISH, called LITTLEFINGER, master of
coin,
—VARYS, a eunuch, called THE SPIDER, master of whisperers,
—LORD MACE TYRELL, master of ships,

—GRAND MAESTER PYCELLE,
—his court and retainers:

—SER ILYN PAYNE, the King’s Justice, a headsman,
—LORD HALLYNE THE PYROMANCER, a Wisdom of the Guild
of Alchemists,
—MOON BOY, a jester and fool,
—ORMOND OF OLDTOWN, the royal harper and bard,

—DONTOS HOLLARD, a fool and a drunkard, formerly a
knight called SER DONTOS THE RED,
—JALABHAR XHO, Prince of the Red Flower Vale, an exile
from the Summer Isles,
—LADY TANDA STOKEWORTH,
—her daughter, FALYSE, wed to Ser Balman Byrch,

—her daughter, LOLLYS, thirty-four, unwed, and soft of wits,
with child after being raped,
—her healer and counselor, MAESTER FRENKEN,

—LORD GYLES ROSBY, a sickly old man,
—SER TALLAD, a promising young knight,

—LORD MORROS SLYNT, a squire, eldest son of the former
Commander of the City Watch,
—JOTHOS SLYNT, his younger brother, a squire,

—DANOS SLYNT, younger still, a page,
—SER BOROS BLOUNT, a former knight of the Kingsguard,
dismissed for cowardice by Queen Cersei,

—JOSMYN PECKLEDON, a squire, and a hero of the Battle of
the Blackwater,

—SER PHILIP FOOTE, made Lord of the Marches for his valor
during the Battle of the Blackwater,
—SER LOTHOR BRUNE, named LOTHOR APPLE-EATER for his
deeds during the Battle of the Blackwater, a former free-rider
in service to Lord Baelish,

—other lords and knights at King’s Landing:

—MATHIS ROWAN, Lord of Goldengrove,

—PAXTER REDWYNE, Lord of the Arbor,
—Lord Paxter’s twin sons, SER HORAS and SER HOBBER,
mocked as HORROR and SLOBBER,
—Lord Redwyne’s healer, MAESTER BALLABAR,
—ARDRIAN CELTIGAR, the Lord of Claw Isle,

—LORD ALESANDER STAEDMON, called PENNYLOVER,

—SER BONIFER HASTY, called THE GOOD, a famed knight,
—SER DONNEL SWANN, heir to Stonehelm,
—SER RONNET CONNINGTON, called RED RONNET, the
Knight of Gri n’s Roost,

—AURANE WATERS, the Bastard of Driftmark,

—SER DERMOT OF THE RAINWOOD, a famed knight,
—SER TIMON SCRAPESWORD, a famed knight,

—the people of King’s Landing:

—the City Watch (the “gold cloaks”),
—{SER JACELYN BYWATER, called IRONHAND},
Commander of the City Watch, slain by his own men
during the Battle of the Blackwater,

—SER ADDAM MARBRAND, Commander of the City Watch,
Ser Jacelyn’s successor,
—CHATAYA, owner of an expensive brothel,
—ALAYAYA, her daughter,

—DANCY, MAREI, JAYDE, Chataya’s girls,

—TOBHO MOTT, a master armorer,
—IRONBELLY, a blacksmith,

—HAMISH THE HARPER, a famed singer,

—COLLIO QUAYNIS, a Tyroshi singer,
—BETHANY FAIR-FINGERS, a woman singer,
—ALARIC OF EYSEN, a singer, far-traveled,

—GALYEON OF CUY, a singer notorious for the length of his
songs,
—SYMON SILVER TONGUE, a singer.

King Jo rey’s banner shows the crowned stag of Baratheon, black
on gold, and the lion of Lannister, gold on crimson, combatant.

THE KING IN THE NORTH
THE KING OF THE TRIDENT

ROBB STARK, Lord of Winterfell, King in the North, and King of
the Trident, the eldest son of Eddark Stark, Lord of Winterfell,
and Lady Catelyn of House Tully,
—his direwolf, GREY WIND,

—his mother, LADY CATELYN, of House Tully, widow of Lord
Eddard Stark,
—his siblings:

—his sister, PRINCESS SANSA, a maid of twelve, a captive in
King’s Landing,
—Sansa’s direwolf, {LADY}, killed at Castle Darry,

—his sister, PRINCESS ARYA, a girl of ten, missing and
presumed dead,
—Arya’s direwolf, NYMERIA, lost near the Trident,

—his brother, PRINCE BRANDON, called BRAN, heir to the
north, a boy of nine, believed dead,
—Bran’s direwolf, SUMMER,

—Bran companions and protectors:
—MEERA REED, a maid of sixteen, daughter of Lord
Howland Reed of Greywater Watch,

—JOJEN REED, her brother, thirteen,
—HODOR, a simpleminded stableboy, seven feet tall,

—his brother, PRINCE RICKON, a boy of four, believed dead,
—Rickon’s direwolf, SHAGGYDOG,

—Rickon’s companion and protector:
—OSHA, a wildling captive who served as a scullion at
Winterfell,

—his half-brother, JON SNOW, a Sworn Brother of the Night’s
Watch,
—Jon’s direwolf, GHOST,

—his uncles and aunts, paternal:

—his father’s elder brother, {BRANDON STARK}, slain at the
command of King Aerys II Targaryen,

—his father’s sister, {LYANNA STARK}, died in the Mountains
of Dorne during Robert’s Rebellion,
—his father’s younger brother, BENJEN STARK, a man of the
Night’s Watch, lost beyond the Wall,

—his uncles, aunts, and cousins, maternal:
—his mother’s younger sister, LYSA ARRYN, Lady of the Eyrie
and widow of Lord Jon Arryn,
—their son, ROBERT ARRYN, Lord of the Eyrie,

—his mother’s younger brother, SER EDMURE TULLY, heir to
Riverrun,

—his grandfather’s brother, SER BRYNDEN TULLY, called THE
BLACKFISH,

—his sworn swords and companions:
—his squire, OLYVAR FREY,

—SER WENDEL MANDERLY, second son to the Lord of White
Harbor,
—PATREK MALLISTER, heir to Seagard,

—DACEY MORMONT, eldest daughter of Lady Maege
Mormont and heir to Bear Island,

—JON UMBER, called THE SMALLJON, heir to Last Hearth,

—DONNEL LOCKE, OWEN NORREY, ROBIN FLINT, northmen,
—his lords bannermen, captains and commanders:
—(with Robb’s army in the Westerlands)

—SER BRYNDEN TULLY, the BLACKFISH, commanding the
scouts and outriders,

—JON UMBER, called THE GREATJON, commanding the van,
—RICKARD KARSTARK, Lord of Karhold,

—GALBART GLOVER, Master of Deepwood Motte,

—MAEGE MORMONT, Lady of Bear Island,
—{SER STEVRON FREY}, eldest son of Lord Walder Frey and
heir to the Twins, died at Oxcross,
—Ser Stevron’s eldest son, SER RYMAN FREY,
—Ser Ryman’s son, BLACK WALDER FREY,

—MARTYN RIVERS, a bastard son of Lord Walder Frey,

—( with Roose Bolton’s host at Harrengal ),

—ROOSE BOLTON, Lord of the Dreadfort,

—SER AENYS FREY, SER JARED FREY, SER HOSTEEN FREY,
SER DANWELL FREY
—their bastard half-brother, RONEL RIVERS,

—SER WYLIS MANDERLY, heir to White Harbor,
—SER KYLE CONDON, a knight in his service,

—RONNEL STOUT,
—VARGO HOAT of the Free City of Qohor, captain of a
sellsword company, the Brave Companions,
—his lieutenant, URSWYCK called THE FAITHFUL,
—his lieutenant, SEPTON UTT,

—TIMEON OF DORNE, RORGE, IGGO, FAT ZOLLO, BITER,
TOGG JOTH of Ibben, PYG, THREE TOES, his men,

—QYBURN, a chainless maester and sometime necromancer,
his healer,

—(with the northern army attacking Duskendale)
—ROBETT GLOVER, of Deepwood Motte,

—SER HELMAN TALLHART, of Torrhen’s Square,

—HARRION KARSTARK, sole surviving son of Lord Rickard
Karstark, and heir to Karhold,

—(traveling north with Lord Eddard’s bones)

—HALLIS MOLLEN, captain of guards for Winterfell,
—JACKS, QUENT, SHADD, guardsmen,

—his lord bannermen and castellans, in the north:
—WYMAN MANDERLY, Lord of White Harbor,

—HOWLAND REED, Lord of Greywater Watch, a crannogman,
—MORS UMBER, called CROWFOOD, and HOTHER UMBER,
called WHORESBANE, uncles to Greatjon Umber, joint
castellans at the Last Hearth,
—LYESSA FLINT, Lady of Widow’s Watch,

—ONDREW LOCKE, Lord of Oldcastle, an old man,

—{CLEY CERWYN}, Lord of Cerwyn, a boy of fourteen, killed
in battle at Winterfell,
—his sister, JONELLE CERWYN, a maid of two-and-thirty,
now the Lady of Cerwyn,

—{LEOBALD TALLHART}, younger brother to Ser Helman,
castellan at Torrhen’s Square, killed in battle at Winterfell,
—Leobald’s wife, BERENA of House Hornwood,
—Leobald’s son, BRANDON, a boy of fourteen,
—Leobald’s son, BEREN, a boy of ten,

—Ser Helman’s son, {BENFRED}, killed by ironmen on the
Stony Shore,
—Ser Helman’s daughter, EDDARA, a girl of nine, heir to
Torrhen’s Square,

—LADY SYBELLE, wife to Robett Glover, a captive of Asha
Greyjoy at Deepwood Motte,

—Robett’s son, GAWEN, three, rightful heir to Deepwood
Motte, a captive of Asha Greyjoy,

—Robett’s daughter, ERENA, a babe of one, a captive of Asha
Greyjoy at Deepwood Motte,

—LARENCE SNOW, a bastard son of Lord Hornwood, and
ward of Galbart Glover, thirteen, a captive of Asha Greyjoy
at Deepwood Motte.

The banner of the King in the North remains as it has for thousands
of years: the grey direwolf of the Starks of Winterfell, running
across an ice-white eld.

THE KING IN THE NARROW SEA
STANNIS BARATHEON, the First of His Name, second son of Lord
Ste on Baratheon and Lady Cassana of House Estermont,
formerly Lord of Dragonstone,
—his wife, QUEEN SELYSE of House Florent,

—PRINCESS SHIREEN, their daughter, a girl of eleven,
—PATCHFACE, her lackwit fool,

—his baseborn nephew, EDRIC STORM, a boy of twelve, bastard
son of King Robert by Delena Florent,
—his squires, DEVAN SEAWORTH and BRYEN FARRING,

—his court and retainers:
—LORD ALESTER FLORENT, Lord of Brightwater Keep and
Hand of the King, the queen’s uncle,

—SER AXELL FLORENT, castellan of Dragonstone and leader of
the queen’s men, the queen’s uncle,
—LADY MELISANDRE OF ASSHAI, called THE RED WOMAN,
priestess of R’hllor, the Lord of Light and God of Flame and
Shadow,
—MAESTER PYLOS, healer, tutor, counselor,

—SER DAVOS SEAWORTH, called THE ONION KNIGHT and
sometimes SHORTHAND, once a smuggler,
—Davos’s wife, LADY MARYA, a carpenter’s daughter,
—their seven sons:

—{DALE}, lost on the Blackwater,

—{ALLARD}, lost on the Blackwater,

—{MATTHOS}, lost on the Blackwater,
—{MARIC}, lost on the Blackwater,
—DEVAN, squire to King Stannis,
—STANNIS, a boy of nine years,
—STEFFON, a boy of six years,

—SALLADHOR SAAN, of the Free City of Lys, styling himself
Prince of the Narrow Sea and Lord of Blackwater Bay, master
of the Valyrian and a eet of sister galleys,
—MEIZO MAHR, a eunuch in his hire,

—KHORANE SATHMANTES, captain of his galley Shayala’s
Dance,

—“PORRIDGE” and “LAMPREY,” two gaolers,

—his lords bannermen,
—MONTERYS VELARYON, Lord of the Tides and Master of
Driftmark, a boy of six,

—DURAM BAR EMMON, Lord of Sharp Point, a boy of fteen
years,
—SER GILBERT FARRING, castellan of Storm’s End,

—LORD ELWOOD MEADOWS, Ser Gilbert’s second,
—MAESTER JURNE, Ser Gilbert’s counselor and healer,

—LORD LUCOS CHYTTERING, called LITTLE LUCOS, a youth
of sixteen,
—LESTER MORRIGEN, Lord of Crows Nest,

—his knights and sworn swords,

—SER LOMAS ESTERMONT, the king’s maternal uncle,
—his son, SER ANDREW ESTERMONT,

—SER ROLLAND STORM, called THE BASTARD OF
NIGHTSONG, a baseborn son of the late Lord Bryen Caron,

—SER PARMEN CRANE, called PARMEN THE PURPLE, held
captive at Highgarden,
—SER ERREN FLORENT, younger brother to Queen Selyse,
held captive at Highgarden,
—SER GERALD GOWER,

—SER TRISTON OF TALLY HILL, formerly in service to Lord
Guncer Sunglass,
—LEWYS, called THE FISHWIFE,

—OMER BLACKBERRY.
King Stannis has taken for his banner the ery heart of the Lord of
Light: a red heart surrounded by orange ames upon a yellow eld.
Within the heart is the crowned stag of House Baratheon, in black.

THE QUEEN ACROSS THE WATER
DAENERYS TARGARYEN, the First of Her Name, Khaleesi of the
Dothraki, called DAENERYS STORMBORN, the UNBURNT,
MOTHER OF DRAGONS, sole surviving heir of Aerys II Targaryen
widow of Khal Drogo of the Dothraki,
—her growing dragons, DROGON, VISERION, RHAEGAL,
—her Queensguard:

—SER JORAH MORMONT, formerly Lord of Bear Island, exiled
for slaving,
—JHOGO, ko and bloodrider, the whip,

—AGGO, ko and bloodrider, the bow,
—RAKHARO, ko and bloodrider, the arakh,

—STRONG BELWAS, a former eunuch slave from the ghting
pits of Meereen,

—his aged squire, ARSTAN called WHITEBEARD; a man of
Westeros,

—her handmaids:

—IRRI, a Dothraki girl, fteen,

—JHIQUI, a Dothraki girl, fourteen,
—GROLEO, captain of the great cog Balerion, a Pentoshi seafarer
in the hire of Illyrio Mopatis,

—her late kin:
—{RHAEGAR}, her brother, Prince of Dragonstone and heir to
the Iron Throne, slain by Robert Baratheon on the Trident,
—{RHAENYS}, Rhaegar’s daughter by Elia of Dorne,
murdered during the Sack of King’s Landing,

—{AEGON}, Rhaegar’s son by Elia of Dorne, murdered
during the Sack of King’s Landing,

—{VISERYS}, her brother, styling himself King Viserys,

the Third of His Name, called THE BEGGAR KING, slain in Vaes
Dothrak by Khal Drogo,
—{DROGO}, her husband, a great khal of the Dothraki, never
defeated in battle, died of a wound,
—{RHAEGO}, her stillborn son by Khal Drogo, slain in the
womb by Mirri Maz Duur,

—her known enemies:

—KHAL PONO, once ko to Drogo,

—KHAL JHAQO, once ko to Drogo,
—MAGGO, his bloodrider,

—THE UNDYING OF QARTH, a band of warlocks,
—PYAT PREE, a Qartheen warlock,

—THE SORROWFUL MEN, a guild of Qartheen assassins,

—her uncertain allies, past and present:
—XARO XHOAN DAXOS, a merchant prince of Qarth,

—QUAITHE, a masked shadowbinder from Asshai,

—ILLYRIO MOPATIS, a magister of the Free City of Pentos,
who brokered her marriage to Khal Drogo,

—in Astapor:

—KRAZNYS MO NAKLOZ, a wealthy slave trader,

—his slave, MISSANDEI, a girl of ten, of the Peaceful People
of Naath,

—GRAZDAN MO ULLHOR, an old slave trader, very rich,
—his slave, CLEON, a butcher and cook,

—GREY WORM, an eunuch of the Unsullied,

—in Yunkai:

—GRAZDAN MO ERAZ, envoy and nobleman,

—MERO OF BRAAVOS, called THE TITAN’S BASTARD, captain
of the Second Sons, a free company,
—BROWN BEN PLUMM, a sergeant in the Second Sons, a
sellsword of dubious descent,

—PRENDAHL NA GHEZN, a Ghiscari sellsword, captain of the
Stormcrows, a free company,
—SALLOR THE BALD, a Qartheen sellsword, captain of the
Stormcrows,

—DAARIO NAHARIS, a amboyant Tyroshi sellsword, captain
of the Stormcrows,

—in Meereen:

—OZNAK ZO PAHL, a hero of the city.

The banner of Daenerys Targaryen is the banner of Aegon the
Conqueror and the dynasty he established: a three-headed dragon,
red on black.

KING OF THE ISLES
AND THE NORTH
BALON GREYJOY, the Ninth of His Name Since the Grey King,
styling himself King of the Iron Islands and the North, King of
Salt and Rock, Son of the Sea Wind, and Lord Reaper of Pyke,
—his wife, QUEEN ALANNYS, of House Harlaw,
—their children:

—{RODRIK}, their eldest son, slain at Seagard during Greyjoy’s
Rebellion,
—{MARON}, their second son, slain at Pyke during Greyjoy’s
Rebellion,
—ASHA, their daughter, captain of the Black Wind and
conqueror of Deepwood Motte,

—THEON, their youngest son, captain of the Sea Bitch and
brie y Prince of Winterfell,

—Theon’s squire, WEX PYKE, bastard son of Lord Botley’s
half-brother, a mute lad of twelve,
—Theon’s crew, the men of the Sea Bitch:

—URZEN, MARON BOTLEY called FISHWHISKERS,
STYGG, GEVIN HARLAW, CADWYLE,

—his brothers:

—EURON, called Crow’s Eye, captain of the Silence, a notorious
outlaw, pirate, and raider,
—VICTARION, Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, master of the
Iron Victory,
—AERON, called DAMPHAIR, a priest of the Drowned God,

—his household on Pyke:

—MAESTER WENDAMYR, healer and counselor,
—HELYA, keeper of the castle,

—his warriors and sworn swords:

—DAGMER called CLEFTJAW, captain of Foamdrinker,
—BLUETOOTH, a longship captain,

—ULLER, SKYTE, oarsmen and warriors,

—ANDRIK THE UNSMILING, a giant of a man,

—QARL, called QARL THE MAID, beardless but deadly,

—people of Lordsport:

—OTTER GIMPKNEE, innkeeper and whoremonger,
—SIGRIN, a shipwright,

—his lords bannermen:

—SAWANE BOTLEY, Lord of Lordsport, on Pyke,
—LORD WYNCH, of Iron Holt, on Pyke,

—STONEHOUSE, DRUMM, and GOODBROTHER of Old Wyk,

—LORD GOODBROTHER, SPARR, LORD MERLYN, and LORD
FARWYND of Great Wyk,
—LORD HARLAW, of Harlaw,

—VOLMARK, MYRE, STONETREE, and KENNING, of Harlaw,
—ORKWOOD and TAWNEY of Orkmont,
—LORD BLACKTYDE of Blacktyde,

—LORD SALTCLIFFE and LORD SUNDERLY of Saltcli e.

OTHER HOUSES GREAT
AND SMALL

HOUSE ARRYN
The Arryns are descended from the Kings of Mountain and Vale, one
of the oldest and purest lines of Andal nobility. House Arryn has
taken no part in the War of the Five Kings, holding back its strength
to protect the Vale of Arryn. The Arryn sigil is the moon-and-falcon,
white, upon a sky-blue eld. The Arryn words are As High As Honor.
ROBERT ARRYN, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale, Warden
of the East, a sickly boy of eight years,
—his mother, LADY LYSA, of House Tully, third wife and widow
of Lord Jon Arryn, and sister to Catelyn Stark,
—their household:
—MARILLION, a handsome young singer, much favored by
Lady Lysa,
—MAESTER COLEMON, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER MARWYN BELMORE, captain of guards,
—MORD, a brutal gaoler,
—his lords bannermen, knights, and retainers:
—LORD NESTOR ROYCE, High Steward of the Vale and
castellan of the Gates of the Moon, of the junior branch of
House Royce,
—Lord Nestor’s son, SER ALBAR,
—Lord Nestor’s daughter, MYRANDA,
—MYA STONE, a bastard girl in his service, natural daughter
of King Robert I Baratheon,

—LORD YOHN ROYCE, called BRONZE YOHN, Lord of
Runestone, of the senior branch of House Royce, cousin to Lord
Nestor,
—Lord Yohn’s eldest son, SER ANDAR,

—Lord Yohn’s second son, {SER ROBAR}, a knight of Renly
Baratheon’s Rainbow Guard, slain at Storm’s End by Ser
Loras Tyrell,

—Lord Yohn’s youngest son, {SER WAYMAR}, a man of the
Night’s Watch, lost beyond the Wall,
—SER LYN CORBRAY, a suitor to Lady Lysa,
—MYCHEL REDFORT, his squire,
—LADY ANYA WAYNWOOD,
—Lady Anya’s eldest son and heir, SER MORTON, a suitor to
Lady Lysa,
—Lady Anya’s second son, SER DONNEL, the Knight of the
Gate,
—EON HUNTER, Lord of Longbow Hall, an old man, and a suitor
to Lady Lysa,
—HORTON REDFORT, Lord of Redfort.

HOUSE FLORENT
The Florents of Brightwater Keep are Tyrell bannermen, despite a
superior claim to Highgarden by virtue of a blood tie to House
Gardener, the old Kings of the Reach. At the outbreak of the War of
the Five Kings, Lord Alester Florent followed the Tyrells in
declaring for King Renly, but his brother Ser Axell chose King
Stannis, whom he had served for years as castellan of Dragonstone.
Their niece Selyse was and is King Stannis’s queen. When Renly died
at Storm’s End, the Florents went over to Stannis with all their
strength, the rst of Renly’s bannermen to do so. The sigil of House
Florent shows a fox head in a circle of owers.
ALESTER FLORENT, Lord of Brightwater,
—his wife, LADY MELARA, of House Crane,
—their children:
—ALEKYNE, heir to Brightwater,
—MELESSA, wed to Lord Randyll Tarly,
—RHEA, wed to Lord Leyton Hightower,
—his siblings:
—SER AXELL, castellan of Dragonstone,
—{SER RYAM}, died in a fall from a horse,
—Ser Ryam’s daughter, QUEEN SELYSE, wed to King Stannis
Baratheon,
—Ser Ryam’s son, {SER IMRY}, commanding Stannis
Baratheon’s eet on the Blackwater, lost with the Fury,
—Ser Ryam’s second son, SER ERREN, held captive at
Highgarden,

—SER COLIN,
—Ser Colin’s daughter, DELENA, wed to SER HOSMAN
NORCROSS,

—Delena’s son, EDRIC STORM, a bastard of King Robert I
Baratheon, twelve years of age,
—Delena’s son, ALESTER NORCROSS, eight,

—Delena’s son, RENLY NORCROSS, a boy of two,
—Ser Colin’s son, MAESTER OMER, in service at Old Oak,
—Ser Colin’s son, MERRELL, a squire on the Arbor,
—his sister, RYLENE, wed to Ser Rycherd Crane.

HOUSE FREY
Powerful, wealthy, and numerous, the Freys are bannermen to
House Tully, but they have not always been diligent in their duty.
When Robert Baratheon met Rhaegar Targaryen on the Trident, the
Freys did not arrive until the battle was done, and thereafter Lord
Hoster Tully always called Lord Walder “the Late Lord Frey.” It is
also said of Walder Frey that he is the only lord in the Seven
Kingdoms who could eld an army out of his breeches.
At the onset of the War of the Five Kings, Robb Stark won Lord
Walder’s allegiance by pledging to wed one of his daughters or
granddaughters. Two of Lord Walder’s grandsons were sent to
Winterfell to be fostered.
WALDER FREY, Lord of the Crossing,
—by his rst wife, {LADY PERRA, of House Royce}:
—{SER STEVRON}, their eldest son, died after the Battle of
Oxcross,
—m. {Corenna Swann, died of a wasting illness},
—Stevron’s eldest son, SER RYMAN, heir to the Twins,
—Ryman’s son, EDWYN, wed to Janyce Hunter,
—Edwyn’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of eight,
—Ryman’s son, WALDER, called BLACK WALDER,
—Ryman’s son, PETYR, called PETYR PIMPLE,
—m. Mylenda Caron,
—Petyr’s daughter, PERRA, a girl of ve,
—m. {Jeyne Lydden, died in a fall from a horse},
—Stevron’s son, AEGON, a halfwit called JINGLEBELL,

—Stevron’s daughter, {MAEGELLE, died in childbed}, m. Ser
Dafyn Vance,
—Maegelle’s daughter, MARIANNE, a maiden,
—Maegelle’s son, WALDER VANCE, a squire,
—Maegelle’s son, PATREK VANCE,

—m. (Marsella Waynwood, died in childbed},

—Stevron’s son, WALTON, m. Deana Hardyng,

—Walton’s son, STEFFON, called THE SWEET,
—Walton’s daughter, WALDA, called FAIR WALDA,
—Walton’s son, BRYAN, a squire,
—SER EMMON, m. Genna of House Lannister,
—Emmon’s son, SER CLEOS, m. Jeyne Darry,
—Cleos’s son, TYWIN, a squire of eleven,
—Cleos’s son, WILLEM, a page at Ashemark, nine,
—Emmon’s son, SER LYONEL, m. Melesa Crakehall,
—Emmon’s son, TION, a captive at Riverrun,
—Emmon’s son, WALDER, called RED WALDER, fourteen, a
squire at Casterly Rock,
—SER AENYS, m. {Tyana Wylde, died in childbed},
—Aenys’s son, AEGON BLOODBORN, an outlaw,
—Aenys’s son, RHAEGAR, m. Jeyne Beesbury,
—Rhaegar’s son, ROBERT, a boy of thirteen,

—Rhaegar’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of ten, called WHITE
WALDA,
—Rhaegar’s son, JONOS, a boy of eight,
—PERRIANE, m. Ser Leslyn Haigh,
—Perriane’s son, SER HARYS HAIGH,
—Harys’s son, WALDER HAIGH, a boy of four,
—Perriane’s son, SER DONNEL HAIGH,

—Perriane’s son, ALYN HAIGH, a squire,
—by his second wife, {LADY CYRENNA, of House Swann}:
—SER JARED, their eldest son, m. {Alys Frey},
—Jared’s son, SER TYTOS, m. Zhoe Blanetree,
—Tytos’s daughter, ZIA, a maid of fourteen,

—Tytos’s son, ZACHERY, a boy of twelve, training at
the Sept of Oldtown,
—Jared’s daughter, KYRA, m. Ser Garse Goodbrook,
—Kyra’s son, WALDER GOODBROOK, a boy of nine,
—Kyra’s daughter, JEYNE GOODBROOK, six,

—SEPTON LUCEON, in service at the Great Sept of Baelor in
King’s Landing,
—by his third wife, {LADY AMAREI of House Crakehall}:
—SER HOSTEEN, their eldest son, m. Bellena Hawick,
—Hosteen’s son, SER ARWOOD, m. Ryella Royce,
—Arwood’s daughter, RYELLA, a girl of ve,

—Arwood’s twin sons, ANDROW and ALYN, three,
—LADY LYTHENE, m. Lord Lucias Vypren,
—Lythene’s daughter, ELYANA, m. Ser Jon Wylde,
—Elyana’s son, RICKARD WYLDE, four,

—Lythene’s son, SER DAMON VYPREN,
—SYMOND, m. Betharios of Braavos,
—Symond’s son, ALESANDER, a singer,

—Symond’s daughter, ALYX, a maid of seventeen,
—Symond’s son, BRADAMAR, a boy of ten, fostered on
Braavos as a ward of Oro Tendyris, a merchant of that city,

—SER DANWELL, m. Wynafrei Whent,
—{many stillbirths and miscarriages},
—MERRETT, m. Mariya Darry,

—Merrett’s daughter, AMEREI, called AMI, a widow of
sixteen, m. {Ser Pate of the Blue Fork},
—Merrett’s daughter, WALDA, called FAT WALDA, a wife of
fteen years, m. Lord Roose Bolton,
—Merrett’s daughter, MARISSA, a maid of thirteen,

—Merrett’s son, WALDER, called LITTLE WALDER, a boy of
seven, taken captive at Winterfell while a ward of Lady
Catelyn Stark,
—{SER GEREMY, drowned}, m. Carolei Waynwood,
—Geremy’s son, SANDOR, a boy of twelve, a squire to Ser
Donnel Waynwood,
—Geremy’s daughter, CYNTHEA, a girl of nine, a ward of
Lady Anya Waynwood,

—SER RAYMUND, m. Beony Beesbury,
—Raymund’s son, ROBERT, sixteen, in training at the Citadel
in Oldtown,
—Raymund’s son, MALWYN, fteen, apprenticed to an
alchemist in Lys,

—Raymund’s twin daughters, SERRA and SARRA, maiden
girls of fourteen,
—Raymund’s daughter, CERSEI, six, called LITTLE BEE,

—by his fourth wife, {LADY ALYSSA, of House Blackwood}:
—LOTHAR, their eldest son, called LAME LOTHAR, m.
Leonella Le ord,
—Lothar’s daughter, TYSANE, a girl of seven,

—Lothar’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of four,
—Lothar’s daughter, EMBERLEI, a girl of two,

—SER JAMMOS, m. Sallei Paege,

—Jammos’s son, WALDER, called BIG WALDER, a boy of
eight, taken captive at Winterfell while a ward of Lady
Catelyn Stark,

—Jammos’s twin sons, DICKON and MATHIS, ve,

—SER WHALEN, m. Sylwa Paege,
—Whalen’s son, HOSTER, a boy of twelve, a squire to Ser
Damon Paege,
—Whalen’s daughter, MERIANNE, called MERRY, a girl of
eleven,
—LADY MORYA, m. Ser Flement Brax,
—Morya’s son, ROBERT BRAX, nine, fostered at Casterly
Rock as a page,
—Morya’s son, WALDER BRAX, a boy of six,
—Morya’s son, JON BRAX, a babe of three,

—TYTA, called TYTA THE MAID, a maid of twenty-nine,

—by his fth wife, {LADY SARYA of House Whent}:

—no progeny,
—by his sixth wife, {LADY BETHANY of House Rosby}:
—SER PERWYN, their eldest son,

—SER BENFREY, m. Jyanna Frey, a cousin,
—Benfrey’s daughter, DELLA, called DEAF DELLA, a girl of
three,
—Benfrey’s son, OSMUND, a boy of two,
—MAESTER WILLAMEN, in service at Longbow Hall,
—OLYVAR, squire to Robb Stark,
—ROSLIN, a maid of sixteen,

—by his seventh wife, {LADY ANNARA of House Farring}:
—ARWYN, a maid of fourteen,

—WENDEL, their eldest son, a boy of thirteen, fostered at
Seagard as a page,
—COLMAR, promised to the Faith, eleven,
—WALTYR, called TYR, a boy of ten,

—ELMAR, formerly betrothed to Arya Stark, a boy of nine,

—SHIREI, a girl of six,

—his eighth wife, LADY JOYEUSE of House Erenford,
—no progeny as yet,
—Lord Walder’s natural children, by sundry mothers,
—WALDER RIVERS, called BASTARD WALDER,

—Bastard Walder’s son, SER AEMON RIVERS,

—Bastard Walder’s daughter, WALDA RIVERS,
—MAESTER MELWYS, in service at Rosby,

—JEYNE RIVERS, MARTYN RIVERS, RYGER RIVERS, RONEL
RIVERS, MELLARA RIVERS, others.

HOUSE LANNISTER
The Lannisters of Casterly Rock remain the principal support of
King Jo rey’s claim to the Iron Throne. They boast of descent from
Lann the Clever, the legendary trickster of the Age of Heroes. The
gold of Casterly Rock and the Golden Tooth has made them the
wealthiest of the Great Houses. The Lannister sigil is a golden lion
upon a crimson eld. Their words are Hear Me Roar!
TYWIN LANNISTER, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West,
Shield of Lannisport, and Hand of the King,
—his son, SER JAIME, called THE KINGSLAYER, a twin to Queen
Cersei, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and Warden of the
East, a captive at Riverrun,
—his daughter, QUEEN CERSEI, twin to Jaime, widow of King
Robert I Baratheon, Queen Regent for her son Jo rey,
—her son, KING JOFFREY BARATHEON, a boy of thirteen,
—her daughter, PRINCESS MYRCELLA BARATHEON, a girl of
nine, a ward of Prince Doran Martell in Dorne,
—her son, PRINCE TOMMEN BARATHEON, a boy of eight,
heir to the Iron Throne,
—his dwarf son, TYRION, called THE IMP, called HALFMAN,
wounded and scarred on the Blackwater,
—his siblings:
—SER KEVAN, Lord Tywin’s eldest brother,
—Ser Kevan’s wife, DORNA, of House Swyft,
—their son, SER LANCEL, formerly a squire to King Robert,
wounded and near death,

—their son, WILLEM, twin to Martyn, a squire, captive at
Riverrun,
—their son, MARTYN, twin to Willem, a squire, a captive
with Robb Stark,
—their daughter, JANEI, a girl of two,

—GENNA, his sister, wed to Ser Emmon Frey,

—their son, SER CLEOS FREY, a captive at Riverrun,
—their son, SER LYONEL,
—their son, TION FREY, a squire, captive at Riverrun,
—their son, WALDER, called RED WALDER, a squire at
Casterly Rock,
—{SER TYGETT}, his second brother, died of a pox,
—Tygett’s widow, DARLESSA, of House Marbrand,
—their son, TYREK, squire to the king, missing,
—{GERION}, his youngest brother, lost at sea,
—Gerion’s bastard daughter, JOY, eleven,
—his cousin, {SER STAFFORD LANNISTER}, brother to the late
Lady Joanna, slain at Oxcross,
—Ser Sta ord’s daughters, CERENNA and MYRIELLE,
—Ser Sta ord’s son, SER DAVEN,
—his cousins:

—SER DAMION LANNISTER, m. Lady Shiera Crakehall,
—his son, SER LUCION,
—his daughter, LANNA, m. Lord Antario Jast,

—MARGOT, m. Lord Titus Peake,
—his household:

—MAESTER CREYLEN, healer, tutor, and counselor,
—VYLARR, captain-of-guards,
—LUM and RED LESTER, guardsmen,

—WHITESMILE WAT, a singer,
—SER BENEDICT BROOM, master-at-arms,

—his lords bannermen:
—DAMON MARBRAND, Lord of Ashemark,
—SER ADDAM MARBRAND, his son and heir,

—ROLAND CRAKEHALL, Lord of Crakehall,
—his brother, {SER BURTON CRAKEHALL}, killed by Lord
Beric Dondarrion and his outlaws,
—his son and heir, SER TYBOLT CRAKEHALL,
—his second son, SER LYLE CRAKEHALL; called
STRONGBOAR, a captive at Pinkmaiden Castle,

—his youngest son, SER MERLON CRAKEHALL,
—{ANDROS BRAX}, Lord of Hornvale, drowned during the
Battle of the Camps,

—his brother, {SER RUPERT BRAX}, slain at Oxcross,
—his eldest son, SER TYTOS BRAX, now Lord of Hornvale, a
captive at the Twins,

—his second son, {SER ROBERT BRAX}, slain at the Battle of
the Fords,
—his third son, SER FLEMENT BRAX, now heir,

—{LORD LEO LEFFORD}, drowned at the Stone Mill,
—REGENARD ESTREN, Lord of Wyndhall, a captive at the
Twins,
—GAWEN WESTERLING, Lord of the Crag, a captive at
Seagard,
—his wife, LADY SYBELL, of House Spicer,
—her brother, SER ROLPH SPICER,
—her cousin, SER SAMWELL SPICER,

—their children:
—SER RAYNALD WESTERLING,

—JEYNE, a maid of sixteen years,
—ELEYNA, a girl of twelve,

—ROLLAM, a boy of nine,
—LEWYS LYDDEN, Lord of the Deep Den,
—LORD ANTARIO JAST, a captive at Pinkmaiden Castle,
—LORD PHILIP PLUMM,

—his sons, SER DENNIS PLUMM, SER PETER PLUMM, and
SER HARWYN PLUMM, called HARDSTONE,

—QUENTEN BANEFORT, Lord of Banefort, a captive of Lord
Jonos Bracken,

—his knights and captains:

—SER HARYS SWYFT, good-father to Ser Kevan Lannister,
—Ser Harys’s son, SER STEFFON SWYFT,
—Ser Ste on’s daughter, JOANNA,

—Ser Harys’s daughter, SHIERLE, m. Ser Melwyn Sars eld,

—SER FORLEY PRESTER,
—SER GARTH GREENFIELD, a captive at Raventree Hall,
—SER LYMOND VIKARY, a captive at Wayfarer’s Rest,
—LORD SELMOND STACKSPEAR,

—his son, SER STEFFON STACKSPEAR,
—his younger son, SER ALYN STACKSPEAR,

—TERRENCE KENNING, Lord of Kayce,

—SER KENNOS OF KAYCE, a knight in his service,
—SER GREGOR CLEGANE, the Mountain That Rides,

—POLLIVER, CHISWYCK, RAFF THE SWEETLING, DUNSEN,
and THE TICKLER, soldiers in his service,
—{SER AMORY LORCH}, fed to a bear by Vargo Hoat after the
fall of Harrenhal.

HOUSE MARTELL
Dorne was the last of the Seven Kingdoms to swear fealty to the
Iron Throne. Blood, custom, and history all set the Dornishmen
apart from the other kingdoms. At the outbreak of the War of the
Five Kings, Dorne took no part. With the betrothal of Myrcella
Baratheon to Prince Trystane, Sunspear declared its support for King
Jo rey and called its banners. The Martell banner is a red sun
pierced by a golden spear. Their words are Unbowed, Unbent,
Unbroken.
DORAN NYMEROS MARTELL, Lord of Sunspear, Prince of Dorne,
—his wife, MELLARIO, of the Free City of Norvos,
—their children:
—PRINCESS ARIANNE, their eldest daughter, heir to Sunspear,
—PRINCE QUENTYN, their elder son,
—PRINCE TRYSTANE, their younger son, betrothed to
Myrcella Baratheon,
—his siblings:
—his sister, {PRINCESS ELIA}, wife of Prince Rhaegar
Targaryen, slain during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—their children:
—{PRINCESS RHAENYS}, a young girl, slain during the Sack
of King’s Landing,
—{PRINCE AEGON}, a babe, slain during the Sack of King’s
Landing,
—his brother, PRINCE OBERYN, called THE RED VIPER,
—Prince Oberyn’s paramour, ELLARIA SAND,

—Prince Oberyn’s bastard daughters, OBARA, NYMERIA,
TYENE, SARELLA, ELIA, OBELLA, DOREA, LOREZA, called
THE SAND SNAKES,
—Prince Oberyn’s companions:

—HARMEN ULLER, Lord of Hellholt,

—Harmen’s brother, SER ULWYCK ULLER,

—SER RYON ALLYRION,
—Ser Ryon’s natural son, SER DAEMON SAND, the
Bastard of Godsgrace,
—DAGOS MANWOODY, Lord of Kingsgrave,
—Dagos’s sons, MORS and DICKON,
—Dagos’s brother, SER MYLES MANWOODY,
—SER ARRON QORGYLE,
—SER DEZIEL DALT, the Knight of Lemonwood,
—MYRIA JORDAYNE, heir to the Tor,
—LARRA BLACKMONT, Lady of Blackmont,
—her daughter, JYNESSA BLACKMONT,
—her son, PERROS BLACKMONT, a squire,

—his household:
—AREO HOTAH, a Norvoshi sellsword, captain of guards,
—MAESTER CALEOTTE, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—his lords bannermen:
—HARMEN ULLER, Lord of Hellholt,

—EDRIC DAYNE, Lord of Starfall,
—DELONNE ALLYRION, Lady of Godsgrace,
—DAGOS MANWOODY, Lord of Kingsgrave,

—LARRA BLACKMONT, Lady of Blackmont,
—TREMOND GARGALEN, Lord of Salt Shore,
—ANDERS YRONWOOD, Lord of Yronwood,

—NYMELLA TOLAND.

HOUSE TULLY
Lord Edmyn Tully of Riverrun was one of the rst of the river lords
to swear fealty to Aegon the Conqueror. The victorious Aegon
rewarded him by raising House Tully to dominion over all the lands
of the Trident. The Tully sigil is a leaping trout, silver, on a eld of
rippling blue and red. The Tully words are Family, Duty, Honor.
HOSTER TULLY, Lord of Riverrun,
—his wife, {LADY MINISA, of House Whent}, died in childbed,
—their children:
—CATELYN, widow of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell,
—her eldest son, ROBB STARK, Lord of Winterfell, King in
the North, and King of the Trident,
—her daughter, SANSA STARK, a maid of twelve, captive at
King’s Landing,
—her daughter, ARYA STARK, ten, missing for a year,
—her son, BRANDON STARK, eight, believed dead,
—her son, RICKON STARK, four, believed dead,
—LYSA, widow of Lord Jon Arryn of the Eyrie,
—her son, ROBERT, Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the
Vale, a sickly boy of seven years,
—SER EDMURE, his only son, heir to Riverrun,
—Ser Edmure’s friends and companions:
—SER MARQ PIPER, heir to Pinkmaiden,
—LORD LYMOND GOODBROOK,
—SER RONALD VANCE, called THE BAD, and his brothers,
SER HUGO, SER ELLERY, and KIRTH,

—PATREK MALLISTER, LUCAS BLACKWOOD, SER
PERWYN FREY, TRISTAN RYGER, SER ROBERT PAEGE,

—his brother, SER BRYNDEN, called THE BLACKFISH,
—his household:
—MAESTER VYMAN, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER DESMOND GRELL, master-at-arms,

—SER ROBIN RYGER, captain of the guard,

—LONG LEW, ELWOOD, DELP, guardsmen,
—UTHERYDES WAYN, steward of Riverrun,
—RYMUND THE RHYMER, a singer,
—his lords bannermen:
—JONOS BRACKEN, Lord of the Stone Hedge,
—JASON MALLISTER, Lord of Seagard,
—WALDER FREY, Lord of the Crossing,
—CLEMENT PIPER, Lord of Pinkmaiden Castle,
—KARYL VANCE, Lord of Wayfarer’s Rest,
—NORBERT VANCE, Lord of Atranta,
—THEOMAR SMALLWOOD, Lord of Acorn Hall,
—his wife, LADY RAVELLA, of House Swann,

—their daughter, CARELLEN,
—WILLIAM MOOTON, Lord of Maidenpool,
—SHELLA WHENT, dispossessed Lady of Harrenhal,
—SER HALMON PAEGE.
—TYTOS BLACKWOOD, Lord of Raventree

HOUSE TYRELL
The Tyrells rose to power as stewards to the Kings of the Reach,
whose domain included the fertile plains of the southwest from the
Dornish marches and Blackwater Rush to the shores of the Sunset
Sea. Through the female line, they claim descent from Garth
Greenhand, gardener king of the First Men, who wore a crown of
vines and owers and made the land bloom. When Mern IX, last
king of House Gardener, was slain on the Field of Fire, his steward
Harlen Tyrell surrendered Highgarden to Aegon the Conqueror.
Aegon granted him the castle and dominion over the Reach. The
Tyrell sigil is a golden rose on a grass-green eld. Their words are
Growing Strong.
Lord Mace Tyrell declared his support for Renly Baratheon at the
onset of the War of the Five Kings, and gave him the hand of his
daughter Margaery. Upon Renly’s death, Highgarden made alliance
with House Lannister, and Margaery was betrothed to King Jo rey.
MACE TYRELL, Lord of Highgarden, Warden of the South,
Defender of the Marches, and High Marshall of the Reach,
—his wife, LADY ALERIE, of House Hightower of Oldtown,
—their children:
—WILLAS, their eldest son, heir to Highgarden,
—SER GARLAN, called THE GALLANT, their second son,
—his wife, LADY LEONETTE of House Fossoway,
—SER LORAS, the Knight of Flowers, their youngest son, a
Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard,
—MARGAERY, their daughter, a widow of fteen years,
betrothed to King Jo rey I Baratheon,

—Margaery’s companions and ladies-in-waiting:
—her cousins, MEGGA, ALLA, and ELINOR TYRELL,
—Elinor’s betrothed, ALYN AMBROSE, squire,

—LADY ALYSANNE BULWER, a girl of eight,
—MEREDYTH CRANE, called MERRY,

—TAENA OF MYR, wife to LORD ORTON MERRYWEATHER,

—LADY ALYCE GRACEFORD,
—SEPTA NYSTERICA, a sister of the Faith,
—his widowed mother, LADY OLENNA of House Redwyne, called
the QUEEN OF THORNS,
—Lady Olenna’s guardsmen, ARRYK and ERRYK, called LEFT
and RIGHT,
—his sisters:
—LADY MINA, wed to Paxter Redwyne, Lord of the Arbor,
—their children:
—SER HORAS REDWYNE, twin to Hobber, mocked as
HORROR,
—SER HOBBER REDWYNE, twin to Horas, mocked as
SLOBBER,
—DESMERA REDWYNE, a maid of sixteen,
—LADY JANNA, wed to Ser Jon Fossoway,

—his uncles and cousins:
—his father’s brother, GARTH, called THE GROSS, Lord
Seneschal of Highgarden,

—Garth’s bastard sons, GARSE and GARRETT FLOWERS,
—his father’s brother, SER MORYN, Lord Commander of the
City Watch of Oldtown,
—Moryn’s son, {SER LUTHOR}, m. Lady Elyn Norridge,
—Luthor’s son, SER THEODORE, m. Lady Lia Serry,

—Theodore’s daughter, ELINOR,
—Theodore’s son, LUTHOR, a squire,

—Luthor’s son, MAESTER MEDWICK,
—Luthor’s daughter, OLENE, m. Ser Leo Blackbar,
—Moryn’s son, LEO, called LEO THE LAZY,

—his father’s brother, MAESTER GORMON, a scholar of the
Citadel,
—his cousin, {SER QUENTIN}, died at Ashford,
—Quentin’s son, SER OLYMER, m. Lady Lysa Meadows,
—Olymer’s sons, RAYMUND and RICKARD,

—Olymer’s daughter, MEGGA,
—his cousin, MAESTER NORMUND, in service at Blackcrown,

—his cousin, {SER VICTOR}, slain by the Smiling Knight of the
Kingswood Brotherhood,
—Victor’s daughter, VICTARIA, m. {Lord Jon Bulwer}, died of
a summer fever,
—their daughter, LADY ALYSANNE BULWER, eight,
—Victor’s son, SER LEO, m. Lady Alys Beesbury,
—Leo’s daughters, ALLA and LEONA,

—Leo’s sons, LYONEL, LUCAS, and LORENT,
—his household at Highgarden:

—MAESTER LOMYS, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—IGON VYRWEL, captain of the guard,

—SER VORTIMER CRANE, master-at-arms,
—BUTTERBUMPS, fool and jester, hugely fat,
—his lords bannermen:
—RANDYLL TARLY, Lord of Horn Hill,
—PAXTER REDWYNE, Lord of the Arbor,
—ARWYN OAKHEART, Lady of Old Oak,

—MATHIS ROWAN, Lord of Goldengrove,
—ALESTER FLORENT, Lord of Brightwater Keep, a rebel in
support of Stannis Baratheon,

—LEYTON HIGHTOWER, Voice of Oldtown, Lord of the Port,
—ORTON MERRYWEATHER, Lord of Longtable,

—LORD ARTHUR AMBROSE,
—his knights and sworn swords:

—SER MARK MULLENDORE, crippled during the Battle of the
Blackwater,
—SER JON FOSSOWAY, of the green-apple Fossoways,
—SER TANTON FOSSOWAY, of the red-apple Fossoways.

REBELS, ROGUES, AND
SWORN BROTHERS
THE SWORN BROTHERS OF THE
NIGHT’S WATCH
(ranging Beyond the Wall)

JEOR MORMONT, called THE OLD BEAR, Lord Commander of
the Night’s Watch,
—JON SNOW, the Bastard of Winterfell, his steward and
squire, lost while scouting the Skirling Pass,
—GHOST, his direwolf, white and silent,
—EDDISON TOLLETT, called DOLOROUS EDD, his squire,
—THOREN SMALLWOOD, commanding the rangers,
—DYWEN, DIRK, SOFTFOOT, GRENN, BEDWYCK called
GIANT, OLLO LOPHAND, GRUBBS, BERNARR called BROWN
BERNARR, another BERNARR called BLACK BERNARR, TIM
STONE, ULMER OF KINGSWOOD, GARTH called
GREYFEATHER, GARTH OF GREENAWAY, GARTH OF
OLDTOWN, ALAN OF ROSBY, RONNEL HARCLAY, AETHAN,
RYLES, MAWNEY, rangers,
—JARMEN BUCKWELL, commanding the scouts,
—BANNEN, KEDGE WHITEYE, TUMBERJON, FORNIO,
GOADY, rangers and scouts,
—SER OTTYN WYTHERS, commanding the rearguard,
—SER MALADOR LOCKE, commanding the baggage,
—DONNEL HILL, called SWEET DONNEL, his squire and
steward,
—HAKE, a steward and cook,
—CHETT, an ugly steward, keeper of hounds,

—SAMWELL TARLY, a fat steward, keeper of ravens, mocked
as SER PIGGY,

—LARK called THE SISTERMAN, his cousin ROLLEY OF
SISTERTON, CLUBFOOT KARL, MASLYN, SMALL PAUL,
SAWWOOD, LEFT HAND LEW, ORPHAN OSS, MUTTERING
BILL, stewards,
—{QHORIN HALFHAND}, commanding the rangers from the
Shadow Tower, slain in the Skirling Pass,

—{SQUIRE DALBRIDGE, EGGEN}, rangers, slain in the Skirling
Pass,
—STONESNAKE, a ranger and mountaineer, lost afoot in
Skirling Pass,
—BLANE, Qhorin Halfhand’s second, commanding the Shadow
Tower men on the Fist of the First Men,
—SER BYAM FLINT,
(at Castle Black)
BOWEN MARSH, Lord Steward and castellan,
—MAESTER AEMON (TARGARYEN), healer and counselor, a
blind man, one hundred years old,
—his steward, CLYDAS,
—BENJEN STARK, First Ranger, missing, feared dead;
—SER WYNTON STOUT, eighty years a ranger,

—SER ALADALE WYNCH, PYPAR, DEAF DICK FOLLARD,
HAIRY HAL, BLACK JACK BULWER, ELRON, MATTHAR,
rangers,
—OTHELL YARWYCK, First Builder,

—SPARE BOOT, YOUNG HENLY, HALDER, ALBETT, KEGS,
SPOTTED PATE OF MAIDENPOOL, builders,
—DONAL NOYE, armorer, smith, and steward, one-armed,
—THREE-FINGER HOBB, steward and chief cook,

—TIM TANGLETONGUE, EASY, MULLY, OLD HENLY,
CUGEN, RED ALYN OF THE ROSEWOOD, JEREN,
stewards,
—SEPTON CELLADOR, a drunken devout,

—SER ENDREW TARTH, master-at-arms,
—RAST, ARRON, EMRICK, SATIN, HOP-ROBIN, recruits in
training,

—CONWY, GUEREN, recruiters and collectors,
(at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea)
—COTTER PYKE, Commander Eastwatch,
—MAESTER HARMUNE, healer and counselor,

—SER ALLISER THORNE, master-at-arms,
—JANOS SLYNT, former commander of the City Watch of
King’s Landing, brie y Lord of Harrenhal,
—SER GLENDON HEWETT,
—DAREON, steward and singer,
—IRON EMMETT, a ranger famed for his strength,

(at Shadow Tower)
SER DENYS MALLISTER, Commander, Shadow Tower
—his steward and squire, WALLACE MASSEY,
—MAESTER MULLIN, healer and counselor.

THE BROTHERHOOD WITHOUT
BANNERS
AN OUTLAW FELLOWSHIP
BERIC DONDARRION, Lord of Blackhaven, called THE
LIGHTNING LORD, oft reported dead,
—his right hand, THOROS OF MYR, a red priest,
—his squire, EDRIC DAYNE, Lord of Starfall, twelve,
—his followers:
—LEM, called LEM LEMONCLOAK, a one-time soldier,
—HARWIN, son of Hullen, formerly in service to Lord Eddard
Stark at Winterfell,
—GREENBEARD, a Tyroshi sellsword,
—TOM OF SEVENSTREAMS, a singer of dubious report, called
TOM SEVENSTRINGS and TOM O’ SEVENS,
—ANGUY THE ARCHER, a bowman from the Dornish Marches,
—JACK-BE-LUCKY, a wanted man, short an eye,
—THE MAD HUNTSMAN, of Stoney Sept,
—KYLE, NOTCH, DENNETT, longbowmen,
—MERRIT O’ MOONTOWN, WATTY THE MILLER, LIKELY
LUKE, MUDGE, BEARDLESS DICK, outlaws in his band,
—at the Inn of the Kneeling Man:
—SHARNA, the innkeep, a cook and midwife,
—her husband, called HUSBAND,
—BOY, an orphan of the war,
—at the Peach, a brothel in Stoney Sept:

—TANSY, the red-haired proprietor,
—ALYCE, CASS, LANNA, JYZENE, HELLY, BELLA, some of
her peaches,

—at Acorn Hall, the seat of House Smallwood:
—LADY RAVELLA, formerly of House Swann, wife to Lord
Theomar Smallwood,

—here and there and elsewhere:
—LORD LYMOND LYCHESTER, an old man of wandering wit,
who once held Ser Maynard at the bridge,
—his young caretaker, MAESTER ROONE,
—the ghost of High Heart,
—the Lady of the Leaves,
—the septon at Sallydance.

the WILDLINGS, or
the FREE FOLK
MANCE RAYDER, King-beyond-the-Wall,
—DALLA, his pregnant wife,

—VAL, her younger sister,
—his chiefs and captains:
—HARMA, called DOGSHEAD, commanding his van,
—THE LORD OF BONES, mocked as RATTLESHIRT, leader of a
war band,
—YGRITTE, a young spearwife, a member of his band,
—RYK, called LONGSPEAR, a member of his band,
—RAGWYLE, LENYL, members of his band,
—his captive, JON SNOW, the crow-come-over,
—GHOST, Jon’s direwolf, white and silent,
—STYR, Magnar of Thenn,
—JARL, a young raider, Val’s lover,
—GRIGG THE GOAT, ERROK, QUORT, BODGER, DEL, BIG
BOIL, HEMPEN DAN, HENK THE HELM, LENN,
TOEFINGER, STONE THUMBS, raiders,
—TORMUND, Mead-King of Ruddy Hall, called GIANTS-BANE,
TALL-TALKER, HORN-BLOWER, and BREAKER OF ICE, also
THUNDERFIST, HUSBAND TO BEARS, SPEAKER TO GODS,
and FATHER OF HOSTS, leader of a war band,
—his sons, TOREGG THE TALL, TORWYRD THE TAME,
DORMUND, and DRYN, his daughter MUNDA,
—{ORELL, called ORELL THE EAGLE}, a skinchanger slain by
Jon Snow in the Skirling Pass,
—MAG MAR TUN DOH WEG, called MAG THE MIGHTY, of
the giants,

—VARMYR called SIXSKINS, a skinchanger, master of three
wolves, a shadowcat, and a snow bear,
—THE WEEPER, a raider and leader of a war band,

—{ALFYN CROWKILLER}, a raider, slain by Qhorin Halfhand
of the Night’s Watch,

CRASTER, of Craster’s Keep, who kneels to none,

—GILLY, his daughter and wife, great with child,
—DYAH, FERNY, NELLA, three of his nineteen wives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If bricks aren’t well made, the wall falls down.

This is an awfully big wall I’m building here, so I need a lot of
bricks. Fortunately, I know a lot of brickmakers, and all sorts of
other useful folk as well.
Thanks and appreciation, once more, to those good friends who
so kindly lent me their expertise (and in some cases, even their
books) so my bricks would be nice and solid—to my Archmaester
Sage Walker, to First Builder Carl Keim, to Melinda Snodgrass my
master of horse.
And as ever, to Parris.

PRAISE FOR

A GAME OF THRONES
“Reminiscent of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, this novel
is an absorbing combination of the mythic, the sweeping historical,
and the intensely personal.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“I always expect the best from George R. R. Martin, and he always
delivers. A Game of Thrones grabs hold and won’t let go. It’s
brilliant.”
—Robert Jordan
“Such a splendid tale and such a fantistorical! I read my eyes out.”
—Anne McCa rey
“Martin makes a triumphant return to high fantasy … [his] trophy
case is already stu ed with major prizes, including Hugos, Nebulas,
Locus Awards and a Bram Stoker. He’s probably going to have to
add another shelf, at least.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A vast, rich saga, with splendid characters and an intricate plot
awlessly articulated against a backdrop of real depth and texture.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The keen and complex human characters and the convincing force
of their surroundings operate as magic … setting George R. R.
Martin’s rst fantasy epic well above the norms of the genre.”
—Locus Magazine
“It is perhaps the best of the epic fantasies—readable and realistic.”
—Marion Zimmer Bradley

“The major fantasy of the decade … compulsively readable.”
—The Denver Post
“George R. R. Martin is one of our very best science ction writers,
and this is one of his very best books.”
—Raymond E. Feist

“We have been invited to a grand feast and pageant: George R. R.
Martin has unveiled for us an intensely realized, romantic but
realistic world … if the next two volumes are as good as this one, it
will be a wonderful feast indeed.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“I would be very surprised if this is not the major fantasy publishing
event of 1996, and I’m already impatient for the next installment.”
—Science Fiction Chronicle
“A colorful, majestic tapestry of characters, action and plot that
deserves a spot on any reader’s wall … the pages seem to pass in a
blur as you read.”
—Albuquerque Journal
“George Martin is assuredly a new master craftsman in the guild of
heroic fantasy.”
—Katharine Kerr

“A Game of Thrones o ers the rich tapestry that the very best
fantasy demands: iron and steel within the silk, grandeur within the
wonder, and characters torn between deep love and loyalty. Few
created worlds are as imaginative and diverse. George R. R. Martin
is to be applauded.”
—Janny Wurts

“A dazzling fantasy adventure … with a great cast of characters that
weave a tapestry of court intrigue, skullduggery, vicious betrayal

and greathearted sacri ce.”

—Julian May

“Terri c, incredibly powerful, with phenomenal characterizations
and exquisite writing.”
—Teresa Medeiros

“The characterization was superb, the story
heartbreaking … when is the next one coming out?”
—Linda Howard

vivid

and

A CLASH OF KINGS
“A truly epic fantasy set in a world bedecked with 8,000 years of
history, beset by an imminent winter that will last ten years and
bedazzled by swords and spells wielded to devastating e ect … here
he provides a banquet for fantasy lovers with large appetites.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Martin amply ful lls the rst volume’s promise and continues what
seems destined to be one of the best fantasy series ever written.”
—The Denver Post
“High fantasy with a vengeance.”

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Rivals T. H. White’s The Once and Future King.”
—The Des Moines Register
“So complex, fascinating and well-rendered, readers will almost
certainly be hooked by the whole series.”
—The Oregonian

A STORM OF SWORDS

“One of the more rewarding examples of gigantism in contemporary
fantasy … richly imagined.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“George R. R. Martin continues to take epic fantasy to new levels of
insight and sophistication, resonant with the turmoils and stress of
the world we call our own.”
—Locus Magazine

“Martin creates a gorgeously and intricately textured world,
peopled with absolutely believable and fascinating characters.”
—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“High fantasy doesn’t get any better than this.”
—The Oregonian

“A riveting continuation of a series whose brilliance continues to
dazzle.”
—The Patriot News

“Enough grit and action to please even the most macho … a pageturner.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“The latest and the best in a powerful … cycle that delivers real
people and a page-turning plot.”
—Contra Costa Times

“Martin’s epic advances his series with gritty characterizations, bold
plot moves and plenty of action.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A FEAST FOR CROWS

A Bantam Spectra Book / November 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
ctitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by George R. R. Martin
Maps by James Sinclair
Heraldic crests by Virginia Norey
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a
boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, George R.R.
A feast for crows / George R. R. Martin
p. cm.—(A song of ice and re ; bk. 4.)
I. Title. II. Series: Martin, George R. R. Song of ice and re ; bk. 4.
PS3563.A7239 F39 2005
813'.54 22
2005053034
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90032-3
v3.0

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Prologue

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20

Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Appendix I: The Kings and Their Courts
The Queen Regent
The King at the Wall
King of the Isles and the North
Appendix II: Other Houses Great and Small
House Arryn

House Florent
House Frey
House Hightower
House Lannister
House Martell
House Stark
House Tully
House Tyrell
Appendix III: Rebels and Rogues Smallfolk and Sworn Brothers
Lordlings, Wanderers, and Common Men
Outlaws and Broken Men
The Sworn Brothers of the Night’s Watch
The Wildlings, or the Free Folk
Appendix IV: Beyond the Narrow Sea
The Queen Across the Water
In Braavos
Acknowledgments

for Stephen Boucher
wizard of Windows, dragon of DOS
without whom this book would have
been written in crayon

Praise for
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
and
A Song of Ice and Fire
“Mainstream readers … have a great treat ahead of them in Martin.
A Feast for Crows is a fast-paced, emotionally complex, masterfully
written adventure … Martin’s writing is as good as ever: his
imaginary places are as vivid and thoroughly imagined, his
characters as consistent and believable, his blood as wet and red.”
—Newsday
“George R. R. Martin has created the unlikely genre of the
realpolitik fantasy novel. Complete with warring kings, noble
heroes and backroom dealings, it’s addictive reading and re ects
our current world a lot better than The Lord of the Rings.” —Rolling
Stone
“What’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”? It’s the only fantasy series I’d put
on a level with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It’s way
better than the Harry Potter books and de nitely not for children.
It’s a fantasy series for hip, smart people, even those who don’t read
fantasy.” —Chicago Tribune
“For a succinct summation of Martin’s medieval fantasy series,
imagine a mix of the literary quality of T. H. White’s The Once and
Future King, the in-your-face, you-are-there grittiness of a movie like
Braveheart and the sort of intricate character development found in
a quality television show like Lost … Vast, complex and undeniably
entertaining … Once in a while, there are books and writers that
manage to elevate an entire genre. Stephen King did so with horror.
George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series has taken
fantasy out of the two-dimensional, black and white realm where it
once happily existed and dragged it kicking and screaming into a
land of believable characters, ambiguous situations, and bloody,
sometimes uncertain denouements.” —Denver Post

“ ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ is rmly at the top of the bestseller lists,
probably because it’s the best fantasy series out there.” —Detroit
Free Press

Click here to view the maps in greater detail:
http://atrandom.com/ cmaps

PROLOGUE

Dragons,” said Mollander. He snatched a withered apple o the
ground and tossed it hand to hand.
“Throw the apple,” urged Alleras the Sphinx. He slipped an arrow
from his quiver and nocked it to his bowstring.
“I should like to see a dragon.” Roone was the youngest of them,
a chunky boy still two years shy of manhood. “I should like that
very much.”
And I should like to sleep with Rosey’s arms around me, Pate
thought. He shifted restlessly on the bench. By the morrow the girl
could well be his. I will take her far from Oldtown, across the narrow
sea to one of the Free Cities. There were no maesters there, no one to
accuse him.
He could hear Emma’s laughter coming through a shuttered
window overhead, mingled with the deeper voice of the man she
was entertaining. She was the oldest of the serving wenches at the
Quill and Tankard, forty if she was a day, but still pretty in a eshy
sort of way. Rosey was her daughter, fteen and freshly owered.
Emma had decreed that Rosey’s maidenhead would cost a golden
dragon. Pate had saved nine silver stags and a pot of copper stars
and pennies, for all the good that would do him. He would have
stood a better chance of hatching a real dragon than saving up
enough coin to make a golden one.

“You were born too late for dragons, lad,” Armen the Acolyte told
Roone. Armen wore a leather thong about his neck, strung with
links of pewter, tin, lead, and copper, and like most acolytes he
seemed to believe that novices had turnips growing from their
shoulders in place of heads. “The last one perished during the reign
of King Aegon the Third.”
“The last dragon in Westeros,” insisted Mollander.
“Throw the apple,” Alleras urged again. He was a comely youth,
their Sphinx. All the serving wenches doted on him. Even Rosey
would sometimes touch him on the arm when she brought him
wine, and Pate had to gnash his teeth and pretend not to see.
“The last dragon in Westeros was the last dragon,” said Armen
doggedly. “That is well known.”
“The apple,” Alleras said. “Unless you mean to eat it.”
“Here.” Dragging his clubfoot, Mollander took a short hop,
whirled, and whipped the apple sidearm into the mists that hung
above the Honeywine. If not for his foot, he would have been a
knight like his father. He had the strength for it in those thick arms
and broad shoulders. Far and fast the apple ew …
… but not as fast as the arrow that whistled after it, a yard-long
shaft of golden wood etched with scarlet feathers. Pate did not see
the arrow catch the apple, but he heard it. A soft chunk echoed back
across the river, followed by a splash.
Mollander whistled. “You cored it. Sweet.”
Not half as sweet as Rosey. Pate loved her hazel eyes and budding
breasts, and the way she smiled every time she saw him. He loved
the dimples in her cheeks. Sometimes she went barefoot as she
served, to feel the grass beneath her feet. He loved that too. He
loved the clean fresh smell of her, the way her hair curled behind
her ears. He even loved her toes. One night she’d let him rub her
feet and play with them, and he’d made up a funny tale for every
toe to keep her giggling.
Perhaps he would do better to remain on this side of the narrow
sea. He could buy a donkey with the coin he’d saved, and he and
Rosey could take turns riding it as they wandered Westeros. Ebrose
might not think him worthy of the silver, but Pate knew how to set

a bone and leech a fever. The smallfolk would be grateful for his
help. If he could learn to cut hair and shave beards, he might even
be a barber. That would be enough, he told himself, so long as I had
Rosey. Rosey was all that he wanted in the world.
That had not always been so. Once he had dreamed of being a
maester in a castle, in service to some open-handed lord who would
honor him for his wisdom and bestow a ne white horse on him to
thank him for his service. How high he’d ride, how nobly, smiling
down at the smallfolk when he passed them on the road …
One night in the Quill and Tankard’s common room, after his
second tankard of fearsomely strong cider, Pate had boasted that he
would not always be a novice. “Too true,” Lazy Leo had called out.
“You’ll be a former novice, herding swine.”
He drained the dregs of his tankard. The torchlit terrace of the
Quill and Tankard was an island of light in a sea of mist this
morning. Downriver, the distant beacon of the Hightower oated in
the damp of night like a hazy orange moon, but the light did little
to lift his spirits.
The alchemist should have come by now. Had it all been some cruel
jape, or had something happened to the man? It would not have
been the rst time that good fortune had turned sour on Pate. He
had once counted himself lucky to be chosen to help old
Archmaester Walgrave with the ravens, never dreaming that before
long he would also be fetching the man’s meals, sweeping out his
chambers, and dressing him every morning. Everyone said that
Walgrave had forgotten more of ravencraft than most maesters ever
knew, so Pate assumed a black iron link was the least that he could
hope for, only to nd that Walgrave could not grant him one. The
old man remained an archmaester only by courtesy. As great a
maester as once he’d been, now his robes concealed soiled
smallclothes oft as not, and half a year ago some acolytes found him
weeping in the Library, unable to nd his way back to his
chambers. Maester Gormon sat below the iron mask in Walgrave’s
place, the same Gormon who had once accused Pate of theft.
In the apple tree beside the water, a nightingale began to sing. It
was a sweet sound, a welcome respite from the harsh screams and

endless quorking of the ravens he had tended all day long. The
white ravens knew his name, and would mutter it to each other
whenever they caught sight of him, “Pate, Pate, Pate,” until he
wanted to scream. The big white birds were Archmaester
Walgrave’s pride. He wanted them to eat him when he died, but
Pate half suspected that they meant to eat him too.
Perhaps it was the fearsomely strong cider—he had not come
here to drink, but Alleras had been buying to celebrate his copper
link, and guilt had made him thirsty—but it almost sounded as if the
nightingale were trilling gold for iron, gold for iron, gold for iron.
Which was passing strange, because that was what the stranger had
said the night Rosey brought the two of them together. “Who are
you?” Pate had demanded of him, and the man had replied, “An
alchemist. I can change iron into gold.” And then the coin was in his
hand, dancing across his knuckles, the soft yellow gold shining in
the candlelight. On one side was a three-headed dragon, on the
other the head of some dead king. Gold for iron, Pate remembered,
you won’t do better. Do you want her? Do you love her? “I am no
thief,” he had told the man who called himself the alchemist, “I am
a novice of the Citadel.” The alchemist had bowed his head, and
said, “If you should reconsider, I shall return here three days hence,
with my dragon.”
Three days had passed. Pate had returned to the Quill and
Tankard, still uncertain what he was, but instead of the alchemist
he’d found Mollander and Armen and the Sphinx, with Roone in
tow. It would have raised suspicions not to join them.
The Quill and Tankard never closed. For six hundred years it had
been standing on its island in the Honeywine, and never once had
its doors been shut to trade. Though the tall, timbered building
leaned toward the south the way novices sometimes leaned after a
tankard, Pate expected that the inn would go on standing for
another six hundred years, selling wine and ale and fearsomely
strong cider to rivermen and seamen, smiths and singers, priests and
princes, and the novices and acolytes of the Citadel.
“Oldtown is not the world,” declared Mollander, too loudly. He
was a knight’s son, and drunk as drunk could be. Since they brought

him word of his father’s death upon the Blackwater, he got drunk
most every night. Even in Oldtown, far from the ghting and safe
behind its walls, the War of the Five Kings had touched them
all … although Archmaester Benedict insisted that there had never
been a war of ve kings, since Renly Baratheon had been slain
before Balon Greyjoy had crowned himself.
“My father always said the world was bigger than any lord’s
castle,” Mollander went on. “Dragons must be the least of the things
a man might nd in Qarth and Asshai and Yi Ti. These sailors’
stories …”
“… are stories told by sailors,” Armen interrupted. “Sailors, my
dear Mollander. Go back down to the docks, and I wager you’ll nd
sailors who’ll tell you of the mermaids that they bedded, or how
they spent a year in the belly of a sh.”
“How do you know they didn’t?” Mollander thumped through the
grass, looking for more apples. “You’d need to be down the belly
yourself to swear they weren’t. One sailor with a story, aye, a man
might laugh at that, but when oarsmen o four di erent ships tell
the same tale in four di erent tongues …”
“The tales are not the same,” insisted Armen. “Dragons in Asshai,
dragons in Qarth, dragons in Meereen, Dothraki dragons, dragons
freeing slaves … each telling di ers from the last.”
“Only in details.” Mollander grew more stubborn when he drank,
and even when sober he was bullheaded. “All speak of dragons, and
a beautiful young queen.”
The only dragon Pate cared about was made of yellow gold. He
wondered what had happened to the alchemist. The third day. He
said he’d be here.
“There’s another apple near your foot,” Alleras called to
Mollander, “and I still have two arrows in my quiver.”
“Fuck your quiver.” Mollander scooped up the windfall. “This
one’s wormy,” he complained, but he threw it anyway. The arrow
caught the apple as it began to fall and sliced it clean in two. One
half landed on a turret roof, tumbled to a lower roof, bounced, and
missed Armen by a foot. “If you cut a worm in two, you make two
worms,” the acolyte informed them.

“If only it worked that way with apples, no one would ever need
go hungry,” said Alleras with one of his soft smiles. The Sphinx was
always smiling, as if he knew some secret jape. It gave him a
wicked look that went well with his pointed chin, widow’s peak,
and dense mat of close-cropped jet-black curls.
Alleras would make a maester. He had only been at the Citadel
for a year, yet already he had forged three links of his maester’s
chain. Armen might have more, but each of his had taken him a
year to earn. Still, he would make a maester too. Roone and
Mollander remained pink-necked novices, but Roone was very
young and Mollander preferred drinking to reading.
Pate, though …
He had been ve years at the Citadel, arriving when he was no
more than three-and-ten, yet his neck remained as pink as it had
been on the day he rst arrived from the westerlands. Twice had he
believed himself ready. The
rst time he had gone before
Archmaester Vaellyn to demonstrate his knowledge of the heavens.
Instead he learned how Vinegar Vaellyn had earned that name. It
took Pate two years to summon up the courage to try again. This
time he submitted himself to kindly old Archmaester Ebrose,
renowned for his soft voice and gentle hands, but Ebrose’s sighs had
somehow proved just as painful as Vaellyn’s barbs.
“One last apple,” promised Alleras, “and I will tell you what I
suspect about these dragons.”
“What could you know that I don’t?” grumbled Mollander. He
spied an apple on a branch, jumped up, pulled it down, and threw.
Alleras drew his bowstring back to his ear, turning gracefully to
follow the target in ight. He loosed his shaft just as the apple
began to fall.
“You always miss your last shot,” said Roone.
The apple splashed down into the river, untouched.
“See?” said Roone.
“The day you make them all is the day you stop improving.”
Alleras unstrung his longbow and eased it into its leather case. The
bow was carved from goldenheart, a rare and fabled wood from the
Summer Isles. Pate had tried to bend it once, and failed. The Sphinx

looks slight, but there’s strength in those slim arms, he re ected, as
Alleras threw a leg across the bench and reached for his wine cup.
“The dragon has three heads,” he announced in his soft Dornish
drawl.
“Is this a riddle?” Roone wanted to know. “Sphinxes always speak
in riddles in the tales.”
“No riddle.” Alleras sipped his wine. The rest of them were
qua ng tankards of the fearsomely strong cider that the Quill and
Tankard was renowned for, but he preferred the strange, sweet
wines of his mother’s country. Even in Oldtown such wines did not
come cheap.
It had been Lazy Leo who dubbed Alleras “the Sphinx.” A sphinx
is a bit of this, a bit of that: a human face, the body of a lion, the
wings of a hawk. Alleras was the same: his father was a
Dornishman, his mother a black-skinned Summer Islander. His own
skin was dark as teak. And like the green marble sphinxes that
anked the Citadel’s main gate, Alleras had eyes of onyx.
“No dragon has ever had three heads except on shields and
banners,” Armen the Acolyte said rmly. “That was a heraldic
charge, no more. Furthermore, the Targaryens are all dead.”
“Not all,” said Alleras. “The Beggar King had a sister.”
“I thought her head was smashed against a wall,” said Roone.
“No,” said Alleras. “It was Prince Rhaegar’s young son Aegon
whose head was dashed against the wall by the Lion of Lannister’s
brave men. We speak of Rhaegar’s sister, born on Dragonstone
before its fall. The one they called Daenerys.”
“The Stormborn. I recall her now.” Mollander lifted his tankard
high, sloshing the cider that remained. “Here’s to her!” He gulped,
slammed his empty tankard down, belched, and wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand. “Where’s Rosey? Our rightful queen
deserves another round of cider, wouldn’t you say?”
Armen the Acolyte looked alarmed. “Lower your voice, fool. You
should not even jape about such things. You never know who could
be listening. The Spider has ears everywhere.”
“Ah, don’t piss your breeches, Armen. I was proposing a drink,
not a rebellion.”

Pate heard a chuckle. A soft, sly voice called out from behind
him. “I always knew you were a traitor, Hopfrog.” Lazy Leo was
slouching by the foot of the old plank bridge, draped in satin striped
in green and gold, with a black silk half cape pinned to his shoulder
by a rose of jade. The wine he’d dribbled down his front had been a
robust red, judging from the color of the spots. A lock of his ashblond hair fell down across one eye.
Mollander bristled at the sight of him. “Bugger that. Go away.
You are not welcome here.” Alleras laid a hand upon his arm to
calm him, whilst Armen frowned. “Leo. My lord. I had understood
that you were still con ned to the Citadel for …”
“… three more days.” Lazy Leo shrugged. “Perestan says the
world is forty thousand years old. Mollos says ve hundred
thousand. What are three days, I ask you?” Though there were a
dozen empty tables on the terrace, Leo sat himself at theirs. “Buy
me a cup of Arbor gold, Hopfrog, and perhaps I won’t inform my
father of your toast. The tiles turned against me at the Checkered
Hazard, and I wasted my last stag on supper. Suckling pig in plum
sauce, stu ed with chestnuts and white tru es. A man must eat.
What did you lads have?”
“Mutton,” muttered Mollander. He sounded none too pleased
about it. “We shared a haunch of boiled mutton.”
“I’m certain it was lling.” Leo turned to Alleras. “A lord’s son
should be open-handed, Sphinx. I understand you won your copper
link. I’ll drink to that.”
Alleras smiled back at him. “I only buy for friends. And I am no
lord’s son, I’ve told you that. My mother was a trader.”
Leo’s eyes were hazel, bright with wine and malice. “Your mother
was a monkey from the Summer Isles. The Dornish will fuck
anything with a hole between its legs. Meaning no o ense. You may
be brown as a nut, but at least you bathe. Unlike our spotted pig
boy.” He waved a hand toward Pate.
If I hit him in the mouth with my tankard, I could knock out half his
teeth, Pate thought. Spotted Pate the pig boy was the hero of a
thousand ribald stories: a good-hearted, empty-headed lout who
always managed to best the fat lordlings, haughty knights, and

pompous septons who beset him. Somehow his stupidity would turn
out to have been a sort of uncouth cunning; the tales always ended
with Spotted Pate sitting on a lord’s high seat or bedding some
knight’s daughter. But those were stories. In the real world pig boys
never fared so well. Pate sometimes thought his mother must have
hated him to have named him as she did.
Alleras was no longer smiling. “You will apologize.”
“Will I?” said Leo. “How can I, with my throat so dry …”
“You shame your House with every word you say,” Alleras told
him. “You shame the Citadel by being one of us.”
“I know. So buy me some wine, that I might drown my shame.”
Mollander said, “I would tear your tongue out by the roots.”
“Truly? Then how would I tell you about the dragons?” Leo
shrugged again. “The mongrel has the right of it. The Mad King’s
daughter is alive, and she’s hatched herself three dragons.”
“Three?” said Roone, astonished.
Leo patted his hand. “More than two and less than four. I would
not try for my golden link just yet if I were you.”
“You leave him be,” warned Mollander.
“Such a chivalrous Hopfrog. As you wish. Every man o every
ship that’s sailed within a hundred leagues of Qarth is speaking of
these dragons. A few will even tell you that they’ve seen them. The
Mage is inclined to believe them.”
Armen pursed his lips in disapproval. “Marwyn is unsound.
Archmaester Perestan would be the rst to tell you that.”
“Archmaester Ryam says so too,” said Roone.
Leo yawned. “The sea is wet, the sun is warm, and the menagerie
hates the masti .”
He has a mocking name for everyone, thought Pate, but he could
not deny that Marwyn looked more a masti than a maester. As if
he wants to bite you. The Mage was not like other maesters. People
said that he kept company with whores and hedge wizards, talked
with hairy Ibbenese and pitch-black Summer Islanders in their own
tongues, and sacri ced to queer gods at the little sailors’ temples
down by the wharves. Men spoke of seeing him down in the
undercity, in rat pits and black brothels, consorting with mummers,

singers, sellswords, even beggars. Some even whispered that once
he had killed a man with his sts.
When Marwyn had returned to Oldtown, after spending eight
years in the east mapping distant lands, searching for lost books,
and studying with warlocks and shadowbinders, Vinegar Vaellyn
had dubbed him “Marwyn the Mage.” The name was soon all over
Oldtown, to Vaellyn’s vast annoyance. “Leave spells and prayers to
priests and septons and bend your wits to learning truths a man can
trust in,” Archmaester Ryam had once counseled Pate, but Ryam’s
ring and rod and mask were yellow gold, and his maester’s chain
had no link of Valyrian steel.
Armen looked down his nose at Lazy Leo. He had the perfect nose
for it, long and thin and pointed. “Archmaester Marwyn believes in
many curious things,” he said, “but he has no more proof of dragons
than Mollander. Just more sailors’ stories.”
“You’re wrong,” said Leo. “There is a glass candle burning in the
Mage’s chambers.”
A hush fell over the torchlit terrace. Armen sighed and shook his
head. Mollander began to laugh. The Sphinx studied Leo with his
big black eyes. Roone looked lost.
Pate knew about the glass candles, though he had never seen one
burn. They were the worst-kept secret of the Citadel. It was said
that they had been brought to Oldtown from Valyria a thousand
years before the Doom. He had heard there were four; one was
green and three were black, and all were tall and twisted.
“What are these glass candles?” asked Roone.
Armen the Acolyte cleared his throat. “The night before an
acolyte says his vows, he must stand a vigil in the vault. No lantern
is permitted him, no torch, no lamp, no taper … only a candle of
obsidian. He must spend the night in darkness, unless he can light
that candle. Some will try. The foolish and the stubborn, those who
have made a study of these so-called higher mysteries. Often they
cut their ngers, for the ridges on the candles are said to be as
sharp as razors. Then, with bloody hands, they must wait upon the
dawn, brooding on their failure. Wiser men simply go to sleep, or

spend their night in prayer, but every year there are always a few
who must try.”
“Yes.” Pate had heard the same stories. “But what’s the use of a
candle that casts no light?”
“It is a lesson,” Armen said, “the last lesson we must learn before
we don our maester’s chains. The glass candle is meant to represent
truth and learning, rare and beautiful and fragile things. It is made
in the shape of a candle to remind us that a maester must cast light
wherever he serves, and it is sharp to remind us that knowledge can
be dangerous. Wise men may grow arrogant in their wisdom, but a
maester must always remain humble. The glass candle reminds us of
that as well. Even after he has said his vow and donned his chain
and gone forth to serve, a maester will think back on the darkness
of his vigil and remember how nothing that he did could make the
candle burn … for even with knowledge, some things are not
possible.”
Lazy Leo burst out laughing. “Not possible for you, you mean. I
saw the candle burning with my own eyes.”
“You saw some candle burning, I don’t doubt,” said Armen. “A
candle of black wax, perhaps.”
“I know what I saw. The light was queer and bright, much
brighter than any beeswax or tallow candle. It cast strange shadows
and the ame never ickered, not even when a draft blew through
the open door behind me.”
Armen crossed his arms. “Obsidian does not burn.”
“Dragonglass,” Pate said. “The smallfolk call it dragonglass.”
Somehow that seemed important.
“They do,” mused Alleras, the Sphinx, “and if there are dragons in
the world again …”
“Dragons and darker things,” said Leo. “The grey sheep have
closed their eyes, but the masti sees the truth. Old powers waken.
Shadows stir. An age of wonder and terror will soon be upon us, an
age for gods and heroes.” He stretched, smiling his lazy smile.
“That’s worth a round, I’d say.”
“We’ve drunk enough,” said Armen. “Morn will be upon us sooner
than we’d like, and Archmaester Ebrose will be speaking on the

properties of urine. Those who mean to forge a silver link would do
well not to miss his talk.”
“Far be it from me to keep you from the piss tasting,” said Leo.
“Myself, I prefer the taste of Arbor gold.”
“If the choice is piss or you, I’ll drink piss.” Mollander pushed
back from the table. “Come, Roone.”
The Sphinx reached for his bowcase. “It’s bed for me as well. I
expect I’ll dream of dragons and glass candles.”
“All of you?” Leo shrugged. “Well, Rosey will remain. Perhaps I’ll
wake our little sweetmeat and make a woman of her.”
Alleras saw the look on Pate’s face. “If he does not have a copper
for a cup of wine, he cannot have a dragon for the girl.”
“Aye,” said Mollander. “Besides, it takes a man to make a woman.
Come with us, Pate. Old Walgrave will wake when the sun comes
up. He’ll be needing you to help him to the privy.”
If he remembers who I am today. Archmaester Walgrave had no
trouble telling one raven from another, but he was not so good with
people. Some days he seemed to think Pate was someone named
Cressen. “Not just yet,” he told his friends. “I’m going to stay
awhile.” Dawn had not broken, not quite. The alchemist might still
be coming, and Pate meant to be here if he did.
“As you wish,” said Armen. Alleras gave Pate a lingering look,
then slung his bow over one slim shoulder and followed the others
toward the bridge. Mollander was so drunk he had to walk with a
hand on Roone’s shoulder to keep from falling. The Citadel was no
great distance as the raven ies, but none of them were ravens and
Oldtown was a veritable labyrinth of a city, all wynds and
crisscrossing alleys and narrow crookback streets. “Careful,” Pate
heard Armen say as the river mists swallowed up the four of them,
“the night is damp, and the cobbles will be slippery.”
When they were gone, Lazy Leo considered Pate sourly across the
table. “How sad. The Sphinx has stolen o with all his silver,
abandoning me to Spotted Pate the pig boy.” He stretched,
yawning. “How is our lovely little Rosey, pray?”
“She’s sleeping,” Pate said curtly.

“Naked, I don’t doubt.” Leo grinned. “Do you think she’s truly
worth a dragon? One day I suppose I must nd out.”
Pate knew better than to reply to that.
Leo needed no reply. “I expect that once I’ve broken in the
wench, her price will fall to where even pig boys will be able to
a ord her. You ought to thank me.”
I ought to kill you, Pate thought, but he was not near drunk
enough to throw away his life. Leo had been trained to arms, and
was known to be deadly with bravo’s blade and dagger. And if Pate
should somehow kill him, it would mean his own head too. Leo had
two names where Pate had only one, and his second was Tyrell. Ser
Moryn Tyrell, commander of the City Watch of Oldtown, was Leo’s
father. Mace Tyrell, Lord of Highgarden and Warden of the South,
was Leo’s cousin. And Oldtown’s Old Man, Lord Leyton of the
Hightower, who numbered “Protector of the Citadel” amongst his
many titles, was a sworn bannerman of House Tyrell. Let it go, Pate
told himself. He says these things just to wound me.
The mists were lightening to the east. Dawn, Pate realized. Dawn
has come, and the alchemist has not. He did not know whether he
should laugh or cry. Am I still a thief if I put it all back and no one ever
knows? It was another question that he had no answer for, like those
that Ebrose and Vaellyn had once asked him.
When he pushed back from the bench and got to his feet, the
fearsomely strong cider all went to his head at once. He had to put
a hand on the table to steady himself. “Leave Rosey be,” he said, by
way of parting. “Just leave her be, or I may kill you.”
Leo Tyrell icked the hair back from his eye. “I do not ght duels
with pig boys. Go away.”
Pate turned and crossed the terrace. His heels rang against the
weathered planks of the old bridge. By the time he reached the
other side, the eastern sky was turning pink. The world is wide, he
told himself. If I bought that donkey, I could still wander the roads and
byways of the Seven Kingdoms, leeching the smallfolk and picking nits
out of their hair. I could sign on to some ship, pull an oar, and sail to
Qarth by the Jade Gates to see these bloody dragons for myself. I do not
need to go back to old Walgrave and the ravens.

Yet somehow his feet turned back toward the Citadel.
When the rst shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds to the
east, morning bells began to peal from the Sailor’s Sept down by the
harbor. The Lord’s Sept joined in a moment later, then the Seven
Shrines from their gardens across the Honeywine, and nally the
Starry Sept that had been the seat of the High Septon for a thousand
years before Aegon landed at King’s Landing. They made a mighty
music. Though not so sweet as one small nightingale.
He could hear singing too, beneath the pealing of the bells. Each
morning at rst light the red priests gathered to welcome the sun
outside their modest wharfside temple. For the night is dark and full
of terrors. Pate had heard them cry those words a hundred times,
asking their god R’hllor to save them from the darkness. The Seven
were gods enough for him, but he had heard that Stannis Baratheon
worshiped at the night res now. He had even put the ery heart of
R’hllor on his banners in place of the crowned stag. If he should win
the Iron Throne, we’ll all need to learn the words of the red priests’ song,
Pate thought, but that was not likely. Tywin Lannister had smashed
Stannis and R’hllor upon the Blackwater, and soon enough he would
nish them and mount the head of the Baratheon pretender on a
spike above the gates of King’s Landing.
As the night’s mists burned away, Oldtown took form around
him, emerging ghostlike from the predawn gloom. Pate had never
seen King’s Landing, but he knew it was a daub-and-wattle city, a
sprawl of mud streets, thatched roofs, and wooden hovels. Oldtown
was built in stone, and all its streets were cobbled, down to the
meanest alley. The city was never more beautiful than at break of
day. West of the Honeywine, the Guildhalls lined the bank like a
row of palaces. Upriver, the domes and towers of the Citadel rose
on both sides of the river, connected by stone bridges crowded with
halls and houses. Downstream, below the black marble walls and
arched windows of the Starry Sept, the manses of the pious
clustered like children gathered round the feet of an old dowager.
And beyond, where the Honeywine widened into Whispering
Sound, rose the Hightower, its beacon res bright against the dawn.
From where it stood atop the blu s of Battle Island, its shadow cut

the city like a sword. Those born and raised in Oldtown could tell
the time of day by where that shadow fell. Some claimed a man
could see all the way to the Wall from the top. Perhaps that was
why Lord Leyton had not made the descent in more than a decade,
preferring to rule his city from the clouds.
A butcher’s cart rumbled past Pate down the river road, ve
piglets in the back squealing in distress. Dodging from its path, he
just avoided being spattered as a townswoman emptied a pail of
night soil from a window overhead. When I am a maester in a castle I
will have a horse to ride, he thought. Then he tripped upon a cobble
and wondered who he was fooling. There would be no chain for
him, no seat at a lord’s high table, no tall white horse to ride. His
days would be spent listening to ravens quork and scrubbing shit
stains o Archmaester Walgrave’s smallclothes.
He was on one knee, trying to wipe the mud o his robes, when a
voice said, “Good morrow, Pate.”
The alchemist was standing over him.
Pate rose. “The third day … you said you would be at the Quill
and Tankard.”
“You were with your friends. It was not my wish to intrude upon
your fellowship.” The alchemist wore a hooded traveler’s cloak,
brown and nondescript. The rising sun was peeking over the
rooftops behind his shoulder, so it was hard to make out the face
beneath his hood. “Have you decided what you are?”
Must he make me say it? “I suppose I am a thief.”
“I thought you might be.”
The hardest part had been getting down on his hands and knees to
pull the strongbox from underneath Archmaester Walgrave’s bed.
Though the box was stoutly made and bound with iron, its lock was
broken. Maester Gormon had suspected Pate of breaking it, but that
wasn’t true. Walgrave had broken the lock himself, after losing the
key that opened it.
Inside, Pate had found a bag of silver stags, a lock of yellow hair
tied up in a ribbon, a painted miniature of a woman who resembled
Walgrave (even to her mustache), and a knight’s gauntlet made of
lobstered steel. The gauntlet had belonged to a prince, Walgrave

claimed, though he could no longer seem to recall which one. When
Pate shook it, the key fell out onto the oor.
If I pick that up, I am a thief, he remembered thinking. The key
was old and heavy, made of black iron; supposedly it opened every
door at the Citadel. Only the archmaesters had such keys. The
others carried theirs upon their person or hid them away in some
safe place, but if Walgrave had hidden his, no one would ever have
seen it again. Pate snatched up the key and had been halfway to the
door before turning back to take the silver too. A thief was a thief,
whether he stole a little or a lot. “Pate,” one of the white ravens had
called after him, “Pate, Pate, Pate.”
“Do you have my dragon?” he asked the alchemist.
“If you have what I require.”
“Give it here. I want to see.” Pate did not intend to let himself be
cheated.
“The river road is not the place. Come.”
He had no time to think about it, to weigh his choices. The
alchemist was walking away. Pate had to follow or lose Rosey and
the dragon both, forever. He followed. As they walked, he slipped
his hand up into his sleeve. He could feel the key, safe inside the
hidden pocket he had sewn there. Maester’s robes were full of
pockets. He had known that since he was a boy.
He had to hurry to keep pace with the alchemist’s longer strides.
They went down an alley, around a corner, through the old Thieves
Market, along Ragpicker’s Wynd. Finally, the man turned into
another alley, narrower than the rst. “This is far enough,” said
Pate. “There’s no one about. We’ll do it here.”
“As you wish.”
“I want my dragon.”
“To be sure.” The coin appeared. The alchemist made it walk
across his knuckles, the way he had when Rosey brought the two of
them together. In the morning light the dragon glittered as it
moved, and gave the alchemist’s ngers a golden glow.
Pate grabbed it from his hand. The gold felt warm against his
palm. He brought it to his mouth and bit down on it the way he’d

seen men do. If truth be told, he wasn’t sure what gold should taste
like, but he did not want to look a fool.
“The key?” the alchemist inquired politely.
Something made Pate hesitate. “Is it some book you want?” Some
of the old Valyrian scrolls down in the locked vaults were said to be
the only surviving copies in the world.
“What I want is none of your concern.”
“No.” It’s done, Pate told himself. Go. Run back to the Quill and
Tankard, wake Rosey with a kiss, and tell her she belongs to you. Yet
still he lingered. “Show me your face.”
“As you wish.” The alchemist pulled his hood down.
He was just a man, and his face was just a face. A young man’s
face, ordinary, with full cheeks and the shadow of a beard. A scar
showed faintly on his right cheek. He had a hooked nose, and a mat
of dense black hair that curled tightly around his ears. It was not a
face Pate recognized. “I do not know you.”
“Nor I you.”
“Who are you?”
“A stranger. No one. Truly.”
“Oh.” Pate had run out of words. He drew out the key and put it
in the stranger’s hand, feeling light-headed, almost giddy. Rosey, he
reminded himself. “We’re done, then.”
He was halfway down the alley when the cobblestones began to
move beneath his feet. The stones are slick and wet, he thought, but
that was not it. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest.
“What’s happening?” he said. His legs had turned to water. “I don’t
understand.”
“And never will,” a voice said sadly.
The cobblestones rushed up to kiss him. Pate tried to cry for help,
but his voice was failing too.
His last thought was of Rosey.

THE PROPHET

The prophet was drowning men on Great Wyk when they came to
tell him that the king was dead.
It was a bleak, cold morning, and the sea was as leaden as the
sky. The rst three men had o ered their lives to the Drowned God
fearlessly, but the fourth was weak in faith and began to struggle as
his lungs cried out for air. Standing waist-deep in the surf, Aeron
seized the naked boy by the shoulders and pushed his head back
down as he tried to snatch a breath. “Have courage,” he said. “We
came from the sea, and to the sea we must return. Open your mouth
and drink deep of god’s blessing. Fill your lungs with water, that
you may die and be reborn. It does no good to ght.”
Either the boy could not hear him with his head beneath the
waves, or else his faith had utterly deserted him. He began to kick
and thrash so wildly that Aeron had to call for help. Four of his
drowned men waded out to seize the wretch and hold him
underwater. “Lord God who drowned for us,” the priest prayed, in a
voice as deep as the sea, “let Emmond your servant be reborn from
the sea, as you were. Bless him with salt, bless him with stone, bless
him with steel.”
Finally, it was done. No more air was bubbling from his mouth,
and all the strength had gone out of his limbs. Facedown in the
shallow sea oated Emmond, pale and cold and peaceful.

That was when the Damphair realized that three horsemen had
joined his drowned men on the pebbled shore. Aeron knew the
Sparr, a hatchet-faced old man with watery eyes whose quavery
voice was law on this part of Great Wyk. His son Ste arion
accompanied him, with another youth whose dark red fur-lined
cloak was pinned at the shoulder with an ornate brooch that showed
the black-and-gold warhorn of the Goodbrothers. One of Gorold’s
sons, the priest decided at a glance. Three tall sons had been born to
Goodbrother’s wife late in life, after a dozen daughters, and it was
said that no man could tell one son from the others. Aeron
Damphair did not deign to try. Whether this be Greydon or
Gormond or Gran, the priest had no time for him.
He growled a brusque command, and his drowned men seized the
dead boy by his arms and legs to carry him above the tideline. The
priest followed, naked but for a sealskin clout that covered his
private parts. Goose eshed and dripping, he splashed back onto
land, across cold wet sand and sea-scoured pebbles. One of his
drowned men handed him a robe of heavy roughspun dyed in
mottled greens and blues and greys, the colors of the sea and the
Drowned God. Aeron donned the robe and pulled his hair free.
Black and wet, that hair; no blade had touched it since the sea had
raised him up. It draped his shoulders like a ragged, ropy cloak, and
fell down past his waist. Aeron wove strands of seaweed through it,
and through his tangled, uncut beard.
His drowned men formed a circle around the dead boy, praying.
Norjen worked his arms whilst Rus knelt astride him, pumping on
his chest, but all moved aside for Aeron. He pried apart the boy’s
cold lips with his ngers and gave Emmond the kiss of life, and
again, and again, until the sea came gushing from his mouth. The
boy began to cough and spit, and his eyes blinked open, full of fear.
Another one returned. It was a sign of the Drowned God’s favor,
men said. Every other priest lost a man from time to time, even
Tarle the Thrice-Drowned, who had once been thought so holy that
he was picked to crown a king. But never Aeron Greyjoy. He was
the Damphair, who had seen the god’s own watery halls and
returned to tell of it. “Rise,” he told the sputtering boy as he

slapped him on his naked back. “You have drowned and been
returned to us. What is dead can never die.”
“But rises.” The boy coughed violently, bringing up more water.
“Rises again.” Every word was bought with pain, but that was the
way of the world; a man must ght to live. “Rises again.” Emmond
staggered to his feet. “Harder. And stronger.”
“You belong to the god now,” Aeron told him. The other drowned
men gathered round and each gave him a punch and a kiss to
welcome him to the brotherhood. One helped him don a roughspun
robe of mottled blue and green and grey. Another presented him
with a driftwood cudgel. “You belong to the sea now, so the sea has
armed you,” Aeron said. “We pray that you shall wield your cudgel
ercely, against all the enemies of our god.”
Only then did the priest turn to the three riders, watching from
their saddles. “Have you come to be drowned, my lords?”
The Sparr coughed. “I was drowned as a boy,” he said, “and my
son upon his name day.”
Aeron snorted. That Ste arion Sparr had been given to the
Drowned God soon after birth he had no doubt. He knew the
manner of it too, a quick dip into a tub of seawater that scarce wet
the infant’s head. Small wonder the ironborn had been conquered,
they who once held sway everywhere the sound of waves was
heard. “That is no true drowning,” he told the riders. “He that does
not die in truth cannot hope to rise from death. Why have you
come, if not to prove your faith?”
“Lord Gorold’s son came seeking you, with news.” The Sparr
indicated the youth in the red cloak.
The boy looked to be no more than six-and-ten. “Aye, and which
are you?” Aeron demanded.
“Gormond. Gormond Goodbrother, if it please my lord.”
“It is the Drowned God we must please. Have you been drowned,
Gormond Goodbrother?”
“On my name day, Damphair. My father sent me to nd you and
bring you to him. He needs to see you.”
“Here I stand. Let Lord Gorold come and feast his eyes.” Aeron
took a leather skin from Rus, freshly lled with water from the sea.

The priest pulled out the cork and took a swallow.
“I am to bring you to the keep,” insisted young Gormond, from
atop his horse.
He is afraid to dismount, lest he get his boots wet. “I have the god’s
work to do.” Aeron Greyjoy was a prophet. He did not su er petty
lords ordering him about like some thrall.
“Gorold’s had a bird,” said the Sparr.
“A maester’s bird, from Pyke,” Gormond con rmed.
Dark wings, dark words. “The ravens y o’er salt and stone. If there
are tidings that concern me, speak them now.”
“Such tidings as we bear are for your ears alone, Damphair,” the
Sparr said. “These are not matters I would speak of here before
these others.”
“These others are my drowned men, god’s servants, just as I am. I
have no secrets from them, nor from our god, beside whose holy
sea I stand.”
The horsemen exchanged a look. “Tell him,” said the Sparr, and
the youth in the red cloak summoned up his courage. “The king is
dead,” he said, as plain as that. Four small words, yet the sea itself
trembled when he uttered them.
Four kings there were in Westeros, yet Aeron did not need to ask
which one was meant. Balon Greyjoy ruled the Iron Islands, and no
other. The king is dead. How can that be? Aeron had seen his eldest
brother not a moon’s turn past, when he had returned to the Iron
Islands from harrying the Stony Shore. Balon’s grey hair had gone
half-white whilst the priest had been away, and the stoop in his
shoulders was more pronounced than when the longships sailed. Yet
all in all the king had not seemed ill.
Aeron Greyjoy had built his life upon two mighty pillars. Those
four small words had knocked one down. Only the Drowned God
remains to me. May he make me as strong and tireless as the sea. “Tell
me the manner of my brother’s death.”
“His Grace was crossing a bridge at Pyke when he fell and was
dashed upon the rocks below.”
The Greyjoy stronghold stood upon a broken headland, its keeps
and towers built atop massive stone stacks that thrust up from the

sea. Bridges knotted Pyke together; arched bridges of carved stone
and swaying spans of hempen rope and wooden planks. “Was the
storm raging when he fell?” Aeron demanded of them.
“Aye,” the youth said, “it was.”
“The Storm God cast him down,” the priest announced. For a
thousand thousand years sea and sky had been at war. From the sea
had come the ironborn, and the sh that sustained them even in the
depths of winter, but storms brought only woe and grief. “My
brother Balon made us great again, which earned the Storm God’s
wrath. He feasts now in the Drowned God’s watery halls, with
mermaids to attend his every want. It shall be for us who remain
behind in this dry and dismal vale to nish his great work.” He
pushed the cork back into his waterskin. “I shall speak with your
lord father. How far from here to Hammerhorn?”
“Six leagues. You may ride pillion with me.”
“One can ride faster than two. Give me your horse, and the
Drowned God will bless you.”
“Take my horse, Damphair,” o ered Ste arion Sparr.
“No. His mount is stronger. Your horse, boy.”
The youth hesitated half a heartbeat, then dismounted and held
the reins for the Damphair. Aeron shoved a bare black foot into a
stirrup and swung himself onto the saddle. He was not fond of
horses—they were creatures from the green lands and helped to
make men weak—but necessity required that he ride. Dark wings,
dark words. A storm was brewing, he could hear it in the waves, and
storms brought naught but evil. “Meet with me at Pebbleton
beneath Lord Merlyn’s tower,” he told his drowned men, as he
turned the horse’s head.
The way was rough, up hills and woods and stony de les, along a
narrow track that oft seemed to disappear beneath the horse’s
hooves. Great Wyk was the largest of the Iron Islands, so vast that
some of its lords had holdings that did not front upon the holy sea.
Gorold Goodbrother was one such. His keep was in the Hardstone
Hills, as far from the Drowned God’s realm as any place in the isles.
Gorold’s folk toiled down in Gorold’s mines, in the stony dark

beneath the earth. Some lived and died without setting eyes upon
salt water. Small wonder that such folk are crabbed and queer.
As Aeron rode, his thoughts turned to his brothers.
Nine sons had been born from the loins of Quellon Greyjoy, the
Lord of the Iron Islands. Harlon, Quenton, and Donel had been born
of Lord Quellon’s rst wife, a woman of the Stonetrees. Balon,
Euron, Victarion, Urrigon, and Aeron were the sons of his second, a
Sunderly of Saltcli e. For a third wife Quellon took a girl from the
green lands, who gave him a sickly idiot boy named Robin, the
brother best forgotten. The priest had no memory of Quenton or
Donel, who had died as infants. Harlon he recalled but dimly, sitting
grey-faced and still in a windowless tower room and speaking in
whispers that grew fainter every day as the greyscale turned his
tongue and lips to stone. One day we shall feast on sh together in the
Drowned God’s watery halls, the four of us and Urri too.
Nine sons had been born from the loins of Quellon Greyjoy, but
only four had lived to manhood. That was the way of this cold
world, where men shed the sea and dug in the ground and died,
whilst women brought forth short-lived children from beds of blood
and pain. Aeron had been the last and least of the four krakens,
Balon the eldest and boldest, a erce and fearless boy who lived
only to restore the ironborn to their ancient glory. At ten he scaled
the Flint Cli s to the Blind Lord’s haunted tower. At thirteen he
could run a longship’s oars and dance the nger dance as well as
any man in the isles. At fteen he had sailed with Dagmer Cleftjaw
to the Stepstones and spent a summer reaving. He slew his rst man
there and took his rst two salt wives. At seventeen Balon captained
his own ship. He was all that an elder brother ought to be, though
he had never shown Aeron aught but scorn. I was weak and full of
sin, and scorn was more than I deserved. Better to be scorned by Balon
the Brave than beloved of Euron Crow’s Eye. And if age and grief had
turned Balon bitter with the years, they had also made him more
determined than any man alive. He was born a lord’s son and died a
king, murdered by a jealous god, Aeron thought, and now the storm is
coming, a storm such as these isles have never known.

It was long after dark by the time the priest espied the spiky iron
battlements of the Hammerhorn clawing at the crescent moon.
Gorold’s keep was hulking and blocky, its great stones quarried
from the cli that loomed behind it. Below its walls, the entrances
of caves and ancient mines yawned like toothless black mouths. The
Hammerhorn’s iron gates had been closed and barred for the night.
Aeron beat on them with a rock until the clanging woke a guard.
The youth who admitted him was the image of Gormond, whose
horse he’d taken. “Which one are you?” Aeron demanded.
“Gran. My father awaits you within.”
The hall was dank and drafty, full of shadows. One of Gorold’s
daughters o ered the priest a horn of ale. Another poked at a sullen
re that was giving o more smoke than heat. Gorold Goodbrother
himself was talking quietly with a slim man in ne grey robes, who
wore about his neck a chain of many metals that marked him for a
maester of the Citadel.
“Where is Gormond?” Gorold asked when he saw Aeron.
“He returns afoot. Send your women away, my lord. And the
maester as well.” He had no love of maesters. Their ravens were
creatures of the Storm God, and he did not trust their healing, not
since Urri. No proper man would choose a life of thralldom, nor forge a
chain of servitude to wear about his throat.
“Gysella, Gwin, leave us,” Goodbrother said curtly. “You as well,
Gran. Maester Murenmure will stay.”
“He will go,” insisted Aeron.
“This is my hall, Damphair. It is not for you to say who must go
and who remains. The maester stays.”
The man lives too far from the sea, Aeron told himself. “Then I shall
go,” he told Goodbrother. Dry rushes rustled underneath the
cracked soles of his bare black feet as he turned and stalked away.
It seemed he had ridden a long way for naught.
Aeron was almost at the door when the maester cleared his
throat, and said, “Euron Crow’s Eye sits the Seastone Chair.”
The Damphair turned. The hall had suddenly grown colder. The
Crow’s Eye is half a world away. Balon sent him o two years ago, and

swore that it would be his life if he returned. “Tell me,” he said
hoarsely.
“He sailed into Lordsport the day after the king’s death, and
claimed the castle and the crown as Balon’s eldest brother,” said
Gorold Goodbrother. “Now he sends forth ravens, summoning the
captains and the kings from every isle to Pyke, to bend their knees
and do him homage as their king.”
“No.” Aeron Damphair did not weigh his words. “Only a godly
man may sit the Seastone Chair. The Crow’s Eye worships naught
but his own pride.”
“You were on Pyke not long ago, and saw the king,” said
Goodbrother. “Did Balon say aught to you of the succession?”
Aye. They had spoken in the Sea Tower, as the wind howled
outside the windows and the waves crashed restlessly below. Balon
had shaken his head in despair when he heard what Aeron had to
tell him of his last remaining son. “The wolves have made a
weakling of him, as I feared,” the king had said. “I pray god that
they killed him, so he cannot stand in Asha’s way.” That was Balon’s
blindness; he saw himself in his wild, headstrong daughter, and
believed she could succeed him. He was wrong in that, and Aeron
tried to tell him so. “No woman will ever rule the ironborn, not
even a woman such as Asha,” he insisted, but Balon could be deaf to
things he did not wish to hear.
Before the priest could answer Gorold Goodbrother, the maester’s
mouth apped open once again. “By rights the Seastone Chair
belongs to Theon, or Asha if the prince is dead. That is the law.”
“Green land law,” said Aeron with contempt. “What is that to us?
We are ironborn, the sons of the sea, chosen of the Drowned God.
No woman may rule over us, nor any godless man.”
“And Victarion?” asked Gorold Goodbrother. “He has the Iron
Fleet. Will Victarion make a claim, Damphair?”
“Euron is the elder brother …” began the maester.
Aeron silenced him with a look. In little shing towns and great
stone keeps alike such a look from Damphair would make maids
feel faint and send children shrieking to their mothers, and it was

more than su cient to quell the chain-neck thrall. “Euron is elder,”
the priest said, “but Victarion is more godly.”
“Will it come to war between them?” asked the maester.
“Ironborn must not spill the blood of ironborn.”
“A pious sentiment, Damphair,” said Goodbrother, “but not one
that your brother shares. He had Sawane Botley drowned for saying
that the Seastone Chair by rights belonged to Theon.”
“If he was drowned, no blood was shed,” said Aeron.
The maester and the lord exchanged a look. “I must send word to
Pyke, and soon,” said Gorold Goodbrother. “Damphair, I would
have your counsel. What shall it be, homage or de ance?”
Aeron tugged his beard, and thought. I have seen the storm, and its
name is Euron Crow’s Eye. “For now, send only silence,” he told the
lord. “I must pray on this.”
“Pray all you wish,” the maester said. “It does not change the
law. Theon is the rightful heir, and Asha next.”
“Silence!” Aeron roared. “Too long have the ironborn listened to
you chain-neck maesters prating of the green lands and their laws.
It is time we listened to the sea again. It is time we listened to the
voice of god.” His own voice rang in that smoky hall, so full of
power that neither Gorold Goodbrother nor his maester dared a
reply. The Drowned God is with me, Aeron thought. He has shown me
the way.
Goodbrother o ered him the comforts of the castle for the night,
but the priest declined. He seldom slept beneath a castle roof, and
never so far from the sea. “Comforts I shall know in the Drowned
God’s watery halls beneath the waves. We are born to su er, that
our su erings might make us strong. All that I require is a fresh
horse to carry me to Pebbleton.”
That Goodbrother was pleased to provide. He sent his son
Greydon as well, to show the priest the shortest way through the
hills down to the sea. Dawn was still an hour o when they set
forth, but their mounts were hardy and surefooted, and they made
good time despite the darkness. Aeron closed his eyes and said a
silent prayer, and after a while began to drowse in the saddle.

The sound came softly, the scream of a rusted hinge. “Urri,” he
muttered, and woke, fearful. There is no hinge here, no door, no Urri.
A ying axe took o half of Urri’s hand when he was ten-and-four,
playing at the nger dance whilst his father and his elder brothers
were away at war. Lord Quellon’s third wife had been a Piper of
Pinkmaiden Castle, a girl with big soft breasts and brown doe’s
eyes. Instead of healing Urri’s hand the Old Way, with re and
seawater, she gave him to her green land maester, who swore that
he could sew back the missing ngers. He did that, and later he
used potions and poltices and herbs, but the hand morti ed and Urri
took a fever. By the time the maester sawed his arm o , it was too
late.
Lord Quellon never returned from his last voyage; the Drowned
God in his goodness granted him a death at sea. It was Lord Balon
who came back, with his brothers Euron and Victarion. When Balon
heard what had befallen Urri, he removed three of the maester’s
ngers with a cook’s cleaver and sent his father’s Piper wife to sew
them back on. Poltices and potions worked as well for the maester
as they had for Urrigon. He died raving, and Lord Quellon’s third
wife followed soon thereafter, as the midwife drew a stillborn
daughter from her womb. Aeron had been glad. It had been his axe
that sheared o Urri’s hand, whilst they danced the nger dance
together, as friends and brothers will.
It shamed him still to recall the years that followed Urri’s death.
At six-and-ten he called himself a man, but in truth he had been a
sack of wine with legs. He would sing, he would dance (but not the
nger dance, never again), he would jape and jabber and make
mock. He played the pipes, he juggled, he rode horses, and could
drink more than all the Wynches and the Botleys, and half the
Harlaws too. The Drowned God gives every man a gift, even him;
no man could piss longer or farther than Aeron Greyjoy, as he
proved at every feast. Once he bet his new longship against a herd
of goats that he could quench a hearth re with no more than his
cock. Aeron feasted on goat for a year, and named the longship
Golden Storm, though Balon threatened to hang him from her mast

when he heard what sort of ram his brother proposed to mount
upon her prow.
In the end the Golden Storm went down o Fair Isle during
Balon’s rst rebellion, cut in half by a towering war galley called
Fury when Stannis Baratheon caught Victarion in his trap and
smashed the Iron Fleet. Yet the god was not done with Aeron, and
carried him to shore. Some shermen took him captive and marched
him down to Lannisport in chains, and he spent the rest of the war
in the bowels of Casterly Rock, proving that krakens can piss
farther and longer than lions, boars, or chickens.
That man is dead. Aeron had drowned and been reborn from the
sea, the god’s own prophet. No mortal man could frighten him, no
more than the darkness could … nor memories, the bones of the
soul. The sound of a door opening, the scream of a rusted iron hinge.
Euron has come again. It did not matter. He was the Damphair priest,
beloved of the god.
“Will it come to war?” asked Greydon Goodbrother as the sun
was lightening the hills. “A war of brother against brother?”
“If the Drowned God wills it. No godless man may sit the
Seastone Chair.” The Crow’s Eye will ght, that is certain. No woman
could defeat him, not even Asha; women were made to ght their
battles in the birthing bed. And Theon, if he lived, was just as
hopeless, a boy of sulks and smiles. At Winterfell he proved his
worth, such that it was, but the Crow’s Eye was no crippled boy.
The decks of Euron’s ship were painted red, to better hide the blood
that soaked them. Victarion. The king must be Victarion, or the storm
will slay us all.
Greydon left him when the sun was up, to take the news of
Balon’s death to his cousins in their towers at Downdelving, Crow
Spike Keep, and Corpse Lake. Aeron continued on alone, up hills
and down vales along a stony track that drew wider and more
traveled as he neared the sea. In every village he paused to preach,
and in the yards of petty lords as well. “We were born from the sea,
and to the sea we all return,” he told them. His voice was as deep as
the ocean, and thundered like the waves. “The Storm God in his
wrath plucked Balon from his castle and cast him down, and now he

feasts beneath the waves in the Drowned God’s watery halls.” He
raised his hands. “Balon is dead! The king is dead! Yet a king will
come again! For what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder
and stronger! A king will rise!”
Some of those who heard him threw down their hoes and picks to
follow, so by the time he heard the crash of waves a dozen men
walked behind his horse, touched by god and desirous of drowning.
Pebbleton was home to several thousand sherfolk, whose hovels
huddled round the base of a square towerhouse with a turret at each
corner. Twoscore of Aeron’s drowned men there awaited him,
camped along a grey sand beach in sealskin tents and shelters built
of driftwood. Their hands were roughened by brine, scarred by nets
and lines, callused from oars and picks and axes, but now those
hands gripped driftwood cudgels hard as iron, for the god had
armed them from his arsenal beneath the sea.
They had built a shelter for the priest just above the tideline.
Gladly he crawled into it, after he had drowned his newest
followers. My god, he prayed, speak to me in the rumble of the waves,
and tell me what to do. The captains and the kings await your word.
Who shall be our king in Balon’s place? Sing to me in the language of
leviathan, that I may know his name. Tell me, O Lord beneath the
waves, who has the strength to ght the storm on Pyke?
Though his ride to Hammerhorn had left him weary, Aeron
Damphair was restless in his driftwood shelter, roofed over with
black weeds from the sea. The clouds rolled in to cloak the moon
and stars, and the darkness lay as thick upon the sea as it did upon
his soul. Balon favored Asha, the child of his body, but a woman cannot
rule the ironborn. It must be Victarion. Nine sons had been born from
the loins of Quellon Greyjoy, and Victarion was the strongest of
them, a bull of a man, fearless and dutiful. And therein lies our
danger. A younger brother owes obedience to an elder, and
Victarion was not a man to sail against tradition. He has no love for
Euron, though. Not since the woman died.
Outside, beneath the snoring of his drowned men and the keening
of the wind, he could hear the pounding of the waves, the hammer
of his god calling him to battle. Aeron crept from his little shelter

into the chill of the night. Naked he stood, pale and gaunt and tall,
and naked he walked into the black salt sea. The water was icy cold,
yet he did not inch from his god’s caress. A wave smashed against
his chest, staggering him. The next broke over his head. He could
taste the salt on his lips and feel the god around him, and his ears
rang with the glory of his song. Nine sons were born from the loins of
Quellon Greyjoy, and I was the least of them, as weak and frightened as
a girl. But no longer. That man is drowned, and the god has made me
strong. The cold salt sea surrounded him, embraced him, reached
down through his weak man’s esh and touched his bones. Bones, he
thought. The bones of the soul. Balon’s bones, and Urri’s. The truth is in
our bones, for esh decays and bone endures. And on the hill of Nagga,
the bones of the Grey King’s Hall …
And gaunt and pale and shivering, Aeron Damphair struggled
back to the shore, a wiser man than he had been when he stepped
into the sea. For he had found the answer in his bones, and the way
was plain before him. The night was so cold that his body seemed to
steam as he stalked back toward his shelter, but there was a re
burning in his heart, and sleep came easily for once, unbroken by
the scream of iron hinges.
When he woke the day was bright and windy. Aeron broke his
fast on a broth of clams and seaweed cooked above a driftwood re.
No sooner had he nished than the Merlyn descended from his
towerhouse with half a dozen guards to seek him out. “The king is
dead,” the Damphair told him.
“Aye. I had a bird. And now another.” The Merlyn was a bald
round eshy man who styled himself “Lord” in the manner of the
green lands, and dressed in furs and velvets. “One raven summons
me to Pyke, another to Ten Towers. You krakens have too many
arms, you pull a man to pieces. What say you, priest? Where should
I send my longships?”
Aeron scowled. “Ten Towers, do you say? What kraken calls you
there?” Ten Towers was the seat of the Lord of Harlaw.
“The Princess Asha. She has set her sails for home. The Reader
sends out ravens, summoning all her friends to Harlaw. He says that
Balon meant for her to sit the Seastone Chair.”

“The Drowned God shall decide who sits the Seastone Chair,” the
priest said. “Kneel, that I might bless you.” Lord Merlyn sank to his
knees, and Aeron uncorked his skin and poured a stream of
seawater on his bald pate. “Lord God who drowned for us, let
Meldred your servant be born again from the sea. Bless him with
salt, bless him with stone, bless him with steel.” Water ran down
Merlyn’s fat cheeks to soak his beard and fox-fur mantle. “What is
dead may never die,” Aeron nished, “but rises again, harder and
stronger.” But when Merlyn rose, he told him, “Stay and listen, that
you may spread god’s word.”
Three feet from the water’s edge the waves broke around a
rounded granite boulder. It was there that Aeron Damphair stood,
so all his school might see him, and hear the words he had to say.
“We were born from the sea, and to the sea we all return,” he
began, as he had a hundred times before. “The Storm God in his
wrath plucked Balon from his castle and cast him down, and now he
feasts beneath the waves.” He raised his hands. “The iron king is
dead! Yet a king will come again! For what is dead may never die,
but rises again, harder and stronger!”
“A king shall rise!” the drowned men cried.
“He shall. He must. But who?” The Damphair listened a moment,
but only the waves gave answer. “Who shall be our king?”
The drowned men began to slam their driftwood cudgels one
against the other. “Damphair!” they cried. “Damphair King! Aeron
King! Give us Damphair!”
Aeron shook his head. “If a father has two sons and gives to one
an axe and to the other a net, which does he intend should be the
warrior?”
“The axe is for the warrior,” Rus shouted back, “the net for a
sher of the seas.”
“Aye,” said Aeron. “The god took me deep beneath the waves and
drowned the worthless thing I was. When he cast me forth again he
gave me eyes to see, ears to hear, and a voice to spread his word,
that I might be his prophet and teach his truth to those who have
forgotten. I was not made to sit upon the Seastone Chair … no more

than Euron Crow’s Eye. For I have heard the god, who says, No
godless man may sit my Seastone Chair!”
The Merlyn crossed his arms against his chest. “Is it Asha, then?
Or Victarion? Tell us, priest!”
“The Drowned God will tell you, but not here.” Aeron pointed at
the Merlyn’s fat white face. “Look not to me, nor to the laws of
men, but to the sea. Raise your sails and unship your oars, my lord,
and take yourself to Old Wyk. You, and all the captains and the
kings. Go not to Pyke, to bow before the godless, nor to Harlaw, to
consort with scheming women. Point your prow toward Old Wyk,
where stood the Grey King’s Hall. In the name of the Drowned God
I summon you. I summon all of you! Leave your halls and hovels,
your castles and your keeps, and return to Nagga’s hill to make a
kingsmoot!”
The Merlyn gaped at him. “A kingsmoot? There has not been a
true kingsmoot in …”
“… too long a time!” Aeron cried in anguish. “Yet in the dawn of
days the ironborn chose their own kings, raising up the worthiest
amongst them. It is time we returned to the Old Way, for only that
shall make us great again. It was a kingsmoot that chose Urras
Ironfoot for High King, and placed a driftwood crown upon his
brows. Sylas Flatnose, Harrag Hoare, the Old Kraken, the
kingsmoot raised them all. And from this kingsmoot shall emerge a
man to nish the work King Balon has begun and win us back our
freedoms. Go not to Pyke, nor to the Ten Towers of Harlaw, but to
Old Wyk, I say again. Seek the hill of Nagga and the bones of the
Grey King’s Hall, for in that holy place when the moon has drowned
and come again we shall make ourselves a worthy king, a godly
king.” He raised his bony hands on high again. “Listen! Listen to the
waves! Listen to the god! He is speaking to us, and he says, We shall
have no king but from the kingsmoot!”
A roar went up at that, and the drowned men beat their cudgels
one against the other. “A kingsmoot!” they shouted. “A kingsmoot, a
kingsmoot. No king but from the kingsmoot!” And the clamor that they
made was so thunderous that surely the Crow’s Eye heard the

shouts on Pyke, and the vile Storm God in his cloudy hall. And
Aeron Damphair knew he had done well.

THE CAPTAIN OF GUARDS

The blood oranges are well past ripe,” the prince observed in a
weary voice, when the captain rolled him onto the terrace.
After that he did not speak again for hours.
It was true about the oranges. A few had fallen to burst open on
the pale pink marble. The sharp sweet smell of them lled Hotah’s
nostrils each time he took a breath. No doubt the prince could smell
them too, as he sat beneath the trees in the rolling chair Maester
Caleotte had made for him, with its goose-down cushions and
rumbling wheels of ebony and iron.
For a long while the only sounds were the children splashing in
the pools and fountains, and once a soft plop as another orange
dropped onto the terrace to burst. Then, from the far side of the
palace, the captain heard the faint drumbeat of boots on marble.
Obara. He knew her stride; long-legged, hasty, angry. In the
stables by the gates, her horse would be lathered, and bloody from
her spurs. She always rode stallions, and had been heard to boast
that she could master any horse in Dorne … and any man as well.
The captain could hear other footsteps as well, the quick soft
scu ng of Maester Caleotte hurrying to keep up.
Obara Sand always walked too fast. She is chasing after something
she can never catch, the prince had told his daughter once, in the
captain’s hearing.

When she appeared beneath the triple arch, Areo Hotah swung his
longaxe sideways to block the way. The head was on a shaft of
mountain ash six feet long, so she could not go around. “My lady,
no farther.” His voice was a bass grumble thick with the accents of
Norvos. “The prince does not wish to be disturbed.”
Her face had been stone before he spoke; then it hardened. “You
are in my way, Hotah.” Obara was the eldest Sand Snake, a bigboned woman near to thirty, with the close-set eyes and rat-brown
hair of the Oldtown whore who’d birthed her. Beneath a mottled
sandsilk cloak of dun and gold, her riding clothes were old brown
leather, worn and supple. They were the softest things about her.
On one hip she wore a coiled whip, across her back a round shield
of steel and copper. She had left her spear outside. For that, Areo
Hotah gave thanks. Quick and strong as she was, the woman was no
match for him, he knew … but she did not, and he had no wish to
see her blood upon the pale pink marble.
Maester Caleotte shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Lady
Obara, I tried to tell you …”
“Does he know that my father is dead?” Obara asked the captain,
paying the maester no more mind than she would a y, if any y
had been foolish enough to buzz about her head.
“He does,” the captain said. “He had a bird.”
Death had come to Dorne on raven wings, writ small and sealed
with a blob of hard red wax. Caleotte must have sensed what was in
that letter, for he’d given it Hotah to deliver. The prince thanked
him, but for the longest time he would not break the seal. All
afternoon he’d sat with the parchment in his lap, watching the
children at their play. He watched until the sun went down and the
evening air grew cool enough to drive them inside; then he watched
the starlight on the water. It was moonrise before he sent Hotah to
fetch a candle, so he might read his letter beneath the orange trees
in the dark of night.
Obara touched her whip. “Thousands are crossing the sands afoot
to climb the Boneway, so they may help Ellaria bring my father
home. The septs are packed to bursting, and the red priests have lit
their temple res. In the pillow houses women are coupling with

every man who comes to them, and refusing any coin. In Sunspear,
on the Broken Arm, along the Greenblood, in the mountains, out in
the deep sand, everywhere, everywhere, women tear their hair and
men cry out in rage. The same question is heard on every tongue—
what will Doran do? What will his brother do to avenge our murdered
prince?” She moved closer to the captain. “And you say, he does not
wish to be disturbed!”
“He does not wish to be disturbed,” Areo Hotah said again.
The captain of guards knew the prince he guarded. Once, long
ago, a callow youth had come from Norvos, a big broad-shouldered
boy with a mop of dark hair. That hair was white now, and his body
bore the scars of many battles … but his strength remained, and he
kept his longaxe sharp, as the bearded priests had taught him. She
shall not pass, he told himself, and said, “The prince is watching the
children at their play. He is never to be disturbed when he is
watching the children at their play.”
“Hotah,” said Obara Sand, “you will remove yourself from my
path, else I shall take that longaxe and—”
“Captain,” came the command, from behind. “Let her pass. I will
speak with her.” The prince’s voice was hoarse.
Areo Hotah jerked his longaxe upright and stepped to one side.
Obara gave him a lingering last look and strode past, the maester
hurrying at her heels. Caleotte was no more than ve feet tall and
bald as an egg. His face was so smooth and fat that it was hard to
tell his age, but he had been here before the captain, had even
served the prince’s mother. Despite his age and girth, he was still
nimble enough, and clever as they came, but meek. He is no match
for any Sand Snake, the captain thought.
In the shade of the orange trees, the prince sat in his chair with
his gouty legs propped up before him, and heavy bags beneath his
eyes … though whether it was grief or gout that kept him sleepless,
Hotah could not say. Below, in the fountains and the pools, the
children were still at their play. The youngest were no more than
ve, the oldest nine and ten. Half were girls and half were boys.
Hotah could hear them splashing and shouting at each other in high,
shrill voices. “It was not so long ago that you were one of the

children in those pools, Obara,” the prince said, when she took one
knee before his rolling chair.
She snorted. “It has been twenty years, or near enough to make
no matter. And I was not here long. I am the whore’s whelp, or had
you forgotten?” When he did not answer, she rose again and put her
hands upon her hips. “My father has been murdered.”
“He was slain in single combat during a trial by battle,” Prince
Doran said. “By law, that is no murder.”
“He was your brother.”
“He was.”
“What do you mean to do about his death?”
The prince turned his chair laboriously to face her. Though he
was but two-and- fty, Doran Martell seemed much older. His body
was soft and shapeless beneath his linen robes, and his legs were
hard to look upon. The gout had swollen and reddened his joints
grotesquely; his left knee was an apple, his right a melon, and his
toes had turned to dark red grapes, so ripe it seemed as though a
touch would burst them. Even the weight of a coverlet could make
him shudder, though he bore the pain without complaint. Silence is a
prince’s friend, the captain had heard him tell his daughter once.
Words are like arrows, Arianne. Once loosed, you cannot call them
back. “I have written to Lord Tywin—”
“Written? If you were half the man my father was—”
“I am not your father.”
“That I knew.” Obara’s voice was thick with contempt.
“You would have me go to war.”
“I know better. You need not even leave your chair. Let me
avenge my father. You have a host in the Prince’s Pass. Lord
Yronwood has another in the Boneway. Grant me the one and Nym
the other. Let her ride the kingsroad, whilst I turn the marcher lords
out of their castles and hook round to march on Oldtown.”
“And how could you hope to hold Oldtown?”
“It will be enough to sack it. The wealth of Hightower—”
“Is it gold you want?”
“It is blood I want.”
“Lord Tywin shall deliver us the Mountain’s head.”

“And who will deliver us Lord Tywin’s head? The Mountain has
always been his pet.”
The prince gestured toward the pools. “Obara, look at the
children, if it please you.”
“It does not please me. I’d get more pleasure from driving my
spear into Lord Tywin’s belly. I’ll make him sing ‘The Rains of
Castamere’ as I pull his bowels out and look for gold.”
“Look,” the prince repeated. “I command you.”
A few of the older children lay facedown upon the smooth pink
marble, browning in the sun. Others paddled in the sea beyond.
Three were building a sand castle with a great spike that resembled
the Spear Tower of the Old Palace. A score or more had gathered in
the big pool, to watch the battles as smaller children rode through
the waist-deep shallows on the shoulders of the larger and tried to
shove each other into the water. Every time a pair went down, the
splash was followed by a roar of laughter. They watched a nutbrown girl yank a towheaded boy o his brother’s shoulders to
tumble him head rst into the pool.
“Your father played that same game once, as I did before him,”
said the prince. “We had ten years between us, so I had left the
pools by the time he was old enough to play, but I would watch him
when I came to visit Mother. He was so erce, even as a boy. Quick
as a water snake. I oft saw him topple boys much bigger than
himself. He reminded me of that the day he left for King’s Landing.
He swore that he would do it one more time, else I would never
have let him go.”
“Let him go?” Obara laughed. “As if you could have stopped him.
The Red Viper of Dorne went where he would.”
“He did. I wish I had some word of comfort to—”
“I did not come to you for comfort.” Her voice was full of scorn.
“The day my father came to claim me, my mother did not wish for
me to go. ‘She is a girl,’ she said, ‘and I do not think that she is
yours. I had a thousand other men.’ He tossed his spear at my feet
and gave my mother the back of his hand across the face, so she
began to weep. ‘Girl or boy, we ght our battles,’ he said, ‘but the
gods let us choose our weapons.’ He pointed to the spear, then to

my mother’s tears, and I picked up the spear. ‘I told you she was
mine,’ my father said, and took me. My mother drank herself to
death within the year. They say that she was weeping as she died.”
Obara edged closer to the prince in his chair. “Let me use the spear;
I ask no more.”
“It is a deal to ask, Obara. I shall sleep on it.”
“You have slept too long already.”
“You may be right. I will send word to you at Sunspear.”
“So long as the word is war.” Obara turned upon her heel and
strode o as angrily as she had come, back to the stables for a fresh
horse and another headlong gallop down the road.
Maester Caleotte remained behind. “My prince?” the little round
man asked. “Do your legs hurt?”
The prince smiled faintly. “Is the sun hot?”
“Shall I fetch a draught for the pain?”
“No. I need my wits about me.”
The maester hesitated. “My prince, is it … is it prudent to allow
Lady Obara to return to Sunspear? She is certain to in ame the
common people. They loved your brother well.”
“So did we all.” He pressed his ngers to his temples. “No. You
are right. I must return to Sunspear as well.”
The little round man hesitated. “Is that wise?”
“Not wise, but necessary. Best send a rider to Ricasso, and have
him open my apartments in the Tower of the Sun. Inform my
daughter Arianne that I will be there on the morrow.”
My little princess. The captain had missed her sorely.
“You will be seen,” the maester warned.
The captain understood. Two years ago, when they had left
Sunspear for the peace and isolation of the Water Gardens, Prince
Doran’s gout had not been half so bad. In those days he had still
walked, albeit slowly, leaning on a stick and grimacing with every
step. The prince did not wish his enemies to know how feeble he
had grown, and the Old Palace and its shadow city were full of
eyes. Eyes, the captain thought, and steps he cannot climb. He would
need to y to sit atop the Tower of the Sun.

“I must be seen. Someone must pour oil on the waters. Dorne
must be reminded that it still has a prince.” He smiled wanly. “Old
and gouty though he is.”
“If you return to Sunspear, you will need to give audience to
Princess Myrcella,” Caleotte said. “Her white knight will be with
her … and you know he sends letters to his queen.”
“I suppose he does.”
The white knight. The captain frowned. Ser Arys had come to
Dorne to attend his own princess, as Areo Hotah had once come
with his. Even their names sounded oddly alike: Areo and Arys. Yet
there the likeness ended. The captain had left Norvos and its
bearded priests, but Ser Arys Oakheart still served the Iron Throne.
Hotah had felt a certain sadness whenever he saw the man in the
long snowy cloak, the times the prince had sent him down to
Sunspear. One day, he sensed, the two of them would ght; on that
day Oakheart would die, with the captain’s longaxe crashing
through his skull. He slid his hand along the smooth ashen shaft of
his axe and wondered if that day was drawing nigh.
“The afternoon is almost done,” the prince was saying. “We will
wait for morn. See that my litter is ready by rst light.”
“As you command.” Caleotte bobbed a bow. The captain stood
aside to let him pass, and listened to his footsteps dwindle.
“Captain?” The prince’s voice was soft.
Hotah strode forward, one hand wrapped about his longaxe. The
ash felt as smooth as a woman’s skin against his palm. When he
reached the rolling chair he thumped its butt down hard to
announce his presence, but the prince had eyes only for the
children. “Did you have brothers, captain?” he asked. “Back in
Norvos, when you were young? Sisters?”
“Both,” Hotah said. “Two brothers, three sisters. I was the
youngest.” The youngest, and unwanted. Another mouth to feed, a big
boy who ate too much and soon outgrew his clothes. Small wonder they
had sold him to the bearded priests.
“I was the oldest,” the prince said, “and yet I am the last. After
Mors and Olyvar died in their cradles, I gave up hope of brothers. I
was nine when Elia came, a squire in service at Salt Shore. When

the raven arrived with word that my mother had been brought to
bed a month too soon, I was old enough to understand that meant
the child would not live. Even when Lord Gargalen told me that I
had a sister, I assured him that she must shortly die. Yet she lived,
by the Mother’s mercy. And a year later Oberyn arrived, squalling
and kicking. I was a man grown when they were playing in these
pools. Yet here I sit, and they are gone.”
Areo Hotah did not know what to say to that. He was only a
captain of guards, and still a stranger to this land and its sevenfaced god, even after all these years. Serve. Obey. Protect. He had
sworn those vows at six-and-ten, the day he wed his axe. Simple
vows for simple men, the bearded priests had said. He had not been
trained to counsel grieving princes.
He was still groping for some words to say when another orange
fell with a heavy splat, no more than a foot from where the prince
was seated. Doran winced at the sound, as if somehow it had hurt
him. “Enough,” he sighed, “it is enough. Leave me, Areo. Let me
watch the children for a few more hours.”
When the sun set the air grew cool and the children went inside
in search of supper, still the prince remained beneath his orange
trees, looking out over the still pools and the sea beyond. A serving
man brought him a bowl of purple olives, with atbread, cheese,
and chickpea paste. He ate a bit of it, and drank a cup of the sweet,
heavy strongwine that he loved. When it was empty, he lled it
once again. Sometimes in the deep black hours of the morning sleep
found him in his chair. Only then did the captain roll him down the
moonlit gallery, past a row of uted pillars and through a graceful
archway, to a great bed with crisp cool linen sheets in a chamber by
the sea. Doran groaned as the captain moved him, but the gods
were good and he did not wake.
The captain’s sleeping cell adjoined his prince’s. He sat upon the
narrow bed and found his whetstone and oilcloth in their niche, and
set to work. Keep your longaxe sharp, the bearded priests had told
him, the day they branded him. He always did.
As he honed the axe, Hotah thought of Norvos, the high city on
the hill and the low beside the river. He could still recall the sounds

of the three bells, the way that Noom’s deep peals set his very
bones to shuddering, the proud strong voice of Narrah, sweet Nyel’s
silvery laughter. The taste of wintercake lled his mouth again, rich
with ginger and pine nuts and bits of cherry, with nahsa to wash it
down, fermented goat’s milk served in an iron cup and laced with
honey. He saw his mother in her dress with the squirrel collar, the
one she wore but once each year, when they went to see the bears
dance down the Sinner’s Steps. And he smelled the stench of burning
hair as the bearded priest touched the brand to the center of his
chest. The pain had been so erce that he thought his heart might
stop, yet Areo Hotah had not inched. The hair had never grown
back over the axe.
Only when both edges were sharp enough to shave with did the
captain lay his ash-and-iron wife down on the bed. Yawning, he
pulled o his soiled clothes, tossed them on the oor, and stretched
out on his straw-stu ed mattress. Thinking of the brand had made it
itch, so he had to scratch himself before he closed his eyes. I should
have gathered up the oranges that fell, he thought, and went to sleep
dreaming of the tart sweet taste of them, and the sticky feel of the
red juice on his ngers.
Dawn came too soon. Outside the stables the smallest of the three
horse litters stood ready, the cedarwood litter with the red silk
draperies. The captain chose twenty spears to accompany it, out of
the thirty who were posted at the Water Gardens; the rest would
stay to guard the grounds and children, some of whom were the
sons and daughters of great lords and wealthy merchants.
Although the prince had spoken of departing at rst light, Areo
Hotah knew that he would dawdle. Whilst the maester helped
Doran Martell to bathe and bandaged up his swollen joints in linen
wraps soaked with soothing lotions, the captain donned a shirt of
copper scales as be t his rank, and a billowing cloak of dun-andyellow sandsilk to keep the sun o the copper. The day promised to
be hot, and the captain had long ago discarded the heavy horsehair
cape and studded leather tunic he had worn in Norvos, which were
like to cook a man in Dorne. He had kept his iron halfhelm, with its
crest of sharpened spikes, but now he wore it wrapped in orange

silk, weaving the cloth in and around the spikes. Elsewise the sun
beating down on the metal would have his head pounding before
they saw the palace.
The prince was still not ready to depart. He had decided to break
his fast before he went, with a blood orange and a plate of gull’s
eggs diced with bits of ham and ery peppers. Then nought would
do but he must say farewell to several of the children who had
become especial favorites: the Dalt boy and Lady Blackmont’s brood
and the round-faced orphan girl whose father had sold cloth and
spices up and down the Greenblood. Doran kept a splendid Myrish
blanket over his legs as he spoke with them, to spare the young
ones the sight of his swollen, bandaged joints.
It was midday before they got under way; the prince in his litter,
Maester Caleotte riding on a donkey, the rest afoot. Five spearmen
walked ahead and ve behind, with ve more anking the litter to
either side. Areo Hotah himself took his familiar place at the left
hand of the prince, resting his longaxe on a shoulder as he walked.
The road from Sunspear to the Water Gardens ran beside the sea, so
they had a cool fresh breeze to soothe them as they made their way
across a sparse red-brown land of stone and sand and twisted
stunted trees.
Halfway there, the second Sand Snake caught them.
She appeared suddenly upon a dune, mounted on a golden sand
steed with a mane like ne white silk. Even ahorse, the Lady Nym
looked graceful, dressed all in shimmering lilac robes and a great
silk cape of cream and copper that lifted at every gust of wind, and
made her look as if she might take ight. Nymeria Sand was veand-twenty, and slender as a willow. Her straight black hair, worn
in a long braid bound up with red-gold wire, made a widow’s peak
above her dark eyes, just as her father’s had. With her high
cheekbones, full lips, and milk-pale skin, she had all the beauty that
her elder sister lacked … but Obara’s mother had been an Oldtown
whore, whilst Nym was born from the noblest blood of old Volantis.
A dozen mounted spearmen tailed her, their round shields gleaming
in the sun. They followed her down the dune.

The prince had tied back the curtains on his litter, the better to
enjoy the breeze blowing o the sea. Lady Nym fell in beside him,
slowing her pretty golden mare to match the litter’s pace. “Well
met, Uncle,” she sang out, as if it had been chance that brought her
here. “May I ride with you to Sunspear?” The captain was on the
opposite side of the litter from Lady Nym, yet he could hear every
word she said.
“I would be glad of it,” Prince Doran replied, though he did not
sound glad to the captain’s ears. “Gout and grief make poor
companions on the road.” By which the captain knew him to mean
that every pebble drove a spike through his swollen joints.
“The gout I cannot help,” she said, “but my father had no use for
grief. Vengeance was more to his taste. Is it true that Gregor
Clegane admitted slaying Elia and her children?”
“He roared out his guilt for all the court to hear,” the prince
admitted. “Lord Tywin has promised us his head.”
“And a Lannister always pays his debts,” said Lady Nym, “yet it
seems to me that Lord Tywin means to pay us with our own coin. I
had a bird from our sweet Ser Daemon, who swears my father
tickled that monster more than once as they fought. If so, Ser
Gregor is as good as dead, and no thanks to Tywin Lannister.”
The prince grimaced. Whether it was from the pain of gout or his
niece’s words, the captain could not say. “It may be so.”
“May be? I say ’tis.”
“Obara would have me go to war.”
Nym laughed. “Yes, she wants to set the torch to Oldtown. She
hates that city as much as our little sister loves it.”
“And you?”
Nym glanced over a shoulder, to where her companions rode a
dozen lengths behind. “I was abed with the Fowler twins when the
word reached me,” the captain heard her say. “You know the
Fowler words? Let Me Soar! That is all I ask of you. Let me soar,
Uncle. I need no mighty host, only one sweet sister.”
“Obara?”
“Tyene. Obara is too loud. Tyene is so sweet and gentle that no
man will suspect her. Obara would make Oldtown our father’s

funeral pyre, but I am not so greedy. Four lives will su ce for me.
Lord Tywin’s golden twins, as payment for Elia’s children. The old
lion, for Elia herself. And last of all the little king, for my father.”
“The boy has never wronged us.”
“The boy is a bastard born of treason, incest, and adultery, if Lord
Stannis can be believed.” The playful tone had vanished from her
voice, and the captain found himself watching her through
narrowed eyes. Her sister Obara wore her whip upon her hip and
carried a spear where any man could see it. Lady Nym was no less
deadly, though she kept her knives well hidden. “Only royal blood
can wash out my father’s murder.”
“Oberyn died during single combat, ghting in a matter that was
none of his concern. I do not call that murder.”
“Call it what you will. We sent them the nest man in Dorne, and
they are sending back a bag of bones.”
“He went beyond anything I asked of him. ‘Take the measure of
this boy king and his council, and make note of their strengths and
weaknesses,’ I told him, on the terrace. We were eating oranges.
‘Find us friends, if there are any to be found. Learn what you can of
Elia’s end, but see that you do not provoke Lord Tywin unduly,’
those were my words to him. Oberyn laughed, and said, ‘When have
I provoked any man … unduly? You would do better to warn the
Lannisters against provoking me.’ He wanted justice for Elia, but he
would not wait—”
“He waited ten-and-seven years,” the Lady Nym broke in. “Were
it you they’d killed, my father would have led his banners north
before your corpse was cold. Were it you, the spears would be
falling thick as rain upon the marches now.”
“I do not doubt it.”
“No more should you doubt this, my prince—my sisters and I
shall not wait ten-and-seven years for our vengeance.” She put her
spurs into the mare and she was o , galloping toward Sunspear with
her tail in hot pursuit.
The prince leaned back against his pillows and closed his eyes,
but Hotah knew he did not sleep. He is in pain. For a moment he

considered calling Maester Caleotte up to the litter, but if Prince
Doran had wanted him, he would have called himself.
The shadows of the afternoon were long and dark and the sun
was as red and swollen as the prince’s joints before they glimpsed
the towers of Sunspear to the east. First the slender Spear Tower, a
hundred-and-a-half feet tall and crowned with a spear of gilded steel
that added another thirty feet to its height; then the mighty Tower
of the Sun, with its dome of gold and leaded glass; last the duncolored Sandship, looking like some monstrous dromond that had
washed ashore and turned to stone.
Only three leagues of coast road divided Sunspear from the Water
Gardens, yet they were two di erent worlds. There children
frolicked naked in the sun, music played in tiled courtyards, and the
air was sharp with the smell of lemons and blood oranges. Here the
air smelled of dust, sweat, and smoke, and the nights were alive
with the babble of voices. In place of the pink marble of the Water
Gardens, Sunspear was built from mud and straw, and colored
brown and dun. The ancient stronghold of House Martell stood at
the easternmost end of a little jut of stone and sand, surrounded on
three sides by the sea. To the west, in the shadows of Sunspear’s
massive walls, mud-brick shops and windowless hovels clung to the
castle like barnacles to a galley’s hull. Stables and inns and
winesinks and pillow houses had grown up west of those, many
enclosed by walls of their own, and yet more hovels had risen
beneath those walls. And so and so and so, as the bearded priests would
say. Compared to Tyrosh or Myr or Great Norvos, the shadow city
was no more than a town, yet it was the nearest thing to a true city
that these Dornish had.
Lady Nym’s arrival had preceded theirs by some hours, and no
doubt she had warned the guards of their coming, for the Threefold
Gate was open when they reached it. Only here were the gates lined
up one behind the other to allow visitors to pass beneath all three of
the Winding Walls directly to the Old Palace, without rst making
their way through miles of narrow alleys, hidden courts, and noisy
bazaars.

Prince Doran had closed the draperies of his litter as soon as the
Spear Tower came in sight, yet still the smallfolk shouted out to
him as the litter passed. The Sand Snakes have stirred them to a boil,
the captain thought uneasily. They crossed the squalor of the outer
crescent and went through the second gate. Beyond, the wind stank
of tar and salt water and rotting seaweed, and the crowd grew
thicker with every step. “Make way for Prince Doran!” Areo Hotah
boomed out, thumping the butt of his longaxe on the bricks. “Make
way for the Prince of Dorne!”
“The prince is dead!” a woman shrilled behind him.
“To spears!” a man bellowed from a balcony.
“Doran!” called some highborn voice. “To the spears!”
Hotah gave up looking for the speakers; the press was too thick,
and a third of them were shouting. “To spears! Vengeance for the
Viper!” By the time they reached the third gate, the guards were
shoving people aside to clear a path for the prince’s litter, and the
crowd was throwing things. One ragged boy darted past the
spearmen with a half-rotten pomegranate in one hand, but when he
saw Areo Hotah in his path, with longaxe at the ready, he let the
fruit fall unthrown and beat a quick retreat. Others farther back let
y with lemons, limes, and oranges, crying “War! War! To the
spears!” One of the guards was hit in the eye with a lemon, and the
captain himself had an orange splatter o his foot.
No answer came from within the litter. Doran Martell stayed
cloaked within his silken walls until the thicker walls of the castle
swallowed all of them, and the portcullis came down behind them
with a rattling crunch. The sounds of shouting dwindled away
slowly. Princess Arianne was waiting in the outer ward to greet her
father, with half the court about her: the old blind seneschal
Ricasso, Ser Manfrey Martell the castellan, young Maester Myles
with his grey robes and silky perfumed beard, twoscore of Dornish
knights in owing linen of half a hundred hues. Little Myrcella
Baratheon stood with her septa and Ser Arys of the Kingsguard,
sweltering in his white-enameled scales.
Princess Arianne strode to the litter on snakeskin sandals laced up
to her thighs. Her hair was a mane of jet-black ringlets that fell to

the small of her back, and around her brow was a band of copper
suns. She is still a little thing, the captain thought. Where the Sand
Snakes were tall, Arianne took after her mother, who stood but ve
foot two. Yet beneath her jeweled girdle and loose layers of owing
purple silk and yellow samite she had a woman’s body, lush and
roundly curved. “Father,” she announced as the curtains opened,
“Sunspear rejoices at your return.”
“Yes, I heard the joy.” The prince smiled wanly and cupped his
daughter’s cheek with a reddened, swollen hand. “You look well.
Captain, be so good as to help me down from here.”
Hotah slid his longaxe into its sling across his back and gathered
the prince into his arms, tenderly so as not to jar his swollen joints.
Even so, Doran Martell bit back a gasp of pain.
“I have commanded the cooks to prepare a feast for this evening,”
Arianne said, “with all your favorite dishes.”
“I fear I could not do them justice.” The prince glanced slowly
around the yard. “I do not see Tyene.”
“She begs a private word. I sent her to the throne room to await
your coming.”
The prince sighed. “Very well. Captain? The sooner I am done
with this, the sooner I may rest.”
Hotah bore him up the long stone steps of the Tower of the Sun,
to the great round chamber beneath the dome, where the last light
of the afternoon was slanting down through thick windows of
many-colored glass to dapple the pale marble with diamonds of half
a hundred colors. There the third Sand Snake awaited them.
She was sitting cross-legged on a pillow beneath the raised dais
where the high seats stood, but she rose as they entered, dressed in
a clinging gown of pale blue samite with sleeves of Myrish lace that
made her look as innocent as the Maid herself. In one hand was a
piece of embroidery she had been working on, in the other a pair of
golden needles. Her hair was gold as well, and her eyes were deep
blue pools … and yet somehow they reminded the captain of her
father’s eyes, though Oberyn’s had been as black as night. All of
Prince Oberyn’s daughters have his viper eyes, Hotah realized suddenly.
The color does not matter.

“Uncle,” said Tyene Sand, “I have been waiting for you.”
“Captain, help me to the high seat.”
There were two seats on the dais, near twin to one another, save
that one had the Martell spear inlaid in gold upon its back, whilst
the other bore the blazing Rhoynish sun that had own from the
masts of Nymeria’s ships when rst they came to Dorne. The
captain placed the prince beneath the spear and stepped away.
“Does it hurt so much?” Lady Tyene’s voice was gentle, and she
looked as sweet as summer strawberries. Her mother had been a
septa, and Tyene had an air of almost otherworldy innocence about
her. “Is there aught that I might do to ease your pain?”
“Say what you would and let me rest. I am weary, Tyene.”
“I made this for you, Uncle.” Tyene unfolded the piece she’d been
embroidering. It showed her father, Prince Oberyn, mounted on a
sand steed and armored all in red, smiling. “When I nish, it is
yours, to help you remember him.”
“I am not like to forget your father.”
“That is good to know. Many have wondered.”
“Lord Tywin has promised us the Mountain’s head.”
“He is so kind … but a headsman’s sword is no t end for brave
Ser Gregor. We have prayed so long for his death, it is only fair that
he pray for it as well. I know the poison that my father used, and
there is none slower or more agonizing. Soon we may hear the
Mountain screaming, even here in Sunspear.”
Prince Doran sighed. “Obara cries to me for war. Nym will be
content with murder. And you?”
“War,” said Tyene, “though not my sister’s war. Dornishmen ght
best at home, so I say let us hone our spears and wait. When the
Lannisters and the Tyrells come down on us, we shall bleed them in
the passes and bury them beneath the blowing sands, as we have a
hundred times before.”
“If they should come down on us.”
“Oh, but they must, or see the realm riven once more, as it was
before we wed the dragons. Father told me so. He said we had the
Imp to thank, for sending us Princess Myrcella. She is so pretty,
don’t you think? I wish that I had curls like hers. She was made to

be a queen, just like her mother.” Dimples bloomed in Tyene’s
cheeks. “I would be honored to arrange the wedding, and to see to
the making of the crowns as well. Trystane and Myrcella are so
innocent, I thought perhaps white gold … with emeralds, to match
Myrcella’s eyes. Oh, diamonds and pearls would serve as well, so
long as the children are wed and crowned. Then we need only hail
Myrcella as the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals, the
Rhoynar, and the First Men, and lawful heir to the Seven Kingdoms
of Westeros, and wait for the lions to come.”
“The lawful heir?” The prince snorted.
“She is older than her brother,” explained Tyene, as if he were
some fool. “By law the Iron Throne should pass to her.”
“By Dornish law.”
“When good King Daeron wed Princess Myriah and brought us
into his kingdom, it was agreed that Dornish law would always rule
in Dorne. And Myrcella is in Dorne, as it happens.”
“So she is.” His tone was grudging. “Let me think on it.”
Tyene grew cross. “You think too much, Uncle.”
“Do I?”
“Father said so.”
“Oberyn thought too little.”
“Some men think because they are afraid to do.”
“There is a di erence between fear and caution.”
“Oh, I must pray that I never see you frightened, Uncle. You might
forget to breathe.” She raised a hand …
The captain brought the butt of his longaxe down upon the
marble with a thump. “My lady, you presume. Step from the dais, if
it please you.”
“I meant no harm, Captain. I love my uncle, as I know he loved
my father.” Tyene went to one knee before the prince. “I have said
all I came to say, Uncle. Forgive me if I gave o ense; my heart is
broken all to pieces. Do I still have your love?”
“Always.”
“Give me your blessing, then, and I shall go.”
Doran hesitated half a heartbeat before placing his hand on his
niece’s head. “Be brave, child.”

“Oh, how not? I am his daughter.”
No sooner had she taken her leave than Maester Caleotte hurried
to the dais. “My prince, she did not … here, let me see your hand.”
He examined the palm rst, then gently turned it upside down to
sni at the back of the prince’s ngers. “No, good. That is good.
There are no scratches, so …”
The prince withdrew his hand. “Maester, could I trouble you for
some milk of the poppy? A thimble cup will su ce.”
“The poppy. Yes, to be sure.”
“Now, I think,” Doran Martell urged gently, and Caleotte scurried
to the stairs.
Outside the sun had set. The light within the dome was the blue
of dusk, and all the diamonds on the oor were dying. The prince
sat in his high seat beneath the Martell spear, his face pale with
pain. After a long silence he turned to Areo Hotah. “Captain,” he
said, “how loyal are my guards?”
“Loyal.” The captain did not know what else to say.
“All of them? Or some?”
“They are good men. Good Dornishmen. They will do as I
command.” He thumped his longaxe on the oor. “I will bring the
head of any man who would betray you.”
“I want no heads. I want obedience.”
“You have it.” Serve. Obey. Protect. Simple vows for a simple man.
“How many men are needed?”
“I will leave that for you to decide. It may be that a few good
men will serve us better than a score. I want this done as quickly
and as quietly as possible, with no blood spilled.”
“Quick and quiet and bloodless, aye. What is your command?”
“You will nd my brother’s daughters, take them into custody,
and con ne them in the cells atop the Spear Tower.”
“The Sand Snakes?” The captain’s throat was dry. “All … all eight,
my prince? The little ones, also?”
The prince considered. “Ellaria’s girls are too young to be a
danger, but there are those who might seek to use them against me.
It would be best to keep them safe in hand. Yes, the little ones as
well … but rst secure Tyene, Nymeria, and Obara.”

“As my prince commands.” His heart was troubled. My little
princess will mislike this. “What of Sarella? She is a woman grown,
almost twenty.”
“Unless she returns to Dorne, there’s naught I can do about
Sarella save pray that she shows more sense than her sisters. Leave
her to her … game. Gather up the others. I shall not sleep until I
know that they are safe and under guard.”
“It will be done.” The captain hesitated. “When this is known in
the streets, the common folk will howl.”
“All Dorne will howl,” said Doran Martell in a tired voice. “I only
pray Lord Tywin hears them in King’s Landing, so he might know
what a loyal friend he has in Sunspear.”

CERSEI

She dreamt she sat the Iron Throne, high above them all.
The courtiers were brightly colored mice below. Great lords and
proud ladies knelt before her. Bold young knights laid their swords
at her feet and pleaded for her favors, and the queen smiled down
at them. Until the dwarf appeared as if from nowhere, pointing at
her and howling with laughter. The lords and ladies began to
chuckle too, hiding their smiles behind their hands. Only then did
the queen realize she was naked.
Horri ed, she tried to cover herself with her hands. The barbs
and blades of the Iron Throne bit into her esh as she crouched to
hide her shame. Blood ran red down her legs, as steel teeth gnawed
at her buttocks. When she tried to stand, her foot slipped through a
gap in the twisted metal. The more she struggled the more the
throne engulfed her, tearing chunks of esh from her breasts and
belly, slicing at her arms and legs until they were slick and red,
glistening.
And all the while her brother capered below, laughing.
His merriment still echoed in her ears when she felt a light touch
on her shoulder, and woke suddenly. For half a heartbeat the hand
seemed part of the nightmare, and Cersei cried out, but it was only
Senelle. The maid’s face was white and frightened.
We are not alone, the queen realized. Shadows loomed around her
bed, tall shapes with chain mail glimmering beneath their cloaks.

Armed men had no business here. Where are my guards? Her
bedchamber was dark, but for the lantern one of the intruders held
on high. I must show no fear. Cersei pushed back sleep-tousled hair,
and said, “What do you want of me?” A man stepped into the
lantern light, and she saw his cloak was white. “Jaime?” I dreamt of
one brother, but the other has come to wake me.
“Your Grace.” The voice was not her brother’s. “The Lord
Commander said come get you.” His hair curled, as Jaime’s did, but
her brother’s hair was beaten gold, like hers, where this man’s was
black and oily. She stared at him, confused, as he muttered about a
privy and a crossbow, and said her father’s name. I am dreaming still,
Cersei thought. I have not woken, nor has my nightmare ended. Tyrion
will creep out from under the bed soon and begin to laugh at me.
But that was folly. Her dwarf brother was down in the black cells,
condemned to die this very day. She looked down at her hands,
turning them over to make certain all her ngers were still there.
When she ran a hand down her arm the skin was covered with
gooseprickles, but unbroken. There were no cuts on her legs, no
gashes on the soles of her feet. A dream, that’s all it was, a dream. I
drank too much last night, these fears are only humors born of wine. I
will be the one laughing, come dusk. My children will be safe, Tommen’s
throne will be secure, and my twisted little valonqar will be short a head
and rotting.
Jocelyn Swyft was at her elbow, pressing a cup on her. Cersei
took a sip: water, mixed with lemon squeezings, so tart she spit it
out. She could hear the night wind rattling the shutters, and she saw
with a strange sharp clarity. Jocelyn was trembling like a leaf, as
frightened as Senelle. Ser Osmund Kettleblack loomed over her.
Behind him stood Ser Boros Blount, with a lantern. At the door were
Lannister guardsmen with gilded lions shining on the crests of their
helmets. They looked afraid as well. Can it be? the queen wondered.
Can it be true?
She rose, and let Senelle slip a bedrobe over her shoulders to hide
her nakedness. Cersei belted it herself, her ngers sti and clumsy.
“My lord father keeps guards about him, night and day,” she said.
Her tongue felt thick. She took another swallow of lemon water and

sloshed it round her mouth to freshen her breath. A moth had
gotten into the lantern Ser Boros was holding; she could hear it
buzzing and see the shadow of its wings as it beat against the glass.
“The guards were at their posts, Your Grace,” said Osmund
Kettleblack. “We found a hidden door behind the hearth. A secret
passage. The Lord Commander’s gone down to see where it goes.”
“Jaime?” Terror seized her, sudden as a storm. “Jaime should be
with the king …”
“The lad’s not been harmed. Ser Jaime sent a dozen men to look
in on him. His Grace is sleeping peaceful.”
Let him have a sweeter dream than mine, and a kinder waking. “Who
is with the king?”
“Ser Loras has that honor, if it please you.”
It did not please her. The Tyrells were only stewards that the
dragon-kings had upjumped far above their station. Their vanity
was exceeded only by their ambition. Ser Loras might be as pretty
as a maiden’s dream, but underneath his white cloak he was Tyrell
to the bone. For all she knew, this night’s foul fruit had been
planted and nurtured in Highgarden.
But that was a suspicion she dare not speak aloud. “Allow me a
moment to dress. Ser Osmund, you shall accompany me to the
Tower of the Hand. Ser Boros, roust the gaolers and make certain
the dwarf is still in his cell.” She would not say his name. He would
never have found the courage to lift a hand against Father, she told
herself, but she had to be certain.
“As Your Grace commands.” Blount surrendered the lantern to Ser
Osmund. Cersei was not displeased to see the back of him. Father
should never have restored him to the white. The man had proved
himself a craven.
By the time they left Maegor’s Holdfast, the sky had turned a
deep cobalt blue, though the stars still shone. All but one, Cersei
thought. The bright star of the west has fallen, and the nights will be
darker now. She paused upon the drawbridge that spanned the dry
moat, gazing down at the spikes below. They would not dare lie to
me about such a thing. “Who found him?”

“One of his guards,” said Ser Osmund. “Lum. He felt a call of
nature, and found his lordship in the privy.”
No, that cannot be. That is not the way a lion dies. The queen felt
strangely calm. She remembered the rst time she had lost a tooth,
when she was just a little girl. It hadn’t hurt, but the hole in her
mouth felt so odd she could not stop touching it with her tongue.
Now there is a hole in the world where Father stood, and holes want
lling.
If Tywin Lannister was truly dead, no one was safe … least of all
her son upon his throne. When the lion falls the lesser beasts move
in: the jackals and the vultures and the feral dogs. They would try
to push her aside, as they always had. She would need to move
quickly, as she had when Robert died. This might be the work of
Stannis Baratheon, through some catspaw. It could well be the
prelude to another attack upon the city. She hoped it was. Let him
come. I will smash him, just as Father did, and this time he will die.
Stannis did not frighten her, no more than Mace Tyrell did. No one
frightened her. She was a daughter of the Rock, a lion. There will be
no more talk of forcing me to wed again. Casterly Rock was hers now,
and all the power of House Lannister. No one would ever disregard
her again. Even when Tommen had no further need of a regent, the
Lady of Casterly Rock would remain a power in the land.
The rising sun had painted the tower tops a vivid red, but beneath
the walls the night still huddled. The outer castle was so hushed that
she could have believed all its people dead. They should be. It is not
tting for Tywin Lannister to die alone. Such a man deserves a retinue to
attend his needs in hell.
Four spearmen in red cloaks and lion-crested helms were posted
at the door of the Tower of the Hand. “No one is to enter or leave
without my permission,” she told them. The command came easily
to her. My father had steel in his voice as well.
Within the tower, the smoke from the torches irritated her eyes,
but Cersei did not weep, no more than her father would have. I am
the only true son he ever had. Her heels scraped against the stone as
she climbed, and she could still hear the moth uttering wildly

inside Ser Osmund’s lantern. Die, the queen thought at it, in
irritation, y into the ame and be done with it.
Two more red-cloaked guardsmen stood atop the steps. Red
Lester muttered a condolence as she passed. The queen’s breath was
coming fast and short, and she could feel her heart uttering in her
chest. The steps, she told herself, this cursed tower has too many steps.
She had half a mind to tear it down.
The hall was full of fools speaking in whispers, as if Lord Tywin
were asleep and they were afraid to wake him. Guards and servants
alike shrank back before her, mouths apping. She saw their pink
gums and waggling tongues, but their words made no more sense
than the buzzing of the moth. What are they doing here? How did they
know? By rights they should have called her rst. She was the
Queen Regent, had they forgotten that?
Before the Hand’s bedchamber stood Ser Meryn Trant in his white
armor and cloak. The visor of his helm was open, and the bags
beneath his eyes made him look still half-asleep. “Clear these people
away,” Cersei told him. “Is my father in the privy?”
“They carried him back to his bed, m’lady.” Ser Meryn pushed the
door open for her to enter.
Morning light slashed through the shutters to paint golden bars
upon the rushes strewn across the oor of the bedchamber. Her
uncle Kevan was on his knees beside the bed, trying to pray, but he
could scarcely get the words out. Guardsmen clustered near the
hearth. The secret door that Ser Osmund had spoken of gaped open
behind the ashes, no bigger than an oven. A man would need to
crawl. But Tyrion is only half a man. The thought made her angry.
No, the dwarf is locked in a black cell. This could not be his work.
Stannis, she told herself, Stannis was behind it. He still has adherents in
the city. Him, or the Tyrells …
There had always been talk of secret passages within the Red
Keep. Maegor the Cruel was supposed to have killed the men who
built the castle to keep the knowledge of them secret. How many
other bedchambers have hidden doors? Cersei had a sudden vision of
the dwarf crawling out from behind a tapestry in Tommen’s

bedchamber with blade in hand. Tommen is well guarded, she told
herself. But Lord Tywin had been well guarded too.
For a moment she did not recognize the dead man. He had hair
like her father, yes, but this was some other man, surely, a smaller
man, and much older. His bedrobe was hiked up around his chest,
leaving him naked below the waist. The quarrel had taken him in
his groin between his navel and his manhood, and was sunk so deep
that only the etching showed. His pubic hair was sti with dried
blood. More was congealing in his navel.
The smell of him made her wrinkle her nose. “Take the quarrel
out of him,” she commanded. “This is the King’s Hand!” And my
father. My lord father. Should I scream and tear my hair? They said
Catelyn Stark had clawed her own face to bloody ribbons when the
Freys slew her precious Robb. Would you like that, Father? she
wanted to ask him. Or would you want me to be strong? Did you weep
for your own father? Her grandfather had died when she was only a
year old, but she knew the story. Lord Tytos had grown very fat,
and his heart burst one day when he was climbing the steps to his
mistress. Her father was o in King’s Landing when it happened,
serving as the Mad King’s Hand. Lord Tywin was often away in
King’s Landing when she and Jaime were young. If he wept when
they brought him word of his father’s death, he did it where no one
could see the tears.
The queen could feel her nails digging into her palms. “How
could you leave him like this? My father was Hand to three kings,
as great a man as ever strode the Seven Kingdoms. The bells must
ring for him, as they rang for Robert. He must be bathed and
dressed as be ts his stature, in ermine and cloth-of-gold and
crimson silk. Where is Pycelle? Where is Pycelle?” She turned to the
guardsmen. “Puckens, bring Grand Maester Pycelle. He must see to
Lord Tywin.”
“He’s seen him, Your Grace,” said Puckens. “He came and saw
and went, to summon the silent sisters.”
They sent for me last. The realization made her almost too angry
for words. And Pycelle runs o to send a message rather than soil his
soft, wrinkled hands. The man is useless. “Find Maester Ballabar,” she

commanded. “Find Maester Frenken. Any of them.” Puckens and
Shortear ran to obey. “Where is my brother?”
“Down the tunnel. There’s a shaft, with iron rungs set in the
stone. Ser Jaime went to see how deep it goes.”
He has only one hand, she wanted to shout at them. One of you
should have gone. He has no business climbing ladders. The men who
murdered Father might be down there, waiting for him. Her twin had
always been too rash, and it would seem that even losing a hand
had not taught him caution. She was about to command the guards
to go down after him and bring him back when Puckens and
Shortear returned with a grey-haired man between them. “Your
Grace,” said Shortear, “this here claims he was a maester.”
The man bowed low. “How may I serve Your Grace?”
His face was vaguely familiar, though Cersei could not place him.
Old, but not so old as Pycelle. This one has some strength in him still. He
was tall, though slightly stooped, with crinkles around his bold blue
eyes. His throat is naked. “You wear no maester’s chain.”
“It was taken from me. My name is Qyburn, if it please Your
Grace. I treated your brother’s hand.”
“His stump, you mean.” She remembered him now. He had come
with Jaime from Harrenhal.
“I could not save Ser Jaime’s hand, it is true. My arts saved his
arm, however, mayhaps his very life. The Citadel took my chain,
but they could not take my knowledge.”
“You may su ce,” she decided. “If you fail me you will lose more
than a chain, I promise you. Remove the quarrel from my father’s
belly and make him ready for the silent sisters.”
“As my queen commands.” Qyburn went to the bedside, paused,
looked back. “And how shall I deal with the girl, Your Grace?”
“Girl?” Cersei had overlooked the second body. She strode to the
bed, ung aside the heap of bloody coverlets, and there she was,
naked, cold, and pink … save for her face, which had turned as
black as Jo ’s had at his wedding feast. A chain of linked golden
hands was half-buried in the esh of her throat, twisted so tight that
it had broken the skin. Cersei hissed like an angry cat. “What is she
doing here?”

“We found her there, Your Grace,” said Shortear. “It’s the Imp’s
whore.” As if that explained why she was here.
My lord father had no use for whores, she thought. After our mother
died he never touched a woman. She gave the guardsman a chilly
look. “This is not … when Lord Tywin’s father died he returned to
Casterly Rock to nd a … a woman of this sort … bedecked in his
lady mother’s jewels, wearing one of her gowns. He stripped them
o her, and all else as well. For a fortnight she was paraded naked
through the streets of Lannisport, to confess to every man she met
that she was a thief and a harlot. That was how Lord Tywin
Lannister dealt with whores. He never … this woman was here for
some other purpose, not for …”
“Perhaps his lordship was questioning the girl about her
mistress,” Qyburn suggested. “Sansa Stark vanished the night the
king was murdered, I have heard.”
“That’s so.” Cersei seized on the suggestion eagerly. “He was
questioning her, to be sure. There can be no doubt.” She could see
Tyrion leering, his mouth twisted into a monkey’s grin beneath the
ruin of his nose. And what better way to question her than naked, with
her legs well spread? the dwarf whispered. That’s how I like to question
her too.
The queen turned away. I will not look at her. Suddenly it was too
much even to be in the same room as the dead woman. She pushed
past Qyburn, out into the hall.
Ser Osmund had been joined by his brothers Osney and Osfryd.
“There is a dead woman in the Hand’s bedchamber,” Cersei told the
three Kettleblacks. “No one is ever to know that she was here.”
“Aye, m’lady.” Ser Osney had faint scratches on his cheek where
another of Tyrion’s whores had clawed him. “And what shall we do
with her?”
“Feed her to your dogs. Keep her for a bedmate. What do I care?
She was never here. I’ll have the tongue of any man who dares to say
she was. Do you understand me?”
Osney and Osfryd exchanged a look. “Aye, Your Grace.”
She followed them back inside and watched as they bundled the
girl up in her father’s bloody blankets. Shae, her name was Shae.

They had last spoken the night before the dwarf’s trial by combat,
after that smiling Dornish snake o ered to champion him. Shae had
been asking about some jewels Tyrion had given her, and certain
promises Cersei might have made, a manse in the city and a knight
to marry her. The queen made it plain that the whore would have
nothing of her until she told them where Sansa Stark had gone.
“You were her maid. Do you expect me to believe that you knew
nothing of her plans?” she had said. Shae left in tears.
Ser Osfryd slung the bundled corpse up over his shoulder. “I want
that chain,” Cersei said. “See that you do not scratch the gold.”
Osfryd nodded and started toward the door. “No, not through the
yard.” She gestured toward the secret passage. “There’s a shaft
down to the dungeons. That way.”
As Ser Osfryd went down on one knee before the hearth, the light
brightened within, and the queen heard noises. Jaime emerged bent
over like an old woman, his boots kicking up pu s of soot from
Lord Tywin’s last re. “Get out of my way,” he told the
Kettleblacks.
Cersei rushed toward him. “Did you nd them? Did you nd the
killers? How many were there?” Surely there had been more than
one. One man alone could not have killed her father.
Her twin’s face had a haggard look. “The shaft goes down to a
chamber where half a dozen tunnels meet. They’re closed o by
iron gates, chained and locked. I need to nd keys.” He glanced
around the bedchamber. “Whoever did this might still be lurking in
the walls. It’s a maze back there, and dark.”
She imagined Tyrion creeping between the walls like some
monstrous rat. No. You are being silly. The dwarf is in his cell. “Take
hammers to the walls. Knock this tower down, if you must. I want
them found. Whoever did this. I want them killed.”
Jaime hugged her, his good hand pressing against the small of her
back. He smelled of ash, but the morning sun was in his hair, giving
it a golden glow. She wanted to draw his face to hers for a kiss.
Later, she told herself, later he will come to me, for comfort. “We are
his heirs, Jaime,” she whispered. “It will be up to us to nish his

work. You must take Father’s place as Hand. You see that now,
surely. Tommen will need you …”
He pushed away from her and raised his arm, forcing his stump
into her face. “A Hand without a hand? A bad jape, sister. Don’t ask
me to rule.”
Their uncle heard the rebu . Qyburn as well, and the
Kettleblacks, wrestling their bundle through the ashes. Even the
guardsmen heard, Puckens and Hoke the Horseleg and Shortear. It
will be all over the castle by nightfall. Cersei felt the heat rising up her
cheeks. “Rule? I said naught of ruling. I shall rule until my son
comes of age.”
“I don’t know who I pity more,” her brother said. “Tommen, or
the Seven Kingdoms.”
She slapped him. Jaime’s arm rose to catch the blow, catquick … but this cat had a cripple’s stump in place of a right hand.
Her ngers left red marks on his cheek.
The sound brought their uncle to his feet. “Your father lies here
dead. Have the decency to take your quarrel outside.”
Jaime inclined his head in apology. “Forgive us, Uncle. My sister
is sick with grief. She forgets herself.”
She wanted to slap him again for that. I must have been mad to
think he could be Hand. She would sooner abolish the o ce. When
had a Hand ever brought her anything but grief? Jon Arryn put
Robert Baratheon in her bed, and before he died he’d begun sni ng
about her and Jaime as well. Eddard Stark took up right where
Arryn had left o ; his meddling had forced her to rid herself of
Robert sooner than she would have liked, before she could deal
with his pestilential brothers. Tyrion sold Myrcella to the
Dornishmen, made one of her sons his hostage, and murdered the
other. And when Lord Tywin returned to King’s Landing …
The next Hand will know his place, she promised herself. It would
have to be Ser Kevan. Her uncle was tireless, prudent, unfailingly
obedient. She could rely on him, as her father had. The hand does
not argue with the head. She had a realm to rule, but she would need
new men to help her rule it. Pycelle was a doddering lickspittle,
Jaime had lost his courage with his sword hand, and Mace Tyrell

and his cronies Redwyne and Rowan could not be trusted. For all
she knew they might have had a part in this. Lord Tyrell had to
know that he would never rule the Seven Kingdoms so long as
Tywin Lannister lived.
I will need to move carefully with that one. The city was full of his
men, and he’d even managed to plant one of his sons in the
Kingsguard, and meant to plant his daughter in Tommen’s bed. It
still made her furious to think that Father had agreed to betroth
Tommen to Margaery Tyrell. The girl is twice his age and twice
widowed. Mace Tyrell claimed his daughter was still virgin, but
Cersei had her doubts. Jo rey had been murdered before he could
bed the girl, but she had been wed to Renly rst … A man may
prefer the taste of hippocras, yet if you set a tankard of ale before him,
he will qua it quick enough. She must command Lord Varys to nd
out what he could.
That stopped her where she stood. She had forgotten about Varys.
He should be here. He is always here. Whenever anything of import
happened in the Red Keep, the eunuch appeared as if from nowhere.
Jaime is here, and Uncle Kevan, and Pycelle has come and gone, but not
Varys. A cold nger touched her spine. He was part of this. He must
have feared that Father meant to have his head, so he struck rst. Lord
Tywin had never had any love for the simpering master of
whisperers. And if any man knew the Red Keep’s secrets, it was
surely the master of whisperers. He must have made common cause
with Lord Stannis. They served together on Robert’s council, after all …
Cersei strode to the door of the bedchamber, to Ser Meryn Trant.
“Trant, bring me Lord Varys. Squealing and squirming if need be,
but unharmed.”
“As Your Grace commands.”
But no sooner had one Kingsguard departed than another one
returned. Ser Boros Blount was red-faced and pu ng from his
headlong rush up the steps. “Gone,” he panted, when he saw the
queen. He sank to one knee. “The Imp … his cell’s open, Your
Grace … no sign of him anywhere …”
The dream was true. “I gave orders,” she said. “He was to be kept
under guard, night and day …”

Blount’s chest was heaving. “One of the gaolers has gone missing
too. Rugen, his name was. Two other men we found asleep.”
It was all she could do not to scream. “I hope you did not wake
them, Ser Boros. Let them sleep.”
“Sleep?” He looked up, jowly and confused. “Aye, Your Grace.
How long shall—”
“Forever. See that they sleep forever, ser. I will not su er guards
to sleep on watch.” He is in the walls. He killed Father as he killed
Mother, as he killed Jo . The dwarf would come for her as well, the
queen knew, just as the old woman had promised her in the dimness
of that tent. I laughed in her face, but she had powers. I saw my future
in a drop of blood. My doom. Her legs were weak as water. Ser Boros
tried to take her by the arm, but the queen recoiled from his touch.
For all she knew he might be one of Tyrion’s creatures. “Get away
from me,” she said. “Get away!” She staggered to a settle.
“Your Grace?” said Blount. “Shall I fetch a cup of water?”
It is blood I need, not water. Tyrion’s blood, the blood of the
valonqar. The torches spun around her. Cersei closed her eyes, and
saw the dwarf grinning at her. No, she thought, no, I was almost rid
of you. But his ngers had closed around her neck, and she could
feel them beginning to tighten.

BRIENNE

I am looking for a maid of three-and-ten,” she told the grey-haired
goodwife beside the village well. “A highborn maid and very
beautiful, with blue eyes and auburn hair. She may have been
traveling with a portly knight of forty years, or perhaps with a fool.
Have you seen her?”
“Not as I recall, ser,” the goodwife said, knuckling her forehead.
“But I’ll keep my eye out, that I will.”
The blacksmith had not seen her either, nor the septon in the
village sept, the swineherd with his pigs, the girl pulling up onions
from her garden, nor any of the other simple folk that the Maid of
Tarth found amongst the daub-and-wattle huts of Rosby. Still, she
persisted. This is the shortest road to Duskendale, Brienne told herself.
If Sansa came this way, someone must have seen her. At the castle
gates she posed her question to two spearmen whose badges
showed three red chevronels on ermine, the arms of House Rosby.
“If she’s on the roads these days she won’t be no maid for long,”
said the older man. The younger wanted to know if the girl had that
auburn hair between her legs as well.
I will nd no help here. As Brienne mounted up again, she glimpsed
a skinny boy atop a piebald horse at the far end of the village. I
have not talked with that one, she thought, but he vanished behind
the sept before she could seek him out. She did not trouble to chase
after him. Most like he knew no more than the others had. Rosby

was scarce more than a wide place in the road; Sansa would have
had no reason to linger here. Returning to the road, Brienne headed
north and east past apple orchards and elds of barley, and soon left
the village and its castle well behind. It was at Duskendale that she
would nd her quarry, she told herself. If she came this way at all.
“I will nd the girl and keep her safe,” Brienne had promised Ser
Jaime, back at King’s Landing. “For her lady mother’s sake. And for
yours.” Noble words, but words were easy. Deeds were hard. She
had lingered too long and learned too little in the city. I should have
set out earlier … but to where? Sansa Stark had vanished on the night
King Jo rey died, and if anyone had seen her since, or had any
inkling where she might have gone, they were not talking. Not to
me, at least.
Brienne believed the girl had left the city. If she were still in
King’s Landing, the gold cloaks would have turned her up. She had
to have gone elsewhere … but elsewhere is a big place. If I were a
maiden newly owered, alone and afraid, in desperate danger, what
would I do? she had asked herself. Where would I go? For her, the
answer came easy. She would make her way back to Tarth, to her
father. Sansa’s father had been beheaded whilst she watched,
however. Her lady mother was dead too, murdered at the Twins,
and Winterfell, the great Stark stronghold, had been sacked and
burned, its people put to the sword. She has no home to run to, no
father, no mother, no brothers. She might be in the next town, or on a
ship to Asshai; one seemed as likely as the other.
Even if Sansa Stark had wanted to go home, how would she get
there? The kingsroad was not safe; even a child would know that.
The ironborn held Moat Cailin athwart the Neck, and at the Twins
sat the Freys, who had murdered Sansa’s brother and lady mother.
The girl could go by sea if she had the coin, but the harbor at King’s
Landing was still in ruins, the river a jumble of broken quays and
burned and sunken galleys. Brienne had asked along the docks, but
no one could remember a ship leaving on the night King Jo rey
died. A few trading ships were anchoring in the bay and o -loading
by boat, one man told her, but more were continuing up the coast
to Duskendale, where the port was busier than ever.

Brienne’s mare was sweet to look upon and kept a pretty pace.
There were more travelers than she would have thought. Begging
brothers trundled by with their bowls dangling on thongs about
their necks. A young septon galloped past upon a palfrey as ne as
any lord’s, and later she met a band of silent sisters who shook their
heads when Brienne put her question to them. A train of oxcarts
lumbered south with grain and sacks of wool, and later she passed a
swineherd driving pigs, and an old woman in a horse litter with an
escort of mounted guards. She asked all of them if they had seen a
highborn girl of three-and-ten years with blue eyes and auburn hair.
None had. She asked about the road ahead as well. “ ’Twixt here
and Duskendale is safe enough,” one man told her, “but past
Duskendale there’s outlaws, and broken men in the woods.”
Only the soldier pines and sentinels still showed green; the
broadleaf trees had donned mantles of russet and gold, or else
uncloaked themselves to scratch against the sky with branches
brown and bare. Every gust of wind drove swirling clouds of dead
leaves across the rutted road. They made a rustling sound as they
scuttled past the hooves of the big bay mare that Jaime Lannister
had bestowed on her. As easy to nd one leaf in the wind as one girl
lost in Westeros. She found herself wondering whether Jaime had
given her this task as some cruel jape. Perhaps Sansa Stark was
dead, beheaded for her part in King Jo rey’s death, buried in some
unmarked grave. How better to conceal her murder than by sending
some big stupid wench from Tarth to nd her?
Jaime would not do that. He was sincere. He gave me the sword, and
called it Oathkeeper. Anyway, it made no matter. She had promised
Lady Catelyn that she would bring back her daughters, and no
promise was as solemn as one sworn to the dead. The younger girl
was long dead, Jaime claimed; the Arya the Lannisters sent north to
marry Roose Bolton’s bastard was a fraud. That left only Sansa.
Brienne had to nd her.
Near dusk she saw a camp re burning by a brook. Two men sat
beside it grilling trout, their arms and armor stacked beneath a tree.
One was old and one was somewhat younger, though far from
young. The younger rose to greet her. He had a big belly straining

at the laces of his spotted doeskin jerkin. A shaggy untrimmed
beard covered his cheeks and chin, the color of old gold. “We have
trout enough for three, ser,” he called out.
It was not the rst time Brienne had been mistaken for a man.
She pulled o her greathelm, letting her hair spill free. It was
yellow, the color of dirty straw, and near as brittle. Long and thin,
it blew about her shoulders. “I thank you, ser.”
The hedge knight squinted at her so earnestly that she realized he
must be nearsighted. “A lady, is it? Armed and armored? Illy, gods
be good, the size of her.”
“I took her for a knight as well,” the older knight said, turning
the trout.
Had Brienne been a man, she would have been called big; for a
woman, she was huge. Freakish was the word she had heard all her
life. She was broad in the shoulder and broader in the hips. Her legs
were long, her arms thick. Her chest was more muscle than bosom.
Her hands were big, her feet enormous. And she was ugly besides,
with a freckled, horsey face and teeth that seemed almost too big
for her mouth. She did not need to be reminded of any of that.
“Sers,” she said, “have you seen a maid of three-and-ten upon the
road? She has blue eyes and auburn hair, and may have been in
company with a portly red-faced man of forty years.”
The nearsighted hedge knight scratched his head. “I recall no such
maid. What sort of hair is auburn?”
“Browny red,” said the older man. “No, we saw her not.”
“We saw her not, m’lady,” the younger told her. “Come,
dismount, the sh is almost done. Are you hungry?”
She was, as it happened, but she was wary as well. Hedge knights
had an unsavory reputation. “A hedge knight and a robber knight
are two sides of the same sword,” it was said. These two do not look
too dangerous. “Might I know your names, sers?”
“I have the honor to be Ser Creighton Longbough, of whom the
singers sing,” said the big-bellied one. “You will have heard of my
deeds on the Blackwater, mayhaps. My companion is Ser Illifer the
Penniless.”

If there was a song about Creighton Longbough, it was not one
Brienne had heard. Their names meant no more to her than did their
arms. Ser Creighton’s green shield showed only a brown chief, and a
deep gouge made by some battle-axe. Ser Illifer bore gold and
ermine gyronny, though everything about him suggested that
painted gold and painted ermine were the only sorts he’d ever
known. He was sixty if he was a day, his face pinched and narrow
beneath the hood of a patched roughspun mantle. Mail-clad he
went, but ecks of rust spotted the iron like freckles. Brienne stood
a head taller than either of them, and was better mounted and
better armed in the bargain. If I fear the likes of these, I had as well
swap my longsword for a pair of knitting needles.
“I thank you, good sers,” she said. “I will gladly share your
trout.” Swinging down, Brienne unsaddled her mare and watered
her before hobbling her to graze. She stacked her arms and shield
and saddlebags beneath an elm. By then the trout was crisply done.
Ser Creighton brought her a sh, and she sat cross-legged on the
ground to eat it.
“We are bound for Duskendale, m’lady,” Longbough told her, as
he pulled apart his own trout with his ngers. “You would do well
to ride with us. The roads are perilous.”
Brienne could have told him more about the perils of the roads
than he might have cared to know. “I thank you, ser, but I have no
need of your protection.”
“I insist. A true knight must defend the gentler sex.”
She touched her sword hilt. “This will defend me, ser.”
“A sword is only as good as the man who wields it.”
“I wield it well enough.”
“As you will. It would not be courteous to argue with a lady. We
will see you safe to Duskendale. Three together may ride more
safely than one alone.”
We were three when we set out from Riverrun, yet Jaime lost his hand
and Cleos Frey his life. “Your mounts could not keep up with mine.”
Ser Creighton’s brown gelding was an old swaybacked creature with
rheumy eyes, and Ser Illifer’s horse looked weedy and half-starved.

“My steed served me well enough on the Blackwater,” Ser
Creighton insisted. “Why, I did great carnage there and won a
dozen ransoms. Was m’lady familiar with Ser Herbert Bolling? You
shall never meet him now. I slew him where he stood. When swords
clash, you shall ne’er nd Ser Creighton Longbough to the rear.”
His companion gave a dry chuckle. “Creigh, leave o . The likes o’
her has no need for the likes o’ us.”
“The likes of me?” Brienne was uncertain what he meant.
Ser Illifer crooked a bony nger at her shield. Though its paint
was cracked and peeling, the device it bore showed plain: a black
bat on a eld divided bendwise, silver and gold. “You bear a liar’s
shield, to which you have no right. My grandfather’s grandfather
helped kill the last o’ Lothston. None since has dared to show that
bat, black as the deeds of them that bore it.”
The shield was the one Ser Jaime had taken from the armory at
Harrenhal. Brienne had found it in the stables with her mare, along
with much else; saddle and bridle, chain mail hauberk and visored
greathelm, purses of gold and silver and a parchment more valuable
than either. “I lost mine own shield,” she explained.
“A true knight is the only shield a maiden needs,” declared Ser
Creighton stoutly.
Ser Illifer paid him no mind. “A barefoot man looks for a boot, a
chilly man a cloak. But who would cloak themselves in shame? Lord
Lucas bore that bat, the Pander, and Manfryd o’ the Black Hood, his
son. Why wear such arms, I ask myself, unless your own sin is
fouler still … and fresher.” He unsheathed his dagger, an ugly piece
of cheap iron. “A woman freakish big and freakish strong who hides
her own true colors. Creigh, behold the Maid o’ Tarth, who opened
Renly’s royal throat for him.”
“That is a lie.” Renly Baratheon had been more than a king to her.
She had loved him since rst he came to Tarth on his leisurely lord’s
progress, to mark his coming of age. Her father welcomed him with
a feast and commanded her to attend; elsewise she would have
hidden in her room like some wounded beast. She had been no older
than Sansa, more afraid of sniggers than of swords. They will know

about the rose, she told Lord Selwyn, they will laugh at me. But the
Evenstar would not relent.
And Renly Baratheon had shown her every courtesy, as if she
were a proper maid, and pretty. He even danced with her, and in
his arms she’d felt graceful, and her feet had oated across the
oor. Later others begged a dance of her, because of his example.
From that day forth, she wanted only to be close to Lord Renly, to
serve him and protect him. But in the end she failed him. Renly died
in my arms, but I did not kill him, she thought, but these hedge
knights would never understand. “I would have given my life for
King Renly, and died happy,” she said. “I did no harm to him. I
swear it by my sword.”
“A knight swears by his sword,” Ser Creighton said.
“Swear it by the Seven,” urged Ser Illifer the Penniless.
“By the Seven, then. I did no harm to King Renly. I swear it by
the Mother. May I never know her mercy if I lie. I swear it by the
Father, and ask that he might judge me justly. I swear it by the
Maiden and Crone, by the Smith and the Warrior. And I swear it by
the Stranger, may he take me now if I am false.”
“She swears well, for a maid,” Ser Creighton allowed.
“Aye.” Ser Illifer the Penniless gave a shrug. “Well, if she’s lied,
the gods will sort her out.” He slipped his dagger back away. “The
rst watch is yours.”
As the hedge knights slept, Brienne paced restlessly around the
little camp, listening to the crackle of the re. I should ride on whilst
I can. She did not know these men, yet she could not bring herself
to leave them undefended. Even in the black of night, there were
riders on the road, and noises in the woods that might or might not
have been owls and prowling foxes. So Brienne paced, and kept her
blade loose in its scabbard.
Her watch was easy, all in all. It was after that was hard, when
Ser Illifer woke and said he would relieve her. Brienne spread a
blanket on the ground, and curled up to close her eyes. I will not
sleep, she told herself, bone weary though she was. She had never
slept easily in the presence of men. Even in Lord Renly’s camps, the
risk of rape was always there. It was a lesson she had learned

beneath the walls of Highgarden, and again when she and Jaime
had fallen into the hands of the Brave Companions.
The cold in the earth seeped through Brienne’s blankets to soak
into her bones. Before long every muscle felt clenched and cramped,
from her jaw down to her toes. She wondered whether Sansa Stark
was cold as well, wherever she might be. Lady Catelyn had said that
Sansa was a gentle soul who loved lemon cakes, silken gowns, and
songs of chivalry, yet the girl had seen her father’s head lopped o
and been forced to marry one of his killers afterward. If half the
tales were true, the dwarf was the cruelest Lannister of all. If she did
poison King Jo rey, the Imp surely forced her hand. She was alone and
friendless at that court. In King’s Landing, Brienne had hunted down a
certain Brella, who had been one of Sansa’s maids. The woman told
her that there was little warmth between Sansa and the dwarf.
Perhaps she had been eeing him as well as Jo rey’s murder.
Whatever dreams Brienne dreamed were gone when dawn awoke
her. Her legs were sti as wood from the cold ground, but no one
had molested her, and her goods remained untouched. The hedge
knights were up and about. Ser Illifer was cutting up a squirrel for
breakfast, while Ser Creighton stood facing a tree, having himself a
good long piss. Hedge knights, she thought, old and vain and plump
and nearsighted, yet decent men for all that. It cheered her to know
that there were still decent men in the world.
They broke their fast on roast squirrel, acorn paste, and pickles,
whilst Ser Creighton regaled her with his exploits on the
Blackwater, where he had slain a dozen fearsome knights that she
had never heard of. “Oh, it was a rare ght, m’lady,” he said, “a
rare and bloody fray.” He allowed that Ser Illifer had fought nobly
in the battle as well. Illifer himself said little.
When time came to resume their journey, the knights fell in on
either side of her, like guards protecting some great lady … though
this lady dwarfed both of her protectors and was better armed and
armored in the nonce. “Did anyone pass by during your watches?”
Brienne asked them.
“Such as a maid of three-and-ten, with auburn hair?” said Ser
Illifer the Penniless. “No, my lady. No one.”

“I had a few,” Ser Creighton put in. “Some farm boy on a piebald
horse went by, and an hour later half a dozen men afoot with staves
and scythes. They caught sight of our re, and stopped for a long
look at our horses, but I showed them a glimpse of my steel and
told them to be along their way. Rough fellows, by the look o’
them, and desperate too, but ne’er so desperate as to tri e with Ser
Creighton Longbough.”
No, Brienne thought, not so desperate as that. She turned away to
hide her smile. Thankfully, Ser Creighton was too intent on the tale
of his epic battle with the Knight of the Red Chicken to make note
of the maiden’s mirth. It felt good to have companions on the road,
even such companions as these two.
It was midday when Brienne heard chanting drifting through the
bare brown trees. “What is that sound?” Ser Creighton asked.
“Voices, raised in prayer.” Brienne knew the chant. They are
beseeching the Warrior for protection, asking the Crone to light their
way.
Ser Illifer the Penniless bared his battered blade and reined in his
horse to wait their coming. “They are close now.”
The chanting lled the woods like pious thunder. And suddenly
the source of the sound appeared in the road ahead. A group of
begging brothers led the way, scru y bearded men in roughspun
robes, some barefoot and some in sandals. Behind them marched
threescore ragged men, women, and children, a spotted sow, and
several sheep. Several of the men had axes, and more had crude
wooden clubs and cudgels. In their midst there rolled a two-wheeled
wayn of grey and splintered wood, piled high with skulls and
broken bits of bone. When they saw the hedge knights, the begging
brothers halted, and the chanting died away. “Good knights,” one
said, “the Mother loves you.”
“And you, brother,” said Ser Illifer. “Who are you?”
“Poor fellows,” said a big man with an axe. Despite the chill of
the autumnal wood, he was shirtless, and on his breast was carved a
seven-pointed star. Andal warriors had carved such stars in their
esh when rst they crossed the narrow sea to overwhelm the
kingdoms of the First Men.

“We are marching to the city,” said a tall woman in the traces of
the wayn, “to bring these holy bones to Blessed Baelor, and seek
succor and protection from the king.”
“Join us, friends,” urged a spare small man in a threadbare
septon’s robe, who wore a crystal on a thong about his neck.
“Westeros has need of every sword.”
“We were bound for Duskendale,” declared Ser Creighton, “but
mayhaps we could see you safely to King’s Landing.”
“If you have the coin to pay us for this escort,” added Ser Illifer,
who seemed practical as well as penniless.
“Sparrows need no gold,” the septon said.
Ser Creighton was lost. “Sparrows?”
“The sparrow is the humblest and most common of birds, as we
are the humblest and most common of men.” The septon had a lean
sharp face and a short beard, grizzled grey and brown. His thin hair
was pulled back and knotted behind his head, and his feet were bare
and black, gnarled and hard as tree roots. “These are the bones of
holy men, murdered for their faith. They served the Seven even
unto death. Some starved, some were tortured. Septs have been
despoiled, maidens and mothers raped by godless men and demon
worshipers. Even silent sisters have been molested. Our Mother
Above cries out in her anguish. It is time for all anointed knights to
forsake their worldly masters and defend our Holy Faith. Come
with us to the city, if you love the Seven.”
“I love them well enough,” said Illifer, “yet I must eat.”
“So must all the Mother’s children.”
“We are bound for Duskendale,” Ser Illifer said atly.
One of the begging brothers spat, and a woman gave a moan.
“You are false knights,” said the big man with the star carved on his
chest. Several others brandished their cudgels.
The barefoot septon calmed them with a word. “Judge not, for
judgment is the Father’s. Let them pass in peace. They are poor
fellows too, lost upon the earth.”
Brienne edged her mare forward. “My sister is lost as well. A girl
of three-and-ten with auburn hair, fair to look upon.”

“All the Mother’s children are fair to look upon. May the Maiden
watch over this poor girl … and you as well, I think.” The septon
lifted one of the traces of the wayn upon his shoulder, and began to
pull. The begging brothers took up the chant once more. Brienne
and the hedge knights sat upon their horses as the procession moved
slowly past, following the rutted road toward Rosby. The sound of
their chanting slowly dwindled away and died.
Ser Creighton lifted one cheek o the saddle to scratch his arse.
“What sort of man would slay a holy septon?”
Brienne knew what sort. Near Maidenpool, she recalled, the
Brave Companions had strung a septon up by his heels from the
limb of a tree and used his corpse for archery practice. She
wondered if his bones were piled in that wayn with all the rest.
“A man would need to be a fool to rape a silent sister,” Ser
Creighton was saying. “Even to lay hands upon one … it’s said they
are the Stranger’s wives, and their female parts are cold and wet as
ice.” He glanced at Brienne. “Uh … beg pardon.”
Brienne spurred her mare toward Duskendale. After a moment,
Ser Illifer followed, and Ser Creighton came bringing up the rear.
Three hours later they came up upon another party struggling
toward Duskendale; a merchant and his serving men, accompanied
by yet another hedge knight. The merchant rode a dappled grey
mare, whilst his servants took turns pulling his wagon. Four labored
in the traces as the other two walked beside the wheels, but when
they heard the sound of horses they formed up around the wagon
with quartersta s of ash at the ready. The merchant produced a
crossbow, the knight a blade. “You will forgive me if I am
suspicious,” called the merchant, “but the times are troubled, and I
have only good Ser Shadrich to defend me. Who are you?”
“Why,” Ser Creighton said, a ronted, “I am the famous Ser
Creighton Longbough, fresh from battle on the Blackwater, and this
is my companion, Ser Illifer the Penniless.”
“We mean you no harm,” said Brienne.
The merchant considered her doubtfully. “My lady, you should be
safe at home. Why do you wear such unnatural garb?”

“I am searching for my sister.” She dared not mention Sansa’s
name, with her accused of regicide. “She is a highborn maid and
beautiful, with blue eyes and auburn hair. Perhaps you saw her with
a portly knight of forty years, or a drunken fool.”
“The roads are full of drunken fools and despoiled maidens. As to
portly knights, it is hard for any honest man to keep his belly round
when so many lack for food … though your Ser Creighton has not
hungered, it would seem.”
“I have big bones,” Ser Creighton insisted. “Shall we ride together
for a time? I do not doubt Ser Shadrich’s valor, but he seems small,
and three blades are better than one.”
Four blades, thought Brienne, but she held her tongue.
The merchant looked to his escort. “What say you, ser?”
“Oh, these three are nought to fear.” Ser Shadrich was a wiry,
fox-faced man with a sharp nose and a shock of orange hair,
mounted on a rangy chestnut courser. Though he could not have
been more than ve foot two, he had a cocksure manner. “The one
is old, t’other fat, and the big one is a woman. Let them come.”
“As you say.” The merchant lowered his crossbow.
As they resumed their journey, the hired knight dropped back and
looked her up and down as if she were a side of good salt pork.
“You’re a strapping healthy wench, I’d say.”
Ser Jaime’s mockery had cut her deep; the little man’s words
hardly touched her. “A giant, compared to some.”
He laughed. “I am big enough where it counts, wench.”
“The merchant called you Shadrich.”
“Ser Shadrich of the Shady Glen. Some call me the Mad Mouse.”
He turned his shield to show her his sigil, a large white mouse with
erce red eyes, on bendy brown and blue. “The brown is for the
lands I’ve roamed, the blue for the rivers that I’ve crossed. The
mouse is me.”
“And are you mad?”
“Oh, quite. Your common mouse will run from blood and battle.
The mad mouse seeks them out.”
“It would seem he seldom nds them.”

“I nd enough. ’Tis true, I am no tourney knight. I save my valor
for the battle eld, woman.”
Woman was marginally better than wench, she supposed. “You
and good Ser Creighton have much in common, then.”
Ser Shadrich laughed. “Oh, I doubt that, but it may be that you
and I share a quest. A little lost sister, is it? With blue eyes and
auburn hair?” He laughed again. “You are not the only hunter in the
woods. I seek for Sansa Stark as well.”
Brienne kept her face a mask, to hide her dismay. “Who is this
Sansa Stark, and why do you seek her?”
“For love, why else?”
She furrowed her brow. “Love?”
“Aye, love of gold. Unlike your good Ser Creighton, I did ght
upon the Blackwater, but on the losing side. My ransom ruined me.
You know who Varys is, I trust? The eunuch has o ered a plump
bag of gold for this girl you’ve never heard of. I am not a greedy
man. If some oversized wench would help me nd this naughty
child, I would split the Spider’s coin with her.”
“I thought you were in this merchant’s hire.”
“Only so far as Duskendale. Hibald is as niggardly as he is fearful.
And he is very fearful. What say you, wench?”
“I know no Sansa Stark,” she insisted. “I am searching for my
sister, a highborn girl …”
“… with blue eyes and auburn hair, aye. Pray, who is this knight
who travels with your sister? Or did you name him fool?” Ser
Shadrich did not wait for her answer, which was good, since she had
none. “A certain fool vanished from King’s Landing the night King
Jo rey died, a stout fellow with a nose full of broken veins, one Ser
Dontos the Red, formerly of Duskendale. I pray your sister and her
drunken fool are not mistaken for the Stark girl and Ser Dontos.
That could be most unfortunate.” He put his heels into his courser
and trotted on ahead.
Even Jaime Lannister had seldom made Brienne feel such a fool.
You are not the only hunter in the woods. The woman Brella had told
her how Jo rey had stripped Ser Dontos of his spurs, how Lady
Sansa begged Jo rey for his life. He helped her ee, Brienne had

decided, when she heard the tale. Find Ser Dontos, and I will nd
Sansa. She should have known there would be others who would see
it too. Some may even be less savory than Ser Shadrich. She could only
hope that Ser Dontos had hidden Sansa well. But if so, how will I ever
nd her?
She hunched her shoulders down and rode on, frowning.
Night was gathering by the time their party came upon the inn, a
tall, timbered building that stood beside a river junction, astride an
old stone bridge. That was the inn’s name, Ser Creighton told them:
the Old Stone Bridge. The innkeep was a friend of his. “Not a bad
cook, and the rooms have no more eas than most,” he vouched.
“Who’s for a warm bed tonight?”
“Not us, unless your friend is giving them away,” said Ser Illifer
the Penniless. “We have no coin for rooms.”
“I can pay for the three of us.” Brienne did not lack for coin;
Jaime had seen to that. In her saddlebags she’d found a purse fat
with silver stags and copper stars, a smaller one stu ed with golden
dragons, and a parchment commanding all loyal subjects of the king
to assist the bearer, Brienne of House Tarth, who was about His
Grace’s business. It was signed in a childish hand by Tommen, the
First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First
Men, and Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.
Hibald was for stopping too, and bid his men to leave the wagon
near the stables. Warm yellow light shone through the diamondshaped panes of the inn’s windows, and Brienne heard a stallion
trumpet at the scent of her mare. She was loosening the saddle
when a boy came out the stable door, and said, “Let me do that,
ser.”
“I am no ser,” she told him, “but you may take the horse. See that
she is fed and brushed and watered.”
The boy reddened. “Beg pardons, m’lady. I thought …”
“It is a common mistake.” Brienne gave him the reins and
followed the others into the inn, with her saddlebags across a
shoulder and her bedroll tucked up beneath one arm.
Sawdust covered the plank oor of the common room, and the air
smelled of hops and smoke and meat. A roast was spitting and

crackling over the re, unattended for the moment. Six locals sat
about a table, talking, but they broke o when the strangers
entered. Brienne could feel their eyes. Despite chain mail, cloak,
and jerkin, she felt naked. When one man said, “Have a look at
that,” she knew he was not speaking of Ser Shadrich.
The innkeep appeared, clutching three tankards in each hand and
slopping ale at every step.
“Do you have rooms, good man?” the merchant asked him.
“I might,” the innkeep said, “for them as has coin.”
Ser Creighton Longbough looked o ended. “Naggle, is that how
you would greet an old friend? ’Tis me, Longbough.”
“ ’Tis you indeed. You owe me seven stags. Show me some silver
and I’ll show you a bed.” The innkeep set the tankards down one by
one, slopping more ale on the table in the process.
“I will pay for one room for myself, and a second for my two
companions.” Brienne indicated Ser Creighton and Ser Illifer.
“I shall take a room as well,” said the merchant, “for myself and
good Ser Shadrich. My serving men will bed down in your stables, if
it please you.”
The innkeep looked them over. “It don’t please me, but might be
I’ll allow it. Will you be wanting supper? That’s good goat on the
spit, that is.”
“I shall judge its goodness for myself,” Hibald announced. “My
men will content themselves with bread and drippings.”
And so they supped. Brienne tried the goat herself, after
following the innkeep up the steps, pressing some coins into his
hand, and stashing her goods in the second room he showed her.
She ordered goat for Ser Creighton and Ser Illifer as well, since they
had shared their trout with her. The hedge knights and the septon
washed down the meat with ale, but Brienne drank a cup of goat’s
milk. She listened to the table talk, hoping against hope that she
might hear something that would help her nd Sansa.
“You come from King’s Landing,” one of the locals said to Hibald.
“Is it true that the Kingslayer’s been crippled?”
“True enough,” Hibald said. “He’s lost his sword hand.”

“Aye,” Ser Creighton said, “chewed o by a direwolf, I hear, one
of them monsters come down from the north. Nought that’s good
ever come from the north. Even their gods are queer.”
“It was not a wolf,” Brienne heard herself say. “Ser Jaime lost his
hand to a Qohorik sellsword.”
“It is no easy thing to ght with your o hand,” observed the
Mad Mouse.
“Bah,” said Ser Creighton Longbough. “As it happens, I ght as
well with either hand.”
“Oh, I have no doubt of that.” Ser Shadrich lifted his tankard in
salute.
Brienne remembered her ght with Jaime Lannister in the woods.
It had been all that she could do to keep his blade at bay. He was
weak from his imprisonment, and chained at the wrists. No knight in the
Seven Kingdoms could have stood against him at his full strength, with
no chains to hamper him. Jaime had done many wicked things, but
the man could ght! His maiming had been monstrously cruel. It
was one thing to slay a lion, another to hack his paw o and leave
him broken and bewildered.
Suddenly the common room was too loud to endure a moment
longer. She muttered her good-nights and took herself up to bed.
The ceiling in her room was low; entering with a taper in her hand,
Brienne had to duck or crack her head. The only furnishings were a
bed wide enough to sleep six, and the stub of a tallow candle on the
sill. She lit it with the taper, barred the door, and hung her sword
belt from a bedpost. Her scabbard was a plain thing, wood wrapped
in cracked brown leather, and her sword was plainer still. She had
bought it in King’s Landing, to replace the blade the Brave
Companions had stolen. Renly’s sword. It still hurt, knowing she had
lost it.
But she had another longsword hidden in her bedroll. She sat on
the bed and took it out. Gold glimmered yellow in the candlelight
and rubies smoldered red. When she slid Oathkeeper from the
ornate scabbard, Brienne’s breath caught in her throat. Black and
red the ripples ran, deep within the steel. Valyrian steel, spell-forged.
It was a sword t for a hero. When she was small, her nurse had

lled her ears with tales of valor, regaling her with the noble
exploits of Ser Galladon of Morne, Florian the Fool, Prince Aemon
the Dragonknight, and other champions. Each man bore a famous
sword, and surely Oathkeeper belonged in their company, even if
she herself did not. “You’ll be defending Ned Stark’s daughter with
Ned Stark’s own steel,” Jaime had promised.
Kneeling between the bed and wall, she held the blade and said a
silent prayer to the Crone, whose golden lamp showed men the way
through life. Lead me, she prayed, light the way before me, show me
the path that leads to Sansa. She had failed Renly, had failed Lady
Catelyn. She must not fail Jaime. He trusted me with his sword. He
trusted me with his honor.
Afterward she stretched out on the bed as best she could. For all
its width it was not long enough, so Brienne lay across it sideways.
She could hear the clatter of tankards from below, and voices
drifting up the steps. The eas that Longbough had spoken of put in
their appearance. Scratching helped keep her awake.
She heard Hibald mount the stairs, and sometime later the knights
as well. “… I never knew his name,” Ser Creighton was saying as he
went by, “but upon his shield he bore a blood-red chicken, and his
blade was dripping gore …” His voice faded, and somewhere up
above, a door opened and closed.
Her candle burned out. Darkness settled over the Old Stone
Bridge, and the inn grew so still that she could hear the murmur of
the river. Only then did Brienne rise to gather up her things. She
eased the door open, listened, made her way barefoot down the
steps. Outside she donned her boots and hurried to the stables to
saddle her bay mare, asking a silent pardon of Ser Creighton and
Ser Illifer as she mounted. One of Hibald’s serving men woke when
she rode past him, but made no move to stop her. Her mare’s
hooves rang upon the old stone bridge. Then the trees closed in
around her, black as pitch and full of ghosts and memories. I am
coming for you, Lady Sansa, she thought as she rode into the
darkness. Be not afraid. I shall not rest until I’ve found you.

SAMWELL

Sam was reading about the Others when he saw the mouse.
His eyes were red and raw. I ought not rub them so much, he
always told himself as he rubbed them. The dust made them itch
and water, and the dust was everywhere down here. Little pu s of
it lled the air every time a page was turned, and it rose in grey
clouds whenever he shifted a stack of books to see what might be
hiding on the bottom.
Sam did not know how long it had been since last he’d slept, but
scarce an inch remained of the fat tallow candle he’d lit when
starting on the ragged bundle of loose pages that he’d found tied up
in twine. He was beastly tired, but it was hard to stop. One more
book, he had told himself, then I’ll stop. One more folio, just one more.
One more page, then I’ll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there
was always another page after that one, and another after that, and
another book waiting underneath the pile. I’ll just take a quick peek
to see what this one is about, he’d think, and before he knew he
would be halfway through it. He had not eaten since that bowl of
bean-and-bacon soup with Pyp and Grenn. Well, except for the bread
and cheese, but that was only a nibble, he thought. That was when he
took a quick glance at the empty platter, and spied the mouse
feasting on the bread crumbs.
The mouse was half as long as his pinky nger, with black eyes
and soft grey fur. Sam knew he ought to kill it. Mice might prefer

bread and cheese, but they ate paper too. He had found plenty of
mouse droppings amongst the shelves and stacks, and some of the
leather covers on the books showed signs of being gnawed.
It is such a little thing, though. And hungry. How could he begrudge
it a few crumbs? It’s eating books, though …
After hours in the chair Sam’s back was sti as a board, and his
legs were half-asleep. He knew he was not quick enough to catch
the mouse, but it might be he could squash it. By his elbow rested a
massive leather-bound copy of Annals of the Black Centaur, Septon
Jorquen’s exhaustively detailed account of the nine years that
Orbert Caswell had served as Lord Commander of the Night’s
Watch. There was a page for each day of his term, every one of
which seemed to begin, “Lord Orbert rose at dawn and moved his
bowels,” except for the last, which said, “Lord Orbert was found to
have died during the night.”
No mouse is a match for Septon Jorquen. Very slowly, Sam took
hold of the book with his left hand. It was thick and heavy, and
when he tried to lift it one-handed, it slipped from his plump ngers
and thumped back down. The mouse was gone in half a heartbeat,
skittery-quick. Sam was relieved. Squishing the poor little thing
would have given him nightmares. “You shouldn’t eat the books,
though,” he said aloud. Maybe he should bring more cheese the next
time he came down here.
He was surprised at how low the candle had burned. Had the
bean-and-bacon soup been today or yesterday? Yesterday. It must
have been yesterday. The realization made him yawn. Jon would be
wondering what had become of him, though Maester Aemon would
no doubt understand. Before he had lost his sight, the maester had
loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way
that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a
hole into another world.
Pushing himself to his feet, Sam grimaced at the pins and needles
in his calves. The chair was very hard and cut into the back of his
thighs when he bent over a book. I need to remember to bring a
cushion. It would be even better if he could sleep down here, in the
cell he’d found half-hidden behind four chests full of loose pages

that had gotten separated from the books they belonged to, but he
did not want to leave Maester Aemon alone for so long. He had not
been strong of late and required help, especially with the ravens.
Aemon had Clydas, to be sure, but Sam was younger, and better
with the birds.
With a stack of books and scrolls under his left arm and the
candle in his right hand, Sam made his way through the tunnels the
brothers called the wormways. A pale shaft of light illuminated the
steep stone steps that led up to the surface, so he knew that day had
come up top. He left the candle burning in a wall niche and began
the climb. By the fth step he was pu ng. At the tenth he stopped
to shift the books to his right arm.
He emerged beneath a sky the color of white lead. A snow sky,
Sam thought, squinting up. The prospect made him uneasy. He
remembered that night on the Fist of the First Men when the wights
and the snows had come together. Don’t be so craven, he thought.
You have your Sworn Brothers all around you, not to mention Stannis
Baratheon and all his knights. Castle Black’s keeps and towers rose
about him, dwarfed by the icy immensity of the Wall. A small army
was crawling over the ice a quarter of the way up, where a new
switchback stair was creeping upward to meet the remnants of the
old one. The sounds of their saws and hammers echoed o the ice.
Jon had the builders working night and day on the task. Sam had
heard some of them complaining about it over supper, insisting that
Lord Mormont never worked them half so hard. Without the great
stair there was no way to reach the top of the Wall except by the
chain winch, however. And as much as Samwell Tarly hated steps,
he hated the winch cage more. He always closed his eyes when he
was riding it, convinced that the chain was about to break. Every
time the iron cage scraped against the ice his heart stopped beating
for an instant.
There were dragons here two hundred years ago, Sam found himself
thinking, as he watched the cage making a slow descent. They would
just have own to the top of the Wall. Queen Alysanne had visited
Castle Black on her dragon, and Jaehaerys, her king, had come after
her on his own. Could Silverwing have left an egg behind? Or had

Stannis found one egg on Dragonstone? Even if he has an egg, how
can he hope to quicken it? Baelor the Blessed had prayed over his
eggs, and other Targaryens had sought to hatch theirs with sorcery.
All they got for it was farce and tragedy.
“Samwell,” said a glum voice, “I was coming to fetch you. I was
told to bring you to the Lord Commander.”
A snow ake landed on Sam’s nose. “Jon wants to see me?”
“As to that, I could not say,” said Dolorous Edd Tollett. “I never
wanted to see half the things I’ve seen, and I’ve never seen half the
things I wanted to. I don’t think wanting comes into it. You’d best
go all the same. Lord Snow wishes to speak with you as soon as he
is done with Craster’s wife.”
“Gilly.”
“That’s the one. If my wet nurse had looked like her, I’d still be
on the teat. Mine had whiskers.”
“Most goats do,” called Pyp, as he and Grenn emerged from
around the corner, with longbows in hand and quivers of arrows on
their backs. “Where have you been, Slayer? We missed you last
night at supper. A whole roast ox went uneaten.”
“Don’t call me Slayer.” Sam ignored the gibe about the ox. That
was just Pyp. “I was reading. There was a mouse …”
“Don’t mention mice to Grenn. He’s terri ed of mice.”
“I am not,” Grenn declared with indignation.
“You’d be too scared to eat one.”
“I’d eat more mice than you would.”
Dolorous Edd Tollett gave a sigh. “When I was a lad, we only ate
mice on special feast days. I was the youngest, so I always got the
tail. There’s no meat on the tail.”
“Where's your longbow, Sam?” asked Grenn. Ser Alliser used to
call him Aurochs, and every day he seemed to grow into the name a
little more. He had come to the Wall big but slow, thick of neck,
thick of waist, red of face, and clumsy. Though his neck still
reddened when Pyp twisted him around into some folly, hours of
work with sword and shield had attened his belly, hardened his
arms, broadened his chest. He was strong, and shaggy as an aurochs
too. “Ulmer was expecting you at the butts.”

“Ulmer,” Sam said, abashed. Almost the rst thing Jon Snow had
done as Lord Commander was institute daily archery drill for the
entire garrison, even stewards and cooks. The Watch had been
placing too much emphasis on the sword and too little on the bow,
he had said, a relic of the days when one brother in every ten had
been a knight, instead of one in every hundred. Sam saw the sense
in the decree, but he hated longbow practice almost as much as he
hated climbing steps. When he wore his gloves he could never hit
anything, but when he took them o he got blisters on his ngers.
Those bows were dangerous. Satin had torn o half his thumbnail on
a bowstring. “I forgot.”
“You broke the heart of the wildling princess, Slayer,” said Pyp.
Of late, Val had taken to watching them from the window of her
chamber in the King’s Tower. “She was looking for you.”
“She was not! Don’t say that!” Sam had only spoken to Val twice,
when Maester Aemon called upon her to make sure the babes were
healthy. The princess was so pretty that he oft found himself
stammering and blushing in her presence.
“Why not?” asked Pyp. “She wants to have your children. Maybe
we should call you Sam the Seducer.”
Sam reddened. King Stannis had plans for Val, he knew; she was
the mortar with which he meant to seal the peace between the
northmen and the free folk. “I don’t have time for archery today, I
need to go see Jon.”
“Jon? Jon? Do we know anyone named Jon, Grenn?”
“He means the Lord Commander.”
“Ohhh. The Great Lord Snow. To be sure. Why do you want to see
him? He can’t even wiggle his ears.” Pyp wiggled his, to show he
could. They were large ears, and red from cold. “He’s Lord Snow for
true now, too bloody highborn for the likes of us.”
“Jon has duties,” Sam said in his defense. “The Wall is his, and all
that goes with it.”
“A man has duties to his friends as well. If not for us, Janos Slynt
might be our lord commander. Lord Janos would have sent Snow
ranging naked on a mule. ‘Scamper on up to Craster’s Keep,’ he
would have said, ‘and fetch me back the Old Bear’s cloak and boots.’

We saved him from that, but now he has too many duties to drink a
cup of mulled wine by the re?”
Grenn agreed. “His duties don’t keep him from the yard. More
days than not, he’s out there ghting someone.”
That was true, Sam had to admit. Once, when Jon came to consult
with Maester Aemon, Sam had asked him why he spent so much
time at swordplay. “The Old Bear never trained much when he was
Lord Commander,” he had pointed out. In answer, Jon had pressed
Longclaw into Sam’s hand. He let him feel the lightness, the
balance, had him turn the blade so that ripples gleamed in the
smoke-dark metal. “Valyrian steel,” he said, “spell-forged and razorsharp, nigh on indestructible. A swordsman should be as good as his
sword, Sam. Longclaw is Valyrian steel, but I’m not. The Halfhand
could have killed me as easy as you swat a bug.”
Sam handed back the sword. “When I try to swat a bug, it always
ies away. All I do is slap my arm. It stings.”
That made Jon laugh. “As you will. Qhorin could have killed me
as easy as you eat a bowl of porridge.” Sam was fond of porridge,
especially when it was sweetened with honey.
“I don’t have time for this.” Sam left his friends and made his way
toward the armory, clutching his books to his chest. I am the shield
that guards the realms of men, he remembered. He wondered what
those men would say if they realized their realms were being
guarded by the likes of Grenn, Pyp, and Dolorous Edd.
The Lord Commander’s Tower had been gutted by re, and
Stannis Baratheon had claimed the King’s Tower for his own
residence, so Jon Snow had established himself in Donal Noye’s
modest quarters behind the armory. Gilly was leaving as Sam
arrived, wrapped up in the old cloak he’d given her when they were
eeing Craster’s Keep. She almost rushed right past him, but Sam
caught her arm, spilling two books as he did. “Gilly.”
“Sam.” Her voice sounded raw. Gilly was dark-haired and slim,
with the big brown eyes of a doe. She was swallowed by the folds
of Sam’s old cloak, her face half-hidden by its hood, but shivering
all the same. Her face looked wan and frightened.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked her. “How are the babes?”

Gilly pulled loose from him. “They’re good, Sam. Good.”
“Between the two of them it’s a wonder you can sleep,” Sam said
pleasantly. “Which one was it that I heard crying last night? I
thought he’d never stop.”
“Dalla’s boy. He cries when he wants the teat. Mine … mine
hardly ever cries. Sometimes he gurgles, but …” Her eyes lled
with tears. “I have to go. It’s past time that I fed them. I’ll be
leaking all over myself if I don’t go.” She rushed across the yard,
leaving Sam perplexed behind her.
He had to get down on his knees to gather up the books he’d
dropped. I should not have brought so many, he told himself as he
brushed the dirt o Colloquo Votar’s Jade Compendium, a thick
volume of tales and legends from the east that Maester Aemon had
commanded him to nd. The book appeared undamaged. Maester
Thomax’s Dragonkin, Being a History of House Targaryen from Exile to
Apotheosis, with a Consideration of the Life and Death of Dragons had
not been so fortunate. It had come open as it fell, and a few pages
had gotten muddy, including one with a rather nice picture of
Balerion the Black Dread done in colored inks. Sam cursed himself
for a clumsy oaf as he smoothed the pages down and brushed them
o . Gilly’s presence always ustered him and gave rise to … well,
risings. A Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch should not be feeling
the sorts of things that Gilly made him feel, especially when she
would talk about her breasts and …
“Lord Snow is waiting.” Two guards in black cloaks and iron
halfhelms stood by the doors of the armory, leaning on their spears.
Hairy Hal was the one who’d spoken. Mully helped Sam back to his
feet. He blurted out thanks and hurried past them, clutching
desperately at the stack of books as he made his way past the forge
with its anvil and bellows. A shirt of ringmail rested on his
workbench, half-completed. Ghost was stretched out beneath the
anvil, gnawing on the bone of an ox to get at the marrow. The big
white direwolf looked up when Sam went by, but made no sound.
Jon’s solar was back beyond the racks of spears and shields. He
was reading a parchment when Sam entered. Lord Commander
Mormont’s raven was on his shoulder, peering down as if it were

reading too, but when the bird spied Sam it spread its wings and
apped toward him crying, “Corn, corn!”
Shifting the books, Sam thrust his arm into the sack beside the
door and came out with a handful of kernels. The raven landed on
his wrist and took one from his palm, pecking so hard that Sam
yelped and snatched his hand back. The raven took to the air again,
and yellow and red kernels went everywhere.
“Close the door, Sam.” Faint scars still marked Jon’s cheek, where
an eagle had once tried to rip his eye out. “Did that wretch break
the skin?”
Sam eased the books down and peeled o his glove. “He did.” He
felt faint. “I’m bleeding.”
“We all shed our blood for the Watch. Wear thicker gloves.” Jon
shoved a chair toward him with a foot. “Sit, and have a look at
this.” He handed him the parchment.
“What is it?” asked Sam. The raven began to hunt out corn
kernels amongst the rushes.
“A paper shield.”
Sam sucked at the blood on his palm as he read. He knew Maester
Aemon’s hand on sight. His writing was small and precise, but the
old man could not see where the ink had blotted, and sometimes he
left unsightly smears. “A letter to King Tommen?”
“At Winterfell Tommen fought my brother Bran with wooden
swords. He wore so much padding he looked like a stu ed goose.
Bran knocked him to the ground.” Jon went to the window. “Yet
Bran’s dead, and pudgy pink-faced Tommen is sitting on the Iron
Throne, with a crown nestled amongst his golden curls.”
Bran’s not dead, Sam wanted to say. He’s gone beyond the Wall with
Coldhands. The words caught in his throat. I swore I would not tell.
“You haven’t signed the letter.”
“The Old Bear begged the Iron Throne for help a hundred times.
They sent him Janos Slynt. No letter will make the Lannisters love
us better. Not once they hear that we’ve been helping Stannis.”
“Only to defend the Wall, not in his rebellion.” Sam read the
letter quickly once again. “That’s what it says here.”

“The distinction may escape Lord Tywin.” Jon took the letter
back. “Why would he help us now? He never did before.”
“Well,” said Sam, “he will not want it said that Stannis rode to the
defense of the realm whilst King Tommen was playing with his
toys. That would bring scorn down upon House Lannister.”
“It’s death and destruction I want to bring down upon House
Lannister, not scorn.” Jon lifted up the letter. “The Night’s Watch
takes no part in the wars of the Seven Kingdoms,” he read. “Our oaths
are sworn to the realm, and the realm now stands in dire peril. Stannis
Baratheon aids us against our foes from beyond the Wall, though we are
not his men …”
“Well,” said Sam, squirming, “we’re not. Are we?”
“I gave Stannis food, shelter, and the Nightfort, plus leave to
settle some free folk in the Gift. That’s all.”
“Lord Tywin will say it was too much.”
“Stannis says it’s not enough. The more you give a king the more
he wants. We are walking on a bridge of ice with an abyss on either
side. Pleasing one king is di cult enough. Pleasing two is hardly
possible.”
“Yes, but … if the Lannisters should prevail and Lord Tywin
decides that we betrayed the king by aiding Stannis, it could mean
the end of the Night’s Watch. He has the Tyrells behind him, with
all the strength of Highgarden. And he did defeat Lord Stannis on
the Blackwater.” The sight of blood might make Sam faint, but he
knew how wars were won. His own father had seen to that.
“The Blackwater was one battle. Robb won all his battles and still
lost his head. If Stannis can raise the north …”
He’s trying to convince himself, Sam realized, but he can’t. The
ravens had gone forth from Castle Black in a storm of black wings,
summoning the lords of the north to declare for Stannis Baratheon
and join their strength to his. Sam had sent out most of them
himself. Thusfar only one bird had returned, the one they’d sent to
Karhold. Elsewise the silence had been thunderous.
Even if he should somehow win the northmen to his side, Sam did
not see how Stannis could hope to match the combined powers of
Casterly Rock, Highgarden, and the Twins. Yet without the north,

his cause was surely doomed. As doomed as the Night’s Watch, if Lord
Tywin marks us down as traitors. “The Lannisters have northmen of
their own. Lord Bolton and his bastard.”
“Stannis has the Karstarks. If he can win White Harbor …”
“If,” Sam stressed. “If not … my lord, even a paper shield is
better than none.”
Jon rattled the letter. “I suppose so.” He sighed, then took up a
quill and scrawled a signature across the bottom of the letter. “Get
the sealing wax.” Sam heated a stick of black wax over a candle and
dribbled some onto the parchment, then watched as Jon pressed the
Lord Commander’s seal down rmly on the puddle. “Take this to
Maester Aemon when you leave,” he commanded, “and tell him to
dispatch a bird to King’s Landing.”
“I will.” Sam hesitated. “My lord, if I might ask … I saw Gilly
leaving. She was almost crying.”
“Val sent her to plead for Mance again.”
“Oh.” Val was the sister of the woman the King-beyond-the-Wall
had taken for his queen. The wildling princess was what Stannis and
his men were calling her. Her sister Dalla had died during the
battle, though no blade had ever touched her; she had perished
giving birth to Mance Rayder’s son. Rayder himself would soon
follow her to the grave, if the whispers Sam had heard had any
truth to them. “What did you tell her?”
“That I would speak to Stannis, though I doubt my words will
sway him. A king’s rst duty is to defend the realm, and Mance
attacked it. His Grace is not like to forget that. My father used to
say that Stannis Baratheon was a just man. No one has ever said he
was forgiving.” Jon paused, frowning. “I would sooner take o
Mance’s head myself. He was a man of the Night’s Watch, once. By
rights, his life belongs to us.”
“Pyp says that Lady Melisandre means to give him to the ames,
to work some sorcery.”
“Pyp should learn to hold his tongue. I have heard the same from
others. King’s blood, to wake a dragon. Where Melisandre thinks to
nd a sleeping dragon, no one is quite sure. It’s nonsense. Mance’s
blood is no more royal than mine own. He has never worn a crown

nor sat a throne. He’s a brigand, nothing more. There’s no power in
brigand’s blood.”
The raven looked up from the oor. “Blood,” it screamed.
Jon paid no mind. “I am sending Gilly away.”
“Oh.” Sam bobbed his head. “Well, that’s … that’s good, my
lord.” It would be the best thing for her, to go somewhere warm
and safe, well away from the Wall and the ghting.
“Her and the boy. We will need to nd another wet nurse for his
milk brother.”
“Goat’s milk might serve, until you do. It’s better for a babe than
cow’s milk.” Sam had read that somewhere. He shifted in his seat.
“My lord, when I was looking through the annals I came on another
boy commander. Four hundred years before the Conquest. Osric
Stark was ten when he was chosen, but he served for sixty years.
That’s four, my lord. You’re not even close to being the youngest
ever chosen. You’re fth youngest, so far.”
“The younger four all being sons, brothers, or bastards of the
King in the North. Tell me something useful. Tell me of our enemy.”
“The Others.” Sam licked his lips. “They are mentioned in the
annals, though not as often as I would have thought. The annals I’ve
found and looked at, that is. There’s more I haven’t found, I know.
Some of the older books are falling to pieces. The pages crumble
when I try and turn them. And the really old books … either they
have crumbled all away or they are buried somewhere that I
haven’t looked yet or … well, it could be that there are no such
books, and never were. The oldest histories we have were written
after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes
on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes
and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set
down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at
the Citadel who question all of it. Those old histories are full of
kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around
a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales,
Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star-Eyes, Night’s King … we say that
you’re the nine hundred and ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the
Night’s Watch, but the oldest list I’ve found shows six hundred

seventy-four commanders, which suggests that it was written
during …”
“Long ago,” Jon broke in. “What about the Others?”
“I found mention of dragonglass. The children of the forest used
to give the Night’s Watch a hundred obsidian daggers every year,
during the Age of Heroes. The Others come when it is cold, most of
the tales agree. Or else it gets cold when they come. Sometimes
they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear.
They hide from the light of the sun and emerge by night … or else
night falls when they emerge. Some stories speak of them riding the
corpses of dead animals. Bears, direwolves, mammoths, horses, it
makes no matter, so long as the beast is dead. The one that killed
Small Paul was riding a dead horse, so that part’s plainly true. Some
accounts speak of giant ice spiders too. I don’t know what those are.
Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else
the dead will rise again as their thralls.”
“We knew all this. The question is, how do we ght them?”
“The armor of the Others is proof against most ordinary blades, if
the tales can be believed,” said Sam, “and their own swords are so
cold they shatter steel. Fire will dismay them, though, and they are
vulnerable to obsidian.” He remembered the one he had faced in the
haunted forest, and how it had seemed to melt away when he
stabbed it with the dragonglass dagger Jon had made for him. “I
found one account of the Long Night that spoke of the last hero
slaying Others with a blade of dragonsteel. Supposedly they could
not stand against it.”
“Dragonsteel?” Jon frowned. “Valyrian steel?”
“That was my rst thought as well.”
“So if I can just convince the lords of the Seven Kingdoms to give
us their Valyrian blades, all is saved? That won’t be hard.” His laugh
had no mirth in it. “Did you nd who the Others are, where they
come from, what they want?”
“Not yet, my lord, but it may be that I’ve just been reading the
wrong books. There are hundreds I have not looked at yet. Give me
more time and I will nd whatever there is to be found.”

“There is no more time.” Jon sounded sad. “You need to get your
things together, Sam. You’re going with Gilly.”
“Going?” For a moment Sam did not understand. “I’m going? To
Eastwatch, my lord? Or … where am I …”
“Oldtown.”
“Oldtown?” It came out in a squeak. Horn Hill was close to
Oldtown. Home. The notion made him light-headed. My father.
“Aemon as well.”
“Aemon? Maester Aemon? But … he’s one hundred and two years
old, my lord, he can’t … you’re sending him and me? Who will tend
the ravens? If they’re sick or wounded, who …”
“Clydas. He’s been with Aemon for years.”
“Clydas is only a steward, and his eyes are going bad. You need a
maester. Maester Aemon is so frail, a sea voyage …” He thought of
the Arbor and the Arbor Queen, and almost choked on his tongue. “It
might … he’s old, and …”
“His life will be at risk. I am aware of that, Sam, but the risk is
greater here. Stannis knows who Aemon is. If the red woman
requires king’s blood for her spells …”
“Oh.” Sam paled.
“Dareon will join you at Eastwatch. My hope is that his songs will
win some men for us in the south. The Blackbird will deliver you to
Braavos. From there you’ll arrange your own passage to Oldtown. If
you still mean to claim Gilly’s babe as your bastard, send her and
the child on to Horn Hill. Elsewise, Aemon will nd a servant’s
place for her at the Citadel.”
“My b-b-bastard.” He had said that, yes, but … All that water. I
could drown. Ships sink all the time, and autumn is a stormy season.
Gilly would be with him, though, and the babe would grow up safe.
“Yes, I … my mother and my sisters will help Gilly with the child.”
I can send a letter, I won’t need to go to Horn Hill myself. “Dareon
could see her to Oldtown just as well as me. I’m … I’ve been
working at my archery every afternoon with Ulmer, as you
commanded … well, except when I’m in the vaults, but you told me
to nd out about the Others. The longbow makes my shoulders ache
and raises blisters on my ngers.” He showed Jon where one had

burst. “I still do it, though. I can hit the target more often than not
now, but I’m still the worst archer who ever bent a bow. I like
Ulmer’s stories, though. Someone needs to write them down and put
them in a book.”
“You do it. They have parchment and ink at the Citadel, as well
as longbows. I will expect you to continue with your practice. Sam,
the Night’s Watch has hundreds of men who can loose an arrow, but
only a handful who can read or write. I need you to become my
new maester.”
The word made him inch. No, Father, please, I won’t speak of it
again, I swear it by the Seven. Let me out, please let me out. “My lord,
I … my work is here, the books …”
“… will be here when you return to us.”
Sam put a hand to his throat. He could almost feel the chain
there, choking him. “My lord, the Citadel … they make you cut up
corpses there.” They make you wear a chain about your neck. If it is
chains you want, come with me. For three days and three nights Sam
had sobbed himself to sleep, manacled hand and foot to a wall. The
chain around his throat was so tight it broke the skin, and whenever
he rolled the wrong way in his sleep it would cut o his breath. “I
cannot wear a chain.”
“You can. You will. Maester Aemon is old and blind. His strength
is leaving him. Who will take his place when he dies? Maester
Mullin at the Shadow Tower is more ghter than scholar, and
Maester Harmune of Eastwatch is drunk more than he’s sober.”
“If you ask the Citadel for more maesters …”
“I mean to. We’ll have need of every one. Aemon Targaryen is
not so easily replaced, however.” Jon seemed puzzled. “I was
certain this would please you. There are so many books at the
Citadel that no man can hope to read them all. You would do well
there, Sam. I know you would.”
“No. I could read the books, but … a m-maester must be a healer
and b-b-blood makes me faint.” He held out a shaky hand for Jon to
see. “I’m Sam the Scared, not Sam the Slayer.”
“Scared? Of what? The chidings of old men? Sam, you saw the
wights come swarming up the Fist, a tide of living dead men with

black hands and bright blue eyes. You slew an Other.”
“It was the d-d-d-dragonglass, not me.”
“Be quiet. You lied and schemed and plotted to make me Lord
Commander. You will obey me. You’ll go to the Citadel and forge a
chain, and if you have to cut up corpses, so be it. At least in
Oldtown the corpses won’t object.”
He doesn’t understand. “My lord,” Sam said, “my f-f-f-father, Lord
Randyll, he, he, he, he, he … the life of a maester is a life of
servitude.” He was babbling, he knew. “No son of House Tarly will
ever wear a chain. The men of Horn Hill do not bow and scrape to
petty lords.” If it is chains you want, come with me. “Jon, I cannot
disobey my father.”
Jon, he’d said, but Jon was gone. It was Lord Snow who faced
him now, grey eyes as hard as ice. “You have no father,” said Lord
Snow. “Only brothers. Only us. Your life belongs to the Night’s
Watch, so go and stu your smallclothes into a sack, along with
anything else you care to take to Oldtown. You leave an hour
before sunrise. And here’s another order. From this day forth, you
will not call yourself a craven. You’ve faced more things this past
year than most men face in a lifetime. You can face the Citadel, but
you’ll face it as a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch. I can’t
command you to be brave, but I can command you to hide your
fears. You said the words, Sam. Remember?”
I am the sword in the darkness. But he was wretched with a sword,
and the darkness scared him. “I … I’ll try.”
“You won’t try. You will obey.”
“Obey.” Mormont’s raven apped its great black wings.
“As my lord commands. Does … does Maester Aemon know?”
“It was as much his idea as mine.” Jon opened the door for him.
“No farewells. The fewer folk who know of this, the better. An hour
before rst light, by the lichyard.”
Sam did not recall leaving the armory. The next thing he knew he
was stumbling through mud and patches of old snow, toward
Maester Aemon’s chambers. I could hide, he told himself. I could hide
in the vaults amongst the books. I could live down there with the mouse
and sneak up at night to steal food. Crazed thoughts, he knew, as

futile as they were desperate. The vaults were the rst place they
would look for him. The last place they would look for him was
beyond the Wall, but that was even madder. The wildlings would
catch me and kill me slowly. They might burn me alive, the way the red
woman means to burn Mance Rayder.
When he found Maester Aemon in the rookery, he gave him Jon’s
letter and blurted out his fears in a great green gush of words. “He
does not understand.” Sam felt as if he might throw up. “If I don a
chain, my lord f-f-f-father … he, he, he …”
“My own father raised the same objections when I chose a life of
service,” the old man said. “It was his father who sent me to the
Citadel. King Daeron had sired four sons, and three had sons of their
own. Too many dragons are as dangerous as too few, I heard His Grace
tell my lord father, the day they sent me o .” Aemon raised a
spotted hand to the chain of many metals that dangled loose about
his thin neck. “The chain is heavy, Sam, but my grandsire had the
right of it. So does your Lord Snow.”
“Snow,” a raven muttered. “Snow,” another echoed. All of them
picked it up then. “Snow, snow, snow, snow, snow.” Sam had taught
them that word. There was no help here, he saw. Maester Aemon
was as trapped as he was. He will die at sea, he thought, despairing.
He is too old to survive such a voyage. Gilly’s little son may die as well,
he’s not as large and strong as Dalla’s boy. Does Jon mean to kill us all?
The next morning, Sam found himself saddling the mare he’d
ridden from Horn Hill and leading her toward the lichyard beside
the eastern road. Her saddlebags bulged with cheese and sausages
and hard-cooked eggs, and half a salted ham that Three-Finger Hobb
had given him on his name day. “You’re a man who appreciates
cooking, Slayer,” the cook had said. “We need more o’ your sort.”
The ham would help, no doubt. Eastwatch was a long cold ride
away, and there were no towns nor inns in the shadow of the Wall.
The hour before dawn was dark and still. Castle Black seemed
strangely hushed. At the lichyard, a pair of two-wheeled wayns
awaited him, along with Black Jack Bulwer and a dozen seasoned
rangers, tough as the garrons they rode. Kedge Whiteye cursed
loudly when his one good eye spied Sam. “Don’t mind him, Slayer,”

said Black Jack. “He lost a wager, said we’d need to drag you out
squealing from beneath some bed.”
Maester Aemon was too frail to ride a horse, so a wayn had been
made ready for him, its bed heaped high with furs, and a leather
awning fastened overhead to keep o the rain and snow. Gilly and
her child would ride with him. The second wayn would carry their
clothing and possessions, along with a chest of rare old books that
Aemon thought the Citadel might lack. Sam had spent half the night
searching for them, though he’d found only one in four. And a good
thing, or we’d need another wayn.
When the maester appeared, he was bundled up in a bearskin
three times his size. As Clydas led him toward the wayn, a gust of
wind came up, and the old man staggered. Sam hurried to his side
and put an arm about him. Another gust like that could blow him over
the Wall. “Keep hold of my arm, maester. It’s not far.”
The blind man nodded as the wind pushed back their hoods. “It is
always warm in Oldtown. There is an inn on an island in the
Honeywine where I used to go when I was a young novice. It will
be pleasant to sit there once again, sipping cider.”
By the time they got the maester into the wayn, Gilly had
appeared, the child bundled in her arms. Beneath her hood her eyes
were red from crying. Jon turned up at the same time, with
Dolorous Edd. “Lord Snow,” Maester Aemon called, “I left a book
for you in my chambers. The Jade Compendium. It was written by
the Volantene adventurer Colloquo Votar, who traveled to the east
and visited all the lands of the Jade Sea. There is a passage you may
nd of interest. I’ve told Clydas to mark it for you.”
“I’ll be sure to read it,” Jon Snow replied.
A line of pale snot ran from Maester Aemon’s nose. He wiped it
away with the back of his glove. “Knowledge is a weapon, Jon. Arm
yourself well before you ride forth to battle.”
“I will.” A light snow had begun to fall, the big soft akes drifting
down lazily from the sky. Jon turned to Black Jack Bulwer. “Make
as good a time as you can, but take no foolish risks. You have an
old man and a suckling babe with you. See that you keep them
warm and well fed.”

“You do the same, m’lord,” said Gilly. “You do the same for
t’other. Find another wet nurse, like you said. You promised me you
would. The boy … Dalla’s boy … the little prince, I mean … you
nd him some good woman, so he grows up big and strong.”
“You have my word,” Jon Snow said solemnly.
“Don’t you name him. Don’t you do that till he’s past two years.
It’s ill luck to name them when they’re still on the breast. You
crows may not know that, but it’s true.”
“As you command, my lady.”
A spasm of anger ashed across Gilly’s face. “Don’t you call me
that. I’m a mother, not a lady. I’m Craster’s wife and Craster’s
daughter, and a mother.”
Dolorous Edd took the babe as Gilly climbed into the wayn and
covered her legs with some musty pelts. By then the eastern sky
was more grey than black. Left Hand Lew was anxious to be o .
Edd handed the infant up and Gilly put him to her breast. This may
be the last I ever see of Castle Black, thought Sam as he hoisted
himself atop his mare. As much as he had once hated Castle Black, it
was tearing him apart to leave it.
“Let’s do this,” Bulwer commanded. A whip snapped, and the
wayns began to rumble slowly down the rutted road as the snow
came down around them. Sam lingered beside Clydas and Dolorous
Edd and Jon Snow. “Well,” he said, “farewell.”
“And to you, Sam,” said Dolorous Edd. “Your boat’s not like to
sink, I don’t think. Boats only sink when I’m aboard.”
Jon was watching the wayns. “The rst time I saw Gilly,” he said,
“she was pressed back against the wall of Craster’s Keep, this skinny
dark-haired girl with her big belly, cringing away from Ghost. He
had gotten in among her rabbits, and I think she was frightened that
he would tear her open and devour the babe … but it was not the
wolf she should have been afraid of, was it?”
No, Sam thought. Craster was the danger, her own father.
“She has more courage than she knows.”
“So do you, Sam. Have a swift, safe voyage, and take care of her
and Aemon and the child.” Jon smiled a strange, sad smile. “And
pull your hood up. The snow akes are melting in your hair.”

ARYA

Faint and far away the light burned, low on the horizon, shining
through the sea mists.
“It looks like a star,” said Arya.
“The star of home,” said Denyo.
His father was shouting orders. Sailors scrambled up and down
the three tall masts and moved along the rigging, ree ng the heavy
purple sails. Below, oarsmen heaved and strained over two great
banks of oars. The decks tilted, creaking, as the galleas Titan’s
Daughter heeled to starboard and began to come about.
The star of home. Arya stood at the prow, one hand resting on the
gilded gurehead, a maiden with a bowl of fruit. For half a
heartbeat she let herself pretend that it was her home ahead.
But that was stupid. Her home was gone, her parents dead, and all
her brothers slain but Jon Snow on the Wall. That was where she
had wanted to go. She told the captain as much, but even the iron
coin did not sway him. Arya never seemed to nd the places she set
out to reach. Yoren had sworn to deliver her to Winterfell, only she
had ended up in Harrenhal and Yoren in his grave. When she
escaped Harrenhal for Riverrun, Lem and Anguy and Tom o’ Sevens
took her captive and dragged her to the hollow hill instead. Then
the Hound had stolen her and dragged her to the Twins. Arya had
left him dying by the river and gone ahead to Saltpans, hoping to
take passage for Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, only …

Braavos might not be so bad. Syrio was from Braavos, and Jaqen
might be there as well. It was Jaqen who had given her the iron coin.
He hadn’t truly been her friend, the way that Syrio had, but what
good had friends ever done her? I don’t need any friends, so long as I
have Needle. She brushed the ball of her thumb across the sword’s
smooth pommel, wishing, wishing …
If truth be told, Arya did not know what to wish for, any more
than she knew what awaited her beneath that distant light. The
captain had given her passage but he had no time to speak with her.
Some of the crew shunned her, but others gave her gifts—a silver
fork, ngerless gloves, a oppy woolen hat patched with leather.
One man showed her how to tie sailor’s knots. Another poured her
thimble cups of re wine. The friendly ones would tap their chests,
repeating their names over and over until Arya said them back,
though none ever thought to ask her name. They called her Salty,
since she’d come aboard at Saltpans, near the mouth of the Trident.
It was as good a name as any, she supposed.
The last of the night’s stars had vanished … all but the pair dead
ahead. “It’s two stars now.”
“Two eyes,” said Denyo. “The Titan sees us.”
The Titan of Braavos. Old Nan had told them stories of the Titan
back in Winterfell. He was a giant as tall as a mountain, and
whenever Braavos stood in danger he would wake with re in his
eyes, his rocky limbs grinding and groaning as he waded out into
the sea to smash the enemies. “The Braavosi feed him on the juicy
pink esh of little highborn girls,” Nan would end, and Sansa would
give a stupid squeak. But Maester Luwin said the Titan was only a
statue, and Old Nan’s stories were only stories.
Winterfell is burned and fallen, Arya reminded herself. Old Nan and
Maester Luwin were both dead, most like, and Sansa too. It did no
good to think of them. All men must die. That was what the words
meant, the words that Jaqen H’ghar had taught her when he gave
her the worn iron coin. She had learned more Braavosi words since
they left Saltpans, the words for please and thank you and sea and
star and re wine, but she came to them knowing that all men must
die. Most of the Daughter’s crew had a smattering of the Common

Tongue from nights ashore in Oldtown and King’s Landing and
Maidenpool, though only the captain and his sons spoke it well
enough to talk to her. Denyo was the youngest of those sons, a
plump, cheerful boy of twelve who kept his father’s cabin and
helped his eldest brother do his sums.
“I hope your Titan isn’t hungry,” Arya told him.
“Hungry?” Denyo said, confused.
“It takes no matter.” Even if the Titan did eat juicy pink girl esh,
Arya would not fear him. She was a scrawny thing, no proper meal
for a giant, and almost eleven, practically a woman grown. And
Salty isn’t highborn, either. “Is the Titan the god of Braavos?” she
asked. “Or do you have the Seven?”
“All gods are honored in Braavos.” The captain’s son loved to talk
about his city almost as much as he loved to talk about his father’s
ship. “Your Seven have a sept here, the Sept-Beyond-the-Sea, but
only Westerosi sailors worship there.”
They are not my Seven. They were my mother’s gods, and they let the
Freys murder her at the Twins. She wondered whether she would nd
a godswood in Braavos, with a weirwood at its heart. Denyo might
know, but she could not ask him. Salty was from Saltpans, and what
would a girl from Saltpans know about the old gods of the north?
The old gods are dead, she told herself, with Mother and Father and
Robb and Bran and Rickon, all dead. A long time ago, she
remembered her father saying that when the cold winds blow the
lone wolf dies and the pack survives. He had it all backwards. Arya,
the lone wolf, still lived, but the wolves of the pack had been taken
and slain and skinned.
“The Moonsingers led us to this place of refuge, where the
dragons of Valyria could not nd us,” Denyo said. “Theirs is the
greatest temple. We esteem the Father of Waters as well, but his
house is built anew whenever he takes his bride. The rest of the
gods dwell together on an isle in the center of the city. That is
where you will nd the … the Many-Faced God.”
The Titan’s eyes seemed brighter now, and farther apart. Arya did
not know any Many-Faced God, but if he answered prayers, he
might be the god she sought. Ser Gregor, she thought, Dunsen, Ra

the Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei. Only six now. Jo rey
was dead, the Hound had slain Polliver, and she’d stabbed the
Tickler herself, and that stupid squire with the pimple. I wouldn’t
have killed him if he hadn’t grabbed me. The Hound had been dying
when she left him on the banks of the Trident, burning up with
fever from his wound. I should have given him the gift of mercy and
put a knife into his heart.
“Salty, look!” Denyo took her by the arm and turned her. “Can
you see? There.” He pointed.
The mists gave way before them, ragged grey curtains parted by
their prow. The Titan’s Daughter cleaved through the grey-green
waters on billowing purple wings. Arya could hear the cries of
seabirds overhead. There, where Denyo pointed, a line of stony
ridges rose sudden from the sea, their steep slopes covered with
soldier pines and black spruce. But dead ahead the sea had broken
through, and there above the open water the Titan towered, with
his eyes blazing and his long green hair blowing in the wind.
His legs bestrode the gap, one foot planted on each mountain, his
shoulders looming tall above the jagged crests. His legs were carved
of solid stone, the same black granite as the sea monts on which he
stood, though around his hips he wore an armored skirt of greenish
bronze. His breastplate was bronze as well, and his head in his
crested halfhelm. His blowing hair was made of hempen ropes dyed
green, and huge res burned in the caves that were his eyes. One
hand rested atop the ridge to his left, bronze ngers coiled about a
knob of stone; the other thrust up into the air, clasping the hilt of a
broken sword.
He is only a little bigger than King Baelor’s statue in King’s Landing,
she told herself when they were still well o to sea. As the galleas
drove closer to where the breakers smashed against the ridgeline,
however, the Titan grew larger still. She could hear Denyo’s father
bellowing commands in his deep voice, and up in the rigging men
were bringing in the sails. We are going to row beneath the Titan’s
legs. Arya could see the arrow slits in the great bronze breastplate,
and stains and speckles on the Titan’s arms and shoulders where the

seabirds nested. Her neck craned upward. Baelor the Blessed would
not reach his knee. He could step right over the walls of Winterfell.
Then the Titan gave a mighty roar.
The sound was as huge as he was, a terrible groaning and
grinding, so loud it drowned out even the captain’s voice and the
crash of the waves against those pine-clad ridges. A thousand
seabirds took to the air at once, and Arya inched until she saw that
Denyo was laughing. “He warns the Arsenal of our coming, that is
all,” he shouted. “You must not be afraid.”
“I never was,” Arya shouted back. “It was loud, is all.”
Wind and wave had the Titan’s Daughter hard in hand now,
driving her swiftly toward the channel. Her double bank of oars
stroked smoothly, lashing the sea to white foam as the Titan’s
shadow fell upon them. For a moment it seemed as though they
must surely smash up against the stones beneath his legs. Huddled
by Denyo at the prow, Arya could taste salt where the spray had
touched her face. She had to look straight up to see the Titan’s head.
“The Braavosi feed him on the juicy pink esh of little highborn
girls,” she heard Old Nan say again, but she was not a little girl, and
she would not be frightened of a stupid statue.
Even so, she kept one hand on Needle as they slipped between his
legs. More arrow slits dotted the insides of those great stone thighs,
and when Arya craned her neck around to watch the crow’s nest slip
through with a good ten yards to spare, she spied murder holes
beneath the Titan’s armored skirts, and pale faces staring down at
them from behind the iron bars.
And then they were past.
The shadow lifted, the pine-clad ridges fell away to either side,
the winds dwindled, and they found themselves moving through a
great lagoon. Ahead rose another sea mont, a knob of rock that
pushed up from the water like a spiked st, its stony battlements
bristling with scorpions, spit res, and trebuchets. “The Arsenal of
Braavos,” Denyo named it, as proud as if he’d built it. “They can
build a war galley there in a day.” Arya could see dozens of galleys
tied up at quays and perched on launching slips. The painted prows
of others poked from innumerable wooden sheds along the stony

shores, like hounds in a kennel, lean and mean and hungry, waiting
for a hunter’s horn to call them forth. She tried to count them, but
there were too many, and more docks and sheds and quays where
the shoreline curved away.
Two galleys had come out to meet them. They seemed to skim
upon the water like dragon ies, their pale oars ashing. Arya heard
the captain shouting to them and their own captains shouting back,
but she did not understand the words. A great horn sounded. The
galleys passed to either side of them, so close that she could hear
the mu ed sound of drums from within their purple hulls, bom bom
bom bom bom bom bom bom, like the beat of living hearts.
Then the galleys were behind them, and the Arsenal as well.
Ahead stretched a broad expanse of pea-green water rippled like a
sheet of colored glass. From its wet heart arose the city proper, a
great sprawl of domes and towers and bridges, grey and gold and
red. The hundred isles of Braavos in the sea.
Maester Luwin had taught them about Braavos, but Arya had
forgotten much of what he’d said. It was a at city, she could see
that even from afar, not like King’s Landing on its three high hills.
The only hills here were the ones that men had raised of brick and
granite, bronze and marble. Something else was missing as well,
though it took her a few moments to realize what it was. The city
has no walls. But when she said as much to Denyo, he laughed at
her. “Our walls are made of wood and painted purple,” he told her.
“Our galleys are our walls. We need no other.”
The deck creaked behind them. Arya turned to nd Denyo’s father
looming over them in his long captain’s coat of purple wool.
Tradesman-Captain Ternesio Terys wore no whiskers and kept his
grey hair cut short and neat, framing his square, windburnt face. On
the crossing she had oft seen him jesting with his crew, but when he
frowned men ran from him as if before a storm. He was frowning
now. “Our voyage is at an end,” he told Arya. “We make for the
Chequy Port, where the Sealord’s customs o cers will come aboard
to inspect our holds. They will be half a day at it, they always are,
but there is no need for you to wait upon their pleasure. Gather

your belongings. I shall lower a boat, and Yorko will put you
ashore.”
Ashore. Arya bit her lip. She had crossed the narrow sea to get
here, but if the captain had asked she would have told him she
wanted to stay aboard the Titan’s Daughter. Salty was too small to
man an oar, she knew that now, but she could learn to splice ropes
and reef the sails and steer a course across the great salt seas.
Denyo had taken her up to the crow’s nest once, and she hadn’t
been afraid at all, though the deck had seemed a tiny thing below
her. I can do sums too, and keep a cabin neat.
But the galleas had no need of a second boy. Besides, she had
only to look at the captain’s face to know how anxious he was to be
rid of her. So Arya only nodded. “Ashore,” she said, though ashore
meant only strangers.
“Valar dohaeris.” He touched two ngers to his brow. “I beg you
remember Ternesio Terys and the service he has done you.”
“I will,” Arya said in a small voice. The wind tugged at her cloak,
insistent as a ghost. It was time she was away.
Gather your belongings, the captain had said, but there were few
enough of those. Only the clothes she was wearing, her little pouch
of coins, the gifts the crew had given her, the dagger on her left hip
and Needle on her right.
The boat was ready before she was, and Yorko was at the oars.
He was the captain’s son as well, but older than Denyo and less
friendly. I never said farewell to Denyo, she thought as she clambered
down to join him. She wondered if she would ever see the boy
again. I should have said farewell.
The Titan’s Daughter dwindled in their wake, while the city grew
larger with every stroke of Yorko’s oars. A harbor was visible o to
her right, beyond a sinking point of land where the tops of halfdrowned buildings thrust themselves above the water: a tangle of
piers and quays crowded with big-bellied whalers out of Ibben,
swan ships from the Summer Isles, and more galleys than a girl
could count. Another harbor, more distant, was o to her left. Arya
had never seen so many big buildings all together in one place.
King’s Landing had the Red Keep and the Great Sept of Baelor and

the Dragonpit, but Braavos seemed to boast a score of temples and
towers and palaces that were as large or even larger. I will be a
mouse again, she thought glumly, the way I was in Harrenhal before I
ran away.
The city had seemed like one big island from where the Titan
stood, but as Yorko rowed them closer she saw that it was many
small islands close together, linked by arched stone bridges that
spanned innumerable canals. Beyond the harbor she glimpsed
streets of grey stone houses, built so close they leaned one upon the
other. To Arya’s eyes they were queer-looking, four and ve stories
tall and very skinny, with sharp-peaked tile roofs like pointed hats.
She saw no thatch, and only a few timbered houses of the sort she
knew in Westeros. They have no trees, she realized. Braavos is all
stone, a grey city in a green sea.
Yorko swung them north of the docks and down the gullet of a
great canal, a broad green waterway that ran straight into the heart
of the city. They passed under the arches of a carved stone bridge,
decorated with half a hundred kinds of sh and crabs and squids. A
second bridge appeared ahead, this one carved in lacy leafy vines,
and beyond that a third, gazing down on them from a thousand
painted eyes. The mouths of lesser canals opened to either side, and
others still smaller o of those. Some of the houses were built above
the waterways, she saw, turning the canals into a sort of tunnel.
Slender boats slid in and out among them, wrought in the shapes of
water serpents with painted heads and upraised tails. Those were
not rowed but poled, she saw, by men who stood at their sterns in
cloaks of grey and brown and deep moss green. She saw huge atbottomed barges too, heaped high with crates and barrels and
pushed along by twenty polemen to a side, and fancy oating
houses with lanterns of colored glass, velvet drapes, and brazen
gureheads. O in the far distance, looming above canals and
houses both, was a massive grey stone roadway of some kind,
supported by three tiers of mighty arches marching away south into
the haze. “What’s that?” Arya asked Yorko, pointing. “The
sweetwater river,” he told her. “It brings fresh water from the

mainland, across the mud ats and the briny shallows. Good sweet
water for the fountains.”
When she looked behind her, the harbor and lagoon were lost to
sight. Ahead, a row of mighty statues stood along both sides of the
channel, solemn stone men in long bronze robes, spattered with the
droppings of the seabirds. Some held books, some daggers, some
hammers. One clutched a golden star in his upraised hand. Another
was upending a stone agon to send an endless stream of water
splashing down into the canal. “Are they gods?” asked Arya.
“Sealords,” said Yorko. “The Isle of the Gods is farther on. See?
Six bridges down, on the right bank. That is the Temple of the
Moonsingers.”
It was one of those that Arya had spied from the lagoon, a mighty
mass of snow-white marble topped by a huge silvered dome whose
milk glass windows showed all the phases of the moon. A pair of
marble maidens anked its gates, tall as the Sealords, supporting a
crescent-shaped lintel.
Beyond it stood another temple, a red stone edi ce as stern as
any fortress. Atop its great square tower a re blazed in an iron
brazier twenty feet across, whilst smaller res anked its brazen
doors. “The red priests love their res,” Yorko told her. “The Lord
of Light is their god, red R’hllor.”
I know. Arya remembered Thoros of Myr in his bits of old armor,
worn over robes so faded that he had seemed more a pink priest
than a red one. Yet his kiss had brought Lord Beric back from death.
She watched the red god’s house drift by, wondering whether these
Braavosi priests of his could do the same.
Next came a huge brick structure festooned with lichen. Arya
might have taken it for a storehouse had not Yorko said, “That is
the Holy Refuge, where we honor the small gods the world has
forgotten. You will hear it called the Warren too.” A small canal ran
between the Warren’s looming lichen-covered walls, and there he
swung them right. They passed through a tunnel and out again into
the light. More shrines loomed up to either side.
“I never knew there were so many gods,” Arya said.

Yorko grunted. They went around a bend and beneath another
bridge. On their left appeared a rocky knoll with a windowless
temple of dark grey stone at its top. A ight of stone steps led from
its doors down to a covered dock.
Yorko backed the oars, and the boat bumped gently against stone
pilings. He grasped an iron ring set to hold them for a moment.
“Here I leave you.”
The dock was shadowed, the steps steep. The temple’s black tile
roof came to a sharp peak, like the houses along the canals. Arya
chewed her lip. Syrio came from Braavos. He might have visited this
temple. He might have climbed those steps. She grabbed a ring and
pulled herself up onto the dock.
“You know my name,” said Yorko from the boat.
“Yorko Terys.”
“Valar dohaeris.” He pushed o with his oar and drifted back o
into the deeper water. Arya watched him row back the way they’d
come, until he vanished in the shadows of the bridge. As the swish
of oars faded, she could almost hear the beating of her heart.
Suddenly she was somewhere else … back in Harrenhal with
Gendry, maybe, or with the Hound in the woods along the Trident.
Salty is a stupid child, she told herself. I am a wolf, and will not be
afraid. She patted Needle’s hilt for luck and plunged into the
shadows, taking the steps two at a time so no one could ever say
she’d been afraid.
At the top she found a set of carved wooden doors twelve feet
high. The left-hand door was made of weirwood pale as bone, the
right of gleaming ebony. In their center was a carved moon face;
ebony on the weirwood side, weirwood on the ebony. The look of it
reminded her somehow of the heart tree in the godswood at
Winterfell. The doors are watching me, she thought. She pushed upon
both doors at once with the at of her gloved hands, but neither one
would budge. Locked and barred. “Let me in, you stupid,” she said.
“I crossed the narrow sea.” She made a st and pounded. “Jaqen
told me to come. I have the iron coin.” She pulled it from her pouch
and held it up. “See? Valar morghulis.”
The doors made no reply, except to open.

They opened inward all in silence, with no human hand to move
them. Arya took a step forward, and another. The doors closed
behind her, and for a moment she was blind. Needle was in her
hand, though she did not remember drawing it.
A few candles burned along the walls, but gave so little light that
Arya could not see her own feet. Someone was whispering, too
softly for her to make out words. Someone else was weeping. She
heard light footfalls, leather sliding over stone, a door opening and
closing. Water, I hear water too.
Slowly her eyes adjusted. The temple seemed much larger within
than it had without. The septs of Westeros were seven-sided, with
seven altars for the seven gods, but here there were more gods than
seven. Statues of them stood along the walls, massive and
threatening. Around their feet red candles ickered, as dim as
distant stars. The nearest was a marble woman twelve feet tall. Real
tears were trickling from her eyes, to ll the bowl she cradled in
her arms. Beyond her was a man with a lion’s head seated on a
throne, carved of ebony. On the other side of the doors, a huge
horse of bronze and iron reared up on two great legs. Farther on she
could make out a great stone face, a pale infant with a sword, a
shaggy black goat the size of an aurochs, a hooded man leaning on a
sta . The rest were only looming shapes to her, half-seen through
the gloom. Between the gods were hidden alcoves thick with
shadows, with here and there a candle burning.
Silent as a shadow, Arya moved between rows of long stone
benches, her sword in hand. The oor was made of stone, her feet
told her; not polished marble like the oor of the Great Sept of
Baelor, but something rougher. She passed some women whispering
together. The air was warm and heavy, so heavy that she yawned.
She could smell the candles. The scent was unfamiliar, and she put it
down to some queer incense, but as she got deeper into the temple,
they seemed to smell of snow and pine needles and hot stew. Good
smells, Arya told herself, and felt a little braver. Brave enough to
slip Needle back into its sheath.
In the center of the temple she found the water she had heard; a
pool ten feet across, black as ink and lit by dim red candles. Beside

it sat a young man in a silvery cloak, weeping softly. She watched
him dip a hand in the water, sending scarlet ripples racing across
the pool. When he drew his ngers back he sucked them, one by
one. He must be thirsty. There were stone cups along the rim of the
pool. Arya lled one and brought it to him, so he could drink. The
young man stared at her for a long moment when she o ered it to
him. “Valar morghulis,” he said.
“Valar dohaeris,” she replied.
He drank deep, and dropped the cup into the pool with a soft
plop. Then he pushed himself to his feet, swaying, holding his belly.
For a moment Arya thought he was going to fall. It was only then
that she saw the dark stain below his belt, spreading as she
watched. “You’re stabbed,” she blurted, but the man paid her no
mind. He lurched unsteadily toward the wall and crawled into an
alcove onto a hard stone bed. When Arya peered around, she saw
other alcoves too. On some there were old people sleeping.
No, a half-remembered voice seemed to whisper in her head. They
are dead, or dying. Look with your eyes.
A hand touched her arm.
Arya spun away, but it was only a little girl: a pale little girl in a
cowled robe that seemed to engulf her, black on the right side and
white on the left. Beneath the cowl was a gaunt and bony face,
hollow cheeks, and dark eyes that looked as big as saucers. “Don’t
grab me,” Arya warned the waif. “I killed the boy who grabbed me
last.”
The girl said some words that Arya did not know.
She shook her head. “Don’t you know the Common Tongue?”
A voice behind her said, “I do.”
Arya did not like the way they kept surprising her. The hooded
man was tall, enveloped in a larger version of the black-and-white
robe the girl was wearing. Beneath his cowl all she could see was
the faint red glitter of candlelight re ecting o his eyes. “What
place is this?” she asked him.
“A place of peace.” His voice was gentle. “You are safe here. This
is the House of Black and White, my child. Though you are young to
seek the favor of the Many-Faced God.”

“Is he like the southron god, the one with seven faces?”
“Seven? No. He has faces beyond count, little one, as many faces
as there are stars in the sky. In Braavos, men worship as they
will … but at the end of every road stands Him of Many Faces,
waiting. He will be there for you one day, do not fear. You need not
rush to his embrace.”
“I only came to nd Jaqen H’ghar.”
“I do not know this name.”
Her heart sank. “He was from Lorath. His hair was white on one
side and red on the other. He said he’d teach me secrets, and gave
me this.” The iron coin was clutched in her st. When she opened
her ngers, it clung to her sweaty palm.
The priest studied the coin, though he made no move to touch it.
The waif with the big eyes was looking at it too. Finally, the cowled
man said, “Tell me your name, child.”
“Salty. I come from Saltpans, by the Trident.”
Though she could not see his face, somehow she could feel him
smiling. “No,” he said. “Tell me your name.”
“Squab,” she answered this time.
“Your true name, child.”
“My mother named me Nan, but they call me Weasel—”
“Your name.”
She swallowed. “Arry. I’m Arry.”
“Closer. And now the truth?”
Fear cuts deeper than swords, she told herself. “Arya.” She
whispered the word the rst time. The second time she threw it at
him. “I am Arya, of House Stark.”
“You are,” he said, “but the House of Black and White is no place
for Arya, of House Stark.”
“Please,” she said. “I have no place to go.”
“Do you fear death?”
She bit her lip. “No.”
“Let us see.” The priest lowered his cowl. Beneath he had no face;
only a yellowed skull with a few scraps of skin still clinging to the
cheeks, and a white worm wriggling from one empty eye socket.

“Kiss me, child,” he croaked, in a voice as dry and husky as a death
rattle.
Does he think to scare me? Arya kissed him where his nose should
be and plucked the grave worm from his eye to eat it, but it melted
like a shadow in her hand.
The yellow skull was melting too, and the kindliest old man that
she had ever seen was smiling down at her. “No one has ever tried
to eat my worm before,” he said. “Are you hungry, child?”
Yes, she thought, but not for food.

CERSEI

A cold rain was falling, turning the walls and ramparts of the Red
Keep dark as blood. The queen held the king’s hand and led him
rmly across the muddy yard to where her litter waited with its
escort. “Uncle Jaime said I could ride my horse and throw pennies
to the smallfolk,” the boy objected.
“Do you want to catch a chill?” She would not risk it; Tommen
had never been as robust as Jo rey. “Your grandfather would want
you to look a proper king at his wake. We will not appear at the
Great Sept wet and bedraggled.” Bad enough I must wear mourning
again. Black had never been a happy color on her. With her fair
skin, it made her look half a corpse herself. Cersei had risen an hour
before dawn to bathe and x her hair, and she did not intend to let
the rain destroy her e orts.
Inside the litter, Tommen settled back against his pillows and
peered out at the falling rain. “The gods are weeping for
grandfather. Lady Jocelyn says the raindrops are their tears.”
“Jocelyn Swyft is a fool. If the gods could weep, they would have
wept for your brother. Rain is rain. Close the curtain before you let
any more in. That mantle is sable, would you have it soaked?”
Tommen did as he was bid. His meekness troubled her. A king
had to be strong. Jo rey would have argued. He was never easy to
cow. “Don’t slump so,” she told Tommen. “Sit like a king. Put your

shoulders back and straighten your crown. Do you want it to tumble
o your head in front of all your lords?”
“No, Mother.” The boy sat straight and reached up to x the
crown. Jo ’s crown was too big for him. Tommen had always
inclined to plumpness, but his face seemed thinner now. Is he eating
well? She must remember to ask the steward. She could not risk
Tommen growing ill, not with Myrcella in the hands of the
Dornishmen. He will grow into Jo ’s crown in time. Until he did, a
smaller one might be needed, one that did not threaten to swallow
his head. She would take it up with the goldsmiths.
The litter made its slow way down Aegon’s High Hill. Two
Kingsguard rode before them, white knights on white horses with
white cloaks hanging sodden from their shoulders. Behind came
fty Lannister guardsmen in gold and crimson.
Tommen peered through the drapes at the empty streets. “I
thought there would be more people. When Father died, all the
people came out to watch us go by.”
“This rain has driven them inside.” King’s Landing had never
loved Lord Tywin. He never wanted love, though. “You cannot eat
love, nor buy a horse with it, nor warm your halls on a cold night,” she
heard him tell Jaime once, when her brother had been no older than
Tommen.
At the Great Sept of Baelor, that magni cence in marble atop
Visenya’s Hill, the little knot of mourners were outnumbered by the
gold cloaks that Ser Addam Marbrand had drawn up across the
plaza. More will turn out later, the queen told herself as Ser Meryn
Trant helped her from the litter. Only the highborn and their
retinues were to be admitted to the morning service; there would be
another in the afternoon for the commons, and the evening prayers
were open to all. Cersei would need to return for that, so that the
smallfolk might see her mourn. The mob must have its show. It was a
nuisance. She had o ces to ll, a war to win, a realm to rule. Her
father would have understood that.
The High Septon met them at the top of the steps. A bent old man
with a wispy grey beard, he was so stooped by the weight of his
ornate embroidered robes that his eyes were on a level with the

queen’s breasts … though his crown, an airy confection of cut
crystal and spun gold, added a good foot and a half to his height.
Lord Tywin had given him that crown to replace the one that was
lost when the mob killed the previous High Septon. They had pulled
the fat fool from his litter and torn him apart, the day Myrcella
sailed for Dorne. That one was a great glutton, and biddable. This
one … This High Septon was of Tyrion’s making, Cersei recalled
suddenly. It was a disquieting thought.
The old man’s spotted hand looked like a chicken claw as it poked
from a sleeve encrusted with golden scrollwork and small crystals.
Cersei knelt on the wet marble and kissed his ngers, and bid
Tommen to do the same. What does he know of me? How much did
the dwarf tell him? The High Septon smiled as he escorted her into
the sept. But was it a threatening smile full of unspoken knowledge,
or just some vacuous twitch of an old man’s wrinkled lips? The
queen could not be certain.
They made their way through the Hall of Lamps beneath colored
globes of leaded glass, Tommen’s hand in hers. Trant and
Kettleblack anked them, water dripping from their wet cloaks to
puddle on the oor. The High Septon walked slowly, leaning on a
weirwood sta topped by a crystal orb. Seven of the Most Devout
attended him, shimmering in cloth-of-silver. Tommen wore cloth-ofgold beneath his sable mantle, the queen an old gown of black
velvet lined with ermine. There’d been no time to have a new one
made, and she could not wear the same dress she had worn for
Jo rey, nor the one she’d buried Robert in.
At least I will not be expected to don mourning for Tyrion. I shall
dress in crimson silk and cloth-of-gold for that, and wear rubies in my
hair. The man who brought her the dwarf’s head would be raised to
lordship, she had proclaimed, no matter how mean and low his birth
or station. Ravens were carrying her promise to every part of the
Seven Kingdoms, and soon enough word would cross the narrow sea
to the Nine Free Cities and the lands beyond. Let the Imp run to the
ends of the earth, he will not escape me.
The royal procession passed through the inner doors into the
cavernous heart of the Great Sept, and down a wide aisle, one of

seven that met beneath the dome. To right and left, highborn
mourners sank to their knees as the king and queen went by. Many
of her father’s bannermen were here, and knights who had fought
beside Lord Tywin in half a hundred battles. The sight of them
made her feel more con dent. I am not without friends.
Under the Great Sept’s lofty dome of glass and gold and crystal,
Lord Tywin Lannister’s body rested upon a stepped marble bier. At
its head Jaime stood at vigil, his one good hand curled about the
hilt of a tall golden greatsword whose point rested on the oor. The
hooded cloak he wore was as white as freshly fallen snow, and the
scales of his long hauberk were mother-of-pearl chased with gold.
Lord Tywin would have wanted him in Lannister gold and crimson, she
thought. It always angered him to see Jaime all in white. Her brother
was growing his beard again as well. The stubble covered his jaw
and cheeks, and gave his face a rough, uncouth look. He might at
least have waited till Father’s bones were interred beneath the Rock.
Cersei led the king up three short steps, to kneel beside the body.
Tommen’s eyes were lled with tears. “Weep quietly,” she told him,
leaning close. “You are a king, not a squalling child. Your lords are
watching you.” The boy swiped the tears away with the back of his
hand. He had her eyes, emerald green, as large and bright as
Jaime’s eyes had been when he was Tommen’s age. Her brother had
been such a pretty boy … but erce as well, as erce as Jo rey, a
true lion cub. The queen put her arm around Tommen and kissed his
golden curls. He will need me to teach him how to rule and keep him
safe from his enemies. Some of them stood around them even now,
pretending to be friends.
The silent sisters had armored Lord Tywin as if to ght some nal
battle. He wore his nest plate, heavy steel enameled a deep, dark
crimson, with gold inlay on his gauntlets, greaves, and breastplate.
His rondels were golden sunbursts; a golden lioness crouched upon
each shoulder; a maned lion crested the greathelm beside his head.
Upon his chest lay a longsword in a gilded scabbard studded with
rubies, his hands folded about its hilt in gloves of gilded mail. Even
in death his face is noble, she thought, although the mouth … The
corners of her father’s lips curved upward ever so slightly, giving

him a look of vague bemusement. That should not be. She blamed
Pycelle; he should have told the silent sisters that Lord Tywin
Lannister never smiled. The man is as useless as nipples on a
breastplate. That half smile made Lord Tywin seem less fearful,
somehow. That, and the fact that his eyes were closed. Her father’s
eyes had always been unsettling; pale green, almost luminous,
ecked with gold. His eyes could see inside you, could see how
weak and worthless and ugly you were down deep. When he looked
at you, you knew.
Unbidden, a memory came to her, of the feast King Aerys had
thrown when Cersei rst came to court, a girl as green as summer
grass. Old Merryweather had been nattering about raising the duty
on wine when Lord Rykker said, “If we need gold, His Grace should
sit Lord Tywin on his chamber pot.” Aerys and his lickspittles
laughed loudly, whilst Father stared at Rykker over his wine cup.
Long after the merriment had died that gaze had lingered. Rykker
turned away, turned back, met Father’s eyes, then ignored them,
drank a tankard of ale, and stalked o red-faced, defeated by a pair
of un inching eyes.
Lord Tywin’s eyes are closed forever now, Cersei thought. It is my
look they will inch from now, my frown that they must fear. I am a lion
too.
It was gloomy within the sept with the sky so grey outside. If the
rain ever stopped, the sun would slant down through the hanging
crystals to drape the corpse in rainbows. The Lord of Casterly Rock
deserved rainbows. He had been a great man. I shall be greater,
though. A thousand years from now, when the maesters write about this
time, you shall be remembered only as Queen Cersei’s sire.
“Mother.” Tommen tugged her sleeve. “What smells so bad?”
My lord father. “Death.” She could smell it too; a faint whisper of
decay that made her want to wrinkle her nose. Cersei paid it no
mind. The seven septons in the silver robes stood behind the bier,
beseeching the Father Above to judge Lord Tywin justly. When they
were done, seventy-seven septas gathered before the altar of the
Mother and began to sing to her for mercy. Tommen was dgeting
by then, and even the queen’s knees had begun to ache. She glanced

at Jaime. Her twin stood as if he had been carved from stone, and
would not meet her eyes.
On the benches, their uncle Kevan knelt with his shoulders
slumped, his son beside him. Lancel looks worse than Father. Though
only seventeen, he might have passed for seventy; grey-faced,
gaunt, with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and hair as white and
brittle as chalk. How can Lancel be among the living when Tywin
Lannister is dead? Have the gods taken leave of their wits?
Lord Gyles was coughing more than usual and covering his nose
with a square of red silk. He can smell it too. Grand Maester Pycelle
had his eyes closed. If he has fallen asleep, I swear I will have him
whipped. To the right of the bier knelt the Tyrells: the Lord of
Highgarden, his hideous mother and vapid wife, his son Garlan and
his daughter Margaery. Queen Margaery, she reminded herself; Jo ’s
widow and Tommen’s wife-to-be. Margaery looked very like her
brother, the Knight of Flowers. The queen wondered if they had
other things in common. Our little rose has a good many ladies waiting
attendance on her, night and day. They were with her now, almost a
dozen of them. Cersei studied their faces, wondering. Who is the
most fearful, the most wanton, the hungriest for favor? Who has the
loosest tongue? She would need to make a point of nding out.
It was a relief when the singing nally ended. The smell coming
o her father’s corpse seemed to have grown stronger. Most of the
mourners had the decency to pretend that nothing was amiss, but
Cersei saw two of Lady Margaery’s cousins wrinkling their little
Tyrell noses. As she and Tommen were walking back down the aisle
the queen thought she heard someone mutter “privy” and chortle,
but when she turned her head to see who had spoken a sea of
solemn faces gazed at her blankly. They would never have dared make
japes about him when he was still alive. He would have turned their
bowels to water with a look.
Back out in the Hall of Lamps, the mourners buzzed about them
thick as ies, eager to shower her with useless condolences. The
Redwyne twins both kissed her hand, their father her cheeks.
Hallyne the Pyromancer promised her that a aming hand would
burn in the sky above the city on the day her father’s bones went

west. Between coughs, Lord Gyles told her that he had hired a
master stonecarver to make a statue of Lord Tywin, to stand eternal
vigil beside the Lion Gate. Ser Lambert Turnberry appeared with a
patch over his right eye, swearing that he would wear it until he
could bring her the head of her dwarf brother.
No sooner had the queen escaped the clutches of that fool than
she found herself cornered by Lady Falyse of Stokeworth and her
husband, Ser Balman Byrch. “My lady mother sends her regrets,
Your Grace,” Falyse burbled at her. “Lollys has been taken to bed
with the child and she felt the need to stay with her. She begs that
you forgive her, and said I should ask you … my mother admired
your late father above all other men. Should my sister have a little
boy, it is her wish that we might name him Tywin, if … if it please
you.”
Cersei stared at her, aghast. “Your lackwit sister gets herself
raped by half of King’s Landing, and Tanda thinks to honor the
bastard with my lord father’s name? I think not.”
Falyse inched back as if she’d been slapped, but her husband
only stroked his thick blond mustache with a thumb. “I told Lady
Tanda as much. We shall nd a more, ah … a more tting name for
Lollys’s bastard, you have my word.”
“See that you do.” Cersei showed them a shoulder and moved
away. Tommen had fallen into the clutches of Margaery Tyrell and
her grandmother, she saw. The Queen of Thorns was so short that
for an instant Cersei took her for another child. Before she could
rescue her son from the roses, the press brought her face-to-face
with her uncle. When the queen reminded him of their meeting
later, Ser Kevan gave a weary nod and begged leave to withdraw.
But Lancel lingered, the very picture of a man with one foot in the
grave. But is he climbing in or climbing out?
Cersei forced herself to smile. “Lancel, I am happy to see you
looking so much stronger. Maester Ballabar brought us such dire
reports, we feared for your life. But I would have thought you on
your way to Darry by now, to take up your lordship.” Her father
had made Lancel a lord after the Battle of the Blackwater, as a sop
to his brother Kevan.

“Not as yet. There are outlaws in my castle.” Her cousin’s voice
was as wispy as the mustache on his upper lip. Though his hair had
gone white, his mustache fuzz remained a sandy color. Cersei had
often gazed up at it while the boy was inside her, pumping dutifully
away. It looks like a smudge of dirt on his lip. She used to threaten to
scrub it o with a little spit. “The riverlands have need of a strong
hand, my father says.”
A pity that they’re getting yours, she wanted to say. Instead she
smiled. “And you are to be wed as well.”
A gloomy look passed across the young knight’s ravaged face. “A
Frey girl, and not of my choosing. She is not even maiden. A
widow, of Darry blood. My father says that will help me with the
peasants, but the peasants are all dead.” He reached for her hand.
“It is cruel, Cersei. Your Grace knows that I love—”
“—House Lannister,” she nished for him. “No one can doubt
that, Lancel. May your wife give you strong sons.” Best not let her
lord grandfather host the wedding, though. “I know you will do many
noble deeds in Darry.”
Lancel nodded, plainly miserable. “When it seemed that I might
die, my father brought the High Septon to pray for me. He is a good
man.” Her cousin’s eyes were wet and shiny, a child’s eyes in an old
man’s face. “He says the Mother spared me for some holy purpose,
so I might atone for my sins.”
Cersei wondered how he intended to atone for her. Knighting him
was a mistake, and bedding him a bigger one. Lancel was a weak reed,
and she liked his newfound piety not at all; he had been much more
amusing when he was trying to be Jaime. What has this mewling fool
told the High Septon? And what will he tell his little Frey when they lie
together in the dark? If he confessed to bedding Cersei, well, she
could weather that. Men were always lying about women; she
would put it down as the braggadocio of a callow boy smitten by
her beauty. If he sings of Robert and the strongwine,
though … “Atonement is best achieved through prayer,” Cersei told
him. “Silent prayer.” She left him to think about that and girded
herself to face the Tyrell host.

Margaery embraced her like a sister, which the queen found
presumptuous, but this was not the place to reproach her. Lady
Alerie and the cousins contented themselves with kissing ngers.
Lady Graceford, who was large with child, asked the queen’s leave
to name it Tywin if it were a boy, or Lanna if it were a girl. Another
one? she almost groaned. The realm will drown in Tywins. She gave
consent as graciously as she could, feigning delight.
It was Lady Merryweather who truly pleased her. “Your Grace,”
that one said, in her sultry Myrish tones, “I have sent word to my
friends across the narrow sea, asking them to seize the Imp at once
should he show his ugly face in the Free Cities.”
“Do you have many friends across the water?”
“In Myr, many. In Lys as well, and Tyrosh. Men of power.”
Cersei could well believe it. The Myrish woman was too beautiful
by half; long-legged and full-breasted, with smooth olive skin, ripe
lips, huge dark eyes, and thick black hair that always looked as if
she’d just come from bed. She even smells of sin, like some exotic lotus.
“Lord Merryweather and I wish only to serve Your Grace and the
little king,” the woman purred, with a look that was as pregnant as
Lady Graceford.
This one is ambitious, and her lord is proud but poor. “We must
speak again, my lady. Taena, is it? You are most kind. I know that
we shall be great friends.”
Then the Lord of Highgarden descended on her.
Mace Tyrell was no more than ten years older than Cersei, yet
she thought of him as her father’s age, not her own. He was not
quite so tall as Lord Tywin had been, but elsewise he was bigger,
with a thick chest and a gut grown even thicker. His hair was
chestnut-colored, but there were specks of white and grey in his
beard. His face was often red. “Lord Tywin was a great man, an
extraordinary man,” he declared ponderously after he had kissed
both her cheeks. “We shall never see his like again, I fear.”
You are looking at his like, fool, Cersei thought. It is his daughter
standing here before you. But she needed Tyrell and the strength of
Highgarden to keep Tommen on his throne, so all she said was, “He
will be greatly missed.”

Tyrell put a hand upon her shoulder. “No man alive is t to don
Lord Tywin’s armor, that is plain. Still, the realm goes on, and must
be ruled. If there is aught that I might do to serve in this dark hour,
Your Grace need only ask.”
If you want to be the King’s Hand, my lord, have the courage to say it
plainly. The queen smiled. Let him read into that as much as he likes.
“Surely my lord is needed in the Reach?”
“My son Willas is an able lad,” the man replied, refusing to take
her perfectly good hint. “His leg may be twisted but he has no want
of wits. And Garlan will soon take Brightwater. Between them the
Reach will be in good hands, if it happens that I am needed
elsewhere. The governance of the realm must come rst, Lord
Tywin often said. And I am pleased to bring Your Grace good
tidings in that regard. My uncle Garth has agreed to serve as master
of coin, as your lord father wished. He is making his way to
Oldtown to take ship. His sons will accompany him. Lord Tywin
mentioned something about nding places for the two of them as
well. Perhaps in the City Watch.”
The queen’s smile had frozen so hard she feared her teeth might
crack. Garth the Gross on the small council and his two bastards in the
gold cloaks … do the Tyrells think I will just serve the realm up to them
on a gilded platter? The arrogance of it took her breath away.
“Garth has served me well as Lord Seneschal, as he served my
father before me,” Tyrell was going on. “Little nger had a nose for
gold, I grant you, but Garth—”
“My lord,” Cersei broke in, “I fear there has been some
misunderstanding. I have asked Lord Gyles Rosby to serve as our
new master of coin, and he has done me the honor of accepting.”
Mace gaped at her. “Rosby? That … cougher? But … the matter
was agreed, Your Grace. Garth is on his way to Oldtown.”
“Best send a raven to Lord Hightower and ask him to make
certain your uncle does not take ship. We would hate for Garth to
brave an autumn sea for nought.” She smiled pleasantly.
A ush crept up Tyrell’s thick neck. “This … your lord father
assured me …” He began to sputter.

Then his mother appeared and slid her arm through his own. “It
would seem that Lord Tywin did not share his plans with our
regent, I can’t imagine why. Still, there ’tis, no use hectoring Her
Grace. She is quite right, you must write Lord Leyton before Garth
boards a ship. You know the sea will sicken him and make his
farting worse.” Lady Olenna gave Cersei a toothless smile. “Your
council chambers will smell sweeter with Lord Gyles, though I
daresay that coughing would drive me to distraction. We all adore
dear old uncle Garth, but the man is atulent, that cannot be
gainsaid. I do abhor foul smells.” Her wrinkled face wrinkled up
even more. “I caught a whi of something unpleasant in the holy
sept, in truth. Mayhaps you smelled it too?”
“No,” Cersei said coldly. “A scent, you say?”
“More like a stink.”
“Perhaps you miss your autumn roses. We have kept you here too
long.” The sooner she rid the court of Lady Olenna the better. Lord
Tyrell would doubtless dispatch a goodly number of knights to see
his mother safely home, and the fewer Tyrell swords in the city, the
more soundly the queen would sleep.
“I do long for the fragrances of Highgarden, I confess it,” said the
old lady, “but of course I cannot leave until I have seen my sweet
Margaery wed to your precious little Tommen.”
“I await that day eagerly as well,” Tyrell put in. “Lord Tywin and
I were on the point of setting a date, as it happens. Perhaps you and
I might take up that discussion, Your Grace.”
“Soon.”
“Soon will serve,” said Lady Olenna with a sni . “Now come
along, Mace, let Her Grace get on with her … grief.”
I will see you dead, old woman, Cersei promised herself as the
Queen of Thorns tottered o between her towering guardsmen, a
pair of seven-footers that it amused her to call Left and Right. We’ll
see how sweet a corpse you make. The old woman was twice as clever
as her lord son, that was plain.
The queen rescued her son from Margaery and her cousins, and
made for the doors. Outside, the rain had nally stopped. The

autumn air smelled sweet and fresh. Tommen took his crown o .
“Put that back on,” Cersei commanded him.
“It makes my neck hurt,” the boy said, but he did as he was bid.
“Will I be married soon? Margaery says that as soon as we’re wed
we can go to Highgarden.”
“You are not going to Highgarden, but you can ride back to the
castle.” Cersei beckoned to Ser Meryn Trant. “Bring His Grace a
mount, and ask Lord Gyles if he would do me the honor of sharing
my litter.” Things were moving more quickly than she had
anticipated; there was no time to be squandered.
Tommen was happy at the prospect of a ride, and of course Lord
Gyles was honored by her invitation … though when she asked him
to be her master of coin, he began coughing so violently that she
feared he might die right then and there. But the Mother was
merciful, and Gyles eventually recovered su ciently to accept, and
even began coughing out the names of men he wanted to replace,
customs o cers and wool factors appointed by Little nger, even
one of the keepers of the keys.
“Name the cow what you will, so long as the milk ows. And
should the question arise, you joined the council yesterday.”
“Yester—” A t of coughing bent him over. “Yesterday. To be
sure.” Lord Gyles coughed into a square of red silk, as if to hide the
blood in his spittle. Cersei pretended not to notice.
When he dies I will nd someone else. Perhaps she would recall
Little nger. The queen could not imagine that Petyr Baelish would
be allowed to remain Lord Protector of the Vale for very long, with
Lysa Arryn dead. The Vale lords were already stirring, if what
Pycelle said was true. Once they take that wretched boy away from
him, Lord Petyr will come crawling back.
“Your Grace?” Lord Gyles coughed, and dabbed his mouth.
“Might I …” He coughed again. “… ask who …” Another series of
coughs racked him. “… who will be the King’s Hand?”
“My uncle,” she replied absently.
It was a relief to see the gates of the Red Keep looming large
before her. She gave Tommen over to the charge of his squires and
retired gratefully to her own chambers to rest.

No sooner had she eased o her shoes than Jocelyn entered
timidly to say that Qyburn was without and craved audience. “Send
him in,” the queen commanded. A ruler gets no rest.
Qyburn was old, but his hair still had more ash than snow in it,
and the laugh lines around his mouth made him look like some little
girl’s favorite grandfather. A rather shabby grandfather, though. The
collar of his robe was frayed, and one sleeve had been torn and
badly sewn. “I must beg Your Grace’s pardon for my appearance,”
he said. “I have been down in the dungeons making inquiries into
the Imp’s escape, as you commanded.”
“And what have you discovered?”
“The night that Lord Varys and your brother disappeared, a third
man also vanished.”
“Yes, the gaoler. What of him?”
“Rugen was the man’s name. An undergaoler who had charge of
the black cells. The chief undergaoler describes him as portly,
unshaven, gru of speech. He held his appointment of the old king,
Aerys, and came and went as he pleased. The black cells have not
oft been occupied in recent years. The other turnkeys were afraid of
him, it seems, but none knew much about him. He had no friends,
no kin. Nor did he drink or frequent brothels. His sleeping cell was
damp and dreary, and the straw he slept upon was mildewed. His
chamber pot was over owing.”
“I know all this.” Jaime had examined Rugen’s cell, and Ser
Addam’s gold cloaks had examined it again.
“Aye, Your Grace,” said Qyburn, “but did you know that under
that stinking chamber pot was a loose stone, which opened on a
small hollow? The sort of place where a man might hide valuables
that he did not wish to be discovered?”
“Valuables?” This was new. “Coin, you mean?” She had suspected
all along that Tyrion had somehow bought this gaoler.
“Beyond a doubt. To be sure, the hole was empty when I found it.
No doubt Rugen took his ill-gotten treasure with him when he ed.
But as I crouched over the hole with my torch, I saw something
glitter, so I scratched in the dirt until I dug it out.” Qyburn opened
his palm. “A gold coin.”

Gold, yes, but the moment Cersei took it she could tell that it was
wrong. Too small, she thought, too thin. The coin was old and worn.
On one side was a king’s face in pro le, on the other side the
imprint of a hand. “This is no dragon,” she said.
“No,” Qyburn agreed. “It dates from before the Conquest, Your
Grace. The king is Garth the Twelfth, and the hand is the sigil of
House Gardener.”
Of Highgarden. Cersei closed her hand around the coin. What
treachery is this? Mace Tyrell had been one of Tyrion’s judges, and
had called loudly for his death. Was that some ploy? Could he have
been plotting with the Imp all the while, conspiring at Father’s death?
With Tywin Lannister in his grave, Lord Tyrell was an obvious
choice to be King’s Hand, but even so … “You will not speak of this
with anyone,” she commanded.
“Your Grace may trust in my discretion. Any man who rides with
a sellsword company learns to hold his tongue, else he does not
keep it long.”
“In my company as well.” The queen put the coin away. She
would think about it later. “What of the other matter?”
“Ser Gregor.” Qyburn shrugged. “I have examined him, as you
commanded. The poison on the Viper’s spear was manticore venom
from the east, I would stake my life on that.”
“Pycelle says no. He told my lord father that manticore venom
kills the instant it reaches the heart.”
“And so it does. But this venom has been thickened somehow, so
as to draw out the Mountain’s dying.”
“Thickened? Thickened how? With some other substance?”
“It may be as Your Grace suggests, though in most cases
adulterating a poison only lessens its potency. It may be that the
cause is … less natural, let us say. A spell, I think.”
Is this one as big a fool as Pycelle? “So are you telling me that the
Mountain is dying of some black sorcery?”
Qyburn ignored the mockery in her voice. “He is dying of the
venom, but slowly, and in exquisite agony. My e orts to ease his
pain have proved as fruitless as Pycelle’s. Ser Gregor is overly
accustomed to the poppy, I fear. His squire tells me that he is

plagued by blinding headaches and oft qua s the milk of the poppy
as lesser men qua ale. Be that as it may, his veins have turned
black from head to heel, his water is clouded with pus, and the
venom has eaten a hole in his side as large as my st. It is a wonder
that the man is still alive, if truth be told.”
“His size,” the queen suggested, frowning. “Gregor is a very large
man. Also a very stupid one. Too stupid to know when he should
die, it seems.” She held out her cup, and Senelle lled it once again.
“His screaming frightens Tommen. It has even been known to wake
me of a night. I would say it is past time we summoned Ilyn
Payne.”
“Your Grace,” said Qyburn, “mayhaps I might move Ser Gregor to
the dungeons? His screams will not disturb you there, and I will be
able to tend to him more freely.”
“Tend to him?” She laughed. “Let Ser Ilyn tend to him.”
“If that is Your Grace’s wish,” Qyburn said, “but this poison … it
would be useful to know more about it, would it not? Send a knight
to slay a knight and an archer to kill an archer, the smallfolk often
say. To combat the black arts …” He did not nish the thought, but
only smiled at her.
He is not Pycelle, that much is plain. The queen weighed him,
wondering. “Why did the Citadel take your chain?”
“The archmaesters are all craven at heart. The grey sheep,
Marwyn calls them. I was as skilled a healer as Ebrose, but aspired
to surpass him. For hundreds of years the men of the Citadel have
opened the bodies of the dead, to study the nature of life. I wished
to understand the nature of death, so I opened the bodies of the
living. For that crime the grey sheep shamed me and forced me into
exile … but I understand the nature of life and death better than
any man in Oldtown.”
“Do you?” That intrigued her. “Very well. The Mountain is yours.
Do what you will with him, but con ne your studies to the black
cells. When he dies, bring me his head. My father promised it to
Dorne. Prince Doran would no doubt prefer to kill Gregor himself,
but we all must su er disappointments in this life.”

“Very good, Your Grace.” Qyburn cleared his throat. “I am not so
well provided as Pycelle, however. I must needs equip myself with
certain …”
“I shall instruct Lord Gyles to provide you with gold su cient for
your needs. Buy yourself some new robes as well. You look as
though you’ve wandered up from Flea Bottom.” She studied his
eyes, wondering how far she dared trust this one. “Need I say that it
will go ill for you if any word of your … labors … should pass
beyond these walls?”
“No, Your Grace.” Qyburn gave her a reassuring smile. “Your
secrets are safe with me.”
When he was gone, Cersei poured herself a cup of strongwine and
drank it by the window, watching the shadows lengthen across the
yard and thinking about the coin. Gold from the Reach. Why would
an undergaoler in King’s Landing have gold from the Reach, unless he
were paid to help bring about Father’s death?
Try as she might, she could not seem to bring Lord Tywin’s face
to mind without seeing that silly little half smile and remembering
the foul smell coming o his corpse. She wondered whether Tyrion
was somehow behind that as well. It is small and cruel, like him.
Could Tyrion have made Pycelle his catspaw? He sent the old man to
the black cells, and this Rugen had charge of those cells, she
remembered. All the strings were tangled up together in ways she
did not like. This High Septon is Tyrion’s creature too, Cersei recalled
suddenly, and Father’s poor body was in his care from dark till dawn.
Her uncle arrived promptly at sunset, wearing a quilted doublet
of charcoal-colored wool as somber as his face. Like all the
Lannisters, Ser Kevan was fair-skinned and blond, though at veand- fty he had lost most of his hair. No one would ever call him
comely. Thick of waist, round of shoulder, with a square jutting
chin that his close-cropped yellow beard did little to conceal, he
reminded her of some old masti … but a faithful old masti was
the very thing that she required.
They ate a simple supper of beets and bread and bloody beef with
a agon of Dornish red to wash it all down. Ser Kevan said little and

scarce touched his wine cup. He broods too much, she decided. He
needs to be put to work to get beyond his grief.
She said as much, when the last of the food had been cleared
away and the servants had departed. “I know how much my father
relied on you, Uncle. Now I must do the same.”
“You need a Hand,” he said, “and Jaime has refused you.”
He is blunt. Very well. “Jaime … I felt so lost with Father dead, I
scarce knew what I was saying. Jaime is gallant, but a bit of a fool,
let us be frank. Tommen needs a more seasoned man. Someone
older …”
“Mace Tyrell is older.”
Her nostrils ared. “Never.” Cersei pushed a lock of hair o her
brow. “The Tyrells overreach themselves.”
“You would be a fool to make Mace Tyrell your Hand,” Ser Kevan
admitted, “but a bigger fool to make him your foe. I’ve heard what
happened in the Hall of Lamps. Mace should have known better
than to broach such matters in public, but even so, you were unwise
to shame him in front of half the court.”
“Better that than su er another Tyrell on the council.” His
reproach annoyed her. “Rosby will make an adequate master of
coin. You’ve seen that litter of his, with its carvings and silk
draperies. His horses are better dressed than most knights. A man
that rich should have no problem
nding gold. As for
Handship … who better to nish my father’s work than the brother
who shared all his counsels?”
“Every man needs someone he can trust. Tywin had me, and once
your mother.”
“He loved her very much.” Cersei refused to think about the dead
whore in his bed. “I know they are together now.”
“So I pray.” Ser Kevan studied her face for a long moment before
he replied. “You ask much of me, Cersei.”
“No more than my father did.”
“I am tired.” Her uncle reached for his wine cup and took a
swallow. “I have a wife I have not seen in two years, a dead son to
mourn, another son about to marry and assume a lordship. Castle

Darry must be made strong again, its lands protected, its burned
elds plowed and planted anew. Lancel needs my help.”
“As does Tommen.” Cersei had not expected Kevan to require
coaxing. He never played coy with Father. “The realm needs you.”
“The realm. Aye. And House Lannister.” He sipped his wine again.
“Very well. I will remain and serve His Grace …”
“Very good,” she started to say, but Ser Kevan raised his voice
and bulled right over her.
“… so long as you name me regent as well as Hand and take
yourself back to Casterly Rock.”
For half a heartbeat Cersei could only stare at him. “I am the
regent,” she reminded him.
“You were. Tywin did not intend that you continue in that role.
He told me of his plans to send you back to the Rock and nd a new
husband for you.”
Cersei could feel her anger rising. “He spoke of such, yes. And I
told him it was not my wish to wed again.”
Her uncle was unmoved. “If you are resolved against another
marriage, I will not force it on you. As to the other, though … you
are the Lady of Casterly Rock now. Your place is there.”
How dare you? she wanted to scream. Instead, she said, “I am also
the Queen Regent. My place is with my son.”
“Your father thought not.”
“My father is dead.”
“To my grief, and the woe of all the realm. Open your eyes and
look about you, Cersei. The kingdom is in ruins. Tywin might have
been able to set matters aright, but …”
“I shall set matters aright!” Cersei softened her tone. “With your
help, Uncle. If you will serve me as faithfully as you served my
father—”
“You are not your father. And Tywin always regarded Jaime as
his rightful heir.”
“Jaime … Jaime has taken vows. Jaime never thinks, he laughs at
everything and everyone and says whatever comes into his head.
Jaime is a handsome fool.”

“And yet he was your rst choice to be the King’s Hand. What
does that make you, Cersei?”
“I told you, I was sick with grief, I did not think—”
“No,” Ser Kevan agreed. “Which is why you should return to
Casterly Rock and leave the king with those who do.”
“The king is my son!” Cersei rose to her feet.
“Aye,” her uncle said, “and from what I saw of Jo rey, you are as
un t a mother as you are a ruler.”
She threw the contents of her wine cup full in his face.
Ser Kevan rose with a ponderous dignity. “Your Grace.” Wine
trickled down his cheeks and dripped from his close-cropped beard.
“With your leave, might I withdraw?”
“By what right do you presume to give me terms? You are no
more than one of my father’s household knights.”
“I hold no lands, that is true. But I have certain incomes, and
chests of coin set aside. My own father forgot none of his children
when he died, and Tywin knew how to reward good service. I feed
two hundred knights and can double that number if need be. There
are freeriders who will follow my banner, and I have the gold to
hire sellswords. You would be wise not to take me lightly, Your
Grace … and wiser still not to make of me a foe.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I am counseling you. If you will not yield the regency to me,
name me your castellan for Casterly Rock and make either Mathis
Rowan or Randyll Tarly the Hand of the King.”
Tyrell bannermen, both of them. The suggestion left her speechless.
Is he bought? she wondered. Has he taken Tyrell gold to betray House
Lannister?
“Mathis Rowan is sensible, prudent, well liked,” her uncle went
on, oblivious. “Randyll Tarly is the nest soldier in the realm. A
poor Hand for peacetime, but with Tywin dead there’s no better
man to nish this war. Lord Tyrell cannot take o ense if you choose
one of his own bannermen as Hand. Both Tarly and Rowan are able
men … and loyal. Name either one, and you make him yours. You
strengthen yourself and weaken Highgarden, yet Mace will likely
thank you for it.” He gave a shrug. “That is my counsel, take it or

no. You may make Moon Boy your Hand for all I care. My brother
is dead, woman. I am going to take him home.”
Traitor, she thought. Turncloak. She wondered how much Mace
Tyrell had given him. “You would abandon your king when he
needs you most,” she told him. “You would abandon Tommen.”
“Tommen has his mother.” Ser Kevan’s green eyes met her own,
unblinking. A last drop of wine trembled wet and red beneath his
chin, and nally fell. “Aye,” he added softly, after a pause, “and his
father too, I think.”

JAIME

Ser Jaime Lannister, all in white, stood beside his father’s bier, ve
ngers curled about the hilt of a golden greatsword.
At dusk, the interior of the Great Sept of Baelor turned dim and
eerie. The last light of day slanted down through the high windows,
washing the towering likenesses of the Seven in a red gloom.
Around their altars, scented candles ickered whilst deep shadows
gathered in the transepts and crept silently across the marble oors.
The echoes of the evensongs died away as the last mourners were
departing.
Balon Swann and Loras Tyrell remained when the rest had gone.
“No man can stand a vigil for seven days and seven nights,” Ser
Balon said. “When did you last sleep, my lord?”
“When my lord father was alive,” said Jaime.
“Allow me to stand tonight in your stead,” Ser Loras o ered.
“He was not your father.” You did not kill him. I did. Tyrion may
have loosed the crossbow bolt that slew him, but I loosed Tyrion. “Leave
me.”
“As my lord commands,” said Swann. Ser Loras looked as if he
might have argued further, but Ser Balon took his arm and drew
him o . Jaime listened to the echoes of their footfalls die away.
And then he was alone again with his lord father, amongst the
candles and the crystals and the sickly sweet smell of death. His
back ached from the weight of his armor, and his legs felt almost

numb. He shifted his stance a bit and tightened his ngers around
the golden greatsword. He could not wield a sword, but he could
hold one. His missing hand was throbbing. That was almost funny.
He had more feeling in the hand he’d lost than in the rest of the
body that remained to him.
My hand is hungry for a sword. I need to kill someone. Varys, for a
start, but rst I’d need to nd the rock he’s hiding under. “I
commanded the eunuch to take him to a ship, not to your
bedchamber,” he told the corpse. “The blood is on his hands as
much as … as Tyrion’s.” The blood is on his hands as much as mine, he
meant to say, but the words stuck in his throat. Whatever Varys did, I
made him do.
He had waited in the eunuch’s chambers that night, when at last
he had decided not to let his little brother die. As he waited, he had
sharpened his dagger with one hand, taking a queer comfort from
the scrape-scrape-scrape of steel on stone. At the sound of footsteps
he stood beside the door. Varys entered in a wash of powder and
lavender. Jaime stepped out behind him, kicked him in the back of
the knee, knelt on his chest, and shoved the knife up under his soft
white chin, forcing his head up. “Why, Lord Varys,” he’d said
pleasantly, “fancy meeting you here.”
“Ser Jaime?” Varys panted. “You frightened me.”
“I meant to.” When he twisted the dagger, a trickle of blood ran
down the blade. “I was thinking you might help me pluck my
brother from his cell before Ser Ilyn lops his head o . It is an ugly
head, I grant you, but he only has the one.”
“Yes … well … if you would … remove the blade … yes, gently,
as it please my lord, gently, oh, I’m pricked …” The eunuch touched
his neck and gaped at the blood on his ngers. “I have always
abhorred the sight of my own blood.”
“You’ll have more to abhor shortly, unless you help me.”
Varys struggled to a sitting position. “Your brother … if the Imp
should vanish unaccountably from his cell, q-questions would be
asked. I would f-fear for my life …”
“Your life is mine. I do not care what secrets you know. If Tyrion
dies, you will not long outlive him, I promise you.”

“Ah.” The eunuch sucked the blood o his ngers. “You ask a
dreadful thing … to loose the Imp who slew our lovely king. Or is it
that you believe him innocent?”
“Innocent or guilty,” Jaime had said, like the fool he was, “a
Lannister pays his debts.” The words had come so easy.
He had not slept since. He could see his brother now, the way the
dwarf had grinned beneath the stub of his nose as the torchlight
licked his face. “You poor stupid blind crippled fool,” he’d snarled,
in a voice thick with malice. “Cersei is a lying whore, she’s been
fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and probably Moon Boy for
all I know. And I am the monster they all say I am. Yes, I killed
your vile son.”
He never said he meant to kill our father. If he had, I would have
stopped him. Then I would be the kinslayer, not him.
Jaime wondered where Varys was hiding. Wisely, the master of
whisperers had not returned to his own chambers, nor had a search
of the Red Keep turned him up. It might be that the eunuch had
taken ship with Tyrion, rather than remain to answer awkward
questions. If so, the two of them were well out to sea by now,
sharing a agon of Arbor gold in the cabin of a galley.
Unless my brother murdered Varys too, and left his corpse to rot
beneath the castle. Down there, it might be years before his bones
were found. Jaime had led a dozen guards below, with torches and
ropes and lanterns. For hours they had groped through twisting
passages, narrow crawl spaces, hidden doors, secret steps, and
shafts that plunged down into utter blackness. Seldom had he felt so
utterly a cripple. A man takes much for granted when he has two
hands. Ladders, for an instance. Even crawling did not come easy;
not for nought do they speak of hands and knees. Nor could he hold
a torch and climb, as others could.
And all for naught. They found only darkness, dust, and rats. And
dragons, lurking down below. He remembered the sullen orange glow
of the coals in the iron dragon’s mouth. The brazier warmed a
chamber at the bottom of a shaft where half a dozen tunnels met.
On the oor he’d found a scu ed mosaic of the three-headed dragon
of House Targaryen done in tiles of black and red. I know you,

Kingslayer, the beast seemed to be saying. I have been here all the
time, waiting for you to come to me. And it seemed to Jaime that he
knew that voice, the iron tones that had once belonged to Rhaegar,
Prince of Dragonstone.
The day had been windy when he said farewell to Rhaegar, in the
yard of the Red Keep. The prince had donned his night-black armor,
with the three-headed dragon picked out in rubies on his
breastplate. “Your Grace,” Jaime had pleaded, “let Darry stay to
guard the king this once, or Ser Barristan. Their cloaks are as white
as mine.”
Prince Rhaegar shook his head. “My royal sire fears your father
more than he does our cousin Robert. He wants you close, so Lord
Tywin cannot harm him. I dare not take that crutch away from him
at such an hour.”
Jaime’s anger had risen up in his throat. “I am not a crutch. I am
a knight of the Kingsguard.”
“Then guard the king,” Ser Jon Darry snapped at him. “When you
donned that cloak, you promised to obey.”
Rhaegar had put his hand on Jaime’s shoulder. “When this battle’s
done I mean to call a council. Changes will be made. I meant to do
it long ago, but … well, it does no good to speak of roads not taken.
We shall talk when I return.”
Those were the last words Rhaegar Targaryen ever spoke to him.
Outside the gates an army had assembled, whilst another descended
on the Trident. So the Prince of Dragonstone mounted up and
donned his tall black helm, and rode forth to his doom.
He was more right than he knew. When the battle was done, there
were changes made. “Aerys thought no harm could come to him if he
kept me near,” he told his father’s corpse. “Isn’t that amusing?”
Lord Tywin seemed to think so; his smile was wider than before. He
seems to enjoy being dead.
It was queer, but he felt no grief. Where are my tears? Where is my
rage? Jaime Lannister had never lacked for rage. “Father,” he told
the corpse, “it was you who told me that tears were a mark of
weakness in a man, so you cannot expect that I should cry for you.”

A thousand lords and ladies had come that morning to le past
the bier, and several thousand smallfolk after noon. They wore
somber clothes and solemn faces, but Jaime suspected that many
and more were secretly delighted to see the great man brought low.
Even in the west, Lord Tywin had been more respected than
beloved, and King’s Landing still remembered the Sack.
Of all the mourners, Grand Maester Pycelle had seemed the most
distraught. “I have served six kings,” he told Jaime after the second
service, whilst sni ng doubtfully about the corpse, “but here before
us lies the greatest man I ever knew. Lord Tywin wore no crown,
yet he was all a king should be.”
Without his beard, Pycelle looked not only old, but feeble.
Shaving him was the cruelest thing Tyrion could have done, thought
Jaime, who knew what it was to lose a part of yourself, the part
that made you who you were. Pycelle’s beard had been magni cent,
white as snow and soft as lambswool, a luxuriant growth that
covered cheeks and chin and owed down almost to his belt. The
Grand Maester had been wont to stroke it when he ponti cated. It
had given him an air of wisdom, and concealed all manner of
unsavory things: the loose skin dangling beneath the old man’s jaw,
the small querulous mouth and missing teeth, warts and wrinkles
and age spots too numerous to count. Though Pycelle was trying to
regrow what he had lost, he was failing. Only wisps and tufts
sprouted from his wrinkled cheeks and weak chin, so thin that
Jaime could see the splotchy pink skin beneath.
“Ser Jaime, I have seen terrible things in my time,” the old man
said. “Wars, battles, murders most foul … I was a boy in Oldtown
when the grey plague took half the city and three-quarters of the
Citadel. Lord Hightower burned every ship in port, closed the gates,
and commanded his guards to slay all those who tried to ee, be
they men, women, or babes in arms. They killed him when the
plague had run its course. On the very day he reopened the port,
they dragged him from his horse and slit his throat, and his young
son’s as well. To this day the ignorant in Oldtown will spit at the
sound of his name, but Quenton Hightower did what was needed.

Your father was that sort of man as well. A man who did what was
needed.”
“Is that why he looks so pleased with himself?”
The vapors rising from the corpse were making Pycelle’s eyes
water. “The esh … as the esh dries, the muscles grow taut and
pull his lips upward. That is no smile, only a … a drying, that is all.”
He blinked back tears. “You must excuse me. I am so very tired.”
Leaning heavily on his cane, Pycelle tottered slowly from the sept.
That one is dying too, Jaime realized. Small wonder Cersei called him
useless.
To be sure, his sweet sister seemed to think half the court was
either useless or treasonous; Pycelle, the Kingsguard, the Tyrells,
Jaime himself … even Ser Ilyn Payne, the silent knight who served
as headsman. As King’s Justice, the dungeons were his
responsibility. Since he lacked a tongue, Payne had largely left the
running of those dungeons to his underlings, but Cersei held him to
blame for Tyrion’s escape all the same. It was my work, not his,
Jaime almost told her. Instead he had promised to nd what
answers he could from the chief undergaoler, a bentback old man
named Rennifer Longwaters.
“I see you wonder, what sort of name is that?” the man had
cackled when Jaime went to question him. “It is an old name, ’tis
true. I am not one to boast, but there is royal blood in my veins. I
am descended from a princess. My father told me the tale when I
was a tad of a lad.” Longwaters had not been a tad of a lad for
many a year, to judge from his spotted head and the white hairs
growing from his chin. “She was the fairest treasure of the
Maidenvault. Lord Oaken st the great admiral lost his heart to her,
though he was married to another. She gave their son the bastard
name of ‘Waters’ in honor of his father, and he grew to be a great
knight, as did his own son, who put the ‘Long’ before the ‘Waters’
so men might know that he was not basely born himself. So I have a
little dragon in me.”
“Yes, I almost mistook you for Aegon the Conqueror,” Jaime had
answered. “Waters” was a common bastard name about Blackwater
Bay; old Longwaters was more like to be descended from some

minor household knight than from a princess. “As it matters,
though, I have more pressing concerns than your lineage.”
Longwaters inclined his head. “The lost prisoner.”
“And the missing gaoler.”
“Rugen,” the old man supplied. “An undergaoler. He had charge
of the third level, the black cells.”
“Tell me of him,” Jaime had to say. A bloody farce. He knew who
Rugen was, even if Longwaters did not.
“Unkempt, unshaven, coarse of speech. I misliked the man, ’tis
true, I do confess it. Rugen was here when I rst came, twelve
years past. He held his appointment from King Aerys. The man was
seldom here, it must be said. I made note of it in my reports, my
lord. I most suredly did, I give you my word upon it, the word of a
man with royal blood.”
Mention that royal blood once more and I may spill some of it,
thought Jaime. “Who saw these reports?”
“Certain of them went to the master of coin, others to the master
of whisperers. All to the chief gaoler and the King’s Justice. It has
always been so in the dungeons.” Longwaters scratched his nose.
“Rugen was here when need be, my lord. That must be said. The
black cells are little used. Before your lordship’s little brother was
sent down, we had Grand Maester Pycelle for a time, and before
him Lord Stark the traitor. There were three others, common men,
but Lord Stark gave them to the Night’s Watch. I did not think it
good to free those three, but the papers were in proper order. I
made note of that in a report as well, you may be certain of it.”
“Tell me of the two gaolers who went to sleep.”
“Gaolers?” Longwaters sni ed. “Those were no gaolers. They
were merely turnkeys. The crown pays wages for twenty turnkeys,
my lord, a full score, but during my time we have never had more
than twelve. We are supposed to have six undergaolers as well, two
on each level, but there are only the three.”
“You and two others?”
Longwaters sni ed again. “I am the chief undergaoler, my lord. I
am above the undergaolers. I am charged with keeping the counts. If
my lord would like to look over my books, he will see that all the

gures are exact.” Longwaters had consulted the great leatherbound book spread out before him. “At present, we have four
prisoners on the rst level and one on the second, in addition to
your lordship’s brother.” The old man frowned. “Who is ed, to be
sure. ’Tis true. I will strike him out.” He took up a quill and began
to sharpen it.
Six prisoners, Jaime thought sourly, while we pay wages for twenty
turnkeys, six undergaolers, a chief undergaoler, a gaoler, and a King’s
Justice. “I want to question these two turnkeys.”
Rennifer Longwaters let up sharpening his quill and peered
doubtfully up at Jaime. “Question them, my lord?”
“You heard me.”
“I did, my lord, I suredly did, and yet … my lord may question
who he pleases, ’tis true, it is not my place to say that he may not.
But, ser, if I may be so bold, I do not think them like to answer.
They are dead, my lord.”
“Dead? By whose command?”
“Your own, I thought, or … the king’s, mayhaps? I did not ask.
It … it is not my place to question the Kingsguard.”
That was salt for his wound; Cersei had used his own men to do
her bloody work, them and her precious Kettleblacks.
“You witless fools,” Jaime had snarled at Boros Blount and
Osmund Kettleblack later, in a dungeon that stank of blood and
death. “What did you imagine you were doing?”
“No more’n we was told, my lord.” Ser Boros was shorter than
Jaime, but heavier. “Her Grace commanded it. Your sister.”
Ser Osmund hooked a thumb through his swordbelt. “She said
they were to sleep forever. So my brothers and me, we saw to it.”
That you did. One corpse sprawled facedown upon the table, like
a man passed out at a feast, but it was a puddle of blood beneath his
head, not a puddle of wine. The second turnkey had managed to
push back from the bench and draw his dagger before someone
shoved a longsword through his ribs. His had been the longer,
messier end. I told Varys no one was to be harmed in this escape,
Jaime thought, but I should have told my brother and my sister. “This
was ill done, ser.”

Ser Osmund shrugged. “They won’t be missed. I’ll wager they was
part of it, along with the one who’s gone missing.”
No, Jaime could have told him. Varys dosed their wine to make
them sleep. “If so, we might have coaxed the truth from them.”
… she’s been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and Moon Boy
for all I know … “If I had a suspicious nature I might wonder why
you were in such haste to make certain these two were never put to
the question. Did you need to silence them to conceal your own part
in this?”
“Us?” Kettleblack choked on that. “All we done was what the
queen commanded. On my word as your Sworn Brother.”
Jaime’s phantom ngers twitched as he said, “Get Osney and
Osfryd down here and clean up this mess you’ve made. And the next
time my sweet sister commands you to kill a man, come to me rst.
Elsewise, stay out of my sight, ser.”
The words echoed in his head in the dimness of Baelor’s Sept.
Above him, all the windows had gone black, and he could see the
faint light of distant stars. The sun had set for good and all. The
stench of death was growing stronger, despite the scented candles.
The smell reminded Jaime Lannister of the pass below the Golden
Tooth, where he had won a glorious victory in the rst days of the
war. On the morning after the battle, the crows had feasted on
victors and vanquished alike, as once they had feasted on Rhaegar
Targaryen after the Trident. How much can a crown be worth, when a
crow can dine upon a king?
There were crows circling the seven towers and great dome of
Baelor’s Sept even now, Jaime suspected, their black wings beating
against the night air as they searched for a way inside. Every crow in
the Seven Kingdoms should pay homage to you, Father. From Castamere
to the Blackwater, you fed them well. That notion pleased Lord Tywin;
his smile widened further. Bloody hell, he’s grinning like a bridegroom
at his bedding.
That was so grotesque it made Jaime laugh aloud.
The sound echoed through the transepts and crypts and chapels,
as if the dead interred within the walls were laughing too. Why not?
This is more absurd than a mummer’s farce, me standing vigil for a

father I helped to slay, sending men forth to capture the brother I helped
to free … He had commanded Ser Addam Marbrand to search the
Street of Silk. “Look under every bed, you know how fond my
brother is of brothels.” The gold cloaks would nd more of interest
beneath the whores’ skirts than beneath their beds. He wondered
how many bastard children would be born of the pointless search.
Unbidden, his thoughts went to Brienne of Tarth. Stupid stubborn
ugly wench. He wondered where she was. Father, give her strength.
Almost a prayer … but was it the god he was invoking, the Father
Above whose towering gilded likeness glimmered in the candlelight
across the sept? Or was he praying to the corpse that lay before
him? Does it matter? They never listened, either one. The Warrior had
been Jaime’s god since he was old enough to hold a sword. Other
men might be fathers, sons, husbands, but never Jaime Lannister,
whose sword was as golden as his hair. He was a warrior, and that
was all he would ever be.
I should tell Cersei the truth, admit that it was me who freed our little
brother from his cell. The truth had worked so splendidly with
Tyrion, after all. I killed your vile son, and now I’m o to kill your
father too. Jaime could hear the Imp laughing in the gloom. He
turned his head to look, but the sound was only his own laughter
coming back at him. He closed his eyes, and just as quickly snapped
them open. I must not sleep. If he slept, he might dream. Oh, how
Tyrion was sniggering.… a lying whore … fucking Lancel and Osmund
Kettleblack …
At midnight the hinges on the Father’s Doors gave a groan as
several hundred septons led in for their devotions. Some were clad
in the cloth-of-silver vestments and crystal coronals that marked the
Most Devout; their humbler brethren wore their crystals on thongs
about their necks and cinched white robes with seven-stranded
belts, each plait a di erent color. Through the Mother’s Doors
marched white septas from their cloister, seven abreast and singing
softly, while the silent sisters came single le down the Stranger’s
Steps. Death’s handmaidens were garbed in soft grey, their faces
hooded and shawled so only their eyes could be seen. A host of
brothers appeared as well, in robes of brown and butternut and dun

and even undyed roughspun, belted with lengths of hempen rope.
Some hung the iron hammer of the Smith about their necks, whilst
others carried begging bowls.
None of the devout paid Jaime any mind. They made a circuit of
the sept, worshiping at each of the seven altars to honor the seven
aspects of the deity. To each god they made sacri ce, to each they
sang a hymn. Sweet and solemn rose their voices. Jaime closed his
eyes to listen, but opened them again when he began to sway. I am
more weary than I knew.
It had been years since his last vigil. And I was younger then, a boy
of fteen years. He had worn no armor then, only a plain white
tunic. The sept where he’d spent the night was not a third as large
as any of the Great Sept’s seven transepts. Jaime had laid his sword
across the Warrior’s knees, piled his armor at his feet, and knelt
upon the rough stone oor before the altar. When dawn came his
knees were raw and bloody. “All knights must bleed, Jaime,” Ser
Arthur Dayne had said, when he saw. “Blood is the seal of our
devotion.” With dawn he tapped him on the shoulder; the pale blade
was so sharp that even that light touch cut through Jaime’s tunic, so
he bled anew. He never felt it. A boy knelt; a knight rose. The
Young Lion, not the Kingslayer.
But that was long ago, and the boy was dead.
He could not have said when the devotions ended. Perhaps he
slept, still standing. When the devout had led out, the Great Sept
grew still once more. The candles were a wall of stars burning in
the darkness, though the air was rank with death. Jaime shifted his
grip upon the golden greatsword. Perhaps he should have let Ser
Loras relieve him after all. Cersei would have hated that. The Knight
of Flowers was still half a boy, arrogant and vain, but he had it in
him to be great, to perform deeds worthy of the White Book.
The White Book would be waiting when this vigil was done, his
page open in dumb reproach. I’ll hack the bloody book to pieces before
I’ll ll it full of lies. Yet if he would not lie, what could he write but
truth?
A woman stood before him.

It is raining again, he thought when he saw how wet she was. The
water was trickling down her cloak to puddle round her feet. How
did she get here? I never heard her enter. She was dressed like a tavern
wench in a heavy roughspun cloak, badly dyed in mottled browns
and fraying at the hem. A hood concealed her face, but he could see
the candles dancing in the green pools of her eyes, and when she
moved he knew her.
“Cersei.” He spoke slowly, like a man waking from a dream, still
wondering where he was. “What hour is it?”
“The hour of the wolf.” His sister lowered her hood, and made a
face. “The drowned wolf, perhaps.” She smiled for him, so sweetly.
“Do you remember the rst time I came to you like this? It was
some dismal inn o Weasel Alley, and I put on servant’s garb to get
past Father’s guards.”
“I remember. It was Eel Alley.” She wants something of me. “Why
are you here, at this hour? What would you have of me?” His last
word echoed up and down the sept, mememememememememememe,
fading to a whisper. For a moment he dared to hope that all she
wanted was the comfort of his arms.
“Speak softly.” Her voice sounded strange … breathless, almost
frightened. “Jaime, Kevan has refused me. He will not serve as
Hand, he … he knows about us. He said as much.”
“Refused?” That surprised him. “How could he know? He will
have read what Stannis wrote, but there is no …”
“Tyrion knew,” she reminded him. “Who can say what tales that
vile dwarf may have told, or to whom? Uncle Kevan is the least of
it. The High Septon … Tyrion raised him to the crown, when the fat
one died. He may know as well.” She moved closer. “You must be
Tommen’s Hand. I do not trust Mace Tyrell. What if he had a hand
in Father’s death? He may have been conspiring with Tyrion. The
Imp could be on his way to Highgarden …”
“He’s not.”
“Be my Hand,” she pleaded, “and we’ll rule the Seven Kingdoms
together, like a king and his queen.”
“You were Robert’s queen. And yet you won’t be mine.”
“I would, if I dared. But our son—”

“Tommen is no son of mine, no more than Jo rey was.” His voice
was hard. “You made them Robert’s too.”
His sister inched. “You swore that you would always love me. It
is not loving to make me beg.”
Jaime could smell the fear on her, even through the rank stench
of the corpse. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her, to
bury his face in her golden curls and promise her that no one would
ever hurt her … not here, he thought, not here in front of the gods,
and Father. “No,” he said. “I cannot. Will not.”
“I need you. I need my other half.” He could hear the rain
pattering against the windows high above. “You are me, I am you. I
need you with me. In me. Please, Jaime. Please.”
Jaime looked to make certain Lord Tywin was not rising from his
bier in wrath, but his father lay still and cold, rotting. “I was made
for a battle eld, not a council chamber. And now it may be that I
am un t even for that.”
Cersei wiped her tears away on a ragged brown sleeve. “Very
well. If it is battle elds you want, battle elds I shall give you.” She
jerked her hood up angrily. “I was a fool to come. I was a fool ever
to love you.” Her footsteps echoed loudly in the quiet, and left
damp splotches on the marble oor.
Dawn caught Jaime almost unawares. As the glass in the dome
began to lighten, suddenly there were rainbows shimmering o the
walls and oors and pillars, bathing Lord Tywin’s corpse in a haze
of many-colored light. The King’s Hand was rotting visibly. His face
had taken on a greenish tinge, and his eyes were deeply sunken,
two black pits. Fissures had opened in his cheeks, and a foul white
uid was seeping through the joints of his splendid gold-andcrimson armor to pool beneath his body.
The septons were the rst to see, when they returned for their
dawn devotions. They sang their songs and prayed their prayers and
wrinkled up their noses, and one of the Most Devout grew so faint
he had to be helped from the sept. Shortly after, a ock of novices
came swinging censers, and the air grew so thick with incense that
the bier seemed cloaked in smoke. All the rainbows vanished in that

perfumed mist, yet the stench persisted, a sweet rotten smell that
made Jaime want to gag.
When the doors were opened the Tyrells were amongst the rst
to enter, as be t their rank. Margaery had brought a great bouquet
of golden roses. She placed them ostentatiously at the foot of Lord
Tywin’s bier but kept one back and held it beneath her nose as she
took her seat. So the girl is as clever as she is pretty. Tommen could do
a deal worse for a queen. Others have. Margaery’s ladies followed her
example.
Cersei waited until the rest were in their places to make her
entrance, with Tommen at her side. Ser Osmund Kettleblack paced
beside them in his white enamel plate and white wool cloak.
“… she’s been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and Moon Boy
for all I know …”
Jaime had seen Kettleblack naked in the bathhouse, had seen the
black hair on his chest, and the coarser thatch between his legs. He
pictured that chest pressed against his sister’s, that hair scratching
the soft skin of her breasts. She would not do that. The Imp lied. Spun
gold and black wire tangled, sweaty. Kettleblack’s narrow cheeks
clenching each time he thrust. Jaime could hear his sister moan. No.
A lie.
Red-eyed and pale, Cersei climbed the steps to kneel above their
father, drawing Tommen down beside her. The boy recoiled at the
sight, but his mother seized his wrist before he could pull away.
“Pray,” she whispered, and Tommen tried. But he was only eight
and Lord Tywin was a horror. One desperate breath of air, then the
king began to sob. “Stop that!” Cersei said. Tommen turned his head
and doubled over, retching. His crown fell o and rolled across the
marble oor. His mother pulled back in disgust, and all at once the
king was running for the doors, as fast as his eight-year-old legs
could carry him.
“Ser Osmund, relieve me,” Jaime said sharply, as Kettleblack
turned to chase the crown. He handed the man the golden sword
and went after his king. In the Hall of Lamps he caught him,
beneath the eyes of two dozen startled septas. “I’m sorry,” Tommen

wept. “I will do better on the morrow. Mother says a king must
show the way, but the smell made me sick.”
This will not do. Too many eager ears and watching eyes. “Best we
go outside, Your Grace.” Jaime led the boy out to where the air was
as fresh and clean as King’s Landing ever got. Twoscore gold cloaks
had been posted around the plaza to guard the horses and the
litters. He took the king o to the side, well away from everyone,
and sat him down upon the marble steps. “I wasn’t scared,” the boy
insisted. “The smell made me sick. Didn’t it make you sick? How
could you bear it, Uncle, ser?”
I have smelled my own hand rotting, when Vargo Hoat made me wear
it for a pendant. “A man can bear most anything, if he must,” Jaime
told his son. I have smelled a man roasting, as King Aerys cooked him
in his own armor. “The world is full of horrors, Tommen. You can
ght them, or laugh at them, or look without seeing … go away
inside.”
Tommen considered that. “I … I used to go away inside
sometimes,” he confessed, “when Jo y …”
“Jo rey.” Cersei stood over them, the wind whipping her skirts
around her legs. “Your brother’s name was Jo rey. He would never
have shamed me so.”
“I never meant to. I wasn’t frightened, Mother. It was only that
your lord father smelled so bad …”
“Do you think he smelled any sweeter to me? I have a nose too.”
She caught his ear and pulled him to his feet. “Lord Tyrell has a
nose. Did you see him retching in the holy sept? Did you see Lady
Margaery bawling like a baby?”
Jaime got to his feet. “Cersei, enough.”
Her nostrils ared. “Ser? Why are you here? You swore to stand
vigil over Father until the wake was done, as I recall.”
“It is done. Go look at him.”
“No. Seven days and seven nights, you said. Surely the Lord
Commander remembers how to count to seven. Take the number of
your ngers, then add two.”
Others had begun to stream out onto the plaza, eeing the
noxious odors in the sept. “Cersei, keep your voice down,” Jaime

warned. “Lord Tyrell is approaching.”
That reached her. The queen drew Tommen to her side. Mace
Tyrell bowed before them. “His Grace is not unwell, I hope?”
“The king was overwhelmed by grief,” said Cersei.
“As are we all. If there is aught that I can do …”
High above, a crow screamed loudly. He was perched on the
statue of King Baelor, shitting on his holy head. “There is much and
more you can do for Tommen, my lord,” Jaime said. “Perhaps you
would do Her Grace the honor of supping with her, after the
evening services?”
Cersei threw him a withering look, but for once she had the sense
to bite her tongue.
“Sup?” Tyrell seemed taken aback. “I suppose … of course, we
should be honored. My lady wife and I.”
The queen forced a smile and made pleasant noises. But when
Tyrell had taken his leave and Tommen had been sent o with Ser
Addam Marbrand, she turned on Jaime angrily. “Are you drunk or
dreaming, ser? Pray tell, why am I having supper with that grasping
fool and his puerile wife?” A gust of wind stirred her golden hair. “I
will not name him Hand, if that’s what—”
“You need Tyrell,” Jaime broke in, “but not here. Ask him to
capture Storm’s End for Tommen. Flatter him, and tell him you
need him in the eld, to replace Father. Mace fancies himself a
mighty warrior. Either he will deliver Storm’s End to you, or he will
muck it up and look a fool. Either way, you win.”
“Storm’s End?” Cersei looked thoughtful. “Yes, but … Lord Tyrell
has made it tediously plain that he will not leave King’s Landing till
Tommen marries Margaery.”
Jaime sighed. “Then let them wed. It will be years before
Tommen is old enough to consummate the marriage. And until he
does, the union can always be set aside. Give Tyrell his wedding
and send him o to play at war.”
A wary smile crept across his sister’s face. “Even sieges have their
dangers,” she murmured. “Why, our Lord of Highgarden might even
lose his life in such a venture.”

“There is that risk,” conceded Jaime. “Especially if his patience
runs thin this time, and he elects to storm the gate.”
Cersei gave him a lingering look. “You know,” she said, “for a
moment you sounded quite like Father.”

BRIENNE

The gates of Duskendale were closed and barred. Through the
predawn gloom the town walls shimmered palely. On their
ramparts, wisps of fog moved like ghostly sentinels. A dozen wayns
and oxcarts had drawn up outside the gates, waiting for the sun to
rise. Brienne took her place behind some turnips. Her calves ached,
and it felt good to dismount and stretch her legs. Before long
another wayn came rumbling from the woods. By the time the sky
began to lighten, the queue stretched back a quarter mile.
The farm folk gave her curious glances, but no one spoke to her.
It is for me to talk to them, Brienne told herself, but she had always
found it hard to speak with strangers. Even as a girl she had been
shy. Long years of scorn had only made her shyer. I must ask after
Sansa. How else will I nd her? She cleared her throat. “Goodwife,”
she said to the woman on the turnip cart, “perhaps you saw my
sister on the road? A young maid, three-and-ten and fair of face,
with blue eyes and auburn hair. She may be riding with a drunken
knight.”
The woman shook her head, but her husband said, “Then she’s no
maid, I’ll wager. Does the poor girl have a name?”
Brienne’s head was empty. I should have made up some name for
her. Any name would do, but none came to her.
“No name? Well, the roads are full of nameless girls.”
“The lichyard’s even fuller,” said his wife.

As dawn broke, guardsmen appeared on the parapets. The farmers
climbed onto their wagons and shook the reins. Brienne mounted as
well and took a glance behind her. Most of the queue waiting to
enter Duskendale were farm folk with loads of fruits and vegetables
to sell. A pair of wealthy townsmen sat on well-bred palfreys a
dozen places behind her, and farther back she spied a skinny boy on
a piebald rounsey. There was no sign of the two knights, nor Ser
Shadrich the Mad Mouse.
The guards were waving through the wayns with scarce a look,
but when Brienne reached the gate she gave them pause. “Halt,
you!” the captain cried. A pair of men in chain mail hauberks
crossed their spears to bar her way. “State your purpose here.”
“I seek the Lord of Duskendale, or his maester.”
The captain’s eyes lingered on her shield. “The black bat of
Lothston. Those are arms of ill repute.”
“They are not mine. I mean to have the shield repainted.”
“Aye?” The captain rubbed his stubbled chin. “My sister does such
work, as it happens. You’ll nd her at the house with the painted
doors, across from the Seven Swords.” He gestured to the guards.
“Let her pass, lads. It’s a wench.”
The gatehouse opened on a market square, where those who had
entered before her were unloading to hawk their turnips, yellow
onions, and sacks of barleycorn. Others were selling arms and
armor, and very cheaply to judge from the prices they shouted out
as she rode by. The looters come with the carrion crows after every
battle. Brienne walked her horse past mail shirts still caked with
brown blood, dinted helms, notched longswords. There was clothing
to be had as well: leather boots, fur cloaks, stained surcoats with
suspicious rents. She knew many of the badges. The mailed st, the
moose, the white sun, the double-bladed axe, all those were
northern sigils. Tarly men had perished here as well, though, and
many from the stormlands. She saw red and green apples, a shield
that bore the three thunderbolts of Leygood, horse trappings
patterned with the ants of Ambrose. Lord Tarly’s own striding
huntsman appeared on many a badge and brooch and doublet.
Friend or foe, the crows care not.

There were pine and linden shields to be had for pennies, but
Brienne rode past them. She meant to keep the heavy oaken shield
Jaime had given her, the one he’d borne himself from Harrenhal to
King’s Landing. A pine shield had its advantages. It was lighter, and
therefore easier to bear, and the soft wood was more like to trap a
foeman’s axe or sword. But oak gave more protection, if you were
strong enough to bear its weight.
Duskendale was built around its harbor. North of town the chalk
cli s rose; to the south a rocky headland shielded the ships at
anchor from storms coming up the narrow sea. The castle
overlooked the port, its square keep and big drum towers visible
from every part of town. In the crowded cobbled streets, it was
easier to walk than ride, so Brienne put her mare up in a stable and
continued on afoot, with her shield slung across her back and her
bedroll tucked up beneath one arm.
The captain’s sister was not hard to nd. The Seven Swords was
the largest inn in town, a four-story structure that towered over its
neighbors, and the double doors on the house across the way were
painted gorgeously. They showed a castle in an autumn wood, the
trees done up in shades of gold and russet. Ivy crawled up the
trunks of ancient oaks, and even the acorns had been done with
loving care. When Brienne peered more closely, she saw creatures
in the foliage: a sly red fox, two sparrows on a branch, and behind
those leaves the shadow of a boar.
“Your door is very pretty,” she told the dark-haired woman who
answered when she knocked. “What castle is that meant to be?”
“All castles,” said the captain’s sister. “The only one I know is the
Dun Fort by the harbor. I made t’other in my head, what a castle
ought to look like. I never seen a dragon neither, nor a gri n, nor a
unicorn.” She had a cheerful manner, but when Brienne showed her
the shield her face went dark. “My old ma used to say that giant
bats ew out from Harrenhal on moonless nights, to carry bad
children to Mad Danelle for her cookpots. Sometimes I’d hear them
scrabbling at the shutters.” She sucked her teeth a moment,
thoughtful. “What goes in its place?”

The arms of Tarth were quartered rose and azure, and bore a
yellow sun and crescent moon. But so long as men believed her to
be a murderess, Brienne dare not carry them. “Your door reminded
me of an old shield I once saw in my father’s armory.” She
described the arms as best she could recall them.
The woman nodded. “I can paint it straightaway, but the paint
will need to dry. Take a room at the Seven Swords, if it please you.
I’ll bring the shield to you by morning.”
Brienne had not meant to overnight in Duskendale, but it might
be for the best. She did not know if the lord of the castle was in
residence, or whether he would consent to see her. She thanked the
painter and crossed the cobblestones to the inn. Above its door,
seven wooden swords swung beneath an iron spike. The whitewash
that covered them was cracked and peeling, but Brienne knew their
meaning. They stood for the seven sons of Darklyn who had worn
the white cloaks of the Kingsguard. No other house in all the realm
could claim as many. They were the glory of their House. And now they
are a sign above an inn. She pushed into the common room and asked
the innkeep for a room and a bath.
He put her on the second oor, and a woman with a liver-colored
birthmark on her face brought up a wooden tub, and then the
water, pail by pail. “Do any Darklyns remain in Duskendale?”
Brienne asked as she climbed into the tub.
“Well, there’s Darkes, I’m one myself. My husband says I was
Darke before we wed, and darker afterward.” She laughed. “Can’t
throw a stone in Duskendale without you hit some Darke or
Darkwood or Dargood, but the lordly Darklyns are all gone. Lord
Denys was the last o’ them, the sweet young fool. Did you know the
Darklyns were kings in Duskendale before the Andals come? You’d
never know t’look at me, but I got me royal blood. Can you see it?
‘Your Grace, another cup of ale,’ I ought to make them say. ‘Your
Grace, the chamber pot needs emptying, and fetch in some fresh
faggots, Your Bloody Grace, the re’s going out.’ ” She laughed
again and shook the last drops from the pail. “Well, there you are.
Is that water hot enough for you?”
“It will serve.” The water was lukewarm.

“I’d bring up more, but it’d just slop over. A girl the size o’ you,
you ll a tub.”
Only a cramped small tub like this one. At Harrenhal the tubs had
been huge, and made of stone. The bathhouse had been thick with
the steam rising o the water, and Jaime had come walking through
that mist naked as his name day, looking half a corpse and half a
god. He climbed into the tub with me, she remembered, blushing. She
seized a chunk of hard lye soap and scrubbed under her arms, trying
to call up Renly’s face again.
By the time the water had gone cold, Brienne was as clean as she
was like to get. She put on the same clothes she had taken o and
girded her swordbelt tight around her hips, but her mail and helm
she left behind, so as not to seem so threatening at the Dun Fort. It
felt good to stretch her legs. The guards at the castle gates wore
leather jacks with a badge that showed crossed warhammers upon a
white saltire. “I would speak with your lord,” Brienne told them.
One laughed. “Best shout out loud, then.”
“Lord Rykker rode to Maidenpool with Randyll Tarly,” the other
said. “He left Ser Rufus Leek as castellan, to look after Lady Rykker
and the young ones.”
It was to Leek that they escorted her. Ser Rufus was a short, stout
greybeard whose left leg ended in a stump. “You will forgive me if I
do not rise,” he said. Brienne o ered him her letter, but Leek could
not read, so he sent her to the maester, a bald man with a freckled
scalp and a sti red mustache.
When he heard the name Hollard, the maester frowned with
irritation. “How often must I sing this song?” Her face must have
given her away. “Did you think you were the rst to come seeking
after Dontos? More like the twenty- rst. The gold cloaks were here
within days of the king’s murder, with Lord Tywin’s warrant. And
what do you have, pray?”
Brienne showed him the letter, with Tommen’s seal and childish
signature. The maester hmmmmed and hrrrred, picked at the wax,
and nally gave it back. “It seems in order.” He climbed onto a
stool and gestured Brienne to another. “I never knew Ser Dontos.
He was a boy when he left Duskendale. The Hollards were a noble

House once, ’tis true. You know their arms? Barry red and pink,
with three golden crowns upon a blue chief. The Darklyns were
petty kings during the Age of Heroes, and three took Hollard wives.
Later their little realm was swallowed up by larger kingdoms, yet
the Darklyns endured and the Hollards served them … aye, even in
de ance. You know of that?”
“A little.” Her own maester used to say that it was the De ance of
Duskendale that had driven King Aerys mad.
“In Duskendale they love Lord Denys still, despite the woe he
brought them. ’Tis Lady Serala that they blame, his Myrish wife.
The Lace Serpent, she is called. If Lord Darklyn had only wed a
Staunton or a Stokeworth … well, you know how smallfolk will go
on. The Lace Serpent lled her husband’s ear with Myrish poison,
they say, until Lord Denys rose against his king and took him
captive. In the taking, his master-at-arms Ser Symon Hollard cut
down Ser Gwayne Gaunt of the Kingsguard. For half a year Aerys
was held within these very walls, whilst the King’s Hand sat outside
Duskendale with a mighty host. Lord Tywin had su cient strength
to storm the town any time he wished, but Lord Denys sent word
that at the rst sign of assault he’d kill the king.”
Brienne remembered what came next. “The king was rescued,”
she said. “Barristan the Bold brought him out.”
“He did,” the maester said. “Once Lord Denys lost his hostage, he
opened his gates and ended his de ance rather than let Lord Tywin
take the town. He bent the knee and begged for mercy, but the king
was not of a forgiving mind. Lord Denys lost his head, as did his
brothers and his sister, uncles, cousins, all the lordly Darklyns. The
Lace Serpent was burned alive, poor woman, though her tongue was
torn out rst, and her female parts, with which it was said that she
had enslaved her lord. Half of Duskendale will still tell you that
Aerys was too kind to her.”
“And the Hollards?”
“Attainted and destroyed,” said the maester. “I was forging my
chain at the Citadel when this happened, but I have read the
accounts of their trials and punishments. Ser Jon Hollard the
Steward was wed to Lord Denys’s sister and died with his wife, as

did their young son, who was half-Darklyn. Robin Hollard was a
squire, and when the king was seized he danced around him and
pulled his beard. He died upon the rack. Ser Symon Hollard was
slain by Ser Barristan during the king’s escape. The Hollard lands
were taken, their castle torn down, their villages put to the torch.
As with the Darklyns, House Hollard was extinguished.”
“Save for Dontos.”
“True enough. Young Dontos was the son of Ser Ste on Hollard,
the twin brother of Ser Symon, who had died of a fever some years
before and had no part in the De ance. Aerys would have taken the
boy’s head o nonetheless, but Ser Barristan asked that his life be
spared. The king could not refuse the man who’d saved him, so
Dontos was taken to King’s Landing as a squire. To my knowledge
he never returned to Duskendale, and why should he? He held no
lands here, had neither kin nor castle. If Dontos and this northern
girl helped murder our sweet king, it seems to me that they would
want to put as many leagues as they could betwixt themselves and
justice. Look for them in Oldtown, if you must, or across the narrow
sea. Look for them in Dorne, or on the Wall. Look elsewhere.” He
rose. “I hear my ravens calling. You will forgive me if I bid you
good morrow.”
The walk back to the inn seemed longer than the walk to the Dun
Fort, though perhaps that was only her mood. She would not nd
Sansa Stark in Duskendale, that seemed plain. If Ser Dontos had
taken her to Oldtown or across the narrow sea, as the maester
seemed to think, Brienne’s quest was hopeless. What was there for
her in Oldtown? she asked herself. The maester never knew her, no
more than he knew Hollard. She would not have gone to strangers.
In King’s Landing, Brienne had found one of Sansa’s former maids
doing washing in a brothel. “I served with Lord Renly before m’lady
Sansa, and both turned traitor,” the woman Brella complained
bitterly. “No lord will touch me now, so I have to wash for whores.”
But when Brienne asked about Sansa, she said, “I’ll tell you what I
told Lord Tywin. That girl was always praying. She’d go to sept and
light her candles like a proper lady, but near every night she went

o to the godswood. She’s gone back north, she has. That’s where
her gods are.”
The north was huge, though, and Brienne had no notion which of
her father’s bannermen Sansa might have been most inclined to
trust. Or would she seek her own blood instead? Though all of her
siblings had been slain, Brienne knew that Sansa still had an uncle
and a bastard half brother on the Wall, serving in the Night’s Watch.
Another uncle, Edmure Tully, was a captive at the Twins, but his
uncle Ser Brynden still held Riverrun. And Lady Catelyn’s younger
sister ruled the Vale. Blood calls to blood. Sansa might well have run
to one of them. Which one, though?
The Wall was too far, surely, and a bleak and bitter place besides.
And to reach Riverrun the girl would need to cross the war-torn
riverlands and pass through the Lannister siege lines. The Eyrie
would be simpler, and Lady Lysa would surely welcome her sister’s
daughter …
Ahead, the alley bent. Somehow Brienne had taken a wrong turn.
She found herself in a dead end, a small muddy yard where three
pigs were rooting round a low stone well. One squealed at the sight
of her, and an old woman drawing water looked her up and down
suspiciously. “What would you be wanting?”
“I was looking for the Seven Swords.”
“Back the way you come. Left at the sept.”
“I thank you.” Brienne turned to retrace her steps, and walked
head rst into someone hurrying round the bend. The collision
knocked him o his feet, and he landed on his arse in the mud.
“Pardons,” she murmured. He was only a boy; a scrawny lad with
straight, thin hair and a sty beneath one eye. “Are you hurt?” She
o ered a hand to help him up, but the boy squirmed back away
from her on heels and elbows. He could not have been more than
ten or twelve, though he wore a chain mail byrnie and had a
longsword in a leather sheath slung across his back. “Do I know
you?” Brienne asked. His face seemed vaguely familiar, though she
could not think from where.
“No. You don’t. You never …” He scrambled to his feet. “F-fforgive me. My lady. I wasn’t looking. I mean, I was, but down. I

was looking down. At my feet.” The boy took to his heels, plunging
headlong back the way he’d come.
Something about him roused all of Brienne’s suspicions, but she
was not about to chase him through the streets of Duskendale.
Outside the gates this morning, that was where I saw him, she realized.
He was riding a piebald rounsey. And it seemed as if she had seen him
somewhere else as well, but where?
By the time Brienne found the Seven Swords again, the common
room was crowded. Four septas sat closest to the re, in robes
stained and dusty from the road. Elsewhere locals lled the
benches, sopping up bowls of hot crab stew with chunks of bread.
The smell made her stomach rumble, but she saw no empty seats.
Then a voice behind her said, “M’lady, here, have my place.” Not
until he hopped o the bench did Brienne realize that the speaker
was a dwarf. The little man was not quite ve feet tall. His nose
was veined and bulbous, his teeth red from sourleaf, and he was
dressed in the brown roughspun robes of a holy brother, with the
iron hammer of the Smith dangling down about his thick neck.
“Keep your seat,” she said. “I can stand as well as you.”
“Aye, but my head is not so apt to knock upon the ceiling.” The
dwarf’s speech was coarse but courteous. Brienne could see the
crown of his scalp where he had shaved it. Many holy brothers wore
such tonsures. Septa Roelle once told her that it was meant to show
that they had nothing to hide from the Father. “Can’t the Father see
through hair?” Brienne had asked. A stupid thing to say. She had been
a slow child; Septa Roelle often told her so. She felt near as stupid
now, so she took the little man’s place at the end of the bench,
signaled for stew, and turned to thank the dwarf. “Do you serve
some holy house in Duskendale, brother?”
“ ’Twas nearer Maidenpool, m’lady, but the wolves burned us
out,” the man replied, gnawing on a heel of bread. “We rebuilt as
best we could, until some sellswords come. I could not say whose
men they were, but they took our pigs and killed the brothers. I
squeezed inside a hollow log and hid, but t’others were too big. It
took me a long time to bury them all, but the Smith, he gave me

strength. When that was done I dug up a few coins the elder brother
had hid by and set o by myself.”
“I met some other brothers going to King’s Landing.”
“Aye, there’s hundreds on the roads. Not only brothers. Septons
too, and smallfolk. Sparrows all. Might be I’m a sparrow too. The
Smith, he made me small enough.” He chuckled. “And what’s your
sad tale, m’lady?”
“I am looking for my sister. She’s highborn, only three-and-ten, a
pretty maid with blue eyes and auburn hair. You may have seen her
traveling with a man. A knight, perhaps a fool. There’s gold for the
man who helps me nd her.”
“Gold?” The brother gave her a red smile. “A bowl of that crab
stew would be enough reward for me, but I fear I cannot help you.
Fools I’ve met, and plenty, but not so many pretty maids.” He
cocked his head and thought a moment. “There was a fool at
Maidenpool, now that I think of it. He was clad in rags and dirt, as
near as I could tell, but under the dirt was motley.”
Did Dontos Hollard wear motley? No one had told Brienne that he
did … but no one had ever said he didn’t, either. Why would the
man be in rags, though? Had some misfortune overtaken him and
Sansa after they ed King’s Landing? That could well be, with the
roads so dangerous. It might not have been him at all. “Did this fool
have a red nose, full of broken veins?”
“I could not swear to that. I confess, I paid him little heed. I’d
gone to Maidenpool after burying my brothers, thinking that I
might nd a ship to take me to King’s Landing. I rst glimpsed the
fool down by the docks. He had a furtive air to him and took care to
avoid Lord Tarly’s soldiers. Later, I encountered him again, at the
Stinking Goose.”
“The Stinking Goose?” she said, uncertain.
“An unsavory place,” the dwarf admitted. “Lord Tarly’s men
patrol the port at Maidenpool, but the Goose is always full of
sailors, and sailors have been known to smuggle men aboard their
ships, if the price is right. This fool was seeking passage for three
across the narrow sea. I oft saw him there, talking with oarsmen o
the galleys. Sometimes he would sing a funny song.”

“Seeking passage for three? Not two?”
“Three, m’lady. That I’d swear to, by the Seven.” Three, she
thought. Sansa, Ser Dontos … but who would be the third? The Imp?
“Did the fool nd his ship?”
“That I could not say,” the dwarf told her, “but one night some of
Lord Tarly’s soldiers visited the Goose looking for him, and a few
days later I heard another man boasting that he’d fooled a fool and
had the gold to prove it. He was drunk, and buying ale for
everyone.”
“ ‘Fooled a fool,’ ” she said. “What did he mean by that?”
“I could not tell you. His name was Nimble Dick, though, that I
do recall.” The dwarf spread his hands. “I fear that’s all that I can
o er you, aside from a small man’s prayers.”
True to her word, Brienne bought him his bowl of hot crab
stew … and some hot fresh bread and a cup of wine as well. As he
ate it, standing by her side, she mulled what he had told her. Could
the Imp have joined them? If Tyrion Lannister were behind Sansa’s
disappearance, and not Dontos Hollard, it stood to reason that they
would need to ee across the narrow sea.
When the little man was done with his bowl of stew, he nished
what was left of hers as well. “You should eat more,” he said. “A
woman big as you needs t’ keep her strength up. It is not far to
Maidenpool, but the road is perilous these days.”
I know. It was on that very road that Ser Cleos Frey had died, and
she and Ser Jaime had been taken by the Bloody Mummers. Jaime
tried to kill me, she remembered, though he was gaunt and weak, and
his wrists were chained. It had been a close thing, even so, but that
was before Zollo hacked his hand o . Zollo and Rorge and Shagwell
would have raped her half a hundred times if Ser Jaime had not told
them she was worth her weight in sapphires.
“M’lady? You look sad. Are you thinking of your sister?” The
dwarf patted her on the hand. “The Crone will light your way to
her, never fear. The Maiden will keep her safe.”
“I pray that you are right.”
“I am.” He bowed. “But now I must be on my way. I’ve a long
way yet to go to reach King’s Landing.”

“Do you have a horse? A mule?”
“Two mules.” The little man laughed. “There they are, at the
bottom of my legs. They get me where I want t’ go.” He bowed,
and waddled to the door, swaying with each step.
She remained at the table after he had gone, lingering over a cup
of watered wine. Brienne did not oft drink wine, but once in a great
while she found it helped to settle her belly. And where do I want to
go? she asked herself. To Maidenpool, to look for a man named Nimble
Dick in a place called the Stinking Goose?
When last she had seen Maidenpool, the town had been a
desolation, its lord shut up inside his castle, its smallfolk dead or
ed or hiding. She remembered burned houses and empty streets,
smashed and broken gates. Feral dogs had skulked along behind
their horses, whilst swollen corpses oated like huge pale water
lilies atop the spring-fed pool that gave the town its name. Jaime
sang “Six Maids in a Pool,” and laughed when I begged him to be quiet.
And Randyll Tarly was at Maidenpool as well, another reason for
her to avoid the town. She might do better to take ship for
Gulltown or White Harbor. I could do both, though. Pay a call on the
Stinking Goose and talk to this Nimble Dick, then nd a ship at
Maidenpool to take me farther north.
The common room had begun to empty. Brienne tore a chunk of
bread in half, listening to the talk at the other tables. Most of it
concerned the death of Lord Tywin Lannister. “Murdered by his
own son, they say,” a local man was saying, a cobbler by the look
of him, “that vile little dwarf.”
“And the king is just a boy,” said the oldest of the four septas.
“Who is to rule us till he comes of age?”
“Lord Tywin’s brother,” said a guardsman. “Or that Lord Tyrell,
might be. Or the Kingslayer.”
“Not him,” declared the innkeep. “Not that oathbreaker.” He spat
into the re. Brienne let the bread fall from her hands and wiped
the crumbs o on her breeches. She’d heard enough.
That night she dreamed herself in Renly’s tent again. All the
candles were guttering out, and the cold was thick around her.
Something was moving through green darkness, something foul and

horrible was hurtling toward her king. She wanted to protect him,
but her limbs felt sti and frozen, and it took more strength than
she had just to lift her hand. And when the shadow sword sliced
through the green steel gorget and the blood began to ow, she saw
that the dying king was not Renly after all but Jaime Lannister, and
she had failed him.
The captain’s sister found her in the common room, drinking a
cup of milk and honey with three raw eggs mixed in. “You did
beautifully,” she said, when the woman showed her the freshly
painted shield. It was more a picture than a proper coat of arms,
and the sight of it took her back through the long years, to the cool
dark of her father’s armory. She remembered how she’d run her
ngertips across the cracked and fading paint, over the green leaves
of the tree, and along the path of the falling star.
Brienne paid the captain’s sister half again the sum they had
agreed, and slung the shield across one shoulder when she left the
inn, after buying some hardbread, cheese, and our from the cook.
She left the town by the north gate, riding slowly through the elds
and farms where the worst of the ghting had been, when the
wolves came down on Duskendale.
Lord Randyll Tarly had commanded Jo rey’s army, made up of
westermen and stormlanders and knights from the Reach. Those
men of his who had died here had been carried back inside the
walls, to rest in heroes’ tombs beneath the septs of Duskendale. The
northern dead, far more numerous, were buried in a common grave
beside the sea. Above the cairn that marked their resting place, the
victors had raised a rough-hewn wooden marker. HERE LIE THE
WOLVES was all it said. Brienne stopped beside it and said a silent
prayer for them, and for Catelyn Stark and her son Robb and all the
men who’d died with them as well.
She remembered the night that Lady Catelyn had learned her sons
were dead, the two young boys she’d left at Winterfell to keep them
safe. Brienne had known that something was terribly amiss. She had
asked her if there had been news of her sons. “I have no sons but
Robb,” Lady Catelyn had replied. She had sounded as if a knife were
twisting her belly. Brienne had reached across the table to give her

comfort, but she stopped before her ngers brushed the older
woman’s, for fear that she would inch away. Lady Catelyn had
turned over her hands, to show Brienne the scars on her palms and
ngers where a knife once bit deep into her esh. Then she had
begun to talk about her daughters. “Sansa was a little lady,” she had
said, “always courteous and eager to please. She loved tales of
knightly valor. She will grow into a woman far more beautiful than
I, you can see that. I would often brush her hair myself. She had
auburn hair, thick and soft … the red in it would shine like copper
in the light of the torches.”
She had spoken of Arya too, her younger daughter, but Arya was
lost, most likely dead by now. Sansa, though … I will nd her, my
lady, Brienne swore to Lady Catelyn’s restless shade. I will never stop
looking. I will give up my life if need be, give up my honor, give up all
my dreams, but I will nd her.
Beyond the battleground the road ran beside the shore, between
the surging grey-green sea and a line of low limestone hills. Brienne
was not the only traveler on the road. There were shing villages
up along the coast for many leagues, and the sherfolk used this
road to take their sh to market. She rode past a shwife and her
daughters, walking home with empty baskets on their shoulders. In
her armor, they took her for a knight until they saw her face. Then
the girls whispered to one another and gave her looks. “Have you
seen a maid of three-and-ten along the road?” she asked them. “A
highborn maid with blue eyes and auburn hair?” Ser Shadrich had
made her wary, but she had to keep on trying. “She may have been
traveling with a fool.” But they only shook their heads and giggled
at her behind their hands.
In the rst village she came to, barefoot boys ran along beside
her horse. She had donned her helm, stung by the giggles of the
sherfolk, so they took her for a man. One boy o ered to sell her
clams, one o ered crabs, and one o ered her his sister.
Brienne bought three crabs from the second boy. By the time she
left the village it had begun to rain, and the wind was rising. Storm
coming, she thought, glancing out to sea. The raindrops pinged

against the steel of her helm, making her ears ring as she rode, but
it was better than being out there in a boat.
An hour farther north, the road divided at a pile of tumbled
stones that marked the ruins of a small castle. The right-hand fork
followed the coast, meandering up along the shore toward
Crackclaw Point, a dismal land of bogs and pine barrens; the lefthand ran through hills and elds and woods to Maidenpool. The
rain was falling more heavily by then. Brienne dismounted and led
her mare o the road to take shelter amongst the ruins. The course
of the castle walls could still be discerned amongst the brambles,
weeds, and wild elms, but the stones that had made them up were
strewn like a child’s blocks between the roads. Part of the main
keep still stood, however. Its triple towers were grey granite, like
the broken walls, but their merlons were yellow sandstone. Three
crowns, she realized, as she gazed at them through the rain. Three
golden crowns. This had been a Hollard castle. Ser Dontos had been
born here, like as not.
She led her mare through the rubble to the keep’s main entrance.
Of the door only rusted iron hinges remained, but the roof was still
sound, and it was dry within. Brienne tied her mare to a wall
sconce, took o her helm, and shook out her hair. She was
searching for some dry wood to light a re when she heard the
sound of another horse, coming closer. Some instinct made her step
back into the shadows, where she could not be seen from the road.
This was the very road where she and Ser Jaime had been captured.
She did not intend to su er that again.
The rider was a small man. The Mad Mouse, she thought, at her
rst sight of him. Somehow he’s followed me. Her hand went to her
sword hilt, and she found herself wondering if Ser Shadrich would
think her easy prey just because she was a woman. Lord Grandison’s
castellan had once made that error. Humfrey Wagsta was his
name; a proud old man of ve-and-sixty, with a nose like a hawk
and a spotted head. The day they were betrothed, he warned
Brienne that he would expect her to be a proper woman once they’d
wed. “I will not have my lady wife cavorting about in man’s mail.
On this you shall obey me, lest I be forced to chastise you.”

She was sixteen and no stranger to a sword, but still shy despite
her prowess in the yard. Yet somehow she had found the courage to
tell Ser Humfrey that she would accept chastisement only from a
man who could out ght her. The old knight purpled, but agreed to
don his own armor to teach her a woman’s proper place. They
fought with blunted tourney weapons, so Brienne’s mace had no
spikes. She broke Ser Humfrey’s collarbone, two ribs, and their
betrothal. He was her third prospective husband, and her last. Her
father did not insist again.
If it was Ser Shadrich dogging her heels, she might well have a
ght on her hands. She did not intend to partner with the man or let
him follow her to Sansa. He had the sort of easy arrogance that comes
with skill at arms, she thought, but he was small. I’ll have the reach on
him, and I should be stronger too.
Brienne was as strong as most knights, and her old master-at-arms
used to say that she was quicker than any woman her size had any
right to be. The gods had given her stamina too, which Ser Goodwin
deemed a noble gift. Fighting with sword and shield was a
wearisome business, and victory oft went to the man with most
endurance. Ser Goodwin had taught her to ght cautiously, to
conserve her strength while letting her foes spend theirs in furious
attacks. “Men will always underestimate you,” he said, “and their
pride will make them want to vanquish you quickly, lest it be said
that a woman tried them sorely.” She had learned the truth of that
once she went into the world. Even Jaime Lannister had come at
her that way, in the woods by Maidenpool. If the gods were good,
the Mad Mouse would make the same mistake. He may be a
seasoned knight, she thought, but he is no Jaime Lannister. She slid her
sword out of its scabbard.
But it was not Ser Shadrich’s chestnut courser that drew up where
the road forked, but a broken-down old piebald rounsey with a
skinny boy upon his back. When Brienne saw the horse she drew
back in confusion. Only some boy, she thought, until she glimpsed
the face beneath his hood. The boy in Duskendale, the one who
bumped into me. It’s him.

The boy never gave the ruined castle a glance, but looked down
one road, then the other. After a moment’s hesitation, he turned the
rounsey toward the hills and plodded on. Brienne watched him
vanish through the falling rain, and suddenly it came to her that she
had seen this same boy in Rosby. He is stalking me, she realized, but
that’s a game that two can play. She untied her mare, climbed back
into the saddle, and went after him.
The boy was staring at the ground as he rode, watching the ruts
in the road ll up with water. The rain mu ed the sound of her
approach, and no doubt his hood played a part as well. He never
looked back once, until Brienne trotted up behind him and gave the
rounsey a whack across the rump with the at of her longsword.
The horse reared, and the skinny boy went ying, his cloak
apping like a pair of wings. He landed in the mud and came up
with dirt and dead brown grass between his teeth to nd Brienne
standing over him. It was the same boy, beyond a doubt. She
recognized the sty. “Who are you?” she demanded.
The boy’s mouth worked soundlessly. His eyes were big as eggs.
“Puh,” was all he could manage. “Puh.” His chain mail byrnie made
a rattling sound when he shivered. “Puh. Puh.”
“Please?” said Brienne. “Are you saying please?” She laid the point
of her sword on the apple of his throat. “Please tell me who you
are, and why you’re following me.”
“Not puh-puh-please.” He stuck a nger in his mouth, and icked
away a clump of mud, spitting. “Puh-puh-Pod. My name. Puh-puhPodrick. Puh-Payne.”
Brienne lowered her sword. She felt a rush of sympathy for the
boy. She remembered a day at Evenfall, and a young knight with a
rose in his hand. He brought the rose to give to me. Or so her septa
told her. All she had to do was welcome him to her father’s castle.
He was eighteen, with long red hair that tumbled to his shoulders.
She was twelve, tightly laced into a sti new gown, its bodice
bright with garnets. The two of them were of a height, but she
could not look him in the eye, nor say the simple words her septa
had taught her. Ser Ronnet. I welcome you to my lord father’s hall. It is
good to look upon your face at last.

“Why are you following me?” she demanded of the boy. “Were
you told to spy upon me? Do you belong to Varys, or the queen?”
“No. Not neither. No one.”
Brienne put his age at ten, but she was terrible at judging how old
a child was. She always thought they were younger than they were,
perhaps because she had always been big for her age. Freakish big,
Septa Roelle used to say, and mannish. “This road is too dangerous
for a boy alone.”
“Not for a squire. I’m his squire. The Hand’s squire.”
“Lord Tywin?” Brienne sheathed her blade.
“No. Not that Hand. The one before. His son. I fought with him in
the battle. I shouted ‘Halfman! Halfman!’ ”
The Imp’s squire. Brienne had not even known he had one. Tyrion
Lannister was no knight. He might have been expected to have a
serving boy or two to attend him, she supposed, a page and a
cupbearer, someone to help dress him. But a squire? “Why are you
stalking after me?” she said. “What do you want?”
“To nd her.” The boy got to his feet. “His lady. You’re looking
for her. Brella told me. She’s his wife. Not Brella, Lady Sansa. So I
thought, if you found her …” His face twisted in sudden anguish.
“I’m his squire,” he repeated, as the rain ran down his face, “but he
left me.”

SANSA

Once, when she was just a little girl, a wandering singer had stayed
with them at Winterfell for half a year. An old man he was, with
white hair and windburnt cheeks, but he sang of knights and quests
and ladies fair, and Sansa had cried bitter tears when he left them,
and begged her father not to let him go. “The man has played us
every song he knows thrice over,” Lord Eddard told her gently. “I
cannot keep him here against his will. You need not weep, though. I
promise you, other singers will come.”
They hadn’t, though, not for a year or more. Sansa had prayed to
the Seven in their sept and old gods of the heart tree, asking them
to bring the old man back, or better still to send another singer,
young and handsome. But the gods never answered, and the halls of
Winterfell stayed silent.
But that was when she was a little girl, and foolish. She was a
maiden now, three-and-ten and owered. All her nights were full of
song, and by day she prayed for silence.
If the Eyrie had been made like other castles, only rats and
gaolers would have heard the dead man singing. Dungeon walls
were thick enough to swallow songs and screams alike. But the sky
cells had a wall of empty air, so every chord the dead man played
ew free to echo o the stony shoulders of the Giant’s Lance. And
the songs he chose … He sang of the Dance of the Dragons, of fair
Jonquil and her fool, of Jenny of Oldstones and the Prince of

Dragon ies. He sang of betrayals, and murders most foul, of hanged
men and bloody vengeance. He sang of grief and sadness.
No matter where she went in the castle, Sansa could not escape
the music. It oated up the winding tower steps, found her naked in
her bath, supped with her at dusk, and stole into her bedchamber
even when she latched the shutters tight. It came in on the cold thin
air, and like the air, it chilled her. Though it had not snowed upon
the Eyrie since the day that Lady Lysa fell, the nights had all been
bitter cold.
The singer’s voice was strong and sweet. Sansa thought he
sounded better than he ever had before, his voice richer somehow,
full of pain and fear and longing. She did not understand why the
gods would have given such a voice to such a wicked man. He would
have taken me by force on the Fingers if Petyr had not set Ser Lothor to
watch over me, she had to remind herself. And he played to drown out
my cries when Aunt Lysa tried to kill me.
That did not make the songs any easier to hear. “Please,” she
begged Lord Petyr, “can’t you make him stop?”
“I gave the man my word, sweetling.” Petyr Baelish, Lord of
Harrenhal, Lord Paramount of the Trident, and Lord Protector of
the Eyrie and the Vale of Arryn, looked up from the letter he was
writing. He had written a hundred letters since Lady Lysa’s fall.
Sansa had seen the ravens coming and going from the rookery. “I’d
sooner su er his singing than listen to his sobbing.”
It is better that he sings, yes, but … “Must he play all night, my
lord? Lord Robert cannot sleep. He cries …”
“… for his mother. That cannot be helped, the wench is dead.”
Petyr shrugged. “It will not be much longer. Lord Nestor is making
his ascent on the morrow.”
Sansa had met Lord Nestor Royce once before, after Petyr’s
wedding to her aunt. Royce was the Keeper of the Gates of the
Moon, the great castle that stood at the base of the mountain and
guarded the steps up to the Eyrie. The wedding party had guested
with him overnight before beginning their ascent. Lord Nestor had
scarce looked at her twice, but the prospect of him coming here
terri ed her. He was High Steward of the Vale as well, Jon Arryn’s

trusted liege man, and Lady Lysa’s. “He won’t … you won’t let Lord
Nestor see Marillion, will you?”
Her horror must have shown on her face, since Petyr put down
his quill. “On the contrary. I shall insist on it.” He beckoned her to
take the seat beside him. “We have come to an agreement,
Marillion and I. Mord can be most persuasive. And if our singer
disappoints us and sings a song we do not care to hear, why, you
and I need only say he lies. Whom do you imagine Lord Nestor will
believe?”
“Us?” Sansa wished she could be certain.
“Of course. Our lies will pro t him.”
The solar was warm, the re crackling merrily, but Sansa
shivered all the same. “Yes, but … but what if …”
“What if Lord Nestor values honor more than pro t?” Petyr put
his arm around her. “What if it is truth he wants, and justice for his
murdered lady?” He smiled. “I know Lord Nestor, sweetling. Do
you imagine I’d ever let him harm my daughter?”
I am not your daughter, she thought. I am Sansa Stark, Lord
Eddard’s daughter and Lady Catelyn’s, the blood of Winterfell. She did
not say it, though. If not for Petyr Baelish it would have been Sansa
who went spinning through a cold blue sky to stony death six
hundred feet below, instead of Lysa Arryn. He is so bold. Sansa
wished she had his courage. She wanted to crawl back into bed and
hide beneath her blanket, to sleep and sleep. She had not slept a
whole night through since Lysa Arryn’s death. “Couldn’t you tell
Lord Nestor that I am … indisposed, or …”
“He will want to hear your account of Lysa’s death.”
“My lord, if … if Marillion tells what truly …”
“If he lies, you mean?”
“Lies? Yes … if he lies, if it is my tale against his, and Lord
Nestor looks in my eyes and sees how scared I am …”
“A touch of fear will not be out of place, Alayne. You’ve seen a
fearful thing. Nestor will be moved.” Petyr studied her eyes, as if
seeing them for the rst time. “You have your mother’s eyes.
Honest eyes, and innocent. Blue as a sunlit sea. When you are a
little older, many a man will drown in those eyes.”

Sansa did not know what to say to that.
“All you need do is tell Lord Nestor the same tale that you told
Lord Robert,” Petyr went on.
Robert is only a sick little boy, she thought, Lord Nestor is a man
grown, stern and suspicious. Robert was not strong and had to be
protected, even from the truth. “Some lies are love,” Petyr had
assured her. She reminded him of that. “When we lied to Lord
Robert, that was just to spare him,” she said.
“And this lie may spare us. Else you and I must leave the Eyrie by
the same door Lysa used.” Petyr picked up his quill again. “We shall
serve him lies and Arbor gold, and he’ll drink them down and ask
for more, I promise you.”
He is serving me lies as well, Sansa realized. They were comforting
lies, though, and she thought them kindly meant. A lie is not so bad if
it is kindly meant. If only she believed them …
The things her aunt had said just before she fell still troubled
Sansa greatly. “Ravings,” Petyr called them. “My wife was mad,
you saw that for yourself.” And so she had. All I did was build a snow
castle, and she meant to push me out the Moon Door. Petyr saved me.
He loved my mother well, and …
And her? How could she doubt it? He had saved her.
He saved Alayne, his daughter, a voice within her whispered. But
she was Sansa too … and sometimes it seemed to her that the Lord
Protector was two people as well. He was Petyr, her protector,
warm and funny and gentle … but he was also Little nger, the lord
she’d known at King’s Landing, smiling slyly and stroking his beard
as he whispered in Queen Cersei’s ear. And Little nger was no
friend of hers. When Jo had her beaten, the Imp defended her, not
Little nger. When the mob sought to rape her, the Hound carried
her to safety, not Little nger. When the Lannisters wed her to
Tyrion against her will, Ser Garlan the Gallant gave her comfort,
not Little nger. Little nger never lifted so much as his little nger
for her.
Except to get me out. He did that for me. I thought it was Ser Dontos,
my poor old drunken Florian, but it was Petyr all the while. Little nger
was only a mask he had to wear. Only sometimes Sansa found it hard

to tell where the man ended and the mask began. Little nger and
Lord Petyr looked so very much alike. She would have ed them
both, perhaps, but there was nowhere for her to go. Winterfell was
burned and desolate, Bran and Rickon dead and cold. Robb had been
betrayed and murdered at the Twins, along with their lady mother.
Tyrion had been put to death for killing Jo rey, and if she ever
returned to King’s Landing the queen would have her head as well.
The aunt she’d hoped would keep her safe had tried to murder her
instead. Her uncle Edmure was a captive of the Freys, while her
great-uncle the Black sh was under siege at Riverrun. I have no
place but here, Sansa thought miserably, and no true friend but Petyr.
That night the dead man sang “The Day They Hanged Black
Robin,” “The Mother’s Tears,” and “The Rains of Castamere.” Then
he stopped for a while, but just as Sansa began to drift o he started
to play again. He sang “Six Sorrows,” “Fallen Leaves,” and
“Alysanne.” Such sad songs, she thought. When she closed her eyes
she could see him in his sky cell, huddled in a corner away from the
cold black sky, crouched beneath a fur with his woodharp cradled
against his chest. I must not pity him, she told herself. He was vain
and cruel, and soon he will be dead. She could not save him. And why
should she want to? Marillion tried to rape her, and Petyr had saved
her life not once but twice. Some lies you have to tell. Lies had been
all that kept her alive in King’s Landing. If she had not lied to
Jo rey, his Kingsguard would have beat her bloody.
After “Alysanne” the singer stopped again, long enough for Sansa
to snatch an hour’s rest. But as the rst light of dawn was prying at
her shutters, she heard the soft strains of “On a Misty Morn”
drifting up from below, and woke at once. That was more properly
a woman’s song, a lament sung by a mother on the dawn after some
terrible battle, as she searches amongst the dead for the body of her
only son. The mother sings her grief for her dead son, Sansa thought,
but Marillion grieves for his ngers, for his eyes. The words rose like
arrows and pierced her in the darkness.
Oh, have you seen my boy, good ser?
His hair is chestnut brown

He promised he’d come back to me
Our home’s in Wendish Town.

Sansa covered her ears with a goose down pillow to shut out the
rest of it, but it was no good. Day had come and she had woken,
and Lord Nestor Royce was coming up the mountain.
The High Steward and his party reached the Eyrie in the late
afternoon, with the valley gold and red beneath them and the wind
rising. He brought his son Ser Albar, along with a dozen knights and
a score of men-at-arms. So many strangers. Sansa looked at their
faces anxiously, wondering if they were friends or foes.
Petyr welcomed his visitors in a black velvet doublet with grey
sleeves that matched his woolen breeches and lent a certain
darkness to his grey-green eyes. Maester Colemon stood beside him,
his chain of many metals hanging loose about his long, skinny neck.
Although the maester was much the taller of the two men, it was
the Lord Protector who drew the eye. He had put away his smiles
for the day, it seemed. He listened solemnly as Royce introduced
the knights who had accompanied him, then said, “My lords are
welcome here. You know our Maester Colemon, of course. Lord
Nestor, you will recall Alayne, my natural daughter?”
“To be sure.” Lord Nestor Royce was a bullnecked, barrel-chested,
balding man with a grey-shot beard and a stern look. He inclined his
head a whole half inch in greeting.
Sansa curtsied, too frightened to speak for fear she might
misspeak. Petyr drew her to her feet. “Sweetling, be a good girl and
bring Lord Robert to the High Hall to receive his guests.”
“Yes, Father.” Her voice sounded thin and strained. A liar’s voice,
she thought as she hurried up the steps and across the gallery to the
Moon Tower. A guilty voice.
Gretchel and Maddy were helping Robert Arryn squirm into his
breeches when Sansa stepped into his bedchamber. The Lord of the
Eyrie had been crying again. His eyes were red and raw, his lashes
crusty, his nose swollen and runny. A trail of snot glistened
underneath one nostril, and his lower lip was bloody where he’d
bitten it. Lord Nestor must not see him like this, Sansa thought,

despairing. “Gretchel, fetch me the washbasin.” She took the boy by
the hand and drew him to the bed. “Did my Sweetrobin sleep well
last night?”
“No.” He sni ed. “I never slept one bit, Alayne. He was singing
again, and my door was locked. I called for them to let me out, but
no one ever came. Someone locked me in my room.”
“That was wicked of them.” Dipping a soft cloth into the warm
water, she began to clean his face … gently, oh so gently. If you
scrubbed Robert too briskly, he might begin to shake. The boy was
frail, and terribly small for his age. He was eight, but Sansa had
known bigger ve-year-olds.
Robert’s lip quivered. “I was going to come sleep with you.”
I know you were. Sweetrobin had been accustomed to crawling in
beside his mother, until she wed Lord Petyr. Since Lady Lysa’s death
he had taken to wandering the Eyrie in quest of other beds. The one
he liked best was Sansa’s … which was why she had asked Ser
Lothor Brune to lock his door last night. She would not have minded
if he only slept, but he was always trying to nuzzle at her breasts,
and when he had his shaking spells he often wet the bed.
“Lord Nestor Royce has come up from the Gates to see you.”
Sansa wiped beneath his nose.
“I don’t want to see him,” he said. “I want a story. A story of the
Winged Knight.”
“After,” Sansa said. “First you must see Lord Nestor.”
“Lord Nestor has a mole,” he said, squirming. Robert was afraid
of men with moles. “Mommy said he was dreadful.”
“My poor Sweetrobin.” Sansa smoothed his hair back. “You miss
her, I know. Lord Petyr misses her too. He loved her just as you
do.” That was a lie, though kindly meant. The only woman Petyr
ever loved was Sansa’s murdered mother. He had confessed as much
to Lady Lysa just before he pushed her out the Moon Door. She was
mad and dangerous. She murdered her own lord husband, and would
have murdered me if Petyr had not come along to save me.
Robert did not need to know that, though. He was only a sick
little boy who’d loved his mother. “There,” Sansa said, “you look a
proper lord now. Maddy, fetch his cloak.” It was lambswool, soft

and warm, a handsome sky-blue that set o the cream color of his
tunic. She fastened it about his shoulders with a silver brooch in the
shape of a crescent moon, and took him by the hand. Robert came
meekly for once.
The High Hall had been closed since Lady Lysa’s fall, and it gave
Sansa a chill to enter it again. The hall was long and grand and
beautiful, she supposed, but she did not like it here. It was a pale
cold place at the best of times. The slender pillars looked like
ngerbones, and the blue veins in the white marble brought to mind
the veins in an old crone’s legs. Though fty silver sconces lined the
walls, less than a dozen torches had been lit, so shadows danced
upon the oors and pooled in every corner. Their footsteps echoed
o the marble, and Sansa could hear the wind rattling at the Moon
Door. I must not look at it, she told herself, else I’ll start to shake as
badly as Robert.
With Maddy’s help, she got Robert seated on his weirwood throne
with a stack of pillows underneath him and sent word that his
lordship would receive his guests. Two guards in sky-blue cloaks
opened the doors at the lower end of the hall, and Petyr ushered
them in and down the long blue carpet that ran between the rows of
bone-white pillars.
The boy greeted Lord Nestor with squeaky courtesy and made no
mention of his mole. When the High Steward asked about his lady
mother, Robert’s hands began to tremble ever so slightly. “Marillion
hurt my mother. He threw her out the Moon Door.”
“Did your lordship see this happen?” asked Ser Marwyn Belmore,
a lanky ginger-headed knight who had been Lysa’s captain of guards
till Petyr had put Ser Lothor Brune in his place.
“Alayne saw it,” the boy said. “And my lord stepfather.”
Lord Nestor looked at her. Ser Albar, Ser Marwyn, Maester
Colemon, all of them were looking. She was my aunt but she wanted
to kill me, Sansa thought. She dragged me to the Moon Door and tried
to push me out. I never wanted a kiss, I was building a castle in the
snow. She hugged herself to keep from shaking.
“Forgive her, my lords,” Petyr Baelish said softly. “She still has
nightmares of that day. Small wonder if she cannot bear to speak of

it.” He came up behind her and put his hands gently on her
shoulders. “I know how hard this is for you, Alayne, but our friends
must hear the truth.”
“Yes.” Her throat felt so dry and tight it almost hurt to speak. “I
saw … I was with the Lady Lysa when …” A tear rolled down her
cheek. That’s good, a tear is good. “… when Marillion … pushed her.”
And she told the tale again, hardly hearing the words as they spilled
out of her.
Before she was half-done Robert began to cry, the pillows shifting
perilously beneath him. “He killed my mother. I want him to y!”
The trembling in his hands had grown worse, and his arms were
shaking too. The boy’s head jerked and his teeth began to chatter.
“Fly!” he shrieked. “Fly, y.” His arms and legs ailed wildly. Lothor
Brune strode to the dais in time to catch the boy as he slipped from
his throne. Maester Colemon was just a step behind, though there
was naught that he could do.
Helpless as the rest, Sansa could only stand and watch as the
shaking spell ran its course. One of Robert’s legs kicked Ser Lothor
in the face. Brune cursed, but still held on as the boy twitched and
ailed and wet himself. Their visitors said not a word; Lord Nestor
at least had seen these ts before. It was long moments before
Robert’s spasms began to subside, and seemed even longer. By the
end, the little lordling was so weak he could not stand. “Best take
his lordship back to bed and bleed him,” Lord Petyr said. Brune
lifted the boy in his arms and carried him from the hall. Maester
Colemon followed, grim-faced.
When their footsteps died away there was no sound in the High
Hall of the Eyrie. Sansa could hear the night wind moaning outside
and scratching at the Moon Door. She was very cold and very tired.
Must I tell the tale again? she wondered.
But she must have told it well enough. Lord Nestor cleared his
throat. “I misliked that singer from the rst,” he grumbled. “I urged
Lady Lysa to send him away. Many a time I urged her.”
“You always gave her good counsel, my lord,” Petyr said.
“She took no heed of it,” Royce complained. “She heard me
grudgingly and took no heed.”

“My lady was too trusting for this world.” Petyr spoke so
tenderly that Sansa would have believed he’d loved his wife. “Lysa
could not see the evil in men, only the good. Marillion sang sweet
songs, and she mistook that for his nature.”
“He called us pigs,” Ser Albar Royce said. A blunt broadshouldered knight who shaved his chin but cultivated thick black
sidewhiskers that framed his homely face like hedgerows, Ser Albar
was a younger version of his father. “He made a song about two
pigs snu ing round a mountain, eating a falcon’s leavings. That was
meant to be us, but when I said so he laughed at me. ‘Why, ser, ’tis
a song about some pigs,’ he said.”
“He made mock of me as well,” Ser Marwyn Belmore said. “Ser
Ding-Dong, he named me. When I vowed I’d cut his tongue out, he
ran to Lady Lysa and hid behind her skirts.”
“As oft he did,” Lord Nestor said. “The man was craven, but the
favor Lady Lysa showed him made him insolent. She dressed him
like a lord, gave him gold rings and a moonstone belt.”
“Even Lord Jon’s favorite falcon.” The knight’s doublet showed
the six white candles of Waxley. “His lordship loved that bird. King
Robert gave it to him.”
Petyr Baelish sighed. “It was unseemly,” he agreed, “and I put an
end to it. Lysa agreed to send him away. That was why she met him
here, that day. I should have been with her, but I never dreamt … if
I had not insisted … it was I who killed her.”
No, Sansa thought, you mustn’t say that, you mustn’t tell them, you
mustn’t. But Albar Royce was shaking his head. “No, my lord, you
must not blame yourself,” he said.
“This was the singer’s work,” his father agreed. “Bring him up,
Lord Petyr. Let us write an end to this sorry business.”
Petyr Baelish composed himself, and said, “As you wish, my
lord.” He turned to his guardsmen and spoke a command, and the
singer was fetched up from the dungeons. The gaoler Mord came
with him, a monstrous man with small black eyes and a lopsided,
scarred face. One ear and part of his cheek had been cleaved o in
some battle, but twenty stone of pallid white esh remained. His
clothes t poorly and had a rank, ripe smell.

Marillion by contrast looked almost elegant. Someone had bathed
him and dressed him in a pair of sky-blue breeches and a loosetting white tunic with pu ed sleeves, belted with a silvery sash
that had been a gift from Lady Lysa. White silk gloves covered his
hands, while a white silk bandage spared the lords the sight of his
eyes.
Mord stood behind him with a lash. When the gaoler prodded him
in the ribs, the singer went to one knee. “Good lords, I beg your
forgiveness.”
Lord Nestor scowled. “You confess your crime?”
“If I had eyes I should weep.” The singer’s voice, so strong and
sure by night, was cracked and whispery now. “I loved her so, I
could not bear to see her in another’s arms, to know she shared his
bed. I meant no harm to my sweet lady, I swear it. I barred the
door so no one could disturb us whilst I declared my passion, but
Lady Lysa was so cold … when she told that she was carrying Lord
Petyr’s child, a … a madness seized me …”
Sansa stared at his hands while he spoke. Fat Maddy claimed that
Mord had taken o three of his ngers, both pinkies and a ring
nger. His little ngers did appear somewhat sti er than the others,
but with those gloves it was hard to be certain. It might have been no
more than a story. How would Maddy know?
“Lord Petyr has been kind enough to let me keep my harp,” the
blind singer said. “My harp and … my tongue … so I may sing my
songs. Lady Lysa dearly loved my singing …”
“Take this creature away, or I’m like to kill him myself,” Lord
Nestor growled. “It sickens me to look at him.”
“Mord, take him back to his sky cell,” said Petyr.
“Yes, m’lord.” Mord grabbed Marillion roughly by the collar. “No
more mouth.” When he spoke, Sansa saw to her astonishment that
the gaoler’s teeth were made of gold. They watched as he half
dragged half shoved the singer toward the doors.
“The man must die,” Ser Marywn Belmore declared when they
were gone. “He should have followed Lady Lysa out the Moon
Door.”

“Without his tongue,” Ser Albar Royce added. “Without that
lying, mocking tongue.”
“I have been too gentle with him, I know,” Petyr Baelish said in
an apologetic tone. “If truth be told, I pity him. He killed for love.”
“For love or hate,” said Belmore, “he must die.”
“Soon enough,” Lord Nestor said gru y. “No man lingers long in
the sky cells. The blue will call to him.”
“It may,” said Petyr Baelish, “but whether Marillion will answer,
only he can say.” He gestured, and his guardsmen opened the doors
at the far end of the hall. “Sers, I know you must be weary after
your ascent. Rooms have been prepared for all of you to spend the
night, and food and wine await you in the Lower Hall. Oswell, show
them the way, and see that they have all they need.” He turned to
Nestor Royce. “My lord, will you join me in the solar for a cup of
wine? Alayne, sweetling, come pour for us.”
A low re burned in the solar, where a agon of wine awaited
them. Arbor gold. Sansa lled Lord Nestor’s cup whilst Petyr
prodded at the logs with an iron poker.
Lord Nestor seated himself beside the re. “This will not be the
end of it,” he said to Petyr, as if Sansa were not there. “My cousin
means to question the singer himself.”
“Bronze Yohn mistrusts me.” Petyr pushed a log aside.
“He means to come in force. Symond Templeton will join him, do
not doubt it. And Lady Waynwood too, I fear.”
“And Lord Belmore, Young Lord Hunter, Horton Redfort. They
will bring Strong Sam Stone, the Tolletts, the Shetts, the
Coldwaters, some Corbrays.”
“You are well-informed. Which Corbrays? Not Lord Lyonel?”
“No, his brother. Ser Lyn mislikes me, for some reason.”
“Lyn Corbray is a dangerous man,” Lord Nestor said doggedly.
“What do you intend to do?”
“What can I do but make them welcome if they come?” Petyr
gave the ames another stir and set the poker down.
“My cousin means to remove you as Lord Protector.”
“If so, I cannot stop him. I keep a garrison of twenty men. Lord
Royce and his friends can raise twenty thousand.” Petyr went to the

oaken chest that sat beneath the window. “Bronze Yohn will do
what he will do,” he said, kneeling. He opened the chest, drew out a
roll of parchment, and brought it to Lord Nestor. “My lord. This is a
token of the love my lady bore you.”
Sansa watched Royce unroll the parchment. “This … this is
unexpected, my lord.” She was startled to see tears in his eyes.
“Unexpected, but not undeserved. My lady valued you above all
her other bannermen. You were her rock, she told me.”
“Her rock.” Lord Nestor reddened. “She said that?”
“Often. And this”—Petyr gestured at the parchment—“is the
proof of it.”
“That … that is good to know. Jon Arryn valued my service, I
know, but Lady Lysa … she scorned me when I came to court her,
and I feared …” Lord Nestor furrowed his brow. “It bears the Arryn
seal, I see, but the signature …”
“Lysa was murdered before the document could be presented for
her signature, so I signed as Lord Protector. I knew that would have
been her wish.”
“I see.” Lord Nestor rolled the parchment. “You are … dutiful, my
lord. Aye, and not without courage. Some will call this grant
unseemly, and fault you for making it. The Keeper’s post has never
been hereditary. The Arryns raised the Gates, in the days when they
still wore the Falcon Crown and ruled the Vale as kings. The Eyrie
was their summer seat, but when the snows began to fall the court
would make its descent. Some would say the Gates were as royal as
the Eyrie.”
“There has been no king in the Vale for three hundred years,”
Petyr Baelish pointed out.
“The dragons came,” Lord Nestor agreed. “But even after, the
Gates remained an Arryn castle. Jon Arryn himself was Keeper of
the Gates whilst his father lived. After his ascent, he named his
brother Ronnel to the honor, and later his cousin Denys.”
“Lord Robert has no brothers, and only distant cousins.”
“True.” Lord Nestor clutched the parchment tightly. “I will not
say I had not hoped for this. Whilst Lord Jon ruled the realm as

Hand, it fell to me to rule the Vale for him. I did all that he required
of me and asked nothing for myself. But by the gods, I earned this!”
“You did,” said Petyr, “and Lord Robert sleeps more easily
knowing that you are always there, a staunch friend at the foot of
his mountain.” He raised a cup. “So … a toast, my lord. To House
Royce, Keepers of the Gates of the Moon … now and forever.”
“Now and forever, aye!” The silver cups crashed together.
Later, much later, after the agon of Arbor gold was dry, Lord
Nestor took his leave to rejoin his company of knights. Sansa was
asleep on her feet by then, wanting only to crawl o to her bed, but
Petyr caught her by the wrist. “You see the wonders that can be
worked with lies and Arbor gold?”
Why did she feel like weeping? It was good that Nestor Royce
was with them. “Were they all lies?”
“Not all. Lysa often called Lord Nestor a rock, though I do not
think she meant it as a compliment. She called his son a clod. She
knew Lord Nestor dreamed of holding the Gates in his own right, a
lord in truth as well as name, but Lysa dreamed of other sons and
meant the castle to go to Robert’s little brother.” He stood. “Do you
understand what happened here, Alayne?”
Sansa hesitated a moment. “You gave Lord Nestor the Gates of
the Moon to be certain of his support.”
“I did,” Petyr admitted, “but our rock is a Royce, which is to say
he is overproud and prickly. Had I asked him his price, he would
have swelled up like an angry toad at the slight upon his honor. But
this way … the man is not utterly stupid, but the lies I served him
were sweeter than the truth. He wants to believe that Lysa valued
him above her other bannermen. One of those others is Bronze
Yohn, after all, and Nestor is very much aware that he was born of
the lesser branch of House Royce. He wants more for his son. Men of
honor will do things for their children that they would never
consider doing for themselves.”
She nodded. “The signature … you might have had Lord Robert
put his hand and seal to it, but instead …”
“… I signed myself, as Lord Protector. Why?”
“So … if you are removed, or … or killed …”

“… Lord Nestor’s claim to the Gates will suddenly be called into
question. I promise you, that is not lost on him. It was clever of you
to see it. Though no more than I’d expect of mine own daughter.”
“Thank you.” She felt absurdly proud for puzzling it out, but
confused as well. “I’m not, though. Your daughter. Not truly. I
mean, I pretend to be Alayne, but you know …”
Little nger put a nger to her lips. “I know what I know, and so
do you. Some things are best left unsaid, sweetling.”
“Even when we are alone?”
“Especially when we are alone. Elsewise a day will come when a
servant walks into a room unannounced, or a guardsman at the door
chances to hear something he should not. Do you want more blood
on your pretty little hands, my darling?”
Marillion’s face seemed to oat before her, the bandage pale
across his eyes. Behind him she could see Ser Dontos, the crossbow
bolts still in him. “No,” Sansa said. “Please.”
“I am tempted to say this is no game we play, daughter, but of
course it is. The game of thrones.”
I never asked to play. The game was too dangerous. One slip and I
am dead. “Oswell … my lord, Oswell rowed me from King’s
Landing the night that I escaped. He must know who I am.”
“If he’s half as clever as a sheep pellet, you would think so. Ser
Lothor knows as well. But Oswell has been in my service a long
time, and Brune is close-mouthed by nature. Kettleblack watches
Brune for me, and Brune watches Kettleblack. Trust no one, I once
told Eddard Stark, but he would not listen. You are Alayne, and you
must be Alayne all the time.” He put two ngers on her left breast.
“Even here. In your heart. Can you do that? Can you be my
daughter in your heart?”
“I …” I do not know, my lord, she almost said, but that was not
what he wanted to hear. Lies and Arbor gold, she thought. “I am
Alayne, Father. Who else would I be?”
Lord Little nger kissed her cheek. “With my wits and Cat’s
beauty, the world will be yours, sweetling. Now o to bed.”
Gretchel had laid a re in her hearth and plumped her featherbed.
Sansa undressed and slipped beneath the blankets. He will not sing

tonight, she prayed, not with Lord Nestor and the others in the castle.
He would not dare. She closed her eyes.
Sometime during the night she woke, as little Robert climbed up
into her bed. I forgot to tell Lothor to lock him in again, she realized.
There was nothing to be done for it, so she put her arm around him.
“Sweetrobin? You can stay, but try not to squirm around. Just close
your eyes and sleep, little one.”
“I will.” He cuddled close and laid his head between her breasts.
“Alayne? Are you my mother now?”
“I suppose I am,” she said. If a lie was kindly meant, there was no
harm in it.

THE KRAKEN’S DAUGHTER

The hall was loud with drunken Harlaws, distant cousins all. Each
lord had hung his banner behind the benches where his men were
seated. Too few, thought Asha Greyjoy, looking down from the
gallery, too few by far. The benches were three-quarters empty.
Qarl the Maid had said as much, when the Black Wind was
approaching from the sea. He had counted the longships moored
beneath her uncle’s castle, and his mouth had tightened. “They have
not come,” he observed, “or not enough of them.” He was not
wrong, but Asha could not agree with him, out where her crew
might hear. She did not doubt their devotion, but even ironborn will
hesitate to give their lives for a cause that’s plainly lost.
Do I have so few friends as this? Amongst the banners, she saw the
silver sh of Botley, the stone tree of the Stonetrees, the black
leviathan of Volmark, the nooses of the Myres. The rest were
Harlaw scythes. Boremund placed his upon a pale blue eld,
Hotho’s was girdled within an embattled border, and the Knight had
quartered his with the gaudy peacock of his mother’s House. Even
Sigfryd Silverhair showed two scythes counterchanged on a eld
divided bendwise. Only the Lord Harlaw displayed the silver scythe
plain upon a night-black eld, as it had own in the dawn of days:
Rodrik, called the Reader, Lord of the Ten Towers, Lord of Harlaw,
Harlaw of Harlaw … her favorite uncle.

Lord Rodrik’s high seat was vacant. Two scythes of beaten silver
crossed above it, so huge that even a giant would have di culty
wielding them, but beneath were only empty cushions. Asha was
not surprised. The feast was long concluded. Only bones and greasy
platters remained upon the trestle tables. The rest was drinking, and
her uncle Rodrik had never been partial to the company of
quarrelsome drunks.
She turned to Three-Tooth, an old woman of fearful age who had
been her uncle’s steward since she was known as Twelve-Tooth.
“My uncle is with his books?”
“Aye, where else?” The woman was so old that a septon had once
said she must have nursed the Crone. That was when the Faith was
still tolerated on the isles. Lord Rodrik had kept septons at Ten
Towers, not for his soul’s sake but for his books. “With the books,
and Botley. He was with him too.”
Botley’s standard hung in the hall, a shoal of silver sh upon a
pale green eld, though Asha had not seen his Swift n amongst the
other longships. “I had heard my nuncle Crow’s Eye had old Sawane
Botley drowned.”
“Lord Tristifer Botley, this one is.”
Tris. She wondered what had happened to Sawane’s elder son,
Harren. I will nd out soon enough, no doubt. This should be awkward.
She had not seen Tris Botley since … no, she ought not dwell on it.
“And my lady mother?”
“Abed,” said Three-Tooth, “in the Widow’s Tower.”
Aye, where else? The widow the tower was named after was her
aunt. Lady Gwynesse had come home to mourn after her husband
had died o Fair Isle during Balon Greyjoy’s rst rebellion. “I will
only stay until my grief has passed,” she had told her brother,
famously, “though by rights Ten Towers should be mine, for I am
seven years your elder.” Long years had passed since then, but still
the widow lingered, grieving, and muttering from time to time that
the castle should be hers. And now Lord Rodrik has a second half-mad
widowed sister beneath his roof, Asha re ected. Small wonder if he
seeks solace in his books.

Even now, it was hard to credit that frail, sickly Lady Alannys had
outlived her husband Lord Balon, who had seemed so hard and
strong. When Asha had sailed away to war, she had done so with a
heavy heart, fearing that her mother might well die before she
could return. Not once had she thought that her father might perish
instead. The Drowned God plays savage japes upon us all, but men are
crueler still. A sudden storm and a broken rope had sent Balon
Greyjoy to his death. Or so they claim.
Asha had last seen her mother when she stopped at Ten Towers to
take on fresh water, on her way north to strike at Deepwood Motte.
Alannys Harlaw never had the sort of beauty the singers cherished,
but her daughter had loved her erce strong face and the laughter
in her eyes. On that last visit, though, she had found Lady Alannys
in a window seat huddled beneath a pile of furs, staring out across
the sea. Is this my mother, or her ghost? she remembered thinking as
she’d kissed her cheek.
Her mother’s skin had been parchment thin, her long hair white.
Some pride remained in the way she held her head, but her eyes
were dim and cloudy, and her mouth had trembled when she asked
after Theon. “Did you bring my baby boy?” she had asked. Theon
had been ten years old when he was carried o to Winterfell a
hostage, and so far as Lady Alannys was concerned he would always
be ten years old, it seemed. “Theon could not come,” Asha had to
tell her. “Father sent him reaving along the Stony Shore.” Lady
Alannys had naught to say to that. She only nodded slowly, yet it
was plain to see how deep her daughter’s words had cut her.
And now I must tell her that Theon is dead, and drive yet another
dagger through her heart. There were two knives buried there
already. On the blades were writ the words Rodrik and Maron, and
many a time they twisted cruelly in the night. I will see her on the
morrow, Asha vowed to herself. Her journey had been long and
wearisome, she could not face her mother now.
“I must speak with Lord Rodrik,” she told Three-Tooth. “See to
my crew, once they’re done unloading Black Wind. They’ll bring
captives. I want them to have warm beds and a hot meal.”

“There’s cold beef in the kitchens. And mustard in a big stone jar,
from Oldtown.” The thought of that mustard made the old woman
smile. A single long brown tooth poked from her gums.
“That will not serve. We had a rough crossing. I want something
hot in their bellies.” Asha hooked a thumb through the studded belt
about her hips. “Lady Glover and the children should not want for
wood nor warmth. Put them in some tower, not the dungeons. The
babe is sick.”
“Babes are often sick. Most die, and folks are sorry. I shall ask my
lord where to put these wolf folk.”
She caught the woman’s nose between thumb and fore nger and
pinched. “You will do as I say. And if this babe dies, no one will be
sorrier than you.” Three-Tooth squealed and promised to obey, till
Asha let her loose and went to nd her uncle.
It was good to walk these halls again. Ten Towers had always felt
like home to Asha, more so than Pyke. Not one castle, ten castles
squashed together, she had thought, the rst time she had seen it. She
remembered breathless races up and down the steps and along
wallwalks and covered bridges, shing o the Long Stone Quay,
days and nights lost amongst her uncle’s wealth of books. His
grandfather’s grandfather had raised the castle, the newest on the
isles. Lord Theomore Harlaw had lost three sons in the cradle and
laid the blame upon the ooded cellars, damp stones, and festering
nitre of ancient Harlaw Hall. Ten Towers was airier, more
comfortable, better sited … but Lord Theomore was a changeable
man, as any of his wives might have testi ed. He’d had six of those,
as dissimilar as his ten towers.
The Book Tower was the fattest of the ten, octagonal in shape and
made with great blocks of hewn stone. The stair was built within
the thickness of the walls. Asha climbed quickly, to the fth story
and the room where her uncle read. Not that there are any rooms
where he does not read. Lord Rodrik was seldom seen without a book
in hand, be it in the privy, on the deck of his Sea Song, or whilst
holding audience. Asha had oft seen him reading on his high seat
beneath the silver scythes. He would listen to each case as it was

laid before him, pronounce his judgment … and read a bit whilst his
captain-of-guards went to bring in the next supplicant.
She found him hunched over a table by a window, surrounded by
parchment scrolls that might have come from Valyria before its
Doom, and heavy leather-bound books with bronze-and-iron hasps.
Beeswax candles as thick and tall as a man’s arm burned on either
side of where he sat, on ornate iron holders. Lord Rodrik Harlaw
was neither fat nor slim; neither tall nor short; neither ugly nor
handsome. His hair was brown, as were his eyes, though the short,
neat beard he favored had gone grey. All in all, he was an ordinary
man, distinguished only by his love of written words, which so
many ironborn found unmanly and perverse.
“Nuncle.” She closed the door behind her. “What reading was so
urgent that you leave your guests without a host?”
“Archmaester Marwyn’s Book of Lost Books.” He lifted his gaze
from the page to study her. “Hotho brought me a copy from
Oldtown. He has a daughter he would have me wed.” Lord Rodrik
tapped the book with a long nail. “See here? Marwyn claims to have
found three pages of Signs and Portents, visions written down by the
maiden daughter of Aenar Targaryen before the Doom came to
Valyria. Does Lanny know that you are here?”
“Not as yet.” Lanny was his pet name for her mother; only the
Reader called her that. “Let her rest.” Asha moved a stack of books
o a stool and seated herself. “Three-Tooth seems to have lost two
more of her teeth. Do you call her One-Tooth now?”
“I seldom call her at all. The woman frightens me. What hour is
it?” Lord Rodrik glanced out the window, at the moonlit sea. “Dark,
so soon? I had not noticed. You come late. We looked for you some
days ago.”
“The winds were against us, and I had captives to concern me.
Robett Glover’s wife and children. The youngest is still at the
breast, and Lady Glover’s milk dried up during our crossing. I had
no choice but to beach Black Wind upon the Stony Shore and send
my men out to nd a wet nurse. They found a goat instead. The girl
does not thrive. Is there a nursing mother in the village? Deepwood
is important to my plans.”

“Your plans must change. You come too late.”
“Late and hungry.” She stretched her long legs out beneath the
table and turned the pages of the nearest book, a septon’s discourse
on Maegor the Cruel’s war against the Poor Fellows. “Oh, and
thirsty too. A horn of ale would go down well, Nuncle.”
Lord Rodrik pursed his lips. “You know I do not permit food nor
drink in my library. The books—”
“—might su er harm.” Asha laughed.
Her uncle frowned. “You do like to provoke me.”
“Oh, don’t look so aggrieved. I have never met a man I didn’t
provoke, you should know that well enough by now. But enough of
me. You are well?”
He shrugged. “Well enough. My eyes grow weaker. I have sent to
Myr for a lens to help me read.”
“And how fares my aunt?”
Lord Rodrik sighed. “Still seven years my elder, and convinced
Ten Towers should be hers. Gwynesse grows forgetful, but that she
does not forget. She mourns for her dead husband as deeply as she
did the day he died, though she cannot always recall his name.”
“I am not certain she ever knew his name.” Asha closed the
septon’s book with a thump. “Was my father murdered?”
“So your mother believes.”
There were times when she would gladly have murdered him herself,
she thought. “And what does my nuncle believe?”
“Balon fell to his death when a rope bridge broke beneath him. A
storm was rising, and the bridge was swaying and twisting with
each gust of wind.” Rodrik shrugged. “Or so we are told. Your
mother had a bird from Maester Wendamyr.”
Asha slid her dirk out of its sheath and began to clean the dirt
from beneath her ngernails. “Three years away, and the Crow’s
Eye returns the very day my father dies.”
“The day after, we had heard. Silence was still out to sea when
Balon died, or so it is claimed. Even so, I will agree that Euron’s
return was … timely, shall we say?”
“That is not how I would say it.” Asha slammed the point of the
dirk into the table. “Where are my ships? I counted twoscore

longships moored below, not near enough to throw the Crow’s Eye
o my father’s chair.”
“I sent the summons. In your name, for the love I bear you and
your mother. House Harlaw has gathered. Stonetree as well, and
Volmark. Some Myres …”
“All from the isle of Harlaw … one isle out of seven. I saw one
lonely Botley banner in the hall, from Pyke. Where are the ships
from Saltcli e, from Orkwood, from the Wyks?”
“Baelor Blacktyde came from Blacktyde to consult with me, and
just as soon set sail again.” Lord Rodrik closed The Book of Lost
Books. “He is on Old Wyk by now.”
“Old Wyk?” Asha had feared he was about to say that they all had
gone to Pyke, to do homage to the Crow’s Eye. “Why Old Wyk?”
“I thought you would have heard. Aeron Damphair has called a
kingsmoot.”
Asha threw back her head and laughed. “The Drowned God must
have shoved a prickle sh up Uncle Aeron’s arse. A kingsmoot? Is this
some jape, or does he mean it truly?”
“The Damphair has not japed since he was drowned. And the
other priests have taken up the call. Blind Beron Blacktyde, Tarle
the Thrice-Drowned … even the Old Grey Gull has left that rock he
lives on to preach this kingsmoot all across Harlaw. The captains
are gathering on Old Wyk as we speak.”
Asha was astonished. “Has the Crow’s Eye agreed to attend this
holy farce and abide by its decision?”
“The Crow’s Eye does not con de in me. Since he summoned me
to Pyke to do him homage, I have had no word from Euron.”
A kingsmoot. This is something new … or rather, something very old.
“And my uncle Victarion? What does he make of the Damphair’s
notion?”
“Victarion was sent word of your father’s death. And of this
kingsmoot too, I do not doubt. Beyond that, I cannot say.”
Better a kingsmoot than a war. “I believe I’ll kiss the Damphair’s
smelly feet and pluck the seaweed from out between his toes.” Asha
wrenched loose her dirk and sheathed it once again. “A bloody
kingsmoot!”

“On Old Wyk,” con rmed Lord Rodrik. “Though I pray it is not
bloody. I have been consulting Haereg’s History of the Ironborn.
When last the salt kings and the rock kings met in kingsmoot, Urron
of Orkmont let his axemen loose among them, and Nagga’s ribs
turned red with gore. House Greyiron ruled unchosen for a
thousand years from that dark day, until the Andals came.”
“You must lend me Haereg’s book, Nuncle.” She would need to
learn all she could of kingsmoots before she reached Old Wyk.
“You may read it here. It is old and fragile.” He studied her,
frowning. “Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel,
for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has
happened before will perforce happen again, he said. I think of that
whenever I contemplate the Crow’s Eye. Euron Greyjoy sounds
queerly like Urron Greyiron to these old ears. I shall not go to Old
Wyk. Nor should you.”
Asha smiled. “And miss the rst kingsmoot called in … how long
has it been, Nuncle?”
“Four thousand years, if Haereg can be believed. Half that, if you
accept Maester Denestan’s arguments in Questions. Going to Old
Wyk serves no purpose. This dream of kingship is a madness in our
blood. I told your father so the rst time he rose, and it is more true
now than it was then. It’s land we need, not crowns. With Stannis
Baratheon and Tywin Lannister contending for the Iron Throne, we
have a rare chance to improve our lot. Let us take one side or the
other, help them to victory with our eets, and claim the lands we
need from a grateful king.”
“That might be worth some thought, once I sit the Seastone
Chair,” said Asha.
Her uncle sighed. “You will not want to hear this, Asha, but you
will not be chosen. No woman has ever ruled the ironborn.
Gwynesse is seven years my elder, but when our father died the Ten
Towers came to me. It will be the same for you. You are Balon’s
daughter, not his son. And you have three uncles.”
“Four.”
“Three kraken uncles. I do not count.”

“You do with me. So long as I have my nuncle of Ten Towers, I
have Harlaw.” Harlaw was not the largest of the Iron Islands, but it
was the richest and most populous, and Lord Rodrik’s power was
not to be despised. On Harlaw, Harlaw had no rival. The Volmarks
and Stonetrees had large holdings on the isle and boasted famous
captains and erce warriors of their own, but even the ercest bent
beneath the scythe. The Kennings and the Myres, once bitter foes,
had long ago been beaten down to vassals.
“My cousins do me fealty, and in war I should command their
swords and sails. In kingsmoot, though …” Lord Rodrik shook his
head. “Beneath the bones of Nagga every captain stands as equal.
Some may shout your name, I do not doubt it. But not enough. And
when the shouts ring out for Victarion or the Crow’s Eye, some of
those now drinking in my hall will join the rest. I say again, do not
sail into this storm. Your ght is hopeless.”
“No ght is hopeless till it has been fought. I have the best claim.
I am the heir of Balon’s body.”
“You are still a willful child. Think of your poor mother. You are
all that Lanny has left to her. I will put a torch to Black Wind if need
be, to keep you here.”
“What, and make me swim to Old Wyk?”
“A long cold swim, for a crown you cannot keep. Your father had
more courage than sense. The Old Way served the isles well when
we were one small kingdom amongst many, but Aegon’s Conquest
put an end to that. Balon refused to see what was plain before him.
The Old Way died with Black Harren and his sons.”
“I know that.” Asha had loved her father, but she did not delude
herself. Balon had been blind in some respects. A brave man but a
bad lord. “Does that mean we must live and die as thralls to the Iron
Throne? If there are rocks to starboard and a storm to port, a wise
captain steers a third course.”
“Show me this third course.”
“I shall … at my queensmoot. Nuncle, how can you even think of
not attending? This will be history, alive …”
“I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living
sort in blood.”

“Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?”
“How else? Though not till I’m done reading.” Lord Rodrik went
to the window. “You have not asked about your lady mother.”
I was afraid. “How is she?”
“Stronger. She may yet outlive us all. She will certainly outlive
you, if you persist in this folly. She eats more than she did when she
rst came here, and oft sleeps through the night.”
“Good.” In her nal years on Pyke, Lady Alannys could not sleep.
She would wander the halls at night with a candle, looking for her
sons. “Maron?” she would call shrilly. “Rodrik, where are you? Theon,
my baby, come to Mother.” Many a time Asha had watched the
maester draw splinters from her mother’s heels of a morning, after
she had crossed the swaying plank bridge to the Sea Tower on bare
feet. “I will see her in the morning.”
“She will ask for word of Theon.”
The Prince of Winterfell. “What have you told her?”
“Little and less. There was naught to tell.” He hesitated. “You are
certain that he is dead?”
“I am certain of nothing.”
“You found a body?”
“We found parts of many bodies. The wolves were there before
us … the four-legged sort, but they showed scant reverence for their
two-legged kin. The bones of the slain were scattered, cracked open
for their marrow. I confess, it was hard to know what happened
there. It seemed as though the northmen fought amongst
themselves.”
“Crows will ght over a dead man’s esh and kill each other for
his eyes.” Lord Rodrik stared across the sea, watching the play of
moonlight on the waves. “We had one king, then ve. Now all I see
are crows, squabbling over the corpse of Westeros.” He fastened the
shutters. “Do not go to Old Wyk, Asha. Stay with your mother. We
shall not have her long, I fear.”
Asha shifted in her seat. “My mother raised me to be bold. If I do
not go, I will spend the rest of my life wondering what might have
happened if I had.”

“If you do go, the rest of your life may be too short for
wondering.”
“Better that than ll the remainder of my days complaining that
the Seastone Chair by rights was mine. I am no Gwynesse.”
That made him wince. “Asha, my two tall sons fed the crabs of
Fair Isle. I am not like to wed again. Stay, and I shall name you heir
to the Ten Towers. Be content with that.”
“Ten Towers?” Would that I could. “Your cousins will not like
that. The Knight, old Sigfryd, Hotho Humpback …”
“They have lands and seats of their own.”
True enough. Damp, decaying Harlaw Hall belonged to old Sigfryd
Harlaw the Silverhair; humpbacked Hotho Harlaw had his seat at
the Tower of Glimmering, on a crag above the western coast. The
Knight, Ser Harras Harlaw, kept court at Grey Garden; Boremund
the Blue ruled atop Harridan Hill. But each was subject to Lord
Rodrik. “Boremund has three sons, Sigfryd Silverhair has grandsons,
and Hotho has ambitions,” Asha said. “They all mean to follow you,
even Sigfryd. That one intends to live forever.”
“The Knight will be the Lord of Harlaw after me,” her uncle said,
“but he can rule from Grey Garden as easily as from here. Do fealty
to him for the castle and Ser Harras will protect you.”
“I can protect myself. Nuncle, I am a kraken. Asha, of House
Greyjoy.” She pushed to her feet. “It’s my father’s seat I want, not
yours. Those scythes of yours look perilous. One could fall and slice
my head o . No, I’ll sit the Seastone Chair.”
“Then you are just another crow, screaming for carrion.” Rodrik
sat again behind his table. “Go. I wish to return to Archmaester
Marwyn and his search.”
“Let me know if he should nd another page.” Her uncle was her
uncle. He would never change. But he will come to Old Wyk, no
matter what he says.
By now her crew would be eating in the hall. Asha knew she
ought to join them, to speak of this gathering on Old Wyk and what
it meant for them. Her own men would be solidly behind her, but
she would need the rest as well, her Harlaw cousins, the Volmarks,
and the Stonetrees. Those are the ones I must win. Her victory at

Deepwood Motte would serve her in good stead, once her men
began to boast of it, as she knew they would. The crew of her Black
Wind took a perverse pride in the deeds of their woman captain.
Half of them loved her like a daughter, and other half wanted to
spread her legs, but either sort would die for her. And I for them, she
was thinking as she shouldered through the door at the bottom of
the steps, into the moonlit yard.
“Asha?” A shadow stepped out from behind the well.
Her hand went to her dirk at once … until the moonlight
transformed the dark shape into a man in a sealskin cloak. Another
ghost. “Tris. I’d thought to nd you in the hall.”
“I wanted to see you.”
“What part of me, I wonder?” She grinned. “Well, here I stand, all
grown up. Look all you like.”
“A woman.” He moved closer. “And beautiful.”
Tristifer Botley had lled out since last she’d seen him, but he had
the same unruly hair that she remembered, and eyes as large and
trusting as a seal’s. Sweet eyes, truly. That was the trouble with poor
Tristifer; he was too sweet for the Iron Islands. His face has grown
comely, she thought. As a boy Tris had been much troubled by
pimples. Asha had su ered the same a iction; perhaps that had
been what drew them together.
“I was sorry to hear about your father,” she told him.
“I grieve for yours.”
Why? Asha almost asked. It was Balon who’d sent the boy away
from Pyke, to be a ward of Baelor Blacktyde’s. “Is it true you are
Lord Botley now?”
“In name, at least. Harren died at Moat Cailin. One of the bog
devils shot him with a poisoned arrow. But I am the lord of nothing.
When my father denied his claim to the Seastone Chair, the Crow’s
Eye drowned him and made my uncles swear him fealty. Even after
that he gave half my father’s lands to Iron Holt. Lord Wynch was
the rst man to bend his knee and call him king.”
House Wynch was strong on Pyke, but Asha took care not to let
her dismay show. “Wynch never had your father’s courage.”

“Your uncle bought him,” Tris said. “The Silence returned with
holds full of treasure. Plate and pearls, emeralds and rubies,
sapphires big as eggs, bags of coin so heavy that no man can lift
them … the Crow’s Eye has been buying friends at every hand. My
uncle Germund calls himself Lord Botley now, and rules in
Lordsport as your uncle’s man.”
“You are the rightful Lord Botley,” she assured him. “Once I hold
the Seastone Chair, your father’s lands shall be restored.”
“If you like. It’s nought to me. You look so lovely in the
moonlight, Asha. A woman grown now, but I remember when you
were a skinny girl with a face all full of pimples.”
Why must they always mention the pimples? “I remember that as
well.” Though not as fondly as you do. Of the ve boys her mother
had brought to Pyke to foster after Ned Stark had taken her last
living son as hostage, Tris had been closest to Asha in age. He had
not been the rst boy she had ever kissed, but he was the rst to
undo the laces of her jerkin and slip a sweaty hand beneath to feel
her budding breasts.
I would have let him feel more than that if he’d been bold enough. Her
rst owering had come upon her during the war and wakened her
desire, but even before that Asha had been curious. He was there, he
was mine own age, and he was willing, that was all it was … that, and
the moon blood. Even so, she’d called it love, till Tris began to go on
about the children she would bear him; a dozen sons at least, and
oh, some daughters too. “I don’t want to have a dozen sons,” she
had told him, appalled. “I want to have adventures.” Not long after,
Maester Qalen found them at their play, and young Tristifer Botley
was sent away to Blacktyde.
“I wrote you letters,” he said, “but Maester Joseran would not
send them. Once I gave a stag to an oarsman on a trader bound for
Lordsport, who promised to put my letter in your hands.”
“Your oarsman winkled you and threw your letter in the sea.”
“I feared as much. They never gave me your letters either.”
I wrote none. In truth, she had been relieved when Tris was sent
away. By then his fumblings had begun to bore her. That was not

something he would care to hear, however. “Aeron Damphair has
called a kingsmoot. Will you come and speak for me?”
“I will go anywhere with you, but … Lord Blacktyde says this
kingsmoot is a dangerous folly. He thinks your uncle will descend
on them and kill them all, as Urron did.”
He’s mad enough. “He lacks the strength.”
“You do not know his strength. He’s been gathering men on Pyke.
Orkwood of Orkmont brought him twenty longships, and Pinchface
Jon Myre a dozen. Left-Hand Lucas Codd is with them. And Harren
Half-Hoare, the Red Oarsman, Kemmett Pyke the Bastard, Rodrik
Freeborn, Torwold Browntooth …”
“Men of small account.” Asha knew them, every one. “The sons of
salt wives, the grandsons of thralls. The Codds … do you know their
words?”
“Though All Men Do Despise Us,” Tris said, “but if they catch you in
those nets of theirs, you’ll be as dead as if they had been
dragonlords. And there’s worse. The Crow’s Eye brought back
monsters from the east … aye, and wizards too.”
“Nuncle always had a fondness for freaks and fools,” said Asha.
“My father used to ght with him about it. Let the wizards call
upon their gods. The Damphair will call on ours, and drown them.
Will I have your voice at the queensmoot, Tris?”
“You shall have all of me. I am your man, forever. Asha, I would
wed you. Your lady mother has given her consent.”
She sti ed a groan. You might have asked me rst … though you
might not have liked the answer half so well.
“I am no second son now,” he went on. “I am the rightful Lord
Botley, as you said yourself. And you are—”
“What I am will be settled on Old Wyk. Tris, we are no longer
children fumbling at each other and trying to see what ts where.
You think you want to wed me, but you don’t.”
“I do. All I dream about is you. Asha, I swear upon the bones of
Nagga, I have never touched another woman.”
“Go touch one … or two, or ten. I have touched more men than I
can count. Some with my lips, more with my axe.” She had
surrendered her virtue at six-and-ten, to a beautiful blond-haired

sailor on a trading galley up from Lys. He only knew six words of
the Common Tongue, but “fuck” was one of them—the very word
she’d hoped to hear. Afterward, Asha had the sense to nd a woods
witch, who showed her how to brew moon tea to keep her belly
at.
Botley blinked, as if he did not quite understand what she had
said. “You … I thought you would wait. Why …” He rubbed his
mouth. “Asha, were you forced?”
“So forced I tore his tunic. You do not want to wed me, take my
word on that. You are a sweet boy and always were, but I am no
sweet girl. If we wed, soon enough you’d come to hate me.”
“Never. Asha, I have ached for you.”
She had heard enough of this. A sickly mother, a murdered father,
and a plague of uncles were enough for any woman to contend
with; she did not require a lovesick puppy too. “Find a brothel, Tris.
They’ll cure you of that ache.”
“I could never …” Tristifer shook his head. “You and I were
meant to be, Asha. I have always known you would be my wife, and
the mother of my sons.” He seized her upper arm.
In a blink her dirk was at his throat. “Take your hand away or
you won’t live long enough to breed a son. Now.” When he did, she
lowered the blade. “You want a woman, well and good. I’ll put one
in your bed tonight. Pretend she’s me, if that will give you pleasure,
but do not presume to grab at me again. I am your queen, not your
wife. Remember that.” Asha sheathed her dirk and left him standing
there, with a fat drop of blood slowly creeping down his neck, black
in the pale light of the moon.

CERSEI

Oh, I pray the Seven will not let it rain upon the king’s wedding,”
Jocelyn Swyft said as she laced up the queen’s gown.
“No one wants rain,” said Cersei. For herself, she wanted sleet
and ice, howling winds, thunder to shake the very stones of the Red
Keep. She wanted a storm to match her rage. To Jocelyn she said,
“Tighter. Cinch it tighter, you simpering little fool.”
It was the wedding that enraged her, though the slow-witted
Swyft girl made a safer target. Tommen’s hold upon the Iron Throne
was not secure enough for her to risk o ending Highgarden. Not so
long as Stannis Baratheon held Dragonstone and Storm’s End, so
long as Riverrun continued in de ance, so long as ironmen prowled
the seas like wolves. So Jocelyn must needs eat the meal Cersei
would sooner have served to Margaery Tyrell and her hideous
wrinkled grandmother.
To break her fast the queen sent to the kitchens for two boiled
eggs, a loaf of bread, and a pot of honey. But when she cracked the
rst egg and found a bloody half-formed chick inside, her stomach
roiled. “Take this away and bring me hot spiced wine,” she told
Senelle. The chill in the air was settling in her bones, and she had a
long nasty day ahead of her.
Nor did Jaime help her mood when he turned up all in white and
still unshaven, to tell her how he meant to keep her son from being
poisoned. “I will have men in the kitchens watching as each dish is

prepared,” he said. “Ser Addam’s gold cloaks will escort the servants
as they bring the food to table, to make certain no tampering takes
place along the way. Ser Boros will be tasting every course before
Tommen puts a bite into his mouth. And if all that should fail,
Maester Ballabar will be seated in the back of the hall, with purges
and antidotes for twenty common poisons on his person. Tommen
will be safe, I promise you.”
“Safe.” The word tasted bitter on her tongue. Jaime did not
understand. No one understood. Only Melara had been in the tent to
hear the old hag’s croaking threats, and Melara was long dead.
“Tyrion will not kill the same way twice. He is too cunning for that.
He could be under the oor even now, listening to every word we
say and making plans to open Tommen’s throat.”
“Suppose he was,” said Jaime. “Whatever plans he makes, he will
still be small and stunted. Tommen will be surrounded by the nest
knights in Westeros. The Kingsguard will protect him.”
Cersei glanced at where the sleeve of her brother’s white silk
tunic had been pinned up over his stump. “I remember how well
they guarded Jo rey, these splendid knights of yours. I want you to
remain with Tommen all night, is that understood?”
“I will have a guardsman outside his door.”
She seized his arm. “Not a guardsman. You. And inside his
bedchamber.”
“In case Tyrion crawls out of the hearth? He won’t.”
“So you say. Will you tell me that you found all the hidden
tunnels in these walls?” They both knew better. “I will not have
Tommen alone with Margaery, not for so much as half a heartbeat.”
“They will not be alone. Her cousins will be with them.”
“As will you. I command it, in the king’s name.” Cersei had not
wanted Tommen and his wife to share a bed at all, but the Tyrells
had insisted. “Husband and wife should sleep together,” the Queen
of Thorns had said, “even if they do no more than sleep. His Grace’s
bed is big enough for two, surely.” Lady Alerie had echoed her
good-mother. “Let the children warm each other in the night. It will
bring them closer. Margaery oft shares her blankets with her

cousins. They sing and play games and whisper secrets to each other
when the candles are snu ed out.”
“How delightful,” Cersei had said. “Let them continue, by all
means. In the Maidenvault.”
“I am sure Her Grace knows best,” Lady Olenna had said to Lady
Alerie. “She is the boy’s own mother, after all, of that we are all
sure. And surely we can agree about the wedding night? A man
should not sleep apart from his wife on the night of their wedding.
It is ill luck for their marriage if they do.”
Someday I will teach you the meaning of “ill luck,” the queen had
vowed. “Margaery may share Tommen’s bedchamber for that one
night,” she had been forced to say. “No longer.”
“Your Grace is so gracious,” the Queen of Thorns had replied, and
everyone had exchanged smiles.
Cersei’s ngers were digging into Jaime’s arm hard enough to
leave bruises. “I need eyes inside that room,” she said.
“To see what?” he said. “There can be no danger of a
consummation. Tommen is much too young.”
“And Ossifer Plumm was much too dead, but that did not stop
him fathering a child, did it?”
Her brother looked lost. “Who was Ossifer Plumm? Was he Lord
Philip’s father, or … who?”
He is near as ignorant as Robert. All his wits were in his sword hand.
“Forget Plumm, just remember what I told you. Swear to me that
you will stay by Tommen’s side until the sun comes up.”
“As you command,” he said, as if her fears were groundless. “Do
you still mean to go ahead and burn the Tower of the Hand?”
“After the feast.” It was the only part of the day’s festivities that
Cersei thought she might enjoy. “Our lord father was murdered in
that tower. I cannot bear to look at it. If the gods are good, the re
may smoke a few rats from the rubble.”
Jaime rolled his eyes. “Tyrion, you mean.”
“Him, and Lord Varys, and this gaoler.”
“If any of them were hiding in the tower, we would have found
them. I’ve had a small army going at it with picks and hammers.

We’ve knocked through walls and ripped up oors and uncovered
half a hundred secret passages.”
“And for all you know there may be half a hundred more.” Some
of the secret crawlways had turned out to be so small that Jaime
had needed pages and stableboys to explore them. A passage to the
black cells had been found, and a stone well that seemed to have no
bottom. They had found a chamber full of skulls and yellowed
bones, and four sacks of tarnished silver coins from the reign of the
rst King Viserys. They had found a thousand rats as well … but
neither Tyrion nor Varys had been amongst them, and Jaime had
nally insisted on putting an end to the search. One boy had gotten
stuck in a narrow passage and had to be pulled out by his feet,
shrieking. Another fell down a shaft and broke his legs. And two
guardsmen vanished exploring a side tunnel. Some of the other
guards swore they could hear them calling faintly through the
stone, but when Jaime’s men tore down the wall they found only
earth and rubble on the far side. “The Imp is small and cunning. He
may still be in the walls. If he is, the re will smoke him out.”
“Even if Tyrion were still hiding in the castle, he won’t be in the
Tower of the Hand. We’ve reduced it to a shell.”
“Would that we could do the same to the rest of this foul castle,”
said Cersei. “After the war I mean to build a new palace beyond the
river.” She had dreamed of it the night before last, a magni cent
white castle surrounded by woods and gardens, long leagues from
the stinks and noise of King’s Landing. “This city is a cesspit. For
half a groat I would move the court to Lannisport and rule the
realm from Casterly Rock.”
“That would be an even greater folly than burning the Tower of
the Hand. So long as Tommen sits the Iron Throne, the realm sees
him as the true king. Hide him under the Rock and he becomes just
another claimant to the throne, no di erent than Stannis.”
“I am aware of that,” the queen said sharply. “I said that I wanted
to move the court to Lannisport, not that I would. Were you always
this slow, or did losing a hand make you stupid?”
Jaime ignored that. “If these ames spread beyond the tower, you
may end up burning down the castle whether you mean to or not.

Wild re is treacherous.”
“Lord Hallyne has assured me that his pyromancers can control
the re.” The Guild of Alchemists had been brewing fresh wild re
for a fortnight. “Let all of King’s Landing see the ames. It will be a
lesson to our enemies.”
“Now you sound like Aerys.”
Her nostrils ared. “Guard your tongue, ser.”
“I love you too, sweet sister.”
How could I ever have loved that wretched creature? she wondered
after he had gone. He was your twin, your shadow, your other half,
another voice whispered. Once, perhaps, she thought. No longer. He
has become a stranger to me.
Compared to the magni cence of Jo rey’s nuptials, the wedding
of King Tommen was a modest a air, and small. No one wanted
another lavish ceremony, least of all the queen, and no one wanted
to pay for one, least of all the Tyrells. So the young king took
Margaery Tyrell to wife in the Red Keep’s royal sept, with fewer
than a hundred guests looking on in place of the thousands who had
seen his brother joined to the same woman.
The bride was fair and gay and beautiful, the groom still babyfaced and plump. He recited his vows in a high, childish voice,
promising his love and devotion to Mace Tyrell’s twice-widowed
daughter. Margaery wore the same gown she had worn to marry
Jo rey, an airy confection of sheer ivory silk, Myrish lace, and seed
pearls. Cersei herself was still in black, as a sign of mourning for
her murdered rstborn. His widow might be pleased to laugh and
drink and dance and put all memory of Jo aside, but his mother
would not forget him so easily.
This is wrong, she thought. It is too soon. A year, two years, that
would have been time enough. Highgarden should have been content
with a betrothal. Cersei stared back to where Mace Tyrell stood
between his wife and mother. You forced me into this travesty of a
wedding, my lord, and I shall not soon forget it.
When it was time for the changing of the cloaks, the bride sank
gracefully to her knees and Tommen covered her with the heavy
cloth-of-gold monstrosity that Robert had cloaked Cersei in on their

own wedding day, with the crowned stag of Baratheon worked
upon its back in beads of onyx. Cersei had wanted to use the ne
red silk cloak Jo rey had used. “It was the cloak my lord father
used when he wed my lady mother,” she explained to the Tyrells,
but the Queen of Thorns had balked her in that as well. “That old
thing?” the crone had said. “It looks a bit threadbare to me … and
dare I say, unlucky? And wouldn’t a stag be more tting for King
Robert’s trueborn son? In my day a bride donned her husband’s
colors, not his lady mother’s.”
Thanks to Stannis and his lthy letter, there were already too
many rumors concerning Tommen’s parentage. Cersei dared not fan
the res by insisting that he drape his bride in Lannister crimson, so
she yielded as gracefully as she could. But the sight of all that gold
and onyx still lled her with resentment. The more we give these
Tyrells, the more they demand of us.
When all the vows were spoken, the king and his new queen
stepped outside the sept to accept congratulations. “Westeros has
two queens now, and the young one is as beautiful as the old one,”
boomed Lyle Crakehall, an oaf of a knight who oft reminded Cersei
of her late and unlamented husband. She could have slapped him.
Gyles Rosby made to kiss her hand, and only succeeded in coughing
on her ngers. Lord Redwyne kissed her on one cheek and Mace
Tyrell on both. Grand Maester Pycelle told Cersei that she had not
lost a son, but rather gained a daughter. At least she was spared
Lady Tanda’s tearful embraces. None of the Stokeworth women had
appeared, and for that much the queen was grateful.
Amongst the last was Kevan Lannister. “I understand you mean to
leave us for another wedding,” the queen said to him.
“Hardstone has cleared the broken men from Darry castle,” he
replied. “Lancel’s bride awaits us there.”
“Will your lady wife be joining you for the nuptials?”
“The riverlands are still too dangerous. Vargo Hoat’s scum remain
abroad, and Beric Dondarrion has been hanging Freys. Is it true that
Sandor Clegane has joined him?”
How does he know that? “Some say. Reports are confused.” The
bird had come last night, from a septry on an island hard by the

mouth of the Trident. The nearby town of Saltpans had been
savagely raided by a band of outlaws, and some of the survivors
claimed a roaring brute in a hound’s head helm was amongst the
raiders. Supposedly he’d killed a dozen men and raped a girl of
twelve. “No doubt Lancel will be eager to hunt down Clegane and
Lord Beric both, to restore the king’s peace to the riverlands.”
Ser Kevan stared into her eyes for a moment. “My son is not the
man to deal with Sandor Clegane.”
We agree on that much, at least. “His father might be.”
Her uncle’s mouth grew hard. “If my service is not required at the
Rock …”
Your service was required here. Cersei had named her cousin
Damion Lannister her castellan for the Rock, and another cousin,
Ser Daven Lannister, the Warden of the West. Insolence has its price,
Uncle. “Bring us Sandor’s head, and I know His Grace will be most
grateful. Jo may have liked the man, but Tommen was always
afraid of him … with good reason, it would seem.”
“When a dog goes bad, the fault lies with his master,” Ser Kevan
said. Then he turned and walked away.
Jaime escorted her to the Small Hall, where the feast was being
readied. “I blame you for all this,” she whispered as they walked.
“Let them wed, you said. Margaery should be mourning Jo rey, not
marrying his brother. She should be as sick with grief as I am. I do
not believe she is a maid. Renly had a cock, didn’t he? He was
Robert’s brother, he surely had a cock. If that disgusting old crone
thinks that I will allow my son to—”
“You will be rid of Lady Olenna soon enough,” Jaime broke in
quietly. “She’s returning to Highgarden on the morrow.”
“So she says.” Cersei did not trust any Tyrell promise.
“She’s leaving,” he insisted. “Mace is taking half the Tyrell
strength to Storm’s End, and the other half will be going back to the
Reach with Ser Garlan to make good his claim on Brightwater. A
few more days, and the only roses left in King’s Landing will be
Margaery and her ladies and a few guardsmen.”
“And Ser Loras. Or have you forgotten your Sworn Brother?”
“Ser Loras is a knight of the Kingsguard.”

“Ser Loras is so Tyrell he pisses rosewater. He should never have
been given a white cloak.”
“He would not have been my choice, I’ll grant you. No one
troubled to consult me. Loras will do well enough, I think. Once a
man puts on that cloak, it changes him.”
“It certainly changed you, and not for the better.”
“I love you too, sweet sister.” He held the door for her, and
walked her to the high table and her seat beside the king. Margaery
was on the other side of Tommen, in the place of honor. When she
entered, arm in arm with the little king, she made a point of
stopping to kiss Cersei on the cheeks and throw her arms around
her. “Your Grace,” the girl said, bold as polished brass, “I feel as
though I have a second mother now. I pray that we shall be very
close, united by our love for your sweet son.”
“I loved both my sons.”
“Jo rey is in my prayers as well,” said Margaery. “I loved him
dearly, though I never had the chance to know him.”
Liar, the queen thought. If you had loved him even for an instant,
you would not have been in such unseemly haste to wed his brother. His
crown was all you ever wanted. For half a groat she would have
slapped the blushing bride right there upon the dais, in view of half
the court.
Like the service, the wedding feast was modest. Lady Alerie had
made all the arrangements; Cersei had not had the stomach to face
that daunting task again, after the way Jo rey’s wedding had
ended. Only seven courses were served. Butterbumps and Moon Boy
entertained the guests between dishes, and musicians played as they
ate. They listened to pipers and ddlers, a lute and a ute, a high
harp. The only singer was some favorite of Lady Margaery’s, a
dashing young cock-a-whoop clad all in shades of azure who called
himself the Blue Bard. He sang a few love songs and retired. “What
a disappointment,” Lady Olenna complained loudly. “I was hoping
for ‘The Rains of Castamere.’ ”
Whenever Cersei looked at the old crone, the face of Maggy the
Frog seemed to oat before her eyes, wrinkled and terrible and
wise. All old women look alike, she tried to tell herself, that’s all it is.

In truth, the bent-back sorceress had looked nothing like the Queen
of Thorns, yet somehow the sight of Lady Olenna’s nasty little smile
was enough to put her back in Maggy’s tent again. She could still
remember the smell of it, redolent with queer eastern spices, and
the softness of Maggy’s gums as she sucked the blood from Cersei’s
nger. Queen you shall be, the old woman had promised, with her
lips still wet and red and glistening, until there comes another,
younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold
dear.
Cersei glanced past Tommen, to where Margaery sat laughing
with her father. She is pretty enough, she had to admit, but most of
that is youth. Even peasant girls are pretty at a certain age, when they
are still fresh and innocent and unspoiled, and most of them have the
same brown hair and brown eyes as she does. Only a fool would ever
claim she was more beautiful than I. The world was full of fools,
however. So was her son’s court.
Her mood was not improved when Mace Tyrell arose to lead the
toasts. He raised a golden goblet high, smiling at his pretty little
daughter, and in a booming voice said, “To the king and queen!”
The other sheep all baaaaaaed along with him. “The king and
queen!” they cried, smashing their cups together. “The king and
queen!” She had no choice but to drink along with them, all the time
wishing that the guests had but a single face, so she could throw her
wine into their eyes and remind them that she was the true queen.
The only one of Tyrell’s lickspittles who seemed to remember her at
all was Paxter Redwyne, who rose to make his own toast, swaying
slightly. “To both our queens!” he chirruped. “To the young queen and
the old!”
Cersei drank several cups of wine and pushed her food around a
golden plate. Jaime ate even less, and seldom deigned to occupy his
seat upon the dais. He is as anxious as I am, the queen realized as she
watched him prowl the hall, twitching aside the tapestries with his
good hand to assure himself that no one was hiding behind them.
There were Lannister spearmen posted around the building, she
knew. Ser Osmund Kettleblack guarded one door, Ser Meryn Trant
the other. Balon Swann stood behind the king’s chair, Loras Tyrell

behind the queen’s. No swords had been allowed inside the feast
save for those the white knights bore.
My son is safe, Cersei told herself. No harm can come to him, not
here, not now. Yet every time she looked at Tommen, she saw
Jo rey clawing at his throat. And when the boy began to cough the
queen’s heart stopped beating for a moment. She knocked aside a
serving girl in her haste to reach him.
“Only a little wine that went down the wrong way,” Margaery
Tyrell assured her, smiling. She took Tommen’s hand in her own
and kissed his ngers. “My little love needs to take smaller sips.
See, you scared your lady mother half to death.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Tommen said, abashed.
It was more than Cersei could stand. I cannot let them see me cry,
she thought, when she felt the tears welling in her eyes. She walked
past Ser Meryn Trant and out into the back passage. Alone beneath
a tallow candle, she allowed herself a shuddering sob, then another.
A woman may weep, but not a queen.
“Your Grace?” said a voice behind her. “Do I intrude?”
It was a woman’s voice, avored with the accents of the east. For
an instant she feared that Maggy the Frog was speaking to her from
the grave. But it was only Merryweather’s wife, the sloe-eyed
beauty Lord Orton had wed during his exile and fetched home with
him to Longtable. “The Small Hall is so stu y,” Cersei heard herself
say. “The smoke was making my eyes water.”
“And mine, Your Grace.” Lady Merryweather was as tall as the
queen, but dark instead of fair, raven-haired and olive-skinned and
younger by a decade. She o ered the queen a pale blue
handkerchief of silk and lace. “I have a son as well. I know that I
shall weep rivers on the day he weds.”
Cersei wiped her cheeks, furious that she had let her tears be
seen. “My thanks,” she said sti y.
“Your Grace, I …” The Myrish woman lowered her voice. “There
is something you must know. Your maid is bought and paid for. She
tells Lady Margaery everything you do.”
“Senelle?” Sudden fury twisted in the queen’s belly. Was there no
one she could trust? “You are certain of this?”

“Have her followed. Margaery never meets with her directly. Her
cousins are her ravens, they bring her messages. Sometimes Elinor,
sometimes Alla, sometimes Megga. All of them are as close to
Margaery as sisters. They meet in the sept and pretend to pray. Put
your own man in the gallery on the morrow, and he will see Senelle
whispering to Megga beneath the altar of the Maiden.”
“If this is true, why tell me? You are one of Margaery’s
companions. Why would you betray her?” Cersei had learned
suspicion at her father’s knee; this could well be some trap, a lie
meant to sow discord between the lion and the rose.
“Longtable may be sworn to Highgarden,” the woman replied,
with a toss of her black hair, “but I am of Myr, and my loyalty is to
my husband and my son. I want all that is best for them.”
“I see.” In the closeness of the passage, the queen could smell the
other woman’s perfume, a musky scent that spoke of moss and earth
and wild owers. Under it, she smelled ambition. She gave testimony
at Tyrion’s trial, Cersei recalled suddenly. She saw the Imp put the
poison in Jo ’s cup and was not afraid to say so. “I shall look into
this,” she promised. “If what you say is true, you will be rewarded.”
And if you’ve lied to me, I’ll have your tongue, and your lord husband’s
lands and gold as well.
“Your Grace is kind. And beautiful.” Lady Merryweather smiled.
Her teeth were white, her lips full and dark.
When the queen returned to the Small Hall, she found her brother
pacing restlessly. “It was only a gulp of wine that went down the
wrong way. Though it startled me as well.”
“My belly is such a knot that I cannot eat,” she growled at him.
“The wine tastes of bile. This wedding was a mistake.”
“This wedding was necessary. The boy is safe.”
“Fool. No one who wears a crown is ever safe.” She looked about
the hall. Mace Tyrell laughed amongst his knights. Lords Redwyne
and Rowan were talking furtively. Ser Kevan sat brooding over his
wine at the back of the hall, whilst Lancel whispered something to a
septon. Senelle was moving down the table, lling the cups of the
bride’s cousins with wine as red as blood. Grand Maester Pycelle
had fallen asleep. There is no one I can rely upon, not even Jaime, she

realized grimly. I will need to sweep them all away and surround the
king with mine own people.
Later, after sweets and nuts and cheese had been served and
cleared away, Margaery and Tommen began the dancing, looking
more than a bit ridiculous as they whirled about the oor. The
Tyrell girl stood a good foot and a half taller than her little
husband, and Tommen was a clumsy dancer at best, with none of
Jo rey’s easy grace. He did his earnest best, though, and seemed
oblivious to the spectacle he was making of himself. And no sooner
was Maid Margaery done with him than her cousins swooped in,
one after the other, insisting that His Grace must dance with them
as well. They will have him stumbling and shu ing like a fool by the
time they’re done, Cersei thought resentfully as she watched. Half the
court will be laughing at him behind his back.
Whilst Alla, Elinor, and Megga took their turns with Tommen,
Margaery took a turn around the oor with her father, then another
with her brother Loras. The Knight of Flowers was in white silk,
with a belt of golden roses about his waist and a jade rose fastening
his cloak. They could be twins, Cersei thought as she watched them.
Ser Loras was a year older than his sister, but they had the same big
brown eyes, the same thick brown hair falling in lazy ringlets to
their shoulders, the same smooth unblemished skin. A ripe crop of
pimples would teach them some humility. Loras was taller and had a
few wisps of soft brown fuzz on his face, and Margaery had a
woman’s shape, but elsewise they were more alike than she and
Jaime. That annoyed her too.
Her own twin interrupted her musings. “Would Your Grace honor
her white knight with a dance?”
She gave him a withering look. “And have you fumbling at me
with that stump? No. I will let you ll my wine cup for me, though.
If you think you can manage it without spilling.”
“A cripple like me? Not likely.” He moved away and made
another circuit of the hall. She had to ll her own cup.
Cersei refused Mace Tyrell as well, and later Lancel. The others
took the hint, and no one else approached her. Our fast friends and
loyal lords. She could not even trust the westermen, her father’s

sworn swords and bannermen. Not if her own uncle was conspiring
with her enemies …
Margaery was dancing with her cousin Alla, Megga with Ser
Tallad the Tall. The other cousin, Elinor, was sharing a cup of wine
with the handsome young Bastard of Driftmark, Aurane Waters. It
was not the rst time the queen had made note of Waters, a lean
young man with grey-green eyes and long silver-gold hair. The rst
time she had seen him, for half a heartbeat she had almost thought
Rhaegar Targaryen had returned from the ashes. It is his hair, she
told herself. He is not half as comely as Rhaegar was. His face is too
narrow, and he has that cleft in his chin. The Velaryons came from old
Valyrian stock, however, and some had the same silvery hair as the
dragonkings of old.
Tommen returned to his seat to nibble at an applecake. Her
uncle’s place was empty. The queen nally found him in a corner,
talking intently with Mace Tyrell’s son Garlan. What do they have to
talk about? The Reach might call Ser Garlan gallant, but she trusted
him no more than Margaery or Loras. She had not forgotten the
gold coin that Qyburn had discovered beneath the gaoler’s chamber
pot. A golden hand from Highgarden. And Margaery is spying on me.
When Senelle appeared to ll her wine cup, the queen had to resist
an urge to take her by the throat and throttle her. Do not presume to
smile at me, you treacherous little bitch. You will be begging me for
mercy before I’m done with you.
“I think Her Grace has had enough wine for one night,” she heard
her brother Jaime say.
No, the queen thought. All the wine in the world would not be
enough to see me through this wedding. She rose so fast she almost
fell. Jaime caught her by the arm and steadied her. She wrenched
free and clapped her hands together. The music died, the voices
stilled. “Lords and ladies,” Cersei called out loudly, “if you will be so
good as to come outside with me, we shall light a candle to
celebrate the union of Highgarden and Casterly Rock, and a new
age of peace and plenty for our Seven Kingdoms.”
Dark and forlorn stood the Tower of the Hand, with only gaping
holes where oaken doors and shuttered windows had once been. Yet

even ruined and slighted, it loomed above the outer ward. As the
wedding guests led out of the Small Hall, they passed beneath its
shadow. When Cersei looked up she saw the tower’s crenellated
battlements gnawing at a hunter’s moon, and wondered for a
moment how many Hands of how many kings had made their home
there over the past three centuries.
A hundred yards from the tower, she took a breath to stop her
head from spinning. “Lord Hallyne! You may commence.”
Hallyne the pyromancer said “Hmmmmmm” and waved the torch
he was holding, and the archers on the walls bent their bows and
sent a dozen aming arrows through the gaping windows.
The tower went up with a whoosh. In half a heartbeat its interior
was alive with light, red, yellow, orange … and green, an ominous
dark green, the color of bile and jade and pyromancer’s piss. “The
substance,” the alchemists named it, but common folk called it
wild re. Fifty pots had been placed inside the Tower of the Hand,
along with logs and casks of pitch and the greater part of the
worldly possessions of a dwarf named Tyrion Lannister.
The queen could feel the heat of those green ames. The
pyromancers said that only three things burned hotter than their
substance: dragon ame, the res beneath the earth, and the summer
sun. Some of the ladies gasped when the rst ames appeared in the
windows, licking up the outer walls like long green tongues. Others
cheered, and made toasts.
It is beautiful, she thought, as beautiful as Jo rey, when they laid
him in my arms. No man had ever made her feel as good as she had
felt when he took her nipple in his mouth to nurse.
Tommen stared wide-eyed at the res, as fascinated as he was
frightened, until Margaery whispered something in his ear that
made him laugh. Some of the knights began to make wagers on how
long it would be before the tower collapsed. Lord Hallyne stood
humming to himself and rocking on his heels.
Cersei thought of all the King’s Hands that she had known
through the years: Owen Merryweather, Jon Connington, Qarlton
Chelsted, Jon Arryn, Eddard Stark, her brother Tyrion. And her
father, Lord Tywin Lannister, her father most of all. All of them are

burning now, she told herself, savoring the thought. They are dead
and burning, every one, with all their plots and schemes and betrayals. It
is my day now. It is my castle and my kingdom.
The Tower of the Hand gave out a sudden groan, so loud that all
the conversation stopped abruptly. Stone cracked and split, and part
of the upper battlements fell away and landed with a crash that
shook the hill, sending up a cloud of dust and smoke. As fresh air
rushed in through the broken masonry, the re surged upward.
Green ames leapt into the sky and whirled around each other.
Tommen shied away, till Margaery took his hand and said, “Look,
the ames are dancing. Just as we did, my love.”
“They are.” His voice was lled with wonder. “Mother, look,
they’re dancing.”
“I see them. Lord Hallyne, how long will the res burn?”
“All night, Your Grace.”
“It makes a pretty candle, I grant you,” said Lady Olenna Tyrell,
leaning on her cane between Left and Right. “Bright enough to see
us safe to sleep, I think. Old bones grow weary, and these young
ones have had enough excitement for one night. It is time the king
and queen were put to bed.”
“Yes.” Cersei beckoned to Jaime. “Lord Commander, escort His
Grace and his little queen to their pillows, if you would.”
“As you command. And you as well?”
“No need.” Cersei felt too alive for sleep. The wild re was
cleansing her, burning away all her rage and fear, lling her with
resolve. “The ames are so pretty. I want to watch them for a
while.”
Jaime hesitated. “You should not stay alone.”
“I will not be alone. Ser Osmund can remain with me and keep
me safe. Your Sworn Brother.”
“If it please Your Grace,” said Kettleblack.
“It does.” Cersei slid her arm through his, and side by side they
watched the re rage.

THE SOILED KNIGHT

The night was unseasonably cool, even for autumn. A brisk wet
wind was swirling down the alleys, stirring up the day’s dust. A
north wind, and full of chill. Ser Arys Oakheart pulled up his hood to
cover his face. It would not do for him to be recognized. A fortnight
past, a trader had been butchered in the shadow city, a harmless
man who’d come to Dorne for fruit and found death instead of
dates. His only crime was being from King’s Landing.
The mob would nd a sterner foe in me. He would almost have
welcomed an attack. His hand drifted down to brush lightly over
the hilt on the longsword that hung half-hidden amongst the folds of
his layered linen robes, the outer with its turquoise stripes and rows
of golden suns, and the lighter orange one beneath. The Dornish
garb was comfortable, but his father would have been aghast had he
lived to see his son so dressed. He was a man of the Reach, and the
Dornish were his ancient foes, as the tapestries at Old Oak bore
witness. Arys only had to close his eyes to see them still. Lord
Edgerran the Open-Handed, seated in splendor with the heads of a
hundred Dornishmen piled round his feet. The Three Leaves in the
Prince’s Pass, pierced by Dornish spears, Alester sounding his
warhorn with his last breath. Ser Olyvar the Green Oak all in white,
dying at the side of the Young Dragon. Dorne is no t place for any
Oakheart.

Even before Prince Oberyn had died, the knight had been ill at
ease whenever he left the grounds of Sunspear to walk the alleys of
the shadow city. He could feel eyes upon him everywhere he went,
small black Dornish eyes regarding him with thinly veiled hostility.
The shopkeepers did their best to cheat him at every turn, and
sometimes he wondered whether the taverners were spitting in his
drinks. Once a group of ragged boys began pelting him with stones,
until he drew his sword and ran them o . The Red Viper’s death had
in amed the Dornish even more, though the streets had quieted a
bit since Prince Doran had con ned the Sand Snakes to a tower.
Even so, to wear his white cloak openly in the shadow city would
be asking for attack. He had brought three with him: two of wool,
one light and one heavy, the third of ne white silk. He felt naked
without one hanging from his shoulders.
Better naked than dead, he told himself. I am a Kingsguard still, even
uncloaked. She must respect that. I must make her understand. He
should never have let himself be drawn into this, but the singer said
that love can make a fool of any man.
Sunspear’s shadow city oft seemed deserted in the heat of the
day, when only buzzing ies moved down the dusty streets, but
once evening fell the same streets came to life. Ser Arys heard faint
music drifting through louvered windows as he passed below, and
somewhere nger drums were beating out the quick rhythm of a
spear dance, giving the night a pulse. Where three alleys met
beneath the second of the Winding Walls, a pillow girl called down
from a balcony. She was dressed in jewels and oil. He took a look at
her, hunched his shoulders, and pushed on, into the teeth of the
wind. We men are so weak. Our bodies betray even the noblest of us.
He thought of King Baelor the Blessed, who would fast to the point
of fainting to tame the lusts that shamed him. Must he do the same?
A short man stood in an arched doorway grilling chunks of snake
over a brazier, turning them with wooden tongs as they crisped.
The pungent smell of his sauces brought tears to the knight’s eyes.
The best snake sauce had a drop of venom in it, he had heard, along
with mustard seeds and dragon peppers. Myrcella had taken to
Dornish food as quick as she had to her Dornish prince, and from

time to time Ser Arys would try a dish or two to please her. The
food seared his mouth and made him gasp for wine, and burned
even worse coming out than it did going in. His little princess loved
it, though.
He had left her in her chambers, bent over a gaming table
opposite Prince Trystane, pushing ornate pieces across squares of
jade and carnelian and lapis lazuli. Myrcella’s full lips had been
slightly parted, her green eyes narrowed with concentration.
Cyvasse, the game was called. It had come to the Planky Town on a
trading galley from Volantis, and the orphans had spread it up and
down the Greenblood. The Dornish court was mad for it.
Ser Arys just found it maddening. There were ten di erent pieces,
each with its own attributes and powers, and the board would
change from game to game, depending on how the players arrayed
their home squares. Prince Trystane had taken to the game at once,
and Myrcella had learned it so she could play with him. She was not
quite one-and-ten, her betrothed three-and-ten; even so, she had
been winning more oft than not of late. Trystane did not seem to
mind. The two children could not have looked more di erent, him
with his olive skin and straight black hair, her pale as milk with a
mop of golden curls; light and dark, like Queen Cersei and King
Robert. He prayed Myrcella would nd more joy in her Dornish boy
than her mother had found with her storm lord.
It made him feel uneasy to leave her, though she should be safe
enough within the castle. There were only two doors that gave
access to Myrcella’s chambers in the Tower of the Sun, and Ser Arys
kept two men on each; Lannister household guards, men who had
come with them from King’s Landing, battle-tested, tough, and loyal
to the bone. Myrcella had her maids and Septa Eglantine as well,
and Prince Trystane was attended by his sworn shield, Ser Gascoyne
of the Greenblood. No one will trouble her, he told himself, and in a
fortnight we shall be safely away.
Prince Doran had promised as much. Though Arys had been
shocked to see how aged and in rm the Dornish prince appeared, he
did not doubt the prince’s word. “I am sorry I could not see you
until now, or meet Princess Myrcella,” Martell had said when Arys

was admitted to his solar, “but I trust that my daughter Arianne has
made you welcome here in Dorne, ser.”
“She has, my prince,” he’d answered, and prayed that no blush
would dare betray him.
“Ours is a harsh land, and poor, yet not without its beauties. It
grieves us that you have seen no more of Dorne than Sunspear, but I
fear that neither you nor your princess would be safe beyond these
walls. We Dornish are a hot-blooded people, quick to anger and
slow to forgive. It would gladden my heart if I could assure you
that the Sand Snakes were alone in wanting war, but I will not tell
you lies, ser. You have heard my smallfolk in the streets, crying out
for me to call my spears. Half my lords agree with them, I fear.”
“And you, my prince?” the knight had dared to ask.
“My mother taught me long ago that only madmen ght wars
they cannot win.” If the bluntness of the question had o ended him,
Prince Doran hid it well. “Yet this peace is fragile … as fragile as
your princess.”
“Only a beast would harm a little girl.”
“My sister Elia had a little girl as well. Her name was Rhaenys.
She was a princess too.” The prince sighed. “Those who would
plunge a knife into Princess Myrcella do not bear her any malice, no
more than Ser Amory Lorch did when he killed Rhaenys, if indeed
he did. They seek only to force my hand. For if Myrcella should be
slain in Dorne whilst under my protection, who would believe my
denials?”
“No one shall ever harm Myrcella whilst I live.”
“A noble vow,” said Doran Martell with a faint smile, “but you
are only one man, ser. I had hoped that imprisoning my headstrong
nieces would help to calm the waters, but all we’ve done is drive
the roaches back beneath the rushes. Every night I hear them
whispering and sharpening their knives.”
He is afraid, Ser Arys realized then. Look, his hand is shaking. The
Prince of Dorne is terri ed. Words failed him.
“My apologies, ser,” Prince Doran said. “I am frail and failing,
and sometimes … Sunspear wearies me, with its noise and dirt and
smells. As soon as my duty allows, I mean to return to the Water

Gardens. When I do I shall take Princess Myrcella with me.” Before
the knight could protest, the prince raised a hand, its knuckles red
and swollen. “You shall go as well. And her septa, her maids, her
guards. Sunspear’s walls are strong, but beneath them is the shadow
city. Even within the castle hundreds come and go each day. The
Gardens are my haven. Prince Maron raised them as a gift for his
Targaryen bride, to mark Dorne’s marriage to the Iron Throne.
Autumn is a lovely season there … hot days, cool nights, the salt
breeze o the sea, the fountains and the pools. And there are other
children, boys and girls of high and gentle birth. Myrcella will have
friends of her own age to play with. She will not be lonely.”
“As you say.” The prince’s words pounded in his head. She will be
safe there. Only why had Doran Martell urged him not to write
King’s Landing about the move? Myrcella will be safest if no one
knows just where she is. Ser Arys had agreed, but what choice did he
have? He was a knight of the Kingsguard, but only one man for all
that, just as the prince had said.
The alley opened suddenly onto a moonlit courtyard. Past the
candlemaker’s shop, she wrote, a gate and a short ight of exterior
steps. He pushed through the gate and climbed the worn steps to an
unmarked door. Should I knock? He pushed the door open instead,
and found himself in a large, dim room with a low ceiling, lit by a
pair of scented candles that ickered in niches cut from the thick
earthen walls. He saw patterned Myrish carpets underneath his
sandals, a tapestry upon one wall, a bed. “My lady?” he called.
“Where are you?”
“Here.” She stepped out from the shadow behind the door.
An ornate snake coiled around her right forearm, its copper and
gold scales glimmering when she moved. It was all she wore.
No, he meant to tell her, I only came to tell you I must go, but when
he saw her shining in the candlelight he seemed to lose the power
of speech. His throat felt as dry as the Dornish sands. Silent he
stood, drinking in the glories of her body, the hollow of her throat,
the round ripe breasts with their huge dark nipples, the lush curves
at waist and hip. And then somehow he was holding her, and she
was pulling o his robes. When she reached his undertunic she

seized it by the shoulders and ripped the silk down to his navel, but
Arys was past caring. Her skin was smooth beneath his ngers, as
warm to the touch as sand baked by the Dornish sun. He raised her
head and found her lips. Her mouth opened under his, and her
breasts lled his hands. He felt her nipples sti en as his thumbs
brushed over them. Her hair was black and thick and smelled of
orchids, a dark and earthy smell that made him so hard it almost
hurt.
“Touch me, ser,” the woman whispered in his ear. His hand
slipped down her rounded belly to nd the sweet wet place beneath
the thicket of black hair. “Yes, there,” she murmured as he slipped a
nger up inside her. She made a whimpering sound, drew him to
the bed, and pushed him down. “More, oh more, yes, sweet, my
knight, my knight, my sweet white knight, yes you, you, I want
you.” Her hands guided him inside her, then slipped around his back
to pull him closer. “Deeper,” she whispered. “Yes, oh.” When she
wrapped her legs around him, they felt as strong as steel. Her nails
raked his back as he drove into her, again and again and again, until
she screamed and arched her back beneath him. As she did, her
ngers found his nipples, pinching till he spent his seed within her. I
could die now, happy, the knight thought, and for a dozen heartbeats
at least he was at peace.
He did not die.
His desire was as deep and boundless as the sea, but when the
tide receded, the rocks of shame and guilt thrust up as sharp as
ever. Sometimes the waves would cover them, but they remained
beneath the waters, hard and black and slimy. What am I doing? he
asked himself. I am a knight of the Kingsguard. He rolled o of her to
sprawl staring at the ceiling. A great crack ran across it, from one
wall to the other. He had not noticed that before, no more than he
had noticed the picture on the tapestry, a scene of Nymeria and her
ten thousand ships. I see only her. A dragon might have been peering in
the window, and I would never have seen anything but her breasts, her
face, her smile.
“There is wine,” she murmured against his neck. She slid a hand
across his chest. “Are you thirsty?”

“No.” He rolled away, and sat on the edge of the bed. The room
was hot, and yet he shivered.
“You bleed,” she said. “I scratched too hard.”
When she touched his back, he inched as if her ngers were
a re. “Don’t.” Naked, he stood. “No more.”
“I have balm. For the scratches.”
But none for my shame. “The scratches are nothing. Forgive me,
my lady, I must go …”
“So soon?” She had a husky voice, a wide mouth made for
whispers, full lips ripe for kissing. Her hair tumbled down across
her bare shoulders to the tops of her full breasts, black and thick. It
curled in big soft lazy ringlets. Even the hair upon her mound was
soft and curly. “Stay with me tonight, ser. I still have much to teach
you.”
“I have learned too much from you already.”
“You seemed glad enough for the lessons at the time, ser. Are you
certain you are not o to some other bed, some other woman? Tell
me who she is. I will ght her for you, bare-breasted, knife to
knife.” She smiled. “Unless she is a Sand Snake. If so, we can share
you. I love my cousins well.”
“You know I have no other woman. Only … duty.”
She rolled onto one elbow to look up at him, her big black eyes
shining in the candlelight. “That poxy bitch? I know her. Dry as dust
between the legs, and her kisses leave you bleeding. Let duty sleep
alone for once, and stay with me tonight.”
“My place is at the palace.”
She sighed. “With your other princess. You will make me jealous.
I think you love her more than me. The maid is much too young for
you. You need a woman, not a little girl, but I can play the innocent
if that excites you.”
“You should not say such things.” Remember, she is Dornish. In the
Reach men said it was the food that made Dornishmen so hottempered and their women so wild and wanton. Fiery peppers and
strange spices heat the blood, she cannot help herself. “I love Myrcella
as a daughter.” He could never have a daughter of his own, no more

than he could have a wife. He had a ne white cloak instead. “We
are going to the Water Gardens.”
“Eventually,” she agreed, “though with my father, everything
takes four times as long as it should. If he says he means to leave
upon the morrow, you will certainly set out within a fortnight. You
will be lonely in the Gardens, I promise you. And where is the brave
young gallant who said he wished to spend the rest of his life in my
arms?”
“I was drunk when I said that.”
“You’d had three cups of watered wine.”
“I was drunk on you. It had been ten years since … I never
touched a woman until you, not since I took the white. I never
knew what love could be, yet now … I am afraid.”
“What would frighten my white knight?”
“I fear for my honor,” he said, “and for yours.”
“I can tend to my own honor.” She touched a nger to her breast,
drawing it slowly round her nipple. “And to my own pleasures, if
need be. I am a woman grown.”
She was that, beyond a doubt. Seeing her there upon the
featherbed, smiling that wicked smile, toying with her
breast … was there ever a woman with nipples so large or so
responsive? He could hardly look at them without wanting to grab
them, to suckle them until they were hard and wet and shiny …
He looked away. His smallclothes were strewn on the carpets.
The knight bent to pick them up.
“Your hands are shaking,” she pointed out. “They would sooner
be caressing me, I think. Must you be in such haste to don your
clothes, ser? I prefer you as you are. Abed, unclad, we are our
truest selves, a man and a woman, lovers, one esh, as close as two
can be. Our clothes make us di erent people. I would sooner be
esh and blood than silks and jewels, and you … you are not your
white cloak, ser.”
“I am,” Ser Arys said. “I am my cloak. And this must end, for your
sake as well as mine. If we should be discovered …”
“Men will think you fortunate.”

“Men will think me an oathbreaker. What if someone were to go
to your father and tell him how I’d dishonored you?”
“My father is many things, but no one has ever said he was a fool.
The Bastard of Godsgrace had my maidenhead when we were both
fourteen. Do you know what my father did when he learned of it?”
She gathered the bedclothes in her st and pulled them up under
her chin, to hide her nakedness. “Nothing. My father is very good at
doing nothing. He calls it thinking. Tell me true, ser, is it my
dishonor that concerns you, or your own?”
“Both.” Her accusation stung. “That is why this must be our last
time.”
“So you have said before.”
I did, and meant it too. But I am weak, else I would not be here now.
He could not tell her that; she was the sort of woman who despised
weakness, he could sense that. She has more of her uncle in her than
her father. He turned away and found his striped silk undertunic on a
chair. She had ripped the fabric to the navel when she pulled it
down over his arms. “This is ruined,” he complained. “How can I
wear it now?”
“Backwards,” she suggested. “Once you don your robes, no one
will see the tear. Perhaps your little princess will sew it up for you.
Or shall I send a new one to the Water Gardens?”
“Send me no gifts.” That would only draw attention. He shook
out the undertunic and pulled it over his head, backwards. The silk
felt cool against his skin, though it clung to his back where she’d
scratched him. It would serve to get him back to the palace, at the
least. “All I want is to end this … this …”
“Is that gallant, ser? You hurt me. I begin to think that all your
words of love were lies.”
I could never lie to you. Ser Arys felt as if she’d slapped him. “Why
else would I have forsaken all my honor, but for love? When I am
with you I … I can scarcely think, you are all I ever dreamt of,
but …”
“Words are wind. If you love me, do not leave me.”
“I swore a vow …”

“… not to wed or father children. Well, I have drunk my moon
tea, and you know I cannot marry you.” She smiled. “Though I
might be persuaded to keep you for my paramour.”
“Now you mock me.”
“Perhaps a little. Do you think you are the only Kingsguard who
ever loved a woman?”
“There have always been men who found it easier to speak vows
than to keep them,” he admitted. Ser Boros Blount was no stranger
to the Street of Silk, and Ser Preston Green eld used to call at a
certain draper’s house whenever the draper was away, but Arys
would not shame his Sworn Brothers by speaking of their failings.
“Ser Terrence Toyne was found abed with his king’s mistress,” he
said instead. “ ’Twas love, he swore, but it cost his life and hers, and
brought about the downfall of his House and the death of the
noblest knight who ever lived.”
“Yes, and what of Lucamore the Lusty, with his three wives and
sixteen children? The song always makes me laugh.”
“The truth is not so funny. He was never called Lucamore the
Lusty whilst he lived. His name was Ser Lucamore Strong, and his
whole life was a lie. When his deceit was discovered, his own Sworn
Brothers gelded him, and the Old King sent him to the Wall. Those
sixteen children were left weeping. He was no true knight, no more
than Terrence Toyne …”
“And the Dragonknight?” She ung the bedclothes aside and
swung her legs to the oor. “The noblest knight who ever lived, you
said, and he took his queen to bed and got her with child.”
“I will not believe that,” he said, o ended. “The tale of Prince
Aemon’s treason with Queen Naerys was only that, a tale, a lie his
brother told when he wished to set his trueborn son aside in favor
of his bastard. Aegon was not called the Unworthy without cause.”
He found his swordbelt and buckled it around his waist. Though it
looked queer against the silken Dornish undertunic, the familiar
weight of longsword and dagger reminded him of who and what he
was. “I will not be remembered as Ser Arys the Unworthy,” he
declared. “I will not soil my cloak.”

“Yes,” she said, “that ne white cloak. You forget, my great-uncle
wore the same cloak. He died when I was little, yet I still remember
him. He was as tall as a tower and used to tickle me until I could
not breathe for laughing.”
“I never had the honor to know Prince Lewyn,” Ser Arys said,
“but all agree that he was a great knight.”
“A great knight with a paramour. She is an old woman now, but
she was a rare beauty in her youth, men say.”
Prince Lewyn? That tale Ser Arys had not heard. It shocked him.
Terrence Toyne’s treason and the deceits of Lucamore the Lusty
were recorded in the White Book, but there was no hint of a woman
on Prince Lewyn’s page.
“My uncle always said that it was the sword in a man’s hand that
determined his worth, not the one between his legs,” she went on,
“so spare me all your pious talk of soiled cloaks. It is not our love
that has dishonored you, it is the monsters you have served and the
brutes you’ve called your brothers.”
That cut too close to the bone. “Robert was no monster.”
“He climbed onto his throne over the corpses of children,” she
said, “though I will grant you he was no Jo rey.”
Jo rey. He had been a handsome lad, tall and strong for his age,
but that was all the good that could be said of him. It still shamed
Ser Arys to remember all the times he’d struck that poor Stark girl
at the boy’s command. When Tyrion had chosen him to go with
Myrcella to Dorne, he lit a candle to the Warrior in thanks. “Jo rey
is dead, poisoned by the Imp.” He would never have thought the
dwarf capable of such enormity. “Tommen is king now, and he is
not his brother.”
“Nor is he his sister.”
It was true. Tommen was a good-hearted little man who always
tried his best, but the last time Ser Arys saw him he had been
weeping on the quay. Myrcella never shed a tear, though it was she
who was leaving hearth and home to seal an alliance with her
maidenhood. The truth was, the princess was braver than her
brother, and brighter and more con dent as well. Her wits were
quicker, her courtesies more polished. Nothing ever daunted her,

not even Jo rey. The women are the strong ones, truly. He was
thinking not only of Myrcella, but of her mother and his own, of the
Queen of Thorns, of the Red Viper’s pretty, deadly Sand Snakes.
And of Princess Arianne Martell, her most of all. “I will not say that
you are wrong.” His voice was hoarse.
“Will not? Cannot! Myrcella is more t for rule …”
“A son comes before a daughter.”
“Why? What god has made it so? I am my father’s heir. Should I
give up my rights to my brothers?”
“You twist my words. I never said … Dorne is di erent. The
Seven Kingdoms have never had a ruling queen.”
“The rst Viserys intended his daughter Rhaenyra to follow him,
do you deny it? But as the king lay dying the Lord Commander of
his Kingsguard decided that it should be otherwise.”
Ser Criston Cole. Criston the Kingmaker had set brother against
sister and divided the Kingsguard against itself, bringing on the
terrible war the singers named the Dance of the Dragons. Some
claimed he acted from ambition, for Prince Aegon was more
tractable than his willful older sister. Others allowed him nobler
motives, and argued that he was defending ancient Andal custom. A
few whispered that Ser Criston had been Princess Rhaenyra’s lover
before he took the white and wanted vengeance on the woman who
had spurned him. “The Kingmaker wrought grave harm,” Ser Arys
said, “and gravely did he pay for it, but …”
“… but perhaps the Seven sent you here so that one white knight
might make right what another set awry. You do know that when
my father returns to the Water Gardens he plans to take Myrcella
with him?”
“To keep her safe from those who would do her harm.”
“No. To keep her away from those who’d seek to crown her.
Prince Oberyn Viper would have placed the crown upon her head
himself if he had lived, but my father lacks the courage.” She got to
her feet. “You say you love the girl as you would a daughter of your
own blood. Would you let your daughter be despoiled of her rights
and locked away in prison?”
“The Water Gardens are no prison,” he protested feebly.

“A prison does not have fountains and g trees, is that what you
think? Yet once the girl is there, she will not be allowed to leave.
No more than you will. Hotah will see to that. You do not know
him as I do. He is terrible when aroused.”
Ser Arys frowned. The big Norvoshi captain with the scarred face
had always made him feel profoundly uneasy. They say he sleeps with
that great axe beside him. “What would you have me do?”
“No more than you have sworn. Protect Myrcella with your life.
Defend her … and her rights. Set a crown upon her head.”
“I swore an oath!”
“To Jo rey, not to Tommen.”
“Aye, but Tommen is a good-hearted boy. He will be a better king
than Jo rey.”
“But not better than Myrcella. She loves the boy as well. I know
she will not let him come to any harm. Storm’s End is his by rights,
since Lord Renly left no heir and Lord Stannis is attainted. In time,
Casterly Rock will pass to the boy as well, through his lady mother.
He will be as great a lord as any in the realm … but Myrcella by
rights should sit the Iron Throne.”
“The law … I do not know …”
“I do.” When she stood, the long black tangle of her hair fell
down to the small of her back. “Aegon the Dragon made the
Kingsguard and its vows, but what one king does another can undo,
or change. Formerly the Kingsguard served for life, yet Jo rey
dismissed Ser Barristan so his dog could have a cloak. Myrcella
would want you to be happy, and she is fond of me as well. She will
give us leave to marry if we ask.” Arianne put her arms around him
and laid her face against his chest. The top of her head came to just
beneath his chin. “You can have me and your white cloak both, if
that is what you want.”
She is tearing me apart. “You know I do, but …”
“I am a princess of Dorne,” she said in her husky voice, “and it is
not meet that you should make me beg.”
Ser Arys could smell the perfume in her hair and feel her heart
beating as she pressed against him. His body was responding to her
closeness, and he did not doubt that she could feel it too. When he

put his arms upon her shoulders, he realized she was trembling.
“Arianne? My princess? What is it, my love?”
“Must I say it, ser? I am afraid. You call me love, yet you refuse
me, when I have most desperate need of you. Is it so wrong of me
to want a knight to keep me safe?”
He had never heard her sound so vulnerable. “No,” he said, “but
you have your father’s guards to keep you safe, why—”
“It is my father’s guards I fear.” For a moment she sounded
younger than Myrcella. “It was my father’s guards who dragged my
sweet cousins o in chains.”
“Not in chains. I have heard that they have every comfort.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “Have you seen them? He will not permit
me to see them, did you know that?”
“They were speaking treason, fomenting war …”
“Loreza is six, Dorea eight. What wars could they foment? Yet my
father has imprisoned them with their sisters. You have seen him.
Fear makes even strong men do things they might never do
otherwise, and my father was never strong. Arys, my heart, hear me
for the love you say you bear me. I have never been as fearless as
my cousins, for I was made with weaker seed, but Tyene and I are
of an age and have been close as sisters since we were little girls.
We have no secrets between us. If she can be imprisoned, so can I,
and for the same cause … this of Myrcella.”
“Your father would never do that.”
“You do not know my father. I have been disappointing him since
I rst arrived in this world without a cock. Half a dozen times he
has tried to marry me to toothless greybeards, each more
contemptible than the last. He never commanded me to wed them, I
grant you, but the o ers alone prove how little he regards me.”
“Even so, you are his heir.”
“Am I?”
“He left you to rule in Sunspear when he took himself o to his
Water Gardens, did he not?”
“To rule? No. He left his cousin Ser Manfrey as castellan, old blind
Ricasso as seneschal, his baili s to collect duties and taxes for his
treasurer Alyse Ladybright to count, his shari s to police the

shadow city, his justiciars to sit in judgment, and Maester Myles to
deal with any letters not requiring the prince’s own attention.
Above them all he placed the Red Viper. My charge was feasts and
frolics, and the entertainment of distinguished guests. Oberyn
would visit the Water Gardens twice a fortnight. Me, he summoned
twice a year. I am not the heir my father wants, he has made that
plain. Our laws constrain him, but he would sooner have my
brother follow him, I know it.”
“Your brother?” Ser Arys put his hand beneath her chin and raised
her head, the better to look her in the eyes. “You cannot mean
Trystane, he is just a boy.”
“Not Trys. Quentyn.” Her eyes were bold and black as sin,
un inching. “I have known the truth since I was four-and-ten, since
the day that I went to my father’s solar to give him a good night
kiss, and found him gone. My mother had sent for him, I learned
later. He’d left a candle burning. When I went to blow it out, I
found a letter lying incomplete beside it, a letter to my brother
Quentyn, o at Yronwood. My father told Quentyn that he must do
all that his maester and his master-at-arms required of him, because
‘one day you will sit where I sit and rule all Dorne, and a ruler must be
strong of mind and body.’ ” A tear crept down Arianne’s soft cheek.
“My father’s words, written in his own hand. They burned
themselves into my memory. I cried myself to sleep that night, and
many nights thereafter.”
Ser Arys had yet to meet Quentyn Martell. The prince had been
fostered by Lord Yronwood from a tender age, had served him as a
page, then a squire, had even taken knighthood at his hands in
preference to the Red Viper’s. If I were a father, I would want my son
to follow me as well, he thought, but he could hear the hurt in her
voice, and he knew that if he said what he was thinking, he would
lose her. “Perhaps you misunderstood,” he said. “You were only a
child. Perhaps the prince was only saying that to encourage your
brother to be more diligent.”
“You think so? Then tell me, where is Quentyn now?”
“The prince is with Lord Yronwood’s host in the Boneway,” Ser
Arys said cautiously. That was what Sunspear’s ancient castellan had

told him, when rst he came to Dorne. The maester with the silky
beard said the same.
Arianne demurred. “So my father wishes us to believe, but I have
friends who tell me otherwise. My brother has crossed the narrow
sea in secret, posing as a common merchant. Why?”
“How would I know? There could be a hundred reasons.”
“Or one. Are you aware that the Golden Company has broken its
contract with Myr?”
“Sellswords break their contracts all the time.”
“Not the Golden Company. Our word is good as gold has been their
boast since the days of Bittersteel. Myr is on the point of war with
Lys and Tyrosh. Why break a contract that o ered them the
prospect of good wages and good plunder?”
“Perhaps Lys o ered them better wages. Or Tyrosh.”
“No,” she said. “I would believe it of any of the other free
companies, yes. Most of them would change sides for half a groat.
The Golden Company is di erent. A brotherhood of exiles and the
sons of exiles, united by the dream of Bittersteel. It’s home they
want, as much as gold. Lord Yronwood knows that as well as I do.
His forebears rode with Bittersteel during three of the Blackfyre
Rebellions.” She took Ser Arys by the hand, and wove her ngers
through his own. “Have you ever seen the arms of House Toland of
Ghost Hill?”
He had to think a moment. “A dragon eating its own tail?”
“The dragon is time. It has no beginning and no ending, so all
things come round again. Anders Yronwood is Criston Cole reborn.
He whispers in my brother’s ear that he should rule after my father,
that it is not right for men to kneel to women … that Arianne
especially is un t to rule, being the willful wanton that she is.” She
tossed her hair de antly. “So your two princesses share a common
cause, ser … and they share as well a knight who claims to love
them both, but will not ght for them.”
“I will.” Ser Arys sank to one knee. “Myrcella is the elder, and
better suited to the crown. Who will defend her rights if not her
Kingsguard? My sword, my life, my honor, all belong to her … and
to you, my heart’s delight. I swear, no man will steal your

birthright whilst I still have the strength to lift a sword. I am yours.
What would you have of me?”
“All.” She knelt to kiss his lips. “All, my love, my true love, my
sweet love, and forever. But rst …”
“Ask, and it is yours.”
“… Myrcella.”

BRIENNE

The stone wall was old and crumbling, but the sight of it across the
eld made the hairs on Brienne’s neck stand up.
That was where the archers hid and slew poor Cleos Frey, she
thought … but half a mile farther on she passed another wall that
looked much like the rst and found herself uncertain. The rutted
road turned and twisted, and the bare brown trees looked di erent
from the green ones she remembered. Had she ridden past the place
where Ser Jaime had snatched his cousin’s sword from its scabbard?
Where were the woods they’d fought in? The stream where they’d
splashed and slashed at one another until they drew the Brave
Companions down upon them?
“My lady? Ser?” Podrick never seemed certain what to call her.
“What are you looking for?”
Ghosts. “A wall I rode by once. It does not matter.” It was when Ser
Jaime still had both his hands. How I loathed him, with all his taunts and
smiles. “Stay quiet, Podrick. There may still be outlaws in these
woods.”
The boy looked at the bare brown trees, the wet leaves, the
muddy road ahead. “I have a longsword. I can ght.”
Not well enough. Brienne did not doubt the boy’s courage, only his
training. A squire he might be, in name at least, but the men he’d
squired for had served him ill.

She had gotten his story out of him in ts and starts on the road
from Duskendale. His was a lesser branch of House Payne, an
impoverished o shoot sprouted from the loins of a younger son. His
father had spent his life squiring for richer cousins and had sired
Podrick upon a chandler’s daughter he’d wed before going o to die
in the Greyjoy Rebellion. His mother had abandoned him with one
of those cousins when he was four, so she could run after a
wandering singer who had put another baby in her belly. Podrick
did not remember what she looked like. Ser Cedric Payne had been
the nearest thing to a parent the boy had ever known, though from
his stammered stories it seemed to Brienne that cousin Cedric had
treated Podrick more like a servant than a son. When Casterly Rock
called its banners, the knight had taken him along to tend his horse
and clean his mail. Then Ser Cedric had been slain in the riverlands
whilst ghting in Lord Tywin’s host.
Far from home, alone, and penniless, the boy had attached
himself to a fat hedge knight named Ser Lorimer the Belly, who was
part of Lord Le ord’s contingent, charged with protecting the
baggage train. “The boys who guard the foodstu s always eat the
best,” Ser Lorimer liked to say, until he was discovered with a
salted ham he’d stolen from Lord Tywin’s personal stores. Tywin
Lannister chose to hang him as a lesson to other looters. Podrick
had shared the ham and might have shared the rope as well, but his
name had saved him. Ser Kevan Lannister took charge of him, and
sometime later sent the boy to squire for his nephew Tyrion.
Ser Cedric had taught Podrick how to groom a horse and check
his shoes for stones, and Ser Lorimer had taught him how to steal,
but neither had given him much training with a sword. The Imp at
least had dispatched him to the Red Keep’s master-at-arms when
they came to court. But during the bread riots Ser Aron Santagar
had been amongst those slain, and that had been the end of
Podrick’s training.
Brienne cut two wooden swords from fallen branches to get a
sense of Podrick’s skills. The boy was slow of speech but not of
hand, she was pleased to learn. Though fearless and attentive, he
was also underfed and skinny, and not near strong enough. If he had

survived the Battle of the Blackwater as he claimed, it could only be
because no one thought him worth the killing. “You may call
yourself a squire,” she told him, “but I’ve seen pages half your age
who could have beat you bloody. If you stay with me, you’ll go to
sleep with blisters on your hands and bruises on your arms most
every night, and you’ll be so sti and sore you’ll hardly sleep. You
don’t want that.”
“I do,” the boy insisted. “I want that. The bruises and the blisters.
I mean, I don’t, but I do. Ser. My lady.”
So far he had been true to his word, and Brienne had been true to
hers. Podrick had not complained. Every time he raised a new
blister on his sword hand, he felt the need to show it to her proudly.
He took good care of their horses too. He is still no squire, she
reminded herself, but I am no knight, no matter how many times he
calls me “ser.” She would have sent him on his way, but he had
nowhere to go. Besides, though Podrick said he did not know where
Sansa Stark had gone, it might be that he knew more than he
realized. Some chance remark, half-remembered, might hold the
key to Brienne’s quest.
“Ser? My lady?” Podrick pointed. “There’s a cart ahead.”
Brienne saw it: a wooden oxcart, two-wheeled and high-sided. A
man and a woman were laboring in the traces, pulling the cart
along the ruts toward Maidenpool. Farm folk, by the look of them.
“Slowly now,” she told the boy. “They may take us for outlaws. Say
no more than you must and be courteous.”
“I will, ser. Be courteous. My lady.” The boy seemed almost
pleased by the prospect of being taken for an outlaw.
The farm folk watched them warily as they came trotting up, but
once Brienne made it plain that she meant them no harm, they let
her ride beside them. “We used to have an ox,” the old man told her
as they made their way through the weed-choked elds, lakes of
soft mud, and burnt and blackened trees, “but the wolves made o
with him.” His face was red from the e ort of pulling the cart.
“They took o our daughter too and had their way with her, but she
come wandering back after the battle down at Duskendale. The ox
never did. The wolves ate him, I expect.”

The woman had little to add. She was younger than the man by
twenty years, but never spoke a word, only looked at Brienne the
same way she might have looked at a two-headed calf. The Maid of
Tarth had seen such eyes before. Lady Stark had been kind to her,
but most women were just as cruel as men. She could not have said
which she found most hurtful, the pretty girls with their waspish
tongues and brittle laughter or the cold-eyed ladies who hid their
disdain behind a mask of courtesy. And common women could be
worse than either. “Maidenpool was all in ruins when last I saw it,”
she said. “The gates were broken and half the town was burned.”
“They rebuilt it some. This Tarly, he’s a hard man, but a braver
lord than Mooton. There’s still outlaws in the woods, but not so
many as there was. Tarly hunted down the worst o’ them and
shortened them with that big sword o’ his.” He turned his head and
spat. “You’ve seen no outlaws on the road?”
“None.” Not this time. The farther they had come from
Duskendale, the emptier the road had been. The only travelers
they’d glimpsed had melted away into the woods before they
reached them, save for a big, bearded septon they met walking
south with twoscore footsore followers. Such inns as they passed
had either been sacked and abandoned or turned into armed camps.
Yesterday they had encountered one of Lord Randyll’s patrols,
bristling with longbows and lances. The horsemen had surrounded
them while their captain questioned Brienne, but in the end he’d let
them continue on their way. “Be wary, woman. The next men you
meet may not be as honest as my lads. The Hound has crossed the
Trident with a hundred outlaws, and it’s said they’re raping every
wench they come upon and cutting o their teats for trophies.”
Brienne felt obligated to pass along that warning to the farmer
and his wife. The man nodded as she told him, but when she was
done he spat again and said, “Dogs and wolves and lions, may the
Others take them all. These outlaws won’t dare come too near to
Maidenpool. Not so long as Lord Tarly has the rule there.”
Brienne knew Lord Randyll Tarly from her time with King Renly’s
host. Though she could not nd it in herself to like the man, she
could not forget the debt she owed him either. If the gods are good,

we will pass Maidenpool before he knows that I am there. “The town
will be restored to Lord Mooton once the ghting’s done,” she told
the farmer. “His lordship has been pardoned by the king.”
“Pardoned?” The old man laughed. “For what? Sitting on his arse
in his bloody castle? He sent men o to Riverrun to ght but never
went himself. Lions sacked his town, then wolves, then sellswords,
and his lordship just sat safe behind his walls. His brother ’ud never
have hid like that. Ser Myles was bold as brass till that Robert killed
him.”
More ghosts, Brienne thought. “I am looking for my sister, a fair
maid of three-and-ten. Perhaps you’ve seen her?”
“I’ve not seen no maids, fair nor foul.”
No one has. But she had to keep asking.
“Mooton’s daughter, she’s a maid,” the man went on. “Till the
bedding, anyways. These eggs, they’re for her wedding. Her and
Tarly’s son. The cooks will need eggs for cakes.”
“They will.” Lord Tarly’s son. Young Dickon’s to be wed. She tried
to recall how old he was; eight or ten, she thought. Brienne had
been betrothed at seven, to a boy three years her senior, Lord
Caron’s younger son, a shy boy with a mole above his lip. They had
only met the once, on the occasion of their betrothal. Two years
later he was dead, carried o by the same chill that took Lord and
Lady Caron and their daughters. Had he lived, they would have
been wed within a year of her rst owering, and her whole life
would have been di erent. She would not be here now, dressed in
man’s mail and carrying a sword, hunting for a dead woman’s child.
More like she’d be at Nightsong, swaddling a child of her own and
nursing another. It was not a new thought for Brienne. It always
made her feel a little sad, but a little relieved as well.
The sun was half-hidden behind a bank of clouds when they
emerged from the blackened trees to nd Maidenpool before them,
with the deep waters of the bay beyond. The town’s gates had been
rebuilt and strengthened, Brienne saw at once, and crossbowmen
walked its pink stone walls once more. Above the gatehouse oated
King Tommen’s royal banner, a black stag and golden lion
combatant on a eld divided gold and crimson. Other banners

displayed the Tarly huntsman, but the red salmon of House Mooton
ew only from their castle on its hill.
At the portcullis they came upon a dozen guards armed with
halberds. Their badges marked them for soldiers of Lord Tarly’s
host, though none was Tarly’s own. She saw two centaurs, a
thunderbolt, a blue beetle and a green arrow, but not the striding
huntsman of Horn Hill. Their serjeant had a peacock on his breast,
its bright tail faded by the sun. When the farmers drew their cart up
he gave a whistle. “What’s this now? Eggs?” He tossed one up,
caught it, and grinned. “We’ll take them.”
The old man squawked. “Our eggs is for Lord Mooton. For the
wedding cakes and such.”
“Have your hens lay more. I haven’t had an egg in half a year.
Here, don’t say you weren’t paid.” He ung a handful of pennies at
the old man’s feet.
The farmer’s wife spoke up. “That’s not enough,” she said. “Not
near enough.”
“I say it is,” said the serjeant. “For them eggs, and you as well.
Bring her here, boys. She’s too young for that old man.” Two of the
guards leaned their halberds against the wall and pulled the woman
away from the cart, struggling. The farmer watched grey-faced, but
dared not move.
Brienne spurred her mare forward. “Release her.”
Her voice made the guards hesitate long enough for the farmer’s
wife to wrench free of their grasp. “This is none of your concern,”
one man said. “You mind your mouth, wench.”
Brienne drew her sword instead.
“Well now,” the serjeant said, “naked steel. Seems to me I smell
an outlaw. You know what Lord Tarly does with outlaws?” He still
held the egg he’d taken from the cart. His hand closed, and the yolk
oozed through his ngers.
“I know what Lord Randyll does with outlaws,” Brienne said. “I
know what he does with rapers too.”
She had hoped the name might cow them, but the serjeant only
icked egg o his ngers and signaled to his men to spread out.

Brienne found herself surrounded by steel points. “What was it you
was saying, wench? What is it that Lord Tarly does to …”
“… rapers,” a deeper voice nished. “He gelds them or sends
them to the Wall. Sometimes both. And he cuts ngers o thieves.”
A languid young man stepped from the gatehouse, a swordbelt
buckled at his waist. The surcoat he wore above his steel had once
been white, and here and there still was, beneath the grass stains
and dried blood. His sigil was displayed across his chest: a brown
deer, dead and bound and slung beneath a pole.
Him. His voice was a punch in her stomach, his face a blade in her
bowels. “Ser Hyle,” she said sti y.
“Best let her by, lads,” warned Ser Hyle Hunt. “This is Brienne the
Beauty, the Maid of Tarth, who slew King Renly and half his
Rainbow Guard. She’s as mean as she is ugly, and there’s no one
uglier … except perhaps for you, Pisspot, but your father was the
rear end of an aurochs, so you have a good excuse. Her father is the
Evenstar of Tarth.”
The guards laughed, but the halberds parted. “Shouldn’t we seize
her, ser?” the serjeant asked. “For killing Renly?”
“Why? Renly was a rebel. So were we all, rebels to a man, but
now we’re Tommen’s loyal lads.” The knight waved the farm folk
through the gate. “His lordship’s steward will be pleased to see
those eggs. You’ll nd him in the market.”
The old man knuckled his forehead. “My thanks, m’lord. You’re a
true knight, it’s plain to see. Come, wife.” They put their shoulders
to the cart again and rumbled through the gate.
Brienne trotted after them, with Podrick at her heels. A true
knight, she thought, frowning. Inside the town she reined up. The
ruins of a stable could be seen o to her left, fronting on a muddy
alley. Across from it three half-dressed whores stood on the balcony
of a brothel, whispering to one another. One looked a bit like a
camp follower who had once come up to Brienne to ask if she had a
cunt or a cock inside her breeches.
“That rounsey may be the most hideous horse I’ve ever seen,”
said Ser Hyle of Podrick’s mount. “I am surprised that you’re not
riding it, my lady. Do you plan to thank me for my help?”

Brienne swung down o her mare. She stood a head taller than
Ser Hyle. “One day I’ll thank you in a mêlée, ser.”
“The way you thanked Red Ronnet?” Hunt laughed. He had a full,
rich laugh, though his face was plain. An honest face, she’d thought
once, before she learned better; shaggy brown hair, hazel eyes, a
little scar by his left ear. His chin had a cleft and his nose was
crooked, but he did laugh well, and often.
“Shouldn’t you be watching your gate?”
He made a wry face at her. “My cousin Alyn is o hunting
outlaws. Doubtless he’ll return with the Hound’s head, gloating and
covered in glory. Meanwhile, I am condemned to guard this gate,
thanks to you. I hope you’re pleased, my beauty. What is it that
you’re looking for?”
“A stable.”
“Over by the east gate. This one burned.”
I can see that. “What you said to those men … I was with King
Renly when he died, but it was some sorcery that slew him, ser. I
swear it on my sword.” She put her hand upon her hilt, ready to
ght if Hunt named her a liar to her face.
“Aye, and it was the Knight of Flowers who carved up the
Rainbow Guard. On a good day you might have been able to defeat
Ser Emmon. He was a rash ghter, and he tired easily. Royce,
though? No. Ser Robar was twice the swordsman that you
are … though you’re not a swordsman, are you? Is there such a
word as swordswench? What quest brings the Maid to Maidenpool,
I wonder?”
Searching for my sister, a maid of three-and-ten, she almost said, but
Ser Hyle would know she had no sisters. “There’s a man I seek, at a
place called the Stinking Goose.”
“I thought Brienne the Beauty had no use for men.” There was a
cruel edge to his smile. “The Stinking Goose. An apt name,
that … the stinking part, at least. It’s by the harbor. First you will
come with me to see his lordship.”
Brienne did not fear Ser Hyle, but he was one of Randyll Tarly’s
captains. A whistle, and a hundred men would come running to
defend him. “Am I to be arrested?”

“What, for Renly? Who was he? We’ve changed kings since then,
some of us twice. No one cares, no one remembers.” He laid a hand
lightly on her arm. “This way, if you please.”
She wrenched away. “I would thank you not to touch me.”
“Thanks at last,” he said, with a wry smile.
When last she had seen Maidenpool, the town had been a
desolation, a grim place of empty streets and burned homes. Now
the streets were full of pigs and children, and most of the burned
buildings had been pulled down. Vegetables had been planted in the
lots where some once stood; merchant’s tents and knight’s pavilions
took the place of others. Brienne saw new houses going up, a stone
inn rising where a wooden inn had burned, a new slate roof on the
town sept. The cool autumn air rang to the sounds of saw and
hammer. Men carried timber through the streets, and quarrymen
drove their wagons down muddy lanes. Many wore the striding
huntsman on their breasts. “The soldiers are rebuilding the town,”
she said, surprised.
“They would sooner be dicing, drinking, and fucking, I don’t
doubt, but Lord Randyll believes in putting idle men to work.”
She had expected to be taken to the castle. Instead, Hunt led them
toward the busy harbor. The traders had returned to Maidenpool,
she was pleased to see. A galley, a galleas, and a big two-masted
cog were in port, along with a score of little shing boats. More
shermen were visible out on the bay. If the Stinking Goose yields
nothing, I will take passage on a ship, she decided. Gulltown was only
a short voyage away. From there she could make her way to the
Eyrie easily enough.
They found Lord Tarly in the shmarket, doing justice.
A platform had been thrown up beside the water, from which his
lordship could look down upon the men accused of crimes. To his
left stood a long gallows, with ropes enough for twenty men. Four
corpses swung beneath it. One looked fresh, but the other three had
plainly been there for some time. A crow was pulling strips of esh
from the ripe ruins of one of the dead men. The other crows had
scattered, wary of the crowd of townsfolk who’d gathered in hopes
of someone’s being hanged.

Lord Randyll shared the platform with Lord Mooton, a pale, soft,
eshy man in a white doublet and red breeches, his ermine cloak
pinned at the shoulder by a red-gold brooch in the shape of a
salmon. Tarly wore mail and boiled leather, and a breastplate of
grey steel. The hilt of a greatsword poked up above his left
shoulder. Heartsbane, it was named, the pride of his House.
A stripling in a roughspun cloak and soiled jerkin was being heard
when they came up. “I never hurt no one, m’lord,” Brienne heard
him say. “I only took what the septons left when they run o . If you
got to take my nger for that, do it.”
“It is customary to take a nger from a thief,” Lord Tarly replied
in a hard voice, “but a man who steals from a sept is stealing from
the gods.” He turned to his captain of guards. “Seven ngers. Leave
his thumbs.”
“Seven?” The thief paled. When the guards seized hold of him he
tried to ght, but feebly, as if he were already maimed. Watching
him, Brienne could not help think of Ser Jaime, and the way he’d
screamed when Zollo’s arakh came ashing down.
The next man was a baker, accused of mixing sawdust in his our.
Lord Randyll ned him fty silver stags. When the baker swore he
did not have that much silver, his lordship declared that he could
have a lash for every stag that he was short. He was followed by a
haggard grey-faced whore, accused of giving the pox to four of
Tarly’s soldiers. “Wash out her private parts with lye and throw her
in a dungeon,” Tarly commanded. As the whore was dragged o
sobbing, his lordship saw Brienne on the edge of the crowd,
standing between Podrick and Ser Hyle. He frowned at her, but his
eyes betrayed not a icker of recognition.
A sailor o the galleas came next. His accuser was an archer of
Lord Mooton’s garrison, with a bandaged hand and a salmon on his
breast. “If it please m’lord, this bastid put his dagger through my
hand. He said I was cheating him at dice.”
Lord Tarly took his gaze away from Brienne to consider the men
before him. “Were you?”
“No, m’lord. I never.”

“For theft, I will take a nger. Lie to me and I will hang you.
Shall I ask to see these dice?”
“The dice?” The archer looked to Mooton, but his lordship was
gazing at the shing boats. The bowman swallowed. “Might be
I … them dice, they’re lucky for me, ’s true, but I …”
Tarly had heard enough. “Take his little nger. He can choose
which hand. A nail through the palm for the other.” He stood.
“We’re done. March the rest of them back to the dungeon, I’ll deal
with them on the morrow.” He turned to beckon Ser Hyle forward.
Brienne followed. “My lord,” she said, when she stood before him.
She felt eight years old again.
“My lady. To what do we owe this … honor?”
“I have been sent to look for … for …” She hesitated.
“How will you nd him if you do not know his name? Did you
slay Lord Renly?”
“No.”
Tarly weighed the word. He is judging me, as he judged those
others. “No,” he said at last, “you only let him die.”
He had died in her arms, his life’s blood drenching her. Brienne
inched. “It was sorcery. I never …”
“You never?” His voice became a whip. “Aye. You never should
have donned mail, nor buckled on a sword. You never should have
left your father’s hall. This is a war, not a harvest ball. By all the
gods, I ought to ship you back to Tarth.”
“Do that and answer to the throne.” Her voice sounded high and
girlish, when she wanted to sound fearless. “Podrick. In my bag
you’ll nd a parchment. Bring it to his lordship.”
Tarly took the letter and unrolled it, scowling. His lips moved as
he read. “The king’s business. What sort of business?”
Lie to me and I will hang you. “S-sansa Stark.”
“If the Stark girl were here, I’d know it. She’s run back north, I’ll
wager. Hoping to nd refuge with one of her father’s bannermen.
She had best hope she chooses the right one.”
“She might have gone to the Vale instead,” Brienne heard herself
blurt out, “to her mother’s sister.”

Lord Randyll gave her a contemptuous look. “Lady Lysa is dead.
Some singer pushed her o a mountain. Little nger holds the Eyrie
now … though not for long. The lords of the Vale are not the sort to
bend their knees to some upjumped jackanapes whose only skill is
counting coppers.” He handed her back her letter. “Go where you
want and do as you will … but when you’re raped don’t look to me
for justice. You will have earned it with your folly.” He glanced at
Ser Hyle. “And you, ser, should be at your gate. I gave you the
command there, did I not?”
“You did, my lord,” said Hyle Hunt, “but I thought—”
“You think too much.” Lord Tarly strode away.
Lysa Tully is dead. Brienne stood beneath the gallows, the precious
parchment in her hand. The crowd had dispersed, and the crows had
returned to resume their feast. A singer pushed her o a mountain.
Had the crows dined on Lady Catelyn’s sister too?
“You spoke of the Stinking Goose, my lady,” said Ser Hyle. “If
you want me to show you—”
“Go back to your gate.”
A look of annoyance ashed across his face. A plain face, not an
honest one. “If that’s your wish.”
“It is.”
“It was only a game to pass the time. We meant no harm.” He
hesitated. “Ben died, you know. Cut down on the Blackwater.
Farrow too, and Will the Stork. And Mark Mullendore took a wound
that cost him half his arm.”
Good, Brienne wanted to say. Good, he deserved it. But she
remembered Mullendore sitting outside his pavilion with his
monkey on his shoulder in a little suit of chain mail, the two of
them making faces at each other. What was it Catelyn Stark had
called them, that night at Bitterbridge? The knights of summer. And
now it was autumn and they were falling like leaves.…
She turned her back on Hyle Hunt. “Podrick, come.”
The boy trotted after her, leading their horses. “Are we going to
nd the place? The Stinking Goose?”
“I am. You are going to the stables, by the east gate. Ask the
stableman if there’s an inn where we can spend the night.”

“I will, ser. My lady.” Podrick stared at the ground as they went,
kicking stones from time to time. “Do you know where it is? The
Goose? The Stinking Goose, I mean.”
“No.”
“He said he’d show us. That knight. Ser Kyle.”
“Hyle.”
“Hyle. What did he do to you, ser? I mean, my lady.”
The boy may be a stumbletongue, but he’s not stupid. “At
Highgarden, when King Renly called his banners, some men played
a game with me. Ser Hyle was one of them. It was a cruel game,
hurtful and unchivalrous.” She stopped. “The east gate is that way.
Wait for me there.”
“As you say, my lady. Ser.”
No sign marked the Stinking Goose. It took her most of an hour
to nd it, down a ight of wooden steps beneath a knacker’s barn.
The cellar was dim and the ceiling low, and Brienne thumped her
head on a beam as she entered. No geese were in evidence. A few
stools were scattered about, and a bench had been shoved up
against one earthen wall. The tables were old wine casks, grey and
wormholed. The promised stink pervaded everything. Mostly it was
wine and damp and mildew, her nose told her, but there was a little
of the privy too, and something of the lichyard.
The only drinkers were three Tyroshi seamen in a corner,
growling at each other through green and purple beards. They gave
her a brief inspection, and one said something that made the others
laugh. The proprietor stood behind a plank that had been placed
across two barrels. She was a woman, round and pale and balding,
with huge soft breasts swaying beneath a soiled smock. She looked
as though the gods had made her out of uncooked dough.
Brienne did not dare to ask for water here. She bought a cup of
wine and said, “I am looking for a man called Nimble Dick.”
“Dick Crabb. Comes in most every night.” The woman eyed
Brienne’s mail and sword. “If you’re going to cut him, do it
somewheres else. We don’t want no trouble with Lord Tarly.”
“I want to talk with him. Why would I do him harm?”
The woman shrugged.

“If you would nod when he comes in I’d be thankful.”
“How thankful?”
Brienne put a copper star on the plank between them and found a
place in the shadows with a good view of the steps.
She tried the wine. It was oily on the tongue and there was a hair
oating in it. A hair as slender as my hopes of nding Sansa, she
thought as she plucked it out. Chasing after Ser Dontos had been
fruitless, and with Lady Lysa dead the Vale no longer seemed a
likely refuge. Where are you, Lady Sansa? Did you run home to
Winterfell, or are you with your husband, as Podrick seems to think?
Brienne did not want to chase the girl across the narrow sea, where
even the language would be strange to her. I will be even more a
freak there, grunting and gesturing to make myself understood. They will
laugh at me, as they laughed at Highgarden. A blush stole up her
cheeks as she remembered.
When Renly donned his crown, the Maid of Tarth had ridden all
the way across the Reach to join him. The king himself had greeted
her courteously and welcomed her to his service. Not so his lords
and knights. Brienne had not expected a warm welcome. She was
prepared for coldness, for mockery, for hostility. She had supped
upon such meat before. It was not the scorn of the many that left
her confused and vulnerable, but the kindness of the few. The Maid
of Tarth had been betrothed three times, but she had never been
courted until she came to Highgarden.
Big Ben Bushy was the rst, one of the few men in Renly’s camp
who overtopped her. He sent his squire to her to clean her mail, and
made her a gift of a silver drinking horn. Ser Edmund Ambrose
went him one better, bringing owers and asking her to ride with
him. Ser Hyle Hunt outdid them both. He gave her a book,
beautifully illuminated and lled with a hundred tales of knightly
valor. He brought apples and carrots for her horses, and a blue silk
plume for her helm. He told her the gossip of the camp and said
clever, cutting things that made her smile. He even trained with her
one day, which meant more than all the rest.
She thought it was because of him that the others started being
courteous. More than courteous. At table men fought for the place

beside her, o ering to ll her wine cup or fetch her sweetbreads.
Ser Richard Farrow played love songs on his lute outside her
pavilion. Ser Hugh Beesbury brought her a pot of honey “as sweet
as the maids of Tarth.” Ser Mark Mullendore made her laugh with
the antics of his monkey, a curious little black-and-white creature
from the Summer Islands. A hedge knight called Will the Stork
o ered to rub the knots from her shoulders.
Brienne refused him. She refused them all. When Ser Owen
Inch eld seized her one night and pressed a kiss upon her, she
knocked him arse-backwards into a cook re. Afterward she looked
at herself in a glass. Her face was as broad and bucktoothed and
freckled as ever, big-lipped, thick of jaw, so ugly. All she wanted
was to be a knight and serve King Renly, yet now …
It was not as if she were the only woman there. Even the camp
followers were prettier than she was, and up in the castle Lord
Tyrell feasted King Renly every night, whilst highborn maids and
lovely ladies danced to the music of pipe and horn and harp. Why
are you being kind to me? she wanted to scream, every time some
strange knight paid her a compliment. What do you want?
Randyll Tarly solved the mystery the day he sent two of his menat-arms to summon her to his pavilion. His young son Dickon had
overheard four knights laughing as they saddled up their horses,
and had told his lord father what they said.
They had a wager.
Three of the younger knights had started it, he told her: Ambrose,
Bushy, and Hyle Hunt, of his own household. As word spread
through the camp, however, others had joined the game. Each man
was required to buy into the contest with a golden dragon, the
whole sum to go to whoever claimed her maidenhead.
“I have put an end to their sport,” Tarly told her. “Some of
these … challengers … are less honorable than others, and the
stakes were growing larger every day. It was only a matter of time
before one of them decided to claim the prize by force.”
“They were knights,” she said, stunned, “anointed knights.”
“And honorable men. The blame is yours.”

The accusation made her inch. “I would never … my lord, I did
nought to encourage them.”
“Your being here encouraged them. If a woman will behave like a
camp follower, she cannot object to being treated like one. A war
host is no place for a maiden. If you have any regard for your virtue
or the honor of your House, you will take o that mail, return
home, and beg your father to nd a husband for you.”
“I came to ght,” she insisted. “To be a knight.”
“The gods made men to ght, and women to bear children,” said
Randyll Tarly. “A woman’s war is in the birthing bed.”
Someone was coming down the cellar steps. Brienne pushed her
wine aside as a ragged, scrawny, sharp-faced man with dirty brown
hair stepped into the Goose. He gave the Tyroshi sailors a quick
look and Brienne a longer one, then went up to the plank. “Wine,”
he said, “and none o’ your horse piss in it, thank’e.”
The woman gave Brienne a look and nodded.
“I’ll buy your wine,” she called out, “for a word.”
The man looked her over, his eyes wary. “A word? I know a lot o’
words.” He sat down on the stool across from her. “Tell me which
m’lady wants t’ hear, and Nimble Dick will say it.”
“I heard you fooled a fool.”
The ragged man sipped his wine, thinking. “Mighten be I did. Or
not.” He wore a faded, torn doublet from which some lord’s badge
had been ripped. “Who is it wants t’ know?”
“King Robert.” She put a silver stag on the barrel between them.
Robert’s head was on one side, the stag on the other.
“Does he now?” The man took the coin and spun it, smiling. “I
like to see a king dance, hey-nonny hey-nonny hey-nonny-ho.
Mighten be I saw this fool of yours.”
“Was there a girl with him?”
“Two girls,” he said at once.
“Two girls?” Could the other one be Arya?
“Well,” the man said, “I never seen the little sweets, mind you,
but he was wanting passage for three.”
“Passage where?”
“T’other side o’ the sea, as I recall.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”
“A fool.” He snatched the spinning coin o the table as it began to
slow, and made it vanish. “A frightened fool.”
“Frightened why?”
He shrugged. “He never said, but old Nimble Dick knows the
smell o’ fear. He come here most every night, buying drinks for
sailors, making japes, singing little songs. Only one night some men
come in with that hunter on their teats, and your fool went white as
milk and got quiet till they left.” He edged his stool closer to hers.
“That Tarly’s got soldiers crawling over the docks, watching every
ship that comes or goes. Man wants a deer, he goes t’ the woods. He
wants a ship, he goes t’ the docks. Your fool didn’t dare. So I o ered
him some help.”
“What sort of help?”
“The sort that costs more than one silver stag.”
“Tell me, and you’ll have another.”
“Let’s see it,” he said. She put another stag on the barrel. He spun
it, smiled, scooped it up. “A man who can’t go t’ the ships need for
the ships t’ come t’ him. I told him I knew a place where that might
happen. A hidden place, like.”
Gooseprickles rose along Brienne’s arms. “A smugglers’ cove. You
sent the fool to smugglers.”
“Him and them two girls.” He chuckled. “Only thing, well, the
place I sent them, been no ships there for a while. Thirty years,
say.” He scratched his nose. “What’s this fool to you?”
“Those two girls are my sisters.”
“Are they, now? Poor little things. Had a sister once meself.
Skinny girl with knobby knees, but then she grew a pair o’ teats and
a knight’s son got between her legs. Last I saw her she was o for
King’s Landing t’ make a living on her back.”
“Where did you send them?”
Another shrug. “As t’ that, I can’t recall.”
“Where?” Brienne slapped another silver stag down.
He icked the coin back at her with his fore nger. “Someplace no
stag ever found … though a dragon might.”

Silver would not get the truth from him, she sensed. Gold might,
or it might not. Steel would be more certain. Brienne touched her
dagger, then reached into her purse instead. She found a golden
dragon and put in on the barrel. “Where?”
The ragged man snatched up the coin and bit it. “Sweet. Puts me
in mind o’ Crackclaw Point. Up north o’ here, ’tis a wild land o’ hills
and bogs, but it happens I was born and bred there. Dick Crabb, I’m
named, though most call me Nimble Dick.”
She did not o er her own name. “Where in Crackclaw Point?”
“The Whispers. You heard o’ Clarence Crabb, o’ course.”
“No.”
That seemed to surprise him. “Ser Clarence Crabb, I said. I got his
blood in me. He was eight foot tall, and so strong he could uproot
pine trees with one hand and chuck them half a mile. No horse
could bear his weight, so he rode an aurochs.”
“What does he have to do with this smugglers’ cove?”
“His wife was a woods witch. Whenever Ser Clarence killed a
man, he’d fetch his head back home and his wife would kiss it on
the lips and bring it back t’ life. Lords, they were, and wizards, and
famous knights and pirates. One was king o’ Duskendale. They gave
old Crabb good counsel. Being they was just heads, they couldn’t
talk real loud, but they never shut up neither. When you’re a head,
talking’s all you got to pass the day. So Crabb’s keep got named the
Whispers. Still is, though it’s been a ruin for a thousand years. A
lonely place, the Whispers.” The man walked the coin deftly across
his knuckles. “One dragon by hisself gets lonely. Ten, now …”
“Ten dragons are a fortune. Do you take me for a fool?”
“No, but I can take you to one.” The coin danced one way, and
back the other. “Take you to the Whispers, m’lady.”
Brienne did not like the way his ngers played with that gold
coin. Still … “Six dragons if we nd my sister. Two if we only nd
the fool. Nothing if nothing is what we nd.”
Crabb shrugged. “Six is good. Six will serve.”
Too quick. She caught his wrist before he could tuck the gold
away. “Do not play me false. You’ll not nd me easy meat.”

When she let go, Crabb rubbed his wrist. “Bloody piss,” he
muttered. “You hurt my hand.”
“I am sorry for that. My sister is a girl of three-and-ten. I need to
nd her before—”
“—before some knight gets in her slit. Aye, I hear you. She’s good
as saved. Nimble Dick is with you now. Meet me by east gate at
rst light. I need t’ see this man about a horse.”

SAMWELL

The sea made Samwell Tarly greensick.
It was not all his fear of drowning, though that was surely some
of it. It was the motion of the ship as well, the way the decks rolled
beneath his feet. “I have a queasy belly,” he confessed to Dareon
the day they sailed from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. The singer slapped
him on the back and said, “With a belly big as yours, Slayer, that is
a lot of quease.”
Sam tried to keep a brave face on him, for Gilly’s sake if little
else. She had never seen the sea before. When they were struggling
through the snows after eeing Craster’s Keep, they had come on
several lakes, and even those had been a wonder to her. As
Blackbird slipped away from shore the girl began to tremble, and
big salt tears rolled down her cheeks. “Gods be good,” Sam heard
her whisper. Eastwatch vanished rst, and the Wall grew smaller
and smaller in the distance, until it nally disappeared. The wind
was coming up by then. The sails were the faded grey of a black
cloak that had been washed too often, and Gilly’s face was white
with fear. “This is a good ship,” Sam tried to tell her. “You don’t
have to be afraid.” But she only looked at him, held her baby
tighter, and ed below.
Sam soon found himself clutching tightly to the gunwale and
watching the sweep of the oars. The way they all moved together
was somehow beautiful to behold, and better than looking at the

water. Looking at the water only made him think of drowning.
When he was small his lord father had tried to teach him how to
swim by throwing him into the pond beneath Horn Hill. The water
had gotten in his nose and in his mouth and in his lungs, and he
coughed and wheezed for hours after Ser Hyle pulled him out. After
that he never dared go in any deeper than his waist.
The Bay of Seals was a lot deeper than his waist, and not so
friendly as that little shpond below his father’s castle. Its waters
were grey and green and choppy, and the wooded shore they
followed was a snarl of rocks and whirlpools. Even if he could kick
and crawl that far somehow, the waves were like to smash him up
against some stone and break his head to pieces.
“Looking for mermaids, Slayer?” asked Dareon when he saw Sam
staring o across the bay. Fair-haired and hazel-eyed, the handsome
young singer out of Eastwatch looked more like some dark prince
than a black brother.
“No.” Sam did not know what he was looking for, or what he was
doing on this boat. Going to the Citadel to forge a chain and be a
maester, to be of better service to the Watch, he told himself, but the
thought just made him weary. He did not want to be a maester,
with a heavy chain wrapped around his neck, cold against his skin.
He did not want to leave his brothers, the only friends he’d ever
had. And he certainly did not want to face the father who had sent
him to the Wall to die.
It was di erent for the others. For them, the voyage would have
a happy ending. Gilly would be safe at Horn Hill, with all the width
of Westeros between her and the horrors she had known in the
haunted forest. As a serving maid in his father’s castle, she would be
warm and well fed, a small part of a great world she could never
have dreamed of as Craster’s wife. She would watch her son grow
up big and strong, and become a huntsman or a stablehand or a
smith. If the boy showed any aptitude for arms, some knight might
even take him as a squire.
Maester Aemon was going to a better place as well. It was
pleasant to think of him spending whatever time remained him
bathed by the warm breezes of Oldtown, conversing with his fellow

maesters and sharing his wisdom with acolytes and novices. He had
earned his rest, a hundred times over.
Even Dareon would be happier. He had always claimed to be
innocent of the rape that sent him to the Wall, insisting that he
belonged at some lord’s court, singing for his supper. Now he would
have that chance. Jon had named him a recruiter, to take the place
of a man named Yoren, who had vanished and was presumed dead.
His task would be to travel the Seven Kingdoms, singing of the
valor of the Night’s Watch, and from time to time returning to the
Wall with new recruits.
The voyage would be long and rough, no one could deny that, but
for the others at least there would be a happy end. That was Sam’s
solace. I am going for them, he told himself, for the Night’s Watch, and
for the happy ending. The longer he looked at the sea, though, the
colder and deeper it appeared.
But not looking at the water was even worse, Sam realized in the
cramped cabin beneath the sterncastle that the passengers were
sharing. He tried to take his mind o the roiling in his stomach by
talking with Gilly as she nursed her son. “This ship will take us as
far as Braavos,” he said. “We’ll nd another ship to carry us to
Oldtown. I read a book about Braavos when I was small. The whole
city is built in a lagoon on a hundred little islands, and they have a
titan there, a stone man hundreds of feet high. They have boats
instead of horses, and their mummers play out written stories
instead of just making up the usual stupid farces. The food is very
good too, especially the sh. They have all kinds of clams and eels
and oysters, fresh from their lagoon. We ought to have a few days
between ships. If we do, we can go and see a mummer show, and
have some oysters.”
He thought that would excite her. He could not have been more
wrong. Gilly peered at him with at, dull eyes, looking through
some strands of unwashed hair. “If you want, m’lord.”
“What do you want?” Sam asked her.
“Nothing.” She turned away from him and moved her son from
one breast to the other.

The motion of the boat was stirring up the eggs and bacon and
fried bread that Sam had eaten before the ship set out. All at once
he could not stand the cabin one more instant. He pushed himself
back to his feet and clambered up the ladder to give his breakfast to
the sea. The sickness came on Sam so strongly that he did not stop
to gauge which way the wind was blowing, so he retched from the
wrong rail and ended up spattering himself. Even so, he felt much
better afterward … though not for long.
The ship was Blackbird, the largest of the Watch’s galleys. Storm
Crow and Talon were faster, Cotter Pyke told Maester Aemon back
at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, but they were ghting ships, lean, swift
birds of prey where the rowers sat on open decks. Blackbird was a
better choice for the rough waters of the narrow sea beyond Skagos.
“There have been storms,” Pyke warned them. “Winter storms are
worse, but autumn’s are more frequent.”
The rst ten days were calm enough, as Blackbird crept across the
Bay of Seals, never out of sight of land. It was cold when the wind
was blowing, but there was something bracing about the salt smell
in the air. Sam could hardly eat, and when he did force something
down it did not stay down for long, but aside from that he did not
do too badly. He tried to bolster Gilly’s courage and give her what
cheer he could, but that proved hard. She would not come up on
deck, no matter what he said, and seemed to prefer to huddle in the
dark with her son. The babe liked the ship no more than his mother
did, it seemed. When he was not squalling, he was retching up his
mother’s milk. His bowels were loose and always moving, staining
the furs that Gilly wrapped him in to keep him warm and lling the
air with a brown stench. No matter how many tallow candles Sam
lit, the smell of shit persisted.
It was more pleasant out in the open air, especially when Dareon
was singing. The singer was known to Blackbird’s oarsmen, and
would play for them as they rowed. He knew all their favorite
songs: sad ones like “The Day They Hanged Black Robin,” “The
Mermaid’s Lament,” and “Autumn of My Day,” rousing ones like
“Iron Lances” and “Seven Swords for Seven Sons,” bawdy ones like
“Milady’s Supper,” “Her Little Flower,” and “Meggett Was a Merry

Maid, a Merry Maid Was She.” When he sang “The Bear and the
Maiden Fair,” all the oarsmen joined in, and Blackbird seemed to y
across the water. Dareon had not been much of a swordsman, Sam
knew from their days training under Alliser Thorne, but he had a
beautiful voice. “Honey poured over thunder,” Maester Aemon had
once called it. He played woodharp and ddle too, and even wrote
his own songs … though Sam did not think them very good. Still, it
was good to sit and listen, though the chest was so hard and
splintery that Sam was almost grateful for his eshy buttocks. Fat
men take a cushion with them wherever they go, he thought.
Maester Aemon preferred to spend his days on deck as well,
huddled beneath a pile of furs and gazing out across the water.
“What is he looking at?” Dareon wondered one day. “For him it’s as
dark up here as it is down in the cabin.”
The old man heard him. Though Aemon’s eyes had dimmed and
gone dark, there was nothing wrong with his ears. “I was not born
blind,” he reminded them. “When last I passed this way, I saw every
rock and tree and whitecap, and watched the grey gulls ying in our
wake. I was ve-and-thirty and had been a maester of the chain for
sixteen years. Egg wanted me to help him rule, but I knew my place
was here. He sent me north aboard the Golden Dragon, and insisted
that his friend Ser Duncan see me safe to Eastwatch. No recruit had
arrived at the Wall with so much pomp since Nymeria sent the
Watch six kings in golden fetters. Egg emptied out the dungeons
too, so I would not need to say my vows alone. My honor guard, he
called them. One was no less a man than Brynden Rivers. Later he
was chosen lord commander.”
“Bloodraven?” said Dareon. “I know a song about him. ‘A
Thousand Eyes, and One,’ it’s called. But I thought he lived a
hundred years ago.”
“We all did. Once I was as young as you.” That seemed to make
him sad. He coughed, and closed his eyes, and went to sleep,
swaying in his furs whenever some wave rocked the ship.
Beneath grey skies they sailed, east and south and east again, as
the Bay of Seals widened about them. The captain, a grizzled
brother with a belly like a keg of ale, wore blacks so stained and

faded that the crew called him Old Tattersalt. He seldom said a
word. His mate made up for him, blistering the salt air with curses
whenever the wind died or the oarsmen seemed to ag. They ate
oaten porridge in the mornings, pease porridge in the afternoons,
and salt beef, salt cod, and salt mutton at night, and washed it down
with ale. Dareon sang, Sam retched, Gilly cried and nursed her
babe, Maester Aemon slept and shivered, and the winds grew colder
and more blustery with every passing day.
Even so, it was a better voyage than the last one Sam had taken.
He had been no more than ten when he set sail on Lord Redwyne’s
galleas, the Arbor Queen. Five times as large as Blackbird and
magni cent to behold, she had three great burgundy sails and banks
of oars that ashed gold and white in the sunlight. The way they
rose and fell as the ship departed Oldtown had made Sam hold his
breath … but that was the last good memory he had of the
Redwyne Straits. Then as now the sea had made him sick, to his
lord father’s disgust.
And when they reached the Arbor, things had gone from bad to
worse. Lord Redwyne’s twin sons had despised Sam on rst sight.
Every morn they found some fresh way to shame him in the
practice yard. On the third day Horas Redwyne made him squeal
like a pig when he begged for quarter. On the fth his brother
Hobber clad a kitchen girl in his own armor and let her beat Sam
with a wooden sword until he began to cry. When she revealed
herself, all the squires and pages and stableboys howled with
laughter.
“The boy needs a bit of seasoning, that’s all,” his father had told
Lord Redwyne that night, but Redwyne’s fool rattled his rattle and
replied, “Aye, a pinch of pepper, a few nice cloves, and an apple in
his mouth.” Thereafter, Lord Randyll forbade Sam to eat apples so
long as they remained beneath Paxter Redwyne’s roof. He had been
seasick on their voyage home as well, but so relieved to be going
that he almost welcomed the taste of vomit at the back of his
throat. It was not until they were back at Horn Hill that his mother
told Sam that his father had never meant for him to return. “Horas
was to come with us in your place, whilst you remained on the

Arbor as Lord Paxter’s page and cupbearer. If you had pleased him,
you would have been betrothed to his daughter.” Sam could still
recall the soft touch of his mother’s hand as she washed the tears o
his face with a bit of lace, dampened with her spit. “My poor Sam,”
she murmured. “My poor poor Sam.”
It will be good to see her again, he thought, as he clung to
Blackbird’s rail and watched waves breaking on the stony shore. If
she saw me in my blacks, it might even make her proud. “I am a man
now, Mother,” I could tell her, “a steward, and a man of the Night’s
Watch. My brothers call me Sam the Slayer sometimes.” He would see
his brother Dickon too, and his sisters. “See,” I could tell them, “see, I
was good for something after all.”
If he went to Horn Hill, though, his father might be there.
The thought made his belly heave again. Sam bent over the
gunwale and retched, but not into the wind. He had gone to the
right rail this time. He was getting good at retching.
Or so he thought, until Blackbird left the land behind and struck
east across the bay for the shores of Skagos.
The island sat at the mouth of the Bay of Seals, massive and
mountainous, a stark and forbidding land peopled by savages. They
lived in caves and grim mountain fastnesses, Sam had read, and
rode great shaggy unicorns to war. Skagos meant “stone” in the Old
Tongue. The Skagosi named themselves the stoneborn, but their
fellow northmen called them Skaggs and liked them little. Only a
hundred years ago Skagos had risen in rebellion. Their revolt had
taken years to quell and claimed the life of the Lord of Winterfell
and hundreds of his sworn swords. Some songs said the Skaggs were
cannibals; supposedly their warriors ate the hearts and livers of the
men they slew. In ancient days, the Skagosi had sailed to the nearby
isle of Skane, seized its women, slaughtered its men, and ate them
on a pebbled beach in a feast that lasted for a fortnight. Skane
remained unpeopled to this day.
Dareon knew the songs as well. When the bleak grey peaks of
Skagos rose up from the sea, he joined Sam at Blackbird’s prow, and
said, “If the gods are good, we may catch a glimpse of a unicorn.”

“If the captain is good, we won’t come that close. The currents
are treacherous around Skagos, and there are rocks that can crack a
ship’s hull like an egg. But don’t you mention that to Gilly. She’s
scared enough.”
“Her and that squalling whelp of hers. I don’t know which of
them is noisier. The only time he ever stops crying is when she
shoves a nipple in his mouth, and then she starts to sob.”
Sam had noticed that as well. “Maybe the babe is hurting her,” he
said, feebly. “If his teeth are coming in …”
Dareon plucked at his lute with one nger, sending up a derisive
note. “I’d heard that wildlings were braver than that.”
“She is brave,” Sam insisted, though even he had to admit that he
had never seen Gilly in such a wretched state. Though she hid her
face more oft than not and kept the cabin dark, he could see that
her eyes were always red, her cheeks wet with tears. When he
asked her what was wrong, though, she only shook her head,
leaving him to nd answers of his own. “The sea scares her, that’s
all,” he told Dareon. “Before she came to the Wall, all she knew was
Craster’s Keep and the woods around it. I don’t know that she went
more than half a league from the place that she was born. She
knows streams and rivers, but she had never seen a lake until we
came on one, and the sea … the sea is a scary thing.”
“We’ve never been out of sight of land.”
“We will be.” Sam did not relish that part himself.
“Surely a little water does not frighten the Slayer.”
“No,” Sam lied, “not me. But Gilly … maybe if you played some
lullabies for them, it would help the babe to sleep.”
Dareon’s mouth twisted in disgust. “Only if she shoves a plug up
his arse. I cannot abide the smell.”
The next day the rains began, and the seas grew rougher. “We
had best go below, where it’s dry,” Sam said to Aemon, but the old
maester only smiled, and said, “The rain feels good against my face,
Sam. It feels like tears. Let me stay awhile longer, I pray you. It has
been a long time since last I wept.”
If Maester Aemon meant to stay on deck, old and frail as he was,
Sam had no choice but to do the same. He stayed beside the old

man for nigh unto an hour, huddled in his cloak as a soft, steady
rain soaked him to his skin. Aemon hardly seemed to feel it. He
sighed and closed his eyes, and Sam moved closer to him, to shield
him from the worst of the wind. He will ask me to help him to the
cabin soon, he told himself. He must. But he never did, and nally
thunder began to rumble in the distance, o to the east. “We have to
get below,” Sam said, shivering. Maester Aemon did not reply. It
was only then that Sam realized the old man had gone to sleep.
“Maester,” he said, shaking him gently by one shoulder. “Maester
Aemon, wake up.”
Aemon’s blind white eyes came open. “Egg?” he said, as the rain
streamed down his cheeks. “Egg, I dreamed that I was old.”
Sam did not know what to do. He knelt and scooped the old man
up and carried him below. No one had ever called him strong, and
the rain had soaked through Maester Aemon’s blacks and made him
twice as heavy, but even so, he weighed no more than a child.
When he shoved into the cabin with Aemon in his arms, he found
that Gilly had let all the candles gutter out. The babe was asleep
and she was curled up in a corner, sobbing softly in the folds of the
big black cloak that Sam had given her. “Help me,” he said
urgently. “Help me dry him o and get him warm.”
She rose at once, and together they got the old maester out of his
wet clothes and buried him beneath a pile of furs. His skin was
damp and cold, though, clammy to the touch. “You get in with
him,” Sam told Gilly. “Hold him. Warm him with your body. We
have to warm him up.” She did that too, never saying a word, all
the while still sni ing. “Where’s Dareon?” asked Sam. “We’d all be
warmer if we were together. He needs to be here too.” He was
headed back up top to nd the singer when the deck rose up
beneath him, then fell away beneath his feet. Gilly wailed, Sam
slammed down hard and lost his legs, and the babe woke screaming.
The next roll of the ship came as he was struggling back to his
feet. It threw Gilly into his arms, and the wildling girl clung to him
so
ercely that Sam could hardly breathe. “Don’t you be
frightened,” he told her. “This is just an adventure. One day you’ll
tell your son this tale.” That only made her dig her nails into his

arm. She shuddered, her whole body shaking with the violence of
her sobs. Whatever I say just makes her worse. He held her tightly,
uncomfortably aware of her breasts pressing up against him. As
frightened as he was, somehow that was enough to make him sti .
She’ll feel it, he thought, ashamed, but if she did, she gave no sign,
only clung to him the harder.
The days ran together after that. They never saw the sun. The
days were grey and the nights black, except when lightning lit the
sky above the peaks of Skagos. All of them were starved yet none
could eat. The captain broached a cask of rewine to fortify the
oarsmen. Sam tried a cup and sighed as hot snakes wriggled down
his throat and through his chest. Dareon took a liking to the drink
as well, and was seldom sober thereafter.
The sails went up, the sails came down, and one ripped free of the
mast and ew away like a great grey bird. As Blackbird rounded the
south coast of Skagos, they spotted the wreckage of a galley on the
rocks. Some of her crew had washed up on the shore, and the rooks
and crabs had gathered to pay them homage. “Too bloody close,”
grumbled Old Tattersalt when he saw. “One good blow, and we’ll
be breaking up aside them.” Exhausted as they were, his rowers
bent to their oars again, and the ship clawed south toward the
narrow sea, till Skagos dwindled to no more than a few dark shapes
in the sky that might have been thunderheads, or the tops of tall
black mountains, or both. After that, they had eight days and seven
nights of clear, smooth sailing.
Then came more storms, worse than before.
Was it three storms, or only one, broken up by lulls? Sam never
knew, though he tried desperately to care. “What does it matter?”
Dareon screamed at him once, when all of them were huddled in the
cabin. It doesn’t, Sam wanted to tell him, but so long as I’m thinking
about that I’m not thinking about drowning or being sick or Maester
Aemon’s shivering. “It doesn’t,” he managed to squeak, but the
thunder drowned out all the rest of it, and the deck lurched and
knocked him sideways. Gilly was sobbing. The babe was shrieking.
And up top he could hear Old Tattersalt bellowing at his crew, the
ragged captain who never spoke at all.

I hate the sea, Sam thought, I hate the sea, I hate the sea, I hate the
sea. The next lightning ash was so bright it lit the cabin through
the seams in the planking overhead. This is a good sound ship, a good
sound ship, a good ship, he told himself. It will not sink. I am not
afraid.
During one of the lulls between the gales, as Sam clung whiteknuckled to the rail wanting desperately to retch, he heard some of
the crew muttering that this was what came of bringing a woman
aboard ship, and a wildling woman at that. “Fucked her own
father,” Sam heard one man say, as the wind was rising once again.
“Worse than whoring, that. Worse than anything. We’ll all drown
unless we get rid of her, and that abomination that she whelped.”
Sam dared not confront them. They were older men, hard and
sinewy, their arms and shoulders thickened by years at the oars. But
he made certain that his knife was sharp, and whenever Gilly left
the cabin to make water, he went with her.
Even Dareon had no good to say about the wildling girl. Once, at
Sam’s urging, the singer played a lullaby to soothe the babe, but
partway through the rst verse Gilly began to sob inconsolably.
“Seven bloody hells,” Dareon snapped, “can’t you even stop
weeping long enough to hear a song?”
“Just play,” Sam pleaded, “just sing the song for her.”
“She doesn’t need a song,” said Dareon. “She needs a good
spanking, or maybe a hard fuck. Get out of my way, Slayer.” He
shoved Sam aside and went from the cabin to nd some solace in a
cup of rewine and the rough brotherhood of the oars.
Sam was at his wit’s end by then. He had almost gotten used to
the smells, but between the storms and Gilly’s sobbing he had not
slept for days. “Isn’t there something you can give her?” he asked
Maester Aemon very softly, when he saw that the old man was
awake. “Some herb or potion, so she won’t be so afraid?”
“It is not fear you hear,” the old man told him. “That is the sound
of grief, and there is no potion for that. Let her tears run their
course, Sam. You cannot stem the ow.”
Sam had not understood. “She’s going to a safe place. A warm
place. Why should she be grieving?”

“Sam,” the old man whispered, “you have two good eyes, and yet
you do not see. She is a mother grieving for her child.”
“He’s greensick, that’s all. We’re all greensick. Once we make
port in Braavos …”
“… the babe will still be Dalla’s son, and not the child of her
body.”
It took Sam a moment to grasp what Aemon was suggesting.
“That couldn’t … she wouldn’t … of course he’s hers. Gilly would
never have left the Wall without her son. She loves him.”
“She nursed them both and loved them both,” said Aemon, “but
not alike. No mother loves all her children the same, not even the
Mother Above. Gilly did not leave the child willingly, I am certain.
What threats the Lord Commander made, what promises, I can only
guess … but threats and promises there surely were.”
“No. No, that’s wrong. Jon would never …”
“Jon would never. Lord Snow did. Sometimes there is no happy
choice, Sam, only one less grievous than the others.”
No happy choice. Sam thought of all the trials that he and Gilly
su ered, Craster’s Keep and the death of the Old Bear, snow and ice
and freezing winds, days and days and days of walking, the wights
at Whitetree, Coldhands and the tree of ravens, the Wall, the Wall,
the Wall, the Black Gate beneath the earth. What had it all been
for? No happy choices and no happy endings.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to howl and sob and shake and
curl up in a little ball and whimper. He switched the babes, he told
himself. He switched the babes to protect the little prince, to keep him
away from Lady Melisandre’s res, away from her red god. If she burns
Gilly’s boy, who will care? No one but Gilly. He was only Craster’s
whelp, an abomination born of incest, not the son of the King-beyondthe-Wall. He’s no good for a hostage, no good for a sacri ce, no good for
anything, he doesn’t even have a name.
Wordless, Sam staggered up onto the deck to retch, but there was
nothing in his belly to bring up. Night had come upon them, a
strange still night such as they had not seen for many days. The sea
was black as glass. At the oars, the rowers rested. One or two were
sleeping where they sat. The wind was in the sails, and to the north

Sam could even see a scattering of stars, and the red wanderer the
free folk called the Thief. That ought to be my star, Sam thought
miserably. I helped to make Jon Lord Commander, and I brought him
Gilly and the babe. There are no happy endings.
“Slayer.” Dareon appeared beside him, oblivious to Sam’s pain. “A
sweet night, for once. Look, the stars are coming out. We might
even get a bit of moon. Might be the worst is done.”
“No.” Sam wiped his nose, and pointed south with a fat nger,
toward the gathering darkness. “There,” he said. No sooner had he
spoken than lightning ashed, sudden and silent and blinding bright.
The distant clouds glowed for half a heartbeat, mountains heaped
on mountains, purple and red and yellow, taller than the world.
“The worst isn’t done. The worst is just beginning, and there are no
happy endings.”
“Gods be good,” said Dareon, laughing. “Slayer, you are such a
craven.”

JAIME

Lord Tywin Lannister had entered the city on a stallion, his
enameled crimson armor polished and gleaming, bright with gems
and goldwork. He left it in a tall wagon draped with crimson
banners, with six silent sisters riding attendance on his bones.
The funeral procession departed King’s Landing through the Gate
of the Gods, wider and more splendid than the Lion Gate. The
choice felt wrong to Jaime. His father had been a lion, that no one
could deny, but even Lord Tywin never claimed to be a god.
An honor guard of fty knights surrounded Lord Tywin’s wagon,
crimson pennons uttering from their lances. The lords of the west
followed close behind them. The winds snapped at their banners,
making their charges dance and utter. As he trotted up the column,
Jaime passed boars, badgers, and beetles, a green arrow and a red
ox, crossed halberds, crossed spears, a treecat, a strawberry, a
maunch, four sunbursts counterchanged.
Lord Brax was wearing a pale grey doublet slashed with cloth-ofsilver, an amethyst unicorn pinned above his heart. Lord Jast was
armored in black steel, three gold lion’s heads inlaid on his
breastplate. The rumors of his death had not been far wrong, to
look at him; wounds and imprisonment had left him a shadow of the
man he’d been. Lord Banefort had weathered battle better, and
looked ready to return to war at once. Plumm wore purple, Prester

ermine, Moreland russet and green, but each had donned a cloak of
crimson silk, in honor of the man they were escorting home.
Behind the lords came a hundred crossbowmen and three hundred
men-at-arms, and crimson owed from their shoulders as well. In
his white cloak and white scale armor, Jaime felt out of place
amongst that river of red.
Nor did his uncle make him more at ease. “Lord Commander,” Ser
Kevan said, when Jaime trotted up beside him at the head of the
column. “Does Her Grace have some last command for me?”
“I am not here for Cersei.” A drum began to beat behind them,
slow, measured, funereal. Dead, it seemed to say, dead, dead. “I
came to make my farewells. He was my father.”
“And hers.”
“I am not Cersei. I have a beard, and she has breasts. If you are
still confused, nuncle, count our hands. Cersei has two.”
“Both of you have a taste for mockery,” his uncle said. “Spare me
your japes, ser, I have no taste for them.”
“As you will.” This is not going as well as I might have hoped. “Cersei
would have wanted to see you o , but she has many pressing
duties.”
Ser Kevan snorted. “So do we all. How fares your king?” His tone
made the question a reproach.
“Well enough,” Jaime said defensively. “Balon Swann is with him
during the mornings. A good and valiant knight.”
“Once that went without saying when men spoke of those who
wore the white cloak.”
No man can choose his brothers, Jaime thought. Give me leave to
pick my own men, and the Kingsguard will be great again. Put that
baldly, though, it sounded feeble; an empty boast from a man the
realm called Kingslayer. A man with shit for honor. Jaime let it go.
He had not come to argue with his uncle. “Ser,” he said, “you need
to make your peace with Cersei.”
“Are we at war? No one told me.”
Jaime ignored that. “Strife between Lannister and Lannister can
only help the enemies of our House.”

“If there is strife, it will not be my doing. Cersei wants to rule.
Well and good. The realm is hers. All I ask is to be left in peace. My
place is at Darry with my son. The castle must needs be restored,
the lands planted and protected.” He gave a bark of bitter laughter.
“And your sister has left me little else to occupy my time. I had as
well see Lancel wed. His bride has grown impatient waiting for us
to make our way to Darry.”
His widow from the Twins. His cousin Lancel was riding ten yards
behind them. With his hollow eyes and dry white hair, he looked
older than Lord Jast. Jaime could feel his phantom ngers itching at
the sight of him. … fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and Moon
Boy for all I know … He had tried to speak with Lancel more times
than he could count, but never found him alone. If his father was
not with him, some septon was. He may be Kevan’s son, but he has
milk in his veins. Tyrion was lying to me. His words were meant to
wound.
Jaime put his cousin from his thoughts and turned back to his
uncle. “Will you remain at Darry after the wedding?”
“For a while, mayhaps. Sandor Clegane is raiding along the
Trident, it would seem. Your sister wants his head. It may be that
he has joined Dondarrion.”
Jaime had heard about Saltpans. By now half the realm had
heard. The raid had been exceptionally savage. Women raped and
mutilated, children butchered in their mothers’ arms, half the town
put to the torch. “Randyll Tarly is at Maidenpool. Let him deal with
the outlaws. I would sooner have you go to Riverrun.”
“Ser Daven has command there. The Warden of the West. He has
no need of me. Lancel does.”
“As you say, uncle.” Jaime’s head was pounding to the same beat
as the drum. Dead, dead, dead. “You would do well to keep your
knights around you.”
His uncle gave him a cool stare. “Is that a threat, ser?”
A threat? The suggestion took him aback. “A caution. I only
meant … Sandor is dangerous.”
“I was hanging outlaws and robber knights when you were still
shitting in your swaddling clothes. I am not like to go o and face

Clegane and Dondarrion by myself, if that is what you fear, ser. Not
every Lannister is a fool for glory.”
Why, nuncle, I believe you are talking about me. “Addam Marbrand
could deal with these outlaws just as well as you. So could Brax,
Banefort, Plumm, any of these others. But none would make a good
King’s Hand.”
“Your sister knows my terms. They have not changed. Tell her
that, the next time you are in her bedchamber.” Ser Kevan put his
heels into his courser and galloped ahead, putting an abrupt end to
their conversation.
Jaime let him go, his missing sword hand twitching. He had
hoped against hope that Cersei had somehow misunderstood, but
plainly that was wrong. He knows about the two of us. About Tommen
and Myrcella. And Cersei knows he knows. Ser Kevan was a Lannister
of Casterly Rock. He could not believe that she would ever do him
harm, but … I was wrong about Tyrion, why not about Cersei? When
sons were killing fathers, what was there to stop a niece from
ordering an uncle slain? An inconvenient uncle, who knows too much.
Though perhaps Cersei was hoping that the Hound might do her
work for her. If Sandor Clegane cut down Ser Kevan, she would not
need to bloody her own hands. And he will, if they should meet.
Kevan Lannister had once been a stout man with a sword, but he
was no longer young, and the Hound …
The column had caught up to him. As his cousin rode past, anked
by his two septons, Jaime called out to him. “Lancel. Coz. I wanted
to congratulate you upon your marriage. I only regret that my
duties do not permit me to attend.”
“His Grace must be protected.”
“And will be. Still, I hate to miss your bedding. It is your rst
marriage and her second, I understand. I’m sure my lady will be
pleased to show you what goes where.”
The bawdy remark drew a laugh from several nearby lords and a
disapproving look from Lancel’s septons. His cousin squirmed
uncomfortably in the saddle. “I know enough to do my duty as a
husband, ser.”

“That’s just the thing a bride wants on her wedding night,” said
Jaime. “A husband who knows how to do his duty.”
A ush crept up Lancel’s cheeks. “I pray for you, cousin. And for
Her Grace the queen. May the Crone lead her to her wisdom and
the Warrior defend her.”
“Why would Cersei need the Warrior? She has me.” Jaime turned
his horse about, his white cloak snapping in the wind. The Imp was
lying. Cersei would sooner have Robert’s corpse between her legs than a
pious fool like Lancel. Tyrion, you evil bastard, you should have lied
about someone more likely. He galloped past his lord father’s funeral
wayn toward the city in the distance.
The streets of King’s Landing seemed almost deserted as Jaime
Lannister made his way back to the Red Keep atop Aegon’s High
Hill. The soldiers who had crowded the city’s gambling dens and pot
shops were largely gone now. Garlan the Gallant had taken half the
Tyrell strength back to Highgarden, and his lady mother and
grandmother had gone with him. The other half had marched south
with Mace Tyrell and Mathis Rowan to invest Storm’s End.
As for the Lannister host, two thousand seasoned veterans
remained encamped outside the city walls, awaiting the arrival of
Paxter Redwyne’s eet to carry them across Blackwater Bay to
Dragonstone. Lord Stannis appeared to have left only a small
garrison behind him when he sailed north, so two thousand men
would be more than su cient, Cersei had judged.
The rest of the westermen had gone back to their wives and
children, to rebuild their homes, plant their elds, and bring in one
last harvest. Cersei had taken Tommen round their camps before
they marched, to let them cheer their little king. She had never
looked more beautiful than she did that day, with a smile on her
lips and the autumn sunlight shining on her golden hair. Whatever
else one might say about his sister, she did know how to make men
love her when she cared enough to try.
As Jaime trotted through the castle gates, he came upon two
dozen knights riding at a quintain in the outer yard. Something else I
can no longer do, he thought. A lance was heavier and more
cumbersome than a sword, and swords were proving trial enough.

He supposed he might try holding the lance with his left hand, but
that would mean shifting his shield to his right arm. In a tilt, a
man’s foe was always to the left. A shield on his right arm would
prove about as useful as nipples on his breastplate. No, my jousting
days are done, he thought as he dismounted … but all the same, he
stopped to watch awhile.
Ser Tallad the Tall lost his mount when the sandbag came around
and thumped him in the head. Strongboar struck the shield so hard
he cracked it. Kennos of Kayce nished the destruction. A new
shield was hung for Ser Dermot of the Rainwood. Lambert
Turnberry only struck a glancing blow, but Beardless Jon Bettley,
Humfrey Swyft, and Alyn Stackspear all scored solid hits, and Red
Ronnet Connington broke his lance clean. Then the Knight of
Flowers mounted up and put the others all to shame.
Jousting was three-quarters horsemanship, Jaime had always
believed. Ser Loras rode superbly, and handled a lance as if he’d
been born holding one … which no doubt accounted for his
mother’s pinched expression. He puts the point just where he means to
put it, and seems to have the balance of a cat. Perhaps it was not such a
uke that he unhorsed me. It was a shame that he would never have
the chance to try the boy again. He left the whole men to their
sport.
Cersei was in her solar in Maegor’s Holdfast, with Tommen and
Lord Merryweather’s dark-haired Myrish wife. The three of them
were laughing at Grand Maester Pycelle. “Did I miss some clever
jape?” Jaime said, as he shoved through the door.
“Oh, look,” purred Lady Merryweather, “your brave brother has
returned, Your Grace.”
“Most of him.” The queen was in her cups, Jaime realized. Of
late, Cersei always seemed to have a agon of wine to hand, she
who had once scorned Robert Baratheon for his drinking. He
misliked that, but these days he seemed to mislike everything his
sister did. “Grand Maester,” she said, “share the tidings with the
Lord Commander, if you would.”
Pycelle looked desperately uncomfortable. “There has been a
bird,” he said. “From Stokeworth. Lady Tanda sends word that her

daughter Lollys has been delivered of a strong, healthy son.”
“And you will never guess what they have named the little
bastard, brother.”
“They wanted to name him Tywin, I recall.”
“Yes, but I forbade it. I told Falyse that I would not have our
father’s noble name bestowed upon the ill-gotten spawn of some pig
boy and a feeble-witted sow.”
“Lady Stokeworth insists the child’s name was not her doing,”
Grand Maester Pycelle put in. Perspiration dotted his wrinkled
forehead. “Lollys’s husband made the choice, she writes. This man
Bronn, he … it would seem that he …”
“Tyrion,” ventured Jaime. “He named the child Tyrion.”
The old man gave a tremulous nod, mopping at his brow with the
sleeve of his robe.
Jaime had to laugh. “There you are, sweet sister. You have been
looking everywhere for Tyrion, and all the time he’s been hiding in
Lollys’s womb.”
“Droll. You and Bronn are both so droll. No doubt the bastard is
sucking on one of Lollys Lackwit’s dugs even as we speak, whilst
this sellsword looks on, smirking at his little insolence.”
“Perhaps this child bears some resemblance to your brother,”
suggested Lady Merryweather. “He might have been born
deformed, or without a nose.” She laughed a throaty laugh.
“We shall have to send the darling boy a gift,” the queen
declared. “Won’t we, Tommen?”
“We could send him a kitten.”
“A lion cub,” said Lady Merryweather. To rip his little throat out,
her smile suggested.
“I had a di erent sort of gift in mind,” said Cersei.
A new stepfather, most like. Jaime knew the look in his sister’s
eyes. He had seen it before, most recently on the night of Tommen’s
wedding, when she burned the Tower of the Hand. The green light
of the wild re had bathed the face of the watchers, so they looked
like nothing so much as rotting corpses, a pack of gleeful ghouls,
but some of the corpses were prettier than others. Even in the
baleful glow, Cersei had been beautiful to look upon. She’d stood

with one hand on her breast, her lips parted, her green eyes shining.
She is crying, Jaime had realized, but whether it was from grief or
ecstasy he could not have said.
The sight had lled him with disquiet, reminding him of Aerys
Targaryen and the way a burning would arouse him. A king has no
secrets from his Kingsguard. Relations between Aerys and his queen
had been strained during the last years of his reign. They slept apart
and did their best to avoid each other during the waking hours. But
whenever Aerys gave a man to the ames, Queen Rhaella would
have a visitor in the night. The day he burned his mace-and-dagger
Hand, Jaime and Jon Darry had stood at guard outside her
bedchamber whilst the king took his pleasure. “You’re hurting me,”
they had heard Rhaella cry through the oaken door. “You’re hurting
me.” In some queer way, that had been worse than Lord Chelsted’s
screaming. “We are sworn to protect her as well,” Jaime had nally
been driven to say. “We are,” Darry allowed, “but not from him.”
Jaime had only seen Rhaella once after that, the morning of the
day she left for Dragonstone. The queen had been cloaked and
hooded as she climbed inside the royal wheelhouse that would take
her down Aegon’s High Hill to the waiting ship, but he heard her
maids whispering after she was gone. They said the queen looked as
if some beast had savaged her, clawing at her thighs and chewing
on her breasts. A crowned beast, Jaime knew.
By the end the Mad King had become so fearful that he would
allow no blade in his presence, save for the swords his Kingsguard
wore. His beard was matted and unwashed, his hair a silver-gold
tangle that reached his waist, his ngernails cracked yellow claws
nine inches long. Yet still the blades tormented him, the ones he
could never escape, the blades of the Iron Throne. His arms and legs
were always covered with scabs and half-healed cuts.
Let him be king over charred bones and cooked meat, Jaime
remembered, studying his sister’s smile. Let him be the king of ashes.
“Your Grace,” he said, “might we have a private word?”
“As you wish. Tommen, it is past time you had your lesson for the
day. Go with the Grand Maester.”
“Yes, Mother. We are learning about Baelor the Blessed.”

Lady Merryweather took her leave as well, kissing the queen on
both cheeks. “Shall I return for supper, Your Grace?”
“I shall be very cross with you if you do not.”
Jaime could not help but note the way the Myrish woman moved
her hips as she walked. Every step is a seduction. When the door
closed behind her, he cleared his throat and said, “First these
Kettleblacks, then Qyburn, now her. It’s a queer menagerie you are
keeping these days, sweet sister.”
“I am growing very fond of Lady Taena. She amuses me.”
“She is one of Margaery Tyrell’s companions,” Jaime reminded
her. “She’s informing on you to the little queen.”
“Of course she is.” Cersei went to the sideboard to ll her cup
anew. “Margaery was thrilled when I asked her leave to take Taena
on as my companion. You should have heard her. ‘She will be a sister
to you, as she’s been to me. Of course you must have her! I have my
cousins and my other ladies.’ Our little queen does not want me to be
lonely.”
“If you know she is a spy, why take her on?”
“Margaery is not half so clever as she thinks. She has no notion
what a sweet serpent she has in that Myrish slut. I use Taena to feed
the little queen what I want her to know. Some of it is even true.”
Cersei’s eyes were bright with mischief. “And Taena tells me
everything Maid Margaery is doing.”
“Does she? How much do you know about this woman?”
“I know she is a mother, with a young son that she wants to rise
high in this world. She will do whatever is required to see that he
does. Mothers are all the same. Lady Merryweather may be a
serpent, but she is far from stupid. She knows I can do more for her
than Margaery, so she makes herself useful to me. You would be
surprised at all the interesting things she’s told me.”
“What sorts of things?”
Cersei sat beneath the window. “Did you know that the Queen of
Thorns keeps a chest of coins in her wheelhouse? Old gold from
before the Conquest. Should any tradesman be so unwise as to name
a price in golden coins, she pays him with hands from Highgarden,
each half the weight of one of our dragons. What merchant would

dare complain of being cheated by Mace Tyrell’s lady mother?” She
sipped her wine, and said, “Did you enjoy your little ride?”
“Our uncle remarked upon your absence.”
“Our uncle’s remarks do not concern me.”
“They should. You could make good use of him. If not at Riverrun
or the Rock, then in the north against Lord Stannis. Father always
relied upon Kevan when—”
“Roose Bolton is our Warden of the North. He will deal with
Stannis.”
“Lord Bolton is trapped below the Neck, cut o from the north by
the ironmen at Moat Cailin.”
“Not for long. Bolton’s bastard son will soon remove that little
obstacle. Lord Bolton will have two thousand Freys to augment his
own strength, under Lord Walder’s sons Hosteen and Aenys. That
should be more than enough to deal with Stannis and a few
thousand broken men.”
“Ser Kevan—”
“—will have his hands full at Darry, teaching Lancel how to wipe
his arse. Father’s death has unmanned him. He is an old done man.
Daven and Damion will serve us better.”
“They’ll su ce.” Jaime had no quarrel with his cousins. “You still
require a Hand, however. If not our uncle, who?”
His sister laughed. “Not you. Have no fear on that count. Perhaps
Taena’s husband. His grandfather was Hand under Aerys.”
The horn-of-plenty Hand. Jaime remembered Owen Merryweather
well enough; an amiable man, but ine ectual. “As I recall, he did so
well that Aerys exiled him and seized his lands.”
“Robert gave them back. Some, at least. Taena would be pleased
if Orton could recover the rest.”
“Is this about pleasing some Myrish whore? Here I thought it was
about governing the realm.”
“I govern the realm.”
Seven save us all, you do. His sister liked to think of herself as Lord
Tywin with teats, but she was wrong. Their father had been as
relentless and implacable as a glacier, where Cersei was all wild re,
especially when thwarted. She had been giddy as a maiden when

she learned that Stannis had abandoned Dragonstone, certain that he
had nally given up the ght and sailed away to exile. When word
came down from the north that he had turned up again at the Wall,
her fury had been fearful to behold. She does not lack for wits, but she
has no judgment, and no patience. “You need a strong Hand to help
you.”
“A weak ruler needs a strong Hand, as Aerys needed Father. A
strong ruler requires only a diligent servant to carry out his orders.”
She swirled her wine. “Lord Hallyne might suit. He would not be
the rst pyromancer to serve as the King’s Hand.”
No. I killed the last one. “There is talk that you mean to make
Aurane Waters the master of ships.”
“Has someone been informing on me?” When he did not answer,
Cersei tossed her hair back, and said, “Waters is well suited to the
o ce. He has spent half his life on ships.”
“Half his life? He cannot be more than twenty.”
“Two-and-twenty, and what of it? Father was not even one-andtwenty when Aerys Targaryen named him Hand. It is past time
Tommen had some young men about him in place of all these
wrinkled greybeards. Aurane is strong and vigorous.”
Strong and vigorous and handsome, Jaime thought. … she’s been
fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and Moon Boy for all I
know … “Paxter Redwyne would be a better choice. He commands
the largest eet in Westeros. Aurane Waters could command a ski ,
but only if you bought him one.”
“You are a child, Jaime. Redwyne is Tyrell’s bannerman, and
nephew to that hideous grandmother of his. I want none of Lord
Tyrell’s creatures on my council.”
“Tommen’s council, you mean.”
“You know what I mean.”
Too well. “I know that Aurane Waters is a bad idea, and Hallyne is
a worse one. As for Qyburn … gods be good, Cersei, he rode with
Vargo Hoat. The Citadel stripped him of his chain!”
“The grey sheep. Qyburn has made himself most useful to me.
And he is loyal, which is more than I can say of mine own kin.”

The crows will feast upon us all if you go on this way, sweet sister.
“Cersei, listen to yourself. You are seeing dwarfs in every shadow
and making foes of friends. Uncle Kevan is not your enemy. I am
not your enemy.”
Her face twisted in fury. “I begged you for your help. I went
down on my knees to you, and you refused me!”
“My vows …”
“… did not stop you slaying Aerys. Words are wind. You could
have had me, but you chose a cloak instead. Get out.”
“Sister …”
“Get out, I said. I am sick of looking at that ugly stump of yours.
Get out!” To speed him on his way, she heaved her wine cup at his
head. She missed, but Jaime took the hint.
Evenfall found him sitting alone in the common room of White
Sword Tower, with a cup of Dornish red and the White Book. He
was turning pages with the stump of his sword hand when the
Knight of Flowers entered, removed his cloak and swordbelt and
hung them on a wall peg next to Jaime’s.
“I saw you in the yard today,” said Jaime. “You rode well.”
“Better than well, surely.” Ser Loras poured himself a cup of wine,
and took a seat across the half-moon table.
“A more modest man might have answered ‘My lord is too kind,’
or ‘I had a good mount.’ ”
“The horse was adequate, and my lord is as kind as I am modest.”
Loras waved at the book. “Lord Renly always said that books were
for maesters.”
“This one is for us. The history of every man who has ever worn a
white cloak is written here.”
“I have glanced at it. The shields are pretty. I prefer books with
more illuminations. Lord Renly owned a few with drawings that
would turn a septon blind.”
Jaime had to smile. “There’s none of that here, ser, but the
histories will open your eyes. You would do well to know about the
lives of those who went before.”
“I do. Prince Aemon the Dragonknight, Ser Ryam Redwyne, the
Greatheart, Barristan the Bold …”

“… Gwayne Corbray, Alyn Connington, the Demon of Darry, aye.
You will have heard of Lucamore Strong as well.”
“Ser Lucamore the Lusty?” Ser Loras seemed amused. “Three
wives and thirty children, was it? They cut his cock o . Shall I sing
the song for you, my lord?”
“And Ser Terrence Toyne?”
“Bedded the king’s mistress and died screaming. The lesson is,
men who wear white breeches need to keep them tightly laced.”
“Gyles Greycloak? Orivel the Open-Handed?”
“Gyles was a traitor, Orivel a coward. Men who shamed the white
cloak. What is my lord suggesting?”
“Little and less. Don’t take o ense where none was meant, ser.
How about Long Tom Costayne?”
Ser Loras shook his head.
“He was a Kingsguard knight for sixty years.”
“When was that? I’ve never—”
“Ser Donnel of Duskendale, then?”
“I may have heard the name, but—”
“Addison Hill? The White Owl, Michael Mertyns? Je ory
Norcross? They called him Neveryield. Red Robert Flowers? What
can you tell me of them?”
“Flowers is a bastard name. So is Hill.”
“Yet both men rose to command the Kingsguard. Their tales are
in the book. Rolland Darklyn is in here too. The youngest man ever
to serve in the Kingsguard, until me. He was given his cloak on a
battle eld and died within an hour of donning it.”
“He can’t have been very good.”
“Good enough. He died, but his king lived. A lot of brave men
have worn the white cloak. Most have been forgotten.”
“Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be
remembered. The best.”
“The best and the worst.” So one of us is like to live in song. “And a
few who were a bit of both. Like him.” He tapped the page he had
been reading.
“Who?” Ser Loras craned his head around to see. “Ten black
pellets on a scarlet eld. I do not know those arms.”

“They belonged to Criston Cole, who served the rst Viserys and
the second Aegon.” Jaime closed the White Book. “They called him
Kingmaker.”

CERSEI

Three wretched fools with a leather sack, the queen thought as they
sank to their knees before her. The look of them did not encourage
her. I suppose there is always a chance.
“Your Grace,” said Qyburn quietly, “the small council …”
“… will await my pleasure. It may be that we can bring them
word of a traitor’s death.” O across the city, the bells of Baelor’s
Sept sang their song of mourning. No bells will ring for you, Tyrion,
Cersei thought. I shall dip your head in tar and give your twisted body
to the dogs. “O your knees,” she told the would-be lords. “Show me
what you’ve brought me.”
They rose; three ugly men, and ragged. One had a boil on his
neck, and none had washed in half a year. The prospect of raising
such to lordship amused her. I could seat them next to Margaery at
feasts. When the chief fool undid the drawstring on the sack and
plunged his hand inside, the smell of decay lled her audience
chamber like some rank rose. The head he pulled out was greygreen and crawling with maggots. It smells like Father. Dorcas
gasped, and Jocelyn covered her mouth and retched.
The queen considered her prize, un inching. “You’ve killed the
wrong dwarf,” she said at last, grudging every word.
“We never did,” one of the fools dared to say. “This is got to be
him, ser. A dwarf, see. He’s rotted some, is all.”

“He has also grown a new nose,” Cersei observed. “A rather
bulbous one, I’d say. Tyrion’s nose was hacked o in a battle.”
The three fools exchanged a look. “No one told us,” said the one
with head in hand. “This one come walking along as bold as you
please, some ugly dwarf, so we thought …”
“He said he were a sparrow,” the one with the boil added, “and
you said he was lying.” That was directed at the third man.
The queen was angry to think that she had kept her small council
waiting for this mummer’s farce. “You have wasted my time and
slain an innocent man. I should have your own heads o .” But if she
did, the next man might hesitate and let the Imp slip the net. She
would pile dead dwarfs ten feet high before she let that happen.
“Remove yourselves from my sight.”
“Aye, Your Grace,” said the boil. “We beg your pardons.”
“Do you want the head?” asked the man who held it.
“Give it to Ser Meryn. No, in the sack, you lackwit. Yes. Ser
Osmund, see them out.”
Trant removed the head and Kettleblack the headsmen, leaving
only Lady Jocelyn’s breakfast as evidence of their visit. “Clean that
up at once,” the queen commanded her. This was the third head that
had been delivered to her. At least this one was a dwarf. The last had
simply been an ugly child.
“Someone will nd the dwarf, never fear,” Ser Osmund assured
her. “And when they do, we’ll kill him good.”
Will you? Last night Cersei had dreamed of the old woman, with
her pebbly jowls and croaking voice. Maggy the Frog, they had
called her in Lannisport. If Father had known what she said to me, he
would have had her tongue out. Cersei had never told anyone,
though, not even Jaime. Melara said that if we never spoke about her
prophecies, we would forget them. She said that a forgotten prophecy
couldn’t come true.
“I have informers sni ng after the Imp everywhere, Your Grace,”
said Qyburn. He had garbed himself in something very like
maester’s robes, but white instead of grey, immaculate as the cloaks
of the Kingsguard. Whorls of gold decorated his hem, sleeves, and
sti high collar, and a golden sash was tied about his waist.

“Oldtown, Gulltown, Dorne, even the Free Cities. Wheresoever he
might run, my whisperers will nd him.”
“You assume he left King’s Landing. He could be hiding in
Baelor’s Sept for all we know, swinging on the bell ropes to make
that awful din.” Cersei made a sour face and let Dorcas help her to
her feet. “Come, my lord. My council awaits.” She took Qyburn by
the arm as they made their way down the stairs. “Have you
attended to that little task I set you?”
“I have, Your Grace. I am sorry that it took so long. Such a large
head. It took the beetles many hours to clean the esh. By way of
pardon, I have lined a box of ebony and silver with felt, to make a
tting presentation for the skull.”
“A cloth sack would serve as well. Prince Doran wants his head.
He won’t give a g what sort of box it comes in.”
The pealing of the bells was louder in the yard. He was only a
High Septon. How long must we endure this? The ringing was more
melodious than the Mountain’s screams had been, but …
Qyburn seemed to sense what she was thinking. “The bells will
stop at sunset, Your Grace.”
“That will be a great relief. How can you know?”
“Knowing is the nature of my service.”
Varys had all of us believing he was irreplaceable. What fools we were.
Once the queen let it become known that Qyburn had taken the
eunuch’s place, the usual vermin had wasted no time in making
themselves known to him, to trade their whispers for a few coins. It
was the silver all along, not the Spider. Qyburn will serve us just as well.
She was looking forward to the look on Pycelle’s face when Qyburn
took his seat.
A knight of the Kingsguard was always posted outside the doors
of the council chambers when the small council was in session.
Today it was Ser Boros Blount. “Ser Boros,” the queen said
pleasantly, “you look quite grey this morning. Something you ate,
perchance?” Jaime had made him the king’s food taster. A tasty task,
but shameful for a knight. Blount hated it. His sagging jowls quivered
as he held the door for them.

The councillors quieted as she entered. Lord Gyles coughed by
way of greeting, loud enough to wake Pycelle. The others rose,
mouthing pleasantries. Cersei allowed herself the faintest of smiles.
“My lords, I know you will forgive my lateness.”
“We are here to serve Your Grace,” said Ser Harys Swyft. “It is
our pleasure to anticipate your coming.”
“You all know Lord Qyburn, I am sure.”
Grand Maester Pycelle did not disappoint her. “Lord Qyburn?” he
managed, purpling. “Your Grace, this … a maester swears sacred
vows, to hold no lands or lordships …”
“Your Citadel took away his chain,” Cersei reminded him. “If he
is not a maester, he cannot be held to a maester’s vows. We called
the eunuch lord as well, you may recall.”
Pycelle sputtered. “This man is … he is un t …”
“Do not presume to speak to me of tness. Not after the stinking
mockery you made of my lord father’s corpse.”
“Your Grace cannot think …” He raised a spotted hand, as if to
ward o a blow. “The silent sisters removed Lord Tywin’s bowels
and organs, drained his blood … every care was taken … his body
was stu ed with salts and fragrant herbs …”
“Oh, spare me the disgusting details. I smelled the results of your
care. Lord Qyburn’s healing arts saved my brother’s life, and I do
not doubt that he will serve the king more ably than that simpering
eunuch. My lord, you know your fellow councillors?”
“I would be a poor informer if I did not, Your Grace.” Qyburn
seated himself between Orton Merryweather and Gyles Rosby.
My councillors. Cersei had uprooted every rose, and all those
beholden to her uncle and her brothers. In their places were men
whose loyalty would be to her. She had even given them new
styles, borrowed from the Free Cities; the queen would have no
“masters” at court beside herself. Orton Merryweather was her
justiciar, Gyles Rosby her lord treasurer. Aurane Waters, the
dashing young Bastard of Driftmark, would be her grand admiral.
And for her Hand, Ser Harys Swyft.
Soft, bald, and obsequious, Swyft had an absurd little white pu
of beard where most men had a chin. The blue bantam rooster of his

House was worked across the front of his plush yellow doublet in
beads of lapis. Over that he wore a mantle of blue velvet decorated
with a hundred golden hands. Ser Harys had been thrilled by his
appointment, too dim to realize that he was more hostage than
Hand. His daughter was her uncle’s wife, and Kevan loved his
chinless lady, at-chested and chicken-legged as she was. So long as
she had Ser Harys in hand, Kevan Lannister must needs think twice
about opposing her. To be sure, a good-father is not the ideal hostage,
but better a imsy shield than none.
“Will the king be joining us?” asked Orton Merryweather.
“My son is playing with his little queen. For the moment, his idea
of kingship is stamping papers with the royal seal. His Grace is still
too young to comprehend a airs of state.”
“And our valiant Lord Commander?”
“Ser Jaime is at his armorer’s being tted for a hand. I know we
were all tired of that ugly stump. And I daresay he would nd these
proceedings as tiresome as Tommen.” Aurane Waters chuckled at
that. Good, Cersei thought, the more they laugh, the less he is a threat.
Let them laugh. “Do we have wine?”
“We do, Your Grace.” Orton Merryweather was not a comely
man, with his big lumpish nose and shock of unruly reddish-orange
hair, but he was never less than courteous. “We have Dornish red
and Arbor gold, and a ne sweet hippocras from Highgarden.”
“The gold, I think. I nd Dornish wines as sour as the Dornish.”
As Merryweather lled her cup, Cersei said, “I suppose we had as
well begin with them.”
Grand Maester Pycelle’s lips were still quivering, yet somehow he
found his tongue. “As you command. Prince Doran has taken his
brother’s unruly bastards into custody, yet Sunspear still seethes.
The prince writes that he cannot hope to calm the waters until he
receives the justice that was promised him.”
“To be sure.” A tiresome creature, this prince. “His long wait is
almost done. I am sending Balon Swann to Sunspear, to deliver him
the head of Gregor Clegane.” Ser Balon would have another task as
well, but that part was best left unsaid.

“Ah.” Ser Harys Swyft fumbled at his funny little beard with
thumb and fore nger. “He is dead then? Ser Gregor?”
“I would think so, my lord,” Aurane Waters said dryly. “I am told
that removing the head from the body is often mortal.”
Cersei favored him with a smile; she liked a bit of wit, so long as
she was not its target. “Ser Gregor perished of his wounds, just as
Grand Maester Pycelle foretold.”
Pycelle harrumphed and eyed Qyburn sourly. “The spear was
poisoned. No man could have saved him.”
“So you said. I recall it well.” The queen turned to her Hand.
“What were you speaking of when I arrived, Ser Harys?”
“Sparrows, Your Grace. Septon Raynard says there may be as
many as two thousand in the city, and more arriving every day.
Their leaders preach of doom and demon worship …”
Cersei took a taste of wine. Very nice. “And long past time,
wouldn’t you agree? What would you call this red god that Stannis
worships, if not a demon? The Faith should oppose such evil.”
Qyburn had reminded her of that, the clever man. “Our late High
Septon let too much pass, I fear. Age had dimmed his sight and
sapped his strength.”
“He was an old done man, Your Grace.” Qyburn smiled at
Pycelle. “His passing should not have surprised us. No man can ask
for more than to die peacefully in his sleep, full of years.”
“No,” said Cersei, “but we must hope that his successor is more
vigorous. My friends upon the other hill tell me that it will most
like be Torbert or Raynard.”
Grand Maester Pycelle cleared his throat. “I have friends among
the Most Devout as well, and they speak of Septon Ollidor.”
“Do not discount this man Luceon,” Qyburn said. “Last night he
feted thirty of the Most Devout on suckling pig and Arbor gold, and
by day he hands out hardbread to the poor to prove his piety.”
Aurane Waters seemed as bored as Cersei by all this prattle about
septons. Seen up close, his hair was more silvery than gold, and his
eyes were grey-green where Prince Rhaegar’s had been purple.
Even so, the resemblance … She wondered if Waters would shave
his beard for her. Though he was ten years her junior, he wanted

her; Cersei could see it in the way he looked at her. Men had been
looking at her that way since her breasts began to bud. Because I
was so beautiful, they said, but Jaime was beautiful as well, and they
never looked at him that way. When she was small she would
sometimes don her brother’s clothing as a lark. She was always
startled by how di erently men treated her when they thought that
she was Jaime. Even Lord Tywin himself …
Pycelle and Merryweather were still quibbling about who the
new High Septon was like to be. “One will serve as well as
another,” the queen announced abruptly, “but whosoever dons the
crystal crown must pronounce an anathema upon the Imp.” This last
High Septon had been conspicuously silent regarding Tyrion. “As for
these pink sparrows, so long as they preach no treason they are the
Faith’s problem, not ours.”
Lord Orton and Ser Harys murmured agreement. Gyles Rosby’s
attempt to do the same dissolved into a t of coughing. Cersei
turned away in distaste as he was hacking up a gob of bloody
phlegm. “Maester, have you brought the letter from the Vale?”
“I have, Your Grace.” Pycelle plucked it from his pile of papers
and smoothed it out. “It is a declaration, rather than a letter. Signed
at Runestone by Bronze Yohn Royce, Lady Waynwood, Lords
Hunter, Redfort, and Belmore, and Symond Templeton, the Knight
of Ninestars. All have a xed their seals. They write—”
A deal of rubbish. “My lords may read the letter if they wish.
Royce and these others are massing men below the Eyrie. They
mean to remove Little nger as Lord Protector of the Vale, forcibly
if need be. The question is, ought we allow this?”
“Does Lord Baelish seek our help?” asked Harys Swyft.
“Not as yet. In truth, he seems quite unconcerned. His last letter
mentions the rebels only brie y before beseeching me to ship him
some old tapestries of Robert’s.”
Ser Harys ngered his chin beard. “And these lords of the
declaration, do they appeal to the king to take a hand?”
“They do not.”
“Then … mayhaps we need do nothing.”
“A war in the Vale would be most tragic,” said Pycelle.

“War?” Orton Merryweather laughed. “Lord Baelish is a most
amusing man, but one does not ght a war with witticisms. I doubt
there will be bloodshed. And does it matter who is regent for little
Lord Robert, so long as the Vale remits its taxes?”
No, Cersei decided. If truth be told, Little nger had been more
use at court. He had a gift for nding gold, and never coughed. “Lord
Orton has convinced me. Maester Pycelle, instruct these Lords
Declarant that no harm must come to Petyr. Elsewise, the crown is
content with whatever dispositions they might make for the
governance of the Vale during Robert Arryn’s minority.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
“Might we discuss the eet?” asked Aurane Waters. “Fewer than a
dozen of our ships survived the inferno on the Blackwater. We must
needs restore our strength at sea.”
Merryweather nodded. “Strength at sea is most essential.”
“Could we make use of the ironmen?” asked Orton
Merryweather. “The enemy of our enemy? What would the
Seastone Chair want of us as the price of an alliance?”
“They want the north,” Grand Maester Pycelle said, “which our
queen’s noble father promised to House Bolton.”
“How inconvenient,” said Merryweather. “Still, the north is large.
The lands could be divided. It need not be a permanent
arrangement. Bolton might consent, so long as we assure him that
our strength will be his once Stannis is destroyed.”
“Balon Greyjoy is dead, I had heard,” said Ser Harys Swyft. “Do
we know who rules the isles now? Did Lord Balon have a son?”
“Leo?” coughed Lord Gyles. “Theo?”
“Theon Greyjoy was raised at Winterfell, a ward of Eddard
Stark,” Qyburn said. “He is not like to be a friend of ours.”
“I had heard he was slain,” said Merryweather.
“Was there only one son?” Ser Harys Swyft tugged upon his chin
beard. “Brothers. There were brothers. Were there not?”
Varys would have known, Cersei thought with irritation. “I do not
propose to climb in bed with that sorry pack of squids. Their turn
will come, once we have dealt with Stannis. What we require is our
own eet.”

“I propose we build new dromonds,” said Aurane Waters. “Ten, to
start with.”
“Where is the coin to come from?” asked Pycelle.
Lord Gyles took that as an invitation to begin coughing again. He
brought up more pink spittle and dabbed it away with a square of
red silk. “There is no …” he managed, before the coughing ate his
words. “… no … we do not …”
Ser Harys proved swift enough at least to grasp the meaning
between the coughs. “The crown incomes have never been greater,”
he objected. “Ser Kevan told me so himself.”
Lord Gyles coughed. “… expenses … gold cloaks …”
Cersei had heard his objections before. “Our lord treasurer is
trying to say that we have too many gold cloaks and too little
gold.” Rosby’s coughing had begun to vex her. Perhaps Garth the
Gross would not have been so ill. “Though large, the crown incomes
are not large enough to keep abreast of Robert’s debts. Accordingly,
I have decided to defer our repayment of the sums owed the Holy
Faith and the Iron Bank of Braavos until war’s end.” The new High
Septon would doubtless wring his holy hands, and the Braavosi
would squeak and squawk at her, but what of it? “The monies saved
will be used for the building of our new eet.”
“Your Grace is prudent,” said Lord Merryweather. “This is a wise
measure. And needed, until the war is done. I concur.”
“And I,” said Ser Harys.
“Your Grace,” Pycelle said in a quavering voice, “this will cause
more trouble than you know, I fear. The Iron Bank …”
“… remains on Braavos, far across the sea. They shall have their
gold, maester. A Lannister pays his debts.”
“The Braavosi have a saying too.” Pycelle’s jeweled chain clinked
softly. “The Iron Bank will have its due, they say.”
“The Iron Bank will have its due when I say they will. Until such
time, the Iron Bank will wait respectfully. Lord Waters, commence
the building of your dromonds.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
Ser Harys shu ed through some papers. “The next matter … we
have had a letter from Lord Frey putting forth some claims …”

“How many lands and honors does that man want?” snapped the
queen. “His mother must have had three teats.”
“My lords may not know,” said Qyburn, “but in the winesinks and
pot shops of this city, there are those who suggest that the crown
might have been somehow complicit in Lord Walder’s crime.”
The other councillors stared at him uncertainly. “Do you refer to
the Red Wedding?” asked Aurane Waters. “Crime?” said Ser Harys.
Pycelle cleared his throat noisily. Lord Gyles coughed.
“These sparrows are especially outspoken,” warned Qyburn. “The
Red Wedding was an a ront to all the laws of gods and men, they
say, and those who had a hand in it are damned.”
Cersei was not slow to take his meaning. “Lord Walder must soon
face the Father’s judgment. He is very old. Let the sparrows spit
upon his memory. It has nought to do with us.”
“No,” said Ser Harys. “No,” said Lord Merryweather. “No one
could think so,” said Pycelle. Lord Gyles coughed.
“A little spittle on Lord Walder’s tomb is not like to disturb the
grave worms,” Qyburn agreed, “but it would also be useful if
someone were to be punished for the Red Wedding. A few Frey
heads would do much to mollify the north.”
“Lord Walder will never sacri ce his own,” said Pycelle.
“No,” mused Cersei, “but his heirs may be less squeamish. Lord
Walder will soon do us the courtesy of dying, we can hope. What
better way for the new Lord of the Crossing to rid himself of
inconvenient half brothers, disagreeable cousins, and scheming
sisters than by naming them the culprits?”
“Whilst we await Lord Walder’s death, there is another matter,”
said Aurane Waters. “The Golden Company has broken its contract
with Myr. Around the docks I’ve heard men say that Lord Stannis
has hired them and is bringing them across the sea.”
“What would he pay them with?” asked Merryweather. “Snow?
They are called the Golden Company. How much gold does Stannis
have?”
“Little enough,” Cersei assured him. “Lord Qyburn has spoken to
the crew of that Myrish galley in the bay. They claim the Golden

Company is making for Volantis. If they mean to cross to Westeros,
they are marching in the wrong direction.”
“Perhaps they grew weary of ghting on the losing side,”
suggested Lord Merryweather.
“There is that as well,” agreed the queen. “Only a blind man
could fail to see our war is all but won. Lord Tyrell has Storm’s End
invested. Riverrun is besieged by the Freys and my cousin Daven,
our new Warden of the West. Lord Redwyne’s ships have passed
through the Straits of Tarth and are moving swiftly up the coast.
Only a few shing boats remain on Dragonstone to oppose
Redwyne’s landing. The castle may hold for some time, but once we
have the port we can cut the garrison o from the sea. Then only
Stannis himself will remain to vex us.”
“If Lord Janos can be believed, he is trying to make common
cause with the wildlings,” warned Grand Maester Pycelle.
“Savages in skins,” declared Lord Merryweather. “Lord Stannis
must be desperate indeed, to seek such allies.”
“Desperate and foolish,” the queen agreed. “The northmen hate
the wildlings. Roose Bolton should have no trouble winning them to
our cause. A few have already joined up with his bastard son to help
him clear the wretched ironmen from Moat Cailin and clear the way
for Lord Bolton to return. Umber, Ryswell … I forget the other
names. Even White Harbor is on the point of joining us. Its lord has
agreed to marry both his granddaughters to our friends of Frey and
open his port to our ships.”
“I thought we had no ships,” Ser Harys said, confused.
“Wyman Manderly was a loyal bannerman to Eddard Stark,” said
Grand Maester Pycelle. “Can such a man be trusted?
No one can be trusted. “He’s a fat old man, and frightened.
However, he is proving stubborn on one point. He insists that he
will not bend the knee until his heir has been returned to him.”
“Do we have this heir?” asked Ser Harys.
“He will be at Harrenhal, if he is still alive. Gregor Clegane took
him captive.” The Mountain had not always been gentle with his
prisoners, even those worth a goodly ransom. “If he is dead, I
suppose we will need to send Lord Manderly the heads of those who

killed him, with our most sincere apologies.” If one head was
enough to appease a prince of Dorne, a bag of them should be more
than adequate for a fat northman wrapped in sealskins.
“Will not Lord Stannis seek to win the allegiance of White Harbor
as well?” asked Grand Maester Pycelle.
“Oh, he has tried. Lord Manderly has sent his letters on to us and
replied with evasions. Stannis demands White Harbor’s swords and
silver, for which he o ers … well, nothing.” One day she must light
a candle to the Stranger for carrying Renly o and leaving Stannis.
If it had been the other way around, her life would have been
harder. “Just this morning there was another bird. Stannis has sent
his onion smuggler to treat with White Harbor on his behalf.
Manderly has clapped the wretch inside a cell. He asks us what he
should do with him.”
“Send him here, that we might question him,” suggested Lord
Merryweather. “The man might know much of value.”
“Let him die,” said Qyburn. “His death will be a lesson to the
north, to show them what becomes of traitors.”
“I quite agree,” the queen said. “I have instructed Lord Manderly
to have his head o forthwith. That should put an end to any chance
of White Harbor supporting Stannis.”
“Stannis will need another Hand,” observed Aurane Waters with a
chuckle. “The turnip knight, perhaps?”
“A turnip knight?” said Ser Harys Swyft, confused. “Who is this
man? I have not heard of him.”
Waters did not reply, except to roll his eyes.
“What if Lord Manderly should refuse?” asked Merryweather.
“He dare not. The onion knight’s head is the coin he’ll need to
buy his son’s life.” Cersei smiled. “The fat old fool may have been
loyal to the Starks in his own way, but with the wolves of
Winterfell extinguished—”
“Your Grace has forgotten the Lady Sansa,” said Pycelle.
The queen bristled. “I most certainly have not forgotten that little
she-wolf.” She refused to say the girl’s name. “I ought to have
shown her to the black cells as the daughter of a traitor, but instead
I made her part of mine own household. She shared my hearth and

hall, played with my own children. I fed her, dressed her, tried to
make her a little less ignorant about the world, and how did she
repay me for my kindness? She helped murder my son. When we
nd the Imp, we will nd the Lady Sansa too. She is not dead … but
before I am done with her, I promise you, she will be singing to the
Stranger, begging for his kiss.”
An awkward silence followed. Have they all swallowed their
tongues? Cersei thought, with irritation. It was enough to make her
wonder why she bothered with a council.
“In any case,” the queen went on, “Lord Eddard’s younger
daughter is with Lord Bolton, and will be wed to his son Ramsay as
soon as Moat Cailin has fallen.” So long as the girl played her role
well enough to cement their claim to Winterfell, neither of the
Boltons would much care that she was actually some steward’s
whelp tricked up by Little nger. “If the north must have a Stark,
we’ll give them one.” She let Lord Merryweather ll her cup once
again. “Another problem has arisen on the Wall, however. The
brothers of the Night’s Watch have taken leave of their wits and
chosen Ned Stark’s bastard son to be their Lord Commander.”
“Snow, the boy is called,” Pycelle said unhelpfully.
“I glimpsed him once at Winterfell,” the queen said, “though the
Starks did their best to hide him. He looks very like his father.” Her
husband’s by-blows had his look as well, though at least Robert had
the grace to keep them out of sight. Once, after that sorry business
with the cat, he had made some noises about bringing some
baseborn daughter of his to court. “Do as you please,” she’d told
him, “but you may nd that the city is not a healthy place for a
growing girl.” The bruise those words had won her had been hard
to hide from Jaime, but they heard no more about the bastard girl.
Catelyn Tully was a mouse, or she would have smothered this Jon Snow
in his cradle. Instead, she’s left the lthy task to me. “Snow shares Lord
Eddard’s taste for treason too,” she said. “The father would have
handed the realm to Stannis. The son has given him lands and
castles.”
“The Night’s Watch is sworn to take no part in the wars of the
Seven Kingdoms,” Pycelle reminded them. “For thousands of years

the black brothers have upheld that tradition.”
“Until now,” said Cersei. “The bastard boy has written us to avow
that the Night’s Watch takes no side, but his actions give the lie to
his words. He has given Stannis food and shelter, yet has the
insolence to plead with us for arms and men.”
“An outrage,” declared Lord Merryweather. “We cannot allow the
Night’s Watch to join its strength to that of Lord Stannis.”
“We must declare this Snow a traitor and a rebel,” agreed Ser
Harys Swyft. “The black brothers must remove him.”
Grand Maester Pycelle nodded ponderously. “I propose that we
inform Castle Black that no more men will be sent to them until
such time as Snow is gone.”
“Our new dromonds will need oarsmen,” said Aurane Waters.
“Let us instruct the lords to send their poachers and thieves to me
henceforth, instead of to the Wall.”
Qyburn leaned forward with a smile. “The Night’s Watch defends
us all from snarks and grumkins. My lords, I say that we must help
the brave black brothers.”
Cersei gave him a sharp look. “What are you saying?”
“This,” Qyburn said. “For years now, the Night’s Watch has
begged for men. Lord Stannis has answered their plea. Can King
Tommen do less? His Grace should send the Wall a hundred men.
To take the black, ostensibly, but in truth …”
“… to remove Jon Snow from the command,” Cersei nished,
delighted. I knew I was right to want him on my council. “That is just
what we shall do.” She laughed. If this bastard boy is truly his father’s
son, he will not suspect a thing. Perhaps he will even thank me, before
the blade slides between his ribs. “It will need to be done carefully, to
be sure. Leave the rest to me, my lords.” This was how an enemy
should be dealt with: with a dagger, not a declaration. “We have
done good work today, my lords. I thank you. Is there aught else?”
“One last thing, Your Grace,” said Aurane Waters, in an
apologetic tone. “I hesitate to take up the council’s time with tri es,
but there has been some queer talk heard along the docks of late.
Sailors from the east. They speak of dragons …”

“… and manticores, no doubt, and bearded snarks?” Cersei
chuckled. “Come back to me when you hear talk of dwarfs, my
lord.” She stood, to signal that the meeting was at an end.
A blustery autumn wind was blowing when Cersei left the council
chambers, and bells of Blessed Baelor still sang their song of
mourning o across the city. In the yard twoscore knights were
hammering each other with sword and shield, adding to the din. Ser
Boros Blount escorted the queen back to her apartments, where she
found Lady Merryweather chuckling with Jocelyn and Dorcas.
“What is it you all nd so amusing?”
“The Redwyne twins,” said Taena. “Both of them have fallen in
love with Lady Margaery. They used to ght over which would be
the next Lord of the Arbor. Now both of them want to join the
Kingsguard, just to be near the little queen.”
“The Redwynes have always had more freckles than wits.” It was
a useful thing to know, though. If Horror or Slobber were to be found
abed with Margaery … Cersei wondered if the little queen liked
freckles. “Dorcas, fetch me Ser Osney Kettleblack.”
Dorcas blushed. “As you command.”
When the girl was gone, Taena Merryweather gave the queen a
quizzical look. “Why did she turn so red?”
“Love.” It was Cersei’s turn to laugh. “She fancies our Ser Osney.”
He was the youngest Kettleblack, the clean-shaved one. Though he
had the same black hair, hooked nose, and easy smile as his brother
Osmund, one cheek bore three long scratches, courtesy of one of
Tyrion’s whores. “She likes his scars, I think.”
Lady Merryweather’s dark eyes shone with mischief. “Just so.
Scars make a man look dangerous, and danger is exciting.”
“You shock me, my lady,” the queen said, teasing. “If danger
excites you so, why wed Lord Orton? We all love him, it is true, but
still …” Petyr had once remarked that the horn of plenty that
adorned House Merryweather’s arms suited Lord Orton admirably,
since he had carrot-colored hair, a nose as bulbous as a beetroot,
and pease porridge for wits.
Taena laughed. “My lord is more bountiful than dangerous, this is
so. Yet … I hope Your Grace will not think the less of me, but I did

not come a maid entire to Orton’s bed.”
You are all whores in the Free Cities, aren’t you? That was good to
know; one day, she might be able to make use of it. “And pray, who
was this lover who was so … full of danger?”
Taena’s olive skin turned even darker as she blushed. “Oh, I
should not have spoken. Your Grace will keep my secret, yes?”
“Men have scars, women mysteries.” Cersei kissed her cheek. I
will have his name out of you soon enough.
When Dorcas returned with Ser Osney Kettleblack, the queen
dismissed her ladies. “Come sit with me by the window, Ser Osney.
Will you take a cup of wine?” She poured for them herself. “Your
cloak is threadbare. I have a mind to put you in a new one.”
“What, a white one? Who’s died?”
“No one, as yet,” the queen said. “Is that your wish, to join your
brother Osmund in our Kingsguard?”
“I’d rather be the queen’s guard, if it please Your Grace.” When
Osney grinned, the scars on his cheek turned bright red.
Cersei’s ngers traced their path across his cheek. “You have a
bold tongue, ser. You will make me forget myself again.”
“Good.” Ser Osney caught her hand and kissed her ngers
roughly. “My sweet queen.”
“You are a wicked man,” the queen whispered, “and no true
knight, I think.” She let him touch her breasts through the silk of
her gown. “Enough.”
“It isn’t. I want you.”
“You’ve had me.”
“Only once.” He grabbed her left breast again and gave it a
clumsy squeeze that reminded her of Robert.
“One good night for one good knight. You did me valiant service,
and you had your reward.” Cersei walked her ngers up his laces.
She could feel him sti ening through his breeches. “Was that a new
horse you were riding in the yard yestermorn?”
“The black stallion? Aye. A gift from my brother Osfryd.
Midnight, I call him.”
How wonderfully original. “A ne mount for a battle. For pleasure,
though, there is nothing to compare to a gallop on a spirited young

lly.” She gave him a smile and a squeeze. “Tell me true. Do you
think our little queen is pretty?”
Ser Osney drew back, wary. “I suppose. For a girl. I’d sooner
have a woman.”
“Why not both?” she whispered. “Pluck the little rose for me, and
you will not nd me to be ungrateful.”
“The little … Margaery, you mean?” Ser Osney’s ardor was
wilting in his breeches. “She’s the king’s wife. Wasn’t there some
Kingsguard who lost his head for bedding the king’s wife?”
“Ages ago.” She was his king’s mistress, not his wife, and his head was
the only thing he did not lose. Aegon dismembered him piece by piece,
and made the woman watch. Cersei did not want Osney dwelling on
that ancient unpleasantness, however. “Tommen is not Aegon the
Unworthy. Have no fear, he will do as I bid him. I mean for
Margaery to lose her head, not you.”
That gave him pause. “Her maidenhead, you mean?”
“That too. Assuming she has one still.” She traced his scars again.
“Unless you think Margaery would prove unresponsive to
your … charms?”
Osney gave her a wounded look. “She likes me well enough.
Them cousins of hers are always teasing with me about my nose.
How big it is, and all. The last time Megga did that, Margaery told
them to stop and said I had a lovely face.”
“There you are, then.”
“There I am,” the man agreed, in a doubtful tone, “but where am
I going to be if she … if I … after we …?”
“… do the deed?” Cersei gave him a barbed smile. “Lying with a
queen is treason. Tommen would have no choice but to send you to
the Wall.”
“The Wall?” he said with dismay.
It was all she could do not to laugh. No, best not. Men hate being
laughed at. “A black cloak would go well with your eyes, and that
black hair of yours.”
“No one returns from the Wall.”
“You will. All you need to do is kill a boy.”
“What boy?”

“A bastard boy in league with Stannis. He’s young and green, and
you’ll have a hundred men.”
Kettleblack was afraid, she could smell it on him, but he was too
proud to own up to that fear. Men are all alike. “I’ve killed more
boys than I can count,” he insisted. “Once this boy is dead, I’d get
my pardon from the king?”
“That, and a lordship.” Unless Snow’s brothers hang you rst. “A
queen must have a consort. One who knows no fear.”
“Lord Kettleblack?” A slow smile spread across his face, and his
scars amed red. “Aye, I like the sound o’ that. A lordly lord …”
“… and t to bed a queen.”
He frowned. “The Wall is cold.”
“And I am warm.” Cersei put her arms about his neck. “Bed a girl
and kill a boy and I am yours. Do you have the courage?”
Osney thought a moment before he nodded. “I am your man.”
“You are, ser.” She kissed him, and let him have a little taste of
tongue before she broke away. “Enough for now. The rest must
wait. Will you dream of me tonight?”
“Aye.” His voice was hoarse.
“And when you’re abed with our Maid Margaery?” she asked him,
teasing. “When you’re in her, will you dream of me then?”
“I will,” swore Osney Kettleblack.
“Good.”
After he was gone, Cersei summoned Jocelyn to brush her hair
out whilst she slipped o her shoes and stretched like a cat. I was
made for this, she told herself. It was the sheer elegance of it that
pleased her most. Even Mace Tyrell would not dare defend his
darling daughter if she was caught in the act with the likes of Osney
Kettleblack, and neither Stannis Baratheon nor Jon Snow would
have cause to wonder why Osney was being sent to the Wall. She
would see to it that Ser Osmund was the one to discover his brother
with the little queen; that way the loyalty of the other two
Kettleblacks need not be impugned. If Father could only see me now,
he would not be so quick to speak of marrying me o again. A pity he’s
so dead. Him and Robert, Jon Arryn, Ned Stark, Renly Baratheon, all
dead. Only Tyrion remains, and not for long.

That night the queen summoned Lady Merryweather to her
bedchamber. “Will you take a cup of wine?” she asked her.
“A small one.” The Myrish woman laughed. “A big one.”
“On the morrow I want you to pay a call on my good-daughter,”
Cersei said as Dorcas was dressing her for bed.
“Lady Margaery is always happy to see me.”
“I know.” The queen did not fail to note the style that Taena used
when referring to Tommen’s little wife. “Tell her I’ve sent seven
beeswax candles to the Baelor’s Sept in memory of our dear High
Septon.”
Taena laughed. “If so, she will send seven-and-seventy candles of
her own, so as not to be outmourned.”
“I will be very cross if she does not,” the queen said, smiling.
“Tell her also that she has a secret admirer, a knight so smitten with
her beauty that he cannot sleep at night.”
“Might I ask Your Grace which knight?” Mischief sparkled in
Taena’s big dark eyes. “Could it be Ser Osney?”
“It could be,” the queen said, “but do not o er up that name
freely. Make her worm it out of you. Will you do that?”
“If it please you. That is all I wish, Your Grace.”
Outside a cold wind was rising. They stayed up late into the
morning, drinking Arbor gold and telling one another tales. Taena
got quite drunk and Cersei pried the name of her secret lover from
her. He was a Myrish sea captain, half a pirate, with black hair to
the shoulders and a scar that ran across his face from chin to ear. “A
hundred times I told him no, and he said yes,” the other woman told
her, “until nally I was saying yes as well. He was not the sort of
man to be denied.”
“I know the sort,” the queen said with a wry smile.
“Has Your Grace ever known a man like that, I wonder?”
“Robert,” she lied, thinking of Jaime.
Yet when she closed her eyes, it was the other brother that she
dreamt of, and the three wretched fools with whom she had begun
her day. In the dream it was Tyrion’s head they brought her in their
sack. She had it bronzed, and kept it in her chamber pot.

THE IRON CAPTAIN

The wind was blowing from the north as the Iron Victory came
round the point and entered the holy bay called Nagga’s Cradle.
Victarion joined Nute the Barber at her prow. Ahead loomed the
sacred shore of Old Wyk and the grassy hill above it, where the ribs
of Nagga rose from the earth like the trunks of great white trees, as
wide around as a dromond’s mast and twice as tall.
The bones of the Grey King’s Hall. Victarion could feel the magic of
this place. “Balon stood beneath those bones, when rst he named
himself a king,” he recalled. “He swore to win us back our
freedoms, and Tarle the Thrice-Drowned placed a driftwood crown
upon his head. ‘BALON!’ they cried. ‘BALON! BALON KING!’ ”
“They will shout your name as loud,” said Nute.
Victarion nodded, though he did not share the Barber’s certainty.
Balon had three sons, and a daughter he loved well.
He had said as much to his captains at Moat Cailin, when rst
they urged him to claim the Seastone Chair. “Balon’s sons are dead,”
Red Ralf Stonehouse had argued, “and Asha is a woman. You were
your brother’s strong right arm, you must pick up the sword that he
let fall.” When Victarion reminded them that Balon had commanded
him to hold the Moat against the northmen, Ralf Kenning said, “The
wolves are broken, lord. What good to win this swamp and lose the
isles?” And Ralf the Limper added, “The Crow’s Eye has been too
long away. He knows us not.”

Euron Greyjoy, King of the Isles and the North. The thought woke an
old rage in his heart, but still …
“Words are wind,” Victarion told them, “and the only good wind
is that which lls our sails. Would you have me ght the Crow’s
Eye? Brother against brother, ironborn against ironborn?” Euron
was still his elder, no matter how much bad blood might be
between them. No man is as accursed as the kinslayer.
But when the Damphair’s summons came, the call to kingsmoot,
then all was changed. Aeron speaks with the Drowned God’s voice,
Victarion reminded himself, and if the Drowned God wills that I should
sit the Seastone Chair … The next day he gave command of Moat
Cailin to Ralf Kenning and set o overland for the Fever River
where the Iron Fleet lay amongst the reeds and willows. Rough seas
and ckle winds had delayed him, but only one ship had been lost,
and he was home.
Grief and Iron Vengeance were close behind as Iron Victory passed
the headland. Behind came Hardhand, Iron Wind, Grey Ghost, Lord
Quellon, Lord Vickon, Lord Dagon, and the rest, nine-tenths of the
Iron Fleet, sailing on the evening tide in a ragged column that
extended back long leagues. The sight of their sails lled Victarion
Greyjoy with content. No man had ever loved his wives half as well
as the Lord Captain loved his ships.
Along the sacred strand of Old Wyk, longships lined the shore as
far as the eye could see, their masts thrust up like spears. In the
deeper waters rode prizes: cogs, carracks, and dromonds won in
raid or war, too big to run ashore. From prow and stern and mast
ew familiar banners.
Nute the Barber squinted toward the strand. “Is that Lord
Harlaw’s Sea Song?” The Barber was a thickset man with bandy legs
and long arms, but his eyes were not so keen as they had been when
he was young. In those days he could throw an axe so well that men
said he could shave you with it.
“Sea Song, aye.” Rodrik the Reader had left his books, it would
seem. “And there’s old Drumm’s Thunderer, with Blacktyde’s
Night yer beside her.” Victarion’s eyes were as sharp as they had
ever been. Even with their sails furled and their banners hanging

limp, he knew them, as be t the Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet.
“Silver n too. Some kin of Sawane Botley.” The Crow’s Eye had
drowned Lord Botley, Victarion had heard, and his heir had died at
Moat Cailin, but there had been brothers, and other sons as well.
How many? Four? No, ve, and none with any cause to love the Crow’s
Eye.
And then he saw her: a single-masted galley, lean and low, with a
dark red hull. Her sails, now furled, were black as a starless sky.
Even at anchor Silence looked both cruel and fast. On her prow was
a black iron maiden with one arm outstretched. Her waist was
slender, her breasts high and proud, her legs long and shapely. A
windblown mane of black iron hair streamed from her head, and
her eyes were mother-of-pearl, but she had no mouth.
Victarion’s hands closed into sts. He had beaten four men to
death with those hands, and one wife as well. Though his hair was
ecked with hoarfrost, he was as strong as he had ever been, with a
bull’s broad chest and a boy’s at belly. The kinslayer is accursed in
the eyes of gods and men, Balon had reminded him on the day he sent
the Crow’s Eye o to sea.
“He is here,” Victarion told the Barber. “Drop sail. We proceed on
oars alone. Command Grief and Iron Vengeance to stand between
Silence and the sea. The rest of the eet to seal the bay. None is to
leave save at my command, neither man nor crow.”
The men upon the shore had spied their sails. Shouts echoed
across the bay as friends and kin called out greetings. But not from
Silence. On her decks a motley crew of mutes and mongrels spoke
no word as the Iron Victory drew nigh. Men black as tar stared out
at him, and others squat and hairy as the apes of Sothoros. Monsters,
Victarion thought.
They dropped anchor twenty yards from Silence. “Lower a boat. I
would go ashore.” He buckled on his swordbelt as the rowers took
their places; his longsword rested on one hip, a dirk upon the other.
Nute the Barber fastened the Lord Captain’s cloak about his
shoulders. It was made of nine layers of cloth-of-gold, sewn in the
shape of the kraken of Greyjoy, arms dangling to his boots. Beneath
he wore heavy grey chain mail over boiled black leather. In Moat

Cailin he had taken to wearing mail day and night. Sore shoulders
and an aching back were easier to bear than bloody bowels. The
poisoned arrows of the bog devils need only scratch a man, and a
few hours later he would be squirting and screaming as his life ran
down his legs in gouts of red and brown. Whoever wins the Seastone
Chair, I shall deal with the bog devils.
Victarion donned a tall black warhelm, wrought in the shape of
an iron kraken, its arms coiled down around his cheeks to meet
beneath his jaw. By then the boat was ready. “I put the chests into
your charge,” he told Nute as he climbed over the side. “See that
they are strongly guarded.” Much depended on the chests.
“As you command, Your Grace.”
Victarion returned a sour scowl. “I am no king as yet.” He
clambered down into the boat.
Aeron Damphair was waiting for him in the surf with his
waterskin slung beneath one arm. The priest was gaunt and tall,
though shorter than Victarion. His nose rose like a shark’s n from a
bony face, and his eyes were iron. His beard reached to his waist,
and tangled ropes of hair slapped at the back of his legs when the
wind blew. “Brother,” he said as the waves broke white and cold
around their ankles, “what is dead can never die.”
“But rises again, harder and stronger.” Victarion lifted o his
helm and knelt. The bay lled his boots and soaked his breeches as
Aeron poured a stream of salt water down upon his brow. And so
they prayed.
“Where is our brother Crow’s Eye?” the Lord Captain demanded
of Aeron Damphair when the prayers were done.
“His is the great tent of cloth-of-gold, there where the din is
loudest. He surrounds himself with godless men and monsters,
worse than before. In him our father’s blood went bad.”
“Our mother’s blood as well.” Victarion would not speak of
kinslaying, here in this godly place beneath the bones of Nagga and
the Grey King’s Hall, but many a night he dreamed of driving a
mailed st into Euron’s smiling face, until the esh split and his bad
blood ran red and free. I must not. I pledged my word to Balon. “All
have come?” he asked his priestly brother.

“All who matter. The captains and the kings.” On the Iron Islands
they were one and the same, for every captain was a king on his
own deck, and every king must be a captain. “Do you mean to claim
our father’s crown?”
Victarion imagined himself seated on the Seastone Chair. “If the
Drowned God wills it.”
“The waves will speak,” said Aeron Damphair as he turned away.
“Listen to the waves, brother.”
“Aye.” He wondered how his name would sound whispered by
waves and shouted by the captains and the kings. If the cup should
pass to me, I will not set it by.
A crowd had gathered round to wish him well and seek his favor.
Victarion saw men from every isle: Blacktydes, Tawneys,
Orkwoods, Stonetrees, Wynches, and many more. The Goodbrothers
of Old Wyk, the Goodbrothers of Great Wyk, and the Goodbrothers
of Orkmont all had come. The Codds were there, though every
decent man despised them. Humble Shepherds, Weavers, and
Netleys rubbed shoulders with men from Houses ancient and proud;
even humble Humbles, the blood of thralls and salt wives. A
Volmark clapped Victarion on the back; two Sparrs pressed a
wineskin into his hands. He drank deep, wiped his mouth, and let
them bear him o to their cook res, to listen to their talk of war
and crowns and plunder, and the glory and the freedom of his reign.
That night the men of the Iron Fleet raised a huge sailcloth tent
above the tideline, so Victarion might feast half a hundred famous
captains on roast kid, salted cod, and lobster. Aeron came as well.
He ate sh and drank water, whilst the captains qua ed enough ale
to oat the Iron Fleet. Many promised him their voices: Fralegg the
Strong, clever Alvyn Sharp, humpbacked Hotho Harlaw. Hotho
o ered him a daughter for his queen. “I have no luck with wives,”
Victarion told him. His rst wife died in childbed, giving him a
stillborn daughter. His second had been stricken by a pox. And his
third …
“A king must have an heir,” Hotho insisted. “The Crow’s Eye
brings three sons to show before the kingsmoot.”
“Bastards and mongrels. How old is this daughter?”

“Twelve,” said Hotho. “Fair and fertile, newly owered, with hair
the color of honey. Her breasts are small as yet, but she has good
hips. She takes after her mother, more than me.”
Victarion knew that to mean the girl did not have a hump. Yet
when he tried to picture her, he only saw the wife he’d killed. He
had sobbed each time he struck her, and afterward carried her down
to the rocks to give her to the crabs. “I will gladly look at the girl
once I am crowned,” he said. That was as much as Hotho dared
hope for, and he shambled o , content.
Baelor Blacktyde was more di cult to please. He sat by
Victarion’s elbow in his lambswool tunic of black-and-green vairy,
smooth-faced and comely. His cloak was sable, and pinned with a
silver seven-pointed star. He had been eight years a hostage in
Oldtown, and had returned a worshiper of the seven green land
gods. “Balon was mad, Aeron is madder, and Euron is maddest of
them all,” Lord Baelor said. “What of you, Lord Captain? If I shout
your name, will you make an end of this mad war?”
Victarion frowned. “Would you have me bend the knee?”
“If need be. We cannot stand alone against all Westeros. King
Robert proved that, to our grief. Balon would pay the iron price for
freedom, he said, but our women bought Balon’s crowns with empty
beds. My mother was one such. The Old Way is dead.”
“What is dead can never die, but rises harder and stronger. In a
hundred years men will sing of Balon the Bold.”
“Balon the Widowmaker, call him. I will gladly trade his freedom
for a father. Have you one to give me?” When Victarion did not
answer, Blacktyde snorted and moved o .
The tent grew hot and smoky. Two of Gorold Goodbrother’s sons
knocked a table over ghting; Will Humble lost a wager and had to
eat his boot; Little Lenwood Tawney ddled whilst Romny Weaver
sang “The Bloody Cup” and “Steel Rain” and other old reaving
songs. Qarl the Maid and Eldred Codd danced the nger dance. A
roar of laughter went up when one of Eldred’s ngers landed in Ralf
the Limper’s wine cup.
A woman was amongst those laughing. Victarion rose and saw her
by the tent ap, whispering something in the ear of Qarl the Maid

that made him laugh as well. He had hoped she would not be fool
enough to come here, yet the sight of her made him smile all the
same. “Asha,” he called in a commanding voice. “Niece.”
She made her way to his side, lean and lithe in high boots of saltstained leather, green woolen breeches, and brown quilted tunic, a
sleeveless leather jerkin half-unlaced. “Nuncle.” Asha Greyjoy was
tall for a woman, yet she had to stand on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“I am pleased to see you at my queensmoot.”
“Queensmoot?” Victarion laughed. “Are you drunk, niece? Sit. I
did not spy your Black Wind on the strand.”
“I beached her beneath Norne Goodbrother’s castle and rode
across the island.” She sat upon a stool and helped herself unasked
to Nute the Barber’s wine. Nute raised no objection; he had passed
out drunk some time ago. “Who holds the Moat?”
“Ralf Kenning. With the Young Wolf dead, only the bog devils
remain to plague us.”
“The Starks were not the only northmen. The Iron Throne has
named the Lord of the Dreadfort as Warden of the North.”
“Would you lesson me in warfare? I was ghting battles when
you were sucking mother’s milk.”
“And losing battles too.” Asha took a drink of wine.
Victarion did not like to be reminded of Fair Isle. “Every man
should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he
is old. You have not come to make a claim, I hope.”
She teased him with a smile. “And if I have?”
“There are men who remember when you were a little girl,
swimming naked in the sea and playing with your doll.”
“I played with axes too.”
“You did,” he had to grant, “but a woman wants a husband, not a
crown. When I am king I’ll give you one.”
“My nuncle is so good to me. Shall I nd a pretty wife for you,
when I am queen?”
“I have no luck with wives. How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to see that Uncle Damphair has woken more than
he intended. The Drumm means to make a claim, and Tarle the

Thrice-Drowned was heard to say that Maron Volmark is the true
heir of the black line.”
“The king must be a kraken.”
“The Crow’s Eye is a kraken. The elder brother comes before the
younger.” Asha leaned close. “But I am the child of King Balon’s
body, so I come before you both. Hear me, nuncle …”
But then a sudden silence fell. The singing died, Little Lenwood
Tawney lowered his ddle, men turned their heads. Even the clatter
of plates and knives was hushed.
A dozen newcomers had entered the feast tent. Victarion saw
Pinchface Jon Myre, Torwold Browntooth, Left-Hand Lucas Codd.
Germund Botley crossed his arms against the gilded breastplate he
had taken o a Lannister captain during Balon’s rst rebellion.
Orkwood of Orkmont stood beside him. Behind them were
Stonehand, Quellon Humble, and the Red Oarsman with his ery
hair in braids. Ralf the Shepherd too, and Ralf of Lordsport, and
Qarl the Thrall.
And the Crow’s Eye, Euron Greyjoy.
He looks unchanged, Victarion thought. He looks the same as he did
the day he laughed at me and left. Euron was the most comely of Lord
Quellon’s sons, and three years of exile had not changed that. His
hair was still black as a midnight sea, with never a whitecap to be
seen, and his face was still smooth and pale beneath his neat dark
beard. A black leather patch covered Euron’s left eye, but his right
was blue as a summer sky.
His smiling eye, thought Victarion. “Crow’s Eye,” he said.
“King Crow’s Eye, brother.” Euron smiled. His lips looked very
dark in the lamplight, bruised and blue.
“We shall have no king but from the kingsmoot.” The Damphair
stood. “No godless man—”
“—may sit the Seastone Chair, aye.” Euron glanced about the
tent. “As it happens I have oft sat upon the Seastone Chair of late. It
raises no objections.” His smiling eye was glittering. “Who knows
more of gods than I? Horse gods and re gods, gods made of gold
with gemstone eyes, gods carved of cedar wood, gods chiseled into
mountains, gods of empty air … I know them all. I have seen their

peoples garland them with owers, and shed the blood of goats and
bulls and children in their names. And I have heard the prayers, in
half a hundred tongues. Cure my withered leg, make the maiden
love me, grant me a healthy son. Save me, succor me, make me
wealthy … protect me! Protect me from mine enemies, protect me
from the darkness, protect me from the crabs inside my belly, from
the horselords, from the slavers, from the sellswords at my door.
Protect me from the Silence.” He laughed. “Godless? Why, Aeron, I
am the godliest man ever to raise sail! You serve one god,
Damphair, but I have served ten thousand. From Ib to Asshai, when
men see my sails, they pray.”
The priest raised a bony nger. “They pray to trees and golden
idols and goat-headed abominations. False gods …”
“Just so,” said Euron, “and for that sin I kill them all. I spill their
blood upon the sea and sow their screaming women with my seed.
Their little gods cannot stop me, so plainly they are false gods. I am
more devout than even you, Aeron. Perhaps it should be you who
kneels to me for blessing.”
The Red Oarsman laughed loudly at that, and the others took
their lead from him.
“Fools,” said the priest, “fools and thralls and blind men, that is
what you are. Do you not see what stands before you?”
“A king,” said Quellon Humble.
The Damphair spat, and strode out into the night.
When he was gone, the Crow’s Eye turned his smiling eye upon
Victarion. “Lord Captain, have you no greeting for a brother long
away? Nor you, Asha? How fares your lady mother?”
“Poorly,” Asha said. “Some man made her a widow.”
Euron shrugged. “I had heard the Storm God swept Balon to his
death. Who is this man who slew him? Tell me his name, niece, so I
might revenge myself on him.”
Asha got to her feet. “You know his name as well as I. Three
years you were gone from us, and yet Silence returns within a day
of my lord father’s death.”
“Do you accuse me?” Euron asked mildly.

“Should I?” The sharpness in Asha’s voice made Victarion frown.
It was dangerous to speak so to the Crow’s Eye, even when his
smiling eye was shining with amusement.
“Do I command the winds?” the Crow’s Eye asked his pets.
“No, Your Grace,” said Orkwood of Orkmont.
“No man commands the winds,” said Germund Botley.
“Would that you did,” the Red Oarsman said. “You would sail
wherever you liked and never be becalmed.”
“There you have it, from the mouths of three brave men,” Euron
said. “The Silence was at sea when Balon died. If you doubt an
uncle’s word, I give you leave to ask my crew.”
“A crew of mutes? Aye, that would serve me well.”
“A husband would serve you well.” Euron turned to his followers
again. “Torwold, I misremember, do you have a wife?”
“Only the one.” Torwold Browntooth grinned, and showed how
he had won his name.
“I am unwed,” announced Left-Hand Lucas Codd.
“And for good reason,” Asha said. “All women do despise the
Codds as well. Don’t look at me so mournful, Lucas. You still have
your famous hand.” She made a pumping motion with her st.
Codd cursed, till the Crow’s Eye put a hand upon his chest. “Was
that courteous, Asha? You have wounded Lucas to the quick.”
“Easier than wounding him in the prick. I throw an axe as well as
any man, but when the target is so small …”
“This girl forgets herself,” snarled Pinchface Jon Myre. “Balon let
her believe she was a man.”
“Your father made the same mistake with you,” said Asha.
“Give her to me, Euron,” suggested the Red Oarsman. “I’ll spank
her till her arse is as red as my hair.”
“Come try,” said Asha, “and hereafter we can call you the Red
Eunuch.” A throwing axe was in her hand. She tossed it in the air
and caught it deftly. “Here is my husband, Nuncle. Any man who
wants me should take it up with him.”
Victarion slammed his st upon the table. “I’ll have no blood shed
here. Euron, take your … pets … and go.”

“I had looked for a warmer welcome from you, brother. I am
your elder … and soon, your rightful king.”
Victarion’s face darkened. “When the kingsmoot speaks, we shall
see who wears the driftwood crown.”
“On that we can agree.” Euron lifted two ngers to the patch that
covered his left eye, and took his leave. The others followed at his
heels like mongrel dogs. Silence lingered behind them, till Little
Lenwood Tawney took up his ddle. The wine and ale began to
ow again, but several guests had lost their thirst. Eldred Codd
slipped out, cradling his bloody hand. Then Will Humble, Hotho
Harlaw, a goodly lot of Goodbrothers.
“Nuncle.” Asha put a hand upon his shoulder. “Walk with me, if
you would.”
Outside the tent the wind was rising. Clouds raced across the
moon’s pale face. They looked a bit like galleys, stroking hard to
ram. The stars were few and faint. All along the strand the
longships rested, tall masts rising like a forest from the surf.
Victarion could hear their hulls creaking as they settled on the sand.
He heard the keening of their lines, the sound of banners apping.
Beyond, in the deeper waters of the bay, larger ships bobbed at
anchor, grim shadows wreathed in mist.
They walked along the strand together just above the surf, far
from the camps and the cook res. “Tell me true, nuncle,” Asha said,
“why did Euron go away so suddenly?”
“The Crow’s Eye oft went reaving.”
“Never for so long.”
“He took the Silence east. A lengthy voyage.”
“I asked why he went, not where.” When he did not answer, Asha
said, “I was away when Silence sailed. I had taken Black Wind
around the Arbor to the Stepstones, to steal a few trinkets from the
Lyseni pirates. When I came home, Euron was gone and your new
wife was dead.”
“She was only a salt wife.” He had not touched another woman
since he gave her to the crabs. I will need to take a wife when I am
king. A true wife, to be my queen and bear me sons. A king must have
an heir.

“My father refused to speak of her,” said Asha.
“It does no good to speak of things no man can change.” He was
weary of the subject. “I saw the Reader’s longship.”
“It took all my charm to winkle him out of his Book Tower.”
She has the Harlaws, then. Victarion’s frown grew deeper. “You
cannot hope to rule. You are a woman.”
“Is that why I always lose the pissing contests?” Asha laughed.
“Nuncle, it grieves me to say so, but you may be right. For four
days and four nights, I have been drinking with the captains and the
kings, listening to what they say … and what they will not say.
Mine own are with me, and many Harlaws. I have Tris Botley too,
and some few others. Not enough.” She kicked a rock, and sent it
splashing into the water between two longships. “I am of a mind to
shout my nuncle’s name.”
“Which uncle?” he demanded. “You have three.”
“Four. Nuncle, hear me. I will place the driftwood crown upon
your brow myself … if you will agree to share the rule.”
“Share the rule? How could that be?” The woman was not making
sense. Does she want to be my queen? Victarion found himself looking
at Asha in a way he had never looked at her before. He could feel
his manhood beginning to sti en. She is Balon’s daughter, he
reminded himself. He remembered her as a little girl, throwing axes
at a door. He crossed his arms against his chest. “The Seastone Chair
seats but one.”
“Then let my nuncle sit,” Asha said. “I will stand behind you, to
guard your back and whisper in your ear. No king can rule alone.
Even when the dragons sat the Iron Throne, they had men to help
them. The King’s Hands. Let me be your Hand, Nuncle.”
No King of the Isles had ever needed a Hand, much less one who
was a woman. The captains and the kings would mock me in their cups.
“Why would you wish to be my Hand?”
“To end this war before this war ends us. We have won all that
we are like to win … and stand to lose all just as quick, unless we
make a peace. I have shown Lady Glover every courtesy, and she
swears her lord will treat with me. If we hand back Deepwood
Motte, Torrhen’s Square, and Moat Cailin, she says, the northmen

will cede us Sea Dragon Point and all the Stony Shore. Those lands
are thinly peopled, yet ten times larger than all the isles put
together. An exchange of hostages will seal the pact, and each side
will agree to make common cause with the other should the Iron
Throne—”
Victarion chuckled. “This Lady Glover plays you for a fool, niece.
Sea Dragon Point and the Stony Shore are ours. Why hand back
anything? Winterfell is burnt and broken, and the Young Wolf rots
headless in the earth. We will have all the north, as your lord father
dreamed.”
“When longships learn to row through trees, perhaps. A sherman
may hook a grey leviathan, but it will drag him down to death
unless he cuts it loose. The north is too large for us to hold, and too
full of northmen.”
“Go back to your dolls, niece. Leave the winning of wars to
warriors.” Victarion showed her his sts. “I have two hands. No
man needs three.”
“I know a man who needs House Harlaw, though.”
“Hotho Humpback has o ered me his daughter for my queen. If I
take her, I will have the Harlaws.”
That took the girl aback. “Lord Rodrik rules House Harlaw.”
“Rodrik has no daughters, only books. Hotho will be his heir, and
I will be the king.” Once he had said the words aloud, they sounded
true. “The Crow’s Eye has been too long away.”
“Some men look larger at a distance,” Asha warned. “Walk
amongst the cook res if you dare, and listen. They are not telling
tales of your strength, nor of my famous beauty. They talk only of
the Crow’s Eye; the far places he has seen, the women he has raped
and the men he’s killed, the cities he has sacked, the way he burnt
Lord Tywin’s eet at Lannisport …”
“I burnt the lion’s eet,” Victarion insisted. “With mine own
hands I ung the rst torch onto his agship.”
“The Crow’s Eye hatched the scheme.” Asha put her hand upon
his arm. “And killed your wife as well … did he not?”
Balon had commanded them not to speak of it, but Balon was
dead. “He put a baby in her belly and made me do the killing. I

would have killed him too, but Balon would have no kinslaying in
his hall. He sent Euron into exile, never to return …”
“… so long as Balon lived?”
Victarion looked at his sts. “She gave me horns. I had no
choice.” Had it been known, men would have laughed at me, as the
Crow’s Eye laughed when I confronted him. “She came to me wet and
willing,” he had boasted. “It seems Victarion is big everywhere but
where it matters.” But he could not tell her that.
“I am sorry for you,” said Asha, “and sorrier for her … but you
leave me small choice but to claim the Seastone Chair myself.”
You cannot. “Your breath is yours to waste, woman.”
“It is,” she said, and left him.

THE DROWNED MAN

Only when his arms and legs were numb from the cold did Aeron
Greyjoy struggle back to shore and don his robes again.
He had run before the Crow’s Eye as if he were still the weak
thing he had been, but when the waves broke over his head they
reminded once more that that man was dead. I was reborn from the
sea, a harder man and stronger. No mortal man could frighten him,
no more than the darkness could, nor the bones of his soul, the grey
and grisly bones of his soul. The sound of a door opening, the scream
of a rusted iron hinge.
The priest’s robes crackled as he pulled them down, still sti with
salt from their last washing a fortnight past. The wool clung to his
wet chest, drinking the brine that ran down from his hair. He lled
his waterskin and slung it over his shoulder.
As he strode across the strand, a drowned man returning from a
call of nature stumbled into him in the darkness. “Damphair,” he
murmured. Aeron laid a hand upon his head, blessed him, and
moved on. The ground rose beneath his feet, gently at rst, then
more steeply. When he felt scrub grass between his toes, he knew
that he had left the strand behind. Slowly he climbed, listening to
the waves. The sea is never weary. I must be as tireless.
On the crown of the hill four-and-forty monstrous stone ribs rose
from the earth like the trunks of great pale trees. The sight made
Aeron’s heart beat faster. Nagga had been the rst sea dragon, the

mightiest ever to rise from the waves. She fed on krakens and
leviathans and drowned whole islands in her wrath, yet the Grey
King had slain her and the Drowned God had changed her bones to
stone so that men might never cease to wonder at the courage of
the rst of kings. Nagga’s ribs became the beams and pillars of his
longhall, just as her jaws became his throne. For a thousand years
and seven he reigned here, Aeron recalled. Here he took his mermaid
wife and planned his wars against the Storm God. From here he ruled
both stone and salt, wearing robes of woven seaweed and a tall pale
crown made from Nagga’s teeth.
But that was in the dawn of days, when mighty men still dwelt on
earth and sea. The hall had been warmed by Nagga’s living re,
which the Grey King had made his thrall. On its walls hung
tapestries woven from silver seaweed most pleasing to the eyes.
The Grey King’s warriors had feasted on the bounty of the sea at a
table in the shape of a great star sh, whilst seated upon thrones
carved from mother-of-pearl. Gone, all the glory gone. Men were
smaller now. Their lives had grown short. The Storm God drowned
Nagga’s re after the Grey King’s death, the chairs and tapestries
had been stolen, the roof and walls had rotted away. Even the Grey
King’s great throne of fangs had been swallowed by the sea. Only
Nagga’s bones endured to remind the ironborn of all the wonder
that had been.
It is enough, thought Aeron Greyjoy.
Nine wide steps had been hewn from the stony hilltop. Behind
rose the howling hills of Old Wyk, with mountains in the distance
black and cruel. Aeron paused where the doors once stood, pulled
the cork from his waterskin, took a swallow of salt water, and
turned to face the sea. We were born from the sea, and to the sea we
must return. Even here he could hear the ceaseless rumble of the
waves and feel the power of the god who lurked below the waters.
Aeron went to his knees. You have sent your people to me, he prayed.
They have left their halls and hovels, their castles and their keeps, and
come here to Nagga’s bones, from every shing village and every hidden
vale. Now grant to them the wisdom to know the true king when he
stands before them, and the strength to shun the false. All night he

prayed, for when the god was in him Aeron Greyjoy had no need of
sleep, no more than the waves did, nor the shes of the sea.
Dark clouds ran before the wind as the rst light stole into the
world. The black sky went grey as slate; the black sea turned greygreen; the black mountains of Great Wyk across the bay put on the
blue-green hues of soldier pines. As color stole back into the world,
a hundred banners lifted and began to ap. Aeron beheld the silver
sh of Botley, the bloody moon of Wynch, the dark green trees of
Orkwood. He saw warhorns and leviathans and scythes, and
everywhere the krakens great and golden. Beneath them, thralls and
salt wives begin to move about, stirring coals into new life and
gutting sh for the captains and the kings to break their fasts. The
dawnlight touched the stony strand, and he watched men wake
from sleep, throwing aside their sealskin blankets as they called for
their rst horn of ale. Drink deep, he thought, for we have god’s work
to do today.
The sea was stirring too. The waves grew larger as the wind rose,
sending plumes of spray to crash against the longships. The Drowned
God wakes, thought Aeron. He could hear his voice welling from the
depths of the sea. I shall be with you here this day, my strong and
faithful servant, the voice said. No godless man will sit my Seastone
Chair.
It was there beneath the arch of Nagga’s ribs that his drowned
men found him, standing tall and stern with his long black hair
blowing in the wind. “Is it time?” Rus asked. Aeron gave a nod, and
said, “It is. Go forth and sound the summons.”
The drowned men took up their driftwood cudgels and began to
beat them one against the other as they walked back down the hill.
Others joined them, and the clangor spread along the strand. Such a
fearful clacking and a clattering it made, as if a hundred trees were
pummeling one another with their limbs. Kettledrums began to beat
as well, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.
A
warhorn
bellowed,
then
another.
AAAAAAoooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Men left their res to make their way toward the bones of the
Grey King’s Hall; oarsmen, steersmen, sailmakers, shipwrights, the

warriors with their axes and the shermen with their nets. Some
had thralls to serve them; some had salt wives. Others, who had
sailed too often to the green lands, were attended by maesters and
singers and knights. The common men crowded together in a
crescent around the base of the knoll, with the thralls, children, and
women toward the rear. The captains and the kings made their way
up the slopes. Aeron Damphair saw cheerful Sigfry Stonetree,
Andrik the Unsmiling, the knight Ser Harras Harlaw. Lord Baelor
Blacktyde in his sable cloak stood beside The Stonehouse in ragged
sealskin. Victarion loomed above all of them save Andrik. His
brother wore no helm, but elsewise he was all in armor, his kraken
cloak hanging golden from his shoulders. He shall be our king. What
man could look on him and doubt it?
When the Damphair raised his bony hands the kettledrums and
the warhorns fell silent, the drowned men lowered their cudgels,
and all the voices stilled. Only the sound of the waves pounding
remained, a roar no man could still. “We were born from the sea,
and to the sea we all return,” Aeron began, softly at rst, so men
would strain to hear. “The Storm God in his wrath plucked Balon
from his castle and cast him down, yet now he feasts beneath the
waves in the Drowned God’s watery halls.” He lifted his eyes to the
sky. “Balon is dead! The iron king is dead!”
“The king is dead!” his drowned men shouted.
“Yet what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and
stronger!” he reminded them. “Balon has fallen, Balon my brother,
who honored the Old Way and paid the iron price. Balon the Brave,
Balon the Blessed, Balon Twice-Crowned, who won us back our
freedoms and our god. Balon is dead … but an iron king shall rise
again, to sit upon the Seastone Chair and rule the isles.”
“A king shall rise!” they answered. “He shall rise!”
“He shall. He must.” Aeron’s voice thundered like the waves. “But
who? Who shall sit in Balon’s place? Who shall rule these holy isles?
Is he here among us now?” The priest spread his hands wide. “Who
shall be king over us?”
A seagull screamed back at him. The crowd began to stir, like
men waking from a dream. Each man looked at his neighbors, to

see which of them might presume to claim a crown. The Crow’s Eye
was never patient, Aeron Damphair told himself. Mayhaps he will
speak rst. If so, it would be his undoing. The captains and the kings
had come a long way to this feast and would not choose the rst
dish set before them. They will want to taste and sample, a bite of him,
a nibble of the other, until they nd the one that suits them best.
Euron must have known that as well. He stood with his arms
crossed amongst his mutes and monsters. Only the wind and the
waves answered Aeron’s call.
“The ironborn must have a king,” the priest insisted, after a long
silence. “I ask again. Who shall be king over us?”
“I will,” came the answer from below.
At once a ragged cry of “Gylbert! Gylbert King!” went up. The
captains gave way to let the claimant and his champions ascend the
hill to stand at Aeron’s side beneath the ribs of Nagga.
This would-be king was a tall spare lord with a melancholy
visage, his lantern jaw shaved clean. His three champions took up
their position two steps below him, bearing his sword and shield
and banner. They shared a certain look with the tall lord, and Aeron
took them for his sons. One unfurled his banner, a great black
longship against a setting sun. “I am Gylbert Farwynd, Lord of the
Lonely Light,” the lord told the kingsmoot.
Aeron knew some Farwynds, a queer folk who held lands on the
westernmost shores of Great Wyk and the scattered isles beyond,
rocks so small that most could support but a single household. Of
those, the Lonely Light was the most distant, eight days’ sail to the
northwest amongst rookeries of seals and sea lions and the
boundless grey oceans. The Farwynds there were even queerer than
the rest. Some said they were skinchangers, unholy creatures who
could take on the forms of sea lions, walruses, even spotted whales,
the wolves of the wild sea.
Lord Gylbert began to speak. He told of a wondrous land beyond
the Sunset Sea, a land without winter or want, where death had no
dominion. “Make me your king, and I shall lead you there,” he
cried. “We will build ten thousand ships as Nymeria once did and

take sail with all our people to the land beyond the sunset. There
every man shall be a king and every wife a queen.”
His eyes, Aeron saw, were now grey, now blue, as changeable as
the seas. Mad eyes, he thought, fool’s eyes. The vision he spoke of
was doubtless a snare set by the Storm God to lure the ironborn to
destruction. The o erings that his men spilled out before the
kingsmoot included sealskins and walrus tusks, arm rings made of
whalebone, warhorns banded in bronze. The captains looked and
turned away, leaving lesser men to help themselves to the gifts.
When the fool was done talking and his champions began to shout
his name, only the Farwynds took up the cry, and not even all of
them. Soon enough the cries of “Gylbert! Gylbert King!” faded away
to silence. The gull screamed loudly above them, and landed atop
one of Nagga’s ribs as the Lord of the Lonely Light made his way
back down the hill.
Aeron Damphair stepped forward once more. “I ask again. Who
shall be king over us?”
“Me!” a deep voice boomed, and once more the crowd parted.
The speaker was borne up the hill in a carved driftwood chair
carried on the shoulders of his grandsons. A great ruin of a man,
twenty stones heavy and ninety years old, he was cloaked in a
white bearskin. His own hair was snow white as well, and his huge
beard covered him like a blanket from cheeks to thighs, so it was
hard to tell where the beard ended and the pelt began. Though his
grandsons were great strapping men, they struggled with his weight
on the steep stone steps. Before the Grey King’s Hall they set him
down, and three remained below him as his champions.
Sixty years ago, this one might well have won the favor of the moot,
Aeron thought, but his hour is long past.
“Aye, me!” the man roared from where he sat, in a voice as huge
as he was. “Why not? Who better? I am Erik Ironmaker, for them
who’s blind. Erik the Just. Erik Anvil-Breaker. Show them my
hammer, Thormor.” One of his champions lifted it up for all to see;
a monstrous thing it was, its haft wrapped in old leather, its head a
brick of steel as large as a loaf of bread. “I can’t count how many
hands I’ve smashed to pulp with that hammer,” Erik said, “but

might be some thief could tell you. I can’t say how many heads I’ve
crushed against my anvil neither, but there’s some widows could. I
could tell you all the deeds I’ve done in battle, but I’m eight-andeighty and won’t live long enough to nish. If old is wise, no one is
wiser than me. If big is strong, no one’s stronger. You want a king
with heirs? I’ve more’n I can count. King Erik, aye, I like the sound
o’ that. Come, say it with me. ERIK! ERIK ANVIL-BREAKER! ERIK
KING!”
As his grandsons took up the cry, their own sons came forward
with chests upon their shoulders. When they upended them at the
base of the stone steps, a torrent of silver, bronze, and steel spilled
forth; arm rings, collars, daggers, dirks, and throwing axes. A few
captains snatched up the choicest items and added their voices to
the swelling chant. But no sooner had the cry begun to build than a
woman’s voice cut through it. “Erik!” Men moved aside to let her
through. With one foot on the lowest step, she said, “Erik, stand
up.”
A hush fell. The wind blew, waves broke against the shore, men
murmured in each other’s ears. Erik Ironmaker stared down at Asha
Greyjoy. “Girl. Thrice-damned girl. What did you say?”
“Stand up, Erik,” she called. “Stand up and I’ll shout your name
with all the rest. Stand up and I’ll be the rst to follow you. You
want a crown, aye. Stand up and take it.”
Elsewhere in the press, the Crow’s Eye laughed. Erik glared at
him. The big man’s hands closed tight around the arms of his
driftwood throne. His face went red, then purple. His arms trembled
with e ort. Aeron could see a thick blue vein pulsing in his neck as
he struggled to rise. For a moment it seemed as though he might do
it, but the breath went out of him all at once, and he groaned and
sank back onto his cushion. Euron laughed all the louder. The big
man hung his head and grew old, all in the blink of an eye. His
grandsons carried him back down the hill.
“Who shall rule the ironborn?” Aeron Damphair called again.
“Who shall be king over us?”
Men looked at one another. Some looked at Euron, some at
Victarion, a few at Asha. Waves broke green and white against the

longships. The gull cried once more, a raucous scream, forlorn.
“Make your claim, Victarion,” the Merlyn called. “Let us have done
with this mummer’s farce.”
“When I am ready,” Victarion shouted back.
Aeron was pleased. It is better if he waits.
The Drumm came next, another old man, though not so old as
Erik. He climbed the hill on his own two legs, and on his hip rode
Red Rain, his famous sword, forged of Valyrian steel in the days
before the Doom. His champions were men of note: his sons Denys
and Donnel, both stout ghters, and between them Andrik the
Unsmiling, a giant of a man with arms as thick as trees. It spoke
well of the Drumm that such a man would stand for him.
“Where is it written that our king must be a kraken?” Drumm
began. “What right has Pyke to rule us? Great Wyk is the largest
isle, Harlaw the richest, Old Wyk the most holy. When the black
line was consumed by dragon re, the ironborn gave the primacy to
Vickon Greyjoy, aye … but as lord, not king.”
It was a good beginning. Aeron heard shouts of approval, but
they dwindled as the old man began to tell of the glory of the
Drumms. He spoke of Dale the Dread, Roryn the Reaver, the
hundred sons of Gormond Drumm the Oldfather. He drew Red Rain
and told them how Hilmar Drumm the Cunning had taken the blade
from an armored knight with wits and a wooden cudgel. He spoke
of ships long lost and battles eight hundred years forgotten, and the
crowd grew restive. He spoke and spoke, and then he spoke still
more.
And when Drumm’s chests were thrown open, the captains saw
the niggard’s gifts he’d brought them. No throne was ever bought with
bronze, the Damphair thought. The truth of that was plain to hear,
as the cries of “Drumm! Drumm! Dunstan King!” died away.
Aeron could feel a tightness in his belly, and it seemed to him
that the waves were pounding louder than before. It is time, he
thought. It is time for Victarion to make his claim. “Who shall be king
over us?” the priest cried once more, but this time his erce black
eyes found his brother in the crowd. “Nine sons were born from the

loins of Quellon Greyjoy. One was mightier than all the rest, and
knew no fear.”
Victarion met his eyes, and nodded. The captains parted before
him as he climbed the steps. “Brother, give me blessing,” he said
when he reached the top. He knelt and bowed his head. Aeron
uncorked his waterskin and poured a stream of seawater down upon
his brow. “What is dead can never die,” the priest said, and Victarion
replied, “but rises again, harder and stronger.”
When Victarion rose, his champions arrayed themselves beneath
him; Ralf the Limper, Red Ralf Stonehouse, and Nute the Barber,
noted warriors all. Stonehouse bore the Greyjoy banner; the golden
kraken on a eld as black as the midnight sea. As soon as it
unfurled, the captains and the kings began to shout out the Lord
Captain’s name. Victarion waited till they quieted, then said, “You
all know me. If you want sweet words, look elsewhere. I have no
singer’s tongue. I have an axe, and I have these.” He raised his huge
mailed hands up to show them, and Nute the Barber displayed his
axe, a fearsome piece of steel. “I was a loyal brother,” Victarion
went on. “When Balon was wed, it was me he sent to Harlaw to
bring him back his bride. I led his longships into many a battle, and
never lost but one. The rst time Balon took a crown, it was me
sailed into Lannisport to singe the lion’s tail. The second time, it
was me he sent to skin the Young Wolf should he come howling
home. All you’ll get from me is more of what you got from Balon.
That’s all I have to say.”
With that his champions began to chant: “VICTARION!
VICTARION! VICTARION KING!” Below, his men were spilling out
his chests, a cascade of silver, gold, and gems, a wealth of plunder.
Captains scrambled to seize the richest pieces, shouting as they did
so. “VICTARION! VICTARION! VICTARION KING!” Aeron watched
the Crow’s Eye. Will he speak now, or let the kingsmoot run its course?
Orkwood of Orkmont was whispering in Euron’s ear.
But it was not Euron who put an end to the shouting, it was the
woman. She put two ngers in her mouth and whistled, a sharp shrill
sound that cut through the tumult like a knife through curds.
“Nuncle! Nuncle!” Bending, she snatched up a twisted golden collar

and bounded up the steps. Nute seized her by the arm, and for half a
heartbeat Aeron was hopeful that his brother’s champions would
keep her silent, but Asha wrenched free of the Barber’s hand and
said something to Red Ralf that made him step aside. As she pushed
past, the cheering died away. She was Balon Greyjoy’s daughter,
and the crowd was curious to hear her speak.
“It was good of you to bring such gifts to my queensmoot,
Nuncle,” she told Victarion, “but you need not have worn so much
armor. I promise not to hurt you.” Asha turned to face the captains.
“There’s no one braver than my nuncle, no one stronger, no one
ercer in a ght. And he counts to ten as quick as any man, I have
seen him do it … though when he needs to go to twenty he does
take o his boots.” That made them laugh. “He has no sons, though.
His wives keep dying. The Crow’s Eye is his elder and has a better
claim …”
“He does!” the Red Oarsman shouted from below.
“Ah, but my claim is better still.” Asha set the collar on her head
at a jaunty angle, so the gold gleamed against her dark hair.
“Balon’s brother cannot come before Balon’s son!”
“Balon’s sons are dead,” cried Ralf the Limper. “All I see is Balon’s
little daughter!”
“Daughter?” Asha slipped a hand beneath her jerkin. “Oho!
What’s this? Shall I show you? Some of you have not seen one since
they weaned you.” They laughed again. “Teats on a king are a
terrible thing, is that the song? Ralf, you have me, I am a
woman … though not an old woman like you. Ralf the
Limper … shouldn’t that be Ralf the Limp?” Asha drew a dirk from
between her breasts. “I’m a mother too, and here’s my suckling
babe!” She held it up. “And here, my champions.” They pushed past
Victarion’s three to stand below her: Qarl the Maid, Tristifer Botley,
and the knight Ser Harras Harlaw, whose sword Nightfall was as
storied as Dunstan Drumm’s Red Rain. “My nuncle said you know
him. You know me too—”
“I want to know you better!” someone shouted.
“Go home and know your wife,” Asha shot back. “Nuncle says
he’ll give you more of what my father gave you. Well, what was

that? Gold and glory, some will say. Freedom, ever sweet. Aye, it’s
so, he gave us that … and widows too, as Lord Blacktyde will tell
you. How many of you had your homes put to the torch when
Robert came? How many had daughters raped and despoiled? Burnt
towns and broken castles, my father gave you that. Defeat was what
he gave you. Nuncle here will give you more. Not me.”
“What will you give us?” asked Lucas Codd. “Knitting?”
“Aye, Lucas. I’ll knit us all a kingdom.” She tossed her dirk from
hand to hand. “We need to take a lesson from the Young Wolf, who
won every battle … and lost all.”
“A wolf is not a kraken,” Victarion objected. “What the kraken
grasps it does not lose, be it longship or leviathan.”
“And what have we grasped, Nuncle? The north? What is that, but
leagues and leagues of leagues and leagues, far from the sound of
the sea? We have taken Moat Cailin, Deepwood Motte, Torrhen’s
Square, even Winterfell. What do we have to show for it?” She
beckoned, and her Black Wind men pushed forward, chests of oak
and iron on their shoulders. “I give you the wealth of the Stony
Shore,” Asha said as the rst was upended. An avalanche of pebbles
clattered forth, cascading down the steps; pebbles grey and black
and white, worn smooth by the sea. “I give you the riches of
Deepwood,” she said, as the second chest was opened. Pinecones
came pouring out, to roll and bounce down into the crowd. “And
last, the gold of Winterfell.” From the third chest came yellow
turnips, round and hard and big as a man’s head. They landed
amidst the pebbles and the pinecones. Asha stabbed one with her
dirk. “Harmund Sharp,” she shouted, “your son Harrag died at
Winterfell, for this.” She pulled the turnip o her blade and tossed it
to him. “You have other sons, I think. If you’d trade their lives for
turnips, shout my nuncle’s name!”
“And if I shout your name?” Harmund demanded. “What then?”
“Peace,” said Asha. “Land. Victory. I’ll give you Sea Dragon Point
and the Stony Shore, black earth and tall trees and stones enough
for every younger son to build a hall. We’ll have the northmen
too … as friends, to stand with us against the Iron Throne. Your
choice is simple. Crown me, for peace and victory. Or crown my

nuncle, for more war and more defeat.” She sheathed her dirk
again. “What will you have, ironmen?”
“VICTORY!” shouted Rodrik the Reader, his hands cupped about
his mouth. “Victory, and Asha!”
“ASHA!” Lord Baelor Blacktyde echoed. “ASHA QUEEN!”
Asha’s own crew took up the cry. “ASHA! ASHA! ASHA QUEEN!”
They stamped their feet and shook their sts and yelled, as the
Damphair listened in disbelief. She would leave her father’s work
undone! Yet Tristifer Botley was shouting for her, with many
Harlaws, some Goodbrothers, red-faced Lord Merlyn, more men
than the priest would ever have believed … for a woman!
But others were holding their tongues, or muttering asides to
their neighbors. “No craven’s peace!” Ralf the Limper roared. Red
Ralf Stonehouse swirled the Greyjoy banner and bellowed,
“Victarion! VICTARION! VICTARION!” Men began to shove at one
another. Someone ung a pinecone at Asha’s head. When she
ducked, her makeshift crown fell o . For a moment it seemed to the
priest as if he stood atop a giant anthill, with a thousand ants in a
boil at his feet. Shouts of “Asha!” and “Victarion!” surged back and
forth, and it seemed as though some savage storm was about to
engulf them all. The Storm God is amongst us, the priest thought,
sowing fury and discord.
Sharp as a swordthrust, the sound of a horn split the air.
Bright and baneful was its voice, a shivering hot scream that
made a man’s bones seem to thrum within him. The cry lingered in
the damp sea air: aaaaRREEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
All eyes turned toward the sound. It was one of Euron’s mongrels
winding the call, a monstrous man with a shaved head. Rings of
gold and jade and jet glistened on his arms, and on his broad chest
was tattooed some bird of prey, talons dripping blood.
aaaaRRREEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
The horn he blew was shiny black and twisted, and taller than a
man as he held it with both hands. It was bound about with bands
of red gold and dark steel, incised with ancient Valyrian glyphs that
seemed to glow redly as the sound swelled.
aaaaaaaRRREEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

It was a terrible sound, a wail of pain and fury that seemed to
burn the ears. Aeron Damphair covered his, and prayed for the
Drowned God to raise a mighty wave and smash the horn to silence,
yet still the shriek went on and on. It is the horn of hell, he wanted to
scream, though no man would have heard him. The cheeks of the
tattooed man were so pu ed out they looked about to burst, and the
muscles in his chest twitched in a way that it made it seem as if the
bird were about to rip free of his esh and take wing. And now the
glyphs were burning brightly, every line and letter shimmering with
white re. On and on and on the sound went, echoing amongst the
howling hills behind them and across the waters of Nagga’s Cradle
to ring against the mountains of Great Wyk, on and on and on until
it lled the whole wet world.
And when it seemed the sound would never end, it did.
The hornblower’s breath failed at last. He staggered and almost
fell. The priest saw Orkwood of Orkmont catch him by one arm to
hold him up, whilst Left-Hand Lucas Codd took the twisted black
horn from his hands. A thin wisp of smoke was rising from the horn,
and the priest saw blood and blisters upon the lips of the man who’d
sounded it. The bird on his chest was bleeding too.
Euron Greyjoy climbed the hill slowly, with every eye upon him.
Above the gull screamed and screamed again. No godless man may sit
the Seastone Chair, Aeron thought, but he knew that he must let his
brother speak. His lips moved silently in prayer.
Asha’s champions stepped aside, and Victarion’s as well. The
priest took a step backward and put one hand upon the cold rough
stone of Nagga’s ribs. The Crow’s Eye stopped atop the steps, at the
doors of the Grey King’s Hall, and turned his smiling eye upon the
captains and the kings, but Aeron could feel his other eye as well,
the one that he kept hidden.
“IRONMEN,” said Euron Greyjoy, “you have heard my horn. Now
hear my words. I am Balon’s brother, Quellon’s eldest living son.
Lord Vickon’s blood is in my veins, and the blood of the Old
Kraken. Yet I have sailed farther than any of them. Only one living
kraken has never known defeat. Only one has never bent his knee.

Only one has sailed to Asshai by the Shadow, and seen wonders and
terrors beyond imagining …”
“If you liked the Shadow so well, go back there,” called out pinkcheeked Qarl the Maid, one of Asha’s champions.
The Crow’s Eye ignored him. “My little brother would nish
Balon’s war, and claim the north. My sweet niece would give us
peace and pinecones.” His blue lips twisted in a smile. “Asha prefers
victory to defeat. Victarion wants a kingdom, not a few scant yards
of earth. From me, you shall have both.
“Crow’s Eye, you call me. Well, who has a keener eye than the
crow? After every battle the crows come in their hundreds and their
thousands to feast upon the fallen. A crow can espy death from afar.
And I say that all of Westeros is dying. Those who follow me will
feast until the end of their days.
“We are the ironborn, and once we were conquerors. Our writ ran
everywhere the sound of the waves was heard. My brother would
have you be content with the cold and dismal north, my niece with
even less … but I shall give you Lannisport. Highgarden. The Arbor.
Oldtown. The riverlands and the Reach, the kingswood and the
rainwood, Dorne and the marches, the Mountains of the Moon and
the Vale of Arryn, Tarth and the Stepstones. I say we take it all! I
say, we take Westeros.” He glanced at the priest. “All for the greater
glory of our Drowned God, to be sure.”
For half a heartbeat even Aeron was swept away by the boldness
of his words. The priest had dreamed the same dream, when rst
he’d seen the red comet in the sky. We shall sweep over the green
lands with re and sword, root out the seven gods of the septons and the
white trees of the northmen …
“Crow’s Eye,” Asha called, “did you leave your wits at Asshai? If
we cannot hold the north—and we cannot—how can we win the
whole of the Seven Kingdoms?”
“Why, it has been done before. Did Balon teach his girl so little of
the ways of war? Victarion, our brother’s daughter has never heard
of Aegon the Conqueror, it would seem.”
“Aegon?” Victarion crossed his arms against his armored chest.
“What has the Conqueror to do with us?”

“I know as much of war as you do, Crow’s Eye,” Asha said.
“Aegon Targaryen conquered Westeros with dragons.”
“And so shall we,” Euron Greyjoy promised. “That horn you heard
I found amongst the smoking ruins that were Valyria, where no man
has dared to walk but me. You heard its call, and felt its power. It is
a dragon horn, bound with bands of red gold and Valyrian steel
graven with enchantments. The dragonlords of old sounded such
horns, before the Doom devoured them. With this horn, ironmen, I
can bind dragons to my will.”
Asha laughed aloud. “A horn to bind goats to your will would be
of more use, Crow’s Eye. There are no more dragons.”
“Again, girl, you are wrong. There are three, and I know where
to nd them. Surely that is worth a driftwood crown.”
“EURON!” shouted Left-Hand Lucas Codd.
“EURON! CROW’S EYE! EURON!” cried the Red Oarsman.
The mutes and mongrels from the Silence threw open Euron’s
chests and spilled out his gifts before the captains and the kings.
Then it was Hotho Harlaw the priest heard, as he lled his hands
with gold. Gorold Goodbrother shouted out as well, and Erik AnvilBreaker. “EURON! EURON! EURON!” The cry swelled, became a
roar. “EURON! EURON! CROW’S EYE! EURON KING!” It rolled up
Nagga’s hill, like the Storm God rattling the clouds. “EURON!
EURON! EURON! EURON! EURON! EURON!”
Even a priest may doubt. Even a prophet may know terror. Aeron
Damphair reached within himself for his god and discovered only
silence. As a thousand voices shouted out his brother’s name, all he
could hear was the scream of a rusted iron hinge.

BRIENNE

East of Maidenpool the hills rose wild, and the pines closed in about
them like a host of silent grey-green soldiers.
Nimble Dick said the coast road was the shortest way, and the
easiest, so they were seldom out of sight of the bay. The towns and
villages along the shore grew smaller as they went, and less
frequent. At nightfall they would seek an inn. Crabb would share
the common bed with other travelers, whilst Brienne took a room
for her and Podrick. “Cheaper if we all shared the same bed,
m’lady,” Nimble Dick would say. “You could lay your sword
between us. Old Dick’s a harmless fellow. Chivalrous as a knight,
and honest as the day is long.”
“The days are growing shorter,” Brienne pointed out.
“Well, that may be. If you don’t trust me in the bed, I could just
curl up on the oor, m’lady.”
“Not on my oor.”
“A man might think you don’t trust me none.”
“Trust is earned. Like gold.”
“As you say, m’lady,” said Crabb, “but up north where the road
gives out, you’ll need t’ trust Dick then. If I wanted t’ take your
gold at swordpoint, who’s to stop me?”
“You don’t own a sword. I do.”
She shut the door between them and stood there listening until
she was certain he had moved away. However nimble he might be,

Dick Crabb was no Jaime Lannister, no Mad Mouse, not even a
Humfrey Wagsta . He was scrawny and ill fed, his only armor a
dinted halfhelm spotted with rust. In place of a sword, he carried an
old, nicked dagger. So long as she was awake, he posed no danger
to her. “Podrick,” she said, “there will come a time when there are
no more inns to shelter us. I do not trust our guide. When we make
camp, can you watch over me as I sleep?”
“Stay awake, my lady? Ser.” He thought. “I have a sword. If
Crabb tries to hurt you, I could kill him.”
“No,” she said sternly. “You are not to try and ght him. All I ask
is that you watch him as I sleep, and wake me if he does anything
suspicious. I wake quickly, you will nd.”
Crabb showed his true colors the next day, when they stopped to
water the horses. Brienne had to step behind some bushes to empty
her bladder. As she was squatting, she heard Podrick say, “What are
you doing? You get away from there.” She nished her business,
hiked up her breeches, and returned to the road to nd Nimble Dick
wiping our o his ngers. “You won’t nd any dragons in my
saddlebags,” she told him. “I keep my gold upon my person.” Some
of it was in the pouch at her belt, the rest hidden in a pair of
pockets sewn inside her clothing. The fat purse inside her saddlebag
was lled with coppers large and small, pennies and halfpennies,
groats and stars … and ne white our, to make it fatter still. She
had bought the our from the cook at the Seven Swords the
morning she rode out from Duskendale.
“Dick meant no harm, m’lady.” He wriggled his our-spotted
ngers to show he held no weapon. “I was only looking to see if
you had these dragons what you promised me. The world’s full o’
liars, ready to cheat an honest man. Not that you’re one.”
Brienne hoped he was a better guide than he was a thief. “We had
best be going.” She mounted up again.
Dick would oft sing as they rode along together; never a whole
song, only a snatch of this and a verse of that. She suspected that he
meant to charm her, to put her o her guard. Sometimes he would
try to get her and Podrick to sing along with him, to no avail. The
boy was too shy and tongue-tied, and Brienne did not sing. Did you

sing for your father? Lady Stark had asked her once, at Riverrun. Did
you sing for Renly? She had not, not ever, though she had
wanted … she had wanted …
When he was not singing, Nimble Dick would talk, regaling them
with tales of Crackclaw Point. Every gloomy valley had its lord, he
said, the lot of them united only by their mistrust of outsiders. In
their veins the blood of the First Men ran dark and strong. “The
Andals tried t’ take Crackclaw, but we bled them in the valleys and
drowned them in the bogs. Only what their sons couldn’t win with
swords, their pretty daughters won with kisses. They married into
the houses they couldn’t conquer, aye.”
The Darklyn kings of Duskendale had tried to impose their rule
on Crackclaw Point; the Mootons of Maidenpool had tried as well,
and later the haughty Celtigars of Crab Isle. But the Crackclaws
knew their bogs and forests as no outsider could, and if hard
pressed would vanish into the caverns that honeycombed their hills.
When not ghting would-be conquerors, they fought each other.
Their blood feuds were as deep and dark as the bogs between their
hills. From time to time some champion would bring peace to the
Point, but it never lasted longer than his lifetime. Lord Lucifer
Hardy, he was a great one, and the Brothers Brune as well. Old
Crackbones even more so, but the Crabbs were the mightiest of all.
Dick still refused to believe that Brienne had never heard of Ser
Clarence Crabb and his exploits.
“Why would I lie?” she asked him. “Every place has its local
heroes. Where I come from, the singers sing of Ser Galladon of
Morne, the Perfect Knight.”
“Ser Gallawho of What?” He snorted. “Never heard o’ him. Why
was he so bloody perfect?”
“Ser Galladon was a champion of such valor that the Maiden
herself lost her heart to him. She gave him an enchanted sword as a
token of her love. The Just Maid, it was called. No common sword
could check her, nor any shield withstand her kiss. Ser Galladon
bore the Just Maid proudly, but only thrice did he unsheathe her.
He would not use the Maid against a mortal man, for she was so
potent as to make any ght unfair.”

Crabb thought that was hilarious. “The Perfect Knight? The
Perfect Fool, he sounds like. What’s the point o’ having some magic
sword if you don’t bloody well use it?”
“Honor,” she said. “The point is honor.”
That only made him laugh the louder. “Ser Clarence Crabb would
have wiped his hairy arse with your Perfect Knight, m’lady. If
they’d ever have met, there’d be one more bloody head sitting on
the shelf at the Whispers, you ask me. ‘I should have used the magic
sword,’ it’d be saying to all the other heads. ‘I should have used the
bloody sword.’ ”
Brienne could not help but smile. “Perhaps,” she allowed, “but Ser
Galladon was no fool. Against a foe eight feet tall mounted on an
aurochs, he might well have unsheathed the Just Maid. He used her
once to slay a dragon, they say.”
Nimble Dick was unimpressed. “Crackbones fought a dragon too,
but he didn’t need no magic sword. He just tied its neck in a knot,
so every time it breathed re it roasted its own arse.”
“And what did Crackbones do when Aegon and his sisters came?”
Brienne asked him.
“He was dead. M’lady must know that.” Crabb gave her a
sideways look. “Aegon sent his sister up to Crackclaw, that Visenya.
The lords had heard o’ Harren’s end. Being no fools, they laid their
swords at her feet. The queen took them as her own men, and said
they’d owe no fealty to Maidenpool, Crab Isle, or Duskendale. Don’t
stop them bloody Celtigars from sending men to t’ eastern shore to
collect his taxes. If he sends enough, a few come back to
him … elsewise, we bow only to our own lords, and the king. The
true king, not Robert and his ilk.” He spat. “There was Crabbs and
Brunes and Boggses with Prince Rhaegar on the Trident, and in the
Kingsguard too. A Hardy, a Cave, a Pyne, and three Crabbs, Clement
and Rupert and Clarence the Short. Six foot tall, he was, but short
compared to the real Ser Clarence. We’re all good dragon men, up
Crackclaw way.”
The tra c continued to dwindle as they moved north and east,
until nally there were no inns to be found. By then the bayside
road was more weeds than ruts. That night they took shelter in a

shing village. Brienne paid the villagers a few coppers to allow
them to bed down in a hay barn. She claimed the loft for Podrick
and herself, and pulled the ladder up after them.
“You leave me down here alone, I could bloody well steal your
horses,” Crabb called up from below. “Best you get them up the
ladder too, m’lady.” When she ignored him, he went on to say, “It’s
going to rain tonight. A cold hard rain. You and Pods will sleep all
snug and warm, and poor old Dick will be shivering down here by
myself.” He shook his head, muttering, as he made a bed on a pile
of hay. “I never knew such a mistrustful maid as you.”
Brienne curled up beneath her cloak, with Podrick yawning at her
side. I was not always wary, she might have shouted down at Crabb.
When I was a little girl I believed that all men were as noble as my
father. Even the men who told her what a pretty girl she was, how
tall and bright and clever, how graceful when she danced. It was
Septa Roelle who had lifted the scales from her eyes. “They only say
those things to win your lord father’s favor,” the woman had said.
“You’ll nd truth in your looking glass, not on the tongues of men.”
It was a harsh lesson, one that left her weeping, but it had stood her
in good stead at Harrenhal when Ser Hyle and his friends had
played their game. A maid has to be mistrustful in this world, or she
will not be a maid for long, she was thinking, as the rain began to
fall.
In the mêlée at Bitterbridge she had sought out her suitors and
battered them one by one, Farrow and Ambrose and Bushy, Mark
Mullendore and Raymond Nayland and Will the Stork. She had
ridden over Harry Sawyer and broken Robin Potter’s helm, giving
him a nasty scar. And when the last of them had fallen, the Mother
had delivered Connington to her. This time Ser Ronnet held a sword
and not a rose. Every blow she dealt him was sweeter than a kiss.
Loras Tyrell had been the last to face her wroth that day. He’d
never courted her, had hardly looked at her at all, but he bore three
golden roses on his shield that day, and Brienne hated roses. The
sight of them had given her a furious strength. She went to sleep
dreaming of the ght they’d had, and of Ser Jaime fastening a
rainbow cloak about her shoulders.

It was still raining the next morning. As they broke their fast,
Nimble Dick suggested that they wait for it to stop.
“When will that be? On the morrow? In a fortnight? When
summer comes again? No. We have cloaks, and leagues to ride.”
It rained all that day. The narrow track they followed soon turned
to mud beneath them. What trees they saw were naked, and the
steady rain had turned their fallen leaves into a sodden brown mat.
Despite its squirrel-skin lining, Dick’s cloak soaked through, and she
could see him shivering. Brienne felt a moment’s pity for the man.
He has not eaten well, that’s plain. She wondered if there truly was a
smugglers’ cove, or a ruined castle called the Whispers. Hungry men
do desperate things. This all might be some ploy to cozen her.
Suspicion soured her stomach.
For a time it seemed as though the steady wash of rain was the
only sound in the world. Nimble Dick plowed on, heedless. She
watched closely, noting how he bent his back, as if huddling low in
the saddle would keep him dry. This time there was no village close
at hand when darkness came upon them. Nor were there any trees
to give them shelter. They were forced to camp amongst some
rocks, fty yards above the tideline. The rocks at least would keep
the wind o . “Best we keep a watch tonight, m’lady,” Crabb told
her, as she was struggling to get a driftwood re lit. “A place like
this, there might be squishers.”
“Squishers?” Brienne gave him a suspicious look.
“Monsters,” Nimble Dick said, with relish. “They look like men
till you get close, but their heads is too big, and they got scales
where a proper man’s got hair. Fish-belly white they are, with webs
between their ngers. They’re always damp and shy-smelling, but
behind these blubbery lips they got rows of green teeth sharp as
needles. Some say the First Men killed them all, but don’t you
believe it. They come by night and steal bad little children, padding
along on them webbed feet with a little squish-squish sound. The
girls they keep to breed with, but the boys they eat, tearing at them
with those sharp green teeth.” He grinned at Podrick. “They’d eat
you, boy. They’d eat you raw.”
“If they try, I’ll kill them.” Podrick touched his sword.

“You try that. You just try. Squishers don’t die easy.” He winked
at Brienne. “You a bad little girl, m’lady?”
“No.” Just a fool. The wood was too damp to light, no matter how
many sparks Brienne struck o her int and steel. The kindling sent
up some smoke, but that was all. Disgusted, she settled down with
her back to a rock, pulled her cloak over herself, and resigned
herself to a cold, wet night. Dreaming of a hot meal, she gnawed on
a strip of hard salt beef whilst Nimble Dick talked about the time
Ser Clarence Crabb had fought the squisher king. He tells a lively
tale, she had to admit, but Mark Mullendore was amusing too, with his
little monkey.
It was too wet to see the sun go down, too grey to see the moon
come up. The night was black and starless. Crabb ran out of tales
and went to sleep. Podrick was soon snoring too. Brienne sat with
her back to the rock, listening to the waves. Are you near the sea,
Sansa? she wondered. Are you waiting at the Whispers for a ship that
will never come? Who do you have with you? Passage for three, he said.
Has the Imp joined you and Ser Dontos, or did you nd your little sister?
The day had been a long one, and Brienne was tired. Even sitting
up against the rock, with rain pattering softly all around her, she
found her eyelids growing heavy. Twice she dozed. The second time
she woke all at once, heart pounding, convinced that someone was
looming over her. Her limbs were sti , and her cloak had gotten
tangled round her ankles. She kicked free of it and stood. Nimble
Dick was curled against a rock, half-buried in wet, heavy sand,
asleep. A dream. It was a dream.
Perhaps she had made a mistake in abandoning Ser Creighton and
Ser Illifer. They had seemed like honest men. Would that Jaime had
come with me, she thought … but he was a knight of the Kingsguard,
his rightful place was with his king. Besides, it was Renly that she
wanted. I swore I would protect him, and I failed. Then I swore I would
avenge him, and I failed at that as well. I ran o with Lady Catelyn
instead, and failed her too. The wind had shifted, and the rain was
running down her face.
The next day the road dwindled to a pebbled thread, and nally
to a mere suggestion. Near midday, it came to an abrupt end at the

foot of a wind-carved cli . Above, a small castle stood frowning
over the waves, its three crooked towers outlined against a leaden
sky. “Is that the Whispers?” Podrick asked.
“That look a bloody ruin t’ you?” Crabb spat. “That’s the Dyre
Den, where old Lord Brune keeps his seat. Road ends here, though.
It’s the pines for us from here on.”
Brienne studied the cli . “How do we get up there?”
“Easy.” Nimble Dick turned his horse. “Stay close t’ Dick. The
squishers are apt t’ take the laggards.”
The way up proved to be a steep stony path hidden within a cleft
in the rock. Most of it was natural, but here and there steps had
been carved to ease the climb. Sheer walls of rock, eaten away by
centuries of wind and spray, hemmed them in to either side. In
some places they had assumed fantastic shapes. Nimble Dick pointed
out a few as they climbed. “There’s an ogre’s head, see?” he said,
and Brienne smiled when she saw it. “And that there’s a stone
dragon. T’other wing fell o when my father was a boy. Above it,
that’s the dugs drooping down, like some hag’s teats.” He glanced
back at her own chest.
“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “There’s a rider.”
“Where?” None of the rocks suggested a rider to her.
“On the road. Not a rock rider. A real rider. Following us. Down
there.” He pointed.
Brienne twisted in her saddle. They had climbed high enough to
see for leagues along the shore. The horse was coming up the same
road they had taken, two or three miles behind them. Again? She
glanced at Nimble Dick suspiciously.
“Don’t squint at me,” Crabb said. “He’s naught t’ do with old
Nimble Dick, whoever he is. Some man o’ Brune’s, most like, come
back from the wars. Or one o’ them singers, wandering from place
to place.” He turned his head and spat. “He’s no squisher, that’s
bloody certain. Their sort don’t ride horses.”
“No,” said Brienne. On that, at least, they could agree.
The last hundred feet of the climb proved the steepest and most
treacherous. Loose pebbles rolled beneath their horse’s hooves and
went rattling down the stony path behind them. When they

emerged from the cleft in the rock, they found themselves under the
castle walls. On a parapet above, a face peered down at them, then
vanished. Brienne thought it might have been a woman, and said as
much to Nimble Dick.
He agreed. “Brune’s too old to go climbing wallwalks, and his
sons and grandsons went o to the wars. No one left in there but
wenches, and a snot-nosed babe or three.”
It was on her lips to ask her guide which king Lord Brune had
espoused, but it made no matter any longer. Brune’s sons were
gone; some might not be coming back. We will have no hospitality
here tonight. A castle full of old men, women, and children was not
like to open its doors to armed strangers. “You speak of Lord Brune
as if you know him,” she said to Nimble Dick.
“Might be I did, once.”
She glanced at the breast of his doublet. Loose threads and a
ragged patch of darker fabric showed where some badge had been
torn away. Her guide was a deserter, she did not doubt. Could the
rider behind them be one of his brothers-in-arms?
“We should ride on,” he urged, “before Brune starts to wonder
why we’re here beneath his walls. Even a wench can wind a bloody
crossbow.” Dick gestured toward the limestone hills that rose
beyond the castle, with their wooded slopes. “No more roads from
here on, only streams and game trails, but m’lady need not fear.
Nimble Dick knows these parts.”
That was what Brienne was afraid of. The wind was gusting along
the top of the cli , but all she could smell was a trap. “What about
that rider?” Unless his horse could walk on waves, he would soon
be coming up the cli .
“What about him? If he’s some fool from Maidenpool, he might
not even nd the bloody path. And if he does, we’ll lose him in the
woods. He won’t have no road to follow there.”
Only our tracks. Brienne wondered if it wouldn’t be better to meet
the rider here, with her blade in hand. I’ll look an utter fool if it is a
wandering singer or one of Lord Brune’s sons. Crabb had the right of it,
she supposed. If he is still behind us on the morrow, I can deal with him
then. “As you will,” she said, turning her mare toward the trees.

Lord Brune’s castle dwindled at their backs, and soon was lost to
sight. Sentinels and soldier pines rose all around them, towering
green-clad spears thrusting toward the sky. The forest oor was a
bed of fallen needles as thick as a castle wall, littered with
pinecones. The hooves of their horses seemed to make no sound. It
rained a bit, stopped for a time, then started once again, but
amongst the pines they scarce felt a drop.
The going was much slower in the woods. Brienne prodded her
mare through the green gloom, weaving in and out amongst the
trees. It would be very easy to get lost here, she realized. Every
way she looked appeared the same. The very air seemed grey and
green and still. Pine boughs scratched against her arms and scraped
noisily against her newly painted shield. The eerie stillness grated
on her more with every passing hour.
It bothered Nimble Dick as well. Late that day, as dusk was
coming on, he tried to sing. “A bear there was, a bear, a bear, all black
and brown, and covered with hair,” he sang, his voice as scratchy as a
pair of woolen breeches. The pines drank his song, as they drank
the wind and rain. After a little while he stopped.
“It’s bad here,” Podrick said. “This is a bad place.”
Brienne felt the same, but it would not serve to admit it. “A pine
wood is a gloomy place, but in the end it’s just a wood. There’s
naught here that we need fear.”
“What about the squishers? And the heads?”
“There’s a clever lad,” said Nimble Dick, laughing.
Brienne gave him a look of annoyance. “There are no squishers,”
she told Podrick, “and no heads.”
The hills went up, the hills went down. Brienne found herself
praying that Nimble Dick was honest, and knew where he was
taking them. By herself, she was not even certain she could have
found the sea again. Day or night, the sky was solid grey and
overcast, with neither sun nor stars to help her nd her way.
They made camp early that night, after they came down a hill and
found themselves on the edge of a glistening green bog. In the greygreen light, the ground ahead looked solid enough, but when they’d
ridden out it had swallowed their horses up to their withers. They

had to turn and ght their way back onto more solid footing. “It’s
no matter,” Crabb assured them. “We’ll go back up the hill and
come down another way.”
The next day was the same. They rode through pines and bogs,
under dark skies and intermittent rain, past sinkholes and caves and
the ruins of ancient strongholds whose stones were blanketed in
moss. Every heap of stones had a story, and Nimble Dick told them
all. To hear him tell it, the men of Crackclaw Point had watered
their pine trees with blood. Brienne’s patience soon began to fray.
“How much longer?” she demanded nally. “We must have seen
every tree in Crackclaw Point by now.”
“Not hardly,” said Crabb. “We’re close now. See, the woods is
thinning out. We’re near the narrow sea.”
This fool he promised me is like to be my own re ection in a pond,
Brienne thought, but it seemed pointless to turn back when she had
come so far. She was weary, though, she could not deny that. Her
thighs were hard as iron from the saddle, and of late she had been
sleeping only four hours a night, whilst Podrick watched over her.
If Nimble Dick meant to try and murder them, she was convinced it
would happen here, on ground that he knew well. He could be
taking them to some robbers’ den where he had kin as treacherous
as he was. Or perhaps he was just leading them in circles, waiting
for that rider to catch up. They had not seen any sign of the man
since leaving Lord Brune’s castle, but that did not mean he had
given up the hunt.
It may be that I will need to kill him, she told herself one night as
she paced about the camp. The notion made her queasy. Her old
master-at-arms had always questioned whether she was hard enough
for battle. “You have a man’s strength in your arms,” Ser Goodwin
had said to her, more than once, “but your heart is as soft as any
maid’s. It is one thing to train in the yard with a blunted sword in
hand, and another to drive a foot of sharpened steel into a man’s
gut and see the light go out of his eyes.” To toughen her, Ser
Goodwin used to send her to her father’s butcher to slaughter lambs
and suckling pigs. The piglets squealed and the lambs screamed like
frightened children. By the time the butchering was done Brienne

had been blind with tears, her clothes so bloody that she had given
them to her maid to burn. But Ser Goodwin still had doubts. “A
piglet is a piglet. It is di erent with a man. When I was a squire
young as you, I had a friend who was strong and quick and agile, a
champion in the yard. We all knew that one day he would be a
splendid knight. Then war came to the Stepstones. I saw my friend
drive his foeman to his knees and knock the axe from his hand, but
when he might have nished he held back for half a heartbeat. In
battle half a heartbeat is a lifetime. The man slipped out his dirk
and found a chink in my friend’s armor. His strength, his speed, his
valor, all his hard-won skill … it was worth less than a mummer’s
fart, because he inched from killing. Remember that, girl.”
I will, she promised his shade, there in the piney wood. She sat
down on a rock, took out her sword, and began to hone its edge. I
will remember, and I pray I will not inch.
The next day dawned bleak and cold and overcast. They never
saw the sun come up, but when the blackness turned to grey
Brienne knew it was time to saddle up again. With Nimble Dick
leading the way, they rode back into the pines. Brienne followed
close behind him, with Podrick bringing up the rear upon his
rounsey.
The castle came upon them without warning. One moment they
were in the depths of the forest, with nothing but pines to see for
leagues and leagues. Then they rode around a boulder, and a gap
appeared ahead. A mile farther on, the forest ended abruptly.
Beyond was sky and sea … and an ancient, tumbledown castle,
abandoned and overgrown on the edge of a cli . “The Whispers,”
said Nimble Dick. “Have a listen. You can hear the heads.”
Podrick’s mouth gaped open. “I hear them.”
Brienne heard them too. A faint, soft murmuring that seemed to
be coming from the ground as much as from the castle. The sound
grew louder as she neared the cli s. It was the sea, she realized
suddenly. The waves had eaten holes in the cli s below and were
rumbling through caves and tunnels beneath the earth. “There are
no heads,” she said. “It’s the waves you hear whispering.”
“Waves don’t whisper. It’s heads.”

The castle was built of old, unmortared stones, no two the same.
Moss grew thick in clefts between the rocks, and trees were
growing up from the foundations. Most old castles had a godswood.
By the look of it, the Whispers had little else. Brienne walked her
mare to the cli ’s edge, where the curtain wall had collapsed.
Mounds of poisonous red ivy grew over the heap of broken stones.
She tied the horse to a tree and edged as close to the precipice as
she dared. Fifty feet below, the waves were swirling in and over the
remnants of a shattered tower. Behind it, she glimpsed the mouth of
a large cavern.
“That’s the old beacon tower,” said Nimble Dick as he came up
behind her. “It fell when I was half as old as Pods here. Used to be
steps down to the cove, but when the cli collapsed they went too.
The smugglers stopped landing here after that. Time was, they
could row their boats into the cave, but no more. See?” He put one
hand on her back, and pointed with the other.
Brienne’s esh prickled. One shove, and I’ll be down there with the
tower. She stepped back. “Keep your hands o me.”
Crabb made a face. “I was only …”
“I don’t care what you were only. Where’s the gate?”
“Around t’other side.” He hesitated. “This fool o’ yours, he’s not a
man to hold a grudge, is he?” he said nervously. “I mean, last night
I got to thinking that he might be angry at old Nimble Dick, on
account o’ that map I sold him, and how I left out that the
smugglers don’t land here no more.”
“With the gold that you’ve got coming, you can give him back
whatever he paid you for your help.” Brienne could not imagine
Dontos Hollard posing a threat. “That is, if he’s even here.”
They made a circuit of the walls. The castle had been triangular,
with square towers at each corner. Its gates were badly rotted.
When Brienne tugged at one, the wood cracked and peeled away in
long wet splinters, and half the gate came down on her. She could
see more green gloom inside. The forest had breached the walls,
and swallowed keep and bailey. But there was a portcullis behind
the gate, its teeth sunk deep into the soft muddy ground. The iron

was red with rust, but it held when Brienne rattled it. “No one’s
used this gate for a long time.”
“I could climb over,” o ered Podrick. “By the cli . Where the
wall fell down.”
“It’s too dangerous. Those stones looked loose to me, and that red
ivy’s poisonous. There has to be a postern gate.”
They found it on the north side of the castle, half-hidden behind a
huge blackberry bramble. The berries had all been picked, and half
the bush had been hacked down to cut a path to the door. The sight
of the broken branches lled Brienne with disquiet. “Someone’s
been through here, and recently.”
“Your fool and those girls,” said Crabb. “I told you.”
Sansa? Brienne could not believe it. Even a wine-soaked sot like
Dontos Hollard would have better sense than to bring her to this
bleak place. Something about the ruins lled her with unease. She
would not nd the Stark girl here … but she had to have a look.
Someone was here, she thought. Someone who needed to stay hidden.
“I’m going in,” she said. “Crabb, you’ll come with me. Podrick, I
want you to watch the horses.”
“I want to come too. I’m a squire. I can ght.”
“That’s why I want you to stay here. There may be outlaws in
these woods. We dare not leave the horses unprotected.”
Podrick scu ed at a rock with his boot. “As you say.”
She shouldered through the blackberries and pulled at a rusted
iron ring. The postern door resisted for a moment, then jerked
open, its hinges screaming protest. The sound made the hairs on the
back of Brienne’s neck stand up. She drew her sword. Even in mail
and boiled leather, she felt naked.
“Go on, m’lady,” urged Nimble Dick, behind her. “What are you
waiting for? Old Crabb’s been dead a thousand years.”
What was she waiting for? Brienne told herself that she was being
foolish. The sound was just the sea, echoing endlessly through the
caverns beneath the castle, rising and falling with each wave. It did
sound like whispering, though, and for a moment she could almost
see the heads, sitting on their shelves and muttering to one another.

“I should have used the sword” one of them was saying. “I should have
used the magic sword.”
“Podrick,” said Brienne. “There’s a sword and scabbard wrapped
up in my bedroll. Bring them here to me.”
“Yes, ser. My lady. I will.” The boy went running o .
“A sword?” Nimble Dick scratched behind his ear. “You got a
sword in your hand. What do you need another for?”
“This one’s for you.” Brienne o ered him the hilt.
“For true?” Crabb reached out hesitantly, as if the blade might
bite him. “The mistrustful maid’s giving old Dick a sword?”
“You do know how to use one?”
“I’m a Crabb.” He snatched the longsword from her hand. “I got
the same blood as old Ser Clarence.” He slashed the air and grinned
at her. “It’s the sword that makes the lord, some say.”
When Podrick Payne returned, he held Oathkeeper as gingerly as
if it were a child. Nimble Dick gave a whistle at the sight of the
ornate scabbard with its row of lion’s heads, but grew quiet when
she drew the blade and tried a cut. Even the sound of it is sharper than
an ordinary sword. “With me,” she told Crabb. She slipped sideways
through the postern, ducking her head to pass beneath the
doorway’s arch.
The bailey opened up before her, overgrown. To her left was the
main gate, and the collapsed shell of what might have been a stable.
Saplings were poking out of half the stalls and growing up through
the dry brown thatch of its roof. To her right she saw rotted
wooden steps descending into the darkness of a dungeon or a root
cellar. Where the keep had been was a pile of collapsed stones,
overgrown with green and purple moss. The yard was all weeds and
pine needles. Soldier pines were everywhere, drawn up in solemn
ranks. In their midst was a pale stranger; a slender young weirwood
with a trunk as white as a cloistered maid. Dark red leaves sprouted
from its reaching branches. Beyond was the emptiness of sky and
sea where the wall had collapsed …
… and the remnants of a re.
The whispers nibbled at her ears, insistent. Brienne knelt beside
the re. She picked up a blackened stick, sni ed at it, stirred the

ashes. Someone was trying to keep warm last night. Or else they were
trying to send a signal to a passing ship.
“Halloooooo,” called Nimble Dick. “Anyone here?”
“Be quiet,” Brienne told him.
“Someone might be hiding. Wanting to get a look at us before
they show themself.” He walked to where the steps went down
beneath the ground, and peered down into the darkness.
“Hallooooo,” he called again. “Anyone down there?”
Brienne saw a sapling sway. From the bushes slid a man, so caked
with dirt that he looked as if he had sprouted from the earth. A
broken sword was in his hand, but it was his face that gave her
pause, the small eyes and wide at nostrils.
She knew that nose. She knew those eyes. Pyg, his friends had
called him.
Everything seemed to happen in a heartbeat. A second man
slipped over the lip of the well, making no more noise than a snake
might make slithering across a pile of wet leaves. He wore an iron
halfhelm wrapped in stained red silk, and had a short, thick
throwing spear in hand. Brienne knew him too. From behind her
came a rustling as a head poked down through the red leaves. Crabb
was standing underneath the weirwood. He looked up and saw the
face. “Here,” he called to Brienne. “It’s your fool.”
“Dick,” she called urgently, “to me.”
Shagwell dropped from the weirwood, braying laughter. He was
garbed in motley, but so faded and stained that it showed more
brown than grey or pink. In place of a jester’s ail he had a triple
morningstar, three spiked balls chained to a wooden haft. He swung
it hard and low, and one of Crabb’s knees exploded in a spray of
blood and bone. “That’s funny,” Shagwell crowed as Dick fell. The
sword she’d given him went ying from his hand and vanished in
the weeds. He writhed on the ground, screaming and clutching at
the ruins of his knee. “Oh, look,” said Shagwell, “it’s Smuggler Dick,
the one who made the map for us. Did you come all this way to
give us back our gold?”
“Please,” Dick whimpered, “please don’t, my leg …”
“Does it hurt? I can make it stop.”

“Leave him be,” said Brienne.
“DON’T!” shrieked Dick, lifting bloody hands to shield his head.
Shagwell whirled the spiked ball once around his head and brought
it down in the middle of Crabb’s face. There was a sickening crunch.
In the silence that followed, Brienne could hear the sound of her
own heart.
“Bad Shags,” said the man who’d come creeping from the well.
When he saw Brienne’s face, he laughed. “You again, woman?
What, come to hunt us down? Or did you miss our friendly faces?”
Shagwell danced from foot to foot and spun his ail. “It’s me she
come for. She dreams of me every night, when she sticks her ngers
up her slit. She wants me, lads, the big horse missed her merry
Shags! I’m going to fuck her up the arse and pump her full of
motley seed, until she whelps a little me.”
“You need to use a di erent hole for that, Shags,” said Timeon, in
his Dornish drawl.
“I best use all her holes, then. Just to make certain.” He moved to
her right as Pyg was circling around to her left, forcing her back
toward the ragged edge of the cli . Passage for three, Brienne
remembered. “There are only three of you.”
Timeon shrugged. “We all went our own ways, after we left
Harrenhal. Urswyck and his lot rode south for Oldtown. Rorge
thought he might slip out at Saltpans. Me and my lads made for
Maidenpool, but we couldn’t get near a ship.” The Dornishman
hefted his spear. “You did for Vargo with that bite, you know. His
ear turned black and started leaking pus. Rorge and Urswyck were
for leaving, but the Goat says we got to hold his castle. Lord of
Harrenhal, he says he is, no one was going to take it o him. He
said it slobbery, the way he always talked. We heard the Mountain
killed him piece by piece. A hand one day, a foot the next, lopped
o neat and clean. They bandaged up the stumps so Hoat didn’t die.
He was saving his cock for last, but some bird called him to King’s
Landing, so he nished it and rode o .”
“I am not here for you. I am looking for my …” She almost said
my sister. “… for a fool.”
“I’m a fool,” Shagwell announced happily.

“The wrong fool,” blurted Brienne. “The one I want is with a
highborn girl, the daughter of Lord Stark of Winterfell.”
“Then it’s the Hound you want,” said Timeon. “He’s not here
neither, as it happens. Just us.”
“Sandor Clegane?” said Brienne. “What do you mean?”
“He’s the one that’s got the Stark girl. The way I hear it, she was
making for Riverrun, and he stole her. Damned dog.”
Riverrun, thought Brienne. She was making for Riverrun. For her
uncles. “How do you know?”
“Had it from one of Beric’s bunch. The lightning lord is looking
for her too. He’s sent his men all up and down the Trident, sni ng
after her. We chanced on three of them after Harrenhal, and
winkled the tale from one before he died.”
“He might have lied.”
“He might have, but he didn’t. Later on, we heard how the Hound
slew three of his brother’s men at an inn by the crossroads. The girl
was with him there. The innkeep swore to it before Rorge killed
him, and the whores said the same. An ugly bunch, they were. Not
so ugly as you, mind you, but still …”
He is trying to distract me, Brienne realized, to lull me with his voice.
Pyg was edging closer. Shagwell took a hop toward her. She backed
away from them. They will back me o the cli if I let them. “Stay
away,” she warned them.
“I think I’m going to fuck you up the nose, wench,” Shagwell
announced. “Won’t that be amusing?”
“He has a very small cock,” Timeon explained. “Drop that pretty
sword and might be we’ll go gentle on you, woman. We need gold
to pay these smugglers, that’s all.”
“And if I give you gold, you’ll let us go?”
“We will.” Timeon smiled. “Once you’ve fucked the lot of us.
We’ll pay you like a proper whore. A silver for each fuck. Or else
we’ll take the gold and rape you anyway, and do you like the
Mountain did Lord Vargo. What’s your choice?”
“This.” Brienne threw herself toward Pyg.
He jerked his broken blade up to protect his face, but as he went
high she went low. Oathkeeper bit through leather, wool, skin, and

muscle, into the sellsword’s thigh. Pyg cut back wildly as his leg
went out from under him. His broken sword scraped against her
chain mail before he landed on his back. Brienne stabbed him
through the throat, gave the blade a hard turn, and slid it out,
whirling just as Timeon’s spear came ashing past her face. I did not
inch, she thought, as blood ran red down her cheek. Did you see,
Ser Goodwin? She hardly felt the cut.
“Your turn,” she told Timeon, as the Dornishman pulled out a
second spear, shorter and thicker than the rst. “Throw it.”
“So you can dance away and charge me? I’d end up dead as Pyg.
No. Get her, Shags.”
“You get her,” Shagwell said. “Did you see what she did to Pyg?
She’s mad with moon blood.” The fool was behind her, Timeon in
front. No matter how she turned, one was at her back.
“Get her,” urged Timeon, “and you can fuck her corpse.”
“Oh, you do love me.” The morningstar was whirling. Choose one,
Brienne told herself. Choose one and kill him quickly. Then a stone
came out of nowhere, and hit Shagwell in the head. Brienne did not
hesitate. She ew at Timeon.
He was better than Pyg, but he had only a short throwing spear,
and she had a Valyrian steel blade. Oathkeeper was alive in her
hands. She had never been so quick. The blade became a grey blur.
He wounded her in the shoulder as she came at him, but she slashed
o his ear and half his cheek, hacked the head o his spear, and put
a foot of rippled steel into his belly through the links of the chain
mail byrnie he was wearing.
Timeon was still trying to ght as she pulled her blade from him,
its fullers running red with blood. He clawed at his belt and came
up with a dagger, so Brienne cut his hand o . That one was for
Jaime. “Mother have mercy,” the Dornishman gasped, the blood
bubbling from his mouth and spurting from his wrist. “Finish it.
Send me back to Dorne, you bloody bitch.”
She did.
Shagwell was on his knees when she turned, looking dazed as he
fumbled for the morningstar. As he staggered to his feet, another
stone slammed him in the ear. Podrick had climbed the fallen wall

and was standing amongst the ivy glowering, a fresh rock in his
hand. “I told you I could ght!” he shouted down.
Shagwell tried to crawl away. “I yield,” the fool cried, “I yield.
You mustn’t hurt sweet Shagwell, I’m too droll to die.”
“You are no better than the rest of them. You have robbed and
raped and murdered.”
“Oh, I have, I have, I shan’t deny it … but I’m amusing, with all
my japes and capers. I make men laugh.”
“And women weep.”
“Is that my fault? Women have no sense of humor.”
Brienne lowered Oathkeeper. “Dig a grave. There, beneath the
weirwood.” She pointed with her blade.
“I have no spade.”
“You have two hands.” One more than you left Jaime.
“Why bother? Leave them for the crows.”
“Timeon and Pyg can feed the crows. Nimble Dick will have a
grave. He was a Crabb. This is his place.”
The ground was soft from rain, but even so it took the fool the
rest of the day to dig down deep enough. Night was falling by the
time he was done, and his hands were bloody and blistered. Brienne
sheathed Oathkeeper, gathered up Dick Crabb, and carried him to
the hole. His face was hard to look on. “I’m sorry that I never
trusted you. I don’t know how to do that anymore.”
As she knelt to lay the body down, she thought, The fool will make
his try now, whilst my back is turned.
She heard his ragged breathing half a heartbeat before Podrick
cried out his warning. Shagwell had a jagged chunk of rock clutched
in one hand. Brienne had her dagger up her sleeve.
A dagger will beat a rock almost every time.
She knocked aside his arm and punched the steel into his bowels.
“Laugh,” she snarled at him. He moaned instead. “Laugh,” she
repeated, grabbing his throat with one hand and stabbing at his
belly with the other. “Laugh!” She kept saying it, over and over,
until her hand was red up to the wrist and the stink of the fool’s
dying was like to choke her. But Shagwell never laughed. The sobs

that Brienne heard were all her own. When she realized that, she
threw down her knife and shuddered.
Podrick helped her lower Nimble Dick into his hole. By the time
they were done the moon was rising. Brienne rubbed the dirt from
her hands and tossed two dragons down into the grave.
“Why did you do that, my lady? Ser?” asked Pod.
“It was the reward I promised him for nding me the fool.”
Laughter sounded from behind them. She ripped Oathkeeper from
her sheath and whirled, expecting more Bloody Mummers … but it
was only Hyle Hunt atop the crumbling wall, his legs crossed. “If
there are brothels down in hell, the wretch will thank you,” the
knight called down. “Elsewise, that’s a waste of good gold.”
“I keep my promises. What are you doing here?”
“Lord Randyll bid me follow you. If by some freak’s chance you
stumbled onto Sansa Stark, he told me to bring her back to
Maidenpool. Have no fear, I was commanded not to harm you.”
Brienne snorted. “As if you could.”
“What will you do now, my lady?”
“Cover him.”
“About the girl, I meant. The Lady Sansa.”
Brienne thought a moment. “She was making for Riverrun, if
Timeon told it true. Somewhere along the way she was taken by the
Hound. If I nd him …”
“… he’ll kill you.”
“Or I’ll kill him,” she said stubbornly. “Will you help me cover up
poor Crabb, ser?”
“No true knight could refuse such beauty.” Ser Hyle climbed
down from the wall. Together, they shoved the dirt on top of
Nimble Dick as the moon rose higher in the sky, and down below
the ground the heads of forgotten kings whispered secrets.

THE QUEENMAKER

Beneath the burning sun of Dorne, wealth was measured as much in
water as in gold, so every well was zealously guarded. The well at
Shandystone had gone dry a hundred years before, however, and its
guardians had departed for some wetter place, abandoning their
modest holdfast with its uted columns and triple arches. Afterward
the sands had crept back in to reclaim their own.
Arianne Martell arrived with Drey and Sylva just as the sun was
going down, with the west a tapestry of gold and purple and the
clouds all glowing crimson. The ruins seemed aglow as well; the
fallen columns glimmered pinkly, red shadows crept across the
cracked stone oors, and the sands themselves turned from gold to
orange to purple as the light faded. Garin had arrived a few hours
earlier, and the knight called Darkstar the day before.
“It is lovely here,” Drey observed as he was helping Garin water
the horses. They had carried their own water with them. The sand
steeds of Dorne were swift and tireless, and would keep going for
long leagues after other horses had given out, but even such as they
could not run dry. “How did you know of this place?”
“My uncle brought me here, with Tyene and Sarella.” The
memory made Arianne smile. “He caught some vipers and showed
Tyene the safest way to milk them for their venom. Sarella turned
over rocks, brushed sand o the mosaics, and wanted to know

everything there was to know about the people who had lived
here.”
“And what did you do, princess?” asked Spotted Sylva.
I sat beside the well and pretended that some robber knight had
brought me here to have his way with me, she thought, a tall hard man
with black eyes and a widow’s peak. The memory made her uneasy. “I
dreamed,” she said, “and when the sun went down I sat cross-legged
at my uncle’s feet and begged him for a story.”
“Prince Oberyn was full of stories.” Garin had been with them as
well that day; he was Arianne’s milk brother, and they had been
inseparable since before they learned to walk. “He told about Prince
Garin, I remember, the one that I was named for.”
“Garin the Great,” o ered Drey, “the wonder of the Rhoyne.”
“That’s the one. He made Valyria tremble.”
“They trembled,” said Ser Gerold, “then they killed him. If I led a
quarter of a million men to death, would they call me Gerold the
Great?” He snorted. “I shall remain Darkstar, I think. At least it is
mine own.” He unsheathed his longsword, sat upon the lip of the
dry well, and began to hone the blade with an oilstone.
Arianne watched him warily. He is highborn enough to make a
worthy consort, she thought. Father would question my good sense, but
our children would be as beautiful as dragonlords. If there was a
handsomer man in Dorne, she did not know him. Ser Gerold Dayne
had an aquiline nose, high cheekbones, a strong jaw. He kept his
face clean-shaven, but his thick hair fell to his collar like a silver
glacier, divided by a streak of midnight black. He has a cruel mouth,
though, and a crueler tongue. His eyes seemed black as he sat
outlined against the dying sun, sharpening his steel, but she had
looked at them from a closer vantage and she knew that they were
purple. Dark purple. Dark and angry.
He must have felt her gaze upon him, for he looked up from his
sword, met her eyes, and smiled. Arianne felt heat rushing to her
face. I should never have brought him. If he gives me such a look when
Arys is here, we will have blood on the sand. Whose, she could not say.
By tradition the Kingsguard were the nest knights in all the Seven
Kingdoms … but Darkstar was Darkstar.

The Dornish nights grow cold out upon the sands. Garin gathered
wood for them, bleached white branches from trees that had
withered up and died a hundred years ago. Drey built a re,
whistling as he struck sparks o his int.
Once the kindling caught, they sat around the ames and passed a
skin of summerwine from hand to hand … all but Darkstar, who
preferred to drink unsweetened lemonwater. Garin was in a lively
mood and entertained them with the latest tales from the Planky
Town at the mouth of the Greenblood, where the orphans of the
river came to trade with the carracks, cogs, and galleys from across
the narrow sea. If the sailors could be believed, the east was
seething with wonders and terrors: a slave revolt in Astapor,
dragons in Qarth, grey plague in Yi Ti. A new corsair king had risen
in the Basilisk Isles and raided Tall Trees Town, and in Qohor
followers of the red priests had rioted and tried to burn down the
Black Goat. “And the Golden Company broke its contract with Myr,
just as the Myrmen were about to go to war with Lys.”
“The Lyseni bought them o ,” suggested Sylva.
“Clever Lyseni,” Drey said. “Clever, craven Lyseni.”
Arianne knew better. If Quentyn has the Golden Company behind
him … “Beneath the gold the bitter steel,” was their cry. You will
need bitter steel and more, brother, if you think to set me aside. Arianne
was loved in Dorne, Quentyn little known. No company of
sellswords could change that.
Ser Gerold rose. “I believe I’ll have a piss.”
“Watch where you set your feet,” Drey cautioned. “It has been a
while since Prince Oberyn milked the local vipers.”
“I was weaned on venom, Dalt. Any viper takes a bite of me will
rue it.” Ser Gerold vanished through a broken arch.
When he was gone, the others exchanged glances. “Forgive me,
princess,” said Garin softly, “but I do not like that man.”
“A pity,” Drey said. “I believe he’s half in love with you.”
“We need him,” Arianne reminded them. “It may be that we will
need his sword, and we will surely need his castle.”
“High Hermitage is not the only castle in Dorne,” Spotted Sylva
pointed out, “and you have other knights who love you well. Drey

is a knight.”
“I am,” he a rmed. “I have a wonderful horse and a very ne
sword, and my valor is second to … well, several, actually.”
“More like several hundred, ser,” said Garin.
Arianne left them to their banter. Drey and Spotted Sylva were
her dearest friends, aside from her cousin Tyene, and Garin had
been teasing her since both of them were drinking from his
mother’s teats, but just now she was in no mood for japery. The sun
was gone, and the sky was full of stars. So many. She leaned her
back against a uted pillar and wondered if her brother was looking
at the same stars tonight, wherever he might be. Do you see the
white one, Quentyn? That is Nymeria’s star, burning bright, and that
milky band behind her, those are ten thousand ships. She burned as
bright as any man, and so shall I. You will not rob me of my birthright!
Quentyn had been very young when he was sent to Yronwood;
too young, according to their mother. Norvoshi did not foster out
their children, and Lady Mellario had never forgiven Prince Doran
for taking her son away from her. “I like it no more than you do,”
Arianne had overheard her father say, “but there is a blood debt,
and Quentyn is the only coin Lord Ormond will accept.”
“Coin?” her mother had screamed. “He is your son. What sort of
father uses his own esh and blood to pay his debts?”
“The princely sort,” Doran Martell had answered.
Prince Doran was still pretending that her brother was with Lord
Yronwood, but Garin’s mother had seen him at the Planky Town,
posing as a merchant. One of his companions had a lazy eye, the
same as Cletus Yronwood, Lord Anders’s randy son. A maester
traveled with them too, a maester skilled in tongues. My brother is
not as clever as he thinks. A clever man would have left from Oldtown,
even if it meant a longer voyage. In Oldtown he might have gone
unrecognized. Arianne had friends amongst the orphans of the
Planky Town, and some had grown curious as to why a prince and a
lord’s son might be traveling under false names and seeking passage
across the narrow sea. One of them had crept through a window of
a night, tickled the lock on Quentyn’s little strongbox, and found
the scrolls within.

Arianne would have given much and more to know that this
secret trip across the narrow sea was Quentyn’s own doing, and his
alone … but parchments he had carried had been sealed with the
sun and spear of Dorne. Garin’s cousin had not dared break the seal
to read them, but …
“Princess.” Ser Gerold Dayne stood behind her, half in starlight
and half in shadow.
“How was your piss?” Arianne inquired archly.
“The sands were duly grateful.” Dayne put a foot upon the head
of a statue that might have been the Maiden till the sands had
scoured her face away. “It occurred to me as I was pissing that this
plan of yours may not yield you what you want.”
“And what is it I want, ser?”
“The Sand Snakes freed. Vengeance for Oberyn and Elia. Do I
know the song? You want a little taste of lion blood.”
That, and my birthright. I want Sunspear, and my father’s seat. I want
Dorne. “I want justice.”
“Call it what you will. Crowning the Lannister girl is a hollow
gesture. She will never sit the Iron Throne. Nor will you get the war
you want. The lion is not so easily provoked.”
“The lion’s dead. Who knows which cub the lioness prefers?”
“The one in her own den.” Ser Gerold drew his sword. It
glimmered in the starlight, sharp as lies. “This is how you start a
war. Not with a crown of gold, but with a blade of steel.”
I am no murderer of children. “Put that away. Myrcella is under my
protection. And Ser Arys will permit no harm to come to his
precious princess, you know that.”
“No, my lady. What I know is that Daynes have been killing
Oakhearts for several thousand years.”
His arrogance took her breath away. “It seems to me that
Oakhearts have been killing Daynes for just as long.”
“We all have our family traditions.” Darkstar sheathed his sword.
“The moon is rising, and I see your paragon approaching.”
His eyes were sharp. The horseman on the tall grey palfrey did
indeed prove to be Ser Arys, white cloak uttering bravely as he

spurred across the sand. Princess Myrcella rode pillion behind him,
swaddled in a cowled robe that hid her golden curls.
As Ser Arys helped her from the saddle, Drey went to one knee
before her. “Your Grace.”
“My lady liege.” Spotted Sylva knelt beside him.
“My queen, I am your man.” Garin dropped to both knees.
Confused, Myrcella clutched Arys Oakheart by the arm. “Why do
they call me Grace?” she asked in a plaintive voice. “Ser Arys, what
is this place, and who are they?”
Has he told her nought? Arianne moved forward in a swirl of silk,
smiling to put the child at ease. “They are my true and loyal friends,
Your Grace … and would be your friends as well.”
“Princess Arianne?” The girl threw her arms around her. “Why do
they call me queen? Did something bad happen to Tommen?”
“He fell in with evil men, Your Grace,” Arianne said, “and I fear
they have conspired with him to steal your throne.”
“My throne? You mean, the Iron Throne?” The girl was more
confused than ever. “He never stole that, Tommen is …”
“… younger than you, surely?”
“I am older by a year.”
“That means the Iron Throne by rights is yours,” Arianne said.
“Your brother is only a little boy, you must not blame him. He has
bad counselors … but you have friends. May I have the honor of
presenting them?” She took the child by the hand. “Your Grace, I
give you Ser Andrey Dalt, the heir to Lemonwood.”
“My friends call me Drey,” he said, “and I should be greatly
honored if Your Grace would do the same.”
Though Drey had an open face and an easy smile, Myrcella
regarded him warily. “Until I know you I must call you ser.”
“Whatever name Your Grace prefers, I am her man.”
Sylva cleared her throat, till Arianne said, “Might I present Lady
Sylva Santagar, my queen? My dearest Spotted Sylva.”
“Why do they call you that?” Myrcella asked.
“For my freckles, Your Grace,” Sylva answered, “though they all
pretend it is because I am the heir to Spottswood.”

Garin was next, a loose-limbed, swarthy, long-nosed fellow with a
jade stud in one ear. “Here is gay Garin of the orphans, who makes
me laugh,” said Arianne. “His mother was my wet nurse.”
“I am sorry she is dead,” Myrcella said.
“She’s not, sweet queen.” Garin ashed the golden tooth Arianne
had bought him to replace the one she’d broken. “I’m of the orphans
of the Greenblood, is what my lady means.”
Myrcella would have time enough to learn the history of the
orphans on her voyage up the river. Arianne led her queen-to-be to
the nal member of her little band. “Last, but rst in valor, I give
you Ser Gerold Dayne, a knight of Starfall.”
Ser Gerold went to one knee. The moonlight shone in his dark
eyes as he studied the child coolly.
“There was an Arthur Dayne,” Myrcella said. “He was a knight of
the Kingsguard in the days of Mad King Aerys.”
“He was the Sword of the Morning. He is dead.”
“Are you the Sword of the Morning now?”
“No. Men call me Darkstar, and I am of the night.”
Arianne drew the child away. “You must be hungry. We have
dates and cheese and olives, and lemonsweet to drink. You ought
not eat or drink too much, though. After a little rest, we must ride.
Out here on the sands it is always best to travel by night, before the
sun ascends the sky. It is kinder to the horses.”
“And the riders,” Spotted Sylva said. “Come, Your Grace, warm
yourself. I should be honored if you’d let me serve you.”
As she led the princess to the re, Arianne found Ser Gerold
behind her. “My House goes back ten thousand years, unto the
dawn of days,” he complained. “Why is it that my cousin is the only
Dayne that anyone remembers?”
“He was a great knight,” Ser Arys Oakheart put in.
“He had a great sword,” Darkstar said.
“And a great heart.” Ser Arys took Arianne by the arm. “Princess,
I beg a moment’s word.”
“Come.” She led Ser Arys deeper into the ruins. Beneath his cloak,
the knight wore a cloth-of-gold doublet embroidered with the three
green oak leaves of his House. On his head was a light steel helm

topped by a jagged spike, wound about with a yellow scarf in the
Dornish fashion. He might have passed for any knight, but for the
cloak. Of shimmering white silk it was, pale as moonlight and airy
as a breeze. A Kingsguard cloak beyond all doubt, the gallant fool.
“How much does the child know?”
“Little enough. Before we left King’s Landing, her uncle reminded
her that I was her protector and that any commands that I might
give her were meant to keep her safe. She has heard them in the
streets as well, shouting out for vengeance. She knew this was no
game. The girl is brave, and wise beyond her years. She did all I
asked of her, and never asked a question.” The knight took her arm,
glanced about, lowered his voice. “There are other tidings you
should hear. Tywin Lannister is dead.”
That was a shock. “Dead?”
“Murdered by the Imp. The queen has assumed the regency.”
“Has she?” A woman on the Iron Throne? Arianne thought about
that for a moment and decided it was all to the good. If the lords of
the Seven Kingdoms grew accustomed to Queen Cersei’s rule, it
would be that much easier for them to bend their knees to Queen
Myrcella. And Lord Tywin had been a dangerous foe; without him,
Dorne’s enemies would be much weaker. Lannisters are killing
Lannisters, how sweet. “What became of the dwarf?”
“He’s ed,” Ser Arys said. “Cersei is o ering a lordship to
whosoever delivers her his head.” In a tiled inner courtyard halfburied by the drifting sands, he pushed her back against a column to
kiss her, and his hand went to her breast. He kissed her long and
hard and would have pushed her skirts up, but Arianne broke free of
him, laughing. “I see that queenmaking excites you, ser, but we
have no time for this. Later, I promise you.” She touched his cheek.
“Did you meet with any problems?”
“Only Trystane. He wanted to sit beside Myrcella’s bedside and
play cyvasse with her.”
“He had redspots when he was four, I told you. You can only get
it once. You should have put out that Myrcella was su ering from
greyscale, that would have kept him well away.”
“The boy perhaps, but not your father’s maester.”

“Caleotte,” she said. “Did he try to see her?”
“Not once I described the red spots on her face. He said that
nothing could be done until the disease had run its course, and gave
me a pot of salve to soothe her itching.”
No one under ten ever died of redspots, but it could be mortal in
adults, and Maester Caleotte had never su ered it as a child.
Arianne learned that when she su ered her own spots, at eight.
“Good,” she said. “And the handmaid? Is she convincing?”
“From a distance. The Imp picked her for this purpose, over many
girls of nobler birth. Myrcella helped her curl her hair, and painted
the dots on her face herself. They are distant kin. Lannisport teems
with Lannys, Lannetts, Lantells, and lesser Lannisters, and half of
them have that yellow hair. Dressed in Myrcella’s bedrobe with the
maester’s salve smeared across her face … she might even have
fooled me, in a dim light. It was a deal harder to nd a man to take
my place. Dake is closest to my height, but he’s too fat, so I put
Rolder in my armor and told him to keep his visor down. The man
is three inches shorter than I am, but perhaps no one will notice if
I’m not there to stand beside him. He’ll keep to Myrcella’s chambers
in any case.”
“All we need is a few days. By that time the princess will be
beyond my father’s reach.”
“Where?” He drew her close and nuzzled at her neck. “It’s time
you told me the rest of the plan, don’t you think?”
She laughed, pushing him away. “No, it’s time we rode.”
The moon had crowned the Moonmaid as they set out from the
dust-dry ruins of Shandystone, striking south and west. Arianne and
Ser Arys took the lead, with Myrcella on a frisky mare between
them. Garin followed close behind with Spotted Sylva, whilst her
two Dornish knights took the rear. We are seven, Arianne realized as
they rode. She had not thought of that before, but it seemed a good
omen for their cause. Seven riders on their way to glory. One day the
singers will make all of us immortal. Drey had wanted a larger party,
but that might have attracted unwelcome attention, and every
additional man doubled the risk of betrayal. That much my father
taught me, at the least. Even when he was younger and stronger,

Doran Martell had been a cautious man much given to silences and
secrets. It is time he put his burdens down, but I will su er no slights to
his honor or his person. She would return him to his Water Gardens,
to live out what years remained him surrounded by laughing
children and the smell of limes and oranges. Yes, and Quentyn can
keep him company. Once I crown Myrcella and free the Sand Snakes, all
Dorne will rally to my banners. The Yronwoods might declare for
Quentyn, but alone they were no threat. If they went over to
Tommen and the Lannisters, she would have Darkstar destroy them
root and branch.
“I am tired,” Myrcella complained, after several hours in the
saddle. “Is it much farther? Where are we going?”
“Princess Arianne is taking Your Grace to a place where you’ll be
safe,” Ser Arys assured her.
“It is a long journey,” Arianne said, “but it will go easier once we
reach the Greenblood. Some of Garin’s people will meet us there,
the orphans of the river. They live on boats, and pole them up and
down the Greenblood and its vassals, shing and picking fruit and
doing whatever work needs doing.”
“Aye,” Garin called out cheerfully, “and we sing and play and
dance on water, and know much and more of healing. My mother is
the best midwife in Westeros, and my father can cure warts.”
“How can you be orphans if you have mothers and fathers?” the
girl asked.
“They are the Rhoynar,” Arianne explained, “and their Mother
was the river Rhoyne.”
Myrcella did not understand. “I thought you were the Rhoynar.
You Dornishmen, I mean.”
“We are in part, Your Grace. Nymeria’s blood is in me, along with
that of Mors Martell, the Dornish lord she married. On the day they
wed, Nymeria red her ships, so her people would understand that
there could be no going back. Most were glad to see those ames,
for their voyagings had been long and terrible before they came to
Dorne, and many and more had been lost to storm, disease, and
slavery. There were a few who mourned, however. They did not
love this dry red land or its seven-faced god, so they clung to their

old ways, hammered boats together from the hulks of the burned
ships, and became the orphans of the Greenblood. The Mother in
their songs is not our Mother, but Mother Rhoyne, whose waters
nourished them from the dawn of days.”
“I’d heard the Rhoynar had some turtle god,” said Ser Arys.
“The Old Man of the River is a lesser god,” said Garin. “He was
born from Mother River too, and fought the Crab King to win
dominion over all who dwell beneath the owing waters.”
“Oh,” said Myrcella.
“I understand you’ve fought some mighty battles too, Your
Grace,” said Drey in his most cheerful voice. “It is said you show
our brave Prince Trystane no mercy at the cyvasse table.”
“He always sets his squares up the same way, with all the
mountains in the front and his elephants in the passes,” said
Myrcella. “So I send my dragon through to eat his elephants.”
“Does your handmaid play the game as well?” asked Drey.
“Rosamund?” asked Myrcella. “No. I tried to teach her, but she
said the rules were too hard.”
“She is a Lannister as well?” said Lady Sylva.
“A Lannister of Lannisport, not a Lannister of Casterly Rock. Her
hair is the same color as mine, but straight instead of curly.
Rosamund doesn’t truly favor me, but when she dresses up in my
clothes people who don’t know us think she’s me.”
“You have done this before, then?”
“Oh, yes. We traded places on the Seaswift, on the way to
Braavos. Septa Eglantine put brown dye in my hair. She said we
were doing it as a game, but it was meant to keep me safe in case
the ship was taken by my uncle Stannis.”
The girl was plainly growing tired, so Arianne called a halt. They
watered the horses once again, rested for a bit, and had some
cheese and fruit. Myrcella split an orange with Spotted Sylva, whilst
Garin ate olives and spit the stones at Drey.
Arianne had hoped to reach the river before the sun came up, but
they had started much later than she’d planned, so they were still in
the saddle when the eastern sky turned red. Darkstar cantered up
beside her. “Princess,” he said, “I’d set a faster pace, unless you

mean to kill the child after all. We have no tents, and by day the
sands are cruel.”
“I know the sands as well as you do, ser,” she told him. All the
same, she did as he suggested. It was hard on their mounts, but
better she should lose six horses than one princess.
Soon enough the wind came gusting from the west, hot and dry
and full of grit. Arianne drew her veil across her face. It was made
of shimmering silk, pale green above and yellow below, the colors
blending into one another. Small green pearls gave it weight, and
rattled softly against each other as she rode.
“I know why my princess wears a veil,” Ser Arys said as she was
fastening it to the temples of her copper helm. “Elsewise her beauty
would outshine the sun above.”
She had to laugh. “No, your princess wears a veil to keep the
glare out of her eyes and the sand out of her mouth. You should do
the same, ser.” She wondered how long her white knight had been
polishing his ponderous gallantry. Ser Arys was pleasant company
abed, but wit and he were strangers.
Her Dornishmen covered their faces as she did, and Spotted Sylva
helped veil the little princess from the sun, but Ser Arys stayed
stubborn. Before long the sweat was running down his face, and his
cheeks had taken on a rosy blush. Much longer and he will cook in
those heavy clothes, she re ected. He would not be the rst. In
centuries past, many a host had come down from the Prince’s Pass
with banners streaming, only to wither and broil on the hot red
Dornish sands. “The arms of House Martell display the sun and
spear, the Dornishman’s two favored weapons,” the Young Dragon
had once written in his boastful Conquest of Dorne, “but of the two,
the sun is the more deadly.”
Thankfully, they did not need to cross the deep sands but only a
sliver of the drylands. When Arianne spied a hawk wheeling high
above them against a cloudless sky, she knew the worst was behind
them. Soon they came upon a tree. It was a gnarled and twisted
thing with as many thorns as leaves, of the sort called sandbeggars,
but it meant that they were not far from water.

“We’re almost there, Your Grace,” Garin told Myrcella cheerfully
when they spied more sandbeggars up ahead, a thicket of them
growing all around the dry bed of a stream. The sun was beating
down like a ery hammer, but it did not matter with their journey
at its end. They stopped to water the horses again, drank deep from
their skins and wet their veils, then mounted for the last push.
Within half a league they were riding over devilgrass and past olive
groves. Beyond a line of stony hills the grass grew greener and
more lush, and there were lemon orchards watered by a spider’s
web of old canals. Garin was the rst to spy the river glimmering
green. He gave a shout and raced ahead.
Arianne Martell had crossed the Mander once, when she had gone
with three of the Sand Snakes to visit Tyene’s mother. Compared to
that mighty waterway, the Greenblood was scarce worthy of the
name of river, yet it remained the life of Dorne. It took its name
from the murky green of its sluggish waters; but as they
approached, the sunlight seemed to turn those waters gold. She had
seldom seen a sweeter sight. The next part should be slow and simple,
she thought, up the Greenblood and onto the Vaith, as far as a poleboat
can go. That would give her time enough to prepare Myrcella for all
that was to come. Beyond Vaith the deep sands waited. They would
need help from Sandstone and the Hellholt to make that crossing,
but she did not doubt that it would be forthcoming. The Red Viper
had been fostered at Sandstone, and Prince Oberyn’s paramour
Ellaria Sand was Lord Uller’s natural daughter; four of the Sand
Snakes were his granddaughters. I will crown Myrcella at the Hellholt
and raise my banners there.
They found the boat half a league downstream, hidden beneath
the drooping branches of a great green willow. Low of roof and
wide abeam, the poleboats had hardly any draft to speak of; the
Young Dragon had disparaged them as “hovels built on rafts,” but
that was hardly fair. All but the poorest orphan boats were
wonderfully carved and painted. This one was done in shades of
green, with a curved wooden tiller shaped like a mermaid, and sh
faces peering through her rails. Poles and ropes and jars of olive oil

cluttered her decks, and iron lanterns swung fore and aft. Arianne
saw no orphans. Where is her crew? she wondered.
Garin reined up beneath the willow. “Wake up, you sh-eyed
lagabeds,” he called as he leapt down from the saddle. “Your queen
is here, and wants her royal welcome. Come up, come out, we’ll
have some songs and sweetwine. My mouth is set for—”
The door on the poleboat slammed open. Out into the sunlight
stepped Areo Hotah, longaxe in hand.
Garin jerked to a halt. Arianne felt as though an axe had caught
her in the belly. It was not supposed to end this way. This was not
supposed to happen. When she heard Drey say, “There’s the last face
I’d hoped to see,” she knew she had to act. “Away!” she cried,
vaulting back into the saddle. “Arys, protect the princess—”
Hotah thumped the butt of his longaxe upon the deck. Behind the
ornate rails of the poleboat, a dozen guardsmen rose, armed with
throwing spears or crossbows. Still more appeared atop the cabin.
“Yield, my princess,” the captain called, “else we must slay all but
the child and yourself, by your father’s word.”
Princess Myrcella sat motionless upon her mount. Garin backed
slowly from the poleboat, his hands in the air. Drey unbuckled his
swordbelt. “Yielding seems the wisest course,” he called to Arianne,
as his sword thumped to the ground.
“No!” Ser Arys Oakheart put his horse between Arianne and the
crossbows, his blade shining silver in his hand. He had unslung his
shield and slipped his left arm through the straps. “You will not take
her whilst I still draw breath.”
You reckless fool, was all that Arianne had time to think, what do
you think you’re doing?
Darkstar’s laughter rang out. “Are you blind or stupid, Oakheart?
There are too many. Put up your sword.”
“Do as he says, Ser Arys,” Drey urged.
We are taken, ser, Arianne might have called out. Your death will
not free us. If you love your princess, yield. But when she tried to
speak, the words caught in her throat.
Ser Arys Oakheart gave her one last longing look, then put his
golden spurs into his horse and charged.

He rode headlong for the poleboat, his white cloak streaming
behind him. Arianne Martell had never seen anything half so
gallant, or half so stupid. “Noooo,” she shrieked, but she had found
her tongue too late. A crossbow thrummed, then another. Hotah
bellowed a command. At such close range, the white knight’s armor
had as well been made of parchment. The rst bolt punched right
through his heavy oaken shield, pinning it to his shoulder. The
second grazed his temple. A thrown spear took Ser Arys’s mount in
the ank, yet still the horse came on, staggering as he hit the
gangplank. “No,” some girl was shouting, some foolish little girl,
“no, please, this was not supposed to happen.” She could hear Myrcella
shrieking too, her voice shrill with fear.
Ser Arys’s longsword slashed right and left, and two spearmen
went down. His horse reared, and kicked a crossbowman in the face
as he was trying to reload, but the other crossbows were ring,
feathering the big courser with their quarrels. The bolts hit home so
hard they knocked the horse sideways. His legs went out from
under him and sent him crashing down the deck. Somehow Arys
Oakheart leapt free. He even managed to keep hold of his sword.
He struggled to his knees beside his dying horse …
… and found Areo Hotah standing over him.
The white knight raised his blade, too slowly. Hotah’s longaxe
took his right arm o at the shoulder, spun away spraying blood,
and came ashing back again in a terrible two-handed slash that
removed the head of Arys Oakheart and sent it spinning through the
air. It landed amongst the reeds, and the Greenblood swallowed the
red with a soft splash.
Arianne did not remember climbing from her horse. Perhaps she’d
fallen. She did not remember that either. Yet she found herself on
her hands and feet in the sand, shaking and sobbing and retching up
her supper. No, was all that she could think, no, no one was to be
hurt, it was all planned, I was so careful. She heard Areo Hotah roar,
“After him. He must not escape. After him!” Myrcella was on the
ground, wailing, shaking, her pale face in her hands, blood
streaming through her ngers. Arianne did not understand. Men
were scrambling onto horses whilst others swarmed over her and

her companions, but none of it made sense. She had fallen into a
dream, some terrible red nightmare. This cannot be real. I will wake
soon, and laugh at my night terrors.
When they sought to bind her hands behind her back, she did not
resist. One of the guardsmen jerked her to her feet. He wore her
father’s colors. Another bent and seized the throwing knife inside
her boot, a gift from her cousin Lady Nym.
Areo Hotah took it from the man and frowned at it. “The prince
said I must bring you back to Sunspear,” he announced. His cheeks
and brow were freckled with the blood of Arys Oakheart. “I am
sorry, little princess.”
Arianne raised a tear-streaked face. “How could he know?” she
asked the captain. “I was so careful. How could he know?”
“Someone told.” Hotah shrugged. “Someone always tells.”

ARYA

Each night before sleep, she murmured her prayer into her pillow.
“Ser Gregor,” it went. “Dunsen, Ra the Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser
Meryn, Queen Cersei.” She would have whispered the names of the
Freys of the Crossing too, if she had known them. One day I’ll know,
she told herself, and then I’ll kill them all.
No whisper was too faint to be heard in the House of Black and
White. “Child,” said the kindly man one day, “what are those names
you whisper of a night?”
“I don’t whisper any names,” she said.
“You lie,” he said. “All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell
many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so
often that they almost come to believe it … though some small part
of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show
upon their faces. Tell me of these names.”
She chewed her lip. “The names don’t matter.”
“They do,” the kindly man insisted. “Tell me, child.”
Tell me, or we will turn you out, she heard. “They’re people I hate.
I want them to die.”
“We hear many such prayers in this House.”
“I know,” said Arya. Jaqen H’ghar had granted three of her
prayers once. All I had to do was whisper …
“Is that why you have come to us?” the kindly man went on. “To
learn our arts, so you may kill these men you hate?”

Arya did not know how to answer that. “Maybe.”
“Then you have come to the wrong place. It is not for you to say
who shall live and who shall die. That gift belongs to Him of Many
Faces. We are but his servants, sworn to do his will.”
“Oh.” Arya glanced at the statues that stood along the walls,
candles glimmering round their feet. “Which god is he?”
“Why, all of them,” said the priest in black and white.
He never told her his name. Neither did the waif, the little girl
with the big eyes and hollow face who reminded her of another
little girl, named Weasel. Like Arya, the waif lived below the
temple, along with three acolytes, two serving men, and a cook
called Umma. Umma liked to talk as she worked, but Arya could not
understand a word she said. The others had no names, or did not
choose to share them. One serving man was very old, his back bent
like a bow. The second was red-faced, with hair growing from his
ears. She took them both for mutes until she heard them praying.
The acolytes were younger. The eldest was her father’s age; the
other two could not have been much older than Sansa, who had
been her sister. The acolytes wore black and white too, but their
robes had no cowls, and were black on the left side and white on
the right. With the kindly man and the waif, it was the opposite.
Arya was given servant’s garb: a tunic of undyed wool, baggy
breeches, linen smallclothes, cloth slippers for her feet.
Only the kindly man knew the Common Tongue. “Who are you?”
he would ask her every day.
“No one,” she would answer, she who had been Arya of House
Stark, Arya Underfoot, Arya Horseface. She had been Arry and
Weasel too, and Squab and Salty, Nan the cupbearer, a grey mouse,
a sheep, the ghost of Harrenhal … but not for true, not in her heart
of hearts. In there she was Arya of Winterfell, the daughter of Lord
Eddard Stark and Lady Catelyn, who had once had brothers named
Robb and Bran and Rickon, a sister named Sansa, a direwolf called
Nymeria, a half brother named Jon Snow. In there she was
someone … but that was not the answer that he wanted.
Without a common language, Arya had no way of talking to the
others. She listened to them, though, and repeated the words she

heard to herself as she went about her work. Though the youngest
acolyte was blind, he had charge of the candles. He would walk the
temple in soft slippers, surrounded by the murmurings of the old
women who came each day to pray. Even without eyes, he always
knew which candles had gone out. “He has the scent to guide him,”
the kindly man explained, “and the air is warmer where a candle
burns.” He told Arya to close her eyes and try it for herself.
They prayed at dawn before they broke their fast, kneeling
around the still, black pool. Some days the kindly man led the
prayer. Other days it was the waif. Arya only knew a few words of
Braavosi, the ones that were the same in High Valyrian. So she
prayed her own prayer to the Many-Faced God, the one that went,
“Ser Gregor, Dunsen, Ra the Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn,
Queen Cersei.” She prayed in silence. If the Many-Faced God was a
proper god, he would hear her.
Worshipers came to the House of Black and White every day.
Most came alone and sat alone; they lit candles at one altar or
another, prayed beside the pool, and sometimes wept. A few drank
from the black cup and went to sleep; more did not drink. There
were no services, no songs, no paeans of praise to please the god.
The temple was never full. From time to time, a worshiper would
ask to see a priest, and the kindly man or the waif would take him
down into the sanctum, but that did not happen often.
Thirty di erent gods stood along the walls, surrounded by their
little lights. The Weeping Woman was the favorite of old women,
Arya saw; rich men preferred the Lion of Night, poor men the
Hooded Wayfarer. Soldiers lit candles to Bakkalon, the Pale Child,
sailors to the Moon-Pale Maiden and the Merling King. The Stranger
had his shrine as well, though hardly anyone ever came to him.
Most of the time only a single candle stood ickering at his feet.
The kindly man said it did not matter. “He has many faces, and
many ears to hear.”
The knoll on which the temple stood was honeycombed with
passageways hewn from the rock. The priests and acolytes had their
sleeping cells on the rst level, Arya and the servants on the second.

The lowest level was forbidden to all save the priests. That was
where the holy sanctum lay.
When she was not working, Arya was free to wander as she
would amongst the vaults and storerooms, so long as she did not
leave the temple, nor descend to the third cellar. She found a room
full of weapons and armor: ornate helms and curious old
breastplates, longswords, daggers, and dirks, crossbows and tall
spears with leaf-shaped heads. Another vault was crammed with
clothing, thick furs and splendid silks in half a hundred colors, next
to piles of foul-smelling rags and threadbare roughspuns. There must
be treasure chambers too, Arya decided. She pictured stacks of golden
plates, bags of silver coins, sapphires blue as the sea, ropes of fat
green pearls.
One day the kindly man came on her unexpectedly and asked
what she was doing. She told him that she had gotten lost.
“You lie. Worse, you lie poorly. Who are you?”
“No one.”
“Another lie.” He sighed.
Weese would have beaten her bloody if he had caught her in a lie,
but it was di erent in the House of Black and White. When she was
helping in the kitchen, Umma would sometimes smack her with her
spoon if she got in the way, but no one else ever raised a hand to
her. They only raise their hands to kill, she thought.
She got along well enough with the cook. Umma would slap a
knife into her hand and point at an onion, and Arya would chop it.
Umma would shove her toward a mound of dough, and Arya would
knead it until the cook said stop (stop was the rst Braavosi word
she learned). Umma would hand her a sh, and Arya would bone it
and llet it and roll it in the nuts the cook was crushing. The
brackish waters that surrounded Braavos teemed with sh and
shell sh of every sort, the kindly man explained. A slow brown
river entered the lagoon from the south, wandering through a wide
expanse of reeds, tidal pools, and mud ats. Clams and cockles
abounded hereabouts; mussels and musk sh, frogs and turtles, mud
crabs and leopard crabs and climber crabs, red eels, black eels,
striped eels, lampreys, and oysters; all made frequent appearances

on the carved wooden table where the servants of the Many-Faced
God took their meals. Some nights Umma spiced the sh with sea
salt and cracked peppercorns, or cooked the eels with chopped
garlic. Once in a great while the cook would even use some sa ron.
Hot Pie would have liked it here, Arya thought.
Supper was her favorite time. It had been a long while since Arya
had gone to sleep every night with a full belly. Some nights the
kindly man would allow her to ask him questions. Once she asked
him why the people who came to the temple always seemed so
peaceful; back home, people were scared to die. She remembered
how that pimply squire had wept when she stabbed him in the
belly, and the way Ser Amory Lorch had begged when the Goat had
him thrown in the bear pit. She remembered the village by the
God’s Eye, and the way the villagers shrieked and screamed and
whimpered whenever the Tickler started asking after gold.
“Death is not the worst thing,” the kindly man replied. “It is His
gift to us, an end to want and pain. On the day that we are born the
Many-Faced God sends each of us a dark angel to walk through life
beside us. When our sins and our su erings grow too great to be
borne, the angel takes us by the hand to lead us to the nightlands,
where the stars burn ever bright. Those who come to drink from the
black cup are looking for their angels. If they are afraid, the candles
soothe them. When you smell our candles burning, what does it
make you think of, my child?”
Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine
needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb
battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I
smell the crypts where the stone kings sit, I smell hot bread baking, I
smell the godswood. I smell my wolf, I smell her fur, almost as if she
were still beside me. “I don’t smell anything,” she said, to see what he
would say.
“You lie,” he said, “but you may keep your secrets if you wish,
Arya of House Stark.” He only called her that when she displeased
him. “You know that you may leave this place. You are not one of
us, not yet. You may go home anytime you wish.”
“You told me that if I left, I couldn’t come back.”

“Just so.”
Those words made her sad. Syrio used to say that too, Arya
remembered. He said it all the time. Syrio Forel had taught her
needlework and died for her. “I don’t want to leave.”
“Then stay … but remember, the House of Black and White is not
a home for orphans. All men must serve beneath this roof. Valar
dohaeris is how we say it here. Remain if you will, but know that we
shall require your obedience. At all times and in all things. If you
cannot obey, you must depart.”
“I can obey.”
“We shall see.”
She had other tasks besides helping Umma. She swept the temple
oors; she served and poured at meals; she sorted piles of dead
men’s clothing, emptied their purses, and counted out stacks of
queer coins. Every morning she walked beside the kindly man as he
made his circuit of the temple to nd the dead. Silent as a shadow,
she would tell herself, remembering Syrio. She carried a lantern
with thick iron shutters. At each alcove, she would open the shutter
a crack, to look for corpses.
The dead were never hard to nd. They came to the House of
Black and White, prayed for an hour or a day or a year, drank sweet
dark water from the pool, and stretched out on a stone bed behind
one god or another. They closed their eyes, and slept, and never
woke. “The gift of the Many-Faced God takes myriad forms,” the
kindly man told her, “but here it is always gentle.” When they
found a body he would say a prayer and make certain life had ed,
and Arya would fetch the serving men, whose task it was to carry
the dead down to the vaults. There acolytes would strip and wash
the bodies. The dead men’s clothes and coins and valuables went
into a bin for sorting. Their cold esh would be taken to the lower
sanctum where only the priests could go; what happened in there
Arya was not allowed to know. Once, as she was eating her supper,
a terrible suspicion seized hold of her, and she put down her knife
and stared suspiciously at a slice of pale white meat. The kindly
man saw the horror on her face. “It is pork, child,” he told her,
“only pork.”

Her bed was stone, and reminded her of Harrenhal and the bed
she’d slept in when scrubbing steps for Weese. The mattress was
stu ed with rags instead of straw, which made it lumpier than the
one she’d had at Harrenhal, but less scratchy too. She was allowed
as many blankets as she wished; thick woolen blankets, red and
green and plaid. And her cell was hers alone. She kept her treasures
there: the silver fork and oppy hat and ngerless gloves given her
by the sailors on the Titan’s Daughter, her dagger, boots, and belt,
her small store of coins, the clothes she had been wearing …
And Needle.
Though her duties left her little time for needlework, she
practiced when she could, dueling with her shadow by the light of a
blue candle. One night the waif happened to be passing and saw
Arya at her swordplay. The girl did not say a word, but the next
day, the kindly man walked Arya back to her cell. “You need to rid
yourself of all this,” he said of her treasures.
Arya felt stricken. “They’re mine.”
“And who are you?”
“No one.”
He picked up her silver fork. “This belongs to Arya of House
Stark. All these things belong to her. There is no place for them
here. There is no place for her. Hers is too proud a name, and we
have no room for pride. We are servants here.”
“I serve,” she said, wounded. She liked the silver fork.
“You play at being a servant, but in your heart you are a lord’s
daughter. You have taken other names, but you wore them as
lightly as you might wear a gown. Under them was always Arya.”
“I don’t wear gowns. You can’t ght in a stupid gown.”
“Why would you wish to ght? Are you some bravo, strutting
through the alleys, spoiling for blood?” He sighed. “Before you
drink from the cold cup, you must o er up all you are to Him of
Many Faces. Your body. Your soul. Yourself. If you cannot bring
yourself to do that, you must leave this place.”
“The iron coin—”
“—has paid your passage here. From this point you must pay your
own way, and the cost is dear.”

“I don’t have any gold.”
“What we o er cannot be bought with gold. The cost is all of you.
Men take many paths through this vale of tears and pain. Ours is
the hardest. Few are made to walk it. It takes uncommon strength
of body and spirit, and a heart both hard and strong.”
I have a hole where my heart should be, she thought, and nowhere
else to go. “I’m strong. As strong as you. I’m hard.”
“You believe this is the only place for you.” It was as if he’d
heard her thoughts. “You are wrong in that. You would nd softer
service in the household of some merchant. Or would you sooner be
a courtesan, and have songs sung of your beauty? Speak the word,
and we will send you to the Black Pearl or the Daughter of the
Dusk. You will sleep on rose petals and wear silken skirts that rustle
when you walk, and great lords will beggar themselves for your
maiden’s blood. Or if it is marriage and children you desire, tell me,
and we shall nd a husband for you. Some honest apprentice boy, a
rich old man, a seafarer, whatever you desire.”
She wanted none of that. Wordless, she shook her head.
“Is it Westeros you dream of, child? Luco Prestayn’s Lady Bright
leaves upon the morrow, for Gulltown, Duskendale, King’s Landing,
and Tyrosh. Shall we nd you passage on her?”
“I only just came from Westeros.” Sometimes it seemed a
thousand years since she had ed King’s Landing, and sometimes it
seemed like only yesterday, but she knew she could not go back.
“I’ll go if you don’t want me, but I won’t go there.”
“My wants do not matter,” said the kindly man. “It may be that
the Many-Faced God has led you here to be His instrument, but
when I look at you I see a child … and worse, a girl child. Many
have served Him of Many Faces through the centuries, but only a
few of His servants have been women. Women bring life into the
world. We bring the gift of death. No one can do both.”
He is trying to scare me away, Arya thought, the way he did with the
worm. “I don’t care about that.”
“You should. Stay, and the Many-Faced God will take your ears,
your nose, your tongue. He will take your sad grey eyes that have
seen so much. He will take your hands, your feet, your arms and

legs, your private parts. He will take your hopes and dreams, your
loves and hates. Those who enter His service must give up all that
makes them who they are. Can you do that?” He cupped her chin
and gazed deep into her eyes, so deep it made her shiver. “No,” he
said, “I do not think you can.”
Arya knocked his hand away. “I could if I wanted to.”
“So says Arya of House Stark, eater of grave worms.”
“I can give up anything I want!”
He gestured at her treasures. “Then start with these.”
That night after supper, Arya went back to her cell and took o
her robe and whispered her names, but sleep refused to take her.
She tossed on her mattress stu ed with rags, gnawing on her lip.
She could feel the hole inside her where her heart had been.
In the black of night she rose again, donned the clothes she’d
worn from Westeros, and buckled on her swordbelt. Needle hung
from one hip, her dagger from the other. With her oppy hat on her
head, her ngerless gloves tucked into her belt, and her silver fork
in one hand, she went stealing up the steps. There is no place here for
Arya of House Stark, she was thinking. Arya’s place was Winterfell,
only Winterfell was gone. When the snows fall and the white winds
blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. She had no pack,
though. They had killed her pack, Ser Ilyn and Ser Meryn and the
queen, and when she tried to make a new one all of them ran o ,
Hot Pie and Gendry and Yoren and Lommy Greenhands, even
Harwin, who had been her father’s man. She shoved through the
doors, out into the night.
It was the rst time she had been outside since entering the
temple. The sky was overcast, and fog covered the ground like a
frayed grey blanket. O to her right she heard paddling from the
canal. Braavos, the Secret City, she thought. The name seemed very
apt. She crept down the steep steps to the covered dock, the mists
swirling round her feet. It was so foggy she could not see the water,
but she heard it lapping softly at stone pilings. In the distance, a
light glowed through the gloom: the night re at the temple of the
red priests, she thought.

At the water’s edge she stopped, the silver fork in hand. It was
real silver, solid through and through. It’s not my fork. It was Salty
that he gave it to. She tossed it underhand, heard the soft plop as it
sank below the water.
Her oppy hat went next, then the gloves. They were Salty’s too.
She emptied her pouch into her palm; ve silver stags, nine copper
stars, some pennies and halfpennies and groats. She scattered them
across the water. Next her boots. They made the loudest splashes.
Her dagger followed, the one she’d gotten o the archer who had
begged the Hound for mercy. Her swordbelt went into the canal.
Her cloak, tunic, breeches, smallclothes, all of it. All but Needle.
She stood on the end of the dock, pale and goose eshed and
shivering in the fog. In her hand, Needle seemed to whisper to her.
Stick them with the pointy end, it said, and, don’t tell Sansa! Mikken’s
mark was on the blade. It’s just a sword. If she needed a sword, there
were a hundred under the temple. Needle was too small to be a
proper sword, it was hardly more than a toy. She’d been a stupid
little girl when Jon had it made for her. “It’s just a sword,” she said,
aloud this time …
… but it wasn’t.
Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her
father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the
laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s
stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm
earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind
rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile. He
used to mess my hair and call me “little sister,” she remembered, and
suddenly there were tears in her eyes.
Polliver had stolen the sword from her when the Mountain’s men
took her captive, but when she and the Hound walked into the inn
at the crossroads, there it was. The gods wanted me to have it. Not
the Seven, nor Him of Many Faces, but her father’s gods, the old
gods of the north. The Many-Faced God can have the rest, she
thought, but he can’t have this.
She padded up the steps as naked as her name day, clutching
Needle. Halfway up, one of the stones rocked beneath her feet. Arya

knelt and dug around its edges with her ngers. It would not move
at rst, but she persisted, picking at the crumbling mortar with her
nails. Finally, the stone shifted. She grunted and got both hands in
and pulled. A crack opened before her.
“You’ll be safe here,” she told Needle. “No one will know where
you are but me.” She pushed the sword and sheath behind the step,
then shoved the stone back into place, so it looked like all the other
stones. As she climbed back to the temple, she counted steps, so she
would know where to nd the sword again. One day she might
have need of it. “One day,” she whispered to herself.
She never told the kindly man what she had done, yet he knew.
The next night he came to her cell after supper. “Child,” he said,
“come sit with me. I have a tale to tell you.”
“What kind of tale?” she asked, wary.
“The tale of our beginnings. If you would be one of us, you had
best know who we are and how we came to be. Men may whisper
of the Faceless Men of Braavos, but we are older than the Secret
City. Before the Titan rose, before the Unmasking of Uthero, before
the Founding, we were. We have owered in Braavos amongst these
northern fogs, but we rst took root in Valyria, amongst the
wretched slaves who toiled in the deep mines beneath the Fourteen
Flames that lit the Freehold’s nights of old. Most mines are dank
and chilly places, cut from cold dead stone, but the Fourteen Flames
were living mountains with veins of molten rock and hearts of re.
So the mines of old Valyria were always hot, and they grew hotter
as the shafts were driven deeper, ever deeper. The slaves toiled in
an oven. The rocks around them were too hot to touch. The air
stank of brimstone and would sear their lungs as they breathed it.
The soles of their feet would burn and blister, even through the
thickest sandals. Sometimes, when they broke through a wall in
search of gold, they would nd steam instead, or boiling water, or
molten rock. Certain shafts were cut so low that the slaves could
not stand upright, but had to crawl or bend. And there were wyrms
in that red darkness too.”
“Earthworms?” she asked, frowning.

“Firewyrms. Some say they are akin to dragons, for wyrms
breathe re too. Instead of soaring through the sky, they bore
through stone and soil. If the old tales can be believed, there were
wyrms amongst the Fourteen Flames even before the dragons came.
The young ones are no larger than that skinny arm of yours, but
they can grow to monstrous size and have no love for men.”
“Did they kill the slaves?”
“Burnt and blackened corpses were oft found in shafts where the
rocks were cracked or full of holes. Yet still the mines drove deeper.
Slaves perished by the score, but their masters did not care. Red
gold and yellow gold and silver were reckoned to be more precious
than the lives of slaves, for slaves were cheap in the old Freehold.
During war, the Valyrians took them by the thousands. In times of
peace they bred them, though only the worst were sent down to die
in the red darkness.”
“Didn’t the slaves rise up and ght?”
“Some did,” he said. “Revolts were common in the mines, but few
accomplished much. The dragonlords of the old Freehold were
strong in sorcery, and lesser men de ed them at their peril. The
rst Faceless Man was one who did.”
“Who was he?” Arya blurted, before she stopped to think.
“No one,” he answered. “Some say he was a slave himself. Others
insist he was a freeholder’s son, born of noble stock. Some will even
tell you he was an overseer who took pity on his charges. The truth
is, no one knows. Whoever he was, he moved amongst the slaves
and would hear them at their prayers. Men of a hundred di erent
nations labored in the mines, and each prayed to his own god in his
own tongue, yet all were praying for the same thing. It was release
they asked for, an end to pain. A small thing, and simple. Yet their
gods made no answer, and their su ering went on. Are their gods all
deaf? he wondered … until a realization came upon him, one night
in the red darkness.
“All gods have their instruments, men and women who serve
them and help to work their will on earth. The slaves were not
crying out to a hundred di erent gods, as it seemed, but to one god
with a hundred di erent faces … and he was that god’s instrument.

That very night he chose the most wretched of the slaves, the one
who had prayed most earnestly for release, and freed him from his
bondage. The rst gift had been given.”
Arya drew back from him. “He killed the slave?” That did not
sound right. “He should have killed the masters!”
“He would bring the gift to them as well … but that is a tale for
another day, one best shared with no one.” He cocked his head.
“And who are you, child?”
“No one.”
“A lie.”
“How do you know? Is it magic?”
“A man does not need to be a wizard to know truth from
falsehood, not if he has eyes. You need only learn to read a face.
Look at the eyes. The mouth. The muscles here, at the corners of
the jaw, and here, where the neck joins the shoulders.” He touched
her lightly with two ngers. “Some liars blink. Some stare. Some
look away. Some lick their lips. Many cover their mouths just
before they tell a lie, as if to hide their deceit. Other signs may be
more subtle, but they are always there. A false smile and a true one
may look alike, but they are as di erent as dusk from dawn. Can
you tell dusk from dawn?”
Arya nodded, though she was not certain that she could.
“Then you can learn to see a lie … and once you do, no secret
will be safe from you.”
“Teach me.” She would be no one if that was what it took. No one
had no holes inside her.
“She will teach you,” said the kindly man as the waif appeared
outside her door. “Starting with the tongue of Braavos. What use
are you if you cannot speak or understand? And you shall teach her
your own tongue. The two of you shall learn together, each from
the other. Will you do this?”
“Yes,” she said, and from that moment she was a novice in the
House of Black and White. Her servant’s garb was taken away, and
she was given a robe to wear, a robe of black and white as buttery
soft as the old red blanket she’d once had at Winterfell. Beneath it

she wore smallclothes of ne white linen, and a black undertunic
that hung down past her knees.
Thereafter she and the waif spent their time together touching
things and pointing, as each tried to teach the other a few words of
her own tongue. Simple words at rst, cup and candle and shoe;
then harder words; then sentences. Once Syrio Forel used to make
Arya stand on one leg until she was trembling. Later he sent her
chasing after cats. She had danced the water dance on the limbs of
trees, a stick sword in her hand. Those things had all been hard, but
this was harder.
Even sewing was more fun than tongues, she told herself, after a
night when she had forgotten half the words she thought she knew,
and pronounced the other half so badly that the waif had laughed at
her. My sentences are as crooked as my stitches used to be. If the girl
had not been so small and starved, Arya would have smashed her
stupid face. Instead she gnawed her lip. Too stupid to learn and too
stupid to give up.
The Common Tongue came to the waif more quickly. One day at
supper she turned to Arya, and asked, “Who are you?”
“No one,” Arya answered, in Braavosi.
“You lie,” said the waif. “You must lie gooder.”
Arya laughed. “Gooder? You mean better, stupid.”
“Better stupid. I will show you.”
The next day they began the lying game, asking questions of one
another, taking turns. Sometimes they would answer truly,
sometimes they would lie. The questioner had to try and tell what
was true and what was false. The waif always seemed to know.
Arya had to guess. Most of the time she guessed wrong.
“How many years have you?” the waif asked her once, in the
Common Tongue. “Ten,” said Arya, and raised ten ngers. She
thought she was still ten, though it was hard to know for certain.
The Braavosi counted days di erently than they did in Westeros.
For all she knew her name day had come and gone.
The waif nodded. Arya nodded back, and in her best Braavosi
said, “How many years have you?”

The waif showed ten ngers. Then ten again, and yet again. Then
six. Her face remained as smooth as still water. She can’t be six-andthirty, Arya thought. She’s a little girl. “You’re lying,” she said. The
waif shook her head and showed her once again: ten and ten and
ten and six. She said the words for six-and-thirty, and made Arya
say them too.
The next day she told the kindly man what the waif had claimed.
“She did not lie,” the priest said, chuckling. “The one you call waif is
a woman grown who has spent her life serving Him of Many Faces.
She gave Him all she was, all she ever might have been, all the lives
that were within her.”
Arya bit her lip. “Will I be like her?”
“No,” he said, “not unless you wish it. It is the poisons that have
made her as you see her.”
Poisons. She understood then. Every evening after prayer the waif
emptied a stone agon into the waters of the black pool.
The waif and kindly man were not the only servants of the ManyFaced God. From time to time others would visit the House of Black
and White. The fat fellow had erce black eyes, a hook nose, and a
wide mouth full of yellow teeth. The stern face never smiled; his
eyes were pale, his lips full and dark. The handsome man had a
beard of a di erent color every time she saw him, and a di erent
nose, but he was never less than comely. Those three came most
often, but there were others: the squinter, the lordling, the starved
man. One time the fat fellow and the squinter came together.
Umma sent Arya to pour for them. “When you are not pouring, you
must stand as still as if you had been carved of stone,” the kindly
man told her. “Can you do that?”
“Yes.” Before you can learn to move you must learn to be still, Syrio
Forel had taught her long ago at King’s Landing, and she had. She
had served as Roose Bolton’s cupbearer at Harrenhal, and he would
ay you if you spilled his wine.
“Good,” the kindly man said. “It would be best if you were blind
and deaf as well. You may hear things, but you must let them pass
in one ear and out the other. Do not listen.”

Arya heard much and more that night, but almost all of it was in
the tongue of Braavos, and she hardly understood one word in ten.
Still as stone, she told herself. The hardest part was struggling not to
yawn. Before the night was done, her wits were wandering.
Standing there with the agon in her hands, she dreamed she was a
wolf, running free through a moonlit forest with a great pack
howling at her heels.
“Are the other men all priests?” she asked the kindly man the
next morning. “Were those their real faces?”
“What do you think, child?”
She thought no. “Is Jaqen H’ghar a priest too? Do you know if
Jaqen will be coming back to Braavos?”
“Who?” he said, all innocence.
“Jaqen H’ghar. He gave me the iron coin.”
“I know no one by this name, child.”
“I asked him how he changed his face, and he said it was no
harder than taking a new name, if you knew the way.”
“Did he?”
“Will you show me how to change my face?”
“If you wish.” He cupped her chin in his hand and turned her
head. “Pu up your cheeks and stick out your tongue.”
Arya pu ed up her cheeks and stuck out her tongue.
“There. Your face is changed.”
“That’s not how I meant. Jaqen used magic.”
“All sorcery comes at a cost, child. Years of prayer and sacri ce
and study are required to work a proper glamor.”
“Years?” she said, dismayed.
“If it were easy all men would do it. You must walk before you
run. Why use a spell, where mummer’s tricks will serve?”
“I don’t know any mummer’s tricks either.”
“Then practice making faces. Beneath your skin are muscles.
Learn to use them. It is your face. Your cheeks, your lips, your ears.
Smiles and scowls should not come upon you like sudden squalls. A
smile should be a servant, and come only when you call it. Learn to
rule your face.”
“Show me how.”

“Pu up your cheeks.” She did. “Lift your eyebrows. No, higher.”
She did that too. “Good. See how long you can hold that. It will not
be long. Try it again on the morrow. You will nd a Myrish mirror
in the vaults. Train before it for an hour every day. Eyes, nostrils,
cheeks, ears, lips, learn to rule them all.” He cupped her chin. “Who
are you?”
“No one.”
“A lie. A sad little lie, child.”
She found the Myrish mirror the next day, and every morn and
every night she sat before it with a candle on each side of her,
making faces. Rule your face, she told herself, and you can lie.
Soon thereafter the kindly man commanded her to help the other
acolytes prepare the corpses. The work was not near as hard as
scrubbing steps for Weese. Sometimes if the corpse was big or fat
she would struggle with the weight, but most of the dead were old
dry bones in wrinkled skins. Arya would look at them as she washed
them, wondering what brought them to the black pool. She
remembered a tale she had heard from Old Nan, about how
sometimes during a long winter men who’d lived beyond their years
would announce that they were going hunting. And their daughters
would weep and their sons would turn their faces to the re, she could
hear Old Nan saying, but no one would stop them, or ask what game
they meant to hunt, with the snows so deep and the cold wind howling.
She wondered what the old Braavosi told their sons and daughters,
before they set o for the House of Black and White.
The moon turned and turned again, though Arya never saw it. She
served, washed the dead, made faces at the mirrors, learned the
Braavosi tongue, and tried to remember that she was no one.
One day the kindly man sent for her. “Your accent is a horror,” he
said, “but you have enough words to make your wants understood
after a fashion. It is time that you left us for a while. The only way
you will ever truly master our tongue is if you speak it every day
from dawn to dusk. You must go.”
“When?” she asked him. “Where?”
“Now,” he answered. “Beyond these walls you will nd the
hundred isles of Braavos in the sea. You have been taught the words

for mussels, cockles, and clams, have you not?”
“Yes.” She repeated them, in her best Braavosi.
Her best Braavosi made him smile. “It will serve. Along the
wharves below the Drowned Town you will nd a shmonger
named Brusco, a good man with a bad back. He has need of a girl to
push his barrow and sell his cockles, clams, and mussels to the
sailors o the ships. You shall be that girl. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And when Brusco asks, who are you?”
“No one.”
“No. That will not serve, outside this House.”
She hesitated. “I could be Salty, from Saltpans.”
“Salty is known to Ternesio Terys and the men of the Titan’s
Daughter. You are marked by the way you speak, so you must be
some girl of Westeros … but a di erent girl, I think.”
She bit her lip. “Could I be Cat?”
“Cat.” He considered. “Yes. Braavos is full of cats. One more will
not be noticed. You are Cat, an orphan of …”
“King’s Landing.” She had visited White Harbor with her father
twice, but she knew King’s Landing better.
“Just so. Your father was oarmaster on a galley. When your
mother died, he took you o to sea with him. Then he died as well,
and his captain had no use for you, so he put you o the ship in
Braavos. And what was the name of the ship?”
“Nymeria,” she said at once.
That night she left the House of Black and White. A long iron
knife rode on her right hip, hidden by her cloak, a patched and
faded thing of the sort an orphan might wear. Her shoes pinched
her toes and her tunic was so threadbare that the wind cut right
through it. But Braavos lay before her. The night air smelled of
smoke and salt and sh. The canals were crooked, the alleys
crookeder. Men gave her curious looks as she went past, and beggar
children called out words she could not understand. Before long she
was completely lost.
“Ser Gregor,” she chanted, as she crossed a stone bridge
supported by four arches. From the center of its span she could see

the masts of ships in the Ragman’s Harbor. “Dunsen, Ra the
Sweetling, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei.” Rain began to fall.
Arya turned her face up to let the raindrops wash her cheeks, so
happy she could dance. “Valar morghulis,” she said, “valar morghulis,
valar morghulis.”

ALAYNE

As the rising sun came streaming through the windows, Alayne sat
up in bed and stretched. Gretchel heard her stir and rose at once to
fetch her bedrobe. The rooms had grown chilly during the night. It
will be worse when winter has us in its grip, she thought. Winter will
make this place as cold as any tomb. Alayne slipped into the robe and
belted it about her waist. “The re’s almost out,” she observed. “Put
another log on, if you would.”
“As my lady wishes,” the old woman said.
Alayne’s apartments in the Maiden’s Tower were larger and more
lavish than the little bedchamber where she’d been kept when Lady
Lysa was alive. She had a dressing room and a privy of her own
now, and a balcony of carved white stone that looked o across the
Vale. While Gretchel was tending to the re, Alayne padded
barefoot across the room and slipped outside. The stone was cold
beneath her feet, and the wind was blowing ercely, as it always
did up here, but the view made her forget all that for half a
heartbeat. Maiden’s was the easternmost of the Eyrie’s seven
slender towers, so she had the Vale before her, its forests and rivers
and elds all hazy in the morning light. The way the sun was hitting
the mountains made them look like solid gold.
So lovely. The snow-clad summit of the Giant’s Lance loomed
above her, an immensity of stone and ice that dwarfed the castle
perched upon its shoulder. Icicles twenty feet long draped the lip of

the precipice where Alyssa’s Tears fell in summer. A falcon soared
above the frozen waterfall, blue wings spread wide against the
morning sky. Would that I had wings as well.
She rested her hands on the carved stone balustrade and made
herself peer over the edge. She could see Sky six hundred feet
below, and the stone steps carved into the mountain, the winding
way that led past Snow and Stone all the way down to the valley
oor. She could see the towers and keeps of the Gates of the Moon,
as small as a child’s toys. Around the walls the hosts of Lords
Declarant were stirring, emerging from their tents like ants from an
anthill. If only they were truly ants, she thought, we could step on them
and crush them.
Young Lord Hunter and his levies had joined the others two days
past. Nestor Royce had closed the Gates against them, but he had
fewer than three hundred men in his garrison. Each of the Lords
Declarant had brought a thousand, and there were six of them.
Alayne knew their names as well as her own. Benedar Belmore,
Lord of Strongsong. Symond Templeton, the Knight of Ninestars.
Horton Redfort, Lord of Redfort. Anya Waynwood, Lady of
Ironoaks. Gilwood Hunter, called Young Lord Hunter by all and
sundry, Lord of Longbow Hall. And Yohn Royce, mightiest of them
all, the redoubtable Bronze Yohn, Lord of Runestone, Nestor’s
cousin and the chief of the senior branch of House Royce. The six
had gathered at Runestone after Lysa Arryn’s fall, and there made a
pact together, vowing to defend Lord Robert, the Vale, and one
another. Their declaration made no mention of the Lord Protector,
but spoke of “misrule” that must be ended, and of “false friends and
evil counselors” as well.
A cold gust of wind blew up her legs. She went inside to choose a
gown to break her fast in. Petyr had given her his late wife’s
wardrobe, a wealth of silks, satins, velvets, and furs far beyond
anything she had ever dreamed, though the great bulk of it was far
too large for her; Lady Lysa had grown very stout during her long
succession of pregnancies, stillbirths, and miscarriages. A few of the
oldest gowns had been made for young Lysa Tully of Riverrun,
however, and others Gretchel had been able to alter to t Alayne,

who was almost as long of leg at three-and-ten as her aunt had been
at twenty.
This morning her eye was caught by a parti-colored gown of Tully
red and blue, lined with vair. Gretchel helped her slide her arms
into the belled sleeves and laced her back, then brushed and pinned
her hair. Alayne had darkened it again last night before she went to
bed. The wash her aunt had given her changed her own rich auburn
into Alayne’s burnt brown, but it was seldom long before the red
began creeping back at the roots. And what must I do when the dye
runs out? The wash had come from Tyrosh, across the narrow sea.
As she went down to break her fast, Alayne was struck again by
the stillness of the Eyrie. There was no quieter castle in all the
Seven Kingdoms. The servants here were few and old and kept their
voices down so as not to excite the young lord. There were no
horses on the mountain, no hounds to bark and growl, no knights
training in the yard. Even the footsteps of the guards seemed
strangely mu ed as they walked the pale stone halls. She could
hear the wind moaning and sighing round the towers, but that was
all. When she had rst come to Eyrie, there had been the murmur of
Alyssa’s Tears as well, but the waterfall was frozen now. Gretchel
said it would stay silent till the spring.
She found Lord Robert alone in the Morning Hall above the
kitchens, pushing a wooden spoon listlessly through a big bowl of
porridge and honey. “I wanted eggs,” he complained when he saw
her. “I wanted three eggs boiled soft, and some back bacon.”
They had no eggs, no more than they had bacon. The Eyrie’s
granaries held su cient oats and corn and barley to feed them for a
year, but they depended on a bastard girl named Mya Stone to bring
fresh foodstu s up from the valley oor. With the Lords Declarant
encamped at the foot of the mountain there was no way for Mya to
get through. Lord Belmore, rst of the six to reach the Gates, had
sent a raven to tell Little nger that no more food would go up to
the Eyrie until he sent Lord Robert down. It was not quite a siege,
not as yet, but it was the next best thing.
“You can have eggs when Mya comes, as many as you like,”
Alayne promised the little lordling. “She’ll bring eggs and butter

and melons, all sorts of tasty things.”
The boy was unappeased. “I wanted eggs today.”
“Sweetrobin, there are no eggs, you know that. Please, eat your
porridge, it’s very nice.” She ate a spoonful of her own.
Robert pushed his spoon across the bowl and back, but never
brought it to his lips. “I am not hungry,” he decided. “I want to go
back to bed. I never slept last night. I heard singing. Maester
Colemon gave me dreamwine but I could still hear it.”
Alayne put down her spoon. “If there had been singing, I should
have heard it too. You had a bad dream, that’s all.”
“No, it wasn’t a dream.” Tears lled his eyes. “Marillion was
singing again. Your father says he’s dead, but he isn’t.”
“He is.” It frightened her to hear him talk like this. Bad enough
that he is small and sickly, what if he is mad as well? “Sweetrobin, he
is. Marillion loved your lady mother too much and could not live
with what he’d done to her, so he walked into the sky.” Alayne had
not seen the body, no more than Robert had, but she did not doubt
the fact of the singer’s death. “He’s gone, truly.”
“But I hear him every night. Even when I close the shutters and
put a pillow on my head. Your father should have cut his tongue out.
I told him to, but he wouldn’t.”
He needed a tongue to confess. “Be a good boy and eat your
porridge,” Alayne pleaded. “Please? For me?”
“I don’t want porridge.” Robert ung his spoon across the hall. It
bounced o a hanging tapestry, and left a smear of porridge upon a
white silk moon. “The lord wants eggs!”
“The lord shall eat porridge and be thankful for it,” said Petyr’s
voice, behind them.
Alayne turned, and saw him in the doorway arch with Maester
Colemon at his side. “You should heed the Lord Protector, my lord,”
the maester said. “Your lord’s bannermen are coming up the
mountain to pay you homage, so you will need all your strength.”
Robert rubbed at his left eye with a knuckle. “Send them away. I
don’t want them. If they come, I’ll make them y.”
“You tempt me sorely, my lord, but I fear I promised them safe
conduct,” said Petyr. “In any case, it is too late to turn them back.

By now they may have climbed as far as Stone.”
“Why won’t they leave us be?” wailed Alayne. “We never did
them any harm. What do they want of us?”
“Just Lord Robert. Him, and the Vale.” Petyr smiled. “There will
be eight of them. Lord Nestor is showing them up, and they have
Lyn Corbray with them. Ser Lyn is not the sort of man to stay away
when blood is in the o ng.”
His words did little to soothe her fears. Lyn Corbray had slain
almost as many men in duels as he had in battle. He had won his
spurs during Robert’s Rebellion, she knew, ghting rst against
Lord Jon Arryn at the gates of Gulltown, and later beneath his
banners on the Trident, where he had cut down Prince Lewyn of
Dorne, a white knight of the Kingsguard. Petyr said that Prince
Lewyn had been sorely wounded by the time the tide of battle
swept him to his nal dance with Lady Forlorn, but added, “That’s
not a point you’ll want to raise with Corbray, though. Those who do
are soon given the chance to ask Martell himself the truth of it,
down in the halls of hell.” If even half of what she had heard from
Lord Robert’s guards was true, Lyn Corbray was more dangerous
than all six of the Lords Declarant put together. “Why is he
coming?” she asked. “I thought the Corbrays were for you.”
“Lord Lyonel Corbray is well disposed toward my rule,” said
Petyr, “but his brother goes his own way. On the Trident, when
their father fell wounded, it was Lyn who snatched up Lady Forlorn
and slew the man who’d cut him down. Whilst Lyonel was carrying
the old man back to the maesters in the rear, Lyn led his charge
against the Dornishmen threatening Robert’s left, broke their lines
to pieces, and slew Lewyn Martell. So when old Lord Corbray died,
he bestowed the Lady upon his younger son. Lyonel got his lands,
his title, his castle, and all his coin, yet still feels he was cheated of
his birthright, whilst Ser Lyn … well, he loves Lyonel as much as he
loves me. He wanted Lysa’s hand for himself.”
“I don’t like Ser Lyn,” Robert insisted. “I won’t have him here.
You send him back down. I never said that he could come. Not here.
The Eyrie is impregnable, Mother said.”

“Your mother is dead, my lord. Until your sixteenth name day, I
rule the Eyrie.” Petyr turned to the stoop-backed serving woman
hovering near the kitchen steps. “Mela, fetch his lordship a new
spoon. He wants to eat his porridge.”
“I do not! Let my porridge y!” This time Robert ung the bowl,
porridge and honey and all. Petyr Baelish ducked aside nimbly, but
Maester Colemon was not so quick. The wooden bowl caught him
square in the chest, and its contents exploded upward over his face
and shoulders. He yelped in a most unmaesterlike fashion, while
Alayne turned to soothe the little lordling, but too late. The t was
on him. A pitcher of milk went ying as his hand caught it, ailing.
When he tried to rise he knocked his chair backwards and fell on
top of it. One foot caught Alayne in the belly, so hard it knocked
the wind from her. “Oh, gods be good,” she heard Petyr say,
disgusted.
Globs of porridge dotted Maester Colemon’s face and hair as he
knelt over his charge, murmuring soothing words. One gobbet crept
slowly down his right cheek, like a lumpy grey-brown tear. It is not
so bad a spell as the last one, Alayne thought, trying to be hopeful. By
the time the shaking stopped, two guards in sky-blue cloaks and
silvery mail shirts had come at Petyr’s summons. “Take him back to
bed and leech him,” the Lord Protector said, and the taller
guardsman scooped the boy up in his arms. I could carry him myself,
Alayne thought. He is no heavier than a doll.
Colemon lingered a moment before following. “My lord, this
parley might best be left for another day. His lordship’s spells have
grown worse since Lady Lysa’s death. More frequent and more
violent. I bleed the child as often as I dare, and mix him dreamwine
and milk of the poppy to help him sleep, but …”
“He sleeps twelve hours a day,” Petyr said. “I require him awake
from time to time.”
The maester combed his ngers through his hair, dribbling globs
of porridge on the oor. “Lady Lysa would give his lordship her
breast whenever he grew overwrought. Archmaester Ebrose claims
that mother’s milk has many heathful properties.”

“Is that your counsel, maester? That we nd a wet nurse for the
Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale? When shall we wean
him, on his wedding day? That way he can move directly from his
nurse’s nipples to his wife’s.” Lord Petyr’s laugh made it plain what
he thought of that. “No, I think not. I suggest you nd another way.
The boy is fond of sweets, is he not?”
“Sweets?” said Colemon.
“Sweets. Cakes and pies, jams and jellies, honey on the comb.
Perhaps a pinch of sweetsleep in his milk, have you tried that? Just
a pinch, to calm him and stop his wretched shaking.”
“A pinch?” The apple in the maester’s throat moved up and down
as he swallowed. “One small pinch … perhaps, perhaps. Not too
much, and not too often, yes, I might try …”
“A pinch,” Lord Petyr said, “before you bring him forth to meet
the lords.”
“As you command, my lord.” The maester hurried out, his chain
clinking softly with every step.
“Father,” Alayne asked when he was gone, “will you have a bowl
of porridge to break your fast?”
“I despise porridge.” He looked at her with Little nger’s eyes.
“I’d sooner break my fast with a kiss.”
A true daughter would not refuse her sire a kiss, so Alayne went
to him and kissed him, a quick dry peck upon the cheek, and just as
quickly stepped away.
“How … dutiful.” Little nger smiled with his mouth, but not his
eyes. “Well, I have other duties for you, as it happens. Tell the cook
to mull some red wine with honey and raisins. Our guests will be
cold and thirsty after their long climb. You are to meet them when
they arrive, and o er them refreshment. Wine, bread, and cheese.
What sort of cheese is left to us?”
“The sharp white and the stinky blue.”
“The white. And you’d best change as well.”
Alayne looked down at her dress, the deep blue and rich dark red
of Riverrun. “Is it too—”
“It is too Tully. The Lords Declarant will not be pleased by the
sight of my bastard daughter prancing about in my dead wife’s

clothes. Choose something else. Need I remind you to avoid sky
blue and cream?”
“No.” Sky blue and cream were the colors of House Arryn. “Eight,
you said … Bronze Yohn is one of them?”
“The only one who matters.”
“Bronze Yohn knows me,” she reminded him. “He was a guest at
Winterfell when his son rode north to take the black.” She had
fallen wildly in love with Ser Waymar, she remembered dimly, but
that was a lifetime ago, when she was a stupid little girl. “And that
was not the only time. Lord Royce saw … he saw Sansa Stark again
at King’s Landing, during the Hand’s tourney.”
Petyr put a nger under her chin. “That Royce glimpsed this
pretty face I do not doubt, but it was one face in a thousand. A man
ghting in a tourney has more to concern him than some child in
the crowd. And at Winterfell, Sansa was a little girl with auburn
hair. My daughter is a maiden tall and fair, and her hair is chestnut.
Men see what they expect to see, Alayne.” He kissed her nose.
“Have Maddy lay a re in the solar. I shall receive our Lords
Declarant there.”
“Not the High Hall?”
“No. Gods forbid they glimpse me near the high seat of the
Arryns, they might think that I mean to sit in it. Cheeks born so low
as mine must never aspire to such lofty cushions.”
“The solar.” She should have stopped with that, but the words
came tumbling out of her. “If you gave them Robert …”
“… and the Vale?”
“They have the Vale.”
“Oh, much of it, that’s true. Not all, however. I am well loved in
Gulltown, and have some lordly friends of mine own as well.
Grafton, Lynderly, Lyonel Corbray … though I’ll grant you, they are
no match for the Lords Declarant. Still, where would you have us
go, Alayne? Back to my mighty stronghold on the Fingers?”
She had thought about that. “Jo rey gave you Harrenhal. You are
lord in your own right there.”
“By title. I needed a great seat to marry Lysa, and the Lannisters
were not about to grant me Casterly Rock.”

“Yes, but the castle is yours.”
“Ah, and what a castle it is. Cavernous halls and ruined towers,
ghosts and draughts, ruinous to heat, impossible to garrison … and
there’s that small matter of a curse.”
“Curses are only in songs and stories.”
That seemed to amuse him. “Has someone made a song about
Gregor Clegane dying of a poisoned spear thrust? Or about the
sellsword before him, whose limbs Ser Gregor removed a joint at a
time? That one took the castle from Ser Amory Lorch, who received
it from Lord Tywin. A bear killed one, your dwarf the other. Lady
Whent’s died as well, I hear. Lothstons, Strongs, Harroways,
Strongs … Harrenhal has withered every hand to touch it.”
“Then give it to Lord Frey.”
Petyr laughed. “Perhaps I shall. Or better still, to our sweet
Cersei. Though I should not speak harshly of her, she is sending me
some splendid tapestries. Isn’t that kind of her?”
The mention of the queen’s name made her sti en. “She’s not
kind. She scares me. If she should learn where I am—”
“—I might have to remove her from the game sooner than I’d
planned. Provided she does not remove herself rst.” Petyr teased
her with a little smile. “In the game of thrones, even the humblest
pieces can have wills of their own. Sometimes they refuse to make
the moves you’ve planned for them. Mark that well, Alayne. It’s a
lesson that Cersei Lannister still has yet to learn. Now, don’t you
have some duties to perform?”
She did indeed. She saw to the mulling of the wine rst, found a
suitable wheel of sharp white cheese, and commanded the cook to
bake bread enough for twenty, in case the Lords Declarant brought
more men than expected. Once they eat our bread and salt they are
our guests and cannot harm us. The Freys had broken all the laws of
hospitality when they’d murdered her lady mother and her brother
at the Twins, but she could not believe that a lord as noble as Yohn
Royce would ever stoop to do the same.
The solar next. Its oor was covered by a Myrish carpet, so there
was no need to lay down rushes. Alayne asked two serving men to
erect the trestle table and bring up eight of the heavy oak-and-

leather chairs. For a feast she would have placed one at the head of
the table, one at the foot, and three along each side, but this was no
feast. She had the men arrange six chairs on one side of the table,
two on the other. By now the Lords Declarant might have climbed
as far as Snow. It took most of a day to make the climb, even on
muleback. Afoot, most men took several days.
It might be that the lords would talk late into the night. They
would need fresh candles. After Maddy laid the re, she sent her
down to nd the scented beeswax candles Lord Waxley had given
Lady Lysa when he sought to win her hand. Then she visited the
kitchens once again, to make certain of the wine and bread. All
seemed well in hand, and there was still time enough for her to
bathe and wash her hair and change.
There was a gown of purple silk that gave her pause, and another
of dark blue velvet slashed with silver that would have woken all
the color in her eyes, but in the end she remembered that Alayne
was after all a bastard, and must not presume to dress above her
station. The dress she picked was lambswool, dark brown and
simply cut, with leaves and vines embroidered around the bodice,
sleeves, and hem in golden thread. It was modest and becoming,
though scarce richer than something a serving girl might wear.
Petyr had given her all of Lady Lysa’s jewels as well, and she tried
on several necklaces, but they all seemed ostentatious. In the end
she chose a simple velvet ribbon in autumn gold. When Gretchel
fetched her Lysa’s silvered looking glass, the color seemed just
perfect with Alayne’s mass of dark brown hair. Lord Royce will never
know me, she thought. Why, I hardly know myself.
Feeling near as bold as Petyr Baelish, Alayne Stone donned her
smile and went down to meet their guests.
The Eyrie was the only castle in the Seven Kingdoms where the
main entrance was underneath the dungeons. Steep stone steps crept
up the mountainside past the waycastles Stone and Snow, but they
came to an end at Sky. The nal six hundred feet of the ascent were
vertical, forcing would-be visitors to dismount their mules and
make a choice. They could ride the swaying wooden basket that was

used to lift supplies, or clamber up a rocky chimney using
handholds carved into the rock.
Lord Redfort and Lady Waynwood, the most elderly of the Lords
Declarant, chose to be drawn up by the winch, after which the
basket was lowered once more for fat Lord Belmore. The other
lords made the climb. Alayne met them in the Crescent Chamber
beside a warming re, where she welcomed them in Lord Robert’s
name and served them bread and cheese and cups of hot mulled
wine in silver cups.
Petyr had given her a roll of arms to study, so she knew their
heraldry if not their faces. The red castle was Redfort, plainly; a
short man with a neat grey beard and mild eyes. Lady Anya was the
only woman amongst the Lords Declarant, and wore a deep green
mantle with the broken wheel of Waynwood picked out in beads of
jet. Six silver bells on purple, that was Belmore, pear-bellied and
round of shoulder. His beard was a ginger-grey horror sprouting
from a multiplicity of chins. Symond Templeton’s, by contrast, was
black and sharply pointed. A beak of a nose and icy blue eyes made
the Knight of Ninestars look like some elegant bird of prey. His
doublet displayed nine black stars within a golden saltire. Young
Lord Hunter’s ermine cloak confused her till she spied the brooch
that pinned it, ve silver arrows fanned. Alayne would have put his
age closer to fty than to forty. His father had ruled at Longbow
Hall for nigh on sixty years, only to die so abruptly that some
whispered the new lord had hastened his inheritance. Hunter’s
cheeks and nose were red as apples, which bespoke a certain
fondness for the grape. She made certain to ll his cup as often as
he emptied it.
The youngest man in the party had three ravens on his chest, each
clutching a blood-red heart in its talons. His brown hair was
shoulder length; one stray lock curled down across his forehead. Ser
Lyn Corbray, Alayne thought, with a wary glance at his hard mouth
and restless eyes.
Last of all came the Royces, Lord Nestor and Bronze Yohn. The
Lord of Runestone stood as tall as the Hound. Though his hair was
grey and his face lined, Lord Yohn still looked as though he could

break most younger men like twigs in those huge gnarled hands.
His seamed and solemn face brought back all of Sansa’s memories of
his time at Winterfell. She remembered him at table, speaking
quietly with her mother. She heard his voice booming o the walls
when he rode back from a hunt with a buck behind his saddle. She
could see him in the yard, a practice sword in hand, hammering her
father to the ground and turning to defeat Ser Rodrik as well. He
will know me. How could he not? She considered throwing herself at
his feet to beg for his protection. He never fought for Robb, why
should he ght for me? The war is nished and Winterfell is fallen.
“Lord Royce,” she asked timidly, “will you have a cup of wine, to
take the chill o ?”
Bronze Yohn had slate-grey eyes, half-hidden beneath the bushiest
eyebrows she had ever seen. They crinkled when he looked down at
her. “Do I know you, girl?”
Alayne felt as though she had swallowed her tongue, but Lord
Nestor rescued her. “Alayne is the Lord Protector’s natural
daughter,” he told his cousin gru y.
“Little nger’s little nger has been busy,” said Lyn Corbray, with
a wicked smile. Belmore laughed, and Alayne could feel the color
rising in her cheeks.
“How old are you, child?” asked Lady Waynwood.
“Four-fourteen, my lady.” For a moment she forgot how old
Alayne should be. “And I am no child, but a maiden owered.”
“But not de owered, one can hope.” Young Lord Hunter’s bushy
mustache hid his mouth entirely.
“Yet,” said Lyn Corbray, as if she were not there. “But ripe for
plucking soon, I’d say.”
“Is that what passes for courtesy at Heart’s Home?” Anya
Waynwood’s hair was greying and she had crow’s-feet around her
eyes and loose skin beneath her chin, but there was no mistaking
the air of nobility about her. “The girl is young and gently bred, and
has su ered enough horrors. Mind your tongue, ser.”
“My tongue is my concern,” Corbray replied. “Your ladyship
should take care to mind her own. I have never taken kindly to
chastisement, as any number of dead men could tell you.”

Lady Waynwood turned away from him. “Best take us to your
father, Alayne. The sooner we are done with this, the better.”
“The Lord Protector awaits you in the solar. If my lords would
follow me.” From the Crescent Chamber they climbed a steep ight
of marble steps that bypassed both undercrofts and dungeons and
passed beneath three murder holes, which the Lords Declarant
pretended not to notice. Belmore was soon pu ng like a bellows,
and Redfort’s face turned as grey as his hair. The guards atop the
stairs raised the portcullis at their coming. “This way, if it please
my lords.” Alayne led them down the arcade past a dozen splendid
tapestries. Ser Lothor Brune stood outside the solar. He opened the
door for them and followed them inside.
Petyr was seated at the trestle table with a cup of wine to hand,
looking over a crisp white parchment. He glanced up as the Lords
Declarant led in. “My lords, be welcome. And you as well, my
lady. The ascent is wearisome, I know. Please be seated. Alayne, my
sweet, more wine for our noble guests.”
“As you say, Father.” The candles had been lighted, she was
pleased to see; the solar smelled of nutmeg and other costly spices.
She went to fetch the agon whilst the visitors arranged themselves
side by side … all save Nestor Royce, who hesitated before walking
around the table to take the empty chair beside Lord Petyr, and Lyn
Corbray, who went to stand beside the hearth instead. The heartshaped ruby in the pommel of his sword shone redly as he warmed
his hands. Alayne saw him smile at Ser Lothor Brune. Ser Lyn is very
handsome, for an older man, she thought, but I do not like the way he
smiles.
“I have been reading this remarkable declaration of yours,” Petyr
began. “Splendid. Whatever maester wrote this has a gift for words.
I only wish you had invited me to sign as well.”
That took them unawares. “You?” said Belmore. “Sign?”
“I wield a quill as well as any man, and no one loves Lord Robert
more than I do. As for these false friends and evil counselors, by all
means let us root them out. My lords, I am with you, heart and
hand. Show me where to sign, I beg you.”

Alayne, pouring, heard Lyn Corbray chuckle. The others seemed
at a loss till Bronze Yohn Royce cracked his knuckles, and said, “We
did not come for your signature. Nor do we mean to bandy words
with you, Little nger.”
“What a pity. I do so love a nicely bandied word.” Petyr set the
parchment to one side. “As you wish. Let us be blunt. What would
you have of me, my lords and lady?”
“We will have naught of you.” Symond Templeton xed the Lord
Protector with his cold blue stare. “We will have you gone.”
“Gone?” Petyr feigned surprise. “Where would I go?”
“The crown has made you Lord of Harrenhal,” Young Lord Hunter
pointed out. “That should be enough for any man.”
“The riverlands have need of a lord,” old Horton Redfort said.
“Riverrun stands besieged, Bracken and Blackwood are at open war,
and outlaws roam freely on both sides of the Trident, stealing and
killing as they will. Unburied corpses litter the landscape
everywhere you go.”
“You make it sound so wonderfully attractive, Lord Redfort,”
Petyr answered, “but as it happens I have pressing duties here. And
there is Lord Robert to consider. Would you have me drag a sickly
child into the midst of such carnage?”
“His lordship will remain in the Vale,” declared Yohn Royce.
“I mean to take the boy with me to Runestone, and raise him up
to be a knight that Jon Arryn would be proud of.”
“Why Runestone?” Petyr mused. “Why not Ironoaks or the
Redfort? Why not Longbow Hall?”
“Any of these would serve as well,” declared Lord Belmore, “and
his lordship will visit each in turn, in due time.”
“Will he?” Petyr’s tone seemed to hint at doubts.
Lady Waynwood sighed. “Lord Petyr, if you think to set us one
against the other, you may spare yourself the e ort. We speak with
one voice here. Runestone suits us all. Lord Yohn raised three ne
sons of his own, there is no man more t to foster his young
lordship. Maester Helliweg is a good deal older and more
experienced than your own Maester Colemon, and better suited to
treat Lord Robert’s frailties. In Runestone the boy will learn the arts

of war from Strong Sam Stone. No man could hope for a ner
master-at-arms. Septon Lucos will instruct him in matters of the
spirit. At Runestone he will also nd other boys his own age, more
suitable companions than the old women and sellswords that
presently surround him.”
Petyr Baelish ngered his beard. “His lordship needs companions,
I do not disagree. Alayne is hardly an old woman, though. Lord
Robert loves my daughter dearly, he will be glad to tell you so
himself. And as it happens, I have asked Lord Grafton and Lord
Lynderly to send me each a son to ward. Each of them has a boy of
an age with Robert.”
Lyn Corbray laughed. “Two pups from a pair of lapdogs.”
“Robert should have an older boy about him too. A promising
young squire, say. Someone he could admire and try to emulate.”
Petyr turned to Lady Waynwood. “You have such a boy at Ironoaks,
my lady. Perhaps you might agree to send me Harrold Hardyng.”
Anya Waynwood seemed amused. “Lord Petyr, you are as bold a
thief as I’d ever care to meet.”
“I do not wish to steal the boy,” said Petyr, “but he and Lord
Robert should be friends.”
Bronze Yohn Royce leaned forward. “It is meet and proper that
Lord Robert should befriend young Harry, and he shall … at
Runestone, under my care, as my ward and squire.”
“Give us the boy,” said Lord Belmore, “and you may depart the
Vale unmolested for your proper seat at Harrenhal.”
Petyr gave him a look of mild reproach. “Are you suggesting that
elsewise I might come to harm, my lord? I cannot think why. My
late wife seemed to think this was my proper seat.”
“Lord Baelish,” Lady Waynwood said, “Lysa Tully was Jon
Arryn’s widow and the mother of his child, and ruled here as his
regent. You … let us be frank, you are no Arryn, and Lord Robert is
no blood of yours. By what right do you presume to rule us?”
“Lysa named me Lord Protector, I do seem to recall.”
Young Lord Hunter said, “Lysa Tully was never truly of the Vale,
nor had she the right to dispose of us.”

“And Lord Robert?” Petyr asked. “Will your lordship also claim
that Lady Lysa had no right to dispose of her own son?”
Nestor Royce had been silent all this while, but now he spoke up
loudly. “I once hoped to wed Lady Lysa myself. As did Lord
Hunter’s father and Lady Anya’s son. Corbray scarce left her side for
half a year. Had she chosen any one of us, no man here would
dispute his right to be the Lord Protector. It happens that she chose
Lord Little nger, and entrusted her son to his care.”
“He was Jon Arryn’s son as well, cousin,” Bronze Yohn said,
frowning at the Keeper. “He belongs to the Vale.”
Petyr feigned puzzlement. “The Eyrie is as much a part of the
Vale as Runestone. Unless someone has moved it?”
“Jape all you like, Little nger,” Lord Belmore blustered. “The
boy shall come with us.”
“I am loath to disappoint you, Lord Belmore, but my stepson will
be remaining here with me. He is not a robust child, as all of you
know well. The journey would tax him sorely. As his stepfather and
Lord Protector, I cannot permit it.”
Symond Templeton cleared his throat, and said, “Each of us has a
thousand men at the foot of this mountain, Little nger.”
“What a splendid place for them.”
“If need be, we can summon many more.”
“Are you threatening me with war, ser?” Petyr did not sound the
least afraid.
Bronze Yohn said, “We shall have Lord Robert.”
For a moment it seemed as though they had come to an impasse,
until Lyn Corbray turned from the re. “All this talk makes me ill.
Little nger will talk you out of your smallclothes if you listen long
enough. The only way to settle his sort is with steel.” He drew his
longsword.
Petyr spread his hands. “I wear no sword, ser.”
“Easily remedied.” Candlelight rippled along the smoke-grey steel
of Corbray’s blade, so dark that it put Sansa in mind of Ice, her
father’s greatsword. “Your apple-eater holds a blade. Tell him to
give it to you, or draw that dagger.”

She saw Lothor Brune reach for his own sword, but before the
blades could meet Bronze Yohn rose in wrath. “Put up your steel, ser!
Are you a Corbray or a Frey? We are guests here.”
Lady Waynwood pursed her lips, and said, “This is unseemly.”
“Sheathe your sword, Corbray,” Young Lord Hunter echoed. “You
shame us all with this.”
“Come, Lyn,” chided Redfort in a softer tone. “This will serve for
nought. Put Lady Forlorn to bed.”
“My lady has a thirst,” Ser Lyn insisted. “Whenever she comes out
to dance, she likes a drop of red.”
“Your lady must go thirsty.” Bronze Yohn put himself squarely in
Corbray’s path.
“The Lords Declarant.” Lyn Corbray snorted. “You should have
named yourselves the Six Old Women.” He slid the dark sword back
into its scabbard and left them, shouldering Brune aside as if he
were not there. Alayne listened to his footsteps recede.
Anya Waynwood and Horton Redfort exchanged a look. Hunter
drained his wine cup and held it out to be re lled. “Lord Baelish,”
Ser Symond said, “you must forgive us that display.”
“Must I?” Little nger’s voice had grown cold. “You brought him
here, my lords.”
Bronze Yohn said, “It was never our intent—”
“You brought him here. I would be well within my rights to call my
guards and have all of you arrested.”
Hunter lurched to his feet so wildly that he almost knocked the
agon out of Alayne’s hands. “You gave us safe conduct!”
“Yes. Be grateful that I have more honor than some.” Petyr
sounded as angry as she had ever heard him. “I have read your
declaration and heard your demands. Now hear mine. Remove your
armies from this mountain. Go home and leave my son in peace.
Misrule there has been, I will not deny it, but that was Lysa’s work,
not mine. Grant me but a year, and with Lord Nestor’s help I
promise that none of you shall have any cause for grievance.”
“So you say,” said Belmore. “Yet how shall we trust you?”
“You dare call me untrustworthy? It was not me who bared steel
at a parley. You write of defending Lord Robert even as you deny

him food. That must end. I am no warrior, but I will ght you if you
do not lift this siege. There are other lords besides you in the Vale,
and King’s Landing will send men as well. If it is war you want, say
so now and the Vale will bleed.”
Alayne could see the doubt blooming in the eyes of the Lords
Declarant. “A year is not so long a time,” Lord Redfort said
uncertainly. “Mayhaps … if you gave assurances …”
“None of us wants war,” acknowledged Lady Waynwood.
“Autumn wanes, and we must gird ourselves for winter.”
Belmore cleared his throat. “At the end of this year …”
“… if I have not set the Vale to rights, I shall willingly step down
as Lord Protector,” Petyr promised them.
“I call that more than fair,” Lord Nestor Royce put in.
“There must be no reprisals,” insisted Templeton. “No talk of
treason or rebellion. You must swear to that as well.”
“Gladly,” said Petyr. “It is friends I want, not foes. I shall pardon
all of you, in writing if you wish. Even Lyn Corbray. His brother is
a good man, there is no need to bring down shame upon a noble
House.”
Lady Waynwood turned to her fellow Lords Declarant. “My lords,
perhaps we might confer?”
“There is no need. It is plain that he has won.” Bronze Yohn’s
grey eyes considered Petyr Baelish. “I like it not, but it would seem
you have your year. Best use it well, my lord. Not all of us are
fooled.” He opened the door so forcefully that he all but wrenched
it o its hinges.
Later there was a feast of sorts, though Petyr was forced to make
apologies for the humble fare. Robert was trotted out in a doublet
of cream and blue, and played the little lord quite graciously.
Bronze Yohn was not there to see; he had already departed from the
Eyrie to begin the long descent, as had Ser Lyn Corbray before him.
The other lords remained with them till morn.
He bewitched them, Alayne thought as she lay abed that night
listening to the wind howl outside her windows. She could not have
said where the suspicion came from, but once it crossed her mind it
would not let her sleep. She tossed and turned, worrying at it like a

dog at some old bone. Finally, she rose and dressed herself, leaving
Gretchel to her dreams.
Petyr was still awake, scratching out a letter. “Alayne,” he said.
“My sweet. What brings you here so late?”
“I had to know. What will happen in a year?”
He put down his quill. “Redfort and Waynwood are old. One or
both of them may die. Gilwood Hunter will be murdered by his
brothers. Most likely by young Harlan, who arranged Lord Eon’s
death. In for a penny, in for a stag, I always say. Belmore is corrupt
and can be bought. Templeton I shall befriend. Bronze Yohn Royce
will continue to be hostile, I fear, but so long as he stands alone he
is not so much a threat.”
“And Ser Lyn Corbray?”
The candlelight was dancing in his eyes. “Ser Lyn will remain my
implacable enemy. He will speak of me with scorn and loathing to
every man he meets, and lend his sword to every secret plot to
bring me down.”
That was when her suspicion turned to certainty. “And how shall
you reward him for this service?”
Little nger laughed aloud. “With gold and boys and promises, of
course. Ser Lyn is a man of simple tastes, my sweetling. All he likes
is gold and boys and killing.”

CERSEI

The king was pouting. “I want to sit on the Iron Throne,” he told
her. “You always let Jo sit up there.”
“Jo rey was twelve.”
“But I’m the king. The throne belongs to me.”
“Who told you that?” Cersei took a deep breath, so Dorcas could
lace her up more tightly. She was a big girl, much stronger than
Senelle, though clumsier as well.
Tommen’s face turned red. “No one told me.”
“No one? Is that what you call your lady wife?” The queen could
smell Margaery Tyrell all over this rebellion. “If you lie to me, I
will have no choice but to send for Pate and have him beaten till he
bleeds.” Pate was Tommen’s whipping boy, as he had been
Jo rey’s. “Is that what you want?”
“No,” the king muttered sullenly.
“Who told you?”
He shu ed his feet. “Lady Margaery.” He knew better than to
call her queen in his mother’s hearing.
“That is better. Tommen, I have grave matters to decide, matters
that you are far too young to understand. I do not need a silly little
boy dgeting on the throne behind me and distracting me with
childish questions. I suppose Margaery thinks you ought to be at my
council meetings too?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “She says I have to learn to be king.”

“When you are older, you can attend as many councils as you
wish,” Cersei told him. “I promise you, you will soon grow sick of
them. Robert used to doze through the sessions.” When he troubled
to attend at all. “He preferred to hunt and hawk, and leave the
tedium to old Lord Arryn. Do you remember him?”
“He died of a bellyache.”
“So he did, poor man. As you are so eager to learn, perhaps you
should learn the names of all the kings of Westeros and the Hands
who served them. You may recite them to me on the morrow.”
“Yes, Mother,” he said meekly.
“That’s my good boy.” The rule was hers; Cersei did not mean to
give it up until Tommen came of age. I waited, so can he. I waited
half my life. She had played the dutiful daughter, the blushing bride,
the pliant wife. She had su ered Robert’s drunken groping, Jaime’s
jealousy, Renly’s mockery, Varys with his titters, Stannis endlessly
grinding his teeth. She had contended with Jon Arryn, Ned Stark,
and her vile, treacherous, murderous dwarf brother, all the while
promising herself that one day it would be her turn. If Margaery
Tyrell thinks to cheat me of my hour in the sun, she had bloody well
think again.
Still, it was an ill way to break her fast, and Cersei’s day did not
soon improve. She spent the rest of the morning with Lord Gyles
and his ledger books, listening to him cough about stars and stags
and dragons. After him Lord Waters arrived, to report that the rst
three dromonds were nearing completion and beg for more gold to
nish them in the splendor they deserved. The queen was pleased to
grant him his request. Moon Boy capered as she took her midday
meal with members of the merchant guilds and listened to them
complain about sparrows wandering the streets and sleeping in the
squares. I may need to use the gold cloaks to chase these sparrows from
the city, she was thinking, when Pycelle intruded.
The Grand Maester had been especially querulous in council of
late. At the last session he had complained bitterly about the men
that Aurane Waters had chosen to captain her new dromonds.
Waters meant to give the ships to younger men, whilst Pycelle
argued for experience, insisting that the commands should go to

those captains who had survived the res of the Blackwater.
“Seasoned men of proven loyalty,” he called them. Cersei called
them old, and sided with Lord Waters. “The only thing these
captains proved was that they know how to swim,” she’d said. “No
mother should outlive her children, and no captain should outlive
his ship.” Pycelle had taken the rebuke with ill grace.
He seemed less choleric today, and even managed a sort of
tremulous smile. “Your Grace, glad tidings,” he announced.
“Wyman Manderly has done as you commanded, and beheaded Lord
Stannis’s onion knight.”
“We know this for a certainty?”
“The man’s head and hands have been mounted above the walls
of White Harbor. Lord Wyman avows this, and the Freys con rm.
They have seen the head there, with an onion in its mouth. And the
hands, one marked by his shortened ngers.”
“Very good,” said Cersei. “Send a bird to Manderly and inform
him that his son will be returned forthwith, now that he has
demonstrated his loyalty.” White Harbor would soon return to the
king’s peace, and Roose Bolton and his bastard son were closing in
on Moat Cailin from south and north. Once the Moat was theirs,
they would join their strength and clear the ironmen out of
Torrhen’s Square and Deepwood Motte as well. That should win
them the allegiance of Ned Stark’s remaining bannermen when the
time came to march against Lord Stannis.
To the south, meanwhile, Mace Tyrell had raised a city of tents
outside Storm’s End and had two dozen mangonels inging stones
against the castle’s massive walls, thus far to small e ect. Lord Tyrell
the warrior, the queen mused. His sigil ought to be a fat man sitting on
his arse.
That afternoon the dour Braavosi envoy turned up for his
audience. Cersei had put him o for a fortnight and would have
gladly put him o another year, but Lord Gyles claimed he could no
longer deal with the man … though the queen was starting to
wonder if Gyles was capable of doing anything but coughing.
Noho Dimittis, the Braavosi named himself. An irritating name for
an irritating man. His voice was irritating too. Cersei shifted in her

seat as he went on, wondering how long she must endure his
hectoring. Behind her loomed the Iron Throne, its barbs and blades
throwing twisted shadows across the oor. Only the king or his
Hand could sit upon the throne itself. Cersei sat by its foot, in a seat
of gilded wood piled with crimson cushions.
When the Braavosi paused for breath, she saw her chance. “This is
more properly a matter for our lord treasurer.”
That answer did not please the noble Noho, it would seem. “I
have spoken with Lord Gyles six times. He coughs at me and makes
excuses, Your Grace, but the gold is not forthcoming.”
“Speak to him a seventh time,” Cersei suggested pleasantly. “The
number seven is sacred to our gods.”
“It pleases Your Grace to make a jest, I see.”
“When I make a jest I smile. Do you see me smiling? Do you hear
laughter? I assure you, when I make a jest, men laugh.”
“King Robert—”
“—is dead,” she said sharply. “The Iron Bank will have its gold
when this rebellion has been put down.”
He had the insolence to scowl at her. “Your Grace—”
“This audience is at an end.” Cersei had su ered quite enough for
one day. “Ser Meryn, show the noble Noho Dimittis to the door. Ser
Osmund, you may escort me back to my apartments.” Her guests
would soon arrive, and she had to bathe and change. Supper
promised to be a tedious a air as well. It was hard work to rule a
kingdom, much less seven of them.
Ser Osmund Kettleblack fell in beside her on the steps, tall and
lean in his Kingsguard whites. When Cersei was certain they were
quite alone, she slid her arm through his. “How is your little brother
faring, pray?”
Ser Osmund looked uneasy. “Ah … well enough, only …”
“Only?” The queen let a hint of anger edge her words. “I must
confess, I am running short of patience with dear Osney. It is past
time he broke in that little lly. I named him Tommen’s sworn
shield so he could spend part of every day in Margaery’s company.
He should have plucked the rose by now. Is the little queen blind to
his charms?”

“His charms is ne. He’s a Kettleblack, ain’t he? Begging your
pardon.” Ser Osmund ran his ngers through his oily black hair.
“It’s her that’s the trouble.”
“And why is that?” The queen had begun to nurse doubts about
Ser Osney. Perhaps another man would have been more to
Margaery’s liking. Aurane Waters, with that silvery hair, or a big
strapping fellow like Ser Tallad. “Would the maid prefer someone
else? Does your brother’s face displease her?”
“She likes his face. She touched his scars two days ago, he told
me. ‘What woman gave you these?’ she asked. Osney never said it
was a woman, but she knew. Might be someone told her. She’s
always touching him when they talk, he says. Straightening the
clasp on his cloak, brushing back his hair, and like that. One time at
the archery butts she had him show her how to hold a longbow, so
he had to put his arms around her. Osney tells her bawdy jests, and
she laughs and comes back with ones that are even bawdier. No, she
wants him, that’s plain, but …”
“But?” Cersei prompted.
“They are never alone. The king’s with them most all the time,
and when he’s not, there’s someone else. Two of her ladies share
her bed, di erent ones every night. Two others bring her breakfast
and help her dress. She prays with her septa, reads with her cousin
Elinor, sings with her cousin Alla, sews with her cousin Megga.
When she’s not o hawking with Janna Fossoway and Merry Crane,
she’s playing come-into-my-castle with that little Bulwer girl. She
never goes riding but she takes a tail, four or ve companions and a
dozen guards at least. And there’s always men about her, even in
the Maidenvault.”
“Men.” That was something. That had possibilities. “What men
are these, pray tell?”
Ser Osmund shrugged. “Singers. She’s a fool for singers and
jugglers and such. Knights, come round to moon over her cousins.
Ser Tallad’s the worst, Osney says. That big oaf don’t seem to know
if it’s Elinor or Alla he wants, but he knows he wants her awful bad.
The Redwyne twins come calling too. Slobber brings owers and
fruit, and Horror’s taken up the lute. To hear Osney tell it, you

could make a sweeter sound strangling a cat. The Summer Islander’s
always underfoot as well.”
“Jalabhar Xho?” Cersei gave a derisive snort. “Begging her for
gold and swords to win his homeland back, most like.” Beneath his
jewels and feathers, Xho was little more than a wellborn beggar.
Robert could have put an end to his importuning for good with one
rm “No,” but the notion of conquering the Summer Isles had
appealed to her drunken lout of a husband. No doubt he dreamt of
brown-skinned wenches naked beneath feathered cloaks, with
nipples black as coal. So instead of “No,” Robert always told Xho,
“Next year,” though somehow next year never came.
“I couldn’t say if he was begging, Your Grace,” Ser Osmund
answered. “Osney says he’s teaching them the Summer Tongue. Not
Osney, the quee—the lly and her cousins.”
“A horse that speaks the Summer Tongue would make a great
sensation,” the queen said dryly. “Tell your brother to keep his
spurs well honed. I shall nd some way for him to mount his lly
soon, you may rely on that.”
“I’ll tell him, Your Grace. He’s eager for that ride, don’t think he
ain’t. She’s a pretty little thing, that lly.”
It is me he’s eager for, fool, the queen thought. All he wants of
Margaery is the lordship between her legs. As fond as she was of
Osmund, at times he seemed as slow as Robert. I hope his sword is
quicker than his wits. The day may come that Tommen has some need of
it.
They were crossing beneath the shadow of the broken Tower of
the Hand when the sound of cheers swept over them. Across the
yard, some squire had made a pass at the quintain and sent the
crossarm spinning. The cheers were being led by Margaery Tyrell
and her hens. A lot of uproar for very little. You would think the boy
had won a tourney. Then she was startled to see that it was Tommen
on the courser, clad all in gilded plate.
The queen had little choice but to don a smile and go to see her
son. She reached him as the Knight of Flowers was helping him
from his horse. The boy was breathless with excitement. “Did you

see?” he was asking everyone. “I did it just the way Ser Loras said.
Did you see, Ser Osney?”
“I did,” said Osney Kettleblack. “A pretty sight.”
“You have a better seat than me, sire,” put in Ser Dermot.
“I broke the lance too. Ser Loras, did you hear it?”
“As loud as a crack of thunder.” A rose of jade and gold clasped
Ser Loras’s white cloak at the shoulder, and the wind was ri ing
artfully through his brown locks. “You rode a splendid course, but
once is not enough. You must do it again upon the morrow. You
must ride every day, until every blow lands true and straight, and
your lance is as much a part of you as your arm.”
“I want to.”
“You were glorious.” Margaery went to one knee, kissed the king
upon his cheek, and put an arm around him. “Brother, take care,”
she warned Loras. “My gallant husband will be unhorsing you in a
few more years, I think.” Her three cousins all agreed, and the
wretched little Bulwer girl began to hop about, chanting, “Tommen
will be the champion, the champion, the champion.”
“When he is a man grown,” said Cersei.
Their smiles withered like roses kissed by frost. The pock-faced
old septa was the rst to bend her knee. The rest followed, save for
the little queen and her brother.
Tommen did not seem to notice the sudden chill in the air.
“Mother, did you see me?” he burbled happily. “I broke my lance
on the shield, and the bag never hit me!”
“I was watching from across the yard. You did very well,
Tommen. I would expect no less of you. Jousting is in your blood.
One day you shall rule the lists, as your father did.”
“No man will stand before him.” Margaery Tyrell gave the queen
a coy smile. “But I never knew that King Robert was so
accomplished at the joust. Pray tell us, Your Grace, what tourneys
did he win? What great knights did he unseat? I know the king
should like to hear about his father’s victories.”
A ush crept up Cersei’s neck. The girl had caught her out. Robert
Baratheon had been an indi erent jouster, in truth. During tourneys
he had much preferred the mêlée, where he could beat men bloody

with blunted axe or hammer. It had been Jaime she had been
thinking of when she spoke. It is not like me to forget myself. “Robert
won the tourney of the Trident,” she had to say. “He overthrew
Prince Rhaegar and named me his queen of love and beauty. I am
surprised you do not know that story, good-daughter.” She gave
Margaery no time to frame a reply. “Ser Osmund, help my son from
his armor, if you would be so good. Ser Loras, walk with me. I need
a word with you.”
The Knight of Flowers had no recourse but to follow at her heels
like the puppy he was. Cersei waited until they were on the
serpentine steps before she said, “Whose notion was that, pray?”
“My sister’s,” he admitted. “Ser Tallad, Ser Dermot, and Ser
Portifer were riding at the quintain, and the queen suggested that
His Grace might like to have a turn.”
He calls her that to irk me. “And your part?”
“I helped His Grace to don his armor and showed him how to
couch his lance,” he answered.
“That horse was much too large for him. What if he had fallen
o ? What if the sandbag had smashed his head in?”
“Bruises and bloody lips are all part of being a knight.”
“I begin to understand why your brother is a cripple.” That wiped
the smile o his pretty face, she was pleased to see. “Perhaps my
brother failed to explain your duties to you, ser. You are here to
protect my son from his enemies. Training him for knighthood is
the province of the master-at-arms.”
“The Red Keep has had no master-at-arms since Aron Santagar
was slain,” Ser Loras said, with a hint of reproach in his voice. “His
Grace is almost nine, and eager to learn. At his age he should be a
squire. Someone has to teach him.”
Someone will, but it will not be you. “Pray, who did you squire for,
ser?” she asked sweetly. “Lord Renly, was it not?”
“I had that honor.”
“Yes, I thought as much.” Cersei had seen how tight the bonds
grew between squires and the knights they served. She did not want
Tommen growing close to Loras Tyrell. The Knight of Flowers was
no sort of man for any boy to emulate. “I have been remiss. With a

realm to rule, a war to ght, and a father to mourn, somehow I
overlooked the crucial matter of naming a new master-at-arms. I
shall rectify that error at once.”
Ser Loras pushed back a brown curl that had fallen across his
forehead. “Your Grace will not nd any man half so skilled with
sword and lance as I.”
Humble, aren’t we? “Tommen is your king, not your squire. You
are to ght for him and die for him, if need be. No more.”
She left him on the drawbridge that spanned the dry moat with its
bed of iron spikes and entered Maegor’s Holdfast alone. Where am I
to nd a master-at-arms? she wondered as she climbed to her
apartments. Having refused Ser Loras, she dare not turn to any of
the Kingsguard knights; that would be salt in the wound, certain to
anger Highgarden. Ser Tallad? Ser Dermot? There must be someone.
Tommen was growing fond of his new sworn shield, but Osney was
proving himself less capable than she had hoped in the matter of
Maid Margaery, and she had a di erent o ce in mind for his
brother Osfryd. It was rather a pity that the Hound had gone rabid.
Tommen had always been frightened of Sandor Clegane’s harsh
voice and burned face, and Clegane’s scorn would have been the
perfect antidote to Loras Tyrell’s simpering chivalry.
Aron Santagar was Dornish, Cersei recalled. I could send to Dorne.
Centuries of blood and war lay between Sunspear and Highgarden.
Yes, a Dornishman might suit my needs admirably. There must be some
good swords in Dorne.
When she entered her solar, Cersei found Lord Qyburn reading in
a window seat. “If it please Your Grace, I have reports.”
“More plots and treasons?” Cersei asked. “I have had a long and
tiring day. Tell me quickly.”
He smiled sympathetically. “As you wish. There is talk that the
Archon of Tyrosh has o ered terms to Lys, to end their present
trade war. It had been rumored that Myr was about to enter the war
on the Tyroshi side, but without the Golden Company the Myrish
did not believe they …”
“What the Myrish believe does not concern me.” The Free Cities
were always ghting one another. Their endless betrayals and

alliances meant little and less to Westeros. “Do you have any news
of more import?”
“The slave revolt in Astapor has spread to Meereen, it would
seem. Sailors o a dozen ships speak of dragons …”
“Harpies. It is harpies in Meereen.” She remembered that from
somewhere. Meereen was at the far end of the world, out east
beyond Valyria. “Let the slaves revolt. Why should I care? We keep
no slaves in Westeros. Is that all you have for me?”
“There is some news from Dorne that Your Grace may nd of
more interest. Prince Doran has imprisoned Ser Daemon Sand, a
bastard who once squired for the Red Viper.”
“I recall him.” Ser Daemon had been amongst the Dornish knights
who had accompanied Prince Oberyn to King’s Landing. “What did
he do?”
“He demanded that Prince Oberyn’s daughters be set free.”
“More fool him.”
“Also,” Lord Qyburn said, “the daughter of the Knight of
Spottswood was betrothed quite unexpectedly to Lord Estermont,
our friends in Dorne inform us. She was sent to Greenstone that
very night, and it is said she and Estermont have already wed.”
“A bastard in the belly would explain that.” Cersei toyed with a
lock of her hair. “How old is the blushing bride?”
“Three-and-twenty, Your Grace. Whereas Lord Estermont—”
“—must be seventy. I am aware of that.” The Estermonts were
her good-kin through Robert, whose father had taken one of them
to wife in what must have been a t of lust or madness. By the time
Cersei wed the king, Robert’s lady mother was long dead, though
both of her brothers had turned up for the wedding and stayed for
half a year. Robert had later insisted on returning the courtesy with
a visit to Estermont, a mountainous little island o Cape Wrath. The
dank and dismal fortnight Cersei spent at Greenstone, the seat of
House Estermont, was the longest of her young life. Jaime dubbed
the castle “Greenshit” at rst sight, and soon had Cersei doing it too.
Elsewise she passed her days watching her royal husband hawk,
hunt, and drink with his uncles, and bludgeon various male cousins
senseless in Greenshit’s yard.

There had been a female cousin too, a chunky little widow with
breasts as big as melons whose husband and father had both died at
Storm’s End during the siege. “Her father was good to me,” Robert
told her, “and she and I would play together when the two of us
were small.” It did not take him long to start playing with her
again. As soon as Cersei closed her eyes, the king would steal o to
console the poor lonely creature. One night she had Jaime follow
him, to con rm her suspicions. When her brother returned he asked
her if she wanted Robert dead. “No,” she had replied, “I want him
horned.” She liked to think that was the night when Jo rey was
conceived.
“Eldon Estermont has taken a wife fty years his junior,” she said
to Qyburn. “Why should that concern me?”
He shrugged. “I do not say it should … but Daemon Sand and this
Santagar girl were both close to Prince Doran’s own daughter,
Arianne, or so the Dornishmen would have us believe. Perhaps it
means little or less, but I thought Your Grace should know.”
“Now I do.” She was losing patience. “Do you have more?”
“One more thing. A tri ing matter.” He gave her an apologetic
smile and told her of a puppet show that had recently become
popular amongst the city’s smallfolk; a puppet show wherein the
kingdom of the beasts was ruled by a pride of haughty lions. “The
puppet lions grow greedy and arrogant as this treasonous tale
proceeds, until they begin to devour their own subjects. When the
noble stag makes objection, the lions devour him as well, and roar
that it is their right as the mightiest of beasts.”
“And is that the end of it?” Cersei asked, amused. Looked at in
the right light, it could be seen as a salutary lesson.
“No, Your Grace. At the end a dragon hatches from an egg and
devours all of the lions.”
The ending took the puppet show from simple insolence to
treason. “Witless fools. Only cretins would hazard their heads upon
a wooden dragon.” She considered a moment. “Send some of your
whisperers to these shows and make note of who attends. If any of
them should be men of note, I would know their names.”
“What will be done with them, if I may be so bold?”

“Any men of substance shall be ned. Half their worth should be
su cient to teach them a sharp lesson and re ll our co ers, without
quite ruining them. Those too poor to pay can lose an eye, for
watching treason. For the puppeteers, the axe.”
“There are four. Perhaps Your Grace might allow me two of them
for mine own purposes. A woman would be especially …”
“I gave you Senelle,” the queen said sharply.
“Alas. The poor girl is quite … exhausted.”
Cersei did not like to think about that. The girl had come with her
unsuspecting, thinking she was along to serve and pour. Even when
Qyburn clapped the chain around her wrist, she had not seemed to
understand. The memory still made the queen queasy. The cells were
bitter cold. Even the torches shivered. And that foul thing screaming in
the darkness … “Yes, you may take a woman. Two, if it please you.
But rst I will have names.”
“As you command.” Qyburn withdrew.
Outside, the sun was setting. Dorcas had prepared a bath for her.
The queen was soaking pleasantly in the warm water and
contemplating what she would say to her supper guests when Jaime
came bursting through the door and ordered Jocelyn and Dorcas
from the room. Her brother looked rather less than immaculate and
had a smell of horse about him. He had Tommen with him too.
“Sweet sister,” he said, “the king requires a word.”
Cersei’s golden tresses oated in the bathwater. The room was
steamy. A drop of sweat trickled down her cheek. “Tommen?” she
said, in a dangerously soft voice. “What is it now?”
The boy knew that tone. He shrank back.
“His Grace wants his white courser on the morrow,” Jaime said.
“For his jousting lesson.”
She sat up in the tub. “There will be no jousting.”
“Yes, there will.” Tommen pu ed out his lower lip. “I have to
ride every day.”
“And you shall,” the queen declared, “once we have a proper
master-at-arms to supervise your training.”
“I don’t want a proper master-at-arms. I want Ser Loras.”

“You make too much of that boy. Your little wife has lled your
head with foolish notions of his prowess, I know, but Osmund
Kettleblack is thrice the knight that Loras is.”
Jaime laughed. “Not the Osmund Kettleblack I know.”
She could have throttled him. Perhaps I need to command Ser Loras
to allow Ser Osmund to unhorse him. That might chase the stars from
Tommen’s eyes. Salt a slug and shame a hero, and they shrink right up.
“I am sending for a Dornishman to train you,” she said. “The
Dornish are the nest jousters in the realm.”
“They are not,” said Tommen. “Anyway, I don’t want any stupid
Dornishman, I want Ser Loras. I command it.”
Jaime laughed. He is no help at all. Does he think this is amusing?
The queen slapped the water angrily. “Must I send for Pate? You do
not command me. I am your mother.”
“Yes, but I’m the king. Margaery says that everyone has to do
what the king says. I want my white courser saddled on the morrow
so Ser Loras can teach me how to joust. I want a kitten too, and I
don’t want to eat beets.” He crossed his arms.
Jaime was still laughing. The queen ignored him. “Tommen,
come here.” When he hung back, she sighed. “Are you afraid? A
king should not show fear.” The boy approached the tub, his eyes
downcast. She reached out and stroked his golden curls. “King or
no, you are a little boy. Until you come of age, the rule is mine.
You will learn to joust, I promise you. But not from Loras. The
knights of the Kingsguard have more important duties than playing
with a child. Ask the Lord Commander. Isn’t that so, ser?”
“Very important duties.” Jaime smiled thinly. “Riding round the
city walls, for an instance.”
Tommen looked close to tears. “Can I still have a kitten?”
“Perhaps,” the queen allowed. “So long as I hear no more
nonsense about jousting. Can you promise me that?”
He shu ed his feet. “Yes.”
“Good. Now run along. My guests will be here shortly.”
Tommen ran along, but before he left he turned back to say,
“When I’m king in my own right, I’m going to outlaw beets.”

Her brother shoved the door shut with his stump. “Your Grace,”
he said, when he and Cersei were alone, “I was wondering. Are you
drunk, or merely stupid?”
She slapped the water once again, sending up another splash to
wash across his feet. “Guard your tongue, or—”
“—or what? Will you send me to inspect the city walls again?” He
sat and crossed his legs. “Your bloody walls are ne. I’ve crawled
over every inch of them and had a look at all seven of the gates.
The hinges on the Iron Gate are rusted, and the King’s Gate and
Mud Gate need to be replaced after the pounding Stannis gave them
with his rams. The walls are as strong as they have ever been … but
perchance Your Grace has forgotten that our friends of Highgarden
are inside the walls?”
“I forget nothing,” she told him, thinking of a certain gold coin,
with a hand on one face and the head of a forgotten king on the
other. How did some miserable wretch of a gaoler come to have such a
coin hidden beneath his chamber pot? How does a man like Rugen come
to have old gold from Highgarden?
“This is the rst I have heard of a new master-at-arms. You’ll
need to look long and hard to nd a better jouster than Loras
Tyrell. Ser Loras is—”
“I know what he is. I won’t have him near my son. You had best
remind him of his duties.” Her bath was growing cool.
“He knows his duties, and there’s no better lance—”
“You were better, before you lost your hand. Ser Barristan, when
he was young. Arthur Dayne was better, and Prince Rhaegar was a
match for even him. Do not prate at me about how erce the
Flower is. He’s just a boy.” She was tired of Jaime balking her. No
one had ever balked her lord father. When Tywin Lannister spoke,
men obeyed. When Cersei spoke, they felt free to counsel her, to
contradict her, even refuse her. It is all because I am a woman.
Because I cannot ght them with a sword. They gave Robert more
respect than they give me, and Robert was a witless sot. She would not
su er it, especially not from Jaime. I need to rid myself of him, and
soon. Once upon a time she had dreamt that the two of them might

rule the Seven Kingdoms side by side, but Jaime had become more
of a hindrance than a help.
Cersei rose from the bath. Water ran down her legs and trickled
from her hair. “When I want your counsel I will ask for it. Leave
me, ser. I must needs dress.”
“Your supper guests, I know. What plot is this, now? There are so
many I lose track.” His glance fell to the water beading in the
golden hair between her legs.
He still wants me. “Pining for what you’ve lost, brother?”
Jaime raised his eyes. “I love you too, sweet sister. But you’re a
fool. A beautiful golden fool.”
The words stung. You called me kinder words at Greenstone, the
night you planted Jo inside me, Cersei thought. “Get out.” She
turned her back to him and listened to him leave, fumbling at the
door with his stump.
Whilst Jocelyn was making certain that all was in readiness for
the supper, Dorcas helped the queen into her new gown. It had
stripes of shiny green satin alternating with stripes of plush black
velvet, and intricate black Myrish lace above the bodice. Myrish
lace was costly, but it was necessary for a queen to look her best at
all times, and her wretched washerwomen had shrunk several of her
old gowns so they no longer t. She would have whipped them for
their carelessness, but Taena had urged her to be merciful. “The
smallfolk will love you more if you are kind,” she had said, so
Cersei had ordered the value of the gowns deducted from the
women’s wages, a much more elegant solution.
Dorcas put a silver looking glass into her hand. Very good, the
queen thought, smiling at her re ection. It was pleasant to be out of
mourning. Black made her look too pale. A pity I am not supping with
Lady Merryweather, the queen re ected. It had been a long day, and
Taena’s wit always cheered her. Cersei had not had a friend she so
enjoyed since Melara Hetherspoon, and Melara had turned out to be
a greedy little schemer with ideas above her station. I should not
think ill of her. She’s dead and drowned, and she taught me never to
trust anyone but Jaime.

By the time she joined them in the solar, her guests had made a
good start on the hippocras. Lady Falyse not only looks like a sh, she
drinks like one, she re ected, when she made note of the half-empty
agon. “Sweet Falyse,” she exclaimed, kissing the woman’s cheek,
“and brave Ser Balman. I was so distraught when I heard about your
dear, dear mother. How fares our Lady Tanda?”
Lady Falyse looked as if she were about to cry. “Your Grace is
good to ask. Mother’s hip was shattered by the fall, Maester
Frenken says. He did what he could. Now we pray, but …”
Pray all you like, she will still be dead before the moon turns. Women
as old as Tanda Stokeworth did not survive a broken hip. “I shall
add my prayers to your own,” said Cersei. “Lord Qyburn tells me
that Tanda was thrown from her horse.”
“Her saddle girth burst whilst she was riding,” said Ser Balman
Byrch. “The stableboy should have seen the strap was worn. He has
been chastised.”
“Severely, I hope.” The queen seated herself and indicated that
her guests should sit as well. “Will you have another cup of
hippocras, Falyse? You were always fond of it, I seem to recall.”
“It is so good of you to remember, Your Grace.”
How could I have forgotten? Cersei thought. Jaime said it was a
wonder you did not piss the stu . “How was your journey?”
“Uncomfortable,” complained Falyse. “It rained most of the day.
We thought to spend the night at Rosby, but that young ward of
Lord Gyles refused us hospitality.” She sni ed. “Mark my word,
when Gyles dies that ill-born wretch will make o with his gold. He
may even try and claim the lands and lordship, though by rights
Rosby should come to us when Gyles passes. My lady mother was
aunt to his second wife, third cousin to Gyles himself.”
Is your sigil a lamb, my lady, or some sort of grasping monkey? Cersei
thought. “Lord Gyles has been threatening to die for as long as I
have known him, but he is still with us, and will be for many years,
I do hope.” She smiled pleasantly. “No doubt he will cough the
whole lot of us into our graves.”
“Like as not,” Ser Balman agreed. “Rosby’s ward was not the only
one to vex us, Your Grace. We encountered ru ans on the road as

well. Filthy, unkempt creatures, with leather shields and axes. Some
had stars sewn on their jerkins, sacred stars of seven points, but
they had an evil look about them all the same.”
“They were lice-ridden, I am certain,” added Falyse.
“They call themselves sparrows,” said Cersei. “A plague upon the
land. Our new High Septon will need to deal with them, once he is
crowned. If not, I shall deal with them myself.”
“Has His High Holiness been chosen yet?” asked Falyse.
“No,” the queen had to confess. “Septon Ollidor was on the verge
of being chosen, until some of these sparrows followed him to a
brothel and dragged him naked out into the street. Luceon seems
the likely choice now, though our friends on the other hill say that
he is still a few votes short of the required number.”
“May the Crone guide the deliberations with her golden lamp of
wisdom,” said Lady Falyse, most piously.
Ser Balman shifted in his seat. “Your Grace, an awkward matter,
but … lest bad feeling fester between us, you should know that
neither my good wife nor her mother had any hand in the naming
of this bastard child. Lollys is a simple creature, and her husband is
given to black humors. I told him to choose a more tting name for
the boy. He laughed.”
The queen sipped her wine and studied him. Ser Balman had been
a noted jouster once, and one of the handsomest knights in the
Seven Kingdoms. He could still boast a handsome mustache;
elsewise, he had not aged well. His wavy blond hair had retreated,
whilst his belly advanced inexorably against his doublet. As a
catspaw he leaves much to be desired, she re ected. Still, he should
serve. “Tyrion was a king’s name before the dragons came. The Imp
has despoiled it, but perhaps this child can restore the name to
honor.” If the bastard lives so long. “I know you are not to blame.
Lady Tanda is the sister that I never had, and you …” Her voice
broke. “Forgive me. I live in fear.”
Falyse opened and closed her mouth, which made her look like
some especially stupid sh. “In … in fear, Your Grace?”
“I have not slept a whole night through since Jo rey died.” Cersei
lled the goblets with hippocras. “My friends … you are my friends,

I hope? And King Tommen’s?”
“That sweet lad,” Ser Balman declared. “Your Grace, the very
words of House Stokeworth are Proud to Be Faithful.”
“Would that there were more like you, good ser. I tell you truly, I
have grave doubts about Ser Bronn of the Blackwater.”
Husband and wife exchanged a look. “The man is insolent, Your
Grace,” Falyse said. “Uncouth and foul-mouthed.”
“He is no true knight,” Ser Balman said.
“No.” Cersei smiled, all for him. “And you are a man who would
know true knighthood. I remember watching you joust in … which
tourney was it where you fought so brilliantly, ser?”
He smiled modestly. “That a air at Duskendale six years ago? No,
you were not there, else you would surely have been crowned the
queen of love and beauty. Was it the tourney at Lannisport after
Greyjoy’s Rebellion? I unhorsed many a good knight in that one …”
“That was the one.” Her face grew somber. “The Imp vanished
the night my father died, leaving two honest gaolers behind in pools
of blood. Some claim he ed across the narrow sea, but I wonder.
The dwarf is cunning. Perhaps he still lurks near, planning more
murders. Perhaps some friend is hiding him.”
“Bronn?” Ser Balman stroked his bushy mustache.
“He was ever the Imp’s creature. Only the Stranger knows how
many men he’s sent to hell at Tyrion’s behest.”
“Your Grace, I think I should have noticed a dwarf skulking about
our lands,” said Ser Balman.
“My brother is small. He was made for skulking.” Cersei let her
hand shake. “A child’s name is a small thing … but insolence
unpunished breeds rebellion. And this man Bronn has been
gathering sellswords to him, Qyburn has told me.”
“He has taken four knights into his household,” said Falyse.
Ser Balman snorted. “My good wife atters them, to call them
knights. They’re upjumped sellswords, with not a thimble of
chivalry to be found amongst the four of them.”
“As I feared. Bronn is gathering swords for the dwarf. May the
Seven save my little son. The Imp will kill him as he killed his

brother.” She sobbed. “My friends, I put my honor in your
hands … but what is a queen’s honor against a mother’s fears?”
“Say on, Your Grace,” Ser Balman assured her. “Your words shall
ne’er leave this room.”
Cersei reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze.
“I … I would sleep more easily of a night if I were to hear that Ser
Bronn had su ered a … a mishap … whilst hunting, perhaps.”
Ser Balman considered a moment. “A mortal mishap?”
No, I desire you to break his little toe. She had to bite her lip. My
enemies are everywhere and my friends are fools. “I beg you, ser,” she
whispered, “do not make me say it …”
“I understand.” Ser Balman raised a nger.
A turnip would have grasped it quicker. “You are a true knight
indeed, ser. The answer to a frightened mother’s prayers.” Cersei
kissed him. “Do it quickly, if you would. Bronn has only a few men
about him now, but if we do not act, he will surely gather more.”
She kissed Falyse. “I shall never forget this, my friends. My true
friends of Stokeworth. Proud to Be Faithful. You have my word, we
shall nd Lollys a better husband when this is done.” A Kettleblack,
perhaps. “We Lannisters pay our debts.”
The rest was hippocras and buttered beets, hot-baked bread, herbcrusted pike, and ribs of wild boar. Cersei had become very fond of
boar since Robert’s death. She did not even mind the company,
though Falyse simpered and Balman preened from soup to sweet. It
was past midnight before she could rid herself of them. Ser Balman
proved a great one for suggesting yet another agon, and the queen
did not think it prudent to refuse. I could have hired a Faceless Man to
kill Bronn for half of what I’ve spent on hippocras, she re ected when
they were gone at last.
At that hour, her son was fast asleep, but Cersei looked in upon
him before seeking her own bed. She was surprised to nd three
black kittens cuddled up beside him. “Where did those come from?”
she asked Ser Meryn Trant, outside the royal bedchamber.
“The little queen gave them to him. She only meant to give him
one, but he couldn’t decide which one he liked the best.”

Better than cutting them out of their mother with a dagger, I suppose.
Margaery’s clumsy attempts at seduction were so obvious as to be
laughable. Tommen is too young for kisses, so she gives him kittens.
Cersei rather wished they were not black, though. Black cats
brought ill luck, as Rhaegar’s little girl had discovered in this very
castle. She would have been my daughter, if the Mad King had not
played his cruel jape on Father. It had to have been the madness that
led Aerys to refuse Lord Tywin’s daughter and take his son instead,
whilst marrying his own son to a feeble Dornish princess with black
eyes and a at chest.
The memory of the rejection still rankled, even after all these
years. Many a night she had watched Prince Rhaegar in the hall,
playing his silver-stringed harp with those long, elegant ngers of
his. Had any man ever been so beautiful? He was more than a man,
though. His blood was the blood of old Valyria, the blood of dragons and
gods. When she was just a little girl, her father had promised her
that she would marry Rhaegar. She could not have been more than
six or seven. “Never speak of it, child,” he had told her, smiling his
secret smile that only Cersei ever saw. “Not until His Grace agrees
to the betrothal. It must remain our secret for now.” And so it had,
though once she had drawn a picture of herself ying behind
Rhaegar on a dragon, her arms wrapped tight about his chest. When
Jaime had discovered it she told him it was Queen Alysanne and
King Jaehaerys.
She was ten when she nally saw her prince in the esh, at the
tourney her lord father had thrown to welcome King Aerys to the
west. Viewing stands had been raised beneath the walls of
Lannisport, and the cheers of the smallfolk had echoed o Casterly
Rock like rolling thunder. They cheered Father twice as loudly as they
cheered the king, the queen recalled, but only half as loudly as they
cheered Prince Rhaegar.
Seventeen and new to knighthood, Rhaegar Targaryen had worn
black plate over golden ringmail when he cantered onto the lists.
Long streamers of red and gold and orange silk had oated behind
his helm, like ames. Two of her uncles fell before his lance, along
with a dozen of her father’s nest jousters, the ower of the west.

By night the prince played his silver harp and made her weep. When
she had been presented to him, Cersei had almost drowned in the
depths of his sad purple eyes. He has been wounded, she recalled
thinking, but I will mend his hurt when we are wed. Next to Rhaegar,
even her beautiful Jaime had seemed no more than a callow boy.
The prince is going to be my husband, she had thought, giddy with
excitement, and when the old king dies I’ll be the queen. Her aunt had
con ded that truth to her before the tourney. “You must be
especially beautiful,” Lady Genna told her, fussing with her dress,
“for at the nal feast it shall be announced that you and Prince
Rhaegar are betrothed.”
Cersei had been so happy that day. Elsewise she would never
have dared visit the tent of Maggy the Frog. She had only done it to
show Jeyne and Melara that the lioness fears nothing. I was going to
be a queen. Why should a queen be afraid of some hideous old woman?
The memory of that foretelling still made her esh crawl a lifetime
later. Jeyne ran shrieking from the tent in fear, the queen
remembered, but Melara stayed and so did I. We let her taste our
blood, and laughed at her stupid prophecies. None of them made the
least bit of sense. She was going to be Prince Rhaegar’s wife, no
matter what the woman said. Her father had promised it, and Tywin
Lannister’s word was gold.
Her laughter died at tourney’s end. There had been no nal feast,
no toasts to celebrate her betrothal to Prince Rhaegar. Only cold
silences and chilly looks between the king and her father. Later,
when Aerys and his son and all his gallant knights had departed for
King’s Landing, the girl had gone to her aunt in tears, not
understanding. “Your father proposed the match,” Lady Genna told
her, “but Aerys refused to hear of it. ‘You are my most able servant,
Tywin,’ the king said, ‘but a man does not marry his heir to his
servant’s daughter.’ Dry those tears, little one. Have you ever seen a
lion weep? Your father will nd another man for you, a better man
than Rhaegar.”
Her aunt had lied, though, and her father had failed her, just as
Jaime was failing her now. Father found no better man. Instead he
gave me Robert, and Maggy’s curse bloomed like some poisonous ower.

If she had only married Rhaegar as the gods intended, he would
never have looked twice at the wolf girl. Rhaegar would be our king
today and I would be his queen, the mother of his sons.
She had never forgiven Robert for killing him.
But then, lions were not good at forgiving. As Ser Bronn of the
Blackwater would shortly learn.

BRIENNE

It was Hyle Hunt who insisted that they take the heads. “Tarly will
want them for the walls,” he said.
“We have no tar,” Brienne pointed out. “The esh will rot. Leave
them.” She did not want to travel through the green gloom of the
piney woods with the heads of the men she’d killed.
Hunt would not listen. He hacked through the dead men’s necks
himself, tied the three heads together by the hair, and slung them
from his saddle. Brienne had no choice but to try and pretend they
were not there, but sometimes, especially at night, she could feel
their dead eyes on her back, and once she dreamed she heard them
whispering to one another.
It was cold and wet on Crackclaw Point as they retraced their
steps. Some days it rained and some days it threatened rain. They
were never warm. Even when they made camp, it was hard to nd
enough dry wood for a re.
By the time they reached the gates of Maidenpool, a host of ies
attended them, a crow had eaten Shagwell’s eyes, and Pyg and
Timeon were crawling with maggots. Brienne and Podrick had long
since taken to riding a hundred yards ahead, to keep the smell of rot
well behind them. Ser Hyle claimed to have lost all sense of smell
by then. “Bury them,” she told him every time they made camp for
a night, but Hunt was nothing if not stubborn. He will most like tell
Lord Randyll that he slew all three of them.

To his honor, though, the knight did nothing of the sort.
“The stammering squire threw a rock,” he said, when he and
Brienne were ushered into Tarly’s presence in the yard of Mooton’s
castle. The heads had been presented to a serjeant of the guard, who
was told to have them cleaned and tarred and mounted above the
gate. “The swordswench did the rest.”
“All three?” Lord Randyll was incredulous.
“The way she fought, she could have killed three more.”
“And did you nd the Stark girl?” Tarly demanded of her.
“No, my lord.”
“Instead you slew some rats. Did you enjoy it?”
“No, my lord.”
“A pity. Well, you’ve had your taste of blood. Proved whatever it
is you meant to prove. It’s time you took o that mail and donned
proper clothes again. There are ships in port. One’s bound to stop at
Tarth. I’ll have you on it.”
“Thank you, my lord, but no.”
Lord Tarly’s face suggested he would have liked nothing better
than to stick her own head on a spike and mount it above the gates
of Maidenpool with Timeon, Pyg, and Shagwell. “You mean to
continue with this folly?”
“I mean to nd the Lady Sansa.”
“If it please my lord,” Ser Hyle said, “I watched her ght the
Mummers. She is stronger than most men, and quick—”
“The sword is quick,” Tarly snapped. “That is the nature of
Valyrian steel. Stronger than most men? Aye. She’s a freak of
nature, far be it from me to deny it.”
His sort will never love me, Brienne thought, no matter what I do.
“My lord, it may be that Sandor Clegane has some knowledge of the
girl. If I could nd him …”
“Clegane’s turned outlaw. He rides with Beric Dondarrion now, it
would seem. Or not, the tales vary. Show me where they’re hiding,
I will gladly slit their bellies open, pull their entrails out, and burn
them. We’ve hanged dozens of outlaws, but the leaders still elude
us. Clegane, Dondarrion, the red priest, and now this woman
Stoneheart … how do you propose to nd them, when I cannot?”

“My lord, I …” She had no good answer for him. “All I can do is
try.”
“Try, then. You have your letter, you do not need my leave, but
I’ll give it nonetheless. If you’re fortunate, all you’ll get for your
trouble are saddle sores. If not, perhaps Clegane will let you live
after he and his pack are done raping you. You can crawl back to
Tarth with some dog’s bastard in your belly.”
Brienne ignored that. “If it please my lord, how many men ride
with the Hound?”
“Six or sixty or six hundred. It would seem to depend on whom
we ask.” Randyll Tarly had plainly had enough of the conversation.
He started to turn away.
“If my squire and I might beg your hospitality until—”
“Beg all you want. I will not su er you beneath my roof.”
Ser Hyle Hunt stepped forward. “If it please my lord, I had
understood that it was still Lord Mooton’s roof.”
Tarly gave the knight a venomous look. “Mooton has the courage
of a worm. You will not speak to me of Mooton. As for you, my
lady, it is said that your father is a good man. If so, I pity him.
Some men are blessed with sons, some with daughters. No man
deserves to be cursed with such as you. Live or die, Lady Brienne,
do not return to Maidenpool whilst I rule here.”
Words are wind, Brienne told herself. They cannot hurt you. Let
them wash over you. “As you command, my lord,” she tried to say,
but Tarly had gone before she got it out. She walked from the yard
like one asleep, not knowing where she was going.
Ser Hyle fell in beside her. “There are inns.”
She shook her head. She did not want words with Hyle Hunt.
“Do you recall the Stinking Goose?”
Her cloak still smelled of it. “Why?”
“Meet me there on the morrow, at midday. My cousin Alyn was
one of those sent out to nd the Hound. I’ll speak with him.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Why not? If you succeed where Alyn failed, I shall be able to
taunt him with that for years.”

There were still inns in Maidenpool; Ser Hyle had not been
wrong. Some had burned during one sack or the other, however,
and had yet to be rebuilt, and those that remained were full to
bursting with men from Lord Tarly’s host. She and Podrick visited
all of them that afternoon, but there were no beds to be had
anywhere.
“Ser? My lady?” Podrick said as the sun was going down. “There
are ships. Ships have beds. Hammocks. Or bunks.”
Lord Randyll’s men still prowled the docks, as thick as the ies
had been on the heads of the three Bloody Mummers, but their
serjeant knew Brienne by sight and let her pass. The local sherfolk
were tying up for the night and crying the day’s catch, but her
interest was in the larger ships that plied the stormy waters of the
narrow sea. Half a dozen were in port, though one, a galleas called
the Titan’s Daughter, was casting o her lines to ride out on the
evening tide. She and Podrick Payne made the rounds of the ships
that remained. The master of the Gulltown Girl took Brienne for a
whore and told them that his ship was not a bawdy house, and a
harpooner on the Ibbenese whaler o ered to buy her boy, but they
had better fortune elsewhere. She purchased Podrick an orange on
the Seastrider, a cog just in from Oldtown by way of Tyrosh, Pentos,
and Duskendale. “Gulltown next,” her captain told her, “thence
around the Fingers to Sisterton and White Harbor, if the storms
allow. She’s a clean ship, ’Strider, not so many rats as most, and
we’ll have fresh eggs and new-churned butter aboard. Is m’lady
seeking passage north?”
“No.” Not yet. She was tempted, but …
As they were making their way to the next pier, Podrick shu ed
his feet, and said, “Ser? My lady? What if my lady did go home? My
other lady, I mean. Ser. Lady Sansa.”
“They burned her home.”
“Still. That’s where her gods are. And gods can’t die.”
Gods cannot die, but girls can. “Timeon was a cruel man and a
murderer, but I do not think he lied about the Hound. We cannot go
north until we know for certain. There will be other ships.”

At the east end of the harbor they nally found shelter for the
night, aboard a storm-wracked trading galley called the Lady of Myr.
She was listing badly, having lost her mast and half her crew in a
storm, but her master did not have the coin he needed to re t her,
so he was glad to take a few pennies from Brienne and allow her
and Pod to share an empty cabin.
They had a restless night. Thrice Brienne woke. Once when the
rain began, and once at a creak that made her think Nimble Dick
was creeping in to kill her. The second time, she woke with knife in
hand, but it was nothing. In the darkness of the cramped little
cabin, it took her a moment to remember that Nimble Dick was
dead. When she nally drifted back to sleep, she dreamed about the
men she’d killed. They danced around her, mocking her, pinching at
her as she slashed at them with her sword. She cut them all to
bloody ribbons, yet still they swarmed around her … Shagwell,
Timeon, and Pyg, aye, but Randyll Tarly too, and Vargo Hoat, and
Red Ronnet Connington. Ronnet had a rose between his ngers.
When he held it out to her, she cut his hand o .
She woke sweating, and spent the rest of the night huddled under
her cloak, listening to rain pound against the deck over her head. It
was a wild night. From time to time she heard the sound of distant
thunder, and thought of the Braavosi ship that had sailed upon the
evening tide.
The next morning she found the Stinking Goose again, woke its
slatternly proprietor, and paid her for some greasy sausages, fried
bread, half a cup of wine, a agon of boiled water, and two clean
cups. The woman squinted at Brienne as she was putting the water
on to boil. “You’re the big one went o with Nimble Dick. I
remember. He cheat you?”
“No.”
“Rape you?”
“No.”
“Steal your horse?”
“No. He was slain by outlaws.”
“Outlaws?” The woman seemed more curious than upset. “I
always gured Dick would hang, or get sent o to that Wall.”

They ate the fried bread and half the sausages. Podrick Payne
washed his down with wine- avored water whilst Brienne nursed a
cup of watered wine and wondered why she’d come. Hyle Hunt was
no true knight. His honest face was just a mummer’s mask. I do not
need his help, I do not need his protection, and I do not need him, she
told herself. He is probably not even coming. Telling me to meet him
here was just another jape.
She was getting up to go when Ser Hyle arrived. “My lady.
Podrick.” He glanced at the cups and plates and the half-eaten
sausages cooling in a puddle of grease, and said, “Gods, I hope you
did not eat the food here.”
“What we ate is no concern of yours,” Brienne said. “Did you nd
your cousin? What did he tell you?”
“Sandor Clegane was last seen in Saltpans, the day of the raid.
Afterward he rode west, along the Trident.”
She frowned. “The Trident is a long river.”
“Aye, but I don’t think our dog will have wandered too far from
its mouth. Westeros has lost its charm for him, it would seem. At
Saltpans he was looking for a ship.” Ser Hyle drew a roll of
sheepskin from his boot, pushed the sausages aside, and unrolled it.
It proved to be a map. “The Hound butchered three of his brother’s
men at the old inn by the crossroads, here. He led the raid on
Saltpans, here.” He tapped Saltpans with his nger. “He may be
trapped. The Freys are up here at the Twins, Darry and Harrenhal
are south across the Trident, west he’s got the Blackwoods and the
Brackens ghting, and Lord Randyll’s here at Maidenpool. The high
road to the Vale is closed by snow, even if he could get past the
mountain clans. Where’s a dog to go?”
“If he is with Dondarrion …?”
“He’s not. Alyn is certain of that. Dondarrion’s men are looking
for him too. They have put out word that they mean to hang him
for what he did at Saltpans. They had no part of that. Lord Randyll
is putting it about that they did in hopes of turning the commons
against Beric and his brotherhood. He will never take the lightning
lord so long as the smallfolk are protecting him. And there’s this
other band, led by this woman Stoneheart … Lord Beric’s lover,

according to one tale. Supposedly she was hanged by the Freys, but
Dondarrion kissed her and brought her back to life, and now she
cannot die, no more than he can.” Brienne considered the map. “If
Clegane was last seen at Saltpans, that would be the place to nd
his trail.”
“There is no one left at Saltpans but an old knight hiding in his
castle, Alyn said.”
“Still, it would be a place to start.”
“There’s a man,” Ser Hyle said. “A septon. He came in through
my gate the day before you turned up. Meribald, his name is. Riverborn and river-bred and he’s served here all his life. He’s departing
on the morrow to make his circuit, and he always calls at Saltpans.
We should go with him.”
Brienne looked up sharply. “We?”
“I am going with you.”
“You’re not.”
“Well, I’m going with Septon Meribald to Saltpans. You and
Podrick can go wherever you bloody well like.”
“Did Lord Randyll command you to follow me again?”
“He commanded me to stay away from you. Lord Randyll is of
the view that you might bene t from a good hard raping.”
“Then why would you come with me?”
“It was that, or return to gate duty.”
“If your lord commanded—”
“He is no longer my lord.”
That took her aback. “You left his service?”
“His lordship informed me that he had no further need of my
sword, or my insolence. It amounts to the same thing. Henceforth I
shall enjoy the adventuresome life of a hedge knight … though if
we do nd Sansa Stark, I imagine we will be well rewarded.”
Gold and land, that’s what he sees in this. “I mean to save the girl,
not sell her. I swore a vow.”
“I don’t recall that I did.”
“That is why you will not be coming with me.”
They left the next morning, as the sun was coming up.

It was a queer procession: Ser Hyle on a chestnut courser and
Brienne on her tall grey mare, Podrick Payne astride his swayback
stot, and Septon Meribald walking beside them with his
quartersta , leading a small donkey and a large dog. The donkey
carried such a heavy load that Brienne was half afraid its back
would break. “Food for the poor and hungry of the riverlands,”
Septon Meribald told them at the gates of Maidenpool. “Seeds and
nuts and dried fruit, oaten porridge, our, barley bread, three
wheels of yellow cheese from the inn by the Fool’s Gate, salt cod
for me, salt mutton for Dog … oh, and salt. Onions, carrots, turnips,
two sacks of beans, four of barley, and nine of oranges. I have a
weakness for the orange, I confess. I got these from a sailor, and I
fear they will be the last I’ll taste till spring.”
Meribald was a septon without a sept, only one step up from a
begging brother in the hierarchy of the Faith. There were hundreds
like him, a ragged band whose humble task it was to trudge from
one yspeck of a village to the next, conducting holy services,
performing marriages, and forgiving sins. Those he visited were
expected to feed and shelter him, but most were as poor as he was,
so Meribald could not linger in one place too long without causing
hardship to his hosts. Kindly innkeeps would sometimes allow him
to sleep in their kitchens or their stables, and there were septries
and holdfasts and even a few castles where he knew he would be
given hospitality. Where no such places were at hand, he slept
beneath the trees or under hedges. “There are many ne hedges in
the riverlands,” Meribald said. “The old ones are the best. There’s
nothing beats a hundred-year-old hedge. Inside one of those a man
can sleep as snug as at an inn, and with less fear of eas.”
The septon could neither read nor write, as he cheerfully
confessed along the road, but he knew a hundred di erent prayers
and could recite long passages from The Seven-Pointed Star from
memory, which was all that was required in the villages. He had a
seamed, windburnt face, a shock of thick grey hair, wrinkles at the
corners of his eyes. Though a big man, six feet tall, he had a way of
hunching forward as he walked that made him seem much shorter.
His hands were large and leathery, with red knuckles and dirt

beneath the nails, and he had the biggest feet that Brienne had ever
seen, bare and black and hard as horn.
“I have not worn a shoe in twenty years,” he told Brienne. “The
rst year, I had more blisters than I had toes, and my soles would
bleed like pigs whenever I trod on a hard stone, but I prayed and
the Cobbler Above turned my skin to leather.”
“There is no cobbler above,” Podrick protested.
“There is, lad … though you may call him by another name. Tell
me, which of the seven gods do you love best?”
“The Warrior,” said Podrick without a moment’s hesitation.
Brienne cleared her throat. “At Evenfall my father’s septon always
said that there was but one god.”
“One god with seven aspects. That’s so, my lady, and you are
right to point it out, but the mystery of the Seven Who Are One is
not easy for simple folk to grasp, and I am nothing if not simple, so
I speak of seven gods.” Meribald turned back to Podrick. “I have
never known a boy who did not love the Warrior. I am old, though,
and being old, I love the Smith. Without his labor, what would the
Warrior defend? Every town has a smith, and every castle. They
make the plows we need to plant our crops, the nails we use to
build our ships, iron shoes to save the hooves of our faithful horses,
the bright swords of our lords. No one could doubt the value of a
smith, and so we name one of the Seven in his honor, but we might
as easily have called him the Farmer or the Fisherman, the
Carpenter or the Cobbler. What he works at makes no matter. What
matters is, he works. The Father rules, the Warrior ghts, the Smith
labors, and together they perform all that is rightful for a man. Just
as the Smith is one aspect of the godhead, the Cobbler is one aspect
of the Smith. It was he who heard my prayer and healed my feet.”
“The gods are good,” Ser Hyle said in a dry voice, “but why
trouble them, when you might just have kept your shoes?”
“Going barefoot was my penance. Even holy septons can be
sinners, and my esh was weak as weak could be. I was young and
full of sap, and the girls … a septon can seem as gallant as a prince
if he is the only man you know who has ever been more than a mile
from your village. I would recite to them from The Seven-Pointed

Star. The Maiden’s Book worked best. Oh, I was a wicked man,
before I threw away my shoes. It shames me to think of all the
maidens I de owered.”
Brienne shifted in the saddle uncomfortably, thinking back to the
camp below the walls of Highgarden and the wager Ser Hyle and
the others had made to see who could bed her rst.
“We’re looking for a maiden,” con ded Podrick Payne. “A
highborn girl of three-and-ten, with auburn hair.”
“I had understood that you were seeking outlaws.”
“Them too,” Podrick admitted.
“Most travelers do all they can to avoid such men,” said Septon
Meribald, “yet you would seek them out.”
“We only seek one outlaw,” Brienne said. “The Hound.”
“So Ser Hyle told me. May the Seven save you, child. It’s said he
leaves a trail of butchered babes and ravished maids behind him.
The Mad Dog of Saltpans, I have heard him called. What would
good folk want with such a creature?”
“The maid that Podrick spoke of may be with him.”
“Truly? Then we must pray for the poor girl.”
And for me, thought Brienne, a prayer for me as well. Ask the Crone
to raise her lamp and lead me to the Lady Sansa, and the Warrior to give
strength to my arm so that I might defend her. She did not say the
words aloud, though; not where Hyle Hunt might hear her and
mock her for her woman’s weakness.
With Septon Meribald afoot and his donkey bearing such a heavy
load, the going was slow all that day. They did not take the main
road west, the road that Brienne had once ridden with Ser Jaime
when they came the other way to nd Maidenpool sacked and full
of corpses. Instead they struck o toward the northwest, following
the shore of the Bay of Crabs on a crooked track so small that it did
not appear on either of Ser Hyle’s precious sheepskin maps. The
steep hills, black bogs, and piney woods of Crackclaw Point were
nowhere to be found this side of Maidenpool. The lands they
traveled through were low and wet, a wilderness of sandy dunes
and salt marshes beneath a vast blue-grey vault of sky. The road
was prone to vanishing amongst the reeds and tidal pools, only to

appear again a mile farther on; without Meribald, Brienne knew,
they surely would have lost their way. The ground was often soft,
so in places the septon would walk ahead, tapping with his
quartersta to make certain of the footing. There were no trees for
leagues around, just sea and sky and sand.
No land could have been more di erent from Tarth, with its
mountains and waterfalls, its high meadows and shadowed vales,
yet this place had its own beauty, Brienne thought. They crossed a
dozen slow- owing streams alive with frogs and crickets, watched
terns oating high above the bay, heard the sandpipers calling from
amongst the dunes. Once a fox crossed their path, and set
Meribald’s dog to barking wildly.
And there were people too. Some lived amongst the reeds in
houses built of mud and straw, whilst others shed the bay in
leather coracles and built their homes on rickety wooden stilts
above the dunes. Most seemed to live alone, out of sight of any
human habitation but their own. They seemed a shy folk for the
most part, but near midday the dog began to bark again, and three
women emerged from the reeds to give Meribald a woven basket
full of clams. He gave each of them an orange in return, though
clams were as common as mud in this world, and oranges were rare
and costly. One of the women was very old, one was heavy with
child, and one was a girl as fresh and pretty as a ower in spring.
When Meribald took them o to hear their sins, Ser Hyle chuckled,
and said, “It would seem the gods walk with us … at least the
Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.” Podrick looked so astonished
that Brienne had to tell him no, they were only three marsh women.
Afterward, when they resumed their journey, she turned to the
septon, and said, “These people live less than a day’s ride from
Maidenpool, and yet the ghting has not touched them.”
“They have little to touch, my lady. Their treasures are shells and
stones and leather boats, their nest weapons knives of rusted iron.
They are born, they live, they love, they die. They know Lord
Mooton rules their lands, but few have ever seen him, and Riverrun
and King’s Landing are only names to them.”

“And yet they know the gods,” said Brienne. “That is your work, I
think. How long have you walked the riverlands?”
“It will be forty years soon,” the septon said, and his dog gave a
loud bark. “From Maidenpool to Maidenpool, my circuit takes me
half a year and ofttimes more, but I will not say I know the Trident.
I glimpse the castles of the great lords only at a distance, but I
know the market towns and holdfasts, the villages too small to have
a name, the hedges and the hills, the rills where a thirsty man can
drink and the caves where he can shelter. And the roads the
smallfolk use, the crooked muddy tracks that do not appear on
parchment maps, I know them too.” He chuckled. “I should. My feet
have trod every mile of them, ten times over.”
The back roads are the ones the outlaws use, and the caves would
make ne places for hunted men to hide. A prickle of suspicion made
Brienne wonder just how well Ser Hyle knew this man. “It must
make for a lonely life, septon.”
“The Seven are always with me,” said Meribald, “and I have my
faithful servant, and Dog.”
“Does your dog have a name?” asked Podrick Payne.
“He must,” said Meribald, “but he is not my dog. Not him.”
The dog barked and wagged his tail. He was a huge, shaggy
creature, ten stone of dog at least, but friendly.
“Who does he belong to?” asked Podrick.
“Why, to himself, and to the Seven. As to his name, he has not
told me what it is. I call him Dog.”
“Oh.” Podrick did not know what to make of a dog named Dog,
plainly. The boy chewed on that a while, then said, “I used to have
a dog when I was little. I called him Hero.”
“Was he?”
“Was he what?”
“A hero.”
“No. He was a good dog, though. He died.”
“Dog keeps me safe upon the roads, even in such trying times as
these. Neither wolf nor outlaw dare molest me when Dog is at my
side.” The septon frowned. “The wolves have grown terrible of late.
There are places where a man alone would do well to nd a tree to

sleep in. In all my years the biggest pack I ever saw had fewer than
a dozen wolves in it, but the great pack that prowls along the
Trident now numbers in the hundreds.”
“Have you come on them yourself?” Ser Hyle asked.
“I have been spared that, Seven save me, but I have heard them
in the night, and more than once. So many voices … a sound to
curdle a man’s blood. It even set Dog to shivering, and Dog has
killed a dozen wolves.” He ru ed the dog’s head. “Some will tell
you that they are demons. They say the pack is led by a monstrous
she-wolf, a stalking shadow grim and grey and huge. They will tell
you that she has been known to bring aurochs down all by herself,
that no trap nor snare can hold her, that she fears neither steel nor
re, slays any wolf that tries to mount her, and devours no other
esh but man.”
Ser Hyle Hunt laughed. “Now you’ve done it, septon. Poor
Podrick’s eyes are big as boiled eggs.”
“They’re not,” said Podrick, indignant. Dog barked.
That night they made a cold camp in the dunes. Brienne sent
Podrick walking by the shore to nd some driftwood for a re, but
he came back empty-handed, with mud up to his knees. “The tide’s
out, ser. My lady. There’s no water, only mud ats.”
“Stay o the mud, child,” counseled Septon Meribald. “The mud is
not fond of strangers. If you walk in the wrong place, it will open
up and swallow you.”
“It’s only mud,” insisted Podrick.
“Until it lls your mouth and starts creeping up your nose. Then
it’s death.” He smiled to take the chill o his words. “Wipe o that
mud and have a slice of orange, lad.”
The next day was more of the same. They broke their fast on salt
cod and more orange slices, and were on their way before the sun
was wholly risen, with a pink sky behind them and a purple sky
ahead. Dog led the way, sni ng at every clump of reeds and
stopping every now and then to piss on one; he seemed to know the
road as well as Meribald. The cries of terns shivered through the
morning air as the tide came rushing in.

Near midday they stopped at a tiny village, the rst they had
encountered, where eight of the stilt-houses loomed above a small
stream. The men were out shing in their coracles, but the women
and young boys clambered down dangling rope ladders and
gathered around Septon Meribald to pray. After the service he
absolved their sins and left them with some turnips, a sack of beans,
and two of his precious oranges.
Back on the road, the septon said, “We would do well to keep a
watch tonight, my friends. The villagers say they’ve seen three
broken men skulking round the dunes, west of the old watchtower.”
“Only three?” Ser Hyle smiled. “Three is honey to our
swordswench. They’re not like to trouble armed men.”
“Unless they’re starving,” the septon said. “There is food in these
marshes, but only for those with the eyes to nd it, and these men
are strangers here, survivors from some battle. If they should accost
us, ser, I beg you, leave them to me.”
“What will you do with them?”
“Feed them. Ask them to confess their sins, so that I might
forgive them. Invite them to come with us to the Quiet Isle.”
“That’s as good as inviting them to slit our throats as we sleep,”
Hyle Hunt replied. “Lord Randyll has better ways to deal with
broken men—steel and hempen rope.”
“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”
“More or less,” Brienne answered.
Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are
many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A
sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the
same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the
law to ght some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this
ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men,
driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring
only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity,
though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born,
simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house
where they were born until the day some lord came round to take
them o to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away

beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a
sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone
to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons
with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and
stories, so they go o with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders
they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a
ne adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.
“Then they get a taste of battle.
“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on
for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in,
but even a man who has survived a hundred ghts can break in his
hundred-and- rst. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose
their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in
after they’ve been gutted by an axe.
“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other
lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when
that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to
eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are
torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches
from drinking bad water.
“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted
iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before
long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose
lands they’re ghting in, men very like the men they used to be.
They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there
it’s just a short step to carrying o their daughters too. And one day
they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that
they are ghting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly
recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back
home and the lord they’re ghting for does not know their names,
yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line
with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their
ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all
in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to ll the
world …
“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls o afterward over the corpses of
the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he nds
someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings
and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat
that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might
drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to
day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not
wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men,
and fear them … but he should pity them as well.”
When Meribald was nished a profound silence fell upon their
little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of
pussywillows, and farther o the faint cry of a loon. She could hear
Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his
donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and
stretched, until nally she said, “How old were you when they
marched you o to war?”
“Why, no older than your boy,” Meribald replied. “Too young for
such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be
left behind. Willam said I could be his squire, though Will was no
knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from
the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It
was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a
mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged
for rape.”
“The War of the Ninepenny Kings?” asked Hyle Hunt.
“So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny.
It was a war, though. That it was.”

SAMWELL

Sam stood before the window, rocking nervously as he watched the
last light of the sun vanish behind a row of sharp-peaked rooftops.
He must have gotten drunk again, he thought glumly. Or else he’s met
another girl. He did not know whether to curse or weep. Dareon was
supposed to be his brother. Ask him to sing, and no one could be
better. Ask him to do aught else …
The mists of evening had begun to rise, sending grey ngers up
the walls of the buildings that lined the old canal. “He promised
he’d be back,” Sam said. “You heard him too.”
Gilly looked at him with eyes red-rimmed and pu y. Her hair
hung about her face, unwashed and tangled. She looked like some
wary animal peering through a bush. It had been days since they’d
last had a re, yet the wildling girl liked to huddle near the hearth,
as if the cold ashes still held some lingering warmth. “He doesn’t
like it here with us,” she said, whispering so as not to wake the
babe. “It’s sad here. He likes it where the wine is, and the smiles.”
Yes, thought Sam, and the wine is everywhere but here. Braavos was
full of inns, alehouses, and brothels. And if Dareon preferred a re
and a cup of mulled wine to stale bread and the company of a
weeping woman, a fat craven, and a sick old man, who could blame
him? I could blame him. He said he would be back before the gloaming;
he said he would bring us wine and food.

He looked out the window once more, hoping against hope to see
the singer hurrying home. Darkness was falling across the secret
city, creeping through the alleys and down the canals. The good
folk of Braavos would soon be shuttering their windows and sliding
bars across their doors. Night belonged to the bravos and the
courtesans. Dareon’s new friends, Sam thought bitterly. They were all
the singer could talk about of late. He was trying to write a song
about one courtesan, a woman called the Moonshadow who had
heard him singing beside the Moon Pool and rewarded him with a
kiss. “You should have asked her for silver,” Sam had said. “It’s coin
we need, not kisses.” But the singer only smiled. “Some kisses are
worth more than yellow gold, Slayer.”
That made him angry too. Dareon was not supposed to be making
up songs about courtesans. He was supposed to be singing about the
Wall and the valor of the Night’s Watch. Jon had hoped that
perhaps his songs might persuade a few young men to take the
black. Instead he sang of golden kisses, silvery hair, and red, red
lips. No one ever took the black for red, red lips.
Sometimes his playing would wake the babe too. Then the child
would begin to wail, Dareon would shout at him to be quiet, Gilly
would weep, and the singer would storm out and not return for
days. “All that weeping makes me want to slap her,” he complained,
“and I can scarce sleep for her sobbing.”
You would weep as well if you had a son and lost him, Sam almost
said. He could not blame Gilly for her grief. Instead, he blamed Jon
Snow and wondered when Jon’s heart had turned to stone. Once he
asked Maester Aemon that very question, when Gilly was down at
the canal fetching water for them. “When you raised him up to be
the lord commander,” the old man answered.
Even now, rotting here in this cold room beneath the eaves, part
of Sam did not want to believe that Jon had done what Maester
Aemon thought. It must be true, though. Why else would Gilly weep so
much? All he had to do was ask her whose child she was nursing at
her breast, but he did not have the courage. He was afraid of the
answer he might get. I am still a craven, Jon. No matter where he
went in this wide world, his fears went with him.

A hollow rumbling echoed o the roofs of Braavos, like the sound
of distant thunder; the Titan, sounding nightfall from across the
lagoon. The noise was loud enough to wake the babe, and his
sudden wail woke Maester Aemon. As Gilly went to give the boy
the breast, the old man’s eyes opened, and he stirred feebly in his
narrow bed. “Egg? It’s dark. Why is it so dark?”
Because you’re blind. Aemon’s wits were wandering more and
more since they arrived at Braavos. Some days he did not seem to
know where he was. Some days he would lose his way when saying
something and begin to ramble on about his father or his brother.
He is one hundred and two, Sam reminded himself, but he had been
just as old at Castle Black and his wits had never wandered there.
“It’s me,” he had to say. “Samwell Tarly. Your steward.”
“Sam.” Maester Aemon licked his lips, and blinked. “Yes. And this
is Braavos. Forgive me, Sam. Is morning come?”
“No.” Sam felt the old man’s brow. His skin was damp with
sweat, cool and clammy to the touch, his every breath a soft
wheeze. “It’s night, maester. You’ve been asleep.”
“Too long. It’s cold in here.”
“We have no wood,” Sam told him, “and the innkeep will not give
us more unless we have the coin.” It was the fourth or fth time
they’d had this same conversation. I should have used our coin for
wood, Sam chided himself every time. I should have had the sense to
keep him warm.
Instead he had squandered the last of their silver on a healer from
the House of the Red Hands, a tall pale man in robes embroidered
with swirling stripes of red and white. All that the silver bought him
was half a ask of dreamwine. “This may help gentle his passing,”
the Braavosi had said, not unkindly. When Sam asked if there wasn’t
any more that he could do, he shook his head. “Ointments I have,
potions and infusions, tinctures and venoms and poultices. I might
bleed him, purge him, leech him … but why? No leech can make
him young again. This is an old man, and death is in his lungs. Give
him this and let him sleep.”
And so he had, all night and all day, but now the old man was
struggling to sit. “We must go down to the ships.”

The ships again. “You’re too weak to go out,” he had to say. A chill
had gotten inside Maester Aemon during the voyage and settled in
his chest. By the time they got to Braavos, he had been so weak
they’d had to carry him ashore. They’d still had a fat bag of silver
then, so Dareon had asked for the inn’s biggest bed. The one they’d
gotten was large enough to sleep eight, so the innkeep insisted on
charging them for that many.
“On the morrow we can go to the docks,” Sam promised. “You
can ask about and nd which ship is departing next for Oldtown.”
Even in autumn, Braavos was still a busy port. Once Aemon was
strong enough to travel, they should have no trouble nding a
suitable vessel to take them where they had to go. Paying for their
passage would prove more di cult. A ship from the Seven
Kingdoms would be their best hope. A trader out of Oldtown, maybe,
with kin in the Night’s Watch. There must still be some who honor the
men who walk the Wall.
“Oldtown,” Maester Aemon wheezed. “Yes. I dreamt of Oldtown,
Sam. I was young again and my brother Egg was with me, with that
big knight he served. We were drinking in the old inn where they
make the fearsomely strong cider.” He tried to rise again, but the
e ort proved too much for him. After a moment he settled back.
“The ships,” he said again. “We will nd our answer there. About
the dragons. I need to know.”
No, thought Sam, it’s food and warmth you need, a full belly and a
hot re crackling in the hearth. “Are you hungry, maester? We have
some bread left, and a bit of cheese.”
“Not just now, Sam. Later, when I’m feeling stronger.”
“How will you get stronger unless you eat?” None of them had
eaten much at sea, not after Skagos. The autumn gales had hounded
them all across the narrow sea. Sometimes they came up from the
south, roiling with thunder and lightning and black rains that fell
for days. Sometimes they came down from the north, cold and grim,
with savage winds that cut right through a man. Once it got so cold
that Sam had woken to nd the whole ship coated in ice, shining as
white as pearl. The captain had taken down their mast and tied it to

the deck, to nish the crossing on oars alone. No one had been
eating by the time they saw the Titan.
Once safe ashore, though, Sam had found himself ravenously
hungry. It was the same for Dareon and Gilly. Even the babe had
begun to suck more lustily. Aemon, though …
“The bread’s gone stale, but I can beg some gravy from the
kitchens to soak it in,” Sam told the old man. The innkeep was a
hard man, cold-eyed and suspicious of these black-clad strangers
beneath his roof, but his cook was kinder.
“No. Perhaps a sip of wine, though?”
They had no wine. Dareon had promised to buy some with the
coin from his singing. “We’ll have wine later,” Sam had to say.
“There’s water, but it’s not the good water.” The good water came
over the arches of the great brick aqueduct the Braavosi called the
sweetwater river. Rich men had it piped into their homes; the poor
lled their pails and buckets at public fountains. Sam had sent Gilly
out to get some, forgetting that the wildling girl had lived her
whole life in sight of Craster’s Keep and never seen so much as a
market town. The stony maze of islands and canals that was
Braavos, devoid of grass and trees and teeming with strangers who
spoke to her in words she could not understand, frightened her so
badly that she lost the map and soon herself. Sam found her
weeping at the stony feet of some long-dead sealord. “All we have
is canal water,” he told Maester Aemon, “but the cook gave it a
boil. There’s dreamwine too, if you need more of that.”
“I have dreamt enough for now. Canal water will su ce. Help
me, if you would.”
Sam eased the old man up and held the cup to his dry, cracked
lips. Even so, half the water dribbled down the maester’s chest.
“Enough,” Aemon coughed, after a few sips. “You’ll drown me.” He
shivered in Sam’s arms. “Why is the room so cold?”
“There’s no more wood.” Dareon had paid the innkeep double for
a room with a hearth, but none of them had realized that wood
would be so costly here. Trees did not grow on Braavos, save in the
courts and gardens of the mighty. Nor would the Braavosi cut the
pines that covered the outlying islands around their great lagoon

and acted as windbreaks to shield them from storms. Instead,
rewood was brought in by barge, up the rivers and across the
lagoon. Even dung was dear here; the Braavosi used boats in place
of horses. None of that would have mattered if they had departed as
planned for Oldtown, but that had proved impossible with Maester
Aemon so weak. Another voyage on the open sea would kill him.
Aemon’s hand crept across the blankets, groping for Sam’s arm.
“We must go to the docks, Sam.”
“When you are stronger.” The old man was in no state to brave
the salt spray and wet winds along the waterfront, and Braavos was
all waterfront. To the north was the Purple Harbor, where Braavosi
traders tied up beneath the domes and towers of the Sealord’s
Palace. To the west lay the Ragman’s Harbor, crowded with ships
from the other Free Cities, from Westeros and Ibben and the fabled,
far-o lands of the east. And everywhere else were little piers and
ferry berths and old grey wharves where shrimpers and crabbers
and sherfolk moored after working the mud ats and river mouths.
“It would be too great a strain on you.”
“Then go in my stead,” Aemon urged, “and bring me someone
who has seen these dragons.”
“Me?” Sam was dismayed by the suggestion. “Maester, it was
only a story. A sailor’s story.” Dareon was to blame for this as well.
The singer had been bringing back all manner of queer tales from
the alehouses and brothels. Unfortunately, he had been in his cups
when he heard the one about the dragons and could not recall the
details. “Dareon may have made up the whole story. Singers do
that. They make things up.”
“They do,” said Maester Aemon, “but even the most fanciful song
may hold a kernel of truth. Find that truth for me, Sam.”
“I wouldn’t know who to ask, or how to ask him. I only have a
little High Valyrian, and when they speak to me in Braavosi I
cannot understand half of what they’re saying. You speak more
tongues than I do, once you are stronger you can …”
“When will I be stronger, Sam? Tell me that.”
“Soon. If you rest and eat. When we reach Oldtown …”

“I shall not see Oldtown again. I know that now.” The old man
tightened his grip on Sam’s arm. “I will be with my brothers soon.
Some were bound to me by vows and some by blood, but they were
all my brothers. And my father … he never thought the throne
would pass to him, and yet it did. He used to say that was his
punishment for the blow that slew his brother. I pray he found the
peace in death that he never knew in life. The septons sing of sweet
surcease, of laying down our burdens and voyaging to a far sweet
land where we may laugh and love and feast until the end of
days … but what if there is no land of light and honey, only cold
and dark and pain beyond the wall called death?”
He is afraid, Sam realized. “You are not dying. You’re ill, that’s
all. It will pass.”
“Not this time, Sam. I dreamed … in the black of night a man
asks all the questions he dare not ask by daylight. For me, these
past years, only one question has remained. Why would the gods
take my eyes and my strength, yet condemn me to linger on so
long, frozen and forgotten? What use could they have for an old
done man like me?” Aemon’s ngers trembled, twigs sheathed in
spotted skin. “I remember, Sam. I still remember.”
He was not making sense. “Remember what?”
“Dragons,” Aemon whispered. “The grief and glory of my House,
they were.”
“The last dragon died before you were born,” said Sam. “How
could you remember them?”
“I see them in my dreams, Sam. I see a red star bleeding in the
sky. I still remember red. I see their shadows on the snow, hear the
crack of leathern wings, feel their hot breath. My brothers dreamed
of dragons too, and the dreams killed them, every one. Sam, we
tremble on the cusp of half-remembered prophecies, of wonders and
terrors that no man now living could hope to comprehend … or …”
“Or?” said Sam.
“… or not.” Aemon chuckled softly. “Or I am an old man, feverish
and dying.” He closed his white eyes wearily, then forced them
open once again. “I should not have left the Wall. Lord Snow could
not have known, but I should have seen it. Fire consumes, but cold

preserves. The Wall … but it is too late to go running back. The
Stranger waits outside my door and will not be denied. Steward,
you have served me faithfully. Do this one last brave thing for me.
Go down to the ships, Sam. Learn all you can about these dragons.”
Sam eased his arm out of the old man’s grasp. “I will. If you
want. I only …” He did not know what else to say. I cannot refuse
him. He could look for Dareon as well, along the docks and wharves
of the Ragman’s Harbor. I will nd Dareon rst, and we’ll go to the
ships together. And when we come back, we’ll bring food and wine and
wood. We’ll have a re and a good hot meal. He rose. “Well. I should
go, then. If I am going. Gilly will be here. Gilly, bar the door when
I am gone.” The Stranger waits outside the door.
Gilly nodded, cradling the babe against her breast, her eyes
welling full of tears. She is going to weep again, Sam realized. It was
more than he could take. His swordbelt hung from a peg on the
wall, beside the old cracked horn that Jon had given him. He ripped
it down and buckled it about him, then swept his black wool cloak
about his rounded shoulders, slumped through the door, and
clattered down a wooden stair whose steps creaked beneath his
weight. The inn had two front doors, one opening on a street and
one on a canal. Sam went out through the former, to avoid the
common room where the innkeep was sure to give him the sour eye
that he reserved for guests who had overstayed their welcome.
There was a chill in the air, but the night was not half so foggy as
some. Sam was grateful for that much. Sometimes the mists covered
the ground so thick that a man could not see his own feet. Once he
had come within a step of walking into a canal.
As a boy Sam had read a history of Braavos and dreamed of one
day coming here. He wanted to behold the Titan rising stern and
fearsome from the sea, glide down the canals in a serpent boat past
all the palaces and temples, and watch the bravos do their water
dance, blades ashing in the starlight. But now that he was here, all
he wanted was to leave and go to Oldtown.
With his hood up and his cloak apping, he made his way along
the cobblestones toward the Ragman’s Harbor. His swordbelt kept
threatening to fall down about his ankles, so he had to keep tugging

it back up as he went. He stayed to the smaller, darker streets,
where he was less likely to encounter anyone, yet every passing cat
still made his heart thump … and Braavos crawled with cats. I need
to nd Dareon, he thought. He is a man of the Night’s Watch, my
Sworn Brother; he and I will puzzle out what to do. Maester Aemon’s
strength was gone, and Gilly would have been lost here even if she
had not been grief-stricken, but Dareon … I should not think ill of
him. He could be hurt, perhaps that is why he did not come back. He
could be dead, lying in some alley in a pool of blood, or oating
facedown in one of the canals. At night the bravos swaggered through
the city in their parti-colored nery, spoiling to prove their skill
with those slender swords they wore. Some would ght for any
cause, some for none at all, and Dareon had a loose tongue and
quick temper, especially when he’d been drinking. Just because a
man can sing about battles doesn’t mean he’s t to ght one.
The best alehouses, inns, and brothels were near the Purple
Harbor or the Moon Pool, but Dareon preferred the Ragman’s
Harbor, where the patrons were more apt to speak the Common
Tongue. Sam began his search at the Inn of the Green Eel, the Black
Bargeman, and Moroggo’s, places where Dareon had played before.
He was not to be found at any of them. Outside the Foghouse
several serpent boats were tied up awaiting patrons, and Sam tried
to ask the polemen if they had seen a singer all in black, but none of
the polemen understood his High Valyrian. That, or they do not chose
to understand. Sam peered into the dingy winesink beneath the
second arch of Nabbo’s Bridge, barely large enough to accommodate
ten people. Dareon was not one of them. He tried the Outcast Inn,
the House of Seven Lamps, and the brothel called the Cattery,
where he got strange looks but no help.
Leaving, he almost bumped into two young men beneath the
Cattery’s red lantern. One was dark and one was fair. The darkhaired one said something in Braavosi. “I am sorry,” Sam had to
say. “I do not understand.” He edged away from them, afraid. In the
Seven Kingdoms nobles draped themselves in velvets, silks, and
samites of a hundred hues whilst peasants and smallfolk wore raw
wool and dull brown roughspun. In Braavos it was otherwise. The

bravos swaggered about like peacocks, ngering their swords,
whilst the mighty dressed in charcoal grey and purple, blues that
were almost black and blacks as dark as a moonless night.
“My friend Terro says you are so fat you make him sick,” said the
fair-haired bravo, whose jacket was green velvet on one side and
cloth-of-silver on the other. “My friend Terro says that the rattle of
your sword makes his head ache.” He was speaking in the Common
Tongue. The other one, the dark-haired bravo in the burgundy
brocade and yellow cloak whose name would appear to have been
Terro, made some comment in Braavosi, and his fair-haired friend
laughed, and said, “My friend Terro says you dress above your
station. Are you some great lord, to wear the black?”
Sam wanted to run, but if he did was like to trip over his own
swordbelt. Do not touch your sword, he told himself. Even a nger
on the hilt might be enough for one or the other of the bravos to
take as a challenge. He tried to think of words that might appease
them. “I’m not—” was all he managed.
“He is not a lord,” a child’s voice put in. “He’s in the Night’s
Watch, stupid. From Westeros.” A girl edged into the light, pushing a
barrow full of seaweed; a scru y, skinny creature in big boots, with
ragged unwashed hair. “There’s another one down at the Happy
Port, singing songs to the Sailor’s Wife,” she informed the two
bravos. To Sam she said, “If they ask who is the most beautiful
woman in the world, say the Nightingale or else they’ll challenge
you. Do you want to buy some clams? I sold all my oysters.”
“I have no coin,” Sam said.
“He has no coin,” mocked the fair-haired bravo. His dark-haired
friend grinned and said something in Braavosi. “My friend Terro is
chilly. Be our good fat friend and give him your cloak.”
“Don’t do that either,” said the barrow girl, “or else they’ll ask for
your boots next, and before long you’ll be naked.”
“Little cats who howl too loud get drowned in the canals,”
warned the fair-haired bravo.
“Not if they have claws.” And suddenly there was a knife in the
girl’s left hand, a blade as skinny as she was. The one called Terro

said something to his fair-haired friend and the two of them moved
o , chuckling at one another.
“Thank you,” Sam told the girl when they were gone.
Her knife vanished. “If you wear a sword at night it means you
can be challenged. Did you want to ght them?”
“No.” It came out in a squeak that made Sam wince.
“Are you truly in the Night’s Watch? I never saw a black brother
like you before.” The girl gestured at the barrow. “You can have the
last clams if you want. It’s dark, no one will buy them now. Are you
sailing to the Wall?”
“To Oldtown.” Sam took one of the baked clams and wolfed it
down. “We’re between ships.” The clam was good. He ate another.
“The bravos never bother anyone without a sword. Not even
stupid camel cunts like Terro and Orbelo.”
“Who are you?”
“No one.” She stank of sh. “I used to be someone, but now I’m
not. You can call me Cat, if you like. Who are you?”
“Samwell, of House Tarly. You speak the Common Tongue.”
“My father was the oarmaster on Nymeria. A bravo killed him for
saying that my mother was more beautiful than the Nightingale.
Not one of those camel cunts you met, a real bravo. Someday I’ll slit
his throat. The captain said Nymeria had no need of little girls, so he
put me o . Brusco took me in and gave me a barrow.” She looked
up at him. “What ship will you be sailing on?”
“We bought passage on the Lady Ushanora.”
The girl squinted at him suspiciously. “She’s gone. Don’t you
know? She left days and days ago.”
I know, Sam might have said. He and Dareon had stood on the
dock watching the rise and fall of her oars as she beat for the Titan
and the open sea. “Well,” the singer said, “that’s done.” If Sam had
been a braver man, he would have shoved him into the water.
When it came to talking girls out of their clothes Dareon had a
honeyed tongue, yet in the captain’s cabin somehow Sam had done
all the talking, trying to persuade the Braavosi to wait for them.
“Three days I have waited for this old man,” the captain had said.

“My holds are full, and my men have fucked their wives farewell.
With you or without, my Lady leaves on the tide.”
“Please,” Sam had pleaded. “Just a few more days, that’s all I ask.
So Maester Aemon can recover his strength.”
“He has no strength.” The captain had visited the inn the night
before to see Maester Aemon for himself. “He is old and ill and I
will not have him dying on my Lady. Stay with him or leave him, it
matters not to me. I sail.” Even worse, he had refused to return the
passage money they had paid him, the silver that was meant to see
them safe to Oldtown. “You bought my nest cabin. It is there,
awaiting you. If you do not choose to occupy it, that is no fault of
mine. Why should I bear the loss?”
By now we might be at Duskendale, Sam thought mournfully. We
might even have reached Pentos, if the winds were kind.
But none of that would matter to the barrow girl. “You said you
saw a singer …”
“At the Happy Port. He’s going to wed the Sailor’s Wife.”
“Wed?”
“She only beds the ones who marry her.”
“Where is this Happy Port?”
“Across from the Mummer’s Ship. I can show you the way.”
“I know the way.” Sam had seen the Mummer’s Ship. Dareon
cannot wed! He said the words! “I have to go.”
He ran. It was a long way over slick cobbles. Before long he was
pu ng, his big black cloak apping noisily behind him. He had to
keep one hand on his swordbelt as he ran. What few people he
encountered gave him curious looks, and once a cat reared up and
hissed at him. By the time he reached the ship he was staggering.
The Happy Port was just across the alley.
No sooner had he entered, ushed and out of breath, than a oneeyed woman threw her arms around his neck. “Don’t,” Sam told her,
“I’m not here for that.” She answered in Braavosi. “I do not speak
that tongue,” Sam said in High Valyrian. There were candles
burning and a re crackling in the hearth. Someone was sawing on
a ddle, and he saw two girls dancing around a red priest, holding

hands. The one-eyed woman pressed her breasts against his chest.
“Don’t do that! I’m not here for that!”
“Sam!” Dareon’s familiar voice rang out. “Yna, let him go, that’s
Sam the Slayer. My Sworn Brother!”
The one-eyed woman peeled away, though she kept one hand on
his arm. One of the dancers called out, “He can slay me if he likes,”
and the other said, “Do you think he’d let me touch his sword?”
Behind them a purple galleas had been painted on the wall, crewed
by women clad in thigh-high boots and nothing else. A Tyroshi
sailor was passed out in a corner, snoring into his huge scarlet
beard. Elsewhere an older woman with huge breasts was turning
tiles with a massive Summer Islander in black-and-scarlet feathers.
In the center of it all sat Dareon, nuzzling at the neck of the woman
in his lap. She was wearing his black cloak.
“Slayer,” the singer called out drunkenly, “come meet my lady
wife.” His hair was sand and honey, his smile warm. “I sang her
love songs. Women melt like butter when I sing. How could I resist
this face?” He kissed her nose. “Wife, give Slayer a kiss, he’s my
brother.” When the girl got to her feet, Sam saw that she was naked
underneath the cloak. “Don’t go fondling my wife now, Slayer,” said
Dareon, laughing. “But if you want one of her sisters, you feel free.
I still have coin enough, I think.”
Coin that might have bought us food, Sam thought, coin that might
have bought wood, so Maester Aemon could keep warm. “What have
you done? You can’t marry. You said the words, the same as me.
They could have your head for this.”
“We’re only wed for this one night, Slayer. Even in Westeros no
one takes your head for that. Haven’t you ever gone to Mole’s Town
to dig for buried treasure?”
“No.” Sam reddened. “I would never …”
“What about your wildling wench? You must have fucked her a
time or three. All those nights in the woods, huddled together under
your cloak, don’t you tell me that you never stuck it in her.” He
waved a hand toward a chair. “Sit down, Slayer. Have a cup of
wine. Have a whore. Have both.”

Sam did not want a cup of wine. “You promised to come back
before the gloaming. To bring back wine and food.”
“Is this how you killed that Other? Scolding him to death?”
Dareon laughed. “She’s my wife, not you. If you will not drink to
my marriage, go away.”
“Come with me,” said Sam. “Maester Aemon’s woken up and
wants to hear about these dragons. He’s talking about bleeding stars
and white shadows and dreams and … if we could nd out more
about these dragons, it might help give him ease. Help me.”
“On the morrow. Not on my wedding night.” Dareon pushed
himself to his feet, took his bride by the hand, and started toward
the stairs, pulling her behind him.
Sam blocked his way. “You promised, Dareon. You said the words.
You’re supposed to be my brother.”
“In Westeros. Does this look like Westeros to you?”
“Maester Aemon—”
“—is dying. That stripey healer you wasted all our silver on said
as much.” Dareon’s mouth had turned hard. “Have a girl or go
away, Sam. You’re ruining my wedding.”
“I’ll go,” said Sam, “but you’ll come with me.”
“No. I’m done with you. I’m done with black.” Dareon tore his
cloak o his naked bride and tossed it in Sam’s face. “Here. Throw
that rag on the old man, it may keep him a little warmer. I shan’t be
needing it. I’ll be clad in velvet soon. Next year I’ll be wearing furs
and eating—”
Sam hit him.
He did not think about it. His hand came up, curled into a st,
and crashed into the singer’s mouth. Dareon cursed and his naked
wife gave a shriek and Sam threw himself onto the singer and
knocked him backwards over a low table. They were almost of a
height, but Sam weighed twice as much, and for once he was too
angry to be afraid. He punched the singer in the face and in the
belly, then began to pummel him about the shoulders with both
hands. When Dareon grabbed his wrists, Sam butted him with his
head and broke his lip. The singer let go and he smashed him in the
nose. Somewhere a man was laughing, a woman cursing. The ght

seemed to slow, as if they were two black ies struggling in amber.
Then someone dragged Sam o the singer’s chest. He hit that person
too, and something hard crashed into his head.
The next he knew he was outside, ying head rst through the
fog. For half a heartbeat he saw black water underneath him. Then
the canal came up and smashed him in the face.
Sam sank like a stone, like a boulder, like a mountain. The water
got into his eyes and up his nose, dark and cold and salty. When he
tried to shout for help he swallowed more. Kicking and gasping, he
rolled over, bubbles bursting from his nose. Swim, he told himself,
swim. The brine stung his eyes when he opened them, blinding him.
He popped to the surface for just an instant, sucked down air, and
slapped desperately with one hand whilst the other scrabbled at the
wall of the canal. But the stones were slick and slimy and he could
not get a grasp. He sank again.
Sam could feel the cold against his skin as the water soaked
through his clothes. His swordbelt slipped down his legs and tangled
round his ankles. I’m going to drown, he thought, in a blind black
panic. He thrashed, trying to claw his way back to the surface, but
instead his face bumped the bottom of the canal. I’m upside down, he
realized, I’m drowning. Something moved beneath one ailing hand,
an eel or a sh, slithering through his ngers. I can’t drown, Maester
Aemon will die without me, and Gilly will have no one. I have to swim, I
have to …
There was a huge splash, and something coiled around him, under
his arms and around his chest. The eel, was his rst thought, the eel
has got me, it’s going to pull me down. He opened his mouth to
scream, and swallowed more water. I’m drowned, was his last
thought. Oh, gods be good, I’m drowned.
When he opened his eyes he was on his back and a big black
Summer Islander was pounding on his belly with sts the size of
hams. Stop that, you’re hurting me, Sam tried to scream. Instead of
words he retched out water, and gasped. He was sodden and
shivering, lying on the cobbles in a puddle of canal water. The
Summer Islander punched him in the belly again, and more water

came squirting out his nose. “Stop that,” Sam gasped. “I haven’t
drowned. I haven’t drowned.”
“No.” His rescuer leaned over him, huge and black and dripping.
“You owe Xhondo many feathers. The water ruined Xhondo’s ne
cloak.”
It had, Sam saw. The feathered cloak clung to the black man’s
huge shoulders, sodden and soiled. “I never meant …”
“… to be swimming? Xhondo saw. Too much splashing. Fat men
should oat.” He grabbed Sam’s doublet with a huge black st and
hauled him to his feet. “Xhondo mates on Cinnamon Wind. Many
tongues he speaks, a little. Inside Xhondo laughs, to see you punch
the singer. And Xhondo hears.” A broad white smile spread across
his face. “Xhondo knows these dragons.”

JAIME

I had hoped that by now you would have grown tired of that
wretched beard. All that hair makes you look like Robert.” His
sister had put aside her mourning for a jade-green gown with
sleeves of silver Myrish lace. An emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg
hung on a golden chain about her neck.
“Robert’s beard was black. Mine is gold.”
“Gold? Or silver?” Cersei plucked a hair from beneath his chin
and held it up. It was grey. “All the color is draining out of you,
brother. You’ve become a ghost of what you were, a pale crippled
thing. And so bloodless, always in white.” She icked the hair away.
“I prefer you garbed in crimson and gold.”
I prefer you dappled in sunlight, with water beading on your naked
skin. He wanted to kiss her, carry her to her bedchamber, throw her
on the bed. … she’s been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and
Moon Boy … “I will make a bargain with you. Relieve me of this
duty, and my razor is yours to command.”
Her mouth tightened. She had been drinking hot spiced wine and
smelled of nutmeg. “You presume to dicker with me? Need I remind
you, you are sworn to obey.”
“I am sworn to protect the king. My place is at his side.”
“Your place is wherever he sends you.”
“Tommen puts his seal on every paper that you put in front of
him. This is your doing, and it’s folly. Why name Daven your

Warden of the West if you have no faith in him?”
Cersei took a seat beneath the window. Behind her Jaime could
see the blackened ruin of the Tower of the Hand. “Why so reluctant,
ser? Did you lose your courage with your hand?”
“I swore an oath to Lady Stark, never again to take up arms
against the Starks or Tullys.”
“A drunken promise made with a sword at your throat.”
“How can I defend Tommen if I am not with him?”
“By defeating his enemies. Father always said that a swift sword
stroke is a better defense than any shield. Admittedly, most sword
strokes require a hand. Still, even a crippled lion may inspire fear. I
want Riverrun. I want Brynden Tully chained or dead. And someone
needs to set Harrenhal to rights. We have urgent need of Wylis
Manderly, assuming he is still alive and captive, but the garrison
has not replied to any of our ravens.”
“Those are Gregor’s men at Harrenhal,” Jaime reminded her.
“The Mountain liked them cruel and stupid. Most like they ate your
ravens, messages and all.”
“That’s why I’m sending you. They may eat you as well, brave
brother, but I trust you’ll give them indigestion.” Cersei smoothed
her skirt. “I want Ser Osmund to command the Kingsguard in your
absence.”
… she’s been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and Moon Boy
for all I know … “That’s not your choice. If I must go, Ser Loras will
command here in my stead.”
“Is that a jape? You know how I feel about Ser Loras.”
“If you had not sent Balon Swann to Dorne—”
“I need him there. These Dornishmen cannot be trusted. That red
snake championed Tyrion, have you forgotten that? I will not leave
my daughter to their mercy. And I will not have Loras Tyrell
commanding the Kingsguard.”
“Ser Loras is thrice the man Ser Osmund is.”
“Your notions of manhood have changed somewhat, brother.”
Jaime felt his anger rising. “True, Loras does not leer at your
teats the way Ser Osmund does, but I hardly think—”
“Think about this.” Cersei slapped his face.

Jaime made no attempt to block the blow. “I see I need a thicker
beard, to cushion me against my queen’s caresses.” He wanted to rip
her gown o and turn her blows to kisses. He’d done it before, back
when he had two good hands.
The queen’s eyes were green ice. “You had best go, ser.”
… Lancel, Osmund Kettleblack, and Moon Boy …
“Are you deaf as well as maimed? You’ll nd the door behind
you, ser.”
“As you command.” Jaime turned on his heel and left her.
Somewhere the gods were laughing. Cersei had never taken
kindly to being balked, he knew that. Softer words might have
swayed her, yet of late the very sight of her made him angry.
Part of him would be glad to put King’s Landing behind him. He
had no taste for the company of the lickspittles and fools who
surrounded Cersei. “The smallest council,” they were calling them
in Flea Bottom, according to Addam Marbrand. And Qyburn … he
might have saved Jaime’s life, but he was still a Bloody Mummer.
“Qyburn stinks of secrets,” he warned Cersei. That only made her
laugh. “We all have secrets, brother,” she replied.
… she’s been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and Moon Boy
for all I know …
Forty knights and as many esquires awaited him outside the Red
Keep’s stables. Half were westermen sworn to House Lannister, the
others recent foes turned doubtful friends. Ser Dermot of the
Rainwood would carry Tommen’s standard, Red Ronnet Connington
the white banner of the Kingsguard. A Paege, a Piper, and a
Peckledon would share the honor of squiring for the Lord
Commander. “Keep friends at your back and foes where you can see
them,” Sumner Crakehall had once counseled him. Or had that been
Father?
His palfrey was a blood bay, his destrier a magni cent grey
stallion. It had been long years since Jaime had named any of his
horses; he had seen too many die in battle, and that was harder
when you named them. But when the Piper boy started calling them
Honor and Glory, he laughed and let the names stand. Glory wore
trappings of Lannister crimson; Honor was barded in Kingsguard

white. Josmyn Peckledon held the palfrey’s reins as Ser Jaime
mounted. The squire was skinny as a spear, with long arms and
legs, greasy mouse-brown hair, and cheeks soft with peach fuzz. His
cloak was Lannister crimson, but his surcoat showed the ten purple
mullets of his own House arrayed upon a yellow eld. “My lord,”
the lad asked, “will you be wanting your new hand?”
“Wear it, Jaime,” urged Ser Kennos of Kayce. “Wave at the
smallfolk and give them a tale to tell their children.”
“I think not.” Jaime would not show the crowds a golden lie. Let
them see the stump. Let them see the cripple. “But feel free to make up
for my lack, Ser Kennos. Wave with both hands, and waggle your
feet if it please you.” He gathered the reins in his left hand and
wheeled his horse around. “Payne,” he called as the rest were
forming up, “you’ll ride beside me.”
Ser Ilyn Payne made his way to Jaime’s side, looking like the
beggar at the ball. His ringmail was old and rusted, worn over a
stained jack of boiled leather. Neither the man nor his mount
showed any heraldry; his shield was so hacked and battered it was
hard to say what color paint might once have covered it. With his
grim face and deep-sunk hollow eyes, Ser Ilyn might have passed
for death himself … as he had, for years.
No longer, though. Ser Ilyn had been half of Jaime’s price, for
swallowing his boy king’s command like a good little Lord
Commander. The other half had been Ser Addam Marbrand. “I need
them,” he had told his sister, and Cersei had not put up a ght. Most
like she’s pleased to rid herself of them. Ser Addam was a boyhood
friend of Jaime’s, and the silent headsman had belonged to their
father, if he belonged to anyone. Payne had been the captain of the
Hand’s guard when he had been heard boasting that it was Lord
Tywin who ruled the Seven Kingdoms and told King Aerys what to
do. Aerys Targaryen took his tongue for that.
“Open the gates,” said Jaime, and Strongboar, in his booming
voice, called out, “OPEN THE GATES!”
When Mace Tyrell had marched out through the Mud Gate to the
sound of drums and ddles, thousands lined the streets to cheer him
o . Little boys had joined the march, striding along beside the

Tyrell soldiers with heads held high and legs pumping, whilst their
sisters threw down kisses from the windows.
Not so today. A few whores called out invitations as they passed,
and a meat pie man cried his wares. In Cobbler’s Square two
threadbare sparrows were haranguing several hundred smallfolk,
crying doom upon the heads of godless men and demon worshipers.
The crowd parted for the column. Sparrows and cobblers alike
looked on with dull eyes. “They like the smell of roses but have no
love for lions,” Jaime observed. “My sister would be wise to take
note of that.” Ser Ilyn made no reply. The perfect companion for a
long ride. I will enjoy his conversation.
The greater part of his command awaited him beyond the city
walls; Ser Addam Marbrand with his outriders, Ser Ste on Swyft
and the baggage train, the Holy Hundred of old Ser Bonifer the
Good, Sars eld’s mounted archers, Maester Gulian with four cages
full of ravens, two hundred heavy horse under Ser Flement Brax.
Not a great host, all in all; fewer than a thousand men in total.
Numbers were the last thing needed at Riverrun. A Lannister army
already invested the castle, and an even larger force of Freys; the
last bird they’d received suggested that the besiegers were having
di culty keeping themselves fed. Brynden Tully had scoured the
land clean before retiring behind his walls.
Not that it required much scouring. From what Jaime had seen of
the riverlands, scarce a eld remained unburnt, a town unsacked, a
maiden undespoiled. And now my sweet sister sends me to nish the
work that Amory Lorch and Gregor Clegane began. It left a bitter taste
in his mouth.
This near to King’s Landing, the kingsroad was as safe as any road
could be in such times, yet Jaime sent Marbrand and his outriders
ahead to scout. “Robb Stark took me unawares in the Whispering
Wood,” he said. “That will never happen again.”
“You have my word on it.” Marbrand seemed visibly relieved to
be ahorse again, wearing the smoke-grey cloak of his own House
instead of the gold wool of the City Watch. “If any foe should come
within a dozen leagues, you will know of them beforehand.”

Jaime had given stern commands that no man was to depart the
column without his leave. Elsewise, he knew he would have bored
young lordlings racing through the elds, scattering livestock and
trampling down the crops. There were still cows and sheep to be
seen near the city; apples on the trees and berries in the brush,
stands of barleycorn and oats and winter wheat, wayns and oxcarts
on the road. Farther a eld, things would not be so rosy.
Riding at the front of the host with Ser Ilyn silent by his side,
Jaime felt almost content. The sun was warm on his back and the
wind ri ed through his hair like a woman’s ngers. When Little
Lew Piper came galloping up with a helm full of blackberries, Jaime
ate a handful and told the boy to share the rest with his fellow
squires and Ser Ilyn Payne.
Payne seemed as comfortable in his silence as in his rusted
ringmail and boiled leather. The clop of his gelding’s hooves and the
rattle of sword in scabbard whenever he shifted his seat were the
only sounds he made. Though his pox-scarred face was grim and his
eyes as cold as ice on a winter lake, Jaime sensed that he was glad
he’d come. I gave the man a choice, he reminded himself. He could
have refused me and remained King’s Justice.
Ser Ilyn’s appointment had been a wedding gift from Robert
Baratheon to the father of his bride, a sinecure to compensate Payne
for the tongue he’d lost in the service of House Lannister. He made
a splendid headsman. He had never botched an execution, and
seldom required as much as a second stroke. And there was
something about his silence that inspired terror. Seldom had a
King’s Justice seemed so well tted for his o ce.
When Jaime decided to take him, he had sought out Ser Ilyn’s
chambers at the end of Traitor’s Walk. The upper oor of the squat,
half-round tower was divided into cells for prisoners who required
some measure of comfort, captive knights or lordlings awaiting
ransom or exchange. The entrance to the dungeons proper was at
ground level, behind a door of hammered iron and a second of
splintery grey wood. On the oors between were rooms set aside
for the use of the Chief Gaoler, the Lord Confessor, and the King’s

Justice. The Justice was a headsman, but by tradition he also had
charge of the dungeons and the men who kept them.
And for that task, Ser Ilyn Payne was singularly ill suited. As he
could neither read, nor write, nor speak, Ser Ilyn had left the
running of the dungeons to his underlings, such as they were. The
realm had not had a Lord Confessor since the second Daeron,
however, and the last Chief Gaoler had been a cloth merchant who
purchased the o ce from Little nger during Robert’s reign. No
doubt he’d had good pro t from it for a few years, until he made
the error of conspiring with some other rich fools to give the Iron
Throne to Stannis. They called themselves “Antler Men,” so Jo had
nailed antlers to their heads before inging them over the city
walls. So it had been left to Rennifer Longwaters, the head
undergaoler with the twisted back who claimed at tedious length to
have a “drop of dragon” in him, to unlock the dungeon doors for
Jaime and conduct him up the narrow steps inside the walls to the
place where Ilyn Payne had lived for fteen years.
The chambers stank of rotted food, and the rushes were crawling
with vermin. As Jaime entered, he almost trod upon a rat. Payne’s
greatsword rested on a trestle table, beside a whetstone and a
greasy oilcloth. The steel was immaculate, the edge glimmering
blue in the pale light, but elsewhere piles of soiled clothing were
strewn about the oors, and the bits of mail and armor scattered
here and there were red with rust. Jaime could not count the
broken wine jars. The man cares for naught but killing, he thought, as
Ser Ilyn emerged from a bedchamber that reeked of over owing
chamber pots. “His Grace bids me win back his riverlands,” Jaime
told him. “I would have you with me … if you can bear to give up
all of this.”
Silence was his answer, and a long, unblinking stare. But just as
he was about to turn and take his leave, Payne had given him a nod.
And here he rides. Jaime glanced at his companion. Perhaps there is
yet hope for the both of us.
That night they made camp beneath the hilltop castle of the
Hayfords. As the sun went down, a hundred tents sprouted beneath
the hill, along the banks of the stream that ran beside it. Jaime set

the sentries himself. He did not expect trouble this close to the city,
but his uncle Sta ord had once thought himself safe on the Oxcross
too. It was best to take no chances.
When the invitation came down from the castle for him to sup
with Lady Hayford’s castellan, Jaime took Ser Ilyn with him, along
with Ser Addam Marbrand, Ser Bonifer Hasty, Red Ronnet
Connington, Strongboar, and a dozen other knights and lordlings. “I
suppose I ought to wear the hand,” he said to Peck before making
his ascent.
The lad fetched it straightaway. The hand was wrought of gold,
very lifelike, with inlaid nails of mother-of-pearl, its ngers and
thumb half closed so as to slip around a goblet’s stem. I cannot ght,
but I can drink, Jaime re ected as the lad was tightening the straps
that bound it to his stump. “Men shall name you Goldenhand from
this day forth, my lord,” the armorer had assured him the rst time
he’d tted it onto Jaime’s wrist. He was wrong. I shall be the
Kingslayer till I die.
The golden hand was the occasion for much admiring comment
over supper, at least until Jaime knocked over a goblet of wine.
Then his temper got the best of him. “If you admire the bloody
thing so much, lop o your own sword hand and you can have it,”
he told Flement Brax. After that there was no more talk about his
hand, and he managed to drink some wine in peace.
The lady of the castle was a Lannister by marriage, a plump
toddler who had been wed to his cousin Tyrek before she was a
year old. Lady Ermesande was duly trotted out for their approval,
all trussed up in a little gown of cloth-of-gold, with the green fretty
and green pale wavy of House Hayford rendered in tiny beads of
jade. But soon enough the girl began to squall, whereupon she was
promptly whisked o to bed by her wet nurse.
“Has there been no word of our Lord Tyrek?” her castellan asked
as a course of trout was served.
“None.” Tyrek Lannister had vanished during the riots in King’s
Landing whilst Jaime himself was still captive at Riverrun. The boy
would be fourteen by now, assuming he was still alive.

“I led a search myself, at Lord Tywin’s command,” o ered Addam
Marbrand as he boned his sh, “but I found no more than Bywater
had before me. The boy was last seen ahorse, when the press of the
mob broke the line of gold cloaks. Afterward … well, his palfrey
was found, but not the rider. Most like they pulled him down and
slew him. But if that’s so, where is his body? The mob let the other
corpses lie, why not his?”
“He would be of more value alive,” suggested Strongboar. “Any
Lannister would bring a hefty ransom.”
“No doubt,” Marbrand agreed, “yet no ransom demand was ever
made. The boy is simply gone.”
“The boy is dead.” Jaime had drunk three cups of wine, and his
golden hand seemed to be growing heavier and clumsier by the
moment. A hook would serve me just as well. “If they realized whom
they’d killed, no doubt they threw him in the river for fear of my
father’s wrath. They know the taste of that in King’s Landing. Lord
Tywin always paid his debts.”
“Always,” Strongboar agreed, and that was the end of that.
Yet afterward, alone in the tower room he had been o ered for
the night, Jaime found himself wondering. Tyrek had served King
Robert as a squire, side by side with Lancel. Knowledge could be
more valuable than gold, more deadly than a dagger. It was Varys
he thought of then, smiling and smelling of lavender. The eunuch
had agents and informers all over the city. It would have been a
simple matter for him to arrange to have Tyrek snatched during the
confusion … provided he knew beforehand that the mob was like to
riot. And Varys knew all, or so he would have us believe. Yet he gave
Cersei no warning of that riot. Nor did he ride down to the ships to see
Myrcella o .
He opened the shutters. The night was growing cold, and a
horned moon rode the sky. His hand shone dully in its light. No
good for throttling eunuchs, but heavy enough to smash that slimy smile
into a ne red ruin. He wanted to hit someone.
Jaime found Ser Ilyn honing his greatsword. “It’s time,” he told
the man. The headsman rose and followed, his cracked leather boots
scraping against the steep stone steps as they went down the stair. A

small courtyard opened o the armory. Jaime found two shields
there, two halfhelms, and a pair of blunted tourney swords. He
o ered one to Payne and took the other in his left hand as he slid
his right through the loops of the shield. His golden ngers were
curved enough to hook, but could not grasp, so his hold upon the
shield was loose. “You were a knight once, ser,” Jaime said. “So
was I. Let us see what we are now.”
Ser Ilyn raised his blade in reply, and Jaime moved at once to the
attack. Payne was as rusty as his ringmail, and not so strong as
Brienne, yet he met every cut with his own blade, or interposed his
shield. They danced beneath the horned moon as the blunted swords
sang their steely song. The silent knight was content to let Jaime
lead the dance for a while, but nally he began to answer stroke for
stroke. Once he shifted to the attack, he caught Jaime on the thigh,
on the shoulder, on the forearm. Thrice he made his head ring with
cuts to the helm. One slash ripped the shield o his right arm, and
almost burst the straps that bound his golden hand to his stump. By
the time they lowered their swords he was bruised and battered, but
the wine had burned away and his head was clear. “We will dance
again,” he promised Ser Ilyn. “On the morrow, and the morrow.
Every day we’ll dance, till I am as good with my left hand as ever I
was with the right.”
Ser Ilyn opened his mouth and made a clacking sound. A laugh,
Jaime realized. Something twisted in his gut.
Come morning, none of the others was so bold as to make
mention of his bruises. Not one of them had heard the sound of
swordplay in the night, it would seem. Yet when they climbed back
down to camp, Little Lew Piper voiced the question the knights and
lordlings dared not ask. Jaime grinned at him. “They have lusty
wenches in House Hayford. These are love bites, lad.”
Another bright and blustery day was followed by a cloudy one,
then three days of rain. Wind and water made no matter. The
column kept its pace, north along the kingsroad, and each night
Jaime found some private place to win himself more love bites.
They fought inside a stable as a one-eyed mule looked on, and in
the cellar of an inn amongst the casks of wine and ale. They fought

in the blackened shell of a big stone barn, on a wooded island in a
shallow stream, and in an open eld as the rain pattered softly
against their helms and shields.
Jaime made excuses for his nightly forays, but he was not so
foolish as to think that they were believed. Addam Marbrand knew
what he was about, surely, and some of his other captains must
have suspected. But no one spoke of it in his hearing … and since
the only witness lacked a tongue, he need not fear anyone learning
just how inept a swordsman the Kingslayer had become.
Soon the signs of war could be seen on every hand. Weeds and
thorns and brushy trees grew high as a horse’s head in elds where
autumn wheat should be ripening, the kingsroad was bereft of
travelers, and wolves ruled the weary world from dusk till dawn.
Most of the animals were wary enough to keep their distance, but
one of Marbrand’s outriders had his horse run o and killed when
he dismounted for a piss. “No beast would be so bold,” declared Ser
Bonifer the Good, of the stern sad face. “These are demons in the
skins of wolves, sent to chastise us for our sins.”
“This must have been an uncommonly sinful horse,” Jaime said,
standing over what remained of the poor animal. He gave orders for
the rest of the carcass to be cut apart and salted down; it might be
they would need the meat.
At a place called Sow’s Horn they found a tough old knight named
Ser Roger Hogg squatting stubbornly in his towerhouse with six
men-at-arms, four crossbowmen, and a score of peasants. Ser Roger
was as big and bristly as his name and Ser Kennos suggested that he
might be some lost Crakehall, since their sigil was a brindled boar.
Strongboar seemed to believe it and spent an earnest hour
questioning Ser Roger about his ancestors.
Jaime was more interested in what Hogg had to say of wolves.
“We had some trouble with a band of them white star wolves,” the
old knight told him. “They come round sni ng after you, my lord,
but we saw them o , and buried three down by the turnips. Before
them there was a pack of bloody lions, begging your pardon. The
one who led them had a manticore on his shield.”

“Ser Amory Lorch,” Jaime o ered. “My lord father commanded
him to harry the riverlands.”
“Which we’re no part of,” Ser Roger Hogg said stoutly. “My
fealty’s owed to House Hayford, and Lady Ermesande bends her
little knee at King’s Landing, or will when she’s old enough to walk.
I told him that, but this Lorch wasn’t much for listening. He
slaughtered half my sheep and three good milk goats, and tried to
roast me in my tower. My walls are solid stone and eight feet thick,
though, so after his re burned out he rode o bored. The wolves
come later, the ones on four legs. They ate the sheep the manticore
left me. I got a few good pelts in recompense, but fur don’t ll your
belly. What should we do, my lord?”
“Plant,” said Jaime, “and pray for one last harvest.” It was not a
hopeful answer, but it was the only one he had.
The next day, the column crossed the stream that formed the
boundary between the lands that did fealty to King’s Landing and
those beholden to Riverrun. Maester Gulian consulted a map and
announced that these hills were held by the brothers Wode, a pair
of landed knights sworn to Harrenhal … but their halls had been
earth and timber, and only blackened beams remained of them.
No Wodes appeared, nor any of their smallfolk, though some
outlaws had taken shelter in the root cellar beneath the second
brother’s keep. One of them wore the ruins of a crimson cloak, but
Jaime hanged him with the rest. It felt good. This was justice. Make
a habit of it, Lannister, and one day men might call you Goldenhand
after all. Goldenhand the Just.
The world grew ever greyer as they drew near to Harrenhal.
They rode beneath slate skies, beside waters that shone old and cold
as a sheet of beaten steel. Jaime found himself wondering if Brienne
might have passed this way before him. If she thought that Sansa
Stark had made for Riverrun … Had they encountered other travelers,
he might have stopped to ask if any of them had chance to see a
pretty maid with auburn hair, or a big ugly one with a face that
would curdle milk. But there was no one on the roads but wolves,
and their howling held no answers.

Across the pewter waters of the lake the towers of Black Harren’s
folly appeared at last, ve twisted ngers of black, misshapen stone
grasping for the sky. Though Little nger had been named the Lord
of Harrenhal, he seemed in no great haste to occupy his new seat,
so it had fallen to Jaime Lannister to “sort out” Harrenhal on his
way to Riverrun.
That it needed sorting out he did not doubt. Gregor Clegane had
wrested the immense, gloomy castle away from the Bloody
Mummers before Cersei recalled him to King’s Landing. No doubt
the Mountain’s men were still rattling around inside like so many
dried peas in a suit of plate, but they were not ideally suited to
restore the king’s peace to the Trident. The only peace Ser Gregor’s
lot had ever given anyone was the peace of the grave.
Ser Addam’s outriders had reported that the gates of Harrenhal
were closed and barred. Jaime drew his men up before them and
commanded Ser Kennos of Kayce to sound the Horn of Herrock,
black and twisted and banded in old gold.
When three blasts had echoed o the walls, they heard the groan
of iron hinges and the gates swung slowly open. So thick were the
walls of Black Harren’s folly that Jaime passed beneath a dozen
murder holes before emerging into sudden sunlight in the yard
where he’d bid farewell to the Bloody Mummers, not so long ago.
Weeds were sprouting from the hard-packed earth, and ies buzzed
about the carcass of a horse.
A handful of Ser Gregor’s men emerged from the towers to watch
him dismount; hard-eyed, hard-mouthed men, the lot of them. They
would have to be, to ride beside the Mountain. About the best that
could be said for Gregor’s men was that they were not quite as vile
and violent a bunch as the Brave Companions. “Fuck me, Jaime
Lannister,” blurted one grey and grizzled man-at-arms. “It’s the
bleeding Kingslayer, boys. Fuck me with a spear!”
“Who might you be?” Jaime asked.
“Ser used to call me Shitmouth, if it please m’lord.” He spit in his
hands and wiped his cheeks with them, as if that would somehow
make him more presentable.
“Charming. Do you command here?”

“Me? Shit, no. M’lord. Bugger me with a bloody spear.”
Shitmouth had enough crumbs in his beard to feed the garrison.
Jaime had to laugh. The man took that for encouragement. “Bugger
me with a bloody spear,” he said again, and started laughing too.
“You heard the man,” Jaime said to Ilyn Payne. “Find a nice long
spear, and shove it up his arse.”
Ser Ilyn did not have a spear, but Beardless Jon Bettley was glad
to toss him one. Shitmouth’s drunken laughter stopped abruptly.
“You keep that bloody thing away from me.”
“Make up your mind,” said Jaime. “Who has the command here?
Did Ser Gregor name a castellan?”
“Polliver,” another man said, “only the Hound killed him, m’lord.
Him and the Tickler both, and that Sars eld boy.”
The Hound again. “You know it was Sandor? You saw him?”
“Not us, m’lord. That innkeep told us.”
“It happened at the crossroads inn, my lord.” The speaker was a
younger man with a mop of sandy hair. He wore the chain of coins
that had once belonged to Vargo Hoat; coins from half a hundred
distant cities, silver and gold, copper and bronze, square coins and
round coins, triangles and rings and bits of bone. “The innkeep
swore the man had one side of his face all burned. His whores told
the same tale. Sandor had some boy with him, a ragged peasant lad.
They hacked Polly and the Tickler to bloody bits and rode o down
the Trident, we were told.”
“Did you send men after them?”
Shitmouth frowned, as if the thought were painful. “No, m’lord.
Fuck us all, we never did.”
“When a dog goes mad you cut his throat.”
“Well,” the man said, rubbing his mouth, “I never much liked
Polly, that shit, and the dog, he were Ser’s brother, so …”
“We’re bad, m’lord,” broke in the man who wore the coins, “but
you’d need to be mad to face the Hound.”
Jaime looked him over. Bolder than the rest, and not as drunk as
Shitmouth. “You were afraid of him.”
“I wouldn’t say afraid, m’lord. I’d say we was leaving him for our
betters. Someone like Ser. Or you.”

Me, when I had two hands. Jaime did not delude himself. Sandor
would make short work of him now. “You have a name?”
“Ra ord, if it pleases. Most call me Ra .”
“Ra , gather the garrison together in the Hall of a Hundred
Hearths. Your captives as well. I’ll want to see them. Those whores
from the crossroads too. Oh, and Hoat. I was distraught to hear that
he had died. I’d like to look upon his head.”
When they brought it to him, he found that the Goat’s lips had
been sliced o , along with his ears and most of his nose. The crows
had supped upon his eyes. It was still recognizably Hoat, however.
Jaime would have known his beard anywhere; an absurd rope of
hair two feet long, dangling from a pointed chin. Elsewise, only a
few leathery strips of esh still clung to the Qohorik’s skull. “Where
is the rest of him?” he asked.
No one wanted to tell him. Finally, Shitmouth lowered his eyes,
and muttered, “Rotted, ser. And et.”
“One of the captives was always begging food,” Ra ord admitted,
“so Ser said to give him roast goat. The Qohorik didn’t have much
meat on him, though. Ser took his hands and feet rst, then his
arms and legs.”
“The fat bugger got most, m’lord,” Shitmouth o ered, “but Ser,
he said to see that all the captives had a taste. And Hoat too, his
own self. That whoreson ’ud slobber when we fed him, and the
grease’d run down into that skinny beard o’ his.”
Father, Jaime thought, your dogs have both gone mad. He found
himself remembering tales he had rst heard as a child at Casterly
Rock, of mad Lady Lothston who bathed in tubs of blood and
presided over feasts of human esh within these very walls.
Somehow revenge had lost its savor. “Take this and throw it in
the lake.” Jaime tossed Hoat’s head to Peck, and turned to address
the garrison. “Until such time as Lord Petyr arrives to claim his
seat, Ser Bonifer Hasty shall hold Harrenhal in the name of the
crown. Those of you who wish may join him, if he’ll have you. The
rest will ride with me to Riverrun.”
The Mountain’s men looked at one another. “We’re owed,” said
one. “Ser promised us. Rich rewards, he said.”

“His very words,” Shitmouth agreed. “Rich rewards, for them as
rides with me.” A dozen others began to yammer their assent.
Ser Bonifer raised a gloved hand. “Any man who remains with me
shall have a hide of land to work, a second hide when he takes a
wife, a third at the birth of his rst child.”
“Land, ser?” Shitmouth spat. “Piss on that. If we wanted to grub
in the bloody dirt, we could have bloody well stayed home, begging
your pardon, ser. Rich rewards, Ser said. Meaning gold.”
“If you have a grievance, go to King’s Landing and take it up with
my sweet sister.” Jaime turned to Ra ord. “I’ll see those captives
now. Starting with Ser Wylis Manderly.”
“He the fat one?” asked Ra ord.
“I devoutly hope so. And tell me no sad stories of how he died, or
the lot of you are apt to do the same.”
Any hopes he might have nursed of nding Shagwell, Pyg, or
Zollo languishing in the dungeons were sadly disappointed. The
Brave Companions had abandoned Vargo Hoat to a man, it would
seem. Of Lady Whent’s people, only three remained—the cook who
had opened the postern gate for Ser Gregor, a bent-back armorer
called Ben Blackthumb, and a girl named Pia, who was not near as
pretty as she had been when Jaime saw her last. Someone had
broken her nose and knocked out half her teeth. The girl fell at
Jaime’s feet when she saw him, sobbing and clinging to his leg with
hysterical strength till Strongboar pulled her o . “No one will hurt
you now,” he told her, but that only made her sob the louder.
The other captives had been better treated. Ser Wylis Manderly
was amongst them, along with several other highborn northmen
taken prisoner by the Mountain That Rides in the ghting at the
fords of the Trident. Useful hostages, all worth a goodly ransom.
They were ragged, lthy, and shaggy to a man, and some had fresh
bruises, cracked teeth, and missing ngers, but their wounds had
been washed and bandaged, and none of them had gone hungry.
Jaime wondered if they had any inkling what they’d been eating,
and decided it was better not to inquire.
None had any de ance left; especially not Ser Wylis, a bushyfaced tub of suet with dull eyes and sallow, sagging jowls. When

Jaime told him that he would be escorted to Maidenpool and there
put on a ship for White Harbor, Ser Wylis collapsed into a puddle on
the oor and sobbed longer and louder than Pia had. It took four
men to lift him back onto his feet. Too much roast goat, Jaime
re ected. Gods, but I hate this bloody castle. Harrenhal had seen more
horror in its three hundred years than Casterly Rock had witnessed
in three thousand.
Jaime commanded that res be lit in the Hall of a Hundred
Hearths and sent the cook hobbling back to the kitchens to prepare
a hot meal for the men of his column. “Anything but goat.”
He took his own supper in Hunter’s Hall with Ser Bonifer Hasty, a
solemn stork of a man prone to salting his speech with appeals to
the Seven. “I want none of Ser Gregor’s followers,” he declared as
he was cutting up a pear as withered as he was, so as to make
certain that its nonexistent juice did not stain his pristine purple
doublet, embroidered with the white bend cotised of his House. “I
will not have such sinners in my service.”
“My septon used to say all men were sinners.”
“He was not wrong,” Ser Bonifer allowed, “but some sins are
blacker than others, and fouler in the nostrils of the Seven.”
And you have no more nose than my little brother, or my own sins
would have you choking on that pear. “Very well. I’ll take Gregor’s lot
o your hands.” He could always nd a use for ghters. If nothing
else, he could send them up the ladders rst, should he need to
storm the walls of Riverrun.
“Take the whore as well,” Ser Bonifer urged. “You know the one.
The girl from the dungeons.”
“Pia.” The last time he had been here, Qyburn had sent the girl to
his bed, thinking that would please him. But the Pia they had
brought up from the dungeons was a di erent creature from the
sweet, simple, giggly creature who’d crawled beneath his blankets.
She had made the mistake of speaking when Ser Gregor wanted
quiet, so the Mountain had smashed her teeth to splinters with a
mailed st and broken her pretty little nose as well. He would have
done worse, no doubt, if Cersei had not called him down to King’s
Landing to face the Red Viper’s spear. Jaime would not mourn him.

“Pia was born in this castle,” he told Ser Bonifer. “It is the only
home she has ever known.”
“She is a font of corruption,” said Ser Bonifer. “I won’t have her
near my men, aunting her … parts.”
“I expect her aunting days are done,” he said, “but if you nd
her that objectionable, I’ll take her.” He could make her a
washerwoman, he supposed. His squires did not mind raising his
tent, grooming his horse, or cleaning his armor, but the task of
caring for his clothes struck them as unmanly. “Can you hold
Harrenhal with just your Holy Hundred?” Jaime asked. They should
actually be called the Holy Eighty-Six, having lost fourteen men
upon the Blackwater, but no doubt Ser Bonifer would ll up his
ranks again as soon as he found some su ciently pious recruits.
“I anticipate no di culty. The Crone will light our way, and the
Warrior will give strength to our arms.”
Or else the Stranger will turn up for the whole holy lot of you. Jaime
could not be certain who had convinced his sister that Ser Bonifer
should be named castellan of Harrenhal, but the appointment
smelled of Orton Merryweather. Hasty had once served
Merryweather’s grandsire, he seemed to recall dimly. And the
carrot-haired justiciar was just the sort of simpleminded fool to
assume that someone called “the Good” was the very potion the
riverlands required to heal the wounds left by Roose Bolton, Vargo
Hoat, and Gregor Clegane.
But he might not be wrong. Hasty hailed from the stormlands, so
had neither friends nor foes along the Trident; no blood feuds, no
debts to pay, no cronies to reward. He was sober, just, and dutiful,
and his Holy Eighty-Six were as well disciplined as any soldiers in
the Seven Kingdoms, and made a lovely sight as they wheeled and
pranced their tall grey geldings. Little nger had once quipped that
Ser Bonifer must have gelded the riders too, so spotless was their
repute.
All the same, Jaime wondered about any soldiers who were better
known for their lovely horses than for the foes they’d slain. They
pray well, I suppose, but can they ght? They had not disgraced
themselves on the Blackwater, so far as he knew, but they had not

distinguished themselves either. Ser Bonifer himself had been a
promising knight in his youth, but something had happened to him,
a defeat or a disgrace or a near brush with death, and afterward he
had decided that jousting was an empty vanity and put away his
lance for good and all.
Harrenhal must be held, though, and Baelor Butthole here is the man
that Cersei chose to hold it. “This castle has an ill repute,” he warned
him, “and one that’s well deserved. It’s said that Harren and his sons
still walk the halls by night, a re. Those who look upon them burst
into ame.”
“I fear no shade, ser. It is written in The Seven-Pointed Star that
spirits, wights, and revenants cannot harm a pious man, so long as
he is armored in his faith.”
“Then armor yourself in faith, by all means, but wear a suit of
mail and plate as well. Every man who holds this castle seems to
come to a bad end. The Mountain, the Goat, even my father …”
“If you will forgive my saying so, they were not godly men, as
we are. The Warrior defends us, and help is always near, if some
dread foe should threaten. Maester Gulian will be remaining with
his ravens, Lord Lancel is nearby at Darry with his garrison, and
Lord Randyll holds Maidenpool. Together we three shall hunt down
and destroy whatever outlaws prowl these parts. Once that is done,
the Seven will guide the goodfolk back to their villages to plow and
plant and build anew.”
The ones the Goat didn’t kill, at least. Jaime hooked his golden
ngers round the stem of his wine goblet. “If any of Hoat’s Brave
Companions fall into your hands, send word to me at once.” The
Stranger might have made o with the Goat before Jaime could get
around to him, but fat Zollo was still out there, with Shagwell,
Rorge, Faithful Urswyck, and the rest.
“So you can torture them and kill them?”
“I suppose you would forgive them, in my place?”
“If they made sincere repentance for their sins … yes, I would
embrace them all as brothers and pray with them before I sent them
to the block. Sins may be forgiven. Crimes require punishment.”
Hasty folded his hands before him like a steeple, in a way that

reminded Jaime uncomfortably of his father. “If it is Sandor
Clegane that we encounter, what would you have me do?”
Pray hard, Jaime thought, and run. “Send him to join his beloved
brother and be glad the gods made seven hells. One would never be
enough to hold both of the Cleganes.” He pushed himself
awkwardly to his feet. “Beric Dondarrion is a di erent matter.
Should you capture him, hold him for my return. I’ll want to march
him back to King’s Landing with a rope about his neck, and have Ser
Ilyn take his head o where half the realm can see.”
“And this Myrish priest who runs with him? It is said he spreads
his false faith everywhere.”
“Kill him, kiss him, or pray with him, as you please.”
“I have no wish to kiss the man, my lord.”
“No doubt he’d say the same of you.” Jaime’s smile turned into a
yawn. “My pardons. I shall take my leave of you, if you have no
objections.”
“None, my lord,” said Hasty. No doubt he wished to pray.
Jaime wished to ght. He took the steps two at a time, out to
where the night air was cold and crisp. In the torchlit yard
Strongboar and Ser Flement Brax were having at each other whilst a
ring of men-at-arms cheered them on. Ser Lyle will have the best of
that one, he knew. I need to nd Ser Ilyn. His ngers had the itch
again. His footsteps took him away from the noise and the light. He
passed beneath the covered bridge and through the Flowstone Yard
before he realized where he was headed.
As he neared the bear pit, he saw the glow of a lantern, its pale
wintry light washing over the tiers of steep stone seats. Someone has
come before me, it would seem. The pit would be a ne place to
dance; perhaps Ser Ilyn had anticipated him.
But the knight standing over the pit was bigger; a husky, bearded
man in a red-and-white surcoat adorned with gri ns. Connington.
What’s he doing here? Below, the carcass of the bear still sprawled
upon the sands, though only bones and ragged fur remained, halfburied. Jaime felt a pang of pity for the beast. At least he died in
battle. “Ser Ronnet,” he called, “have you lost your way? It is a
large castle, I know.”

Red Ronnet raised his lantern. “I wished to see where the bear
danced with the maiden not-so-fair.” His beard shone in the light as
if it were a re. Jaime could smell wine on his breath. “Is it true the
wench fought naked?”
“Naked? No.” He wondered how that wrinkle had been added to
the story. “The Mummers put her in a pink silk gown and shoved a
tourney sword into her hand. The Goat wanted her death to be
amuthing. Elsewise …”
“… the sight of Brienne naked might have made the bear ee in
terror.” Connington laughed.
Jaime did not. “You speak as if you know the lady.”
“I was betrothed to her.”
That took him by surprise. Brienne had never mentioned a
betrothal. “Her father made a match for her …”
“Thrice,” said Connington. “I was the second. My father’s notion.
I had heard the wench was ugly, and I told him so, but he said all
women were the same once you blew the candle out.”
“Your father.” Jaime eyed Red Ronnet’s surcoat, where two
gri ns faced each other on a eld of red and white. Dancing gri ns.
“Our late Hand’s … brother, was he?”
“Cousin. Lord Jon had no brothers.”
“No.” It all came back to him. Jon Connington had been Prince
Rhaegar’s friend. When Merryweather failed so dismally to contain
Robert’s Rebellion and Prince Rhaegar could not be found, Aerys
had turned to the next best thing, and raised Connington to the
Handship. But the Mad King was always chopping o his Hands. He
had chopped Lord Jon after the Battle of the Bells, stripping him of
honors, lands, and wealth, and packing him o across the sea to die
in exile, where he soon drank himself to death. The cousin, though
—Red Ronnet’s father—had joined the rebellion and been rewarded
with Gri n’s Roost after the Trident. He only got the castle,
though; Robert kept the gold, and bestowed the greater part of the
Connington lands on more fervent supporters.
Ser Ronnet was a landed knight, no more. For any such, the Maid
of Tarth would have been a sweet plum indeed. “How is it that you
did not wed?” Jaime asked him.

“Why, I went to Tarth and saw her. I had six years on her, yet the
wench could look me in the eye. She was a sow in silk, though most
sows have bigger teats. When she tried to talk she almost choked on
her own tongue. I gave her a rose and told her it was all that she
would ever have from me.” Connington glanced into the pit. “The
bear was less hairy than that freak, I’ll—”
Jaime’s golden hand cracked him across the mouth so hard the
other knight went stumbling down the steps. His lantern fell and
smashed, and the oil spread out, burning. “You are speaking of a
highborn lady, ser. Call her by her name. Call her Brienne.”
Connington edged away from the spreading ames on his hands
and knees. “Brienne. If it please my lord.” He spat a glob of blood
at Jaime’s foot. “Brienne the Beauty.”

CERSEI

It was a slow climb to the top of Visenya’s Hill. As the horses
labored upward, the queen leaned back against a plump red
cushion. From outside came the voice of Ser Osmund Kettleblack.
“Make way. Clear the street. Make way for Her Grace the queen.”
“Margaery does keep a lively court,” Lady Merryweather was
saying. “We have jugglers, mummers, poets, puppets …”
“Singers?” prompted Cersei.
“Many and more, Your Grace. Hamish the Harper plays for her
once a fortnight, and sometimes Alaric of Eysen will entertain us of
an evening, but the Blue Bard is her favorite.”
Cersei recalled the bard from Tommen’s wedding. Young, and fair
to look upon. Could there be something there? “There are other men as
well, I hear. Knights and courtiers. Admirers. Tell me true, my lady.
Do you think Margaery is still a maiden?”
“She says she is, Your Grace.”
“So she does. What do you say?”
Taena’s black eyes sparkled with mischief. “When she wed Lord
Renly at Highgarden, I helped disrobe him for the bedding. His
lordship was a well-made man, and lusty. I saw the proof when we
tumbled him into the wedding bed where his bride awaited him as
naked as her name day, blushing prettily beneath the coverlets. Ser
Loras had carried her up the steps himself. Margaery may say that
the marriage was never consummated, that Lord Renly had drunk

too much wine at the wedding feast, but I promise you, the bit
between his legs was anything but weary when last I saw it.”
“Did you chance to see the marriage bed the morning after?”
Cersei asked. “Did she bleed?”
“No sheet was shown, Your Grace.”
A pity. Still, the absence of a bloody sheet meant little, by itself.
Common peasant girls bled like pigs upon their wedding nights, she
had heard, but that was less true of highborn maids like Margaery
Tyrell. A lord’s daughter was more like to give her maidenhead to a
horse than a husband, it was said, and Margaery had been riding
since she was old enough to walk. “I understand the little queen has
many admirers amongst our household knights. The Redwyne twins,
Ser Tallad … who else, pray tell?”
Lady Merryweather gave a shrug. “Ser Lambert, the fool who
hides a good eye behind a patch. Bayard Norcross. Courtenay
Greenhill. The brothers Woodwright, sometimes Portifer and often
Lucantine. Oh, and Grand Maester Pycelle is a frequent visitor.”
“Pycelle? Truly?” Had that doddering old worm forsaken the lion
for the rose? If so, he will regret it. “Who else?”
“The Summer Islander in his feathered cloak. How could I have
forgotten him, with his skin as black as ink? Others come to pay
court to her cousins. Elinor is promised to the Ambrose boy, but
loves to irt, and Megga has a new suitor every fortnight. Once she
kissed a potboy in the kitchen. I have heard talk of her marrying
Lady Bulwer’s brother, but if Megga were to choose for herself, she
would sooner have Mark Mullendore, I am certain.”
Cersei laughed. “The butter y knight who lost his arm on the
Blackwater? What good is half a man?”
“Megga thinks him sweet. She has asked Lady Margaery to help
her nd a monkey for him.”
“A monkey.” The queen did not know what to say to that.
Sparrows and monkeys. Truly, the realm is going mad. “What of our
brave Ser Loras? How often does he call upon his sister?”
“More than any of the others.” When Taena frowned, a tiny
crease appeared between her dark eyes. “Every morn and every
night he visits, unless duty interferes. Her brother is devoted to her,

they share everything with … oh …” For a moment, the Myrish
woman looked almost shocked. Then a smile spread across her face.
“I have had a most wicked thought, Your Grace.”
“Best keep it to yourself. The hill is thick with sparrows, and we
all know how sparrows abhor wickedness.”
“I have heard they abhor soap and water too, Your Grace.”
“Perhaps too much prayer robs a man of his sense of smell. I shall
be sure to ask His High Holiness.”
The draperies swayed back and forth in a wash of crimson silk.
“Orton told me that the High Septon has no name,” Lady Taena
said. “Can that be true? In Myr we all have names.”
“Oh, he had a name once. They all do.” The queen waved a hand
dismissively. “Even septons born of noble blood go only by their
given names once they have taken their vows. When one of them is
elevated to High Septon, he puts aside that name as well. The Faith
will tell you he no longer has any need of a man’s name, for he has
become the avatar of the gods.”
“How do you distinguish one High Septon from another?”
“With di culty. One has to say, ‘the fat one,’ or ‘the one before
the fat one,’ or ‘the old one who died in his sleep.’ You can always
winkle out their birth names if you like, but they take umbrage if
you use them. It reminds them that they were born ordinary men,
and they do not like that.”
“My lord husband tells me this new one was born with lth
beneath his ngernails.”
“So I suspect. As a rule the Most Devout elevate one of their own,
but there have been exceptions.” Grand Maester Pycelle had
informed her of the history, at tedious length. “During the reign of
King Baelor the Blessed a simple stonemason was chosen as High
Septon. He worked stone so beautifully that Baelor decided he was
the Smith reborn in mortal esh. The man could neither read nor
write, nor recall the words of the simplest of prayers.” Some still
claimed that Baelor’s Hand had the man poisoned to spare the realm
embarrassment. “After that one died, an eight-year-old boy was
elevated, once more at King Baelor’s urging. The boy worked

miracles, His Grace declared, though even his little healing hands
could not save Baelor during his nal fast.”
Lady Merryweather gave a laugh. “Eight years old? Perhaps my
son could be High Septon. He is almost seven.”
“Does he pray a lot?” the queen asked.
“He prefers to play with swords.”
“A real boy, then. Can he name all seven gods?”
“I think so.”
“I shall have to take him under consideration.” Cersei did not
doubt that there were any number of boys who would do more
honor to the crystal crown than the wretch on whom the Most
Devout had chosen to bestow it. This is what comes of letting fools and
cowards rule themselves. Next time, I will choose their master for them.
And the next time might not be long in coming, if the new High
Septon continued to annoy her. Baelor’s Hand had little to teach
Cersei Lannister where such matters were concerned.
“Clear the way!” Ser Osmund Kettleblack was shouting. “Make way
for the Queen’s Grace!”
The litter began to slow, which could only mean that they were
near the top of the hill. “You should bring this son of yours to
court,” Cersei told Lady Merryweather. “Six is not too young.
Tommen needs other boys about him. Why not your son?” Jo rey
had never had a close friend of his own age, that she recalled. The
poor boy was always alone. I had Jaime when I was a child … and
Melara, until she fell into the well. Jo had been fond of the Hound, to
be sure, but that was not friendship. He was looking for the father
he never found in Robert. A little foster brother might be just what
Tommen needs to wean him away from Margaery and her hens. In time
they might grow as close as Robert and his boyhood friend Ned
Stark. A fool, but a loyal fool. Tommen will have need of loyal friends to
watch his back.
“Your Grace is kind, but Russell has never known any home but
Longtable. I fear he would be lost in this great city.”
“In the beginning,” the queen allowed, “but he will soon outgrow
that, as I did. When my father sent for me to court I wept and
Jaime raged, until my aunt sat me down in the Stone Garden and

told me there was no one in King’s Landing that I need ever fear.
‘You are a lioness,’ she said, ‘and it is for all the lesser beasts to fear
you.’ Your son will nd his courage too. Surely you would prefer to
have him close at hand, where you could see him every day? He is
your only child, is he not?”
“For the present. My lord husband has asked the gods to bless us
with another son, in case …”
“I know.” She thought of Jo rey, clawing at his neck. In his last
moments he had looked to her in desperate appeal, and a sudden
memory had stopped her heart; a drop of red blood hissing in a
candle ame, a croaking voice that spoke of crowns and shrouds, of
death at the hands of the valonqar.
Outside the litter, Ser Osmund was shouting something, and
someone was shouting back. The litter jerked to a halt. “Are you all
dead?” roared Kettleblack. “Get out of the bloody way!”
The queen pulled back a corner of the curtain and beckoned to
Ser Meryn Trant. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“The sparrows, Your Grace.” Ser Meryn wore white scale armor
beneath his cloak. His helm and shield were slung from his saddle.
“Camping in the street. We’ll make them move.”
“Do that, but gently. I do not care to be caught up in another
riot.” Cersei let the curtain fall. “This is absurd.”
“It is, Your Grace,” Lady Merryweather agreed. “The High Septon
should have come to you. And these wretched sparrows …”
“He feeds them, coddles them, blesses them. Yet will not bless the
king.” The blessing was an empty ritual, she knew, but rituals and
ceremonies had power in the eyes of the ignorant. Aegon the
Conqueror himself had dated the start of his realm from the day the
High Septon anointed him in Oldtown. “This wretched priest will
obey, or learn how weak and human he still is.”
“Orton says it is the gold he really wants. That he means to
withhold his blessing until the crown resumes its payments.”
“The Faith will have its gold as soon as we have peace.” Septon
Torbert and Septon Raynard had been most understanding of her
plight … unlike the wretched Braavosi, who had hounded poor Lord
Gyles so mercilessly that he had taken to his bed, coughing up

blood. We had to have those ships. She could not rely upon the Arbor
for her navy; the Redwynes were too close to the Tyrells. She
needed her own strength at sea.
The dromonds rising on the river would give her that. Her
agship would dip twice as many oars as King Robert’s Hammer.
Aurane had asked her leave to name her Lord Tywin, which Cersei
had been pleased to grant. She looked forward to hearing men
speak of her father as a “she.” Another of the ships would be named
Sweet Cersei, and would bear a gilded gurehead carved in her
likeness, clad in mail and lion helm, with spear in hand. Brave
Jo rey, Lady Joanna, and Lioness would follow her to sea, along
with Queen Margaery, Golden Rose, Lord Renly, Lady Olenna, and
Princess Myrcella. The queen had made the mistake of telling
Tommen he might name the last ve. He had actually chosen Moon
Boy for one. Only when Lord Aurane suggested that men might not
want to serve on a ship named for a fool had the boy reluctantly
agreed to honor his sister instead.
“If this ragged septon thinks to make me buy Tommen’s blessing,
he will soon learn better,” she told Taena. The queen did not intend
to truckle to a pack of priests.
The litter halted yet again, so suddenly that Cersei jerked. “Oh,
this is infuriating.” She leaned out once more, and saw that they had
reached the top of Visenya’s Hill. Ahead loomed the Great Sept of
Baelor, with its magni cent dome and seven shining towers, but
between her and the marble steps lay a sullen sea of humanity,
brown and ragged and unwashed. Sparrows, she thought, sni ng,
though no sparrows had ever smelled so rank.
Cersei was appalled. Qyburn had brought her reports of their
numbers, but hearing about them was one thing and seeing them
another. Hundreds were encamped upon the plaza, hundreds more
in the gardens. Their cook res lled the air with smoke and stinks.
Roughspun tents and miserable hovels made of mud and scrap wood
besmirched the pristine white marble. They were even huddled on
the steps, beneath the Great Sept’s towering doors.
Ser Osmund came trotting back to her. Beside him rode Ser
Osfryd, mounted on a stallion as golden as his cloak. Osfryd was the

middle Kettleblack, quieter than his siblings, more apt to scowl than
smile. And crueler as well, if the tales are true. Perhaps I should have
sent him to the Wall.
Grand Maester Pycelle had wanted an older man “more seasoned
in the ways of war” to command the gold cloaks, and several of her
other councillors had agreed with him. “Ser Osfryd is seasoned quite
su ciently,” she had told them, but even that did not shut them up.
They yap at me like a pack of small, annoying dogs. Her patience with
Pycelle had all but run its course. He had even had the temerity to
object to her sending to Dorne for a master-at-arms, on the grounds
that it might o end the Tyrells. “Why do you think I’m doing it?”
she had asked him scornfully.
“Beg pardon, Your Grace,” said Ser Osmund. “My brother’s
summoning more gold cloaks. We’ll clear a path, never fear.”
“I do not have the time. I will continue on afoot.”
“Please, Your Grace.” Taena caught her arm. “They frighten me.
There are hundreds of them, and so dirty.”
Cersei kissed her cheek. “The lion does not fear the
sparrow … but it is good of you to care. I know you love me well,
my lady. Ser Osmund, kindly help me down.”
If I had known I was going to have to walk, I would have dressed for
it. She wore a white gown slashed with cloth-of-gold, lacy but
demure. It had been several years since the last time she had
donned it, and the queen found it uncomfortably tight about the
middle. “Ser Osmund, Ser Meryn, you will accompany me. Ser
Osfryd, see that my litter comes to no harm.” Some of the sparrows
looked gaunt and hollow-eyed enough to eat her horses.
As she made her way through the ragged throng, past their
cook res, wagons, and crude shelters, the queen found herself
remembering another crowd that had once gathered on this plaza.
The day she wed Robert Baratheon, thousands had turned out to
cheer for them. All the women wore their best, and half the men
had children on their shoulders. When she had emerged from inside
the sept, hand in hand with the young king, the crowd sent up a
roar so loud it could be heard in Lannisport. “They like you well,
my lady,” Robert whispered in her ear. “See, every face is smiling.”

For that one short moment she had been happy in her
marriage … until she chanced to glance at Jaime. No, she
remembered thinking, not every face, my lord.
No one was smiling now. The looks the sparrows gave her were
dull, sullen, hostile. They made way but reluctantly. If they were
truly sparrows, a shout would send them ying. A hundred gold cloaks
with staves and swords and maces could clear this rabble quick enough.
That was what Lord Tywin would have done. He would have ridden
over them instead of walking through.
When she saw what they had done to Baelor the Beloved, the
queen had cause to rue her soft heart. The great marble statue that
had smiled serenely over the plaza for a hundred years was waistdeep in a heap of bones and skulls. Some of the skulls had scraps of
esh still clinging to them. A crow sat atop one such, enjoying a
dry, leathery feast. Flies were everywhere. “What is the meaning of
this?” Cersei demanded of the crowd. “Do you mean to bury Blessed
Baelor in a mountain of carrion?”
A one-legged man stepped forward, leaning on a wooden crutch.
“Your Grace, these are the bones of holy men and women,
murdered for their faith. Septons, septas, brothers brown and dun
and green, sisters white and blue and grey. Some were hanged,
some disemboweled. Septs have been despoiled, maidens and
mothers raped by godless men and demon worshipers. Even silent
sisters have been molested. The Mother Above cries out in her
anguish. We have brought their bones here from all over the realm,
to bear witness to the agony of the Holy Faith.”
Cersei could feel the weight of eyes upon her. “The king shall
know of these atrocities,” she answered solemnly. “Tommen will
share your outrage. This is the work of Stannis and his red witch,
and the savage northmen who worship trees and wolves.” She
raised her voice. “Good people, your dead shall be avenged!”
A few cheered, but only a few. “We ask no vengeance for our
dead,” said the one-legged man, “only protection for the living. For
the septs and holy places.”
“The Iron Throne must defend the Faith,” growled a hulking lout
with a seven-pointed star painted on his brow. “A king who does

not protect his people is no king at all.” Mutters of assent went up
from those around him. One man had the temerity to grasp Ser
Meryn by the wrist, and say, “It is time for all anointed knights to
forsake their worldly masters and defend our Holy Faith. Stand with
us, ser, if you love the Seven.”
“Unhand me,” said Ser Meryn, wrenching free.
“I hear you,” Cersei said. “My son is young, but he loves the
Seven well. You shall have his protection, and mine own.”
The man with the star upon his brow was not appeased. “The
Warrior will defend us,” he said, “not this fat boy king.”
Meryn Trant reached for his sword, but Cersei stopped him before
he could unsheathe it. She had only two knights amidst a sea of
sparrows. She saw staves and scythes, cudgels and clubs, several
axes. “I will have no blood shed in this holy place, ser.” Why are all
men such children? Cut him down, and the rest will tear us limb from
limb. “We are all the Mother’s children. Come, His High Holiness
awaits us.” But as she made her way through the press to the steps
of the sept, a gaggle of armed men stepped out to block the doors.
They wore mail and boiled leather, with here and there a bit of
dinted plate. Some had spears and some had longswords. More
favored axes, and had sewn red stars upon their bleached white
surcoats. Two had the insolence to cross their spears and bar her
way.
“Is this how you receive your queen?” she demanded of them.
“Pray, where are Raynard and Torbert?” It was not like those two
to miss a chance to fawn on her. Torbert always made a show of
getting down on his knees to wash her feet.
“I do not know the men you speak of,” said one of the men with a
red star on his surcoat, “but if they are of the Faith, no doubt the
Seven had need of their service.”
“Septon Raynard and Septon Torbert are of the Most Devout,”
Cersei said, “and will be furious to learn that you obstructed me. Do
you mean to deny me entrance to Baelor’s holy sept?”
“Your Grace,” said a greybeard with a stooped shoulder. “You are
welcome here, but your men must leave their swordbelts. No
weapons are allowed within, by command of the High Septon.”

“Knights of the Kingsguard do not set aside their swords, not even
in the presence of the king.”
“In the king’s house, the king’s word must rule,” replied the aged
knight, “but this is the house of the gods.”
Color rose to her cheeks. One word to Meryn Trant, and the
stoop-backed greybeard would be meeting his gods sooner than he
might have liked. Not here, though. Not now. “Wait for me,” she told
the Kingsguard curtly. Alone, she climbed the steps. The spearmen
uncrossed their spears. Two other men put their weight against the
doors, and with a great groan they swung apart.
In the Hall of Lamps, Cersei found a score of septons on their
knees, but not in prayer. They had pails of soap and water, and
were scrubbing at the oor. Their roughspun robes and sandals led
Cersei to take them for sparrows, until one raised his head. His face
was red as a beet, and there were broken blisters on his hands,
bleeding. “Your Grace.”
“Septon Raynard?” The queen could scarce believe what she was
seeing. “What are you doing on your knees?”
“He is cleaning the oor.” The speaker was shorter than the
queen by several inches and as thin as a broom handle. “Work is a
form of prayer, most pleasing to the Smith.” He stood, scrub brush
in hand. “Your Grace. We have been expecting you.”
The man’s beard was grey and brown and closely trimmed, his
hair tied up in a hard knot behind his head. Though his robes were
clean, they were frayed and patched as well. He had rolled his
sleeves up to his elbows as he scrubbed, but below the knees the
cloth was soaked and sodden. His face was sharply pointed, with
deep-set eyes as brown as mud. His feet are bare, she saw with
dismay. They were hideous as well, hard and horny things, thick
with callus. “You are His High Holiness?”
“We are.”
Father, give me strength. The queen knew that she should kneel,
but the oor was wet with soap and dirty water and she did not
wish to ruin her gown. She glanced over at the old men on their
knees. “I do not see my friend Septon Torbert.”

“Septon Torbert has been con ned to a penitent’s cell on bread
and water. It is sinful for any man to be so plump when half the
realm is starving.”
Cersei had su ered quite enough for one day. She let him see her
anger. “Is this how you greet me? With a scrub brush in your hand,
dripping water? Do you know who I am?”
“Your Grace is the Queen Regent of the Seven Kingdoms,” the
man said, “but in The Seven-Pointed Star it is written that as men
bow to their lords, and lords to their kings, so kings and queens
must bow before the Seven Who Are One.”
Is he telling me to kneel? If so, he did not know her very well. “By
rights you should have met me on the steps in your nest robes,
with the crystal crown upon your head.”
“We have no crown, Your Grace.”
Her frown deepened. “My lord father gave your predecessor a
crown of rare beauty, wrought in crystal and spun gold.”
“And for that gift we honor him in our prayers,” the High Septon
said, “but the poor need food in their bellies more than we need
gold and crystal on our head. That crown has been sold. So have the
others in our vaults, and all our rings, and our robes of cloth-of-gold
and cloth-of-silver. Wool will keep a man as warm. That is why the
Seven gave us sheep.”
He is utterly mad. The Most Devout must have been mad as well,
to elevate this creature … mad, or terri ed of the beggars at their
doors. Qyburn’s whisperers claimed that Septon Luceon had been
nine votes from elevation when those doors had given way, and the
sparrows came pouring into the Great Sept with their leader on
their shoulders and their axes in their hands.
She xed the small man with an icy stare. “Is there someplace
where we may speak more privily, Your Holiness?”
The High Septon surrendered his scrub brush to one of the Most
Devout. “If Your Grace will follow us?”
He led her through the inner doors, into the sept proper. Their
footsteps echoed o the marble oor. Dust motes swam in the
beams of colored light slanting down through the leaded glass of
the great dome. Incense sweetened the air, and beside the seven

altars candles shone like stars. A thousand twinkled for the Mother
and near as many for the Maid, but you could count the Stranger’s
candles on two hands and still have ngers left.
Even here the sparrows had invaded. A dozen scru y hedge
knights were kneeling before the Warrior, beseeching him to bless
the swords they had piled at his feet. At the Mother’s altar, a septon
was leading a hundred sparrows in prayer, their voices as distant as
waves upon the shore. The High Septon led Cersei to where the
Crone raised her lantern. When he knelt before the altar, she had no
choice but to kneel beside him. Mercifully, this High Septon was not
as long-winded as the fat one had been. I should be grateful for that
much, I suppose.
His High Holiness made no move to rise when his prayer was
done. It would seem they must confer upon their knees. A small
man’s ploy, she thought, amused. “High Holiness,” she said, “these
sparrows are frightening the city. I want them gone.”
“Where should they go, Your Grace?”
There are seven hells, any one of them will serve. “Back where they
came from, I would imagine.”
“They came from everywhere. As the sparrow is the humblest and
most common of the birds, they are the humblest and most common
of men.”
They are common, we agree on that much. “Have you seen what
they have done to Blessed Baelor’s statue? They befoul the plaza
with their pigs and goats and night soil.”
“Night soil can be washed away more easily than blood, Your
Grace. If the plaza was befouled, it was befouled by the execution
that was done here.”
He dares throw Ned Stark in my face? “We all regret that. Jo rey
was young, and not as wise as he might have been. Lord Stark
should have been beheaded elsewhere, out of respect for Blessed
Baelor … but the man was a traitor, let us not forget.”
“King Baelor forgave those who conspired against him.”
King Baelor imprisoned his own sisters, whose only crime was being
beautiful. The rst time Cersei heard that tale, she had gone to
Tyrion’s nursery and pinched the little monster till he cried. I should

have pinched his nose shut and stu ed my sock into his mouth. She
forced herself to smile. “King Tommen will forgive the sparrows
too, once they have returned to their homes.”
“Most have lost their homes. Su ering is everywhere … and
grief, and death. Before coming to King’s Landing, I tended to half a
hundred little villages too small to have a septon of their own. I
walked from each one to the next, performing marriages, absolving
sinners of their sins, naming newborn children. Those villages are
no more, Your Grace. Weeds and thorns grow where gardens once
ourished, and bones litter the roadsides.”
“War is a dreadful thing. These atrocities are the work of the
northmen, and of Lord Stannis and his demon-worshipers.”
“Some of my sparrows speak of bands of lions who despoiled
them … and of the Hound, who was your own sworn man. At
Saltpans he slew an aged septon and despoiled a girl of twelve, an
innocent child promised to the Faith. He wore his armor as he raped
her and her tender esh was torn and crushed by his iron mail.
When he was done he gave her to his men, who cut o her nose and
nipples.”
“His Grace cannot be held responsible for the crimes of every
man who ever served House Lannister. Sandor Clegane is a traitor
and a brute. Why do you think I dismissed him from our service?
He ghts for the outlaw Beric Dondarrion now, not for King
Tommen.”
“As you say. Yet it must be asked—where were the king’s knights
when these things were being done? Did not Jaehaerys the
Conciliator once swear upon the Iron Throne itself that the crown
would always protect and defend the Faith?”
Cersei had no idea what Jaehaerys the Conciliator might have
sworn. “He did,” she agreed, “and the High Septon blessed him and
anointed him as king. It is traditional for every new High Septon to
give the king his blessing … and yet you have refused to bless King
Tommen.”
“Your Grace is mistaken. We have not refused.”
“You have not come.”
“The hour is not yet ripe.”

Are you a priest or a greengrocer? “And what might I do to make
it … riper?” If he dares mention gold, I will deal with this one as I did
the last and nd a pious eight-year-old to wear the crystal crown.
“The realm is full of kings. For the Faith to exalt one above the
rest we must be certain. Three hundred years ago, when Aegon the
Dragon landed beneath this very hill, the High Septon locked
himself within the Starry Sept of Oldtown and prayed for seven
days and seven nights, taking no nourishment but bread and water.
When he emerged he announced that the Faith would not oppose
Aegon and his sisters, for the Crone had lifted up her lamp to show
him what lay ahead. If Oldtown took up arms against the Dragon,
Oldtown would burn, and the Hightower and the Citadel and the
Starry Sept would be cast down and destroyed. Lord Hightower was
a godly man. When he heard the prophecy, he kept his strength at
home and opened the city gates to Aegon when he came. And His
High Holiness anointed the Conqueror with the seven oils. I must do
as he did, three hundred years ago. I must pray, and fast.”
“For seven days and seven nights?”
“For as long as need be.”
Cersei itched to slap his solemn, pious face. I could help you fast,
she thought. I could shut you up in some tower and see that no one
brings you food until the gods have spoken. “These false kings espouse
false gods,” she reminded him. “Only King Tommen defends the
Holy Faith.”
“Yet everywhere septs are burned and looted. Even silent sisters
have been raped, crying their anguish to the sky. Your Grace has
seen the bones and skulls of our holy dead?”
“I have,” she had to say. “Give Tommen your blessing, and he
shall put an end to these outrages.”
“And how shall he do that, Your Grace? Will he send a knight to
walk the roads with every begging brother? Will he give us men to
guard our septas against the wolves and lions?”
I will pretend you did not mention lions. “The realm is at war. His
Grace has need of every man.” Cersei did not intend to squander
Tommen’s strength playing wet nurse to sparrows, or guarding the
wrinkled cunts of a thousand sour septas. Half of them are probably

praying for a good raping. “Your sparrows have clubs and axes. Let
them defend themselves.”
“King Maegor’s laws prohibit that, as Your Grace must know. It
was by his decree that the Faith laid down its swords.”
“Tommen is king now, not Maegor.” What did she care what
Maegor the Cruel had decreed three hundred years ago? Instead of
taking the swords out of the hands of the faithful, he should have used
them for his own ends. She pointed to where the Warrior stood above
his altar of red marble. “What is that he holds?”
“A sword.”
“Has he forgotten how to use it?”
“Maegor’s laws—”
“—could be undone.” She let that hang there, waiting for the
High Sparrow to rise to the bait.
He did not disappoint her. “The Faith Militant reborn … that
would be the answer to three hundred years of prayer, Your Grace.
The Warrior would lift his shining sword again and cleanse this
sinful realm of all its evil. If His Grace were to allow me to restore
the ancient blessed orders of the Sword and Star, every godly man
in the Seven Kingdoms would know him to be our true and rightful
lord.”
That was sweet to hear, but Cersei took care not to seem too
eager. “Your High Holiness spoke of forgiveness earlier. In these
troubled times, King Tommen would be most grateful if you could
see your way to forgiving the crown’s debt. It seems to me we owe
the Faith some nine hundred thousand dragons.”
“Nine hundred thousand six hundred and seventy-four dragons.
Gold that could feed the hungry and rebuild a thousand septs.”
“Is it gold you want?” the queen asked. “Or do you want these
dusty laws of Maegor’s set aside?”
The High Septon pondered that a moment. “As you wish. This
debt shall be forgiven, and King Tommen will have his blessing. The
Warrior’s Sons shall escort me to him, shining in the glory of their
Faith, whilst my sparrows go forth to defend the meek and humble
of the land, reborn as Poor Fellows as of old.”

The queen got to her feet and smoothed her skirts. “I shall have
the papers drawn up, and His Grace will sign them and a x them
with the royal seal.” If there was one part of kingship that Tommen
loved, it was playing with his seal.
“Seven save His Grace. Long may he reign.” The High Septon
made a steeple of his hands and raised his eyes to heaven. “Let the
wicked tremble!”
Do you hear that, Lord Stannis? Cersei could not help but smile.
Even her lord father could have done no better. At a stroke, she had
rid King’s Landing of the plague of sparrows, secured Tommen’s
blessing, and lessened the crown’s debt by close to a million
dragons. Her heart was soaring as she allowed the High Septon to
escort her back to the Hall of Lamps.
Lady Merryweather shared the queen’s delight, though she had
never heard of the Warrior’s Sons or the Poor Fellows. “They date
from before Aegon’s Conquest,” Cersei explained to her. “The
Warrior’s Sons were an order of knights who gave up their lands
and gold and swore their swords to His High Holiness. The Poor
Fellows … they were humbler, though far more numerous. Begging
brothers of a sort, though they carried axes instead of bowls. They
wandered the roads, escorting travelers from sept to sept and town
to town. Their badge was the seven-pointed star, red on white, so
the smallfolk named them Stars. The Warrior’s Sons wore rainbow
cloaks and inlaid silver armor over hair shirts, and bore star-shaped
crystals in the pommels of their longswords. They were the Swords.
Holy
men,
ascetics,
fanatics,
sorcerers,
dragonslayers,
demonhunters … there were many tales about them. But all agree
that they were implacable in their hatred for all enemies of the
Holy Faith.”
Lady Merryweather understood at once. “Enemies such as Lord
Stannis and his red sorceress, perhaps?”
“Why, yes, as it happens,” said Cersei, giggling like a girl. “Shall
we broach a agon of hippocras and drink to the fervor of the
Warrior’s Sons on our way home?”
“To the fervor of the Warrior’s Sons and the brilliance of the
Queen Regent. To Cersei, the First of Her Name!”

The hippocras was as sweet and savory as Cersei’s triumph, and
the queen’s litter seemed almost to oat back across the city. But at
the base of Aegon’s High Hill, they encountered Margaery Tyrell
and her cousins returning from a ride. She dogs me everywhere I go,
Cersei thought with annoyance when she laid eyes on the little
queen.
Behind Margaery came a long tail of courtiers, guards, and
servants, many of them laden with baskets of fresh owers. Each of
her cousins had an admirer in thrall; the gangly squire Alyn
Ambrose rode with Elinor, to whom he was betrothed, Ser Tallad
with shy Alla, one-armed Mark Mullendore with Megga, plump and
laughing. The Redwyne twins were escorting two of Margaery’s
other ladies, Meredyth Crane and Janna Fossoway. The women all
wore owers in their hair. Jalabhar Xho had attached himself to the
party too, as had Ser Lambert Turnberry with his eye patch, and the
handsome singer known as the Blue Bard.
And of course a knight of the Kingsguard must accompany the little
queen, and of course it is the Knight of Flowers. In white scale armor
chased with gold, Ser Loras glittered. Though he no longer
presumed to train Tommen at arms, the king still spent far too
much time in his company. Every time the boy returned from an
afternoon with his little wife, he had some new tale to tell about
something that Ser Loras had said or done.
Margaery hailed them when the two columns met and fell in
beside the queen’s litter. Her cheeks were ushed, her brown
ringlets tumbling loosely about her shoulders, stirred by every pu
of wind. “We have been picking autumn owers in the kingswood,”
she told them.
I know where you were, the queen thought. Her informers were
very good about keeping her apprised of Margaery’s movements.
Such a restless girl, our little queen. She seldom let more than three
days pass without going o for a ride. Some days they would ride
along the Rosby road to hunt for shells and eat beside the sea. Other
times she would take her entourage across the river for an
afternoon of hawking. The little queen was fond of going out on
boats as well, sailing up and down the Blackwater Rush to no

particular purpose. When she was feeling pious she would leave the
castle to pray at Baelor’s Sept. She gave her custom to a dozen
di erent seamstresses, was well-known amongst the city’s
goldsmiths, and had even been known to visit the sh market by
the Mud Gate for a look at the day’s catch. Wherever she went, the
smallfolk fawned on her, and Lady Margaery did all she could to fan
their ardor. She was forever giving alms to beggars, buying hot pies
o bakers’ carts, and reining up to speak to common tradesmen.
Had it been up to her, she would have had Tommen doing all
these things as well. She was forever inviting him to accompany her
and her hens on their adventures, and the boy was forever pleading
with his mother for leave to go along. The queen had given her
consent a few times, if only to allow Ser Osney to spend a few more
hours in Margaery’s company. For all the good it has done. Osney has
proved a grievous disappointment. “Do you remember the day your
sister sailed for Dorne?” Cersei asked her son. “Do you recall the
mob howling on our way back to the castle? The stones, the
curses?”
But the king was deaf to sense, thanks to his little queen. “If we
mingle with the commons, they will love us better.”
“The mob loved the fat High Septon so well they tore him limb
from limb, and him a holy man,” she reminded him. All it did was
make him sullen with her. Just as Margaery wants, I wager. Every day
in every way she tries to steal him from me. Jo rey would have seen
through her schemer’s smile and let her know her place, but
Tommen was more gullible. She knew Jo was too strong for her,
Cersei thought, remembering the gold coin Qyburn had found. For
House Tyrell to hope to rule, he had to be removed. It came back to her
that Margaery and her hideous grandmother had once plotted to
marry Sansa Stark to the little queen’s crippled brother Willas. Lord
Tywin had forestalled that by stealing a march on them and
wedding Sansa to Tyrion, but the link had been there. They are all in
it together, she realized with a start. The Tyrells bribed the gaolers to
free Tyrion, and whisked him down the roseroad to join his vile bride. By
now the both of them are safe in Highgarden, hidden away behind a wall
of roses.

“You should have come along with us, Your Grace,” the little
schemer prattled on as they climbed the slope of Aegon’s High Hill.
“We could have had such a lovely time together. The trees are
gowned in gold and red and orange, and there are owers
everywhere. Chestnuts too. We roasted some on our way home.”
“I have no time for riding through the woods and picking
owers,” Cersei said. “I have a kingdom to rule.”
“Only one, Your Grace? Who rules the other six?” Margaery
laughed a merry little laugh. “You will forgive me my jest, I hope. I
know what a burden you bear. You should let me share the load.
There must be some things I could do to help you. It would put to
rest all this talk that you and I are rivals for the king.”
“Is that what they say?” Cersei smiled. “How foolish. I have
never looked upon you as a rival, not even for a moment.”
“I am so pleased to hear that.” The girl did not seem to realize
that she had been cut. “You and Tommen must come with us the
next time. I know His Grace would love it. The Blue Bard played for
us, and Ser Tallad showed us how to ght with a sta the way the
smallfolk do. The woods are so beautiful in autumn.”
“My late husband loved the forest too.” In the early years of their
marriage, Robert was forever imploring her to hunt with him, but
Cersei had always begged o . His hunting trips allowed her time
with Jaime. Golden days and silver nights. It was a dangerous dance
that they had danced, to be sure. Eyes and ears were everywhere
within the Red Keep, and one could never be certain when Robert
would return. Somehow the peril had only served to make their
times together that much more thrilling. “Still, beauty can
sometimes mask deadly danger,” she warned the little queen.
“Robert lost his life in the woods.”
Margaery smiled at Ser Loras; a sweet sisterly smile, full of
fondness. “Your Grace is kind to fear for me, but my brother keeps
me well protected.”
Go and hunt, Cersei had urged Robert, half a hundred times. My
brother keeps me well protected. She recalled what Taena had told her
earlier, and a laugh came bursting from her lips.

“Your Grace laughs so prettily.” Lady Margaery gave her a
quizzical smile. “Might we share the jest?”
“You will,” the queen said. “I promise you, you will.”

THE REAVER

The drums were pounding out a battle beat as the Iron Victory swept
forward, her ram cutting through the choppy green waters. The
smaller ship ahead was turning, oars slapping at the sea. Roses
streamed upon her banners; fore and aft a white rose upon a red
escutcheon, atop her mast a golden one on a eld as green as grass.
The Iron Victory raked her side so hard that half the boarding party
lost their feet. Oars snapped and splintered, sweet music to the
captain’s ears.
He vaulted over the gunwale, landing on the deck below with his
golden cloak billowing behind him. The white roses drew back, as
men always did at the sight of Victarion Greyjoy armed and
armored, his face hidden behind his kraken helm. They were
clutching swords and spears and axes, but nine of every ten wore no
armor, and the tenth had only a shirt of sewn scales. These are no
ironmen, Victarion thought. They still fear drowning.
“Get him!” one man shouted. “He’s alone!”
“COME!” he roared back. “Come kill me, if you can.”
From all sides the rosey warriors converged, with grey steel in
their hands and terror behind their eyes. Their fear was so ripe
Victarion could taste it. Left and right he laid about, hewing o the
rst man’s arm at the elbow, cleaving through the shoulder of the
second. The third buried his own axehead in the soft pine of
Victarion’s shield. He slammed it into the fool’s face, knocked him

o his feet, and slew him when he tried to rise again. As he was
struggling to free his axe from the dead man’s rib cage, a spear
jabbed him between the shoulder blades. It felt as though someone
had slapped him on the back. Victarion spun and slammed his axe
down onto the spearman’s head, feeling the impact in his arm as the
steel went crunching through helm and hair and skull. The man
swayed for half a heartbeat, till the iron captain wrenched the steel
free and sent his corpse staggering loose-limbed across the deck,
looking more drunk than dead.
By then his ironborn had followed him down onto the deck of the
broken longship. He heard Wulfe One-Ear let out a howl as he went
to work, glimpsed Ragnor Pyke in his rusted mail, saw Nute the
Barber send a throwing axe spinning through the air to catch a man
in the chest. Victarion slew another man, and another. He would
have killed a third, but Ragnor cut him down rst. “Well struck,”
Victarion bellowed at him.
When he turned to nd the next victim for his axe, he spied the
other captain across the deck. His white surcoat was spotted with
blood and gore, but Victarion could make out the arms upon his
breast, the white rose within its red escutcheon. The man bore the
same device upon his shield, on a white eld with a red embattled
border. “You!” the iron captain called across the carnage. “You of
the rose! Be you the lord of Southshield?”
The other raised his visor to show a beardless face. “His son and
heir. Ser Talbert Serry. And who are you, kraken?”
“Your death.” Victarion bulled toward him.
Serry leapt to meet him. His longsword was good castle-forged
steel, and the young knight made it sing. His rst cut was low, and
Victarion de ected it o his axe. His second caught the iron captain
on the helm before he got his shield up. Victarion answered with a
sidearm blow of his axe. Serry’s shield got in the way. Wooden
splinters ew, and the white rose split lengthwise with a sweet
sharp crack. The young knight’s longsword hammered at his thigh,
once, twice, thrice, screaming against the steel. This boy is quick, the
iron captain realized. He smashed his shield in Serry’s face and sent
him staggering back against the gunwale. Victarion raised his axe

and put all his weight behind his cut, to open the boy from neck to
groin, but Serry spun away. The axehead crashed through the rail,
sending splinters ying, and lodged there when he tried to pull it
free. The deck moved under his feet, and he stumbled to one knee.
Ser Talbert cast away his broken shield and slashed down with his
longsword. Victarion’s own shield had twisted half around when he
stumbled. He caught Serry’s blade in an iron st. Lobstered steel
crunched, and a stab of pain made him grunt, yet Victarion held on.
“I am quick as well, boy,” he said as he ripped the sword from the
knight’s hand and ung it into the sea.
Ser Talbert’s eyes went wide. “My sword …”
Victarion caught the lad about the throat with a bloody st. “Go
and get it,” he said, forcing him backwards over the side into the
bloodstained waters.
That won him a respite to pull his axe loose. The white roses
were falling back before the iron tide. Some tried to ee
belowdecks, as others cried for quarter. Victarion could feel warm
blood trickling down his ngers beneath the mail and leather and
lobstered plate, but that was nothing. Around the mast a thick knot
of foemen fought on, standing shoulder to shoulder in a ring. These
few are men, at least. They would sooner die than yield. Victarion
would grant some of them that wish. He beat his axe against his
shield and charged them.
The Drowned God had not shaped Victarion Greyjoy to ght with
words at kingsmoots, nor struggle against furtive sneaking foes in
endless bogs. This was why he had been put on earth; to stand steelclad with an axe red and dripping in his hand, dealing death with
every blow.
They hacked at him from front and back, but their swords might
have been willow switches for all the harm they did him. No blade
could cut through Victarion Greyjoy’s heavy plate, nor did he give
his foes the time to nd the weak points at the joints, where only
mail and leather warded him. Let three men assail him, or four, or
ve; it made no matter. He slew them one at a time, trusting in his
steel to protect him from the others. As each foe fell he turned his
wroth upon the next.

The last man to face him must have been a smith; he had
shoulders like a bull, and one much more muscular than the other.
His armor was a studded brigandine and a cap of boiled leather. The
only blow he landed completed the ruin of Victarion’s shield, but
the cut the captain dealt in answer split his head in two. Would that
I could deal with the Crow’s Eye as simply. When he jerked his
axehead free again, the smith’s skull seemed to burst. Bone and
blood and brain went everywhere, and the corpse fell forward, up
against his legs. Too late to plead for quarter now, Victarion thought
as he untangled himself from the dead man.
By then the deck was slick beneath his feet, and the dead and the
dying lay in heaps on every side. He threw his shield away and
sucked in air. “Lord Captain,” he heard the Barber say beside him,
“the day is ours.”
All around the sea was full of ships. Some were burning, some
were sinking, some had been smashed to splinters. Between the
hulls the water was thick as stew, full of corpses, broken oars, and
men clinging to the wreckage. In the distance, half a dozen of
southron longships were racing back toward the Mander. Let them
go, Victarion thought, let them tell the tale. Once a man had turned
his tail and run from battle he ceased to be a man.
His eyes were stinging from the sweat that had run down into
them during the ght. Two of his oarsmen helped undo his kraken
helm so he might lift it o . Victarion mopped at his brow. “That
knight,” he grumbled, “the knight of the white rose. Did any of you
pull him out?” A lord’s son would be worth a goodly ransom; from
his father, if Lord Serry had survived the day. From his liege at
Highgarden, if not.
None of his men had seen what became of the knight after he
went over the side, however. Most like the man had drowned. “May
he feast as he fought, in the Drowned God’s watery halls.” Though
the men of the Shield Islands called themselves sailors, they crossed
the seas in dread and went lightly clad in battle for fear of
drowning. Young Serry had been di erent. A brave man, thought
Victarion. Almost ironborn.

He gave the captured ship to Ragnor Pyke, named a dozen men to
crew her, and clambered back up onto his own Iron Victory. “Strip
the captives of arms and armor and have their wounds bound up,”
he told Nute the Barber. “Throw the dying in the sea. If any beg for
mercy, cut their throats rst.” He had only contempt for such;
better to drown on seawater than on blood. “I want a count of the
ships we won and all the knights and lordlings we took captive. I
want their banners too.” One day he would hang them in his hall, so
when he grew old and feeble he could remember all the foes he had
slain when he was young and strong.
“It will be done.” Nute grinned. “It is a great victory.”
Aye, he thought, a great victory for the Crow’s Eye and his wizards.
The other captains would shout his brother’s name anew when the
tidings reached Oakenshield. Euron had seduced them with his glib
tongue and smiling eye and bound them to his cause with the
plunder of half a hundred distant lands; gold and silver, ornate
armor, curved swords with gilded pommels, daggers of Valyrian
steel, striped tiger pelts and the skins of spotted cats, jade
manticores and ancient Valyrian sphinxes, chests of nutmeg, cloves,
and sa ron, ivory tusks and the horns of unicorns, green and orange
and yellow feathers from the Summer Sea, bolts of ne silk and
shimmering samite … and yet all that was little and less, compared
to this. Now he has given them conquest, and they are his for good and
all, the captain thought. The taste was bitter on his tongue. This was
my victory, not his. Where was he? Back on Oakenshield, lazing in a
castle. He stole my wife and he stole my throne, and now he steals my
glory.
Obedience came naturally to Victarion Greyjoy; he had been born
to it. Growing to manhood in the shadow of his brothers, he had
followed Balon dutifully in everything he did. Later, when Balon’s
sons were born, he had grown to accept that one day he would
kneel to them as well, when one of them took his father’s place
upon the Seastone Chair. But the Drowned God had summoned
Balon and his sons down to his watery halls, and Victarion could not
call Euron “king” without tasting bile in his throat.

The wind was freshening, and his thirst was raging. After a battle
he always wanted wine. He gave the deck to Nute and went below.
In his cramped cabin aft, he found the dusky woman wet and ready;
perhaps the battle had warmed her blood as well. He took her
twice, in quick succession. When they were done there was blood
smeared across her breasts and thighs and belly, but it was his
blood, from the gash in his palm. The dusky woman washed it out
for him with boiled vinegar.
“The plan was good, I grant him,” Victarion said as she knelt
beside him. “The Mander is open to us now, as it was of old.” It was
a lazy river, wide and slow and treacherous with snags and
sandbars. Most seagoing vessels dared not sail beyond Highgarden,
but longships with their shallow draughts could navigate as far
upstream as Bitterbridge. In ancient days, the ironborn had boldly
sailed the river road and plundered all along the Mander and its
vassal streams … until the kings of the green hand had armed the
sherfolk on the four small islands o the Mander’s mouth and
named them his shields.
Two thousand years had passed, but in the watchtowers along
their craggy shores, greybeards still kept the ancient vigil. At the
rst glimpse of longships the old men would light their beacon
res, and the call would leap from hill to hill and island to island.
Fear! Foes! Raiders! Raiders! When the sherfolk saw the res
burning on the high places they would put their nets and plows
aside and take up their swords and axes. Their lords would rush
from their castles, attended by their knights and men-at-arms.
Warhorns would echo across the waters, from Greenshield and
Greyshield, Oakenshield and Southshield, and their longships would
come sliding out from moss-covered stone pens along the shores,
oars ashing as they swarmed across the straits to seal the Mander
and hound and harry the raiders upriver to their doom.
Euron had sent Torwold Browntooth and the Red Oarsman up the
Mander with a dozen swift longships, so the lords of the Shield
Islands would spill forth in pursuit. By the time his main eet
arrived, only a handful of ghting men remained to defend the isles
themselves. The ironborn had come in on the evening tide, so the

glare of the setting sun would keep them hidden from the
greybeards in the watchtowers until it was too late. The wind was
at their backs, as it had been all the way down from Old Wyk. It
was whispered about the eet that Euron’s wizards had much and
more to do with that, that the Crow’s Eye appeased the Storm God
with blood sacri ce. How else would he have dared sail so far to
the west, instead of following the shoreline as was the custom?
The ironborn ran their longships up onto the stony shingles and
spilled out into the purple dusk with steel glimmering in their
hands. By then the res were burning in the high places, but few
remained to take up arms. Greyshield, Greenshield, and Southshield
fell before the sun came up. Oakenshield lasted half a day longer.
And when the men of the Four Shields broke o their pursuit of
Torwold and the Red Oarsman and turned downriver, they found
the Iron Fleet waiting at the Mander’s mouth.
“All fell out as Euron said it would,” Victarion told the dusky
woman as she bound up his hand with linen. “His wizards must have
seen it.” He had three aboard the Silence, Quellon Humble had
con ded in a whisper. Queer men and terrible, they were, but the
Crow’s Eye had made them slaves. “He still needs me to ght his
battles, though,” Victarion insisted. “Wizards may be well and good,
but blood and steel win wars.” The vinegar made his wound hurt
worse than ever. He shoved the woman away and closed his st,
glowering. “Bring me wine.”
He drank in the darkness, brooding on his brother. If I do not
strike the blow with mine own hand, am I still a kinslayer? Victarion
feared no man, but the Drowned God’s curse gave him pause. If
another strikes him down at my command, will his blood still stain my
hands? Aeron Damphair would know the answer, but the priest was
somewhere back on the Iron Islands, still hoping to raise the
ironborn against their new-crowned king. Nute the Barber can shave
a man with a thrown axe from twenty yards away. And none of Euron’s
mongrels could stand against Wulfe One-Ear or Andrik the Unsmiling.
Any of them could do it. But what a man can do and what a man will
do are two di erent things, he knew.

“Euron’s blasphemies will bring down the Drowned God’s wroth
upon us all,” Aeron had prophesied, back on Old Wyk. “We must
stop him, brother. We are still of Balon’s blood, are we not?”
“So is he,” Victarion had said. “I like it no more than you, but
Euron is the king. Your kingsmoot raised him up, and you put the
driftwood crown upon his head yourself!”
“I placed the crown upon his head,” said the priest, seaweed
dripping in his hair, “and gladly will I wrest it o again and crown
you in his stead. Only you are strong enough to ght him.”
“The Drowned God raised him up,” Victarion complained. “Let
the Drowned God cast him down.”
Aeron gave him a baleful look, the look that had been known to
sour wells and make women barren. “It was not the god who spoke.
Euron is known to keep wizards and foul sorcerers on that red ship
of his. They sent some spell among us, so we could not hear the sea.
The captains and the kings were drunk with all this talk of
dragons.”
“Drunk, and fearful of that horn. You heard the sound it made. It
makes no matter. Euron is our king.”
“Not mine,” the priest declared. “The Drowned God helps bold
men, not those who cower below their decks when the storm is
rising. If you will not bestir yourself to remove the Crow’s Eye from
the Seastone Chair, I must take the task upon myself.”
“How? You have no ships, no swords.”
“I have my voice,” the priest replied, “and the god is with me.
Mine is the strength of the sea, a strength the Crow’s Eye cannot
hope to withstand. The waves may break upon the mountain, yet
still they come, wave upon wave, and in the end only pebbles
remain where once the mountain stood. And soon even the pebbles
are swept away, to be ground beneath the sea for all eternity.”
“Pebbles?” Victarion grumbled. “You are mad if you think to
bring the Crow’s Eye down with talk of waves and pebbles.”
“The ironborn shall be waves,” the Damphair said. “Not the great
and lordly, but the simple folk, tillers of the soil and shers of the
sea. The captains and the kings raised Euron up, but the common
folk shall tear him down. I shall go to Great Wyk, to Harlaw, to

Orkmont, to Pyke itself. In every town and village shall my words
be heard. No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair!” He shook his
shaggy head and stalked back out into the night. When the sun
came up the next day, Aeron Greyjoy had vanished from Old Wyk.
Even his drowned men knew not where. They said the Crow’s Eye
only laughed when he was told.
But though the priest was gone, his dire warnings lingered.
Victarion found himself remembering Baelor Blacktyde’s words as
well. “Balon was mad, Aeron is madder, and Euron is maddest of them
all.” The young lord had tried to sail home after the kingsmoot,
refusing to accept Euron as his liege. But the Iron Fleet had closed
the bay, the habit of obedience was rooted deep in Victarion
Greyjoy, and Euron wore the driftwood crown. Night yer was
seized, Lord Blacktyde delivered to the king in chains. Euron’s
mutes and mongrels had cut him into seven parts, to feed the seven
green land gods he worshiped.
As a reward for his leal service, the new-crowned king had given
Victarion the dusky woman, taken o some slaver bound for Lys. “I
want none of your leavings,” he had told his brother scornfully, but
when the Crow’s Eye said that the woman would be killed unless he
took her, he had weakened. Her tongue had been torn out, but
elsewise she was undamaged, and beautiful besides, with skin as
brown as oiled teak. Yet sometimes when he looked at her, he
found himself remembering the rst woman his brother had given
him, to make a man of him.
Victarion wanted to use the dusky woman once again, but found
himself unable. “Fetch me another skin of wine,” he told her, “then
get out.” When she returned with a skin of sour red, the captain
took it up on deck, where he could breathe the clean sea air. He
drank half the skin and poured the rest into the sea for all the men
who’d died.
The Iron Victory lingered for hours o the mouth of the Mander.
As the greater part of the Iron Fleet got under way for Oakenshield,
Victarion kept Grief, Lord Dagon, Iron Wind, and Maiden’s Bane about
him as a rear guard. They pulled survivors from the sea, and
watched Hardhand sink slowly, dragged under by the wreck that she

had rammed. By the time she vanished beneath the waters Victarion
had the count he’d asked for. He had lost six ships, and captured
eight-and-thirty. “It will serve,” he told Nute. “To the oars. We
return to Lord Hewett’s Town.”
His oarsmen bent their backs toward Oakenshield, and the iron
captain went belowdecks once again. “I could kill him,” he told the
dusky woman. “Though it is a great sin to kill your king, and a
worse one to kill your brother.” He frowned. “Asha should have
given me her voice.” How could she have ever hoped to win the
captains and the kings, her with her pinecones and her turnips?
Balon’s blood is in her, but she is still a woman. She had run after the
kingsmoot. The night the driftwood crown was placed on Euron’s
head, she and her crew had melted away. Some small part of
Victarion was glad she had. If the girl keeps her wits about her, she will
wed some northern lord and live with him in his castle, far from the sea
and Euron Crow’s Eye.
“Lord Hewett’s Town, Lord Captain,” a crewman called.
Victarion rose. The wine had dulled the throbbing in his hand.
Perhaps he would have Hewett’s maester look at it, if the man had
not been killed. He returned to deck as they came around a
headland. The way Lord Hewett’s castle sat above the harbor
reminded him of Lordsport, though this town was twice as big. A
score of longships prowled the waters beyond the port, the golden
kraken writhing on their sails. Hundreds more were beached along
the shingles and drawn up to the piers that lined the harbor. At a
stone quay stood three great cogs and a dozen smaller ones, taking
on plunder and provisions. Victarion gave orders for the Iron Victory
to drop anchor. “Have a boat made ready.”
The town seemed strangely still as they approached. Most of the
shops and houses had been looted, as their smashed doors and
broken shutters testi ed, but only the sept had been put to the
torch. The streets were strewn with corpses, each with a small ock
of carrion crows in attendance. A gang of sullen survivors moved
amongst them, chasing o the black birds and tossing the dead into
the back of a wagon for burial. The notion lled Victarion with
disgust. No true son of the sea would want to rot beneath the

ground. How would he ever nd the Drowned God’s watery halls,
to drink and feast for all eternity?
The Silence was amongst the ships they passed. Victarion’s gaze
was drawn to the iron gurehead at her prow, the mouthless
maiden with the windblown hair and outstretched arm. Her motherof-pearl eyes seemed to follow him. She had a mouth like any other
woman, till the Crow’s Eye sewed it shut.
As they neared the shore, he noticed a line of women and children
herded up onto the deck of one of the great cogs. Some had their
hands bound behind their backs, and all wore loops of hempen rope
about their necks. “Who are they?” he asked the men who helped
tie up their boat.
“Widows and orphans. They’re to be sold as slaves.”
“Sold?” There were no slaves in the Iron Islands, only thralls. A
thrall was bound to service, but he was not chattel. His children
were born free, so long as they were given to the Drowned God.
And thralls were never bought nor sold for gold. A man paid the
iron price for thralls, or else had none. “They should be thralls, or
salt wives,” Victarion complained.
“It’s by the king’s decree,” the man said.
“The strong have always taken from the weak,” said Nute the
Barber. “Thralls or slaves, it makes no matter. Their men could not
defend them, so now they are ours, to do with as we will.”
It is not the Old Way, he might have said, but there was no time.
His victory had preceded him, and men were gathering round to
o er congratulations. Victarion let them fawn, until one began to
praise Euron’s daring. “It is daring to sail out of sight of land, so no
word of our coming could reach these islands before us,” he
growled, “but crossing half the world to hunt for dragons, that is
something else.” He did not wait for a reply, but shouldered
through the press and on up to the keep.
Lord Hewett’s castle was small but strong, with thick walls and
studded oaken gates that evoked his House’s ancient arms, an oak
escutcheon studded with iron upon a eld of undy blue and white.
But it was the kraken of House Greyjoy that ew atop his greenroofed towers now, and they found the great gates burned and

broken. On the ramparts walked ironborn with spears and axes, and
some of Euron’s mongrels too.
In the yard Victarion came on Gorold Goodbrother and old
Drumm, speaking quietly with Rodrik Harlaw. Nute the Barber gave
a hoot at the sight of them. “Reader,” he called out, “why is your
face so long? Your misgivings were for nought. The day is ours, and
ours the prize!”
Lord Rodrik’s mouth puckered. “These rocks, you mean? All four
together wouldn’t make Harlaw. We have won some stones and
trees and trinkets, and the enmity of House Tyrell.”
“The roses?” Nute laughed. “What rose can harm the krakens of
the deep? We have taken their shields from them, and smashed
them all to pieces. Who will protect them now?”
“Highgarden,” replied the Reader. “Soon enough all the power of
the Reach will be marshaled against us, Barber, and then you may
learn that some roses have steel thorns.”
Drumm nodded, one hand on the hilt of his Red Rain. “Lord Tarly
bears the greatsword Heartsbane, forged of Valyrian steel, and he is
always in Lord Tyrell’s van.”
Victarion’s hunger ared. “Let him come. I will take his sword for
mine own, as your own forebear took Red Rain. Let them all come,
and bring the Lannisters as well. A lion may be erce enough on
land, but at sea the kraken rules supreme.” He would give half his
teeth for the chance to try his axe against the Kingslayer or the
Knight of Flowers. That was the sort of battle that he understood.
The kinslayer was accursed in the eyes of gods and men, but the
warrior was honored and revered.
“Have no fear, Lord Captain,” said the Reader. “They will come.
His Grace desires it. Why else would he have commanded us to let
Hewett’s ravens y?”
“You read too much and ght too little,” Nute said. “Your blood
is milk.” But the Reader made as if he had not heard.
A riotous feast was in progress when Victarion entered the hall.
Ironborn lled the tables, drinking and shouting and jostling each
other, boasting of the men that they had slain, the deeds that they
had done, the prizes they had won. Many were bedecked with

plunder. Left-Hand Lucas Codd and Quellon Humble had torn
tapestries o the walls to serve as cloaks. Germund Botley wore a
rope of pearls and garnets over his gilded Lannister breastplate.
Andrik the Unsmiling staggered by with a woman under each arm;
though he remained unsmiling, he had rings on every nger.
Instead of trenchers carved from old stale bread, the captains were
eating o solid silver platters.
Nute the Barber’s face grew dark with anger as he looked about.
“The Crow’s Eye sends us forth to face the longships, whilst his own
men take the castles and the villages and grab all the loot and
women. What has he left for us?”
“We have the glory.”
“Glory is good,” said Nute, “but gold is better.”
Victarion shrugged. “The Crow’s Eye says we shall have all of
Westeros. The Arbor, Oldtown, Highgarden … that’s where you’ll
nd your gold. But enough talk. I’m hungry.”
By right of blood Victarion might have claimed a seat on the dais,
but he did not care to eat with Euron and his creatures. Instead, he
chose a place by Ralf the Limper, the captain of the Lord Quellon. “A
great victory, Lord Captain,” said the Limper. “A victory worthy of
a lordship. You should have an island.”
Lord Victarion. Aye, and why not? It might not be the Seastone
Chair, but it would be something.
Hotho Harlaw was across the table, sucking meat o a bone. He
icked it aside and hunched forward. “The Knight’s to have
Greyshield. My cousin. Did you hear?”
“No.” Victarion looked across the hall, to where Ser Harras
Harlaw sat drinking wine from a golden cup; a tall man, long-faced
and austere. “Why would Euron give that one an island?”
Hotho held out his empty wine cup, and a pale young woman in a
gown of blue velvet and gilt lace re lled it for him. “The Knight
took Grimston by himself. He planted his standard beneath the
castle and de ed the Grimms to face him. One did, and then
another, and another. He slew them all … well, near enough, two
yielded. When the seventh man went down, Lord Grimm’s septon
decided the gods had spoken and surrendered the castle.” Hotho

laughed. “He’ll be the Lord of Greyshield, and welcome to it. With
him gone, I am the Reader’s heir.” He thumped his wine cup against
his chest. “Hotho the Humpback, Lord of Harlaw.”
“Seven, you say.” Victarion wondered how Nightfall would fare
against his axe. He had never fought a man armed with a Valyrian
steel blade, though he had thrashed young Harras Harlaw many a
time when both of them were young. As a boy Harlaw had been fast
friends with Balon’s eldest son, Rodrik, who had died beneath the
walls of Seagard.
The feast was good. The wine was of the best, and there was
roast ox, rare and bloody, and stu ed ducks as well, and buckets of
fresh crabs. The serving wenches wore ne woolens and plush
velvets, the Lord Captain did not fail to note. He took them for
scullions dressed up in the clothes of Lady Hewett and her ladies,
until Hotho told him they were Lady Hewett and her ladies. It
amused the Crow’s Eye to make them wait and pour. There were
eight of them: her ladyship herself, still handsome though grown
somewhat stout, and seven younger women aged from twenty- ve
to ten, her daughters and good-daughters.
Lord Hewett himself sat in his accustomed place upon the dais,
dressed in all his heraldic nery. His arms and legs had been tied to
his chair, and a huge white radish shoved between his teeth so he
could not speak … though he could see and hear. The Crow’s Eye
had claimed the place of honor at his lordship’s right hand. A pretty,
buxom girl of seventeen or eighteen years was in his lap, barefoot
and disheveled, her arms around his neck. “Who is that?” Victarion
asked the men around him.
“His lordship’s bastard daughter,” laughed Hotho. “Before Euron
took the castle, she was made to wait at table on the rest and take
her own meals with the servants.”
Euron put his blue lips to her throat, and the girl giggled and
whispered something in his ear. Smiling, he kissed her throat again.
Her white skin was covered with red marks where his mouth had
been; they made a rosy necklace about her neck and shoulders.
Another whisper in his ear, and this time the Crow’s Eye laughed
aloud, then slammed his wine cup down for silence. “Good ladies,”

he called out to his highborn serving women, “Falia is concerned for
your ne gowns. She would not have them stained with grease and
wine and dirty groping ngers, since I have promised that she may
choose her own clothes from your wardrobes after the feast. So you
had best disrobe.”
A roar of laughter washed over the great hall, and Lord Hewett’s
face turned so red that Victarion thought his head might burst. The
women had no choice but to obey. The youngest one cried a little,
but her mother comforted her and helped undo the laces down her
back. Afterward, they continued to serve as before, moving along
the tables with agons full of wine to ll each empty cup, only now
they did so naked.
He shames Hewett as he once shamed me, the captain thought,
remembering how his wife had sobbed as he was beating her. The
men of the Four Shields oft married one another, he knew, just as
the ironborn did. One of these naked serving wenches might well be
Ser Talbert Serry’s wife. It was one thing to kill a foe, another to
dishonor him. Victarion made a st. His hand was bloody where his
wound had soaked through the linen.
On the dais, Euron pushed aside his slattern and climbed upon the
table. The captains began to bang their cups and stamp their feet
upon the oor. “EURON!” they shouted. “EURON! EURON! EURON!”
It was kingsmoot come again.
“I swore to give you Westeros,” the Crow’s Eye said when the
tumult died away, “and here is your rst taste. A morsel, nothing
more … but we shall feast before the fall of night!” The torches
along the walls were burning bright, and so was he, blue lips, blue
eye, and all. “What the kraken grasps it does not loose. These isles
were once ours, and now they are again … but we need strong men
to hold them. So rise, Ser Harras Harlaw, Lord of Greyshield.” The
Knight stood, one hand upon Nightfall’s moonstone pommel. “Rise,
Andrik the Unsmiling, Lord of Southshield.” Andrik shoved away his
women and lurched to his feet, like a mountain rising sudden from
the sea. “Rise, Maron Volmark, Lord of Greenshield.” A beardless
boy of six-and-ten years, Volmark stood hesitantly, looking like the
lord of rabbits. “And rise, Nute the Barber, Lord of Oakenshield.”

Nute’s eyes grew wary, as if he feared he was the butt of some
cruel jape. “A lord?” he croaked.
Victarion had expected the Crow’s Eye to give the lordships to his
own creatures, Stonehand and the Red Oarsman and Left-Hand
Lucas Codd. A king must needs be open-handed, he tried to tell
himself, but another voice whispered, Euron’s gifts are poisoned.
When he turned it over in his head, he saw it plain. The Knight was
the Reader’s chosen heir, and Andrik the Unsmiling the strong right arm
of Dunstan Drumm. Volmark is a callow boy, but he has Black Harren’s
blood in him through his mother. And the Barber …
Victarion grabbed him by the forearm. “Refuse him!”
Nute looked at him as if he had gone mad. “Refuse him? Lands
and lordship? Will you make me a lord?” He wrenched his arm
away and stood, basking in the cheers.
And now he steals my men away, Victarion thought.
King Euron called to Lady Hewett for a fresh cup of wine and
raised it high above his head. “Captains and kings, lift your cups to
the Lords of the Four Shields!” Victarion drank with the rest. There
is no wine so sweet as wine taken from a foe. Someone had told him
that once. His father, or his brother Balon. One day I shall drink your
wine, Crow’s Eye, and take from you all that you hold dear. But was
there anything Euron held dear?
“On the morrow we prepare once more to sail,” the king was
saying. “Fill our casks anew with spring water, take every sack of
grain and cask of beef, and as many sheep and goats as we can
carry. The wounded who are still hale enough to pull an oar will
row. The rest shall remain here, to help hold these isles for their
new lords. Torwold and the Red Oarsman will soon be back with
more provisions. Our decks will stink of pigs and chickens on the
voyage east, but we’ll return with dragons.”
“When?” The voice was Lord Rodrik’s. “When shall we return,
Your Grace? A year? Three years? Five? Your dragons are a world
away, and autumn is upon us.” The Reader walked forward,
sounding all the hazards. “Galleys guard the Redwyne Straits. The
Dornish coast is dry and bleak, four hundred leagues of whirlpools,
cli s, and hidden shoals with hardly a safe landing anywhere.

Beyond wait the Stepstones, with their storms and their nests of
Lysene and Myrish pirates. If a thousand ships set sail, three
hundred may reach the far side of the narrow sea … and then what?
Lys will not welcome us, nor will Volantis. Where will you nd
fresh water, food? The rst storm will scatter us across half the
earth.”
A smile played across Euron’s blue lips. “I am the storm, my lord.
The rst storm, and the last. I have taken the Silence on longer
voyages than this, and ones far more hazardous. Have you
forgotten? I have sailed the Smoking Sea and seen Valyria.”
Every man there knew that the Doom still ruled Valyria. The very
sea there boiled and smoked, and the land was overrun with
demons. It was said that any sailor who so much as glimpsed the
ery mountains of Valyria rising above the waves would soon die a
dreadful death, yet the Crow’s Eye had been there, and returned.
“Have you?” the Reader asked, so softly.
Euron’s blue smile vanished. “Reader,” he said into the quiet,
“you would do well to keep your nose in your books.”
Victarion could feel the unease in the hall. He pushed himself to
his feet. “Brother,” he boomed. “You have not answered Harlaw’s
questions.”
Euron shrugged. “The price of slaves is rising. We will sell our
slaves in Lys and Volantis. That, and the plunder we have taken
here, will give us su cient gold to buy provisions.”
“Are we slavers now?” asked the Reader. “And for what? Dragons
that no man here has seen? Shall we chase some drunken sailor’s
fancy to the far ends of the earth?”
His words drew mutters of assent. “Slaver’s Bay is too far,” called
out Ralf the Limper. “And too close to Valyria,” shouted Quellon
Humble. Fralegg the Strong said, “Highgarden’s close. I say, look
for dragons there. The golden kind!” Alvyn Sharp said, “Why sail the
world, when the Mander lies before us?” Red Ralf Stonehouse
bounded to his feet. “Oldtown is richer, and the Arbor richer still.
Redwyne’s eet is o away. We need only reach out our hand to
pluck the ripest fruit in Westeros.”

“Fruit?” The king’s eye looked more black than blue. “Only a
craven would steal a fruit when he could take the orchard.”
“It is the Arbor we want,” said Red Ralf, and other men took up
the cry. The Crow’s Eye let the shouts wash over him. Then he leapt
down from the table, grabbed his slattern by the arm, and pulled
her from the hall.
Fled, like a dog. Euron’s hold upon the Seastone Chair suddenly
did not seem as secure as it had a few moments before. They will not
follow him to Slaver’s Bay. Perhaps they are not such dogs and fools as I
had feared. That was such a merry thought that Victarion had to
wash it down. He drained a cup with the Barber, to show him that
he did not begrudge him his lordship, even if it came from Euron’s
hand.
Outside the sun went down. Darkness gathered beyond the walls,
but inside the torches burned with a ruddy orange glow, and their
smoke gathered under the rafters like a grey cloud. Drunken men
began to dance the nger dance. At some point Left-Hand Lucas
Codd decided he wanted one of Lord Hewett’s daughters, so he took
her on a table whilst her sisters screamed and sobbed.
Victarion felt a tap upon his shoulder. One of Euron’s mongrel
sons stood behind him, a boy of ten with woolly hair and skin the
color of mud. “My father wishes words with you.”
Victarion rose unsteadily. He was a big man, with a large capacity
for wine, but even so, he had drunk too much. I beat her to death
with mine own hands, he thought, but the Crow’s Eye killed her when
he shoved himself inside her. I had no choice. He followed the bastard
boy from the hall and up a winding stone stair. The sounds of rape
and revelry diminished as they climbed, until there was only the
soft scrape of boots on stone.
The Crow’s Eye had taken Lord Hewett’s bedchamber along with
his bastard daughter. When he entered, the girl was sprawled naked
on the bed, snoring softly. Euron stood by the window, drinking
from a silver cup. He wore the sable cloak he took from Blacktyde,
his red leather eye patch, and nothing else. “When I was a boy, I
dreamt that I could y,” he announced. “When I woke, I
couldn’t … or so the maester said. But what if he lied?”

Victarion could smell the sea through the open window, though
the room stank of wine and blood and sex. The cold salt air helped
to clear his head. “What do you mean?”
Euron turned to face him, his bruised blue lips curled in a half
smile. “Perhaps we can y. All of us. How will we ever know unless
we leap from some tall tower?” The wind came gusting through the
window and stirred his sable cloak. There was something obscene
and disturbing about his nakedness. “No man ever truly knows what
he can do unless he dares to leap.”
“There is the window. Leap.” Victarion had no patience for this.
His wounded hand was troubling him. “What do you want?”
“The world.” Firelight glimmered in Euron’s eye. His smiling eye.
“Will you take a cup of Lord Hewett’s wine? There’s no wine half so
sweet as wine taken from a beaten foe.”
“No.” Victarion glanced away. “Cover yourself.”
Euron seated himself and gave his cloak a twitch, so it covered
his private parts. “I had forgotten what a small and noisy folk they
are, my ironborn. I would bring them dragons, and they shout out
for grapes.”
“Grapes are real. A man can gorge himself on grapes. Their juice
is sweet, and they make wine. What do dragons make?”
“Woe.” The Crow’s Eye sipped from his silver cup. “I once held a
dragon’s egg in this hand, brother. This Myrish wizard swore he
could hatch it if I gave him a year and all the gold that he required.
When I grew bored with his excuses, I slew him. As he watched his
entrails sliding through his ngers he said, ‘But it has not been a
year.’ ” He laughed. “Cragorn’s died, you know.”
“Who?”
“The man who blew my dragon horn. When the maester cut him
open, his lungs were charred as black as soot.”
Victarion shuddered. “Show me this dragon’s egg.”
“I threw it in the sea during one of my dark moods.” Euron gave
a shrug. “It comes to me that the Reader was not wrong. Too large
a eet could never hold together over such a distance. The voyage
is too long, too perilous. Only our nest ships and crews could hope
to sail to Slaver’s Bay and back. The Iron Fleet.”

The Iron Fleet is mine, Victarion thought. He said nothing.
The Crow’s Eye lled two cups with a strange black wine that
owed as thick as honey. “Drink with me, brother. Have a taste of
this.” He o ered one of the cups to Victarion.
The captain took the cup Euron had not o ered, sni ed at its
contents suspiciously. Seen up close, it looked more blue than black.
It was thick and oily, with a smell like rotted esh. He tried a small
swallow, and spit it out at once. “Foul stu . Do you mean to poison
me?”
“I mean to open your eyes.” Euron drank deep from his own cup,
and smiled. “Shade-of-the-evening, the wine of the warlocks. I came
upon a cask of it when I captured a certain galleas out of Qarth,
along with some cloves and nutmeg, forty bolts of green silk, and
four warlocks who told a curious tale. One presumed to threaten
me, so I killed him and fed him to the other three. They refused to
eat of their friend’s esh at rst, but when they grew hungry
enough they had a change of heart. Men are meat.”
Balon was mad, Aeron is madder, and Euron is maddest of them all.
Victarion was turning to go when the Crow’s Eye said, “A king must
have a wife, to give him heirs. Brother, I have need of you. Will
you go to Slaver’s Bay and bring my love to me?”
I had a love once too. Victarion’s hands coiled into sts, and a drop
of blood fell to patter on the oor. I should beat you raw and red and
feed you to the crabs, the same as I did her. “You have sons,” he told
his brother.
“Baseborn mongrels, born of whores and weepers.”
“They are of your body.”
“So are the contents of my chamber pot. None is t to sit the
Seastone Chair, much less the Iron Throne. No, to make an heir
that’s worthy of him, I need a di erent woman. When the kraken
weds the dragon, brother, let all the world beware.”
“What dragon?” said Victarion, frowning.
“The last of her line. They say she is the fairest woman in the
world. Her hair is silver-gold, and her eyes are amethysts … but
you need not take my word for it, brother. Go to Slaver’s Bay,
behold her beauty, and bring her back to me.”

“Why should I?” Victarion demanded.
“For love. For duty. Because your king commands it.” Euron
chuckled. “And for the Seastone Chair. It is yours, once I claim the
Iron Throne. You shall follow me as I followed Balon … and your
own trueborn sons shall one day follow you.”
My own sons. But to have a trueborn son a man must rst have a
wife. Victarion had no luck with wives. Euron’s gifts are poisoned, he
reminded himself, but still …
“The choice is yours, brother. Live a thrall or die a king. Do you
dare to y? Unless you take the leap, you’ll never know.”
Euron’s smiling eye was bright with mockery. “Or do I ask too
much of you? It is a fearsome thing to sail beyond Valyria.”
“I could sail the Iron Fleet to hell if need be.” When Victarion
opened his hand, his palm was red with blood. “I’ll go to Slaver’s
Bay, aye. I’ll nd this dragon woman, and I’ll bring her back.” But
not for you. You stole my wife and despoiled her, so I’ll have yours. The
fairest woman in the world, for me.

JAIME

The elds outside the walls of Darry were being tilled once more.
The burned crops had been plowed under, and Ser Addam’s scouts
reported seeing women in the furrows pulling weeds, whilst a team
of oxen broke new ground on the edge of a nearby wood. A dozen
bearded men with axes stood guard over them as they worked.
By the time Jaime and his column reached the castle, all of them
had ed within the walls. He found Darry closed to him, just as
Harrenhal had been. A chilly welcome from mine own blood.
“Sound the horn,” he commanded. Ser Kennos of Kayce unslung
the Horn of Herrock and let it wind. As he waited for a response
from the castle, Jaime eyed the banner oating brown and crimson
above his cousin’s barbican. Lancel had taken to quartering the lion
of Lannister with the Darry plowman, it would seem. He saw his
uncle’s hand in that, as in Lancel’s choice of bride. House Darry had
ruled these lands since the Andals cast down the First Men. No
doubt Ser Kevan realized that his son would have an easier time of
it if the peasants saw him as a continuation of the old line, holding
these lands by right of marriage rather than royal decree. Kevan
should be Tommen’s Hand. Harys Swyft is a toad, and my sister is a fool
if she thinks elsewise.
The castle gates swung open slowly. “My coz will not have room
to accommodate a thousand men,” Jaime told Strongboar. “We’ll

make camp beneath the western wall. I want the perimeters ditched
and staked. There are still bands of outlaws in these parts.”
“They’d need to be mad to attack a force as strong as ours.”
“Mad or starving.” Until he had a better notion of these outlaws
and their strength, Jaime was not inclined to take any risks with his
defenses. “Ditched and staked,” he said again, before spurring
Honor toward the gate. Ser Dermot rode beside him with the royal
stag and lion, and Ser Hugo Vance with the white standard of the
Kingsguard. Jaime had charged Red Ronnet with the task of
delivering Wylis Manderly to Maidenpool, so he would not need to
look on him henceforth.
Pia rode with Jaime’s squires, on the gelding Peck had found for
her. “It’s like some toy castle,” Jaime heard her say. She’s known no
home but Harrenhal, he re ected. Every castle in the realm will seem
small to her, except the Rock.
Josmyn Peckleton was saying the same thing. “You must not
judge by Harrenhal. Black Harren built too big.” Pia listened as
solemnly as a girl of ve being lessoned by her septa. That’s all she
is, a little girl in a woman’s body, scarred and scared. Peck was taken
with her, though. Jaime suspected that the boy had never known a
woman, and Pia was still pretty enough, so long as she kept her
mouth closed. There’s no harm in him bedding her, I suppose, so long as
she’s willing.
One of the Mountain’s men had tried to rape the girl at
Harrenhal, and had seemed honestly perplexed when Jaime
commanded Ilyn Payne to take his head o . “I had her before, a
hunnerd times,” he kept saying as they forced him to his knees. “A
hunnerd times, m’lord. We all had her.” When Ser Ilyn presented
Pia with his head, she had smiled through her ruined teeth.
Darry had changed hands several times during the ghting, and
its castle had been burned once and sacked at least twice, but Lancel
had seemingly wasted little time setting things to rights. The castle
gates were newly hung, raw oaken planks reinforced with iron
studs. A new stable was going up where an older one had been put
to the torch. The steps to the keep had been replaced, and the

shutters on many of the windows. Blackened stones showed where
the ames had licked, but time and rain would fade those.
Within the walls, crossbowmen walked the ramparts, some in
crimson cloaks and lion-crested helms, others in the blue and grey
of House Frey. As Jaime trotted across the yard, chickens ran out
from under Honor’s hooves, sheep bleated, and peasants stared at
him with sullen eyes. Armed peasants, he did not fail to note. Some
had scythes, some staves, some hoes sharpened to cruel points.
There were axes in evidence as well, and he spied several bearded
men with red, seven-pointed stars sewn onto ragged, lthy tunics.
More bloody sparrows. Where do they all come from?
Of his uncle Kevan he saw no sign. Nor of Lancel. Only a maester
emerged to greet him, with a grey robe apping about his skinny
legs. “Lord Commander, Darry is honored by this … unexpected
visit. You must forgive our lack of preparations. We had been given
to understand that you were bound for Riverrun.”
“Darry was on my way,” lied Jaime. Riverrun will keep. And if
perchance the siege had ended before he reached the castle, he
would be spared the need to take up arms against House Tully.
Dismounting, he handed Honor to a stableboy. “Will I nd my
uncle here?” He did not supply a name. Ser Kevan was the only
uncle he had left, the last surviving son of Tytos Lannister.
“No, my lord. Ser Kevan took his leave of us after the wedding.”
The maester pulled at the chain collar, as if it had grown too tight
for him. “I know Lord Lancel will be pleased to see you and … and
all your gallant knights. Though it pains me to confess that Darry
cannot feed so many.”
“We have our own provisions. You are?”
“Maester Ottomore, if it please my lord. Lady Amerei wished to
welcome you herself, but she is seeing to the preparation of a feast
in your honor. It is her hope that you and your chief knights and
captains will join us at table this evening.”
“A hot meal would be most welcome. The days have been cold
and wet.” Jaime glanced about the yard, at the bearded faces of the
sparrows. Too many. And too many Freys as well. “Where will I nd
Hardstone?”

“We had a report of outlaws beyond the Trident. Ser Harwyn
took ve knights and twenty archers and went to deal with them.”
“And Lord Lancel?”
“He is at his prayers. His lordship has commanded us never to
disturb him when he is praying.”
He and Ser Bonifer should get on well. “Very well.” There would be
time enough to talk with his cousin later. “Show me to my
chambers and have a bath brought up.”
“If it please my lord, we have put you in the Plowman’s Keep. I
will show you there.”
“I know the way.” Jaime was no stranger to this castle. He and
Cersei had been guests here twice before, once on their way to
Winterfell with Robert, and again on the way back to King’s
Landing. Though small as castles went, it was larger than an inn,
with good hunting along the river. Robert Baratheon had never
been loath to impose upon the hospitality of his subjects.
The keep was much as he recalled it. “The walls are still bare,”
Jaime observed as the maester led him down a gallery.
“Lord Lancel hopes one day to cover them with hangings,” said
Ottomore. “Scenes of piety and devotion.”
Piety and devotion. It was all he could do not to laugh. The walls
had been bare on his rst visit too. Tyrion had pointed out the
squares of darker stone where tapestries had once hung. Ser
Raymun could remove the hangings, but not the marks they’d left.
Later, the Imp had slipped a handful of stags to one of Darry’s
serving men for the key to the cellar where the missing tapestries
were hidden. He showed them to Jaime by the light of a candle,
grinning; woven portraits of all the Targaryen kings, from the rst
Aegon to the second Aenys. “If I tell Robert, mayhaps he’ll make me
Lord of Darry,” the dwarf said, chortling.
Maester Ottomore led Jaime to the top of the keep. “I trust you
will be comfortable here, my lord. There is a privy, when nature
calls. Your window looks out upon the godswood. The bedchamber
adjoins her ladyship’s, with a servant’s cell between.”
“These were Lord Darry’s own apartments.”
“Yes, my lord.”

“My cousin is too kind. I did not intend to put Lancel out of his
own bedchamber.”
“Lord Lancel has been sleeping in the sept.”
Sleeping with the Mother and the Maiden, when he has a warm wife
just through that door? Jaime did not know whether to laugh or
weep. Maybe he is praying for his cock to harden. In King’s Landing it
had been rumored that Lancel’s wounds had left him incapable. Still,
he ought to have sense enough to try. His cousin’s hold on his new
lands would not be secure until he fathered a son on his half-Darry
wife. Jaime had begun to rue the impulse that had brought him
here. He gave thanks to Ottomore, reminded him about the bath,
and had Peck see him out.
The lord’s bedchamber had changed since his last visit, and not
for the better. Old stale rushes covered the oor in place of the ne
Myrish carpet that had been there previously, and all the
furnishings were new and crudely made. Ser Raymun Darry’s bed
had been large enough to sleep six, with brown velvet draperies and
oakwood posts carved with vines and leaves; Lancel’s was a lumpy
straw pallet, placed beneath the window where the rst light of day
would be sure to wake him. The other bed had no doubt been
burned or smashed or stolen, but even so …
When the tub arrived, Little Lew pulled o Jaime’s boots and
helped remove his golden hand. Peck and Garrett hauled water, and
Pia found him something clean to sup in. The girl glanced at him
shyly as she shook his doublet out. Jaime was uncomfortably aware
of the curve of hip and breast beneath her roughspun brown dress.
He found himself remembering the things that Pia had whispered to
him at Harrenhal, the night that Qyburn sent her to his bed.
Sometimes when I’m with some man, she’d said, I close my eyes and
pretend it’s you on top of me.
He was grateful when the bath was deep enough to conceal his
arousal. As he lowered himself into the steaming water, he recalled
another bath, the one he’d shared with Brienne. He had been
feverish and weak from loss of blood, and the heat had made him so
dizzy he found himself saying things better left unsaid. This time he
had no such excuse. Remember your vows. Pia is more t for Tyrion’s

bed than yours. “Fetch me soap and a sti brush,” he told Peck. “Pia,
you may leave us.”
“Aye, m’lord. Thank you, m’lord.” She covered her mouth when
she spoke, to hide her broken teeth.
“Do you want her?” Jaime asked Peck, when she was gone.
The squire turned beet red.
“If she’ll have you, take her. She’ll teach you a few things you’ll
nd useful on your wedding night, I don’t doubt, and you’re not like
to get a bastard by her.” Pia had spread her legs for half his father’s
army and never quickened; most like the girl was barren. “If you
bed her, though, be kind to her.”
“Kind, my lord? How … how would I …?”
“Sweet words. Gentle touches. You don’t want to wed her, but so
long as you’re abed treat her as you would your bride.”
The lad nodded. “My lord, I … where should I take her? There’s
never a place to … to …”
“… to be alone?” Jaime grinned. “We’ll be at supper several
hours. The straw looks lumpy, but it should serve.”
Peck’s eyes grew wide. “His lordship’s bed?”
“You’ll feel a lord yourself when you’re done, if Pia knows her
business.” And someone ought to make some use of that miserable straw
mattress.
When he descended for the feast that night, Jaime Lannister wore
a doublet of red velvet slashed with cloth-of-gold, and a golden
chain studded with black diamonds. He had strapped on his golden
hand as well, polished to a ne bright sheen. This was no t place
to wear his whites. His duty awaited him at Riverrun; a darker need
had brought him here.
Darry’s great hall was great only by courtesy. Trestle tables
crowded it from wall to wall, and the ceiling rafters were black
with smoke. Jaime had been seated on the dais, to the right of
Lancel’s empty chair. “Will my cousin not be joining us for supper?”
he asked as he sat down.
“My lord prefers to fast,” said Lancel’s wife, the Lady Amerei.
“He’s sick with grief for the poor High Septon.” She was a longlegged, full-breasted, strapping girl of some eight-and-ten years; a

healthy wench to look at her, though her pinched, chinless face
reminded Jaime of his late and unlamented cousin Cleos, who had
always looked somewhat like a weasel.
Fasting? He is an even bigger fool than I suspected. His cousin should
be busy fathering a little weasel-faced heir on his widow instead of
starving himself to death. He wondered what Ser Kevan might have
had to say about his son’s new fervor. Could that be the reason for
his uncle’s abrupt departure?
Over bowls of bean-and-bacon soup Lady Amerei told Jaime how
her rst husband had been slain by Ser Gregor Clegane when the
Freys were still ghting for Robb Stark. “I begged him not to go,
but my Pate was oh so very brave, and swore he was the man to
slay that monster. He wanted to make a great name for himself.”
We all do. “When I was a squire I told myself I’d be the man to
slay the Smiling Knight.”
“The Smiling Knight?” She sounded lost. “Who was that?”
The Mountain of my boyhood. Half as big but twice as mad.
“An outlaw, long dead. No one who need concern your ladyship.”
Amerei’s lip trembled. Tears rolled from her brown eyes.
“You must forgive my daughter,” said an older woman. Lady
Amerei had brought a score of Freys to Darry with her; a sister, an
uncle, a half uncle, various cousins … and her mother, who had
been born a Darry. “She still grieves for her father.”
“Outlaws killed him,” sobbed Lady Amerei. “Father had only gone
out to ransom Petyr Pimple. He brought them the gold they asked
for, but they hung him anyway.”
“Hanged, Ami. Your father was not a tapestry.” Lady Mariya
turned back to Jaime. “I believe you knew him, ser.”
“We were squires together once, at Crakehall.” He would not go
so far as to claim they had been friends. When Jaime had arrived,
Merrett Frey had been the castle bully, lording it over all the
younger boys. Then he tried to bully me. “He was … very strong.” It
was the only praise that came to mind. Merrett had been slow and
clumsy and stupid, but he was strong.
“You fought against the Kingswood Brotherhood together,”
sni ed Lady Amerei. “Father used to tell me stories.”

Father used to boast and lie, you mean. “We did.” Frey’s chief
contributions to the ght had consisted of contracting the pox from
a camp follower and getting himself captured by the White Fawn.
The outlaw queen burned her sigil into his arse before ransoming
him back to Sumner Crakehall. Merrett had not been able to sit
down for a fortnight, though Jaime doubted that the red-hot iron
was half so nasty as the kettles of shit his fellow squires made him
eat once he was returned. Boys are the cruelest creatures on the earth.
He slipped his golden hand around his wine cup and raised it up.
“To Merrett’s memory,” he said. It was easier to drink to the man
than to talk of him.
After the toast Lady Amerei stopped weeping and the table talk
turned to wolves, of the four-footed kind. Ser Danwell Frey claimed
there were more of them about than even his grandfather could
remember. “They’ve lost all fear of men. Packs of them attacked
our baggage train on our way down from the Twins. Our archers
had to feather a dozen before the others ed.” Ser Addam Marbrand
confessed that their own column had faced similar troubles on their
way up from King’s Landing.
Jaime concentrated on the fare before him, tearing o chunks of
bread with his left hand and fumbling at his wine cup with his right.
He watched Addam Marbrand charm the girl beside him, watched
Ste on Swyft re ght the battle for King’s Landing with bread and
nuts and carrots. Ser Kennos pulled a serving girl into his lap,
urging her to stroke his horn, whilst Ser Dermot regaled some
squires with tales of knight errantry in the rainwood. Farther down
the table Hugo Vance had closed his eyes. Brooding on the mysteries
of life, thought Jaime. That, or napping between courses. He turned
back to Lady Mariya. “The outlaws who killed your husband … was
it Lord Beric’s band?”
“So we thought, at rst.” Though Lady Mariya’s hair was streaked
with grey, she was still a handsome woman. “The killers scattered
when they left Oldstones. Lord Vypren tracked one band to
Fairmarket, but lost them there. Black Walder led hounds and
hunters into Hag’s Mire after the others. The peasants denied seeing
them, but when questioned sharply they sang a di erent song. They

spoke of a one-eyed man and another who wore a yellow
cloak … and a woman, cloaked and hooded.”
“A woman?” He would have thought that the White Fawn would
have taught Merrett to stay clear of outlaw wenches. “There was a
woman in the Kingswood Brotherhood as well.”
“I know of her.” How not, her tone suggested, when she left her
mark upon my husband? “The White Fawn was young and fair, they
say. This hooded woman is neither. The peasants would have us
believe that her face was torn and scarred, and her eyes terrible to
look upon. They claim she led the outlaws.”
“Led them?” Jaime found that hard to believe. “Beric Dondarrion
and the red priest …”
“… were not seen.” Lady Mariya sounded certain.
“Dondarrion’s dead,” said Strongboar. “The Mountain drove a
knife through his eye, we have men with us who saw it.”
“That’s one tale,” said Addam Marbrand. “Others will tell you
that Lord Beric can’t be killed.”
“Ser Harwyn says those tales are lies.” Lady Amerei wound a
braid around her nger. “He has promised me Lord Beric’s head.
He’s very gallant.” She was blushing beneath her tears.
Jaime thought back on the head he’d given to Pia. He could
almost hear his little brother chuckle. Whatever became of giving
women owers? Tyrion might have asked. He would have had a few
choice words for Harwyn Plumm as well, though gallant would not
have been one of them. Plumm’s brothers were big, eshy fellows
with thick necks and red faces; loud and lusty, quick to laugh, quick
to anger, quick to forgive. Harwyn was a di erent sort of Plumm;
hard-eyed and taciturn, unforgiving … and deadly, with his hammer
in his hand. A good man to command a garrison, but not a man to
love. Although … Jaime gazed at Lady Amerei.
The serving men were bringing out the sh course, a river pike
baked in a crust of herbs and crushed nuts. Lancel’s lady tasted it,
approved, and commanded that the rst portion be served to Jaime.
As they set the sh before him, she leaned across her husband’s
place to touch his golden hand. “You could kill Lord Beric, Ser
Jaime. You slew the Smiley Knight. Please, my lord, I beg you, stay

and help us with Lord Beric and the Hound.” Her pale ngers
caressed his golden ones.
Does she think that I can feel that? “The Sword of the Morning slew
the Smiling Knight, my lady. Ser Arthur Dayne, a better knight than
me.” Jaime pulled back his golden ngers and turned once more to
Lady Mariya. “How far did Black Walder track this hooded woman
and her men?”
“His hounds picked up their scent again north of Hag’s Mire,” the
older woman told him. “He swears that he was no more than half a
day behind them when they vanished into the Neck.”
“Let them rot there,” declared Ser Kennos cheerfully. “If the gods
are good, they’ll be swallowed up in quicksand or gobbled down by
lizard-lions.”
“Or taken in by frogeaters,” said Ser Danwell Frey. “I would not
put it past the crannogmen to shelter outlaws.”
“Would that it were only them,” said Lady Mariya. “Some of the
river lords are hand in glove with Lord Beric’s men as well.”
“The smallfolk too,” sni ed her daughter. “Ser Harwyn says they
hide them and feed them, and when he asks where they’ve gone,
they lie. They lie to their own lords!”
“Have their tongues out,” urged Strongboar.
“Good luck getting answers then,” said Jaime. “If you want their
help, you need to make them love you. That was how Arthur Dayne
did it, when we rode against the Kingswood Brotherhood. He paid
the smallfolk for the food we ate, brought their grievances to King
Aerys, expanded the grazing lands around their villages, even won
them the right to fell a certain number of trees each year and take a
few of the king’s deer during the autumn. The forest folk had
looked to Toyne to defend them, but Ser Arthur did more for them
than the Brotherhood could ever hope to do, and won them to our
side. After that, the rest was easy.”
“The Lord Commander speaks wisely,” said Lady Mariya. “We
shall never be rid of these outlaws until the smallfolk come to love
Lancel as much as they once loved my father and grandfather.”
Jaime glanced at his cousin’s empty place. Lancel will never win
their love by praying, though.

Lady Amerei put on a pout. “Ser Jaime, I pray you, do not
abandon us. My lord has need of you, and so do I. These are such
fearful times. Some nights I can hardly sleep, for fear.”
“My place is with the king, my lady.”
“I’ll come,” o ered Strongboar. “Once we’re done at Riverrun, I’ll
be itching for another ght. Not that Beric Dondarrion is like to
give me one. I recall the man from tourneys past. A comely lad in a
pretty cloak, he was. Slight and callow.”
“That was before he died,” said young Ser Arwood Frey. “Death
changed him, the smallfolk say. You can kill him, but he won’t stay
dead. How do you ght a man like that? And there’s the Hound as
well. He slew twenty men at Saltpans.”
Strongboar gu awed. “Twenty fat innkeeps, maybe. Twenty
serving men pissing in their breeches. Twenty begging brothers
armed with bowls. Not twenty knights. Not me.”
“There is a knight at Saltpans,” Ser Arwood insisted. “He hid
behind his walls whilst Clegane and his mad dogs ravaged through
his town. You have not seen the things he did, ser. I have. When the
reports reached the Twins, I rode down with Harys Haigh and his
brother Donnel and half a hundred men, archers and men-at-arms.
We thought it was Lord Beric’s work, and hoped to nd his trail. All
that remains of Saltpans is the castle, and old Ser Quincy so
frightened he would not open his gates, but shouted down at us
from his battlements. The rest is bones and ashes. A whole town.
The Hound put the buildings to the torch and the people to the
sword and rode o laughing. The women … you would not believe
what he did to some of the women. I will not speak of it at table. It
made me sick to see.”
“I cried when I heard,” said Lady Amerei.
Jaime sipped his wine. “What makes you certain it was the
Hound?” What they were describing sounded more like Gregor’s
work than Sandor’s. Sandor had been hard and brutal, yes, but it
was his big brother who was the real monster in House Clegane.
“He was seen,” Ser Arwood said. “That helm of his is not easily
mistaken, nor forgotten, and there were a few who survived to tell
the tale. The girl he raped, some boys who hid, a woman we found

trapped beneath a blackened beam, the sherfolk who watched the
butchery from their boats …”
“Do not call it butchery,” Lady Mariya said softly. “That gives
insult to honest butchers everywhere. Saltpans was the work of
some fell beast in human skin.”
This is a time for beasts, Jaime re ected, for lions and wolves and
angry dogs, for ravens and carrion crows.
“Evil work.” Strongboar lled his cup again. “Lady Mariya, Lady
Amerei, your distress has moved me. You have my word, once
Riverrun has fallen I shall return to hunt down the Hound and kill
him for you. Dogs do not frighten me.”
This one should. Both men were large and powerful, but Sandor
Clegane was much quicker, and fought with a savagery that Lyle
Crakehall could not hope to match.
Lady Amerei was thrilled, however. “You are a true knight, Ser
Lyle, to help a lady in distress.”
At least she did not call herself “a maiden.” Jaime reached for his
cup and knocked it over. The linen tablecloth drank the wine. As the
red stain spread, his companions all pretended not to notice. High
table courtesy, he told himself, but it tasted just like pity. He rose
abruptly. “My lady. Pray excuse me.”
Lady Amerei looked stricken. “Would you leave us? There’s
venison to come, and capons stu ed with leeks and mushrooms.”
“Very ne, no doubt, but I could not eat another bite. I need to
see my cousin.” Bowing, Jaime left them to their food.
Men were eating in the yard as well. The sparrows had gathered
round a dozen cook res to warm their hands against the chill of
dusk and watch fat sausages spit and sizzle above the ames. There
had to be a hundred of them. Useless mouths. Jaime wondered how
many sausages his cousin had laid by and how he intended to feed
the sparrows once they were gone. They will be eating rats by winter,
unless they can get a harvest in. This late in autumn, the chances of
another harvest were not good.
He found the sept o the castle’s inner ward; a windowless,
seven-sided, half-timbered building with carved wood doors and a
tiled roof. Three sparrows sat upon its steps. When Jaime

approached, they rose. “Where you going, m’lord?” asked one. He
was the smallest of the three, but he had the biggest beard.
“Inside.”
“His lordship’s in there, praying.”
“His lordship is my cousin.”
“Well, then, m’lord,” said a di erent sparrow, a huge bald man
with a seven-pointed star painted over one eye, “you won’t want to
bother your cousin at his prayers.”
“Lord Lancel is asking the Father Above for guidance,” said the
third sparrow, the beardless one. A boy, Jaime had thought, but her
voice marked her for a woman, dressed in shapeless rags and a shirt
of rusted mail. “He is praying for the soul of the High Septon and
all the others who have died.”
“They’ll still be dead tomorrow,” Jaime told her. “The Father
Above has more time than I do. Do you know who I am?”
“Some lord,” said the big man with the starry eye.
“Some cripple,” said the small one with the big beard.
“The Kingslayer,” said the woman, “but we’re no kings, just Poor
Fellows, and you can’t go in unless his lordship says you can.” She
hefted a spiked club, and the small man raised an axe.
The doors behind them opened. “Let my cousin pass in peace,
friends,” Lancel said softly. “I have been expecting him.”
The sparrows moved aside.
Lancel looked even thinner than he had at King’s Landing. He was
barefoot, and dressed in a plain, roughspun tunic of undyed wool
that made him look more like a beggar than a lord. The crown of
his head had been shaved smooth, but his beard had grown out a
little. To call it peach fuzz would have given insult to the peach. It
went queerly with the white hair around his ears.
“Cousin,” said Jaime when they were alone within the sept, “have
you lost your bloody wits?”
“I prefer to say I’ve found my faith.”
“Where is your father?”
“Gone. We quarreled.” Lancel knelt before the altar of his other
Father. “Will you pray with me, Jaime?”
“If I pray nicely, will the Father give me a new hand?”

“No. But the Warrior will give you courage, the Smith will lend
you strength, and the Crone will give you wisdom.”
“It’s a hand I need.” The seven gods loomed above carved altars,
the dark wood gleaming in the candlelight. A faint smell of incense
hung in the air. “You sleep down here?”
“Each night I make my bed beneath a di erent altar, and the
Seven send me visions.”
Baelor the Blessed once had visions too. Especially when he was
fasting. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”
“My faith is all the nourishment I need.”
“Faith is like porridge. Better with milk and honey.”
“I dreamed that you would come. In the dream you knew what I
had done. How I’d sinned. You killed me for it.”
“You’re more like to kill yourself with all this fasting. Didn’t
Baelor the Blessed fast himself onto a bier?”
“Our lives are candle ames, says The Seven-Pointed Star. Any
errant pu of wind can snu us out. Death is never far in this world,
and seven hells await sinners who do not repent their sins. Pray
with me, Jaime.”
“If I do, will you eat a bowl of porridge?” When his coz did not
answer, Jaime sighed. “You should be sleeping with your wife, not
with the Maid. You need a son with Darry blood if you want to
keep this castle.”
“A pile of cold stones. I never asked for it. I never wanted it. I
only wanted …” Lancel shuddered. “Seven save me, but I wanted to
be you.”
Jaime had to laugh. “Better me than Blessed Baelor. Darry needs
a lion, coz. So does your little Frey. She gets moist between the legs
every time someone mentions Hardstone. If she hasn’t bedded him
yet, she will soon.”
“If she loves him, I wish them joy of one another.”
“A lion shouldn’t have horns. You took the girl to wife.”
“I said some words and gave her a red cloak, but only to please
Father. Marriage requires consummation. King Baelor was made to
wed his sister Daena, but they never lived as man and wife, and he
put her aside as soon as he was crowned.”

“The realm would have been better served if he had closed his
eyes and fucked her. I know enough history to know that. In any
case, you’re not like to be taken for Baelor the Blessed.”
“No,” Lancel allowed. “He was a rare spirit, pure and brave and
innocent, untouched by all the evils of the world. I am a sinner,
with much and more to atone for.”
Jaime put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “What do you know
of sin, coz? I killed my king.”
“The brave man slays with a sword, the craven with a wineskin.
We are both kingslayers, ser.”
“Robert was no true king. Some might even say that a stag is a
lion’s natural prey.” Jaime could feel the bones beneath his cousin’s
skin … and something else as well. Lancel was wearing a hair shirt
underneath his tunic. “What else did you do, to require so much
atonement? Tell me.”
His cousin bowed his head, tears running down his cheeks.
Those tears were all the answer Jaime needed. “You killed the
king,” he said, “then you fucked the queen.”
“I never …”
“… lay with my sweet sister?” Say it. Say it!
“Never spilled my seed in … in her …”
“… cunt?” suggested Jaime.
“… womb,” Lancel nished. “It is not treason unless you nish
inside. I gave her comfort, after the king died. You were a captive,
your father was in the eld, and your brother … she was afraid of
him, and with good reason. He made me betray her.”
“Did he?” Lancel and Ser Osmund and how many more? Was the
part about Moon Boy just a gibe? “Did you force her?”
“No! I loved her. I wanted to protect her.”
You wanted to be me. His phantom ngers itched. The day his
sister had come to White Sword Tower to beg him to renounce his
vows, she had laughed after he refused her and boasted of having
lied to him a thousand times. Jaime had taken that for a clumsy
attempt to hurt him as he’d hurt her. It may have been the only true
thing that she ever said to me.

“Do not think ill of the queen,” Lancel pleaded. “All esh is weak,
Jaime. No harm came of our sin. No … no bastard.”
“No. Bastards are seldom made upon the belly.” He wondered
what his cousin would say if he were to confess his own sins, the
three treasons Cersei had named Jo rey, Tommen, and Myrcella.
“I was angry with Her Grace after the battle, but the High Septon
said I must forgive her.”
“You confessed your sins to His High Holiness, did you?”
“He prayed for me when I was wounded. He was a good man.”
He’s a dead man. They rang the bells for him. He wondered if his
cousin had any notion what fruit his words had borne. “Lancel,
you’re a bloody fool.”
“You are not wrong,” said Lancel, “but my folly is behind me, ser.
I have asked the Father Above to show me the way, and he has. I
am renouncing this lordship and this wife. Hardstone is welcome to
the both of them, if he likes. On the morrow I will return to King’s
Landing and swear my sword to the new High Septon and the
Seven. I mean to take vows and join the Warrior’s Sons.”
The boy was not making sense. “The Warrior’s Sons were
proscribed three hundred years ago.”
“The new High Septon has revived them. He’s sent out a call for
worthy knights to pledge their lives and swords to the service of the
Seven. The Poor Fellows are to be restored as well.”
“Why would the Iron Throne allow that?” One of the early
Targaryen kings had fought for years to suppress the two military
orders, Jaime recalled, though he did not remember which. Maegor,
perhaps, or the rst Jaehaerys. Tyrion would have known.
“His High Holiness writes that King Tommen has given his
consent. I will show you the letter, if you like.”
“Even if this is true … you are a lion of the Rock, a lord. You
have a wife, a castle, lands to defend, people to protect. If the gods
are good, you will have sons of your blood to follow you. Why
would you throw all that away for … for some vow?”
“Why did you?” asked Lancel softly.
For honor, Jaime might have said. For glory. That would have been
a lie, though. Honor and glory had played their parts, but most of it

had been for Cersei. A laugh escaped his lips. “Is it the High Septon
you’re running to, or my sweet sister? Pray on that one, coz. Pray
hard.”
“Will you pray with me, Jaime?”
He glanced about the sept, at the gods. The Mother, full of mercy.
The Father, stern in judgment. The Warrior, one hand upon his
sword. The Stranger in the shadows, his half-human face concealed
beneath a hooded mantle. I thought that I was the Warrior and Cersei
was the Maid, but all the time she was the Stranger, hiding her true face
from my gaze. “Pray for me, if you like,” he told his cousin. “I’ve
forgotten all the words.”
The sparrows were still uttering about the steps when Jaime
stepped back out into the night. “Thank you,” he told them. “I feel
ever so much holier now.”
He went and found Ser Ilyn and a pair of swords.
The castle yard was full of eyes and ears. To escape them, they
sought out Darry’s godswood. There were no sparrows there, only
trees bare and brooding, their black branches scratching at the sky.
A mat of dead leaves crunched beneath their feet.
“Do you see that window, ser?” Jaime used a sword to point.
“That was Raymun Darry’s bedchamber. Where King Robert slept,
on our return from Winterfell. Ned Stark’s daughter had run o
after her wolf savaged Jo , you’ll recall. My sister wanted the girl
to lose a hand. The old penalty, for striking one of the blood royal.
Robert told her she was cruel and mad. They fought for half the
night … well, Cersei fought, and Robert drank. Past midnight, the
queen summoned me inside. The king was passed out snoring on the
Myrish carpet. I asked my sister if she wanted me to carry him to
bed. She told me I should carry her to bed, and shrugged out of her
robe. I took her on Raymun Darry’s bed after stepping over Robert.
If His Grace had woken I would have killed him there and then. He
would not have been the rst king to die upon my sword … but you
know that story, don’t you?” He slashed at a tree branch, shearing it
in half. “As I was fucking her, Cersei cried, ‘I want.’ I thought that
she meant me, but it was the Stark girl that she wanted, maimed or

dead.” The things I do for love. “It was only by chance that Stark’s
own men found the girl before me. If I had come on her rst …”
The pockmarks on Ser Ilyn’s face were black holes in the
torchlight, as dark as Jaime’s soul. He made that clacking sound.
He is laughing at me, realized Jaime Lannister. “For all I know you
fucked my sister too, you pock-faced bastard,” he spat out. “Well,
shut your bloody mouth and kill me if you can.”

BRIENNE

The septry stood upon an upthrust island half a mile from the shore,
where the wide mouth of the Trident widened further still to kiss
the Bay of Crabs. Even from shore its prosperity was apparent. Its
slope was covered with terraced elds, with shponds down below
and a windmill above, its wood-and-sailcloth blades turning slowly
in the breeze o the bay. Brienne could see sheep grazing on the
hillside and storks wading in the shallow waters around the ferry
landing.
“Saltpans is just across the water,” said Septon Meribald, pointing
north across the bay. “The brothers will ferry us over on the
morning tide, though I fear what we shall nd there. Let us enjoy a
good hot meal before we face that. The brothers always have a
bone to spare for Dog.” Dog barked and wagged his tail.
The tide was going out now, and swiftly. The water that
separated the island from the shore was receding, leaving behind a
broad expanse of glistening brown mud ats dotted by tidal pools
that glittered like golden coins in the afternoon sun. Brienne
scratched the back of her neck, where an insect had bitten her. She
had pinned her hair up, and the sun had warmed her skin.
“Why do they call it the Quiet Isle?” asked Podrick.
“Those who dwell here are penitents, who seek to atone for their
sins through contemplation, prayer, and silence. Only the Elder

Brother and his proctors are permitted to speak, and the proctors
only for one day of every seven.”
“The silent sisters never speak,” said Podrick. “I heard they don’t
have any tongues.”
Septon Meribald smiled. “Mothers have been cowing their
daughters with that tale since I was your age. There was no truth to
it then and there is none now. A vow of silence is an act of
contrition, a sacri ce by which we prove our devotion to the Seven
Above. For a mute to take a vow of silence would be akin to a
legless man giving up the dance.” He led his donkey down the
slope, beckoning them to follow. “If you would sleep beneath a roof
tonight, you must climb o your horses and cross the mud with me.
The path of faith, we call it. Only the faithful may cross safely. The
wicked are swallowed by the quicksands, or drowned when the tide
comes rushing in. None of you are wicked, I hope? Even so, I would
be careful where I set my feet. Walk only where I walk, and you
shall reach the other side.”
The path of faith was a crooked one, Brienne could not help but
note. Though the island seemed to rise to the northeast of where
they left the shore, Septon Meribald did not make directly for it.
Instead, he started due east, toward the deeper waters of the bay,
which shimmered blue and silver in the distance. The soft brown
mud squished up between his toes. As he walked he paused from
time to time, to probe ahead with his quartersta . Dog stayed near
his heels, sni ng at every rock, shell, and clump of seaweed. For
once he did not bound ahead or stray.
Brienne followed, taking care to keep close to the line of prints
left by the dog, the donkey, and the holy man. Then came Podrick,
and last of all Ser Hyle. A hundred yards out, Meribald turned
abruptly toward the south, so his back was almost to the septry. He
proceeded in that direction for another hundred yards, leading them
between two shallow tidal pools. Dog stuck his nose in one and
yelped when a crab pinched it with his claw. A brief but furious
struggle ensued before the dog came trotting back, wet and mudspattered, with the crab between his jaws.

“Isn’t that where we want to go?” Ser Hyle called out from behind
them, pointing at the septry. “We seem to be walking every way
but toward it.”
“Faith,” urged Septon Meribald. “Believe, persist, and follow, and
we shall nd the peace we seek.”
The ats shimmered wetly all about them, mottled in half a
hundred hues. The mud was such a dark brown it appeared almost
black, but there were swathes of golden sand as well, upthrust rocks
both grey and red, and tangles of black and green seaweed. Storks
stalked through the tidal pools and left their footprints all around
them, and crabs scuttled across the surface of shallow waters. The
air smelled of brine and rot, and the ground sucked at their feet and
let them go only reluctantly, with a pop and a squelchy sigh. Septon
Meribald turned and turned again and yet again. His footprints
lled up with water as soon as he moved on. By the time the
ground grew rmer and began to rise beneath the feet, they had
walked at least a mile and a half.
Three men were waiting for them as they clambered up the
broken stones that ringed the isle’s shoreline. They were clad in the
brown-and-dun robes of brothers, with wide bell sleeves and
pointed cowls. Two had wound lengths of wool about the lower
halves of their faces as well, so all that could be seen of them were
their eyes. The third brother was the one to speak. “Septon
Meribald,” he called. “It has been nigh upon a year. You are
welcome. Your companions as well.”
Dog wagged his tail, and Meribald shook mud from his feet.
“Might we beg your hospitality for a night?”
“Yes, of course. There’s to be sh stew this evening. Will you
require the ferry in the morning?”
“If it is not too much to ask.” Meribald turned to his fellow
travelers. “Brother Narbert is a proctor of the order, so he is
allowed to speak one day of every seven. Brother, these good folk
helped me on my way. Ser Hyle Hunt is a gallant from the Reach.
The lad is Podrick Payne, late of the westerland. And this is Lady
Brienne, known as the Maid of Tarth.”
Brother Narbert drew up short. “A woman.”

“Yes, brother.” Brienne unpinned her hair and shook it out. “Do
you have no women here?”
“Not at present,” said Narbert. “Those women who do visit come
to us sick or hurt, or heavy with child. The Seven have blessed our
Elder Brother with healing hands. He has restored many a man to
health that even the maesters could not cure, and many a woman
too.”
“I am not sick or hurt or heavy with child.”
“Lady Brienne is a warrior maid,” con ded Septon Meribald,
“hunting for the Hound.”
“Aye?” Narbert seemed taken aback. “To what end?”
Brienne touched Oathkeeper’s hilt. “His,” she said.
The proctor studied her. “You are … brawny for a woman, it is
true, but … mayhaps I should take you up to Elder Brother. He will
have seen you crossing the mud. Come.”
Narbert led them along a pebbled path and through a grove of
apple trees to a whitewashed stable with a peaked thatch roof. “You
may leave your animals here. Brother Gillam will see that they are
fed and watered.”
The stable was more than three-quarters empty. At one end were
half a dozen mules, being tended by a bandy-legged little brother
whom Brienne took for Gillam. Way down at the far end, well away
from the other animals, a huge black stallion trumpeted at the
sound of their voices and kicked at the door of his stall.
Ser Hyle gave the big horse an admiring look as he was handing
his reins to Brother Gillam. “A handsome beast.”
Brother Narbert sighed. “The Seven send us blessings, and the
Seven send us trials. Handsome he may be, but Driftwood was
surely whelped in hell. When we sought to harness him to a plow he
kicked Brother Rawney and broke his shinbone in two places. We
had hoped gelding might improve the beast’s ill temper,
but … Brother Gillam, will you show them?”
Brother Gillam lowered his cowl. Underneath he had a mop of
blond hair, a tonsured scalp, and a bloodstained bandage where he
should have had an ear.
Podrick gasped. “The horse bit o your ear?”

Gillam nodded, and covered his head again.
“Forgive me, brother,” said Ser Hyle, “but I might take the other
ear, if you approached me with a pair of shears.”
The jest did not sit well with Brother Narbert. “You are a knight,
ser. Driftwood is a beast of burden. The Smith gave men horses to
help them in their labors.” He turned away. “If you will. Elder
Brother will no doubt be waiting.”
The slope was steeper than it had looked from across the
mud ats. To ease it, the brothers had erected a ight of wooden
steps that wandered back and forth across the hillside and amongst
the buildings. After a long day in the saddle Brienne was glad for a
chance to stretch her legs.
They passed a dozen brothers of the order on their way up;
cowled men in dun-and-brown who gave them curious looks as they
went by, but spoke no word of greeting. One was leading a pair of
milk cows toward a low barn roofed in sod; another worked a
butter churn. On the upper slopes they saw three boys driving
sheep, and higher still they passed a lichyard where a brother
bigger than Brienne was struggling to dig a grave. From the way he
moved, it was plain to see that he was lame. As he ung a spadeful
of the stony soil over one shoulder, some chanced to spatter against
their feet. “Be more watchful there,” chided Brother Narbert.
“Septon Meribald might have gotten a mouthful of dirt.” The
gravedigger lowered his head. When Dog went to sni him he
dropped his spade and scratched his ear.
“A novice,” explained Narbert.
“Who is the grave for?” asked Ser Hyle, as they resumed their
climb up the wooden steps.
“Brother Clement, may the Father judge him justly.”
“Was he old?” asked Podrick Payne.
“If you consider eight-and-forty old, aye, but it was not the years
that killed him. He died of wounds he got at Saltpans. He had taken
some of our mead to the market there, on the day the outlaws
descended on the town.”
“The Hound?” said Brienne.

“Another, just as brutal. He cut poor Clement’s tongue out when
he would not speak. Since he had taken a vow of silence, the raider
said he had no need of it. The Elder Brother will know more. He
keeps the worst of the tidings from outside to himself, so as not to
disturb the tranquillity of the septry. Many of our brothers came
here to escape the horrors of the world, not to dwell upon them.
Brother Clement was not the only wounded man amongst us. Some
wounds do not show.” Brother Narbert gestured to their right.
“There lies our summer arbor. The grapes are small and tart, but
make a drinkable wine. We brew our own ale as well, and our mead
and cider are far famed.”
“The war has never come here?” Brienne said.
“Not this war, praise the Seven. Our prayers protect us.”
“And your tides,” suggested Meribald. Dog barked agreement.
The brow of the hill was crowned by a low wall of unmortared
stone, encircling a cluster of large buildings; the windmill, its sails
creaking as they turned, the cloisters where the brothers slept and
the common hall where they took their meals, a wooden sept for
prayer and meditation. The sept had windows of leaded glass, wide
doors carved with likenesses of the Mother and the Father, and a
seven-sided steeple with a walk on top. Behind it was a vegetable
garden where some older brothers were pulling weeds. Brother
Narbert led the visitors around a chestnut tree to a wooden door set
in the side of the hill.
“A cave with a door?” Ser Hyle said, surprised.
Septon Meribald smiled. “It is called the Hermit’s Hole. The rst
holy man to nd his way here lived therein, and worked such
wonders that others came to join him. That was two thousand years
ago, they say. The door came somewhat later.”
Perhaps two thousand years ago the Hermit’s Hole had been a
damp, dark place, oored with dirt and echoing to the sounds of
dripping water, but no longer. The cave that Brienne and her
companions entered had been turned into a warm, snug sanctum.
Woolen carpets covered the ground, tapestries the walls. Tall
beeswax candles gave more than ample light. The furnishings were
strange but simple; a long table, a settle, a chest, several tall cases

full of books, and chairs. All were made from driftwood, oddly
shaped pieces cunningly joined together and polished till they shone
a deep gold in the candlelight.
The Elder Brother was not what Brienne had expected. He could
hardly be called elder, for a start; whereas the brothers weeding in
the garden had had the stooped shoulders and bent backs of old
men, he stood straight and tall, and moved with the vigor of a man
in the prime of his years. Nor did he have the gentle, kindly face
she expected of a healer. His head was large and square, his eyes
shrewd, his nose veined and red. Though he wore a tonsure, his
scalp was as stubbly as his heavy jaw.
He looks more like a man made to break bones than to heal one,
thought the Maid of Tarth, as the Elder Brother strode across the
room to embrace Septon Meribald and pat Dog. “It is always a glad
day when our friends Meribald and Dog honor us with another
visit,” he announced, before turning to his other guests. “And new
faces are always welcome. We see so few of them.”
Meribald performed the customary courtesies before seating
himself upon the settle. Unlike Septon Narbert, the Elder Brother
did not seem dismayed by Brienne’s sex, but his smile did icker
and fade when the septon told him why she and Ser Hyle had come.
“I see,” was all he said, before he turned away with, “You must be
thirsty. Please, have some of our sweet cider to wash the dust of
travel from your throats.” He poured for them himself. The cups
were carved from driftwood too, no two the same. When Brienne
complimented them, he said, “My lady is too kind. All we do is cut
and polish the wood. We are blessed here. Where the river meets
the bay, the currents and the tides wrestle one against the other,
and many strange and wondrous things are pushed toward us, to
wash up on our shores. Driftwood is the least of it. We have found
silver cups and iron pots, sacks of wool and bolts of silk, rusted
helms and shining swords … aye, and rubies.”
That interested Ser Hyle. “Rhaegar’s rubies?”
“It may be. Who can say? The battle was long leagues from here,
but the river is tireless and patient. Six have been found. We are all
waiting for the seventh.”

“Better rubies than bones.” Septon Meribald was rubbing his foot,
the mud aking o beneath his nger. “Not all the river’s gifts are
pleasant. The good brothers collect the dead as well. Drowned
cows, drowned deer, dead pigs swollen up to half the size of horses.
Aye, and corpses.”
“Too many corpses, these days.” The Elder Brother sighed. “Our
gravedigger knows no rest. Rivermen, westermen, northmen, all
wash up here. Knights and knaves alike. We bury them side by side,
Stark and Lannister, Blackwood and Bracken, Frey and Darry. That
is the duty the river asks of us in return for all its gifts, and we do it
as best we can. Sometimes we nd a woman, though … or worse, a
little child. Those are the cruelest gifts.” He turned to Septon
Meribald. “I hope that you have time to absolve us of our sins. Since
the raiders slew old Septon Bennet, we have had no one to hear
confession.”
“I shall make time,” said Meribald, “though I hope you have some
better sins than the last time I came through.” Dog barked. “You
see? Even Dog was bored.”
Podrick Payne was puzzled. “I thought no one could talk. Well,
not no one. The brothers. The other brothers, not you.”
“We are allowed to break silence when confessing,” said the Elder
Brother. “It is hard to speak of sin with signs and nods.”
“Did they burn the sept at Saltpans?” asked Hyle Hunt.
The smile vanished. “They burned everything at Saltpans, save
the castle. Only that was made of stone … though it had as well
been made of suet for all the good it did the town. It fell to me to
treat some of the survivors. The sherfolk brought them across the
bay to me after the ames had gone out and they deemed it safe to
land. One poor woman had been raped a dozen times, and her
breasts … my lady, you wear man’s mail, so I shall not spare you
these horrors … her breasts had been torn and chewed and eaten, as
if by some … cruel beast. I did what I could for her, though that
was little enough. As she lay dying, her worst curses were not for
the men who had raped her, nor the monster who devoured her
living esh, but for Ser Quincy Cox, who barred his gates when the

outlaws entered the town and sat safe behind stone walls as his
people screamed and died.”
“Ser Quincy is an old man,” said Septon Meribald gently. “His
sons and good-sons are far away or dead, his grandsons are still
boys, and he has two daughters. What could he have done, one man
against so many?”
He could have tried, Brienne thought. He could have died. Old or
young, a true knight is sworn to protect those who are weaker than
himself, or die in the attempt.
“True words, and wise,” the Elder Brother said to Septon
Meribald. “When you cross to Saltpans, no doubt Ser Quincy will
ask you for forgiveness. I am glad that you are here to give it. I
could not.” He put aside the driftwood cup, and stood. “The supper
bell will sound soon. My friends, will you come with me to the sept,
to pray for the souls of the good folk of Saltpans before we sit down
to break bread and share some meat and mead?”
“Gladly,” said Meribald. Dog barked.
Their supper in the septry was as strange a meal as Brienne had
ever eaten, though not at all unpleasant. The food was plain, but
very good; there were loaves of crusty bread still warm from the
ovens, crocks of fresh-churned butter, honey from the septry’s
hives, and a thick stew of crabs, mussels, and at least three di erent
kinds of sh. Septon Meribald and Ser Hyle drank the mead the
brothers made, and pronounced it excellent, whilst she and Podrick
contented themselves with more sweet cider. Nor was the meal a
somber one. Meribald pronounced a prayer before the food was
served, and whilst the brothers ate at four long trestle tables, one of
their number played for them on the high harp, lling the hall with
soft sweet sounds. When the Elder Brother excused the musician to
take his own meal, Brother Narbert and another proctor took turns
reading from The Seven-Pointed Star.
By the time the readings were completed, the last of the food had
been cleared away by the novices whose task it was to serve. Most
were boys near Podrick’s age, or younger, but there were grown
men as well, amongst them the big gravedigger they had
encountered on the hill, who walked with the awkward lurching

gait of one half-crippled. As the hall emptied, the Elder Brother
asked Narbert to show Podrick and Ser Hyle to their pallets in the
cloisters. “You will not mind sharing a cell, I hope? It is not large,
but you will nd it comfortable.”
“I want to stay with ser,” said Podrick. “I mean, my lady.”
“What you and Lady Brienne may do elsewhere is between you
and the Seven,” said Brother Narbert, “but on the Quiet Isle, men
and women do not sleep beneath the same roof unless they are
wed.”
“We have some modest cottages set aside for the women who
visit us, be they noble ladies or common village girls,” said the
Elder Brother. “They are not oft used, but we keep them clean and
dry. Lady Brienne, would you allow me to show you the way?”
“Yes, thank you. Podrick, go with Ser Hyle. We are guests of the
holy brothers here. Beneath their roof, their rules.”
The women’s cottages were on the east side of the isle, looking
out over a broad expanse of mud and the distant waters of the Bay
of Crabs. It was colder here than on the sheltered side, and wilder.
The hill was steeper, and the path meandered back and forth
through weeds and briars, wind-carved rocks, and twisted, thorny
trees that clung tenaciously to the stony hillside. The Elder Brother
brought a lantern to light their way down. At one turn he paused.
“On a clear night you could see the res of Saltpans from here.
Across the bay, just there.” He pointed.
“There’s nothing,” Brienne said.
“Only the castle remains. Even the sherfolk are gone, the
fortunate few who were out on the water when the raiders came.
They watched their houses burn and listened to screams and cries
oat across the harbor, too fearful to land their boats. When at last
they came ashore, it was to bury friends and kin. What is there for
them at Saltpans now but bones and bitter memories? They have
moved to Maidenpool or other towns.” He gestured with the
lantern, and they resumed their descent. “Saltpans was never an
important port, but ships did call there from time to time. That was
what the raiders wanted, a galley or a cog to carry them across the
narrow sea. When none was at hand, they took their rage and

desperation out upon the townsfolk. I wonder, my lady … what do
you hope to nd there?”
“A girl,” she told him. “A highborn maid of three-and-ten, with a
fair face and auburn hair.”
“Sansa Stark.” The name was softly said. “You believe this poor
child is with the Hound?”
“The Dornishman said that she was on her way to Riverrun.
Timeon. He was a sellsword, one of the Brave Companions, a killer
and a raper and a liar, but I do not think he lied about this. He said
that the Hound stole her and carried her away.”
“I see.” The path turned, and there were the cottages ahead of
them. The Elder Brother had called them modest. That they were.
They looked like beehives made of stone, low and rounded,
windowless. “This one,” he said, indicating the nearest cottage, the
only one with smoke rising from the smokehole in the center of its
roof. Brienne had to duck when entering to keep from banging her
head against the lintel. Inside she found a dirt oor, a straw pallet,
furs and blankets to keep her warm, a basin of water, a agon of
cider, some bread and cheese, a small re, and two low chairs. The
Elder Brother sat in one, and put the lantern down. “May I stay
awhile? I feel that we should talk.”
“If you wish.” Brienne undid her swordbelt and hung it from the
second chair, then sat cross-legged on the pallet.
“Your Dornishman did not lie,” the Elder Brother began, “but I
fear you did not understand him. You are chasing the wrong wolf,
my lady. Eddard Stark had two daughters. It was the other one that
Sandor Clegane made o with, the younger one.”
“Arya Stark?” Brienne stared open-mouthed, astonished. “You
know this? Lady Sansa’s sister is alive?”
“Then,” said the Elder Brother. “Now … I do not know. She may
have been amongst the children slain at Saltpans.”
The words were a knife in her belly. No, Brienne thought. No, that
would be too cruel. “May have been … meaning that you are not
certain …?”
“I am certain that the child was with Sandor Clegane at the inn
beside the crossroads, the one old Masha Heddle used to keep,

before the lions hanged her. I am certain they were on their way to
Saltpans. Beyond that … no. I do not know where she is, or even if
she lives. There is one thing I do know, however. The man you hunt
is dead.”
That was another shock. “How did he die?”
“By the sword, as he had lived.”
“You know this for a certainty?”
“I buried him myself. I can tell you where his grave lies, if you
wish. I covered him with stones to keep the carrion eaters from
digging up his esh, and set his helm atop the cairn to mark his
nal resting place. That was a grievous error. Some other wayfarer
found my marker and claimed it for himself. The man who raped
and killed at Saltpans was not Sandor Clegane, though he may be as
dangerous. The riverlands are full of such scavengers. I will not call
them wolves. Wolves are nobler than that … and so are dogs, I
think.
“I know a little of this man, Sandor Clegane. He was Prince
Jo rey’s sworn shield for many a year, and even here we would
hear tell of his deeds, both good and ill. If even half of what we
heard was true, this was a bitter, tormented soul, a sinner who
mocked both gods and men. He served, but found no pride in
service. He fought, but took no joy in victory. He drank, to drown
his pain in a sea of wine. He did not love, nor was he loved himself.
It was hate that drove him. Though he committed many sins, he
never sought forgiveness. Where other men dream of love, or
wealth, or glory, this man Sandor Clegane dreamed of slaying his
own brother, a sin so terrible it makes me shudder just to speak of
it. Yet that was the bread that nourished him, the fuel that kept his
res burning. Ignoble as it was, the hope of seeing his brother’s
blood upon his blade was all this sad and angry creature lived
for … and even that was taken from him, when Prince Oberyn of
Dorne stabbed Ser Gregor with a poisoned spear.”
“You sound as if you pity him,” said Brienne.
“I did. You would have pitied him as well, if you had seen him at
the end. I came upon him by the Trident, drawn by his cries of pain.
He begged me for the gift of mercy, but I am sworn not to kill

again. Instead, I bathed his fevered brow with river water, and gave
him wine to drink and a poultice for his wound, but my e orts were
too little and too late. The Hound died there, in my arms. You may
have seen a big black stallion in our stables. That was his warhorse,
Stranger. A blasphemous name. We prefer to call him Driftwood, as
he was found beside the river. I fear he has his former master’s
nature.”
The horse. She had seen the stallion, had heard it kicking, but she
had not understood. Destriers were trained to kick and bite. In war
they were a weapon, like the men who rode them. Like the Hound.
“It is true, then,” she said dully. “Sandor Clegane is dead.”
“He is at rest.” The Elder Brother paused. “You are young, child. I
have counted four-and-forty name days … which makes me more
than twice your age, I think. Would it surprise you to learn that I
was once a knight?”
“No. You look more like a knight than you do a holy man.” It was
written in his chest and shoulders, and across that thick square jaw.
“Why would you give up knighthood?”
“I never chose it. My father was a knight, and his before him. So
were my brothers, every one. I was trained for battle since the day
they deemed me old enough to hold a wooden sword. I saw my
share of them, and did not disgrace myself. I had women too, and
there I did disgrace myself, for some I took by force. There was a
girl I wished to marry, the younger daughter of a petty lord, but I
was my father’s thirdborn son and had neither land nor wealth to
o er her … only a sword, a horse, a shield. All in all, I was a sad
man. When I was not ghting, I was drunk. My life was writ in red,
in blood and wine.”
“When did it change?” asked Brienne.
“When I died in the Battle of the Trident. I fought for Prince
Rhaegar, though he never knew my name. I could not tell you why,
save that the lord I served served a lord who served a lord who had
decided to support the dragon rather than the stag. Had he decided
elsewise, I might have been on the other side of the river. The
battle was a bloody thing. The singers would have us believe it was
all Rhaegar and Robert struggling in the stream for a woman both

of them claimed to love, but I assure you, other men were ghting
too, and I was one. I took an arrow through the thigh and another
through the foot, and my horse was killed from under me, yet I
fought on. I can still remember how desperate I was to nd another
horse, for I had no coin to buy one, and without a horse I would no
longer be a knight. That was all that I was thinking of, if truth be
told. I never saw the blow that felled me. I heard hooves behind my
back and thought, a horse! but before I could turn something
slammed into my head and knocked me back into the river, where
by rights I should have drowned.
“Instead I woke here, upon the Quiet Isle. The Elder Brother told
me I had washed up on the tide, naked as my name day. I can only
think that someone found me in the shallows, stripped me of my
armor, boots, and breeches, and pushed me back out into the deeper
water. The river did the rest. We are all born naked, so I suppose it
was only tting that I come into my second life the same way. I
spent the next ten years in silence.”
“I see.” Brienne did not know why he was telling her all of this,
or what else she ought to say.
“Do you?” He leaned forward, his big hands on his knees. “If so,
give up this quest of yours. The Hound is dead, and in any case he
never had your Sansa Stark. As for this beast who wears his helm,
he will be found and hanged. The wars are ending, and these
outlaws cannot survive the peace. Randyll Tarly is hunting them
from Maidenpool and Walder Frey from the Twins, and there is a
new young lord in Darry, a pious man who will surely set his lands
to rights. Go home, child. You have a home, which is more than
many can say in these dark days. You have a noble father who must
surely love you. Consider his grief if you should never return.
Perhaps they will bring your sword and shield to him, after you
have fallen. Perhaps he will even hang them in his hall and look on
them with pride … but if you were to ask him, I know he would tell
you that he would sooner have a living daughter than a shattered
shield.”
“A daughter.” Brienne’s eyes lled with tears. “He deserves that.
A daughter who could sing to him and grace his hall and bear him

grandsons. He deserves a son too, a strong and gallant son to bring
honor to his name. Galladon drowned when I was four and he was
eight, though, and Alysanne and Arianne died still in the cradle. I
am the only child the gods let him keep. The freakish one, not t to
be a son or daughter.” All of it came pouring out of Brienne then,
like black blood from a wound; the betrayals and betrothals, Red
Ronnet and his rose, Lord Renly dancing with her, the wager for her
maidenhead, the bitter tears she shed the night her king wed
Margaery Tyrell, the mêlée at Bitterbridge, the rainbow cloak that
she had been so proud of, the shadow in the king’s pavilion, Renly
dying in her arms, Riverrun and Lady Catelyn, the voyage down the
Trident, dueling Jaime in the woods, the Bloody Mummers, Jaime
crying “Sapphires,” Jaime in the tub at Harrenhal with steam rising
from his body, the taste of Vargo Hoat’s blood when she bit down
on his ear, the bear pit, Jaime leaping down onto the sand, the long
ride to King’s Landing, Sansa Stark, the vow she’d sworn to Jaime,
the vow she’d sworn to Lady Catelyn, Oathkeeper, Duskendale,
Maidenpool, Nimble Dick and Crackclaw and the Whispers, the men
she’d killed …
“I have to nd her,” she nished. “There are others looking, all
wanting to capture her and sell her to the queen. I have to nd her
rst. I promised Jaime. Oathkeeper, he named the sword. I have to
try to save her … or die in the attempt.”

CERSEI

A thousand ships!” The little queen’s brown hair was tousled and
uncombed, and the torchlight made her cheeks look ushed, as if
she had just come from some man’s embrace. “Your Grace, this
must be answered ercely!” Her last word rang o the rafters and
echoed through the cavernous throne room.
Seated on her gold-and-crimson high seat beneath the Iron
Throne, Cersei could feel a growing tightness in her neck. Must, she
thought. She dares say “must” to me. She itched to slap the Tyrell girl
across the face. She should be on her knees, begging for my help.
Instead, she presumes to tell her rightful queen what she must do.
“A thousand ships?” Ser Harys Swyft was wheezing. “Surely not.
No lord commands a thousand ships.”
“Some frightened fool has counted double,” agreed Orton
Merryweather. “That, or Lord Tyrell’s bannermen are lying to us,
pu ng up the numbers of the foe so we will not think them lax.”
The torches on the back wall threw the long, barbed shadow of
the Iron Throne halfway to the doors. The far end of the hall was
lost in darkness, and Cersei could not but feel that the shadows
were closing around her too. My enemies are everywhere, and my
friends are useless. She had only to glance at her councillors to know
that; only Lord Qyburn and Aurane Waters seemed awake. The
others had been roused from bed by Margaery’s messengers
pounding on their doors, and stood there rumpled and confused.

Outside the night was black and still. The castle and the city slept.
Boros Blount and Meryn Trant seemed to be sleeping too, albeit on
their feet. Even Osmund Kettleblack was yawning. Not Loras,
though. Not our Knight of Flowers. He stood behind his little sister, a
pale shadow with a longsword on his hip.
“Half as many ships would still be ve hundred, my lord,” Waters
pointed out to Orton Merryweather. “Only the Arbor has enough
strength at sea to oppose a eet that size.”
“What of your new dromonds?” asked Ser Harys. “The longships
of the ironmen cannot stand before our dromonds, surely? King
Robert’s Hammer is the mightiest warship in all Westeros.”
“She was,” said Waters. “Sweet Cersei will be her equal, once
complete, and Lord Tywin will be twice the size of either. Only half
are tted out, however, and none is fully crewed. Even when they
are, the numbers would be greatly against us. The common longship
is small compared to our galleys, this is true, but the ironmen have
larger ships as well. Lord Balon’s Great Kraken and the warships of
the Iron Fleet were made for battle, not for raids. They are the
equal of our lesser war galleys in speed and strength, and most are
better crewed and captained. The ironmen live their whole lives at
sea.”
Robert should have scoured the isles after Balon Greyjoy rose against
him, Cersei thought. He smashed their eet, burned their towns, and
broke their castles, but when he had them on their knees he let them up
again. He should have made another island of their skulls. That was
what her father would have done, but Robert never had the stomach
that a king requires if he hopes to keep peace in the realm. “The
ironmen have not dared raid the Reach since Dagon Greyjoy sat the
Seastone Chair,” she said. “Why would they do so now? What has
emboldened them?”
“Their new king.” Qyburn stood with his hands hidden up his
sleeves. “Lord Balon’s brother. The Crow’s Eye, he is called.”
“Carrion crows make their feasts upon the carcasses of the dead
and dying,” said Grand Maester Pycelle. “They do not descend upon
hale and healthy animals. Lord Euron will gorge himself on gold

and plunder, aye, but as soon as we move against him he will back
to Pyke, as Lord Dagon was wont to do in his day.”
“You are wrong,” said Margaery Tyrell. “Reavers do not come in
such strength. A thousand ships! Lord Hewett and Lord Chester are
slain, as well as Lord Serry’s son and heir. Serry has ed to
Highgarden with what few ships remain him, and Lord Grimm is a
prisoner in his own castle. Willas says that the iron king has raised
up four lords of his own in their places.”
Willas, Cersei thought, the cripple. He is to blame for this. That oaf
Mace Tyrell left the defense of the Reach in the hands of a hapless
weakling. “It is a long voyage from the Iron Isles to the Shields,” she
pointed out. “How could a thousand ships come all that way
without being seen?”
“Willas believes that they did not follow the coast,” said
Margaery. “They made the voyage out of sight of land, sailing far
out into the Sunset Sea and swooping back in from the west.”
More like the cripple did not have his watchtowers manned, and now
he fears to have us know it. The little queen is making excuses for her
brother. Cersei’s mouth was dry. I need a cup of Arbor gold. If the
ironmen decided to take the Arbor next, the whole realm might
soon be going thirsty. “Stannis may have had a hand in this. Balon
Greyjoy o ered my lord father an alliance. Perhaps his son has
o ered one to Stannis.”
Pycelle frowned. “What would Lord Stannis gain by …”
“He gains another foothold. And plunder, that as well. Stannis
needs gold to pay his sellswords. By raiding in the west, he hopes
he can distract us from Dragonstone and Storm’s End.”
Lord Merryweather nodded. “A diversion. Stannis is more cunning
than we knew. Your Grace is clever to have seen through his ploy.”
“Lord Stannis is striving to win the northmen to his cause,” said
Pycelle. “If he befriends the ironborn, he cannot hope …”
“The northmen will not have him,” said Cersei, wondering how
such a learned man could be so stupid. “Lord Manderly hacked the
head and hands o the onion knight, we have that from the Freys,
and half a dozen other northern lords have rallied to Lord Bolton.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Where else can Stannis turn,

but to the ironmen and the wildlings, the enemies of the north? But
if he thinks that I am going to walk into his trap, he is a bigger fool
than you.” She turned back to the little queen. “The Shield Islands
belong to the Reach. Grimm and Serry and the rest are sworn to
Highgarden. It is for Highgarden to answer this.”
“Highgarden shall answer,” said Margaery Tyrell. “Willas has sent
word to Leyton Hightower in Oldtown, so he can see to his own
defenses. Garlan is gathering men to retake the isles. The best part
of our power remains with my lord father, though. We must send
word to him at Storm’s End. At once.”
“And lift the siege?” Cersei did not care for Margaery’s
presumption. She says “at once” to me. Does she take me for her
handmaid? “I have no doubt that Lord Stannis would be pleased by
that. Have you been listening, my lady? If he can draw our eyes
away from Dragonstone and Storm’s End to these rocks …”
“Rocks?” gasped Margaery. “Did Your Grace say rocks?”
The Knight of Flowers put a hand upon his sister’s shoulder. “If it
please Your Grace, from those rocks the ironmen threaten Oldtown
and the Arbor. From strongholds on the Shields, raiders can sail up
the Mander into the very heart of the Reach, as they did of old.
With enough men they might even threaten Highgarden.”
“Truly?” said the queen, all innocence. “Why then, your brave
brothers had best roust them o those rocks, and quickly.”
“How would the queen suggest they accomplish that, without
su cient ships?” asked Ser Loras. “Willas and Garlan can raise ten
thousand men within a fortnight and twice that in a moon’s turn,
but they cannot walk on water, Your Grace.”
“Highgarden sits above the Mander,” Cersei reminded him. “You
and your vassals command a thousand leagues of coast. Are there no
sherfolk along your shores? Do you have no pleasure barges, no
ferries, no river galleys, no ski s?”
“Many and more,” Ser Loras admitted.
“Such should be more than su cient to carry a host across a little
stretch of water, I would think.”
“And when the longships of the ironborn descend upon our ragtag
eet as it is making its way across this ‘little stretch of water,’ what

would Your Grace have us do then?”
Drown, thought Cersei. “Highgarden has gold as well. You have
my leave to hire sellsails from beyond the narrow sea.”
“Pirates out of Myr and Lys, you mean?” Loras said with
contempt. “The scum of the Free Cities?”
He is as insolent as his sister. “Sad to say, all of us must deal with
scum from time to time,” she said with poisonous sweetness.
“Perhaps you have a better notion?”
“Only the Arbor has su cient galleys to retake the mouth of the
Mander from the ironmen and protect my brothers from their
longships during their crossing. I beg Your Grace, send word to
Dragonstone and command Lord Redwyne to raise his sails at once.”
At least he has the sense to beg. Paxter Redwyne owned two
hundred warships, and ve times as many merchant carracks, wine
cogs, trading galleys, and whalers. Redwyne was encamped beneath
the walls of Dragonstone, however, and the greater part of his eet
was engaged in ferrying men across Blackwater Bay for the assault
on that island stronghold. The remainder prowled Shipbreaker Bay
to the south, where only their presence prevented Storm’s End from
being resupplied by sea.
Aurane Waters bristled at Ser Loras’s suggestion. “If Lord
Redwyne sails his ships away, how are we to supply our men on
Dragonstone? Without the Arbor’s galleys, how will we maintain
the siege of Storm’s End?”
“The siege can be resumed later, after—”
Cersei cut him o . “Storm’s End is a hundred times more valuable
than the Shields, and Dragonstone … so long as Dragonstone
remains in the hands of Stannis Baratheon, it is a knife at my son’s
throat. We will release Lord Redwyne and his eet when the castle
falls.” The queen pushed herself to her feet. “This audience is at an
end. Grand Maester Pycelle, a word.”
The old man started, as if her voice had woken him from some
dream of youth, but before he could answer, Loras Tyrell strode
forward, so swiftly that the queen drew back in alarm. She was
about to shout for Ser Osmund to defend her when the Knight of
Flowers sank to one knee. “Your Grace, let me take Dragonstone.”

His sister’s hand went to her mouth. “Loras, no.”
Ser Loras ignored her plea. “It will take half a year or more to
starve Dragonstone into submission, as Lord Paxter means to do.
Give me the command, Your Grace. The castle will be yours within
a fortnight if I have to tear it down with my bare hands.”
No one had given Cersei such a lovely gift since Sansa Stark had
run to her to divulge Lord Eddard’s plans. She was pleased to see
that Margaery had gone pale. “Your courage takes my breath away,
Ser Loras,” Cersei said. “Lord Waters, are any of the new dromonds
t to put to sea?”
“Sweet Cersei is, Your Grace. A swift ship, and as strong as the
queen she’s named for.”
“Splendid. Let Sweet Cersei carry our Knight of Flowers to
Dragonstone at once. Ser Loras, the command is yours. Swear to me
that you shall not return until Dragonstone is Tommen’s.”
“I shall, Your Grace.” He rose.
Cersei kissed him on both cheeks. She kissed his sister too, and
whispered, “You have a gallant brother.” Either Margaery did not
have the grace to answer or fear had stolen all her words.
Dawn was still several hours away when Cersei slipped out the
king’s door behind the Iron Throne. Ser Osmund went before her
with a torch and Qyburn strolled along beside her. Pycelle had to
struggle to keep up. “If it please Your Grace,” he pu ed, “young
men are overbold, and think only of the glory of battle and never of
its dangers. Ser Loras … this plan of his is fraught with peril. To
storm the very walls of Dragonstone …”
“… is very brave.”
“… brave, yes, but …”
“I have no doubt that our Knight of Flowers will be the rst man
to gain the battlements.” And perhaps the rst to fall. The pox-scarred
bastard that Stannis had left to hold his castle was no callow
tourney champion but a seasoned killer. If the gods were good, he
would give Ser Loras the glorious end he seemed to want. Assuming
the boy does not drown on the way. There had been another storm
last night, a savage one. The rain had come down in black sheets for
hours. And wouldn’t that be sad? the queen mused. Drowning is

ordinary. Ser Loras lusts for glory as real men lust for women, the least
the gods can do is grant him a death worthy of a song.
No matter what befell the boy on Dragonstone, however, the
queen would be the winner. If Loras took the castle, Stannis would
su er a grievous blow, and the Redwyne eet could sail o to meet
the ironmen. If he failed, she would see to it that he had the lion’s
share of the blame. Nothing tarnishes a hero as much as failure. And
if he should come home on his shield, covered in blood and glory, Ser
Osney will be there to console his grieving sister.
The laugh would not be contained any longer. It burst from
Cersei’s lips, and echoed down the hall.
“Your Grace?” Grand Maester Pycelle blinked, his mouth sagging
open. “Why … why would you laugh?”
“Why,” she had to say, “elsewise I might weep. My heart is
bursting with love for our Ser Loras and his valor.”
She left the Grand Maester on the serpentine steps. That one has
outlived any usefulness he ever had, the queen decided. All Pycelle
ever seemed to do of late was plague her with cautions and
objections. He had even objected to the understanding she had
reached with the High Septon, gaping at her with dim and rheumy
eyes when she commanded him to prepare the necessary papers and
babbling about old dead history until Cersei cut him o . “King
Maegor’s day is done, and so are his decrees,” she said rmly. “This
is King Tommen’s day, and mine.” I would have done better to let him
perish in the black cells.
“Should Ser Loras fall, Your Grace will need to nd another
worthy for the Kingsguard,” Lord Qyburn said as they crossed over
the spiked moat that girded Maegor’s Holdfast.
“Someone splendid,” she agreed. “Someone so young and swift
and strong that Tommen will forget all about Ser Loras. A bit of
gallantry would not be amiss, but his head should not be full of
foolish notions. Do you know of such a man?”
“Alas, no,” said Qyburn. “I had another sort of champion in mind.
What he lacks in gallantry he will give you tenfold in devotion. He
will protect your son, kill your enemies, and keep your secrets, and
no living man will be able to withstand him.”

“So you say. Words are wind. When the hour is ripe, you may
produce this paragon of yours and we will see if he is all that you
have promised.”
“They will sing of him, I swear it.” Lord Qyburn’s eyes crinkled
with amusement. “Might I ask about the armor?”
“I have placed your order. The armorer thinks that I am mad. He
assures me that no man is strong enough to move and ght in such
a weight of plate.” Cersei gave the chainless maester a warning
look. “Play me for a fool, and you’ll die screaming. You are aware
of that, I trust?”
“Always, Your Grace.”
“Good. Say no more of this.”
“The queen is wise. These walls have ears.”
“So they do.” At night Cersei sometimes heard soft sounds, even
in her own apartments. Mice in the walls, she would tell herself, no
more than that.
A candle was burning by her bedside, but the hearth re had gone
out and there was no other light. The room was cold as well. Cersei
undressed and slipped beneath the blankets, leaving her gown to
puddle on the oor. Across the bed, Taena stirred. “Your Grace,”
she murmured softly. “What hour is it?”
“The hour of the owl,” the queen replied.
Though Cersei often slept alone, she had never liked it. Her oldest
memories were of sharing a bed with Jaime, when they had still
been so young that no one could tell the two of them apart. Later,
after they were separated, she’d had a string of bedmaids and
companions, most of them girls of an age with her, the daughters of
her father’s household knights and bannermen. None had pleased
her, and few lasted very long. Little sneaks, the lot of them. Vapid,
weepy creatures, always telling tales and trying to worm their way
between me and Jaime. Still, there had been nights deep within the
black bowels of the Rock when she had welcomed their warmth
beside her. An empty bed was a cold bed.
Here most of all. There were chills in this room, and her wretched
royal husband had died beneath this canopy. Robert Baratheon, the
First of His Name, may there never be a second. A dim, drunken brute

of a man. Let him weep in hell. Taena warmed the bed as well as
Robert ever had, and never tried to force Cersei’s legs apart. Of late
she had shared the queen’s bed more often than Lord
Merryweather’s. Orton did not seem to mind … or if he did, he
knew better than to say so.
“I was concerned when I woke and found you gone,” murmured
Lady Merryweather, sitting up against the pillows, the coverlets
tangled about her waist. “Is aught amiss?”
“No,” said Cersei, “all is well. On the morrow Ser Loras will sail
for Dragonstone, to win the castle, loose the Redwyne eet, and
prove his manhood to us all.” She told the Myrish woman all that
had occurred beneath the shifting shadow of the Iron Throne.
“Without her valiant brother, our little queen is next to naked. She
has her guards, to be sure, but I have their captain here and there
about the castle. A garrulous old man with a squirrel on his surcoat.
Squirrels run from lions. He does not have it in him to defy the Iron
Throne.”
“Margaery has other swords about her,” cautioned Lady
Merryweather. “She has made many friends about the court, and
she and her young cousins all have admirers.”
“A few suitors do not concern me,” Cersei said. “The army at
Storm’s End, however …”
“What do you mean to do, Your Grace?”
“Why do you ask?” The question was a little too pointed for
Cersei’s taste. “I do hope you are not thinking of sharing my idle
musings with our poor little queen?”
“Never. I am not that girl Senelle.”
Cersei did not care to think about Senelle. She repaid my kindness
with betrayal. Sansa Stark had done the same. So had Melara
Hetherspoon and fat Jeyne Farman when the three of them were
girls. I would never have gone into that tent if not for them. I would
never have allowed Maggy the Frog to taste my morrows in a drop of
blood. “I would be very sad if you ever betrayed my trust, Taena. I
would have no choice but to give you to Lord Qyburn, but I know
that I should weep.”

“I will never give you cause to weep, Your Grace. If I do, say the
word, and I will give myself to Qyburn. I want only to be close to
you. To serve you, however you require.”
“And for this service, what reward will you expect?”
“Nothing. It pleases me to please you.” Taena rolled onto her
side, her olive skin shining in the candlelight. Her breasts were
larger than the queen’s and tipped with huge nipples, black as horn.
She is younger than I am. Her breasts have not begun to sag. Cersei
wondered what it would feel like to kiss another woman. Not
lightly on the cheek, as was common courtesy amongst ladies of
high birth, but full upon the lips. Taena’s lips were very full. She
wondered what it would feel like to suckle on those breasts, to lay
the Myrish woman on her back and push her legs apart and use her
as a man would use her, the way Robert would use her when the
drink was in him, and she was unable to bring him o with hand or
mouth.
Those had been the worst nights, lying helpless underneath him
as he took his pleasure, stinking of wine and grunting like a boar.
Usually he rolled o and went to sleep as soon as it was done, and
was snoring before his seed could dry upon her thighs. She was
always sore afterward, raw between the legs, her breasts painful
from the mauling he would give them. The only time he’d ever
made her wet was on their wedding night.
Robert had been handsome enough when they rst married, tall
and strong and powerful, but his hair was black and heavy, thick on
his chest and coarse around his sex. The wrong man came back from
the Trident, the queen would sometimes think as he was plowing
her. In the rst few years, when he mounted her more often, she
would close her eyes and pretend that he was Rhaegar. She could
not pretend that he was Jaime; he was too di erent, too unfamiliar.
Even the smell of him was wrong.
For Robert, those nights never happened. Come morning he
remembered nothing, or so he would have had her believe. Once,
during the rst year of their marriage, Cersei had voiced her
displeasure the next day. “You hurt me,” she complained. He had
the grace to look ashamed. “It was not me, my lady,” he said in a

sulky sullen tone, like a child caught stealing apple cakes from the
kitchen. “It was the wine. I drink too much wine.” To wash down
his admission, he reached for his horn of ale. As he raised it to his
mouth, she smashed her own horn in his face, so hard she chipped a
tooth. Years later at a feast, she heard him telling a serving wench
how he’d cracked the tooth in a mêlée. Well, our marriage was a
mêlée, she re ected, so he did not lie.
The rest had all been lies, though. He did remember what he did
to her at night, she was convinced of that. She could see it in his
eyes. He only pretended to forget; it was easier to do that than to
face his shame. Deep down Robert Baratheon was a coward. In time
the assaults did grow less frequent. During the rst year he took her
at least once a fortnight; by the end it was not even once a year. He
never stopped completely, though. Sooner or later there would
always come a night when he would drink too much and want to
claim his rights. What shamed him in the light of day gave him
pleasure in the darkness.
“My queen?” said Taena Merryweather. “You have a strange look
in your eyes. Are you unwell?”
“I was just … remembering.” Her throat was dry. “You are a
good friend, Taena. I have not had a true friend in …”
Someone hammered at the door.
Again? The urgency of the sound made her shiver. Have another
thousand ships descended on us? She slipped into a bedrobe and went
to see who it was. “Beg pardon for disturbing you, Your Grace,” the
guardsman said, “but Lady Stokeworth is below, begging audience.”
“At this hour?” snapped Cersei. “Has Falyse lost her wits? Tell her
I have retired. Tell her that smallfolk on the Shields are being
slaughtered. Tell her that I have been awake for half the night. I
will see her on the morrow.”
The guard hesitated. “If it please Your Grace, she’s … she’s not in
a good way, if you take my meaning.”
Cersei frowned. She had assumed Falyse was here to tell her that
Bronn was dead. “Very well. I shall need to dress. Take her to my
solar and have her wait.” When Lady Merryweather made to rise

and come with her, the queen demurred. “No, stay. One of us
should get some rest, at least. I shan’t be long.”
Lady Falyse’s face was bruised and swollen, her eyes red from her
tears. Her lower lip was broken, her clothing soiled and torn. “Gods
be good,” Cersei said as she ushered her into the solar and closed
the door. “What has happened to your face?”
Falyse did not seem to hear the question. “He killed him,” she said
in a quavery voice. “Mother have mercy, he … he …” She broke
down sobbing, her whole body trembling.
Cersei poured a cup of wine and took it to the weeping woman.
“Drink this. The wine will calm you. That’s it. A little more now.
Stop that weeping and tell me why you’re here.”
It took the rest of the agon before the queen was nally able to
coax the whole sad tale out of Lady Falyse. Once she had, she did
not know whether to laugh or rage. “Single combat,” she repeated.
Is there no one in the Seven Kingdoms that I can rely upon? Am I the
only one in Westeros with a pinch of wits? “You are telling me Ser
Balman challenged Bronn to single combat?”
“He said it would be s-s-simple. The lance is a kn-knight’s
weapon, he said, and B-Bronn was no true knight. Balman said he
would unhorse him and nish him as he lay st-st-stunned.”
Bronn was no knight, that was true. Bronn was a battle-hardened
killer. Your cretin of a husband wrote his own death warrant. “A
splendid plan. Dare I ask how it went awry?”
“B-Bronn drove his lance through the chest of Balman’s poor h-hh-horse. Balman, he … his legs were crushed when the beast fell. He
screamed so piteously …”
Sellswords have no pity, Cersei might have said. “I asked you to
arrange a hunting mishap. An arrow gone astray, a fall from a
horse, an angry boar … there are so many ways a man can die in
the woods. None of them involving lances.”
Falyse did not seem to hear her. “When I tried to run to my
Balman, he, he, he struck me in the face. He made my lord c-cconfess. Balman was crying out for Maester Frenken to attend him,
but the sellsword, he, he, he …”

“Confess?” Cersei did not like that word. “I trust our brave Ser
Balman held his tongue.”
“Bronn put a dagger in his eye, and told me I had best be gone
from Stokeworth before the sun went down or I’d get the same. He
said he’d pass me around to the g-g-garrison, if any of them would
have me. When I ordered Bronn seized, one of his knights had the
insolence to say that I should do as Lord Stokeworth said. He called
him Lord Stokeworth!” Lady Falyse clutched at the queen’s hand.
“Your Grace must give me knights. A hundred knights! And
crossbowmen, to take my castle back. Stokeworth is mine! They
would not even permit me to gather up my clothes! Bronn said they
were his wife’s clothes now, all my s-silks and velvets.”
Your rags are the least of your concern. The queen pulled her
ngers free of the other woman’s clammy grasp. “I asked you to
snu out a candle to help protect the king. Instead you heaved a pot
of wild re at it. Did your witless Balman bring my name into this?
Tell me he did not.”
Falyse licked her lips. “He … he was in pain, his legs were
broken. Bronn said he would show him mercy, but … What will
happen to my poor m-m-mother?”
I imagine she will die. “What do you think?” Lady Tanda might
well be dead already. Bronn did not seem the sort of man who
would expend much e ort nursing an old woman with a broken hip.
“You have to help me. Where am I to go? What will I do?”
Perhaps you might wed Moon Boy, Cersei almost said. He is nigh as
big a fool as your late husband. She could not risk a war on the very
doorstep of King’s Landing, not now. “The silent sisters are always
glad to welcome widows,” she said. “Theirs is a serene life, a life of
prayer and contemplation and good works. They bring solace to the
living and peace to the dead.” And they do not talk. She could not
have the woman running about the Seven Kingdoms spreading
dangerous tales.
Falyse was deaf to good sense. “All we did, we did in service to
Your Grace. Proud to Be Faithful. You said …”
“I recall.” Cersei forced a smile. “You shall stay here with us, my
lady, until such time as we nd a way to win your castle back. Let

me pour you another cup of wine. It will help you sleep. You are
weary and sick of heart, that’s plain to see. My poor dear Falyse.
That’s it, drink up.”
As her guest was working on the agon, Cersei went to the door
and called her maids. She told Dorcas to nd Lord Qyburn for her
and bring him here at once. Jocelyn Swyft she dispatched to the
kitchens. “Bring bread and cheese, a meat pie and some apples. And
wine. We have a thirst.”
Qyburn arrived before the food. Lady Falyse had put down three
more cups by then, and was beginning to nod, though from time to
time she would rouse and give another sob. The queen took Qyburn
aside and told him of Ser Balman’s folly. “I cannot have Falyse
spreading tales about the city. Her grief has made her witless. Do
you still need women for your … work?”
“I do, Your Grace. The puppeteers are quite used up.”
“Take her and do with her as you will, then. But once she goes
down into the black cells … need I say more?”
“No, Your Grace. I understand.”
“Good.” The queen donned her smile once again. “Sweet Falyse,
Maester Qyburn’s here. He’ll help you rest.”
“Oh,” said Falyse vaguely. “Oh, good.”
When the door closed behind them Cersei poured herself another
cup of wine. “I am surrounded by enemies and imbeciles,” she said.
She could not even trust to her own blood and kin, nor Jaime, who
had once been her other half. He was meant to be my sword and
shield, my strong right arm. Why does he insist on vexing me?
Bronn was no more than an annoyance, to be sure. She had never
truly believed that he was harboring the Imp. Her twisted little
brother was too clever to allow Lollys to name her wretched illbegotten bastard after him, knowing it was sure to draw the queen’s
wroth down upon her. Lady Merryweather had pointed that out,
and she was right. The mockery was almost certainly the sellsword’s
doing. She could picture him watching his wrinkled red stepson
sucking on one of Lollys’s swollen dugs, a cup of wine in his hand
and an insolent smile on his face. Grin all you wish, Ser Bronn, you’ll
be screaming soon enough. Enjoy your lackwit lady and your stolen

castle whilst you can. When the time comes, I shall swat you as if you
were a y. Perhaps she would send Loras Tyrell to do the swatting,
if the Knight of Flowers should somehow return alive from
Dragonstone. That would be delicious. If the gods were good, each of
them would kill the other, like Ser Arryk and Ser Erryk. As for
Stokeworth … no, she was sick of thinking about Stokeworth.
Taena had drifted back to sleep by the time the queen returned to
the bedchamber, her head spinning. Too much wine and too little
sleep, she told herself. It was not every night that she was awakened
twice with such desperate tidings. At least I could awaken. Robert
would have been too drunk to rise, let alone rule. It would have fallen to
Jon Arryn to deal with all of this. It pleased her to think that she made
a better king than Robert.
The sky outside the window was already beginning to lighten.
Cersei sat on the bed beside Lady Merryweather, listening to her
soft breathing, watching her breasts rise and fall. Does she dream of
Myr? she wondered. Or is it her lover with the scar, the dangerous darkhaired man who would not be refused? She was quite certain Taena
was not dreaming of Lord Orton.
Cersei cupped the other woman’s breast. Softly at rst, hardly
touching, feeling the warmth of it beneath her palm, the skin as
smooth as satin. She gave it a gentle squeeze, then ran her
thumbnail lightly across the big dark nipple, back and forth and
back and forth until she felt it sti en. When she glanced up, Taena’s
eyes were open. “Does that feel good?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Lady Merryweather.
“And this?” Cersei pinched the nipple now, pulling on it hard,
twisting it between her ngers.
The Myrish woman gave a gasp of pain. “You’re hurting me.”
“It’s just the wine. I had a agon with my supper, and another
with the widow Stokeworth. I had to drink to keep her calm.” She
twisted Taena’s other nipple too, pulling until the other woman
gasped. “I am the queen. I mean to claim my rights.”
“Do what you will.” Taena’s hair was as black as Robert’s, even
down between her legs, and when Cersei touched her there she
found her hair all sopping wet, where Robert’s had been coarse and

dry. “Please,” the Myrish woman said, “go on, my queen. Do as you
will with me. I’m yours.”
But it was no good. She could not feel it, whatever Robert felt on
the nights he took her. There was no pleasure in it, not for her. For
Taena, yes. Her nipples were two black diamonds, her sex slick and
steamy. Robert would have loved you, for an hour. The queen slid a
nger into that Myrish swamp, then another, moving them in and
out, but once he spent himself inside you, he would have been hardpressed to recall your name.
She wanted to see if it would be as easy with a woman as it had
always been with Robert. Ten thousand of your children perished in
my palm, Your Grace, she thought, slipping a third nger into Myr.
Whilst you snored, I would lick your sons o my face and ngers one by
one, all those pale sticky princes. You claimed your rights, my lord, but
in the darkness I would eat your heirs. Taena gave a shudder. She
gasped some words in a foreign tongue, then shuddered again and
arched her back and screamed. She sounds as if she is being gored, the
queen thought. For a moment she let herself imagine that her
ngers were a bore’s tusks, ripping the Myrish woman apart from
groin to throat.
It was still no good.
It had never been any good with anyone but Jaime.
When she tried to take her hand away, Taena caught it and kissed
her ngers. “Sweet queen, how shall I pleasure you?” She slid her
hand down Cersei’s side and touched her sex. “Tell me what you
would have of me, my love.”
“Leave me.” Cersei rolled away and pulled up the bedclothes to
cover herself, shivering. Dawn was breaking. It would be morning
soon, and all of this would be forgotten.
It had never happened.

JAIME

The trumpets made a brazen blare, and cut the still blue air of dusk.
Josmyn Peckledon was on his feet at once, scrambling for his
master’s swordbelt.
The boy has good instincts. “Outlaws don’t blow trumpets to herald
their arrival,” Jaime told him. “I shan’t need my sword. That will be
my cousin, the Warden of the West.”
The riders were dismounting when he emerged from his tent; half
a dozen knights, and twoscore mounted archers and men-at-arms.
“Jaime!” roared a shaggy man clad in gilded ringmail and a fox-fur
cloak. “So gaunt, and all in white! And bearded too!”
“This? Mere stubble, against that mane of yours, coz.” Ser
Daven’s bristling beard and bushy mustache grew into sidewhiskers
as thick as a hedgerow, and those into the tangled yellow thicket
atop his head, matted down by the helm he was removing.
Somewhere in the midst of all that hair lurked a pug nose and a pair
of lively hazel eyes. “Did some outlaw steal your razor?”
“I vowed I would not let my hair be cut until my father was
avenged.” For a man who looked so leonine, Daven Lannister
sounded oddly sheepish. “The Young Wolf got to Karstark rst,
though. Robbed me of my vengeance.” He handed his helm to a
squire and pushed his ngers through his hair where the weight of
the steel had crushed it down. “I like a bit of hair. The nights grow
colder, and a little foliage helps to keep your face warm. Aye, and

Aunt Genna always said I had a brick for a chin.” He clasped Jaime
by the arms. “We feared for you after the Whispering Wood. Heard
Stark’s direwolf tore out your throat.”
“Did you weep bitter tears for me, coz?”
“Half of Lannisport was mourning. The female half.” Ser Daven’s
gaze went to Jaime’s stump. “So it’s true. The bastards took your
sword hand.”
“I have a new one, made of gold. There’s much to be said for
being one-handed. I drink less wine for fear of spilling and am
seldom inclined to scratch my arse at court.”
“Aye, there’s that. Maybe I should have mine o as well.” His
cousin laughed. “Was it Catelyn Stark who took it?”
“Vargo Hoat.” Where do these tales come from?
“The Qohorik?” Ser Daven spat. “That’s for him and all his Brave
Companions. I told your father I would forage for him, but he
refused me. Some tasks are t for lions, he said, but foraging is best
left for goats and dogs.”
Lord Tywin’s very words, Jaime knew; he could almost hear his
father’s voice. “Come inside, coz. We need to talk.”
Garrett had lit the braziers, and their glowing coals lled Jaime’s
tent with a ruddy heat. Ser Daven shrugged out of his cloak and
tossed it at Little Lew. “You a Piper, boy?” he growled. “You have a
runty look to you.”
“I’m Lewys Piper, if it please my lord.”
“I beat your brother bloody in a mêlée once. The runty little fool
took o ense when I asked him if that was his sister dancing naked
on his shield.”
“She’s the sigil of our House. We don’t have a sister.”
“More’s the pity. Your sigil has nice teats. What sort of man hides
behind a naked woman, though? Every time I thumped your
brother’s shield, I felt unchivalrous.”
“Enough,” said Jaime, laughing. “Leave him be.” Pia was mulling
wine for them, stirring the kettle with a spoon. “I need to know
what I can expect to nd at Riverrun.”
His cousin shrugged. “The siege drags on. The Black sh sits inside
the castle, we sit outside in our camps. Bloody boring, if you want

the truth.” Ser Daven seated himself upon a camp stool. “Tully
ought to make a sortie, to remind us all we’re still at war. Be nice if
he culled some Freys too. Ryman, for a start. The man’s drunk more
oft than not. Oh, and Edwyn. Not as thick as his father, but as full
of hate as a boil’s full of pus. And our own Ser Emmon … no, Lord
Emmon, Seven save us, must not forget his new title … our Lord of
Riverrun does nought but try to tell me how to run the siege. He
wants me to take the castle without damaging it, since it is now his
lordly seat.”
“Is that wine hot yet?” Jaime asked Pia.
“Yes, m’lord.” The girl covered her mouth when she spoke. Peck
served the wine on a golden platter. Ser Daven pulled o his gloves
and took a cup. “Thank you, boy. Who might you be?”
“Josmyn Peckledon, if it please my lord.”
“Peck was a hero on the Blackwater,” Jaime said. “He slew two
knights and captured two more.”
“You must be more dangerous than you look, lad. Is that a beard,
or did you forget to wash the dirt o your face? Stannis Baratheon’s
wife has a thicker mustache. How old are you?”
“Fifteen, ser.”
Ser Daven snorted. “You know the best thing about heroes,
Jaime? They all die young and leave more women for the rest of
us.” He tossed the cup back to the squire. “Fill that full again, and
I’ll call you hero too. I have a thirst.”
Jaime lifted his own cup left-handed and took a swallow. The
warmth spread through his chest. “You were speaking of the Freys
you wanted dead. Ryman, Edwyn, Emmon …”
“And Walder Rivers,” Daven said, “that whoreson. Hates that he’s
a bastard, and hates everyone who’s not. Ser Perwyn seems a decent
fellow, though, might as well spare him. The women too. I’m to
marry one, I hear. Your father might have seen t to consult with
me about this marriage, by the bye. My own father was treating
with Paxter Redwyne before Oxcross, did you know? Redwyne has
a nicely dowered daughter …”
“Desmera?” Jaime laughed. “How well do you like freckles?”

“If my choice is Freys or freckles, well … half of Lord Walder’s
brood look like stoats.”
“Only half? Be thankful. I saw Lancel’s bride at Darry.”
“Gatehouse Ami, gods be good. I couldn’t believe that Lancel
picked that one. What’s wrong with that boy?”
“He’s grown pious,” said Jaime, “but it wasn’t him who did the
picking. Lady Amerei’s mother is a Darry. Our uncle thought she’d
help Lancel win the Darry smallfolk.”
“How, by fucking them? You know why they call her Gatehouse
Ami? She raises her portcullis for every knight who happens by.
Lancel had best nd an armorer to make him a horned helm.”
“That won’t be necessary. Our coz is o to King’s Landing to take
vows as one of the High Septon’s swords.”
Ser Daven could not have looked more astonished if Jaime had
told him that Lancel had decided to become a mummer’s monkey.
“Not truly? You are japing with me. Gatehouse Ami must be more
stoatish than I’d heard if she could drive the boy to that.”
When Jaime had taken his leave of Lady Amerei, she had been
weeping softly at the dissolution of her marriage whilst letting Lyle
Crakehall console her. Her tears had not troubled him half so much
as the hard looks on the faces of her kin as they stood about the
yard. “I hope you do not intend to take vows as well, coz,” he said
to Daven. “The Freys are prickly where marriage contracts are
concerned. I would hate to disappoint them again.”
Ser Daven snorted. “I’ll wed and bed my stoat, never fear. I know
what happened to Robb Stark. From what Edwyn tells me, though,
I’d best pick one who hasn’t owered yet, or I’m like to nd that
Black Walder has been there rst. I’ll wager he’s had Gatehouse
Ami, and more than thrice. Maybe that explains Lancel’s godliness,
and his father’s mood.”
“You have seen Ser Kevan?”
“Aye. He passed here on his way west. I asked him to help us take
the castle, but Kevan would have none of it. He brooded the whole
time he was here. Courteous enough, but chilly. I swore to him that
I never asked to be made Warden of the West, that the honor should
have gone to him, and he declared that he held no grudge against

me, but you would never have known it from his tone. He stayed
three days and hardly said three words to me. Would that he’d
remained, I could have used his counsel. Our friends of Frey would
not have dared vex Ser Kevan the way that they’ve been vexing
me.”
“Tell me,” said Jaime.
“I would, but where to begin? Whilst I’ve been building rams and
siege towers, Ryman Frey has raised a gibbet. Every day at dawn he
brings forth Edmure Tully, drapes a noose around his neck, and
threatens to hang him unless the castle yields. The Black sh pays
his mummer’s show no mind, so come evenfall Lord Edmure is
taken down again. His wife’s with child, did you know?”
He hadn’t. “Edmure bedded her, after the Red Wedding?”
“He was bedding her during the Red Wedding. Roslin’s a pretty
little thing, hardly stoatish at all. And fond of Edmure, queerly.
Perwyn tells me she’s praying for a girl.”
Jaime considered that a moment. “Once Edmure’s son is born,
Lord Walder will have no more need of Edmure.”
“That’s how I see it too. Our good-uncle Emm … ah, Lord
Emmon, that is … he wants Edmure hanged at once. The presence
of a Tully Lord of Riverrun distresses him almost as much as the
prospective birth of yet another. Daily he beseeches me to make Ser
Ryman dangle Tully, never mind how. Meanwhile, I have Lord
Gawen Westerling tugging at my other sleeve. The Black sh has his
lady wife inside the castle, along with three of his snot-nosed
whelps. His lordship fears Tully will kill them if the Freys hang
Edmure. One of them is the Young Wolf’s little queen.”
Jaime had met Jeyne Westerling, he thought, though he could not
recall what she looked like. She must be fair indeed, to have been
worth a kingdom. “Ser Brynden won’t kill children,” he assured his
cousin. “He’s not as black a sh as that.” He was beginning to grasp
why Riverrun had not yet fallen. “Tell me of your dispositions, coz.”
“We have the castle well encircled. Ser Ryman and the Freys are
north of the Tumblestone. South of Red Fork sits Lord Emmon, with
Ser Forley Prester and with what remains of your old host, plus the
river lords who came over to us after the Red Wedding. A sullen lot,

I don’t mind saying. Good for sulking in their tents, but not much
more. Mine own camp is between the rivers, facing the moat and
Riverrun’s main gates. We’ve thrown a boom across the Red Fork,
downstream of the castle. Manfryd Yew and Raynard Ruttiger have
charge of its defense, so no one can escape by boat. I gave them
nets as well, to sh. It helps keep us fed.”
“Can we starve the castle out?”
Ser Daven shook his head. “The Black sh expelled all the useless
mouths from Riverrun and picked this country clean. He has enough
stores to keep man and horse alive for two full years.”
“And how well are we provisioned?”
“So long as there are sh in the rivers, we won’t starve, though I
don’t know how we’re going to feed the horses. The Freys are
hauling food and fodder down from the Twins, but Ser Ryman
claims he does not have enough to share, so we must forage for
ourselves. Half the men I send o to look for food do not return.
Some are deserting. Others we nd ripening under trees, with ropes
about their necks.”
“We came on some, the day before last,” said Jaime. Addam
Marbrand’s scouts had found them, hanging black-faced beneath a
crabapple tree. The corpses had been stripped naked, and each man
had a crabapple shoved between his teeth. None bore any wounds;
plainly, they had yielded. Strongboar had grown furious at that,
vowing bloody vengeance on the heads of any men who would truss
up warriors to die like suckling pigs.
“It might have been outlaws,” Ser Daven said, when Jaime told
the tale, “or not. There are still bands of northmen about. And these
Lords of the Trident may have bent their knees, but methinks their
hearts are still … wol sh.”
Jaime glanced at his two younger squires, who were hovering
near the braziers pretending not to listen. Lewys Piper and Garrett
Paege were both the sons of river lords. He had grown fond of both
of them and would hate to have to give them to Ser Ilyn. “The ropes
suggest Dondarrion to me.”
“Your lightning lord’s not the only man who knows how to tie a
noose. Don’t get me started on Lord Beric. He’s here, he’s there, he’s

everywhere, but when you send men after him, he melts away like
dew. The river lords are helping him, never doubt it. A bloody
marcher lord, if you can believe it. One day you hear the man is
dead, the next they’re saying how he can’t be killed.” Ser Daven put
his wine cup down. “My scouts report res in the high places at
night. Signal res, they think … as if there were a ring of watchers
all around us. And there are res in the villages as well. Some new
god …”
No, an old one. “Thoros is with Dondarrion, the fat Myrish priest
who used to drink with Robert.” His golden hand was on the table.
Jaime touched it and watched the gold glimmer in the sullen light
of the braziers. “We’ll deal with Dondarrion if we have to, but the
Black sh must come rst. He has to know his cause is hopeless.
Have you tried to treat with him?”
“Ser Ryman did. Rode up to the castle gates half-drunk and
blustering, making threats. The Black sh appeared on the ramparts
long enough to say that he would not waste fair words on foul men.
Then he put an arrow in the rump of Ryman’s palfrey. The horse
reared, Frey fell into the mud, and I laughed so hard I almost pissed
myself. If it had been me inside the castle, I would have put that
arrow through Ryman’s lying throat.”
“I’ll wear a gorget when I treat with them,” said Jaime, with a
half smile. “I mean to o er him generous terms.” If he could end
this siege without bloodshed, then it could not be said that he had
taken up arms against House Tully.
“You are welcome to try, my lord, but I doubt that words will
win the day. We need to storm the castle.”
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Jaime would
doubtless have urged the same course. He knew he could not sit
here for two years to starve the Black sh out. “Whatever we do
needs to be done quickly,” he told Ser Daven. “My place is back at
King’s Landing, with the king.”
“Aye,” his cousin said. “I don’t doubt your sister needs you. Why
did she send o Kevan? I thought she’d make him Hand.”
“He would not take it.” He was not as blind as I was.

“Kevan should be the Warden of the West. Or you. It’s not that
I’m not grateful for the honor, mind you, but our uncle’s twice my
age and has more experience of command. I hope he knows I never
asked for this.”
“He knows.”
“How is Cersei? As beautiful as ever?”
“Radiant.” Fickle. “Golden.” False as fool’s gold. Last night he
dreamed he’d found her fucking Moon Boy. He’d killed the fool and
smashed his sister’s teeth to splinters with his golden hand, just as
Gregor Clegane had done to poor Pia. In his dreams Jaime always
had two hands; one was made of gold, but it worked just like the
other. “The sooner we are done with Riverrun, the sooner I’ll be
back at Cersei’s side.” What Jaime would do then he did not know.
He talked with his cousin for another hour before the Warden of
the West nally took his leave. When he was gone, Jaime donned
his gold hand and brown cloak to walk amongst the tents.
If truth be told, he liked this life. He felt more comfortable
amongst soldiers in the eld than he ever had at court. And his men
seemed comfortable with him as well. At one cook re three
crossbowmen o ered him a share of a hare they’d caught. At
another a young knight asked his counsel on the best way to defend
against a warhammer. Down beside the river, he watched two
washerwomen jousting in the shallows, mounted on the shoulders of
a pair of men-at-arms. The girls were half-drunk and half-naked,
laughing and snapping rolled-up cloaks at one another as a dozen
other men urged them on. Jaime bet a copper star on the blond girl
riding Ra the Sweetling, and lost it when the two of them went
down splashing amongst the reeds.
Across the river wolves were howling, and the wind was gusting
through a stand of willows, making their branches writhe and
whisper. Jaime found Ser Ilyn Payne alone outside his tent, honing
his greatsword with a whetstone. “Come,” he said, and the silent
knight rose, smiling thinly. He enjoys this, he realized. It pleases him
to humiliate me nightly. It might please him even more to kill me. He
liked to believe that he was getting better, but the improvement
was slow and not without cost. Underneath his steel and wool and

boiled leather Jaime Lannister was a tapestry of cuts and scabs and
bruises.
A sentry challenged them as they led their horses from the camp.
Jaime clapped the man’s shoulder with his golden hand. “Stay
vigilant. There are wolves about.” They rode back along the Red
Fork to the ruins of a burned village they had passed that afternoon.
It was there they danced their midnight dance, amongst blackened
stones and old cold cinders. For a little while Jaime had the better
of it. Perhaps his old skill was coming back, he allowed himself to
think. Perhaps tonight it would be Payne who went to sleep bruised
and bloody.
It was as if Ser Ilyn heard his thoughts. He parried Jaime’s last
cut lazily and launched a counterattack that drove Jaime back into
the river, where his boot slipped out from under him in the mud. He
ended on his knees, with the silent knight’s sword at his throat and
his own lost in the reeds. In the moonlight the pockmarks on
Payne’s face were large as craters. He made that clacking sound that
might have been a laugh and drew his sword up Jaime’s throat till
the point came to rest between his lips. Only then did he step back
and sheathe his steel.
I would have done better to challenge Ra the Sweetling, with a whore
upon my back, Jaime thought as he shook mud o his gilded hand.
Part of him wanted to tear the thing o and ing it in the river. It
was good for nothing, and the left was not much better. Ser Ilyn
had gone back to the horses, leaving him to nd his own feet. At
least I still have two of those.
The last day of their journey was cold and gusty. The wind rattled
amongst the branches in the bare brown woods and made the river
reeds bow low along the Red Fork. Even mantled in the winter
wool of the Kingsguard, Jaime could feel the iron teeth of that wind
as he rode beside his cousin Daven. It was late afternoon when they
sighted Riverrun, rising from the narrow point where the
Tumblestone joined the Red Fork. The Tully castle looked like a
great stone ship with its prow pointed downriver. Its sandstone
walls were drenched in red-gold light, and seemed higher and
thicker than Jaime had remembered. This nut will not crack easily, he

thought gloomily. If the Black sh would not listen, he would have
no choice but to break the vow he’d made to Catelyn Stark. The
vow he’d sworn his king came rst.
The boom across the river and the three great camps of the
besieging army were just as his cousin had described. Ser Ryman
Frey’s encampment north of the Tumblestone was the largest, and
the most disorderly. A great grey gallows loomed above the tents,
as tall as any trebuchet. On it stood a solitary gure with a rope
about his neck. Edmure Tully. Jaime felt a stab of pity. To keep him
standing there day after day, with that noose around his neck … better
to have his head o and be done with it.
Behind the gallows, tents and cook res spread out in ragged
disarray. The Frey lordlings and their knights had raised their
pavilions comfortably upstream of the latrine trenches; downstream
were muddy hovels, wayns, and oxcarts. “Ser Ryman don’t want his
boys getting bored, so he gives them whores and cock ghts and
boar baiting,” Ser Daven said. “He’s even got himself a bloody
singer. Our aunt brought Whitesmile Wat from Lannisport, if you
can believe it, so Ryman had to have a singer too. Couldn’t we just
dam the river and drown the whole lot of them, coz?”
Jaime could see archers moving behind the merlons on the castle
ramparts. Above them streamed the banners of House Tully, the
silver trout de ant on its striped eld of red and blue. But the
highest tower ew a di erent ag; a long white standard
emblazoned with the direwolf of Stark. “The rst time I saw
Riverrun, I was a squire green as summer grass,” Jaime told his
cousin. “Old Sumner Crakehall sent me to deliver a message, one he
swore could not be entrusted to a raven. Lord Hoster kept me for a
fortnight whilst mulling his reply, and sat me beside his daughter
Lysa at every meal.”
“Small wonder you took the white. I’d have done the same.”
“Oh, Lysa was not so fearsome as all that.” She had been a pretty
girl, in truth; dimpled and delicate, with long auburn hair. Timid,
though. Prone to tongue-tied silences and ts of giggles, with none of
Cersei’s re. Her older sister had seemed more interesting, though
Catelyn was promised to some northern boy, the heir of

Winterfell … but at that age, no girl interested Jaime half so much
as Hoster’s famous brother, who had won renown ghting the
Ninepenny Kings upon the Stepstones. At table he had ignored poor
Lysa, whilst pressing Brynden Tully for tales of Maelys the
Monstrous and the Ebon Prince. Ser Brynden was younger then than I
am now, Jaime re ected, and I was younger than Peck.
The nearest ford across the Red Fork was upstream of the castle.
To reach Ser Daven’s camp they had to ride through Emmon Frey’s,
past the pavilions of the river lords who had bent their knees and
been accepted back into the king’s peace. Jaime noted the banners
of Lychester and Vance, of Roote and Goodbrook, the acorns of
House Smallford and Lord Piper’s dancing maiden, but the banners
he did not see gave him pause. The silver eagle of Mallister was
nowhere in evidence; nor the red horse of Bracken, the willow of
the Rygers, the twining snakes of Paege. Though all had renewed
their fealty to the Iron Throne, none had come to join the siege. The
Brackens were
ghting the Blackwoods, Jaime knew, which
accounted for their absence, but as for the rest …
Our new friends are no friends at all. Their loyalty goes no deeper
than their skins. Riverrun had to be taken, and soon. The longer the
siege dragged on, the more it would hearten other recalcitrants, like
Tytos Blackwood.
At the ford, Ser Kennos of Kayce blew the Horn of Herrock. That
should bring the Black sh to the battlements. Ser Hugo and Ser Dermot
led Jaime’s way across the river, splashing through the muddy redbrown waters with the white standard of the Kingsguard and
Tommen’s stag and lion streaming in the wind. The rest of the
column followed hard behind them.
The Lannister camp rang to the sound of wooden hammers where
a new siege tower was rising. Two other towers stood completed,
half-covered with raw horsehide. Between them sat a rolling ram; a
tree trunk with a re-hardened point suspended on chains beneath a
wooden roof. My coz has not been idle, it would seem.
“My lord,” Peck asked, “where do you want your tent?”
“There, upon that rise.” He pointed with his golden hand, though
it was not well suited to that task. “Baggage there, horse lines

there. We’ll use the latrines my cousin has so kindly dug for us. Ser
Addam, inspect our perimeter with an eye for any weaknesses.”
Jaime did not anticipate an attack, but he had not anticipated the
Whispering Wood either.
“Shall I summon the stoats for a war council?” Daven asked.
“Not until I’ve spoken to the Black sh.” Jaime beckoned to
Beardless Jon Bettley. “Shake out a peace banner and bear a
message to the castle. Inform Ser Brynden Tully that I would have
words with him, at rst light on the morrow. I will come to the
edge of the moat and meet him on his drawbridge.”
Peck looked alarmed. “My lord, the bowmen could …”
“They won’t.” Jaime dismounted. “Raise my tent and plant my
standards.” And we’ll see who comes running, and how quickly.
It did not require long. Pia was fussing at a brazier, trying to light
the coals. Peck went to help her. Of late, Jaime oft went to sleep to
the sound of them fucking in a corner of the tent. As Garrett was
undoing the clasps on Jaime’s greaves, the tent apped open. “Here
at last, are you?” boomed his aunt. She lled the door, with her
Frey husband peering out from behind her. “Past time. Have you no
hug for your old fat aunt?” She held out her arms and left him no
choice but to embrace her.
Genna Lannister had been a shapely woman in her youth, always
threatening to over ow her bodice. Now the only shape she had
was square. Her face was broad and smooth, her neck a thick pink
pillar, her bosom enormous. She carried enough esh to make two
of her husband. Jaime hugged her dutifully and waited for her to
pinch his ear. She had been pinching his ear for as long as he could
remember, but today she forbore. Instead, she planted soft and
sloppy kisses on his cheeks. “I am sorry for your loss.”
“I had a new hand made, of gold.” He showed her.
“Very nice. Will they make you a gold father too?” Lady Genna’s
voice was sharp. “Tywin was the loss I meant.”
“A man such as Tywin Lannister comes but once in a thousand
years,” declared her husband. Emmon Frey was a fretful man with
nervous hands. He might have weighed ten stone … but only wet,
and clad in mail. He was a weed in wool, with no chin to speak of, a

aw that the prominence of the apple in his throat made even more
absurd. Half his hair had been gone before he turned thirty. Now he
was sixty and only a few white wisps remained.
“Some queer tales have been reaching us of late,” Lady Genna
said, after Jaime dismissed Pia and his squires. “A woman hardly
knows what to believe. Can it be true that Tyrion slew Tywin? Or is
that some calumny your sister put about?”
“It’s true enough.” The weight of his golden hand had grown
irksome. He fumbled at the straps that secured it to his wrist.
“For a son to raise his hand against a father,” Ser Emmon said.
“Monstrous. These are dark days in Westeros. I fear for us all with
Lord Tywin gone.”
“You feared for us all when he was here.” Genna settled her
ample rump upon a camp stool, which creaked alarmingly beneath
her weight. “Nephew, speak to us of our son Cleos and the manner
of his death.”
Jaime undid the last fastening and set his hand aside. “We were
set upon by outlaws. Ser Cleos scattered them, but it cost his life.”
The lie came easy; he could see that it pleased them.
“The boy had courage, I always said so. It was in his blood.” A
pinkish froth glistened on Ser Emmon’s lips when he spoke,
courtesy of the sourleaf he liked to chew.
“His bones should be interred beneath the Rock, in the Hall of
Heroes,” Lady Genna declared. “Where was he laid to rest?”
Nowhere. The Bloody Mummers stripped his corpse and left his esh to
feast the carrion crows. “Beside a stream,” he lied. “When this war is
done, I will nd the place and send him home.” Bones were bones;
these days, nothing was easier to come by.
“This war …” Lord Emmon cleared his throat, the apple in his
throat moving up and down. “You will have seen the siege
machines. Rams, trebuchets, towers. It will not serve, Jaime. Daven
means to break my walls, smash in my gates. He talks of burning
pitch, of setting the castle a re. My castle.” He reached up one
sleeve, brought out a parchment, and thrust it at Jaime’s face. “I
have the decree. Signed by the king, by Tommen, see, the royal

seal, the stag and lion. I am the lawful lord of Riverrun, and I will
not have it reduced to a smoking ruin.”
“Oh, put that fool thing away,” his wife snapped. “So long as the
Black sh sits inside Riverrun you can wipe your arse with that
paper for all the good it does us.” Though she had been a Frey for
fty years, Lady Genna remained very much a Lannister. Quite a lot
of Lannister. “Jaime will deliver you the castle.”
“To be sure,” Lord Emmon said. “Ser Jaime, your lord father’s
faith in me was well placed, you shall see. I mean to be rm but fair
with my new vassals. Blackwood and Bracken, Jason Mallister,
Vance and Piper, they shall learn that they have a just overlord in
Emmon Frey. My father as well, yes. He is the Lord of the Crossing,
but I am the Lord of Riverrun. A son has a duty to obey his father,
true, but a bannerman must obey his overlord.”
Oh, gods be good. “You are not his overlord, ser. Read your
parchment. You were granted Riverrun with its lands and incomes,
no more. Petyr Baelish is the Lord Paramount of the Trident.
Riverrun will be subject to the rule of Harrenhal.”
That did not please Lord Emmon. “Harrenhal is a ruin, haunted
and accursed,” he objected, “and Baelish … the man is a coin
counter, no proper lord, his birth …”
“If you are unhappy with the arrangements, go to King’s Landing
and take it up with my sweet sister.” Cersei would devour Emmon
Frey and pick her teeth with his bones, he did not doubt. That is, if
she’s not too busy fucking Osmund Kettleblack.
Lady Genna gave a snort. “There is no need to trouble Her Grace
with such nonsense. Emm, why don’t you step outside and have a
breath of air?”
“A breath of air?”
“Or a good long piss, if you prefer. My nephew and I have family
matters to discuss.”
Lord Emmon ushed. “Yes, it is warm in here. I will wait outside,
my lady. Ser.” His lordship rolled up his parchment, sketched a bow
toward Jaime, and tottered from the tent.
It was hard not to feel contemptuous of Emmon Frey. He had
arrived at Casterly Rock in his fourteenth year to wed a lioness half

his age. Tyrion used to say that Lord Tywin had given him a
nervous belly for a wedding gift. Genna has played her part as well.
Jaime remembered many a feast where Emmon sat poking at his
food sullenly whilst his wife made ribald jests with whatever
household knight had been seated to her left, their conversations
punctuated by loud bursts of laughter. She gave Frey four sons, to be
sure. At least she says they are his. No one in Casterly Rock had the
courage to suggest otherwise, least of all Ser Emmon.
No sooner was he gone than his lady wife rolled her eyes. “My
lord and master. What was your father thinking, to name him Lord
of Riverrun?”
“I imagine he was thinking of your sons.”
“I think of them as well. Emm will make a wretched lord. Ty may
do better, if he has the sense to learn from me and not his father.”
She looked about the tent. “Do you have wine?”
Jaime found a agon and poured for her, one-handed. “Why are
you here, my lady? You should have remained at Casterly Rock
until the ghting’s done.”
“Once Emm heard he was a lord, he had to come at once to claim
his seat.” Lady Genna took a drink and wiped her mouth on her
sleeve. “Your father should have granted us Darry. Cleos married
one of the plowman’s daughters, you will recall. His grieving
widow is furious that her sons were not granted her lord father’s
lands. Gatehouse Ami is Darry only on her mother’s side. My gooddaughter Jeyne is her aunt, a full sister to Lady Mariya.”
“A younger sister,” Jaime reminded her, “and Ty will have
Riverrun, a greater prize than Darry.”
“A poisoned prize. House Darry is extinguished in the male line,
House Tully is not. That muttonhead Ser Ryman puts a noose round
Edmure’s neck, but will not hang him. And Roslin Frey has a trout
growing in her belly. My grandsons will never be secure in Riverrun
so long as any Tully heir remains alive.”
She was not wrong, Jaime knew. “If Roslin has a girl—”
“—she can wed Ty, provided old Lord Walder will consent. Yes,
I’ve thought of that. A boy is just as likely, though, and his little
cock would cloud the issue. And if Ser Brynden should survive this

siege, he might be inclined to claim Riverrun in his own name … or
in the name of young Robert Arryn.”
Jaime remembered little Robert from King’s Landing, still sucking
on his mother’s teats at four. “Arryn won’t live long enough to
breed. And why should the Lord of the Eyrie need Riverrun?”
“Why does a man with one pot of gold need another? Men are
greedy. Tywin should have granted Riverrun to Kevan and Darry to
Emm. I would have told him so if he had troubled to ask me, but
when did your father ever consult with anyone but Kevan?” She
sighed deeply. “I do not blame Kevan for wanting the safer seat for
his own boy, mind you. I know him too well.”
“What Kevan wants and what Lancel wants appear to be two
di erent things.” He told her of Lancel’s decision to renounce wife
and lands and lordship to ght for the Holy Faith. “If you still want
Darry, write to Cersei and make your case.”
Lady Genna waved her cup in dismissal. “No, that horse has left
the yard. Emm has it in his pointed head that he will rule the
riverlands. And Lancel … I suppose we should have seen this
coming from afar. A life protecting the High Septon is not so
di erent from a life protecting the king, after all. Kevan will be
wroth, I fear. As wroth as Tywin was when you got it in your head
to take the white. At least Kevan still has Martyn for an heir. He can
marry him to Gatehouse Ami in Lancel’s place. Seven save us all.”
His aunt gave a sigh. “And speaking of the Seven, why would Cersei
permit the Faith to arm again?”
Jaime shrugged. “I am certain she had reasons.”
“Reasons?” Lady Genna made a rude noise. “They had best be
good reasons. The Swords and Stars troubled even the Targaryens.
The Conqueror himself tread carefully with the Faith, so they would
not oppose him. And when Aegon died and the lords rose up against
his sons, both orders were in the thick of that rebellion. The more
pious lords supported them, and many of the smallfolk. King
Maegor nally had to put a bounty on them. He paid a dragon for
the head of any unrepentant Warrior’s Son, and a silver stag for the
scalp of a Poor Fellow, if I recall my history. Thousands were slain,
but nigh as many still roamed the realm, de ant, until the Iron

Throne slew Maegor and King Jaehaerys agreed to pardon all those
who would set aside their swords.”
“I’d forgotten most of that,” Jaime confessed.
“You and your sister both.” She took another swallow of her
wine. “Is it true that Tywin was smiling on his bier?”
“He was rotting on his bier. It made his mouth twist.”
“Was that all it was?” That seemed to sadden her. “Men say that
Tywin never smiled, but he smiled when he wed your mother, and
when Aerys made him Hand. When Tarbeck Hall came crashing
down on Lady Ellyn, that scheming bitch, Tyg claimed he smiled
then. And he smiled at your birth, Jaime, I saw that with mine own
eyes. You and Cersei, pink and perfect, as alike as two peas in a
pod … well, except between the legs. What lungs you had!”
“Hear us roar.” Jaime grinned. “Next you’ll be telling me how
much he liked to laugh.”
“No. Tywin mistrusted laughter. He heard too many people
laughing at your grandsire.” She frowned. “I promise you, this
mummer’s farce of a siege would not have amused him. How do
you mean to end it, now that you’re here?”
“Treat with the Black sh.”
“That won’t work.”
“I mean to o er him good terms.”
“Terms require trust. The Freys murdered guests beneath their
roof, and you, well … I mean no o ense, my love, but you did kill a
certain king you had sworn to protect.”
“And I’ll kill the Black sh if he does not yield.” His tone was
harsher than he’d intended, but he was in no mood for having Aerys
Targaryen thrown in his face.
“How, with your tongue?” Her voice was scornful. “I may be an
old fat woman, but I do not have cheese between my ears, Jaime.
Neither does the Black sh. Empty threats won’t daunt him.”
“What would you counsel?”
She gave a ponderous shrug. “Emm wants Edmure’s head o . For
once, he may be right. Ser Ryman has made us a laughingstock with
that gibbet of his. You need to show Ser Brynden that your threats
have teeth.”

“Killing Edmure might harden Ser Brynden’s resolve.”
“Resolve is one thing Brynden Black sh never lacked for. Hoster
Tully could have told you that.” Lady Genna nished her wine.
“Well, I would never presume to tell you how to ght a war. I
know my place … unlike your sister. Is it true that Cersei burned
the Red Keep?”
“Only the Tower of the Hand.”
His aunt rolled her eyes. “She would have done better to leave
the tower and burn her Hand. Harys Swyft? If ever a man deserved
his arms, it is Ser Harys. And Gyles Rosby, Seven save us, I thought
he died years ago. Merryweather … your father used to call his
grandsire ‘the Chuckler,’ I’ll have you know. Tywin claimed the
only thing Merryweather was good for was chuckling at the king’s
witticisms. His lordship chuckled himself right into exile, as I recall.
Cersei has put some bastard on the council too, and a kettle in the
Kingsguard. She has the Faith arming and the Braavosi calling in
loans all over Westeros. None of which would be happening if she’d
had the simple sense to make your uncle the King’s Hand.”
“Ser Kevan refused the o ce.”
“So he said. He did not say why. There was much he did not say.
Would not say.” Lady Genna made a face. “Kevan always did what
was asked of him. It is not like him to turn away from any duty.
Something is awry here, I can smell it.”
“He said that he was tired.” He knows, Cersei had said, as they
stood above their father’s corpse. He knows about us.
“Tired?” His aunt pursed her lips. “I suppose he has a right to be.
It has been hard for Kevan, living all his life in Tywin’s shadow. It
was hard for all my brothers. That shadow Tywin cast was long and
black, and each of them had to struggle to nd a little sun. Tygett
tried to be his own man, but he could never match your father, and
that just made him angrier as the years went by. Gerion made japes.
Better to mock the game than to play and lose. But Kevan saw how
things stood early on, so he made himself a place by your father’s
side.”
“And you?” Jaime asked her.

“It was not a game for girls. I was my father’s precious
princess … and Tywin’s too, until I disappointed him. My brother
never learned to like the taste of disappointment.” She pushed
herself to her feet. “I’ve said what I came to say, I shan’t take any
more of your time. Do what Tywin would have done.”
“Did you love him?” Jaime heard himself ask.
His aunt looked at him strangely. “I was seven when Walder Frey
persuaded my lord father to give my hand to Emm. His second son,
not even his heir. Father was himself a thirdborn son, and younger
children crave the approval of their elders. Frey sensed that
weakness in him, and Father agreed for no better reason than to
please him. My betrothal was announced at a feast with half the
west in attendance. Ellyn Tarbeck laughed and the Red Lion went
angry from the hall. The rest sat on their tongues. Only Tywin
dared speak against the match. A boy of ten. Father turned as white
as mare’s milk, and Walder Frey was quivering.” She smiled. “How
could I not love him, after that? That is not to say that I approved
of all he did, or much enjoyed the company of the man that he
became … but every little girl needs a big brother to protect her.
Tywin was big even when he was little.” She gave a sigh. “Who will
protect us now?”
Jaime kissed her cheek. “He left a son.”
“Aye, he did. That is what I fear the most, in truth.”
That was a queer remark. “Why should you fear?”
“Jaime,” she said, tugging on his ear, “sweetling, I have known
you since you were a babe at Joanna’s breast. You smile like Gerion
and ght like Tyg, and there’s some of Kevan in you, else you
would not wear that cloak … but Tyrion is Tywin’s son, not you. I
said so once to your father’s face, and he would not speak to me for
half a year. Men are such thundering great fools. Even the sort who
come along once in a thousand years.”

CAT OF THE CANALS

She woke before the sun came up, in the little room beneath the
eaves that she shared with Brusco’s daughters.
Cat was always the rst to awaken. It was warm and snug under
the blankets with Talea and Brea. She could hear the soft sounds of
their breath. When she stirred, sitting up and fumbling for her
slippers, Brea muttered a sleepy complaint and rolled over. The chill
o the grey stone walls gave Cat gooseprickles. She dressed quickly
in the darkness. As she was slipping her tunic over her head, Talea
opened her eyes and called out, “Cat, be a sweet and bring my
clothes for me.” She was a gawky girl, all skin and bones and
elbows, always complaining she was cold.
Cat fetched her clothes for her, and Talea squirmed into them
underneath the blankets. Together they pulled her big sister from
the bed, as Brea muttered sleepy threats.
By the time the three of them climbed down the ladder from the
room beneath the eaves, Brusco and his sons were out in the boat
on the little canal behind the house. Brusco barked at the girls to
hurry, as he did every morning. His sons helped Talea and Brea
onto the boat. It was Cat’s task to untie them from the piling, toss
the rope to Brea, and shove the boat away from the dock with a
booted foot. Brusco’s sons leaned into their poles. Cat ran and leapt
across the widening gap between dock and deck.

After that, she had nothing to do but sit and yawn for a long
while as Brusco and his sons pushed them through the predawn
gloom, wending down a confusion of small canals. The day looked
to be a rare one, crisp and clear and bright. Braavos only had three
kinds of weather; fog was bad, rain was worse, and freezing rain
was worst. But every so often would come a morning when the
dawn broke pink and blue and the air was sharp and salty. Those
were the days that Cat loved best.
When they reached the broad straight waterway that was the
Long Canal, they turned south for the shmarket. Cat sat with her
legs crossed, ghting a yawn and trying to recall the details of her
dream. I dreamed I was a wolf again. She could remember the smells
best of all: trees and earth, her pack brothers, the scents of horse
and deer and man, each di erent from the others, and the sharp
acrid tang of fear, always the same. Some nights the wolf dreams
were so vivid that she could hear her brothers howling even as she
woke, and once Brea had claimed that she was growling in her sleep
as she thrashed beneath the covers. She thought that was some
stupid lie till Talea said it too.
I should not be dreaming wolf dreams, the girl told herself. I am a
cat now, not a wolf. I am Cat of the Canals. The wolf dreams belonged
to Arya of House Stark. Try as she might, though, she could not rid
herself of Arya. It made no di erence whether she slept beneath the
temple or in the little room beneath the eaves with Brusco’s
daughters, the wolf dreams still haunted her by night … and
sometimes other dreams as well.
The wolf dreams were the good ones. In the wolf dreams she was
swift and strong, running down her prey with her pack at her heels.
It was the other dream she hated, the one where she had two feet
instead of four. In that one she was always looking for her mother,
stumbling through a wasted land of mud and blood and re. It was
always raining in that dream, and she could hear her mother
screaming, but a monster with a dog’s head would not let her go
save her. In that dream she was always weeping, like a frightened
little girl. Cats never weep, she told herself, no more than wolves do.
It’s just a stupid dream.

The Long Canal took Brusco’s boat beneath the green copper
domes of the Palace of Truth and the tall square towers of the
Prestayns and Antaryons before passing under the immense grey
arches of the sweetwater river to the district known as Silty Town,
where the buildings were smaller and less grand. Later in the day
the canal would be choked with serpent boats and barges, but in the
predawn darkness they had the waterway almost to themselves.
Brusco liked to reach the shmarket just as the Titan roared to
herald the coming of the sun. The sound would boom across the
lagoon, faint with distance but still loud enough to wake the
sleeping city.
By the time Brusco and his sons tied up by the shmarket, it was
swarming with herring sellers and cod wives, oystermen, clam
diggers, stewards, cooks, smallwives, and sailors o the galleys, all
haggling loudly with one another as they inspected the morning
catch. Brusco would walk from boat to boat, having a look at all the
shell sh, and from time to time tapping a cask or crate with his
cane. “This one,” he would say. “Yes.” Tap tap. “This one.” Tap tap.
“No, not that. Here.” Tap. He was not much one for talking. Talea
said her father was as grudging with his words as with his coins.
Oysters, clams, crabs, mussels, cockles, sometimes prawns … Brusco
bought it all, depending on what looked best each day. It was for
them to carry the crates and casks that he tapped back to the boat.
Brusco had a bad back, and could not lift anything heavier than a
tankard of brown ale.
Cat always stank of brine and sh by the time they pushed o for
home again. She had grown so used to it that she hardly even
smelled it anymore. She did not mind the work. When her muscles
ached from lifting, or her back got sore from the weight of a cask,
she told herself that she was getting stronger.
Once all the casks were loaded, Brusco shoved them o again,
and his sons poled them back up the Long Canal. Brea and Talea sat
at the front of the boat whispering to one another. Cat knew that
they were talking about Brea’s boy, the one she climbed up on the
roof to meet, after her father was asleep.

“Learn three new things before you come back to us,” the kindly
man had commanded Cat, when he sent her forth into the city. She
always did. Sometimes it was no more than three new words of the
Braavosi tongue. Sometimes she brought back sailor’s tales, of
strange and wondrous happenings from the wide wet world beyond
the isles of Braavos, wars and rains of toads and dragons hatching.
Sometimes she learned three new japes or three new riddles, or
tricks of this trade or the other. And every so often, she would learn
some secret.
Braavos was a city made for secrets, a city of fogs and masks and
whispers. Its very existence had been a secret for a century, the girl
had learned; its location had been hidden thrice that long. “The Nine
Free Cities are the daughters of Valyria that was,” the kindly man
taught her, “but Braavos is the bastard child who ran away from
home. We are a mongrel folk, the sons of slaves and whores and
thieves. Our forebears came from half a hundred lands to this place
of refuge, to escape the dragonlords who had enslaved them. Half a
hundred gods came with them, but there is one god all of them
shared in common.”
“Him of Many Faces.”
“And many names,” the kindly man had said. “In Qohor he is the
Black Goat, in Yi Ti the Lion of Night, in Westeros the Stranger. All
men must bow to him in the end, no matter if they worship the
Seven or the Lord of Light, the Moon Mother or the Drowned God
or the Great Shepherd. All mankind belongs to him … else
somewhere in the world would be a folk who lived forever. Do you
know of any folk who live forever?”
“No,” she would answer. “All men must die.”
Cat would always nd the kindly man waiting for her when she
went creeping back to the temple on the knoll on the night the
moon went black. “What do you know that you did not know when
you left us?” he would always ask her.
“I know what Blind Beqqo puts in the hot sauce he uses on his
oysters,” she would say. “I know the mummers at the Blue Lantern
are going to do The Lord of the Woeful Countenance and the
mummers at the Ship mean to answer with Seven Drunken Oarsmen.

I know the bookseller Lotho Lornel sleeps in the house of
Tradesman-Captain Moredo Prestayn whenever the honorable
tradesman-captain is away on a voyage, and moves out whenever
the Vixen comes home.”
“It is good to know these things. And who are you?”
“No one.”
“You lie. You are Cat of the canals, I know you well. Go and
sleep, child. On the morrow you must serve.”
“All men must serve.” And so she did, three days of every thirty.
When the moon was black she was no one, a servant of the ManyFaced God in a robe of black and white. She walked beside the
kindly man through the fragrant darkness, carrying her iron lantern.
She washed the dead, went through their clothes, and counted out
their coins. Some days she still helped Umma cook, chopping big
white mushrooms and boning sh. But only when the moon was
black. The rest of the time she was an orphan girl in a pair of
battered boots too big for her feet and a brown cloak with a ragged
hem, crying “Mussels and cockles and clams” as she wheeled her
barrow through the Ragman’s Harbor.
The moon would be black tonight, she knew; last night it had
been no more than a sliver. “What do you know that you did not
know when you left us?” the kindly man would ask as soon as he
saw her. I know that Brusco’s daughter Brea meets a boy on the roof
when her father is asleep, she thought. Brea lets him touch her, Talea
says, even though he’s just a roof rat and all the roof rats are supposed to
be thieves. That was only one thing, though. Cat would need two
more. She was not concerned. There were always new things to
learn, down by the ships.
When they returned to the house Cat helped Brusco’s sons unload
the boat. Brusco and his daughters divided the shell sh amongst
three barrows, arranging them on layered beds of seaweed. “Come
back when all is sold,” Brusco told the girls, just as he did every
morning, and they set forth to cry the catch. Brea would wheel her
barrow to the Purple Harbor, to sell to the Braavosi sailors whose
ships were anchored there. Talea would try the alleys round the

Moon Pool, or sell amongst the temples on the Isle of the Gods. Cat
headed for the Ragman’s Harbor, as she did nine days of every ten.
Only Braavosi were permitted use of the Purple Harbor, from the
Drowned Town and the Sealord’s Palace; ships from her sister cities
and the rest of the wide world had to use the Ragman’s Harbor, a
poorer, rougher, dirtier port than the Purple. It was noisier as well,
as sailors and traders from half a hundred lands crowded its
wharves and alleys, mingling with those who served and preyed on
them. Cat liked it best of any place in Braavos. She liked the noise
and the strange smells, and seeing what ships had come in on the
evening tide and what ships had departed. She liked the sailors too;
the boisterous Tyroshi with their booming voices and dyed
whiskers; the fair-haired Lyseni, always trying to niggle down her
prices; the squat, hairy sailors from the Port of Ibben, growling
curses in low, raspy voices. Her favorites were the Summer
Islanders, with their skins as smooth and dark as teak. They wore
feathered cloaks of red and green and yellow, and the tall masts and
white sails of their swan ships were magni cent.
And sometimes there were Westerosi too, oarsmen and sailors o
carracks out of Oldtown, trading galleys out of Duskendale, King’s
Landing, and Gulltown, big-bellied wine cogs from the Arbor. Cat
knew the Braavosi words for mussels and cockles and clams, but
along the Ragman’s Harbor she cried her wares in the trade tongue,
the language of the wharves and docks and sailor’s taverns, a coarse
jumble of words and phrases from a dozen languages, accompanied
by hand signs and gestures, most of them insulting. Those were the
ones that Cat liked best. Any man who bothered her was apt to see
the g, or hear himself described as an ass’s pizzle or a camel’s cunt.
“Maybe I never saw a camel,” she would tell them, “but I know a
camel’s cunt when I smell one.”
Once in a great while that would make somebody angry, but
when it did she had her nger knife. She kept it very sharp, and
knew how to use it too. Red Roggo showed her one afternoon at the
Happy Port, while he was waiting for Lanna to come free. He
taught her how to hide it up her sleeve and slip it out when she had
need of it, and how to slice a purse so smooth and quick the coins

would all be spent before their owner ever missed them. That was
good to know, even the kindly man agreed; especially at night,
when the bravos and roof rats were abroad.
Cat had made friends along the wharves; porters and mummers,
ropemakers and sailmenders, taverners, brewers and bakers and
beggars and whores. They bought clams and cockles from her, told
her true tales of Braavos and lies about their lives, and laughed at
the way she talked when she tried to speak Braavosi. She never let
that trouble her. Instead, she showed them all the g, and told them
they were camel cunts, which made them roar with laughter.
Gyloro Dothare taught her lthy songs, and his brother Gyleno told
her the best places to catch eels. The mummers o the Ship showed
her how a hero stands, and taught her speeches from The Song of the
Rhoyne, The Conqueror’s Two Wives, and The Merchant’s Lusty Lady.
Quill, the sad-eyed little man who made up all the bawdy farces for
the Ship, o ered to teach her how a woman kisses, but Tagganaro
smacked him with a cod sh and put an end to that. Cossomo the
Conjurer instructed her in sleight of hand. He could swallow mice
and pull them from her ears. “It’s magic,” he’d say. “It’s not,” Cat
said. “The mouse was up your sleeve the whole time. I could see it
moving.”
“Oysters, clams, and cockles” were Cat’s magic words, and like all
good magic words they could take her almost anywhere. She had
boarded ships from Lys and Oldtown and the Port of Ibben and sold
her oysters right on deck. Some days she rolled her barrow past the
towers of the mighty to o er baked clams to the guardsmen at their
gates. Once she cried her catch on the steps of the Palace of Truth,
and when another peddler tried to run her o she turned his cart
over and sent his oysters skittering across the cobbles. Customs
o cers from the Chequy Port would buy from her, and paddlers
from the Drowned Town, whose sunken domes and towers poked
up from the green waters of the lagoon. One time, when Brea took
to her bed with her moon blood, Cat had pushed her barrow to the
Purple Harbor to sell crabs and prawns to oarsmen o the Sealord’s
pleasure barge, covered stem to stern with laughing faces. Other
days she followed the sweetwater river to the Moon Pool. She sold

to swaggering bravos in striped satin, and to keyholders and
justiciars in drab coats of brown and grey. But she always returned
to the Ragman’s Harbor.
“Oysters, clams, and cockles,” the girl shouted as she pushed her
barrow along the wharves. “Mussels, prawns, and cockles.” A dirty
orange cat came padding after her, drawn by the sound of her call.
Farther on, a second cat appeared, a sad, bedraggled grey thing
with a stub tail. Cats liked the smell of Cat. Some days she would
have a dozen trailing after her before the sun went down. From
time to time the girl would throw an oyster at them and watch to
see who came away with it. The biggest toms would seldom win,
she noticed; oft as not, the prize went to some smaller, quicker
animal, thin and mean and hungry. Like me, she told herself. Her
favorite was a scrawny old tom with a chewed ear who reminded
her of a cat that she’d once chased all around the Red Keep. No, that
was some other girl, not me.
Two of the ships that had been here yesterday were gone, Cat
saw, but ve new ones had docked; a small carrack called the
Brazen Monkey, a huge Ibbenese whaler that reeked of tar and blood
and whale oil, two battered cogs from Pentos, and a lean green
galley up from Old Volantis. Cat stopped at the foot of every
gangplank to cry her clams and oysters, once in the trade talk and
again in the Common Tongue of Westeros. A crewman on the
whaler cursed at her so loudly that he scared away her cats and one
of the Pentoshi oarsman asked how much she wanted for the clam
between her legs, but she fared better at the other ships. A mate on
the green galley wolfed half a dozen oysters and told her how his
captain had been killed by the Lysene pirates who had tried to
board them near the Stepstones. “That bastard Saan it was, with Old
Mother’s Son and his big Valyrian. We got away, but just.”
The little Brazen Monkey proved to be from Gulltown, with a
Westerosi crew who were glad to talk to someone in the Common
Tongue. One asked how a girl from King’s Landing came to be
selling mussels on the docks of Braavos, so she had to tell her tale.
“We’re here four days, and four long nights,” another told her.
“Where’s a man to go to nd a bit of sport?”

“The mummers at the Ship are doing Seven Drunken Oarsmen,” Cat
told them, “and there’s eel ghts in the Spotted Cellar, down by the
gates of Drowned Town. Or if you want you can go by the Moon
Pool, where the bravos duel at night.”
“Aye, that’s good,” another sailor said, “but what Wat was really
wanting was a woman.”
“The best whores are at the Happy Port, down by where the
mummers’ Ship is moored.” She pointed. Some of the dockside
whores were vicious, and sailors fresh from the sea never knew
which ones. S’vrone was the worst. Everyone said she had robbed
and killed a dozen men, rolling the bodies into the canals to feed
the eels. The Drunken Daughter could be sweet when sober, but not
with wine in her. And Canker Jeyne was really a man. “Ask for
Merry. Meralyn is her true name, but everyone calls her Merry, and
she is.” Merry bought a dozen oysters every time Cat came by the
brothel and shared them with her girls. She had a good heart,
everyone agreed. “That, and the biggest pair of teats in all of
Braavos,” Merry herself was fond of boasting.
Her girls were nice as well; Blushing Bethany and the Sailor’s
Wife, one-eyed Yna who could tell your fortune from a drop of
blood, pretty little Lanna, even Assadora, the Ibbenese woman with
the mustache. They might not be beautiful, but they were kind to
her. “The Happy Port is where all the porters go,” Cat assured the
men of the Brazen Monkey. “ ‘The boys unload the ships,’ Merry
says, ‘and my girls unload the lads who sail them.’ ”
“What about them fancy whores the singers sing about?” asked
the youngest monkey, a red-haired boy with freckles who could not
have been much more than six-and-ten. “Are they as pretty as they
say? Where would I get one o’ them?”
His shipmates looked at him and laughed. “Seven hells, boy,” said
one of them. “Might be the captain could get hisself a courty-san,
but only if he sold the bloody ship. That sort o’ cunt’s for lords and
such, not for the likes o’ us.”
The courtesans of Braavos were famed across the world. Singers
sang of them, goldsmiths and jewelers showered them with gifts,
craftsmen begged for the honor of their custom, merchant princes

paid royal ransoms to have them on their arms at balls and feasts
and mummer shows, and bravos slew each other in their names. As
she pushed her barrow along the canals, Cat would sometimes
glimpse one of them oating by, on her way to an evening with
some lover. Every courtesan had her own barge, and servants to
pole her to her trysts. The Poetess always had a book to hand, the
Moonshadow wore only white and silver, and the Merling Queen
was never seen without her Mermaids, four young maidens in the
blush of their rst owering who held her train and did her hair.
Each courtesan was more beautiful than the last. Even the Veiled
Lady was beautiful, though only those she took as lovers ever saw
her face.
“I sold three cockles to a courtesan,” Cat told the sailors. “She
called to me as she was stepping o her barge.” Brusco had made it
plain to her that she was never to speak to a courtesan unless she
was spoken to rst, but the woman had smiled at her and paid her
in silver, ten times what the cockles had been worth.
“Which one was this, now? The Queen o’ Cockles, was it?”
“The Black Pearl,” she told them. Merry claimed the Black Pearl
was the most famous courtesan of all. “She’s descended from the
dragons, that one,” the woman had told Cat. “The rst Black Pearl
was a pirate queen. A Westerosi prince took her for a lover and got
a daughter on her, who grew up to be a courtesan. Her own
daughter followed her, and her daughter after her, until you get to
this one. What did she say to you, Cat?”
“She said ‘I’ll take three cockles,’ and ‘Do you have some hot sauce,
little one?’ ” the girl had answered.
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘No, my lady,’ and, ‘Don’t call me little one. My name is Cat.’
I should have hot sauce. Beqqo does, and he sells three times as
many oysters as Brusco.”
Cat told the kindly man about the Black Pearl too. “Her true
name is Bellegere Otherys,” she informed him. It was one of the
three things that she had learned.
“It is,” the priest said softly. “Her mother was Bellonara, but the
rst Black Pearl was a Bellegere as well.”

Cat knew that the men o the Brazen Monkey would not care
about the name of a courtesan’s mother, though. Instead, she asked
them for tidings of the Seven Kingdoms, and the war.
“War?” laughed one of them. “What war? There is no war.”
“Not in Gulltown,” said another. “Not in the Vale. The little lord’s
kept us out of it, same as his mother did.”
Same as his mother did. The lady of the Vale was her own mother’s
sister. “Lady Lysa,” she said, “is she …?”
“… dead?” nished the freckled boy whose head was full of
courtesans. “Aye. Murdered by her own singer.”
“Oh.” It’s nought to me. Cat of the Canals never had an aunt. She
never did. Cat lifted her barrow and wheeled away from the Brazen
Monkey, bumping over cobblestones. “Oysters, clams, and cockles,”
she called. “Oysters, clams, and cockles.” She sold most of her clams
to the porters o -loading the big wine cog from the Arbor, and the
rest to the men repairing a Myrish trading galley that had been
savaged by the storms.
Farther down the docks she came on Tagganaro sitting with his
back against a piling, next to Casso, King of Seals. He bought some
mussels from her, and Casso barked and let her shake his ipper.
“You come work with me, Cat,” urged Tagganaro as he was sucking
mussels from their shells. He had been looking for a new partner
ever since the Drunken Daughter put her knife through Little
Narbo’s hand. “I give you more than Brusco, and you would not
smell like sh.”
“Casso likes the way I smell,” she said. The King of Seals barked,
as if to agree. “Is Narbo’s hand no better?”
“Three ngers do not bend,” complained Tagganaro, between
mussels. “What good is a cutpurse who cannot use his ngers?
Narbo was good at picking pockets, not so good at picking whores.”
“Merry says the same.” Cat was sad. She liked Little Narbo, even
if he was a thief. “What will he do?”
“Pull an oar, he says. Two ngers are enough for that, he thinks,
and the Sealord’s always looking for more oarsmen. I tell him,
‘Narbo, no. That sea is colder than a maiden and crueler than a

whore. Better you should cut o the hand, and beg.’ Casso knows I
am right. Don’t you, Casso?”
The seal barked, and Cat had to smile. She tossed another cockle
his way before she went o on her own.
The day was nearly done by the time Cat reached the Happy Port,
across the alley from where the Ship was anchored. Some of the
mummers sat up atop the listing hulk, passing a skin of wine from
hand to hand, but when they saw Cat’s barrow they came down for
some oysters. She asked them how it went with Seven Drunken
Oarsmen. Joss the Gloom shook his head. “Quence nally came on
Allaquo abed with Sloey. They went at one another with mummer
swords, and both of them have left us. We’ll only be ve drunken
oarsmen tonight, it would seem.”
“We shall strive to make up in drunkenness what we lack in
oarsmen,” declared Myrmello. “I for one am equal to the task.”
“Little Narbo wants to be an oarsman,” Cat told them. “If you got
him, you’d have six.”
“You had best go see Merry,” Joss told her. “You know how sour
she gets without her oysters.”
When Cat slipped inside the brothel, though, she found Merry
sitting in the common room with her eyes shut, listening to Dareon
play his woodharp. Yna was there too, braiding Lanna’s ne long
golden hair. Another stupid love song. Lanna was always begging the
singer to play her stupid love songs. She was the youngest of the
whores, only ten-and-four. Merry asked three times as much for her
as for any of the other girls, Cat knew.
It made her angry to see Dareon sitting there so brazen, making
eyes at Lanna as his ngers danced across the harp strings. The
whores called him the black singer, but there was hardly any black
about him now. With the coin his singing brought him, the crow
had transformed himself into a peacock. Today he wore a plush
purple cloak lined with vair, a striped white-and-lilac tunic, and the
parti-colored breeches of a bravo, but he owned a silken cloak as
well, and one made of burgundy velvet that was lined with cloth-ofgold. The only black about him was his boots. Cat had heard him

tell Lanna that he’d thrown all the rest in a canal. “I am done with
darkness,” he had announced.
He is a man of the Night’s Watch, she thought, as he sang about
some stupid lady throwing herself o some stupid tower because
her stupid prince was dead. The lady should go kill the ones who killed
her prince. And the singer should be on the Wall. When Dareon had
rst appeared at the Happy Port, Arya had almost asked if he would
take her with him back to Eastwatch, until she heard him telling
Bethany that he was never going back. “Hard beds, salt cod, and
endless watches, that’s the Wall,” he’d said. “Besides, there’s no one
half as pretty as you at Eastwatch. How could I ever leave you?” He
had said the same thing to Lanna, Cat had heard, and to one of the
whores at the Cattery, and even to the Nightingale the night he
played at the House of Seven Lamps.
I wish I had been here the night the fat one hit him. Merry’s whores
still laughed about that. Yna said the fat boy had gone red as a beet
every time she touched him, but when he started trouble Merry had
him dragged outside and thrown in the canal.
Cat was thinking about the fat boy, remembering how she had
saved him from Terro and Orbelo, when the Sailor’s Wife appeared
beside her. “He sings a pretty song,” she murmured softly, in the
Common Tongue of Westeros. “The gods must have loved him to
give him such a voice, and that fair face as well.”
He is fair of face and foul of heart, thought Arya, but she did not
say it. Dareon had once wed the Sailor’s Wife, who would only bed
with men who married her. The Happy Port sometimes had three or
four weddings a night. Often the cheerful wine-soaked red priest
Ezzelyno performed the rites. Elsewise it was Eustace, who had
once been a septon at the Sept-Beyond-the-Sea. If neither priest nor
septon was on hand, one of the whores would run to the Ship and
fetch back a mummer. Merry always claimed the mummers made
much better priests than priests, especially Myrmello.
The weddings were loud and jolly, with a lot of drinking.
Whenever Cat happened by with her barrow, the Sailor’s Wife
would insist that her new husband buy some oysters, to sti en him

for the consummation. She was good that way, and quick to laugh
as well, but Cat thought there was something sad about her too.
The other whores said that the Sailor’s Wife visited the Isle of the
Gods on the days when her ower was in bloom, and knew all the
gods who lived there, even the ones that Braavos had forgotten.
They said she went to pray for her rst husband, her true husband,
who had been lost at sea when she was a girl no older than Lanna.
“She thinks that if she nds the right god, maybe he will send the
winds and blow her old love back to her,” said one-eyed Yna, who
had known her longest, “but I pray it never happens. Her love is
dead, I could taste that in her blood. If he ever should come back to
her, it will be a corpse.”
Dareon’s song was nally ending. As the last notes faded in the
air, Lanna gave a sigh and the singer put his harp aside and pulled
her up into his lap. He had just started to tickle her when Cat said
loudly, “There’s oysters, if anyone is wanting some,” and Merry’s
eyes popped open. “Good,” the woman said. “Bring them in, child.
Yna, fetch some bread and vinegar.”
The swollen red sun hung in the sky behind the row of masts
when Cat took her leave of the Happy Port, with a plump purse of
coins and a barrow empty but for salt and seaweed. Dareon was
leaving too. He had promised to sing at the Inn of the Green Eel this
evening, he told her as they strolled along together. “Every time I
play the Eel I come away with silver,” he boasted, “and some nights
there are captains there, and owners.” They crossed a little bridge,
and made their way down a crooked back street as the shadows of
the day grew longer. “Soon I will be playing in the Purple, and after
that the Sealord’s Palace,” Dareon went on. Cat’s empty barrow
clattered over the cobblestones, making its own sort of rattling
music. “Yesterday I ate herring with the whores, but within the year
I’ll be having emperor crab with courtesans.”
“What happened to your brother?” Cat asked. “The fat one. Did
he ever nd a ship to Oldtown? He said he was supposed to sail on
the Lady Ushanora.”
“We all were. Lord Snow’s command. I told Sam, leave the old
man, but the fat fool would not listen.” The last light of the setting

sun shone in his hair. “Well, it’s too late now.”
“Just so,” said Cat as they stepped into the gloom of a twisty
little alley.
By the time Cat returned to Brusco’s house, an evening fog was
gathering above the small canal. She put away her barrow, found
Brusco in his counting room, and thumped her purse down on the
table in front of him. She thumped the boots down too.
Brusco gave the purse a pat. “Good. But what’s this?”
“Boots.”
“Good boots are hard to nd,” said Brusco, “but these are too
small for my feet.” He picked one up to squint at it.
“The moon will be black tonight,” she reminded him.
“Best you pray, then.” Brusco shoved the boots aside and poured
out the coins to count them. “Valar dohaeris.”
Valar morghulis, she thought.
Fog rose all around as she walked through the streets of Braavos.
She was shivering a little by the time she pushed through the
weirwood door into the House of Black and White. Only a few
candles burned this evening, ickering like fallen stars. In the
darkness all the gods were strangers.
Down in the vaults, she untied Cat’s threadbare cloak, pulled
Cat’s shy brown tunic over her head, kicked o Cat’s salt-stained
boots, climbed out of Cat’s smallclothes, and bathed in lemonwater
to wash away the very smell of Cat of the Canals. When she
emerged, soaped and scrubbed pink with her brown hair plastered
to her cheeks, Cat was gone. She donned clean robes and a pair of
soft cloth slippers, and padded to the kitchens to beg some food of
Umma. The priests and acolytes had already eaten, but the cook had
saved a piece of nice fried cod for her, and some mashed yellow
turnips. She wolfed it down, washed the dish, then went to help the
waif prepare her potions.
Her part was mostly fetching, scrambling up ladders to nd the
herbs and leaves the waif required. “Sweetsleep is the gentlest of
poisons,” the waif told her, as she was grinding some with a mortar
and pestle. “A few grains will slow a pounding heart and stop a
hand from shaking, and make a man feel calm and strong. A pinch

will grant a night of deep and dreamless sleep. Three pinches will
produce that sleep that does not end. The taste is very sweet, so it is
best used in cakes and pies and honeyed wines. Here, you can smell
the sweetness.” She let her have a whi , then sent her up the
ladders to nd a red glass bottle. “This is a crueler poison, but
tasteless and odorless, hence easier to hide. The tears of Lys, men
call it. Dissolved in wine or water, it eats at a man’s bowels and
belly, and kills as a sickness of those parts. Smell.” Arya sni ed, and
smelled nothing. The waif put the tears to one side and opened a fat
stone jar. “This paste is spiced with basilisk blood. It will give
cooked esh a savory smell, but if eaten it produces violent
madness, in beasts as well as men. A mouse will attack a lion after a
taste of basilisk blood.”
Arya chewed her lip. “Would it work on dogs?”
“On any animal with warm blood.” The waif slapped her.
She raised her hand to her cheek, more surprised than hurt. “Why
did you do that?”
“It is Arya of House Stark who chews on her lip whenever she is
thinking. Are you Arya of House Stark?”
“I am no one.” She was angry. “Who are you?”
She did not expect the waif to answer, but she did. “I was born
the only child of an ancient House, my noble father’s heir,” the waif
replied. “My mother died when I was little, I have no memory of
her. When I was six my father wed again. His new wife treated me
kindly until she gave birth to a daughter of her own. Then it was
her wish that I should die, so her own blood might inherit my
father’s wealth. She should have sought the favor of the Many-Faced
God, but she could not bear the sacri ce he would ask of her.
Instead, she thought to poison me herself. It left me as you see me
now, but I did not die. When the healers in the House of the Red
Hands told my father what she had done, he came here and made
sacri ce, o ering up all his wealth and me. Him of Many Faces
heard his prayer. I was brought to the temple to serve, and my
father’s wife received the gift.”
Arya considered her warily. “Is that true?”
“There is truth in it.”

“And lies as well?”
“There is an untruth, and an exaggeration.”
She had been watching the waif’s face the whole time she told her
story, but the other girl had shown her no signs. “The Many-Faced
God took two-thirds of your father’s wealth, not all.”
“Just so. That was my exaggeration.”
Arya grinned, realized she was grinning, and gave her cheek a
pinch. Rule your face, she told herself. My smile is my servant, he
should come at my command. “What part was the lie?”
“No part. I lied about the lie.”
“Did you? Or are you lying now?”
But before the waif could answer, the kindly man stepped into the
chamber, smiling. “You have returned to us.”
“The moon is black.”
“It is. What three new things do you know, that you did not know
when last you left us?”
I know thirty new things, she almost said. “Three of Little Narbo’s
ngers will not bend. He means to be an oarsman.”
“It is good to know this. And what else?”
She thought back on her day. “Quence and Alaquo had a ght and
left the Ship, but I think that they’ll come back.”
“Do you only think, or do you know?”
“I only think,” she had to confess, even though she was certain of
it. Mummers had to eat the same as other men, and Quence and
Alaquo were not good enough for the Blue Lantern.
“Just so,” said the kindly man. “And the third thing?”
This time she did not hesitate. “Dareon is dead. The black singer
who was sleeping at the Happy Port. He was really a deserter from
the Night’s Watch. Someone slit his throat and pushed him into a
canal, but they kept his boots.”
“Good boots are hard to nd.”
“Just so.” She tried to keep her face still.
“Who could have done this thing, I wonder?”
“Arya of House Stark.” She watched his eyes, his mouth, the
muscles of his jaw.
“That girl? I thought she had left Braavos. Who are you?”

“No one.”
“You lie.” He turned to the waif. “My throat is dry. Do me a
kindness and bring a cup of wine for me and warm milk for our
friend Arya, who has returned to us so unexpectedly.”
On her way across the city Arya had wondered what the kindly
man would say when she told him about Dareon. Maybe he would
be angry with her, or maybe he would be pleased that she had
given the singer the gift of the Many-Faced God. She had played
this talk out in her head half a hundred times, like a mummer in a
show. But she had never thought warm milk.
When the milk came, Arya drank it down. It smelled a little burnt
and had a bitter aftertaste. “Go to bed now, child,” the kindly man
said. “On the morrow you must serve.”
That night she dreamed she was a wolf again, but it was di erent
from the other dreams. In this dream she had no pack. She prowled
alone, bounding over rooftops and padding silently beside the banks
of a canal, stalking shadows through the fog.
When she woke the next morning, she was blind.

SAMWELL

The Cinnamon Wind was a swan ship out of Tall Trees Town on the
Summer Isles, where men were black, women were wanton, and
even the gods were strange. She had no septon aboard her to lead
them in the prayers of passing, so the task fell to Samwell Tarly,
somewhere o the sun-scorched southern coast of Dorne.
Sam donned his blacks to say the words, though the afternoon
was warm and muggy, with nary a breath of wind. “He was a good
man,” he began … but as soon as he had said the words he knew
that they were wrong. “No. He was a great man. A maester of the
Citadel, chained and sworn, and Sworn Brother of the Night’s
Watch, ever faithful. When he was born they named him for a hero
who had died too young, but though he lived a long long time, his
own life was no less heroic. No man was wiser, or gentler, or
kinder. At the Wall, a dozen lords commander came and went
during his years of service, but he was always there to counsel
them. He counseled kings as well. He could have been a king
himself, but when they o ered him the crown he told them they
should give it to his younger brother. How many men would do
that?” Sam felt the tears welling in his eyes, and knew he could not
go on much longer. “He was the blood of the dragon, but now his
re has gone out. He was Aemon Targaryen. And now his watch is
ended.”

“And now his watch is ended,” Gilly murmured after him, rocking
the babe in her arms. Kojja Mo echoed her in the Common Tongue
of Westeros, then repeated the words in the Summer Tongue for
Xhondo and her father and the rest of the assembled crew. Sam
hung his head and began to weep, his sobs so loud and wrenching
that they made his whole body shake. Gilly came and stood beside
him and let him cry upon her shoulder. There were tears in her eyes
as well.
The air was moist and warm and dead calm, and the Cinnamon
Wind was adrift upon a deep blue sea far beyond the sight of land.
“Black Sam said good words,” Xhondo said. “Now we drink his life.”
He shouted something in the Summer Tongue, and a cask of spiced
rum was rolled up onto the afterdeck and breached, so those on
watch might down a cup in the memory of the old blind dragon.
The crew had known him only a short while, but Summer Islanders
revered the elderly and celebrated their dead.
Sam had never drunk rum before. The liquor was strange and
heady; sweet at rst, but with a ery aftertaste that burned his
tongue. He was tired, so tired. Every muscle he had was aching, and
there were other aches in places where Sam hadn’t known he had
muscles. His knees were sti , his hands covered with fresh new
blisters and raw, sticky patches of skin where the old blisters had
burst. Yet between them, rum and sadness seemed to wash his hurts
away. “If only we could have gotten him to Oldtown, the
archmaesters might have saved him,” he told Gilly, as they sipped
their rum on the Cinnamon Wind’s high forecastle. “The healers of
the Citadel are the best in the Seven Kingdoms. For a while I
thought … I hoped …”
On Braavos, it had seemed possible that Aemon might recover.
Xhondo’s talk of dragons had almost seemed to restore the old man
to himself. That night he ate every bite Sam put before him. “No
one ever looked for a girl,” he said. “It was a prince that was
promised, not a princess. Rhaegar, I thought … the smoke was from
the re that devoured Summerhall on the day of his birth, the salt
from the tears shed for those who died. He shared my belief when
he was young, but later he became persuaded that it was his own

son who ful lled the prophecy, for a comet had been seen above
King’s Landing on the night Aegon was conceived, and Rhaegar was
certain the bleeding star had to be a comet. What fools we were,
who thought ourselves so wise! The error crept in from the
translation. Dragons are neither male nor female, Barth saw the
truth of that, but now one and now the other, as changeable as
ame. The language misled us all for a thousand years. Daenerys is
the one, born amidst salt and smoke. The dragons prove it.” Just
talking of her seemed to make him stronger. “I must go to her. I
must. Would that I was even ten years younger.”
The old man had been so determined that he had even walked up
the plank onto the Cinnamon Wind on his own two legs, after Sam
made arrangements for their passage. He had already given his
sword and scabbard to Xhondo, to repay the big mate for the
feathered cloak he’d ruined saving Sam from drowning. The only
things of value that still remained to them were the books they had
brought from the vaults of Castle Black. Sam parted with them
glumly. “They were meant for the Citadel,” he said, when Xhondo
asked him what was wrong. When the mate translated those words,
the captain laughed. “Quhuru Mo says the grey men will be having
these books still,” Xhondo told him, “only they will be buying them
from Quhuru Mo. The maesters give good silver for books they are
not having, and sometimes red and yellow gold.”
The captain wanted Aemon’s chain as well, but there Sam had
refused. It was a great shame for any maester to surrender his
chain, he had explained. Xhondo had to go over that part three
times before Quhuru Mo accepted it. By the time the dealing was
done, Sam was down to his boots and blacks and smallclothes, and
the broken horn Jon Snow had found on the Fist of First Men. I had
no choice, he told himself. We could not stay on Braavos, and short of
theft or beggary, there was no other way to pay for passage. He would
have counted it cheap at thrice the price if only they had gotten
Maester Aemon safe to Oldtown.
Their passage south had been a stormy one, however, and every
gale took its toll on the old man’s strength and spirits. At Pentos he
asked to be brought up onto deck so Sam might paint a picture of

the city for him with words, but that was the last time he left the
captain’s bed. Soon after that, his wits began to wander once again.
By the time the Cinnamon Wind swept past the Bleeding Tower into
Tyrosh harbor, Aemon no longer spoke of trying to nd a ship to
take him east. Instead his talk turned back to Oldtown, and the
archmaesters of the Citadel.
“You must tell them, Sam,” he said. “The archmaesters. You must
make them understand. The men who were at the Citadel when I
was have been dead for fty years. These others never knew me.
My letters … in Oldtown, they must have read like the ravings of
an old man whose wits had ed. You must convince them, where I
could not. Tell them, Sam … tell them how it is upon the
Wall … the wights and the white walkers, the creeping cold …”
“I will,” Sam promised. “I will add my voice to yours, maester.
We will both tell them, the two of us together.”
“No,” the old man said. “It must be you. Tell them. The
prophecy … my brother’s dream … Lady Melisandre has misread
the signs. Stannis … Stannis has some of the dragon blood in him,
yes. His brothers did as well. Rhaelle, Egg’s little girl, she was how
they came by it … their father’s mother … she used to call me
Uncle Maester when she was a little girl. I remembered that, so I
allowed myself to hope … perhaps I wanted to … we all deceive
ourselves, when we want to believe. Melisandre most of all, I think.
The sword is wrong, she has to know that … light without
heat … an empty glamor … the sword is wrong, and the false light
can only lead us deeper into darkness, Sam. Daenerys is our hope.
Tell them that, at the Citadel. Make them listen. They must send her
a maester. Daenerys must be counseled, taught, protected. For all
these years I’ve lingered, waiting, watching, and now that the day
has dawned I am too old. I am dying, Sam.” Tears ran from his
blind white eyes at that admission. “Death should hold no fear for a
man as old as me, but it does. Isn’t that silly? It is always dark
where I am, so why should I fear the darkness? Yet I cannot help
but wonder what will follow, when the last warmth leaves my
body. Will I feast forever in the Father’s golden hall as the septons
say? Will I talk with Egg again, nd Dareon whole and happy, hear

my sisters singing to their children? What if the horselords have the
truth of it? Will I ride through the night sky forever on a stallion
made of ame? Or must I return again to this vale of sorrow? Who
can say, truly? Who has been beyond the wall of death to see? Only
the wights, and we know what they are like. We know.”
There was little and less that Sam could say to that, but he had
given the old man what little comfort he could. And Gilly came in
afterward and sang a song for him, a nonsense song thing that she
learned from some of Craster’s other wives. It made the old man
smile and helped him go to sleep.
That had been one of his last good days. After that the old man
spent more time sleeping than awake, curled up beneath a pile of
furs in the captain’s cabin. Sometimes he would mutter in his sleep.
When he woke he’d call for Sam, insisting that he had to tell him
something, but oft as not he would have forgotten what he meant to
say by the time that Sam arrived. Even when he did recall, his talk
was all a jumble. He spoke of dreams and never named the
dreamer, of a glass candle that could not be lit and eggs that would
not hatch. He said the sphinx was the riddle, not the riddler,
whatever that meant. He asked Sam to read for him from a book by
Septon Barth, whose writings had been burned during the reign of
Baelor the Blessed. Once he woke up weeping. “The dragon must
have three heads,” he wailed, “but I am too old and frail to be one
of them. I should be with her, showing her the way, but my body
has betrayed me.”
As the Cinnamon Wind made her way through the Stepstones,
Maester Aemon forgot Sam’s name oft as not. Some days he took
him for one of his dead brothers. “He was too frail for such a long
voyage,” Sam told Gilly on the forecastle, after another sip of the
rum. “Jon should have seen that. Aemon was a hundred and two
years old, he should never have been sent to sea. If he had stayed at
Castle Black, he might have lived another ten years.”
“Or else she might have burned him. The red woman.” Even here,
a thousand leagues from the Wall, Gilly was reluctant to say Lady
Melisandre’s name aloud. “She wanted king’s blood for her res. Val
knew she did. Lord Snow too. That was why they made me take

Dalla’s babe away and leave my own behind in his place. Maester
Aemon went to sleep and didn’t wake up, but if he had stayed, she
would have burned him.”
He will still burn, Sam thought miserably, only now I have to do it.
The Targaryens always gave their fallen to the ames. Quhuru Mo
would not allow a funeral pyre aboard the Cinnamon Wind, so
Aemon’s corpse had been stu ed inside a cask of blackbelly rum to
preserve it until the ship reached Oldtown.
“The night before he died, he asked if he might hold the babe,”
Gilly went on. “I was afraid he might drop him, but he never did.
He rocked him and hummed a song for him, and Dalla’s boy reached
up and touched his face. The way he pulled his lip I thought he
might be hurting him, but it only made the old man laugh.” She
stroked Sam’s hand. “We could name the little one Maester, if you
like. When he’s old enough, not now. We could.”
“Maester is not a name. You could call him Aemon, though.”
Gilly thought about that. “Dalla brought him forth during battle,
as the swords sang all around her. That should be his name. Aemon
Battleborn. Aemon Steelsong.”
A name even my lord father might like. A warrior’s name. The boy
was Mance Rayder’s son and Craster’s grandson, after all. He had
none of Sam’s craven blood. “Yes. Call him that.”
“When he is two,” she promised, “not before.”
“Where is the boy?” Sam thought to ask. Between rum and
sorrow, it had taken him that long to realize that Gilly did not have
the babe with her.
“Kojja has him. I asked her to take him for a while.”
“Oh.” Kojja Mo was the captain’s daughter, taller than Sam and
slender as a spear, with skin as black and smooth as polished jet.
She captained the ship’s red archers too, and pulled a double-curved
goldenheart bow that could send a shaft four hundred yards. When
the pirates had attacked them in the Stepstones, Kojja’s arrows had
slain a dozen of them whilst Sam’s own shafts were falling in the
water. The only thing Kojja Mo loved better than her bow was
bouncing Dalla’s boy upon her knee and singing to him in the
Summer Tongue. The wildling prince had become the darling of all

the women in the crew, and Gilly seemed to trust them with him as
she had never trusted any man.
“That was kind of Kojja,” Sam said.
“I was afraid of her at rst,” said Gilly. “She was so black, and
her teeth were so big and white, I was afraid she was a beastling or
a monster, but she’s not. She’s good. I like her.”
“I know you do.” For most of her life the only man Gilly had
known had been the terrifying Craster. The rest of her world had
been female. Men frighten her, but women don’t, Sam realized. He
could understand that. Back at Horn Hill he had preferred the
company of girls as well. His sisters had been kind to him, and
though the other girls would sometimes taunt him, cruel words
were easier to shrug o than the blows and bu ets he got from the
other castle boys. Even now, on the Cinnamon Wind, Sam felt more
comfortable with Kojja Mo than with her father, though that might
be because she spoke the Common Tongue and he did not.
“I like you too, Sam,” whispered Gilly. “And I like this drink. It
tastes like re.”
Yes, Sam thought, a drink for dragons. Their cups were empty, so
he went over to the cask and lled them once again. The sun was
low in the west, he saw, swollen to thrice its proper size. Its ruddy
light made Gilly’s face seem ushed and red. They drank a cup to
Kojja Mo, and one to Dalla’s boy, and one to Gilly’s babe back on
the Wall. And after that nothing would do but to drink two cups for
Aemon of House Targaryen. “May the Father judge him justly,” Sam
said, sni ng. The sun was almost gone by the time they were done
with Maester Aemon. Only a long thin line of red still glowed upon
the western horizon, like a slash across the sky. Gilly said that the
drink was making the ship spin round, so Sam helped her down the
ladder to the women’s quarters in the bow of the ship.
There was a lantern hanging just inside the cabin, and he
managed to bang his head on it going in. “Ow,” he said, and Gilly
said, “Are you hurt? Let me see.” She leaned close …
… and kissed his mouth.
Sam found himself kissing her back. I said the words, he thought,
but her hands were tugging at his blacks, pulling at the laces of his

breeches. He broke o the kiss long enough to say, “We can’t,” but
Gilly said, “We can,” and covered his mouth with her own again.
The Cinnamon Wind was spinning all around them and he could
taste the rum on Gilly’s tongue and the next thing her breasts were
bare and he was touching them. I said the words, Sam thought again,
but one of her nipples found its way between his lips. It was pink
and hard and when he sucked on it her milk lled his mouth,
mingling with the taste of rum, and he had never tasted anything so
ne and sweet and good. If I do this I am no better than Dareon, Sam
thought, but it felt too good to stop. And suddenly his cock was out,
jutting upward from his breeches like a fat pink mast. It looked so
silly standing there that he might have laughed, but Gilly pushed
him back onto her pallet, hiked her skirts up around her thighs, and
lowered herself onto him with a little whimpery sound. That was
even better than her nipples. She’s so wet, he thought, gasping. I
never knew a woman could get so wet down there. “I am your wife
now,” she whispered, sliding up and down on him. And Sam
groaned and thought, No, no, you can’t be, I said the words, I said the
words, but the only word he said was, “Yes.”
Afterward she went to sleep with her arms around him and her
face across his chest. Sam needed sleep as well, but he was drunk on
rum and mother’s milk and Gilly. He knew he ought to crawl back
to his own hammock in the men’s cabin, but she felt so good curled
up against him that somehow he could not move.
Others came in, men and women both, and he listened to them
kissing and laughing and mating with one another. Summer
Islanders. That’s how they mourn. They answer death with life. Sam had
read that somewhere, a long time ago. He wondered if Gilly knew,
if Kojja Mo had told her what to do.
He breathed the fragrance of her hair and stared at the lantern
swinging overhead. Even the Crone herself could not lead me safely out
of this. The best thing he could do would be to slip away and jump
into the sea. If I’m drowned, no one need ever know that I shamed
myself and broke my vows, and Gilly can nd herself a better man, one
who is not some big fat coward.

He awoke the next morning in his own hammock in the men’s
cabin, with Xhondo bellowing about the wind. “Wind is up,” the
mate kept shouting. “Wake and work, Black Sam. Wind is up.” What
Xhondo lacked in vocabulary he made up for in volume. Sam rolled
from his hammock to his feet, and regretted it at once. His head
was t to split, one of the blisters on his palm had torn open in the
night, and he felt as if he were about to retch.
Xhondo had no mercy, though, so all that Sam could do was
struggle back into his blacks. He found them on the deck beneath
his hammock, all bundled up in one damp heap. He sni ed at them
to see how foul they were, and inhaled the smell of salt and sea and
tar, wet canvas and mildew, fruit and sh and blackbelly rum,
strange spices and exotic woods, and a heady bouquet of his own
dried sweat. But Gilly’s smell was on them too, the clean smell of
her hair and the sweet smell of her milk, and that made him glad to
wear them. He would have given much and more for warm dry
socks, though. Some sort of fungus had begun to grow between his
toes.
The chest of books had not been near enough to buy passage for
four from Braavos to Oldtown. The Cinnamon Wind was
shorthanded, however, so Quhuru Mo had agreed that he would
take them, provided that they worked their way. When Sam had
protested that Maester Aemon was too weak, the boy a babe in
arms, and Gilly terri ed of the sea, Xhondo only laughed, “Black
Sam is big fat man. Black Sam will work for four.”
If truth be told, Sam was so fumble- ngered that he doubted he
was even doing the work of one good man, but he did try. He
scrubbed decks and rubbed them smooth with stones, he hauled on
anchor chains, he coiled rope and hunted rats, he sewed up torn
sails, patched leaks with bubbling hot tar, boned sh and chopped
fruit for the cook. Gilly tried as well. She was better in the rigging
than Sam was, though from time to time the sight of so much empty
water still made her close her eyes.
Gilly, Sam thought, what am I going to do with Gilly?
It was a long hot sticky day, made longer by his pounding head.
Sam busied himself with ropes and sails and the other tasks that

Xhondo set him, and tried not to let his eyes wander to the cask of
rum that held old Maester Aemon’s body … or to Gilly. He could
not face the wildling girl right now, not after what they’d done last
night. When she came up on deck he went below. When she went
forward he went aft. When she smiled at him he turned away,
feeling wretched. I should have jumped into the sea whilst she was still
asleep, he thought. I have always been a craven, but I was never an
oathbreaker till now.
If Maester Aemon had not died, Sam could have asked him what
to do. If Jon Snow had been aboard, or even Pyp and Grenn, he
might have turned to them. Instead he had Xhondo. Xhondo would
not understand what I was saying. Or if he did, he’d just tell me to fuck
the girl again. “Fuck” had been the rst word of the Common Tongue
that Xhondo had learned, and he was very fond of it.
He was fortunate that the Cinnamon Wind was so big. Aboard the
Blackbird Gilly could have run him down in hardly any time at all.
“Swan ships,” the great vessels from the Summer Isles were called
in the Seven Kingdoms, for their billowing white sails and for their
gureheads, most of which depicted birds. Large as they were, they
rode the waves with a grace that was all their own. With a good
brisk wind behind them, the Cinnamon Wind could outrun any
galley, though she was helpless when becalmed. And she o ered
plenty of places for a craven to hide.
Near the end of Sam’s watch, he was nally cornered. He was
climbing down a ladder when Xhondo seized him by the collar.
“Black Sam come with Xhondo,” he said, dragging him across the
deck and dumping him at the feet of Kojja Mo.
Far o to the north, a haze was visible low on the horizon. Kojja
pointed at it. “There is the coast of Dorne. Sand and rocks and
scorpions, and no good anchorage for hundreds of leagues. You can
swim there if you like, and walk to Oldtown. You will need to cross
the deep desert and climb some mountains and swim the Torentine.
Or else you could go to Gilly.”
“You do not understand. Last night we …”
“… honored your dead, and the gods who made you both.
Xhondo did the same. I had the child, else I would have been with

him. All you Westerosi make a shame of loving. There is no shame
in loving. If your septons say there is, your seven gods must be
demons. In the isles we know better. Our gods gave us legs to run
with, noses to smell with, hands to touch and feel. What mad cruel
god would give a man eyes and tell him he must forever keep them
shut, and never look at all the beauty in the world? Only a monster
god, a demon of the darkness.” Kojja put her hand between Sam’s
legs. “The gods gave you this for a reason too, for … what is your
Westerosi word?”
“Fucking,” Xhondo o ered helpfully.
“Yes, for fucking. For the giving of pleasure and the making of
children. There is no shame in that.”
Sam backed away from her. “I took a vow. I will take no wife, and
father no children. I said the words.”
“She knows the words you said. She is a child in some ways, but
she is not blind. She knows why you wear the black, why you go to
Oldtown. She knows she cannot keep you. She wants you for a little
while, is all. She lost her father and her husband, her mother and
her sisters, her home, her world. All she has is you, and the babe. So
you go to her, or swim.”
Sam looked despairingly at the haze that marked the distant
shoreline. He could never swim so far, he knew.
He went to Gilly. “What we did … if I could take a wife, I would
sooner have you than any princess or highborn maiden, but I can’t. I
am still a crow. I said the words, Gilly. I went with Jon into the
woods and said the words before a heart tree.”
“The trees watch over us,” Gilly whispered, brushing the tears
from his cheeks. “In the forest, they see all … but there are no trees
here. Only water, Sam. Only water.”

CERSEI

The day had been cold and grey and wet. It had poured all morning,
and even when the rain stopped that afternoon the clouds refused to
part. They never saw the sun. Such wretched weather was enough
to discourage even the little queen. Instead of riding with her hens
and their retinue of guardsmen and admirers, she spent all day in
the Maidenvault with her hens, listening to the Blue Bard sing.
Cersei’s own day was little better, till evenfall. As the grey sky
began to fade to black, they told her that the Sweet Cersei had come
in on the evening tide, and that Aurane Waters was without,
begging audience.
The queen sent for him at once. As soon as he strode into her
solar, she knew his tidings were good. “Your Grace,” he said with a
broad smile, “Dragonstone is yours.”
“How splendid.” She took his hands and kissed him on the cheeks.
“I know Tommen will be pleased as well. This will mean that we
can release Lord Redwyne’s eet, and drive the ironmen from the
Shields.” The news from the Reach seemed to grow more dire with
every raven. The ironmen had not been content with their new
rocks, it seemed. They were raiding up the Mander in strength, and
had gone so far as to attack the Arbor and the smaller islands that
surrounded it. The Redwynes had kept no more than a dozen
warships in their home waters, and all those had been
overwhelmed, taken, or sunk. And now there were reports that this

madman who called himself Euron Crow’s Eye was even sending
longships up Whispering Sound toward Oldtown.
“Lord Paxter was taking on provisions for the voyage home when
Sweet Cersei raised sail,” Lord Waters reported. “I would imagine
that by now his main eet has put to sea.”
“Let us hope they enjoy a swift voyage, and better weather than
today.” The queen drew Waters down into the window seat beside
her. “Do we have Ser Loras to thank for this triumph?”
His smile vanished. “Some will say so, Your Grace.”
“Some?” She gave him a quizzical look. “Not you?”
“I never saw a braver knight,” Waters said, “but he turned what
could have been a bloodless victory into a slaughter. A thousand
men are dead, or near enough to make no matter. Most of them our
own. And not just common men, Your Grace, but knights and young
lords, the best and the bravest.”
“And Ser Loras himself?”
“He will make a thousand and one. They carried him inside the
castle after the battle, but his wounds are grievous. He has lost so
much blood that the maesters will not even leech him.”
“Oh, how sad. Tommen will be heartbroken. He did so admire
our gallant Knight of Flowers.”
“The smallfolk too,” her admiral said. “We’ll have maidens
weeping into their wine all across the realm when Loras dies.”
He was not wrong, the queen knew. Three thousand smallfolk
had crowded through the Mud Gate to see Ser Loras o the day he
sailed, and three of every four were women. The sight had only
served to ll her with contempt. She had wanted to scream at them
that they were sheep, to tell them that all that they could ever hope
to get from Loras Tyrell was a smile and a ower. Instead she had
proclaimed him the boldest knight in the Seven Kingdoms, and
smiled as Tommen presented him with a jeweled sword to carry
into battle. The king had given him a hug as well, which had not
been part of Cersei’s plans, but it made no matter now. She could
a ord to be generous. Loras Tyrell was dying.
“Tell me,” Cersei commanded. “I want to know all of it, from the
beginning to the end.”

The room had grown dark by the time that he was done. The
queen lit some candles and sent Dorcas to the kitchens to bring
them up some bread and cheese and a bit of boiled beef with
horseradish. As they supped, she bid Aurane to tell the tale again, so
she would remember all the details correctly. “I do not want our
precious Margaery to hear these tidings from a stranger, after all,”
she said. “I will tell her myself.”
“Your Grace is kind,” said Waters with a smile. A wicked smile, the
queen thought. Aurane did not resemble Prince Rhaegar as much as
she had thought. He has the hair, but so do half the whores in Lys, if the
tales are true. Rhaegar was a man. This is a sly boy, no more. Useful in
his way, though.
Margaery was in the Maidenvault, sipping wine and trying to
puzzle out some new game from Volantis with her three cousins.
Though the hour was late, the guards admitted Cersei at once.
“Your Grace,” she began, “it is best you hear the news from me.
Aurane is back from Dragonstone. Your brother is a hero.”
“I always knew he was.” Margaery did not seem surprised. Why
should she? She expected this, from the moment Loras begged for the
command. Yet by the time Cersei had nished with her tale, tears
glistened on the cheeks of the younger queen. “Redwyne had miners
working to drive a tunnel underneath the castle walls, but that was
too slow for the Knight of Flowers. No doubt he was thinking of
your lord father’s people su ering on the Shields. Lord Waters says
he ordered the assault not half a day after taking command, after
Lord Stannis’s castellan refused his o er to settle the siege between
them in single combat. Loras was the rst one through the breach
when the ram broke the castle gates. He rode straight into the
dragon’s mouth, they say, all in white and swinging his morningstar
about his head, slaying left and right.”
Megga Tyrell was sobbing openly by then. “How did he die?” she
asked. “Who killed him?”
“No one man has that honor,” said Cersei. “Ser Loras took a
quarrel through the thigh and another through the shoulder, but he
fought on gallantly, though the blood was streaming from him.

Later he su ered a mace blow that broke some ribs. After
that … but no, I would spare you the worst of it.”
“Tell me,” said Margaery. “I command it.”
Command it? Cersei paused a moment, then decided she would let
that pass. “The defenders fell back to an inner keep once the curtain
wall was taken. Loras led the attack there as well. He was doused
with boiling oil.”
Lady Alla turned white as chalk, and ran from the room.
“The maesters are doing all they can, Lord Waters assures me, but
I fear your brother is too badly burned.” Cersei took Margaery in
her arms to comfort her. “He saved the realm.” When she kissed the
little queen upon the cheek, she could taste the salt of her tears.
“Jaime will enter all his deeds in the White Book, and the singers
will sing of him for a thousand years.”
Margaery wrenched free of her embrace, so violently that Cersei
almost fell. “Dying is not dead,” she said.
“No, but the maesters say—”
“Dying is not dead!”
“I only want to spare you—”
“I know what you want. Get out.”
Now you know how I felt, the night my Jo rey died. She bowed, her
face a mask of cool courtesy. “Sweet daughter. I am so sad for you.
I will leave you with your grief.”
Lady Merryweather did not appear that night, and Cersei found
herself too restless to sleep. If Lord Tywin could see me now, he would
know he had his heir, an heir worthy of the Rock, she thought as she
lay abed with Jocelyn Swyft snoring softly into the other pillow.
Margaery would soon be weeping the bitter tears she should have
wept for Jo rey. Mace Tyrell might weep as well, but she had
given him no cause to break with her. What had she done, after all,
but honor Loras with her trust? He had requested the command on
bended knee whilst half her court looked on.
When he dies I must raise a statue of him somewhere, and give him a
funeral such as King’s Landing has never seen. The smallfolk would
like that. So would Tommen. Mace may even thank me, poor man. As
for his lady mother, if the gods are good this news will kill her.

The sunrise was the prettiest that Cersei had seen in years. Taena
appeared soon thereafter, and confessed to having spent the night
consoling Margaery and her ladies, drinking wine and crying and
telling tales of Loras. “Margaery is still convinced he will not die,”
she reported, as the queen was dressed for court. “She plans to send
her own maester to look after him. The cousins are praying for the
Mother’s mercy.”
“I shall pray as well. On the morrow, come with me to Baelor’s
Sept, and we will light a hundred candles for our gallant Knight of
Flowers.” She turned to her handmaid. “Dorcas, bring my crown.
The new one, if you please.” It was lighter than the old, pale spun
gold set with emeralds that sparkled when she turned her head.
“There are four come about the Imp this morning,” Ser Osmund
said, when Jocelyn admitted him.
“Four?” The queen was pleasantly surprised. A steady stream of
informers had been making their way to the Red Keep, claiming
knowledge of Tyrion, but four in one day was unusual.
“Aye,” said Osmund. “One brought a head for you.”
“I will see him rst. Bring him to my solar.” This time, let there be
no mistakes. Let me be avenged at long last, so Jo can rest in peace.
The septons said that the number seven was sacred to the gods. If
so, perhaps this seventh head would bring her the balm her soul
desired.
The man proved to be Tyroshi; short and stout and sweaty, with
an unctuous smile that reminded her of Varys and a forked beard
dyed green and pink. Cersei misliked him on sight, but was willing
to overlook his aws if he actually had Tyrion’s head inside the
chest he carried. It was cedar, inlaid with ivory in a pattern of vines
and owers, with hinges and clasps of white gold. A lovely thing,
but the queen’s only interest lay in what might be within. It is big
enough, at least. Tyrion had a grotesquely large head, for one so small
and stunted.
“Your Grace,” the Tyroshi murmured, bowing low, “I see you are
as lovely as the tales. Even beyond the narrow sea we have heard of
your great beauty, and the grief that tears your gentle heart. No
man can restore your brave young son to you, but it is my hope I

can at least o er you some balm for your pain.” He laid his hand
upon his chest. “I bring you justice. I bring you the head of your
valonqar.”
The old Valyrian word sent a chill through her, though it also
gave her a tingle of hope. “The Imp is no longer my brother, if he
ever was,” she declared. “Nor will I say his name. It was a proud
name once, before he dishonored it.”
“In Tyrosh we name him Redhands, for the blood running from
his ngers. A king’s blood, and a father’s. Some say he slew his
mother too, ripping his way from her womb with savage claws.”
What nonsense, Cersei thought. “ ’Tis true,” she said. “If the Imp’s
head is in that chest, I shall raise you to lordship and grant you rich
lands and keeps.” Titles were cheaper than dirt, and the riverlands
were full of ruined castles, standing desolate amidst untended elds
and burned villages. “My court awaits. Open the box and let us
see.”
The Tyroshi threw open the box with a ourish, and stepped back
smiling. Within, the head of a dwarf reposed upon a bed of soft blue
velvet, staring up at her.
Cersei took a long look. “That is not my brother.” There was a
sour taste in her mouth. I suppose it was too much to hope for,
especially after Loras. The gods are never that good. “This man has
brown eyes. Tyrion had one black eye and one green.”
“The eyes, just so … Your Grace, your brother’s own eyes
had … somewhat decayed. I took the liberty of replacing them with
glass … but of the wrong color, as you say.”
That only annoyed her further. “Your head may have glass eyes,
but I do not. There are gargoyles on Dragonstone that look more
like the Imp than this creature. He’s bald, and twice my brother’s
age. What happened to his teeth?”
The man shrank before the fury in her voice. “He had a ne set of
gold teeth, Your Grace, but we … I regret …”
“Oh, not yet. But you will.” I ought to have him strangled. Let him
gasp for breath until his face turns black, the way my sweet son did. The
words were on her lips.

“An honest mistake. One dwarf looks so much like another,
and … Your Grace will observe, he has no nose …”
“He has no nose because you cut it o .”
“No!” The sweat on his brow gave the lie to his denial.
“Yes.” A poisonous sweetness crept into Cersei’s tone. “At least
you had that much sense. The last fool tried to tell me that a hedge
wizard had regrown it. Still, it seems to me that you owe this dwarf
a nose. House Lannister pays its debts, and so shall you. Ser Meryn,
take this fraud to Qyburn.”
Ser Meryn Trant took the Tyroshi by the arm and hauled him o ,
still protesting. When they were gone, Cersei turned to Osmund
Kettleblack. “Ser Osmund, get this thing out of my sight, and bring
in the other three who claim knowledge of the Imp.”
“Aye, Your Grace.”
Sad to say, the three would-be informers proved no more useful
than the Tyroshi. One said that the Imp was hiding in an Oldtown
brothel, pleasuring men with his mouth. It made for a droll picture,
but Cersei did not believe it for an instant. The second claimed to
have seen the dwarf in a mummer’s show in Braavos. The third
insisted Tyrion had become a hermit in the riverlands, living on
some haunted hill. The queen made the same response to each. “If
you will be so good as to lead some of my brave knights to this
dwarf, you shall be richly rewarded,” she promised. “Provided that
it is the Imp. If not … well, my knights have little patience for
deception, nor fools who send them chasing after shadows. A man
could lose his tongue.” And quick as that, all three informers
suddenly lost faith, and allowed that perhaps it might have been
some other dwarf they saw.
Cersei had never realized there were so many dwarfs. “Is the
whole world overrun with these twisted little monsters?” she
complained, whilst the last of the informers was being ushered out.
“How many of them can there be?”
“Fewer than there were,” said Lady Merryweather. “May I have
the honor of accompanying Your Grace to court?”
“If you can bear the tedium,” said Cersei. “Robert was a fool
about most things, but he was right in one regard. It is wearisome

work to rule a kingdom.”
“It saddens me to see Your Grace so careworn. I say, run o and
play and leave the King’s Hand to hear these tiresome petitions. We
could dress as serving girls and spend the day amongst the
smallfolk, to hear what they are saying of the fall of Dragonstone. I
know the inn where the Blue Bard plays when he is not singing
attendance on the little queen, and a certain cellar where a conjurer
turns lead into gold, water into wine, and girls into boys. Perhaps
he would work his spells on the two of us. Would it amuse Your
Grace to be a man one night?”
If I were a man I would be Jaime, the queen thought. If I were a
man I could rule this realm in my own name in place of Tommen’s.
“Only if you remained a woman,” she said, knowing that was what
Taena wanted to hear. “You are a wicked thing to tempt me so, but
what sort of queen would I be if I put my realm in the trembling
hands of Harys Swyft?”
Taena pouted. “Your Grace is too diligent.”
“I am,” Cersei allowed, “and by day’s end I shall rue it.” She
slipped her arm through Lady Merryweather’s. “Come.”
Jalabhar Xho was the rst to petition her that day, as be t his
rank as a prince in exile. Splendid as he looked in his bright
feathered cloak, he had only come to beg. Cersei let him make his
usual plea for men and arms to help him regain Red Flower Vale,
then said, “His Grace is ghting his own war, Prince Jalabhar. He
has no men to spare for yours just now. Next year, perhaps.” That
was what Robert always told him. Next year she would tell him
never, but not today. Dragonstone was hers.
Lord Hallyne of the Guild of Alchemists presented himself, to ask
that his pyromancers be allowed to hatch any dragon’s eggs that
might turn up upon Dragonstone, now that the isle was safely back
in royal hands. “If any such eggs remained, Stannis would have sold
them to pay for his rebellion,” the queen told him. She refrained
from saying that the plan was mad. Ever since the last Targaryen
dragon had died, all such attempts had ended in death, disaster, or
disgrace.

A group of merchants appeared before her to beg the throne to
intercede for them with the Iron Bank of Braavos. The Braavosi
were demanding repayment of their outstanding debts, it seemed,
and refusing all new loans. We need our own bank, Cersei decided,
the Golden Bank of Lannisport. Perhaps when Tommen’s throne was
secure, she could make that happen. For the nonce, all she could do
was tell the merchants to pay the Braavosi usurers their due.
The delegation from the Faith was headed by her old friend
Septon Raynard. Six of the Warrior’s Sons escorted him across the
city; together they were seven, a holy and propitious number. The
new High Septon—or High Sparrow, as Moon Boy had dubbed him
—did everything by sevens. The knights wore swordbelts striped in
the seven colors of the Faith. Crystals adorned the pommels of their
longswords and the crests of their greathelms. They carried kite
shields of a style not common since the Conquest, displaying a
device not seen in the Seven Kingdoms for centuries: a rainbow
sword shining bright upon a eld of darkness. Close to a hundred
knights had already come forth to pledge their lives and swords to
the Warrior’s Sons, Qyburn claimed, and more turned up every day.
Drunk on the gods, the lot of them. Who would have thought the realm
contained so many of them?
Most had been household knights and hedge knights, but a
handful were of high birth; younger sons, petty lords, old men
wanting to atone for the old sins. And then there was Lancel. She
had thought Qyburn must be japing when he had told her that her
mooncalf cousin had forsaken castle, lands, and wife and wandered
back to the city to join the Noble and Puissant Order of the
Warrior’s Sons, yet there he stood with the other pious fools.
Cersei liked that not at all. Nor was she pleased by the High
Sparrow’s endless truculence and ingratitude. “Where is the High
Septon?” she demanded of Raynard. “It was him I summoned.”
Septon Raynard assumed a regretful tone. “His High Holiness sent
me in his stead, and bade me tell Your Grace that the Seven have
sent him forth to battle wickedness.”
“How? By preaching chastity along the Street of Silk? Does he
think praying over whores will turn them back to virgins?”

“Our bodies were shaped by our Father and Mother so we might
join male to female and beget trueborn children,” Raynard replied.
“It is base and sinful for women to sell their holy parts for coin.”
The pious sentiment would have been more convincing if the
queen had not known that Septon Raynard had special friends in
every brothel on the Street of Silk. No doubt he had decided that
echoing the High Sparrow’s twitterings was preferable to scrubbing
oors. “Do not presume to preach at me,” she told him. “The
brothel keepers have been complaining, and rightly so.”
“If sinners speak, why should the righteous listen?”
“These sinners feed the royal co ers,” the queen said bluntly,
“and their pennies help pay the wages of my gold cloaks and build
galleys to defend our shores. There is trade to be considered as
well. If King’s Landing had no brothels, the ships would go to
Duskendale or Gulltown. His High Holiness promised me peace in
my streets. Whoring helps to keep that peace. Common men
deprived of whores are apt to turn to rape. Henceforth let His High
Holiness do his praying in the sept where it belongs.”
The queen had expected to hear from Lord Gyles as well, but
instead Grand Maester Pycelle appeared, grey-faced and apologetic,
to tell her that Rosby was too weak to leave his bed. “Sad to say, I
fear Lord Gyles must join his noble forebears soon. May the Father
judge him justly.”
If Rosby dies, Mace Tyrell and the little queen will try and force Garth
the Gross on me again. “Lord Gyles has had that cough for years, and
it never killed him before,” she complained. “He coughed through
half of Robert’s reign and all of Jo rey’s. If he is dying now, it can
only be because someone wants him dead.”
Grand Maester Pycelle blinked in disbelief. “Your Grace? Wh-who
would want Lord Gyles dead?”
“His heir, perhaps.” Or the little queen. “Some woman he once
scorned.” Margaery and Mace and the Queen of Thorns, why not?
Gyles is in their way. “An old enemy. A new one. You.”
The old man blanched. “Y-your Grace japes. I … I have purged his
lordship, bled him, treated him with poultices and infusions … the
mists give him some relief and sweetsleep helps with the violence

of his coughing, but he is bringing up bits of lung with the blood
now, I fear.”
“Be that as it may. You will return to Lord Gyles and inform him
that he does not have my leave to die.”
“If it please Your Grace.” Pycelle bowed sti y.
There was more, and more, and more, each petitioner more
boring than the last. And that evening, when the last of them had
nally gone and she was eating a simple supper with her son, she
told him, “Tommen, when you say your prayers before bed, tell the
Mother and the Father that you are thankful you are still a child.
Being king is hard work. I promise you, you will not like it. They
peck at you like a murder of crows. Every one wants a piece of your
esh.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Tommen, in a sad tone. The little queen had
told him of Ser Loras, she understood. Ser Osmund said the boy had
wept. He is young. By the time he is Jo ’s age he will not recall what
Loras looked like. “I wouldn’t mind them pecking, though,” her son
went on to say. “I should go to court with you every day, to listen.
Margaery says—”
“—a deal too much,” Cersei snapped. “For half a groat I’d gladly
have her tongue torn out.”
“Don’t you say that,” Tommen shouted suddenly, his round little
face turning red. “You leave her tongue alone. Don’t you touch her.
I’m the king, not you.”
She stared at him, incredulous. “What did you say?”
“I’m the king. I get to say who has their tongues torn out, not
you. I won’t let you hurt Margaery. I won’t. I forbid it.”
Cersei took him by the ear and dragged him squealing to the
door, where she found Ser Boros Blount standing guard. “Ser Boros,
His Grace has forgotten himself. Kindly escort him to his
bedchamber and bring up Pate. This time I want Tommen to whip
the boy himself. He is to continue until the boy is bleeding from
both cheeks. If His Grace refuses, or says one word of protest,
summon Qyburn and tell him to remove Pate’s tongue, so His Grace
can learn the cost of insolence.”

“As you command,” Ser Boros hu ed, glancing at the king
uneasily. “Your Grace, please come with me.”
As night fell over the Red Keep, Jocelyn kindled a re in the
queen’s hearth whilst Dorcas lit the bedside candles. Cersei opened
the window for a breath of air, and found that the clouds had rolled
back in to hide the stars. “Such a dark night, Your Grace,”
murmured Dorcas.
Aye, she thought, but not so dark as in the Maidenvault, or on
Dragonstone where Loras Tyrell lies burned and bleeding, or down in the
black cells beneath the castle. The queen did not know why that
occurred to her. She had resolved not to give Falyse another
thought. Single combat. Falyse should have known better than to marry
such a fool. The word from Stokeworth was that Lady Tanda had
died of a chill in the chest, brought on by her broken hip. Lollys
Lackwit had been proclaimed Lady Stokeworth, with Ser Bronn her
lord. Tanda dead and Gyles dying. It is well that we have Moon Boy, or
the court would be entirely bereft of fools. The queen smiled as she lay
her head upon the pillow. When I kissed her cheek, I could taste the
salt of her tears.
She dreamt an old dream, of three girls in brown cloaks, a
wattled crone, and a tent that smelled of death.
The crone’s tent was dark, with a tall peaked roof. She did not
want to go in, no more than she had wanted to at ten, but the other
girls were watching her, so she could not turn away. They were
three in the dream, as they had been in life. Fat Jeyne Farman hung
back as she always did. It was a wonder she had come this far.
Melara Hetherspoon was bolder, older, and prettier, in a freckly
sort of way. Wrapped in roughspun cloaks with their hoods pulled
up, the three of them had stolen from their beds and crossed the
tourney grounds to seek the sorceress. Melara had heard the serving
girls whispering how she could curse a man or make him fall in
love, summon demons and foretell the future.
In life the girls had been breathless and giddy, whispering to each
other as they went, as excited as they were afraid. The dream was
di erent. In the dream the pavilions were shadowed, and the
knights and serving men they passed were made of mist. The girls

wandered for a long while before they found the crone’s tent. By
the time they did all the torches were guttering out. Cersei watched
the girls huddling, whispering to one another. Go back, she tried to
tell them. Turn away. There is nothing here for you. But though she
moved her mouth, no words came out.
Lord Tywin’s daughter was the rst through the ap, with Melara
close behind her. Jeyne Farman came last, and tried to hide behind
the other two, the way she always did.
The inside of the tent was full of smells. Cinnamon and nutmeg.
Pepper, red and white and black. Almond milk and onions. Cloves
and lemongrass and precious sa ron, and stranger spices, rarer still.
The only light came from an iron brazier shaped like a basilisk’s
head, a dim green light that made the walls of the tent look cold
and dead and rotten. Had it been that way in life as well? Cersei
could not seem to remember.
The sorceress was sleeping in the dream, as once she’d slept in
life. Leave her be, the queen wanted to cry out. You little fools, never
wake a sleeping sorceress. Without a tongue, she could only watch as
the girl threw o her cloak, kicked the witch’s bed, and said, “Wake
up, we want our futures told.”
When Maggy the Frog opened her eyes, Jeyne Farman gave a
frightened squeak and ed the tent, plunging headlong back into the
night. Plump stupid timid little Jeyne, pasty-faced and fat and
scared of every shadow. She was the wise one, though. Jeyne lived on
Fair Isle still. She had married one of her lord brother’s bannermen
and whelped a dozen children.
The old woman’s eyes were yellow, and crusted all about with
something vile. In Lannisport it was said that she had been young
and beautiful when her husband had brought her back from the east
with a load of spices, but age and evil had left their marks on her.
She was short, squat, and warty, with pebbly greenish jowls. Her
teeth were gone and her dugs hung down to her knees. You could
smell sickness on her if you stood too close, and when she spoke her
breath was strange and strong and foul. “Begone,” she told the girls,
in a croaking whisper.
“We came for a foretelling,” young Cersei told her.

“Begone,” croaked the old woman, a second time.
“We heard that you can see into the morrow,” said Melara. “We
just want to know what men we’re going to marry.”
“Begone,” croaked Maggy, a third time.
Listen to her, the queen would have cried if she had her tongue.
You still have time to ee. Run, you little fools!
The girl with the golden curls put her hands upon her hips. “Give
us our foretelling, or I’ll go to my lord father and have you whipped
for insolence.”
“Please,” begged Melara. “Just tell us our futures, then we’ll go.”
“Some are here who have no futures,” Maggy muttered in her
terrible deep voice. She pulled her robe about her shoulders and
beckoned the girls closer. “Come, if you will not go. Fools. Come,
yes. I must taste your blood.”
Melara paled, but not Cersei. A lioness does not fear a frog, no
matter how old and ugly she might be. She should have gone, she
should have listened, she should have run away. Instead she took
the dagger Maggy o ered her, and ran the twisted iron blade across
the ball of her thumb. Then she did Melara too.
In the dim green tent, the blood seemed more black than red.
Maggy’s toothless mouth trembled at the sight of it. “Here,” she
whispered, “give it here.” When Cersei o ered her hand, she sucked
away the blood with gums as soft as a newborn babe’s. The queen
could still remember how queer and cold her mouth had been.
“Three questions may you ask,” the crone said, once she’d had her
drink. “You will not like my answers. Ask, or begone with you.”
Go, the dreaming queen thought, hold your tongue, and ee. But
the girl did not have sense enough to be afraid.
“When will I wed the prince?” she asked.
“Never. You will wed the king.”
Beneath her golden curls, the girl’s face wrinkled up in
puzzlement. For years after, she took those words to mean that she
would not marry Rhaegar until after his father Aerys had died. “I
will be queen, though?” asked the younger her.
“Aye.” Malice gleamed in Maggy’s yellow eyes. “Queen you shall
be … until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to

cast you down and take all that you hold dear.”
Anger ashed across the child’s face. “If she tries I will have my
brother kill her.” Even then she would not stop, willful child as she
was. She still had one more question due her, one more glimpse into
her life to come. “Will the king and I have children?” she asked.
“Oh, aye. Six-and-ten for him, and three for you.”
That made no sense to Cersei. Her thumb was throbbing where
she’d cut it, and her blood was dripping on the carpet. How could
that be? she wanted to ask, but she was done with her questions.
The old woman was not done with her, however. “Gold shall be
their crowns and gold their shrouds,” she said. “And when your
tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about
your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”
“What is a valonqar? Some monster?” The golden girl did not like
that foretelling. “You’re a liar and a warty frog and a smelly old
savage, and I don’t believe a word of what you say. Come away,
Melara. She is not worth hearing.”
“I get three questions too,” her friend insisted. And when Cersei
tugged upon her arm, she wriggled free and turned back to the
crone. “Will I marry Jaime?” she blurted out.
You stupid girl, the queen thought, angry even now. Jaime does not
even know you are alive. Back then her brother lived only for swords
and dogs and horses … and for her, his twin.
“Not Jaime, nor any other man,” said Maggy. “Worms will have
your maidenhead. Your death is here tonight, little one. Can you
smell her breath? She is very close.”
“The only breath we smell is yours,” said Cersei. There was a jar
of some thick potion by her elbow, sitting on a table. She snatched
it up and threw it into the old woman’s eyes. In life the crone had
screamed at them in some queer foreign tongue, and cursed them as
they ed her tent. But in the dream her face dissolved, melting
away into ribbons of grey mist until all that remained were two
squinting yellow eyes, the eyes of death.
The valonqar shall wrap his hands about your throat, the queen
heard, but the voice did not belong to the old woman. The hands
emerged from the mists of her dream and coiled around her neck;

thick hands, and strong. Above them oated his face, leering down
at her with his mismatched eyes. No, the queen tried to cry out, but
the dwarf’s ngers dug deep into her neck, choking o her protests.
She kicked and screamed to no avail. Before long she was making
the same sound her son had made, the terrible thin sucking sound
that marked Jo ’s last breath on earth.
She woke gasping in the dark with her blanket wound about her
neck. Cersei wrenched it o so violently that it tore, and sat up with
her breasts heaving. A dream, she told herself, an old dream and a
tangled coverlet, that’s all it was.
Taena was spending the night with the little queen again, so it
was Dorcas asleep beside her. The queen shook the girl roughly by
the shoulder. “Wake up, and nd Pycelle. He’ll be with Lord Gyles,
I expect. Fetch him here at once.” Still half asleep, Dorcas stumbled
from the bed and went scampering across the chamber for her
clothing, her bare feet rustling on the rushes.
Ages later, Grand Maester Pycelle entered shu ing, and stood
before her with bowed head, blinking his heavy-lidded eyes and
struggling not to yawn. He looked as if the weight of the huge
maester’s chain about his wattled neck was dragging him down to
the oor. Pycelle had been old as far back as Cersei could
remember, but there was a time when he had also been
magni cent: richly clad, digni ed, exquisitely courteous. His
immense white beard had given him an air of wisdom. Tyrion had
shaved his beard o , though, and what had grown back was pitiful,
a few patchy tufts of thin, brittle hair that did little to hide the loose
pink esh beneath his sagging chin. This is no man, she thought, only
the ruins of one. The black cells robbed him of whatever strength he had.
That, and the Imp’s razor.
“How old are you?” Cersei asked, abruptly.
“Four-and-eighty, if it please Your Grace.”
“A younger man would please me more.”
His tongue icked across his lips. “I was but two-and-forty when
the Conclave called me. Kaeth was eighty when they chose him, and
Ellendor was nigh on ninety. The cares of o ce crushed them, and
both were dead within a year of being raised. Merion came next,

only six-and-sixty, but he died of a chill on his way to King’s
Landing. Afterward King Aegon asked the Citadel to send a younger
man. He was the rst king I served.”
And Tommen shall be the last. “I need a potion from you.
Something to help me sleep.”
“A cup of wine before bed will oft—”
“I drink wine, you witless cretin. I require something stronger.
Something that will not let me dream.”
“You … Your Grace does not wish to dream?”
“What did I just say? Have your ears grown as feeble as your
cock? Can you make me such a potion, or must I command Lord
Qyburn to rectify another of your failures?”
“No. There is no need to involve that … to involve Qyburn.
Dreamless sleep. You shall have your potion.”
“Good. You may go.” As he turned toward the door, though, she
called him back. “One more thing. What does the Citadel teach
concerning prophecy? Can our morrows be foretold?”
The old man hesitated. One wrinkled hand groped blindly at his
chest, as if to stroke the beard that was not there. “Can our
morrows be foretold?” he repeated slowly. “Mayhaps. There are
certain spells in the old books … but Your Grace might ask instead,
‘Should our morrows be foretold?’ And to that I should answer, ‘No.’
Some doors are best left closed.”
“See that you close mine as you leave.” She should have known
that he would give her an answer as useless as he was.
The next morning she broke her fast with Tommen. The boy
seemed much subdued; ministering to Pate had served its purpose,
it would seem. They ate fried eggs, fried bread, bacon, and some
blood oranges newly come by ship from Dorne. Her son was
attended by his kittens. As she watched the cats frolic about his feet,
Cersei felt a little better. No harm will ever come to Tommen whilst I
still live. She would kill half the lords in Westeros and all the
common people, if that was what it took to keep him safe. “Go with
Jocelyn,” she told the boy after they had eaten.
Then she sent for Qyburn. “Is Lady Falyse still alive?”
“Alive, yes. Perhaps not entirely … comfortable.”

“I see.” Cersei considered a moment. “This man Bronn … I cannot
say I like the notion of an enemy so close. His power all derives
from Lollys. If we were to produce her elder sister …”
“Alas,” said Qyburn. “I fear that Lady Falyse is no longer capable
of ruling Stokeworth. Or, indeed, of feeding herself. I have learned
a great deal from her, I am pleased to say, but the lessons have not
been entirely without cost. I hope I have not exceeded Your Grace’s
instructions.”
“No.” Whatever she had intended, it was too late. There was no
sense dwelling on such things. It is better if she dies, she told herself.
She would not want to go on living without her husband. Oaf that he
was, the fool seemed fond of him. “There is another matter. Last night
I had a dreadful dream.”
“All men are so a icted, from time to time.”
“This dream concerned a witch woman I visited as a child.”
“A woods witch? Most are harmless creatures. They know a little
herb-craft and some midwifery, but elsewise …”
“She was more than that. Half of Lannisport used to go to her for
charms and potions. She was mother to a petty lord, a wealthy
merchant upjumped by my grandsire. This lord’s father had found
her whilst trading in the east. Some say she cast a spell on him,
though more like the only charm she needed was the one between
her thighs. She was not always hideous, or so they said. I don’t
recall the woman’s name. Something long and eastern and
outlandish. The smallfolk used to call her Maggy.”
“Maegi?”
“Is that how you say it? The woman would suck a drop of blood
from your nger, and tell you what your morrows held.”
“Bloodmagic is the darkest kind of sorcery. Some say it is the
most powerful as well.”
Cersei did not want to hear that. “This maegi made certain
prophecies. I laughed at them at rst, but … she foretold the death
of one of my bedmaids. At the time she made the prophecy, the girl
was one-and-ten, healthy as a little horse and safe within the Rock.
Yet she soon fell down a well and drowned.” Melara had begged her
never to speak of the things they heard that night in the maegi’s

tent. If we never talk about it we’ll soon forget, and then it will be just a
bad dream we had, Melara had said. Bad dreams never come true. The
both of them had been so young, that had sounded almost wise.
“Do you still grieve for this friend of your childhood?” Qyburn
asked. “Is that what troubles you, Your Grace?”
“Melara? No. I can hardly recall what she looked like. It is
just … the maegi knew how many children I would have, and she
knew of Robert’s bastards. Years before he’d sired even the rst of
them, she knew. She promised me I should be queen, but said
another queen would come …” Younger and more beautiful, she said.
“… another queen, who would take from me all I loved.”
“And you wish to forestall this prophecy?”
More than anything, she thought. “Can it be forestalled?”
“Oh, yes. Never doubt that.”
“How?”
“I think Your Grace knows how.”
She did. I knew it all along, she thought. Even in the tent. “If she
tries I will have my brother kill her.”
Knowing what needed to be done was one thing, though;
knowing how to do it was another. Jaime could no longer be relied
on. A sudden sickness would be best, but the gods were seldom so
obliging. How then? A knife, a pillow, a cup of heart’s bane? All of
those posed problems. When an old man died in his sleep no one
thought twice of it, but a girl of six-and-ten found dead in bed was
certain to raise awkward questions. Besides, Margaery never slept
alone. Even with Ser Loras dying, there were swords about her
night and day.
Swords have two edges, though. The very men who guard her could be
used to bring her down. The evidence would need to be so
overwhelming that even Margaery’s own lord father would have no
choice but to consent to her execution. That would not be easy. Her
lovers are not like to confess, knowing it would mean their heads as well
as hers. Unless …
The next day the queen came on Osmund Kettleblack in the yard,
as he was sparring with one of the Redwyne twins. Which one she
could not say; she had never been able to tell the two of them apart.

She watched the swordplay for a while, then called Ser Osmund
aside. “Walk with me a bit,” she said, “and tell me true. I want no
empty boasting now, no talk of how a Kettleblack is thrice as good
as any other knight. Much may ride upon your answer. Your
brother Osney. How good a sword is he?”
“Good. You’ve seen him. He’s not as strong as me nor Osfryd, but
he’s quick to the kill.”
“If it came to it, could he defeat Ser Boros Blount?”
“Boros the Belly?” Ser Osmund chortled. “He’s what, forty? Fifty?
Half-drunk half the time, fat even when he’s sober. If he ever had a
taste for battle, he’s lost it. Aye, Your Grace, if Ser Boros wants for
killing, Osney could do it easy enough. Why? Has Boros done some
treason?”
“No,” she said. But Osney has.

BRIENNE

They came upon the rst corpse a mile from the crossroads.
He swung beneath the limb of a dead tree whose blackened trunk
still bore the scars of the lightning that had killed it. The carrion
crows had been at work on his face, and wolves had feasted on his
lower legs where they dangled near the ground. Only bones and
rags remained below his knees … along with one well-chewed shoe,
half-covered by mud and mold.
“What does he have in his mouth?” asked Podrick.
Brienne had to steel herself to look. His face was grey and green
and ghastly, his mouth open and distended. Someone had shoved a
jagged white rock between his teeth. A rock, or …
“Salt,” said Septon Meribald.
Fifty yards farther on they spied the second body. The scavengers
had torn him down, so what remained of him was strewn on the
ground beneath a frayed rope looped about the limb of an elm.
Brienne might have ridden past him, unawares, if Dog had not
sni ed him out and loped into the weeds for a closer smell.
“What do you have there, Dog?” Ser Hyle dismounted, strode
after the dog, and came up with a halfhelm. The dead man’s skull
was still inside it, along with some worms and beetles. “Good
steel,” he pronounced, “and not too badly dinted, though the lion’s
lost his head. Pod, would you like a helm?”
“Not that one. It’s got worms in it.”

“Worms wash out, lad. You’re squeamish as a girl.”
Brienne scowled at him. “It is too big for him.”
“He’ll grow into it.”
“I don’t want to,” said Podrick. Ser Hyle shrugged, and tossed the
broken helm back into the weeds, lion crest and all. Dog barked and
went to lift his leg against the tree.
After that, hardly a hundred yards went by without a corpse.
They dangled under ash and alder, beech and birch, larch and elm,
hoary old willows and stately chestnut trees. Each man wore a
noose around his neck, and swung from a length of hempen rope,
and each man’s mouth was packed with salt. Some wore cloaks of
grey or blue or crimson, though rain and sun had faded them so
badly that it was hard to tell one color from another. Others had
badges sewn on their breasts. Brienne spied axes, arrows, several
salmon, a pine tree, an oak leaf, beetles, bantams, a boar’s head,
half a dozen tridents. Broken men, she realized, dregs from a dozen
armies, the leavings of the lords.
Some of the dead men had been bald and some bearded, some
young and some old, some short, some tall, some fat, some thin.
Swollen in death, with faces gnawed and rotten, they all looked the
same. On the gallows tree, all men are brothers. Brienne had read that
in a book, though she could not recall which one.
It was Hyle Hunt who nally put words to what all of them had
realized. “These are the men who raided Saltpans.”
“May the Father judge them harshly,” said Meribald, who had
been a friend to the town’s aged septon.
Who they were did not concern Brienne half so much as who had
hanged them. The noose was the preferred method of execution for
Beric Dondarrion and his band of outlaws, it was said. If so, the socalled lightning lord might well be near.
Dog barked, and Septon Meribald glanced about and frowned.
“Shall we keep a brisker pace? The sun will soon be setting, and
corpses make poor company by night. These were dark and
dangerous men, alive. I doubt that death will have improved them.”
“There we disagree,” said Ser Hyle. “These are just the sort of
fellows who are most improved by death.” All the same, he put his

heels into his horse, and they moved a little faster.
Farther on the trees began to thin, though not the corpses. The
woods gave way to muddy elds, tree limbs to gibbets. Clouds of
crows rose screeching from the bodies as the travelers came near,
and settled again once they had passed. These were evil men, Brienne
reminded herself, yet the sight still made her sad. She forced herself
to look at every man in turn, searching for familiar faces. A few she
thought she recognized from Harrenhal, but their condition made it
hard to be certain. None had a hound’s head helm, but few had
helms of any sort. Most had been stripped of arms, armor, and
boots before they were strung up.
When Podrick asked the name of the inn where they hoped to
spend the night, Septon Meribald seized upon the question eagerly,
perhaps to take their minds o the grisly sentinels along the
roadside. “The Old Inn, some call it. There has been an inn there for
many hundreds of years, though this inn was only raised during the
reign of the rst Jaehaerys, the king who built the kingsroad.
Jaehaerys and his queen slept there during their journeys, it is said.
For a time the inn was known as the Two Crowns in their honor,
until one innkeep built a bell tower, and changed it to the Bellringer
Inn. Later it passed to a crippled knight named Long Jon Heddle,
who took up ironworking when he grew too old to ght. He forged
a new sign for the yard, a three-headed dragon of black iron that he
hung from a wooden post. The beast was so big it had to be made in
a dozen pieces, joined with rope and wire. When the wind blew it
would clank and clatter, so the inn became known far and wide as
the Clanking Dragon.”
“Is the dragon sign still there?” asked Podrick.
“No,” said Septon Meribald. “When the smith’s son was an old
man, a bastard son of the fourth Aegon rose up in rebellion against
his trueborn brother and took for his sigil a black dragon. These
lands belonged to Lord Darry then, and his lordship was ercely
loyal to the king. The sight of the black iron dragon made him
wroth, so he cut down the post, hacked the sign into pieces, and
cast them into the river. One of the dragon’s heads washed up on
the Quiet Isle many years later, though by that time it was red with

rust. The innkeep never hung another sign, so men forgot the
dragon and took to calling the place the River Inn. In those days,
the Trident owed beneath its back door, and half its rooms were
built out over the water. Guests could throw a line out their
window and catch trout, it’s said. There was a ferry landing here as
well, so travelers could cross to Lord Harroway’s Town and
Whitewalls.”
“We left the Trident south of here, and have been riding north
and west … not toward the river but away from it.”
“Aye, my lady,” the septon said. “The river moved. Seventy years
ago, it was. Or was it eighty? It was when old Masha Heddle’s
grandfather kept the place. It was her who told me all this history.
A kindly woman, Masha, fond of sourleaf and honey cakes. When
she did not have a room for me, she would let me sleep beside the
hearth, and she never sent me on my way without some bread and
cheese and a few stale cakes.”
“Is she the innkeep now?” asked Podrick.
“No. The lions hanged her. After they moved on, I heard that one
of her nephews tried opening the inn again, but the wars had made
the roads too dangerous for common folk to travel, so there was
little custom. He brought in whores, but even that could not save
him. Some lord killed him as well, I hear.”
Ser Hyle made a wry face. “I never dreamed that keeping an inn
could be so deadly dangerous.”
“It is being common-born that is dangerous, when the great lords
play their game of thrones,” said Septon Meribald. “Isn’t that so,
Dog?” Dog barked agreement.
“So,” said Podrick, “does the inn have a name now?”
“The smallfolk call it the crossroads inn. Elder Brother told me
that two of Masha Heddle’s nieces have opened it to trade once
again.” He raised his sta . “If the gods are good, that smoke rising
beyond the hanged men will be from its chimneys.”
“They could call the place the Gallows Inn,” Ser Hyle said.
By any name the inn was large, rising three stories above the
muddy roads, its walls and turrets and chimneys made of ne white
stone that glimmered pale and ghostly against the grey sky. Its

south wing had been built upon heavy wooden pilings above a
cracked and sunken expanse of weeds and dead brown grass. A
thatch-roofed stable and a bell tower were attached to the north
side. The whole sprawl was surrounded by a low wall of broken
white stones overgrown by moss.
At least no one has burned it down. At Saltpans, they had found
only death and desolation. By the time Brienne and her companions
were ferried over from the Quiet Isle, the survivors had ed and the
dead had been given to the ground, but the corpse of the town itself
remained, ashen and unburied. The air still smelled of smoke, and
the cries of the seagulls oating overhead sounded almost human,
like the lamentations of lost children. Even the castle had seemed
forlorn and abandoned. Grey as the ashes of the town around it, the
castle consisted of a square keep girded by a curtain wall, built so as
to overlook the harbor. It was closed tight as Brienne and the others
led their horses o the ferry, nothing moving on its battlements but
banners. It took a quarter hour of Dog barking and Septon Meribald
knocking on the front gate with his quartersta before a woman
appeared above them to demand their business.
By that time the ferry had departed and it had begun to rain. “I
am a holy septon, good lady,” Meribald had shouted up, “and these
are honest travelers. We seek shelter from the rain, and a place by
your re for the night.” The woman had been unmoved by his
appeals. “The closest inn is at the crossroads, to the west,” she
replied. “We want no strangers here. Begone.” Once she vanished,
neither Meribald’s prayers, Dog’s barks, nor Ser Hyle’s curses could
bring her back. In the end they had spent the night in the woods,
beneath a shelter made of woven branches.
There was life at the crossroads inn, though. Even before they
reached the gate, Brienne heard the sound: a hammering, faint but
steady. It had a steely ring.
“A forge,” Ser Hyle said. “Either they have themselves a smith, or
the old innkeep’s ghost is making another iron dragon.” He put his
heels into his horse. “I hope they have a ghostly cook as well. A
crisp roast chicken would set the world aright.”

The inn’s yard was a sea of brown mud that sucked at the hooves
of the horses. The clang of steel was louder here, and Brienne saw
the red glow of the forge down past the far end of the stables,
behind an oxcart with a broken wheel. She could see horses in the
stables too, and a small boy was swinging from the rusted chains of
the weathered gibbet that loomed above the yard. Four girls stood
on the inn’s porch, watching him. The youngest was no more than
two, and naked. The oldest, nine or ten, stood with her arms
protectively about the little one. “Girls,” Ser Hyle called to them,
“run and fetch your mother.”
The boy dropped from the chain and dashed o toward the
stables. The four girls stood dgeting. After a moment one said,
“We have no mothers,” and another added, “I had one but they
killed her.” The oldest of the four stepped forward, pushing the
little one behind her skirts. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Honest travelers seeking shelter. My name is Brienne, and this is
Septon Meribald, who is well-known through the riverlands. The
boy is my squire, Podrick Payne, the knight Ser Hyle Hunt.”
The hammering stopped suddenly. The girl on the porch looked
them over, wary as only a ten-year-old can be. “I’m Willow. Will
you be wanting beds?”
“Beds, and ale, and hot food to ll our bellies,” said Ser Hyle
Hunt as he dismounted. “Are you the innkeep?”
She shook her head. “That’s my sister Jeyne. She’s not here. All
we have to eat is horse meat. If you come for whores, there are
none. My sister run them o . We have beds, though. Some
featherbeds, but more are straw.”
“And all have eas, I don’t doubt,” said Ser Hyle.
“Do you have coin to pay? Silver?”
Ser Hyle laughed. “Silver? For a night’s bed and a haunch of
horse? Do you mean to rob us, child?”
“We’ll have silver. Else you can sleep in the woods with the dead
men.” Willow glanced toward the donkey, and the casks and
bundles on his back. “Is that food? Where did you get it?”
“Maidenpool,” said Meribald. Dog barked.
“Do you question all your guests this way?” asked Ser Hyle.

“We don’t have so many guests. Not like before the war. It’s
mostly sparrows on the roads these days, or worse.”
“Worse?” Brienne asked.
“Thieves,” said a boy’s voice from the stables. “Robbers.”
Brienne turned, and saw a ghost.
Renly. No hammerblow to the heart could have felled her half so
hard. “My lord?” she gasped.
“Lord?” The boy pushed back a lock of black hair that had fallen
across his eyes. “I’m just a smith.”
He is not Renly, Brienne realized. Renly is dead. Renly died in my
arms, a man of one-and-twenty. This is a only a boy. A boy who
looked as Renly had, the rst time he came to Tarth. No, younger.
His jaw is squarer, his brows bushier. Renly had been lean and lithe,
whereas this boy had the heavy shoulders and muscular right arm so
often seen on smiths. He wore a long leather apron, but under it his
chest was bare. A dark stubble covered his cheeks and chin, and his
hair was a thick black mop that grew down past his ears. King
Renly’s hair had been that same coal black, but his had always been
washed and brushed and combed. Sometimes he cut it short, and
sometimes he let it fall loose to his shoulders, or tied it back behind
his head with a golden ribbon, but it was never tangled or matted
with sweat. And though his eyes had been that same deep blue,
Lord Renly’s eyes had always been warm and welcoming, full of
laughter, whereas this boy’s eyes brimmed with anger and
suspicion.
Septon Meribald saw it too. “We mean no harm, lad. When Masha
Heddle owned this inn she always had a honey cake for me.
Sometimes she even let me have a bed, if the inn was not full.”
“She’s dead,” the boy said. “The lions hanged her.”
“Hanging seems your favorite sport in these parts,” said Ser Hyle
Hunt. “Would that I had some land hereabouts. I’d plant hemp, sell
rope, and make my fortune.”
“All these children,” Brienne said to the girl Willow. “Are they
your … sisters? Brothers? Kin and cousins?”
“No.” Willow was staring at her, in a way that she knew well.
“They’re just … I don’t know … the sparrows bring them here,

sometimes. Others nd their own way. If you’re a woman, why are
you dressed up like a man?”
Septon Meribald answered. “Lady Brienne is a warrior maid upon
a quest. Just now, though, she is in need of a dry bed and a warm
re. As are we all. My old bones say it’s going to rain again, and
soon. Do you have rooms for us?”
“No,” said the boy smith. “Yes,” said the girl Willow.
They glared at one another. Then Willow stomped her foot. “They
have food, Gendry. The little ones are hungry.” She whistled, and
more children appeared as if by magic; ragged boys with unshorn
locks crept from under the porch, and furtive girls appeared in the
windows overlooking the yard. Some clutched crossbows, wound
and loaded.
“They could call it Crossbow Inn,” Ser Hyle suggested.
Orphan Inn would be more apt, thought Brienne.
“Wat, you help them with those horses,” said Willow. “Will, put
down that rock, they’ve not come to hurt us. Tansy, Pate, run get
some wood to feed the re. Jon Penny, you help the septon with
those bundles. I’ll show them to some rooms.”
In the end they took three rooms adjoining one another, each
boasting a featherbed, a chamber pot, and a window. Brienne’s
room had a hearth as well. She paid a few pennies more for some
wood. “Will I sleep in your room, or Ser Hyle’s?” Podrick asked as
she was opening the shutters. “This is not the Quiet Isle,” she told
him. “You can stay with me.” Come the morrow she meant for the
two of them to strike out on their own. Septon Meribald was going
on to Nutten, Riverbend, and Lord Harroway’s Town, but Brienne
saw no sense in following him any farther. He had Dog to keep him
company, and the Elder Brother had persuaded her that she would
not nd Sansa Stark along the Trident. “I mean to rise before the
sun comes up, whilst Ser Hyle is still sleeping.” Brienne had not
forgiven him for Highgarden … and as he himself had said, Hunt
had sworn no vows concerning Sansa.
“Where will we go, ser? I mean, my lady?”
Brienne had no ready answer for him. They had come to the
crossroads, quite literally; the place where the kingsroad, the river

road, and the high road all came together. The high road would
take them east through the mountains to the Vale of Arryn, where
Lady Sansa’s aunt had ruled until her death. West ran the river road,
which followed the course of the Red Fork to Riverrun and Sansa’s
great-uncle, who was besieged but still alive. Or they could ride the
kingsroad north, past the Twins and through the Neck with its bogs
and marshes. If she could nd a way past Moat Cailin and whoever
held it now, the kingsroad would bring them all the way to
Winterfell.
Or I could take the kingsroad south, Brienne thought. I could slink
back to King’s Landing, confess my failure to Ser Jaime, give him back
his sword, and nd a ship to carry me home to Tarth, as the Elder
Brother urged. The thought was a bitter one, yet there was part of
her that yearned for Evenfall and her father, and another part that
wondered if Jaime would comfort her should she weep upon his
shoulder. That was what men wanted, wasn’t it? Soft helpless
women that they needed to protect?
“Ser? My lady? I asked, where are we going?”
“Down to the common room, to supper.”
The common room was crawling with children. Brienne tried to
count them, but they would not stand still even for an instant, so
she counted some of them twice or thrice and others not at all, until
she nally gave it up. They had pushed the tables together in three
long rows, and the older boys were wrestling benches from the
back. Older here meant ten or twelve. Gendry was the closest thing
to a man grown, but it was Willow shouting all the orders, as if she
were a queen in her castle and the other children were no more
than servants.
If she were highborn, command would come naturally to her, and
deference to them. Brienne wondered whether Willow might be more
than she appeared. The girl was too young and too plain to be Sansa
Stark, but she was of the right age to be the younger sister, and
even Lady Catelyn had said that Arya lacked her sister’s beauty.
Brown hair, brown eyes, skinny … could it be? Arya Stark’s hair was
brown, she recalled, but Brienne was not sure of the color of her

eyes. Brown and brown, was that it? Could it be that she did not die at
Saltpans after all?
Outside, the last light of day was fading. Inside, Willow had four
greasy tallow candles lit and told the girls to keep the hearth re
burning high and hot. The boys helped Podrick Payne unpack the
donkey and carried in the salt cod, mutton, vegetables, nuts, and
wheels of cheese, whilst Septon Meribald repaired to the kitchens to
take charge of the porridge. “Alas, my oranges are gone, and I
doubt that I shall see another till the spring,” he told one small boy.
“Have you ever had an orange, lad? Squeezed one and sucked down
that ne juice?” When the boy shook his head no, the septon
mussed his hair. “Then I’ll bring you one, come spring, if you will
be a good lad and help me stir the porridge.”
Ser Hyle pulled o his boots to warm his feet by the re. When
Brienne sat down next to him, he nodded at the far end of the room.
“There are bloodstains on the oor over there where Dog is sni ng.
They’ve been scrubbed, but the blood soaked deep into the wood,
and there’s no getting it out.”
“This is the inn where Sandor Clegane killed three of his brother’s
men,” she reminded him.
“ ’Tis that,” Hunt agreed, “but who is to say that they were the
rst to die here … or that they’ll be the last.”
“Are you afraid of a few children?”
“Four would be a few. Ten would be a surfeit. This is a
cacophony. Children should be wrapped in swaddling clothes and
hung upon the wall until the girls grow breasts and the boys are old
enough to shave.”
“I feel sorry for them. All of them have lost their mothers and
fathers. Some have seen them slain.”
Hunt rolled his eyes. “I forgot that I was talking to a woman.
Your heart is as mushy as our septon’s porridge. Can it be?
Somewhere inside our swordswench is a mother just squirming to
give birth. What you really want is a sweet pink babe to suckle at
your teat.” Ser Hyle grinned. “You need a man for that, I hear. A
husband, preferably. Why not me?”
“If you still hope to win your wager—”

“What I want to win is you, Lord Selwyn’s only living child. I’ve
known men to wed lackwits and suckling babes for prizes a tenth
the size of Tarth. I am not Renly Baratheon, I confess it, but I have
the virtue of being still amongst the living. Some would say that is
my only virtue. Marriage would serve the both of us. Lands for me,
and a castle full of these for you.” He waved his hand at the
children. “I am capable, I assure you. I’ve sired at least one bastard
that I know of. Have no fear, I shan’t in ict her upon you. The last
time I went to see her, her mother doused me with a kettle of
soup.”
A ush crept up her neck. “My father’s only four-and- fty. Not
too old to wed again and get a son by his new wife.”
“That’s a risk … if your father weds again and if his bride proves
fertile and if the babe’s a boy. I’ve made worse wagers.”
“And lost them. Play your game with someone else, ser.”
“So speaks a maid who has never played the game with anyone.
Once you do you’ll take a di erent view. In the dark you’d be as
beautiful as any other woman. Your lips were made for kissing.”
“They are lips,” said Brienne. “All lips are the same.”
“And all lips are made for kissing,” Hunt agreed pleasantly.
“Leave your chamber door unbarred tonight, and I will steal into
your bed and prove the truth of what I say.”
“If you do, you’ll be a eunuch when you leave.” Brienne got up
and walked away from him.
Septon Meribald asked if he might lead the children in a grace,
ignoring the small girl crawling naked across the table. “Aye,” said
Willow, snatching up the crawler before she reached the porridge.
So they bowed their heads together and thanked the Father and the
Mother for their bounty … all but the black-haired boy from the
forge, who crossed his arms against his chest and sat glowering as
the others prayed. Brienne was not the only one to notice. When the
prayer was done Septon Meribald looked across the table, and said,
“Do you have no love for the gods, son?”
“Not for your gods.” Gendry stood abruptly. “I have work to do.”
He stalked out without a bite of food.
“Is there some other god he loves?” asked Hyle Hunt.

“The Lord of Light,” piped one scrawny boy, nigh to six.
Willow hit him with her spoon. “Ben Big Mouth. There’s food.
You should be eating it, not bothering m’lords with talk.”
The children fell upon the supper like wolves upon a wounded
deer, quarreling over cod sh, tearing the barley bread to pieces,
and getting porridge everywhere. Even the huge wheel of cheese
did not long survive. Brienne contented herself with sh and bread
and carrots, whilst Septon Meribald fed two morsels to Dog for
every one he ate himself. Outside, a rain began to fall. Inside, the
re crackled, and the common room was lled by the sounds of
chewing, and Willow smacking children with her spoon. “One day
that little girl will make some man a frightful wife,” Ser Hyle
observed. “That poor ’prentice boy, most like.”
“Someone should take him some food before it’s all gone.”
“You’re someone.”
She wrapped a wedge of cheese, a heel of bread, a dried apple,
and two chunks of aky fried cod in a square of cloth. When
Podrick got up to follow her outside, she told him to sit back down
and eat. “I will not be long.”
The rain was coming down heavy in the yard. Brienne covered
the food with a fold of her cloak. Some of the horses whinnied at
her as she made her way past the stables. They are hungry too.
Gendry was at his forge, bare-chested beneath his leather apron.
He was beating on a sword as if he wished it were a foe, his sweatsoaked hair falling across his brow. She watched him for a moment.
He has Renly’s eyes and Renly’s hair, but not his build. Lord Renly was
more lithe than brawny … not like his brother Robert, whose strength
was fabled.
It was not until he stopped to wipe his brow that Gendry saw her
standing there. “What do you want?”
“I brought supper.” She opened the cloth for him to see.
“If I wanted food, I would have eaten some.”
“A smith needs to eat to keep his strength up.”
“Are you my mother?”
“No.” She put down the food. “Who was your mother?”
“What’s that to you?”

“You were born in King’s Landing.” The way he spoke made her
certain of it.
“Me and many more.” He plunged the sword into a tub of
rainwater to quench it. The hot steel hissed angrily.
“How old are you?” Brienne asked. “Is your mother still alive?
And your father, who was he?”
“You ask too many questions.” He set down the sword. “My
mother’s dead and I never knew my father.”
“You’re a bastard.”
He took it for an insult. “I’m a knight. That sword will be mine
own, once it’s done.”
What would a knight be doing working at a smithy? “You have black
hair and blue eyes, and you were born in the shadow of the Red
Keep. Has no one ever remarked upon your face?”
“What’s wrong with my face? It’s not as ugly as yours.”
“In King’s Landing you must have seen King Robert.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. At tourneys, from afar. Once at
Baelor’s Sept. The gold cloaks shoved us aside so he could pass.
Another time I was playing near the Mud Gate when he come back
from a hunt. He was so drunk he almost rode me down. A big fat
sot, he was, but a better king than these sons of his.”
They are not his sons. Stannis told it true, that day he met with Renly.
Jo rey and Tommen were never Robert’s sons. This boy, though …
“Listen to me,” Brienne began. Then she heard Dog barking, loud
and frantic. “Someone is coming.”
“Friends,” said Gendry, unconcerned.
“What sort of friends?” Brienne moved to the door of the smithy
to peer out through the rain.
He shrugged. “You’ll meet them soon enough.”
I may not want to meet them, Brienne thought, as the rst riders
came splashing through the puddles into the yard. Beneath the
patter of the rain and Dog’s barking, she could hear the faint clink
of swords and mail from beneath their ragged cloaks. She counted
them as they came. Two, four, six, seven. Some of them were
wounded, judging from the way they rode. The last man was
massive and hulking, as big as two of the others. His horse was

blown and bloody, staggering beneath his weight. All the riders had
their hoods up against the lashing rain, save him alone. His face was
broad and hairless, maggot white, his round cheeks covered with
weeping sores.
Brienne sucked in her breath and drew Oathkeeper. Too many,
she thought, with a start of fear, they are too many. “Gendry,” she
said in a low voice, “you’ll want a sword, and armor. These are not
your friends. They’re no one’s friends.”
“What are you talking about?” The boy came and stood beside
her, his hammer in his hand.
Lightning cracked to the south as the riders swung down o their
horses. For half a heartbeat darkness turned to day. An axe gleamed
silvery blue, light shimmered o mail and plate, and beneath the
dark hood of the lead rider Brienne glimpsed an iron snout and rows
of steel teeth, snarling.
Gendry saw it too. “Him.”
“Not him. His helm.” Brienne tried to keep the fear from her
voice, but her mouth was dry as dust. She had a pretty good notion
who wore the Hound’s helm. The children, she thought.
The door to the inn banged open. Willow stepped out into the
rain, a crossbow in her hands. The girl was shouting at the riders,
but a clap of thunder rolled across the yard, drowning out her
words. As it faded, Brienne heard the man in the Hound’s helm say,
“Loose a quarrel at me and I’ll shove that crossbow up your cunt
and fuck you with it. Then I’ll pop your fucking eyes out and make
you eat them.” The fury in the man’s voice drove Willow back a
step, trembling.
Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance
against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice.
She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand. “Leave her be.
If you want to rape someone, try me.”
The oulaws turned as one. One laughed, and another said
something in a tongue Brienne did not know. The huge one with the
broad white face gave a malevolent hissssssssssssssss. The man in the
Hound’s helm began to laugh. “You’re even uglier than I
remembered. I’d sooner rape your horse.”

“Horses, that’s what we want,” one of the wounded men said.
“Fresh horses, and some food. There are outlaws after us. Give us
your horses and we’ll be gone. We won’t do you harm.”
“Fuck that.” The outlaw in the Hound’s helm yanked a battle axe
o his saddle. “I want to cut her bloody legs o . I’ll set her on her
stumps so she can watch me fuck the crossbow girl.”
“With what?” taunted Brienne. “Shagwell said they cut your
manhood o when they took your nose.”
She meant it to provoke him, and it did. Bellowing curses, he
came at her, his feet sending up splashes of black water as he
charged. The others stood back to watch the show, as she had
prayed they might. Brienne stayed as still as stone, waiting. The
yard was dark, the mud slippery underfoot. Better to let him come to
me. If the gods are good, he’ll slip and fall.
The gods were not that good, but her sword was. Five steps, four
steps, now, Brienne counted, and Oathkeeper swept up to meet his
rush. Steel crashed against steel as her blade bit through his rags
and opened a gash in his chain mail, even as his axe came crashing
down at her. She twisted aside, slashing at his chest again as she
retreated.
He followed, staggering and bleeding, roaring rage. “Whore!” he
boomed. “Freak! Bitch! I’ll give you to my dog to fuck, you bloody
bitch!” His axe whirled in murderous arcs, a brutal black shadow
that turned silver every time the lightning ashed. Brienne had no
shield to catch the blows. All she could do was slide back away from
him, darting this way and that as the axehead ew at her. Once the
mud gave way under her heel and she almost fell, but somehow she
recovered herself, though the axe grazed her left shoulder that time
and left a blaze of pain in its wake. “You got the bitch!” one of the
others called, and another said, “Let’s see her dance away from that
one.”
Dance she did, relieved that they were watching. Better that than
have them interfere. She could not ght seven, not alone, even if
one or two were wounded. Old Ser Goodwin was long in his grave,
yet she could hear him whispering in her ear. Men will always
underestimate you, he said, and their pride will make them want to

vanquish you quickly, lest it be said that a woman tried them sorely. Let
them spend their strength in furious attacks, whilst you conserve your
own. Wait and watch, girl, wait and watch. She waited, watching,
moving sideways, then backwards, then sideways again, slashing
now at his face, now at his legs, now at his arm. His blows came
more slowly as his axe grew heavier. Brienne turned him so the rain
was in his eyes, and stepped back two quick steps. He wrenched his
axe up once more, cursing, and lurched after her, one foot sliding in
the mud …
… and she leapt to meet his rush, both hands on her sword hilt.
His headlong charge brought him right onto her point, and
Oathkeeper punched through cloth and mail and leather and more
cloth, deep into his bowels and out his back, rasping as it scraped
along his spine. His axe fell from limp ngers, and the two of them
slammed together, Brienne’s face mashed up against the dog’s head
helm. She felt the cold wet metal against her cheek. Rain ran down
the steel in rivers, and when the lightning ashed again she saw
pain and fear and rank disbelief through the eye slits. “Sapphires,”
she whispered at him, as she gave her blade a hard twist that made
him shudder. His weight sagged heavily against her, and all at once
it was a corpse that she embraced, there in the black rain. She
stepped back and let him fall …
… and Biter crashed into her, shrieking.
He fell on her like an avalanche of wet wool and milk-white esh,
lifting her o her feet and slamming her down into the ground. She
landed in a puddle with a splash that sent water up her nose and
into her eyes. All the air was driven out of her, and her head
snapped down against some half-buried stone with a crack. “No,”
was all that she had time to say before he fell on top of her, his
weight driving her deeper into the mud. One of his hands was in her
hair, pulling her head back. The other groped for her throat.
Oathkeeper was gone, torn from her grasp. She had only her hands
to ght him o , but when she slammed a st into his face it was
like punching a ball of wet white dough. He hissed at her.
She hit him again, again, again, smashing the heel of her hand
into his eye, but he did not seem to feel her blows. She clawed at

his wrists, but his grip just grew tighter, though blood ran from the
gouges where she scratched him. He was crushing her, smothering
her. She pushed at his shoulders to get him o her, but he was
heavy as a horse, impossible to move. When she tried to knee him
in the groin, all she did was drive her knee into his belly. Grunting,
Biter tore out a handful of her hair.
My dagger. Brienne clutched at the thought, desperate. She
worked her hand down between them, ngers squirming under his
sour, su ocating esh, searching until they nally found the hilt.
Biter locked both his hands about her neck and began to slam her
head against the ground. The lightning ashed again, this time
inside her skull, yet somehow her ngers tightened, pulled the
dagger from its sheath. With him on top of her, she could not raise
the blade to stab, so she drew it hard across his belly. Something
warm and wet gushed between her ngers. Biter hissed again,
louder than before, and let go of her throat just long enough to
smash her in the face. She heard bones crack, and the pain blinded
her for an instant. When she tried to slash at him again, he
wrenched the dagger from her ngers and slammed a knee down
onto her forearm, breaking it. Then he seized her head again and
resumed trying to tear it o her shoulders.
Brienne could hear Dog barking, and men were shouting all about
her, and between the claps of thunder she heard the clash of steel
on steel. Ser Hyle, she thought, Ser Hyle has joined the ght, but all
that seemed far away and unimportant. Her world was no larger
than the hands at her throat and the face that loomed above her.
The rain ran o his hood as he leaned closer. His breath stank like
cheese gone rotten.
Brienne’s chest was burning, and the storm was behind her eyes,
blinding her. Bones ground against each other inside of her. Biter’s
mouth gaped open, impossibly wide. She saw his teeth, yellow and
crooked, led into points. When they closed on the soft meat of her
cheek, she hardly felt it. She could feel herself spiraling down into
the dark. I cannot die yet, she told herself, there is something I still
need to do.

Biter’s mouth tore free, full of blood and esh. He spat, grinned,
and sank his pointed teeth into her esh again. This time he chewed
and swallowed. He is eating me, she realized, but she had no
strength left to ght him any longer. She felt as if she were oating
above herself, watching the horror as if it were happening to some
other woman, to some stupid girl who thought she was a knight. It
will be nished soon, she told herself. Then it will not matter if he eats
me. Biter threw back his head and opened his mouth again, howling,
and stuck his tongue out at her. It was sharply pointed, dripping
blood, longer than any tongue should be. Sliding from his mouth,
out and out and out, red and wet and glistening, it made a hideous
sight, obscene. His tongue is a foot long, Brienne thought, just before
the darkness took her. Why, it looks almost like a sword.

JAIME

The brooch that fastened Ser Brynden Tully’s cloak was a black sh,
wrought in jet and gold. His ringmail was grim and grey. Over it he
wore greaves, gorget, gauntlets, pauldron, and poleyns of blackened
steel, none half so dark as the look upon his face as he waited for
Jaime Lannister at the end of the drawbridge, alone atop a chestnut
courser caparisoned in red and blue.
He loves me not. Tully had a craggy face, deeply lined and
windburnt beneath a shock of sti grey hair, but Jaime could still
see the great knight who had once enthralled a squire with tales of
the Ninepenny Kings. Honor’s hooves clattered against the planks of
the drawbridge. Jaime had thought long and hard about whether to
wear his gold armor or his white to this meeting; in the end, he’d
chosen a leather jack and a crimson cloak.
He drew up a yard from Ser Brynden, and inclined his head to the
older man. “Kingslayer,” said Tully.
That he would make that name the rst word from his mouth
spoke volumes, but Jaime was resolved to keep his temper.
“Black sh,” he responded. “Thank you for coming.”
“I assume you have returned to ful ll the oaths you swore my
niece,” Ser Brynden said. “As I recall, you promised Catelyn her
daughters in return for your freedom.” His mouth tightened. “Yet I
do not see the girls. Where are they?”
Must he make me say it? “I do not have them.”

“Pity. Do you wish to resume your captivity? Your old cell is still
available. We have put fresh rushes on the oor.”
And a nice new pail for me to shit in, I don’t doubt. “That was
thoughtful of you, ser, but I fear I must decline. I prefer the
comforts of my pavilion.”
“Whilst Catelyn enjoys the comforts of her grave.”
I had no hand in Lady Catelyn’s death, he might have said, and her
daughters were gone before I reached King’s Landing. It was on his
tongue to speak of Brienne and the sword he’d given her, but the
Black sh was looking at him the way that Eddard Stark had looked
at him when he’d found him on the Iron Throne with the Mad King’s
blood upon his blade. “I came to speak of the living, not the dead.
Of those who need not die, but shall …”
“… unless I hand you Riverrun. Is this where you threaten to
hang Edmure?” Beneath his bushy brows, Tully’s eyes were stone.
“My nephew is marked for death no matter what I do. So hang him
and be done with it. I expect that Edmure is as weary of standing on
those gallows as I am of seeing him there.”
Ryman Frey is a bloody fool. His mummer’s show with Edmure and
the gallows had only made the Black sh more obdurate, that was
plain. “You hold Lady Sybelle Westerling and three of her children.
I’ll return your nephew in exchange for them.”
“As you returned Lady Catelyn’s daughters?”
Jaime did not allow himself to be provoked. “An old woman and
three children for your liege lord. That’s a better bargain than you
could have hoped for.”
Ser Brynden smiled a hard smile. “You do not lack for gall,
Kingslayer. Bargaining with oathbreakers is like building on
quicksand, though. Cat should have known better than to trust the
likes of you.”
It was Tyrion she trusted in, Jaime almost said. The Imp deceived her
too. “The promises I made to Lady Catelyn were wrung from me at
swordpoint.”
“And the oath you swore to Aerys?”
He felt his phantom ngers twitching. “Aerys is no part of this.
Will you exchange the Westerlings for Edmure?”

“No. My king entrusted his queen to my keeping, and I swore to
keep her safe. I will not hand her over to a Frey noose.”
“The girl has been pardoned. No harm will come to her. You have
my word on that.”
“Your word of honor?” Ser Brynden raised an eyebrow. “Do you
even know what honor is?”
A horse. “I will swear any oath that you require.”
“Spare me, Kingslayer.”
“I want to. Strike your banners and open your gates and I’ll grant
your men their lives. Those who wish to remain at Riverrun in
service to Lord Emmon may do so. The rest shall be free to go
where they will, though I will require them to surrender their arms
and armor.”
“I wonder, how far will they get, unarmed, before ‘outlaws’ set
upon them? You dare not allow them to join Lord Beric, we both
know that. And what of me? Will I be paraded through King’s
Landing to die like Eddard Stark?”
“I will permit you to take the black. Ned Stark’s bastard is the
Lord Commander on the Wall.”
The Black sh narrowed his eyes. “Did your father arrange for
that as well? Catelyn never trusted the boy, as I recall, no more
than she ever trusted Theon Greyjoy. It would seem she was right
about them both. No, ser, I think not. I’ll die warm, if you please,
with a sword in hand running red with lion blood.”
“Tully blood runs just as red,” Jaime reminded him. “If you will
not yield the castle, I must storm it. Hundreds will die.”
“Hundreds of mine. Thousands of yours.”
“Your garrison will perish to a man.”
“I know that song. Do you sing it to the tune of ‘The Rains of
Castamere’? My men would sooner die upon their feet ghting than
on their knees beneath a headsman’s axe.”
This is not going well. “This de ance serves no purpose, ser. The
war is done, and your Young Wolf is dead.”
“Murdered in breach of all the sacred laws of hospitality.”
“Frey’s work, not mine.”
“Call it what you will. It stinks of Tywin Lannister.”

Jaime could not deny that. “My father is dead as well.”
“May the Father judge him justly.”
Now, there’s an awful prospect. “I would have slain Robb Stark in
the Whispering Wood, if I could have reached him. Some fools got
in my way. Does it matter how the boy perished? He’s no less dead,
and his kingdom died when he did.”
“You must be blind as well as maimed, ser. Lift your eyes, and
you will see that the direwolf still ies above our walls.”
“I’ve seen him. He looks lonely. Harrenhal has fallen. Seagard and
Maidenpool. The Brackens have bent the knee, and they’ve got
Tytos Blackwood penned up in Raventree. Piper, Vance, Mooton, all
your bannermen have yielded. Only Riverrun remains. We have
twenty times your numbers.”
“Twenty times the men require twenty times the food. How well
are you provisioned, my lord?”
“Well enough to sit here till the end of days if need be, whilst you
starve inside your walls.” He told the lie as boldly as he could and
hoped his face did not betray him.
The Black sh was not deceived. “The end of your days, perhaps.
Our own supplies are ample, though I fear we did not leave much in
the elds for visitors.”
“We can bring food down from the Twins,” said Jaime, “or over
the hills from the west, if it comes to that.”
“If you say so. Far be it from me to question the word of such an
honorable knight.”
The scorn in his voice made Jaime bristle. “There is a quicker
way to decide the matter. A single combat. My champion against
yours.”
“I was wondering when you would get to that.” Ser Brynden
laughed. “Who will it be? Strongboar? Addam Marbrand? Black
Walder Frey?” He leaned forward. “Why not you and me, ser?”
That would have been a sweet ght once, Jaime thought, ne fodder
for the singers. “When Lady Catelyn freed me, she made me swear
not to take arms again against the Starks or Tullys.”
“A most convenient oath, ser.”
His face darkened. “Are you calling me a coward?”

“No. I am calling you a cripple.” The Black sh nodded at Jaime’s
golden hand. “We both know you cannot ght with that.”
“I had two hands.” Would you throw your life away for pride? a
voice inside him whispered. “Some might say a cripple and an old
man are well matched. Free me from my vow to Lady Catelyn and I
will meet you sword to sword. If I win, Riverrun is ours. If you slay
me, we’ll lift the siege.”
Ser Brynden laughed again. “Much as I would welcome the
chance to take that golden sword away from you and cut out your
black heart, your promises are worthless. I would gain nothing from
your death but the pleasure of killing you, and I will not risk my
own life for that … as small a risk as that may be.”
It was a good thing that Jaime wore no sword; elsewise he would
have ripped his blade out, and if Ser Brynden did not slay him, the
archers on the walls most surely would. “Are there any terms you
will accept?” he demanded of the Black sh.
“From you?” Ser Brynden shrugged. “No.”
“Why did you even come to treat with me?”
“A siege is deadly dull. I wanted to see this stump of yours and
hear whatever excuses you cared to o er up for your latest
enormities. They were feebler than I’d hoped. You always
disappoint, Kingslayer.” The Black sh wheeled his mare and trotted
back toward Riverrun. The portcullis descended with a rush, its iron
spikes biting deep into the muddy ground.
Jaime turned Honor’s head about for the long ride back to the
Lannister siege lines. He could feel the eyes on him; the Tully men
upon their battlements, the Freys across the river. If they are not
blind, they’ll all know he threw my o er in my teeth. He would need to
storm the castle. Well, what’s one more broken vow to the Kingslayer?
Just more shit in the bucket. Jaime resolved to be the rst man on the
battlements. And with this golden hand of mine, most like the rst to
fall.
Back at camp, Little Lew held his bridle whilst Peck gave him a
hand down from the saddle. Do they think I’m such a cripple that I
cannot dismount by myself? “How did you fare, my lord?” asked his
cousin Ser Daven.

“No one put an arrow in my horse’s rump. Elsewise, there was
little to distinguish me from Ser Ryman.” He grimaced. “So now he
must needs turn the Red Fork redder.” Blame yourself for that,
Black sh. You left me little choice. “Assemble a war council. Ser
Addam, Strongboar, Forley Prester, those river lords of ours … and
our friends of Frey. Ser Ryman, Lord Emmon, whoever else they
care to bring.”
They gathered quickly. Lord Piper and both Lords Vance came to
speak for the repentant lords of the Trident, whose loyalties would
shortly be put to the test. The west was represented by Ser Daven,
Strongboar, Addam Marbrand, and Forley Prester. Lord Emmon
Frey joined them, with his wife. Lady Genna claimed her stool with
a look that dared any man there to question her presence. None did.
The Freys sent Ser Walder Rivers, called “Bastard Walder,” and Ser
Ryman’s rstborn Edwyn, a pallid, slender man with a pinched nose
and lank dark hair. Under a blue lambswool cloak, Edwyn wore a
jerkin of nely tooled grey calfskin with ornate scrollwork worked
into the leather. “I speak for House Frey,” he announced. “My
father is indisposed this morning.”
Ser Daven gave a snort. “Is he drunk, or just greensick from last
night’s wine?”
Edwyn had the hard mean mouth of a miser. “Lord Jaime,” he
said, “must I su er such discourtesy?”
“Is it true?” Jaime asked him. “Is your father drunk?”
Frey pressed his lips together and eyed Ser Ilyn Payne, who was
standing beside by the tent ap in his rusted mail, his sword poking
up above one bony shoulder. “He … my father has a bad belly, my
lord. Red wine helps with his digestion.”
“He must be digesting a bloody mammoth,” said Ser Daven.
Strongboar laughed, and Lady Genna chuckled.
“Enough,” said Jaime. “We have a castle to win.” When his father
sat in council, he let his captains speak rst. He was resolved to do
the same. “How shall we proceed?”
“Hang Edmure Tully, for a start,” urged Lord Emmon Frey. “That
will teach Ser Brynden that we mean what we say. If we send Ser
Edmure’s head to his uncle, it may move him to yield.”

“Brynden Black sh is not moved so easily.” Karyl Vance, the Lord
of Wayfarer’s Rest, had a melancholy look. A winestain birthmark
covered half his neck and one side of his face. “His own brother
could not move him to a marriage bed.”
Ser Daven shook his shaggy head. “We have to storm the walls, as
I’ve been saying all along. Siege towers, scaling ladders, a ram to
break the gate, that’s what’s needed here.”
“I will lead the assault,” said Strongboar. “Give the sh a taste of
steel and re, that’s what I say.”
“They are my walls,” protested Lord Emmon, “and that is my gate
you would break.” He drew his parchment out of his sleeve again.
“King Tommen himself has granted me—”
“We’ve all seen your paper, nuncle,” snapped Edwyn Frey. “Why
don’t you go wave it at the Black sh for a change?”
“Storming the walls will be a bloody business,” said Addam
Marbrand. “I propose we wait for a moonless night and send a
dozen picked men across the river in a boat with mu ed oars. They
can scale the walls with ropes and grapnels, and open the gates
from the inside. I will lead them, if the council wishes.”
“Folly,” declared the bastard, Walder Rivers. “Ser Brynden is no
man to be cozened by such tricks.”
“The Black sh is the obstacle,” agreed Edwyn Frey. “His helm
bears a black trout on its crest that makes him easy to pick out from
afar. I propose that we move our siege towers close, ll them full of
bowmen, and feign an attack upon the gates. That will bring Ser
Brynden to the battlements, crest and all. Let every archer smear his
shafts with night soil, and make that crest his mark. Once Ser
Brynden dies, Riverrun is ours.”
“Mine,” piped Lord Emmon. “Riverrun is mine.”
Lord Karyl’s birthmark darkened. “Will the night soil be your own
contribution, Edwyn? A mortal poison, I don’t doubt.”
“The Black sh deserves a nobler death, and I’m the man to give it
to him.” Strongboar thumped his st on the table. “I will challenge
him to single combat. Mace or axe or longsword, makes no matter.
The old man will be my meat.”

“Why would he deign to accept your challenge, ser?” asked Ser
Forley Prester. “What could he gain from such a duel? Will we lift
the siege if he should win? I do not believe that. Nor will he. A
single combat would accomplish nought.”
“I have known Brynden Tully since we were squires together, in
service to Lord Darry,” said Norbert Vance, the blind Lord of
Atranta. “If it please my lords, let me go and speak with him and
try to make him understand the hopelessness of his position.”
“He understands that well enough,” said Lord Piper. He was a
short, rotund, bowlegged man with a bush of wild red hair, the
father of one of Jaime’s squires; the resemblance to the boy was
unmistakeable. “The man’s not bloody stupid, Norbert. He has
eyes … and too much sense to yield to such as these.” He made a
rude gesture in the direction of Edwyn Frey and Walder Rivers.
Edwyn bristled. “If my lord of Piper means to imply—”
“I don’t imply, Frey. I say what I mean straight out, like an honest
man. But what would you know of the ways of honest men? You’re
a treacherous lying weasel, like all your kin. I’d sooner drink a pint
of piss than take the word of any Frey.” He leaned across the table.
“Where is Marq, answer me that? What have you done with my
son? He was a guest at your bloody wedding.”
“And our honored guest he shall remain,” said Edwyn, “until you
prove your loyalty to His Grace, King Tommen.”
“Five knights and twenty men-at-arms went with Marq to the
Twins,” said Piper. “Are they your guests as well, Frey?”
“Some of the knights, perhaps. The others were served no more
than they deserved. You’d do well to guard your traitor’s tongue,
Piper, unless you want your heir returned in pieces.”
My father’s councils never went like this, Jaime thought, as Piper
came lurching to his feet. “Say that with a sword in your hand,
Frey,” the small man snarled. “Or do you only ght with smears of
shit?”
Frey’s pinched face went pale. Beside him Walder Rivers rose.
“Edwyn is no man of the sword … but I am, Piper. If you have
more remarks to make, come outside and make them.”

“This is a war council, not a war,” Jaime reminded them. “Sit
down, the both of you.” Neither man moved. “Now!”
Walder Rivers seated himself. Lord Piper was not so easy to cow.
He muttered a curse and strode from the tent. “Shall I send men
after him to drag him back, my lord?” Ser Daven asked Jaime.
“Send Ser Ilyn,” urged Edywn Frey. “We only need his head.”
Karyl Vance turned to Jaime. “Lord Piper spoke from grief. Marq
is his rstborn son. Those knights who accompanied him to the
Twins were nephews and cousins all.”
“Traitors and rebels all, you mean,” said Edwyn Frey.
Jaime gave him a cold look. “The Twins took up the Young
Wolf’s cause as well,” he reminded the Freys. “Then you betrayed
him. That makes you twice as treacherous as Piper.” He enjoyed
seeing Edwyn’s thin smile curdle up and die. I have endured su cient
counsel for one day, he decided. “We’re done. See to your
preparations, my lords. We attack at rst light.”
The wind was blowing from the north as the lords led from the
tent. Jaime could smell the stink of the Frey encampments beyond
the Tumblestone. Across the water Edmure Tully stood forlorn atop
the tall grey gallows, with a rope around his neck.
His aunt departed last, her husband at her heels. “Lord nephew,”
Emmon protested, “this assault on my seat … you must not do this.”
When he swallowed, the apple in his throat moved up and down.
“You must not. I … I forbid it.” He had been chewing sourleaf
again; pinkish froth glistened on his lips. “The castle is mine, I have
the parchment. Signed by the king, by little Tommen. I am the
lawful lord of Riverrun, and …”
“Not so long as Edmure Tully lives,” said Lady Genna. “He is soft
of heart and soft of head, I know, but alive, the man is still a
danger. What do you mean to do about that, Jaime?”
It’s the Black sh who is the danger, not Edmure. “Leave Edmure to
me. Ser Lyle, Ser Ilyn. Attend me, if you would. It’s time I paid a
visit to those gallows.”
The Tumblestone was deeper and swifter than the Red Fork, and
the nearest ford was leagues upstream. The ferry had just started
across with Walder Rivers and Edwyn Frey when Jaime and his men

arrived at the river. As they awaited its return, Jaime told them
what he wanted. Ser Ilyn spat into the river.
When the three of them stepped o the ferry on the north bank, a
drunken camp follower o ered to pleasure Strongboar with her
mouth. “Here, pleasure my friend,” Ser Lyle said, shoving her
toward Ser Ilyn. Laughing, the woman moved to kiss Payne on the
lips, then saw his eyes and shrank away.
The paths between the cook res were raw brown mud, mixed
with horse dung and torn up by hooves and boots alike. Everywhere
Jaime saw the twin towers of House Frey displayed on shield and
banners, blue on grey, along with the arms of lesser Houses sworn
to the Crossing: the heron of Erenford, the pitchfork of Haigh, Lord
Charlton’s three sprigs of mistletoe. The arrival of the Kingslayer
did not go unnoticed. An old woman selling piglets from a basket
stopped to stare at him, a knight with a half-familiar face went to
one knee, and two men-at-arms pissing in a ditch turned and
sprayed each other. “Ser Jaime,” someone called after him, but he
strode on without turning. Around him he glimpsed the faces of
men he’d done his best to kill in the Whispering Wood, where the
Freys had fought beneath the direwolf banners of Robb Stark. His
golden hand hung heavy at his side.
Ryman Frey’s great rectangular pavilion was the largest in the
camp; its grey canvas walls were made of sewn squares to resemble
stonework, and its two peaks evoked the Twins. Far from being
indisposed, Ser Ryman was enjoying some entertainment. The sound
of a woman’s drunken laughter drifted from within the tent,
mingled with the strains of a woodharp and a singer’s voice. I will
deal with you later, ser, Jaime thought. Walder Rivers stood before
his own modest tent, talking with two men-at-arms. His shield bore
the arms of House Frey with the colors reversed, and a red bend
sinister across the towers. When the bastard saw Jaime, he frowned.
There’s a cold suspicious look if ever I saw one. That one is more
dangerous than any of his trueborn brothers.
The gallows had been raised ten feet o the ground. Two
spearmen were posted at the foot of the steps. “You can’t go up
without Ser Ryman’s leave,” one told Jaime.

“This says I can.” Jaime tapped his sword hilt with a nger. “The
question is, will I need to step over your corpse?”
The spearmen moved aside.
Atop the gallows, the Lord of Riverrun stood staring at the trap
beneath him. His feet were black and caked with mud, his legs bare.
Edmure wore a soiled silken tunic striped in Tully red and blue, and
a noose of hempen rope. At the sound of Jaime’s footsteps, he
raised his head and licked his dry, cracked lips. “Kingslayer?” The
sight of Ser Ilyn widened his eyes. “Better a sword than a rope. Do
it, Payne.”
“Ser Ilyn,” said Jaime. “You heard Lord Tully. Do it.”
The silent knight gripped his greatsword with both hands. Long
and heavy it was, sharp as common steel could be. Edmure’s
cracked lips moved soundlessly. As Ser Ilyn drew the blade back, he
closed his eyes. The stroke had all Payne’s weight behind it.
“No! Stop. NO!” Edwyn Frey came panting into view. “My father
comes. Fast as he can. Jaime, you must …”
“My lord would suit me better, Frey,” said Jaime. “And you would
do well to omit must from any speech directed at me.”
Ser Ryman came stomping up the gallows steps in company with
a straw-haired slattern as drunk as he was. Her gown laced up the
front, but someone had undone the laces to the navel, so her breasts
were spilling out. They were large and heavy, with big brown
nipples. On her head a circlet of hammered bronze sat askew,
graven with runes and ringed with small black swords. When she
saw Jaime, she laughed. “Who in seven hells is this one?”
“The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard,” Jaime returned with
cold courtesy. “I might ask the same of you, my lady.”
“Lady? I’m no lady. I’m the queen.”
“My sister will be surprised to hear that.”
“Lord Ryman crowned me his very self.” She gave a shake of her
ample hips. “I’m the queen o’ whores.”
No, Jaime thought, my sweet sister holds that title too.
Ser Ryman found his tongue. “Shut your mouth, slut, Lord Jaime
doesn’t want to hear some harlot’s nonsense.” This Frey was a

thickset man with a broad face, small eyes, and a soft eshy set of
chins. His breath stank of wine and onions.
“Making queens, Ser Ryman?” Jaime asked softly. “Stupid. As
stupid as this business with Lord Edmure.”
“I gave the Black sh warning. I told him Edmure would die
unless the castle yielded. I had this gallows built, to show them that
Ser Ryman Frey does not make idle threats. At Seagard my son
Walder did the same with Patrek Mallister and Lord Jason bent the
knee, but … the Black sh is a cold man. He refused us, so …”
“… you hanged Lord Edmure?”
The man reddened. “My lord grandfather … if we hang the man
we have no hostage, ser. Have you considered that?”
“Only a fool makes threats he’s not prepared to carry out. If I
were to threaten to hit you unless you shut your mouth, and you
presumed to speak, what do you think I’d do?”
“Ser, you do not unders—”
Jaime hit him. It was a backhand blow delivered with his golden
hand, but the force of it sent Ser Ryman stumbling backward into
the arms of his whore. “You have a fat head, Ser Ryman, and a thick
neck as well. Ser Ilyn, how many strokes would it take you to cut
through that neck?”
Ser Ilyn laid a single nger against his nose.
Jaime laughed. “An empty boast. I say three.”
Ryman Frey went to his knees. “I have done nothing …”
“… but drink and whore. I know.”
“I am heir to the Crossing. You can’t …”
“I warned you about talking.” Jaime watched the man turn white.
A sot, a fool, and a craven. Lord Walder had best outlive this one, or the
Freys are done. “You are dismissed, ser.”
“Dismissed?”
“You heard me. Go away.”
“But … where should I go?”
“To hell or home, as you prefer. See that you are not in camp
when the sun comes up. You may take your queen of whores, but
not that crown of hers.” Jaime turned from Ser Ryman to his son.

“Edwyn, I am giving you your father’s command. Try not to be so
stupid as your sire.”
“That ought not pose much di culty, my lord.”
“Send word to Lord Walder. The crown requires all his prisoners.”
Jaime waved his golden hand. “Ser Lyle, bring him.”
Edmure Tully had collapsed facedown on the sca old when Ser
Ilyn’s blade sheared the rope in two. A foot of hemp still dangled
from the noose about his neck. Strongboar grabbed the end of it and
pulled him to his feet. “A sh on a leash,” he said, chortling.
“There’s a sight I never saw before.”
The Freys stepped aside to let them pass. A crowd had gathered
below the sca old, including a dozen camp followers in various
states of disarray. Jaime noticed one man holding a woodharp.
“You. Singer. Come with me.”
The man do ed his hat. “As my lord commands.”
No one said a word as they walked back to the ferry, with Ser
Ryman’s singer trailing after them. But as they shoved o from the
riverbank and made for the south side of the Tumblestone, Edmure
Tully grabbed Jaime by the arm. “Why?”
A Lannister pays his debts, he thought, and you’re the only coin that’s
left to me. “Consider it a wedding gift.”
Edmure stared at him with wary eyes. “A … wedding gift?”
“I am told your wife is pretty. She’d have to be, for you to bed
her while your sister and your king were being murdered.”
“I never knew.” Edmure licked his cracked lips. “There were
ddlers outside the bedchamber …”
“And Lady Roslin was distracting you.”
“She … they made her do it, Lord Walder and the rest. Roslin
never wanted … she wept, but I thought it was …”
“The sight of your rampant manhood? Aye, that would make any
woman weep, I’m sure.”
“She is carrying my child.”
No, Jaime thought, that’s your death she has growing in her belly.
Back at his pavilion, he dismissed Strongboar and Ser Ilyn, but not
the singer. “I may have need of a song shortly,” he told the man.
“Lew, heat some bathwater for my guest. Pia, nd him some clean

clothing. Nothing with lions on it, if you please. Peck, wine for Lord
Tully. Are you hungry, my lord?”
Edmure nodded, but his eyes were still suspicious.
Jaime settled on a stool while Tully had his bath. The lth came
o in grey clouds. “Once you’ve eaten, my men will escort you to
Riverrun. What happens after that is up to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your uncle is an old man. Valiant, yes, but the best part of his
life is done. He has no bride to grieve for him, no children to
defend. A good death is all the Black sh can hope for … but you
have years remaining, Edmure. And you are the rightful lord of
House Tully, not him. Your uncle serves at your pleasure. The fate
of Riverrun is in your hands.”
Edmure stared. “The fate of Riverrun …”
“Yield the castle and no one dies. Your smallfolk may go in peace
or stay to serve Lord Emmon. Ser Brynden will be allowed to take
the black, along with as many of the garrison as choose to join him.
You as well, if the Wall appeals to you. Or you may go to Casterly
Rock as my captive and enjoy all the comforts and courtesy that
be ts a hostage of your rank. I’ll send your wife to join you, if you
like. If her child is a boy, he will serve House Lannister as a page
and a squire, and when he earns his knighthood we’ll bestow some
lands upon him. Should Roslin give you a daughter, I’ll see her well
dowered when she’s old enough to wed. You yourself may even be
granted parole, once the war is done. All you need do is yield the
castle.”
Edmure raised his hands from the tub and watched the water run
between his ngers. “And if I will not yield?”
Must you make me say the words? Pia was standing by the ap of
the tent with her arms full of clothes. His squires were listening as
well, and the singer. Let them hear, Jaime thought. Let the world
hear. It makes no matter. He forced himself to smile, “You’ve seen
our numbers, Edmure. You’ve seen the ladders, the towers, the
trebuchets, the rams. If I speak the command, my coz will bridge
your moat and break your gate. Hundreds will die, most of them
your own. Your former bannermen will make up the rst wave of

attackers, so you’ll start your day by killing the fathers and brothers
of men who died for you at the Twins. The second wave will be
Freys, I have no lack of those. My westermen will follow when your
archers are short of arrows and your knights so weary they can
hardly lift their blades. When the castle falls, all those inside will be
put to the sword. Your herds will be butchered, your godswood will
be felled, your keeps and towers will burn. I’ll pull your walls
down, and divert the Tumblestone over the ruins. By the time I’m
done no man will ever know that a castle once stood here.” Jaime
got to his feet. “Your wife may whelp before that. You’ll want your
child, I expect. I’ll send him to you when he’s born. With a
trebuchet.”
Silence followed his speech. Edmure sat in his bath. Pia clutched
the clothing to her breasts. The singer tightened a string on his
harp. Little Lew hollowed out a loaf of stale bread to make a
trencher, pretending that he had not heard. With a trebuchet, Jaime
thought. If his aunt had been there, would she still say Tyrion was
Tywin’s son?
Edmure Tully nally found his voice. “I could climb out of this
tub and kill you where you stand, Kingslayer.”
“You could try.” Jaime waited. When Edmure made no move to
rise, he said, “I’ll leave you to enjoy your food. Singer, play for our
guest whilst he eats. You know the song, I trust.”
“The one about the rain? Aye, my lord. I know it.”
Edmure seemed to see the man for the rst time. “No. Not him.
Get him away from me.”
“Why, it’s just a song,” said Jaime. “He cannot have that bad a
voice.”

CERSEI

Grand Maester Pycelle had been old for as long as she had known
him, but he seemed to have aged another hundred years in the past
three nights. It took him an eternity to bend his creaky knee before
her, and once he had he could not rise again until Ser Osmund
jerked him to his feet.
Cersei studied him with displeasure. “Lord Qyburn informs me
that Lord Gyles has coughed his last.”
“Yes, Your Grace. I did my best to ease his passing.”
“Did you?” The queen turned to Lady Merryweather. “I did say I
wanted Rosby alive, did I not?”
“You did, Your Grace.”
“Ser Osmund, what is your recollection of the conversation?”
“You commanded Grand Maester Pycelle to save the man, Your
Grace. We all heard.”
Pycelle’s mouth opened and closed. “Your Grace must know, I did
all that could be done for the poor man.”
“As you did for Jo rey? And his father, my own beloved
husband? Robert was as strong as any man in the Seven Kingdoms,
yet you lost him to a boar. Oh, and let us not forget Jon Arryn. No
doubt you would have killed Ned Stark as well, if I had let you keep
him longer. Tell me, maester, was it at the Citadel that you learned
to wring your hands and make excuses?”

Her voice made the old man inch. “No man could have done
more, Your Grace. I … I have always given leal service.”
“When you counseled King Aerys to open his gates as my father’s
host approached, was that your notion of leal service?”
“That … I misjudged the …”
“Was that good counsel?”
“Your Grace must surely know …”
“What I know is that when my son was poisoned you proved to be
of less use than Moon Boy. What I know is that the crown has
desperate need of gold, and our lord treasurer is dead.”
The old fool seized upon that. “I … I shall draw up a list of men
suitable to take Lord Gyles’s place upon the council.”
“A list.” Cersei was amused by his presumption. “I can well
imagine the sort of list you would provide me. Greybeards and
grasping fools and Garth the Gross.” Her lips tightened. “You have
been much in Lady Margaery’s company of late.”
“Yes. Yes, I … Queen Margaery has been most distraught about
Ser Loras. I provide Her Grace with sleeping draughts and … other
sorts of potions.”
“No doubt. Tell me, was it our little queen who commanded you
to kill Lord Gyles?”
“K-kill?” Grand Maester Pycelle’s eyes grew as big as boiled eggs.
“Your Grace cannot believe … it was his cough, by all the gods,
I … Her Grace would not … she bore Lord Gyles no ill will, why
would Queen Margaery want him …”
“… dead? Why, to plant another rose on Tommen’s council. Are
you blind or bought? Rosby stood in her way, so she put him in his
grave. With your connivance.”
“Your Grace, I swear to you, Lord Gyles perished from his
cough.” His mouth was quivering. “My loyalty has always been to
the crown, to the realm … t-to House Lannister.”
In that order? Pycelle’s fear was palpable. He is ripe enough. Time
to squeeze the fruit and taste the juice. “If you are as leal as you claim,
why are you lying to me? Do not trouble to deny it. You began to
dance attendance on Maid Margaery before Ser Loras went to
Dragonstone, so spare me further fables about how you want only

to console our good-daughter in her grief. What brings you to the
Maidenvault so often? Not Margaery’s vapid conversation, surely?
Are you courting that pox-faced septa of hers? Diddling little Lady
Bulwer? Do you play the spy for her, informing on me to serve her
plots?”
“I … I obey. A maester takes an oath of service …”
“A grand maester swears to serve the realm.”
“Your Grace, she … she is the queen …”
“I am the queen.”
“I meant … she is the king’s wife, and …”
“I know who she is. What I want to know is why she has need of
you. Is my good-daughter unwell?”
“Unwell?” The old man plucked at the thing he called a beard,
that patched growth of thin white hair sprouting from the loose
pink wattles under his chin. “N-not unwell, Your Grace, not as such.
My oaths forbid me to divulge …”
“Your oaths will be of small comfort in the black cells,” she
warned him. “I’ll hear the truth, or you’ll wear chains.”
Pycelle collapsed to his knees. “I beg you … I was your lord
father’s man, and a friend to you in the matter of Lord Arryn. I
could not survive the dungeons, not again …”
“Why does Margaery send for you?”
“She desires … she … she …”
“Say it!”
He cringed. “Moon tea,” he whispered. “Moon tea, for …”
“I know what moon tea is for.” There it is. “Very well. Get o
those saggy knees and try to remember what it was to be a man.”
Pycelle struggled to rise, but took so long about it that she had to
tell Osmund Kettleblack to give him another yank. “As to Lord
Gyles, no doubt our Father Above will judge him justly. He left no
children?”
“No children of his body, but there is a ward …”
“… not of his blood.” Cersei dismissed that annoyance with a ick
of her hand. “Gyles knew of our dire need for gold. No doubt he
told you of his wish to leave all his lands and wealth to Tommen.”
Rosby’s gold would help refresh their co ers, and Rosby’s lands and

castle could be bestowed upon one of her own as a reward for leal
service. Lord Waters, perhaps. Aurane had been hinting at his need
for a seat; his lordship was only an empty honor without one. He
had his eye on Dragonstone, Cersei knew, but there he aimed too
high. Rosby would be more suitable to his birth and station.
“Lord Gyles loved His Grace with all his heart,” Pycelle was
saying, “but … his ward …”
“… will doubtless understand, once he hears you speak of Lord
Gyles’s dying wish. Go, and see it done.”
“If it please Your Grace.” Grand Maester Pycelle almost tripped
over his own robes in his haste to leave.
Lady Merryweather closed the door behind him. “Moon tea,” she
said, as she turned back to the queen. “How foolish of her. Why
would she do such a thing, take such a risk?”
“The little queen has appetites that Tommen is as yet too young
to satisfy.” That was always a danger, when a grown woman was
married to a child. Even more so with a widow. She may claim that
Renly never touched her, but I will not believe it. Women only drank
moon tea for one reason; maidens had no need for it at all. “My son
has been betrayed. Margaery has a lover. That is high treason,
punishable by death.” She could only hope that Mace Tyrell’s prunefaced harridan of a mother lived long enough to see the trial. By
insisting that Tommen and Margaery be wed at once, Lady Olenna
had condemned her precious rose to a headsman’s sword. “Jaime
made o with Ser Ilyn Payne. I suppose I shall need to nd a new
King’s Justice to snick her head o .”
“I’ll do it,” o ered Osmund Kettleblack, with an easy grin.
“Margaery’s got a pretty little neck. A good sharp sword will go
right through it.”
“It would,” said Taena, “but there is a Tyrell army at Storm’s End
and another at Maidenpool. They have sharp swords as well.”
I am awash in roses. It was vexing. She still had need of Mace
Tyrell, if not his daughter. At least until such time as Stannis is
defeated. Then I shan’t need any of them. But how could she rid
herself of the daughter without losing the father? “Treason is
treason,” she said, “but we must have proof, something more

substantial than moon tea. If she is proved to be untrue, even her
own lord father must condemn her, or her shame becomes his own.”
Kettleblack chewed on one end of his mustache. “We need to
catch them during the deed.”
“How? Qyburn has eyes on her day and night. Her serving men
take my coin, but bring us only tri es. Yet no one has seen this
lover. The ears outside her door hear singing, laughter, gossip,
nothing of any use.”
“Margaery is too shrewd to be caught so easily,” said Lady
Merryweather. “Her women are her castle walls. They sleep with
her, dress her, pray with her, read with her, sew with her. When
she is not hawking or riding she is playing come-into-my-castle with
little Alysanne Bulwer. Whenever men are about, her septa will be
with her, or her cousins.”
“She must rid herself of her hens sometime,” the queen insisted. A
thought struck her. “Unless her ladies are part of it as well … not all
of them, perhaps, but some.”
“The cousins?” Even Taena sounded doubtful. “All three are
younger than the little queen, and more innocent.”
“Wantons clad in maiden’s white. That only makes their sins more
shocking. Their names will live in shame.” Suddenly the queen
could almost taste it. “Taena, your lord husband is my justiciar. The
two of you must sup with me, this very night.” She wanted this
done quickly, before Margaery took it in her little head to return to
Highgarden, or sail to Dragonstone to be with her wounded brother
at death’s door. “I shall command the cooks to roast a boar for us.
And of course we must have some music, to help with our
digestion.”
Taena was very quick. “Music. Just so.”
“Go and tell your lord husband and make arrangements for the
singer,” Cersei urged. “Ser Osmund, you may remain. We have
much and more to discuss. I shall have need of Qyburn too.”
Sad to say, the kitchens proved to have no wild boar on hand, and
there was not time enough to send out hunters. Instead, the cooks
butchered one of the castle sows, and served them ham studded
with cloves and basted with honey and dried cherries. It was not

what Cersei wanted, but she made do. Afterward they had baked
apples with a sharp white cheese. Lady Taena savored every bite.
Not so Orton Merryweather, whose round face remained blotched
and pale from broth to cheese. He drank heavily and kept stealing
glances at the singer.
“A great pity about Lord Gyles,” Cersei said at last. “I daresay
none of us will miss his coughing, though.”
“No. No, I’d think not.”
“We shall have need of a new lord treasurer. If the Vale were not
so unsettled, I would bring back Petyr Baelish, but … I am minded
to try Ser Harys in the o ce. He can do no worse than Gyles, and at
least he does not cough.”
“Ser Harys is the King’s Hand,” said Taena.
Ser Harys is a hostage, and feeble even at that. “It is time that
Tommen had a more forceful Hand.”
Lord Orton lifted his gaze from his wine cup. “Forceful. To be
sure.” He hesitated. “Who …?”
“You, my lord. It is in your blood. Your grandsire took my own
father’s place as Hand to Aerys.” Replacing Tywin Lannister with
Owen Merryweather had proved to be akin to replacing a destrier
with a donkey, to be sure, but Owen had been an old done man
when Aerys raised him, amiable if ine ectual. His grandson was
younger, and … Well, he has a strong wife. It was a pity Taena could
not serve as Hand. She was thrice the man her husband was, and far
more amusing. She was also Myrish-born and female, however, so
Orton must needs su ce. “I have no doubt that you are more able
than Ser Harys.” The contents of my chamber pot are more able than
Ser Harys. “Will you consent to serve?”
“I … yes, of course. Your Grace does me great honor.”
A greater one than you deserve. “You have served me ably as
justiciar, my lord. And will continue to do so through
these … trying times ahead.” When she saw that Merryweather had
grasped her meaning, the queen turned to smile at the singer. “And
you must be rewarded as well, for all the sweet songs you have
played for us whilst we ate. The gods have given you a gift.”
The singer bowed. “Your Grace is kind to say so.”

“Not kind,” said Cersei, “merely truthful. Taena tells me that you
are called the Blue Bard.”
“I am, Your Grace.” The singer’s boots were supple blue calfskin,
his breeches ne blue wool. The tunic he wore was pale blue silk
slashed with shiny blue satin. He had even gone so far as to dye his
hair blue, in the Tyroshi fashion. Long and curly, it fell to his
shoulders and smelled as if it had been washed in rosewater. From
blue roses, no doubt. At least his teeth are white. They were good
teeth, not the least bit crooked.
“You have no other name?”
A hint of pink su used his cheeks. “As a boy, I was called Wat. A
ne name for a plowboy, less tting for a singer.”
The Blue Bard’s eyes were the same color as Robert’s. For that
alone, she hated him. “It is easy to see why you are Lady
Margaery’s favorite.”
“Her Grace is kind. She says I give her pleasure.”
“Oh, I’m certain of it. Might I see your lute?”
“If it please Your Grace.” Beneath the courtesy, there was a faint
hint of unease, but he handed her the lute all the same. One does
not refuse the queen’s request.
Cersei plucked a string and smiled at the sound. “Sweet and sad
as love. Tell me, Wat … the rst time you took Margaery to bed,
was that before she wed my son, or after?”
For a moment he did not seem to understand. When he did, his
eyes grew large. “Your Grace has been misinformed. I swear to you,
I never—”
“Liar!” Cersei smashed the lute across the singer’s face so hard the
painted wood exploded into shards and splinters. “Lord Orton,
summon my guards and take this creature to the dungeons.”
Orton Merryweather’s face was damp with fear. “This … oh,
infamy … he dared seduce the queen?”
“I fear it was the other way around, but he is a traitor all the
same. Let him sing for Lord Qyburn.”
The Blue Bard went white. “No.” Blood dripped from his lip
where the lute had torn it. “I never …” When Merryweather seized
him by the arm, he screamed, “Mother have mercy, no.”

“I am not your mother,” Cersei told him.
Even in the black cells, all they got from him were denials,
prayers, and pleas for mercy. Before long, blood was streaming
down his chin from all his broken teeth, and he wet his dark blue
breeches three times over, yet still the man persisted in his lies. “Is
it possible we have the wrong singer?” Cersei asked.
“All things are possible, Your Grace. Have no fear. The man will
confess before the night is done.” Down here in the dungeons,
Qyburn wore roughspun wool and a blacksmith’s leather apron. To
the Blue Bard he said, “I am sorry if the guards were rough with
you. Their courtesies are sadly lacking.” His voice was kind,
solicitous. “All we want from you is the truth.”
“I’ve told you the truth,” the singer sobbed. Iron shackles held
him hard against the cold stone wall.
“We know better.” Qyburn had a razor in his hand, its edge
gleaming faintly in the torchlight. He cut away the Blue Bard’s
clothing, until the man was naked but for his high blue boots. The
hair between his legs was brown, Cersei was amused to see. “Tell us
how you pleasured the little queen,” she commanded.
“I never … I sang, was all, I sang and played. Her ladies will tell
you. They were always with us. Her cousins.”
“How many of them did you have carnal knowledge of?”
“None of them. I’m just a singer. Please.”
Qyburn said, “Your Grace, mayhaps this poor man only played for
Margaery whilst she entertained other lovers.”
“No. Please. She never … I sang, I only sang …”
Lord Qyburn ran a hand up the Blue Bard’s chest. “Does she take
your nipples in her mouth during your love play?” He took one
between his thumb and fore nger, and twisted. “Some men enjoy
that. Their nipples are as sensitive as a woman’s.” The razor ashed,
the singer shrieked. On his chest a wet red eye wept blood. Cersei
felt ill. Part of her wanted to close her eyes, to turn away, to make
it stop. But she was the queen and this was treason. Lord Tywin
would not have turned away.
In the end the Blue Bard told them his whole life, back to his rst
name day. His father had been a chandler and Wat was raised to

that trade, but as a boy he found he had more skill at making lutes
than barrels. When he was twelve he ran o to join a troupe of
musicians he had heard performing at a fair. He had wandered half
the Reach before coming to King’s Landing in hopes of nding favor
at court.
“Favor?” Qyburn chuckled. “Is that what women call it now? I
fear you found too much of it, my friend … and from the wrong
queen. The true one stands before you.”
Yes. Cersei blamed Margaery Tyrell for this. If not for her, Wat
might have lived a long and fruitful life, singing his little songs and
bedding pig girls and crofter’s daughters. Her scheming forced this on
me. She has soiled me with her treachery.
By dawn the singer’s high blue boots were full of blood, and he
had told them how Margaery would fondle herself as she watched
her cousins pleasuring him with their mouths. At other times he
would sing for her whilst she sated her lusts with other lovers.
“Who were they?” the queen demanded, and the wretched Wat
named Ser Tallad the Tall, Lambert Turnberry, Jalabhar Xho, the
Redwyne twins, Osney Kettleblack, Hugh Clifton, and the Knight of
Flowers.
That displeased her. She dare not besmirch the name of the hero
of Dragonstone. Besides, no one who knew Ser Loras would ever
believe it. The Redwynes could not be a part of it either. Without
the Arbor and its eet, the realm could never hope to rid itself of
this Euron Crow’s Eye and his accursed ironmen. “All you are doing
is spitting up the names of men you saw about her chambers. We
want the truth!”
“The truth.” Wat looked at her with the one blue eye that Qyburn
had left him. Blood bubbled through the holes where his front teeth
had been. “I might have … misremembered.”
“Horas and Hobber had no part of this, did they?”
“No,” he admitted. “Not them.”
“As for Ser Loras, I am certain Margaery took pains to hide what
she was doing from her brother.”
“She did. I remember now. Once I had to hide under the bed
when Ser Loras came to see her. He must never know, she said.”

“I prefer this song to the other.” Leave the great lords out of it,
that was for the best. The others, though … Ser Tallad had been a
hedge knight, Jalabhar Xho was an exile and a beggar, Clifton was
the only one of the little queen’s guardsman. And Osney is the plum
that makes the pudding. “I know you feel better for having told the
truth. You will want to remember that when Margaery comes to
trial. If you were to start lying again …”
“I won’t. I’ll tell it true. And after …”
“… you will be allowed to take the black. You have my word on
that.” Cersei turned to Qyburn. “See that his wounds are cleaned
and dressed, and give him milk of the poppy for the pain.”
“Your Grace is good.” Qyburn dropped the bloody razor into a
pail of vinegar. “Margaery may wonder where her bard has gone.”
“Singers come and go, they are infamous for it.”
The climb up the dark stone steps from the black cells left Cersei
feeling breathless. I must rest. Getting to the truth was wearisome
work, and she dreaded what must follow. I must be strong. What I
must do I do for Tommen and the realm. It was a pity that Maggy the
Frog was dead. Piss on your prophecy, old woman. The little queen
may be younger than I, but she has never been more beautiful, and soon
she will be dead.
Lady Merryweather was waiting in her bedchamber. It was the
black of night, closer to dawn than to dusk. Jocelyn and Dorcas
were both asleep, but not Taena. “Was it terrible?” she asked.
“You cannot know. I need to sleep, but fear to dream.”
Taena stroked her hair. “It was all for Tommen.”
“It was. I know it was.” Cersei shuddered. “My throat is raw. Be a
sweet and pour me some wine.”
“If it please you. That is all that I desire.”
Liar. She knew what Taena desired. So be it. If the woman was
besotted with her, that would help ensure that she and her husband
remained loyal. In a world so full of treachery, that was worth a
few kisses. She is no worse than most men. At least there is no danger of
her ever getting me with child.
The wine helped, but not enough. “I feel soiled,” the queen
complained as she stood beside her window, cup in hand.

“A bath will set you right, my sweet.” Lady Merryweather woke
Dorcas and Jocelyn and sent them for hot water. As the tub was
lled, she helped the queen disrobe, undoing her laces with deft
ngers and easing the gown o her shoulders. Then she slipped out
of her own dress and let it puddle on the oor.
The two of them shared the bath together, with Cersei lying back
in Taena’s arms. “Tommen must be spared the worst of this,” she
told the Myrish woman. “Margaery still takes him to the sept every
day, so they can ask the gods to heal her brother.” Ser Loras still
clung to life, annoyingly. “He is fond of her cousins as well. It will
go hard on him, to lose them all.”
“All three may not be guilty,” suggested Lady Merryweather.
“Why, it might well be that one of them took no part. If she was
shamed and sickened by the things she saw …”
“… she might be persuaded to bear witness against the others.
Yes, very good, but which one is the innocent?”
“Alla.”
“The shy one?”
“So she seems, but there is more of sly than shy in her. Leave her
to me, my sweet.”
“Gladly.” Alone, the Blue Bard’s confession would never su ce.
Singers lied for their living, after all. Alla Tyrell would be of great
help, if Taena could deliver her. “Ser Osney shall confess as well.
The others must be made to understand that only through
confession can they earn the king’s forgiveness, and the Wall.”
Jalabhar Xho would nd the truth attractive. About the rest she was
less certain, but Qyburn was persuasive …
Dawn was breaking over King’s Landing when they climbed from
the tub. The queen’s skin was white and wrinkled from her long
immersion. “Stay with me,” she told Taena. “I do not want to sleep
alone.” She even said a prayer before she crawled beneath her
coverlet, beseeching the Mother for sweet dreams.
It proved a waste of breath; as ever, the gods were deaf. Cersei
dreamt that she was down in the black cells once again, only this
time it was her chained to the wall in place of the singer. She was
naked, and blood dripped from the tips of her breasts where the

Imp had torn o her nipples with his teeth. “Please,” she begged,
“please, not my children, do not harm my children.” Tyrion only
leered at her. He was naked too, covered with coarse hair that made
him look more like a monkey than a man. “You shall see them
crowned,” he said, “and you shall see them die.” Then he took her
bleeding breast into his mouth and began to suck, and pain sawed
through her like a hot knife.
She woke shuddering in Taena’s arms. “A bad dream,” she said
weakly. “Did I scream? I’m sorry.”
“Dreams turn to dust in light of day. Was it the dwarf again? Why
does he frighten you so, this silly little man?”
“He is going to kill me. It was foreseen when I was ten. I wanted
to know who I would marry, but she said …”
“She?”
“The maegi.” The words came tumbling out of her. She could still
hear Melara Hetherspoon insisting that if they never spoke about
the prophecies, they would not come true. She was not so silent in the
well, though. She screamed and shouted. “Tyrion is the valonqar,” she
said. “Do you use that word in Myr? It’s High Valyrian, it means
little brother.” She had asked Septa Saranella about the word, after
Melara drowned.
Taena took her hand and stroked it. “This was a hateful woman,
old and sick and ugly. You were young and beautiful, full of life and
pride. She lived in Lannisport, you said, so she would have known
of the dwarf and how he killed your lady mother. This creature
dared not strike you, because of who you were, so she sought to
wound you with her viper’s tongue.”
Could it be? Cersei wanted to believe it. “Melara died, though,
just as she foretold. I never wed Prince Rhaegar. And Jo rey … the
dwarf killed my son before my eyes.”
“One son,” said Lady Merryweather, “but you have another,
sweet and strong, and no harm will ever come to him.”
“Never, whilst I live.” Saying it helped her believe that it was so.
Dreams turn to dust in light of day, yes. Outside the morning sun was
shining through a haze of cloud. Cersei slipped out from under the

blankets. “I will break my fast with the king this morning. I want to
see my son.” All I do, I do for him.
Tommen helped restore her to herself. He had never been more
precious to her than he was that morning, chattering about his
kittens as he dribbled honey onto a chunk of hot black bread fresh
from the ovens. “Ser Pounce caught a mouse,” he told her, “but
Lady Whiskers stole it from him.”
I was never so sweet and innocent, Cersei thought. How can he ever
hope to rule in this cruel realm? The mother in her wanted only to
protect him; the queen in her knew he must grow harder, or the
Iron Throne was certain to devour him. “Ser Pounce must learn to
defend his rights,” she told him. “In this world the weak are always
the victims of the strong.”
The king considered that, licking honey o his ngers. “When Ser
Loras comes back I’m going to learn to ght with lance and sword
and morningstar, the same way he does.”
“You will learn to ght,” the queen promised, “but not from Ser
Loras. He will not be coming back, Tommen.”
“Margaery says he will. We pray for him. We ask for the Mother’s
mercy, and for the Warrior to give him strength. Elinor says that
this is Ser Loras’s hardest battle.”
She smoothed his hair back, the soft golden curls that reminded
her so much of Jo . “Will you be spending the afternoon with your
wife and her cousins?”
“Not today. She has to fast and purify herself, she said.”
Fast and purify … oh, for Maiden’s Day. It had been years since
Cersei had been required to observe that particular holy day. Thrice
wed, yet she still would have us believe she is a maid. Demure in white,
the little queen would lead her hens to Baelor’s Sept to light tall
white candles at the Maiden’s feet and hang parchment garlands
about her holy neck. A few of her hens, at least. On Maiden’s Day
widows, mothers, and whores alike were barred from the septs,
along with men, lest they profane the sacred songs of innocence.
Only virgin maids could …
“Mother? Did I say something wrong?”

Cersei kissed her son’s brow. “You said something very wise,
sweetling. Now run along and play with your kittens.”
Afterward she summoned Ser Osney Kettleblack to her solar. He
came in sweaty from the yard and swaggering, and as he took a
knee he undressed her with his eyes, the way he always did.
“Rise, ser, and sit here next to me. You did me a valiant service
once, but now I have a harder task for you.”
“Aye, and I have something hard for you.”
“That must wait.” She traced his scars lightly with the tips of her
ngers. “Do you recall the whore who gave these to you? I’ll give
her to you when you come back from the Wall. Would you like
that?”
“It’s you I want.”
That was the right answer. “First you must confess your treason.
A man’s sins can poison his soul if left to fester. I know it must be
hard for you to live with what you’ve done. It is past time that you
rid yourself of your shame.”
“Shame?” Osney sounded ba ed. “I told Osmund, Margaery just
teases. She never lets me do any more than …”
“It is chivalrous of you to protect her,” Cersei broke in, “but you
are too good a knight to go on living with your crime. No, you must
take yourself to the Great Sept of Baelor this very night and speak
with the High Septon. When a man’s sins are so black, only His
High Holiness himself can save him from hell’s torments. Tell him
how you bedded Margaery and her cousins.”
Osney blinked. “What, the cousins too?”
“Megga and Elinor,” she decided, “never Alla.” That little detail
would make the whole story more plausible. “Alla would sit
weeping, and plead with the others to stop their sinning.”
“Just Megga and Elinor? Or Margaery too?”
“Margaery, most certainly. She was the one behind it all.”
She told him all she had in mind. As Osney listened, apprehension
slowly spread across his face. When she nished he said, “After you
cut her head o , I want to take that kiss she never gave me.”
“You may take all the kisses you like.”
“And then the Wall?”

“For just a little while. Tommen is a forgiving king.”
Osney scratched at his scarred cheek. “Usually if I lie about some
woman, it’s me saying how I never fucked them and them saying
how I did. This … I never lied to no High Septon before. I think you
go to some hell for that. One o’ the bad ones.”
The queen was taken aback. The last thing she expected was piety
from a Kettleblack. “Are you refusing to obey me?”
“No.” Osney touched her golden hair. “The thing is, the best lies
have some truth in ’em … to give ’em avor, as it were. And you
want me to go tell how I fucked a queen …”
She almost slapped his face. Almost. But she had gone too far, and
too much was at stake. All I do, I do for Tommen. She turned her
head and caught Ser Osney’s hand with her own, kissing his ngers.
They were rough and hard, callused from the sword. Robert had
hands like that, she thought.
Cersei wrapped her arms about his neck. “I would not want it said
I made a liar of you,” she whispered in a husky voice. “Give me an
hour, and meet me in my bedchamber.”
“We waited long enough.” He thrust his ngers inside the bodice
of her gown and yanked, and the silk parted with a ripping sound so
loud that Cersei was afraid that half of the Red Keep must have
heard it. “Take o the rest before I tear that too,” he said. “You can
keep the crown on. I like you in the crown.”

THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER

Hers was a gentle prison.
Arianne took solace from that. Why would her father go to such
great pains to provide for her comfort in captivity if he had marked
her for a traitor’s death? He cannot mean to kill me, she told herself
a hundred times. He does not have it in him to be so cruel. I am his
blood and seed, his heir, his only daughter. If need be, she would
throw herself beneath the wheels of his chair, admit her fault, and
beg him for his pardon. And she would weep. When he saw tears
rolling down her face, he would forgive her.
She was less certain whether she would forgive herself.
“Areo,” she had pleaded with her captor during the long dry ride
from the Greenblood back to Sunspear, “I never wanted the girl to
come to harm. You must believe me.”
Hotah made no reply, except to grunt. Arianne could feel his
anger. Darkstar had escaped him, the most dangerous of all her
little group of plotters. He had outraced all his pursuers and
vanished into the deep desert, with blood upon his blade.
“You know me, captain,” Arianne had said, as the leagues rolled
past. “You have known me since I was little. You always kept me
safe, as you kept my lady mother safe when you came with her
from Great Norvos to be her shield in a strange land. I need you
now. I need your help. I never meant—”

“What you meant does not matter, little princess,” Areo Hotah
said. “Only what you did.” His countenance was stony. “I am sorry.
It is for my prince to command, for Hotah to obey.”
Arianne expected to be brought before her father’s high seat
beneath the dome of leaded glass in the Tower of the Sun. Instead,
Hotah delivered her to the Spear Tower, and the custody of her
father’s seneschal Ricasso and Ser Manfrey Martell, the castellan.
“Princess,” Ricasso said, “you will forgive an old blind man if he
does not make the climb with you. These legs are not equal to so
many steps. A chamber has been prepared for you. Ser Manfrey
shall escort you there, to await the prince’s pleasure.”
“The prince’s displeasure, you mean. Will my friends be con ned
here as well?” Arianne had been parted from Garin, Drey, and the
others after capture, and Hotah had refused to say what would be
done with them. “That is for the prince to decide,” was all the
captain had to say upon the subject. Ser Manfrey proved a bit more
forthcoming. “They were taken to the Planky Town and will be
conveyed by ship to Ghaston Grey, until such time as Prince Doran
decides their fate.”
Ghaston Grey was a crumbling old castle perched on a rock in the
Sea of Dorne, a drear and dreadful prison where the vilest of
criminals were sent to rot and die. “Does my father mean to kill
them?” Arianne could not believe it. “All they did they did for love
for me. If my father must have blood, it should be mine.”
“As you say, princess.”
“I want to speak with him.”
“He thought you might.” Ser Manfrey took her arm and marched
her up the steps, up and up until her breath grew short. The Spear
Tower stood a hundred and a half feet high, and her cell was nearly
at the top. Arianne eyed every door they passed, wondering if one
of the Sand Snakes might be locked within.
When her own door had been closed and barred, Arianne explored
her new home. Her cell was large and airy, and did not lack for
comforts. There were Myrish carpets on the oor, red wine to
drink, books to read. In one corner stood an ornate cyvasse table
with pieces carved of ivory and onyx, though she had no one to play

with even if she had been so inclined. She had a featherbed to sleep
in, and a privy with a marble seat, sweetened by a basketful of
herbs. This high up, the views were splendid. One window opened
to the east, so she could watch the sun rise above the sea. The other
allowed her to look down upon the Tower of the Sun, and the
Winding Walls and Threefold Gate beyond.
The exploration took less time than it would have taken her to
lace a pair of sandals, but at least it served to keep the tears at bay
for a time. Arianne found a basin and a agon of cool water and
washed her hands and face, but no amount of scrubbing could
cleanse her of her grief. Arys, she thought, my white knight. Tears
lled her eyes, and suddenly she was weeping, her whole body
wracked by sobs. She remembered how Hotah’s heavy axe had
cleaved through his esh and bone, the way his head had gone
spinning through the air. Why did you do it? Why throw your life
away? I never told you to, I never wanted that, I only wanted … I
wanted … I wanted …
That night she cried herself to sleep … for the rst time, if not
the last. Even in her dreams she found no peace. She dreamt of Arys
Oakheart caressing her, smiling at her, telling her that he loved
her … but all the while the quarrels were in him and his wounds
were weeping, turning his whites to red. Part of her knew it was a
nightmare, even as she dreamt it. Come morning all of this will vanish,
the princess told herself, but when morning came, she was still in
her cell, Ser Arys was still dead, and Myrcella … I never wanted that,
never. I meant the girl no harm. All I wanted was for her to be a queen.
If we had not been betrayed …
“Someone told,” Hotah had said. The memory still made her
angry. Arianne clung to that, feeding the ame within her heart.
Anger was better than tears, better than grief, better than guilt.
Someone told, someone she had trusted. Arys Oakheart had died
because of that, slain by the traitor’s whisper as much as by the
captain’s axe. The blood that had streamed down Myrcella’s face,
that was the betrayer’s work as well. Someone told, someone she
had loved. That was the cruelest cut of all.

She found a cedar chest full of her clothes at the foot of her bed,
so she stripped out of the travel-stained garb she had slept in and
donned the most revealing garments she could nd, wisps of silk
that covered everything and hid nothing. Prince Doran might treat
her like a child, but she refused to dress like one. She knew such
garb would discom t her father when he came to chastise her for
making o with Myrcella. She counted on it. If I must crawl and
weep, let him be uncomfortable as well.
She expected him that day, but when the door nally opened it
proved to be only the servants with her midday meal. “When might
I see my father?” she asked, but none of them would answer. The
kid had been roasted with lemon and honey. With it were grape
leaves stu ed with a mélange of raisins, onions, mushrooms, and
ery dragon peppers. “I am not hungry,” Arianne said. Her friends
would be eating ship’s biscuits and salt beef on their way to Ghaston
Grey. “Take this away and bring me Prince Doran.” But they left the
food, and her father did not come. After a while, hunger weakened
her resolve, so she sat and ate.
Once the food was gone, there was nothing else for Arianne to
do. She paced around her tower, twice and thrice and three times
thrice. She sat beside the cyvasse table and idly moved an elephant.
She curled up in the window seat and tried to read a book, until the
words became a blur and she realized that she was crying again.
Arys, my sweet, my white knight, why did you do it? You should have
yielded. I tried to tell you, but the words caught in my mouth. You
gallant fool, I never meant for you to die, or for Myrcella … oh, gods be
good, that little girl …
Finally, she crawled back onto the featherbed. The world had
grown dark, and there was little she could do but sleep. Someone
told, she thought. Someone told. Garin, Drey, and Spotted Sylva were
friends of her girlhood, as dear to her as her cousin Tyene. She
could not believe they would inform on her … but that left only
Darkstar, and if he was the betrayer, why had he turned his sword
on poor Myrcella? He wanted to kill her instead of crowning her, he
said as much at Shandystone. He said that was how I’d get the war I
wanted. But it made no sense for Dayne to be the traitor. If Ser

Gerold had been the worm in the apple, why would he have turned
his sword upon Myrcella?
Someone told. Could it have been Ser Arys? Had the white knight’s
guilt won out over his lust? Had he loved Myrcella more than her
and betrayed his new princess to atone for his betrayal of the old?
Was he so ashamed of what he’d done that he threw his life away at
the Greenblood rather than live to face dishonor?
Someone told. When her father came to see her, she would learn
which one. Prince Doran did not come the next day, though. Nor the
day after. The princess was left alone to pace, and weep, and nurse
her wounds. During the daylight hours she would try to read, but
the books that they had given her were deadly dull: ponderous old
histories and geographies, annotated maps, a dry-as-dust study of
the laws of Dorne, The Seven-Pointed Star and Lives of the High
Septons, a huge tome about dragons that somehow made them about
as interesting as newts. Arianne would have given much and more
for a copy of Ten Thousand Ships or The Loves of Queen Nymeria,
anything to occupy her thoughts and let her escape her tower for an
hour or two, but such amusements were denied her.
From her window seat, she had only to glance out to see the great
dome of gold and colored glass below her, where her father sat in
state. He will summon me soon, she told herself.
No visitors were permitted her beyond the servants; Bors with his
stubbly jaw, tall Timoth dripping dignity, the sisters Morra and
Mellei, pretty little Cedra, old Belandra who had been her mother’s
bedmaid. They brought her meals, changed her bed, and emptied
the chamber pot beneath her privy, but none would speak with her.
When she required more wine, Timoth would fetch it. If she desired
some favorite food, gs or olives or peppers stu ed with cheese,
she need only tell Belandra, and it would appear. Morra and Mellei
took away her dirty clothes and returned them clean and fresh.
Every second day a bath was brought for her, and shy little Cedra
would soap her back and help her brush her hair.
Yet none of them had a word for her, nor would they deign to tell
her what was happening in the world outside her sandstone cage.
“Has Darkstar been captured?” she asked Bors one day. “Are they

still hunting for him?” The man only turned his back on her and
walked away. “Have you gone deaf?” Arianne snapped at him.
“Come back here and answer me. I command it.” Her only reply
was the sound of a door closing.
“Timoth,” she tried, another day, “what has become of Princess
Myrcella? I never meant for harm to come to her.” The last she had
seen of the other princess had been on their ride back to Sunspear.
Too weak to sit a horse, Myrcella had traveled in a litter, her head
bound up in silken bandages where Darkstar slashed at her, her
green eyes bright with fever. “Tell me that she has not died, I beg
you. What harm could come of my knowing that? Tell me how she
fares.” Timoth would not.
“Belandra,” Arianne said, a few days later, “if you ever loved my
lady mother, take pity on her poor daughter and tell me when my
father means to come and see me. Please. Please.” But Belandra had
lost her tongue as well.
Is this my father’s notion of torment? Not hot irons or the rack, but
simple silence? That was so very like Doran Martell that Arianne had
to laugh. He thinks he is being subtle when he is only being feeble. She
resolved to enjoy the quiet, to use the time to heal and fortify
herself for what must come.
It was no good dwelling endlessly on Ser Arys, she knew. Instead,
she made herself think about the Sand Snakes, Tyene especially.
Arianne loved all her bastard cousins, from prickly, hot-tempered
Obara to little Loreza, the youngest, only six years old. Tyene had
always been the one she loved the most, though; the sweet sister
that she never had. The princess had never been close to her
brothers; Quentyn was o at Yronwood, and Trystane was too
young. No, it had always been her and Tyene, with Garin and Drey
and Spotted Sylva. Nym would sometimes join them in their sport,
and Sarella was forever pushing in where she didn’t belong, but for
the most part they had been a company of ve. They splashed in the
pools and fountains of the Water Gardens, and rode into battle
perched on one another’s naked backs. She and Tyene had learned
to read together, learned to ride together, learned to dance
together. When they were ten Arianne had stolen a agon of wine,

and the two of them had gotten drunk together. They shared meals
and beds and jewelry. They would have shared their rst man as
well, but Drey got too excited and spurted all over Tyene’s ngers
the moment she drew him from his breeches. Her hands are
dangerous. The memory made her smile.
The more she thought about her cousins, the more the princess
missed them. For all I know, they might be right below me. That night
Arianne tried pounding on the oor with the heel of her sandal.
When no one answered, she leaned out a window and peered down.
She could see other windows below, smaller than her own, some no
more than arrow loops. “Tyene!” she called. “Tyene, are you there?
Obara, Nym? Can you hear me? Ellaria? Anyone? TYENE?” The
princess spent half the night hanging out the window, calling till her
throat was raw, but no answering shouts came back to her. That
frightened her more than she could say. If the Sand Snakes were
imprisoned in the Spear Tower, they surely would have heard her
shouting. Why didn’t they answer? If Father has done them harm, I
will never forgive him, never, she told herself.
By the time a fortnight had passed, her patience had worn paperthin. “I will speak with my father now,” she told Bors, in her most
commanding voice. “You will take me to him.” He did not take her
to him. “I am ready to see the prince,” she told Timoth, but he
turned away as if he had not heard. The next morning, Arianne was
waiting beside the door when it opened. She bolted past Belandra,
sending a platter of spiced eggs to crash against the wall, but the
guards caught her before she’d gone three yards. She knew them
too, but they were deaf to her entreaties. They dragged her back to
her cell, kicking and squirming.
Arianne decided that she must needs be more subtle. Cedra was
her best hope; the girl was young, naive, and gullible. Garin had
boasted of bedding her once, the princess recalled. The next time
she bathed, as Cedra soaped her shoulders, she began to talk of
everything and nothing. “I know you have been commanded not to
speak to me,” she said, “but no one told me not to speak to you.”
She spoke about the heat of the day, and what she’d had last night
for supper, and how slow and sti poor Belandra was becoming.

Prince Oberyn had armed each of his daughters so they need never
be defenseless, but Arianne Martell had no weapon but her guile.
And so she smiled and charmed, and asked nothing in return of
Cedra, neither word nor nod.
The next day at supper, she nattered at the girl again as she was
serving. This time she contrived to mention Garin. Cedra glanced up
shyly at his name and almost spilled the wine that she was pouring.
So it is that way, is it? thought Arianne.
During her next bath, she spoke of her imprisoned friends,
especially Garin. “He’s the one I fear for most,” she con ded to the
serving girl. “The orphans are free spirits, they live to wander.
Garin needs sunshine and fresh air. If they lock him away in some
dank stone cell, how will he survive? He will not last a year at
Ghaston Grey.” Cedra did not reply, but her face was pale when
Arianne rose from the water, and she was squeezing the sponge so
tightly that soap was dripping on the Myrish carpet.
Even so, it was four more days and two more baths before the
girl was hers. “Please,” Cedra nally whispered, after Arianne had
painted a vivid picture of Garin throwing himself from the window
of his cell, to taste freedom one last time before he died. “You have
to help him. Please don’t let him die.”
“I can do little and less so long as I am locked up here,” she
whispered back. “My father will not see me. You are the only one
who can save Garin. Do you love him?”
“Yes,” Cedra whispered, blushing. “But how can I help?”
“You can smuggle out a letter for me,” said the princess. “Will do
you that? Will you take the risk … for Garin?”
Cedra’s eyes got big. She nodded.
I have a raven, Arianne thought, triumphantly, but who to send her
to? The only one of her conspirators to escape her father’s net was
Darkstar. By now Ser Gerold might well have been taken, however;
if not, he would surely have ed Dorne. Her next thought was of
Garin’s mother and the orphans of the Greenblood. No, not them. It
must be someone with real power, someone who had no part of our plot
yet might have reason to be sympathetic to us. She considered
appealing to her own mother, but Lady Mellario was far away in

Norvos. Besides, Prince Doran had not listened to his lady wife for
many years. Not her either. I need a lord, one great enough to cow my
father into releasing me.
The most powerful of the Dornish lords was Anders Yronwood,
the Bloodroyal, Lord of Yronwood and Warden of the Stone Way,
but Arianne knew better than to look for help from the man who
had fostered her brother Quentyn. No. Drey’s brother Ser Deziel
Dalt had once aspired to marry her, but he was much too dutiful to
go against his prince. Besides, whilst the Knight of Lemonwood
might intimidate a petty lord, he did not have the strength to sway
the Prince of Dorne. No. The same was true of Spotted Sylva’s
father. No. Arianne nally decided that she had but two real hopes:
Harmen Uller, Lord of Hellholt, and Franklyn Fowler, Lord of
Skyreach and Warden of the Prince’s Pass.
Half of the Ullers are half-mad, the saying went, and the other half
are worse. Ellaria Sand was Lord Harmen’s natural daughter. She and
her little ones had been locked away with the rest of the Sand
Snakes. That would have made Lord Harmen wroth, and the Ullers
were dangerous when wroth. Too dangerous, perhaps. The princess
did not want to put any more lives in danger.
Lord Fowler might be a safer choice. The Old Hawk, he was
called. He had never gotten on with Anders Yronwood; there was
bad blood between their Houses going back a thousand years, from
when the Fowlers had chosen Martell over Yronwood during
Nymeria’s War. The Fowler twins were famous friends of Lady Nym
as well, but how much weight would that carry with the Old Hawk?
For days Arianne wavered as she composed her secret letter.
“Give the man who brings this to you a hundred silver stags,” she
began. That should ensure that the message was delivered. She
wrote where she was, and pleaded for rescue. “Whoever shall
deliver me from this cell, he shall not be forgotten when I wed.”
That should bring the heroes running. Unless Prince Doran had
attainted her, she remained the lawful heir to Sunspear; the man
who married her would one day rule Dorne by her side. Arianne
could only pray that her rescuer would prove younger than the

greybeards her father had o ered her over the years. “I want a
consort with teeth,” she had told him when she refused the last.
She dare not ask for parchment for fear of rousing the suspicions
of her captors, so she wrote the letter on the bottom of a page torn
from The Seven-Pointed Star, and pressed it into Cedra’s hand on her
next bath day. “There’s a place beside the Threefold Gate where the
caravans take on supplies before crossing the deep sand,” Arianne
told her. “Find some traveler headed for the Prince’s Pass, and
promise him a hundred silver stags if he will put this in Lord
Fowler’s hand.”
“I will.” Cedra hid the message in her bodice. “I’ll nd someone
before the sun goes down, princess.”
“Good,” she said. “Tell me how it went on the morrow.”
The girl did not return upon the morrow, however. Nor on the
day that followed. When it was time for Arianne to bathe, it was
Morra and Mellei who lled her tub, and stayed to wash her back
and brush her hair. “Has Cedra taken ill?” the princess asked them,
but neither would reply. She has been caught was all that she could
think. What else could it be? That night she hardly slept, for fear of
what might come next.
When Timoth brought her breakfast the next morning, Arianne
asked to see Ricasso rather than her father. Plainly she could not
compel Prince Doran to attend her, but surely a mere seneschal
would not ignore a summons from the rightful heir to Sunspear.
He did, though. “Did you tell Ricasso what I said?” she demanded
the next time she saw Timoth. “Did you tell him I had need of
him?” When the man refused to answer her, Arianne seized a agon
of red wine and upended it over his head. The serving man
retreated dripping, his face a mask of wounded dignity. My father
means to leave me here to rot, the princess decided. Or else he is
making plans to marry me o to some disgusting old fool and intends to
keep me locked away until the bedding.
Arianne Martell had grown up expecting that one day she would
wed some great lord of her father’s choosing. That was what
princesses were for, she had been taught … though, admittedly, her
uncle Oberyn had taken a di erent view of matters. “If you would

wed, wed,” the Red Viper had told his own daughters. “If not, take
your pleasure where you nd it. There’s little enough of it in this
world. Choose well, though. If you saddle yourself with a fool or a
brute, don’t look to me to rid you of him. I gave you the tools to do
that for yourself.”
The freedom that Prince Oberyn allowed his bastard daughters
had never been shared by Prince Doran’s lawful heir. Arianne must
wed; she had accepted that. Drey had wanted her, she knew; so had
his brother Deziel, the Knight of Lemonwood. Daemon Sand had
gone so far as to ask for her hand. Daemon was bastard-born,
however, and Prince Doran did not mean for her to wed a
Dornishman.
Arianne had accepted that as well. One year King Robert’s brother
came to visit and she did her best to seduce him, but she was half a
girl and Lord Renly seemed more bemused than in amed by her
overtures. Later, when Hoster Tully asked her to come to Riverrun
and meet his heir, she lit candles to the Maid in thanks, but Prince
Doran had declined the invitation. The princess might even have
considered Willas Tyrell, crippled leg and all, but her father refused
to send her to Highgarden to meet him. She tried to go despite him,
with Tyene’s help … but Prince Oberyn caught them at Vaith and
brought them back. That same year, Prince Doran tried to betroth
her to Ben Beesbury, a minor lordling who was eighty if he was a
day, and as blind as he was toothless.
Beesbury died a few years later. That gave her some small
comfort in her present pass; she could not be forced to marry him if
he was dead. And the Lord of the Crossing had wed again, so she
was safe from him as well. Elden Estermont is still alive and unwed,
though. Lord Rosby and Lord Grandison as well. Grandison was called
the Greybeard, but by the time she’d met him his beard had gone
snow white. At the welcoming feast, he had gone to sleep between
the sh course and the meat. Drey called that apt, since his sigil was
a sleeping lion. Garin challenged her to see if she could tie a knot in
his beard without waking him, but Arianne refrained. Grandison had
seemed a pleasant fellow, less querulous than Estermont and more

robust than Rosby. She would never marry him, however. Not even
if Hotah stands behind me with his axe.
No one came to marry her the next day, nor the day after. Nor
did Cedra return. Arianne tried to win Morra and Mellei the same
way, but it was no good. If she had been able to get either one
alone she might have some hope, but together the sisters were a
wall. By that time, the princess would have welcomed a touch of a
hot iron, or an evening on the rack. The loneliness was like to drive
her mad. I deserve a headsman’s axe for what I did, but he will not even
give me that. He would sooner shut me away and forget I ever lived. She
wondered if Maester Caleotte was drawing a proclamation to name
her brother Quentyn heir to Dorne.
Days came and went, one after the other, so many that Arianne
lost count of how long she had been imprisoned. She found herself
spending more and more time abed, until she reached the point
where she did not rise at all except to use her privy. The meals the
servants brought grew cold, untouched. Arianne slept and woke and
slept again, and still felt too weary to rise. She prayed to the
Mother for mercy and to the Warrior for courage, then slept some
more. Fresh meals replaced the old ones, but she did not eat them
either. Once, when she felt especially strong, she carried all the
food to the window and ung it out into the yard, so it would not
tempt her. The e ort exhausted her, so afterward she crawled back
into bed and slept for half a day.
Then came a day when a rough hand woke her, shaking her by
the shoulder. “Little princess,” said a voice she’d known from
childhood. “Up and dress. The prince has called for you.” Areo
Hotah stood over her, her old friend and protector. He was talking
to her. Arianne smiled sleepily. It was good to see that seamed,
scarred face, and hear his gru , deep voice and thick Norvoshi
accent. “What did you do with Cedra?”
“The prince sent her to the Water Gardens,” Hotah said. “He will
tell you. First you must wash, and eat.”
She must look a wretched creature. Arianne crawled from the
bed, weak as a kitten. “Have Morra and Mellei prepare a bath,” she

told him, “and tell Timoth to bring me up some food. Nothing
heavy. Some cold broth and a bit of bread and fruit.”
“Aye,” said Hotah. Never had she heard a sweeter sound.
The captain waited without whilst the princess bathed and
brushed her hair and ate sparingly of the cheese and fruit they’d
brought her. She drank a little wine to settle her stomach. I am
frightened, she realized, for the rst time in my life, I am frightened of
my father. That made her laugh until the wine came out her nose.
When it was time to dress, she chose a simple gown of ivory linen,
with vines and purple grapes embroidered around the sleeves and
bodice. She wore no jewels. I must be chaste and humble and contrite.
I must throw myself at his feet and beg forgiveness, or I may never hear
another human voice again.
By the time she was ready, dusk had fallen. Arianne had thought
that Hotah would escort her to the Tower of the Sun to hear her
father’s judgment. Instead he delivered her to the prince’s solar,
where they found Doran Martell seated behind a cyvasse table, his
gouty legs supported by a cushioned footstool. He was toying with
an onyx elephant, turning it in his reddened, swollen hands. The
prince looked worse than she had ever seen him. His face was pale
and pu y, his joints so in amed that it hurt her just to look at them.
Seeing him this way made Arianne’s heart go out to him … yet
somehow she could not bring herself to kneel and beg, as she had
planned. “Father,” she said instead.
When he raised his head to look at her, his dark eyes were
clouded with pain. Is that the gout? Arianne wondered. Or is it me?
“A strange and subtle folk, the Volantenes,” he muttered, as he put
the elephant aside. “I saw Volantis once, on my way to Norvos,
where I rst met Mellario. The bells were ringing, and the bears
danced down the steps. Areo will recall the day.”
“I remember,” echoed Areo Hotah in his deep voice. “The bears
danced and the bells rang, and the prince wore red and gold and
orange. My lady asked me who it was who shone so bright.”
Prince Doran smiled wanly. “Leave us, captain.”
Hotah stamped the butt of his longaxe on the oor, turned on his
heel, and took his leave.

“I told them to place a cyvasse table in your chambers,” her father
said when the two of them were alone.
“Who was I supposed to play with?” Why is he talking about a
game? Has the gout robbed him of his wits?
“Yourself. Sometimes it is best to study a game before you
attempt to play it. How well do you know the game, Arianne?”
“Well enough to play.”
“But not to win. My brother loved the ght for its own sake, but I
only play such games as I can win. Cyvasse is not for me.” He
studied her face for a long moment before he said, “Why? Tell me
that, Arianne. Tell me why.”
“For the honor of our House.” Her father’s voice made her angry.
He sounded so sad, so exhausted, so weak. You are a prince! she
wanted to shout. You should be raging! “Your meekness shames all
Dorne, Father. Your brother went to King’s Landing in your place,
and they killed him!”
“Do you think I do not know that? Oberyn is with me every time
I close my eyes.”
“Telling you to open them, no doubt.” She seated herself across
the cyvasse table from her father.
“I did not give you leave to sit.”
“Then call Hotah back and whip me for my insolence. You are the
Prince of Dorne. You can do that.” She touched one of the cyvasse
pieces, the heavy horse. “Have you caught Ser Gerold?”
He shook his head. “Would that we had. You were a fool to make
him part of this. Darkstar is the most dangerous man in Dorne. You
and he have done us all great harm.”
Arianne was almost afraid to ask. “Myrcella. Is she …?”
“… dead? No, though Darkstar did his best. All eyes were on your
white knight so no one seems quite certain just what happened, but
it would appear that her horse shied away from his at the last
instant, else he would have taken o the top of the girl’s skull. As it
is, the slash opened her cheek down to the bone and sliced o her
right ear. Maester Caleotte was able to save her life, but no poultice
nor potion will ever restore her face. She was my ward, Arianne.

Betrothed to your own brother and under my protection. You have
dishonored all of us.”
“I never meant her harm,” Arianne insisted. “If Hotah had not
interfered …”
“… you would have crowned Myrcella queen, to raise a rebellion
against her brother. Instead of an ear, she would have lost her life.”
“Only if we lost.”
“If? The word is when. Dorne is the least populous of the Seven
Kingdoms. It pleased the Young Dragon to make all our armies
larger when he wrote that book of his, so as to make his conquest
that much more glorious, and it has pleased us to water the seed he
planted and let our foes think us more powerful than we are, but a
princess ought to know the truth. Valor is a poor substitute for
numbers. Dorne cannot hope to win a war against the Iron Throne,
not alone. And yet that may well be what you have given us. Are
you proud?” The prince did not allow her time to answer. “What am
I to do with you, Arianne?”
Forgive me, part of her wanted to say, but his words had cut her
too deeply. “Why, do what you always do. Do nothing.”
“You make it di cult for a man to swallow his anger.”
“Best stop swallowing, you’re like to choke on it.” The prince did
not answer. “Tell me how you knew my plans.”
“I am the Prince of Dorne. Men seek my favor.”
Someone told. “You knew, and yet you still allowed us to make o
with Myrcella. Why?”
“That was my mistake, and it has proved a grievous one. You are
my daughter, Arianne. The little girl who used to run to me when
she skinned her knee. I found it hard to believe that you would
conspire against me. I had to learn the truth.”
“Now you have. I want to know who informed on me.”
“I would as well, in your place.”
“Will you tell me?”
“I can think of no reason why I should.”
“You think I cannot discover the truth on my own?”
“You are welcome to try. Until such time you must mistrust them
all … and a little mistrust is a good thing in a princess.” Prince

Doran sighed. “You disappoint me, Arianne.”
“Said the crow to the raven. You have been disappointing me for
years, Father.” She had not meant to be so blunt with him, but the
words came spilling out. There, now I have said it.
“I know. I am too meek and weak and cautious, too lenient to our
enemies. Just now, though, you are in need of some of that
leniency, it seems to me. You ought to be pleading for my
forgiveness rather than seeking to provoke me further.”
“I ask leniency only for my friends.”
“How noble of you.”
“What they did they did for love for me. They do not deserve to
die on Ghaston Grey.”
“As it happens, I agree. Aside from Darkstar, your fellow plotters
were no more than foolish children. Still, this was no harmless game
of cyvasse. You and your friends were playing at treason. I might
have had their heads o .”
“You might have, but you didn’t. Dayne, Dalt, Santagar … no,
you would never dare make enemies of such Houses.”
“I dare more than you dream … but leave that for the nonce. Ser
Andrey has been sent to Norvos to serve your lady mother for three
years. Garin will spend his next two years in Tyrosh. From his kin
amongst the orphans, I took coin and hostages. Lady Sylva received
no punishment from me, but she was of an age to marry. Her father
has shipped her to Greenstone to wed Lord Estermont. As for Arys
Oakheart, he chose his own fate and met it bravely. A knight of the
Kingsguard … what did you do to him?”
“I fucked him, Father. You did command me to entertain our
noble visitors, as I recall.”
His face grew ushed. “Was that all that was required?”
“I told him that once Myrcella was the queen she would give us
leave to marry. He wanted me for his wife.”
“You did everything you could to stop him from dishonoring his
vows, I am certain,” her father said.
It was her turn to ush. Her seduction of Ser Arys had required
half a year. Though he claimed to have known other women before
taking the white, she would never have known that from the way

he acted. His caresses had been clumsy, his kisses nervous, and the
rst time they were abed together he spent his seed on her thigh as
she was guiding him inside her with her hand. Worse, he had been
consumed by shame. If she only had a dragon for every time he had
whispered, “We should not be doing this,” she would be richer than
the Lannisters. Did he charge at Areo Hotah in hopes of saving me?
Arianne wondered. Or did he do it to escape me, to wash out his
dishonor with his life’s blood? “He did love me,” she heard herself say.
“He died for me.”
“If so, he may well be but the rst of many. You and your cousins
wanted war. You may get your wish. Another Kingsguard knight
creeps toward Sunspear even as we speak. Ser Balon Swann is
bringing me the Mountain’s head. My bannermen have been
delaying him, to purchase me some time. The Wyls kept him
hunting and hawking for eight days on the Boneway, and Lord
Yronwood feasted him for a fortnight when he emerged from the
mountains. At present he is at the Tor, where Lady Jordayne has
arranged games in his honor. When he reaches Ghost Hill he will
nd Lady Toland intent on outdoing her. Soon or late, however, Ser
Balon must arrive at Sunspear, and when he does he will expect to
see Princess Myrcella … and Ser Arys, his Sworn Brother. What
shall we tell him, Arianne? Shall I say that Oakheart perished in a
hunting accident, or from a tumble down some slippery steps?
Perhaps Arys went swimming at the Water Gardens, slipped upon
the marble, hit his head, and drowned?”
“No,” Arianne said. “Say that he died defending his little princess.
Tell Ser Balon that Darkstar tried to kill her and Ser Arys stepped
between them and saved her life.” That was how the white knights
of the Kingsguard were supposed to die, giving up their own lives
for those that they had sworn to protect. “Ser Balon may be
suspicious, as you were when the Lannisters killed your sister and
her children, but he will have no proof …”
“… until he speaks with Myrcella. Or must that brave child su er
a tragic accident as well? If so, it will mean war. No lie will save
Dorne from the queen’s wroth if her daughter should perish whilst
in my care.”

He needs me, Arianne realized. That’s why he sent for me.
“I could tell Myrcella what to say, but why should I?”
A spasm of anger rippled across her father’s face. “I warn you,
Arianne, I am out of patience.”
“With me?” That is so like him. “For Lord Tywin and the Lannisters
you always had the forbearance of Baelor the Blessed, but for your
own blood, none.”
“You mistake patience for forbearance. I have worked at the
downfall of Tywin Lannister since the day they told me of Elia and
her children. It was my hope to strip him of all that he held most
dear before I killed him, but it would seem his dwarf son has
robbed me of that pleasure. I take some small solace in knowing
that he died a cruel death at the hands of the monster that he
himself begot. Be that as it may. Lord Tywin is howling down in
hell … where thousands more will soon be joining him, if your folly
turns to war.” Her father grimaced, as if the very word were painful
to him. “Is that what you want?”
The princess refused to be cowed. “I want my cousins freed. I
want my uncle avenged. I want my rights.”
“Your rights?”
“Dorne.”
“You will have Dorne after I am dead. Are you so anxious to be
rid of me?”
“I should turn that question back on you, Father. You have been
trying to rid yourself of me for years.”
“That is not true.”
“No? Shall we ask my brother?”
“Trystane?”
“Quentyn.”
“What of him?”
“Where is he?”
“He is with Lord Yronwood’s host in the Boneway.”
“You do lie well, Father, I will grant you that. You did not so
much as blink. Quentyn has gone to Lys.”
“Where did you get that notion?”
“A friend told me.” She could have secrets too.

“Your friend lied. You have my word, your brother has not gone
to Lys. I swear it by sun and spear and Seven.”
Arianne could not be fooled so easily. “Is it Myr, then? Tyrosh? I
know he is somewhere across the narrow sea, hiring sellswords to
steal away my birthright.”
Her father’s face darkened. “This mistrust does you no honor,
Arianne. Quentyn should be the one conspiring against me. I sent
him away when he was just a child, too young to understand the
needs of Dorne. Anders Yronwood has been more a father to him
than I have, yet your brother remains faithful and obedient.”
“Why not? You favor him and always have. He looks like you, he
thinks like you, and you mean to give him Dorne, don’t trouble to
deny it. I read your letter.” The words still burned as bright as re
in her memory. “ ‘One day you will sit where I sit and rule all Dorne,’
you wrote him. Tell me, Father, when did you decide to disinherit
me? Was it the day that Quentyn was born, or the day that I was
born? What did I ever do to make you hate me so?” To her fury,
there were tears in her eyes.
“I never hated you.” Prince Doran’s voice was parchment-thin,
and full of grief. “Arianne, you do not understand.”
“Do you deny you wrote those words?”
“No. That was when Quentyn rst went to Yronwood. I did
intend for him to follow me, yes. I had other plans for you.”
“Oh, yes,” she said scornfully, “such plans. Gyles Rosby. Blind
Ben Beesbury. Greybeard Grandison. They were your plans.”
She gave him no chance to reply. “I know it is my duty to provide
an heir for Dorne, I have never been forgetful of that. I would have
wed, and gladly, but the matches that you brought to me were
insults. With every one you spit on me. If you ever felt any love for
me at all, why o er me to Walder Frey?”
“Because I knew that you would spurn him. I had to be seen to try
to nd a consort for you once you’d reached a certain age, else it
would have raised suspicions, but I dared not bring you any man
you might accept. You were promised, Arianne.”
Promised? Arianne stared at him incredulously. “What are you
saying? Is this another lie? You never said …”

“The pact was sealed in secret. I meant to tell you when you were
old enough … when you came of age, I thought, but …”
“I am three-and-twenty, for seven years a woman grown.”
“I know. If I kept you ignorant too long, it was only to protect
you. Arianne, your nature … to you, a secret was only a choice tale
to whisper to Garin and Tyene in your bed of a night. Garin gossips
as only the orphans can, and Tyene keeps nothing from Obara and
the Lady Nym. And if they knew … Obara is too fond of wine, and
Nym is too close to the Fowler twins. And who might the Fowler
twins con de in? I could not take the risk.”
She was lost, confounded. Promised. I was promised. “Who is it?
Who have I been betrothed to, all these years?”
“It makes no matter. He is dead.”
That left her more ba ed than ever. “The old ones are so frail.
Was it a broken hip, a chill, the gout?”
“It was a pot of molten gold. We princes make our careful plans
and the gods smash them all awry.” Prince Doran made a weary
gesture with a chafed red hand. “Dorne will be yours. You have my
word on that, if my word still has any meaning for you. Your
brother Quentyn has a harder road to walk.”
“What road?” Arianne regarded him suspiciously. “What are you
holding back? Seven save me, but I am sick of secrets. Tell me the
rest, Father … or else name Quentyn your heir and send for Hotah
and his axe, and let me die beside my cousins.”
“Do you truly believe I would harm my brother’s children?” Her
father grimaced. “Obara, Nym, and Tyene lack for nothing but their
freedom, and Ellaria and her daughters are happily ensconced at the
Water Gardens. Dorea stalks about knocking oranges o the trees
with her morningstar, and Elia and Obella have become the terror
of the pools.” He sighed. “It has not been so long since you were
playing in those pools. You used to ride the shoulders of an older
girl … a tall girl with wispy yellow hair …”
“Jeyne Fowler, or her sister Jennelyn.” It had been years since
Arianne had thought of that. “Oh, and Frynne, her father was a
smith. Her hair was brown. Garin was my favorite, though. When I

rode Garin no one could defeat us, not even Nym and that greenhaired Tyroshi girl.”
“That green-haired girl was the Archon’s daughter. I was to have
sent you to Tyrosh in her place. You would have served the Archon
as a cupbearer and met with your betrothed in secret, but your
mother threatened to harm herself if I stole another of her children,
and I … I could not do that to her.”
His tale grows ever stranger. “Is that where Quentyn’s gone? To
Tyrosh, to court the Archon’s green-haired daughter?”
Her father plucked up a cyvasse piece. “I must know how you
learned that Quentyn was abroad. Your brother went with Cletus
Yronwood, Maester Kedry, and three of Lord Yronwood’s best
young knights on a long and perilous voyage, with an uncertain
welcome at its end. He has gone to bring us back our heart’s
desire.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What is our heart’s desire?”
“Vengeance.” His voice was soft, as if he were afraid that
someone might be listening. “Justice.” Prince Doran pressed the
onyx dragon into her palm with his swollen, gouty ngers, and
whispered, “Fire and blood.”

ALAYNE

She turned the iron ring and pushed the door open, just a crack.
“Sweetrobin?” she called. “May I enter?”
“Have a care, m’lady,” warned old Gretchel, wringing her hands.
“His lordship threw his chamber pot at the maester.”
“Then he has none to throw at me. Isn’t there some work you
should be doing? And you, Maddy … are all the windows closed and
shuttered? Have all the furnishings been covered?”
“All of them, m’lady,” said Maddy.
“Best make certain of it.” Alayne slipped into the darkened
bedchamber. “It’s only me, Sweetrobin.”
Someone sni ed in the darkness. “Are you alone?”
“I am, my lord.”
“Come close, then. Just you.”
Alayne shut the door rmly behind her. It was solid oak, four
inches thick; Maddy and Gretchel might listen all they wished, but
they would hear nothing. That was just as well. Gretchel could hold
her tongue, but Maddy gossiped shamelessly.
“Did Maester Colemon send you?” the boy asked.
“No,” she lied. “I heard my Sweetrobin was ailing.” After his
encounter with the chamber pot the maester had come running to
Ser Lothor, and Brune had come to her. “If m’lady can talk him out
of bed nice,” the knight said, “I won’t have to drag him out.”

We can’t have that, she told herself. When Robert was handled
roughly he was apt to go into a shaking t. “Are you hungry, my
lord?” she asked the little lord. “Shall I send Maddy down for
berries and cream, or some warm bread and butter?” Too late she
remembered that there was no warm bread; the kitchens were
closed, the ovens cold. If it gets Robert out of bed, it would be worth
the bother of lighting a re, she told herself.
“I don’t want food,” the little lord said, in a reedy, petulant voice.
“I’m going to stay in bed today. You could read to me if you want.”
“It is too dark in here for reading.” The heavy curtains drawn
across the windows made the bedchamber black as night. “Has my
Sweetrobin forgotten what day this is?”
“No,” he said, “but I’m not going. I want to stay in bed. You could
read to me about the Winged Knight.”
The Winged Knight was Ser Artys Arryn. Legend said that he had
driven the First Men from the Vale and own to the top of the
Giant’s Lance on a huge falcon to slay the Gri n King. There were a
hundred tales of his adventures. Little Robert knew them all so well
he could have recited them from memory, but he liked to have
them read to him all the same. “Sweetling, we have to go,” she told
the boy, “but I promise, I’ll read you two tales of the Winged Knight
when we reach the Gates of the Moon.”
“Three,” he said at once. No matter what you o ered him, Robert
always wanted more.
“Three,” she agreed. “Might I let some sun in?”
“No. The light hurts my eyes. Come to bed, Alayne.”
She went to the windows anyway, edging around the broken
chamber pot. She could smell it better than she saw it. “I shan’t
open them very wide. Only enough to see my Sweetrobin’s face.”
He sni ed. “If you must.”
The curtains were of plush blue velvet. She pulled one back a
nger’s length and tied it o . Dust motes danced in a shaft of pale
morning light. The small diamond-shaped panes of the window
were obscured by frost. Alayne rubbed at one with the heel of her
hand, enough to glimpse a brilliant blue sky and a blaze of white

from the mountainside. The Eyrie was wrapped in an icy mantle,
the Giant’s Lance above buried in waist-deep snows.
When she turned back, Robert Arryn was propped up against the
pillows looking at her. The Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale.
A woolen blanket covered him below the waist. Above it he was
naked, a pasty boy with hair as long as any girl’s. Robert had
spindly arms and legs, a soft concave chest and little belly, and eyes
that were always red and runny. He cannot help the way he is. He was
born small and sickly. “You look very strong this morning, my lord.”
He loved to be told how strong he was. “Shall I have Maddy and
Gretchel fetch hot water for your bath? Maddy will scrub your back
for you and wash your hair, to make you clean and lordly for your
journey. Won’t that be nice?”
“No. I hate Maddy. She has a wart on her eye, and she scrubs so
hard it hurts. My mommy never hurt me scrubbing.”
“I will tell Maddy not to scrub my Sweetrobin so hard. You’ll feel
better when you’re fresh and clean.”
“No bath, I told you, my head hurts most awfully.”
“Shall I bring you a warm cloth for your brow? Or a cup of
dreamwine? Only a little one, though. Mya Stone is waiting down
at Sky, and she’ll be hurt if you go to sleep on her. You know how
much she loves you.”
“I don’t love her. She’s just the mule girl.” Robert sni ed.
“Maester Colemon put something vile in my milk last night, I could
taste it. I told him I wanted sweetmilk, but he wouldn’t bring me
any. Not even when I commanded him. I am the lord, he should do
what I say. No one does what I say.”
“I’ll speak to him,” Alayne promised, “but only if you get up out
of bed. It’s beautiful outside, Sweetrobin. The sun is shining bright,
a perfect day for going down the mountain. The mules are waiting
down at Sky with Mya …”
His mouth quivered. “I hate those smelly mules. One tried to bite
me once! You tell that Mya that I’m staying here.” He sounded as if
he were about to cry. “No one can hurt me so long as I stay here.
The Eyrie is impregnable.”

“Who would want to hurt my Sweetrobin? Your lords and knights
adore you, and the smallfolk cheer your name.” He is afraid, she
thought, and with good reason. Since his lady mother had fallen, the
boy would not even stand upon a balcony, and the way from the
Eyrie to the Gates of the Moon was perilous enough to daunt
anyone. Alayne’s heart had been in her throat when she made her
own ascent with Lady Lysa and Lord Petyr, and everyone agreed
that the descent was even more harrowing, since you were looking
down the whole time. Mya could tell of great lords and bold knights
who had gone pale and wet their smallclothes on the mountain. And
none of them had the shaking sickness either.
Still, it would not serve. On the valley oor autumn still lingered,
warm and golden, but winter had closed around the mountain
peaks. They had weathered three snowstorms, and an ice storm that
transformed the castle into crystal for a fortnight. The Eyrie might
be impregnable, but it would soon be inaccessible as well, and the
way down grew more hazardous every day. Most of the castle’s
servants and soldiers had already made the descent. Only a dozen
still lingered up here, to attend Lord Robert.
“Sweetrobin,” she said gently, “the descent will be ever so jolly,
you’ll see. Ser Lothor will be with us, and Mya. Her mules have
gone up and down this old mountain a thousand times.”
“I hate mules,” he insisted. “Mules are nasty. I told you, one tried
to bite me when I was little.”
Robert had never learned to ride properly, she knew. Mules,
horses, donkeys, it made no matter; to him they were all fearsome
beasts, as terrifying as dragons or gri ns. He had been brought to
the Vale at six, riding with his head cradled between his mother’s
milky breasts, and had never left the Eyrie since.
Still, they had to go, before the ice closed about the castle for
good. There was no telling how long the weather would hold. “Mya
will keep the mules from biting,” Alayne said, “and I’ll be riding
just behind you. I’m only a girl, not as brave or strong as you. If I
can do it, I know you can, Sweetrobin.”
“I could do it,” Lord Robert said, “but I don’t choose to.” He
swiped at his runny nose with the back of his hand. “Tell Mya I am

going to stay abed. Perhaps I will come down on the morrow, if I
feel better. Today is too cold out, and my head hurts. You can have
some sweetmilk too, and I’ll tell Gretchel to bring us some
honeycombs to eat. We’ll sleep and kiss and play games, and you
can read me about the Winged Knight.”
“I will. Three tales, as I promised … when we reach the Gates of
the Moon.” Alayne was running short of patience. We have to go, she
reminded herself, or we’ll still be above the snow line when the sun goes
down. “Lord Nestor has prepared a feast to welcome you, mushroom
soup and venison and cakes. You don’t want to disappoint him, do
you?”
“Will they be lemon cakes?” Lord Robert loved lemon cakes,
perhaps because Alayne did.
“Lemony lemony lemon cakes,” she assured him, “and you can
have as many as you like.”
“A hundred?” he wanted to know. “Could I have a hundred?”
“If it please you.” She sat on the bed and smoothed his long, ne
hair. He does have pretty hair. Lady Lysa had brushed it herself every
night, and cut it when it wanted cutting. After she had fallen Robert
had su ered terrible shaking ts whenever anyone came near him
with a blade, so Petyr had commanded that his hair be allowed to
grow. Alayne wound a lock around her nger, and said, “Now, will
you get out of bed and let us dress you?”
“I want a hundred lemon cakes and ve tales!”
I’d like to give you a hundred spankings and ve slaps. You would not
dare behave like this if Petyr were here. The little lord had a good
healthy fear of his stepfather. Alayne forced a smile. “As my lord
desires. But nothing till you’re washed and dressed and on your
way. Come, before the morning’s gone.” She took him rmly by the
hand, and drew him out of bed.
Before she could summon the servants, however, Sweetrobin
threw his skinny arms around her and kissed her. It was a little
boy’s kiss, and clumsy. Everything Robert Arryn did was clumsy. If I
close my eyes I can pretend he is the Knight of Flowers. Ser Loras had
given Sansa Stark a red rose once, but he had never kissed

her … and no Tyrell would ever kiss Alayne Stone. Pretty as she
was, she had been born on the wrong side of the blanket.
As the boy’s lips touched her own she found herself thinking of
another kiss. She could still remember how it felt, when his cruel
mouth pressed down on her own. He had come to Sansa in the
darkness as green re lled the sky. He took a song and a kiss, and
left me nothing but a bloody cloak.
It made no matter. That day was done, and so was Sansa.
Alayne pushed her little lord away. “That’s enough. You can kiss
me again when we reach the Gates, if you keep your word.”
Maddy and Gretchel were waiting outside with Maester Colemon.
The maester had washed the night soil from his hair and changed
his robe. Robert’s squires had turned up as well. Terrance and Gyles
could always sni out trouble.
“Lord Robert is feeling stronger,” Alayne told the serving women.
“Fetch hot water for his bath, but see you don’t scald him. And do
not pull on his hair when you brush out the tangles, he hates that.”
One of the squires sniggered, until she said, “Terrance, lay out his
lordship’s riding clothes and his warmest cloak. Gyles, you may
clean up that broken chamber pot.”
Gyles Grafton made a face. “I’m no scrubwoman.”
“Do as Lady Alayne commands, or Lothor Brune will hear of it,”
said Maester Colemon. He followed her along the hallway and
down the twisting stairs. “I am grateful for your intercession, my
lady. You have a way with him.” He hesitated. “Did you observe
any shaking while you were with him?”
“His ngers trembled a little bit when I held his hand, that’s all.
He says you put something vile in his milk.”
“Vile?” Colemon blinked at her, and the apple in his throat moved
up and down. “I merely … is he bleeding from the nose?”
“No.”
“Good. That is good.” His chain clinked softly as he bobbed his
head, atop a ridiculously long and skinny neck. “This descent … my
lady, it might be safest if I mixed his lordship some milk of the
poppy. Mya Stone could lash him over the back of her most
surefooted mule whilst he slumbered.”

“The Lord of the Eyrie cannot descend from his mountain tied up
like a sack of barleycorn.” Of that Alayne was certain. They dare
not let the full extent of Robert’s frailty and cowardice become too
widely known, her father had warned her. I wish he were here. He
would know what to do.
Petyr Baelish was clear across the Vale, though, attending Lord
Lyonel Corbray at his wedding. A widower of forty-odd years, and
childless, Lord Lyonel was to wed the strapping sixteen-year-old
daughter of a rich Gulltown merchant. Petyr had brokered the
match himself. The bride’s dower was said to be staggering; it had
to be, since she was of common birth. Corbray’s vassals would be
there, with the Lords Waxley, Grafton, Lynderly, some petty lords
and landed knights … and Lord Belmore, who had lately reconciled
with her father. The other Lords Declarant were expected to shun
the nuptials, so Petyr’s presence was essential.
Alayne understood all that well enough, but it meant that the
burden of getting Sweetrobin safely down the mountain fell on her.
“Give his lordship a cup of sweetmilk,” she told the maester. “That
will stop him from shaking on the journey down.”
“He had a cup not three days past,” Colemon objected.
“And wanted another last night, which you refused him.”
“It was too soon. My lady, you do not understand. As I’ve told the
Lord Protector, a pinch of sweetsleep will prevent the shaking, but
it does not leave the esh, and in time …”
“Time will not matter if his lordship has a shaking t and falls o
the mountain. If my father were here, I know he would tell you to
keep Lord Robert calm at all costs.”
“I try, my lady, yet his ts grow ever more violent, and his blood
is so thin I dare not leech him any more. Sweetsleep … you are
certain he was not bleeding from the nose?”
“He was sni ing,” Alayne admitted, “but I saw no blood.”
“I must speak to the Lord Protector. This feast … is that wise, I
wonder, after the strain of the descent?”
“It will not be a large feast,” she assured him. “No more than
forty guests. Lord Nestor and his household, the Knight of the Gate,
a few lesser lords and their retainers …”

“Lord Robert mislikes strangers, you know that, and there will be
drinking, noise … music. Music frightens him.”
“Music soothes him,” she corrected, “the high harp especially. It’s
singing he can’t abide, since Marillion killed his mother.” Alayne had
told the lie so many times that she remembered it that way more
oft than not; the other seemed no more than a bad dream that
sometimes troubled her sleep. “Lord Nestor will have no singers at
the feast, only utes and ddles for the dancing.” What would she
do when the music began to play? It was a vexing question, to
which her heart and head gave di erent answers. Sansa loved to
dance, but Alayne … “Just give him a cup of the sweetmilk before
we go, and another at the feast, and there should be no trouble.”
“Very well.” They paused at the foot of the stairs. “But this must
be the last. For half a year, or longer.”
“You had best take that up with the Lord Protector.” She pushed
through the door and crossed the yard. Colemon only wanted the
best for his charge, Alayne knew, but what was best for Robert the
boy and what was best for Lord Arryn were not always the same.
Petyr had said as much, and it was true. Maester Colemon cares only
for the boy, though. Father and I have larger concerns.
Old snow cloaked the courtyard, and icicles hung down like
crystal spears from the terraces and towers. The Eyrie was built of
ne white stone, and winter’s mantle made it whiter still. So
beautiful, Alayne thought, so impregnable. She could not love this
place, no matter how she tried. Even before the guards and serving
men had made their descent, the castle had seemed as empty as a
tomb, and more so when Petyr Baelish was away. No one sang up
there, not since Marillion. No one ever laughed too loud. Even the
gods were silent. The Eyrie boasted a sept, but no septon; a
godswood, but no heart tree. No prayers are answered here, she often
thought, though some days she felt so lonely she had to try. Only
the wind answered her, sighing endlessly around the seven slim
white towers and rattling the Moon Door every time it gusted. It
will be even worse in winter, she knew. In winter this will be a cold
white prison.

And yet the thought of leaving frightened her almost as much as
it frightened Robert. She only hid it better. Her father said there
was no shame in being afraid, only in showing your fear. “All men
live with fear,” he said. Alayne was not certain she believed that.
Nothing frightened Petyr Baelish. He only said that to make me brave.
She would need to be brave down below, where the chance of being
unmasked was so much greater. Petyr’s friends at court had sent
him word that the queen had men out looking for the Imp and Sansa
Stark. It will mean my head if I am found, she reminded herself as she
descended a ight of icy stone steps. I must be Alayne all the time,
inside and out.
Lothor Brune was in the winch room, helping the gaoler Mord
and two serving men wrestle chests of clothes and bales of cloth
into six huge oaken buckets, each big enough around to hold three
men. The great chain winches were the easiest way to reach the
waycastle Sky, six hundred feet below them; elsewise you had to
descend the natural stone chimney from the undercellar. Or go the
way Marillion went, and Lady Lysa before him.
“Boy out of bed?” Ser Lothor asked.
“They’re bathing him. He will be ready within the hour.”
“We best hope he is. Mya won’t wait past midday.” The winch
room was unheated, so his breath misted with every word.
“She’ll wait,” Alayne said. “She has to wait.”
“Don’t be so certain, m’lady. She’s half mule herself, that one. I
think she’d leave us all to starve before she’d put those animals at
risk.” He smiled when he said it. He always smiles when he speaks of
Mya Stone. Mya was much younger than Ser Lothor, but when her
father had been brokering the marriage between Lord Corbray and
his merchant’s daughter, he’d told her that young girls were always
happiest with older men. “Innocence and experience make for a
perfect marriage,” he had said.
Alayne wondered what Mya made of Ser Lothor. With his
squashed nose, square jaw, and nap of woolly grey hair, Brune
could not be called comely, but he was not ugly either. It is a
common face but an honest one. Though he had risen to knighthood,
Ser Lothor’s birth had been very low. One night he had told her that

he was kin to the Brunes of Brownhollow, an old knightly family
from Crackclaw Point. “I went to them when my father died,” he
confessed, “but they shat on me, and said I was no blood of theirs.”
He would not speak of what happened after that, except to say that
he had learned all he knew of arms the hard way. Sober, he was a
quiet man, but a strong one. And Petyr says he’s loyal. He trusts him
as much as he trusts anyone. Brune would be a good match for a
bastard girl like Mya Stone, she thought. It might be di erent if her
father had acknowledged her, but he never did. And Maddy says that
she’s no maid either.
Mord took up his whip and cracked it, and the rst pair of oxen
began to lumber in a circle, turning the winch. The chain uncoiled,
rattling as it scraped across the stone, the oaken bucket swaying as
it began its long descent to Sky. Poor oxen, thought Alayne. Mord
would cut their throats and butcher them before he left, and leave
them for the falcons. Whatever part remained when the Eyrie was
reopened would be roasted up for the spring feast, if it had not
spoiled. A good supply of hard frozen meat foretold a summer of
plenty, old Gretchel claimed.
“M’lady,” Ser Lothor said, “you’d best know. Mya didn’t come up
alone. Lady Myranda’s with her.”
“Oh.” Why would she ride all the way up the mountain, just to ride
back down again? Myranda Royce was the Lord Nestor’s daughter.
The one time that Sansa had visited the Gates of the Moon, on the
way up to the Eyrie with her aunt Lysa and Lord Petyr, she had
been away, but Alayne had heard much of her since from the Eyrie’s
soldiers and serving girls. Her mother was long dead, so Lady
Myranda kept her father’s castle for him; it was a much livelier
court when she was home than when she was away, according to
rumor. “Soon or late you must meet Myranda Royce,” Petyr had
warned her. “When you do, be careful. She likes to play the merry
fool, but underneath she’s shrewder than her father. Guard your
tongue around her.”
I will, she thought, but I did not know I’d need to start so soon.
“Robert will be pleased.” He liked Myranda Royce. “You must
excuse me, ser. I need to nish packing.” Alone, she climbed the

steps back to her room for one last time. The windows had been
sealed and shuttered, the furnishings covered. A few of her things
had already been removed, the rest stored away. All of Lady Lysa’s
silks and samites were to be left behind. Her sheerest linens and
plushest velvets, the rich embroidery and ne Myrish lace; all
would remain. Down below, Alayne must dress modestly, as be t a
girl of modest birth. It makes no matter, she told herself. I dared not
wear the best clothes even here.
Gretchel had stripped the bed and laid out the rest of her
clothing. Alayne was already wearing woolen hose beneath her
skirts, over a double layer of smallclothes. Now she donned a
lambswool overtunic and a hooded fur cloak, fastening it with an
enameled mockingbird that had been a gift from Petyr. There was a
scarf as well, and a pair of leather gloves lined with fur to match
her riding boots. When she’d donned it all, she felt as fat and furry
as a bear cub. I will be glad of it on the mountain, she had to remind
herself. She took one last look at her room before she left. I was safe
here, she thought, but down below …
When Alayne returned to the winch room, she found Mya Stone
waiting impatiently with Lothor Brune and Mord. She must have
come up in the bucket to see what was taking us so long. Slim and
sinewy, Mya looked as tough as the old riding leathers she wore
beneath her silvery ringmail shirt. Her hair was black as a raven’s
wing, so short and shaggy that Alayne suspected that she cut it with
a dagger. Mya’s eyes were her best feature, big and blue. She could
be pretty, if she would dress up like a girl. Alayne found herself
wondering whether Ser Lothor liked her best in her iron and
leather, or dreamed of her gowned in lace and silk. Mya liked to say
that her father had been a goat and her mother an owl, but Alayne
had gotten the true story from Maddy. Yes, she thought, looking at
her now, those are his eyes, and she has his hair too, the thick black hair
he shared with Renly.
“Where is he?” the bastard girl demanded.
“His lordship is being bathed and dressed.”
“He needs to make some haste. It’s getting colder, can’t you feel
it? We need to get below Snow before the sun goes down.”

“How bad is the wind?” Alayne asked her.
“It could be worse … and will be, after dark.” Mya pushed a lock
of hair from her eyes. “If he bathes much longer, we’ll be trapped
up here all winter with nothing to eat except each other.”
Alayne did not know what to say to that. Thankfully, she was
spared by the arrival of Robert Arryn. The little lord wore sky-blue
velvet, a chain of gold and sapphires, and a white bearskin cloak.
His squires each held an end, to keep the cloak from dragging on
the oor. Maester Colemon accompanied them, in a threadbare grey
cloak lined with squirrel fur. Gretchel and Maddy were not far
behind.
When he felt the cold wind on his face, Robert quailed, but
Terrance and Gyles were behind him, so he could not ee. “My
lord,” said Mya, “will you ride down with me?”
Too brusque, Alayne thought. She should have greeted him with a
smile, told him how strong and brave he looks.
“I want Alayne,” Lord Robert said. “I’ll only go with her.”
“The bucket can hold all three of us.”
“I just want Alayne. You smell all stinky, like a mule.”
“As you wish.” Mya’s face showed no emotion.
Some of the winch chains were xed to wicker baskets, others to
stout oaken buckets. The largest of those was taller than Alayne,
with iron bands girding its dark brown staves. Even so, her heart
was in her throat as she took Robert’s hand and helped him in. Once
the hatch was closed behind them, the wood surrounded them on all
sides. Only the top was open. It is best that way, she told herself, we
can’t look down. Below them was only Sky and sky. Six hundred feet
of sky. For a moment she found herself wondering how long it had
taken her aunt to fall that distance, and what her last thought had
been as the mountain rushed up to meet her. No, I mustn’t think of
that. I mustn’t!
“AWAY!” came Ser Lothor’s shout. Someone shoved the bucket
hard. It swayed and tipped, scraped against the oor, then swung
free. She heard the crack of Mord’s whip and the rattle of the chain.
They began to descend, by jerks and starts at rst, then more
smoothly. Robert’s face was pale and his eyes pu y, but his hands

were still. The Eyrie shrank above them. The sky cells on the lower
levels made the castle look something like a honeycomb from
below. A honeycomb made of ice, Alayne thought, a castle made of
snow. She could hear the wind whistling round the bucket.
A hundred feet down, a sudden gust caught hold of them. The
bucket swayed sideways, spinning in the air, then bumped hard
against the rock face behind them. Shards of ice and snow rained
down on them, and the oak creaked and strained. Robert gave a
gasp and clung to her, burying his face between her breasts.
“My lord is brave,” Alayne said, when she felt him shaking. “I’m
so frightened I can hardly talk, but not you.”
She felt him nod. “The Winged Knight was brave, and so am I,”
he boasted to her bodice. “I’m an Arryn.”
“Will my Sweetrobin hold me tight?” she asked, though he was
already holding her so tightly that she could scarcely breathe.
“If you like,” he whispered. And clinging hard to one another,
they continued on straight down to Sky.
Calling this a castle is like calling a puddle on a privy oor a lake,
Alayne thought, when the bucket was opened so they might emerge
within the waycastle. Sky was no more than a crescent-shaped wall
of old unmortared stone, enclosing a stony ledge and the yawning
mouth of a cavern. Inside were storehouses and stables, a long
natural hall, and the chiseled handholds that led up to the Eyrie.
Outside, the ground was strewn by broken stones and boulders.
Earthen ramps gave access to the wall. Six hundred feet above, the
Eyrie was so small she could hide it with her hand, but far below
the Vale stretched green and golden.
Twenty mules awaited them within the waycastle, along with two
mule-walkers and the Lady Myranda Royce. Lord Nestor’s daughter
proved to be a short, eshy woman, of an age with Mya Stone, but
where Mya was slim and sinewy, Myranda was soft-bodied and
sweet-smelling, broad of hip, thick of waist, and extremely buxom.
Her thick chestnut curls framed round red cheeks, a small mouth,
and a pair of lively brown eyes. When Robert climbed gingerly
from the bucket, she knelt in a patch of snow to kiss his hand and
cheeks. “My lord,” she said, “you’ve grown so big!”

“Have I?” said Robert, pleased.
“You will be taller than me soon,” the lady lied. She got to her
feet and brushed the snow from her skirts. “And you must be the
Lord Protector’s daughter,” she added, as the bucket went rattling
back up to the Eyrie. “I had heard that you were beautiful. I see
that it is true.”
Alayne curtsied. “My lady is kind to say so.”
“Kind?” The older girl gave a laugh. “How boring that would be.
I aspire to be wicked. You must tell me all your secrets on the ride
down. May I call you Alayne?”
“If you wish, my lady.” But you’ll get no secrets from me.
“I am ‘my lady’ at the Gates, but up here on the mountain you
may call me Randa. How many years have you, Alayne?”
“Four-and-ten, my lady.” She had decided that Alayne Stone
should be older than Sansa Stark.
“Randa. It seems a hundred years since I was four-and-ten. How
innocent I was. Are you still innocent, Alayne?”
She blushed. “You should not … yes, of course.”
“Saving yourself for Lord Robert?” Lady Myranda teased. “Or is
there some ardent squire dreaming of your favors?”
“No,” said Alayne, even as Robert said, “She’s my friend. Terrance
and Gyles can’t have her.”
A second bucket had arrived by then, thumping down softly on a
mound of frozen snow. Maester Colemon emerged with the squires
Terrance and Gyles. The next winch delivered Maddy and Gretchel,
who rode with Mya Stone. The bastard girl wasted no time taking
charge. “We don’t want to get bunched up on the mountain,” she
told the other mule handlers. “I’ll take Lord Robert and his
companions. Ossy, you’ll bring down Ser Lothor and the rest, but
give me an hour’s lead. Carrot, you’ll have charge of their chests
and boxes.” She turned to Robert Arryn, her black hair blowing.
“Which mule will you ride today, my lord?”
“They’re all stinky. I’ll have the grey one, with the ear chewed
o . I want Alayne to ride with me. And Myranda too.”
“Where the way is wide enough. Come, my lord, let’s get you on
your mule. There’s a smell of snow in the air.”

It was another half hour before they were ready to set out. When
all of them were mounted up, Mya Stone gave a crisp command,
and two of Sky’s men-at-arms swung the gates open. Mya led them
out, with Lord Robert just behind her, swaddled in his bearskin
cloak. Alayne and Myranda Royce followed, then Gretchel and
Maddy, then Terrance Lynderly and Gyles Grafton. Maester
Colemon brought up the rear, leading a second mule laden with his
chests of herbs and potions.
Beyond the walls, the wind picked up sharply. They were above
the tree line here, exposed to the elements. Alayne was thankful
that she’d dressed so warmly. Her cloak was apping noisily behind
her, and a sudden gust blew back her hood. She laughed, but a few
yards ahead Lord Robert squirmed, and said, “It’s too cold. We
should go back and wait until it’s warmer.”
“It will be warmer on the valley oor, my lord,” said Mya.
“You’ll see when we get down there.”
“I don’t want to see,” said Robert, but Mya paid no mind.
Their road was a crooked series of stone steps carved into the
mountainside, but the mules knew every inch of it. Alayne was glad
of that. Here and there the stone was shattered from the strain of
countless seasons, with all their thaws and freezes. Patches of snow
clung to the rock on either side of the path, blinding white. The sun
was bright, the sky was blue, and there were falcons circling
overhead, riding on the wind.
Up here where the slope was steepest, the steps wound back and
forth rather than plunging straight down. Sansa Stark went up the
mountain, but Alayne Stone is coming down. It was a strange thought.
Coming up, Mya had warned her to keep her eyes on the path
ahead, she remembered. “Look up, not down,” she said … but that
was not possible on the descent. I could close my eyes. The mule
knows the way, he has no need of me. But that seemed more
something Sansa would have done, that frightened girl. Alayne was
an older woman, and bastard brave.
At rst they rode in single le, but farther down the path
widened enough for two to ride abreast, and Myranda Royce came
up beside her. “We have had a letter from your father,” she said, as

casually as if they were sitting with their septa, doing needlework.
“He is on his way home, he says, and hopes to see his darling
daughter soon. He writes that Lyonel Corbray seems well pleased
with his bride, and even more so with her dowry. I do hope Lord
Lyonel remembers which one he needs to bed. Lady Waynwood
turned up with the Knight of Ninestars for the wedding feast, Lord
Petyr says, to everyone’s astonishment.”
“Anya Waynwood? Truly?” The Lords Declarant were down from
six to three, it would seem. The day he’d departed the mountain,
Petyr Baelish had been con dent of winning Symond Templeton to
his side, but not so Lady Waynwood. “Was there more?” she asked.
The Eyrie was such a lonely place that she was eager for any bit of
news from the world beyond, however trivial or insigni cant.
“Not from your father, no, but we’ve had other birds. The war
goes on, everywhere but here. Riverrun has yielded, but
Dragonstone and Storm’s End still hold for Lord Stannis.”
“Lady Lysa was so wise, to keep us out of it.”
Myranda gave her a shrewd little smile. “Yes, she was the very
soul of wisdom, that good lady.” She shifted her seat. “Why must
mules be so bony and ill-tempered? Mya does not feed them
enough. A nice fat mule would be more comfortable to ride. There’s
a new High Septon, did you know? Oh, and the Night’s Watch has a
boy commander, some bastard son of Eddard Stark’s.”
“Jon Snow?” she blurted out, surprised.
“Snow? Yes, it would be Snow, I suppose.”
She had not thought of Jon in ages. He was only her half brother,
but still … with Robb and Bran and Rickon dead, Jon Snow was the
only brother that remained to her. I am a bastard too now, just like
him. Oh, it would be so sweet, to see him once again. But of course that
could never be. Alayne Stone had no brothers, baseborn or
otherwise.
“Our cousin Bronze Yohn had himself a mêlée at Runestone,”
Myranda Royce went on, oblivious, “a small one, just for squires. It
was meant for Harry the Heir to win the honors, and so he did.”
“Harry the Heir?”

“Lady Waynwood’s ward. Harrold Hardyng. I suppose we must
call him Ser Harry now. Bronze Yohn knighted him.”
“Oh.” Alayne was confused. Why should Lady Waynwood’s ward
be her heir? She had sons of her own blood. One was the Knight of
the Bloody Gate, Ser Donnel. She did not want to look stupid,
though, so all she said was, “I pray he proves a worthy knight.”
Lady Myranda snorted. “I pray he gets the pox. He has a bastard
daughter by some common girl, you know. My lord father had
hoped to marry me to Harry, but Lady Waynwood would not hear
of it. I do not know whether it was me she found unsuitable, or just
my dowry.” She gave a sigh. “I do need another husband. I had one
once, but I killed him.”
“You did?” Alayne said, shocked.
“Oh, yes. He died on top of me. In me, if truth be told. You do
know what goes on in a marriage bed, I hope?”
She thought of Tyrion, and of the Hound and how he’d kissed her,
and gave a nod. “That must have been dreadful, my lady. Him
dying. There, I mean, whilst … whilst he was …”
“… fucking me?” She shrugged. “It was disconcerting, certainly.
Not to mention discourteous. He did not even have the common
decency to plant a child in me. Old men have weak seed. So here I
am, a widow, but scarce used. Harry could have done much worse. I
daresay that he will. Lady Waynwood will most like marry him to
one of her granddaughters, or one of Bronze Yohn’s.”
“As you say, my lady.” Alayne remembered Petyr’s warning.
“Randa. Come now, you can say it. Ran. Da.”
“Randa.”
“Much better. I fear I must apologize to you. You will think me a
dreadful slut, I know, but I bedded that pretty boy Marillion. I did
not know he was a monster. He sang beautifully, and could do the
sweetest things with his ngers. I would never have taken him to
bed if I had known he was going to push Lady Lysa through the
Moon Door. I do not bed monsters, as a rule.” She studied Alayne’s
face and chest. “You are prettier than me, but my breasts are larger.
The maesters say large breasts produce no more milk than small
ones, but I do not believe it. Have you ever known a wet nurse with

small teats? Yours are ample for a girl your age, but as they are
bastard breasts, I shan’t concern myself with them.” Myranda edged
her mule closer. “You know our Mya’s not a maid, I trust?”
She did. Fat Maddy had whispered it to her, one time when Mya
brought up their supplies. “Maddy told me.”
“Of course she did. She has a mouth as big as her thighs, and her
thighs are enormous. Mychel Redfort was the one. He used to be Lyn
Corbray’s squire. A real squire, not like that loutish lad Ser Lyn’s got
squiring for him now. He only took that one on for coin, they say.
Mychel was the best young swordsman in the Vale, and
gallant … or so poor Mya thought, till he wed one of Bronze Yohn’s
daughters. Lord Horton gave him no choice in the matter, I am sure,
but it was still a cruel thing to do to Mya.”
“Ser Lothor is fond of her.” Alayne glanced down at the mule girl,
twenty steps below. “More than fond.”
“Lothor Brune?” Myranda raised an eyebrow. “Does she know?”
She did not wait for an answer. “He has no hope, poor man. My
father’s tried to make a match for Mya, but she’ll have none of
them. She is half mule, that one.”
Despite herself, Alayne found herself warming to the older girl.
She had not had a friend to gossip with since poor Jeyne Poole. “Do
you think Ser Lothor likes her as she is, in mail and leather?” she
asked the older girl, who seemed so worldly-wise. “Or does he
dream of her draped in silks and velvets?”
“He’s a man. He dreams of her naked.”
She is trying to make me blush again.
Lady Myranda must have heard her thoughts. “You do turn such a
pretty shade of pink. When I blush I look quite like an apple. I have
not blushed for years, though.” She leaned closer. “Does your father
plan to wed again?”
“My father?” Alayne had never considered that. Somehow the
notion made her squirm. She found herself remembering the look
on Lysa Arryn’s face as she’d tumbled through the Moon Door.
“We all know how devoted he was to Lady Lysa,” said Myranda,
“but he cannot mourn forever. He needs a pretty young wife to
wash away his grief. I imagine he could have his pick of half the

noble maidens in the Vale. Who could be a better husband than our
own bold Lord Protector? Though I do wish he had a better name
than Little nger. How little is it, do you know?”
“His nger?” She blushed again. “I don’t … I never …”
Lady Myranda laughed so loud that Mya Stone glanced back at
them. “Never you mind, Alayne, I’m sure it’s large enough.”
They passed beneath a wind-carved arch, where long icicles clung
to the pale stone, dripping down on them. On the far side the path
narrowed and plunged down sharply for a hundred feet or more.
Myranda was forced to drop back. Alayne gave the mule his head.
The steepness of this part of the descent made her cling tightly to
her saddle. The steps here had been worn smooth by the iron-shod
hooves of all the mules who’d passed this way, until they resembled
a series of shallow stone bowls. Water lled the bottoms of the
bowls, glimmering golden in the afternoon sun. It is water now,
Alayne thought, but come dark, all of it will turn to ice. She realized
that she was holding her breath, and let it out. Mya Stone and Lord
Robert had almost reached the rock spire where the slope leveled
o again. She tried to look at them, and only them. I will not fall,
she told herself. Mya’s mule will see me through. The wind skirled
around her, as she bumped and scraped her way down step by step.
It seemed to take a lifetime.
Then all at once she was at the bottom with Mya and her little
lord, huddled beneath a twisted, rocky spire. Ahead stretched a high
stone saddle, narrow and icy. Alayne could hear the wind shrieking,
and feel it plucking at her cloak. She remembered this place from
her ascent. It had frightened her then, and it frightened her now. “It
is wider than it looks,” Mya was telling Lord Robert in a cheerful
voice. “A yard across, and no more than eight yards long, that’s
nothing.”
“Nothing,” Robert said. His hand was shaking.
Oh, no, Alayne thought. Please. Not here. Not now.
“It’s best to lead the mules across,” Mya said. “If it please my
lord, I’ll take mine over rst, then come back for yours.” Lord
Robert did not answer. He was staring at the narrow saddle with his

reddened eyes. “I shan’t be long, my lord,” Mya promised, but
Alayne doubted that the boy could even hear her.
When the bastard girl led her mule out from beneath the shelter
of the spire, the wind caught her in its teeth. Her cloak lifted,
twisting and apping in the air. Mya staggered, and for half a
heartbeat it seemed as if she would be blown over the precipice, but
somehow she regained her balance and went on.
Alayne took Robert’s gloved hand in her own to stop his shaking.
“Sweetrobin,” she said, “I’m scared. Hold my hand, and help me get
across. I know you’re not afraid.”
He looked at her, his pupils small dark pinpricks in eyes as big
and white as eggs. “I’m not?”
“Not you. You’re my winged knight, Ser Sweetrobin.”
“The Winged Knight could y,” Robert whispered.
“Higher than the mountains.” She gave his hand a squeeze.
Lady Myranda had joined them by the spire. “He could,” she
echoed, when she saw what was happening.
“Ser Sweetrobin,” Lord Robert said, and Alayne knew that she
dare not wait for Mya to return. She helped the boy dismount, and
hand in hand they walked out onto the bare stone saddle, their
cloaks snapping and apping behind them. All around was empty air
and sky, the ground falling away sharply to either side. There was
ice underfoot, and broken stones just waiting to turn an ankle, and
the wind was howling ercely. It sounds like a wolf, thought Sansa. A
ghost wolf, big as mountains.
And then they were on the other side, and Mya Stone was
laughing and lifting Robert for a hug. “Be careful,” Alayne told her.
“He can hurt you, ailing. You wouldn’t think so, but he can.” They
found a place for him, a cleft in the rock to keep him out of the cold
wind. Alayne tended him until the shaking passed, whilst Mya went
back to help the others cross.
Fresh mules awaited them at Snow, and a hot meal of stewed
goat and onions. She ate with Mya and Myranda. “So you’re brave
as well as beautiful,” Myranda said to her.
“No.” The compliment made her blush. “I’m not. I was so scared.
I don’t think I could have crossed without Lord Robert.” She turned

to Mya Stone. “You almost fell.”
“You’re mistaken. I never fall.” Mya’s hair had tumbled across her
cheek, hiding one eye.
“Almost, I said. I saw you. Weren’t you afraid?”
Mya shook her head. “I remember a man throwing me in the air
when I was very little. He stands as tall as the sky, and he throws
me up so high it feels as though I’m ying. We’re both laughing,
laughing so much that I can hardly catch a breath, and nally I
laugh so hard I wet myself, but that only makes him laugh the
louder. I was never afraid when he was throwing me. I knew that
he would always be there to catch me.” She pushed her hair back.
“Then one day he wasn’t. Men come and go. They lie, or die, or
leave you. A mountain is not a man, though, and a stone is a
mountain’s daughter. I trust my father, and I trust my mules. I
won’t fall.” She put her hand on a jagged spur of rock, and got to
her feet. “Best nish. We have a long way yet to go, and I can smell
a storm.”
The snow began to fall as they were leaving Stone, the largest
and lowest of the three waycastles that defended the approaches to
the Eyrie. Dusk was settling by then. Lady Myranda suggested that
perhaps they might turn back, spend the night at Stone, and resume
their descent when the sun came up, but Mya would not hear of it.
“The snow might be ve feet deep by then, and the steps
treacherous even for my mules,” she said. “We will do better to
press on. We’ll take it slow.”
And so they did. Below Stone the steps were broader and less
steep, winding in and out of the tall pines and grey-green sentinels
that cloaked the lower slopes of the Giant’s Lance. Mya’s mules
knew every root and rock on the way down, it seemed, and any
they forgot the bastard girl remembered. Half the night was gone
before they sighted the lights of the Gates of the Moon through the
falling snow. The last part of their journey was the most peaceful.
The snow fell steadily, cloaking all the world in white. Sweetrobin
drifted to sleep in the saddle, swaying back and forth with the
motion of his mule. Even Lady Myranda began to yawn and
complain of being weary. “We have apartments prepared for all of

you,” she told Alayne, “but if you like you may share my bed
tonight. It’s large enough for four.”
“I should be honored, my lady.”
“Randa. Count yourself fortunate that I’m so tired. All I want to
do is curl up and go to sleep. Usually when ladies share my bed they
have to pay a pillow tax and tell me all about the wicked things
they’ve done.”
“What if they haven’t done any wicked things?”
“Why, then they must confess all the wicked things they want to
do. Not you, of course. I can see how virtuous you are just by
looking at those rosy cheeks and big blue eyes of yours.” She
yawned again. “I hope your feet are warm. I do hate bedmaids with
cold feet.”
By the time they nally reached her father’s castle, Lady Myranda
was drowsing too, and Alayne was dreaming of her bed. It will be a
featherbed, she told herself, soft and warm and deep, piled high with
furs. I will dream a sweet dream, and when I wake there will be dogs
barking, women gossiping beside the well, swords ringing in the yard.
And later there will be a feast, with music and dancing. After the
deathly silence of the Eyrie, she yearned for shouts and laughter.
As the riders were climbing o their mules, however, one of
Petyr’s guardsmen emerged from within the keep. “Lady Alayne,”
he said, “the Lord Protector has been waiting for you.”
“He’s back?” she said, startled.
“At evenfall. You’ll nd him in the west tower.”
The hour was closer to dawn than to dusk, and most of the castle
was asleep, but not Petyr Baelish. Alayne found him seated by a
crackling re, drinking hot mulled wine with three men she did not
know. They all rose when she entered, and Petyr smiled warmly.
“Alayne. Come, give your father a kiss.”
She hugged him dutifully and kissed him on the cheek. “I am
sorry to intrude, Father. No one told me you had company.”
“You are never an intrusion, sweetling. I was just now telling
these good knights what a dutiful daughter I had.”
“Dutiful and beautiful,” said an elegant young knight whose thick
blond mane cascaded down well past his shoulders.

“Aye,” said the second knight, a burly fellow with a thick saltand-pepper beard, a red nose bulbous with broken veins, and
gnarled hands as large as hams. “You left out that part, m’lord.”
“I would do the same if she were my daughter,” said the last
knight, a short, wiry man with a wry smile, pointed nose, and
bristly orange hair. “Particularly around louts like us.”
Alayne laughed. “Are you louts?” she said, teasing. “Why, I took
the three of you for gallant knights.”
“Knights they are,” said Petyr. “Their gallantry has yet to be
demonstrated, but we may hope. Allow me to present Ser Byron,
Ser Morgarth, and Ser Shadrich. Sers, the Lady Alayne, my natural
and very clever daughter … with whom I must needs confer, if you
will be so good as to excuse us.”
The three knights bowed and withdrew, though the tall one with
the blond hair kissed her hand before taking his leave.
“Hedge knights?” said Alayne, when the door had closed.
“Hungry knights. I thought it best that we have a few more
swords about us. The times grow ever more interesting, my sweet,
and when the times are interesting you can never have too many
swords. The Merling King’s returned to Gulltown, and old Oswell had
some tales to tell.”
She knew better than to ask what sort of tales. If Petyr had
wanted her to know, he would have told her. “I did not expect you
back so soon,” she said. “I am glad you’ve come.”
“I would never have known it from the kiss you gave me.” He
pulled her closer, caught her face between his hands, and kissed her
on the lips for a long time. “Now that’s the sort of kiss that says
welcome home. See that you do better next time.”
“Yes, Father.” She could feel herself blushing.
He did not hold her kiss against her. “You would not believe half
of what is happening in King’s Landing, sweetling. Cersei stumbles
from one idiocy to the next, helped along by her council of the deaf,
the dim, and the blind. I always anticipated that she would beggar
the realm and destroy herself, but I never expected she would do it
quite so fast. It is quite vexing. I had hoped to have four or ve
quiet years to plant some seeds and allow some fruits to ripen, but

now … it is a good thing that I thrive on chaos. What little peace
and order the ve kings left us will not long survive the three
queens, I fear.”
“Three queens?” She did not understand.
Nor did Petyr choose to explain. Instead, he smiled and said, “I
have brought my sweet girl back a gift.”
Alayne was as pleased as she was surprised. “Is it a gown?” She
had heard there were ne seamstresses in Gulltown, and she was so
tired of dressing drably.
“Something better. Guess again.”
“Jewels?”
“No jewels could hope to match my daughter’s eyes.”
“Lemons? Did you nd some lemons?” She had promised
Sweetrobin lemon cake, and for lemon cake you needed lemons.
Petyr Baelish took her by the hand and drew her down onto his
lap. “I have made a marriage contract for you.”
“A marriage …” Her throat tightened. She did not want to wed
again, not now, perhaps not ever. “I do not … I cannot marry.
Father, I …” Alayne looked to the door, to make certain it was
closed. “I am married,” she whispered. “You know.”
Petyr put a nger to her lips to silence her. “The dwarf wed Ned
Stark’s daughter, not mine. Be that as it may. This is only a
betrothal. The marriage must needs wait until Cersei is done and
Sansa’s safely widowed. And you must meet the boy and win his
approval. Lady Waynwood will not make him marry against his
will, she was quite rm on that.”
“Lady Waynwood?” Alayne could hardly believe it. “Why would
she marry one of her sons to … to a …”
“… bastard? For a start, you are the Lord Protector’s bastard,
never forget. The Waynwoods are very old and very proud, but not
as rich as one might think, as I discovered when I began buying up
their debt. Not that Lady Anya would ever sell a son for gold. A
ward, however … young Harry’s only a cousin, and the dower that I
o ered her ladyship was even larger than the one that Lyonel
Corbray just collected. It had to be, for her to risk Bronze Yohn’s
wroth. This will put all his plans awry. You are promised to Harrold

Hardyng, sweetling, provided you can win his boyish
heart … which should not be hard, for you.”
“Harry the Heir?” Alayne tried to recall what Myranda had told
her about him on the mountain. “He was just knighted. And he has a
bastard daughter by some common girl.”
“And another on the way by a di erent wench. Harry can be a
beguiling one, no doubt. Soft sandy hair, deep blue eyes, and
dimples when he smiles. And very gallant, I am told.” He teased her
with a smile. “Bastard-born or no, sweetling, when this match is
announced you will be the envy of every highborn maiden in the
Vale, and a few from the riverlands and the Reach as well.”
“Why?” Alayne was lost. “Is Ser Harrold … how could he be Lady
Waynwood’s heir? Doesn’t she have sons of her own blood?”
“Three,” Petyr allowed. She could smell the wine on his breath,
the cloves and nutmeg. “Daughters too, and grandsons.”
“Won’t they come before Harry? I don’t understand.”
“You will. Listen.” Petyr took her hand in his own and brushed
his nger lightly down the inside of her palm. “Lord Jasper Arryn,
begin with him. Jon Arryn’s father. He begot three children, two
sons and a daughter. Jon was the eldest, so the Eyrie and the
lordship passed to him. His sister Alys wed Ser Elys Waynwood,
uncle to the present Lady Waynwood.” He made a wry face. “Elys
and Alys, isn’t that precious? Lord Jasper’s younger son, Ser Ronnel
Arryn, wed a Belmore girl, but only rang her once or twice before
dying of a bad belly. Their son Elbert was being born in one bed
even as poor Ronnel was dying in another down the hall. Are you
paying close attention, sweetling?”
“Yes. There was Jon and Alys and Ronnel, but Ronnel died.”
“Good. Now, Jon Arryn married thrice, but his rst two wives
gave him no children, so for long years his nephew Elbert was his
heir. Meantime, Elys was plowing Alys quite dutifully, and she was
whelping once a year. She gave him nine children, eight girls and
one precious little boy, another Jasper, after which she died
exhausted. Boy Jasper, inconsiderate of the heroic e orts that had
gone into begetting him, got himself kicked in the head by a horse
when he was three years old. A pox took two of his sisters soon

after, leaving six. The eldest married Ser Denys Arryn, a distant
cousin to the Lords of the Eyrie. There are several branches of
House Arryn scattered across the Vale, all as proud as they are
penurious, save for the Gulltown Arryns, who had the rare good
sense to marry merchants. They’re rich, but less than couth, so no
one talks about them. Ser Denys hailed from one of the poor, proud
branches … but he was also a renowned jouster, handsome and
gallant and brimming with courtesy. And he had that magic Arryn
name, which made him ideal for the eldest Waynwood girl. Their
children would be Arryns, and the next heirs to the Vale should any
ill befall Elbert. Well, as it happened, Mad King Aerys befell Elbert.
You know that story?”
She did. “The Mad King murdered him.”
“He did indeed. And soon after, Ser Denys left his pregnant
Waynwood wife to ride to war. He died during the Battle of the
Bells, of an excess of gallantry and an axe. When they told his lady
of his death she perished of grief, and her newborn son soon
followed. No matter. Jon Arryn had gotten himself a young wife
during the war, one he had reason to believe fertile. He was very
hopeful, I’m sure, but you and I know that all he ever got from Lysa
were stillbirths, miscarriages, and poor Sweetrobin.
“Which brings us back to the ve remaining daughters of Elys and
Alys. The eldest had been left terribly scarred by the same pox that
killed her sisters, so she became a septa. Another was seduced by a
sellsword. Ser Elys cast her out, and she joined the silent sisters
after her bastard died in infancy. The third wed the Lord of the
Paps, but proved barren. The fourth was on her way to the
riverlands to marry some Bracken when Burned Men carried her o .
That left the youngest, who wed a landed knight sworn to the
Waynwoods, gave him a son that she named Harrold, and perished.”
He turned her hand over and lightly kissed her wrist. “So tell me,
sweetling—why is Harry the Heir?”
Her eyes widened. “He is not Lady Waynwood’s heir. He’s
Robert’s heir. If Robert were to die …”
Petyr arched an eyebrow. “When Robert dies. Our poor brave
Sweetrobin is such a sickly boy, it is only a matter of time. When

Robert dies, Harry the Heir becomes Lord Harrold, Defender of the
Vale and Lord of the Eyrie. Jon Arryn’s bannermen will never love
me, nor our silly, shaking Robert, but they will love their Young
Falcon … and when they come together for his wedding, and you
come out with your long auburn hair, clad in a maiden’s cloak of
white and grey with a direwolf emblazoned on the back … why,
every knight in the Vale will pledge his sword to win you back your
birthright. So those are your gifts from me, my sweet
Sansa … Harry, the Eyrie, and Winterfell. That’s worth another kiss
now, don’t you think?”

BRIENNE

This is an evil dream, she thought. But if she were dreaming, why did
it hurt so much?
The rain had stopped falling, but all the world was wet. Her cloak
felt as heavy as her mail. The ropes that bound her wrists were
soaked through, but that only made them tighter. No matter how
Brienne turned her hands, she could not slip free. She did not
understand who had bound her, or why. She tried to ask the
shadows, but they did not answer. Perhaps they did not hear her.
Perhaps they were not real. Under her layers of wet wool and
rusting mail, her skin was ushed and feverish. She wondered
whether all of this was just a fever dream.
She had a horse beneath her, though she could not remember
mounting. She lay facedown across his hindquarters, like a sack of
oats. Her wrists and ankles had been lashed together. The air was
damp, the ground cloaked in mist. Her head pounded with every
step. She could hear voices, but all she could see was the earth
beneath the horse’s hooves. There were things broken inside of her.
Her face felt swollen, her cheek was sticky with blood, and every
jounce and bounce send a stab of agony through her arm. She could
hear Podrick calling her, as if from far away. “Ser?” he kept saying.
“Ser? My lady? Ser? My lady?” His voice was faint and hard to
hear. Finally, there was only silence.

She dreamt she was at Harrenhal, down in the bear pit once
again. This time it was Biter facing her, huge and bald and maggotwhite, with weeping sores upon his cheeks. Naked he came,
fondling his member, gnashing his led teeth together. Brienne ed
from him. “My sword,” she called. “Oathkeeper. Please.” The
watchers did not answer. Renly was there, with Nimble Dick and
Catelyn Stark. Shagwell, Pyg, and Timeon had come, and the
corpses from the trees with their sunken cheeks, swollen tongues,
and empty eye sockets. Brienne wailed in horror at the sight of
them, and Biter grabbed her arm and yanked her close and tore a
chunk from her face. “Jaime,” she heard herself scream, “Jaime.”
Even in the depths of dream the pain was there. Her face
throbbed. Her shoulder bled. Breathing hurt. The pain crackled up
her arm like lightning. She cried out for a maester.
“We have no maester,” said a girl’s voice. “Only me.”
I am looking for a girl, Brienne remembered. A highborn maid of
three-and-ten, with blue eyes and auburn hair. “My lady?” she said.
“Lady Sansa?”
A man laughed. “She thinks you’re Sansa Stark.”
“She can’t go much farther. She’ll die.”
“One less lion. I won’t weep.”
Brienne heard the sound of someone praying. She thought of
Septon Meribald, but all the words were wrong. The night is dark
and full of terrors, and so are dreams.
They were riding through a gloomy wood, a dank, dark, silent
place where the pines pressed close. The ground was soft beneath
her horse’s hooves, and the tracks she left behind lled up with
blood. Beside her rode Lord Renly, Dick Crabb, and Vargo Hoat.
Blood ran from Renly’s throat. The Goat’s torn ear oozed pus.
“Where are we going?” Brienne asked. “Where are you taking me?”
None of them would answer. How can they answer? All of them are
dead. Did that mean that she was dead as well?
Lord Renly was ahead of her, her sweet smiling king. He was
leading her horse through the trees. Brienne called out to tell him
how much she loved him, but when he turned to scowl at her, she

saw that he was not Renly after all. Renly never scowled. He always
had a smile for me, she thought … except …
“Cold,” her king said, puzzled, and a shadow moved without a
man to cast it, and her sweet lord’s blood came washing through the
green steel of his gorget to drench her hands. He had been a warm
man, but his blood was cold as ice. This is not real, she told herself.
This is another bad dream, and soon I’ll wake.
Her mount came to a sudden halt. Rough hands seized hold of
her. She saw shafts of red afternoon light slanting through the
branches of a chestnut tree. A horse rooted amongst the dead leaves
after chestnuts, and men moved nearby, talking in quiet voices.
Ten, twelve, maybe more. Brienne did not recognize their faces. She
was stretched out on the ground, her back against a tree trunk.
“Drink this, m’lady,” said the girl’s voice. She lifted a cup to
Brienne’s lips. The taste was strong and sour. Brienne spat it out.
“Water,” she gasped. “Please. Water.”
“Water won’t help the pain. This will. A little.” The girl put the
cup to Brienne’s lips again.
It even hurt to drink. Wine ran down her chin and dribbled on her
chest. When the cup was empty the girl lled it from a skin. Brienne
sucked it down until she sputtered. “No more.”
“More. You have a broken arm, and some of your ribs is cracked.
Two, maybe three.”
“Biter,” Brienne said, remembering the weight of him, the way
his knee had slammed into her chest.
“Aye. A real monster, that one.”
It all came back to her; lightning above and mud below, the rain
pinging softly against the dark steel of the Hound’s helm, the terrible
strength in Biter’s hands. Suddenly she could not stand being bound.
She tried to wrench free of her ropes, but all that did was chafe her
worse. Her wrists were tied too tightly. There was dried blood on
the hemp. “Is he dead?” She trembled. “Biter. Is he dead?” She
remembered his teeth tearing into the esh of her face. The thought
that he might still be out there somewhere, breathing, made
Brienne want to scream.

“He’s dead. Gendry shoved a spearpoint through the back of his
neck. Drink, m’lady, or I’ll pour it down your throat.”
She drank. “I am looking for a girl,” she whispered, between
swallows. She almost said my sister. “A highborn maid of three-andten. She has blue eyes and auburn hair.”
“I’m not her.”
No. Brienne could see that. The girl was thin to the point of
looking starved. She wore her brown hair in a braid, and her eyes
were older than her years. Brown hair, brown eyes, plain. Willow, six
years older. “You’re the sister. The innkeep.”
“I might be.” The girl squinted. “What if I am?”
“Do you have a name?” Brienne asked. Her stomach gurgled. She
was afraid that she might retch.
“Heddle. Same as Willow. Jeyne Heddle.”
“Jeyne. Untie my hands. Please. Have pity. The ropes are cha ng
my wrists. I’m bleeding.”
“It’s not allowed. You’re to stay bound, till …”
“… till you stand before m’lady.” Renly stood behind the girl,
pushing his black hair out of his eyes. Not Renly. Gendry. “M’lady
means for you to answer for your crimes.”
“M’lady.” The wine was making her head spin. It was hard to
think. “Stoneheart. Is that who you mean?” Lord Randyll had
spoken of her, back at Maidenpool. “Lady Stoneheart.”
“Some call her that. Some call her other things. The Silent Sister.
Mother Merciless. The Hangwoman.”
The Hangwoman. When Brienne closed her eyes, she saw the
corpses swaying underneath the bare brown limbs, their faces black
and swollen. Suddenly she was desperately afraid. “Podrick. My
squire. Where is Podrick? And the others … Ser Hyle, Septon
Meribald. Dog. What did you do with Dog?”
Gendry and the girl exchanged a look. Brienne fought to rise, and
managed to get one knee under her before the world began to spin.
“It was you killed the dog, m’lady,” she heard Gendry say, just
before the darkness swallowed her again.
Then she was back at the Whispers, standing amongst the ruins
and facing Clarence Crabb. He was huge and erce, mounted on an

aurochs shaggier than he was. The beast pawed the ground in fury,
tearing deep furrows in the earth. Crabb’s teeth had been led into
points. When Brienne went to draw her sword, she found her
scabbard empty. “No,” she cried, as Ser Clarence charged. It wasn’t
fair. She could not ght without her magic sword. Ser Jaime had
given it to her. The thought of failing him as she had failed Lord
Renly made her want to weep. “My sword. Please, I have to nd
my sword.”
“The wench wants her sword back,” a voice declared.
“And I want Cersei Lannister to suck my cock. So what?”
“Jaime called it Oathkeeper. Please.” But the voices did not listen,
and Clarence Crabb thundered down on her and swept o her head.
Brienne spiraled down into a deeper darkness.
She dreamed that she was lying in a boat, her head pillowed on
someone’s lap. There were shadows all around them, hooded men in
mail and leather, paddling them across a foggy river with mu ed
oars. She was drenched in sweat, burning, yet somehow shivering
too. The fog was full of faces. “Beauty,” whispered the willows on
the bank, but the reeds said, “freak, freak.” Brienne shuddered.
“Stop,” she said. “Someone make them stop.”
The next time she woke, Jeyne was holding a cup of hot soup to
her lips. Onion broth, Brienne thought. She drank as much of it as
she could, until a bit of carrot caught in her throat and made her
choke. Coughing was agony. “Easy,” the girl said.
“Gendry,” she wheezed. “I have to talk with Gendry.”
“He turned back at the river, m’lady. He’s gone back to his forge,
to Willow and the little ones, to keep them safe.”
No one can keep them safe. She began to cough again. “Ah, let her
choke. Save us a rope.” One of the shadow men shoved the girl
aside. He was clad in rusted rings and a studded belt. At his hip
hung longsword and dirk. A yellow greatcloak was plastered to his
shoulders, sodden and lthy. From his shoulders rose a steel dog’s
head, its teeth bared in a snarl.
“No,” Brienne moaned. “No, you’re dead, I killed you.”
The Hound laughed. “You got that backwards. It’ll be me killing
you. I’d do it now, but m’lady wants to see you hanged.”

Hanged. The word sent a jolt of fear through her. She looked at
the girl, Jeyne. She is too young to be so hard. “Bread and salt,”
Brienne gasped. “The inn … Septon Meribald fed the children … we
broke bread with your sister …”
“Guest right don’t mean so much as it used to,” said the girl. “Not
since m’lady come back from the wedding. Some o’ them swinging
down by the river gured they was guests too.”
“We gured di erent,” said the Hound. “They wanted beds. We
gave ’em trees.”
“We got more trees, though,” put in another shadow, one-eyed
beneath a rusty pothelm. “We always got more trees.”
When it was time to mount again, they yanked a leather hood
down over her face. There were no eyeholes. The leather mu ed
the sounds around her. The taste of onions lingered on her tongue,
sharp as the knowledge of her failure. They mean to hang me. She
thought of Jaime, of Sansa, of her father back on Tarth, and was
glad for the hood. It helped hide the tears welling in her eyes. From
time to time she heard the outlaws talking, but she could not make
out their words. After a while she gave herself up to weariness and
the slow, steady motion of her horse.
This time she dreamed that she was home again, at Evenfall.
Through the tall arched windows of her lord father’s hall she could
see the sun just going down. I was safe here. I was safe.
She was dressed in silk brocade, a quartered gown of blue and red
decorated with golden suns and silver crescent moons. On another
girl it might have been a pretty gown, but not on her. She was
twelve, ungainly and uncomfortable, waiting to meet the young
knight her father had arranged for her to marry, a boy six years her
senior, sure to be a famous champion one day. She dreaded his
arrival. Her bosom was too small, her hands and feet too big. Her
hair kept sticking up, and there was a pimple nestled in the fold
beside her nose. “He will bring a rose for you,” her father promised
her, but a rose was no good, a rose could not keep her safe. It was a
sword she wanted. Oathkeeper. I have to nd the girl. I have to nd his
honor.

Finally the doors opened, and her betrothed strode into her
father’s hall. She tried to greet him as she had been instructed, only
to have blood come pouring from her mouth. She had bitten her
tongue o as she waited. She spat it at the young knight’s feet, and
saw the disgust on his face. “Brienne the Beauty,” he said in a
mocking tone. “I have seen sows more beautiful than you.” He
tossed the rose in her face. As he walked away, the gri ns on his
cloak rippled and blurred and changed to lions. Jaime! she wanted
to cry. Jaime, come back for me! But her tongue lay on the oor by
the rose, drowned in blood.
Brienne woke suddenly, gasping.
She did not know where she was. The air was cold and heavy, and
smelled of earth and worms and mold. She was lying on a pallet
beneath a mound of sheepskins, with rock above her head and roots
poking through the walls. The only light came from a tallow candle,
smoking in a pool of melted wax.
She pushed aside the sheepskins. Someone had stripped her of her
clothes and armor, she saw. She was clad in a brown woolen shift,
thin but freshly washed. Her forearm had been splinted and bound
up with linen, though. One side of her face felt wet and sti . When
she touched herself, she found some sort of damp poultice covering
her cheek and jaw and ear. Biter …
Brienne got to her feet. Her legs felt weak as water, her head as
light as air. “Is anyone there?”
Something moved in one of the shadowed alcoves behind the
candle; an old grey man clad in rags. The blankets that had covered
him slipped to the oor. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Lady
Brienne? You gave me a fright. I was dreaming.”
No, she thought, that was me. “What place is this? Is this a
dungeon?”
“A cave. Like rats, we must run back to our holes when the dogs
come sni ng after us, and there are more dogs every day.” He was
clad in the ragged remains of an old robe, pink and white. His hair
was long and grey and tangled, the loose skin of his cheeks and chin
was covered with coarse stubble. “Are you hungry? Could you keep
down a cup of milk? Perhaps some bread and honey?”

“I want my clothes. My sword.” She felt naked without her mail,
and she wanted Oathkeeper at her side. “The way out. Show me the
way out.” The oor of the cave was dirt and stone, rough beneath
the soles of her feet. Even now she felt light-headed, as if she were
oating. The ickering light cast queer shadows. Spirits of the slain,
she thought, dancing all about me, hiding when I turn to look at them.
Everywhere she saw holes and cracks and crevices, but there was no
way to know which passages led out, which would take her deeper
into the cave, and which went nowhere. All were black as pitch.
“Might I feel your brow, my lady?” Her gaoler’s hand was scarred
and hard with callus, yet strangely gentle. “Your fever has broken,”
he announced, in a voice avored with the accents of the Free
Cities. “Well and good. Just yesterday your esh felt as if it were on
re. Jeyne feared that we might lose you.”
“Jeyne. The tall girl?”
“The very one. Though she is not so tall as you, my lady. Long
Jeyne, the men call her. It was she who set your arm and splinted
it, as well as any maester. She did what she could for your face as
well, washing out the wounds with boiled ale to stop the
morti cation. Even so … a human bite is a lthy thing. That is
where the fever came from, I am certain.” The grey man touched
her bandaged face. “We had to cut away some of the esh. Your
face will not be pretty, I fear.”
It has never been pretty. “Scars, you mean?”
“My lady, that creature chewed o half your cheek.”
Brienne could not help but inch. Every knight has battle scars, Ser
Goodwin had warned her, when she asked him to teach her the
sword. Is that what you want, child? Her old master-at-arms had been
talking about sword cuts, though; he could never have anticipated
Biter’s pointed teeth. “Why set my bones and wash my wounds if
you only mean to hang me?”
“Why indeed?” He glanced at the candle, as if he could no longer
bear to look at her. “You fought bravely at the inn, they tell me.
Lem should not have left the crossroads. He was told to stay close,
hidden, to come at once if he saw smoke rising from the
chimney … but when word reached him that the Mad Dog of

Saltpans had been seen making his way north along the Green Fork,
he took the bait. We have been hunting that lot for so long … still,
he ought to have known better. As it was, it was half a day before
he realized that the mummers had used a stream to hide their tracks
and doubled back behind him, and then he lost more time circling
around a column of Frey knights. If not for you, only corpses might
have remained at the inn by the time that Lem and his men got
back. That was why Jeyne dressed your wounds, mayhaps.
Whatever else you may have done, you won those wounds
honorably, in the best of causes.”
Whatever else you may have done. “What is it that you think I’ve
done?” she said. “Who are you?”
“We were king’s men when we began,” the man told her, “but
king’s men must have a king, and we have none. We were brothers
too, but now our brotherhood is broken. I do not know who we are,
if truth be told, nor where we might be going. I only know the road
is dark. The res have not shown me what lies at its end.”
I know where it ends. I have seen the corpses in the trees. “Fires,”
Brienne repeated. All at once she understood. “You are the Myrish
priest. The red wizard.”
He looked down at his ragged robes, and smiled ruefully. “The
pink pretender, rather. I am Thoros, late of Myr, aye … a bad priest
and a worse wizard.”
“You ride with the Dondarrion. The lightning lord.”
“Lightning comes and goes and then is seen no more. So too with
men. Lord Beric’s re has gone out of this world, I fear. A grimmer
shadow leads us in his place.”
“The Hound?”
The priest pursed his lips. “The Hound is dead and buried.”
“I saw him. In the woods.”
“A fever dream, my lady.”
“He said that he would hang me.”
“Even dreams can lie. My lady, how long has it been since you
have eaten? Surely you are famished?”
She was, she realized. Her belly felt hollow. “Food … food would
be welcome, thank you.”

“A meal, then. Sit. We will talk more, but rst a meal. Wait
here.” Thoros lit a taper from the sagging candle, and vanished into
a black hole beneath a ledge of rock. Brienne found herself alone in
the small cave. For how long, though?
She prowled the chamber, looking for a weapon. Any sort of
weapon would have served; a sta , a club, a dagger. She found only
rocks. One t her st nicely … but she remembered the Whispers,
and what happened when Shagwell tried to pit a stone against a
knife. When she heard the priest’s returning footsteps, she let the
rock fall to the cavern oor and resumed her seat.
Thoros had bread and cheese and a bowl of stew. “I am sorry,” he
said. “The last of the milk had soured, and the honey is all gone.
Food grows scant. Still, this will ll you.”
The stew was cold and greasy, the bread hard, the cheese harder.
Brienne had never eaten anything half so good. “Are my
companions here?” she asked the priest, as she was spooning up the
last of the stew.
“The septon was set free to go upon his way. There was no harm
in him. The others are here, awaiting judgment.”
“Judgment?” She frowned. “Podrick Payne is just a boy.”
“He says he is a squire.”
“You know how boys will boast.”
“The Imp’s squire. He has fought in battles, by his own admission.
He has even killed, to hear him tell it.”
“A boy,” she said again. “Have pity.”
“My lady,” Thoros said, “I do not doubt that kindness and mercy
and forgiveness can still be found somewhere in these Seven
Kingdoms, but do not look for them here. This is a cave, not a
temple. When men must live like rats in the dark beneath the earth,
they soon run out of pity, as they do of milk and honey.”
“And justice? Can that be found in caves?”
“Justice.” Thoros smiled wanly. “I remember justice. It had a
pleasant taste. Justice was what we were about when Beric led us,
or so we told ourselves. We were king’s men, knights, and
heroes … but some knights are dark and full of terror, my lady.
War makes monsters of us all.”

“Are you saying you are monsters?”
“I am saying we are human. You are not the only one with
wounds, Lady Brienne. Some of my brothers were good men when
this began. Some were … less good, shall we say? Though there are
those who say it does not matter how a man begins, but only how
he ends. I suppose it is the same for women.” The priest got to his
feet. “Our time together is at an end, I fear. I hear my brothers
coming. Our lady sends for you.”
Brienne heard their footsteps and saw torchlight ickering in the
passage. “You told me she had gone to Fairmarket.”
“And so she had. She returned whilst we were sleeping. She never
sleeps herself.”
I will not be afraid, she told herself, but it was too late for that. I
will not let them see my fear, she promised herself instead. There
were four of them, hard men with haggard faces, clad in mail and
scale and leather. She recognized one of them; the man with one
eye, from her dreams.
The biggest of the four wore a stained and tattered yellow cloak.
“Enjoy the food?” he asked. “I hope so. It’s the last food you’re ever
like to eat.” He was brown-haired, bearded, brawny, with a broken
nose that had healed badly. I know this man, Brienne thought. “You
are the Hound.”
He grinned. His teeth were awful; crooked, and streaked brown
with rot. “I suppose I am. Seeing as how m’lady went and killed the
last one.” He turned his head and spat.
She remembered lightning ashing, the mud beneath her feet. “It
was Rorge I killed. He took the helm from Clegane’s grave, and you
stole it o his corpse.”
“I didn’t hear him objecting.”
Thoros sucked in his breath in dismay. “Is this true? A dead man’s
helm? Have we fallen that low?”
The big man scowled at him. “It’s good steel.”
“There is nothing good about that helm, nor the men who wore
it,” said the red priest. “Sandor Clegane was a man in torment, and
Rorge a beast in human skin.”
“I’m not them.”

“Then why show the world their face? Savage, snarling,
twisted … is that who you would be, Lem?”
“The sight of it will make my foes afraid.”
“The sight of it makes me afraid.”
“Close your eyes, then.” The man in the yellow cloak made a
sharp gesture. “Bring the whore.”
Brienne did not resist. There were four of them, and she was
weak and wounded, naked beneath the woolen shift. She had to
bend her neck to keep from hitting her head as they marched her
through the twisting passage. The way ahead rose sharply, turning
twice before emerging in a much larger cavern full of outlaws.
A re pit had been dug into the center of the oor, and the air
was blue with smoke. Men clustered near the ames, warming
themselves against the chill of the cave. Others stood along the
walls or sat cross-legged on straw pallets. There were women too,
and even a few children peering out from behind their mothers’
skirts. The one face Brienne knew belonged to Long Jeyne Heddle.
A trestle table had been set up across the cave, in a cleft in the
rock. Behind it sat a woman all in grey, cloaked and hooded. In her
hands was a crown, a bronze circlet ringed by iron swords. She was
studying it, her ngers stroking the blades as if to test their
sharpness. Her eyes glimmered under her hood.
Grey was the color of the silent sisters, the handmaidens of the
Stranger. Brienne felt a shiver climb her spine. Stoneheart.
“M’lady,” said the big man. “Here she is.”
“Aye,” added the one-eyed man. “The Kingslayer’s whore.”
She inched. “Why would you call me that?”
“If I had a silver stag for every time you said his name, I’d be as
rich as your friends the Lannisters.”
“That was only … you do not understand …”
“Don’t we, though?” The big man laughed. “I think we might.
There’s a stink of lion about you, lady.”
“That’s not so.”
Another of the outlaws stepped forward, a younger man in a
greasy sheepskin jerkin. In his hand was Oathkeeper. “This says it
is.” His voice was frosted with the accents of the north. He slid the

sword from its scabbard and placed it in front of Lady Stoneheart.
In the light from the repit the red and black ripples in the blade
almost seem to move, but the woman in grey had eyes only for the
pommel: a golden lion’s head, with ruby eyes that shone like two
red stars.
“There is this as well.” Thoros of Myr drew a parchment from his
sleeve, and put it down next to the sword. “It bears the boy king’s
seal and says the bearer is about his business.”
Lady Stoneheart set the sword aside to read the letter.
“The sword was given me for a good purpose,” said Brienne. “Ser
Jaime swore an oath to Catelyn Stark …”
“… before his friends cut her throat for her, that must have
been,” said the big man in the yellow cloak. “We all know about the
Kingslayer and his oaths.”
It is no good, Brienne realized. No words of mine will sway them.
She plunged ahead despite that. “He promised Lady Catelyn her
daughters, but by the time we reached King’s Landing they were
gone. Jaime sent me out to seek the Lady Sansa …”
“… and if you had found the girl,” asked the young northman,
“what were you to do with her?”
“Protect her. Take her somewhere safe.”
The big man laughed. “Where’s that? Cersei’s dungeon?”
“No.”
“Deny it all you want. That sword says you’re a liar. Are we
supposed to believe the Lannisters are handing out gold and ruby
swords to foes? That the Kingslayer meant for you to hide the girl
from his own twin? I suppose the paper with the boy king’s seal was
just in case you needed to wipe your arse? And then there’s the
company you keep …” The big man turned and beckoned, the ranks
of outlaws parted, and two more captives were brought forth. “The
boy was the Imp’s own squire, m’lady,” he said to Lady Stoneheart.
“T’other is one of Randyll Bloody Tarly’s bloody household
knights.”
Hyle Hunt had been beaten so badly that his face was swollen
almost beyond recognition. He stumbled as they shoved him, and

almost fell. Podrick caught him by the arm. “Ser,” the boy said
miserably, when he saw Brienne. “My lady, I mean. Sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” Brienne turned to Lady
Stoneheart. “Whatever treachery you think I may have done, my
lady, Podrick and Ser Hyle were no part of it.”
“They’re lions,” said the one-eyed man. “That’s enough. I say they
hang. Tarly’s hanged a score o’ ours, past time we strung up some o’
his.”
Ser Hyle gave Brienne a faint smile. “My lady,” he said, “you
should have wed me when I made my o er. Now I fear you’re
doomed to die a maid, and me a poor man.”
“Let them go,” Brienne pleaded.
The woman in grey gave no answer. She studied the sword, the
parchment, the bronze-and-iron crown. Finally she reached up under
her jaw and grasped her neck, as if she meant to throttle herself.
Instead she spoke … Her voice was halting, broken, tortured. The
sound seemed to come from her throat, part croak, part wheeze,
part death rattle. The language of the damned, thought Brienne. “I
don’t understand. What did she say?”
“She asked the name of this blade of yours,” said the young
northman in the sheepskin jerkin.
“Oathkeeper,” Brienne answered.
The woman in grey hissed through her ngers. Her eyes were two
red pits burning in the shadows. She spoke again.
“No, she says. Call it Oathbreaker, she says. It was made for
treachery and murder. She names it False Friend. Like you.”
“To whom have I been false?”
“To her,” the northman said. “Can it be that my lady has
forgotten that you once swore her your service?”
There was only one woman that the Maid of Tarth had ever
sworn to serve. “That cannot be,” she said. “She’s dead.”
“Death and guest right,” muttered Long Jeyne Heddle. “They
don’t mean so much as they used to, neither one.”
Lady Stoneheart lowered her hood and unwound the grey wool
scarf from her face. Her hair was dry and brittle, white as bone. Her
brow was mottled green and grey, spotted with the brown blooms

of decay. The esh of her face clung in ragged strips from her eyes
down to her jaw. Some of the rips were crusted with dried blood,
but others gaped open to reveal the skull beneath.
Her face, Brienne thought. Her face was so strong and handsome,
her skin so smooth and soft. “Lady Catelyn?” Tears lled her eyes.
“They said … they said that you were dead.”
“She is,” said Thoros of Myr. “The Freys slashed her throat from
ear to ear. When we found her by the river she was three days
dead. Harwin begged me to give her the kiss of life, but it had been
too long. I would not do it, so Lord Beric put his lips to hers instead,
and the ame of life passed from him to her. And … she rose. May
the Lord of Light protect us. She rose.”
Am I dreaming still? Brienne wondered. Is this another nightmare
born from Biter’s teeth? “I never betrayed her. Tell her that. I swear
it by the Seven. I swear it by my sword.”
The thing that had been Catelyn Stark took hold of her throat
again, ngers pinching at the ghastly long slash in her neck, and
choked out more sounds. “Words are wind, she says,” the northman
told Brienne. “She says that you must prove your faith.”
“How?” asked Brienne.
“With your sword. Oathkeeper, you call it? Then keep your oath to
her, milady says.”
“What does she want of me?”
“She wants her son alive, or the men who killed him dead,” said
the big man. “She wants to feed the crows, like they did at the Red
Wedding. Freys and Boltons, aye. We’ll give her those, as many as
she likes. All she asks from you is Jaime Lannister.”
Jaime. The name was a knife, twisting in her belly. “Lady
Catelyn, I … you do not understand, Jaime … he saved me from
being raped when the Bloody Mummers took us, and later he came
back for me, he leapt into the bear pit empty-handed … I swear to
you, he is not the man he was. He sent me after Sansa to keep her
safe, he could not have had a part in the Red Wedding.”
Lady Catelyn’s ngers dug deep into her throat, and the words
came rattling out, choked and broken, a stream as cold as ice. The
northman said, “She says that you must choose. Take the sword and

slay the Kingslayer, or be hanged for a betrayer. The sword or the
noose, she says. Choose, she says. Choose.”
Brienne remembered her dream, waiting in her father’s hall for
the boy she was to marry. In the dream she had bitten o her
tongue. My mouth was full of blood. She took a ragged breath and
said, “I will not make that choice.”
There was a long silence. Then Lady Stoneheart spoke again. This
time Brienne understood her words. There were only two. “Hang
them,” she croaked.
“As you command, m’lady,” said the big man.
They bound Brienne’s wrists with rope again and led her from the
cavern, up a twisting stony path to the surface. It was morning
outside, she was surprised to see. Shafts of pale dawn light were
slanting through the trees. So many trees to choose from, she thought.
They will not need to take us far.
Nor did they. Beneath a crooked willow, the outlaws slipped a
noose about her neck, jerked it tight, and tossed the other end of
the rope over a limb. Hyle Hunt and Podrick Payne were given
elms. Ser Hyle was shouting that he would kill Jaime Lannister, but
the Hound cu ed him across the face and shut him up. He had
donned the helm again. “If you got crimes to confess to your gods,
this would be the time to say them.”
“Podrick has never harmed you. My father will ransom him.
Tarth is called the sapphire isle. Send Podrick with my bones to
Evenfall, and you’ll have sapphires, silver, whatever you want.”
“I want my wife and daughter back,” said the Hound. “Can your
father give me that? If not, he can get buggered. The boy will rot
beside you. Wolves will gnaw your bones.”
“Do you mean to hang her, Lem?” asked the one-eyed man. “Or
do you gure to talk the bitch to death?”
The Hound snatched the end of the rope from the man holding it.
“Let’s see if she can dance,” he said, and gave a yank.
Brienne felt the hemp constricting, digging into her skin, jerking
her chin upward. Ser Hyle was cursing them eloquently, but not the
boy. Podrick never lifted his eyes, not even when his feet were
jerked up o the ground. If this is another dream, it is time for me to

awaken. If this is real, it is time for me to die. All she could see was
Podrick, the noose around his thin neck, his legs twitching. Her
mouth opened. Pod was kicking, choking, dying. Brienne sucked the
air in desperately, even as the rope was strangling her. Nothing had
ever hurt so much.
She screamed a word.

CERSEI

Septa Moelle was a white-haired harridan with a face as sharp as an
axe and lips pursed in perpetual disapproval. This one still has her
maidenhead, I’ll wager, Cersei thought, though by now it’s hard and
sti as boiled leather. Six of the High Sparrow’s knights escorted her,
with the rainbow sword of their reborn order emblazoned on their
kite shields.
“Septa.” Cersei sat beneath the Iron Throne, clad in green silk and
golden lace. “Tell his High Holiness that we are vexed with him. He
presumes too much.” Emeralds glimmered on her ngers and in her
golden hair. The eyes of court and city were upon her, and she
meant for them to see Lord Tywin’s daughter. By the time this
mummer’s farce was done they would know they had but one true
queen. But rst we must dance the dance and never miss a step. “Lady
Margaery is my son’s true and gentle wife, his helpmate and
consort. His High Holiness had no cause to lay his hands upon her
person, or to con ne her and her young cousins, who are so dear to
all of us. I demand that he release them.”
Septa Moelle’s stern expression did not icker. “I shall convey
Your Grace’s words to His High Holiness, but it grieves me to say
that the young queen and her ladies cannot be released until and
unless their innocence has been proved.”
“Innocence? Why, you need only look upon their sweet young
faces to see how innocent they are.”

“A sweet face oft hides a sinner’s heart.”
Lord Merryweather spoke up from the council table. “What
o ense have these young maids been accused of, and by whom?”
The septa said, “Megga Tyrell and Elinor Tyrell stand accused of
lewdness, fornication, and conspiracy to commit high treason. Alla
Tyrell has been charged with witnessing their shame and helping
them conceal it. All this Queen Margaery has also been accused of,
as well as adultery and high treason.”
Cersei put a hand to her breast. “Tell me who is spreading such
calumnies about my good-daughter! I do not believe a word of this.
My sweet son loves Lady Margaery with all his heart, she could
never have been so cruel as to play him false.”
“The accuser is a knight of your own household. Ser Osney
Kettleblack has confessed his carnal knowledge of the queen to the
High Septon himself, before the altar of the Father.”
At the council table Harys Swyft gasped, and Grand Maester
Pycelle turned away. A buzz lled the air, as if a thousand wasps
were loose in the throne room. Some of the ladies in the galleries
began to slip away, followed by a stream of petty lords and knights
from the back of the hall. The gold cloaks let them go, but the
queen had instructed Ser Osfryd to make note of all who ed.
Suddenly the Tyrell rose does not smell so sweet.
“Ser Osney is young and lusty, I will grant you,” the queen said,
“but a faithful knight for all that. If he says that he was part of
this … no, it cannot be. Margaery is a maiden!”
“She is not. I examined her myself, at the behest of His High
Holiness. Her maidenhead is not intact. Septa Aglantine and Septa
Melicent will say the same, as will Queen Margaery’s own septa,
Nysterica, who has been con ned to a penitent’s cell for her part in
the queen’s shame. Lady Megga and Lady Elinor were examined as
well. Both were found to have been broken.”
The wasps were growing so loud that the queen could hardly hear
herself think. I do hope the little queen and her cousins enjoyed those
rides of theirs.
Lord Merryweather thumped his
st on the table. “Lady
Margaery had sworn solemn oaths attesting to her maidenhood, to

Her Grace the queen and her late father. Many here bore witness.
Lord Tyrell has also testi ed to her innocence, as has the Lady
Olenna, whom we all know to be above reproach. Would you have
us believe that all of these noble people lied to us?”
“Perhaps they were deceived as well, my lord,” said Septa
Moelle. “I cannot speak to this. I can only swear to the truth of
what I discovered for myself when I examined the queen.”
The picture of this sour old crone poking her wrinkled ngers up
Margaery’s little pink cunt was so droll that Cersei almost laughed.
“We insist that His High Holiness allow our own maesters to
examine my good-daughter, to determine if there is any shred of
truth to these slanders. Grand Maester Pycelle, you shall accompany
Septa Moelle back to Beloved Baelor’s Sept, and return to us with
the truth about our Margaery’s maidenhead.”
Pycelle had gone the color of curdled white. At council meetings
the wretched old fool cannot say enough, but now that I need a few
words from him he has lost the power of speech, the queen thought,
before the old man nally came out with, “There is no need for me
to examine her … her privy parts.” His voice was a quaver. “I
grieve to say … Queen Margaery is no maiden. She has required me
to make her moon tea, not once, but many times.”
The uproar that followed that was all that Cersei Lannister could
ever have hoped for.
Even the royal herald beating on the oor with his sta did little
to quell the noise. The queen let it wash over her for a few
heartbeats, savoring the sounds of the little queen’s disgrace. When
it had gone on long enough, she rose stone-faced and commanded
that the gold cloaks clear the hall. Margaery Tyrell is done, she
thought, exulting. Her white knights fell in around her as she made
her exit through the king’s door behind the Iron Throne; Boros
Blount, Meryn Trant, and Osmund Kettleblack, the last of the
Kingsguard still remaining in the city.
Moon Boy was standing beside the door, holding his rattle in his
hand and gaping at the confusion with his big round eyes. A fool he
may be, but he wears his folly honestly. Maggy the Frog should have
been in motley too, for all she knew about the morrow. Cersei prayed

the old fraud was screaming down in hell. The younger queen
whose coming she’d foretold was nished, and if that prophecy
could fail, so could the rest. No golden shrouds, no valonqar, I am
free of your croaking malice at last.
The remnants of her small council followed her out. Harys Swyft
appeared dazed. He stumbled at the door and might have fallen if
Aurane Waters had not caught him by the arm. Even Orton
Merryweather seemed anxious. “The smallfolk are fond of the little
queen,” he said. “They will not take well to this. I fear what might
happen next, Your Grace.”
“Lord Merryweather is right,” said Lord Waters. “If it please Your
Grace, I will launch the rest of our new dromonds. The sight of
them upon the Blackwater with King Tommen’s banner ying from
their masts will remind the city who rules here, and keep them safe
should the mobs decide to run riot again.”
He left the rest unspoken; once on the Blackwater, his dromonds
could stop Mace Tyrell from bringing his army back across the
river, just as Tyrion had once stopped Stannis. Highgarden had no
sea power of its own this side of Westeros. They relied upon the
Redwyne eet, presently on its way back to the Arbor.
“A prudent measure,” the queen announced. “Until this storm has
passed, I want your ships crewed and on the water.”
Ser Harys Swyft was so pale and damp he looked about to faint.
“When word of this reaches Lord Tyrell, his fury will know no
bounds. There will be blood in the streets …”
The knight of the yellow chicken, Cersei mused. You ought to take a
worm for your sigil, ser. A chicken is too bold for you. If Mace Tyrell will
not even assault Storm’s End, how do you imagine that he would ever
dare attack the gods? When he was done blathering she said, “It must
not come to blood, and I mean to see that it does not. I will go to
Baelor’s Sept myself to speak to Queen Margaery and the High
Septon. Tommen loves them both, I know, and would want me to
make peace between them.”
“Peace?” Ser Harys dabbed at his brow with a velvet sleeve. “If
peace is possible … that is very brave of you.”

“Some sort of trial may be necessary,” said the queen, “to
disprove these base calumnies and lies and show the world that our
sweet Margaery is the innocent we all know her to be.”
“Aye,” said Merryweather, “but this High Septon may want to try
the queen himself, as the Faith once tried men of old.”
I hope so, Cersei thought. Such a court was not like to look with
favor on treasonous queens who spread their legs for singers and
profaned the Maiden’s holy rites to hide their shame. “The
important thing is to nd the truth, I am sure we all agree,” she
said. “And now, my lords, you must excuse me. I must go see the
king. He should not be alone at such a time.”
Tommen was shing for cats when his mother returned to him.
Dorcas had made him a mouse with scraps of fur and tied it on a
long string at the end of an old shing pole. The kittens loved to
chase it, and the boy liked nothing better than jerking it about the
oor as they pounced after it. He seemed surprised when Cersei
gathered him up in her arms and kissed him on his brow. “What’s
that for, Mother? Why are you crying?”
Because you’re safe, she wanted to tell him. Because no harm will
ever come to you. “You are mistaken. A lion never cries.” There
would be time later to tell him about Margaery and her cousins.
“There are some warrants that I need you to sign.”
For the king’s sake, the queen had left the names o the arrest
warrants. Tommen signed them blank, and pressed his seal into the
warm wax happily, as he always did. Afterward she sent him o
with Jocelyn Swyft.
Ser Osfryd Kettleblack arrived as the ink was drying. Cersei had
written in the names herself: Ser Tallad the Tall, Jalabhar Xho,
Hamish the Harper, Hugh Clifton, Mark Mullendore, Bayard
Norcross, Lambert Turnberry, Horas Redwyne, Hobber Redwyne,
and a certain churl named Wat, who called himself the Blue Bard.
“So many.” Ser Osfryd shu ed through the warrants, as wary of
the words as if they had been roaches crawling across the
parchment. None of the Kettleblacks could read.
“Ten. You have six thousand gold cloaks. Su cient for ten, I
would think. Some of the clever ones may have ed, if the rumors

reached their ears in time. If so, it makes no matter, their absence
only makes them look that much more guilty. Ser Tallad is a bit of
an oaf and may try to resist you. See that he does not die before
confessing, and do no harm to any of the others. A few may well be
innocent.” It was important that the Redwyne twins be found to
have been falsely accused. That would demonstrate the fairness of
the judgments against the others.
“We’ll have them all before the sun comes up, Your Grace.” Ser
Osfryd hesitated. “There’s a crowd gathering outside the door of
Baelor’s Sept.”
“What sort of crowd?” Anything unexpected made her wary. She
remembered what Lord Waters had said about the riots. I had not
considered how the smallfolk might react to this. Margaery has been their
little pet. “How many?”
“A hundred or so. They’re shouting for the High Septon to release
the little queen. We can send them running, if you like.”
“No. Let them shout until they’re hoarse, it will not sway the
Sparrow. He only listens to the gods.” There was a certain irony in
His High Holiness having an angry mob encamped upon his
doorstep, since just such a mob had raised him to the crystal crown.
Which he promptly sold. “The Faith has its own knights now. Let
them defend the sept. Oh, and close the city gates as well. No one is
to enter or leave King’s Landing without my leave, until all this is
done and settled.”
“As you command, Your Grace.” Ser Osfryd bowed and went o
to nd someone to read the warrants to him.
By the time the sun went down that day, all of the accused
traitors were in custody. Hamish the Harper had collapsed when
they came for him, and Ser Tallad the Tall had wounded three gold
cloaks before the others overwhelmed him. Cersei ordered that the
Redwyne twins be given comfortable chambers in a tower. The rest
went down to the dungeons.
“Hamish is having di culty breathing,” Qyburn informed her
when he came to call that night. “He is calling for a maester.”
“Tell him he can have one as soon as he confesses.” She thought a
moment. “He is too old to have been amongst the lovers, but no

doubt he was made to play and sing for Margaery whilst she was
entertaining other men. We will need details.”
“I shall help him to remember them, Your Grace.”
The next day, Lady Merryweather helped Cersei dress for their
visit to the little queen. “Nothing too rich or colorful,” she said.
“Something suitably devout and drab for the High Septon. He’s like
to make me pray with him.”
In the end, she chose a soft woolen dress that covered her from
throat to ankle, with only a few small vines embroidered on the
bodice and the sleeves in golden thread to soften the severity of its
lines. Even better, brown would help conceal the dirt if she was
made to kneel. “Whilst I am comforting my good-daughter you shall
speak with the three cousins,” she told Taena. “Win Alla if you can,
but be careful what you say. The gods may not be the only ones
listening.”
Jaime always said that the hardest part of any battle is just
before, waiting for the carnage to begin. When she stepped outside,
Cersei saw that the sky was grey and bleak. She could not take the
risk of being caught in a downpour and arriving at Baelor’s Sept
soaked and bedraggled. That meant the litter. For her escort, she
took ten Lannister house guards and Boros Blount. “Margaery’s mob
may not have the wit to tell one Kettleblack from another,” she told
Ser Osmund, “and I cannot have you cutting through the commons.
Best we keep you out of sight for a time.”
As they made their way across King’s Landing, Taena had a
sudden doubt. “This trial,” she said, in a quiet voice, “what if
Margaery demands that her guilt or innocence be determined by
wager of battle?”
A smile brushed Cersei’s lips. “As queen, her honor must be
defended by a knight of the Kingsguard. Why, every child in
Westeros knows how Prince Aemon the Dragonknight championed
his sister Queen Naerys against Ser Morghil’s accusations. With Ser
Loras so gravely wounded, though, I fear Prince Aemon’s part must
fall to one of his Sworn Brothers.” She shrugged. “Who, though? Ser
Arys and Ser Balon are far away in Dorne, Jaime is o at Riverrun,

and Ser Osmund is the brother of the man accusing her, which
leaves only … oh, dear …”
“Boros Blount and Meryn Trant.” Lady Taena laughed.
“Yes, and Ser Meryn has been feeling ill of late. Remind me to
tell him that when we return to the castle.”
“I shall, my sweet.” Taena took her hand and kissed it. “I pray
that I never o end you. You are terrible when roused.”
“Any mother would do the same to protect her children,” said
Cersei. “When do you mean to bring that boy of yours to court?
Russell, was that his name? He could train with Tommen.”
“That would thrill the boy, I know … but things are so uncertain
just now, I thought it best to wait until the danger passed.”
“Soon enough,” promised Cersei. “Send word to Longtable and
have Russell pack his best doublet and his wooden sword. A new
young friend will be just the thing to help Tommen forget his loss,
after Margaery’s little head has rolled.”
They descended from the litter under Blessed Baelor’s statue. The
queen was pleased to see that the bones and lth had been cleaned
away. Ser Osfryd had told it true; the crowd was neither as
numerous nor as unruly as the sparrows had been. They stood about
in small clumps, gazing sullenly at the doors of the Great Sept,
where a line of novice septons had been drawn up with quartersta s
in their hands. No steel, Cersei noted. That was either very wise or
very stupid, she was not sure which.
No one made any attempt to hinder her. Smallfolk and novices
alike parted as they passed. Once inside the doors, they were met
by three knights in the Hall of Lamps, each clad in the rainbowstriped robes of the Warrior’s Sons. “I am here to see my gooddaughter,” Cersei told them.
“His High Holiness has been expecting you. I am Ser Theodan the
True, formerly Ser Theodan Wells. If Your Grace will come with
me.”
The High Sparrow was on his knees, as ever. This time he was
praying before the Father’s altar. Nor did he break o his prayer
when the queen approached, but made her wait impatiently until he

had nished. Only then did he rise and bow to her. “Your Grace.
This is a sad day.”
“Very sad. Do we have your leave to speak with Margaery and
her cousins?” She chose a meek and humble manner; with this man,
that was like to work the best.
“If that is your wish. Come to me afterward, my child. We must
pray together, you and I.”
The little queen had been con ned atop one of the Great Sept’s
slender towers. Her cell was eight feet long and six feet wide, with
no furnishings but a straw-stu ed pallet and a bench for prayer, a
ewer of water, a copy of The Seven-Pointed Star, and a candle to read
it by. The only window was hardly wider than an arrow slit.
Cersei found Margaery barefoot and shivering, clad in the
roughspun shift of a novice sister. Her locks were all a tangle, and
her feet were lthy. “They took my clothes from me,” the little
queen told her once they were alone. “I wore a gown of ivory lace,
with freshwater pearls on the bodice, but the septas laid their hands
on me and stripped me to the skin. My cousins too. Megga sent one
septa crashing into the candles and set her robe a re. I fear for Alla,
though. She went as white as milk, too frightened even to cry.”
“Poor child.” There were no chairs, so Cersei sat beside the little
queen on her pallet. “Lady Taena has gone to speak with her, to let
her know that she is not forgotten.”
“He will not even let me see them,” fumed Margaery. “He keeps
each of us apart from the others. Until you came, I was allowed no
visitors but septas. One comes every hour to ask if I wish to confess
my fornications. They will not even let me sleep. They wake me to
demand confessions. Last night I confessed to Septa Unella that I
wished to scratch her eyes out.”
A shame you did not do it, Cersei thought. Blinding some poor old
septa would certainly persuade the High Sparrow of your guilt. “They
are questioning your cousins the same way.”
“Damn them, then,” said Margaery. “Damn them all to seven
hells. Alla is gentle and shy, how can they do this to her? And
Megga … she laughs as loud as a dockside whore, I know, but

inside she’s still just a little girl. I love them all, and they love me.
If this sparrow thinks to make them lie about me …”
“They stand accused as well, I fear. All three.”
“My cousins?” Margaery paled. “Alla and Megga are hardly more
than children. Your Grace, this … this is obscene. Will you take us
out of here?”
“Would that I could.” Her voice was full of sorrow. “His High
Holiness has his new knights guarding you. To free you I would
need to send the gold cloaks and profane this holy place with
killing.” Cersei took Margaery’s hand in hers. “I have not been idle,
though. I have gathered up all those that Ser Osney named as your
lovers. They will tell His High Holiness of your innocence, I am
certain, and swear to it at your trial.”
“Trial?” There was real fear in the girl’s voice now. “Must there
be a trial?”
“How else will you prove your innocence?” Cersei gave
Margaery’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “It is your right to decide the
manner of the trial, to be sure. You are the queen. The knights of
the Kingsguard are sworn to defend you.”
Margaery understood at once. “A trial by battle? Loras is hurt,
though, elsewise he …”
“He has six brothers.”
Margaery stared at her, then pulled her hand away. “Is that a
jape? Boros is a craven, Meryn is old and slow, your brother is
maimed, the other two are o in Dorne, and Osmund is a bloody
Kettleblack. Loras has two brothers, not six. If there’s to be a trial by
battle, I want Garlan as my champion.”
“Ser Garlan is not a member of the Kingsguard,” the queen said.
“When the queen’s honor is at issue, law and custom require that
her champion be one of the king’s sworn seven. The High Septon
will insist, I fear.” I will make certain of it.
Margaery did not answer at once, but her brown eyes narrowed
in suspicion. “Blount or Trant,” she said at last. “It would have to be
one of them. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Osney Kettleblack
would cut either one to pieces.”

Seven hells. Cersei donned a look of hurt. “You wrong me,
daughter. All I want—”
“—is your son, all for yourself. He will never have a wife that
you don’t hate. And I am not your daughter, thank the gods. Leave
me.”
“You are being foolish. I am only here to help you.”
“To help me to my grave. I asked for you to leave. Will you make
me call my gaolers and have you dragged away, you vile, scheming,
evil bitch?”
Cersei gathered up her skirts and dignity. “This must be very
frightening for you. I shall forgive those words.” Here, as at court,
one never knew who might be listening. “I would be afraid as well,
in your place. Grand Maester Pycelle has admitted providing you
with moon tea, and your Blue Bard … if I were you, my lady, I
would pray to the Crone for wisdom and to the Mother for her
mercy. I fear you may soon be in dire need of both.”
Four shriveled septas escorted the queen down the tower steps.
Each of the crones seemed more feeble than the last. When they
reached the ground they continued down, into the heart of Visenya’s
Hill. The steps ended well below the earth, where a line of
ickering torches lit a long hallway.
She found the High Septon waiting for her in a small seven-sided
audience chamber. The room was sparse and plain, with bare stone
walls, a rough-hewn table, three chairs, and a prayer bench. The
faces of the Seven had been carved into the walls. Cersei thought
the carvings crude and ugly, but there was a certain power to them,
especially about the eyes, orbs of onyx, malachite, and yellow
moonstone that somehow made the faces come alive.
“You spoke with the queen,” the High Septon said.
She resisted the urge to say, I am the queen. “I did.”
“All men sin, even kings and queens. I have sinned myself, and
been forgiven. Without confession, though, there can be no
forgiveness. The queen will not confess.”
“Perhaps she is innocent.”
“She is not. Holy septas have examined her, and testify that her
maidenhead is broken. She has drunk of moon tea, to murder the

fruit of her fornications in her womb. An anointed knight has sworn
upon his sword to having carnal knowledge of her and two of her
three cousins. Others have lain with her as well, he says, and names
many names of men both great and humble.”
“My gold cloaks have taken all of them to the dungeons,” Cersei
assured him. “Only one has yet been questioned, a singer called the
Blue Bard. What he had to say was disturbing. Even so, I pray that
when my good-daughter is brought to trial, her innocence may yet
be proved.” She hesitated. “Tommen loves his little queen so much,
Your Holiness, I fear it might be hard for him or his lords to judge
her justly. Perhaps the Faith should conduct the trial?”
The High Sparrow steepled his thin hands. “I have had the
selfsame thought, Your Grace. Just as Maegor the Cruel once took
the swords from the Faith, so Jaehaerys the Conciliator deprived us
of the scales of judgment. Yet who is truly t to judge a queen, save
the Seven Above and the godsworn below? A sacred court of seven
judges shall sit upon this case. Three shall be of your female sex. A
maiden, a mother, and a crone. Who could be more suited to judge
the wickedness of women?”
“That would be for the best. To be sure, Margaery does have the
right to demand that her guilt or innocence be proven by wager of
battle. If so, her champion must be one of Tommen’s Seven.”
“The knights of the Kingsguard have served as the rightful
champions of king and queen since the days of Aegon the
Conqueror. Crown and Faith speak as one on this.”
Cersei covered her face with her hands, as if in grief. When she
raised her head again, a tear glistened in one eye. “These are sad
days indeed,” she said, “but I am pleased to nd us so much in
agreement. If Tommen were here I know he would thank you.
Together you and I must nd the truth.”
“We shall.”
“I must return to the castle. With your leave, I will take Ser
Osney Kettleblack back with me. The small council will want to
question him, and hear his accusations for themselves.”
“No,” said the High Septon.

It was only a word, one little word, but to Cersei it felt like a
splash of icy water in the face. She blinked, and her certainty
ickered, just a little. “Ser Osney will be held securely, I promise
you.”
“He is held securely here. Come. I will show you.”
Cersei could feel the eyes of the Seven staring at her, eyes of jade
and malachite and onyx, and a sudden shiver of fear went through
her, cold as ice. I am the queen, she told herself. Lord Tywin’s
daughter. Reluctantly, she followed.
Ser Osney was not far. The chamber was dark, and closed by a
heavy iron door. The High Septon produced the key to open it, and
took a torch down from the wall to light the room within. “After
you, Your Grace.”
Within, Osney Kettleblack hung naked from the ceiling, swinging
from a pair of heavy iron chains. He had been whipped. His back
and shoulders been laid almost bare, and cuts and welts crisscrossed
his legs and arse as well.
The queen could hardly stand to look at him. She turned back to
the High Septon. “What have you done?”
“We have sought after the truth, most earnestly.”
“He told you the truth. He came to you of his own free will and
confessed his sins.”
“Aye. He did that. I have heard many men confess, Your Grace,
but seldom have I heard a man so pleased to be so guilty.”
“You whipped him!”
“There can be no penance without pain. No man should spare
himself the scourge, as I told Ser Osney. I seldom feel so close to
god as when I am being whipped for mine own wickedness, though
my darkest sins are no wise near as black as his.”
“B-but,” she sputtered, “you preach the Mother’s mercy …”
“Ser Osney shall taste of that sweet milk in the afterlife. In The
Seven-Pointed Star it is written that all sins may be forgiven, but
crimes must still be punished. Osney Kettleblack is guilty of treason
and murder, and the wages of treason are death.”
He is just a priest, he cannot do this. “It is not for the Faith to
condemn a man to death, whatever his o ense.”

“Whatever his o ense.” The High Septon repeated the words
slowly, weighing them. “Strange to say, Your Grace, the more
diligently we applied the scourge, the more Ser Osney’s o enses
seemed to change. He would now have us believe that he never
touched Margaery Tyrell. Is that not so, Ser Osney?”
Osney Kettleblack opened his eyes. When he saw the queen
standing there before him he ran his tongue across his swollen lips,
and said, “The Wall. You promised me the Wall.”
“He is mad,” said Cersei. “You have driven him mad.”
“Ser Osney,” said the High Septon, in a rm, clear voice, “did you
have carnal knowledge of the queen?”
“Aye.” The chains rattled softly as Osney twisted in his shackles.
“That one there. She’s the queen I fucked, the one sent me to kill
the old High Septon. He never had no guards. I just come in when
he was sleeping and pushed a pillow down across his face.”
Cersei whirled, and ran.
The High Septon tried to seize her, but he was some old sparrow
and she was a lioness of the Rock. She pushed him aside and burst
through the door, slamming it behind her with a clang. The
Kettleblacks, I need the Kettleblacks, I will send in Osfryd with the gold
cloaks and Osmund with the Kingsguard, Osney will deny it all once they
cut him free, and I’ll rid myself of this High Septon just as I did the other.
The four old septas blocked her way and clutched at her with
wrinkled hands. She knocked one to the oor and clawed another
across the face, and gained the steps. Halfway up, she remembered
Taena Merryweather. It made her stumble, panting. Seven save me,
she prayed. Taena knows it all. If they take her too, and whip her …
She ran as far as the sept, but no farther. There were women
waiting for her there, more septas and silent sisters too, younger
than the four old crones below. “I am the queen,” she shouted,
backing away from them. “I will have your heads for this, I will
have all your heads. Let me pass.” Instead, they laid hands upon
her. Cersei ran to the altar of the Mother, but they caught her there,
a score of them, and dragged her kicking up the tower steps. Inside
the cell three silent sisters held her down as a septa named Scolera
stripped her bare. She even took her smallclothes. Another septa

tossed a roughspun shift at her. “You cannot do this,” the queen
kept screaming at them. “I am a Lannister, unhand me, my brother
will kill you, Jaime will slice you open from throat to cunt, unhand
me! I am the queen!”
“The queen should pray,” said Septa Scolera, before they left her
naked in the cold bleak cell.
She was not meek Margaery Tyrell, to don her little shift and
submit to such captivity. I will teach them what it means to put a lion
in a cage, Cersei thought. She tore the shift into a hundred pieces,
found a ewer of water and smashed it against the wall, then did the
same with the chamber pot. When no one came, she began to pound
on the door with her sts. Her escort was below, on the plaza: ten
Lannister guardsmen and Ser Boros Blount. Once they hear they’ll
come free me, and we’ll drag the bloody High Sparrow back to the Red
Keep in chains.
She screamed and kicked and howled until her throat was raw, at
the door and at the window. No one shouted back, nor came to
rescue her. The cell began to darken. It was growing cold as well.
Cersei began to shiver. How can they leave me like this, without so
much as a re? I am their queen. She began to regret tearing apart
the shift they’d given her. There was a blanket on the pallet in the
corner, a threadbare thing of thin brown wool. It was rough and
scratchy, but it was all she had. Cersei huddled underneath to keep
from shivering, and before long she had fallen into an exhausted
sleep.
The next she knew, a heavy hand was shaking her awake. It was
black as pitch inside the cell, and a huge ugly woman was kneeling
over her, a candle in her hand. “Who are you?” the queen
demanded. “Are you come to set me free?”
“I am Septa Unella. I am come to hear you tell of all your
murders and fornications.”
Cersei knocked her hand aside. “I will have your head. Do not
presume to touch me. Get away.”
The woman rose. “Your Grace. I will be back in an hour. Mayhaps
by then you will be ready to confess.”

An hour and an hour and an hour. So passed the longest night that
Cersei Lannister had ever known, save for the night of Jo rey’s
wedding. Her throat was so raw from shouting that she could hardly
swallow. The cell turned freezing cold. She had smashed the
chamber pot, so she had to squat in a corner to make her water and
watch it trickle across the oor. Every time she closed her eyes,
Unella was looming over her again, shaking her and asking her if
she wanted to confess her sins.
Day brought no relief. Septa Moelle brought her a bowl of some
waterly grey gruel as the sun was coming up. Cersei ung it at her
head. When they brought a fresh ewer of water, though, she was so
thirsty that she had no choice but to drink. When they brought
another shift, grey and thin and smelling of mildew, she put it on
over her nakedness. And that evening when Moelle appeared again
she ate the bread and sh and demanded wine to wash it down. No
wine appeared, only Septa Unella, making her hourly visit to ask if
the queen was ready to confess.
What can be happening? Cersei wondered, as the thin slice of sky
outside her window began to darken once again. Why has no one
come to pry me out of here? She could not believe that the
Kettleblacks would abandon their brother. What was her council
doing? Cravens and traitors. When I get out of here I will have the lot of
them beheaded and nd better men to take their place.
Thrice that day she heard the sound of distant shouting drifting
up from the plaza, but it was Margaery’s name that the mob was
calling, not hers.
It was near dawn on the second day and Cersei was licking the
last of the porridge from the bottom of the bowl when her cell door
swung open unexpectedly to admit Lord Qyburn. It was all she
could do not to throw herself at him. “Qyburn,” she whispered, “oh,
gods, I am so glad to see your face. Take me home.”
“That will not be allowed. You are to be tried before a holy court
of seven, for murder, treason, and fornication.”
Cersei was so exhausted that the words seemed nonsensical to her
at rst. “Tommen. Tell me of my son. Is he still king?”

“He is, Your Grace. He is safe and well, secure within the walls of
Maegor’s Holdfast, protected by the Kingsguard. He is lonely,
though. Fretful. He asks for you, and for his little queen. As yet, no
one has told him of your … your …”
“… di culties?” she suggested. “What of Margaery?”
“She is to be tried as well, by the same court that conducts your
trial. I had the Blue Bard delivered to the High Septon, as Your
Grace commanded. He is here now, somewhere down below us. My
whisperers tell me that they are whipping him, but so far he is still
singing the same sweet song we taught him.”
The same sweet song. Her wits were dull for want of sleep. Wat, his
real name is Wat. If the gods were good, Wat might die beneath the
lash, leaving Margaery with no way to disprove his testimony.
“Where are my knights? Ser Osfryd … the High Septon means to
kill his brother Osney, his gold cloaks must …”
“Osfryd Kettleblack no longer commands the City Watch. The
king has removed him from o ce and raised the captain of the
Dragon Gate in his place, a certain Humfrey Waters.”
Cersei was so tired, none of this made any sense. “Why would
Tommen do that?”
“The boy is not to blame. When his council puts a decree in front
of him, he signs his name and stamps it with his seal.”
“My council … who? Who would do that? Not you?”
“Alas, I have been dismissed from the council, although for the
nonce they allow me to continue my work with the eunuch’s
whisperers. The realm is being ruled by Ser Harys Swyft and Grand
Maester Pycelle. They have dispatched a raven to Casterly Rock,
inviting your uncle to return to court and assume the regency. If he
means to accept, he had best make haste. Mace Tyrell has
abandoned his siege of Storm’s End and is marching back to the city
with his army, and Randyll Tarly is reported on his way down from
Maidenpool as well.”
“Has Lord Merryweather agreed to this?”
“Merryweather has resigned his seat on the council and ed back
to Longtable with his wife, who was the rst to bring us news of
the … accusations … against Your Grace.”

“They let Taena go.” That was the best thing she had heard since
the High Sparrow had said no. Taena could have doomed her. “What
of Lord Waters? His ships … if he brings his crews ashore, he should
have enough men to …”
“As soon as word of Your Grace’s present troubles reached the
river, Lord Waters raised sail, unshipped his oars, and took his eet
to sea. Ser Harys fears he means to join Lord Stannis. Pycelle
believes that he is sailing to the Stepstones, to set himself up as a
pirate.”
“All my lovely dromonds.” Cersei almost laughed. “My lord
father used to say that bastards are treacherous by nature. Would
that I had listened.” She shivered. “I am lost, Qyburn.”
“No.” He took her hand. “Hope remains. Your Grace has the right
to prove your innocence by battle. My queen, your champion stands
ready. There is no man in all the Seven Kingdoms who can hope to
stand against him. If you will only give the command …”
This time she did laugh. It was funny, terribly funny, hideously
funny. “The gods make japes of all our hopes and plans. I have a
champion no man can defeat, but I am forbidden to make use of
him. I am the queen, Qyburn. My honor can only be defended by a
Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard.”
“I see.” The smile died on Qyburn’s face. “Your Grace, I am at a
loss. I do not know how to counsel you …”
Even in her exhausted, frightened state, the queen knew she dare
not trust her fate to a court of sparrows. Nor could she count on Ser
Kevan to intervene, after the words that had passed between them
at their last meeting. It will have to be a trial by battle. There is no
other way. “Qyburn, for the love you bear me, I beg you, send a
message for me. A raven if you can. A rider, if not. You must send
to Riverrun, to my brother. Tell him what has happened, and
write … write …”
“Yes, Your Grace?”
She licked her lips, shivering. “Come at once. Help me. Save me. I
need you now as I have never needed you before. I love you. I love
you. I love you. Come at once.”
“As you command. ‘I love you’ thrice?”

“Thrice.” She had to reach him. “He will come. I know he will. He
must. Jaime is my only hope.”
“My queen,” said Qyburn, “have you … forgotten? Ser Jaime has
no sword hand. If he should champion you and lose …”
We will leave this world together, as we once came into it. “He will
not lose. Not Jaime. Not with my life at stake.”

JAIME

The new Lord of Riverrun was so angry that he was shaking. “We
have been deceived,” he said. “This man has played us false!” Pink
spittle ew from his lips as he jabbed a nger at Edmure Tully. “I
will have his head o ! I rule in Riverrun, by the king’s own decree,
I—”
“Emmon,” said his wife, “the Lord Commander knows about the
king’s decree. Ser Edmure knows about the king’s decree. The
stableboys know about the king’s decree.”
“I am the lord, and I will have his head!”
“For what crime?” Thin as he was, Edmure still looked more
lordly than Emmon Frey. He wore a quilted doublet of red wool
with a leaping trout embroidered on its chest. His boots were black,
his breeches blue. His auburn hair had been washed and barbered,
his red beard neatly trimmed. “I did all that was asked of me.”
“Oh?” Jaime Lannister had not slept since Riverrun had opened
its gates, and his head was pounding. “I do not recall asking you to
let Ser Brynden escape.”
“You required me to surrender my castle, not my uncle. Am I to
blame if your men let him slip through their siege lines?”
Jaime was not amused. “Where is he?” he said, letting his
irritation show. His men had searched Riverrun thrice over, and
Brynden Tully was nowhere to be found.
“He never told me where he meant to go.”

“And you never asked. How did he get out?”
“Fish swim. Even black ones.” Edmure smiled.
Jaime was sorely tempted to crack him across the mouth with his
golden hand. A few missing teeth would put an end to his smiles.
For a man who was going to spend the rest of his life a prisoner,
Edmure was entirely too pleased with himself. “We have oubliettes
beneath the Casterly Rock that t a man as tight as a suit of armor.
You can’t turn in them, or sit, or reach down to your feet when the
rats start gnawing at your toes. Would you care to reconsider that
answer?”
Lord Edmure’s smile went away. “You gave me your word that I
would be treated honorably, as be ts my rank.”
“So you shall,” said Jaime. “Nobler knights than you have died
whimpering in those oubliettes, and many a high lord too. Even a
king or two, if I recall my history. Your wife can have the one
beside you, if you like. I would not want to part you.”
“He did swim,” said Edmure, sullenly. He had the same blue eyes
as his sister Catelyn, and Jaime saw the same loathing there that
he’d once seen in hers. “We raised the portcullis on the Water Gate.
Not all the way, just three feet or so. Enough to leave a gap under
the water, though the gate still appeared to be closed. My uncle is a
strong swimmer. After dark, he pulled himself beneath the spikes.”
And he slipped under our boom the same way, no doubt. A moonless
night, bored guards, a black sh in a black river oating quietly
downstream. If Ruttiger or Yew or any of their men heard a splash,
they would put it down to a turtle or a trout. Edmure had waited
most of the day before hauling down the direwolf of Stark in token
of surrender. In the confusion of the castle changing hands, it had
been the next morning before Jaime had been informed that the
Black sh was not amongst the prisoners.
He went to the window and gazed out over the river. It was a
bright autumn day, and the sun was shining on the waters. By now
the Black sh could be ten leagues downstream.
“You have to nd him,” insisted Emmon Frey.
“He’ll be found.” Jaime spoke with a certainty he did not feel. “I
have hounds and hunters sni ng after him even now.” Ser Addam

Marbrand was leading the search on the south side of the river, Ser
Dermot of the Rainwood on the north. He had considered enlisting
the riverlords as well, but Vance and Piper and their ilk were more
like to help the Black sh escape than clap him into fetters. All in all,
he was not hopeful. “He may elude us for a time,” he said, “but
eventually he must surface.”
“What if he should try and take my castle back?”
“You have a garrison of two hundred.” Too large a garrison, in
truth, but Lord Emmon had an anxious disposition. At least he
would have no trouble feeding them; the Black sh had left Riverrun
amply provisioned, just as he had claimed. “After the trouble Ser
Brynden took to leave us, I doubt that he’ll come skulking back.”
Unless it is at the head of a band of outlaws. He did not doubt that the
Black sh meant to continue the ght.
“This is your seat,” Lady Genna told her husband. “It is for you to
hold it. If you cannot do that, put it to the torch and run back to the
Rock.”
Lord Emmon rubbed his mouth. His hand came away red and
slimy from the sourleaf. “To be sure. Riverrun is mine, and no man
shall ever take it from me.” He gave Edmure Tully one last
suspicious look, as Lady Genna drew him from the solar.
“Is there any more that you would care to tell me?” Jaime asked
Edmure when the two of them were alone.
“This was my father’s solar,” said Tully. “He ruled the riverlands
from here, wisely and well. He liked to sit beside that window. The
light was good there, and whenever he looked up from his work he
could see the river. When his eyes were tired he would have Cat
read to him. Little nger and I built a castle out of wooden blocks
once, there beside the door. You will never know how sick it makes
me to see you in this room, Kingslayer. You will never know how
much I despise you.”
He was wrong about that. “I have been despised by better men
than you, Edmure.” Jaime called for a guard. “Take his lordship
back to his tower and see that he’s fed.”
The Lord of Riverrun went silently. On the morrow, he would
start west. Ser Forley Prester would command his escort; a hundred

men, including twenty knights. Best double that. Lord Beric may try to
free Edmure before they reach the Golden Tooth. Jaime did not want to
have to capture Tully for a third time.
He returned to Hoster Tully’s chair, pulled over the map of the
Trident, and attened it beneath his golden hand. Where would I go,
if I were the Black sh?
“Lord Commander?” A guardsman stood in the open door. “Lady
Westerling and her daughter are without, as you commanded.”
Jaime shoved the map aside. “Show them in.” At least the girl did
not vanish too. Jeyne Westerling had been Robb Stark’s queen, the
girl who cost him everything. With a wolf in her belly, she could
have proved more dangerous than the Black sh.
She did not look dangerous. Jeyne was a willowy girl, no more
than fteen or sixteen, more awkward than graceful. She had
narrow hips, breasts the size of apples, a mop of chestnut curls, and
the soft brown eyes of a doe. Pretty enough for a child, Jaime
decided, but not a girl to lose a kingdom for. Her face was pu y, and
there was a scab on her forehead, half-hidden by a lock of brown
hair. “What happened there?” he asked her.
The girl turned her head away. “It is nothing,” insisted her
mother, a stern-faced woman in a gown of green velvet. A necklace
of golden seashells looped about her long, thin neck. “She would
not give up the little crown the rebel gave her, and when I tried to
take it from her head the willful child fought me.”
“It was mine.” Jeyne sobbed. “You had no right. Robb had it
made for me. I loved him.”
Her mother made to slap her, but Jaime stepped between them.
“None of that,” he warned Lady Sybell. “Sit down, both of you.”
The girl curled up in her chair like a frightened animal, but her
mother sat sti y, her head high. “Will you have wine?” he asked
them. The girl did not answer. “No, thank you,” said her mother.
“As you will.” Jaime turned to the daughter. “I am sorry for your
loss. The boy had courage, I’ll give him that. There is a question I
must ask you. Are you carrying his child, my lady?”
Jeyne burst from her chair and would have ed the room if the
guard at the door had not seized her by the arm. “She is not,” said

Lady Sybell, as her daughter struggled to escape. “I made certain of
that, as your lord father bid me.”
Jaime nodded. Tywin Lannister was not a man to overlook such
details. “Unhand the girl,” he said, “I’m done with her for now.” As
Jeyne ed sobbing down the stairs, he considered her mother.
“House Westerling has its pardon, and your brother Rolph has been
made Lord of Castamere. What else would you have of us?”
“Your lord father promised me worthy marriages for Jeyne and
her younger sister. Lords or heirs, he swore to me, not younger sons
nor household knights.”
Lords or heirs. To be sure. The Westerlings were an old House, and
proud, but Lady Sybell herself had been born a Spicer, from a line
of upjumped merchants. Her grandmother had been some sort of
half-mad witch woman from the east, he seemed to recall. And the
Westerlings were impoverished. Younger sons would have been the
best that Sybell Spicer’s daughters could have hoped for in the
ordinary course of events, but a nice fat pot of Lannister gold would
make even a dead rebel’s widow look attractive to some lord.
“You’ll have your marriages,” said Jaime, “but Jeyne must wait two
full years before she weds again.” If the girl took another husband
too soon and had a child by him, inevitably there would come
whispers that the Young Wolf was the father.
“I have two sons as well,” Lady Westerling reminded him.
“Rollam is with me, but Raynald was a knight and went with the
rebels to the Twins. If I had known what was to happen there, I
would never have allowed that.” There was a hint of reproach in
her voice. “Raynald knew nought of any … of the understanding
with your lord father. He may be a captive at the Twins.”
Or he may be dead. Walder Frey would not have known of the
understanding either. “I will make inquiries. If Ser Raynald is still a
captive, we’ll pay his ransom for you.”
“Mention was made of a match for him as well. A bride from
Casterly Rock. Your lord father said that Raynald should have joy of
him, if all went as we hoped.”
Even from the grave, Lord Tywin’s dead hand moves us all. “Joy is
my late uncle Gerion’s natural daughter. A betrothal can be

arranged, if that is your wish, but any marriage will need to wait.
Joy was nine or ten when last I saw her.”
“His natural daughter?” Lady Sybell looked as if she had
swallowed a lemon. “You want a Westerling to wed a bastard?”
“No more than I want Joy to marry the son of some scheming
turncloak bitch. She deserves better.” Jaime would happily have
strangled the woman with her seashell necklace. Joy was a sweet
child, albeit a lonely one; her father had been Jaime’s favorite
uncle. “Your daughter is worth ten of you, my lady. You’ll leave
with Edmure and Ser Forley on the morrow. Until then, you would
do well to stay out of my sight.” He shouted for a guardsman, and
Lady Sybell went o with her lips pressed primly together. Jaime
had to wonder how much Lord Gawen knew about his wife’s
scheming. How much do we men ever know?
When Edmure and the Westerlings departed, four hundred men
rode with them; Jaime had doubled the escort again at the last
moment. He rode with them a few miles, to talk with Ser Forley
Prester. Though he bore a bull’s head upon his surcoat and horns
upon his helm, Ser Forley could not have been less bovine. He was a
short, spare, hard-bitten man. With his pinched nose, bald pate, and
grizzled brown beard, he looked more like an innkeep than a
knight. “We don’t know where the Black sh is,” Jaime reminded
him, “but if he can cut Edmure free, he will.”
“That will not happen, my lord.” Like most innkeeps, Ser Forley
was no man’s fool. “Scouts and outriders will screen our march, and
we’ll fortify our camps by night. I have picked ten men to stay with
Tully day and night, my best longbowmen. If he should ride so
much as a foot o the road, they will loose so many shafts at him
that his own mother would take him for a goose.”
“Good.” Jaime would as lief have Tully reach Casterly Rock
safely, but better dead than ed. “Best keep some archers near Lord
Westerling’s daughter as well.”
Ser Forley seemed taken aback. “Gawen’s girl? She’s—”
“—the Young Wolf’s widow,” Jaime nished, “and twice as
dangerous as Edmure if she were ever to escape us.”
“As you say, my lord. She will be watched.”

Jaime had to canter past the Westerlings as he rode down the
column on his way back to Riverrun. Lord Gawen nodded gravely as
he passed, but Lady Sybell looked through him with eyes like chips
of ice. Jeyne never saw him at all. The widow rode with downcast
eyes, huddled beneath a hooded cloak. Underneath its heavy folds,
her clothes were nely made, but torn. She ripped them herself, as a
mark of mourning, Jaime realized. That could not have pleased her
mother. He found himself wondering if Cersei would tear her gown
if she should ever hear that he was dead.
He did not go straight back to the castle but crossed the
Tumblestone once more to call on Edwyn Frey and discuss the
transfer of his great-grandfather’s prisoners. The Frey host had
begun to break up within hours of Riverrun’s surrender, as Lord
Walder’s bannermen and freeriders pulled up stakes to make for
home. The Freys who still remained were striking camp, but he
found Edwyn with his bastard uncle in the latter’s pavilion.
The two of them were huddled over a map, arguing heatedly, but
they broke o when Jaime entered. “Lord Commander,” Rivers said
with cold courtesy, but Edwyn blurted out, “My father’s blood is on
your hands, ser.”
That took Jaime a bit aback. “How so?”
“You were the one who sent him home, were you not?”
Someone had to. “Has some ill befallen Ser Ryman?”
“Hanged with all his party,” said Walder Rivers. “The outlaws
caught them two leagues south of Fairmarket.”
“Dondarrion?”
“Him, or Thoros, or this woman Stoneheart.”
Jaime frowned. Ryman Frey had been a fool, a craven, and a sot,
and no one was like to miss him much, least of all his fellow Freys.
If Edwyn’s dry eyes were any clue, even his own sons would not
mourn him long. Still … these outlaws are growing bold, if they dare
hang Lord Walder’s heir not a day’s ride from the Twins. “How many
men did Ser Ryman have with him?” he asked.
“Three knights and a dozen men-at-arms,” said Rivers. “It is
almost as if they knew that he would be returning to the Twins, and
with a small escort.”

Edwyn’s mouth twisted. “My brother had a hand in this, I’ll
wager. He allowed the outlaws to escape after they murdered
Merrett and Petyr, and this is why. With our father dead, there’s
only me left between Black Walder and the Twins.”
“You have no proof of this,” said Walder Rivers.
“I do not need proof. I know my brother.”
“Your brother is at Seagard,” Rivers insisted. “How could he have
known that Ser Ryman was returning to the Twins?”
“Someone told him,” said Edwyn in a bitter tone. “He has his
spies in our camp, you can be sure.”
And you have yours at Seagard. Jaime knew that the enmity
between Edwyn and Black Walder ran deep, but cared not a g
which of them succeeded their great-grandfather as Lord of the
Crossing.
“If you will pardon me for intruding on your grief,” he said, in a
dry tone, “we have other matters to consider. When you return to
the Twins, please inform Lord Walder that King Tommen requires
all the captives you took at the Red Wedding.”
Ser Walder frowned. “These prisoners are valuable, ser.”
“His Grace would not ask for them if they were worthless.”
Frey and Rivers exchanged a look. Edwyn said, “My lord
grandfather will expect recompense for these prisoners.”
And he’ll have it, as soon as I grow a new hand, thought Jaime. “We
all have expectations,” he said mildly. “Tell me, is Ser Raynald
Westerling amongst these captives?”
“The knight of seashells?” Edwyn sneered. “You’ll nd that one
feeding the sh at the bottom of the Green Fork.”
“He was in the yard when our men came to put the direwolf
down,” said Walder Rivers. “Whalen demanded his sword and he
gave it over meek enough, but when the crossbowmen began
feathering the wolf he seized Whalen’s axe and cut the monster
loose of the net they’d thrown over him. Whalen says he took a
quarrel in his shoulder and another in the gut, but still managed to
reach the wallwalk and throw himself into the river.”
“He left a trail of blood on the steps,” said Edwyn.
“Did you nd his corpse afterward?” asked Jaime.

“We found a thousand corpses afterward. Once they’ve spent a
few days in the river they all look much the same.”
“I’ve heard the same is true of hanged men,” said Jaime, before
he took his leave.
By the next morning little remained of the Frey encampment but
ies, horse dung, and Ser Ryman’s gallows, standing forlorn beside
the Tumblestone. His coz wanted to know what should be done with
it, and with the siege equipment he had built, his rams and sows
and towers and trebuchets. Daven proposed that they drag it all to
Raventree and use it there. Jaime told him to put everything to the
torch, starting with the gallows. “I mean to deal with Lord Tytos
myself. It won’t require a siege tower.”
Daven grinned through his bushy beard. “Single combat, coz?
Scarce seems fair. Tytos is an old grey man.”
An old grey man with two hands.
That night he and Ser Ilyn fought for three hours. It was one of
his better nights. If they had been in earnest, Payne only would
have killed him twice. Half a dozen deaths were more the rule, and
some nights were worse than that. “If I keep at this for another
year, I may be as good as Peck,” Jaime declared, and Ser Ilyn made
that clacking sound that meant he was amused. “Come, let’s drink
some more of Hoster Tully’s good red wine.”
Wine had become a part of their nightly ritual. Ser Ilyn made the
perfect drinking companion. He never interrupted, never disagreed,
never complained or asked for favors or told long pointless stories.
All he did was drink and listen.
“I should have the tongues removed from all my friends,” said
Jaime as he lled their cups, “and from my kin as well. A silent
Cersei would be sweet. Though I’d miss her tongue when we
kissed.” He drank. The wine was a deep red, sweet and heavy. It
warmed him going down. “I can’t remember when we rst began to
kiss. It was innocent at rst. Until it wasn’t.” He nished the wine
and set his cup aside. “Tyrion once told me that most whores will
not kiss you. They’ll fuck you blind, he said, but you’ll never feel
their lips on yours. Do you think my sister kisses Kettleblack?”
Ser Ilyn did not answer.

“I don’t think it would be proper for me to slay mine own Sworn
Brother. What I need to do is geld him and send him to the Wall.
That’s what they did with Lucamore the Lusty. Ser Osmund may not
take kindly to the gelding, to be sure. And there are his brothers to
consider. Brothers can be dangerous. After Aegon the Unworthy put
Ser Terrence Toyne to death for sleeping with his mistress, Toyne’s
brothers did their best to kill him. Their best was not quite good
enough, thanks to the Dragonknight, but it was not for want of
trying. It’s written down in the White Book. All of it, save what to
do with Cersei.”
Ser Ilyn drew a nger across his throat.
“No,” said Jaime. “Tommen has lost a brother, and the man he
thought of as his father. If I were to kill his mother, he would hate
me for it … and that sweet little wife of his would nd a way to
turn that hatred to the bene t of Highgarden.”
Ser Ilyn smiled in a way Jaime did not like. An ugly smile. An ugly
soul. “You talk too much,” he told the man.
The next day Ser Dermot of the Rainwood returned to the castle,
empty-handed. When asked what he’d found, he answered, “Wolves.
Hundreds of the bloody beggars.” He’d lost two sentries to them.
The wolves had come out of the dark to savage them. “Armed men
in mail and boiled leather, and yet the beasts had no fear of them.
Before he died, Jate said the pack was led by a she-wolf of
monstrous size. A direwolf, to hear him tell it. The wolves got in
amongst our horse lines too. The bloody bastards killed my favorite
bay.”
“A ring of res round your camp might keep them o ,” said
Jaime, though he wondered. Could Ser Dermot’s direwolf be the
same beast that had mauled Jo rey near the crossroads?
Wolves or no, Ser Dermot took fresh horses and more men and
went out again the next morning, to resume the search for Brynden
Tully. That same afternoon, the lords of the Trident came to Jaime
asking his leave to return to their own lands. He granted it. Lord
Piper also wanted to know about his son Marq. “All the captives
will be ransomed,” Jaime promised. As the riverlords took their
leave, Lord Karyl Vance lingered to say, “Lord Jaime, you must go

to Raventree. So long as it is Jonos at his gates Tytos will never
yield, but I know he will bend his knee for you.” Jaime thanked him
for his counsel.
Strongboar was the next to depart. He wanted to return to Darry
as he’d promised and ght the outlaws. “We rode across half the
bloody realm and for what? So you could make Edmure Tully piss
his breeches? There’s no song in that. I need a ght. I want the
Hound, Jaime. Him, or the marcher lord.”
“The Hound’s head is yours if you can take it,” Jaime said, “but
Beric Dondarrion is to be captured alive, so he can be brought back
to King’s Landing. A thousand people need to see him die, or else he
won’t stay dead.” Strongboar grumbled at that, but nally agreed.
The next day he departed with his squire and men-at-arms, plus
Beardless Jon Bettley, who had decided that hunting outlaws was
preferable to returning to his famously homely wife. Supposedly she
had the beard that Bettley lacked.
Jaime still had the garrison to deal with. To a man, they swore
that they knew nothing of Ser Brynden’s plans or where he might
have gone. “They are lying,” Emmon Frey insisted, but Jaime
thought not. “If you share your plans with no one, no one can
betray you,” he pointed out. Lady Genna suggested that a few of the
men might be put to the question. He refused. “I gave Edmure my
word that if he yielded, the garrison could leave unharmed.”
“That was chivalrous of you,” his aunt said, “but it’s strength
that’s needed here, not chivalry.”
Ask Edmure how chivalrous I am, thought Jaime. Ask him about the
trebuchet. Somehow he did not think the maesters were like to
confuse him with Prince Aemon the Dragonknight when they wrote
their histories. Still, he felt curiously content. The war was all but
won. Dragonstone had fallen and Storm’s End would soon enough,
he could not doubt, and Stannis was welcome to the Wall. The
northmen would love him no more than the storm lords had. If
Roose Bolton did not destroy him, winter would.
And he had done his own part here at Riverrun without actually
ever taking up arms against the Starks or Tullys. Once he found the
Black sh, he would be free to return to King’s Landing, where he

belonged. My place is with my king. With my son. Would Tommen
want to know that? The truth could cost the boy his throne. Would
you sooner have a father or a chair, lad? Jaime wished he knew the
answer. He does like stamping papers with his seal. The boy might not
even believe him, to be sure. Cersei would say it was a lie. My sweet
sister, the deceiver. He would need to nd some way to winkle
Tommen from her clutches before the boy became another Jo rey.
And whilst at that, he should nd the lad a new small council too. If
Cersei can be put aside, Ser Kevan may agree to serve as Tommen’s
Hand. And if not, well, the Seven Kingdoms did not lack for able
men. Forley Prester would make a good choice, or Roland
Crakehall. If someone other than a westerman was needed to
appease the Tyrells, there was always Mathis Rowan … or even
Petyr Baelish. Little nger was as amiable as he was clever, but too
lowborn to threaten any of the great lords, with no swords of his
own. The perfect Hand.
The Tully garrison departed the next morning, stripped of all
their arms and armor. Each man was allowed three days’ food and
the clothing on his back, after he swore a solemn oath never to take
up arms against Lord Emmon or House Lannister. “If you’re
fortunate, one man in ten may keep that vow,” Lady Genna said.
“Good. I’d sooner face nine men than ten. The tenth might have
been the one who would have killed me.”
“The other nine will kill you just as quick.”
“Better that than die in bed.” Or on the privy.
Two men did not choose to depart with the others. Ser Desmond
Grell, Lord Hoster’s old master-at-arms, preferred to take the black.
So did Ser Robin Ryger, Riverrun’s captain of guards. “This castle’s
been my home for forty years,” said Grell. “You say I’m free to go,
but where? I’m too old and too stout to make a hedge knight. But
men are always welcome at the Wall.”
“As you wish,” said Jaime, though it was a bloody nuisance. He
allowed them to keep their arms and armor, and assigned a dozen
of Gregor Clegane’s men to escort the two of them to Maidenpool.
The command he gave to Ra ord, the one they called the Sweetling.
“See to it that the prisoners reach Maidenpool unspoiled,” he told

the man, “or what Ser Gregor did to the Goat will seem a jolly lark
compared to what I’ll do to you.”
More days passed. Lord Emmon assembled all of Riverrun in the
yard, Lord Edmure’s people and his own, and spoke to them for
close on three hours about what would be expected of them now
that he was their lord and master. From time to time he waved his
parchment, as stableboys and serving girls and smiths listened in a
sullen silence and a light rain fell down upon them all.
The singer was listening too, the one that Jaime had taken from
Ser Ryman Frey. Jaime came upon him standing inside an open
door, where it was dry. “His lordship should have been a singer,”
the man said. “This speech is longer than a marcher ballad, and I
don’t think he’s stopped for breath.”
Jaime had to laugh. “Lord Emmon does not need to breathe, so
long as he can chew. Are you going to make a song of it?”
“A funny one. I’ll call it ‘Talking to the Fish.’ ”
“Just don’t play it where my aunt can hear.” Jaime had never
paid the man much mind before. He was a small fellow, garbed in
ragged green breeches and a frayed tunic of a lighter shade of
green, with brown leather patches covering the holes. His nose was
long and sharp, his smile big and loose. Thin brown hair fell to his
collar, snaggled and unwashed. Fifty if he’s a day, thought Jaime, a
hedge harp, and hard used by life. “Weren’t you Ser Ryman’s man
when I found you?” he asked.
“Only for a fortnight.”
“I would have expected you to depart with the Freys.”
“That one up there’s a Frey,” the singer said, nodding at Lord
Emmon, “and this castle seems a nice snug place to pass the winter.
Whitesmile Wat went home with Ser Forley, so I thought I’d see if I
could win his place. Wat’s got that high sweet voice that the likes o’
me can’t hope to match. But I know twice as many bawdy songs as
he does. Begging my lord’s pardon.”
“You should get on famously with my aunt,” said Jaime. “If you
hope to winter here, see that your playing pleases Lady Genna.
She’s the one that matters.”
“Not you?”

“My place is with the king. I shall not stay here long.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, my lord. I know better songs than ‘The
Rains of Castamere.’ I could have played you … oh, all sorts o’
things.”
“Some other time,” said Jaime. “Do you have a name?”
“Tom of Sevenstreams, if it please my lord.” The singer do ed his
hat. “Most call me Tom o’ Sevens, though.”
“Sing sweetly, Tom o’ Sevens.”
That night he dreamt that he was back in the Great Sept of
Baelor, still standing vigil over his father’s corpse. The sept was still
and dark, until a woman emerged from the shadows and walked
slowly to the bier. “Sister?” he said.
But it was not Cersei. She was all in grey, a silent sister. A hood
and veil concealed her features, but he could see the candles
burning in the green pools of her eyes. “Sister,” he said, “what
would you have of me?” His last word echoed up and down the
sept, mememememememememememe.
“I am not your sister, Jaime.” She raised a pale soft hand and
pushed her hood back. “Have you forgotten me?”
Can I forget someone I never knew? The words caught in his throat.
He did know her, but it had been so long …
“Will you forget your own lord father too? I wonder if you ever
knew him, truly.” Her eyes were green, her hair spun gold. He
could not tell how old she was. Fifteen, he thought, or fty. She
climbed the steps to stand above the bier. “He could never abide
being laughed at. That was the thing he hated most.”
“Who are you?” He had to hear her say it.
“The question is, who are you?”
“This is a dream.”
“Is it?” She smiled sadly. “Count your hands, child.”
One. One hand, clasped tight around the sword hilt. Only one. “In
my dreams I always have two hands.” He raised his right arm and
stared uncomprehending at the ugliness of his stump.
“We all dream of things we cannot have. Tywin dreamed that his
son would be a great knight, that his daughter would be a queen.

He dreamed they would be so strong and brave and beautiful that
no one would ever laugh at them.”
“I am a knight,” he told her, “and Cersei is a queen.”
A tear rolled down her cheek. The woman raised her hood again
and turned her back on him. Jaime called after her, but already she
was moving away, her skirt whispering lullabies as it brushed across
the oor. Don’t leave me, he wanted to call, but of course she’d left
them long ago.
He woke in darkness, shivering. The room had grown cold as ice.
Jaime ung aside the covers with the stump of his sword hand. The
re in the hearth had died, he saw, and the window had blown
open. He crossed the pitch-dark chamber to fumble with the
shutters, but when he reached the window his bare foot came down
in something wet. Jaime recoiled, startled for a moment. His rst
thought was of blood, but blood would not have been so cold.
It was snow, drifting through the window.
Instead of closing the shutters he threw them wide. The yard
below was covered by a thin white blanket, growing thicker even as
he watched. The merlons on the battlements wore white cowls. The
akes fell silently, a few drifting in the window to melt upon his
face. Jaime could see his own breath.
Snow in the riverlands. If it was snowing here, it could well be
snowing on Lannisport as well, and on King’s Landing. Winter is
marching south, and half our granaries are empty. Any crops still in the
elds were doomed. There would be no more plantings, no more
hopes of one last harvest. He found himself wondering what his
father would do to feed the realm, before he remembered that
Tywin Lannister was dead.
When morning broke the snow was ankle deep, and deeper in the
godswood, where drifts had piled up under the trees. Squires,
stableboys, and highborn pages turned to children again under its
cold white spell, and fought a snowball war up and down the wards
and all along the battlements. Jaime heard them laughing. There
was a time, not long ago, when he might have been out making
snowballs with the best of them, to ing at Tyrion when he waddled

by, or slip down the back of Cersei’s gown. You need two hands to
make a decent snowball, though.
There was a rap upon his door. “See who that is, Peck.”
It was Riverrun’s old maester, with a message clutched in his
lined and wrinkled hand. Vyman’s face was as pale as the new-fallen
snow. “I know,” Jaime said, “there has been a white raven from the
Citadel. Winter has come.”
“No, my lord. The bird was from King’s Landing. I took the
liberty … I did not know …” He held the letter out.
Jaime read it in the window seat, bathed in the light of that cold
white morning. Qyburn’s words were terse and to the point, Cersei’s
fevered and fervent. Come at once, she said. Help me. Save me. I
need you now as I have never needed you before. I love you. I love you.
I love you. Come at once.
Vyman was hovering by the door, waiting, and Jaime sensed that
Peck was watching too. “Does my lord wish to answer?” the
maester asked, after a long silence.
A snow ake landed on the letter. As it melted, the ink began to
blur. Jaime rolled the parchment up again, as tight as one hand
would allow, and handed it to Peck. “No,” he said. “Put this in the
re.”

SAMWELL

The most perilous part of the voyage was the last. The Redwyne
Straits were swarming with longships, as they had been warned in
Tyrosh. With the main strength of the Arbor’s eet on the far side of
Westeros, the ironmen had sacked Ryamsport and taken Vinetown
and Star sh Harbor for their own, using them as bases to prey on
shipping bound for Oldtown.
Thrice longships were sighted by the crow’s nest. Two were well
astern, however, and the Cinnamon Wind soon outdistanced them.
The third appeared near sunset, to cut them o from Whispering
Sound. When they saw her oars rising and falling, lashing the
copper waters white, Kojja Mo sent her archers to the castles with
their great bows of goldenheart that could send a shaft farther and
truer than even Dornish yew. She waited till the longship came
within two hundred yards before she gave the command to loose.
Sam loosed with them, and this time he thought his arrow reached
the ship. One volley was all it took. The longship veered south in
search of tamer prey.
A deep blue dusk was falling as they entered Whispering Sound.
Gilly stood beside the prow with the babe, gazing up at a castle on
the cli s. “Three Towers,” Sam told her, “the seat of House
Costayne.” Etched against the evening stars with torchlight
ickering from its windows, the castle made a splendid sight, but he
was sad to see it. Their voyage was almost at its end.

“It’s very tall,” said Gilly.
“Wait until you see the Hightower.”
Dalla’s babe began to cry. Gilly pulled open her tunic and gave
the boy her breast. She smiled as he nursed, and stroked his soft
brown hair. She has come to love this one as much as the one she left
behind, Sam realized. He hoped that the gods would be kind to both
of the children.
The ironmen had penetrated even to the sheltered waters of
Whispering Sound. Come morning, as the Cinnamon Wind continued
on toward Oldtown, she began to bump up against corpses drifting
down to the sea. Some of the bodies carried complements of crows,
who rose into the air complaining noisily when the swan ship
disturbed their grotesquely swollen rafts. Scorched elds and
burned villages appeared on the banks, and the shallows and
sandbars were strewn with shattered ships. Merchanters and shing
boats were the most common, but they saw abandoned longships
too, and the wreckage of two big dromonds. One had been burned
down to the waterline, whilst the other had a gaping splintered hole
in her side where her hull had been rammed.
“Battle here,” said Xhondo. “Not so long.”
“Who would be so mad as to raid this close to Oldtown?”
Xhondo pointed at a half-sunken longship in the shallows. The
remnants of a banner drooped from her stern, smoke-stained and
ragged. The charge was one Sam had never seen before: a red eye
with a black pupil, beneath a black iron crown supported by two
crows. “Whose banner is that?” Sam asked. Xhondo only shrugged.
The next day was cold and misty. As the Cinnamon Wind was
creeping past another plundered shing village, a war galley came
sliding from the fog, stroking slowly toward them. Huntress was the
name she bore, behind a gurehead of a slender maiden clad in
leaves and brandishing a spear. A heartbeat later, two smaller
galleys appeared on either side of her, like a pair of matched
greyhounds stalking at their master’s heels. To Sam’s relief, they
ew King Tommen’s stag-and-lion banner above the stepped white
tower of Oldtown, with its crown of ame.

The captain of the Huntress was a tall man in a smoke-grey cloak
with a border of red satin ames. He brought his galley in alongside
the Cinnamon Wind, raised his oars, and shouted that he was coming
aboard. As his crossbowmen and Kojja Mo’s archers eyed each other
across the narrow span of water, he crossed over with half a dozen
knights, gave Quhuru Mo a nod, and asked to see his holds. Father
and daughter conferred brie y, then agreed.
“My apologies,” the captain said when his inspection was
complete. “It grieves me that honest men must su er such
discourtesy, but sooner that than ironmen in Oldtown. Only a
fortnight ago some of those bloody bastards captured a Tyroshi
merchantman in the straits. They killed her crew, donned their
clothes, and used the dyes they found to color their whiskers half a
hundred colors. Once inside the walls they meant to set the port
ablaze and open a gate from within whilst we fought the re. Might
have worked, but they ran afoul of the Lady of the Tower, and her
oarsmaster has a Tyroshi wife. When he saw all the green and
purple beards he hailed them in the tongue of Tyrosh, and not one
of them had the words to hail him back.”
Sam was aghast. “They cannot mean to raid Oldtown.”
The captain of the Huntress gave him a curious look. “These are
no mere reavers. The ironmen have always raided where they
could. They would strike sudden from the sea, carry o some gold
and girls, and sail away, but there were seldom more than one or
two longships, and never more than half a dozen. Hundreds of their
ships a ict us now, sailing out of the Shield Islands and some of the
rocks around the Arbor. They have taken Stonecrab Cay, the Isle of
Pigs, and the Mermaid’s Palace, and there are other nests on
Horseshoe Rock and Bastard’s Cradle. Without Lord Redwyne’s
eet, we lack the ships to come to grips with them.”
“What is Lord Hightower doing?” Sam blurted. “My father always
said he was as wealthy as the Lannisters, and could command thrice
as many swords as any of Highgarden’s other bannermen.”
“More, if he sweeps the cobblestones,” the captain said, “but
swords are no good against the ironmen, unless the men who wield
them know how to walk on water.”

“The Hightower must be doing something.”
“To be sure. Lord Leyton’s locked atop his tower with the Mad
Maid, consulting books of spells. Might be he’ll raise an army from
the deeps. Or not. Baelor’s building galleys, Gunthor has charge of
the harbor, Garth is training new recruits, and Humfrey’s gone to
Lys to hire sellsails. If he can winkle a proper eet out of his whore
of a sister, we can start paying back the ironmen with some of their
own coin. Till then, the best we can do is guard the sound and wait
for the bitch queen in King’s Landing to let Lord Paxter o his
leash.”
The bitterness of the captain’s nal words shocked Sam as much
as the things he said. If King’s Landing loses Oldtown and the Arbor,
the whole realm will fall to pieces, he thought as he watched the
Huntress and her sisters moving o .
It made him wonder if even Horn Hill was truly safe. The Tarly
lands lay inland amidst thickly wooded foothills, a hundred leagues
northeast of Oldtown and a long way from any coast. They should
be well beyond the reach of ironmen and longships, even with his
lord father o
ghting in the riverlands and the castle lightly held.
The Young Wolf had no doubt thought the same was true of
Winterfell until the night that Theon Turncloak scaled his walls.
Sam could not bear the thought that he might have brought Gilly
and her babe all this long way to keep them out of harm, only to
abandon them in the midst of war.
He wrestled with his doubts through the rest of the voyage,
wondering what to do. He could keep Gilly with him in Oldtown, he
supposed. The city’s walls were much more formidable than those
of his father’s castle, and had thousands of men to defend them, as
opposed to the handful Lord Randyll would have left at Horn Hill
when he marched to Highgarden to answer his liege lord’s
summons. If he did, though, he would need to hide her somehow;
the Citadel did not permit its novices to keep wives or paramours,
at least not openly. Besides, if I stay with Gilly very much longer, how
will I ever nd the strength to leave her? He had to leave her, or
desert. I said the words, Sam reminded himself. If I desert, it will mean
my head, and how will that help Gilly?

He considered begging Kojja Mo and her father to take the
wildling girl with them to the Summer Isles. That path had its perils
too, however. When the Cinnamon Wind left Oldtown, she would
need to cross the Redwyne Straits again, and this time she might not
be so fortunate. What if the wind died, and the Summer Islanders
found themselves becalmed? If the tales he’d heard were true, Gilly
would be carried o for a thrall or salt wife, and the babe was like
to be chucked into the sea as a nuisance.
It has to be Horn Hill, Sam nally decided. Once we reach Oldtown
I’ll hire a wagon and some horses and take her there myself. That way
he could make certain of the castle and its garrison, and if any part
of what he saw or heard gave him pause, he could just turn around
and bring Gilly back to Oldtown.
They reached Oldtown on a cold damp morning, when the fog
was so thick that the beacon of the Hightower was the only part of
the city to be seen. A boom stretched across the harbor, linking two
dozen rotted hulks. Just behind it stood a line of warships, anchored
by three big dromonds and Lord Hightower’s towering four-decked
banner ship, the Honor of Oldtown. Once again the Cinnamon Wind
had to submit to inspection. This time it was Lord Leyton’s son
Gunthor who came aboard, in a cloth-of-silver cloak and a suit of
grey enameled scales. Ser Gunthor had studied at the Citadel for
several years and spoke the Summer Tongue, so he and Qurulu Mo
adjourned to the captain’s cabin for a privy conference.
Sam used the time to explain his plans to Gilly. “First the Citadel,
to present Jon’s letters and tell them of Maester Aemon’s death. I
expect the archmaesters will send a cart for his body. Then I will
arrange for horses and a wagon to take you to my mother at Horn
Hill. I will be back as soon as I can, but it may not be until the
morrow.”
“The morrow,” she repeated, and gave him a kiss for luck.
At length Ser Gunthor reemerged and gave the signal for the
chain to be opened so the Cinnamon Wind could slip through the
boom to dock. Sam joined Kojja Mo and three of her archers near
the gangplank as the swan ship was tying up, the Summer Islanders
resplendent in the feathered cloaks they only wore ashore. He felt a

shabby thing beside them in his baggy blacks, faded cloak, and saltstained boots. “How long will you remain in port?”
“Two days, ten days, who can say? However long it takes to
empty our holds and ll them again.” Kojja grinned. “My father
must visit the grey maesters as well. He has books to sell.”
“Can Gilly stay aboard till I return?”
“Gilly can stay as long as she likes.” She poked Sam in the belly
with a nger. “She does not eat so much as some.”
“I’m not so fat as I was before,” Sam said defensively. The
passage south had seen to that. All those watches, and nothing to
eat but fruit and sh. Summer Islanders loved fruit and sh.
Sam followed the archers across the plank, but once ashore they
parted company and went their separate ways. He hoped he still
remembered the way to the Citadel. Oldtown was a maze, and he
had no time for getting lost.
The day was damp, so the cobblestones were wet and slippery
underfoot, the alleys shrouded in mist and mystery. Sam avoided
them as best he could and stayed on the river road that wound
along beside the Honeywine through the heart of the old city. It felt
good to have solid ground beneath his feet again instead of a rolling
deck, but the walk made him feel uncomfortable all the same. He
could feel eyes on him, peering down from balconies and windows,
watching him from the darkened doorways. On the Cinnamon Wind
he had known every face. Here, everywhere he turned he saw
another stranger. Even worse was the thought of being seen by
someone who knew him. Lord Randyll Tarly was known in
Oldtown, but little loved. Sam did not know which would be worse:
to be recognized by one of his lord father’s enemies or by one of his
friends. He pulled his cloak up and quickened his pace.
The gates of the Citadel were anked by a pair of towering green
sphinxes with the bodies of lions, the wings of eagles, and the tails
of serpents. One had a man’s face, one a woman’s. Just beyond
stood Scribe’s Hearth, where Oldtowners came in search of acolytes
to write their wills and read their letters. Half a dozen bored scribes
sat in open stalls, waiting for some custom. At other stalls books
were being bought and sold. Sam stopped at one that o ered maps,

and looked over a hand-drawn map of Citadel to ascertain the
shortest way to the Seneschal’s Court.
The path divided where the statue of King Daeron the First sat
astride his tall stone horse, his sword lifted toward Dorne. A seagull
was perched on the Young Dragon’s head, and two more on the
blade. Sam took the left fork, which ran beside the river. At the
Weeping Dock, he watched two acolytes help an old man into a
boat for the short voyage to the Bloody Isle. A young mother
climbed in after him, a babe not much older than Gilly’s squalling in
her arms. Beneath the dock, some cook’s boys waded in the
shallows, gathering frogs. A stream of pink-cheeked novices hurried
by him toward the septry. I should have come here when I was their
age, Sam thought. If I had run o and taken a false name, I could have
disappeared amongst the other novices. Father could have pretended that
Dickon was his only son. I doubt he would even have troubled to search
for me, unless I took a mule to ride. Then he would have hunted me
down, but only for the mule.
Outside the Seneschal’s Court, the rectors were locking an older
novice into the stocks. “Stealing food from the kitchens,” one
explained to the acolytes who were waiting to pelt the captive with
rotting vegetables. They all gave Sam curious looks as he strode
past, his black cloak billowing behind him like a sail.
Beyond the doors he found a hall with a stone oor and high,
arched windows. At the far end a man with a pinched face sat upon
a raised dais, scratching in a ledger with a quill. Though the man
was clad in a maester’s robe, there was no chain about his neck.
Sam cleared his throat. “Good morrow.”
The man glanced up and did not appear to approve of what he
saw. “You smell of novice.”
“I hope to be one soon.” Sam drew out the letters Jon Snow had
given him. “I came from the Wall with Maester Aemon, but he died
during the voyage. If I could speak with the Seneschal …”
“Your name?”
“Samwell. Samwell Tarly.”
The man wrote the name in his ledger and waved his quill at a
bench along the wall. “Sit. You’ll be called when wanted.”

Sam took a seat on the bench.
Others came and went. Some delivered messages and took their
leave. Some spoke to the man on the dais and were sent through the
door behind him and up a turnpike stair. Some joined Sam on the
benches, waiting for their names to be called. A few of those who
were summoned had come in after him, he was almost certain. After
the fourth or fth time that happened, he rose and crossed the room
again. “How much longer will it be?”
“The Seneschal is an important man.”
“I came all the way from the Wall.”
“Then you will have no trouble going a bit farther.” He waved his
quill. “To that bench just there, beneath the window.”
Sam returned to the bench. Another hour passed. Others entered,
spoke to the man on the dais, waited a few moments, and were
ushered onward. The gatekeeper did not so much as glance at Sam
in all that time. The fog outside grew thinner as the day wore on,
and pale sunlight slanted down through the windows. He found
himself watching dust motes dance in the light. A yawn escaped
him, then another. He picked at a broken blister on his palm, then
leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
He must have drowsed. The next he knew, the man behind the
dais was calling out a name. Sam came lurching to his feet, then sat
back down again when he realized it was not his name.
“You need to slip Lorcas a penny, or you’ll be waiting here three
days,” a voice beside him said. “What brings the Night’s Watch to
the Citadel?”
The speaker was a slim, slight, comely youth, clad in doeskin
breeches and a snug green brigandine with iron studs. He had skin
the color of a light brown ale and a cap of tight black curls that
came to a widow’s peak above his big black eyes. “The Lord
Commander is restoring the abandoned castles,” Sam explained.
“We need more maesters, for the ravens … did you say, a penny?”
“A penny will serve. For a silver stag Lorcas will carry you up to
the Seneschal on his back. He has been fty years an acolyte. He
hates novices, particularly novices of noble birth.”
“How could you tell I was of noble birth?”

“The same way you can tell that I’m half Dornish.” The statement
was delivered with a smile, in a soft Dornish drawl.
Sam fumbled for a penny. “Are you a novice?”
“An acolyte. Alleras, by some called Sphinx.”
The name gave Sam a jolt. “The sphinx is the riddle, not the
riddler,” he blurted. “Do you know what that means?”
“No. Is it a riddle?”
“I wish I knew. I’m Samwell Tarly. Sam.”
“Well met. And what business does Samwell Tarly have with
Archmaester Theobald?”
“Is he the Seneschal?” said Sam, confused. “Maester Aemon said
his name was Norren.”
“Not for the past two turns. There is a new one every year. They
ll the o ce by lot from amongst the archmaesters, most of whom
regard it as a thankless task that takes them away from their true
work. This year the black stone was drawn by Archmaester
Walgrave, but Walgrave’s wits are prone to wander, so Theobald
stepped up and said he’d serve his term. He’s a gru man, but a
good one. Did you say Maester Aemon?”
“Aye.”
“Aemon Targaryen?”
“Once. Most just called him Maester Aemon. He died during our
voyage south. How is it that you know of him?”
“How not? He was more than just the oldest living maester. He
was the oldest man in Westeros, and lived through more history
than Archmaester Perestan has ever learned. He could have told us
much and more about his father’s reign, and his uncle’s. How old
was he, do you know?”
“One hundred and two.”
“What was he doing at sea, at his age?”
Sam chewed on the question for a moment, wondering how much
he ought to say. The sphinx is the riddle, not the riddler. Could
Maester Aemon have meant this Sphinx? It seemed unlikely. “Lord
Commander Snow sent him away to save his life,” he began,
hesitantly. He spoke awkwardly of King Stannis and Melisandre of
Asshai, intending to stop at that, but one thing led to another and he

found himself speaking of Mance Rayder and his wildlings, king’s
blood and dragons, and before he knew what was happening, all the
rest came spilling out; the wights at the Fist of First Men, the Other
on his dead horse, the murder of the Old Bear at Craster’s Keep,
Gilly and their ight, Whitetree and Small Paul, Coldhands and the
ravens, Jon’s becoming lord commander, the Blackbird, Dareon,
Braavos, the dragons Xhondo saw in Qarth, the Cinnamon Wind and
all that Maester Aemon whispered toward the end. He held back
only the secrets that he was sworn to keep, about Bran Stark and his
companions and the babes Jon Snow had swapped. “Daenerys is the
only hope,” he concluded. “Aemon said the Citadel must send her a
maester at once, to bring her home to Westeros before it is too
late.”
Alleras listened intently. He blinked from time to time, but he
never laughed and never interrupted. When Sam was done he
touched him lightly on the forearm with a slim brown hand and
said, “Save your penny, Sam. Theobald will not believe half of that,
but there are those who might. Will you come with me?”
“Where?”
“To speak with an archmaester.”
You must tell them, Sam, Maester Aemon had said. You must tell the
archmaesters. “Very well.” He could always return to the Seneschal
on the morrow, with a penny in his hand. “How far do we have to
go?”
“Not far. The Isle of Ravens.”
They did not need a boat to reach the Isle of Ravens; a weathered
wooden drawbridge linked it to the eastern bank. “The Ravenry is
the oldest building at the Citadel,” Alleras told him, as they crossed
over the slow- owing waters of the Honeywine. “In the Age of
Heroes it was supposedly the stronghold of a pirate lord who sat
here robbing ships as they came down the river.”
Moss and creeping vines covered the walls, Sam saw, and ravens
walked its battlements in place of archers. The drawbridge had not
been raised in living memory.
It was cool and dim inside the castle walls. An ancient weirwood
lled the yard, as it had since these stones had rst been raised. The

carved face on its trunk was grown over by the same purple moss
that hung heavy from the tree’s pale limbs. Half of the branches
seemed dead, but elsewhere a few red leaves still rustled, and it was
there the ravens liked to perch. The tree was full of them, and there
were more in the arched windows overhead, all around the yard.
The ground was speckled by their droppings. As they crossed the
yard, one apped overhead and he heard the others quorking to
each other. “Archmaester Walgrave has his chambers in the west
tower, below the white rookery,” Alleras told him. “The white
ravens and the black ones quarrel like Dornishmen and Marchers, so
they keep them apart.”
“Will Archmaester Walgrave understand what I am telling him?”
wondered Sam. “You said his wits were prone to wander.”
“He has good days and bad ones,” said Alleras, “but it is not
Walgrave you’re going to see.” He opened the door to the north
tower and began to climb. Sam clambered up the steps behind him.
There were utterings and mutterings from above, and here and
there an angry scream, as the ravens complained of being woken.
At the top of the steps, a pale blond youth about Sam’s age sat
outside a door of oak and iron, staring intently into a candle ame
with his right eye. His left was hidden beneath a fall of ash blond
hair. “What are you looking for?” Alleras asked him. “Your destiny?
Your death?”
The blond youth turned from the candle, blinking. “Naked
women,” he said. “Who’s this now?”
“Samwell. A new novice, come to see the Mage.”
“The Citadel is not what it was,” complained the blond. “They
will take anything these days. Dusky dogs and Dornishmen, pig
boys, cripples, cretins, and now a black-clad whale. And here I
thought leviathans were grey.” A half cape striped in green and gold
draped one shoulder. He was very handsome, though his eyes were
sly and his mouth cruel.
Sam knew him. “Leo Tyrell.” Saying the name made him feel as if
he were still a boy of seven, about to wet his smallclothes. “I am
Sam, from Horn Hill. Lord Randyll Tarly’s son.”

“Truly?” Leo gave him another look. “I suppose you are. Your
father told us all that you were dead. Or was it only that he wished
you were?” He grinned. “Are you still a craven?”
“No,” lied Sam. Jon had made it a command. “I went beyond the
Wall and fought in battles. They call me Sam the Slayer.” He did not
know why he said it. The words just tumbled out.
Leo laughed, but before he could reply the door behind him
opened. “Get in here, Slayer,” growled the man in the doorway.
“And you, Sphinx. Now.”
“Sam,” said Alleras, “this is Archmaester Marwyn.”
Marwyn wore a chain of many metals around his bull’s neck. Save
for that, he looked more like a dockside thug than a maester. His
head was too big for his body, and the way it thrust forward from
his shoulders, together with that slab of jaw, made him look as if he
were about to tear o someone’s head. Though short and squat, he
was heavy in the chest and shoulders, with a round, rock-hard ale
belly straining at the laces of the leather jerkin he wore in place of
robes. Bristly white hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils. His
brow beetled, his nose had been broken more than once, and
sourleaf had stained his teeth a mottled red. He had the biggest
hands that Sam had ever seen.
When Sam hesitated, one of those hands grabbed him by the arm
and yanked him through the door. The room beyond was large and
round. Books and scrolls were everywhere, strewn across the tables
and stacked up on the oor in piles four feet high. Faded tapestries
and ragged maps covered the stone walls. A re was burning in the
hearth, beneath a copper kettle. Whatever was inside of it smelled
burned. Aside from that, the only light came from a tall black
candle in the center of the room.
The candle was unpleasantly bright. There was something queer
about it. The ame did not icker, even when Archmaester Marwyn
closed the door so hard that papers blew o a nearby table. The
light did something strange to colors too. Whites were bright as
fresh-fallen snow, yellow shone like gold, reds turned to ame, but
the shadows were so black they looked like holes in the world. Sam
found himself staring. The candle itself was three feet tall and

slender as a sword, ridged and twisted, glittering black. “Is
that …?”
“… obsidian,” said the other man in the room, a pale, eshy,
pasty-faced young fellow with round shoulders, soft hands, close-set
eyes, and food stains on his robes.
“Call it dragonglass.” Archmaester Marwyn glanced at the candle
for a moment. “It burns but is not consumed.”
“What feeds the ame?” asked Sam.
“What feeds a dragon’s re?” Marwyn seated himself upon a
stool. “All Valyrian sorcery was rooted in blood or re. The
sorcerers of the Freehold could see across mountains, seas, and
deserts with one of these glass candles. They could enter a man’s
dreams and give him visions, and speak to one another half a world
apart, seated before their candles. Do you think that might be
useful, Slayer?”
“We would have no more need of ravens.”
“Only after battles.” The archmaester peeled a sourleaf o a bale,
shoved it in his mouth, and began to chew it. “Tell me all you told
our Dornish sphinx. I know much of it and more, but some small
parts may have escaped my notice.”
He was not a man to be refused. Sam hesitated a moment, then
told his tale again as Marywn, Alleras, and the other novice
listened. “Maester Aemon believed that Daenerys Targaryen was the
ful llment of a prophecy … her, not Stannis, nor Prince Rhaegar,
nor the princeling whose head was dashed against the wall.”
“Born amidst salt and smoke, beneath a bleeding star. I know the
prophecy.” Marwyn turned his head and spat a gob of red phlegm
onto the oor. “Not that I would trust it. Gorghan of Old Ghis once
wrote that a prophecy is like a treacherous woman. She takes your
member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and
think, how sweet, how ne, how good this is … and then her teeth
snap shut and your moans turn to screams. That is the nature of
prophecy, said Gorghan. Prophecy will bite your prick o every
time.” He chewed a bit. “Still …”
Alleras stepped up next to Sam. “Aemon would have gone to her
if he had the strength. He wanted us to send a maester to her, to

counsel her and protect her and fetch her safely home.”
“Did he?” Archmaester Marwyn shrugged. “Perhaps it’s good that
he died before he got to Oldtown. Elsewise the grey sheep might
have had to kill him, and that would have made the poor old dears
wring their wrinkled hands.”
“Kill him?” Sam said, shocked. “Why?”
“If I tell you, they may need to kill you too.” Marywn smiled a
ghastly smile, the juice of the sourleaf running red between his
teeth. “Who do you think killed all the dragons the last time
around? Gallant dragonslayers armed with swords?” He spat. “The
world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or
prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons. Ask yourself why
Aemon Targaryen was allowed to waste his life upon the Wall,
when by rights he should have been raised to archmaester. His blood
was why. He could not be trusted. No more than I can.”
“What will you do?” asked Alleras, the Sphinx.
“Get myself to Slaver’s Bay, in Aemon’s place. The swan ship that
delivered Slayer should serve my needs well enough. The grey
sheep will send their man on a galley, I don’t doubt. With fair winds
I should reach her rst.” Marwyn glanced at Sam again, and
frowned. “You … you should stay and forge your chain. If I were
you, I would do it quickly. A time will come when you’ll be needed
on the Wall.” He turned to the pasty-faced novice. “Find Slayer a
dry cell. He’ll sleep here, and help you tend the ravens.”
“B-b-but,” Sam sputtered, “the other archmaesters … the
Seneschal … what should I tell them?”
“Tell them how wise and good they are. Tell them that Aemon
commanded you to put yourself into their hands. Tell them that you
have always dreamed that one day you might be allowed to wear
the chain and serve the greater good, that service is the highest
honor, and obedience the highest virtue. But say nothing of
prophecies or dragons, unless you fancy poison in your porridge.”
Marwyn snatched a stained leather cloak o a peg near the door
and tied it tight. “Sphinx, look after this one.”
“I will,” Alleras answered, but the archmaester was already gone.
They heard his boots stomping down the steps.

“Where has he gone?” asked Sam, bewildered.
“To the docks. The Mage is not a man who believes in wasting
time.” Alleras smiled. “I have a confession. Ours was no chance
encounter, Sam. The Mage sent me to snatch you up before you
spoke to Theobald. He knew that you were coming.”
“How?”
Alleras nodded at the glass candle.
Sam stared at the strange pale ame for a moment, then blinked
and looked away. Outside the window it was growing dark.
“There’s an empty sleeping cell under mine in the west tower,
with steps that lead right up to Walgrave’s chambers,” said the
pasty-faced youth. “If you don’t mind the ravens quorking, there’s a
good view of the Honeywine. Will that serve?”
“I suppose.” He had to sleep somewhere.
“I will bring you some woolen coverlets. Stone walls turn cold at
night, even here.”
“My thanks.” There was something about the pale, soft youth that
he misliked, but he did not want to seem discourteous, so he added,
“My name’s not Slayer, truly. I’m Sam. Samwell Tarly.”
“I’m Pate,” the other said, “like the pig boy.”

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE WALL …

Hey, wait a minute!” some of you may be saying about now. “Wait
a minute, wait a minute! Where’s Dany and the dragons? Where’s
Tyrion? We hardly saw Jon Snow. That can’t be all of it.…”
Well, no. There’s more to come. Another book as big as this one.
I did not forget to write about the other characters. Far from it. I
wrote lots about them. Pages and pages and pages. Chapters and
more chapters. I was still writing when it dawned on me that the
book had become too big to publish in a single volume … and I
wasn’t close to nished yet. To tell all of the story that I wanted to
tell, I was going to have to cut the book in two.
The simplest way to do that would have been to take what I had,
chop it in half around the middle, and end with “To Be Continued.”
The more I thought about that, however, the more I felt that the
readers would be better served by a book that told all the story for
half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters.
So that’s the route I chose to take.
Tyrion, Jon, Dany, Stannis and Melisandre, Davos Seaworth, and
all the rest of the characters you love or love to hate will be along
next year (I devoutly hope) in A Dance with Dragons, which will
focus on events along the Wall and across the sea, just as the
present book focused on King’s Landing.

—George R. R. Martin
June 2005

APPENDIX I:
THE KINGS AND THEIR COURTS

THE QUEEN REGENT
CERSEI LANNISTER, the First of Her Name, widow of {King Robert
I Baratheon}, Queen Dowager, Protector of the Realm, Lady of
Casterly Rock, and Queen Regent,
—Queen Cersei’s children:
—{KING JOFFREY I BARATHEON}, poisoned at his wedding
feast, a boy of twelve,
—PRINCESS MYRCELLA BARATHEON, a girl of nine, a ward
of Prince Doran Martell at Sunspear,
—KING TOMMEN I BARATHEON, a boy king of eight years,
—his kittens, SER POUNCE, LADY WHISKERS, BOOTS,
—Queen Cersei’s brothers:
—SER JAIME LANNISTER, her twin, called THE
KINGSLAYER, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard,
—TYRION LANNISTER, called THE IMP, a dwarf, accused
and condemned for regicide and kinslaying,
—PODRICK PAYNE, Tyrion’s squire, a boy of ten,
—Queen Cersei’s uncles, aunt, and cousins:
—SER KEVAN LANNISTER, her uncle,
—SER LANCEL, Ser Kevan’s son, her cousin, formerly King
Robert’s squire and Cersei’s lover, newly raised to Lord
of Darry,
—{WILLEM}, Ser Kevan’s son, murdered at Riverrun,

—MARTYN, twin to Willem, a squire,
—JANEI, Ser Kevan’s daughter, a girl of three,

—LADY GENNA LANNISTER, Cersei’s aunt, m. Ser Emmon
Frey,
—{SER CLEOS FREY}, Genna’s son, killed by outlaws,
—SER TYWIN FREY, called TY, Cleos’s son,
—WILLEM FREY, Cleos’s son, a squire,

—SER LYONEL FREY, Lady Genna’s second son,
—{TION FREY}, Genna’s son, murdered at Riverrun,
—WALDER FREY, called RED WALDER, Lady Genna’s
youngest son, a page at Casterly Rock,
—TYREK LANNISTER, Cersei’s cousin, son of her father’s late
brother Tygett,
—LADY ERMESANDE HAYFORD, Tyrek’s child wife,
—JOY HILL, bastard daughter of Queen Cersei’s lost uncle
Gerion, a girl of eleven,
—CERENNA LANNISTER, Cersei’s cousin, daughter of her
late uncle Sta ord, her mother’s brother,
—MYRIELLE LANNISTER, Cersei’s cousin and Cerenna’s
sister, daughter of her uncle Sta ord,
—SER DAVEN LANNISTER, her cousin, Sta ord’s son,
—SER DAMION LANNISTER, a more distant cousin, m.
Shiera Crakehall,

—SER LUCION LANNISTER, their son,
—LANNA, their daughter, m. Lord Antario Jast,
—LADY MARGOT, a cousin still more distant, m. Lord Titus
Peake,

—King Tommen’s small council:
—{LORD TYWIN LANNISTER}, Hand of the King,

—SER JAIME LANNISTER, Lord Commander of the
Kingsguard,
—SER KEVAN LANNISTER, master of laws,

—VARYS, a eunuch, master of whisperers,
—GRAND MAESTER PYCELLE, counselor and healer,

—LORD MACE TYRELL, LORD MATHIS ROWAN, LORD
PAXTER REDWYNE, counselors,
—Tommen’s Kingsguard:
—SER JAIME LANNISTER, Lord Commander,
—SER MERYN TRANT,
—SER BOROS BLOUNT, removed and thence restored,
—SER BALON SWANN,
—SER OSMUND KETTLEBLACK,

—SER LORAS TYRELL, the Knight of Flowers,
—SER ARYS OAKHEART, with Princess Myrcella in Dorne,
—Cersei’s household at King’s Landing:

—LADY JOCELYN SWYFT, her companion,
—SENELLE and DORCAS, her bedmaids and servingwomen,

—LUM, RED LESTER, HOKE, called HORSELEG, SHORTEAR, and PUCKENS, guardsmen,
—QUEEN MARGAERY of House Tyrell, a maid of sixteen,
widowed bride of King Jo rey I Baratheon and of Lord Renly
Baratheon before him,
—Margaery’s court at King’s Landing:
—MACE TYRELL, Lord of Highgarden, her father
—LADY ALERIE of House Hightower, her mother,
—LADY OLENNA TYRELL, her grandmother, an aged
widow called THE QUEEN OF THORNS,
—ARRYK and ERRYK, Lady Olenna’s guards, twins
seven feet tall called LEFT and RIGHT,

—SER GARLAN TYRELL, Margaery’s brother, THE
GALLANT,
—his wife, LADY LEONETTE of House Fossoway,

—SER LORAS TYRELL, her youngest brother, the Knight of
Flowers, a Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard,
—Margaery’s lady companions:
—her cousins, MEGGA, ALLA, and ELINOR TYRELL,
—Elinor’s betrothed, ALYN AMBROSE, squire,

—LADY ALYSANNE BULWER, a girl of eight,
—MEREDYTH CRANE, called MERRY,
—LADY TAENA MERRYWEATHER,
—LADY ALYCE GRACEFORD,

—SEPTA NYSTERICA, a sister of the Faith,
—PAXTER REDWYNE, Lord of the Arbor,

—his twin sons, SER HORAS and SER HOBBER,

—MAESTER BALLABAR, his healer and counselor,
—MATHIS ROWAN, Lord of Goldengrove,

—SER WILLAM WYTHERS, Margaery’s captain of guards,
—HUGH CLIFTON, a handsome young guardsman,

—SER PORTIFER WOODWRIGHT and his brother, SER
LUCANTINE,

—Cersei’s court at King’s Landing:

—SER OSFRYD KETTLEBLACK and SER OSNEY
KETTLEBLACK, younger brothers to Ser Osmund
Kettleblack,
—SER GREGOR CLEGANE, called THE MOUNTAIN THAT
RIDES, dying painfully of a poisoned wound,

—SER ADDAM MARBRAND, Commander of the City Watch
of King’s Landing (the “gold cloaks”),

—JALABHAR XHO, Prince of the Red Flower Vale, an exile
from the Summer Isles,
—GYLES ROSBY, Lord of Rosby, troubled by a cough,
—ORTON MERRYWEATHER, Lord of Longtable,
—TAENA, his wife, a woman of Myr,
—LADY TANDA STOKEWORTH,

—LADY FALYSE, her elder daughter and heir,

—SER BALMAN BYRCH, Lady Falyse’s husband,
—LADY LOLLYS, her younger daughter, great with child
but weak of wit,
—SER BRONN OF THE BLACKWATER, Lady Lollys’s
husband, a former sellsword,

—{SHAE}, a camp follower serving as Lollys’s bedmaid,
strangled in Lord Tywin’s bed,

—MAESTER FRENKEN, in Lady Tanda’s service,

—SER ILYN PAYNE, the King’s Justice, a headsman,

—RENNIFER LONGWATERS, chief undergaoler of the Red
Keep’s dungeons,
—RUGEN, undergaoler for the black cells,

—LORD HALLYNE THE PYROMANCER, a Wisdom of the
Guild of Alchemists,

—NOHO DIMITTIS, envoy from the Iron Bank of Braavos,

—QYBURN, a necromancer, once a maester of the Citadel,
more recently of the Brave Companions,
—MOON BOY, the royal jester and fool,

—PATE, a lad of eight, King Tommen’s whipping boy,
—ORMOND OF OLDTOWN, the royal harper and bard,

—SER MARK MULLENDORE, who lost a monkey and half an
arm in the Battle of the Blackwater,
—AURANE WATERS, the Bastard of Driftmark,

—LORD ALESANDER STAEDMON, called PENNYLOVER,

—SER RONNET CONNINGTON, called RED RONNET, the
Knight of Gri n’s Roost,
—SER LAMBERT TURNBERRY, SER DERMOT OF THE
RAINWOOD, SER TALLAD called THE TALL, SER BAYARD
NORCROSS, SER BONIFER HASTY called BONIFER THE
GOOD, SER HUGO VANCE, knights sworn to the Iron
Throne,
—SER LYLE CRAKEHALL called STRONGBOAR, SER ALYN
STACKSPEAR, SER JON BETTLEY called BEARDLESS JON,
SER STEFFON SWYFT, SER HUMFREY SWYFT, knights
sworn to Casterly Rock,
—JOSMYN PECKLEDON, a squire and hero of the
Blackwater,

—GARRETT PAEGE and LEW PIPER, squires and hostages,

—the people of King’s Landing:
—THE HIGH SEPTON, Father of the Faithful, Voice of the
Seven on Earth, an old man and frail,

—SEPTON TORBERT, SEPTON RAYNARD, SEPTON
LUCEON, SEPTON OLLIDOR, of the Most Devout,
serving the Seven at the Great Sept of Baelor,
—SEPTA MOELLE, SEPTA AGLANTINE, SEPTA HELICENT,
SEPTA UNELLA, of the Most Devout, serving the Seven
at the Great Sept of Baelor,
—the “sparrows,” the humblest of men, erce in their
piety,

—CHATAYA, proprietor of an expensive brothel,
—ALAYAYA, her daughter,
—DANCY, MAREI, two of Chataya’s girls,

—BRELLA, a servingwoman, lately in the service of Lady
Sansa Stark,
—TOBHO MOTT, a master armorer,

—HAMISH THE HARPER, an aged singer,
—ALARIC OF EYSEN, a singer, far-traveled,

—WAT, a singer, styling himself THE BLUE BARD,

—SER THEODAN WELLS, a pious knight, later called SER
THEODAN THE TRUE.

King Tommen’s banner shows the crowned stag of Baratheon, black
on gold, and the lion of Lannister, gold on crimson, combatant.

THE KING AT THE WALL
STANNIS BARATHEON, the First of His Name, second son of Lord
Ste on Baratheon and Lady Cassana of House Estermont, Lord of
Dragonstone, styling himself King of Westeros,
—QUEEN SELYSE of House Florent, his wife, presently at
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea,
—PRINCESS SHIREEN, their daughter, a girl of eleven,
—PATCHFACE, Shireen’s lackwit fool,
—EDRIC STORM, his bastard nephew, King Robert’s son by
Lady Delena Florent, a boy of twelve, sailing the narrow
sea on the Mad Prendos,
—SER ANDREW ESTERMONT, King Stannis’s cousin, a
king’s man, commanding Edric’s escort,
—SER GERALD GOWER, LEWYS called THE FISHWIFE,
SER TRISTON OF TALLY HILL, OMER BLACKBERRY,
king’s men, Edric’s guards and protectors,
—Stannis’s court at Castle Black:
—LADY MELISANDRE OF ASSHAI, called THE RED
WOMAN, a priestess of R’hllor, the Lord of Light,
—MANCE RAYDER, King-Beyond-the-Wall, a captive
condemned to death,
—Rayder’s son by his wife {DALLA}, a newborn as yet
unnamed, “the wildling prince,”
—GILLY, the babe’s wet nurse, a wildling girl,

—her son, another newborn as yet unnamed, fathered
by her father {CRASTER},

—SER RICHARD HORPE, SER JUSTIN MASSEY, SER
CLAYTON SUGGS, SER GODRY FARRING, called
GIANTSLAYER, LORD HARWOOD FELL, SER CORLISS
PENNY, queen’s men and knights,
—DEVAN SEAWORTH and BRYEN FARRING, royal squires,

—Stannis’s court at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea:

—SER DAVOS SEAWORTH, called THE ONION KNIGHT,
Lord of the Rainwood, Admiral of the Narrow Sea, and
Hand of the King,
—SER AXELL FLORENT, Queen Selyse’s uncle, foremost of
the queen’s men,
—SALLADHAR SAAN of Lys, a pirate and sellsail, master of
the Valyrian and a eet of galleys,
—Stannis’s garrison at Dragonstone:
—SER ROLLAND STORM, called THE BASTARD OF
NIGHTSONG, a king’s man, castellan of Dragonstone,
—MAESTER PYLOS, healer, tutor, counselor,
—“PORRIDGE” and “LAMPREY,” two gaolers,

—lords sworn to Dragonstone:
—MONTERYS VELARYON, Lord of the Tides and Master of
Driftmark, a boy of six,
—DURAM BAR EMMON, Lord of Sharp Point, a boy of
fteen years,
—Stannis’s garrison at Storm’s End:

—SER GILBERT FARRING, castellan of Storm’s End,
—LORD ELWOOD MEADOWS, Ser Gilbert’s second,
—MAESTER JURNE, Ser Gilbert’s counselor and healer,

—lords sworn to Storm’s End:

—ELDON ESTERMONT, Lord of Greenstone, uncle to King
Stannis, great uncle to King Tommen, a cautious friend to
both,
—SER AEMON, Lord Eldon’s son and heir, with King
Tommen in King’s Landing,
—SER ALYN, Ser Aemon’s son, likewise with King
Tommen in King’s Landing,

—SER LOMAS, brother of Lord Eldon, uncle and supporter
of King Stannis, at Storm’s End,
—SER ANDREW, Ser Lomas’s son, protecting Edric
Storm upon the narrow sea,

—LESTER MORRIGEN, Lord of Crows Nest,
—LORD LUCOS CHYTTERING, called LITTLE LUCOS, a
youth of sixteen,

—DAVOS SEAWORTH, Lord of the Rainwood,
—MARYA, his wife, a carpenter’s daughter,
—{DALE, ALLARD, MATTHOS, MARIC}, their four
eldest sons, lost in the Battle of the Blackwater,
—DEVAN, a squire with King Stannis at Castle Black,
—STANNIS, a boy of ten years, with Lady Marya on
Cape Wrath,
—STEFFON, a boy of six years, with Lady Marya on
Cape Wrath.

Stannis has taken for his banner the ery heart of the Lord of Light;
a red heart surrounded by orange ames upon a yellow eld.
Within the heart is the crowned stag of House Baratheon, in black.

KING OF THE ISLES AND THE NORTH
The Greyjoys of Pyke claim descent from the Grey King of the Age
of Heroes. Legend says the Grey King ruled the sea itself and took a
mermaid to wife. Aegon the Dragon ended the line of the last King
of the Iron Islands, but allowed the ironborn to revive their ancient
custom and choose who should have the primacy among them. They
chose Lord Vickon Greyjoy of Pyke. The Greyjoy sigil is a golden
kraken upon a black eld. Their words are We Do Not Sow.
Balon Greyjoy’s rst rebellion against the Iron Throne was put
down by King Robert I Baratheon and Lord Eddard Stark of
Winterfell, but in the chaos following Robert’s death Lord Balon
named himself king once more, and sent his ships to attack the
north.
{BALON GREYJOY}, the Ninth of His Name Since the Grey King,
King of the Iron Islands and the North, King of Salt and Rock,
Son of the Sea Wind, and Lord Reaper of Pyke, killed in a fall,
—King Balon’s widow, QUEEN ALANNYS, of House Harlaw,
—their children:
—{RODRIK}, slain during Balon’s rst rebellion,
—{MARON}, slain during Balon’s rst rebellion,
—ASHA, their daughter, captain of the Black Wind and
conquerer of Deepwood Motte,
—THEON, styling himself the Prince of Winterfell, called by
northmen THEON TURNCLOAK,

—King Balon’s brothers and half brothers:
—{HARLON}, died of greyscale in his youth,
—{QUENTON}, died in infancy,
—{DONEL}, died in infancy,

—EURON, called Crow’s Eye, captain of the Silence,

—VICTARION, Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, master of the
Iron Victory,

—{URRIGON}, died of a wound gone bad,
—AERON, called DAMPHAIR, a priest of the Drowned God,
—RUS and NORJEN, two of his acolytes, the “drowned
men,”
—{ROBIN}, died in infancy,
—King Balon’s household on Pyke:
—MAESTER WENDAMYR, healer and counselor,
—HELYA, keeper of the castle,
—King Balon’s warriors and sworn swords:
—DAGMER called CLEFTJAW, captain of Foamdrinker,
commanding the ironborn at Torrhen’s Square,

—BLUETOOTH, a longship captain,
—ULLER, SKYTE, oarsmen and warriors,
—CLAIMANTS TO THE SEASTONE CHAIR AT THE KINGSMOOT ON OLD WYK
GYLBERT FARWYND, Lord of the Lonely Light,
—Gylbert’s champions: his sons GYLES, YGON, YOHN,

ERIK IRONMAKER, called ERIK ANVIL-BREAKER and ERIK
THE JUST, an old man, once a famed captain and raider,
—Erik’s champions: his grandsons UREK, THORMOR,
DAGON,

DUNSTAN DRUMM, The Drumm, the Bone Hand, Lord of Old
Wyk,

—Dunstan’s champions: his sons DENYS and DONNEL, and
ANDRIK THE UNSMILING, a giant of a man,
ASHA GREYJOY, only daughter of Balon Greyjoy, captain of
the Black Wind,

—Asha’s champions: QARL THE MAID, TRISTIFER BOTLEY,
and SER HARRAS HARLAW
—Asha’s captains and supporters: LORD RODRIK HARLAW,
LORD BAELOR BLACKTYDE, LORD MELDRED MERLYN,
HARMUND SHARP
VICTARION GREYJOY, brother to Balon Greyjoy, master of the
Iron Victory and Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet,
—Victarion’s champions: RED RALF STONEHOUSE, RALF
THE LIMPER, and NUTE THE BARBER,
—Victarion’s captains and supporters: HOTHO HARLAW,
ALVYN SHARP, FRALEGG THE STRONG, ROMNY
WEAVER, WILL HUMBLE, LITTLE LENWOOD TAWNEY,
RALF KENNING, MARON VOLMARK, GOROLD
GOODBROTHER,
—Victarion’s crewmen: WULF ONE-EAR, RAGNOR PYKE

—Victarion’s bedmate, a certain dusky woman, mute and
tongueless, a gift from his brother Euron,
EURON GREYJOY, called THE CROW’S EYE, brother to Balon
Greyjoy and captain of the Silence,
—Euron’s champions: GERMUND BOTLEY, LORD
ORKWOOD OF ORKMONT, DONNOR SALTCLIFFE
—Euron’s captains and supporters: TORWOLD
BROWNTOOTH, PINCHFACE JON MYRE, RODRIK
FREEBORN, THE RED OARSMAN, LEFT-HAND LUCAS
CODD, QUELLON HUMBLE, HARREN HALF-HOARE,
KEMMETT PYKE THE BASTARD, QARL THE THRALL,
STONEHAND, RALF THE SHEPHERD, RALF OF
LORDSPORT
—Euron’s crewmen: CRAGORN

—Balon’s bannermen, the Lords of the Iron Islands:
ON PYKE

—{SAWANE BOTLEY}, Lord of Lordsport, drowned by Euron
Crow’s Eye,
—{HARREN}, his eldest son, killed at Moat Cailin,

—TRISTIFER, his second son and rightful heir, dispossessed
by his uncle,
—SYMOND, HARLON, VICKON, and BENNARION, his
younger sons, likewise dispossessed,
—GERMUND, his brother, made Lord of Lordsport
—Germund’s sons, BALON and QUELLON,

—SARGON and LUCIMORE, Sawane’s half brothers,
—WEX, a mute boy of twelve years, bastard son of
Sargon, squire to Theon Greyjoy,

—WALDON WYNCH, Lord of Iron Holt,
ON HARLAW

—RODRIK HARLAW, called THE READER, Lord of Harlaw,
Lord of Ten Towers, Harlaw of Harlaw,
—LADY GWYNESSE, his elder sister,
—LADY ALANNYS, his younger sister, widow of King
Balon Greyjoy
—SIGFRYD HARLAW, called SIGFRYD SILVERHAIR, his
great uncle, master of Harlaw Hall,

—HOTHO HARLAW, called HOTHO HUMPBACK, of the
Tower of Glimmering, a cousin,

—SER HARRAS HARLAW, called THE KNIGHT, the Knight
of Grey Garden, a cousin,
—BOREMUND HARLAW, called BOREMUND THE BLUE,
master of Harridan Hill, a cousin,
—Lord Rodrik’s bannermen and sworn swords:

—MARON VOLMARK, Lord of Volmark,

—MYRE, STONETREE, and KENNING,
—Lord Rodrik’s household:

—THREE-TOOTH, his steward, a crone,

ON BLACKTYDE

—BAELOR BLACKTYDE, Lord of Blacktyde, captain of the
Night yer,

—BLIND BEN BLACKTYDE, a priest of the Drowned God,
ON OLD WYK
—DUNSTAN DRUMM, The Drumm, captain of Thunderer,
—NORNE GOODBROTHER, of Shatterstone,

—THE STONEHOUSE,
—TARLE, called TARLE THE THRICE-DROWNED, a priest of
the Drowned God,

ON GREAT WYK

—GOROLD GOODBROTHER, Lord of the Hammerhorn,

—his sons, GREYDON, GRAN, and GORMOND, triplets,

—his daughters, GYSELLA and GWIN,
—MAESTER MURENMURE, tutor, healer, and counselor,

—TRISTON FARWYND, Lord of Sealskin Point,
—THE SPARR,

—his son and heir, STEFFARION,
—MELDRED MERLYN, Lord of Pebbleton,

ON ORKMONT

—ORKWOOD OF ORKMONT,
—LORD TAWNEY,

ON SALTCLIFFE

—LORD DONNOR SALTCLIFFE,
—LORD SUNDERLY

ON THE LESSER ISLANDS AND ROCKS

—GYLBERT FARWYND, Lord of the Lonely Light,

—THE OLD GREY GULL, a priest of the Drowned God.

APPENDIX II:
OTHER HOUSES GREAT AND SMALL

HOUSE ARRYN
The Arryns are descended from the Kings of Mountain and Vale.
Their sigil is a white moon-and-falcon upon a sky-blue eld. House
Arryn has taken no part in the War of the Five Kings. Their Arryn
words are As High as Honor.
ROBERT ARRYN, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale, styled
by his mother True Warden of the East, a sickly boy of eight
years, sometimes called SWEETROBIN,
—his mother, {LADY LYSA of House Tully}, widow of Lord Jon
Arryn, pushed from the Moon Door to her death,
—his stepfather, PETYR BAELISH, called LITTLEFINGER, Lord
of Harrenhal, Lord Paramount of the Trident, and Lord
Protector of the Vale,
—ALAYNE STONE, Lord Petyr’s natural daughter, a maid of
three-and-ten, actually Sansa Stark,
—SER LOTHOR BRUNE, a sellsword in Lord Petyr’s service,
the Eyrie’s captain of guards,
—OSWELL, a grizzled man-at-arms in Lord Petyr’s service,
sometimes called KETTLEBLACK,

—Lord Robert’s household at the Eyrie:
—MARILLION, a handsome young singer much favored by
Lady Lysa and accused of her murder,
—MAESTER COLEMON, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—MORD, a brutal gaoler with teeth of gold,
—GRETCHEL, MADDY, and MELA, servingwomen,

—Lord Robert’s bannermen, the Lords of the Vale:

—LORD NESTOR ROYCE, High Steward of the Vale and
castellan of the Gates of the Moon,
—SER ALBAR, Lord Nestor’s son and heir,
—MYRANDA, called RANDA, Lord Nestor’s daughter, a
widow, but scarce used,
—Lord Nestor’s household:
—SER MARWYN BELMORE, captain of guards,
—MYA STONE, a mule tender and guide, bastard
daughter of King Robert I Baratheon,
—OSSY and CARROT, mule tenders,
—LYONEL CORBRAY, Lord of Heart’s Home,
—SER LYN CORBRAY, his brother and heir, who wields
the famed blade Lady Forlorn,
—SER LUCAS CORBRAY, his younger brother,
—JON LYNDERLY, Lord of the Snakewood,

—TERRANCE, his son and heir, a young squire,
—EDMUND WAXLEY, the Knight of Wickenden,

—GEROLD GRAFTON, the Lord of Gulltown,
—GYLES, his youngest son, a squire,
—TRISTON SUNDERLAND, Lord of the Three Sisters,
—GODRIC BORRELL, Lord of Sweetsister,
—ROLLAND LONGTHORPE, Lord of Longsister,
—ALESANDOR TORRENT, Lord of Littlesister,

—the Lords Declarant, bannermen of House Arryn joined
together in defense of young Lord Robert:
—YOHN ROYCE, called BRONZE YOHN, Lord of Runestone,
of the senior branch of House Royce,
—SER ANDAR, Bronze Yohn’s sole surviving son, and heir
to Runestone,
—Bronze Yohn’s household:
—MAESTER HELLIWEG, tutor, healer, counselor,
—SEPTON LUCOS,

—SER SAMWELL STONE, called STRONG SAM STONE,
master-at-arms,
—Bronze Yohn’s bannermen and sworn swords:
—ROYCE COLDWATER, Lord of Coldwater Burn,
—SER DAMON SHETT, Knight of Gull Tower,
—UTHOR TOLLETT, Lord of the Grey Glen

—ANYA WAYNWOOD, Lady of Ironoaks Castle,
—SER MORTON, her eldest son and heir,

—SER DONNEL, her second son, the Knight of the Gate,
—WALLACE, her youngest son,

—HARROLD HARDYNG, her ward, a squire oft called
HARRY THE HEIR,
—BENEDAR BELMORE, Lord of Strongsong,

—SER SYMOND TEMPLETON, the Knight of Ninestars,
—{EON HUNTER}, Lord of Longbow Hall, recently deceased,
—SER GILWOOD, Lord Eon’s eldest son and heir, now
called YOUNG LORD HUNTER,
—SER EUSTACE, Lord Eon’s second son,
—SER HARLAN, Lord Eon’s youngest son,
—Young Lord Hunter’s household:
—MAESTER WILLAMEN, counselor, healer, tutor,

—HORTON REDFORT, Lord of Redfort, thrice wed,
—SER JASPER, SER CREIGHTON, SER JON, his sons,

—SER MYCHEL, his youngest son, a new-made knight, m.
Ysilla Royce of Runestone,
—clan chiefs from the Mountains of the Moon,
—SHAGGA SON OF DOLF, OF THE STONE CROWS,
presently leading a band in the kingswood,

—TIMETT SON OF TIMETT, OF THE BURNED MEN,

—CHELLA DAUGHTER OF CHEYK, OF THE BLACK EARS,
—CRAWN SON OF CALOR, OF THE MOON BROTHERS.

HOUSE FLORENT
The Florents of Brightwater Keep are bannermen of Highgarden. At
the outset of the War of the Five Kings, Lord Alester Florent
followed his liege lord in declaring for King Renly while his brother
Ser Axell chose Stannis, husband to his niece Selyse. After Renly’s
death, Lord Alester went over to Stannis as well, with all the
strength of Brightwater. Stannis made Lord Alester his Hand, and
gave command of his eet to Ser Imry Florent, his wife’s brother.
The eet and Ser Imry both were lost in the Battle of Blackwater,
and Lord Alester’s e orts to negotiate a peace after the defeat were
regarded by King Stannis as treason. He was given to the red
priestess Melisandre, who burned him as a sacri ce to R’hllor.
The Iron Throne has also named the Florents traitors for their
support of Stannis and his rebellion. They were attainted, and
Brightwater Keep and its lands were awarded to Ser Garlan Tyrell.
The sigil of House Florent shows a fox head in a circle of owers.
{ALESTER FLORENT}, Lord of Brightwater, burned as a traitor,
—his wife, LADY MELARA, of House Crane,
—their children:
—ALEKYNE, attainted Lord of Brightwater, ed to Oldtown
to seek refuge at the Hightower,
—LADY MELESSA, wed to Lord Randyll Tarly,
—LADY RHEA, wed to Lord Leyton Hightower,
—his siblings:

—SER AXELL, a queen’s man, in service to his niece Queen
Selyse at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea,
—{SER RYAM}, died in a fall from a horse,

—SELYSE, his daughter, wife and queen to King Stannis I
Baratheon,
—SHIREEN BARATHEON, her only child,

—{SER IMRY}, his eldest son, killed in the Battle of the
Blackwater,

—SER ERREN, his second son, a captive at Highgarden,
—SER COLIN, castellan at Brightwater Keep,
—DELENA, his daughter, m. SER HOSMAN NORCROSS,
—her natural son, EDRIC STORM, fathered by King Robert
I Baratheon,
—ALESTER NORCROSS, her eldest trueborn son, a boy
of nine,
—RENLY NORCROSS, her second trueborn son, a boy of
three,
—MAESTER OMER, Ser Colin’s eldest son, in service at
Old Oak,
—MERRELL, Ser Colin’s youngest son, a squire on the
Arbor,
—RYLENE, Lord Alester’s sister, m. Ser Rycherd Crane.

HOUSE FREY
The Freys are bannermen to House Tully, but have not always been
diligent in their duty. At the onset of the War of the Five Kings,
Robb Stark won Lord Walder’s allegiance by pledging to marry one
of his daughters or granddaughters. When he wed Lady Jeyne
Westerling instead, the Freys conspired with Roose Bolton and
murdered the Young Wolf and his followers at what became known
as the Red Wedding.
WALDER FREY, Lord of the Crossing,
—by his rst wife, {LADY PERRA, of House Royce}:
—{SER STEVRON}, died after the Battle of Oxcross,
—m. {Corenna Swann}, died of a wasting illness,
—Stevron’s eldest son, SER RYMAN, heir to the Twins,
—Ryman’s son, EDWYN, wed to Janyce Hunter,
—Edwyn’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of nine,
—Ryman’s son, WALDER, called BLACK WALDER,
—Ryman’s son, {PETYR}, called PETYR PIMPLE, hanged
at Oldstones, m. Mylenda Caron,
—Petyr’s daughter, PERRA, a girl of ve,
—m. {Jeyne Lydden}, died in a fall from a horse,
—Stevron’s son, {AEGON}, called JINGLEBELL, killed at the
Red Wedding by Catelyn Stark,

—Stevron’s daughter, {MAEGELLE}, died in childbed, m. Ser
Dafyn Vance,
—Maegelle’s daughter, MARIANNE VANCE, a maiden,
—Maegelle’s son, WALDER VANCE, a squire,
—Maegelle’s son, PATREK VANCE,

—m. {Marsella Waynwood}, died in childbed,

—Stevron’s son, WALTON, m. Deana Hardyng,

—Walton’s son, STEFFON, called THE SWEET,
—Walton’s daughter, WALDA, called FAIR WALDA,
—Walton’s son, BRYAN, a squire,
—SER EMMON, Lord Walder’s second son, m. Genna Lannister,
—Emmon’s son, {SER CLEOS}, killed by outlaws near
Maidenpool, m. Jeyne Darry,
—Cleos’s son, TYWIN, a squire of twelve,
—Cleos’s son, WILLEM, a page at Ashemark, ten,
—Emmon’s son, SER LYONEL, m. Melesa Crakehall,
—Emmon’s son, {TION}, a squire, murdered by Rickard
Karstark while a captive at Riverrun,
—Emmon’s son, WALDER, called RED WALDER, fourteen, a
page at Casterly Rock,
—SER AENYS, Lord Walder’s third son, m. {Tyana Wylde},
died in childbed,
—Aenys’s son, AEGON BLOODBORN, an outlaw,
—Aenys’s son, RHAEGAR, m. {Jeyne Beesbury}, died of a
wasting illness,
—Rhaegar’s son, ROBERT, a boy of thirteen,
—Rhaegar’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of eleven, called
WHITE WALDA,

—Rhaegar’s son, JONOS, a boy of eight,
—PERRIANE, Lord Walder’s daughter, m. Ser Leslyn Haigh,

—Perriane’s son, SER HARYS HAIGH,
—Harys’s son, WALDER HAIGH, a boy of ve,

—Perriane’s son, SER DONNEL HAIGH,
—Perriane’s son, ALYN HAIGH, a squire,
—by his second wife, {LADY CYRENNA, of House Swann}:

—SER JARED, Lord Walder’s fourth son, m. {Alys Frey},
—Jared’s son, {SER TYTOS}, slain by Sandor Clegane during
the Red Wedding, m. Zhoe Blanetree,
—Tytos’s daughter, ZIA, a maid of fourteen,
—Tytos’s son, ZACHERY, a boy of twelve sworn to the
Faith, training at the Sept of Oldtown,

—Jared’s daughter, KYRA, m. {Ser Garse Goodbrook}, slain
during the Red Wedding,
—Kyra’s son, WALDER GOODBROOK, a boy of nine,

—Kyra’s daughter, JEYNE GOODBROOK, six,
—SEPTON LUCEON, in service at the Great Sept of Baelor,
—by his third wife, {LADY AMAREI of House Crakehall}:
—SER HOSTEEN, m. Bellena Hawick,
—Hosteen’s son, SER ARWOOD, m. Ryella Royce,
—Arwood’s daughter, RYELLA, a girl of ve,
—Arwood’s twin sons, ANDROW and ALYN, four,

—Arwood’s daughter, HOSTELLA, a newborn babe,
—LYENTHE, Lord Walder’s daughter, m. Lord Lucias Vypren,
—Lythene’s daughter, ELYANA, m. Ser Jon Wylde,
—Elyana’s son, RICKARD WYLDE, four,
—Lythene’s son, SER DAMON VYPREN,

—SYMOND, m. Betharios of Braavos,
—Symond’s son, ALESANDER, a singer,

—Symond’s daughter, ALYX, a maid of seventeen,

—Symond’s son, BRADAMAR, a boy of ten, a ward of Oro
Tendyris, a merchant of Braavos,
—SER DANWELL, Lord Walder’s eighth son, m. Wynafrei
Whent,
—{many stillbirths and miscarriages},

—{MERRETT}, hanged at Oldstones, m. Mariya Darry,
—Merrett’s daughter, AMEREI, called AMI, m. {Ser Pate of
the Blue Fork, slain by Ser Gregor Clegane},

—Merrett’s daughter, WALDA, called FAT WALDA, m. Roose
Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort,
—Merrett’s daughter, MARISSA, a maid of thirteen,

—Merrett’s son, WALDER, called LITTLE WALDER, eight, a
squire in service to Ramsay Bolton,

—{SER GEREMY}, drowned, m. Carolei Waynwood,

—Geremy’s son, SANDOR, a boy of twelve, a squire,
—Geremy’s daughter, CYNTHEA, a girl of nine, a ward of
Lady Anya Waynwood,

—SER RAYMUND, m. Beony Beesbury,
—Raymund’s son, ROBERT, an acolyte at the Citadel,

—Raymund’s son, MALWYN, serving with alchemist in Lys,
—Raymund’s twin daughters, SERRA and SARRA,
—Raymund’s daughter, CERSEI, called LITTLE BEE,

—Raymund’s twin sons, JAIME and TYWIN, newborn,

—by his fourth wife, {LADY ALYSSA, of House Blackwood}:

—LOTHAR, Lord Walder’s twelfth son, called LAME LOTHAR,
m. Leonella Le ord,
—Lothar’s daughter, TYSANE, a girl of seven,

—Lothar’s daughter, WALDA, a girl of ve,
—Lothar’s daughter, EMBERLEI, a girl of three,
—Lothar’s daughter, LEANA, a newborn babe,

—SER JAMMOS, Lord Walder’s thirteenth son, m. Sallei Paege,
—Jammos’s son, WALDER, called BIG WALDER, eight, a
squire in service to Ramsey Bolton,

—Jammos’s twin sons, DICKON and MATHIS, ve,
—SER WHALEN, Lord Walder’s fourteenth son, m. Sylwa
Paege,

—Whalen’s son, HOSTER, a squire of twelve, in service to Ser
Damon Paege,
—Whalen’s daughter, MERIANNE, called MERRY, eleven,

—MORYA, Lord Walder’s daughter, m. Ser Flement Brax,
—Morya’s son, ROBERT BRAX, nine, a page at Casterly
Rock,
—Morya’s son, WALDER BRAX, a boy of six,
—Morya’s son, JON BRAX, a babe of three,

—TYTA, Lord Walder’s daughter, called TYTA THE MAID,
—by his fth wife, {LADY SARYA of House Whent}:

—no progeny,
—by his sixth wife, {LADY BETHANY of House Rosby}:
—SER PERWYN, Lord Walder’s fteenth son,

—{SER BENFREY}, Lord Walder’s sixteenth son, died of a
wound received at the Red Wedding, m. Jyanna Frey, a
cousin,

—Benfrey’s daughter, DELLA, called DEAF DELLA, a girl of
three,
—Benfrey’s son, OSMUND, a boy of two,

—MAESTER WILLAMEN, Lord Walder’s seventeenth son, in
service at Longbow Hall,

—OLYVAR, Lord Walder’s eighteenth son, formerly a squire to
Robb Stark,

—ROSLIN, sixteen, m. Lord Edmure Tully at the Red Wedding,

—by his seventh wife, {LADY ANNARA of House Farring}:
—ARWYN, Lord Walder’s daughter, a maid of fourteen,

—WENDEL, Lord Walder’s nineteenth son, thirteen, a page at
Seagard,

—COLMAR, Lord Walder’s twentieth son, eleven and promised
to the Faith,
—WALTYR, called TYR, Lord Walder’s twenty- rst son, ten,
—ELMAR, Lord Walder’s lastborn son, a boy of nine brie y
betrothed to Arya Stark,
—SHIREI, Lord Walder’s youngest child, a girl of seven,
—his eighth wife, LADY JOYEUSE of House Erenford,
—presently with child,
—Lord Walder’s natural children, by sundry mothers,
—WALDER RIVERS, called BASTARD WALDER,

—Bastard Walder’s son, SER AEMON RIVERS,
—Bastard Walder’s daughter, WALDA RIVERS,

—MAESTER MELWYS, in service at Rosby,

—JEYNE RIVERS, MARTYN RIVERS, RYGER RIVERS,
RONEL RIVERS, MELLARA RIVERS, others

HOUSE HIGHTOWER
The Hightowers of Oldtown are among the oldest and proudest of
the Great Houses of Westeros, tracing their descent back to the First
Men. Once kings, they have ruled Oldtown and its environs since
the Dawn of Days, welcoming the Andals rather than resisting them,
and later bending the knee to the Kings of the Reach and giving up
their crowns whilst retaining all their ancient privileges. Though
powerful and immensely wealthy, the Lords of the High Tower have
traditionally preferred trade to battle, and have seldom played a
large part in the wars of Westeros. The Hightowers were
instrumental in the founding of the Citadel and continue to protect
it to this day. Subtle and sophisticated, they have always been great
patrons of learning and the Faith, and it is said that certain of them
have also dabbled in alchemy, necromancy, and other sorcerous
arts.
The arms of House Hightower show a stepped white tower
crowned with re on a smoke-grey eld. The House words are We
Light the Way.
LEYTON HIGHTOWER, Voice of Oldtown, Lord of the Port, Lord
of the High Tower, Defender of the Citadel, Beacon of the South,
called THE OLD MAN OF OLDTOWN,
—LADY RHEA of House Hightower, his fourth wife,
—Lord Leyton’s eldest son and heir, SER BAELOR, called
BAELOR BRIGHTSMILE, m. Rhonda Rowan,
—Lord Leyton’s daughter, MALORA, called THE MAD MAID,

—Lord Leyton’s daughter, ALERIE, m. Lord Mace Tyrell,
—Lord Leyton’s son SER GARTH, called GREYSTEEL,

—Lord Leyton’s daughter, DENYSE, m. Ser Desmond Redwyne,
—her son, DENYS, a squire,

—Lord Leyton’s daughter, LEYLA, m. Ser Jon Cupps,

—Lord Leyton’s daughter, ALYSANNE, m. Lord Arthur
Ambrose,

—Lord Leyton’s daughter, LYNESSE, m. Lord Jorah Mormont,
presently chief concubine to Tregar Ormollen of Lys,
—Lord Leyton’s son, SER GUNTHOR, m. Jeyne Fossoway, of
the green apple Fossoways,
—Lord Leyton’s youngest son, SER HUMFREY,
—Lord Leyton’s bannermen:
—TOMMEN COSTAYNE, Lord of the Three Towers,
—ALYSANNE BULWER, Lady of Blackcrown, a girl of eight,
—MARTYN MULLENDORE, Lord of Uplands,
—WARRYN BEESBURY, Lord of Honeyholt,
—BRANSTON CUY, Lord of Sun ower Hall,
—the people of Oldtown:
—EMMA, a serving wench at the Quill and Tankard, where
the women are willing and the cider is fearsomely strong,
—ROSEY, her daughter, a girl of ve-and-ten whose
maidenhead will cost a golden dragon,
—the Archmaesters of the Citadel:

—ARCHMAESTER NORREN, Seneschal for the waning year,
whose ring and rod and mask are electrum,
—ARCHMAESTER THEOBALD, Seneschal for the coming
year, whose ring and rod and mask are lead,
—ARCHMAESTER EBROSE, the healer, whose ring and rod
and mask are silver,

—ARCHMAESTER MARWYN, called MARWYN THE MAGE,
whose ring and rod and mask are Valyrian steel,
—ARCHMAESTER PERESTAN, the historian, whose ring and
rod and mask are copper,

—ARCHMAESTER VAELLYN, called VINEGAR VAELLYN, the
stargazer, whose ring and rod and mask are bronze,
—ARCHMAESTER RYAM, whose ring and rod and mask are
yellow gold,
—ARCHMAESTER WALGRAVE, an old man of uncertain wit,
whose ring and rod and mask are black iron,

—GALLARD, CASTOS, ZARABELO, BENEDICT, GARIZON,
NYMOS, CETHERES, WILLIFER, MOLLOS, HARODON,
GUYNE, AGRIVANE, OCLEY, archmaesters all,
—maesters, acolytes, and novices of the Citadel:

—MAESTER GORMON, who oft serves in Walgrave’s stead,
—ARMEN, an acolyte of four links, called THE ACOLYTE,
—ALLERAS, called THE SPHINX, an acolyte of three links, a
devoted archer,
—ROBERT FREY, sixteen, an acolyte of two links,
—LORCAS, an acolyte of nine links, in service to the
Seneschal,
—LEO TYRELL, called LAZY LEO, a highborn novice,
—MOLLANDER, a novice, born with a club foot,

—PATE, who tends Archmaester Walgrave’s ravens, a novice
of little promise,
—ROONE, a young novice.

HOUSE LANNISTER
The Lannisters of Casterly Rock remain the principal support of
King Tommen’s claim to the Iron Throne. They boast of descent
from Lann the Clever, the legendary trickster of the Age of Heroes.
The gold of Casterly Rock and the Golden Tooth has made them the
wealthiest of the Great Houses. The Lannister sigil is a golden lion
upon a crimson eld. Their words are Hear Me Roar!
{TYWIN LANNISTER}, Lord of Casterly Rock, Shield of Lannisport,
Warden of the West, and Hand of the King, murdered by his
dwarf son in his privy,
—Lord Tywin’s children:
—CERSEI, twin to Jaime, now Lady of Casterly Rock,
—SER JAIME, twin to Cersei, called THE KINGSLAYER,
—TYRION, called THE IMP, dwarf and kinslayer,
—Lord Tywin’s siblings and their o spring:
—SER KEVAN LANNISTER, m. Dorna of House Swyft,
—LADY GENNA, m. Ser Emmon Frey, now Lord of Riverrun,
—Genna’s eldest son, {SER CLEOS FREY}, m. Jeyne of
House Darry, killed by outlaws,
—Cleos’s eldest son, SER TYWIN FREY, called TY, now
heir to Riverrun,
—Cleos’s second son, WILLEM FREY, a squire,
—Genna’s second son, SER LYONEL FREY,

—Genna’s third son, {TION FREY}, a squire, murdered
while a captive at Riverrun,
—Genna’s youngest son, WALDER FREY, called RED
WALDER, a page at Casterly Rock,

—WHITESMILE WAT, a singer in service to Lady Genna,

—{SER TYGETT LANNISTER}, died of a pox,

—TYREK, Tygett’s son, missing and feared dead,
—LADY ERMESANDE HAYFORD, Tyrek’s child wife,
—{GERION LANNISTER}, lost at sea,
—JOY HILL, Gerion’s bastard daughter, eleven,
—Lord Tywin’s other close kin:
—{SER STAFFORD LANNISTER}, a cousin and brother to
Lord Tywin’s wife, slain in battle at Oxcross,
—CERENNA and MYRIELLE, Sta ord’s daughters,
—SER DAVEN LANNISTER, Sta ord’s son,
—SER DAMION LANNISTER, a cousin, m. Lady Shiera
Crakehall,
—their son, SER LUCION,
—their daughter, LANNA, m. Lord Antario Jast,
—LADY MARGOT, a cousin, m. Lord Titus Peake,
—the household at Casterly Rock:

—MAESTER CREYLEN, healer, tutor, and counselor,
—VYLARR, captain of guards,
—SER BENEDICT BROOM, master-at-arms,

—WHITESMILE WAT, a singer,
—bannermen and sworn swords, Lords of the West:

—DAMON MARBRAND, Lord of Ashemark,
—SER ADDAM MARBRAND, his son and heir, Commander
of the City Watch of King’s Landing,
—ROLAND CRAKEHALL, Lord of Crakehall,

—Roland’s brother, {SER BURTON}, slain by outlaws,
—Roland’s son and heir, SER TYBOLT,

—Roland’s son, SER LYLE, called STRONGBOAR,
—Roland’s youngest son, SER MERLON,
—SEBASTON FARMAN, Lord of Fair Isle,
—JEYNE, his sister, m. SER GARETH CLIFTON,
—TYTOS BRAX, Lord of Hornvale,
—SER FLEMENT BRAX, his brother and heir,
—QUENTEN BANEFORT, Lord of Banefort,

—SER HARYS SWYFT, good-father to Ser Kevan Lannister,
—Ser Harys’s son, SER STEFFON SWYFT,
—Ser Ste on’s daughter, JOANNA,
—Ser Harys’s daughter, SHIERLE, m. Ser Melwyn
Sars eld,
—REGENARD ESTREN, Lord of Wyndhall,
—GAWEN WESTERLING, Lord of the Crag,
—his wife, LADY SYBELL, of House Spicer,

—her brother, SER ROLPH SPICER, newly raised to Lord
of Castamere,
—her cousin, SER SAMWELL SPICER,

—their children:
—SER RAYNALD WESTERLING,
—JEYNE, widowed wife of Robb Stark,
—ELEYNA, a girl of twelve,
—ROLLAM, a boy of nine,

—LORD SELMOND STACKSPEAR,
—his son, SER STEFFON STACKSPEAR,

—his younger son, SER ALYN STACKSPEAR,
—TERRENCE KENNING, Lord of Kayce,

—SER KENNOS OF KAYCE, a knight in his service,
—LORD ANTARIO JAST,
—LORD ROBIN MORELAND,
—LADY ALYSANNE LEFFORD,
—LEWYS LYDDEN, Lord of the Deep Den,
—LORD PHILIP PLUMM,

—his sons, SER DENNIS PLUMM, SER PETER PLUMM, and
SER HARWYN PLUMM, called HARDSTONE,

—LORD GARRISON PRESTER,

—SER FORLEY PRESTER, his cousin,
—SER GREGOR CLEGANE, called THE MOUNTAIN THAT
RIDES,
—SANDOR CLEGANE, his brother,
—SER LORENT LORCH, a landed knight,

—SER GARTH GREENFIELD, a landed knight,
—SER LYMOND VIKARY, a landed knight,
—SER RAYNARD RUTTIGER, a landed knight
—SER MANFRYD YEW, a landed knight,

—SER TYBOLT HETHERSPOON, a landed knight,

—{MELARA HETHERSPOON}, his daughter, drowned in a
well while a ward at Casterly Rock

HOUSE MARTELL
Dorne was the last of the Seven Kingdoms to swear fealty to the
Iron Throne. Blood, custom, geography, and history all helped to set
the Dornishmen apart from the other kingdoms. At the outbreak of
the War of the Five Kings Dorne took no part, but when Myrcella
Baratheon was betrothed to Prince Trystane, Sunspear declared its
support for King Jo rey. The Martell banner is a red sun pierced by
a golden spear. Their words are Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.
DORAN NYMEROS MARTELL, Lord of Sunspear, Prince of Dorne,
—his wife, MELLARIO, of the Free City of Norvos,
—their children:
—PRINCESS ARIANNE, heir to Sunspear,
—GARIN, Arianne’s milk brother and companion, of the
orphans of the Greenblood,
—PRINCE QUENTYN, a new-made knight, long fostered by
Lord Yronwood of Yronwood,
—PRINCE TRYSTANE, betrothed to Myrcella Baratheon,
—Prince Doran’s siblings:
—{PRINCESS ELIA, raped and murdered during the Sack of
King’s Landing},
—{RHAENYS TARGARYEN}, her young daughter,
murdered during the Sack of King’s Landing,
—{AEGON TARGARYEN}, a babe at the breast, murdered
during the Sack of King’s Landing,

—{PRINCE OBERYN}, called THE RED VIPER, slain by Ser
Gregor Clegane during a trial by combat,
—ELLARIA SAND, Prince Oberyn’s paramour, natural
daughter of Lord Harmen Uller,
—THE SAND SNAKES, Oberyn’s bastard daughters:

—OBARA, eight-and-twenty, Oberyn’s daughter by an
Oldtown whore,

—NYMERIA, called LADY NYM, ve-and-twenty, his
daughter by a noblewoman of Volantis,
—TYENE, three-and-twenty, Oberyn’s daughter by a
septa,
—SARELLA, nineteen, his daughter by a trader, captain
of the Feathered Kiss,
—ELIA, fourteen, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,
—OBELLA, twelve, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,
—DOREA, eight, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,
—LOREZA, six, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,
—Prince Doran’s court, at the Water Gardens:
—AREO HOTAH, of Norvos, captain of the guards,
—MAESTER CALEOTTE, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—threescore children of both high and common birth, sons
and daughters of lords, knights, orphans, merchants,
craftsmen, and peasants, his wards,
—Prince Doran’s court, at Sunspear:

—PRINCESS MYRCELLA BARATHEON, his ward, betrothed
to Prince Trystane,
—SER ARYS OAKHEART, Myrcella’s sworn shield,
—ROSAMUND LANNISTER, Myrcella’s bedmaid and
companion, a distant cousin,
—SEPTA EGLANTINE, Myrcella’s confessor,

—MAESTER MYLES, counselor, healer, and tutor,

—RICASSO, Seneschal at Sunspear, old and blind,
—SER MANFREY MARTELL, castellan at Sunspear

—LADY ALYSE LADYBRIGHT, lord treasurer,
—SER GASCOYNE of the Greenblood, Prince Trystane’s
sworn shield,

—BORS and TIMOTH, serving men at Sunspear,
—BELANDRA, CEDRA, the sisters MORRA and MELLEI,
servingwomen at Sunspear,

—Prince Doran’s bannermen, the Lords of Dorne:
—ANDERS YRONWOOD, Lord of Yronwood, Warden of the
Stone Way, the Bloodroyal,
—SER CLETUS, his son, known for a lazy eye,
—MAESTER KEDRY, healer, tutor, and counselor,
—HARMEN ULLER, Lord of Hellholt,
—ELLARIA SAND, his natural daughter,
—SER ULWYCK ULLER, his brother,

—DELONNE ALLYRION, Lady of Godsgrace,
—SER RYON, her son and heir,
—SER DAEMON SAND, Ryon’s natural son, the Bastard
of Godsgrace,
—DAGOS MANWOODY, Lord of Kingsgrave,
—MORS and DICKON, his sons,
—SER MYLES, his brother,
—LARRA BLACKMONT, Lady of Blackmont,
—JYNESSA, her daughter and heir,
—PERROS, her son, a squire,

—NYMELLA TOLAND, Lady of Ghost Hill,
—QUENTYN QORGYLE, Lord of Sandstone,
—SER GULIAN, his eldest son and heir

—SER ARRON, his second son,
—SER DEZIEL DALT, the Knight of Lemonwood,

—SER ANDREY, his brother and heir, called DREY,
—FRANKLYN FOWLER, Lord of Skyreach, called THE OLD
HAWK, the Warden of the Prince’s Pass,
—JEYNE and JENNELYN, his twin daughters,
—SER SYMON SANTAGAR, the Knight of Spottswood,

—SYLVA, his daughter and heir, called SPOTTED SYLVA
for her freckles,
—EDRIC DAYNE, Lord of Starfall, a squire,

—SER GEROLD DAYNE, called DARKSTAR, the Knight of
High Hermitage, his cousin and bannerman,
—TREBOR JORDAYNE, Lord of the Tor,
—MYRIA, his daughter and heir,

—TREMOND GARGALEN, Lord of Salt Shore,
—DAERON VAITH, Lord of the Red Dunes.

HOUSE STARK
The Starks trace their descent from Brandon the Builder and the
Kings of Winter. For thousands of years, they ruled from Winterfell
as Kings in the North, until Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt,
chose to swear fealty to Aegon the Dragon rather than give battle.
When Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell was executed by King
Jo rey, the northmen foreswore their loyalty to the Iron Throne
and proclaimed Lord Eddard’s son Robb as King in the North.
During the War of the Five Kings, he won every battle, but was
betrayed and murdered by the Freys and Boltons at the Twins
during his uncle’s wedding.
{ROBB STARK}, King in the North, King of the Trident, Lord of
Winterfell, eldest son of Lord Eddard Stark and Lady Catelyn of
House Tully, a youth of sixteen called THE YOUNG WOLF,
murdered at the Red Wedding,
—{GREY WIND}, his direwolf, killed at the Red Wedding,
—his trueborn siblings:
—SANSA, his sister, m. Tyrion of House Lannister,
—{LADY}, her direwolf, killed at Castle Darry,
—ARYA, a girl of eleven, missing and thought dead,
—NYMERIA, her direwolf, prowling the riverlands,
—BRANDON, called BRAN, a crippled boy of nine, heir to
Winterfell, believed dead,
—SUMMER, his direwolf,

—Bran’s companions and protectors:
—MEERA REED, a maid of sixteen, daughter of Lord
Howland Reed of Greywater Watch,
—JOJEN REED, her brother, thirteen,
—HODOR, a simple boy, seven feet tall,

—RICKON, a boy of four, believed dead,

—SHAGGYDOG, his direwolf, black and savage,

—Rickon’s companion, OSHA, a wildling once captive at
Winterfell,
—his bastard half brother, JON SNOW, of the Night’s Watch,
—GHOST, Jon’s direwolf, white and silent,
—Robb’s sworn swords:
—{DONNEL LOCKE, OWEN NORREY, DACEY MORMONT,
SER WENDEL MANDERLY, ROBIN FLINT}, slain at the
Red Wedding,
—HALLIS MOLLEN, captain of the guards, escorting Eddard
Stark’s bones back to Winterfell,
—JACKS, QUENT, SHADD, guardsmen,
—Robb’s uncles and cousins:
—BENJEN STARK, his father’s younger brother, lost ranging
beyond the Wall, presumed dead,
—{LYSA ARRYN}, his mother’s sister, Lady of the Eyrie, m.
Lord Jon Arryn, slain with a shove,
—their son, ROBERT ARRYN, Lord of the Eyrie and
Defender of the Vale, a sickly boy,
—EDMURE TULLY, Lord of Riverrun, his mother’s brother,
taken captive at the Red Wedding,
—LADY ROSLIN, of House Frey, Edmure’s bride,
—SER BRYNDEN TULLY, called THE BLACKFISH, his
mother’s uncle, castellan of Riverrun,

—the Young Wolf’s bannermen, the Lords of the North:

—ROOSE BOLTON, Lord of the Dreadfort, the turncloak,
—{DOMERIC}, his trueborn son and heir, died of a bad
belly,

—RAMSAY BOLTON (formerly RAMSAY SNOW), Roose’s
natural son, called THE BASTARD OF BOLTON, castellan
of the Dreadfort,
—WALDER FREY and WALDER FREY, called BIG
WALDER and LITTLE WALDER, Ramsay’s squires,
—{REEK}, a man-at-arms infamous for his stench, slain
while posing as Ramsay,
—“ARYA STARK,” Lord Roose’s captive, a feigned girl
betrothed to Ramsay,
—WALTON called STEELSHANKS, Roose’s captain,

—BETH CASSELL, KYRA, TURNIP, PALLA, BANDY,
SHYRA, PALLA, and OLD NAN, women of Winterfell
held captive at the Dreadfort,
—JON UMBER, called THE GREATJON, Lord of the Last
Hearth, a captive at the Twins,

—{JON}, called THE SMALLJON, the Greatjon’s eldest son
and heir, slain at the Red Wedding,
—MORS called CROWFOOD, uncle to the Greatjon,
castellan at the Last Hearth,

—HOTHER called WHORESBANE, uncle to the Greatjon,
likewise castellan at the Last Hearth,
—{RICKARD KARSTARK}, Lord of Karhold, beheaded for
treason and murder of prisoner,
—{EDDARD}, his son, slain in the Whispering Wood,
—{TORRHEN}, his son, slain in the Whispering Wood,
—HARRION, his son, a captive at Maidenpool,
—ALYS, Lord Rickard’s daughter, a maid of fteen,
—Rickard’s uncle, ARNOLF, castellan of Karhold,

—GALBART GLOVER, Master of Deepwood Motte, unwed,
—ROBETT GLOVER, his brother and heir,
—Robett’s wife, SYBELLE of House Locke,
—their children:
—GAWEN, a boy of three,
—ERENA, a babe at the breast,

—Galbart’s ward, LARENCE SNOW, natural son of {Lord
Halys Hornwood}, a boy of thirteen,

—HOWLAND REED, Lord of Greywater Watch, a
crannogman,
—his wife, JYANA, of the crannogmen,
—their children:

—MEERA, a young huntress,
—JONJEN, a boy blessed with green sight,

—WYMAN MANDERLY, Lord of White Harbor, vastly fat,
—SER WYLIS MANDERLY, his eldest son and heir, very
fat, a captive at Harrenhal,
—Wylis’s wife, LEONA of House Wool eld,

—WYNAFRYD, their daughter, a maid of nineteen years,
—WYLLA, their daughter, a maid of fteen,

—{SER WENDEL MANDERLY}, his second son, slain at the
Red Wedding,
—SER MARLON MANDERLY, his cousin, commander of
the garrison at White Harbor,

—MAESTER THEOMORE, counselor, tutor, healer,
—MAEGE MORMONT, Lady of Bear Island,

—{DACEY}, her eldest daughter and heir, slain at the Red
Wedding,
—ALYSANE, LYRA, JORELLE, LYANNA, her daughters,

—{JEOR MORMONT}, her brother, Lord Commander of
the Night’s Watch, slain by own men,

—SER JORAH MORMONT, Lord Jeor’s son, once Lord of
Bear Island in his own right, a knight condemned and
exiled,

—{SER HELMAN TALLHART}, Master of Torrhen’s Square,
slain at Duskendale,
—{BENFRED}, his son and heir, slain by ironmen on the
Stony Shore,
—EDDARA, his daughter, captive at Torrhen’s Square,
—{LEOBALD}, his brother, killed at Winterfell,

—Leobald’s wife, BERENA of House Hornwood, captive
at Torrhen’s Square,

—their sons, BRANDON and BEREN, likewise captives at
Torrhen’s Square,
—RODRIK RYSWELL, Lord of the Rills,
—BARBREY DUSTIN, his daughter, Lady of Barrowton,
widow of {Lord Willam Dustin},
—HARWOOD STOUT, her liege man, a petty lord at
Barrowton,

—{BETHANY BOLTON}, his daughter, second wife of Lord
Roose Bolton, died of a fever,

—ROGER RYSWELL, RICKARD RYSWELL, ROOSE
RYSWELL, his quarrelsome cousins and bannermen,
—{CLEY CERWYN}, Lord of Cerwyn, killed at Winterfell,
—JONELLE, his sister, a maid of two-and-thirty,

—LYESSA FLINT, Lady of Widow’s Watch,
—ONDREW LOCKE, Lord of Oldcastle, an old man,

—HUGO WULL, called BIG BUCKET, chief of his clan,

—BRANDON NORREY, called THE NORREY, chief of his
clan,

—TORREN LIDDLE, called THE LIDDLE, chief of his clan.

The Stark arms show a grey direwolf racing across an ice-white
eld. The Stark words are Winter Is Coming.

HOUSE TULLY
Lord Edmyn Tully of Riverrun was one of the rst of the river lords
to swear fealty to Aegon the Conquerer. King Aegon rewarded him
by raising House Tully to dominion over all the lands of the Trident.
The Tully sigil is a leaping trout, silver, on a eld of rippling blue
and red. The Tully words are Family, Duty, Honor.
EDMURE TULLY, Lord of Riverrun, taken captive at his wedding
and held prisoner by the Freys,
—LADY ROSLIN of House Frey, Edmure’s young bride,
—{LADY CATELYN STARK}, his sister, widow of Lord Eddard
Stark of Winterfell, slain at the Red Wedding,
—{LADY LYSA ARRYN}, his sister, widow of Lord Jon Arryn of
the Vale, pushed to her death from the Eyrie,
—SER BRYNDEN TULLY, called THE BLACKFISH, Edmure’s
uncle, castellan of Riverrun,
—Lord Edmure’s household at Riverrun:
—MAESTER VYMAN, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—SER DESMOND GRELL, master-at-arms,
—SER ROBIN RYGER, captain of the guard,
—LONG LEW, ELWOOD, DELP, guardsmen,
—UTHERYDES WAYN, steward of Riverrun,
—Edmure’s bannermen, the Lords of the Trident:
—TYTOS BLACKWOOD, Lord of Raventree Hall,

—{LUCAS}, his son, slain at the Red Wedding,
—JONOS BRACKEN, Lord of the Stone Hedge,

—JASON MALLISTER, Lord of Seagard, a prisoner in his own
castle,
—PATREK, his son, imprisoned with his father,
—SER DENYS MALLISTER, Lord Jason’s uncle, a man of
the Night’s Watch,
—CLEMENT PIPER, Lord of Pinkmaiden Castle,
—his son and heir, SER MARQ PIPER, taken captive at the
Red Wedding,
—KARYL VANCE, Lord of Wayfarer’s Rest,
—his elder daughter and heir, LIANE,
—his younger daughters, RHIALTA and EMPHYRIA,
—NORBERT VANCE, the blind Lord of Atranta,
—his eldest son and heir, SER RONALD VANCE, called
THE BAD,
—his younger sons, SER HUGO, SER ELLERY, SER KIRTH,
and MAESTER JON,
—THEOMAR SMALLWOOD, Lord of Acorn Hall,
—his wife, LADY RAVELLA, of House Swann,
—their daughter, CARELLEN,
—WILLIAM MOOTON, Lord of Maidenpool,

—SHELLA WHENT, dispossessed Lady of Harrenhal,
—SER WILLIS WODE, a knight in her service,
—SER HALMON PAEGE,
—LORD LYMOND GOODBROOK.

HOUSE TYRELL
The Tyrells rose to power as stewards to the Kings of the Reach,
though they claim descent from Garth Greenhand, gardener king of
the First Men. When the last king of House Gardener was slain on
the Field of Fire, his steward Harlen Tyrell surrendered Highgarden
to Aegon the Conquerer. Aegon granted him the castle and
dominion over the Reach. Mace Tyrell declared his support for
Renly Baratheon at the onset of the War of the Five Kings, and gave
him the hand of his daughter Margaery. Upon Renly’s death,
Highgarden made alliance with House Lannister, and Margaery was
betrothed to King Jo rey.
MACE TYRELL, Lord of Highgarden, Warden of the South,
Defender of the Marches, and High Marshal of the Reach,
—his wife, LADY ALERIE, of House Hightower of Oldtown,
—their children:
—WILLAS, their eldest son, heir to Highgarden,
—SER GARLAN, called THE GALLANT, their second son,
newly raised to Lord of Brightwater,
—Garlan’s wife, LADY LEONETTE of House Fossoway,
—SER LORAS, the Knight of Flowers, their youngest son, a
Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard,
—MARGAERY, their daughter, twice wed and twice
widowed,
—Margaery’s companions and ladies-in-waiting:

—her cousins, MEGGA, ALLA, and ELINOR TYRELL,
—Elinor’s betrothed, ALYN AMBROSE, squire,

—LADY ALYSANNE BULWER, LADY ALYCE GRACEFORD,
LADY TAENA MERRYWEATHER, MEREDYTH CRANE
called MERRY, SEPTA NYSTERICA, her companions,

—Mace’s widowed mother, LADY OLENNA of House Redwyne,
called THE QUEEN OF THORNS,
—ARRYK and ERRYK, her guardsmen, twins seven feet tall
called LEFT and RIGHT,
—Mace’s sisters:
—LADY MINA, wed to Paxter Redwyne, Lord of the Arbor,
—their children:
—SER HORAS REDWYNE, twin to Hobber, called
HORROR,
—SER HOBBER REDWYNE, twin to Horas, called
SLOBBER,
—DESMERA REDWYNE, a maid of sixteen,
—LADY JANNA, wed to Ser Jon Fossoway,
—Mace’s uncles and cousins:
—Mace’s uncle, GARTH, called THE GROSS, Lord Seneschal
of Highgarden,
—Garth’s bastard sons, GARSE and GARRETT FLOWERS,
—Mace’s uncle, SER MORYN, Lord Commander of the City
Watch of Oldtown,
—Moryn’s son, {SER LUTHOR}, m. Lady Elyn Norridge,
—Luthor’s son, SER THEODORE, m. Lady Lia Serry,
—Theodore’s daughter, ELINOR,
—Theodore’s son, LUTHOR, a squire,
—Luthor’s son, MAESTER MEDWICK,

—Luthor’s daughter, OLENE, m. Ser Leo Blackbar,

—Moryn’s son, LEO, called LEO THE LAZY, a novice at the
Citadel of Oldtown,
—Mace’s uncle, MAESTER GORMON, serving at the Citadel,
—Mace’s cousin, {SER QUENTIN}, died at Ashford,
—Quentin’s son, SER OLYMER, m. Lady Lysa Meadows,

—Olymer’s sons, RAYMUND and RICKARD,
—Olymer’s daughter, MEGGA,
—Mace’s cousin, MAESTER NORMUND, in service at
Blackcrown,
—Mace’s cousin, {SER VICTOR}, slain by the Smiling Knight
of the Kingswood Brotherhood,
—Victor’s daughter, VICTARIA, m. {Lord Jon Bulwer},
died of a summer fever,
—their daughter, LADY ALYSANNE BULWER, eight,
—Victor’s son, SER LEO, m. Lady Alys Beesbury,
—Leo’s daughters, ALLA and LEONA,
—Leo’s sons, LYONEL, LUCAS, and LORENT,

—Mace’s household at Highgarden:
—MAESTER LOMYS, counselor, healer, and tutor,
—IGON VYRWEL, captain of the guard,
—SER VORTIMER CRANE, master-at-arms,
—BUTTERBUMPS, fool and jester, hugely fat,

—his bannermen, the Lords of the Reach:
—RANDYLL TARLY, Lord of Horn Hill,

—PAXTER REDWYNE, Lord of the Arbor,
—SER HORAS and SER HOBBER, his twin sons,

—Lord Paxter’s healer, MAESTER BALLABAR,
—ARWYN OAKHEART, Lady of Old Oak,
—Lady Arwyn’s youngest son, SER ARYS, a Sworn Brother
of the Kingsguard,

—MATHIS ROWAN, Lord of Goldengrove, m. Bethany of
House Redwyne,
—LEYTON HIGHTOWER, Voice of Oldtown, Lord of the
Port,
—HUMFREY HEWETT, Lord of Oakenshield,
—FALIA FLOWERS, his bastard daughter,
—OSBERT SERRY, Lord of Southshield,
—SER TALBERT, his son and heir,

—GUTHOR GRIMM, Lord of Greyshield,
—MORIBALD CHESTER, Lord of Greenshield,

—ORTON MERRYWEATHER, Lord of Longtable,
—LADY TAENA, his wife, a woman of Myr,

—RUSSELL, her son, a boy of eight,
—LORD ARTHUR AMBROSE, m. Lady Alysanne Hightower,

—his knights and sworn swords:

—SER JON FOSSOWAY, of the green-apple Fossoways,
—SER TANTON FOSSOWAY, of the red-apple Fossoways.

The Tyrell sigil is a golden rose on a grass-green eld. Their words
are Growing Strong.

APPENDIX III:
REBELS AND ROGUES SMALLFOLK AND SWORN BROTHERS

LORDLINGS, WANDERERS, AND COMMON MEN
—SER CREIGHTON LONGBOUGH and SER ILLIFER THE
PENNILESS, hedge knights and companions,
—HIBALD, a merchant fearful and niggardly,
—SER SHADRICK OF THE SHADY GLEN, called THE MAD
MOUSE, a hedge knight in Hibald’s service,
—BRIENNE, THE MAID OF TARTH, also called BRIENNE THE
BEAUTY, a maiden on a quest,
—LORD SELWYN THE EVENSTAR, Lord of Tarth, her father,
—{BIG BEN BUSHY}, SER HYLE HUNT, SER MARK
MULLENDORE, SER EDMUND AMBROSE, {SER RICHARD
FARROW}, {WILL THE STORK}, SER HUGH BEESBURY,
SER RAYMOND NAYLAND, HARRY SAWYER, SER OWEN
INCHFIELD, ROBIN POTTER, her onetime suitors,
—RENFRED RYKKER, Lord of Duskendale,
—SER RUFUS LEEK, a one-legged knight in his service,
castellan of the Dun Fort at Duskendale,
—WILLIAM MOOTON, Lord of Maidenpool,
—ELEANOR, his eldest daughter and heir, thirteen,
—RANDYLL TARLY, Lord of Horn Hill, commanding King
Tommen’s forces along the Trident,
—DICKON, his son and heir, a young squire,

—SER HYLE HUNT, sworn to the service of House Tarly,
—SER ALYN HUNT, Ser Hyle’s cousin, likewise in Lord
Randyll’s service,

—DICK CRABB, called NIMBLE DICK, a Crabb of Crackclaw
Point,

—EUSTACE BRUNE, Lord of the Dyre Den,

—BENNARD BRUNE, the Knight of Brownhollow, his cousin,
—SER ROGER HOGG, the Knight of Sow’s Horn,
—SEPTON MERIBALD, a barefoot septon,
—his dog, DOG,
—THE ELDER BROTHER, of the Quiet Isle,
—BROTHER NARBERT, BROTHER GILLAM, BROTHER
RAWNEY, pentitent brothers of the Quiet Isle,
—SER QUINCY COX, the Knight of Saltpans, an old man in his
dotage,
—at the old crossroads inn:
—JEYNE HEDDLE, called LONG JEYNE, innkeep, a tall
young wench of eighteen years,
—WILLOW, her sister, stern with a spoon,
—TANSY, PATE, JON PENNY, BEN, orphans at the inn,
—GENDRY, an apprentice smith and bastard son of King
Robert I Baratheon, ignorant of his birth,
—at Harrenhal,

—RAFFORD called RAFF THE SWEETLING, SHITMOUTH,
DUNSEN, men of the garrison,
—BEN BLACKTHUMB, a smith and armorer,
—PIA, a serving wench, once pretty,
—MAESTER GULIAN, healer, tutor, and counselor,

—at Darry,

—LADY AMEREI FREY, called GATEHOUSE AMI, an
amorous young widow betrothed to Lord Lancel Lannister,
—Lady Amerei’s mother, LADY MARIYA of House Darry,
widowed wife of Merrett Frey,
—Lady Amerei’s sister, MARISSA, a maid of thirteen,
—SER HARWYN PLUMM, called HARDSTONE, commander
of the garrison,

—MAESTER OTTOMORE, healer, tutor, and advisor,
—at the Inn of the Kneeling Man:
—SHARNA, the innkeep, a cook and midwife,
—her husband, called HUSBAND,
—BOY, an orphan of the war,
—HOT PIE, a baker’s boy, now orphaned.

OUTLAWS AND BROKEN MEN
{BERIC DONDARRION}, once Lord of Blackhaven, six times slain,
—EDRIC DAYNE, Lord of Starfall, a boy of twelve, Lord Beric’s
squire,
—THE MAD HUNTSMAN of Stoney Sept, his sometime ally,
—GREENBEARD, a Tyroshi sellsword, his uncertain friend,
—ANGUY THE ARCHER, a bowman from the Dornish Marches,
—MERRIT O’ MOONTOWN, WATTY THE MILLER, SWAMPY
MEG, JON O’ NUTTEN, outlaws in his band,
LADY STONEHEART, a hooded woman, sometimes called
MOTHER MERCY, THE SILENT SISTER, and THE
HANGWOMAN,
—LEM, called LEM LEMONCLOAK, a onetime soldier,
—THOROS OF MYR, a red priest,
—HARWIN, son of Hullen, a northman once in service to Lord
Eddard Stark of Winterfell,
—JACK-BE-LUCKY, a wanted man, short an eye,
—TOM OF SEVENSTREAMS, a singer of dubious report, called
TOM SEVENSTRINGS and TOM O’ SEVENS,
—LIKELY LUKE, NOTCH, MUDGE, BEARDLESS DICK, outlaws,
SANDOR CLEGANE, called THE HOUND, once King Jo rey’s
sworn shield, later a Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard, last seen
feverish and dying beside the Trident,
{VARGO HOAT} of the Free City of Qohor, called THE GOAT,a
sellsword captain of slobbery speech, slain at Harrenhal by Ser

Gregor Clegane,
—his Brave Companions, also called the Bloody Mummers:
—URSWYCK called FAITHFUL, his lieutenant,

—{SEPTON UTT}, hanged by Lord Beric Dondarrion,

—TIMEON OF DORNE, FAT ZOLLO, RORGE, BITER, PYG,
SHAGWELL THE FOOL, TOGG JOTH of Ibben, THREE
TOES, scattered and running,
—at the Peach, a brothel in Stoney Sept:
—TANSY, the red-haired proprietor,
—ALYCE, CASS, LANNA, JYZENE, HELLY, BELLA, some of
her peaches,
—at Acorn Hall, the seat of House Smallwood:
—LADY RAVELLA, formerly of House Swann, wife to Lord
Theomar Smallwood,
—here and there and elsewhere:
—LORD LYMOND LYCHESTER, an old man of wandering
wit, who once held Ser Maynard at the bridge,
—his young caretaker, MAESTER ROONE,
—the ghost of High Heart,
—the Lady of the Leaves,
—the septon at Sallydance.

THE SWORN BROTHERS OF THE NIGHT’S WATCH
JON SNOW, the Bastard of Winterfell, nine-hundred-and-ninetyeighth Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch,
—GHOST, his white direwolf,
—his steward, EDDISON TOLLETT, called DOLOROUS EDD,
THE MEN OF C ASTLE BLACK

—BENJEN STARK, First Ranger, long missing, presumed dead,
—SER WYNTON STOUT, an aged ranger, feeble of wit,
—KEDGE WHITEYE, BEDWYCK called GIANT, MATTHAR,
DYWEN, GARTH GREYFEATHER, ULMER OF THE
KINGSWOOD, ELRON, PYPAR called PYP, GRENN called
AUROCHS, BERNARR called BLACK BERNARR, GOADY,
TIM STONE, BLACK JACK BULWER, GEOFF called THE
SQUIRREL, BEARDED BEN, rangers,
—BOWEN MARSH, Lord Steward,
—THREE-FINGER HOBB, steward and chief cook,
—{DONAL NOYE}, one-armed armorer and smith, slain at
the gate by Mag the Mighty
—OWEN called THE OAF, TIM TANGLETONGUE, MULLY,
CUGEN, DONNEL HILL called SWEET DONNEL, LEFT
HAND LEW, JEREN, WICK WHITTLESTICK, stewards,
—OTHELL YARWYCK, First Builder,
—SPARE BOOT, HALDER, ALBETT, KEGS, builders,
—CONWY, GUEREN, wandering recruiters,
—SEPTON CELLADOR, a drunken devout,

—SER ALLISER THORNE, former master-at-arms,
—LORD JANOS SLYNT, former commander of the City Watch
of King’s Landing, brie y Lord of Harrenhal,
—MAESTER AEMON (TARGARYEN), healer and counselor, a
blind man, one hundred and two years old,
—Aemon’s steward, CLYDAS,

—Aemon’s steward, SAMWELL TARLY, fat and bookish,
—IRON EMMETT, formerly of Eastwatch, master-at-arms,
—HARETH called HORSE, the twins ARRON and EMRICK,
SATIN, HOP-ROBIN, recruits in training,
THE MEN OF THE SHADOW TOWER

SER DENYS MALLISTER, Commander, Shadow Tower,
—his steward and squire, WALLACE MASSEY,
—MAESTER MULLIN, healer and counselor,
—{QHORIN HALFHAND}, chief ranger, slain by Jon Snow
beyond the Wall,
—brothers of the Shadow Tower:
—{SQUIRE DALBRIDGE, EGGEN}, rangers, slain in the
Skirling Pass,
—STONESNAKE, a ranger, lost afoot in Skirling Pass,
THE MEN OF EASTWATCH-BY-THE-SEA

COTTER PYKE, Commander,

—MAESTER HARMUNE, healer and counselor,
—OLD TATTERSALT, captain of the Blackbird,
—SER GLENDON HEWETT, master-at-arms,
—brothers of Eastwatch:
—DAREON, steward and singer,
AT C RASTER’S KEEP (THE BETRAYERS)

—DIRK, who murdered Craster, his host,

—OLLO LOPHAND, who slew his lord commander, Jeor
Mormont,
—GARTH OF GREENAWAY, MAWNEY, GRUBBS, ALAN OF
ROSBY, former rangers

—CLUBFOOT KARL, ORPHAN OSS, MUTTERING BILL, former
stewards.

the WILDLINGS, or THE FREE FOLK
MANCE RAYDER, King-beyond-the-Wall, a captive at Castle Black,
—his wife, {DALLA}, died in childbirth,
—their newborn son, born in battle, not yet named,
—VAL, Dalla’s younger sister, “the wildling princess,” a
captive at Castle Black,
—wildling chiefs and captains:
—{HARMA}, called DOGSHEAD, slain beneath the Wall,
—HALLECK, her brother,
—THE LORD OF BONES, mocked as RATTLESHIRT, a raider
and leader of a war band, captive at Castle Black,
—{YGRITTE}, a young spearwife, Jon Snow’s lover, killed
during the attack on Castle Black,
—RYK, called LONGSPEAR, a member of his band,
—RAGWYLE, LENYL, members of his band,
—{STYR}, Magnar of Thenn, slain attacking Castle Black,
—SIGORN, Styr’s son, the new Magnar of Thenn,
—TORMUND, Mead-King of Ruddy Hall, called GIANTSBANE,
TALL-TALKER, HORN-BLOWER, and BREAKER OF ICE, also
THUNDERFIST, HUSBAND TO BEARS, SPEAKER TO GODS,
and FATHER OF HOSTS,
—Tormund’s sons, TOREGG THE TALL, TORWYRD THE
TAME, DORMUND, and DRYN, his daughter MUNDA,
—THE WEEPER, a raider and leader of a war band,

—{ALFYN CROWKILLER}, a raider, slain by Qhorin
Halfhand of the Night’s Watch,

—{ORELL}, called ORELL THE EAGLE, a skinchanger slain
by Jon Snow in the Skirling Pass,

—{MAG MAR TUN DOH WEG}, called MAG THE MIGHTY, a
giant, slain by Donal Noye at the gate of Castle Black,
—VARAMYR called SIXSKINS, a skinchanger, master of three
wolves, a shadowcat, and snow bear,

—{JARL}, a young raider, Val’s lover, killed in a fall from
the Wall,
—GRIGG THE GOAT, ERROK, BODGER, DEL, BIG BOIL,
HEMPEN DAN, HENK THE HELM, LENN, TOEFINGER,
wildlings and raiders,
{CRASTER}, master of Craster’s Keep, slain by Dirk of the
Night’s Watch, a guest beneath his roof,
—GILLY, his daughter and wife,
—Gilly’s newborn son, not yet named,
—DYAH, FERNY, NELLA, three of Craster’s nineteen wives.

APPENDIX IV:
BEYOND THE NARROW SEA

THE QUEEN ACROSS THE WATER
DAENERYS TARGARYEN, the First of Her Name, Queen of
Meereen, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First
Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Protector of the Realm,
Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, called DAENERYS STORMBORN,
the UNBURNT, MOTHER OF DRAGONS,
—her dragons, DROGON, VISERION, RHAEGAL,
—her brother, {RHAEGAR}, Prince of Dragonstone, slain by
Robert Baratheon on the Trident,
—Rhaegar’s daughter, {RHAENYS}, murdered during the
Sack of King’s Landing,
—Rhaegar’s son, {AEGON, a babe in arms, murdered during
the Sack of King’s Landing,
—her brother {VISERYS}, the Third of His Name, called THE
BEGGAR KING, crowned with molten gold,
—her lord husband, {DROGO}, a khal of the Dothraki, died of a
wound gone bad,
—her stillborn son by Drogo, {RHAEGO}, slain in the womb
by the maegi Mirri Maz Duur,

—her Queensguard:
—SER BARRISTAN SELMY, called BARRISTAN THE BOLD,
once Lord Commander of King Robert’s Kingsguard,
—JHOGO, ko and bloodrider, the whip,
—AGGO, ko and bloodrider, the bow,

—RAKHARO, ko and bloodrider, the arakh,

—STRONG BELWAS, eunuch and former ghting slave,

—her captains and commanders:
—DAARIO NAHARIS, a amboyant Tyroshi sellsword,
commanding the company of Stormcrows,
—BEN PLUMM, called BROWN BEN, a mongrel sellsword,
commanding the company of Second Sons,
—GREY WORM, a eunuch, commanding the Unsullied, a
company of eunuch infantry,
—GROLEO of Pentos, formerly captain of the great cog
Saduleon, now an admiral without a eet,
—her handmaids:
—IRRI and JHIQUI, two Dothraki girls, sixteen,
—MISSANDEI, a Naathi scribe and translator,
—her known and suspected enemies:
—GRAZDAN MO ERAZ, a nobleman of Yunkai,
—KHAL PONO, once ko to Khal Drogo,
—KHAL JHAQO, once ko to Khal Drogo,
—MAGGO, his bloodrider,

—THE UNDYING OF QARTH, a band of warlocks,
—PYAT PREE, a Qartheen warlock,
—THE SORROWFUL MEN, a guild of Qartheen assassins,

—SER JORAH MORMONT, formerly Lord of Bear Island,
—{MIRRI MAZ DUUR}, godswife and maegi, a servant of the
Great Shepherd of Lhazar,

—her uncertain allies, past and present:
—XARO XHOAN DAXOS, a merchant prince of Qarth,

—QUAITHE, a masked shadowbinder from Asshai,
—ILLYRIO MOPATIS, a magister of the Free City of Pentos,
who brokered her marriage to Khal Drogo,
—CLEON THE GREAT, butcher king of Astapor,
—KHAL MORO, sometime ally of Khal Drogo,
—RHOGORO, his son and khalakka,

—KHAL JOMMO, sometime ally of Khal Drogo.
The Targaryens are the blood of the dragon, descended from the
high lords of the ancient Freehold of Valyria, their heritage marked
by lilac, indigo, and violet eyes and hair of silver-gold. To preserve
their blood and keep it pure, House Targaryen has oft wed brother
to sister, cousin to cousin, uncle to niece. The founder of the
dynasty, Aegon the Conquerer, took both his sisters to wife and
fathered sons on each. The Targaryen banner is a three-headed
dragon, red on black, the three heads representing Aegon and his
sisters. The Targaryen words are Fire and Blood.

IN BRAAVOS
FERREGO ANTARYON, Sealord of Braavos,
—QARRO VOLENTIN, First Sword of Braavos, his protector,
—BELLEGERE OTHERYS called THE BLACK PEARL, a
courtesan descended from the pirate queen of the same
name,
—THE VEILED LADY, THE MERLING QUEEN, THE
MOONSHADOW, THE DAUGHTER OF THE DUSK, THE
NIGHTINGALE, THE POETESS, famous courtesans,
—TERNESIO TERYS, Merchant-Captain of the Titan’s Daughter,
—YORKO and DENYO, two of his sons,
—MOREDO PRESTAYN, Merchant-Captain of the Vixen,
—LOTHO LORNEL, a dealer in old books and scrolls,
—EZZELYNO, a red priest, oft drunk,
—SEPTON EUSTACE, disgraced and defrocked,
—TERRO and ORBELO, a pair of bravos,
—BLIND BEQQO, a shmonger,
—BRUSCO, a shmonger,
—his daughters, TALEA and BREA,
—MERALYN, called MERRY, proprietor of the Happy Port, a
brothel near the Ragman’s Harbor,
—THE SAILOR’S WIFE, a whore at the Happy Port,
—LANNA, her daughter, a young whore,

—BLUSHING BETHANY, YNA ONE-EYE, ASSADORA OF
IBBEN, the whores of the Happy Port,

—RED ROGGO, GYLORO DOTHARE, GYLENO DOTHARE, a
scribbler called QUILL, COSSOMO THE CONJURER,
patrons of the Happy Port,

—TAGGANARO, a dockside cutpurse and thief,

—CASSO, KING OF THE SEALS, his trained seal,
—LITTLE NARBO, his sometime partner,

—MYRMELLO, JOSS THE GLOOM, QUENCE, ALLAQUO,
SLOEY, mummers performing nightly on the Ship,
—S’VRONE, a dockside whore of a murderous bent,
—THE DRUNKEN DAUGHTER, a whore of uncertain temper,
—CANKER JEYNE, a whore of uncertain sex,
—THE KINDLY MAN and THE WAIF, servants of the ManyFaced God at the House of Black and White,
—UMMA, the temple cook,
—THE HANDSOME MAN, THE FAT FELLOW, THE
LORDLING, THE STERN FACE, THE SQUINTER, and THE
STARVED MAN, secret servants of Him of Many Faces,

—ARYA of House Stark, a girl with an iron coin, also known as
ARRY, NAN, WEASEL, SQUAB, SALTY, and CAT
—QUHURU MO, of Tall Trees Town in the Summer Isles,
master of the merchantman Cinnamon Wind,
—KOJJA MO, his daughter, the red archer,
—XHONDO DHORU, mate on the Cinnamon Wind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This one was a bitch.
My thanks and appreciation go out once again to those stalwart
souls, my editors: Nita Taublib, Joy Chamberlain, Jane Johnson,
and especially Anne Lesley Groell, for her counsel, her good humor,
and her vast forbearance.
Thanks also to my readers, for all their kind and supportive emails, and for their patience. A special tip of the helm to Lodey of
the Three Fists, Pod the Devil Bunny, Trebla and Daj the Trivial
Kings, sweet Caress of the Wall, Lannister the Squirrel Slayer, and
the rest of the Brotherhood Without Banners, that half-mad drunken
fellowship of brave knights and lovely ladies who throw the best
parties at worldcon, year after year after year. And let me sound a
fanfare too for Elio and Linda, who seem to know the Seven
Kingdoms better than I do, and help me keep my continuity
straight. Their Westeros website and concordance is a joy and a
wonder.
And thanks to Walter Jon Williams for guiding me across more
salty seas, to Sage Walker for leeches and fevers and broken bones,
to Pati Nagle for HTML and spinning shields and getting all my
news up quickly, and to Melinda Snodgrass and Daniel Abraham for
service that was truly above and beyond the call of duty. I get by
with a little help from my friends.

No words could su ce for Parris, who has been there on the good
days and the bad ones for every bloody page. All that needs be said
is that I could not sing this Song without her.

A Dance with Dragons is a work of ction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used ctitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by George R. R. Martin.
Endpaper and interior maps
copyright © by Je rey L. Ward
Heraldic crests by Virginia Norey
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The
Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Martin, George R. R.
A dance with dragons / George R. R. Martin.
p. cm — (A song of ice and re; bk. 5)
eISBN: 978-0-553-90565-6
I. Title.
PS3563.A7239D36 2011
813’.54—dc22 2011015508
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1_r10

Contents

Master - Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Cavil on Chronology
Maps

Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18

Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48

Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Epilogue
Appendix
Westeros
The Boy King
The King at the Wall
King of the Isles and the North

Other Houses Great and Small
House Arryn
House Baratheon
House Frey
House Lannister
House Martell
House Stark
House Tully
House Tyrell
The Sworn Brothers of the Night’s Watch
The Wildings, or the Free Folk
Beyond the Wall
Essos Beyond the Narrow Sea
In Braavos
In Old Volantis
On Slaver’s Bay
The Queen Across the Water
The Sellswords Men and Women of the Free Companies
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author

this one is for my fans
for Lodey, Trebla, Stego, Pod,
Caress, Yags, X-Ray and Mr. X,
Kate, Chataya, Mormont, Mich,
Jamie, Vanessa, Ro,
for Stubby, Louise, Agravaine,
Wert, Malt, Jo,
Mouse, Telisiane, Blackfyre,
Bronn Stone, Coyote’s Daughter,
and the rest of the madmen and wild women of
the Brotherhood Without Banners
for my website wizards
Elio and Linda, lords of Westeros,
Winter and Fabio of WIC,
and Gibbs of Dragonstone, who started it all
for men and women of Asshai in Spain
who sang to us of a bear and a maiden fair
and the fabulous fans of Italy
who gave me so much wine
for my readers in Finland, Germany,
Brazil, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands
and all the other distant lands
where you’ve been waiting for this dance
and for all the friends and fans
I have yet to meet
thanks for your patience

A CAVIL ON CHRONOLOGY

It has been a while between books, I know. So a reminder may be
in order.
The book you hold in your hands is the fth volume of A Song of
Ice and Fire. The fourth volume was A Feast for Crows. However, this
volume does not follow that one in the traditional sense, so much as
run in tandem with it.
Both Dance and Feast take up the story immediately after the
events of the third volume in the series, A Storm of Swords. Whereas
Feast focused on events in and around King’s Landing, on the Iron
Islands, and down in Dorne, Dance takes us north to Castle Black
and the Wall (and beyond), and across the narrow sea to Pentos and
Slaver’s Bay, to pick up the tales of Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow,
Daenerys Targaryen, and all the other characters you did not see in
the preceding volume. Rather than being sequential, the two books
are parallel … divided geographically, rather than chronologically.
But only up to a point.
A Dance with Dragons is a longer book than A Feast for Crows, and
covers a longer time period. In the latter half of this volume, you
will notice certain of the viewpoint characters from A Feast for
Crows popping up again. And that means just what you think it
means: the narrative has moved past the time frame of Feast, and
the two streams have once again rejoined each other.
Next up, The Winds of Winter. Wherein, I hope, everybody will be
shivering together once again.…
—George R. R. Martin
April 2011

Click here to view the maps in greater detail:
http://atrandom.com/dwdmaps/

PROLOGUE

T

he night was rank with the smell of man.
The warg stopped beneath a tree and sni ed, his grey-brown fur
dappled by shadow. A sigh of piney wind brought the man-scent to
him, over fainter smells that spoke of fox and hare, seal and stag,
even wolf. Those were man-smells too, the warg knew; the stink of
old skins, dead and sour, near drowned beneath the stronger scents
of smoke and blood and rot. Only man stripped the skins from other
beasts and wore their hides and hair.
Wargs have no fear of man, as wolves do. Hate and hunger coiled
in his belly, and he gave a low growl, calling to his one-eyed
brother, to his small sly sister. As he raced through the trees, his
packmates followed hard on his heels. They had caught the scent as
well. As he ran, he saw through their eyes too and glimpsed himself
ahead. The breath of the pack pu ed warm and white from long
grey jaws. Ice had frozen between their paws, hard as stone, but the
hunt was on now, the prey ahead. Flesh, the warg thought, meat.
A man alone was a feeble thing. Big and strong, with good sharp
eyes, but dull of ear and deaf to smells. Deer and elk and even hares
were faster, bears and boars ercer in a ght. But men in packs
were dangerous. As the wolves closed on the prey, the warg heard
the wailing of a pup, the crust of last night’s snow breaking under
clumsy man-paws, the rattle of hardskins and the long grey claws
men carried.
Swords, a voice inside him whispered, spears.
The trees had grown icy teeth, snarling down from the bare
brown branches. One Eye ripped through the undergrowth, spraying
snow. His packmates followed. Up a hill and down the slope
beyond, until the wood opened before them and the men were
there. One was female. The fur-wrapped bundle she clutched was
her pup. Leave her for last, the voice whispered, the males are the
danger. They were roaring at each other as men did, but the warg

could smell their terror. One had a wooden tooth as tall as he was.
He ung it, but his hand was shaking and the tooth sailed high.
Then the pack was on them.
His one-eyed brother knocked the tooth-thrower back into a
snowdrift and tore his throat out as he struggled. His sister slipped
behind the other male and took him from the rear. That left the
female and her pup for him.
She had a tooth too, a little one made of bone, but she dropped it
when the warg’s jaws closed around her leg. As she fell, she
wrapped both arms around her noisy pup. Underneath her furs the
female was just skin and bones, but her dugs were full of milk. The
sweetest meat was on the pup. The wolf saved the choicest parts for
his brother. All around the carcasses, the frozen snow turned pink
and red as the pack lled its bellies.
Leagues away, in a one-room hut of mud and straw with a
thatched roof and a smoke hole and a oor of hard-packed earth,
Varamyr shivered and coughed and licked his lips. His eyes were
red, his lips cracked, his throat dry and parched, but the taste of
blood and fat lled his mouth, even as his swollen belly cried for
nourishment. A child’s esh, he thought, remembering Bump. Human
meat. Had he sunk so low as to hunger after human meat? He could
almost hear Haggon growling at him. “Men may eat the esh of
beasts and beasts the esh of men, but the man who eats the esh of
man is an abomination.”
Abomination. That had always been Haggon’s favorite word.
Abomination, abomination, abomination. To eat of human meat was
abomination, to mate as wolf with wolf was abomination, and to
seize the body of another man was the worst abomination of all.
Haggon was weak, afraid of his own power. He died weeping and alone
when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his
heart himself. He taught me much and more, and the last thing I
learned from him was the taste of human esh.
That was as a wolf, though. He had never eaten the meat of men
with human teeth. He would not grudge his pack their feast,
however. The wolves were as famished as he was, gaunt and cold
and hungry, and the prey … two men and a woman, a babe in arms,

eeing from defeat to death. They would have perished soon in any case,
from exposure or starvation. This way was better, quicker. A mercy.
“A mercy,” he said aloud. His throat was raw, but it felt good to
hear a human voice, even his own. The air smelled of mold and
damp, the ground was cold and hard, and his re was giving o
more smoke than heat. He moved as close to the ames as he dared,
coughing and shivering by turns, his side throbbing where his
wound had opened. Blood had soaked his breeches to the knee and
dried into a hard brown crust.
Thistle had warned him that might happen. “I sewed it up the
best I could,” she’d said, “but you need to rest and let it mend, or
the esh will tear open again.”
Thistle had been the last of his companions, a spearwife tough as
an old root, warty, windburnt, and wrinkled. The others had
deserted them along the way. One by one they fell behind or forged
ahead, making for their old villages, or the Milkwater, or
Hardhome, or a lonely death in the woods. Varamyr did not know,
and could not care. I should have taken one of them when I had the
chance. One of the twins, or the big man with the scarred face, or the
youth with the red hair. He had been afraid, though. One of the
others might have realized what was happening. Then they would
have turned on him and killed him. And Haggon’s words had
haunted him, and so the chance had passed.
After the battle there had been thousands of them struggling
through the forest, hungry, frightened, eeing the carnage that had
descended on them at the Wall. Some had talked of returning to the
homes that they’d abandoned, others of mounting a second assault
upon the gate, but most were lost, with no notion of where to go or
what to do. They had escaped the black-cloaked crows and the
knights in their grey steel, but more relentless enemies stalked them
now. Every day left more corpses by the trails. Some died of
hunger, some of cold, some of sickness. Others were slain by those
who had been their brothers-in-arms when they marched south with
Mance Rayder, the King-Beyond-the-Wall.
Mance is fallen, the survivors told each other in despairing voices,
Mance is taken, Mance is dead. “Harma’s dead and Mance is

captured, the rest run o and left us,” Thistle had claimed, as she
was sewing up his wound. “Tormund, the Weeper, Sixskins, all them
brave raiders. Where are they now?”
She does not know me, Varamyr realized then, and why should she?
Without his beasts he did not look like a great man. I was Varamyr
Sixskins, who broke bread with Mance Rayder. He had named himself
Varamyr when he was ten. A name t for a lord, a name for songs, a
mighty name, and fearsome. Yet he had run from the crows like a
frightened rabbit. The terrible Lord Varamyr had gone craven, but
he could not bear that she should know that, so he told the
spearwife that his name was Haggon. Afterward he wondered why
that name had come to his lips, of all those he might have chosen. I
ate his heart and drank his blood, and still he haunts me.
One day, as they ed, a rider came galloping through the woods
on a gaunt white horse, shouting that they all should make for the
Milkwater, that the Weeper was gathering warriors to cross the
Bridge of Skulls and take the Shadow Tower. Many followed him;
more did not. Later, a dour warrior in fur and amber went from
cook re to cook re, urging all the survivors to head north and take
refuge in the valley of the Thenns. Why he thought they would be
safe there when the Thenns themselves had ed the place Varamyr
never learned, but hundreds followed him. Hundreds more went o
with the woods witch who’d had a vision of a eet of ships coming
to carry the free folk south. “We must seek the sea,” cried Mother
Mole, and her followers turned east.
Varamyr might have been amongst them if only he’d been
stronger. The sea was grey and cold and far away, though, and he
knew that he would never live to see it. He was nine times dead and
dying, and this would be his true death. A squirrel-skin cloak, he
remembered, he knifed me for a squirrel-skin cloak.
Its owner had been dead, the back of her head smashed into red
pulp ecked with bits of bone, but her cloak looked warm and
thick. It was snowing, and Varamyr had lost his own cloaks at the
Wall. His sleeping pelts and woolen smallclothes, his sheepskin
boots and fur-lined gloves, his store of mead and hoarded food, the
hanks of hair he took from the women he bedded, even the golden

arm rings Mance had given him, all lost and left behind. I burned
and I died and then I ran, half-mad with pain and terror. The memory
still shamed him, but he had not been alone. Others had run as well,
hundreds of them, thousands. The battle was lost. The knights had
come, invincible in their steel, killing everyone who stayed to ght. It was
run or die.
Death was not so easily outrun, however. So when Varamyr came
upon the dead woman in the wood, he knelt to strip the cloak from
her, and never saw the boy until he burst from hiding to drive the
long bone knife into his side and rip the cloak out of his clutching
ngers. “His mother,” Thistle told him later, after the boy had run
o . “It were his mother’s cloak, and when he saw you robbing
her …”
“She was dead,” Varamyr said, wincing as her bone needle
pierced his esh. “Someone smashed her head. Some crow.”
“No crow. Hornfoot men. I saw it.” Her needle pulled the gash in
his side closed. “Savages, and who’s left to tame them?” No one. If
Mance is dead, the free folk are doomed. The Thenns, giants, and the
Hornfoot men, the cave-dwellers with their led teeth, and the men
of the western shore with their chariots of bone … all of them were
doomed as well. Even the crows. They might not know it yet, but
those black-cloaked bastards would perish with the rest. The enemy
was coming.
Haggon’s rough voice echoed in his head. “You will die a dozen
deaths, boy, and every one will hurt … but when your true death
comes, you will live again. The second life is simpler and sweeter,
they say.”
Varamyr Sixskins would know the truth of that soon enough. He
could taste his true death in the smoke that hung acrid in the air,
feel it in the heat beneath his ngers when he slipped a hand under
his clothes to touch his wound. The chill was in him too, though,
deep down in his bones. This time it would be cold that killed him.
His last death had been by re. I burned. At rst, in his confusion,
he thought some archer on the Wall had pierced him with a aming
arrow … but the re had been inside him, consuming him. And the
pain …

Varamyr had died nine times before. He had died once from a
spear thrust, once with a bear’s teeth in his throat, and once in a
wash of blood as he brought forth a stillborn cub. He died his rst
death when he was only six, as his father’s axe crashed through his
skull. Even that had not been so agonizing as the re in his guts,
crackling along his wings, devouring him. When he tried to y from
it, his terror fanned the ames and made them burn hotter. One
moment he had been soaring above the Wall, his eagle’s eyes
marking the movements of the men below. Then the ames had
turned his heart into a blackened cinder and sent his spirit
screaming back into his own skin, and for a little while he’d gone
mad. Even the memory was enough to make him shudder.
That was when he noticed that his re had gone out.
Only a grey-and-black tangle of charred wood remained, with a
few embers glowing in the ashes. There’s still smoke, it just needs
wood. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Varamyr crept to the pile
of broken branches Thistle had gathered before she went o
hunting, and tossed a few sticks onto the ashes. “Catch,” he
croaked. “Burn.” He blew upon the embers and said a wordless
prayer to the nameless gods of wood and hill and eld.
The gods gave no answer. After a while, the smoke ceased to rise
as well. Already the little hut was growing colder. Varamyr had no
int, no tinder, no dry kindling. He would never get the re
burning again, not by himself. “Thistle,” he called out, his voice
hoarse and edged with pain. “Thistle!”
Her chin was pointed and her nose at, and she had a mole on
one cheek with four dark hairs growing from it. An ugly face, and
hard, yet he would have given much to glimpse it in the door of the
hut. I should have taken her before she left. How long had she been
gone? Two days? Three? Varamyr was uncertain. It was dark inside
the hut, and he had been drifting in and out of sleep, never quite
sure if it was day or night outside. “Wait,” she’d said. “I will be
back with food.” So like a fool he’d waited, dreaming of Haggon
and Bump and all the wrongs he had done in his long life, but days
and nights had passed and Thistle had not returned. She won’t be
coming back. Varamyr wondered if he had given himself away.

Could she tell what he was thinking just from looking at him, or
had he muttered in his fever dream?
Abomination, he heard Haggon saying. It was almost as if he were
here, in this very room. “She is just some ugly spearwife,” Varamyr
told him. “I am a great man. I am Varamyr, the warg, the
skinchanger, it is not right that she should live and I should die.” No
one answered. There was no one there. Thistle was gone. She had
abandoned him, the same as all the rest.
His own mother had abandoned him as well. She cried for Bump,
but she never cried for me. The morning his father pulled him out of
bed to deliver him to Haggon, she would not even look at him. He
had shrieked and kicked as he was dragged into the woods, until his
father slapped him and told him to be quiet. “You belong with your
own kind,” was all he said when he ung him down at Haggon’s
feet.
He was not wrong, Varamyr thought, shivering. Haggon taught me
much and more. He taught me how to hunt and sh, how to butcher a
carcass and bone a sh, how to nd my way through the woods. And he
taught me the way of the warg and the secrets of the skinchanger, though
my gift was stronger than his own.
Years later he had tried to nd his parents, to tell them that their
Lump had become the great Varamyr Sixskins, but both of them
were dead and burned. Gone into the trees and streams, gone into the
rocks and earth. Gone to dirt and ashes. That was what the woods
witch told his mother, the day Bump died. Lump did not want to be
a clod of earth. The boy had dreamed of a day when bards would
sing of his deeds and pretty girls would kiss him. When I am grown I
will be the King-Beyond-the-Wall, Lump had promised himself. He
never had, but he had come close. Varamyr Sixskins was a name
men feared. He rode to battle on the back of a snow bear thirteen
feet tall, kept three wolves and a shadowcat in thrall, and sat at the
right hand of Mance Rayder. It was Mance who brought me to this
place. I should not have listened. I should have slipped inside my bear
and torn him to pieces.
Before Mance, Varamyr Sixskins had been a lord of sorts. He lived
alone in a hall of moss and mud and hewn logs that had once been

Haggon’s, attended by his beasts. A dozen villages did him homage
in bread and salt and cider, o ering him fruit from their orchards
and vegetables from their gardens. His meat he got himself.
Whenever he desired a woman he sent his shadowcat to stalk her,
and whatever girl he’d cast his eye upon would follow meekly to his
bed. Some came weeping, aye, but still they came. Varamyr gave
them his seed, took a hank of their hair to remember them by, and
sent them back. From time to time, some village hero would come
with spear in hand to slay the beastling and save a sister or a lover
or a daughter. Those he killed, but he never harmed the women.
Some he even blessed with children. Runts. Small, puny things, like
Lump, and not one with the gift.
Fear drove him to his feet, reeling. Holding his side to staunch
the seep of blood from his wound, Varamyr lurched to the door and
swept aside the ragged skin that covered it to face a wall of white.
Snow. No wonder it had grown so dark and smoky inside. The
falling snow had buried the hut.
When Varamyr pushed at it, the snow crumbled and gave way,
still soft and wet. Outside, the night was white as death; pale thin
clouds danced attendance on a silver moon, while a thousand stars
watched coldly. He could see the humped shapes of other huts
buried beneath drifts of snow, and beyond them the pale shadow of
a weirwood armored in ice. To the south and west the hills were a
vast white wilderness where nothing moved except the blowing
snow. “Thistle,” Varamyr called feebly, wondering how far she
could have gone. “Thistle. Woman. Where are you?”
Far away, a wolf gave howl.
A shiver went through Varamyr. He knew that howl as well as
Lump had once known his mother’s voice. One Eye. He was the
oldest of his three, the biggest, the ercest. Stalker was leaner,
quicker, younger, Sly more cunning, but both went in fear of One
Eye. The old wolf was fearless, relentless, savage.
Varamyr had lost control of his other beasts in the agony of the
eagle’s death. His shadowcat had raced into the woods, whilst his
snow bear turned her claws on those around her, ripping apart four
men before falling to a spear. She would have slain Varamyr had he

come within her reach. The bear hated him, had raged each time he
wore her skin or climbed upon her back.
His wolves, though …
My brothers. My pack. Many a cold night he had slept with his
wolves, their shaggy bodies piled up around him to help keep him
warm. When I die they will feast upon my esh and leave only bones to
greet the thaw come spring. The thought was queerly comforting. His
wolves had often foraged for him as they roamed; it seemed only
tting that he should feed them in the end. He might well begin his
second life tearing at the warm dead esh of his own corpse.
Dogs were the easiest beasts to bond with; they lived so close to
men that they were almost human. Slipping into a dog’s skin was
like putting on an old boot, its leather softened by wear. As a boot
was shaped to accept a foot, a dog was shaped to accept a collar,
even a collar no human eye could see. Wolves were harder. A man
might befriend a wolf, even break a wolf, but no man could truly
tame a wolf. “Wolves and women wed for life,” Haggon often said.
“You take one, that’s a marriage. The wolf is part of you from that
day on, and you’re part of him. Both of you will change.”
Other beasts were best left alone, the hunter had declared. Cats
were vain and cruel, always ready to turn on you. Elk and deer
were prey; wear their skins too long, and even the bravest man
became a coward. Bears, boars, badgers, weasels … Haggon did not
hold with such. “Some skins you never want to wear, boy. You
won’t like what you’d become.” Birds were the worst, to hear him
tell it. “Men were not meant to leave the earth. Spend too much
time in the clouds and you never want to come back down again. I
know skinchangers who’ve tried hawks, owls, ravens. Even in their
own skins, they sit moony, staring up at the bloody blue.”
Not all skinchangers felt the same, however. Once, when Lump
was ten, Haggon had taken him to a gathering of such. The wargs
were the most numerous in that company, the wolf-brothers, but
the boy had found the others stranger and more fascinating. Borroq
looked so much like his boar that all he lacked was tusks, Orell had
his eagle, Briar her shadowcat (the moment he saw them, Lump
wanted a shadowcat of his own), the goat woman Grisella …

None of them had been as strong as Varamyr Sixskins, though,
not even Haggon, tall and grim with his hands as hard as stone. The
hunter died weeping after Varamyr took Greyskin from him, driving
him out to claim the beast for his own. No second life for you, old
man. Varamyr Threeskins, he’d called himself back then. Greyskin
made four, though the old wolf was frail and almost toothless and
soon followed Haggon into death.
Varamyr could take any beast he wanted, bend them to his will,
make their esh his own. Dog or wolf, bear or badger …
Thistle, he thought.
Haggon would call it an abomination, the blackest sin of all, but
Haggon was dead, devoured, and burned. Mance would have cursed
him as well, but Mance was slain or captured. No one will ever know.
I will be Thistle the spearwife, and Varamyr Sixskins will be dead. His
gift would perish with his body, he expected. He would lose his
wolves, and live out the rest of his days as some scrawny, warty
woman … but he would live. If she comes back. If I am still strong
enough to take her.
A wave of dizziness washed over Varamyr. He found himself upon
his knees, his hands buried in a snowdrift. He scooped up a stful of
snow and lled his mouth with it, rubbing it through his beard and
against his cracked lips, sucking down the moisture. The water was
so cold that he could barely bring himself to swallow, and he
realized once again how hot he was.
The snowmelt only made him hungrier. It was food his belly
craved, not water. The snow had stopped falling, but the wind was
rising, lling the air with crystal, slashing at his face as he struggled
through the drifts, the wound in his side opening and closing again.
His breath made a ragged white cloud. When he reached the
weirwood tree, he found a fallen branch just long enough to use as
a crutch. Leaning heavily upon it, he staggered toward the nearest
hut. Perhaps the villagers had forgotten something when they
ed … a sack of apples, some dried meat, anything to keep him
alive until Thistle returned.
He was almost there when his crutch snapped beneath his weight,
and his legs went out from under him.

How long he sprawled there with his blood reddening the snow
Varamyr could not have said. The snow will bury me. It would be a
peaceful death. They say you feel warm near the end, warm and sleepy.
It would be good to feel warm again, though it made him sad to
think that he would never see the green lands, the warm lands
beyond the Wall that Mance used to sing about. “The world beyond
the Wall is not for our kind,” Haggon used to say. “The free folk
fear skinchangers, but they honor us as well. South of the Wall, the
kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs.”
You warned me, Varamyr thought, but it was you who showed me
Eastwatch too. He could not have been more than ten. Haggon
traded a dozen strings of amber and a sled piled high with pelts for
six skins of wine, a block of salt, and a copper kettle. Eastwatch was
a better place to trade than Castle Black; that was where the ships
came, laden with goods from the fabled lands beyond the sea. The
crows knew Haggon as a hunter and a friend to the Night’s Watch,
and welcomed the news he brought of life beyond their Wall. Some
knew him for a skinchanger too, but no one spoke of that. It was
there at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea that the boy he’d been rst began to
dream of the warm south.
Varamyr could feel the snow akes melting on his brow. This is not
so bad as burning. Let me sleep and never wake, let me begin my second
life. His wolves were close now. He could feel them. He would leave
this feeble esh behind, become one with them, hunting the night
and howling at the moon. The warg would become a true wolf.
Which, though?
Not Sly. Haggon would have called it abomination, but Varamyr
had often slipped inside her skin as she was being mounted by One
Eye. He did not want to spend his new life as a bitch, though, not
unless he had no other choice. Stalker might suit him better, the
younger male … though One Eye was larger and ercer, and it was
One Eye who took Sly whenever she went into heat.
“They say you forget,” Haggon had told him, a few weeks before
his own death. “When the man’s esh dies, his spirit lives on inside
the beast, but every day his memory fades, and the beast becomes a

little less a warg, a little more a wolf, until nothing of the man is
left and only the beast remains.”
Varamyr knew the truth of that. When he claimed the eagle that
had been Orell’s, he could feel the other skinchanger raging at his
presence. Orell had been slain by the turncloak crow Jon Snow, and
his hate for his killer had been so strong that Varamyr found himself
hating the beastling boy as well. He had known what Snow was the
moment he saw that great white direwolf stalking silent at his side.
One skinchanger can always sense another. Mance should have let me
take the direwolf. There would be a second life worthy of a king. He
could have done it, he did not doubt. The gift was strong in Snow,
but the youth was untaught, still ghting his nature when he should
have gloried in it.
Varamyr could see the weirwood’s red eyes staring down at him
from the white trunk. The gods are weighing me. A shiver went
through him. He had done bad things, terrible things. He had stolen,
killed, raped. He had gorged on human esh and lapped the blood
of dying men as it gushed red and hot from their torn throats. He
had stalked foes through the woods, fallen on them as they slept,
clawed their entrails from their bellies and scattered them across
the muddy earth. How sweet their meat had tasted. “That was the
beast, not me,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “That was the gift you
gave me.”
The gods made no reply. His breath hung pale and misty in the
air. He could feel ice forming in his beard. Varamyr Sixskins closed
his eyes.
He dreamt an old dream of a hovel by the sea, three dogs
whimpering, a woman’s tears.
Bump. She weeps for Bump, but she never wept for me.
Lump had been born a month before his proper time, and he was
sick so often that no one expected him to live. His mother waited
until he was almost four to give him a proper name, and by then it
was too late. The whole village had taken to calling him Lump, the
name his sister Meha had given him when he was still in their
mother’s belly. Meha had given Bump his name as well, but Lump’s
little brother had been born in his proper time, big and red and

robust, sucking greedily at Mother’s teats. She was going to name
him after Father. Bump died, though. He died when he was two and I
was six, three days before his nameday.
“Your little one is with the gods now,” the woods witch told his
mother, as she wept. “He’ll never hurt again, never hunger, never
cry. The gods have taken him down into the earth, into the trees.
The gods are all around us, in the rocks and streams, in the birds
and beasts. Your Bump has gone to join them. He’ll be the world
and all that’s in it.”
The old woman’s words had gone through Lump like a knife.
Bump sees. He is watching me. He knows. Lump could not hide from
him, could not slip behind his mother’s skirts or run o with the
dogs to escape his father’s fury. The dogs. Loptail, Sni , the
Growler. They were good dogs. They were my friends.
When his father found the dogs sni ng round Bump’s body, he
had no way of knowing which had done it, so he took his axe to all
three. His hands shook so badly that it took two blows to silence
Sni and four to put the Growler down. The smell of blood hung
heavy in the air, and the sounds the dying dogs had made were
terrible to hear, yet Loptail still came when father called him. He
was the oldest dog, and his training overcame his terror. By the
time Lump slipped inside his skin it was too late.
No, Father, please, he tried to say, but dogs cannot speak the
tongues of men, so all that emerged was a piteous whine. The axe
crashed into the middle of the old dog’s skull, and inside the hovel
the boy let out a scream. That was how they knew. Two days later,
his father dragged him into the woods. He brought his axe, so Lump
thought he meant to put him down the same way he had done the
dogs. Instead he’d given him to Haggon.
Varamyr woke suddenly, violently, his whole body shaking. “Get
up,” a voice was screaming, “get up, we have to go. There are
hundreds of them.” The snow had covered him with a sti white
blanket. So cold. When he tried to move, he found that his hand was
frozen to the ground. He left some skin behind when he tore it
loose. “Get up,” she screamed again, “they’re coming.”

Thistle had returned to him. She had him by the shoulders and
was shaking him, shouting in his face. Varamyr could smell her
breath and feel the warmth of it upon cheeks gone numb with cold.
Now, he thought, do it now, or die.
He summoned all the strength still in him, leapt out of his own
skin, and forced himself inside her.
Thistle arched her back and screamed.
Abomination. Was that her, or him, or Haggon? He never knew.
His old esh fell back into the snowdrift as her ngers loosened.
The spearwife twisted violently, shrieking. His shadowcat used to
ght him wildly, and the snow bear had gone half-mad for a time,
snapping at trees and rocks and empty air, but this was worse. “Get
out, get out!” he heard her own mouth shouting. Her body
staggered, fell, and rose again, her hands ailed, her legs jerked this
way and that in some grotesque dance as his spirit and her own
fought for the esh. She sucked down a mouthful of the frigid air,
and Varamyr had half a heartbeat to glory in the taste of it and the
strength of this young body before her teeth snapped together and
lled his mouth with blood. She raised her hands to his face. He
tried to push them down again, but the hands would not obey, and
she was clawing at his eyes. Abomination, he remembered, drowning
in blood and pain and madness. When he tried to scream, she spat
their tongue out.
The white world turned and fell away. For a moment it was as if
he were inside the weirwood, gazing out through carved red eyes as
a dying man twitched feebly on the ground and a madwoman
danced blind and bloody underneath the moon, weeping red tears
and ripping at her clothes. Then both were gone and he was rising,
melting, his spirit borne on some cold wind. He was in the snow
and in the clouds, he was a sparrow, a squirrel, an oak. A horned
owl ew silently between his trees, hunting a hare; Varamyr was
inside the owl, inside the hare, inside the trees. Deep below the
frozen ground, earthworms burrowed blindly in the dark, and he
was them as well. I am the wood, and everything that’s in it, he
thought, exulting. A hundred ravens took to the air, cawing as they
felt him pass. A great elk trumpeted, unsettling the children clinging

to his back. A sleeping direwolf raised his head to snarl at empty
air. Before their hearts could beat again he had passed on, searching
for his own, for One Eye, Sly, and Stalker, for his pack. His wolves
would save him, he told himself.
That was his last thought as a man.
True death came suddenly; he felt a shock of cold, as if he had
been plunged into the icy waters of a frozen lake. Then he found
himself rushing over moonlit snows with his packmates close behind
him. Half the world was dark. One Eye, he knew. He bayed, and Sly
and Stalker gave echo.
When they reached the crest the wolves paused. Thistle, he
remembered, and a part of him grieved for what he had lost and
another part for what he’d done. Below, the world had turned to
ice. Fingers of frost crept slowly up the weirwood, reaching out for
each other. The empty village was no longer empty. Blue-eyed
shadows walked amongst the mounds of snow. Some wore brown
and some wore black and some were naked, their esh gone white
as snow. A wind was sighing through the hills, heavy with their
scents: dead esh, dry blood, skins that stank of mold and rot and
urine. Sly gave a growl and bared her teeth, her ru bristling. Not
men. Not prey. Not these.
The things below moved, but did not live. One by one, they
raised their heads toward the three wolves on the hill. The last to
look was the thing that had been Thistle. She wore wool and fur and
leather, and over that she wore a coat of hoarfrost that crackled
when she moved and glistened in the moonlight. Pale pink icicles
hung from her ngertips, ten long knives of frozen blood. And in
the pits where her eyes had been, a pale blue light was ickering,
lending her coarse features an eerie beauty they had never known
in life.
She sees me.

TYRION

H

e drank his way across the narrow sea.
The ship was small, his cabin smaller, but the captain would not
allow him abovedecks. The rocking of the deck beneath his feet
made his stomach heave, and the wretched food tasted even worse
when retched back up. But why did he need salt beef, hard cheese,
and bread crawling with worms when he had wine to nourish him?
It was red and sour, very strong. Sometimes he heaved the wine up
too, but there was always more.
“The world is full of wine,” he muttered in the dankness of his
cabin. His father never had any use for drunkards, but what did that
matter? His father was dead. He’d killed him. A bolt in the belly, my
lord, and all for you. If only I was better with a crossbow, I would have
put it through that cock you made me with, you bloody bastard.
Belowdecks, there was neither night nor day. Tyrion marked time
by the comings and goings of the cabin boy who brought the meals
he did not eat. The boy always brought a brush and bucket too, to
clean up. “Is this Dornish wine?” Tyrion asked him once, as he
pulled a stopper from a skin. “It reminds me of a certain snake I
knew. A droll fellow, till a mountain fell on him.”
The cabin boy did not answer. He was an ugly boy, though
admittedly more comely than a certain dwarf with half a nose and a
scar from eye to chin. “Have I o ended you?” Tyrion asked, as the
boy was scrubbing. “Were you commanded not to talk to me? Or
did some dwarf diddle your mother?” That went unanswered too.
“Where are we sailing? Tell me that.” Jaime had made mention of
the Free Cities, but had never said which one. “Is it Braavos?

Tyrosh? Myr?” Tyrion would sooner have gone to Dorne. Myrcella is
older than Tommen, by Dornish law the Iron Throne is hers. I will help
her claim her rights, as Prince Oberyn suggested.
Oberyn was dead, though, his head smashed to bloody ruin by the
armored st of Ser Gregor Clegane. And without the Red Viper to
urge him on, would Doran Martell even consider such a chancy
scheme? He might clap me in chains instead and hand me back to my
sweet sister. The Wall might be safer. Old Bear Mormont said the
Night’s Watch had need of men like Tyrion. Mormont might be dead,
though. By now Slynt may be the lord commander. That butcher’s son
was not like to have forgotten who sent him to the Wall. Do I really
want to spend the rest of my life eating salt beef and porridge with
murderers and thieves? Not that the rest of his life would last very
long. Janos Slynt would see to that.
The cabin boy wet his brush and scrubbed on manfully. “Have
you ever visited the pleasure houses of Lys?” the dwarf inquired.
“Might that be where whores go?” Tyrion could not seem to recall
the Valyrian word for whore, and in any case it was too late. The
boy tossed his brush back in his bucket and took his leave.
The wine has blurred my wits. He had learned to read High
Valyrian at his maester’s knee, though what they spoke in the Nine
Free Cities … well, it was not so much a dialect as nine dialects on
the way to becoming separate tongues. Tyrion had some Braavosi
and a smattering of Myrish. In Tyrosh he should be able to curse the
gods, call a man a cheat, and order up an ale, thanks to a sellsword
he had once known at the Rock. At least in Dorne they speak the
Common Tongue. Like Dornish food and Dornish law, Dornish
speech was spiced with the avors of the Rhoyne, but a man could
comprehend it. Dorne, yes, Dorne for me. He crawled into his bunk,
clutching that thought like a child with a doll.
Sleep had never come easily to Tyrion Lannister. Aboard that ship
it seldom came at all, though from time to time he managed to
drink su cient wine to pass out for a while. At least he did not
dream. He had dreamed enough for one small life. And of such
follies: love, justice, friendship, glory. As well dream of being tall. It was

all beyond his reach, Tyrion knew now. But he did not know where
whores go.
“Wherever whores go,” his father had said. His last words, and
what words they were. The crossbow thrummed, Lord Tywin sat back
down, and Tyrion Lannister found himself waddling through the
darkness with Varys at his side. He must have clambered back down
the shaft, two hundred and thirty rungs to where orange embers
glowed in the mouth of an iron dragon. He remembered none of it.
Only the sound the crossbow made, and the stink of his father’s
bowels opening. Even in his dying, he found a way to shit on me.
Varys had escorted him through the tunnels, but they never spoke
until they emerged beside the Blackwater, where Tyrion had won a
famous victory and lost a nose. That was when the dwarf turned to
the eunuch and said, “I’ve killed my father,” in the same tone a man
might use to say, “I’ve stubbed my toe.”
The master of whisperers had been dressed as a begging brother,
in a moth-eaten robe of brown roughspun with a cowl that
shadowed his smooth fat cheeks and bald round head. “You should
not have climbed that ladder,” he said reproachfully.
“Wherever whores go.” Tyrion had warned his father not to say
that word. If I had not loosed, he would have seen my threats were
empty. He would have taken the crossbow from my hands, as once he
took Tysha from my arms. He was rising when I killed him.
“I killed Shae too,” he confessed to Varys.
“You knew what she was.”
“I did. But I never knew what he was.”
Varys tittered. “And now you do.”
I should have killed the eunuch as well. A little more blood on his
hands, what would it matter? He could not say what had stayed his
dagger. Not gratitude. Varys had saved him from a headsman’s
sword, but only because Jaime had compelled him. Jaime … no,
better not to think of Jaime.
He found a fresh skin of wine instead and sucked at it as if it were
a woman’s breast. The sour red ran down his chin and soaked
through his soiled tunic, the same one he had been wearing in his
cell. The deck was swaying beneath his feet, and when he tried to

rise it lifted sideways and smashed him hard against a bulkhead. A
storm, he realized, or else I am even drunker than I knew. He retched
the wine up and lay in it a while, wondering if the ship would sink.
Is this your vengeance, Father? Has the Father Above made you his
Hand? “Such are the wages of the kinslayer,” he said as the wind
howled outside. It did not seem fair to drown the cabin boy and the
captain and all the rest for something he had done, but when had
the gods ever been fair? And around about then, the darkness
gulped him down.
When he stirred again, his head felt like to burst and the ship was
spinning round in dizzy circles, though the captain was insisting that
they’d come to port. Tyrion told him to be quiet and kicked feebly
as a huge bald sailor tucked him under one arm and carried him
squirming to the hold, where an empty wine cask awaited him. It
was a squat little cask, and a tight t even for a dwarf. Tyrion
pissed himself in his struggles, for all the good it did. He was
crammed face- rst into the cask with his knees pushed up against
his ears. The stub of his nose itched horribly, but his arms were
pinned so tightly that he could not reach to scratch it. A palanquin t
for a man of my stature, he thought as they hammered shut the lid.
He could hear voices shouting as he was hoisted up. Every bounce
cracked his head against the bottom of the cask. The world went
round and round as the cask rolled downward, then stopped with a
crash that made him want to scream. Another cask slammed into
his, and Tyrion bit his tongue.
That was the longest journey he had ever taken, though it could
not have lasted more than half an hour. He was lifted and lowered,
rolled and stacked, upended and righted and rolled again. Through
the wooden staves he heard men shouting, and once a horse
whickered nearby. His stunted legs began to cramp, and soon hurt
so badly that he forgot the hammering in his head.
It ended as it had begun, with another roll that left him dizzy and
more jouncing. Outside, strange voices were speaking in a tongue
he did not know. Someone started pounding on the top of the cask
and the lid cracked open suddenly. Light came ooding in, and cool
air as well. Tyrion gasped greedily and tried to stand, but only

managed to knock the cask over sideways and spill himself out onto
a hard-packed earthen oor.
Above him loomed a grotesque fat man with a forked yellow
beard, holding a wooden mallet and an iron chisel. His bedrobe was
large enough to serve as a tourney pavilion, but its loosely knotted
belt had come undone, exposing a huge white belly and a pair of
heavy breasts that sagged like sacks of suet covered with coarse
yellow hair. He reminded Tyrion of a dead sea cow that had once
washed up in the caverns under Casterly Rock.
The fat man looked down and smiled. “A drunken dwarf,” he said,
in the Common Tongue of Westeros.
“A rotting sea cow.” Tyrion’s mouth was full of blood. He spat it
at the fat man’s feet. They were in a long, dim cellar with barrelvaulted ceilings, its stone walls spotted with nitre. Casks of wine
and ale surrounded them, more than enough drink to see a thirsty
dwarf safely through the night. Or through a life.
“You are insolent. I like that in a dwarf.” When the fat man
laughed, his esh bounced so vigorously that Tyrion was afraid he
might fall and crush him. “Are you hungry, my little friend?
Weary?”
“Thirsty.” Tyrion struggled to his knees. “And lthy.”
The fat man sni ed. “A bath rst, just so. Then food and a soft
bed, yes? My servants shall see to it.” His host put the mallet and
chisel aside. “My house is yours. Any friend of my friend across the
water is a friend to Illyrio Mopatis, yes.”
And any friend of Varys the Spider is someone I will trust just as far as
I can throw him.
The fat man made good on the promised bath, though. No sooner
did Tyrion lower himself into the hot water and close his eyes than
he was fast asleep. He woke naked on a goose-down feather bed so
soft it felt as if he had been swallowed by a cloud. His tongue was
growing hair and his throat was raw, but his cock was as hard as an
iron bar. He rolled from the bed, found a chamber pot, and
commenced to lling it, with a groan of pleasure.
The room was dim, but there were bars of yellow sunlight
showing between the slats of the shutters. Tyrion shook the last

drops o and waddled over patterned Myrish carpets as soft as new
spring grass. Awkwardly he climbed the window seat and ung the
shutters open to see where Varys and the gods had sent him.
Beneath his window six cherry trees stood sentinel around a
marble pool, their slender branches bare and brown. A naked boy
stood on the water, poised to duel with a bravo’s blade in hand. He
was lithe and handsome, no older than sixteen, with straight blond
hair that brushed his shoulders. So lifelike did he seem that it took
the dwarf a long moment to realize he was made of painted marble,
though his sword shimmered like true steel.
Across the pool stood a brick wall twelve feet high, with iron
spikes along its top. Beyond that was the city. A sea of tiled
rooftops crowded close around a bay. He saw square brick towers, a
great red temple, a distant manse upon a hill. In the far distance,
sunlight shimmered o deep water. Fishing boats were moving
across the bay, their sails rippling in the wind, and he could see the
masts of larger ships poking up along the shore. Surely one is bound
for Dorne, or for Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. He had no means to pay for
passage, though, nor was he made to pull an oar. I suppose I could
sign on as a cabin boy and earn my way by letting the crew bugger me
up and down the narrow sea.
He wondered where he was. Even the air smells di erent here.
Strange spices scented the chilly autumn wind, and he could hear
faint cries drifting over the wall from the streets beyond. It sounded
something like Valyrian, but he did not recognize more than one
word in ve. Not Braavos, he concluded, nor Tyrosh. Those bare
branches and the chill in the air argued against Lys and Myr and
Volantis as well.
When he heard the door opening behind him, Tyrion turned to
confront his fat host. “This is Pentos, yes?”
“Just so. Where else?”
Pentos. Well, it was not King’s Landing, that much could be said
for it. “Where do whores go?” he heard himself ask.
“Whores are found in brothels here, as in Westeros. You will have
no need of such, my little friend. Choose from amongst my
servingwomen. None will dare refuse you.”

“Slaves?” the dwarf asked pointedly.
The fat man stroked one of the prongs of his oiled yellow beard, a
gesture Tyrion found remarkably obscene. “Slavery is forbidden in
Pentos, by the terms of the treaty the Braavosi imposed on us a
hundred years ago. Still, they will not refuse you.” Illyrio gave a
ponderous half bow. “But now my little friend must excuse me. I
have the honor to be a magister of this great city, and the prince
has summoned us to session.” He smiled, showing a mouth full of
crooked yellow teeth. “Explore the manse and grounds as you like,
but on no account stray beyond the walls. It is best that no man
knows that you were here.”
“Were? Have I gone somewhere?”
“Time enough to speak of that this evening. My little friend and I
shall eat and drink and make great plans, yes?”
“Yes, my fat friend,” Tyrion replied. He thinks to use me for his
pro t. It was all pro t with the merchant princes of the Free Cities.
“Spice soldiers and cheese lords,” his lord father called them, with
contempt. Should a day ever dawn when Illyrio Mopatis saw more
pro t in a dead dwarf than a live one, Tyrion would nd himself
packed into another wine cask by dusk. It would be well if I was gone
before that day arrives. That it would arrive he did not doubt; Cersei
was not like to forget him, and even Jaime might be vexed to nd a
quarrel in Father’s belly.
A light wind was ri ing the waters of the pool below, all around
the naked swordsman. It reminded him of how Tysha would ri e
his hair during the false spring of their marriage, before he helped
his father’s guardsmen rape her. He had been thinking of those
guardsmen during his ight, trying to recall how many there had
been. You would think he might remember that, but no. A dozen? A
score? A hundred? He could not say. They had all been grown men,
tall and strong … though all men were tall to a dwarf of thirteen
years. Tysha knew their number. Each of them had given her a silver
stag, so she would only need to count the coins. A silver for each and
a gold for me. His father had insisted that he pay her too. A Lannister
always pays his debts.

“Wherever whores go,” he heard Lord Tywin say once more, and
once more the bowstring thrummed.
The magister had invited him to explore the manse. He found
clean clothes in a cedar chest inlaid with lapis and mother-of-pearl.
The clothes had been made for a small boy, he realized as he
struggled into them. The fabrics were rich enough, if a little musty,
but the cut was too long in the legs and too short in the arms, with
a collar that would have turned his face as black as Jo rey’s had he
somehow contrived to get it fastened. Moths had been at them too.
At least they do not stink of vomit.
Tyrion began his explorations with the kitchen, where two fat
women and a potboy watched him warily as he helped himself to
cheese, bread, and gs. “Good morrow to you, fair ladies,” he said
with a bow. “Do you know where whores go?” When they did not
respond, he repeated the question in High Valyrian, though he had
to say courtesan in place of whore. The younger, fatter cook gave
him a shrug that time.
He wondered what they would do if he took them by the hand
and dragged them to his bedchamber. None will dare refuse you,
Illyrio claimed, but somehow Tyrion did not think he meant these
two. The younger woman was old enough to be his mother, and the
older was likely her mother. Both were near as fat as Illyrio, with
teats that were larger than his head. I could smother myself in esh.
There were worse ways to die. The way his lord father had died, for
one. I should have made him shit a little gold before expiring. Lord
Tywin might have been niggardly with his approval and a ection,
but he had always been open-handed when it came to coin. The only
thing more pitiful than a dwarf without a nose is a dwarf without a nose
who has no gold.
Tyrion left the fat women to their loaves and kettles and went in
search of the cellar where Illyrio had decanted him the night before.
It was not hard to nd. There was enough wine there to keep him
drunk for a hundred years; sweet reds from the Reach and sour reds
from Dorne, pale Pentoshi ambers, the green nectar of Myr, three
score casks of Arbor gold, even wines from the fabled east, from
Qarth and Yi Ti and Asshai by the Shadow. In the end, Tyrion chose

a cask of strongwine marked as the private stock of Lord Runceford
Redwyne, the grandfather of the present Lord of the Arbor. The
taste of it was languorous and heady on the tongue, the color a
purple so dark that it looked almost black in the dim-lit cellar.
Tyrion lled a cup, and a agon for good measure, and carried them
up to the gardens to drink beneath those cherry trees he’d seen.
As it happened, he left by the wrong door and never found the
pool he had spied from his window, but it made no matter. The
gardens behind the manse were just as pleasant, and far more
extensive. He wandered through them for a time, drinking. The
walls would have shamed any proper castle, and the ornamental
iron spikes along the top looked strangely naked without heads to
adorn them. Tyrion pictured how his sister’s head might look up
there, with tar in her golden hair and ies buzzing in and out of her
mouth. Yes, and Jaime must have the spike beside her, he decided. No
one must ever come between my brother and my sister.
With a rope and a grapnel he might be able to get over that wall.
He had strong arms and he did not weigh much. He should be able
to clamber over, if he did not impale himself on a spike. I will search
for a rope on the morrow, he resolved.
He saw three gates during his wanderings—the main entrance
with its gatehouse, a postern by the kennels, and a garden gate
hidden behind a tangle of pale ivy. The last was chained, the others
guarded. The guards were plump, their faces as smooth as babies’
bottoms, and every man of them wore a spiked bronze cap. Tyrion
knew eunuchs when he saw them. He knew their sort by reputation.
They feared nothing and felt no pain, it was said, and were loyal to
their masters unto death. I could make good use of a few hundred of
mine own, he re ected. A pity I did not think of that before I became a
beggar.
He walked along a pillared gallery and through a pointed arch,
and found himself in a tiled courtyard where a woman was washing
clothes at a well. She looked to be his own age, with dull red hair
and a broad face dotted by freckles. “Would you like some wine?”
he asked her. She looked at him uncertainly. “I have no cup for you,
we’ll have to share.” The washerwoman went back to wringing out

tunics and hanging them to dry. Tyrion settled on a stone bench
with his agon. “Tell me, how far should I trust Magister Illyrio?”
The name made her look up. “That far?” Chuckling, he crossed his
stunted legs and took a drink. “I am loath to play whatever part the
cheesemonger has in mind for me, yet how can I refuse him? The
gates are guarded. Perhaps you might smuggle me out under your
skirts? I’d be so grateful; why, I’ll even wed you. I have two wives
already, why not three? Ah, but where would we live?” He gave her
as pleasant a smile as a man with half a nose could manage. “I have
a niece in Sunspear, did I tell you? I could make rather a lot of
mischief in Dorne with Myrcella. I could set my niece and nephew
at war, wouldn’t that be droll?” The washerwoman pinned up one
of Illyrio’s tunics, large enough to double as a sail. “I should be
ashamed to think such evil thoughts, you’re quite right. Better if I
sought the Wall instead. All crimes are wiped clean when a man
joins the Night’s Watch, they say. Though I fear they would not let
me keep you, sweetling. No women in the Watch, no sweet freckly
wives to warm your bed at night, only cold winds, salted cod, and
small beer. Do you think I might stand taller in black, my lady?” He
lled his cup again. “What do you say? North or south? Shall I
atone for old sins or make some new ones?”
The washerwoman gave him one last glance, picked up her
basket, and walked away. I cannot seem to hold a wife for very long,
Tyrion re ected. Somehow his agon had gone dry. Perhaps I should
stumble back down to the cellars. The strongwine was making his
head spin, though, and the cellar steps were very steep. “Where do
whores go?” he asked the wash apping on the line. Perhaps he
should have asked the washerwoman. Not to imply that you’re a
whore, my dear, but perhaps you know where they go. Or better yet, he
should have asked his father. “Wherever whores go,” Lord Tywin
said. She loved me. She was a crofter’s daughter, she loved me and she
wed me, she put her trust in me.
The empty agon slipped from his hand and rolled across the
yard. Tyrion pushed himself o the bench and went to fetch it. As
he did, he saw some mushrooms growing up from a cracked paving
tile. Pale white they were, with speckles, and red-ribbed undersides

dark as blood. The dwarf snapped one o and sni ed it. Delicious, he
thought, and deadly.
There were seven of the mushrooms. Perhaps the Seven were
trying to tell him something. He picked them all, snatched a glove
down from the line, wrapped them carefully, and stu ed them
down his pocket. The e ort made him dizzy, so afterward he
crawled back onto the bench, curled up, and shut his eyes.
When he woke again, he was back in his bedchamber, drowning
in the goose-down feather bed once more while a blond girl shook
his shoulder. “My lord,” she said, “your bath awaits. Magister
Illyrio expects you at table within the hour.”
Tyrion propped himself against the pillows, his head in his hands.
“Do I dream, or do you speak the Common Tongue?”
“Yes, my lord. I was bought to please the king.” She was blueeyed and fair, young and willowy.
“I am sure you did. I need a cup of wine.”
She poured for him. “Magister Illyrio said that I am to scrub your
back and warm your bed. My name—”
“—is of no interest to me. Do you know where whores go?”
She ushed. “Whores sell themselves for coin.”
“Or jewels, or gowns, or castles. But where do they go?”
The girl could not grasp the question. “Is it a riddle, m’lord? I’m
no good at riddles. Will you tell me the answer?”
No, he thought. I despise riddles, myself. “I will tell you nothing.
Do me the same favor.” The only part of you that interests me is the
part between your legs, he almost said. The words were on his
tongue, but somehow never passed his lips. She is not Shae, the
dwarf told himself, only some little fool who thinks I play at riddles. If
truth be told, even her cunt did not interest him much. I must be
sick, or dead. “You mentioned a bath? We must not keep the great
cheesemonger waiting.”
As he bathed, the girl washed his feet, scrubbed his back, and
brushed his hair. Afterward she rubbed sweet-smelling ointment
into his calves to ease the aches, and dressed him once again in
boy’s clothing, a musty pair of burgundy breeches and a blue velvet

doublet lined with cloth-of-gold. “Will my lord want me after he has
eaten?” she asked as she was lacing up his boots.
“No. I am done with women.” Whores.
The girl took that disappointment too well for his liking. “If
m’lord would prefer a boy, I can have one waiting in his bed.”
M’lord would prefer his wife. M’lord would prefer a girl named Tysha.
“Only if he knows where whores go.”
The girl’s mouth tightened. She despises me, he realized, but no
more than I despise myself. That he had fucked many a woman who
loathed the very sight of him, Tyrion Lannister had no doubt, but
the others had at least the grace to feign a ection. A little honest
loathing might be refreshing, like a tart wine after too much sweet.
“I believe I have changed my mind,” he told her. “Wait for me
abed. Naked, if you please, I’ll be a deal too drunk to fumble at
your clothing. Keep your mouth shut and your thighs open and the
two of us should get on splendidly.” He gave her a leer, hoping for
a taste of fear, but all she gave him was revulsion. No one fears a
dwarf. Even Lord Tywin had not been afraid, though Tyrion had
held a crossbow in his hands. “Do you moan when you are being
fucked?” he asked the bedwarmer.
“If it please m’lord.”
“It might please m’lord to strangle you. That’s how I served my
last whore. Do you think your master would object? Surely not. He
has a hundred more like you, but no one else like me.” This time,
when he grinned, he got the fear he wanted.
Illyrio was reclining on a padded couch, gobbling hot peppers and
pearl onions from a wooden bowl. His brow was dotted with beads
of sweat, his pig’s eyes shining above his fat cheeks. Jewels danced
when he moved his hands; onyx and opal, tiger’s eye and
tourmaline, ruby, amethyst, sapphire, emerald, jet and jade, a black
diamond, and a green pearl. I could live for years on his rings, Tyrion
mused, though I’d need a cleaver to claim them.
“Come sit, my little friend.” Illyrio waved him closer.
The dwarf clambered up onto a chair. It was much too big for
him, a cushioned throne intended to accommodate the magister’s
massive buttocks, with thick sturdy legs to bear his weight. Tyrion

Lannister had lived all his life in a world that was too big for him,
but in the manse of Illyrio Mopatis the sense of disproportion
assumed grotesque dimensions. I am a mouse in a mammoth’s lair, he
mused, though at least the mammoth keeps a good cellar. The thought
made him thirsty. He called for wine.
“Did you enjoy the girl I sent you?” Illyrio asked.
“If I had wanted a girl I would have asked for one.”
“If she failed to please …”
“She did all that was required of her.”
“I would hope so. She was trained in Lys, where they make an art
of love. The king enjoyed her greatly.”
“I kill kings, hadn’t you heard?” Tyrion smiled evilly over his
wine cup. “I want no royal leavings.”
“As you wish. Let us eat.” Illyrio clapped his hands together, and
serving men came running.
They began with a broth of crab and monk sh, and cold egg lime
soup as well. Then came quails in honey, a saddle of lamb, goose
livers drowned in wine, buttered parsnips, and suckling pig. The
sight of it all made Tyrion feel queasy, but he forced himself to try
a spoon of soup for the sake of politeness, and once he had tasted it
he was lost. The cooks might be old and fat, but they knew their
business. He had never eaten so well, even at court.
As he was sucking the meat o the bones of his quail, he asked
Illyrio about the morning’s summons. The fat man shrugged. “There
are troubles in the east. Astapor has fallen, and Meereen. Ghiscari
slave cities that were old when the world was young.” The suckling
pig was carved. Illyrio reached for a piece of the crackling, dipped
it in a plum sauce, and ate it with his ngers.
“Slaver’s Bay is a long way from Pentos.” Tyrion speared a goose
liver on the point of his knife. No man is as cursed as the kinslayer, he
mused, but I could learn to like this hell.
“This is so,” Illyrio agreed, “but the world is one great web, and a
man dare not touch a single strand lest all the others tremble. More
wine?” Illyrio popped a pepper into his mouth. “No, something
better.” He clapped his hands together.

At the sound a serving man entered with a covered dish. He
placed it in front of Tyrion, and Illyrio leaned across the table to
remove the lid. “Mushrooms,” the magister announced, as the smell
wafted up. “Kissed with garlic and bathed in butter. I am told the
taste is exquisite. Have one, my friend. Have two.”
Tyrion had a fat black mushroom halfway to his mouth, but
something in Illyrio’s voice made him stop abruptly. “After you, my
lord.” He pushed the dish toward his host.
“No, no.” Magister Illyrio pushed the mushrooms back. For a
heartbeat it seemed as if a mischievous boy was peering out from
inside the cheesemonger’s bloated esh. “After you. I insist. Cook
made them specially for you.”
“Did she indeed?” He remembered the cook, the our on her
hands, heavy breasts shot through with dark blue veins. “That was
kind of her, but … no.” Tyrion eased the mushroom back into the
lake of butter from which it had emerged.
“You are too suspicious.” Illyrio smiled through his forked yellow
beard. Oiled every morning to make it gleam like gold, Tyrion
suspected. “Are you craven? I had not heard that of you.”
“In the Seven Kingdoms it is considered a grave breach of
hospitality to poison your guest at supper.”
“Here as well.” Illyrio Mopatis reached for his wine cup. “Yet
when a guest plainly wishes to end his own life, why, his host must
oblige him, no?” He took a gulp. “Magister Ordello was poisoned
by a mushroom not half a year ago. The pain is not so much, I am
told. Some cramping in the gut, a sudden ache behind the eyes, and
it is done. Better a mushroom than a sword through your neck, is it
not so? Why die with the taste of blood in your mouth when it
could be butter and garlic?”
The dwarf studied the dish before him. The smell of garlic and
butter had his mouth watering. Some part of him wanted those
mushrooms, even knowing what they were. He was not brave
enough to take cold steel to his own belly, but a bite of mushroom
would not be so hard. That frightened him more than he could say.
“You mistake me,” he heard himself say.

“Is it so? I wonder. If you would sooner drown in wine, say the
word and it shall be done, and quickly. Drowning cup by cup wastes
time and wine both.”
“You mistake me,” Tyrion said again, more loudly. The buttered
mushrooms glistened in the lamplight, dark and inviting. “I have no
wish to die, I promise you. I have …” His voice trailed o into
uncertainty. What do I have? A life to live? Work to do? Children to
raise, lands to rule, a woman to love?
“You have nothing,” nished Magister Illyrio, “but we can change
that.” He plucked a mushroom from the butter, and chewed it
lustily. “Delicious.”
“The mushrooms are not poisoned.” Tyrion was irritated.
“No. Why should I wish you ill?” Magister Illyrio ate another.
“We must show a little trust, you and I. Come, eat.” He clapped his
hands again. “We have work to do. My little friend must keep his
strength up.”
The serving men brought out a heron stu ed with gs, veal
cutlets blanched with almond milk, creamed herring, candied
onions, foul-smelling cheeses, plates of snails and sweetbreads, and
a black swan in her plumage. Tyrion refused the swan, which
reminded him of a supper with his sister. He helped himself to
heron and herring, though, and a few of the sweet onions. And the
serving men lled his wine cup anew each time he emptied it.
“You drink a deal of wine for such a little man.”
“Kinslaying is dry work. It gives a man a thirst.”
The fat man’s eyes glittered like the gemstones on his ngers.
“There are those in Westeros who would say that killing Lord
Lannister was merely a good beginning.”
“They had best not say it in my sister’s hearing, or they will nd
themselves short a tongue.” The dwarf tore a loaf of bread in half.
“And you had best be careful what you say of my family, magister.
Kinslayer or no, I am a lion still.”
That seemed to amuse the lord of cheese no end. He slapped a
meaty thigh and said, “You Westerosi are all the same. You sew
some beast upon a scrap of silk, and suddenly you are all lions or
dragons or eagles. I can take you to a real lion, my little friend. The

prince keeps a pride in his menagerie. Would you like to share a
cage with them?”
The lords of the Seven Kingdoms did make rather much of their
sigils, Tyrion had to admit. “Very well,” he conceded. “A Lannister
is not a lion. Yet I am still my father’s son, and Jaime and Cersei are
mine to kill.”
“How odd that you should mention your fair sister,” said Illyrio,
between snails. “The queen has o ered a lordship to the man who
brings her your head, no matter how humble his birth.”
It was no more than Tyrion had expected. “If you mean to take
her up on it, make her spread her legs for you as well. The best part
of me for the best part of her, that’s a fair trade.”
“I would sooner have mine own weight in gold.” The
cheesemonger laughed so hard that Tyrion feared he was about to
rupture. “All the gold in Casterly Rock, why not?”
“The gold I grant you,” the dwarf said, relieved that he was not
about to drown in a gout of half-digested eels and sweetmeats, “but
the Rock is mine.”
“Just so.” The magister covered his mouth and belched a mighty
belch. “Do you think King Stannis will give it to you? I am told he is
a great one for the law. Your brother wears the white cloak, so you
are heir by all the laws of Westeros.”
“Stannis might well grant me Casterly Rock,” said Tyrion, “but
for the small matter of regicide and kinslaying. For those he would
shorten me by a head, and I am short enough as I stand. But why
would you think I mean to join Lord Stannis?”
“Why else would you go the Wall?”
“Stannis is at the Wall?” Tyrion rubbed at his nose. “What in
seven bloody hells is Stannis doing at the Wall?”
“Shivering, I would think. It is warmer down in Dorne. Perhaps
he should have sailed that way.”
Tyrion was beginning to suspect that a certain freckled
washerwoman knew more of the Common Speech than she
pretended. “My niece Myrcella is in Dorne, as it happens. And I
have half a mind to make her a queen.”

Illyrio smiled as his serving men spooned out bowls of black
cherries in sweet cream for them both. “What has this poor child
done to you that you would wish her dead?”
“Even a kinslayer is not required to slay all his kin,” said Tyrion,
wounded. “Queen her, I said. Not kill her.”
The cheesemonger spooned up cherries. “In Volantis they use a
coin with a crown on one face and a death’s-head on the other. Yet
it is the same coin. To queen her is to kill her. Dorne might rise for
Myrcella, but Dorne alone is not enough. If you are as clever as our
friend insists, you know this.”
Tyrion looked at the fat man with new interest. He is right on both
counts. To queen her is to kill her. And I knew that. “Futile gestures
are all that remain to me. This one would make my sister weep
bitter tears, at least.”
Magister Illyrio wiped sweet cream from his mouth with the back
of a fat hand. “The road to Casterly Rock does not go through
Dorne, my little friend. Nor does it run beneath the Wall. Yet there
is such a road, I tell you.”
“I am an attainted traitor, a regicide, and kinslayer.” This talk of
roads annoyed him. Does he think this is a game?
“What one king does, another may undo. In Pentos we have a
prince, my friend. He presides at ball and feast and rides about the
city in a palanquin of ivory and gold. Three heralds go before him
with the golden scales of trade, the iron sword of war, and the
silver scourge of justice. On the rst day of each new year he must
de ower the maid of the elds and the maid of the seas.” Illyrio
leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Yet should a crop fail or a
war be lost, we cut his throat to appease the gods and choose a new
prince from amongst the forty families.”
“Remind me never to become the Prince of Pentos.”
“Are your Seven Kingdoms so di erent? There is no peace in
Westeros, no justice, no faith … and soon enough, no food. When
men are starving and sick of fear, they look for a savior.”
“They may look, but if all they nd is Stannis—”
“Not Stannis. Nor Myrcella.” The yellow smile widened. “Another.
Stronger than Tommen, gentler than Stannis, with a better claim

than the girl Myrcella. A savior come from across the sea to bind up
the wounds of bleeding Westeros.”
“Fine words.” Tyrion was unimpressed. “Words are wind. Who is
this bloody savior?”
“A dragon.” The cheesemonger saw the look on his face at that,
and laughed. “A dragon with three heads.”

DAENERYS

S

he could hear the dead man coming up the steps. The slow,
measured sound of footsteps went before him, echoing amongst the
purple pillars of her hall. Daenerys Targaryen awaited him upon the
ebon bench that she had made her throne. Her eyes were soft with
sleep, her silver-gold hair all tousled.
“Your Grace,” said Ser Barristan Selmy, the lord commander of
her Queensguard, “there is no need for you to see this.”
“He died for me.” Dany clutched her lion pelt to her chest.
Underneath, a sheer white linen tunic covered her to midthigh. She
had been dreaming of a house with a red door when Missandei
woke her. There had been no time to dress.
“Khaleesi,” whispered Irri, “you must not touch the dead man. It is
bad luck to touch the dead.”
“Unless you killed them yourself.” Jhiqui was bigger-boned than
Irri, with wide hips and heavy breasts. “That is known.”
“It is known,” Irri agreed.
Dothraki were wise where horses were concerned, but could be
utter fools about much else. They are only girls, besides. Her
handmaids were of an age with her—women grown to look at
them, with their black hair, copper skin, and almond-shaped eyes,
but girls all the same. They had been given to her when she wed
Khal Drogo. It was Drogo who had given her the pelt she wore, the
head and hide of a hrakkar, the white lion of the Dothraki sea. It
was too big for her and had a musty smell, but it made her feel as if
her sun-and-stars was still near her.

Grey Worm appeared atop the steps rst, a torch in hand. His
bronze cap was crested with three spikes. Behind him followed four
of his Unsullied, bearing the dead man on their shoulders. Their
caps had only one spike each, and their faces showed so little they
might have been cast of bronze as well. They laid the corpse down
at her feet. Ser Barristan pulled back the bloodstained shroud. Grey
Worm lowered the torch, so she might see.
The dead man’s face was smooth and hairless, though his cheeks
had been slashed open ear to ear. He had been a tall man, blue-eyed
and fair of face. Some child of Lys or Old Volantis, snatched o a ship
by corsairs and sold into bondage in red Astapor. Though his eyes were
open, it was his wounds that wept. There were more wounds than
she could count.
“Your Grace,” Ser Barristan said, “there was a harpy drawn on the
bricks in the alley where he was found …”
“… drawn in blood.” Daenerys knew the way of it by now. The
Sons of the Harpy did their butchery by night, and over each kill
they left their mark. “Grey Worm, why was this man alone? Had he
no partner?” By her command, when the Unsullied walked the
streets of Meereen by night they always walked in pairs.
“My queen,” replied the captain, “your servant Stalwart Shield
had no duty last night. He had gone to a … a certain place … to
drink, and have companionship.”
“A certain place? What do you mean?”
“A house of pleasure, Your Grace.”
A brothel. Half of her freedmen were from Yunkai, where the
Wise Masters had been famed for training bedslaves. The way of the
seven sighs. Brothels had sprouted up like mushrooms all over
Meereen. It is all they know. They need to survive. Food was more
costly every day, whilst the price of esh grew cheaper. In the
poorer districts between the stepped pyramids of Meereen’s slaver
nobility, there were brothels catering to every conceivable erotic
taste, she knew. Even so … “What could a eunuch hope to nd in a
brothel?”
“Even those who lack a man’s parts may still have a man’s heart,
Your Grace,” said Grey Worm. “This one has been told that your

servant Stalwart Shield sometimes gave coin to the women of the
brothels to lie with him and hold him.”
The blood of the dragon does not weep. “Stalwart Shield,” she said,
dry-eyed. “That was his name?”
“If it please Your Grace.”
“It is a ne name.” The Good Masters of Astapor had not allowed
their slave soldiers even names. Some of her Unsullied reclaimed
their birth names after she had freed them; others chose new names
for themselves. “Is it known how many attackers fell upon Stalwart
Shield?”
“This one does not know. Many.”
“Six or more,” said Ser Barristan. “From the look of his wounds,
they swarmed him from all sides. He was found with an empty
scabbard. It may be that he wounded some of his attackers.”
Dany said a silent prayer that somewhere one of the Harpy’s Sons
was dying even now, clutching at his belly and writhing in pain.
“Why did they cut open his cheeks like that?”
“Gracious queen,” said Grey Worm, “his killers had forced the
genitals of a goat down the throat of your servant Stalwart Shield.
This one removed them before bringing him here.”
They could not feed him his own genitals. The Astapori left him neither
root nor stem. “The Sons grow bolder,” Dany observed. Until now,
they had limited their attacks to unarmed freedmen, cutting them
down in the streets or breaking into their homes under the cover of
darkness to murder them in their beds. “This is the rst of my
soldiers they have slain.”
“The rst,” Ser Barristan warned, “but not the last.”
I am still at war, Dany realized, only now I am ghting shadows. She
had hoped for a respite from the killing, for some time to build and
heal.
Shrugging o the lion pelt, she knelt beside the corpse and closed
the dead man’s eyes, ignoring Jhiqui’s gasp. “Stalwart Shield shall
not be forgotten. Have him washed and dressed for battle and bury
him with cap and shield and spears.”
“It shall be as Your Grace commands,” said Grey Worm.

“Send men to the Temple of the Graces and ask if any man has
come to the Blue Graces with a sword wound. And spread the word
that we will pay good gold for the short sword of Stalwart Shield.
Inquire of the butchers and the herdsmen, and learn who has been
gelding goats of late.” Perhaps some goatherd would confess.
“Henceforth, no man of mine walks alone after dark.”
“These ones shall obey.”
Daenerys pushed her hair back. “Find these cowards for me. Find
them, so that I might teach the Harpy’s Sons what it means to wake
the dragon.”
Grey Worm saluted her. His Unsullied closed the shroud once
more, lifted the dead man onto their shoulders, and bore him from
the hall. Ser Barristan Selmy remained behind. His hair was white,
and there were crow’s-feet at the corners of his pale blue eyes. Yet
his back was still unbent, and the years had not yet robbed him of
his skill at arms. “Your Grace,” he said, “I fear your eunuchs are ill
suited for the tasks you set them.”
Dany settled on her bench and wrapped her pelt about her
shoulders once again. “The Unsullied are my nest warriors.”
“Soldiers, not warriors, if it please Your Grace. They were made
for the battle eld, to stand shoulder to shoulder behind their shields
with their spears thrust out before them. Their training teaches
them to obey, fearlessly, perfectly, without thought or
hesitation … not to unravel secrets or ask questions.”
“Would knights serve me any better?” Selmy was training knights
for her, teaching the sons of slaves to ght with lance and
longsword in the Westerosi fashion … but what good would lances
do against cowards who killed from the shadows?
“Not in this,” the old man admitted. “And Your Grace has no
knights, save me. It will be years before the boys are ready.”
“Then who, if not Unsullied? Dothraki would be even worse.”
Dothraki fought from horseback. Mounted men were of more use in
open elds and hills than in the narrow streets and alleys of the
city. Beyond Meereen’s walls of many-colored brick, Dany’s rule
was tenuous at best. Thousands of slaves still toiled on vast estates
in the hills, growing wheat and olives, herding sheep and goats, and

mining salt and copper. Meereen’s storehouses held ample supplies
of grain, oil, olives, dried fruit, and salted meat, but the stores were
dwindling. So Dany had dispatched her tiny khalasar to subdue the
hinterlands, under the command of her three bloodriders, whilst
Brown Ben Plumm took his Second Sons south to guard against
Yunkish incursions.
The most crucial task of all she had entrusted to Daario Naharis,
glib-tongued Daario with his gold tooth and trident beard, smiling
his wicked smile through purple whiskers. Beyond the eastern hills
was a range of rounded sandstone mountains, the Khyzai Pass, and
Lhazar. If Daario could convince the Lhazarene to reopen the
overland trade routes, grains could be brought down the river or
over the hills at need … but the Lamb Men had no reason to love
Meereen. “When the Stormcrows return from Lhazar, perhaps I can
use them in the streets,” she told Ser Barristan, “but until then I
have only the Unsullied.” Dany rose. “You must excuse me, ser. The
petitioners will soon be at my gates. I must don my oppy ears and
become their queen again. Summon Reznak and the Shavepate, I’ll
see them when I’m dressed.”
“As Your Grace commands.” Selmy bowed.
The Great Pyramid shouldered eight hundred feet into the sky,
from its huge square base to the lofty apex where the queen kept
her private chambers, surrounded by greenery and fragrant pools.
As a cool blue dawn broke over the city, Dany walked out onto the
terrace. To the west sunlight blazed o the golden domes of the
Temple of the Graces, and etched deep shadows behind the stepped
pyramids of the mighty. In some of those pyramids, the Sons of the
Harpy are plotting new murders even now, and I am powerless to stop
them.
Viserion sensed her disquiet. The white dragon lay coiled around
a pear tree, his head resting on his tail. When Dany passed his eyes
came open, two pools of molten gold. His horns were gold as well,
and the scales that ran down his back from head to tail. “You’re
lazy,” she told him, scratching under his jaw. His scales were hot to
the touch, like armor left too long in the sun. Dragons are re made
esh. She had read that in one of the books Ser Jorah had given her

as a wedding gift. “You should be hunting with your brothers. Have
you and Drogon been ghting again?” Her dragons were growing
wild of late. Rhaegal had snapped at Irri, and Viserion had set
Reznak’s tokar ablaze the last time the seneschal had called. I have
left them too much to themselves, but where am I to nd the time for
them?
Viserion’s tail lashed sideways, thumping the trunk of the tree so
hard that a pear came tumbling down to land at Dany’s feet. His
wings unfolded, and he half ew, half hopped onto the parapet. He
grows, she thought as he launched himself into the sky. They are all
three growing. Soon they will be large enough to bear my weight. Then
she would y as Aegon the Conqueror had own, up and up, until
Meereen was so small that she could blot it out with her thumb.
She watched Viserion climb in widening circles until he was lost
to sight beyond the muddy waters of the Skahazadhan. Only then
did Dany go back inside the pyramid, where Irri and Jhiqui were
waiting to brush the tangles from her hair and garb her as be t the
Queen of Meereen, in a Ghiscari tokar.
The garment was a clumsy thing, a long loose shapeless sheet that
had to be wound around her hips and under an arm and over a
shoulder, its dangling fringes carefully layered and displayed.
Wound too loose, it was like to fall o ; wound too tight, it would
tangle, trip, and bind. Even wound properly, the tokar required its
wearer to hold it in place with the left hand. Walking in a tokar
demanded small, mincing steps and exquisite balance, lest one tread
upon those heavy trailing fringes. It was not a garment meant for
any man who had to work. The tokar was a master’s garment, a sign
of wealth and power.
Dany had wanted to ban the tokar when she took Meereen, but
her advisors had convinced her otherwise. “The Mother of Dragons
must don the tokar or be forever hated,” warned the Green Grace,
Galazza Galare. “In the wools of Westeros or a gown of Myrish lace,
Your Radiance shall forever remain a stranger amongst us, a
grotesque outlander, a barbarian conqueror. Meereen’s queen must
be a lady of Old Ghis.” Brown Ben Plumm, the captain of the

Second Sons, had put it more succinctly. “Man wants to be the king
o’ the rabbits, he best wear a pair o’ oppy ears.”
The oppy ears she chose today were made of sheer white linen,
with a fringe of golden tassels. With Jhiqui’s help, she wound the
tokar about herself correctly on her third attempt. Irri fetched her
crown, wrought in the shape of the three-headed dragon of her
House. Its coils were gold, its wings silver, its three heads ivory,
onyx, and jade. Dany’s neck and shoulders would be sti and sore
from the weight of it before the day was done. A crown should not sit
easy on the head. One of her royal forebears had said that, once.
Some Aegon, but which one? Five Aegons had ruled the Seven
Kingdoms of Westeros. There would have been a sixth, but the
Usurper’s dogs had murdered her brother’s son when he was still a
babe at the breast. If he had lived, I might have married him. Aegon
would have been closer to my age than Viserys. Dany had only been
conceived when Aegon and his sister were murdered. Their father,
her brother Rhaegar, perished even earlier, slain by the Usurper on
the Trident. Her brother Viserys had died screaming in Vaes
Dothrak with a crown of molten gold upon his head. They will kill
me too if I allow it. The knives that slew my Stalwart Shield were meant
for me.
She had not forgotten the slave children the Great Masters had
nailed up along the road from Yunkai. They had numbered one
hundred sixty-three, a child every mile, nailed to mileposts with one
arm outstretched to point her way. After Meereen had fallen, Dany
had nailed up a like number of Great Masters. Swarms of ies had
attended their slow dying, and the stench had lingered long in the
plaza. Yet some days she feared that she had not gone far enough.
These Meereenese were a sly and stubborn people who resisted her
at every turn. They had freed their slaves, yes … only to hire them
back as servants at wages so meagre that most could scarce a ord
to eat. Those too old or young to be of use had been cast into the
streets, along with the in rm and the crippled. And still the Great
Masters gathered atop their lofty pyramids to complain of how the
dragon queen had lled their noble city with hordes of unwashed
beggars, thieves, and whores.

To rule Meereen I must win the Meereenese, however much I may
despise them. “I am ready,” she told Irri.
Reznak and Skahaz waited atop the marble steps. “Great queen,”
declared Reznak mo Reznak, “you are so radiant today I fear to look
on you.” The seneschal wore a tokar of maroon silk with a golden
fringe. A small, damp man, he smelled as if he had bathed in
perfume and spoke a bastard form of High Valyrian, much
corrupted and avored with a thick Ghiscari growl.
“You are kind to say so,” Dany answered, in the same tongue.
“My queen,” growled Skahaz mo Kandaq, of the shaven head.
Ghiscari hair was dense and wiry; it had long been the fashion for
the men of the Slaver Cities to tease it into horns and spikes and
wings. By shaving, Skahaz had put old Meereen behind him to
accept the new, and his kin had done the same after his example.
Others followed, though whether from fear, fashion, or ambition,
Dany could not say; shavepates, they were called. Skahaz was the
Shavepate … and the vilest of traitors to the Sons of the Harpy and
their ilk. “We were told about the eunuch.”
“His name was Stalwart Shield.”
“More will die unless the murderers are punished.” Even with his
shaven scalp, Skahaz had an odious face—a beetled brow, small
eyes with heavy bags beneath them, a big nose dark with
blackheads, oily skin that looked more yellow than the usual amber
of Ghiscari. It was a blunt, brutal, angry face. She could only pray it
was an honest one as well.
“How can I punish them when I do not know who they are?”
Dany demanded of him. “Tell me that, bold Skahaz.”
“You have no lack of enemies, Your Grace. You can see their
pyramids from your terrace. Zhak, Hazkar, Ghazeen, Merreq, Loraq,
all the old slaving families. Pahl. Pahl, most of all. A house of
women now. Bitter old women with a taste for blood. Women do
not forget. Women do not forgive.”
No, Dany thought, and the Usurper’s dogs will learn that, when I
return to Westeros. It was true that there was blood between her and
the House of Pahl. Oznak zo Pahl had been cut down by Strong
Belwas in single combat. His father, commander of Meereen’s city

watch, had died defending the gates when Joso’s Cock smashed
them into splinters. Three uncles had been among the hundred sixtythree on the plaza. “How much gold have we o ered for
information concerning the Sons of the Harpy?” Dany asked.
“One hundred honors, if it please Your Radiance.”
“One thousand honors would please us more. Make it so.”
“Your Grace has not asked for my counsel,” said Skahaz
Shavepate, “but I say that blood must pay for blood. Take one man
from each of the families I have named and kill him. The next time
one of yours is slain, take two from each great House and kill them
both. There will not be a third murder.”
Reznak squealed in distress. “Noooo … gentle queen, such
savagery would bring down the ire of the gods. We will nd the
murderers, I promise you, and when we do they will prove to be
baseborn lth, you shall see.”
The seneschal was as bald as Skahaz, though in his case the gods
were responsible. “Should any hair be so insolent as to appear, my
barber stands with razor ready,” he had assured her when she raised
him up. There were times when Dany wondered if that razor might
not be better saved for Reznak’s throat. He was a useful man, but
she liked him little and trusted him less. The Undying of Qarth had
told her she would be thrice betrayed. Mirri Maz Duur had been the
rst, Ser Jorah the second. Would Reznak be the third? The
Shavepate? Daario? Or will it be someone I would never suspect, Ser
Barristan or Grey Worm or Missandei?
“Skahaz,” she told the Shavepate, “I thank you for your counsel.
Reznak, see what one thousand honors may accomplish.” Clutching
her tokar, Daenerys swept past them down the broad marble stair.
She took one step at a time, lest she trip over her fringe and go
tumbling head rst into court.
Missandei announced her. The little scribe had a sweet, strong
voice. “All kneel for Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Queen of
Meereen, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men,
Khaleesi of Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Shackles, and Mother of
Dragons.”

The hall had lled. Unsullied stood with their backs to the pillars,
holding shields and spears, the spikes on their caps jutting upward
like a row of knives. The Meereenese had gathered beneath the
eastern windows. Her freedmen stood well apart from their former
masters. Until they stand together, Meereen will know no peace.
“Arise.” Dany settled onto her bench. The hall rose. That at least they
do as one.
Reznak mo Reznak had a list. Custom demanded that the queen
begin with the Astapori envoy, a former slave who called himself
Lord Ghael, though no one seemed to know what he was lord of.
Lord Ghael had a mouth of brown and rotten teeth and the
pointed yellow face of a weasel. He also had a gift. “Cleon the
Great sends these slippers as a token of his love for Daenerys
Stormborn, the Mother of Dragons.”
Irri slid the slippers onto Dany’s feet. They were gilded leather,
decorated with green freshwater pearls. Does the butcher king believe
a pair of pretty slippers will win my hand? “King Cleon is most
generous. You may thank him for his lovely gift.” Lovely, but made
for a child. Dany had small feet, yet the pointed slippers mashed her
toes together.
“Great Cleon will be pleased to know they pleased you,” said
Lord Ghael. “His Magni cence bids me say that he stands ready to
defend the Mother of Dragons from all her foes.”
If he proposes again that I wed King Cleon, I’ll throw a slipper at his
head, Dany thought, but for once the Astapori envoy made no
mention of a royal marriage. Instead he said, “The time has come
for Astapor and Meereen to end the savage reign of the Wise
Masters of Yunkai, who are sworn foes to all those who live in
freedom. Great Cleon bids me tell you that he and his new Unsullied
will soon march.”
His new Unsullied are an obscene jape. “King Cleon would be wise
to tend his own gardens and let the Yunkai’i tend theirs.” It was not
that Dany harbored any love for Yunkai. She was coming to regret
leaving the Yellow City untaken after defeating its army in the
eld. The Wise Masters had returned to slaving as soon as she

moved on, and were busy raising levies, hiring sellswords, and
making alliances against her.
Cleon the self-styled Great was no better, however. The Butcher
King had restored slavery to Astapor, the only change being that the
former slaves were now the masters and the former masters were
now the slaves.
“I am only a young girl and know little of the ways of war,” she
told Lord Ghael, “but we have heard that Astapor is starving. Let
King Cleon feed his people before he leads them out to battle.” She
made a gesture of dismissal. Ghael withdrew.
“Magni cence,” prompted Reznak mo Reznak, “will you hear the
noble Hizdahr zo Loraq?”
Again? Dany nodded, and Hizdahr strode forth; a tall man, very
slender, with awless amber skin. He bowed on the same spot
where Stalwart Shield had lain in death not long before. I need this
man, Dany reminded herself. Hizdahr was a wealthy merchant with
many friends in Meereen, and more across the seas. He had visited
Volantis, Lys, and Qarth, had kin in Tolos and Elyria, and was even
said to wield some in uence in New Ghis, where the Yunkai’i were
trying to stir up enmity against Dany and her rule.
And he was rich. Famously and fabulously rich …
And like to grow richer, if I grant his petition. When Dany had closed
the city’s ghting pits, the value of pit shares had plummeted.
Hizdahr zo Loraq had grabbed them up with both hands, and now
owned most of the ghting pits in Meereen.
The nobleman had wings of wiry red-black hair sprouting from
his temples. They made him look as if his head were about to take
ight. His long face was made even longer by a beard bound with
rings of gold. His purple tokar was fringed with amethysts and
pearls. “Your Radiance will know the reason I am here.”
“Why, it must be because you have no other purpose but to
plague me. How many times have I refused you?”
“Five times, Your Magni cence.”
“Six now. I will not have the ghting pits reopened.”
“If Your Majesty will hear my arguments …”
“I have. Five times. Have you brought new arguments?”

“Old arguments,” Hizdahr admitted, “new words. Lovely words,
and courteous, more apt to move a queen.”
“It is your cause I nd wanting, not your courtesies. I have heard
your arguments so often I could plead your case myself. Shall I?”
Dany leaned forward. “The ghting pits have been a part of
Meereen since the city was founded. The combats are profoundly
religious in nature, a blood sacri ce to the gods of Ghis. The mortal
art of Ghis is not mere butchery but a display of courage, skill, and
strength most pleasing to your gods. Victorious ghters are
pampered and acclaimed, and the slain are honored and
remembered. By reopening the pits I would show the people of
Meereen that I respect their ways and customs. The pits are farfamed across the world. They draw trade to Meereen, and ll the
city’s co ers with coin from the ends of the earth. All men share a
taste for blood, a taste the pits help slake. In that way they make
Meereen more tranquil. For criminals condemned to die upon the
sands, the pits represent a judgment by battle, a last chance for a
man to prove his innocence.” She leaned back again, with a toss of
her head. “There. How have I done?”
“Your Radiance has stated the case much better than I could have
hoped to do myself. I see that you are eloquent as well as beautiful.
I am quite persuaded.”
She had to laugh. “Ah, but I am not.”
“Your Magni cence,” whispered Reznak mo Reznak in her ear, “it
is customary for the city to claim one-tenth of all the pro ts from
the ghting pits, after expenses, as a tax. That coin might be put to
many noble uses.”
“It might … though if we were to reopen the pits, we should take
our tenth before expenses. I am only a young girl and know little of
such matters, but I dwelt with Xaro Xhoan Daxos long enough to
learn that much. Hizdahr, if you could marshal armies as you
marshal arguments, you could conquer the world … but my answer
is still no. For the sixth time.”
“The queen has spoken.” He bowed again, as deeply as before.
His pearls and amethysts clattered softly against the marble oor. A
very limber man was Hizdahr zo Loraq.

He might be handsome, but for that silly hair. Reznak and the Green
Grace had been urging Dany to take a Meereenese noble for her
husband, to reconcile the city to her rule. Hizdahr zo Loraq might
be worth a careful look. Sooner him than Skahaz. The Shavepate had
o ered to set aside his wife for her, but the notion made her
shudder. Hizdahr at least knew how to smile.
“Magni cence,” said Reznak, consulting his list, “the noble
Grazdan zo Galare would address you. Will you hear him?”
“It would be my pleasure,” said Dany, admiring the glimmer of
the gold and the sheen of the green pearls on Cleon’s slippers while
doing her best to ignore the pinching in her toes. Grazdan, she had
been forewarned, was a cousin of the Green Grace, whose support
she had found invaluable. The priestess was a voice for peace,
acceptance, and obedience to lawful authority. I can give her cousin a
respectful hearing, whatever he desires.
What he desired turned out to be gold. Dany had refused to
compensate any of the Great Masters for the value of their slaves,
but the Meereenese kept devising other ways to squeeze coin from
her. The noble Grazdan had once owned a slave woman who was a
very ne weaver, it seemed; the fruits of her loom were greatly
valued, not only in Meereen, but in New Ghis and Astapor and
Qarth. When this woman had grown old, Grazdan had purchased
half a dozen young girls and commanded the crone to instruct them
in the secrets of her craft. The old woman was dead now. The
young ones, freed, had opened a shop by the harbor wall to sell
their weavings. Grazdan zo Galare asked that he be granted a
portion of their earnings. “They owe their skill to me,” he insisted.
“I plucked them from the auction bloc and gave them to the loom.”
Dany listened quietly, her face still. When he was done, she said,
“What was the name of the old weaver?”
“The slave?” Grazdan shifted his weight, frowning. “She
was … Elza, it might have been. Or Ella. It was six years ago she
died. I have owned so many slaves, Your Grace.”
“Let us say Elza. Here is our ruling. From the girls, you shall have
nothing. It was Elza who taught them weaving, not you. From you,

the girls shall have a new loom, the nest coin can buy. That is for
forgetting the name of the old woman.”
Reznak would have summoned another tokar next, but Dany
insisted that he call upon a freedman. Thereafter she alternated
between the former masters and the former slaves. Many and more
of the matters brought before her involved redress. Meereen had
been sacked savagely after its fall. The stepped pyramids of the
mighty had been spared the worst of the ravages, but the humbler
parts of the city had been given over to an orgy of looting and
killing as the city’s slaves rose up and the starving hordes who had
followed her from Yunkai and Astapor poured through the broken
gates. Her Unsullied had nally restored order, but the sack left a
plague of problems in its wake. And so they came to see the queen.
A rich woman came, whose husband and sons had died defending
the city walls. During the sack she had ed to her brother in fear.
When she returned, she found her house had been turned into a
brothel. The whores had bedecked themselves in her jewels and
clothes. She wanted her house back, and her jewels. “They can keep
the clothes,” she allowed. Dany granted her the jewels but ruled the
house was lost when she abandoned it.
A former slave came, to accuse a certain noble of the Zhak. The
man had recently taken to wife a freedwoman who had been the
noble’s bedwarmer before the city fell. The noble had taken her
maidenhood, used her for his pleasure, and gotten her with child.
Her new husband wanted the noble gelded for the crime of rape,
and he wanted a purse of gold as well, to pay him for raising the
noble’s bastard as his own. Dany granted him the gold, but not the
gelding. “When he lay with her, your wife was his property, to do
with as he would. By law, there was no rape.” Her decision did not
please him, she could see, but if she gelded every man who ever
forced a bedslave, she would soon rule a city of eunuchs.
A boy came, younger than Dany, slight and scarred, dressed up in
a frayed grey tokar trailing silver fringe. His voice broke when he
told of how two of his father’s household slaves had risen up the
night the gate broke. One had slain his father, the other his elder
brother. Both had raped his mother before killing her as well. The

boy had escaped with no more than the scar upon his face, but one
of the murderers was still living in his father’s house, and the other
had joined the queen’s soldiers as one of the Mother’s Men. He
wanted them both hanged.
I am queen over a city built on dust and death. Dany had no choice
but to deny him. She had declared a blanket pardon for all crimes
committed during the sack. Nor would she punish slaves for rising
up against their masters.
When she told him, the boy rushed at her, but his feet tangled in
his tokar and he went sprawling headlong on the purple marble.
Strong Belwas was on him at once. The huge brown eunuch yanked
him up one-handed and shook him like a masti with a rat.
“Enough, Belwas,” Dany called. “Release him.” To the boy she said,
“Treasure that tokar, for it saved your life. You are only a boy, so
we will forget what happened here. You should do the same.” But
as he left the boy looked back over his shoulder, and when she saw
his eyes Dany thought, The Harpy has another Son.
By midday Daenerys was feeling the weight of the crown upon
her head, and the hardness of the bench beneath her. With so many
still waiting on her pleasure, she did not stop to eat. Instead she
dispatched Jhiqui to the kitchens for a platter of atbread, olives,
gs, and cheese. She nibbled whilst she listened, and sipped from a
cup of watered wine. The gs were ne, the olives even ner, but
the wine left a tart metallic aftertaste in her mouth. The small pale
yellow grapes native to these regions produced a notably inferior
vintage. We shall have no trade in wine. Besides, the Great Masters
had burned the best arbors along with the olive trees.
In the afternoon a sculptor came, proposing to replace the head of
the great bronze harpy in the Plaza of Puri cation with one cast in
Dany’s image. She denied him with as much courtesy as she could
muster. A pike of unprecedented size had been caught in the
Skahazadhan, and the sherman wished to give it to the queen. She
admired the sh extravagantly, rewarded the sherman with a
purse of silver, and sent the pike to her kitchens. A coppersmith had
fashioned her a suit of burnished rings to wear to war. She accepted
it with fulsome thanks; it was lovely to behold, and all that

burnished copper would ash prettily in the sun, though if actual
battle threatened, she would sooner be clad in steel. Even a young
girl who knew nothing of the ways of war knew that.
The slippers the Butcher King had sent her had grown too
uncomfortable. Dany kicked them o and sat with one foot tucked
beneath her and the other swinging back and forth. It was not a
very regal pose, but she was tired of being regal. The crown had
given her a headache, and her buttocks had gone to sleep. “Ser
Barristan,” she called, “I know what quality a king needs most.”
“Courage, Your Grace?”
“Cheeks like iron,” she teased. “All I do is sit.”
“Your Grace takes too much on herself. You should allow your
councillors to shoulder more of your burdens.”
“I have too many councillors and too few cushions.” Dany turned
to Reznak. “How many more?”
“Three-and-twenty, if it please Your Magni cence. With as many
claims.” The seneschal consulted some papers. “One calf and three
goats. The rest will be sheep or lambs, no doubt.”
“Three-and-twenty.” Dany sighed. “My dragons have developed a
prodigious taste for mutton since we began to pay the shepherds for
their kills. Have these claims been proven?”
“Some men have brought burnt bones.”
“Men make res. Men cook mutton. Burnt bones prove nothing.
Brown Ben says there are red wolves in the hills outside the city,
and jackals and wild dogs. Must we pay good silver for every lamb
that goes astray between Yunkai and the Skahazadhan?”
“No, Magni cence.” Reznak bowed. “Shall I send these rascals
away, or will you want them scourged?”
Daenerys shifted on the bench. “No man should ever fear to come
to me.” Some claims were false, she did not doubt, but more were
genuine. Her dragons had grown too large to be content with rats
and cats and dogs. The more they eat, the larger they will grow, Ser
Barristan had warned her, and the larger they grow, the more they’ll
eat. Drogon especially ranged far a eld and could easily devour a
sheep a day. “Pay them for the value of their animals,” she told
Reznak, “but henceforth claimants must present themselves at the

Temple of the Graces and swear a holy oath before the gods of
Ghis.”
“It shall be done.” Reznak turned to the petitioners. “Her
Magni cence the Queen has consented to compensate each of you
for the animals you have lost,” he told them in the Ghiscari tongue.
“Present yourselves to my factors on the morrow, and you shall be
paid in coin or kind, as you prefer.”
The pronouncement was received in sullen silence. You would
think they might be happier, Dany thought. They have what they came
for. Is there no way to please these people?
One man lingered behind as the rest were ling out—a squat man
with a windburnt face, shabbily dressed. His hair was a cap of
coarse red-black wire cropped about his ears, and in one hand he
held a sad cloth sack. He stood with his head down, gazing at the
marble oor as if he had quite forgotten where he was. And what
does this one want? Dany wondered.
“All kneel for Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Queen of Meereen,
Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Khaleesi of
Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Shackles, and Mother of Dragons,” cried
Missandei in her high, sweet voice.
As Dany stood, her tokar began to slip. She caught it and tugged it
back in place. “You with the sack,” she called, “did you wish to
speak with us? You may approach.”
When he raised his head, his eyes were red and raw as open
sores. Dany glimpsed Ser Barristan sliding closer, a white shadow at
her side. The man approached in a stumbling shu e, one step and
then another, clutching his sack. Is he drunk, or ill? she wondered.
There was dirt beneath his cracked yellow ngernails.
“What is it?” Dany asked. “Do you have some grievance to lay
before us, some petition? What would you have of us?”
His tongue icked nervously over chapped, cracked lips. “I … I
brought …”
“Bones?” she said, impatiently. “Burnt bones?”
He lifted the sack, and spilled its contents on the marble.
Bones they were, broken bones and blackened. The longer ones
had been cracked open for their marrow.

“It were the black one,” the man said, in a Ghiscari growl, “the
winged shadow. He come down from the sky and … and …”
No. Dany shivered. No, no, oh no.
“Are you deaf, fool?” Reznak mo Reznak demanded of the man.
“Did you not hear my pronouncement? See my factors on the
morrow, and you shall be paid for your sheep.”
“Reznak,” Ser Barristan said quietly, “hold your tongue and open
your eyes. Those are no sheep bones.”
No, Dany thought, those are the bones of a child.

JON

T

he white wolf raced through a black wood, beneath a pale cli
as tall as the sky. The moon ran with him, slipping through a tangle
of bare branches overhead, across the starry sky.
“Snow,” the moon murmured. The wolf made no answer. Snow
crunched beneath his paws. The wind sighed through the trees.
Far o , he could hear his packmates calling to him, like to like.
They were hunting too. A wild rain lashed down upon his black
brother as he tore at the esh of an enormous goat, washing the
blood from his side where the goat’s long horn had raked him. In
another place, his little sister lifted her head to sing to the moon,
and a hundred small grey cousins broke o their hunt to sing with
her. The hills were warmer where they were, and full of food. Many
a night his sister’s pack gorged on the esh of sheep and cows and
horses, the prey of men, and sometimes even on the esh of man
himself.
“Snow,” the moon called down again, cackling. The white wolf
padded along the man trail beneath the icy cli . The taste of blood
was on his tongue, and his ears rang to the song of the hundred
cousins. Once they had been six, ve whimpering blind in the snow
beside their dead mother, sucking cool milk from her hard dead
nipples whilst he crawled o alone. Four remained … and one the
white wolf could no longer sense.
“Snow,” the moon insisted.
The white wolf ran from it, racing toward the cave of night
where the sun had hidden, his breath frosting in the air. On starless
nights the great cli was as black as stone, a darkness towering high

above the wide world, but when the moon came out it shimmered
pale and icy as a frozen stream. The wolf’s pelt was thick and
shaggy, but when the wind blew along the ice no fur could keep the
chill out. On the other side the wind was colder still, the wolf
sensed. That was where his brother was, the grey brother who
smelled of summer.
“Snow.” An icicle tumbled from a branch. The white wolf turned
and bared his teeth. “Snow!” His fur rose bristling, as the woods
dissolved around him. “Snow, snow, snow!” He heard the beat of
wings. Through the gloom a raven ew.
It landed on Jon Snow’s chest with a thump and a scrabbling of
claws. “SNOW!” it screamed into his face.
“I hear you.” The room was dim, his pallet hard. Grey light
leaked through the shutters, promising another bleak cold day. “Is
this how you woke Mormont? Get your feathers out of my face.”
Jon wriggled an arm out from under his blankets to shoo the raven
o . It was a big bird, old and bold and scru y, utterly without fear.
“Snow,” it cried, apping to his bedpost. “Snow, snow.” Jon lled his
st with a pillow and let y, but the bird took to the air. The pillow
struck the wall and burst, scattering stu ng everywhere just as
Dolorous Edd Tollett poked his head through the door. “Beg
pardon,” he said, ignoring the urry of feathers, “shall I fetch
m’lord some breakfast?”
“Corn,” cried the raven. “Corn, corn.”
“Roast raven,” Jon suggested. “And half a pint of ale.” Having a
steward fetch and serve for him still felt strange; not long ago, it
would have been him fetching breakfast for Lord Commander
Mormont.
“Three corns and one roast raven,” said Dolorous Edd. “Very
good, m’lord, only Hobb’s made boiled eggs, black sausage, and
apples stewed with prunes. The apples stewed with prunes are
excellent, except for the prunes. I won’t eat prunes myself. Well,
there was one time when Hobb chopped them up with chestnuts and
carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook, my lord. They’ll
prune you when you least expect it.”

“Later.” Breakfast could wait; Stannis could not. “Any trouble
from the stockades last night?”
“Not since you put guards on the guards, m’lord.”
“Good.” A thousand wildlings had been penned up beyond the
Wall, the captives Stannis Baratheon had taken when his knights
had smashed Mance Rayder’s patchwork host. Many of the prisoners
were women, and some of the guards had been sneaking them out
to warm their beds. King’s men, queen’s men, it did not seem to
matter; a few black brothers had tried the same thing. Men were
men, and these were the only women for a thousand leagues.
“Two more wildlings turned up to surrender,” Edd went on. “A
mother with a girl clinging to her skirts. She had a boy babe too, all
swaddled up in fur, but he was dead.”
“Dead,” said the raven. It was one of the bird’s favorite words.
“Dead, dead, dead.”
They had free folk drifting in most every night, starved halffrozen creatures who had run from the battle beneath the Wall only
to crawl back when they realized there was no safe place to run to.
“Was the mother questioned?” Jon asked. Stannis Baratheon had
smashed Mance Rayder’s host and made the King-Beyond-the-Wall
his captive … but the wildlings were still out there, the Weeper and
Tormund Giantsbane and thousands more.
“Aye, m’lord,” said Edd, “but all she knows is that she ran o
during the battle and hid in the woods after. We lled her full of
porridge, sent her to the pens, and burned the babe.”
Burning dead children had ceased to trouble Jon Snow; live ones
were another matter. Two kings to wake the dragon. The father rst
and then the son, so both die kings. The words had been murmured by
one of the queen’s men as Maester Aemon had cleaned his wounds.
Jon had tried to dismiss them as his fever talking. Aemon had
demurred. “There is power in a king’s blood,” the old maester had
warned, “and better men than Stannis have done worse things than
this.” The king can be harsh and unforgiving, aye, but a babe still on the
breast? Only a monster would give a living child to the ames.
Jon pissed in darkness, lling his chamber pot as the Old Bear’s
raven muttered complaints. The wolf dreams had been growing

stronger, and he found himself remembering them even when
awake. Ghost knows that Grey Wind is dead. Robb had died at the
Twins, betrayed by men he’d believed his friends, and his wolf had
perished with him. Bran and Rickon had been murdered too,
beheaded at the behest of Theon Greyjoy, who had once been their
lord father’s ward … but if dreams did not lie, their direwolves had
escaped. At Queenscrown, one had come out of the darkness to save
Jon’s life. Summer, it had to be. His fur was grey, and Shaggydog is
black. He wondered if some part of his dead brothers lived on inside
their wolves.
He lled his basin from the agon of water beside his bed,
washed his face and hands, donned a clean set of black woolens,
laced up a black leather jerkin, and pulled on a pair of well-worn
boots. Mormont’s raven watched with shrewd black eyes, then
uttered to the window. “Do you take me for your thrall?” When
Jon folded back the window with its thick diamond-shaped panes of
yellow glass, the chill of the morning hit him in the face. He took a
breath to clear away the cobwebs of the night as the raven apped
away. That bird is too clever by half. It had been the Old Bear’s
companion for long years, but that had not stopped it from eating
Mormont’s face once he died.
Outside his bedchamber a ight of steps descended to a larger
room furnished with a scarred pinewood table and a dozen oak-andleather chairs. With Stannis in the King’s Tower and the Lord
Commander’s Tower burned to a shell, Jon had established himself
in Donal Noye’s modest rooms behind the armory. In time, no
doubt, he would need larger quarters, but for the moment these
would serve whilst he accustomed himself to command.
The grant that the king had presented him for signature was on
the table beneath a silver drinking cup that had once been Donal
Noye’s. The one-armed smith had left few personal e ects: the cup,
six pennies and a copper star, a niello brooch with a broken clasp, a
musty brocade doublet that bore the stag of Storm’s End. His
treasures were his tools, and the swords and knives he made. His life was
at the forge. Jon moved the cup aside and read the parchment once
again. If I put my seal to this, I will forever be remembered as the lord

commander who gave away the Wall, he thought, but if I should
refuse …
Stannis Baratheon was proving to be a prickly guest, and a
restless one. He had ridden down the kingsroad almost as far as
Queenscrown, prowled through the empty hovels of Mole’s Town,
inspected the ruined forts at Queensgate and Oakenshield. Each
night he walked atop the Wall with Lady Melisandre, and during the
days he visited the stockades, picking captives out for the red
woman to question. He does not like to be balked. This would not be
a pleasant morning, Jon feared.
From the armory came a clatter of shields and swords, as the
latest lot of boys and raw recruits armed themselves. He could hear
the voice of Iron Emmett telling them to be quick about it. Cotter
Pyke had not been pleased to lose him, but the young ranger had a
gift for training men. He loves to ght, and he’ll teach his boys to love
it too. Or so he hoped.
Jon’s cloak hung on a peg by the door, his sword belt on another.
He donned them both and made his way to the armory. The rug
where Ghost slept was empty, he saw. Two guardsmen stood inside
the doors, clad in black cloaks and iron halfhelms, spears in their
hands. “Will m’lord be wanting a tail?” asked Garse.
“I think I can nd the King’s Tower by myself.” Jon hated having
guards trailing after him everywhere he went. It made him feel like
a mother duck leading a procession of ducklings.
Iron Emmett’s lads were well at it in the yard, blunted swords
slamming into shields and ringing against one another. Jon stopped
to watch a moment as Horse pressed Hop-Robin back toward the
well. Horse had the makings of a good ghter, he decided. He was
strong and getting stronger, and his instincts were sound. HopRobin was another tale. His clubfoot was bad enough, but he was
afraid of getting hit as well. Perhaps we can make a steward of him.
The ght ended abruptly, with Hop-Robin on the ground.
“Well fought,” Jon said to Horse, “but you drop your shield too
low when pressing an attack. You will want to correct that, or it is
like to get you killed.”

“Yes, m’lord. I’ll keep it higher next time.” Horse pulled HopRobin to his feet, and the smaller boy made a clumsy bow.
A few of Stannis’s knights were sparring on the far side of the
yard. King’s men in one corner and queen’s men in another, Jon did
not fail to note, but only a few. It’s too cold for most of them. As he
strode past them, a booming voice called after him. “BOY! YOU
THERE! BOY!”
Boy was not the worst of the things that Jon Snow had been
called since being chosen lord commander. He ignored it.
“Snow,” the voice insisted, “Lord Commander.”
This time he stopped. “Ser?”
The knight overtopped him by six inches. “A man who bears
Valyrian steel should use it for more than scratching his arse.”
Jon had seen this one about the castle—a knight of great renown,
to hear him tell it. During the battle beneath the Wall, Ser Godry
Farring had slain a eeing giant, pounding after him on horseback
and driving a lance through his back, then dismounting to hack o
the creature’s pitiful small head. The queen’s men had taken to
calling him Godry the Giantslayer.
Jon remembered Ygritte, crying. I am the last of the giants. “I use
Longclaw when I must, ser.”
“How well, though?” Ser Godry drew his own blade. “Show us. I
promise not to hurt you, lad.”
How kind of you. “Some other time, ser. I fear that I have other
duties just now.”
“You fear. I see that.” Ser Godry grinned at his friends. “He
fears,” he repeated, for the slow ones.
“You will excuse me.” Jon showed them his back.
Castle Black seemed a bleak and forlorn place in the pale dawn
light. My command, Jon Snow re ected ruefully, as much a ruin as it
is a stronghold. The Lord Commander’s Tower was a shell, the
Common Hall a pile of blackened timbers, and Hardin’s Tower
looked as if the next gust of wind would knock it over … though it
had looked that way for years. Behind them rose the Wall:
immense, forbidding, frigid, acrawl with builders pushing up a new
switchback stair to join the remnants of the old. They worked from

dawn to dusk. Without the stair, there was no way to reach the top
of the Wall save by winch. That would not serve if the wildlings
should attack again.
Above the King’s Tower the great golden battle standard of House
Baratheon cracked like a whip from the roof where Jon Snow had
prowled with bow in hand not long ago, slaying Thenns and free
folk beside Satin and Deaf Dick Follard. Two queen’s men stood
shivering on the steps, their hands tucked up into their armpits and
their spears leaning against the door. “Those cloth gloves will never
serve,” Jon told them. “See Bowen Marsh on the morrow, and he’ll
give you each a pair of leather gloves lined with fur.”
“We will, m’lord, and thank you,” said the older guard.
“That’s if our bloody hands aren’t froze o ,” the younger added,
his breath a pale mist. “I used to think that it got cold up in the
Dornish Marches. What did I know?”
Nothing, thought Jon Snow, the same as me.
Halfway up the winding steps, he came upon Samwell Tarly,
headed down. “Are you coming from the king?” Jon asked him.
“Maester Aemon sent me with a letter.”
“I see.” Some lords trusted their maesters to read their letters and
convey the contents, but Stannis insisted on breaking the seals
himself. “How did Stannis take it?”
“Not happily, by his face.” Sam dropped his voice to a whisper. “I
am not supposed to speak of it.”
“Then don’t.” Jon wondered which of his father’s bannermen had
refused King Stannis homage this time. He was quick enough to
spread the word when Karhold declared for him. “How are you and
your longbow getting on?”
“I found a good book about archery.” Sam frowned. “Doing it is
harder than reading about it, though. I get blisters.”
“Keep at it. We may need your bow on the Wall if the Others turn
up some dark night.”
“Oh, I hope not.”
More guards stood outside the king’s solar. “No arms are allowed
in His Grace’s presence, my lord,” their serjeant said. “I’ll need that

sword. Your knives as well.” It would do no good to protest, Jon
knew. He handed them his weaponry.
Within the solar the air was warm. Lady Melisandre was seated
near the re, her ruby glimmering against the pale skin of her
throat. Ygritte had been kissed by re; the red priestess was re,
and her hair was blood and ame. Stannis stood behind the roughhewn table where the Old Bear had once been wont to sit and take
his meals. Covering the table was a large map of the north, painted
on a ragged piece of hide. A tallow candle weighed down one end
of it, a steel gauntlet the other.
The king wore lambswool breeches and a quilted doublet, yet
somehow he looked as sti and uncomfortable as if he had been
clad in plate and mail. His skin was pale leather, his beard cropped
so short that it might have been painted on. A fringe about his
temples was all that remained of his black hair. In his hand was a
parchment with a broken seal of dark green wax.
Jon took a knee. The king frowned at him, and rattled the
parchment angrily. “Rise. Tell me, who is Lyanna Mormont?”
“One of Lady Maege’s daughters, Sire. The youngest. She was
named for my lord father’s sister.”
“To curry your lord father’s favor, I don’t doubt. I know how that
game is played. How old is this wretched girl child?”
Jon had to think a moment. “Ten. Or near enough to make no
matter. Might I know how she has o ended Your Grace?”
Stannis read from the letter. “Bear Island knows no king but the
King in the North, whose name is STARK. A girl of ten, you say, and
she presumes to scold her lawful king.” His close-cropped beard lay
like a shadow over his hollow cheeks. “See that you keep these
tidings to yourself, Lord Snow. Karhold is with me, that is all the
men need know. I will not have your brothers trading tales of how
this child spat on me.”
“As you command, Sire.” Maege Mormont had ridden south with
Robb, Jon knew. Her eldest daughter had joined the Young Wolf’s
host as well. Even if both of them had died, however, Lady Maege
had other daughters, some with children of their own. Had they
gone with Robb as well? Surely Lady Maege would have left at least

one of the older girls behind as castellan. He did not understand
why Lyanna should be writing Stannis, and could not help but
wonder if the girl’s answer might have been di erent if the letter
had been sealed with a direwolf instead of a crowned stag, and
signed by Jon Stark, Lord of Winterfell. It is too late for such
misgivings. You made your choice.
“Two score ravens were sent out,” the king complained, “yet we
get no response but silence and de ance. Homage is the duty every
leal subject owes his king. Yet your father’s bannermen all turn
their back on me, save the Karstarks. Is Arnolf Karstark the only
man of honor in the north?”
Arnolf Karstark was the late Lord Rickard’s uncle. He had been
made the castellan of Karhold when his nephew and his sons went
south with Robb, and he had been the rst to respond to King
Stannis’s call for homage, with a raven declaring his allegiance. The
Karstarks have no other choice, Jon might have said. Rickard Karstark
had betrayed the direwolf and spilled the blood of lions. The stag
was Karhold’s only hope. “In times as confused as these, even men
of honor must wonder where their duty lies. Your Grace is not the
only king in the realm demanding homage.”
Lady Melisandre stirred. “Tell me, Lord Snow … where were
these other kings when the wild people stormed your Wall?”
“A thousand leagues away and deaf to our need,” Jon replied. “I
have not forgotten that, my lady. Nor will I. But my father’s
bannermen have wives and children to protect, and smallfolk who
will die should they choose wrongly. His Grace asks much of them.
Give them time, and you will have your answers.”
“Answers such as this?” Stannis crushed Lyanna’s letter in his st.
“Even in the north men fear the wroth of Tywin Lannister.
Boltons make bad enemies as well. It is not happenstance that put a
ayed man on their banners. The north rode with Robb, bled with
him, died for him. They have supped on grief and death, and now
you come to o er them another serving. Do you blame them if they
hang back? Forgive me, Your Grace, but some will look at you and
see only another doomed pretender.”

“If His Grace is doomed, your realm is doomed as well,” said
Lady Melisandre. “Remember that, Lord Snow. It is the one true
king of Westeros who stands before you.”
Jon kept his face a mask. “As you say, my lady.”
Stannis snorted. “You spend your words as if every one were a
golden dragon. I wonder, how much gold do you have laid by?”
“Gold?” Are those the dragons the red woman means to wake?
Dragons made of gold? “Such taxes as we collect are paid in kind,
Your Grace. The Watch is rich in turnips but poor in coin.”
“Turnips are not like to appease Salladhor Saan. I require gold or
silver.”
“For that, you need White Harbor. The city cannot compare to
Oldtown or King’s Landing, but it is still a thriving port. Lord
Manderly is the richest of my lord father’s bannermen.”
“Lord Too-Fat-to-Sit-a-Horse.” The letter that Lord Wyman
Manderly had sent back from White Harbor had spoken of his age
and in rmity, and little more. Stannis had commanded Jon not to
speak of that one either.
“Perhaps his lordship would fancy a wildling wife,” said Lady
Melisandre. “Is this fat man married, Lord Snow?”
“His lady wife is long dead. Lord Wyman has two grown sons,
and grandchildren by the elder. And he is too fat to sit a horse,
thirty stone at least. Val would never have him.”
“Just once you might try to give me an answer that would please
me, Lord Snow,” the king grumbled.
“I would hope the truth would please you, Sire. Your men call Val
a princess, but to the free folk she is only the sister of their king’s
dead wife. If you force her to marry a man she does not want, she is
like to slit his throat on their wedding night. Even if she accepts her
husband, that does not mean the wildlings will follow him, or you.
The only man who can bind them to your cause is Mance Rayder.”
“I know that,” Stannis said, unhappily. “I have spent hours
speaking with the man. He knows much and more of our true
enemy, and there is cunning in him, I’ll grant you. Even if he were
to renounce his kingship, though, the man remains an oathbreaker.
Su er one deserter to live, and you encourage others to desert. No.

Laws should be made of iron, not of pudding. Mance Rayder’s life is
forfeit by every law of the Seven Kingdoms.”
“The law ends at the Wall, Your Grace. You could make good use
of Mance.”
“I mean to. I’ll burn him, and the north will see how I deal with
turncloaks and traitors. I have other men to lead the wildlings. And
I have Rayder’s son, do not forget. Once the father dies, his whelp
will be the King-Beyond-the-Wall.”
“Your Grace is mistaken.” You know nothing, Jon Snow, Ygritte
used to say, but he had learned. “The babe is no more a prince than
Val is a princess. You do not become King-Beyond-the-Wall because
your father was.”
“Good,” said Stannis, “for I will su er no other kings in Westeros.
Have you signed the grant?”
“No, Your Grace.” And now it comes. Jon closed his burned ngers
and opened them again. “You ask too much.”
“Ask? I asked you to be Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the
North. I require these castles.”
“We have ceded you the Nightfort.”
“Rats and ruins. It is a niggard’s gift that costs the giver nothing.
Your own man Yarwyck says it will be half a year before the castle
can be made t for habitation.”
“The other forts are no better.”
“I know that. It makes no matter. They are all we have. There are
nineteen forts along the Wall, and you have men in only three of
them. I mean to have every one of them garrisoned again before the
year is out.”
“I have no quarrel with that, Sire, but it is being said that you
also mean to grant these castles to your knights and lords, to hold
as their own seats as vassals to Your Grace.”
“Kings are expected to be open-handed to their followers. Did
Lord Eddard teach his bastard nothing? Many of my knights and
lords abandoned rich lands and stout castles in the south. Should
their loyalty go unrewarded?”
“If Your Grace wishes to lose all of my lord father’s bannermen,
there is no more certain way than by giving northern halls to

southron lords.”
“How can I lose men I do not have? I had hoped to bestow
Winterfell on a northman, you may recall. A son of Eddard Stark.
He threw my o er in my face.” Stannis Baratheon with a grievance
was like a masti with a bone; he gnawed it down to splinters.
“By right Winterfell should go to my sister Sansa.”
“Lady Lannister, you mean? Are you so eager to see the Imp
perched on your father’s seat? I promise you, that will not happen
whilst I live, Lord Snow.”
Jon knew better than to press the point. “Sire, some claim that
you mean to grant lands and castles to Rattleshirt and the Magnar
of Thenn.”
“Who told you that?”
The talk was all over Castle Black. “If you must know, I had the
tale from Gilly.”
“Who is Gilly?”
“The wet nurse,” said Lady Melisandre. “Your Grace gave her
freedom of the castle.”
“Not for running tales. She’s wanted for her teats, not for her
tongue. I’ll have more milk from her, and fewer messages.”
“Castle Black needs no useless mouths,” Jon agreed. “I am
sending Gilly south on the next ship out of Eastwatch.”
Melisandre touched the ruby at her neck. “Gilly is giving suck to
Dalla’s son as well as her own. It seems cruel of you to part our
little prince from his milk brother, my lord.”
Careful now, careful. “Mother’s milk is all they share. Gilly’s son is
larger and more robust. He kicks the prince and pinches him, and
shoves him from the breast. Craster was his father, a cruel man and
greedy, and blood tells.”
The king was confused. “I thought the wet nurse was this man
Craster’s daughter?”
“Wife and daughter both, Your Grace. Craster married all his
daughters. Gilly’s boy was the fruit of their union.”
“Her own father got this child on her?” Stannis sounded shocked.
“We are well rid of her, then. I will not su er such abominations
here. This is not King’s Landing.”

“I can nd another wet nurse. If there’s none amongst the
wildlings, I will send to the mountain clans. Until such time, goat’s
milk should su ce for the boy, if it please Your Grace.”
“Poor fare for a prince … but better than whore’s milk, aye.”
Stannis drummed his ngers on the map. “If we may return to the
matter of these forts …”
“Your Grace,” said Jon, with chilly courtesy, “I have housed your
men and fed them, at dire cost to our winter stores. I have clothed
them so they would not freeze.”
Stannis was not appeased. “Aye, you’ve shared your salt pork and
porridge, and you’ve thrown us some black rags to keep us warm.
Rags the wildlings would have taken o your corpses if I had not
come north.”
Jon ignored that. “I have given you fodder for your horses, and
once the stair is done I will lend you builders to restore the
Nightfort. I have even agreed to allow you to settle wildlings on the
Gift, which was given to the Night’s Watch in perpetuity.”
“You o er me empty lands and desolations, yet deny me the
castles I require to reward my lords and bannermen.”
“The Night’s Watch built those castles …”
“And the Night’s Watch abandoned them.”
“… to defend the Wall,” Jon nished stubbornly, “not as seats for
southron lords. The stones of those forts are mortared with the
blood and bones of my brothers, long dead. I cannot give them to
you.”
“Cannot or will not?” The cords in the king’s neck stood out sharp
as swords. “I o ered you a name.”
“I have a name, Your Grace.”
“Snow. Was ever a name more ill-omened?” Stannis touched his
sword hilt. “Just who do you imagine that you are?”
“The watcher on the walls. The sword in the darkness.”
“Don’t prate your words at me.” Stannis drew the blade he called
Lightbringer. “Here is your sword in the darkness.” Light rippled up
and down the blade, now red, now yellow, now orange, painting
the king’s face in harsh, bright hues. “Even a green boy should be
able to see that. Are you blind?”

“No, Sire. I agree these castles must be garrisoned—”
“The boy commander agrees. How fortunate.”
“—by the Night’s Watch.”
“You do not have the men.”
“Then give me men, Sire. I will provide o cers for each of the
abandoned forts, seasoned commanders who know the Wall and the
lands beyond, and how best to survive the coming winter. In return
for all we’ve given you, grant me the men to ll out the garrisons.
Men-at-arms, crossbowmen, raw boys. I will even take your
wounded and in rm.”
Stannis stared at him incredulously, then gave a bark of laughter.
“You are bold enough, Snow, I grant you that, but you’re mad if
you think my men will take the black.”
“They can wear any color cloak they choose, so long as they obey
my o cers as they would your own.”
The king was unmoved. “I have knights and lords in my service,
scions of noble Houses old in honor. They cannot be expected to
serve under poachers, peasants, and murderers.”
Or bastards, Sire? “Your own Hand is a smuggler.”
“Was a smuggler. I shortened his ngers for that. They tell me
that you are the nine-hundred-ninety-eighth man to command the
Night’s Watch, Lord Snow. What do you think the nine-hundredninety-ninth might say about these castles? The sight of your head
on a spike might inspire him to be more helpful.” The king laid his
bright blade down on the map, along the Wall, its steel shimmering
like sunlight on water. “You are only lord commander by my
su erance. You would do well to remember that.”
“I am lord commander because my brothers chose me.” There
were mornings when Jon Snow did not quite believe it himself,
when he woke up thinking surely this was some mad dream. It’s like
putting on new clothes, Sam had told him. The t feels strange at rst,
but once you’ve worn them for a while you get to feeling comfortable.
“Alliser Thorne complains about the manner of your choosing,
and I cannot say he does not have a grievance.” The map lay
between them like a battleground, drenched by the colors of the

glowing sword. “The count was done by a blind man with your fat
friend by his elbow. And Slynt names you a turncloak.”
And who would know one better than Slynt? “A turncloak would tell
you what you wished to hear and betray you later. Your Grace
knows that I was fairly chosen. My father always said you were a
just man.” Just but harsh had been Lord Eddard’s exact words, but
Jon did not think it would be wise to share that.
“Lord Eddard was no friend to me, but he was not without some
sense. He would have given me these castles.”
Never. “I cannot speak to what my father might have done. I took
an oath, Your Grace. The Wall is mine.”
“For now. We will see how well you hold it.” Stannis pointed at
him. “Keep your ruins, as they mean so much to you. I promise you,
though, if any remain empty when the year is out, I will take them
with your leave or without it. And if even one should fall to the foe,
your head will soon follow. Now get out.”
Lady Melisandre rose from her place near the hearth. “With your
leave, Sire, I will show Lord Snow back to his chambers.”
“Why? He knows the way.” Stannis waved them both away. “Do
what you will. Devan, food. Boiled eggs and lemon water.”
After the warmth of the king’s solar, the turnpike stair felt bonechillingly cold. “Wind’s rising, m’lady,” the serjeant warned
Melisandre as he handed Jon back his weapons. “You might want a
warmer cloak.”
“I have my faith to warm me.” The red woman walked beside Jon
down the steps. “His Grace is growing fond of you.”
“I can tell. He only threatened to behead me twice.”
Melisandre laughed. “It is his silences you should fear, not his
words.” As they stepped out into the yard, the wind lled Jon’s
cloak and sent it apping against her. The red priestess brushed the
black wool aside and slipped her arm through his. “It may be that
you are not wrong about the wildling king. I shall pray for the Lord
of Light to send me guidance. When I gaze into the ames, I can see
through stone and earth, and nd the truth within men’s souls. I can
speak to kings long dead and children not yet born, and watch the
years and seasons icker past, until the end of days.”

“Are your res never wrong?”
“Never … though we priests are mortal and sometimes err,
mistaking this must come for this may come.”
Jon could feel her heat, even through his wool and boiled leather.
The sight of them arm in arm was drawing curious looks. They will
be whispering in the barracks tonight. “If you can truly see the morrow
in your ames, tell me when and where the next wildling attack
will come.” He slipped his arm free.
“R’hllor sends us what visions he will, but I shall seek for this
man Tormund in the ames.” Melisandre’s red lips curled into a
smile. “I have seen you in my res, Jon Snow.”
“Is that a threat, my lady? Do you mean to burn me too?”
“You mistake my meaning.” She gave him a searching look. “I
fear that I make you uneasy, Lord Snow.”
Jon did not deny it. “The Wall is no place for a woman.”
“You are wrong. I have dreamed of your Wall, Jon Snow. Great
was the lore that raised it, and great the spells locked beneath its
ice. We walk beneath one of the hinges of the world.” Melisandre
gazed up at it, her breath a warm moist cloud in the air. “This is my
place as it is yours, and soon enough you may have grave need of
me. Do not refuse my friendship, Jon. I have seen you in the storm,
hard-pressed, with enemies on every side. You have so many
enemies. Shall I tell you their names?”
“I know their names.”
“Do not be so certain.” The ruby at Melisandre’s throat gleamed
red. “It is not the foes who curse you to your face that you must
fear, but those who smile when you are looking and sharpen their
knives when you turn your back. You would do well to keep your
wolf close beside you. Ice, I see, and daggers in the dark. Blood
frozen red and hard, and naked steel. It was very cold.”
“It is always cold on the Wall.”
“You think so?”
“I know so, my lady.”
“Then you know nothing, Jon Snow,” she whispered.

BRAN

A

re we there yet?
Bran never said the words aloud, but they were often on his lips
as their ragged company trudged through groves of ancient oaks
and towering grey-green sentinels, past gloomy soldier pines and
bare brown chestnut trees. Are we near? the boy would wonder, as
Hodor clambered up a stony slope, or descended into some dark
crevice where drifts of dirty snow cracked beneath his feet. How
much farther? he would think, as the great elk splashed across a halffrozen stream. How much longer? It’s so cold. Where is the three-eyed
crow?
Swaying in his wicker basket on Hodor’s back, the boy hunched
down, ducking his head as the big stableboy passed beneath the
limb of an oak. The snow was falling again, wet and heavy. Hodor
walked with one eye frozen shut, his thick brown beard a tangle of
hoarfrost, icicles drooping from the ends of his bushy mustache.
One gloved hand still clutched the rusty iron longsword he had
taken from the crypts below Winterfell, and from time to time he
would lash out at a branch, knocking loose a spray of snow. “Hod-dd-dor,” he would mutter, his teeth chattering.
The sound was strangely reassuring. On their journey from
Winterfell to the Wall, Bran and his companions had made the miles
shorter by talking and telling tales, but it was di erent here. Even
Hodor felt it. His hodors came less often than they had south of the
Wall. There was a stillness to this wood like nothing Bran had ever
known before. Before the snows began, the north wind would swirl
around them and clouds of dead brown leaves would kick up from

the ground with a faint small rustling sound that reminded him of
roaches scurrying in a cupboard, but now all the leaves were buried
under a blanket of white. From time to time a raven would y
overhead, big black wings slapping against the cold air. Elsewise
the world was silent.
Just ahead, the elk wove between the snowdrifts with his head
down, his huge rack of antlers crusted with ice. The ranger sat
astride his broad back, grim and silent. Coldhands was the name that
the fat boy Sam had given him, for though the ranger’s face was
pale, his hands were black and hard as iron, and cold as iron too.
The rest of him was wrapped in layers of wool and boiled leather
and ringmail, his features shadowed by his hooded cloak and a
black woolen scarf about the lower half of his face.
Behind the ranger, Meera Reed wrapped her arms around her
brother, to shelter him from the wind and cold with the warmth of
her own body. A crust of frozen snot had formed below Jojen’s
nose, and from time to time he shivered violently. He looks so small,
Bran thought, as he watched him sway. He looks smaller than me
now, and weaker too, and I’m the cripple.
Summer brought up the rear of their little band. The direwolf’s
breath frosted the forest air as he padded after them, still limping
on the hind leg that had taken the arrow back at Queenscrown. Bran
felt the pain of the old wound whenever he slipped inside the big
wolf’s skin. Of late Bran wore Summer’s body more often than his
own; the wolf felt the bite of the cold, despite the thickness of his
fur, but he could see farther and hear better and smell more than
the boy in the basket, bundled up like a babe in swaddling clothes.
Other times, when he was tired of being a wolf, Bran slipped into
Hodor’s skin instead. The gentle giant would whimper when he felt
him, and thrash his shaggy head from side to side, but not as
violently as he had the rst time, back at Queenscrown. He knows
it’s me, the boy liked to tell himself. He’s used to me by now. Even
so, he never felt comfortable inside Hodor’s skin. The big stableboy
never understood what was happening, and Bran could taste the
fear at the back of his mouth. It was better inside Summer. I am
him, and he is me. He feels what I feel.

Sometimes Bran could sense the direwolf sni ng after the elk,
wondering if he could bring the great beast down. Summer had
grown accustomed to horses at Winterfell, but this was an elk and
elk were prey. The direwolf could sense the warm blood coursing
beneath the elk’s shaggy hide. Just the smell was enough to make
the slaver run from between his jaws, and when it did Bran’s mouth
would water at the thought of rich, dark meat.
From a nearby oak a raven quorked, and Bran heard the sound of
wings as another of the big black birds apped down to land beside
it. By day only half a dozen ravens stayed with them, itting from
tree to tree or riding on the antlers of the elk. The rest of the
murder ew ahead or lingered behind. But when the sun sank low
they would return, descending from the sky on night-black wings
until every branch of every tree was thick with them for yards
around. Some would y to the ranger and mutter at him, and it
seemed to Bran that he understood their quorks and squawks. They
are his eyes and ears. They scout for him, and whisper to him of dangers
ahead and behind.
As now. The elk stopped suddenly, and the ranger vaulted lightly
from his back to land in knee-deep snow. Summer growled at him,
his fur bristling. The direwolf did not like the way that Coldhands
smelled. Dead meat, dry blood, a faint whi of rot. And cold. Cold over
all.
“What is it?” Meera wanted to know.
“Behind us,” Coldhands announced, his voice mu ed by the black
wool scarf across his nose and mouth.
“Wolves?” Bran asked. They had known for days that they were
being followed. Every night they heard the mournful howling of the
pack, and every night the wolves seemed a little closer. Hunters,
and hungry. They can smell how weak we are. Often Bran woke
shivering hours before the dawn, listening to the sound of them
calling to one another in the distance as he waited for the sun to
rise. If there are wolves, there must be prey, he used to think, until it
came to him that they were the prey.
The ranger shook his head. “Men. The wolves still keep their
distance. These men are not so shy.”

Meera Reed pushed back her hood. The wet snow that had
covered it tumbled to the ground with a soft thump. “How many
men? Who are they?”
“Foes. I’ll deal with them.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You’ll stay. The boy must be protected. There is a lake ahead,
hard frozen. When you come on it, turn north and follow the
shoreline. You’ll come to a shing village. Take refuge there until I
can catch up with you.”
Bran thought that Meera meant to argue until her brother said,
“Do as he says. He knows this land.” Jojen’s eyes were a dark
green, the color of moss, but heavy with a weariness that Bran had
never seen in them before. The little grandfather. South of the Wall,
the boy from the crannogs had seemed to be wise beyond his years,
but up here he was as lost and frightened as the rest of them. Even
so, Meera always listened to him.
That was still true. Coldhands slipped between the trees, back the
way they’d come, with four ravens apping after him. Meera
watched him go, her cheeks red with cold, breath pu ng from her
nostrils. She pulled her hood back up and gave the elk a nudge, and
their trek resumed. Before they had gone twenty yards, though, she
turned to glance behind them and said, “Men, he says. What men?
Does he mean wildlings? Why won’t he say?”
“He said he’d go and deal with them,” said Bran.
“He said, aye. He said he would take us to this three-eyed crow
too. That river we crossed this morning is the same one we crossed
four days ago, I swear. We’re going in circles.”
“Rivers turn and twist,” Bran said uncertainly, “and where there’s
lakes and hills, you need to go around.”
“There’s been too much going around,” Meera insisted, “and too
many secrets. I don’t like it. I don’t like him. And I don’t trust him.
Those hands of his are bad enough. He hides his face, and will not
speak a name. Who is he? What is he? Anyone can put on a black
cloak. Anyone, or any thing. He does not eat, he never drinks, he
does not seem to feel the cold.”

It’s true. Bran had been afraid to speak of it, but he had noticed.
Whenever they took shelter for the night, while he and Hodor and
the Reeds huddled together for warmth, the ranger kept apart.
Sometimes Coldhands closed his eyes, but Bran did not think he
slept. And there was something else …
“The scarf.” Bran glanced about uneasily, but there was not a
raven to be seen. All the big black birds had left them when the
ranger did. No one was listening. Even so, he kept his voice low.
“The scarf over his mouth, it never gets all hard with ice, like
Hodor’s beard. Not even when he talks.”
Meera gave him a sharp look. “You’re right. We’ve never seen his
breath, have we?”
“No.” A pu of white heralded each of Hodor’s hodors. When
Jojen or his sister spoke, their words could be seen too. Even the
elk left a warm fog upon the air when he exhaled.
“If he does not breathe …”
Bran found himself remembering the tales Old Nan had told him
when he was a babe. Beyond the Wall the monsters live, the giants and
the ghouls, the stalking shadows and the dead that walk, she would say,
tucking him in beneath his scratchy woolen blanket, but they cannot
pass so long as the Wall stands strong and the men of the Night’s Watch
are true. So go to sleep, my little Brandon, my baby boy, and dream
sweet dreams. There are no monsters here. The ranger wore the black
of the Night’s Watch, but what if he was not a man at all? What if
he was some monster, taking them to the other monsters to be
devoured?
“The ranger saved Sam and the girl from the wights,” Bran said,
hesitantly, “and he’s taking me to the three-eyed crow.”
“Why won’t this three-eyed crow come to us? Why couldn’t he
meet us at the Wall? Crows have wings. My brother grows weaker
every day. How long can we go on?”
Jojen coughed. “Until we get there.”
They came upon the promised lake not long after, and turned
north as the ranger had bid them. That was the easy part.
The water was frozen, and the snow had been falling for so long
that Bran had lost count of the days, turning the lake into a vast

white wilderness. Where the ice was at and the ground was
bumpy, the going was easy, but where the wind had pushed the
snow up into ridges, sometimes it was hard to tell where the lake
ended and the shore began. Even the trees were not as infallible a
guide as they might have hoped, for there were wooded islands in
the lake, and wide areas ashore where no trees grew.
The elk went where he would, regardless of the wishes of Meera
and Jojen on his back. Mostly he stayed beneath the trees, but
where the shore curved away westward he would take the more
direct path across the frozen lake, shouldering through snowdrifts
taller than Bran as the ice crackled underneath his hooves. Out there
the wind was stronger, a cold north wind that howled across the
lake, knifed through their layers of wool and leather, and set them
all to shivering. When it blew into their faces, it would drive the
snow into their eyes and leave them as good as blind.
Hours passed in silence. Ahead, shadows began to steal between
the trees, the long ngers of the dusk. Dark came early this far
north. Bran had come to dread that. Each day seemed shorter than
the last, and where the days were cold, the nights were bitter cruel.
Meera halted them again. “We should have come on the village
by now.” Her voice sounded hushed and strange.
“Could we have passed it?” Bran asked.
“I hope not. We need to nd shelter before nightfall.”
She was not wrong. Jojen’s lips were blue, Meera’s cheeks dark
red. Bran’s own face had gone numb. Hodor’s beard was solid ice.
Snow caked his legs almost to the knee, and Bran had felt him
stagger more than once. No one was as strong as Hodor, no one. If
even his great strength was failing …
“Summer can nd the village,” Bran said suddenly, his words
misting in the air. He did not wait to hear what Meera might say,
but closed his eyes and let himself ow from his broken body.
As he slipped inside Summer’s skin, the dead woods came to
sudden life. Where before there had been silence, now he heard:
wind in the trees, Hodor’s breathing, the elk pawing at the ground
in search of fodder. Familiar scents lled his nostrils: wet leaves and
dead grass, the rotted carcass of a squirrel decaying in the brush,

the sour stink of man-sweat, the musky odor of the elk. Food. Meat.
The elk sensed his interest. He turned his head toward the direwolf,
wary, and lowered his great antlers.
He is not prey, the boy whispered to the beast who shared his skin.
Leave him. Run.
Summer ran. Across the lake he raced, his paws kicking up sprays
of snow behind him. The trees stood shoulder to shoulder, like men
in a battle line, all cloaked in white. Over roots and rocks the
direwolf sped, through a drift of old snow, the crust crackling
beneath his weight. His paws grew wet and cold. The next hill was
covered with pines, and the sharp scent of their needles lled the
air. When he reached the top, he turned in a circle, sni ng at the
air, then raised his head and howled.
The smells were there. Mansmells.
Ashes, Bran thought, old and faint, but ashes. It was the smell of
burnt wood, soot, and charcoal. A dead re.
He shook the snow o his muzzle. The wind was gusting, so the
smells were hard to follow. The wolf turned this way and that,
sni ng. All around were heaps of snow and tall trees garbed in
white. The wolf let his tongue loll out between his teeth, tasting the
frigid air, his breath misting as snow akes melted on his tongue.
When he trotted toward the scent, Hodor lumbered after him at
once. The elk took longer to decide, so Bran returned reluctantly to
his own body and said, “That way. Follow Summer. I smelled it.”
As the rst sliver of a crescent moon came peeking through the
clouds, they nally stumbled into the village by the lake. They had
almost walked straight through it. From the ice, the village looked
no di erent than a dozen other spots along the lakeshore. Buried
under drifts of snow, the round stone houses could just as easily
have been boulders or hillocks or fallen logs, like the deadfall that
Jojen had mistaken for a building the day before, until they dug
down into it and found only broken branches and rotting logs.
The village was empty, abandoned by the wildlings who had once
lived there, like all the other villages they had passed. Some had
been burned, as if the inhabitants had wanted to make certain they
could not come creeping back, but this one had been spared the

torch. Beneath the snow they found a dozen huts and a longhall,
with its sod roof and thick walls of rough-hewn logs.
“At least we will be out of the wind,” Bran said.
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
Meera slid down from the elk’s back. She and her brother helped
lift Bran out of the wicker basket. “Might be the wildlings left some
food behind,” she said.
That proved a forlorn hope. Inside the longhall they found the
ashes of a re, oors of hard-packed dirt, a chill that went bone
deep. But at least they had a roof above their heads and log walls to
keep the wind o . A stream ran nearby, covered with a lm of ice.
The elk had to crack it with his hoof to drink. Once Bran and Jojen
and Hodor were safely settled, Meera fetched back some chunks of
broken ice for them to suck on. The melting water was so cold it
made Bran shudder.
Summer did not follow them into the longhall. Bran could feel the
big wolf’s hunger, a shadow of his own. “Go hunt,” he told him,
“but you leave the elk alone.” Part of him was wishing he could go
hunting too. Perhaps he would, later.
Supper was a stful of acorns, crushed and pounded into paste, so
bitter that Bran gagged as he tried to keep it down. Jojen Reed did
not even make the attempt. Younger and frailer than his sister, he
was growing weaker by the day.
“Jojen, you have to eat,” Meera told him.
“Later. I just want to rest.” Jojen smiled a wan smile. “This is not
the day I die, sister. I promise you.”
“You almost fell o the elk.”
“Almost. I am cold and hungry, that’s all.”
“Then eat.”
“Crushed acorns? My belly hurts, but that will only make it
worse. Leave me be, sister. I’m dreaming of roast chicken.”
“Dreams will not sustain you. Not even greendreams.”
“Dreams are what we have.”
All we have. The last of the food that they had brought from the
south was ten days gone. Since then hunger walked beside them day
and night. Even Summer could nd no game in these woods. They

lived on crushed acorns and raw sh. The woods were full of frozen
streams and cold black lakes, and Meera was as good a sher with
her three-pronged frog spear as most men were with hook and line.
Some days her lips were blue with cold by the time she waded back
to them with her catch wriggling on her tines. It had been three
days since Meera caught a sh, however. Bran’s belly felt so hollow
it might have been three years.
After they choked down their meagre supper, Meera sat with her
back against a wall, sharpening her dagger on a whetstone. Hodor
squatted down beside the door, rocking back and forth on his
haunches and muttering, “Hodor, hodor, hodor.”
Bran closed his eyes. It was too cold to talk, and they dare not
light a re. Coldhands had warned them against that. These woods
are not as empty as you think, he had said. You cannot know what the
light might summon from the darkness. The memory made him shiver,
despite the warmth of Hodor beside him.
Sleep would not come, could not come. Instead there was wind,
the biting cold, moonlight on snow, and re. He was back inside
Summer, long leagues away, and the night was rank with the smell
of blood. The scent was strong. A kill, not far. The esh would still
be warm. Slaver ran between his teeth as the hunger woke inside
him. Not elk. Not deer. Not this.
The direwolf moved toward the meat, a gaunt grey shadow
sliding from tree to tree, through pools of moonlight and over
mounds of snow. The wind gusted around him, shifting. He lost the
scent, found it, then lost it again. As he searched for it once more, a
distant sound made his ears prick up.
Wolf, he knew at once. Summer stalked toward the sound, wary
now. Soon enough the scent of blood was back, but now there were
other smells: piss and dead skins, bird shit, feathers, and wolf, wolf,
wolf. A pack. He would need to ght for his meat.
They smelled him too. As he moved out from amongst the
darkness of the trees into the bloody glade, they were watching
him. The female was chewing on a leather boot that still had half a
leg in it, but she let it fall at his approach. The leader of the pack,
an old male with a grizzled white muzzle and a blind eye, moved

out to meet him, snarling, his teeth bared. Behind him, a younger
male showed his fangs as well.
The direwolf’s pale yellow eyes drank in the sights around them.
A nest of entrails coiled through a bush, entangled with the
branches. Steam rising from an open belly, rich with the smells of
blood and meat. A head staring sightlessly up at a horned moon,
cheeks ripped and torn down to bloody bone, pits for eyes, neck
ending in a ragged stump. A pool of frozen blood, glistening red and
black.
Men. The stink of them lled the world. Alive, they had been as
many as the ngers on a man’s paw, but now they were none. Dead.
Done. Meat. Cloaked and hooded, once, but the wolves had torn
their clothing into pieces in their frenzy to get at the esh. Those
who still had faces wore thick beards crusted with ice and frozen
snot. The falling snow had begun to bury what remained of them,
so pale against the black of ragged cloaks and breeches. Black.
Long leagues away, the boy stirred uneasily.
Black. Night’s Watch. They were Night’s Watch.
The direwolf did not care. They were meat. He was hungry.
The eyes of the three wolves glowed yellow. The direwolf swung
his head from side to side, nostrils aring, then bared his fangs in a
snarl. The younger male backed away. The direwolf could smell the
fear in him. Tail, he knew. But the one-eyed wolf answered with a
growl and moved to block his advance. Head. And he does not fear
me though I am twice his size.
Their eyes met.
Warg!
Then the two rushed together, wolf and direwolf, and there was
no more time for thought. The world shrank down to tooth and
claw, snow ying as they rolled and spun and tore at one another,
the other wolves snarling and snapping around them. His jaws
closed on matted fur slick with hoarfrost, on a limb thin as a dry
stick, but the one-eyed wolf clawed at his belly and tore himself
free, rolled, lunged for him. Yellow fangs snapped closed on his
throat, but he shook o his old grey cousin as he would a rat, then
charged after him, knocked him down. Rolling, ripping, kicking,

they fought until the both of them were ragged and fresh blood
dappled the snows around them. But nally the old one-eyed wolf
lay down and showed his belly. The direwolf snapped at him twice
more, sni ed at his butt, then lifted a leg over him.
A few snaps and a warning growl, and the female and the tail
submitted too. The pack was his.
The prey as well. He went from man to man, sni ng, before
settling on the biggest, a faceless thing who clutched black iron in
one hand. His other hand was missing, severed at the wrist, the
stump bound up in leather. Blood owed thick and sluggish from
the slash across his throat. The wolf lapped at it with his tongue,
licked the ragged eyeless ruin of his nose and cheeks, then buried
his muzzle in his neck and tore it open, gulping down a gobbet of
sweet meat. No esh had ever tasted half as good.
When he was done with that one, he moved to the next, and
devoured the choicest bits of that man too. Ravens watched him
from the trees, squatting dark-eyed and silent on the branches as
snow drifted down around them. The other wolves made do with
his leavings; the old male fed rst, then the female, then the tail.
They were his now. They were pack.
No, the boy whispered, we have another pack. Lady’s dead and
maybe Grey Wind too, but somewhere there’s still Shaggydog and
Nymeria and Ghost. Remember Ghost?
Falling snow and feasting wolves began to dim. Warmth beat
against his face, comforting as a mother’s kisses. Fire, he thought,
smoke. His nose twitched to the smell of roasting meat. And then
the forest fell away, and he was back in the longhall again, back in
his broken body, staring at a re. Meera Reed was turning a chunk
of raw red esh above the ames, letting it char and spit. “Just in
time,” she said. Bran rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and
wriggled backwards against the wall to sit. “You almost slept
through supper. The ranger found a sow.”
Behind her, Hodor was tearing eagerly at a chunk of hot charred
esh as blood and grease ran down into his beard. Wisps of smoke
rose from between his ngers. “Hodor,” he muttered between bites,
“hodor, hodor.” His sword lay on the earthen oor beside him.

Jojen Reed nipped at his own joint with small bites, chewing each
chunk of meat a dozen times before swallowing.
The ranger killed a pig. Coldhands stood beside the door, a raven
on his arm, both staring at the re. Re ections from the ames
glittered o four black eyes. He does not eat, Bran remembered, and
he fears the ames.
“You said no re,” he reminded the ranger.
“The walls around us hide the light, and dawn is close. We will be
on our way soon.”
“What happened to the men? The foes behind us?”
“They will not trouble you.”
“Who were they? Wildlings?”
Meera turned the meat to cook the other side. Hodor was
chewing and swallowing, muttering happily under his breath. Only
Jojen seemed aware of what was happening as Coldhands turned his
head to stare at Bran. “They were foes.”
Men of the Night’s Watch. “You killed them. You and the ravens.
Their faces were all torn, and their eyes were gone.” Coldhands did
not deny it. “They were your brothers. I saw. The wolves had ripped
their clothes up, but I could still tell. Their cloaks were black. Like
your hands.” Coldhands said nothing. “Who are you? Why are your
hands black?”
The ranger studied his hands as if he had never noticed them
before. “Once the heart has ceased to beat, a man’s blood runs down
into his extremities, where it thickens and congeals.” His voice
rattled in his throat, as thin and gaunt as he was. “His hands and
feet swell up and turn as black as pudding. The rest of him becomes
as white as milk.”
Meera Reed rose, her frog spear in her hand, a chunk of smoking
meat still impaled upon its tines. “Show us your face.”
The ranger made no move to obey.
“He’s dead.” Bran could taste the bile in his throat. “Meera, he’s
some dead thing. The monsters cannot pass so long as the Wall
stands and the men of the Night’s Watch stay true, that’s what Old
Nan used to say. He came to meet us at the Wall, but he could not
pass. He sent Sam instead, with that wildling girl.”

Meera’s gloved hand tightened around the shaft of her frog spear.
“Who sent you? Who is this three-eyed crow?”
“A friend. Dreamer, wizard, call him what you will. The last
greenseer.” The longhall’s wooden door banged open. Outside, the
night wind howled, bleak and black. The trees were full of ravens,
screaming. Coldhands did not move.
“A monster,” Bran said.
The ranger looked at Bran as if the rest of them did not exist.
“Your monster, Brandon Stark.”
“Yours,” the raven echoed, from his shoulder. Outside the door,
the ravens in the trees took up the cry, until the night wood echoed
to the murderer’s song of “Yours, yours, yours.”
“Jojen, did you dream this?” Meera asked her brother. “Who is
he? What is he? What do we do now?”
“We go with the ranger,” said Jojen. “We have come too far to
turn back now, Meera. We would never make it back to the Wall
alive. We go with Bran’s monster, or we die.”

TYRION

T

hey departed Pentos by the Sunrise Gate, though Tyrion
Lannister never glimpsed the sunrise. “It will be as if you had never
come to Pentos, my little friend,” promised Magister Illyrio, as he
drew shut the litter’s purple velvet drapes. “No man must see you
leave the city, as no man saw you enter.”
“No man except the sailors who stu ed me in that barrel, the
cabin boy who cleaned up after me, the girl you sent to warm my
bed, and that treacherous freckled washerwoman. Oh, and your
guards. Unless you removed their wits along with their balls, they
know you’re not alone in here.” The litter was suspended between
eight mammoth draft horses on heavy leather straps. Four eunuchs
paced beside the horses, two to either side, and more were trudging
along behind to guard the baggage train.
“Unsullied tell no tales,” Illyrio assured him. “And the galley that
delivered you is on her way to Asshai even now. It will be two
years before she returns, if the seas are kind. As for my household,
they love me well. None would betray me.”
Cherish that thought, my fat friend. One day we will carve those words
upon your crypt. “We should be aboard that galley,” the dwarf said.
“The fastest way to Volantis is by sea.”
“The sea is hazardous,” replied Illyrio. “Autumn is a season rife
with storms, and pirates still make their dens upon the Stepstones
and venture forth to prey on honest men. It would never do for my
little friend to fall into such hands.”
“There are pirates on the Rhoyne as well.”

“River pirates.” The cheesemonger gave a yawn, covering his
mouth with the back of his hand. “Cockroach captains scurrying
after crumbs.”
“One hears talk of stone men as well.”
“They are real enough, poor damned things. But why speak of
such things? The day is too ne for such talk. We shall see the
Rhoyne soon, and there you shall be rid of Illyrio and his big belly.
Till then, let us drink and dream. We have sweet wine and savories
to enjoy. Why dwell upon disease and death?”
Why indeed? Tyrion heard the thrum of a crossbow once again,
and wondered. The litter swayed side to side, a soothing movement
that made him feel as if he were a child being rocked to sleep in his
mother’s arms. Not that I would know what that was like. Silk pillows
stu ed with goose down cushioned his cheeks. The purple velvet
walls curved overhead to form a roof, making it pleasantly warm
within despite the autumn chill outside.
A train of mules trailed behind them, carrying chests and casks
and barrels, and hampers of delectables to keep the lord of cheese
from growing peckish. They nibbled on spiced sausage that
morning, washed down with a dark smokeberry brown. Jellied eels
and Dornish reds lled their afternoon. Come evening there were
sliced hams, boiled eggs, and roasted larks stu ed with garlic and
onions, with pale ales and Myrish re wines to help in their
digestion. The litter was as slow as it was comfortable, however,
and the dwarf soon found himself itching with impatience.
“How many days until we reach the river?” he asked Illyrio that
evening. “At this pace, your queen’s dragons will be larger than
Aegon’s three before I can lay eyes upon them.”
“Would it were so. A large dragon is more fearsome than a small
one.” The magister shrugged. “Much as it would please me to
welcome Queen Daenerys to Volantis, I must rely on you and Gri
for that. I can serve her best in Pentos, smoothing the way for her
return. So long as I am with you, though … well, an old fat man
must have his comforts, yes? Come, drink a cup of wine.”
“Tell me,” Tyrion said as he drank, “why should a magister of
Pentos give three gs who wears the crown in Westeros? Where is

the gain for you in this venture, my lord?”
The fat man dabbed grease from his lips. “I am an old man,
grown weary of this world and its treacheries. Is it so strange that I
should wish to do some good before my days are done, to help a
sweet young girl regain her birthright?”
Next you will be o ering me a suit of magic armor and a palace in
Valyria. “If Daenerys is no more than a sweet young girl, the Iron
Throne will cut her into sweet young pieces.”
“Fear not, my little friend. The blood of Aegon the Dragon ows
in her veins.”
Along with the blood of Aegon the Unworthy, Maegor the Cruel, and
Baelor the Befuddled. “Tell me more of her.”
The fat man grew pensive. “Daenerys was half a child when she
came to me, yet fairer even than my second wife, so lovely I was
tempted to claim her for myself. Such a fearful, furtive thing,
however, I knew I should get no joy from coupling with her.
Instead I summoned a bedwarmer and fucked her vigorously until
the madness passed. If truth be told, I did not think Daenerys would
survive for long amongst the horselords.”
“That did not stop you selling her to Khal Drogo …”
“Dothraki neither buy nor sell. Say rather that her brother Viserys
gave her to Drogo to win the khal’s friendship. A vain young man,
and greedy. Viserys lusted for his father’s throne, but he lusted for
Daenerys too, and was loath to give her up. The night before the
princess wed he tried to steal into her bed, insisting that if he could
not have her hand, he would claim her maidenhead. Had I not taken
the precaution of posting guards upon her door, Viserys might have
undone years of planning.”
“He sounds an utter fool.”
“Viserys was Mad Aerys’s son, just so. Daenerys … Daenerys is
quite di erent.” He popped a roasted lark into his mouth and
crunched it noisily, bones and all. “The frightened child who
sheltered in my manse died on the Dothraki sea, and was reborn in
blood and re. This dragon queen who wears her name is a true
Targaryen. When I sent ships to bring her home, she turned toward
Slaver’s Bay. In a short span of days she conquered Astapor, made

Yunkai bend the knee, and sacked Meereen. Mantarys will be next,
if she marches west along the old Valyrian roads. If she comes by
sea, well … her eet must take on food and water at Volantis.”
“By land or by sea, there are long leagues between Meereen and
Volantis,” Tyrion observed.
“Five hundred fty, as the dragon ies, through deserts,
mountains, swamps, and demon-haunted ruins. Many and more will
perish, but those who survive will be stronger by the time they
reach Volantis … where they shall nd you and Gri awaiting them,
with fresh forces and su cient ships to carry them all across the sea
to Westeros.”
Tyrion pondered all he knew of Volantis, oldest and proudest of
the Nine Free Cities. Something was awry here. Even with half a
nose, he could smell it. “It’s said there are ve slaves for every free
man in Volantis. Why would the triarchs assist a queen who
smashed the slave trade?” He pointed at Illyrio. “For that matter,
why would you? Slavery may be forbidden by the laws of Pentos,
yet you have a nger in that trade as well, and maybe a whole
hand. And yet you conspire for the dragon queen, and not against
her. Why? What do you hope to gain from Queen Daenerys?”
“Are we back to that again? You are a persistent little man.”
Illyrio gave a laugh and slapped his belly. “As you will. The Beggar
King swore that I should be his master of coin, and a lordly lord as
well. Once he wore his golden crown, I should have my choice of
castles … even Casterly Rock, if I desired.”
Tyrion snorted wine back up the scarred stump that had been his
nose. “My father would have loved to hear that.”
“Your lord father had no cause for concern. Why would I want a
rock? My manse is large enough for any man, and more
comfortable than your drafty Westerosi castles. Master of coin,
though …” The fat man peeled another egg. “I am fond of coins. Is
there any sound as sweet as the clink of gold on gold?”
A sister’s screams. “Are you quite certain that Daenerys will make
good her brother’s promises?”
“She will, or she will not.” Illyrio bit the egg in half. “I told you,
my little friend, not all that a man does is done for gain. Believe as

you wish, but even fat old fools like me have friends, and debts of
a ection to repay.”
Liar, thought Tyrion. There is something in this venture worth more
to you than coin or castles. “You meet so few men who value
friendship over gold these days.”
“Too true,” the fat man said, deaf to the irony.
“How is it that the Spider became so dear to you?”
“We were young together, two green boys in Pentos.”
“Varys came from Myr.”
“So he did. I met him not long after he arrived, one step ahead of
the slavers. By day he slept in the sewers, by night he prowled the
rooftops like a cat. I was near as poor, a bravo in soiled silks, living
by my blade. Perhaps you chanced to glimpse the statue by my
pool? Pytho Malanon carved that when I was six-and-ten. A lovely
thing, though now I weep to see it.”
“Age makes ruins of us all. I am still in mourning for my nose.
But Varys …”
“In Myr he was a prince of thieves, until a rival thief informed on
him. In Pentos his accent marked him, and once he was known for a
eunuch he was despised and beaten. Why he chose me to protect
him I may never know, but we came to an arrangement. Varys
spied on lesser thieves and took their takings. I o ered my help to
their victims, promising to recover their valuables for a fee. Soon
every man who had su ered a loss knew to come to me, whilst
city’s footpads and cutpurses sought out Varys … half to slit his
throat, the other half to sell him what they’d stolen. We both grew
rich, and richer still when Varys trained his mice.”
“In King’s Landing he kept little birds.”
“Mice, we called them then. The older thieves were fools who
thought no further than turning a night’s plunder into wine. Varys
preferred orphan boys and young girls. He chose the smallest, the
ones who were quick and quiet, and taught them to climb walls and
slip down chimneys. He taught them to read as well. We left the
gold and gems for common thieves. Instead our mice stole letters,
ledgers, charts … later, they would read them and leave them
where they lay. Secrets are worth more than silver or sapphires, Varys

claimed. Just so. I grew so respectable that a cousin of the Prince of
Pentos let me wed his maiden daughter, whilst whispers of a certain
eunuch’s talents crossed the narrow sea and reached the ears of a
certain king. A very anxious king, who did not wholly trust his son,
nor his wife, nor his Hand, a friend of his youth who had grown
arrogant and overproud. I do believe that you know the rest of this
tale, is that not so?”
“Much of it,” Tyrion admitted. “I see that you are somewhat more
than a cheesemonger after all.”
Illyrio inclined his head. “You are kind to say so, my little friend.
And for my part, I see that you are just as quick as Lord Varys
claimed.” He smiled, showing all his crooked yellow teeth, and
shouted for another jar of Myrish re wine.
When the magister drifted o to sleep with the wine jar at his
elbow, Tyrion crept across the pillows to work it loose from its
eshy prison and pour himself a cup. He drained it down, and
yawned, and lled it once again. If I drink enough re wine, he told
himself, perhaps I’ll dream of dragons.
When he was still a lonely child in the depths of Casterly Rock, he
oft rode dragons through the nights, pretending he was some lost
Targaryen princeling, or a Valyrian dragonlord soaring high o’er
elds and mountains. Once, when his uncles asked him what gift he
wanted for his nameday, he begged them for a dragon. “It wouldn’t
need to be a big one. It could be little, like I am.” His uncle Gerion
thought that was the funniest thing he had ever heard, but his uncle
Tygett said, “The last dragon died a century ago, lad.” That had
seemed so monstrously unfair that the boy had cried himself to
sleep that night.
Yet if the lord of cheese could be believed, the Mad King’s
daughter had hatched three living dragons. Two more than even a
Targaryen should require. Tyrion was almost sorry that he had killed
his father. He would have enjoyed seeing Lord Tywin’s face when
he learned that there was a Targaryen queen on her way to
Westeros with three dragons, backed by a scheming eunuch and a
cheesemonger half the size of Casterly Rock.

The dwarf was so stu ed that he had to undo his belt and the
topmost laces on his breeches. The boy’s clothes his host had
dressed him in made him feel like ten pounds of sausage in a vepound skin. If we eat this way every day I will be the size of Illyrio
before I meet this dragon queen. Outside the litter night had fallen.
Inside all was dark. Tyrion listened to Illyrio’s snores, the creak of
the leather straps, the slow clop clop of the team’s ironshod hooves
on the hard Valyrian road, but his heart was listening for the beat of
leathern wings.
When he woke, dawn had come. The horses plodded on, the litter
creaking and swaying between them. Tyrion pulled the curtain back
an inch to peer outside, but there was little to see but ochre elds,
bare brown elms, and the road itself, a broad stone highway that
ran straight as a spear to the horizon. He had read about Valyrian
roads, but this was the rst he had seen. The Freehold’s grasp had
reached as far as Dragonstone, but never to the mainland of
Westeros itself. Odd, that. Dragonstone is no more than a rock. The
wealth was farther west, but they had dragons. Surely they knew that it
was there.
He had drunk too much last night. His head was pounding, and
even the gentle swaying of the litter was enough to make his gorge
rise in his throat. Though he said no word of complaint, his distress
must have been plain to Illyrio Mopatis. “Come, drink with me,” the
fat man said. “A scale from the dragon that burned you, as they
say.” He poured for them from a agon of blackberry wine so sweet
that it drew more ies than honey. Tyrion shooed them o with the
back of his hand and drank deep. The taste was so cloying that it
was all he could do to keep it down. The second cup went down
easier, however. Even so, he had no appetite, and when Illyrio
o ered him a bowl of blackberries in cream he waved it o . “I
dreamed about the queen,” he said. “I was on my knees before her,
swearing my allegiance, but she mistook me for my brother, Jaime,
and fed me to her dragons.”
“Let us hope this dream was not prophetic. You are a clever imp,
just as Varys said, and Daenerys will have need of clever men about

her. Ser Barristan is a valiant knight and true; but none, I think, has
ever called him cunning.”
“Knights know only one way to solve a problem. They couch their
lances and charge. A dwarf has a di erent way of looking at the
world. What of you, though? You are a clever man yourself.”
“You atter me.” Illyrio waggled his hand. “Alas, I am not made
for travel, so I will send you to Daenerys in my stead. You did Her
Grace a great service when you slew your father, and it is my hope
that you will do her many more. Daenerys is not the fool her
brother was. She will make good use of you.”
As kindling? Tyrion thought, smiling pleasantly.
They changed out teams only thrice that day but seemed to halt
twice an hour at the least so Illyrio could climb down from the litter
and have himself a piss. Our lord of cheese is the size of an elephant,
but he has a bladder like a peanut, the dwarf mused. During one stop,
he used the time to have a closer look at the road. Tyrion knew
what he would nd: not packed earth, nor bricks, nor cobbles, but a
ribbon of fused stone raised a half foot above the ground to allow
rainfall and snowmelt to run o its shoulders. Unlike the muddy
tracks that passed for roads in the Seven Kingdoms, the Valyrian
roads were wide enough for three wagons to pass abreast, and
neither time nor tra c marred them. They still endured,
unchanging, four centuries after Valyria itself had met its Doom. He
looked for ruts and cracks but found only a pile of warm dung
deposited by one of the horses.
The dung made him think of his lord father. Are you down in some
hell, Father? A nice cold hell where you can look up and see me help
restore Mad Aerys’s daughter to the Iron Throne?
As they resumed their journey, Illyrio produced a bag of roasted
chestnuts and began to speak once more of the dragon queen. “Our
last news of Queen Daenerys is old and stale, I fear. By now she will
have left Meereen, we must assume. She has her host at last, a
ragged host of sellswords, Dothraki horselords, and Unsullied
infantry, and she will no doubt lead them west, to take back her
father’s throne.” Magister Illyrio twisted open a pot of garlic snails,
sni ed at them, and smiled. “At Volantis, you will have fresh tidings

of Daenerys, we must hope,” he said, as he sucked one from its
shell. “Dragons and young girls are both capricious, and it may be
that you will need to adjust your plans. Gri will know what to do.
Will you have a snail? The garlic is from my own gardens.”
I could ride a snail and make a better pace than this litter of yours.
Tyrion waved the dish away. “You place a deal of trust in this man
Gri . Another friend of your childhood?”
“No. A sellsword, you would call him, but Westerosi born.
Daenerys needs men worthy of her cause.” Illyrio raised a hand. “I
know! ‘Sellswords put gold before honor,’ you are thinking. ‘This man
Gri will sell me to my sister.’ Not so. I trust Gri as I would trust a
brother.”
Another mortal error. “Then I shall do likewise.”
“The Golden Company marches toward Volantis as we speak,
there to await the coming of our queen out of the east.”
Beneath the gold, the bitter steel. “I had heard the Golden Company
was under contract with one of the Free Cities.”
“Myr.” Illyrio smirked. “Contracts can be broken.”
“There is more coin in cheese than I knew,” said Tyrion. “How
did you accomplish that?”
The magister waggled his fat ngers. “Some contracts are writ in
ink, and some in blood. I say no more.”
The dwarf pondered that. The Golden Company was reputedly the
nest of the free companies, founded a century ago by Bittersteel, a
bastard son of Aegon the Unworthy. When another of Aegon’s Great
Bastards tried to seize the Iron Throne from his trueborn halfbrother, Bittersteel joined the revolt. Daemon Blackfyre had
perished on the Redgrass Field, however, and his rebellion with
him. Those followers of the Black Dragon who survived the battle
yet refused to bend the knee ed across the narrow sea, among
them Daemon’s younger sons, Bittersteel, and hundreds of landless
lords and knights who soon found themselves forced to sell their
swords to eat. Some joined the Ragged Standard, some the Second
Sons or Maiden’s Men. Bittersteel saw the strength of House
Blackfyre scattering to the four winds, so he formed the Golden
Company to bind the exiles together.

From that day to this, the men of the Golden Company had lived
and died in the Disputed Lands, ghting for Myr or Lys or Tyrosh in
their pointless little wars, and dreaming of the land their fathers
had lost. They were exiles and sons of exiles, dispossessed and
unforgiven … yet formidable ghters still.
“I admire your powers of persuasion,” Tyrion told Illyrio. “How
did you convince the Golden Company to take up the cause of our
sweet queen when they have spent so much of their history ghting
against the Targaryens?”
Illyrio brushed away the objection as if it were a y. “Black or
red, a dragon is still a dragon. When Maelys the Monstrous died
upon the Stepstones, it was the end of the male line of House
Blackfyre.” The cheesemonger smiled through his forked beard.
“And Daenerys will give the exiles what Bittersteel and the
Blackfyres never could. She will take them home.”
With re and sword. It was the kind of homecoming that Tyrion
wished for as well. “Ten thousand swords makes for a princely gift,
I grant you. Her Grace should be most pleased.”
The magister gave a modest bob of his head, chins jiggling. “I
would never presume to say what might please Her Grace.”
Prudent of you. Tyrion knew much and more about the gratitude
of kings. Why should queens be any di erent?
Soon enough the magister was fast asleep, leaving Tyrion to
brood alone. He wondered what Barristan Selmy would think of
riding into battle with the Golden Company. During the War of the
Ninepenny Kings, Selmy had cut a bloody path through their ranks
to slay the last of the Blackfyre Pretenders. Rebellion makes for queer
bedfellows. And none more queer than this fat man and me.
The cheesemonger woke when they stopped to change the horses
and sent for a fresh hamper. “How far have we come?” the dwarf
asked him as they stu ed themselves with cold capon and a relish
made of carrots, raisins, and bits of lime and orange.
“This is Andalos, my friend. The land your Andals came from.
They took it from the hairy men who were here before them,
cousins to the hairy men of Ib. The heart of Hugor’s ancient realm
lies north of us, but we are passing through its southern marches. In

Pentos, these are called the Flatlands. Farther east stand the Velvet
Hills, whence we are bound.”
Andalos. The Faith taught that the Seven themselves had once
walked the hills of Andalos in human form. “The Father reached his
hand into the heavens and pulled down seven stars,” Tyrion recited
from memory, “and one by one he set them on the brow of Hugor
of the Hill to make a glowing crown.”
Magister Illyrio gave him a curious look. “I did not dream my
little friend was so devout.”
The dwarf shrugged. “A relic of my boyhood. I knew I would not
make a knight, so I decided to be High Septon. That crystal crown
adds a foot to a man’s height. I studied the holy books and prayed
until I had scabs on both my knees, but my quest came to a tragic
end. I reached that certain age and fell in love.”
“A maiden? I know the way of that.” Illyrio thrust his right hand
up his left sleeve and drew out a silver locket. Inside was a painted
likeness of a woman with big blue eyes and pale golden hair
streaked by silver. “Serra. I found her in a Lysene pillow house and
brought her home to warm my bed, but in the end I wed her. Me,
whose rst wife had been a cousin of the Prince of Pentos. The
palace gates were closed to me thereafter, but I did not care. The
price was small enough, for Serra.”
“How did she die?” Tyrion knew that she was dead; no man spoke
so fondly of a woman who had abandoned him.
“A Braavosi trading galley called at Pentos on her way back from
the Jade Sea. The Treasure carried cloves and sa ron, jet and jade,
scarlet samite, green silk … and the grey death. We slew her
oarsmen as they came ashore and burned the ship at anchor, but the
rats crept down the oars and paddled to the quay on cold stone feet.
The plague took two thousand before it ran its course.” Magister
Illyrio closed the locket. “I keep her hands in my bedchamber. Her
hands that were so soft …”
Tyrion thought of Tysha. He glanced out at the elds where once
the gods had walked. “What sort of gods make rats and plagues and
dwarfs?” Another passage from The Seven-Pointed Star came back to
him. “The Maid brought him forth a girl as supple as a willow with

eyes like deep blue pools, and Hugor declared that he would have
her for his bride. So the Mother made her fertile, and the Crone
foretold that she would bear the king four-and-forty mighty sons.
The Warrior gave strength to their arms, whilst the Smith wrought
for each a suit of iron plates.”
“Your Smith must have been Rhoynish,” Illyrio quipped. “The
Andals learned the art of working iron from the Rhoynar who dwelt
along the river. This is known.”
“Not by our septons.” Tyrion gestured at the elds. “Who dwells
in these Flatlands of yours?”
“Tillers and toilers, bound to the land. There are orchards, farms,
mines … I own some such myself, though I seldom visit them. Why
should I spend my days out here, with the myriad delights of Pentos
close at hand?”
“Myriad delights.” And huge thick walls. Tyrion swirled his wine in
his cup. “We have seen no towns since Pentos.”
“There are ruins.” Illyrio waved a chicken leg toward the
curtains. “The horselords come this way, whenever some khal takes
it into his head to gaze upon the sea. The Dothraki are not fond of
towns, you will know this even in Westeros.”
“Fall upon one of these khalasars and destroy it, and you may nd
that the Dothraki are not so quick to cross the Rhoyne.”
“It is cheaper to buy o foes with food and gifts.”
If only I had thought to bring a nice cheese to the battle on the
Blackwater, I might still have all my nose. Lord Tywin had always held
the Free Cities in contempt. They ght with coins instead of swords, he
used to say. Gold has its uses, but wars are won with iron. “Give gold
to a foe and he will just come back for more, my father always
said.”
“Is this the selfsame father that you murdered?” Illyrio tossed his
chicken bone from the litter. “Sellswords will not stand against
Dothraki screamers. That was proved at Qohor.”
“Not even your brave Gri ?” mocked Tyrion.
“Gri is di erent. He has a son he dotes on. Young Gri , the boy
is called. There never was a nobler lad.”

The wine, the food, the sun, the sway of the litter, the buzzing of
the ies, all conspired to make Tyrion sleepy. So he slept, woke,
drank. Illyrio matched him cup for cup. And as the sky turned a
dusky purple, the fat man began to snore.
That night Tyrion Lannister dreamed of a battle that turned the
hills of Westeros as red as blood. He was in the midst of it, dealing
death with an axe as big as he was, ghting side by side with
Barristan the Bold and Bittersteel as dragons wheeled across the sky
above them. In the dream he had two heads, both noseless. His
father led the enemy, so he slew him once again. Then he killed his
brother, Jaime, hacking at his face until it was a red ruin, laughing
every time he struck a blow. Only when the ght was nished did
he realize that his second head was weeping.
When he woke his stunted legs were sti as iron. Illyrio was
eating olives. “Where are we?” Tyrion asked him.
“We have not yet left the Flatlands, my hasty friend. Soon our
road shall pass into the Velvet Hills. There we begin our climb
toward Ghoyan Drohe, upon the Little Rhoyne.”
Ghoyan Drohe had been a Rhoynar city, until the dragons of
Valyria had reduced it to a smoldering desolation. I am traveling
through years as well as leagues, Tyrion re ected, back through history
to the days when dragons ruled the earth.
Tyrion slept and woke and slept again, and day and night seemed
not to matter. The Velvet Hills proved a disappointment. “Half the
whores in Lannisport have breasts bigger than these hills,” he told
Illyrio. “You ought to call them the Velvet Teats.” They saw a circle
of standing stones that Illyrio claimed had been raised by giants,
and later a deep lake. “Here lived a den of robbers who preyed on
all who passed this way,” Illyrio said. “It is said they still dwell
beneath the water. Those who sh the lake are pulled under and
devoured.” The next evening they came upon a huge Valyrian
sphinx crouched beside the road. It had a dragon’s body and a
woman’s face.
“A dragon queen,” said Tyrion. “A pleasant omen.”
“Her king is missing.” Illyrio pointed out the smooth stone plinth
on which the second sphinx once stood, now grown over with moss

and owering vines. “The horselords built wooden wheels beneath
him and dragged him back to Vaes Dothrak.”
That is an omen too, thought Tyrion, but not as hopeful.
That night, drunker than usual, he broke into sudden song.
He rode through the streets of the city,
down from his hill on high,

O’er the wynds and the steps and the cobbles,
he rode to a woman’s sigh.

For she was his secret treasure,

she was his shame and his bliss.

And a chain and a keep are nothing,
compared to a woman’s kiss.

Those were all the words he knew, aside from the refrain. Hands
of gold are always cold, but a woman’s hands are warm. Shae’s hands
had beat at him as the golden hands dug into her throat. He did not
remember if they’d been warm or not. As the strength went out of
her, her blows became moths uttering about his face. Each time he
gave the chain another twist the golden hands dug deeper. A chain
and a keep are nothing, compared to a woman’s kiss. Had he kissed her
one last time, after she was dead? He could not
remember … though he still recalled the rst time they had kissed,
in his tent beside the Green Fork. How sweet her mouth had tasted.
He remembered the rst time with Tysha as well. She did not
know how, no more than I did. We kept bumping our noses, but when I
touched her tongue with mine she trembled. Tyrion closed his eyes to
bring her face to mind, but instead he saw his father, squatting on a
privy with his bedrobe hiked up about his waist. “Wherever whores
go,” Lord Tywin said, and the crossbow thrummed.
The dwarf rolled over, pressing half a nose deep into the silken
pillows. Sleep opened beneath him like a well, and he threw himself
into it with a will and let the darkness eat him up.

THE MERCHANT’S MAN

A

dventure stank.
She boasted sixty oars, a single sail, and a long lean hull that
promised speed. Small, but she might serve, Quentyn thought when he
saw her, but that was before he went aboard and got a good whi
of her. Pigs, was his rst thought, but after a second sni he
changed his mind. Pigs had a cleaner smell. This stink was piss and
rotting meat and nightsoil, this was the reek of corpse esh and
weeping sores and wounds gone bad, so strong that it overwhelmed
the salt air and sh smell of the harbor.
“I want to retch,” he said to Gerris Drinkwater. They were
waiting for the ship’s master to appear, sweltering in the heat as the
stench wafted up from the deck beneath them.
“If the captain smells anything like his ship, he may mistake your
vomit for perfume,” Gerris replied.
Quentyn was about to suggest that they try another ship when the
master nally made his appearance, with two vile-looking crewmen
at his side. Gerris greeted him with a smile. Though he did not
speak the Volantene tongue as well as Quentyn, their ruse required
that he speak for them. Back in the Planky Town Quentyn had
played the wineseller, but the mummery had chafed at him, so
when the Dornishmen changed ships at Lys they had changed roles
as well. Aboard the Meadowlark, Cletus Yronwood became the
merchant, Quentyn the servant; in Volantis, with Cletus slain, Gerris
had assumed the master’s role.
Tall and fair, with blue-green eyes, sandy hair streaked by the
sun, and a lean and comely body, Gerris Drinkwater had a swagger

to him, a con dence bordering on arrogance. He never seemed ill at
ease, and even when he did not speak the language, he had ways of
making himself understood. Quentyn cut a poor
gure by
comparison—short-legged and stocky, thickly built, with hair the
brown of new-turned earth. His forehead was too high, his jaw too
square, his nose too broad. A good honest face, a girl had called it
once, but you should smile more.
Smiles had never come easily for Quentyn Martell, any more than
they did for his lord father.
“How swift is your Adventure?” Gerris said, in a halting
approximation of High Valyrian.
The Adventure’s master recognized the accent and responded in
the Common Tongue of Westeros. “There is none swifter, honored
lord. Adventure can run down the wind itself. Tell me where you
wish to sail, and swiftly I shall bring you there.”
“I seek passage to Meereen for myself and two servants.”
That gave the captain pause. “I am no stranger to Meereen. I
could nd the city again, aye … but why? There are no slaves to be
had in Meereen, no pro t to be found there. The silver queen has
put an end to that. She has even closed the ghting pits, so a poor
sailor cannot even amuse himself as he waits to ll his holds. Tell
me, my Westerosi friend, what is there in Meereen that you should
want to go there?”
The most beautiful woman in the world, thought Quentyn. My brideto-be, if the gods are good. Sometimes at night he lay awake
imagining her face and form, and wondering why such a woman
would ever want to marry him, of all the princes in the world. I am
Dorne, he told himself. She will want Dorne.
Gerris answered with the tale they had concocted. “Wine is our
family trade. My father owns extensive vineyards back in Dorne,
and wishes me to nd new markets. It is hoped that the good folk
of Meereen will welcome what I sell.”
“Wine? Dornish wine?” The captain was not convinced. “The slave
cities are at war. Can it be you do not know this?”
“The ghting is between Yunkai and Astapor, we had heard.
Meereen is not involved.”

“Not as yet. But soon. An envoy from the Yellow City is in
Volantis even now, hiring swords. The Long Lances have already
taken ship for Yunkai, and the Windblown and the Company of the
Cat will follow once they have nished lling out their ranks. The
Golden Company marches east as well. All this is known.”
“If you say so. I deal in wine, not wars. Ghiscari wine is poor
stu , all agree. The Meereenese will pay a good price for my ne
Dornish vintages.”
“Dead men do not care what kind of wine they drink.” The master
of Adventure ngered his beard. “I am not the rst captain you have
approached, I think. Nor the tenth.”
“No,” Gerris admitted.
“How many, then? A hundred?”
Close enough, thought Quentyn. The Volantenes were fond of
boasting that the hundred isles of Braavos could be dropped into
their deep harbor and drowned. Quentyn had never seen Braavos,
but he could believe it. Rich and ripe and rotted, Volantis covered
the mouth of the Rhoyne like a warm wet kiss, stretching across hill
and marsh on both sides of the river. Ships were everywhere,
coming down the river or headed out to sea, crowding the wharves
and piers, taking on cargo or o -loading it: warships and whalers
and trading galleys, carracks and ski s, cogs, great cogs, longships,
swan ships, ships from Lys and Tyrosh and Pentos, Qartheen spicers
big as palaces, ships from Tolos and Yunkai and the Basilisks. So
many that Quentyn, seeing the port for the rst time from the deck
of the Meadowlark, had told his friends that they would only linger
here three days.
Yet twenty days had passed, and here they remained, still
shipless. The captains of the Melantine, the Triarch’s Daughter, and
the Mermaid’s Kiss had all refused them. A mate on the Bold Voyager
had laughed in their faces. The master of the Dolphin berated them
for wasting his time, and the owner of the Seventh Son accused them
of being pirates. All on the rst day.
Only the captain of the Fawn had given them reasons for his
refusal. “It is true that I am sailing east,” he told them, over
watered wine. “South around Valyria and thence into the sunrise.

We will take on water and provisions at New Ghis, then bend all
oars toward Qarth and the Jade Gates. Every voyage has perils,
long ones more than most. Why should I seek out more danger by
turning into Slaver’s Bay? The Fawn is my livelihood. I will not risk
her to take three mad Dornishmen into the middle of a war.”
Quentyn had begun to think that they might have done better to
buy their own ship in the Planky Town. That would have drawn
unwanted attention, however. The Spider had informers
everywhere, even in the halls of Sunspear. “Dorne will bleed if your
purpose is discovered,” his father had warned him, as they watched
the children frolic in the pools and fountains of the Water Gardens.
“What we do is treason, make no mistake. Trust only your
companions, and do your best to avoid attracting notice.”
So Gerris Drinkwater gave the captain of Adventure his most
disarming smile. “Truth be told, I have not kept count of all the
cowards who refused us, but at the Merchant’s House I heard it said
that you were a bolder sort of man, the sort who might risk
anything for su cient gold.”
A smuggler, Quentyn thought. That was how the other traders
styled Adventure’s master, back at the Merchant’s House. “He is a
smuggler and a slaver, half pirate and half pander, but it may be
that he is your best hope,” the innkeep had told them.
The captain rubbed thumb and fore nger together. “And how
much gold would you deem su cient for such a voyage?”
“Thrice your usual fee for passage to Slaver’s Bay.”
“For each of you?” The captain showed his teeth in something
that might have been intended as a smile though it gave his narrow
face a feral look. “Perhaps. It is true, I am a bolder man than most.
How soon will you wish to leave?”
“The morrow would not be too soon.”
“Done. Return an hour before rst light, with your friends and
your wines. Best to be under way whilst Volantis sleeps, so no one
will ask us inconvenient questions about our destination.”
“As you say. An hour before rst light.”
The captain’s smile widened. “I am pleased that I can help you.
We will have a happy voyage, yes?”

“I am certain of it,” said Gerris. The captain called for ale then,
and the two of them drank a toast to their venture.
“A sweet man,” Gerris said afterward, as he and Quentyn made
their way down to the foot of the pier where their hired hathay
waited. The air hung hot and heavy, and the sun was so bright that
both of them were squinting.
“This is a sweet city,” Quentyn agreed. Sweet enough to rot your
teeth. Sweet beets were grown in profusion hereabouts, and were
served with almost every meal. The Volantenes made a cold soup of
them, as thick and rich as purple honey. Their wines were sweet as
well. “I fear our happy voyage will be short, however. That sweet
man does not mean to take us to Meereen. He was too quick to
accept your o er. He’ll take thrice the usual fee, no doubt, and once
he has us aboard and out of sight of land, he’ll slit our throats and
take the rest of our gold as well.”
“Or chain us to an oar, beside those wretches we were smelling.
We need to nd a better class of smuggler, I think.”
Their driver awaited them beside his hathay. In Westeros, it might
have been called an oxcart, though it was a deal more ornate than
any cart that Quentyn had ever seen in Dorne, and lacked an ox.
The hathay was pulled by a dwarf elephant, her hide the color of
dirty snow. The streets of Old Volantis were full of such.
Quentyn would have preferred to walk, but they were miles from
their inn. Besides, the innkeep at the Merchant’s House had warned
him that traveling afoot would taint them in the eyes of foreign
captains and the native-born Volantenes alike. Persons of quality
traveled by palanquin, or in the back of a hathay … and as it
happened the innkeep had a cousin who owned several such
contrivances and would be pleased to serve them in this matter.
Their driver was one of the cousin’s slaves, a small man with a
wheel tattooed upon one cheek, naked but for a breechclout and a
pair of sandals. His skin was the color of teak, his eyes chips of int.
After he had helped them up onto the cushioned bench between the
cart’s two huge wooden wheels, he clambered onto the elephant’s
back. “The Merchant’s House,” Quentyn told him, “but go along the
wharves.” Beyond the waterfront and its breezes, the streets and

alleys of Volantis were hot enough to drown a man in his own
sweat, at least on this side of the river.
The driver shouted something at his elephant in the local tongue.
The beast began to move, trunk swaying from side to side. The cart
lurched along behind her, the driver hooting at sailors and slaves
alike to clear the way. It was easy enough to tell one from the
other. The slaves were all tattooed: a mask of blue feathers, a
lightning bolt that ran from jaw to brow, a coin upon the cheek, a
leopard’s spots, a skull, a jug. Maester Kedry said there were ve
slaves for every free man in Volantis though he had not lived long
enough to verify his estimate. He had perished on the morning the
corsairs swarmed aboard the Meadowlark.
Quentyn lost two other friends that same day—Willam Wells with
his freckles and his crooked teeth, fearless with a lance, and Cletus
Yronwood, handsome despite his lazy eye, always randy, always
laughing. Cletus had been Quentyn’s dearest friend for half his life,
a brother in all but blood. “Give your bride a kiss for me,” Cletus
had whispered to him, just before he died.
The corsairs had come aboard in the darkness before the dawn, as
the Meadowlark was anchored o the coast of the Disputed Lands.
The crew had beaten them o , at the cost of twelve lives. Afterward
the sailors stripped the dead corsairs of boots and belts and
weapons, divvied up their purses, and yanked gemstones from their
ears and rings from their ngers. One of the corpses was so fat that
the ship’s cook had to cut his ngers o with a meat cleaver to
claim his rings. It took three Meadowlarks to roll the body into the
sea. The other pirates were chucked in after him, without a word of
prayer or ceremony.
Their own dead received more tender treatment. The sailors
sewed their bodies up in canvas, weighed down with ballast stones
so they might sink more quickly. The captain of the Meadowlark led
his crew in a prayer for the souls of their slain shipmates. Then he
turned to his Dornish passengers, the three who still remained of
the six who had come aboard at the Planky Town. Even the big man
had emerged, pale and greensick and unsteady on his feet,
struggling up from the depths of the ship’s hold to pay his last

respects. “One of you should say some words for your dead, before
we give them to the sea,” the captain said. Gerris had obliged, lying
with every other word, since he dare not tell the truth of who
they’d been or why they’d come.
It was not supposed to end like that for them. “This will be a tale to
tell our grandchildren,” Cletus had declared the day they set out
from his father’s castle. Will made a face at that, and said, “A tale to
tell tavern wenches, you mean, in hopes they’ll lift their skirts.”
Cletus had slapped him on the back. “For grandchildren, you need
children. For children, you need to lift some skirts.” Later, in the
Planky Town, the Dornishmen had toasted Quentyn’s future bride,
made ribald japes about his wedding night to come, and talked
about the things they’d see, the deeds they’d do, the glory they
would win. All they won was a sailcloth sack lled with ballast stones.
As much as he mourned Will and Cletus, it was the maester’s loss
that Quentyn felt most keenly. Kedry had been uent in the tongues
of all of the Free Cities, and even the mongrel Ghiscari that men
spoke along the shores of Slaver’s Bay. “Maester Kedry will
accompany you,” his father said the night they parted. “Heed his
counsel. He has devoted half his life to the study of the Nine Free
Cities.” Quentyn wondered if things might not have gone a deal
easier if only he were here to guide them.
“I would sell my mother for a bit of breeze,” said Gerris, as they
rolled through the dockside throngs. “It’s moist as the Maiden’s
cunt, and still shy of noon. I hate this city.”
Quentyn shared the feeling. The sullen wet heat of Volantis
sapped his strength and left him feeling dirty. The worst part was
knowing that nightfall would bring no relief. Up in the high
meadows north of Lord Yronwood’s estates, the air was always crisp
and cool after dark, no matter how hot the day had been. Not here.
In Volantis, the nights were almost as hot as the days.
“The Goddess sails for New Ghis on the morrow,” Gerris reminded
him. “That at least would bring us closer.”
“New Ghis is an island, and a much smaller port than this. We
would be closer, yes, but we could nd ourselves stranded. And
New Ghis has allied with the Yunkai’i.” That news had not come as

a surprise to Quentyn. New Ghis and Yunkai were both Ghiscari
cities. “If Volantis should ally with them as well—”
“We need to nd a ship from Westeros,” suggested Gerris, “some
trader out of Lannisport or Oldtown.”
“Few come this far, and those who do ll their holds with silk and
spice from the Jade Sea, then bend their oars for home.”
“Perhaps a Braavosi ship? One hears of purple sails as far away as
Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea.”
“The Braavosi are descended from escaped slaves. They do not
trade in Slaver’s Bay.”
“Do we have enough gold to buy a ship?”
“And who will sail her? You? Me?” Dornishmen had never been
seafarers, not since Nymeria burned her ten thousand ships. “The
seas around Valyria are perilous, and thick with corsairs.”
“I have had enough of corsairs. Let’s not buy a ship.”
This is still just a game to him, Quentyn realized, no di erent than
the time he led six of us up into the mountains to nd the old lair of the
Vulture King. It was not in Gerris Drinkwater’s nature to imagine
they might fail, let alone that they might die. Even the deaths of
three friends had not served to chasten him, it would seem. He
leaves that to me. He knows my nature is as cautious as his is bold.
“Perhaps the big man is right,” Ser Gerris said. “Piss on the sea,
we can nish the journey overland.”
“You know why he says that,” Quentyn said. “He’d rather die
than set foot on another ship.” The big man had been greensick
every day of their voyage. In Lys, it had taken him four days to
recover his strength. They’d had to take rooms in an inn so Maester
Kedry could tuck him into a feather bed and feed him broths and
potions until some pink returned to his cheeks.
It was possible to go overland to Meereen, that much was true.
The old Valyrian roads would take them there. Dragon roads, men
called the great stone roadways of the Freehold, but the one that
ran eastward from Volantis to Meereen had earned a more sinister
name: the demon road.
“The demon road is dangerous, and too slow,” Quentyn said.
“Tywin Lannister will send his own men after the queen once word

of her reaches King’s Landing.” His father had been certain of that.
“His will come with knives. If they reach her rst—”
“Let’s hope her dragons will sni them out and eat them,” said
Gerris. “Well, if we cannot nd a ship, and you will not let us ride,
we had as well book passage back to Dorne.”
Crawl back to Sunspear defeated, with my tail between my legs? His
father’s disappointment would be more than Quentyn could bear,
and the scorn of the Sand Snakes would be withering. Doran Martell
had put the fate of Dorne into his hands, he could not fail him, not
whilst life remained.
Heat shimmers rose o the street as the hathay rattled and
jounced along on its iron-rimmed wheels, giving a dreamlike quality
to their surroundings. In amongst the warehouses and the wharves,
shops and stalls of many sorts crowded the waterfront. Here fresh
oysters could be bought, here iron chains and manacles, here cyvasse
pieces carved of ivory and jade. Here were temples too, where
sailors came to sacri ce to foreign gods, cheek by jowl with pillow
houses where women called down from balconies to men below.
“Have a look at that one,” Gerris urged, as they passed one pillow
house. “I think she’s in love with you.”
And how much does a whore’s love cost? Truth be told, girls made
Quentyn anxious, especially the pretty ones.
When rst he’d come to Yronwood, he had been smitten with
Ynys, the eldest of Lord Yronwood’s daughters. Though he never
said a word about his feelings, he nursed his dreams for
years … until the day she was dispatched to wed Ser Ryon Allyrion,
the heir to Godsgrace. The last time he had seen her, she’d had one
boy at her breast and another clinging to her skirts.
After Ynys had come the Drinkwater twins, a pair of tawny young
maidens who loved hawking, hunting, climbing rocks, and making
Quentyn blush. One of them had given him his rst kiss, though he
never knew which one. As daughters of a landed knight, the twins
were too lowborn to marry, but Cletus did not think that was any
reason to stop kissing them. “After you’re wed you can take one of
them for a paramour. Or both, why not?” But Quentyn thought of

several reasons why not, so he had done his best to avoid the twins
thereafter, and there had been no second kiss.
More recently, the youngest of Lord Yronwood’s daughters had
taken to following him about the castle. Gwyneth was but twelve, a
small, scrawny girl whose dark eyes and brown hair set her apart in
that house of blue-eyed blondes. She was clever, though, as quick
with words as with her hands, and fond of telling Quentyn that he
had to wait for her to ower, so she could marry him.
That was before Prince Doran had summoned him to the Water
Gardens. And now the most beautiful woman in the world was
waiting in Meereen, and he meant to do his duty and claim her for
his bride. She will not refuse me. She will honor the agreement.
Daenerys Targaryen would need Dorne to win the Seven Kingdoms,
and that meant that she would need him. It does not mean that she
will love me, though. She may not even like me.
The street curved where the river met the sea, and there along
the bend a number of animal sellers were clustered together,
o ering jeweled lizards, giant banded snakes, and agile little
monkeys with striped tails and clever pink hands. “Perhaps your
silver queen would like a monkey,” said Gerris.
Quentyn had no idea what Daenerys Targaryen might like. He
had promised his father that he would bring her back to Dorne, but
more and more he wondered if he was equal to the task.
I never asked for this, he thought.
Across the wide blue expanse of the Rhoyne, he could see the
Black Wall that had been raised by the Valyrians when Volantis was
no more than an outpost of their empire: a great oval of fused stone
two hundred feet high and so thick that six four-horse chariots could
race around its top abreast, as they did each year to celebrate the
founding of the city. Outlanders, foreigners, and freedmen were not
allowed inside the Black Wall save at the invitation of those who
dwelt within, scions of the Old Blood who could trace their ancestry
back to Valyria itself.
The tra c was thicker here. They were near the western end of
the Long Bridge, which linked the two halves of the city. Wayns and
carts and hathays crowded the streets, all of them coming from the

bridge or making for it. Slaves were everywhere, as numerous as
roaches, scurrying about their masters’ business.
Not far from Fishermonger’s Square and the Merchant’s House,
shouts erupted from a cross street, and a dozen Unsullied spearmen
in ornate armor and tiger-skin cloaks appeared as if from nowhere,
waving everyone aside so the triarch could pass through atop his
elephant. The triarch’s elephant was a grey-skinned behemoth clad
in elaborate enameled armor that clattered softly as he moved, the
castle on its back so tall that it scraped the top of the ornamental
stone arch he was passing underneath. “The triarchs are considered
so elevated that their feet are not allowed to touch the ground
during their year of service,” Quentyn informed his companion.
“They ride everywhere on elephants.”
“Blocking up the streets and leaving heaps of dung for the likes of
us to contend with,” said Gerris. “Why Volantis needs three princes
when Dorne makes do with one, I will never know.”
“The triarchs are neither kings nor princes. Volantis is a freehold,
like Valyria of old. All freeborn landholders share the rule. Even
women are allowed to vote, provided they own land. The three
triarchs are chosen from amongst those noble families who can
prove unbroken descent from old Valyria, to serve until the rst day
of the new year. And you would know all this if you had troubled to
read the book that Maester Kedry gave you.”
“It had no pictures.”
“There were maps.”
“Maps do not count. If he had told me it was about tigers and
elephants, I might have given it a try. It looked suspiciously like a
history.”
When their hathay reached the edge of the Fishermonger’s Square,
their elephant lifted her trunk and made a honking noise like some
huge white goose, reluctant to plunge into the tangle of wayns,
palanquins, and foot tra c ahead. Their driver prodded her with his
heel and kept her moving.
The shmongers were out in strength, crying the morning catch.
Quentyn understood one word in two at best, but he did not need to
know the words to know the sh. He saw cod and sail sh and

sardines, barrels of mussels and clams. Eels hung along the front of
one stall. Another displayed a gigantic turtle, strung up by its legs
on iron chains, heavy as a horse. Crabs scrabbled inside casks of
brine and seaweed. Several of the vendors were frying chunks of
sh with onions and beets, or selling peppery sh stew out of small
iron kettles.
In the center of the square, under the cracked and headless statue
of a dead triarch, a crowd had begun to gather about some dwarfs
putting on a show. The little men were done up in wooden armor,
miniature knights preparing for a joust. Quentyn saw one mount a
dog, as the other hopped onto a pig … only to slide right o again,
to a smattering of laughter.
“They look amusing,” Gerris said. “Shall we stop and watch them
ght? A laugh might serve you well, Quent. You look like an old
man who has not moved his bowels in half a year.”
I am eight-and-ten, six years younger than you, Quentyn thought. I
am no old man. Instead he said, “I have no need for comic dwarfs.
Unless they have a ship.”
“A small one, I would think.”
Four stories tall, the Merchant’s House dominated the docks and
wharves and storehouses that surrounded it. Here traders from
Oldtown and King’s Landing mingled with their counterparts from
Braavos and Pentos and Myr, with hairy Ibbenese, pale-skinned
voyagers from Qarth, coal-black Summer Islanders in feathered
cloaks, even masked shadow-binders from Asshai by the Shadow.
The paving stones felt warm beneath his feet when Quentyn
climbed down from the hathay, even through the leather of his
boots. Outside the Merchant’s House a trestle table had been set up
in the shade and decorated with striped blue-and-white pennons that
uttered at every breath of air. Four hard-eyed sellswords lounged
around the table, calling out to every passing man and boy.
Windblown, Quentyn knew. The serjeants were looking for fresh
meat to ll their ranks before they sailed for Slaver’s Bay. And every
man who signs with them is another sword for Yunkai, another blade
meant to drink the blood of my bride-to-be.

One of the Windblown shouted at them. “I do not speak your
tongue,” Quentyn answered. Though he could read and write High
Valyrian, he had little practice speaking it. And the Volantene apple
had rolled a fair distance from the Valyrian tree.
“Westerosi?” the man answered, in the Common Tongue.
“Dornishmen. My master is a wineseller.”
“Master? Fuck that. Are you a slave? Come with us and be your
own master. Do you want to die abed? We’ll teach you sword and
spear. You’ll ride to battle with the Tattered Prince and come home
richer than a lord. Boys, girls, gold, whatever you want, if you’re
man enough to take it. We’re the Windblown, and we fuck the
goddess slaughter up her arse.”
Two of the sellswords began to sing, bellowing out the words to
some marching song. Quentyn understood enough to get the gist.
We are the Windblown, they sang. Blow us east to Slaver’s Bay, we’ll
kill the butcher king and fuck the dragon queen.
“If Cletus and Will were still with us, we could come back with
the big man and kill the lot of them,” said Gerris.
Cletus and Will are dead. “Pay them no mind,” Quentyn said. The
sellswords threw taunts at their backs as they pushed through the
doors of the Merchant’s House, mocking them as bloodless cravens
and frightened girls.
The big man was waiting in their rooms on the second oor.
Though the inn had come well recommended by the master of the
Meadowlark, that did not mean Quentyn was willing to leave their
goods and gold unguarded. Every port had thieves, rats, and
whores, and Volantis had more than most.
“I was about to go out looking for you,” Ser Archibald Yronwood
said as he slid the bar back to admit them. It was his cousin Cletus
who had started calling him the big man, but the name was well
deserved. Arch was six-and-a-half-feet tall, broad of shoulder, huge
of belly, with legs like tree trunks, hands the size of hams, and no
neck to speak of. Some childhood malady had made all his hair fall
out. His bald head reminded Quentyn of a smooth pink boulder.
“So,” he demanded, “what did the smuggler say? Do we have a
boat?”

“A ship,” corrected Quentyn. “Aye, he’ll take us, but only as far as
the nearest hell.”
Gerris sat upon a sagging bed and pulled o his boots. “Dorne is
sounding more attractive every moment.”
The big man said, “I still say we would do better to ride the
demon road. Might be it’s not as perilous as men say. And if it is,
that only means more glory for those who dare it. Who would dare
molest us? Drink with his sword, me with my hammer, that’s more
than any demon could digest.”
“And if Daenerys is dead before we reach her?” Quentyn said.
“We must have a ship. Even if it is Adventure.”
Gerris laughed. “You must be more desperate for Daenerys than I
knew if you’d endure that stench for months on end. After three
days, I’d be begging them to murder me. No, my prince, I pray you,
not Adventure.”
“Do you have a better way?” Quentyn asked him.
“I do. It’s just now come to me. It has its risks, and it is not what
you would call honorable, I grant you … but it will get you to your
queen quicker than the demon road.”
“Tell me,” said Quentyn Martell.

JON

J

on Snow read the letter over until the words began to blur and
run together. I cannot sign this. I will not sign this.
He almost burned the parchment then and there. Instead he took
a sip of ale, the dregs of the half cup that remained from his solitary
supper the night before. I have to sign it. They chose me to be their
lord commander. The Wall is mine, and the Watch as well. The Night’s
Watch takes no part.
It was a relief when Dolorous Edd Tollett opened the door to tell
him that Gilly was without. Jon set Maester Aemon’s letter aside. “I
will see her.” He dreaded this. “Find Sam for me. I will want to
speak with him next.”
“He’ll be down with the books. My old septon used to say that
books are dead men talking. Dead men should keep quiet, is what I
say. No one wants to hear a dead man’s yabber.” Dolorous Edd went
o muttering of worms and spiders.
When Gilly entered, she went at once to her knees. Jon came
around the table and drew her to her feet. “You don’t need to take a
knee for me. That’s just for kings.” Though a wife and mother, Gilly
still seemed half a child to him, a slender little thing wrapped up in
one of Sam’s old cloaks. The cloak was so big on her that she could
have hidden several other girls beneath its folds. “The babes are
well?” he asked her.
The wildling girl smiled timidly from under her cowl. “Yes,
m’lord. I was scared I wouldn’t have milk enough for both, but the
more they suck, the more I have. They’re strong.”

“I have something hard to tell you.” He almost said ask, but
caught himself at the last instant.
“Is it Mance? Val begged the king to spare him. She said she’d let
some kneeler marry her and never slit his throat if only Mance
could live. That Lord o’Bones, he’s to be spared. Craster always
swore he’d kill him if he ever showed his face about the keep.
Mance never did half the things he done.”
All Mance ever did was lead an army down upon the realm he once
swore to protect. “Mance said our words, Gilly. Then he turned his
cloak, wed Dalla, and crowned himself King-Beyond-the-Wall. His
life is in the king’s hands now. It’s not him we need to talk about.
It’s his son. Dalla’s boy.”
“The babe?” Her voice trembled. “He never broke no oath,
m’lord. He sleeps and cries and sucks, is all; he’s never done no
harm to no one. Don’t let her burn him. Save him, please.”
“Only you can do that, Gilly.” Jon told her how.
Another woman would have shrieked at him, cursed him, damned
him down to seven hells. Another woman might have own at him
in rage, slapped him, kicked him, raked at his eyes with her nails.
Another woman might have thrown her de ance in his teeth.
Gilly shook her head. “No. Please, no.”
The raven picked up the word. “No,” it screamed.
“Refuse, and the boy will burn. Not on the morrow, nor the day
after … but soon, whenever Melisandre needs to wake a dragon or
raise a wind or work some other spell requiring king’s blood. Mance
will be ash and bone by then, so she will claim his son for the re,
and Stannis will not deny her. If you do not take the boy away, she
will burn him.”
“I’ll go,” said Gilly. “I’ll take him, I’ll take the both o’ them,
Dalla’s boy and mine.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. If not for the
way the candle made them glisten, Jon might never have known
that she was weeping. Craster’s wives would have taught their
daughters to shed their tears into a pillow. Perhaps they went outside to
weep, well away from Craster’s sts.
Jon closed the ngers of his sword hand. “Take both boys and the
queen’s men will ride after you and drag you back. The boy will

still burn … and you with him.” If I comfort her, she may think that
tears can move me. She has to realize that I will not yield. “You’ll take
one boy, and that one Dalla’s.”
“A mother can’t leave her son, or else she’s cursed forever. Not a
son. We saved him, Sam and me. Please. Please, m’lord. We saved
him from the cold.”
“Men say that freezing to death is almost peaceful. Fire,
though … do you see the candle, Gilly?”
She looked at the ame. “Yes.”
“Touch it. Put your hand over the ame.”
Her big brown eyes grew bigger still. She did not move.
“Do it.” Kill the boy. “Now.”
Trembling, the girl reached out her hand, held it well above the
ickering candle ame.
“Down. Let it kiss you.”
Gilly lowered her hand. An inch. Another. When the ame licked
her esh, she snatched her hand back and began to sob.
“Fire is a cruel way to die. Dalla died to give this child life, but
you have nourished him, cherished him. You saved your own boy
from the ice. Now save hers from the re.”
“They’ll burn my babe, then. The red woman. If she can’t have
Dalla’s, she’ll burn mine.”
“Your son has no king’s blood. Melisandre gains nothing by
giving him to the re. Stannis wants the free folk to ght for him,
he will not burn an innocent without good cause. Your boy will be
safe. I will nd a wet nurse for him and he’ll be raised here at
Castle Black under my protection. He’ll learn to hunt and ride, to
ght with sword and axe and bow. I’ll even see that he is taught to
read and write.” Sam would like that. “And when he is old enough,
he will learn the truth of who he is. He’ll be free to seek you out if
that is what he wants.”
“You will make a crow of him.” She wiped at her tears with the
back of a small pale hand. “I won’t. I won’t.”
Kill the boy, thought Jon. “You will. Else I promise you, the day
that they burn Dalla’s boy, yours will die as well.”
“Die,” shrieked the Old Bear’s raven. “Die, die, die.”

The girl sat hunched and shrunken, staring at the candle ame,
tears glistening in her eyes. Finally Jon said, “You have my leave to
go. Do not speak of this, but see that you are ready to depart an
hour before rst light. My men will come for you.”
Gilly got to her feet. Pale and wordless, she departed, with never
a look back at him. Jon heard her footsteps as she rushed through
the armory. She was almost running.
When he went to close the door, Jon saw that Ghost was
stretched out beneath the anvil, gnawing on the bone of an ox. The
big white direwolf looked up at his approach. “Past time that you
were back.” He returned to his chair, to read over Maester Aemon’s
letter once again.
Samwell Tarly turned up a few moments later, clutching a stack
of books. No sooner had he entered than Mormont’s raven ew at
him demanding corn. Sam did his best to oblige, o ering some
kernels from the sack beside the door. The raven did its best to peck
through his palm. Sam yowled, the bird apped o , corn scattered.
“Did that wretch break the skin?” Jon asked.
Sam gingerly removed his glove. “He did. I’m bleeding.”
“We all shed our blood for the Watch. Wear thicker gloves.” Jon
shoved a chair toward him with a foot. “Sit, and have a look at
this.” He handed Sam the parchment.
“What is it?”
“A paper shield.”
Sam read it slowly. “A letter to King Tommen?”
“At Winterfell, Tommen fought my brother Bran with wooden
swords,” Jon said, remembering. “He wore so much padding he
looked like a stu ed goose. Bran knocked him to the ground.” He
went to the window and threw the shutters open. The air outside
was cold and bracing, though the sky was a dull grey. “Yet Bran’s
dead, and pudgy pink-faced Tommen is sitting on the Iron Throne,
with a crown nestled amongst his golden curls.”
That got an odd look from Sam, and for a moment he looked as if
he wanted to say something. Instead he swallowed and turned back
to the parchment. “You haven’t signed the letter.”

Jon shook his head. “The Old Bear begged the Iron Throne for
help a hundred times. They sent him Janos Slynt. No letter will
make the Lannisters love us better. Not once they hear that we’ve
been helping Stannis.”
“Only to defend the Wall, not in his rebellion. That’s what it says
here.”
“The distinction may escape Lord Tywin.” Jon snatched the letter
back. “Why would he help us now? He never did before.”
“Well, he will not want it said that Stannis rode to the defense of
the realm whilst King Tommen was playing with his toys. That
would bring scorn down upon House Lannister.”
“It’s death and destruction I want to bring down upon House
Lannister, not scorn.” Jon read from the letter. “The Night’s Watch
takes no part in the wars of the Seven Kingdoms. Our oaths are sworn to
the realm, and the realm now stands in dire peril. Stannis Baratheon aids
us against our foes from beyond the Wall, though we are not his men …”
Sam squirmed in his seat. “Well, we’re not. Are we?”
“I gave Stannis food, shelter, and the Nightfort, plus leave to
settle some free folk in the Gift. That’s all.”
“Lord Tywin will say it was too much.”
“Stannis says it’s not enough. The more you give a king, the more
he wants. We are walking on a bridge of ice with an abyss on either
side. Pleasing one king is di cult enough. Pleasing two is hardly
possible.”
“Yes, but … if the Lannisters should prevail and Lord Tywin
decides that we betrayed the king by aiding Stannis, it could mean
the end of the Night’s Watch. He has the Tyrells behind him, with
all the strength of Highgarden. And he did defeat Lord Stannis on
the Blackwater.”
“The Blackwater was one battle. Robb won all his battles and still
lost his head. If Stannis can raise the north …”
Sam hesitated, then said, “The Lannisters have northmen of their
own. Lord Bolton and his bastard.”
“Stannis has the Karstarks. If he can win White Harbor …”
“If,” Sam stressed. “If not … my lord, even a paper shield is
better than none.”

“I suppose so.” Him and Aemon both. Somehow he had hoped that
Sam Tarly might see it di erently. It is only ink and parchment.
Resigned, he grabbed the quill and signed. “Get the sealing wax.”
Before I change my mind. Sam hastened to obey. Jon xed the lord
commander’s seal and handed him the letter. “Take this to Maester
Aemon when you leave, and tell him to dispatch a bird to King’s
Landing.”
“I will.” Sam sounded relieved. “My lord, if I might ask … I saw
Gilly leaving. She was almost crying.”
“Val sent her to plead for Mance again,” Jon lied, and they talked
for a while of Mance and Stannis and Melisandre of Asshai, until the
raven ate the last corn kernel and screamed, “Blood.”
“I am sending Gilly away,” Jon said. “Her and the boy. We will
need to nd another wet nurse for his milk brother.”
“Goat’s milk might serve, until you do. It’s better for a babe than
cow’s milk.” Talking about breasts plainly made Sam
uncomfortable, and suddenly he began to speak of history, and boy
commanders who had lived and died hundreds of years ago. Jon cut
him o with, “Tell me something useful. Tell me of our enemy.”
“The Others.” Sam licked his lips. “They are mentioned in the
annals, though not as often as I would have thought. The annals I’ve
found and looked at, that is. There’s more I haven’t found, I know.
Some of the older books are falling to pieces. The pages crumble
when I try and turn them. And the really old books … either they
have crumbled all away or they are buried somewhere that I
haven’t looked yet or … well, it could be that there are no such
books and never were. The oldest histories we have were written
after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes
on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes
and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set
down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at
the Citadel who question all of it. Those old histories are full of
kings who reigned for hundreds of years, and knights riding around
a thousand years before there were knights. You know the tales,
Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star-Eyes, Night’s King … we say that
you’re the nine-hundred-and-ninety-eighth Lord Commander of the

Night’s Watch, but the oldest list I’ve found shows six hundred
seventy-four commanders, which suggests that it was written during
—”
“Long ago,” Jon broke in. “What about the Others?”
“I found mention of dragonglass. The children of the forest used
to give the Night’s Watch a hundred obsidian daggers every year,
during the Age of Heroes. The Others come when it is cold, most of
the tales agree. Or else it gets cold when they come. Sometimes
they appear during snowstorms and melt away when the skies clear.
They hide from the light of the sun and emerge by night … or else
night falls when they emerge. Some stories speak of them riding the
corpses of dead animals. Bears, direwolves, mammoths, horses, it
makes no matter, so long as the beast is dead. The one that killed
Small Paul was riding a dead horse, so that part’s plainly true. Some
accounts speak of giant ice spiders too. I don’t know what those are.
Men who fall in battle against the Others must be burned, or else
the dead will rise again as their thralls.”
“We knew all this. The question is, how do we ght them?”
“The armor of the Others is proof against most ordinary blades, if
the tales can be believed, and their own swords are so cold they
shatter steel. Fire will dismay them, though, and they are
vulnerable to obsidian. I found one account of the Long Night that
spoke of the last hero slaying Others with a blade of dragonsteel.
Supposedly they could not stand against it.”
“Dragonsteel?” The term was new to Jon. “Valyrian steel?”
“That was my rst thought as well.”
“So if I can just convince the lords of the Seven Kingdoms to give
us their Valyrian blades, all is saved? That won’t be hard.” No harder
than asking them to give up their coin and castles. He gave a bitter
laugh. “Did you nd who the Others are, where they come from,
what they want?”
“Not yet, my lord, but it may be that I’ve just been reading the
wrong books. There are hundreds I have not looked at yet. Give me
more time and I will nd whatever there is to be found.”
“There is no more time. You need to get your things together,
Sam. You’re going with Gilly.”

“Going?” Sam gaped at him openmouthed, as if he did not
understand the meaning of the word. “I’m going? To Eastwatch, my
lord? Or … where am I …”
“Oldtown.”
“Oldtown?” Sam repeated, in a high-pitched squeak.
“Aemon as well.”
“Aemon? Maester Aemon? But … he’s one hundred and two years
old, my lord, he can’t … you’re sending him and me? Who will tend
the ravens? If there’s sick or wounded, who …”
“Clydas. He’s been with Aemon for years.”
“Clydas is only a steward, and his eyes are going bad. You need a
maester. Maester Aemon is so frail, a sea voyage … it might … he’s
old, and …”
“His life will be at risk. I am aware of that, Sam, but the risk is
greater here. Stannis knows who Aemon is. If the red woman
requires king’s blood for her spells …”
“Oh.” Sam’s fat cheeks seemed to drain of color.
“Dareon will join you at Eastwatch. My hope is that his songs will
win some men for us in the south. The Blackbird will deliver you to
Braavos. From there, you’ll arrange your own passage to Oldtown.
If you still mean to claim Gilly’s babe as your bastard, send her and
the child on to Horn Hill. Elsewise, Aemon will nd a servant’s
place for her at the Citadel.”
“My b-b-bastard. Yes, I … my mother and my sisters will help
Gilly with the child. Dareon could see her to Oldtown just as well as
me. I’m … I’ve been working at my archery every afternoon with
Ulmer, as you commanded … well, except when I’m in the vaults,
but you told me to nd out about the Others. The longbow makes
my shoulders ache and raises blisters on my ngers.” He showed
Jon his hand. “I still do it, though. I can hit the target more often
than not now, but I’m still the worst archer who ever bent a bow. I
like Ulmer’s stories, though. Someone needs to write them down
and put them in a book.”
“You do it. They have parchment and ink at the Citadel, as well
as longbows. I will expect you to continue with your practice. Sam,
the Night’s Watch has hundreds of men who can loose an arrow, but

only a handful who can read or write. I need you to become my
new maester.”
“My lord, I … my work is here, the books …”
“… will be here when you return to us.”
Sam put a hand to his throat. “My lord, the Citadel … they make
you cut up corpses there. I cannot wear a chain.”
“You can. You will. Maester Aemon is old and blind. His strength
is leaving him. Who will take his place when he dies? Maester
Mullin at the Shadow Tower is more ghter than scholar, and
Maester Harmune of Eastwatch is drunk more than he’s sober.”
“If you ask the Citadel for more maesters …”
“I mean to. We’ll have need of every one. Aemon Targaryen is
not so easily replaced, however.” This is not going as I had hoped. He
had known Gilly would be hard, but he had assumed Sam would be
glad to trade the dangers of the Wall for the warmth of Oldtown. “I
was certain this would please you,” he said, puzzled. “There are so
many books at the Citadel that no man can hope to read them all.
You would do well there, Sam. I know you would.”
“No. I could read the books, but … a m-maester must be a healer
and b-b-blood makes me faint.” His hand shook, to prove the truth
of that. “I’m Sam the Scared, not Sam the Slayer.”
“Scared? Of what? The chidings of old men? Sam, you saw the
wights come swarming up the Fist, a tide of living dead men with
black hands and bright blue eyes. You slew an Other.”
“It was the d-d-d-dragonglass, not me.”
“Be quiet,” Jon snapped. After Gilly, he had no patience for the
fat boy’s fears. “You lied and schemed and plotted to make me lord
commander. You will obey me. You’ll go to the Citadel and forge a
chain, and if you have to cut up corpses, so be it. At least in
Oldtown the corpses won’t object.”
“My lord, my f-f-f-father, Lord Randyll, he, he, he, he, he … the
life of a maester is a life of servitude. No son of House Tarly will
ever wear a chain. The men of Horn Hill do not bow and scrape to
petty lords. Jon, I cannot disobey my father.”
Kill the boy, Jon thought. The boy in you, and the one in him. Kill
the both of them, you bloody bastard. “You have no father. Only

brothers. Only us. Your life belongs to the Night’s Watch, so go and
stu your smallclothes into a sack, along with anything else you
care to take to Oldtown. You leave an hour before sunrise. And
here’s another order. From this day forth, you will not call yourself
a craven. You’ve faced more things this past year than most men
face in a lifetime. You can face the Citadel, but you’ll face it as a
Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch. I can’t command you to be
brave, but I can command you to hide your fears. You said the
words, Sam. Remember?”
“I … I’ll try.”
“You won’t try. You will obey.”
“Obey.” Mormont’s raven apped its great black wings.
Sam seemed to sag. “As my lord commands. Does … does Maester
Aemon know?”
“It was as much his idea as mine.” Jon opened the door for him.
“No farewells. The fewer folk who know of this, the better. An hour
before rst light, by the lichyard.”
Sam ed from him just as Gilly had.
Jon was tired. I need sleep. He had been up half the night poring
over maps, writing letters, and making plans with Maester Aemon.
Even after stumbling into his narrow bed, rest had not come easily.
He knew what he would face today, and found himself tossing
restlessly as he brooded on Maester Aemon’s nal words. “Allow me
to give my lord one last piece of counsel,” the old man had said,
“the same counsel that I once gave my brother when we parted for
the last time. He was three-and-thirty when the Great Council chose
him to mount the Iron Throne. A man grown with sons of his own,
yet in some ways still a boy. Egg had an innocence to him, a
sweetness we all loved. Kill the boy within you, I told him the day I
took ship for the Wall. It takes a man to rule. An Aegon, not an Egg.
Kill the boy and let the man be born.” The old man felt Jon’s face.
“You are half the age that Egg was, and your own burden is a
crueler one, I fear. You will have little joy of your command, but I
think you have the strength in you to do the things that must be
done. Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy
and let the man be born.”

Jon donned his cloak and strode outside. He made the rounds of
Castle Black each day, visiting the men on watch and hearing their
reports rst hand, watching Ulmer and his charges at the archery
butts, talking with king’s men and queen’s men alike, walking the
ice atop the Wall to have a look at the forest. Ghost padded after
him, a white shadow at his side.
Kedge Whiteye had the Wall when Jon made his ascent. Kedge
had seen forty-odd namedays, thirty of them on the Wall. His left
eye was blind, his right eye mean. In the wild, alone with axe and
garron, he was as good a ranger as any in the Watch, but he had
never gotten on well with the other men. “A quiet day,” he told
Jon. “Nothing to report, except the wrong-way rangers.”
“The wrong-way rangers?” Jon asked.
Kedge grinned. “A pair of knights. Went riding o an hour ago,
south along the kingsroad. When Dywen saw them buggering o ,
he said the southron fools were riding the wrong way.”
“I see,” said Jon.
He found out more from Dywen himself, as the old forester
sucked down a bowl of barley broth in the barracks. “Aye, m’lord, I
saw them. Horpe and Massey, it were. Claimed Stannis sent ’em
out, but never said where or what for or when they would be back.”
Ser Richard Horpe and Ser Justin Massey were both queen’s men,
and high in the king’s councils. A pair of common freeriders would
have served if all that Stannis had in mind was scouting, Jon Snow
re ected, but knights are better suited to act as messengers or envoys.
Cotter Pyke had sent word from Eastwatch that the Onion Lord and
Salladhor Saan had set sail for White Harbor to treat with Lord
Manderly. It made sense that Stannis would send out other envoys.
His Grace was not a patient man.
Whether the wrong-way rangers would return was another
question. Knights they might be, but they did not know the north.
There will be eyes along the kingsroad, not all of them friendly. It was
none of Jon’s concern, though. Let Stannis have his secrets. The gods
know that I have mine.
Ghost slept at the foot of the bed that night, and for once Jon did
not dream he was a wolf. Even so, he slept tfully, tossing for hours

before sliding down into a nightmare. Gilly was in it, weeping,
pleading with him to leave her babes alone, but he ripped the
children from her arms and hacked their heads o , then swapped
the heads around and told her to sew them back in place.
When he woke, he found Edd Tollett looming over him in the
darkness of his bedchamber. “M’lord? It is time. The hour of the
wolf. You left orders to be woken.”
“Bring me something hot.” Jon threw o his blankets.
Edd was back by the time that he had dressed, pressing a
steaming cup into his hands. Jon expected hot mulled wine, and was
surprised to nd that it was soup, a thin broth that smelled of leeks
and carrots but seemed to have no leeks or carrots in it. The smells
are stronger in my wolf dreams, he re ected, and food tastes richer too.
Ghost is more alive than I am. He left the empty cup upon the forge.
Kegs was on his door this morning. “I will want to speak with
Bedwyck and with Janos Slynt,” Jon told him. “Have them both
here at rst light.”
Outside the world was black and still. Cold, but not dangerously
cold. Not yet. It will be warmer when the sun comes up. If the gods are
good, the Wall may weep. When they reached the lichyard, the
column had already formed up. Jon had given Black Jack Bulwer
command of the escort, with a dozen mounted rangers under him,
and two wayns. One was piled high with chests and crates and
sacks, provisions for the journey. The other had a sti roof of boiled
leather to keep the wind o . Maester Aemon was seated in the back
of it, huddled in a bearskin that made him look as small as a child.
Sam and Gilly stood nearby. Her eyes were red and pu y, but the
boy was in her arms, bundled tight. Whether it was her boy or
Dalla’s he could not be sure. He had only seen the two together a
few times. Gilly’s boy was older, Dalla’s more robust, but they were
close enough in age and size so that no one who did not know them
well would be able to easily tell one from the other.
“Lord Snow,” Maester Aemon called out, “I left a book for you in
my chambers. The Jade Compendium. It was written by the
Volantene adventurer Colloquo Votar, who traveled to the east and

visited all the lands of the Jade Sea. There is a passage you may
nd of interest. I’ve told Clydas to mark it for you.”
“I’ll be sure to read it.”
Maester Aemon wiped his nose. “Knowledge is a weapon, Jon.
Arm yourself well before you ride forth to battle.”
“I will.” Jon felt something wet and cold upon his face. When he
raised his eyes, he saw that it was snowing. A bad omen. He turned
to Black Jack Bulwer. “Make as good a time as you can, but take no
foolish risks. You have an old man and a suckling babe with you.
See that you keep them warm and well fed.”
“You do the same, m’lord.” Gilly did not seem in any haste to
climb into the wayn. “You do the same for t’other. Find another wet
nurse, like you said. You promised me you would. The
boy … Dalla’s boy … the little prince, I mean … you nd him some
good woman, so he grows up big and strong.”
“You have my word.”
“Don’t you name him. Don’t you do that, till he’s past two years.
It’s ill luck to name them when they’re still on the breast. You
crows may not know that, but it’s true.”
“As you command, my lady.”
“Don’t you call me that. I’m a mother, not a lady. I’m Craster’s
wife and Craster’s daughter, and a mother.” She gave the babe to
Dolorous Edd as she climbed into the wayn and covered herself with
furs. When Edd gave her back the child, Gilly put him to her breast.
Sam turned away from the sight, red-faced, and heaved himself up
onto his mare. “Let’s do this,” commanded Black Jack Bulwer,
snapping his whip. The wayns rolled forward.
Sam lingered a moment. “Well,” he said, “farewell.”
“And to you, Sam,” said Dolorous Edd. “Your boat’s not like to
sink, I don’t think. Boats only sink when I’m aboard.”
Jon was remembering. “The rst time I saw Gilly she was pressed
back against the wall of Craster’s Keep, this skinny dark-haired girl
with her big belly, cringing away from Ghost. He had gotten in
among her rabbits, and I think she was frightened that he would
tear her open and devour the babe … but it was not the wolf she
should have been afraid of, was it?”

“She has more courage than she knows,” said Sam.
“So do you, Sam. Have a swift, safe voyage, and take care of her
and Aemon and the child.” The cold trickles on his face reminded
Jon of the day he’d bid farewell to Robb at Winterfell, never
knowing that it was for the last time. “And pull your hood up. The
snow akes are melting in your hair.”
By the time the little column had dwindled in the distance, the
eastern sky had gone from black to grey and the snow was falling
heavily. “Giant will be waiting on the lord commander’s pleasure,”
Dolorous Edd reminded him. “Janos Slynt as well.”
“Yes.” Jon Snow glanced up at the Wall, towering over them like
a cli of ice. A hundred leagues from end to end, and seven hundred
feet high. The strength of the Wall was its height; the length of the
Wall was its weakness. Jon remembered something his father had
said once. A wall is only as strong as the men who stand behind it. The
men of the Night’s Watch were brave enough, but they were far too
few for the task that confronted them.
Giant was waiting in the armory. His real name was Bedwyck. At
a hair and a half over ve feet he was the smallest man in the
Night’s Watch. Jon came directly to the point. “We need more eyes
along the Wall. Way-castles where our patrols can get out of the
cold and nd hot food and a fresh mount. I am putting a garrison in
Icemark and giving you command of it.”
Giant put the tip of his little nger in his ear to clean out the wax.
“Command? Me? M’lord knows I’m just a crofter’s get, on the Wall
for poaching?”
“You’ve been a ranger for a dozen years. You survived the Fist of
the First Men and Craster’s Keep, and came back to tell the tale. The
younger men look up to you.”
The small man laughed. “Only dwarfs look up to me. I don’t read,
my lord. On a good day I can write my name.”
“I’ve sent to Oldtown for more maesters. You’ll have two ravens
for when your need is urgent. When it’s not, send riders. Until we
have more maesters and more birds, I mean to establish a line of
beacon towers along the top of the Wall.”
“And how many poor fools will I be commanding?”

“Twenty, from the Watch,” said Jon, “and half as many men from
Stannis.” Old, green, or wounded. “They won’t be his best men, and
none will take the black, but they’ll obey. Make what use of them
you can. Four of the brothers I’m sending with you will be
Kingslanders who came to the Wall with Lord Slynt. Keep one eye
on that lot and watch for climbers with the other.”
“We can watch, m’lord, but if enough climbers gain the top o’ the
Wall, thirty men won’t be enough to throw them o .”
Three hundred might not be enough. Jon kept that doubt to himself.
It was true that climbers were desperately vulnerable whilst on the
ascent. Stones and spears and pots of burning pitch could be rained
down on them from above, and all they could do was cling
desperately to the ice. Sometimes the Wall itself seemed to shake
them o , as a dog might shake o
eas. Jon had seen that for
himself, when a sheet of ice cracked beneath Val’s lover Jarl,
sending him to his death.
If the climbers reached the top of the Wall undetected, however,
everything changed. Given time, they could carve out a toehold for
themselves up there, throwing up ramparts of their own and
dropping ropes and ladders for thousands more to clamber over
after them. That was how Raymun Redbeard had done it, Raymun
who had been King-Beyond-the-Wall in the days of his grandfather’s
grandfather. Jack Musgood had been the lord commander in those
days. Jolly Jack, he was called before Redbeard came down upon
the north; Sleepy Jack, forever after. Raymun’s host had met a
bloody end on the shores of Long Lake, caught between Lord
Willam of Winterfell and the Drunken Giant, Harmond Umber.
Redbeard had been slain by Artos the Implacable, Lord Willam’s
younger brother. The Watch arrived too late to ght the wildlings,
but in time to bury them, the task that Artos Stark assigned them in
his wroth as he grieved above the headless corpse of his fallen
brother.
Jon did not intend to be remembered as Sleepy Jon Snow. “Thirty
men will stand a better chance than none,” he told Giant.
“True enough,” the small man said. “Is it just to be Icemark, then,
or will m’lord be opening t’other forts as well?”

“I mean to garrison all of them, in time,” said Jon, “but for the
moment, it will just be Icemark and Greyguard.”
“And has m’lord decided who’s to command at Greyguard?”
“Janos Slynt,” said Jon. Gods save us. “A man does not rise to
command of the gold cloaks without ability. Slynt was born a
butcher’s son. He was captain of the Iron Gate when Manly
Stokeworth died, and Jon Arryn raised him up and put the defense
of King’s Landing into his hands. Lord Janos cannot be as great a
fool as he seems.” And I want him well away from Alliser Thorne.
“Might be that’s so,” said Giant, “but I’d still send him to the
kitchens to help Three-Finger Hobb cut up the turnips.”
If I did, I’d never dare to eat another turnip.
Half the morning passed before Lord Janos reported as
commanded. Jon was cleaning Longclaw. Some men would have
given that task to a steward or a squire, but Lord Eddard had taught
his sons to care for their own weapons. When Kegs and Dolorous
Edd arrived with Slynt, Jon thanked them and bid Lord Janos sit.
That he did, albeit with poor grace, crossing his arms, scowling,
and ignoring the naked steel in his lord commander’s hands. Jon slid
the oilcloth down his bastard sword, watching the play of morning
light across the ripples, thinking how easily the blade would slide
through skin and fat and sinew to part Slynt’s ugly head from his
body. All of a man’s crimes were wiped away when he took the
black, and all of his allegiances as well, yet he found it hard to think
of Janos Slynt as a brother. There is blood between us. This man
helped slay my father and did his best to have me killed as well.
“Lord Janos.” Jon sheathed his sword. “I am giving you command
of Greyguard.”
That took Slynt aback. “Greyguard … Greyguard was where you
climbed the Wall with your wildling friends …”
“It was. The fort is in a sorry state, admittedly. You will restore it
as best you can. Start by clearing back the forest. Steal stones from
the structures that have collapsed to repair those still standing.” The
work will be hard and brutal, he might have added. You’ll sleep on
stone, too exhausted to complain or plot, and soon you’ll forget what it
was like to be warm, but you might remember what it was to be a man.

“You will have thirty men. Ten from here, ten from the Shadow
Tower, and ten lent to us by King Stannis.”
Slynt’s face had turned the color of a prune. His meaty jowls
began to quiver. “Do you think I cannot see what you are doing?
Janos Slynt is not a man to be gulled so easily. I was charged with
the defense of King’s Landing when you were soiling your
swaddling clothes. Keep your ruin, bastard.”
I am giving you a chance, my lord. It is more than you ever gave my
father. “You mistake me, my lord,” Jon said. “That was a command,
not an o er. It is forty leagues to Greyguard. Pack up your arms
and armor, say your farewells, and be ready to depart at rst light
on the morrow.”
“No.” Lord Janos lurched to his feet, sending his chair crashing
over backwards. “I will not go meekly o to freeze and die. No
traitor’s bastard gives commands to Janos Slynt! I am not without
friends, I warn you. Here, and in King’s Landing too. I was the Lord
of Harrenhal! Give your ruin to one of the blind fools who cast a
stone for you, I will not have it. Do you hear me, boy? I will not
have it!”
“You will.”
Slynt did not deign to answer that, but he kicked the chair aside
as he departed.
He still sees me as a boy, Jon thought, a green boy, to be cowed by
angry words. He could only hope that a night’s sleep would bring
Lord Janos to his senses.
The next morning proved that hope was vain.
Jon found Slynt breaking his fast in the common room. Ser Alliser
Thorne was with him, and several of their cronies. They were
laughing about something when Jon came down the steps with Iron
Emmett and Dolorous Edd, and behind them Mully, Horse, Red Jack
Crabb, Rusty Flowers, and Owen the Oaf. Three-Finger Hobb was
ladling out porridge from his kettle. Queen’s men, king’s men, and
black brothers sat at their separate tables, some bent over bowls of
porridge, others lling their bellies with fried bread and bacon. Jon
saw Pyp and Grenn at one table, Bowen Marsh at another. The air

smelled of smoke and grease, and the clatter of knives and spoons
echoed o the vaulted ceiling.
All the voices died at once.
“Lord Janos,” Jon said, “I will give you one last chance. Put down
that spoon and get to the stables. I have had your horse saddled and
bridled. It is a long, hard road to Greyguard.”
“Then you had best be on your way, boy.” Slynt laughed,
dribbling porridge down his chest. “Greyguard’s a good place for
the likes of you, I’m thinking. Well away from decent godly folk.
The mark of the beast is on you, bastard.”
“You are refusing to obey my order?”
“You can stick your order up your bastard’s arse,” said Slynt, his
jowls quivering.
Alliser Thorne smiled a thin smile, his black eyes xed on Jon. At
another table, Godry the Giantslayer began to laugh.
“As you will.” Jon nodded to Iron Emmett. “Please take Lord
Janos to the Wall—”
—and con ne him to an ice cell, he might have said. A day or ten
cramped up inside the ice would leave him shivering and feverish
and begging for release, Jon did not doubt. And the moment he is
out, he and Thorne will begin to plot again.
—and tie him to his horse, he might have said. If Slynt did not wish
to go to Greyguard as its commander, he could go as its cook. It will
only be a matter of time until he deserts, then. And how many others will
he take with him?
“—and hang him,” Jon nished.
Janos Slynt’s face went as white as milk. The spoon slipped from
his ngers. Edd and Emmett crossed the room, their footsteps
ringing on the stone oor. Bowen Marsh’s mouth opened and closed
though no words came out. Ser Alliser Thorne reached for his sword
hilt. Go on, Jon thought. Longclaw was slung across his back. Show
your steel. Give me cause to do the same.
Half the men in the hall were on their feet. Southron knights and
men-at-arms, loyal to King Stannis or the red woman or both, and
Sworn Brothers of the Night’s Watch. Some had chosen Jon to be
their lord commander. Others had cast their stones for Bowen

Marsh, Ser Denys Mallister, Cotter Pyke … and some for Janos
Slynt. Hundreds of them, as I recall. Jon wondered how many of
those men were in the cellar right now. For a moment the world
balanced on a sword’s edge.
Alliser Thorne took his hand from his sword and stepped aside to
let Edd Tollett pass.
Dolorous Edd took hold of Slynt by one arm, Iron Emmett by the
other. Together they hauled him from the bench. “No,” Lord Janos
protested, ecks of porridge spraying from his lips. “No, unhand
me. He’s just a boy, a bastard. His father was a traitor. The mark of
the beast is on him, that wolf of his … Let go of me! You will rue the
day you laid hands on Janos Slynt. I have friends in King’s Landing.
I warn you—” He was still protesting as they half-marched, halfdragged him up the steps.
Jon followed them outside. Behind him, the cellar emptied. At the
cage, Slynt wrenched loose for a moment and tried to make a ght
of it, but Iron Emmett caught him by the throat and slammed him
back against the iron bars until he desisted. By then all of Castle
Black had come outside to watch. Even Val was at her window, her
long golden braid across one shoulder. Stannis stood on the steps of
the King’s Tower, surrounded by his knights.
“If the boy thinks that he can frighten me, he is mistaken,” they
heard Lord Janos said. “He would not dare to hang me. Janos Slynt
has friends, important friends, you’ll see …” The wind whipped
away the rest of his words.
This is wrong, Jon thought. “Stop.”
Emmett turned back, frowning. “My lord?”
“I will not hang him,” said Jon. “Bring him here.”
“Oh, Seven save us,” he heard Bowen Marsh cry out.
The smile that Lord Janos Slynt smiled then had all the sweetness
of rancid butter. Until Jon said, “Edd, fetch me a block,” and
unsheathed Longclaw.
By the time a suitable chopping block was found, Lord Janos had
retreated into the winch cage, but Iron Emmett went in after him
and dragged him out. “No,” Slynt cried, as Emmett half-shoved and

half-pulled him across the yard. “Unhand me … you cannot … when
Tywin Lannister hears of this, you will all rue—”
Emmett kicked his legs out from under him. Dolorous Edd
planted a foot on his back to keep him on his knees as Emmett
shoved the block beneath his head. “This will go easier if you stay
still,” Jon Snow promised him. “Move to avoid the cut, and you will
still die, but your dying will be uglier. Stretch out your neck, my
lord.” The pale morning sunlight ran up and down his blade as Jon
clasped the hilt of the bastard sword with both hands and raised it
high. “If you have any last words, now is the time to speak them,”
he said, expecting one last curse.
Janos Slynt twisted his neck around to stare up at him. “Please,
my lord. Mercy. I’ll … I’ll go, I will, I …”
No, thought Jon. You closed that door. Longclaw descended.
“Can I have his boots?” asked Owen the Oaf, as Janos Slynt’s
head went rolling across the muddy ground. “They’re almost new,
those boots. Lined with fur.”
Jon glanced back at Stannis. For an instant their eyes met. Then
the king nodded and went back inside his tower.

TYRION

H

e woke alone, and found the litter halted.
A pile of crushed cushions remained to show where Illyrio had
sprawled. The dwarf’s throat felt dry and raspy. He had
dreamed … what had he dreamed? He did not remember.
Outside, voices were speaking in a tongue he did not know.
Tyrion swung his legs through the curtains and hopped to the
ground, to nd Magister Illyrio standing by the horses with two
riders looming over him. Both wore shirts of worn leather beneath
cloaks of dark brown wool, but their swords were sheathed and the
fat man did not look to be in danger.
“I need a piss,” the dwarf announced. He waddled o the road,
undid his breeches, and relieved himself into a tangle of thorns. It
took quite a long time.
“He pisses well, at least,” a voice observed.
Tyrion icked the last drops o and tucked himself away. “Pissing
is the least of my talents. You ought to see me shit.” He turned to
Magister Illyrio. “Are these two known to you, magister? They look
like outlaws. Should I nd my axe?”
“Your axe?” exclaimed the larger of the riders, a brawny man
with a shaggy beard and a shock of orange hair. “Did you hear that,
Haldon? The little man wants to ght with us!”
His companion was older, clean-shaved, with a lined ascetic face.
His hair had been pulled back and tied in a knot behind his head.
“Small men oft feel a need to prove their courage with unseemly
boasts,” he declared. “I doubt if he could kill a duck.”
Tyrion shrugged. “Fetch the duck.”

“If you insist.” The rider glanced at his companion.
The brawny man unsheathed a bastard sword. “I’m Duck, you
mouthy little pisspot.”
Oh, gods be good. “I had a smaller duck in mind.”
The big man roared with laughter. “Did you hear, Haldon? He
wants a smaller Duck!”
“I should gladly settle for a quieter one.” The man called Haldon
studied Tyrion with cool grey eyes before turning back to Illyrio.
“You have some chests for us?”
“And mules to carry them.”
“Mules are too slow. We have pack horses, we’ll shift the chests
to them. Duck, attend to that.”
“Why is it always Duck who attends to things?” The big man
slipped his sword back in its sheath. “What do you attend to,
Haldon? Who is the knight here, you or me?” Yet he stomped o
toward the baggage mules all the same.
“How fares our lad?” asked Illyrio as the chests were being
secured. Tyrion counted six, oaken chests with iron hasps. Duck
shifted them easily enough, hoisting them on one shoulder.
“He is as tall as Gri now. Three days ago he knocked Duck into a
horse trough.”
“I wasn’t knocked. I fell in just to make him laugh.”
“Your ploy was a success,” said Haldon. “I laughed myself.”
“There is a gift for the boy in one of the chests. Some candied
ginger. He was always fond of it.” Illyrio sounded oddly sad. “I
thought I might continue on to Ghoyan Drohe with you. A farewell
feast before you start downriver …”
“We have no time for feasts, my lord,” said Haldon. “Gri means
to strike downriver the instant we are back. News has been coming
upriver, none of it good. Dothraki have been seen north of Dagger
Lake, outriders from old Motho’s khalasar, and Khal Zekko is not far
behind him, moving through the Forest of Qohor.”
The fat man made a rude noise. “Zekko visits Qohor every three
or four years. The Qohorik give him a sack of gold and he turns east
again. As for Motho, his men are near as old as he is, and there are
fewer every year. The threat is—”

“—Khal Pono,” Haldon nished. “Motho and Zekko ee from
him, if the tales are true. The last reports had Pono near the
headwaters of the Selhoru with a khalasar of thirty thousand. Gri
does not want to risk being caught up in the crossing if Pono should
decide to risk the Rhoyne.” Haldon glanced at Tyrion. “Does your
dwarf ride as well as he pisses?”
“He rides,” Tyrion broke in, before the lord of cheese could
answer for him, “though he rides best with a special saddle and a
horse that he knows well. He talks as well.”
“So he does. I am Haldon, the healer in our little band of
brothers. Some call me Halfmaester. My companion is Ser Duck.”
“Ser Rolly,” said the big man. “Rolly Duck eld. Any knight can
make a knight, and Gri made me. And you, dwarf?”
Illyrio spoke up quickly. “Yollo, he is called.”
Yollo? Yollo sounds like something you might name a monkey.
Worse, it was a Pentoshi name, and any fool could see that Tyrion
was no Pentoshi. “In Pentos I am Yollo,” he said quickly, to make
what amends he could, “but my mother named me Hugor Hill.”
“Are you a little king or a little bastard?” asked Haldon.
Tyrion realized he would do well to be careful around Haldon
Halfmaester. “Every dwarf is a bastard in his father’s eyes.”
“No doubt. Well, Hugor Hill, answer me this. How did Serwyn of
the Mirror Shield slay the dragon Urrax?”
“He approached behind his shield. Urrax saw only his own
re ection until Serwyn had plunged his spear through his eye.”
Haldon was unimpressed. “Even Duck knows that tale. Can you
tell me the name of the knight who tried the same ploy with Vhagar
during the Dance of the Dragons?”
Tyrion grinned. “Ser Byron Swann. He was roasted for his
trouble … only the dragon was Syrax, not Vhagar.”
“I fear that you’re mistaken. In The Dance of the Dragons, A True
Telling, Maester Munkun writes—”
“—that it was Vhagar. Grand Maester Munkun errs. Ser Byron’s
squire saw his master die, and wrote his daughter of the manner of
it. His account says it was Syrax, Rhaenyra’s she-dragon, which
makes more sense than Munken’s version. Swann was the son of a

marcher lord, and Storm’s End was for Aegon. Vhagar was ridden
by Prince Aemond, Aegon’s brother. Why should Swann want to
slay her?”
Haldon pursed his lips. “Try not to tumble o the horse. If you
do, best waddle back to Pentos. Our shy maid will not wait for man
nor dwarf.”
“Shy maids are my favorite sort. Aside from wanton ones. Tell
me, where do whores go?”
“Do I look like a man who frequents whores?”
Duck laughed derisively. “He don’t dare. Lemore would make him
pray for pardon, the lad would want to come along, and Gri might
cut his cock o and stu it down his throat.”
“Well,” said Tyrion, “a maester does not need a cock.”
“Haldon’s only half a maester, though.”
“You seem to nd the dwarf amusing, Duck,” said Haldon. “He
can ride with you.” He wheeled his mount about.
It took another few moments for Duck to nish securing Illyrio’s
chests to the three pack horses. By that time Haldon had vanished.
Duck seemed unconcerned. He swung into the saddle, grabbed
Tyrion by the collar, and hoisted the little man up in front of him.
“Hold tight to the pommel and you’ll do ne. The mare’s got a nice
sweet gait, and the dragon road’s smooth as a maiden’s arse.”
Gathering the reins in his right hand and the leads in his left, Ser
Rolly set o at a brisk trot.
“Good fortune,” Illyrio called after them. “Tell the boy I am sorry
that I will not be with him for his wedding. I will rejoin you in
Westeros. That I swear, by my sweet Serra’s hands.”
The last that Tyrion Lannister saw of Illyrio Mopatis, the magister
was standing by his litter in his brocade robes, his massive
shoulders slumped. As his gure dwindled in their dust, the lord of
cheese looked almost small.
Duck caught up with Haldon Halfmaester a quarter mile on.
Thereafter the riders continued side by side. Tyrion clung to the
high pommel with his short legs splayed out awkwardly, knowing
he could look forward to blisters, cramps, and saddle sores.

“I wonder what the pirates of Dagger Lake will make of our
dwarf?” Haldon said as they rode on.
“Dwarf stew?” suggested Duck.
“Urho the Unwashed is the worst of them,” Haldon con ded. “His
stench alone is enough to kill a man.”
Tyrion shrugged. “Fortunately, I have no nose.”
Haldon gave him a thin smile. “If we should encounter the Lady
Korra on Hag’s Teeth, you may soon be lacking other parts as well.
Korra the Cruel, they call her. Her ship is crewed by beautiful
young maids who geld every male they capture.”
“Terrifying. I may well piss my breeches.”
“Best not,” Duck warned darkly.
“As you say. If we encounter this Lady Korra, I will just slip into a
skirt and say that I am Cersei, the famous bearded beauty of King’s
Landing.”
This time Duck laughed, and Haldon said, “What a droll little
fellow you are, Yollo. They say that the Shrouded Lord will grant a
boon to any man who can make him laugh. Perhaps His Grey Grace
will choose you to ornament his stony court.”
Duck glanced at his companion uneasily. “It’s not good to jape of
that one, not when we’re so near the Rhoyne. He hears.”
“Wisdom from a duck,” said Haldon. “I beg your pardon, Yollo.
You need not look so pale, I was only playing with you. The Prince
of Sorrows does not bestow his grey kiss lightly.”
His grey kiss. The thought made his esh crawl. Death had lost its
terror for Tyrion Lannister, but greyscale was another matter. The
Shrouded Lord is just a legend, he told himself, no more real than the
ghost of Lann the Clever that some claim haunts Casterly Rock. Even so,
he held his tongue.
The dwarf’s sudden silence went unnoticed, as Duck had begun to
regale him with his own life story. His father had been an armorer
at Bitterbridge, he said, so he had been born with the sound of steel
ringing in his ears and had taken to swordplay at an early age. Such
a large and likely lad drew the eye of old Lord Caswell, who o ered
him a place in his garrison, but the boy had wanted more. He
watched Caswell’s weakling son named a page, a squire, and nally

a knight. “A weedy pinch-faced sneak, he was, but the old lord had
four daughters and only the one son, so no one was allowed to say a
word against him. T’other squires hardly dared to lay a nger on
him in the yard.”
“You were not so timid, though.” Tyrion could see where this tale
was going easily enough.
“My father made a longsword for me to mark my sixteenth
nameday,” said Duck, “but Lorent liked the look of it so much he
took it for himself, and my bloody father never dared to tell him
no. When I complained, Lorent told me to my face that my hand
was made to hold a hammer, not a sword. So I went and got a
hammer and beat him with it, till both his arms and half his ribs
were broken. After that I had to leave the Reach, quick as it were. I
made it across the water to the Golden Company. I did some
smithing for a few years as a ’prentice, then Ser Harry Strickland
took me on as squire. When Gri sent word downriver that he
needed someone to help train his son to arms, Harry sent him me.”
“And Gri knighted you?”
“A year later.”
Haldon Halfmaester smiled a thin smile. “Tell our little friend
how you came by your name, why don’t you?”
“A knight needs more than just the one name,” the big man
insisted, “and, well, we were in a eld when he dubbed me, and I
looked up and saw these ducks, so … don’t laugh, now.”
Just after sunset, they left the road to rest in an overgrown yard
beside an old stone well. Tyrion hopped down to work the cramps
out of his calves whilst Duck and Haldon were watering the horses.
Tough brown grass and weed trees sprouted from the gaps between
the cobbles, and the mossy walls of what once might have been a
huge stone manse. After the animals had been tended to, the riders
shared a simple supper of salt pork and cold white beans, washed
down with ale. Tyrion found the plain fare a pleasant change from
all the rich food he had eaten with Illyrio. “Those chests we brought
you,” he said as they were chewing. “Gold for the Golden Company,
I thought at rst, until I saw Ser Rolly hoist a chest onto one

shoulder. If it were full of coin, he could never have lifted it so
easily.”
“It’s just armor,” said Duck, with a shrug.
“Clothing as well,” Haldon broke in. “Court clothes, for all our
party. Fine woolens, velvets, silken cloaks. One does not come
before a queen looking shabby … nor empty-handed. The magister
has been kind enough to provide us with suitable gifts.”
Come moonrise, they were back in their saddles, trotting
eastward under a mantle of stars. The old Valyrian road glimmered
ahead of them like a long silver ribbon winding through wood and
dale. For a little while Tyrion Lannister felt almost at peace. “Lomas
Longstrider told it true. The road’s a wonder.”
“Lomas Longstrider?” asked Duck.
“A scribe, long dead,” said Haldon. “He spent his life traveling the
world and writing about the lands he visited in two books he called
Wonders and Wonders Made by Man.”
“An uncle of mine gave them to me when I was just a boy,” said
Tyrion. “I read them until they fell to pieces.”
“The gods made seven wonders, and mortal man made nine,” quoted
the Halfmaester. “Rather impious of mortal man to do the gods two
better, but there you are. The stone roads of Valyria were one of
Longstrider’s nine. The fth, I believe.”
“The fourth,” said Tyrion, who had committed all sixteen of the
wonders to memory as a boy. His uncle Gerion liked to set him on
the table during feasts and make him recite them. I liked that well
enough, didn’t I? Standing there amongst the trenchers with every eye
upon me, proving what a clever little imp I was. For years afterward,
he had cherished a dream that one day he would travel the world
and see Longstrider’s wonders for himself.
Lord Tywin had put an end to that hope ten days before his dwarf
son’s sixteenth nameday, when Tyrion asked to tour the Nine Free
Cities, as his uncles had done at that same age. “My brothers could
be relied upon to bring no shame upon House Lannister,” his father
had replied. “Neither ever wed a whore.” And when Tyrion had
reminded him that in ten days he would be a man grown, free to
travel where he wished, Lord Tywin had said, “No man is free. Only

children and fools think elsewise. Go, by all means. Wear motley
and stand upon your head to amuse the spice lords and the cheese
kings. Just see that you pay your own way and put aside any
thoughts of returning.” At that the boy’s de ance had crumbled. “If
it is useful occupation you require, useful occupation you shall
have,” his father then said. So to mark his manhood, Tyrion was
given charge of all the drains and cisterns within Casterly Rock.
Perhaps he hoped I’d fall into one. But Tywin had been disappointed
in that. The drains never drained half so well as when he had charge
of them.
I need a cup of wine, to wash the taste of Tywin from my mouth. A
skin of wine would serve me even better.
They rode all night, with Tyrion sleeping tfully, dozing against
the pommel and waking suddenly. From time to time he would
begin to slip sideways from the saddle, but Ser Rolly would get a
hand on him and yank him upright once again. By dawn the dwarf’s
legs were aching and his cheeks were chafed and raw.
It was the next day before they reached the site of Ghoyan Drohe,
hard beside the river. “The fabled Rhoyne,” said Tyrion when he
glimpsed the slow green waterway from atop a rise.
“The Little Rhoyne,” said Duck.
“It is that.” A pleasant enough river, I suppose, but the smallest fork
of the Trident is twice as wide, and all three of them run swifter. The
city was no more impressive. Ghoyan Drohe had never been large,
Tyrion recalled from his histories, but it had been a fair place, green
and owering, a city of canals and fountains. Until the war. Until the
dragons came. A thousand years later, the canals were choked with
reeds and mud, and pools of stagnant water gave birth to swarms of
ies. The broken stones of temples and palaces were sinking back
into the earth, and gnarled old willows grew thick along the
riverbanks.
A few people still remained amidst the squalor, tending little
gardens in amongst the weeds. The sound of iron hooves ringing on
the old Valyrian road sent most of them darting back into the holes
they’d crawled from, but the bolder ones lingered in the sun long
enough to stare at the passing riders with dull, incurious eyes. One

naked girl with mud up to her knees could not seem to take her
eyes o Tyrion. She has never seen a dwarf before, he realized, much
less a dwarf without a nose. He made a face and stuck his tongue out,
and the girl began to cry.
“What did you do to her?” Duck asked.
“I blew her a kiss. All the girls cry when I kiss them.”
Beyond the tangled willows the road ended abruptly and they
turned north for a short ways and rode beside the water, until the
brush gave way and they found themselves beside an old stone
quay, half-submerged and surrounded by tall brown weeds. “Duck!”
came a shout. “Haldon!” Tyrion craned his head to one side, and
saw a boy standing on the roof of a low wooden building, waving a
wide-brimmed straw hat. He was a lithe and well-made youth, with
a lanky build and a shock of dark blue hair. The dwarf put his age at
fteen, sixteen, or near enough to make no matter.
The roof the boy was standing on turned out to be the cabin of
the Shy Maid, an old ramshackle single-masted poleboat. She had a
broad beam and a shallow draft, ideal for making her way up the
smallest of streams and crabwalking over sandbars. A homely maid,
thought Tyrion, but sometimes the ugliest ones are the hungriest once
abed. The poleboats that plied the rivers of Dorne were often
brightly painted and exquisitely carved, but not this maid. Her
paintwork was a muddy greyish brown, mottled and aking; her big
curved tiller, plain and unadorned. She looks like dirt, he thought, but
no doubt that’s the point.
Duck was hallooing back by then. The mare splashed through the
shallows, trampling down the reeds. The boy leapt down o the
cabin roof to the poleboat’s deck, and the rest of the Shy Maid’s
crew made their appearance. An older couple with a Rhoynish cast
to their features stood close beside the tiller, whilst a handsome
septa in a soft white robe stepped through the cabin door and
pushed a lock of dark brown hair from her eyes.
But there was no mistaking Gri . “That will be enough shouting,”
he said. A sudden silence fell upon the river.
This one will be trouble, Tyrion knew at once.

Gri ’s cloak was made from the hide and head of a red wolf of
the Rhoyne. Under the pelt he wore brown leather sti ened with
iron rings. His clean-shaved face was leathery too, with wrinkles at
the corners of his eyes. Though his hair was as blue as his son’s, he
had red roots and redder eyebrows. At his hip hung a sword and
dagger. If he was happy to have Duck and Haldon back again, he
hid it well, but he did not trouble to conceal his displeasure at the
sight of Tyrion. “A dwarf? What’s this?”
“I know, you were hoping for a wheel of cheese.” Tyrion turned
to Young Gri and gave the lad his most disarming smile. “Blue hair
may serve you well in Tyrosh, but in Westeros children will throw
stones at you and girls will laugh in your face.”
The lad was taken aback. “My mother was a lady of Tyrosh. I dye
my hair in memory of her.”
“What is this creature?” Gri demanded.
Haldon answered. “Illyrio sent a letter to explain.”
“I will have it, then. Take the dwarf to my cabin.”
I do not like his eyes, Tyrion re ected, when the sellsword sat
down across from him in the dimness of the boat’s interior, with a
scarred plank table and a tallow candle between them. They were
ice blue, pale, cold. The dwarf misliked pale eyes. Lord Tywin’s
eyes had been pale green and ecked with gold.
He watched the sellsword read. That he could read said something
all by itself. How many sellswords could boast of that? He hardly
moves his lips at all, Tyrion re ected.
Finally Gri looked up from the parchment, and those pale eyes
narrowed. “Tywin Lannister dead? At your hand?”
“At my nger. This one.” Tyrion held it up for Gri to admire.
“Lord Tywin was sitting on a privy, so I put a crossbow bolt
through his bowels to see if he really did shit gold. He didn’t. A
pity, I could have used some gold. I also slew my mother,
somewhat earlier. Oh, and my nephew Jo rey, I poisoned him at
his wedding feast and watched him choke to death. Did the
cheesemonger leave that part out? I mean to add my brother and
sister to the list before I’m done, if it please your queen.”

“Please her? Has Illyrio taken leave of his senses? Why does he
imagine that Her Grace would welcome the service of a selfconfessed kingslayer and betrayer?”
A fair question, thought Tyrion, but what he said was, “The king I
slew was sitting on her throne, and all those I betrayed were lions,
so it seems to me that I have already done the queen good service.”
He scratched the stump of his nose. “Have no fear, I won’t kill you,
you are no kin of mine. Might I see what the cheesemonger wrote?
I do love to read about myself.”
Gri ignored the request. Instead he touched the letter to the
candle ame and watched the parchment blacken, curl, and are up.
“There is blood between Targaryen and Lannister. Why would you
support the cause of Queen Daenerys?”
“For gold and glory,” the dwarf said cheerfully. “Oh, and hate. If
you had ever met my sister, you would understand.”
“I understand hate well enough.” From the way Gri said the
word, Tyrion knew that much was true. He has supped on hate
himself, this one. It has warmed him in the night for years.
“Then we have that in common, ser.”
“I am no knight.”
Not only a liar, but a bad one. That was clumsy and stupid, my lord.
“And yet Ser Duck says you knighted him.”
“Duck talks too much.”
“Some might wonder that a duck can talk at all. No matter, Gri .
You are no knight and I am Hugor Hill, a little monster. Your little
monster, if you like. You have my word, all that I desire is to be
leal servant of your dragon queen.”
“And how do you propose to serve her?”
“With my tongue.” He licked his ngers, one by one. “I can tell
Her Grace how my sweet sister thinks, if you call it thinking. I can
tell her captains the best way to defeat my brother, Jaime, in battle.
I know which lords are brave and which are craven, which are loyal
and which are venal. I can deliver allies to her. And I know much
and more of dragons, as your halfmaester will tell you. I’m amusing
too, and I don’t eat much. Consider me your own true imp.”

Gri weighed that for a moment. “Understand this, dwarf. You
are the last and least of our company. Hold your tongue and do as
you are told, or you will soon wish you had.”
Yes, Father, Tyrion almost said. “As you say, my lord.”
“I am no lord.”
Liar. “It was a courtesy, my friend.”
“I am not your friend either.”
No knight, no lord, no friend. “A pity.”
“Spare me your irony. I will take you as far as Volantis. If you
show yourself to be obedient and useful, you may remain with us,
to serve the queen as best you can. Prove yourself more trouble
than you are worth, and you can go your own way.”
Aye, and my way will take me to the bottom of the Rhoyne with sh
nibbling at what’s left of my nose. “Valar dohaeris.”
“You may sleep on the deck or in the hold, as you prefer. Ysilla
will nd bedding for you.”
“How kind of her.” Tyrion made a waddling bow, but at the cabin
door, he turned back. “What if we should nd the queen and
discover that this talk of dragons was just some sailor’s drunken
fancy? This wide world is full of such mad tales. Grumkins and
snarks, ghosts and ghouls, mermaids, rock goblins, winged horses,
winged pigs … winged lions.”
Gri stared at him, frowning. “I have given you fair warning,
Lannister. Guard your tongue or lose it. Kingdoms are at hazard
here. Our lives, our names, our honor. This is no game we’re
playing for your amusement.”
Of course it is, thought Tyrion. The game of thrones. “As you say,
Captain,” he murmured, bowing once again.

DAVOS

L

ightning split the northern sky, etching the black tower of the
Night Lamp against the blue-white sky. Six heartbeats later came
the thunder, like a distant drum.
The guards marched Davos Seaworth across a bridge of black
basalt and under an iron portcullis showing signs of rust. Beyond lay
a deep salt moat and a drawbridge supported by a pair of massive
chains. Green waters surged below, sending up plumes of spray to
smash against the foundations of the castle. Then came a second
gatehouse, larger than the rst, its stones bearded with green algae.
Davos stumbled across a muddy yard with his hands bound at the
wrists. A cold rain stung his eyes. The guards prodded him up the
steps, into Breakwater’s cavernous stone keep.
Once inside, the captain removed his cloak and hung it from a
peg, so as not to leave puddles on the threadbare Myrish carpet.
Davos did the same, fumbling at the clasp with his bound hands. He
had not forgotten the courtesies he had learned on Dragonstone
during his years of service.
They found the lord alone in the gloom of his hall, making a
supper of beer and bread and sister’s stew. Twenty iron sconces
were mounted along his thick stone walls, but only four held
torches, and none of them was lit. Two fat tallow candles gave a
meagre, ickering light. Davos could hear the rain lashing at the
walls, and a steady dripping where the roof had sprung a leak.
“M’lord,” said the captain, “we found this man in the Belly o’ the
Whale, trying to buy his way o island. He had twelve dragons on
him, and this thing too.” The captain put it on the table by the lord:

a wide ribbon of black velvet trimmed with cloth-of-gold, and
bearing three seals; a crowned stag stamped in golden beeswax, a
aming heart in red, a hand in white.
Davos waited wet and dripping, his wrists cha ng where the wet
rope dug into his skin. One word from this lord and he would soon
be hanging from the Gallows Gate of Sisterton, but at least he was
out of the rain, with solid stone beneath his feet in place of a
heaving deck. He was soaked and sore and haggard, worn thin by
grief and betrayal, and sick to death of storms.
The lord wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and picked up
the ribbon for a closer squint. Lightning ashed outside, making the
arrow loops blaze blue and white for half a heartbeat. One, two,
three, four, Davos counted, before the thunder came. When it
quieted, he listened to the dripping, and the duller roar beneath his
feet, where the waves were smashing against Breakwater’s huge
stone arches and swirling through its dungeons. He might well end
up down there, fettered to a wet stone oor and left to drown when
the tide came rushing in. No, he tried to tell himself, a smuggler
might die that way, but not a King’s Hand. I’m worth more if he sells me
to his queen.
The lord ngered the ribbon, frowning at the seals. He was an
ugly man, big and eshy, with an oarsman’s thick shoulders and no
neck. Coarse grey stubble, going white in patches, covered his
cheeks and chin. Above a massive shelf of brow he was bald. His
nose was lumpy and red with broken veins, his lips thick, and he
had a sort of webbing between the three middle ngers of his right
hand. Davos had heard that some of the lords of the Three Sisters
had webbed hands and feet, but he had always put that down as just
another sailor’s story.
The lord leaned back. “Cut him free,” he said, “and peel those
gloves o him. I want to see his hands.”
The captain did as he was told. As he jerked up his captive’s
maimed left hand the lightning ashed again, throwing the shadow
of Davos Seaworth’s shortened ngers across the blunt and brutal
face of Godric Borrell, Lord of Sweetsister. “Any man can steal a

ribbon,” the lord said, “but those ngers do not lie. You are the
onion knight.”
“I have been called that, my lord.” Davos was a lord himself, and
had been a knight for long years now, but deep down he was still
what he had always been, a smuggler of common birth who had
bought his knighthood with a hold of onions and salt sh. “I have
been called worse things too.”
“Aye. Traitor. Rebel. Turncloak.”
He bristled at the last. “I have never turned my cloak, my lord. I
am a king’s man.”
“Only if Stannis is a king.” The lord weighed him with hard black
eyes. “Most knights who land upon my shores seek me in my hall,
not in the Belly of the Whale. A vile smuggler’s den, that place. Are
you returning to your old trade, onion knight?”
“No, my lord. I was looking for passage to White Harbor. The
king sent me, with a message for its lord.”
“Then you are in the wrong place, with the wrong lord.” Lord
Godric seemed amused. “This is Sisterton, on Sweetsister.”
“I know it is.” There was nothing sweet about Sisterton, though.
It was a vile town, a sty, small and mean and rank with the odors of
pig shit and rotting sh. Davos remembered it well from his
smuggling days. The Three Sisters had been a favorite haunt of
smugglers for hundreds of years, and a pirate’s nest before that.
Sisterton’s streets were mud and planks, its houses daub-and-wattle
hovels roofed with straw, and by the Gallows Gate there were
always hanged men with their entrails dangling out.
“You have friends here, I do not doubt,” said the lord. “Every
smuggler has friends on the Sisters. Some of them are my friends as
well. The ones who aren’t, them I hang. I let them strangle slowly,
with their guts slapping up against their knees.” The hall grew
bright again, as lightning lit the windows. Two heartbeats later
came the thunder. “If it is White Harbor that you want, why are you
in Sisterton? What brought you here?”
A king’s command and a friend’s betrayal, Davos might have said.
Instead he answered, “Storms.”

Nine-and-twenty ships had set sail from the Wall. If half of them
were still a oat, Davos would be shocked. Black skies, bitter winds,
and lashing rains had hounded them all the way down the coast.
The galleys Oledo and Old Mother’s Son had been driven onto the
rocks of Skagos, the isle of unicorns and cannibals where even the
Blind Bastard had feared to land; the great cog Saathos Saan had
foundered o the Grey Cli s. “Stannis will be paying for them,”
Salladhor Saan had fumed. “He will be paying for them with good
gold, every one.” It was as if some angry god was exacting payment
for their easy voyage north, when they had ridden a steady
southerly from Dragonstone to the Wall. Another gale had ripped
away the rigging of the Bountiful Harvest, forcing Salla to have her
taken under tow. Ten leagues north of Widow’s Watch the seas rose
again, slamming the Harvest into one of the galleys towing her and
sinking both. The rest of the Lysene eet had been scattered across
the narrow sea. Some would straggle into one port or another.
Others would never be seen again.
“Salladhor the Beggar, that’s what your king has made me,”
Salladhor Saan complained to Davos, as the remnants of his eet
limped across the Bite. “Salladhor the Smashed. Where are my
ships? And my gold, where is all the gold that I was promised?”
When Davos had tried to assure him that he would have his
payment, Salla had erupted. “When, when? On the morrow, on the
new moon, when the red comet comes again? He is promising me
gold and gems, always promising, but this gold I have not seen. I
have his word, he is saying, oh yes, his royal word, he writes it
down. Can Salladhor Saan eat the king’s word? Can he quench his
thirst with parchments and waxy seals? Can he tumble promises
into a feather bed and fuck them till they squeal?”
Davos had tried to persuade him to stay true. If Salla abandoned
Stannis and his cause, he pointed out, he abandoned all hope of
collecting the gold that was due him. A victorious King Tommen
was not like to pay his defeated uncle’s debts, after all. Salla’s only
hope was to remain loyal to Stannis Baratheon until he won the Iron
Throne. Elsewise he would never see a groat of his money. He had
to be patient.

Perhaps some lord with honey on his tongue might have swayed
the Lysene pirate prince, but Davos was an onion knight, and his
words had only provoked Salla to fresh outrage. “On Dragonstone I
was patient,” he said, “when the red woman burned wooden gods
and screaming men. All the long way to the Wall I was patient. At
Eastwatch I was patient … and cold, so very cold. Bah, I say. Bah to
your patience, and bah to your king. My men are hungry. They are
wishing to fuck their wives again, to count their sons, to see the
Stepstones and the pleasure gardens of Lys. Ice and storms and
empty promises, these they are not wanting. This north is much too
cold, and getting colder.”
I knew the day would come, Davos told himself. I was fond of the
old rogue, but never so great a fool as to trust him.
“Storms.” Lord Godric said the word as fondly as another man
might say his lover’s name. “Storms were sacred on the Sisters
before the Andals came. Our gods of old were the Lady of the
Waves and the Lord of the Skies. They made storms every time they
mated.” He leaned forward. “These kings never bother with the
Sisters. Why should they? We are small and poor. And yet you’re
here. Delivered to me by the storms.”
Delivered to you by a friend, Davos thought.
Lord Godric turned to his captain. “Leave this man with me. He
was never here.”
“No, m’lord. Never.” The captain took his leave, his wet boots
leaving damp footprints across the carpet. Beneath the oor the sea
was rumbling and restless, pounding at the castle’s feet. The outer
door closed with a sound like distant thunder, and again the
lightning came, as if in answer.
“My lord,” said Davos, “if you would send me on to White
Harbor, His Grace would count it as an act of friendship.”
“I could send you to White Harbor,” the lord allowed. “Or I could
send you to some cold wet hell.”
Sisterton is hell enough. Davos feared the worst. The Three Sisters
were ckle bitches, loyal only to themselves. Supposedly they were
sworn to the Arryns of the Vale, but the Eyrie’s grasp upon the
islands was tenuous at best.

“Sunderland would require me to hand you over if he knew of
you.” Borrell did fealty for Sweetsister, as Longthorpe did for
Longsister and Torrent for Littlesister; all were sworn to Triston
Sunderland, the Lord of the Three Sisters. “He’d sell you to the
queen for a pot of that Lannister gold. Poor man needs every
dragon, with seven sons all determined to be knights.” The lord
picked up a wooden spoon and attacked his stew again. “I used to
curse the gods who gave me only daughters until I heard Triston
bemoaning the cost of destriers. You would be surprised to know
how many sh it takes to buy a decent suit of plate and mail.”
I had seven sons as well, but four are burned and dead. “Lord
Sunderland is sworn to the Eyrie,” Davos said. “By rights he should
deliver me to Lady Arryn.” He would stand a better chance with her
than with the Lannisters, he judged. Though she had taken no part
in the War of the Five Kings, Lysa Arryn was a daughter of
Riverrun, and aunt to the Young Wolf.
“Lysa Arryn’s dead,” Lord Godric said, “murdered by some singer.
Lord Little nger rules the Vale now. Where are the pirates?” When
Davos did not answer, he rapped his spoon against the table. “The
Lyseni. Torrent spied their sails from Littlesister, and before him the
Flints from Widow’s Watch. Orange sails, and green, and pink.
Salladhor Saan. Where is he?”
“At sea.” Salla would be sailing around the Fingers and down the
narrow sea. He was returning to the Stepstones with what few ships
remained him. Perhaps he would acquire a few more along the way,
if he came upon some likely merchantmen. A little piracy to help the
leagues go by. “His Grace has sent him south, to trouble the
Lannisters and their friends.” The lie was one he had rehearsed as
he rowed toward Sisterton through the rain. Soon or late the world
would learn that Salladhor Saan had abandoned Stannis Baratheon,
leaving him without a eet, but they would not hear it from the lips
of Davos Seaworth.
Lord Godric stirred his stew. “Did that old pirate Saan make you
swim to shore?”
“I came ashore in an open boat, my lord.” Salla had waited until
the beacon of the Night Lamp shone o the Valyrian’s port bow

before he put him o . Their friendship had been worth that much,
at least. The Lyseni would gladly have taken him south with him, he
avowed, but Davos had refused. Stannis needed Wyman Manderly,
and had trusted Davos to win him. He would not betray that trust,
he told Salla. “Bah,” the pirate prince replied, “he will kill you with
these honors, old friend. He will kill you.”
“I have never had a King’s Hand beneath my roof before,” Lord
Godric said. “Would Stannis ransom you, I wonder?”
Would he? Stannis had given Davos lands and titles and o ces,
but would he pay good gold to buy back his life? He has no gold.
Else he’d still have Salla. “You will nd His Grace at Castle Black if
my lord would like to ask that of him.”
Borrell grunted. “Is the Imp at Castle Black as well?”
“The Imp?” Davos did not understand the question. “He is at
King’s Landing, condemned to die for the murder of his nephew.”
“The Wall is the last to learn, my father used to say. The dwarf’s
escaped. He twisted through the bars of his cell and tore his own
father apart with his bare hands. A guardsman saw him ee, red
from head to heel, as if he’d bathed in blood. The queen will make a
lord of any man who kills him.”
Davos struggled to believe what he was hearing. “You are telling
me that Tywin Lannister is dead?”
“At his son’s hand, aye.” The lord took a drink of beer. “When
there were kings on the Sisters, we did not su er dwarfs to live. We
cast them all into the sea, as an o ering to the gods. The septons
made us stop that. A pack of pious fools. Why would the gods give a
man such a shape but to mark him as a monster?”
Lord Tywin dead. This changes all. “My lord, will you grant me
leave to send a raven to the Wall? His Grace will want to know of
Lord Tywin’s death.”
“He’ll know. But not from me. Nor you, so long as you are here
beneath my leaky roof. I’ll not have it said that I gave Stannis aid
and counsel. The Sunderlands dragged the Sisters into two of the
Blackfyre Rebellions, and we all su ered grievously for that.” Lord
Godric waved his spoon toward a chair. “Sit. Before you fall, ser.
My hall is cold and damp and dark, but not without some courtesy.

We’ll nd dry clothes for you, but rst you’ll eat.” He shouted, and
a woman entered the hall. “We have a guest to feed. Bring beer and
bread and sister’s stew.”
The beer was brown, the bread black, the stew a creamy white.
She served it in a trencher hollowed out of a stale loaf. It was thick
with leeks, carrots, barley, and turnips white and yellow, along
with clams and chunks of cod and crabmeat, swimming in a stock of
heavy cream and butter. It was the sort of stew that warmed a man
right down to his bones, just the thing for a wet, cold night. Davos
spooned it up gratefully.
“You have tasted sister’s stew before?”
“I have, my lord.” The same stew was served all over the Three
Sisters, in every inn and tavern.
“This is better than what you’ve had before. Gella makes it. My
daughter’s daughter. Are you married, onion knight?”
“I am, my lord.”
“A pity. Gella’s not. Homely women make the best wives. There’s
three kinds of crabs in there. Red crabs and spider crabs and
conquerors. I won’t eat spider crab, except in sister’s stew. Makes
me feel half a cannibal.” His lordship gestured at the banner
hanging above the cold black hearth. A spider crab was
embroidered there, white on a grey-green eld. “We heard tales
that Stannis burned his Hand.”
The Hand who went before me. Melisandre had given Alester
Florent to her god on Dragonstone, to conjure up the wind that bore
them north. Lord Florent had been strong and silent as the queen’s
men bound him to the post, as digni ed as any half-naked man
could hope to be, but as the ames licked up his legs he had begun
to scream, and his screams had blown them all the way to
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, if the red woman could be believed. Davos
had misliked that wind. It had seemed to him to smell of burning
esh, and the sound of it was anguished as it played amongst the
lines. It could as easily have been me. “I did not burn,” he assured
Lord Godric, “though Eastwatch almost froze me.”
“The Wall will do that.” The woman brought them a fresh loaf of
bread, still hot from the oven. When Davos saw her hand, he stared.

Lord Godric did not fail to make note of it. “Aye, she has the mark.
Like all Borrells, for ve thousand years. My daughter’s daughter.
Not the one who makes the stew.” He tore the bread apart and
o ered half to Davos. “Eat. It’s good.”
It was, though any stale crust would have tasted just as ne to
Davos; it meant he was a guest here, for this one night at least. The
lords of the Three Sisters had a black repute, and none more so than
Godric Borrell, Lord of Sweetsister, Shield of Sisterton, Master of
Breakwater Castle, and Keeper of the Night Lamp … but even
robber lords and wreckers were bound by the ancient laws of
hospitality. I will see the dawn, at least, Davos told himself. I have
eaten of his bread and salt.
Though there were stranger spices than salt in this sister’s stew.
“Is it sa ron that I’m tasting?” Sa ron was worth more than gold.
Davos had only tasted it once before, when King Robert had sent a
half a sh to him at a feast on Dragonstone.
“Aye. From Qarth. There’s pepper too.” Lord Godric took a pinch
between his thumb and fore nger and sprinkled his own trencher.
“Cracked black pepper from Volantis, nothing ner. Take as much
as you require if you’re feeling peppery. I’ve got forty chests of it.
Not to mention cloves and nutmeg, and a pound of sa ron. Took it
o a sloe-eyed maid.” He laughed. He still had all his teeth, Davos
saw, though most of them were yellow and one on the top was
black and dead. “She was making for Braavos, but a gale swept her
into the Bite and she smashed up against some of my rocks. So you
see, you are not the only gift the storms have brought me. The sea’s
a treacherous cruel thing.”
Not as treacherous as men, thought Davos. Lord Godric’s forebears
had been pirate kings until the Starks came down on them with re
and sword. These days the Sistermen left open piracy to Salladhor
Saan and his ilk and con ned themselves to wrecking. The beacons
that burned along the shores of the Three Sisters were supposed to
warn of shoals and reefs and rocks and lead the way to safety, but
on stormy nights and foggy ones, some Sistermen would use false
lights to draw unwary captains to their doom.

“The storms did you a kindness, blowing you to my door,” Lord
Godric said. “You’d have found a cold welcome in White Harbor.
You come too late, ser. Lord Wyman means to bend his knee, and
not to Stannis.” He took a swallow of his beer. “The Manderlys are
no northmen, not down deep. ’Twas no more than nine hundred
years ago when they came north, laden down with all their gold and
gods. They’d been great lords on the Mander until they overreached
themselves and the green hands slapped them down. The wolf king
took their gold, but he gave them land and let them keep their
gods.” He mopped at his stew with a chunk of bread. “If Stannis
thinks the fat man will ride the stag, he’s wrong. The Lionstar put in
at Sisterton twelve days ago to ll her water casks. Do you know
her? Crimson sails and a gold lion on her prow. And full of Freys,
making for White Harbor.”
“Freys?” That was the last thing that Davos would have expected.
“The Freys killed Lord Wyman’s son, we heard.”
“Aye,” Lord Godric said, “and the fat man was so wroth that he
took a vow to live on bread and wine till he had his vengeance. But
before the day was out, he was stu ng clams and cakes into his
mouth again. There’s ships that go between the Sisters and White
Harbor all the time. We sell them crabs and sh and goat cheese,
they sell us wood and wool and hides. From all I hear, his lordship’s
fatter than ever. So much for vows. Words are wind, and the wind
from Manderly’s mouth means no more than the wind escaping out
his bottom.” The lord tore o another chunk of bread to swipe out
his trencher. “The Freys were bringing the fat fool a bag of bones.
Some call that courtesy, to bring a man his dead son’s bones. Had it
been my son, I would have returned the courtesy and thanked the
Freys before I hanged them, but the fat man’s too noble for that.”
He stu ed the bread into his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “I had the
Freys to supper. One sat just where you’re sitting now. Rhaegar, he
named himself. I almost laughed right in his face. He’d lost his wife,
he said, but he meant to get himself a new one in White Harbor.
Ravens have been ying back and forth. Lord Wyman and Lord
Walder have made a pact, and mean to seal it with a marriage.”

Davos felt as though the lord had punched him in the belly. If he
tells it true, my king is lost. Stannis Baratheon had desperate need of
White Harbor. If Winterfell was the heart of the north, White
Harbor was its mouth. Its rth had remained free of ice even in the
depths of winter for centuries. With winter coming on, that could
mean much and more. So could the city’s silver. The Lannisters had
all the gold of Casterly Rock, and had wed the wealth of
Highgarden. King Stannis’s co ers were exhausted. I must try, at
least. There may be some way that I can stop this marriage. “I have to
reach White Harbor,” he said. “Your lordship, I beg you, help me.”
Lord Godric began to eat his trencher, tearing it apart in his big
hands. The stew had softened the stale bread. “I have no love for
northmen,” he announced. “The maesters say the Rape of the Three
Sisters was two thousand years ago, but Sisterton has not forgotten.
We were a free people before that, with our kings ruling over us.
Afterward, we had to bend our knees to the Eyrie to get the
northmen out. The wolf and the falcon fought over us for a
thousand years, till between the two of them they had gnawed all
the fat and esh o the bones of these poor islands. As for your
King Stannis, when he was Robert’s master of ships he sent a eet
into my port without my leave and made me hang a dozen ne
friends. Men like you. He went so far as to threaten to hang me if it
should happen that some ship went aground because the Night
Lamp had gone black. I had to eat his arrogance.” He ate some of
the trencher. “Now he comes north humbled, with his tail between
his legs. Why should I give him any aid? Answer me that.”
Because he is your rightful king, Davos thought. Because he is a
strong man and a just one, the only man who can restore the realm and
defend it against the peril that gathers in the north. Because he has a
magic sword that glows with the light of the sun. The words caught in
his throat. None of them would sway the Lord of Sweetsister. None
of them would get him a foot closer to White Harbor. What answer
does he want? Must I promise him gold we do not have? A highborn
husband for his daughter’s daughter? Lands, honors, titles? Lord Alester
Florent had tried to play that game, and the king had burned him
for it.

“The Hand has lost his tongue, it seems. He has no taste for
sister’s stew, or truth.” Lord Godric wiped his mouth.
“The lion is dead,” said Davos, slowly. “There’s your truth, my
lord. Tywin Lannister is dead.”
“What if he is?”
“Who rules now in King’s Landing? Not Tommen, he is just a
child. Is it Ser Kevan?”
Candlelight gleamed in Lord Godric’s black eyes. “If it were,
you’d be in chains. It’s the queen who rules.”
Davos understood. He nurses doubts. He does not want to nd
himself upon the losing side. “Stannis held Storm’s End against the
Tyrells and the Redwynes. He took Dragonstone from the last
Targaryens. He smashed the Iron Fleet o Fair Isle. This child king
will not prevail against him.”
“This child king commands the wealth of Casterly Rock and the
power of Highgarden. He has the Boltons and the Freys.” Lord
Godric rubbed his chin. “Still … in this world only winter is certain.
Ned Stark told my father that, here in this very hall.”
“Ned Stark was here?”
“At the dawn of Robert’s Rebellion. The Mad King had sent to the
Eyrie for Stark’s head, but Jon Arryn sent him back de ance.
Gulltown stayed loyal to the throne, though. To get home and call
his banners, Stark had to cross the mountains to the Fingers and nd
a sherman to carry him across the Bite. A storm caught them on
the way. The sherman drowned, but his daughter got Stark to the
Sisters before the boat went down. They say he left her with a bag
of silver and a bastard in her belly. Jon Snow, she named him, after
Arryn.
“Be that as it may. My father sat where I sit now when Lord
Eddard came to Sisterton. Our maester urged us to send Stark’s head
to Aerys, to prove our loyalty. It would have meant a rich reward.
The Mad King was open-handed with them as pleased him. By then
we knew that Jon Arryn had taken Gulltown, though. Robert was
the rst man to gain the wall, and slew Marq Grafton with his own
hand. ‘This Baratheon is fearless,’ I said. ‘He ghts the way a king
should ght.’ Our maester chuckled at me and told us that Prince

Rhaegar was certain to defeat this rebel. That was when Stark said,
‘In this world only winter is certain. We may lose our heads, it’s
true … but what if we prevail?’ My father sent him on his way with
his head still on his shoulders. ‘If you lose,’ he told Lord Eddard,
‘you were never here.’ ”
“No more than I was,” said Davos Seaworth.

JON

T

hey brought forth the King-Beyond-the-Wall with his hands
bound by hempen rope and a noose around his neck.
The other end of the rope was looped about the saddle horn of
Ser Godry Farring’s courser. The Giantslayer and his mount were
armored in silvered steel inlaid with niello. Mance Rayder wore
only a thin tunic that left his limbs naked to the cold. They could
have let him keep his cloak, Jon Snow thought, the one the wildling
woman patched with strips of crimson silk.
Small wonder that the Wall was weeping.
“Mance knows the haunted forest better than any ranger,” Jon
had told King Stannis, in his nal e ort to convince His Grace that
the King-Beyond-the-Wall would be of more use to them alive than
dead. “He knows Tormund Giantsbane. He has fought the Others.
And he had the Horn of Joramun and did not blow it. He did not
bring down the Wall when he could have.”
His words fell on deaf ears. Stannis had remained unmoved. The
law was plain; a deserter’s life was forfeit.
Beneath the weeping Wall, Lady Melisandre raised her pale white
hands. “We all must choose,” she proclaimed. “Man or woman,
young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same.” Her voice
made Jon Snow think of anise and nutmeg and cloves. She stood at
the king’s side on a wooden sca old raised above the pit. “We
choose light or we choose darkness. We choose good or we choose
evil. We choose the true god or the false.”
Mance Rayder’s thick grey-brown hair blew about his face as he
walked. He pushed it from his eyes with bound hands, smiling. But

when he saw the cage, his courage failed him. The queen’s men had
made it from the trees of the haunted forest, from saplings and
supple branches, pine boughs sticky with sap, and the bone-white
ngers of the weirwoods. They’d bent them and twisted them
around and through each other to weave a wooden lattice, then
hung it high above a deep pit lled with logs, leaves, and kindling.
The wildling king recoiled from the sight. “No,” he cried, “mercy.
This is not right, I’m not the king, they—”
Ser Godry gave a pull on the rope. The King-Beyond-the-Wall had
no choice but to stumble after him, the rope choking o his words.
When he lost his feet, Godry dragged him the rest of the way.
Mance was bloody when the queen’s men half-shoved, half-carried
him to the cage. A dozen men-at-arms heaved together to hoist him
into the air.
Lady Melisandre watched him rise. “FREE FOLK! Here stands your
king of lies. And here is the horn he promised would bring down the
Wall.” Two queen’s men brought forth the Horn of Joramun, black
and banded with old gold, eight feet long from end to end. Runes
were carved into the golden bands, the writing of the First Men.
Joramun had died thousands of years ago, but Mance had found his
grave beneath a glacier, high up in the Frostfangs. And Joramun
blew the Horn of Winter, and woke giants from the earth. Ygritte had
told Jon that Mance never found the horn. She lied, or else Mance
kept it secret even from his own.
A thousand captives watched through the wooden bars of their
stockade as the horn was lifted high. All were ragged and halfstarved. Wildlings, the Seven Kingdoms called them; they named
themselves the free folk. They looked neither wild nor free—only
hungry, frightened, numb.
“The Horn of Joramun?” Melisandre said. “No. Call it the Horn of
Darkness. If the Wall falls, night falls as well, the long night that
never ends. It must not happen, will not happen! The Lord of Light
has seen his children in their peril and sent a champion to them,
Azor Ahai reborn.” She swept a hand toward Stannis, and the great
ruby at her throat pulsed with light.

He is stone and she is ame. The king’s eyes were blue bruises,
sunk deep in a hollow face. He wore grey plate, a fur-trimmed cloak
of cloth-of-gold owing from his broad shoulders. His breastplate
had a aming heart inlaid above his own. Girding his brows was a
red-gold crown with points like twisting ames. Val stood beside
him, tall and fair. They had crowned her with a simple circlet of
dark bronze, yet she looked more regal in bronze than Stannis did in
gold. Her eyes were grey and fearless, un inching. Beneath an
ermine cloak, she wore white and gold. Her honey-blond hair had
been done up in a thick braid that hung over her right shoulder to
her waist. The chill in the air had put color in her cheeks.
Lady Melisandre wore no crown, but every man there knew that
she was Stannis Baratheon’s real queen, not the homely woman he
had left to shiver at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. Talk was, the king did
not mean to send for Queen Selyse and their daughter until the
Nightfort was ready for habitation. Jon felt sorry for them. The
Wall o ered few of the comforts that southron ladies and little
highborn girls were used to, and the Nightfort o ered none. That
was a grim place, even at the best of times.
“FREE FOLK!” cried Melisandre. “Behold the fate of those who
choose the darkness!”
The Horn of Joramun burst into ame.
It went up with a whoosh as swirling tongues of green and yellow
re leapt up crackling all along its length. Jon’s garron shied
nervously, and up and down the ranks others fought to still their
mounts as well. A moan came from the stockade as the free folk
saw their hope a re. A few began to shout and curse, but most
lapsed into silence. For half a heartbeat the runes graven on the
gold bands seemed to shimmer in the air. The queen’s men gave a
heave and sent the horn tumbling down into the re pit.
Inside his cage, Mance Rayder clawed at the noose about his neck
with bound hands and screamed incoherently of treachery and
witchery, denying his kingship, denying his people, denying his
name, denying all that he had ever been. He shrieked for mercy and
cursed the red woman and began to laugh hysterically.

Jon watched unblinking. He dare not appear squeamish before his
brothers. He had ordered out two hundred men, more than half the
garrison of Castle Black. Mounted in solemn sable ranks with tall
spears in hand, they had drawn up their hoods to shadow their
faces … and hide the fact that so many were greybeards and green
boys. The free folk feared the Watch. Jon wanted them to take that
fear with them to their new homes south of the Wall.
The horn crashed amongst the logs and leaves and kindling.
Within three heartbeats the whole pit was a ame. Clutching the
bars of his cage with bound hands, Mance sobbed and begged.
When the re reached him he did a little dance. His screams became
one long, wordless shriek of fear and pain. Within his cage, he
uttered like a burning leaf, a moth caught in a candle ame.
Jon found himself remembering a song.
Brothers, oh brothers, my days here are done,
the Dornishman’s taken my life,

But what does it matter, for all men must die,
and I’ve tasted the Dornishman’s wife!

Val stood on the platform as still as if she had been carved of salt.
She will not weep nor look away. Jon wondered what Ygritte would
have done in her place. The women are the strong ones. He found
himself thinking about Sam and Maester Aemon, about Gilly and the
babe. She will curse me with her dying breath, but I saw no other way.
Eastwatch reported savage storms upon the narrow sea. I meant to
keep them safe. Did I feed them to the crabs instead? Last night he had
dreamed of Sam drowning, of Ygritte dying with his arrow in her (it
had not been his arrow, but in his dreams it always was), of Gilly
weeping tears of blood.
Jon Snow had seen enough. “Now,” he said.
Ulmer of the Kingswood jammed his spear into the ground,
unslung his bow, and slipped a black arrow from his quiver. Sweet
Donnel Hill threw back his hood to do the same. Garth Greyfeather
and Bearded Ben nocked shafts, bent their bows, loosed.

One arrow took Mance Rayder in the chest, one in the gut, one in
the throat. The fourth struck one of the cage’s wooden bars, and
quivered for an instant before catching re. A woman’s sobs echoed
o the Wall as the wildling king slid bonelessly to the oor of his
cage, wreathed in re. “And now his Watch is done,” Jon murmured
softly. Mance Rayder had been a man of the Night’s Watch once,
before he changed his black cloak for one slashed with bright red
silk.
Up on the platform, Stannis was scowling. Jon refused to meet his
eyes. The bottom had fallen out of the wooden cage, and its bars
were crumbling. Every time the re licked upward, more branches
tumbled free, cherry red and black. “The Lord of Light made the sun
and moon and stars to light our way, and gave us re to keep the
night at bay,” Melisandre told the wildlings. “None can withstand
his ames.”
“None can withstand his ames,” the queen’s men echoed.
The red woman’s robes of deep-dyed scarlet swirled about her,
and her coppery hair made a halo round her face. Tall yellow ames
danced from her ngertips like claws. “FREE FOLK! Your false gods
cannot help you. Your false horn did not save you. Your false king
brought you only death, despair, defeat … but here stands the true
king. BEHOLD HIS GLORY!”
Stannis Baratheon drew Lightbringer.
The sword glowed red and yellow and orange, alive with light.
Jon had seen the show before … but not like this, never before like
this. Lightbringer was the sun made steel. When Stannis raised the
blade above his head, men had to turn their heads or cover their
eyes. Horses shied, and one threw his rider. The blaze in the re pit
seemed to shrink before this storm of light, like a small dog
cowering before a larger one. The Wall itself turned red and pink
and orange, as waves of color danced across the ice. Is this the power
of king’s blood?
“Westeros has but one king,” said Stannis. His voice rang harsh,
with none of Melisandre’s music. “With this sword I defend my
subjects and destroy those who menace them. Bend the knee, and I
promise you food, land, and justice. Kneel and live. Or go and die.

The choice is yours.” He slipped Lightbringer into its scabbard, and
the world darkened once again, as if the sun had gone behind a
cloud. “Open the gates.”
“OPEN THE GATES,” bellowed Ser Clayton Suggs, in a voice as
deep as a warhorn. “OPEN THE GATES,” echoed Ser Corliss Penny,
commanding the guards. “OPEN THE GATES,” cried the serjeants.
Men scrambled to obey. Sharpened stakes were wrenched from the
ground, planks were dropped across deep ditches, and the stockade
gates were thrown wide. Jon Snow raised his hand and lowered it,
and his black ranks parted right and left, clearing a path to the
Wall, where Dolorous Edd Tollett pushed open the iron gate.
“Come,” urged Melisandre. “Come to the light … or run back to
the darkness.” In the pit below her, the re was crackling. “If you
choose life, come to me.”
And they came. Slowly at rst, some limping or leaning on their
fellows, the captives began to emerge from their rough-hewn pen. If
you would eat, come to me, Jon thought. If you would not freeze or
starve, submit. Hesitant, wary of some trap, the rst few prisoners
edged across the planks and through the ring of the stakes, toward
Melisandre and the Wall. More followed, when they saw that no
harm had come to those who went before. Then more, until it was a
steady stream. Queen’s men in studded jacks and halfhelms handed
each passing man, woman, or child a piece of white weirwood: a
stick, a splintered branch as pale as broken bone, a spray of bloodred leaves. A piece of the old gods to feed the new. Jon exed the
ngers of his sword hand.
The heat from the re pit was palpable even at a distance; for the
wildlings, it had to be blistering. He saw men cringing as they
neared the ames, heard children cry. A few turned for the forest.
He watched a young woman stumble away with a child on either
hand. Every few steps she looked back to make certain no one was
coming after them, and when she neared the trees she broke into a
run. One greybeard took the weirwood branch they handed him and
used it as a weapon, laying about with it until the queen’s men
converged on him with spears. The others had to step around his

body, until Ser Corliss had it thrown in the re. More of the free
folk chose the woods after that—one in ten, perhaps.
But most came on. Behind them was only cold and death. Ahead
was hope. They came on, clutching their scraps of wood until the
time came to feed them to the ames. R’hllor was a jealous deity,
ever hungry. So the new god devoured the corpse of the old, and
cast gigantic shadows of Stannis and Melisandre upon the Wall,
black against the ruddy red re ections on the ice.
Sigorn was the rst to kneel before the king. The new Magnar of
Thenn was a younger, shorter version of his father—lean, balding,
clad in bronze greaves and a leather shirt sewn with bronze scales.
Next came Rattleshirt in clattering armor made of bones and boiled
leather, his helm a giant’s skull. Under the bones lurked a ruined
and wretched creature with cracked brown teeth and a yellow tinge
to the whites of his eyes. A small, malicious, treacherous man, as
stupid as he is cruel. Jon did not believe for a moment that he would
keep faith. He wondered what Val was feeling as she watched him
kneel, forgiven.
Lesser leaders followed. Two clan chiefs of the Hornfoot men,
whose feet were black and hard. An old wisewoman revered by the
peoples of the Milkwater. A scrawny dark-eyed boy of two-and-ten,
the son of Alfyn Crowkiller. Halleck, brother to Harma Dogshead,
with her pigs. Each took a knee before the king.
It is too cold for this mummer’s show, thought Jon. “The free folk
despise kneelers,” he had warned Stannis. “Let them keep their
pride, and they will love you better.” His Grace would not listen.
He said, “It is swords I need from them, not kisses.”
Having knelt, the wildlings shu ed past the ranks of the black
brothers to the gate. Jon had detailed Horse and Satin and half a
dozen others to lead them through the Wall with torches. On the far
side, bowls of hot onion soup awaited them, and chunks of black
bread and sausage. Clothes as well: cloaks, breeches, boots, tunics,
good leather gloves. They would sleep on piles of clean straw, with
res blazing to keep the chill of night at bay. This king was nothing
if not methodical. Soon or late, however, Tormund Giantsbane
would assault the Wall again, and when that hour came Jon

wondered whose side Stannis’s new-made subjects would choose.
You can give them land and mercy, but the free folk choose their own
kings, and it was Mance they chose, not you.
Bowen Marsh edged his mount up next to Jon’s. “This is a day I
never thought to see.” The Lord Steward had thinned notably since
su ering a head wound at the Bridge of Skulls. Part of one ear was
gone. He no longer looks much like a pomegranate, Jon thought.
Marsh said, “We bled to stop the wildlings at the Gorge. Good men
were slain there, friends and brothers. For what?”
“The realm will curse us all for this,” declared Ser Alliser Thorne
in a venomous tone. “Every honest man in Westeros will turn his
head and spit at the mention of the Night’s Watch.”
What would you know of honest men? “Quiet in the ranks.” Ser
Alliser had grown more circumspect since Lord Janos had lost his
head, but the malice was still there. Jon had toyed with the idea of
giving him the command Slynt had refused, but he wanted the man
close. He was always the more dangerous of the two. Instead he had
dispatched a grizzled steward from the Shadow Tower to take
command at Greyguard.
He hoped the two new garrisons would make a di erence. The
Watch can make the free folk bleed, but in the end we cannot hope to
stop them. Giving Mance Rayder to the re did not change the truth
of that. We are still too few and they are still too many, and without
rangers, we’re good as blind. I have to send men out. But if I do, will
they come back again?
The tunnel through the Wall was narrow and twisting, and many
of the wildlings were old or ill or wounded, so the going was
painfully slow. By the time the last of them had bent the knee, night
had fallen. The pit re was burning low, and the king’s shadow on
the Wall had shrunk to a quarter of its former height. Jon Snow
could see his breath in the air. Cold, he thought, and getting colder.
This mummer’s show has gone on long enough.
Two score captives lingered by the stockade. Four giants were
among them, massive hairy creatures with sloped shoulders, legs as
large as tree trunks, and huge splayed feet. Big as they were, they
might still have passed through the Wall, but one would not leave

his mammoth, and the others would not leave him. The rest of those
who remained were all of human stature. Some were dead and some
were dying; more were their kin or close companions, unwilling to
abandon them even for a bowl of onion soup.
Some shivering, some too numb to shiver, they listened as the
king’s voice rumbled o the Wall. “You are free to go,” Stannis told
them. “Tell your people what you witnessed. Tell them that you
saw the true king, and that they are welcome in his realm, so long
as they keep his peace. Elsewise, they had best ee or hide. I will
brook no further attacks upon my Wall.”
“One realm, one god, one king!” cried Lady Melisandre.
The queen’s men took up the cry, beating the butts of their spears
against their shields. “One realm, one god, one king! STANNIS!
STANNIS! ONE REALM, ONE GOD, ONE KING!”
Val did not join the chant, he saw. Nor did the brothers of the
Night’s Watch. During the tumult the few remaining wildlings
melted into the trees. The giants were the last to go, two riding on
the back of a mammoth, the other two afoot. Only the dead were
left behind. Jon watched Stannis descend from the platform, with
Melisandre by his side. His red shadow. She never leaves his side for
long. The king’s honor guard fell in around them—Ser Godry, Ser
Clayton, and a dozen other knights, queen’s men all. Moonlight
shimmered on their armor and the wind whipped at their cloaks.
“Lord Steward,” Jon told Marsh, “break up that stockade for
rewood and throw the corpses in the ames.”
“As my lord commands.” Marsh barked out orders, and a swarm
of his stewards broke from ranks to attack the wooden walls. The
Lord Steward watched them, frowning. “These wildlings … do you
think they will keep faith, my lord?”
“Some will. Not all. We have our cowards and our knaves, our
weaklings and our fools, as do they.”
“Our vows … we are sworn to protect the realm …”
“Once the free folk are settled in the Gift, they will become part
of the realm,” Jon pointed out. “These are desperate days, and like
to grow more desperate. We have seen the face of our real foe, a
dead white face with bright blue eyes. The free folk have seen that

face as well. Stannis is not wrong in this. We must make common
cause with the wildlings.”
“Common cause against a common foe, I could agree with that,”
said Bowen Marsh, “but that does not mean we should allow tens of
thousands of half-starved savages through the Wall. Let them return
to their villages and ght the Others there, whilst we seal the gates.
It will not be di cult, Othell tells me. We need only ll the tunnels
with chunks of stone and pour water through the murder holes. The
Wall does the rest. The cold, the weight … in a moon’s turn, it will
be as if no gate had ever been. Any foe would need to hack his way
through.”
“Or climb.”
“Unlikely,” said Bowen Marsh. “These are not raiders, out to steal
a wife and some plunder. Tormund will have old women with him,
children, herds of sheep and goats, even mammoths. He needs a gate,
and only three of those remain. And if he should send climbers up,
well, defending against climbers is as simple as spearing sh in a
kettle.”
Fish never climb out of the kettle and shove a spear through your belly.
Jon had climbed the Wall himself.
Marsh went on. “Mance Rayder’s bowmen must have loosed ten
thousand arrows at us, judging from the number of spent shafts
we’ve gathered up. Fewer than a hundred reached our men atop the
Wall, most of those lifted by some errant gust of wind. Red Alyn of
the Rosewood was the only man to die up there, and it was his fall
that killed him, not the arrow that pricked his leg. Donal Noye died
to hold the gate. A gallant act, yes … but if the gate had been
sealed, our brave armorer might still be with us. Whether we face a
hundred foes or a hundred thousand, so long as we’re atop the Wall
and they’re below, they cannot do us harm.”
He’s not wrong. Mance Rayder’s host had broken against the Wall
like a wave upon a stony shore, though the defenders were no more
than a handful of old men, green boys, and cripples. Yet what
Bowen was suggesting went against all of Jon’s instincts. “If we seal
the gates, we cannot send out rangers,” he pointed out. “We will be
as good as blind.”

“Lord Mormont’s last ranging cost the Watch a quarter of its men,
my lord. We need to conserve what strength remains us. Every
death diminishes us, and we are stretched so thin … Take the high
ground and win the battle, my uncle used to say. No ground is
higher than the Wall, Lord Commander.”
“Stannis promises land, food, and justice to any wildlings who
bend the knee. He will never permit us to seal the gates.”
Marsh hesitated. “Lord Snow, I am not one to bear tales, but
there has been talk that you are becoming too … too friendly with
Lord Stannis. Some even suggest that you are … a …”
A rebel and a turncloak, aye, and a bastard and a warg as well. Janos
Slynt might be gone, but his lies lingered. “I know what they say.”
Jon had heard the whispers, had seen men turn away when he
crossed the yard. “What would they have me do, take up swords
against Stannis and the wildlings both? His Grace has thrice the
ghting men we do, and is our guest besides. The laws of
hospitality protect him. And we owe him and his a debt.”
“Lord Stannis helped us when we needed help,” Marsh said
doggedly, “but he is still a rebel, and his cause is doomed. As
doomed as we’ll be if the Iron Throne marks us down as traitors.
We must be certain that we do not choose the losing side.”
“It is not my intent to choose any side,” said Jon, “but I am not as
certain of the outcome of this war as you seem to be, my lord. Not
with Lord Tywin dead.” If the tales coming up the kingsroad could
be believed, the King’s Hand had been murdered by his dwarf son
whilst sitting on a privy. Jon had known Tyrion Lannister, brie y.
He took my hand and named me friend. It was hard to believe the
little man had it in him to murder his own sire, but the fact of Lord
Tywin’s demise seemed to be beyond doubt. “The lion in King’s
Landing is a cub, and the Iron Throne has been known to cut grown
men to ribbons.”
“A boy he may be, my lord, but … King Robert was well loved,
and most men still accept that Tommen is his son. The more they
see of Lord Stannis the less they love him, and fewer still are fond
of Lady Melisandre with her res and this grim red god of hers.
They complain.”

“They complained about Lord Commander Mormont too. Men
love to complain about their wives and lords, he told me once.
Those without wives complain twice as much about their lords.” Jon
Snow glanced toward the stockade. Two walls were down, a third
falling fast. “I will leave you to nish here, Bowen. Make certain
every corpse is burned. Thank you for your counsel. I promise you,
I will think on all you’ve said.”
Smoke and drifting ash still lingered in the air about the pit as
Jon trotted back to the gate. There he dismounted, to walk his
garron through the ice to the south side. Dolorous Edd went before
him with a torch. Its ames licked the ceiling, so cold tears trickled
down upon them with every step.
“It was a relief to see that horn burn, my lord,” Edd said. “Just
last night I dreamt I was pissing o the Wall when someone decided
to give the horn a toot. Not that I’m complaining. It was better than
my old dream, where Harma Dogshead was feeding me to her pigs.”
“Harma’s dead,” Jon said.
“But not the pigs. They look at me the way Slayer used to look at
ham. Not to say that the wildlings mean us harm. Aye, we hacked
their gods apart and made them burn the pieces, but we gave them
onion soup. What’s a god compared to a nice bowl of onion soup? I
could do with one myself.”
The odors of smoke and burned esh still clung to Jon’s blacks.
He knew he had to eat, but it was company he craved, not food. A
cup of wine with Maester Aemon, some quiet words with Sam, a few
laughs with Pyp and Grenn and Toad. Aemon and Sam were gone,
though, and his other friends … “I will take supper with the men
this evening.”
“Boiled beef and beets.” Dolorous Edd always seemed to know
what was cooking. “Hobb says he’s out of horseradish, though.
What good is boiled beef without horseradish?”
Since the wildlings had burned the old common hall, the men of
the Night’s Watch took their meals in the stone cellar below the
armory, a cavernous space divided by two rows of square stone
pillars, with barrel-vaulted ceilings and great casks of wine and ale
along the walls. When Jon entered, four builders were playing at

tiles at the table nearest the steps. Closer to the re sat a group of
rangers and a few king’s men, talking quietly.
The younger men were gathered at another table, where Pyp had
stabbed a turnip with his knife. “The night is dark and full of
turnips,” he announced in a solemn voice. “Let us all pray for
venison, my children, with some onions and a bit of tasty gravy.”
His friends laughed—Grenn, Toad, Satin, the whole lot of them.
Jon Snow did not join the laughter. “Making mock of another
man’s prayer is fool’s work, Pyp. And dangerous.”
“If the red god’s o ended, let him strike me down.”
All the smiles had died. “It was the priestess we were laughing
at,” said Satin, a lithe and pretty youth who had once been a whore
in Oldtown. “We were only having a jape, my lord.”
“You have your gods and she has hers. Leave her be.”
“She won’t let our gods be,” argued Toad. “She calls the Seven
false gods, m’lord. The old gods too. She made the wildlings burn
weirwood branches. You saw.”
“Lady Melisandre is not part of my command. You are. I won’t
have bad blood between the king’s men and my own.”
Pyp laid a hand on Toad’s arm. “Croak no more, brave Toad, for
our Great Lord Snow has spoken.” Pyp hopped to his feet and gave
Jon a mocking bow. “I beg pardon. Henceforth, I shall not even
waggle my ears save by your lordship’s lordly leave.”
He thinks this is all some game. Jon wanted to shake some sense
into him. “Waggle your ears all you like. It’s your tongue waggling
that makes the trouble.”
“I’ll see that he’s more careful,” Grenn promised, “and I’ll clout
him if he’s not.” He hesitated. “My lord, will you sup with us?
Owen, shove over and make room for Jon.”
Jon wanted nothing more. No, he had to tell himself, those days
are gone. The realization twisted in his belly like a knife. They had
chosen him to rule. The Wall was his, and their lives were his as
well. A lord may love the men that he commands, he could hear his
lord father saying, but he cannot be a friend to them. One day he may
need to sit in judgment on them, or send them forth to die. “Another

day,” the lord commander lied. “Edd, best see to your own supper. I
have work to nish.”
The outside air seemed even colder than before. Across the castle,
he could see candlelight shining from the windows of the King’s
Tower. Val stood on the tower roof, gazing up at the Wall. Stannis
kept her closely penned in rooms above his own, but he did allow
her to walk the battlements for exercise. She looks lonely, Jon
thought. Lonely, and lovely. Ygritte had been pretty in her own way,
with her red hair kissed by re, but it was her smile that made her
face come alive. Val did not need to smile; she would have turned
men’s heads in any court in the wide world.
All the same, the wildling princess was not beloved of her
gaolers. She scorned them all as “kneelers,” and had thrice
attempted to escape. When one man-at-arms grew careless in her
presence she had snatched his dagger from its sheath and stabbed
him in the neck. Another inch to the left and he might have died.
Lonely and lovely and lethal, Jon Snow re ected, and I might have
had her. Her, and Winterfell, and my lord father’s name. Instead he
had chosen a black cloak and a wall of ice. Instead he had chosen
honor. A bastard’s sort of honor.
The Wall loomed on his right as he crossed the yard. Its high ice
glimmered palely, but down below all was shadow. At the gate a
dim orange glow shone through the bars where the guards had
taken refuge from the wind. Jon could hear the creak of chains as
the winch cage swung and scraped against the ice. Up top, the
sentries would be huddling in the warming shed around a brazier,
shouting to be heard above the wind. Or else they would have given
up the e ort, and each man would be sunk in his own pool of
silence. I should be walking the ice. The Wall is mine.
He was walking beneath the shell of the Lord Commander’s
Tower, past the spot where Ygritte had died in his arms, when
Ghost appeared beside him, his warm breath steaming in the cold.
In the moonlight, his red eyes glowed like pools of re. The taste of
hot blood lled Jon’s mouth, and he knew that Ghost had killed that
night. No, he thought. I am a man, not a wolf. He rubbed his mouth
with the back of a gloved hand and spat.

Clydas still occupied the rooms beneath the rookery. At Jon’s
knock, he came shu ing, a taper in his hand, to open the door a
crack. “Do I intrude?” asked Jon.
“Not at all.” Clydas opened the door wider. “I was mulling wine.
Will my lord take a cup?”
“With pleasure.” His hands were sti from cold. He pulled o his
gloves and exed his ngers.
Clydas returned to the hearth to stir the wine. He’s sixty if he’s a
day. An old man. He only seemed young compared with Aemon. Short
and round, he had the dim pink eyes of some nocturnal creature. A
few white hairs clung to his scalp. When Clydas poured, Jon held
the cup with both hands, sni ed the spices, swallowed. The warmth
spread through his chest. He drank again, long and deep, to wash
the taste of blood from his mouth.
“The queen’s men are saying that the King-Beyond-the-Wall died
craven. That he cried for mercy and denied he was a king.”
“He did. Lightbringer was brighter than I’d ever seen it. As bright
as the sun.” Jon raised his cup. “To Stannis Baratheon and his magic
sword.” The wine was bitter in his mouth.
“His Grace is not an easy man. Few are, who wear a crown. Many
good men have been bad kings, Maester Aemon used to say, and
some bad men have been good kings.”
“He would know.” Aemon Targaryen had seen nine kings upon
the Iron Throne. He had been a king’s son, a king’s brother, a king’s
uncle. “I looked at that book Maester Aemon left me. The Jade
Compendium. The pages that told of Azor Ahai. Lightbringer was his
sword. Tempered with his wife’s blood if Votar can be believed.
Thereafter Lightbringer was never cold to the touch, but warm as
Nissa Nissa had been warm. In battle the blade burned ery hot.
Once Azor Ahai fought a monster. When he thrust the sword
through the belly of the beast, its blood began to boil. Smoke and
steam poured from its mouth, its eyes melted and dribbled down its
cheeks, and its body burst into ame.”
Clydas blinked. “A sword that makes its own heat …”
“… would be a ne thing on the Wall.” Jon put aside his wine cup
and drew on his black moleskin gloves. “A pity that the sword that

Stannis wields is cold. I’ll be curious to see how his Lightbringer
behaves in battle. Thank you for the wine. Ghost, with me.” Jon
Snow raised the hood of his cloak and pulled at the door. The white
wolf followed him back into the night.
The armory was dark and silent. Jon nodded to the guards before
making his way past the silent racks of spears to his rooms. He hung
his sword belt from a peg beside the door and his cloak from
another. When he peeled o his gloves, his hands were sti and
cold. It took him a long while to get the candles lit. Ghost curled up
on his rug and went to sleep, but Jon could not rest yet. The scarred
pinewood table was covered with maps of the Wall and the lands
beyond, a roster of rangers, and a letter from the Shadow Tower
written in Ser Denys Mallister’s owing hand.
He read the letter from the Shadow Tower again, sharpened a
quill, and unstoppered a pot of thick black ink. He wrote two
letters, the rst to Ser Denys, the second to Cotter Pyke. Both of
them had been hounding him for more men. Halder and Toad he
dispatched west to the Shadow Tower, Grenn and Pyp to Eastwatchby-the-Sea. The ink would not ow properly, and all his words
seemed curt and crude and clumsy, yet he persisted.
When he nally put the quill down, the room was dim and chilly,
and he could feel its walls closing in. Perched above the window,
the Old Bear’s raven peered down at him with shrewd black eyes.
My last friend, Jon thought ruefully. And I had best outlive you, or
you’ll eat my face as well. Ghost did not count. Ghost was closer than
a friend. Ghost was part of him.
Jon rose and climbed the steps to the narrow bed that had once
been Donal Noye’s. This is my lot, he realized as he undressed, from
now until the end of my days.

DAENERYS

W

hat is it?” she cried, as Irri shook her gently by the
shoulder. It was the black of night outside. Something is wrong, she
knew at once. “Is it Daario? What’s happened?” In her dream they
had been man and wife, simple folk who lived a simple life in a tall
stone house with a red door. In her dream he had been kissing her
all over—her mouth, her neck, her breasts.
“No, Khaleesi,” Irri murmured, “it is your eunuch Grey Worm and
the bald men. Will you see them?”
“Yes.” Her hair was disheveled and her bedclothes all atangle,
Dany realized. “Help me dress. I’ll have a cup of wine as well. To
clear my head.” To drown my dream. She could hear the soft sounds
of sobs. “Who is that weeping?”
“Your slave Missandei.” Jhiqui had a taper in her hand.
“My servant. I have no slaves.” Dany did not understand. “Why
does she weep?”
“For him who was her brother,” Irri told her.
The rest she had from Skahaz, Reznak, and Grey Worm, when
they were ushered into her presence. Dany knew their tidings were
bad before a word was spoken. One glance at the Shavepate’s ugly
face su ced to tell her that. “The Sons of the Harpy?”
Skahaz nodded. His mouth was grim.
“How many dead?”
Reznak wrung his hands. “N-nine, Magni cence. Foul work it
was, and wicked. A dreadful night, dreadful.”
Nine. The word was a dagger in her heart. Every night the
shadow war was waged anew beneath the stepped pyramids of

Meereen. Every morn the sun rose upon fresh corpses, with harpies
drawn in blood on the bricks beside them. Any freedman who
became too prosperous or too outspoken was marked for death.
Nine in one night, though … That frightened her. “Tell me.”
Grey Worm answered. “Your servants were set upon as they
walked the bricks of Meereen to keep Your Grace’s peace. All were
well armed, with spears and shields and short swords. Two by two
they walked, and two by two they died. Your servants Black Fist
and Cetherys were slain by crossbow bolts in Mazdhan’s Maze. Your
servants Mossador and Duran were crushed by falling stones
beneath the river wall. Your servants Eladon Goldenhair and Loyal
Spear were poisoned at a wineshop where they were accustomed to
stop each night upon their rounds.”
Mossador. Dany made a st. Missandei and her brothers had been
taken from their home on Naath by raiders from the Basilisk Isles
and sold into slavery in Astapor. Young as she was, Missandei had
shown such a gift for tongues that the Good Masters had made a
scribe of her. Mossador and Marselen had not been so fortunate.
They had been gelded and made into Unsullied. “Have any of the
murderers been captured?”
“Your servants have arrested the owner of the wineshop and his
daughters. They plead their ignorance and beg for mercy.”
They all plead ignorance and beg for mercy. “Give them to the
Shavepate. Skahaz, keep each apart from the others and put them to
the question.”
“It will be done, Your Worship. Would you have me question
them sweetly, or sharply?”
“Sweetly, to begin. Hear what tales they tell and what names
they give you. It may be they had no part in this.” She hesitated.
“Nine, the noble Reznak said. Who else?”
“Three freedmen, murdered in their homes,” the Shavepate said.
“A moneylender, a cobbler, and the harpist Rylona Rhee. They cut
her ngers o before they killed her.”
The queen inched. Rylona Rhee had played the harp as sweetly
as the Maiden. When she had been a slave in Yunkai, she had played
for every highborn family in the city. In Meereen she had become a

leader amongst the Yunkish freedmen, their voice in Dany’s
councils. “We have no captives but this wineseller?”
“None, this one grieves to confess. We beg your pardon.”
Mercy, thought Dany. They will have the dragon’s mercy. “Skahaz, I
have changed my mind. Question the man sharply.”
“I could. Or I could question the daughters sharply whilst the
father looks on. That will wring some names from him.”
“Do as you think best, but bring me names.” Her fury was a re
in her belly. “I will have no more Unsullied slaughtered. Grey
Worm, pull your men back to their barracks. Henceforth let them
guard my walls and gates and person. From this day, it shall be for
Meereenese to keep the peace in Meereen. Skahaz, make me a new
watch, made up in equal parts of shavepates and freedmen.”
“As you command. How many men?”
“As many as you require.”
Reznak mo Reznak gasped. “Magni cence, where is the coin to
come from to pay wages for so many men?”
“From the pyramids. Call it a blood tax. I will have a hundred
pieces of gold from every pyramid for each freedman that the
Harpy’s Sons have slain.”
That brought a smile to the Shavepate’s face. “It will be done,” he
said, “but Your Radiance should know that the Great Masters of
Zhak and Merreq are making preparations to quit their pyramids
and leave the city.”
Daenerys was sick unto death of Zhak and Merreq; she was sick
of all the Meereenese, great and small alike. “Let them go, but see
that they take no more than the clothes upon their backs. Make
certain that all their gold remains here with us. Their stores of food
as well.”
“Magni cence,” murmured Reznak mo Reznak, “we cannot know
that these great nobles mean to join your enemies. More like they
are simply making for their estates in the hills.”
“They will not mind us keeping their gold safe, then. There is
nothing to buy in the hills.”
“They are afraid for their children,” Reznak said.

Yes, Daenerys thought, and so am I. “We must keep them safe as
well. I will have two children from each of them. From the other
pyramids as well. A boy and a girl.”
“Hostages,” said Skahaz, happily.
“Pages and cupbearers. If the Great Masters make objection,
explain to them that in Westeros it is a great honor for a child to be
chosen to serve at court.” She left the rest unspoken. “Go and do as
I’ve commanded. I have my dead to mourn.”
When she returned to her rooms atop the pyramid, she found
Missandei crying softly on her pallet, trying as best she could to
mu e the sound of her sobs. “Come sleep with me,” she told the
little scribe. “Dawn will not come for hours yet.”
“Your Grace is kind to this one.” Missandei slipped under the
sheets. “He was a good brother.”
Dany wrapped her arms about the girl. “Tell me of him.”
“He taught me how to climb a tree when we were little. He could
catch sh with his hands. Once I found him sleeping in our garden
with a hundred butter ies crawling over him. He looked so
beautiful that morning, this one … I mean, I loved him.”
“As he loved you.” Dany stroked the girl’s hair. “Say the word,
my sweet, and I will send you from this awful place. I will nd a
ship somehow and send you home. To Naath.”
“I would sooner stay with you. On Naath I’d be afraid. What if
the slavers came again? I feel safe when I’m with you.”
Safe. The word made Dany’s eyes ll up with tears. “I want to
keep you safe.” Missandei was only a child. With her, she felt as if
she could be a child too. “No one ever kept me safe when I was
little. Well, Ser Willem did, but then he died, and Viserys … I want
to protect you but … it is so hard. To be strong. I don’t always
know what I should do. I must know, though. I am all they have. I
am the queen … the … the …”
“… mother,” whispered Missandei.
“Mother to dragons.” Dany shivered.
“No. Mother to us all.” Missandei hugged her tighter. “Your Grace
should sleep. Dawn will be here soon, and court.”

“We’ll both sleep, and dream of sweeter days. Close your eyes.”
When she did, Dany kissed her eyelids and made her giggle.
Kisses came easier than sleep, however. Dany shut her eyes and
tried to think of home, of Dragonstone and King’s Landing and all
the other places that Viserys had told her of, in a kinder land than
this … but her thoughts kept turning back to Slaver’s Bay, like ships
caught in some bitter wind. When Missandei was sound asleep,
Dany slipped from her arms and stepped out into the predawn air to
lean upon the cool brick parapet and gaze out across the city. A
thousand roofs stretched out below her, painted in shades of ivory
and silver by the moon.
Somewhere beneath those roofs, the Sons of the Harpy were
gathered, plotting ways to kill her and all those who loved her and
put her children back in chains. Somewhere down there a hungry
child was crying for milk. Somewhere an old woman lay dying.
Somewhere a man and a maid embraced, and fumbled at each
other’s clothes with eager hands. But up here there was only the
sheen of moonlight on pyramids and pits, with no hint what lay
beneath. Up here there was only her, alone.
She was the blood of the dragon. She could kill the Sons of the
Harpy, and the sons of the sons, and the sons of the sons of the
sons. But a dragon could not feed a hungry child nor help a dying
woman’s pain. And who would ever dare to love a dragon?
She found herself thinking of Daario Naharis once again, Daario
with his gold tooth and trident beard, his strong hands resting on
the hilts of his matched arakh and stiletto, hilts wrought of gold in
the shape of naked women. The day he took his leave of her, as she
was bidding him farewell, he had brushed the balls of his thumbs
lightly across them, back and forth. I am jealous of a sword hilt, she
had realized, of women made of gold. Sending him to the Lamb Men
had been wise. She was a queen, and Daario Naharis was not the
stu of kings.
“It has been so long,” she had said to Ser Barristan, just
yesterday. “What if Daario has betrayed me and gone over to my
enemies?” Three treasons will you know. “What if he met another
woman, some princess of the Lhazarene?”

The old knight neither liked nor trusted Daario, she knew. Even
so, he had answered gallantly. “There is no woman more lovely
than Your Grace. Only a blind man could believe otherwise, and
Daario Naharis was not blind.”
No, she thought. His eyes are a deep blue, almost purple, and his
gold tooth gleams when he smiles for me.
Ser Barristan was sure he would return, though. Dany could only
pray that he was right.
A bath will help soothe me. She padded barefoot through the grass
to her terrace pool. The water felt cool on her skin, raising
goosebumps. Little sh nibbled at her arms and legs. She closed her
eyes and oated.
A soft rustle made her open them again. She sat up with a soft
splash. “Missandei?” she called. “Irri? Jhiqui?”
“They sleep,” came the answer.
A woman stood under the persimmon tree, clad in a hooded robe
that brushed the grass. Beneath the hood, her face seemed hard and
shiny. She is wearing a mask, Dany knew, a wooden mask nished in
dark red lacquer. “Quaithe? Am I dreaming?” She pinched her ear
and winced at the pain. “I dreamt of you on Balerion, when rst we
came to Astapor.”
“You did not dream. Then or now.”
“What are you doing here? How did you get past my guards?”
“I came another way. Your guards never saw me.”
“If I call out, they will kill you.”
“They will swear to you that I am not here.”
“Are you here?”
“No. Hear me, Daenerys Targaryen. The glass candles are
burning. Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the others. Kraken
and dark ame, lion and gri n, the sun’s son and the mummer’s
dragon. Trust none of them. Remember the Undying. Beware the
perfumed seneschal.”
“Reznak? Why should I fear him?” Dany rose from the pool.
Water trickled down her legs, and goose esh covered her arms in
the cool night air. “If you have some warning for me, speak plainly.
What do you want of me, Quaithe?”

Moonlight shone in the woman’s eyes. “To show you the way.”
“I remember the way. I go north to go south, east to go west,
back to go forward. And to touch the light I have to pass beneath
the shadow.” She squeezed the water from her silvery hair. “I am
half-sick of riddling. In Qarth I was a beggar, but here I am a queen.
I command you—”
“Daenerys. Remember the Undying. Remember who you are.”
“The blood of the dragon.” But my dragons are roaring in the
darkness. “I remember the Undying. Child of three, they called me.
Three mounts they promised me, three res, and three treasons.
One for blood and one for gold and one for …”
“Your Grace?” Missandei stood in the door of the queen’s
bedchamber, a lantern in her hand. “Who are you talking to?”
Dany glanced back toward the persimmon tree. There was no
woman there. No hooded robe, no lacquer mask, no Quaithe.
A shadow. A memory. No one. She was the blood of the dragon,
but Ser Barristan had warned her that in that blood there was a
taint. Could I be going mad? They had called her father mad, once. “I
was praying,” she told the Naathi girl. “It will be light soon. I had
best eat something, before court.”
“I will bring you food to break your fast.”
Alone again, Dany went all the way around the pyramid in hopes
of nding Quaithe, past the burned trees and scorched earth where
her men had tried to capture Drogon. But the only sound was the
wind in the fruit trees, and the only creatures in the gardens were a
few pale moths.
Missandei returned with a melon and a bowl of hard-cooked eggs,
but Dany found she had no appetite. As the sky lightened and the
stars faded one by one, Irri and Jhiqui helped her don a tokar of
violet silk fringed in gold.
When Reznak and Skahaz appeared, she found herself looking at
them askance, mindful of the three treasons. Beware the perfumed
seneschal. She sni ed suspiciously at Reznak mo Reznak. I could
command the Shavepate to arrest him and put him to the question.
Would that forestall the prophecy? Or would some other betrayer

take his place? Prophecies are treacherous, she reminded herself, and
Reznak may be no more than he appears.
In the purple hall, Dany found her ebon bench piled high about
with satin pillows. The sight brought a wan smile to her lips. Ser
Barristan’s work, she knew. The old knight was a good man, but
sometimes very literal. It was only a jape, ser, she thought, but she
sat on one of the pillows just the same.
Her sleepless night soon made itself felt. Before long she was
ghting o a yawn as Reznak prattled about the craftsmen’s guilds.
The stonemasons were wroth with her, it seemed. The bricklayers
as well. Certain former slaves were carving stone and laying bricks,
stealing work from guild journeymen and masters alike. “The
freedmen work too cheaply, Magni cence,” Reznak said. “Some call
themselves journeymen, or even masters, titles that belong by
rights only to the craftsmen of the guilds. The masons and the
bricklayers do respectfully petition Your Worship to uphold their
ancient rights and customs.”
“The freedmen work cheaply because they are hungry,” Dany
pointed out. “If I forbid them to carve stone or lay bricks, the
chandlers, the weavers, and the goldsmiths will soon be at my gates
asking that they be excluded from those trades as well.” She
considered a moment. “Let it be written that henceforth only guild
members shall be permitted to name themselves journeymen or
masters … provided the guilds open their rolls to any freedman who
can demonstrate the requisite skills.”
“So shall it be proclaimed,” said Reznak. “Will it please Your
Worship to hear the noble Hizdahr zo Loraq?”
Will he never admit defeat? “Let him step forth.”
Hizdahr was not in a tokar today. Instead he wore a simple robe
of grey and blue. He was shorn as well. He has shaved o his beard
and cut his hair, she realized. The man had not gone shavepate, not
quite, but at least those absurd wings of his were gone. “Your
barber has served you well, Hizdahr. I hope you have come to show
me his work and not to plague me further about the ghting pits.”
He made a deep obeisance. “Your Grace, I fear I must.”

Dany grimaced. Even her own people would give no rest about
the matter. Reznak mo Reznak stressed the coin to be made through
taxes. The Green Grace said that reopening the pits would please
the gods. The Shavepate felt it would win her support against the
Sons of the Harpy. “Let them ght,” grunted Strong Belwas, who
had once been a champion in the pits. Ser Barristan suggested a
tourney instead; his orphans could ride at rings and ght a mêlée
with blunted weapons, he said, a suggestion Dany knew was as
hopeless as it was well-intentioned. It was blood the Meereenese
yearned to see, not skill. Elsewise the ghting slaves would have
worn armor. Only the little scribe Missandei seemed to share the
queen’s misgivings.
“I have refused you six times,” Dany reminded Hizdahr.
“Your Radiance has seven gods, so perhaps she will look upon my
seventh plea with favor. Today I do not come alone. Will you hear
my friends? There are seven of them as well.” He brought them
forth one by one. “Here is Khrazz. Here Barsena Blackhair, ever
valiant. Here Camarron of the Count and Goghor the Giant. This is
the Spotted Cat, this Fearless Ithoke. Last, Belaquo Bonebreaker.
They have come to add their voices to mine own, and ask Your
Grace to let our ghting pits reopen.”
Dany knew his seven, by name if not by sight. All had been
amongst the most famed of Meereen’s ghting slaves … and it had
been the ghting slaves, freed from their shackles by her sewer
rats, who led the uprising that won the city for her. She owed them
a blood debt. “I will hear you,” she allowed.
One by one, each of them asked her to let the ghting pits
reopen. “Why?” she demanded, when Ithoke had nished. “You are
no longer slaves, doomed to die at a master’s whim. I freed you.
Why should you wish to end your lives upon the scarlet sands?”
“I train since three,” said Goghor the Giant. “I kill since six.
Mother of Dragons says I am free. Why not free to ght?”
“If it is ghting you want, ght for me. Swear your sword to the
Mother’s Men or the Free Brothers or the Stalwart Shields. Teach
my other freedmen how to ght.”

Goghor shook his head. “Before, I ght for master. You say, ght
for you. I say, ght for me.” The huge man thumped his chest with
a st as big as a ham. “For gold. For glory.”
“Goghor speaks for us all.” The Spotted Cat wore a leopard skin
across one shoulder. “The last time I was sold, the price was three
hundred thousand honors. When I was a slave, I slept on furs and
ate red meat o the bone. Now that I’m free, I sleep on straw and
eat salt sh, when I can get it.”
“Hizdahr swears that the winners shall share half of all the coin
collected at the gates,” said Khrazz. “Half, he swears it, and Hizdahr
is an honorable man.”
No, a cunning man. Daenerys felt trapped. “And the losers? What
shall they receive?”
“Their names shall be graven on the Gates of Fate amongst the
other valiant fallen,” declared Barsena. For eight years she had slain
every other woman sent against her, it was said. “All men must die,
and women too … but not all will be remembered.”
Dany had no answer for that. If this is truly what my people wish, do
I have the right to deny it to them? It was their city before it was mine,
and it is their own lives they wish to squander. “I will consider all
you’ve said. Thank you for your counsel.” She rose. “We will
resume on the morrow.”
“All kneel for Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Queen of Meereen,
Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Khaleesi of
Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Shackles, and Mother of Dragons,”
Missandei called.
Ser Barristan escorted her back up to her chambers. “Tell me a
tale, ser,” Dany said as they climbed. “Some tale of valor with a
happy ending.” She felt in need of happy endings. “Tell me how you
escaped from the Usurper.”
“Your Grace. There is no valor in running for your life.”
Dany seated herself on a cushion, crossed her legs, and gazed up
at him. “Please. It was the Young Usurper who dismissed you from
the Kingsguard …”
“Jo rey, aye. They gave my age for a reason, though the truth
was elsewise. The boy wanted a white cloak for his dog Sandor

Clegane and his mother wanted the Kingslayer to be her lord
commander. When they told me, I … I took o my cloak as they
commanded, threw my sword at Jo rey’s feet, and spoke
unwisely.”
“What did you say?”
“The truth … but truth was never welcome at that court. I walked
from the throne room with my head high, though I did not know
where I was going. I had no home but White Sword Tower. My
cousins would nd a place for me at Harvest Hall, I knew, but I had
no wish to bring Jo rey’s displeasure down upon them. I was
gathering my things when it came to me that I had brought this on
myself by taking Robert’s pardon. He was a good knight but a bad
king, for he had no right to the throne he sat. That was when I
knew that to redeem myself I must nd the true king, and serve
him loyally with all the strength that still remained me.”
“My brother Viserys.”
“Such was my intent. When I reached the stables the gold cloaks
tried to seize me. Jo rey had o ered me a tower to die in, but I had
spurned his gift, so now he meant to o er me a dungeon. The
commander of the City Watch himself confronted me, emboldened
by my empty scabbard, but he had only three men with him and I
still had my knife. I slashed one man’s face open when he laid his
hands upon me, and rode through the others. As I spurred for the
gates I heard Janos Slynt shouting for them to go after me. Once
outside the Red Keep, the streets were congested, else I might have
gotten away clean. Instead they caught me at the River Gate. The
gold cloaks who had pursued me from the castle shouted for those
at the gate to stop me, so they crossed their spears to bar my way.”
“And you without your sword? How did you get past them?”
“A true knight is worth ten guardsmen. The men at the gate were
taken by surprise. I rode one down, wrenched away his spear, and
drove it through the throat of my closest pursuer. The other broke
o once I was through the gate, so I spurred my horse to a gallop
and rode hellbent along the river until the city was lost to sight
behind me. That night I traded my horse for a handful of pennies
and some rags, and the next morning I joined the stream of

smallfolk making their way to King’s Landing. I’d gone out the Mud
Gate, so I returned through the Gate of the Gods, with dirt on my
face, stubble on my cheeks, and no weapon but a wooden sta . In
roughspun clothes and mud-caked boots, I was just one more old
man eeing the war. The gold cloaks took a stag from me and
waved me through. King’s Landing was crowded with smallfolk
who’d come seeking refuge from the ghting. I lost myself amongst
them. I had a little silver, but I needed that to pay my passage
across the narrow sea, so I slept in septs and alleys and took my
meals in pot shops. I let my beard grow out and cloaked myself in
age. The day Lord Stark lost his head, I was there, watching.
Afterward I went into the Great Sept and thanked the seven gods
that Jo rey had stripped me of my cloak.”
“Stark was a traitor who met a traitor’s end.”
“Your Grace,” said Selmy, “Eddard Stark played a part in your
father’s fall, but he bore you no ill will. When the eunuch Varys told
us that you were with child, Robert wanted you killed, but Lord
Stark spoke against it. Rather than countenance the murder of
children, he told Robert to nd himself another Hand.”
“Have you forgotten Princess Rhaenys and Prince Aegon?”
“Never. That was Lannister work, Your Grace.”
“Lannister or Stark, what di erence? Viserys used to call them the
Usurper’s dogs. If a child is set upon by a pack of hounds, does it
matter which one tears out his throat? All the dogs are just as
guilty. The guilt …” The word caught in her throat. Hazzea, she
thought, and suddenly she heard herself say, “I have to see the pit,”
in a voice as small as a child’s whisper. “Take me down, ser, if you
would.”
A icker of disapproval crossed the old man’s face, but it was not
his way to question his queen. “As you command.”
The servants’ steps were the quickest way down—not grand, but
steep and straight and narrow, hidden in the walls. Ser Barristan
brought a lantern, lest she fall. Bricks of twenty di erent colors
pressed close around them, fading to grey and black beyond the
lantern light. Thrice they passed Unsullied guards, standing as if

they had been carved from stone. The only sound was the soft scru
of their feet upon the steps.
At ground level the Great Pyramid of Meereen was a hushed
place, full of dust and shadows. Its outer walls were thirty feet
thick. Within them, sounds echoed o arches of many-colored
bricks, and amongst the stables, stalls, and storerooms. They passed
beneath three massive arches, down a torchlit ramp into the vaults
beneath the pyramid, past cisterns, dungeons, and torture chambers
where slaves had been scourged and skinned and burned with redhot irons. Finally they came to a pair of huge iron doors with rusted
hinges, guarded by Unsullied.
At her command, one produced an iron key. The door opened,
hinges shrieking. Daenerys Targaryen stepped into the hot heart of
darkness and stopped at the lip of a deep pit. Forty feet below, her
dragons raised their heads. Four eyes burned through the shadows—
two of molten gold and two of bronze.
Ser Barristan took her by the arm. “No closer.”
“You think they would harm me?”
“I do not know, Your Grace, but I would sooner not risk your
person to learn the answer.”
When Rhaegal roared, a gout of yellow ame turned darkness
into day for half a heartbeat. The re licked along the walls, and
Dany felt the heat upon her face, like the blast from an oven. Across
the pit, Viserion’s wings unfolded, stirring the stale air. He tried to
y to her, but the chains snapped taut as he rose and slammed him
down onto his belly. Links as big as a man’s st bound his feet to
the oor. The iron collar about his neck was fastened to the wall
behind him. Rhaegal wore matching chains. In the light of Selmy’s
lantern, his scales gleamed like jade. Smoke rose from between his
teeth. Bones were scattered on the oor at his feet, cracked and
scorched and splintered. The air was uncomfortably hot and smelled
of sulfur and charred meat.
“They are larger.” Dany’s voice echoed o the scorched stone
walls. A drop of sweat trickled down her brow and fell onto her
breast. “Is it true that dragons never stop growing?”

“If they have food enough, and space to grow. Chained up in
here, though …”
The Great Masters had used the pit as a prison. It was large
enough to hold ve hundred men … and more than ample for two
dragons. For how long, though? What will happen when they grow too
large for the pit? Will they turn on one another with ame and claw?
Will they grow wan and weak, with withered anks and shrunken
wings? Will their res go out before the end?
What sort of mother lets her children rot in darkness?
If I look back, I am doomed, Dany told herself … but how could
she not look back? I should have seen it coming. Was I so blind, or did
I close my eyes willfully, so I would not have to see the price of power?
Viserys had told her all the tales when she was little. He loved to
talk of dragons. She knew how Harrenhal had fallen. She knew
about the Field of Fire and the Dance of the Dragons. One of her
forebears, the third Aegon, had seen his own mother devoured by
his uncle’s dragon. And there were songs beyond count of villages
and kingdoms that lived in dread of dragons till some brave
dragonslayer rescued them. At Astapor the slaver’s eyes had melted.
On the road to Yunkai, when Daario tossed the heads of Sallor the
Bald and Prendahl na Ghezn at her feet, her children made a feast of
them. Dragons had no fear of men. And a dragon large enough to
gorge on sheep could take a child just as easily.
Her name had been Hazzea. She was four years old. Unless her
father lied. He might have lied. No one had seen the dragon but him.
His proof was burned bones, but burned bones proved nothing. He
might have killed the little girl himself, and burned her afterward.
He would not have been the rst father to dispose of an unwanted
girl child, the Shavepate claimed. The Sons of the Harpy might have
done it, and made it look like dragon’s work to make the city hate me.
Dany wanted to believe that … but if that was so, why had Hazzea’s
father waited until the audience hall was almost empty to come
forward? If his purpose had been to in ame the Meereenese against
her, he would have told his tale when the hall was full of ears to
hear.

The Shavepate had urged her to put the man to death. “At least
rip out his tongue. This man’s lie could destroy us all,
Magni cence.” Instead Dany chose to pay the blood price. No one
could tell her the worth of a daughter, so she set it at one hundred
times the worth of a lamb. “I would give Hazzea back to you if I
could,” she told the father, “but some things are beyond the power
of even a queen. Her bones shall be laid to rest in the Temple of the
Graces, and a hundred candles shall burn day and night in her
memory. Come back to me each year upon her nameday, and your
other children shall not want … but this tale must never pass your
lips again.”
“Men will ask,” the grieving father had said. “They will ask me
where Hazzea is and how she died.”
“She died of a snakebite,” Reznak mo Reznak insisted. “A
ravening wolf carried her o . A sudden sickness took her. Tell them
what you will, but never speak of dragons.”
Viserion’s claws scrabbled against the stones, and the huge chains
rattled as he tried to make his way to her again. When he could not,
he gave a roar, twisted his head back as far as he was able, and spat
golden ame at the wall behind him. How soon till his re burns hot
enough to crack stone and melt iron?
Once, not long ago, he had ridden on her shoulder, his tail coiled
round her arm. Once she had fed him morsels of charred meat from
her own hand. He had been the rst chained up. Daenerys had led
him to the pit herself and shut him up inside with several oxen.
Once he had gorged himself he grew drowsy. They had chained him
whilst he slept.
Rhaegal had been harder. Perhaps he could hear his brother
raging in the pit, despite the walls of brick and stone between them.
In the end, they had to cover him with a net of heavy iron chain as
he basked on her terrace, and he fought so ercely that it had taken
three days to carry him down the servants’ steps, twisting and
snapping. Six men had been burned in the struggle.
And Drogon …
The winged shadow, the grieving father called him. He was the
largest of her three, the ercest, the wildest, with scales as black as

night and eyes like pits of re.
Drogon hunted far a eld, but when he was sated he liked to bask
in the sun at the apex of the Great Pyramid, where once the harpy
of Meereen had stood. Thrice they had tried to take him there, and
thrice they had failed. Two score of her bravest had risked
themselves trying to capture him. Almost all had su ered burns, and
four of them had died. The last she had seen of Drogon had been at
sunset on the night of the third attempt. The black dragon had been
ying north across the Skahazadhan toward the tall grasses of the
Dothraki sea. He had not returned.
Mother of dragons, Daenerys thought. Mother of monsters. What
have I unleashed upon the world? A queen I am, but my throne is made
of burned bones, and it rests on quicksand. Without dragons, how
could she hope to hold Meereen, much less win back Westeros? I am
the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I.

REEK

T

he rat squealed as he bit into it, squirming wildly in his hands,
frantic to escape. The belly was the softest part. He tore at the
sweet meat, the warm blood running over his lips. It was so good
that it brought tears to his eyes. His belly rumbled and he
swallowed. By the third bite the rat had ceased to struggle, and he
was feeling almost content.
Then he heard the sounds of voices outside the dungeon door.
At once he stilled, fearing even to chew. His mouth was full of
blood and esh and hair, but he dare not spit or swallow. He
listened in terror, sti as stone, to the scu of boots and the
clanking of iron keys. No, he thought, no, please gods, not now, not
now. It had taken him so long to catch the rat. If they catch me with
it, they will take it away, and then they’ll tell, and Lord Ramsay will hurt
me.
He knew he ought to hide the rat, but he was so hungry. It had
been two days since he had eaten, or maybe three. Down here in
the dark it was hard to tell. Though his arms and legs were thin as
reeds, his belly was swollen and hollow, and ached so much that he
found he could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, he found
himself remembering Lady Hornwood. After their wedding, Lord
Ramsay had locked her away in a tower and starved her to death. In
the end she had eaten her own ngers.
He crouched down in a corner of his cell, clutching his prize
under his chin. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth as he
nibbled at the rat with what remained of his teeth, trying to bolt
down as much of the warm esh as he could before the cell was

opened. The meat was stringy, but so rich he thought he might be
sick. He chewed and swallowed, picking small bones from the holes
in his gums where teeth had been yanked out. It hurt to chew, but
he was so hungry he could not stop.
The sounds were growing louder. Please gods, he isn’t coming for
me, he prayed, tearing o one of the rat’s legs. It had been a long
time since anyone had come for him. There were other cells, other
prisoners. Sometimes he heard them screaming, even through the
thick stone walls. The women always scream the loudest. He sucked at
the raw meat and tried to spit out the leg bone, but it only dribbled
over his lower lip and tangled in his beard. Go away, he prayed, go
away, pass me by, please, please.
But the footsteps stopped just when they were loudest, and the
keys clattered right outside the door. The rat fell from his ngers.
He wiped his bloody ngers on his breeches. “No,” he mumbled,
“noooo.” His heels scrabbled at the straw as he tried to push himself
into the corner, into the cold damp stone walls.
The sound of the lock turning was the most terrible of all. When
the light hit him full in the face, he let out a shriek. He had to cover
his eyes with his hands. He would have clawed them out if he’d
dared, his head was pounding so. “Take it away, do it in the dark,
please, oh please.”
“That’s not him,” said a boy’s voice. “Look at him. We’ve got the
wrong cell.”
“Last cell on the left,” another boy replied. “This is the last cell on
the left, isn’t it?”
“Aye.” A pause. “What’s he saying?”
“I don’t think he likes the light.”
“Would you, if you looked like that?” The boy hawked and spat.
“And the stench of him. I’m like to choke.”
“He’s been eating rats,” said the second boy. “Look.”
The rst boy laughed. “He has. That’s funny.”
I had to. The rats bit him when he slept, gnawing at his ngers
and his toes, even at his face, so when he got his hands on one he
did not hesitate. Eat or be eaten, those were the only choices. “I did

it,” he mumbled, “I did, I did, I ate him, they do the same to me,
please …”
The boys moved closer, the straw crunching softly under their
feet. “Talk to me,” said one of them. He was the smaller of the two,
a thin boy, but clever. “Do you remember who you are?”
The fear came bubbling up inside him, and he moaned.
“Talk to me. Tell me your name.”
My name. A scream caught in his throat. They had taught him his
name, they had, they had, but it had been so long that he’d
forgotten. If I say it wrong, he’ll take another nger, or worse,
he’ll … he’ll … He would not think about that, he could not think
about that. There were needles in his jaw, in his eyes. His head was
pounding. “Please,” he squeaked, his voice thin and weak. He
sounded a hundred years old. Perhaps he was. How long have I been
in here? “Go,” he mumbled, through broken teeth and broken
ngers, his eyes closed tight against the terrible bright light.
“Please, you can have the rat, don’t hurt me …”
“Reek,” said the larger of the boys. “Your name is Reek.
Remember?” He was the one with the torch. The smaller boy had
the ring of iron keys.
Reek? Tears ran down his cheeks. “I remember. I do.” His mouth
opened and closed. “My name is Reek. It rhymes with leek.” In the
dark he did not need a name, so it was easy to forget. Reek, Reek,
my name is Reek. He had not been born with that name. In another
life he had been someone else, but here and now, his name was
Reek. He remembered.
He remembered the boys as well. They were clad in matching
lambswool doublets, silver-grey with dark blue trim. Both were
squires, both were eight, and both were Walder Frey. Big Walder
and Little Walder, yes. Only the big one was Little and the little one
was Big, which amused the boys and confused the rest of the world.
“I know you,” he whispered, through cracked lips. “I know your
names.”
“You’re to come with us,” said Little Walder.
“His lordship has need of you,” said Big Walder.

Fear went through him like a knife. They are only children, he
thought. Two boys of eight. He could overcome two boys of eight,
surely. Even as weak as he was, he could take the torch, take the
keys, take the dagger sheathed on Little Walder’s hip, escape. No.
No, it is too easy. It is a trap. If I run, he will take another nger from
me, he will take more of my teeth.
He had run before. Years ago, it seemed, when he still had some
strength in him, when he had still been de ant. That time it had
been Kyra with the keys. She told him she had stolen them, that she
knew a postern gate that was never guarded. “Take me back to
Winterfell, m’lord,” she begged, pale-faced and trembling. “I don’t
know the way. I can’t escape alone. Come with me, please.” And so
he had. The gaoler was dead drunk in a puddle of wine, with his
breeches down around his ankles. The dungeon door was open and
the postern gate had been unguarded, just as she had said. They
waited for the moon to go behind a cloud, then slipped from the
castle and splashed across the Weeping Water, stumbling over
stones, half-frozen by the icy stream. On the far side, he had kissed
her. “You’ve saved us,” he said. Fool. Fool.
It had all been a trap, a game, a jape. Lord Ramsay loved the
chase and preferred to hunt two-legged prey. All night they ran
through the darkling wood, but as the sun came up the sound of a
distant horn came faintly through the trees, and they heard the
baying of a pack of hounds. “We should split up,” he told Kyra as
the dogs drew closer. “They cannot track us both.” The girl was
crazed with fear, though, and refused to leave his side, even when
he swore that he would raise a host of ironborn and come back for
her if she should be the one they followed.
Within the hour, they were taken. One dog knocked him to the
ground, and a second bit Kyra on the leg as she scrambled up a
hillside. The rest surrounded them, baying and snarling, snapping at
them every time they moved, holding them there until Ramsay
Snow rode up with his huntsmen. He was still a bastard then, not
yet a Bolton. “There you are,” he said, smiling down at them from
the saddle. “You wound me, wandering o like this. Have you
grown tired of my hospitality so soon?” That was when Kyra seized

a stone and threw it at his head. It missed by a good foot, and
Ramsay smiled. “You must be punished.”
Reek remembered the desperate, frightened look in Kyra’s eyes.
She had never looked so young as she did in that moment, still half
a girl, but there was nothing he could do. She brought them down on
us, he thought. If we had separated as I wanted, one of us might have
gotten away.
The memory made it hard to breathe. Reek turned away from the
torch with tears glimmering in his eyes. What does he want of me this
time? he thought, despairing. Why won’t he just leave me be? I did no
wrong, not this time, why won’t they just leave me in the dark? He’d
had a rat, a fat one, warm and wriggling …
“Should we wash him?” asked Little Walder.
“His lordship likes him stinky,” said Big Walder. “That’s why he
named him Reek.”
Reek. My name is Reek, it rhymes with bleak. He had to remember
that. Serve and obey and remember who you are, and no more harm
will come to you. He promised, his lordship promised. Even if he had
wanted to resist, he did not have the strength. It had been scourged
from him, starved from him, ayed from him. When Little Walder
pulled him up and Big Walder waved the torch at him to herd him
from the cell, he went along as docile as a dog. If he’d had a tail, he
would have tucked it down between his legs.
If I had a tail, the Bastard would have cut it o . The thought came
unbidden, a vile thought, dangerous. His lordship was not a bastard
anymore. Bolton, not Snow. The boy king on the Iron Throne had
made Lord Ramsay legitimate, giving him the right to use his lord
father’s name. Calling him Snow reminded him of his bastardy and
sent him into a black rage. Reek must remember that. And his
name, he must remember his name. For half a heartbeat it eluded
him, and that frightened him so badly that he tripped on the steep
dungeon steps and tore his breeches open on the stone, drawing
blood. Little Walder had to shove the torch at him to get him back
on his feet and moving again.
Out in the yard, night was settling over the Dreadfort and a full
moon was rising over the castle’s eastern walls. Its pale light cast

the shadows of the tall triangular merlons across the frozen ground,
a line of sharp black teeth. The air was cold and damp and full of
half-forgotten smells. The world, Reek told himself, this is what the
world smells like. He did not know how long he had been down there
in the dungeons, but it had to have been half a year at least. That
long, or longer. What if it has been ve years, or ten, or twenty? Would
I even know? What if I went mad down there, and half my life is gone?
But no, that was folly. It could not have been so long. The boys
were still boys. If it had been ten years, they would have grown
into men. He had to remember that. I must not let him drive me mad.
He can take my ngers and my toes, he can put out my eyes and slice
my ears o , but he cannot take my wits unless I let him.
Little Walder led the way with torch in hand. Reek followed
meekly, with Big Walder just behind him. The dogs in the kennels
barked as they went by. Wind swirled through the yard, cutting
through the thin cloth of the lthy rags he wore and raising
gooseprickles on his skin. The night air was cold and damp, but he
saw no sign of snow though surely winter was close at hand. Reek
wondered if he would be alive to see the snows come. How many
ngers will I have? How many toes? When he raised a hand, he was
shocked to see how white it was, how eshless. Skin and bones, he
thought. I have an old man’s hands. Could he have been wrong about
the boys? What if they were not Little Walder and Big Walder after
all, but the sons of the boys he’d known?
The great hall was dim and smoky. Rows of torches burned to left
and right, grasped by skeletal human hands jutting from the walls.
High overhead were wooden rafters black from smoke, and a
vaulted ceiling lost in shadow. The air was heavy with the smells of
wine and ale and roasted meat. Reek’s stomach rumbled noisily at
the scents, and his mouth began to water.
Little Walder pushed him stumbling past the long tables where
the men of the garrison were eating. He could feel their eyes upon
him. The best places, up near the dais, were occupied by Ramsay’s
favorites, the Bastard’s Boys. Ben Bones, the old man who kept his
lordship’s beloved hunting hounds. Damon, called Damon Dance-forMe, fair-haired and boyish. Grunt, who had lost his tongue for

speaking carelessly in Lord Roose’s hearing. Sour Alyn. Skinner.
Yellow Dick. Farther down, below the salt, were others that Reek
knew by sight if not by name: sworn swords and serjeants, soldiers
and gaolers and torturers. But there were strangers too, faces he did
not know. Some wrinkled their noses as he passed, whilst others
laughed at the sight of him. Guests, Reek thought, his lordship’s
friends, and I am brought up to amuse them. A shiver of fear went
through him.
At the high table the Bastard of Bolton sat in his lord father’s seat,
drinking from his father’s cup. Two old men shared the high table
with him, and Reek knew at a glance that both were lords. One was
gaunt, with inty eyes, a long white beard, and a face as hard as a
winter frost. His jerkin was a ragged bearskin, worn and greasy.
Underneath he wore a ringmail byrnie, even at table. The second
lord was thin as well, but twisted where the rst was straight. One
of his shoulders was much higher than the other, and he stooped
over his trencher like a vulture over carrion. His eyes were grey
and greedy, his teeth yellow, his forked beard a tangle of snow and
silver. Only a few wisps of white hair still clung to his spotted skull,
but the cloak he wore was soft and ne, grey wool trimmed with
black sable and fastened at the shoulder with a starburst wrought in
beaten silver.
Ramsay was clad in black and pink—black boots, black belt and
scabbard, black leather jerkin over a pink velvet doublet slashed
with dark red satin. In his right ear gleamed a garnet cut in the
shape of a drop of blood. Yet for all the splendor of his garb, he
remained an ugly man, big-boned and slope-shouldered, with a
eshiness to him that suggested that in later life he would run to
fat. His skin was pink and blotchy, his nose broad, his mouth small,
his hair long and dark and dry. His lips were wide and meaty, but
the thing men noticed rst about him were his eyes. He had his lord
father’s eyes—small, close-set, queerly pale. Ghost grey, some men
called the shade, but in truth his eyes were all but colorless, like
two chips of dirty ice.
At the sight of Reek, he smiled a wet-lipped smile. “There he is.
My sour old friend.” To the men beside him he said, “Reek has been

with me since I was a boy. My lord father gave him to me as a
token of his love.”
The two lords exchanged a look. “I had heard your serving man
was dead,” said the one with the stooped shoulder. “Slain by the
Starks, they said.”
Lord Ramsay chuckled. “The ironmen will tell you that what is
dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger. Like Reek.
He smells of the grave, though, I grant you that.”
“He smells of nightsoil and stale vomit.” The stoop-shouldered old
lord tossed aside the bone that he’d been gnawing on and wiped his
ngers on the tablecloth. “Is there some reason you must needs
in ict him upon us whilst we’re eating?”
The second lord, the straight-backed old man in the mail byrnie,
studied Reek with inty eyes. “Look again,” he urged the other
lord. “His hair’s gone white and he is three stone thinner, aye, but
this is no serving man. Have you forgotten?”
The crookback lord looked again and gave a sudden snort. “Him?
Can it be? Stark’s ward. Smiling, always smiling.”
“He smiles less often now,” Lord Ramsay confessed. “I may have
broken some of his pretty white teeth.”
“You would have done better to slit his throat,” said the lord in
mail. “A dog who turns against his master is t for naught but
skinning.”
“Oh, he’s been skinned, here and there,” said Ramsay.
“Yes, my lord. I was bad, my lord. Insolent and …” He licked his
lip, trying to think of what else he had done. Serve and obey, he told
himself, and he’ll let you live, and keep the parts that you still have.
Serve and obey and remember your name. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with
meek. “… bad and …”
“There’s blood on your mouth,” Ramsay observed. “Have you
been chewing on your ngers again, Reek?”
“No. No, my lord, I swear.” Reek had tried to bite his own ring
nger o once, to stop it hurting after they had stripped the skin
from it. Lord Ramsay would never simply cut o a man’s nger. He
preferred to ay it and let the exposed esh dry and crack and
fester. Reek had been whipped and racked and cut, but there was no

pain half so excruciating as the pain that followed aying. It was
the sort of pain that drove men mad, and it could not be endured
for long. Soon or late the victim would scream, “Please, no more,
no more, stop it hurting, cut it o ,” and Lord Ramsay would oblige.
It was a game they played. Reek had learned the rules, as his hands
and feet could testify, but that one time he had forgotten and tried
to end the pain himself, with his teeth. Ramsay had not been
pleased, and the o ense had cost Reek another toe. “I ate a rat,” he
mumbled.
“A rat?” Ramsay’s pale eyes glittered in the torchlight. “All the
rats in the Dreadfort belong to my lord father. How dare you make
a meal of one without my leave.”
Reek did not know what to say, so he said nothing. One wrong
word could cost him another toe, even a nger. Thus far he had lost
two ngers o his left hand and the pinky o his right, but only the
little toe o his right foot against three from his left. Sometimes
Ramsay would make japes about balancing him out. My lord was
only japing, he tried to tell himself. He does not want to hurt me, he
told me so, he only does it when I give him cause. His lord was
merciful and kind. He might have ayed his face o for some of the
things Reek had said, before he’d learned his true name and proper
place.
“This grows tedious,” said the lord in the mail byrnie. “Kill him
and be done with it.”
Lord Ramsay lled his cup with ale. “That would spoil our
celebration, my lord. Reek, I have glad tidings for you. I am to be
wed. My lord father is bringing me a Stark girl. Lord Eddard’s
daughter, Arya. You remember little Arya, don’t you?”
Arya Underfoot, he almost said. Arya Horseface. Robb’s younger
sister, brown-haired, long-faced, skinny as a stick, always dirty.
Sansa was the pretty one. He remembered a time when he had
thought that Lord Eddard Stark might marry him to Sansa and claim
him for a son, but that had only been a child’s fancy. Arya,
though … “I remember her. Arya.”
“She shall be the Lady of Winterfell, and me her lord.”
She is only a girl. “Yes, my lord. Congratulations.”

“Will you attend me at my wedding, Reek?”
He hesitated. “If you wish it, my lord.”
“Oh, I do.”
He hesitated again, wondering if this was some cruel trap. “Yes,
my lord. If it please you. I would be honored.”
“We must take you out of that vile dungeon, then. Scrub you pink
again, get you some clean clothes, some food to eat. Some nice soft
porridge, would you like that? Perhaps a pease pie laced with
bacon. I have a little task for you, and you’ll need your strength
back if you are to serve me. You do want to serve me, I know.”
“Yes, my lord. More than anything.” A shiver went through him.
“I’m your Reek. Please let me serve you. Please.”
“Since you ask so nicely, how can I deny you?” Ramsay Bolton
smiled. “I ride to war, Reek. And you will be coming with me, to
help me fetch home my virgin bride.”

BRAN

S

omething about the way the raven screamed sent a shiver
running up Bran’s spine. I am almost a man grown, he had to remind
himself. I have to be brave now.
But the air was sharp and cold and full of fear. Even Summer was
afraid. The fur on his neck was bristling. Shadows stretched against
the hillside, black and hungry. All the trees were bowed and twisted
by the weight of ice they carried. Some hardly looked like trees at
all. Buried from root to crown in frozen snow, they huddled on the
hill like giants, monstrous and misshapen creatures hunched against
the icy wind. “They are here.”
The ranger drew his longsword.
“Where?” Meera’s voice was hushed.
“Close. I don’t know. Somewhere.”
The raven shrieked again. “Hodor,” whispered Hodor. He had his
hands tucked up beneath his armpits. Icicles hung from the brown
briar of his beard, and his mustache was a lump of frozen snot,
glittering redly in the light of sunset.
“Those wolves are close as well,” Bran warned them. “The ones
that have been following us. Summer can smell them whenever
we’re downwind.”
“Wolves are the least of our woes,” said Coldhands. “We have to
climb. It will be dark soon. You would do well to be inside before
night comes. Your warmth will draw them.” He glanced to the west,
where the light of the setting sun could be seen dimly through the
trees, like the glow of a distant re.
“Is this the only way in?” asked Meera.

“The back door is three leagues north, down a sinkhole.”
That was all he had to say. Not even Hodor could climb down
into a sinkhole with Bran heavy on his back, and Jojen could no
more walk three leagues than run a thousand.
Meera eyed the hill above. “The way looks clear.”
“Looks,” the ranger muttered darkly. “Can you feel the cold?
There’s something here. Where are they?”
“Inside the cave?” suggested Meera.
“The cave is warded. They cannot pass.” The ranger used his
sword to point. “You can see the entrance there. Halfway up,
between the weirwoods, that cleft in the rock.”
“I see it,” said Bran. Ravens were ying in and out.
Hodor shifted his weight. “Hodor.”
“A fold in the rock, that’s all I see,” said Meera.
“There’s a passage there. Steep and twisty at rst, a runnel
through the rock. If you can reach it, you’ll be safe.”
“What about you?”
“The cave is warded.”
Meera studied the cleft in the hillside. “It can’t be more than a
thousand yards from here to there.”
No, thought Bran, but all those yards are upward. The hill was steep
and thickly wooded. The snow had stopped three days ago, but
none of it had melted. Beneath the trees, the ground was blanketed
in white, still pristine and unbroken. “No one’s here,” said Bran,
bravely. “Look at the snow. There are no footprints.”
“The white walkers go lightly on the snow,” the ranger said.
“You’ll nd no prints to mark their passage.” A raven descended
from above to settle on his shoulder. Only a dozen of the big black
birds remained with them. The rest had vanished along the way;
every dawn when they arose, there had been fewer of them.
“Come,” the bird squawked. “Come, come.”
The three-eyed crow, thought Bran. The greenseer. “It’s not so far,”
he said. “A little climb, and we’ll be safe. Maybe we can have a
re.” All of them were cold and wet and hungry, except the ranger,
and Jojen Reed was too weak to walk unaided.

“You go.” Meera Reed bent down beside her brother. He was
settled in the bole of an oak, eyes closed, shivering violently. What
little of his face could be seen beneath his hood and scarf was as
colorless as the surrounding snow, but breath still pu ed faintly
from his nostrils whenever he exhaled. Meera had been carrying
him all day. Food and re will set him right again, Bran tried to tell
himself, though he wasn’t sure it would. “I can’t ght and carry
Jojen both, the climb’s too steep,” Meera was saying. “Hodor, you
take Bran up to that cave.”
“Hodor.” Hodor clapped his hands together.
“Jojen just needs to eat,” Bran said, miserably. It had been twelve
days since the elk had collapsed for the third and nal time, since
Coldhands had knelt beside it in the snowbank and murmured a
blessing in some strange tongue as he slit its throat. Bran wept like
a little girl when the bright blood came rushing out. He had never
felt more like a cripple than he did then, watching helplessly as
Meera Reed and Coldhands butchered the brave beast who had
carried them so far. He told himself he would not eat, that it was
better to go hungry than to feast upon a friend, but in the end he’d
eaten twice, once in his own skin and once in Summer’s. As gaunt
and starved as the elk had been, the steaks the ranger carved from
him had sustained them for seven days, until they nished the last
of them huddled over a re in the ruins of an old hillfort.
“He needs to eat,” Meera agreed, smoothing her brother’s brow.
“We all do, but there’s no food here. Go.”
Bran blinked back a tear and felt it freeze upon his cheek.
Coldhands took Hodor by the arm. “The light is fading. If they’re
not here now, they will be soon. Come.”
Wordless for once, Hodor slapped the snow o his legs, and
plowed upward through the snowdrifts with Bran upon his back.
Coldhands stalked beside them, his blade in a black hand. Summer
came after. In some places the snow was higher than he was, and
the big direwolf had to stop and shake it o after plunging through
the thin crust. As they climbed, Bran turned awkwardly in his
basket to watch as Meera slid an arm beneath her brother to lift him
to his feet. He’s too heavy for her. She’s half-starved, she’s not as strong

as she was. She clutched her frog spear in her other hand, jabbing
the tines into the snow for a little more support. Meera had just
begun to struggle up the hill, half-dragging and half-carrying her
little brother, when Hodor passed between two trees, and Bran lost
sight of them.
The hill grew steeper. Drifts of snow cracked under Hodor’s
boots. Once a rock moved beneath his foot and he slid backwards,
and almost went tumbling back down the hill. The ranger caught
him by the arm and saved him. “Hodor,” said Hodor. Every gust of
wind lled the air with ne white powder that shone like glass in
the last light of day. Ravens apped around them. One ew ahead
and vanished inside the cave. Only eighty yards now, Bran thought,
that’s not far at all.
Summer stopped suddenly, at the bottom of a steep stretch of
unbroken white snow. The direwolf turned his head, sni ed the air,
then snarled. Fur bristling, he began to back away.
“Hodor, stop,” said Bran. “Hodor. Wait.” Something was wrong.
Summer smelled it, and so did he. Something bad. Something close.
“Hodor, no, go back.”
Coldhands was still climbing, and Hodor wanted to keep up.
“Hodor, hodor, hodor,” he grumbled loudly, to drown out Bran’s
complaints. His breathing had grown labored. Pale mist lled the
air. He took a step, then another. The snow was almost waist deep
and the slope was very steep. Hodor was leaning forward, grasping
at rocks and trees with his hands as he climbed. Another step.
Another. The snow Hodor disturbed slid downhill, starting a small
avalanche behind them.
Sixty yards. Bran craned himself sideways to better see the cave.
Then he saw something else. “A re!” In the little cleft between the
weirwood trees was a ickering glow, a ruddy light calling through
the gathering gloom. “Look, someone—”
Hodor screamed. He twisted, stumbled, fell.
Bran felt the world slide sideways as the big stableboy spun
violently around. A jarring impact drove the breath from him. His
mouth was full of blood and Hodor was thrashing and rolling,
crushing the crippled boy beneath him.

Something has hold of his leg. For half a heartbeat Bran thought
maybe a root had gotten tangled round his ankle … until the root
moved. A hand, he saw, as the rest of the wight came bursting from
beneath the snow.
Hodor kicked at it, slamming a snow-covered heel full into the
thing’s face, but the dead man did not even seem to feel it. Then the
two of them were grappling, punching and clawing at each other,
sliding down the hill. Snow lled Bran’s mouth and nose as they
rolled over, but in a half a heartbeat he was rolling up again.
Something slammed against his head, a rock or a chunk of ice or a
dead man’s st, he could not tell, and he found himself out of his
basket, sprawled across the hillside, spitting snow, his gloved hand
full of hair that he’d torn from Hodor’s head.
All around him, wights were rising from beneath the snow.
Two, three, four. Bran lost count. They surged up violently amidst
sudden clouds of snow. Some wore black cloaks, some ragged skins,
some nothing. All of them had pale esh and black hands. Their
eyes glowed like pale blue stars.
Three of them descended on the ranger. Bran saw Coldhands slash
one across the face. The thing kept right on coming, driving him
back into the arms of another. Two more were going after Hodor,
lumbering clumsily down the slope. Meera was going to climb right
into this, Bran realized, with a sick sense of helpless terror. He
smashed the snow and shouted out a warning.
Something grabbed hold of him.
That was when his shout became a scream. Bran lled a st with
snow and threw it, but the wight did not so much as blink. A black
hand fumbled at his face, another at his belly. Its ngers felt like
iron. He’s going to pull my guts out.
But suddenly Summer was between them. Bran glimpsed skin tear
like cheap cloth, heard the splintering of bone. He saw a hand and
wrist rip loose, pale ngers wriggling, the sleeve faded black
roughspun. Black, he thought, he’s wearing black, he was one of the
Watch. Summer ung the arm aside, twisted, and sank his teeth into
the dead man’s neck under the chin. When the big grey wolf

wrenched free, he took most of the creature’s throat out in an
explosion of pale rotten meat.
The severed hand was still moving. Bran rolled away from it. On
his belly, clawing at the snow, he glimpsed the trees above, pale
and snow-cloaked, the orange glow between.
Fifty yards. If he could drag himself fty yards, they could not get
him. Damp seeped through his gloves as he clutched at roots and
rocks, crawling toward the light. A little farther, just a little farther.
Then you can rest beside the re.
The last light had vanished from amongst the trees by then. Night
had fallen. Coldhands was hacking and cutting at the circle of dead
men that surrounded him. Summer was tearing at the one that he’d
brought down, its face between his teeth. No one was paying any
mind to Bran. He crawled a little higher, dragging his useless legs
behind him. If I can reach that cave …
“Hoooodor” came a whimper, from somewhere down below.
And suddenly he was not Bran, the broken boy crawling through
the snow, suddenly he was Hodor halfway down the hill, with the
wight raking at his eyes. Roaring, he came lurching to his feet,
throwing the thing violently aside. It went to one knee, began to
rise again. Bran ripped Hodor’s longsword from his belt. Deep
inside he could hear poor Hodor whimpering still, but outside he
was seven feet of fury with old iron in his hand. He raised the
sword and brought it down upon the dead man, grunting as the
blade sheared through wet wool and rusted mail and rotted leather,
biting deep into the bones and esh beneath. “HODOR!” he
bellowed, and slashed again. This time he took the wight’s head o
at the neck, and for half a moment he exulted … until a pair of dead
hands came groping blindly for his throat.
Bran backed away, bleeding, and Meera Reed was there, driving
her frog spear deep into the wight’s back. “Hodor,” Bran roared
again, waving her uphill. “Hodor, hodor.” Jojen was twisting feebly
where she’d laid him down. Bran went to him, dropped the
longsword, gathered the boy into Hodor’s arm, and lurched back to
his feet. “HODOR!” he bellowed.

Meera led the way back up the hill, jabbing at the wights when
they came near. The things could not be hurt, but they were slow
and clumsy. “Hodor,” Hodor said with every step. “Hodor, hodor.”
He wondered what Meera would think if he should suddenly tell her
that he loved her.
Up above them, aming gures were dancing in the snow.
The wights, Bran realized. Someone set the wights on re.
Summer was snarling and snapping as he danced around the
closest, a great ruin of a man wreathed in swirling ame. He
shouldn’t get so close, what is he doing? Then he saw himself,
sprawled facedown in the snow. Summer was trying to drive the
thing away from him. What will happen if it kills me? the boy
wondered. Will I be Hodor for good or all? Will I go back into
Summer’s skin? Or will I just be dead?
The world moved dizzily around him. White trees, black sky, red
ames, everything was whirling, shifting, spinning. He felt himself
stumbling. He could hear Hodor screaming, “Hodor hodor hodor
hodor. Hodor hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor hodor hodor hodor.”
A cloud of ravens was pouring from the cave, and he saw a little
girl with a torch in hand, darting this way and that. For a moment
Bran thought it was his sister Arya … madly, for he knew his little
sister was a thousand leagues away, or dead. And yet there she was,
whirling, a scrawny thing, ragged, wild, her hair atangle. Tears
lled Hodor’s eyes and froze there.
Everything turned inside out and upside down, and Bran found
himself back inside his own skin, half-buried in the snow. The
burning wight loomed over him, etched tall against the trees in
their snowy shrouds. It was one of the naked ones, Bran saw, in the
instant before the nearest tree shook o the snow that covered it
and dropped it all down upon his head.
The next he knew, he was lying on a bed of pine needles beneath
a dark stone roof. The cave. I’m in the cave. His mouth still tasted of
blood where he’d bitten his tongue, but a re was burning to his
right, the heat washing over his face, and he had never felt anything
so good. Summer was there, sni ng round him, and Hodor, soaking

wet. Meera cradled Jojen’s head in her lap. And the Arya thing
stood over them, clutching her torch.
“The snow,” Bran said. “It fell on me. Buried me.”
“Hid you. I pulled you out.” Meera nodded at the girl. “It was her
who saved us, though. The torch … re kills them.”
“Fire burns them. Fire is always hungry.”
That was not Arya’s voice, nor any child’s. It was a woman’s
voice, high and sweet, with a strange music in it like none that he
had ever heard and a sadness that he thought might break his heart.
Bran squinted, to see her better. It was a girl, but smaller than Arya,
her skin dappled like a doe’s beneath a cloak of leaves. Her eyes
were queer—large and liquid, gold and green, slitted like a cat’s
eyes. No one has eyes like that. Her hair was a tangle of brown and
red and gold, autumn colors, with vines and twigs and withered
owers woven through it.
“Who are you?” Meera Reed was asking.
Bran knew. “She’s a child. A child of the forest.” He shivered, as
much from wonderment as cold. They had fallen into one of Old
Nan’s tales.
“The First Men named us children,” the little woman said. “The
giants called us woh dak nag gran, the squirrel people, because we
were small and quick and fond of trees, but we are no squirrels, no
children. Our name in the True Tongue means those who sing the song
of earth. Before your Old Tongue was ever spoken, we had sung our
songs ten thousand years.”
Meera said, “You speak the Common Tongue now.”
“For him. The Bran boy. I was born in the time of the dragon, and
for two hundred years I walked the world of men, to watch and
listen and learn. I might be walking still, but my legs were sore and
my heart was weary, so I turned my feet for home.”
“Two hundred years?” said Meera.
The child smiled. “Men, they are the children.”
“Do you have a name?” asked Bran.
“When I am needing one.” She waved her torch toward the black
crack in the back wall of the cave. “Our way is down. You must
come with me now.”

Bran shivered again. “The ranger …”
“He cannot come.”
“They’ll kill him.”
“No. They killed him long ago. Come now. It is warmer down
deep, and no one will hurt you there. He is waiting for you.”
“The three-eyed crow?” asked Meera.
“The greenseer.” And with that she was o , and they had no
choice but to follow. Meera helped Bran back up onto Hodor’s back,
though his basket was half-crushed and wet from melting snow.
Then she slipped an arm around her brother and shouldered him
back onto his feet once more. His eyes opened. “What?” he said.
“Meera? Where are we?” When he saw the re, he smiled. “I had
the strangest dream.”
The way was cramped and twisty, and so low that Hodor soon
was crouching. Bran hunched down as best he could, but even so,
the top of his head was soon scraping and bumping against the
ceiling. Loose dirt crumbled at each touch and dribbled down into
his eyes and hair, and once he smacked his brow on a thick white
root growing from the tunnel wall, with tendrils hanging from it
and spiderwebs between its ngers.
The child went in front with the torch in hand, her cloak of leaves
whispering behind her, but the passage turned so much that Bran
soon lost sight of her. Then the only light was what was re ected
o the passage walls. After they had gone down a little, the cave
divided, but the left branch was dark as pitch, so even Hodor knew
to follow the moving torch to the right.
The way the shadows shifted made it seem as if the walls were
moving too. Bran saw great white snakes slithering in and out of
the earth around him, and his heart thumped in fear. He wondered
if they had blundered into a nest of milk snakes or giant grave
worms, soft and pale and squishy. Grave worms have teeth.
Hodor saw them too. “Hodor,” he whimpered, reluctant to go on.
But when the girl child stopped to let them catch her, the torchlight
steadied, and Bran realized that the snakes were only white roots
like the one he’d hit his head on. “It’s weirwood roots,” he said.

“Remember the heart tree in the godswood, Hodor? The white tree
with the red leaves? A tree can’t hurt you.”
“Hodor.” Hodor plunged ahead, hurrying after the child and her
torch, deeper into the earth. They passed another branching, and
another, then came into an echoing cavern as large as the great hall
of Winterfell, with stone teeth hanging from its ceiling and more
poking up through its oor. The child in the leafy cloak wove a path
through them. From time to time she stopped and waved her torch
at them impatiently. This way, it seemed to say, this way, this way,
faster.
There were more side passages after that, more chambers, and
Bran heard dripping water somewhere to his right. When he looked
o that way, he saw eyes looking back at them, slitted eyes that
glowed bright, re ecting back the torchlight. More children, he told
himself, the girl is not the only one, but Old Nan’s tale of Gendel’s
children came back to him as well.
The roots were everywhere, twisting through earth and stone,
closing o some passages and holding up the roofs of others. All the
color is gone, Bran realized suddenly. The world was black soil and
white wood. The heart tree at Winterfell had roots as thick around
as a giant’s legs, but these were even thicker. And Bran had never
seen so many of them. There must be a whole grove of weirwoods
growing up above us.
The light dwindled again. Small as she was, the child-who-wasnot-a-child moved quickly when she wanted. As Hodor thumped
after her, something crunched beneath his feet. His halt was so
sudden that Meera and Jojen almost slammed into his back.
“Bones,” said Bran. “It’s bones.” The oor of the passage was
littered with the bones of birds and beasts. But there were other
bones as well, big ones that must have come from giants and small
ones that could have been from children. On either side of them, in
niches carved from the stone, skulls looked down on them. Bran
saw a bear skull and a wolf skull, half a dozen human skulls and
near as many giants. All the rest were small, queerly formed.
Children of the forest. The roots had grown in and around and

through them, every one. A few had ravens perched atop them,
watching them pass with bright black eyes.
The last part of their dark journey was the steepest. Hodor made
the nal descent on his arse, bumping and sliding downward in a
clatter of broken bones, loose dirt, and pebbles. The girl child was
waiting for them, standing on one end of a natural bridge above a
yawning chasm. Down below in the darkness, Bran heard the sound
of rushing water. An underground river.
“Do we have to cross?” Bran asked, as the Reeds came sliding
down behind him. The prospect frightened him. If Hodor slipped on
that narrow bridge, they would fall and fall.
“No, boy,” the child said. “Behind you.” She lifted her torch
higher, and the light seemed to shift and change. One moment the
ames burned orange and yellow, lling the cavern with a ruddy
glow; then all the colors faded, leaving only black and white.
Behind them Meera gasped. Hodor turned.
Before them a pale lord in ebon nery sat dreaming in a tangled
nest of roots, a woven weirwood throne that embraced his withered
limbs as a mother does a child.
His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at rst
Bran took him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long
that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him.
What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody
blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was ne
and thin as root hair and long enough to brush against the earthen
oor. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One
burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated esh of his thigh,
to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves
sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A
little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as
white leather, but even that was fraying, and here and there the
brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through.
“Are you the three-eyed crow?” Bran heard himself say. A threeeyed crow should have three eyes. He has only one, and that one red.
Bran could feel the eye staring at him, shining like a pool of blood
in the torchlight. Where his other eye should have been, a thin

white root grew from an empty socket, down his cheek, and into his
neck.
“A … crow?” The pale lord’s voice was dry. His lips moved
slowly, as if they had forgotten how to form words. “Once, aye.
Black of garb and black of blood.” The clothes he wore were rotten
and faded, spotted with moss and eaten through with worms, but
once they had been black. “I have been many things, Bran. Now I
am as you see me, and now you will understand why I could not
come to you … except in dreams. I have watched you for a long
time, watched you with a thousand eyes and one. I saw your birth,
and that of your lord father before you. I saw your rst step, heard
your rst word, was part of your rst dream. I was watching when
you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark,
though the hour is late.”
“I’m here,” Bran said, “only I’m broken. Will you … will you x
me … my legs, I mean?”
“No,” said the pale lord. “That is beyond my powers.”
Bran’s eyes lled with tears. We came such a long way. The
chamber echoed to the sound of the black river.
“You will never walk again, Bran,” the pale lips promised, “but
you will y.”

TYRION

F

or a long while he did not stir, but lay unmoving upon the heap
of old sacks that served him for a bed, listening to the wind in the
lines, to the lapping of the river at the hull.
A full moon oated above the mast. It is following me downriver,
watching me like some great eye. Despite the warmth of the musty
skins that covered him, a shiver went through the little man. I need
a cup of wine. A dozen cups of wine. But the moon would blink
before that whoreson Gri let him quench his thirst. Instead he
drank water, and was condemned to sleepless nights and days of
sweats and shakes.
The dwarf sat up, cradling his head in his hands. Did I dream? All
memory of it had ed. The nights had never been kind to Tyrion
Lannister. He slept badly even on soft feather beds. On the Shy
Maid, he made his bed atop the roof of the cabin, with a coil of
hempen rope for a pillow. He liked it better up here than in the
boat’s cramped hold. The air was fresher, and the river sounds were
sweeter than Duck’s snoring. There was a price to be paid for such
joys, though; the deck was hard, and he woke sti and sore, his legs
cramped and aching.
They were throbbing now, his calves gone hard as wood. He
kneaded them with his ngers, trying to rub the ache away, but
when he stood the pain was still enough to make him grimace. I
need to bathe. His boy’s clothes stank, and so did he. The others
bathed in the river, but thus far he had not joined them. Some of
the turtles he’d seen in the shallows looked big enough to bite him

in half. Bonesnappers, Duck called them. Besides, he did not want
Lemore to see him naked.
A wooden ladder led down from the cabin roof. Tyrion pulled on
his boots and descended to the afterdeck, where Gri sat wrapped
in a wolfskin cloak beside an iron brazier. The sellsword kept the
night watch by himself, rising as the rest of his band sought their
beds and retiring when the sun came up.
Tyrion squatted across from him and warmed his hands over the
coals. Across the water nightingales were singing. “Day soon,” he
said to Gri .
“Not soon enough. We need to be under way.” If it had been up
to Gri , the Shy Maid would continue downstream by night as well
as day, but Yandry and Ysilla refused to risk their poleboat in the
dark. The Upper Rhoyne was full of snags and sawyers, any one of
which could rip out the Shy Maid’s hull. Gri did not want to hear
it. What he wanted was Volantis.
The sellsword’s eyes were always moving, searching the night
for … what? Pirates? Stone men? Slave-catchers? The river had perils,
the dwarf knew, but Gri himself struck Tyrion as more dangerous
than any of them. He reminded Tyrion of Bronn, though Bronn had
a sellsword’s black humor and Gri had no humor at all.
“I would kill for a cup of wine,” muttered Tyrion.
Gri made no reply. You will die before you drink, his pale eyes
seemed to say. Tyrion had drunk himself blind his rst night on the
Shy Maid. The next day he awoke with dragons ghting in his skull.
Gri took one look at him retching over the side of the poleboat,
and said, “You are done with drink.”
“Wine helps me sleep,” Tyrion had protested. Wine drowns my
dreams, he might have said.
“Then stay awake,” Gri had replied, implacable.
To the east, the rst pale light of day su used the sky above the
river. The waters of the Rhoyne slowly went from black to blue, to
match the sellsword’s hair and beard. Gri got to his feet. “The
others should wake soon. The deck is yours.” As the nightingales
fell silent, the river larks took up their song. Egrets splashed
amongst the reeds and left their tracks across the sandbars. The

clouds in the sky were aglow: pink and purple, maroon and gold,
pearl and sa ron. One looked like a dragon. Once a man has seen a
dragon in ight, let him stay at home and tend his garden in content,
someone had written once, for this wide world has no greater wonder.
Tyrion scratched at his scar and tried to recall the author’s name.
Dragons had been much in his thoughts of late.
“Good morrow, Hugor.” Septa Lemore had emerged in her white
robes, cinched at the waist with a woven belt of seven colors. Her
hair owed loose about her shoulders. “How did you sleep?”
“Fitfully, good lady. I dreamed of you again.” A waking dream. He
could not sleep, so he had eased a hand between his legs and
imagined the septa atop him, breasts bouncing.
“A wicked dream, no doubt. You are a wicked man. Will you pray
with me and ask forgiveness for your sins?”
Only if we pray in the fashion of the Summer Isles. “No, but do give
the Maiden a long, sweet kiss for me.”
Laughing, the septa walked to the prow of the boat. It was her
custom to bathe in the river every morning. “Plainly, this boat was
not named for you,” Tyrion called as she disrobed.
“The Mother and the Father made us in their image, Hugor. We
should glory in our bodies, for they are the work of gods.”
The gods must have been drunk when they got to me. The dwarf
watched Lemore slip into the water. The sight always made him
hard. There was something wonderfully wicked about the thought
of peeling the septa out of those chaste white robes and spreading
her legs. Innocence despoiled, he thought … though Lemore was not
near as innocent as she appeared. She had stretch marks on her
belly that could only have come from childbirth.
Yandry and Ysilla had risen with the sun and were going about
their business. Yandry stole a glance at Septa Lemore from time to
time as he was checking the lines. His small dark wife, Ysilla, took
no notice. She fed some wood chips to the brazier on the afterdeck,
stirred the coals with a blackened blade, and began to knead the
dough for the morning biscuits.
When Lemore climbed back onto the deck, Tyrion savored the
sight of water trickling between her breasts, her smooth skin

glowing golden in the morning light. She was past forty, more
handsome than pretty, but still easy on the eye. Being randy is the
next best thing to being drunk, he decided. It made him feel as if he
was still alive. “Did you see the turtle, Hugor?” the septa asked
him, wringing water from her hair. “The big ridgeback?”
The early morning was the best time for seeing turtles. During
the day they would swim down deep, or hide in cuts along the
banks, but when the sun was newly risen they came to the surface.
Some liked to swim beside the boat. Tyrion had glimpsed a dozen
di erent sorts: large turtles and small ones, atbacks and red-ears,
softshells and bonesnappers, brown turtles, green turtles, black
turtles, clawed turtles and horned turtles, turtles whose ridged and
patterned shells were covered with whorls of gold and jade and
cream. Some were so large they could have borne a man upon their
backs. Yandry swore the Rhoynar princes used to ride them across
the river. He and his wife were Greenblood born, a pair of Dornish
orphans come home to Mother Rhoyne.
“I missed the ridgeback.” I was watching the naked woman.
“I am sad for you.” Lemore slipped her robe over her head. “I
know you only rise so early in hopes of seeing turtles.”
“I like to watch the sun come up as well.” It was like watching a
maiden rising naked from her bath. Some might be prettier than
others, but every one was full of promise. “The turtles have their
charms, I will allow. Nothing delights me so much as the sight of a
nice pair of shapely … shells.”
Septa Lemore laughed. Like everyone else aboard the Shy Maid,
she had her secrets. She was welcome to them. I do not want to know
her, I only want to fuck her. She knew it too. As she hung her septa’s
crystal about her neck, to nestle in the cleft between her breasts,
she teased him with a smile.
Yandry pulled up the anchor, slid one of the long poles o the
cabin roof, and pushed them o . Two of the herons raised their
heads to watch as the Shy Maid drifted away from the bank, out into
the current. Slowly the boat began to move downstream. Yandry
went to the tiller. Ysilla was turning the biscuits. She laid an iron
pan atop the brazier and put the bacon in. Some days she cooked

biscuits and bacon; some days bacon and biscuits. Once every
fortnight there might be a sh, but not today.
When Ysilla turned her back, Tyrion snatched a biscuit o the
brazier, darting away just in time to avoid a smack from her
fearsome wooden spoon. They were best when eaten hot, dripping
with honey and butter. The smell of the bacon cooking soon fetched
Duck up from the hold. He sni ed over the brazier, received a
swack from Ysilla’s spoon, and went back to have his morning piss
o the stern.
Tyrion waddled over to join him. “Now here’s a sight to see,” he
quipped as they were emptying their bladders, “a dwarf and a duck,
making the mighty Rhoyne that much mightier.”
Yandry snorted in derision. “Mother Rhoyne has no need of your
water, Yollo. She is the greatest river in the world.”
Tyrion shook o the last few drops. “Big enough to drown a
dwarf, I grant you. The Mander is as broad, though. So is the
Trident, near its mouth. The Blackwater runs deeper.”
“You do not know the river. Wait, and you will see.”
The bacon turned crisp, the biscuits golden brown. Young Gri
stumbled up onto deck yawning. “Good morrow, all.” The lad was
shorter than Duck, but his lanky build suggested that he had not yet
come into his full growth. This beardless boy could have any maiden
in the Seven Kingdoms, blue hair or no. Those eyes of his would melt
them. Like his sire, Young Gri had blue eyes, but where the
father’s eyes were pale, the son’s were dark. By lamplight they
turned black, and in the light of dusk they seemed purple. His
eyelashes were as long as any woman’s.
“I smell bacon,” the lad said, pulling on his boots.
“Good bacon,” said Ysilla. “Sit.”
She fed them on the afterdeck, pressing honeyed biscuits on
Young Gri and hitting Duck’s hand with her spoon whenever he
made a grab for more bacon. Tyrion pulled apart two biscuits, lled
them with bacon, and carried one to Yandry at the tiller. Afterward
he helped Duck to raise the Shy Maid’s big lateen sail. Yandry took
them out into the center of the river, where the current was
strongest. The Shy Maid was a sweet boat. Her draft was so shallow

she could work her way up even the smallest of the river’s vassal
streams, negotiating sandbars that would have stranded larger
vessels, yet with her sail raised and a current under her, she could
make good speed. That could mean life and death on the upper
reaches of the Rhoyne, Yandry claimed. “There is no law above the
Sorrows, not for a thousand years.”
“And no people, so far as I can see.” He’d glimpsed some ruins
along the banks, piles of masonry overgrown by vines and moss and
owers, but no other signs of human habitation.
“You do not know the river, Yollo. A pirate boat may lurk up any
stream, and escaped slaves oft hide amongst the ruins. The slavecatchers seldom come so far north.”
“Slave-catchers would be a welcome change from turtles.” Not
being an escaped slave, Tyrion need not fear being caught. And no
pirate was like to bother a poleboat moving downstream. The
valuable goods came up the river from Volantis.
When the bacon was gone, Duck punched Young Gri in the
shoulder. “Time to raise some bruises. Swords today, I think.”
“Swords?” Young Gri grinned. “Swords will be sweet.”
Tyrion helped him dress for the bout, in heavy breeches, padded
doublet, and a dinted suit of old steel plate. Ser Rolly shrugged into
his mail and boiled leather. Both set helms upon their heads and
chose blunted longswords from the bundle in the weapons chest.
They set to on the afterdeck, having at each other lustily whilst the
rest of the morning company looked on.
When they fought with mace or blunted longaxe, Ser Rolly’s
greater size and strength would quickly overwhelm his charge; with
swords the contests were more even. Neither man had taken up a
shield this morning, so it was a game of slash and parry, back and
forth across the deck. The river rang to the sounds of their combat.
Young Gri landed more blows, though Duck’s were harder. After a
while, the bigger man began to tire. His cuts came a little slower, a
little lower. Young Gri turned them all and launched a furious
attack that forced Ser Rolly back. When they reached the stern, the
lad tied up their blades and slammed a shoulder into Duck, and the
big man went into the river.

He came up sputtering and cursing, bellowing for someone to sh
him out before a ’snapper ate his privates. Tyrion tossed a line to
him. “Ducks should swim better than that,” he said as he and
Yandry were hauling the knight back aboard the Shy Maid.
Ser Rolly grabbed Tyrion by the collar. “Let us see how dwarfs
swim,” he said, chucking him headlong into the Rhoyne.
The dwarf laughed last; he could paddle passably well, and
did … until his legs began to cramp. Young Gri extended him a
pole. “You are not the rst to try and drown me,” he told Duck, as
he was pouring river water from his boot. “My father threw me
down a well the day I was born, but I was so ugly that the water
witch who lived down there spat me back.” He pulled o the other
boot, then did a cartwheel along the deck, spraying all of them.
Young Gri laughed. “Where did you learn that?”
“The mummers taught me,” he lied. “My mother loved me best of
all her children because I was so small. She nursed me at her breast
till I was seven. That made my brothers jealous, so they stu ed me
in a sack and sold me to a mummer’s troupe. When I tried to run o
the master mummer cut o half my nose, so I had no choice but to
go with them and learn to be amusing.”
The truth was rather di erent. His uncle had taught him a bit of
tumbling when he was six or seven. Tyrion had taken to it eagerly.
For half a year he cartwheeled his merry way about Casterly Rock,
bringing smiles to the faces of septons, squires, and servants alike.
Even Cersei laughed to see him once or twice.
All that ended abruptly the day his father returned from a sojourn
in King’s Landing. That night at supper Tyrion surprised his sire by
walking the length of the high table on his hands. Lord Tywin was
not pleased. “The gods made you a dwarf. Must you be a fool as
well? You were born a lion, not a monkey.”
And you’re a corpse, Father, so I’ll caper as I please.
“You have a gift for making men smile,” Septa Lemore told
Tyrion as he was drying o his toes. “You should thank the Father
Above. He gives gifts to all his children.”
“He does,” he agreed pleasantly. And when I die, please let them
bury with me a crossbow, so I can thank the Father Above for his gifts the

same way I thanked the father below.
His clothing was still soaked from his involuntary swim, clinging
to his arms and legs uncomfortably. Whilst Young Gri went o
with Septa Lemore to be instructed in the mysteries of the Faith,
Tyrion stripped o the wet clothes and donned dry ones. Duck had a
good gu aw when he emerged on deck again. He could not blame
him. Dressed as he was, he made a comic sight. His doublet was
divided down the middle; the left side was purple velvet with
bronze studs; the right, yellow wool embroidered in green oral
patterns. His breeches were similarly split; the right leg was solid
green, the left leg striped in red and white. One of Illyrio’s chests
had been packed with a child’s clothing, musty but well made. Septa
Lemore had slit each garment apart, then sewn them back together,
joining half of this to half of that to fashion a crude motley. Gri
had even insisted that Tyrion help with the cutting and sewing. No
doubt he meant for it to be humbling, but Tyrion enjoyed the
needlework. Lemore was always pleasant company, despite her
penchant for scolding him whenever he said something rude about
the gods. If Gri wants to cast me as the fool, I’ll play the game.
Somewhere, he knew, Lord Tywin Lannister was horri ed, and that
took the sting from it.
His other duty was anything but foolish. Duck has his sword, I my
quill and parchment. Gri had commanded him to set down all he
knew of dragonlore. The task was a formidable one, but the dwarf
labored at it every day, scratching away as best he could as he sat
cross-legged on the cabin roof.
Tyrion had read much and more of dragons through the years.
The greater part of those accounts were idle tales and could not be
relied on, and the books that Illyrio had provided them were not the
ones he might have wished for. What he really wanted was the
complete text of The Fires of the Freehold, Galendro’s history of
Valyria. No complete copy was known to Westeros, however; even
the Citadel’s lacked twenty-seven scrolls. They must have a library in
Old Volantis, surely. I may nd a better copy there, if I can nd a way
inside the Black Walls to the city’s heart.

He was less hopeful concerning Septon Barth’s Dragons, Wyrms,
and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History. Barth had been a blacksmith’s
son who rose to be King’s Hand during the reign of Jaehaerys the
Conciliator. His enemies always claimed he was more sorcerer than
septon. Baelor the Blessed had ordered all Barth’s writings
destroyed when he came to the Iron Throne. Ten years ago, Tyrion
had read a fragment of Unnatural History that had eluded the Blessed
Baelor, but he doubted that any of Barth’s work had found its way
across the narrow sea. And of course there was even less chance of
his coming on the fragmentary, anonymous, blood-soaked tome
sometimes called Blood and Fire and sometimes The Death of
Dragons, the only surviving copy of which was supposedly hidden
away in a locked vault beneath the Citadel.
When the Halfmaester appeared on deck, yawning, the dwarf was
writing down what he recalled concerning the mating habits of
dragons, on which subject Barth, Munkun, and Thomax held
markedly divergent views. Haldon stalked to the stern to piss down
at the sun where it shimmered on the water, breaking apart with
every pu of wind. “We should reach the junction with the Noyne
by evening, Yollo,” the Halfmaester called out.
Tyrion glanced up from his writing. “My name is Hugor. Yollo is
hiding in my breeches. Shall I let him out to play?”
“Best not. You might frighten the turtles.” Haldon’s smile was as
sharp as the blade of a dagger. “What did you tell me was the name
of that street in Lannisport where you were born, Yollo?”
“It was an alley. It had no name.” Tyrion took a mordant pleasure
in inventing the details of the colorful life of Hugor Hill, also
known as Yollo, a bastard out of Lannisport. The best lies are
seasoned with a bit of truth. The dwarf knew he sounded like a
westerman, and a highborn westerman at that, so Hugor must needs
be some lordling’s by-blow. Born in Lannisport because he knew
that city better than Oldtown or King’s Landing, and cities were
where most dwarfs ended up, even those whelped by Goodwife
Bumpkin in the turnip patch. The countryside had no grotesqueries
or mummer shows … though it did have wells aplenty, to swallow
up unwanted kittens, three-headed calves, and babes like him.

“I see you have been defacing more good parchment, Yollo.”
Haldon laced up his breeches.
“Not all of us can be half a maester.” Tyrion’s hand was cramping.
He put his quill aside and exed his stubby ngers. “Fancy another
game of cyvasse?” The Halfmaester always defeated him, but it was
a way to pass the time.
“This evening. Will you join us for Young Gri ’s lesson?”
“Why not? Someone needs to correct your errors.”
There were four cabins on the Shy Maid. Yandry and Ysilla shared
one, Gri and Young Gri another. Septa Lemore had a cabin to
herself, as did Haldon. The Halfmaester’s cabin was the largest of
the four. One wall was lined with bookshelves and bins stacked
with old scrolls and parchments; another held racks of ointments,
herbs, and potions. Golden light slanted through the wavy yellow
glass of the round window. The furnishings included a bunk, a
writing desk, a chair, a stool, and the Halfmaester’s cyvasse table,
strewn with carved wooden pieces.
The lesson began with languages. Young Gri spoke the Common
Tongue as if he had been born to it, and was uent in High
Valyrian, the low dialects of Pentos, Tyrosh, Myr, and Lys, and the
trade talk of sailors. The Volantene dialect was as new to him as it
was to Tyrion, so every day they learned a few more words whilst
Haldon corrected their mistakes. Meereenese was harder; its roots
were Valyrian as well, but the tree had been grafted onto the harsh,
ugly tongue of Old Ghis. “You need a bee up your nose to speak
Ghiscari properly,” Tyrion complained. Young Gri laughed, but the
Halfmaester only said, “Again.” The boy obeyed, though he rolled
his eyes along with his zzzs this time. He has a better ear than me,
Tyrion was forced to admit, though I’ll wager my tongue is still more
nimble.
Geometry followed languages. There the boy was less adroit, but
Haldon was a patient teacher, and Tyrion was able to make himself
of use as well. He had learned the mysteries of squares and circles
and triangles from his father’s maesters at Casterly Rock, and they
came back more quickly than he would have thought.

By the time they turned to history, Young Gri was growing
restive. “We were discussing the history of Volantis,” Haldon said to
him. “Can you tell Yollo the di erence between a tiger and an
elephant?”
“Volantis is the oldest of the Nine Free Cities, rst daughter of
Valyria,” the lad replied, in a bored tone. “After the Doom it
pleased the Volantenes to consider themselves the heirs of the
Freehold and rightful rulers of the world, but they were divided as
to how dominion might best be achieved. The Old Blood favored
the sword, while the merchants and moneylenders advocated trade.
As they contended for rule of the city, the factions became known
as the tigers and elephants, respectively.
“The tigers held sway for almost a century after the Doom of
Valyria. For a time they were successful. A Volantene eet took Lys
and a Volantene army captured Myr, and for two generations all
three cities were ruled from within the Black Walls. That ended
when the tigers tried to swallow Tyrosh. Pentos came into the war
on the Tyroshi side, along with the Westerosi Storm King. Braavos
provided a Lyseni exile with a hundred warships, Aegon Targaryen
ew forth from Dragonstone on the Black Dread, and Myr and Lys
rose up in rebellion. The war left the Disputed Lands a waste, and
freed Lys and Myr from the yoke. The tigers su ered other defeats
as well. The eet they sent to reclaim Valyria vanished in the
Smoking Sea. Qohor and Norvos broke their power on the Rhoyne
when the re galleys fought on Dagger Lake. Out of the east came
the Dothraki, driving smallfolk from their hovels and nobles from
their estates, until only grass and ruins remained from the forest of
Qohor to the headwaters of the Selhoru. After a century of war,
Volantis found herself broken, bankrupt, and depopulated. It was
then that the elephants rose up. They have held sway ever since.
Some years the tigers elect a triarch, and some years they do not,
but never more than one, so the elephants have ruled the city for
three hundred years.”
“Just so,” said Haldon. “And the present triarchs?”
“Malaquo is a tiger, Nyessos and Doniphos are elephants.”
“And what lesson can we draw from Volantene history?”

“If you want to conquer the world, you best have dragons.”
Tyrion could not help but laugh.
Later, when Young Gri went up on deck to help Yandry with the
sails and poles, Haldon set up his cyvasse table for their game.
Tyrion watched with mismatched eyes, and said, “The boy is bright.
You have done well by him. Half the lords in Westeros are not so
learned, sad to say. Languages, history, songs, sums … a heady stew
for some sellsword’s son.”
“A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands,” said
Haldon. “Try to give me a better battle this time, Yollo. You play
cyvasse as badly as you tumble.”
“I am trying to lull you into a false sense of con dence,” said
Tyrion, as they arranged their tiles on either side of a carved
wooden screen. “You think you taught me how to play, but things
are not always as they seem. Perhaps I learned the game from the
cheesemonger, have you considered that?”
“Illyrio does not play cyvasse.”
No, thought the dwarf, he plays the game of thrones, and you and
Gri and Duck are only pieces, to be moved where he will and sacri ced
at need, just as he sacri ced Viserys. “The blame must fall on you,
then. If I play badly, it is your doing.”
The Halfmaester chuckled. “Yollo, I shall miss you when the
pirates cut your throat.”
“Where are these famous pirates? I am beginning to think that
you and Illyrio made them all up.”
“They are thickest on the stretch of river between Ar Noy and the
Sorrows. Above the ruins of Ar Noy, the Qohorik rule the river, and
below the Sorrows the galleys of Volantis hold sway, but neither
city claims the waters in between, so the pirates have made it their
own. Dagger Lake is full of islands where they lurk in hidden caves
and secret strongholds. Are you ready?”
“For you? Beyond a doubt. For the pirates? Less so.”
Haldon removed the screen. Each of them contemplated the
other’s opening array. “You are learning,” the Halfmaester said.
Tyrion almost grabbed his dragon but thought better of it. Last
game he had brought her out too soon and lost her to a trebuchet.

“If we do meet these fabled pirates, I may join up with them. I’ll
tell them that my name is Hugor Halfmaester.” He moved his light
horse toward Haldon’s mountains.
Haldon answered with an elephant. “Hugor Halfwit would suit
you better.”
“I only need half my wits to be a match for you.” Tyrion moved
up his heavy horse to support the light. “Perhaps you would care to
wager on the outcome?”
The Halfmaester arched an eyebrow. “How much?”
“I have no coin. We’ll play for secrets.”
“Gri would cut my tongue out.”
“Afraid, are you? I would be if I were you.”
“The day you defeat me at cyvasse will be the day turtles crawl
out my arse.” The Halfmaester moved his spears. “You have your
wager, little man.”
Tyrion stretched a hand out for his dragon.
It was three hours later when the little man nally crept back up
on deck to empty his bladder. Duck was helping Yandry wrestle
down the sail, while Ysilla took the tiller. The sun hung low above
the reed-beds along the western bank, as the wind began to gust
and rip. I need that skin of wine, the dwarf thought. His legs were
cramped from squatting on that stool, and he felt so light-headed
that he was lucky not to fall into the river.
“Yollo,” Duck called. “Where’s Haldon?”
“He’s taken to his bed, in some discomfort. There are turtles
crawling out his arse.” He left the knight to sort that out and
crawled up the ladder to the cabin roof. O to the east, there was
darkness gathering behind a rocky island.
Septa Lemore found him there. “Can you feel the storms in the
air, Hugor Hill? Dagger Lake is ahead of us, where pirates prowl.
And beyond that lie the Sorrows.”
Not mine. I carry mine own sorrows with me, everywhere I go. He
thought of Tysha and wondered where whores go. Why not Volantis?
Perhaps I’ll nd her there. A man should cling to hope. He wondered
what he would say to her. I am sorry that I let them rape you, love. I
thought you were a whore. Can you nd it in your heart to forgive me? I

want to go back to our cottage, to the way it was when we were man
and wife.
The island fell away behind them. Tyrion saw ruins rising along
the eastern bank: crooked walls and fallen towers, broken domes
and rows of rotted wooden pillars, streets choked by mud and
overgrown with purple moss. Another dead city, ten times as large as
Ghoyan Drohe. Turtles lived there now, big bonesnappers. The dwarf
could see them basking in the sun, brown and black hummocks with
jagged ridges down the center of their shells. A few saw the Shy
Maid and slid down into the water, leaving ripples in their wake.
This would not be a good place for a swim.
Then, through the twisted half-drowned trees and wide wet
streets, he glimpsed the silvery sheen of sunlight upon water.
Another river, he knew at once, rushing toward the Rhoyne. The ruins
grew taller as the land grew narrower, until the city ended on a
point of land where stood the remains of a colossal palace of pink
and green marble, its collapsed domes and broken spires looming
large above a row of covered archways. Tyrion saw more ’snappers
sleeping in the slips where half a hundred ships might once have
docked. He knew where he was then. That was Nymeria’s palace, and
this is all that remains of Ny Sar, her city.
“Yollo,” shouted Yandry as the Shy Maid passed the point, “tell
me again of those Westerosi rivers as big as Mother Rhoyne.”
“I did not know,” he called back. “No river in the Seven
Kingdoms is half so wide as this.” The new river that had joined
them was a close twin to the one they had been sailing down, and
that one alone had almost matched the Mander or the Trident.
“This is Ny Sar, where the Mother gathers in her Wild Daughter,
Noyne,” said Yandry, “but she will not reach her widest point until
she meets her other daughters. At Dagger Lake the Qhoyne comes
rushing in, the Darkling Daughter, full of gold and amber from the
Axe and pinecones from the Forest of Qohor. South of there the
Mother meets Lhorulu, the Smiling Daughter from the Golden
Fields. Where they join once stood Chroyane, the festival city,
where the streets were made of water and the houses made of gold.
Then south and east again for long leagues, until at last comes

creeping in Selhoru, the Shy Daughter who hides her course in reeds
and withes. There Mother Rhoyne waxes so wide that a man upon a
boat in the center of the stream cannot see a shore to either side.
You shall see, my little friend.”
I shall, the dwarf was thinking, when he spied a rippling ahead
not six yards from the boat. He was about to point it out to Lemore
when it came to the surface with a wash of water that rocked the
Shy Maid sideways.
It was another turtle, a horned turtle of enormous size, its dark
green shell mottled with brown and overgrown with water moss
and crusty black river molluscs. It raised its head and bellowed, a
deep-throated thrumming roar louder than any warhorn that Tyrion
had ever heard. “We are blessed,” Ysilla was crying loudly, as tears
streamed down her face. “We are blessed, we are blessed.”
Duck was hooting, and Young Gri too. Haldon came out on deck
to learn the cause of the commotion … but too late. The giant turtle
had vanished below the water once again. “What was the cause of
all that noise?” the Halfmaester asked.
“A turtle,” said Tyrion. “A turtle bigger than this boat.”
“It was him,” cried Yandry. “The Old Man of the River.”
And why not? Tyrion grinned. Gods and wonders always appear, to
attend the birth of kings.

DAVOS

T

he Merry Midwife stole into White Harbor on the evening tide,
her patched sail rippling with every gust of wind.
She was an old cog, and even in her youth no one had ever called
her pretty. Her gurehead showed a laughing woman holding an
infant by one foot, but the woman’s cheeks and the babe’s bottom
were both pocked by wormholes. Uncounted layers of drab brown
paint covered her hull; her sails were grey and tattered. She was not
a ship to draw a second glance, unless it was to wonder how she
stayed a oat. The Merry Midwife was known in White Harbor too.
For years she had plied a humble trade between there and Sisterton.
It was not the sort of arrival that Davos Seaworth had anticipated
when he’d set sail with Salla and his eet. All this had seemed
simpler then. The ravens had not brought King Stannis the
allegiance of White Harbor, so His Grace would send an envoy to
treat with Lord Manderly in person. As a show of strength, Davos
would arrive aboard Salla’s galleas Valyrian, with the rest of the
Lysene eet behind her. Every hull was striped: black and yellow,
pink and blue, green and white, purple and gold. The Lyseni loved
bright hues, and Salladhor Saan was the most colorful of all.
Salladhor the Splendid, Davos thought, but the storms wrote an end to
all of that.
Instead he would smuggle himself into the city, as he might have
done twenty years before. Until he knew how matters stood here, it
was more prudent to play the common sailor, not the lord.
White Harbor’s walls of whitewashed stone rose before them, on
the eastern shore where the White Knife plunged into the rth.

Some of the city’s defenses had been strengthened since the last
time Davos had been here, half a dozen years before. The jetty that
divided the inner and outer harbors had been forti ed with a long
stone wall, thirty feet tall and almost a mile long, with towers
every hundred yards. There was smoke rising from Seal Rock as
well, where once there had been only ruins. That could be good or
bad, depending on what side Lord Wyman chooses.
Davos had always been fond of this city, since rst he’d come
here as a cabin boy on Cobblecat. Though small compared to
Oldtown and King’s Landing, it was clean and well-ordered, with
wide straight cobbled streets that made it easy for a man to nd his
way. The houses were built of whitewashed stone, with steeply
pitched roofs of dark grey slate. Roro Uhoris, the Cobblecat’s cranky
old master, used to claim that he could tell one port from another
just by the way they smelled. Cities were like women, he insisted;
each one had its own unique scent. Oldtown was as owery as a
perfumed dowager. Lannisport was a milkmaid, fresh and earthy,
with woodsmoke in her hair. King’s Landing reeked like some
unwashed whore. But White Harbor’s scent was sharp and salty, and
a little shy too. “She smells the way a mermaid ought to smell,”
Roro said. “She smells of the sea.”
She still does, thought Davos, but he could smell the peat smoke
drifting o Seal Rock too. The sea stone dominated the approaches
to the outer harbor, a massive grey-green upthrust looming fty
feet above the waters. Its top was crowned with a circle of
weathered stones, a ringfort of the First Men that had stood
desolate and abandoned for hundreds of years. It was not
abandoned now. Davos could see scorpions and spit res behind the
standing stones, and crossbowmen peering between them. It must be
cold up there, and wet. On all his previous visits, seals could be seen
basking on the broken rocks below. The Blind Bastard always made
him count them whenever the Cobblecat set sail from White Harbor;
the more seals there were, Roro said, the more luck they would
have on their voyage. There were no seals now. The smoke and the
soldiers had frightened them away. A wiser man would see a caution
in that. If I had a thimble full of sense, I would have gone with Salla. He

could have made his way back south, to Marya and their sons. I have
lost four sons in the king’s service, and my fth serves as his squire. I
should have the right to cherish the two boys who still remain. It has been
too long since I saw them.
At Eastwatch, the black brothers told him there was no love
between the Manderlys of White Harbor and the Boltons of the
Dreadfort. The Iron Throne had raised Roose Bolton up to Warden
of the North, so it stood to reason that Wyman Manderly should
declare for Stannis. White Harbor cannot stand alone. The city needs
an ally, a protector. Lord Wyman needs King Stannis as much as Stannis
needs him. Or so it seemed at Eastwatch.
Sisterton had undermined those hopes. If Lord Borrell told it true,
if the Manderlys meant to join their strength to the Boltons and the
Freys … no, he would not dwell on that. He would know the truth
soon enough. He prayed he had not come too late.
That jetty wall conceals the inner harbor, he realized, as the Merry
Midwife was pulling down her sail. The outer harbor was larger, but
the inner harbor o ered better anchorage, sheltered by the city wall
on one side and the looming mass of the Wolf’s Den on another, and
now by the jetty wall as well. At Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, Cotter Pyke
told Davos that Lord Wyman was building war galleys. There could
have been a score of ships concealed behind those walls, waiting
only a command to put to sea.
Behind the city’s thick white walls, the New Castle rose proud and
pale upon its hill. Davos could see the domed roof of the Sept of the
Snows as well, surmounted by tall statues of the Seven. The
Manderlys had brought the Faith north with them when they were
driven from the Reach. White Harbor had its godswood too, a
brooding tangle of root and branch and stone locked away behind
the crumbling black walls of the Wolf’s Den, an ancient fortress that
served only as a prison now. But for the most part the septons ruled
here.
The merman of House Manderly was everywhere in evidence,
ying from the towers of the New Castle, above the Seal Gate, and
along the city walls. At Eastwatch, the northmen insisted that White
Harbor would never abandon its allegiance to Winterfell, but Davos

saw no sign of the direwolf of Stark. There are no lions either. Lord
Wyman cannot have declared for Tommen yet, or he would have raised
his standard.
The dockside wharves were swarming. A clutter of small boats
were tied up along the sh market, o -loading their catches. He
saw three river runners too, long lean boats built tough to brave the
swift currents and rocky shoots of the White Knife. It was the
seagoing vessels that interested him most, however; a pair of
carracks as drab and tattered as the Merry Midwife, the trading
galley Storm Dancer, the cogs Brave Magister and Horn of Plenty, a
galleas from Braavos marked by her purple hull and sails …
… and there beyond, the warship.
The sight of her sent a knife through his hopes. Her hull was
black and gold, her gurehead a lion with an upraised paw. Lionstar,
read the letters on her stern, beneath a uttering banner that bore
the arms of the boy king on the Iron Throne. A year ago, he would
not have been able to read them, but Maester Pylos had taught him
some of the letters back on Dragonstone. For once, the reading gave
him little pleasure. Davos had been praying that the galley had been
lost in the same storms that had ravaged Salla’s eet, but the gods
had not been so kind. The Freys were here, and he would need to
face them.
The Merry Midwife tied up to the end of a weathered wooden pier
in the outer harbor, well away from Lionstar. As her crew made her
fast to the pilings and lowered a gangplank, her captain sauntered
up to Davos. Casso Mogat was a mongrel of the narrow sea,
fathered on a Sisterton whore by an Ibbenese whaler. Only ve feet
tall and very hirsute, he dyed his hair and whiskers a mossy green.
It made him look like a tree stump in yellow boots. Despite his
appearance, he seemed a good sailor, though a hard master to his
crew. “How long will you be gone?”
“A day at least. It may be longer.” Davos had found that lords
liked to keep you waiting. They did it to make you anxious, he
suspected, and to demonstrate their power.
“The Midwife will linger here three days. No longer. They will
look for me back in Sisterton.”

“If things go well, I could be back by the morrow.”
“And if these things go badly?”
I may not be back at all. “You need not wait for me.”
A pair of customs men were clambering aboard as he went down
the gangplank, but neither gave him so much as a glance. They
were there to see the captain and inspect the hold; common seamen
did not concern them, and few men looked as common as Davos. He
was of middling height, his shrewd peasant’s face weathered by
wind and sun, his grizzled beard and brown hair well salted with
grey. His garb was plain as well: old boots, brown breeches and
blue tunic, a woolen mantle of undyed wool, fastened with a
wooden clasp. He wore a pair of salt-stained leather gloves to hide
the stubby ngers of the hand that Stannis had shortened, so many
years ago. Davos hardly looked a lord, much less a King’s Hand.
That was all to the good until he knew how matters stood here.
He made his way along the wharf and through the sh market.
The Brave Magister was taking on some mead. The casks stood four
high along the pier. Behind one stack he glimpsed three sailors
throwing dice. Farther on the shwives were crying the day’s catch,
and a boy was beating time on a drum as a shabby old bear danced
in a circle for a ring of river runners. Two spearmen had been
posted at the Seal Gate, with the badge of House Manderly upon
their breasts, but they were too intent on irting with a dockside
whore to pay Davos any mind. The gate was open, the portcullis
raised. He joined the tra c passing through.
Inside was a cobbled square with a fountain at its center. A stone
merman rose from its waters, twenty feet tall from tail to crown.
His curly beard was green and white with lichen, and one of the
prongs of his trident had broken o before Davos had been born,
yet somehow he still managed to impress. Old Fishfoot was what the
locals called him. The square was named for some dead lord, but no
one ever called it anything but Fishfoot Yard.
The Yard was teeming this afternoon. A woman was washing her
smallclothes in Fishfoot’s fountain and hanging them o his trident
to dry. Beneath the arches of the peddler’s colonnade the scribes
and money changers had set up for business, along with a hedge

wizard, an herb woman, and a very bad juggler. A man was selling
apples from a barrow, and a woman was o ering herring with
chopped onions. Chickens and children were everywhere underfoot.
The huge oak-and-iron doors of the Old Mint had always been
closed when Davos had been in Fishfoot Yard before, but today they
stood open. Inside he glimpsed hundreds of women, children, and
old men, huddled on the oor on piles of furs. Some had little
cook res going.
Davos stopped beneath the colonnade and traded a halfpenny for
an apple. “Are people living in the Old Mint?” he asked the apple
seller.
“Them as have no other place to live. Smallfolk from up the
White Knife, most o’ them. Hornwood’s people too. With that
Bastard o’ Bolton running loose, they all want to be inside the walls.
I don’t know what his lordship means to do with all o’ them. Most
turned up with no more’n the rags on their backs.”
Davos felt a pang of guilt. They came here for refuge, to a city
untouched by the ghting, and here I turn up to drag them back into the
war. He took a bite of the apple and felt guilty about that as well.
“How do they eat?”
The apple seller shrugged. “Some beg. Some steal. Lots o’ young
girls taking up the trade, the way girls always do when it’s all they
got to sell. Any boy stands ve feet tall can nd a place in his
lordship’s barracks, long as he can hold a spear.”
He’s raising men, then. That might be good … or bad, depending.
The apple was dry and mealy, but Davos made himself take another
bite. “Does Lord Wyman mean to join the Bastard?”
“Well,” said the apple seller, “the next time his lordship comes
down here hunkering for an apple, I’ll be sure and ask him.”
“I heard his daughter was to wed some Frey.”
“His granddaughter. I heard that too, but his lordship forgot t’
invite me to the wedding. Here, you going to nish that? I’ll take
the rest back. Them seeds is good.”
Davos tossed him back the core. A bad apple, but it was worth half
a penny to learn that Manderly is raising men. He made his way
around Old Fishfoot, past where a young girl was selling cups of

fresh milk from her nanny goat. He was remembering more of the
city now that he was here. Down past where Old Fishfoot’s trident
pointed was an alley where they sold fried cod, crisp and golden
brown outside and aky white within. Over there was a brothel,
cleaner than most, where a sailor could enjoy a woman without fear
of being robbed or killed. O the other way, in one of those houses
that clung to the walls of the Wolf’s Den like barnacles to an old
hull, there used to be a brewhouse where they made a black beer so
thick and tasty that a cask of it could fetch as much as Arbor gold in
Braavos and the Port of Ibben, provided the locals left the brewer
any to sell.
It was wine he wanted, though—sour, dark, and dismal. He
strolled across the yard and down a ight of steps, to a winesink
called the Lazy Eel, underneath a warehouse full of sheepskins. Back
in his smuggling days, the Eel had been renowned for o ering the
oldest whores and vilest wine in White Harbor, along with meat
pies full of lard and gristle that were inedible on their best days and
poisonous on their worst. With fare like that, most locals shunned
the place, leaving it for sailors who did not know any better. You
never saw a city guardsman down in the Lazy Eel, or a customs
o cer.
Some things never change. Inside the Eel, time stood still. The
barrel-vaulted ceiling was stained black with soot, the oor was
hard-packed earth, the air smelled of smoke and spoiled meat and
stale vomit. The fat tallow candles on the tables gave o more
smoke than light, and the wine that Davos ordered looked more
brown than red in the gloom. Four whores were seated near the
door, drinking. One gave him a hopeful smile as he entered. When
Davos shook his head, the woman said something that made her
companions laugh. After that none of them paid him any mind.
Aside from the whores and the proprietor, Davos had the Eel to
himself. The cellar was large, full of nooks and shadowed alcoves
where a man could be alone. He took his wine to one of them and
sat with his back to a wall to wait.
Before long, he found himself staring at the hearth. The red
woman could see the future in the re, but all that Davos Seaworth

ever saw were the shadows of the past: the burning ships, the ery
chain, the green shadows ashing across the belly of the clouds, the
Red Keep brooding over all. Davos was a simple man, raised up by
chance and war and Stannis. He did not understand why the gods
would take four lads as young and strong as his sons, yet spare their
weary father. Some nights he thought he had been left to rescue
Edric Storm … but by now King Robert’s bastard boy was safe in
the Stepstones, yet Davos still remained. Do the gods have some other
task for me? he wondered. If so, White Harbor may be some part of it.
He tried the wine, then poured half his cup onto the oor beside his
foot.
As dusk fell outside, the benches at the Eel began to ll with
sailors. Davos called to the proprietor for another cup. When he
brought it, he brought him a candle too. “You want food?” the man
asked. “We got meat pies.”
“What kind of meat is in them?”
“The usual kind. It’s good.”
The whores laughed. “It’s grey, he means,” one said.
“Shut your bloody yap. You eat them.”
“I eat all kinds o’ shit. Don’t mean I like it.”
Davos blew the candle out as soon as the proprietor moved o ,
and sat back in the shadows. Seamen were the worst gossips in the
world when the wine was owing, even wine as cheap as this. All
he need do was listen.
Most of what he heard he’d learned in Sisterton, from Lord Godric
or the denizens of the Belly of the Whale. Tywin Lannister was
dead, butchered by his dwarf son; his corpse had stunk so badly that
no one had been able to enter the Great Sept of Baelor for days
afterward; the Lady of the Eyrie had been murdered by a singer;
Little nger ruled the Vale now, but Bronze Yohn Royce had sworn
to bring him down; Balon Greyjoy had died as well, and his brothers
were ghting for the Seastone Chair; Sandor Clegane had turned
outlaw and was plundering and killing in the lands along the
Trident; Myr and Lys and Tyrosh were embroiled in another war; a
slave revolt was raging in the east.

Other tidings were of greater interest. Robett Glover was in the
city and had been trying to raise men, with little success. Lord
Manderly had turned a deaf ear to his pleas. White Harbor was
weary of war, he was reported to have said. That was bad. The
Ryswells and the Dustins had surprised the ironmen on the Fever
River and put their longships to the torch. That was worse. And now
the Bastard of Bolton was riding south with Hother Umber to join
them for an attack on Moat Cailin. “The Whoresbane his own self,”
claimed a riverman who’d just brought a load of hides and timber
down the White Knife, “with three hundred spearmen and a
hundred archers. Some Hornwood men have joined them, and
Cerwyns too.” That was worst of all.
“Lord Wyman best send some men to ght if he knows what’s
good for him,” said the old fellow at the end of the table. “Lord
Roose, he’s the Warden now. White Harbor’s honor bound to
answer his summons.”
“What did any Bolton ever know o’ honor?” said the Eel’s
proprietor as he lled their cups with more brown wine.
“Lord Wyman won’t go no place. He’s too bloody fat.”
“I heard how he was ailing. All he does is sleep and weep, they
say. He’s too sick to get out o’ his bed most days.”
“Too fat, you mean.”
“Fat or thin’s got naught to do with it,” said the Eel’s proprietor.
“The lions got his son.”
No one spoke of King Stannis. No one even seemed to know that
His Grace had come north to help defend the Wall. Wildlings and
wights and giants had been all the talk at Eastwatch, but here no
one seemed to be giving them so much as a thought.
Davos leaned into the relight. “I thought the Freys killed his
son. That’s what we heard in Sisterton.”
“They killed Ser Wendel,” said the proprietor. “His bones are
resting in the Snowy Sept with candles all around them, if you want
to have a look. Ser Wylis, though, he’s still a captive.”
Worse and worse. He had known that Lord Wyman had two sons,
but he’d thought that both of them were dead. If the Iron Throne has
a hostage … Davos had fathered seven sons himself, and lost four on

the Blackwater. He knew he would do whatever gods or men
required of him to protect the other three. Ste on and Stannis were
thousands of leagues from the ghting and safe from harm, but
Devan was at Castle Black, a squire to the king. The king whose cause
may rise or fall with White Harbor.
His fellow drinkers were talking about dragons now. “You’re
bloody mad,” said an oarsman o Storm Dancer. “The Beggar King’s
been dead for years. Some Dothraki horselord cut his head o .”
“So they tell us,” said the old fellow. “Might be they’re lying,
though. He died half a world away, if he died at all. Who’s to say?
If a king wanted me dead, might be I’d oblige him and pretend to
be a corpse. None of us has ever seen his body.”
“I never saw Jo rey’s corpse, nor Robert’s,” growled the Eel’s
proprietor. “Maybe they’re all alive as well. Maybe Baelor the
Blessed’s just been having him a little nap all these years.”
The old fellow made a face. “Prince Viserys weren’t the only
dragon, were he? Are we sure they killed Prince Rhaegar’s son? A
babe, he was.”
“Wasn’t there some princess too?” asked a whore. She was the
same one who’d said the meat was grey.
“Two,” said the old fellow. “One was Rhaegar’s daughter, t’other
was his sister.”
“Daena,” said the riverman. “That was the sister. Daena of
Dragonstone. Or was it Daera?”
“Daena was old King Baelor’s wife,” said the oarsman. “I rowed
on a ship named for her once. The Princess Daena.”
“If she was a king’s wife, she’d be a queen.”
“Baelor never had a queen. He was holy.”
“Don’t mean he never wed his sister,” said the whore. “He just
never bedded her, is all. When they made him king, he locked her
up in a tower. His other sisters too. There was three.”
“Daenela,” the proprietor said loudly. “That was her name. The
Mad King’s daughter, I mean, not Baelor’s bloody wife.”
“Daenerys,” Davos said. “She was named for the Daenerys who
wed the Prince of Dorne during the reign of Daeron the Second. I
don’t know what became of her.”

“I do,” said the man who’d started all the talk of dragons, a
Braavosi oarsman in a somber woolen jack. “When we were down
to Pentos we moored beside a trader called the Sloe-Eyed Maid, and
I got to drinking with her captain’s steward. He told me a pretty
tale about some slip of a girl who come aboard in Qarth, to try and
book passage back to Westeros for her and three dragons. Silver
hair she had, and purple eyes. ‘I took her to the captain my own
self,’ this steward swore to me, ‘but he wasn’t having none of that.
There’s more pro t in cloves and sa ron, he tells me, and spices
won’t set re to your sails.’ ”
Laughter swept the cellar. Davos did not join in. He knew what
had befallen the Sloe-Eyed Maid. The gods were cruel to let a man
sail across half the world, then send him chasing a false light when
he was almost home. That captain was a bolder man than me, he
thought, as he made his way to the door. One voyage to the east,
and a man could live as rich as a lord until the end of his days.
When he’d been younger, Davos had dreamed of making such
voyages himself, but the years went dancing by like moths around a
ame, and somehow the time had never been quite right. One day,
he told himself. One day when the war is done and King Stannis sits the
Iron Throne and has no more need of onion knights. I’ll take Devan with
me. Ste and Stanny too if they’re old enough. We’ll see these dragons
and all the wonders of the world.
Outside the wind was gusting, making the ames shiver in the oil
lamps that lit the yard. It had grown colder since the sun went
down, but Davos remembered Eastwatch, and how the wind would
come screaming o the Wall at night, kni ng through even the
warmest cloak to freeze a man’s blood right in his veins. White
Harbor was a warm bath by comparison.
There were other places he might get his ears lled: an inn
famous for its lamprey pies, the alehouse where the wool factors
and the customs men did their drinking, a mummer’s hall where
bawdy entertainments could be had for a few pennies. But Davos
felt that he had heard enough. I’ve come too late. Old instinct made
him reach for his chest, where once he’d kept his ngerbones in a
little sack on a leather thong. There was nothing there. He had lost

his luck in the res of the Blackwater, when he’d lost his ship and
sons.
What must I do now? He pulled his mantle tighter. Do I climb the
hill and present myself at the gates of the New Castle, to make a futile
plea? Return to Sisterton? Make my way back to Marya and my boys?
Buy a horse and ride the kingsroad, to tell Stannis that he has no friends
in White Harbor, and no hope?
Queen Selyse had feasted Salla and his captains, the night before
the eet had set sail. Cotter Pyke had joined them, and four other
high o cers of the Night’s Watch. Princess Shireen had been
allowed to attend as well. As the salmon was being served, Ser Axell
Florent had entertained the table with the tale of a Targaryen
princeling who kept an ape as a pet. This prince liked to dress the
creature in his dead son’s clothes and pretend he was a child, Ser
Axell claimed, and from time to time he would propose marriages
for him. The lords so honored always declined politely, but of
course they did decline. “Even dressed in silk and velvet, an ape
remains an ape,” Ser Axell said. “A wiser prince would have known
that you cannot send an ape to do a man’s work.” The queen’s men
laughed, and several grinned at Davos. I am no ape, he’d thought. I
am as much a lord as you, and a better man. But the memory still
stung.
The Seal Gate had been closed for the night. Davos would not be
able to return to the Merry Midwife till dawn. He was here for the
night. He gazed up at Old Fishfoot with his broken trident. I have
come through rain and wrack and storm. I will not go back without
doing what I came for, no matter how hopeless it may seem. He might
have lost his ngers and his luck, but he was no ape in velvet. He
was a King’s Hand.
Castle Stair was a street with steps, a broad white stone way that
led up from the Wolf’s Den by the water to the New Castle on its
hill. Marble mermaids lit the way as Davos climbed, bowls of
burning whale oil cradled in their arms. When he reached the top,
he turned to look behind him. From here he could see down into the
harbors. Both of them. Behind the jetty wall, the inner harbor was

crowded with war galleys. Davos counted twenty-three. Lord
Wyman was a fat man, but not an idle one, it seemed.
The gates of the New Castle had been closed, but a postern
opened when he shouted, and a guard emerged to ask his business.
Davos showed him the black and gold ribbon that bore the royal
seals. “I need to see Lord Manderly at once,” he said. “My business
is with him, and him alone.”

DAENERYS

T

he dancers shimmered, their sleek shaved bodies covered with
a ne sheen of oil. Blazing torches whirled from hand to hand to the
beat of drums and the trilling of a ute. Whenever two torches
crossed in the air, a naked girl leapt between them, spinning. The
torchlight shone o oiled limbs and breasts and buttocks.
The three men were erect. The sight of their arousal was
arousing, though Daenerys Targaryen found it comical as well. The
men were all of a height, with long legs and at bellies, every
muscle as sharply etched as if it had been chiseled out of stone.
Even their faces looked the same, somehow … which was passing
strange, since one had skin as dark as ebony, while the second was
as pale as milk, and the third gleamed like burnished copper.
Are they meant to in ame me? Dany stirred amongst her silken
cushions. Against the pillars her Unsullied stood like statues in their
spiked caps, their smooth faces expressionless. Not so the whole
men. Reznak mo Reznak’s mouth was open, and his lips glistened
wetly as he watched. Hizdahr zo Loraq was saying something to the
man beside him, yet all the time his eyes were on the dancing girls.
The Shavepate’s ugly, oily face was as stern as ever, but he missed
nothing.
It was harder to know what her honored guest was dreaming. The
pale, lean, hawk-faced man who shared her high table was
resplendent in robes of maroon silk and cloth-of-gold, his bald head
shining in the torchlight as he devoured a g with small, precise,
elegant bites. Opals winked along the nose of Xaro Xhoan Daxos as
his head turned to follow the dancers.

In his honor Daenerys had donned a Qartheen gown, a sheer
confection of violet samite cut so as to leave her left breast bare.
Her silver-gold hair brushed lightly over her shoulder, falling
almost to her nipple. Half the men in the hall had stolen glances at
her, but not Xaro. It was the same in Qarth. She could not sway the
merchant prince that way. Sway him I must, however. He had come
from Qarth upon the galleas Silken Cloud with thirteen galleys
sailing attendance, his eet an answered prayer. Meereen’s trade
had dwindled away to nothing since she had ended slavery, but
Xaro had the power to restore it.
As the drums reached a crescendo, three of the girls leapt above
the ames, spinning in the air. The male dancers caught them about
the waists and slid them down onto their members. Dany watched
as the women arched their backs and coiled their legs around their
partners while the utes wept and the men thrust in time to the
music. She had seen the act of love before; the Dothraki mated as
openly as their mares and stallions. This was the rst time she had
seen lust put to music, though.
Her face was warm. The wine, she told herself. Yet somehow she
found herself thinking of Daario Naharis. His messenger had come
that morning. The Stormcrows were returning from Lhazar. Her
captain was riding back to her, bringing her the friendship of the
Lamb Men. Food and trade, she reminded herself. He did not fail me,
nor will he. Daario will help me save my city. The queen longed to see
his face, to stroke his three-pronged beard, to tell him her
troubles … but the Stormcrows were still many days away, beyond
the Khyzai Pass, and she had a realm to rule.
Smoke hung between the purple pillars. The dancers knelt, heads
bowed. “You were splendid,” Dany told them. “Seldom have I seen
such grace, such beauty.” She beckoned to Reznak mo Reznak, and
the seneschal scurried to her side. Beads of sweat dotted his bald,
wrinkled head. “Escort our guests to the baths, that they may
refresh themselves, and bring them food and drink.”
“It shall be my great honor, Magni cence.”
Daenerys held out her cup for Irri to re ll. The wine was sweet
and strong, redolent with the smell of eastern spices, much superior

to the thin Ghiscari wines that had lled her cup of late. Xaro
perused the fruits on the platter Jhiqui o ered him and chose a
persimmon. Its orange skin matched the color of the coral in his
nose. He took a bite and pursed his lips. “Tart.”
“Would my lord prefer something sweeter?”
“Sweetness cloys. Tart fruit and tart women give life its savor.”
Xaro took another bite, chewed, swallowed. “Daenerys, sweet
queen, I cannot tell you what pleasure it gives me to bask once
more in your presence. A child departed Qarth, as lost as she was
lovely. I feared she was sailing to her doom, yet now I nd her here
enthroned, mistress of an ancient city, surrounded by a mighty host
that she raised up out of dreams.”
No, she thought, out of blood and re. “I am glad you came to me.
It is good to see your face again, my friend.” I will not trust you, but I
need you. I need your Thirteen, I need your ships, I need your trade.
For centuries Meereen and her sister cities Yunkai and Astapor
had been the linchpins of the slave trade, the place where Dothraki
khals and the corsairs of the Basilisk Isles sold their captives and the
rest of the world came to buy. Without slaves, Meereen had little to
o er traders. Copper was plentiful in the Ghiscari hills, but the
metal was not as valuable as it had been when bronze ruled the
world. The cedars that had once grown tall along the coast grew no
more, felled by the axes of the Old Empire or consumed by
dragon re when Ghis made war against Valyria. Once the trees had
gone, the soil baked beneath the hot sun and blew away in thick red
clouds. “It was these calamities that transformed my people into
slavers,” Galazza Galare had told her, at the Temple of the Graces.
And I am the calamity that will change these slavers back into people,
Dany had sworn to herself.
“I had to come,” said Xaro in a languid tone. “Even far away in
Qarth, fearful tales had reached my ears. I wept to hear them. It is
said that your enemies have promised wealth and glory and a
hundred virgin slave girls to any man who slays you.”
“The Sons of the Harpy.” How does he know that? “They scrawl on
walls by night and cut the throats of honest freedmen as they sleep.
When the sun comes up they hide like roaches. They fear my Brazen

Beasts.” Skahaz mo Kandaq had given her the new watch she had
asked for, made up in equal numbers of freedmen and shavepate
Meereenese. They walked the streets both day and night, in dark
hoods and brazen masks. The Sons of the Harpy had promised grisly
death to any traitor who dared serve the dragon queen, and to their
kith and kin as well, so the Shavepate’s men went about as jackals,
owls, and other beasts, keeping their true faces hidden. “I might
have cause to fear the Sons if they saw me wandering alone through
the streets, but only if it was night and I was naked and unarmed.
They are craven creatures.”
“A craven’s knife can slay a queen as easily as a hero’s. I would
sleep more soundly if I knew my heart’s delight had kept her erce
horselords close around her. In Qarth, you had three bloodriders
who never left your side. Wherever have they gone?”
“Aggo, Jhoqo, and Rakharo still serve me.” He is playing games
with me. Dany could play as well. “I am only a young girl and know
little of such things, but older, wiser men tell me that to hold
Meereen I must control its hinterlands, all the land west of Lhazar
as far south as the Yunkish hills.”
“Your hinterlands are not precious to me. Your person is. Should
any ill befall you, this world would lose its savor.”
“My lord is good to care so much, but I am well protected.” Dany
gestured toward where Barristan Selmy stood with one hand resting
on his sword hilt. “Barristan the Bold, they call him. Twice he has
saved me from assassins.”
Xaro gave Selmy a cursory inspection. “Barristan the Old, did you
say? Your bear knight was younger, and devoted to you.”
“I do not wish to speak of Jorah Mormont.”
“To be sure. The man was coarse and hairy.” The merchant prince
leaned across the table. “Let us speak instead of love, of dreams and
desire and Daenerys, the fairest woman in this world. I am drunk
with the sight of you.”
She was no stranger to the overblown courtesies of Qarth. “If you
are drunk, blame the wine.”
“No wine is half so intoxicating as your beauty. My manse has
seemed as empty as a tomb since Daenerys departed, and all the

pleasures of the Queen of Cities have been as ashes in my mouth.
Why did you abandon me?”
I was hounded from your city in fear for my life. “It was time. Qarth
wished me gone.”
“Who? The Pureborn? They have water in their veins. The
Spicers? There are curds between their ears. And the Undying are
all dead. You should have taken me to husband. I am almost certain
that I asked you for your hand. Begged you, even.”
“Only half a hundred times,” Dany teased. “You gave up too
easily, my lord. For I must marry, all agree.”
“A khaleesi must have a khal,” said Irri, as she lled the queen’s
cup once again. “This is known.”
“Shall I ask again?” wondered Xaro. “No, I know that smile. It is
a cruel queen who dices with men’s hearts. Humble merchants like
myself are no more than stones beneath your jeweled sandals.” A
single tear ran slowly down his pale white cheek.
Dany knew him too well to be moved. Qartheen men could weep
at will. “Oh, stop that.” She took a cherry from the bowl on the
table and threw it at his nose. “I may be a young girl, but I am not
so foolish as to wed a man who nds a fruit platter more enticing
than my breast. I saw which dancers you were watching.”
Xaro wiped away his tear. “The same ones Your Grace was
following, I believe. You see, we are alike. If you will not take me
for your husband, I am content to be your slave.”
“I want no slave. I free you.” His jeweled nose made a tempting
target. This time Dany threw an apricot at him.
Xaro caught it in the air and took a bite. “Whence came this
madness? Should I count myself fortunate that you did not free my
own slaves when you were my guest in Qarth?”
I was a beggar queen and you were Xaro of the Thirteen, Dany
thought, and all you wanted were my dragons. “Your slaves seemed
well treated and content. It was not till Astapor that my eyes were
opened. Do you know how Unsullied are made and trained?”
“Cruelly, I have no doubt. When a smith makes a sword, he
thrusts the blade into the re, beats on it with a hammer, then

plunges it into iced water to temper the steel. If you would savor
the sweet taste of the fruit, you must water the tree.”
“This tree has been watered with blood.”
“How else, to grow a soldier? Your Radiance enjoyed my dancers.
Would it surprise you to know that they are slaves, bred and trained
in Yunkai? They have been dancing since they were old enough to
walk. How else to achieve such perfection?” He took a swallow of
his wine. “They are expert in all the erotic arts as well. I had
thought to make Your Grace a gift of them.”
“By all means.” Dany was unsurprised. “I shall free them.”
That made him wince. “And what would they do with freedom?
As well give a sh a suit of mail. They were made to dance.”
“Made by who? Their masters? Perhaps your dancers would
sooner build or bake or farm. Have you asked them?”
“Perhaps your elephants would sooner be nightingales. Instead of
sweet song, Meereen’s nights would be lled with thunderous
trumpetings, and your trees would shatter beneath the weight of
great grey birds.” Xaro sighed. “Daenerys, my delight, beneath that
sweet young breast beats a tender heart … but take counsel from an
older, wiser head. Things are not always as they seem. Much that
may seem evil can be good. Consider rain.”
“Rain?” Does he take me for a fool, or just a child?
“We curse the rain when it falls upon our heads, yet without it we
should starve. The world needs rain … and slaves. You make a face,
but it is true. Consider Qarth. In art, music, magic, trade, all that
makes us more than beasts, Qarth sits above the rest of mankind as
you sit at the summit of this pyramid … but below, in place of
bricks, the magni cence that is the Queen of Cities rests upon the
backs of slaves. Ask yourself, if all men must grub in the dirt for
food, how shall any man lift his eyes to contemplate the stars? If
each of us must break his back to build a hovel, who shall raise the
temples to glorify the gods? For some men to be great, others must
be enslaved.”
He was too eloquent for her. Dany had no answer for him, only
the raw feeling in her belly. “Slavery is not the same as rain,” she

insisted. “I have been rained on and I have been sold. It is not the
same. No man wants to be owned.”
Xaro gave a languid shrug. “As it happens, when I came ashore in
your sweet city, I chanced to see upon the riverbank a man who had
once been a guest in my manse, a merchant who dealt in rare spices
and choice wines. He was naked from the waist up, red and peeling,
and seemed to be digging a hole.”
“Not a hole. A ditch, to bring water from the river to the elds.
We mean to plant beans. The bean elds must have water.”
“How kind of my old friend to help with the digging. And how
very unlike him. Is it possible he was given no choice in the matter?
No, surely not. You have no slaves in Meereen.”
Dany ushed. “Your friend is being paid with food and shelter. I
cannot give him back his wealth. Meereen needs beans more than it
needs rare spices, and beans require water.”
“Would you set my dancers to digging ditches as well? Sweet
queen, when he saw me, my old friend fell to his knees and begged
me to buy him as a slave and take him back to Qarth.”
She felt as if he’d slapped her. “Buy him, then.”
“If it please you. I know it will please him.” He put his hand upon
her arm. “There are truths only a friend may tell you. I helped you
when you came to Qarth a beggar, and I have crossed long leagues
and stormy seas to help you once again. Is there some place where
we might speak frankly?”
Dany could feel the warmth of his ngers. He was warm in Qarth
as well, she recalled, until the day he had no more use for me. She rose
to her feet. “Come,” she said, and Xaro followed her through the
pillars, to the wide marble steps that led up to her private chambers
at the apex of the pyramid.
“Oh most beautiful of women,” Xaro said, as they began to climb,
“there are footsteps behind us. We are followed.”
“My old knight does not frighten you, surely? Ser Barristan is
sworn to keep my secrets.”
She took him out onto the terrace that overlooked the city. A full
moon swam in the black sky above Meereen. “Shall we walk?”
Dany slipped her arm through his. The air was heavy with the scent

of night-blooming owers. “You spoke of help. Trade with me,
then. Meereen has salt to sell, and wine …”
“Ghiscari wine?” Xaro made a sour face. “The sea provides all the
salt that Qarth requires, but I would gladly take as many olives as
you cared to sell me. Olive oil as well.”
“I have none to o er. The slavers burned the trees.” Olives had
been grown along the shores of Slaver’s Bay for centuries; but the
Meereenese had put their ancient groves to the torch as Dany’s host
advanced on them, leaving her to cross a blackened wasteland. “We
are replanting, but it takes seven years before an olive tree begins
to bear, and thirty years before it can truly be called productive.
What of copper?”
“A pretty metal, but ckle as a woman. Gold, now … gold is
sincere. Qarth will gladly give you gold … for slaves.”
“Meereen is a free city of free men.”
“A poor city that once was rich. A hungry city that once was fat.
A bloody city that once was peaceful.”
His accusations stung. There was too much truth in them.
“Meereen will be rich and fat and peaceful once again, and free as
well. Go to the Dothraki if you must have slaves.”
“Dothraki make slaves, Ghiscari train them. And to reach Qarth,
the horselords must needs drive their captives across the red waste.
Hundreds would die, if not thousands … and many horses too,
which is why no khal will risk it. And there is this: Qarth wants no
khalasars seething round our walls. The stench of all those
horses … meaning no o ense, Khaleesi.”
“A horse has an honest smell. That is more than can be said of
some great lords and merchant princes.”
Xaro took no notice of the sally. “Daenerys, let me be honest with
you, as be ts a friend. You will not make Meereen rich and fat and
peaceful. You will only bring it to destruction, as you did Astapor.
You are aware that there was battle joined at the Horns of Hazzat?
The Butcher King has ed back to his palace, his new Unsullied
running at his heels.”
“This is known.” Brown Ben Plumm had sent back word of the
battle from the eld. “The Yunkai’i have bought themselves new

sellswords, and two legions from New Ghis fought beside them.”
“Two will soon become four, then ten. And Yunkish envoys have
been sent to Myr and Volantis to hire more blades. The Company of
the Cat, the Long Lances, the Windblown. Some say that the Wise
Masters have bought the Golden Company as well.”
Her brother Viserys had once feasted the captains of the Golden
Company, in hopes they might take up his cause. They ate his food
and heard his pleas and laughed at him. Dany had only been a little
girl, but she remembered. “I have sellswords too.”
“Two companies. The Yunkai’i will send twenty against you if
they must. And when they march, they will not march alone. Tolos
and Mantarys have agreed to an alliance.”
That was ill news, if true. Daenerys had sent missions to Tolos
and Mantarys, hoping to nd new friends to the west to balance the
enmity of Yunkai to the south. Her envoys had not returned.
“Meereen has made alliance with Lhazar.”
That only made him chuckle. “The Dothraki horselords call the
Lhazarene the Lamb Men. When you shear them, all they do is bleat.
They are not a martial people.”
Even a sheepish friend is better than none. “The Wise Masters should
follow their example. I spared Yunkai before, but I will not make
that mistake again. If they should dare attack me, this time I shall
raze their Yellow City to the ground.”
“And whilst you are razing Yunkai, my sweet, Meereen shall rise
behind you. Do not close your eyes to your peril, Daenerys. Your
eunuchs are ne soldiers, but they are too few to match the hosts
that Yunkai will send against you, once Astapor has fallen.”
“My freedman—” Dany started.
“Bedslaves, barbers, and brickmakers win no battles.”
He was wrong in that, she hoped. The freedmen had been a
rabble once, but she had organized the men of ghting age into
companies and commanded Grey Worm to make them into soldiers.
Let him think what he will. “Have you forgotten? I have dragons.”
“Do you? In Qarth, you were seldom seen without a dragon on
your shoulder … yet now that shapely shoulder is as fair and bare
as your sweet breast, I observe.”

“My dragons have grown, my shoulders have not. They range far
a eld, hunting.” Hazzea, forgive me. She wondered how much Xaro
knew, what whispers he had heard. “Ask the Good Masters of
Astapor about my dragons if you doubt them.” I saw a slaver’s eyes
melt and go running down his cheeks. “Tell me true, old friend, why
did you seek me out if not to trade?”
“To bring a gift, for the queen of my heart.”
“Say on.” What trap is this, now?
“The gift you begged of me in Qarth. Ships. There are thirteen
galleys in the bay. Yours, if you will have them. I have brought you
a eet, to carry you home to Westeros.”
A eet. It was more than she could hope for, so of course it made
her wary. In Qarth, Xaro had o ered her thirty ships … for a
dragon. “And what price do you ask for these ships?”
“None. I no longer lust for dragons. I saw their work at Astapor
on my way here, when my Silken Cloud put in for water. The ships
are yours, sweet queen. Thirteen galleys, and men to pull the oars.”
Thirteen. To be sure. Xaro was one of the Thirteen. No doubt he
had convinced each of his fellow members to give up one ship. She
knew the merchant prince too well to think that he would sacri ce
thirteen of his own ships. “I must consider this. May I inspect these
ships?”
“You have grown suspicious, Daenerys.”
Always. “I have grown wise, Xaro.”
“Inspect all you wish. When you are satis ed, swear to me that
you shall return to Westeros forthwith, and the ships are yours.
Swear by your dragons and your seven-faced god and the ashes of
your fathers, and go.”
“And if I should decide to wait a year, or three?”
A mournful look crossed Xaro’s face. “That would make me very
sad, my sweet delight … for young and strong as you now seem,
you shall not live so long. Not here.”
He o ers the honeycomb with one hand and shows the whip with the
other. “The Yunkai’i are not so fearsome as all that.”
“Not all your enemies are in the Yellow City. Beware men with
cold hearts and blue lips. You had not been gone from Qarth a

fortnight when Pyat Pree set out with three of his fellow warlocks,
to seek for you in Pentos.”
Dany was more amused than afraid. “It is good I turned aside,
then. Pentos is half a world from Meereen.”
“This is so,” he allowed, “yet soon or late word must reach them
of the dragon queen of Slaver’s Bay.”
“Is that meant to frighten me? I lived in fear for fourteen years,
my lord. I woke afraid each morning and went to sleep afraid each
night … but my fears were burned away the day I came forth from
the re. Only one thing frightens me now.”
“And what is it that you fear, sweet queen?”
“I am only a foolish young girl.” Dany rose on her toes and kissed
his cheek. “But not so foolish as to tell you that. My men shall look
at these ships. Then you shall have my answer.”
“As you say.” He touched her bare breast lightly, and whispered,
“Let me stay and help persuade you.”
For a moment she was tempted. Perhaps the dancers had stirred
her after all. I could close my eyes and pretend that he was Daario. A
dream Daario would be safer than the real one. But she pushed the
thought aside. “No, my lord. I thank you, but no.” Dany slipped
from his arms. “Some other night, perhaps.”
“Some other night.” His mouth was sad, but his eyes seemed
more relieved than disappointed.
If I were a dragon, I could y to Westeros, she thought when he was
gone. I would have no need of Xaro or his ships. Dany wondered how
many men thirteen galleys could hold. It had taken three to carry
her and her khalasar from Qarth to Astapor, but that was before she
had acquired eight thousand Unsullied, a thousand sellswords, and a
vast horde of freedmen. And the dragons, what am I to do with them?
“Drogon,” she whispered softly, “where are you?” For a moment
she could almost see him sweeping across the sky, his black wings
swallowing the stars.
She turned her back upon the night, to where Barristan Selmy
stood silent in the shadows. “My brother once told me a Westerosi
riddle. Who listens to everything yet hears nothing?”
“A knight of the Kingsguard.” Selmy’s voice was solemn.

“You heard Xaro make his o er?”
“I did, Your Grace.” The old knight took pains not to look at her
bare breast as he spoke to her.
Ser Jorah would not turn his eyes away. He loved me as a woman,
where Ser Barristan loves me only as his queen. Mormont had been an
informer, reporting to her enemies in Westeros, yet he had given
her good counsel too. “What do you think of it? Of him?”
“Of him, little and less. These ships, though … Your Grace, with
these ships we might be home before year’s end.”
Dany had never known a home. In Braavos, there had been a
house with a red door, but that was all. “Beware of Qartheen
bearing gifts, especially merchants of the Thirteen. There is some
trap here. Perhaps these ships are rotten, or …”
“If they were so unseaworthy, they could not have crossed the sea
from Qarth,” Ser Barristan pointed out, “but Your Grace was wise to
insist upon inspection. I will take Admiral Groleo to the galleys at
rst light with his captains and two score of his sailors. We can
crawl over every inch of those ships.”
It was good counsel. “Yes, make it so.” Westeros. Home. But if she
left, what would happen to her city? Meereen was never your city,
her brother’s voice seemed to whisper. Your cities are across the sea.
Your Seven Kingdoms, where your enemies await you. You were born to
serve them blood and re.
Ser Barristan cleared his throat and said, “This warlock that the
merchant spoke of …”
“Pyat Pree.” She tried to recall his face, but all she could see were
his lips. The wine of the warlocks had turned them blue. Shade-ofthe-evening, it was called. “If a warlock’s spell could kill me, I would
be dead by now. I left their palace all in ashes.” Drogon saved me
when they would have drained my life from me. Drogon burned them
all.
“As you say, Your Grace. Still. I will be watchful.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “I know you will. Come, walk me
back down to the feast.”
The next morning Dany woke as full of hope as she had been
since rst she came to Slaver’s Bay. Daario would soon be at her

side once more, and together they would sail for Westeros. For
home. One of her young hostages brought her morning meal, a
plump shy girl named Mezzara, whose father ruled the pyramid of
Merreq, and Dany gave her a happy hug and thanked her with a
kiss.
“Xaro Xhoan Daxos has o ered me thirteen galleys,” she told Irri
and Jhiqui as they were dressing her for court.
“Thirteen is a bad number, Khaleesi,” murmured Jhiqui, in the
Dothraki tongue. “It is known.”
“It is known,” Irri agreed.
“Thirty would be better,” Daenerys agreed. “Three hundred better
still. But thirteen may su ce to carry us to Westeros.”
The two Dothraki girls exchanged a look. “The poison water is
accursed, Khaleesi,” said Irri. “Horses cannot drink it.”
“I do not intend to drink it,” Dany promised them.
Only four petitioners awaited her that morning. As ever, Lord
Ghael was the rst to present himself, looking even more wretched
than usual. “Your Radiance,” he moaned, as he fell to the marble at
her feet, “the armies of the Yunkai’i descend on Astapor. I beg you,
come south with all your strength!”
“I warned your king that this war of his was folly,” Dany
reminded him. “He would not listen.”
“Great Cleon sought only to strike down the vile slavers of
Yunkai.”
“Great Cleon is a slaver himself.”
“I know that the Mother of Dragons will not abandon us in our
hour of peril. Lend us your Unsullied to defend our walls.”
And if I do, who will defend my walls? “Many of my freedmen were
slaves in Astapor. Perhaps some will wish to help defend your king.
That is their choice, as free men. I gave Astapor its freedom. It is up
to you to defend it.”
“We are all dead, then. You gave us death, not freedom.” Ghael
leapt to his feet and spat into her face.
Strong Belwas seized him by the shoulder and slammed him down
onto the marble so hard that Dany heard Ghael’s teeth crack. The
Shavepate would have done worse, but she stopped him.

“Enough,” she said, dabbing at her cheek with the end of her
tokar. “No one has ever died from spittle. Take him away.”
They dragged him out feet rst, leaving several broken teeth and
a trail of blood behind. Dany would gladly have sent the rest of the
petitioners away … but she was still their queen, so she heard them
out and did her best to give them justice.
Late that afternoon Admiral Groleo and Ser Barristan returned
from their inspection of the galleys. Dany assembled her council to
hear them. Grey Worm was there for the Unsullied, Skahaz mo
Kandaq for the Brazen Beasts. In the absence of her bloodriders, a
wizened jaqqa rhan called Rommo, squint-eyed and bowlegged,
came to speak for her Dothraki. Her freedmen were represented by
the captains of the three companies she had formed—Mollono Yos
Dob of the Stalwart Shields, Symon Stripeback of the Free Brothers,
Marselen of the Mother’s Men. Reznak mo Reznak hovered at the
queen’s elbow, and Strong Belwas stood behind her with his huge
arms crossed. Dany would not lack for counsel.
Groleo had been a most unhappy man since they had broken up
his ship to build the siege engines that won Meereen for her. Dany
had tried to console him by naming him her lord admiral, but it was
a hollow honor; the Meereenese eet had sailed for Yunkai when
Dany’s host approached the city, so the old Pentoshi was an admiral
without ships. Yet now he was smiling through his ragged saltstreaked beard in a way that the queen could scarce remember.
“The ships are sound, then?” she said, hoping.
“Sound enough, Your Grace. They are old ships, aye, but most are
well maintained. The hull of the Pureborn Princess is worm-eaten. I’d
not want to take her beyond the sight of land. The Narraqqa could
stand a new rudder and lines, and the Banded Lizard has some
cracked oars, but they will serve. The rowers are slaves, but if we
o er them an honest oarsman’s wage, most will stay with us.
Rowing’s all they know. Those who leave can be replaced from my
own crews. It is a long hard voyage to Westeros, but these ships are
sound enough to get us there, I’d judge.”
Reznak mo Reznak gave a piteous moan. “Then it is true. Your
Worship means to abandon us.” He wrung his hands. “The Yunkai’i

will restore the Great Masters the instant you are gone, and we who
have so faithfully served your cause will be put to the sword, our
sweet wives and maiden daughters raped and enslaved.”
“Not mine,” grumbled Skahaz Shavepate. “I will kill them rst,
with mine own hand.” He slapped his sword hilt.
Dany felt as if he had slapped her face instead. “If you fear what
may follow when I leave, come with me to Westeros.”
“Wherever the Mother of Dragons goes, the Mother’s Men will go
as well,” announced Marselen, Missandei’s remaining brother.
“How?” asked Symon Stripeback, named for the tangle of scars
that ridged his back and shoulders, a reminder of the whippings he
had su ered as a slave in Astapor. “Thirteen ships … that’s not
enough. A hundred ships might not be enough.”
“Wooden horses are no good,” objected Rommo, the old jaqqa
rhan. “Dothraki will ride.”
“These ones could march overland along the shore,” suggested
Grey Worm. “The ships could keep pace and resupply the column.”
“That might serve until you reached the ruins of Bhorash,” said
the Shavepate. “Beyond that, your ships would need to turn south
past Tolos and the Isle of Cedars and sail around Valyria, whilst the
foot continued on to Mantarys by the old dragon road.”
“The demon road, they call it now,” said Mollono Yos Dob. The
plump commander of the Stalwart Shields looked more like a scribe
than a soldier, with his inky hands and heavy paunch, but he was as
clever as they came. “Many and more of us would die.”
“Those left behind in Meereen would envy them their easy
deaths,” moaned Reznak. “They will make slaves of us, or throw us
in the pits. All will be as it was, or worse.”
“Where is your courage?” Ser Barristan lashed out. “Her Grace
freed you from your chains. It is for you to sharpen your swords
and defend your own freedom when she leaves.”
“Brave words, from one who means to sail into the sunset,”
Symon Stripeback snarled back. “Will you look back at our dying?”
“Your Grace—”
“Magni cence—”
“Your Worship—”

“Enough.” Dany slapped the table. “No one will be left to die. You
are all my people.” Her dreams of home and love had blinded her.
“I will not abandon Meereen to the fate of Astapor. It grieves me to
say so, but Westeros must wait.”
Groleo was aghast. “We must accept these ships. If we refuse this
gift …”
Ser Barristan went to one knee before her. “My queen, your
realm has need of you. You are not wanted here, but in Westeros
men will ock to your banners by the thousands, great lords and
noble knights. ‘She is come,’ they will shout to one another, in glad
voices. ‘Prince Rhaegar’s sister has come home at last.’ ”
“If they love me so much, they will wait for me.” Dany stood.
“Reznak, summon Xaro Xhoan Daxos.”
She received the merchant prince alone, seated on her bench of
polished ebony, on the cushions Ser Barristan had brought her. Four
Qartheen sailors accompanied him, bearing a rolled tapestry upon
their shoulders. “I have brought another gift for the queen of my
heart,” Xaro announced. “It has been in my family vaults since
before the Doom that took Valyria.”
The sailors unrolled the tapestry across the oor. It was old,
dusty, faded … and huge. Dany had to move to Xaro’s side before
the patterns became plain. “A map? It is beautiful.” It covered half
the oor. The seas were blue, the lands were green, the mountains
black and brown. Cities were shown as stars in gold or silver
thread. There is no Smoking Sea, she realized. Valyria is not yet an
island.
“There you see Astapor, and Yunkai, and Meereen.” Xaro pointed
at three silver stars beside the blue of Slaver’s Bay. “Westeros
is … somewhere down there.” His hand waved vaguely toward the
far end of the hall. “You turned north when you should have
continued south and west, across the Summer Sea, but with my gift
you shall soon be back where you belong. Accept my galleys with a
joyful heart, and bend your oars westward.”
Would that I could. “My lord, I will gladly have those ships, but I
cannot give you the promise that you ask.” She took his hand. “Give
me the galleys, and I swear that Qarth will have the friendship of

Meereen until the stars go out. Let me trade with them, and you
will have a good part of the pro ts.”
Xaro’s glad smile died upon his lips. “What are you saying? Are
you telling me you will not go?”
“I cannot go.”
Tears welled from his eyes, creeping down his nose, past
emeralds, amethysts, and black diamonds. “I told the Thirteen that
you would heed my wisdom. It grieves me to learn that I was
wrong. Take these ships and sail away, or you will surely die
screaming. You cannot know how many enemies you have made.”
I know one stands before me now, weeping mummer’s tears. The
realization made her sad.
“When I went to the Hall of a Thousand Thrones to beg the
Pureborn for your life, I said that you were no more than a child,”
Xaro went on, “but Egon Emeros the Exquisite rose and said, ‘She is
a foolish child, mad and heedless and too dangerous to live.’ When
your dragons were small they were a wonder. Grown, they are
death and devastation, a aming sword above the world.” He wiped
away the tears. “I should have slain you in Qarth.”
“I was a guest beneath your roof and ate of your meat and mead,”
she said. “In memory of all you did for me, I will forgive those
words … once … but never presume to threaten me again.”
“Xaro Xhoan Daxos does not threaten. He promises.”
Her sadness turned to fury. “And I promise you that if you are not
gone before the sun comes up, we will learn how well a liar’s tears
can quench dragon re. Leave me, Xaro. Quickly.”
He went but left his world behind. Dany seated herself upon her
bench again to gaze across the blue silk sea, toward distant
Westeros. One day, she promised herself.
The next morning Xaro’s galleas was gone, but the “gift” that he
had brought her remained behind in Slaver’s Bay. Long red
streamers ew from the masts of the thirteen Qartheen galleys,
writhing in the wind. And when Daenerys descended to hold court,
a messenger from the ships awaited her. He spoke no word but laid
at her feet a black satin pillow, upon which rested a single
bloodstained glove.

“What is this?” Skahaz demanded. “A bloody glove …”
“… means war,” said the queen.

JON

C

areful of the rats, my lord.” Dolorous Edd led Jon down the
steps, a lantern in one hand. “They make an awful squeal if you step
on them. My mother used to make a similar sound when I was a
boy. She must have had some rat in her, now that I think of it.
Brown hair, beady little eyes, liked cheese. Might be she had a tail
too, I never looked to see.”
All of Castle Black was connected underground by a maze of
tunnels that the brothers called the wormways. It was dark and
gloomy underneath the earth, so the wormways were little used in
summer, but when the winter winds began to blow and the snows
began to fall, the tunnels became the quickest way to move about
the castle. The stewards were making use of them already. Jon saw
candles burning in several wall niches as they made their way along
the tunnel, their footsteps echoing ahead of them.
Bowen Marsh was waiting at a junction where four wormways
met. With him he had Wick Whittlestick, tall and skinny as a spear.
“These are the counts from three turns ago,” Marsh told Jon,
o ering him a thick sheaf of papers, “for comparison with our
present stores. Shall we start with the granaries?”
They moved through the grey gloom beneath the earth. Each
storeroom had a solid oaken door closed with an iron padlock as big
as a supper plate. “Is pilferage a problem?” Jon asked.
“Not as yet,” said Bowen Marsh. “Once winter comes, though,
your lordship might be wise to post guards down here.”
Wick Whittlestick wore the keys on a ring about his neck. They
all looked alike to Jon, yet somehow Wick found the right one for

every door. Once inside, he would take a st-sized chunk of chalk
from his pouch and mark each cask and sack and barrel as he
counted them while Marsh compared the new count to the old.
In the granaries were oats and wheat and barley, and barrels of
coarse ground our. In the root cellars strings of onions and garlic
dangled from the rafters, and bags of carrots, parsnips, radishes,
and white and yellow turnips lled the shelves. One storeroom held
wheels of cheese so large it took two men to move them. In the
next, casks of salt beef, salt pork, salt mutton, and salt cod were
stacked ten feet high. Three hundred hams and three thousand long
black sausages hung from ceiling beams below the smokehouse. In
the spice locker they found peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon,
mustard seeds, coriander, sage and clary sage and parsley, blocks of
salt. Elsewhere were casks of apples and pears, dried peas, dried
gs, bags of walnuts, bags of chestnuts, bags of almonds, planks of
dry smoked salmon, clay jars packed with olives in oil and sealed
with wax. One storeroom o ered potted hare, haunch of deer in
honey, pickled cabbage, pickled beets, pickled onions, pickled eggs,
and pickled herring.
As they moved from one vault to another, the wormways seemed
to grow colder. Before long Jon could see their breath frosting in
the lantern light. “We’re beneath the Wall.”
“And soon inside it,” said Marsh. “The meat won’t spoil in the
cold. For long storage, it’s better than salting.”
The next door was made of rusty iron. Behind it was a ight of
wooden steps. Dolorous Edd led the way with his lantern. Up top
they found a tunnel as long as Winterfell’s great hall though no
wider than the wormways. The walls were ice, bristling with iron
hooks. From each hook hung a carcass: skinned deer and elk, sides
of beef, huge sows swinging from the ceiling, headless sheep and
goats, even horse and bear. Hoarfrost covered everything.
As they did their count, Jon peeled the glove o his left hand and
touched the nearest haunch of venison. He could feel his ngers
sticking, and when he pulled them back he lost a bit of skin. His
ngertips were numb. What did you expect? There’s a mountain of ice

above your head, more tons than even Bowen Marsh could count. Even
so, the room felt colder than it should.
“It is worse than I feared, my lord,” Marsh announced when he
was done. He sounded gloomier than Dolorous Edd.
Jon had just been thinking that all the meat in the world
surrounded them. You know nothing, Jon Snow. “How so? This seems
a deal of food to me.”
“It was a long summer. The harvests were bountiful, the lords
generous. We had enough laid by to see us through three years of
winter. Four, with a bit of scrimping. Now, though, if we must go
on feeding all these king’s men and queen’s men and
wildlings … Mole’s Town alone has a thousand useless mouths, and
still they come. Three more turned up yesterday at the gates, a
dozen the day before. It cannot go on. Settling them on the Gift,
that’s well and good, but it is too late to plant crops. We’ll be down
to turnips and pease porridge before the year is out. After that we’ll
be drinking the blood of our own horses.”
“Yum,” declared Dolorous Edd. “Nothing beats a hot cup of horse
blood on a cold night. I like mine with a pinch of cinnamon
sprinkled on top.”
The Lord Steward paid him no mind. “There will be sickness too,”
he went on, “bleeding gums and loose teeth. Maester Aemon used
to say that lime juice and fresh meat would remedy that, but our
limes were gone a year ago and we do not have enough fodder to
keep herds afoot for fresh meat. We should butcher all but a few
breeding pairs. It’s past time. In winters past, food could be brought
up the kingsroad from the south, but with the war … it is still
autumn, I know, but I would advise we go on winter rations
nonetheless, if it please my lord.”
The men will love that. “If we must. We’ll cut each man’s portion
by a quarter.” If my brothers are complaining of me now, what will they
say when they’re eating snow and acorn paste?
“That will help, my lord.” The Lord Steward’s tone made it plain
that he did not think that it would help enough.
Dolorous Edd said, “Now I understand why King Stannis let the
wildlings through the Wall. He means for us to eat them.”

Jon had to smile. “It will not come to that.”
“Oh, good,” said Edd. “They look a stringy lot, and my teeth are
not as sharp as when I was younger.”
“If we had su cient coin, we could buy food from the south and
bring it in by ship,” the Lord Steward said.
We could, thought Jon, if we had the gold, and someone willing to
sell us food. Both of those were lacking. Our best hope may be the
Eyrie. The Vale of Arryn was famously fertile and had gone
untouched during the ghting. Jon wondered how Lady Catelyn’s
sister would feel about feeding Ned Stark’s bastard. As a boy, he
often felt as if the lady grudged him every bite.
“We can always hunt if need be,” Wick Whittlestick put in.
“There’s still game in the woods.”
“And wildlings, and darker things,” said Marsh. “I would not send
out hunters, my lord. I would not.”
No. You would close our gates forever and seal them up with stone
and ice. Half of Castle Black agreed with the Lord Steward’s views,
he knew. The other half heaped scorn on them. “Seal our gates and
plant your fat black arses on the Wall, aye, and the free folk’ll come
swarming o’er the Bridge o’ Skulls or through some gate you
thought you’d sealed ve hundred years ago,” the old forester
Dywen had declared loudly over supper, two nights past. “We don’t
have the men to watch a hundred leagues o’ Wall. Tormund
Giantsbutt and the bloody Weeper knows it too. Ever see a duck
frozen in a pond, with his feet in the ice? It works the same for
crows.” Most rangers echoed Dywen, whilst the stewards and
builders inclined toward Bowen Marsh.
But that was a quandary for another day. Here and now, the
problem was food. “We cannot leave King Stannis and his men to
starve, even if we wished to,” Jon said. “If need be, he could simply
take all this at swordpoint. We do not have the men to stop them.
The wildlings must be fed as well.”
“How, my lord?” asked Bowen Marsh.
Would that I knew. “We will nd a way.”
By the time they returned to the surface, the shadows of the
afternoon were growing long. Clouds streaked the sky like tattered

banners, grey and white and torn. The yard outside the armory was
empty, but inside Jon found the king’s squire awaiting him. Devan
was a skinny lad of some twelve years, brown of hair and eye. They
found him frozen by the forge, hardly daring to move as Ghost
sni ed him up and down. “He won’t hurt you,” Jon said, but the
boy inched at the sound of his voice, and that sudden motion made
the direwolf bare his teeth. “No!” Jon said. “Ghost, leave him be.
Away.” The wolf slunk back to his ox bone, silence on four feet.
Devan looked as pale as Ghost, his face damp with perspiration.
“M-my lord. His Grace c-commands your presence.” The boy was
clad in Baratheon gold and black, with the aming heart of a
queen’s man sewn above his own.
“You mean requests,” said Dolorous Edd. “His Grace requests the
presence of the lord commander. That’s how I’d say it.”
“Leave it be, Edd.” Jon was in no mood for such squabbles.
“Ser Richard and Ser Justin have returned,” said Devan. “Will you
come, my lord?”
The wrong-way rangers. Massey and Horpe had ridden south, not
north. Whatever they had learned did not concern the Night’s
Watch, but Jon was curious all the same. “If it would please His
Grace.” He followed the young squire back across the yard. Ghost
padded after them until Jon said, “No. Stay!” Instead the direwolf
ran o .
In the King’s Tower, Jon was stripped of his weapons and
admitted to the royal presence. The solar was hot and crowded.
Stannis and his captains were gathered over the map of the north.
The wrong-way rangers were amongst them. Sigorn was there as
well, the young Magnar of Thenn, clad in a leather hauberk sewn
with bronze scales. Rattleshirt sat scratching at the manacle on his
wrist with a cracked yellow ngernail. Brown stubble covered his
sunken cheeks and receding chin, and strands of dirty hair hung
across his eyes. “Here he comes,” he said when he saw Jon, “the
brave boy who slew Mance Rayder when he was caged and bound.”
The big square-cut gem that adorned his iron cu glimmered redly.
“Do you like my ruby, Snow? A token o’ love from Lady Red.”

Jon ignored him and took a knee. “Your Grace,” announced the
squire Devan, “I’ve brought Lord Snow.”
“I can see that. Lord Commander. You know my knights and
captains, I believe.”
“I have that honor.” He had made it a point to learn all he could
of the men around the king. Queen’s men, all. It struck Jon as odd
that there were no king’s men about the king, but that seemed to be
the way of it. The king’s men had incurred Stannis’s ire on
Dragonstone if the talk Jon heard was true.
“There is wine. Or water boiled with lemons.”
“Thank you, but no.”
“As you wish. I have a gift for you, Lord Snow.” The king waved
a hand at Rattleshirt. “Him.”
Lady Melisandre smiled. “You did say you wanted men, Lord
Snow. I believe our Lord of Bones still quali es.”
Jon was aghast. “Your Grace, this man cannot be trusted. If I
keep him here, someone will slit his throat for him. If I send him
ranging, he’ll just go back over to the wildlings.”
“Not me. I’m done with those bloody fools.” Rattleshirt tapped
the ruby on his wrist. “Ask your red witch, bastard.”
Melisandre spoke softly in a strange tongue. The ruby at her
throat throbbed slowly, and Jon saw that the smaller stone on
Rattleshirt’s wrist was brightening and darkening as well. “So long
as he wears the gem he is bound to me, blood and soul,” the red
priestess said. “This man will serve you faithfully. The ames do not
lie, Lord Snow.”
Perhaps not, Jon thought, but you do.
“I’ll range for you, bastard,” Rattleshirt declared. “I’ll give you
sage counsel or sing you pretty songs, as you prefer. I’ll even ght
for you. Just don’t ask me to wear your cloak.”
You are not worthy of one, Jon thought, but he held his tongue. No
good would come of squabbling before the king.
King Stannis said, “Lord Snow, tell me of Mors Umber.”
The Night’s Watch takes no part, Jon thought, but another voice
within him said, Words are not swords. “The elder of the Greatjon’s
uncles. Crowfood, they call him. A crow once took him for dead and

pecked out his eye. He caught the bird in his st and bit its head o .
When Mors was young he was a fearsome ghter. His sons died on
the Trident, his wife in childbed. His only daughter was carried o
by wildlings thirty years ago.”
“That’s why he wants the head,” said Harwood Fell.
“Can this man Mors be trusted?” asked Stannis.
Has Mors Umber bent the knee? “Your Grace should have him
swear an oath before his heart tree.”
Godry the Giantslayer gu awed. “I had forgotten that you
northmen worship trees.”
“What sort of god lets himself be pissed upon by dogs?” asked
Farring’s crony Clayton Suggs.
Jon chose to ignore them. “Your Grace, might I know if the
Umbers have declared for you?”
“Half of them, and only if I meet this Crowfood’s price,” said
Stannis, in an irritated tone. “He wants Mance Rayder’s skull for a
drinking cup, and he wants a pardon for his brother, who has ridden
south to join Bolton. Whoresbane, he’s called.”
Ser Godry was amused by that as well. “What names these
northmen have! Did this one bite the head o some whore?”
Jon regarded him coolly. “You might say so. A whore who tried
to rob him, fty years ago in Oldtown.” Odd as it might seem, old
Hoarfrost Umber had once believed his youngest son had the
makings of a maester. Mors loved to boast about the crow who took
his eye, but Hother’s tale was only told in whispers … most like
because the whore he’d disemboweled had been a man. “Have other
lords declared for Bolton too?”
The red priestess slid closer to the king. “I saw a town with
wooden walls and wooden streets, lled with men. Banners ew
above its walls: a moose, a battle-axe, three pine trees, longaxes
crossed beneath a crown, a horse’s head with ery eyes.”
“Hornwood, Cerwyn, Tallhart, Ryswell, and Dustin,” supplied Ser
Clayton Suggs. “Traitors, all. Lapdogs of the Lannisters.”
“The Ryswells and Dustins are tied to House Bolton by marriage,”
Jon informed him. “These others have lost their lords in the

ghting. I do not know who leads them now. Crowfood is no
lapdog, though. Your Grace would do well to accept his terms.”
Stannis ground his teeth. “He informs me that Umber will not
ght Umber, for any cause.”
Jon was not surprised. “If it comes to swords, see where Hother’s
banner ies and put Mors on the other end of the line.”
The Giantslayer disagreed. “You would make His Grace look
weak. I say, show our strength. Burn Last Hearth to the ground and
ride to war with Crowfood’s head mounted on a spear, as a lesson
to the next lord who presumes to o er half his homage.”
“A ne plan if what you want is every hand in the north raised
against you. Half is more than none. The Umbers have no love for
the Boltons. If Whoresbane has joined the Bastard, it can only be
because the Lannisters hold the Greatjon captive.”
“That is his pretext, not his reason,” declared Ser Godry. “If the
nephew dies in chains, these uncles can claim his lands and lordship
for themselves.”
“The Greatjon has sons and daughters both. In the north the
children of a man’s body still come before his uncles, ser.”
“Unless they die. Dead children come last everywhere.”
“Suggest that in the hearing of Mors Umber, Ser Godry, and you
will learn more of death than you might wish.”
“I have slain a giant, boy. Why should I fear some ea-ridden
northman who paints one on his shield?”
“The giant was running away. Mors won’t be.”
The big knight ushed. “You have a bold tongue in the king’s
solar, boy. In the yard you sang a di erent song.”
“Oh, leave o , Godry,” said Ser Justin Massey, a loose-limbed,
eshy knight with a ready smile and a mop of axen hair. Massey
had been one of the wrong-way rangers. “We all know what a big
giant sword you have, I’m sure. No need for you to wave it in our
faces yet again.”
“The only thing waving here is your tongue, Massey.”
“Be quiet,” Stannis snapped. “Lord Snow, attend me. I have
lingered here in the hopes that the wildlings would be fool enough

to mount another attack upon the Wall. As they will not oblige me,
it is time I dealt with my other foes.”
“I see.” Jon’s tone was wary. What does he want of me? “I have no
love for Lord Bolton or his son, but the Night’s Watch cannot take
up arms against them. Our vows prohibit—”
“I know all about your vows. Spare me your rectitude, Lord
Snow, I have strength enough without you. I have a mind to march
against the Dreadfort.” When he saw the shock on Jon’s face, he
smiled. “Does that surprise you? Good. What surprises one Snow
may yet surprise another. The Bastard of Bolton has gone south,
taking Hother Umber with him. On that Mors Umber and Arnolf
Karstark are agreed. That can only mean a strike at Moat Cailin, to
open the way for his lord father to return to the north. The bastard
must think I am too busy with the wildlings to trouble him. Well
and good. The boy has shown me his throat. I mean to rip it out.
Roose Bolton may regain the north, but when he does he will nd
that his castle, herds, and harvest all belong to me. If I take the
Dreadfort unawares—”
“You won’t,” Jon blurted.
It was as if he whacked a wasps’ nest with a stick. One of the
queen’s men laughed, one spat, one muttered a curse, and the rest
all tried to talk at once. “The boy has milkwater in his veins,” said
Ser Godry the Giantslayer. And Lord Sweet hu ed, “The craven sees
an outlaw behind every blade of grass.”
Stannis raised a hand for silence. “Explain your meaning.”
Where to begin? Jon moved to the map. Candles had been placed
at its corners to keep the hide from rolling up. A nger of warm
wax was puddling out across the Bay of Seals, slow as a glacier. “To
reach the Dreadfort, Your Grace must travel down the kingsroad
past the Last River, turn south by east and cross the Lonely Hills.”
He pointed. “Those are Umber lands, where they know every tree
and every rock. The kingsroad runs along their western marches for
a hundred leagues. Mors will cut your host to pieces unless you
meet his terms and win him to your cause.”
“Very well. Let us say I do that.”

“That will bring you to the Dreadfort,” said Jon, “but unless your
host can outmarch a raven or a line of beacon res, the castle will
know of your approach. It will be an easy thing for Ramsay Bolton
to cut o your retreat and leave you far from the Wall, without
food or refuge, surrounded by your foes.”
“Only if he abandons his siege of Moat Cailin.”
“Moat Cailin will fall before you ever reach the Dreadfort. Once
Lord Roose has joined his strength to Ramsay’s, they will have you
outnumbered ve to one.”
“My brother won battles at worse odds.”
“You assume Moat Cailin will fall quickly, Snow,” objected Justin
Massey, “but the ironmen are doughty ghters, and I’ve heard it
said that the Moat has never been taken.”
“From the south. A small garrison in Moat Cailin can play havoc
with any army coming up the causeway, but the ruins are
vulnerable from the north and east.” Jon turned back to Stannis.
“Sire, this is a bold stroke, but the risk—” The Night’s Watch takes no
part. Baratheon or Bolton should be the same to me. “If Roose Bolton
should catch you beneath his walls with his main strength, it will be
the end for all of you.”
“Risk is part of war,” declared Ser Richard Horpe, a lean knight
with a ravaged face whose quilted doublet showed three death’shead moths on a eld of ash and bone. “Every battle is a gamble,
Snow. The man who does nothing also takes a risk.”
“There are risks and risks, Ser Richard. This one … it is too much,
too soon, too far away. I know the Dreadfort. It is a strong castle,
all of stone, with thick walls and massive towers. With winter
coming you will nd it well provisioned. Centuries ago, House
Bolton rose up against the King in the North, and Harlon Stark laid
siege to the Dreadfort. It took him two years to starve them out. To
have any hope of taking the castle, Your Grace would need siege
engines, towers, battering rams …”
“Siege towers can be raised if need be,” Stannis said. “Trees can
be felled for rams if rams are required. Arnolf Karstark writes that
fewer than fty men remain at the Dreadfort, half of them servants.
A strong castle weakly held is weak.”

“Fifty men inside a castle are worth ve hundred outside.”
“That depends upon the men,” said Richard Horpe. “These will be
greybeards and green boys, the men this bastard did not deem t
for battle. Our own men were blooded and tested on the
Blackwater, and they are led by knights.”
“You saw how we went through the wildlings.” Ser Justin pushed
back a lock of axen hair. “The Karstarks have sworn to join us at
the Dreadfort, and we will have our wildlings as well. Three
hundred men of ghting age. Lord Harwood made a count as they
were passing through the gate. Their women ght as well.”
Stannis gave him a sour look. “Not for me, ser. I want no widows
wailing in my wake. The women will remain here, with the old, the
wounded, and the children. They will serve as hostages for the
loyalty of their husbands and fathers. The wildling men will form
my van. The Magnar will command them, with their own chiefs as
serjeants. First, though, we must needs arm them.”
He means to plunder our armory, Jon realized. Food and clothing,
land and castles, now weapons. He draws me in deeper every day.
Words might not be swords, but swords were swords. “I could nd
three hundred spears,” he said, reluctantly. “Helms as well, if you’ll
take them old and dinted and red with rust.”
“Armor?” asked the Magnar. “Plate? Mail?”
“When Donal Noye died we lost our armorer.” The rest Jon left
unspoken. Give the wildlings mail and they’ll be twice as great a danger
to the realm.
“Boiled leather will su ce,” said Ser Godry. “Once we’ve tasted
battle, the survivors can loot the dead.”
The few who live that long. If Stannis placed the free folk in the
van, most would perish quickly. “Drinking from Mance Rayder’s
skull may give Mors Umber pleasure, but seeing wildlings cross his
lands will not. The free folk have been raiding the Umbers since the
Dawn of Days, crossing the Bay of Seals for gold and sheep and
women. One of those carried o was Crowfood’s daughter. Your
Grace, leave the wildlings here. Taking them will only serve to turn
my lord father’s bannermen against you.”

“Your father’s bannermen seem to have no liking for my cause in
any case. I must assume they see me as … what was it that you
called me, Lord Snow? Another doomed pretender?” Stannis stared at
the map. For a long moment the only sound was the king grinding
his teeth. “Leave me. All of you. Lord Snow, remain.”
The brusque dismissal did not sit well with Justin Massey, but he
had no choice but to smile and withdraw. Horpe followed him out,
after giving Jon a measured look. Clayton Suggs drained his cup dry
and muttered something to Harwood Fell that made the younger
man laugh. Boy was part of it. Suggs was an upjumped hedge
knight, as crude as he was strong. The last man to take his leave
was Rattleshirt. At the door, he gave Jon a mocking bow, grinning
through a mouthful of brown and broken teeth.
All of you did not seem to include Lady Melisandre. The king’s red
shadow. Stannis called to Devan for more lemon water. When his
cup was lled the king drank, and said, “Horpe and Massey aspire
to your father’s seat. Massey wants the wildling princess too. He
once served my brother Robert as squire and acquired his appetite
for female esh. Horpe will take Val to wife if I command it, but it
is battle he lusts for. As a squire he dreamed of a white cloak, but
Cersei Lannister spoke against him and Robert passed him over.
Perhaps rightly. Ser Richard is too fond of killing. Which would you
have as Lord of Winterfell, Snow? The smiler or the slayer?”
Jon said, “Winterfell belongs to my sister Sansa.”
“I have heard all I need to hear of Lady Lannister and her claim.”
The king set the cup aside. “You could bring the north to me. Your
father’s bannermen would rally to the son of Eddard Stark. Even
Lord Too-Fat-to-Sit-a-Horse. White Harbor would give me a ready
source of supply and a secure base to which I could retreat at need.
It is not too late to amend your folly, Snow. Take a knee and swear
that bastard sword to me, and rise as Jon Stark, Lord of Winterfell
and Warden of the North.”
How many times will he make me say it? “My sword is sworn to the
Night’s Watch.”
Stannis looked disgusted. “Your father was a stubborn man as
well. Honor, he called it. Well, honor has its costs, as Lord Eddard

learned to his sorrow. If it gives you any solace, Horpe and Massey
are doomed to disappointment. I am more inclined to bestow
Winterfell upon Arnolf Karstark. A good northman.”
“A northman.” Better a Karstark than a Bolton or a Greyjoy, Jon told
himself, but the thought gave him little solace. “The Karstarks
abandoned my brother amongst his enemies.”
“After your brother took o Lord Rickard’s head. Arnolf was a
thousand leagues away. He has Stark blood in him. The blood of
Winterfell.”
“No more than half the other Houses of the north.”
“Those other Houses have not declared for me.”
“Arnolf Karstark is an old man with a crooked back, and even in
his youth he was never the ghter Lord Rickard was. The rigors of
the campaign may well kill him.”
“He has heirs,” Stannis snapped. “Two sons, six grandsons, some
daughters. If Robert had fathered trueborn sons, many who are
dead might still be living.”
“Your Grace would do better with Mors Crowfood.”
“The Dreadfort will be the proof of that.”
“Then you mean to go ahead with this attack?”
“Despite the counsel of the great Lord Snow? Aye. Horpe and
Massey may be ambitious, but they are not wrong. I dare not sit
idle whilst Roose Bolton’s star waxes and mine wanes. I must strike
and show the north that I am still a man to fear.”
“The merman of Manderly was not amongst those banners Lady
Melisandre saw in her res,” Jon said. “If you had White Harbor
and Lord Wyman’s knights …”
“If is a word for fools. We have had no word from Davos. It may
be he never reached White Harbor. Arnolf Karstark writes that the
storms have been erce upon the narrow sea. Be that as it may. I
have no time to grieve, nor wait upon the whims of Lord Too-Fat. I
must consider White Harbor lost to me. Without a son of Winterfell
to stand beside me, I can only hope to win the north by battle. That
requires stealing a leaf from my brother’s book. Not that Robert
ever read one. I must deal my foes a mortal blow before they know
that I am on them.”

Jon realized that his words were wasted. Stannis would take the
Dreadfort or die in the attempt. The Night’s Watch takes no part, a
voice said, but another replied, Stannis ghts for the realm, the
ironmen for thralls and plunder. “Your Grace, I know where you
might nd more men. Give me the wildlings, and I will gladly tell
you where and how.”
“I gave you Rattleshirt. Be content with him.”
“I want them all.”
“Some of your own Sworn Brothers would have me believe that
you are half a wildling yourself. Is it true?”
“To you they are only arrow fodder. I can make better use of
them upon the Wall. Give them to me to do with as I will, and I’ll
show you where to nd your victory … and men as well.”
Stannis rubbed the back of his neck. “You haggle like a crone
with a cod sh, Lord Snow. Did Ned Stark father you on some
shwife? How many men?”
“Two thousand. Perhaps three.”
“Three thousand? What manner of men are these?”
“Proud. Poor. Prickly where their honor is concerned but erce
ghters.”
“This had best not be some bastard’s trick. Will I trade three
hundred ghters for three thousand? Aye, I will. I am not an utter
fool. If I leave the girl with you as well, do I have your word that
you will keep our princess closely?”
She is not a princess. “As you wish, Your Grace.”
“Do I need to make you swear an oath before a tree?”
“No.” Was that a jape? With Stannis, it was hard to tell.
“Done, then. Now, where are these men?”
“You’ll nd them here.” Jon spread his burned hand across the
map, west of the kingsroad and south of the Gift.
“Those mountains?” Stannis grew suspicious. “I see no castles
marked there. No roads, no towns, no villages.”
“The map is not the land, my father often said. Men have lived in
the high valleys and mountain meadows for thousands of years,
ruled by their clan chiefs. Petty lords, you would call them, though
they do not use such titles amongst themselves. Clan champions

ght with huge two-handed greatswords, while the common men
sling stones and batter one another with sta s of mountain ash. A
quarrelsome folk, it must be said. When they are not ghting one
another, they tend their herds, sh the Bay of Ice, and breed the
hardiest mounts you’ll ever ride.”
“And they will ght for me, you believe?”
“If you ask them.”
“Why should I beg for what is owed me?”
“Ask, I said, not beg.” Jon pulled back his hand. “It is no good
sending messages. Your Grace will need to go to them yourself. Eat
their bread and salt, drink their ale, listen to their pipers, praise the
beauty of their daughters and the courage of their sons, and you’ll
have their swords. The clans have not seen a king since Torrhen
Stark bent his knee. Your coming does them honor. Command them
to ght for you, and they will look at one another and say, ‘Who is
this man? He is no king of mine.’ ”
“How many clans are you speaking of?”
“Two score, small and large. Flint, Wull, Norrey, Liddle … win
Old Flint and Big Bucket, the rest will follow.”
“Big Bucket?”
“The Wull. He has the biggest belly in the mountains, and the
most men. The Wulls sh the Bay of Ice and warn their little ones
that ironmen will carry them o if they don’t behave. To reach
them Your Grace must pass through the Norrey’s lands, however.
They live the nearest to the Gift and have always been good friends
to the Watch. I could give you guides.”
“Could?” Stannis missed little. “Or will?”
“Will. You’ll need them. And some sure-footed garrons too. The
paths up there are little more than goat tracks.”
“Goat tracks?” The king’s eyes narrowed. “I speak of moving
swiftly, and you waste my time with goat tracks?”
“When the Young Dragon conquered Dorne, he used a goat track
to bypass the Dornish watchtowers on the Boneway.”
“I know that tale as well, but Daeron made too much of it in that
vainglorious book of his. Ships won that war, not goat tracks.
Oaken st broke the Planky Town and swept halfway up the

Greenblood whilst the main Dornish strength was engaged in the
Prince’s Pass.” Stannis drummed his ngers on the map. “These
mountain lords will not hinder my passage?”
“Only with feasts. Each will try to outdo the others with his
hospitality. My lord father said he never ate half so well as when
visiting the clans.”
“For three thousand men, I suppose I can endure some pipes and
porridge,” the king said, though his tone begrudged even that.
Jon turned to Melisandre. “My lady, fair warning. The old gods
are strong in those mountains. The clansmen will not su er insults
to their heart trees.”
That seemed to amuse her. “Have no fear, Jon Snow, I will not
trouble your mountain savages and their dark gods. My place is
here with you and your brave brothers.”
That was the last thing Jon Snow would have wanted, but before
he could object, the king said, “Where would you have me lead
these stalwarts if not against the Dreadfort?”
Jon glanced down at the map. “Deepwood Motte.” He tapped it
with a nger. “If Bolton means to ght the ironmen, so must you.
Deepwood is a motte-and-bailey castle in the midst of thick forest,
easy to creep up on unawares. A wooden castle, defended by an
earthen dike and a palisade of logs. The going will be slower
through the mountains, admittedly, but up there your host can
move unseen, to emerge almost at the gates of Deepwood.”
Stannis rubbed his jaw. “When Balon Greyjoy rose the rst time, I
beat the ironmen at sea, where they are ercest. On land, taken
unawares … aye. I have won a victory over the wildlings and their
King-Beyond-the-Wall. If I can smash the ironmen as well, the north
will know it has a king again.”
And I will have a thousand wildlings, thought Jon, and no way to
feed even half that number.

TYRION

T

he Shy Maid moved through the fog like a blind man groping
his way down an unfamiliar hall.
Septa Lemore was praying. The mists mu ed the sound of her
voice, making it seem small and hushed. Gri paced the deck, mail
clinking softly beneath his wolfskin cloak. From time to time he
touched his sword, as if to make certain that it still hung at his side.
Rolly Duck eld was pushing at the starboard pole, Yandry at the
larboard. Ysilla had the tiller.
“I do not like this place,” Haldon Halfmaester muttered.
“Frightened of a little fog?” mocked Tyrion, though in truth there
was quite a lot of fog. At the prow of the Shy Maid, Young Gri
stood with the third pole, to push them away from hazards as they
loomed up through the mists. The lanterns had been lit fore and aft,
but the fog was so thick that all the dwarf could see from amidships
was a light oating out ahead of him and another following behind.
His own task was to tend the brazier and make certain that the re
did not go out.
“This is no common fog, Hugor Hill,” Ysilla insisted. “It stinks of
sorcery, as you would know if you had a nose to smell it. Many a
voyager has been lost here, poleboats and pirates and great river
galleys too. They wander forlorn through the mists, searching for a
sun they cannot nd until madness or hunger claim their lives.
There are restless spirits in the air here and tormented souls below
the water.”
“There’s one now,” said Tyrion. O to starboard a hand large
enough to crush the boat was reaching up from the murky depths.

Only the tops of two ngers broke the river’s surface, but as the Shy
Maid eased on past he could see the rest of the hand rippling below
the water and a pale face looking up. Though his tone was light, he
was uneasy. This was a bad place, rank with despair and death.
Ysilla is not wrong. This fog is not natural. Something foul grew in the
waters here, and festered in the air. Small wonder the stone men go
mad.
“You should not make mock,” warned Ysilla. “The whispering
dead hate the warm and quick and ever seek for more damned souls
to join them.”
“I doubt they have a shroud my size.” The dwarf stirred the coals
with a poker.
“Hatred does not stir the stone men half so much as hunger.”
Haldon Halfmaester had wrapped a yellow scarf around his mouth
and nose, mu ing his voice. “Nothing any sane man would want to
eat grows in these fogs. Thrice each year the triarchs of Volantis
send a galley upriver with provisions, but the mercy ships are oft
late and sometimes bring more mouths than food.”
Young Gri said, “There must be sh in the river.”
“I would not eat any sh taken from these waters,” said Ysilla. “I
would not.”
“We’d do well not to breathe the fog either,” said Haldon.
“Garin’s Curse is all about us.”
The only way not to breathe the fog is not to breathe. “Garin’s Curse
is only greyscale,” said Tyrion. The curse was oft seen in children,
especially in damp, cold climes. The a icted esh sti ened,
calci ed, and cracked, though the dwarf had read that greyscale’s
progress could be stayed by limes, mustard poultices, and scaldinghot baths (the maesters said) or by prayer, sacri ce, and fasting
(the septons insisted). Then the disease passed, leaving its young
victims dis gured but alive. Maesters and septons alike agreed that
children marked by greyscale could never be touched by the rarer
mortal form of the a iction, nor by its terrible swift cousin, the
grey plague. “Damp is said to be the culprit,” he said. “Foul humors
in the air. Not curses.”

“The conquerors did not believe either, Hugor Hill,” said Ysilla.
“The men of Volantis and Valyria hung Garin in a golden cage and
made mock as he called upon his Mother to destroy them. But in the
night the waters rose and drowned them, and from that day to this
they have not rested. They are down there still beneath the water,
they who were once the lords of re. Their cold breath rises from
the murk to make these fogs, and their esh has turned as stony as
their hearts.”
The stump of Tyrion’s nose was itching ercely. He gave it a
scratch. The old woman may be right. This place is no good. I feel as if I
am back in the privy again, watching my father die. He would go mad
as well if he had to spend his days in this grey soup whilst his esh
and bones turned to stone.
Young Gri did not seem to share his misgivings. “Let them try
and trouble us, we’ll show them what we’re made of.”
“We are made of blood and bone, in the image of the Father and
the Mother,” said Septa Lemore. “Make no vainglorious boasts, I
beg you. Pride is a grievous sin. The stone men were proud as well,
and the Shrouded Lord was proudest of them all.”
The heat from the glowing coals brought a ush to Tyrion’s face.
“Is there a Shrouded Lord? Or is he just some tale?”
“The Shrouded Lord has ruled these mists since Garin’s day,” said
Yandry. “Some say that he himself is Garin, risen from his watery
grave.”
“The dead do not rise,” insisted Haldon Halfmaester, “and no man
lives a thousand years. Yes, there is a Shrouded Lord. There have
been a score of them. When one dies another takes his place. This
one is a corsair from the Basilisk Islands who believed the Rhoyne
would o er richer pickings than the Summer Sea.”
“Aye, I’ve heard that too,” said Duck, “but there’s another tale I
like better. The one that says he’s not like t’other stone men, that he
started as a statue till a grey woman came out of the fog and kissed
him with lips as cold as ice.”
“Enough,” said Gri . “Be quiet, all of you.”
Septa Lemore sucked in her breath. “What was that?”
“Where?” Tyrion saw nothing but the fog.

“Something moved. I saw the water rippling.”
“A turtle,” the prince announced cheerfully. “A big ’snapper,
that’s all it was.” He thrust his pole out ahead of them and pushed
them away from a towering green obelisk.
The fog clung to them, damp and chilly. A sunken temple loomed
up out of the greyness as Yandry and Duck leaned upon their poles
and paced slowly from prow to stern, pushing. They passed a
marble stair that spiraled up from the mud and ended jaggedly in
air. Beyond, half-seen, were other shapes: shattered spires, headless
statues, trees with roots bigger than their boat.
“This was the most beautiful city on the river, and the richest,”
said Yandry. “Chroyane, the festival city.”
Too rich, thought Tyrion, too beautiful. It is never wise to tempt the
dragons. The drowned city was all around them. A half-seen shape
apped by overhead, pale leathery wings beating at the fog. The
dwarf craned his head around to get a better look, but the thing was
gone as suddenly as it had appeared.
Not long after, another light oated into view. “Boat,” a voice
called across the water, faintly. “Who are you?”
“Shy Maid,” Yandry shouted back.
“King sher. Up or down?”
“Down. Hides and honey, ale and tallow.”
“Up. Knives and needles, lace and linen, spice wine.”
“What word from old Volantis?” Yandry called.
“War,” the word came back.
“Where?” Gri shouted. “When?”
“When the year turns,” came the answer, “Nyessos and Malaquo
go hand in hand, and the elephants show stripes.” The voice faded
as the other boat moved away from them. They watched its light
dwindle and disappear.
“Is it wise to shout through the fog at boats we cannot see?”
asked Tyrion. “What if they were pirates?” They had been fortunate
where the pirates were concerned, slipping down Dagger Lake by
night, unseen and unmolested. Once Duck had caught a glimpse of a
hull that he insisted belonged to Urho the Unwashed. The Shy Maid

had been upwind, however, and Urho—if Urho it had been—had
shown no interest in them.
“The pirates will not sail into the Sorrows,” said Yandry.
“Elephants with stripes?” Gri muttered. “What is that about?
Nyessos and Malaquo? Illyrio has paid Triarch Nyessos enough to
own him eight times over.”
“In gold or cheese?” quipped Tyrion.
Gri rounded on him. “Unless you can cut this fog with your next
witticism, keep it to yourself.”
Yes, Father, the dwarf almost said. I’ll be quiet. Thank you. He did
not know these Volantenes, yet it seemed to him that elephants and
tigers might have good reason to make common cause when faced
with dragons. Might be the cheesemonger has misjudged the situation.
You can buy a man with gold, but only blood and steel will keep him
true.
The little man stirred the coals again and blew on them to make
them burn brighter. I hate this. I hate this fog, I hate this place, and I
am less than fond of Gri . Tyrion still had the poison mushrooms he
had plucked from the grounds of Illyrio’s manse, and there were
days when he was sore tempted to slip them into Gri ’s supper. The
trouble was, Gri scarce seemed to eat.
Duck and Yandry pushed against the poles. Ysilla turned the tiller.
Young Gri pushed the Shy Maid away from a broken tower whose
windows stared down like blind black eyes. Overhead her sail hung
limp and heavy. The water deepened under her hull, until their
poles could not touch bottom, but still the current pushed them
downstream, until …
All Tyrion could see was something massive rising from the river,
humped and ominous. He took it for a hill looming above a wooded
island, or some colossal rock overgrown with moss and ferns and
hidden by the fog. As the Shy Maid drew nearer, though, the shape
of it came clearer. A wooden keep could be seen beside the water,
rotted and overgrown. Slender spires took form above it, some of
them snapped o like broken spears. Roo ess towers appeared and
disappeared, thrusting blindly upward. Halls and galleries drifted

past: graceful buttresses, delicate arches, uted columns, terraces
and bowers.
All ruined, all desolate, all fallen.
The grey moss grew thickly here, covering the fallen stones in
great mounds and bearding all the towers. Black vines crept in and
out of windows, through doors and over archways, up the sides of
high stone walls. The fog concealed three-quarters of the palace, but
what they glimpsed was more than enough for Tyrion to know that
this island fastness had been ten times the size of the Red Keep once
and a hundred times more beautiful. He knew where he was. “The
Palace of Love,” he said softly.
“That was the Rhoynar name,” said Haldon Halfmaester, “but for
a thousand years this has been the Palace of Sorrow.”
The ruin was sad enough, but knowing what it had been made it
even sadder. There was laughter here once, Tyrion thought. There
were gardens bright with owers and fountains sparkling golden in the
sun. These steps once rang to the sound of lovers’ footsteps, and beneath
that broken dome marriages beyond count were sealed with a kiss. His
thoughts turned to Tysha, who had so brie y been his lady wife. It
was Jaime, he thought, despairing. He was my own blood, my big
strong brother. When I was small he brought me toys, barrel hoops and
blocks and a carved wooden lion. He gave me my rst pony and taught
me how to ride him. When he said that he had bought you for me, I
never doubted him. Why would I? He was Jaime, and you were just
some girl who’d played a part. I had feared it from the start, from the
moment you rst smiled at me and let me touch your hand. My own
father could not love me. Why would you if not for gold?
Through the long grey ngers of the fog, he heard again the deep
shuddering thrum of a bowstring snapping taut, the grunt Lord
Tywin made as the quarrel took him beneath the belly, the slap of
cheeks on stone as he sat back down to die. “Wherever whores go,”
he said. And where is that? Tyrion wanted to ask him. Where did
Tysha go, Father? “How much more of this fog must we endure?”
“Another hour should see us clear of the Sorrows,” said Haldon
Halfmaester. “From there on, this should be a pleasure cruise.
There’s a village around every bend along the lower Rhoyne.

Orchards and vineyards and elds of grain ripening in the sun,
sherfolk on the water, hot baths and sweet wines. Selhorys,
Valysar, and Volon Therys are walled towns so large they would be
cities in the Seven Kingdoms. I believe I’ll—”
“Light ahead,” warned Young Gri .
Tyrion saw it too. King sher, or another poleboat, he told himself,
but somehow he knew that was not right. His nose itched. He
scratched at it savagely. The light grew brighter as the Shy Maid
approached it. A soft star in the distance, it glimmered faintly
through the fog, beckoning them on. Shortly it became two lights,
then three: a ragged row of beacons rising from the water.
“The Bridge of Dream,” Gri named it. “There will be stone men
on the span. Some may start to wail at our approach, but they are
not like to molest us. Most stone men are feeble creatures, clumsy,
lumbering, witless. Near the end they all go mad, but that is when
they are most dangerous. If need be, fend them o with the torches.
On no account let them touch you.”
“They may not even see us,” said Haldon Halfmaester. “The fog
will hide us from them until we are almost at the bridge, and then
we will be past before they know that we are here.”
Stone eyes are blind eyes, thought Tyrion. The mortal form of
greyscale began in the extremities, he knew: a tingling in a
ngertip, a toenail turning black, a loss of feeling. As the numbness
crept into the hand, or stole past the foot and up the leg, the esh
sti ened and grew cold and the victim’s skin took on a greyish hue,
resembling stone. He had heard it said that there were three good
cures for greyscale: axe and sword and cleaver. Hacking o a icted
parts did sometimes stop the spread of the disease, Tyrion knew,
but not always. Many a man had sacri ced one arm or foot, only to
nd the other going grey. Once that happened, hope was gone.
Blindness was common when the stone reached the face. In the nal
stages the curse turned inward, to muscles, bones, and inner organs.
Ahead of them, the bridge grew larger. The Bridge of Dream, Gri
called it, but this dream was smashed and broken. Pale stone arches
marched o into the fog, reaching from the Palace of Sorrow to the
river’s western bank. Half of them had collapsed, pulled down by

the weight of the grey moss that draped them and the thick black
vines that snaked upward from the water. The broad wooden span
of the bridge had rotted through, but some of the lamps that lined
the way were still aglow. As the Shy Maid drew closer, Tyrion could
see the shapes of stone men moving in the light, shu ing aimlessly
around the lamps like slow grey moths. Some were naked, others
clad in shrouds.
Gri drew his longsword. “Yollo, light the torches. Lad, take
Lemore back to her cabin and stay with her.”
Young Gri gave his father a stubborn look. “Lemore knows
where her cabin is. I want to stay.”
“We are sworn to protect you,” Lemore said softly.
“I don’t need to be protected. I can use a sword as well as Duck.
I’m half a knight.”
“And half a boy,” said Gri . “Do as you are told. Now.”
The youth cursed under his breath and ung his pole down onto
the deck. The sound echoed queerly in the fog, and for a moment it
was as if poles were falling around them. “Why should I run and
hide? Haldon is staying, and Ysilla. Even Hugor.”
“Aye,” said Tyrion, “but I’m small enough to hide behind a duck.”
He thrust half a dozen torches into the brazier’s glowing coals and
watched the oiled rags are up. Don’t stare at the re, he told
himself. The ames would leave him night blind.
“You’re a dwarf,” Young Gri said scornfully.
“My secret is revealed,” Tyrion agreed. “Aye, I’m less than half of
Haldon, and no one gives a mummer’s fart whether I live or die.”
Least of all me. “You, though … you are everything.”
“Dwarf,” said Gri , “I warned you—”
A wail came shivering through the fog, faint and high.
Lemore whirled, trembling. “Seven save us all.”
The broken bridge was a bare ve yards ahead. Around its piers,
the water rippled white as the foam from a madman’s mouth. Forty
feet above, the stone men moaned and muttered beneath a
ickering lamp. Most took no more notice of the Shy Maid than of a
drifting log. Tyrion clutched his torch tighter and found that he was
holding his breath. And then they were beneath the bridge, white

walls heavy with curtains of grey fungus looming to either side,
water foaming angrily around them. For a moment it looked as
though they might crash into the right-hand pier, but Duck raised
his pole and shoved o , back into the center of the channel, and a
few heartbeats later they were clear.
Tyrion had no sooner exhaled than Young Gri grabbed hold of
his arm. “What do you mean? I am everything? What did you mean
by that? Why am I everything?”
“Why,” said Tyrion, “if the stone men had taken Yandry or Gri
or our lovely Lemore, we would have grieved for them and gone
on. Lose you, and this whole enterprise is undone, and all those
years of feverish plotting by the cheesemonger and the eunuch will
have been for naught … isn’t that so?”
The boy looked to Gri . “He knows who I am.”
If I did not know before, I would now. By then the Shy Maid was
well downstream of the Bridge of Dream. All that remained was a
dwindling light astern, and soon enough that would be gone as well.
“You’re Young Gri , son of Gri the sellsword,” said Tyrion. “Or
perhaps you are the Warrior in mortal guise. Let me take a closer
look.” He held up his torch, so that the light washed over Young
Gri ’s face.
“Leave o ,” Gri commanded, “or you will wish you had.”
The dwarf ignored him. “The blue hair makes your eyes seem
blue, that’s good. And the tale of how you color it in honor of your
dead Tyroshi mother was so touching it almost made me cry. Still, a
curious man might wonder why some sellsword’s whelp would need
a soiled septa to instruct him in the Faith, or a chainless maester to
tutor him in history and tongues. And a clever man might question
why your father would engage a hedge knight to train you in arms
instead of simply sending you o to apprentice with one of the free
companies. It is almost as if someone wanted to keep you hidden
whilst still preparing you for … what? Now, there’s a puzzlement,
but I’m sure that in time it will come to me. I must admit, you have
noble features for a dead boy.”
The boy ushed. “I am not dead.”

“How not? My lord father wrapped your corpse in a crimson
cloak and laid you down beside your sister at the foot of the Iron
Throne, his gift to the new king. Those who had the stomach to lift
the cloak said that half your head was gone.”
The lad backed o a step, confused. “Your—?”
“—father, aye. Tywin of House Lannister. Perhaps you may have
heard of him.”
Young Gri hesitated. “Lannister? Your father—”
“—is dead. At my hand. If it please Your Grace to call me Yollo or
Hugor, so be it, but know that I was born Tyrion of House
Lannister, trueborn son of Tywin and Joanna, both of whom I slew.
Men will tell you that I am a kingslayer, a kinslayer, and a liar, and
all of that is true … but then, we are a company of liars, are we
not? Take your feigned father. Gri , is it?” The dwarf sniggered.
“You should thank the gods that Varys the Spider is a part of this
plot of yours. Gri would not have fooled the cockless wonder for
an instant, no more than it did me. No lord, my lordship says, no
knight. And I’m no dwarf. Just saying a thing does not make it true.
Who better to raise Prince Rhaegar’s infant son than Prince
Rhaegar’s dear friend Jon Connington, once Lord of Gri n’s Roost
and Hand of the King?”
“Be quiet.” Gri ’s voice was uneasy.
On the larboard side of the boat, a huge stone hand was visible
just below the water. Two ngers broke the surface. How many of
those are there? Tyrion wondered. A trickle of moisture ran down his
spine and made him shudder. The Sorrows drifted by them. Peering
through the mists, he glimpsed a broken spire, a headless hero, an
ancient tree torn from the ground and upended, its huge roots
twisting through the roof and windows of a broken dome. Why does
all of this seem so familiar?
Straight on, a tilted stairway of pale marble rose up out of the
dark water in a graceful spiral, ending abruptly ten feet above their
heads. No, thought Tyrion, that is not possible.
“Ahead.” Lemore’s voice was shivery. “A light.”
All of them looked. All of them saw it.

“King sher,” said Gri . “Her, or some other like her.” But he drew
his sword again.
No one said a word. The Shy Maid moved with the current. Her
sail had not been raised since she rst entered the Sorrows. She had
no way to move but with the river. Duck stood squinting, clutching
his pole with both hands. After a time even Yandry stopped
pushing. Every eye was on the distant light. As they grew closer, it
turned into two lights. Then three.
“The Bridge of Dream,” said Tyrion.
“Inconceivable,” said Haldon Halfmaester. “We’ve left the bridge
behind. Rivers only run one way.”
“Mother Rhoyne runs how she will,” murmured Yandry.
“Seven save us,” said Lemore.
Up ahead, the stone men on the span began to wail. A few were
pointing down at them. “Haldon, get the prince below,”
commanded Gri .
It was too late. The current had them in its teeth. They drifted
inexorably toward the bridge. Yandry stabbed out with his pole to
keep them from smashing into a pier. The thrust shoved them
sideways, through a curtain of pale grey moss. Tyrion felt tendrils
brush against his face, soft as a whore’s ngers. Then there was a
crash behind him, and the deck tilted so suddenly that he almost
lost his feet and went pitching over the side.
A stone man crashed down into the boat.
He landed on the cabin roof, so heavily that the Shy Maid seemed
to rock, and roared a word down at them in a tongue that Tyrion
did not know. A second stone man followed, landing back beside
the tiller. The weathered planks splintered beneath the impact, and
Ysilla let out a shriek.
Duck was closest to her. The big man did not waste time reaching
for his sword. Instead he swung his pole, slamming it into the stone
man’s chest and knocking him o the boat into the river, where he
sank at once without a sound.
Gri was on the second man the instant he shambled down o the
cabin roof. With a sword in his right hand and a torch in his left, he
drove the creature backwards. As the current swept the Shy Maid

beneath the bridge, their shifting shadows danced upon the mossy
walls. When the stone man moved aft, Duck blocked his way, pole
in hand. When he went forward, Haldon Halfmaester waved a
second torch at him and drove him back. He had no choice but to
come straight at Gri . The captain slid aside, his blade ashing. A
spark ew where the steel bit into the stone man’s calci ed grey
esh, but his arm tumbled to the deck all the same. Gri kicked the
limb aside. Yandry and Duck had come up with their poles.
Together they forced the creature over the side and into the black
waters of the Rhoyne.
By then the Shy Maid had drifted out from under the broken
bridge. “Did we get them all?” asked Duck. “How many jumped?”
“Two,” said Tyrion, shivering.
“Three,” said Haldon. “Behind you.”
The dwarf turned, and there he stood.
The leap had shattered one of his legs, and a jagged piece of pale
bone jutted out through the rotted cloth of his breeches and the
grey meat beneath. The broken bone was speckled with brown
blood, but still he lurched forward, reaching for Young Gri . His
hand was grey and sti , but blood oozed between his knuckles as he
tried to close his ngers to grasp. The boy stood staring, as still as if
he too were made of stone. His hand was on his sword hilt, but he
seemed to have forgotten why.
Tyrion kicked the lad’s leg out from under him and leapt over
him when he fell, thrusting his torch into the stone man’s face to
send him stumbling backwards on his shattered leg, ailing at the
ames with sti grey hands. The dwarf waddled after him, slashing
with the torch, jabbing it at the stone man’s eyes. A little farther.
Back, one more step, another. They were at the edge of the deck
when the creature rushed him, grabbed the torch, and ripped it
from his hands. Bugger me, thought Tyrion.
The stone man ung the torch away. There was a soft hiss as the
black waters quenched the ames. The stone man howled. He had
been a Summer Islander, before; his jaw and half his cheek had
turned to stone, but his skin was black as midnight where it was not
grey. Where he had grasped the torch, his skin had cracked and

split. Blood was seeping from his knuckles though he did not seem
to feel it. That was some small mercy, Tyrion supposed. Though
mortal, greyscale was supposedly not painful.
“Stand aside!” someone shouted, far away, and another voice said,
“The prince! Protect the boy!” The stone man staggered forward,
his hands outstretched and grasping.
Tyrion drove a shoulder into him.
It felt like slamming into a castle wall, but this castle stood upon
a shattered leg. The stone man went over backwards, grabbing hold
of Tyrion as he fell. They hit the river with a towering splash, and
Mother Rhoyne swallowed up the two of them.
The sudden cold hit Tyrion like a hammer. As he sank he felt a
stone hand fumbling at his face. Another closed around his arm,
dragging him down into darkness. Blind, his nose full of river,
choking, sinking, he kicked and twisted and fought to pry the
clutching ngers o his arm, but the stone ngers were unyielding.
Air bubbled from his lips. The world was black and growing
blacker. He could not breathe.
There are worse ways to die than drowning. And if truth be told, he
had perished long ago, back in King’s Landing. It was only his
revenant who remained, the small vengeful ghost who throttled
Shae and put a crossbow bolt through the great Lord Tywin’s
bowels. No man would mourn the thing that he’d become. I’ll haunt
the Seven Kingdoms, he thought, sinking deeper. They would not love
me living, so let them dread me dead.
When he opened his mouth to curse them all, black water lled
his lungs, and the dark closed in around him.

DAVOS

H

is lordship will hear you now, smuggler.”
The knight wore silver armor, his greaves and gauntlet inlaid
with niello to suggest owing fronds of seaweed. The helm beneath
his arm was the head of the merling king, with a crown of motherof-pearl and a jutting beard of jet and jade. His own beard was as
grey as the winter sea.
Davos rose. “May I know your name, ser?”
“Ser Marlon Manderly.” He was a head taller than Davos and
three stones heavier, with slate-grey eyes and a haughty way of
speaking. “I have the honor to be Lord Wyman’s cousin and
commander of his garrison. Follow me.”
Davos had come to White Harbor as an envoy, but they had made
him a captive. His chambers were large, airy, and handsomely
furnished, but there were guards outside his doors. From his
window he could see the streets of White Harbor beyond the castle
walls, but he was not allowed to walk them. He could see the
harbor too, and had watched Merry Midwife make her way down the
rth. Casso Mogat had waited four days instead of three before
departing. Another fortnight had passed since then.
Lord Manderly’s household guard wore cloaks of blue-green wool
and carried silver tridents in place of common spears. One went
before him, one behind, and one to either side. They walked past
the faded banners, broken shields, and rusted swords of a hundred
ancient victories, and a score of wooden gures, cracked and wormriddled, that could only have adorned the prows of ships.

Two marble mermen anked his lordship’s court, Fishfoot’s
smaller cousins. As the guards threw open the doors, a herald
slammed the butt of his sta against an old plank oor. “Ser Davos
of House Seaworth,” he called in a ringing voice.
As many times as he had visited White Harbor, Davos had never
set foot inside the New Castle, much less the Merman’s Court. Its
walls and oor and ceiling were made of wooden planks notched
cunningly together and decorated with all the creatures of the sea.
As they approached the dais, Davos trod on painted crabs and clams
and star sh, half-hidden amongst twisting black fronds of seaweed
and the bones of drowned sailors. On the walls to either side, pale
sharks prowled painted blue-green depths, whilst eels and octopods
slithered amongst rocks and sunken ships. Shoals of herring and
great cod sh swam between the tall arched windows. Higher up,
near where the old shing nets drooped down from the rafters, the
surface of the sea had been depicted. To his right a war galley
stroked serene against the rising sun; to his left, a battered old cog
raced before a storm, her sails in rags. Behind the dais a kraken and
grey leviathan were locked in battle beneath the painted waves.
Davos had hoped to speak with Wyman Manderly alone, but he
found a crowded court. Along the walls, the women outnumbered
the men by ve to one; what few males he did see had long grey
beards or looked too young to shave. There were septons as well,
and holy sisters in white robes and grey. Near the top of the hall
stood a dozen men in the blue and silver-grey of House Frey. Their
faces had a likeness a blind man could have seen; several wore the
badge of the Twins, two towers connected by a bridge.
Davos had learned to read men’s faces long before Maester Pylos
had taught him to read words on paper. These Freys would gladly see
me dead, he realized at a glance.
Nor did he nd any welcome in the pale blue eyes of Wyman
Manderly. His lordship’s cushioned throne was wide enough to
accommodate three men of common girth, yet Manderly threatened
to over ow it. His lordship sagged into his seat, his shoulders
slumped, his legs splayed, his hands resting on the arms of his
throne as if the weight of them were too much to bear. Gods be

good, thought Davos, when he saw Lord Wyman’s face, this man
looks half a corpse. His skin was pallid, with an undertone of grey.
Kings and corpses always draw attendants, the old saying went.
So it was with Manderly. Left of the high seat stood a maester nigh
as fat as the lord he served, a rosy-cheeked man with thick lips and
a head of golden curls. Ser Marlon claimed the place of honor at his
lordship’s right hand. On a cushioned stool at his feet perched a
plump pink lady. Behind Lord Wyman stood two younger women,
sisters by the look of them. The elder wore her brown hair bound in
a long braid. The younger, no more than fteen, had an even longer
braid, dyed a garish green.
None chose to honor Davos with a name. The maester was the
rst to speak. “You stand before Wyman Manderly, Lord of White
Harbor and Warden of the White Knife, Shield of the Faith,
Defender of the Dispossessed, Lord Marshal of the Mander, a Knight
of the Order of the Green Hand,” he said. “In the Merman’s Court, it
is customary for vassals and petitioners to kneel.”
The onion knight would have bent his knee, but a King’s Hand
could not; to do so would suggest that the king he served was less
than this fat lord. “I have not come as a petitioner,” Davos replied.
“I have a string of titles too. Lord of the Rainwood, Admiral of the
Narrow Sea, Hand of the King.”
The plump woman on the stool rolled her eyes. “An admiral
without ships, a hand without ngers, in service to a king without a
throne. Is this a knight who comes before us, or the answer to a
child’s riddle?”
“He is a messenger, good-daughter,” Lord Wyman said, “an onion
of ill omen. Stannis did not like the answer his ravens brought him,
so he has sent this … this smuggler.” He squinted at Davos through
eyes half-buried in rolls of fat. “You have visited our city before, I
think, taking coin from our pockets and food o our table. How
much did you steal from me, I wonder?”
Not enough that you ever missed a meal. “I paid for my smuggling
at Storm’s End, my lord.” Davos pulled o his glove and held up his
left hand, with its four shortened ngers.

“Four ngertips, for a lifetime’s worth of theft?” said the woman
on the stool. Her hair was yellow, her face round and pink and
eshy. “You got o cheaply, Onion Knight.”
Davos did not deny it. “If it please my lord, I would request a
privy audience.”
It did not please the lord. “I keep no secrets from my kin, nor
from my leal lords and knights, good friends all.”
“My lord,” said Davos, “I would not want my words to be heard
by His Grace’s enemies … or by your lordship’s.”
“Stannis may have enemies in this hall. I do not.”
“Not even the men who slew your son?” Davos pointed. “These
Freys were amongst his hosts at the Red Wedding.”
One of the Freys stepped forward, a knight long and lean of limb,
clean-shaved but for a grey mustache as thin as a Myrish stiletto.
“The Red Wedding was the Young Wolf’s work. He changed into a
beast before our eyes and tore out the throat of my cousin
Jinglebell, a harmless simpleton. He would have slain my lord
father too, if Ser Wendel had not put himself in the way.”
Lord Wyman blinked back tears. “Wendel was always a brave
boy. I was not surprised to learn he died a hero.”
The enormity of the lie made Davos gasp. “Is it your claim that
Robb Stark killed Wendel Manderly?” he asked the Frey.
“And many more. Mine own son Tytos was amongst them, and
my daughter’s husband. When Stark changed into a wolf, his
northmen did the same. The mark of the beast was on them all.
Wargs birth other wargs with a bite, it is well-known. It was all my
brothers and I could do to put them down before they slew us all.”
The man was smirking as he told the tale. Davos wanted to peel
his lips o with a knife. “Ser, may I have your name?”
“Ser Jared, of House Frey.”
“Jared of House Frey, I name you liar.”
Ser Jared seemed amused. “Some men cry when slicing onions,
but I have never had that weakness.” Steel whispered against
leather as he drew his sword. “If you are indeed a knight, ser,
defend that slander with your body.”

Lord Wyman’s eyes uttered open. “I’ll have no bloodshed in the
Merman’s Court. Put up your steel, Ser Jared, else I must ask you to
leave my presence.”
Ser Jared sheathed his sword. “Beneath your lordship’s roof, your
lordship’s word is law … but I shall want a reckoning with this
onion lord before he leaves this city.”
“Blood!” howled the woman on the stool. “That’s what this ill
onion wants of us, my lord. See how he stirs up trouble? Send him
away, I beg you. He wants the blood of your people, the blood of
your brave sons. Send him away. Should the queen hear that you
gave audience to this traitor, she may question our own loyalty. She
might … she could … she …”
“It will not come to that, good-daughter,” Lord Wyman said. “The
Iron Throne shall have no cause to doubt us.”
Davos misliked the sound of that, but he had not come all this
way to hold his tongue. “The boy on the Iron Throne is a usurper,”
he said, “and I am no traitor, but the Hand of Stannis Baratheon, the
First of His Name, the trueborn King of Westeros.”
The fat maester cleared his throat. “Stannis Baratheon was
brother to our late King Robert, may the Father judge him justly.
Tommen is the issue of Robert’s body. The laws of succession are
clear in such a case. A son must come before a brother.”
“Maester Theomore speaks truly,” said Lord Wyman. “He is wise
in all such matters, and has always given me good counsel.”
“A trueborn son comes before a brother,” Davos agreed, “but
Tommen-called-Baratheon is bastard-born, as his brother Jo rey
was before him. They were sired by the Kingslayer, in de ance of
all the laws of gods and men.”
Another of the Freys spoke up. “He speaks treason with his own
lips, my lord. Stannis took his thieving ngers. You should take his
lying tongue.”
“Take his head, rather,” suggested Ser Jared. “Or let him meet me
on the eld of honor.”
“What would a Frey know of honor?” Davos threw back.
Four of the Freys started forward until Lord Wyman halted them
with an upraised hand. “Step back, my friends. I will hear him out

before I … before I deal with him.”
“Can you o er any proof of this incest, ser?” Maester Theomore
asked, folding his soft hands atop his belly.
Edric Storm, thought Davos, but I sent him far away across the
narrow sea, to keep him safe from Melisandre’s res. “You have the
word of Stannis Baratheon that all I’ve said is true.”
“Words are wind,” said the young woman behind Lord Wyman’s
high seat, the handsome one with the long brown braid. “And men
will lie to get their way, as any maid could tell you.”
“Proof requires more than some lord’s unsupported word,”
declared Maester Theomore. “Stannis Baratheon would not be the
rst man who ever lied to win a throne.”
The pink woman pointed a plump nger down at Davos. “We
want no part of any treason, you. We are good people in White
Harbor, lawful, loyal people. Pour no more poison in our ears, or
my good-father will send you to the Wolf’s Den.”
How have I o ended this one? “Might I have the honor of my
lady’s name?”
The pink woman gave an angry sni and let the maester answer.
“The Lady Leona is wife to Lord Wyman’s son Ser Wylis, presently a
captive of the Lannisters.”
She speaks from fear. If White Harbor should declare for Stannis,
her husband would answer with his life. How can I ask Lord Wyman
to condemn his son to death? What would I do in his place if Devan
were a hostage? “My lord,” said Davos, “I pray no harm will come to
your son, or to any man of White Harbor.”
“Another lie,” said Lady Leona from her stool.
Davos thought it best to ignore her. “When Robb Stark took up
arms against the bastard Jo rey-called-Baratheon, White Harbor
marched with him. Lord Stark has fallen, but his war goes on.”
“Robb Stark was my liege lord,” said Lord Wyman. “Who is this
man Stannis? Why does he trouble us? He never felt the need to
journey north before, as best I can recall. Yet he turns up now, a
beaten cur with his helm in his hand, begging for alms.”
“He came to save the realm, my lord,” Davos insisted. “To defend
your lands against the ironborn and the wildlings.”

Next to the high seat, Ser Marlon Manderly gave a snort of
disdain. “It has been centuries since White Harbor has seen any
wildlings, and the ironmen have never troubled this coast. Does
Lord Stannis propose to defend us from snarks and dragons too?”
Laughter swept the Merman’s Court, but at Lord Wyman’s feet,
Lady Leona began to sob. “Ironmen from the isles, wildlings from
beyond the Wall … and now this traitor lord with his outlaws,
rebels, and sorcerers.” She pointed a nger at Davos. “We have
heard of your red witch, oh yes. She would turn us against the
Seven to bow before a re demon!”
Davos had no love for the red priestess, but he dare not let Lady
Leona go unanswered. “Lady Melisandre is a priestess of the red
god. Queen Selyse has adopted her faith, along with many others,
but more of His Grace’s followers still worship the Seven. Myself
among them.” He prayed no one would ask him to explain about the
sept at Dragonstone or the godswood at Storm’s End. If they ask, I
must needs tell them. Stannis would not have me lie.
“The Seven defend White Harbor,” Lady Leona declared. “We do
not fear your red queen or her god. Let her send what spells she
will. The prayers of godly men will shield us against evil.”
“Indeed.” Lord Wyman gave Lady Leona a pat on the shoulder.
“Lord Davos, if you are a lord, I know what your so-called king
would have of me. Steel and silver and a bended knee.” He shifted
his weight to lean upon an elbow. “Before he was slain, Lord Tywin
o ered White Harbor full pardon for our support of the Young
Wolf. He promised that my son would be returned to me once I paid
a ransom of three thousand dragons and proved my loyalty beyond
a doubt. Roose Bolton, who is named our Warden of the North,
requires that I give up my claim to Lord Hornwood’s lands and
castles but swears my other holdings shall remain untouched.
Walder Frey, his good-father, o ers one of his daughters to be my
wife, and husbands for my son’s daughters here behind me. These
terms seem generous to me, a good basis for a fair and lasting
peace. You would have me spurn them. So I ask you, Onion Knight
—what does Lord Stannis o er me in return for my allegiance?”

War and woe and the screams of burning men, Davos might have
said. “The chance to do your duty,” he replied instead. That was the
answer Stannis would have given Wyman Manderly. The Hand
should speak with the king’s voice.
Lord Wyman sagged back in his chair. “Duty. I see.”
“White Harbor is not strong enough to stand alone. You need His
Grace as much as he needs you. Together you can defeat your
common enemies.”
“My lord,” said Ser Marlon, in his ornate silver armor, “will you
permit me to ask a few questions of Lord Davos?”
“As you wish, cousin.” Lord Wyman closed his eyes.
Ser Marlon turned to Davos. “How many northern lords have
declared for Stannis? Tell us that.”
“Arnolf Karstark has vowed to join His Grace.”
“Arnolf is no true lord, only a castellan. What castles does Lord
Stannis hold at present, pray?”
“His Grace has taken the Nightfort for his seat. In the south, he
holds Storm’s End and Dragonstone.”
Maester Theomore cleared his throat. “Only for the nonce.
Storm’s End and Dragonstone are lightly held and must soon fall.
And the Nightfort is a haunted ruin, a drear and dreadful place.”
Ser Marlon went on. “How many men can Stannis put into the
eld, can you tell us that? How many knights ride with him? How
many bowmen, how many freeriders, how many men-at-arms?”
Too few, Davos knew. Stannis had come north with no more than
fteen hundred men … but if he told them that, his mission here
was doomed. He fumbled for words and found none.
“Your silence is all the answer I require, ser. Your king brings us
only enemies.” Ser Marlon turned to his lord cousin. “Your lordship
asked the onion knight what Stannis o ers us. Let me answer. He
o ers us defeat and death. He would have you mount a horse of air
and give battle with a sword of wind.”
The fat lord opened his eyes slowly, as if the e ort were almost
too much for him. “My cousin cuts to the bone, as ever. Do you
have any more to say to me, Onion Knight, or can we put an end to
this mummer’s farce? I grow weary of your face.”

Davos felt a stab of despair. His Grace should have sent another
man, a lord or knight or maester, someone who could speak for him
without tripping on his own tongue. “Death,” he heard himself say,
“there will be death, aye. Your lordship lost a son at the Red
Wedding. I lost four upon the Blackwater. And why? Because the
Lannisters stole the throne. Go to King’s Landing and look on
Tommen with your own eyes, if you doubt me. A blind man could
see it. What does Stannis o er you? Vengeance. Vengeance for my
sons and yours, for your husbands and your fathers and your
brothers. Vengeance for your murdered lord, your murdered king,
your butchered princes. Vengeance!”
“Yes,” piped a girl’s voice, thin and high.
It belonged to the half-grown child with the blond eyebrows and
the long green braid. “They killed Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn
and King Robb,” she said. “He was our king! He was brave and
good, and the Freys murdered him. If Lord Stannis will avenge him,
we should join Lord Stannis.”
Manderly pulled her close. “Wylla, every time you open your
mouth you make me want to send you to the silent sisters.”
“I only said—”
“We heard what you said,” said the older girl, her sister. “A
child’s foolishness. Speak no ill of our friends of Frey. One of them
will be your lord and husband soon.”
“No,” the girl declared, shaking her head. “I won’t. I won’t ever.
They killed the king.”
Lord Wyman ushed. “You will. When the appointed day arrives,
you will speak your wedding vows, else you will join the silent
sisters and never speak again.”
The poor girl looked stricken. “Grandfather, please …”
“Hush, child,” said Lady Leona. “You heard your lord grandfather.
Hush! You know nothing.”
“I know about the promise,” insisted the girl. “Maester
Theomore, tell them! A thousand years before the Conquest, a
promise was made, and oaths were sworn in the Wolf’s Den before
the old gods and the new. When we were sore beset and friendless,
hounded from our homes and in peril of our lives, the wolves took

us in and nourished us and protected us against our enemies. The
city is built upon the land they gave us. In return we swore that we
should always be their men. Stark men!”
The maester ngered the chain about his neck. “Solemn oaths
were sworn to the Starks of Winterfell, aye. But Winterfell has
fallen and House Stark has been extinguished.”
“That’s because they killed them all!”
Another Frey spoke up. “Lord Wyman, if I may?”
Wyman Manderly gave him a nod. “Rhaegar. We are always
pleased to hear your noble counsel.”
Rhaegar Frey acknowledged the compliment with a bow. He was
thirty, or nigh unto, round-shouldered and kettle-bellied, but richly
dressed in a doublet of soft grey lambswool trimmed in cloth-ofsilver. His cloak was cloth-of-silver too, lined with vair and clasped
at the collar with a brooch in the shape of the twin towers. “Lady
Wylla,” he said to the girl with the green braid, “loyalty is a virtue.
I hope you will be as loyal to Little Walder when you are joined in
wedlock. As to the Starks, that House is extinguished only in the
male line. Lord Eddard’s sons are dead, but his daughters live, and
the younger girl is coming north to wed brave Ramsay Bolton.”
“Ramsay Snow,” Wylla Manderly threw back.
“Have it as you will. By any name, he shall soon be wed to Arya
Stark. If you would keep faith with your promise, give him your
allegiance, for he shall be your Lord of Winterfell.”
“He won’t ever be my lord! He made Lady Hornwood marry him,
then shut her in a dungeon and made her eat her ngers.”
A murmur of assent swept the Merman’s Court. “The maid tells it
true,” declared a stocky man in white and purple, whose cloak was
fastened with a pair of crossed bronze keys. “Roose Bolton’s cold
and cunning, aye, but a man can deal with Roose. We’ve all known
worse. But this bastard son of his … they say he’s mad and cruel, a
monster.”
“They say?” Rhaegar Frey sported a silky beard and a sardonic
smile. “His enemies say, aye … but it was the Young Wolf who was
the monster. More beast than boy, that one, pu ed up with pride
and bloodlust. And he was faithless, as my lord grandfather learned

to his sorrow.” He spread his hands. “I do not fault White Harbor
for supporting him. My grandsire made the same grievous mistake.
In all the Young Wolf’s battles, White Harbor and the Twins fought
side by side beneath his banners. Robb Stark betrayed us all. He
abandoned the north to the cruel mercies of the ironmen to carve
out a fairer kingdom for himself along the Trident. Then he
abandoned the riverlords who had risked much and more for him,
breaking his marriage pact with my grandfather to wed the rst
western wench who caught his eye. The Young Wolf? He was a vile
dog and died like one.”
The Merman’s Court had grown still. Davos could feel the chill in
the air. Lord Wyman was looking down at Rhaegar as if he were a
roach in need of a hard heel … yet then, abruptly, he gave a
ponderous nod that set his chins to wobbling. “A dog, aye. He
brought us only grief and death. A vile dog indeed. Say on.”
Rhaegar Frey went on. “Grief and death, aye … and this onion
lord will bring you more with his talk of vengeance. Open your
eyes, as my lord grandsire did. The War of the Five Kings is all but
done. Tommen is our king, our only king. We must help him bind up
the wounds of this sad war. As Robert’s trueborn son, the heir of
stag and lion, the Iron Throne is his by rights.”
“Wise words, and true,” said Lord Wyman Manderly.
“They weren’t.” Wylla Manderly stamped her foot.
“Be quiet, wretched child,” scolded Lady Leona. “Young girls
should be an ornament to the eye, not an ache in the ear.” She
seized the girl by her braid and pulled her squealing from the hall.
There went my only friend in this hall, thought Davos.
“Wylla has always been a willful child,” her sister said, by way of
apology. “I fear that she will make a willful wife.”
Rhaegar shrugged. “Marriage will soften her, I have no doubt. A
rm hand and a quiet word.”
“If not, there are the silent sisters.” Lord Wyman shifted in his
seat. “As for you, Onion Knight, I have heard su cient treason for
one day. You would have me risk my city for a false king and a
false god. You would have me sacri ce my only living son so
Stannis Baratheon can plant his puckered arse upon a throne to

which he has no right. I will not do it. Not for you. Not for your
lord. Not for any man.” The Lord of White Harbor pushed himself to
his feet. The e ort brought a red ush to his neck. “You are still a
smuggler, ser, come to steal my gold and blood. You would take my
son’s head. I think I shall take yours instead. Guards! Seize this
man!”
Before Davos could even think to move, he was surrounded by
silver tridents. “My lord,” he said, “I am an envoy.”
“Are you? You came sneaking into my city like a smuggler. I say
you are no lord, no knight, no envoy, only a thief and a spy, a
peddler of lies and treasons. I should tear your tongue out with hot
pincers and deliver you to the Dreadfort to be ayed. But the
Mother is merciful, and so am I.” He beckoned to Ser Marlon.
“Cousin, take this creature to the Wolf’s Den and cut o his head
and hands. I want them brought to me before I sup. I shall not be
able to eat a bite until I see this smuggler’s head upon a spike, with
an onion shoved between his lying teeth.”

REEK

T

hey gave him a horse and a banner, a soft woolen doublet and
a warm fur cloak, and set him loose. For once, he did not stink.
“Come back with that castle,” said Damon Dance-for-Me as he
helped Reek climb shaking into the saddle, “or keep going and see
how far you get before we catch you. He’d like that, he would.”
Grinning, Damon gave the horse a lick across the rump with his
whip, and the old stot whinnied and lurched into motion.
Reek did not dare to look back, for fear that Damon and Yellow
Dick and Grunt and the rest were coming after him, that all of this
was just another of Lord Ramsay’s japes, some cruel test to see what
he would do if they gave him a horse and set him free. Do they think
that I will run? The stot they had given him was a wretched thing,
knock-kneed and half-starved; he could never hope to outdistance
the ne horses Lord Ramsay and his hunters would be riding. And
Ramsay loved nothing more than to set his girls baying on the trail
of some fresh prey.
Besides, where would he run to? Behind him were the camps,
crowded with Dreadfort men and those the Ryswells had brought
from the Rills, with the Barrowton host between them. South of
Moat Cailin, another army was coming up the causeway, an army of
Boltons and Freys marching beneath the banners of the Dreadfort.
East of the road lay a bleak and barren shore and a cold salt sea, to
the west the swamps and bogs of the Neck, infested with serpents,
lizard lions, and bog devils with their poisoned arrows.
He would not run. He could not run.
I will deliver him the castle. I will. I must.

It was a grey day, damp and misty. The wind was from the south,
moist as a kiss. The ruins of Moat Cailin were visible in the
distance, threaded through with wisps of morning mist. His horse
moved toward them at a walk, her hooves making faint wet
squelching sounds as they pulled free of the grey-green muck.
I have come this way before. It was a dangerous thought, and he
regretted it at once. “No,” he said, “no, that was some other man,
that was before you knew your name.” His name was Reek. He had
to remember that. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with leek.
When that other man had come this way, an army had followed
close behind him, the great host of the north riding to war beneath
the grey-and-white banners of House Stark. Reek rode alone,
clutching a peace banner on a pinewood sta . When that other man
had come this way, he had been mounted on a courser, swift and
spirited. Reek rode a broken-down stot, all skin and bone and ribs,
and he rode her slowly for fear he might fall o . The other man had
been a good rider, but Reek was uneasy on horseback. It had been
so long. He was no rider. He was not even a man. He was Lord
Ramsay’s creature, lower than a dog, a worm in human skin. “You
will pretend to be a prince,” Lord Ramsay told him last night, as
Reek was soaking in a tub of scalding water, “but we know the
truth. You’re Reek. You’ll always be Reek, no matter how sweet
you smell. Your nose may lie to you. Remember your name.
Remember who you are.”
“Reek,” he said. “Your Reek.”
“Do this little thing for me, and you can be my dog and eat meat
every day,” Lord Ramsay promised. “You will be tempted to betray
me. To run or ght or join our foes. No, quiet, I’ll not hear you
deny it. Lie to me, and I’ll take your tongue. A man would turn
against me in your place, but we know what you are, don’t we?
Betray me if you want, it makes no matter … but count your ngers
rst and know the cost.”
Reek knew the cost. Seven, he thought, seven ngers. A man can
make do with seven ngers. Seven is a sacred number. He remembered
how much it had hurt when Lord Ramsay had commanded Skinner
to lay his ring nger bare.

The air was wet and heavy, and shallow pools of water dotted the
ground. Reek picked his way between them carefully, following the
remnants of the log-and-plank road that Robb Stark’s vanguard had
laid down across the soft ground to speed the passage of his host.
Where once a mighty curtain wall had stood, only scattered stones
remained, blocks of black basalt so large it must once have taken a
hundred men to hoist them into place. Some had sunk so deep into
the bog that only a corner showed; others lay strewn about like
some god’s abandoned toys, cracked and crumbling, spotted with
lichen. Last night’s rain had left the huge stones wet and glistening,
and the morning sunlight made them look as if they were coated in
some ne black oil.
Beyond stood the towers.
The Drunkard’s Tower leaned as if it were about to collapse, just
as it had for half a thousand years. The Children’s Tower thrust into
the sky as straight as a spear, but its shattered top was open to the
wind and rain. The Gatehouse Tower, squat and wide, was the
largest of the three, slimy with moss, a gnarled tree growing
sideways from the stones of its north side, fragments of broken wall
still standing to the east and west. The Karstarks took the Drunkard’s
Tower and the Umbers the Children’s Tower, he recalled. Robb claimed
the Gatehouse Tower for his own.
If he closed his eyes, he could see the banners in his mind’s eye,
snapping bravely in a brisk north wind. All gone now, all fallen. The
wind on his cheeks was blowing from the south, and the only
banners ying above the remains of Moat Cailin displayed a golden
kraken on a eld of black.
He was being watched. He could feel the eyes. When he looked
up, he caught a glimpse of pale faces peering from behind the
battlements of the Gatehouse Tower and through the broken
masonry that crowned the Children’s Tower, where legend said the
children of the forest had once called down the hammer of the
waters to break the lands of Westeros in two.
The only dry road through the Neck was the causeway, and the
towers of Moat Cailin plugged its northern end like a cork in a
bottle. The road was narrow, the ruins so positioned that any enemy

coming up from the south must pass beneath and between them. To
assault any of the three towers, an attacker must expose his back to
arrows from the other two, whilst climbing damp stone walls
festooned with streamers of slimy white ghostskin. The swampy
ground beyond the causeway was impassable, an endless morass of
suckholes, quicksands, and glistening green swards that looked solid
to the unwary eye but turned to water the instant you trod upon
them, the whole of it infested with venomous serpents and
poisonous owers and monstrous lizard lions with teeth like
daggers. Just as dangerous were its people, seldom seen but always
lurking, the swamp-dwellers, the frog-eaters, the mud-men. Fenn
and Reed, Peat and Boggs, Cray and Quagg, Greengood and
Blackmyre, those were the sorts of names they gave themselves.
The ironborn called them all bog devils.
Reek passed the rotted carcass of a horse, an arrow jutting from
its neck. A long white snake slithered into its empty eye socket at
his approach. Behind the horse he spied the rider, or what remained
of him. The crows had stripped the esh from the man’s face, and a
feral dog had burrowed beneath his mail to get at his entrails.
Farther on, another corpse had sunk so deep into the muck that only
his face and ngers showed.
Closer to the towers, corpses littered the ground on every side.
Blood-blooms had sprouted from their gaping wounds, pale owers
with petals plump and moist as a woman’s lips.
The garrison will never know me. Some might recall the boy he’d
been before he learned his name, but Reek would be a stranger to
them. It had been a long while since he last looked into a glass, but
he knew how old he must appear. His hair had turned white; much
of it had fallen out, and what was left was sti and dry as straw.
The dungeons had left him weak as an old woman and so thin a
strong wind could knock him down.
And his hands … Ramsay had given him gloves, ne gloves of
black leather, soft and supple, stu ed with wool to conceal his
missing ngers, but if anyone looked closely, he would see that
three of his ngers did not bend.
“No closer!” a voice rang out. “What do you want?”

“Words.” He spurred the stot onward, waving the peace banner so
they could not fail to see it. “I come unarmed.”
There was no reply. Inside the walls, he knew, the ironmen were
discussing whether to admit him or ll his chest with arrows. It
makes no matter. A quick death here would be a hundred times
better than returning to Lord Ramsay as a failure.
Then the gatehouse doors ung open. “Quickly.” Reek was turning
toward the sound when the arrow struck. It came from somewhere
to his right, where broken chunks of the curtain wall lay halfsubmerged beneath the bog. The shaft tore through the folds of his
banner and hung spent, the point a bare foot from his face. It
startled him so badly that he dropped the peace banner and tumbled
from his saddle.
“Inside,” the voice shouted, “hurry, fool, hurry!”
Reek scrambled up the steps on hands and knees as another arrow
uttered over his head. Someone seized him and dragged him
inside, and he heard the door crash shut behind him. He was pulled
to his feet and shoved against a wall. Then a knife was at his throat,
a bearded face so close to his that he could count the man’s nose
hairs. “Who are you? What’s your purpose here? Quick now, or I’ll
do you the same as him.” The guard jerked his head toward a body
rotting on the oor beside the door, its esh green and crawling
with maggots.
“I am ironborn,” Reek answered, lying. The boy he’d been before
had been ironborn, true enough, but Reek had come into this world
in the dungeons of the Dreadfort. “Look at my face. I am Lord
Balon’s son. Your prince.” He would have said the name, but
somehow the words caught in his throat. Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes
with squeak. He had to forget that for a little while, though. No man
would ever yield to a creature such as Reek, no matter how
desperate his situation. He must pretend to be a prince again.
His captor stared at his face, squinting, his mouth twisted in
suspicion. His teeth were brown, and his breath stank of ale and
onion. “Lord Balon’s sons were killed.”
“My brothers. Not me. Lord Ramsay took me captive after
Winterfell. He’s sent me here to treat with you. Do you command

here?”
“Me?” The man lowered his knife and took a step backwards,
almost stumbling over the corpse. “Not me, m’lord.” His mail was
rusted, his leathers rotting. On the back of one hand an open sore
wept blood. “Ralf Kenning has the command. The captain said. I’m
on the door, is all.”
“And who is this?” Reek gave the corpse a kick.
The guard stared at the dead man as if seeing him for the rst
time. “Him … he drank the water. I had to cut his throat for him, to
stop his screaming. Bad belly. You can’t drink the water. That’s why
we got the ale.” The guard rubbed his face, his eyes red and
in amed. “We used to drag the dead down into the cellars. All the
vaults are ooded down there. No one wants to take the trouble
now, so we just leave them where they fall.”
“The cellar is a better place for them. Give them to the water. To
the Drowned God.”
The man laughed. “No gods down there, m’lord. Only rats and
water snakes. White things, thick as your leg. Sometimes they
slither up the steps and bite you in your sleep.”
Reek remembered the dungeons underneath the Dreadfort, the rat
squirming between his teeth, the taste of warm blood on his lips. If I
fail, Ramsay will send me back to that, but rst he’ll ay the skin from
another nger. “How many of the garrison are left?”
“Some,” said the ironman. “I don’t know. Fewer than we was
before. Some in the Drunkard’s Tower too, I think. Not the
Children’s Tower. Dagon Codd went over there a few days back.
Only two men left alive, he said, and they was eating on the dead
ones. He killed them both, if you can believe that.”
Moat Cailin has fallen, Reek realized then, only no one has seen t
to tell them. He rubbed his mouth to hide his broken teeth, and said,
“I need to speak with your commander.”
“Kenning?” The guard seemed confused. “He don’t have much to
say these days. He’s dying. Might be he’s dead. I haven’t seen him
since … I don’t remember when …”
“Where is he? Take me to him.”
“Who will keep the door, then?”

“Him.” Reek gave the corpse a kick.
That made the man laugh. “Aye. Why not? Come with me, then.”
He pulled a torch down from a wall sconce and waved it till it
blazed up bright and hot. “This way.” The guard led him through a
door and up a spiral stair, the torchlight glimmering o black stone
walls as they climbed.
The chamber at the top of the steps was dark, smoky, and
oppressively hot. A ragged skin had been hung across the narrow
window to keep the damp out, and a slab of peat smoldered in a
brazier. The smell in the room was foul, a miasma of mold and piss
and nightsoil, of smoke and sickness. Soiled rushes covered the
oor, whilst a heap of straw in the corner passed for a bed.
Ralf Kenning lay shivering beneath a mountain of furs. His arms
were stacked beside him—sword and axe, mail hauberk, iron
warhelm. His shield bore the storm god’s cloudy hand, lightning
crackling from his ngers down to a raging sea, but the paint was
discolored and peeling, the wood beneath starting to rot.
Ralf was rotting too. Beneath the furs he was naked and feverish,
his pale pu y esh covered with weeping sores and scabs. His head
was misshapen, one cheek grotesquely swollen, his neck so
engorged with blood that it threatened to swallow his face. The arm
on that same side was big as a log and crawling with white worms.
No one had bathed him or shaved him for many days, from the look
of him. One eye wept pus, and his beard was crusty with dried
vomit. “What happened to him?” asked Reek.
“He was on the parapets and some bog devil loosed an arrow at
him. It was only a graze, but … they poison their shafts, smear the
points with shit and worse things. We poured boiling wine into the
wound, but it made no di erence.”
I cannot treat with this thing. “Kill him,” Reek told the guard. “His
wits are gone. He’s full of blood and worms.”
The man gaped at him. “The captain put him in command.”
“You’d put a dying horse down.”
“What horse? I never had no horse.”
I did. The memory came back in a rush. Smiler’s screams had
sounded almost human. His mane a re, he had reared up on his

hind legs, blind with pain, lashing out with his hooves. No, no. Not
mine, he was not mine, Reek never had a horse. “I will kill him for
you.” Reek snatched up Ralf Kenning’s sword where it leaned
against his shield. He still had ngers enough to clasp the hilt.
When he laid the edge of the blade against the swollen throat of the
creature on the straw, the skin split open in a gout of black blood
and yellow pus. Kenning jerked violently, then lay still. An awful
stench lled the room. Reek bolted for the steps. The air was damp
and cold there, but much cleaner by comparison. The ironman
stumbled out after him, white-faced and struggling not to retch.
Reek grasped him by the arm. “Who was second-in-command?
Where are the rest of the men?”
“Up on the battlements, or in the hall. Sleeping, drinking. I’ll take
you if you like.”
“Do it now.” Ramsay had only given him a day.
The hall was dark stone, high ceilinged and drafty, full of drifting
smoke, its stone walls spotted by huge patches of pale lichen. A peat
re burned low in a hearth blackened by the hotter blazes of years
past. A massive table of carved stone lled the chamber, as it had
for centuries. There was where I sat, the last time I was here, he
remembered. Robb was at the head of the table, with the Greatjon to his
right and Roose Bolton on his left. The Glovers sat next to Helman
Tallhart. Karstark and his sons were across from them.
Two dozen ironborn sat drinking at the table. A few looked at
him with dull, at eyes when he entered. The rest ignored him. All
the men were strangers to him. Several wore cloaks fastened by
brooches in the shape of silver cod sh. The Codds were not well
regarded in the Iron Islands; the men were said to be thieves and
cowards, the women wantons who bedded with their own fathers
and brothers. It did not surprise him that his uncle had chosen to
leave these men behind when the Iron Fleet went home. This will
make my task that much easier. “Ralf Kenning is dead,” he said. “Who
commands here?”
The drinkers stared at him blankly. One laughed. Another spat.
Finally one of the Codds said, “Who asks?”

“Lord Balon’s son.” Reek, my name is Reek, it rhymes with cheek. “I
am here at the command of Ramsay Bolton, Lord of the Hornwood
and heir to the Dreadfort, who captured me at Winterfell. His host
is north of you, his father’s to the south, but Lord Ramsay is
prepared to be merciful if you yield Moat Cailin to him before the
sun goes down.” He drew out the letter that they’d given him and
tossed it on the table before the drinkers.
One of them picked it up and turned it over in his hands, picking
at the pink wax that sealed it. After a moment he said, “Parchment.
What good is that? It’s cheese we need, and meat.”
“Steel, you mean,” said the man beside him, a greybeard whose
left arm ended in a stump. “Swords. Axes. Aye, and bows, a hundred
more bows, and men to loose the arrows.”
“Ironborn do not surrender,” said a third voice.
“Tell that to my father. Lord Balon bent the knee when Robert
broke his wall. Elsewise he would have died. As you will if you do
not yield.” He gestured at the parchment. “Break the seal. Read the
words. That is a safe conduct, written in Lord Ramsay’s own hand.
Give up your swords and come with me, and his lordship will feed
you and give you leave to march unmolested to the Stony Shore and
nd a ship for home. Elsewise you die.”
“Is that a threat?” One of the Codds pushed to his feet. A big
man, but pop-eyed and wide of mouth, with dead white esh. He
looked as if his father had sired him on a sh, but he still wore a
longsword. “Dagon Codd yields to no man.”
No, please, you have to listen. The thought of what Ramsay would
do to him if he crept back to camp without the garrison’s surrender
was almost enough to make him piss his breeches. Reek, Reek, it
rhymes with leak. “Is that your answer?” The words rang feebly in
his ears. “Does this cod sh speak for all of you?”
The guard who had met him at the door seemed less certain.
“Victarion commanded us to hold, he did. I heard him with my own
ears. Hold here till I return, he told Kenning.”
“Aye,” said the one-armed man. “That’s what he said. The
kingsmoot called, but he swore that he’d be back, with a driftwood
crown upon his head and a thousand men behind him.”

“My uncle is never coming back,” Reek told them. “The
kingsmoot crowned his brother Euron, and the Crow’s Eye has other
wars to ght. You think my uncle values you? He doesn’t. You are
the ones he left behind to die. He scraped you o the same way he
scrapes mud o his boots when he wades ashore.”
Those words struck home. He could see it in their eyes, in the
way they looked at one another or frowned above their cups. They
all feared they’d been abandoned, but it took me to turn fear into
certainty. These were not the kin of famous captains nor the blood
of the great Houses of the Iron Islands. These were the sons of
thralls and salt wives.
“If we yield, we walk away?” said the one-armed man. “Is that
what it says on this here writing?” He nudged the roll of parchment,
its wax seal still unbroken.
“Read it for yourself,” he answered, though he was almost certain
that none of them could read. “Lord Ramsay treats his captives
honorably so long as they keep faith with him.” He has only taken
toes and ngers and that other thing, when he might have had my
tongue, or peeled the skin o my legs from heel to thigh. “Yield up your
swords to him, and you will live.”
“Liar.” Dagon Codd drew his longsword. “You’re the one they call
Turncloak. Why should we believe your promises?”
He is drunk, Reek realized. The ale is speaking. “Believe what you
want. I have brought Lord Ramsay’s message. Now I must return to
him. We’ll sup on wild boar and neeps, washed down with strong
red wine. Those who come with me will be welcome at the feast.
The rest of you will die within a day. The Lord of the Dreadfort will
bring his knights up the causeway, whilst his son leads his own men
down on you from the north. No quarter will be granted. The ones
that die ghting will be the lucky ones. Those who live will be
given to the bog devils.”
“Enough,” snarled Dagon Codd. “You think you can frighten
ironborn with words? Begone. Run back to your master before I
open your belly, pull your entrails out, and make you eat them.”
He might have said more, but suddenly his eyes gaped wide. A
throwing axe sprouted from the center of his forehead with a solid

thunk. Codd’s sword fell from his ngers. He jerked like a sh on a
hook, then crashed face- rst onto the table.
It was the one-armed man who’d ung the axe. As he rose to his
feet he had another in his hand. “Who else wants to die?” he asked
the other drinkers. “Speak up, I’ll see you do.” Thin red streams
were spreading out across the stone from the pool of blood where
Dagon Codd’s head had come to rest. “Me, I mean to live, and that
don’t mean staying here to rot.”
One man took a swallow of ale. Another turned his cup over to
wash away a nger of blood before it reached the place where he
was seated. No one spoke. When the one-armed man slid the
throwing axe back through his belt, Reek knew he had won. He
almost felt a man again. Lord Ramsay will be pleased with me.
He pulled down the kraken banner with his own two hands,
fumbling some because of his missing ngers but thankful for the
ngers that Lord Ramsay had allowed him to keep. It took the
better part of the afternoon before the ironborn were ready to
depart. There were more of them than he would have guessed—
forty-seven in the Gatehouse Tower and another eighteen in the
Drunkard’s Tower. Two of those were so close to dead there was no
hope for them, another ve too weak to walk. That still left ftyeight who were t enough to ght. Weak as they were, they would
have taken three times their own number with them if Lord Ramsay
had stormed the ruins. He did well to send me, Reek told himself as
he climbed back onto his stot to lead his ragged column back across
the boggy ground to where the northmen were encamped. “Leave
your weapons here,” he told the prisoners. “Swords, bows, daggers.
Armed men will be slain on sight.”
It took them thrice as long to cover the distance as it had taken
Reek alone. Crude litters had been patched together for four of the
men who could not walk; the fth was carried by his son, upon his
back. It made for slow going, and all the ironborn were well aware
of how exposed they were, well within bowshot of the bog devils
and their poisoned arrows. If I die, I die. Reek only prayed the
archer knew his business, so death would be quick and clean. A
man’s death, not the end Ralf Kenning su ered.

The one-armed man walked at the head of the procession, limping
heavily. His name, he said, was Adrack Humble, and he had a rock
wife and three salt wives back on Great Wyk. “Three of the four
had big bellies when we sailed,” he boasted, “and Humbles run to
twins. First thing I’ll need to do when I get back is count up my new
sons. Might be I’ll even name one after you, m’lord.”
Aye, name him Reek, he thought, and when he’s bad you can cut his
toes o and give him rats to eat. He turned his head and spat, and
wondered if Ralf Kenning hadn’t been the lucky one.
A light rain had begun to piss down out of the slate-grey sky by
the time Lord Ramsay’s camp appeared in front of them. A sentry
watched them pass in silence. The air was full of drifting smoke
from the cook res drowning in the rain. A column of riders came
wheeling up behind them, led by a lordling with a horsehead on his
shield. One of Lord Ryswell’s sons, Reek knew. Roger, or maybe
Rickard. He could not tell the two of them apart. “Is this all of
them?” the rider asked from atop a chestnut stallion.
“All who weren’t dead, my lord.”
“I thought there would be more. We came at them three times,
and three times they threw us back.”
We are ironborn, he thought, with a sudden ash of pride, and for
half a heartbeat he was a prince again, Lord Balon’s son, the blood
of Pyke. Even thinking was dangerous, though. He had to
remember his name. Reek, my name is Reek, it rhymes with weak.
They were just outside the camp when the baying of a pack of
hounds told of Lord Ramsay’s approach. Whoresbane was with him,
along with half a dozen of his favorites, Skinner and Sour Alyn and
Damon Dance-for-Me, and the Walders Big and Little too. The dogs
swarmed around them, snapping and snarling at the strangers. The
Bastard’s girls, Reek thought, before he remembered that one must
never, never, never use that word in Ramsay’s presence.
Reek swung down from his saddle and took a knee. “My lord,
Moat Cailin is yours. Here are its last defenders.”
“So few. I had hoped for more. They were such stubborn foes.”
Lord Ramsay’s pale eyes shone. “You must be starved. Damon,

Alyn, see to them. Wine and ale, and all the food that they can eat.
Skinner, show their wounded to our maesters.”
“Aye, my lord.”
A few of the ironborn muttered thanks before they shambled o
toward the cook res in the center of the camp. One of the Codds
even tried to kiss Lord Ramsay’s ring, but the hounds drove him
back before he could get close, and Alison took a chunk of his ear.
Even as the blood streamed down his neck, the man bobbed and
bowed and praised his lordship’s mercy.
When the last of them were gone, Ramsay Bolton turned his smile
on Reek. He clasped him by the back of the head, pulled his face
close, kissed him on his cheek, and whispered, “My old friend Reek.
Did they really take you for their prince? What bloody fools, these
ironmen. The gods are laughing.”
“All they want is to go home, my lord.”
“And what do you want, my sweet Reek?” Ramsay murmured, as
softly as a lover. His breath smelled of mulled wine and cloves, so
sweet. “Such valiant service deserves a reward. I cannot give you
back your ngers or your toes, but surely there is something you
would have of me. Shall I free you instead? Release you from my
service? Do you want to go with them, return to your bleak isles in
the cold grey sea, be a prince again? Or would you sooner stay my
leal serving man?”
A cold knife scraped along his spine. Be careful, he told himself, be
very, very careful. He did not like his lordship’s smile, the way his
eyes were shining, the spittle glistening at the corner of his mouth.
He had seen such signs before. You are no prince. You’re Reek, just
Reek, it rhymes with freak. Give him the answer that he wants.
“My lord,” he said, “my place is here, with you. I’m your Reek. I
only want to serve you. All I ask … a skin of wine, that would be
reward enough for me … red wine, the strongest that you have, all
the wine a man can drink …”
Lord Ramsay laughed. “You’re not a man, Reek. You’re just my
creature. You’ll have your wine, though. Walder, see to it. And fear
not, I won’t return you to the dungeons, you have my word as a
Bolton. We’ll make a dog of you instead. Meat every day, and I’ll

even leave you teeth enough to eat it. You can sleep beside my
girls. Ben, do you have a collar for him?”
“I’ll have one made, m’lord,” said old Ben Bones.
The old man did better than that. That night, besides the collar,
there was a ragged blanket too, and half a chicken. Reek had to
ght the dogs for the meat, but it was the best meal he’d had since
Winterfell.
And the wine … the wine was dark and sour, but strong. Squatting
amongst the hounds, Reek drank until his head swam, retched,
wiped his mouth, and drank some more. Afterward he lay back and
closed his eyes. When he woke a dog was licking vomit from his
beard, and dark clouds were scuttling across the face of a sickle
moon. Somewhere in the night, men were screaming. He shoved the
dog aside, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
The next morning Lord Ramsay dispatched three riders down the
causeway to take word to his lord father that the way was clear.
The ayed man of House Bolton was hoisted above the Gatehouse
Tower, where Reek had hauled down the golden kraken of Pyke.
Along the rotting-plank road, wooden stakes were driven deep into
the boggy ground; there the corpses festered, red and dripping.
Sixty-three, he knew, there are sixty-three of them. One was short half
an arm. Another had a parchment shoved between its teeth, its wax
seal still unbroken.
Three days later, the vanguard of Roose Bolton’s host threaded its
way through the ruins and past the row of grisly sentinels—four
hundred mounted Freys clad in blue and grey, their spearpoints
glittering whenever the sun broke through the clouds. Two of old
Lord Walder’s sons led the van. One was brawny, with a massive jut
of jaw and arms thick with muscle. The other had hungry eyes
close-set above a pointed nose, a thin brown beard that did not
quite conceal the weak chin beneath it, a bald head. Hosteen and
Aenys. He remembered them from before he knew his name.
Hosteen was a bull, slow to anger but implacable once roused, and
by repute the ercest ghter of Lord Walder’s get. Aenys was older,
crueler, and more clever—a commander, not a swordsman. Both
were seasoned soldiers.

The northmen followed hard behind the van, their tattered
banners streaming in the wind. Reek watched them pass. Most were
afoot, and there were so few of them. He remembered the great
host that marched south with Young Wolf, beneath the direwolf of
Winterfell. Twenty thousand swords and spears had gone o to war
with Robb, or near enough to make no matter, but only two in ten
were coming back, and most of those were Dreadfort men.
Back where the press was thickest at the center of the column
rode a man armored in dark grey plate over a quilted tunic of
blood-red leather. His rondels were wrought in the shape of human
heads, with open mouths that shrieked in agony. From his shoulders
streamed a pink woolen cloak embroidered with droplets of blood.
Long streamers of red silk uttered from the top of his closed helm.
No crannogman will slay Roose Bolton with a poisoned arrow, Reek
thought when he rst saw him. An enclosed wagon groaned along
behind him, drawn by six heavy draft horses and defended by
crossbowmen, front and rear. Curtains of dark blue velvet concealed
the wagon’s occupants from watching eyes.
Farther back came the baggage train—lumbering wayns laden
with provisions and loot taken in the war, and carts crowded with
wounded men and cripples. And at the rear, more Freys. At least a
thousand, maybe more: bowmen, spearmen, peasants armed with
scythes and sharpened sticks, freeriders and mounted archers, and
another hundred knights to sti en them.
Collared and chained and back in rags again, Reek followed with
the other dogs at Lord Ramsay’s heels when his lordship strode
forth to greet his father. When the rider in the dark armor removed
his helm, however, the face beneath was not one that Reek knew.
Ramsay’s smile curdled at the sight, and anger ashed across his
face. “What is this, some mockery?”
“Just caution,” whispered Roose Bolton, as he emerged from
behind the curtains of the enclosed wagon.
The Lord of the Dreadfort did not have a strong likeness to his
bastard son. His face was clean-shaved, smooth-skinned, ordinary,
not handsome but not quite plain. Though Roose had been in
battles, he bore no scars. Though well past forty, he was as yet

unwrinkled, with scarce a line to tell of the passage of time. His lips
were so thin that when he pressed them together they seemed to
vanish altogether. There was an agelessness about him, a stillness;
on Roose Bolton’s face, rage and joy looked much the same. All he
and Ramsay had in common were their eyes. His eyes are ice. Reek
wondered if Roose Bolton ever cried. If so, do the tears feel cold upon
his cheeks?
Once, a boy called Theon Greyjoy had enjoyed tweaking Bolton
as they sat at council with Robb Stark, mocking his soft voice and
making japes about leeches. He must have been mad. This is no man
to jape with. You had only to look at Bolton to know that he had
more cruelty in his pinky toe than all the Freys combined.
“Father.” Lord Ramsay knelt before his sire.
Lord Roose studied him for a moment. “You may rise.” He turned
to help two young women down from inside the wagon.
The rst was short and very fat, with a round red face and three
chins wobbling beneath a sable hood. “My new wife,” Roose Bolton
said. “Lady Walda, this is my natural son. Kiss your stepmother’s
hand, Ramsay.” He did. “And I am sure you will recall the Lady
Arya. Your betrothed.”
The girl was slim, and taller than he remembered, but that was
only to be expected. Girls grow fast at that age. Her dress was grey
wool bordered with white satin; over it she wore an ermine cloak
clasped with a silver wolf’s head. Dark brown hair fell halfway
down her back. And her eyes …
That is not Lord Eddard’s daughter.
Arya had her father’s eyes, the grey eyes of the Starks. A girl her
age might let her hair grow long, add inches to her height, see her
chest ll out, but she could not change the color of her eyes. That’s
Sansa’s little friend, the steward’s girl. Jeyne, that was her name. Jeyne
Poole.
“Lord Ramsay.” The girl dipped down before him. That was
wrong as well. The real Arya Stark would have spat into his face. “I
pray that I will make you a good wife and give you strong sons to
follow after you.”
“That you will,” promised Ramsay, “and soon.”

JON

H

is candle had guttered out in a pool of wax, but morning light
was shining through the shutters of his window. Jon had fallen
asleep over his work again. Books covered his table, tall stacks of
them. He’d fetched them up himself, after spending half the night
searching through dusty vaults by lantern light. Sam was right, the
books desperately needed to be sorted, listed, and put in order, but
that was no task for stewards who could neither read nor write. It
would need to wait for Sam’s return.
If he does return. Jon feared for Sam and Maester Aemon. Cotter
Pyke had written from Eastwatch to report that the Storm Crow had
sighted the wreckage of a galley along the coast of Skagos. Whether
the broken ship was Blackbird, one of Stannis Baratheon’s sellsails,
or some passing trader, the crew of the Storm Crow had not been
able to discern. I meant to send Gilly and the babe to safety. Did I send
them to their graves instead?
Last night’s supper had congealed beside his elbow, scarce
touched. Dolorous Edd had lled his trencher almost to over owing
to allow Three-Finger Hobb’s infamous three-meat stew to soften
the stale bread. The jest among the brothers was that the three
meats were mutton, mutton, and mutton, but carrot, onion, and
turnip would have been closer to the mark. A lm of cold grease
glistened atop the remains of the stew.
Bowen Marsh had urged him to move into the Old Bear’s former
chambers in the King’s Tower after Stannis vacated them, but Jon
had declined. Moving into the king’s chambers could too easily be
taken to mean he did not expect the king to return.

A strange listlessness had settled over Castle Black since Stannis
had marched south, as if the free folk and the black brothers alike
were holding their breath, waiting to see what would come. The
yards and dining hall were empty more oft than not, the Lord
Commander’s Tower was a shell, the old common hall a pile of
blackened timbers, and Hardin’s Tower looked as if the next gust of
wind would knock it over. The only sound of life that Jon could
hear was the faint clash of swords coming from the yard outside the
armory. Iron Emmett was shouting at Hop-Robin to keep his shield
up. We had all best keep our shields up.
Jon washed and dressed and left the armory, stopping in the yard
outside just long enough to say a few words of encouragement to
Hop-Robin and Emmett’s other charges. He declined Ty’s o er of a
tail, as usual. He would have men enough about him; if it came to
blood, two more would hardly matter. He did take Longclaw,
though, and Ghost followed at his heels.
By the time he reached the stable, Dolorous Edd had the lord
commander’s palfrey saddled and bridled and waiting for him. The
wayns were forming up beneath Bowen Marsh’s watchful eye. The
Lord Steward was trotting down the column, pointing and fussing,
his cheeks red from the cold. When he spied Jon, they reddened
even more. “Lord Commander. Are you still intent on this …”
“… folly?” nished Jon. “Please tell me you were not about to
say folly, my lord. Yes, I am. We have been over this. Eastwatch
wants more men. The Shadow Tower wants more men. Greyguard
and Icemark as well, I have no doubt, and we have fourteen other
castles still sitting empty, long leagues of Wall that remain
unwatched and undefended.”
Marsh pursed his lips. “Lord Commander Mormont—”
“—is dead. And not at wildling hands, but at the hands of his own
Sworn Brothers, men he trusted. Neither you nor I can know what
he would or would not have done in my place.” Jon wheeled his
horse around. “Enough talk. Away.”
Dolorous Edd had heard the entire exchange. As Bowen Marsh
trotted o , he nodded toward his back and said, “Pomegranates. All

those seeds. A man could choke to death. I’d sooner have a turnip.
Never knew a turnip to do a man any harm.”
It was at times like this that Jon missed Maester Aemon the most.
Clydas tended to the ravens well enough, but he had not a tenth of
Aemon Targaryen’s knowledge or experience, and even less of his
wisdom. Bowen was a good man in his way, but the wound he had
taken at the Bridge of Skulls had hardened his attitudes, and the
only song he ever sang now was his familiar refrain about sealing
the gates. Othell Yarwyck was as stolid and unimaginative as he
was taciturn, and the First Rangers seemed to die as quick as they
were named. The Night’s Watch has lost too many of its best men, Jon
re ected, as the wagons began to move. The Old Bear, Qhorin
Halfhand, Donal Noye, Jarmen Buckwell, my uncle …
A light snow began to fall as the column made its way south
along the kingsroad, the long line of wagons wending past elds
and streams and wooded hillsides, with a dozen spearmen and a
dozen archers riding escort. The last few trips had seen some
ugliness at Mole’s Town, a little pushing and shoving, some
muttered curses, a lot of sullen looks. Bowen Marsh felt it best not
to take chances, and for once he and Jon were agreed.
The Lord Steward led the way. Jon rode a few yards back,
Dolorous Edd Tollett at his side. Half a mile south of Castle Black,
Edd urged his garron close to Jon’s and said, “M’lord? Look up
there. The big drunkard on the hill.”
The drunkard was an ash tree, twisted sideways by centuries of
wind. And now it had a face. A solemn mouth, a broken branch for
a nose, two eyes carved deep into the trunk, gazing north up the
kingsroad, toward the castle and the Wall.
The wildlings brought their gods with them after all. Jon was not
surprised. Men do not give up their gods so easily. The whole
pageant that Lady Melisandre had orchestrated beyond the Wall
suddenly seemed as empty as a mummer’s farce. “Looks a bit like
you, Edd,” he said, trying to make light of it.
“Aye, m’lord. I don’t have leaves growing out my nose, but
elsewise … Lady Melisandre won’t be happy.”
“She’s not like to see it. See that no one tells her.”

“She sees things in those res, though.”
“Smoke and cinders.”
“And people burning. Me, most like. With leaves up my nose. I
always feared I’d burn, but I was hoping to die rst.”
Jon glanced back at the face, wondering who had carved it. He
had posted guards around Mole’s Town, both to keep his crows
away from the wildling women and to keep the free folk from
slipping o southward to raid. Whoever had carved up the ash had
eluded his sentries, plainly. And if one man could slip through the
cordon, others could as well. I could double the guard again, he
thought sourly. Waste twice as many men, men who might otherwise be
walking the Wall.
The wagons continued on their slow way south through frozen
mud and blowing snow. A mile farther on, they came upon a second
face, carved into a chestnut tree that grew beside an icy stream,
where its eyes could watch the old plank bridge that spanned its
ow. “Twice as much trouble,” announced Dolorous Edd.
The chestnut was lea ess and skeletal, but its bare brown limbs
were not empty. On a low branch overhanging the stream a raven
sat hunched, its feathers ru ed up against the cold. When it spied
Jon it spread its wings and gave a scream. When he raised his st
and whistled, the big black bird came apping down, crying, “Corn,
corn, corn.”
“Corn for the free folk,” Jon told him. “None for you.” He
wondered if they would all be reduced to eating ravens before the
coming winter had run its course.
The brothers on the wagons had seen this face as well, Jon did
not doubt. No one spoke of it, but the message was plain to read for
any man with eyes. Jon had once heard Mance Rayder say that most
kneelers were sheep. “Now, a dog can herd a ock of sheep,” the
King-Beyond-the-Wall had said, “but free folk, well, some are
shadowcats and some are stones. One kind prowls where they
please and will tear your dogs to pieces. The other will not move at
all unless you kick them.” Neither shadowcats nor stones were like
to give up the gods they had worshiped all their lives to bow down
before one they hardly knew.

Just north of Mole’s Town they came upon the third watcher,
carved into the huge oak that marked the village perimeter, its deep
eyes xed upon the kingsroad. That is not a friendly face, Jon Snow
re ected. The faces that the First Men and the children of the forest
had carved into the weirwoods in eons past had stern or savage
visages more oft than not, but the great oak looked especially
angry, as if it were about to tear its roots from the earth and come
roaring after them. Its wounds are as fresh as the wounds of the men
who carved it.
Mole’s Town had always been larger than it seemed; most of it
was underground, sheltered from the cold and snow. That was more
true than ever now. The Magnar of Thenn had put the empty village
to the torch when he passed through on his way to attack Castle
Black, and only heaps of blackened beams and old scorched stones
remained above-ground … but down beneath the frozen earth, the
vaults and tunnels and deep cellars still endured, and that was
where the free folk had taken refuge, huddled together in the dark
like the moles from which the village took its name.
The wagons drew up in a crescent in front of what had once been
the village smithy. Nearby a swarm of red-faced children were
building a snow fort, but they scattered at the sight of the blackcloaked brothers, vanishing down one hole or another. A few
moments later the adults began to emerge from the earth. A stench
came with them, the smell of unwashed bodies and soiled clothing,
of nightsoil and urine. Jon saw one of his men wrinkle his nose and
say something to the man beside him. Some jape about the smell of
freedom, he guessed. Too many of his brothers were making japes
about the stench of the savages in Mole’s Town.
Pig ignorance, Jon thought. The free folk were no di erent than
the men of the Night’s Watch; some were clean, some dirty, but
most were clean at times and dirty at other times. This stink was
just the smell of a thousand people jammed into cellars and tunnels
that had been dug to shelter no more than a hundred.
The wildlings had done this dance before. Wordless, they formed
up in lines behind the wagons. There were three women for every
man, many with children—pale skinny things clutching at their

skirts. Jon saw very few babes in arms. The babes in arms died during
the march, he realized, and those who survived the battle died in the
king’s stockade.
The ghters had fared better. Three hundred men of ghting age,
Justin Massey had claimed in council. Lord Harwood Fell had
counted them. There will be spearwives too. Fifty, sixty, maybe as many
as a hundred. Fell’s count had included men who had su ered
wounds, Jon knew. He saw a score of those—men on crude
crutches, men with empty sleeves and missing hands, men with one
eye or half a face, a legless man carried between two friends. And
every one grey-faced and gaunt. Broken men, he thought. The wights
are not the only sort of living dead.
Not all the ghting men were broken, though. Half a dozen
Thenns in bronze scale armor stood clustered round one cellar stair,
watching sullenly and making no attempt to join the others. In the
ruins of the old village smithy Jon spied a big bald slab of a man he
recognized as Halleck, the brother of Harma Dogshead. Harma’s
pigs were gone, though. Eaten, no doubt. Those two in furs were
Hornfoot men, as savage as they were scrawny, barefoot even in
the snow. There are wolves amongst these sheep, still.
Val had reminded him of that, on his last visit with her. “Free folk
and kneelers are more alike than not, Jon Snow. Men are men and
women women, no matter which side of the Wall we were born on.
Good men and bad, heroes and villains, men of honor, liars,
cravens, brutes … we have plenty, as do you.”
She was not wrong. The trick was telling one from the other,
parting the sheep from the goats.
The black brothers began to pass out food. They’d brought slabs
of hard salt beef, dried cod, dried beans, turnips, carrots, sacks of
barley meal and wheaten our, pickled eggs, barrels of onions and
apples. “You can have an onion or an apple,” Jon heard Hairy Hal
tell one woman, “but not both. You got to pick.”
The woman did not seem to understand. “I need two of each. One
o’ each for me, t’others for my boy. He’s sick, but an apple will set
him right.”

Hal shook his head. “He has to come get his own apple. Or his
onion. Not both. Same as you. Now, is it an apple or an onion? Be
quick about it, now, there’s more behind you.”
“An apple,” she said, and he gave her one, an old dried thing,
small and withered.
“Move along, woman,” shouted a man three places back. “It’s
cold out here.”
The woman paid the shout no mind. “Another apple,” she said to
Hairy Hal. “For my son. Please. This one is so little.”
Hal looked to Jon. Jon shook his head. They would be out of
apples soon enough. If they started giving two to everyone who
wanted two, the latecomers would get none.
“Out of the way,” a girl behind the woman said. Then she shoved
her in the back. The woman staggered, lost her apple, and fell. The
other foodstu s in her arms went ying. Beans scattered, a turnip
rolled into a mud puddle, a sack of our split and spilled its
precious contents in the snow.
Angry voices rose, in the Old Tongue and the Common. More
shoving broke out at another wagon. “It’s not enough,” an old man
snarled. “You bloody crows are starving us to death.” The woman
who’d been knocked down was scrabbling on her knees after her
food. Jon saw the ash of naked steel a few yards away. His own
bowmen nocked arrows to their strings.
He turned in his saddle. “Rory. Quiet them.”
Rory lifted his great horn to his lips and blew.
AAAAhooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
The tumult and the shoving died. Heads turned. A child began to
cry. Mormont’s raven walked from Jon’s left shoulder to his right,
bobbing its head and muttering, “Snow, snow, snow.”
Jon waited until the last echoes had faded, then spurred his
palfrey forward where everyone could see him. “We’re feeding you
as best we can, as much as we can spare. Apples, onions, neeps,
carrots … there’s a long winter ahead for all of us, and our stores
are not inexhaustible.”
“You crows eat good enough.” Halleck shoved forward.

For now. “We hold the Wall. The Wall protects the realm … and
you now. You know the foe we face. You know what’s coming
down on us. Some of you have faced them before. Wights and white
walkers, dead things with blue eyes and black hands. I’ve seen them
too, fought them, sent one to hell. They kill, then they send your
dead against you. The giants were not able to stand against them,
nor you Thenns, the ice-river clans, the Hornfoots, the free
folk … and as the days grow shorter and the nights colder, they are
growing stronger. You left your homes and came south in your
hundreds and your thousands … why, but to escape them? To be
safe. Well, it’s the Wall that keeps you safe. It’s us that keeps you
safe, the black crows you despise.”
“Safe and starved,” said a squat woman with a windburned face, a
spearwife by the look of her.
“You want more food?” asked Jon. “The food’s for ghters. Help
us hold the Wall, and you’ll eat as well as any crow.” Or as poorly,
when the food runs short.
A silence fell. The wildlings exchanged wary looks. “Eat,” the
raven muttered. “Corn, corn.”
“Fight for you?” This voice was thickly accented. Sigorn, the
young Magnar of Thenn, spoke the Common Tongue haltingly at
best. “Not ght for you. Kill you better. Kill all you.”
The raven apped its wings. “Kill, kill.”
Sigorn’s father, the old Magnar, had been crushed beneath the
falling stair during his attack on Castle Black. I would feel the same if
someone asked me to make common cause with the Lannisters, Jon told
himself. “Your father tried to kill us all,” he reminded Sigorn. “The
Magnar was a brave man, yet he failed. And if he had
succeeded … who would hold the Wall?” He turned away from the
Thenns. “Winterfell’s walls were strong as well, but Winterfell
stands in ruins today, burned and broken. A wall is only as good as
the men defending it.”
An old man with a turnip cradled against his chest said, “You kill
us, you starve us, now you want t’ make us slaves.”
A chunky red-faced man shouted assent. “I’d sooner go naked
than wear one o’ them black rags on my back.”

One of the spearwives laughed. “Even your wife don’t want to see
you naked, Butts.”
A dozen voices all began to speak at once. The Thenns were
shouting in the Old Tongue. A little boy began to cry. Jon Snow
waited until all of it had died down, then turned to Hairy Hal and
said, “Hal, what was it that you told this woman?”
Hal looked confused. “About the food, you mean? An apple or an
onion? That’s all I said. They got to pick.”
“You have to pick,” Jon Snow repeated. “All of you. No one is
asking you to take our vows, and I do not care what gods you
worship. My own gods are the old gods, the gods of the North, but
you can keep the red god, or the Seven, or any other god who hears
your prayers. It’s spears we need. Bows. Eyes along the Wall.
“I will take any boy above the age of twelve who knows how to
hold a spear or string a bow. I will take your old men, your
wounded, and your cripples, even those who can no longer ght.
There are other tasks they may be able to perform. Fletching
arrows, milking goats, gathering
rewood, mucking out our
stables … the work is endless. And yes, I will take your women too.
I have no need of blushing maidens looking to be protected, but I
will take as many spearwives as will come.”
“And girls?” a girl asked. She looked as young as Arya had, the
last time Jon had seen her.
“Sixteen and older.”
“You’re taking boys as young as twelve.”
Down in the Seven Kingdoms boys of twelve were often pages or
squires; many had been training at arms for years. Girls of twelve
were children. These are wildlings, though. “As you will. Boys and
girls as young as twelve. But only those who know how to obey an
order. That goes for all of you. I will never ask you to kneel to me,
but I will set captains over you, and serjeants who will tell you
when to rise and when to sleep, where to eat, when to drink, what
to wear, when to draw your swords and loose your arrows. The
men of the Night’s Watch serve for life. I will not ask that of you,
but so long as you are on the Wall you will be under my command.

Disobey an order, and I’ll have your head o . Ask my brothers if I
won’t. They’ve seen me do it.”
“O ,” screamed the Old Bear’s raven. “O , o , o .”
“The choice is yours,” Jon Snow told them. “Those who want to
help us hold the Wall, return to Castle Black with me and I’ll see
you armed and fed. The rest of you, get your turnips and your
onions and crawl back inside your holes.”
The girl was the rst to come forward. “I can ght. My mother
was a spearwife.” Jon nodded. She may not even be twelve, he
thought, as she squirmed between a pair of old men, but he was not
about to turn away his only recruit.
A pair of striplings followed her, boys no older than fourteen.
Next a scarred man with a missing eye. “I seen them too, the dead
ones. Even crows are better’n that.” A tall spearwife, an old man on
crutches, a moonfaced boy with a withered arm, a young man
whose red hair reminded Jon of Ygritte.
And then Halleck. “I don’t like you, crow,” he growled, “but I
never liked the Mance neither, no more’n my sister did. Still, we
fought for him. Why not ght for you?”
The dam broke then. Halleck was a man of note. Mance was not
wrong. “Free folk don’t follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on
a tunic,” the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. “They won’t dance
for coins, they don’t care how you style yourself or what that chain
of o ce means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength.
They follow the man.”
Halleck’s cousins followed Halleck, then one of Harma’s bannerbearers, then men who’d fought with her, then others who had
heard tales of their prowess. Greybeards and green boys, ghting
men in their prime, wounded men and cripples, a good score of
spearwives, even three Hornfoot men.
But no Thenns. The Magnar turned and vanished back into the
tunnels, and his bronze-clad minions followed hard at his heels.
By the time the last withered apple had been handed out, the
wagons were crowded with wildlings, and they were sixty-three
stronger than when the column had set out from Castle Black that

morning. “What will you do with them?” Bowen Marsh asked Jon
on the ride back up the kingsroad.
“Train them, arm them, and split them up. Send them where
they’re needed. Eastwatch, the Shadow Tower, Icemark, Greyguard.
I mean to open three more forts as well.”
The Lord Steward glanced back. “Women too? Our brothers are
not accustomed to having women amongst them, my lord. Their
vows … there will be ghts, rapes …”
“These women have knives and know how to use them.”
“And the rst time one of these spearwives slits the throat of one
of our brothers, what then?”
“We will have lost a man,” said Jon, “but we have just gained
sixty-three. You’re good at counting, my lord. Correct me if I’m
wrong, but my reckoning leaves us sixty-two ahead.”
Marsh was unconvinced. “You’ve added sixty-three more mouths,
my lord … but how many are ghters, and whose side will they
ght on? If it’s the Others at the gates, most like they’ll stand with
us, I grant you … but if it’s Tormund Giantsbane or the Weeping
Man come calling with ten thousand howling killers, what then?”
“Then we’ll know. So let us hope it never comes to that.”

TYRION

H

e dreamt of his lord father and the Shrouded Lord. He dreamt
that they were one and the same, and when his father wrapped
stone arms around him and bent to give him his grey kiss, he woke
with his mouth dry and rusty with the taste of blood and his heart
hammering in his chest.
“Our dead dwarf has returned to us,” Haldon said.
Tyrion shook his head to clear away the webs of dream. The
Sorrows. I was lost in the Sorrows. “I am not dead.”
“That remains to be seen.” The Halfmaester stood over him.
“Duck, be a ne fowl and boil some broth for our little friend here.
He must be famished.”
He was on the Shy Maid, Tyrion saw, under a scratchy blanket
that smelled of vinegar. The Sorrows are behind us. It was just a dream
I dreamed as I was drowning. “Why do I stink of vinegar?”
“Lemore has been washing you with it. Some say it helps prevent
the greyscale. I am inclined to doubt that, but there was no harm in
trying. It was Lemore who forced the water from your lungs after
Gri had pulled you up. You were as cold as ice, and your lips were
blue. Yandry said we ought to throw you back, but the lad forbade
it.”
The prince. Memory came rushing back: the stone man reaching
out with cracked grey hands, the blood seeping from his knuckles.
He was heavy as a boulder, pulling me under. “Gri brought me up?”
He must hate me, or he would have let me die. “How long have I been
sleeping? What place is this?”

“Selhorys.” Haldon produced a small knife from his sleeve.
“Here,” he said, tossing it underhand at Tyrion.
The dwarf inched. The knife landed between his feet and stood
quivering in the deck. He plucked it out. “What’s this?”
“Take o your boots. Prick each of your toes and ngers.”
“That sounds … painful.”
“I hope so. Do it.”
Tyrion yanked o one boot and then the other, peeled down his
hose, squinted at his toes. It seemed to him they looked no better or
worse than usual. He poked gingerly at one big toe.
“Harder,” urged Haldon Halfmaester.
“Do you want me to draw blood?”
“If need be.”
“I’ll have a scab on every toe.”
“The purpose of the exercise is not to count your toes. I want to
see you wince. So long as the pricks hurt, you are safe. It is only
when you cannot feel the blade that you will have cause to fear.”
Greyscale. Tyrion grimaced. He stabbed another toe, cursed as a
bead of blood welled up around the knife’s point. “That hurt. Are
you happy?”
“Dancing with joy.”
“Your feet smell worse than mine, Yollo.” Duck had a cup of
broth. “Gri warned you not to lay hands upon the stone men.”
“Aye, but he forgot to warn the stone men not to lay their hands
upon me.”
“As you prick, look for patches of dead grey skin, for nails
beginning to turn black,” said Haldon. “If you see such signs, do not
hesitate. Better to lose a toe than a foot. Better to lose an arm than
spend your days wailing on the Bridge of Dream. Now the other
foot, if you please. Then your ngers.”
The dwarf recrossed his stunted legs and began to prick the other
set of toes. “Shall I prick my prick as well?”
“It would not hurt.”
“It would not hurt you is what you mean. Though I had as well
slice it o for all the use I make of it.”

“Feel free. We will have it tanned and stu ed and sell it for a
fortune. A dwarf’s cock has magical powers.”
“I have been telling all the women that for years.” Tyrion drove
the dagger’s point into the ball of his thumb, watched the blood
bead up, sucked it away. “How long must I continue to torture
myself? When will we be certain that I’m clean?”
“Truly?” said the Halfmaester. “Never. You swallowed half the
river. You may be going grey even now, turning to stone from
inside out, starting with your heart and lungs. If so, pricking your
toes and bathing in vinegar will not save you. When you’re done,
come have some broth.”
The broth was good, though Tyrion noted that the Halfmaester
kept the table between them as he ate. The Shy Maid was moored to
a weathered pier on the east bank of the Rhoyne. Two piers down, a
Volantene river galley was discharging soldiers. Shops and stalls and
storehouses huddled beneath a sandstone wall. The towers and
domes of the city were visible beyond it, reddened by the light of
the setting sun.
No, not a city. Selhorys was still accounted a mere town, and was
ruled from Old Volantis. This was not Westeros.
Lemore emerged on deck with the prince in tow. When she saw
Tyrion, she rushed across the deck to hug him. “The Mother is
merciful. We have prayed for you, Hugor.”
You did, at least. “I won’t hold that against you.”
Young Gri ’s greeting was less e usive. The princeling was in a
sullen mood, angry that he had been forced to remain on the Shy
Maid instead of going ashore with Yandry and Ysilla. “We only want
to keep you safe,” Lemore told him. “These are unsettled times.”
Haldon Halfmaester explained. “On the way down from the
Sorrows to Selhorys, we thrice glimpsed riders moving south along
the river’s eastern shore. Dothraki. Once they were so close we
could hear the bells tinkling in their braids, and sometimes at night
their res could be seen beyond the eastern hills. We passed
warships as well, Volantene river galleys crammed with slave
soldiers. The triarchs fear an attack upon Selhorys, plainly.”

Tyrion understood that quick enough. Alone amongst the major
river towns, Selhorys stood upon the eastern bank of the Rhoyne,
making it much more vulnerable to the horselords than its sister
towns across the river. Even so, it is a small prize. If I were khal, I
would feint at Selhorys, let the Volantenes rush to defend it, then swing
south and ride hard for Volantis itself.
“I know how to use a sword,” Young Gri was insisting.
“Even the bravest of your forebears kept his Kingsguard close
about him in times of peril.” Lemore had changed out of her septa’s
robes into garb more be tting the wife or daughter of a prosperous
merchant. Tyrion watched her closely. He had sni ed out the truth
beneath the dyed blue hair of Gri and Young Gri easily enough,
and Yandry and Ysilla seemed to be no more than they claimed to
be, whilst Duck was somewhat less. Lemore, though … Who is she,
really? Why is she here? Not for gold, I’d judge. What is this prince to
her? Was she ever a true septa?
Haldon took note of her change of garb as well. “What are we to
make of this sudden loss of faith? I preferred you in your septa’s
robes, Lemore.”
“I preferred her naked,” said Tyrion.
Lemore gave him a reproachful look. “That is because you have a
wicked soul. Septa’s robes scream of Westeros and might draw
unwelcome eyes onto us.” She turned back to Prince Aegon. “You
are not the only one who must needs hide.”
The lad did not seem appeased. The perfect prince but still half a
boy for all that, with little and less experience of the world and all its
woes. “Prince Aegon,” said Tyrion, “since we’re both stuck aboard
this boat, perhaps you will honor me with a game of cyvasse to
while away the hours?”
The prince gave him a wary look. “I am sick of cyvasse.”
“Sick of losing to a dwarf, you mean?”
That pricked the lad’s pride, just as Tyrion had known it would.
“Go fetch the board and pieces. This time I mean to smash you.”
They played on deck, sitting cross-legged behind the cabin. Young
Gri arrayed his army for attack, with dragon, elephants, and heavy
horse up front. A young man’s formation, as bold as it is foolish. He

risks all for the quick kill. He let the prince have rst move. Haldon
stood behind them, watching the play.
When the prince reached for his dragon, Tyrion cleared his throat.
“I would not do that if I were you. It is a mistake to bring your
dragon out too soon.” He smiled innocently. “Your father knew the
dangers of being overbold.”
“Did you know my true father?”
“Well, I saw him twice or thrice, but I was only ten when Robert
killed him, and mine own sire had me hidden underneath a rock.
No, I cannot claim I knew Prince Rhaegar. Not as your false father
did. Lord Connington was the prince’s dearest friend, was he not?”
Young Gri pushed a lock of blue hair out of his eyes. “They were
squires together at King’s Landing.”
“A true friend, our Lord Connington. He must be, to remain so
ercely loyal to the grandson of the king who took his lands and
titles and sent him into exile. A pity about that. Elsewise Prince
Rhaegar’s friend might have been on hand when my father sacked
King’s Landing, to save Prince Rhaegar’s precious little son from
getting his royal brains dashed out against a wall.”
The lad ushed. “That was not me. I told you. That was some
tanner’s son from Pisswater Bend whose mother died birthing him.
His father sold him to Lord Varys for a jug of Arbor gold. He had
other sons but had never tasted Arbor gold. Varys gave the
Pisswater boy to my lady mother and carried me away.”
“Aye.” Tyrion moved his elephants. “And when the pisswater
prince was safely dead, the eunuch smuggled you across the narrow
sea to his fat friend the cheesemonger, who hid you on a poleboat
and found an exile lord willing to call himself your father. It does
make for a splendid story, and the singers will make much of your
escape once you take the Iron Throne … assuming that our fair
Daenerys takes you for her consort.”
“She will. She must.”
“Must?” Tyrion made a tsking sound. “That is not a word queens
like to hear. You are her perfect prince, agreed, bright and bold and
comely as any maid could wish. Daenerys Targaryen is no maid,
however. She is the widow of a Dothraki khal, a mother of dragons

and sacker of cities, Aegon the Conqueror with teats. She may not
prove as willing as you wish.”
“She’ll be willing.” Prince Aegon sounded shocked. It was plain
that he had never before considered the possibility that his bride-tobe might refuse him. “You don’t know her.” He picked up his heavy
horse and put it down with a thump.
The dwarf shrugged. “I know that she spent her childhood in
exile, impoverished, living on dreams and schemes, running from
one city to the next, always fearful, never safe, friendless but for a
brother who was by all accounts half-mad … a brother who sold her
maidenhood to the Dothraki for the promise of an army. I know
that somewhere out upon the grass her dragons hatched, and so did
she. I know she is proud. How not? What else was left her but
pride? I know she is strong. How not? The Dothraki despise
weakness. If Daenerys had been weak, she would have perished
with Viserys. I know she is erce. Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen are
proof enough of that. She has crossed the grasslands and the red
waste, survived assassins and conspiracies and fell sorceries, grieved
for a brother and a husband and a son, trod the cities of the slavers
to dust beneath her dainty sandaled feet. Now, how do you suppose
this queen will react when you turn up with your begging bowl in
hand and say, ‘Good morrow to you, Auntie. I am your nephew,
Aegon, returned from the dead. I’ve been hiding on a poleboat all
my life, but now I’ve washed the blue dye from my hair and I’d like
a dragon, please … and oh, did I mention, my claim to the Iron
Throne is stronger than your own?’ ”
Aegon’s mouth twisted in fury. “I will not come to my aunt a
beggar. I will come to her a kinsman, with an army.”
“A small army.” There, that’s made him good and angry. The dwarf
could not help but think of Jo rey. I have a gift for angering princes.
“Queen Daenerys has a large one, and no thanks to you.” Tyrion
moved his crossbows.
“Say what you want. She will be my bride, Lord Connington will
see to it. I trust him as much as if he were my own blood.”
“Perhaps you should be the fool instead of me. Trust no one, my
prince. Not your chainless maester, not your false father, not the

gallant Duck nor the lovely Lemore nor these other ne friends who
grew you from a bean. Above all, trust not the cheesemonger, nor
the Spider, nor this little dragon queen you mean to marry. All that
mistrust will sour your stomach and keep you awake by night, ’tis
true, but better that than the long sleep that does not end.” The
dwarf pushed his black dragon across a range of mountains. “But
what do I know? Your false father is a great lord, and I am just
some twisted little monkey man. Still, I’d do things di erently.”
That got the boy’s attention. “How di erently?”
“If I were you? I would go west instead of east. Land in Dorne
and raise my banners. The Seven Kingdoms will never be more ripe
for conquest than they are right now. A boy king sits the Iron
Throne. The north is in chaos, the riverlands a devastation, a rebel
holds Storm’s End and Dragonstone. When winter comes, the realm
will starve. And who remains to deal with all of this, who rules the
little king who rules the Seven Kingdoms? Why, my own sweet
sister. There is no one else. My brother, Jaime, thirsts for battle,
not for power. He’s run from every chance he’s had to rule. My
uncle Kevan would make a passably good regent if someone pressed
the duty on him, but he will never reach for it. The gods shaped him
to be a follower, not a leader.” Well, the gods and my lord father.
“Mace Tyrell would grasp the sceptre gladly, but mine own kin are
not like to step aside and give it to him. And everyone hates
Stannis. Who does that leave? Why, only Cersei.
“Westeros is torn and bleeding, and I do not doubt that even now
my sweet sister is binding up the wounds … with salt. Cersei is as
gentle as King Maegor, as sel ess as Aegon the Unworthy, as wise
as Mad Aerys. She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She
takes caution for cowardice and dissent for de ance. And she is
greedy. Greedy for power, for honor, for love. Tommen’s rule is
bolstered by all of the alliances that my lord father built so
carefully, but soon enough she will destroy them, every one. Land
and raise your banners, and men will ock to your cause. Lords
great and small, and smallfolk too. But do not wait too long, my
prince. The moment will not last. The tide that lifts you now will

soon recede. Be certain you reach Westeros before my sister falls
and someone more competent takes her place.”
“But,” Prince Aegon said, “without Daenerys and her dragons,
how could we hope to win?”
“You do not need to win,” Tyrion told him. “All you need to do is
raise your banners, rally your supporters, and hold, until Daenerys
arrives to join her strength to yours.”
“You said she might not have me.”
“Perhaps I overstated. She may take pity on you when you come
begging for her hand.” The dwarf shrugged. “Do you want to wager
your throne upon a woman’s whim? Go to Westeros, though … ah,
then you are a rebel, not a beggar. Bold, reckless, a true scion of
House Targaryen, walking in the footsteps of Aegon the Conqueror.
A dragon.
“I told you, I know our little queen. Let her hear that her brother
Rhaegar’s murdered son is still alive, that this brave boy has raised
the dragon standard of her forebears in Westeros once more, that he
is ghting a desperate war to avenge his father and reclaim the Iron
Throne for House Targaryen, hard-pressed on every side … and she
will y to your side as fast as wind and water can carry her. You are
the last of her line, and this Mother of Dragons, this Breaker of
Chains, is above all a rescuer. The girl who drowned the slaver cities
in blood rather than leave strangers to their chains can scarcely
abandon her own brother’s son in his hour of peril. And when she
reaches Westeros, and meets you for the rst time, you will meet as
equals, man and woman, not queen and supplicant. How can she
help but love you then, I ask you?” Smiling, he seized his dragon,
ew it across the board. “I hope Your Grace will pardon me. Your
king is trapped. Death in four.”
The prince stared at the playing board. “My dragon—”
“—is too far away to save you. You should have moved her to the
center of the battle.”
“But you said—”
“I lied. Trust no one. And keep your dragon close.”
Young Gri jerked to his feet and kicked over the board. Cyvasse
pieces ew in all directions, bouncing and rolling across the deck of

the Shy Maid. “Pick those up,” the boy commanded.
He may well be a Targaryen after all. “If it please Your Grace.”
Tyrion got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl about
the deck, gathering up pieces.
It was close to dusk when Yandry and Ysilla returned to the Shy
Maid. A porter trotted at their heels, pushing a wheelbarrow heaped
high with provisions: salt and our, fresh-churned butter, slabs of
bacon wrapped in linen, sacks of oranges, apples, and pears. Yandry
had a wine cask on one shoulder, while Ysilla had slung a pike over
hers. The sh was as large as Tyrion.
When she saw the dwarf standing at the end of the gangplank,
Ysilla stopped so suddenly that Yandry blundered into her, and the
pike almost slid o her back into the river. Duck helped her rescue
it. Ysilla glared at Tyrion and made a peculiar stabbing gesture with
three of her ngers. A sign to ward o evil. “Let me help you with
that sh,” he said to Duck.
“No,” Ysilla snapped. “Stay away. Touch no food besides the food
you eat yourself.”
The dwarf raised both hands. “As you command.”
Yandry thumped the wine cask down onto the deck. “Where’s
Gri ?” he demanded of Haldon.
“Asleep.”
“Then rouse him. We have tidings he’d best hear. The queen’s
name is on every tongue in Selhorys. They say she still sits in
Meereen, sore beset. If the talk in the markets can be believed, Old
Volantis will soon join the war against her.”
Haldon pursed his lips. “The gossip of shmongers is not to be
relied on. Still, I suppose Gri will want to hear. You know how he
is.” The Halfmaester went below.
The girl never started for the west. No doubt she had good reasons.
Between Meereen and Volantis lay ve hundred leagues of deserts,
mountains, swamps, and ruins, plus Mantarys with its sinister
repute. A city of monsters, they say, but if she marches overland, where
else is she to turn for food and water? The sea would be swifter, but if
she does not have the ships …

By the time Gri appeared on deck, the pike was spitting and
sizzling over the brazier whilst Ysilla hovered over it with a lemon,
squeezing. The sellsword wore his mail and wolfskin cloak, soft
leather gloves, dark woolen breeches. If he was surprised to see
Tyrion awake, he gave no sign beyond his customary scowl. He
took Yandry back to the tiller, where they spoke in low voices, too
quietly for the dwarf to hear.
Finally Gri beckoned to Haldon. “We need to know the truth of
these rumors. Go ashore and learn what you can. Qavo will know, if
you can nd him. Try the Riverman and the Painted Turtle. You
know his other places.”
“Aye. I’ll take the dwarf as well. Four ears hear more than two.
And you know how Qavo is about his cyvasse.”
“As you wish. Be back before the sun comes up. If for any reason
you’re delayed, make your way to the Golden Company.”
Spoken like a lord. Tyrion kept the thought to himself.
Haldon donned a hooded cloak, and Tyrion shed his homemade
motley for something drab and grey. Gri allowed them each a
purse of silver from Illyrio’s chests. “To loosen tongues.”
Dusk was giving way to darkness as they made their way along
the riverfront. Some of the ships they passed appeared deserted,
their gangplanks drawn up. Others crawled with armed men who
eyed them with suspicion. Under the town walls, parchment
lanterns had been lit above the stalls, throwing pools of colored
light upon the cobbled path. Tyrion watched as Haldon’s face turned
green, then red, then purple. Under the cacophony of foreign
tongues, he heard queer music playing from somewhere up ahead, a
thin high uting accompanied by drums. A dog was barking too,
behind them.
And the whores were out. River or sea, a port was a port, and
wherever you found sailors, you’d nd whores. Is that what my father
meant? Is that where whores go, to the sea?
The whores of Lannisport and King’s Landing were free women.
Their sisters of Selhorys were slaves, their bondage indicated by the
tears tattooed beneath their right eyes. Old as sin and twice as ugly,
the lot of them. It was almost enough to put a man o whoring.

Tyrion felt their eyes upon them as he waddled by, and heard them
whispering to one another and giggling behind their hands. You
would think they had never seen a dwarf before.
A squad of Volantene spearmen stood guard at the river gate.
Torchlight gleamed o the steel claws that jutted from their
gauntlets. Their helms were tiger’s masks, the faces beneath marked
by green stripes tattooed across both cheeks. The slave soldiers of
Volantis were ercely proud of their tiger stripes, Tyrion knew. Do
they yearn for freedom? he wondered. What would they do if this child
queen bestowed it on them? What are they, if not tigers? What am I, if
not a lion?
One of the tigers spied the dwarf and said something that made
the others laugh. As they reached the gate, he pulled o his clawed
gauntlet and the sweaty glove beneath, locked one arm around the
dwarf’s neck, and roughly rubbed his head. Tyrion was too startled
to resist. It was all over in a heartbeat. “Was there some reason for
that?” he demanded of the Halfmaester.
“He says that it is good luck to rub the head of a dwarf,” Haldon
said after an exchange with the guard in his own tongue.
Tyrion forced himself to smile at the man. “Tell him that it is
even better luck to suck on a dwarf’s cock.”
“Best not. Tigers have been known to have sharp teeth.”
A di erent guard motioned them through the gate, waving a
torch at them impatiently. Haldon Halfmaester led the way into
Selhorys proper, with Tyrion waddling warily at his heels.
A great square opened up before them. Even at this hour, it was
crowded and noisy and ablaze with light. Lanterns swung from iron
chains above the doors of inns and pleasure houses, but within the
gates, they were made of colored glass, not parchment. To their
right a night re burned outside a temple of red stone. A priest in
scarlet robes stood on the temple balcony, haranguing the small
crowd that had gathered around the ames. Elsewhere, travelers sat
playing cyvasse in front of an inn, drunken soldiers wandered in and
out of what was obviously a brothel, a woman beat a mule outside a
stable. A two-wheeled cart went rumbling past them, pulled by a

white dwarf elephant. This is another world, thought Tyrion, but not
so di erent from the world I know.
The square was dominated by a white marble statue of a headless
man in impossibly ornate armor, astride a warhorse similarly
arrayed. “Who might that be?” wondered Tyrion.
“Triarch Horonno. A Volantene hero from the Century of Blood.
He was returned as triarch every year for forty years, until he
wearied of elections and declared himself triarch for life. The
Volantenes were not amused. He was put to death soon after. Tied
between two elephants and torn in half.”
“His statue seems to lack a head.”
“He was a tiger. When the elephants came to power, their
followers went on a rampage, knocking the heads from the statues
of those they blamed for all the wars and deaths.” He shrugged.
“That was another age. Come, we’d best hear what that priest is
going on about. I swear I heard the name Daenerys.”
Across the square they joined the growing throng outside the red
temple. With the locals towering above him on every hand, the
little man found it hard to see much beyond their arses. He could
hear most every word the priest was saying, but that was not to say
he understood them. “Do you understand what he is saying?” he
asked Haldon in the Common Tongue.
“I would if I did not have a dwarf piping in my ear.”
“I do not pipe.” Tyrion crossed his arms and looked behind him,
studying the faces of the men and women who had stopped to
listen. Everywhere he turned, he saw tattoos. Slaves. Four of every
ve of them are slaves.
“The priest is calling on the Volantenes to go to war,” the
Halfmaester told him, “but on the side of right, as soldiers of the
Lord of Light, R’hllor who made the sun and stars and ghts
eternally against the darkness. Nyessos and Malaquo have turned
away from the light, he says, their hearts darkened by the yellow
harpies from the east. He says …”
“Dragons. I understood that word. He said dragons.”
“Aye. The dragons have come to carry her to glory.”
“Her. Daenerys?”

Haldon nodded. “Benerro has sent forth the word from Volantis.
Her coming is the ful llment of an ancient prophecy. From smoke
and salt was she born to make the world anew. She is Azor Ahai
returned … and her triumph over darkness will bring a summer that
will never end … death itself will bend its knee, and all those who
die ghting in her cause shall be reborn …”
“Do I have to be reborn in this same body?” asked Tyrion. The
crowd was growing thicker. He could feel them pressing in around
them. “Who is Benerro?”
Haldon raised an eyebrow. “High Priest of the red temple in
Volantis. Flame of Truth, Light of Wisdom, First Servant of the Lord
of Light, Slave of R’hllor.”
The only red priest Tyrion had ever known was Thoros of Myr,
the portly, genial, wine-stained roisterer who had loitered about
Robert’s court swilling the king’s nest vintages and setting his
sword on re for mêlées. “Give me priests who are fat and corrupt
and cynical,” he told Haldon, “the sort who like to sit on soft satin
cushions, nibble sweetmeats, and diddle little boys. It’s the ones
who believe in gods who make the trouble.”
“It may be that we can use this trouble to our advantage. I know
where we may nd answers.” Haldon led them past the headless
hero to where a big stone inn fronted on the square. The ridged
shell of some immense turtle hung above its door, painted in garish
colors. Inside a hundred dim red candles burned like distant stars.
The air was fragrant with the smell of roasted meat and spices, and
a slave girl with a turtle on one cheek was pouring pale green wine.
Haldon paused in the doorway. “There. Those two.”
In the alcove two men sat over a carved stone cyvasse table,
squinting at their pieces by the light of a red candle. One was gaunt
and sallow, with thinning black hair and a blade of a nose. The
other was wide of shoulder and round of belly, with corkscrew
ringlets tumbling past his collar. Neither deigned to look up from
their game until Haldon drew up a chair between them and said,
“My dwarf plays better cyvasse than both of you combined.”
The bigger man raised his eyes to gaze at the intruders in distaste
and said something in the tongue of Old Volantis, too fast for

Tyrion to hope to follow. The thinner one leaned back in his chair.
“Is he for sale?” he asked in the Common Tongue of Westeros. “The
triarch’s grotesquerie is in need of a cyvasse-playing dwarf.”
“Yollo is no slave.”
“What a pity.” The thin man shifted an onyx elephant.
Across the cyvasse table, the man behind the alabaster army
pursed his lips in disapproval. He moved his heavy horse.
“A blunder,” said Tyrion. He had as well play his part.
“Just so,” the thin man said. He answered with his own heavy
horse. A urry of quick moves followed, until nally the thin man
smiled and said, “Death, my friend.”
The big man glowered at the board, then rose and growled
something in his own tongue. His opponent laughed. “Come now.
The dwarf does not stink as bad as that.” He beckoned Tyrion
toward the empty chair. “Up with you, little man. Put your silver on
the table, and we will see how well you play the game.”
Which game? Tyrion might have asked. He climbed onto the chair.
“I play better with a full belly and a cup of wine to hand.” The thin
man turned obligingly and called for the slave girl to fetch them
food and drink.
Haldon said, “The noble Qavo Nogarys is the customs o cer here
in Selhorys. I have never once defeated him at cyvasse.”
Tyrion understood. “Perhaps I will be more fortunate.” He
opened his purse and stacked silver coins beside the board, one atop
another until nally Qavo smiled.
As each of them was setting up his pieces behind the cyvasse
screen, Haldon said, “What news from downriver? Will it be war?”
Qavo shrugged. “The Yunkai’i would have it so. They style
themselves the Wise Masters. Of their wisdom I cannot speak, but
they do not lack for cunning. Their envoy came to us with chests of
gold and gems and two hundred slaves, nubile girls and smoothskinned boys trained in the way of the seven sighs. I am told his
feasts are memorable and his bribes lavish.”
“The Yunkishmen have bought your triarchs?”
“Only Nyessos.” Qavo removed the screen and studied the
placement of Tyrion’s army. “Malaquo may be old and toothless,

but he is a tiger still, and Doniphos will not be returned as triarch.
The city thirsts for war.”
“Why?” wondered Tyrion. “Meereen is long leagues across the
sea. How has this sweet child queen o ended Old Volantis?”
“Sweet?” Qavo laughed. “If even half the stories coming back
from Slaver’s Bay are true, this child is a monster. They say that she
is bloodthirsty, that those who speak against her are impaled on
spikes to die lingering deaths. They say she is a sorceress who feeds
her dragons on the esh of newborn babes, an oathbreaker who
mocks the gods, breaks truces, threatens envoys, and turns on those
who have served her loyally. They say her lust cannot be sated, that
she mates with men, women, eunuchs, even dogs and children, and
woe betide the lover who fails to satisfy her. She gives her body to
men to take their souls in thrall.”
Oh, good, thought Tyrion. If she gives her body to me, she is welcome
to my soul, small and stunted though it is.
“They say,” said Haldon. “By they, you mean the slavers, the
exiles she drove from Astapor and Meereen. Mere calumnies.”
“The best calumnies are spiced with truth,” suggested Qavo, “but
the girl’s true sin cannot be denied. This arrogant child has taken it
upon herself to smash the slave trade, but that tra c was never
con ned to Slaver’s Bay. It was part of the sea of trade that spanned
the world, and the dragon queen has clouded the water. Behind the
Black Wall, lords of ancient blood sleep poorly, listening as their
kitchen slaves sharpen their long knives. Slaves grow our food,
clean our streets, teach our young. They guard our walls, row our
galleys, ght our battles. And now when they look east, they see
this young queen shining from afar, this breaker of chains. The Old
Blood cannot su er that. Poor men hate her too. Even the vilest
beggar stands higher than a slave. This dragon queen would rob him
of that consolation.”
Tyrion advanced his spearmen. Qavo replied with his light horse.
Tyrion moved his crossbowmen up a square and said, “The red
priest outside seemed to think Volantis should ght for this silver
queen, not against her.”

“The red priests would be wise to hold their tongues,” said Qavo
Nogarys. “Already there has been ghting between their followers
and those who worship other gods. Benerro’s rantings will only
serve to bring a savage wrath down upon his head.”
“What rantings?” the dwarf asked, toying with his rabble.
The Volantene waved a hand. “In Volantis, thousands of slaves
and freedmen crowd the temple plaza every night to hear Benerro
shriek of bleeding stars and a sword of re that will cleanse the
world. He has been preaching that Volantis will surely burn if the
triarchs take up arms against the silver queen.”
“That’s a prophecy even I could make. Ah, supper.”
Supper was a plate of roasted goat served on a bed of sliced
onions. The meat was spiced and fragrant, charred outside and red
and juicy within. Tyrion plucked at a piece. It was so hot it burned
his ngers, but so good he could not help but reach for another
chunk. He washed it down with the pale green Volantene liquor, the
closest thing he’d had to wine for ages. “Very good,” he said,
plucking up his dragon. “The most powerful piece in the game,” he
announced, as he removed one of Qavo’s elephants. “And Daenerys
Targaryen has three, it’s said.”
“Three,” Qavo allowed, “against thrice three thousand enemies.
Grazdan mo Eraz was not the only envoy sent out from the Yellow
City. When the Wise Masters move against Meereen, the legions of
New Ghis will ght beside them. Tolosi. Elyrians. Even the
Dothraki.”
“You have Dothraki outside your own gates,” Haldon said.
“Khal Pono.” Qavo waved a pale hand in dismissal. “The
horselords come, we give them gifts, the horselords go.” He moved
his catapult again, closed his hand around Tyrion’s alabaster dragon,
removed it from the board.
The rest was slaughter, though the dwarf held on another dozen
moves. “The time has come for bitter tears,” Qavo said at last,
scooping up the pile of silver. “Another game?”
“No need,” said Haldon. “My dwarf has had his lesson in humility.
I think it is best we get back to our boat.”

Outside in the square, the night re was still burning, but the
priest was gone and the crowd was long dispersed. The glow of
candles glimmered from the windows of the brothel. From inside
came the sound of women’s laughter. “The night is still young,” said
Tyrion. “Qavo may not have told us everything. And whores hear
much and more from the men they service.”
“Do you need a woman so badly, Yollo?”
“A man grows weary of having no lovers but his ngers.” Selhorys
may be where whores go. Tysha might be in there even now, with tears
tattooed upon her cheek. “I almost drowned. A man needs a woman
after that. Besides, I need to make sure my prick hasn’t turned to
stone.”
The Halfmaester laughed. “I will wait for you in the tavern by the
gate. Do not be too long about your business.”
“Oh, have no fear on that count. Most women prefer to be done
with me as quickly as they can.”
The brothel was a modest one compared to those the dwarf had
been wont to frequent in Lannisport and King’s Landing. The
proprietor did not seem to speak any tongue but that of Volantis,
but he understood the clank of silver well enough and led Tyrion
through an archway into a long room that smelled of incense, where
four bored slave girls were lounging about in various states of
undress. Two had seen at least forty namedays come and go, he
guessed; the youngest was perhaps fteen or sixteen. None was as
hideous as the whores he’d seen working the docks, though they fell
well short of beauty. One was plainly pregnant. Another was just
fat, and sported iron rings in both her nipples. All four had tears
tattooed beneath one eye.
“Do you have a girl who speaks the tongue of Westeros?” asked
Tyrion. The proprietor squinted, uncomprehending, so he repeated
the question in High Valyrian. This time the man seemed to grasp a
word or three and replied in Volantene. “Sunset girl” was all the
dwarf could get out of his answer. He took that to mean a girl from
the Sunset Kingdoms.
There was only one such in the house, and she was not Tysha. She
had freckled cheeks and tight red curls upon her head, which gave

promise of freckled breasts and red hair between her legs. “She’ll
do,” said Tyrion, “and I’ll have a agon too. Red wine with red
esh.” The whore was looking at his noseless face with revulsion in
her eyes. “Do I o end you, sweetling? I am an o ensive creature, as
my father would be glad to tell you if he were not dead and
rotting.”
Though she did look Westerosi, the girl spoke not a word of the
Common Tongue. Perhaps she was captured by some slaver as a child.
Her bedchamber was small, but there was a Myrish carpet on the
oor and a mattress stu ed with feathers in place of straw. I have
seen worse. “Will you give me your name?” he asked, as he took a
cup of wine from her. “No?” The wine was strong and sour and
required no translation. “I suppose I shall settle for your cunt.” He
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Have you ever bedded
a monster before? Now’s as good a time as any. Out of your clothes
and onto your back, if it please you. Or not.”
She looked at him uncomprehending, until he took the agon
from her hands and lifted her skirts up over her head. After that she
understood what was required of her, though she did not prove the
liveliest of partners. Tyrion had been so long without a woman that
he spent himself inside her on the third thrust.
He rolled o feeling more ashamed than sated. This was a mistake.
What a wretched creature I’ve become. “Do you know a woman by the
name of Tysha?” he asked, as he watched his seed dribble out of her
onto the bed. The whore did not respond. “Do you know where
whores go?” She did not answer that one either. Her back was
crisscrossed by ridges of scar tissue. This girl is as good as dead. I have
just fucked a corpse. Even her eyes looked dead. She does not even
have the strength to loathe me.
He needed wine. A lot of wine. He seized the agon with both
hands and raised it to his lips. The wine ran red. Down his throat,
down his chin. It dripped from his beard and soaked the feather
bed. In the candlelight it looked as dark as the wine that had
poisoned Jo rey. When he was done he tossed the empty agon
aside and half-rolled and half-staggered to the oor, groping for a
chamber pot. There was none to be found. His stomach heaved, and

he found himself on his knees, retching on the carpet, that
wonderful thick Myrish carpet, as comforting as lies.
The whore cried out in distress. They will blame her for this, he
realized, ashamed. “Cut o my head and take it to King’s Landing,”
Tyrion urged her. “My sister will make a lady of you, and no one
will ever whip you again.” She did not understand that either, so he
shoved her legs apart, crawled between them, and took her once
more. That much she could comprehend, at least.
Afterward the wine was done and so was he, so he wadded up the
girl’s clothing and tossed it at the door. She took the hint and ed,
leaving him alone in the darkness, sinking deeper into his feather
bed. I am stinking drunk. He dare not close his eyes, for fear of
sleep. Beyond the veil of dream, the Sorrows were waiting for him.
Stone steps ascending endlessly, steep and slick and treacherous,
and somewhere at the top, the Shrouded Lord. I do not want to meet
the Shrouded Lord. Tyrion fumbled back into his clothes again and
groped his way to the stair. Gri will ay me. Well, why not? If ever a
dwarf deserved a skinning, I’m him.
Halfway down the steps, he lost his footing. Somehow he
managed to break his tumble with his hands and turn it into a
clumsy thumping cartwheel. The whores in the room below looked
up in astonishment when he landed at the foot of the steps. Tyrion
rolled onto his feet and gave them a bow. “I am more agile when
I’m drunk.” He turned to the proprietor. “I fear I ruined your
carpet. The girl’s not to blame. Let me pay.” He pulled out a stful
of coins and tossed them at the man.
“Imp,” a deep voice said, behind him.
In the corner of the room, a man sat in a pool of shadow, with a
whore squirming on his lap. I never saw that girl. If I had, I would
have taken her upstairs instead of freckles. She was younger than the
others, slim and pretty, with long silvery hair. Lyseni, at a
guess … but the man whose lap she lled was from the Seven
Kingdoms. Burly and broad-shouldered, forty if he was a day, and
maybe older. Half his head was bald, but coarse stubble covered his
cheeks and chin, and hair grew thickly down his arms, sprouting
even from his knuckles.

Tyrion did not like the look of him. He liked the big black bear
on his surcoat even less. Wool. He’s wearing wool, in this heat. Who
else but a knight would be so fucking mad? “How pleasant to hear the
Common Tongue so far from home,” he made himself say, “but I
fear you have mistaken me. My name is Hugor Hill. May I buy you
a cup of wine, my friend?”
“I’ve drunk enough.” The knight shoved his whore aside and got
to his feet. His sword belt hung on a peg beside him. He took it
down and drew his blade. Steel whispered against leather. The
whores were watching avidly, candlelight shining in their eyes. The
proprietor had vanished. “You’re mine, Hugor.”
Tyrion could no more outrun him than out ght him. Drunk as he
was, he could not even hope to outwit him. He spread his hands.
“And what do you mean to do with me?”
“Deliver you,” the knight said, “to the queen.”

DAENERYS

G

alazza Galare arrived at the Great Pyramid attended by a
dozen White Graces, girls of noble birth who were still too young to
have served their year in the temple’s pleasure gardens. They made
for a pretty portrait, the proud old woman all in green surrounded
by the little girls robed and veiled in white, armored in their
innocence.
The queen welcomed them warmly, then summoned Missandei to
see that the girls were fed and entertained whilst she shared a
private supper with the Green Grace.
Her cooks had prepared them a magni cent meal of honeyed
lamb, fragrant with crushed mint and served with the small green
gs she liked so much. Two of Dany’s favorite hostages served the
food and kept the cups lled—a doe-eyed little girl called Qezza and
a skinny boy named Grazhar. They were brother and sister, and
cousins of the Green Grace, who greeted them with kisses when she
swept in, and asked them if they had been good.
“They are very sweet, the both of them,” Dany assured her.
“Qezza sings for me sometimes. She has a lovely voice. And Ser
Barristan has been instructing Grazhar and the other boys in the
ways of western chivalry.”
“They are of my blood,” the Green Grace said, as Qezza lled her
cup with a dark red wine. “It is good to know they have pleased
Your Radiance. I hope I may do likewise.” The old woman’s hair
was white and her skin was parchment thin, but the years had not
dimmed her eyes. They were as green as her robes; sad eyes, full of

wisdom. “If you will forgive my saying so, Your Radiance
looks … weary. Are you sleeping?”
It was all Dany could do not to laugh. “Not well. Last night three
Qartheen galleys sailed up the Skahazadhan under the cover of
darkness. The Mother’s Men loosed ights of re arrows at their
sails and ung pots of burning pitch onto their decks, but the
galleys slipped by quickly and su ered no lasting harm. The
Qartheen mean to close the river to us, as they have closed the bay.
And they are no longer alone. Three galleys from New Ghis have
joined them, and a carrack out of Tolos.” The Tolosi had replied to
her request for an alliance by proclaiming her a whore and
demanding that she return Meereen to its Great Masters. Even that
was preferable to the answer of Mantarys, which came by way of
caravan in a cedar chest. Inside she had found the heads of her three
envoys, pickled. “Perhaps your gods can help us. Ask them to send a
gale and sweep the galleys from the bay.”
“I shall pray and make sacri ce. Mayhaps the gods of Ghis will
hear me.” Galazza Galare sipped her wine, but her eyes did not
leave Dany. “Storms rage within the walls as well as without. More
freedmen died last night, or so I have been told.”
“Three.” Saying it left a bitter taste in her mouth. “The cowards
broke in on some weavers, freedwomen who had done no harm to
anyone. All they did was make beautiful things. I have a tapestry
they gave me hanging over my bed. The Sons of the Harpy broke
their loom and raped them before slitting their throats.”
“This we have heard. And yet Your Radiance has found the
courage to answer butchery with mercy. You have not harmed any
of the noble children you hold as hostage.”
“Not as yet, no.” Dany had grown fond of her young charges.
Some were shy and some were bold, some sweet and some sullen,
but all were innocent. “If I kill my cupbearers, who will pour my
wine and serve my supper?” she said, trying to make light of it.
The priestess did not smile. “The Shavepate would feed them to
your dragons, it is said. A life for a life. For every Brazen Beast cut
down, he would have a child die.”

Dany pushed her food about her plate. She dare not glance over
to where Grazhar and Qezza stood, for fear that she might cry. The
Shavepate has a harder heart than mine. They had fought about the
hostages half a dozen times. “The Sons of the Harpy are laughing in
their pyramids,” Skahaz said, just this morning. “What good are
hostages if you will not take their heads?” In his eyes, she was only
a weak woman. Hazzea was enough. What good is peace if it must be
purchased with the blood of little children? “These murders are not
their doing,” Dany told the Green Grace, feebly. “I am no butcher
queen.”
“And for that Meereen gives thanks,” said Galazza Galare. “We
have heard that the Butcher King of Astapor is dead.”
“Slain by his own soldiers when he commanded them to march
out and attack the Yunkai’i.” The words were bitter in her mouth.
“He was hardly cold before another took his place, calling himself
Cleon the Second. That one lasted eight days before his throat was
opened. Then his killer claimed the crown. So did the rst Cleon’s
concubine. King Cutthroat and Queen Whore, the Astapori call
them. Their followers are ghting battles in the streets, while the
Yunkai’i and their sellswords wait outside the walls.”
“These are grievous times. Your Radiance, might I presume to
o er you my counsel?”
“You know how much I value your wisdom.”
“Then heed me now and marry.”
“Ah.” Dany had been expecting this.
“Oftimes I have heard you say that you are only a young girl. To
look at you, you still seem half a child, too young and frail to face
such trials by yourself. You need a king beside you to help you bear
these burdens.”
Dany speared a chunk of lamb, took a bite from it, chewed
slowly. “Tell me, can this king pu his cheeks up and blow Xaro’s
galleys back to Qarth? Can he clap his hands and break the siege of
Astapor? Can he put food in the bellies of my children and bring
peace back to my streets?”
“Can you?” the Green Grace asked. “A king is not a god, but there
is still much that a strong man might do. When my people look at

you, they see a conqueror from across the seas, come to murder us
and make slaves of our children. A king could change that. A
highborn king of pure Ghiscari blood could reconcile the city to
your rule. Elsewise, I fear, your reign must end as it began, in blood
and re.”
Dany pushed her food about her plate. “And who would the gods
of Ghis have me take as my king and consort?”
“Hizdahr zo Loraq,” Galazza Galare said rmly.
Dany did not trouble to feign surprise. “Why Hizdahr? Skahaz is
noble born as well.”
“Skahaz is Kandaq, Hizdahr Loraq. Your Radiance will forgive
me, but only one who is not herself Ghiscari would not understand
the di erence. Oft have I heard that yours is the blood of Aegon the
Conqueror, Jaehaerys the Wise, and Daeron the Dragon. The noble
Hizdahr is of the blood of Mazdhan the Magni cent, Hazrak the
Handsome, and Zharaq the Liberator.”
“His forebears are as dead as mine. Will Hizdahr raise their
shades to defend Meereen against its enemies? I need a man with
ships and swords. You o er me ancestors.”
“We are an old people. Ancestors are important to us. Wed
Hizdahr zo Loraq and make a son with him, a son whose father is
the harpy, whose mother is the dragon. In him the prophecies shall
be ful lled, and your enemies will melt away like snow.”
He shall be the stallion that mounts the world. Dany knew how it
went with prophecies. They were made of words, and words were
wind. There would be no son for Loraq, no heir to unite dragon and
harpy. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas
go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. Only then would
her womb quicken once again …
… but Daenerys Targaryen had other children, tens of thousands
who had hailed her as their mother when she broke their chains.
She thought of Stalwart Shield, of Missandei’s brother, of the
woman Rylona Rhee, who had played the harp so beautifully. No
marriage would ever bring them back to life, but if a husband could
help end the slaughter, then she owed it to her dead to marry.

If I wed Hizdahr, will that turn Skahaz against me? She trusted
Skahaz more than she trusted Hizdahr, but the Shavepate would be
a disaster as a king. He was too quick to anger, too slow to forgive.
She saw no gain in wedding a man as hated as herself. Hizdahr was
well respected, so far as she could see. “What does my prospective
husband think of this?” she asked the Green Grace. What does he
think of me?
“Your Grace need only ask him. The noble Hizdahr awaits below.
Send down to him if that is your pleasure.”
You presume too much, priestess, the queen thought, but she
swallowed her anger and made herself smile. “Why not?” She sent
for Ser Barristan and told the old knight to bring Hizdahr to her. “It
is a long climb. Have the Unsullied help him up.”
By the time the nobleman had made the ascent, the Green Grace
had nished eating. “If it please Your Magni cence, I will take my
leave. You and the noble Hizdahr will have many things to discuss, I
do not doubt.” The old woman dabbed a smear of honey o her lips,
gave Qezza and Grazhar each a parting kiss upon the brow, and
fastened her silken veil across her face. “I shall return to the Temple
of the Graces and pray for the gods to show my queen the course of
wisdom.”
When she was gone, Dany let Qezza ll her cup again, dismissed
the children, and commanded that Hizdahr zo Loraq be admitted to
her presence. And if he dares say one word about his precious ghting
pits, I may have him thrown o the terrace.
Hizdahr wore a plain green robe beneath a quilted vest. He
bowed low when he entered, his face solemn. “Have you no smile
for me?” Dany asked him. “Am I as fearful as all that?”
“I always grow solemn in the presence of such beauty.”
It was a good start. “Drink with me.” Dany lled his cup herself.
“You know why you are here. The Green Grace seems to feel that if
I take you for my husband, all my woes will vanish.”
“I would never make so bold a claim. Men are born to strive and
su er. Our woes only vanish when we die. I can be of help to you,
however. I have gold and friends and in uence, and the blood of
Old Ghis ows in my veins. Though I have never wed, I have two

natural children, a boy and a girl, so I can give you heirs. I can
reconcile the city to your rule and put an end to this nightly
slaughter in the streets.”
“Can you?” Dany studied his eyes. “Why should the Sons of the
Harpy lay down their knives for you? Are you one of them?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you were?”
He laughed. “No.”
“The Shavepate has ways of nding the truth.”
“I do not doubt that Skahaz would soon have me confessing. A
day with him, and I will be one of the Harpy’s Sons. Two days, and
I will be the Harpy. Three, and it will turn out I slew your father
too, back in the Sunset Kingdoms when I was yet a boy. Then he
will impale me on a stake and you can watch me die … but
afterward the killings will go on.” Hizdahr leaned closer. “Or you
can marry me and let me try to stop them.”
“Why would you want to help me? For the crown?”
“A crown would suit me well, I will not deny that. It is more than
that, however. Is it so strange that I would want to protect my own
people, as you protect your freedmen? Meereen cannot endure
another war, Your Radiance.”
That was a good answer, and an honest one. “I have never
wanted war. I defeated the Yunkai’i once and spared their city when
I might have sacked it. I refused to join King Cleon when he
marched against them. Even now, with Astapor besieged, I stay my
hand. And Qarth … I have never done the Qartheen any harm …”
“Not by intent, no, but Qarth is a city of merchants, and they love
the clink of silver coins, the gleam of yellow gold. When you
smashed the slave trade, the blow was felt from Westeros to Asshai.
Qarth depends upon its slaves. So too Tolos, New Ghis, Lys, Tyrosh,
Volantis … the list is long, my queen.”
“Let them come. In me they shall nd a sterner foe than Cleon. I
would sooner perish ghting than return my children to bondage.”
“There may be another choice. The Yunkai’i can be persuaded to
allow all your freedmen to remain free, I believe, if Your Worship

will agree that the Yellow City may trade and train slaves
unmolested from this day forth. No more blood need ow.”
“Save for the blood of those slaves that the Yunkai’i will trade and
train,” Dany said, but she recognized the truth in his words even so.
It may be that is the best end we can hope for. “You have not said you
love me.”
“I will, if it would please Your Radiance.”
“That is not the answer of a man in love.”
“What is love? Desire? No man with all his parts could ever look
on you and not desire you, Daenerys. That is not why I would
marry you, however. Before you came Meereen was dying. Our
rulers were old men with withered cocks and crones whose
puckered cunts were dry as dust. They sat atop their pyramids
sipping apricot wine and talking of the glories of the Old Empire
whilst the centuries slipped by and the very bricks of the city
crumbled all around them. Custom and caution had an iron grip
upon us till you awakened us with re and blood. A new time has
come, and new things are possible. Marry me.”
He is not hard to look at, Dany told herself, and he has a king’s
tongue. “Kiss me,” she commanded.
He took her hand again, and kissed her ngers.
“Not that way. Kiss me as if I were your wife.”
Hizdahr took her by the shoulders as tenderly as if she were a
baby bird. Leaning forward, he pressed his lips to hers. His kiss was
light and dry and quick. Dany felt no stirrings.
“Shall I … kiss you again?” he asked when it was over.
“No.” On her terrace, in her bathing pool, the little sh would
nibble at her legs as she soaked. Even they kissed with more fervor
than Hizdahr zo Loraq. “I do not love you.”
Hizdahr shrugged. “That may come, in time. It has been known to
happen that way.”
Not with us, she thought. Not whilst Daario is so close. It’s him I
want, not you. “One day I will want to return to Westeros, to claim
the Seven Kingdoms that were my father’s.”
“One day all men must die, but it serves no good to dwell on
death. I prefer to take each day as it comes.”

Dany folded her hands together. “Words are wind, even words
like love and peace. I put more trust in deeds. In my Seven
Kingdoms, knights go on quests to prove themselves worthy of the
maiden that they love. They seek for magic swords, for chests of
gold, for crowns stolen from a dragon’s hoard.”
Hizdahr arched an eyebrow. “The only dragons that I know are
yours, and magic swords are even scarcer. I will gladly bring you
rings and crowns and chests of gold if that is your desire.”
“Peace is my desire. You say that you can help me end the nightly
slaughter in my streets. I say do it. Put an end to this shadow war,
my lord. That is your quest. Give me ninety days and ninety nights
without a murder, and I will know that you are worthy of a throne.
Can you do that?”
Hizdahr looked thoughtful. “Ninety days and ninety nights
without a corpse, and on the ninety- rst we wed?”
“Perhaps,” said Dany, with a coy look. “Though young girls have
been known to be ckle. I may still want a magic sword.”
Hizdahr laughed. “Then you shall have that too, Radiance. Your
wish is my command. Best tell your seneschal to begin making
preparations for our wedding.”
“Nothing would please the noble Reznak more.” If Meereen knew
that a wedding was in the o ng, that alone might buy her a few
nights’ respite, even if Hizdahr’s e orts came to naught. The
Shavepate will not be happy with me, but Reznak mo Reznak will dance
for joy. Dany did not know which of those concerned her more. She
needed Skahaz and the Brazen Beasts, and she had come to mistrust
all of Reznak’s counsel. Beware the perfumed seneschal. Has Reznak
made common cause with Hizdahr and the Green Grace and set some
trap to snare me?
No sooner had Hizdahr zo Loraq taken his leave of her than Ser
Barristan appeared behind her in his long white cloak. Years of
service in the Kingsguard had taught the white knight how to
remain unobtrusive when she was entertaining, but he was never
far. He knows, she saw at once, and he disapproves. The lines around
his mouth had deepened. “So,” she said to him, “it seems that I may
wed again. Are you happy for me, ser?”

“If that is your command, Your Grace.”
“Hizdahr is not the husband you would have chosen for me.”
“It is not my place to choose your husband.”
“It is not,” she agreed, “but it is important to me that you should
understand. My people are bleeding. Dying. A queen belongs not to
herself, but to the realm. Marriage or carnage, those are my
choices. A wedding or a war.”
“Your Grace, may I speak frankly?”
“Always.”
“There is a third choice.”
“Westeros?”
He nodded. “I am sworn to serve Your Grace, and to keep you
safe from harm wherever you may go. My place is by your side,
whether here or in King’s Landing … but your place is back in
Westeros, upon the Iron Throne that was your father’s. The Seven
Kingdoms will never accept Hizdahr zo Loraq as king.”
“No more than Meereen will accept Daenerys Targaryen as queen.
The Green Grace has the right of that. I need a king beside me, a
king of old Ghiscari blood. Elsewise they will always see me as the
uncouth barbarian who smashed through their gates, impaled their
kin on spikes, and stole their wealth.”
“In Westeros you will be the lost child who returns to gladden her
father’s heart. Your people will cheer when you ride by, and all
good men will love you.”
“Westeros is far away.”
“Lingering here will never bring it any closer. The sooner we take
our leave of this place—”
“I know. I do.” Dany did not know how to make him see. She
wanted Westeros as much as he did, but rst she must heal
Meereen. “Ninety days is a long time. Hizdahr may fail. And if he
does, the trying buys me time. Time to make alliances, to
strengthen my defenses, to—”
“And if he does not fail? What will Your Grace do then?”
“Her duty.” The word felt cold upon her tongue. “You saw my
brother Rhaegar wed. Tell me, did he wed for love or duty?”

The old knight hesitated. “Princess Elia was a good woman, Your
Grace. She was kind and clever, with a gentle heart and a sweet wit.
I know the prince was very fond of her.”
Fond, thought Dany. The word spoke volumes. I could become
fond of Hizdahr zo Loraq, in time. Perhaps.
Ser Barristan went on. “I saw your father and your mother wed as
well. Forgive me, but there was no fondness there, and the realm
paid dearly for that, my queen.”
“Why did they wed if they did not love each other?”
“Your grandsire commanded it. A woods witch had told him that
the prince was promised would be born of their line.”
“A woods witch?” Dany was astonished.
“She came to court with Jenny of Oldstones. A stunted thing,
grotesque to look upon. A dwarf, most people said, though dear to
Lady Jenny, who always claimed that she was one of the children of
the forest.”
“What became of her?”
“Summerhall.” The word was fraught with doom.
Dany sighed. “Leave me now. I am very weary.”
“As you command.” Ser Barristan bowed and turned to go. But at
the door, he stopped. “Forgive me. Your Grace has a visitor. Shall I
tell him to return upon the morrow?”
“Who is it?”
“Naharis. The Stormcrows have returned to the city.”
Daario. Her heart gave a utter in her chest. “How long
has … when did he …?” She could not seem to get the words out.
Ser Barristan seemed to understand. “Your Grace was with the
priestess when he arrived. I knew you would not want to be
disturbed. The captain’s news can wait until the morrow.”
“No.” How could I ever hope to sleep, knowing that my captain is so
close? “Send him up at once. And … I will have no more need of you
this evening. I shall be safe with Daario. Oh, and send Irri and
Jhiqui, if you would be so good. And Missandei.” I need to change, to
make myself beautiful.
She said as much to her handmaids when they came. “What does
Your Grace wish to wear?” asked Missandei.

Starlight and seafoam, Dany thought, a wisp of silk that leaves my left
breast bare for Daario’s delight. Oh, and owers for my hair. When rst
they met, the captain brought her owers every day, all the way
from Yunkai to Meereen. “Bring the grey linen gown with the
pearls on the bodice. Oh, and my white lion’s pelt.” She always felt
safer wrapped in Drogo’s lionskin.
Daenerys received the captain on her terrace, seated on a carved
stone bench beneath a pear tree. A half-moon oated in the sky
above the city, attended by a thousand stars. Daario Naharis entered
swaggering. He swaggers even when he is standing still. The captain
wore striped pantaloons tucked into high boots of purple leather, a
white silk shirt, a vest of golden rings. His trident beard was purple,
his amboyant mustachios gold, his long curls equal parts of both.
On one hip he wore a stiletto, on the other a Dothraki arakh. “Bright
queen,” he said, “you have grown more beautiful in my absence.
How is this thing possible?”
The queen was accustomed to such praise, yet somehow the
compliment meant more coming from Daario than from the likes of
Reznak, Xaro, or Hizdahr. “Captain. They tell us you did us good
service in Lhazar.” I have missed you so much.
“Your captain lives to serve his cruel queen.”
“Cruel?”
Moonlight glimmered in his eyes. “He raced ahead of all his men
to see her face the sooner, only to be left languishing whilst she ate
lamb and gs with some dried-up old woman.”
They never told me you were here, Dany thought, or I might have
played the fool and sent for you at once. “I was supping with the
Green Grace.” It seemed best not to mention Hizdahr. “I had urgent
need of her wise counsel.”
“I have only one urgent need: Daenerys.”
“Shall I send for food? You must be hungry.”
“I have not eaten in two days, but now that I am here, it is
enough for me to feast upon your beauty.”
“My beauty will not ll up your belly.” She plucked down a pear
and tossed it at him. “Eat this.”

“If my queen commands it.” He took a bite of the pear, his gold
tooth gleaming. Juice ran down into his purple beard.
The girl in her wanted to kiss him so much it hurt. His kisses would
be hard and cruel, she told herself, and he would not care if I cried out
or commanded him to stop. But the queen in her knew that would be
folly. “Tell me of your journey.”
He gave a careless shrug. “The Yunkai’i sent some hired swords to
close the Khyzai Pass. The Long Lances, they name themselves. We
descended on them in the night and sent a few to hell. In Lhazar I
slew two of my own serjeants for plotting to steal the gems and
gold plate my queen had entrusted to me as gifts for the Lamb Men.
Elsewise, all went as I had promised.”
“How many men did you lose in the ghting?”
“Nine,” said Daario, “but a dozen of the Long Lances decided they
would sooner be Stormcrows than corpses, so we came out three
ahead. I told them they would live longer ghting with your
dragons than against them, and they saw the wisdom in my words.”
That made her wary. “They might be spying for Yunkai.”
“They are too stupid to be spies. You do not know them.”
“Neither do you. Do you trust them?”
“I trust all my men. Just as far as I can spit.” He spat out a seed
and smiled at her suspicions. “Shall I bring their heads to you? I
will, if you command it. One is bald and two have braids and one
dyes his beard four di erent colors. What spy would wear such a
beard, I ask you? The slinger can put a stone through a gnat’s eye at
forty paces, and the ugly one has a way with horses, but if my
queen says that they must die …”
“I did not say that. I only … see that you keep your eye on them,
that’s all.” She felt foolish saying it. She always felt a little foolish
when she was with Daario. Gawky and girlish and slow-witted. What
must he think of me? She changed the subject. “Will the Lamb Men
send us food?”
“Grain will come down the Skahazadhan by barge, my queen, and
other goods by caravan over the Khyzai.”
“Not the Skahazadhan. The river has been closed to us. The seas
as well. You will have seen the ships out in the bay. The Qartheen

have driven o a third of our shing eet and seized another third.
The others are too frightened to leave port. What little trade we
still had has been cut o .”
Daario tossed away the pear stem. “Qartheen have milk in their
veins. Let them see your dragons, and they’ll run.”
Dany did not want to talk about the dragons. Farmers still came
to her court with burned bones, complaining of missing sheep,
though Drogon had not returned to the city. Some reported seeing
him north of the river, above the grass of the Dothraki sea. Down in
the pit, Viserion had snapped one of his chains; he and Rhaegal
grew more savage every day. Once the iron doors had glowed redhot, her Unsullied told her, and no one dared to touch them for a
day. “Astapor is under siege as well.”
“This I knew. One of the Long Lances lived long enough to tell us
that men were eating one another in the Red City. He said
Meereen’s turn would come soon, so I cut his tongue out and fed it
to a yellow dog. No dog will eat a liar’s tongue. When the yellow
dog ate his, I knew he spoke the truth.”
“I have war inside the city too.” She told him of the Harpy’s Sons
and the Brazen Beasts, of blood upon the bricks. “My enemies are
all around me, within the city and without.”
“Attack,” he said at once. “A man surrounded by foes cannot
defend himself. Try, and the axe will take you in the back whilst
you are parrying the sword. No. When faced with many enemies,
choose the weakest, kill him, ride over him, and escape.”
“Where should I escape to?”
“Into my bed. Into my arms. Into my heart.” The hilts of Daario’s
arakh and stiletto were wrought in the shape of golden women,
naked and wanton. He brushed his thumbs across them in a way
that was remarkably obscene and smiled a wicked smile.
Dany felt blood rushing to her face. It was almost as if he were
caressing her. Would he think me wanton too if I pulled him into bed?
He made her want to be his wanton. I should never see him alone. He
is too dangerous to have near me. “The Green Grace says that I must
take a Ghiscari king,” she said, ustered. “She urges me to wed the
noble Hizdahr zo Loraq.”

“That one?” Daario chuckled. “Why not Grey Worm, if you want
a eunuch in your bed? Do you want a king?”
I want you. “I want peace. I gave Hizdahr ninety days to end the
killings. If he does, I will take him for a husband.”
“Take me for your husband. I will do it in nine.”
You know I cannot do that, she almost said.
“You are ghting shadows when you should be ghting the men
who cast them,” Daario went on. “Kill them all and take their
treasures, I say. Whisper the command, and your Daario will make
you a pile of their heads taller than this pyramid.”
“If I knew who they were—”
“Zhak and Pahl and Merreq. Them, and all the rest. The Great
Masters. Who else would it be?”
He is as bold as he is bloody. “We have no proof this is their work.
Would you have me slaughter my own subjects?”
“Your own subjects would gladly slaughter you.”
He had been so long away, Dany had almost forgotten what he
was. Sellswords were treacherous by nature, she reminded herself.
Fickle, faithless, brutal. He will never be more than he is. He will never
be the stu of kings. “The pyramids are strong,” she explained to
him. “We could take them only at great cost. The moment we attack
one the others will rise against us.”
“Then winkle them out of their pyramids on some pretext. A
wedding might serve. Why not? Promise your hand to Hizdahr and
all the Great Masters will come to see you married. When they
gather in the Temple of the Graces, turn us loose upon them.”
Dany was appalled. He is a monster. A gallant monster, but a
monster still. “Do you take me for the Butcher King?”
“Better the butcher than the meat. All kings are butchers. Are
queens so di erent?”
“This queen is.”
Daario shrugged. “Most queens have no purpose but to warm
some king’s bed and pop out sons for him. If that’s the sort of queen
you mean to be, best marry Hizdahr.”
Her anger ashed. “Have you forgotten who I am?”
“No. Have you?”

Viserys would have his head o for that insolence. “I am the blood of
the dragon. Do not presume to teach me lessons.” When Dany
stood, the lion pelt slipped from her shoulders and tumbled to the
ground. “Leave me.”
Daario gave her a sweeping bow. “I live to obey.”
When he was gone, Daenerys called Ser Barristan back. “I want
the Stormcrows back in the eld.”
“Your Grace? They have only now returned …”
“I want them gone. Let them scout the Yunkish hinterlands and
give protection to any caravans coming over the Khyzai Pass.
Henceforth Daario shall make his reports to you. Give him every
honor that is due him and see that his men are well paid, but on no
account admit him to my presence.”
“As you say, Your Grace.”
That night she could not sleep but turned and twisted restlessly in
her bed. She even went so far as to summon Irri, hoping her
caresses might help ease her way to rest, but after a short while she
pushed the Dothraki girl away. Irri was sweet and soft and willing,
but she was not Daario.
What have I done? she thought, huddled in her empty bed. I have
waited so long for him to come back, and I send him away. “He would
make a monster of me,” she whispered, “a butcher queen.” But then
she thought of Drogon far away, and the dragons in the pit. There is
blood on my hands too, and on my heart. We are not so di erent,
Daario and I. We are both monsters.

THE LOST LORD

I

t should not have taken this long, Gri told himself as he paced the
deck of the Shy Maid. Had they lost Haldon as they had Tyrion
Lannister? Could the Volantenes have taken him? I should have sent
Duck eld with him. Haldon alone could not be trusted; he had
proved that in Selhorys when he let the dwarf escape.
The Shy Maid was tied up in one of the meaner sections of the
long, chaotic riverfront, between a listing poleboat that had not left
the pier in years and the gaily painted mummers’ barge. The
mummers were a loud and lively lot, always quoting speeches at
each other and drunk more oft than not.
The day was hot and sticky, as all the days had been since they
left the Sorrows. A ferocious southern sun beat down upon the
crowded riverfront of Volon Therys, but heat was the last and least
of Gri ’s concerns. The Golden Company was encamped three miles
south of town, well north of where he had expected them, and
Triarch Malaquo had come north with ve thousand foot and a
thousand horse to cut them o from the delta road. Daenerys
Targaryen remained a world away, and Tyrion Lannister … well, he
could be most anywhere. If the gods were good, Lannister’s severed
head was halfway back to King’s Landing by now, but more like the
dwarf was hale and whole and somewhere close, stinking drunk and
plotting some new infamy.
“Where in the seven hells is Haldon?” Gri complained to Lady
Lemore. “How long should it take to buy three horses?”
She shrugged. “My lord, wouldn’t it be safer to leave the boy here
aboard the boat?”

“Safer, yes. Wiser, no. He is a man grown now, and this is the
road that he was born to walk.” Gri had no patience for this
quibbling. He was sick of hiding, sick of waiting, sick of caution. I
do not have time enough for caution.
“We have gone to great lengths to keep Prince Aegon hidden all
these years,” Lemore reminded him. “The time will come for him to
wash his hair and declare himself, I know, but that time is not now.
Not to a camp of sellswords.”
“If Harry Strickland means him ill, hiding him on the Shy Maid
will not protect him. Strickland has ten thousand swords at his
command. We have Duck. Aegon is all that could be wanted in a
prince. They need to see that, Strickland and the rest. These are his
own men.”
“His because they’re bought and paid for. Ten thousand armed
strangers, plus hangers-on and camp followers. All it takes is one to
bring us all to ruin. If Hugor’s head was worth a lord’s honors, how
much will Cersei Lannister pay for the rightful heir to the Iron
Throne? You do not know these men, my lord. It has been a dozen
years since you last rode with the Golden Company, and your old
friend is dead.”
Blackheart. Myles Toyne had been so full of life the last time Gri
had left him, it was hard to accept that he was gone. A golden skull
atop a pole, and Homeless Harry Strickland in his place. Lemore was
not wrong, he knew. Whatever their sires or their grandsires might
have been back in Westeros before their exile, the men of the
Golden Company were sellswords now, and no sellsword could be
trusted. Even so …
Last night he’d dreamt of Stoney Sept again. Alone, with sword in
hand, he ran from house to house, smashing down doors, racing up
stairs, leaping from roof to roof, as his ears rang to the sound of
distant bells. Deep bronze booms and silver chiming pounded
through his skull, a maddening cacophony of noise that grew ever
louder until it seemed as if his head would explode.
Seventeen years had come and gone since the Battle of the Bells,
yet the sound of bells ringing still tied a knot in his guts. Others
might claim that the realm was lost when Prince Rhaegar fell to

Robert’s warhammer on the Trident, but the Battle of the Trident
would never have been fought if the gri n had only slain the stag
there in Stoney Sept. The bells tolled for all of us that day. For Aerys
and his queen, for Elia of Dorne and her little daughter, for every true
man and honest woman in the Seven Kingdoms. And for my silver
prince.
“The plan was to reveal Prince Aegon only when we reached
Queen Daenerys,” Lemore was saying.
“That was when we believed the girl was coming west. Our
dragon queen has burned that plan to ash, and thanks to that fat
fool in Pentos, we have grasped the she-dragon by the tail and
burned our ngers to the bone.”
“Illyrio could not have been expected to know that the girl would
choose to remain at Slaver’s Bay.”
“No more than he knew that the Beggar King would die young, or
that Khal Drogo would follow him into the grave. Very little of
what the fat man has anticipated has come to pass.” Gri slapped
the hilt of his longsword with a gloved hand. “I have danced to the
fat man’s pipes for years, Lemore. What has it availed us? The
prince is a man grown. His time is—”
“Gri ,” Yandry called loudly, above the clanging of the mummers’
bell. “It’s Haldon.”
So it was. The Halfmaester looked hot and bedraggled as he made
his way along the waterfront to the foot of the pier. Sweat had left
dark rings beneath the arms of his light linen robes, and he had the
same sour look on his long face as at Selhorys, when he returned to
the Shy Maid to confess that the dwarf was gone. He was leading
three horses, however, and that was all that mattered.
“Bring the boy,” Gri told Lemore. “See that he’s ready.”
“As you say,” she answered, unhappily.
So be it. He had grown fond of Lemore, but that did not mean he
required her approval. Her task had been to instruct the prince in
the doctrines of the Faith, and she had done that. No amount of
prayer would put him on the Iron Throne, however. That was Gri ’s
task. He had failed Prince Rhaegar once. He would not fail his son,
not whilst life remained in his body.

Haldon’s horses did not please him. “Were these the best that you
could nd?” he complained to the Halfmaester.
“They were,” said Haldon, in an irritated tone, “and you had best
not ask what they cost us. With Dothraki across the river, half the
populace of Volon Therys has decided they would sooner be
elsewhere, so horse esh grows more expensive every day.”
I should have gone myself. After Selhorys, he had found it di cult
to put the same trust in Haldon as previously. He let the dwarf
beguile him with that glib tongue of his. Let him wander o into a
whorehouse alone while he lingered like a mooncalf in the square. The
brothel keeper had insisted that the little man had been carried o
at swordpoint, but Gri was still not sure he believed that. The Imp
was clever enough to have conspired in his own escape. This
drunken captor that the whores spoke of could have been some
henchman in his hire. I share the blame. After the dwarf put himself
between Aegon and the stone man, I let down my guard. I should have
slit his throat the rst time I laid eyes on him.
“They will do well enough, I suppose,” he told Haldon. “The
camp is only three miles south.” The Shy Maid would have gotten
them there more quickly, but he preferred to keep Harry Strickland
ignorant of where he and the prince had been. Nor did he relish the
prospect of splashing through the shallows to climb some muddy
riverbank. That sort of entrance might serve for a sellsword and his
son, but not for a great lord and his prince.
When the lad emerged from the cabin with Lemore by his side,
Gri looked him over carefully from head to heel. The prince wore
sword and dagger, black boots polished to a high sheen, a black
cloak lined with blood-red silk. With his hair washed and cut and
freshly dyed a deep, dark blue, his eyes looked blue as well. At his
throat he wore three huge square-cut rubies on a chain of black
iron, a gift from Magister Illyrio. Red and black. Dragon colors. That
was good. “You look a proper prince,” he told the boy. “Your father
would be proud if he could see you.”
Young Gri ran his ngers through his hair. “I am sick of this
blue dye. We should have washed it out.”

“Soon enough.” Gri would be glad to go back to his own true
colors too, though his once red hair had gone to grey. He clapped
the lad on the shoulder. “Shall we go? Your army awaits your
coming.”
“I like the sound of that. My army.” A smile ashed across his
face, then vanished. “Are they, though? They’re sellswords. Yollo
warned me to trust no one.”
“There is wisdom in that,” Gri admitted. It might have been
di erent if Blackheart still commanded, but Myles Toyne was four
years dead, and Homeless Harry Strickland was a di erent sort of
man. He would not say that to the boy, however. That dwarf had
already planted enough doubts in his young head. “Not every man is
what he seems, and a prince especially has good cause to be
wary … but go too far down that road, and the mistrust can poison
you, make you sour and fearful.” King Aerys was one such. By the
end, even Rhaegar saw that plain enough. “You would do best to walk
a middle course. Let men earn your trust with leal service … but
when they do, be generous and openhearted.”
The boy nodded. “I will remember.”
They gave the prince the best of the three horses, a big grey
gelding so pale that he was almost white. Gri and Haldon rode
beside him on lesser mounts. The road ran south beneath the high
white walls of Volon Therys for a good half mile. Then they left the
town behind, following the winding course of the Rhoyne through
willow groves and poppy elds and past a tall wooden windmill
whose blades creaked like old bones as they turned.
They found the Golden Company beside the river as the sun was
lowering in the west. It was a camp that even Arthur Dayne might
have approved of—compact, orderly, defensible. A deep ditch had
been dug around it, with sharpened stakes inside. The tents stood in
rows, with broad avenues between them. The latrines had been
placed beside the river, so the current would wash away the wastes.
The horse lines were to the north, and beyond them, two dozen
elephants grazed beside the water, pulling up reeds with their
trunks. Gri glanced at the great grey beasts with approval. There is
not a warhorse in all of Westeros that will stand against them.

Tall battle standards of cloth-of-gold apped atop lofty poles
along the perimeters of the camp. Beneath them, armed and
armored sentries walked their rounds with spears and crossbows,
watching every approach. Gri had feared that the company might
have grown lax under Harry Strickland, who had always seemed
more concerned with making friends than enforcing discipline; but
it would seem his worries had been misplaced.
At the gate, Haldon said something to the serjeant of guards, and
a runner was sent o to nd a captain. When he turned up, he was
just as ugly as the last time Gri laid eyes on him. A big-bellied,
shambling hulk of a man, the sellsword had a seamed face
crisscrossed with old scars. His right ear looked as if a dog had
chewed on it and his left was missing. “Have they made you a
captain, Flowers?” Gri said. “I thought the Golden Company had
standards.”
“It’s worse than that, you bugger,” said Franklyn Flowers. “They
knighted me as well.” He clasped Gri by the forearm, pulled him
into a bone-crushing hug. “You look awful, even for a man’s been
dead a dozen years. Blue hair, is it? When Harry said you’d be
turning up, I almost shit myself. And Haldon, you icy cunt, good to
see you too. Still have that stick up your arse?” He turned to Young
Gri . “And this would be …”
“My squire. Lad, this is Franklyn Flowers.”
The prince acknowledged him with a nod. “Flowers is a bastard
name. You’re from the Reach.”
“Aye. My mother was a washerwoman at Cider Hall till one of
milord’s sons raped her. Makes me a sort o’ brown apple Fossoway,
the way I see it.” Flowers waved them through the gate. “Come
with me. Strickland’s called all the o cers to his tent. War council.
The bloody Volantenes are rattling their spears and demanding to
know our intentions.”
The men of the Golden Company were outside their tents, dicing,
drinking, and swatting away ies. Gri wondered how many of
them knew who he was. Few enough. Twelve years is a long time.
Even the men who’d ridden with him might not recognize the exile
lord Jon Connington of the ery red beard in the lined, clean-

shaved face and dyed blue hair of the sellsword Gri . So far as most
of them were concerned, Connington had drunk himself to death in
Lys after being driven from the company in disgrace for stealing
from the war chest. The shame of the lie still stuck in his craw, but
Varys had insisted it was necessary. “We want no songs about the
gallant exile,” the eunuch had tittered, in that mincing voice of his.
“Those who die heroic deaths are long remembered, thieves and
drunks and cravens soon forgotten.”
What does a eunuch know of a man’s honor? Gri had gone along
with the Spider’s scheme for the boy’s sake, but that did not mean
he liked it any better. Let me live long enough to see the boy sit the
Iron Throne, and Varys will pay for that slight and so much more. Then
we’ll see who’s soon forgotten.
The captain-general’s tent was made of cloth-of-gold and
surrounded by a ring of pikes topped with gilded skulls. One skull
was larger than the rest, grotesquely malformed. Below it was a
second, no larger than a child’s st. Maelys the Monstrous and his
nameless brother. The other skulls had a sameness to them, though
several had been cracked and splintered by the blows that had slain
them, and one had led, pointed teeth. “Which one is Myles?” Gri
found himself asking.
“There. On the end.” Flowers pointed. “Wait. I’ll go announce
you.” He slipped inside the tent, leaving Gri to contemplate the
gilded skull of his old friend. In life, Ser Myles Toyne had been ugly
as sin. His famous forebear, the dark and dashing Terrence Toyne of
whom the singers sang, had been so fair of face that even the king’s
mistress could not resist him; but Myles had been possessed of jug
ears, a crooked jaw, and the biggest nose that Jon Connington had
ever seen. When he smiled at you, though, none of that mattered.
Blackheart, his men had named him, for the sigil on his shield.
Myles had loved the name and all it hinted at. “A captain-general
should be feared, by friend and foe alike,” he had once confessed.
“If men think me cruel, so much the better.” The truth was
otherwise. Soldier to the bone, Toyne was erce but always fair, a
father to his men and always generous to the exile lord Jon
Connington.

Death had robbed him of his ears, his nose, and all his warmth.
The smile remained, transformed into a glittering golden grin. All
the skulls were grinning, even Bittersteel’s on the tall pike in the
center. What does he have to grin about? He died defeated and alone, a
broken man in an alien land. On his deathbed, Ser Aegor Rivers had
famously commanded his men to boil the esh from his skull, dip it
in gold, and carry it before them when they crossed the sea to
retake Westeros. His successors had followed his example.
Jon Connington might have been one of those successors if his
exile had gone otherwise. He had spent ve years with the
company, rising from the ranks to a place of honor at Toyne’s right
hand. Had he stayed, it might well have been him the men turned to
after Myles died, instead of Harry Strickland. But Gri did not
regret the path he’d chosen. When I return to Westeros, it will not be
as a skull atop a pole.
Flowers stepped out of the tent. “Go on in.”
The high o cers of the Golden Company rose from stools and
camp chairs as they entered. Old friends greeted Gri with smiles
and embraces, the new men more formally. Not all of them are as
glad to see us as they would have me believe. He sensed knives behind
some of the smiles. Until quite recently, most of them had believed
that Lord Jon Connington was safely in his grave, and no doubt
many felt that was a ne place for him, a man who would steal
from his brothers-in-arms. Gri might have felt the same way in
their place.
Ser Franklyn did the introductions. Some of the sellsword captains
bore bastard names, as Flowers did: Rivers, Hill, Stone. Others
claimed names that had once loomed large in the histories of the
Seven Kingdoms; Gri counted two Strongs, three Peakes, a Mudd,
a Mandrake, a Lothston, a pair of Coles. Not all were genuine, he
knew. In the free companies, a man could call himself whatever he
chose. By any name, the sellswords displayed a rude splendor. Like
many in their trade, they kept their worldly wealth upon their
persons: jeweled swords, inlaid armor, heavy torcs, and ne silks
were much in evidence, and every man there wore a lord’s ransom
in golden arm rings. Each ring signi ed one year’s service with the

Golden Company. Marq Mandrake, whose pox-scarred face had a
hole in one cheek where a slave’s mark had been burned away,
wore a chain of golden skulls as well.
Not every captain was of Westerosi blood. Black Balaq, a whitehaired Summer Islander with skin dark as soot, commanded the
company’s archers, as in Blackheart’s day. He wore a feathered
cloak of green and orange, magni cent to behold. The cadaverous
Volantene, Gorys Edoryen, had replaced Strickland as paymaster. A
leopard skin was draped across one shoulder, and hair as red as
blood tumbled to his shoulders in oiled ringlets though his pointed
beard was black. The spymaster was new to Gri , a Lyseni named
Lysono Maar, with lilac eyes and white-gold hair and lips that
would have been the envy of a whore. At rst glance, Gri had
almost taken him for a woman. His ngernails were painted purple,
and his earlobes dripped with pearls and amethysts.
Ghosts and liars, Gri thought, as he surveyed their faces.
Revenants from forgotten wars, lost causes, failed rebellions, a
brotherhood of the failed and the fallen, the disgraced and the
disinherited. This is my army. This is our best hope.
He turned to Harry Strickland.
Homeless Harry looked little like a warrior. Portly, with a big
round head, mild grey eyes, and thinning hair that he brushed
sideways to conceal a bald spot, Strickland sat in a camp chair
soaking his feet in a tub of salt water. “You will pardon me if I do
not rise,” he said by way of greeting. “Our march was wearisome,
and my toes are prone to blisters. It is a curse.”
It is a mark of weakness. You sound like an old woman. The
Stricklands had been part of the Golden Company since its founding,
Harry’s great-grandsire having lost his lands when he rose with the
Black Dragon during the rst Blackfyre Rebellion. “Gold for four
generations,” Harry would boast, as if four generations of exile and
defeat were something to take pride in.
“I can make you an ointment for that,” said Haldon, “and there
are certain mineral salts that will toughen your skin.”
“That is kind of you.” Strickland beckoned to his squire. “Watkyn,
wine for our friends.”

“Thank you, but no,” said Gri . “We will drink water.”
“As you prefer.” The captain-general smiled up at the prince.
“And this must be your son.”
Does he know? Gri wondered. How much did Myles tell him? Varys
had been adamant about the need for secrecy. The plans that he and
Illyrio had made with Blackheart had been known to them alone.
The rest of the company had been left ignorant. What they did not
know they could not let slip.
That time was done, though. “No man could have asked for a
worthier son,” Gri said, “but the lad is not of my blood, and his
name is not Gri . My lords, I give you Aegon Targaryen, rstborn
son of Rhaegar, Prince of Dragonstone, by Princess Elia of
Dorne … soon, with your help, to be Aegon, the Sixth of His Name,
King of Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, and Lord of the
Seven Kingdoms.”
Silence greeted his announcement. Someone cleared his throat.
One of the Coles re lled his wine cup from the agon. Gorys
Edoryen played with one of his corkscrew ringlets and murmured
something in a tongue Gri did not know. Laswell Peake coughed,
Mandrake and Lothston exchanged a glance. They know, Gri
realized then. They have known all along. He turned to look at Harry
Strickland. “When did you tell them?”
The captain-general wriggled his blistered toes in his footbath.
“When we reached the river. The company was restless, with good
reason. We walked away from an easy campaign in the Disputed
Lands, and for what? So we could swelter in this god-awful heat
watching our coins melt away and our blades go to rust whilst I
turn away rich contracts?”
That news made Gri ’s skin crawl. “Who?”
“The Yunkishmen. The envoy that they sent to woo Volantis has
already dispatched three free companies to Slaver’s Bay. He wishes
us to be the fourth and o ers twice what Myr was paying us, plus a
slave for every man in the company, ten for every o cer, and a
hundred choice maidens all for me.”
Bloody hell. “That would require thousands of slaves. Where do
the Yunkishmen expect to nd so many?”

“In Meereen.” Strickland beckoned to his squire. “Watkyn, a
towel. This water’s growing cool, and my toes have wrinkled up
like raisins. No, not that towel, the soft one.”
“You refused him,” said Gri .
“I told him I would think on his proposal.” Harry winced as his
squire toweled his feet. “Gentle with the toes. Think of them as
thin-skinned grapes, lad. You want to dry them without crushing
them. Pat, do not scrub. Yes, like that.” He turned back to Gri . “A
blunt refusal would have been unwise. The men might rightly ask if
I had taken leave of my wits.”
“You will have work for your blades soon enough.”
“Will we?” asked Lysono Maar. “I assume you know that the
Targaryen girl has not started for the west?”
“We heard that tale in Selhorys.”
“No tale. Simple truth. The why of it is harder to grasp. Sack
Meereen, aye, why not? I would have done the same in her place.
The slaver cities reek of gold, and conquest requires coin. But why
linger? Fear? Madness? Sloth?”
“The why of it does not matter.” Harry Strickland unrolled a pair
of striped woolen stockings. “She is in Meereen and we are here,
where the Volantenes grow daily more unhappy with our presence.
We came to raise up a king and queen who would lead us home to
Westeros, but this Targaryen girl seems more intent on planting
olive trees than in reclaiming her father’s throne. Meanwhile, her
foes gather. Yunkai, New Ghis, Tolos. Bloodbeard and the Tattered
Prince will both be in the eld against her … and soon enough the
eets of Old Volantis will descend on her as well. What does she
have? Bedslaves with sticks?”
“Unsullied,” said Gri . “And dragons.”
“Dragons, aye,” the captain-general said, “but young ones, hardly
more than hatchlings.” Strickland eased his sock over his blisters
and up his ankle. “How much will they avail her when all these
armies close about her city like a st?”
Tristan Rivers drummed his ngers on his knee. “All the more
reason that we must reach her quickly, I say. If Daenerys will not
come to us, we must go to Daenerys.”

“Can we walk across the waves, ser?” asked Lysono Maar. “I tell
you again, we cannot reach the silver queen by sea. I slipped into
Volantis myself, posing as a trader, to learn how many ships might
be available to us. The harbor teems with galleys, cogs, and
carracks of every sort and size, yet even so I soon found myself
consorting with smugglers and pirates. We have ten thousand men
in the company, as I am sure Lord Connington remembers from his
years of service with us. Five hundred knights, each with three
horses. Five hundred squires, with one mount apiece. And
elephants, we must not forget the elephants. A pirate ship will not
su ce. We would need a pirate eet … and even if we found one,
the word has come back from Slaver’s Bay that Meereen has been
closed o by blockade.”
“We could feign acceptance of the Yunkish o er,” urged Gorys
Edoryen. “Allow the Yunkai’i to transport us to the east, then return
their gold beneath the walls of Meereen.”
“One broken contract is stain enough upon the honor of the
company.” Homeless Harry Strickland paused with his blistered foot
in hand. “Let me remind you, it was Myles Toyne who put his seal
to this secret pact, not me. I would honor his agreement if I could,
but how? It seems plain to me that the Targaryen girl is never
coming west. Westeros was her father’s kingdom. Meereen is hers.
If she can break the Yunkai’i, she’ll be Queen of Slaver’s Bay. If not,
she’ll die long before we could hope to reach her.”
His words came as no surprise to Gri . Harry Strickland had
always been a genial man, better at hammering out contracts than
at hammering on foes. He had a nose for gold, but whether he had
the belly for battle was another question.
“There is the land route,” suggested Franklyn Flowers.
“The demon road is death. We will lose half the company to
desertion if we attempt that march, and bury half of those who
remain beside the road. It grieves me to say it, but Magister Illyrio
and his friends may have been unwise to put so much hope on this
child queen.”
No, thought Gri , but they were most unwise to put their hopes on
you.

And then Prince Aegon spoke. “Then put your hopes on me,” he
said. “Daenerys is Prince Rhaegar’s sister, but I am Rhaegar’s son. I
am the only dragon that you need.”
Gri put a black-gloved hand upon Prince Aegon’s shoulder.
“Spoken boldly,” he said, “but think what you are saying.”
“I have,” the lad insisted. “Why should I go running to my aunt as
if I were a beggar? My claim is better than her own. Let her come
to me … in Westeros.”
Franklyn Flowers laughed. “I like it. Sail west, not east. Leave the
little queen to her olives and seat Prince Aegon upon the Iron
Throne. The boy has stones, give him that.”
The captain-general looked as if someone had slapped his face.
“Has the sun curdled your brains, Flowers? We need the girl. We
need the marriage. If Daenerys accepts our princeling and takes him
for her consort, the Seven Kingdoms will do the same. Without her,
the lords will only mock his claim and brand him a fraud and a
pretender. And how do you propose to get to Westeros? You heard
Lysono. There are no ships to be had.”
This man is afraid to ght, Gri realized. How could they have
chosen him to take the Blackheart’s place? “No ships for Slaver’s Bay.
Westeros is another matter. The east is closed to us, not the sea. The
triarchs would be glad to see the back of us, I do not doubt. They
might even help us arrange passage back to the Seven Kingdoms.
No city wants an army on its doorstep.”
“He’s not wrong,” said Lysono Maar.
“By now the lion surely has the dragon’s scent,” said one of the
Coles, “but Cersei’s attentions will be xed upon Meereen and this
other queen. She knows nothing of our prince. Once we land and
raise our banners, many and more will ock to join us.”
“Some,” allowed Homeless Harry, “not many. Rhaegar’s sister has
dragons. Rhaegar’s son does not. We do not have the strength to
take the realm without Daenerys and her army. Her Unsullied.”
“The rst Aegon took Westeros without eunuchs,” said Lysono
Maar. “Why shouldn’t the sixth Aegon do the same?”
“The plan—”

“Which plan?” said Tristan Rivers. “The fat man’s plan? The one
that changes every time the moon turns? First Viserys Targaryen
was to join us with fty thousand Dothraki screamers at his back.
Then the Beggar King was dead, and it was to be the sister, a pliable
young child queen who was on her way to Pentos with three newhatched dragons. Instead the girl turns up on Slaver’s Bay and
leaves a string of burning cities in her wake, and the fat man
decides we should meet her by Volantis. Now that plan is in ruins as
well.
“I have had enough of Illyrio’s plans. Robert Baratheon won the
Iron Throne without the bene t of dragons. We can do the same.
And if I am wrong and the realm does not rise for us, we can always
retreat back across the narrow sea, as Bittersteel once did, and
others after him.”
Strickland shook his head stubbornly. “The risk—”
“—is not what it was, now that Tywin Lannister is dead. The
Seven Kingdoms will never be more ripe for conquest. Another boy
king sits the Iron Throne, this one even younger than the last, and
rebels are thick upon the ground as autumn leaves.”
“Even so,” said Strickland, “alone, we cannot hope to—”
Gri had heard enough of the captain-general’s cowardice. “We
will not be alone. Dorne will join us, must join us. Prince Aegon is
Elia’s son as well as Rhaegar’s.”
“That’s so,” the boy said, “and who is there left in Westeros to
oppose us? A woman.”
“A Lannister woman,” insisted the captain-general. “The bitch will
have the Kingslayer at her side, count on that, and they will have all
the wealth of Casterly Rock behind them. And Illyrio says this boy
king is betrothed to the Tyrell girl, which means we must face the
power of Highgarden as well.”
Laswell Peake rapped his knuckles on the table. “Even after a
century, some of us still have friends in the Reach. The power of
Highgarden may not be what Mace Tyrell imagines.”
“Prince Aegon,” said Tristan Rivers, “we are your men. Is this
your wish, that we sail west instead of east?”

“It is,” Aegon replied eagerly. “If my aunt wants Meereen, she’s
welcome to it. I will claim the Iron Throne by myself, with your
swords and your allegiance. Move fast and strike hard, and we can
win some easy victories before the Lannisters even know that we
have landed. That will bring others to our cause.”
Rivers was smiling in approval. Others traded thoughtful looks.
Then Peake said, “I would sooner die in Westeros than on the
demon road,” and Marq Mandrake chuckled and responded, “Me, I’d
sooner live, win lands and some great castle,” and Franklyn Flowers
slapped his sword hilt and said, “So long as I can kill some
Fossoways, I’m for it.”
When all of them began to speak at once, Gri knew the tide had
turned. This is a side of Aegon I never saw before. It was not the
prudent course, but he was tired of prudence, sick of secrets, weary
of waiting. Win or lose, he would see Gri n’s Roost again before he
died, and be buried in the tomb beside his father’s.
One by one, the men of the Golden Company rose, knelt, and laid
their swords at the feet of his young prince. The last to do so was
Homeless Harry Strickland, blistered feet and all.
The sun was reddening the western sky and painting scarlet
shadows on the golden skulls atop their spears when they took their
leave of the captain-general’s tent. Franklyn Flowers o ered to take
the prince around the camp and introduce him to some of what he
called the lads. Gri gave his consent. “But remember, so far as the
company is concerned, he must remain Young Gri until we cross
the narrow sea. In Westeros we’ll wash his hair and let him don his
armor.”
“Aye, understood.” Flowers clapped a hand on Young Gri ’s back.
“With me. We’ll start with the cooks. Good men to know.”
When they were gone, Gri turned to the Halfmaester. “Ride
back to the Shy Maid and return with Lady Lemore and Ser Rolly.
We’ll need Illyrio’s chests as well. All the coin, and the armor. Give
Yandry and Ysilla our thanks. Their part in this is done. They will
not be forgotten when His Grace comes into his kingdom.”
“As you command, my lord.”

Gri left him there, and slipped inside the tent that Homeless
Harry had assigned him.
The road ahead was full of perils, he knew, but what of it? All
men must die. All he asked was time. He had waited so long, surely
the gods would grant him a few more years, enough time to see the
boy he’d called a son seated on the Iron Throne. To reclaim his
lands, his name, his honor. To still the bells that rang so loudly in
his dreams whenever he closed his eyes to sleep.
Alone in the tent, as the gold and scarlet rays of the setting sun
shone through the open ap, Jon Connington shrugged o his
wolfskin cloak, slipped his mail shirt o over his head, settled on a
camp stool, and peeled the glove from his right hand. The nail on
his middle nger had turned as black as jet, he saw, and the grey
had crept up almost to the rst knuckle. The tip of his ring nger
had begun to darken too, and when he touched it with the point of
his dagger, he felt nothing.
Death, he knew, but slow. I still have time. A year. Two years. Five.
Some stone men live for ten. Time enough to cross the sea, to see
Gri n’s Roost again. To end the Usurper’s line for good and all, and put
Rhaegar’s son upon the Iron Throne.
Then Lord Jon Connington could die content.

THE WINDBLOWN

T

he word passed through the camp like a hot wind. She is
coming. Her host is on the march. She is racing south to Yunkai, to put
the city to the torch and its people to the sword, and we are going north
to meet her.
Frog had it from Dick Straw who had it from Old Bill Bone who
had it from a Pentoshi named Myrio Myrakis, who had a cousin
who served as cupbearer to the Tattered Prince. “Coz heard it in the
command tent, from Caggo’s own lips,” Dick Straw insisted. “We’ll
march before the day is out, see if we don’t.”
That much proved true. The command came down from the
Tattered Prince through his captains and his serjeants: strike the
tents, load the mules, saddle the horses, we march for Yunkai at the
break of day. “Not that them Yunkish bastards will be wanting us
inside their Yellow City, sni ng round their daughters,” predicted
Baqq, the squint-eyed Myrish crossbowman whose name meant
Beans. “We’ll get provisions in Yunkai, maybe fresh horses, then it
will be on to Meereen to dance with the dragon queen. So hop
quick, Frog, and put a nice edge on your master’s sword. Might be
he’ll need it soon.”
In Dorne Quentyn Martell had been a prince, in Volantis a
merchant’s man, but on the shores of Slaver’s Bay he was only Frog,
squire to the big bald Dornish knight the sellswords called
Greenguts. The men of the Windblown used what names they
would, and changed them at a whim. They’d fastened Frog on him
because he hopped so fast when the big man shouted a command.

Even the commander of the Windblown kept his true name to
himself. Some free companies had been born during the century of
blood and chaos that had followed the Doom of Valyria. Others had
been formed yesterday and would be gone upon the morrow. The
Windblown went back thirty years, and had known but one
commander, the soft-spoken, sad-eyed Pentoshi nobleman called the
Tattered Prince. His hair and mail were silver-grey, but his ragged
cloak was made of twists of cloth of many colors, blue and grey and
purple, red and gold and green, magenta and vermilion and
cerulean, all faded by the sun. When the Tattered Prince was threeand-twenty, as Dick Straw told the story, the magisters of Pentos
had chosen him to be their new prince, hours after beheading their
old prince. Instead he’d buckled on a sword, mounted his favorite
horse, and ed to the Disputed Lands, never to return. He had
ridden with the Second Sons, the Iron Shields, and the Maiden’s
Men, then joined with ve brothers-in-arms to form the Windblown.
Of those six founders, only he survived.
Frog had no notion whether any of that was true. Since signing
into the Windblown in Volantis, he had seen the Tattered Prince
only at a distance. The Dornishmen were new hands, raw recruits,
arrow fodder, three amongst two thousand. Their commander kept
more elevated company. “I am not a squire,” Quentyn had protested
when Gerris Drinkwater—known here as Dornish Gerrold, to
distinguish him from Gerrold Redback and Black Gerrold, and
sometimes as Drink, since the big man had slipped and called him
that—suggested the ruse. “I earned my spurs in Dorne. I am as
much a knight as you are.”
But Gerris had the right of it; he and Arch were here to protect
Quentyn, and that meant keeping him by the big man’s side. “Arch
is the best ghter of the three of us,” Drinkwater had pointed out,
“but only you can hope to wed the dragon queen.”
Wed her or ght her; either way, I will face her soon. The more
Quentyn heard of Daenerys Targaryen, the more he feared that
meeting. The Yunkai’i claimed that she fed her dragons on human
esh and bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her skin smooth and
supple. Beans laughed at that but relished the tales of the silver

queen’s promiscuity. “One of her captains comes of a line where the
men have foot-long members,” he told them, “but even he’s not big
enough for her. She rode with the Dothraki and grew accustomed to
being fucked by stallions, so now no man can ll her.” And Books,
the clever Volantene swordsman who always seemed to have his
nose poked in some crumbly scroll, thought the dragon queen both
murderous and mad. “Her khal killed her brother to make her
queen. Then she killed her khal to make herself khaleesi. She
practices blood sacri ce, lies as easily as she breathes, turns against
her own on a whim. She’s broken truces, tortured envoys … her
father was mad too. It runs in the blood.”
It runs in the blood. King Aerys II had been mad, all of Westeros
knew that. He had exiled two of his Hands and burned a third. If
Daenerys is as murderous as her father, must I still marry her? Prince
Doran had never spoken of that possibility.
Frog would be glad to put Astapor behind him. The Red City was
the closest thing to hell he ever hoped to know. The Yunkai’i had
sealed the broken gates to keep the dead and dying inside the city,
but the sights that he had seen riding down those red brick streets
would haunt Quentyn Martell forever. A river choked with corpses.
The priestess in her torn robes, impaled upon a stake and attended
by a cloud of glistening green ies. Dying men staggering through
the streets, bloody and befouled. Children ghting over half-cooked
puppies. The last free king of Astapor, screaming naked in the pit as
he was set on by a score of starving dogs. And res, res
everywhere. He could close his eyes and see them still: ames
whirling from brick pyramids larger than any castle he had ever
seen, plumes of greasy smoke coiling upward like great black
snakes.
When the wind blew from the south, the air smelled of smoke
even here, three miles from the city. Behind its crumbling red brick
walls, Astapor was still asmolder, though by now most of the great
res had burned out. Ashes oated lazy on the breeze like fat grey
snow akes. It would be good to go.
The big man agreed. “Past time,” he said, when Frog found him
dicing with Beans and Books and Old Bill Bone, and losing yet

again. The sellswords loved Greenguts, who bet as fearlessly as he
fought, but with far less success. “I’ll want my armor, Frog. Did you
scrub that blood o my mail?”
“Aye, ser.” Greenguts’s mail was old and heavy, patched and
patched again, much worn. The same was true of his helm, his
gorget, greaves, and gauntlets, and the rest of his mismatched plate.
Frog’s kit was only slightly better, and Ser Gerris’s was notably
worse. Company steel, the armorer had called it. Quentyn had not
asked how many other men had worn it before him, how many men
had died in it. They had abandoned their own ne armor in
Volantis, along with their gold and their true names. Wealthy
knights from Houses old in honor did not cross the narrow sea to
sell their swords, unless exiled for some infamy. “I’d sooner pose as
poor than evil,” Quentyn had declared, when Gerris had explained
his ruse to them.
It took the Windblown less than an hour to strike their camp.
“And now we ride,” the Tattered Prince proclaimed from his huge
grey warhorse, in a classic High Valyrian that was the closest thing
they had to a company tongue. His stallion’s spotted hindquarters
were covered with ragged strips of cloth torn from the surcoats of
men his master had slain. The prince’s cloak was sewn together
from more of the same. An old man he was, past sixty, yet he still
sat straight and tall in the high saddle, and his voice was strong
enough to carry to every corner of the eld. “Astapor was but a
taste,” he said, “Meereen will be the feast,” and the sellswords sent
up a wild cheer. Streamers of pale blue silk uttered from their
lances, whilst fork-tailed blue-and-white banners ew overhead, the
standards of the Windblown.
The three Dornishmen cheered with all the rest. Silence would
have drawn notice. But as the Windblown rode north along the
coast road, close behind Bloodbeard and the Company of the Cat,
Frog fell in beside Dornish Gerrold. “Soon,” he said, in the Common
Tongue of Westeros. There were other Westerosi in the company,
but not many, and not near. “We need to do it soon.”
“Not here,” warned Gerris, with a mummer’s empty smile. “We’ll
speak of this tonight, when we make camp.”

It was a hundred leagues from Astapor to Yunkai by the old
Ghiscari coast road, and another fty from Yunkai to Meereen. The
free companies, well mounted, could reach Yunkai in six days of
hard riding, or eight at a more leisurely pace. The legions from Old
Ghis would take half again as long, marching afoot, and the
Yunkai’i and their slave soldiers … “With their generals, it’s a
wonder they don’t march into the sea,” Beans said.
The Yunkai’i did not lack for commanders. An old hero named
Yurkhaz zo Yunzak had the supreme command, though the men of
the Windblown glimpsed him only at a distance, coming and going
in a palanquin so huge it required forty slaves to carry it.
They could not help but see his underlings, however. The Yunkish
lordlings scuttled everywhere, like roaches. Half of them seemed to
be named Ghazdan, Grazdan, Mazdhan, or Ghaznak; telling one
Ghiscari name from another was an art few of the Windblown had
mastered, so they gave them mocking styles of their own devising.
Foremost amongst them was the Yellow Whale, an obscenely fat
man who always wore yellow silk tokars with golden fringes. Too
heavy even to stand unassisted, he could not hold his water, so he
always smelled of piss, a stench so sharp that even heavy perfumes
could not conceal it. But he was said to be the richest man in
Yunkai, and he had a passion for grotesques; his slaves included a
boy with the legs and hooves of a goat, a bearded woman, a twoheaded monster from Mantarys, and a hermaphrodite who warmed
his bed at night. “Cock and cunny both,” Dick Straw told them. “The
Whale used to own a giant too, liked to watch him fuck his slave
girls. Then he died. I hear the Whale’d give a sack o’ gold for a new
one.”
Then there was the Girl General, who rode about on a white
horse with a red mane and commanded a hundred strapping slave
soldiers that she had bred and trained herself, all of them young,
lean, rippling with muscle, and naked but for breechclouts, yellow
cloaks, and long bronze shields with erotic inlays. Their mistress
could not have been more than sixteen and fancied herself Yunkai’s
own Daenerys Targaryen.

The Little Pigeon was not quite a dwarf, but he might have
passed for one in a bad light. Yet he strutted about as if he were a
giant, with his plump little legs spread wide and his plump little
chest pu ed out. His soldiers were the tallest that any of the
Windblown had ever seen; the shortest stood seven feet tall, the
tallest close to eight. All were long-faced and long-legged, and the
stilts built into the legs of their ornate armor made them longer
still. Pink-enameled scales covered their torsos; on their heads were
perched elongated helms complete with pointed steel beaks and
crests of bobbing pink feathers. Each man wore a long curved sword
upon his hip, and each clasped a spear as tall as he was, with a leafshaped blade at either end.
“The Little Pigeon breeds them,” Dick Straw informed them. “He
buys tall slaves from all over the world, mates the men to the
women, and keeps their tallest o spring for the Herons. One day he
hopes to be able to dispense with the stilts.”
“A few sessions on the rack might speed along the process,”
suggested the big man.
Gerris Drinkwater laughed. “A fearsome lot. Nothing scares me
worse than stilt-walkers in pink scales and feathers. If one was after
me, I’d laugh so hard my bladder might let go.”
“Some say that herons are majestic,” said Old Bill Bone.
“If your king eats frogs while standing on one leg.”
“Herons are craven,” the big man put in. “One time me and Drink
and Cletus were hunting, and we came on these herons wading in
the shallows, feasting on tadpoles and small sh. They made a
pretty sight, aye, but then a hawk passed overhead, and they all
took to the wing like they’d seen a dragon. Kicked up so much wind
it blew me o my horse, but Cletus nocked an arrow to his string
and brought one down. Tasted like duck, but not so greasy.”
Even the Little Pigeon and his Herons paled beside the folly of
the brothers the sellswords called the Clanker Lords. The last time
the slave soldiers of Yunkai’i had faced the dragon queen’s
Unsullied, they broke and ran. The Clanker Lords had devised a
stratagem to prevent that; they chained their troops together in
groups of ten, wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle. “None of the poor

bastards can run unless they all run,” Dick Straw explained,
laughing. “And if they do all run, they won’t run very fast.”
“They don’t fucking march very fast either,” observed Beans.
“You can hear them clanking ten leagues o .”
There were more, near as mad or worse: Lord Wobblecheeks, the
Drunken Conqueror, the Beastmaster, Pudding Face, the Rabbit, the
Charioteer, the Perfumed Hero. Some had twenty soldiers, some
two hundred or two thousand, all slaves they had trained and
equipped themselves. Every one was wealthy, every one was
arrogant, and every one was a captain and commander, answerable
to no one but Yurkhaz zo Yunzak, disdainful of mere sellswords,
and prone to squabbles over precedence that were as endless as they
were incomprehensible.
In the time it took the Windblown to ride three miles, the
Yunkai’i had fallen two-and-a-half miles behind. “A pack of stinking
yellow fools,” Beans complained. “They still ain’t managed to puzzle
out why the Stormcrows and the Second Sons went over to the
dragon queen.”
“For gold, they believe,” said Books. “Why do you think they’re
paying us so well?”
“Gold is sweet, but life is sweeter,” said Beans. “We were dancing
with cripples at Astapor. Do you want to face real Unsullied with
that lot on your side?”
“We fought the Unsullied at Astapor,” the big man said.
“I said real Unsullied. Hacking o some boy’s stones with a
butcher’s cleaver and handing him a pointy hat don’t make him
Unsullied. That dragon queen’s got the real item, the kind that don’t
break and run when you fart in their general direction.”
“Them, and dragons too.” Dick Straw glanced up at the sky as if
he thought the mere mention of dragons might be enough to bring
them down upon the company. “Keep your swords sharp, boys,
we’ll have us a real ght soon.”
A real ght, thought Frog. The words stuck in his craw. The ght
beneath the walls of Astapor had seemed real enough to him,
though he knew the sellswords felt otherwise. “That was butchery,
not battle,” the warrior bard Denzo D’han had been heard to declare

afterward. Denzo was a captain, and veteran of a hundred battles.
Frog’s experience was limited to practice yard and tourney ground,
so he did not think it was his place to dispute the verdict of such a
seasoned warrior.
It seemed like a battle when it rst began, though. He remembered
how his gut had clenched when he was kicked awake at dawn with
the big man looming over him. “Into your armor, slugabed,” he’d
boomed. “The Butcher’s coming out to give us battle. Up, unless you
mean to be his meat.”
“The Butcher King is dead,” Frog had protested sleepily. That was
the story all of them had heard as they scrambled from the ships
that had brought them from Old Volantis. A second King Cleon had
taken the crown and died in turn, supposedly, and now the Astapori
were ruled by a whore and a mad barber whose followers were
ghting with each other to control the city.
“Maybe they lied,” the big man had replied. “Or else this is some
other butcher. Might be the rst one come back screaming from his
tomb to kill some Yunkishmen. Makes no bloody matter, Frog. Get
your armor on.” The tent slept ten, and all of them had been on their
feet by then, wriggling into breeches and boots, sliding long coats
of ringmail down onto their shoulders, buckling breastplates,
tightening the straps on greaves or vambraces, grabbing for helms
and shields and sword belts. Gerris, quick as ever, was the rst one
fully clad, Arch close behind him. Together they helped Quentyn
don his own harness.
Three hundred yards away, Astapor’s new Unsullied had been
pouring through their gates and forming up in ranks beneath their
city’s crumbling red brick walls, dawn light glinting o their spiked
bronze helmets and the points of their long spears.
The three Dornishmen spilled from the tent together to join the
ghters sprinting for the horse lines. Battle. Quentyn had trained
with spear and sword and shield since he was old enough to walk,
but that meant nothing now. Warrior, make me brave, Frog had
prayed, as drums beat in the distance, BOOM boom BOOM boom
BOOM boom. The big man pointed out the Butcher King to him,
sitting sti and tall upon an armored horse in a suit of copper scale

that ashed brilliantly in the morning sun. He remembered Gerris
sidling up just before the ght began. “Stay close to Arch, whatever
happens. Remember, you’re the only one of us who can get the
girl.” By then the Astapori were advancing.
Dead or alive, the Butcher King still took the Wise Masters
unawares. The Yunkishmen were still running about in uttering
tokars trying to get their half-trained slave soldiers into some
semblance of order as Unsullied spears came crashing through their
siege lines. If not for their allies and their despised hirelings they
might well have been overwhelmed, but the Windblown and the
Company of the Cat were ahorse in minutes and came thundering
down on the Astapori anks even as a legion from New Ghis pushed
through the Yunkish camp from the other side and met the
Unsullied spear to spear and shield to shield.
The rest was butchery, but this time it was the Butcher King on
the wrong end of the cleaver. Caggo was the one who nally cut
him down, ghting through the king’s protectors on his monstrous
warhorse and opening Cleon the Great from shoulder to hip with
one blow of his curved Valyrian arakh. Frog did not see it, but those
who did claimed Cleon’s copper armor rent like silk, and from
within came an awful stench and a hundred wriggling grave worms.
Cleon had been dead after all. The desperate Astapori had pulled
him from his tomb, clapped him into armor, and tied him onto a
horse in hopes of giving heart to their Unsullied.
Dead Cleon’s fall wrote an end to that. The new Unsullied threw
down their spears and shields and ran, only to nd the gates of
Astapor shut behind them. Frog had done his part in the slaughter
that followed, riding down the frightened eunuchs with the other
Windblown. Hard by the big man’s hip he rode, slashing right and
left as their wedge went through the Unsullied like a spearpoint.
When they burst through on the other side, the Tattered Prince had
wheeled them round and led them through again. It was only
coming back that Frog got a good look at the faces beneath the
spiked bronze caps and realized that most were no older than he.
Green boys screaming for their mothers, he’d thought, but he killed
them all the same. By the time he’d left the eld, his sword was

running red with blood and his arm was so tired he could hardly lift
it.
Yet that was no real ght, he thought. The real ght will be on us
soon, and we must be away before it comes, or we’ll nd ourselves
ghting on the wrong side.
That night the Windblown made camp beside the shore of Slaver’s
Bay. Frog drew the rst watch and was sent to guard the horse
lines. Gerris met him there just after sundown, as a half-moon shone
upon the waters.
“The big man should be here as well,” said Quentyn.
“He’s gone to look up Old Bill Bone and lose the rest of his
silver,” Gerris said. “Leave him out of this. He’ll do as we say,
though he won’t like it much.”
“No.” There was much and more about this Quentyn did not like
himself. Sailing on an overcrowded ship tossed by wind and sea,
eating hard-bread crawling with weevils and drinking black tar rum
to sweet oblivion, sleeping on piles of moldy straw with the stench
of strangers in his nostrils … all that he had expected when he made
his mark on that scrap of parchment in Volantis, pledging the
Tattered Prince his sword and service for a year. Those were
hardships to be endured, the stu of all adventures.
But what must come next was plain betrayal. The Yunkai’i had
brought them from Old Volantis to ght for the Yellow City, but
now the Dornishmen meant to turn their cloaks and go over to the
other side. That meant abandoning their new brothers-in-arms as
well. The Windblown were not the sort of companions Quentyn
would have chosen, but he had crossed the sea with them, shared
their meat and mead, fought beside them, traded tales with those
few whose talk he understood. And if all his tales were lies, well,
that was the cost of passage to Meereen.
It is not what you’d call honorable, Gerris had warned them, back at
the Merchant’s House.
“Daenerys may be halfway to Yunkai by now, with an army at
her back,” Quentyn said as they walked amongst the horses.
“She may be,” Gerris said, “but she’s not. We’ve heard such talk
before. The Astapori were convinced Daenerys was coming south

with her dragons to break the siege. She didn’t come then, and she’s
not coming now.”
“We can’t know that, not for certain. We need to steal away
before we end up ghting the woman I was sent to woo.”
“Wait till Yunkai.” Gerris gestured at the hills. “These lands
belong to the Yunkai’i. No one is like to want to feed or shelter
three deserters. North of Yunkai, that’s no-man’s-land.”
He was not wrong. Even so, Quentyn felt uneasy. “The big man’s
made too many friends. He knows the plan was always to steal o
and make our way to Daenerys, but he’s not going to feel good
about abandoning men he’s fought with. If we wait too long, it’s
going to feel as if we’re deserting them on the eve of battle. He will
never do that. You know him as well as I do.”
“It’s desertion whenever we do it,” argued Gerris, “and the
Tattered Prince takes a dim view of deserters. He’ll send hunters
after us, and Seven save us if they catch us. If we’re lucky, they’ll
just chop o a foot to make sure we never run again. If we’re
unlucky, they’ll give us to Pretty Meris.”
That last gave Quentyn pause. Pretty Meris frightened him. A
Westerosi woman, but taller than he was, just a thumb under six
feet. After twenty years amongst the free companies, there was
nothing pretty about her, inside or out.
Gerris took him by the arm. “Wait. A few more days, that’s all.
We have crossed half the world, be patient for a few more leagues.
Somewhere north of Yunkai our chance will come.”
“If you say,” said Frog doubtfully …
… but for once the gods were listening, and their chance came
much sooner than that.
It was two days later. Hugh Hungerford reined up by their
cook re, and said, “Dornish. You’re wanted in the command tent.”
“Which one of us?” asked Gerris. “We’re all Dornish.”
“All of you, then.” Sour and saturnine, with a maimed hand,
Hungerford had been company paymaster for a time, until the
Tattered Prince had caught him stealing from the co ers and
removed three of his ngers. Now he was just a serjeant.

What could this be? Up to now, Frog had no notion that their
commander knew he was alive. Hungerford had already ridden o ,
however, so there was no time for questions. All they could do was
gather up the big man and report as ordered. “Admit to nothing and
be prepared to ght,” Quentyn told his friends.
“I am always prepared to ght,” said the big man.
The great grey sailcloth pavilion that the Tattered Prince liked to
call his canvas castle was crowded when the Dornishmen arrived. It
took Quentyn only a moment to realize that most of those
assembled were from the Seven Kingdoms, or boasted Westerosi
blood. Exiles or the sons of exiles. Dick Straw claimed there were
three score Westerosi in the company; a good third of those were
here, including Dick himself, Hugh Hungerford, Pretty Meris, and
golden-haired Lewis Lanster, the company’s best archer.
Denzo D’han was there as well, with Caggo huge beside him.
Caggo Corpsekiller the men were calling him now, though not to his
face; he was quick to anger, and that curved black sword of his was
as nasty as its owner. There were hundreds of Valyrian longswords
in the world, but only a handful of Valyrian arakhs. Neither Caggo
nor D’han was Westerosi, but both were captains and stood high in
the Tattered Prince’s regard. His right arm and his left. Something
major is afoot.
It was the Tattered Prince himself who did the speaking. “Orders
have come down from Yurkhaz,” he said. “What Astapori still
survive have come creeping from their hidey-holes, it seems.
There’s nothing left in Astapor but corpses, so they’re pouring out
into the countryside, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all
starved and sick. The Yunkai’i don’t want them near their Yellow
City. We’ve been commanded to hunt them down and turn them,
drive them back to Astapor or north to Meereen. If the dragon
queen wants to take them in, she’s welcome to them. Half of them
have the bloody ux, and even the healthy ones are mouths to
feed.”
“Yunkai is closer than Meereen,” Hugh Hungerford objected.
“What if they won’t turn, my lord?”

“That’s why you have swords and lances, Hugh. Though bows
might serve you better. Stay well away from those who show signs
of the ux. I’m sending half our strength into the hills. Fifty patrols,
twenty riders each. Bloodbeard’s got the same orders, so the Cats
will be in the eld as well.”
A look passed between the men, and a few muttered under their
breath. Though the Windblown and the Company of the Cat were
both under contract to Yunkai, a year ago in the Disputed Lands
they had been on opposite sides of the battle lines, and bad blood
still lingered. Bloodbeard, the savage commander of the Cats, was a
roaring giant with a ferocious appetite for slaughter who made no
secret of his disdain for “old greybeards in rags.”
Dick Straw cleared his throat. “Begging your pardon, but we’re all
Seven Kingdoms born here. M’lord never broke up the company by
blood or tongue before. Why send us lot together?”
“A fair question. You’re to ride east, deep into the hills, then
swing wide about Yunkai, making for Meereen. Should you come on
any Astapori, drive them north or kill them … but know that is not
the purpose of your mission. Beyond the Yellow City, you’re like to
come up against the dragon queen’s patrols. Second Sons or
Stormcrows. Either will serve. Go over to them.”
“Go over to them?” said the bastard knight, Ser Orson Stone.
“You’d have us turn our cloaks?”
“I would,” said the Tattered Prince.
Quentyn Martell almost laughed aloud. The gods are mad.
The Westerosi shifted uneasily. Some stared into their wine cups,
as if they hoped to nd some wisdom there. Hugh Hungerford
frowned. “You think Queen Daenerys will take us in …”
“I do.”
“… but if she does, what then? Are we spies? Assassins? Envoys?
Are you thinking to change sides?”
Caggo scowled. “That is for the prince to decide, Hungerford.
Your part is to do as you are told.”
“Always.” Hungerford raised his two- ngered hand.
“Let us be frank,” said Denzo D’han, the warrior bard. “The
Yunkai’i do not inspire con dence. Whatever the outcome of this

war, the Windblown should share in the spoils of victory. Our
prince is wise to keep all roads open.”
“Meris will command you,” said the Tattered Prince. “She knows
my mind in this … and Daenerys Targaryen may be more accepting
of another woman.”
Quentyn glanced back to Pretty Meris. When her cold dead eyes
met his, he felt a shiver. I do not like this.
Dick Straw still had doubts as well. “The girl would be a fool to
trust us. Even with Meris. Especially with Meris. Hell, I don’t trust
Meris, and I’ve fucked her a few times.” He grinned, but no one
laughed. Least of all Pretty Meris.
“I think you are mistaken, Dick,” the Tattered Prince said. “You
are all Westerosi. Friends from home. You speak her same tongue,
worship her same gods. As for motive, all of you have su ered
wrongs at my hands. Dick, I’ve whipped you more than any man in
the company, and you have the back to prove it. Hugh lost three
ngers to my discipline. Meris was raped half round the company.
Not this company, true, but we need not mention that. Will of the
Woods, well, you’re just lth. Ser Orson blames me for dispatching
his brother to the Sorrows and Ser Lucifer is still seething about that
slave girl Caggo took from him.”
“He could have given her back when he’d had her,” Lucifer Long
complained. “He had no cause to kill her.”
“She was ugly,” said Caggo. “That’s cause enough.”
The Tattered Prince went on as if no one had spoken. “Webber,
you nurse claims to lands lost in Westeros. Lanster, I killed that boy
you were so fond of. You Dornish three, you think we lied to you.
The plunder from Astapor was much less than you were promised in
Volantis, and I took the lion’s share of it.”
“The last part’s true,” Ser Orson said.
“The best ruses always have some seed of truth,” said the
Tattered Prince. “Every one of you has ample reason for wanting to
abandon me. And Daenerys Targaryen knows that sellswords are a
ckle lot. Her own Second Sons and Stormcrows took Yunkish gold
but did not hesitate to join her when the tide of battle began to ow
her way.”

“When should we leave?” asked Lewis Lanster.
“At once. Be wary of the Cats and any Long Lances you may
encounter. No one will know your defection is a ruse but those of us
in this tent. Turn your tiles too soon, and you will be maimed as
deserters or disemboweled as turncloaks.”
The three Dornishmen were silent as they left the command tent.
Twenty riders, all speaking the Common Tongue, thought Quentyn.
Whispering has just gotten a deal more dangerous.
The big man slapped him hard across the back. “So. This is sweet,
Frog. A dragon hunt.”

THE WAYWARD BRIDE

A

sha Greyjoy was seated in Galbart Glover’s longhall drinking
Galbart Glover’s wine when Galbart Glover’s maester brought the
letter to her.
“My lady.” The maester’s voice was anxious, as it always was
when he spoke to her. “A bird from Barrowton.” He thrust the
parchment at her as if he could not wait to be rid of it. It was
tightly rolled and sealed with a button of hard pink wax.
Barrowton. Asha tried to recall who ruled in Barrowton. Some
northern lord, no friend of mine. And that seal … the Boltons of the
Dreadfort went into battle beneath pink banners spattered with
little drops of blood. It only stood to reason that they would use
pink sealing wax as well.
This is poison that I hold, she thought. I ought to burn it. Instead she
cracked the seal. A scrap of leather uttered down into her lap.
When she read the dry brown words, her black mood grew blacker
still. Dark wings, dark words. The ravens never brought glad tidings.
The last message sent to Deepwood had been from Stannis
Baratheon, demanding homage. This was worse. “The northmen
have taken Moat Cailin.”
“The Bastard of Bolton?” asked Qarl, beside her.
“Ramsay Bolton, Lord of Winterfell, he signs himself. But there are
other names as well.” Lady Dustin, Lady Cerwyn, and four Ryswells
had appended their own signatures beneath his. Beside them was
drawn a crude giant, the mark of some Umber.
Those were done in maester’s ink, made of soot and coal tar, but
the message above was scrawled in brown in a huge, spiky hand. It

spoke of the fall of Moat Cailin, of the triumphant return of the
Warden of the North to his domains, of a marriage soon to be made.
The rst words were, “I write this letter in the blood of ironmen,” the
last, “I send you each a piece of prince. Linger in my lands, and share
his fate.”
Asha had believed her little brother dead. Better dead than this.
The scrap of skin had fallen into her lap. She held it to the candle
and watched the smoke curl up, until the last of it had been
consumed and the ame was licking at her ngers.
Galbart Glover’s maester hovered expectantly at her elbow.
“There will be no answer,” she informed him.
“May I share these tidings with Lady Sybelle?”
“If it please you.” Whether Sybelle Glover would nd any joy in
the fall of Moat Cailin, Asha could not say. Lady Sybelle all but
lived in her godswood, praying for her children and her husband’s
safe return. Another prayer like to go unanswered. Her heart tree is as
deaf and blind as our Drowned God. Robett Glover and his brother
Galbart had ridden south with the Young Wolf. If the tales they had
heard of the Red Wedding were even half-true, they were not like
to ride north again. Her children are alive, at least, and that is thanks
to me. Asha had left them at Ten Towers in the care of her aunts.
Lady Sybelle’s infant daughter was still on the breast, and she had
judged the girl too delicate to expose to the rigors of another
stormy crossing. Asha shoved the letter into the maester’s hands.
“Here. Let her nd some solace here if she can. You have my leave
to go.”
The maester inclined his head and departed. After he was gone,
Tris Botley turned to Asha. “If Moat Cailin has fallen, Torrhen’s
Square will soon follow. Then it will be our turn.”
“Not for a while yet. The Cleftjaw will make them bleed.”
Torrhen’s Square was not a ruin like Moat Cailin, and Dagmer was
iron to the bone. He would die before he’d yield.
If my father still lived, Moat Cailin would never have fallen. Balon
Greyjoy had known that the Moat was the key to holding the north.
Euron knew that as well; he simply did not care. No more than he
cared what happened to Deepwood Motte or Torrhen’s Square.

“Euron has no interest in Balon’s conquests. My nuncle’s o chasing
dragons.” The Crow’s Eye had summoned all the strength of the
Iron Isles to Old Wyk and sailed out into the deepness of the Sunset
Sea, with his brother Victarion following behind like a whipped cur.
There was no one left on Pyke to appeal to, save for her own lord
husband. “We stand alone.”
“Dagmer will smash them,” insisted Cromm, who had never met a
woman he loved half so much as battle. “They are only wolves.”
“The wolves are all slain.” Asha picked at the pink wax with her
thumbnail. “These are the skinners who slew them.”
“We should go to Torrhen’s Square and join the ght,” urged
Quenton Greyjoy, a distant cousin and captain of the Salty Wench.
“Aye,” said Dagon Greyjoy, a cousin still more distant. Dagon the
Drunkard, men called him, but drunk or sober he loved to ght.
“Why should the Cleftjaw have all the glory for himself?”
Two of Galbart Glover’s serving men brought forth the roast, but
that strip of skin had taken Asha’s appetite. My men have given up all
hope of victory, she realized glumly. All they look for now is a good
death. The wolves would give them that, she had no doubt. Soon or
late, they will come to take this castle back.
The sun was sinking behind the tall pines of the wolfswood as
Asha climbed the wooden steps to the bedchamber that had once
been Galbart Glover’s. She had drunk too much wine and her head
was pounding. Asha Greyjoy loved her men, captains and crew
alike, but half of them were fools. Brave fools, but fools nonetheless.
Go to the Cleftjaw, yes, as if we could …
Between Deepwood and Dagmer lay long leagues, rugged hills,
thick woods, wild rivers, and more northmen than she cared to
contemplate. Asha had four longships and not quite two hundred
men … including Tristifer Botley, who could not be relied on. For
all his talk of love, she could not imagine Tris rushing o to
Torrhen’s Square to die with Dagmer Cleftjaw.
Qarl followed her up to Galbart Glover’s bedchamber. “Get out,”
she told him. “I want to be alone.”
“What you want is me.” He tried to kiss her.
Asha pushed him away. “Touch me again and I’ll—”

“What?” He drew his dagger. “Undress yourself, girl.”
“Fuck yourself, you beardless boy.”
“I’d sooner fuck you.” One quick slash unlaced her jerkin. Asha
reached for her axe, but Qarl dropped his knife and caught her
wrist, twisting back her arm until the weapon fell from her ngers.
He pushed her back onto Glover’s bed, kissed her hard, and tore o
her tunic to let her breasts spill out. When she tried to knee him in
the groin, he twisted away and forced her legs apart with his knees.
“I’ll have you now.”
“Do it,” she spat, “and I’ll kill you in your sleep.”
She was sopping wet when he entered her. “Damn you,” she said.
“Damn you damn you damn you.” He sucked her nipples till she
cried out half in pain and half in pleasure. Her cunt became the
world. She forgot Moat Cailin and Ramsay Bolton and his little
piece of skin, forgot the kingsmoot, forgot her failure, forgot her
exile and her enemies and her husband. Only his hands mattered,
only his mouth, only his arms around her, his cock inside her. He
fucked her till she screamed, and then again until she wept, before
he nally spent his seed inside her womb.
“I am a woman wed,” she reminded him, afterward. “You’ve
despoiled me, you beardless boy. My lord husband will cut your
balls o and put you in a dress.”
Qarl rolled o her. “If he can get out of his chair.”
The room was cold. Asha rose from Galbart Glover’s bed and took
o her torn clothes. The jerkin would need fresh laces, but her tunic
was ruined. I never liked it anyway. She tossed it on the ames. The
rest she left in a puddle by the bed. Her breasts were sore, and
Qarl’s seed was trickling down her thigh. She would need to brew
some moon tea or risk bringing another kraken into the world.
What does it matter? My father’s dead, my mother’s dying, my brother’s
being ayed, and there’s naught that I can do about any of it. And I’m
married. Wedded and bedded … though not by the same man.
When she slipped back beneath the furs, Qarl was asleep. “Now
your life is mine. Where did I put my dagger?” Asha pressed herself
against his back and slid her arms about him. On the isles he was
known as Qarl the Maid, in part to distinguish him from Qarl

Shepherd, Queer Qarl Kenning, Qarl Quickaxe, and Qarl the Thrall,
but more for his smooth cheeks. When Asha had rst met him, Qarl
had been trying to raise a beard. “Peach fuzz,” she had called it,
laughing. Qarl confessed that he had never seen a peach, so she told
him he must join her on her next voyage south.
It had still been summer then; Robert sat the Iron Throne, Balon
brooded on the Seastone Chair, and the Seven Kingdoms were at
peace. Asha sailed the Black Wind down the coast, trading. They
called at Fair Isle and Lannisport and a score of smaller ports before
reaching the Arbor, where the peaches were always huge and sweet.
“You see,” she’d said, the rst time she’d held one up against Qarl’s
cheek. When she made him try a bite, the juice ran down his chin,
and she had to kiss it clean.
That night they’d spent devouring peaches and each other, and by
the time daylight returned Asha was sated and sticky and as happy
as she’d ever been. Was that six years ago, or seven? Summer was a
fading memory, and it had been three years since Asha last enjoyed
a peach. She still enjoyed Qarl, though. The captains and the kings
might not have wanted her, but he did.
Asha had known other lovers; some shared her bed for half a
year, some for half a night. Qarl pleased her more than all the rest
together. He might shave but once a fortnight, but a shaggy beard
does not make a man. She liked the feel of his smooth, soft skin
beneath her ngers. She liked the way his long, straight hair
brushed against his shoulders. She liked the way he kissed. She liked
how he grinned when she brushed her thumbs across his nipples.
The hair between his legs was a darker shade of sand than the hair
on his head, but ne as down compared to the coarse black bush
around her own sex. She liked that too. He had a swimmer’s body,
long and lean, with not a scar upon him.
A shy smile, strong arms, clever ngers, and two sure swords. What
more could any woman want? She would have married Qarl, and
gladly, but she was Lord Balon’s daughter and he was commonborn, the grandson of a thrall. Too lowborn for me to wed, but not too
low for me to suck his cock. Drunk, smiling, she crawled beneath the
furs and took him in her mouth. Qarl stirred in his sleep, and after a

moment he began to sti en. By the time she had him hard again, he
was awake and she was wet. Asha draped the furs across her bare
shoulders and mounted him, drawing him so deep inside her that
she could not tell who had the cock and who the cunt. This time the
two of them reached their peak together.
“My sweet lady,” he murmured after, in a voice still thick with
sleep. “My sweet queen.”
No, Asha thought, I am no queen, nor shall I ever be. “Go back to
sleep.” She kissed his cheek, padded across Galbart Glover’s
bedchamber, and threw the shutters open. The moon was almost
full, the night so clear that she could see the mountains, their peaks
crowned with snow. Cold and bleak and inhospitable, but beautiful in
the moonlight. Their summits glimmered pale and jagged as a row of
sharpened teeth. The foothills and the smaller peaks were lost in
shadow.
The sea was closer, only ve leagues north, but Asha could not
see it. Too many hills stood in the way. And trees, so many trees. The
wolfswood, the northmen named the forest. Most nights you could
hear the wolves, calling to each other through the dark. An ocean of
leaves. Would it were an ocean of water.
Deepwood might be closer to the sea than Winterfell, but it was
still too far for her taste. The air smelled of pines instead of salt.
Northeast of those grim grey mountains stood the Wall, where
Stannis Baratheon had raised his standards. The enemy of my enemy
is my friend, men said, but the other side of that coin was, the enemy
of my friend is my enemy. The ironborn were the enemies of the
northern lords this Baratheon pretender needed desperately. I could
o er him my fair young body, she thought, pushing a strand of hair
from her eyes, but Stannis was wed and so was she, and he and the
ironborn were old foes. During her father’s rst rebellion, Stannis
had smashed the Iron Fleet o Fair Isle and subdued Great Wyk in
his brother’s name.
Deepwood’s mossy walls enclosed a wide, rounded hill with a
attened top, crowned by a cavernous longhall with a watchtower
at one end, rising fty feet above the hill. Beneath the hill was the
bailey, with its stables, paddock, smithy, well, and sheepfold,

defended by a deep ditch, a sloping earthen dike, and a palisade of
logs. The outer defenses made an oval, following the contours of
the land. There were two gates, each protected by a pair of square
wooden towers, and wallwalks around the perimeter. On the south
side of the castle, moss grew thick upon the palisade and crept
halfway up the towers. To east and west were empty elds. Oats
and barley had been growing there when Asha took the castle, only
to be crushed underfoot during her attack. A series of hard frosts
had killed the crops they’d planted afterward, leaving only mud and
ash and wilted, rotting stalks.
It was an old castle, but not a strong one. She had taken it from
the Glovers, and the Bastard of Bolton would take it from her. He
would not ay her, though. Asha Greyjoy did not intend to be taken
alive. She would die as she had lived, with an axe in her hand and a
laugh upon her lips.
Her lord father had given her thirty longships to capture
Deepwood. Four remained, counting her own Black Wind, and one
of those belonged to Tris Botley, who had joined her when all her
other men were eeing. No. That is not just. They sailed home to do
homage to their king. If anyone ed, it was me. The memory still
shamed her.
“Go,” the Reader had urged, as the captains were bearing her
uncle Euron down Nagga’s hill to don his driftwood crown.
“Said the raven to the crow. Come with me. I need you to raise
the men of Harlaw.” Back then, she’d meant to ght.
“The men of Harlaw are here. The ones who count. Some were
shouting Euron’s name. I will not set Harlaw against Harlaw.”
“Euron’s mad. And dangerous. That hellhorn …”
“I heard it. Go, Asha. Once Euron has been crowned, he’ll look for
you. You dare not let his eye fall upon you.”
“If I stand with my other uncles …”
“… you will die outcast, with every hand against you. When you
put your name before the captains you submitted yourself to their
judgment. You cannot go against that judgment now. Only once has
the choice of a kingsmoot been overthrown. Read Haereg.”

Only Rodrik the Reader would talk of some old book whilst their
lives were balanced on a sword’s edge. “If you are staying, so am I,”
she told him stubbornly.
“Don’t be a fool. Euron shows the world his smiling eye tonight,
but come the morrow … Asha, you are Balon’s daughter, and your
claim is stronger than his own. So long as you draw breath you
remain a danger to him. If you stay, you will be killed or wed to the
Red Oarsman. I don’t know which would be worse. Go. You will not
have another chance.”
Asha had landed Black Wind on the far side of the island for just
such an eventuality. Old Wyk was not large. She could be back
aboard her ship before the sun came up, on her way to Harlaw
before Euron realized she was missing. Yet she hesitated until her
uncle said, “Do it for the love you bear me, child. Do not make me
watch you die.”
So she went. To Ten Towers rst, to bid farewell to her mother.
“It may be a long while before I come again,” Asha warned her.
Lady Alannys had not understood. “Where is Theon?” she asked.
“Where is my baby boy?” Lady Gwynesse only wanted to know
when Lord Rodrik would return. “I am seven years his elder. Ten
Towers should be mine.”
Asha was still at Ten Towers taking on provisions when the
tidings of her marriage reached her. “My wayward niece needs
taming,” the Crow’s Eye was reported to have said, “and I know the
man to tame her.” He had married her to Erik Ironmaker and
named the Anvil-Breaker to rule the Iron Islands whilst he was
chasing dragons. Erik had been a great man in his day, a fearless
reaver who could boast of having sailed with her grandsire’s
grandsire, that same Dagon Greyjoy whom Dagon the Drunkard had
been named for. Old women on Fair Isle still frightened their
grandchildren with tales of Lord Dagon and his men. I wounded
Erik’s pride at the kingsmoot, Asha re ected. He is not like to forget
that.
She had to pay her nuncle his just due. With one stroke, Euron
had turned a rival into a supporter, secured the isles in his absence,
and removed Asha as a threat. And enjoyed a good belly laugh too.

Tris Botley said that the Crow’s Eye had used a seal to stand in for
her at her wedding. “I hope Erik did not insist on a consummation,”
she’d said.
I cannot go home, she thought, but I dare not stay here much longer.
The quiet of the woods unnerved her. Asha had spent her life on
islands and on ships. The sea was never silent. The sound of the
waves washing against a rocky shore was in her blood, but there
were no waves at Deepwood Motte … only the trees, the endless
trees, soldier pines and sentinels, beech and ash and ancient oaks,
chestnut trees and ironwoods and rs. The sound they made was
softer than the sea, and she heard it only when the wind was
blowing; then the sighing seemed to come from all around her, as if
the trees were whispering to one another in some language that she
could not understand.
Tonight the whispering seemed louder than before. A rush of dead
brown leaves, Asha told herself, bare branches creaking in the wind.
She turned away from the window, away from the woods. I need a
deck beneath my feet again. Or failing that, some food in my belly.
She’d had too much wine tonight, but too little bread and none of
that great bloody roast.
The moonlight was bright enough to nd her clothes. She donned
thick black breeches, a quilted tunic, and a green leather jerkin
covered with overlapping plates of steel. Leaving Qarl to his
dreams, she padded down the keep’s exterior stair, the steps
creaking under her bare feet. One of the men walking sentry on the
walls spied her making her descent and lifted his spear to her. Asha
whistled back at him. As she crossed the inner yard to the kitchens,
Galbart Glover’s dogs began to bark. Good, she thought. That will
drown out the sound of the trees.
She was cutting a wedge of yellow cheese from a round as big as
a cart wheel when Tris Botley stepped into the kitchen, bundled up
in a thick fur cloak. “My queen.”
“Don’t mock me.”
“You will always rule my heart. No amount of fools shouting at a
kingsmoot can change that.”

What am I to do with this boy? Asha could not doubt his devotion.
Not only had he stood her champion on Nagga’s hill and shouted out
her name, but he had even crossed the sea to join her afterward,
abandoning his king and kin and home. Not that he dared defy Euron
to his face. When the Crow’s Eye took the eet to sea Tris had
simply lagged behind, changing course only when the other ships
were lost to sight. Even that took a certain courage, though; he
could never return to the isles. “Cheese?” she asked him. “There’s
ham as well, and mustard.”
“It’s not food I want, my lady. You know that.” Tris had grown
himself a thick brown beard at Deepwood. He claimed it helped to
keep his face warm. “I saw you from the watchtower.”
“If you have the watch, what are you doing here?”
“Cromm’s up there, and Hagen the Horn. How many eyes do we
need to watch leaves rustle in the moonlight? We need to talk.”
“Again?” She sighed. “You know Hagen’s daughter, the one with
the red hair. She steers a ship as well as any man and has a pretty
face. Seventeen, and I’ve seen her looking at you.”
“I don’t want Hagen’s daughter.” He almost touched her before
thinking better of it. “Asha, it is time to go. Moat Cailin was the
only thing holding back the tide. If we remain here, the northmen
will kill us all, you know that.”
“Would you have me run?”
“I would have you live. I love you.”
No, she thought, you love some innocent maiden who lives only in
your head, a frightened child in need of your protection. “I do not love
you,” she said bluntly, “and I do not run.”
“What’s here that you should hold so tight to it but pine and mud
and foes? We have our ships. Sail away with me, and we’ll make
new lives upon the sea.”
“As pirates?” It was almost tempting. Let the wolves have back their
gloomy woods and retake the open sea.
“As traders,” he insisted. “We’ll voyage east as the Crow’s Eye
did, but we’ll come back with silks and spices instead of a dragon’s
horn. One voyage to the Jade Sea and we’ll be as rich as gods. We
can have a manse in Oldtown or one of the Free Cities.”

“You and me and Qarl?” She saw him inch at the mention of
Qarl’s name. “Hagen’s girl might like to sail the Jade Sea with you.
I am still the kraken’s daughter. My place is—”
“—where? You cannot return to the isles. Not unless you mean to
submit to your lord husband.”
Asha tried to picture herself abed with Erik Ironmaker, crushed
beneath his bulk, su ering his embraces. Better him than the Red
Oarsman or Left-Hand Lucas Codd. The Anvil-Breaker had once been
a roaring giant, fearsomely strong, ercely loyal, utterly without
fear. It might not be so bad. He’s like to die the rst time he tries to do
his duty as a husband. That would make her Erik’s widow instead of
Erik’s wife, which could be better or a good deal worse, depending
on his grandsons. And my nuncle. In the end, all the winds blow me
back toward Euron. “I have hostages, on Harlaw,” she reminded him.
“And there is still Sea Dragon Point … if I cannot have my father’s
kingdom, why not make one of my own?” Sea Dragon Point had not
always been as thinly peopled as it was now. Old ruins could still be
found amongst its hills and bogs, the remains of ancient strongholds
of the First Men. In the high places, there were weirwood circles
left by the children of the forest.
“You are clinging to Sea Dragon Point the way a drowning man
clings to a bit of wreckage. What does Sea Dragon have that anyone
could ever want? There are no mines, no gold, no silver, not even
tin or iron. The land is too wet for wheat or corn.”
I do not plan on planting wheat or corn. “What’s there? I’ll tell you.
Two long coastlines, a hundred hidden coves, otters in the lakes,
salmon in the rivers, clams along the shore, colonies of seals
o shore, tall pines for building ships.”
“Who will build these ships, my queen? Where will Your Grace
nd subjects for her kingdom if the northmen let you have it? Or do
you mean to rule over a realm of seals and otters?”
She gave a rueful laugh. “Otters might be easier to rule than men,
I grant you. And seals are smarter. No, you may be right. My best
course may still be to return to Pyke. There are those on Harlaw
who would welcome my return. On Pyke as well. And Euron won
no friends on Blacktyde when he slew Lord Baelor. I could nd my

nuncle Aeron, raise the isles.” No one had seen the Damphair since
the kingsmoot, but his Drowned Men claimed he was hiding on
Great Wyk and would soon come forth to call down the wroth of
the Drowned God on the Crow’s Eye and his minions.
“The Anvil-Breaker is searching for the Damphair too. He is
hunting down the Drowned Men. Blind Beron Blacktyde was taken
and put to the question. Even the Old Grey Gull was given shackles.
How will you nd the priest when all of Euron’s men cannot?”
“He is my blood. My father’s brother.” It was a feeble answer,
and Asha knew it.
“Do you know what I think?”
“I am about to, I suspect.”
“I think the Damphair’s dead. I think the Crow’s Eye slit his
throat for him. Ironmaker’s search is just to make us believe the
priest escaped. Euron is afraid to be seen as a kinslayer.”
“Never let my nuncle hear you say that. Tell the Crow’s Eye he’s
afraid of kinslaying, and he’ll murder one of his own sons just to
prove you wrong.” Asha was feeling almost sober by then. Tristifer
Botley had that e ect on her.
“Even if you did nd your uncle Damphair, the two of you would
fail. You were both part of the kingsmoot, so you cannot say it was
unlawful called, as Torgon did. You are bound to its decision by all
the laws of gods and men. You—”
Asha frowned. “Wait. Torgon? Which Torgon?”
“Torgon the Latecomer.”
“He was a king during the Age of Heroes.” She recalled that much
about him, but little else. “What of him?”
“Torgon Greyiron was the king’s eldest son. But the king was old
and Torgon restless, so it happened that when his father died he was
raiding along the Mander from his stronghold on Greyshield. His
brothers sent no word to him but instead quickly called a
kingsmoot, thinking that one of them would be chosen to wear the
driftwood crown. But the captains and the kings chose Urragon
Goodbrother to rule instead. The rst thing the new king did was
command that all the sons of the old king be put to death, and so

they were. After that men called him Badbrother, though in truth
they’d been no kin of his. He ruled for almost two years.”
Asha remembered now. “Torgon came home …”
“… and said the kingsmoot was unlawful since he had not been
there to make his claim. Badbrother had proved to be as mean as he
was cruel and had few friends left upon the isles. The priests
denounced him, the lords rose against him, and his own captains
hacked him into pieces. Torgon the Latecomer became the king and
ruled for forty years.”
Asha took Tris Botley by the ears and kissed him full upon the
lips. He was red and breathless by the time she let him go. “What
was that?” he said.
“A kiss, it’s called. Drown me for a fool, Tris, I should have
remembered—” She broke o suddenly. When Tris tried to speak,
she shushed him, listening. “That’s a warhorn. Hagen.” Her rst
thought was of her husband. Could Erik Ironmaker have come all
this way to claim his wayward wife? “The Drowned God loves me
after all. Here I was wondering what to do, and he has sent me foes
to ght.” Asha got to her feet and slammed her knife back into its
sheath. “The battle’s come to us.”
She was trotting by the time she reached the castle bailey, with
Tris dogging her heels, but even so she came too late. The ght was
done. Asha found two northmen bleeding by the eastern wall not far
from the postern gate, with Lorren Longaxe, Six-Toed Harl, and
Grimtongue standing over them. “Cromm and Hagen saw them
coming over the wall,” Grimtongue explained.
“Just these two?” asked Asha.
“Five. We killed two before they could get over, and Harl slew
another on the wallwalk. These two made it to the yard.”
One man was dead, his blood and brains crusting Lorren’s
longaxe, but the second was still breathing raggedly, though
Grimtongue’s spear had pinned him to the ground in a spreading
pool of blood. Both were clad in boiled leather and mottled cloaks
of brown and green and black, with branches, leaves, and brush
sewn about their heads and shoulders.
“Who are you?” Asha asked the wounded man.

“A Flint. Who are you?”
“Asha of House Greyjoy. This is my castle.”
“Deepwood be Galbart Glover’s seat. No home for squids.”
“Are there any more of you?” Asha demanded of him. When he
did not answer, she seized Grimtongue’s spear and turned it, and the
northman cried out in anguish as more blood gushed from his
wound. “What was your purpose here?”
“The lady,” he said, shuddering. “Gods, stop. We come for the
lady. T’ rescue her. It was just us ve.”
Asha looked into his eyes. When she saw the falsehood there, she
leaned upon the spear, twisting it. “How many more?” she said. “Tell
me, or I’ll make your dying last until the dawn.”
“Many,” he nally sobbed, between screams. “Thousands. Three
thousand, four … aieeee … please …”
She ripped the spear out of him and drove it down two-handed
through his lying throat. Galbart Glover’s maester had claimed the
mountain clans were too quarrelsome to ever band together without
a Stark to lead them. He might not have been lying. He might just have
been wrong. She had learned what that tasted like at her nuncle’s
kingsmoot. “These ve were sent to open our gates before the main
attack,” she said. “Lorren, Harl, fetch me Lady Glover and her
maester.”
“Whole or bloody?” asked Lorren Longaxe.
“Whole and unharmed. Grimtongue, get up that thrice-damned
tower and tell Cromm and Hagen to keep a sharp eye out. If they
see so much as a hare, I want to know of it.”
Deepwood’s bailey was soon full of frightened people. Her own
men were struggling into armor or climbing up onto the wallwalks.
Galbart Glover’s folk looked on with fearful faces, whispering to
one another. Glover’s steward had to be carried up from the cellar,
having lost a leg when Asha took the castle. The maester protested
noisily until Lorren cracked him hard across the face with a mailed
st. Lady Glover emerged from the godswood on the arm of her
bedmaid. “I warned you that this day would come, my lady,” she
said, when she saw the corpses on the ground.

The maester pushed forward, with blood dripping from a broken
nose. “Lady Asha, I beg you, strike your banners and let me bargain
for your life. You have used us fairly, and with honor. I will tell
them so.”
“We will exchange you for the children.” Sybelle Glover’s eyes
were red, from tears and sleepless nights. “Gawen is four now. I
missed his nameday. And my sweet girl … give me back my
children, and no harm need come to you. Nor to your men.”
The last part was a lie, Asha knew. She might be exchanged,
perhaps, shipped back to the Iron Islands to her husband’s loving
arms. Her cousins would be ransomed too, as would Tris Botley and
a few more of her company, those whose kin had coin enough to
buy them back. For the rest it would be the axe, the noose, or the
Wall. Still, they have the right to choose.
Asha climbed on a barrel so all of them could see her. “The
wolves are coming down on us with their teeth bared. They will be
at our gates before the sun comes up. Shall we throw down our
spears and axes and plead with them to spare us?”
“No.” Qarl the Maid drew his sword. “No,” echoed Lorren
Longaxe. “No,” boomed Rolfe the Dwarf, a bear of a man who stood
a head taller than anyone else in her crew. “Never.” And Hagen’s
horn sounded again from on high, ringing out across the bailey.
AHooooooooooooooooooooooo, the warhorn cried, long and low, a
sound to curdle blood. Asha had begun to hate the sound of horns.
On Old Wyk her uncle’s hellhorn had blown a death knell for her
dreams, and now Hagen was sounding what might well be her last
hour on earth. If I must die, I will die with an axe in my hand and a
curse upon my lips.
“To the walls,” Asha Greyjoy told her men. She turned her own
steps for the watchtower, with Tris Botley right behind her.
The wooden watchtower was the tallest thing this side of the
mountains, rising twenty feet above the biggest sentinels and
soldier pines in the surrounding woods. “There, Captain,” said
Cromm, when she made the platform. Asha saw only trees and
shadows, the moonlit hills and the snowy peaks beyond. Then she
realized that trees were creeping closer. “Oho,” she laughed, “these

mountain goats have cloaked themselves in pine boughs.” The
woods were on the move, creeping toward the castle like a slow
green tide. She thought back to a tale she had heard as a child,
about the children of the forest and their battles with the First Men,
when the greenseers turned the trees to warriors.
“We cannot ght so many,” Tris Botley said.
“We can ght as many as come, pup,” insisted Cromm. “The more
there are, the more the glory. Men will sing of us.”
Aye, but will they sing of your courage or my folly? The sea was ve
long leagues away. Would they do better to stand and ght behind
Deepwood’s deep ditches and wooden walls? Deepwood’s wooden
walls did the Glovers small good when I took their castle, she reminded
herself. Why should they serve me any better?
“Come the morrow we will feast beneath the sea.” Cromm
stroked his axe as if he could not wait.
Hagen lowered his horn. “If we die with dry feet, how will we
nd our way to the Drowned God’s watery halls?”
“These woods are full of little streams,” Cromm assured him. “All
of them lead to rivers, and all the rivers to the sea.”
Asha was not ready to die, not here, not yet. “A living man can
nd the sea more easily than a dead one. Let the wolves keep their
gloomy woods. We are making for the ships.”
She wondered who was in command of her foes. If it were me, I
would take the strand and put our longships to the torch before attacking
Deepwood. The wolves would not nd that easy, though, not
without longships of their own. Asha never beached more than half
her ships. The other half stood safely o to sea, with orders to raise
sail and make for Sea Dragon Point if the northmen took the strand.
“Hagen, blow your horn and make the forest shake. Tris, don some
mail, it’s time you tried out that sweet sword of yours.” When she
saw how pale he was, she pinched his cheek. “Splash some blood
upon the moon with me, and I promise you a kiss for every kill.”
“My queen,” said Tristifer, “here we have the walls, but if we
reach the sea and nd that the wolves have taken our ships or
driven them away …”

“… we die,” she nished cheerfully, “but at least we’ll die with
our feet wet. Ironborn ght better with salt spray in their nostrils
and the sound of the waves at their backs.”
Hagen blew three short blasts in quick succession, the signal that
would send the ironborn back to their ships. From below came
shouting, the clatter of spear and sword, the whinnying of horses.
Too few horses and too few riders. Asha headed for the stair. In the
bailey, she found Qarl the Maid waiting with her chestnut mare, her
warhelm, and her throwing axes. Ironmen were leading horses from
Galbart Glover’s stables.
“A ram!” a voice shouted down from the walls. “They have a
battering ram!”
“Which gate?” asked Asha, mounting up.
“The north!” From beyond Deepwood’s mossy wooden walls came
the sudden sound of trumpets.
Trumpets? Wolves with trumpets? That was wrong, but Asha had no
time to ponder it. “Open the south gate,” she commanded, even as
the north gate shook to the impact of the ram. She pulled a shorthafted throwing axe from the belt across her shoulder. “The hour of
the owl has ed, my brothers. Now comes the hour of the spear, the
sword, the axe. Form up. We’re going home.”
From a hundred throats came roars of “Home!” and “Asha!” Tris
Botley galloped up beside her on a tall roan stallion. In the bailey,
her men closed about each other, hefting shields and spears. Qarl
the Maid, no horse rider, took his place between Grimtongue and
Lorren Longaxe. As Hagen came scrambling down the watchtower
steps, a wol ing’s arrow caught him in the belly and sent him
plunging head rst to the ground. His daughter ran to him, wailing.
“Bring her,” Asha commanded. This was no time for mourning.
Rolfe the Dwarf pulled the girl onto his horse, her red hair ying.
Asha could hear the north gate groaning as the ram slammed into it
again. We may need to cut our way through them, she thought, as the
south gate swung wide before them. The way was clear. For how
long?
“Move out!” Asha drove her heels into her horse’s anks.

Men and mounts alike were trotting by the time they reached the
trees on the far side of the sodden eld, where dead shoots of
winter wheat rotted beneath the moon. Asha held her horsemen
back as a rear guard, to keep the stragglers moving and see that no
one was left behind. Tall soldier pines and gnarled old oaks closed
in around them. Deepwood was aptly named. The trees were huge
and dark, somehow threatening. Their limbs wove through one
another and creaked with every breath of wind, and their higher
branches scratched at the face of the moon. The sooner we are shut of
here, the better I will like it, Asha thought. The trees hate us all, deep in
their wooden hearts.
They pressed on south and southwest, until the wooden towers of
Deepwood Motte were lost to sight and the sounds of trumpets had
been swallowed by the woods. The wolves have their castle back, she
thought, perhaps they will be content to let us go.
Tris Botley trotted up beside her. “We are going the wrong way,”
he said, gesturing at the moon as it peered down through the
canopy of branches. “We need to turn north, for the ships.”
“West rst,” Asha insisted. “West until the sun comes up. Then
north.” She turned to Rolfe the Dwarf and Roggon Rustbeard, her
best riders. “Scout ahead and make sure our way is clear. I want no
surprises when we reach the shore. If you come on wolves, ride
back to me with word.”
“If we must,” promised Roggon through his huge red beard.
After the scouts had vanished into the trees, the rest of the
ironborn resumed their march, but the going was slow. The trees
hid the moon and stars from them, and the forest oor beneath their
feet was black and treacherous. Before they had gone half a mile,
her cousin Quenton’s mare stumbled into a pit and shattered her
foreleg. Quenton had to slit her throat to stop her screaming. “We
should make torches,” urged Tris.
“Fire will bring the northmen down on us.” Asha cursed beneath
her breath, wondering if it had been a mistake to leave the castle.
No. If we had stayed and fought, we might all be dead by now. But it
was no good blundering on through the dark either. These trees will
kill us if they can. She took o her helm and pushed back her sweat-

soaked hair. “The sun will be up in a few hours. We’ll stop here and
rest till break of day.”
Stopping proved simple; rest came hard. No one slept, not even
Droopeye Dale, an oarsman who had been known to nap between
strokes. Some of the men shared a skin of Galbart Glover’s apple
wine, passing it from hand to hand. Those who had brought food
shared it with those who had not. The riders fed and watered their
horses. Her cousin Quenton Greyjoy sent three men up trees, to
watch for any sign of torches in the woods. Cromm honed his axe,
and Qarl the Maid his sword. The horses cropped dead brown grass
and weeds. Hagen’s red-haired daughter seized Tris Botley by the
hand to draw him o into the trees. When he refused her, she went
o with Six-Toed Harl instead.
Would that I could do the same. It would be sweet to lose herself in
Qarl’s arms one last time. Asha had a bad feeling in her belly.
Would she ever feel Black Wind’s deck beneath her feet again? And
if she did, where would she sail her? The isles are closed to me, unless
I mean to bend my knees and spread my legs and su er Erik
Ironmaker’s embraces, and no port in Westeros is like to welcome the
kraken’s daughter. She could turn merchanter, as Tris seemed to
want, or else make for the Stepstones and join the pirates there.
Or …
“I send you each a piece of prince,” she muttered.
Qarl grinned. “I would sooner have a piece of you,” he
whispered, “the sweet piece that’s—”
Something ew from the brush to land with a soft thump in their
midst, bumping and bouncing. It was round and dark and wet, with
long hair that whipped about it as it rolled. When it came to rest
amongst the roots of an oak, Grimtongue said, “Rolfe the Dwarf’s
not so tall as he once was.” Half her men were on their feet by then,
reaching for shields and spears and axes. They lit no torches either,
Asha had time enough to think, and they know these woods better than
we ever could. Then the trees erupted all around them, and the
northmen poured in howling. Wolves, she thought, they howl like
bloody wolves. The war cry of the north. Her ironborn screamed back
at them, and the ght began.

No singer would ever make a song about that battle. No maester
would ever write down an account for one of the Reader’s beloved
books. No banners ew, no warhorns moaned, no great lord called
his men about him to hear his nal ringing words. They fought in
the predawn gloom, shadow against shadow, stumbling over roots
and rocks, with mud and rotting leaves beneath their feet. The
ironborn were clad in mail and salt-stained leather, the northmen in
furs and hides and piney branches. The moon and stars looked down
upon their struggle, their pale light ltered through the tangle of
bare limbs that twisted overhead.
The rst man to come at Asha Greyjoy died at her feet with her
throwing axe between his eyes. That gave her respite enough to slip
her shield onto her arm. “To me!” she called, but whether she was
calling to her own men or the foes even Asha could not have said
for certain. A northman with an axe loomed up before her, swinging
with both hands as he howled in wordless fury. Asha raised her
shield to block his blow, then shoved in close to gut him with her
dirk. His howling took on a di erent tone as he fell. She spun and
found another wolf behind her, and slashed him across the brow
beneath his helm. His own cut caught her below the breast, but her
mail turned it, so she drove the point of her dirk into his throat and
left him to drown in his own blood. A hand seized her hair, but
short as it was he could not get a good enough grip to wrench her
head back. Asha slammed her boot heel down onto his instep and
wrenched loose when he cried out in pain. By the time she turned
the man was down and dying, still clutching a handful of her hair.
Qarl stood over him, with his longsword dripping and moonlight
shining in his eyes.
Grimtongue was counting the northmen as he killed them, calling
out, “Four,” as one went down and, “Five,” a heartbeat later. The
horses screamed and kicked and rolled their eyes in terror,
maddened by the butchery and blood … all but Tris Botley’s big
roan stallion. Tris had gained the saddle, and his mount was rearing
and wheeling as he laid about with his sword. I may owe him a kiss
or three before the night is done, thought Asha.

“Seven,” shouted Grimtongue, but beside him Lorren Longaxe
sprawled with one leg twisted under him, and the shadows kept on
coming, shouting and rustling. We are ghting shrubbery, Asha
thought as she slew a man who had more leaves on him than most
of the surrounding trees. That made her laugh. Her laughter drew
more wolves to her, and she killed them too, wondering if she
should start a count of her own. I am a woman wed, and here’s my
suckling babe. She pushed her dirk into a northman’s chest through
fur and wool and boiled leather. His face was so close to hers that
she could smell the sour stench of his breath, and his hand was at
her throat. Asha felt iron scraping against bone as her point slid
over a rib. Then the man shuddered and died. When she let go of
him, she was so weak she almost fell on top of him.
Later, she stood back-to-back with Qarl, listening to the grunts
and curses all around them, to brave men crawling through the
shadows weeping for their mothers. A bush drove at her with a
spear long enough to punch through her belly and Qarl’s back as
well, pinning them together as they died. Better that than die alone,
she thought, but her cousin Quenton killed the spearman before he
reached her. A heartbeat later another bush killed Quenton, driving
an axe into the base of his skull.
Behind her Grimtongue shouted, “Nine, and damn you all.”
Hagen’s daughter burst naked from beneath the trees with two
wolves at her heels. Asha wrenched loose a throwing axe and sent it
ying end over end to take one of them in the back. When he fell,
Hagen’s daughter stumbled to her knees, snatched up his sword,
stabbed the second man, then rose again, smeared with blood and
mud, her long red hair unbound, and plunged into the ght.
Somewhere in the ebb and ow of battle, Asha lost Qarl, lost Tris,
lost all of them. Her dirk was gone as well, and all her throwing
axes; instead she had a sword in hand, a short sword with a broad
thick blade, almost like a butcher’s cleaver. For her life she could
not have said where she had gotten it. Her arm ached, her mouth
tasted of blood, her legs were trembling, and shafts of pale dawn
light were slanting through the trees. Has it been so long? How long
have we been ghting?

Her last foe was a northman with an axe, a big man bald and
bearded, clad in a byrnie of patched and rusted mail that could only
mean he was a chief or champion. He was not pleased to nd
himself ghting a woman. “Cunt!” he roared each time he struck at
her, his spittle dampening her cheeks. “Cunt! Cunt!”
Asha wanted to shout back at him, but her throat was so dry she
could do no more than grunt. His axe was shivering her shield,
cracking the wood on the downswing, tearing o long pale splinters
when he wrenched it back. Soon she would have only a tangle of
kindling on her arm. She backed away and shook free of the ruined
shield, then backed away some more and danced left and right and
left again to avoid the downrushing axe.
And then her back came up hard against a tree, and she could
dance no more. The wolf raised the axe above his head to split her
head in two. Asha tried to slip to her right, but her feet were
tangled in some roots, trapping her. She twisted, lost her footing,
and the axehead crunched against her temple with a scream of steel
on steel. The world went red and black and red again. Pain crackled
up her leg like lightning, and far away she heard her northman say,
“You bloody cunt,” as he lifted up his axe for the blow that would
nish her.
A trumpet blew.
That’s wrong, she thought. There are no trumpets in the Drowned
God’s watery halls. Below the waves the merlings hail their lord by
blowing into seashells.
She dreamt of red hearts burning, and a black stag in a golden
wood with ame streaming from his antlers.

TYRION

B

y the time they reached Volantis, the sky was purple to the
west and black to the east, and the stars were coming out. The same
stars as in Westeros, Tyrion Lannister re ected.
He might have taken some comfort in that if he had not been
trussed up like a goose and lashed to a saddle. He had given up
squirming. The knots that bound him were too tight. Instead he’d
gone as limp as a sack of meal. Saving my strength, he told himself,
though for what he could not have said.
Volantis closed its gates at dark, and the guardsmen on its
northern gate were grumbling impatiently at the stragglers. They
joined the queue behind a wagon laden with limes and oranges. The
guards motioned the wagon through with their torches but took a
harder look at the big Andal on his warhorse, with his longsword
and his mail. A captain was summoned. Whilst he and the knight
exchanged some words in Volantene, one of the guardsmen pulled
o his clawed gauntlet and gave Tyrion’s head a rub. “I’m full of
good fortune,” the dwarf told him. “Cut me loose, friend, and I’ll
see you’re well rewarded.”
His captor overheard. “Save your lies for those who speak your
tongue, Imp,” he said, when the Volantenes waved them on.
They were moving again, through the gate and beneath the city’s
massive walls. “You speak my tongue. Can I sway you with
promises, or are you determined to buy a lordship with my head?”
“I was a lord, by right of birth. I want no hollow titles.”
“That’s all you’re like to get from my sweet sister.”
“And here I’d heard a Lannister always pays his debts.”

“Oh, every penny … but never a groat more, my lord. You’ll get
the meal you bargained for, but it won’t be sauced with gratitude,
and in the end it will not nourish you.”
“Might be all I want is to see you pay for crimes. The kinslayer is
accursed in the eyes of gods and men.”
“The gods are blind. And men see only what they wish.”
“I see you plain enough, Imp.” Something dark had crept into the
knight’s tone. “I have done things I am not proud of, things that
brought shame onto my House and my father’s name … but to kill
your own sire? How could any man do that?”
“Give me a crossbow and pull down your breeches, and I’ll show
you.” Gladly.
“You think this is a jape?”
“I think life is a jape. Yours, mine, everyone’s.”
Inside the city walls, they rode past guildhalls, markets, and
bathhouses. Fountains splashed and sang in the centers of wide
squares, where men sat at stone tables, moving cyvasse pieces and
sipping wine from glass utes as slaves lit ornate lanterns to hold
the dark at bay. Palms and cedars grew along the cobbled road, and
monuments stood at every junction. Many of the statues lacked
heads, the dwarf noted, yet even headless they still managed to
look imposing in the purple dusk.
As the warhorse plodded south along the river, the shops grew
smaller and meaner, the trees along the street became a row of
stumps. Cobblestones gave way to devilgrass beneath their horse’s
hooves, then to soft wet mud the color of a baby’s nightsoil. The
little bridges that spanned the small streams that fed the Rhoyne
creaked alarmingly beneath their weight. Where a fort had once
overlooked the river now stood a broken gate, gaping open like an
old man’s toothless mouth. Goats could be glimpsed peering over
the parapets.
Old Volantis, rst daughter of Valyria, the dwarf mused. Proud
Volantis, queen of the Rhoyne and mistress of the Summer Sea, home to
noble lords and lovely ladies of the most ancient blood. Never mind the
packs of naked children that roamed the alleys screaming in shrill
voices, or the bravos standing in the doors of wineshops ngering

their sword hilts, or the slaves with their bent backs and tattooed
faces who scurried everywhere like cockroaches. Mighty Volantis,
grandest and most populous of the Nine Free Cities. Ancient wars had
depopulated much of the city, however, and large areas of Volantis
had begun to sink back into the mud on which it stood. Beautiful
Volantis, city of fountains and owers. But half the fountains were
dry, half the pools cracked and stagnant. Flowering vines sent up
creepers from every crack in the wall or pavement, and young trees
had taken root in the walls of abandoned shops and roo ess
temples.
And then there was the smell. It hung in the hot, humid air, rich,
rank, pervasive. There’s sh in it, and owers, and some elephant dung
as well. Something sweet and something earthy and something dead and
rotten. “This city smells like an old whore,” Tyrion announced. “Like
some sagging slattern who has drenched her privy parts in perfume
to drown the stench between her legs. Not that I am complaining.
With whores, the young ones smell much better, but the old ones
know more tricks.”
“You would know more of that than I do.”
“Ah, of course. That brothel where we met, did you take it for a
sept? Was that your virgin sister squirming in your lap?”
That made him scowl. “Give that tongue of yours a rest unless
you’d rather I tied it in a knot.”
Tyrion swallowed his retort. His lip was still fat and swollen from
the last time he had pushed the big knight too far. Hard hands and
no sense of humor makes for a bad marriage. That much he’d learned
on the road from Selhorys. His thoughts went to his boot, to the
mushrooms in the toe. His captor had not searched him quite as
thoroughly as he might have. There is always that escape. Cersei will
not have me alive, at least.
Farther south, signs of prosperity began to reappear. Abandoned
buildings were seen less often, the naked children vanished, the
bravos in the doorways seemed more sumptuously dressed. A few of
the inns they passed actually looked like places where a man might
sleep without fear of having his throat slit. Lanterns swung from
iron stanchions along the river road, swaying when the wind blew.

The streets grew broader, the buildings more imposing. Some were
topped with great domes of colored glass. In the gathering dusk,
with res lit beneath them, the domes glowed blue and red and
green and purple.
Even so, there was something in the air that made Tyrion uneasy.
West of the Rhoyne, he knew, the wharves of Volantis teemed with
sailors, slaves, and traders, and the wineshops, inns, and brothels all
catered to them. East of the river, strangers from across the seas
were seen less seldom. We are not wanted here, the dwarf realized.
The rst time they passed an elephant, Tyrion could not help but
stare. There had been an elephant in the menagerie at Lannisport
when he had been a boy, but she had died when he was
seven … and this great grey behemoth looked to be twice her size.
Farther on, they fell in behind a smaller elephant, white as old
bone and pulling an ornate cart. “Is an oxcart an oxcart without an
ox?” Tyrion asked his captor. When that sally got no response, he
lapsed back into silence, contemplating the rolling rump of the
white dwarf elephant ahead of them.
Volantis was overrun with white dwarf elephants. As they drew
closer to the Black Wall and the crowded districts near the Long
Bridge, they saw a dozen of them. Big grey elephants were not
uncommon either—huge beasts with castles on their backs. And in
the half-light of evening the dung carts had come out, attended by
half-naked slaves whose task it was to shovel up the steaming piles
left by elephants both great and small. Swarms of ies followed the
carts, so the dung slaves had ies tattooed upon their cheeks, to
mark them for what they were. There’s a trade for my sweet sister,
Tyrion mused. She’d look so pretty with a little shovel and ies tattooed
on those sweet pink cheeks.
By then they had slowed to a crawl. The river road was thick with
tra c, almost all of it owing south. The knight went with it, a log
caught in a current. Tyrion eyed the passing throngs. Nine men of
every ten bore slave marks on their cheeks. “So many
slaves … where are they all going?”
“The red priests light their night res at sunset. The High Priest
will be speaking. I would avoid it if I could, but to reach the Long

Bridge we must pass the red temple.”
Three blocks later the street opened up before them onto a huge
torchlit plaza, and there it stood. Seven save me, that’s got to be three
times the size of the Great Sept of Baelor. An enormity of pillars, steps,
buttresses, bridges, domes, and towers owing into one another as
if they had all been chiseled from one collossal rock, the Temple of
the Lord of Light loomed like Aegon’s High Hill. A hundred hues of
red, yellow, gold, and orange met and melded in the temple walls,
dissolving one into the other like clouds at sunset. Its slender towers
twisted ever upward, frozen ames dancing as they reached for the
sky. Fire turned to stone. Huge night res burned beside the temple
steps, and between them the High Priest had begun to speak.
Benerro. The priest stood atop a red stone pillar, joined by a
slender stone bridge to a lofty terrace where the lesser priests and
acolytes stood. The acolytes were clad in robes of pale yellow and
bright orange, priests and priestesses in red.
The great plaza before them was packed almost solid. Many and
more of the worshipers were wearing some scrap of red cloth
pinned to their sleeves or tied around their brows. Every eye was
on the high priest, save theirs. “Make way,” the knight growled as
his horse pushed through the throng. “Clear a path.” The Volantenes
gave way resentfully, with mutters and angry looks.
Benerro’s high voice carried well. Tall and thin, he had a drawn
face and skin white as milk. Flames had been tattooed across his
cheeks and chin and shaven head to make a bright red mask that
crackled about his eyes and coiled down and around his lipless
mouth. “Is that a slave tattoo?” asked Tyrion.
The knight nodded. “The red temple buys them as children and
makes them priests or temple prostitutes or warriors. Look there.”
He pointed at the steps, where a line of men in ornate armor and
orange cloaks stood before the temple’s doors, clasping spears with
points like writhing ames. “The Fiery Hand. The Lord of Light’s
sacred soldiers, defenders of the temple.”
Fire knights. “And how many ngers does this hand have, pray?”
“One thousand. Never more, and never less. A new ame is
kindled for every one that gutters out.”

Benerro jabbed a nger at the moon, made a st, spread his
hands wide. When his voice rose in a crescendo, ames leapt from
his ngers with a sudden whoosh and made the crowd gasp. The
priest could trace ery letters in the air as well. Valyrian glyphs.
Tyrion recognized perhaps two in ten; one was Doom, the other
Darkness.
Shouts erupted from the crowd. Women were weeping and men
were shaking their sts. I have a bad feeling about this. The dwarf
was reminded of the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne and the riot that
boiled up as they made their way back to the Red Keep.
Haldon Halfmaester had spoken of using the red priest to Young
Gri ’s advantage, Tyrion recalled. Now that he had seen and heard
the man himself, that struck him as a very bad idea. He hoped that
Gri had better sense. Some allies are more dangerous than enemies.
But Lord Connington will need to puzzle that one out for himself. I am
like to be a head on a spike.
The priest was pointing at the Black Wall behind the temple,
gesturing up at its parapets, where a handful of armored guardsmen
stood gazing down. “What is he saying?” Tyrion asked the knight.
“That Daenerys stands in peril. The dark eye has fallen upon her,
and the minions of night are plotting her destruction, praying to
their false gods in temples of deceit … conspiring at betrayal with
godless outlanders …”
The hairs on the back of Tyrion’s neck began to prickle. Prince
Aegon will nd no friend here. The red priest spoke of ancient
prophecy, a prophecy that foretold the coming of a hero to deliver
the world from darkness. One hero. Not two. Daenerys has dragons,
Aegon does not. The dwarf did not need to be a prophet himself to
foresee how Benerro and his followers might react to a second
Targaryen. Gri will see that too, surely, he thought, surprised to nd
how much he cared.
The knight had forced their way through most of the press at the
back of the plaza, ignoring the curses that were ung at them as
they passed. One man stepped in front of them, but his captor
gripped the hilt of his longsword and drew it just far enough to
show a foot of naked steel. The man melted away, and all at once

an alley opened up before them. The knight urged his mount to a
trot, and they left the crowd behind them. For a while Tyrion could
still hear Benerro’s voice growing fainter at their back and the roars
his words provoked, sudden as thunder.
They came upon a stable. The knight dismounted, then hammered
on the door until a haggard slave with a horsehead on his cheek
came running. The dwarf was pulled down roughly from the saddle
and lashed to a post whilst his captor woke the stable’s owner and
haggled with him over the price of his horse and saddle. Cheaper to
sell a horse than to ship one half across the world. Tyrion sensed a ship
in his immediate future. Perhaps he was a prophet after all.
When the dickering was done, the knight slung his weapons,
shield, and saddlebag over his shoulder and asked for directions to
the nearest smithy. That proved shuttered too, but opened quick
enough at the knight’s shout. The smith gave Tyrion a squint, then
nodded and accepted a stful of coins. “Come here,” the knight told
his prisoner. He drew his dagger and slit Tyrion’s bonds apart. “My
thanks,” said the dwarf as he rubbed his wrists, but the knight only
laughed and said, “Save your gratitude for someone who deserves
it, Imp. You will not like this next bit.”
He was not wrong.
The manacles were black iron, thick and heavy, each weighing a
good two pounds, if the dwarf was any judge. The chains added
even more weight. “I must be more fearsome than I knew,” Tyrion
confessed as the last links were hammered closed. Each blow sent a
shock up his arm almost to the shoulder. “Or were you afraid that I
would dash away on these stunted little legs of mine?”
The ironsmith did not so much as look up from his work, but the
knight chuckled darkly. “It’s your mouth that concerns me, not your
legs. In fetters, you’re a slave. No one will listen to a word you say,
not even those who speak the tongue of Westeros.”
“There’s no need for this,” Tyrion protested. “I will be a good
little prisoner, I will, I will.”
“Prove it, then, and shut your mouth.”
So he bowed his head and bit his tongue as the chains were xed,
wrist to wrist, wrist to ankle, ankle to ankle. These bloody things

weigh more than I do. Still, at least he drew breath. His captor could
just as easily have cut his head o . That was all Cersei required,
after all. Not striking it o straightaway had been his captor’s rst
mistake. There is half a world between Volantis and King’s Landing, and
much and more can happen along the way, ser.
The rest of the way they went by foot, Tyrion clanking and
clattering as he struggled to keep up with his captor’s long,
impatient strides. Whenever he threatened to fall behind, the knight
would seize his fetters and yank them roughly, sending the dwarf
stumbling and hopping along beside him. It could be worse. He could
be urging me along with a whip.
Volantis straddled one mouth of the Rhoyne where the river
kissed the sea, its two halves joined by the Long Bridge. The oldest,
richest part of the city was east of the river, but sellswords,
barbarians, and other uncouth outlanders were not welcome there,
so they must needs cross over to the west.
The gateway to the Long Bridge was a black stone arch carved
with sphinxes, manticores, dragons, and creatures stranger still.
Beyond the arch stretched the great span that the Valyrians had
built at the height of their glory, its fused stone roadway supported
by massive piers. The road was just wide enough for two carts to
pass abreast, so whenever a wagon headed west passed one going
east, both had to slow to a crawl.
It was well they were afoot. A third of the way out, a wagon
laden with melons had gotten its wheels tangled with one piled high
with silken carpets and brought all wheeled tra c to a halt. Much
of the foot tra c had stopped as well, to watch the drivers curse
and scream at one another, but the knight grabbed hold of Tyrion’s
chain and bulled a path through the throng for both of them. In the
middle of the press, a boy tried to reach into his purse, but a hard
elbow put an end to that and spread the thief’s bloody nose across
half his face.
Buildings rose to either side of them: shops and temples, taverns
and inns, cyvasse parlors and brothels. Most were three or four
stories tall, each oor overhanging the one beneath it. Their top
oors almost kissed. Crossing the bridge felt like passing through a

torchlit tunnel. Along the span were shops and stalls of every sort;
weavers and lacemakers displayed their wares cheek by jowl with
glassblowers, candlemakers, and shwives selling eels and oysters.
Each goldsmith had a guard at his door, and every spicer had two,
for their goods were twice as valuable. Here and there, between the
shops, a traveler might catch a glimpse of the river he was crossing.
To the north the Rhoyne was a broad black ribbon bright with stars,
ve times as wide as the Blackwater Rush at King’s Landing. South
of the bridge the river opened up to embrace the briny sea.
At the bridge’s center span, the severed hands of thieves and
cutpurses hung like strings of onions from iron stanchions along the
roadway. Three heads were on display as well—two men and a
woman, their crimes scrawled on tablets underneath them. A pair of
spearmen attended them, clad in polished helms and shirts of silver
mail. Across their cheeks were tiger stripes as green as jade. From
time to time the guards waved their spears to chase away the
kestrels, gulls, and carrion crows paying court to the deceased. The
birds returned to the heads within moments.
“What did they do?” Tyrion inquired innocently.
The knight glanced at the inscriptions. “The woman was a slave
who raised her hand to her mistress. The older man was accused of
fomenting rebellion and spying for the dragon queen.”
“And the young one?”
“Killed his father.”
Tyrion gave the rotting head a second look. Why, it almost looks as
if those lips are smiling.
Farther on, the knight paused brie y to consider a jeweled tiara
displayed upon a bed of purple velvet. He passed that by, but a few
steps on he stopped again to haggle over a pair of gloves at a
leatherworker’s stall. Tyrion was grateful for the respites. The
headlong pace had left him pu ng, and his wrists were chafed raw
from the manacles.
From the far end of the Long Bridge, it was only a short walk
through the teeming waterfront districts of the west bank, down
torchlit streets crowded with sailors, slaves, and drunken
merrymakers. Once an elephant lumbered past with a dozen half-

naked slave girls waving from the castle on its back, teasing
passersby with glimpses of their breasts and crying, “Malaquo,
Malaquo.” They made such an entrancing sight that Tyrion almost
waddled right into the steaming pile of dung the elephant had left
to mark its passage. He was saved at the last instant when the
knight snatched him aside, yanking on his chain so hard it made him
reel and stumble.
“How much farther?” the dwarf asked.
“Just there. Fishmonger’s Square.”
Their destination proved to be the Merchant’s House, a four-story
monstrosity that squatted amongst the warehouses, brothels, and
taverns of the waterside like some enormous fat man surrounded by
children. Its common room was larger than the great halls of half
the castles in Westeros, a dim-lit maze of a place with a hundred
private alcoves and hidden nooks whose blackened beams and
cracked ceilings echoed to the din of sailors, traders, captains,
money changers, shippers, and slavers, lying, cursing, and cheating
each other in half a hundred di erent tongues.
Tyrion approved the choice of hostelry. Soon or late the Shy Maid
must reach Volantis. This was the city’s biggest inn, rst choice for
shippers, captains, and merchantmen. A lot of business was done in
that cavernous warren of a common room. He knew enough of
Volantis to know that. Let Gri turn up here with Duck and Haldon,
and he would be free again soon enough.
Meanwhile, he would be patient. His chance would come.
The rooms upstairs proved rather less than grand, however,
particularly the cheap ones up on the fourth oor. Wedged into a
corner of the building beneath a sloping roof, the bedchamber his
captor had engaged featured a low ceiling, a sagging feather bed
with an unpleasant odor, and a slanting wood-plank oor that
reminded Tyrion of his sojourn at the Eyrie. At least this room has
walls. It had windows too; those were its chief amenity, along with
the iron ring set in the wall, so useful for chaining up one’s slaves.
His captor paused only long enough to light a tallow candle before
securing Tyrion’s chains to the ring.

“Must you?” the dwarf protested, rattling feebly. “Where am I
going to go, out the window?”
“You might.”
“We are four oors up, and I cannot y.”
“You can fall. I want you alive.”
Aye, but why? Cersei is not like to care. Tyrion rattled his chains. “I
know who you are, ser.” It had not been hard to puzzle out. The
bear on his surcoat, the arms on his shield, the lost lordship he had
mentioned. “I know what you are. And if you know who I am, you
also know that I was the King’s Hand and sat in council with the
Spider. Would it interest you to know that it was the eunuch who
dispatched me on this journey?” Him and Jaime, but I’ll leave my
brother out of it. “I am as much his creature as you are. We ought not
be at odds.”
That did not please the knight. “I took the Spider’s coin, I’ll not
deny it, but I was never his creature. And my loyalties lie elsewhere
now.”
“With Cersei? More fool you. All my sister requires is my head,
and you have a ne sharp sword. Why not end this farce now and
spare us both?”
The knight laughed. “Is this some dwarf’s trick? Beg for death in
hopes I’ll let you live?” He went to the door. “I’ll bring you
something from the kitchens.”
“How kind of you. I’ll wait here.”
“I know you will.” Yet when the knight left, he locked the door
behind him with a heavy iron key. The Merchant’s House was
famous for its locks. As secure as a gaol, the dwarf thought bitterly,
but at least there are those windows.
Tyrion knew that the chances of his escaping his chains were little
and less, but even so, he felt obliged to try. His e orts to slip a
hand through the manacle served only to scrap o more skin and
leave his wrist slick with blood, and all his tugging or twisting
could not pull the iron ring from the wall. Bugger this, he thought,
slumping back as far as his chains would allow. His legs had begun
to cramp. This was going to be a hellishly uncomfortable night. The
rst of many, I do not doubt.

The room was sti ing, so the knight had opened the shutters to
let in a cross breeze. Cramped into a corner of the building under
the eaves, the chamber was fortunate in having two windows. One
looked toward the Long Bridge and the black-walled heart of Old
Volantis across the river. The other opened on the square below.
Fishermonger’s Square, Mormont called it. As tight as the chains
were, Tyrion found he could see out the latter by leaning sideways
and letting the iron ring support his weight. Not as long a fall as the
one from Lysa Arryn’s sky cells, but it would leave me just as dead.
Perhaps if I were drunk …
Even at this hour the square was crowded, with sailors roistering,
whores prowling for custom, and merchants going about their
business. A red priestess scurried past, attended by a dozen acolytes
with torches, their robes whisking about their ankles. Elsewhere a
pair of cyvasse players waged war outside a tavern. A slave stood
beside their table, holding a lantern over the board. Tyrion could
hear a woman singing. The words were strange, the tune was soft
and sad. If I knew what she was singing, I might cry. Closer to hand, a
crowd was gathering around a pair of jugglers throwing aming
torches at each other.
His captor returned shortly, carrying two tankards and a roasted
duck. He kicked the door shut, ripped the duck in two, and tossed
half of it to Tyrion. He would have snatched it from the air, but his
chains brought him up short when he tried to lift his arms. Instead
the bird struck his temple and slid hot and greasy down his face,
and he had to hunker down and stretch for it with fetters clanking.
He got it on the third try and tore into it happily with his teeth.
“Some ale to wash this down?”
Mormont handed him a tankard. “Most of Volantis is getting
drunk, why not you?”
The ale was sweet as well. It tasted of fruit. Tyrion drank a
healthy swallow and belched happily. The tankard was pewter, very
heavy. Empty it and ing it at his head, he thought. If I am lucky, it
might crack his skull. If I’m very lucky, it will miss, and he’ll beat me to
death with his sts. He took another gulp. “Is this some holy day?”

“Third day of their elections. They last for ten. Ten days of
madness. Torchlight marches, speeches, mummers and minstrels and
dancers, bravos ghting death duels for the honor of their
candidates, elephants with the names of would-be triarchs painted
on their sides. Those jugglers are performing for Methyso.”
“Remind me to vote for someone else.” Tyrion licked grease from
his ngers. Below, the crowd was inging coins at the jugglers. “Do
all these would-be triarchs provide mummer shows?”
“They do whatever they think will win them votes,” said
Mormont. “Food, drink, spectacle … Alios has sent a hundred pretty
slave girls out into the streets to lie with voters.”
“I’m for him,” Tyrion decided. “Bring me a slave girl.”
“They’re for freeborn Volantenes with enough property to vote.
Precious few voters west of the river.”
“And this goes on for ten days?” Tyrion laughed. “I might enjoy
that, though three kings is two too many. I am trying to imagine
ruling the Seven Kingdoms with my sweet sister and brave brother
beside me. One of us would kill the other two inside a year. I am
surprised these triarchs don’t do the same.”
“A few have tried. Might be the Volantenes are the clever ones
and us Westerosi the fools. Volantis has known her share of follies,
but she’s never su ered a boy triarch. Whenever a madman’s been
elected, his colleagues restrain him until his year has run its course.
Think of the dead who might still live if Mad Aerys only had two
fellow kings to share the rule.”
Instead he had my father, Tyrion thought.
“Some in the Free Cities think that we’re all savages on our side
of the narrow sea,” the knight went on. “The ones who don’t think
that we’re children, crying out for a father’s strong hand.”
“Or a mother’s?” Cersei will love that. Especially when he presents her
with my head. “You seem to know this city well.”
“I spent the best part of a year here.” The knight sloshed the
dregs at the bottom of his tankard. “When Stark drove me into
exile, I ed to Lys with my second wife. Braavos would have suited
me better, but Lynesse wanted someplace warm. Instead of serving
the Braavosi I fought them on the Rhoyne, but for every silver I

earned my wife spent ten. By the time I got back to Lys, she had
taken a lover, who told me cheerfully that I would be enslaved for
debt unless I gave her up and left the city. That was how I came to
Volantis … one step ahead of slavery, owning nothing but my
sword and the clothes upon my back.”
“And now you want to run home.”
The knight drained the last of his ale. “On the morrow I’ll nd us
a ship. The bed is mine. You can have whatever piece of oor your
chains will let you reach. Sleep if you can. If not, count your crimes.
That should see you through till the morning.”
You have your crimes to answer for, Jorah Mormont, the dwarf
thought, but it seemed wiser to keep that thought to himself.
Ser Jorah hung his sword belt on a bedpost, kicked o his boots,
pulled his chain mail over his head, and stripped out of his wool and
leather and sweat-stained undertunic to reveal a scarred, brawny
torso covered with dark hair. If I could skin him, I could sell that pelt
for a fur cloak, Tyrion thought as Mormont tumbled into the slightly
smelly comfort of his sagging feather bed.
In no time at all the knight was snoring, leaving his prize alone
with his chains. With both windows open wide, the light of the
waning moon spilled across the bedchamber. Sounds drifted up from
the square below: snatches of drunken song, the yowling of a cat in
heat, the far-o ring of steel on steel. Someone’s about to die,
thought Tyrion.
His wrist was throbbing where he’d torn the skin, and his fetters
made it impossible for him to sit, let alone stretch out. The best he
could do was twist sideways to lean against the wall, and before
long he began to lose all feeling in his hands. When he moved to
relieve the strain, sensation came ooding back as pain. He had to
grind his teeth to keep from screaming. He wondered how much his
father had hurt when the quarrel punched through his groin, what
Shae had felt as he twisted the chain around her lying throat, what
Tysha had been feeling as they raped her. His su erings were
nothing compared to their own, but that did not make him hurt any
less. Just make it stop.

Ser Jorah had rolled onto one side, so all that Tyrion could see of
him was a broad, hairy, muscular back. Even if I could slip these
chains, I’d need to climb over him to reach his sword belt. Perhaps if I
could ease the dagger loose … Or else he could try for the key, unlock
the door, creep down the stairs and through the common
room … and go where? I have no friends, no coin, I do not even speak
the local tongue.
Exhaustion nally overwhelmed his pains, and Tyrion drifted o
into a tful sleep. But every time another cramp took root inside his
calf and twisted, the dwarf would cry out in his sleep, trembling in
his chains. He woke with every muscle aching, to nd morning
streaming through the windows bright and golden as the lion of
Lannister. Below he could hear the cries of shmongers and the
rumble of iron-rimmed wheels on cobblestones.
Jorah Mormont was standing over him. “If I take you o the ring,
will you do as you’re told?”
“Will it involve dancing? I might nd dancing di cult. I cannot
feel my legs. They may have fallen o . Elsewise, I am your
creature. On my honor as a Lannister.”
“The Lannisters have no honor.” Ser Jorah loosed his chains
anyway. Tyrion took two wobbly steps and fell. The blood rushing
back into his hands brought tears to his eyes. He bit his lip and said,
“Wherever we’re going, you will need to roll me there.”
Instead the big knight carried him, hoisting him by the chain
between his wrists.
The common room of the Merchant’s House was a dim labyrinth
of alcoves and grottoes built around a central courtyard where a
trellis of owering vines threw intricate patterns across the
agstone oor and green and purple moss grew between the stones.
Slave girls scurried through light and shadow, bearing agons of ale
and wine and some iced green drink that smelled of mint. One table
in twenty was occupied at this hour of the morning.
One of those was occupied by a dwarf. Clean-shaved and pinkcheeked, with a mop of chestnut hair, a heavy brow, and a squashed
nose, he perched on a high stool with a wooden spoon in hand,

contemplating a bowl of purplish gruel with red-rimmed eyes. Ugly
little bastard, Tyrion thought.
The other dwarf felt his stare. When he raised his head and saw
Tyrion, the spoon slipped from his hand.
“He saw me,” Tyrion warned Mormont.
“What of it?”
“He knows me. Who I am.”
“Should I stu you in a sack, so no one will see you?” The knight
touched the hilt of his longsword. “If he means to try and take you,
he is welcome to try.”
Welcome to die, you mean, thought Tyrion. What threat could he
pose to a big man like you? He is only a dwarf.
Ser Jorah claimed a table in a quiet corner and ordered food and
drink. They broke their fast with warm soft atbread, pink sh roe,
honey sausage, and fried locusts, washed down with a bittersweet
black ale. Tyrion ate like a man half-starved. “You have a healthy
appetite this morning,” the knight observed.
“I’ve heard the food in hell is wretched.” Tyrion glanced at the
door, where a man had just come in: tall and stooped, his pointed
beard dyed a splotchy purple. Some Tyroshi trader. A gust of sound
came with him from outside; the cries of gulls, a woman’s laughter,
the voices of the shmongers. For half a heartbeat he thought he
glimpsed Illyrio Mopatis, but it was only one of those white dwarf
elephants passing the front door.
Mormont spread some sh roe across a slice of atbread and took
a bite. “Are you expecting someone?”
Tyrion shrugged. “You never know who the wind might blow in.
My one true love, my father’s ghost, a duck.” He popped a locust
into his mouth and crunched it. “Not bad. For a bug.”
“Last night the talk here was all of Westeros. Some exiled lord
has hired the Golden Company to win back his lands for him. Half
the captains in Volantis are racing upriver to Volon Therys to o er
him their ships.”
Tyrion had just swallowed another locust. He almost choked on
it. Is he mocking me? How much could he know of Gri and Aegon?
“Bugger,” he said. “I meant to hire the Golden Company myself, to

win me Casterly Rock.” Could this be some ploy of Gri ’s, false reports
deliberately spread? Unless … Could the pretty princeling have
swallowed the bait? Turned them west instead of east, abandoning
his hopes of wedding Queen Daenerys? Abandoning the
dragons … would Gri allow that? “I’ll gladly hire you as well, ser.
My father’s seat is mine by rights. Swear me your sword, and once I
win it back I’ll drown you in gold.”
“I saw a man drowned in gold once. It was not a pretty sight. If
you ever get my sword, it will be through your bowels.”
“A sure cure for constipation,” said Tyrion. “Just ask my father.”
He reached for his tankard and took a slow swallow, to help conceal
whatever might be showing on his face. It had to be a stratagem,
designed to lull Volantene suspicions. Get the men aboard with this
false pretext and seize the ships when the eet is out to sea. Is that Gri ’s
plan? It might work. The Golden Company was ten thousand strong,
seasoned and disciplined. None of them seamen, though. Gri will
need to keep a sword at every throat, and should they come on Slaver’s
Bay and need to ght …
The serving girl returned. “The widow will see you next, noble
ser. Have you brought a gift for her?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Ser Jorah slipped a coin into the girl’s palm
and sent her on her way.
Tyrion frowned. “Whose widow is this?”
“The widow of the waterfront. East of the Rhoyne they still call
her Vogarro’s whore, though never to her face.”
The dwarf was not enlightened. “And Vogarro was …?”
“An elephant, seven times a triarch, very rich, a power on the
docks. Whilst other men built the ships and sailed them, he built
piers and storehouses, brokered cargoes, changed money, insured
shipowners against the hazards of the sea. He dealt in slaves as
well. When he grew besotted with one of them, a bedslave trained
at Yunkai in the way of seven sighs, it was a great scandal … and a
greater scandal when he freed her and took her for his wife. After
he died, she carried on his ventures. No freedman may dwell within
the Black Wall, so she was compelled to sell Vogarro’s manse. She
took up residence at the Merchant’s House. That was thirty-two

years ago, and she remains here to this day. That’s her behind you,
back by the courtyard, holding court at her customary table. No,
don’t look. There’s someone with her now. When he’s done, it will
be our turn.”
“And this old harridan will help you how?”
Ser Jorah stood. “Watch and see. He’s leaving.”
Tyrion hopped down o his chair with a rattle of iron. This should
be enlightening.
There was something vulpine about the way the woman sat in her
corner by the courtyard, something reptilian about her eyes. Her
white hair was so thin that the pink of her scalp showed through.
Under one eye she still bore faint scars where a knife had cut away
her tears. The remnants of her morning meal littered the table—
sardine heads, olive pits, chunks of atbread. Tyrion did not fail to
note how well chosen her “customary table” was; solid stone at her
back, a leafy alcove to one side for entrances and exits, a perfect
view of the inn’s front door, yet so steeped in shadow that she
herself was nigh invisible.
The sight of him made the old woman smile. “A dwarf,” she
purred, in a voice as sinister as it was soft. She spoke the Common
Tongue with only a trace of accent. “Volantis has been overrun with
dwarfs of late, it seems. Does this one do tricks?”
Yes, Tyrion wanted to say. Give me a crossbow, and I’ll show you
my favorite. “No,” Ser Jorah answered.
“A pity. I once had a monkey who could perform all sorts of
clever tricks. Your dwarf reminds me of him. Is he a gift?”
“No. I brought you these.” Ser Jorah produced his pair of gloves,
and slapped them down on the table beside the other gifts the
widow had received this morning: a silver goblet, an ornate fan
carved of jade leaves so thin they were translucent, and an ancient
bronze dagger marked with runes. Beside such treasures the gloves
looked cheap and tawdry.
“Gloves for my poor old wrinkled hands. How nice.” The widow
made no move to touch them.
“I bought them on the Long Bridge.”

“A man can buy most anything on the Long Bridge. Gloves,
slaves, monkeys.” The years had bent her spine and put a crone’s
hump upon her back, but the widow’s eyes were bright and black.
“Now tell this old widow how she may be of service to you.”
“We need swift passage to Meereen.”
One word. Tyrion Lannister’s world turned upside down.
One word. Meereen. Or had he misheard?
One word. Meereen, he said Meereen, he’s taking me to Meereen.
Meereen meant life. Or hope for life, at least.
“Why come to me?” the widow said. “I own no ships.”
“You have many captains in your debt.”
Deliver me to the queen, he says. Aye, but which queen? He isn’t
selling me to Cersei. He’s giving me to Daenerys Targaryen. That’s why
he hasn’t hacked my head o . We’re going east, and Gri and his prince
are going west, the bloody fools.
Oh, it was all too much. Plots within plots, but all roads lead down
the dragon’s gullet. A gu aw burst from his lips, and suddenly Tyrion
could not stop laughing.
“Your dwarf is having a t,” the widow observed.
“My dwarf will be quiet, or I’ll see him gagged.”
Tyrion covered his mouth with his hands. Meereen!
The widow of the waterfront decided to ignore him. “Shall we
have a drink?” she asked. Dust motes oated in the air as a serving
girl lled two green glass cups for Ser Jorah and the widow.
Tyrion’s throat was dry, but no cup was poured for him. The widow
took a sip, rolled the wine round her mouth, swallowed. “All the
other exiles are sailing west, or so these old ears have heard. And
all those captains in my debt are falling over one another to take
them there and leach a little gold from the co ers of the Golden
Company. Our noble triarchs have pledged a dozen warships to the
cause, to see the eet safely as far as the Stepstones. Even old
Doniphos has given his assent. Such a glorious adventure. And yet
you would go the other way, ser.”
“My business is in the east.”
“And what business is that, I wonder? Not slaves, the silver queen
has put an end to that. She has closed the ghting pits as well, so it

cannot be a taste for blood. What else could Meereen o er to a
Westerosi knight? Bricks? Olives? Dragons? Ah, there it is.” The old
woman’s smile turned feral. “I have heard it said that the silver
queen feeds them with the esh of infants while she herself bathes
in the blood of virgin girls and takes a di erent lover every night.”
Ser Jorah’s mouth had hardened. “The Yunkai’i are pouring
poison in your ears. My lady should not believe such lth.”
“I am no lady, but even Vogarro’s whore knows the taste of
falsehood. This much is true, though … the dragon queen has
enemies … Yunkai, New Ghis, Tolos, Qarth … aye, and Volantis,
soon enough. You would travel to Meereen? Just wait a while, ser.
Swords will be wanted soon enough, when the warships bend their
oars eastward to bring down the silver queen. Tigers love to bare
their claws, and even elephants will kill if threatened. Malaquo
hungers for a taste of glory, and Nyessos owes much of his wealth
to the slave trade. Let Alios or Parquello or Belicho gain the
triarchy, and the eets will sail.”
Ser Jorah scowled. “If Doniphos is returned …”
“Vogarro will be returned rst, and my sweet lord has been dead
these thirty years.”
Behind them, some sailor was bellowing loudly. “They call this
ale? Fuck. A monkey could piss better ale.”
“And you would drink it,” another voice replied.
Tyrion twisted around for a look, hoping against hope that it was
Duck and Haldon he was hearing. Instead he saw two
strangers … and the dwarf, who was standing a few feet away
staring at him intently. He seemed somehow familiar.
The widow sipped daintily at her wine. “Some of the rst
elephants were women,” she said, “the ones who brought the tigers
down and ended the old wars. Trianna was returned four times.
That was three hundred years ago, alas. Volantis has had no female
triarch since, though some women have the vote. Women of good
birth who dwell in ancient palaces behind the Black Walls, not
creatures such as me. The Old Blood will have their dogs and
children voting before any freedman. No, it will be Belicho, or
perhaps Alios, but either way it will be war. Or so they think.”

“And what do you think?” Ser Jorah asked.
Good, thought Tyrion. The right question.
“Oh, I think it will be war as well, but not the war they want.”
The old woman leaned forward, her black eyes gleaming. “I think
that red R’hllor has more worshipers in this city than all the other
gods together. Have you heard Benerro preach?”
“Last night.”
“Benerro can see the morrow in his ames,” the widow said.
“Triarch Malaquo tried to hire the Golden Company, did you know?
He meant to clean out the red temple and put Benerro to the sword.
He dare not use tiger cloaks. Half of them worship the Lord of Light
as well. Oh, these are dire days in Old Volantis, even for wrinkled
old widows. But not half so dire as in Meereen, I think. So tell me,
ser … why do you seek the silver queen?”
“That is my concern. I can pay for our passage and pay well. I
have the silver.”
Fool, thought Tyrion. It’s not coin she wants, it’s respect. Haven’t you
heard a word she’s said? He glanced back over his shoulder again.
The dwarf had moved closer to their table. And he seemed to have a
knife in his hand. The hairs on the back of Tyrion’s neck began to
prickle.
“Keep your silver. I have gold. And spare me your black looks,
ser. I am too old to be frightened of a scowl. You are a hard man, I
see, and no doubt skilled with that long sword at your side, but this
is my realm. Let me crook a nger and you may nd yourself
traveling to Meereen chained to an oar in the belly of a galley.” She
lifted her jade fan and opened it. There was a rustle of leaves, and a
man slid from the overgrown archway to her left. His face was a
mass of scars, and in one hand he held a sword, short and heavy as
a cleaver. “Seek the widow of the waterfront, someone told you, but
they should have also warned you, beware the widow’s sons. It is such
a sweet morning, though, I shall ask again. Why would you seek
Daenerys Targaryen, whom half the world wants dead?”
Jorah Mormont’s face was dark with anger, but he answered. “To
serve her. Defend her. Die for her, if need be.”

That made the widow laugh. “You want to rescue her, is that the
way of it? From more enemies than I can name, with swords
beyond count … this is what you’d have the poor widow believe?
That you are a true and chivalrous Westerosi knight crossing half
the world to come to the aid of this … well, she is no maiden,
though she may still be fair.” She laughed again. “Do you think your
dwarf will please her? Will she bathe in his blood, do you think, or
content herself with striking o his head?”
Ser Jorah hesitated. “The dwarf is—”
“—I know who the dwarf is, and what he is.” Her black eyes
turned to Tyrion, hard as stone. “Kinslayer, kingslayer, murderer,
turncloak. Lannister.” She made the last a curse. “What do you plan
to o er the dragon queen, little man?”
My hate, Tyrion wanted to say. Instead he spread his hands as far
as the fetters would allow. “Whatever she would have of me. Sage
counsel, savage wit, a bit of tumbling. My cock, if she desires it. My
tongue, if she does not. I will lead her armies or rub her feet, as she
desires. And the only reward I ask is I might be allowed to rape and
kill my sister.”
That brought the smile back to the old woman’s face. “This one at
least is honest,” she announced, “but you, ser … I have known a
dozen Westerosi knights and a thousand adventurers of the same
ilk, but none so pure as you would paint yourself. Men are beasts,
sel sh and brutal. However gentle the words, there are always
darker motives underneath. I do not trust you, ser.” She icked
them o with her fan, as if they were no more than ies buzzing
about her head. “If you want to get to Meereen, swim. I have no
help to give you.”
Then seven hells broke out at once.
Ser Jorah started to rise, the widow snapped her fan closed, her
scarred man slid out of the shadows … and behind them a girl
screamed. Tyrion spun just in time to see the dwarf rushing toward
him. She’s a girl, he realized all at once, a girl dressed up in man’s
clothes. And she means to gut me with that knife.
For half a heartbeat Ser Jorah, the widow, and the scarred man
stood still as stone. Idlers watched from nearby tables, sipping ale

and wine, but no one moved to interfere. Tyrion had to move both
hands at once, but his chains had just enough give for him to reach
the agon on the table. He closed his st around it, spun, dashed its
contents into the face of the charging dwarf girl, then threw himself
to one side to avoid her knife. The agon shattered underneath him
as the oor came up to smack him in the head. Then the girl was on
him once again. Tyrion rolled on one side as she buried the knife
blade in the oorboards, yanked it free, raised it again …
… and suddenly she was rising o the oor, legs kicking wildly
as she struggled in Ser Jorah’s grasp. “No!” she wailed, in the
Common Tongue of Westeros. “Let go!” Tyrion heard her tunic rip
as she fought to free herself.
Mormont had her by the collar with one hand. With the other he
wrenched the dagger from her grasp. “Enough.”
The landlord made his appearance then, a cudgel in his hand.
When he saw the broken agon, he uttered a blistering curse and
demanded to know what had happened here. “Dwarf ght,” replied
the Tyroshi with the purple beard, chuckling.
Tyrion blinked up at the dripping girl twisting in the air. “Why?”
he demanded. “What did I ever do to you?”
“They killed him.” All the ght went out of her at that. She hung
limply in Mormont’s grasp as her eyes lled with tears. “My
brother. They took him and they killed him.”
“Who killed him?” asked Mormont.
“Sailors. Sailors from the Seven Kingdoms. There were ve of
them, drunk. They saw us jousting in the square and followed us.
When they realized I was a girl they let me go, but they took my
brother and killed him. They cut his head o .”
Tyrion felt a sudden shock of recognition. They saw us jousting in
the square. He knew who the girl was then. “Did you ride the pig?”
he asked her. “Or the dog?”
“The dog,” she sobbed. “Oppo always rode the pig.”
The dwarfs from Jo rey’s wedding. It was their show that had
started all the trouble that night. How strange, to encounter them
again half a world away. Though perhaps not so strange as that. If
they had half the wits of their pig, they would have ed King’s Landing

the night Jo died, before Cersei could assign them some share of blame
in her son’s death. “Let her down, ser,” he told Ser Jorah Mormont.
“She won’t do us any harm.”
Ser Jorah dumped the dwarf girl on the oor. “I am sorry for
your brother … but we had no part in his murder.”
“He did.” The girl pushed herself to her knees, clutching her torn,
wine-drenched tunic to small, pale breasts. “It was him they
wanted. They thought Oppo was him.” The girl was weeping,
begging for help from anyone who would listen. “He should die, the
way my poor brother died. Please. Someone help me. Someone kill
him.” The landlord seized her roughly by one arm and wrenched her
back to her feet, shouting in Volantene, demanding to know who
was going to pay for this damage.
The widow of the waterfront gave Mormont a cool look. “Knights
defend the weak and protect the innocent, they say. And I am the
fairest maid in all Volantis.” Her laugh was full of scorn. “What do
they call you, child?”
“Penny.”
The old woman called out to the landlord in the tongue of Old
Volantis. Tyrion knew enough to understand that she was telling
him to take the dwarf girl up to her rooms, give her wine, and nd
some clothes for her to wear.
When they were gone, the widow studied Tyrion, her black eyes
shining. “Monsters should be larger, it seems to me. You are worth
a lordship back in Westeros, little man. Here, I fear, your worth is
somewhat less. But I think I had best help you after all. Volantis is
no safe place for dwarfs, it seems.”
“You are too kind.” Tyrion gave her his sweetest smile. “Perhaps
you would remove these charming iron bracelets as well? This
monster has but half a nose, and it itches most abominably. The
chains are too short for me to scratch it. I’ll make you a gift of
them, and gladly.”
“How generous. But I have worn iron in my time, and now I nd
that I prefer gold and silver. And sad to say, this is Volantis, where
fetters and chains are cheaper than day-old bread and it is forbidden
to help a slave escape.”

“I’m no slave.”
“Every man ever taken by slavers sings that same sad song. I dare
not help you … here.” She leaned forward again. “Two days from
now, the cog Selaesori Qhoran will set sail for Qarth by way of New
Ghis, carrying tin and iron, bales of wool and lace, fty Myrish
carpets, a corpse pickled in brine, twenty jars of dragon peppers,
and a red priest. Be on her when she sails.”
“We will,” said Tyrion, “and thank you.”
Ser Jorah frowned. “Qarth is not our destination.”
“She will never reach Qarth. Benerro has seen it in his res.” The
crone smiled a vulpine smile.
“As you say.” Tyrion grinned. “If I were Volantene, and free, and
had the blood, you’d have my vote for triarch, my lady.”
“I am no lady,” the widow replied, “just Vogarro’s whore. You
want to be gone from here before the tigers come. Should you reach
your queen, give her a message from the slaves of Old Volantis.”
She touched the faded scar upon her wrinkled cheek, where her
tears had been cut away. “Tell her we are waiting. Tell her to come
soon.”

JON

W

hen he heard the order, Ser Alliser’s mouth twisted into a
semblance of a smile, but his eyes remained as cold and hard as
int. “So the bastard boy sends me out to die.”
“Die,” cried Mormont’s raven. “Die, die, die.”
You are not helping. Jon swatted the bird away. “The bastard boy
is sending you out to range. To nd our foes and kill them if need
be. You are skilled with a blade. You were master-at-arms, here and
at Eastwatch.”
Thorne touched the hilt of his longsword. “Aye. I have
squandered a third of my life trying to teach the rudiments of
swordplay to churls, muttonheads, and knaves. Small good that will
do me in those woods.”
“Dywen will be with you, and another seasoned ranger.”
“We’ll learn you what you need t’ know, ser,” Dywen told
Thorne, cackling. “Teach you how t’ wipe your highborn arse with
leaves, just like a proper ranger.”
Kedge Whiteye laughed at that, and Black Jack Bulwer spat. Ser
Alliser only said, “You would like me to refuse. Then you could
hack o my head, same as you did for Slynt. I’ll not give you that
pleasure, bastard. You’d best pray that it’s a wildling blade that kills
me, though. The ones the Others kill don’t stay dead … and they
remember. I’m coming back, Lord Snow.”
“I pray you do.” Jon would never count Ser Alliser Thorne
amongst his friends, but he was still a brother. No one ever said you
had to like your brothers.

It was no easy thing to send men into the wild, knowing that the
chances were good that they might never return. They are all
seasoned men, Jon told himself … but his uncle Benjen and his
rangers had been seasoned men as well, and the haunted forest had
swallowed them up without a trace. When two of them nally came
straggling back to the Wall, it had been as wights. Not for the rst
time, or the last, Jon Snow found himself wondering what had
become of Benjen Stark. Perhaps the rangers will come upon some sign
of them, he told himself, never truly believing it.
Dywen would lead one ranging, Black Jack Bulwer and Kedge
Whiteye the other two. They at least were eager for the duty. “Feels
good to have a horse under me again,” Dywen said at the gate,
sucking on his wooden teeth. “Begging your pardon, m’lord, but we
were all o’ us getting splinters up our arses from sitting about.” No
man in Castle Black knew the woods as well as Dywen did, the trees
and streams, the plants that could be eaten, the ways of predator
and prey. Thorne is in better hands than he deserves.
Jon watched the riders go from atop the Wall—three parties, each
of three men, each carrying a pair of ravens. From on high their
garrons looked no larger than ants, and Jon could not tell one
ranger from another. He knew them, though. Every name was
graven on his heart. Eight good men, he thought, and one … well, we
shall see.
When the last of the riders had disappeared into the trees, Jon
Snow rode the winch cage down with Dolorous Edd. A few scattered
snow akes were falling as they made their slow descent, dancing on
the gusty wind. One followed the cage down, drifting just beyond
the bars. It was falling faster than they were descending and from
time to time would vanish beneath them. Then a gust of wind
would catch it and push it upward once again. Jon could have
reached through the bars and caught it if he had wished.
“I had a frightening dream last night, m’lord,” Dolorous Edd
confessed. “You were my steward, fetching my food and cleaning
up my leavings. I was lord commander, with never a moment’s
peace.”
Jon did not smile. “Your nightmare, my life.”

Cotter Pyke’s galleys were reporting ever-increasing numbers of
free folk along the wooded shores to the north and east of the Wall.
Camps had been seen, half-built rafts, even the hull of a broken cog
that someone had begun repairing. The wildlings always vanished
into the woods when seen, no doubt to reemerge as soon as Pyke’s
ships had passed. Meanwhile, Ser Denys Mallister was still seeing
res in the night north of the Gorge. Both commanders were asking
for more men.
And where am I to get more men? Jon had sent ten of the Mole’s
Town wildlings to each of them: green boys, old men, some
wounded and in rm, but all capable of doing work of one sort or
another. Far from being pleased, Pyke and Mallister had both
written back to complain. “When I asked for men, I had in mind
men of the Night’s Watch, trained and disciplined, whose loyalty I
should never have reason to doubt,” wrote Ser Denys. Cotter Pyke
was blunter. “I could hang them from the Wall as a warning to
other wildlings to stay away, but I don’t see any other use for
them,” Maester Harmune wrote for him. “I wouldn’t trust such to
clean my chamber pot, and ten is not enough.”
The iron cage moved downward at the end of its long chain,
creaking and rattling, until it nally jerked to a halt a foot above
the ground at the base of the Wall. Dolorous Edd pushed open the
door and hopped down, his boots breaking the crust of the last
snow. Jon followed.
Outside the armory, Iron Emmett was still urging on his charges
in the yard. The song of steel on steel woke a hunger in Jon. It
reminded him of warmer, simpler days, when he had been a boy at
Winterfell matching blades with Robb under the watchful eye of Ser
Rodrik Cassel. Ser Rodrik too had fallen, slain by Theon Turncloak
and his ironmen as he’d tried to retake Winterfell. The great
stronghold of House Stark was a scorched desolation. All my
memories are poisoned.
When Iron Emmett spied him, he raised a hand and combat
ceased. “Lord Commander. How may we serve you?”
“With your three best.”
Emmett grinned. “Arron. Emrick. Jace.”

Horse and Hop-Robin fetched padding for the lord commander,
along with a ringmail hauberk to go over it, and greaves, gorget,
and halfhelm. A black shield rimmed with iron for his left arm, a
blunted longsword for his right hand. The sword gleamed silvery
grey in the dawn light, almost new. One of the last to come from
Donal’s forge. A pity he did not live long enough to put an edge on it.
The blade was shorter than Longclaw but made of common steel,
which made it heavier. His blows would be a little slower. “It will
serve.” Jon turned to face his foes. “Come.”
“Which one do you want rst?” asked Arron.
“All three of you. At once.”
“Three on one?” Jace was incredulous. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
He was one of Conwy’s latest bunch, a cobbler’s son from Fair Isle.
Maybe that explained it.
“True. Come here.”
When he did, Jon’s blade slammed him alongside his head,
knocking him o his feet. In the blink of an eye the boy had a boot
on his chest and a swordpoint at his throat. “War is never fair,” Jon
told him. “It’s two on one now, and you’re dead.”
When he heard gravel crunch, he knew the twins were coming.
Those two will make rangers yet. He spun, blocking Arron’s cut with
the edge of his shield and meeting Emrick’s with his sword. “Those
aren’t spears,” he shouted. “Get in close.” He went to the attack to
show them how it was done. Emrick rst. He slashed at his head
and shoulders, right and left and right again. The boy got his shield
up and tried a clumsy countercut. Jon slammed his own shield into
Emrick’s, and brought him down with a blow to the lower
leg … none too soon, because Arron was on him, with a crunching
cut to the back of his thigh that sent him to one knee. That will leave
a bruise. He caught the next cut on his shield, then lurched back to
his feet and drove Arron across the yard. He’s quick, he thought, as
the longswords kissed once and twice and thrice, but he needs to get
stronger. When he saw relief in Arron’s eyes, he knew Emrick was
behind him. He came around and dealt him a cut to the back of the
shoulders that sent him crashing into his brother. By that time Jace
had found his feet, so Jon put him down again. “I hate it when dead

men get up. You’ll feel the same the day you meet a wight.”
Stepping back, he lowered his sword.
“The big crow can peck the little crows,” growled a voice behind
him, “but has he belly enough to ght a man?”
Rattleshirt was leaning against a wall. A coarse stubble covered
his sunken cheeks, and thin brown hair was blowing across his little
yellow eyes.
“You atter yourself,” Jon said.
“Aye, but I’d atten you.”
“Stannis burned the wrong man.”
“No.” The wildling grinned at him through a mouth of brown and
broken teeth. “He burned the man he had to burn, for all the world
to see. We all do what we have to do, Snow. Even kings.”
“Emmett, nd some armor for him. I want him in steel, not old
bones.”
Once clad in mail and plate, the Lord of Bones seemed to stand a
little straighter. He seemed taller too, his shoulders thicker and
more powerful than Jon would have thought. It’s the armor, not the
man, he told himself. Even Sam could appear almost formidable, clad
head to heel in Donal Noye’s steel. The wildling waved away the
shield Horse o ered him. Instead he asked for a two-handed sword.
“There’s a sweet sound,” he said, slashing at the air. “Flap closer,
Snow. I mean to make your feathers y.”
Jon rushed him hard.
Rattleshirt took a step backwards and met the charge with a twohanded slash. If Jon had not interposed his shield, it might have
staved his breastplate in and broken half his ribs. The force of the
blow staggered him for a moment and sent a solid jolt up his arm.
He hits harder than I would have thought. His quickness was another
unpleasant surprise. They circled round each other, trading blow for
blow. The Lord of Bones gave as good as he was getting. By rights
the two-handed greatsword should have been a deal more
cumbersome than Jon’s longsword, but the wildling wielded it with
blinding speed.
Iron Emmett’s edglings cheered their lord commander at the
start, but the relentless speed of Rattleshirt’s attack soon beat them

down to silence. He cannot keep this up for long, Jon told himself as
he stopped another blow. The impact made him grunt. Even dulled,
the greatsword cracked his pinewood shield and bent the iron rim.
He will tire soon. He must. Jon slashed at the wildling’s face, and
Rattleshirt pulled back his head. He hacked down at Rattleshirt’s
calf, only to have him deftly leap the blade. The greatsword crashed
down onto Jon’s shoulder, hard enough to ding his pouldron and
numb the arm beneath. Jon backed away. The Lord of Bones came
after, chortling. He has no shield, Jon reminded himself, and that
monster sword’s too cumbersome for parries. I should be landing two
blows for every one of his.
Somehow he wasn’t, though, and the blows he did land were
having no e ect. The wildling always seemed to be moving away or
sliding sideways, so Jon’s longsword glanced o a shoulder or an
arm. Before long he found himself giving more ground, trying to
avoid the other’s crashing cuts and failing half the time. His shield
had been reduced to kindling. He shook it o his arm. Sweat was
running down his face and stinging his eyes beneath his helm. He is
too strong and too quick, he realized, and with that greatsword he has
weight and reach on me. It would have been a di erent ght if Jon
had been armed with Longclaw, but …
His chance came on Rattleshirt’s next backswing. Jon threw
himself forward, bulling into the other man, and they went down
together, legs entangled. Steel slammed on steel. Both men lost
their swords as they rolled on the hard ground. The wildling drove
a knee between Jon’s legs. Jon lashed out with a mailed st.
Somehow Rattleshirt ended up on top, with Jon’s head in his hands.
He smashed it against the ground, then wrenched his visor open. “If
I had me a dagger, you’d be less an eye by now,” he snarled, before
Horse and Iron Emmett dragged him o the lord commander’s
chest. “Let go o’ me, you bloody crows,” he roared.
Jon struggled to one knee. His head was ringing, and his mouth
was full of blood. He spat it out and said, “Well fought.”
“You atter yourself, crow. I never broke a sweat.”
“Next time you will,” said Jon. Dolorous Edd helped him to his
feet and unbuckled his helm. It had acquired several deep dents that

had not been there when he’d donned it. “Release him.” Jon tossed
the helm to Hop-Robin, who dropped it.
“My lord,” said Iron Emmett, “he threatened your life, we all
heard. He said that if he had a dagger—”
“He does have a dagger. Right there on his belt.” There is always
someone quicker and stronger, Ser Rodrik had once told Jon and
Robb. He’s the man you want to face in the yard before you need to
face his like upon a battle eld.
“Lord Snow?” a soft voice said.
He turned to nd Clydas standing beneath the broken archway, a
parchment in his hand. “From Stannis?” Jon had been hoping for
some word from the king. The Night’s Watch took no part, he knew,
and it should not matter to him which king emerged triumphant.
Somehow it did. “Is it Deepwood?”
“No, my lord.” Clydas thrust the parchment forward. It was
tightly rolled and sealed, with a button of hard pink wax. Only the
Dreadfort uses pink sealing wax. Jon ripped o his gauntlet, took the
letter, cracked the seal. When he saw the signature, he forgot the
battering Rattleshirt had given him.
Ramsay Bolton, Lord of the Hornwood, it read, in a huge, spiky
hand. The brown ink came away in akes when Jon brushed it with
his thumb. Beneath Bolton’s signature, Lord Dustin, Lady Cerwyn,
and four Ryswells had appended their own marks and seals. A
cruder hand had drawn the giant of House Umber. “Might we know
what it says, my lord?” asked Iron Emmett.
Jon saw no reason not to tell him. “Moat Cailin is taken. The
ayed corpses of the ironmen have been nailed to posts along the
kingsroad. Roose Bolton summons all leal lords to Barrowton, to
a rm their loyalty to the Iron Throne and celebrate his son’s
wedding to …” His heart seemed to stop for a moment. No, that is
not possible. She died in King’s Landing, with Father.
“Lord Snow?” Clydas peered at him closely with his dim pink
eyes. “Are you … unwell? You seem …”
“He’s to marry Arya Stark. My little sister.” Jon could almost see
her in that moment, long-faced and gawky, all knobby knees and
sharp elbows, with her dirty face and tangled hair. They would

wash the one and comb the other, he did not doubt, but he could
not imagine Arya in a wedding gown, nor Ramsay Bolton’s bed. No
matter how afraid she is, she will not show it. If he tries to lay a hand on
her, she’ll ght him.
“Your sister,” Iron Emmett said, “how old is …”
By now she’d be eleven, Jon thought. Still a child. “I have no sister.
Only brothers. Only you.” Lady Catelyn would have rejoiced to hear
those words, he knew. That did not make them easier to say. His
ngers closed around the parchment. Would that they could crush
Ramsay Bolton’s throat as easily.
Clydas cleared his throat. “Will there be an answer?”
Jon shook his head and walked away.
By nightfall the bruises that Rattleshirt had given him had turned
purple. “They’ll go yellow before they fade away,” he told
Mormont’s raven. “I’ll look as sallow as the Lord of Bones.”
“Bones,” the bird agreed. “Bones, bones.”
He could hear the faint murmur of voices coming from outside,
although the sound was too weak to make out words. They sound a
thousand leagues away. It was Lady Melisandre and her followers at
their night re. Every night at dusk the red woman led her followers
in their twilight prayer, asking her red god to see them through the
dark. For the night is dark and full of terrors. With Stannis and most of
the queen’s men gone, her ock was much diminished; half a
hundred of the free folk up from Mole’s Town, the handful of
guards the king had left her, perhaps a dozen black brothers who
had taken her red god for their own.
Jon felt as sti as a man of sixty years. Dark dreams, he thought,
and guilt. His thoughts kept returning to Arya. There is no way I can
help her. I put all kin aside when I said my words. If one of my men told
me his sister was in peril, I would tell him that was no concern of his.
Once a man had said the words his blood was black. Black as a
bastard’s heart. He’d had Mikken make a sword for Arya once, a
bravo’s blade, made small to t her hand. Needle. He wondered if
she still had it. Stick them with the pointy end, he’d told her, but if
she tried to stick the Bastard, it could mean her life.
“Snow,” muttered Lord Mormont’s raven. “Snow, snow.”

Suddenly he could not su er it a moment longer.
He found Ghost outside his door, gnawing on the bone of an ox to
get at the marrow. “When did you get back?” The direwolf got to
his feet, abandoning the bone to come padding after Jon.
Mully and Kegs stood inside the doors, leaning on their spears. “A
cruel cold out there, m’lord,” warned Mully through his tangled
orange beard. “Will you be out long?”
“No. I just need a breath of air.” Jon stepped out into the night.
The sky was full of stars, and the wind was gusting along the Wall.
Even the moon looked cold; there were goosebumps all across its
face. Then the rst gust caught him, slicing through his layers of
wool and leather to set his teeth to chattering. He stalked across the
yard, into the teeth of that wind. His cloak apped loudly from his
shoulders. Ghost came after. Where am I going? What am I doing?
Castle Black was still and silent, its halls and towers dark. My seat,
Jon Snow re ected. My hall, my home, my command. A ruin.
In the shadow of the Wall, the direwolf brushed up against his
ngers. For half a heartbeat the night came alive with a thousand
smells, and Jon Snow heard the crackle of the crust breaking on a
patch of old snow. Someone was behind him, he realized suddenly.
Someone who smelled warm as a summer day.
When he turned he saw Ygritte.
She stood beneath the scorched stones of the Lord Commander’s
Tower, cloaked in darkness and in memory. The light of the moon
was in her hair, her red hair kissed by re. When he saw that, Jon’s
heart leapt into his mouth. “Ygritte,” he said.
“Lord Snow.” The voice was Melisandre’s.
Surprise made him recoil from her. “Lady Melisandre.” He took a
step backwards. “I mistook you for someone else.” At night all robes
are grey. Yet suddenly hers were red. He did not understand how he
could have taken her for Ygritte. She was taller, thinner, older,
though the moonlight washed years from her face. Mist rose from
her nostrils, and from pale hands naked to the night. “You will
freeze your ngers o ,” Jon warned.
“If that is the will of R’hllor. Night’s powers cannot touch one
whose heart is bathed in god’s holy re.”

“Your heart does not concern me. Just your hands.”
“The heart is all that matters. Do not despair, Lord Snow. Despair
is a weapon of the enemy, whose name may not be spoken. Your
sister is not lost to you.”
“I have no sister.” The words were knives. What do you know of
my heart, priestess? What do you know of my sister?
Melisandre seemed amused. “What is her name, this little sister
that you do not have?”
“Arya.” His voice was hoarse. “My half-sister, truly …”
“… for you are bastard born. I had not forgotten. I have seen
your sister in my res, eeing from this marriage they have made
for her. Coming here, to you. A girl in grey on a dying horse, I have
seen it plain as day. It has not happened yet, but it will.” She gazed
at Ghost. “May I touch your … wolf?”
The thought made Jon uneasy. “Best not.”
“He will not harm me. You call him Ghost, yes?”
“Yes, but …”
“Ghost.” Melisandre made the word a song.
The direwolf padded toward her. Wary, he stalked about her in a
circle, sni ng. When she held out her hand he smelled that too,
then shoved his nose against her ngers.
Jon let out a white breath. “He is not always so …”
“… warm? Warmth calls to warmth, Jon Snow.” Her eyes were
two red stars, shining in the dark. At her throat, her ruby gleamed,
a third eye glowing brighter than the others. Jon had seen Ghost’s
eyes blazing red the same way, when they caught the light just
right. “Ghost,” he called. “To me.”
The direwolf looked at him as if he were a stranger.
Jon frowned in disbelief. “That’s … queer.”
“You think so?” She knelt and scratched Ghost behind his ear.
“Your Wall is a queer place, but there is power here, if you will use
it. Power in you, and in this beast. You resist it, and that is your
mistake. Embrace it. Use it.”
I am not a wolf, he thought. “And how would I do that?”
“I can show you.” Melisandre draped one slender arm over Ghost,
and the direwolf licked her face. “The Lord of Light in his wisdom

made us male and female, two parts of a greater whole. In our
joining there is power. Power to make life. Power to make light.
Power to cast shadows.”
“Shadows.” The world seemed darker when he said it.
“Every man who walks the earth casts a shadow on the world.
Some are thin and weak, others long and dark. You should look
behind you, Lord Snow. The moon has kissed you and etched your
shadow upon the ice twenty feet tall.”
Jon glanced over his shoulder. The shadow was there, just as she
had said, etched in moonlight against the Wall. A girl in grey on a
dying horse, he thought. Coming here, to you. Arya. He turned back to
the red priestess. Jon could feel her warmth. She has power. The
thought came unbidden, seizing him with iron teeth, but this was
not a woman he cared to be indebted to, not even for his little
sister. “Dalla told me something once. Val’s sister, Mance Rayder’s
wife. She said that sorcery was a sword without a hilt. There is no
safe way to grasp it.”
“A wise woman.” Melisandre rose, her red robes stirring in the
wind. “A sword without a hilt is still a sword, though, and a sword
is a ne thing to have when foes are all about. Hear me now, Jon
Snow. Nine crows ew into the white wood to nd your foes for
you. Three of them are dead. They have not died yet, but their
death is out there waiting for them, and they ride to meet it. You
sent them forth to be your eyes in the darkness, but they will be
eyeless when they return to you. I have seen their pale dead faces in
my ames. Empty sockets, weeping blood.” She pushed her red hair
back, and her red eyes shone. “You do not believe me. You will.
The cost of that belief will be three lives. A small price to pay for
wisdom, some might say … but not one you had to pay. Remember
that when you behold the blind and ravaged faces of your dead. And
come that day, take my hand.” The mist rose from her pale esh,
and for a moment it seemed as if pale, sorcerous ames were
playing about her ngers. “Take my hand,” she said again, “and let
me save your sister.”

DAVOS

E

ven in the gloom of the Wolf’s Den, Davos Seaworth could
sense that something was awry this morning.
He woke to the sound of voices and crept to the door of his cell,
but the wood was too thick and he could not make out the words.
Dawn had come, but not the porridge Garth brought him every
morn to break his fast. That made him anxious. All the days were
much the same inside the Wolf’s Den, and any change was usually
for the worse. This may be the day I die. Garth may be sitting with a
whetstone even now, to put an edge on Lady Lu.
The onion knight had not forgotten Wyman Manderly’s last words
to him. Take this creature to the Wolf’s Den and cut o head and
hands, the fat lord had commanded. I shall not be able to eat a bite
until I see this smuggler’s head upon a spike, with an onion shoved
between his lying teeth. Every night Davos went to sleep with those
words in his head, and every morn he woke to them. And should he
forget, Garth was always pleased to remind him. Dead man was his
name for Davos. When he came by in the morning, it was always,
“Here, porridge for the dead man.” At night it was, “Blow out the
candle, dead man.”
Once Garth brought his ladies by to introduce them to the dead
man. “The Whore don’t look like much,” he said, fondling a rod of
cold black iron, “but when I heat her up red-hot and let her touch
your cock, you’ll cry for mother. And this here’s my Lady Lu. It’s
her who’ll take your head and hands, when Lord Wyman sends
down word.” Davos had never seen a bigger axe than Lady Lu, nor
one with a sharper edge. Garth spent his days honing her, the other

keepers said. I will not plead for mercy, Davos resolved. He would go
to his death a knight, asking only that they take his head before his
hands. Even Garth would not be so cruel as to deny him that, he
hoped.
The sounds coming through the door were faint and mu ed.
Davos rose and paced his cell. As cells went, it was large and
queerly comfortable. He suspected it might once have been some
lordling’s bedchamber. It was thrice the size of his captain’s cabin
on Black Bessa, and even larger than the cabin Salladhor Saan
enjoyed on his Valyrian. Though its only window had been bricked
in years before, one wall still boasted a hearth big enough to hold a
kettle, and there was an actual privy built into a corner nook. The
oor was made of warped planks full of splinters, and his sleeping
pallet smelled of mildew, but those discomforts were mild
compared to what Davos had expected.
The food had come as a surprise as well. In place of gruel and
stale bread and rotten meat, the usual dungeon fare, his keepers
brought him fresh-caught sh, bread still warm from the oven,
spiced mutton, turnips, carrots, even crabs. Garth was none too
pleased by that. “The dead should not eat better than the living,” he
complained, more than once. Davos had furs to keep him warm by
night, wood to feed his re, clean clothing, a greasy tallow candle.
When he asked for paper, quill, and ink, Therry brought them the
next day. When he asked for a book, so he might keep at his
reading, Therry turned up with The Seven-Pointed Star.
For all its comforts, though, his cell remained a cell. Its walls
were solid stone, so thick that he could hear nothing of the outside
world. The door was oak and iron, and his keepers kept it barred.
Four sets of heavy iron fetters dangled from the ceiling, waiting for
the day Lord Manderly decided to chain him up and give him over
to the Whore. Today may be that day. The next time Garth opens my
door, it may not be to bring me porridge.
His belly was rumbling, a sure sign that the morning was
creeping past, and still no sign of food. The worst part is not the
dying, it’s not knowing when or how. He had seen the inside of a few
gaols and dungeons in his smuggling days, but those he’d shared

with other prisoners, so there was always someone to talk with, to
share your fears and hopes. Not here. Aside from his keepers, Davos
Seaworth had the Wolf’s Den to himself.
He knew there were true dungeons down in the castle cellars—
oubliettes and torture chambers and dank pits where huge black rats
scrabbled in the darkness. His gaolers claimed all of them were
unoccupied at present. “Only us here, Onion,” Ser Bartimus had told
him. He was the chief gaoler, a cadaverous one-legged knight, with
a scarred face and a blind eye. When Ser Bartimus was in his cups
(and Ser Bartimus was in his cups most every day), he liked to boast
of how he had saved Lord Wyman’s life at the Battle of the Trident.
The Wolf’s Den was his reward.
The rest of “us” consisted of a cook Davos never saw, six
guardsmen in the ground- oor barracks, a pair of washerwomen,
and the two turnkeys who looked after the prisoner. Therry was the
young one, the son of one of the washerwomen, a boy of ten-andfour. The old one was Garth, huge and bald and taciturn, who wore
the same greasy leather jerkin every day and always seemed to
have a glower on his face.
His years as a smuggler had given Davos Seaworth a sense of
when a man was wrong, and Garth was wrong. The onion knight
took care to hold his tongue in Garth’s presence. With Therry and
Ser Bartimus he was less reticent. He thanked them for his food,
encouraged them to talk about their hopes and histories, answered
their questions politely, and never pressed too hard with queries of
his own. When he made requests, they were small ones: a basin of
water and a bit of soap, a book to read, more candles. Most such
favors were granted, and Davos was duly grateful.
Neither man would speak about Lord Manderly or King Stannis or
the Freys, but they would talk of other things. Therry wanted to go
o to war when he was old enough, to ght in battles and become a
knight. He liked to complain about his mother too. She was bedding
two of the guardsmen, he con ded. The men were on di erent
watches and neither knew about the other, but one day one man or
t’other would puzzle it out, and then there would be blood. Some

nights the boy would even bring a skin of wine to the cell and ask
Davos about the smuggler’s life as they drank.
Ser Bartimus had no interest in the world outside, or indeed
anything that had happened since he lost his leg to a riderless horse
and a maester’s saw. He had come to love the Wolf’s Den, however,
and liked nothing more than to talk about its long and bloody
history. The Den was much older than White Harbor, the knight
told Davos. It had been raised by King Jon Stark to defend the
mouth of the White Knife against raiders from the sea. Many a
younger son of the King in the North had made his seat there, many
a brother, many an uncle, many a cousin. Some passed the castle to
their own sons and grandsons, and o shoot branches of House Stark
had arisen; the Greystarks had lasted the longest, holding the Wolf’s
Den for ve centuries, until they presumed to join the Dreadfort in
rebellion against the Starks of Winterfell.
After their fall, the castle had passed through many other hands.
House Flint held it for a century, House Locke for almost two.
Slates, Longs, Holts, and Ashwoods had held sway here, charged by
Winterfell to keep the river safe. Reavers from the Three Sisters
took the castle once, making it their toehold in the north. During
the wars between Winterfell and the Vale, it was besieged by
Osgood Arryn, the Old Falcon, and burned by his son, the one
remembered as the Talon. When old King Edrick Stark had grown
too feeble to defend his realm, the Wolf’s Den was captured by
slavers from the Stepstones. They would brand their captives with
hot irons and break them to the whip before shipping them o
across the sea, and these same black stone walls bore witness.
“Then a long cruel winter fell,” said Ser Bartimus. “The White
Knife froze hard, and even the rth was icing up. The winds came
howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle
round their res, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king
come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeard’s
great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolf’s
Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves
he’d found chained up in the dungeons. It’s said they hung their
entrails in the branches of the heart tree, as an o ering to the gods.

The old gods, not these new ones from the south. Your Seven don’t
know winter, and winter don’t know them.”
Davos could not argue with the truth of that. From what he had
seen at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, he did not care to know winter either.
“What gods do you keep?” he asked the one-legged knight.
“The old ones.” When Ser Bartimus grinned, he looked just like a
skull. “Me and mine were here before the Manderlys. Like as not,
my own forebears strung those entrails through the tree.”
“I never knew that northmen made blood sacri ce to their heart
trees.”
“There’s much and more you southrons do not know about the
north,” Ser Bartimus replied.
He was not wrong. Davos sat beside his candle and looked at the
letters he had scratched out word by word during the days of his
con nement. I was a better smuggler than a knight, he had written to
his wife, a better knight than a King’s Hand, a better King’s Hand than
a husband. I am so sorry. Marya, I have loved you. Please forgive the
wrongs I did you. Should Stannis lose his war, our lands will be lost as
well. Take the boys across the narrow sea to Braavos and teach them to
think kindly of me, if you would. Should Stannis gain the Iron Throne,
House Seaworth will survive and Devan will remain at court. He will help
you place the other boys with noble lords, where they can serve as pages
and squires and win their knighthoods. It was the best counsel he had
for her, though he wished it sounded wiser.
He had written to each of his three surviving sons as well, to help
them remember the father who had bought them names with his
ngertips. His notes to Ste on and young Stannis were short and
sti and awkward; if truth be told, he did not know them half as
well as he had his older boys, the ones who’d burned or drowned
upon the Blackwater. To Devan he wrote more, telling him how
proud he was to see his own son as a king’s squire and reminding
him that as the eldest it was his duty to protect his lady mother and
his younger brothers. Tell His Grace I did my best, he ended. I am
sorry that I failed him. I lost my luck when I lost my ngerbones, the day
the river burned below King’s Landing.

Davos shu ed through the letters slowly, reading each one over
several times, wondering whether he should change a word here or
add one there. A man should have more to say when staring at the
end of his life, he thought, but the words came hard. I did not do so
ill, he tried to tell himself. I rose up from Flea Bottom to be a King’s
Hand, and I learned to read and write.
He was still hunched over the letters when he heard the sound of
iron keys rattling on a ring. Half a heartbeat later, the door to his
cell came swinging open.
The man who stepped through the door was not one of his
gaolers. He was tall and haggard, with a deeply lined face and a
shock of grey-brown hair. A longsword hung from his hip, and his
deep-dyed scarlet cloak was fastened at the shoulder with a heavy
silver brooch in the shape of a mailed st. “Lord Seaworth,” he said,
“we do not have much time. Please, come with me.”
Davos eyed the stranger warily. The “please” confused him. Men
about to lose their heads and hands were not oft accorded such
courtesies. “Who are you?”
“Robett Glover, if it please, my lord.”
“Glover. Your seat was Deepwood Motte.”
“My brother Galbart’s seat. It was and is, thanks to your King
Stannis. He has taken Deepwood back from the iron bitch who stole
it and o ers to restore it to its rightful owners. Much and more has
happened whilst you have been con ned within these walls, Lord
Davos. Moat Cailin has fallen, and Roose Bolton has returned to the
north with Ned Stark’s younger daughter. A host of Freys came with
him. Bolton has sent forth ravens, summoning all the lords of the
north to Barrowton. He demands homage and hostages … and
witnesses to the wedding of Arya Stark and his bastard Ramsay
Snow, by which match the Boltons mean to lay claim to Winterfell.
Now, will you come with me, or no?”
“What choice do I have, my lord? Come with you, or remain with
Garth and Lady Lu?”
“Who is Lady Lu? One of the washerwomen?” Glover was
growing impatient. “All will be explained if you will come.”

Davos rose to his feet. “If I should die, I beseech my lord to see
that my letters are delivered.”
“You have my word on that … though if you die, it will not be at
Glover’s hands, nor Lord Wyman’s. Quickly now, with me.”
Glover led him along a darkened hall and down a ight of worn
steps. They crossed the castle’s godswood, where the heart tree had
grown so huge and tangled that it had choked out all the oaks and
elms and birch and sent its thick, pale limbs crashing through the
walls and windows that looked down on it. Its roots were as thick
around as a man’s waist, its trunk so wide that the face carved into
it looked fat and angry. Beyond the weirwood, Glover opened a
rusted iron gate and paused to light a torch. When it was blazing
red and hot, he took Davos down more steps into a barrel-vaulted
cellar where the weeping walls were crusted white with salt, and
seawater sloshed beneath their feet with every step. They passed
through several cellars, and rows of small, damp, foul-smelling cells
very di erent from the room where Davos had been con ned. Then
there was a blank stone wall that turned when Glover pushed on it.
Beyond was a long narrow tunnel and still more steps. These led up.
“Where are we?” asked Davos as they climbed. His words echoed
faintly though the darkness.
“The steps beneath the steps. The passage runs beneath the Castle
Stair up to the New Castle. A secret way. It would not do for you to
be seen, my lord. You are supposed to be dead.”
Porridge for the dead man. Davos climbed.
They emerged through another wall, but this one was lath and
plaster on the far side. The room beyond was snug and warm and
comfortably furnished, with a Myrish carpet on the oor and
beeswax candles burning on a table. Davos could hear pipes and
ddles playing, not far away. On the wall hung a sheepskin with a
map of the north painted across it in faded colors. Beneath the map
sat Wyman Manderly, the colossal Lord of White Harbor.
“Please sit.” Lord Manderly was richly garbed. His velvet doublet
was a soft blue-green, embroidered with golden thread at hem and
sleeves and collar. His mantle was ermine, pinned at the shoulder
with a golden trident. “Are you hungry?”

“No, my lord. Your gaolers have fed me well.”
“There is wine, if you have a thirst.”
“I will treat with you, my lord. My king commanded that of me. I
do not have to drink with you.”
Lord Wyman sighed. “I have treated you most shamefully, I
know. I had my reasons, but … please, sit and drink, I beg you.
Drink to my boy’s safe return. Wylis, my eldest son and heir. He is
home. That is the welcoming feast you hear. In the Merman’s Court
they are eating lamprey pie and venison with roasted chestnuts.
Wynafryd is dancing with the Frey she is to marry. The other Freys
are raising cups of wine to toast our friendship.”
Beneath the music, Davos could hear the murmur of many voices,
the clatter of cups and platters. He said nothing.
“I have just come from the high table,” Lord Wyman went on. “I
have eaten too much, as ever, and all White Harbor knows my
bowels are bad. My friends of Frey will not question a lengthy visit
to the privy, we hope.” He turned his cup over. “There. You will
drink and I will not. Sit. Time is short, and there is much we need to
say. Robett, wine for the Hand, if you will be so good. Lord Davos,
you will not know, but you are dead.”
Robett Glover lled a wine cup and o ered it to Davos. He took
it, sni ed it, drank. “How did I die, if I may ask?”
“By the axe. Your head and hands were mounted above the Seal
Gate, with your face turned so your eyes looked out across the
harbor. By now you are well rotted, though we dipped your head in
tar before we set it upon the spike. Carrion crows and seabirds
squabbled over your eyes, they say.”
Davos shifted uncomfortably. It was a queer feeling, being dead.
“If it please my lord, who died in my place?”
“Does it matter? You have a common face, Lord Davos. I hope my
saying so does not o end you. The man had your coloring, a nose of
the same shape, two ears that were not dissimilar, a long beard that
could be trimmed and shaped like yours. You can be sure we tarred
him well, and the onion shoved between his teeth served to twist
the features. Ser Bartimus saw that the ngers of his left hand were
shortened, the same as yours. The man was a criminal, if that gives

you any solace. His dying may accomplish more good than anything
he ever did whilst living. My lord, I bear you no ill will. The rancor
I showed you in the Merman’s Court was a mummer’s farce put on
to please our friends of Frey.”
“My lord should take up a life of mummery,” said Davos. “You
and yours were most convincing. Your good-daughter seemed to
want me dead most earnestly, and the little girl …”
“Wylla.” Lord Wyman smiled. “Did you see how brave she was?
Even when I threatened to have her tongue out, she reminded me of
the debt White Harbor owes to the Starks of Winterfell, a debt that
can never be repaid. Wylla spoke from the heart, as did Lady Leona.
Forgive her if you can, my lord. She is a foolish, frightened woman,
and Wylis is her life. Not every man has it in him to be Prince
Aemon the Dragonknight or Symeon Star-Eyes, and not every
woman can be as brave as my Wylla and her sister
Wynafryd … who did know, yet played her own part fearlessly.
“When treating with liars, even an honest man must lie. I did not
dare defy King’s Landing so long as my last living son remained a
captive. Lord Tywin Lannister wrote me himself to say that he had
Wylis. If I would have him freed unharmed, he told me, I must
repent my treason, yield my city, declare my loyalty to the boy
king on the Iron Throne … and bend my knee to Roose Bolton, his
Warden of the North. Should I refuse, Wylis would die a traitor’s
death, White Harbor would be stormed and sacked, and my people
would su er the same fate as the Reynes of Castamere.
“I am fat, and many think that makes me weak and foolish.
Mayhaps Tywin Lannister was one such. I sent him back a raven to
say that I would bend my knee and open my gates after my son was
returned, but not before. There the matter stood when Tywin died.
Afterward the Freys turned up with Wendel’s bones … to make a
peace and seal it with a marriage pact, they claimed, but I was not
about to give them what they wanted until I had Wylis, safe and
whole, and they were not about to give me Wylis until I proved my
loyalty. Your arrival gave me the means to do that. That was the
reason for the discourtesy I showed you in the Merman’s Court, and
for the head and hands rotting above the Seal Gate.”

“You took a great risk, my lord,” Davos said. “If the Freys had
seen through your deception …”
“I took no risk at all. If any of the Freys had taken it upon
themselves to climb my gate for a close look at the man with the
onion in his mouth, I would have blamed my gaolers for the error
and produced you to appease them.”
Davos felt a shiver up his spine. “I see.”
“I hope so. You have sons of your own, you said.”
Three, thought Davos, though I fathered seven.
“Soon I must return to the feast to toast my friends of Frey,”
Manderly continued. “They watch me, ser. Day and night their eyes
are on me, noses sni ng for some whi of treachery. You saw
them, the arrogant Ser Jared and his nephew Rhaegar, that smirking
worm who wears a dragon’s name. Behind them both stands
Symond, clinking coins. That one has bought and paid for several of
my servants and two of my knights. One of his wife’s handmaids
has found her way into the bed of my own fool. If Stannis wonders
that my letters say so little, it is because I dare not even trust my
maester. Theomore is all head and no heart. You heard him in my
hall. Maesters are supposed to put aside old loyalties when they don
their chains, but I cannot forget that Theomore was born a Lannister
of Lannisport and claims some distant kinship to the Lannisters of
Casterly Rock. Foes and false friends are all around me, Lord Davos.
They infest my city like roaches, and at night I feel them crawling
over me.” The fat man’s ngers coiled into a st, and all his chins
trembled. “My son Wendel came to the Twins a guest. He ate Lord
Walder’s bread and salt, and hung his sword upon the wall to feast
with friends. And they murdered him. Murdered, I say, and may the
Freys choke upon their fables. I drink with Jared, jape with
Symond, promise Rhaegar the hand of my own beloved
granddaughter … but never think that means I have forgotten. The
north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the
mummer’s farce is almost done. My son is home.”
Something about the way Lord Wyman said that chilled Davos to
the bone. “If it is justice that you want, my lord, look to King
Stannis. No man is more just.”

Robett Glover broke in to add, “Your loyalty does you honor, my
lord, but Stannis Baratheon remains your king, not our own.”
“Your own king is dead,” Davos reminded them, “murdered at the
Red Wedding beside Lord Wyman’s son.”
“The Young Wolf is dead,” Manderly allowed, “but that brave boy
was not Lord Eddard’s only son. Robett, bring the lad.”
“At once, my lord.” Glover slipped out the door.
The lad? Was it possible that one of Robb Stark’s brothers had
survived the ruin of Winterfell? Did Manderly have a Stark heir
hidden away in his castle? A found boy or a feigned boy? The north
would rise for either, he suspected … but Stannis Baratheon would
never make common cause with an imposter.
The lad who followed Robett Glover through the door was not a
Stark, nor could he ever hope to pass for one. He was older than the
Young Wolf’s murdered brothers, fourteen or fteen by the look of
him, and his eyes were older still. Beneath a tangle of dark brown
hair his face was almost feral, with a wide mouth, sharp nose, and
pointed chin. “Who are you?” Davos asked.
The boy looked to Robett Glover.
“He is a mute, but we have been teaching him his letters. He
learns quickly.” Glover drew a dagger from his belt and gave it to
the boy. “Write your name for Lord Seaworth.”
There was no parchment in the chamber. The boy carved the
letters into a wooden beam in the wall. W … E … X. He leaned hard
into the X. When he was done he ipped the dagger in the air,
caught it, and stood admiring his handiwork.
“Wex is ironborn. He was Theon Greyjoy’s squire. Wex was at
Winterfell.” Glover sat. “How much does Lord Stannis know of what
transpired at Winterfell?”
Davos thought back on the tales they’d heard. “Winterfell was
captured by Theon Greyjoy, who had once been Lord Stark’s ward.
He had Stark’s two young sons put to death and mounted their
heads above the castle walls. When the northmen came to oust him,
he put the entire castle to sword, down to the last child, before he
himself was slain by Lord Bolton’s bastard.”

“Not slain,” said Glover. “Captured, and carried back to the
Dreadfort. The Bastard has been aying him.”
Lord Wyman nodded. “The tale you tell is one we all have heard,
as full of lies as a pudding’s full of raisins. It was the Bastard of
Bolton who put Winterfell to the sword … Ramsay Snow, he was
called then, before the boy king made him a Bolton. Snow did not
kill them all. He spared the women, roped them together, and
marched them to the Dreadfort for his sport.”
“His sport?”
“He is a great hunter,” said Wyman Manderly, “and women are
his favorite prey. He strips them naked and sets them loose in the
woods. They have a half day’s start before he sets out after them
with hounds and horns. From time to time some wench escapes and
lives to tell the tale. Most are less fortunate. When Ramsay catches
them he rapes them, ays them, feeds their corpses to his dogs, and
brings their skins back to the Dreadfort as trophies. If they have
given him good sport, he slits their throats before he skins them.
Elsewise, t’other way around.”
Davos paled. “Gods be good. How could any man—”
“The evil is in his blood,” said Robett Glover. “He is a bastard
born of rape. A Snow, no matter what the boy king says.”
“Was ever snow so black?” asked Lord Wyman. “Ramsay took
Lord Hornwood’s lands by forcibly wedding his widow, then locked
her in a tower and forgot her. It is said she ate her own ngers in
her extremity … and the Lannister notion of king’s justice is to
reward her killer with Ned Stark’s little girl.”
“The Boltons have always been as cruel as they were cunning, but
this one seems a beast in human skin,” said Glover.
The Lord of White Harbor leaned forward. “The Freys are no
better. They speak of wargs and skinchangers and assert that it was
Robb Stark who slew my Wendel. The arrogance of it! They do not
expect the north to believe their lies, not truly, but they think we
must pretend to believe or die. Roose Bolton lies about his part in
the Red Wedding, and his bastard lies about the fall of Winterfell.
And yet so long as they held Wylis I had no choice but to eat all this
excrement and praise the taste.”

“And now, my lord?” asked Davos.
He had hoped to hear Lord Wyman say, And now I shall declare for
King Stannis, but instead the fat man smiled an odd, twinkling smile
and said, “And now I have a wedding to attend. I am too fat to sit a
horse, as any man with eyes can plainly see. As a boy I loved to
ride, and as a young man I handled a mount well enough to win
some small acclaim in the lists, but those days are done. My body
has become a prison more dire than the Wolf’s Den. Even so, I must
go to Winterfell. Roose Bolton wants me on my knees, and beneath
the velvet courtesy he shows the iron mail. I shall go by barge and
litter, attended by a hundred knights and my good friends from the
Twins. The Freys came here by sea. They have no horses with them,
so I shall present each of them with a palfrey as a guest gift. Do
hosts still give guest gifts in the south?”
“Some do, my lord. On the day their guest departs.”
“Perhaps you understand, then.” Wyman Manderly lurched
ponderously to his feet. “I have been building warships for more
than a year. Some you saw, but there are as many more hidden up
the White Knife. Even with the losses I have su ered, I still
command more heavy horse than any other lord north of the Neck.
My walls are strong, and my vaults are full of silver. Oldcastle and
Widow’s Watch will take their lead from me. My bannermen
include a dozen petty lords and a hundred landed knights. I can
deliver King Stannis the allegiance of all the lands east of the White
Knife, from Widow’s Watch and Ramsgate to the Sheepshead Hills
and the headwaters of the Broken Branch. All this I pledge to do if
you will meet my price.”
“I can bring your terms to the king, but—”
Lord Wyman cut him o . “If you will meet my price, I said. Not
Stannis. It’s not a king I need but a smuggler.”
Robett Glover took up the tale. “We may never know all that
happened at Winterfell, when Ser Rodrik Cassel tried to take the
castle back from Theon Greyjoy’s ironmen. The Bastard of Bolton
claims that Greyjoy murdered Ser Rodrik during a parley. Wex says
no. Until he learns more letters we will never know half the

truth … but he came to us knowing yes and no, and those can go a
long way once you nd the right questions.”
“It was the Bastard who murdered Ser Rodrik and the men of
Winterfell,” said Lord Wyman. “He slew Greyjoy’s ironmen as well.
Wex saw men cut down trying to yield. When we asked how he
escaped, he took a chunk of chalk and drew a tree with a face.”
Davos thought about that. “The old gods saved him?”
“After a fashion. He climbed the heart tree and hid himself
amongst the leaves. Bolton’s men searched the godswood twice and
killed the men they found there, but none thought to clamber up
into the trees. Is that how it happened, Wex?”
The boy ipped up Glover’s dagger, caught it, nodded.
Glover said, “He stayed up in the tree a long time. He slept
amongst the branches, not daring to descend. Finally he heard
voices down beneath him.”
“The voices of the dead,” said Wyman Manderly.
Wex held up ve ngers, tapped each one with the dagger, then
folded four away and tapped the last again.
“Six of them,” asked Davos. “There were six.”
“Two of them Ned Stark’s murdered sons.”
“How could a mute tell you that?”
“With chalk. He drew two boys … and two wolves.”
“The lad is ironborn, so he thought it best not to show himself,”
said Glover. “He listened. The six did not linger long amongst the
ruins of Winterfell. Four went one way, two another. Wex stole
after the two, a woman and a boy. He must have stayed downwind,
so the wolf would not catch his scent.”
“He knows where they went,” Lord Wyman said.
Davos understood. “You want the boy.”
“Roose Bolton has Lord Eddard’s daughter. To thwart him White
Harbor must have Ned’s son … and the direwolf. The wolf will
prove the boy is who we say he is, should the Dreadfort attempt to
deny him. That is my price, Lord Davos. Smuggle me back my liege
lord, and I will take Stannis Baratheon as my king.”
Old instinct made Davos Seaworth reach for his throat. His
ngerbones had been his luck, and somehow he felt he would have

need of luck to do what Wyman Manderly was asking of him. The
bones were gone, though, so he said, “You have better men than me
in your service. Knights and lords and maesters. Why would you
need a smuggler? You have ships.”
“Ships,” Lord Wyman agreed, “but my crews are rivermen, or
sherfolk who have never sailed beyond the Bite. For this I must
have a man who’s sailed in darker waters and knows how to slip
past dangers, unseen and unmolested.”
“Where is the boy?” Somehow Davos knew he would not like the
answer. “Where is it you want me to go, my lord?”
Robett Glover said, “Wex. Show him.”
The mute ipped the dagger, caught it, then ung it end over end
at the sheepskin map that adorned Lord Wyman’s wall. It struck
quivering. Then he grinned.
For half a heartbeat Davos considered asking Wyman Manderly to
send him back to the Wolf’s Den, to Ser Bartimus with his tales and
Garth with his lethal ladies. In the Den even prisoners ate porridge
in the morning. But there were other places in this world where
men were known to break their fast on human esh.

DAENERYS

E

ach morning, from her western ramparts, the queen would
count the sails on Slaver’s Bay.
Today she counted ve-and-twenty, though some were far away
and moving, so it was hard to be certain. Sometimes she missed
one, or counted one twice. What does it matter? A strangler only needs
ten ngers. All trade had stopped, and her sherfolk did not dare put
out into the bay. The boldest still dropped a few lines into the river,
though even that was hazardous; more remained tied up beneath
Meereen’s walls of many-colored brick.
There were ships from Meereen out in the bay too, warships and
trading galleys whose captains had taken them to sea when Dany’s
host rst laid siege to the city, now returned to augment the eets
from Qarth, Tolos, and New Ghis.
Her admiral’s counsel had proved worse than useless. “Let them
see your dragons,” Groleo said. “Let the Yunkishmen have a taste of
re, and the trade will ow again.”
“Those ships are strangling us, and all my admiral can do is talk
of dragons,” Dany said. “You are my admiral, are you not?”
“An admiral without ships.”
“Build ships.”
“Warships cannot be made from brick. The slavers burned every
stand of timber within twenty leagues of here.”
“Then ride out two-and-twenty leagues. I will give you wagons,
workers, mules, whatever you require.”
“I am a sailor, not a shipwright. I was sent to fetch Your Grace
back to Pentos. Instead you brought us here and tore my Saduleon

to pieces for some nails and scraps of wood. I will never see her like
again. I may never see my home again, nor my old wife. It was not
me who refused the ships this Daxos o ered. I cannot ght the
Qartheen with shing boats.”
His bitterness dismayed her, so much so that Dany found herself
wondering if the grizzled Pentoshi could be one of her three
betrayers. No, he is only an old man, far from home and sick at heart.
“There must be something we can do.”
“Aye, and I’ve told you what. These ships are made of rope and
pitch and canvas, of Qohorik pine and teak from Sothoryos, old oak
from Great Norvos, yew and ash and spruce. Wood, Your Grace.
Wood burns. The dragons—”
“I will hear no more about my dragons. Leave me. Go pray to
your Pentoshi gods for a storm to sink our foes.”
“No sailor prays for storms, Your Grace.”
“I am tired of hearing what you will not do. Go.”
Ser Barristan remained. “Our stores are ample for the moment,”
he reminded her, “and Your Grace has planted beans and grapes and
wheat. Your Dothraki have harried the slavers from the hills and
struck the shackles from their slaves. They are planting too, and
will be bringing their crops to Meereen to market. And you will
have the friendship of Lhazar.”
Daario won that for me, for all that it is worth. “The Lamb Men.
Would that lambs had teeth.”
“That would make the wolves more cautious, no doubt.”
That made her laugh. “How fare your orphans, ser?”
The old knight smiled. “Well, Your Grace. It is good of you to
ask.” The boys were his pride. “Four or ve have the makings of
knights. Perhaps as many as a dozen.”
“One would be enough if he were as true as you.” The day might
come soon when she would have need of every knight. “Will they
joust for me? I should like that.” Viserys had told her stories of the
tourneys he had witnessed in the Seven Kingdoms, but Dany had
never seen a joust herself.
“They are not ready, Your Grace. When they are, they will be
pleased to demonstrate their prowess.”

“I hope that day comes quickly.” She would have kissed her good
knight on the cheek, but just then Missandei appeared beneath the
arched doorway. “Missandei?”
“Your Grace. Skahaz awaits your pleasure.”
“Send him up.”
The Shavepate was accompanied by two of his Brazen Beasts. One
wore a hawk mask, the other the likeness of a jackal. Only their
eyes could be seen behind the brass. “Your Radiance, Hizdahr was
seen to enter the pyramid of Zhak last evening. He did not depart
until well after dark.”
“How many pyramids has he visited?” asked Dany.
“Eleven.”
“And how long since the last murder?”
“Six-and-twenty days.” The Shavepate’s eyes brimmed with fury.
It had been his notion to have the Brazen Beasts follow her
betrothed and take note of all his actions.
“So far Hizdahr has made good on his promises.”
“How? The Sons of the Harpy have put down their knives, but
why? Because the noble Hizdahr asked sweetly? He is one of them,
I tell you. That’s why they obey him. He may well be the Harpy.”
“If there is a Harpy.” Skahaz was convinced that somewhere in
Meereen the Sons of the Harpy had a highborn overlord, a secret
general commanding an army of shadows. Dany did not share his
belief. The Brazen Beasts had taken dozens of the Harpy’s Sons, and
those who had survived their capture had yielded names when
questioned sharply … too many names, it seemed to her. It would
have been pleasant to think that all the deaths were the work of a
single enemy who might be caught and killed, but Dany suspected
that the truth was otherwise. My enemies are legion. “Hizdahr zo
Loraq is a persuasive man with many friends. And he is wealthy.
Perhaps he has bought this peace for us with gold, or convinced the
other highborn that our marriage is in their best interests.”
“If he is not the Harpy, he knows him. I can nd the truth of that
easy enough. Give me your leave to put Hizdahr to the question,
and I will bring you a confession.”

“No,” she said. “I do not trust these confessions. You’ve brought
me too many of them, all of them worthless.”
“Your Radiance—”
“No, I said.”
The Shavepate’s scowl turned his ugly face even uglier. “A
mistake. The Great Master Hizdahr plays Your Worship for a fool.
Do you want a serpent in your bed?”
I want Daario in my bed, but I sent him away for the sake of you and
yours. “You may continue to watch Hizdahr zo Loraq, but no harm is
to come to him. Is that understood?”
“I am not deaf, Magni cence. I will obey.” Skahaz drew a
parchment scroll from his sleeve. “Your Worship should have a look
at this. A list of all the Meereenese ships in the blockade, with their
captains. Great Masters all.”
Dany studied the scroll. All the ruling families of Meereen were
named: Hazkar, Merreq, Quazzar, Zhak, Rhazdar, Ghazeen, Pahl,
even Reznak and Loraq. “What am I to do with a list of names?”
“Every man on that list has kin within the city. Sons and brothers,
wives and daughters, mothers and fathers. Let my Brazen Beasts
seize them. Their lives will win you back those ships.”
“If I send the Brazen Beasts into the pyramids, it will mean open
war inside the city. I have to trust in Hizdahr. I have to hope for
peace.” Dany held the parchment above a candle and watched the
names go up in ame, while Skahaz glowered at her.
Afterward, Ser Barristan told her that her brother Rhaegar would
have been proud of her. Dany remembered the words Ser Jorah had
spoken at Astapor: Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly,
Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.
When she descended to the purple marble hall, she found it
almost empty. “Are there no petitioners today?” Dany asked Reznak
mo Reznak. “No one who craves justice or silver for a sheep?”
“No, Your Worship. The city is afraid.”
“There is nothing to fear.”
But there was much and more to fear as she learned that evening.
As her young hostages Miklaz and Kezmya were laying out a simple
supper of autumn greens and ginger soup for her, Irri came to tell

her that Galazza Galare had returned, with three Blue Graces from
the temple. “Grey Worm is come as well, Khaleesi. They beg words
with you, most urgently.”
“Bring them to my hall. And summon Reznak and Skahaz. Did the
Green Grace say what this was about?”
“Astapor,” said Irri.
Grey Worm began the tale. “He came out of the morning mists, a
rider on a pale horse, dying. His mare was staggering as she
approached the city gates, her sides pink with blood and lather, her
eyes rolling with terror. Her rider called out, ‘She is burning, she is
burning,’ and fell from the saddle. This one was sent for, and gave
orders that the rider be brought to the Blue Graces. When your
servants carried him inside the gates, he cried out again, ‘She is
burning.’ Under his tokar he was a skeleton, all bones and fevered
esh.”
One of the Blue Graces took up the tale from there. “The
Unsullied brought this man to the temple, where we stripped him
and bathed him in cool water. His clothes were soiled, and my
sisters found half an arrow in his thigh. Though he had broken o
the shaft, the head remained inside him, and the wound had
morti ed, lling him with poisons. He died within the hour, still
crying out that she was burning.”
“ ‘She is burning,’ ” Daenerys repeated. “Who is she?”
“Astapor, Your Radiance,” said another of the Blue Graces. “He
said it, once. He said ‘Astapor is burning.’ ”
“It might have been his fever talking.”
“Your Radiance speaks wisely,” said Galazza Galare, “but Ezzara
saw something else.”
The Blue Grace called Ezzara folded her hands. “My queen,” she
murmured, “his fever was not brought on by the arrow. He had
soiled himself, not once but many times. The stains reached to his
knees, and there was dried blood amongst his excrement.”
“His horse was bleeding, Grey Worm said.”
“This thing is true, Your Grace,” the eunuch con rmed. “The pale
mare was bloody from his spur.”

“That may be so, Your Radiance,” said Ezzara, “but this blood was
mingled with his stool. It stained his smallclothes.”
“He was bleeding from the bowels,” said Galazza Galare.
“We cannot be certain,” said Ezzara, “but it may be that Meereen
has more to fear than the spears of the Yunkai’i.”
“We must pray,” said the Green Grace. “The gods sent this man to
us. He comes as a harbinger. He comes as a sign.”
“A sign of what?” asked Dany.
“A sign of wroth and ruin.”
She did not want to believe that. “He was one man. One sick man
with an arrow in his leg. A horse brought him here, not a god.” A
pale mare. Dany rose abruptly. “I thank you for your counsel and for
all that you did for this poor man.”
The Green Grace kissed Dany’s ngers before she took her leave.
“We shall pray for Astapor.”
And for me. Oh, pray for me, my lady. If Astapor had fallen,
nothing remained to prevent Yunkai from turning north.
She turned to Ser Barristan. “Send riders into the hills to nd my
bloodriders. Recall Brown Ben and the Second Sons as well.”
“And the Stormcrows, Your Grace?”
Daario. “Yes. Yes.” Just three nights ago she had dreamed of
Daario lying dead beside the road, staring sightlessly into the sky as
crows quarreled above his corpse. Other nights she tossed in her
bed, imagining that he’d betrayed her, as he had once betrayed his
fellow captains in the Stormcrows. He brought me their heads. What
if he had taken his company back to Yunkai, to sell her for a pot of
gold? He would not do that. Would he? “The Stormcrows too. Send
riders after them at once.”
The Second Sons were the rst to return, eight days after the
queen sent forth her summons. When Ser Barristan told her that her
captain desired words with her, she thought for a moment that it
was Daario, and her heart leapt. But the captain that he spoke of
was Brown Ben Plumm.
Brown Ben had a seamed and weathered face, skin the color of
old teak, white hair, and wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Dany
was so pleased to see his leathery brown face that she hugged him.

His eyes crinkled in amusement. “I heard talk Your Grace was going
to take a husband,” he said, “but no one told me it was me.” They
laughed together as Reznak sputtered, but the laughter ceased when
Brown Ben said, “We caught three Astapori. Your Worship had best
hear what they say.”
“Bring them.”
Daenerys received them in the grandeur of her hall as tall candles
burned amongst the marble pillars. When she saw that the Astapori
were half-starved, she sent for food at once. These three were all
that remained of a dozen who had set out together from the Red
City: a bricklayer, a weaver, and a cobbler. “What befell the rest of
your party?” the queen asked.
“Slain,” said the cobbler. “Yunkai’s sellswords roam the hills
north of Astapor, hunting down those who ee the ames.”
“Has the city fallen, then? Its walls were thick.”
“This is so,” said the bricklayer, a stoop-backed man with rheumy
eyes, “but they were old and crumbling as well.”
The weaver raised her head. “Every day we told each other that
the dragon queen was coming back.” The woman had thin lips and
dull dead eyes, set in a pinched and narrow face. “Cleon had sent
for you, it was said, and you were coming.”
He sent for me, thought Dany. That much is true, at least.
“Outside our walls, the Yunkai’i devoured our crops and
slaughtered our herds,” the cobbler went on. “Inside we starved. We
ate cats and rats and leather. A horsehide was a feast. King
Cutthroat and Queen Whore accused each other of feasting on the
esh of the slain. Men and women gathered in secret to draw lots
and gorge upon the esh of him who drew the black stone. The
pyramid of Nakloz was despoiled and set a ame by those who
claimed that Kraznys mo Nakloz was to blame for all our woes.”
“Others blamed Daenerys,” said the weaver, “but more of us still
loved you. ‘She is on her way,’ we said to one another. ‘She is
coming at the head of a great host, with food for all.’ ”
I can scarce feed my own folk. If I had marched to Astapor, I would
have lost Meereen.

The cobbler told them how the body of the Butcher King had been
disinterred and clad in copper armor, after the Green Grace of
Astapor had a vision that he would deliver them from the Yunkai’i.
Armored and stinking, the corpse of Cleon the Great was strapped
onto the back of a starving horse to lead the remnants of his new
Unsullied on a sortie, but they rode right into the iron teeth of a
legion from New Ghis and were cut down to a man.
“Afterward the Green Grace was impaled upon a stake in the
Plaza of Punishment and left until she died. In the pyramid of
Ullhor, the survivors had a great feast that lasted half the night, and
washed the last of their food down with poison wine so none need
wake again come morning. Soon after came the sickness, a bloody
ux that killed three men of every four, until a mob of dying men
went mad and slew the guards on the main gate.”
The old brickmaker broke in to say, “No. That was the work of
healthy men, running to escape the ux.”
“Does it matter?” asked the cobbler. “The guards were torn apart
and the gates thrown open. The legions of New Ghis came pouring
into Astapor, followed by the Yunkai’i and the sellswords on their
horses. Queen Whore died ghting them with a curse upon her lips.
King Cutthroat yielded and was thrown into a ghting pit, to be
torn apart by a pack of starving dogs.”
“Even then some said that you were coming,” said the weaver.
“They swore they had seen you mounted on a dragon, ying high
above the camps of the Yunkai’i. Every day we looked for you.”
I could not come, the queen thought. I dare not.
“And when the city fell?” demanded Skahaz. “What then?”
“The butchery began. The Temple of the Graces was full of the
sick who had come to ask the gods to heal them. The legions sealed
the doors and set the temple ablaze with torches. Within the hour
res were burning in every corner of the city. As they spread they
joined with one another. The streets were full of mobs, running this
way and that to escape the ames, but there was no way out. The
Yunkai’i held the gates.”
“Yet you escaped,” the Shavepate said. “How is that?”

The old man answered. “I am by trade a brickmaker, as my father
and his father were before me. My grandfather built our house up
against the city walls. It was an easy thing to work loose a few
bricks every night. When I told my friends, they helped me shore up
the tunnel so it would not collapse. We all agreed that it might be
good to have our own way out.”
I left you with a council to rule over you, Dany thought, a healer, a
scholar, and a priest. She could still recall the Red City as she had
rst seen it, dry and dusty behind its red brick walls, dreaming
cruel dreams, yet full of life. There were islands in the Worm where
lovers kissed, but in the Plaza of Punishment they peeled the skin o
men in strips and left them hanging naked for the ies. “It is good that
you have come,” she told the Astapori. “You will be safe in
Meereen.”
The cobbler thanked her for that, and the old brickmaker kissed
her foot, but the weaver looked at her with eyes as hard as slate.
She knows I lie, the queen thought. She knows I cannot keep them safe.
Astapor is burning, and Meereen is next.
“There’s more coming,” Brown Ben announced when the Astapori
had been led away. “These three had horses. Most are afoot.”
“How many are they?” asked Reznak.
Brown Ben shrugged. “Hundreds. Thousands. Some sick, some
burned, some wounded. The Cats and the Windblown are swarming
through the hills with lance and lash, driving them north and
cutting down the laggards.”
“Mouths on feet. And sick, you say?” Reznak wrung his hands.
“Your Worship must not allow them in the city.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Brown Ben Plumm. “I’m no maester, mind you,
but I know you got to keep the bad apples from the good.”
“These are not apples, Ben,” said Dany. “These are men and
women, sick and hungry and afraid.” My children. “I should have
gone to Astapor.”
“Your Grace could not have saved them,” said Ser Barristan. “You
warned King Cleon against this war with Yunkai. The man was a
fool, and his hands were red with blood.”

And are my hands any cleaner? She remembered what Daario had
said—that all kings must be butchers, or meat. “Cleon was the
enemy of our enemy. If I had joined him at the Horns of Hazzat, we
might have crushed the Yunkai’i between us.”
The Shavepate disagreed. “If you had taken the Unsullied south to
Hazzat, the Sons of the Harpy—”
“I know. I know. It is Eroeh all over again.”
Brown Ben Plumm was puzzled. “Who is Eroeh?”
“A girl I thought I’d saved from rape and torment. All I did was
make it worse for her in the end. And all I did in Astapor was make
ten thousand Eroehs.”
“Your Grace could not have known—”
“I am the queen. It was my place to know.”
“What is done is done,” said Reznak mo Reznak. “Your Worship, I
beg you, take the noble Hizdahr for your king at once. He can speak
with the Wise Masters, make a peace for us.”
“On what terms?” Beware the perfumed seneschal, Quaithe had
said. The masked woman had foretold the coming of the pale mare,
was she right about the noble Reznak too? “I may be a young girl
innocent of war, but I am not a lamb to walk bleating into the
harpy’s den. I still have my Unsullied. I have the Stormcrows and
the Second Sons. I have three companies of freedmen.”
“Them, and dragons,” said Brown Ben Plumm, with a grin.
“In the pit, in chains,” wailed Reznak mo Reznak. “What good are
dragons that cannot be controlled? Even the Unsullied grow fearful
when they must open the doors to feed them.”
“What, o’ the queen’s little pets?” Brown Ben’s eyes crinkled in
amusement. The grizzled captain of the Second Sons was a creature
of the free companies, a mongrel with the blood of a dozen di erent
peoples owing through his veins, but he had always been fond of
the dragons, and them of him.
“Pets?” screeched Reznak. “Monsters, rather. Monsters that feed
on children. We cannot—”
“Silence,” said Daenerys. “We will not speak of that.”
Reznak shrank away from her, inching from the fury in her tone.
“Forgive me, Magni cence, I did not …”

Brown Ben Plumm bulled over him. “Your Grace, the Yunkish got
three free companies against our two, and there’s talk the
Yunkishmen sent to Volantis to fetch back the Golden Company.
Those bastards eld ten thousand. Yunkai’s got four Ghiscari legions
too, maybe more, and I heard it said they sent riders across the
Dothraki sea to maybe bring some big khalasar down on us. We need
them dragons, the way I see it.”
Dany sighed. “I am sorry, Ben. I dare not loose the dragons.” She
could see that was not the answer that he wanted.
Plumm scratched at his speckled whiskers. “If there’s no dragons
in the balance, well … we should leave before them Yunkish
bastards close the trap … only rst, make the slavers pay to see our
backs. They pay the khals to leave their cities be, why not us? Sell
Meereen back to them and start west with wagons full o’ gold and
gems and such.”
“You want me to loot Meereen and ee? No, I will not do that.
Grey Worm, are my freedmen ready for battle?”
The eunuch crossed his arms against his chest. “They are not
Unsullied, but they will not shame you. This one will swear to that
by spear and sword, Your Worship.”
“Good. That’s good.” Daenerys looked at the faces of the men
around her. The Shavepate, scowling. Ser Barristan, with his lined
face and sad blue eyes. Reznak mo Reznak, pale, sweating. Brown
Ben, white-haired, grizzled, tough as old leather. Grey Worm,
smooth-cheeked, stolid, expressionless. Daario should be here, and my
bloodriders, she thought. If there is to be a battle, the blood of my blood
should be with me. She missed Ser Jorah Mormont too. He lied to me,
informed on me, but he loved me too, and he always gave good counsel.
“I defeated the Yunkai’i before. I will defeat them again. Where,
though? How?”
“You mean to take the eld?” The Shavepate’s voice was thick
with disbelief. “That would be folly. Our walls are taller and thicker
than the walls of Astapor, and our defenders are more valiant. The
Yunkai’i will not take this city easily.”
Ser Barristan disagreed. “I do not think we should allow them to
invest us. Theirs is a patchwork host at best. These slavers are no

soldiers. If we take them unawares …”
“Small chance of that,” the Shavepate said. “The Yunkai’i have
many friends inside the city. They will know.”
“How large an army can we muster?” Dany asked.
“Not large enough, begging your royal pardon,” said Brown Ben
Plumm. “What does Naharis have to say? If we’re going to make a
ght o’ this, we need his Stormcrows.”
“Daario is still in the eld.” Oh, gods, what have I done? Have I sent
him to his death? “Ben, I will need your Second Sons to scout our
enemies. Where they are, how fast they are advancing, how many
men they have, and how they are disposed.”
“We’ll need provisions. Fresh horses too.”
“Of course. Ser Barristan will see to it.”
Brown Ben scratched his chin. “Might be we could get some o’
them to come over. If Your Grace could spare a few bags o’ gold
and gems … just to give their captains a good taste, as it
were … well, who knows?”
“Buy them, why not?” Dany said. That sort of thing went on all
the time amongst the free companies of the Disputed Lands, she
knew. “Yes, very good. Reznak, see to it. Once the Second Sons ride
out, close the gates and double the watch upon the walls.”
“It shall be done, Magni cence,” said Reznak mo Reznak. “What
of these Astapori?”
My children. “They are coming here for help. For succor and
protection. We cannot turn our backs on them.”
Ser Barristan frowned. “Your Grace, I have known the bloody ux
to destroy whole armies when left to spread unchecked. The
seneschal is right. We cannot have the Astapori in Meereen.”
Dany looked at him helplessly. It was good that dragons did not
cry. “As you say, then. We will keep them outside the walls until
this … this curse has run its course. Set up a camp for them beside
the river, west of the city. We will send them what food we can.
Perhaps we can separate the healthy from the sick.” All of them
were looking at her. “Will you make me say it twice? Go and do as
I’ve commanded you.” Dany rose, brushed past Brown Ben, and
climbed the steps to the sweet solitude of her terrace.

Two hundred leagues divided Meereen from Astapor, yet it
seemed to her that the sky was darker to the southwest, smudged
and hazy with the smoke of the Red City’s passing. Brick and blood
built Astapor, and brick and blood its people. The old rhyme rang in
her head. Ash and bone is Astapor, and ash and bone its people. She
tried to recall Eroeh’s face, but the dead girl’s features kept turning
into smoke.
When Daenerys nally turned away, Ser Barristan stood near her,
wrapped in his white cloak against the chill of evening. “Can we
make a ght of this?” she asked him.
“Men can always ght, Your Grace. Ask rather if we can win.
Dying is easy, but victory comes hard. Your freedmen are halftrained and unblooded. Your sellswords once served your foes, and
once a man turns his cloak he will not scruple to turn it again. You
have two dragons who cannot be controlled, and a third that may
be lost to you. Beyond these walls your only friends are the
Lhazarene, who have no taste for war.”
“My walls are strong, though.”
“No stronger than when we sat outside them. And the Sons of the
Harpy are inside the walls with us. So are the Great Masters, both
those you did not kill and the sons of those you did.”
“I know.” The queen sighed. “What do you counsel, ser?”
“Battle,” said Ser Barristan. “Meereen is overcrowded and full of
hungry mouths, and you have too many enemies within. We cannot
long withstand a siege, I fear. Let me meet the foe as he comes
north, on ground of my own choosing.”
“Meet the foe,” she echoed, “with the freedmen you’ve called
half-trained and unblooded.”
“We were all unblooded once, Your Grace. The Unsullied will
help sti en them. If I had ve hundred knights …”
“Or ve. And if I give you the Unsullied, I will have no one but
the Brazen Beasts to hold Meereen.” When Ser Barristan did not
dispute her, Dany closed her eyes. Gods, she prayed, you took Khal
Drogo, who was my sun-and-stars. You took our valiant son before he
drew a breath. You have had your blood of me. Help me now, I pray

you. Give me the wisdom to see the path ahead and the strength to do
what I must to keep my children safe.
The gods did not respond.
When she opened her eyes again, Daenerys said, “I cannot ght
two enemies, one within and one without. If I am to hold Meereen,
I must have the city behind me. The whole city. I need … I need …”
She could not say it.
“Your Grace?” Ser Barristan prompted, gently.
A queen belongs not to herself but to her people.
“I need Hizdahr zo Loraq.”

MELISANDRE

I

t was never truly dark in Melisandre’s chambers.
Three tallow candles burned upon her windowsill to keep the
terrors of the night at bay. Four more ickered beside her bed, two
to either side. In the hearth a re was kept burning day and night.
The rst lesson those who would serve her had to learn was that the
re must never, ever be allowed to go out.
The red priestess closed her eyes and said a prayer, then opened
them once more to face the hearth re. One more time. She had to be
certain. Many a priest and priestess before her had been brought
down by false visions, by seeing what they wished to see instead of
what the Lord of Light had sent. Stannis was marching south into
peril, the king who carried the fate of the world upon his shoulders,
Azor Ahai reborn. Surely R’hllor would vouchsafe her a glimpse of
what awaited him. Show me Stannis, Lord, she prayed. Show me your
king, your instrument.
Visions danced before her, gold and scarlet, ickering, forming
and melting and dissolving into one another, shapes strange and
terrifying and seductive. She saw the eyeless faces again, staring out
at her from sockets weeping blood. Then the towers by the sea,
crumbling as the dark tide came sweeping over them, rising from
the depths. Shadows in the shape of skulls, skulls that turned to
mist, bodies locked together in lust, writhing and rolling and
clawing. Through curtains of re great winged shadows wheeled
against a hard blue sky.
The girl. I must nd the girl again, the grey girl on the dying horse.
Jon Snow would expect that of her, and soon. It would not be

enough to say the girl was eeing. He would want more, he would
want the when and where, and she did not have that for him. She
had seen the girl only once. A girl as grey as ash, and even as I
watched she crumbled and blew away.
A face took shape within the hearth. Stannis? she thought, for just
a moment … but no, these were not his features. A wooden face,
corpse white. Was this the enemy? A thousand red eyes oated in the
rising ames. He sees me. Beside him, a boy with a wolf’s face threw
back his head and howled.
The red priestess shuddered. Blood trickled down her thigh, black
and smoking. The re was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, lling
her, searing her, transforming her. Shimmers of heat traced patterns
on her skin, insistent as a lover’s hand. Strange voices called to her
from days long past. “Melony,” she heard a woman cry. A man’s
voice called, “Lot Seven.” She was weeping, and her tears were
ame. And still she drank it in.
Snow akes swirled from a dark sky and ashes rose to meet them,
the grey and the white whirling around each other as aming
arrows arced above a wooden wall and dead things shambled silent
through the cold, beneath a great grey cli where res burned
inside a hundred caves. Then the wind rose and the white mist came
sweeping in, impossibly cold, and one by one the res went out.
Afterward only the skulls remained.
Death, thought Melisandre. The skulls are death.
The ames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the
whispered name Jon Snow. His long face oated before her, limned
in tongues of red and orange, appearing and disappearing again, a
shadow half-seen behind a uttering curtain. Now he was a man,
now a wolf, now a man again. But the skulls were here as well, the
skulls were all around him. Melisandre had seen his danger before,
had tried to warn the boy of it. Enemies all around him, daggers in the
dark. He would not listen.
Unbelievers never listened until it was too late.
“What do you see, my lady?” the boy asked, softly.
Skulls. A thousand skulls, and the bastard boy again. Jon Snow.
Whenever she was asked what she saw within her res, Melisandre

would answer, “Much and more,” but seeing was never as simple as
those words suggested. It was an art, and like all arts it demanded
mastery, discipline, study. Pain. That too. R’hllor spoke to his chosen
ones through blessed re, in a language of ash and cinder and
twisting ame that only a god could truly grasp. Melisandre had
practiced her art for years beyond count, and she had paid the price.
There was no one, even in her order, who had her skill at seeing the
secrets half-revealed and half-concealed within the sacred ames.
Yet now she could not even seem to nd her king. I pray for a
glimpse of Azor Ahai, and R’hllor shows me only Snow. “Devan,” she
called, “a drink.” Her throat was raw and parched.
“Yes, my lady.” The boy poured her a cup of water from the stone
jug by the window and brought it to her.
“Thank you.” Melisandre took a sip, swallowed, and gave the boy
a smile. That made him blush. The boy was half in love with her,
she knew. He fears me, he wants me, and he worships me.
All the same, Devan was not pleased to be here. The lad had
taken great pride in serving as a king’s squire, and it had wounded
him when Stannis commanded him to remain at Castle Black. Like
any boy his age, his head was full of dreams of glory; no doubt he
had been picturing the prowess he would display at Deepwood
Motte. Other boys his age had gone south, to serve as squires to the
king’s knights and ride into battle at their side. Devan’s exclusion
must have seemed a rebuke, a punishment for some failure on his
part, or perhaps for some failure of his father.
In truth, he was here because Melisandre had asked for him. The
four eldest sons of Davos Seaworth had perished in the battle on the
Blackwater, when the king’s eet had been consumed by green re.
Devan was the fthborn and safer here with her than at the king’s
side. Lord Davos would not thank her for it, no more than the boy
himself, but it seemed to her that Seaworth had su ered enough
grief. Misguided as he was, his loyalty to Stannis could not be
doubted. She had seen that in her ames.
Devan was quick and smart and able too, which was more than
could be said about most of her attendants. Stannis had left a dozen
of his men behind to serve her when he marched south, but most of

them were useless. His Grace had need of every sword, so all he
could spare were greybeards and cripples. One man had been
blinded by a blow to his head in the battle by the Wall, another
lamed when his falling horse crushed his legs. Her serjeant had lost
an arm to a giant’s club. Three of her guard were geldings that
Stannis had castrated for raping wildling women. She had two
drunkards and a craven too. The last should have been hanged, as
the king himself admitted, but he came from a noble family, and his
father and brothers had been stalwart from the rst.
Having guards about her would no doubt help keep the black
brothers properly respectful, the red priestess knew, but none of the
men that Stannis had given her were like to be much help should
she nd herself in peril. It made no matter. Melisandre of Asshai did
not fear for herself. R’hllor would protect her.
She took another sip of water, laid her cup aside, blinked and
stretched and rose from her chair, her muscles sore and sti . After
gazing into the ames so long, it took her a few moments to adjust
to the dimness. Her eyes were dry and tired, but if she rubbed
them, it would only make them worse.
Her re had burned low, she saw. “Devan, more wood. What
hour is it?”
“Almost dawn, my lady.”
Dawn. Another day is given us, R’hllor be praised. The terrors of the
night recede. Melisandre had spent the night in her chair by the re,
as she often did. With Stannis gone, her bed saw little use. She had
no time for sleep, with the weight of the world upon her shoulders.
And she feared to dream. Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings
of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night. She would
sooner sit bathed in the ruddy glow of her red lord’s blessed ames,
her cheeks ushed by the wash of heat as if by a lover’s kisses.
Some nights she drowsed, but never for more than an hour. One
day, Melisandre prayed, she would not sleep at all. One day she
would be free of dreams. Melony, she thought. Lot Seven.
Devan fed fresh logs to the re until the ames leapt up again,
erce and furious, driving the shadows back into the corners of the
room, devouring all her unwanted dreams. The dark recedes

again … for a little while. But beyond the Wall, the enemy grows
stronger, and should he win the dawn will never come again. She
wondered if it had been his face that she had seen, staring out at her
from the ames. No. Surely not. His visage would be more frightening
than that, cold and black and too terrible for any man to gaze upon and
live. The wooden man she had glimpsed, though, and the boy with
the wolf’s face … they were his servants, surely … his champions,
as Stannis was hers.
Melisandre went to her window, pushed open the shutters.
Outside the east had just begun to lighten, and the stars of morning
still hung in a pitch-black sky. Castle Black was already beginning
to stir as men in black cloaks made their way across the yard to
break their fast with bowls of porridge before they relieved their
brothers atop the Wall. A few snow akes drifted by the open
window, oating on the wind.
“Does my lady wish to break her fast?” asked Devan.
Food. Yes, I should eat. Some days she forgot. R’hllor provided her
with all the nourishment her body needed, but that was something
best concealed from mortal men.
It was Jon Snow she needed, not fried bread and bacon, but it
was no use sending Devan to the lord commander. He would not
come to her summons. Snow still chose to dwell behind the armory,
in a pair of modest rooms previously occupied by the Watch’s late
blacksmith. Perhaps he did not think himself worthy of the King’s
Tower, or perhaps he did not care. That was his mistake, the false
humility of youth that is itself a sort of pride. It was never wise for
a ruler to eschew the trappings of power, for power itself ows in
no small measure from such trappings.
The boy was not entirely naive, however. He knew better than to
come to Melisandre’s chambers like a supplicant, insisting she come
to him instead should she have need of words with him. And oft as
not, when she did come, he would keep her waiting or refuse to see
her. That much, at least, was shrewd.
“I will have nettle tea, a boiled egg, and bread with butter. Fresh
bread, if you please, not fried. You may nd the wildling as well.
Tell him that I must speak with him.”

“Rattleshirt, my lady?”
“And quickly.”
While the boy was gone, Melisandre washed herself and changed
her robes. Her sleeves were full of hidden pockets, and she checked
them carefully as she did every morning to make certain all her
powders were in place. Powders to turn re green or blue or silver,
powders to make a ame roar and hiss and leap up higher than a
man is tall, powders to make smoke. A smoke for truth, a smoke for
lust, a smoke for fear, and the thick black smoke that could kill a
man outright. The red priestess armed herself with a pinch of each
of them.
The carved chest that she had brought across the narrow sea was
more than three-quarters empty now. And while Melisandre had the
knowledge to make more powders, she lacked many rare
ingredients. My spells should su ce. She was stronger at the Wall,
stronger even than in Asshai. Her every word and gesture was more
potent, and she could do things that she had never done before.
Such shadows as I bring forth here will be terrible, and no creature of the
dark will stand before them. With such sorceries at her command, she
should soon have no more need of the feeble tricks of alchemists
and pyromancers.
She shut the chest, turned the lock, and hid the key inside her
skirts in another secret pocket. Then came a rapping at her door.
Her one-armed serjeant, from the tremulous sound of his knock.
“Lady Melisandre, the Lord o’ Bones is come.”
“Send him in.” Melisandre settled herself back into the chair
beside the hearth.
The wildling wore a sleeveless jerkin of boiled leather dotted
with bronze studs beneath a worn cloak mottled in shades of green
and brown. No bones. He was cloaked in shadows too, in wisps of
ragged grey mist, half-seen, sliding across his face and form with
every step he took. Ugly things. As ugly as his bones. A widow’s peak,
close-set dark eyes, pinched cheeks, a mustache wriggling like a
worm above a mouthful of broken brown teeth.
Melisandre felt the warmth in the hollow of her throat as her
ruby stirred at the closeness of its slave. “You have put aside your

suit of bones,” she observed.
“The clacking was like to drive me mad.”
“The bones protect you,” she reminded him. “The black brothers
do not love you. Devan tells me that only yesterday you had words
with some of them over supper.”
“A few. I was eating bean-and-bacon soup whilst Bowen Marsh
was going on about the high ground. The Old Pomegranate thought
that I was spying on him and announced that he would not su er
murderers listening to their councils. I told him that if that was
true, maybe they shouldn’t have them by the re. Bowen turned red
and made some choking sounds, but that was as far as it went.” The
wildling sat on the edge of the window, slid his dagger from its
sheath. “If some crow wants to slip a knife between my ribs whilst
I’m spooning up some supper, he’s welcome to try. Hobb’s gruel
would taste better with a drop of blood to spice it.”
Melisandre paid the naked steel no mind. If the wildling had
meant her harm, she would have seen it in her ames. Danger to
her own person was the rst thing she had learned to see, back
when she was still half a child, a slave girl bound for life to the
great red temple. It was still the rst thing she looked for whenever
she gazed into a re. “It is their eyes that should concern you, not
their knives,” she warned him.
“The glamor, aye.” In the black iron fetter about his wrist, the
ruby seemed to pulse. He tapped it with the edge of his blade. The
steel made a faint click against the stone. “I feel it when I sleep.
Warm against my skin, even through the iron. Soft as a woman’s
kiss. Your kiss. But sometimes in my dreams it starts to burn, and
your lips turn into teeth. Every day I think how easy it would be to
pry it out, and every day I don’t. Must I wear the bloody bones as
well?”
“The spell is made of shadow and suggestion. Men see what they
expect to see. The bones are part of that.” Was I wrong to spare this
one? “If the glamor fails, they will kill you.”
The wildling began to scrape the dirt out from beneath his nails
with the point of his dagger. “I’ve sung my songs, fought my

battles, drunk summer wine, tasted the Dornishman’s wife. A man
should die the way he’s lived. For me that’s steel in hand.”
Does he dream of death? Could the enemy have touched him? Death is
his domain, the dead his soldiers. “You shall have work for your steel
soon enough. The enemy is moving, the true enemy. And Lord
Snow’s rangers will return before the day is done, with their blind
and bloody eyes.”
The wildling’s own eyes narrowed. Grey eyes, brown eyes;
Melisandre could see the color change with each pulse of the ruby.
“Cutting out the eyes, that’s the Weeper’s work. The best crow’s a
blind crow, he likes to say. Sometimes I think he’d like to cut out
his own eyes, the way they’re always watering and itching. Snow’s
been assuming the free folk would turn to Tormund to lead them,
because that’s what he would do. He liked Tormund, and the old
fraud liked him too. If it’s the Weeper, though … that’s not good.
Not for him, and not for us.”
Melisandre nodded solemnly, as if she had taken his words to
heart, but this Weeper did not matter. None of his free folk
mattered. They were a lost people, a doomed people, destined to
vanish from the earth, as the children of the forest had vanished.
Those were not words he would wish to hear, though, and she could
not risk losing him, not now. “How well do you know the north?”
He slipped his blade away. “As well as any raider. Some parts
more than others. There’s a lot of north. Why?”
“The girl,” she said. “A girl in grey on a dying horse. Jon Snow’s
sister.” Who else could it be? She was racing to him for protection,
that much Melisandre had seen clearly. “I have seen her in my
ames, but only once. We must win the lord commander’s trust, and
the only way to do that is to save her.”
“Me save her, you mean? The Lord o’ Bones?” He laughed. “No
one ever trusted Rattleshirt but fools. Snow’s not that. If his sister
needs saving, he’ll send his crows. I would.”
“He is not you. He made his vows and means to live by them. The
Night’s Watch takes no part. But you are not Night’s Watch. You can
do what he cannot.”

“If your sti -necked lord commander will allow it. Did your res
show you where to nd this girl?”
“I saw water. Deep and blue and still, with a thin coat of ice just
forming on it. It seemed to go on and on forever.”
“Long Lake. What else did you see around this girl?”
“Hills. Fields. Trees. A deer, once. Stones. She is staying well
away from villages. When she can she rides along the bed of little
streams, to throw hunters o her trail.”
He frowned. “That will make it di cult. She was coming north,
you said. Was the lake to her east or to her west?”
Melisandre closed her eyes, remembering. “West.”
“She is not coming up the kingsroad, then. Clever girl. There are
fewer watchers on the other side, and more cover. And some hideyholes I have used myself from time—” He broke o at the sound of
a warhorn and rose swiftly to his feet. All over Castle Black,
Melisandre knew, the same sudden hush had fallen, and every man
and boy turned toward the Wall, listening, waiting. One long blast
of the horn meant rangers returning, but two …
The day has come, the red priestess thought. Lord Snow will have to
listen to me now.
After the long mournful cry of the horn had faded away, the
silence seemed to stretch out to an hour. The wildling nally broke
the spell. “Only one, then. Rangers.”
“Dead rangers.” Melisandre rose to her feet as well. “Go put on
your bones and wait. I will return.”
“I should go with you.”
“Do not be foolish. Once they nd what they will nd, the sight
of any wildling will in ame them. Stay here until their blood has
time to cool.”
Devan was coming up the steps of the King’s Tower as Melisandre
made her descent, anked by two of the guards Stannis had left her.
The boy was carrying her half-forgotten breakfast on a tray. “I
waited for Hobb to pull the fresh loaves from the ovens, my lady.
The bread’s still hot.”
“Leave it in my chambers.” The wildling would eat it, like as not.
“Lord Snow has need of me, beyond the Wall.” He does not know it

yet, but soon …
Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. A crowd of crows had
gathered around the gate by the time Melisandre and her escort
arrived, but they made way for the red priestess. The lord
commander had preceded her through the ice, accompanied by
Bowen Marsh and twenty spearmen. Snow had also sent a dozen
archers to the top of the Wall, should any foes be hidden in the
nearby woods. The guards on the gate were not queen’s men, but
they passed her all the same.
It was cold and dark beneath the ice, in the narrow tunnel that
crooked and slithered through the Wall. Morgan went before her
with a torch and Merrel came behind her with an axe. Both men
were hopeless drunkards, but they were sober at this hour of the
morning. Queen’s men, at least in name, both had a healthy fear of
her, and Merrel could be formidable when he was not drunk. She
would have no need of them today, but Melisandre made it a point
to keep a pair of guards about her everywhere she went. It sent a
certain message. The trappings of power.
By the time the three of them emerged north of the Wall the
snow was falling steadily. A ragged blanket of white covered the
torn and tortured earth that stretched from the Wall to the edge of
the haunted forest. Jon Snow and his black brothers were gathered
around three spears, some twenty yards away.
The spears were eight feet long and made of ash. The one on the
left had a slight crook, but the other two were smooth and straight.
At the top of each was impaled a severed head. Their beards were
full of ice, and the falling snow had given them white hoods. Where
their eyes had been, only empty sockets remained, black and bloody
holes that stared down in silent accusation.
“Who were they?” Melisandre asked the crows.
“Black Jack Bulwer, Hairy Hal, and Garth Greyfeather,” Bowen
Marsh said solemnly. “The ground is half-frozen. It must have taken
the wildlings half the night to drive the spears so deep. They could
still be close. Watching us.” The Lord Steward squinted at the line
of trees.

“Could be a hundred of them out there,” said the black brother
with the dour face. “Could be a thousand.”
“No,” said Jon Snow. “They left their gifts in the black of night,
then ran.” His huge white direwolf prowled around the shafts,
sni ng, then lifted his leg and pissed on the spear that held the
head of Black Jack Bulwer. “Ghost would have their scent if they
were still out there.”
“I hope the Weeper burned the bodies,” said the dour man, the
one called Dolorous Edd. “Elsewise they might come looking for
their heads.”
Jon Snow grasped the spear that bore Garth Greyfeather’s head
and wrenched it violently from the ground. “Pull down the other
two,” he commanded, and four of the crows hurried to obey.
Bowen Marsh’s cheeks were red with cold. “We should never
have sent out rangers.”
“This is not the time and place to pick at that wound. Not here,
my lord. Not now.” To the men struggling with the spears Snow
said, “Take the heads and burn them. Leave nothing but bare bone.”
Only then did he seem to notice Melisandre. “My lady. Walk with
me, if you would.”
At last. “If it please the lord commander.”
As they walked beneath the Wall, she slipped her arm through
his. Morgan and Merrel went before them, Ghost came prowling at
their heels. The priestess did not speak, but she slowed her pace
deliberately, and where she walked the ice began to drip. He will not
fail to notice that.
Beneath the iron grating of a murder hole Snow broke the silence,
as she had known he would. “What of the other six?”
“I have not seen them,” Melisandre said.
“Will you look?”
“Of course, my lord.”
“We’ve had a raven from Ser Denys Mallister at the Shadow
Tower,” Jon Snow told her. “His men have seen res in the
mountains on the far side of the Gorge. Wildlings massing, Ser
Denys believes. He thinks they are going to try to force the Bridge
of Skulls again.”

“Some may.” Could the skulls in her vision have signi ed this
bridge? Somehow Melisandre did not think so. “If it comes, that
attack will be no more than a diversion. I saw towers by the sea,
submerged beneath a black and bloody tide. That is where the
heaviest blow will fall.”
“Eastwatch?”
Was it? Melisandre had seen Eastwatch-by-the-Sea with King
Stannis. That was where His Grace left Queen Selyse and their
daughter Shireen when he assembled his knights for the march to
Castle Black. The towers in her re had been di erent, but that was
oft the way with visions. “Yes. Eastwatch, my lord.”
“When?”
She spread her hands. “On the morrow. In a moon’s turn. In a
year. And it may be that if you act, you may avert what I have seen
entirely.” Else what would be the point of visions?
“Good,” said Snow.
The crowd of crows beyond the gate had swollen to two score by
the time they emerged from beneath the Wall. The men pressed
close about them. Melisandre knew a few by name: the cook ThreeFinger Hobb, Mully with his greasy orange hair, the dim-witted boy
called Owen the Oaf, the drunkard Septon Celladar.
“Is it true, m’lord?” said Three-Finger Hobb.
“Who is it?” asked Owen the Oaf. “Not Dywen, is it?”
“Nor Garth,” said the queen’s man she knew as Alf of
Runnymudd, one of the rst to exchange his seven false gods for the
truth of R’hllor. “Garth’s too clever for them wildlings.”
“How many?” Mully asked.
“Three,” Jon told them. “Black Jack, Hairy Hal, and Garth.”
Alf of Runnymudd let out a howl loud enough to wake sleepers in
the Shadow Tower. “Put him to bed and get some mulled wine into
him,” Jon told Three-Finger Hobb.
“Lord Snow,” Melisandre said quietly. “Will you come with me to
the King’s Tower? I have more to share with you.”
He looked at her face for a long moment with those cold grey
eyes of his. His right hand closed, opened, closed again. “As you
wish. Edd, take Ghost back to my chambers.”

Melisandre took that as a sign and dismissed her own guard as
well. They crossed the yard together, just the two of them. The
snow fell all around them. She walked as close to Jon Snow as she
dared, close enough to feel the mistrust pouring o him like a black
fog. He does not love me, will never love me, but he will make use of
me. Well and good. Melisandre had danced the same dance with
Stannis Baratheon, back in the beginning. In truth, the young lord
commander and her king had more in common than either one
would ever be willing to admit. Stannis had been a younger son
living in the shadow of his elder brother, just as Jon Snow, bastardborn, had always been eclipsed by his trueborn sibling, the fallen
hero men had called the Young Wolf. Both men were unbelievers by
nature, mistrustful, suspicious. The only gods they truly worshiped
were honor and duty.
“You have not asked about your sister,” Melisandre said, as they
climbed the spiral steps of the King’s Tower.
“I told you. I have no sister. We put aside our kin when we say
our words. I cannot help Arya, much as I—”
He broke o as they stepped inside her chambers. The wildling
was within, seated at her board, spreading butter on a ragged chunk
of warm brown bread with his dagger. He had donned the bone
armor, she was pleased to see. The broken giant’s skull that was his
helm rested on the window seat behind him.
Jon Snow tensed. “You.”
“Lord Snow.” The wildling grinned at them through a mouth of
brown and broken teeth. The ruby on his wrist glimmered in the
morning light like a dim red star.
“What are you doing here?”
“Breaking my fast. You’re welcome to share.”
“I’ll not break bread with you.”
“Your loss. The loaf’s still warm. Hobb can do that much, at
least.” The wildling ripped o a bite. “I could visit you as easily, my
lord. Those guards at your door are a bad jape. A man who has
climbed the Wall half a hundred times can climb in a window easy
enough. But what good would come of killing you? The crows

would only choose someone worse.” He chewed, swallowed. “I
heard about your rangers. You should have sent me with them.”
“So you could betray them to the Weeper?”
“Are we talking about betrayals? What was the name of that
wildling wife of yours, Snow? Ygritte, wasn’t it?” The wildling
turned to Melisandre. “I will need horses. Half a dozen good ones.
And this is nothing I can do alone. Some of the spearwives penned
up at Mole’s Town should serve. Women would be best for this. The
girl’s more like to trust them, and they will help me carry o a
certain ploy I have in mind.”
“What is he talking about?” Lord Snow asked her.
“Your sister.” Melisandre put her hand on his arm. “You cannot
help her, but he can.”
Snow wrenched his arm away. “I think not. You do not know this
creature. Rattleshirt could wash his hands a hundred times a day
and he’d still have blood beneath his nails. He’d be more like to
rape and murder Arya than to save her. No. If this was what you
have seen in your res, my lady, you must have ashes in your eyes.
If he tries to leave Castle Black without my leave, I’ll take his head
o myself.”
He leaves me no choice. So be it. “Devan, leave us,” she said, and
the squire slipped away and closed the door behind him.
Melisandre touched the ruby at her neck and spoke a word.
The sound echoed queerly from the corners of the room and
twisted like a worm inside their ears. The wildling heard one word,
the crow another. Neither was the word that left her lips. The ruby
on the wildling’s wrist darkened, and the wisps of light and shadow
around him writhed and faded.
The bones remained—the rattling ribs, the claws and teeth along
his arms and shoulders, the great yellowed collarbone across his
shoulders. The broken giant’s skull remained a broken giant’s skull,
yellowed and cracked, grinning its stained and savage grin.
But the widow’s peak dissolved. The brown mustache, the knobby
chin, the sallow yellowed esh and small dark eyes, all melted.
Grey ngers crept through long brown hair. Laugh lines appeared at
the corners of his mouth. All at once he was bigger than before,

broader in the chest and shoulders, long-legged and lean, his face
clean-shaved and windburnt.
Jon Snow’s grey eyes grew wider. “Mance?”
“Lord Snow.” Mance Rayder did not smile.
“She burned you.”
“She burned the Lord of Bones.”
Jon Snow turned to Melisandre. “What sorcery is this?”
“Call it what you will. Glamor, seeming, illusion. R’hllor is Lord
of Light, Jon Snow, and it is given to his servants to weave with it,
as others weave with thread.”
Mance Rayder chuckled. “I had my doubts as well, Snow, but why
not let her try? It was that, or let Stannis roast me.”
“The bones help,” said Melisandre. “The bones remember. The
strongest glamors are built of such things. A dead man’s boots, a
hank of hair, a bag of ngerbones. With whispered words and
prayer, a man’s shadow can be drawn forth from such and draped
about another like a cloak. The wearer’s essence does not change,
only his seeming.”
She made it sound a simple thing, and easy. They need never
know how di cult it had been, or how much it had cost her. That
was a lesson Melisandre had learned long before Asshai; the more
e ortless the sorcery appears, the more men fear the sorcerer.
When the ames had licked at Rattleshirt, the ruby at her throat had
grown so hot that she had feared her own esh might start to smoke
and blacken. Thankfully Lord Snow had delivered her from that
agony with his arrows. Whilst Stannis had seethed at the de ance,
she had shuddered with relief.
“Our false king has a prickly manner,” Melisandre told Jon Snow,
“but he will not betray you. We hold his son, remember. And he
owes you his very life.”
“Me?” Snow sounded startled.
“Who else, my lord? Only his life’s blood could pay for his
crimes, your laws said, and Stannis Baratheon is not a man to go
against the law … but as you said so sagely, the laws of men end at
the Wall. I told you that the Lord of Light would hear your prayers.
You wanted a way to save your little sister and still hold fast to the

honor that means so much to you, to the vows you swore before
your wooden god.” She pointed with a pale nger. “There he
stands, Lord Snow. Arya’s deliverance. A gift from the Lord of
Light … and me.”

REEK

H

e heard the girls rst, barking as they raced for home. The
drum of hoofbeats echoing o
agstone jerked him to his feet,
chains rattling. The one between his ankles was no more than a foot
long, shortening his stride to a shu e. It was hard to move quickly
that way, but he tried as best he could, hopping and clanking from
his pallet. Ramsay Bolton had returned and would want his Reek on
hand to serve him.
Outside, beneath a cold autumnal sky, the hunters were pouring
through the gates. Ben Bones led the way, with the girls baying and
barking all around him. Behind came Skinner, Sour Alyn, and
Damon Dance-for-Me with his long greased whip, then the Walders
riding the grey colts Lady Dustin had given them. His lordship
himself rode Blood, a red stallion with a temper to match his own.
He was laughing. That could be very good or very bad, Reek knew.
The dogs were on him before he could puzzle out which, drawn to
his scent. The dogs were fond of Reek; he slept with them oft as
not, and sometimes Ben Bones let him share their supper. The pack
raced across the agstones barking, circling him, jumping up to lick
his lthy face, nipping at his legs. Helicent caught his left hand
between her teeth and worried it so ercely Reek feared he might
lose two more ngers. Red Jeyne slammed into his chest and
knocked him o his feet. She was lean, hard muscle, where Reek
was loose, grey skin and brittle bones, a white-haired starveling.
The riders were dismounting by the time he pushed Red Jeyne o
and struggled to his knees. Two dozen horsemen had gone out and
two dozen had returned, which meant the search had been a failure.

That was bad. Ramsay did not like the taste of failure. He will want
to hurt someone.
Of late, his lord had been forced to restrain himself, for
Barrowton was full of men House Bolton needed, and Ramsay knew
to be careful around the Dustins and Ryswells and his fellow
lordlings. With them he was always courteous and smiling. What he
was behind closed doors was something else.
Ramsay Bolton was attired as be t the lord of the Hornwood and
heir to the Dreadfort. His mantle was stitched together from
wolfskins and clasped against the autumn chill by the yellowed
teeth of the wolf’s head on his right shoulder. On one hip he wore a
falchion, its blade as thick and heavy as a cleaver; on the other a
long dagger and a small curved aying knife with a hooked point
and a razor-sharp edge. All three blades had matched hilts of yellow
bone. “Reek,” his lordship called down from Blood’s high saddle,
“you stink. I can smell you clear across the yard.”
“I know, my lord,” Reek had to say. “I beg your pardon.”
“I brought you a gift.” Ramsay twisted, reached behind him,
pulled something from his saddle, and ung it. “Catch!”
Between the chain, the fetters, and his missing ngers, Reek was
clumsier than he had been before he learned his name. The head
struck his maimed hands, bounced away from the stumps of his
ngers, and landed at his feet, raining maggots. It was so crusted
with dried blood as to be unrecognizable.
“I told you to catch it,” said Ramsay. “Pick it up.”
Reek tried to lift the head up by the ear. It was no good. The esh
was green and rotting, and the ear tore o between his ngers.
Little Walder laughed, and a moment later all the other men were
laughing too. “Oh, leave him be,” said Ramsay. “Just see to Blood. I
rode the bastard hard.”
“Yes, my lord. I will.” Reek hurried to the horse, leaving the
severed head for the dogs.
“You smell like pigshit today, Reek,” said Ramsay.
“On him, that’s an improvement,” said Damon Dance-for-Me,
smiling as he coiled his whip.

Little Walder swung down from the saddle. “You can see to my
horse too, Reek. And to my little cousin’s.”
“I can see to my own horse,” said Big Walder. Little Walder had
become Lord Ramsay’s best boy and grew more like him every day,
but the smaller Frey was made of di erent stu and seldom took
part in his cousin’s games and cruelties.
Reek paid the squires no mind. He led Blood o toward the
stables, hopping aside when the stallion tried to kick him. The
hunters strode into the hall, all but Ben Bones, who was cursing at
the dogs to stop them ghting over the severed head.
Big Walder followed him into the stables, leading his own mount.
Reek stole a look at him as he removed Blood’s bit. “Who was he?”
he said softly, so the other stablehands would not hear.
“No one.” Big Walder pulled the saddle o his grey. “An old man
we met on the road, is all. He was driving an old nanny goat and
four kids.”
“His lordship slew him for his goats?”
“His lordship slew him for calling him Lord Snow. The goats were
good, though. We milked the mother and roasted up the kids.”
Lord Snow. Reek nodded, his chains clinking as he wrestled with
Blood’s saddle straps. By any name, Ramsay’s no man to be around
when he is in a rage. Or when he’s not. “Did you nd your cousins, my
lord?”
“No. I never thought we would. They’re dead. Lord Wyman had
them killed. That’s what I would have done if I was him.”
Reek said nothing. Some things were not safe to say, not even in
the stables with his lordship in the hall. One wrong word could cost
him another toe, even a nger. Not my tongue, though. He will never
take my tongue. He likes to hear me plead with him to spare me from the
pain. He likes to make me say it.
The riders had been sixteen days on the hunt, with only hard
bread and salt beef to eat, aside from the occasional stolen kid, so
that night Lord Ramsay commanded that a feast be laid to celebrate
his return to Barrowton. Their host, a grizzled one-armed petty lord
by the name of Harwood Stout, knew better than to refuse him,
though by now his larders must be well nigh exhausted. Reek had

heard Stout’s servants muttering at how the Bastard and his men
were eating through the winter stores. “He’ll bed Lord Eddard’s
little girl, they say,” Stout’s cook complained when she did not
know that Reek was listening, “but we’re the ones who’ll be fucked
when the snows come, you mark my words.”
Yet Lord Ramsay had decreed a feast, so feast they must. Trestle
tables were set up in Stout’s hall, an ox was slaughtered, and that
night as the sun went down the empty-handed hunters ate roasts
and ribs, barley bread, a mash of carrots and pease, washing it all
down with prodigious quantities of ale.
It fell to Little Walder to keep Lord Ramsay’s cup lled, whilst
Big Walder poured for the others at the high table. Reek was
chained up beside the doors lest his odor put the feasters o their
appetites. He would eat later, o whatever scraps Lord Ramsay
thought to send him. The dogs enjoyed the run of the hall, however,
and provided the night’s best entertainment, when Maude and Grey
Jeyne tore into one of Lord Stout’s hounds over an especially meaty
bone that Will Short had tossed them. Reek was the only man in the
hall who did not watch the three dogs ght. He kept his eyes on
Ramsay Bolton.
The ght did not end until their host’s dog was dead. Stout’s old
hound never stood a mummer’s chance. He had been one against
two, and Ramsay’s bitches were young, strong, and savage. Ben
Bones, who liked the dogs better than their master, had told Reek
they were all named after peasant girls Ramsay had hunted, raped,
and killed back when he’d still been a bastard, running with the rst
Reek. “The ones who give him good sport, anywise. The ones who
weep and beg and won’t run don’t get to come back as bitches.” The
next litter to come out of the Dreadfort’s kennels would include a
Kyra, Reek did not doubt. “He’s trained ’em to kill wolves as well,”
Ben Bones had con ded. Reek said nothing. He knew which wolves
the girls were meant to kill, but he had no wish to watch the girls
ghting over his severed toe.
Two serving men were carrying o the dead dog’s carcass and an
old woman had fetched out a mop and rake and bucket to deal with
the blood-soaked rushes when the doors to the hall ew open in a

wash of wind, and a dozen men in grey mail and iron halfhelms
stalked through, shouldering past Stout’s pasty-faced young guards
in their leather brigandines and cloaks of gold and russet. A sudden
silence seized the feasters … all but Lord Ramsay, who tossed aside
the bone he had been gnawing, wiped his mouth on his sleeve,
smiled a greasy, wet-lipped smile, and said, “Father.”
The Lord of the Dreadfort glanced idly at the remnants of the
feast, at the dead dog, at the hangings on the walls, at Reek in his
chains and fetters. “Out,” he told the feasters, in a voice as soft as a
murmur. “Now. The lot of you.”
Lord Ramsay’s men pushed back from the tables, abandoning cups
and trenchers. Ben Bones shouted at the girls, and they trotted after
him, some with bones still in their jaws. Harwood Stout bowed
sti y and relinquished his hall without a word. “Unchain Reek and
take him with you,” Ramsay growled at Sour Alyn, but his father
waved a pale hand and said, “No, leave him.”
Even Lord Roose’s own guards retreated, pulling the doors shut
behind them. When the echo died away, Reek found himself alone
in the hall with the two Boltons, father and son.
“You did not nd our missing Freys.” The way Roose Bolton said
it, it was more a statement than a question.
“We rode back to where Lord Lamprey claims they parted ways,
but the girls could not nd a trail.”
“You asked after them in villages and holdfasts.”
“A waste of words. The peasants might as well be blind for all
they ever see.” Ramsay shrugged. “Does it matter? The world won’t
miss a few Freys. There’s plenty more down at the Twins should we
ever have need of one.”
Lord Roose tore a small piece o a heel of bread and ate it.
“Hosteen and Aenys are distressed.”
“Let them go looking, if they like.”
“Lord Wyman blames himself. To hear him tell it, he had become
especially fond of Rhaegar.”
Lord Ramsay was turning wroth. Reek could see it in his mouth,
the curl of those thick lips, the way the cords stood up in his neck.
“The fools should have stayed with Manderly.”

Roose Bolton shrugged. “Lord Wyman’s litter moves at a snail’s
pace … and of course his lordship’s health and girth do not permit
him to travel more than a few hours a day, with frequent stops for
meals. The Freys were anxious to reach Barrowton and be reunited
with their kin. Can you blame them for riding on ahead?”
“If that’s what they did. Do you believe Manderly?”
His father’s pale eyes glittered. “Did I give you that impression?
Still. His lordship is most distraught.”
“Not so distraught that he can’t eat. Lord Pig must have brought
half the food in White Harbor with him.”
“Forty wayns full of foodstu s. Casks of wine and hippocras,
barrels of fresh-caught lampreys, a herd of goats, a hundred pigs,
crates of crabs and oysters, a monstrous cod sh … Lord Wyman
likes to eat. You may have noticed.”
“What I noticed was that he brought no hostages.”
“I noticed that as well.”
“What do you mean to do about it?”
“It is a quandary.” Lord Roose found an empty cup, wiped it out
on the tablecloth, and lled it from a agon. “Manderly is not alone
in throwing feasts, it would seem.”
“It should have been you who threw the feast, to welcome me
back,” Ramsay complained, “and it should have been in Barrow
Hall, not this pisspot of a castle.”
“Barrow Hall and its kitchens are not mine to dispose of,” his
father said mildly. “I am only a guest there. The castle and the town
belong to Lady Dustin, and she cannot abide you.”
Ramsay’s face darkened. “If I cut o her teats and feed them to
my girls, will she abide me then? Will she abide me if I strip o her
skin to make myself a pair of boots?”
“Unlikely. And those boots would come dear. They would cost us
Barrowton, House Dustin, and the Ryswells.” Roose Bolton seated
himself across the table from his son. “Barbrey Dustin is my second
wife’s younger sister, Rodrik Ryswell’s daughter, sister to Roger,
Rickard, and mine own namesake, Roose, cousin to the other
Ryswells. She was fond of my late son and suspects you of having
some part in his demise. Lady Barbrey is a woman who knows how

to nurse a grievance. Be grateful for that. Barrowton is staunch for
Bolton largely because she still holds Ned Stark to blame for her
husband’s death.”
“Staunch?” Ramsay seethed. “All she does is spit on me. The day
will come when I’ll set her precious wooden town a re. Let her spit
on that, see if it puts out the ames.”
Roose made a face, as if the ale he was sipping had suddenly gone
sour. “There are times you make me wonder if you truly are my
seed. My forebears were many things, but never fools. No, be quiet
now, I have heard enough. We appear strong for the moment, yes.
We have powerful friends in the Lannisters and Freys, and the
grudging support of much of the north … but what do you imagine
is going to happen when one of Ned Stark’s sons turns up?”
Ned Stark’s sons are all dead, Reek thought. Robb was murdered at
the Twins, and Bran and Rickon … we dipped the heads in tar … His
own head was pounding. He did not want to think about anything
that had happened before he knew his name. There were things too
hurtful to remember, thoughts almost as painful as Ramsay’s aying
knife …
“Stark’s little wol ings are dead,” said Ramsay, sloshing some
more ale into his cup, “and they’ll stay dead. Let them show their
ugly faces, and my girls will rip those wolves of theirs to pieces.
The sooner they turn up, the sooner I kill them again.”
The elder Bolton sighed. “Again? Surely you misspeak. You never
slew Lord Eddard’s sons, those two sweet boys we loved so well.
That was Theon Turncloak’s work, remember? How many of our
grudging friends do you imagine we’d retain if the truth were
known? Only Lady Barbrey, whom you would turn into a pair of
boots … inferior boots. Human skin is not as tough as cowhide and
will not wear as well. By the king’s decree you are now a Bolton.
Try and act like one. Tales are told of you, Ramsay. I hear them
everywhere. People fear you.”
“Good.”
“You are mistaken. It is not good. No tales were ever told of me.
Do you think I would be sitting here if it were otherwise? Your
amusements are your own, I will not chide you on that count, but

you must be more discreet. A peaceful land, a quiet people. That has
always been my rule. Make it yours.”
“Is this why you left Lady Dustin and your fat pig wife? So you
could come down here and tell me to be quiet?”
“Not at all. There are tidings that you need to hear. Lord Stannis
has nally left the Wall.”
That got Ramsay halfway to his feet, a smile glistening on his
wide, wet lips. “Is he marching on the Dreadfort?”
“He is not, alas. Arnolf does not understand it. He swears that he
did all he could to bait the trap.”
“I wonder. Scratch a Karstark and you’ll nd a Stark.”
“After the scratch the Young Wolf gave Lord Rickard, that may be
somewhat less true than formerly. Be that as it may. Lord Stannis
has taken Deepwood Motte from the ironmen and restored it to
House Glover. Worse, the mountain clans have joined him, Wull and
Norrey and Liddle and the rest. His strength is growing.”
“Ours is greater.”
“Now it is.”
“Now is the time to smash him. Let me march on Deepwood.”
“After you are wed.”
Ramsay slammed down his cup, and the dregs of his ale erupted
across the tablecloth. “I’m sick of waiting. We have a girl, we have
a tree, and we have lords enough to witness. I’ll wed her on the
morrow, plant a son between her legs, and march before her
maiden’s blood has dried.”
She’ll pray for you to march, Reek thought, and she’ll pray that you
never come back to her bed.
“You will plant a son in her,” Roose Bolton said, “but not here.
I’ve decided you shall wed the girl at Winterfell.”
That prospect did not appear to please Lord Ramsay. “I laid waste
to Winterfell, or had you forgotten?”
“No, but it appears you have … the ironmen laid waste to
Winterfell, and butchered all its people. Theon Turncloak.”
Ramsay gave Reek a suspicious glance. “Aye, so he did, but
still … a wedding in that ruin?”

“Even ruined and broken, Winterfell remains Lady Arya’s home.
What better place to wed her, bed her, and stake your claim? That
is only half of it, however. We would be fools to march on Stannis.
Let Stannis march on us. He is too cautious to come to
Barrowton … but he must come to Winterfell. His clansmen will not
abandon the daughter of their precious Ned to such as you. Stannis
must march or lose them … and being the careful commander that
he is, he will summon all his friends and allies when he marches. He
will summon Arnolf Karstark.”
Ramsay licked his chapped lips. “And we’ll have him.”
“If the gods will it.” Roose rose to his feet. “You’ll wed at
Winterfell. I shall inform the lords that we march in three days and
invite them to accompany us.”
“You are the Warden of the North. Command them.”
“An invitation will accomplish the same thing. Power tastes best
when sweetened by courtesy. You had best learn that if you ever
hope to rule.” The Lord of the Dreadfort glanced at Reek. “Oh, and
unchain your pet. I am taking him.”
“Taking him? Where? He’s mine. You cannot have him.”
Roose seemed amused by that. “All you have I gave you. You
would do well to remember that, bastard. As for this … Reek … if
you have not ruined him beyond redemption, he may yet be of
some use to us. Get the keys and remove those chains from him,
before you make me rue the day I raped your mother.”
Reek saw the way Ramsay’s mouth twisted, the spittle glistening
between his lips. He feared he might leap the table with his dagger
in his hand. Instead he ushed red, turned his pale eyes from his
father’s paler ones, and went to nd the keys. But as he knelt to
unlock the fetters around Reek’s wrists and ankles, he leaned close
and whispered, “Tell him nothing and remember every word he
says. I’ll have you back, no matter what that Dustin bitch may tell
you. Who are you?”
“Reek, my lord. Your man. I’m Reek, it rhymes with sneak.”
“It does. When my father brings you back, I’m going to take
another nger. I’ll let you choose which one.”

Unbidden, tears began to trickle down his cheeks. “Why?” he
cried, his voice breaking. “I never asked for him to take me from
you. I’ll do whatever you want, serve, obey, I … please, no …”
Ramsay slapped his face. “Take him,” he told his father. “He’s not
even a man. The way he smells disgusts me.”
The moon was rising over the wooden walls of Barrowton when
they stepped outside. Reek could hear the wind sweeping across the
rolling plains beyond the town. It was less than a mile from Barrow
Hall to Harwood Stout’s modest keep beside the eastern gates. Lord
Bolton o ered him a horse. “Can you ride?”
“I … my lord, I … I think so.”
“Walton, help him mount.”
Even with the fetters gone, Reek moved like an old man. His esh
hung loosely on his bones, and Sour Alyn and Ben Bones said he
twitched. And his smell … even the mare they’d brought for him
shied away when he tried to mount.
She was a gentle horse, though, and she knew the way to Barrow
Hall. Lord Bolton fell in beside him as they rode out the gate. The
guards fell back to a discreet distance. “What would you have me
call you?” the lord asked, as they trotted down the broad straight
streets of Barrowton.
Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes with wreak. “Reek,” he said, “if it please
my lord.”
“M’lord.” Bolton’s lips parted just enough to show a quarter inch
of teeth. It might have been a smile.
He did not understand. “My lord? I said—”
“—my lord, when you should have said m’lord. Your tongue
betrays your birth with every word you say. If you want to sound a
proper peasant, say it as if you had mud in your mouth, or were too
stupid to realize it was two words, not just one.”
“If it please my—m’lord.”
“Better. Your stench is quite appalling.”
“Yes, m’lord. I beg your pardon, m’lord.”
“Why? The way you smell is my son’s doing, not your own. I am
well aware of that.” They rode past a stable and a shuttered inn
with a wheat sheaf painted on its sign. Reek heard music coming

through its windows. “I knew the rst Reek. He stank, though not
for want of washing. I have never known a cleaner creature, truth
be told. He bathed thrice a day and wore owers in his hair as if he
were a maiden. Once, when my second wife was still alive, he was
caught stealing scent from her bedchamber. I had him whipped for
that, a dozen lashes. Even his blood smelled wrong. The next year
he tried it again. This time he drank the perfume and almost died of
it. It made no matter. The smell was something he was born with. A
curse, the smallfolk said. The gods had made him stink so that men
would know his soul was rotting. My old maester insisted it was a
sign of sickness, yet the boy was otherwise as strong as a young
bull. No one could stand to be near him, so he slept with the
pigs … until the day that Ramsay’s mother appeared at my gates to
demand that I provide a servant for my bastard, who was growing
up wild and unruly. I gave her Reek. It was meant to be amusing,
but he and Ramsay became inseparable. I do wonder, though … was
it Ramsay who corrupted Reek, or Reek Ramsay?” His lordship
glanced at the new Reek with eyes as pale and strange as two white
moons. “What was he whispering whilst he unchained you?”
“He … he said …” He said to tell you nothing. The words caught in
his throat, and he began to cough and choke.
“Breathe deep. I know what he said. You’re to spy on me and
keep his secrets.” Bolton chuckled. “As if he had secrets. Sour Alyn,
Luton, Skinner, and the rest, where does he think they came from?
Can he truly believe they are his men?”
“His men,” Reek echoed. Some comment seemed to be expected
of him, but he did not know what to say.
“Has my bastard ever told you how I got him?”
That he did know, to his relief. “Yes, my … m’lord. You met his
mother whilst out riding and were smitten by her beauty.”
“Smitten?” Bolton laughed. “Did he use that word? Why, the boy
has a singer’s soul … though if you believe that song, you may well
be dimmer than the rst Reek. Even the riding part is wrong. I was
hunting a fox along the Weeping Water when I chanced upon a mill
and saw a young woman washing clothes in the stream. The old
miller had gotten himself a new young wife, a girl not half his age.

She was a tall, willowy creature, very healthy-looking. Long legs
and small rm breasts, like two ripe plums. Pretty, in a common
sort of way. The moment that I set eyes on her I wanted her. Such
was my due. The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys
abolished the lord’s right to the rst night to appease his shrewish
queen, but where the old gods rule, old customs linger. The Umbers
keep the rst night too, deny it as they may. Certain of the
mountain clans as well, and on Skagos … well, only heart trees ever
see half of what they do on Skagos.
“This miller’s marriage had been performed without my leave or
knowledge. The man had cheated me. So I had him hanged, and
claimed my rights beneath the tree where he was swaying. If truth
be told, the wench was hardly worth the rope. The fox escaped as
well, and on our way back to the Dreadfort my favorite courser
came up lame, so all in all it was a dismal day.
“A year later this same wench had the impudence to turn up at
the Dreadfort with a squalling, red-faced monster that she claimed
was my own get. I should’ve had the mother whipped and thrown
her child down a well … but the babe did have my eyes. She told
me that when her dead husband’s brother saw those eyes, he beat
her bloody and drove her from the mill. That annoyed me, so I gave
her the mill and had the brother’s tongue cut out, to make certain
he did not go running to Winterfell with tales that might disturb
Lord Rickard. Each year I sent the woman some piglets and chickens
and a bag of stars, on the understanding that she was never to tell
the boy who had fathered him. A peaceful land, a quiet people, that
has always been my rule.”
“A ne rule, m’lord.”
“The woman disobeyed me, though. You see what Ramsay is. She
made him, her and Reek, always whispering in his ear about his
rights. He should have been content to grind corn. Does he truly
think that he can ever rule the north?”
“He ghts for you,” Reek blurted out. “He’s strong.”
“Bulls are strong. Bears. I have seen my bastard ght. He is not
entirely to blame. Reek was his tutor, the rst Reek, and Reek was

never trained at arms. Ramsay is ferocious, I will grant you, but he
swings that sword like a butcher hacking meat.”
“He’s not afraid of anyone, m’lord.”
“He should be. Fear is what keeps a man alive in this world of
treachery and deceit. Even here in Barrowton the crows are circling,
waiting to feast upon our esh. The Cerwyns and the Tallharts are
not to be relied on, my fat friend Lord Wyman plots betrayal, and
Whoresbane … the Umbers may seem simple, but they are not
without a certain low cunning. Ramsay should fear them all, as I do.
The next time you see him, tell him that.”
“Tell him … tell him to be afraid?” Reek felt ill at the very
thought of it. “M’lord, I … if I did that, he’d …”
“I know.” Lord Bolton sighed. “His blood is bad. He needs to be
leeched. The leeches suck away the bad blood, all the rage and pain.
No man can think so full of anger. Ramsay, though … his tainted
blood would poison even leeches, I fear.”
“He is your only son.”
“For the moment. I had another, once. Domeric. A quiet boy, but
most accomplished. He served four years as Lady Dustin’s page, and
three in the Vale as a squire to Lord Redfort. He played the high
harp, read histories, and rode like the wind. Horses … the boy was
mad for horses, Lady Dustin will tell you. Not even Lord Rickard’s
daughter could outrace him, and that one was half a horse herself.
Redfort said he showed great promise in the lists. A great jouster
must be a great horseman rst.”
“Yes, m’lord. Domeric. I … I have heard his name …”
“Ramsay killed him. A sickness of the bowels, Maester Uthor
says, but I say poison. In the Vale, Domeric had enjoyed the
company of Redfort’s sons. He wanted a brother by his side, so he
rode up the Weeping Water to seek my bastard out. I forbade it, but
Domeric was a man grown and thought that he knew better than his
father. Now his bones lie beneath the Dreadfort with the bones of
his brothers, who died still in the cradle, and I am left with Ramsay.
Tell me, my lord … if the kinslayer is accursed, what is a father to
do when one son slays another?”

The question frightened him. Once he had heard Skinner say that
the Bastard had killed his trueborn brother, but he had never dared
to believe it. He could be wrong. Brothers die sometimes, it does not
mean that they were killed. My brothers died, and I never killed them.
“My lord has a new wife to give him sons.”
“And won’t my bastard love that? Lady Walda is a Frey, and she
has a fertile feel to her. I have become oddly fond of my fat little
wife. The two before her never made a sound in bed, but this one
squeals and shudders. I nd that quite endearing. If she pops out
sons the way she pops in tarts, the Dreadfort will soon be overrun
with Boltons. Ramsay will kill them all, of course. That’s for the
best. I will not live long enough to see new sons to manhood, and
boy lords are the bane of any House. Walda will grieve to see them
die, though.”
Reek’s throat was dry. He could hear the wind rattling the bare
branches of the elms that lined the street. “My lord, I—”
“M’lord, remember?”
“M’lord. If I might ask … why did you want me? I’m no use to
anyone, I’m not even a man, I’m broken, and … the smell …”
“A bath and change of clothes will make you smell sweeter.”
“A bath?” Reek felt a clenching in his guts. “I … I would sooner
not, m’lord. Please. I have … wounds, I … and these clothes, Lord
Ramsay gave them to me, he … he said that I was never to take
them o , save at his command …”
“You are wearing rags,” Lord Bolton said, quite patiently. “Filthy
things, torn and stained and stinking of blood and urine. And thin.
You must be cold. We’ll put you in lambswool, soft and warm.
Perhaps a fur-lined cloak. Would you like that?”
“No.” He could not let them take the clothes Lord Ramsay gave
him. He could not let them see him.
“Would you prefer to dress in silk and velvet? There was a time
when you were fond of such, I do recall.”
“No,” he insisted, shrilly. “No, I only want these clothes. Reek’s
clothes. I’m Reek, it rhymes with peek.” His heart was beating like
a drum, and his voice rose to a frightened squeak. “I don’t want a
bath. Please, m’lord, don’t take my clothes.”

“Will you let us wash them, at least?”
“No. No, m’lord. Please.” He clutched his tunic to his chest with
both hands and hunched down in the saddle, half-afraid that Roose
Bolton might command his guardsmen to tear the clothes o him
right there in the street.
“As you wish.” Bolton’s pale eyes looked empty in the moonlight,
as if there were no one behind them at all. “I mean you no harm,
you know. I owe you much and more.”
“You do?” Some part of him was screaming, This is a trap, he is
playing with you, the son is just the shadow of the father. Lord Ramsay
played with his hopes all the time. “What … what do you owe me,
m’lord?”
“The north. The Starks were done and doomed the night that you
took Winterfell.” He waved a pale hand, dismissive. “All this is only
squabbling over spoils.”
Their short journey reached its end at the wooden walls of
Barrow Hall. Banners ew from its square towers, apping in the
wind: the ayed man of the Dreadfort, the battle-axe of Cerwyn,
Tallhart’s pines, the merman of Manderly, old Lord Locke’s crossed
keys, the Umber giant and the stony hand of Flint, the Hornwood
moose. For the Stouts, chevrony russet and gold, for Slate, a grey
eld within a double tressure white. Four horseheads proclaimed
the four Ryswells of the Rills—one grey, one black, one gold, one
brown. The jape was that the Ryswells could not even agree upon
the color of their arms. Above them streamed the stag-and-lion of
the boy who sat upon the Iron Throne a thousand leagues away.
Reek listened to the vanes turning on the old windmill as they
rode beneath the gatehouse into a grassy courtyard where
stableboys ran out to take their horses. “This way, if you please.”
Lord Bolton led him toward the keep, where the banners were those
of the late Lord Dustin and his widowed wife. His showed a spiked
crown above crossed longaxes; hers quartered those same arms with
Rodrik Ryswell’s golden horsehead.
As he climbed a wide ight of wooden steps to the hall, Reek’s
legs began to shake. He had to stop to steady them, staring up at
the grassy slopes of the Great Barrow. Some claimed it was the

grave of the First King, who had led the First Men to Westeros.
Others argued that it must be some King of the Giants who was
buried there, to account for its size. A few had even been known to
say it was no barrow, just a hill, but if so it was a lonely hill, for
most of the barrowlands were at and windswept.
Inside the hall, a woman stood beside the hearth, warming thin
hands above the embers of a dying re. She was clad all in black,
from head to heel, and wore no gold nor gems, but she was
highborn, that was plain to see. Though there were wrinkles at the
corners of her mouth and more around her eyes, she still stood tall,
unbent, and handsome. Her hair was brown and grey in equal parts
and she wore it tied behind her head in a widow’s knot.
“Who is this?” she said. “Where is the boy? Did your bastard
refuse to give him up? Is this old man his … oh, gods be good, what
is that smell? Has this creature soiled himself?”
“He has been with Ramsay. Lady Barbrey, allow me to present
the rightful Lord of the Iron Islands, Theon of House Greyjoy.”
No, he thought, no, don’t say that name, Ramsay will hear you, he’ll
know, he’ll know, he’ll hurt me.
Her mouth pursed. “He is not what I expected.”
“He is what we have.”
“What did your bastard do to him?”
“Removed some skin, I would imagine. A few small parts.
Nothing too essential.”
“Is he mad?”
“He may be. Does it matter?”
Reek could hear no more. “Please, m’lord, m’lady, there’s been
some mistake.” He fell to his knees, trembling like a leaf in a winter
storm, tears streaming down his ravaged cheeks. “I’m not him, I’m
not the turncloak, he died at Winterfell. My name is Reek.” He had
to remember his name. “It rhymes with freak.”

TYRION

T

he Selaesori Qhoran was seven days from Volantis when Penny
nally emerged from her cabin, creeping up on deck like some
timid woodland creature emerging from a long winter’s sleep.
It was dusk and the red priest had lit his night re in the great
iron brazier amidships as the crew gathered round to pray.
Moqorro’s voice was a bass drum that seemed to boom from
somewhere deep within his massive torso. “We thank you for your
sun that keeps us warm,” he prayed. “We thank you for your stars that
watch over us as we sail this cold black sea.” A huge man, taller than
Ser Jorah and wide enough to make two of him, the priest wore
scarlet robes embroidered at sleeve and hem and collar with orange
satin ames. His skin was black as pitch, his hair as white as snow;
the ames tattooed across his cheeks and brow yellow and orange.
His iron sta was as tall as he was and crowned with a dragon’s
head; when he stamped its butt upon the deck, the dragon’s maw
spat crackling green ame.
His guardsmen, ve slave warriors of the Fiery Hand, led the
responses. They chanted in the tongue of Old Volantis, but Tyrion
had heard the prayers enough to grasp the essence. Light our re and
protect us from the dark, blah blah, light our way and keep us toasty
warm, the night is dark and full of terrors, save us from the scary things,
and blah blah blah some more.
He knew better than to voice such thoughts aloud. Tyrion
Lannister had no use for any god, but on this ship it was wise to
show a certain respect for red R’hllor. Jorah Mormont had removed

Tyron’s chains and fetters once they were safely under way, and the
dwarf did not wish to give him cause to clap them on again.
The Selaesori Qhoran was a wallowing tub of ve hundred tons,
with a deep hold, high castles fore and aft, and a single mast
between. At her forecastle stood a grotesque gurehead, some
worm-eaten wooden eminence with a constipated look and a scroll
tucked up under one arm. Tyrion had never seen an uglier ship. Her
crew was no prettier. Her captain, a mean-mouthed, inty, kettlebellied man with close-set, greedy eyes, was a bad cyvasse player
and a worse loser. Under him served four mates, freedmen all, and
fty slaves bound to the ship, each with a crude version of the cog’s
gurehead tattooed upon one cheek. No-Nose, the sailors liked to
call Tyrion, no matter how many times he told them his name was
Hugor Hill.
Three of the mates and more than three-quarters of the crew were
fervent worshipers of the Lord of Light. Tyrion was less certain
about the captain, who always emerged for the evening prayers but
took no other part in them. But Moqorro was the true master of the
Selaesori Qhoran, at least for this voyage.
“Lord of Light, bless your slave Moqorro, and light his way in the dark
places of the world,” the red priest boomed. “And defend your
righteous slave Benerro. Grant him courage. Grant him wisdom. Fill his
heart with re.”
That was when Tyrion noticed Penny, watching the mummery
from the steep wooden stair that led down beneath the sterncastle.
She stood on one of the lower steps, so only the top of her head was
visible. Beneath her hood her eyes shone big and white in the light
of the night re. She had her dog with her, the big grey hound she
rode in the mock jousts.
“My lady,” Tyrion called softly. In truth, she was no lady, but he
could not bring himself to mouth that silly name of hers, and he was
not about to call her girl or dwarf.
She cringed back. “I … I did not see you.”
“Well, I am small.”
“I … I was unwell …” Her dog barked.
Sick with grief, you mean. “If I can be of help …”

“No.” And quick as that she was gone again, retreating back
below to the cabin she shared with her dog and sow. Tyrion could
not fault her. The crew of the Selaesori Qhoran had been pleased
enough when he rst came on board; a dwarf was good luck, after
all. His head had been rubbed so often and so vigorously that it was
a wonder he wasn’t bald. But Penny had met with a more mixed
reaction. She might be a dwarf, but she was also a woman, and
women were bad luck aboard ship. For every man who tried to rub
her head, there were three who muttered maledictions under their
breath when she went by.
And the sight of me can only be salt in her wound. They hacked o
her brother’s head in the hope that it was mine, yet here I sit like some
bloody gargoyle, o ering empty consolations. If I were her, I’d want
nothing more than to shove me into the sea.
He felt nothing but pity for the girl. She did not deserve the
horror visited on her in Volantis, any more than her brother had.
The last time he had seen her, just before they left port, her eyes
had been raw from crying, two ghastly red holes in a wan, pale
face. By the time they raised sail she had locked herself in her cabin
with her dog and her pig, but at night they could hear her weeping.
Only yesterday he had heard one of the mates say that they ought
to throw her overboard before her tears could swamp the ship.
Tyrion was not entirely sure he had been japing.
When the evening prayers had ended and the ship’s crew had
once again dispersed, some to their watch and others to food and
rum and hammocks, Moqorro remained beside his night re, as he
did every night. The red priest rested by day but kept vigil through
the dark hours, to tend his sacred ames so that the sun might
return to them at dawn.
Tyrion squatted across from him and warmed his hands against
the night’s chill. Moqorro took no notice of him for several
moments. He was staring into the ickering ames, lost in some
vision. Does he see days yet to come, as he claims? If so, that was a
fearsome gift. After a time the priest raised his eyes to meet the
dwarf’s. “Hugor Hill,” he said, inclining his head in a solemn nod.
“Have you come to pray with me?”

“Someone told me that the night is dark and full of terrors. What
do you see in those ames?”
“Dragons,” Moqorro said in the Common Tongue of Westeros. He
spoke it very well, with hardly a trace of accent. No doubt that was
one reason the high priest Benerro had chosen him to bring the faith
of R’hllor to Daenerys Targaryen. “Dragons old and young, true and
false, bright and dark. And you. A small man with a big shadow,
snarling in the midst of all.”
“Snarling? An amiable fellow like me?” Tyrion was almost
attered. And no doubt that is just what he intends. Every fool loves to
hear that he’s important. “Perhaps it was Penny you saw. We’re
almost of a size.”
“No, my friend.”
My friend? When did that happen, I wonder? “Did you see how long
it will take us to reach Meereen?”
“You are eager to behold the world’s deliverer?”
Yes and no. The world’s deliverer may snick o my head or give me to
her dragons as a savory. “Not me,” said Tyrion. “For me, it is all
about the olives. Though I fear I may grow old and die before I
taste one. I could dog-paddle faster than we’re sailing. Tell me, was
Selaesori Qhoran a triarch or a turtle?”
The red priest chuckled. “Neither. Qhoran is … not a ruler, but
one who serves and counsels such, and helps conduct his business.
You of Westeros might say steward or magister.”
King’s Hand? That amused him. “And selaesori?”
Moqorro touched his nose. “Imbued with a pleasant aroma.
Fragrant, would you say? Flowery?”
“So Selaesori Qhoran means Stinky Steward, more or less?”
“Fragrant Steward, rather.”
Tyrion gave a crooked grin. “I believe I will stay with Stinky. But
I do thank you for the lesson.”
“I am pleased to have enlightened you. Perhaps someday you will
let me teach you the truth of R’hllor as well.”
“Someday.” When I am a head on a spike.
The quarters he shared with Ser Jorah were a cabin only by
courtesy; the dank, dark, foul-smelling closet had barely enough

space to hang a pair of sleeping hammocks, one above the other. He
found Mormont stretched out in the lower one, swaying slowly with
the motion of the ship. “The girl
nally poked her nose
abovedecks,” Tyrion told him. “One look at me and she scurried
right back down below.”
“You’re not a pretty sight.”
“Not all of us can be as comely as you. The girl is lost. It would
not surprise me if the poor creature wasn’t sneaking up to jump
over the side and drown herself.”
“The poor creature’s name is Penny.”
“I know her name.” He hated her name. Her brother had gone by
the name of Groat, though his true name had been Oppo. Groat and
Penny. The smallest coins, worth the least, and what’s worse, they chose
the names themselves. It left a bad taste in Tyrion’s mouth. “By any
name, she needs a friend.”
Ser Jorah sat up in his hammock. “Befriend her, then. Marry her,
for all I care.”
That left a bad taste in his mouth as well. “Like with like, is that
your notion? Do you mean to nd a she-bear for yourself, ser?”
“You were the one who insisted that we bring her.”
“I said we could not abandon her in Volantis. That does not mean
I want to fuck her. She wants me dead, have you forgotten? I’m the
last person she’s like to want as a friend.”
“You’re both dwarfs.”
“Yes, and so was her brother, who was killed because some
drunken fools took him for me.”
“Feeling guilty, are you?”
“No.” Tyrion bristled. “I have sins enough to answer for; I’ll have
no part of this one. I might have nurtured some ill will toward her
and her brother for the part they played the night of Jo rey’s
wedding, but I never wished them harm.”
“You are a harmless creature, to be sure. Innocent as a lamb.” Ser
Jorah got to his feet. “The dwarf girl is your burden. Kiss her, kill
her, or avoid her, as you like. It’s naught to me.” He shouldered
past Tyrion and out of the cabin.

Twice exiled, and small wonder, Tyrion thought. I’d exile him too if I
could. The man is cold, brooding, sullen, deaf to humor. And those are
his good points. Ser Jorah spent most of his waking hours pacing the
forecastle or leaning on the rail, gazing out to sea. Looking for his
silver queen. Looking for Daenerys, willing the ship to sail faster. Well, I
might do the same if Tysha waited in Meereen.
Could Slaver’s Bay be where whores went? It seemed unlikely.
From what he’d read, the slaver cities were the place where whores
were made. Mormont should have bought one for himself. A pretty
slave girl might have done wonders to improve his
temper … particularly one with silvery hair, like the whore who
had been sitting on his cock back in Selhorys.
On the river Tyrion had to endure Gri , but there had at least
been the mystery of the captain’s true identity to divert him and the
more congenial companionship of the rest of the poleboat’s little
company. On the cog, alas, everyone was just who they appeared to
be, no one was particularly congenial, and only the red priest was
interesting. Him, and maybe Penny. But the girl hates me, and she
should.
Life aboard the Selaesori Qhoran was nothing if not tedious, Tyrion
had found. The most exciting part of his day was pricking his toes
and ngers with a knife. On the river there had been wonders to
behold: giant turtles, ruined cities, stone men, naked septas. One
never knew what might be lurking around the next bend. The days
and nights at sea were all the same. Leaving Volantis, the cog had
sailed within sight of land at rst, so Tyrion could gaze at passing
headlands, watch clouds of seabirds rise from stony cli s and
crumbling watchtowers, count bare brown islands as they slipped
past. He saw many other ships as well: shing boats, lumbering
merchantmen, proud galleys with their oars lashing the waves into
white foam. But once they struck out into deeper waters, there was
only sea and sky, air and water. The water looked like water. The
sky looked like sky. Sometimes there was a cloud. Too much blue.
And the nights were worse. Tyrion slept badly at the best of
times, and this was far from that. Sleep meant dreams as like as not,
and in his dreams the Sorrows waited, and a stony king with his

father’s face. That left him with the beggar’s choice of climbing up
into his hammock and listening to Jorah Mormont snore beneath
him, or remaining abovedecks to contemplate the sea. On moonless
nights the water was as black as maester’s ink, from horizon to
horizon. Dark and deep and forbidding, beautiful in a chilly sort of
way, but when he looked at it too long Tyrion found himself musing
on how easy it would be to slip over the gunwale and drop down
into that darkness. One very small splash, and the pathetic little tale
that was his life would soon be done. But what if there is a hell and
my father’s waiting for me?
The best part of each evening was supper. The food was not
especially good, but it was plentiful, so that was where the dwarf
went next. The galley where he took his meals was a cramped and
uncomfortable space, with a ceiling so low that the taller passengers
were always in danger of cracking their heads, a hazard the
strapping slave soldiers of the Fiery Hand seemed particularly prone
to. As much as Tyrion enjoyed sniggering at that, he had come to
prefer taking his meals alone. Sitting at a crowded table with men
who did not share a common language with you, listening to them
talk and jape whilst understanding none of it, had quickly grown
wearisome. Particularly since he always found himself wondering if
the japes and laughter were directed at him.
The galley was also where the ship’s books were kept. Her
captain being an especially bookish man, she carried three—a
collection of nautical poetry that went from bad to worse, a wellthumbed tome about the erotic adventures of a young slave girl in a
Lysene pillow house, and the fourth and nal volume of The Life of
the Triarch Belicho, a famous Volantene patriot whose unbroken
succession of conquests and triumphs ended rather abruptly when
he was eaten by giants. Tyrion had nished them all by their third
day at sea. Then, for lack of any other books, he started reading
them again. The slave girl’s story was the worst written but the
most engrossing, and that was the one he took down this evening to
see him through a supper of buttered beets, cold sh stew, and
biscuits that could have been used to drive nails.

He was reading the girl’s account of the day she and her sister
were taken by slavers when Penny entered the galley. “Oh,” she
said, “I thought … I did not mean to disturb m’lord, I …”
“You are not disturbing me. You’re not going to try to kill me
again, I hope.”
“No.” She looked away, her face reddening.
“In that case, I would welcome some company. There’s little
enough aboard this ship.” Tyrion closed the book. “Come. Sit. Eat.”
The girl had left most of her meals untouched outside her cabin
door. By now she must be starving. “The stew is almost edible. The
sh is fresh, at least.”
“No, I … I choked on a sh bone once, I can’t eat sh.”
“Have some wine, then.” He lled a cup and slid it toward her.
“Compliments of our captain. Closer to piss than Arbor gold, if truth
be told, but even piss tastes better than the black tar rum the sailors
drink. It might help you sleep.”
The girl made no move to touch the cup. “Thank you, m’lord, but
no.” She backed away. “I should not be bothering you.”
“Do you mean to spend your whole life running away?” Tyrion
asked before she could slip back out the door.
That stopped her. Her cheeks turned a bright pink, and he was
afraid she was about to start weeping again. Instead she thrust out
her lip de antly and said, “You’re running too.”
“I am,” he confessed, “but I am running to and you are running
from, and there’s a world of di erence there.”
“We would never have had to run at all but for you.”
It took some courage to say that to my face. “Are you speaking of
King’s Landing or Volantis?”
“Both.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “Everything. Why couldn’t
you just come joust with us, the way the king wanted? You
wouldn’t have gotten hurt. What would that have cost m’lord, to
climb up on our dog and ride a tilt to please the boy? It was just a
bit of fun. They would have laughed at you, that’s all.”
“They would have laughed at me,” said Tyrion. I made them laugh
at Jo instead. And wasn’t that a clever ploy?

“My brother says that is a good thing, making people laugh. A
noble thing, and honorable. My brother says … he …” The tears fell
then, rolling down her face.
“I am sorry about your brother.” Tyrion had said the same words
to her before, back in Volantis, but she was so far gone in grief back
there that he doubted she had heard them.
She heard them now. “Sorry. You are sorry.” Her lip was
trembling, her cheeks were wet, her eyes were red-rimmed holes.
“We left King’s Landing that very night. My brother said it was for
the best, before someone wondered if we’d had some part in the
king’s death and decided to torture us to nd out. We went to
Tyrosh rst. My brother thought that would be far enough, but it
wasn’t. We knew a juggler there. For years and years he would
juggle every day by the Fountain of the Drunken God. He was old,
so his hands were not as deft as they had been, and sometimes he
would drop his balls and chase them across the square, but the
Tyroshi would laugh and throw him coins all the same. Then one
morning we heard that his body had been found at the Temple of
Trios. Trios has three heads, and there’s a big statue of him beside
the temple doors. The old man had been cut into three parts and
pushed inside the threefold mouths of Trios. Only when the parts
were sewn back together, his head was gone.”
“A gift for my sweet sister. He was another dwarf.”
“A little man, aye. Like you, and Oppo. Groat. Are you sorry
about the juggler too?”
“I never knew your juggler existed until this very moment … but
yes, I am sorry he is dead.”
“He died for you. His blood is on your hands.”
The accusation stung, coming so hard on the heels of Jorah
Mormont’s words. “His blood is on my sister’s hands, and the hands
of the brutes who killed him. My hands …” Tyrion turned them
over, inspected them, coiled them into sts. “… my hands are
crusted with old blood, aye. Call me kinslayer, and you won’t be
wrong. Kingslayer, I’ll answer to that one as well. I have killed
mothers, fathers, nephews, lovers, men and women, kings and
whores. A singer once annoyed me, so I had the bastard stewed. But

I have never killed a juggler, nor a dwarf, and I am not to blame for
what happened to your bloody brother.”
Penny picked the cup of wine he’d poured for her and threw it in
his face. Just like my sweet sister. He heard the galley door slam but
never saw her leave. His eyes were stinging, and the world was a
blur. So much for befriending her.
Tyrion Lannister had scant experience with other dwarfs. His lord
father had not welcomed any reminders of his son’s deformities, and
such mummers as featured little folk in their troupes soon learned
to stay away from Lannisport and Casterly Rock, at the risk of his
displeasure. Growing up, Tyrion heard reports of a dwarf jester at
the seat of the Dornish Lord Fowler, a dwarf maester in service on
the Fingers, and a female dwarf amongst the silent sisters, but he
never felt the least need to seek them out. Less reliable tales also
reached his ears, of a dwarf witch who haunted a hill in the
riverlands, and a dwarf whore in King’s Landing renowned for
coupling with dogs. His own sweet sister had told him of the last,
even o ering to nd him a bitch in heat if he cared to try it out.
When he asked politely if she were referring to herself, Cersei had
thrown a cup of wine in his face. That was red, as I recall, and this is
gold. Tyrion mopped at his face with a sleeve. His eyes still stung.
He did not see Penny again until the day of the storm.
The salt air lay still and heavy that morning, but the western sky
was a ery red, streaked with lowering clouds that glowed as bright
as Lannister crimson. Sailors were dashing about battening hatches,
running lines, clearing the decks, lashing down everything that was
not already lashed down. “Bad wind coming,” one warned him. “NoNose should get below.”
Tyrion remembered the storm he’d su ered crossing the narrow
sea, the way the deck had jumped beneath his feet, the hideous
creaking sounds the ship had made, the taste of wine and vomit.
“No-Nose will stay up here.” If the gods wanted him, he would
sooner die by drowning than choking on his own vomit. And
overhead the cog’s canvas sail rippled slowly, like the fur of some
great beast stirring from a long sleep, then lled with a sudden
crack that turned every head on the ship.

The winds drove the cog before them, far o her chosen course.
Behind them black clouds piled one atop another against a blood-red
sky. By midmorning they could see lightning ickering to the west,
followed by the distant crash of thunder. The sea grew rougher, and
dark waves rose up to smash against the hull of the Stinky Steward.
It was about then that the crew started hauling down the canvas.
Tyrion was underfoot amidships, so he climbed the forecastle and
hunkered down, savoring the lash of cold rain on his cheeks. The
cog went up and down, bucking more wildly than any horse he’d
ever ridden, lifting with each wave before sliding down into the
troughs between, jarring him to the bones. Even so, it was better
here where he could see than down below locked in some airless
cabin.
By the time the storm broke, evening was upon them and Tyrion
Lannister was soaked through to the smallclothes, yet somehow he
felt elated … and even more so later, when he found a drunken
Jorah Mormont in a pool of vomit in their cabin.
The dwarf lingered in the galley after supper, celebrating his
survival by sharing a few tots of black tar rum with the ship’s cook,
a great greasy loutish Volantene who spoke only one word of the
Common Tongue (fuck), but played a ferocious game of cyvasse,
particularly when drunk. They played three games that night.
Tyrion won the rst, then lost the other two. After that he decided
that he’d had enough and stumbled back up on deck to clear his
head of rum and elephants alike.
He found Penny on the forecastle, where he had so often found
Ser Jorah, standing by the rail beside the cog’s hideous half-rotted
gurehead and gazing out across the inky sea. From behind, she
looked as small and vulnerable as a child.
Tyrion thought it best to leave her undisturbed, but it was too
late. She had heard him. “Hugor Hill.”
“If you like.” We both know better. “I am sorry to intrude on you. I
will retire.”
“No.” Her face was pale and sad, but she did not look to have
been crying. “I’m sorry too. About the wine. It wasn’t you who
killed my brother or that poor old man in Tyrosh.”

“I played a part, though not by choice.”
“I miss him so much. My brother. I …”
“I understand.” He found himself thinking of Jaime. Count
yourself lucky. Your brother died before he could betray you.
“I thought I wanted to die,” she said, “but today when the storm
came and I thought the ship would sink, I … I …”
“You realized that you wanted to live after all.” I have been there
too. Something else we have in common.
Her teeth were crooked, which made her shy with her smiles, but
she smiled now. “Did you truly cook a singer in a stew?”
“Who, me? No. I do not cook.”
When Penny giggled, she sounded like the sweet young girl she
was … seventeen, eighteen, no more than nineteen. “What did he
do, this singer?”
“He wrote a song about me.” For she was his secret treasure, she was
his shame and his bliss. And a chain and a keep are nothing, compared
to a woman’s kiss. It was queer how quick the words came back to
him. Perhaps they had never left him. Hands of gold are always cold,
but a woman’s hands are warm.
“It must have been a very bad song.”
“Not really. It was no ‘Rains of Castamere,’ mind you, but some
parts were … well …”
“How did it go?”
He laughed. “No. You do not want to hear me sing.”
“My mother used to sing to us when we were children. My
brother and me. She always said that it didn’t matter what your
voice was like so long as you loved the song.”
“Was she …?”
“… a little person? No, but our father was. His own father sold
him to a slaver when he was three, but he grew up to be such a
famous mummer that he bought his freedom. He traveled to all the
Free Cities, and Westeros as well. In Oldtown they used to call him
Hop-Bean.”
Of course they did. Tyrion tried not to wince.
“He’s dead now,” Penny went on. “My mother too. Oppo … he
was my last family, and now he’s gone too.” She turned her head

away and gazed out across the sea. “What will I do? Where will I
go? I have no trade, just the jousting show, and that needs two.”
No, thought Tyrion. That is not a place you want to go, girl. Do not
ask that of me. Do not even think it. “Find yourself some likely orphan
boy,” he suggested.
Penny did not seem to hear that. “It was Father’s idea to do the
tilts. He even trained the rst pig, but by then he was too sick to
ride her, so Oppo took his place. I always rode the dog. We
performed for the Sealord of Braavos once, and he laughed so hard
that afterward he gave each of us a … a grand gift.”
“Is that where my sister found you? In Braavos?”
“Your sister?” The girl looked lost.
“Queen Cersei.”
Penny shook her head. “She never … it was a man who came to
us, in Pentos. Osmund. No, Oswald. Something like that. Oppo met
with him, not me. Oppo made all of our arrangements. My brother
always knew what to do, where we should go next.”
“Meereen is where we’re going next.”
She gave him a puzzled look. “Qarth, you mean. We’re bound for
Qarth, by way of New Ghis.”
“Meereen. You’ll ride your dog for the dragon queen and come
away with your weight in gold. Best start eating more, so you’ll be
nice and plump when you joust before Her Grace.”
Penny did not return the smile. “By myself, all I can do is ride
around in circles. And even if the queen should laugh, where will I
go afterward? We never stay in one place long. The rst time they
see us they laugh and laugh, but by the fourth or fth time, they
know what we’re going to do before we do it. Then they stop
laughing, so we have to go somewhere new. We make the most
coin in the big cities, but I always liked the little towns the best.
Places like that, the people have no silver, but they feed us at their
own tables, and the children follow us everywhere.”
That’s because they have never seen a dwarf before, in their wretched
pisspot towns, Tyrion thought. The bloody brats would follow around a
two-headed goat if one turned up. Until they got bored with its bleating
and slaughtered it for supper. But he had no wish to make her weep

again, so instead he said, “Daenerys has a kind heart and a generous
nature.” It was what she needed to hear. “She will nd a place for
you at her court, I don’t doubt. A safe place, beyond my sister’s
reach.”
Penny turned back to him. “And you will be there too.”
Unless Daenerys decides she needs some Lannister blood, to pay for
the Targaryen blood my brother shed. “I will.”
After that, the dwarf girl was seen more frequently above deck.
The next day Tyrion encountered her and her spotted sow amidships
in midafternoon, when the air was warm and the sea calm. “Her
name is Pretty,” the girl told him, shyly.
Pretty the pig and Penny the girl, he thought. Someone has a deal to
answer for. Penny gave Tyrion some acorns, and he let Pretty eat
them from his hand. Do not think I don’t see what you are doing, girl,
he thought, as the big sow snu ed and squealed.
Soon they began to take their meals together. Some nights it was
just the two of them; at other meals they crowded in with
Moqorro’s guards. The ngers, Tyrion called them; they were men of
the Fiery Hand, after all, and there were ve of them. Penny
laughed at that, a sweet sound, though not one that he heard often.
Her wound was too fresh, her grief too deep.
He soon had her calling the ship the Stinky Steward, though she
got somewhat wroth with him whenever he called Pretty Bacon. To
atone for that Tyrion made an attempt to teach her cyvasse, though
he soon realized that was a lost cause. “No,” he said, a dozen times,
“the dragon ies, not the elephants.”
That same night, she came right out and asked him if he would
like to tilt with her. “No,” he answered. Only later did it occur to
him that perhaps tilt did not mean tilt. His answer would still have
been no, but he might not have been so brusque.
Back in the cabin he shared with Jorah Mormont, Tyrion twisted
in his hammock for hours, slipping in and out of sleep. His dreams
were full of grey, stony hands reaching for him from out of the fog,
and a stair that led up to his father.
Finally he gave it up and made his way up top for a breath of
night air. The Selaesori Qhoran had furled her big striped sail for the

night, and her decks were all but deserted. One of the mates was on
the sterncastle, and amidships Moqorro sat by his brazier, where a
few small ames still danced amongst the embers.
Only the brightest stars were visible, all to the west. A dull red
glow lit the sky to the northeast, the color of a blood bruise. Tyrion
had never seen a bigger moon. Monstrous, swollen, it looked as if it
had swallowed the sun and woken with a fever. Its twin, oating on
the sea beyond the ship, shimmered red with every wave. “What
hour is this?” he asked Moqorro. “That cannot be sunrise unless the
east has moved. Why is the sky red?”
“The sky is always red above Valyria, Hugor Hill.”
A cold chill went down his back. “Are we close?”
“Closer than the crew would like,” Moqorro said in his deep
voice. “Do you know the stories, in your Sunset Kingdoms?”
“I know some sailors say that any man who lays eyes upon that
coast is doomed.” He did not believe such tales himself, no more
than his uncle had. Gerion Lannister had set sail for Valyria when
Tyrion was eighteen, intent on recovering the lost ancestral blade of
House Lannister and any other treasures that might have survived
the Doom. Tyrion had wanted desperately to go with them, but his
lord father had dubbed the voyage a “fool’s quest,” and forbidden
him to take part.
And perhaps he was not so wrong. Almost a decade had passed since
the Laughing Lion headed out from Lannisport, and Gerion had never
returned. The men Lord Tywin sent to seek after him had traced his
course as far as Volantis, where half his crew had deserted him and
he had bought slaves to replace them. No free man would willingly
sign aboard a ship whose captain spoke openly of his intent to sail
into the Smoking Sea. “So those are res of the Fourteen Flames
we’re seeing, re ected on the clouds?”
“Fourteen or fourteen thousand. What man dares count them? It
is not wise for mortals to look too deeply at those res, my friend.
Those are the res of god’s own wrath, and no human ame can
match them. We are small creatures, men.”
“Some smaller than others.” Valyria. It was written that on the
day of Doom every hill for ve hundred miles had split asunder to

ll the air with ash and smoke and re, blazes so hot and hungry
that even the dragons in the sky were engulfed and consumed.
Great rents had opened in the earth, swallowing palaces, temples,
entire towns. Lakes boiled or turned to acid, mountains burst, ery
fountains spewed molten rock a thousand feet into the air, red
clouds rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons, and
to the north the ground splintered and collapsed and fell in on itself
and an angry sea came rushing in. The proudest city in all the world
was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day, the
Lands of the Long Summer scorched and drowned and blighted.
An empire built on blood and re. The Valyrians reaped the seed they
had sown. “Does our captain mean to test the curse?”
“Our captain would prefer to be fty leagues farther out to sea,
well away from that accursed shore, but I have commanded him to
steer the shortest course. Others seek Daenerys too.”
Gri , with his young prince. Could all that talk of the Golden
Company sailing west have been a feint? Tyrion considered saying
something, then thought better. It seemed to him that the prophecy
that drove the red priests had room for just one hero. A second
Targaryen would only serve to confuse them. “Have you seen these
others in your res?” he asked, warily.
“Only their shadows,” Moqorro said. “One most of all. A tall and
twisted thing with one black eye and ten long arms, sailing on a sea
of blood.”

BRAN

T

he moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife.
A pale sun rose and set and rose again. Red leaves whispered in the
wind. Dark clouds lled the skies and turned to storms. Lightning
ashed and thunder rumbled, and dead men with black hands and
bright blue eyes shu ed round a cleft in the hillside but could not
enter. Under the hill, the broken boy sat upon a weirwood throne,
listening to whispers in the dark as ravens walked up and down his
arms.
“You will never walk again,” the three-eyed crow had promised,
“but you will y.” Sometimes the sound of song would drift up from
someplace far below. The children of the forest, Old Nan would have
called the singers, but those who sing the song of earth was their own
name for themselves, in the True Tongue that no human man could
speak. The ravens could speak it, though. Their small black eyes
were full of secrets, and they would caw at him and peck his skin
when they heard the songs.
The moon was fat and full. Stars wheeled across a black sky. Rain
fell and froze, and tree limbs snapped from the weight of the ice.
Bran and Meera made up names for those who sang the song of
earth: Ash and Leaf and Scales, Black Knife and Snowylocks and
Coals. Their true names were too long for human tongues, said
Leaf. Only she could speak the Common Tongue, so what the others
thought of their new names Bran never learned.
After the bone-grinding cold of the lands beyond the Wall, the
caves were blessedly warm, and when the chill crept out of the rock
the singers would light res to drive it o again. Down here there

was no wind, no snow, no ice, no dead things reaching out to grab
you, only dreams and rushlight and the kisses of the ravens. And the
whisperer in darkness.
The last greenseer, the singers called him, but in Bran’s dreams he
was still a three-eyed crow. When Meera Reed had asked him his
true name, he made a ghastly sound that might have been a
chuckle. “I wore many names when I was quick, but even I once
had a mother, and the name she gave me at her breast was
Brynden.”
“I have an uncle Brynden,” Bran said. “He’s my mother’s uncle,
really. Brynden Black sh, he’s called.”
“Your uncle may have been named for me. Some are, still. Not so
many as before. Men forget. Only the trees remember.” His voice
was so soft that Bran had to strain to hear.
“Most of him has gone into the tree,” explained the singer Meera
called Leaf. “He has lived beyond his mortal span, and yet he
lingers. For us, for you, for the realms of men. Only a little strength
remains in his esh. He has a thousand eyes and one, but there is
much to watch. One day you will know.”
“What will I know?” Bran asked the Reeds afterward, when they
came with torches burning brightly in their hand, to carry him back
to a small chamber o the big cavern where the singers had made
beds for them to sleep. “What do the trees remember?”
“The secrets of the old gods,” said Jojen Reed. Food and re and
rest had helped restore him after the ordeals of their journey, but he
seemed sadder now, sullen, with a weary, haunted look about the
eyes. “Truths the First Men knew, forgotten now in
Winterfell … but not in the wet wild. We live closer to the green in
our bogs and crannogs, and we remember. Earth and water, soil and
stone, oaks and elms and willows, they were here before us all and
will still remain when we are gone.”
“So will you,” said Meera. That made Bran sad. What if I don’t
want to remain when you are gone? he almost asked, but he
swallowed the words unspoken. He was almost a man grown, and
he did not want Meera to think he was some weepy babe. “Maybe
you could be greenseers too,” he said instead.

“No, Bran.” Now Meera sounded sad.
“It is given to a few to drink of that green fountain whilst still in
mortal esh, to hear the whisperings of the leaves and see as the
trees see, as the gods see,” said Jojen. “Most are not so blessed. The
gods gave me only greendreams. My task was to get you here. My
part in this is done.”
The moon was a black hole in the sky. Wolves howled in the
wood, sni ng through the snowdrifts after dead things. A murder
of ravens erupted from the hillside, screaming their sharp cries,
black wings beating above a white world. A red sun rose and set
and rose again, painting the snows in shades of rose and pink.
Under the hill, Jojen brooded, Meera fretted, and Hodor wandered
through dark tunnels with a sword in his right hand and a torch in
his left. Or was it Bran wandering?
No one must ever know.
The great cavern that opened on the abyss was as black as pitch,
black as tar, blacker than the feathers of a crow. Light entered as a
trespasser, unwanted and unwelcome, and soon was gone again;
cook res, candles, and rushes burned for a little while, then
guttered out again, their brief lives at an end.
The singers made Bran a throne of his own, like the one Lord
Brynden sat, white weirwood ecked with red, dead branches
woven through living roots. They placed it in the great cavern by
the abyss, where the black air echoed to the sound of running water
far below. Of soft grey moss they made his seat. Once he had been
lowered into place, they covered him with warm furs.
There he sat, listening to the hoarse whispers of his teacher.
“Never fear the darkness, Bran.” The lord’s words were
accompanied by a faint rustling of wood and leaf, a slight twisting
of his head. “The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the
earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk.
Darkness will make you strong.”
The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife.
Snow akes drifted down soundlessly to cloak the soldier pines and
sentinels in white. The drifts grew so deep that they covered the
entrance to the caves, leaving a white wall that Summer had to dig

through whenever he went outside to join his pack and hunt. Bran
did not oft range with them in those days, but some nights he
watched them from above.
Flying was even better than climbing.
Slipping into Summer’s skin had become as easy for him as
slipping on a pair of breeches once had been, before his back was
broken. Changing his own skin for a raven’s night-black feathers
had been harder, but not as hard as he had feared, not with these
ravens. “A wild stallion will buck and kick when a man tries to
mount him, and try to bite the hand that slips the bit between his
teeth,” Lord Brynden said, “but a horse that has known one rider
will accept another. Young or old, these birds have all been ridden.
Choose one now, and y.”
He chose one bird, and then another, without success, but the
third raven looked at him with shrewd black eyes, tilted its head,
and gave a quork, and quick as that he was not a boy looking at a
raven but a raven looking at a boy. The song of the river suddenly
grew louder, the torches burned a little brighter than before, and
the air was full of strange smells. When he tried to speak it came
out in a scream, and his rst ight ended when he crashed into a
wall and ended back inside his own broken body. The raven was
unhurt. It ew to him and landed on his arm, and Bran stroked its
feathers and slipped inside of it again. Before long he was ying
around the cavern, weaving through the long stone teeth that hung
down from the ceiling, even apping out over the abyss and
swooping down into its cold black depths.
Then he realized he was not alone.
“Someone else was in the raven,” he told Lord Brynden, once he
had returned to his own skin. “Some girl. I felt her.”
“A woman, of those who sing the song of earth,” his teacher said.
“Long dead, yet a part of her remains, just as a part of you would
remain in Summer if your boy’s esh were to die upon the morrow.
A shadow on the soul. She will not harm you.”
“Do all the birds have singers in them?”
“All,” Lord Brynden said. “It was the singers who taught the First
Men to send messages by raven … but in those days, the birds

would speak the words. The trees remember, but men forget, and so
now they write the messages on parchment and tie them round the
feet of birds who have never shared their skin.”
Old Nan had told him the same story once, Bran remembered, but
when he asked Robb if it was true, his brother laughed and asked
him if he believed in grumkins too. He wished Robb were with
them now. I’d tell him I could y, but he wouldn’t believe, so I’d have
to show him. I bet that he could learn to y too, him and Arya and
Sansa, even baby Rickon and Jon Snow. We could all be ravens and live
in Maester Luwin’s rookery.
That was just another silly dream, though. Some days Bran
wondered if all of this wasn’t just some dream. Maybe he had fallen
asleep out in the snows and dreamed himself a safe, warm place.
You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now,
or you’ll go dreaming into death. Once or twice he pinched his arm
with his ngers, really hard, but the only thing that did was make
his arm hurt. In the beginning he had tried to count the days by
making note of when he woke and slept, but down here sleeping
and waking had a way of melting into one another. Dreams became
lessons, lessons became dreams, things happened all at once or not
at all. Had he done that or only dreamed it?
“Only one man in a thousand is born a skinchanger,” Lord
Brynden said one day, after Bran had learned to y, “and only one
skinchanger in a thousand can be a greenseer.”
“I thought the greenseers were the wizards of the children,” Bran
said. “The singers, I mean.”
“In a sense. Those you call the children of the forest have eyes as
golden as the sun, but once in a great while one is born amongst
them with eyes as red as blood, or green as the moss on a tree in
the heart of the forest. By these signs do the gods mark those they
have chosen to receive the gift. The chosen ones are not robust, and
their quick years upon the earth are few, for every song must have
its balance. But once inside the wood they linger long indeed. A
thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient
trees. Greenseers.”

Bran did not understand, so he asked the Reeds. “Do you like to
read books, Bran?” Jojen asked him.
“Some books. I like the ghting stories. My sister Sansa likes the
kissing stories, but those are stupid.”
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,” said Jojen. “The
man who never reads lives only one. The singers of the forest had
no books. No ink, no parchment, no written language. Instead they
had the trees, and the weirwoods above all. When they died, they
went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees
remembered. All their songs and spells, their histories and prayers,
everything they knew about this world. Maesters will tell you that
the weirwoods are sacred to the old gods. The singers believe they
are the old gods. When singers die they become part of that
godhood.”
Bran’s eyes widened. “They’re going to kill me?”
“No,” Meera said. “Jojen, you’re scaring him.”
“He is not the one who needs to be afraid.”
The moon was fat and full. Summer prowled through the silent
woods, a long grey shadow that grew more gaunt with every hunt,
for living game could not be found. The ward upon the cave mouth
still held; the dead men could not enter. The snows had buried most
of them again, but they were still there, hidden, frozen, waiting.
Other dead things came to join them, things that had once been men
and women, even children. Dead ravens sat on bare brown
branches, wings crusted with ice. A snow bear crashed through the
brush, huge and skeletal, half its head sloughed away to reveal the
skull beneath. Summer and his pack fell upon it and tore it into
pieces. Afterward they gorged, though the meat was rotted and
half-frozen, and moved even as they ate it.
Under the hill they still had food to eat. A hundred kinds of
mushrooms grew down here. Blind white sh swam in the black
river, but they tasted just as good as sh with eyes once you cooked
them up. They had cheese and milk from the goats that shared the
caves with the singers, even some oats and barleycorn and dried
fruit laid by during the long summer. And almost every day they ate
blood stew, thickened with barley and onions and chunks of meat.

Jojen thought it might be squirrel meat, and Meera said that it was
rat. Bran did not care. It was meat and it was good. The stewing
made it tender.
The caves were timeless, vast, silent. They were home to more
than three score living singers and the bones of thousands dead, and
extended far below the hollow hill. “Men should not go wandering
in this place,” Leaf warned them. “The river you hear is swift and
black, and ows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are
passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts,
forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my
people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a
thousand thousand of your man-years.”
Though the men of the Seven Kingdoms might call them the
children of the forest, Leaf and her people were far from childlike.
Little wise men of the forest would have been closer. They were small
compared to men, as a wolf is smaller than a direwolf. That does
not mean it is a pup. They had nut-brown skin, dappled like a deer’s
with paler spots, and large ears that could hear things that no man
could hear. Their eyes were big too, great golden cat’s eyes that
could see down passages where a boy’s eyes saw only blackness.
Their hands had only three ngers and a thumb, with sharp black
claws instead of nails.
And they did sing. They sang in True Tongue, so Bran could not
understand the words, but their voices were as pure as winter air.
“Where are the rest of you?” Bran asked Leaf, once.
“Gone down into the earth,” she answered. “Into the stones, into
the trees. Before the First Men came all this land that you call
Westeros was home to us, yet even in those days we were few. The
gods gave us long lives but not great numbers, lest we overrun the
world as deer will overrun a wood where there are no wolves to
hunt them. That was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising.
Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost
gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great
lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but
gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will

outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that
men have made, there is no room for them, or us.”
She seemed sad when she said it, and that made Bran sad as well.
It was only later that he thought, Men would not be sad. Men would
be wroth. Men would hate and swear a bloody vengeance. The singers
sing sad songs, where men would ght and kill.
One day Meera and Jojen decided to go see the river, despite
Leaf’s cautions. “I want to come too,” Bran said.
Meera gave him a mournful look. The river was six hundred feet
below, down steep slopes and twisty passages, she explained, and
the last part required climbing down a rope. “Hodor could never
make the climb with you on his back. I’m sorry, Bran.”
Bran remembered a time when no one could climb as good as
him, not even Robb or Jon. Part of him wanted to shout at them for
leaving him, and another part wanted to cry. He was almost a man
grown, though, so he said nothing. But after they were gone, he
slipped inside Hodor’s skin and followed them.
The big stableboy no longer fought him as he had the rst time,
back in the lake tower during the storm. Like a dog who has had all
the ght whipped out of him, Hodor would curl up and hide
whenever Bran reached out for him. His hiding place was
somewhere deep within him, a pit where not even Bran could touch
him. No one wants to hurt you, Hodor, he said silently, to the childman whose esh he’d taken. I just want to be strong again for a while.
I’ll give it back, the way I always do.
No one ever knew when he was wearing Hodor’s skin. Bran only
had to smile, do as he was told, and mutter “Hodor” from time to
time, and he could follow Meera and Jojen, grinning happily,
without anyone suspecting it was really him. He often tagged along,
whether he was wanted or not. In the end, the Reeds were glad he
came. Jojen made it down the rope easily enough, but after Meera
caught a blind white sh with her frog spear and it was time to
climb back up, his arms began to tremble and he could not make it
to the top, so they had to tie the rope around him and let Hodor
haul him up. “Hodor,” he grunted every time he gave a pull.
“Hodor, hodor, hodor.”

The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife.
Summer dug up a severed arm, black and covered with hoarfrost, its
ngers opening and closing as it pulled itself across the frozen
snow. There was still enough meat on it to ll his empty belly, and
after that was done he cracked the arm bones for the marrow. Only
then did the arm remember it was dead.
Bran ate with Summer and his pack, as a wolf. As a raven he ew
with the murder, circling the hill at sunset, watching for foes,
feeling the icy touch of the air. As Hodor he explored the caves. He
found chambers full of bones, shafts that plunged deep into the
earth, a place where the skeletons of gigantic bats hung upside
down from the ceiling. He even crossed the slender stone bridge
that arched over the abyss and discovered more passages and
chambers on the far side. One was full of singers, enthroned like
Brynden in nests of weirwood roots that wove under and through
and around their bodies. Most of them looked dead to him, but as
he crossed in front of them their eyes would open and follow the
light of his torch, and one of them opened and closed a wrinkled
mouth as if he were trying to speak. “Hodor,” Bran said to him, and
he felt the real Hodor stir down in his pit.
Seated on his throne of roots in the great cavern, half-corpse and
half-tree, Lord Brynden seemed less a man than some ghastly statue
made of twisted wood, old bone, and rotted wool. The only thing
that looked alive in the pale ruin that was his face was his one red
eye, burning like the last coal in a dead re, surrounded by twisted
roots and tatters of leathery white skin hanging o a yellowed
skull.
The sight of him still frightened Bran—the weirwood roots
snaking in and out of his withered esh, the mushrooms sprouting
from his cheeks, the white wooden worm that grew from the socket
where one eye had been. He liked it better when the torches were
put out. In the dark he could pretend that it was the three-eyed
crow who whispered to him and not some grisly talking corpse.
One day I will be like him. The thought lled Bran with dread. Bad
enough that he was broken, with his useless legs. Was he doomed to
lose the rest too, to spend all of his years with a weirwood growing

in him and through him? Lord Brynden drew his life from the tree,
Leaf told them. He did not eat, he did not drink. He slept, he
dreamed, he watched. I was going to be a knight, Bran remembered. I
used to run and climb and ght. It seemed a thousand years ago.
What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House
Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to
ruins. He had thought the three-eyed crow would be a sorcerer, a
wise old wizard who could x his legs, but that was some stupid
child’s dream, he realized now. I am too old for such fancies, he told
himself. A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of
ancient trees. That was as good as being a knight. Almost as good,
anyway.
The moon was a black hole in the sky. Outside the cave the world
went on. Outside the cave the sun rose and set, the moon turned,
the cold winds howled. Under the hill, Jojen Reed grew ever more
sullen and solitary, to his sister’s distress. She would often sit with
Bran beside their little re, talking of everything and nothing,
petting Summer where he slept between them, whilst her brother
wandered the caverns by himself. Jojen had even taken to climbing
up to the cave’s mouth when the day was bright. He would stand
there for hours, looking out over the forest, wrapped in furs yet
shivering all the same.
“He wants to go home,” Meera told Bran. “He will not even try
and ght his fate. He says the greendreams do not lie.”
“He’s being brave,” said Bran. The only time a man can be brave is
when he is afraid, his father had told him once, long ago, on the day
they found the direwolf pups in the summer snows. He still
remembered.
“He’s being stupid,” Meera said. “I’d hoped that when we found
your three-eyed crow … now I wonder why we ever came.”
For me, Bran thought. “His greendreams,” he said.
“His greendreams.” Meera’s voice was bitter.
“Hodor,” said Hodor.
Meera began to cry.
Bran hated being crippled then. “Don’t cry,” he said. He wanted
to put his arms around her, hold her tight the way his mother used

to hold him back at Winterfell when he’d hurt himself. She was
right there, only a few feet from him, but so far out of reach it
might have been a hundred leagues. To touch her he would need to
pull himself along the ground with his hands, dragging his legs
behind him. The oor was rough and uneven, and it would be slow
going, full of scrapes and bumps. I could put on Hodor’s skin, he
thought. Hodor could hold her and pat her on the back. The thought
made Bran feel strange, but he was still thinking it when Meera
bolted from the re, back out into the darkness of the tunnels. He
heard her steps recede until there was nothing but the voices of the
singers.
The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife.
The days marched past, one after the other, each shorter than the
one before. The nights grew longer. No sunlight ever reached the
caves beneath the hill. No moonlight ever touched those stony halls.
Even the stars were strangers there. Those things belonged to the
world above, where time ran in its iron circles, day to night to day
to night to day.
“It is time,” Lord Brynden said.
Something in his voice sent icy ngers running up Bran’s back.
“Time for what?”
“For the next step. For you to go beyond skinchanging and learn
what it means to be a greenseer.”
“The trees will teach him,” said Leaf. She beckoned, and another
of the singers padded forward, the white-haired one that Meera had
named Snowylocks. She had a weirwood bowl in her hands, carved
with a dozen faces, like the ones the heart trees wore. Inside was a
white paste, thick and heavy, with dark red veins running through
it. “You must eat of this,” said Leaf. She handed Bran a wooden
spoon.
The boy looked at the bowl uncertainly. “What is it?”
“A paste of weirwood seeds.”
Something about the look of it made Bran feel ill. The red veins
were only weirwood sap, he supposed, but in the torchlight they
looked remarkably like blood. He dipped the spoon into the paste,
then hesitated. “Will this make me a greenseer?”

“Your blood makes you a greenseer,” said Lord Brynden. “This
will help awaken your gifts and wed you to the trees.”
Bran did not want to be married to a tree … but who else would
wed a broken boy like him? A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom
deep as the roots of ancient trees. A greenseer.
He ate.
It had a bitter taste, though not so bitter as acorn paste. The rst
spoonful was the hardest to get down. He almost retched it right
back up. The second tasted better. The third was almost sweet. The
rest he spooned up eagerly. Why had he thought that it was bitter?
It tasted of honey, of new-fallen snow, of pepper and cinnamon and
the last kiss his mother ever gave him. The empty bowl slipped
from his ngers and clattered on the cavern oor. “I don’t feel any
di erent. What happens next?”
Leaf touched his hand. “The trees will teach you. The trees
remember.” He raised a hand, and the other singers began to move
about the cavern, extinguishing the torches one by one. The
darkness thickened and crept toward them.
“Close your eyes,” said the three-eyed crow. “Slip your skin, as
you do when you join with Summer. But this time, go into the roots
instead. Follow them up through the earth, to the trees upon the
hill, and tell me what you see.”
Bran closed his eyes and slipped free of his skin. Into the roots, he
thought. Into the weirwood. Become the tree. For an instant he could
see the cavern in its black mantle, could hear the river rushing by
below.
Then all at once he was back home again.
Lord Eddard Stark sat upon a rock beside the deep black pool in
the godswood, the pale roots of the heart tree twisting around him
like an old man’s gnarled arms. The greatsword Ice lay across Lord
Eddard’s lap, and he was cleaning the blade with an oilcloth.
“Winterfell,” Bran whispered.
His father looked up. “Who’s there?” he asked, turning …
… and Bran, frightened, pulled away. His father and the black
pool and the godswood faded and were gone and he was back in the

cavern, the pale thick roots of his weirwood throne cradling his
limbs as a mother does a child. A torch ared to life before him.
“Tell us what you saw.” From far away Leaf looked almost a girl,
no older than Bran or one of his sisters, but close at hand she
seemed far older. She claimed to have seen two hundred years.
Bran’s throat was very dry. He swallowed. “Winterfell. I was back
in Winterfell. I saw my father. He’s not dead, he’s not, I saw him,
he’s back at Winterfell, he’s still alive.”
“No,” said Leaf. “He is gone, boy. Do not seek to call him back
from death.”
“I saw him.” Bran could feel rough wood pressing against one
cheek. “He was cleaning Ice.”
“You saw what you wished to see. Your heart yearns for your
father and your home, so that is what you saw.”
“A man must know how to look before he can hope to see,” said
Lord Brynden. “Those were shadows of days past that you saw,
Bran. You were looking through the eyes of the heart tree in your
godswood. Time is di erent for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil
and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days
and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in
its ow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction.
The lives of trees are di erent. They root and grow and die in one
place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the
acorn is the oak. And the weirwood … a thousand human years are
a moment to a weirwood, and through such gates you and I may
gaze into the past.”
“But,” said Bran, “he heard me.”
“He heard a whisper on the wind, a rustling amongst the leaves.
You cannot speak to him, try as you might. I know. I have my own
ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a
woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of
mine has ever reached them. The past remains the past. We can
learn from it, but we cannot change it.”
“Will I see my father again?”
“Once you have mastered your gifts, you may look where you
will and see what the trees have seen, be it yesterday or last year or

a thousand ages past. Men live their lives trapped in an eternal
present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is
all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole
lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long
as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years,
a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left
undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the utter of a moth’s wing,
and past, present, and future are one. Nor will your sight be limited
to your godswood. The singers carved eyes into their heart trees to
awaken them, and those are the rst eyes a new greenseer learns to
use … but in time you will see well beyond the trees themselves.”
“When?” Bran wanted to know.
“In a year, or three, or ten. That I have not glimpsed. It will come
in time, I promise you. But I am tired now, and the trees are calling
me. We will resume on the morrow.”
Hodor carried Bran back to his chamber, muttering “Hodor” in a
low voice as Leaf went before them with a torch. He had hoped that
Meera and Jojen would be there, so he could tell them what he had
seen, but their snug alcove in the rock was cold and empty. Hodor
eased Bran down onto his bed, covered him with furs, and made a
re for them. A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the
roots of ancient trees.
Watching the ames, Bran decided he would stay awake till
Meera came back. Jojen would be unhappy, he knew, but Meera
would be glad for him, He did not remember closing his eyes.
… but then somehow he was back at Winterfell again, in the
godswood looking down upon his father. Lord Eddard seemed much
younger this time. His hair was brown, with no hint of grey in it,
his head bowed. “… let them grow up close as brothers, with only
love between them,” he prayed, “and let my lady wife nd it in her
heart to forgive …”
“Father.” Bran’s voice was a whisper in the wind, a rustle in the
leaves. “Father, it’s me. It’s Bran. Brandon.”
Eddard Stark lifted his head and looked long at the weirwood,
frowning, but he did not speak. He cannot see me, Bran realized,
despairing. He wanted to reach out and touch him, but all that he

could do was watch and listen. I am in the tree. I am inside the heart
tree, looking out of its red eyes, but the weirwood cannot talk, so I can’t.
Eddard Stark resumed his prayer. Bran felt his eyes ll up with
tears. But were they his own tears, or the weirwood’s? If I cry, will
the tree begin to weep?
The rest of his father’s words were drowned out by a sudden
clatter of wood on wood. Eddard Stark dissolved, like mist in a
morning sun. Now two children danced across the godswood,
hooting at one another as they dueled with broken branches. The
girl was the older and taller of the two. Arya! Bran thought eagerly,
as he watched her leap up onto a rock and cut at the boy. But that
couldn’t be right. If the girl was Arya, the boy was Bran himself,
and he had never worn his hair so long. And Arya never beat me
playing swords, the way that girl is beating him. She slashed the boy
across his thigh, so hard that his leg went out from under him and
he fell into the pool and began to splash and shout. “You be quiet,
stupid,” the girl said, tossing her own branch aside. “It’s just water.
Do you want Old Nan to hear and run tell Father?” She knelt and
pulled her brother from the pool, but before she got him out again,
the two of them were gone.
After that the glimpses came faster and faster, till Bran was
feeling lost and dizzy. He saw no more of his father, nor the girl
who looked like Arya, but a woman heavy with child emerged
naked and dripping from the black pool, knelt before the tree, and
begged the old gods for a son who would avenge her. Then there
came a brown-haired girl slender as a spear who stood on the tips of
her toes to kiss the lips of a young knight as tall as Hodor. A darkeyed youth, pale and erce, sliced three branches o the weirwood
and shaped them into arrows. The tree itself was shrinking, growing
smaller with each vision, whilst the lesser trees dwindled into
saplings and vanished, only to be replaced by other trees that would
dwindle and vanish in their turn. And now the lords Bran glimpsed
were tall and hard, stern men in fur and chain mail. Some wore
faces he remembered from the statues in the crypts, but they were
gone before he could put a name to them.

Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto
his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped
toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in
her hand.
“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more
than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair,
hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the
mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet
drummed against the earth … but as his life owed out of him in a
red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.

JON

T

he sun had broken through near midday, after seven days of
dark skies and snow urries. Some of the drifts were higher than a
man, but the stewards had been shoveling all day and the paths
were as clean as they were like to get. Re ections glimmered o
the Wall, every crack and crevice glittering pale blue.
Seven hundred feet up, Jon Snow stood looking down upon the
haunted forest. A north wind swirled through the trees below,
sending thin white plumes of snow crystals ying from the highest
branches, like icy banners. Elsewise nothing moved. Not a sign of
life. That was not entirely reassuring. It was not the living that he
feared. Even so …
The sun is out. The snow has stopped. It may be a moon’s turn before
we have another chance as good. It may be a season. “Have Emmett
assemble his recruits,” he told Dolorous Edd. “We’ll want an escort.
Ten rangers, armed with dragonglass. I want them ready to leave
within the hour.”
“Aye, m’lord. And to command?”
“That would be me.”
Edd’s mouth turned down even more than usual. “Some might
think it better if the lord commander stayed safe and warm south of
the Wall. Not that I’d say such myself, but some might.”
Jon smiled. “Some had best not say so in my presence.”
A sudden gust of wind set Edd’s cloak to apping noisily. “Best go
down, m’lord. This wind’s like to push us o the Wall, and I never
did learn the knack of ying.”

They rode the winch lift back to the ground. The wind was
gusting, cold as the breath of the ice dragon in the tales Old Nan
had told when Jon was a boy. The heavy cage was swaying. From
time to time it scraped against the Wall, starting small crystalline
showers of ice that sparkled in the sunlight as they fell, like shards
of broken glass.
Glass, Jon mused, might be of use here. Castle Black needs its own
glass gardens, like the ones at Winterfell. We could grow vegetables even
in the deep of winter. The best glass came from Myr, but a good clear
pane was worth its weight in spice, and green and yellow glass
would not work as well. What we need is gold. With enough coin, we
could buy ’prentice glassblowers and glaziers in Myr, bring them north,
o er them their freedom for teaching their art to some of our recruits.
That would be the way to go about it. If we had the gold. Which we
do not.
At the base of the Wall he found Ghost rolling in a snowbank. The
big white direwolf seemed to love fresh snow. When he saw Jon he
bounded back onto his feet and shook himself o . Dolorous Edd
said, “He’s going with you?”
“He is.”
“A clever wolf, him. And me?”
“You’re not.”
“A clever lord, you. Ghost’s the better choice. I don’t have the
teeth for biting wildlings anymore.”
“If the gods are good, we won’t encounter any wildlings. I’ll want
the grey gelding.”
Word spread fast at Castle Black. Edd was still saddling the grey
when Bowen Marsh stomped across the yard to confront Jon at the
stables. “My lord, I wish you would reconsider. The new men can
take their vows in the sept as easily.”
“The sept is home to the new gods. The old gods live in the wood,
and those who honor them say their words amongst the weirwoods.
You know that as well as I.”
“Satin comes from Oldtown, and Arron and Emrick from the
westerlands. The old gods are not their gods.”

“I do not tell men which god to worship. They were free to
choose the Seven or the red woman’s Lord of Light. They chose the
trees instead, with all the peril that entails.”
“The Weeping Man may still be out there, watching.”
“The grove is no more than two hours’ ride, even with the snow.
We should be back by midnight.”
“Too long. This is not wise.”
“Unwise,” said Jon, “but necessary. These men are about to
pledge their lives to the Night’s Watch, joining a brotherhood that
stretches back in an unbroken line for thousands of years. The
words matter, and so do these traditions. They bind us all together,
highborn and low, young and old, base and noble. They make us
brothers.” He clapped Marsh on his shoulder. “I promise you, we
shall return.”
“Aye, my lord,” said the Lord Steward, “but will it be as living
men or heads on spears with your eyes scooped out? You will be
returning through the black of night. The snowdrifts are waist deep
in places. I see that you are taking seasoned men with you, that is
good, but Black Jack Bulwer knew these woods as well. Even
Benjen Stark, your own uncle, he—”
“I have something they did not.” Jon turned his head and
whistled. “Ghost. To me.” The direwolf shook the snow from his
back and trotted to Jon’s side. The rangers parted to let him
through, though one mare whinnied and shied away till Rory gave
her reins a sharp tug. “The Wall is yours, Lord Bowen.” He took his
horse by the bridle and walked him to the gate and the icy tunnel
that snaked beneath the Wall.
Beyond the ice, the trees stood tall and silent, huddled in the
thick white cloaks. Ghost stalked beside Jon’s horse as the rangers
and recruits formed up, then stopped and sni ed, his breath frosting
in the air. “What is it?” Jon asked. “Is someone there?” The woods
were empty as far as he could see, but that was not very far.
Ghost bounded toward the trees, slipped between two whitecloaked pines, and vanished in a cloud of snow. He wants to hunt,
but what? Jon did not fear for the direwolf so much as for any
wildlings he might encounter. A white wolf in a white wood, silent as a

shadow. They will never know he’s coming. He knew better than to go
chasing him. Ghost would return when he wanted to and not before.
Jon put his heels into his horse. His men fell in around them, the
hooves of their garrons breaking through the icy crust to the softer
snow beneath. Into the woods they went, at a steady walking pace,
as the Wall dwindled behind them.
The soldier pines and sentinels wore thick white coats, and icicles
draped the bare brown limbs of the broadleafs. Jon sent Tom
Barleycorn ahead to scout for them, though the way to the white
grove was oft trod and familiar. Big Liddle and Luke of Longtown
slipped into the brush to east and west. They would ank the
column to give warning of any approach. All were seasoned
rangers, armed with obsidian as well as steel, warhorns slung across
their saddles should they need to summon help.
The others were good men too. Good men in a ght, at least, and
loyal to their brothers. Jon could not speak for what they might have
been before they reached the Wall, but he did not doubt that most
had pasts as black as their cloaks. Up here, they were the sort of
men he wanted at his back. Their hoods were raised against the
biting wind, and some had scarves wrapped about their faces,
hiding their features. Jon knew them, though. Every name was
graven on his heart. They were his men, his brothers.
Six more rode with them—a mix of young and old, large and
small, seasoned and raw. Six to say the words. Horse had been born
and raised in Mole’s Town, Arron and Emrick came from Fair Isle,
Satin from the brothels of Oldtown at the other end of Westeros. All
of them were boys. Leathers and Jax were older men, well past
forty, sons of the haunted forest, with sons and grandsons of their
own. They had been two of the sixty-three wildlings who had
followed Jon Snow back to the Wall the day he made his appeal, so
far the only two to decide they wanted a black cloak. Iron Emmett
said they all were ready, or as ready as they were ever going to be.
He and Jon and Bowen Marsh had weighed each man in turn and
assigned him to an order: Leathers, Jax, and Emrick to the rangers,
Horse to the builders, Arron and Satin to the stewards. The time had
come for them to take their vows.

Iron Emmett rode at the head of the column, mounted on the
ugliest horse Jon had ever seen, a shaggy beast that looked to be all
hair and hooves. “Talk is there was some trouble at Harlot’s Tower
last night,” the master-at-arms said.
“Hardin’s Tower.” Of the sixty-three who had come back with
him from Mole’s Town, nineteen had been women and girls. Jon
had housed them in the same abandoned tower where he had once
slept when he had been new to the Wall. Twelve were spearwives,
more than capable of defending both themselves and the younger
girls from the unwanted attentions of black brothers. It was some of
the men they’d turned away who’d given Hardin’s Tower its new,
in ammatory name. Jon was not about to condone the mockery.
“Three drunken fools mistook Hardin’s for a brothel, that’s all. They
are in the ice cells now, contemplating their mistake.”
Iron Emmett grimaced. “Men are men, vows are words, and
words are wind. You should put guards around the women.”
“And who will guard the guards?” You know nothing, Jon Snow.
He had learned, though, and Ygritte had been his teacher. If he
could not hold to his own vows, how could he expect more of his
brothers? But there were dangers in tri ing with wildling women. A
man can own a woman, and a man can own a knife, Ygritte had told
him once, but no man can own both. Bowen Marsh had not been all
wrong. Hardin’s Tower was tinder waiting for a spark. “I mean to
open three more castles,” Jon said. “Deep Lake, Sable Hall, and the
Long Barrow. All garrisoned with free folk, under the command of
our own o cers. The Long Barrow will be all women, aside from
the commander and chief steward.” There would be some mingling,
he did not doubt, but the distances were great enough to make that
di cult, at least.
“And what poor fool will get that choice command?”
“I am riding beside him.”
The look of mingled horror and delight that passed across Iron
Emmett’s face was worth more than a sack of gold. “What have I
done to make you hate me so, my lord?”
Jon laughed. “Have no fear, you won’t be alone. I mean to give
you Dolorous Edd as your second and your steward.”

“The spearwives will be so happy. You might do well to bestow a
castle on the Magnar.”
Jon’s smile died. “I might if I could trust him. Sigorn blames me
for his father’s death, I fear. Worse, he was bred and trained to give
orders, not to take them. Do not confuse the Thenns with free folk.
Magnar means lord in the Old Tongue, I am told, but Styr was closer
to a god to his people, and his son is cut from the same skin. I do
not require men to kneel, but they do need to obey.”
“Aye, m’lord, but you had best do something with the Magnar.
You’ll have trouble with the Thenns if you ignore them.”
Trouble is the lord commander’s lot, Jon might have said. His visit
to Mole’s Town was giving him plenty, as it happened, and the
women were the least of it. Halleck was proving to be just as
truculent as he had feared, and there were some amongst the black
brothers whose hatred of the free folk was bone deep. One of
Halleck’s followers had already cut o a builder’s ear in the yard,
and like as not that was just a taste of the bloodshed to come. He
had to get the old forts open soon, so Harma’s brother could be sent
o to garrison Deep Lake or Sable Hall. Just now, though, neither
of those was t for human habitation, and Othell Yarwyck and his
builders were still o trying to restore the Nightfort. There were
nights when Jon Snow wondered if he had not made a grievous
mistake by preventing Stannis from marching all the wildlings o to
be slaughtered. I know nothing, Ygritte, he thought, and perhaps I
never will.
Half a mile from the grove, long red shafts of autumn sunlight
were slanting down between the branches of the lea ess trees,
staining the snowdrifts pink. The riders crossed a frozen stream,
between two jagged rocks armored in ice, then followed a twisting
game trail to the northeast. Whenever the wind kicked up, sprays of
loose snow lled the air and stung their eyes. Jon pulled his scarf
up over his mouth and nose and raised the hood on his cloak. “Not
far now,” he told the men. No one replied.
Jon smelled Tom Barleycorn before he saw him. Or was it Ghost
who smelled him? Of late, Jon Snow sometimes felt as if he and the
direwolf were one, even awake. The great white wolf appeared

rst, shaking o the snow. A few moments later Tom was there.
“Wildlings,” he told Jon, softly. “In the grove.”
Jon brought the riders to a halt. “How many?”
“I counted nine. No guards. Some dead, might be, or sleeping.
Most look to be women. One child, but there’s a giant too. Just the
one that I saw. They got a re burning, smoke drifting through the
trees. Fools.”
Nine, and I have seven-and-ten. Four of his were green boys,
though, and none were giants.
Jon was not of a mind to fall back to the Wall, however. If the
wildlings are still alive, it may be we can bring them in. And if they are
dead, well … a corpse or two could be of use. “We’ll continue on
foot,” he said, dropping lightly to the frozen ground. The snow was
ankle deep. “Rory, Pate, stay with the horses.” He might have given
that duty to the recruits, but they would need to be blooded soon
enough. This was as good a time as any. “Spread out and form a
crescent. I want to close in on the grove from three sides. Keep the
men to your right and left in sight, so the gaps do not widen. The
snow should mu e our steps. Less chance of blood if we take them
unawares.”
Night was falling fast. The shafts of sunlight had vanished when
the last thin slice of the sun was swallowed beneath the western
woods. The pink snow drifts were going white again, the color
leaching out of them as the world darkened. The evening sky had
turned the faded grey of an old cloak that had been washed too
many times, and the rst shy stars were coming out.
Ahead he glimpsed a pale white trunk that could only be a
weirwood, crowned with a head of dark red leaves. Jon Snow
reached back and pulled Longclaw from his sheath. He looked to
right and left, gave Satin and Horse a nod, watched them pass it on
to the men beyond. They rushed the grove together, kicking
through drifts of old snow with no sound but their breathing. Ghost
ran with them, a white shadow at Jon’s side.
The weirwoods rose in a circle around the edges of the clearing.
There were nine, all roughly of the same age and size. Each one had
a face carved into it, and no two faces were alike. Some were

smiling, some were screaming, some were shouting at him. In the
deepening glow their eyes looked black, but in daylight they would
be blood-red, Jon knew. Eyes like Ghost’s.
The re in the center of the grove was a small sad thing, ashes
and embers and a few broken branches burning slow and smoky.
Even then, it had more life than the wildlings huddled near it. Only
one of them reacted when Jon stepped from the brush. That was the
child, who began to wail, clutching at his mother’s ragged cloak.
The woman raised her eyes and gasped. By then the grove was
ringed by rangers, sliding past the bone-white trees, steel glinting in
black-gloved hands, poised for slaughter.
The giant was the last to notice them. He had been asleep, curled
up by the re, but something woke him—the child’s cry, the sound
of snow crunching beneath black boots, a sudden indrawn breath.
When he stirred it was as if a boulder had come to life. He heaved
himself into a sitting position with a snort, pawing at his eyes with
hands as big as hams to rub the sleep away … until he saw Iron
Emmett, his sword shining in his hand. Roaring, he came leaping to
his feet, and one of those huge hands closed around a maul and
jerked it up.
Ghost showed his teeth in answer. Jon grabbed the wolf by the
scru of the neck. “We want no battle here.” His men could bring
the giant down, he knew, but not without cost. Once blood was
shed, the wildlings would join the fray. Most or all would die here,
and some of his own brothers too. “This is a holy place. Yield, and
we—”
The giant bellowed again, a sound that shook the leaves in the
trees, and slammed his maul against the ground. The shaft of it was
six feet of gnarled oak, the head a stone as big as a loaf of bread.
The impact made the ground shake. Some of the other wildlings
went scrambling for their own weapons.
Jon Snow was about to reach for Longclaw when Leathers spoke,
from the far side of the grove. His words sounded gru and
guttural, but Jon heard the music in it and recognized the Old
Tongue. Leathers spoke for a long while. When he was done, the
giant answered. It sounded like growling, interspersed with grunts,

and Jon could not understand a word of it. But Leathers pointed at
the trees and said something else, and the giant pointed at the trees,
ground his teeth, and dropped his maul.
“It’s done,” said Leathers. “They want no ght.”
“Well done. What did you tell him?”
“That they were our gods too. That we came to pray.”
“We shall. Put away your steel, all of you. We will have no blood
shed here tonight.”
Nine, Tom Barleycorn had said, and nine there were, but two
were dead and one so weak he might have died by morning. The six
who remained included a mother and child, two old men, a
wounded Thenn in battered bronze, and one of the Hornfoot folk,
his bare feet so badly frostbitten that Jon knew at a glance he
would never walk again. Most had been strangers to one another
when they came to the grove, he learned subsequently; when
Stannis broke Mance Rayder’s host, they had ed into the woods to
escape the carnage, wandered for a time, lost friends and kin to cold
and starvation, and nally washed up here, too weak and weary to
go on. “The gods are here,” one of the old men said. “This was as
good a place to die as any.”
“The Wall is only a few hours south of here,” said Jon. “Why not
seek shelter there? Others yielded. Even Mance.”
The wildlings exchanged looks. Finally one said, “We heard
stories. The crows burned all them that yielded.”
“Even Mance hisself,” the woman added.
Melisandre, Jon thought, you and your red god have much and more
to answer for. “All those who wish are welcome to return with us.
There is food and shelter at Castle Black, and the Wall to keep you
safe from the things that haunt these woods. You have my word, no
one will burn.”
“A crow’s word,” the woman said, hugging her child close, “but
who’s to say that you can keep it? Who are you?”
“Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and a son of Eddard
Stark of Winterfell.” Jon turned to Tom Barleycorn. “Have Rory and
Pate bring up the horses. I do not mean to stay here one moment
longer than we must.”

“As you say, m’lord.”
One last thing remained before they could depart: the thing that
they had come for. Iron Emmett called forth his charges, and as the
rest of the company watched from a respectful distance, they knelt
before the weirwoods. The last light of day was gone by then; the
only light came from the stars above and the faint red glow of the
dying re in the center of the grove.
With their black hoods and thick black cowls, the six might have
been carved from shadow. Their voices rose together, small against
the vastness of the night. “Night gathers, and now my watch
begins,” they said, as thousands had said before them. Satin’s voice
was sweet as song, Horse’s hoarse and halting, Arron’s a nervous
squeak. “It shall not end until my death.”
May those deaths be long in coming. Jon Snow sank to one knee in
the snow. Gods of my fathers, protect these men. And Arya too, my
little sister, wherever she might be. I pray you, let Mance nd her and
bring her safe to me.
“I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children,” the
recruits promised, in voices that echoed back through years and
centuries. “I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and
die at my post.”
Gods of the wood, grant me the strength to do the same, Jon Snow
prayed silently. Give me the wisdom to know what must be done and
the courage to do it.
“I am the sword in the darkness,” said the six, and it seemed to
Jon as though their voices were changing, growing stronger, more
certain. “I am the watcher on the walls. I am the re that burns
against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes
the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men.”
The shield that guards the realms of men. Ghost nuzzled up against
his shoulder, and Jon draped an arm around him. He could smell
Horse’s unwashed breeches, the sweet scent Satin combed into his
beard, the rank sharp smell of fear, the giant’s overpowering musk.
He could hear the beating of his own heart. When he looked across
the grove at the woman with her child, the two greybeards, the
Hornfoot man with his maimed feet, all he saw was men.

“I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night
and all the nights to come.”
Jon Snow was the rst onto his feet. “Rise now as men of the
Night’s Watch.” He gave Horse a hand to pull him up.
The wind was rising. It was time to go.
The journey back took much longer than the journey to the
grove. The giant’s pace was a ponderous one, despite the length and
girth of those legs, and he was forever stopping to knock snow o
low-hanging limbs with his maul. The woman rode double with
Rory, her son with Tom Barleycorn, the old men with Horse and
Satin. The Thenn was frightened of the horses, however, and
preferred to limp along despite his wounds. The Hornfoot man
could not sit a saddle and had to be tied over the back of a garron
like a sack of grain; so too the pale-faced crone with the stick-thin
limbs, whom they had not been able to rouse.
They did the same with the two corpses, to the puzzlement of
Iron Emmett. “They will only slow us, my lord,” he said to Jon.
“We should chop them up and burn them.”
“No,” said Jon. “Bring them. I have a use for them.”
They had no moon to guide them home, and only now and then a
patch of stars. The world was black and white and still. It was a
long, slow, endless trek. The snow clung to their boots and
breeches, and the wind rattled the pines and made their cloaks snap
and swirl. Jon glimpsed the red wanderer above, watching them
through the lea ess branches of great trees as they made their way
beneath. The Thief, the free folk called it. The best time to steal a
woman was when the Thief was in the Moonmaid, Ygritte had
always claimed. She never mentioned the best time to steal a giant.
Or two dead men.
It was almost dawn before they saw the Wall again.
A sentry’s horn greeted them as they approached, sounding from
on high like the cry of some huge, deep-throated bird, a single long
blast that meant rangers returning. Big Liddle unslung his own
warhorn and gave answer. At the gate, they had to wait a few
moments before Dolorous Edd Tollett appeared to slide back the
bolts and swing open the iron bars. When Edd caught sight of the

ragged band of wildlings, he pursed his lips and gave the giant a
long look. “Might need some butter to slide that one through the
tunnel, m’lord. Shall I send someone to the larder?”
“Oh, I think he’ll t. Unbuttered.”
So he did … on hands and knees, crawling. A big boy, this one.
Fourteen feet, at least. Even bigger than Mag the Mighty. Mag had died
beneath this very ice, locked in mortal struggle with Donal Noye. A
good man. The Watch has lost too many good men. Jon took Leathers
aside. “Take charge of him. You speak his tongue. See that he is fed
and nd him a warm place by the re. Stay with him. See that no
one provokes him.”
“Aye.” Leathers hesitated. “M’lord.”
The living wildlings Jon sent o to have their wounds and
frostbites tended. Some hot food and warm clothes would restore
most of them, he hoped, though the Hornfoot man was like to lose
both feet. The corpses he consigned to the ice cells.
Clydas had come and gone, Jon noted as he was hanging his cloak
on the peg beside the door. A letter had been left on the table in his
solar. Eastwatch or the Shadow Tower, he assumed at rst glance. But
the wax was gold, not black. The seal showed a stag’s head within a
aming heart. Stannis. Jon cracked the hardened wax, attened the
roll of parchment, read. A maester’s hand, but the king’s words.
Stannis had taken Deepwood Motte, and the mountain clans had
joined him. Flint, Norrey, Wull, Liddle, all.
And we had other help, unexpected but most welcome, from a
daughter of Bear Island. Alysane Mormont, whose men name her
the She-Bear, hid ghters inside a gaggle of shing sloops and
took the ironmen unawares where they lay o the strand.
Greyjoy’s longships are burned or taken, her crews slain or
surrendered. The captains, knights, notable warriors, and others
of high birth we shall ransom or make other use of, the rest I
mean to hang …
The Night’s Watch was sworn to take no side in the quarrels and
con icts of the realm. Nonetheless, Jon Snow could not help but

feel a certain satisfaction. He read on.
… more northmen coming in as word spreads of our victory.
Fisherfolk, freeriders, hillmen, crofters from the deep of the
wolfswood and villagers who ed their homes along the stony
shore to escape the ironmen, survivors from the battle outside the
gates of Winterfell, men once sworn to the Hornwoods, the
Cerwyns, and the Tallharts. We are ve thousand strong as I
write, our numbers swelling every day. And word has come to us
that Roose Bolton moves toward Winterfell with all his power,
there to wed his bastard to your half sister. He must not be
allowed to restore the castle to its former strength. We march
against him. Arnolf Karstark and Mors Umber will join us. I will
save your sister if I can, and nd a better match for her than
Ramsay Snow. You and your brothers must hold the Wall until I
can return.
It was signed, in a di erent hand,
Done in the Light of Lord, under the sign and seal of Stannis of
House Baratheon, the First of His Name, King of the Andals, the
Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and
Protector of the Realm.
The moment Jon set the letter aside, the parchment curled up
again, as if eager to protect its secrets. He was not at all sure how
he felt about what he had just read. Battles had been fought at
Winterfell before, but never one without a Stark on one side or the
other. “The castle is a shell,” he said, “not Winterfell, but the ghost
of Winterfell.” It was painful just to think of it, much less say the
words aloud. And still …
He wondered how many men old Crowfood would bring to the
fray, and how many swords Arnolf Karstark would be able to
conjure up. Half the Umbers would be across the eld with
Whoresbane, ghting beneath the ayed man of the Dreadfort, and
the greater part of the strength of both houses had gone south with

Robb, never to return. Even ruined, Winterfell itself would confer a
considerable advantage on whoever held it. Robert Baratheon
would have seen that at once and moved swiftly to secure the
castle, with the forced marches and midnight rides for which he had
been famous. Would his brother be as bold?
Not likely. Stannis was a deliberate commander, and his host was a
half-digested stew of clansmen, southron knights, king’s men and
queen’s men, salted with a few northern lords. He should move on
Winterfell swiftly, or not at all, Jon thought. It was not his place to
advise the king, but …
He glanced at the letter again. I will save your sister if I can. A
surprisingly tender sentiment from Stannis, though undercut by that
nal, brutal if I can and the addendum and nd a better match for her
than Ramsay Snow. But what if Arya was not there to be saved?
What if Lady Melisandre’s ames had told it true? Could his sister
truly have escaped such captors? How would she do that? Arya was
always quick and clever, but in the end she’s just a little girl, and Roose
Bolton is not the sort who would be careless with a prize of such great
worth.
What if Bolton never had his sister? This wedding could well be
just some ruse to lure Stannis into a trap. Eddard Stark had never
had any reason to complain of the Lord of the Dreadfort, so far as
Jon knew, but even so he had never trusted him, with his whispery
voice and his pale, pale eyes.
A grey girl on a dying horse, eeing from her marriage. On the
strength of those words he had loosed Mance Rayder and six
spearwives on the north. “Young ones, and pretty,” Mance had said.
The unburnt king supplied some names, and Dolorous Edd had done
the rest, smuggling them from Mole’s Town. It seemed like madness
now. He might have done better to strike down Mance the moment
he revealed himself. Jon had a certain grudging admiration for the
late King-Beyond-the-Wall, but the man was an oathbreaker and a
turncloak. He had even less trust in Melisandre. Yet somehow here
he was, pinning his hopes on them. All to save my sister. But the men
of the Night’s Watch have no sisters.

When Jon had been a boy at Winterfell, his hero had been the
Young Dragon, the boy king who had conquered Dorne at the age of
fourteen. Despite his bastard birth, or perhaps because of it, Jon
Snow had dreamed of leading men to glory just as King Daeron had,
of growing up to be a conqueror. Now he was a man grown and the
Wall was his, yet all he had were doubts. He could not even seem to
conquer those.

DAENERYS

T

he stench of the camp was so appalling it was all that Dany
could do not to gag.
Ser Barristan wrinkled up his nose, and said, “Your Grace should
not be here, breathing these black humors.”
“I am the blood of the dragon,” Dany reminded him. “Have you
ever seen a dragon with the ux?” Viserys had oft claimed that
Targaryens were untroubled by the pestilences that a icted
common men, and so far as she could tell, it was true. She could
remember being cold and hungry and afraid, but never sick.
“Even so,” the old knight said, “I would feel better if Your Grace
would return to the city.” The many-colored brick walls of Meereen
were half a mile back. “The bloody ux has been the bane of every
army since the Dawn Age. Let us distribute the food, Your Grace.”
“On the morrow. I am here now. I want to see.” She put her heels
into her silver. The others trotted after her. Jhogo rode before her,
Aggo and Rakharo just behind, long Dothraki whips in hand to keep
away the sick and dying. Ser Barristan was at her right, mounted on
a dapple grey. To her left was Symon Stripeback of the Free
Brothers and Marselen of the Mother’s Men. Three score soldiers
followed close behind the captains, to protect the food wagons.
Mounted men all, Dothraki and Brazen Beasts and freedmen, they
were united only by their distaste for this duty.
The Astapori stumbled after them in a ghastly procession that
grew longer with every yard they crossed. Some spoke tongues she
did not understand. Others were beyond speaking. Many lifted their
hands to Dany, or knelt as her silver went by. “Mother,” they called

to her, in the dialects of Astapor, Lys, and Old Volantis, in guttural
Dothraki and the liquid syllables of Qarth, even in the Common
Tongue of Westeros. “Mother, please … mother, help my sister, she
is sick … give me food for my little ones … please, my old
father … help him … help her … help me …”
I have no more help to give, Dany thought, despairing. The Astapori
had no place to go. Thousands remained outside Meereen’s thick
walls—men and women and children, old men and little girls and
newborn babes. Many were sick, most were starved, and all were
doomed to die. Daenerys dare not open her gates to let them in. She
had tried to do what she could for them. She had sent them healers,
Blue Graces and spell-singers and barber-surgeons, but some of
those had sickened as well, and none of their arts had slowed the
galloping progression of the ux that had come on the pale mare.
Separating the healthy from the sick had proved impractical as well.
Her Stalwart Shields had tried, pulling husbands away from wives
and children from their mothers, even as the Astapori wept and
kicked and pelted them with stones. A few days later, the sick were
dead and the healthy ones were sick. Dividing the one from the
other had accomplished nothing.
Even feeding them had grown di cult. Every day she sent them
what she could, but every day there were more of them and less
food to give them. It was growing harder to nd drivers willing to
deliver the food as well. Too many of the men they had sent into
the camp had been stricken by the ux themselves. Others had been
attacked on the way back to the city. Yesterday a wagon had been
overturned and two of her soldiers killed, so today the queen had
determined that she would bring the food herself. Every one of her
advisors had argued fervently against it, from Reznak and the
Shavepate to Ser Barristan, but Daenerys would not be moved. “I
will not turn away from them,” she said stubbornly. “A queen must
know the su erings of her people.”
Su ering was the only thing they did not lack. “There is scarcely
a horse or mule left, though many rode from Astapor,” Marselen
reported to her. “They’ve eaten every one, Your Grace, along with

every rat and scavenger dog that they could catch. Now some have
begun to eat their own dead.”
“Man must not eat the esh of man,” said Aggo.
“It is known,” agreed Rahkaro. “They will be cursed.”
“They’re past cursing,” said Symon Stripeback.
Little children with swollen stomachs trailed after them, too weak
or scared to beg. Gaunt men with sunken eyes squatted amidst sand
and stones, shitting out their lives in stinking streams of brown and
red. Many shat where they slept now, too feeble to crawl to the
ditches she’d commanded them to dig. Two women fought over a
charred bone. Nearby a boy of ten stood eating a rat. He ate onehanded, the other clutching a sharpened stick lest anyone try to
wrest away his prize. Unburied dead lay everywhere. Dany saw one
man sprawled in the dirt under a black cloak, but as she rode past
his cloak dissolved into a thousand ies. Skeletal women sat upon
the ground clutching dying infants. Their eyes followed her. Those
who had the strength called out. “Mother … please, Mother … bless
you, Mother …”
Bless me, Dany thought bitterly. Your city is gone to ash and bone,
your people are dying all around you. I have no shelter for you, no
medicine, no hope. Only stale bread and wormy meat, hard cheese, a
little milk. Bless me, bless me.
What kind of mother has no milk to feed her children?
“Too many dead,” Aggo said. “They should be burned.”
“Who will burn them?” asked Ser Barristan. “The bloody ux is
everywhere. A hundred die each night.”
“It is not good to touch the dead,” said Jhogo.
“This is known,” Aggo and Rakharo said, together.
“That may be so,” said Dany, “but this thing must be done, all the
same.” She thought a moment. “The Unsullied have no fear of
corpses. I shall speak to Grey Worm.”
“Your Grace,” said Ser Barristan, “the Unsullied are your best
ghters. We dare not loose this plague amongst them. Let the
Astapori bury their own dead.”
“They are too feeble,” said Symon Stripeback.
Dany said, “More food might make them stronger.”

Symon shook his head. “Food should not be wasted on the dying,
Your Worship. We do not have enough to feed the living.”
He was not wrong, she knew, but that did not make the words
any easier to hear. “This is far enough,” the queen decided. “We’ll
feed them here.” She raised a hand. Behind her the wagons bumped
to a halt, and her riders spread out around them, to keep the
Astapori from rushing at the food. No sooner had they stopped than
the press began to thicken around them, as more and more of the
a icted came limping and shambling toward the wagons. The
riders cut them o . “Wait your turn,” they shouted. “No pushing.
Back. Stay back. Bread for everyone. Wait your turn.”
Dany could only sit and watch. “Ser,” she said to Barristan Selmy,
“is there no more we can do? You have provisions.”
“Provisions for Your Grace’s soldiers. We may well need to
withstand a long siege. The Stormcrows and the Second Sons can
harry the Yunkishmen, but they cannot hope to turn them. If Your
Grace would allow me to assemble an army …”
“If there must be a battle, I would sooner ght it from behind the
walls of Meereen. Let the Yunkai’i try and storm my battlements.”
The queen surveyed the scene around her. “If we were to share our
food equally …”
“… the Astapori would eat through their portion in days, and we
would have that much less for the siege.”
Dany gazed across the camp, to the many-colored brick walls of
Meereen. The air was thick with ies and cries. “The gods have sent
this pestilence to humble me. So many dead … I will not have them
eating corpses.” She beckoned Aggo closer. “Ride to the gates and
bring me Grey Worm and fty of his Unsullied.”
“Khaleesi. The blood of your blood obeys.” Aggo touched his horse
with his heels and galloped o .
Ser Barristan watched with ill-concealed apprehension. “You
should not linger here overlong, Your Grace. The Astapori are being
fed, as you commanded. There’s no more we can do for the poor
wretches. We should repair back to the city.”
“Go if you wish, ser. I will not detain you. I will not detain any of
you.” Dany vaulted down from the horse. “I cannot heal them, but I

can show them that their Mother cares.”
Jhogo sucked in his breath. “Khaleesi, no.” The bell in his braid
rang softly as he dismounted. “You must not get any closer. Do not
let them touch you! Do not!”
Dany walked right past him. There was an old man on the ground
a few feet away, moaning and staring up at the grey belly of the
clouds. She knelt beside him, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and
pushed back his dirty grey hair to feel his brow. “His esh is on re.
I need water to bathe him. Seawater will serve. Marselen, will you
fetch some for me? I need oil as well, for the pyre. Who will help
me burn the dead?”
By the time Aggo returned with Grey Worm and fty of the
Unsullied loping behind his horse, Dany had shamed all of them into
helping her. Symon Stripeback and his men were pulling the living
from the dead and stacking up the corpses, while Jhogo and
Rakharo and their Dothraki helped those who could still walk
toward the shore to bathe and wash their clothes. Aggo stared at
them as if they had all gone mad, but Grey Worm knelt beside the
queen and said, “This one would be of help.”
Before midday a dozen res were burning. Columns of greasy
black smoke rose up to stain a merciless blue sky. Dany’s riding
clothes were stained and sooty as she stepped back from the pyres.
“Worship,” Grey Worm said, “this one and his brothers beg your
leave to bathe in the salt sea when our work here is done, that we
might be puri ed according to the laws of our great goddess.”
The queen had not known that the eunuchs had a goddess of their
own. “Who is this goddess? One of the gods of Ghis?”
Grey Worm looked troubled. “The goddess is called by many
names. She is the Lady of Spears, the Bride of Battle, the Mother of
Hosts, but her true name belongs only to these poor ones who have
burned their manhoods upon her altar. We may not speak of her to
others. This one begs your forgiveness.”
“As you wish. Yes, you may bathe if that is your desire. Thank
you for your help.”
“These ones live to serve you.”

When Daenerys returned to her pyramid, sore of limb and sick of
heart, she found Missandei reading some old scroll whilst Irri and
Jhiqui argued about Rakharo. “You are too skinny for him,” Jhiqui
was saying. “You are almost a boy. Rakharo does not bed with
boys. This is known.” Irri bristled back. “It is known that you are
almost a cow. Rakharo does not bed with cows.”
“Rakharo is blood of my blood. His life belongs to me, not you,”
Dany told the two of them. Rakharo had grown almost half a foot
during his time away from Meereen and returned with arms and
legs thick with muscle and four bells in his hair. He towered over
Aggo and Jhogo now, as her handmaids had both noticed. “Now be
quiet. I need to bathe.” She had never felt more soiled. “Jhiqui, help
me from these clothes, then take them away and burn them. Irri,
tell Qezza to nd me something light and cool to wear. The day was
very hot.”
A cool wind was blowing on her terrace. Dany sighed with
pleasure as she slipped into the waters of her pool. At her
command, Missandei stripped o her clothes and climbed in after
her. “This one heard the Astapori scratching at the walls last night,”
the little scribe said as she was washing Dany’s back.
Irri and Jhiqui exchanged a look. “No one was scratching,” said
Jhiqui. “Scratching … how could they scratch?”
“With their hands,” said Missandei. “The bricks are old and
crumbling. They are trying to claw their way into the city.”
“This would take them many years,” said Irri. “The walls are very
thick. This is known.”
“It is known,” agreed Jhiqui.
“I dream of them as well.” Dany took Missandei’s hand. “The
camp is a good half-mile from the city, my sweetling. No one was
scratching at the walls.”
“Your Grace knows best,” said Missandei. “Shall I wash your hair?
It is almost time. Reznak mo Reznak and the Green Grace are
coming to discuss—”
“—the wedding preparations.” Dany sat up with a splash. “I had
almost forgotten.” Perhaps I wanted to forget. “And after them, I am

to dine with Hizdahr.” She sighed. “Irri, bring the green tokar, the
silk one fringed with Myrish lace.”
“That one is being repaired, Khaleesi. The lace was torn. The blue
tokar has been cleaned.”
“Blue, then. They will be just as pleased.”
She was only half-wrong. The priestess and the seneschal were
happy to see her garbed in a tokar, a proper Meereenese lady for
once, but what they really wanted was to strip her bare. Daenerys
heard them out, incredulous. When they were done, she said, “I
have no wish to give o ense, but I will not present myself naked to
Hizdahr’s mother and sisters.”
“But,” said Reznak mo Reznak, blinking, “but you must, Your
Worship. Before a marriage it is traditional for the women of the
man’s house to examine the bride’s womb and, ah … her female
parts. To ascertain that they are well formed and, ah …”
“… fertile,” nished Galazza Galare. “An ancient ritual, Your
Radiance. Three Graces shall be present to witness the examination
and say the proper prayers.”
“Yes,” said Reznak, “and afterward there is a special cake. A
women’s cake, baked only for betrothals. Men are not allowed to
taste it. I am told it is delicious. Magical.”
And if my womb is withered and my female parts accursed, is there a
special cake for that as well? “Hizdahr zo Loraq may inspect my
women’s parts after we are wed.” Khal Drogo found no fault with
them, why should he? “Let his mother and his sisters examine one
another and share the special cake. I shall not be eating it. Nor shall
I wash the noble Hizdahr’s noble feet.”
“Magni cence, you do not understand,” protested Reznak. “The
washing of the feet is hallowed by tradition. It signi es that you
shall be your husband’s handmaid. The wedding garb is fraught with
meaning too. The bride is dressed in dark red veils above a tokar of
white silk, fringed with baby pearls.”
The queen of the rabbits must not be wed without her oppy ears. “All
those pearls will make me rattle when I walk.”
“The pearls symbolize fertility. The more pearls Your Worship
wears, the more healthy children she will bear.”

“Why would I want a hundred children?” Dany turned to the
Green Grace. “If we should wed by Westerosi rites …”
“The gods of Ghis would deem it no true union.” Galazza Galare’s
face was hidden behind a veil of green silk. Only her eyes showed,
green and wise and sad. “In the eyes of the city you would be the
noble Hizdahr’s concubine, not his lawful wedded wife. Your
children would be bastards. Your Worship must marry Hizdahr in
the Temple of the Graces, with all the nobility of Meereen on hand
to bear witness to your union.”
Get the heads of all the noble houses out of their pyramids on some
pretext, Daario had said. The dragon’s words are re and blood. Dany
pushed the thought aside. It was not worthy of her. “As you wish,”
she sighed. “I shall marry Hizdahr in the Temple of the Graces
wrapped in a white tokar fringed with baby pearls. Is there anything
else?”
“One more small matter, Your Worship,” said Reznak. “To
celebrate your nuptials, it would be most tting if you would allow
the ghting pits to open once again. It would be your wedding gift
to Hizdahr and to your loving people, a sign that you had embraced
the ancient ways and customs of Meereen.”
“And most pleasing to the gods as well,” the Green Grace added
in her soft and kindly voice.
A bride price paid in blood. Daenerys was weary of ghting this
battle. Even Ser Barristan did not think she could win. “No ruler can
make a people good,” Selmy had told her. “Baelor the Blessed
prayed and fasted and built the Seven as splendid a temple as any
gods could wish for, yet he could not put an end to war and want.”
A queen must listen to her people, Dany reminded herself. “After the
wedding Hizdahr will be king. Let him reopen the ghting pits if he
wishes. I want no part of it.” Let the blood be on his hands, not mine.
She rose. “If my husband wishes me to wash his feet, he must rst
wash mine. I will tell him so this evening.” She wondered how her
betrothed would take that.
She need not have been concerned. Hizdahr zo Loraq arrived an
hour after the sun had set. His own tokar was burgundy, with a
golden stripe and a fringe of golden beads. Dany told him of her

meeting with Reznak and the Green Grace as she was pouring wine
for him. “These rituals are empty,” Hizdahr declared, “just the sort
of thing we must sweep aside. Meereen has been steeped in these
foolish old traditions for too long.” He kissed her hand and said,
“Daenerys, my queen, I will gladly wash you from head to heel if
that is what I must do to be your king and consort.”
“To be my king and consort, you need only bring me peace.
Skahaz tells me you have had messages of late.”
“I have.” Hizdahr crossed his long legs. He looked pleased with
himself. “Yunkai will give us peace, but for a price. The disruption
of the slave trade has caused great injury throughout the civilized
world. Yunkai and her allies will require an indemnity of us, to be
paid in gold and gemstones.”
Gold and gems were easy. “What else?”
“The Yunkai’i will resume slaving, as before. Astapor will be
rebuilt, as a slave city. You will not interfere.”
“The Yunkai’i resumed their slaving before I was two leagues
from their city. Did I turn back? King Cleon begged me to join with
him against them, and I turned a deaf ear to his pleas. I want no war
with Yunkai. How many times must I say it? What promises do they
require?”
“Ah, there is the thorn in the bower, my queen,” said Hizdahr zo
Loraq. “Sad to say, Yunkai has no faith in your promises. They keep
plucking the same string on the harp, about some envoy that your
dragons set on re.”
“Only his tokar was burned,” said Dany scornfully.
“Be that as it may, they do not trust you. The men of New Ghis
feel the same. Words are wind, as you yourself have so oft said. No
words of yours will secure this peace for Meereen. Your foes
require deeds. They would see us wed, and they would see me
crowned as king, to rule beside you.”
Dany lled his wine cup again, wanting nothing so much as to
pour the agon over his head and drown his complacent smile.
“Marriage or carnage. A wedding or a war. Are those my choices?”
“I see only one choice, Your Radiance. Let us say our vows before
the gods of Ghis and make a new Meereen together.”

The queen was framing her response when she heard a step
behind her. The food, she thought. Her cooks had promised her to
serve the noble Hizdahr’s favorite meal, dog in honey, stu ed with
prunes and peppers. But when she turned to look, it was Ser
Barristan standing there, freshly bathed and clad in white, his
longsword at his side. “Your Grace,” he said, bowing, “I am sorry to
disturb you, but I thought that you would want to know at once.
The Stormcrows have returned to the city, with word of the foe.
The Yunkishmen are on the march, just as we had feared.”
A icker of annoyance crossed the noble face of Hizdahr zo Loraq.
“The queen is at her supper. These sellswords can wait.”
Ser Barristan ignored him. “I asked Lord Daario to make his
report to me, as Your Grace had commanded. He laughed and said
that he would write it out in his own blood if Your Grace would
send your little scribe to show him how to make the letters.”
“Blood?” said Dany, horri ed. “Is that a jape? No. No, don’t tell
me, I must see him for myself.” She was a young girl, and alone,
and young girls can change their minds. “Convene my captains and
commanders. Hizdahr, I know you will forgive me.”
“Meereen must come rst.” Hizdahr smiled genially. “We will
have other nights. A thousand nights.”
“Ser Barristan will show you out.” Dany hurried o , calling for
her handmaids. She would not welcome her captain home in a tokar.
In the end she tried a dozen gowns before she found one she liked,
but she refused the crown that Jhiqui o ered her.
As Daario Naharis took a knee before her, Dany’s heart gave a
lurch. His hair was matted with dried blood, and on his temple a
deep cut glistened red and raw. His right sleeve was bloody almost
to the elbow. “You’re hurt,” she gasped.
“This?” Daario touched his temple. “A crossbowman tried to put a
quarrel through my eye, but I outrode it. I was hurrying home to
my queen, to bask in the warmth of her smile.” He shook his sleeve,
spattering red droplets. “This blood is not mine. One of my
serjeants said we should go over to the Yunkai’i, so I reached down
his throat and pulled his heart out. I meant to bring it to you as a
gift for my silver queen, but four of the Cats cut me o and came

snarling and spitting after me. One almost caught me, so I threw the
heart into his face.”
“Very gallant,” said Ser Barristan, in a tone that suggested it was
anything but, “but do you have tidings for Her Grace?”
“Hard tidings, Ser Grandfather. Astapor is gone, and the slavers
are coming north in strength.”
“This is old news, and stale,” growled the Shavepate.
“Your mother said the same of your father’s kisses,” Daario
replied. “Sweet queen, I would have been here sooner, but the hills
are aswarm with Yunkish sellswords. Four free companies. Your
Stormcrows had to cut their way through all of them. There is
more, and worse. The Yunkai’i are marching their host up the coast
road, joined by four legions out of New Ghis. They have elephants,
a hundred, armored and towered. Tolosi slingers too, and a corps of
Qartheen camelry. Two more Ghiscari legions took ship at Astapor.
If our captives told it true, they will be landed beyond the
Skahazadhan to cut us o from the Dothraki sea.”
As he told his tale, from time to time a drop of bright red blood
would patter against the marble oor, and Dany would wince.
“How many men were killed?” she asked when he was done.
“Of ours? I did not stop to count. We gained more than we lost,
though.”
“More turncloaks?”
“More brave men drawn to your noble cause. My queen will like
them. One is an axeman from the Basilisk Isles, a brute, bigger than
Belwas. You should see him. Some Westerosi too, a score or more.
Deserters from the Windblown, unhappy with the Yunkai’i. They’ll
make good Stormcrows.”
“If you say.” Dany would not quibble. Meereen might soon have
need of every sword.
Ser Barristan frowned at Daario. “Captain, you made mention of
four free companies. We know of only three. The Windblown, the
Long Lances, and the Company of the Cat.”
“Ser Grandfather knows how to count. The Second Sons have
gone over to the Yunkai’i.” Daario turned his head and spat. “That’s

for Brown Ben Plumm. When next I see his ugly face I will open
him from throat to groin and rip out his black heart.”
Dany tried to speak and found no words. She remembered Ben’s
face the last time she had seen it. It was a warm face, a face I trusted.
Dark skin and white hair, the broken nose, the wrinkles at the
corners of his eyes. Even the dragons had been fond of old Brown
Ben, who liked to boast that he had a drop of dragon blood himself.
Three treasons will you know. Once for gold and once for blood and
once for love. Was Plumm the third treason, or the second? And
what did that make Ser Jorah, her gru old bear? Would she never
have a friend that she could trust? What good are prophecies if you
cannot make sense of them? If I marry Hizdahr before the sun comes up,
will all these armies melt away like morning dew and let me rule in
peace?
Daario’s announcement had sparked an uproar. Reznak was
wailing, the Shavepate was muttering darkly, her bloodriders were
swearing vengeance. Strong Belwas thumped his scarred belly with
his st and swore to eat Brown Ben’s heart with plums and onions.
“Please,” Dany said, but only Missandei seemed to hear. The queen
got to her feet. “Be quiet! I have heard enough.”
“Your Grace.” Ser Barristan went to one knee. “We are yours to
command. What would you have us do?”
“Continue as we planned. Gather food, as much as you can.” If I
look back I am lost. “We must close the gates and put every ghting
man upon the walls. No one enters, no one leaves.”
The hall was quiet for a moment. The men looked at one another.
Then Reznak said, “What of the Astapori?”
She wanted to scream, to gnash her teeth and tear her clothes and
beat upon the oor. Instead she said, “Close the gates. Will you make
me say it thrice?” They were her children, but she could not help
them now. “Leave me. Daario, remain. That cut should be washed,
and I have more questions for you.”
The others bowed and went. Dany took Daario Naharis up the
steps to her bedchamber, where Irri washed his cut with vinegar
and Jhiqui wrapped it in white linen. When that was done she sent

her handmaids o as well. “Your clothes are stained with blood,”
she told Daario. “Take them o .”
“Only if you do the same.” He kissed her.
His hair smelled of blood and smoke and horse, and his mouth
was hard and hot on hers. Dany trembled in his arms. When they
broke apart, she said, “I thought you would be the one to betray
me. Once for blood and once for gold and once for love, the
warlocks said. I thought … I never thought Brown Ben. Even my
dragons seemed to trust him.” She clutched her captain by the
shoulders. “Promise me that you will never turn against me. I could
not bear that. Promise me.”
“Never, my love.”
She believed him. “I swore that I should wed Hizdahr zo Loraq if
he gave me ninety days of peace, but now … I wanted you from the
rst time that I saw you, but you were a sellsword, ckle,
treacherous. You boasted that you’d had a hundred women.”
“A hundred?” Daario chuckled through his purple beard. “I lied,
sweet queen. It was a thousand. But never once a dragon.”
She raised her lips to his. “What are you waiting for?”

THE PRINCE OF WINTERFELL

T

he hearth was caked with cold black ash, the room unheated
but for candles. Every time a door opened their ames would sway
and shiver. The bride was shivering too. They had dressed her in
white lambswool trimmed with lace. Her sleeves and bodice were
sewn with freshwater pearls, and on her feet were white doeskin
slippers—pretty, but not warm. Her face was pale, bloodless.
A face carved of ice, Theon Greyjoy thought as he draped a furtrimmed cloak about her shoulders. A corpse buried in the snow. “My
lady. It is time.” Beyond the door, the music called them, lute and
pipes and drum.
The bride raised her eyes. Brown eyes, shining in the candlelight.
“I will be a good wife to him, and t-true. I … I will please him and
give him sons. I will be a better wife than the real Arya could have
been, he’ll see.”
Talk like that will get you killed, or worse. That lesson he had
learned as Reek. “You are the real Arya, my lady. Arya of House
Stark, Lord Eddard’s daughter, heir to Winterfell.” Her name, she
had to know her name. “Arya Underfoot. Your sister used to call
you Arya Horseface.”
“It was me made up that name. Her face was long and horsey.
Mine isn’t. I was pretty.” Tears spilled from her eyes at last. “I was
never beautiful like Sansa, but they all said I was pretty. Does Lord
Ramsay think I am pretty?”
“Yes,” he lied. “He’s told me so.”
“He knows who I am, though. Who I really am. I see it when he
looks at me. He looks so angry, even when he smiles, but it’s not

my fault. They say he likes to hurt people.”
“My lady should not listen to such … lies.”
“They say that he hurt you. Your hands, and …”
His mouth was dry. “I … I deserved it. I made him angry. You
must not make him angry. Lord Ramsay is a … a sweet man, and
kindly. Please him, and he will be good to you. Be a good wife.”
“Help me.” She clutched at him. “Please. I used to watch you in
the yard, playing with your swords. You were so handsome.” She
squeezed his arm. “If we ran away, I could be your wife, or
your … your whore … whatever you wanted. You could be my
man.”
Theon wrenched his arm away from her. “I’m no … I’m no one’s
man.” A man would help her. “Just … just be Arya, be his wife.
Please him, or … just please him, and stop this talk about being
someone else.” Jeyne, her name is Jeyne, it rhymes with pain. The
music was growing more insistent. “It is time. Wipe those tears
from your eyes.” Brown eyes. They should be grey. Someone will see.
Someone will remember. “Good. Now smile.”
The girl tried. Her lips, trembling, twitched up and froze, and he
could see her teeth. Pretty white teeth, he thought, but if she angers
him, they will not be pretty long. When he pushed the door open,
three of the four candles uttered out. He led the bride into the
mist, where the wedding guests were waiting.
“Why me?” he had asked when Lady Dustin told him he must give
the bride away.
“Her father is dead and all her brothers. Her mother perished at
the Twins. Her uncles are lost or dead or captive.”
“She has a brother still.” She has three brothers still, he might have
said. “Jon Snow is with the Night’s Watch.”
“A half-brother, bastard-born, and bound to the Wall. You were
her father’s ward, the nearest thing she has to living kin. It is only
tting that you give her hand in marriage.”
The nearest thing she has to living kin. Theon Greyjoy had grown up
with Arya Stark. Theon would have known an imposter. If he was
seen to accept Bolton’s feigned girl as Arya, the northern lords who
had gathered to bear witness to the match would have no grounds

to question her legitimacy. Stout and Slate, Whoresbane Umber, the
quarrelsome Ryswells, Hornwood men and Cerywn cousins, fat Lord
Wyman Manderly … not one of them had known Ned Stark’s
daughters half so well as he. And if a few entertained private
doubts, surely they would be wise enough to keep those misgivings
to themselves.
They are using me to cloak their deception, putting mine own face on
their lie. That was why Roose Bolton had clothed him as a lord
again, to play his part in this mummer’s farce. Once that was done,
once their false Arya had been wedded and bedded, Bolton would
have no more use for Theon Turncloak. “Serve us in this, and when
Stannis is defeated we will discuss how best to restore you to your
father’s seat,” his lordship had said in that soft voice of his, a voice
made for lies and whispers. Theon never believed a word of it. He
would dance this dance for them because he had no choice, but
afterward … He will give me back to Ramsay then, he thought, and
Ramsay will take a few more ngers and turn me into Reek once more.
Unless the gods were good, and Stannis Baratheon descended on
Winterfell and put all of them to the sword, himself included. That
was the best he could hope for.
It was warmer in the godswood, strange to say. Beyond its
con nes, a hard white frost gripped Winterfell. The paths were
treacherous with black ice, and hoarfrost sparkled in the moonlight
on the broken panes of the Glass Gardens. Drifts of dirty snow had
piled up against the walls, lling every nook and corner. Some were
so high they hid the doors behind them. Under the snow lay grey
ash and cinders, and here and there a blackened beam or a pile of
bones adorned with scraps of skin and hair. Icicles long as lances
hung from the battlements and fringed the towers like an old man’s
sti white whiskers. But inside the godswood, the ground remained
unfrozen, and steam rose o the hot pools, as warm as baby’s
breath.
The bride was garbed in white and grey, the colors the true Arya
would have worn had she lived long enough to wed. Theon wore
black and gold, his cloak pinned to his shoulder by a crude iron
kraken that a smith in Barrowton had hammered together for him.

But under the hood, his hair was white and thin, and his esh had
an old man’s greyish undertone. A Stark at last, he thought. Arm in
arm, the bride and he passed through an arched stone door, as wisps
of fog stirred round their legs. The drum was as tremulous as a
maiden’s heart, the pipes high and sweet and beckoning. Up above
the treetops, a crescent moon was oating in a dark sky, halfobscured by mist, like an eye peering through a veil of silk.
Theon Greyjoy was no stranger to this godswood. He had played
here as a boy, skipping stones across the cold black pool beneath
the weirwood, hiding his treasures in the bole of an ancient oak,
stalking squirrels with a bow he made himself. Later, older, he had
soaked his bruises in the hot springs after many a session in the
yard with Robb and Jory and Jon Snow. In amongst these chestnuts
and elms and soldier pines he had found secret places where he
could hide when he wanted to be alone. The rst time he had ever
kissed a girl had been here. Later, a di erent girl had made a man
of him upon a ragged quilt in the shade of that tall grey-green
sentinel.
He had never seen the godswood like this, though—grey and
ghostly, lled with warm mists and oating lights and whispered
voices that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Beneath
the trees, the hot springs steamed. Warm vapors rose from the
earth, shrouding the trees in their moist breath, creeping up the
walls to draw grey curtains across the watching windows.
There was a path of sorts, a meandering footpath of cracked
stones overgrown with moss, half-buried beneath blown dirt and
fallen leaves and made treacherous by thick brown roots pushing up
from underneath. He led the bride along it. Jeyne, her name is Jeyne,
it rhymes with pain. He must not think that, though. Should that
name pass his lips, it might cost him a nger or an ear. He walked
slowly, watching every step. His missing toes made him hobble
when he hurried, and it would not do to stumble. Mar Lord
Ramsay’s wedding with a misstep, and Lord Ramsay might rectify
such clumsiness by aying the o ending foot.
The mists were so thick that only the nearest trees were visible;
beyond them stood tall shadows and faint lights. Candles ickered

beside the wandering path and back amongst the trees, pale re ies
oating in a warm grey soup. It felt like some strange underworld,
some timeless place between the worlds, where the damned
wandered mournfully for a time before nding their way down to
whatever hell their sins had earned them. Are we all dead, then? Did
Stannis come and kill us in our sleep? Is the battle yet to come, or has it
been fought and lost?
Here and there a torch burned hungrily, casting its ruddy glow
over the faces of the wedding guests. The way the mists threw back
the shifting light made their features seem bestial, half-human,
twisted. Lord Stout became a masti , old Lord Locke a vulture,
Whoresbane Umber a gargoyle, Big Walder Frey a fox, Little
Walder a red bull, lacking only a ring for his nose. Roose Bolton’s
own face was a pale grey mask, with two chips of dirty ice where
his eyes should be.
Above their heads the trees were full of ravens, their feathers
u ed as they hunched on bare brown branches, staring down at
the pageantry below. Maester Luwin’s birds. Luwin was dead, and his
maester’s tower had been put to the torch, yet the ravens lingered.
This is their home. Theon wondered what that would be like, to have
a home.
Then the mists parted, like the curtain opening at a mummer
show to reveal some new tableau. The heart tree appeared in front
of them, its bony limbs spread wide. Fallen leaves lay about the
wide white trunk in drifts of red and brown. The ravens were the
thickest here, muttering to one another in the murderers’ secret
tongue. Ramsay Bolton stood beneath them, clad in high boots of
soft grey leather and a black velvet doublet slashed with pink silk
and glittering with garnet teardrops. A smile danced across his face.
“Who comes?” His lips were moist, his neck red above his collar.
“Who comes before the god?”
Theon answered. “Arya of House Stark comes here to be wed. A
woman grown and owered, trueborn and noble, she comes to beg
the blessings of the gods. Who comes to claim her?”
“Me,” said Ramsay. “Ramsay of House Bolton, Lord of the
Hornwood, heir to the Dreadfort. I claim her. Who gives her?”

“Theon of House Greyjoy, who was her father’s ward.” He turned
to the bride. “Lady Arya, will you take this man?”
She raised her eyes to his. Brown eyes, not grey. Are all of them so
blind? For a long moment she did not speak, but those eyes were
begging. This is your chance, he thought. Tell them. Tell them now.
Shout out your name before them all, tell them that you are not Arya
Stark, let all the north hear how you were made to play this part. It
would mean her death, of course, and his own as well, but Ramsay
in his wroth might kill them quickly. The old gods of the north
might grant them that small boon.
“I take this man,” the bride said in a whisper.
All around them lights glimmered through the mists, a hundred
candles pale as shrouded stars. Theon stepped back, and Ramsay
and his bride joined hands and knelt before the heart tree, bowing
their heads in token of submission. The weirwood’s carved red eyes
stared down at them, its great red mouth open as if to laugh. In the
branches overhead a raven quorked.
After a moment of silent prayer, the man and woman rose again.
Ramsay undid the cloak that Theon had slipped about his bride’s
shoulders moments before, the heavy white wool cloak bordered in
grey fur, emblazoned with the direwolf of House Stark. In its place
he fastened a pink cloak, spattered with red garnets like those upon
his doublet. On its back was the ayed man of the Dreadfort done in
sti red leather, grim and grisly.
Quick as that, it was done. Weddings went more quickly in the
north. It came of not having priests, Theon supposed, but whatever
the reason it seemed to him a mercy. Ramsay Bolton scooped his
wife up in his arms and strode through the mists with her. Lord
Bolton and his Lady Walda followed, then the rest. The musicians
began to play again, and the bard Abel began to sing “Two Hearts
That Beat as One.” Two of his women joined their voices to his own
to make a sweet harmony.
Theon found himself wondering if he should say a prayer. Will the
old gods hear me if I do? They were not his gods, had never been his
gods. He was ironborn, a son of Pyke, his god was the Drowned
God of the islands … but Winterfell was long leagues from the sea.

It had been a lifetime since any god had heard him. He did not
know who he was, or what he was, why he was still alive, why he
had ever been born.
“Theon,” a voice seemed to whisper.
His head snapped up. “Who said that?” All he could see were the
trees and the fog that covered them. The voice had been as faint as
rustling leaves, as cold as hate. A god’s voice, or a ghost’s. How many
died the day that he took Winterfell? How many more the day he
lost it? The day that Theon Greyjoy died, to be reborn as Reek. Reek,
Reek, it rhymes with shriek.
Suddenly he did not want to be here.
Once outside the godswood the cold descended on him like a
ravening wolf and caught him in its teeth. He lowered his head into
the wind and made for the Great Hall, hastening after the long line
of candles and torches. Ice crunched beneath his boots, and a sudden
gust pushed back his hood, as if a ghost had plucked at him with
frozen ngers, hungry to gaze upon his face.
Winterfell was full of ghosts for Theon Greyjoy.
This was not the castle he remembered from the summer of his
youth. This place was scarred and broken, more ruin than redoubt, a
haunt of crows and corpses. The great double curtain wall still
stood, for granite does not yield easily to re, but most of the
towers and keeps within were roo ess. A few had collapsed. The
thatch and timber had been consumed by re, in whole or in part,
and under the shattered panes of the Glass Garden the fruits and
vegetables that would have fed the castle during the winter were
dead and black and frozen. Tents lled the yard, half-buried in the
snow. Roose Bolton had brought his host inside the walls, along
with his friends the Freys; thousands huddled amongst the ruins,
crowding every court, sleeping in cellar vaults and under topless
towers, and in buildings abandoned for centuries.
Plumes of grey smoke snaked up from the rebuilt kitchens and
reroofed barracks keep. The battlements and crenellations were
crowned with snow and hung with icicles. All the color had been
leached from Winterfell until only grey and white remained. The
Stark colors. Theon did not know whether he ought to nd that

ominous or reassuring. Even the sky was grey. Grey and grey and
greyer. The whole world grey, everywhere you look, everything grey
except the eyes of the bride. The eyes of the bride were brown. Big
and brown and full of fear. It was not right that she should look to
him for rescue. What had she been thinking, that he would whistle
up a winged horse and y her out of here, like some hero in the
stories she and Sansa used to love? He could not even help himself.
Reek, Reek, it rhymes with meek.
All about the yard, dead men hung half-frozen at the end of
hempen ropes, swollen faces white with hoarfrost. Winterfell had
been crawling with squatters when Bolton’s van had reached the
castle. More than two dozen had been driven at spearpoint from the
nests they had made amongst the castle’s half-ruined keeps and
towers. The boldest and most truculent had been hanged, the rest
put to work. Serve well, Lord Bolton told them, and he would be
merciful. Stone and timber were plentiful with the wolfswood so
close at hand. Stout new gates had gone up rst, to replace those
that had been burned. Then the collapsed roof of the Great Hall had
been cleared away and a new one raised hurriedly in its stead.
When the work was done, Lord Bolton hanged the workers. True to
his word, he showed them mercy and did not ay a one.
By that time, the rest of Bolton’s army had arrived. They raised
King Tommen’s stag and lion above the walls of Winterfell as the
wind came howling from the north, and below it the ayed man of
the Dreadfort. Theon arrived in Barbrey Dustin’s train, with her
ladyship herself, her Barrowton levies, and the bride-to-be. Lady
Dustin had insisted that she should have custody of Lady Arya until
such time as she was wed, but now that time was done. She belongs
to Ramsay now. She said the words. By this marriage Ramsay would
be Lord of Winterfell. So long as Jeyne took care not to anger him,
he should have no cause to harm her. Arya. Her name is Arya.
Even inside fur-lined gloves, Theon’s hands had begun to throb
with pain. It was often his hands that hurt the worst, especially his
missing ngers. Had there truly been a time when women yearned
for his touch? I made myself the Prince of Winterfell, he thought, and
from that came all of this. He had thought that men would sing of

him for a hundred years and tell tales of his daring. But if anyone
spoke of him now, it was as Theon Turncloak, and the tales they
told were of his treachery. This was never my home. I was a hostage
here. Lord Stark had not treated him cruelly, but the long steel
shadow of his greatsword had always been between them. He was
kind to me, but never warm. He knew that one day he might need to put
me to death.
Theon kept his eyes downcast as he crossed the yard, weaving
between the tents. I learned to ght in this yard, he thought,
remembering warm summer days spent sparring with Robb and Jon
Snow under the watchful eyes of old Ser Rodrik. That was back
when he was whole, when he could grasp a sword hilt as well as
any man. But the yard held darker memories as well. This was
where he had assembled Stark’s people the night Bran and Rickon
ed the castle. Ramsay was Reek then, standing at his side,
whispering that he should ay a few of his captives to make them
tell him where the boys had gone. There will be no aying here whilst
I am Prince of Winterfell, Theon had responded, little dreaming how
short his rule would prove. None of them would help me. I had known
them all for half my life, and not one of them would help me. Even so,
he had done his best to protect them, but once Ramsay put Reek’s
face aside he’d slain all the men, and Theon’s ironborn as well. He
set my horse a re. That was the last sight he had seen the day the
castle fell: Smiler burning, the ames leaping from his mane as he
reared up, kicking, screaming, his eyes white with terror. Here in
this very yard.
The doors of the Great Hall loomed up in front of him; new-made,
to replace the doors that burned, they seemed crude and ugly to
him, raw planks hastily joined. A pair of spearmen guarded them,
hunched and shivering under thick fur cloaks, their beards crusty
with ice. They eyed Theon resentfully as he hobbled up the steps,
pushed against the right-hand door, and slipped inside.
The hall was blessedly warm and bright with torchlight, as
crowded as he had ever seen it. Theon let the heat wash over him,
then made his way toward the front of the hall. Men sat crammed
knee to knee along the benches, so tightly packed that the servers

had to squirm between them. Even the knights and lords above the
salt enjoyed less space than usual.
Up near the dais, Abel was plucking at his lute and singing “Fair
Maids of Summer.” He calls himself a bard. In truth he’s more a
pander. Lord Manderly had brought musicians from White Harbor,
but none were singers, so when Abel turned up at the gates with a
lute and six women, he had been made welcome. “Two sisters, two
daughters, one wife, and my old mother,” the singer claimed,
though not one looked like him. “Some dance, some sing, one plays
the pipe and one the drums. Good washerwomen too.”
Bard or pander, Abel’s voice was passable, his playing fair. Here
amongst the ruins, that was as much as anyone might expect.
Along the walls the banners hung: the horseheads of the Ryswells
in gold, brown, grey, and black; the roaring giant of House Umber;
the stone hand of House Flint of Flint’s Finger; the moose of
Hornwood and the merman of Manderly; Cerwyn’s black battle-axe
and the Tallhart pines. Yet their bright colors could not entirely
cover the blackened walls behind them, nor the boards that closed
the holes where windows once had been. Even the roof was wrong,
its raw new timbers light and bright, where the old rafters had been
stained almost black by centuries of smoke.
The largest banners were behind the dais, where the direwolf of
Winterfell and the ayed man of the Dreadfort hung back of the
bride and groom. The sight of the Stark banner hit Theon harder
than he had expected. Wrong, it’s wrong, as wrong as her eyes. The
arms of House Poole were a blue plate on white, framed by a grey
tressure. Those were the arms they should have hung.
“Theon Turncloak,” someone said as he passed. Other men turned
away at the sight of him. One spat. And why not? He was the traitor
who had taken Winterfell by treachery, slain his foster brothers,
delivered his own people to be ayed at Moat Cailin, and given his
foster sister to Lord Ramsay’s bed. Roose Bolton might make use of
him, but true northmen must despise him.
The missing toes on his left foot had left him with a crabbed,
awkward gait, comical to look upon. Back behind him, he heard a
woman laugh. Even here in this half-frozen lichyard of a castle,

surrounded by snow and ice and death, there were women.
Washerwomen. That was the polite way of saying camp follower,
which was the polite way of saying whore.
Where they came from Theon could not say. They just seemed to
appear, like maggots on a corpse or ravens after a battle. Every
army drew them. Some were hardened whores who could fuck
twenty men in a night and drink them all blind. Others looked as
innocent as maids, but that was just a trick of their trade. Some
were camp brides, bound to the soldiers they followed with words
whispered to one god or another but doomed to be forgotten once
the war was done. They would warm a man’s bed by night, patch
the holes in his boots at morning, cook his supper come dusk, and
loot his corpse after the battle. Some even did a bit of washing.
With them, oft as not, came bastard children, wretched, lthy
creatures born in one camp or the other. And even such as these
made mock of Theon Turncloak. Let them laugh. His pride had
perished here in Winterfell; there was no place for such in the
dungeons of the Dreadfort. When you have known the kiss of a
aying knife, a laugh loses all its power to hurt you.
Birth and blood accorded him a seat upon the dais at the end of
the high table, beside a wall. To his left sat Lady Dustin, clad as
ever in black wool, severe in cut and unadorned. To his right sat no
one. They are all afraid the dishonor might rub o on them. If he had
dared, he would have laughed.
The bride had the place of highest honor, between Ramsay and
his father. She sat with eyes downcast as Roose Bolton bid them
drink to Lady Arya. “In her children our two ancient houses will
become as one,” he said, “and the long enmity between Stark and
Bolton will be ended.” His voice was so soft that the hall grew
hushed as men strained to hear. “I am sorry that our good friend
Stannis has not seen t to join us yet,” he went on, to a ripple of
laughter, “as I know Ramsay had hoped to present his head to Lady
Arya as a wedding gift.” The laughs grew louder. “We shall give
him a splendid welcome when he arrives, a welcome worthy of true
northmen. Until that day, let us eat and drink and make

merry … for winter is almost upon us, my friends, and many of us
here shall not live to see the spring.”
The Lord of White Harbor had furnished the food and drink, black
stout and yellow beer and wines red and gold and purple, brought
up from the warm south on fat-bottomed ships and aged in his deep
cellars. The wedding guests gorged on cod cakes and winter squash,
hills of neeps and great round wheels of cheese, on smoking slabs of
mutton and beef ribs charred almost black, and lastly on three great
wedding pies, as wide across as wagon wheels, their aky crusts
stu ed to bursting with carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips,
mushrooms, and chunks of seasoned pork swimming in a savory
brown gravy. Ramsay hacked o slices with his falchion and
Wyman Manderly himself served, presenting the rst steaming
portions to Roose Bolton and his fat Frey wife, the next to Ser
Hosteen and Ser Aenys, the sons of Walder Frey. “The best pie you
have ever tasted, my lords,” the fat lord declared. “Wash it down
with Arbor gold and savor every bite. I know I shall.”
True to his word, Manderly devoured six portions, two from each
of the three pies, smacking his lips and slapping his belly and
stu ng himself until the front of his tunic was half-brown with
gravy stains and his beard was ecked with crumbs of crust. Even
Fat Walda Frey could not match his gluttony, though she did
manage three slices herself. Ramsay ate heartily as well, though his
pale bride did no more than stare at the portion set before her.
When she raised her head and looked at Theon, he could see the
fear behind her big brown eyes.
No longswords had been allowed within the hall, but every man
there wore a dagger, even Theon Greyjoy. How else to cut his
meat? Every time he looked at the girl who had been Jeyne Poole,
he felt the presence of that steel at his side. I have no way to save
her, he thought, but I could kill her easy enough. No one would expect
it. I could beg her for the honor of a dance and cut her throat. That
would be a kindness, wouldn’t it? And if the old gods hear my prayer,
Ramsay in his wroth might strike me dead as well. Theon was not
afraid to die. Underneath the Dreadfort, he had learned there were
far worse things than death. Ramsay had taught him that lesson,

nger by nger and toe by toe, and it was not one that he was ever
like to forget.
“You do not eat,” observed Lady Dustin.
“No.” Eating was hard for him. Ramsay had left him with so
many broken teeth that chewing was an agony. Drinking was easier,
though he had to grasp the wine cup with both hands to keep from
dropping it.
“No taste for pork pie, my lord? The best pork pie we ever tasted,
our fat friend would have us believe.” She gestured toward Lord
Manderly with her wine cup. “Have you ever seen a fat man so
happy? He is almost dancing. Serving with his own hands.”
It was true. The Lord of White Harbor was the very picture of the
jolly fat man, laughing and smiling, japing with the other lords and
slapping them on the back, calling out to the musicians for this tune
or that tune. “Give us ‘The Night That Ended,’ singer,” he bellowed.
“The bride will like that one, I know. Or sing to us of brave young
Danny Flint and make us weep.” To look at him, you would have
thought that he was the one newly wed.
“He’s drunk,” said Theon.
“Drowning his fears. He is craven to the bone, that one.”
Was he? Theon was not certain. His sons had been fat as well, but
they had not shamed themselves in battle. “Ironborn will feast
before a battle too. A last taste of life, should death await. If Stannis
comes …”
“He will. He must.” Lady Dustin chuckled. “And when he does,
the fat man will piss himself. His son died at the Red Wedding, yet
he’s shared his bread and salt with Freys, welcomed them beneath
his roof, promised one his granddaughter. He even serves them pie.
The Manderlys ran from the south once, hounded from their lands
and keeps by enemies. Blood runs true. The fat man would like to
kill us all, I do not doubt, but he does not have the belly for it, for
all his girth. Under that sweaty esh beats a heart as craven and
cringing as … well … yours.”
Her last word was a lash, but Theon dared not answer back in
kind. Any insolence would cost him skin. “If my lady believes Lord
Manderly wants to betray us, Lord Bolton is the one to tell.”

“You think Roose does not know? Silly boy. Watch him. Watch
how he watches Manderly. No dish so much as touches Roose’s lips
until he sees Lord Wyman eat of it rst. No cup of wine is sipped
until he sees Manderly drink of the same cask. I think he would be
pleased if the fat man attempted some betrayal. It would amuse
him. Roose has no feelings, you see. Those leeches that he loves so
well sucked all the passions out of him years ago. He does not love,
he does not hate, he does not grieve. This is a game to him, mildly
diverting. Some men hunt, some hawk, some tumble dice. Roose
plays with men. You and me, these Freys, Lord Manderly, his plump
new wife, even his bastard, we are but his playthings.” A serving
man was passing by. Lady Dustin held out her wine cup and let him
ll it, then gestured for him to do the same for Theon. “Truth be
told,” she said, “Lord Bolton aspires to more than mere lordship.
Why not King of the North? Tywin Lannister is dead, the Kingslayer
is maimed, the Imp is ed. The Lannisters are a spent force, and you
were kind enough to rid him of the Starks. Old Walder Frey will not
object to his fat little Walda becoming a queen. White Harbor might
prove troublesome should Lord Wyman survive this coming
battle … but I am quite sure that he will not. No more than Stannis.
Roose will remove both of them, as he removed the Young Wolf.
Who else is there?”
“You,” said Theon. “There is you. The Lady of Barrowton, a
Dustin by marriage, a Ryswell by birth.”
That pleased her. She took a sip of wine, her dark eyes sparkling,
and said, “The widow of Barrowton … and yes, if I so choose, I
could be an inconvenience. Of course, Roose sees that too, so he
takes care to keep me sweet.”
She might have said more, but then she saw the maesters. Three
of them had entered together by the lord’s door behind the dais—
one tall, one plump, one very young, but in their robes and chains
they were three grey peas from a black pod. Before the war,
Medrick had served Lord Hornwood, Rhodry Lord Cerwyn, and
young Henly Lord Slate. Roose Bolton had brought them all to
Winterfell to take charge of Luwin’s ravens, so messages might be
sent and received from here again.

As Maester Medrick went to one knee to whisper in Bolton’s ear,
Lady Dustin’s mouth twisted in distaste. “If I were queen, the rst
thing I would do would be to kill all those grey rats. They scurry
everywhere, living on the leavings of the lords, chittering to one
another, whispering in the ears of their masters. But who are the
masters and who are the servants, truly? Every great lord has his
maester, every lesser lord aspires to one. If you do not have a
maester, it is taken to mean that you are of little consequence. The
grey rats read and write our letters, even for such lords as cannot
read themselves, and who can say for a certainty that they are not
twisting the words for their own ends? What good are they, I ask
you?”
“They heal,” said Theon. It seemed to be expected of him.
“They heal, yes. I never said they were not subtle. They tend to
us when we are sick and injured, or distraught over the illness of a
parent or a child. Whenever we are weakest and most vulnerable,
there they are. Sometimes they heal us, and we are duly grateful.
When they fail, they console us in our grief, and we are grateful for
that as well. Out of gratitude we give them a place beneath our roof
and make them privy to all our shames and secrets, a part of every
council. And before too long, the ruler has become the ruled.
“That was how it was with Lord Rickard Stark. Maester Walys
was his grey rat’s name. And isn’t it clever how the maesters go by
only one name, even those who had two when they rst arrived at
the Citadel? That way we cannot know who they truly are or where
they come from … but if you are dogged enough, you can still nd
out. Before he forged his chain, Maester Walys had been known as
Walys Flowers. Flowers, Hill, Rivers, Snow … we give such names
to baseborn children to mark them for what they are, but they are
always quick to shed them. Walys Flowers had a Hightower girl for
a mother … and an archmaester of the Citadel for a father, it was
rumored. The grey rats are not as chaste as they would have us
believe. Oldtown maesters are the worst of all. Once he forged his
chain, his secret father and his friends wasted no time dispatching
him to Winterfell to ll Lord Rickard’s ears with poisoned words as

sweet as honey. The Tully marriage was his notion, never doubt it,
he—”
She broke o as Roose Bolton rose to his feet, pale eyes shining in
the torchlight. “My friends,” he began, and a hush swept through
the hall, so profound that Theon could hear the wind plucking at the
boards over the windows. “Stannis and his knights have left
Deepwood Motte, ying the banner of his new red god. The clans of
the northern hills come with him on their shaggy runtish horses. If
the weather holds, they could be on us in a fortnight. And Crowfood
Umber marches down the kingsroad, whilst the Karstarks approach
from the east. They mean to join with Lord Stannis here and take
this castle from us.”
Ser Hosteen Frey pushed to his feet. “We should ride forth to
meet them. Why allow them to combine their strength?”
Because Arnolf Karstark awaits only a sign from Lord Bolton before he
turns his cloak, thought Theon, as other lords began to shout out
counsel. Lord Bolton raised his hands for silence. “The hall is not the
place for such discussions, my lords. Let us adjourn to the solar
whilst my son consummates his marriage. The rest of you, remain
and enjoy the food and drink.”
As the Lord of the Dreadfort slipped out, attended by the three
maesters, other lords and captains rose to follow. Hother Umber,
the gaunt old man called Whoresbane, went grim-faced and
scowling. Lord Manderly was so drunk he required four strong men
to help him from the hall. “We should have a song about the Rat
Cook,” he was muttering, as he staggered past Theon, leaning on his
knights. “Singer, give us a song about the Rat Cook.”
Lady Dustin was amongst the last to bestir herself. When she had
gone, all at once the hall seemed sti ing. It was not until Theon
pushed himself to his feet that he realized how much he’d drunk.
When he stumbled from the table, he knocked a agon from the
hands of a serving girl. Wine splashed across his boots and breeches,
a dark red tide.
A hand grabbed his shoulder, ve ngers hard as iron digging
deep into his esh. “You’re wanted, Reek,” said Sour Alyn, his
breath foul with the smell from his rotten teeth. Yellow Dick and

Damon Dance-for-Me were with him. “Ramsay says you’re to bring
his bride to his bed.”
A shiver of fear went through him. I played my part, he thought.
Why me? He knew better than to object, though.
Lord Ramsay had already left the hall. His bride, forlorn and
seemingly forgotten, sat hunched and silent beneath the banner of
House Stark, clutching a silver goblet in both hands. Judging from
the way she looked at him when he approached, she had emptied
that goblet more than once. Perhaps she hoped that if she drank
enough, the ordeal would pass her by. Theon knew better. “Lady
Arya,” he said. “Come. It is time you did your duty.”
Six of the Bastard’s boys accompanied them as Theon led the girl
out the back of the hall and across the frigid yard to the Great Keep.
It was up three ights of stone steps to Lord Ramsay’s bedchamber,
one of the rooms the res had touched but lightly. As they climbed,
Damon Dance-for-Me whistled, whilst Skinner boasted that Lord
Ramsay had promised him a piece of the bloody sheet as a mark of
special favor.
The bedchamber had been well prepared for the consummation.
All the furnishings were new, brought up from Barrowton in the
baggage train. The canopy bed had a feather mattress and drapes of
blood-red velvet. The stone oor was covered with wolfskins. A re
was burning in the hearth, a candle on the bedside table. On the
sideboard was a agon of wine, two cups, and a half wheel of
veined white cheese.
There was a chair as well, carved of black oak with a red leather
seat. Lord Ramsay was seated in it when they entered. Spittle
glistened on his lips. “There’s my sweet maid. Good lads. You may
leave us now. Not you, Reek. You stay.”
Reek, Reek, it rhymes with peek. He could feel his missing ngers
cramping: two on his left hand, one on his right. And on his hip his
dagger rested, sleeping in its leather sheath, but heavy, oh so
heavy. It is only my pinky gone on my right hand, Theon reminded
himself. I can still grip a knife. “My lord. How may I serve you?”
“You gave the wench to me. Who better to unwrap the gift? Let’s
have a look at Ned Stark’s little daughter.”

She is no kin to Lord Eddard, Theon almost said. Ramsay knows, he
has to know. What new cruel game is this? The girl was standing by a
bedpost, trembling like a doe. “Lady Arya, if you will turn your
back, I must needs unlace your gown.”
“No.” Lord Ramsay poured himself a cup of wine. “Laces take too
long. Cut it o her.”
Theon drew the dagger. All I need do is turn and stab him. The knife
is in my hand. He knew the game by then. Another trap, he told
himself, remembering Kyra with her keys. He wants me to try to kill
him. And when I fail, he’ll ay the skin from the hand I used to hold the
blade. He grabbed a handful of the bride’s skirt. “Stand still, my
lady.” The gown was loose below the waist, so that was where he
slid the blade in, slicing upward slowly, so as not to cut her. Steel
whispered through wool and silk with a faint, soft sound. The girl
was shaking. Theon had to grab her arm to hold her still. Jeyne,
Jeyne, it rhymes with pain. He tightened his grip, as much as his
maimed left hand would allow. “Stay still.”
Finally the gown fell away, a pale tangle round her feet. “Her
smallclothes too,” Ramsay commanded. Reek obeyed.
When it was done the bride stood naked, her bridal nery a heap
of white and grey rags about her feet. Her breasts were small and
pointed, her hips narrow and girlish, her legs as skinny as a bird’s. A
child. Theon had forgotten how young she was. Sansa’s age. Arya
would be even younger. Despite the
re in the hearth, the
bedchamber was chilly. Jeyne’s pale skin was pebbled with
gooseprickles. There was a moment when her hands rose, as if to
cover her breasts, but Theon mouthed a silent no and she saw and
stopped at once.
“What do you think of her, Reek?” asked Lord Ramsay.
“She …” What answer does he want? What was it the girl had said,
before the godswood? They all said that I was pretty. She was not
pretty now. He could see a spiderweb of faint thin lines across her
back where someone had whipped her. “… she is beautiful, so … so
beautiful.”
Ramsay smiled his wet smile. “Does she make your cock hard,
Reek? Is it straining against your laces? Would you like to fuck her

rst?” He laughed. “The Prince of Winterfell should have that right,
as all lords did in days of old. The rst night. But you’re no lord, are
you? Only Reek. Not even a man, truth be told.” He took another
gulp of wine, then threw the cup across the room to shatter o a
wall. Red rivers ran down across the stone. “Lady Arya. Get on the
bed. Yes, against the pillows, that’s a good wife. Now spread your
legs. Let us see your cunt.”
The girl obeyed, wordless. Theon took a step back toward the
door. Lord Ramsay sat beside his bride, slid his hand along her inner
thigh, then jammed two ngers up inside her. The girl let out a gasp
of pain. “You’re dry as an old bone.” Ramsay pulled his hand free
and slapped her face. “I was told that you’d know how to please a
man. Was that a lie?”
“N-no, my lord. I was t-trained.”
Ramsay rose, the relight shining on his face. “Reek, get over
here. Get her ready for me.”
For a moment he did not understand. “I … do you
mean … m’lord, I have no … I …”
“With your mouth,” Lord Ramsay said. “And be quick about it. If
she’s not wet by the time I’m done disrobing, I will cut o that
tongue of yours and nail it to the wall.”
Somewhere in the godswood, a raven screamed. The dagger was
still in his hand.
He sheathed it.
Reek, my name is Reek, it rhymes with weak.
Reek bent to his task.

THE WATCHER

L

et us look upon this head,” his prince commanded.
Areo Hotah ran his hand along the smooth shaft of his longaxe,
his ash-and-iron wife, all the while watching. He watched the white
knight, Ser Balon Swann, and the others who had come with him.
He watched the Sand Snakes, each at a di erent table. He watched
the lords and ladies, the serving men, the old blind seneschal, and
the young maester Myles, with his silky beard and servile smile.
Standing half in light and half in shadow, he saw all of them. Serve.
Protect. Obey. That was his task.
All the rest had eyes only for the chest. It was carved of ebony,
with silver clasps and hinges. A ne-looking box, no doubt, but
many of those assembled here in the Old Palace of Sunspear might
soon be dead, depending on what was in that chest.
His slippers whispering against the oor, Maester Caleotte
crossed the hall to Ser Balon Swann. The round little man looked
splendid in his new robes, with their broad bands of dun and
butternut and narrow stripes of red. Bowing, he took the chest from
the hands of the white knight and carried it to the dais, where
Doran Martell sat in his rolling chair between his daughter Arianne
and his dead brother’s beloved paramour, Ellaria. A hundred scented
candles perfumed the air. Gemstones glittered on the ngers of the
lords and the girdles and hairnets of the ladies. Areo Hotah had
polished his shirt of copper scales mirror-bright so he would blaze in
the candlelight as well.
A hush had fallen across the hall. Dorne holds its breath. Maester
Caleotte set the box on the oor beside Prince Doran’s chair. The

maester’s ngers, normally so sure and deft, turned clumsy as he
worked the latch and opened the lid, to reveal the skull within.
Hotah heard someone clear his throat. One of the Fowler twins
whispered something to the other. Ellaria Sand had closed her eyes
and was murmuring a prayer.
Ser Balon Swann was taut as a drawn bow, the captain of guards
observed. This new white knight was not so tall nor comely as the
old one, but he was bigger across the chest, burlier, his arms thick
with muscle. His snowy cloak was clasped at the throat by two
swans on a silver brooch. One was ivory, the other onyx, and it
seemed to Areo Hotah as if the two of them were ghting. The man
who wore them looked a ghter too. This one will not die so easy as
the other. He will not charge into my axe the way Ser Arys did. He will
stand behind his shield and make me come at him. If it came to that,
Hotah would be ready. His longaxe was sharp enough to shave
with.
He allowed himself a brief glance at the chest. The skull rested on
a bed of black felt, grinning. All skulls grinned, but this one seemed
happier than most. And bigger. The captain of guards had never seen
a larger skull. Its brow shelf was thick and heavy, its jaw massive.
The bone shone in the candlelight, white as Ser Balon’s cloak. “Place
it on the pedestal,” the prince commanded. He had tears glistening
in his eyes.
The pedestal was a column of black marble three feet taller than
Maester Caleotte. The fat little maester hopped up on his toes but
still could not quite reach. Areo Hotah was about to go and help
him, but Obara Sand moved rst. Even without her whip and shield,
she had an angry mannish look to her. In place of a gown, she wore
men’s breeches and a calf-length linen tunic, cinched at the waist
with a belt of copper suns. Her brown hair was tied back in a knot.
Snatching the skull from the maester’s soft pink hands, she placed it
up atop the marble column.
“The Mountain rides no more,” the prince said, gravely.
“Was his dying long and hard, Ser Balon?” asked Tyene Sand, in
the tone a maiden might use to ask if her gown was pretty.

“He screamed for days, my lady,” the white knight replied,
though it was plain that it pleased him little to say so. “We could
hear him all over the Red Keep.”
“Does that trouble you, ser?” asked the Lady Nym. She wore a
gown of yellow silk so sheer and ne that the candles shone right
through it to reveal the spun gold and jewels beneath. So immodest
was her garb that the white knight seemed uncomfortable looking
at her, but Hotah approved. Nymeria was least dangerous when
nearly naked. Elsewise she was sure to have a dozen blades
concealed about her person. “Ser Gregor was a bloody brute, all
men agree. If ever a man deserved to su er, it was him.”
“That is as it may be, my lady,” said Balon Swann, “but Ser
Gregor was a knight, and a knight should die with sword in hand.
Poison is a foul and lthy way to kill.”
Lady Tyene smiled at that. Her gown was cream and green, with
long lace sleeves, so modest and so innocent that any man who
looked at her might think her the most chaste of maids. Areo Hotah
knew better. Her soft, pale hands were as deadly as Obara’s callused
ones, if not more so. He watched her carefully, alert to every little
utter of her ngers.
Prince Doran frowned. “That is so, Ser Balon, but the Lady Nym is
right. If ever a man deserved to die screaming, it was Gregor
Clegane. He butchered my good sister, smashed her babe’s head
against a wall. I only pray that now he is burning in some hell, and
that Elia and her children are at peace. This is the justice that Dorne
has hungered for. I am glad that I lived long enough to taste it. At
long last the Lannisters have proved the truth of their boast and
paid this old blood debt.”
The prince left it to Ricasso, his blind seneschal, to rise and
propose the toast. “Lords and ladies, let us all now drink to
Tommen, the First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar,
and the First Men, and Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.”
Serving men had begun to move amongst the guests as the
seneschal was speaking, lling cups from the agons that they bore.
The wine was Dornish strongwine, dark as blood and sweet as
vengeance. The captain did not drink of it. He never drank at feasts.

Nor did the prince himself partake. He had his own wine, prepared
by Maester Myles and well laced with poppy juice to ease the agony
in his swollen joints.
The white knight did drink, as was only courteous. His
companions likewise. So did the Princess Arianne, Lady Jordayne,
the Lord of Godsgrace, the Knight of Lemonwood, the Lady of
Ghost Hill … even Ellaria Sand, Prince Oberyn’s beloved paramour,
who had been with him in King’s Landing when he died. Hotah paid
more note to those who did not drink: Ser Daemon Sand, Lord
Tremond Gargalen, the Fowler twins, Dagos Manwoody, the Ullers
of the Hellholt, the Wyls of the Boneway. If there is trouble, it could
start with one of them. Dorne was an angry and divided land, and
Prince Doran’s hold on it was not as rm as it might be. Many of his
own lords thought him weak and would have welcomed open war
with the Lannisters and the boy king on the Iron Throne.
Chief amongst those were the Sand Snakes, the bastard daughters
of the prince’s late brother Oberyn, the Red Viper, three of whom
were at the feast. Doran Martell was the wisest of princes, and it
was not the place of his captain of guards to question his decisions,
but Areo Hotah did wonder why he had chosen to release the ladies
Obara, Nymeria, and Tyene from their lonely cells in the Spear
Tower.
Tyene declined Ricasso’s toast with a murmur and Lady Nym with
a ick of a hand. Obara let them ll her cup to the brim, then
upended it to spill the red wine on the oor. When a serving girl
knelt to wipe up the spilled wine, Obara left the hall. After a
moment Princess Arianne excused herself and went after her. Obara
would never turn her rage on the little princess, Hotah knew. They are
cousins, and she loves her well.
The feast continued late into the night, presided over by the
grinning skull on its pillar of black marble. Seven courses were
served, in honor of the seven gods and the seven brothers of the
Kingsguard. The soup was made with eggs and lemons, the long
green peppers stu ed with cheese and onions. There were lamprey
pies, capons glazed with honey, a whisker sh from the bottom of
the Greenblood that was so big it took four serving men to carry it

to table. After that came a savory snake stew, chunks of seven
di erent sorts of snake slow-simmered with dragon peppers and
blood oranges and a dash of venom to give it a good bite. The stew
was ery hot, Hotah knew, though he tasted none of it. Sherbet
followed, to cool the tongue. For the sweet, each guest was served a
skull of spun sugar. When the crust was broken, they found sweet
custard inside and bits of plum and cherry.
Princess Arianne returned in time for the stu ed peppers. My little
princess, Hotah thought, but Arianne was a woman now. The scarlet
silks she wore left no doubt of that. Of late she had changed in
other ways as well. Her plot to crown Myrcella had been betrayed
and smashed, her white knight had perished bloodily at Hotah’s
hand, and she herself had been con ned to the Spear Tower,
condemned to solitude and silence. All of that had chastened her.
There was something else as well, though, some secret her father
had con ded in her before releasing her from her con nement.
What that was, the captain did not know.
The prince had placed his daughter between himself and the
white knight, a place of high honor. Arianne smiled as she slipped
into her seat again, and murmured something in Ser Balon’s ear.
The knight did not choose to respond. He ate little, Hotah observed:
a spoon of soup, a bite of the pepper, the leg o a capon, some sh.
He shunned the lamprey pie and tried only one small spoonful of
the stew. Even that made his brow break out in sweat. Hotah could
sympathize. When rst he came to Dorne, the ery food would tie
his bowels in knots and burn his tongue. That was years ago,
however; now his hair was white, and he could eat anything a
Dornishman could eat.
When the spun-sugar skulls were served, Ser Balon’s mouth grew
tight, and he gave the prince a lingering look to see if he was being
mocked. Doran Martell took no notice, but his daughter did. “It is
the cook’s little jape, Ser Balon,” said Arianne. “Even death is not
sacred to a Dornishmen. You won’t be cross with us, I pray?” She
brushed the back of the white knight’s hand with her ngers. “I
hope you have enjoyed your time in Dorne.”
“Everyone has been most hospitable, my lady.”

Arianne touched the pin that clasped his cloak, with its quarreling
swans. “I have always been fond of swans. No other bird is half so
beautiful, this side of the Summer Isles.”
“Your peacocks might dispute that,” said Ser Balon.
“They might,” said Arianne, “but peacocks are vain, proud
creatures, strutting about in all those gaudy colors. Give me a swan
serene in white or beautiful in black.”
Ser Balon gave a nod and sipped his wine. This one is not so easily
seduced as was his Sworn Brother, Hotah thought. Ser Arys was a boy,
despite his years. This one is a man, and wary. The captain had only to
look at him to see that the white knight was ill at ease. This place is
strange to him, and little to his liking. Hotah could understand that.
Dorne had seemed a queer place to him as well when rst he came
here with his own princess, many years ago. The bearded priests
had drilled him on the Common Speech of Westeros before they
sent him forth, but the Dornishmen all spoke too quickly for him to
understand. Dornish women were lewd, Dornish wine was sour, and
Dornish food was full of queer hot spices. And the Dornish sun was
hotter than the pale, wan sun of Norvos, glaring down from a blue
sky day after day.
Ser Balon’s journey had been shorter but troubling in its own
way, the captain knew. Three knights, eight squires, twenty men-atarms, and sundry grooms and servants had accompanied him from
King’s Landing, but once they crossed the mountains into Dorne
their progress had been slowed by a round of feasts, hunts, and
celebrations at every castle that they chanced to pass. And now that
they had reached Sunspear, neither Princess Myrcella nor Ser Arys
Oakheart was on hand to greet them. The white knight knows that
something is amiss, Hotah could tell, but it is more than that. Perhaps
the presence of the Sand Snakes unnerved him. If so, Obara’s return
to the hall must have been vinegar in the wound. She slipped back
into her place without a word, and sat there sullen and scowling,
neither smiling nor speaking.
Midnight was close at hand when Prince Doran turned to the
white knight and said, “Ser Balon, I have read the letter that you

brought me from our gracious queen. Might I assume that you are
familiar with its contents, ser?”
Hotah saw the knight tense. “I am, my lord. Her Grace informed
me that I might be called upon to escort her daughter back to King’s
Landing. King Tommen has been pining for his sister and would like
Princess Myrcella to return to court for a short visit.”
Princess Arianne made a sad face. “Oh, but we have all grown so
fond of Myrcella, ser. She and my brother Trystane have become
inseparable.”
“Prince Trystane would be welcome in King’s Landing as well,”
said Balon Swann. “King Tommen would wish to meet him, I am
sure. His Grace has so few companions near his own age.”
“The bonds formed in boyhood can last a man for life,” said
Prince Doran. “When Trystane and Myrcella wed, he and Tommen
will be as brothers. Queen Cersei has the right of it. The boys
should meet, become friends. Dorne will miss him, to be sure, but it
is past time Trystane saw something of the world beyond the walls
of Sunspear.”
“I know King’s Landing will welcome him most warmly.”
Why is he sweating now? the captain wondered, watching. The hall
is cool enough, and he never touched the stew.
“As for the other matter that Queen Cersei raises,” Prince Doran
was saying, “it is true, Dorne’s seat upon the small council has been
vacant since my brother’s death, and it is past time that it was lled
again. I am attered that Her Grace feels my counsel might be of
use to her, though I wonder if I have the strength for such a
journey. Perhaps if we went by sea?”
“By ship?” Ser Balon seemed taken aback. “That … would that be
safe, my prince? Autumn is a bad season for storms, or so I’ve
heard, and … the pirates in the Stepstones, they …”
“The pirates. To be sure. You may be right, ser. Safer to return
the way you came.” Prince Doran smiled pleasantly. “Let us talk
again on the morrow. When we reach the Water Gardens, we can
tell Myrcella. I know how excited she will be. She misses her
brother too, I do not doubt.”

“I am eager to see her once again,” said Ser Balon. “And to visit
your Water Gardens. I’ve heard they are very beautiful.”
“Beautiful and peaceful,” the prince said. “Cool breezes, sparkling
water, and the laughter of children. The Water Gardens are my
favorite place in this world, ser. One of my ancestors had them built
to please his Targaryen bride and free her from the dust and heat of
Sunspear. Daenerys was her name. She was sister to King Daeron the
Good, and it was her marriage that made Dorne part of the Seven
Kingdoms. The whole realm knew that the girl loved Daeron’s
bastard brother Daemon Blackfyre, and was loved by him in turn,
but the king was wise enough to see that the good of thousands
must come before the desires of two, even if those two were dear to
him. It was Daenerys who lled the gardens with laughing children.
Her own children at the start, but later the sons and daughters of
lords and landed knights were brought in to be companions to the
boys and girls of princely blood. And one summer’s day when it was
scorching hot, she took pity on the children of her grooms and
cooks and serving men and invited them to use the pools and
fountains too, a tradition that has endured till this day.” The prince
grasped the wheels of his chair and pushed himself from the table.
“But now you must excuse me, ser. All this talk has wearied me, and
we should leave at break of day. Obara, would you be so kind as to
help me to my bed? Nymeria, Tyene, come as well, and bid your
old uncle a fond good night.”
So it fell to Obara Sand to roll the prince’s chair from Sunspear’s
feast hall and down a long gallery to his solar. Areo Hotah followed
with her sisters, along with Princess Arianne and Ellaria Sand.
Maester Caleotte hurried behind on slippered feet, cradling the
Mountain’s skull as if it were a child.
“You cannot seriously intend to send Trystane and Myrcella to
King’s Landing,” Obara said as she was pushing. Her strides were
long and angry, much too fast, and the chair’s big wooden wheels
clacked noisily across rough-cut stone oors. “Do that, and we will
never see the girl again, and your son will spend his life a hostage
to the Iron Throne.”

“Do you take me for a fool, Obara?” The prince sighed. “There is
much you do not know. Things best not discussed here, where
anyone can hear. If you hold your tongue, I may enlighten you.” He
winced. “Slower, for the love you bear me. That last jolt sent a knife
right through my knee.”
Obara slowed her pace by half. “What will you do, then?”
Her sister Tyene gave answer. “What he always does,” she
purred. “Delay, obscure, prevaricate. Oh, no one does that half so
well as our brave uncle.”
“You do him wrong,” said Princess Arianne.
“Be quiet, all of you,” the prince commanded.
Not until the doors of his solar were safely closed behind them
did he wheel his chair about to face the women. Even that e ort left
him breathless, and the Myrish blanket that covered his legs caught
between two spokes as he rolled, so he had to clutch it to keep it
from being torn away. Beneath the coverlet, his legs were pale,
soft, ghastly. Both of his knees were red and swollen, and his toes
were almost purple, twice the size they should have been. Areo
Hotah had seen them a thousand times and still found them hard to
look upon.
Princess Arianne came forward. “Let me help you, Father.”
The prince pulled the blanket free. “I can still master mine own
blanket. That much at least.” It was little enough. His legs had been
useless for three years, but there was still some strength in his
hands and shoulders.
“Shall I fetch my prince a thimble cup of milk of the poppy?”
Maester Caleotte asked.
“I would need a bucket, with this pain. Thank you, but no. I want
my wits about me. I’ll have no more need of you tonight.”
“Very good, my prince.” Maester Caleotte bowed, Ser Gregor’s
head still clutched in his soft pink hands.
“I’ll take that.” Obara Sand plucked the skull from him and held it
at arm’s length. “What did the Mountain look like? How do we
know that this is him? They could have dipped the head in tar. Why
strip it to the bone?”

“Tar would have ruined the box,” suggested Lady Nym, as
Maester Caleotte scurried o . “No one saw the Mountain die, and no
one saw his head removed. That troubles me, I confess, but what
could the bitch queen hope to accomplish by deceiving us? If Gregor
Clegane is alive, soon or late the truth will out. The man was eight
feet tall, there is not another like him in all of Westeros. If any such
appears again, Cersei Lannister will be exposed as a liar before all
the Seven Kingdoms. She would be an utter fool to risk that. What
could she hope to gain?”
“The skull is large enough, no doubt,” said the prince. “And we
know that Oberyn wounded Gregor grievously. Every report we
have had since claims that Clegane died slowly, in great pain.”
“Just as Father intended,” said Tyene. “Sisters, truly, I know the
poison Father used. If his spear so much as broke the Mountain’s
skin, Clegane is dead, I do not care how big he was. Doubt your
little sister if you like, but never doubt our sire.”
Obara bristled. “I never did and never shall.” She gave the skull a
mocking kiss. “This is a start, I’ll grant.”
“A start?” said Ellaria Sand, incredulous. “Gods forbid. I would it
were a nish. Tywin Lannister is dead. So are Robert Baratheon,
Amory Lorch, and now Gregor Clegane, all those who had a hand in
murdering Elia and her children. Even Jo rey, who was not yet
born when Elia died. I saw the boy perish with mine own eyes,
clawing at his throat as he tried to draw a breath. Who else is there
to kill? Do Myrcella and Tommen need to die so the shades of
Rhaenys and Aegon can be at rest? Where does it end?”
“It ends in blood, as it began,” said Lady Nym. “It ends when
Casterly Rock is cracked open, so the sun can shine on the maggots
and the worms within. It ends with the utter ruin of Tywin
Lannister and all his works.”
“The man died at the hand of his own son,” Ellaria snapped back.
“What more could you wish?”
“I could wish that he died at my hand.” Lady Nym settled in a
chair, her long black braid falling across one shoulder to her lap.
She had her father’s widow’s peak. Beneath it her eyes were large

and lustrous. Her wine-red lips curled in a silken smile. “If he had,
his dying would not have been so easy.”
“Ser Gregor does look lonely,” said Tyene, in her sweet septa’s
voice. “He would like some company, I’m certain.”
Ellaria’s cheeks were wet with tears, her dark eyes shining. Even
weeping, she has a strength in her, the captain thought.
“Oberyn wanted vengeance for Elia. Now the three of you want
vengeance for him. I have four daughters, I remind you. Your
sisters. My Elia is fourteen, almost a woman. Obella is twelve, on
the brink of maidenhood. They worship you, as Dorea and Loreza
worship them. If you should die, must El and Obella seek vengeance
for you, then Dorea and Loree for them? Is that how it goes, round
and round forever? I ask again, where does it end?” Ellaria Sand laid
her hand on the Mountain’s head. “I saw your father die. Here is his
killer. Can I take a skull to bed with me, to give me comfort in the
night? Will it make me laugh, write me songs, care for me when I
am old and sick?”
“What would you have us do, my lady?” asked the Lady Nym.
“Shall we lay down our spears and smile, and forget all the wrongs
that have been done to us?”
“War will come, whether we wish it or not,” said Obara. “A boy
king sits the Iron Throne. Lord Stannis holds the Wall and is
gathering northmen to his cause. The two queens are squabbling
over Tommen like bitches with a juicy bone. The ironmen have
taken the Shields and are raiding up the Mander, deep into the heart
of the Reach, which means Highgarden will be preoccupied as well.
Our enemies are in disarray. The time is ripe.”
“Ripe for what? To make more skulls?” Ellaria Sand turned to the
prince. “They will not see. I can hear no more of this.”
“Go back to your girls, Ellaria,” the prince told her. “I swear to
you, no harm will come to them.”
“My prince.” Ellaria kissed him on the brow and took her leave.
Areo Hotah was sad to see her go. She is a good woman.
When she had gone, Lady Nym said, “I know she loved our father
well, but it is plain she never understood him.”

The prince gave her a curious look. “She understood more than
you ever will, Nymeria. And she made your father happy. In the end
a gentle heart may be worth more than pride or valor. Be that as it
may, there are things Ellaria does not know and should not know.
This war has already begun.”
Obara laughed. “Aye, our sweet Arianne has seen to that.”
The princess ushed, and Hotah saw a spasm of anger pass across
her father’s face. “What she did, she did as much for you as for
herself. I would not be so quick to mock.”
“That was praise,” Obara Sand insisted. “Procrastinate, obscure,
prevaricate, dissemble, and delay all you like, Uncle, Ser Balon must
still come face-to-face with Myrcella at the Water Gardens, and
when he does he’s like to see she’s short an ear. And when the girl
tells him how your captain cut Arys Oakheart from neck to groin
with that steel wife of his, well …”
“No.” Princess Arianne unfolded from the cushion where she sat
and put a hand on Hotah’s arm. “That wasn’t how it happened,
Cousin. Ser Arys was slain by Gerold Dayne.”
The Sand Snakes looked at one another. “Darkstar?”
“Darkstar did it,” his little princess said. “He tried to kill Princess
Myrcella too. As she will tell Ser Balon.”
Nym smiled. “That part at least is true.”
“It is all true,” said the prince, with a wince of pain. Is it his gout
that hurts him, or the lie? “And now Ser Gerold has ed back to High
Hermitage, beyond our reach.”
“Darkstar,” Tyene murmured, with a giggle. “Why not? It is all
his doing. But will Ser Balon believe it?”
“He will if he hears it from Myrcella,” Arianne insisted.
Obara snorted in disbelief. “She may lie today and lie tomorrow,
but soon or late she’ll tell the truth. If Ser Balon is allowed to carry
tales back to King’s Landing, drums will sound and blood will ow.
He should not be allowed to leave.”
“We could kill him, to be sure,” said Tyene, “but then we would
need to kill the rest of his party too, even those sweet young
squires. That would be … oh, so messy.”

Prince Doran shut his eyes and opened them again. Hotah could
see his leg trembling underneath the blanket. “If you were not my
brother’s daughters, I would send the three of you back to your cells
and keep you there until your bones were grey. Instead I mean to
take you with us to the Water Gardens. There are lessons there if
you have the wit to see them.”
“Lessons?” said Obara. “All I’ve seen are naked children.”
“Aye,” the prince said. “I told the story to Ser Balon, but not all of
it. As the children splashed in the pools, Daenerys watched from
amongst the orange trees, and a realization came to her. She could
not tell the highborn from the low. Naked, they were only children.
All innocent, all vulnerable, all deserving of long life, love,
protection. ‘There is your realm,’ she told her son and heir, ‘remember
them, in everything you do.’ My own mother said those same words
to me when I was old enough to leave the pools. It is an easy thing
for a prince to call the spears, but in the end the children pay the
price. For their sake, the wise prince will wage no war without
good cause, nor any war he cannot hope to win.
“I am not blind, nor deaf. I know that you all believe me weak,
frightened, feeble. Your father knew me better. Oberyn was ever
the viper. Deadly, dangerous, unpredictable. No man dared tread on
him. I was the grass. Pleasant, complaisant, sweet-smelling,
swaying with every breeze. Who fears to walk upon the grass? But
it is the grass that hides the viper from his enemies and shelters him
until he strikes. Your father and I worked more closely than you
know … but now he is gone. The question is, can I trust his
daughters to serve me in his place?”
Hotah studied each of them in turn. Obara, rusted nails and boiled
leather, with her angry, close-set eyes and rat-brown hair. Nymeria,
languid, elegant, olive-skinned, her long black braid bound up in
red-gold wire. Tyene, blue-eyed and blond, a child-woman with her
soft hands and little giggles.
Tyene answered for the three of them. “It is doing nothing that is
hard, Uncle. Set a task for us, any task, and you shall nd us as leal
and obedient as any prince could hope for.”

“That is good to hear,” the prince said, “but words are wind. You
are my brother’s daughters and I love you, but I have learned I
cannot trust you. I want your oath. Will you swear to serve me, to
do as I command?”
“If we must,” said Lady Nym.
“Then swear it now, upon your father’s grave.”
Obara’s face darkened. “If you were not my uncle—”
“I am your uncle. And your prince. Swear, or go.”
“I swear,” said Tyene. “On my father’s grave.”
“I swear,” said Lady Nym. “By Oberyn Martell, the Red Viper of
Dorne, and a better man than you.”
“Aye,” said Obara. “Me as well. By Father. I swear.”
Some of the tension went out of the prince. Hotah saw him sag
back into his chair. He held out his hand, and Princess Arianne
moved to his side to hold it. “Tell them, Father.”
Prince Doran took a jagged breath. “Dorne still has friends at
court. Friends who tell us things we were not meant to know. This
invitation Cersei sent us is a ruse. Trystane is never meant to reach
King’s Landing. On the road back, somewhere in the kingswood, Ser
Balon’s party will be attacked by outlaws, and my son will die. I am
asked to court only so that I may witness this attack with my own
eyes and thereby absolve the queen of any blame. Oh, and these
outlaws? They will be shouting, ‘Halfman, Halfman,’ as they attack.
Ser Balon may even catch a quick glimpse of the Imp, though no
one else will.”
Areo Hotah would not have believed it possible to shock the Sand
Snakes. He would have been wrong.
“Seven save us,” whispered Tyene. “Trystane? Why?”
“The woman must be mad,” Obara said. “He’s just a boy.”
“This is monstrous,” said Lady Nym. “I would not have believed
it, not of a Kingsguard knight.”
“They are sworn to obey, just as my captain is,” the prince said.
“I had my doubts as well, but you all saw how Ser Balon balked
when I suggested that we go by sea. A ship would have disturbed all
the queen’s arrangements.”

Obara’s face was ushed. “Give me back my spear, Uncle. Cersei
sent us a head. We should send her back a bag of them.”
Prince Doran raised a hand. His knuckles were as dark as cherries
and near as big. “Ser Balon is a guest beneath my roof. He has eaten
of my bread and salt. I will not do him harm. No. We will travel to
the Water Gardens, where he will hear Myrcella’s story and send a
raven to his queen. The girl will ask him to hunt down the man who
hurt her. If he is the man I judge, Swann will not be able to refuse.
Obara, you will lead him to High Hermitage to beard Darkstar in
his den. The time is not yet come for Dorne to openly defy the Iron
Throne, so we must needs return Myrcella to her mother, but I will
not be accompanying her. That task will be yours, Nymeria. The
Lannisters will not like it, no more than they liked it when I sent
them Oberyn, but they dare not refuse. We need a voice in council,
an ear at court. Be careful, though. King’s Landing is a pit of
snakes.”
Lady Nym smiled. “Why, Uncle, I love snakes.”
“And what of me?” asked Tyene.
“Your mother was a septa. Oberyn once told me that she read to
you in the cradle from the Seven-Pointed Star. I want you in King’s
Landing too, but on the other hill. The Swords and the Stars have
been re-formed, and this new High Septon is not the puppet that the
others were. Try and get close to him.”
“Why not? White suits my coloring. I look so … pure.”
“Good,” the prince said, “good.” He hesitated. “If … if certain
things should come to pass, I will send word to each of you. Things
can change quickly in the game of thrones.”
“I know you will not fail us, cousins.” Arianne went to each of
them in turn, took their hands, kissed them lightly on the lips.
“Obara, so erce. Nymeria, my sister. Tyene, sweetling. I love you
all. The sun of Dorne goes with you.”
“Unbowed, unbent, unbroken,” the Sand Snakes said, together.
Princess Arianne lingered when her cousins had departed. Areo
Hotah remained as well, as was his place.
“They are their father’s daughters,” the prince said.
The little princess smiled. “Three Oberyns, with teats.”

Prince Doran laughed. It had been so long since Hotah last heard
him laugh, he had almost forgotten what it sounded like.
“I still say it should be me who goes to King’s Landing, not Lady
Nym,” Arianne said.
“It is too dangerous. You are my heir, the future of Dorne. Your
place is by my side. Soon enough, you’ll have another task.”
“That last part, about the message. Have you had tidings?”
Prince Doran shared his secret smile with her. “From Lys. A great
eet has put in there to take on water. Volantene ships chie y,
carrying an army. No word as to who they are, or where they might
be bound. There was talk of elephants.”
“No dragons?”
“Elephants. Easy enough to hide a young dragon in a big cog’s
hold, though. Daenerys is most vulnerable at sea. If I were her, I
would keep myself and my intentions hidden as long as I could, so I
might take King’s Landing unawares.”
“Do you think that Quentyn will be with them?”
“He could be. Or not. We will know by where they land if
Westeros is indeed their destination. Quentyn will bring her up the
Greenblood if he can. But it does no good to speak of it. Kiss me.
We leave for the Water Gardens at rst light.”
We may depart by midday, then, Hotah thought.
Later, when Arianne had gone, he put down his longaxe and lifted
Prince Doran into his bed. “Until the Mountain crushed my brother’s
skull, no Dornishmen had died in this War of the Five Kings,” the
prince murmured softly, as Hotah pulled a blanket over him. “Tell
me, Captain, is that my shame or my glory?”
“That is not for me to say, my prince.” Serve. Protect. Obey. Simple
vows for simple men. That was all he knew.

JON

V

al waited by the gate in the predawn cold, wrapped up in a
bearskin cloak so large it might well have t Sam. Beside her was a
garron, saddled and bridled, a shaggy grey with one white eye.
Mully and Dolorous Edd stood with her, a pair of unlikely guards.
Their breath frosted in the cold black air.
“You gave her a blind horse?” Jon said, incredulous.
“He’s only half-blind, m’lord,” o ered Mully. “Elsewise he’s sound
enough.” He patted the garron on the neck.
“The horse may be half-blind, but I am not,” said Val. “I know
where I must go.”
“My lady, you do not have to do this. The risk—”
“—is mine, Lord Snow. And I am no southron lady but a woman
of the free folk. I know the forest better than all your black-cloaked
rangers. It holds no ghosts for me.”
I hope not. Jon was counting on that, trusting that Val could
succeed where Black Jack Bulwer and his companions had failed.
She need fear no harm from the free folk, he hoped … but both of
them knew too well that wildlings were not the only ones waiting
in the woods. “You have su cient food?”
“Hard bread, hard cheese, oat cakes, salt cod, salt beef, salt
mutton, and a skin of sweet wine to rinse all that salt out of my
mouth. I will not die of hunger.”
“Then it’s time you were away.”
“You have my word, Lord Snow. I will return, with Tormund or
without him.” Val glanced at the sky. The moon was but half-full.
“Look for me on the rst day of the full moon.”

“I will.” Do not fail me, he thought, or Stannis will have my head.
“Do I have your word that you will keep our princess closely?” the
king had said, and Jon had promised that he would. Val is no
princess, though. I told him that half a hundred times. It was a feeble
sort of evasion, a sad rag wrapped around his wounded word. His
father would never have approved. I am the sword that guards the
realm of men, Jon reminded himself, and in the end, that must be
worth more than one man’s honor.
The road beneath the Wall was as dark and cold as the belly of an
ice dragon and as twisty as a serpent. Dolorous Edd led them
through with a torch in hand. Mully had the keys for the three
gates, where bars of black iron as thick as a man’s arm closed o
the passage. Spearmen at each gate knuckled their foreheads at Jon
Snow but stared openly at Val and her garron.
When they emerged north of the Wall, through a thick door made
of freshly hewn green wood, the wildling princess paused for a
moment to gaze out across the snow-covered eld where King
Stannis had won his battle. Beyond, the haunted forest waited, dark
and silent. The light of the half-moon turned Val’s honey-blond hair
a pale silver and left her cheeks as white as snow. She took a deep
breath. “The air tastes sweet.”
“My tongue is too numb to tell. All I can taste is cold.”
“Cold?” Val laughed lightly. “No. When it is cold it will hurt to
breathe. When the Others come …”
The thought was a disquieting one. Six of the rangers Jon had
sent out were still missing. It is too soon. They may yet be back. But
another part of him insisted, They are dead, every man of them. You
sent them out to die, and you are doing the same to Val. “Tell Tormund
what I’ve said.”
“He may not heed your words, but he will hear them.” Val kissed
him lightly on the cheek. “You have my thanks, Lord Snow. For the
half-blind horse, the salt cod, the free air. For hope.”
Their breath mingled, a white mist in the air. Jon Snow drew
back and said, “The only thanks I want is—”
“—Tormund Giantsbane. Aye.” Val pulled up the hood of her
bearskin. The brown pelt was well salted with grey. “Before I go,

one question. Did you kill Jarl, my lord?”
“The Wall killed Jarl.”
“So I’d heard. But I had to be sure.”
“You have my word. I did not kill him.” Though I might have if
things had gone otherwise.
“This is farewell, then,” she said, almost playfully.
Jon Snow was in no mood for it. It is too cold and dark to play, and
the hour is too late. “Only for a time. You will return. For the boy, if
for no other reason.”
“Craster’s son?” Val shrugged. “He is no kin to me.”
“I have heard you singing to him.”
“I was singing to myself. Am I to blame if he listens?” A faint
smile brushed her lips. “It makes him laugh. Oh, very well. He is a
sweet little monster.”
“Monster?”
“His milk name. I had to call him something. See that he stays
safe and warm. For his mother’s sake, and mine. And keep him
away from the red woman. She knows who he is. She sees things in
her res.”
Arya, he thought, hoping it was so. “Ashes and cinders.”
“Kings and dragons.”
Dragons again. For a moment Jon could almost see them too,
coiling in the night, their dark wings outlined against a sea of ame.
“If she knew, she would have taken the boy away from us. Dalla’s
boy, not your monster. A word in the king’s ear would have been
the end of it.” And of me. Stannis would have taken it for treason.
“Why let it happen if she knew?”
“Because it suited her. Fire is a ckle thing. No one knows which
way a ame will go.” Val put a foot into a stirrup, swung her leg
over her horse’s back, and looked down from the saddle. “Do you
remember what my sister told you?”
“Yes.” A sword without a hilt, with no safe way to hold it. But
Melisandre had the right of it. Even a sword without a hilt is better
than an empty hand when foes are all around you.
“Good.” Val wheeled the garron toward the north. “The rst night
of the full moon, then.” Jon watched her ride away wondering if he

would ever see her face again. I am no southron lady, he could hear
her say, but a woman of the free folk.
“I don’t care what she says,” muttered Dolorous Edd, as Val
vanished behind a stand of soldier pines. “The air is so cold it hurts
to breathe. I would stop, but that would hurt worse.” He rubbed his
hands together. “This is going to end badly.”
“You say that of everything.”
“Aye, m’lord. Usually I’m right.”
Mully cleared his throat. “M’lord? The wildling princess, letting
her go, the men may say—”
“—that I am half a wildling myself, a turncloak who means to sell
the realm to our raiders, cannibals, and giants.” Jon did not need to
stare into a re to know what was being said of him. The worst part
was, they were not wrong, not wholly. “Words are wind, and the
wind is always blowing at the Wall. Come.”
It was still dark when Jon returned to his chambers behind the
armory. Ghost was not yet back, he saw. Still hunting. The big white
direwolf was gone more oft than not of late, ranging farther and
farther in search of prey. Between the men of the Watch and the
wildlings down in Mole’s Town, the hills and elds near Castle
Black had been hunted clean, and there had been little enough game
to begin with. Winter is coming, Jon re ected. And soon, too soon. He
wondered if they would ever see a spring.
Dolorous Edd made the trek to the kitchens and soon was back
with a tankard of brown ale and a covered platter. Under the lid
Jon discovered three duck’s eggs fried in drippings, a strip of bacon,
two sausages, a blood pudding, and half a loaf of bread still warm
from the oven. He ate the bread and half an egg. He would have
eaten the bacon too, but the raven made o with it before he had
the chance. “Thief,” Jon said, as the bird apped up to the lintel
above the door to devour its prize.
“Thief,” the raven agreed.
Jon tried a bite of sausage. He was washing the taste from his
mouth with a sip of ale when Edd returned to tell him Bowen Marsh
was without. “Othell’s with him, and Septon Cellador.”

That was quick. He wondered who was telling tales and if there
was more than one. “Send them in.”
“Aye, m’lord. You’ll want to watch your sausages with this lot,
though. They have a hungry look about them.”
Hungry was not the word Jon would have used. Septon Cellador
appeared confused and groggy and in dire need of some scales from
the dragon that had amed him, whilst First Builder Othell Yarwyck
looked as if he had swallowed something he could not quite digest.
Bowen Marsh was angry. Jon could see it in his eyes, the tightness
around his mouth, the ush to those round cheeks. That red is not
from cold. “Please sit,” he said. “May I o er you food or drink?”
“We broke our fast in the commons,” said Marsh.
“I could do with more.” Yarwyck eased himself down onto a
chair. “Good of you to o er.”
“Perhaps some wine?” said Septon Cellador.
“Corn,” screamed the raven from the lintel. “Corn, corn.”
“Wine for the septon and a plate for our First Builder,” Jon told
Dolorous Edd. “Nothing for the bird.” He turned back to his visitors.
“You’re here about Val.”
“And other matters,” said Bowen Marsh. “The men have concerns,
my lord.”
And who is it who appointed you to speak for them? “As do I. Othell,
how goes the work at the Nightfort? I have had a letter from Ser
Axell Florent, who styles himself the Queen’s Hand. He tells me that
Queen Selyse is not pleased with her quarters at Eastwatch-by-theSea and wishes to move into her husband’s new seat at once. Will
that be possible?”
Yarwyck shrugged. “We’ve got most of the keep restored and put
a roof back on the kitchens. She’d need food and furnishings and
rewood, mind you, but it might serve. Not so many comforts as
Eastwatch, to be sure. And a long way from the ships, should Her
Grace wish to leave us, but … aye, she could live there, though it
will be years before the place looks a proper castle. Sooner if I had
more builders.”
“I could o er you a giant.”
That gave Othell a start. “The monster in the yard?”

“His name is Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun, Leathers tells me. A lot to
wrap a tongue around, I know. Leathers calls him Wun Wun, and
that seems to serve.” Wun Wun was very little like the giants in Old
Nan’s tales, those huge savage creatures who mixed blood into their
morning porridge and devoured whole bulls, hair and hide and
horns. This giant ate no meat at all, though he was a holy terror
when served a basket of roots, crunching onions and turnips and
even raw hard neeps between his big square teeth. “He’s a willing
worker, though getting him to understand what you want is not
always easy. He speaks the Old Tongue after a fashion, but nothing
of the Common. Tireless, though, and his strength is prodigious. He
could do the work of a dozen men.”
“I … my lord, the men would never … giants eat human esh, I
think … no, my lord, I thank you, but I do not have the men to
watch over such a creature, he …”
Jon Snow was unsurprised. “As you wish. We will keep the giant
here.” Truth be told, he would have been loath to part with Wun
Wun. You know nothing, Jon Snow, Ygritte might say, but Jon spoke
with the giant whenever he could, through Leathers or one of the
free folk they had brought back from the grove, and was learning
much and more about his people and their history. He only wished
that Sam were here to write the stories down.
That was not to say that he was blind to the danger Wun Wun
represented. The giant would lash out violently when threatened,
and those huge hands were strong enough to rip a man apart. He
reminded Jon of Hodor. Hodor twice as big, twice as strong, and half
as clever. There’s a thought to sober even Septon Cellador. But if
Tormund has giants with him, Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun may help us
treat with them.
Mormont’s raven muttered his annoyance as the door opened
beneath him, heralding the return of Dolorous Edd with a agon of
wine and a plate of eggs and sausages. Bowen Marsh waited with
obvious impatience as Edd poured, resuming only when he left
again. “Tollett is a good man, and well liked, and Iron Emmett has
been a ne master-at-arms,” he said then. “Yet the talk is that you
mean to send them away.”

“We need good men at Long Barrow.”
“Whore’s Hole, the men have started calling it,” said Marsh, “but
be that as it may. Is it true that you mean to replace Emmett with
this savage Leathers as our master-at-arms? That is an o ce most
oft reserved for knights, or rangers at the least.”
“Leathers is savage,” Jon agreed mildly. “I can attest to that. I’ve
tried him in the practice yard. He’s as dangerous with a stone axe as
most knights are with castle-forged steel. I grant you, he is not as
patient as I’d like, and some of the boys are terri ed of him … but
that’s not all for the bad. One day they’ll nd themselves in a real
ght, and a certain familiarity with terror will serve them well.”
“He’s a wildling.”
“He was, until he said the words. Now he is our brother. One who
can teach the boys more than swordcraft. It would not hurt them to
learn a few words of the Old Tongue and something of the ways of
the free folk.”
“Free,” the raven muttered. “Corn. King.”
“The men do not trust him.”
Which men? Jon might have asked. How many? But that would
lead him down a road he did not mean to ride. “I am sorry to hear
that. Is there more?”
Septon Cellador spoke up. “This boy Satin. It’s said you mean to
make him your steward and squire, in Tollett’s place. My lord, the
boy’s a whore … a … dare I say … a painted catamite from the
brothels of Oldtown.”
And you are a drunk. “What he was in Oldtown is none of our
concern. He’s quick to learn and very clever. The other recruits
started out despising him, but he won them over and made friends
of them all. He’s fearless in a ght and can even read and write
after a fashion. He should be capable of fetching me my meals and
saddling my horse, don’t you think?”
“Most like,” said Bowen Marsh, stony-faced, “but the men do not
like it. Traditionally the lord commander’s squires are lads of good
birth being groomed for command. Does my lord believe the men of
the Night’s Watch would ever follow a whore into battle?”

Jon’s temper ashed. “They have followed worse. The Old Bear
left a few cautionary notes about certain of the men, for his
successor. We have a cook at the Shadow Tower who was fond of
raping septas. He burned a seven-pointed star into his esh for
every one he claimed. His left arm is stars from wrist to elbow, and
stars mark his calves as well. At Eastwatch we have a man who set
his father’s house a re and barred the door. His entire family
burned to death, all nine. Whatever Satin may have done in
Oldtown, he is our brother now, and he will be my squire.”
Septon Cellador drank some wine. Othell Yarwyck stabbed a
sausage with his dagger. Bowen Marsh sat red-faced. The raven
apped its wings and said, “Corn, corn, kill.” Finally the Lord
Steward cleared his throat. “Your lordship knows best, I am sure.
Might I ask about these corpses in the ice cells? They make the men
uneasy. And to keep them under guard? Surely that is a waste of two
good men, unless you fear that they …”
“… will rise? I pray they do.”
Septon Cellador paled. “Seven save us.” Wine dribbled down his
chin in a red line. “Lord Commander, wights are monstrous,
unnatural creatures. Abominations before the eyes of the gods.
You … you cannot mean to try to talk with them?”
“Can they talk?” asked Jon Snow. “I think not, but I cannot claim
to know. Monsters they may be, but they were men before they
died. How much remains? The one I slew was intent on killing Lord
Commander Mormont. Plainly it remembered who he was and
where to nd him.” Maester Aemon would have grasped his
purpose, Jon did not doubt; Sam Tarly would have been terri ed,
but he would have understood as well. “My lord father used to tell
me that a man must know his enemies. We understand little of the
wights and less about the Others. We need to learn.”
That answer did not please them. Septon Cellador ngered the
crystal that hung about his neck and said, “I think this most unwise,
Lord Snow. I shall pray to the Crone to lift her shining lamp and
lead you down the path of wisdom.”
Jon Snow’s patience was exhausted. “We could all do with a bit
more wisdom, I am sure.” You know nothing, Jon Snow. “Now, shall

we speak of Val?”
“It is true, then?” said Marsh. “You have released her.”
“Beyond the Wall.”
Septon Cellador sucked in his breath. “The king’s prize. His Grace
will be most wroth to nd her gone.”
“Val will return.” Before Stannis, if the gods are good.
“How can you know that?” demanded Bowen Marsh.
“She said she would.”
“And if she lied? If she meets with misadventure?”
“Why, then, you may have a chance to choose a lord commander
more to your liking. Until such time, I fear you’ll still need to su er
me.” Jon took a swallow of ale. “I sent her to nd Tormund
Giantsbane and bring him my o er.”
“If we may know, what o er is this?”
“The same o er I made at Mole’s Town. Food and shelter and
peace, if he will join his strength to ours, ght our common enemy,
help us hold the Wall.”
Bowen Marsh did not appear surprised. “You mean to let him
pass.” His voice suggested he had known all along. “To open the
gates for him and his followers. Hundreds, thousands.”
“If he has that many left.”
Septon Cellador made the sign of the star. Othell Yarwyck
grunted. Bowen Marsh said, “Some might call this treason. These
are wildlings. Savages, raiders, rapers, more beast than man.”
“Tormund is none of those things,” said Jon, “no more than
Mance Rayder. But even if every word you said was true, they are
still men, Bowen. Living men, human as you and me. Winter is
coming, my lords, and when it does, we living men will need to
stand together against the dead.”
“Snow,” screamed Lord Mormont’s raven. “Snow, Snow.”
Jon ignored him. “We have been questioning the wildlings we
brought back from the grove. Several of them told an interesting
tale, of a woods witch called Mother Mole.”
“Mother Mole?” said Bowen Marsh. “An unlikely name.”
“Supposedly she made her home in a burrow beneath a hollow
tree. Whatever the truth of that, she had a vision of a eet of ships

arriving to carry the free folk to safety across the narrow sea.
Thousands of those who ed the battle were desperate enough to
believe her. Mother Mole has led them all to Hardhome, there to
pray and await salvation from across the sea.”
Othell Yarwyck scowled. “I’m no ranger, but … Hardhome is an
unholy place, it’s said. Cursed. Even your uncle used to say as much,
Lord Snow. Why would they go there?”
Jon had a map before him on the table. He turned it so they could
see. “Hardhome sits on a sheltered bay and has a natural harbor
deep enough for the biggest ships a oat. Wood and stone are
plentiful near there. The waters teem with sh, and there are
colonies of seals and sea cows close at hand.”
“All that’s true, I don’t doubt,” said Yarwyck, “but it’s not a place
I’d want to spend a night. You know the tale.”
He did. Hardhome had been halfway toward becoming a town,
the only true town north of the Wall, until the night six hundred
years ago when hell had swallowed it. Its people had been carried
o into slavery or slaughtered for meat, depending on which
version of the tale you believed, their homes and halls consumed in
a con agration that burned so hot that watchers on the Wall far to
the south had thought the sun was rising in the north. Afterward
ashes rained down on haunted forest and Shivering Sea alike for
almost half a year. Traders reported nding only nightmarish
devastation where Hardhome had stood, a landscape of charred
trees and burned bones, waters choked with swollen corpses, bloodchilling shrieks echoing from the cave mouths that pocked the great
cli that loomed above the settlement.
Six centuries had come and gone since that night, but Hardhome
was still shunned. The wild had reclaimed the site, Jon had been
told, but rangers claimed that the overgrown ruins were haunted by
ghouls and demons and burning ghosts with an unhealthy taste for
blood. “It is not the sort of refuge I’d choose either,” Jon said, “but
Mother Mole was heard to preach that the free folk would nd
salvation where once they found damnation.”
Septon Cellador pursed his lips. “Salvation can be found only
through the Seven. This witch has doomed them all.”

“And saved the Wall, mayhaps,” said Bowen Marsh. “These are
enemies we speak of. Let them pray amongst the ruins, and if their
gods send ships to carry them o to a better world, well and good.
In this world I have no food to feed them.”
Jon exed the ngers of his sword hand. “Cotter Pyke’s galleys
sail past Hardhome from time to time. He tells me there is no
shelter there but the caves. The screaming caves, his men call them.
Mother Mole and those who followed her will perish there, of cold
and starvation. Hundreds of them. Thousands.”
“Thousands of enemies. Thousands of wildlings.”
Thousands of people, Jon thought. Men, women, children. Anger
rose inside him, but when he spoke his voice was quiet and cold.
“Are you so blind, or is it that you do not wish to see? What do you
think will happen when all these enemies are dead?”
Above the door the raven muttered, “Dead, dead, dead.”
“Let me tell you what will happen,” Jon said. “The dead will rise
again, in their hundreds and their thousands. They will rise as
wights, with black hands and pale blue eyes, and they will come for
us.” He pushed himself to his feet, the ngers of his sword hand
opening and closing. “You have my leave to go.”
Septon Cellador rose grey-faced and sweating, Othell Yarwyck
sti y, Bowen Marsh tight-lipped and pale. “Thank you for your
time, Lord Snow.” They left without another word.

TYRION

T

he sow had a sweeter temper than some horses he had ridden.
Patient and sure-footed, she accepted Tyrion with hardly a squeal
when he clambered onto her back, and remained motionless as he
reached for shield and lance. Yet when he gathered up her reins and
pressed his feet into her side, she moved at once. Her name was
Pretty, short for Pretty Pig, and she had been trained to saddle and
bridle since she was a piglet.
The painted wooden armor clattered as Pretty trotted across the
deck. Tyrion’s armpits were prickly with perspiration, and a bead of
sweat was trickling down his scar beneath the oversized, ill- tting
helm, yet for one absurd moment he felt almost like Jaime, riding
out onto a tourney eld with lance in hand, his golden armor
ashing in the sun.
When the laughter began, the dream dissolved. He was no
champion, just a dwarf on a pig clutching a stick, capering for the
amusement of some restless rum-soaked sailors in hopes of
sweetening their mood. Somewhere down in hell his father was
seething and Jo rey was chuckling. Tyrion could feel their cold
dead eyes watching this mummer’s face, as avid as the crew of the
Selaesori Qhoran.
And now here came his foe. Penny rode her big grey dog, her
striped lance waving drunkenly as the beast bounded across the
deck. Her shield and armor had been painted red, though the paint
was chipped and fading; his own armor was blue. Not mine. Groat’s.
Never mine, I pray.

Tyrion kicked at Pretty’s haunches to speed her to a charge as the
sailors urged him on with hoots and shouts. Whether they were
shouting encouragement or mocking him he could not have said for
certain, though he had a fair notion. Why did I ever allow myself to be
talked into this farce?
He knew the answer, though. For twelve days now the ship had
oated becalmed in the Gulf of Grief. The mood of the crew was
ugly, and like to turn uglier when their daily rum ration went dry.
There were only so many hours a man could devote to mending
sails, caulking leaks, and shing. Jorah Mormont had heard the
muttering about how dwarf luck had failed them. Whilst the ship’s
cook still gave Tyrion’s head a rub from time to time, in hopes that
it might stir a wind, the rest had taken to giving him venomous
looks whenever he crossed their paths. Penny’s lot was even worse,
since the cook had put about the notion that squeezing a dwarf girl’s
breast might be just the thing to win their luck back. He had also
started referring to Pretty Pig as Bacon, a jape that had seemed
much funnier when Tyrion had made it.
“We have to make them laugh,” Penny had said, pleading. “We
have to make them like us. If we give them a show, it will help
them forget. Please, m’lord.” And somehow, somewise, someway he
had consented. It must have been the rum. The captain’s wine had
been the rst thing to run out. You could get drunk much quicker
on rum than on wine, Tyrion Lannister had discovered.
So he found himself clad in Groat’s painted wooden armor, astride
Groat’s sow, whilst Groat’s sister instructed him in the ner points
of the mummer’s joust that had been their bread and salt. It had a
certain delicious irony to it, considering that Tyrion had almost lost
his head once by refusing to mount the dog for his nephew’s twisted
amusement. Yet somehow he found it di cult to appreciate the
humor of it all from sowback.
Penny’s lance descended just in time for its blunted point to brush
his shoulder; his own lance wobbled as he brought it down and
banged it noisily o a corner of her shield. She kept her seat. He
lost his. But then, he was supposed to.

Easy as falling o a pig … though falling o this particular pig was
harder than it looked. Tyrion curled into a ball as he dropped,
remembering his lesson, but even so, he hit the deck with a solid
thump and bit his tongue so hard he tasted blood. He felt as if he
were twelve again, cartwheeling across the supper table in Casterly
Rock’s great hall. Back then his uncle Gerion had been on hand to
praise his e orts, in place of surly sailors. Their laughter seemed
sparse and strained compared to the great gales that had greeted
Groat’s and Penny’s antics at Jo rey’s wedding feast, and some
hissed at him in anger. “No-Nose, you ride same way you look,
ugly,” one man shouted from the sterncastle. “Must have no balls,
let girl beat you.” He wagered coin on me, Tyrion decided. He let the
insult wash right over him. He had heard worse in his time.
The wooden armor made rising awkward. He found himself
ailing like a turtle on its back. That, at least, set a few of the
sailors to laughing. A shame I did not break my leg, that would have
left them howling. And if they had been in that privy when I shot my
father through the bowels, they might have laughed hard enough to shit
their breeches right along with him. But anything to keep the bloody
bastards sweet.
Jorah Mormont nally took pity on Tyrion’s struggles and pulled
him to his feet. “You looked a fool.”
That was the intent. “It is hard to look a hero when mounted on a
pig.”
“That must be why I stay o pigs.”
Tyrion unbuckled his helm, twisted it o , and spat a gobbet of
bloody pink phlegm over the side. “It feels as though I bit through
half my tongue.”
“Next time bite harder.” Ser Jorah shrugged. “Truth be told, I’ve
seen worse jousters.”
Was that praise? “I fell o the bloody pig and bit my tongue. What
could possibly be worse than that?”
“Getting a splinter through your eye and dying.”
Penny had vaulted o her dog, a big grey brute called Crunch.
“The thing is not to joust well, Hugor.” She was always careful to

call him Hugor where anyone might hear. “The thing is to make
them laugh and throw coins.”
Poor payment for the blood and bruises, Tyrion thought, but he kept
that to himself as well. “We failed at that as well. No one threw
coins.” Not a penny, not a groat.
“They will when we get better.” Penny pulled o her helm.
Mouse-brown hair spilled down to her ears. Her eyes were brown
too, beneath a heavy shelf of brow, her cheeks smooth and ushed.
She pulled some acorns from a leather bag for Pretty Pig. The sow
ate them from her hand, squealing happily. “When we perform for
Queen Daenerys the silver will rain down, you’ll see.”
Some of the sailors were shouting at them and slamming their
heels against the deck, demanding another tilt. The ship’s cook was
the loudest, as always. Tyrion had learned to despise that man, even
if he was the only half-decent cyvasse player on the cog. “You see,
they liked us,” Penny said, with a hopeful little smile. “Shall we go
again, Hugor?”
He was on the point of refusing when a shout from one of the
mates spared him the necessity. It was midmorning, and the captain
wanted the boats out again. The cog’s huge striped sail hung limply
from her mast, as it had for days, but he was hopeful that they
could nd a wind somewhere to the north. That meant rowing. The
boats were small, however, and the cog was large; towing it was
hot, sweaty, exhausting work that left the hands blistered and the
back aching, and accomplished nothing. The crew hated it. Tyrion
could not blame them. “The widow should have put us on a galley,”
he muttered sourly. “If someone could help me out of these bloody
planks, I would be grateful. I think I may have a splinter through
my crotch.”
Mormont did the duty, albeit with poor grace. Penny collected
her dog and pig and led them both below. “You might want to tell
your lady to keep her door closed and barred when she’s inside,”
Ser Jorah said as he was undoing the buckles on the straps that
joined the wooden breastplate to the backplate. “I’m hearing too
much talk about ribs and hams and bacon.”
“That pig is half her livelihood.”

“A Ghiscari crew would eat the dog as well.” Mormont pulled the
breastplate and backplate apart. “Just tell her.”
“As you wish.” His tunic was soaked with sweat and clinging to
his chest. Tyrion plucked at it, wishing for a bit of breeze. The
wooden armor was as hot and heavy as it was uncomfortable. Half
of it looked to be old paint, layer on layer on layer of it, from a
hundred past repaintings. At Jo rey’s wedding feast, he recalled,
one rider had displayed the direwolf of Robb Stark, the other the
arms and colors of Stannis Baratheon. “We will need both animals if
we’re to tilt for Queen Daenerys,” he said. If the sailors took it in
their heads to butcher Pretty Pig, neither he nor Penny could hope
to stop them … but Ser Jorah’s longsword might give them pause,
at least.
“Is that how you hope to keep your head, Imp?”
“Ser Imp, if you please. And yes. Once Her Grace knows my true
worth, she’ll cherish me. I am a lovable little fellow, after all, and I
know many useful things about my kin. But until such time I had
best keep her amused.”
“Caper as you like, it won’t wash out your crimes. Daenerys
Targaryen is no silly child to be diverted by japes and tumbles. She
will deal with you justly.”
Oh, I hope not. Tyrion studied Mormont with his mismatched eyes.
“And how will she welcome you, this just queen? A warm embrace,
a girlish titter, a headsman’s axe?” He grinned at the knight’s
obvious discom t. “Did you truly expect me to believe you were
about the queen’s business in that whorehouse? Defending her from
half a world away? Or could it be that you were running, that your
dragon queen sent you from her side? But why would she … oh,
wait, you were spying on her.” Tyrion made a clucking sound. “You
hope to buy your way back into her favor by presenting her with
me. An ill-considered scheme, I’d say. One might even say an act of
drunken desperation. Perhaps if I were Jaime … but Jaime killed
her father, I only killed my own. You think Daenerys will execute
me and pardon you, but the reverse is just as likely. Maybe you
should hop up on that pig, Ser Jorah. Put on a suit of iron motley,
like Florian the—”

The blow the big knight gave him cracked his head around and
knocked him sideways, so hard that his head bounced o the deck.
Blood lled his mouth as he staggered back onto one knee. He spat
out a broken tooth. Growing prettier every day, but I do believe I poked
a wound. “Did the dwarf say something to o end you, ser?” Tyrion
asked innocently, wiping bubbles of blood o his broken lip with
the back of his hand.
“I am sick of your mouth, dwarf,” said Mormont. “You still have
a few teeth left. If you want to keep them, stay away from me for
the rest of this voyage.”
“That could be di cult. We share a cabin.”
“You can nd somewhere else to sleep. Down in the hold, up on
deck, it makes no matter. Just keep out of my sight.”
Tyrion pulled himself back to his feet. “As you wish,” he
answered, through a mouthful of blood, but the big knight was
already gone, his boots pounding on the deckboards.
Below, in the galley, Tyrion was rinsing out his mouth with rum
and water and wincing at the sting when Penny found him. “I heard
what happened. Oh, are you hurt?”
He shrugged. “A bit of blood and a broken tooth.” But I believe I
hurt him more. “And him a knight. Sad to say, I would not count on
Ser Jorah should we need protection.”
“What did you do? Oh, your lip is bleeding.” She slipped a square
from her sleeve and dabbed at it. “What did you say?”
“A few truths Ser Bezoar did not care to hear.”
“You mustn’t mock him. Don’t you know anything? You can’t talk
that way to a big person. They can hurt you. Ser Jorah could have
tossed you in the sea. The sailors would have laughed to see you
drown. You have to be careful around big people. Be jolly and
playful with them, keep them smiling, make them laugh, that’s
what my father always said. Didn’t your father ever tell you how to
act with big people?”
“My father called them smallfolk,” said Tyrion, “and he was not
what you’d call a jolly man.” He took another sip of watered rum,
sloshed it around his mouth, spat it out. “Still, I take your point. I

have a deal to learn about being a dwarf. Perhaps you will be good
enough to teach me, in between the jousting and the pig-riding.”
“I will, m’lord. Gladly. But … what were these truths? Why did
Ser Jorah hit you so hard?”
“Why, for love. The same reason that I stewed that singer.” He
thought of Shae and the look in her eyes as he tightened the chain
about her throat, twisting it in his st. A chain of golden hands. For
hands of gold are always cold, but a woman’s hands are warm. “Are
you a maid, Penny?”
She blushed. “Yes. Of course. Who would have—”
“Stay that way. Love is madness, and lust is poison. Keep your
maidenhead. You’ll be happier for it, and you’re less like to nd
yourself in some dingy brothel on the Rhoyne with a whore who
looks a bit like your lost love.” Or chasing across half the world,
hoping to nd wherever whores go. “Ser Jorah dreams of rescuing his
dragon queen and basking in her gratitude, but I know a thing or
two about the gratitude of kings, and I’d sooner have a palace in
Valyria.” He broke o suddenly. “Did you feel that? The ship
moved.”
“It did.” Penny’s face lit up with joy. “We’re moving again. The
wind …” She rushed to the door. “I want to see. Come, I’ll race you
up.” O she went.
She is young, Tyrion had to remind himself, as Penny scrambled
from the galley and up the steep wooden steps as fast as her short
legs would allow. Almost a child. Still, it tickled him to see her
excitement. He followed her topside.
The sail had come to life again, billowing, emptying, then
billowing again, the red stripes on the canvas wriggling like snakes.
Sailors dashed across the decks and hauled on lines as the mates
bellowed orders in the tongue of Old Volantis. The rowers in the
ship’s boats had loosed their tow ropes and turned back toward the
cog, stroking hard. The wind was blowing from the west, swirling
and gusting, clutching at ropes and cloaks like a mischievous child.
The Selaesori Qhoran was under way.
Might be we’ll make Meereen after all, Tyrion thought.

But when he clambered up the ladder to the sterncastle and
looked o from the stern, his smile faltered. Blue sky and blue sea
here, but o west … I have never seen a sky that color. A thick band of
clouds ran along the horizon. “A bar sinister,” he said to Penny,
pointing.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means some big bastard is creeping up behind us.”
He was surprised to nd that Moqorro and two of his ery ngers
had joined them on the sterncastle. It was only midday, and the red
priest and his men did not normally emerge till dusk. The priest
gave him a solemn nod. “There you see it, Hugor Hill. God’s wroth.
The Lord of Light will not be mocked.”
Tyrion had a bad feeling about this. “The widow said this ship
would never reach her destination. I took that to mean that once we
were out to sea beyond the reach of triarchs, the captain would
change course for Meereen. Or perhaps that you would seize the
ship with your Fiery Hand and take us to Daenerys. But that isn’t
what your high priest saw at all, is it?”
“No.” Moqorro’s deep voice tolled as solemnly as a funeral bell.
“This is what he saw.” The red priest lifted his sta , and inclined its
head toward the west.
Penny was lost. “I don’t understand. What does it mean?”
“It means we had best get below. Ser Jorah has exiled me from
our cabin. Might I hide in yours when the time comes?”
“Yes,” she said. “You would be … oh …”
For the better part of three hours they ran before the wind, as the
storm grew closer. The western sky went green, then grey, then
black. A wall of dark clouds loomed up behind them, churning like a
kettle of milk left on the re too long. Tyrion and Penny watched
from the forecastle, huddled by the gurehead and holding hands,
careful to stay out of the way of captain and crew.
The last storm had been thrilling, intoxicating, a sudden squall
that had left him feeling cleansed and refreshed. This one felt
di erent right from the rst. The captain sensed it too. He changed
their course to north by northeast to try and get out of the storm’s
path.

It was a futile e ort. This storm was too big. The seas around
them grew rougher. The wind began to howl. The Stinky Steward
rose and fell as waves smashed against her hull. Behind them
lightning stabbed down from the sky, blinding purple bolts that
danced across the sea in webs of light. Thunder followed. “The time
has come to hide.” Tyrion took Penny by the arm and led her
belowdecks.
Pretty and Crunch were both half-mad with fear. The dog was
barking, barking, barking. He knocked Tyrion right o his feet as
they entered. The sow had been shitting everywhere. Tyrion
cleaned that up as best he could whilst Penny tried to calm the
animals. Then they tied down or put away anything that was still
loose. “I’m frightened,” Penny confessed. The cabin had begun to
tilt and jump, going this way and that as the waves hammered at
the hull of the ship.
There are worse ways to die than drowning. Your brother learned that,
and so did my lord father. And Shae, that lying cunt. Hands of gold are
always cold, but a woman’s hands are warm. “We should play a
game,” Tyrion suggested. “That might help take our thoughts o
the storm.”
“Not cyvasse,” she said at once.
“Not cyvasse,” Tyrion agreed, as the deck rose under him. That
would only lead to pieces ying violently across the cabin and
raining down on sow and dog. “When you were a little girl, did you
ever play come-into-my-castle?”
“No. Can you teach me?”
Could he? Tyrion hesitated. Fool of a dwarf. Of course she’s never
played come-into-my-castle. She never had a castle. Come-into-mycastle was a game for highborn children, one meant to teach them
courtesy, heraldry, and a thing or two about their lord father’s
friends and foes. “That won’t …” he started. The deck gave another
violent heave, slamming the two of them together. Penny gave a
squeak of fright. “That game won’t do,” Tyrion told her, gritting his
teeth. “Sorry. I don’t know what game—”
“I do.” Penny kissed him.

It was an awkward kiss, rushed, clumsy. But it took him utterly
by surprise. His hands jerked up and grabbed hold of her shoulders
to shove her away. Instead he hesitated, then pulled her closer,
gave her a squeeze. Her lips were dry, hard, closed up tighter than a
miser’s purse. A small mercy, thought Tyrion. This was nothing he
had wanted. He liked Penny, he pitied Penny, he even admired
Penny in a way, but he did not desire her. He had no wish to hurt
her, though; the gods and his sweet sister had given her enough
pain. So he let the kiss go on, holding her gently by the shoulders.
His own lips stayed rmly shut. The Selaesori Qhoran rolled and
shuddered around them.
Finally she pulled back an inch or two. Tyrion could see his own
re ection shining in her eyes. Pretty eyes, he thought, but he saw
other things as well. A lot of fear, a little hope … but not a bit of lust.
She does not want me, no more than I want her.
When she lowered her head, he took her under the chin and
raised it up again. “We cannot play that game, my lady.” Above the
thunder boomed, close at hand now.
“I never meant … I never kissed a boy before, but … I only
thought, what if we drown, and I … I …”
“It was sweet,” lied Tyrion, “but I am married. She was with me
at the feast, you may remember her. Lady Sansa.”
“Was she your wife? She … she was very beautiful …”
And false. Sansa, Shae, all my women … Tysha was the only one who
ever loved me. Where do whores go? “A lovely girl,” said Tyrion, “and
we were joined beneath the eyes of gods and men. It may be that
she is lost to me, but until I know that for a certainty I must be true
to her.”
“I understand.” Penny turned her face away from his.
My perfect woman, Tyrion thought bitterly. One still young enough
to believe such blatant lies.
The hull was creaking, the deck moving, and Pretty was squealing
in distress. Penny crawled across the cabin oor on her hands and
knees, wrapped her arms around the sow’s head, and murmured
reassurance to her. Looking at the two of them, it was hard to know
who was comforting whom. The sight was so grotesque it should

have been hilarious, but Tyrion could not even nd a smile. The girl
deserves better than a pig, he thought. An honest kiss, a little kindness,
everyone deserves that much, however big or small. He looked about
for his wine cup, but when he found it all the rum had spilled.
Drowning is bad enough, he re ected sourly, but drowning sad and
sober, that’s too cruel.
In the end, they did not drown … though there were times when
the prospect of a nice, peaceful drowning had a certain appeal. The
storm raged for the rest of that day and well into the night. Wet
winds howled around them and waves rose like the sts of drowned
giants to smash down on their decks. Above, they learned later, a
mate and two sailors were swept overboard, the ship’s cook was
blinded when a kettle of hot grease ew up into his face, and the
captain was thrown from the sterncastle to the main deck so
violently he broke both legs. Below, Crunch howled and barked and
snapped at Penny, and Pretty Pig began to shit again, turning the
cramped, damp cabin into a sty. Tyrion managed to avoid retching
his way through all of this, chie y thanks to the lack of wine. Penny
was not so fortunate, but he held her anyway as the ship’s hull
creaked and groaned alarmingly around them, like a cask about to
burst.
Nearby midnight the winds nally died away, and the sea grew
calm enough for Tyrion to make his way back up onto deck. What
he saw there did not reassure him. The cog was drifting on a sea of
dragonglass beneath a bowl of stars, but all around the storm raged
on. East, west, north, south, everywhere he looked, the clouds rose
up like black mountains, their tumbled slopes and collossal cli s
alive with blue and purple lightning. No rain was falling, but the
decks were slick and wet underfoot.
Tyrion could hear someone screaming from below, a thin, high
voice hysterical with fear. He could hear Moqorro too. The red
priest stood on the forecastle facing the storm, his sta raised above
his head as he boomed a prayer. Amidships, a dozen sailors and two
of the ery ngers were struggling with tangled lines and sodden
canvas, but whether they were trying to raise the sail again or pull

it down he never knew. Whatever they were doing, it seemed to
him a very bad idea. And so it was.
The wind returned as a whispered threat, cold and damp,
brushing over his cheek, apping the wet sail, swirling and tugging
at Moqorro’s scarlet robes. Some instinct made Tyrion grab hold of
the nearest rail, just in time. In the space of three heartbeats the
little breeze became a howling gale. Moqorro shouted something,
and green ames leapt from the dragon’s maw atop his sta to
vanish in the night. Then the rains came, black and blinding, and
forecastle and sterncastle both vanished behind a wall of water.
Something huge apped overhead, and Tyrion glanced up in time to
see the sail taking wing, with two men still dangling from the lines.
Then he heard a crack. Oh, bloody hell, he had time to think, that had
to be the mast.
He found a line and pulled on it, ghting toward the hatch to get
himself below out of the storm, but a gust of wind knocked his feet
from under him and a second slammed him into the rail and there
he clung. Rain lashed at his face, blinding him. His mouth was full
of blood again. The ship groaned and growled beneath him like a
constipated fat man straining to shit.
Then the mast burst.
Tyrion never saw it, but he heard it. That cracking sound again
and then a scream of tortured wood, and suddenly the air was full
of shards and splinters. One missed his eye by half an inch, a second
found his neck, a third went through his calf, boots and breeches
and all. He screamed. But he held on to the line, held on with a
desperate strength he did not know he had. The widow said this ship
would never reach her destination, he remembered. Then he laughed
and laughed, wild and hysterical, as thunder boomed and timbers
moaned and waves crashed all around him.
By the time the storm abated and the surviving passengers and
crew came crawling back on deck, like pale pink worms wriggling
to the surface after a rain, the Selaesori Qhoran was a broken thing,
oating low in the water and listing ten degrees to port, her hull
sprung in half a hundred places, her hold awash in seawater, her
mast a splintered ruin no taller than a dwarf. Even her gurehead

had not escaped; one of his arms had broken o , the one with all his
scrolls. Nine men had been lost, including a mate, two of the ery
ngers, and Moqorro himself.
Did Benerro see this in his res? Tyrion wondered, when he realized
the huge red priest was gone. Did Moqorro?
“Prophecy is like a half-trained mule,” he complained to Jorah
Mormont. “It looks as though it might be useful, but the moment
you trust in it, it kicks you in the head. That bloody widow knew
the ship would never reach her destination, she warned us of that,
said Benerro saw it in his res, only I took that to mean … well,
what does it matter?” His mouth twisted. “What it really meant was
that some bloody big storm would turn our mast to kindling so we
could drift aimlessly across the Gulf of Grief until our food ran out
and we started eating one another. Who do you suppose they’ll
carve up rst … the pig, the dog, or me?”
“The noisiest, I’d say.”
The captain died the following day, the ship’s cook three nights
later. It was all that the remaining crew could do to keep the wreck
a oat. The mate who had assumed command reckoned that they
were somewhere o the southern end of the Isle of Cedars. When
he lowered the ship’s boats to tow them toward the nearest land,
one sank and the men in the other cut the line and rowed o north,
abandoning the cog and all their shipmates.
“Slaves,” said Jorah Mormont, contemptuous.
The big knight had slept through the storm, to hear him tell it.
Tyrion had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. One day he
might want to bite someone in the leg, and for that you needed
teeth. Mormont seemed content to ignore their disagreement, so
Tyrion decided to pretend it had not happened.
For nineteen days they drifted, as food and water dwindled. The
sun beat down on them, relentless. Penny huddled in her cabin with
her dog and her pig, and Tyrion brought her food, limping on his
bandaged calf and sni ng at the wound by night. When he had
nothing else to do, he pricked his toes and ngers too. Ser Jorah
made a point of sharpening his sword each day, honing the point
until it gleamed. The three remaining ery ngers lit the night re

as the sun went down, but they wore their ornate armor as they led
the crew in prayer, and their spears were close at hand. And not a
single sailor tried to rub the head of either dwarf.
“Should we joust for them again?” Penny asked one night.
“Best not,” said Tyrion. “That would only serve to remind them
we have a nice plump pig.” Though Pretty was growing less plump
with every passing day, and Crunch was fur and bones.
That night he dreamed that he was back in King’s Landing again,
a crossbow in his hand. “Wherever whores go,” Lord Tywin said,
but when Tyrion’s nger clenched and the bowstring thrummed, it
was Penny with the quarrel buried in her belly.
He woke to the sound of shouting.
The deck was moving under him, and for half a heartbeat he was
so confused he thought he was back on the Shy Maid. A whi of
pigshit brought him to his senses. The Sorrows were behind him,
half a world away, and the joys of that time as well. He
remembered how sweet Lemore had looked after her morning
swims, with beads of water glistening on her naked skin, but the
only maiden here was his poor Penny, the stunted little dwarf girl.
Something was afoot, though. Tyrion slipped from the hammock,
yawning, and looked about for his boots. And mad though it was, he
looked for the crossbow as well, but of course there was none such
to be found. A pity, he mused, it might have been some use when the
big folk come to eat me. He pulled his boots on and climbed on deck
to see what the shouting was about. Penny was there before him,
her eyes wide with wonder. “A sail,” she shouted, “there, there, do
you see? A sail, and they’ve seen us, they have. A sail.”
This time he kissed her … once on each cheek, once on the brow,
and one last one on the mouth. She was ushed and laughing by the
last kiss, suddenly shy again, but it made no matter. The other ship
was closing. A big galley, he saw. Her oars left a long white wake
behind her. “What ship is that?” he asked Ser Jorah Mormont. “Can
you read her name?”
“I don’t need to read her name. We’re downwind. I can smell
her.” Mormont drew his sword. “That’s a slaver.”

THE TURNCLOAK

T

he rst akes came drifting down as the sun was setting in the
west. By nightfall snow was coming down so heavily that the moon
rose behind a white curtain, unseen.
“The gods of the north have unleashed their wroth on Lord
Stannis,” Roose Bolton announced come morning as men gathered
in Winterfell’s Great Hall to break their fast. “He is a stranger here,
and the old gods will not su er him to live.”
His men roared their approval, banging their sts on the long
plank tables. Winterfell might be ruined, but its granite walls would
still keep the worst of the wind and weather at bay. They were well
stocked with food and drink; they had res to warm them when o
duty, a place to dry their clothes, snug corners to lie down and
sleep. Lord Bolton had laid by enough wood to keep the res fed for
half a year, so the Great Hall was always warm and cozy. Stannis
had none of that.
Theon Greyjoy did not join the uproar. Neither did the men of
House Frey, he did not fail to note. They are strangers here as well, he
thought, watching Ser Aenys Frey and his half-brother Ser Hosteen.
Born and bred in the riverlands, the Freys had never seen a snow
like this. The north has already claimed three of their blood, Theon
thought, recalling the men that Ramsay had searched for fruitlessly,
lost between White Harbor and Barrowton.
On the dais, Lord Wyman Manderly sat between a pair of his
White Harbor knights, spooning porridge into his fat face. He did
not seem to be enjoying it near as much as he had the pork pies at

the wedding. Elsewhere one-armed Harwood Stout talked quietly
with the cadaverous Whoresbane Umber.
Theon queued up with the other men for porridge, ladled into
wooden bowls from a row of copper kettles. The lords and knights
had milk and honey and even a bit of butter to sweeten their
portions, he saw, but none of that would be o ered him. His reign
as prince of Winterfell had been a brief one. He had played his part
in the mummer’s show, giving the feigned Arya to be wed, and now
he was of no further use to Roose Bolton.
“First winter I remember, the snows came over my head,” said a
Hornwood man in the queue ahead of him.
“Aye, but you were only three foot tall at the time,” a rider from
the Rills replied.
Last night, unable to sleep, Theon had found himself brooding on
escape, of slipping away unseen whilst Ramsay and his lord father
had their attention elsewhere. Every gate was closed and barred and
heavily guarded, though; no one was allowed to enter or depart the
castle without Lord Bolton’s leave. Even if he found some secret
way out, Theon would not have trusted it. He had not forgotten
Kyra and her keys. And if he did get out, where would he go? His
father was dead, and his uncles had no use for him. Pyke was lost to
him. The nearest thing to a home that remained to him was here,
amongst the bones of Winterfell.
A ruined man, a ruined castle. This is my place.
He was still waiting for his porridge when Ramsay swept into the
hall with his Bastard’s Boys, shouting for music. Abel rubbed the
sleep from his eyes, took up his lute, and launched into “The
Dornishman’s Wife,” whilst one of his washerwomen beat time on
her drum. The singer changed the words, though. Instead of tasting
a Dornishman’s wife, he sang of tasting a northman’s daughter.
He could lose his tongue for that, Theon thought, as his bowl was
being lled. He is only a singer. Lord Ramsay could ay the skin o
both his hands, and no one would say a word. But Lord Bolton smiled
at the lyric and Ramsay laughed aloud. Then others knew that it
was safe to laugh as well. Yellow Dick found the song so funny that
wine snorted out his nose.

Lady Arya was not there to share the merriment. She had not
been seen outside her chambers since her wedding night. Sour Alyn
had been saying that Ramsay kept his bride naked and chained to a
bedpost, but Theon knew that was only talk. There were no chains,
at least none that men could see. Just a pair of guards outside the
bedchamber, to keep the girl from wandering. And she is only naked
when she bathes.
That she did most every night, though. Lord Ramsay wanted his
wife clean. “She has no handmaids, poor thing,” he had said to
Theon. “That leaves you, Reek. Should I put you in a dress?” He
laughed. “Perhaps if you beg it of me. Just now, it will su ce for
you to be her bath maid. I won’t have her smelling like you.” So
whenever Ramsay had an itch to bed his wife, it fell to Theon to
borrow some servingwomen from Lady Walda or Lady Dustin and
fetch hot water from the kitchens. Though Arya never spoke to any
of them, they could not fail to see her bruises. It is her own fault. She
has not pleased him. “Just be Arya,” he told the girl once, as he
helped her into the water. “Lord Ramsay does not want to hurt you.
He only hurts us when we … when we forget. He never cut me
without cause.”
“Theon …” she whispered, weeping.
“Reek.” He grabbed her arm and shook her. “In here I’m Reek.
You have to remember, Arya.” But the girl was no true Stark, only a
steward’s whelp. Jeyne, her name is Jeyne. She should not look to me
for rescue. Theon Greyjoy might have tried to help her, once. But
Theon had been ironborn, and a braver man than Reek. Reek, Reek,
it rhymes with weak.
Ramsay had a new plaything to amuse him, one with teats and a
cunny … but soon Jeyne’s tears would lose their savor, and Ramsay
would want his Reek again. He will ay me inch by inch. When my
ngers are gone he will take my hands. After my toes, my feet. But only
when I beg for it, when the pain grows so bad that I plead for him to give
me some relief. There would be no hot baths for Reek. He would roll
in shit again, forbidden to wash. The clothes he wore would turn to
rags, foul and stinking, and he would be made to wear them till
they rotted. The best he could hope for was to be returned to the

kennels with Ramsay’s girls for company. Kyra, he remembered. The
new bitch he calls Kyra.
He took his bowl to the back of the hall and found a place on an
empty bench, yards away from the nearest torch. Day or night, the
benches below the salt were never less than half-full with men
drinking, dicing, talking, or sleeping in their clothes in quiet
corners. Their serjeants would kick them awake when it came their
turn to shrug back into their cloaks and walk the walls. But no man
of them would welcome the company of Theon Turncloak, nor did
he have much taste for theirs.
The gruel was grey and watery, and he pushed it away after his
third spoonful and let it congeal in the bowl. At the next table, men
were arguing about the storm and wondering aloud how long the
snow would fall. “All day and all night, might be even longer,”
insisted one big, black-bearded archer with a Cerwyn axe sewn on
his breast. A few of the older men spoke of other snowstorms and
insisted this was no more than a light dusting compared to what
they’d seen in the winters of their youth. The riverlanders were
aghast. They have no love of snow and cold, these southron swords.
Men entering the hall huddled by the res or clapped their hands
together over glowing braziers as their cloaks hung dripping from
pegs inside the door.
The air was thick and smoky and a crust had formed atop his
porridge when a woman’s voice behind him said, “Theon Greyjoy.”
My name is Reek, he almost said. “What do you want?”
She sat down next to him, straddling the bench, and pushed a
wild mop of red-brown hair out of her eyes. “Why do you eat alone,
m’lord? Come, rise, join the dance.”
He went back to his porridge. “I don’t dance.” The Prince of
Winterfell had been a graceful dancer, but Reek with his missing
toes would be grotesque. “Leave me be. I have no coin.”
The woman smiled crookedly. “Do you take me for a whore?” She
was one of the singer’s washerwomen, the tall skinny one, too lean
and leathery to be called pretty … though there was a time when
Theon would have tumbled her all the same, to see how it felt to
have those long legs wrapped around him. “What good would coin

do me here? What would I buy with it, some snow?” She laughed.
“You could pay me with a smile. I’ve never seen you smile, not
even during your sister’s wedding feast.”
“Lady Arya is not my sister.” I do not smile either, he might have
told her. Ramsay hated my smiles, so he took a hammer to my teeth. I
can hardly eat. “She never was my sister.”
“A pretty maid, though.”
I was never beautiful like Sansa, but they all said I was pretty. Jeyne’s
words seemed to echo in his head, to the beat of the drums two of
Abel’s other girls were pounding. Another one had pulled Little
Walder Frey up onto the table to teach him how to dance. All the
men were laughing. “Leave me be,” said Theon.
“Am I not to m’lord’s taste? I could send Myrtle to you if you
want. Or Holly, might be you’d like her better. All the men like
Holly. They’re not my sisters neither, but they’re sweet.” The
woman leaned close. Her breath smelled of wine. “If you have no
smile for me, tell me how you captured Winterfell. Abel will put it
in a song, and you will live forever.”
“As a betrayer. As Theon Turncloak.”
“Why not Theon the Clever? It was a daring feat, the way we
heard it. How many men did you have? A hundred? Fifty?”
Fewer. “It was madness.”
“Glorious madness. Stannis has ve thousand, they say, but Abel
claims ten times as many still could not breach these walls. So how
did you get in, m’lord? Did you have some secret way?”
I had ropes, Theon thought. I had grapnels. I had darkness on my
side, and surprise. The castle was but lightly held, and I took them
unawares. But he said none of that. If Abel made a song about him,
like as not Ramsay would prick his eardrums to make certain that
he never heard it.
“You can trust me, m’lord. Abel does.” The washerwoman put her
hand upon his own. His hands were gloved in wool and leather.
Hers were bare, long- ngered, rough, with nails chewed to the
quick. “You never asked my name. It’s Rowan.”
Theon wrenched away. This was a ploy, he knew it. Ramsay sent
her. She’s another of his japes, like Kyra with the keys. A jolly jape, that’s

all. He wants me to run, so he can punish me.
He wanted to hit her, to smash that mocking smile o her face.
He wanted to kiss her, to fuck her right there on the table and make
her cry his name. But he knew he dare not touch her, in anger or in
lust. Reek, Reek, my name is Reek. I must not forget my name. He
jerked to his feet and made his way wordlessly to the doors,
limping on his maimed feet.
Outside the snow was falling still. Wet, heavy, silent, it had
already begun to cover the footsteps left by the men coming and
going from the hall. The drifts came almost to the top of his boots.
It will be deeper in the wolfswood … and out on the kingsroad, where
the wind is blowing, there will be no escape from it. A battle was being
fought in the yard; Ryswells pelting Barrowton boys with
snowballs. Above, he could see some squires building snowmen
along the battlements. They were arming them with spears and
shields, putting iron halfhelms on their heads, and arraying them
along the inner wall, a rank of snowy sentinels. “Lord Winter has
joined us with his levies,” one of the sentries outside the Great Hall
japed … until he saw Theon’s face and realized who he was talking
to. Then he turned his head and spat.
Beyond the tents the big destriers of the knights from White
Harbor and the Twins were shivering in their horse lines. Ramsay
had burned the stables when he sacked Winterfell, so his father had
thrown up new ones twice as large as the old, to accommodate the
warhorses and palfreys of his lords’ bannermen and knights. The
rest of the horses were tethered in the wards. Hooded grooms
moved amongst them, covering them with blankets to keep them
warm.
Theon made his way deeper into the ruined parts of the castle. As
he picked through the shattered stone that had once been Maester
Luwin’s turret, ravens looked down from the gash in the wall
above, muttering to one another. From time to time one would let
out a raucous scream. He stood in the doorway of a bedchamber
that had once been his own (ankle deep in snow that had blown in
through a shattered window), visited the ruins of Mikken’s forge
and Lady Catelyn’s sept. Beneath the Burned Tower, he passed

Rickard Ryswell nuzzling at the neck of another one of Abel’s
washerwomen, the plump one with the apple cheeks and pug nose.
The girl was barefoot in the snow, bundled up in a fur cloak. He
thought she might be naked underneath. When she saw him, she
said something to Ryswell that made him laugh aloud.
Theon trudged away from them. There was a stair beyond the
mews, seldom used; it was there his feet took him. The steps were
steep and treacherous. He climbed carefully and found himself alone
on the battlements of the inner wall, well away from the squires
and their snowmen. No one had given him freedom of the castle,
but no one had denied it to him either. He could go where he would
within the walls.
Winterfell’s inner wall was the older and taller of the two, its
ancient grey crenellations rising one hundred feet high, with square
towers at every corner. The outer wall, raised many centuries later,
was twenty feet lower, but thicker and in better repair, boasting
octagonal towers in place of square ones. Between the two walls
was the moat, deep and wide … and frozen. Drifts of snow had
begun to creep across its icy surface. Snow was building up along
the battlements too, lling the gaps between the merlons and
putting pale, soft caps on every tower top.
Beyond the walls, as far as he could see, the world was turning
white. The woods, the elds, the kingsroad—the snows were
covering all of them beneath a pale soft mantle, burying the
remnants of the winter town, hiding the blackened walls Ramsay’s
men had left behind when they put the houses to the torch. The
wounds Snow made, snow conceals, but that was wrong. Ramsay was
a Bolton now, not a Snow, never a Snow.
Farther o , the rutted kingsroad had vanished, lost amidst the
elds and rolling hills, all one vast expanse of white. And still the
snow was falling, drifting down in silence from a windless sky.
Stannis Baratheon is out there somewhere, freezing. Would Lord Stannis
try to take Winterfell by storm? If he does, his cause is doomed. The
castle was too strong. Even with the moat frozen over, Winterfell’s
defenses remained formidable. Theon had captured the castle by
stealth, sending his best men to scale the walls and swim the moat

under the cover of darkness. The defenders had not even known
they were under attack until it was too late. No such subterfuge was
possible for Stannis.
He might prefer to cut the castle o from the outside world and
starve out its defenders. Winterfell’s storerooms and cellar vaults
were empty. A long supply train had come with Bolton and his
friends of Frey up through the Neck, Lady Dustin had brought food
and fodder from Barrowton, and Lord Manderly had arrived well
provisioned from White Harbor … but the host was large. With so
many mouths to feed, their stores could not last for long. Lord
Stannis and his men will be just as hungry, though. And cold and
footsore as well, in no condition for a ght … but the storm will make
them desperate to get inside the castle.
Snow was falling on the godswood too, melting when it touched
the ground. Beneath the white-cloaked trees the earth had turned to
mud. Tendrils of mist hung in the air like ghostly ribbons. Why did I
come here? These are not my gods. This is not my place. The heart tree
stood before him, a pale giant with a carved face and leaves like
bloody hands.
A thin lm of ice covered the surface of the pool beneath the
weirwood. Theon sank to his knees beside it. “Please,” he
murmured through his broken teeth, “I never meant …” The words
caught in his throat. “Save me,” he nally managed. “Give me …”
What? Strength? Courage? Mercy? Snow fell around him, pale and
silent, keeping its own counsel. The only sound was a faint soft
sobbing. Jeyne, he thought. It is her, sobbing in her bridal bed. Who
else could it be? Gods do not weep. Or do they?
The sound was too painful to endure. Theon grabbed hold of a
branch and pulled himself back to his feet, knocked the snow o his
legs, and limped back toward the lights. There are ghosts in
Winterfell, he thought, and I am one of them.
More snowmen had risen in the yard by the time Theon Greyjoy
made his way back. To command the snowy sentinels on the walls,
the squires had erected a dozen snowy lords. One was plainly meant
to be Lord Manderly; it was the fattest snowman that Theon had
ever seen. The one-armed lord could only be Harwood Stout, the

snow lady Barbrey Dustin. And the one closest to the door with the
beard made of icicles had to be old Whoresbane Umber.
Inside, the cooks were ladling out beef-and-barley stew, thick
with carrots and onions, served in trenchers hollowed from loaves
of yesterday’s bread. Scraps were thrown onto the oor to be
gobbled up by Ramsay’s girls and the other dogs.
The girls were glad to see him. They knew him by his smell. Red
Jeyne loped over to lick at his hand, and Helicent slipped under the
table and curled up by his feet, gnawing at a bone. They were good
dogs. It was easy to forget that every one was named for a girl that
Ramsay had hunted and killed.
Weary as he was, Theon had appetite enough to eat a little stew,
washed down with ale. By then the hall had grown raucous. Two of
Roose Bolton’s scouts had come straggling back through the
Hunter’s Gate to report that Lord Stannis’s advance had slowed to a
crawl. His knights rode destriers, and the big warhorses were
foundering in the snow. The small, sure-footed garrons of the hill
clans were faring better, the scouts said, but the clansmen dared not
press too far ahead or the whole host would come apart. Lord
Ramsay commanded Abel to give them a marching song in honor of
Stannis trudging through the snows, so the bard took up his lute
again, whilst one of his washerwomen coaxed a sword from Sour
Alyn and mimed Stannis slashing at the snow akes.
Theon was staring down into the last dregs of his third tankard
when Lady Barbrey Dustin swept into the hall and sent two of her
sworn swords to bring him to her. When he stood below the dais,
she looked him up and down, and sni ed. “Those are the same
clothes you wore for the wedding.”
“Yes, my lady. They are the clothes I was given.” That was one of
the lessons he had learned at the Dreadfort: to take what he was
given and never ask for more.
Lady Dustin wore black, as ever, though her sleeves were lined
with vair. Her gown had a high sti collar that framed her face.
“You know this castle.”
“Once.”

“Somewhere beneath us are the crypts where the old Stark kings
sit in darkness. My men have not been able to nd the way down
into them. They have been through all the undercrofts and cellars,
even the dungeons, but …”
“The crypts cannot be accessed from the dungeons, my lady.”
“Can you show me the way down?”
“There’s nothing down there but—”
“—dead Starks? Aye. And all my favorite Starks are dead, as it
happens. Do you know the way or not?”
“I do.” He did not like the crypts, had never liked the crypts, but
he was no stranger to them.
“Show me. Serjeant, fetch a lantern.”
“My lady will want a warm cloak,” cautioned Theon. “We will
need to go outside.”
The snow was coming down heavier than ever when they left the
hall, with Lady Dustin wrapped in sable. Huddled in their hooded
cloaks, the guards outside were almost indistinguishable from the
snowmen. Only their breath fogging the air gave proof that they
still lived. Fires burned along the battlements, a vain attempt to
drive the gloom away. Their small party found themselves slogging
through a smooth, unbroken expanse of white that came halfway up
their calves. The tents in the yard were half-buried, sagging under
the weight of the accumulation.
The entrance to the crypts was in the oldest section of the castle,
near the foot of the First Keep, which had sat unused for hundreds
of years. Ramsay had put it to the torch when he sacked Winterfell,
and much of what had not burned had collapsed. Only a shell
remained, one side open to the elements and lling up with snow.
Rubble was strewn all about it: great chunks of shattered masonry,
burned beams, broken gargoyles. The falling snow had covered
almost all of it, but part of one gargoyle still poked above the drift,
its grotesque face snarling sightless at the sky.
This is where they found Bran when he fell. Theon had been out
hunting that day, riding with Lord Eddard and King Robert, with no
hint of the dire news that awaited them back at the castle. He
remembered Robb’s face when they told him. No one had expected

the broken boy to live. The gods could not kill Bran, no more than I
could. It was a strange thought, and stranger still to remember that
Bran might still be alive.
“There.” Theon pointed to where a snowbank had crept up the
wall of the keep. “Under there. Watch for broken stones.”
It took Lady Dustin’s men the better part of half an hour to
uncover the entrance, shoveling through the snow and shifting
rubble. When they did, the door was frozen shut. Her serjeant had
to go nd an axe before he could pull it open, hinges screaming, to
reveal stone steps spiraling down into darkness.
“It is a long way down, my lady,” Theon cautioned.
Lady Dustin was undeterred. “Beron, the light.”
The way was narrow and steep, the steps worn in the center by
centuries of feet. They went single le—the serjeant with the
lantern, then Theon and Lady Dustin, her other man behind them.
He had always thought of the crypts as cold, and so they seemed in
summer, but now as they descended the air grew warmer. Not
warm, never warm, but warmer than above. Down there below the
earth, it would seem, the chill was constant, unchanging.
“The bride weeps,” Lady Dustin said, as they made their way
down, step by careful step. “Our little Lady Arya.”
Take care now. Take care, take care. He put one hand on the wall.
The shifting torchlight made the steps seem to move beneath his
feet. “As … as you say, m’lady.”
“Roose is not pleased. Tell your bastard that.”
He is not my bastard, he wanted to say, but another voice inside
him said, He is, he is. Reek belongs to Ramsay, and Ramsay belongs to
Reek. You must not forget your name.
“Dressing her in grey and white serves no good if the girl is left
to sob. The Freys may not care, but the northmen … they fear the
Dreadfort, but they love the Starks.”
“Not you,” said Theon.
“Not me,” the Lady of Barrowton confessed, “but the rest, yes.
Old Whoresbane is only here because the Freys hold the Greatjon
captive. And do you imagine the Hornwood men have forgotten the
Bastard’s last marriage, and how his lady wife was left to starve,

chewing her own ngers? What do you think passes through their
heads when they hear the new bride weeping? Valiant Ned’s
precious little girl.”
No, he thought. She is not of Lord Eddard’s blood, her name is Jeyne,
she is only a steward’s daughter. He did not doubt that Lady Dustin
suspected, but even so …
“Lady Arya’s sobs do us more harm than all of Lord Stannis’s
swords and spears. If the Bastard means to remain Lord of
Winterfell, he had best teach his wife to laugh.”
“My lady,” Theon broke in. “Here we are.”
“The steps go farther down,” observed Lady Dustin.
“There are lower levels. Older. The lowest level is partly
collapsed, I hear. I have never been down there.” He pushed the
door open and led them out into a long vaulted tunnel, where
mighty granite pillars marched two by two into blackness.
Lady Dustin’s serjeant raised the lantern. Shadows slid and
shifted. A small light in a great darkness. Theon had never felt
comfortable in the crypts. He could feel the stone kings staring
down at him with their stone eyes, stone ngers curled around the
hilts of rusted longswords. None had any love for ironborn. A
familiar sense of dread lled him.
“So many,” Lady Dustin said. “Do you know their names?”
“Once … but that was a long time ago.” Theon pointed. “The ones
on this side were Kings in the North. Torrhen was the last.”
“The King Who Knelt.”
“Aye, my lady. After him they were only lords.”
“Until the Young Wolf. Where is Ned Stark’s tomb?”
“At the end. This way, my lady.”
Their footsteps echoed through the vault as they made their way
between the rows of pillars. The stone eyes of the dead men seemed
to follow them, and the eyes of their stone direwolves as well. The
faces stirred faint memories. A few names came back to him,
unbidden, whispered in the ghostly voice of Maester Luwin. King
Edrick Snowbeard, who had ruled the north for a hundred years.
Brandon the Shipwright, who had sailed beyond the sunset. Theon
Stark, the Hungry Wolf. My namesake. Lord Beron Stark, who made

common cause with Casterly Rock to war against Dagon Greyjoy,
Lord of Pyke, in the days when the Seven Kingdoms were ruled in
all but name by the bastard sorcerer men called Bloodraven.
“That king is missing his sword,” Lady Dustin observed.
It was true. Theon did not recall which king it was, but the
longsword he should have held was gone. Streaks of rust remained
to show where it had been. The sight disquieted him. He had always
heard that the iron in the sword kept the spirits of the dead locked
within their tombs. If a sword was missing …
There are ghosts in Winterfell. And I am one of them.
They walked on. Barbrey Dustin’s face seemed to harden with
every step. She likes this place no more than I do. Theon heard himself
say, “My lady, why do you hate the Starks?”
She studied him. “For the same reason you love them.”
Theon stumbled. “Love them? I never … I took this castle from
them, my lady. I had … had Bran and Rickon put to death, mounted
their heads on spikes, I …”
“… rode south with Robb Stark, fought beside him at the
Whispering Wood and Riverrun, returned to the Iron Islands as his
envoy to treat with your own father. Barrowton sent men with the
Young Wolf as well. I gave him as few men as I dared, but I knew
that I must needs give him some or risk the wroth of Winterfell. So
I had my own eyes and ears in that host. They kept me well
informed. I know who you are. I know what you are. Now answer
my question. Why do you love the Starks?”
“I …” Theon put a gloved hand against a pillar. “… I wanted to
be one of them …”
“And never could. We have more in common than you know, my
lord. But come.”
Only a little farther on, three tombs were closely grouped
together. That was where they halted. “Lord Rickard,” Lady Dustin
observed, studying the central gure. The statue loomed above
them—long-faced, bearded, solemn. He had the same stone eyes as
the rest, but his looked sad. “He lacks a sword as well.”
It was true. “Someone has been down here stealing swords.
Brandon’s is gone as well.”

“He would hate that.” She pulled o her glove and touched his
knee, pale esh against dark stone. “Brandon loved his sword. He
loved to hone it. ‘I want it sharp enough to shave the hair from a
woman’s cunt,’ he used to say. And how he loved to use it. ‘A
bloody sword is a beautiful thing,’ he told me once.”
“You knew him,” Theon said.
The lantern light in her eyes made them seem as if they were
a re. “Brandon was fostered at Barrowton with old Lord Dustin, the
father of the one I’d later wed, but he spent most of his time riding
the Rills. He loved to ride. His little sister took after him in that. A
pair of centaurs, those two. And my lord father was always pleased
to play host to the heir to Winterfell. My father had great ambitions
for House Ryswell. He would have served up my maidenhead to any
Stark who happened by, but there was no need. Brandon was never
shy about taking what he wanted. I am old now, a dried-up thing,
too long a widow, but I still remember the look of my maiden’s
blood on his cock the night he claimed me. I think Brandon liked
the sight as well. A bloody sword is a beautiful thing, yes. It hurt,
but it was a sweet pain.
“The day I learned that Brandon was to marry Catelyn Tully,
though … there was nothing sweet about that pain. He never
wanted her, I promise you that. He told me so, on our last night
together … but Rickard Stark had great ambitions too. Southron
ambitions that would not be served by having his heir marry the
daughter of one of his own vassals. Afterward my father nursed
some hope of wedding me to Brandon’s brother Eddard, but Catelyn
Tully got that one as well. I was left with young Lord Dustin, until
Ned Stark took him from me.”
“Robert’s Rebellion …”
“Lord Dustin and I had not been married half a year when Robert
rose and Ned Stark called his banners. I begged my husband not to
go. He had kin he might have sent in his stead. An uncle famed for
his prowess with an axe, a great-uncle who had fought in the War of
the Ninepenny Kings. But he was a man and full of pride, nothing
would serve but that he lead the Barrowton levies himself. I gave
him a horse the day he set out, a red stallion with a ery mane, the

pride of my lord father’s herds. My lord swore that he would ride
him home when the war was done.
“Ned Stark returned the horse to me on his way back home to
Winterfell. He told me that my lord had died an honorable death,
that his body had been laid to rest beneath the red mountains of
Dorne. He brought his sister’s bones back north, though, and there
she rests … but I promise you, Lord Eddard’s bones will never rest
beside hers. I mean to feed them to my dogs.”
Theon did not understand. “His … his bones …?”
Her lips twisted. It was an ugly smile, a smile that reminded him
of Ramsay’s. “Catelyn Tully dispatched Lord Eddard’s bones north
before the Red Wedding, but your iron uncle seized Moat Cailin and
closed the way. I have been watching ever since. Should those
bones ever emerge from the swamps, they will get no farther than
Barrowton.” She threw one last lingering look at the likeness of
Eddard Stark. “We are done here.”
The snowstorm was still raging when they emerged from the
crypts. Lady Dustin was silent during their ascent, but when they
stood beneath the ruins of the First Keep again she shivered and
said, “You would do well not to repeat anything I might have said
down there. Is that understood?”
It was. “Hold my tongue or lose it.”
“Roose has trained you well.” She left him there.

THE KING’S PRIZE

T

he king’s host departed Deepwood Motte by the light of a
golden dawn, uncoiling from behind the log palisades like a long,
steel serpent emerging from its nest.
The southron knights rode out in plate and mail, dinted and
scarred by the battles they had fought, but still bright enough to
glitter when they caught the rising sun. Faded and stained, torn and
mended, their banners and surcoats still made a riot of colors amidst
the winter wood—azure and orange, red and green, purple and blue
and gold, glimmering amongst bare brown trunks, grey-green pines
and sentinels, drifts of dirty snow.
Each knight had his squires, servants, and men-at-arms. Behind
them came armorers, cooks, grooms; ranks of spearmen, axemen,
archers; grizzled veterans of a hundred battles and green boys o to
ght their rst. Before them marched the clansmen from the hills;
chiefs and champions astride shaggy garrons, their hirsute ghters
trotting beside them, clad in furs and boiled leather and old mail.
Some painted their faces brown and green and tied bundles of brush
about them, to hide amongst the trees.
Back of the main column the baggage train followed: mules,
horses, oxen, a mile of wayns and carts laden with food, fodder,
tents, and other provisions. Last the rear guard—more knights in
plate and mail, with a screening of outriders following half-hidden
to make certain no foe could steal up on them unawares.
Asha Greyjoy rode in the baggage train, in a covered wayn with
two huge iron-rimmed wheels, fettered at wrist and ankle and
watched over day and night by a She-Bear who snored worse than

any man. His Grace King Stannis was taking no chances on his prize
escaping captivity. He meant to carry her to Winterfell, to display
her there in chains for the lords of the north to see, the kraken’s
daughter bound and broken, proof of his power.
Trumpets saw the column on its way. Spearpoints shone in the
light of the rising sun, and all along the verges the grass glistened
with the morning frost. Between Deepwood Motte and Winterfell
lay one hundred leagues of forest. Three hundred miles as the raven
ies. “Fifteen days,” the knights told each other.
“Robert would have done it in ten,” Asha heard Lord Fell
boasting. His grandsire had been slain by Robert at Summerhall;
somehow this had elevated his slayer to godlike prowess in the
grandson’s eyes. “Robert would have been inside Winterfell a
fortnight ago, thumbing his nose at Bolton from the battlements.”
“Best not mention that to Stannis,” suggested Justin Massey, “or
he’ll have us marching nights as well as days.”
This king lives in his brother’s shadow, Asha thought.
Her ankle still gave a stab of pain whenever she tried to put her
weight on it. Something was broken down inside, Asha did not
doubt. The swelling had gone down at Deepwood, but the pain
remained. A sprain would surely have healed by now. Her irons
clacked every time she moved. The fetters chafed at her wrists and
at her pride. But that was the cost of submission.
“No man has ever died from bending his knee,” her father had
once told her. “He who kneels may rise again, blade in hand. He
who will not kneel stays dead, sti legs and all.” Balon Greyjoy had
proved the truth of his own words when his rst rebellion failed;
the kraken bent the knee to stag and direwolf, only to rise again
when Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark were dead.
And so at Deepwood the kraken’s daughter had done the same
when she was dumped before the king, bound and limping (though
blessedly unraped), her ankle a blaze of pain. “I yield, Your Grace.
Do as you wish with me. I ask only that you spare my men.” Qarl
and Tris and the rest who had survived the wolfswood were all she
had to care about. Only nine remained. We ragged nine, Cromm
named them. He was the worst wounded.

Stannis had given her their lives. Yet she sensed no true mercy in
the man. He was determined, beyond a doubt. Nor did he lack for
courage. Men said he was just … and if his was a harsh, hardhanded sort of justice, well, life on the Iron Islands had accustomed
Asha Greyjoy to that. All the same, she could not like this king.
Those deep-set blue eyes of his seemed always slitted in suspicion,
cold fury boiling just below their surface. Her life meant little and
less to him. She was only his hostage, a prize to show the north that
he could vanquish the ironborn.
More fool him. Bringing down a woman was not like to awe any
northmen, if she knew the breed, and her worth as a hostage was
less than naught. Her uncle ruled the Iron Islands now, and the
Crow’s Eye would not care if she lived or died. It might matter
some to the wretched ruin of a husband that Euron had in icted
upon her, but Eric Ironmaker did not have coin enough to ransom
her. But there was no explaining such things to Stannis Baratheon.
Her very womanhood seemed to o end him. Men from the green
lands liked their women soft and sweet in silk, she knew, not clad in
mail and leather with a throwing axe in each hand. But her short
acquaintance with the king at Deepwood Motte convinced her that
he would have been no more fond of her in a gown. Even with
Galbart Glover’s wife, the pious Lady Sybelle, he had been correct
and courteous but plainly uncomfortable. This southron king
seemed to be one of those men to whom women are another race,
as strange and unfathomable as giants and grumkins and the
children of the forest. The She-Bear made him grind his teeth as
well.
There was only one woman that Stannis listened to, and he had
left her on the Wall. “Though I would sooner she was with us,”
confessed Ser Justin Massey, the fair-haired knight who commanded
the baggage train. “The last time we went into battle without Lady
Melisandre was the Blackwater, when Lord Renly’s shade came
down upon us and drove half our host into the bay.”
“The last time?” Asha said. “Was this sorceress at Deepwood
Motte? I did not see her.”

“Hardly a battle,” Ser Justin said, smiling. “Your ironmen fought
bravely, my lady, but we had many times your numbers, and we
took you unawares. Winterfell will know that we are coming. And
Roose Bolton has as many men as we do.”
Or more, thought Asha.
Even prisoners have ears, and she had heard all the talk at
Deepwood Motte, when King Stannis and his captains were debating
this march. Ser Justin had opposed it from the start, along with
many of the knights and lords who had come with Stannis from the
south. But the wolves insisted; Roose Bolton could not be su ered
to hold Winterfell, and the Ned’s girl must be rescued from the
clutches of his bastard. So said Morgan Liddle, Brandon Norrey, Big
Bucket Wull, the Flints, even the She-Bear. “One hundred leagues
from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell,” said Artos Flint, the night the
argument boiled to a head in Galbart Glover’s longhall. “Three
hundred miles as the raven ies.”
“A long march,” a knight named Corliss Penny said.
“Not so long as that,” insisted Ser Godry, the big knight the
others called the Giantslayer. “We have come as far already. The
Lord of Light will blaze a path for us.”
“And when we arrive before Winterfell?” said Justin Massey.
“Two walls with a moat between them, and the inner wall a
hundred feet high. Bolton will never march out to face us in the
eld, and we do not have the provisions to mount a siege.”
“Arnolf Karstark will join his strength to ours, never forget,” said
Harwood Fell. “Mors Umber as well. We will have as many
northmen as Lord Bolton. And the woods are thick north of the
castle. We will raise siege towers, build rams …”
And die by the thousands, Asha thought.
“We might do best to winter here,” suggested Lord Peasebury.
“Winter here?” Big Bucket roared. “How much food and fodder do
you think Galbart Glover has laid by?”
Then Ser Richard Horpe, the knight with the ravaged face and the
death’s-head moths on his surcoat, turned to Stannis and said, “Your
Grace, your brother—”

The king cut him o . “We all know what my brother would do.
Robert would gallop up to the gates of Winterfell alone, break them
with his warhammer, and ride through the rubble to slay Roose
Bolton with his left hand and the Bastard with his right.” Stannis
rose to his feet. “I am not Robert. But we will march, and we will
free Winterfell … or die in the attempt.”
Whatever doubts his lords might nurse, the common men seemed
to have faith in their king. Stannis had smashed Mance Rayder’s
wildlings at the Wall and cleaned Asha and her ironborn out of
Deepwood Motte; he was Robert’s brother, victor in a famous sea
battle o Fair Isle, the man who had held Storm’s End all through
Robert’s Rebellion. And he bore a hero’s sword, the enchanted blade
Lightbringer, whose glow lit up the night.
“Our foes are not as formidable as they appear,” Ser Justin
assured Asha on the rst day of the march. “Roose Bolton is feared,
but little loved. And his friends the Freys … the north has not
forgotten the Red Wedding. Every lord at Winterfell lost kinsmen
there. Stannis need only bloody Bolton, and the northmen will
abandon him.”
So you hope, thought Asha, but rst the king must bloody him. Only
a fool deserts the winning side.
Ser Justin called upon her cart half a dozen times that rst day, to
bring her food and drink and tidings of the march. A man of easy
smiles and endless japes, large and well eshed, with pink cheeks,
blue eyes, and a wind-tossed tangle of white-blond hair as pale as
ax, he was a considerate gaoler, ever solicitous of his captive’s
comfort.
“He wants you,” said the She-Bear, after his third visit.
Her proper name was Alysane of House Mormont, but she wore
the other name as easily as she wore her mail. Short, chunky,
muscular, the heir to Bear Island had big thighs, big breasts, and big
hands ridged with callus. Even in sleep she wore ringmail under her
furs, boiled leather under that, and an old sheepskin under the
leather, turned inside out for warmth. All those layers made her
look almost as wide as she was tall. And ferocious. Sometimes it was

hard for Asha Greyjoy to remember that she and the She-Bear were
almost of an age.
“He wants my lands,” Asha replied. “He wants the Iron Islands.”
She knew the signs. She had seen the same before in other suitors.
Massey’s own ancestral holdings, far to the south, were lost to him,
so he must needs make an advantageous marriage or resign himself
to being no more than a knight of the king’s household. Stannis had
frustrated Ser Justin’s hopes of marrying the wildling princess that
Asha had heard so much of, so now he had set his sights on her. No
doubt he dreamed of putting her in the Seastone Chair on Pyke and
ruling through her, as her lord and master. That would require
ridding her of her present lord and master, to be sure … not to
mention the uncle who had married her to him. Not likely, Asha
judged. The Crow’s Eye could eat Ser Justin to break his fast and never
even belch.
It made no matter. Her father’s lands would never be hers, no
matter whom she married. The ironborn were not a forgiving
people, and Asha had been defeated twice. Once at the kingsmoot
by her uncle Euron, and again at Deepwood Motte by Stannis. More
than enough to stamp her as un t to rule. Wedding Justin Massey,
or any of Stannis Baratheon’s lordlings, would hurt more than it
helped. The kraken’s daughter turned out to be just a woman after all,
the captains and the kings would say. See how she spreads her legs for
this soft green land lord.
Still, if Ser Justin wished to court her favor with food and wine
and words, Asha was not like to discourage him. He made for better
company than the taciturn She-Bear, and she was elsewise alone
amongst ve thousand foes. Tris Botley, Qarl the Maid, Cromm,
Roggon, and the rest of her bloodied band had been left behind at
Deepwood Motte, in Galbart Glover’s dungeons.
The army covered twenty-two miles the rst day, by the
reckoning of the guides Lady Sybelle had given them, trackers and
hunters sworn to Deepwood with clan names like Forrester and
Woods, Branch and Bole. The second day the host made twentyfour, as their vanguard passed beyond the Glover lands into the
thick of the wolfswood. “R’hllor, send your light to lead us through this

gloom,” the faithful prayed that night as they gathered about a
roaring blaze outside the king’s pavilion. Southron knights and menat-arms, the lot of them. Asha would have called them king’s men,
but the other stormlanders and crownlands men named them
queen’s men … though the queen they followed was the red one at
Castle Black, not the wife that Stannis Baratheon had left behind at
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. “Oh, Lord of Light, we beseech you, cast your
ery eye upon us and keep us safe and warm,” they sang to the
ames, “for the night is dark and full of terrors.”
A big knight named Ser Godry Farring led them. Godry the
Giantslayer. A big name for a small man. Farring was broad-chested
and well muscled under his plate and mail. He was also arrogant
and vain, it seemed to Asha, hungry for glory, deaf to caution, a
glutton for praise, and contemptuous of smallfolk, wolves, and
women. In the last, he was not unlike his king.
“Let me have a horse,” Asha asked Ser Justin, when he rode up to
the wayn with half a ham. “I am going mad in these chains. I will
not attempt escape. You have my word on that.”
“Would that I could, my lady. You are the king’s captive, not
mine own.”
“Your king will not take a woman’s word.”
The She-Bear growled. “Why should we trust the word of any
ironman after what your brother did at Winterfell?”
“I am not Theon,” Asha insisted … but the chains remained.
As Ser Justin galloped down the column, she found herself
remembering the last time she had seen her mother. It had been on
Harlaw, at Ten Towers. A candle had been ickering in her mother’s
chamber, but her great carved bed was empty beneath its dusty
canopy. Lady Alannys sat beside a window, staring out across the
sea. “Did you bring my baby boy?” she’d asked, mouth trembling.
“Theon could not come,” Asha had told her, looking down upon the
ruin of the woman who had given her birth, a mother who had lost
two of her sons. And the third …
I send you each a piece of prince.
Whatever befell when battle was joined at Winterfell, Asha
Greyjoy did not think her brother likely to survive it. Theon

Turncloak. Even the She-Bear wants his head on a spike.
“Do you have brothers?” Asha asked her keeper.
“Sisters,” Alysane Mormont replied, gru as ever. “Five, we were.
All girls. Lyanna is back on Bear Island. Lyra and Jory are with our
mother. Dacey was murdered.”
“The Red Wedding.”
“Aye.” Alysane stared at Asha for a moment. “I have a son. He’s
only two. My daughter’s nine.”
“You started young.”
“Too young. But better that than wait too late.”
A stab at me, Asha thought, but let it be. “You are wed.”
“No. My children were fathered by a bear.” Alysane smiled. Her
teeth were crooked, but there was something ingratiating about that
smile. “Mormont women are skinchangers. We turn into bears and
nd mates in the woods. Everyone knows.”
Asha smiled back. “Mormont women are all ghters too.”
The other woman’s smile faded. “What we are is what you made
us. On Bear Island every child learns to fear krakens rising from the
sea.”
The Old Way. Asha turned away, chains clinking faintly. On the
third day the forest pressed close around them, and the rutted roads
dwindled down to game trails that soon proved to be too narrow for
their larger wagons. Here and there they wound their way past
familiar landmarks: a stony hill that looked a bit like a wolf’s head
when seen from a certain angle, a half-frozen waterfall, a natural
stone arch bearded with grey-green moss. Asha knew them all. She
had come this way before, riding to Winterfell to persuade her
brother Theon to abandon his conquest and return with her to the
safety of Deepwood Motte. I failed in that as well.
That day they made fourteen miles, and were glad of it.
When dusk fell, the driver pulled the wayn o under the tree. As
he was loosing the horses from the traces, Ser Justin trotted up and
undid the fetters around Asha’s ankles. He and the She-Bear escorted
her through the camp to the king’s tent. A captive she might be, but
she was still a Greyjoy of Pyke, and it pleased Stannis Baratheon to

feed her scraps from his own table, where he supped with his
captains and commanders.
The king’s pavilion was near as large as the longhall back at
Deepwood Motte, but there was little grand about it beyond its size.
Its sti walls of heavy yellow canvas were badly faded, stained by
mud and water, with spots of mildew showing. Atop its center pole
ew the royal standard, golden, with a stag’s head within a burning
heart. On three sides the pavilions of the southron lordlings who
had come north with Stannis surrounded it. On the fourth side the
night re roared, lashing at the darkening sky with swirls of ame.
A dozen men were splitting logs to feed the blaze when Asha
came limping up with her keepers. Queen’s men. Their god was Red
R’hllor, and a jealous god he was. Her own god, the Drowned God
of the Iron Isles, was a demon to their eyes, and if she did not
embrace this Lord of Light, she would be damned and doomed. They
would as gladly burn me as those logs and broken branches. Some had
urged that very thing within her hearing after the battle in the
woods. Stannis had refused.
The king stood outside his tent, staring into the night re. What
does he see there? Victory? Doom? The face of his red and hungry god?
His eyes were sunk in deep pits, his close-cropped beard no more
than a shadow across his hollow cheeks and bony jawbone. Yet
there was power in his stare, an iron ferocity that told Asha this
man would never, ever turn back from his course.
She went to one knee before him. “Sire.” Am I humbled enough for
you, Your Grace? Am I beaten, bowed, and broken su ciently for your
liking? “Strike these chains from my wrists, I beg you. Let me ride. I
will attempt no escape.”
Stannis looked at her as he might look at a dog who presumed to
hump against his leg. “You earned those irons.”
“I did. Now I o er you my men, my ships, my wits.”
“Your ships are mine, or burnt. Your men … how many are left?
Ten? Twelve?”
Nine. Six, if you count only those strong enough to ght. “Dagmer
Cleftjaw holds Torrhen’s Square. A erce ghter, and a leal servant
of House Greyjoy. I can deliver that castle to you, and its garrison

as well.” Perhaps, she might have added, but it would not serve her
cause to show doubt before this king.
“Torrhen’s Square is not worth the mud beneath my heels. It is
Winterfell that matters.”
“Strike o these irons and let me help you take it, Sire. Your
Grace’s royal brother was renowned for turning fallen foes into
friends. Make me your man.”
“The gods did not make you a man. How can I?” Stannis turned
back to the night re and whatever he saw dancing there amongst
the orange ames.
Ser Justin Massey grasped Asha by the arm and pulled her inside
the royal tent. “That was ill judged, my lady,” he told her. “Never
speak to him of Robert.”
I should have known better. Asha knew how it went with little
brothers. She remembered Theon as a boy, a shy child who lived in
awe, and fear, of Rodrik and Maron. They never grow out of it, she
decided. A little brother may live to be a hundred, but he will always be
a little brother. She rattled her iron jewelry and imagined how
pleasant it would be to step up behind Stannis and throttle him with
the chain that bound her wrists.
They supped that night on a venison stew made from a scrawny
hart that a scout called Benjicot Branch had brought down. But only
in the royal tent. Beyond those canvas walls, each man got a heel of
bread and a chunk of black sausage no longer than a nger, washed
down with the last of Galbart Glover’s ale.
One hundred leagues from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell. Three
hundred miles as the raven ies. “Would that we were ravens,”
Justin Massey said on the fourth day of the march, the day the snow
began to fall. Only a few small urries at rst. Cold and wet, but
nothing they could not push through easily.
But it snowed again the next day, and the day after, and the day
after that. The thick beards of the wolves were soon caked with ice
where their breath had frozen, and every clean-shaved southron boy
was letting his whiskers grow out to keep his face warm. Before
long the ground ahead of the column was blanketed in white,
concealing stones and twisted roots and deadfalls, turning every

step into an adventure. The wind picked up as well, driving the
snow before it. The king’s host became a column of snowmen,
staggering through knee-high drifts.
On the third day of snow, the king’s host began to come apart.
Whilst the southron knights and lordlings struggled, the men of the
northern hills fared better. Their garrons were sure-footed beasts
that ate less than palfreys, and much less than the big destriers, and
the men who rode them were at home in the snow. Many of the
wolves donned curious footwear. Bear-paws, they called them,
queer elongated things made with bent wood and leather strips.
Lashed onto the bottoms of their boots, the things somehow
allowed them to walk on top of the snow without breaking through
the crust and sinking down to their thighs.
Some had bear-paws for their horses too, and the shaggy little
garrons wore them as easily as other mounts wore iron
horseshoes … but the palfreys and destriers wanted no part of them.
When a few of the king’s knights strapped them onto their feet
nonetheless, the big southern horses balked and refused to move, or
tried to shake the things o their feet. One destrier broke an ankle
trying to walk in them.
The northmen on their bear-paws soon began to outdistance the
rest of the host. They overtook the knights in the main column, then
Ser Godry Farring and his vanguard. And meanwhile, the wayns and
wagons of the baggage train were falling farther and farther behind,
so much so that the men of the rear guard were constantly
chivvying them to keep up a faster pace.
On the fth day of the storm, the baggage train crossed a rippling
expanse of waist-high snowdrifts that concealed a frozen pond.
When the hidden ice cracked beneath the weight of the wagons,
three teamsters and four horses were swallowed up by the freezing
water, along with two of the men who tried to rescue them. One
was Harwood Fell. His knights pulled him out before he drowned,
but not before his lips turned blue and his skin as pale as milk.
Nothing they did could seem to warm him afterward. He shivered
violently for hours, even when they cut him out of his sodden

clothes, wrapped him in warm furs, and sat him by the re. That
same night he slipped into a feverish sleep. He never woke.
That was the night that Asha rst heard the queen’s men
muttering about a sacri ce—an o ering to their red god, so he
might end the storm. “The gods of the north have unleashed this
storm on us,” Ser Corliss Penny said.
“False gods,” insisted Ser Godry, the Giantslayer.
“R’hllor is with us,” said Ser Clayton Suggs.
“Melisandre is not,” said Justin Massey.
The king said nothing. But he heard. Asha was certain of that. He
sat at the high table as a dish of onion soup cooled before him,
hardly tasted, staring at the ame of the nearest candle with those
hooded eyes, ignoring the talk around him. The second-incommand, the lean tall knight named Richard Horpe, spoke for him.
“The storm must break soon,” he declared.
But the storm only worsened. The wind became a lash as cruel as
any slaver’s whip. Asha thought she had known cold on Pyke, when
the wind came howling o the sea, but that was nothing compared
to this. This is a cold that drives men mad.
Even when the shout came down the line to make camp for the
night, it was no easy thing to warm yourself. The tents were damp
and heavy, hard to raise, harder to take down, and prone to sudden
collapse if too much snow accumulated on top of them. The king’s
host was creeping through the heart of the largest forest in the
Seven Kingdoms, yet dry wood became di cult to nd. Every camp
saw fewer res burning, and those that were lit threw o more
smoke than heat. Oft as not food was eaten cold, even raw.
Even the night re shrank and grew feeble, to the dismay of the
queen’s men. “Lord of Light, preserve us from this evil,” they prayed,
led by the deep voice of Ser Godry the Giantslayer. “Show us your
bright sun again, still these winds, and melt these snows, that we may
reach your foes and smite them. The night is dark and cold and full of
terrors, but yours is the power and glory and the light. R’hllor, ll us with
your re.”
Later, when Ser Corliss Penny wondered aloud whether an entire
army had ever frozen to death in a winter storm, the wolves

laughed. “This is no winter,” declared Big Bucket Wull. “Up in the
hills we say that autumn kisses you, but winter fucks you hard. This
is only autumn’s kiss.”
God grant that I never know true winter, then. Asha herself was
spared the worst of it; she was the king’s prize, after all. Whilst
others hungered, she was fed. Whilst others shivered, she was
warm. Whilst others struggled through the snows atop weary
horses, she rode upon a bed of furs inside a wayn, with a sti
canvas roof to keep the snow o , comfortable in her chains.
The horses and the common men had it hardest. Two squires from
the stormlands stabbed a man-at-arms to death in a quarrel over
who would sit closest to the re. The next night some archers
desperate for warmth somehow managed to set their tent a re,
which had at least the virtue of heating the adjacent tents. Destriers
began to perish of exhaustion and exposure. “What is a knight
without a horse?” men riddled. “A snowman with a sword.” Any
horse that went down was butchered on the spot for meat. Their
provisions had begun to run low as well.
Peasebury, Cobb, Foxglove, and other southron lords urged the
king to make camp until the storm had passed. Stannis would have
none of that. Nor would he heed the queen’s men when they came
to urge him to make an o ering to their hungry red god.
That tale she had from Justin Massey, who was less devout than
most. “A sacri ce will prove our faith still burns true, Sire,” Clayton
Suggs had told the king. And Godry the Giantslayer said, “The old
gods of the north have sent this storm upon us. Only R’hllor can end
it. We must give him an unbeliever.”
“Half my army is made up of unbelievers,” Stannis had replied. “I
will have no burnings. Pray harder.”
No burnings today, and none tomorrow … but if the snows continue,
how long before the king’s resolve begins to weaken? Asha had never
shared her uncle Aeron’s faith in the Drowned God, but that night
she prayed as fervently to He Who Dwells Beneath the Waves as
ever the Damphair had. The storm did not abate. The march
continued, slowing to a stagger, then a crawl. Five miles was a good
day. Then three. Then two.

By the ninth day of the storm, every camp saw the captains and
commanders entering the king’s tent wet and weary, to sink to one
knee and report their losses for the day.
“One man dead, three missing.”
“Six horses lost, one of them mine own.”
“Two dead men, one a knight. Four horses down. We got one up
again. The others are lost. Destriers, and one palfrey.”
The cold count, Asha heard it named. The baggage train su ered
the worst: dead horses, lost men, wayns overturned and broken.
“The horses founder in the snow,” Justin Massey told the king.
“Men wander o or just sit down to die.”
“Let them,” King Stannis snapped. “We press on.”
The northmen fared much better, with their garrons and their
bear-paws. Black Donnel Flint and his half-brother Artos only lost
one man between them. The Liddles, the Wulls, and the Norreys lost
none at all. One of Morgan Liddle’s mules had gone astray, but he
seemed to think the Flints had stolen him.
One hundred leagues from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell. Three
hundred miles as the raven ies. Fifteen days. The fteenth day of the
march came and went, and they had crossed less than half the
distance. A trail of broken wayns and frozen corpses stretched back
behind them, buried beneath the blowing snow. The sun and moon
and stars had been gone so long that Asha was starting to wonder
whether she had dreamed them.
It was the twentieth day of the advance when she nally won free
of her ankle chains. Late that afternoon, one of the horses drawing
her wayn died in the traces. No replacement could be found; what
draft horses remained were needed to pull the wagons that held
their food and fodder. When Ser Justin Massey rode up, he told
them to butcher the dead horse for meat and break up the wagon
for rewood. Then he removed the fetters around Asha’s ankles,
rubbing the sti ness from her calves. “I have no mount to give you,
my lady,” he said, “and if we tried to ride double, it would be the
end of my horse as well. You must walk.”
Asha’s ankle throbbed beneath her weight with every step. The
cold will numb it soon enough, she told herself. In an hour I won’t feel

my feet at all. She was only part wrong; it took less time than that.
By the time darkness halted the column, she was stumbling and
yearning for the comforts of her rolling prison. The irons made me
weak. Supper found her so exhausted that she fell asleep at the
table.
On the twenty-sixth day of the fteen-day march, the last of the
vegetables was consumed. On the thirty-second day, the last of the
grain and fodder. Asha wondered how long a man could live on
raw, half-frozen horse meat.
“Branch swears we are only three days from Winterfell,” Ser
Richard Horpe told the king that night after the cold count.
“If we leave the weakest men behind,” said Corliss Penny.
“The weakest men are beyond saving,” insisted Horpe. “Those
still strong enough must reach Winterfell or die as well.”
“The Lord of Light will deliver us the castle,” said Ser Godry
Farring. “If Lady Melisandre were with us—”
Finally, after a nightmarish day when the column advanced a bare
mile and lost a dozen horses and four men, Lord Peasebury turned
against the northmen. “This march was madness. More dying every
day, and for what? Some girl?”
“Ned’s girl,” said Morgan Liddle. He was the second of three sons,
so the other wolves called him Middle Liddle, though not often in
his hearing. It was Morgan who had almost slain Asha in the ght
by Deepwood Motte. He had come to her later, on the march, to
beg her pardon … for calling her cunt in his battle lust, not for
trying to split her head open with an axe.
“Ned’s girl,” echoed Big Bucket Wull. “And we should have had
her and the castle both if you prancing southron jackanapes didn’t
piss your satin breeches at a little snow.”
“A little snow?” Peasebury’s soft girlish mouth twisted in fury.
“Your ill counsel forced this march upon us, Wull. I am starting to
suspect you have been Bolton’s creature all along. Is that the way of
it? Did he send you to us to whisper poison in the king’s ear?”
Big Bucket laughed in his face. “Lord Pea Pod. If you were a man,
I would kill you for that, but my sword is made of too ne a steel to
besmirch with craven’s blood.” He took a drink of ale and wiped his

mouth. “Aye, men are dying. More will die before we see
Winterfell. What of it? This is war. Men die in war. That is as it
should be. As it has always been.”
Ser Corliss Penny gave the clan chief an incredulous look. “Do
you want to die, Wull?”
That seemed to amuse the northman. “I want to live forever in a
land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the
clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-andtwenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could ght all day and
fuck all night. What men want does not matter.
“Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would
sooner my men die ghting for the Ned’s little girl than alone and
hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No
one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This
will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I
want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a
Bolton skull. I want to lick it o my lips and die with the taste of it
on my tongue.”
“Aye!” shouted Morgan Liddle. “Blood and battle!” Then all the
hillmen were shouting, banging their cups and drinking horns on
the table, lling the king’s tent with the clangor.
Asha Greyjoy would have welcomed a ght herself. One battle, to
put an end to this misery. Steel on steel, pink snow, broken shields and
severed limbs, and it would all be done.
The next day the king’s scouts chanced upon an abandoned
crofters’ village between two lakes—a mean and meagre place, no
more than a few huts, a longhall, and a watchtower. Richard Horpe
commanded a halt, though the army had advanced no more than a
half-mile that day and they were hours shy of dark. It was well past
moonrise before the baggage train and rear guard straggled in. Asha
was amongst them.
“There are sh in those lakes,” Horpe told the king. “We’ll cut
holes in the ice. The northmen know how it’s done.”
Even in his bulky fur cloak and heavy armor, Stannis looked like
a man with one foot in the grave. What little esh he’d carried on
his tall, spare frame at Deepwood Motte had melted away during

the march. The shape of his skull could be seen under his skin, and
his jaw was clenched so hard Asha feared his teeth might shatter.
“Fish, then,” he said, biting o each word with a snap. “But we
march at rst light.”
Yet when light came, the camp woke to snow and silence. The
sky turned from black to white, and seemed no brighter. Asha
Greyjoy awoke cramped and cold beneath the pile of sleeping furs,
listening to the She-Bear’s snores. She had never known a woman to
snore so loudly, but she had grown used to it whilst on the march,
and even took some comfort in it now. It was the silence that
troubled her. No trumpets blew to rouse the men to mount up, form
column, prepare to march. No warhorns summoned forth the
northmen. Something is wrong.
Asha crawled out from under her sleeping furs and pushed her
way out of the tent, knocking aside the wall of snow that had sealed
them in during the night. Her irons clanked as she climbed to her
feet and took a breath of the icy morning air. The snow was still
falling, even more heavily than when she’d crawled inside the tent.
The lakes had vanished, and the woods as well. She could see the
shapes of other tents and lean-tos and the fuzzy orange glow of the
beacon re burning atop the watchtower, but not the tower itself.
The storm had swallowed the rest.
Somewhere ahead Roose Bolton awaited them behind the walls of
Winterfell, but Stannis Baratheon’s host sat snowbound and
unmoving, walled in by ice and snow, starving.

DAENERYS

T

he candle was almost gone. Less than an inch remained, jutting
from a pool of warm melted wax to cast its light over the queen’s
bed. The ame had begun to gutter.
It will go out before much longer, Dany realized, and when it does
another night will be at its end.
Dawn always came too soon.
She had not slept, could not sleep, would not sleep. She had not
even dared to close her eyes, for fear it would be morning when she
opened them again. If only she had the power, she would have
made their nights go on forever, but the best that she could do was
stay awake to try and savor every last sweet moment before
daybreak turned them into no more than fading memories.
Beside her, Daario Naharis was sleeping as peacefully as a
newborn babe. He had a gift for sleeping, he’d boasted, smiling in
that cocksure way of his. In the eld, he would sleep in the saddle
oft as not, he claimed, so as to be well rested should he come upon
a battle. Sun or storm, it made no matter. “A warrior who cannot
sleep soon has no strength to ght,” he said. He was never vexed by
nightmares either. When Dany told him how Serwyn of the Mirror
Shield was haunted by the ghosts of all the knights he’d killed,
Daario only laughed. “If the ones I killed come bother me, I will kill
them all again.” He has a sellsword’s conscience, she realized then.
That is to say, none at all.
Daario lay upon his stomach, the light linen coverlets tangled
about his long legs, his face half-buried in the pillows.

Dany ran her hand down his back, tracing the line of his spine.
His skin was smooth beneath her touch, almost hairless. His skin is
silk and satin. She loved the feel of him beneath her ngers. She
loved to run her ngers through his hair, to knead the ache from his
calves after a long day in the saddle, to cup his cock and feel it
harden against her palm.
If she had been some ordinary woman, she would gladly have
spent her whole life touching Daario, tracing his scars and making
him tell her how he’d come by every one. I would give up my crown
if he asked it of me, Dany thought … but he had not asked it, and
never would. Daario might whisper words of love when the two of
them were as one, but she knew it was the dragon queen he loved.
If I gave up my crown, he would not want me. Besides, kings who lost
their crowns oft lost their heads as well, and she could see no
reason why it would be any di erent for a queen.
The candle ickered one last time and died, drowned in its own
wax. Darkness swallowed the feather bed and its two occupants,
and lled every corner of the chamber. Dany wrapped her arms
around her captain and pressed herself against his back. She drank
in the scent of him, savoring the warmth of his esh, the feel of his
skin against her own. Remember, she told herself. Remember how he
felt. She kissed him on his shoulder.
Daario rolled toward her, his eyes open. “Daenerys.” He smiled a
lazy smile. That was another of his talents; he woke all at once, like
a cat. “Is it dawn?”
“Not yet. We have a while still.”
“Liar. I can see your eyes. Could I do that if it were the black of
night?” Daario kicked loose of the coverlets and sat up. “The halflight. Day will be here soon.”
“I do not want this night to end.”
“No? And why is that, my queen?”
“You know.”
“The wedding?” He laughed. “Marry me instead.”
“You know I cannot do that.”
“You are a queen. You can do what you like.” He slid a hand
along her leg. “How many nights remain to us?”

Two. Only two. “You know as well as I. This night and the next,
and we must end this.”
“Marry me, and we can have all the nights forever.”
If I could, I would. Khal Drogo had been her sun-and-stars, but he
had been dead so long that Daenerys had almost forgotten how it
felt to love and be loved. Daario had helped her to remember. I was
dead and he brought me back to life. I was asleep and he woke me. My
brave captain. Even so, of late he grew too bold. On the day that he
returned from his latest sortie, he had tossed the head of a Yunkish
lord at her feet and kissed her in the hall for all the world to see,
until Barristan Selmy pulled the two of them apart. Ser Grandfather
had been so wroth that Dany feared blood might be shed. “We
cannot wed, my love. You know why.”
He climbed from her bed. “Marry Hizdahr, then. I will give him a
nice set of horns for his wedding gift. Ghiscari men like to prance
about in horns. They make them from their own hair, with combs
and wax and irons.” Daario found his breeches and pulled them on.
He did not trouble himself with smallclothes.
“Once I am wed it will be high treason to desire me.” Dany pulled
the coverlet up over her breasts.
“Then I must be a traitor.” He slipped a blue silk tunic over his
head and straightened the prongs of his beard with his ngers. He
had dyed it afresh for her, taking it from purple back to blue, as it
had been when rst she met him. “I smell of you,” he said, sni ng
at his ngers and grinning.
Dany loved the way his gold tooth gleamed when he grinned. She
loved the ne hairs on his chest. She loved the strength in his arms,
the sound of his laughter, the way he would always look into her
eyes and say her name as he slid his cock inside her. “You are
beautiful,” she blurted as she watched him don his riding boots and
lace them up. Some days he let her do that for him, but not today, it
seemed. That’s done with too.
“Not beautiful enough to marry.” Daario took his sword belt o
the peg where he had hung it.
“Where are you going?”

“Out into your city,” he said, “to drink a keg or two and pick a
quarrel. It has been too long since I’ve killed a man. Might be I
should seek out your betrothed.”
Dany threw a pillow at him. “You will leave Hizdahr be!”
“As my queen commands. Will you hold court today?”
“No. On the morrow I will be a woman wed, and Hizdahr will be
king. Let him hold court. These are his people.”
“Some are his, some are yours. The ones you freed.”
“Are you chiding me?”
“The ones you call your children. They want their mother.”
“You are. You are chiding me.”
“Only a little, bright heart. Will you come hold court?”
“After my wedding, perhaps. After the peace.”
“This after that you speak of never comes. You should hold court.
My new men do not believe that you are real. The ones who came
over from the Windblown. Bred and born in Westeros, most of
them, full of tales about Targaryens. They want to see one with
their own eyes. The Frog has a gift for you.”
“The Frog?” she said, giggling. “And who is he?”
He shrugged. “Some Dornish boy. He squires for the big knight
they call Greenguts. I told him he could give his gift to me and I’d
deliver it, but he wouldn’t have it.”
“Oh, a clever frog. ‘Give the gift to me.’ ” She threw the other
pillow at him. “Would I have ever seen it?”
Daario stroked his gilded mustachio. “Would I steal from my
sweet queen? If it were a gift worthy of you, I would have put it
into your soft hands myself.”
“As a token of your love?”
“As to that I will not say, but I told him that he could give it to
you. You would not make a liar of Daario Naharis?” Dany was
helpless to refuse. “As you wish. Bring your frog to court tomorrow.
The others too. The Westerosi.” It would be nice to hear the
Common Tongue from someone besides Ser Barristan.
“As my queen commands.” Daario bowed deeply, grinned, and
took his leave, his cloak swirling behind him.

Dany sat amongst the rumpled bedclothes with her arms about
her knees, so forlorn that she did not hear when Missandei came
creeping in with bread and milk and gs. “Your Grace? Are you
unwell? In the black of night this one heard you scream.”
Dany took a g. It was black and plump, still moist with dew.
Will Hizdahr ever make me scream? “It was the wind that you heard
screaming.” She took a bite, but the fruit had lost its savor now that
Daario was gone. Sighing, she rose and called to Irri for a robe, then
wandered out onto her terrace.
Her foes were all about her. There were never less than a dozen
ships drawn up on the shore. Some days there were as many as a
hundred, when the soldiers were disembarking. The Yunkai’i were
even bringing in wood by sea. Behind their ditches, they were
building catapults, scorpions, tall trebuchets. On still nights she
could hear the hammers ringing through the warm, dry air. No siege
towers, though. No battering rams. They would not try to take
Meereen by storm. They would wait behind their siege lines,
inging stones at her until famine and disease had brought her
people to their knees.
Hizdahr will bring me peace. He must.
That night her cooks roasted her a kid with dates and carrots, but
Dany could only eat a bite of it. The prospect of wrestling with
Meereen once more left her feeling weary. Sleep came hard, even
when Daario came back, so drunk that he could hardly stand.
Beneath her coverlets she tossed and turned, dreaming that Hizdahr
was kissing her … but his lips were blue and bruised, and when he
thrust himself inside her, his manhood was cold as ice. She sat up
with her hair disheveled and the bedclothes atangle. Her captain
slept beside her, yet she was alone. She wanted to shake him, wake
him, make him hold her, fuck her, help her forget, but she knew
that if she did, he would only smile and yawn and say, “It was just a
dream, my queen. Go back to sleep.”
Instead she slipped into a hooded robe and stepped out onto her
terrace. She went to the parapet and stood there gazing down upon
the city as she had done a hundred times before. It will never be my
city. It will never be my home.

The pale pink light of dawn found her still out on her terrace,
asleep upon the grass beneath a blanket of ne dew. “I promised
Daario that I would hold court today,” Daenerys told her handmaids
when they woke her. “Help me nd my crown. Oh, and some
clothes to wear, something light and cool.”
She made her descent an hour later. “All kneel for Daenerys
Stormborn, the Unburnt, Queen of Meereen, Queen of the Andals and
the Rhoynar and the First Men, Khaleesi of Great Grass Sea, Breaker of
Shackles and Mother of Dragons,” Missandei called.
Reznak mo Reznak bowed and beamed. “Magni cence, every day
you grow more beautiful. I think the prospect of your wedding has
given you a glow. Oh, my shining queen!”
Dany sighed. “Summon the rst petitioner.”
It had been so long since she last held court that the crush of
cases was almost overwhelming. The back of the hall was a solid
press of people, and scu es broke out over precedence. Inevitably
it was Galazza Galare who stepped forward, her head held high, her
face hidden behind a shimmering green veil. “Your Radiance, it
might be best were we to speak in private.”
“Would that I had the time,” said Dany sweetly. “I am to be wed
upon the morrow.” Her last meeting with the Green Grace had not
gone well. “What would you have of me?”
“I would speak to you about the presumption of a certain
sellsword captain.”
She dares say that in open court? Dany felt a blaze of anger. She has
courage, I grant that, but if she thinks I am about to su er another
scolding, she could not be more wrong. “The treachery of Brown Ben
Plumm has shocked us all,” she said, “but your warning comes too
late. And now I know you will want to return to your temple to
pray for peace.”
The Green Grace bowed. “I shall pray for you as well.”
Another slap, thought Dany, color rising to her face.
The rest was a tedium the queen knew well. She sat upon her
cushions, listening, one foot jiggling with impatience. Jhiqui
brought a platter of gs and ham at midday. There seemed to be no

end to the petitioners. For every two she sent o smiling, one left
red-eyed or muttering.
It was close to sunset before Daario Naharis appeared with his
new Stormcrows, the Westerosi who had come over to him from the
Windblown. Dany found herself glancing at them as yet another
petitioner droned on and on. These are my people. I am their rightful
queen. They seemed a scru y bunch, but that was only to be
expected of sellswords. The youngest could not have been more
than a year older than her; the oldest must have seen sixty
namedays. A few sported signs of wealth: gold arm rings, silken
tunics, silver-studded sword belts. Plunder. For the most part, their
clothes were plainly made and showed signs of hard wear.
When Daario brought them forward, she saw that one of them
was a woman, big and blond and all in mail. “Pretty Meris,” her
captain named her, though pretty was the last thing Dany would
have called her. She was six feet tall and earless, with a slit nose,
deep scars in both cheeks, and the coldest eyes the queen had ever
seen. As for the rest …
Hugh Hungerford was slim and saturnine, long-legged, longfaced, clad in faded nery. Webber was short and muscular, with
spiders tattooed across his head and chest and arms. Red-faced
Orson Stone claimed to be a knight, as did lanky Lucifer Long. Will
of the Woods leered at her even as he took a knee. Dick Straw had
corn ower-blue eyes, hair as white as ax, and an unsettling smile.
Ginger Jack’s face was hidden behind a bristly orange beard, and his
speech was unintelligible. “He bit o half his tongue in his rst
battle,” Hungerford explained to her.
The Dornishmen seemed di erent. “If it please Your Grace,” said
Daario, “these three are Greenguts, Gerrold, and Frog.”
Greenguts was huge and bald as a stone, with arms thick enough
to rival even Strong Belwas. Gerrold was a lean, tall youth with sun
streaks in his hair and laughing blue-green eyes. That smile has won
many a maiden’s heart, I’ll wager. His cloak was made of soft brown
wool lined with sandsilk, a goodly garment.
Frog, the squire, was the youngest of the three, and the least
impressive, a solemn, stocky lad, brown of hair and eye. His face

was squarish, with a high forehead, heavy jaw, and broad nose. The
stubble on his cheeks and chin made him look like a boy trying to
grow his rst beard. Dany had no inkling why anyone would call
him Frog. Perhaps he can jump farther than the others.
“You may rise,” she said. “Daario tells me you come to us from
Dorne. Dornishmen will always have a welcome at my court.
Sunspear stayed loyal to my father when the Usurper stole his
throne. You must have faced many perils to reach me.”
“Too many,” said Gerrold, the handsome one with the sunstreaked hair. “We were six when we left Dorne, Your Grace.”
“I am sorry for your losses.” The queen turned to his large
companion. “Greenguts is a queer sort of name.”
“A jape, Your Grace. From the ships. I was greensick the whole
way from Volantis. Heaving and … well, I shouldn’t say.”
Dany giggled. “I think that I can guess, ser. It is ser, is it not?
Daario tells me that you are a knight.”
“If it please Your Grace, we are all three knights.”
Dany glanced at Daario and saw anger ash across his face. He
did not know. “I have need of knights,” she said.
Ser Barristan’s suspicions had awakened. “Knighthood is easily
claimed this far from Westeros. Are you prepared to defend that
boast with sword or lance?”
“If need be,” said Gerrold, “though I will not claim that any of us
is the equal of Barristan the Bold. Your Grace, I beg your pardon,
but we have come before you under false names.”
“I knew someone else who did that once,” said Dany, “a man
called Arstan Whitebeard. Tell me your true names, then.”
“Gladly … but if we may beg the queen’s indulgence, is there
some place with fewer eyes and ears?”
Games within games. “As you wish. Skahaz, clear my court.”
The Shavepate roared out orders. His Brazen Beasts did the rest,
herding the other Westerosi and the rest of the day’s petitioners
from the hall. Her counselors remained.
“Now,” Dany said, “your names.”
Handsome young Gerrold bowed. “Ser Gerris Drinkwater, Your
Grace. My sword is yours.”

Greenguts crossed his arms against his chest. “And my
warhammer. I’m Ser Archibald Yronwood.”
“And you, ser?” the queen asked the boy called Frog.
“If it please Your Grace, may I rst present my gift?”
“If you wish,” Daenerys said, curious, but as Frog started forward
Daario Naharis stepped in front of him and held out a gloved hand.
“Give this gift to me.”
Stone-faced, the stocky lad bent, unlaced his boot, and drew a
yellowed parchment from a hidden ap within.
“This is your gift? A scrap of writing?” Daario snatched the
parchment out of the Dornishman’s hands and unrolled it, squinting
at the seals and signatures. “Very pretty, all the gold and ribbons,
but I do not read your Westerosi scratchings.”
“Bring it to the queen,” Ser Barristan commanded. “Now.”
Dany could feel the anger in the hall. “I am only a young girl, and
young girls must have their gifts,” she said lightly. “Daario, please,
you must not tease me. Give it here.”
The parchment was written in the Common Tongue. The queen
unrolled it slowly, studying the seals and signatures. When she saw
the name Ser Willem Darry, her heart beat a little faster. She read it
over once, and then again.
“May we know what it says, Your Grace?” asked Ser Barristan.
“It is a secret pact,” Dany said, “made in Braavos when I was just
a little girl. Ser Willem Darry signed for us, the man who spirited
my brother and myself away from Dragonstone before the Usurper’s
men could take us. Prince Oberyn Martell signed for Dorne, with
the Sealord of Braavos as witness.” She handed the parchment to Ser
Barristan, so he might read it for himself. “The alliance is to be
sealed by a marriage, it says. In return for Dorne’s help
overthrowing the Usurper, my brother Viserys is to take Prince
Doran’s daughter Arianne for his queen.”
The old knight read the pact slowly. “If Robert had known of this,
he would have smashed Sunspear as he once smashed Pyke, and
claimed the heads of Prince Doran and the Red Viper … and like as
not, the head of this Dornish princess too.”

“No doubt that was why Prince Doran chose to keep the pact a
secret,” suggested Daenerys. “If my brother Viserys had known that
he had a Dornish princess waiting for him, he would have crossed to
Sunspear as soon as he was old enough to wed.”
“And thereby brought Robert’s warhammer down upon himself,
and Dorne as well,” said Frog. “My father was content to wait for
the day that Prince Viserys found his army.”
“Your father?”
“Prince Doran.” He sank back onto one knee. “Your Grace, I have
the honor to be Quentyn Martell, a prince of Dorne and your most
leal subject.”
Dany laughed.
The Dornish prince ushed red, whilst her own court and
counselors gave her puzzled looks. “Radiance?” said Skahaz
Shavepate, in the Ghiscari tongue. “Why do you laugh?”
“They call him frog,” she said, “and we have just learned why. In
the Seven Kingdoms there are children’s tales of frogs who turn into
enchanted princes when kissed by their true love.” Smiling at the
Dornish knights, she switched back to the Common Tongue. “Tell
me, Prince Quentyn, are you enchanted?”
“No, Your Grace.”
“I feared as much.” Neither enchanted nor enchanting, alas. A pity
he’s the prince, and not the one with the wide shoulders and the sandy
hair. “You have come for a kiss, however. You mean to marry me. Is
that the way of it? The gift you bring me is your own sweet self.
Instead of Viserys and your sister, you and I must seal this pact if I
want Dorne.”
“My father hoped that you might nd me acceptable.”
Daario Naharis gave a scornful laugh. “I say you are a pup. The
queen needs a man beside her, not a mewling boy. You are no t
husband for a woman such as her. When you lick your lips, do you
still taste your mother’s milk?”
Ser Gerris Drinkwater darkened at his words. “Mind your tongue,
sellsword. You are speaking to a prince of Dorne.”
“And to his wet nurse, I am thinking.” Daario brushed his thumbs
across his sword hilts and smiled dangerously.

Skahaz scowled, as only he could scowl. “This boy might serve for
Dorne, but Meereen needs a king of Ghiscari blood.”
“I know of this Dorne,” said Reznak mo Reznak. “Dorne is sand
and scorpions, and bleak red mountains baking in the sun.”
Prince Quentyn answered him. “Dorne is fty thousand spears
and swords, pledged to our queen’s service.”
“Fifty thousand?” mocked Daario. “I count three.”
“Enough,” Daenerys said. “Prince Quentyn has crossed half the
world to o er me his gift, I will not have him treated with
discourtesy.” She turned to the Dornishmen. “Would that you had
come a year ago. I am pledged to wed the noble Hizdahr zo Loraq.”
Ser Gerris said, “It is not too late—”
“I will be the judge of that,” Daenerys said. “Reznak, see that the
prince and his companions are given quarters suitable to their high
birth, and that their wants are attended to.”
“As you wish, Your Radiance.”
The queen rose. “Then we are done for now.”
Daario and Ser Barristan followed her up the steps to her
apartments. “This changes everything,” the old knight said.
“This changes nothing,” Dany said, as Irri removed her crown.
“What good are three men?”
“Three knights,” said Selmy.
“Three liars,” Daario said darkly. “They deceived me.”
“And bought you too, I do not doubt.” He did not trouble to deny
it. Dany unrolled the parchment and examined it again. Braavos. This
was done in Braavos, while we were living in the house with the red
door. Why did that make her feel so strange?
She found herself remembering her nightmare. Sometimes there is
truth in dreams. Could Hizdahr zo Loraq be working for the
warlocks, was that what the dream had meant? Could the dream
have been a sending? Were the gods telling her to put Hizdahr aside
and wed this Dornish prince instead? Something tickled at her
memory. “Ser Barristan, what are the arms of House Martell?”
“A sun in splendor, trans xed by a spear.”
The sun’s son. A shiver went through her. “Shadows and
whispers.” What else had Quaithe said? The pale mare and the sun’s

son. There was a lion in it too, and a dragon. Or am I the dragon?
“Beware the perfumed seneschal.” That she remembered. “Dreams
and prophecies. Why must they always be in riddles? I hate this.
Oh, leave me, ser. Tomorrow is my wedding day.”
That night Daario had her every way a man can have a woman,
and she gave herself to him willingly. The last time, as the sun was
coming up, she used her mouth to make him hard again, as Doreah
had taught her long ago, then rode him so wildly that his wound
began to bleed again, and for one sweet heartbeat she could not tell
whether he was inside of her, or her inside of him.
But when the sun rose upon her wedding day so did Daario
Naharis, donning his clothes and buckling on his sword belt with its
gleaming golden wantons. “Where are you going?” Dany asked him.
“I forbid you to make a sortie today.”
“My queen is cruel,” her captain said. “If I cannot slay your foes,
how shall I amuse myself whilst you are being wed?”
“By nightfall I shall have no foes.”
“It is only dawn, sweet queen. The day is long. Time enough for
one last sortie. I will bring you back the head of Brown Ben Plumm
for a wedding gift.”
“No heads,” Dany insisted. “Once you brought me owers.”
“Let Hizdahr bring you owers. He is not one to stoop and pluck
a dandelion, true, but he has servants who will be pleased to do it
for him. Do I have your leave to go?”
“No.” She wanted him to stay and hold her. One day he will go and
not return, she thought. One day some archer will put an arrow through
his chest, or ten men will fall on him with spears and swords and axes,
ten would-be heroes. Five of them would die, but that would not
make her grief easier to bear. One day I will lose him, as I lost my sunand-stars. But please gods, not today. “Come back to bed and kiss
me.” No one had ever kissed her like Daario Naharis. “I am your
queen, and I command you to fuck me.”
She had meant it playfully, but Daario’s eyes hardened at her
words. “Fucking queens is king’s work. Your noble Hizdahr can
attend to that, once you’re wed. And if he proves to be too highborn
for such sweaty work, he has servants who will be pleased to do

that for him as well. Or perhaps you can call the Dornish boy into
your bed, and his pretty friend as well, why not?” He strode from
the bedchamber.
He is going to make a sortie, Dany realized, and if he takes Ben
Plumm’s head, he’ll walk into the wedding feast and throw it at my feet.
Seven save me. Why couldn’t he be better born?
When he was gone, Missandei brought the queen a simple meal of
goat cheese and olives, with raisins for a sweet. “Your Grace needs
more than wine to break her fast. You are such a tiny thing, and
you will surely need your strength today.”
That made Daenerys laugh, coming from a girl so small. She
relied so much on the little scribe that she oft forgot that Missandei
had only turned eleven. They shared the food together on her
terrace. As Dany nibbled on an olive, the Naathi girl gazed at her
with eyes like molten gold and said, “It is not too late to tell them
that you have decided not to wed.”
It is, though, the queen thought, sadly. “Hizdahr’s blood is ancient
and noble. Our joining will join my freedmen to his people. When
we become as one, so will our city.”
“Your Grace does not love the noble Hizdahr. This one thinks you
would sooner have another for your husband.”
I must not think of Daario today. “A queen loves where she must,
not where she will.” Her appetite had left her. “Take this food
away,” she told Missandei. “It is time I bathed.”
Afterward, as Jhiqui was patting Daenerys dry, Irri approached
with her tokar. Dany envied the Dothraki maids their loose sandsilk
trousers and painted vests. They would be much cooler than her in
her tokar, with its heavy fringe of baby pearls. “Help me wind this
round myself, please. I cannot manage all these pearls by myself.”
She should be eager with anticipation for her wedding and the
night that would follow, she knew. She remembered the night of
her rst wedding, when Khal Drogo had claimed her maidenhead
beneath the stranger stars. She remembered how frightened she had
been, and how excited. Would it be the same with Hizdahr? No. I
am not the girl I was, and he is not my sun-and-stars.

Missandei reemerged from inside the pyramid. “Reznak and
Skahaz beg the honor of escorting Your Grace to the Temple of the
Graces. Reznak has ordered your palanquin made ready.”
Meereenese seldom rode within their city walls. They preferred
palanquins, litters, and sedan chairs, borne upon the shoulders of
their slaves. “Horses befoul the streets,” one man of Zakh had told
her, “slaves do not.” Dany had freed the slaves, yet palanquins,
litters, and sedan chairs still choked the streets as before, and none
of them oated magically through the air.
“The day is too hot to be shut up in a palanquin,” said Dany.
“Have my silver saddled. I would not go to my lord husband upon
the backs of bearers.”
“Your Grace,” said Missandei, “this one is so sorry, but you
cannot ride in a tokar.”
The little scribe was right, as she so often was. The tokar was not
a garment meant for horseback. Dany made a face. “As you say. Not
the palanquin, though. I would su ocate behind those drapes. Have
them ready a sedan chair.” If she must wear her oppy ears, let all
the rabbits see her.
When Dany made her descent, Reznak and Skahaz dropped to
their knees. “Your Worship shines so brightly, you will blind every
man who dares to look upon you,” said Reznak. The seneschal wore
a tokar of maroon samite with golden fringes. “Hizdahr zo Loraq is
most fortunate in you … and you in him, if I may be so bold as to
say. This match will save our city, you will see.”
“So we pray. I want to plant my olive trees and see them fruit.”
Does it matter that Hizdahr’s kisses do not please me? Peace will please
me. Am I a queen or just a woman?
“The crowds will be thick as ies today.” The Shavepate was clad
in a pleated black skirt and a muscled breastplate, with a brazen
helm shaped like a serpent’s head beneath one arm.
“Should I be afraid of ies? Your Brazen Beasts will keep me safe
from any harm.”
It was always dusk inside the base of the Great Pyramid. Walls
thirty feet thick mu ed the tumult of the streets and kept the heat
outside, so it was cool and dim within. Her escort was forming up

inside the gates. Horses, mules, and donkeys were stabled in the
western walls, elephants in the eastern. Dany had acquired three of
those huge, queer beasts with her pyramid. They reminded her of
hairless grey mammoths, though their tusks had been bobbed and
gilded, and their eyes were sad.
She found Strong Belwas eating grapes, as Barristan Selmy
watched a stableboy cinch the girth on his dapple grey. The three
Dornishmen were with him, talking, but they broke o when the
queen appeared. Their prince went to one knee. “Your Grace, I must
entreat you. My father’s strength is failing, but his devotion to your
cause is as strong as ever. If my manner or my person have
displeased you, that is my sorrow, but—”
“If you would please me, ser, be happy for me,” Daenerys said.
“This is my wedding day. They will be dancing in the Yellow City, I
do not doubt.” She sighed. “Rise, my prince, and smile. One day I
shall return to Westeros to claim my father’s throne, and look to
Dorne for help. But on this day the Yunkai’i have my city ringed in
steel. I may die before I see my Seven Kingdoms. Hizdahr may die.
Westeros may be swallowed by the waves.” Dany kissed his cheek.
“Come. It’s time I wed.”
Ser Barristan helped her up onto her sedan chair. Quentyn
rejoined his fellow Dornishmen. Strong Belwas bellowed for the
gates to be opened, and Daenerys Targaryen was carried forth into
the sun. Selmy fell in beside her on his dapple grey.
“Tell me,” Dany said, as the procession turned toward the Temple
of the Graces, “if my father and my mother had been free to follow
their own hearts, whom would they have wed?”
“It was long ago. Your Grace would not know them.”
“You know, though. Tell me.”
The old knight inclined his head. “The queen your mother was
always mindful of her duty.” He was handsome in his gold-andsilver armor, his white cloak streaming from his shoulders, but he
sounded like a man in pain, as if every word were a stone he had to
pass. “As a girl, though … she was once smitten with a young
knight from the stormlands who wore her favor at a tourney and
named her queen of love and beauty. A brief thing.”

“What happened to this knight?”
“He put away his lance the day your lady mother wed your
father. Afterward he became most pious, and was heard to say that
only the Maiden could replace Queen Rhaella in his heart. His
passion was impossible, of course. A landed knight is no t consort
for a princess of royal blood.”
And Daario Naharis is only a sellsword, not t to buckle on the golden
spurs of even a landed knight. “And my father? Was there some
woman he loved better than his queen?”
Ser Barristan shifted in the saddle. “Not … not loved. Mayhaps
wanted is a better word, but … it was only kitchen gossip, the
whispers of washerwomen and stableboys …”
“I want to know. I never knew my father. I want to know
everything about him. The good and … the rest.”
“As you command.” The white knight chose his words with care.
“Prince Aerys … as a youth, he was taken with a certain lady of
Casterly Rock, a cousin of Tywin Lannister. When she and Tywin
wed, your father drank too much wine at the wedding feast and was
heard to say that it was a great pity that the lord’s right to the rst
night had been abolished. A drunken jape, no more, but Tywin
Lannister was not a man to forget such words, or the … the liberties
your father took during the bedding.” His face reddened. “I have
said too much, Your Grace. I—”
“Gracious queen, well met!” Another procession had come up
beside her own, and Hizdahr zo Loraq was smiling at her from his
own sedan chair. My king. Dany wondered where Daario Naharis
was, what he was doing. If this were a story, he would gallop up just as
we reached the temple, to challenge Hizdahr for my hand.
Side by side the queen’s procession and Hizdahr zo Loraq’s made
their slow way across Meereen, until nally the Temple of the
Graces loomed up before them, its golden domes ashing in the sun.
How beautiful, the queen tried to tell herself, but inside her was
some foolish little girl who could not help but look about for
Daario. If he loved you, he would come and carry you o at
swordpoint, as Rhaegar carried o his northern girl, the girl in her
insisted, but the queen knew that was folly. Even if her captain was

mad enough to attempt it, the Brazen Beasts would cut him down
before he got within a hundred yards of her.
Galazza Galare awaited them outside the temple doors,
surrounded by her sisters in white and pink and red, blue and gold
and purple. There are fewer than there were. Dany looked for Ezzara
and did not see her. Has the bloody ux taken even her? Though the
queen had let the Astapori starve outside her walls to keep the
bloody ux from spreading, it was spreading nonetheless. Many had
been stricken: freedmen, sellswords, Brazen Beasts, even Dothraki,
though as yet none of the Unsullied had been touched. She prayed
the worst was past.
The Graces brought forth an ivory chair and a golden bowl.
Holding her tokar daintily so as not to tread upon its fringes,
Daenerys Targaryen eased herself onto the chair’s plush velvet seat,
and Hizdahr zo Loraq went to his knees, unlaced her sandals, and
washed her feet whilst fty eunuchs sang and ten thousand eyes
looked on. He has gentle hands, she mused, as warm fragrant oils ran
between her toes. If he has a gentle heart as well, I may grow fond of
him in time.
When her feet were clean, Hizdahr dried them with a soft towel,
laced her sandals on again, and helped her stand. Hand in hand,
they followed the Green Grace inside the temple, where the air was
thick with incense and the gods of Ghis stood cloaked in shadows in
their alcoves.
Four hours later, they emerged again as man and wife, bound
together wrist and ankle with chains of yellow gold.

JON

Q

ueen Selyse descended upon Castle Black with her daughter
and her daughter’s fool, her serving girls and lady companions, and
a retinue of knights, sworn swords, and men-at-arms fty strong.
Queen’s men all, Jon Snow knew. They may attend Selyse, but it is
Melisandre they serve. The red priestess had warned him of their
coming almost a day before the raven arrived from Eastwatch with
the same message.
He met the queen’s party by the stables, accompanied by Satin,
Bowen Marsh, and half a dozen guards in long black cloaks. It
would never do to come before this queen without a retinue of his
own, if half of what they said of her was true. She might mistake
him for a stableboy and hand him the reins of her horse.
The snows had nally moved o to the south and given them a
respite. There was even a hint of warmth in the air as Jon Snow
took a knee before this southron queen. “Your Grace. Castle Black
welcomes you and yours.”
Queen Selyse looked down at him. “My thanks. Please escort me
to your lord commander.”
“My brothers chose me for that honor. I am Jon Snow.”
“You? They said you were young, but …” Queen Selyse’s face was
pinched and pale. She wore a crown of red gold with points in the
shape of ames, a twin to that worn by Stannis. “… you may rise,
Lord Snow. This is my daughter, Shireen.”
“Princess.” Jon inclined his head. Shireen was a homely child,
made even uglier by the greyscale that had left her neck and part of

her cheek sti and grey and cracked. “My brothers and I are at your
service,” he told the girl.
Shireen reddened. “Thank you, my lord.”
“I believe you are acquainted with my kinsman, Ser Axell
Florent?” the queen went on.
“Only by raven.” And report. The letters he’d received from
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea had a deal to say of Axell Florent, very little
of it good. “Ser Axell.”
“Lord Snow.” A stout man, Florent had short legs and a thick
chest. Coarse hair covered his cheeks and jowls and poked from his
ears and nostrils.
“My loyal knights,” Queen Selyse went on. “Ser Narbert, Ser
Benethon, Ser Brus, Ser Patrek, Ser Dorden, Ser Malegorn, Ser
Lambert, Ser Perkin.” Each worthy bowed in turn. She did not
trouble to name her fool, but the cowbells on his antlered hat and
the motley tattooed across his pu y cheeks made him hard to
overlook. Patchface. Cotter Pyke’s letters had made mention of him
as well. Pyke claimed he was a simpleton.
Then the queen beckoned to another curious member of her
entourage: a tall gaunt stick of a man, his height accentuated by an
outlandish three-tiered hat of purple felt. “And here we have the
honorable Tycho Nestoris, an emissary of the Iron Bank of Braavos,
come to treat with His Grace King Stannis.”
The banker do ed his hat and made a sweeping bow. “Lord
Commander. I thank you and your brothers for your hospitality.”
He spoke the Common Tongue awlessly, with only the slightest
hint of accent. Half a foot taller than Jon, the Braavosi sported a
beard as thin as a rope sprouting from his chin and reaching almost
to his waist. His robes were a somber purple, trimmed with ermine.
A high sti collar framed his narrow face. “I hope we shall not
inconvenience you too greatly.”
“Not at all, my lord. You are most welcome.” More welcome than
this queen, if truth be told. Cotter Pyke had sent a raven ahead to
advise them of the banker’s coming. Jon Snow had thought of little
since.

Jon turned back to the queen. “The royal chambers in the King’s
Tower have been prepared for Your Grace for so long as you wish
to remain with us. This is our Lord Steward, Bowen Marsh. He will
nd quarters for your men.”
“How kind of you to make room for us.” The queen’s words were
courteous enough, though her tone said, It is no more than your duty,
and you had best hope these quarters please me. “We will not be with
you long. A few days at the most. It is our intent to press on to our
new seat at the Nightfort as soon as we are rested. The journey
from Eastwatch was wearisome.”
“As you say, Your Grace,” said Jon. “You will be cold and hungry,
I am sure. A hot meal awaits you in our common room.”
“Very good.” The queen glanced about the yard. “First, though,
we wish to consult with the Lady Melisandre.”
“Of course, Your Grace. Her apartments are in the King’s Tower
as well. This way, if you will?” Queen Selyse nodded, took her
daughter by the hand, and permitted him to lead them from the
stables. Ser Axell, the Braavosi banker, and the rest of her party
followed, like so many ducklings done up in wool and fur.
“Your Grace,” said Jon Snow, “my builders have done all they can
to make the Nightfort ready to receive you … yet much of it
remains in ruins. It is a large castle, the largest on the Wall, and we
have only been able to restore a part of it. You might be more
comfortable back at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.”
Queen Selyse sni ed. “We are done with Eastwatch. We did not
like it there. A queen should be mistress beneath her own roof. We
found your Cotter Pyke to be an uncouth and unpleasant man,
quarrelsome and niggardly.”
You should hear what Cotter says of you. “I am sorry for that, but I
fear Your Grace will nd conditions at the Nightfort even less to
your liking. We speak of a fortress, not a palace. A grim place, and
cold. Whereas Eastwatch—”
“Eastwatch is not safe.” The queen put a hand on her daughter’s
shoulder. “This is the king’s true heir. Shireen will one day sit the
Iron Throne and rule the Seven Kingdoms. She must be kept from
harm, and Eastwatch is where the attack will come. This Nightfort

is the place my husband has chosen for our seat, and there we shall
abide. We—oh!”
An enormous shadow emerged from behind the shell of the Lord
Commander’s Tower. Princess Shireen gave a shriek, and three of
the queen’s knights gasped in harmony. Another swore. “Seven save
us,” he said, quite forgetting his new red god in his shock.
“Don’t be afraid,” Jon told them. “There’s no harm in him, Your
Grace. This is Wun Wun.”
“Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun.” The giant’s voice rumbled like a
boulder crashing down a mountainside. He sank to his knees before
them. Even kneeling, he loomed over them. “Kneel queen. Little
queen.” Words that Leathers had taught him, no doubt.
Princess Shireen’s eyes went wide as dinner plates. “He’s a giant!
A real true giant, like from the stories. But why does he talk so
funny?”
“He only knows a few words of the Common Tongue as yet,” said
Jon. “In their own land, giants speak the Old Tongue.”
“Can I touch him?”
“Best not,” her mother warned. “Look at him. A lthy creature.”
The queen turned her frown on Jon. “Lord Snow, what is this bestial
creature doing on our side of the Wall?”
“Wun Wun is a guest of the Night’s Watch, as you are.”
The queen did not like that answer. Nor did her knights. Ser Axell
grimaced in disgust, Ser Brus gave a nervous titter, Ser Narbert said,
“I had been told all the giants were dead.”
“Almost all.” Ygritte wept for them.
“In the dark the dead are dancing.” Patchface shu ed his feet in a
grotesque dance step. “I know, I know, oh oh oh.” At Eastwatch
someone had sewn him a motley cloak of beaver pelts, sheepskins,
and rabbit fur. His hat sported antlers hung with bells and long
brown aps of squirrel fur that hung down over his ears. Every step
he took set him to ringing.
Wun Wun gaped at him with fascination, but when the giant
reached for him the fool hopped back away, jingling. “Oh no, oh no,
oh no.” That brought Wun Wun lurching to his feet. The queen
grabbed hold of Princess Shireen and pulled her back, her knights

reached for their swords, and Patchface reeled away in alarm, lost
his footing, and plopped down on his arse in a snowdrift.
Wun Wun began to laugh. A giant’s laughter could put to shame a
dragon’s roar. Patchface covered his ears, Princess Shireen pressed
her face into her mother’s furs, and the boldest of the queen’s
knights moved forward, steel in hand. Jon raised an arm to block
his path. “You do not want to anger him. Sheathe your steel, ser.
Leathers, take Wun Wun back to Hardin’s.”
“Eat now, Wun Wun?” asked the giant.
“Eat now,” Jon agreed. To Leathers he said, “I’ll send out a bushel
of vegetables for him and meat for you. Start a re.”
Leathers grinned. “I will, m’lord, but Hardin’s is bone cold.
Perhaps m’lord could send out some wine to warm us?”
“For you. Not him.” Wun Wun had never tasted wine until he
came to Castle Black, but once he had, he had taken a gigantic
liking to it. Too much a liking. Jon had enough to contend with just
now without adding a drunken giant to the mix. He turned back to
the queen’s knights. “My lord father used to say a man should never
draw his sword unless he means to use it.”
“Using it was my intent.” The knight was clean-shaved and
windburnt; beneath a cloak of white fur he wore a cloth-of-silver
surcoat emblazoned with a blue ve-pointed star. “I had been given
to understand that the Night’s Watch defended the realm against
such monsters. No one mentioned keeping them as pets.”
Another bloody southron fool. “You are …?”
“Ser Patrek of King’s Mountain, if it please my lord.”
“I do not know how you observe guest right on your mountain,
ser. In the north we hold it sacred. Wun Wun is a guest here.”
Ser Patrek smiled. “Tell me, Lord Commander, should the Others
turn up, do you plan to o er hospitality to them as well?” The
knight turned to his queen. “Your Grace, that is the King’s Tower
there, if I am not mistaken. If I may have the honor?”
“As you wish.” The queen took his arm and swept past the men of
the Night’s Watch with never a second glance.
Those ames on her crown are the warmest thing about her. “Lord
Tycho,” Jon called. “A moment, please.”

The Braavosi halted. “No lord I. Only a simple servant of the Iron
Bank of Braavos.”
“Cotter Pyke informs me that you came to Eastwatch with three
ships. A galleas, a galley, and a cog.”
“Just so, my lord. The crossing can be perilous in this season. One
ship alone may founder, where three together may aid one another.
The Iron Bank is always prudent in such matters.”
“Perhaps before you leave we might have a quiet word?”
“I am at your service, Lord Commander. And in Braavos we say
there is no time like the present. Will that suit?”
“As good as any. Shall we repair to my solar, or would you like to
see the top of the Wall?”
The banker glanced up, to where the ice loomed vast and pale
against the sky. “I fear it will be bitter cold up top.”
“That, and windy. You learn to walk well away from the edge.
Men have been blown o . Still. The Wall is like nothing else on
earth. You may never have another chance to see it.”
“No doubt I shall rue my caution upon my deathbed, but after a
long day in the saddle, a warm room sounds preferable to me.”
“My solar, then. Satin, some mulled wine, if you would.”
Jon’s rooms behind the armory were quiet enough, if not
especially warm. His re had gone out some time ago; Satin was
not as diligent in feeding it as Dolorous Edd had been. Mormont’s
raven greeted them with a shriek of “Corn!” Jon hung up his cloak.
“You come seeking Stannis, is that correct?”
“It is, my lord. Queen Selyse has suggested that we might send
word to Deepwood Motte by raven, to inform His Grace that I await
his pleasure at the Nightfort. The matter that I mean to put to him
is too delicate to entrust to letters.”
“A debt.” What else could it be? “His own debt? Or his brother’s?”
The banker pressed his ngers together. “It would not be proper
for me to discuss Lord Stannis’s indebtedness or lack of same. As to
King Robert … it was indeed our pleasure to assist His Grace in his
need. For so long as Robert lived, all was well. Now, however, the
Iron Throne has ceased all repayment.”

Could the Lannisters truly be so foolish? “You cannot mean to hold
Stannis responsible for his brother’s debts.”
“The debts belong to the Iron Throne,” Tycho declared, “and
whosoever sits on that chair must pay them. Since young King
Tommen and his counsellors have become so obdurate, we mean to
broach the subject with King Stannis. Should he prove himself more
worthy of our trust, it would of course be our great pleasure to lend
him whatever help he needs.”
“Help,” the raven screamed. “Help, help, help.”
Much of this Jon had surmised the moment he learned that the
Iron Bank had sent an envoy to the Wall. “When last we heard, His
Grace was marching on Winterfell to confront Lord Bolton and his
allies. You may seek him there if you wish, though that carries a
risk. You could nd yourself caught up in his war.”
Tycho bowed his head. “We who serve the Iron Bank face death
full as often as you who serve the Iron Throne.”
Is that whom I serve? Jon Snow was no longer certain. “I can
provide you with horses, provisions, guides, whatever is required to
get you as far as Deepwood Motte. From there you will need to
make your own way to Stannis.” And you may well nd his head
upon a spike. “There will be a price.”
“Price,” screamed Mormont’s raven. “Price, price.”
“There is always a price, is there not?” The Braavosi smiled.
“What does the Watch require?”
“Your ships, for a start. With their crews.”
“All three? How will I return to Braavos?”
“I only need them for a single voyage.”
“A hazardous voyage, I assume. For a start, you said?”
“We need a loan as well. Gold enough to keep us fed till spring.
To buy food and hire ships to bring it to us.”
“Spring?” Tycho sighed. “It is not possible, my lord.”
What was it Stannis had said to him? You haggle like a crone with a
cod sh, Lord Snow. Did Lord Eddard father you on a shwife? Perhaps
he had at that.
It took the better part of an hour before the impossible became
possible, and another hour before they could agree on terms. The

agon of mulled wine that Satin delivered helped them settle the
more nettlesome points. By the time Jon Snow signed the
parchment the Braavosi drew up, both of them were half-drunk and
quite unhappy. Jon thought that a good sign.
The three Braavosi ships would bring the eet at Eastwatch up to
eleven, including the Ibbenese whaler that Cotter Pyke had
commandeered on Jon’s order, a trading galley out of Pentos
similarly impressed, and three battered Lysene warships, remnants
of Salladhor Saan’s former eet driven back north by the autumn
storms. All three of Saan’s ships had been in dire need of re tting,
but by now the work should be complete.
Eleven ships was no wise enough, but if he waited any longer, the
free folk at Hardhome would be dead by the time the rescue eet
arrived. Sail now or not at all. Whether Mother Mole and her people
would be desperate enough to entrust their lives to the Night’s
Watch, though …
The day had darkened by the time he and Tycho Nestoris left the
solar. Snow had begun to fall. “Our respite was a brief one, it would
seem.” Jon drew his cloak about himself more tightly.
“Winter is nigh upon us. The day I left Braavos, there was ice on
the canals.”
“Three of my men passed through Braavos not long ago,” Jon told
him. “An old maester, a singer, and a young steward. They were
escorting a wildling girl and her child to Oldtown. I do not suppose
you chanced to encounter them?”
“I fear not, my lord. Westerosi pass through Braavos every day,
but most come and go from the Ragman’s Harbor. The ships of the
Iron Bank moor at the Purple Harbor. If you wish, I can make
inquiries after them when I return home.”
“No need. By now they should be safe in Oldtown.”
“Let us hope so. The narrow sea is perilous this time of year, and
of late there have been troubling reports of strange ships seen
amongst the Stepstones.”
“Salladhor Saan?”
“The Lysene pirate? Some say he has returned to his old haunts,
this is so. And Lord Redwyne’s war eet creeps through the Broken

Arm as well. On its way home, no doubt. But these men and their
ships are well-known to us. No, these other sails … from farther
east, perhaps … one hears queer talk of dragons.”
“Would that we had one here. A dragon might warm things up a
bit.”
“My lord jests. You will forgive me if I do not laugh. We Braavosi
are descended from those who ed Valyria and the wroth of its
dragonlords. We do not jape of dragons.”
No, I suppose not. “My apologies, Lord Tycho.”
“None is required, Lord Commander. Now I nd that I am
hungry. Lending such large sums of gold will give a man an
appetite. Will you be so good as to point me to your feast hall?”
“I will take you there myself.” Jon gestured. “This way.”
Once there, it would have been discourteous not to break bread
with the banker, so Jon sent Satin o to fetch them food. The
novelty of newcomers had brought out almost all the men who
were not on duty or asleep, so the cellar was crowded and warm.
The queen herself was absent, as was her daughter. By now
presumably they were settling into the King’s Tower. But Ser Brus
and Ser Malegorn were on hand, entertaining such brothers as had
gathered with the latest tidings from Eastwatch and beyond the sea.
Three of the queen’s ladies sat together, attended by their serving
maids and a dozen admiring men of the Night’s Watch.
Nearer the door, the Queen’s Hand was attacking a brace of
capons, sucking the meat o the bones and washing down each bite
with ale. When he espied Jon Snow, Axell Florent tossed a bone
aside, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and sauntered
over. With his bowed legs, barrel chest, and prominent ears, he
presented a comical appearance, but Jon knew better than to laugh
at him. He was an uncle to Queen Selyse and had been among the
rst to follow her in accepting Melisandre’s red god. If he is not a
kinslayer, he is the next best thing. Axell Florent’s brother had been
burned by Melisandre, Maester Aemon had informed him, yet Ser
Axell had done little and less to stop it. What sort of man can stand
by idly and watch his own brother being burned alive?

“Nestoris,” said Ser Axell, “and the lord commander. Might I join
you?” He lowered himself to the bench before they could reply.
“Lord Snow, if I may ask … this wildling princess His Grace King
Stannis wrote of … where might she be, my lord?”
Long leagues from here, Jon thought. If the gods are good, by now
she has found Tormund Giantsbane. “Val is the younger sister of
Dalla, who was Mance Rayder’s wife and mother to his son. King
Stannis took Val and the child captive after Dalla died in childbed,
but she is no princess, not as you mean it.”
Ser Axell shrugged. “Whatever she may be, at Eastwatch men
claimed the wench was fair. I’d like to see with mine own eyes.
Some of these wildling women, well, a man would need to turn
them over to do his duty as a husband. If it please the lord
commander, bring her out, let us have a look.”
“She is not a horse to be paraded for inspection, ser.”
“I promise not to count her teeth.” Florent grinned. “Oh, never
fear, I’ll treat her with all the courtesy she is due.”
He knows I do not have her. A village has no secrets, and no more
did Castle Black. Val’s absence was not spoken of openly, but some
men knew, and in the common hall at night the brothers talked.
What has he heard? Jon wondered. How much does he believe?
“Forgive me, ser, but Val will not be joining us.”
“I’ll go to her. Where do you keep the wench?”
Away from you. “Somewhere safe. Enough, ser.”
The knight’s face grew ushed. “My lord, have you forgotten who
I am?” His breath smelled of ale and onions. “Must I speak to the
queen? A word from Her Grace and I can have this wildling girl
delivered naked to the hall for our inspection.”
That would be a pretty trick, even for a queen. “The queen would
never presume upon our hospitality,” Jon said, hoping that was
true. “Now I fear I must take my leave, before I forget the duties of
a host. Lord Tycho, pray excuse me.”
“Yes, of course,” the banker said. “A pleasure.”
Outside, the snow was coming down more heavily. Across the
yard the King’s Tower had turned into a hulking shadow, the lights
in its windows obscured by falling snow.

Back in his solar, Jon found the Old Bear’s raven perched on the
back of the oak-and-leather chair behind the trestle table. The bird
began to scream for food the moment he entered. Jon took a stful
of dried kernels from the sack by the door and scattered them on
the oor, then claimed the chair.
Tycho Nestoris had left behind a copy of their agreement. Jon
read it over thrice. That was simple, he re ected. Simpler than I dared
hope. Simpler than it should have been.
It gave him an uneasy feeling. Braavosi coin would allow the
Night’s Watch to buy food from the south when their own stores ran
short, food enough to see them through the winter, however long it
might prove to be. A long hard winter will leave the Watch so deep in
debt that we will never climb out, Jon reminded himself, but when the
choice is debt or death, best borrow.
He did not have to like it, though. And come spring, when the
time came to repay all that gold, he would like it even less. Tycho
Nestoris had impressed him as cultured and courteous, but the Iron
Bank of Braavos had a fearsome reputation when collecting debts.
Each of the Nine Free Cities had its bank, and some had more than
one, ghting over every coin like dogs over a bone, but the Iron
Bank was richer and more powerful than all the rest combined.
When princes defaulted on their debts to lesser banks, ruined
bankers sold their wives and children into slavery and opened their
own veins. When princes failed to repay the Iron Bank, new princes
sprang up from nowhere and took their thrones.
As poor plump Tommen may be about to learn. No doubt the
Lannisters had good reason for refusing to honor King Robert’s
debts, but it was folly all the same. If Stannis was not too sti necked to accept their terms, the Braavosi would give him all the
gold and silver he required, coin enough to buy a dozen sellsword
companies, to bribe a hundred lords, to keep his men paid, fed,
clothed, and armed. Unless Stannis is lying dead beneath the walls of
Winterfell, he may just have won the Iron Throne. He wondered if
Melisandre had seen that in her res.
Jon sat back, yawned, stretched. On the morrow he would draft
orders for Cotter Pyke. Eleven ships to Hardhome. Bring back as many

as you can, women and children rst. It was time they set sail. Should
I go myself, though, or leave it to Cotter? The Old Bear had led a
ranging. Aye. And never returned.
Jon closed his eyes. Just for a moment …
… and woke, sti as a board, with the Old Bear’s raven
muttering, “Snow, Snow,” and Mully shaking him. “M’lord, you’re
wanted. Beg pardon, m’lord. A girl’s been found.”
“A girl?” Jon sat, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the back of
his hands. “Val? Has Val returned?”
“Not Val, m’lord. This side of the Wall, it were.”
Arya. Jon straightened. It had to be her.
“Girl,” screamed the raven. “Girl, girl.”
“Ty and Dannel came on her two leagues south of Mole’s Town.
They were chasing down some wildlings who scampered o down
the kingsroad. Brought them back as well, but then they come on
the girl. She’s highborn, m’lord, and she’s been asking for you.”
“How many with her?” He moved to his basin, splashed water on
his face. Gods, but he was tired.
“None, m’lord. She come alone. Her horse was dying under her.
All skin and ribs it was, lame and lathered. They cut it loose and
took the girl for questioning.”
A grey girl on a dying horse. Melisandre’s res had not lied, it
would seem. But what had become of Mance Rayder and his
spearwives? “Where is the girl now?”
“Maester Aemon’s chambers, m’lord.” The men of Castle Black
still called it that, though by now the old maester should be warm
and safe in Oldtown. “Girl was blue from the cold, shivering like all
get out, so Ty wanted Clydas to have a look at her.”
“That’s good.” Jon felt fteen years old again. Little sister. He rose
and donned his cloak.
The snow was still falling as he crossed the yard with Mully. A
golden dawn was breaking in the east, but behind Lady Melisandre’s
window in the King’s Tower a reddish light still ickered. Does she
never sleep? What game are you playing, priestess? Did you have some
other task for Mance?

He wanted to believe it would be Arya. He wanted to see her face
again, to smile at her and muss her hair, to tell her she was safe. She
won’t be safe, though. Winterfell is burned and broken and there are no
more safe places.
He could not keep her here with him, no matter how much he
might want to. The Wall was no place for a woman, much less a girl
of noble birth. Nor was he about to turn her over to Stannis or
Melisandre. The king would only want to marry her to one of his
own men, Horpe or Massey or Godry Giantslayer, and the gods
alone knew what use the red woman might want to make of her.
The best solution he could see would mean dispatching her to
Eastwatch and asking Cotter Pyke to put her on a ship to someplace
across the sea, beyond the reach of all these quarrelsome kings. It
would need to wait until the ships returned from Hardhome, to be
sure. She could return to Braavos with Tycho Nestoris. Perhaps the Iron
Bank could help nd some noble family to foster her. Braavos was the
nearest of the Free Cities, though … which made it both the best
and the worst choice. Lorath or the Port of Ibben might be safer.
Wherever he might send her, though, Arya would need silver to
support her, a roof above her head, someone to protect her. She was
only a child.
Maester Aemon’s old chambers were so warm that the sudden
cloud of steam when Mully pulled the door open was enough to
blind the both of them. Within, a fresh re was burning in the
hearth, the logs crackling and spitting. Jon stepped over a puddle of
damp clothing. “Snow, Snow, Snow,” the ravens called down from
above. The girl was curled up near the re, wrapped in a black
woolen cloak three times her size and fast asleep.
She looked enough like Arya to give him pause, but only for a
moment. A tall, skinny, coltish girl, all legs and elbows, her brown
hair was woven in a thick braid and bound about with strips of
leather. She had a long face, a pointy chin, small ears.
But she was too old, far too old. This girl is almost of an age with
me. “Has she eaten?” Jon asked Mully.
“Only bread and broth, my lord.” Clydas rose from a chair. “It is
best to go slow, Maester Aemon always said. Any more and she

might not have been able to digest it.”
Mully nodded. “Dannel had one o’ Hobb’s sausages and o ered
her a bite, but she wouldn’t touch it.”
Jon could not blame her for that. Hobb’s sausages were made of
grease and salt and things that did not bear thinking about.
“Perhaps we should just let her rest.”
That was when the girl sat up, clutching the cloak to her small,
pale breasts. She looked confused. “Where …?”
“Castle Black, my lady.”
“The Wall.” Her eyes lled up with tears. “I’m here.”
Clydas moved closer. “Poor child. How old are you?”
“Sixteen on my next nameday. And no child, but a woman grown
and owered.” She yawned, covered her mouth with the cloak. One
bare knee peeked through its folds. “You do not wear a chain. Are
you a maester?”
“No,” said Clydas, “but I have served one.”
She does look a bit like Arya, Jon thought. Starved and skinny, but
her hair’s the same color, and her eyes. “I am told you have been
asking after me. I am—”
“—Jon Snow.” The girl tossed her braid back. “My house and
yours are bound in blood and honor. Hear me, kinsman. My uncle
Cregan is hard upon my trail. You must not let him take me back to
Karhold.”
Jon was staring. I know this girl. There was something about her
eyes, the way she held herself, the way she talked. For a moment
the memory eluded him. Then it came. “Alys Karstark.”
That brought the ghost of a smile to her lips. “I was not sure you
would remember. I was six the last time you saw me.”
“You came to Winterfell with your father.” The father Robb
beheaded. “I don’t recall what for.”
She blushed. “So I could meet your brother. Oh, there was some
other pretext, but that was the real reason. I was almost of an age
with Robb, and my father thought we might make a match. There
was a feast. I danced with you and your brother both. He was very
courteous and said that I danced beautifully. You were sullen. My
father said that was to be expected in a bastard.”

“I remember.” It was only half a lie.
“You’re still a little sullen,” the girl said, “but I will forgive you
that if you will save me from my uncle.”
“Your uncle … would that be Lord Arnolf?”
“He is no lord,” Alys said scornfully. “My brother Harry is the
rightful lord, and by law I am his heir. A daughter comes before an
uncle. Uncle Arnolf is only castellan. He’s my great-uncle, actually,
my father’s uncle. Cregan is his son. I suppose that makes him a
cousin, but we always called him uncle. Now they mean to make me
call him husband.” She made a st. “Before the war I was betrothed
to Daryn Hornwood. We were only waiting till I owered to be
wed, but the Kingslayer killed Daryn in the Whispering Wood. My
father wrote that he would nd some southron lord to wed me, but
he never did. Your brother Robb cut o his head for killing
Lannisters.” Her mouth twisted. “I thought the whole reason they
marched south was to kill some Lannisters.”
“It was … not so simple as that. Lord Karstark slew two
prisoners, my lady. Unarmed boys, squires in a cell.”
The girl did not seem surprised. “My father never bellowed like
the Greatjon, but he was no less dangerous in his wroth. He is dead
now too, though. So is your brother. But you and I are here, still
living. Is there blood feud between us, Lord Snow?”
“When a man takes the black he puts his feuds behind him. The
Night’s Watch has no quarrel with Karhold, nor with you.”
“Good. I was afraid … I begged my father to leave one of my
brothers as castellan, but none of them wished to miss the glory and
ransoms to be won in the south. Now Torr and Edd are dead. Harry
was a prisoner at Maidenpool when last we heard, but that was
almost a year ago. He may be dead as well. I did not know where
else to turn but to the last son of Eddard Stark.”
“Why not the king? Karhold declared for Stannis.”
“My uncle declared for Stannis, in hopes it might provoke the
Lannisters to take poor Harry’s head. Should my brother die,
Karhold should pass to me, but my uncles want my birthright for
their own. Once Cregan gets a child by me they won’t need me

anymore. He’s buried two wives already.” She rubbed away a tear
angrily, the way Arya might have done it. “Will you help me?”
“Marriages and inheritance are matters for the king, my lady. I
will write to Stannis on your behalf, but—”
Alys Karstark laughed, but it was the laughter of despair. “Write,
but do not look for a reply. Stannis will be dead before he gets your
message. My uncle will see to that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Arnolf is rushing to Winterfell, ’tis true, but only so he might put
his dagger in your king’s back. He cast his lot with Roose Bolton
long ago … for gold, the promise of a pardon, and poor Harry’s
head. Lord Stannis is marching to a slaughter. So he cannot help me,
and would not even if he could.” Alys knelt before him, clutching
the black cloak. “You are my only hope, Lord Snow. In your father’s
name, I beg you. Protect me.”

THE BLIND GIRL

H

er nights were lit by distant stars and the shimmer of
moonlight on snow, but every dawn she woke to darkness.
She opened her eyes and stared up blind at the black that
shrouded her, her dream already fading. So beautiful. She licked her
lips, remembering. The bleating of the sheep, the terror in the
shepherd’s eyes, the sound the dogs had made as she killed them
one by one, the snarling of her pack. Game had become scarcer
since the snows began to fall, but last night they had feasted. Lamb
and dog and mutton and the esh of man. Some of her little grey
cousins were afraid of men, even dead men, but not her. Meat was
meat, and men were prey. She was the night wolf. But only when
she dreamed.
The blind girl rolled onto her side, sat up, sprang to her feet,
stretched. Her bed was a rag-stu ed mattress on a shelf of cold
stone, and she was always sti and tight when she awakened. She
padded to her basin on small, bare, callused feet, silent as a shadow,
splashed cool water on her face, patted herself dry. Ser Gregor, she
thought. Dunsen, Ra the Sweetling. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei.
Her morning prayer. Or was it? No, she thought, not mine. I am no
one. That is the night wolf’s prayer. Someday she will nd them, hunt
them, smell their fear, taste their blood. Someday.
She found her smallclothes in a pile, sni ed at them to make sure
they were fresh enough to wear, donned them in her darkness. Her
servant’s garb was where she’d hung it—a long tunic of undyed
wool, roughspun and scratchy. She snapped it out and pulled it
down over her head with one smooth practiced motion. Socks came

last. One black, one white. The black one had stitching round the
top, the white none; she could feel which was which, make sure she
got each sock on the right leg. Skinny as they were, her legs were
strong and springy and growing longer every day. She was glad of
that. A water dancer needs good legs. Blind Beth was no water
dancer, but she would not be Beth forever.
She knew the way to the kitchens, but her nose would have led
her there even if she hadn’t. Hot peppers and fried sh, she decided,
sni ng down the hall, and bread fresh from Umma’s oven. The smells
made her belly rumble. The night wolf had feasted, but that would
not ll the blind girl’s belly. Dream meat could not nourish her, she
had learned that early on.
She broke her fast on sardines, fried crisp in pepper oil and served
so hot they burned her ngers. She mopped up the leftover oil with
a chunk of bread torn o the end of Umma’s morning loaf and
washed it all down with a cup of watered wine, savoring the tastes
and the smells, the rough feel of the crust beneath her ngers, the
slickness of the oil, the sting of the hot pepper when it got into the
half-healed scrape on the back of the hand. Hear, smell, taste, feel,
she reminded herself. There are many ways to know the world for those
who cannot see.
Someone had entered the room behind her, moving on soft
padded slippers quiet as a mouse. Her nostrils ared. The kindly
man. Men had a di erent smell than women, and there was a hint of
orange in the air as well. The priest was fond of chewing orange
rinds to sweeten his breath, whenever he could get them.
“And who are you this morning?” she heard him ask, as he took
his seat at the head of the table. Tap, tap, she heard, then a tiny
crackling sound. Breaking his rst egg.
“No one,” she replied.
“A lie. I know you. You are that blind beggar girl.”
“Beth.” She had known a Beth once, back at Winterfell when she
was Arya Stark. Maybe that was why she’d picked the name. Or
maybe it was just because it went so well with blind.
“Poor child,” said the kindly man. “Would you like to have your
eyes back? Ask, and you shall see.”

He asked the same question every morning. “I may want them on
the morrow. Not today.” Her face was still water, hiding all,
revealing nothing.
“As you will.” She could hear him peeling the egg, then a faint
silvery clink as he picked up the salt spoon. He liked his eggs well
salted. “Where did my poor blind girl go begging last night?”
“The Inn of the Green Eel.”
“And what three new things do you know that you did not know
when last you left us?”
“The Sealord is still sick.”
“This is no new thing. The Sealord was sick yesterday, and he will
still be sick upon the morrow.”
“Or dead.”
“When he is dead, that will be a new thing.”
When he is dead, there will be a choosing, and the knives will come
out. That was the way of it in Braavos. In Westeros, a dead king was
followed by his eldest son, but the Braavosi had no kings. “Tormo
Fregar will be the new sealord.”
“Is that what they are saying at the Inn of the Green Eel?”
“Yes.”
The kindly man took a bite of his egg. The girl heard him
chewing. He never spoke with his mouth full. He swallowed, and
said, “Some men say there is wisdom in wine. Such men are fools.
At other inns other names are being bruited about, never doubt.” He
took another bite of egg, chewed, swallowed. “What three new
things do you know, that you did not know before?”
“I know that some men are saying that Tormo Fregar will surely
be the new sealord,” she answered. “Some drunken men.”
“Better. And what else do you know?”
It is snowing in the riverlands, in Westeros, she almost said. But he
would have asked her how she knew that, and she did not think that
he would like her answer. She chewed her lip, thinking back to last
night. “The whore S’vrone is with child. She is not certain of the
father, but thinks it might have been that Tyroshi sellsword that she
killed.”
“This is good to know. What else?”

“The Merling Queen has chosen a new Mermaid to take the place
of the one that drowned. She is the daughter of a Prestayn serving
maid, thirteen and penniless, but lovely.”
“So are they all, at the beginning,” said the priest, “but you
cannot know that she is lovely unless you have seen her with your
own eyes, and you have none. Who are you, child?”
“No one.”
“Blind Beth the beggar girl is who I see. She is a wretched liar,
that one. See to your duties. Valar morghulis.”
“Valar dohaeris.” She gathered up her bowl and cup, knife and
spoon, and pushed to her feet. Last of all she grasped her stick. It
was ve feet long, slender and supple, thick as her thumb, with
leather wrapped around the shaft a foot from the top. Better than
eyes, once you learn how to use it, the waif had told her.
That was a lie. They often lied to her, to test her. No stick was
better than a pair of eyes. It was good to have, though, so she
always kept it close. Umma had taken to calling her Stick, but
names did not matter. She was her. No one. I am no one. Just a blind
girl, just a servant of Him of Many Faces.
Each night at supper the waif brought her a cup of milk and told
her to drink it down. The drink had a queer, bitter taste that the
blind girl soon learned to loathe. Even the faint smell that warned
her what it was before it touched her tongue soon made her feel
like retching, but she drained the cup all the same.
“How long must I be blind?” she would ask.
“Until darkness is as sweet to you as light,” the waif would say,
“or until you ask us for your eyes. Ask and you shall see.”
And then you will send me away. Better blind than that. They
would not make her yield.
On the day she had woken blind, the waif took her by the hand
and led her through the vaults and tunnels of the rock on which the
House of Black and White was built, up the steep stone steps into
the temple proper. “Count the steps as you climb,” she had said.
“Let your ngers brush the wall. There are markings there, invisible
to the eye, plain to the touch.”
That was her rst lesson. There had been many more.

Poisons and potions were for the afternoons. She had smell and
touch and taste to help her, but touch and taste could be perilous
when grinding poisons, and with some of the waif’s more toxic
concoctions even smell was less than safe. Burned pinky tips and
blistered lips became familiar to her, and once she made herself so
sick she could not keep down any food for days.
Supper was for language lessons. The blind girl understood
Braavosi and could speak it passably, she had even lost most of her
barbaric accent, but the kindly man was not content. He was
insisting that she improve her High Valyrian and learn the tongues
of Lys and Pentos too.
In the evening she played the lying game with the waif, but
without eyes to see the game was very di erent. Sometimes all she
had to go on was tone and choice of words; other times the waif
allowed her to lay hands upon her face. At rst the game was much,
much harder, the next thing to impossible … but just when she was
near the point of screaming with frustration, it all became much
easier. She learned to hear the lies, to feel them in the play of the
muscles around the mouth and eyes.
Many of her other duties had remained the same, but as she went
about them she stumbled over furnishings, walked into walls,
dropped trays, got hopelessly helplessly lost inside the temple. Once
she almost fell headlong down the steps, but Syrio Forel had taught
her balance in another lifetime, when she was the girl called Arya,
and somehow she recovered and caught herself in time.
Some nights she might have cried herself to sleep if she had still
been Arry or Weasel or Cat, or even Arya of House Stark … but no
one had no tears. Without eyes, even the simplest task was perilous.
She burned herself a dozen times as she worked with Umma in the
kitchens. Once, chopping onions, she cut her nger down to the
bone. Twice she could not even nd her own room in the cellar and
had to sleep on the oor at the base of the steps. All the nooks and
alcoves made the temple treacherous, even after the blind girl had
learned to use her ears; the way her footsteps bounced o the
ceiling and echoed round the legs of the thirty tall stone gods made

the walls themselves seem to move, and the pool of still black water
did strange things to sound as well.
“You have ve senses,” the kindly man said. “Learn to use the
other four, you will have fewer cuts and scrapes and scabs.”
She could feel air currents on her skin now. She could nd the
kitchens by their smell, tell men from women by their scents. She
knew Umma and the servants and the acolytes by the pattern of
their footfalls, could tell one from the other before they got close
enough to smell (but not the waif or the kindly man, who hardly
made a sound at all unless they wanted to). The candles burning in
the temple had scents as well; even the unscented ones gave o
faint wisps of smoke from their wicks. They had as well been
shouting, once she had learned to use her nose.
The dead men had their own smell too. One of her duties was to
nd them in the temple every morning, wherever they had chosen
to lie down and close their eyes after drinking from the pool.
This morning she found two.
One man had died at the feet of the Stranger, a single candle
ickering above him. She could feel its heat, and the scent that it
gave o tickled her nose. The candle burned with a dark red ame,
she knew; for those with eyes, the corpse would have seemed awash
in a ruddy glow. Before summoning the serving men to carry him
away, she knelt and felt his face, tracing the line of his jaw,
brushing her ngers across his cheeks and nose, touching his hair.
Curly hair, and thick. A handsome face, unlined. He was young. She
wondered what had brought him here to seek the gift of death.
Dying bravos oft found their way to the House of Black and White,
to hasten their ends, but this man had no wounds that she could
nd.
The second body was that of an old woman. She had gone to
sleep upon a dreaming couch, in one of the hidden alcoves where
special candles conjured visions of things loved and lost. A sweet
death and a gentle one, the kindly man was fond of saying. Her
ngers told her that the old woman had died with a smile on her
face. She had not been dead long. Her body was still warm to the

touch. Her skin is so soft, like old thin leather that’s been folded and
wrinkled a thousand times.
When the serving men arrived to bear the corpse away, the blind
girl followed them. She let their footsteps be her guide, but when
they made their descent she counted. She knew the counts of all the
steps by heart. Under the temple was a maze of vaults and tunnels
where even men with two good eyes were often lost, but the blind
girl had learned every inch of it, and she had her stick to help her
nd her way should her memory falter.
The corpses were laid out in the vault. The blind girl went to
work in the dark, stripping the dead of boots and clothes and other
possessions, emptying their purses and counting out their coins.
Telling one coin from another by touch alone was one of the rst
things the waif had taught her, after they took away her eyes. The
Braavosi coins were old friends; she need only brush her ngertips
across their faces to recognize them. Coins from other lands and
cities were harder, especially those from far away. Volantene
honors were most common, little coins no bigger than a penny with
a crown on one side and a skull on the other. Lysene coins were
oval and showed a naked woman. Other coins had ships stamped
onto them, or elephants, or goats. The Westerosi coins showed a
king’s head on the front and a dragon on the back.
The old woman had no purse, no wealth at all but for a ring on
one thin nger. On the handsome man she found four golden
dragons out of Westeros. She was running the ball of her thumb
across the most worn of them, trying to decide which king it
showed, when she heard the door opening softly behind her.
“Who is there?” she asked.
“No one.” The voice was deep, harsh, cold.
And moving. She stepped to one side, grabbed for her stick,
snapped it up to protect her face. Wood clacked against wood. The
force of the blow almost knocked the stick from her hand. She held
on, slashed back … and found only empty air where he should have
been. “Not there,” the voice said. “Are you blind?”
She did not answer. Talking would only muddle any sounds he
might be making. He would be moving, she knew. Left or right? She

jumped left, swung right, hit nothing. A stinging cut from behind
her caught her in the back of the legs. “Are you deaf?” She spun, the
stick in her left hand, whirling, missing. From the left she heard the
sound of laughter. She slashed right.
This time she connected. Her stick smacked o his own. The
impact sent a jolt up her arm. “Good,” the voice said.
The blind girl did not know whom the voice belonged to. One of
the acolytes, she supposed. She did not remember ever hearing his
voice before, but what was there to say that the servants of the
Many-Faced God could not change their voices as easily as they did
their faces? Besides her, the House of Black and White was home to
two serving men, three acolytes, Umma the cook, and the two
priests that she called the waif and the kindly man. Others came and
went, sometimes by secret ways, but those were the only ones who
lived here. Her nemesis could be any of them.
The girl darted sideways, her stick spinning, heard a sound behind
her, whirled in that direction, struck at air. And all at once his own
stick was between her legs, tangling them as she tried to turn again,
scraping down her shin. She stumbled and went down to one knee,
so hard she bit her tongue.
There she stopped. Still as stone. Where is he?
Behind her, he laughed. He rapped her smartly on one ear, then
cracked her knuckles as she was scrambling to her feet. Her stick
fell clattering to the stone. She hissed in fury.
“Go on. Pick it up. I am done beating you for today.”
“No one beat me.” The girl crawled on all fours until she found
her stick, then sprang back to her feet, bruised and dirty. The vault
was still and silent. He was gone. Or was he? He could be standing
right beside her, she would never know. Listen for his breathing, she
told herself, but there was nothing. She gave it another moment,
then put her stick aside and resumed her work. If I had my eyes, I
could beat him bloody. One day the kindly man would give them
back, and she would show them all.
The old woman’s corpse was cool by now, the bravo’s body
sti ening. The girl was used to that. Most days, she spent more time
with the dead than with the living. She missed the friends she’d had

when she was Cat of the Canals; Old Brusco with his bad back, his
daughters Talea and Brea, the mummers from the Ship, Merry and
her whores at the Happy Port, all the other rogues and wharfside
scum. She missed Cat herself the most of all, even more than she
missed her eyes. She had liked being Cat, more than she had ever
liked being Salty or Squab or Weasel or Arry. I killed Cat when I
killed that singer. The kindly man had told her that they would have
taken her eyes from her anyway, to help her to learn to use her
other senses, but not for half a year. Blind acolytes were common in
the House of Black and White, but few as young as she. The girl was
not sorry, though. Dareon had been a deserter from the Night’s
Watch; he had deserved to die.
She had said as much to the kindly man. “And are you a god, to
decide who should live and who should die?” he asked her. “We
give the gift to those marked by Him of Many Faces, after prayers
and sacri ce. So has it always been, from the beginning. I have told
you of the founding of our order, of how the rst of us answered
the prayers of slaves who wished for death. The gift was given only
to those who yearned for it, in the beginning … but one day, the
rst of us heard a slave praying not for his own death but for his
master’s. So fervently did he desire this that he o ered all he had,
that his prayer might be answered. And it seemed to our rst
brother that this sacri ce would be pleasing to Him of Many Faces,
so that night he granted the prayer. Then he went to the slave and
said, ‘You o ered all you had for this man’s death, but slaves have
nothing but their lives. That is what the god desires of you. For the
rest of your days on earth, you will serve him.’ And from that
moment, we were two.” His hand closed around her arm, gently but
rmly. “All men must die. We are but death’s instruments, not
death himself. When you slew the singer, you took god’s powers on
yourself. We kill men, but we do not presume to judge them. Do
you understand?”
No, she thought. “Yes,” she said.
“You lie. And that is why you must now walk in darkness until
you see the way. Unless you wish to leave us. You need only ask,
and you may have your eyes back.”

No, she thought. “No,” she said.
That evening, after supper and a short session of the lying game,
the blind girl tied a strip of rag around her head to hide her useless
eyes, found her begging bowl, and asked the waif to help her don
Beth’s face. The waif had shaved her head for her when they took
her eyes; a mummer’s cut, she called it, since many mummers did
the same so their wigs might t them better. But it worked for
beggars too and helped to keep their heads free from eas and lice.
More than a wig was needed, though. “I could cover you with
weeping sores,” the waif said, “but then innkeeps and taverners
would chase you from their doors.” Instead she gave her pox scars
and a mummer’s mole on one cheek with a dark hair growing from
it. “Is it ugly?” the blind girl asked.
“It is not pretty.”
“Good.” She had never cared if she was pretty, even when she
was stupid Arya Stark. Only her father had ever called her that.
Him, and Jon Snow, sometimes. Her mother used to say she could be
pretty if she would just wash and brush her hair and take more care
with her dress, the way her sister did. To her sister and sister’s
friends and all the rest, she had just been Arya Horseface. But they
were all dead now, even Arya, everyone but her half-brother, Jon.
Some nights she heard talk of him, in the taverns and brothels of
the Ragman’s Harbor. The Black Bastard of the Wall, one man had
called him. Even Jon would never know Blind Beth, I bet. That made
her sad.
The clothes she wore were rags, faded and fraying, but warm
clean rags for all that. Under them she hid three knives—one in a
boot, one up a sleeve, one sheathed at the small of her back.
Braavosi were a kindly folk, by and large, more like to help the
poor blind beggar girl than try to do her harm, but there were
always a few bad ones who might see her as someone they could
safely rob or rape. The blades were for them, though so far the
blind girl had not been forced to use them. A cracked wooden
begging bowl and belt of hempen rope completed her garb.
She set out as the Titan roared the sunset, counting her way down
the steps from the temple door, then tapping to the bridge that took

her over the canal to the Isle of the Gods. She could tell that the fog
was thick from the clammy way her clothes clung to her and the
damp feeling of the air on her bare hands. The mists of Braavos did
queer things to sounds as well, she had found. Half the city will be
half-blind tonight.
As she made her way past the temples, she could hear the
acolytes of the Cult of Starry Wisdom atop their scrying tower,
singing to the evening stars. A wisp of scented smoke hung in the
air, drawing her down the winding path to where the red priests
had red the great iron braziers outside the house of the Lord of
Light. Soon she could even feel the heat in the air, as red R’hllor’s
worshipers lifted their voices in prayer. “For the night is dark and full
of terrors,” they prayed.
Not for me. Her nights were bathed in moonlight and lled with
the songs of her pack, with the taste of red meat torn o the bone,
with the warm familiar smells of her grey cousins. Only during the
days was she alone and blind.
She was no stranger to the waterfront. Cat used to prowl the
wharves and alleys of the Ragman’s Harbor selling mussels and
oysters and clams for Brusco. With her rag and her shaved head and
her mummer’s mole, she did not look the same as she had then, but
just to be safe she stayed away from the Ship and the Happy Port
and the other places where Cat had been best known.
She knew each inn and tavern by its scent. The Black Bargeman
had a briny smell. Pynto’s stank of sour wine, stinky cheese, and
Pynto himself, who never changed his clothes or washed his hair. At
the Sailmender’s the smoky air was always spiced with the scent of
roasting meat. The House of Seven Lamps was fragrant with
incense, the Satin Palace with the perfumes of pretty young girls
who dreamed of being courtesans.
Each place had its own sounds too. Moroggo’s and the Inn of the
Green Eel had singers performing most nights. At the Outcast Inn
the patrons themselves did the singing, in drunken voices and half a
hundred tongues. The Foghouse was always crowded with polemen
o the serpent boats, arguing about gods and courtesans and
whether or not the Sealord was a fool. The Satin Palace was much

quieter, a place of whispered endearments, the soft rustle of silk
gowns, and the giggling of girls.
Beth did her begging at a di erent place every night. She had
learned early on that innkeeps and taverners were more apt to
tolerate her presence if it was not a frequent occurrence. Last night
she had spent outside the Inn of the Green Eel, so tonight she turned
right instead of left after the Bloody Bridge and made her way to
Pynto’s at the other end of Ragman’s Harbor, right on the edge of
the Drowned Town. Loud and smelly he might be, but Pynto had a
soft heart under all his unwashed clothes and bluster. Oft as not, he
would let her come inside where it was warm if the place was not
too crowded, and now and again he might even let her have a mug
of ale and a crust of food whilst regaling her with his stories. In his
younger days Pynto had been the most notorious pirate in the
Stepstones, to hear him tell it; he loved nothing better than to speak
at great length about his exploits.
She was in luck tonight. The tavern was near empty, and she was
able to claim a quiet corner not far from the re. No sooner had she
settled there and crossed her legs than something brushed up
against her thigh. “You again?” said the blind girl. She scratched his
head behind one ear, and the cat jumped up into her lap and began
to purr. Braavos was full of cats, and no place more than Pynto’s.
The old pirate believed they brought good luck and kept his tavern
free of vermin. “You know me, don’t you?” she whispered. Cats
were not fooled by a mummer’s moles. They remembered Cat of the
Canals.
It was a good night for the blind girl. Pynto was in a jolly mood
and gave her a cup of watered wine, a chunk of stinky cheese, and
half of an eel pie. “Pynto is a very good man,” he announced, then
settled down to tell her of the time he seized the spice ship, a tale
she had heard a dozen times before.
As the hours passed the tavern lled. Pynto was soon too busy to
pay her any mind, but several of his regulars dropped coins into her
begging bowl. Other tables were occupied by strangers: Ibbenese
whalers who reeked of blood and blubber, a pair of bravos with
scented oil in their hair, a fat man out of Lorath who complained

that Pynto’s booths were too small for his belly. And later three
Lyseni, sailors o the Goodheart, a storm-wracked galley that had
limped into Braavos last night and been seized this morning by the
Sealord’s guards.
The Lyseni took the table nearest to the re and spoke quietly
over cups of black tar rum, keeping their voices low so no one could
overhear. But she was no one and she heard most every word. And
for a time it seemed that she could see them too, through the slitted
yellow eyes of the tomcat purring in her lap. One was old and one
was young and one had lost an ear, but all three had the whiteblond hair and smooth fair skin of Lys, where the blood of the old
Freehold still ran strong.
The next morning, when the kindly man asked her what three
things she knew that she had not known before, she was ready.
“I know why the Sealord seized the Goodheart. She was carrying
slaves. Hundreds of slaves, women and children, roped together in
her hold.” Braavos had been founded by escaped slaves, and the
slave trade was forbidden here.
“I know where the slaves came from. They were wildlings from
Westeros, from a place called Hardhome. An old ruined place,
accursed.” Old Nan had told her tales of Hardhome, back at
Winterfell when she had still been Arya Stark. “After the big battle
where the King-Beyond-the-Wall was killed, the wildlings ran away,
and this woods witch said that if they went to Hardhome, ships
would come and carry them away to someplace warm. But no ships
came, except these two Lyseni pirates, Goodheart and Elephant, that
had been driven north by a storm. They dropped anchor o
Hardhome to make repairs, and saw the wildlings, but there were
thousands and they didn’t have room for all of them, so they said
they’d just take the women and the children. The wildlings had
nothing to eat, so the men sent out their wives and daughters, but
as soon as the ships were out to sea, the Lyseni drove them below
and roped them up. They meant to sell them all in Lys. Only then
they ran into another storm and the ships were parted. The
Goodheart was so damaged her captain had no choice but to put in
here, but the Elephant may have made it back to Lys. The Lyseni at

Pynto’s think that she’ll return with more ships. The price of slaves
is rising, they said, and there are thousands more women and
children at Hardhome.”
“It is good to know. This is two. Is there a third?”
“Yes. I know that you’re the one who has been hitting me.” Her
stick ashed out, and cracked against his ngers, sending his own
stick clattering to the oor.
The priest winced and snatched his hand back. “And how could a
blind girl know that?”
I saw you. “I gave you three. I don’t need to give you four.”
Maybe on the morrow she would tell him about the cat that had
followed her home last night from Pynto’s, the cat that was hiding
in the rafters, looking down on them. Or maybe not. If he could have
secrets, so could she.
That evening Umma served salt-crusted crabs for supper. When
her cup was presented to her, the blind girl wrinkled her nose and
drank it down in three long gulps. Then she gasped and dropped the
cup. Her tongue was on re, and when she gulped a cup of wine the
ames spread down her throat and up her nose.
“Wine will not help, and water will just fan the ames,” the waif
told her. “Eat this.” A heel of bread was pressed into her hand. The
girl stu ed it in her mouth, chewed, swallowed. It helped. A second
chunk helped more.
And come the morning, when the night wolf left her and she
opened her eyes, she saw a tallow candle burning where no candle
had been the night before, its uncertain ame swaying back and
forth like a whore at the Happy Port. She had never seen anything
so beautiful.

A GHOST IN WINTERFELL

T

he dead man was found at the base of the inner wall, with his
neck broken and only his left leg showing above the snow that had
buried him during the night.
If Ramsay’s bitches had not dug him up, he might have stayed
buried till spring. By the time Ben Bones pulled them o , Grey
Jeyne had eaten so much of the dead man’s face that half the day
was gone before they knew for certain who he’d been: a man-atarms of four-and-forty years who had marched north with Roger
Ryswell. “A drunk,” Ryswell declared. “Pissing o the wall, I’ll
wager. He slipped and fell.” No one disagreed. But Theon Greyjoy
found himself wondering why any man would climb the snow-slick
steps to the battlements in the black of night just to take a piss.
As the garrison broke its fast that morning on stale bread fried in
bacon grease (the lords and knights ate the bacon), the talk along
the benches was of little but the corpse.
“Stannis has friends inside the castle,” Theon heard one serjeant
mutter. He was an old Tallhart man, three trees sewn on his ragged
surcoat. The watch had just changed. Men were coming in from the
cold, stomping their feet to knock the snow o their boots and
breeches as the midday meal was served—blood sausage, leeks, and
brown bread still warm from the ovens.
“Stannis?” laughed one of Roose Ryswell’s riders. “Stannis is
snowed to death by now. Else he’s run back to the Wall with his tail
froze between his legs.”
“He could be camped ve feet from our walls with a hundred
thousand men,” said an archer wearing Cerwyn colors. “We’d never

see a one o’ them through this storm.”
Endless, ceaseless, merciless, the snow had fallen day and night.
Drifts climbed the walls and lled the crenels along the battlements,
white blankets covered every roof, tents sagged beneath the weight.
Ropes were strung from hall to hall to help men keep from getting
lost as they crossed the yards. Sentries crowded into the guard
turrets to warm half-frozen hands over glowing braziers, leaving the
wallwalks to the snowy sentinels the squires had thrown up, who
grew larger and stranger every night as wind and weather worked
their will upon them. Ragged beards of ice grew down the spears
clasped in their snowy sts. No less a man than Hosteen Frey, who
had been heard growling that he did not fear a little snow, lost an
ear to frostbite.
The horses in the yards su ered most. The blankets thrown over
them to keep them warm soaked through and froze if not changed
regularly. When res were lit to keep the cold at bay, they did
more harm than good. The warhorses feared the ames and fought
to get away, injuring themselves and other horses as they twisted at
their lines. Only the horses in the stables were safe and warm, but
the stables were already overcrowded.
“The gods have turned against us,” old Lord Locke was heard to
say in the Great Hall. “This is their wroth. A wind as cold as hell
itself and snows that never end. We are cursed.”
“Stannis is cursed,” a Dreadfort man insisted. “He is the one out
there in the storm.”
“Lord Stannis might be warmer than we know,” one foolish
freerider argued. “His sorceress can summon re. Might be her red
god can melt these snows.”
That was unwise, Theon knew at once. The man spoke too loudly,
and in the hearing of Yellow Dick and Sour Alyn and Ben Bones.
When the tale reached Lord Ramsay, he sent his Bastard’s Boys to
seize the man and drag him out into the snow. “As you seem so fond
of Stannis, we will send you to him,” he said. Damon Dance-for-Me
gave the freerider a few lashes with his long greased whip. Then,
whilst Skinner and Yellow Dick made wagers on how fast his blood

would freeze, Ramsay had the man dragged up to the Battlements
Gate.
Winterfell’s great main gates were closed and barred, and so
choked with ice and snow that the portcullis would need to be
chipped free before it could be raised. Much the same was true of
the Hunter’s Gate, though there at least ice was not a problem, since
the gate had seen recent use. The Kingsroad Gate had not, and ice
had frozen those drawbridge chains rock hard. Which left the
Battlements Gate, a small arched postern in the inner wall. Only
half a gate, in truth, it had a drawbridge that spanned the frozen
moat but no corresponding gateway through the outer wall, o ering
access to the outer ramparts but not the world beyond.
The bleeding freerider was carried across the bridge and up the
steps, still protesting. Then Skinner and Sour Alyn seized his arms
and legs and tossed him from the wall to the ground eighty feet
below. The drifts had climbed so high that they swallowed the man
bodily … but bowmen on the battlements claimed they glimpsed
him sometime later, dragging a broken leg through the snow. One
feathered his rump with an arrow as he wriggled away. “He will be
dead within the hour,” Lord Ramsay promised.
“Or he’ll be sucking Lord Stannis’s cock before the sun goes
down,” Whoresbane Umber threw back.
“He best take care it don’t break o ,” laughed Rickard Ryswell.
“Any man out there in this, his cock is frozen hard.”
“Lord Stannis is lost in the storm,” said Lady Dustin. “He’s leagues
away, dead or dying. Let winter do its worst. A few more days and
the snows will bury him and his army both.”
And us as well, thought Theon, marveling at her folly. Lady
Barbrey was of the north and should have known better. The old
gods might be listening.
Supper was pease porridge and yesterday’s bread, and that caused
muttering amongst the common men as well; above the salt, the
lords and knights were seen to be eating ham.
Theon was bent over a wooden bowl nishing the last of his own
portion of pease porridge when a light touch on his shoulder made
him drop his spoon. “Never touch me,” he said, twisting down to

snatch the fallen utensil o the oor before one of Ramsay’s girls
could get hold of it. “Never touch me.”
She sat down next to him, too close, another of Abel’s
washerwomen. This one was young, fteen or maybe sixteen, with
shaggy blond hair in need of a good wash and a pair of pouty lips in
need of a good kiss. “Some girls like to touch,” she said, with a little
half-smile. “If it please m’lord, I’m Holly.”
Holly the whore, he thought, but she was pretty enough. Once he
might have laughed and pulled her into his lap, but that day was
done. “What do you want?”
“To see these crypts. Where are they, m’lord? Would you show
me?” Holly toyed with a strand of her hair, coiling it around her
little nger. “Deep and dark, they say. A good place for touching.
All the dead kings watching.”
“Did Abel send you to me?”
“Might be. Might be I sent myself. But if it’s Abel you’re wanting,
I could bring him. He’ll sing m’lord a sweet song.”
Every word she said persuaded Theon that this was all some ploy.
But whose, and to what end? What could Abel want of him? The man
was just a singer, a pander with a lute and a false smile. He wants to
know how I took the castle, but not to make a song of it. The answer
came to him. He wants to know how we got in so he can get out. Lord
Bolton had Winterfell sewn up tight as a babe’s swaddling clothes.
No one could come or go without his leave. He wants to ee, him
and his washerwoman. Theon could not blame him, but even so he
said, “I want no part of Abel, or you, or any of your sisters. Just
leave me be.”
Outside the snow was swirling, dancing. Theon groped his way to
the wall, then followed it to the Battlements Gate. He might have
taken the guards for a pair of Little Walder’s snowmen if he had not
seen the white plumes of their breath. “I want to walk the walls,”
he told them, his own breath frosting in the air.
“Bloody cold up there,” one warned.
“Bloody cold down here,” the other said, “but you do as you like,
turncloak.” He waved Theon through the gate.

The steps were snow-packed and slippery, treacherous in the
dark. Once he reached the wallwalk, it did not take him long to nd
the place where they’d thrown down the freerider. He knocked
aside the wall of fresh-fallen snow lling up the crenel and leaned
out between the merlons. I could jump, he thought. He lived, why
shouldn’t I? He could jump, and … And what? Break a leg and die
beneath the snow? Creep away to freeze to death?
It was madness. Ramsay would hunt him down, with the girls.
Red Jeyne and Jez and Helicent would tear him to pieces if the gods
were good. Or worse, he might be taken back alive. “I have to
remember my name,” he whispered.
The next morning Ser Aenys Frey’s grizzled squire was found
naked and dead of exposure in the old castle lichyard, his face so
obscured by hoarfrost that he appeared to be wearing a mask. Ser
Aenys put it forth that the man had drunk too much and gotten lost
in the storm, though no one could explain why he had taken o his
clothes to go outside. Another drunkard, Theon thought. Wine could
drown a host of suspicions.
Then, before the day was done, a crossbowman sworn to the
Flints turned up in the stables with a broken skull. Kicked by a
horse, Lord Ramsay declared. A club, more like, Theon decided.
It all seemed so familiar, like a mummer show that he had seen
before. Only the mummers had changed. Roose Bolton was playing
the part that Theon had played the last time round, and the dead
men were playing the parts of Aggar, Gynir Rednose, and Gelmarr
the Grim. Reek was there too, he remembered, but he was a di erent
Reek, a Reek with bloody hands and lies dripping from his lips, sweet as
honey. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with sneak.
The deaths set Roose Bolton’s lords to quarreling openly in the
Great Hall. Some were running short of patience. “How long must
we sit here waiting for this king who never comes?” Ser Hosteen
Frey demanded. “We should take the ght to Stannis and make an
end to him.”
“Leave the castle?” croaked one-armed Harwood Stout. His tone
suggested he would sooner have his remaining arm hacked o .
“Would you have us charge blindly into the snow?”

“To ght Lord Stannis we would rst need to nd him,” Roose
Ryswell pointed out. “Our scouts go out the Hunter’s Gate, but of
late, none of them return.”
Lord Wyman Manderly slapped his massive belly. “White Harbor
does not fear to ride with you, Ser Hosteen. Lead us out, and my
knights will ride behind you.”
Ser Hosteen turned on the fat man. “Close enough to drive a lance
through my back, aye. Where are my kin, Manderly? Tell me that.
Your guests, who brought your son back to you.”
“His bones, you mean.” Manderly speared a chunk of ham with
his dagger. “I recall them well. Rhaegar of the round shoulders,
with his glib tongue. Bold Ser Jared, so swift to draw his steel.
Symond the spymaster, always clinking coins. They brought home
Wendel’s bones. It was Tywin Lannister who returned Wylis to me,
safe and whole, as he had promised. A man of his word, Lord
Tywin, Seven save his soul.” Lord Wyman popped the meat into his
mouth, chewed it noisily, smacked his lips, and said, “The road has
many dangers, ser. I gave your brothers guest gifts when we took
our leave of White Harbor. We swore we would meet again at the
wedding. Many and more bore witness to our parting.”
“Many and more?” mocked Aenys Frey. “Or you and yours?”
“What are you suggesting, Frey?” The Lord of White Harbor
wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I do not like your tone, ser. No,
not one bloody bit.”
“Step out into the yard, you sack of suet, and I’ll serve you all the
bloody bits that you can stomach,” Ser Hosteen said.
Wyman Manderly laughed, but half a dozen of his knights were
on their feet at once. It fell to Roger Ryswell and Barbrey Dustin to
calm them with quiet words. Roose Bolton said nothing at all. But
Theon Greyjoy saw a look in his pale eyes that he had never seen
before—an uneasiness, even a hint of fear.
That night the new stable collapsed beneath the weight of the
snow that had buried it. Twenty-six horses and two grooms died,
crushed beneath the falling roof or smothered under the snows. It
took the best part of the morning to dig out the bodies. Lord Bolton
appeared brie y in the outer ward to inspect the scene, then

ordered the remaining horses brought inside, along with the mounts
still tethered in the outer ward. And no sooner had the men nished
digging out the dead men and butchering the horses than another
corpse was found.
This one could not be waved away as some drunken tumble or the
kick of a horse. The dead man was one of Ramsay’s favorites, the
squat, scrofulous, ill-favored man-at-arms called Yellow Dick.
Whether his dick had actually been yellow was hard to determine,
as someone had sliced it o and stu ed it into his mouth so
forcefully they had broken three of his teeth. When the cooks found
him outside the kitchens, buried up to his neck in a snowdrift, both
dick and man were blue from cold. “Burn the body,” Roose Bolton
ordered, “and see that you do not speak of this. I’ll not have this
tale spread.”
The tale spread nonetheless. By midday most of Winterfell had
heard, many from the lips of Ramsay Bolton, whose “boy” Yellow
Dick had been. “When we nd the man who did this,” Lord Ramsay
promised, “I will ay the skin o him, cook it crisp as crackling,
and make him eat it, every bite.” Word went out that the killer’s
name would be worth a golden dragon.
The reek within the Great Hall was palpable by eventide. With
hundreds of horses, dogs, and men squeezed underneath one roof,
the oors slimy with mud and melting snow, horseshit, dog turds,
and even human feces, the air redolent with the smells of wet dog,
wet wool, and sodden horse blankets, there was no comfort to be
found amongst the crowded benches, but there was food. The cooks
served up great slabs of fresh horsemeat, charred outside and
bloody red within, with roast onions and neeps … and for once, the
common soldiers ate as well as the lords and knights.
The horsemeat was too tough for the ruins of Theon’s teeth. His
attempts to chew gave him excruciating pain. So he mashed the
neeps and onions up together with the at of his dagger and made a
meal of that, then cut the horse up very small, sucked on each
piece, and spat it out. That way at least he had the taste, and some
nourishment from the grease and blood. The bone was beyond him,

though, so he tossed it to the dogs and watched Grey Jeyne make
o with it whilst Sara and Willow snapped at her heels.
Lord Bolton commanded Abel to play for them as they ate. The
bard sang “Iron Lances,” then “The Winter Maid.” When Barbrey
Dustin asked for something more cheerful, he gave them “The
Queen Took O Her Sandal, the King Took O His Crown,” and
“The Bear and the Maiden Fair.” The Freys joined the singing, and
even a few northmen slammed their sts on the table to the chorus,
bellowing, “A bear! A bear!” But the noise frightened the horses, so
the singers soon let o and the music died away.
The Bastard’s Boys gathered beneath a wall sconce where a torch
was aming smokily. Luton and Skinner were throwing dice. Grunt
had a woman in his lap, a breast in his hand. Damon Dance-for-Me
sat greasing up his whip. “Reek,” he called. He tapped the whip
against his calf as a man might do to summon his dog. “You are
starting to stink again, Reek.”
Theon had no reply for that beyond a soft “Yes.”
“Lord Ramsay means to cut your lips o when all this is done,”
said Damon, stroking his whip with a greasy rag.
My lips have been between his lady’s legs. That insolence cannot go
unpunished. “As you say.”
Luton gu awed. “I think he wants it.”
“Go away, Reek,” Skinner said. “The smell of you turns my
stomach.” The others laughed.
He ed quickly, before they changed their minds. His tormentors
would not follow him outside. Not so long as there was food and
drink within, willing women and warm res. As he left the hall,
Abel was singing “The Maids That Bloom in Spring.”
Outside the snow was coming down so heavily that Theon could
not see more than three feet ahead of him. He found himself alone
in a white wilderness, walls of snow looming up to either side of
him chest high. When he raised his head, the snow akes brushed his
cheeks like cold soft kisses. He could hear the sound of music from
the hall behind him. A soft song now, and sad. For a moment he felt
almost at peace.

Farther on, he came upon a man striding in the opposite
direction, a hooded cloak apping behind him. When they found
themselves face-to-face their eyes met brie y. The man put a hand
on his dagger. “Theon Turncloak. Theon Kinslayer.”
“I’m not. I never … I was ironborn.”
“False is all you were. How is it you still breathe?”
“The gods are not done with me,” Theon answered, wondering if
this could be the killer, the night walker who had stu ed Yellow
Dick’s cock into his mouth and pushed Roger Ryswell’s groom o
the battlements. Oddly, he was not afraid. He pulled the glove from
his left hand. “Lord Ramsay is not done with me.”
The man looked, and laughed. “I leave you to him, then.”
Theon trudged through the storm until his arms and legs were
caked with snow and his hands and feet had gone numb from cold,
then climbed to the battlements of the inner wall again. Up here, a
hundred feet high, a little wind was blowing, stirring the snow. All
the crenels had lled up. Theon had to punch through a wall of
snow to make a hole … only to nd that he could not see beyond
the moat. Of the outer wall, nothing remained but a vague shadow
and a few dim lights oating in the dark.
The world is gone. King’s Landing, Riverrun, Pyke, and the Iron
Islands, all the Seven Kingdoms, every place that he had ever
known, every place that he had ever read about or dreamed of, all
gone. Only Winterfell remained.
He was trapped here, with the ghosts. The old ghosts from the
crypts and the younger ones that he had made himself, Mikken and
Farlen, Gynir Rednose, Aggar, Gelmarr the Grim, the miller’s wife
from Acorn Water and her two young sons, and all the rest. My
work. My ghosts. They are all here, and they are angry. He thought of
the crypts and those missing swords.
Theon returned to his own chambers. He was stripping o his wet
clothes when Steelshanks Walton found him. “Come with me,
turncloak. His lordship wants words with you.”
He had no clean dry clothes, so he wriggled back into the same
damp rags and followed. Steelshanks led him back to the Great
Keep and the solar that had once been Eddard Stark’s. Lord Bolton

was not alone. Lady Dustin sat with him, pale-faced and severe; an
iron horsehead brooch clasped Roger Ryswell’s cloak; Aenys Frey
stood near the re, pinched cheeks ushed with cold.
“I am told you have been wandering the castle,” Lord Bolton
began. “Men have reported seeing you in the stables, in the
kitchens, in the barracks, on the battlements. You have been
observed near the ruins of collapsed keeps, outside Lady Catelyn’s
old sept, coming and going from the godswood. Do you deny it?”
“No, m’lord.” Theon made sure to muddy up the word. He knew
that pleased Lord Bolton. “I cannot sleep, m’lord. I walk.” He kept
his head down, xed upon the old stale rushes scattered on the
oor. It was not wise to look his lordship in the face.
“I was a boy here before the war. A ward of Eddard Stark.”
“You were a hostage,” Bolton said.
“Yes, m’lord. A hostage.” It was my home, though. Not a true home,
but the best I ever knew.
“Someone has been killing my men.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
“Not you, I trust?” Bolton’s voice grew even softer. “You would
not repay all my kindnesses with such treachery.”
“No, m’lord, not me. I wouldn’t. I … only walk, is all.”
Lady Dustin spoke up. “Take o your gloves.”
Theon glanced up sharply. “Please, no. I … I …”
“Do as she says,” Ser Aenys said. “Show us your hands.”
Theon peeled his gloves o and held his hands up for them to see.
It is not as if I stand before them naked. It is not so bad as that. His left
hand had three ngers, his right four. Ramsay had taken only the
pinky o the one, the ring nger and fore nger from the other.
“The Bastard did this to you,” Lady Dustin said.
“If it please m’lady, I … I asked it of him.” Ramsay always made
him ask. Ramsay always makes me beg.
“Why would you do that?”
“I … I did not need so many ngers.”
“Four is enough.” Ser Aenys Frey ngered the wispy brown beard
that sprouted from his weak chin like a rat’s tail. “Four on his right
hand. He could still hold a sword. A dagger.”

Lady Dustin laughed. “Are all Freys such fools? Look at him. Hold
a dagger? He hardly has the strength to hold a spoon. Do you truly
think he could have overcome the Bastard’s disgusting creature and
shoved his manhood down his throat?”
“These dead were all strong men,” said Roger Ryswell, “and none
of them were stabbed. The turncloak’s not our killer.”
Roose Bolton’s pale eyes were xed on Theon, as sharp as
Skinner’s aying knife. “I am inclined to agree. Strength aside, he
does not have it in him to betray my son.”
Roger Ryswell grunted. “If not him, who? Stannis has some man
inside the castle, that’s plain.”
Reek is no man. Not Reek. Not me. He wondered if Lady Dustin
had told them about the crypts, the missing swords.
“We must look at Manderly,” muttered Ser Aenys Frey. “Lord
Wyman loves us not.”
Ryswell was not convinced. “He loves his steaks and chops and
meat pies, though. Prowling the castle by dark would require him
to leave the table. The only time he does that is when he seeks the
privy for one of his hourlong squats.”
“I do not claim Lord Wyman does the deeds himself. He brought
three hundred men with him. A hundred knights. Any of them might
have—”
“Night work is not knight’s work,” Lady Dustin said. “And Lord
Wyman is not the only man who lost kin at your Red Wedding,
Frey. Do you imagine Whoresbane loves you any better? If you did
not hold the Greatjon, he would pull out your entrails and make you
eat them, as Lady Hornwood ate her ngers. Flints, Cerwyns,
Tallharts, Slates … they all had men with the Young Wolf.”
“House Ryswell too,” said Roger Ryswell.
“Even Dustins out of Barrowton.” Lady Dustin parted her lips in a
thin, feral smile. “The north remembers, Frey.”
Aenys Frey’s mouth quivered with outrage. “Stark dishonored us.
That is what you northmen had best remember.”
Roose Bolton rubbed at his chapped lips. “This squabbling will not
serve.” He icked his ngers at Theon. “You are free to go. Take

care where you wander. Else it might be you we nd upon the
morrow, smiling a red smile.”
“As you say, m’lord.” Theon drew his gloves on over his maimed
hands and took his leave, limping on his maimed foot.
The hour of the wolf found him still awake, wrapped in layers of
heavy wool and greasy fur, walking yet another circuit of the inner
walls, hoping to exhaust himself enough to sleep. His legs were
caked with snow to the knee, his head and shoulders shrouded in
white. On this stretch of the wall the wind was in his face, and
melting snow ran down his cheeks like icy tears.
Then he heard the horn.
A long low moan, it seemed to hang above the battlements,
lingering in the black air, soaking deep into the bones of every man
who heard it. All along the castle walls, sentries turned toward the
sound, their hands tightening around the shafts of their spears. In
the ruined halls and keeps of Winterfell, lords hushed other lords,
horses nickered, and sleepers stirred in their dark corners. No
sooner had the sound of the warhorn died away than a drum began
to beat: BOOM doom BOOM doom BOOM doom. And a name passed
from the lips of each man to the next, written in small white pu s
of breath. Stannis, they whispered, Stannis is here, Stannis is come,
Stannis, Stannis, Stannis.
Theon shivered. Baratheon or Bolton, it made no matter to him.
Stannis had made common cause with Jon Snow at the Wall, and
Jon would take his head o in a heartbeat. Plucked from the clutches
of one bastard to die at the hands of another, what a jape. Theon would
have laughed aloud if he’d remembered how.
The drumming seemed to be coming from the wolfswood beyond
the Hunter’s Gate. They are just outside the walls. Theon made his
way along the wallwalk, one more man amongst a score doing the
same. But even when they reached the towers that anked the gate
itself, there was nothing to be seen beyond the veil of white.
“Do they mean to try and blow our walls down?” japed a Flint
when the warhorn sounded once again. “Mayhaps he thinks he’s
found the Horn of Joramun.”
“Is Stannis fool enough to storm the castle?” a sentry asked.

“He’s not Robert,” declared a Barrowton man. “He’ll sit, see if he
don’t. Try and starve us out.”
“He’ll freeze his balls o
rst,” another sentry said.
“We should take the ght to him,” declared a Frey.
Do that, Theon thought. Ride out into the snow and die. Leave
Winterfell to me and the ghosts. Roose Bolton would welcome such a
ght, he sensed. He needs an end to this. The castle was too crowded
to withstand a long siege, and too many of the lords here were of
uncertain loyalty. Fat Wyman Manderly, Whoresbane Umber, the
men of House Hornwood and House Tallhart, the Lockes and Flints
and Ryswells, all of them were northmen, sworn to House Stark for
generations beyond count. It was the girl who held them here, Lord
Eddard’s blood, but the girl was just a mummer’s ploy, a lamb in a
direwolf’s skin. So why not send the northmen forth to battle
Stannis before the farce unraveled? Slaughter in the snow. And every
man who falls is one less foe for the Dreadfort.
Theon wondered if he might be allowed to ght. Then at least he
might die a man’s death, sword in hand. That was a gift Ramsay
would never give him, but Lord Roose might. If I beg him. I did all he
asked of me, I played my part, I gave the girl away.
Death was the sweetest deliverance he could hope for.
In the godswood the snow was still dissolving as it touched the
earth. Steam rose o the hot pools, fragrant with the smell of moss
and mud and decay. A warm fog hung in the air, turning the trees
into sentinels, tall soldiers shrouded in cloaks of gloom. During
daylight hours, the steamy wood was often full of northmen come
to pray to the old gods, but at this hour Theon Greyjoy found he
had it all to himself.
And in the heart of the wood the weirwood waited with its
knowing red eyes. Theon stopped by the edge of the pool and
bowed his head before its carved red face. Even here he could hear
the drumming, boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM.
Like distant thunder, the sound seemed to come from everywhere at
once.
The night was windless, the snow drifting straight down out of a
cold black sky, yet the leaves of the heart tree were rustling his

name. “Theon,” they seemed to whisper, “Theon.”
The old gods, he thought. They know me. They know my name. I
was Theon of House Greyjoy. I was a ward of Eddard Stark, a friend
and brother to his children. “Please.” He fell to his knees. “A sword,
that’s all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek.” Tears trickled
down his cheeks, impossibly warm. “I was ironborn. A son … a son
of Pyke, of the islands.”
A leaf drifted down from above, brushed his brow, and landed in
the pool. It oated on the water, red, ve- ngered, like a bloody
hand. “… Bran,” the tree murmured.
They know. The gods know. They saw what I did. And for one
strange moment it seemed as if it were Bran’s face carved into the
pale trunk of the weirwood, staring down at him with eyes red and
wise and sad. Bran’s ghost, he thought, but that was madness. Why
should Bran want to haunt him? He had been fond of the boy, had
never done him any harm. It was not Bran we killed. It was not
Rickon. They were only miller’s sons, from the mill by the Acorn Water.
“I had to have two heads, else they would have mocked
me … laughed at me … they …”
A voice said, “Who are you talking to?”
Theon spun, terri ed that Ramsay had found him, but it was just
the washerwomen—Holly, Rowan, and one whose name he did not
know. “The ghosts,” he blurted. “They whisper to me. They … they
know my name.”
“Theon Turncloak.” Rowan grabbed his ear, twisting. “You had to
have two heads, did you?”
“Elsewise men would have laughed at him,” said Holly.
They do not understand. Theon wrenched free. “What do you
want?” he asked.
“You,” said the third washerwoman, an older woman, deepvoiced, with grey streaks in her hair.
“I told you. I want to touch you, turncloak.” Holly smiled. In her
hand a blade appeared.
I could scream, Theon thought. Someone will hear. The castle is full
of armed men. He would be dead before help reached him, to be
sure, his blood soaking into the ground to feed the heart tree. And

what would be so wrong with that? “Touch me,” he said. “Kill me.”
There was more despair than de ance in his voice. “Go on. Do me,
the way you did the others. Yellow Dick and the rest. It was you.”
Holly laughed. “How could it be us? We’re women. Teats and
cunnies. Here to be fucked, not feared.”
“Did the Bastard hurt you?” Rowan asked. “Chopped o your
ngers, did he? Skinned your widdle toes? Knocked your teeth out?
Poor lad.” She patted his cheek. “There will be no more o’ that, I
promise. You prayed, and the gods sent us. You want to die as
Theon? We’ll give you that. A nice quick death, ’twill hardly hurt at
all.” She smiled. “But not till you’ve sung for Abel. He’s waiting for
you.”

TYRION

L

ot ninety-seven.” The auctioneer snapped his whip. “A pair of
dwarfs, well trained for your amusement.”
The auction block had been thrown up where the broad brown
Skahazadhan owed into Slaver’s Bay. Tyrion Lannister could smell
the salt in the air, mingled with the stink from the latrine ditches
behind the slave pens. He did not mind the heat so much as he did
the damp. The very air seemed to weigh him down, like a warm
wet blanket across his head and shoulders.
“Dog and pig included in lot,” the auctioneer announced. “The
dwarfs ride them. Delight the guests at your next feast or use them
for a folly.”
The bidders sat on wooden benches sipping fruit drinks. A few
were being fanned by slaves. Many wore tokars, that peculiar
garment beloved by the old blood of Slaver’s Bay, as elegant as it
was impractical. Others dressed more plainly—men in tunics and
hooded cloaks, women in colored silks. Whores or priestesses, most
like; this far east it was hard to tell the two apart.
Back behind the benches, trading japes and making mock of the
proceedings, stood a clot of westerners. Sellswords, Tyrion knew. He
spied longswords, dirks and daggers, a brace of throwing axes, mail
beneath their cloaks. Their hair and beards and faces marked most
for men of the Free Cities, but here and there were a few who
might have been Westerosi. Are they buying? Or did they just turn up
for the show?
“Who will open for this pair?”
“Three hundred,” bid a matron on an antique palanquin.

“Four,” called a monstrously fat Yunkishman from the litter
where he sprawled like a leviathan. Covered all in yellow silk
fringed with gold, he looked as large as four Illyrios. Tyrion pitied
the slaves who had to carry him. At least we will be spared that duty.
What joy to be a dwarf.
“And one,” said a crone in a violet tokar. The auctioneer gave her
a sour look but did not disallow the bid.
The slave sailors o the Selaesori Qhoran, sold singly, had gone for
prices ranging from ve hundred to nine hundred pieces of silver.
Seasoned seamen were a valuable commodity. None had put up any
sort of ght when the slavers boarded their crippled cog. For them
this was just a change of owner. The ship’s mates had been free
men, but the widow of the waterfront had written them a binder,
promising to stand their ransom in such a case as this. The three
surviving ery ngers had not been sold yet, but they were chattels
of the Lord of Light and could count on being bought back by some
red temple. The ames tattooed upon their faces were their binders.
Tyrion and Penny had no such reassurance.
“Four- fty,” came the bid.
“Four-eighty.”
“Five hundred.”
Some bids were called out in High Valyrian, some in the mongrel
tongue of Ghis. A few buyers signaled with a nger, the twist of a
wrist, or the wave of a painted fan.
“I’m glad they are keeping us together,” Penny whispered.
The slave trader shot them a look. “No talk.”
Tyrion gave Penny’s shoulder a squeeze. Strands of hair, pale
blond and black, clung to his brow, the rags of his tunic to his back.
Some of that was sweat, some dried blood. He had not been so
foolish as to ght the slavers, as Jorah Mormont had, but that did
not mean he had escaped punishment. In his case it was his mouth
that earned him lashes.
“Eight hundred.”
“And fty.”
“And one.”

We’re worth as much as a sailor, Tyrion mused. Though perhaps it
was Pretty Pig the buyers wanted. A well-trained pig is hard to nd.
They certainly were not bidding by the pound.
At nine hundred pieces of silver, the bidding began to slow. At
nine hundred fty-one (from the crone), it stopped. The auctioneer
had the scent, though, and nothing would do but that the dwarfs
give the crowd a taste of their show. Crunch and Pretty Pig were
led up onto the platform. Without saddles or bridles, mounting
them proved tricky. The moment the sow began to move Tyrion slid
o her rump and landed on his own, provoking gales of laughter
from the bidders.
“One thousand,” bid the grotesque fat man.
“And one.” The crone again.
Penny’s mouth was frozen in a rictus of a smile. Well trained for
your amusement. Her father had a deal to answer for, in whatever
small hell was reserved for dwarfs.
“Twelve hundred.” The leviathan in yellow. A slave beside him
handed him a drink. Lemon, no doubt. The way those yellow eyes
were xed upon the block made Tyrion uncomfortable.
“Thirteen hundred.”
“And one.” The crone.
My father always said a Lannister was worth ten times as much as any
common man.
At sixteen hundred the pace began to ag again, so the slave
trader invited some of the buyers to come up for a closer look at the
dwarfs. “The female’s young,” he promised. “You could breed the
two of them, get good coin for the whelps.”
“Half his nose is gone,” complained the crone once she’d had a
good close look. Her wrinkled face puckered with displeasure. Her
esh was maggot white; wrapped in the violet tokar, she looked like
a prune gone to mold. “His eyes don’t match neither. An ill-favored
thing.”
“My lady hasn’t seen my best part yet.” Tyrion grabbed his
crotch, in case she missed his meaning.
The hag hissed in outrage, and Tyrion got a lick of the whip
across his back, a stinging cut that drove him to his knees. The taste

of blood lled his mouth. He grinned and spat.
“Two thousand,” called a new voice, back of the benches.
And what would a sellsword want with a dwarf? Tyrion pushed
himself back to his feet to get a better look. The new bidder was an
older man, white-haired yet tall and t, with leathery brown skin
and a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard. Half-hidden under a
faded purple cloak were a longsword and a brace of daggers.
“Twenty- ve hundred.” A female voice this time; a girl, short,
with a thick waist and heavy bosom, clad in ornate armor. Her
sculpted black steel breastplate was inlaid in gold and showed a
harpy rising with chains dangling from her claws. A pair of slave
soldiers lifted her to shoulder height on a shield.
“Three thousand.” The brown-skinned man pushed through the
crowd, his fellow sellswords shoving buyers aside to clear a path.
Yes. Come closer. Tyrion knew how to deal with sellswords. He did
not think for a moment that this man wanted him to frolic at feasts.
He knows me. He means to take me back to Westeros and sell me to my
sister. The dwarf rubbed his mouth to hide his smile. Cersei and the
Seven Kingdoms were half a world away. Much and more could
happen before he got there. I turned Bronn. Give me half a chance,
might be I could turn this one too.
The crone and the girl on the shield gave up the chase at three
thousand, but not the fat man in yellow. He weighed the sellswords
with his yellow eyes, icked his tongue across his yellow teeth, and
said, “Five thousand silvers for the lot.”
The sellsword frowned, shrugged, turned away.
Seven hells. Tyrion was quite certain that he did not want to
become the property of the immense Lord Yellowbelly. Just the
sight of him sagging across his litter, a mountain of sallow esh
with piggy yellow eyes and breasts big as Pretty Pig pushing at the
silk of his tokar was enough to make the dwarf’s skin crawl. And the
smell wafting o him was palpable even on the block.
“If there are no further bids—”
“Seven thousand,” shouted Tyrion.
Laughter rippled across the benches. “The dwarf wants to buy
himself,” the girl on the shield observed.

Tyrion gave her a lascivious grin. “A clever slave deserves a
clever master, and you lot all look like fools.”
That provoked more laughter from the bidders, and a scowl from
the auctioneer, who was ngering his whip indecisively as he tried
to puzzle out whether this would work to his bene t.
“Five thousand is an insult!” Tyrion called out. “I joust, I sing, I
say amusing things. I’ll fuck your wife and make her scream. Or
your enemy’s wife if you prefer, what better way to shame him?
I’m murder with a crossbow, and men three times my size quail and
tremble when we meet across a cyvasse table. I have even been
known to cook from time to time. I bid ten thousand silvers for
myself! I’m good for it, I am, I am. My father told me I must always
pay my debts.”
The sellsword in the purple cloak turned back. His eyes met
Tyrion’s across the rows of other bidders, and he smiled. A warm
smile, that, the dwarf re ected. Friendly. But my, those eyes are cold.
Might be I don’t want him to buy us after all.
The yellow enormity was squirming in his litter, a look of
annoyance on his huge pie face. He muttered something sour in
Ghiscari that Tyrion did not understand, but the tone of it was plain
enough. “Was that another bid?” The dwarf cocked his head. “I o er
all the gold of Casterly Rock.”
He heard the whip before he felt it, a whistle in the air, thin and
sharp. Tyrion grunted under the blow, but this time he managed to
stay on his feet. His thoughts ashed back to the beginnings of his
journey, when his most pressing problem had been deciding which
wine to drink with his midmorning snails. See what comes of chasing
dragons. A laugh burst from his lips, spattering the rst row of
buyers with blood and spit.
“You are sold,” the auctioneer announced. Then he hit him again,
just because he could. This time Tyrion went down.
One of the guards yanked him back to his feet. Another prodded
Penny down o the platform with the butt of his spear. The next
piece of chattel was already being led up to take their place. A girl,
fteen or sixteen, not o the Selaesori Qhoran this time. Tyrion did
not know her. The same age as Daenerys Targaryen, or near enough.

The slaver soon had her naked. At least we were spared that
humiliation.
Tyrion gazed across the Yunkish camp to the walls of Meereen.
Those gates looked so close … and if the talk in the slave pens could
be believed, Meereen remained a free city for the nonce. Within
those crumbling walls, slavery and the slave trade were still
forbidden. All he had to do was reach those gates and pass beyond,
and he would be a free man again.
But that was hardly possible unless he abandoned Penny. She’d
want to take the dog and the pig along.
“It won’t be so terrible, will it?” Penny whispered. “He paid so
much for us. He’ll be kind, won’t he?”
So long as we amuse him. “We’re too valuable to mistreat,” he
reassured her, with blood still trickling down his back from those
last two lashes. When our show grows stale, however … and it does, it
does grow stale …
Their master’s overseer was waiting to take charge of them, with
a mule cart and two soldiers. He had a long narrow face and a chin
beard bound about with golden wire, and his sti red-black hair
swept out from his temples to form a pair of taloned hands. “What
darling little creatures you are,” he said. “You remind me of my
own children … or would, if my little ones were not dead. I shall
take good care of you. Tell me your names.”
“Penny.” Her voice was a whisper, small and scared.
Tyrion, of House Lannister, rightful lord of Casterly Rock, you
sniveling worm. “Yollo.”
“Bold Yollo. Bright Penny. You are the property of the noble and
valorous Yezzan zo Qaggaz, scholar and warrior, revered amongst
the Wise Masters of Yunkai. Count yourselves fortunate, for Yezzan
is a kindly and benevolent master. Think of him as you would your
father.”
Gladly, thought Tyrion, but this time he held his tongue. They
would have to perform for their new master soon enough, he did
not doubt, and he could not take another lash.
“Your father loves his special treasures best of all, and he will
cherish you,” the overseer was saying. “And me, think of me as you

would the nurse who cared for you when you were small. Nurse is
what all my children call me.”
“Lot ninety-nine,” the auctioneer called. “A warrior.”
The girl had sold quickly and was being bundled o to her new
owner, clutching her clothing to small, pink-tipped breasts. Two
slavers dragged Jorah Mormont onto the block to take her place.
The knight was naked but for a breechclout, his back raw from the
whip, his face so swollen as to be almost unrecognizable. Chains
bound his wrists and ankles. A little taste of the meal he cooked for
me, Tyrion thought, yet he found that he could take no pleasure
from the big knight’s miseries.
Even in chains, Mormont looked dangerous, a hulking brute with
big, thick arms and sloped shoulders. All that coarse dark hair on his
chest made him look more beast than man. Both his eyes were
blackened, two dark pits in that grotesquely swollen face. Upon one
cheek he bore a brand: a demon’s mask.
When the slavers had swarmed aboard the Selaesori Qhoran, Ser
Jorah had met them with longsword in hand, slaying three before
they overwhelmed him. Their shipmates would gladly have killed
him, but the captain forbade it; a ghter was always worth good
silver. So Mormont had been chained to an oar, beaten within an
inch of his life, starved, and branded.
“Big and strong, this one,” the auctioneer declared. “Plenty of piss
in him. He’ll give a good show in the ghting pits. Who will start
me out at three hundred?”
No one would.
Mormont paid no mind to the mongrel crowd; his eyes were xed
beyond the siege lines, on the distant city with its ancient walls of
many-colored brick. Tyrion could read that look as easy as a book:
so near and yet so distant. The poor wretch had returned too late.
Daenerys Targaryen was wed, the guards on the pens had told
them, laughing. She had taken a Meereenese slaver as her king, as
wealthy as he was noble, and when the peace was signed and sealed
the ghting pits of Meereen would open once again. Other slaves
insisted that the guards were lying, that Daenerys Targaryen would
never make peace with slavers. Mhysa, they called her. Someone

told him that meant Mother. Soon the silver queen would come forth
from her city, smash the Yunkai’i, and break their chains, they
whispered to one another.
And then she’ll bake us all a lemon pie and kiss our widdle wounds
and make them better, the dwarf thought. He had no faith in royal
rescues. If need be, he would see to their deliverance himself. The
mushrooms jammed into the toe of his boot should be su cient for
both him and Penny. Crunch and Pretty Pig would need to fend for
themselves.
Nurse was still lecturing his master’s new prizes. “Do all you are
told and nothing more, and you shall live like little lords, pampered
and adored,” he promised. “Disobey … but you would never do
that, would you? Not my sweetlings.” He reached down and
pinched Penny on her cheek.
“Two hundred, then,” the auctioneer said. “A big brute like this,
he’s worth three times as much. What a bodyguard he will make!
No enemy will dare molest you!”
“Come, my little friends,” Nurse said, “I will show you to your
new home. In Yunkai you will dwell in the golden pyramid of
Qaggaz and dine o silver plates, but here we live simply, in the
humble tents of soldiers.”
“Who will give me one hundred?” cried the auctioneer.
That drew a bid at last, though it was only fty silvers. The
bidder was a thin man in a leather apron.
“And one,” said the crone in the violet tokar.
One of the soldiers lifted Penny onto the back of the mule cart.
“Who is the old woman?” the dwarf asked him.
“Zahrina,” the man said. “Cheap ghters, hers. Meat for heroes.
Your friend dead soon.”
He was no friend to me. Yet Tyrion Lannister found himself turning
to Nurse and saying, “You cannot let her have him.”
Nurse squinted at him. “What is this noise you make?”
Tyrion pointed. “That one is part of our show. The bear and the
maiden fair. Jorah is the bear, Penny is the maiden, I am the brave
knight who rescues her. I dance about and hit him in the balls. Very
funny.”

The overseer squinted at the auction block. “Him?” The bidding
for Jorah Mormont had reached two hundred silvers.
“And one,” said the crone in the violet tokar.
“Your bear. I see.” Nurse went scuttling o through the crowd,
bent over the huge yellow Yunkishman in his litter, whispered in his
ear. His master nodded, chins wobbling, then raised his fan. “Three
hundred,” he called out in a wheezy voice.
The crone sni ed and turned away.
“Why did you do that?” Penny asked, in the Common Tongue.
A fair question, thought Tyrion. Why did I? “Your show was
growing dull. Every mummer needs a dancing bear.”
She gave him a reproachful look, then retreated to the back of the
cart and sat with her arms around Crunch, as if the dog was her last
true friend in the world. Perhaps he is.
Nurse returned with Jorah Mormont. Two of their master’s slave
soldiers ung him into the back of the mule cart between the
dwarfs. The knight did not struggle. All the ght went out of him
when he heard that his queen had wed, Tyrion realized. One
whispered word had done what sts and whips and clubs could not;
it had broken him. I should have let the crone have him. He’s going to
be as useful as nipples on a breastplate.
Nurse climbed onto the front of the mule cart and took up the
reins, and they set o through the siege camp to the compound of
their new master, the noble Yezzan zo Qaggaz. Four slave soldiers
marched beside them, two on either side of the cart.
Penny did not weep, but her eyes were red and miserable, and
she never lifted them from Crunch. Does she think all this might fade
away if she does not look at it? Ser Jorah Mormont looked at no one
and nothing. He sat huddled, brooding in his chains.
Tyrion looked at everything and everyone.
The Yunkish encampment was not one camp but a hundred camps
raised up cheek by jowl in a crescent around the walls of Meereen,
a city of silk and canvas with its own avenues and alleys, taverns
and trollops, good districts and bad. Between the siege lines and the
bay, tents had sprouted up like yellow mushrooms. Some were
small and mean, no more than a ap of old stained canvas to keep

o the rain and sun, but beside them stood barracks tents large
enough to sleep a hundred men and silken pavilions as big as
palaces with harpies gleaming atop their roof poles. Some camps
were orderly, with the tents arrayed around a re pit in concentric
circles, weapons and armor stacked around the inner ring, horse
lines outside. Elsewhere, pure chaos seemed to reign.
The dry, scorched plains around Meereen were at and bare and
treeless for long leagues, but the Yunkish ships had brought lumber
and hides up from the south, enough to raise six huge trebuchets.
They were arrayed on three sides of the city, all but the river side,
surrounded by piles of broken stone and casks of pitch and resin just
waiting for a torch. One of the soldiers walking along beside the
cart saw where Tyrion was looking and proudly told him that each
of the trebuchets had been given a name: Dragonbreaker, Harridan,
Harpy’s Daughter, Wicked Sister, Ghost of Astapor, Mazdhan’s Fist.
Towering above the tents to a height of forty feet, the trebuchets
were the siege camp’s chief landmarks. “Just the sight of them
drove the dragon queen to her knees,” he boasted. “And there she
will stay, sucking Hizdahr’s noble cock, else we smash her walls to
rubble.”
Tyrion saw a slave being whipped, blow after blow, until his back
was nothing but blood and raw meat. A le of men marched past in
irons, clanking with every step; they carried spears and wore short
swords, but chains linked them wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle.
The air smelled of roasting meat, and he saw one man skinning a
dog for his stewpot.
He saw the dead as well, and heard the dying. Under the drifting
smoke, the smell of horses, and the sharp salt tang of the bay was a
stink of blood and shit. Some ux, he realized, as he watched two
sellswords carry the corpse of a third from one of the tents. That
made his ngers twitch. Disease could wipe out an army quicker
than any battle, he had heard his father say once.
All the more reason to escape, and soon.
A quarter mile on, he found good reason to reconsider. A crowd
had formed around three slaves taken whilst trying to escape. “I

know my little treasures will be sweet and obedient,” Nurse said.
“See what befalls ones who try to run.”
The captives had been tied to a row of crossbeams, and a pair of
slingers were using them to test their skills. “Tolosi,” one of the
guards told them. “The best slingers in the world. They throw soft
lead balls in place of stones.”
Tyrion had never seen the point of slings, when bows had so
much better range … but he had never seen Tolosi at work before.
Their lead balls did vastly more damage than the smooth stones
other slingers used, and more than any bow as well. One struck the
knee of one of the captives, and it burst apart in a gout of blood and
bone that left the man’s lower leg dangling by a rope of dark red
tendon. Well, he won’t run again, Tyrion allowed, as the man began
to scream. His shrieks mingled in the morning air with the laughter
of camp followers and the curses of those who’d wagered good coin
that the slinger would miss. Penny looked away, but Nurse grasped
her under the chin and twisted her head back around. “Watch,” he
commanded. “You too, bear.”
Jorah Mormont raised his head and stared at Nurse. Tyrion could
see the tightness in his arms. He’s going to throttle him, and that will
be the end for all of us. But the knight only grimaced, then turned to
watch the bloody show.
To the east the massive brick walls of Meereen shimmered
through the morning heat. That was the refuge these poor fools had
hoped to reach. How long will it remain a refuge, though?
All three of the would-be escapees were dead before Nurse
gathered up the reins again. The mule cart rumbled on.
Their master’s camp was south and east of the Harridan, almost in
its shadow, and spread over several acres. The humble tent of
Yezzan zo Qaggaz proved to be a palace of lemon-colored silk.
Gilded harpies stood atop the center poles of each of its nine peaked
roofs, shining in the sun. Lesser tents ringed it on all sides. “Those
are the dwellings of our noble master’s cooks, concubines, and
warriors, and a few less-favored kinsmen,” Nurse told them, “but
you little darlings shall have the rare privilege of sleeping within
Yezzan’s own pavilion. It pleases him to keep his treasures close.”

He frowned at Mormont. “Not you, bear. You are big and ugly, you
will be chained outside.” The knight did not respond. “First, all of
you must be tted for collars.”
The collars were made of iron, lightly gilded to make them glitter
in the light. Yezzan’s name was incised into the metal in Valyrian
glyphs, and a pair of tiny bells were a xed below the ears, so the
wearer’s every step produced a merry little tinkling sound. Jorah
Mormont accepted his collar in a sullen silence, but Penny began to
cry as the armorer was fastening her own into place. “It’s so heavy,”
she complained.
Tyrion squeezed her hand. “It’s solid gold,” he lied. “In Westeros,
highborn ladies dream of such a necklace.” Better a collar than a
brand. A collar can be removed. He remembered Shae, and the way
the golden chain had glimmered as he twisted it tighter and tighter
about her throat.
Afterward, Nurse had Ser Jorah’s chains fastened to a stake near
the cook re whilst he escorted the two dwarfs inside the master’s
pavilion and showed them where they would sleep, in a carpeted
alcove separated from the main tent by walls of yellow silk. They
would share this space with Yezzan’s other treasures: a boy with
twisted, hairy “goat legs,” a two-headed girl out of Mantarys, a
bearded woman, and a willowy creature called Sweets who dressed
in moonstones and Myrish lace. “You are trying to decide if I’m a
man or woman,” Sweets said, when she was brought before the
dwarfs. Then she lifted her skirts and showed them what was
underneath. “I’m both, and master loves me best.”
A grotesquerie, Tyrion realized. Somewhere some god is laughing.
“Lovely,” he said to Sweets, who had purple hair and violet eyes,
“but we were hoping to be the pretty ones for once.”
Sweets sniggered, but Nurse was not amused. “Save your japes
for this evening, when you perform for our noble master. If you
please him, you will be well rewarded. If not …” He slapped Tyrion
across the face.
“You will want to be careful with Nurse,” said Sweets when the
overseer had departed. “He is the only true monster here.” The
bearded woman spoke an incomprehensible variety of Ghiscari, the

goat boy some guttural sailor’s pidgin called the trade talk. The
two-headed girl was feebleminded; one head was no bigger than an
orange and did not speak at all, the other had led teeth and was
like to growl at anyone who came too close to her cage. But Sweets
was uent in four tongues, one of them High Valyrian.
“What is the master like?” Penny asked, anxiously.
“His eyes are yellow, and he stinks,” said Sweets. “Ten years ago
he went to Sothoryos, and he has been rotting from the inside out
ever since. Make him forget that he is dying, even for a little while,
and he can be most generous. Deny him nothing.”
They had only the afternoon to learn the ways of chattel. Yezzan’s
body slaves lled a tub with hot water, and the dwarfs were
allowed to bathe—Penny rst, then Tyrion. Afterward another slave
spread a stinging ointment across the cuts on his back to keep them
from mortifying, then covered them with a cool poultice. Penny’s
hair was cut, and Tyrion’s beard got a trim. They were given soft
slippers and fresh clothing, plain but clean.
As evening fell, Nurse returned to tell them that it was time to
don their mummer’s plate. Yezzan would be hosting the Yunkish
supreme commander, the noble Yurkhaz zo Yunzak, and they would
be expected to perform. “Shall we unchain your bear?”
“Not this night,” Tyrion said. “Let us joust for our master rst and
save the bear for some other time.”
“Just so. After your capers are concluded, you will help serve and
pour. See that you do not spill on the guests, or it will go ill for
you.”
A juggler began the evening’s frolics. Then came a trio of
energetic tumblers. After them the goat-legged boy came out and
did a grotesque jig whilst one of Yurkhaz’s slaves played on a bone
ute. Tyrion had half a mind to ask him if he knew “The Rains of
Castamere.” As they waited their own turn to perform, he watched
Yezzan and his guests. The human prune in the place of honor was
evidently the Yunkish supreme commander, who looked about as
formidable as a loose stool. A dozen other Yunkish lords attended
him. Two sellsword captains were on hand as well, each
accompanied by a dozen men of his company. One was an elegant

Pentoshi, grey-haired and clad in silk but for his cloak, a ragged
thing sewn from dozens of strips of torn, bloodstained cloth. The
other captain was the man who’d tried to buy them that morning,
the brown-skinned bidder with the salt-and-pepper beard. “Brown
Ben Plumm,” Sweets named him. “Captain of the Second Sons.”
A Westerosi, and a Plumm. Better and better.
“You are next,” Nurse informed them. “Be amusing, my little
darlings, or you will wish you had.”
Tyrion had not mastered half of Groat’s old tricks, but he could
ride the sow, fall o when he was meant to, roll, and pop back onto
his feet. All of that proved well received. The sight of little people
running about drunkenly and whacking at one another with wooden
weapons appeared to be just as hilarious in a siege camp by Slaver’s
Bay as at Jo rey’s wedding feast in King’s Landing. Contempt,
thought Tyrion, the universal tongue.
Their master Yezzan laughed loudest and longest whenever one of
his dwarfs su ered a fall or took a blow, his whole vast body
shaking like suet in an earthquake; his guests waited to see how
Yurkhaz no Yunzak responded before joining in. The supreme
commander appeared so frail that Tyrion was afraid laughing might
kill him. When Penny’s helm was struck o and ew into the lap of
a sour-faced Yunkishman in a striped green-and-gold tokar, Yurkhaz
cackled like a chicken. When said lord reached inside the helm and
drew out a large purple melon dribbling pulp, he wheezed until his
face turned the same color as the fruit. He turned to his host and
whispered something that made their master chortle and lick his
lips … though there was a hint of anger in those slitted yellow eyes,
it seemed to Tyrion.
Afterward the dwarfs stripped o their wooden armor and the
sweat-soaked clothing beneath and changed into the fresh yellow
tunics that had been provided them for serving. Tyrion was given a
agon of purple wine, Penny a agon of water. They moved about
the tent lling cups, their slippered feet whispering over thick
carpets. It was harder work than it appeared. Before long his legs
were cramping badly, and one of the cuts on his back had begun to

bleed again, the red seeping through the yellow linen of his tunic.
Tyrion bit his tongue and kept on pouring.
Most of the guests paid them no more mind than they did the
other slaves … but one Yunkishman declared drunkenly that Yezzan
should make the two dwarfs fuck, and another demanded to know
how Tyrion had lost his nose. I shoved it up your wife’s cunt and she
bit it o , he almost replied … but the storm had persuaded him that
he did not want to die as yet, so instead he said, “It was cut o to
punish me for insolence, lord.”
Then a lord in a blue tokar fringed with tiger’s eyes recalled that
Tyrion had boasted of his skill at cyvasse on the auction block. “Let
us put him to the test,” he said. A table and set of pieces was duly
produced. A scant few moments later, the red-faced lord shoved the
table over in fury, scattering the pieces across the carpets to the
sound of Yunkish laughter.
“You should have let him win,” Penny whispered.
Brown Ben Plumm lifted the fallen table, smiling. “Try me next,
dwarf. When I was younger, the Second Sons took contract with
Volantis. I learned the game there.”
“I am only a slave. My noble master decides when and who I
play.” Tyrion turned to Yezzan. “Master?”
The yellow lord seemed amused by the notion. “What stakes do
you propose, Captain?”
“If I win, give this slave to me,” said Plumm.
“No,” Yezzan zo Qaggaz said. “But if you can defeat my dwarf,
you may have the price I paid for him, in gold.”
“Done,” the sellsword said. The scattered pieces were picked up
o the carpet, and they sat down to play.
Tyrion won the rst game. Plumm took the second, for double
the stakes. As they set up for their third contest, the dwarf studied
his opponent. Brown-skinned, his cheeks and jaw covered by a
close-cropped bristly beard of grey and white, his face creased by a
thousand wrinkles and a few old scars, Plumm had an amiable look
to him, especially when he smiled. The faithful retainer, Tyrion
decided. Every man’s favorite nuncle, full of chuckles and old sayings
and roughspun wisdom. It was all sham. Those smiles never touched

Plumm’s eyes, where greed hid behind a veil of caution. Hungry, but
wary, this one.
The sellsword was nearly as bad a player as the Yunkish lord had
been, but his play was stolid and tenacious rather than bold. His
opening arrays were di erent every time, yet all the same—
conservative, defensive, passive. He does not play to win, Tyrion
realized. He plays so as not to lose. It worked in their second game,
when the little man overreached himself with an unsound assault. It
did not work in the third game, nor the fourth, nor the fth, which
proved to be their last.
Near the end of that nal contest, with his fortress in ruins, his
dragon dead, elephants before him and heavy horse circling round
his rear, Plumm looked up smiling and said, “Yollo wins again.
Death in four.”
“Three.” Tyrion tapped his dragon. “I was lucky. Perhaps you
should give my head a good rub before our next game, Captain.
Some of that luck might rub o on your ngers.” You will still lose,
but you might give me a better game. Grinning, he pushed back from
the cyvasse table, picked up his wine agon, and returned to pouring
with Yezzan zo Qaggaz considerably richer and Brown Ben Plumm
considerably impoverished. His gargantuan master had fallen o
into drunken sleep during the third game, his goblet slipping from
his yellowed ngers to spill its contents on the carpet, but perhaps
he would be pleased when he awakened.
When the supreme commander Yurkhaz zo Yunzak departed,
supported by a pair of burly slaves, that seemed to be a general
signal for the other guests to take their leaves as well. After the tent
had emptied out, Nurse reappeared to tell the servers that they
might make their own feast from the leavings. “Eat quickly. All this
must be clean again before you sleep.”
Tyrion was on his knees, his legs aching and his bloody back
screaming with pain, trying to scrub out the stain that the noble
Yezzan’s spilled wine had left upon the noble Yezzan’s carpet, when
the overseer tapped his cheek gently with the end of his whip.
“Yollo. You have done well. You and your wife.”
“She is not my wife.”

“Your whore, then. On your feet, both of you.”
Tyrion rose unsteadily, one leg trembling beneath him. His thighs
were knots, so cramped that Penny had to lend him a hand to pull
him to his feet. “What have we done?”
“Much and more,” said the overseer. “Nurse said you would be
rewarded if you pleased your father, did he not? Though the noble
Yezzan is loath to lose his little treasures, as you have seen, Yurkhaz
zo Yunzak persuaded him that it would be sel sh to keep such droll
antics to himself. Rejoice! To celebrate the signing of the peace, you
shall have the honor of jousting in the Great Pit of Daznak.
Thousands will come see you! Tens of thousands! And, oh, how we
shall laugh!”

JAIME

R

aventree Hall was old. Moss grew thick between its ancient
stones, spiderwebbing up its walls like the veins in a crone’s legs.
Two huge towers anked the castle’s main gate, and smaller ones
defended every angle of its walls. All were square. Drum towers
and half-moons held up better against catapults, since thrown stones
were more apt to de ect o a curved wall, but Raventree predated
that particular bit of builder’s wisdom.
The castle dominated the broad fertile valley that maps and men
alike called Blackwood Vale. A vale it was, beyond a doubt, but no
wood had grown here for several thousand years, be it black or
brown or green. Once, yes, but axes had long since cleared the trees
away. Homes and mills and holdfasts had risen where once the oaks
stood tall. The ground was bare and muddy, and dotted here and
there with drifts of melting snow.
Inside the castle walls, however, a bit of the forest still remained.
House Blackwood kept the old gods, and worshiped as the First Men
had in the days before the Andals came to Westeros. Some of the
trees in their godswood were said to be as old as Raventree’s square
towers, especially the heart tree, a weirwood of colossal size whose
upper branches could be seen from leagues away, like bony ngers
scratching at the sky.
As Jaime Lannister and his escort wound through the rolling hills
into the vale, little remained of the elds and farms and orchards
that had once surrounded Raventree—only mud and ashes, and here
and there the blackened shells of homes and mills. Weeds and
thorns and nettles grew in that wasteland, but nothing that could be

called a crop. Everywhere Jaime looked he saw his father’s hand,
even in the bones they sometimes glimpsed beside the road. Most
were sheep bones, but there were horses too, and cattle, and now
and again a human skull, or a headless skeleton with weeds poking
up through its rib cage.
No great hosts encircled Raventree, as Riverrun had been
encircled. This siege was a more intimate a air, the latest step in a
dance that went back many centuries. At best Jonos Bracken had
ve hundred men about the castle. Jaime saw no siege towers, no
battering rams, no catapults. Bracken did not mean to break the
gates of Raventree nor storm its high, thick walls. With no prospect
of relief in sight, he was content to starve his rival out. No doubt
there had been sorties and skirmishes at the start of the siege, and
arrows ying back and forth; half a year into it, everyone was too
tired for such nonsense. Boredom and routine had taken over, the
enemies of discipline.
Past time this was ended, thought Jaime Lannister. With Riverrun
now safely in Lannister hands, Raventree was the remnant of the
Young Wolf’s short-lived kingdom. Once it yielded, his work along
the Trident would be done, and he would be free to return to King’s
Landing. To the king, he told himself, but another part of him
whispered, to Cersei.
He would have to face her, he supposed. Assuming the High
Septon had not put her to death by the time he got back to the city.
“Come at once,” she had written, in the letter he’d had Peck burn at
Riverrun. “Help me. Save me. I need you now as I have never needed
you before. I love you. I love you. I love you. Come at once.” Her need
was real enough, Jaime did not doubt. As for the rest … she’s been
fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and Moon Boy for all I know …
Even if he had gone back, he could not hope to save her. She was
guilty of every treason laid against her, and he was short a sword
hand.
When the column came trotting from the elds, the sentries
stared at them with more curiosity than fear. No one sounded the
alarm, which suited Jaime well enough. Lord Bracken’s pavilion did
not prove di cult to nd. It was the largest in the camp, and the

best sited; sitting atop a low rise beside a stream, it commanded a
clear view of two of Raventree’s gates.
The tent was brown, like the standard apping from its center
pole, where the red stallion of House Bracken reared upon its gold
escutcheon. Jaime gave the order to dismount and told his men that
they might mingle if they liked. “Not you two,” he said to his
banner-bearers. “Stay close. This will not keep me long.” Jaime
vaulted down o Honor and strode to Bracken’s tent, his sword
rattling in its scabbard.
The guards outside the tent ap exchanged an anxious look at his
approach. “My lord,” said one. “Shall we announce you?”
“I’ll announce myself.” Jaime pushed aside the ap with his
golden hand and ducked inside.
They were well and truly at it when he entered, so intent on their
rutting that neither took any note of his arrival. The woman had her
eyes closed. Her hands clutched the coarse brown hair on Bracken’s
back. She gasped every time he drove into her. His lordship’s head
was buried in her breasts, his hands locked around her hips. Jaime
cleared his throat. “Lord Jonos.”
The woman’s eyes ew open, and she gave a startled shriek.
Jonos Bracken rolled o her, grabbed for his scabbard, and came up
with naked steel in hand, cursing. “Seven bloody hells,” he started,
“who dares—” Then he saw Jaime’s white cloak and golden
breastplate. His swordpoint dropped. “Lannister?”
“I am sorry to disturb you at your pleasure, my lord,” said Jaime,
with a half-smile, “but I am in some haste. May we talk?”
“Talk. Aye.” Lord Jonos sheathed his sword. He was not quite so
tall as Jaime, but he was heavier, with thick shoulders and arms
that would have made a blacksmith envious. Brown stubble covered
his cheeks and chin. His eyes were brown as well, the anger in them
poorly hidden. “You took me unawares, my lord. I was not told of
your coming.”
“And I seem to have prevented yours.” Jaime smiled at the
woman in the bed. She had one hand over her left breast and the
other between her legs, which left her right breast exposed. Her
nipples were darker than Cersei’s and thrice the size. When she felt

Jaime’s gaze she covered her right nipple, but that revealed her
mound. “Are all camp followers so modest?” he wondered. “If a
man wants to sell his turnips, he needs to set them out.”
“You been looking at my turnips since you came in, ser.” The
woman found the blanket and pulled it up high enough to cover
herself to the waist, then raised one hand to push her hair back
from her eyes. “And they’re not for sale, neither.”
Jaime gave a shrug. “My apologies if I mistook you for something
you’re not. My little brother has known a hundred whores, I’m sure,
but I’ve only ever bedded one.”
“She’s a prize of war.” Bracken retrieved his breeches from the
oor and shook them out. “She belonged to one of Blackwood’s
sworn swords till I split his head in two. Put your hands down,
woman. My lord of Lannister wants a proper look at those teats.”
Jaime ignored that. “You are putting those breeches on
backwards, my lord,” he told Bracken. As Jonos cursed, the woman
slipped o the bed to snatch up her scattered clothing, her ngers
uttering nervously between her breasts and cleft as she bent and
turned and reached. Her e orts to conceal herself were oddly
provocative, far more so than if she’d simply gone about the
business naked. “Do you have a name, woman?” he asked her.
“My mother named me Hildy, ser.” She pulled a soiled shift down
over her head and shook her hair out. Her face was almost as dirty
as her feet and she had enough hair between her legs to pass for
Bracken’s sister, but there was something appealing about her all
the same. That pug nose, her shaggy mane of hair … or the way she
did a little curtsy after she had stepped into her skirt. “Have you
seen my other shoe, m’lord?”
The question seemed to vex Lord Bracken. “Am I a bloody
handmaid, to fetch you shoes? Go barefoot if you must. Just go.”
“Does that mean m’lord won’t be taking me home with him, to
pray with his little wife?” Laughing, Hildy gave Jaime a brazen
look. “Do you have a little wife, ser?”
No, I have a sister. “What color is my cloak?”
“White,” she said, “but your hand is solid gold. I like that in a
man. And what is it you like in a woman, m’lord?”

“Innocence.”
“In a woman, I said. Not a daughter.”
He thought of Myrcella. I will need to tell her too. The Dornishmen
might not like that. Doran Martell had betrothed her to his son in
the belief that she was Robert’s blood. Knots and tangles, Jaime
thought, wishing he could cut through all of it with one swift stroke
of his sword. “I have sworn a vow,” he told Hildy wearily.
“No turnips for you, then,” the girl said, saucily.
“Get out,” Lord Jonos roared at her.
She did. But as she slipped past Jaime, clutching one shoe and a
pile of her clothes, she reached down and gave his cock a squeeze
through his breeches. “Hildy,” she reminded him, before she darted
half-clothed from the tent.
Hildy, Jaime mused. “And how fares your lady wife?” he asked
Lord Jonos when the girl was gone.
“How would I know? Ask her septon. When your father burned
our castle, she decided the gods were punishing us. Now all she
does is pray.” Jonos had nally gotten his breeches turned the right
way round and was lacing them up the front. “What brings you
here, my lord? The Black sh? We heard how he escaped.”
“Did you?” Jaime settled on a camp stool. “From the man
himself, perchance?”
“Ser Brynden knows better than to come running to me. I am
fond of the man, I won’t deny that. That won’t stop me clapping
him in chains if he shows his face near me or mine. He knows I’ve
bent the knee. He should have done the same, but he always was a
stubborn one. His brother could have told you that.”
“Tytos Blackwood has not bent the knee,” Jaime pointed out.
“Might the Black sh seek refuge at Raventree?”
“He might seek it, but to nd it he’d need to get past my siege
lines, and last I heard he hadn’t grown wings. Tytos will be needing
refuge himself before much longer. They’re down to rats and roots
in there. He’ll yield before the next full moon.”
“He’ll yield before the sun goes down. I mean to o er him terms
and accept him back into the king’s peace.”

“I see.” Lord Jonos shrugged into a brown woolen tunic with the
red stallion of Bracken embroidered on the front. “Will my lord take
a horn of ale?”
“No, but don’t go dry on my account.”
Bracken lled a horn for himself, drank half of it, and wiped his
mouth. “You spoke of terms. What sort of terms?”
“The usual sort. Lord Blackwood shall be required to confess his
treason and abjure his allegiance to the Starks and Tullys. He will
swear solemnly before gods and men to henceforth remain a leal
vassal of Harrenhal and the Iron Throne, and I will give him pardon
in the king’s name. We will take a pot or two of gold, of course.
The price of rebellion. I’ll claim a hostage as well, to ensure that
Raventree does not rise again.”
“His daughter,” suggested Bracken. “Blackwood has six sons, but
only the one daughter. He dotes on her. A snot-nosed little creature,
couldn’t be more than seven.”
“Young, but she might serve.”
Lord Jonos drained the last of his ale and tossed the horn aside.
“What of the lands and castles we were promised?”
“What lands were these?”
“The east bank of the Widow’s Wash, from Crossbow Ridge to
Rutting Meadow, and all the islands in the stream. Grindcorn Mill
and Lord’s Mill, the ruins of Muddy Hall, the Ravishment, Battle
Valley, Oldforge, the villages of Buckle, Blackbuckle, Cairns, and
Claypool, and the market town at Mudgrave. Waspwood, Lorgen’s
Wood, Greenhill, and Barba’s Teats. Missy’s Teats, the Blackwoods
call them, but they were Barba’s rst. Honeytree and all the hives.
Here, I’ve marked them out if my lord would like a look.” He
rooted about on a table and produced a parchment map.
Jaime took it with his good hand, but he had to use the gold to
open it and hold it at. “This is a deal of land,” he observed. “You
will be increasing your domains by a quarter.”
Bracken’s mouth set stubbornly. “All these lands belonged to
Stone Hedge once. The Blackwoods stole them from us.”
“What about this village here, between the Teats?” Jaime tapped
the map with a gilded knuckle.

“Pennytree. That was ours once too, but it’s been a royal ef for a
hundred years. Leave that out. We ask only for the lands stolen by
the Blackwoods. Your lord father promised to restore them to us if
we would subdue Lord Tytos for him.”
“Yet as I was riding up, I saw Tully banners ying from the castle
walls, and the direwolf of Stark as well. That would seem to suggest
that Lord Tytos has not been subdued.”
“We’ve driven him and his from the eld and penned them up
inside Raventree. Give me su cient men to storm his walls, my
lord, and I will subdue the whole lot of them to their graves.”
“If I gave you su cient men, they would be doing the subduing,
not you. In which case I should reward myself.” Jaime let the map
roll up again. “I’ll keep this if I might.”
“The map is yours. The lands are ours. It’s said that a Lannister
always pays his debts. We fought for you.”
“Not half as long as you fought against us.”
“The king has pardoned us for that. I lost my nephew to your
swords, and my natural son. Your Mountain stole my harvest and
burned everything he could not carry o . He put my castle to the
torch and raped one of my daughters. I will have recompense.”
“The Mountain’s dead, as is my father,” Jaime told him, “and
some might say your head was recompense enough. You did declare
for Stark, and kept faith with him until Lord Walder killed him.”
“Murdered him, and a dozen good men of my own blood.” Lord
Jonos turned his head and spat. “Aye, I kept faith with the Young
Wolf. As I’ll keep faith with you, so long as you treat me fair. I bent
the knee because I saw no sense in dying for the dead nor shedding
Bracken blood in a lost cause.”
“A prudent man.” Though some might say that Lord Blackwood has
been more honorable. “You’ll get your lands. Some of them, at least.
Since you partly subdued the Blackwoods.”
That seemed to satisfy Lord Jonos. “We will be content with
whatever portion my lord thinks fair. If I may o er you some
counsel, though, it does not serve to be too gentle with these
Blackwoods. Treachery runs in their blood. Before the Andals came
to Westeros, House Bracken ruled this river. We were kings and the

Blackwoods were our vassals, but they betrayed us and usurped the
crown. Every Blackwood is born a turncloak. You would do well to
remember that when you are making terms.”
“Oh, I shall,” Jaime promised.
When he rode from Bracken’s siege camp to the gates of
Raventree, Peck went before him with a peace banner. Before they
reached the castle, twenty pairs of eyes were watching them from
the gatehouse ramparts. He drew Honor to a halt at the edge of the
moat, a deep trench lined with stone, its green waters choked by
scum. Jaime was about to command Ser Kennos to sound the Horn
of Herrock when the drawbridge began to descend.
Lord Tytos Blackwood met him in the outer ward, mounted on a
destrier as gaunt as himself. Very tall and very thin, the Lord of
Raventree had a hook nose, long hair, and a ragged salt-and-pepper
beard that showed more salt than pepper. In silver inlay on the
breastplate of his burnished scarlet armor was a white tree bare and
dead, surrounded by a ock of onyx ravens taking ight. A cloak of
raven feathers uttered from his shoulders.
“Lord Tytos,” Jaime said.
“Ser.”
“Thank you for allowing me to enter.”
“I will not say that you are welcome. Nor will I deny that I have
hoped that you might come. You are here for my sword.”
“I am here to make an end of this. Your men have fought
valiantly, but your war is lost. Are you prepared to yield?”
“To the king. Not to Jonos Bracken.”
“I understand.”
Blackwood hesitated a moment. “Is it your wish that I dismount
and kneel before you here and now?”
A hundred eyes were looking on. “The wind is cold and the yard
is muddy,” said Jaime. “You can do your kneeling on the carpet in
your solar once we’ve agreed on terms.”
“That is chivalrous of you,” said Lord Tytos. “Come, ser. My hall
might lack for food, but never for courtesy.”
Blackwood’s solar was on the second oor of a cavernous timber
keep. There was a re burning in the hearth when they entered. The

room was large and airy, with great beams of dark oak supporting
the high ceiling. Woolen tapestries covered the walls, and a pair of
wide latticework doors looked out upon the godswood. Through
their thick, diamond-shaped panes of yellow glass Jaime glimpsed
the gnarled limbs of the tree from which the castle took its name. It
was a weirwood ancient and colossal, ten times the size of the one
in the Stone Garden at Casterly Rock. This tree was bare and dead,
though.
“The Brackens poisoned it,” said his host. “For a thousand years it
has not shown a leaf. In another thousand it will have turned to
stone, the maesters say. Weirwoods never rot.”
“And the ravens?” asked Jaime. “Where are they?”
“They come at dusk and roost all night. Hundreds of them. They
cover the tree like black leaves, every limb and every branch. They
have been coming for thousands of years. How or why, no man can
say, yet the tree draws them every night.” Blackwood settled in a
high-backed chair. “For honor’s sake I must ask about my liege
lord.”
“Ser Edmure is on his way to Casterly Rock as my captive. His
wife will remain at the Twins until their child is born. Then she and
the babe will join him. So long as he does not attempt escape or
plot rebellion, Edmure will live a long life.”
“Long and bitter. A life without honor. Until his dying day, men
will say he was afraid to ght.”
Unjustly, Jaime thought. It was his child he feared for. He knew
whose son I am, better than mine own aunt. “The choice was his. His
uncle would have made us bleed.”
“We agree on that much.” Blackwood’s voice gave nothing away.
“What have you done with Ser Brynden, if I may ask?”
“I o ered to let him take the black. Instead he ed.” Jaime
smiled. “Do you have him here, perchance?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
It was Tytos Blackwood’s turn to smile.
Jaime brought his hands together, the gold ngers inside the
eshy ones. “Perhaps it is time we talked of terms.”

“Is this where I get down on my knees?”
“If it please you. Or we can say you did.”
Lord Blackwood remained seated. They soon reached agreement
on the major points: confession, fealty, pardon, a certain sum of
gold and silver to be paid. “What lands will you require?” Lord
Tytos asked. When Jaime handed him the map, he took one look
and chuckled. “To be sure. The turncloak must be given his
reward.”
“Yes, but a smaller one than he imagines, for a smaller service.
Which of these lands will you consent to part with?”
Lord Tytos considered for a moment. “Woodhedge, Crossbow
Ridge, and Buckle.”
“A ruin, a ridge, and a few hovels? Come, my lord. You must
su er for your treason. He will want one of the mills, at least.”
Mills were a valuable source of tax. The lord received a tenth of all
the grain they ground.
“Lord’s Mill, then. Grindcorn is ours.”
“And another village. Cairns?”
“I have forebears buried beneath the rocks of Cairns.” He looked
at the map again. “Give him Honeytree and its hives. All that sweet
will make him fat and rot his teeth.”
“Done, then. But for one last thing.”
“A hostage.”
“Yes, my lord. You have a daughter, I believe.”
“Bethany.” Lord Tytos looked stricken. “I also have two brothers
and a sister. A pair of widowed aunts. Nieces, nephews, cousins. I
had thought you might consent …”
“It must be a child of your blood.”
“Bethany is only eight. A gentle girl, full of laughter. She has
never been more than a day’s ride from my hall.”
“Why not let her see King’s Landing? His Grace is almost of an
age with her. He would be pleased to have another friend.”
“One he can hang if the friend’s father should displease him?”
asked Lord Tytos. “I have four sons. Would you consider one of
them instead? Ben is twelve and thirsty for adventure. He could
squire for you if it please my lord.”

“I have more squires than I know what to do with. Every time I
take a piss, they ght for the right to hold my cock. And you have
six sons, my lord, not four.”
“Once. Robert was my youngest and never strong. He died nine
days ago, of a looseness of the bowels. Lucas was murdered at the
Red Wedding. Walder Frey’s fourth wife was a Blackwood, but
kinship counts for no more than guest right at the Twins. I should
like to bury Lucas beneath the tree, but the Freys have not yet seen
t to return his bones to me.”
“I’ll see that they do. Was Lucas your eldest son?”
“My second. Brynden is my eldest, and my heir. Next comes
Hoster. A bookish boy, I fear.”
“They have books in King’s Landing too. I recall my little brother
reading them from time to time. Perhaps your son would like a look
at them. I will accept Hoster as our hostage.”
Blackwood’s relief was palpable. “Thank you, my lord.” He
hesitated a moment. “If I may be so bold, you would do well to
require a hostage from Lord Jonos too. One of his daughters. For all
his rutting, he has not proved man enough to father sons.”
“He had a bastard son killed in the war.”
“Did he? Harry was a bastard, true enough, but whether Jonos
sired him is a thornier question. A fair-haired boy, he was, and
comely. Jonos is neither.” Lord Tytos got to his feet. “Will you do
me the honor of taking supper with me?”
“Some other time, my lord.” The castle was starving; no good
would be served by Jaime stealing food from their mouths. “I
cannot linger. Riverrun awaits.”
“Riverrun? Or King’s Landing?”
“Both.”
Lord Tytos did not attempt to dissuade him. “Hoster can be ready
to depart within the hour.”
He was. The boy met Jaime by the stables, with a bedroll slung
over one shoulder and a bundle of scrolls beneath his arm. He could
not have been any older than sixteen, yet he was even taller than
his father, almost seven feet of legs and shins and elbows, a

gangling, gawky boy with a cowlick. “Lord Commander. I’m your
hostage, Hoster. Hos, they call me.” He grinned.
Does he think this is a lark? “Pray, who are they?”
“My friends. My brothers.”
“I am not your friend and I am not your brother.” That cleaned
the grin o the boy’s face. Jaime turned to Lord Tytos. “My lord, let
there be no misunderstanding here. Lord Beric Dondarrion, Thoros
of Myr, Sandor Clegane, Brynden Tully, this woman
Stoneheart … all these are outlaws and rebels, enemies to the king
and all his leal subjects. If I should learn that you or yours are
hiding them, protecting them, or assisting them in any way, I will
not hesitate to send you your son’s head. I hope you understand
that. Understand this as well: I am not Ryman Frey.”
“No.” All trace of warmth had left Lord Blackwood’s mouth. “I
know who I am dealing with. Kingslayer.”
“Good.” Jaime mounted and wheeled Honor toward the gate. “I
wish you a good harvest and the joy of the king’s peace.”
He did not ride far. Lord Jonos Bracken was waiting for him
outside Raventree, just beyond the range of a good crossbow. He
was mounted on an armored destrier and had donned his plate and
mail, and a grey steel greathelm with a horsehair crest. “I saw them
pull the direwolf banner down,” he said when Jaime reached him.
“Is it done?”
“Done and done. Go home and plant your elds.”
Lord Bracken raised his visor. “I trust I have more elds to plant
than when you went into that castle.”
“Buckle, Woodhedge, Honeytree and all its hives.” He was
forgetting one. “Oh, and Crossbow Ridge.”
“A mill,” said Bracken. “I must have a mill.”
“Lord’s Mill.”
Lord Jonos snorted. “Aye, that will serve. For now.” He pointed
at Hoster Blackwood, riding back with Peck. “Is this what he gave
you for a hostage? You were cozened, ser. A weakling, this one.
Water for blood. Never mind how tall he is, any one of my girls
could snap him like a rotten twig.”
“How many daughters do you have, my lord?” Jaime asked him.

“Five. Two by my rst wife and three by my third.” Too late, he
seemed to realize that he might have said too much.
“Send one of them to court. She will have the privilege of
attending the Queen Regent.”
Bracken’s face grew dark as he realized the import of those
words. “Is this how you repay the friendship of Stone Hedge?”
“It is a great honor to wait upon the queen,” Jaime reminded his
lordship. “You might want to impress that on her. We’ll look for the
girl before the year is out.” He did not wait for Lord Bracken to
reply but touched Honor lightly with his golden spurs and trotted
o . His men formed up and followed, banners streaming. Castle and
camp were soon lost behind them, obscured by the dust of their
hooves.
Neither outlaws nor wolves had troubled them on their way to
Raventree, so Jaime decided to return by a di erent route. If the
gods were good, he might stumble on the Black sh, or lure Beric
Dondarrion into an unwise attack.
They were following the Widow’s Wash when they ran out of
day. Jaime called his hostage forward and asked him where to nd
the nearest ford, and the boy led them there. As the column
splashed across the shallow waters, the sun was setting behind a
pair of grassy hills. “The Teats,” said Hoster Blackwood.
Jaime recalled Lord Bracken’s map. “There’s a village between
those hills.”
“Pennytree,” the lad con rmed.
“We’ll camp there for the night.” If there were villagers about,
they might have knowledge of Ser Brynden or the outlaws. “Lord
Jonos made some remark about whose teats they were,” he recalled
to the Blackwood boy as they rode toward the darkening hills and
the last light of the day. “The Brackens call them by one name and
the Blackwoods by another.”
“Aye, my lord. For a hundred years or so. Before that, they were
the Mother’s Teats, or just the Teats. There are two of them, and it
was thought that they resembled …”
“I can see what they resemble.” Jaime found himself thinking
back on the woman in the tent and the way she’d tried to hide her

large, dark nipples. “What changed a hundred years ago?”
“Aegon the Unworthy took Barba Bracken as his mistress,” the
bookish boy replied. “She was a very buxom wench, they say, and
one day when the king was visiting at the Stone Hedge he went out
hunting and saw the Teats and …”
“… named them for his mistress.” Aegon the Fourth had died long
before Jaime had been born, but he recalled enough of the history
of his reign to guess what must have happened next. “Only later he
put the Bracken girl aside and took up with a Blackwood, was that
the way of it?”
“Lady Melissa,” Hoster con rmed. “Missy, they called her.
There’s a statue of her in our godswood. She was much more
beautiful than Barba Bracken, but slender, and Barba was heard to
say that Missy was at as a boy. When King Aegon heard, he …”
“… gave her Barba’s teats.” Jaime laughed. “How did all this
begin, between Blackwood and Bracken? Is it written down?”
“It is, my lord,” the boy said, “but some of the histories were
penned by their maesters and some by ours, centuries after the
events that they purport to chronicle. It goes back to the Age of
Heroes. The Blackwoods were kings in those days. The Brackens
were petty lords, renowned for breeding horses. Rather than pay
their king his just due, they used the gold their horses brought them
to hire swords and cast him down.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Five hundred years before the Andals. A thousand, if the True
History is to be believed. Only no one knows when the Andals
crossed the narrow sea. The True History says four thousand years
have passed since then, but some maesters claim that it was only
two. Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and
the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.”
Tyrion would like this one. They could talk from dusk to dawn,
arguing about books. For a moment his bitterness toward his brother
was forgotten, until he remembered what the Imp had done. “So
you are ghting over a crown that one of you took from the other
back when the Casterlys still held Casterly Rock, is that the root of
it? The crown of a kingdom that has not existed for thousands of

years?” He chuckled. “So many years, so many wars, so many
kings … you’d think someone would have made a peace.”
“Someone did, my lord. Many someones. We’ve had a hundred
peaces with the Brackens, many sealed with marriages. There’s
Blackwood blood in every Bracken, and Bracken blood in every
Blackwood. The Old King’s Peace lasted half a century. But then
some fresh quarrel broke out, and the old wounds opened and
began to bleed again. That’s how it always happens, my father says.
So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no
peace will ever last. So we go on century after century, with us
hating the Brackens and them hating us. My father says there will
never be an end to it.”
“There could be.”
“How, my lord? The old wounds never heal, my father says.”
“My father had a saying too. Never wound a foe when you can
kill him. Dead men don’t claim vengeance.”
“Their sons do,” said Hoster, apologetically.
“Not if you kill the sons as well. Ask the Casterlys about that if
you doubt me. Ask Lord and Lady Tarbeck, or the Reynes of
Castamere. Ask the Prince of Dragonstone.” For an instant, the deep
red clouds that crowned the western hills reminded him of
Rhaegar’s children, all wrapped up in crimson cloaks.
“Is that why you killed all the Starks?”
“Not all,” said Jaime. “Lord Eddard’s daughters live. One has just
been wed. The other …” Brienne, where are you? Have you found
her? “… if the gods are good, she’ll forget she was a Stark. She’ll
wed some burly blacksmith or fat-faced innkeep, ll his house with
children, and never need to fear that some knight might come along
to smash their heads against a wall.”
“The gods are good,” his hostage said, uncertainly.
You go on believing that. Jaime let Honor feel his spurs.
Pennytree proved to be a much larger village than he had
anticipated. The war had been here too; blackened orchards and the
scorched shells of broken houses testi ed to that. But for every
home in ruins three more had been rebuilt. Through the gathering
blue dusk Jaime glimpsed fresh thatch upon a score of roofs, and

doors made of raw green wood. Between a duck pond and a
blacksmith’s forge, he came upon the tree that gave the place its
name, an oak ancient and tall. Its gnarled roots twisted in and out
of the earth like a nest of slow brown serpents, and hundreds of old
copper pennies had been nailed to its huge trunk.
Peck stared at the tree, then at the empty houses. “Where are the
people?”
“Hiding,” Jaime told him.
Inside the homes all the res had been put out, but some still
smoked, and none of them were cold. The nanny goat that Hot
Harry Merrell found rooting through a vegetable garden was the
only living creature to be seen … but the village had a holdfast as
strong as any in the riverlands, with thick stone walls twelve feet
high, and Jaime knew that was where he’d nd the villagers. They
hid behind those walls when raiders came, that’s why there’s still a village
here. And they are hiding there again, from me.
He rode Honor up to the holdfast gates. “You in the holdfast. We
mean you no harm. We’re king’s men.”
Faces appeared on the wall above the gate. “They was king’s men
burned our village,” one man called down. “Before that, some other
king’s men took our sheep. They were for a di erent king, but that
didn’t matter none to our sheep. King’s men killed Harsley and Ser
Ormond, and raped Lacey till she died.”
“Not my men,” Jaime said. “Will you open your gates?”
“When you’re gone we will.”
Ser Kennos rode close to him. “We could break that gate down
easy enough, or put it to the torch.”
“While they drop stones on us and feather us with arrows.” Jaime
shook his head. “It would be a bloody business, and for what? These
people have done us no harm. We’ll shelter in the houses, but I’ll
have no stealing. We have our own provisions.”
As a half-moon crept up the sky, they staked their horses out in
the village commons and supped on salted mutton, dried apples, and
hard cheese. Jaime ate sparingly and shared a skin of wine with
Peck and Hos the hostage. He tried to count the pennies nailed to
the old oak, but there were too many of them and he kept losing

count. What’s that all about? The Blackwood boy would tell him if he
asked, but that would spoil the mystery.
He posted sentries to see that no one left the con nes of the
village. He sent out scouts as well, to make certain no enemy took
them unawares. It was near midnight when two came riding back
with a woman they had taken captive. “She rode up bold as you
please, m’lord, demanding words with you.”
Jaime scrambled to his feet. “My lady. I had not thought to see
you again so soon.” Gods be good, she looks ten years older than when
I saw her last. And what’s happened to her face? “That
bandage … you’ve been wounded …”
“A bite.” She touched the hilt of her sword, the sword that he had
given her. Oathkeeper. “My lord, you gave me a quest.”
“The girl. Have you found her?”
“I have,” said Brienne, Maid of Tarth.
“Where is she?”
“A day’s ride. I can take you to her, ser … but you will need to
come alone. Elsewise, the Hound will kill her.”

JON

R

’hllor,” sang Melisandre, her arms upraised against the falling
snow, “you are the light in our eyes, the re in our hearts, the heat
in our loins. Yours is the sun that warms our days, yours the stars
that guard us in the dark of night.”
“All praise R’hllor, the Lord of Light,” the wedding guests answered
in ragged chorus before a gust of ice-cold wind blew their words
away. Jon Snow raised the hood of his cloak.
The snowfall was light today, a thin scattering of akes dancing
in the air, but the wind was blowing from the east along the Wall,
cold as the breath of the ice dragon in the tales Old Nan used to tell.
Even Melisandre’s re was shivering; the ames huddled down in
the ditch, crackling softly as the red priestess sang. Only Ghost
seemed not to feel the chill.
Alys Karstark leaned close to Jon. “Snow during a wedding means
a cold marriage. My lady mother always said so.”
He glanced at Queen Selyse. There must have been a blizzard the
day she and Stannis wed. Huddled beneath her ermine mantle and
surrounded by her ladies, serving girls, and knights, the southron
queen seemed a frail, pale, shrunken thing. A strained smile was
frozen into place on her thin lips, but her eyes brimmed with
reverence. She hates the cold but loves the ames. He had only to look
at her to see that. A word from Melisandre, and she would walk into
the re willingly, embrace it like a lover.
Not all her queen’s men seemed to share her fervor. Ser Brus
appeared half-drunk, Ser Malegorn’s gloved hand was cupped round
the arse of the lady beside him, Ser Narbert was yawning, and Ser

Patrek of King’s Mountain looked angry. Jon Snow had begun to
understand why Stannis had left them with his queen.
“The night is dark and lled with terrors,” Melisandre sang.
“Alone we are born and alone we die, but as we walk through this
black vale we draw strength from one another, and from you, our
lord.” Her scarlet silks and satins swirled with every gust of wind.
“Two come forth today to join their lives, so they may face this
world’s darkness together. Fill their hearts with re, my lord, so
they may walk your shining path hand in hand forever.”
“Lord of Light, protect us,” cried Queen Selyse. Other voices echoed
the response. Melisandre’s faithful: pallid ladies, shivering serving
girls, Ser Axell and Ser Narbert and Ser Lambert, men-at-arms in
iron mail and Thenns in bronze, even a few of Jon’s black brothers.
“Lord of Light, bless your children.”
Melisandre’s back was to the Wall, on one side of the deep ditch
where her re burned. The couple to be joined faced her across the
ditch. Behind them stood the queen, with her daughter and her
tattooed fool. Princess Shireen was wrapped in so many furs that
she looked round, breathing in white pu s through the scarf that
covered most of her face. Ser Axell Florent and his queen’s men
surrounded the royal party.
Though only a few men of the Night’s Watch had gathered about
the ditch re, more looked down from rooftops and windows and
the steps of the great switchback stair. Jon took careful note of who
was there and who was not. Some men had the duty; many just o
watch were fast asleep. But others had chosen to absent themselves
to show their disapproval. Othell Yarwyck and Bowen Marsh were
amongst the missing. Septon Cellador had emerged brie y from the
sept, ngering the seven-sided crystal on the thong about his neck,
only to retreat inside again once the prayers began.
Melisandre raised her hands, and the ditch re leapt upward
toward her ngers, like a great red dog springing for a treat. A
swirl of sparks rose to meet the snow akes coming down. “Oh, Lord
of Light, we thank you,” she sang to the hungry ames. “We thank
you for brave Stannis, by your grace our king. Guide him and

defend him, R’hllor. Protect him from the treacheries of evil men
and grant him strength to smite the servants of the dark.”
“Grant him strength,” answered Queen Selyse and her knights and
ladies. “Grant him courage. Grant him wisdom.”
Alys Karstark slipped her arm through Jon’s. “How much longer,
Lord Snow? If I’m to be buried beneath this snow, I’d like to die a
woman wed.”
“Soon, my lady,” Jon assured her. “Soon.”
“We thank you for the sun that warms us,” chanted the queen. “We
thank you for the stars that watch over us in the black of night. We thank
you for our hearths and for our torches that keep the savage dark at bay.
We thank you for our bright spirits, the res in our loins and in our
hearts.”
And Melisandre said, “Let them come forth, who would be
joined.” The ames cast her shadow on the Wall behind her, and her
ruby gleamed against the paleness of her throat.
Jon turned to Alys Karstark. “My lady. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“You’re not scared?”
The girl smiled in a way that reminded Jon so much of his little
sister that it almost broke his heart. “Let him be scared of me.” The
snow akes were melting on her cheeks, but her hair was wrapped
in a swirl of lace that Satin had found somewhere, and the snow had
begun to collect there, giving her a frosty crown. Her cheeks were
ushed and red, and her eyes sparkled.
“Winter’s lady.” Jon squeezed her hand.
The Magnar of Thenn stood waiting by the re, clad as if for
battle, in fur and leather and bronze scales, a bronze sword at his
hip. His receding hair made him look older than his years, but as he
turned to watch his bride approach, Jon could see the boy in him.
His eyes were big as walnuts, though whether it was the re, the
priestess, or the woman that had put the fear in him Jon could not
say. Alys was more right than she knew.
“Who brings this woman to be wed?” asked Melisandre.
“I do,” said Jon. “Now comes Alys of House Karstark, a woman
grown and owered, of noble blood and birth.” He gave her hand

one last squeeze and stepped back to join the others.
“Who comes forth to claim this woman?” asked Melisandre.
“Me.” Sigorn slapped his chest. “Magnar of Thenn.”
“Sigorn,” asked Melisandre, “will you share your re with Alys,
and warm her when the night is dark and full of terrors?”
“I swear me.” The Magnar’s promise was a white cloud in the air.
Snow dappled his shoulders. His ears were red. “By the red god’s
ames, I warm her all her days.”
“Alys, do you swear to share your re with Sigorn, and warm him
when the night is dark and full of terrors?”
“Till his blood is boiling.” Her maiden’s cloak was the black wool
of the Night’s Watch. The Karstark sunburst sewn on its back was
made of the same white fur that lined it.
Melisandre’s eyes shone as bright as the ruby at her throat. “Then
come to me and be as one.” As she beckoned, a wall of ames
roared upward, licking at the snow akes with hot orange tongues.
Alys Karstark took her Magnar by the hand.
Side by side they leapt the ditch.
“Two went into the ames.” A gust of wind lifted the red
woman’s scarlet skirts till she pressed them down again. “One
emerges.” Her coppery hair danced about her head. “What re
joins, none may put asunder.”
“What re joins, none may put asunder,” came the echo, from
queen’s men and Thenns and even a few of the black brothers.
Except for kings and uncles, thought Jon Snow.
Cregan Karstark had turned up a day behind his niece. With him
came four mounted men-at-arms, a huntsman, and a pack of dogs,
sni ng after Lady Alys as if she were a deer. Jon Snow met them
on the kingsroad half a league south of Mole’s Town, before they
could turn up at Castle Black, claim guest right, or call for parley.
One of Karstark’s men had loosed a crossbow quarrel at Ty and died
for it. That left four, and Cregan himself.
Fortunately they had a dozen ice cells. Room for all.
Like so much else, heraldry ended at the Wall. The Thenns had no
family arms as was customary amongst the nobles of the Seven
Kingdoms, so Jon told the stewards to improvise. He thought they

had done well. The bride’s cloak Sigorn fastened about Lady Alys’s
shoulders showed a bronze disk on a eld of white wool,
surrounded by ames made with wisps of crimson silk. The echo of
the Karstark sunburst was there for those who cared to look, but
di erenced to make the arms appropriate for House Thenn.
The Magnar all but ripped the maiden’s cloak from Alys’s
shoulders, but when he fastened her bride’s cloak about her he was
almost tender. As he leaned down to kiss her cheek, their breath
mingled. The ames roared once again. The queen’s men began to
sing a song of praise. “Is it done?” Jon heard Satin whisper.
“Done and done,” muttered Mully, “and a good thing. They’re
wed and I’m half-froze.” He was mu ed up in his best blacks,
woolens so new that they had hardly had a chance to fade yet, but
the wind had turned his cheeks as red as his hair. “Hobb’s mulled
some wine with cinnamon and cloves. That’ll warm us some.”
“What’s cloves?” asked Owen the Oaf.
The snow had started to descend more heavily and the re in the
ditch was guttering out. The crowd began to break apart and stream
from the yard, queen’s men, king’s men, and free folk alike, all
anxious to get out of the wind and the cold. “Will my lord be
feasting with us?” Mully asked Jon Snow.
“Shortly.” Sigorn might take it as a slight if he did not appear.
And this marriage is mine own work, after all. “I have other matters to
attend to rst, however.”
Jon crossed to Queen Selyse, with Ghost beside him. His boots
crunched through piles of old snow. It was growing ever more timeconsuming to shovel out the paths from one building to another;
more and more, the men were resorting to the underground
passages they called wormways.
“… such a beautiful rite,” the queen was saying. “I could feel our
lord’s ery gaze upon us. Oh, you cannot know how many times I
have begged Stannis to let us be wed again, a true joining of body
and spirit blessed by the Lord of Light. I know that I could give His
Grace more children if we were bound in re.”
To give him more children you would rst need to get him into your
bed. Even at the Wall, it was common knowledge that Stannis

Baratheon had shunned his wife for years. One could only imagine
how His Grace had responded to the notion of a second wedding in
the midst of his war.
Jon bowed. “If it please Your Grace, the feast awaits.”
The queen glanced at Ghost suspiciously, then raised her head to
Jon. “To be sure. Lady Melisandre knows the way.”
The red priestess spoke up. “I must attend my res, Your Grace.
Perhaps R’hllor will vouchsafe me a glimpse of His Grace. A glimpse
of some great victory, mayhaps.”
“Oh.” Queen Selyse looked stricken. “To be sure … let us pray for
a vision from our lord …”
“Satin, show Her Grace to her place,” said Jon.
Ser Malegorn stepped forward. “I will escort Her Grace to the
feast. We shall not require your … steward.” The way the man drew
out the last word told Jon that he had been considering saying
something else. Boy? Pet? Whore?
Jon bowed again. “As you wish. I shall join you shortly.”
Ser Malegorn o ered his arm, and Queen Selyse took it sti y.
Her other hand settled on her daughter’s shoulder. The royal
ducklings fell in behind them as they made their way across the
yard, marching to the music of the bells on the fool’s hat. “Under
the sea the mermen feast on star sh soup, and all the serving men
are crabs,” Patchface proclaimed as they went. “I know, I know, oh,
oh, oh.”
Melisandre’s face darkened. “That creature is dangerous. Many a
time I have glimpsed him in my ames. Sometimes there are skulls
about him, and his lips are red with blood.”
A wonder you haven’t had the poor man burned. All it would take
was a word in the queen’s ear, and Patchface would feed her res.
“You see fools in your re, but no hint of Stannis?”
“When I search for him all I see is snow.”
The same useless answer. Clydas had dispatched a raven to
Deepwood Motte to warn the king of Arnolf Karstark’s treachery,
but whether the bird had reached His Grace in time Jon did not
know. The Braavosi banker was o in search of Stannis as well,
accompanied by the guides that Jon had given him, but between the

war and weather, it would be a wonder if he found him. “Would
you know if the king was dead?” Jon asked the red priestess.
“He is not dead. Stannis is the Lord’s chosen, destined to lead the
ght against the dark. I have seen it in the ames, read of it in
ancient prophecy. When the red star bleeds and the darkness
gathers, Azor Ahai shall be born again amidst smoke and salt to
wake dragons out of stone. Dragonstone is the place of smoke and
salt.”
Jon had heard all this before. “Stannis Baratheon was the Lord of
Dragonstone, but he was not born there. He was born at Storm’s
End, like his brothers.” He frowned. “And what of Mance? Is he lost
as well? What do your res show?”
“The same, I fear. Only snow.”
Snow. It was snowing heavily to the south, Jon knew. Only two
days’ ride from here, the kingsroad was said to be impassable.
Melisandre knows that too. And to the east, a savage storm was
raging on the Bay of Seals. At last report, the ragtag eet they had
assembled to rescue the free folk from Hardhome still huddled at
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, con ned to port by the rough seas. “You are
seeing cinders dancing in the updraft.”
“I am seeing skulls. And you. I see your face every time I look
into the ames. The danger that I warned you of grows very close
now.”
“Daggers in the dark. I know. You will forgive my doubts, my
lady. A grey girl on a dying horse, eeing from a marriage, that was
what you said.”
“I was not wrong.”
“You were not right. Alys is not Arya.”
“The vision was a true one. It was my reading that was false. I am
as mortal as you, Jon Snow. All mortals err.”
“Even lord commanders.” Mance Rayder and his spearwives had
not returned, and Jon could not help but wonder whether the red
woman had lied of a purpose. Is she playing her own game?
“You would do well to keep your wolf beside you, my lord.”
“Ghost is seldom far.” The direwolf raised his head at the sound
of his name. Jon scratched him behind the ears. “But now you must

excuse me. Ghost, with me.”
Carved from the base of the Wall and closed with heavy wooden
doors, the ice cells ranged from small to smaller. Some were big
enough to allow a man to pace, others so small that prisoners were
forced to sit; the smallest were too cramped to allow even that.
Jon had given his chief captive the largest cell, a pail to shit in,
enough furs to keep him from freezing, and a skin of wine. It took
the guards some time to open his cell, as ice had formed inside the
lock. Rusted hinges screamed like damned souls when Wick
Whittlestick yanked the door wide enough for Jon to slip through. A
faint fecal odor greeted him, though less overpowering than he’d
expected. Even shit froze solid in such bitter cold. Jon Snow could
see his own re ection dimly inside the icy walls.
In one corner of the cell a heap of furs was piled up almost to the
height of a man. “Karstark,” said Jon Snow. “Wake up.”
The furs stirred. Some had frozen together, and the frost that
covered them glittered when they moved. An arm emerged, then a
face—brown hair, tangled and matted and streaked with grey, two
erce eyes, a nose, a mouth, a beard. Ice caked the prisoner’s
mustache, clumps of frozen snot. “Snow.” His breath steamed in the
air, fogging the ice behind his head. “You have no right to hold me.
The laws of hospitality—”
“You are no guest of mine. You came to the Wall without my
leave, armed, to carry o your niece against her will. Lady Alys was
given bread and salt. She is a guest. You are a prisoner.” Jon let
that hang for a moment, then said, “Your niece is wed.”
Cregan Karstark’s lips skinned back from his teeth. “Alys was
promised to me.” Though past fty, he had been a strong man when
he went into the cell. The cold had robbed him of that strength and
left him sti and weak. “My lord father—”
“Your father is a castellan, not a lord. And a castellan has no right
to make marriage pacts.”
“My father, Arnolf, is Lord of Karhold.”
“A son comes before an uncle by all the laws I know.”
Cregan pushed himself to his feet and kicked aside the furs
clinging to his ankles. “Harrion is dead.”

Or will be soon. “A daughter comes before an uncle too. If her
brother is dead, Karhold belongs to Lady Alys. And she has given
her hand in marriage to Sigorn, Magnar of Thenn.”
“A wildling. A lthy, murdering wildling.” Cregan’s hands closed
into sts. The gloves that covered them were leather, lined with fur
to match the cloak that hung matted and sti from his broad
shoulders. His black wool surcoat was emblazoned with the white
sunburst of his house. “I see what you are, Snow. Half a wolf and
half a wildling, baseborn get of a traitor and a whore. You would
deliver a highborn maid to the bed of some stinking savage. Did
you sample her yourself rst?” He laughed. “If you mean to kill me,
do it and be damned for a kinslayer. Stark and Karstark are one
blood.”
“My name is Snow.”
“Bastard.”
“Guilty. Of that, at least.”
“Let this Magnar come to Karhold. We’ll hack o his head and
stu it in a privy, so we can piss into his mouth.”
“Sigorn leads two hundred Thenns,” Jon pointed out, “and Lady
Alys believes Karhold will open its gates to her. Two of your men
have already sworn her their service and con rmed all she had to
say concerning the plans your father made with Ramsay Snow. You
have close kin at Karhold, I am told. A word from you could save
their lives. Yield the castle. Lady Alys will pardon the women who
betrayed her and allow the men to take the black.”
Cregan shook his head. Chunks of ice had formed about the
tangles in his hair, and clicked together softly when he moved.
“Never,” he said. “Never, never, never.”
I should make his head a wedding gift for Lady Alys and her Magnar,
Jon thought, but dare not take the risk. The Night’s Watch took no
part in the quarrels of the realm; some would say he had already
given Stannis too much help. Behead this fool, and they will claim I am
killing northmen to give their lands to wildlings. Release him, and he will
do his best to rip apart all I’ve done with Lady Alys and the Magnar. Jon
wondered what his father would do, how his uncle might deal with

this. But Eddard Stark was dead, Benjen Stark lost in the frozen
wilds beyond the Wall. You know nothing, Jon Snow.
“Never is a long time,” Jon said. “You may feel di erently on the
morrow, or a year from now. Soon or late King Stannis will return
to the Wall, however. When he does he will have you put to
death … unless it happens that you are wearing a black cloak. When
a man takes the black, his crimes are wiped away.” Even such a man
as you. “Now pray excuse me. I have a feast to attend.”
After the biting cold of the ice cells, the crowded cellar was so
hot that Jon felt su ocated from the moment he came down the
steps. The air smelled of smoke and roasting meat and mulled wine.
Axell Florent was making a toast as Jon took his place upon the
dais. “To King Stannis and his wife, Queen Selyse, Light of the
North!” Ser Axell bellowed. “To R’hllor, the Lord of Light, may he
defend us all! One land, one god, one king!”
“One land, one god, one king!” the queen’s men echoed.
Jon drank with the rest. Whether Alys Karstark would nd any
joy in her marriage he could not say, but this one night at least
should be one of celebration.
The stewards began to bring out the rst dish, an onion broth
avored with bits of goat and carrot. Not precisely royal fare, but
nourishing; it tasted good enough and warmed the belly. Owen the
Oaf took up his ddle, and several of the free folk joined in with
pipes and drums. The same pipes and drums they played to sound
Mance Rayder’s attack upon the Wall. Jon thought they sounded
sweeter now. With the broth came loaves of coarse brown bread,
warm from the oven. Salt and butter sat upon the tables. The sight
made Jon gloomy. They were well provided with salt, Bowen Marsh
had told him, but the last of the butter would be gone within a
moon’s turn.
Old Flint and The Norrey had been given places of high honor just
below the dais. Both men had been too old to march with Stannis;
they had sent their sons and grandsons in their stead. But they had
been quick enough to descend on Castle Black for the wedding.
Each had brought a wet nurse to the Wall as well. The Norrey
woman was forty, with the biggest breasts Jon Snow had ever seen.

The Flint girl was fourteen and at-chested as a boy, though she did
not lack for milk. Between the two of them, the child Val called
Monster seemed to be thriving.
For that much Jon was grateful … but he did not believe for a
moment that two such hoary old warriors would have hied down
from their hills for that alone. Each had brought a tail of ghting
men— ve for Old Flint, twelve for The Norrey, all clad in ragged
skins and studded leathers, fearsome as the face of winter. Some
had long beards, some had scars, some had both; all worshiped the
old gods of the north, those same gods worshiped by the free folk
beyond the Wall. Yet here they sat, drinking to a marriage hallowed
by some queer red god from beyond the seas.
Better that than refuse to drink. Neither Flint nor Norrey had turned
their cups over to spill their wine upon the oor. That might
betoken a certain acceptance. Or perhaps they just hate to waste good
southron wine. They will not have tasted much of it up in those stony
hills of theirs.
Between courses, Ser Axell Florent led Queen Selyse out onto the
oor to dance. Others followed—the queen’s knights rst, partnered
with her ladies. Ser Brus gave Princess Shireen her rst dance, then
took a turn with her mother. Ser Narbert danced with each of
Selyse’s lady companions in turn.
The queen’s men outnumbered the queen’s ladies three to one, so
even the humblest serving girls were pressed into the dance. After a
few songs some black brothers remembered skills learned at the
courts and castles of their youth, before their sins had sent them to
the Wall, and took the oor as well. That old rogue Ulmer of the
Kingswood proved as adept at dancing as he was at archery, no
doubt regaling his partners with his tales of the Kingswood
Brotherhood, when he rode with Simon Toyne and Big Belly Ben
and helped Wenda the White Fawn burn her mark in the buttocks of
her highborn captives. Satin was all grace, dancing with three
serving girls in turn but never presuming to approach a highborn
lady. Jon judged that wise. He did not like the way some of the
queen’s knights were looking at the steward, particularly Ser Patrek

of King’s Mountain. That one wants to shed a bit of blood, he thought.
He is looking for some provocation.
When Owen the Oaf began to dance with Patchface the fool,
laughter echoed o the vaulted ceiling. The sight made Lady Alys
smile. “Do you dance often, here at Castle Black?”
“Every time we have a wedding, my lady.”
“You could dance with me, you know. It would be only
courteous. You danced with me anon.”
“Anon?” teased Jon.
“When we were children.” She tore o a bit of bread and threw it
at him. “As you know well.”
“My lady should dance with her husband.”
“My Magnar is not one for dancing, I fear. If you will not dance
with me, at least pour me some of the mulled wine.”
“As you command.” He signaled for a agon.
“So,” said Alys, as Jon poured, “I am now a woman wed. A
wildling husband with his own little wildling army.”
“Free folk is what they call themselves. Most, at least. The
Thenns are a people apart, though. Very old.” Ygritte had told him
that. You know nothing, Jon Snow. “They come from a hidden vale at
the north end of the Frostfangs, surrounded by high peaks, and for
thousands of years they’ve had more truck with the giants than with
other men. It made them di erent.”
“Di erent,” she said, “but more like us.”
“Aye, my lady. The Thenns have lords and laws.” They know how
to kneel. “They mine tin and copper for bronze, forge their own
arms and armor instead of stealing it. A proud folk, and brave.
Mance Rayder had to best the old Magnar thrice before Styr would
accept him as King-Beyond-the-Wall.”
“And now they are here, on our side of the Wall. Driven from
their mountain fastness and into my bedchamber.” She smiled a wry
smile. “It is my own fault. My lord father told me I must charm
your brother Robb, but I was only six and didn’t know how.”
Aye, but now you’re almost six-and-ten, and we must pray you will
know how to charm your new husband. “My lady, how do things stand
at Karhold with your food stores?”

“Not well.” Alys sighed. “My father took so many of our men
south with him that only the women and young boys were left to
bring the harvest in. Them, and the men too old or crippled to go
o to war. Crops withered in the elds or were pounded into the
mud by autumn rains. And now the snows are come. This winter
will be hard. Few of the old people will survive it, and many
children will perish as well.”
It was a tale that any northmen knew well. “My father’s
grandmother was a Flint of the mountains, on his mother’s side,”
Jon told her. “The First Flints, they call themselves. They say the
other Flints are the blood of younger sons, who had to leave the
mountains to nd food and land and wives. It has always been a
harsh life up there. When the snows fall and food grows scarce,
their young must travel to the winter town or take service at one
castle or the other. The old men gather up what strength remains in
them and announce that they are going hunting. Some are found
come spring. More are never seen again.”
“It is much the same at Karhold.”
That did not surprise him. “When your stores begin to dwindle,
my lady, remember us. Send your old men to the Wall, let them say
our words. Here at least they will not die alone in the snow, with
only memories to warm them. Send us boys as well, if you have
boys to spare.”
“As you say.” She touched his hand. “Karhold remembers.”
The elk was being carved. It smelled better than Jon had any
reason to expect. He dispatched a portion to Leathers out at
Hardin’s Tower, along with three big platters of roast vegetables for
Wun Wun, then ate a healthy slice himself. Three-Finger Hobb’s
acquitted himself well. That had been a concern. Hobb had come to
him two nights ago complaining that he’d joined the Night’s Watch
to kill wildlings, not to cook for them. “Besides, I never done no
wedding feast, m’lord. Black brothers don’t never take no wifes. It’s
in the bloody vows, I swear ’tis.”
Jon was washing the roast down with a sip of mulled wine when
Clydas appeared at his elbow. “A bird,” he announced, and slipped a
parchment into Jon’s hand. The note was sealed with a dot of hard

black wax. Eastwatch, Jon knew, even before he broke the seal. The
letter had been written by Maester Harmune; Cotter Pyke could
neither read nor write. But the words were Pyke’s, set down as he
had spoken them, blunt and to the point.
Calm seas today. Eleven ships set sail for Hardhome on the
morning tide. Three Braavosi, four Lyseni, four of ours. Two of
the Lyseni barely seaworthy. We may drown more wildlings than
we save. Your command. Twenty ravens aboard, and Maester
Harmune. Will send reports. I command from Talon, Tattersalt
second on Blackbird, Ser Glendon holds Eastwatch.
“Dark wings, dark words?” asked Alys Karstark.
“No, my lady. This news was long awaited.” Though the last part
troubles me. Glendon Hewett was a seasoned man and a strong one,
a sensible choice to command in Cotter Pyke’s absence. But he was
also as much a friend as Alliser Thorne could boast, and a crony of
sorts with Janos Slynt, however brie y. Jon could still recall how
Hewett had dragged him from his bed, and the feel of his boot
slamming into his ribs. Not the man I would have chosen. He rolled
the parchment up and slipped it into his belt.
The sh course was next, but as the pike was being boned Lady
Alys dragged the Magnar up onto the oor. From the way he moved
it was plain that Sigorn had never danced before, but he had drunk
enough mulled wine so that it did not seem to matter.
“A northern maid and a wildling warrior, bound together by the
Lord of Light.” Ser Axell Florent slipped into Lady Alys’s vacant
seat. “Her Grace approves. I am close to her, my lord, so I know her
mind. King Stannis will approve as well.”
Unless Roose Bolton has stuck his head on a spear.
“Not all agree, alas.” Ser Axell’s beard was a ragged brush
beneath his sagging chin; coarse hair sprouted from his ears and
nostrils. “Ser Patrek feels he would have made a better match for
Lady Alys. His lands were lost to him when he came north.”
“There are many in this hall who have lost far more than that,”
said Jon, “and more who have given up their lives in service to the

realm. Ser Patrek should count himself fortunate.”
Axell Florent smiled. “The king might say the same if he were
here. Yet some provision must be made for His Grace’s leal knights,
surely? They have followed him so far and at such cost. And we
must needs bind these wildlings to king and realm. This marriage is
a good rst step, but I know that it would please the queen to see
the wildling princess wed as well.”
Jon sighed. He was weary of explaining that Val was no true
princess. No matter how often he told them, they never seemed to
hear. “You are persistent, Ser Axell, I grant you that.”
“Do you blame me, my lord? Such a prize is not easily won. A
nubile girl, I hear, and not hard to look upon. Good hips, good
breasts, well made for whelping children.”
“Who would father these children? Ser Patrek? You?”
“Who better? We Florents have the blood of the old Gardener
kings in our veins. Lady Melisandre could perform the rites, as she
did for Lady Alys and the Magnar.”
“All you are lacking is a bride.”
“Easily remedied.” Florent’s smile was so false that it looked
painful. “Where is she, Lord Snow? Have you moved her to one of
your other castles? Greyguard or the Shadow Tower? Whore’s
Burrow, with t’other wenches?” He leaned close. “Some say you
have her tucked away for your own pleasure. It makes no matter to
me, so long as she is not with child. I’ll get my own sons on her. If
you’ve broken her to saddle, well … we are both men of the world,
are we not?”
Jon had heard enough. “Ser Axell, if you are truly the Queen’s
Hand, I pity Her Grace.”
Florent’s face grew ushed with anger. “So it is true. You mean to
keep her for yourself, I see it now. The bastard wants his father’s
seat.”
The bastard refused his father’s seat. If the bastard had wanted Val, all
he had to do was ask for her. “You must excuse me, ser,” he said. “I
need a breath of fresh air.” It stinks in here. His head turned. “That
was a horn.”

Others had heard it too. The music and the laughter died at once.
Dancers froze in place, listening. Even Ghost pricked up his ears.
“Did you hear that?” Queen Selyse asked her knights.
“A warhorn, Your Grace,” said Ser Narbert.
The queen’s hand went uttering to her throat. “Are we under
attack?”
“No, Your Grace,” said Ulmer of the Kingswood. “It’s the
watchers on the Wall, is all.”
One blast, thought Jon Snow. Rangers returning.
Then it came again. The sound seemed to ll the cellar.
“Two blasts,” said Mully.
Black brothers, northmen, free folk, Thenns, queen’s men, all of
them fell quiet, listening. Five heartbeats passed. Ten. Twenty.
Then Owen the Oaf tittered, and Jon Snow could breathe again.
“Two blasts,” he announced. “Wildlings.” Val.
Tormund Giantsbane had come at last.

DAENERYS

T

he hall rang to Yunkish laughter, Yunkish songs, Yunkish
prayers. Dancers danced; musicians played queer tunes with bells
and squeaks and bladders; singers sang ancient love songs in the
incomprehensible tongue of Old Ghis. Wine owed—not the thin
pale stu of Slaver’s Bay but rich sweet vintages from the Arbor and
dreamwine from Qarth, avored with strange spices. The Yunkai’i
had come at King Hizdahr’s invitation, to sign the peace and witness
the rebirth of Meereen’s far-famed ghting pits. Her noble husband
had opened the Great Pyramid to fete them.
I hate this, thought Daenerys Targaryen. How did this happen, that I
am drinking and smiling with men I’d sooner ay?
A dozen di erent sorts of meat and sh were served: camel,
crocodile, singing squid, lacquered ducks and spiny grubs, with goat
and ham and horse for those whose tastes were less exotic. Plus
dog. No Ghiscari feast was complete without a course of dog.
Hizdahr’s cooks prepared dog four di erent ways. “Ghiscari will eat
anything that swims or ies or crawls, but for man and dragon,”
Daario had warned her, “and I’d wager they’d eat dragon too if
given half a chance.” Meat alone does not make a meal, though, so
there were fruits and grains and vegetables as well. The air was
redolent with the scents of sa ron, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and
other costly spices.
Dany scarce touched a bite. This is peace, she told herself. This is
what I wanted, what I worked for, this is why I married Hizdahr. So why
does it taste so much like defeat?

“It is only for a little while more, my love,” Hizdahr had assured
her. “The Yunkai’i will soon be gone, and their allies and hirelings
with them. We shall have all we desired. Peace, food, trade. Our
port is open once again, and ships are being permitted to come and
go.”
“They are permitting that, yes,” she had replied, “but their
warships remain. They can close their ngers around our throat
again whenever they wish. They have opened a slave market within
sight of my walls!”
“Outside our walls, sweet queen. That was a condition of the
peace, that Yunkai would be free to trade in slaves as before,
unmolested.”
“In their own city. Not where I have to see it.” The Wise Masters
had established their slave pens and auction block just south of the
Skahazadhan, where the wide brown river owed into Slaver’s Bay.
“They are mocking me to my face, making a show of how powerless
I am to stop them.”
“Posing and posturing,” said her noble husband. “A show, as you
have said. Let them have their mummery. When they are gone, we
will make a fruit market of what they leave behind.”
“When they are gone,” Dany repeated. “And when will they be
gone? Riders have been seen beyond the Skahazadhan. Dothraki
scouts, Rakharo says, with a khalasar behind them. They will have
captives. Men, women, and children, gifts for the slavers.” Dothraki
did not buy or sell, but they gave gifts and received them. “That is
why the Yunkai’i have thrown up this market. They will leave here
with thousands of new slaves.”
Hizdahr zo Loraq shrugged. “But they will leave. That is the
important part, my love. Yunkai will trade in slaves, Meereen will
not, this is what we have agreed. Endure this for a little while
longer, and it shall pass.”
So Daenerys sat silent through the meal, wrapped in a vermilion
tokar and black thoughts, speaking only when spoken to, brooding
on the men and women being bought and sold outside her walls,
even as they feasted here within the city. Let her noble husband

make the speeches and laugh at the feeble Yunkish japes. That was
a king’s right and a king’s duty.
Much of the talk about the table was of the matches to be fought
upon the morrow. Barsena Blackhair was going to face a boar, his
tusks against her dagger. Khrazz was ghting, as was the Spotted
Cat. And in the day’s nal pairing, Goghor the Giant would go
against Belaquo Bonebreaker. One would be dead before the sun
went down. No queen has clean hands, Dany told herself. She
thought of Doreah, of Quaro, of Eroeh … of a little girl she had
never met, whose name had been Hazzea. Better a few should die in
the pit than thousands at the gates. This is the price of peace, I pay it
willingly. If I look back, I am lost.
The Yunkish Supreme Commander, Yurkhaz zo Yunzak, might
have been alive during Aegon’s Conquest, to judge by his
appearance. Bent-backed, wrinkled, and toothless, he was carried to
the table by two strapping slaves. The other Yunkish lords were
hardly more impressive. One was small and stunted, though the
slave soldiers who attended him were grotesquely tall and thin. The
third was young, t, and dashing, but so drunk that Dany could
scarce understand a word he said. How could I have been brought to
this pass by creatures such as these?
The sellswords were a di erent matter. Each of the four free
companies serving Yunkai had sent its commander. The Windblown
were represented by the Pentoshi nobleman known as the Tattered
Prince, the Long Lances by Gylo Rhegan, who looked more
shoemaker than soldier and spoke in murmurs. Bloodbeard, from
the Company of the Cat, made enough noise for him and a dozen
more. A huge man with a great bush of beard and a prodigious
appetite for wine and women, he bellowed, belched, farted like a
thunderclap, and pinched every serving girl who came within his
reach. From time to time he would pull one down into his lap to
squeeze her breasts and fondle her between the legs.
The Second Sons were represented too. If Daario were here, this
meal would end in blood. No promised peace could ever have
persuaded her captain to permit Brown Ben Plumm to stroll back
into Meereen and leave alive. Dany had sworn that no harm would

come to the seven envoys and commanders, though that had not
been enough for the Yunkai’i. They had required hostages of her as
well. To balance the three Yunkish nobles and four sellsword
captains, Meereen sent seven of its own out to the siege camp:
Hizdahr’s sister, two of his cousins, Dany’s bloodrider Jhogo, her
admiral Groleo, the Unsullied captain Hero, and Daario Naharis.
“I will leave my girls with you,” her captain had said, handing her
his sword belt and its gilded wantons. “Keep them safe for me,
beloved. We would not want them making bloody mischief amongst
the Yunkai’i.”
The Shavepate was absent as well. The rst thing Hizdahr had
done upon being crowned was to remove him from command of the
Brazen Beasts, replacing him with his own cousin, the plump and
pasty Marghaz zo Loraq. It is for the best. The Green Grace says there
is blood between Loraq and Kandaq, and the Shavepate never made a
secret of his disdain for my lord husband. And Daario …
Daario had only grown wilder since her wedding. Her peace did
not please him, her marriage pleased him less, and he had been
furious at being deceived by the Dornishmen. When Prince Quentyn
told them that the other Westerosi had come over to the
Stormcrows at the command of the Tattered Prince, only the
intercession of Grey Worm and his Unsullied prevented Daario from
killing them all. The false deserters had been imprisoned safely in
the bowels of the pyramid … but Daario’s rage continued to fester.
He will be safer as a hostage. My captain was not made for peace.
Dany could not risk his cutting down Brown Ben Plumm, making
mock of Hizdahr before the court, provoking the Yunkai’i, or
otherwise upsetting the agreement that she had given up so much to
win. Daario was war and woe. Henceforth, she must keep him out
of her bed, out of her heart, and out of her. If he did not betray her,
he would master her. She did not know which of those she feared
the most.
When the gluttony was done and all the half-eaten food had been
cleared away—to be given to the poor who gathered below, at the
queen’s insistence—tall glass utes were lled with a spiced liqueur
from Qarth as dark as amber. Then began the entertainments.

A troupe of Yunkish castrati owned by Yurkhaz zo Yunzak sang
them songs in the ancient tongue of the Old Empire, their voices
high and sweet and impossibly pure. “Have you ever heard such
singing, my love?” Hizdahr asked her. “They have the voices of
gods, do they not?”
“Yes,” she said, “though I wonder if they might not have
preferred to have the fruits of men.”
All of the entertainers were slaves. That had been part of the
peace, that slaveowners be allowed the right to bring their chattels
into Meereen without fear of having them freed. In return the
Yunkai’i had promised to respect the rights and liberties of the
former slaves that Dany had freed. A fair bargain, Hizdahr said, but
the taste it left in the queen’s mouth was foul. She drank another
cup of wine to wash it out.
“If it please you, Yurkhaz will be pleased to give us the singers, I
do not doubt,” her noble husband said. “A gift to seal our peace, an
ornament to our court.”
He will give us these castrati, Dany thought, and then he will march
home and make some more. The world is full of boys.
The tumblers who came next failed to move her either, even
when they formed a human pyramid nine levels high, with a naked
little girl on top. Is that meant to represent my pyramid? the queen
wondered. Is the girl on top meant to be me?
Afterward her lord husband led his guests onto the lower terrace,
so the visitors from the Yellow City might behold Meereen by
night. Wine cups in hand, the Yunkai’i wandered the garden in small
groups, beneath lemon trees and night-blooming owers, and Dany
found herself face-to-face with Brown Ben Plumm.
He bowed low. “Worship. You look lovely. Well, you always did.
None of them Yunkishmen are half so pretty. I thought I might
bring a wedding gift for you, but the bidding went too high for old
Brown Ben.”
“I want no gifts from you.”
“This one you might. The head of an old foe.”
“Your own?” she said sweetly. “You betrayed me.”

“Now that’s a harsh way o’ putting it, if you don’t mind me
saying.” Brown Ben scratched at his speckled grey-and-white
whiskers. “We went over to the winning side, is all. Same as we
done before. It weren’t all me, neither. I put it to my men.”
“So they betrayed me, is that what you are saying? Why? Did I
mistreat the Second Sons? Did I cheat you on your pay?”
“Never that,” said Brown Ben, “but it’s not all about the coin,
Your High-and-Mightiness. I learned that a long time back, at my
rst battle. Morning after the ght, I was rooting through the dead,
looking for the odd bit o’ plunder, as it were. Came upon this one
corpse, some axeman had taken his whole arm o at the shoulder.
He was covered with ies, all crusty with dried blood, might be
why no one else had touched him, but under them he wore this
studded jerkin, looked to be good leather. I gured it might t me
well enough, so I chased away the ies and cut it o him. The damn
thing was heavier than it had any right to be, though. Under the
lining, he’d sewn a fortune in coin. Gold, Your Worship, sweet
yellow gold. Enough for any man to live like a lord for the rest o’
his days. But what good did it do him? There he was with all his
coin, lying in the blood and mud with his fucking arm cut o . And
that’s the lesson, see? Silver’s sweet and gold’s our mother, but once
you’re dead they’re worth less than that last shit you take as you lie
dying. I told you once, there are old sellswords and there are bold
sellswords, but there are no old bold sellswords. My boys didn’t
care to die, that’s all, and when I told them that you couldn’t
unleash them dragons against the Yunkishmen, well …”
You saw me as defeated, Dany thought, and who am I to say that
you were wrong? “I understand.” She might have ended it there, but
she was curious. “Enough gold to live like a lord, you said. What
did you do with all that wealth?”
Brown Ben laughed. “Fool boy that I was, I told a man I took to
be my friend, and he told our serjeant, and my brothers-in-arms
come and relieved me o’ that burden. Serjeant said I was too young,
that I’d only waste it all on whores and such. He let me keep the
jerkin, though.” He spat. “You don’t never want to trust a sellsword,
m’lady.”

“I have learned that much. One day I must be sure to thank you
for the lesson.”
Brown Ben’s eyes crinkled up. “No need. I know the sort o’ thanks
you have in mind.” He bowed again and moved away.
Dany turned to gaze out over her city. Beyond her walls the
yellow tents of the Yunkai’i stood in orderly rows beside the sea,
protected by the ditches their slaves had dug for them. Two iron
legions out of New Ghis, trained and armed in the same fashion as
Unsullied, were encamped across the river to the north. Two more
Ghiscari legions had made camp to the east, choking o the road to
the Khyzai Pass. The horse lines and cook res of the free companies
lay to the south. By day thin plumes of smoke hung against the sky
like ragged grey ribbons. By night distant res could be seen. Hard
by the bay was the abomination, the slave market at her door. She
could not see it now, with the sun set, but she knew that it was
there. That just made her angrier.
“Ser Barristan?” she said softly.
The white knight appeared at once. “Your Grace.”
“How much did you hear?”
“Enough. He was not wrong. Never trust a sellsword.”
Or a queen, thought Dany. “Is there some man in the Second Sons
who might be persuaded to … remove … Brown Ben?”
“As Daario Naharis once removed the other captains of the
Stormcrows?” The old knight looked uncomfortable. “Perhaps. I
would not know, Your Grace.”
No, she thought, you are too honest and too honorable. “If not, the
Yunkai’i employ three other companies.”
“Rogues and cutthroats, scum of a hundred battle elds,” Ser
Barristan warned, “with captains full as treacherous as Plumm.”
“I am only a young girl and know little of such things, but it
seems to me that we want them to be treacherous. Once, you’ll
recall, I convinced the Second Sons and Stormcrows to join us.”
“If Your Grace wishes a privy word with Gylo Rhegan or the
Tattered Prince, I could bring them up to your apartments.”
“This is not the time. Too many eyes, too many ears. Their
absence would be noted even if you could separate them discreetly

from the Yunkai’i. We must nd some quieter way of reaching out
to them … not tonight, but soon.”
“As you command. Though I fear this is not a task for which I am
well suited. In King’s Landing work of this sort was left to Lord
Little nger or the Spider. We old knights are simple men, only good
for ghting.” He patted his sword hilt.
“Our prisoners,” suggested Dany. “The Westerosi who came over
from the Windblown with the three Dornishmen. We still have them
in cells, do we not? Use them.”
“Free them, you mean? Is that wise? They were sent here to
worm their way into your trust, so they might betray Your Grace at
the rst chance.”
“Then they failed. I do not trust them. I will never trust them.” If
truth be told, Dany was forgetting how to trust. “We can still use
them. One was a woman. Meris. Send her back, as a … a gesture of
my regard. If their captain is a clever man, he will understand.”
“The woman is the worst of all.”
“All the better.” Dany considered a moment. “We should sound
out the Long Lances too. And the Company of the Cat.”
“Bloodbeard.” Ser Barristan’s frown deepened. “If it please Your
Grace, we want no part of him. Your Grace is too young to
remember the Ninepenny Kings, but this Bloodbeard is cut from the
same savage cloth. There is no honor in him, only hunger … for
gold, for glory, for blood.”
“You know more of such men than me, ser.” If Bloodbeard might
be truly the most dishonorable and greedy of the sellswords, he
might be the easiest to sway, but she was loath to go against Ser
Barristan’s counsel in such matters. “Do as you think best. But do it
soon. If Hizdahr’s peace should break, I want to be ready. I do not
trust the slavers.” I do not trust my husband. “They will turn on us at
the rst sign of weakness.”
“The Yunkai’i grow weaker as well. The bloody ux has taken
hold amongst the Tolosi, it is said, and spread across the river to the
third Ghiscari legion.”
The pale mare. Daenerys sighed. Quaithe warned me of the pale
mare’s coming. She told me of the Dornish prince as well, the sun’s son.

She told me much and more, but all in riddles. “I cannot rely on
plague to save me from my enemies. Set Pretty Meris free. At
once.”
“As you command. Though … Your Grace, if I may be so bold,
there is another road …”
“The Dornish road?” Dany sighed. The three Dornishmen had
been at the feast, as be t Prince Quentyn’s rank, though Reznak had
taken care to seat them as far as possible from her husband. Hizdahr
did not seem to be of a jealous nature, but no man would be pleased
by the presence of a rival suitor near his new bride. “The boy seems
pleasant and well spoken, but …”
“House Martell is ancient and noble, and has been a leal friend to
House Targaryen for more than a century, Your Grace. I had the
honor of serving with Prince Quentyn’s great-uncle in your father’s
seven. Prince Lewyn was as valiant a brother-in-arms as any man
could wish for. Quentyn Martell is of the same blood, if it please
Your Grace.”
“It would please me if he had turned up with these fty thousand
swords he speaks of. Instead he brings two knights and a
parchment. Will a parchment shield my people from the Yunkai’i? If
he had come with a eet …”
“Sunspear has never been a sea power, Your Grace.”
“No.” Dany knew enough of Westerosi history to know that.
Nymeria had landed ten thousand ships upon Dorne’s sandy shores,
but when she wed her Dornish prince she had burned them all and
turned her back upon the sea forever. “Dorne is too far away. To
please this prince, I would need to abandon all my people. You
should send him home.”
“Dornishmen are notoriously stubborn, Your Grace. Prince
Quentyn’s forebears fought your own for the better part of two
hundred years. He will not go without you.”
Then he will die here, Daenerys thought, unless there is more to him
than I can see. “Is he still within?”
“Drinking with his knights.”
“Bring him to me. It is time he met my children.”

A icker of doubt passed across the long, solemn face of Barristan
Selmy. “As you command.”
Her king was laughing with Yurkhaz zo Yunzak and the other
Yunkish lords. Dany did not think that he would miss her, but just
in case she instructed her handmaids to tell him that she was
answering a call of nature, should he inquire after her.
Ser Barristan was waiting by the steps with the Dornish prince.
Martell’s square face was ushed and ruddy. Too much wine, the
queen concluded, though he was doing his best to conceal that.
Apart from the line of copper suns that ornamented his belt, the
Dornishman was plainly dressed. They call him Frog, Dany recalled.
She could see why. He was not a handsome man.
She smiled. “My prince. It is a long way down. Are you certain
that you wish to do this?”
“If it would please Your Grace.”
“Then come.”
A pair of Unsullied went down the steps before them, bearing
torches; behind came two Brazen Beasts, one masked as a sh, the
other as a hawk. Even here in her own pyramid, on this happy night
of peace and celebration, Ser Barristan insisted on keeping guards
about her everywhere she went. The small company made the long
descent in silence, stopping thrice to refresh themselves along the
way. “The dragon has three heads,” Dany said when they were on
the nal ight. “My marriage need not be the end of all your hopes.
I know why you are here.”
“For you,” said Quentyn, all awkward gallantry.
“No,” said Dany. “For re and blood.”
One of the elephants trumpeted at them from his stall. An
answering roar from below made her ush with sudden heat. Prince
Quentyn looked up in alarm. “The dragons know when she is near,”
Ser Barristan told him.
Every child knows its mother, Dany thought. When the seas go dry
and mountains blow in the wind like leaves … “They call to me.
Come.” She took Prince Quentyn by the hand and led him to the pit
where two of her dragons were con ned. “Remain outside,” Dany
told Ser Barristan, as the Unsullied were opening the huge iron

doors. “Prince Quentyn will protect me.” She drew the Dornish
prince inside with her, to stand above the pit.
The dragons craned their necks around, gazing at them with
burning eyes. Viserion had shattered one chain and melted the
others. He clung to the roof of the pit like some huge white bat, his
claws dug deep into the burnt and crumbling bricks. Rhaegal, still
chained, was gnawing on the carcass of a bull. The bones on the
oor of the pit were deeper than the last time she had been down
here, and the walls and oors were black and grey, more ash than
brick. They would not hold much longer … but behind them was
only earth and stone. Can dragons tunnel through rock, like the
rewyrms of old Valyria? She hoped not.
The Dornish prince had gone as white as milk. “I … I had heard
that there were three.”
“Drogon is hunting.” He did not need to hear the rest. “The white
one is Viserion, the green is Rhaegal. I named them for my
brothers.” Her voice echoed o the scorched stone walls. It sounded
small—a girl’s voice, not the voice of a queen and conqueror, nor
the glad voice of a new-made bride.
Rhaegal roared in answer, and re lled the pit, a spear of red
and yellow. Viserion replied, his own ames gold and orange. When
he apped his wings, a cloud of grey ash lled the air. Broken
chains clanked and clattered about his legs. Quentyn Martell jumped
back a foot.
A crueler woman might have laughed at him, but Dany squeezed
his hand and said, “They frighten me as well. There is no shame in
that. My children have grown wild and angry in the dark.”
“You … you mean to ride them?”
“One of them. All I know of dragons is what my brother told me
when I was a girl, and some I read in books, but it is said that even
Aegon the Conqueror never dared mount Vhagar or Meraxes, nor
did his sisters ride Balerion the Black Dread. Dragons live longer
than men, some for hundreds of years, so Balerion had other riders
after Aegon died … but no rider ever ew two dragons.”
Viserion hissed again. Smoke rose between his teeth, and deep
down in his throat they could see gold re churning.

“They are … they are fearsome creatures.”
“They are dragons, Quentyn.” Dany stood on her toes and kissed
him lightly, once on each cheek. “And so am I.”
The young prince swallowed. “I … I have the blood of the dragon
in me as well, Your Grace. I can trace my lineage back to the rst
Daenerys, the Targaryen princess who was sister to King Daeron the
Good and wife to the Prince of Dorne. He built the Water Gardens
for her.”
“The Water Gardens?” She knew little and less of Dorne or its
history, if truth be told.
“My father’s favorite palace. It would please me to show them to
you one day. They are all of pink marble, with pools and fountains,
overlooking the sea.”
“They sound lovely.” She drew him away from the pit. He does
not belong here. He should never have come. “You ought to return
there. My court is no safe place for you, I fear. You have more
enemies than you know. You made Daario look a fool, and he is not
a man to forget such a slight.”
“I have my knights. My sworn shields.”
“Two knights. Daario has ve hundred Stormcrows. And you
would do well to beware of my lord husband too. He seems a mild
and pleasant man, I know, but do not be deceived. Hizdahr’s crown
derives from mine, and he commands the allegiance of some of the
most fearsome ghters in the world. If one of them should think to
win his favor by disposing of a rival …”
“I am a prince of Dorne, Your Grace. I will not run from slaves
and sell swords.”
Then you truly are a fool, Prince Frog. Dany gave her wild children
one last lingering look. She could hear the dragons screaming as she
led the boy back to the door, and see the play of light against the
bricks, re ections of their res. If I look back, I am lost. “Ser
Barristan will have summoned a pair of sedan chairs to carry us
back up to the banquet, but the climb can still be wearisome.”
Behind them, the great iron doors closed with a resounding clang.
“Tell me of this other Daenerys. I know less than I should of the

history of my father’s kingdom. I never had a maester growing up.”
Only a brother.
“It would be my pleasure, Your Grace,” said Quentyn.
It was well past midnight before the last of their guests took their
leave and Dany retired to her own apartments to join her lord and
king. Hizdahr at least was happy, if somewhat drunk. “I keep my
promises,” he told her, as Irri and Jhiqui were robing them for bed.
“You wished for peace, and it is yours.”
And you wished for blood, and soon enough I must give it to you,
Dany thought, but what she said was, “I am grateful.”
The excitement of the day had in amed her husband’s passions.
No sooner had her handmaids retired for the night than he tore the
robe from her and tumbled her backwards into bed. Dany slid her
arms around him and let him have his way. Drunk as he was, she
knew he would not be inside her long.
Nor was he. Afterward he nuzzled at her ear and whispered,
“Gods grant that we have made a son tonight.”
The words of Mirri Maz Duur rang in her head. When the sun rises
in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains
blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you
bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before. The meaning
was plain enough; Khal Drogo was as like to return from the dead
as she was to bear a living child. But there are some secrets she
could not bring herself to share, even with a husband, so she let
Hizdahr zo Loraq keep his hopes.
Her noble husband was soon fast asleep. Daenerys could only
twist and turn beside him. She wanted to shake him, wake him,
make him hold her, kiss her, fuck her again, but even if he did, he
would fall back to sleep again afterward, leaving her alone in the
darkness. She wondered what Daario was doing. Was he restless as
well? Was he thinking about her? Did he love her, truly? Did he
hate her for marrying Hizdahr? I should never have taken him into my
bed. He was only a sellsword, no t consort for a queen, and yet …
I knew that all along, but I did it anyway.
“My queen?” said a soft voice in the darkness.
Dany inched. “Who is there?”

“Only Missandei.” The Naathi scribe moved closer to the bed.
“This one heard you crying.”
“Crying? I was not crying. Why would I cry? I have my peace, I
have my king, I have everything a queen might wish for. You had a
bad dream, that was all.”
“As you say, Your Grace.” She bowed and made to go.
“Stay,” said Dany. “I do not wish to be alone.”
“His Grace is with you,” Missandei pointed out.
“His Grace is dreaming, but I cannot sleep. On the morrow I must
bathe in blood. The price of peace.” She smiled wanly and patted
the bed. “Come. Sit. Talk with me.”
“If it please you.” Missandei sat down beside her. “What shall we
talk of?”
“Home,” said Dany. “Naath. Butter ies and brothers. Tell me of
the things that make you happy, the things that make you giggle,
all your sweetest memories. Remind me that there is still good in
the world.”
Missandei did her best. She was still talking when Dany nally
fell to sleep, to dream queer, half-formed dreams of smoke and re.
The morning came too soon.

THEON

D

ay stole upon them just as Stannis had: unseen.
Winterfell had been awake for hours, its battlements and towers
crammed with men in wool and mail and leather awaiting an attack
that never came. By the time the sky began to lighten the sound of
drums had faded away, though warhorns were heard thrice more,
each time a little closer. And still the snow fell.
“The storm will end today,” one of the surviving stableboys was
insisting loudly. “Why, it isn’t even winter.” Theon would have
laughed if he had dared. He remembered tales Old Nan had told
them of storms that raged for forty days and forty nights, for a
year, for ten years … storms that buried castles and cities and
whole kingdoms under a hundred feet of snow.
He sat in the back of the Great Hall, not far from the horses,
watching Abel, Rowan, and a mousy brown-haired washerwoman
called Squirrel attack slabs of stale brown bread fried in bacon
grease. Theon broke his own fast with a tankard of dark ale, cloudy
with yeast and thick enough to chew on. A few more tankards, and
perhaps Abel’s plan might not seem quite so mad.
Roose Bolton entered, pale-eyed and yawning, accompanied by
his plump and pregnant wife, Fat Walda. Several lords and captains
had preceded him, amongst them Whoresbane Umber, Aenys Frey,
and Roger Ryswell. Farther down the table Wyman Manderly sat
wol ng down sausages and boiled eggs, whilst old Lord Locke
beside him spooned gruel into his toothless mouth.
Lord Ramsay soon appeared as well, buckling on his sword belt as
he made his way to the front of the hall. His mood is foul this

morning. Theon could tell. The drums kept him awake all night, he
guessed, or someone has displeased him. One wrong word, an illconsidered look, an ill-timed laugh, any of them could provoke his
lordship’s wroth and cost a man a strip of skin. Please, m’lord, don’t
look this way. One glance would be all it would take for Ramsay to
know everything. He’ll see it written on my face. He’ll know. He
always knows.
Theon turned to Abel. “This will not work.” His voice was pitched
so low that even the horses could not have overheard. “We will be
caught before we leave the castle. Even if we do escape, Lord
Ramsay will hunt us down, him and Ben Bones and the girls.”
“Lord Stannis is outside the walls, and not far by the sound of it.
All we need do is reach him.” Abel’s ngers danced across the
strings of his lute. The singer’s beard was brown, though his long
hair had largely gone to grey. “If the Bastard does come after us, he
might live long enough to rue it.”
Think that, Theon thought. Believe that. Tell yourself it’s true.
“Ramsay will use your women as his prey,” he told the singer.
“He’ll hunt them down, rape them, and feed their corpses to his
dogs. If they lead him a good chase, he may name his next litter of
bitches after them. You he’ll ay. Him and Skinner and Damon
Dance-for-Me, they will make a game of it. You’ll be begging them
to kill you.” He clutched the singer’s arm with a maimed hand. “You
swore you would not let me fall into his hands again. I have your
word on that.” He needed to hear it again.
“Abel’s word,” said Squirrel. “Strong as oak.” Abel himself only
shrugged. “No matter what, my prince.”
Up on the dais, Ramsay was arguing with his father. They were
too far away for Theon to make out any of the words, but the fear
on Fat Walda’s round pink face spoke volumes. He did hear Wyman
Manderly calling for more sausages and Roger Ryswell’s laughter at
some jape from one-armed Harwood Stout.
Theon wondered if he would ever see the Drowned God’s watery
halls, or if his ghost would linger here at Winterfell. Dead is dead.
Better dead than Reek. If Abel’s scheme went awry, Ramsay would
make their dying long and hard. He will ay me from head to heel this

time, and no amount of begging will end the anguish. No pain Theon
had ever known came close to the agony that Skinner could evoke
with a little ensing blade. Abel would learn that lesson soon
enough. And for what? Jeyne, her name is Jeyne, and her eyes are the
wrong color. A mummer playing a part. Lord Bolton knows, and
Ramsay, but the rest are blind, even this bloody bard with his sly smiles.
The jape is on you, Abel, you and your murdering whores. You’ll die for
the wrong girl.
He had come this close to telling them the truth when Rowan had
delivered him to Abel in the ruins of the Burned Tower, but at the
last instant he had held his tongue. The singer seemed intent on
making o with the daughter of Eddard Stark. If he knew that Lord
Ramsay’s bride was but a steward’s whelp, well …
The doors of the Great Hall opened with a crash.
A cold wind came swirling through, and a cloud of ice crystals
sparkled blue-white in the air. Through it strode Ser Hosteen Frey,
caked with snow to the waist, a body in his arms. All along the
benches men put down their cups and spoons to turn and gape at
the grisly spectacle. The hall grew quiet.
Another murder.
Snow slid from Ser Hosteen’s cloaks as he stalked toward the high
table, his steps ringing against the oor. A dozen Frey knights and
men-at-arms entered behind him. One was a boy Theon knew—Big
Walder, the little one, fox-faced and skinny as a stick. His chest and
arms and cloak were spattered with blood.
The scent of it set the horses to screaming. Dogs slid out from
under the tables, sni ng. Men rose from the benches. The body in
Ser Hosteen’s arms sparkled in the torchlight, armored in pink frost.
The cold outside had frozen his blood.
“My brother Merrett’s son.” Hosteen Frey lowered the body to
the oor before the dais. “Butchered like a hog and shoved beneath
a snowbank. A boy.”
Little Walder, thought Theon. The big one. He glanced at Rowan.
There are six of them, he remembered. Any of them could have done
this. But the washerwoman felt his eyes. “This was no work of
ours,” she said.

“Be quiet,” Abel warned her.
Lord Ramsay descended from the dais to the dead boy. His father
rose more slowly, pale-eyed, still-faced, solemn. “This was foul
work.” For once Roose Bolton’s voice was loud enough to carry.
“Where was the body found?”
“Under that ruined keep, my lord,” replied Big Walder. “The one
with the old gargoyles.” The boy’s gloves were caked with his
cousin’s blood. “I told him not to go out alone, but he said he had to
nd a man who owed him silver.”
“What man?” Ramsay demanded. “Give me his name. Point him
out to me, boy, and I will make you a cloak of his skin.”
“He never said, my lord. Only that he won the coin at dice.” The
Frey boy hesitated. “It was some White Harbor men who taught
dice. I couldn’t say which ones, but it was them.”
“My lord,” boomed Hosteen Frey. “We know the man who did
this. Killed this boy and all the rest. Not by his own hand, no. He is
too fat and craven to do his own killing. But by his word.” He
turned to Wyman Manderly. “Do you deny it?”
The Lord of White Harbor bit a sausage in half. “I confess …” He
wiped the grease from his lips with his sleeve. “… I confess that I
know little of this poor boy. Lord Ramsay’s squire, was he not?
How old was the lad?”
“Nine, on his last nameday.”
“So young,” said Wyman Manderly. “Though mayhaps this was a
blessing. Had he lived, he would have grown up to be a Frey.”
Ser Hosteen slammed his foot into the tabletop, knocking it o its
trestles, back into Lord Wyman’s swollen belly. Cups and platters
ew, sausages scattered everywhere, and a dozen Manderly men
came cursing to their feet. Some grabbed up knives, platters,
agons, anything that might serve as a weapon.
Ser Hosteen Frey ripped his longsword from its scabbard and
leapt toward Wyman Manderly. The Lord of White Harbor tried to
jerk away, but the tabletop pinned him to his chair. The blade
slashed through three of his four chins in a spray of bright red
blood. Lady Walda gave a shriek and clutched at her lord husband’s
arm. “Stop,” Roose Bolton shouted. “Stop this madness.” His own

men rushed forward as the Manderlys vaulted over the benches to
get at the Freys. One lunged at Ser Hosteen with a dagger, but the
big knight pivoted and took his arm o at the shoulder. Lord
Wyman pushed to his feet, only to collapse. Old Lord Locke was
shouting for a maester as Manderly opped on the oor like a
clubbed walrus in a spreading pool of blood. Around him dogs
fought over sausages.
It took two score Dreadfort spearmen to part the combatants and
put an end to the carnage. By that time six White Harbor men and
two Freys lay dead upon the oor. A dozen more were wounded
and one of the Bastard’s Boys, Luton, was dying noisily, crying for
his mother as he tried to shove a stful of slimy entrails back
through a gaping belly wound. Lord Ramsay silenced him, yanking
a spear from one of Steelshanks’s men and driving it down through
Luton’s chest. Even then the rafters still rang with shouts and
prayers and curses, the shrieks of terri ed horses and the growls of
Ramsay’s bitches. Steelshanks Walton had to slam the butt of his
spear against the oor a dozen times before the hall quieted enough
for Roose Bolton to be heard.
“I see you all want blood,” the Lord of the Dreadfort said.
Maester Rhodry stood beside him, a raven on his arm. The bird’s
black plumage shone like coal oil in the torchlight. Wet, Theon
realized. And in his lordship’s hand, a parchment. That will be wet as
well. Dark wings, dark words. “Rather than use our swords upon each
other, you might try them on Lord Stannis.” Lord Bolton unrolled
the parchment. “His host lies not three days’ ride from here,
snowbound and starving, and I for one am tired of waiting on his
pleasure. Ser Hosteen, assemble your knights and men-at-arms by
the main gates. As you are so eager for battle, you shall strike our
rst blow. Lord Wyman, gather your White Harbor men by the east
gate. They shall go forth as well.”
Hosteen Frey’s sword was red almost to the hilt. Blood spatters
speckled his cheeks like freckles. He lowered his blade and said, “As
my lord commands. But after I deliver you the head of Stannis
Baratheon, I mean to nish hacking o Lord Lard’s.”

Four White Harbor knights had formed a ring around Lord
Wyman, as Maester Medrick labored over him to staunch his
bleeding. “First you must needs come through us, ser,” said the
eldest of them, a hard-faced greybeard whose bloodstained surcoat
showed three silvery mermaids upon a violet eld.
“Gladly. One at a time or all at once, it makes no matter.”
“Enough,” roared Lord Ramsay, brandishing his bloody spear.
“Another threat, and I’ll gut you all myself. My lord father has
spoken! Save your wroth for the pretender Stannis.”
Roose Bolton gave an approving nod. “As he says. There will be
time enough to ght each other once we are done with Stannis.” He
turned his head, his pale cold eyes searching the hall until they
found the bard Abel beside Theon. “Singer,” he called, “come sing
us something soothing.”
Abel bowed. “If it please your lordship.” Lute in hand, he
sauntered to the dais, hopping nimbly over a corpse or two, and
seated himself cross-legged on the high table. As he began to play—
a sad, soft song that Theon Greyjoy did not recognize—Ser Hosteen,
Ser Aenys, and their fellow Freys turned away to lead their horses
from the hall.
Rowan grasped Theon’s arm. “The bath. It must be now.”
He wrenched free of her touch. “By day? We will be seen.”
“The snow will hide us. Are you deaf? Bolton is sending forth his
swords. We have to reach King Stannis before they do.”
“But … Abel …”
“Abel can fend for himself,” murmured Squirrel.
This is madness. Hopeless, foolish, doomed. Theon drained the last
dregs of his ale and rose reluctantly to his feet. “Find your sisters. It
takes a deal of water to ll my lady’s tub.”
Squirrel slipped away, soft-footed as she always was. Rowan
walked Theon from the hall. Since she and her sisters had found him
in the godswood, one of them had dogged his every step, never
letting him out of sight. They did not trust him. Why should they? I
was Reek before and might be Reek again. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with
sneak.

Outside the snow still fell. The snowmen the squires had built had
grown into monstrous giants, ten feet tall and hideously misshapen.
White walls rose to either side as he and Rowan made their way to
the godswood; the paths between keep and tower and hall had
turned into a maze of icy trenches, shoveled out hourly to keep
them clear. It was easy to get lost in that frozen labyrinth, but
Theon Greyjoy knew every twist and turning.
Even the godswood was turning white. A lm of ice had formed
upon the pool beneath the heart tree, and the face carved into its
pale trunk had grown a mustache of little icicles. At this hour they
could not hope to have the old gods to themselves. Rowan pulled
Theon away from the northmen praying before the tree, to a
secluded spot back by the barracks wall, beside a pool of warm mud
that stank of rotten eggs. Even the mud was icing up about the
edges, Theon saw. “Winter is coming …”
Rowan gave him a hard look. “You have no right to mouth Lord
Eddard’s words. Not you. Not ever. After what you did—”
“You killed a boy as well.”
“That was not us. I told you.”
“Words are wind.” They are no better than me. We’re just the same.
“You killed the others, why not him? Yellow Dick—”
“—stank as bad as you. A pig of a man.”
“And Little Walder was a piglet. Killing him brought the Freys
and Manderlys to dagger points, that was cunning, you—”
“Not us.” Rowan grabbed him by the throat and shoved him back
against the barracks wall, her face an inch from his. “Say it again
and I will rip your lying tongue out, kinslayer.”
He smiled through his broken teeth. “You won’t. You need my
tongue to get you past the guards. You need my lies.”
Rowan spat in his face. Then she let him go and wiped her gloved
hands on her legs, as if just touching him had soiled her.
Theon knew he should not goad her. In her own way, this one
was as dangerous as Skinner or Damon Dance-for-Me. But he was
cold and tired, his head was pounding, he had not slept in days. “I
have done terrible things … betrayed my own, turned my cloak,
ordered the death of men who trusted me … but I am no kinslayer.”

“Stark’s boys were never brothers to you, aye. We know.”
That was true, but it was not what Theon had meant. They were
not my blood, but even so, I never harmed them. The two we killed were
just some miller’s sons. Theon did not want to think about their
mother. He had known the miller’s wife for years, had even bedded
her. Big heavy breasts with wide dark nipples, a sweet mouth, a merry
laugh. Joys that I will never taste again.
But there was no use telling Rowan any of that. She would never
believe his denials, any more than he believed hers. “There is blood
on my hands, but not the blood of brothers,” he said wearily. “And
I’ve been punished.”
“Not enough.” Rowan turned her back on him.
Foolish woman. He might well be a broken thing, but Theon still
wore a dagger. It would have been a simple thing to slide it out and
drive it down between her shoulder blades. That much he was still
capable of, missing teeth and broken teeth and all. It might even be
a kindness—a quicker, cleaner end than the one she and her sisters
would face when Ramsay caught them.
Reek might have done it. Would have done it, in hopes it might
please Lord Ramsay. These whores meant to steal Ramsay’s bride;
Reek could not allow that. But the old gods had known him, had
called him Theon. Ironborn, I was ironborn, Balon Greyjoy’s son and
rightful heir to Pyke. The stumps of his ngers itched and twitched,
but he kept his dagger in its sheath.
When Squirrel returned, the other four were with her: gaunt greyhaired Myrtle, Willow Witch-Eye with her long black braid, Frenya
of the thick waist and enormous breasts, Holly with her knife. Clad
as serving girls in layers of drab grey roughspun, they wore brown
woolen cloaks lined with white rabbit fur. No swords, Theon saw. No
axes, no hammers, no weapons but knives. Holly’s cloak was fastened
with a silver clasp, and Frenya had a girdle of hempen rope wound
about her middle from her hips to breasts. It made her look even
more massive than she was.
Myrtle had servant’s garb for Rowan. “The yards are crawling
with fools,” she warned them. “They mean to ride out.”

“Kneelers,” said Willow, with a snort of contempt. “Their lordly
lord spoke, they must obey.”
“They’re going to die,” chirped Holly, happily.
“Them and us,” said Theon. “Even if we do get past the guards,
how do you mean to get Lady Arya out?”
Holly smiled. “Six women go in, six come out. Who looks at
serving girls? We’ll dress the Stark girl up as Squirrel.”
Theon glanced at Squirrel. They are almost of a size. It might work.
“And how does Squirrel get out?”
Squirrel answered for herself. “Out a window, and straight down
to the godswood. I was twelve the rst time my brother took me
raiding south o’ your Wall. That’s where I got my name. My brother
said I looked like a squirrel running up a tree. I’ve done that Wall
six times since, over and back again. I think I can climb down some
stone tower.”
“Happy, turncloak?” Rowan asked. “Let’s be about it.”
Winterfell’s cavernous kitchen occupied a building all its own, set
well apart from the castle’s main halls and keeps in case of re.
Inside, the smells changed hour by hour—an ever-changing perfume
of roast meats, leeks and onions, fresh-baked bread. Roose Bolton
had posted guards at the kitchen door. With so many mouths to
feed, every scrap of food was precious. Even the cooks and potboys
were watched constantly. But the guards knew Reek. They liked to
taunt him when he came to fetch hot water for Lady Arya’s bath.
None of them dared go further than that, though. Reek was known
to be Lord Ramsay’s pet.
“The Prince of Stink is come for some hot water,” one guard
announced when Theon and his serving girls appeared before him.
He pushed the door open for them. “Quick now, before all that
sweet warm air escapes.”
Within, Theon grabbed a passing potboy by the arm. “Hot water
for m’lady, boy,” he commanded. “Six pails full, and see that it’s
good and hot. Lord Ramsay wants her pink and clean.”
“Aye, m’lord,” the boy said. “At once, m’lord.”
“At once” took longer than Theon would have liked. None of the
big kettles was clean, so the potboy had to scrub one out before

lling it with water. Then it seemed to take forever to come to a
rolling boil and twice forever to ll six wooden pails. All the while
Abel’s women waited, their faces shadowed by their cowls. They are
doing it all wrong. Real serving girls were always teasing the
potboys, irting with the cooks, wheedling a taste of this, a bite of
that. Rowan and her scheming sisters did not want to attract notice,
but their sullen silence soon had the guards giving them queer
looks. “Where’s Maisie and Jez and t’other girls?” one asked Theon.
“The usual ones.”
“Lady Arya was displeased with them,” he lied. “Her water was
cold before it reached the tub last time.”
The hot water lled the air with clouds of steam, melting the
snow akes as they came drifting down. Back through the maze of
ice-walled trenches went the procession. With every sloshing step
the water cooled. The passages were clogged with troops: armored
knights in woolen surcoats and fur cloaks, men-at-arms with spears
across their shoulders, archers carrying unstrung bows and sheaves
of arrows, freeriders, grooms leading warhorses. The Frey men
wore the badge of the two towers, those from White Harbor
displayed merman and trident. They shouldered through the storm
in opposite directions and eyed each other warily as they passed,
but no swords were drawn. Not here. It may be di erent out there in
the woods.
Half a dozen seasoned Dreadfort men guarded the doors of the
Great Keep. “Another bloody bath?” said their serjeant when he saw
the pails of steaming water. He had his hands tucked up into his
armpits against the cold. “She had a bath last night. How dirty can
one woman get in her own bed?”
Dirtier than you know, when you share that bed with Ramsay, Theon
thought, remembering the wedding night and the things that he and
Jeyne had been made to do. “Lord Ramsay’s command.”
“Get in there, then, before the water freezes,” the serjeant said.
Two of the guards pushed open the double doors.
The entryway was nigh as cold as the air outside. Holly kicked
snow from her boots and lowered the hood of her cloak. “I thought
that would be harder.” Her breath frosted the air.

“There are more guards upstairs at m’lord’s bedchamber,” Theon
warned her. “Ramsay’s men.” He dare not call them the Bastard’s
Boys, not here. You never knew who might be listening. “Keep your
heads down and your hoods up.”
“Do as he says, Holly,” Rowan said. “There’s some will know
your face. We don’t need that trouble.”
Theon led the way up the stairs. I have climbed these steps a
thousand times before. As a boy he would run up; descending, he
would take the steps three at a time, leaping. Once he leapt right
into Old Nan and knocked her to the oor. That earned him the
worst thrashing he ever had at Winterfell, though it was almost
tender compared to the beatings his brothers used to give him back
on Pyke. He and Robb had fought many a heroic battle on these
steps, slashing at one another with wooden swords. Good training,
that; it brought home how hard it was to ght your way up a spiral
stair against determined opposition. Ser Rodrik liked to say that one
good man could hold a hundred, ghting down.
That was long ago, though. They were all dead now. Jory, old Ser
Rodrik, Lord Eddard, Harwin and Hullen, Cayn and Desmond and
Fat Tom, Alyn with his dreams of knighthood, Mikken who had
given him his rst real sword. Even Old Nan, like as not.
And Robb. Robb who had been more a brother to Theon than any
son born of Balon Greyjoy’s loins. Murdered at the Red Wedding,
butchered by the Freys. I should have been with him. Where was I? I
should have died with him.
Theon stopped so suddenly that Willow almost plowed into his
back. The door to Ramsay’s bedchamber was before him. And
guarding it were two of the Bastard’s Boys, Sour Alyn and Grunt.
The old gods must wish us well. Grunt had no tongue and Sour Alyn
had no wits, Lord Ramsay liked to say. One was brutal, the other
mean, but both had spent most of their lives in service at the
Dreadfort. They did as they were told.
“I have hot water for the Lady Arya,” Theon told them.
“Try a wash yourself, Reek,” said Sour Alyn. “You smell like
horse piss.” Grunt grunted in agreement. Or perhaps that noise was

meant to be a laugh. But Alyn unlocked the door to the
bedchamber, and Theon waved the women through.
No day had dawned inside this room. Shadows covered all. One
last log crackled feebly amongst the dying embers in the hearth,
and a candle ickered on the table beside a rumpled, empty bed.
The girl is gone, Theon thought. She has thrown herself out a window in
despair. But the windows here were shuttered against the storm,
sealed up by crusts of blown snow and frost. “Where is she?” Holly
asked. Her sisters emptied their pails into the big round wooden
tub. Frenya shut the chamber door and put her back against it.
“Where is she?” Holly said again. Outside a horn was blowing. A
trumpet. The Freys, assembling for battle. Theon could feel an itching
in his missing ngers.
Then he saw her. She was huddled in the darkest corner of the
bedchamber, on the oor, curled up in a ball beneath a pile of
wolfskins. Theon might never have spotted her but for the way she
trembled. Jeyne had pulled the furs up over herself to hide. From
us? Or was she expecting her lord husband? The thought that Ramsay
might be coming made him want to scream. “My lady.” Theon could
not bring himself to call her Arya and dare not call her Jeyne. “No
need to hide. These are friends.”
The furs stirred. An eye peered out, shining with tears. Dark, too
dark. A brown eye. “Theon?”
“Lady Arya.” Rowan moved closer. “You must come with us, and
quickly. We’ve come to take you to your brother.”
“Brother?” The girl’s face emerged from underneath the
wolfskins. “I … I have no brothers.”
She has forgotten who she is. She has forgotten her name. “That’s so,”
said Theon, “but you had brothers once. Three of them. Robb and
Bran and Rickon.”
“They’re dead. I have no brothers now.”
“You have a half-brother,” Rowan said. “Lord Crow, he is.”
“Jon Snow?”
“We’ll take you to him, but you must come at once.”
Jeyne pulled her wolfskins up to her chin. “No. This is some trick.
It’s him, it’s my … my lord, my sweet lord, he sent you, this is just

some test to make sure that I love him. I do, I do, I love him more
than anything.” A tear ran down her cheek. “Tell him, you tell him.
I’ll do what he wants … whatever he wants … with him or … or
with the dog or … please … he doesn’t need to cut my feet o , I
won’t try to run away, not ever, I’ll give him sons, I swear it, I
swear it …”
Rowan whistled softly. “Gods curse the man.”
“I’m a good girl,” Jeyne whimpered. “They trained me.”
Willow scowled. “Someone stop her crying. That guard was mute,
not deaf. They’re going to hear.”
“Get her up, turncloak.” Holly had her knife in hand. “Get her up
or I will. We have to go. Get the little cunt up on her feet and shake
some courage into her.”
“And if she screams?” said Rowan.
We are all dead, Theon thought. I told them this was folly, but none
of them would listen. Abel had doomed them. All singers were halfmad. In songs, the hero always saved the maiden from the
monster’s castle, but life was not a song, no more than Jeyne was
Arya Stark. Her eyes are the wrong color. And there are no heroes here,
only whores. Even so, he knelt beside her, pulled down the furs,
touched her cheek. “You know me. I’m Theon, you remember. I
know you too. I know your name.”
“My name?” She shook her head. “My name … it’s …”
He put a nger to her lips. “We can talk about that later. You
need to be quiet now. Come with us. With me. We will take you
away from here. Away from him.”
Her eyes widened. “Please,” she whispered. “Oh, please.”
Theon slipped his hand through hers. The stumps of his lost
ngers tingled as he drew the girl to her feet. The wolfskins fell
away from her. Underneath them she was naked, her small pale
breasts covered with teeth marks. He heard one of the women suck
in her breath. Rowan thrust a bundle of clothes into his hands. “Get
her dressed. It’s cold outside.” Squirrel had stripped down to her
smallclothes, and was rooting through a carved cedar chest in
search of something warmer. In the end she settled for one of Lord

Ramsay’s quilted doublets and a well-worn pair of breeches that
apped about her legs like a ship’s sails in a storm.
With Rowan’s help, Theon got Jeyne Poole into Squirrel’s clothes.
If the gods are good and the guards are blind, she may pass. “Now we
are going out and down the steps,” Theon told the girl. “Keep your
head down and your hood up. Follow Holly. Don’t run, don’t cry,
don’t speak, don’t look anyone in the eye.”
“Stay close to me,” Jeyne said. “Don’t leave me.”
“I will be right beside you,” Theon promised as Squirrel slipped
into Lady Arya’s bed and pulled the blanket up.
Frenya opened the bedchamber door.
“You give her a good wash, Reek?” asked Sour Alyn as they
emerged. Grunt gave Willow’s breast a squeeze as she went by.
They were fortunate in his choice. If the man had touched Jeyne,
she might have screamed. Then Holly would have opened his throat
for him with the knife hidden up her sleeve. Willow simply twisted
away and past him.
For a moment Theon felt almost giddy. They never looked. They
never saw. We walked the girl right by them!
But on the steps the fear returned. What if they met Skinner or
Damon Dance-for-Me or Steelshanks Walton? Or Ramsay himself?
Gods save me, not Ramsay, anyone but him. What use was it to
smuggle the girl out of her bedchamber? They were still inside the
castle, with every gate closed and barred and the battlements thick
with sentries. Like as not, the guards outside the keep would stop
them. Holly and her knife would be of small use against six men in
mail with swords and spears.
But the guards outside were huddled by the doors, backs turned
against the icy wind and blown snow. Even the serjeant did not
spare them more than a quick glance. Theon felt a stab of pity for
him and his men. Ramsay would ay them all when he learned his
bride was gone, and what he would do to Grunt and Sour Alyn did
not bear thinking about.
Not ten yards from the door, Rowan dropped her empty pail, and
her sisters did likewise. The Great Keep was already lost to sight
behind them. The yard was a white wilderness, full of half-heard

sounds that echoed strangely amidst the storm. The icy trenches
rose around them, knee high, then waist high, then higher than
their heads. They were in the heart of Winterfell with the castle all
around them, but no sign of it could be seen. They might have
easily been lost amidst the Land of Always Winter, a thousand
leagues beyond the Wall. “It’s cold,” Jeyne Poole whimpered as she
stumbled along at Theon’s side.
And soon to be colder. Beyond the castle walls, winter was waiting
with its icy teeth. If we get that far. “This way,” he said when they
came to a junction where three trenches crossed.
“Frenya, Holly, go with them,” Rowan said. “We will be along
with Abel. Do not wait for us.” And with that, she whirled and
plunged into the snow, toward the Great Hall. Willow and Myrtle
hurried after her, cloaks snapping in the wind.
Madder and madder, thought Theon Greyjoy. Escape had seemed
unlikely with all six of Abel’s women; with only two, it seemed
impossible. But they had gone too far to return the girl to her
bedchamber and pretend none of this had ever happened. Instead he
took Jeyne by the arm and drew her down the pathway to the
Battlements Gate. Only a halfgate, he reminded himself. Even if the
guards let us pass, there is no way through the outer wall. On other
nights, the guards had allowed Theon through, but all those times
he’d come alone. He would not pass so easily with three serving
girls in tow, and if the guards looked beneath Jeyne’s hood and
recognized Lord Ramsay’s bride …
The passage twisted to the left. There before them, behind a veil
of falling snow, yawned the Battlements Gate, anked by a pair of
guards. In their wool and fur and leather, they looked as big as
bears. The spears they held were eight feet tall. “Who goes there?”
one called out. Theon did not recognize the voice. Most of the man’s
features were covered by the scarf about his face. Only his eyes
could be seen. “Reek, is that you?”
Yes, he meant to say. Instead he heard himself reply, “Theon
Greyjoy. I … I have brought some women for you.”
“You poor boys must be freezing,” said Holly. “Here, let me
warm you up.” She slipped past the guard’s spearpoint and reached

up to his face, pulling loose the half-frozen scarf to plant a kiss upon
his mouth. And as their lips touched, her blade slid through the
meat of his neck, just below the ear. Theon saw the man’s eyes
widen. There was blood on Holly’s lips as she stepped back, and
blood dribbling from his mouth as he fell.
The second guard was still gaping in confusion when Frenya
grabbed the shaft of his spear. They struggled for a moment,
tugging, till the woman wrenched the weapon from his ngers and
clouted him across the temple with its butt. As he stumbled
backwards, she spun the spear around and drove its point through
his belly with a grunt.
Jeyne Poole let out a shrill, high scream.
“Oh, bloody shit,” said Holly. “That will bring the kneelers down
on us, and no mistake. Run!”
Theon clapped one hand around Jeyne’s mouth, grabbed her
about the waist with the other, and pulled her past the dead and
dying guards, through the gate, and over the frozen moat. And
perhaps the old gods were still watching over them; the drawbridge
had been left down, to allow Winterfell’s defenders to cross to and
from the outer battlements more quickly. From behind them came
alarums and the sounds of running feet, then the blast of a trumpet
from the ramparts of the inner wall.
On the drawbridge, Frenya stopped and turned. “Go on. I will
hold the kneelers here.” The bloody spear was still clutched in her
big hands.
Theon was staggering by the time he reached the foot of the stair.
He slung the girl over his shoulder and began to climb. Jeyne had
ceased to struggle by then, and she was such a little thing
besides … but the steps were slick with ice beneath soft powdery
snow, and halfway up he lost his footing and went down hard on
one knee. The pain was so bad he almost lost the girl, and for half a
heartbeat he feared this was as far as he would go. But Holly pulled
him back onto his feet, and between the two of them they nally
got Jeyne up to the battlements.
As he leaned up against a merlon, breathing hard, Theon could
hear the shouting from below, where Frenya was ghting half a

dozen guardsmen in the snow. “Which way?” he shouted at Holly.
“Where do we go now? How do we get out?”
The fury on Holly’s face turned to horror. “Oh, fuck me bloody.
The rope.” She gave a hysterical laugh. “Frenya has the rope.” Then
she grunted and grabbed her stomach. A quarrel had sprouted from
her gut. When she wrapped a hand around it, blood leaked through
her ngers. “Kneelers on the inner wall …” she gasped, before a
second shaft appeared between her breasts. Holly grabbed for the
nearest merlon and fell. The snow that she’d knocked loose buried
her with a soft thump.
Shouts rang out from their left. Jeyne Poole was staring down at
Holly as the snowy blanket over her turned from white to red. On
the inner wall the crossbowman would be reloading, Theon knew.
He started right, but there were men coming from that direction
too, racing toward them with swords in hand. Far o to the north
he heard a warhorn sound. Stannis, he thought wildly. Stannis is our
only hope, if we can reach him. The wind was howling, and he and
the girl were trapped.
The crossbow snapped. A bolt passed within a foot of him,
shattering the crust of frozen snow that had plugged the closest
crenel. Of Abel, Rowan, Squirrel, and the others there was no sign.
He and the girl were alone. If they take us alive, they will deliver us to
Ramsay.
Theon grabbed Jeyne about the waist and jumped.

DAENERYS

T

he sky was a merciless blue, without a wisp of cloud in sight.
The bricks will soon be baking in the sun, thought Dany. Down on the
sands, the ghters will feel the heat through the soles of their sandals.
Jhiqui slipped Dany’s silk robe from her shoulders and Irri helped
her into her bathing pool. The light of the rising sun shimmered on
the water, broken by the shadow of the persimmon tree. “Even if
the pits must open, must Your Grace go yourself?” asked Missandei
as she was washing the queen’s hair.
“Half of Meereen will be there to see me, gentle heart.”
“Your Grace,” said Missandei, “this one begs leave to say that half
of Meereen will be there to watch men bleed and die.”
She is not wrong, the queen knew, but it makes no matter.
Soon Dany was as clean as she was ever going to be. She pushed
herself to her feet, splashing softly. Water ran down her legs and
beaded on her breasts. The sun was climbing up the sky, and her
people would soon be gathering. She would rather have drifted in
the fragrant pool all day, eating iced fruit o silver trays and
dreaming of a house with a red door, but a queen belongs to her
people, not to herself.
Jhiqui brought a soft towel to pat her dry. “Khaleesi, which tokar
will you want today?” asked Irri.
“The yellow silk.” The queen of the rabbits could not be seen
without her oppy ears. The yellow silk was light and cool, and it
would be blistering down in the pit. The red sands will burn the soles
of those about to die. “And over it, the long red veils.” The veils

would keep the wind from blowing sand into her mouth. And the red
will hide any blood spatters.
As Jhiqui brushed Dany’s hair and Irri painted the queen’s nails,
they chattered happily about the day’s matches. Missandei
reemerged. “Your Grace. The king bids you join him when you are
dressed. And Prince Quentyn has come with his Dornish Men. They
beg a word, if that should please you.”
Little about this day shall please me. “Some other day.”
At the base of the Great Pyramid, Ser Barristan awaited them
beside an ornate open palanquin, surrounded by Brazen Beasts. Ser
Grandfather, Dany thought. Despite his age, he looked tall and
handsome in the armor that she’d given him. “I would be happier if
you had Unsullied guards about you today, Your Grace,” the old
knight said, as Hizdahr went to greet his cousin. “Half of these
Brazen Beasts are untried freedmen.” And the other half are
Meereenese of doubtful loyalty, he left unsaid. Selmy mistrusted all
the Meereenese, even shavepates.
“And untried they shall remain unless we try them.”
“A mask can hide many things, Your Grace. Is the man behind the
owl mask the same owl who guarded you yesterday and the day
before? How can we know?”
“How should Meereen ever come to trust the Brazen Beasts if I do
not? There are good brave men beneath those masks. I put my life
into their hands.” Dany smiled for him. “You fret too much, ser. I
will have you beside me, what other protection do I need?”
“I am one old man, Your Grace.”
“Strong Belwas will be with me as well.”
“As you say.” Ser Barristan lowered his voice. “Your Grace. We
set the woman Meris free, as you commanded. Before she went, she
asked to speak with you. I met with her instead. She claims this
Tattered Prince meant to bring the Windblown over to your cause
from the beginning. That he sent her here to treat with you secretly,
but the Dornishmen unmasked them and betrayed them before she
could make her own approach.”
Treachery on treachery, the queen thought wearily. Is there no end
to it? “How much of this do you believe, ser?”

“Little and less, Your Grace, but those were her words.”
“Will they come over to us, if need be?”
“She says they will. But for a price.”
“Pay it.” Meereen needed iron, not gold.
“The Tattered Prince will want more than coin, Your Grace. Meris
says that he wants Pentos.”
“Pentos?” Her eyes narrowed. “How can I give him Pentos? It is
half a world away.”
“He would be willing to wait, the woman Meris suggested. Until
we march for Westeros.”
And if I never march for Westeros? “Pentos belongs to the Pentoshi.
And Magister Illyrio is in Pentos. He who arranged my marriage to
Khal Drogo and gave me my dragon eggs. Who sent me you, and
Belwas, and Groleo. I owe him much and more. I will not repay that
debt by giving his city to some sellsword. No.”
Ser Barristan inclined his head. “Your Grace is wise.”
“Have you ever seen such an auspicious day, my love?” Hizdahr
zo Loraq commented when she rejoined him. He helped Dany up
onto the palanquin, where two tall thrones stood side by side.
“Auspicious for you, perhaps. Less so for those who must die
before the sun goes down.”
“All men must die,” said Hizdahr, “but not all can die in glory,
with the cheers of the city ringing in their ears.” He lifted a hand to
the soldiers on the doors. “Open.”
The plaza that fronted on her pyramid was paved with bricks of
many colors, and the heat rose from them in shimmering waves.
People swarmed everywhere. Some rode litters or sedan chairs,
some forked donkeys, many were afoot. Nine of every ten were
moving westward, down the broad brick thoroughfare to Daznak’s
Pit. When they caught sight of the palanquin emerging from the
pyramid, a cheer went up from those nearest and spread across the
plaza. How queer, the queen thought. They cheer me on the same
plaza where I once impaled one hundred sixty-three Great Masters.
A great drum led the royal procession to clear their way through
the streets. Between each beat, a shavepate herald in a shirt of
polished copper disks cried for the crowd to part. BOMM. “They

come!” BOMM. “Make way!” BOMM. “The queen!” BOMM. “The
king!” BOMM. Behind the drum marched Brazen Beasts four abreast.
Some carried cudgels, others staves; all wore pleated skirts, leathern
sandals, and patchwork cloaks sewn from squares of many colors to
echo the many-colored bricks of Meereen. Their masks gleamed in
the sun: boars and bulls, hawks and herons, lions and tigers and
bears, fork-tongued serpents and hideous basilisks.
Strong Belwas, who had no love for horses, walked in front of
them in his studded vest, his scarred brown belly jiggling with
every step. Irri and Jhiqui followed ahorse, with Aggo and Rakharo,
then Reznak in an ornate sedan chair with an awning to keep the
sun o his head. Ser Barristan Selmy rode at Dany’s side, his armor
ashing in the sun. A long cloak owed from his shoulders,
bleached as white as bone. On his left arm was a large white shield.
A little farther back was Quentyn Martell, the Dornish prince, with
his two companions.
The column crept slowly down the long brick street. BOMM.
“They come!” BOMM. “Our queen. Our king.” BOMM. “Make way.”
Dany could hear her handmaids arguing behind her, debating who
was going to win the day’s nal match. Jhiqui favored the gigantic
Goghor, who looked more bull than man, even to the bronze ring in
his nose. Irri insisted that Belaquo Bonebreaker’s ail would prove
the giant’s undoing. My handmaids are Dothraki, she told herself.
Death rides with every khalasar. The day she wed Khal Drogo, the
arakhs had ashed at her wedding feast, and men had died whilst
others drank and mated. Life and death went hand in hand amongst
the horselords, and a sprinkling of blood was thought to bless a
marriage. Her new marriage would soon be drenched in blood. How
blessed it would be.
BOMM, BOMM, BOMM, BOMM, BOMM, BOMM, came the
drumbeats, faster than before, suddenly angry and impatient. Ser
Barristan drew his sword as the column ground to an abrupt halt
between the pink-and-white pyramid of Pahl and the green-andblack of Naqqan.
Dany turned. “Why are we stopped?”
Hizdahr stood. “The way is blocked.”

A palanquin lay overturned athwart their way. One of its bearers
had collapsed to the bricks, overcome by heat. “Help that man,”
Dany commanded. “Get him o the street before he’s stepped on
and give him food and water. He looks as though he has not eaten
in a fortnight.”
Ser Barristan glanced uneasily to left and right. Ghiscari faces
were visible on the terraces, looking down with cool and
unsympathetic eyes. “Your Grace, I do not like this halt. This may
be some trap. The Sons of the Harpy—”
“—have been tamed,” declared Hizdahr zo Loraq. “Why should
they seek to harm my queen when she has taken me for her king
and consort? Now help that man, as my sweet queen has
commanded.” He took Dany by the hand and smiled.
The Brazen Beasts did as they were bid. Dany watched them at
their work. “Those bearers were slaves before I came. I made them
free. Yet that palanquin is no lighter.”
“True,” said Hizdahr, “but those men are paid to bear its weight
now. Before you came, that man who fell would have an overseer
standing over him, stripping the skin o his back with a whip.
Instead he is being given aid.”
It was true. A Brazen Beast in a boar mask had o ered the litter
bearer a skin of water. “I suppose I must be thankful for small
victories,” the queen said.
“One step, then the next, and soon we shall be running. Together
we shall make a new Meereen.” The street ahead had nally
cleared. “Shall we continue on?”
What could she do but nod? One step, then the next, but where is it
I’m going?
At the gates of Daznak’s Pit two towering bronze warriors stood
locked in mortal combat. One wielded a sword, the other an axe;
the sculptor had depicted them in the act of killing one another,
their blades and bodies forming an archway overhead.
The mortal art, thought Dany.
She had seen the ghting pits many times from her terrace. The
small ones dotted the face of Meereen like pockmarks; the larger
were weeping sores, red and raw. None compared to this one,

though. Strong Belwas and Ser Barristan fell in to either side as she
and her lord husband passed beneath the bronzes, to emerge at the
top of a great brick bowl ringed by descending tiers of benches,
each a di erent color.
Hizdahr zo Loraq led her down, through black, purple, blue,
green, white, yellow, and orange to the red, where the scarlet
bricks took the color of the sands below. Around them peddlers
were selling dog sausages, roast onions, and unborn puppies on a
stick, but Dany had no need of such. Hizdahr had stocked their box
with agons of chilled wine and sweetwater, with gs, dates,
melons, and pomegranates, with pecans and peppers and a big bowl
of honeyed locusts. Strong Belwas bellowed, “Locusts!” as he seized
the bowl and began to crunch them by the handful.
“Those are very tasty,” advised Hizdahr. “You ought to try a few
yourself, my love. They are rolled in spice before the honey, so they
are sweet and hot at once.”
“That explains the way Belwas is sweating,” Dany said. “I believe
I will content myself with gs and dates.”
Across the pit the Graces sat in owing robes of many colors,
clustered around the austere gure of Galazza Galare, who alone
amongst them wore the green. The Great Masters of Meereen
occupied the red and orange benches. The women were veiled, and
the men had brushed and lacquered their hair into horns and hands
and spikes. Hizdahr’s kin of the ancient line of Loraq seemed to
favor tokars of purple and indigo and lilac, whilst those of Pahl were
striped in pink and white. The envoys from Yunkai were all in
yellow and lled the box beside the king’s, each of them with his
slaves and servants. Meereenese of lesser birth crowded the upper
tiers, more distant from the carnage. The black and purple benches,
highest and most distant from the sand, were crowded with
freedmen and other common folk. The sellswords had been placed
up there as well, Daenerys saw, their captains seated right amongst
the common soldiers. She spied Brown Ben’s weathered face and
Bloodbeard’s ery red whiskers and long braids.
Her lord husband stood and raised his hands. “Great Masters! My
queen has come this day, to show her love for you, her people. By

her grace and with her leave, I give you now your mortal art.
Meereen! Let Queen Daenerys hear your love!”
Ten thousand throats roared out their thanks; then twenty
thousand; then all. They did not call her name, which few of them
could pronounce. “Mother!” they cried instead; in the old dead
tongue of Ghis, the word was Mhysa! They stamped their feet and
slapped their bellies and shouted, “Mhysa, Mhysa, Mhysa,” until the
whole pit seemed to tremble. Dany let the sound wash over her. I
am not your mother, she might have shouted, back, I am the mother of
your slaves, of every boy who ever died upon these sands whilst you
gorged on honeyed locusts. Behind her, Reznak leaned in to whisper
in her ear, “Magni cence, hear how they love you!”
No, she knew, they love their mortal art. When the cheers began to
ebb, she allowed to herself to sit. Their box was in the shade, but
her head was pounding. “Jhiqui,” she called, “sweet water, if you
would. My throat is very dry.”
“Khrazz will have the honor of the day’s rst kill,” Hizdahr told
her. “There has never been a better ghter.”
“Strong Belwas was better,” insisted Strong Belwas.
Khrazz was Meereenese, of humble birth—a tall man with a brush
of sti red-black hair running down the center of his head. His foe
was an ebon-skinned spearman from the Summer Isles whose thrusts
kept Khrazz at bay for a time, but once he slipped inside the spear
with his shortsword, only butchery remained. After it was done,
Khrazz cut the heart from the black man, raised it above his head
red and dripping, and took a bite from it.
“Khrazz believes the hearts of brave men make him stronger,”
said Hizdahr. Jhiqui murmured her approval. Dany had once eaten a
stallion’s heart to give strength to her unborn son … but that had
not saved Rhaego when the maegi murdered him in her womb. Three
treasons shall you know. She was the rst, Jorah was the second, Brown
Ben Plumm the third. Was she done with betrayals?
“Ah,” said Hizdahr, pleased. “Now comes the Spotted Cat. See
how he moves, my queen. A poem on two feet.”
The foe Hizdahr had found for the walking poem was as tall as
Goghor and as broad as Belwas, but slow. They were ghting six

feet from Dany’s box when the Spotted Cat hamstrung him. As the
man stumbled to his knees, the Cat put a foot on his back and a
hand around his head and opened his throat from ear to ear. The red
sands drank his blood, the wind his nal words. The crowd
screamed its approval.
“Bad ghting, good dying,” said Strong Belwas. “Strong Belwas
hates it when they scream.” He had nished all the honeyed locusts.
He gave a belch and took a swig of wine.
Pale Qartheen, black Summer Islanders, copper-skinned Dothraki,
Tyroshi with blue beards, Lamb Men, Jogos Nhai, sullen Braavosi,
brindle-skinned half-men from the jungles of Sothoyros—from the
ends of the world they came to die in Daznak’s Pit. “This one shows
much promise, my sweet,” Hizdahr said of a Lysene youth with long
blond hair that uttered in the wind … but his foe grabbed a
handful of that hair, pulled the boy o -balance, and gutted him. In
death he looked even younger than he had with blade in hand. “A
boy,” said Dany. “He was only a boy.”
“Six-and-ten,” Hizdahr insisted. “A man grown, who freely chose
to risk his life for gold and glory. No children die today in Daznak’s,
as my gentle queen in her wisdom has decreed.”
Another small victory. Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she
told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.
Daenerys would have prohibited contests between women as well,
but Barsena Blackhair protested that she had as much right to risk
her life as any man. The queen had also wished to forbid the follies,
comic combats where cripples, dwarfs, and crones had at one
another with cleavers, torches, and hammers (the more inept the
ghters, the funnier the folly, it was thought), but Hizdahr said his
people would love her more if she laughed with them, and argued
that without such frolics, the cripples, dwarfs, and crones would
starve. So Dany had relented.
It had been the custom to sentence criminals to the pits; that
practice she agreed might resume, but only for certain crimes.
“Murderers and rapers may be forced to ght, and all those who
persist in slaving, but not thieves or debtors.”

Beasts were still allowed, though. Dany watched an elephant
make short work of a pack of six red wolves. Next a bull was set
against a bear in a bloody battle that left both animals torn and
dying. “The esh is not wasted,” said Hizdahr. “The butchers use the
carcasses to make a healthful stew for the hungry. Any man who
presents himself at the Gates of Fate may have a bowl.”
“A good law,” Dany said. You have so few of them. “We must make
certain that this tradition is continued.”
After the beast ghts came a mock battle, pitting six men on foot
against six horsemen, the former armed with shields and
longswords, the latter with Dothraki arakhs. The mock knights were
clad in mail hauberks, whilst the mock Dothraki wore no armor. At
rst the riders seemed to have the advantage, riding down two of
their foes and slashing the ear from a third, but then the surviving
knights began to attack the horses, and one by one the riders were
unmounted and slain, to Jhiqui’s great disgust. “That was no true
khalasar,” she said.
“These carcasses are not destined for your healthful stew, I would
hope,” Dany said, as the slain were being removed.
“The horses, yes,” said Hizdahr. “The men, no.”
“Horsemeat and onions makes you strong,” said Belwas.
The battle was followed by the day’s rst folly, a tilt between a
pair of jousting dwarfs, presented by one of the Yunkish lords that
Hizdahr had invited to the games. One rode a hound, the other a
sow. Their wooden armor had been freshly painted, so one bore the
stag of the usurper Robert Baratheon, the other the golden lion of
House Lannister. That was for her sake, plainly. Their antics soon
had Belwas snorting laughter, though Dany’s smile was faint and
forced. When the dwarf in red tumbled from the saddle and began
to chase his sow across the sands, whilst the dwarf on the dog
galloped after him, whapping at his buttocks with a wooden sword,
she said, “This is sweet and silly, but …”
“Be patient, my sweet,” said Hizdahr. “They are about to loose
the lions.”
Daenerys gave him a quizzical look. “Lions?”
“Three of them. The dwarfs will not expect them.”

She frowned. “The dwarfs have wooden swords. Wooden armor.
How do you expect them to ght lions?”
“Badly,” said Hizdahr, “though perhaps they will surprise us.
More like they will shriek and run about and try to climb out of the
pit. That is what makes this a folly.”
Dany was not pleased. “I forbid it.”
“Gentle queen. You do not want to disappoint your people.”
“You swore to me that the ghters would be grown men who had
freely consented to risk their lives for gold and honor. These dwarfs
did not consent to battle lions with wooden swords. You will stop it.
Now.”
The king’s mouth tightened. For a heartbeat Dany thought she
saw a ash of anger in those placid eyes. “As you command.”
Hizdahr beckoned to his pitmaster. “No lions,” he said when the
man trotted over, whip in hand.
“Not one, Magni cence? Where is the fun in that?”
“My queen has spoken. The dwarfs will not be harmed.”
“The crowd will not like it.”
“Then bring on Barsena. That should appease them.”
“Your Worship knows best.” The pitmaster snapped his whip and
shouted out commands. The dwarfs were herded o , pig and dog
and all, as the spectators hissed their disapproval and pelted them
with stones and rotten fruit.
A roar went up as Barsena Blackhair strode onto the sands, naked
save for breechclout and sandals. A tall, dark woman of some thirty
years, she moved with the feral grace of a panther. “Barsena is
much loved,” Hizdahr said, as the sound swelled to ll the pit. “The
bravest woman I have ever seen.”
Strong Belwas said, “Fighting girls is not so brave. Fighting
Strong Belwas would be brave.”
“Today she ghts a boar,” said Hizdahr.
Aye, thought Dany, because you could not nd a woman to face her,
no matter how plump the purse. “And not with a wooden sword, it
would seem.”
The boar was a huge beast, with tusks as long as a man’s forearm
and small eyes that swam with rage. She wondered whether the

boar that had killed Robert Baratheon had looked as erce. A terrible
creature and a terrible death. For a heartbeat she felt almost sorry for
the Usurper.
“Barsena is very quick,” Reznak said. “She will dance with the
boar, Magni cence, and slice him when he passes near her. He will
be awash in blood before he falls, you shall see.”
It began just as he said. The boar charged, Barsena spun aside, her
blade ashed silver in the sun. “She needs a spear,” Ser Barristan
said, as Barsena vaulted over the beast’s second charge. “That is no
way to ght a boar.” He sounded like someone’s fussy old
grandsire, just as Daario was always saying.
Barsena’s blade was running red, but the boar soon stopped. He is
smarter than a bull, Dany realized. He will not charge again. Barsena
came to the same realization. Shouting, she edged closer to the
boar, tossing her knife from hand to hand. When the beast backed
away, she cursed and slashed at his snout, trying to provoke
him … and succeeding. This time her leap came an instant too late,
and a tusk ripped her left leg open from knee to crotch.
A moan went up from thirty thousand throats. Clutching at her
torn leg, Barsena dropped her knife and tried to hobble o , but
before she had gone two feet the boar was on her once again. Dany
turned her face away. “Was that brave enough?” she asked Strong
Belwas, as a scream rang out across the sand.
“Fighting pigs is brave, but it is not brave to scream so loud. It
hurts Strong Belwas in the ears.” The eunuch rubbed his swollen
stomach, crisscrossed with old white scars. “It makes Strong Belwas
sick in his belly too.”
The boar buried his snout in Barsena’s belly and began rooting
out her entrails. The smell was more than the queen could stand.
The heat, the ies, the shouts from the crowd … I cannot breathe.
She lifted her veil and let it utter away. She took her tokar o as
well. The pearls rattled softly against one another as she unwound
the silk.
“Khaleesi?” Irri asked. “What are you doing?”
“Taking o my oppy ears.” A dozen men with boar spears came
trotting out onto the sand to drive the boar away from the corpse

and back to his pen. The pitmaster was with them, a long barbed
whip in his hand. As he snapped it at the boar, the queen rose. “Ser
Barristan, will you see me safely back to my garden?”
Hizdahr looked confused. “There is more to come. A folly, six old
women, and three more matches. Belaquo and Goghor!”
“Belaquo will win,” Irri declared. “It is known.”
“It is not known,” Jhiqui said. “Belaquo will die.”
“One will die, or the other will,” said Dany. “And the one who
lives will die some other day. This was a mistake.”
“Strong Belwas ate too many locusts.” There was a queasy look
on Belwas’s broad brown face. “Strong Belwas needs milk.”
Hizdahr ignored the eunuch. “Magni cence, the people of
Meereen have come to celebrate our union. You heard them
cheering you. Do not cast away their love.”
“It was my oppy ears they cheered, not me. Take me from this
abbatoir, husband.” She could hear the boar snorting, the shouts of
the spearmen, the crack of the pitmaster’s whip.
“Sweet lady, no. Stay only a while longer. For the folly, and one
last match. Close your eyes, no one will see. They will be watching
Belaquo and Ghogor. This is no time for—”
A shadow rippled across his face.
The tumult and the shouting died. Ten thousand voices stilled.
Every eye turned skyward. A warm wind brushed Dany’s cheeks,
and above the beating of her heart she heard the sound of wings.
Two spearmen dashed for shelter. The pitmaster froze where he
stood. The boar went snu ing back to Barsena. Strong Belwas gave
a moan, stumbled from his seat, and fell to his knees.
Above them all the dragon turned, dark against the sun. His scales
were black, his eyes and horns and spinal plates blood red. Ever the
largest of her three, in the wild Drogon had grown larger still. His
wings stretched twenty feet from tip to tip, black as jet. He apped
them once as he swept back above the sands, and the sound was like
a clap of thunder. The boar raised his head, snorting … and ame
engulfed him, black re shot with red. Dany felt the wash of heat
thirty feet away. The beast’s dying scream sounded almost human.
Drogon landed on the carcass and sank his claws into the smoking

esh. As he began to feed, he made no distinction between Barsena
and the boar.
“Oh, gods,” moaned Reznak, “he’s eating her!” The seneschal
covered his mouth. Strong Belwas was retching noisily. A queer
look passed across Hizdahr zo Loraq’s long, pale face—part fear,
part lust, part rapture. He licked his lips. Dany could see the Pahls
streaming up the steps, clutching their tokars and tripping over the
fringes in their haste to be away. Others followed. Some ran,
shoving at one another. More stayed in their seats.
One man took it on himself to be a hero.
He was one of the spearmen sent out to drive the boar back to his
pen. Perhaps he was drunk, or mad. Perhaps he had loved Barsena
Blackhair from afar or had heard some whisper of the girl Hazzea.
Perhaps he was just some common man who wanted bards to sing
of him. He darted forward, his boar spear in his hands. Red sand
kicked up beneath his heels, and shouts rang out from the seats.
Drogon raised his head, blood dripping from his teeth. The hero
leapt onto his back and drove the iron spearpoint down at the base
of the dragon’s long scaled neck.
Dany and Drogon screamed as one.
The hero leaned into his spear, using his weight to twist the point
in deeper. Drogon arched upward with a hiss of pain. His tail lashed
sideways. She watched his head crane around at the end of that long
serpentine neck, saw his black wings unfold. The dragonslayer lost
his footing and went tumbling to the sand. He was trying to
struggle back to his feet when the dragon’s teeth closed hard around
his forearm. “No” was all the man had time to shout. Drogon
wrenched his arm from his shoulder and tossed it aside as a dog
might toss a rodent in a rat pit.
“Kill it,” Hizdahr zo Loraq shouted to the other spearmen. “Kill the
beast!”
Ser Barristan held her tightly. “Look away, Your Grace.”
“Let me go!” Dany twisted from his grasp. The world seemed to
slow as she cleared the parapet. When she landed in the pit she lost
a sandal. Running, she could feel the sand between her toes, hot and

rough. Ser Barristan was calling after her. Strong Belwas was still
vomiting. She ran faster.
The spearmen were running too. Some were rushing toward the
dragon, spears in hand. Others were rushing away, throwing down
their weapons as they ed. The hero was jerking on the sand, the
bright blood pouring from the ragged stump of his shoulder. His
spear remained in Drogon’s back, wobbling as the dragon beat his
wings. Smoke rose from the wound. As the other spears closed in,
the dragon spat re, bathing two men in black ame. His tail lashed
sideways and caught the pitmaster creeping up behind him,
breaking him in two. Another attacker stabbed at his eyes until the
dragon caught him in his jaws and tore his belly out. The
Meereenese were screaming, cursing, howling. Dany could hear
someone pounding after her. “Drogon,” she screamed. “Drogon.”
His head turned. Smoke rose between his teeth. His blood was
smoking too, where it dripped upon the ground. He beat his wings
again, sending up a choking storm of scarlet sand. Dany stumbled
into the hot red cloud, coughing. He snapped.
“No” was all that she had time to say. No, not me, don’t you know
me? The black teeth closed inches from her face. He meant to tear
my head o . The sand was in her eyes. She stumbled over the
pitmaster’s corpse and fell on her backside.
Drogon roared. The sound lled the pit. A furnace wind engulfed
her. The dragon’s long scaled neck stretched toward her. When his
mouth opened, she could see bits of broken bone and charred esh
between his black teeth. His eyes were molten. I am looking into hell,
but I dare not look away. She had never been so certain of anything.
If I run from him, he will burn me and devour me. In Westeros the
septons spoke of seven hells and seven heavens, but the Seven
Kingdoms and their gods were far away. If she died here, Dany
wondered, would the horse god of the Dothraki part the grass and
claim her for his starry khalasar, so she might ride the nightlands
beside her sun-and-stars? Or would the angry gods of Ghis send
their harpies to seize her soul and drag her down to torment?
Drogon roared full in her face, his breath hot enough to blister skin.

O to her right Dany heard Barristan Selmy shouting, “Me! Try me.
Over here. Me!”
In the smoldering red pits of Drogon’s eyes, Dany saw her own
re ection. How small she looked, how weak and frail and scared. I
cannot let him see my fear. She scrabbled in the sand, pushing against
the pitmaster’s corpse, and her ngers brushed against the handle of
his whip. Touching it made her feel braver. The leather was warm,
alive. Drogon roared again, the sound so loud that she almost
dropped the whip. His teeth snapped at her.
Dany hit him. “No,” she screamed, swinging the lash with all the
strength that she had in her. The dragon jerked his head back. “No,”
she screamed again. “NO!” The barbs raked along his snout. Drogon
rose, his wings covering her in shadow. Dany swung the lash at his
scaled belly, back and forth until her arm began to ache. His long
serpentine neck bent like an archer’s bow. With a hisssssss, he spat
black re down at her. Dany darted underneath the ames,
swinging the whip and shouting, “No, no, no. Get DOWN!” His
answering roar was full of fear and fury, full of pain. His wings beat
once, twice …
… and folded. The dragon gave one last hiss and stretched out
at upon his belly. Black blood was owing from the wound where
the spear had pierced him, smoking where it dripped onto the
scorched sands. He is re made esh, she thought, and so am I.
Daenerys Targaryen vaulted onto the dragon’s back, seized the
spear, and ripped it out. The point was half-melted, the iron red-hot,
glowing. She ung it aside. Drogon twisted under her, his muscles
rippling as he gathered his strength. The air was thick with sand.
Dany could not see, she could not breathe, she could not think. The
black wings cracked like thunder, and suddenly the scarlet sands
were falling away beneath her.
Dizzy, Dany closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she
glimpsed the Meereenese beneath her through a haze of tears and
dust, pouring up the steps and out into the streets.
The lash was still in her hand. She icked it against Drogon’s neck
and cried, “Higher!” Her other hand clutched at his scales, her
ngers scrabbling for purchase. Drogon’s wide black wings beat the

air. Dany could feel the heat of him between her thighs. Her heart
felt as if it were about to burst. Yes, she thought, yes, now, now, do
it, do it, take me, take me, FLY!

JON

H

e was not a tall man, Tormund Giantsbane, but the gods had
given him a broad chest and massive belly. Mance Rayder had
named him Tormund Horn-Blower for the power of his lungs, and
was wont to say that Tormund could laugh the snow o
mountaintops. In his wroth, his bellows reminded Jon of a
mammoth trumpeting.
That day Tormund bellowed often and loudly. He roared, he
shouted, he slammed his st against the table so hard that a agon
of water overturned and spilled. A horn of mead was never far from
his hand, so the spittle he sprayed when making threats was sweet
with honey. He called Jon Snow a craven, a liar, and a turncloak,
cursed him for a black-hearted buggering kneeler, a robber, and a
carrion crow, accused him of wanting to fuck the free folk up the
arse. Twice he ung his drinking horn at Jon’s head, though only
after he had emptied it. Tormund was not the sort of man to waste
good mead. Jon let it all wash over him. He never raised his own
voice nor answered threat with threat, but neither did he give more
ground than he had come prepared to give.
Finally, as the shadows of the afternoon grew long outside the
tent, Tormund Giantsbane—Tall-Talker, Horn-Blower, and Breaker
of Ice, Tormund Thunder st, Husband to Bears, Mead-King of
Ruddy Hall, Speaker to Gods and Father of Hosts—thrust out his
hand. “Done then, and may the gods forgive me. There’s a hundred
mothers never will, I know.”
Jon clasped the o ered hand. The words of his oath rang through
his head. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls.

I am the re that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn,
the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of
men. And for him a new refrain: I am the guard who opened the gates
and let the foe march through. He would have given much and more
to know that he was doing the right thing. But he had gone too far
to turn back. “Done and done,” he said.
Tormund’s grip was bone-crushing. That much had not changed
about him. The beard was the same as well, though the face under
that thicket of white hair had thinned considerably, and there were
deep lines graven in those ruddy cheeks. “Mance should have killed
you when he had the chance,” he said as he did his best to turn
Jon’s hand to pulp and bone. “Gold for gruel, and boys … a cruel
price. Whatever happened to that sweet lad I knew?”
They made him lord commander. “A fair bargain leaves both sides
unhappy, I’ve heard it said. Three days?”
“If I live that long. Some o’ my own will spit on me when they
hear these terms.” Tormund released Jon’s hand. “Your crows will
grumble too, if I know them. And I ought to. I have killed more o’
you black buggers than I can count.”
“It might be best if you did not mention that so loudly when you
come south of the Wall.”
“Har!” Tormund laughed. That had not changed either; he still
laughed easily and often. “Wise words. I’d not want you crows to
peck me to death.” He slapped Jon’s back. “When all my folk are
safe behind your Wall, we’ll share a bit o’ meat and mead. Till
then …” The wildling pulled o the band from his left arm and
tossed it at Jon, then did the same with its twin upon his right.
“Your rst payment. Had those from my father and him from his.
Now they’re yours, you thieving black bastard.”
The armbands were old gold, solid and heavy, engraved with the
ancient runes of the First Men. Tormund Giantsbane had worn them
as long as Jon had known him; they had seemed as much a part of
him as his beard. “The Braavosi will melt these down for the gold.
That seems a shame. Perhaps you ought to keep them.”
“No. I’ll not have it said that Tormund Thunder st made the free
folk give up their treasures whilst he kept his own.” He grinned.

“But I’ll keep the ring I wear about me member. Much bigger than
those little things. On you it’d be a torque.”
Jon had to laugh. “You never change.”
“Oh, I do.” The grin melted away like snow in summer. “I am not
the man I was at Ruddy Hall. Seen too much death, and worse
things too. My sons …” Grief twisted Tormund’s face. “Dormund
was cut down in the battle for the Wall, and him still half a boy.
One o’ your king’s knights did for him, some bastard all in grey
steel with moths upon his shield. I saw the cut, but my boy was
dead before I reached him. And Torwynd … it was the cold claimed
him. Always sickly, that one. He just up and died one night. The
worst o’ it, before we ever knew he’d died he rose pale with them
blue eyes. Had to see to him m’self. That was hard, Jon.” Tears
shone in his eyes. “He wasn’t much of a man, truth be told, but he’d
been me little boy once, and I loved him.”
Jon put a hand on his shoulder. “I am so sorry.”
“Why? Weren’t your doing. There’s blood on your hands, aye,
same as mine. But not his.” Tormund shook his head. “I still have
two strong sons.”
“Your daughter …?”
“Munda.” That brought Tormund’s smile back. “Took that
Longspear Ryk to husband, if you believe it. Boy’s got more cock
than sense, you ask me, but he treats her well enough. I told him if
he ever hurt her, I’d yank his member o and beat him bloody with
it.” He gave Jon another hearty slap. “Time you were going back.
Keep you any longer, they’re like to think we ate you.”
“Dawn, then. Three days from now. The boys rst.”
“I heard you the rst ten times, crow. A man’d think there was no
trust between us.” He spat. “Boys rst, aye. Mammoths go the long
way round. You make sure Eastwatch expects them. I’ll make sure
there’s no ghting, nor rushing at your bloody gate. Nice and
orderly we’ll be, ducklings in a row. And me the mother duck. Har!”
Tormund led Jon from his tent.
Outside the day was bright and cloudless. The sun had returned to
the sky after a fortnight’s absence, and to the south the Wall rose
blue-white and glittering. There was a saying Jon had heard from

the older men at Castle Black: the Wall has more moods than Mad
King Aerys, they’d say, or sometimes, the Wall has more moods than a
woman. On cloudy days it looked to be white rock. On moonless
nights it was as black as coal. In snowstorms it seemed carved of
snow. But on days like this, there was no mistaking it for anything
but ice. On days like this the Wall shimmered bright as a septon’s
crystal, every crack and crevasse limned by sunlight, as frozen
rainbows danced and died behind translucent ripples. On days like
this the Wall was beautiful.
Tormund’s eldest son stood near the horses, talking with Leathers.
Tall Toregg, he was called amongst the free folk. Though he barely
had an inch on Leathers, he overtopped his father by a foot. Hareth,
the strapping Mole’s Town boy called Horse, huddled near the re,
his back to the other two. He and Leathers were the only men Jon
had brought with him to the parley; any more might have been seen
as a sign of fear, and twenty men would have been of no more use
than two if Tormund had been intent on blood. Ghost was the only
protection Jon needed; the direwolf could sni out foes, even those
who hid their enmity behind smiles.
Ghost was gone, though. Jon peeled o one black glove, put two
ngers in his mouth, and whistled. “Ghost! To me.”
From above came the sudden sound of wings. Mormont’s raven
apped from a limb of an old oak to perch upon Jon’s saddle.
“Corn,” it cried. “Corn, corn, corn.”
“Did you follow me as well?” Jon reached to shoo the bird away
but ended up stroking its feathers. The raven cocked its eye at him.
“Snow,” it muttered, bobbing its head knowingly. Then Ghost
emerged from between two trees, with Val beside him.
They look as though they belong together. Val was clad all in white;
white woolen breeches tucked into high boots of bleached white
leather, white bearskin cloak pinned at the shoulder with a carved
weirwood face, white tunic with bone fastenings. Her breath was
white as well … but her eyes were blue, her long braid the color of
dark honey, her cheeks ushed red from the cold. It had been a long
while since Jon Snow had seen a sight so lovely.
“Have you been trying to steal my wolf?” he asked her.

“Why not? If every woman had a direwolf, men would be much
sweeter. Even crows.”
“Har!” laughed Tormund Giantsbane. “Don’t bandy words with
this one, Lord Snow, she’s too clever for the likes o’ you and me.
Best steal her quick, before Toregg wakes up and takes her rst.”
What had that oaf Axell Florent said of Val? “A nubile girl, not
hard to look upon. Good hips, good breasts, well made for whelping
children.” All true enough, but the wildling woman was so much
more. She had proved that by nding Tormund where seasoned
rangers of the Watch had failed. She may not be a princess, but she
would make a worthy wife for any lord.
But that bridge had been burned a long time ago, and Jon himself
had thrown the torch. “Toregg is welcome to her,” he announced. “I
took a vow.”
“She won’t mind. Will you, girl?”
Val patted the long bone knife on her hip. “Lord Crow is welcome
to steal into my bed any night he dares. Once he’s been gelded,
keeping those vows will come much easier for him.”
“Har!” Tormund snorted again. “You hear that, Toregg? Stay
away from this one. I have one daughter, don’t need another.”
Shaking his head, the wildling chief ducked back inside his tent.
As Jon scratched Ghost behind the ear, Toregg brought up Val’s
horse for her. She still rode the grey garron that Mully had given
her the day she left the Wall, a shaggy, stunted thing blind in one
eye. As she turned it toward the Wall, she asked, “How fares the
little monster?”
“Twice as big as when you left us, and thrice as loud. When he
wants the teat, you can hear him wail in Eastwatch.” Jon mounted
his own horse.
Val fell in beside him. “So … I brought you Tormund, as I said I
would. What now? Am I to be returned to my old cell?”
“Your old cell is occupied. Queen Selyse has claimed the King’s
Tower, for her own. Do you remember Hardin’s Tower?”
“The one that looks about to collapse?”
“It’s looked that way for a hundred years. I’ve had the top oor
made ready for you, my lady. You will have more room than in the

King’s Tower, though you may not be as comfortable. No one has
ever called it Hardin’s Palace.”
“I would choose freedom over comfort every time.”
“Freedom of the castle you shall have, but I regret to say you
must remain a captive. I can promise that you will not be troubled
by unwanted visitors, however. My own men guard Hardin’s Tower,
not the queen’s. And Wun Wun sleeps in the entry hall.”
“A giant as protector? Even Dalla could not boast of that.”
Tormund’s wildlings watched them pass, peering out from tents
and lean-tos beneath lea ess trees. For every man of ghting age,
Jon saw three women and as many children, gaunt-faced things
with hollow cheeks and staring eyes. When Mance Rayder had led
the free folk down upon the Wall, his followers drove large herds of
sheep and goats and swine before them, but now the only animals
to be seen were the mammoths. If not for the ferocity of the giants,
those would have been slaughtered too, he did not doubt. There was
a lot of meat on a mammoth’s bones.
Jon saw signs of sickness too. That disquieted him more than he
could say. If Tormund’s band were starved and sick, what of the
thousands who had followed Mother Mole to Hardhome? Cotter
Pyke should reach them soon. If the winds were kind, his eet might well
be on its way back to Eastwatch even now, with as many of the free folk
as he could cram aboard.
“How did you fare with Tormund?” asked Val.
“Ask me a year from now. The hard part still awaits me. The part
where I convince mine own to eat this meal I’ve cooked for them.
None of them are going to like the taste, I fear.”
“Let me help.”
“You have. You brought me Tormund.”
“I can do more.”
Why not? thought Jon. They are all convinced she is a princess. Val
looked the part and rode as if she had been born on horseback. A
warrior princess, he decided, not some willowy creature who sits up in a
tower, brushing her hair and waiting for some knight to rescue her. “I
must inform the queen of this agreement,” he said. “You are
welcome to come meet her, if you can nd it in yourself to bend a

knee.” It would never do to o end Her Grace before he even
opened his mouth.
“May I laugh when I kneel?”
“You may not. This is no game. A river of blood runs between our
peoples, old and deep and red. Stannis Baratheon is one of the few
who favors admitting wildlings to the realm. I need his queen’s
support for what I’ve done.”
Val’s playful smile died. “You have my word, Lord Snow. I will be
a proper wildling princess for your queen.”
She is not my queen, he might have said. If truth be told, the day of
her departure cannot come too fast for me. And if the gods are good, she
will take Melisandre with her.
They rode the rest of the way in silence, Ghost loping at their
heels. Mormont’s raven followed them as far as the gate, then
apped upward as the rest of them dismounted. Horse went ahead
with a brand to light the way through the icy tunnel.
A small crowd of black brothers was waiting by the gate when
Jon and his companions emerged south of the Wall. Ulmer of the
Kingswood was amongst them, and it was the old archer who came
forward to speak for the rest. “If it please m’lord, the lads were
wondering. Will it be peace, m’lord? Or blood and iron?”
“Peace,” Jon Snow replied. “Three days hence, Tormund
Giantsbane will lead his people through the Wall. As friends, not
foes. Some may even swell our ranks, as brothers. It will be for us
to make them welcome. Now back to your duties.” Jon handed the
reins of his horse to Satin. “I must see Queen Selyse.” Her Grace
would take it as a slight if he did not come to her at once.
“Afterward I will have letters to write. Bring parchment, quills, and
a pot of maester’s black to my chambers. Then summon Marsh,
Yarwyck, Septon Cellador, Clydas.” Cellador would be half-drunk,
and Clydas was a poor substitute for a real maester, but they were
what he had. Till Sam returns. “The northmen too. Flint and Norrey.
Leathers, you should be there as well.”
“Hobb is baking onion pies,” said Satin. “Shall I request that they
all join you for supper?”

Jon considered. “No. Ask them to join me atop the Wall at
sunset.” He turned to Val. “My lady. With me, if you please.”
“The crow commands, the captive must obey.” Her tone was
playful. “This queen of yours must be erce if the legs of grown
men give out beneath them when they meet her. Should I have
dressed in mail instead of wool and fur? These clothes were given
to me by Dalla, I would sooner not get bloodstains all over them.”
“If words drew blood, you might have cause to fear. I think your
clothes are safe enough, my lady.”
They made their way toward the King’s Tower, along freshshoveled pathways between mounds of dirty snow. “I have heard it
said that your queen has a great dark beard.”
Jon knew he should not smile, but he did. “Only a mustache. Very
wispy. You can count the hairs.”
“How disappointing.”
For all her talk about wanting to be mistress of her seat, Selyse
Baratheon seemed in no great haste to abandon the comforts of
Castle Black for the shadows of the Nightfort. She kept guards, of
course—four men posted at the door, two outside on the steps, two
inside by the brazier. Commanding them was Ser Patrek of King’s
Mountain, clad in his knightly raiment of white and blue and silver,
his cloak a spatter of ve-pointed stars. When presented to Val, the
knight sank to one knee to kiss her glove. “You are even lovelier
than I was told, princess,” he declared. “The queen has told me
much and more of your beauty.”
“How odd, when she has never seen me.” Val patted Ser Patrek
on the head. “Up with you now, ser kneeler. Up, up.” She sounded
as if she were talking to a dog.
It was all that Jon could do not to laugh. Stone-faced, he told the
knight that they required audience with the queen. Ser Patrek sent
one of the men-at-arms scrambling up the steps to inquire as to
whether Her Grace would receive them. “The wolf stays here,
though,” Ser Patrek insisted.
Jon had expected that. The direwolf made Queen Selyse anxious,
almost as much as Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun. “Ghost, stay.”

They found Her Grace sewing by the re, whilst her fool danced
about to music only he could hear, the cowbells on his antlers
clanging. “The crow, the crow,” Patchface cried when he saw Jon.
“Under the sea the crows are white as snow, I know, I know, oh,
oh, oh.” Princess Shireen was curled up in a window seat, her hood
drawn up to hide the worst of the greyscale that had dis gured her
face.
There was no sign of Lady Melisandre. For that much Jon was
grateful. Soon or late he would need to face the red priestess, but he
would sooner it was not in the queen’s presence. “Your Grace.” He
took a knee. Val did likewise.
Queen Selyse set aside her sewing. “You may rise.”
“If it please Your Grace, may I present the Lady Val? Her sister
Dalla was—”
“—mother to that squalling babe who keeps us awake at night. I
know who she is, Lord Snow.” The queen sni ed. “You are
fortunate that she returned to us before the king my husband, else it
might have gone badly for you. Very badly indeed.”
“Are you the wildling princess?” Shireen asked Val.
“Some call me that,” said Val. “My sister was wife to Mance
Rayder, the King-Beyond-the-Wall. She died giving him a son.”
“I’m a princess too,” Shireen announced, “but I never had a sister.
I used to have a cousin once, before he sailed away. He was just a
bastard, but I liked him.”
“Honestly, Shireen,” her mother said. “I am sure the lord
commander did not come to hear about Robert’s by-blows.
Patchface, be a good fool and take the princess to her room.”
The bells on his hat rang. “Away, away,” the fool sang. “Come
with me beneath the sea, away, away, away.” He took the little
princess by one hand and drew her from the room, skipping.
Jon said, “Your Grace, the leader of the free folk has agreed to
my terms.”
Queen Selyse gave the tiniest of nods. “It was ever my lord
husband’s wish to grant sanctuary to these savage peoples. So long
as they keep the king’s peace and the king’s laws, they are welcome

in our realm.” She pursed her lips. “I am told they have more giants
with them.”
Val answered. “Almost two hundred of them, Your Grace. And
more than eighty mammoths.”
The queen shuddered. “Dreadful creatures.” Jon could not tell if
she was speaking of the mammoths or the giants. “Though such
beasts might be useful to my lord husband in his battles.”
“That may be, Your Grace,” Jon said, “but the mammoths are too
big to pass through our gate.”
“Cannot the gate be widened?”
“That … that would be unwise, I think.”
Selyse sni ed. “If you say so. No doubt you know about such
things. Where do you mean to settle these wildlings? Surely Mole’s
Town is not large enough to contain … how many are they?”
“Four thousand, Your Grace. They will help us garrison our
abandoned castles, the better to defend the Wall.”
“I had been given to understand that those castles were ruins.
Dismal places, bleak and cold, hardly more than heaps of rubble. At
Eastwatch we heard talk of rats and spiders.”
The cold will have killed the spiders by now, thought Jon, and the
rats may be a useful source of meat come winter. “All true, Your
Grace … but even ruins o er some shelter. And the Wall will stand
between them and the Others.”
“I see you have considered all this carefully, Lord Snow. I am sure
King Stannis will be pleased when he returns triumphant from his
battle.”
Assuming he returns at all.
“Of course,” the queen went on, “the wildlings must rst
acknowledge Stannis as their king and R’hllor as their god.”
And here we are, face-to-face in the narrow passage. “Your Grace,
forgive me. Those were not the terms that we agreed to.”
The queen’s face hardened. “A grievous oversight.” What faint
traces of warmth her voice had held vanished all at once.
“Free folk do not kneel,” Val told her.
“Then they must be knelt,” the queen declared.

“Do that, Your Grace, and we will rise again at the rst chance,”
Val promised. “Rise with blades in hand.”
The queen’s lips tightened, and her chin gave a small quiver. “You
are insolent. I suppose that is only to be expected of a wildling. We
must nd you a husband who can teach you courtesy.” The queen
turned her glare on Jon. “I do not approve, Lord Commander. Nor
will my lord husband. I cannot prevent you from opening your gate,
as we both know full well, but I promise you that you shall answer
for it when the king returns from battle. Mayhaps you might want
to reconsider.”
“Your Grace.” Jon knelt again. This time Val did not join him. “I
am sorry my actions have displeased you. I did as I thought best. Do
I have your leave to go?”
“You do. At once.”
Once outside and well away from the queen’s men, Val gave vent
to her wroth. “You lied about her beard. That one has more hair on
her chin than I have between my legs. And the daughter … her
face …”
“Greyscale.”
“The grey death is what we call it.”
“It is not always mortal in children.”
“North of the Wall it is. Hemlock is a sure cure, but a pillow or a
blade will work as well. If I had given birth to that poor child, I
would have given her the gift of mercy long ago.”
This was a Val that Jon had never seen before. “Princess Shireen
is the queen’s only child.”
“I pity both of them. The child is not clean.”
“If Stannis wins his war, Shireen will stand as heir to the Iron
Throne.”
“Then I pity your Seven Kingdoms.”
“The maesters say greyscale is not—”
“The maesters may believe what they wish. Ask a woods witch if
you would know the truth. The grey death sleeps, only to wake
again. The child is not clean!”
“She seems a sweet girl. You cannot know—”

“I can. You know nothing, Jon Snow.” Val seized his arm. “I want
the monster out of there. Him and his wet nurses. You cannot leave
them in that same tower as the dead girl.”
Jon shook her hand away. “She is not dead.”
“She is. Her mother cannot see it. Nor you, it seems. Yet death is
there.” She walked away from him, stopped, turned back. “I
brought you Tormund Giantsbane. Bring me my monster.”
“If I can, I will.”
“Do. You owe me a debt, Jon Snow.”
Jon watched her stride away. She is wrong. She must be wrong.
Greyscale is not so deadly as she claims, not in children.
Ghost was gone again. The sun was low in the west. A cup of hot
spiced wine would serve me well just now. Two cups would serve me
even better. But that would have to wait. He had foes to face. Foes
of the worst sort: brothers.
He found Leathers waiting for him by the winch cage. The two of
them rode up together. The higher they went, the stronger the
wind. Fifty feet up, the heavy cage began to sway with every gust.
From time to time it scraped against the Wall, starting small
crystalline showers of ice that sparkled in the sunlight as they fell.
They rose above the tallest towers of the castle. At four hundred
feet the wind had teeth, and tore at his black cloak so it slapped
noisily at the iron bars. At seven hundred it cut right through him.
The Wall is mine, Jon reminded himself as the winchmen were
swinging in the cage, for two more days, at least.
Jon hopped down onto the ice, thanked the men on the winch,
and nodded to the spearmen standing sentry. Both wore woolen
hoods pulled down over their heads, so nothing could be seen of
their faces but their eyes, but he knew Ty by the tangled rope of
greasy black hair falling down his back and Owen by the sausage
stu ed into the scabbard at his hip. He might have known them
anyway, just by the way they stood. A good lord must know his men,
his father had once told him and Robb, back at Winterfell.
Jon walked to the edge of the Wall and gazed down upon the
killing ground where Mance Rayder’s host had died. He wondered

where Mance was now. Did he ever nd you, little sister? Or were you
just a ploy he used so I would set him free?
It had been so long since he had last seen Arya. What would she
look like now? Would he even know her? Arya Underfoot. Her face
was always dirty. Would she still have that little sword he’d had
Mikken forge for her? Stick them with the pointy end, he’d told her.
Wisdom for her wedding night if half of what he heard of Ramsay
Snow was true. Bring her home, Mance. I saved your son from
Melisandre, and now I am about to save four thousand of your free folk.
You owe me this one little girl.
In the haunted forest to the north, the shadows of the afternoon
crept through the trees. The western sky was a blaze of red, but to
the east the rst stars were peeking out. Jon Snow exed the
ngers of his sword hand, remembering all he’d lost. Sam, you sweet
fat fool, you played me a cruel jape when you made me lord
commander. A lord commander has no friends.
“Lord Snow?” said Leathers. “The cage is coming up.”
“I hear it.” Jon moved back from the edge.
First to make the ascent were the clan chiefs Flint and Norrey,
clad in fur and iron. The Norrey looked like some old fox—wrinkled
and slight of build, but sly-eyed and spry. Torghen Flint was half a
head shorter but must weigh twice as much—a stout gru man with
gnarled, red-knuckled hands as big as hams, leaning heavily on a
blackthorn cane as he limped across the ice. Bowen Marsh came
next, bundled up in a bearskin. After him Othell Yarwyck. Then
Septon Cellador, half in his cups.
“Walk with me,” Jon told them. They walked west along the
Wall, down gravel-strewn paths toward the setting sun. When they
had come fty yards from the warming shed, he said, “You know
why I’ve summoned you. Three days hence at dawn the gate will
open, to allow Tormund and his people through the Wall. There is
much we need to do in preparation.”
Silence greeted his pronouncement. Then Othell Yarwyck said,
“Lord Commander, there are thousands of—”
“—scrawny wildlings, bone weary, hungry, far from home.” Jon
pointed at the lights of their camp res. “There they are. Four

thousand, Tormund claims.”
“Three thousand, I make them, by the res.” Bowen Marsh lived
for counts and measures. “More than twice that number at
Hardhome with the woods witch, we are told. And Ser Denys writes
of great camps in the mountains beyond the Shadow Tower …”
Jon did not deny it. “Tormund says the Weeper means to try the
Bridge of Skulls again.”
The Old Pomegranate touched his scar. He had gotten it
defending the Bridge of Skulls the last time the Weeping Man had
tried to cut his way across the Gorge. “Surely the lord commander
cannot mean to allow that … that demon through as well?”
“Not gladly.” Jon had not forgotten the heads the Weeping Man
had left him, with bloody holes where their eyes had been. Black
Jack Bulwer, Hairy Hal, Garth Greyfeather. I cannot avenge them, but I
will not forget their names. “But yes, my lord, him as well. We cannot
pick and choose amongst the free folk, saying this one may pass,
this one may not. Peace means peace for all.”
The Norrey hawked and spat. “As well make peace with wolves
and carrion crows.”
“It’s peaceful in my dungeons,” grumbled Old Flint. “Give the
Weeping Man to me.”
“How many rangers has the Weeper killed?” asked Othell
Yarwyck. “How many women has he raped or killed or stolen?”
“Three of mine own ilk,” said Old Flint. “And he blinds the girls
he does not take.”
“When a man takes the black, his crimes are forgiven,” Jon
reminded them. “If we want the free folk to ght beside us, we
must pardon their past crimes as we would for our own.”
“The Weeper will not say the words,” insisted Yarwyck. “He will
not wear the cloak. Even other raiders do not trust him.”
“You need not trust a man to use him.” Else how could I make use
of all of you? “We need the Weeper, and others like him. Who
knows the wild better than a wildling? Who knows our foes better
than a man who has fought them?”
“All the Weeper knows is rape and murder,” said Yarwyck.

“Once past the Wall, the wildlings will have thrice our numbers,”
said Bowen Marsh. “And that is only Tormund’s band. Add the
Weeper’s men and those at Hardhome, and they will have the
strength to end the Night’s Watch in a single night.”
“Numbers alone do not win a war. You have not seen them. Half
of them are dead on their feet.”
“I would sooner have them dead in the ground,” said Yarwyck. “If
it please my lord.”
“It does not please me.” Jon’s voice was as cold as the wind
snapping at their cloaks. “There are children in that camp, hundreds
of them, thousands. Women as well.”
“Spearwives.”
“Some. Along with mothers and grandmothers, widows and
maids … would you condemn them all to die, my lord?”
“Brothers should not squabble,” Septon Cellador said. “Let us
kneel and pray to the Crone to light our way to wisdom.”
“Lord Snow,” said The Norrey, “where do you mean to put these
wildlings o’ yours? Not on my lands, I hope.”
“Aye,” declared Old Flint. “You want them in the Gift, that’s your
folly, but see they don’t wander o or I’ll send you back their
heads. Winter is nigh, I want no more mouths to feed.”
“The wildlings will remain upon the Wall,” Jon assured them.
“Most will be housed in one of our abandoned castles.” The Watch
now had garrisons at Icemark, Long Barrow, Sable Hall, Greyguard,
and Deep Lake, all badly undermanned, but ten castles still stood
empty and abandoned. “Men with wives and children, all orphan
girls and any orphan boys below the age of ten, old women,
widowed mothers, any woman who does not care to ght. The
spearwives we’ll send to Long Barrow to join their sisters, single
men to the other forts we’ve reopened. Those who take the black
will remain here, or be posted to Eastwatch or the Shadow Tower.
Tormund will take Oakenshield as his seat, to keep him close at
hand.”
Bowen Marsh sighed. “If they do not slay us with their swords,
they will do so with their mouths. Pray, how does the lord
commander propose to feed Tormund and his thousands?”

Jon had anticipated that question. “Through Eastwatch. We will
bring in food by ship, as much as might be required. From the
riverlands and the stormlands and the Vale of Arryn, from Dorne
and the Reach, across the narrow sea from the Free Cities.”
“And this food will be paid for … how, if I may ask?”
With gold, from the Iron Bank of Braavos, Jon might have replied.
Instead he said, “I have agreed that the free folk may keep their
furs and pelts. They will need those for warmth when winter comes.
All other wealth they must surrender. Gold and silver, amber,
gemstones, carvings, anything of value. We will ship it all across
the narrow sea to be sold in the Free Cities.”
“All the wealth o’ the wildlings,” said The Norrey. “That should
buy you a bushel o’ barleycorn. Two bushels, might be.”
“Lord Commander, why not demand that the wildlings give up
their arms as well?” asked Clydas.
Leathers laughed at that. “You want the free folk to ght beside
you against the common foe. How are we to do that without arms?
Would you have us throw snowballs at the wights? Or will you give
us sticks to hit them with?”
The arms most wildlings carry are little more than sticks, thought Jon.
Wooden clubs, stone axes, mauls, spears with re-hardened points,
knives of bone and stone and dragonglass, wicker shields, bone
armor, boiled leather. The Thenns worked bronze, and raiders like
the Weeper carried stolen steel and iron swords looted o some
corpse … but even those were oft of ancient vintage, dinted from
years of hard use and spotted with rust.
“Tormund Giantsbane will never willingly disarm his people,” Jon
said. “He is not the Weeping Man, but he is no craven either. If I
had asked that of him, it would have come to blood.”
The Norrey ngered his beard. “You may put your wildlings in
these ruined forts, Lord Snow, but how will you make them stay?
What is there to stop them moving south to fairer, warmer lands?”
“Our lands,” said Old Flint.
“Tormund has given me his oath. He will serve with us until the
spring. The Weeper and their other captains will swear the same or
we will not let them pass.”

Old Flint shook his head. “They will betray us.”
“The Weeper’s word is worthless,” said Othell Yarwyck.
“These are godless savages,” said Septon Cellador. “Even in the
south the treachery of wildlings is renowned.”
Leathers crossed his arms. “That battle down below? I was on
t’other side, remember? Now I wear your blacks and train your
boys to kill. Some might call me turncloak. Might be so … but I am
no more savage than you crows. We have gods too. The same gods
they keep in Winterfell.”
“The gods of the North, since before this Wall was raised,” said
Jon. “Those are the gods that Tormund swore by. He will keep his
word. I know him, as I knew Mance Rayder. I marched with them
for a time, you may recall.”
“I had not forgotten,” said the Lord Steward.
No, thought Jon, I did not think you had.
“Mance Rayder swore an oath as well,” Marsh went on. “He
vowed to wear no crowns, take no wife, father no sons. Then he
turned his cloak, did all those things, and led a fearsome host
against the realm. It is the remnants of that host that waits beyond
the Wall.”
“Broken remnants.”
“A broken sword can be reforged. A broken sword can kill.”
“The free folk have neither laws nor lords,” Jon said, “but they
love their children. Will you admit that much?”
“It is not their children who concern us. We fear the fathers, not
the sons.”
“As do I. So I insisted upon hostages.” I am not the trusting fool you
take me for … nor am I half wildling, no matter what you believe. “One
hundred boys between the ages of eight and sixteen. A son from
each of their chiefs and captains, the rest chosen by lot. The boys
will serve as pages and squires, freeing our own men for other
duties. Some may choose to take the black one day. Queerer things
have happened. The rest will stand hostage for the loyalty of their
sires.”
The northmen glanced at one another. “Hostages,” mused The
Norrey. “Tormund has agreed to this?”

It was that, or watch his people die. “My blood price, he called it,”
said Jon Snow, “but he will pay.”
“Aye, and why not?” Old Flint stomped his cane against the ice.
“Wards, we always called them, when Winterfell demanded boys of
us, but they were hostages, and none the worse for it.”
“None but them whose sires displeased the Kings o’ Winter,” said
The Norrey. “Those came home shorter by a head. So you tell me,
boy … if these wildling friends o’ yours prove false, do you have
the belly to do what needs be done?”
Ask Janos Slynt. “Tormund Giantsbane knows better than to try
me. I may seem a green boy in your eyes, Lord Norrey, but I am
still a son of Eddard Stark.”
Yet even that did not appease his Lord Steward. “You say these
boys will serve as squires. Surely the lord commander does not
mean they will be trained at arms?”
Jon’s anger ared. “No, my lord, I mean to set them to sewing
lacy smallclothes. Of course they shall be trained at arms. They
shall also churn butter, hew rewood, muck stables, empty chamber
pots, and run messages … and in between they will be drilled with
spear and sword and longbow.”
Marsh ushed a deeper shade of red. “The lord commander must
pardon my bluntness, but I have no softer way to say this. What you
propose is nothing less than treason. For eight thousand years the
men of the Night’s Watch have stood upon the Wall and fought
these wildlings. Now you mean to let them pass, to shelter them in
our castles, to feed them and clothe them and teach them how to
ght. Lord Snow, must I remind you? You swore an oath.”
“I know what I swore.” Jon said the words. “I am the sword in the
darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the re that burns against
the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers,
the shield that guards the realms of men. Were those the same words
you said when you took your vows?”
“They were. As the lord commander knows.”
“Are you certain that I have not forgotten some? The ones about
the king and his laws, and how we must defend every foot of his
land and cling to each ruined castle? How does that part go?” Jon

waited for an answer. None came. “I am the shield that guards the
realms of men. Those are the words. So tell me, my lord—what are
these wildlings, if not men?”
Bowen Marsh opened his mouth. No words came out. A ush
crept up his neck.
Jon Snow turned away. The last light of the sun had begun to
fade. He watched the cracks along the Wall go from red to grey to
black, from streaks of re to rivers of black ice. Down below, Lady
Melisandre would be lighting her night re and chanting, Lord of
Light, defend us, for the night is dark and full of terrors.
“Winter is coming,” Jon said at last, breaking the awkward
silence, “and with it the white walkers. The Wall is where we stop
them. The Wall was made to stop them … but the Wall must be
manned. This discussion is at an end. We have much to do before
the gate is opened. Tormund and his people will need to be fed and
clothed and housed. Some are sick and will need nursing. Those will
fall to you, Clydas. Save as many as you can.”
Clydas blinked his dim pink eyes. “I will do my best, Jon. My
lord, I mean.”
“We will need every cart and wagon made ready to transport the
free folk to their new homes. Othell, you shall see to that.”
Yarwyck grimaced. “Aye, Lord Commander.”
“Lord Bowen, you shall collect the tolls. The gold and silver, the
amber, the torques and armbands and necklaces. Sort it all, count it,
see that it reaches Eastwatch safely.”
“Yes, Lord Snow,” said Bowen Marsh.
And Jon thought, “Ice,” she said, “and daggers in the dark. Blood
frozen red and hard, and naked steel.” His sword hand exed. The
wind was rising.

CERSEI

E

ach night seemed colder than the last.
The cell had neither replace nor brazier. The only window was
too high to allow her a view and too small to squeeze through, but
more than large enough to let in the chill. Cersei had torn up the
rst shift they gave her, demanding the return of her own clothes,
but that only left her naked and shivering. When they brought her
another shift, she pulled it down over her head and thanked them,
choking upon the words.
The window let in sounds as well. That was the only way the
queen had to know what might be happening in the city. The septas
who brought her food would tell her nothing.
She hated that. Jaime would be coming for her, but how would
she know when he arrived? Cersei only hoped he was not so foolish
as to go racing ahead of his army. He would need every sword to
deal with the ragged horde of Poor Fellows surrounding the Great
Sept. She asked about her twin often, but her gaolers gave no
answer. She asked about Ser Loras too. At last report the Knight of
Flowers had been dying on Dragonstone of wounds received whilst
taking the castle. Let him die, Cersei thought, and let him be quick
about it. The boy’s death would mean an empty place on the
Kingsguard, and that might be her salvation. But the septas were as
close-mouthed about Loras Tyrell as they were about Jaime.
Lord Qyburn had been her last and only visitor. Her world had a
population of four: herself and her three gaolers, pious and
unyielding. Septa Unella was big-boned and mannish, with callused
hands and homely, scowling features. Septa Moelle had sti white

hair and small mean eyes perpetually crinkled in suspicion, peering
out of a wrinkled face as sharp as the blade of an axe. Septa Scolera
was thick-waisted and short, with heavy breasts, olive skin, and a
sour smell to her, like milk on the verge of going bad. They brought
her food and water, emptied her chamber pot, and took away her
shift for washing every few days, leaving her to huddle naked under
her blanket until it was returned to her. Sometimes Scolera would
read to her from The Seven-Pointed Star or The Book of Holy Prayer,
but elsewise none of them would speak with her or answer any of
her questions.
She hated and despised all three of them, almost as much as she
hated and despised the men who had betrayed her.
False friends, treacherous servants, men who had professed
undying love, even her own blood … all of them had deserted her
in her hour of need. Osney Kettleblack, that weakling, had broken
beneath the lash, lling the High Sparrow’s ears with secrets he
should have taken to his grave. His brothers, scum of the streets
whom she had raised high, did no more than sit upon their hands.
Aurane Waters, her admiral, had ed to sea with the dromonds she
had built for him. Orton Merryweather had gone running back to
Longtable, taking his wife, Taena, who had been the queen’s one
true friend in these terrible times. Harys Swyft and Grand Maester
Pycelle had abandoned her to captivity and o ered the realm to the
very men who had conspired against her. Meryn Trant and Boros
Blount, the king’s sworn protectors, were nowhere to be found.
Even her cousin Lancel, who once had claimed to love her, was one
of her accusers. Her uncle had refused to help her rule when she
would have made him the King’s Hand.
And Jaime …
No, that she could not believe, would not believe. Jaime would
be here once he knew of her plight. “Come at once,” she had written
to him. “Help me. Save me. I need you now as I have never needed you
before. I love you. I love you. I love you. Come at once.” Qyburn had
sworn that he would see that her letter reached her twin, o in the
riverlands with his army. Qyburn had never returned, however. For
all she knew, he might be dead, his head impaled upon a spike

above the city Keep’s gates. Or perhaps he was languishing in one
of the black cells beneath the Red Keep, her letter still unsent. The
queen had asked after him a hundred times, but her captors would
not speak of him. All she knew for certain was that Jaime had not
come.
Not yet, she told herself. But soon. And once he comes the High
Sparrow and his bitches will sing a di erent song.
She hated feeling helpless.
She had threatened, but her threats had been received with stony
faces and deaf ears. She had commanded, but her commands had
been ignored. She had invoked the Mother’s mercy, appealing to the
natural sympathy of one woman for another, but the three shriveled
septas must have put their womanhood aside when they spoke their
vows. She had tried charm, speaking to them gently, accepting each
new outrage meekly. They were not swayed. She had o ered them
rewards, promised leniency, honors, gold, positions at court. They
treated her promises as they did her threats.
And she had prayed. Oh, how she had prayed. Prayer was what
they wanted, so she served it to them, served it on her knees as if
she were some common trollop of the streets and not a daughter of
the Rock. She had prayed for relief, for deliverance, for Jaime.
Loudly she asked the gods to defend her in her innocence; silently
she prayed for her accusers to su er sudden, painful deaths. She
prayed until her knees were raw and bloody, until her tongue felt so
thick and heavy that she was like to choke on it. All the prayers
they had taught her as a girl came back to Cersei in her cell, and she
made up new ones as needed, calling on the Mother and the
Maiden, on the Father and the Warrior, on the Crone and the Smith.
She had even prayed to the Stranger. Any god in a storm. The Seven
proved as deaf as their earthly servants. Cersei gave them all the
words that she had in her, gave them everything but tears. That they
will never have, she told herself.
She hated feeling weak.
If the gods had given her the strength they gave Jaime and that
swaggering oaf Robert, she could have made her own escape. Oh,
for a sword and the skill to wield it. She had a warrior’s heart, but the

gods in their blind malice had given her the feeble body of a
woman. The queen had tried to ght them early on, but the septas
had overwhelmed her. There were too many of them, and they
were stronger than they looked. Ugly old women, every one of
them, but all that praying and scrubbing and beating novices with
sticks had left them tough as roots.
And they would not let her rest. Night or day, whenever the
queen closed her eyes to sleep, one of her captors would appear to
wake her and demand that she confess her sins. She stood accused
of adultery, fornication, high treason, even murder, for Osney
Kettleblack had confessed to smothering the last High Septon at her
command. “I am come to hear you tell of all your murders and
fornications,” Septa Unella would growl when she shook the queen
awake. Septa Moelle would tell her that it was her sins that kept her
sleepless. “Only the innocent know the peace of untroubled sleep.
Confess your sins, and you will sleep like a newborn babe.”
Wake and sleep and wake again, every night was broken into
pieces by the rough hands of her tormentors, and every night was
colder and crueler than the night before. The hour of the owl, the
hour of the wolf, the hour of the nightingale, moonrise and
moonset, dusk and dawn, they staggered past like drunkards. What
hour was it? What day was it? Where was she? Was this a dream, or
had she woken? The little shards of sleep that they allowed her
turned into razors, slicing at her wits. Each day found her duller
than the day before, exhausted and feverish. She had lost all sense
of how long she had been imprisoned in this cell, high up in one of
the seven towers of the Great Sept of Baelor. I will grow old and die
here, she thought, despairing.
Cersei could not allow that to happen. Her son had need of her.
The realm had need of her. She had to free herself, no matter what
the risk. Her world had shrunk to a cell six feet square, a chamber
pot, a lumpy pallet, and a brown wool blanket thin as hope that
made her skin itch, but she was still Lord Tywin’s heir, a daughter
of the Rock.
Exhausted by her lack of sleep, shivering from the cold that stole
into the tower cell each night, feverish and famished by turns,

Cersei came at last to know she must confess.
That night, when Septa Unella came to wrench her out of sleep,
she found the queen waiting on her knees. “I have sinned,” said
Cersei. Her tongue was thick in her mouth, her lips raw and
chapped. “I have sinned most grievously. I see that now. How could
I have been so blind for so long? The Crone came to me with her
lamp raised high, and by its holy light I saw the road that I must
walk. I want to be clean again. I want only absolution. Please, good
septa, I beg of you, take me to the High Septon so that I might
confess my crimes and fornications.”
“I will tell him, Your Grace,” said Septa Unella. “His High
Holiness will be most pleased. Only through confession and true
repentance may our immortal souls be saved.”
And for the rest of that long night they let her sleep. Hours and
hours of blessed sleep. The owl and the wolf and the nightingale
slipped by for once with their passage unseen and unremarked,
whilst Cersei dreamed a long sweet dream where Jaime was her
husband and their son was still alive.
Come morning, the queen felt almost like herself again. When her
captors came for her, she made pious noises at them again and told
them how determined she was to confess her sins and be forgiven
for all that she had done.
“We rejoice to hear it,” said Septa Moelle.
“It will be a great weight o your soul,” said Septa Scolera. “You
will feel much better afterward, Your Grace.”
Your Grace. Those two simple words thrilled her. During her long
captivity, her gaolers had not oft bothered with even that simple
courtesy.
“His High Holiness awaits,” said Septa Unella.
Cersei lowered her head, humble and obedient. “Might I be
allowed to bathe rst? I am in no t state to attend him.”
“You may wash later if His High Holiness allows,” said Septa
Unella. “It is the cleanliness of your immortal soul that should
concern you now, not such vanities of the esh.”
The three septas led her down the tower stairs, with Septa Unella
going before her and Septa Moelle and Septa Scolera at her heels, as

if they were afraid that she might try to ee. “It has been so long
since I have had a visitor,” Cersei murmured in a quiet voice as they
made their descent. “Is the king well? I ask only as a mother,
fearful for her child.”
“His Grace is in good health,” said Septa Scolera, “and well
protected, day and night. The queen is with him, always.”
I am the queen! She swallowed, smiled, and said, “That is good to
know. Tommen loves her so. I never believed those terrible things
that were being said of her.” Had Margaery Tyrell somehow
wriggled free of the accusations of fornication, adultery, and high
treason? “Was there a trial?”
“Soon,” said Septa Scolera, “but her brother—”
“Hush.” Septa Unella turned to glare back over her shoulder at
Scolera. “You chatter too much, you foolish old woman. It is not for
us to speak of such things.”
Scolera lowered her head. “Pray forgive me.”
They made the rest of the descent in silence.
The High Sparrow received her in his sanctum, an austere sevensided chamber where crudely carved faces of the Seven stared out
from the stone walls with expressions almost as sour and
disapproving as His High Holiness himself. When she entered, he
was seated behind a rough-hewn table, writing. The High Septon
had not changed since the last time she had been in his presence,
the day he had her seized and imprisoned. He was still a scrawny
grey-haired man with a lean, hard, half-starved look, his face sharpfeatured, lined, his eyes suspicious. In place of the rich robes of his
predecessors, he wore a shapeless tunic of undyed wool that fell
down to his ankles. “Your Grace,” he said, by way of greeting. “I
understand that you wish to make confession.”
Cersei dropped to her knees. “I do, High Holiness. The Crone
came to me as I slept with her lamp held high—”
“To be sure. Unella, you will stay and make a record of Her
Grace’s words. Scolera, Moelle, you have my leave to go.” He
pressed the ngers of his hands together, the same gesture she had
seen her father use a thousand times.

Septa Unella took a seat behind her, spread out a parchment,
dipped a quill in maester’s ink. Cersei felt a stab of fright. “Once I
have confessed, will I be permitted to—”
“Your Grace shall be dealt with according to your sins.”
This man is implacable, she realized once again. She gathered
herself for a moment. “Mother have mercy on me, then. I have lain
with men outside the bonds of marriage. I confess it.”
“Who?” The High Septon’s eyes were xed on hers.
Cersei could hear Unella writing behind her. Her quill made a
faint, soft scratching sound. “Lancel Lannister, my cousin. And
Osney Kettleblack.” Both men had confessed to bedding her, it
would do her no good to deny it. “His brothers too. Both of them.”
She had no way of knowing what Osfryd and Osmund might say.
Safer to confess too much than too little. “It does not excuse my sin,
High Holiness, but I was lonely and afraid. The gods took King
Robert from me, my love and my protector. I was alone,
surrounded by schemers, false friends, and traitors who were
conspiring at the death of my children. I did not know who to trust,
so I … I used the only means that I had to bind the Kettleblacks to
me.”
“By which you mean your female parts?”
“My esh.” She pressed a hand to her face, shuddering. When she
lowered it again, her eyes were wet with tears. “Yes. May the Maid
forgive me. It was for my children, though, for the realm. I took no
pleasure in it. The Kettleblacks … they are hard men, and cruel, and
they used me roughly, but what else was I to do? Tommen needed
men around him I could trust.”
“His Grace was protected by the Kingsguard.”
“The Kingsguard stood by useless as his brother Jo rey died,
murdered at his own wedding feast. I watched one son die, I could
not bear to lose another. I have sinned, I have committed wanton
fornication, but I did it for Tommen. Forgive me, High Holiness, but
I would open my legs for every man in King’s Landing if that was
what I had to do to keep my children safe.”
“Forgiveness comes only from the gods. What of Ser Lancel, who
was your cousin and your lord husband’s squire? Did you take him

into your bed to win his loyalty as well?”
“Lancel.” Cersei hesitated. Careful, she told herself, Lancel will
have told him everything. “Lancel loved me. He was half a boy, but I
never doubted his devotion to me or my son.”
“And yet you still corrupted him.”
“I was lonely.” She choked back a sob. “I had lost my husband,
my son, my lord father. I was regent, but a queen is still a woman,
and women are weak vessels, easily tempted … Your High Holiness
knows the truth of that. Even holy septas have been known to sin. I
took comfort with Lancel. He was kind and gentle and I needed
someone. It was wrong, I know, but I had no one else … a woman
needs to be loved, she needs a man beside her, she … she …” She
began to sob uncontrollably.
The High Septon made no move to comfort her. He sat there with
his hard eyes xed on her, watching her weep, as stony as the
statues of the Seven in the sept above. Long moments passed, but
nally her tears were all dried up. By then her eyes were red and
raw from crying, and she felt as if she might faint.
The High Sparrow was not done with her, however. “These are
common sins,” he said. “The wickedness of widows is well-known,
and all women are wantons at heart, given to using their wiles and
their beauty to work their wills on men. There is no treason here, so
long as you did not stray from your marriage bed whilst His Grace
King Robert was still alive.”
“Never,” she whispered, shivering. “Never, I swear it.”
He paid that no mind. “There are other charges laid against Your
Grace, crimes far more grievous than simple fornications. You admit
Ser Osney Kettleblack was your lover, and Ser Osney insists that he
smothered my predecessor at your behest. He further insists that he
bore false witness against Queen Margaery and her cousins, telling
tales of fornications, adultery, and high treason, again at your
behest.”
“No,” said Cersei. “It is not true. I love Margaery as I would a
daughter. And the other … I complained of the High Septon, I admit
it. He was Tyrion’s creature, weak and corrupt, a stain upon our
Holy Faith. Your High Holiness knows that as well as I. It may be

that Osney thought that his death would please me. If so, I bear
some part of the blame … but murder? No. Of that I am innocent.
Take me to the sept and I will stand before the Father’s judgment
seat and swear the truth of that.”
“In time,” said the High Septon. “You also stand accused of
conspiring at the murder of your own lord husband, our late
beloved King Robert, First of His Name.”
Lancel, Cersei thought. “Robert was killed by a boar. Do they say
I am a skinchanger now? A warg? Am I accused of killing Jo rey
too, my own sweet son, my rstborn?”
“No. Just your husband. Do you deny it?”
“I deny it. I do. Before gods and men, I deny it.”
He nodded. “Last of all, and worst of all, there are some who say
your children were not fathered by King Robert, that they are
bastards born of incest and adultery.”
“Stannis says that,” Cersei said at once. “A lie, a lie, a palpable
lie. Stannis wants the Iron Throne for himself, but his brother’s
children stand in his way, so he must needs claim that they are not
his brother’s. That lthy letter … there is no shred of truth to it. I
deny it.”
The High Septon placed both hands at upon the table and pushed
himself to his feet. “Good. Lord Stannis has turned from the truth of
the Seven to worship a red demon, and his false faith has no place
in these Seven Kingdoms.”
That was almost reassuring. Cersei nodded.
“Even so,” His High Holiness went on, “these are terrible charges,
and the realm must know the truth of them. If Your Grace has told
it true, no doubt a trial will prove your innocence.”
A trial, still. “I have confessed—”
“—to certain sins, aye. Others you deny. Your trial will separate
the truths from the falsehoods. I shall ask the Seven to forgive the
sins you have confessed and pray that you be found innocent of
these other accusations.”
Cersei rose slowly from her knees. “I bow to the wisdom of Your
High Holiness,” she said, “but if I might beg for just one drop of the

Mother’s mercy, I … it has been so long since I last saw my son,
please …”
The old man’s eyes were chips of int. “It would not be tting to
allow you near the king until you have been cleansed of all your
wickedness. You have taken the rst step on your path back to
righteousness, however, and in light of that I shall permit you other
visitors. One each day.”
The queen began to weep again. This time the tears were true.
“You are too kind. Thank you.”
“The Mother is merciful. It is her that you should thank.”
Moelle and Scolera were waiting to lead her back up to her tower
cell. Unella followed close behind them. “We have all been praying
for Your Grace,” Septa Moelle said as they were climbing. “Yes,”
Septa Scolera echoed, “and you must feel so much lighter now,
clean and innocent as a maid on the morning of her wedding.”
I fucked Jaime on the morning of my wedding, the queen recalled. “I
do,” she said, “I feel reborn, as if a festering boil has been lanced
and now at last I can begin to heal. I could almost y.” She
imagined how sweet it would be to slam an elbow into Septa
Scolera’s face and send her careening down the spiral steps. If the
gods were good, the wrinkled old cunt might crash into Septa
Unella and take her down with her.
“It is good to see you smiling again,” Scolera said.
“His High Holiness said I might have visitors?”
“He did,” said Septa Unella. “If Your Grace will tell us whom you
wish to see, we will send word to them.”
Jaime, I need Jaime. But if her twin was in the city, why had he
not come to her? It might be wiser to wait on Jaime until she had a
better notion of what was happening beyond the walls of the Great
Sept of Baelor. “My uncle,” she said. “Ser Kevan Lannister, my
father’s brother. Is he in the city?”
“He is,” said Septa Unella. “The Lord Regent has taken up
residence in the Red Keep. We will send for him at once.”
“Thank you,” said Cersei, thinking, Lord Regent, is it? She could
not pretend to be surprised.

A humble and a contrite heart proved to have bene ts over and
beyond cleansing the soul of sin. That night the queen was moved
to a larger cell two oors down, with a window she could actually
look out of and warm, soft blankets for her bed. And when time
came for supper, instead of stale bread and oaten porridge, she was
served a roast capon, a bowl of crisp greens sprinkled with crushed
walnuts, and a mound of mashed neeps aswim in butter. That night
she crawled into her bed with a full stomach for the rst time since
she was taken, and slept through the black watches of the night
undisturbed.
The next morning, with the dawn, there came her uncle.
Cersei was still at her breakfast when the door swung open and
Ser Kevan Lannister stepped through. “Leave us,” he told her
gaolers. Septa Unella ushered Scolera and Moelle away and closed
the door behind them. The queen rose to her feet.
Ser Kevan looked older than when she’d seen him last. He was a
big man, broad in the shoulder and thick about the waist, with a
close-cropped blond beard that followed the line of his heavy jaw
and short blond hair in full retreat from his brow. A heavy woolen
cloak, dyed crimson, was clasped at one shoulder with a golden
brooch in the shape of a lion’s head.
“Thank you for coming,” the queen said.
Her uncle frowned. “You should sit. There are things that I must
needs tell you—”
She did not want to sit. “You are still angry with me. I hear it in
your voice. Forgive me, Uncle. It was wrong of me to throw my
wine at you, but—”
“You think I care about a cup of wine? Lancel is my son, Cersei.
Your own cousin. If I am angry with you, that is the cause. You
should have looked after him, guided him, found him a likely girl of
good family. Instead you—”
“I know. I know.” Lancel wanted me more than I ever wanted him.
He still does, I will wager. “I was alone, weak. Please. Uncle. Oh,
Uncle. It is so good to see your face, your sweet sweet face. I have
done wicked things, I know, but I could not bear for you to hate

me.” She threw her arms around him, kissed his cheek. “Forgive
me. Forgive me.”
Ser Kevan su ered the embrace for a few heartbeats before he
nally raised his own arms to return it. His hug was short and
awkward. “Enough,” he said, his voice still at and cold. “You are
forgiven. Now sit. I bring some hard tidings, Cersei.”
His words frightened her. “Has something happened to Tommen?
Please, no. I have been so afraid for my son. No one will tell me
anything. Please tell me that Tommen is well.”
“His Grace is well. He asks about you often.” Ser Kevan laid his
hands on her shoulders, held her at arm’s length.
“Jaime, then? Is it Jaime?”
“No. Jaime is still in the riverlands, somewhere.”
“Somewhere?” She did not like the sound of that.
“He took Raventree and accepted Lord Blackwood’s surrender,”
said her uncle, “but on his way back to Riverrun he left his tail and
went o with a woman.”
“A woman?” Cersei stared at him, uncomprehending. “What
woman? Why? Where did they go?”
“No one knows. We’ve had no further word of him. The woman
may have been the Evenstar’s daughter, Lady Brienne.”
Her. The queen remembered the Maid of Tarth, a huge, ugly,
shambling thing who dressed in man’s mail. Jaime would never
abandon me for such a creature. My raven never reached him, elsewise
he would have come.
“We have had reports of sellswords landing all over the south,”
Ser Kevan was saying. “Tarth, the Stepstones, Cape Wrath … where
Stannis found the coin to hire a free company I would dearly love to
know. I do not have the strength to deal with them, not here. Mace
Tyrell does, but he refuses to bestir himself until this matter with
his daughter has been settled.”
A headsman would settle Margaery quick enough. Cersei did not care
a g for Stannis or his sellswords. The Others take him and the Tyrells
both. Let them slaughter each other, the realm will be the better for it.
“Please, Uncle, take me out of here.”

“How? By force of arms?” Ser Kevan walked to the window and
gazed out, frowning. “I would need to make an abbatoir of this holy
place. And I do not have the men. The best part of our forces were
at Riverrun with your brother. I had no time to raise up a new
host.” He turned back to face her. “I have spoken with His High
Holiness. He will not release you until you have atoned for your
sins.”
“I have confessed.”
“Atoned, I said. Before the city. A walk—”
“No.” She knew what her uncle was about to say, and she did not
want to hear it. “Never. Tell him that, if you speak again. I am a
queen, not some dockside whore.”
“No harm would come to you. No one will touch—”
“No,” she said, more sharply. “I would sooner die.”
Ser Kevan was unmoved. “If that is your wish, you may soon
have it granted. His High Holiness is resolved that you be tried for
regicide, deicide, incest, and high treason.”
“Deicide?” She almost laughed. “When did I kill a god?”
“The High Septon speaks for the Seven here on earth. Strike at
him, and you are striking at the gods themselves.” Her uncle raised
a hand before she could protest. “It does no good to speak of such
things. Not here. The time for all that is at trial.” He gazed about
her cell. The look on his face spoke volumes.
Someone is listening. Even here, even now, she dare not speak
freely. She took a breath. “Who will try me?”
“The Faith,” her uncle said, “unless you insist on a trial by battle.
In which case you must be championed by a knight of the
Kingsguard. Whatever the outcome, your rule is at an end. I will
serve as Tommen’s regent until he comes of age. Mace Tyrell has
been named King’s Hand. Grand Maester Pycelle and Ser Harys
Swyft will continue as before, but Paxter Redwyne is now lord
admiral and Randyll Tarly has assumed the duties of justiciar.”
Tyrell bannermen, the both of them. The whole governance of the
realm was being handed to her enemies, Queen Margaery’s kith and
kin. “Margaery stands accused as well. Her and those cousins of
hers. How is it that the sparrows freed her and not me?”

“Randyll Tarly insisted. He was the rst to reach King’s Landing
when this storm broke, and he brought his army with him. The
Tyrell girls will still be tried, but the case against them is weak, His
High Holiness admits. All of the men named as the queen’s lovers
have denied the accusation or recanted, save for your maimed
singer, who appears to be half-mad. So the High Septon handed the
girls over to Tarly’s custody and Lord Randyll swore a holy oath to
deliver them for trial when the time comes.”
“And her accusers?” the queen demanded. “Who holds them?”
“Osney Kettleblack and the Blue Bard are here, beneath the sept.
The Redwyne twins have been declared innocent, and Hamish the
Harper has died. The rest are in the dungeons under the Red Keep,
in the charge of your man Qyburn.”
Qyburn, thought Cersei. That was good, one straw at least that
she could clutch. Lord Qyburn had them, and Lord Qyburn could do
wonders. And horrors. He can do horrors as well.
“There is more, worse. Will you sit down?”
“Sit down?” Cersei shook her head. What could be worse? She
was to be tried for high treason whilst the little queen and her
cousins ew o as free as birds. “Tell me. What is it?”
“Myrcella. We have had grave news from Dorne.”
“Tyrion,” she said at once. Tyrion had sent her little girl to Dorne,
and Cersei had dispatched Ser Balon Swann to bring her home. All
Dornishmen were snakes, and the Martells were the worst of them.
The Red Viper had even tried to defend the Imp, had come within a
hairbreadth of a victory that would have allowed the dwarf to
escape the blame for Jo rey’s murder. “It’s him, he’s been in Dorne
all this time, and now he’s seized my daughter.”
Ser Kevan gave her another scowl. “Myrcella was attacked by a
Dornish knight named Gerold Dayne. She’s alive, but hurt. He
slashed her face open, she … I’m sorry … she lost an ear.”
“An ear.” Cersei stared at him, aghast. She was just a child, my
precious princess. She was so pretty, too. “He cut o her ear. And
Prince Doran and his Dornish knights, where were they? They could
not defend one little girl? Where was Arys Oakheart?”
“Slain, defending her. Dayne cut him down, it’s said.”

The Sword of the Morning had been a Dayne, the queen recalled,
but he was long dead. Who was this Ser Gerold and why would he
wish to harm her daughter? She could not make any sense of this,
unless … “Tyrion lost half his nose in the Battle of the Blackwater.
Slashing her face, cutting o an ear … the Imp’s grubby little
ngers are all over this.”
“Prince Doran says nothing of your brother. And Balon Swann
writes that Myrcella puts it all on this Gerold Dayne. Darkstar, they
call him.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “Whatever they call him, he is my
brother’s catspaw. Tyrion has friends amongst the Dornish. The Imp
planned this all along. It was Tyrion who betrothed Myrcella to
Prince Trystane. Now I see why.”
“You see Tyrion in every shadow.”
“He is a creature of the shadows. He killed Jo rey. He killed
Father. Did you think he would stop there? I feared that the Imp
was still in King’s Landing plotting harm to Tommen, but he must
have gone to Dorne instead to kill Myrcella rst.” Cersei paced the
width of the cell. “I need to be with Tommen. These Kingsguard
knights are as useless as nipples on a breastplate.” She rounded on
her uncle. “Ser Arys was killed, you said.”
“At the hands of this man Darkstar, yes.”
“Dead, he’s dead, you are certain of that?”
“That is what we have been told.”
“Then there is an empty place amongst the Kingsguard. It must be
lled at once. Tommen must be protected.”
“Lord Tarly is drawing up a list of worthy knights for your
brother to consider, but until Jaime reappears …”
“The king can give a man a white cloak. Tommen’s a good boy.
Tell him who to name and he will name him.”
“And who would you have him name?”
She did not have a ready answer. My champion will need a new
name as well as a new face. “Qyburn will know. Trust him in this.
You and I have had our di erences, Uncle, but for the blood we
share and the love you bore my father, for Tommen’s sake and the
sake of his poor maimed sister, do as I ask you. Go to Lord Qyburn

on my behalf, bring him a white cloak, and tell him that the time
has come.”

THE QUEENSGUARD

Y

ou were the queen’s man,” said Reznak mo Reznak. “The king
desires his own men about him when he holds court.”
I am the queen’s man still. Today, tomorrow, always, until my last
breath, or hers. Barristan Selmy refused to believe that Daenerys
Targaryen was dead.
Perhaps that was why he was being put aside. One by one, Hizdahr
removes us all. Strong Belwas lingered at the door of death in the
temple, under the care of the Blue Graces … though Selmy half
suspected they were nishing the job those honeyed locusts had
begun. Skahaz Shavepate had been stripped of his command. The
Unsullied had withdrawn to their barracks. Jhogo, Daario Naharis,
Admiral Groleo, and Hero of the Unsullied remained hostages of the
Yunkai’i. Aggo and Rakharo and the rest of the queen’s khalasar had
been dispatched across the river to search for their lost queen. Even
Missandei had been replaced; the king did not think it t to use a
child as his herald, and a onetime Naathi slave at that. And now me.
There was a time when he might have taken this dismissal as a
blot upon his honor. But that was in Westeros. In the viper’s pit that
was Meereen, honor seemed as silly as a fool’s motley. And this
mistrust was mutual. Hizdahr zo Loraq might be his queen’s consort,
but he would never be his king. “If His Grace wishes for me to
remove myself from court …”
“His Radiance,” the seneschal corrected. “No, no, no, you
misunderstand me. His Worship is to receive a delegation from the
Yunkai’i, to discuss the withdrawal of their armies. They may ask
for … ah … recompense for those who lost their lives to the

dragon’s wroth. A delicate situation. The king feels it will be better
if they see a Meereenese king upon the throne, protected by
Meereenese warriors. Surely you can understand that, ser.”
I understand more than you know. “Might I know which men His
Grace has chosen to protect him?”
Reznak mo Reznak smiled his slimy smile. “Fearsome ghters,
who love His Worship well. Goghor the Giant. Khrazz. The Spotted
Cat. Belaquo Bonebreaker. Heroes all.”
Pit ghters all. Ser Barristan was unsurprised. Hizdahr zo Loraq sat
uneasily on his new throne. It had been a thousand years since
Meereen last had a king, and there were some even amongst the old
blood who thought they might have made a better choice than him.
Outside the city sat the Yunkai’i with their sellswords and their
allies; inside were the Sons of the Harpy.
And the king’s protectors grew fewer every day. Hizdahr’s
blunder with Grey Worm had cost him the Unsullied. When His
Grace had tried to put them under the command of a cousin, as he
had the Brazen Beasts, Grey Worm had informed the king that they
were free men who took commands only from their mother. As for
the Brazen Beasts, half were freedmen and the rest shavepates,
whose true loyalty might still be to Skahaz mo Kandaq. The pit
ghters were King Hizdahr’s only reliable support, against a sea of
enemies.
“May they defend His Grace against all threats.” Ser Barristan’s
tone gave no hint of his true feelings; he had learned to hide such
back in King’s Landing years ago.
“His Magni cence,” Reznak mo Reznak stressed. “Your other
duties shall remain unchanged, ser. Should this peace fail, His
Radiance would still wish for you to command his forces against the
enemies of our city.”
He has that much sense, at least. Belaquo Bonebreaker and Goghor
the Giant might serve as Hizdahr’s shields, but the notion of either
leading an army into battle was so ludicrous that the old knight
almost smiled. “I am His Grace’s to command.”
“Not Grace,” the seneschal complained. “That style is Westerosi.
His Magni cence, His Radiance, His Worship.”

His Vanity would t better. “As you say.”
Reznak licked his lips. “Then we are done.” This time his oily
smile betokened dismissal. Ser Barristan took his leave, grateful to
leave the stench of the seneschal’s perfume behind him. A man
should smell of sweat, not owers.
The Great Pyramid of Meereen was eight hundred feet high from
base to point. The seneschal’s chambers were on the second level.
The queen’s apartments, and his own, occupied the highest step. A
long climb for a man my age, Ser Barristan thought, as he started up.
He had been known to make that climb ve or six times a day on
the queen’s business, as the aches in his knees and the small of his
back could attest. There will come a day when I can no longer face
these steps, he thought, and that day will be here sooner than I would
like. Before it came, he must make certain that at least a few of his
lads were ready to take his place at the queen’s side. I will knight
them myself when they are worthy, and give them each a horse and
golden spurs.
The royal apartments were still and silent. Hizdahr had not taken
up residence there, preferring to establish his own suite of rooms
deep in the heart of the Great Pyramid, where massive brick walls
surrounded him on all sides. Mezzara, Miklaz, Qezza, and the rest of
the queen’s young cupbearers—hostages in truth, but both Selmy
and the queen had become so fond of them that it was hard for him
to think of them that way—had gone with the king, whilst Irri and
Jhiqui departed with the other Dothraki. Only Missandei remained,
a forlorn little ghost haunting the queen’s chambers at the apex of
the pyramid.
Ser Barristan walked out onto the terrace. The sky above Meereen
was the color of corpse esh, dull and white and heavy, a mass of
unbroken cloud from horizon to horizon. The sun was hidden behind
a wall of cloud. It would set unseen, as it had risen unseen that
morning. The night would be hot, a sweaty, su ocating, sticky sort
of night without a breath of air. For three days rain had threatened,
but not a drop had fallen. Rain would come as a relief. It might help
wash the city clean.

From here he could see four lesser pyramids, the city’s western
walls, and the camps of the Yunkishmen by the shores of Slaver’s
Bay, where a thick column of greasy smoke twisted upward like
some monstrous serpent. The Yunkishmen burning their dead, he
realized. The pale mare is galloping through their siege camps. Despite
all the queen had done, the sickness had spread, both within the city
walls and without. Meereen’s markets were closed, its streets
empty. King Hizdahr had allowed the ghting pits to remain open,
but the crowds were sparse. The Meereenese had even begun to
shun the Temple of the Graces, reportedly.
The slavers will nd some way to blame Daenerys for that as well, Ser
Barristan thought bitterly. He could almost hear them whispering—
Great Masters, Sons of the Harpy, Yunkai’i, all telling one another
that his queen was dead. Half of the city believed it, though as yet
they did not have the courage to say such words aloud. But soon, I
think.
Ser Barristan felt very tired, very old. Where have all the years
gone? Of late, whenever he knelt to drink from a still pool, he saw a
stranger’s face gazing up from the water’s depths. When had those
crow’s-feet rst appeared around his pale blue eyes? How long ago
had his hair turned from sunlight into snow? Years ago, old man.
Decades.
Yet it seemed like only yesterday that he had been raised to
knighthood, after the tourney at King’s Landing. He could still recall
the touch of King Aegon’s sword upon his shoulder, light as a
maiden’s kiss. His words had caught in his throat when he spoke his
vows. At the feast that night he had eaten ribs of wild boar,
prepared the Dornish way with dragon peppers, so hot they burned
his mouth. Forty-seven years, and the taste still lingered in his
memory, yet he could not have said what he had supped on ten days
ago if all seven kingdoms had depended on it. Boiled dog, most like.
Or some other foul dish that tasted no better.
Not for the rst time, Selmy wondered at the strange fates that
had brought him here. He was a knight of Westeros, a man of the
stormlands and the Dornish marches; his place was in the Seven
Kingdoms, not here upon the sweltering shores of Slaver’s Bay. I

came to bring Daenerys home. Yet he had lost her, just as he had lost
her father and her brother. Even Robert. I failed him too.
Perhaps Hizdahr was wiser than he knew. Ten years ago I would
have sensed what Daenerys meant to do. Ten years ago I would have
been quick enough to stop her. Instead he had stood befuddled as she
leapt into the pit, shouting her name, then running uselessly after
her across the scarlet sands. I am become old and slow. Small wonder
Naharis mocked him as Ser Grandfather. Would Daario have moved
more quickly if he had been beside the queen that day? Selmy thought
he knew the answer to that, though it was not one he liked.
He had dreamed of it again last night: Belwas on his knees
retching up bile and blood, Hizdahr urging on the dragonslayers,
men and women eeing in terror, ghting on the steps, climbing
over one another, screaming and shouting. And Daenerys …
Her hair was a ame. She had the whip in her hand and she was
shouting, then she was on the dragon’s back, ying. The sand that
Drogon stirred as he took wing had stung Ser Barristan’s eyes, but
through a veil of tears he had watched the beast y from the pit, his
great black wings slapping at the shoulders of the bronze warriors
at the gates.
The rest he learned later. Beyond the gates had been a solid press
of people. Maddened by the smell of dragon, horses below reared in
terror, lashing out with iron-shod hooves. Food stalls and
palanquins alike were overturned, men knocked down and
trampled. Spears were thrown, crossbows were red. Some struck
home. The dragon twisted violently in the air, wounds smoking, the
girl clinging to his back. Then he loosed the re.
It had taken the rest of the day and most of the night for the
Brazen Beasts to gather up the corpses. The nal count was two
hundred fourteen slain, three times as many burned or wounded.
Drogon was gone from the city by then, last seen high over the
Skahazadhan, ying north. Of Daenerys Targaryen, no trace had
been found. Some swore they saw her fall. Others insisted that the
dragon had carried her o to devour her. They are wrong.
Ser Barristan knew no more of dragons than the tales every child
hears, but he knew Targaryens. Daenerys had been riding that

dragon, as Aegon had once ridden Balerion of old.
“She might be ying home,” he told himself, aloud.
“No,” murmured a soft voice behind him. “She would not do that,
ser. She would not go home without us.”
Ser Barristan turned. “Missandei. Child. How long have you been
standing there?”
“Not long. This one is sorry if she has disturbed you.” She
hesitated. “Skahaz mo Kandaq wishes words with you.”
“The Shavepate? You spoke with him?” That was rash, rash. The
enmity ran deep between Skahaz and the king, and the girl was
clever enough to know that. Skahaz had been outspoken in his
opposition to the queen’s marriage, a fact Hizdahr had not
forgotten. “Is he here? In the pyramid?”
“When he wishes. He comes and goes, ser.”
Yes. He would. “Who told you he wants words with me?”
“A Brazen Beast. He wore an owl mask.”
He wore an owl mask when he spoke to you. By now he could be a
jackal, a tiger, a sloth. Ser Barristan had hated the masks from the
start and never more than now. Honest men should never need to
hide their faces. And the Shavepate …
What could he be thinking? After Hizdahr had given command of
the Brazen Beasts to his cousin Marghaz zo Loraq, Skahaz had been
named Warden of the River, with charge of all the ferries, dredges,
and irrigation ditches along the Skahazadhan for fty leagues, but
the Shavepate had refused that ancient and honorable o ce, as
Hizdahr called it, preferring to retire to the modest pyramid of
Kandaq. Without the queen to protect him, he takes a great risk coming
here. And if Ser Barristan were seen speaking with him, suspicion
might fall on the knight as well.
He did not like the taste of this. It smelled of deceit, of whispers
and lies and plots hatched in the dark, all the things he’d hoped to
leave behind with the Spider and Lord Little nger and their ilk.
Barristan Selmy was not a bookish man, but he had often glanced
through the pages of the White Book, where the deeds of his
predecessors had been recorded. Some had been heroes, some
weaklings, knaves, or cravens. Most were only men—quicker and

stronger than most, more skilled with sword and shield, but still
prey to pride, ambition, lust, love, anger, jealousy, greed for gold,
hunger for power, and all the other failings that a icted lesser
mortals. The best of them overcame their aws, did their duty, and
died with their swords in their hands. The worst …
The worst were those who played the game of thrones. “Can you nd
this owl again?” he asked Missandei.
“This one can try, ser.”
“Tell him I will speak with … with our friend … after dark, by
the stables.” The pyramid’s main doors were closed and barred at
sunset. The stables would be quiet at that hour. “Make certain it is
the same owl.” It would not serve to have the wrong Brazen Beast
hear of this.
“This one understands.” Missandei turned as if to go, then paused
a moment and said, “It is said that the Yunkai’i have ringed the city
all about with scorpions, to loose iron bolts into the sky should
Drogon return.”
Ser Barristan had heard that too. “It is no simple thing to slay a
dragon in the sky. In Westeros, many tried to bring down Aegon
and his sisters. None succeeded.”
Missandei nodded. It was hard to tell if she was reassured. “Do
you think that they will nd her, ser? The grasslands are so vast,
and dragons leave no tracks across the sky.”
“Aggo and Rakharo are blood of her blood … and who knows the
Dothraki sea better than Dothraki?” He squeezed her shoulder.
“They will nd her if she can be found.” If she still lives. There were
other khals who prowled the grass, horselords with khalasars whose
riders numbered in the tens of thousands. But the girl did not need
to hear that. “You love her well, I know. I swear, I shall keep her
safe.”
The words seemed to give the girl some comfort. Words are wind,
though, Ser Barristan thought. How can I protect the queen when I am
not with her?
Barristan Selmy had known many kings. He had been born during
the troubled reign of Aegon the Unlikely, beloved by the common
folk, had received his knighthood at his hands. Aegon’s son

Jaehaerys had bestowed the white cloak on him when he was threeand-twenty, after he slew Maelys the Monstrous during the War of
the Ninepenny Kings. In that same cloak he had stood beside the
Iron Throne as madness consumed Jaehaerys’s son Aerys. Stood, and
saw, and heard, and yet did nothing.
But no. That was not fair. He did his duty. Some nights, Ser
Barristan wondered if he had not done that duty too well. He had
sworn his vows before the eyes of gods and men, he could not in
honor go against them … but the keeping of those vows had grown
hard in the last years of King Aerys’s reign. He had seen things that
it pained him to recall, and more than once he wondered how much
of the blood was on his own hands. If he had not gone into
Duskendale to rescue Aerys from Lord Darklyn’s dungeons, the king
might well have died there as Tywin Lannister sacked the town.
Then Prince Rhaegar would have ascended the Iron Throne,
mayhaps to heal the realm. Duskendale had been his nest hour, yet
the memory tasted bitter on his tongue.
It was his failures that haunted him at night, though. Jaehaerys,
Aerys, Robert. Three dead kings. Rhaegar, who would have been a ner
king than any of them. Princess Elia and the children. Aegon just a babe,
Rhaenys with her kitten. Dead, every one, yet he still lived, who had
sworn to protect them. And now Daenerys, his bright shining child
queen. She is not dead. I will not believe it.
Afternoon brought Ser Barristan a brief respite from his doubts.
He spent it in the training hall on the pyramid’s third level, working
with his boys, teaching them the art of sword and shield, horse and
lance … and chivalry, the code that made a knight more than any
pit ghter. Daenerys would need protectors her own age about her
after he was gone, and Ser Barristan was determined to give her
such.
The lads he was instructing ranged in age from eight to twenty.
He had started with more than sixty of them, but the training had
proved too rigorous for many. Less than half that number now
remained, but some showed great promise. With no king to guard, I
will have more time to train them now, he realized as he walked from
pair to pair, watching them go at one another with blunted swords

and spears with rounded heads. Brave boys. Baseborn, aye, but some
will make good knights, and they love the queen. If not for her, all of
them would have ended in the pits. King Hizdahr has his pit ghters, but
Daenerys will have knights.
“Keep your shield up,” he called. “Show me your strokes.
Together now. Low, high, low, low, high, low …”
Selmy took his simple supper out onto the queen’s terrace that
night and ate it as the sun went down. Through the purple twilight
he watched res waken one by one in the great stepped pyramids,
as the many-colored bricks of Meereen faded to grey and then to
black. Shadows gathered in the streets and alleys below, making
pools and rivers. In the dusk, the city seemed a tranquil place, even
beautiful. That is pestilence, not peace, the old knight told himself
with his last sip of wine.
He did not wish to be conspicuous, so when he was nished with
his supper he changed out of his court clothes, trading the white
cloak of the Queensguard for a hooded brown traveler’s cloak such
as any common man might wear. He kept his sword and dagger.
This could still be some trap. He had little trust in Hizdahr and less in
Reznak mo Reznak. The perfumed seneschal could well be part of
this, trying to lure him into a secret meeting so he could sweep up
him and Skahaz both and charge them with conspiring against the
king. If the Shavepate speaks treason, he will leave me no choice but to
arrest him. Hizdahr is my queen’s consort, however little I may like it.
My duty is to him, not Skahaz.
Or was it?
The rst duty of the Kingsguard was to defend the king from
harm or threat. The white knights were sworn to obey the king’s
commands as well, to keep his secrets, counsel him when counsel
was requested and keep silent when it was not, serve his pleasure
and defend his name and honor. Strictly speaking, it was purely the
king’s choice whether or not to extend Kingsguard protection to
others, even those of royal blood. Some kings thought it right and
proper to dispatch Kingsguard to serve and defend their wives and
children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins of greater and lesser
degree, and occasionally even their lovers, mistresses, and bastards.

But others preferred to use household knights and men-at-arms for
those purposes, whilst keeping their seven as their own personal
guard, never far from their sides.
If the queen had commanded me to protect Hizdahr, I would have had
no choice but to obey. But Daenerys Targaryen had never established
a proper Queensguard even for herself nor issued any commands in
respect to her consort. The world was simpler when I had a lord
commander to decide such matters, Selmy re ected. Now I am the lord
commander, and it is hard to know which path is right.
When at last he came to the bottom of the last ight of steps, he
found himself all but alone amongst the torchlit corridors inside the
pyramid’s massive brick walls. The great gates were closed and
barred, as he had anticipated. Four Brazen Beasts stood guard
outside those doors, four more within. It was those that the old
knight encountered—big men, masked as boar, bear, vole, and
manticore.
“All quiet, ser,” the bear told him.
“Keep it so.” It was not unknown for Ser Barristan to walk around
at night, to make certain the pyramid was secure.
Deeper inside the pyramid, another four Brazen Beasts had been
set to guard the iron doors outside the pit where Viserion and
Rhaegal were chained. The light of the torches shimmered o their
masks—ape, ram, wolf, crocodile.
“Have they been fed?” Ser Barristan asked.
“Aye, ser,” replied the ape. “A sheep apiece.”
And how long will that su ce, I wonder? As the dragons grew, so
did their appetites.
It was time to nd the Shavepate. Ser Barristan made his way
past the elephants and the queen’s silver mare, to the back of the
stables. An ass nickered as he went by, and a few of the horses
stirred at the light of his lantern. Elsewise all was dark and silent.
Then a shadow detached itself from inside an empty stall and
became another Brazen Beast, clad in pleated black skirt, greaves,
and muscled breastplate. “A cat?” said Barristan Selmy when he saw
the brass beneath the hood. When the Shavepate had commanded

the Brazen Beasts, he had favored a serpent’s-head mask, imperious
and frightening.
“Cats go everywhere,” replied the familiar voice of Skahaz mo
Kandaq. “No one ever looks at them.”
“If Hizdahr should learn that you are here …”
“Who will tell him? Marghaz? Marghaz knows what I want him
to know. The Beasts are still mine. Do not forget it.” The
Shavepate’s voice was mu ed by his mask, but Selmy could hear
the anger in it. “I have the poisoner.”
“Who?”
“Hizdahr’s confectioner. His name would mean nothing to you.
The man was just a catspaw. The Sons of the Harpy took his
daughter and swore she would be returned unharmed once the
queen was dead. Belwas and the dragon saved Daenerys. No one
saved the girl. She was returned to her father in the black of night,
in nine pieces. One for every year she lived.”
“Why?” Doubts gnawed at him. “The Sons had stopped their
killing. Hizdahr’s peace—”
“—is a sham. Not at rst, no. The Yunkai’i were afraid of our
queen, of her Unsullied, of her dragons. This land has known
dragons before. Yurkhaz zo Yunzak had read his histories, he knew.
Hizdahr as well. Why not a peace? Daenerys wanted it, they could
see that. Wanted it too much. She should have marched to Astapor.”
Skahaz moved closer. “That was before. The pit changed all.
Daenerys gone, Yurkhaz dead. In place of one old lion, a pack of
jackals. Bloodbeard … that one has no taste for peace. And there is
more. Worse. Volantis has launched its eet against us.”
“Volantis.” Selmy’s sword hand tingled. We made a peace with
Yunkai. Not with Volantis. “You are certain?”
“Certain. The Wise Masters know. So do their friends. The Harpy,
Reznak, Hizdahr. This king will open the city gates to the
Volantenes when they arrive. All those Daenerys freed will be
enslaved again. Even some who were never slaves will be tted for
chains. You may end your days in a ghting pit, old man. Khrazz
will eat your heart.”
His head was pounding. “Daenerys must be told.”

“Find her rst.” Skahaz grasped his forearm. His ngers felt like
iron. “We cannot wait for her. I have spoken with the Free Brothers,
the Mother’s Men, the Stalwart Shields. They have no trust in Loraq.
We must break the Yunkai’i. But we need the Unsullied. Grey Worm
will listen to you. Speak to him.”
“To what end?” He is speaking treason. Conspiracy.
“Life.” The Shavepate’s eyes were black pools behind the brazen
cat mask. “We must strike before the Volantenes arrive. Break the
siege, kill the slaver lords, turn their sellswords. The Yunkai’i do
not expect an attack. I have spies in their camps. There’s sickness,
they say, worse every day. Discipline has gone to rot. The lords are
drunk more oft than not, gorging themselves at feasts, telling each
other of the riches they’ll divide when Meereen falls, squabbling
over primacy. Bloodbeard and the Tattered Prince despise each
other. No one expects a ght. Not now. Hizdahr’s peace has lulled
us to sleep, they believe.”
“Daenerys signed that peace,” Ser Barristan said. “It is not for us
to break it without her leave.”
“And if she is dead?” demanded Skahaz. “What then, ser? I say
she would want us to protect her city. Her children.”
Her children were the freedmen. Mhysa, they called her, all those
whose chains she broke. “Mother.” The Shavepate was not wrong.
Daenerys would want her children protected. “What of Hizdahr? He
is still her consort. Her king. Her husband.”
“Her poisoner.”
Is he? “Where is your proof?”
“The crown he wears is proof enough. The throne he sits. Open
your eyes, old man. That is all he needed from Daenerys, all he ever
wanted. Once he had it, why share the rule?”
Why indeed? It had been so hot down in the pit. He could still see
the air shimmering above the scarlet sands, smell the blood spilling
from the men who’d died for their amusement. And he could still
hear Hizdahr, urging his queen to try the honeyed locusts. Those are
very tasty … sweet and hot … yet he never touched so much as one
himself … Selmy rubbed his temple. I swore no vows to Hizdahr zo

Loraq. And if I had, he has cast me aside, just as Jo rey did.
“This … this confectioner, I want to question him myself. Alone.”
“Is it that way?” The Shavepate crossed his arms against his chest.
“Done, then. Question him as you like.”
“If … if what he has to say convinces me … if I join with you in
this, this … I would require your word that no harm would come to
Hizdahr zo Loraq until … unless … it can be proved that he had
some part in this.”
“Why do you care so much for Hizdahr, old man? If he is not the
Harpy, he is the Harpy’s rstborn son.”
“All I know for certain is that he is the queen’s consort. I want
your word on this, or I swear, I shall oppose you.”
Skahaz’s smile was savage. “My word, then. No harm to Hizdahr
till his guilt is proved. But when we have the proof, I mean to kill
him with my own hands. I want to pull his entrails out and show
them to him before I let him die.”
No, the old knight thought. If Hizdahr conspired at my queen’s
death, I will see to him myself, but his death will be swift and clean. The
gods of Westeros were far away, yet Ser Barristan Selmy paused for
a moment to say a silent prayer, asking the Crone to light his way
to wisdom. For the children, he told himself. For the city. For my
queen.
“I will talk to Grey Worm,” he said.

THE IRON SUITOR

G

rief appeared alone at daybreak, her black sails stark against
the pale pink skies of morning.
Fifty-four, Victarion thought sourly when they woke him, and she
sails alone. Silently he cursed the Storm God for his malice, his rage
a black stone in his belly. Where are my ships?
He had set sail from the Shields with ninety-three, of the hundred
that had once made up the Iron Fleet, a eet belonging not to a
single lord but to the Seastone Chair itself, captained and crewed by
men from all the islands. Ships smaller than the great war dromonds
of the green lands, aye, but thrice the size of any common longship,
with deep hulls and savage rams, t to meet the king’s own eets in
battle.
In the Stepstones they had taken on grain and game and fresh
water, after the long voyage along the bleak and barren coast of
Dorne with its shoals and whirlpools. There, the Iron Victory had
captured a fat merchant ship, the great cog Noble Lady, on her way
to Oldtown by way of Gulltown, Duskendale, and King’s Landing,
with a cargo of salt cod, whale oil, and pickled herring. The food
was a welcome addition to their stores. Five other prizes taken in
the Redwyne Straits and along the Dornish coast—three cogs, a
galleas, and a galley—had brought their numbers to ninety-nine.
Nine-and-ninety ships had left the Stepstones in three proud eets,
with orders to join up again o the southern tip of the Isle of
Cedars. Forty- ve had now arrived on the far side of the world.
Twenty-two of Victarion’s own had straggled in, by threes and
fours, sometimes alone; fourteen of Ralf the Limper’s; only nine of

those that had sailed with Red Ralf Stonehouse. Red Ralf himself
was amongst the missing. To their number the eet had added nine
new prizes taken on the seas, so the sum was fty-four … but the
captured ships were cogs and shing boats, merchantmen and
slavers, not warships. In battle, they would be poor substitutes for
the lost ships of the Iron Fleet.
The last ship to appear had been the Maiden’s Bane, three days
previous. The day before that, three ships had come out of the south
together—his captive Noble Lady, lumbering along between
Ravenfeeder and Iron Kiss. But the day before and the day before
there had been nothing, and only Headless Jeyne and Fear before
that, then two more days of empty seas and cloudless skies after
Ralf the Limper appeared with the remnants of his squadron. Lord
Quellon, White Widow, Lamentation, Woe, Leviathan, Iron Lady,
Reaper’s Wind, and Warhammer, with six more ships behind, two of
them storm-wracked and under tow.
“Storms,” Ralf the Limper had muttered when he came crawling
to Victarion. “Three big storms, and foul winds between. Red winds
out of Valyria that smelled of ash and brimstone, and black winds
that drove us toward that blighted shore. This voyage was cursed
from the rst. The Crow’s Eye fears you, my lord, why else send
you so far away? He does not mean for us to return.”
Victarion had thought the same when he met the rst storm a day
out of Old Volantis. The gods hate kinslayers, he brooded, elsewise
Euron Crow’s Eye would have died a dozen deaths by my hand. As the
sea crashed around him and the deck rose and fell beneath his feet,
he had seen Dagon’s Feast and Red Tide slammed together so
violently that both exploded into splinters. My brother’s work, he’d
thought. Those were the rst two ships he’d lost from his own third
of the eet. But not the last.
So he had slapped the Limper twice across the face and said, “The
rst is for the ships you lost, the second for your talk of curses.
Speak of that again and I will nail your tongue to the mast. If the
Crow’s Eye can make mutes, so can I.” The throb of pain in his left
hand made the words harsher than they might have been elsewise,

but he meant what he said. “More ships will come. The storms are
done for now. I will have my eet.”
A monkey on the mast above howled derision, almost as if it
could taste his frustration. Filthy, noisy beast. He could send a man
up after it, but the monkeys seemed to like that game and had
proved themselves more agile than his crew. The howls rang in his
ears, though, and made the throbbing in his hand seem worse.
“Fifty-four,” he grumbled. It would have been too much to hope
for the full strength of the Iron Fleet after a voyage of such
length … but seventy ships, even eighty, the Drowned God might
have granted him that much. Would that we had the Damphair with
us, or some other priest. Victarion had made sacri ce before setting
sail, and again in the Stepstones when he split the eet in three, but
perhaps he had said the wrong prayers. That, or the Drowned God has
no power here. More and more, he had come to fear that they had
sailed too far, into strange seas where even the gods were
queer … but such doubts he con ded only to his dusky woman, who
had no tongue to repeat them.
When Grief appeared, Victarion summoned Wulfe One-Ear. “I will
want words with the Vole. Send word to Ralf the Limper, Bloodless
Tom, and the Black Shepherd. All hunting parties are to be recalled,
the shore camps broken up by rst light. Load as much fruit as can
be gathered and drive the pigs aboard the ships. We can slaughter
them at need. Shark is to remain here to tell any stragglers where
we’ve gone.” She would need that long to make repairs; the storms
had left her little more than a hulk. That would bring them down to
fty-three, but there was no help for it. “The eet departs upon the
morrow, on the evening tide.”
“As you command,” said Wulfe, “but another day might mean
another ship, lord Captain.”
“Aye. And ten days might mean ten ships, or none at all. We have
squandered too many days waiting on the sight of sails. Our victory
will be that much the sweeter if we win it with a smaller eet.” And
I must needs reach the dragon queen before the Volantenes.
In Volantis he had seen the galleys taking on provisions. The
whole city had seemed drunk. Sailors and soldiers and tinkers had

been observed dancing in the streets with nobles and fat merchants,
and in every inn and winesink cups were being raised to the new
triarchs. All the talk had been of the gold and gems and slaves that
would ood into Volantis once the dragon queen was dead. One day
of such reports was all that Victarion Greyjoy could stomach; he
paid the gold price for food and water, though it shamed him, and
took his ships back out to sea.
The storms would have scattered and delayed the Volantenes,
even as they had his own ships. If fortune smiled, many of their
warships might have sunk or run aground. But not all. No god was
that good, and those green galleys that survived by now could well
have sailed around Valyria. They will be sweeping north toward
Meereen and Yunkai, great dromonds of war teeming with slave soldiers.
If the Storm God spared them, by now they could be in the Gulf of Grief.
Three hundred ships, perhaps as many as ve hundred. Their allies
were already o Meereen: Yunkishmen and Astapors, men from
New Ghis and Qarth and Tolos and the Storm God knew where else,
even Meereen’s own warships, the ones that ed the city before its
fall. Against all that, Victarion had four-and- fty. Three-and- fty,
less the Shark.
The Crow’s Eye had sailed halfway across the world, reaving and
plundering from Qarth to Tall Trees Town, calling at unholy ports
beyond where only madmen went. Euron had even braved the
Smoking Sea and lived to tell of it. And that with only one ship. If he
can mock the gods, so can I.
“Aye, Captain,” said Wulfe One-Ear. He was not half the man that
Nute the Barber was, but the Crow’s Eye had stolen Nute. By raising
him to Lord of Oakenshield, his brother made Victarion’s best man
his own. “Is it still to be Meereen?”
“Where else? The dragon queen awaits me in Meereen.” The
fairest woman in the world if my brother could be believed. Her hair is
silver-gold, her eyes are amethysts.
Was it too much to hope that for once Euron had told it true?
Perhaps. Like as not, the girl would prove to be some pock-faced
slattern with teats slapping against her knees, her “dragons” no
more than tattooed lizards from the swamps of Sothoryos. If she is

all that Euron claims, though … They had heard talk of the beauty of
Daenerys Targaryen from the lips of pirates in the Stepstones and
fat merchants in Old Volantis. It might be true. And Euron had not
made Victarion a gift of her; the Crow’s Eye meant to take her for
himself. He sends me like a serving man to fetch her. How he will howl
when I claim her for myself. Let the men mutter. They had sailed too
far and lost too much for Victarion to turn west without his prize.
The iron captain closed his good hand into a st. “Go see that my
commands are carried out. And nd the maester wherever he is
hiding and send him to my cabin.”
“Aye.” Wulfe hobbled o .
Victarion Greyjoy turned back toward the prow, his gaze
sweeping across his eet. Longships lled the sea, sails furled and
oars shipped, oating at anchor or run up on the pale sand shore.
The Isle of Cedars. Where were these cedars? Drowned four hundred
years ago, it seemed. Victarion had gone ashore a dozen times,
hunting fresh meat, and had yet to see a cedar.
The girlish maester Euron had in icted upon him back in
Westeros claimed this place had once been called ‘the Isle of a
Hundred Battles,’ but the men who had fought those battles had all
gone to dust centuries ago. The Isle of Monkeys, that’s what they
should call it. There were pigs as well: the biggest, blackest boars
that any of the ironborn had ever seen and plenty of squealing
piglets in the brush, bold creatures that had no fear of man. They
were learning, though. The larders of the Iron Fleet were lling up
with smoked hams, salted pork, and bacon.
The monkeys, though … the monkeys were a plague. Victarion
had forbidden his men to bring any of the demonic creatures aboard
ship, yet somehow half his eet was now infested with them, even
his own Iron Victory. He could see some now, swinging from spar to
spar and ship to ship. Would that I had a crossbow.
Victarion did not like this sea, nor these endless cloudless skies,
nor the blazing sun that beat down on their heads and baked the
decks until the boards were hot enough to scorch bare feet. He did
not like these storms, which seemed to come up out of nowhere.
The seas around Pyke were often stormy, but there at least a man

could smell them coming. These southron storms were as
treacherous as women. Even the water was the wrong color—a
shimmering turquoise close to shore, and farther out a blue so deep
that it was almost black. Victarion missed the grey-green waters of
home, with their whitecaps and surges.
He did not like this Isle of Cedars either. The hunting might be
good, but the forests were too green and still, full of twisted trees
and queer bright owers like none his men had ever seen before,
and there were horrors lurking amongst the broken palaces and
shattered statues of drowned Velos, half a league north of the point
where the eet lay at anchor. The last time Victarion had spent a
night ashore, his dreams had been dark and disturbing and when he
woke his mouth was full of blood. The maester said he had bitten
his own tongue in his sleep, but he took it for a sign from the
Drowned God, a warning that if he lingered here too long, he would
choke on his own blood.
On the day the Doom came to Valyria, it was said, a wall of water
three hundred feet high had descended on the island, drowning
hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, leaving none
to tell the tale but some sherfolk who had been at sea and a
handful of Velosi spearmen posted in a stout stone tower on the
island’s highest hill, who had seen the hills and valleys beneath
them turn into a raging sea. Fair Velos with its palaces of cedar and
pink marble had vanished in a heartbeat. On the north end of the
island, the ancient brick walls and stepped pyramids of the slaver
port Ghozai had su ered the same fate.
So many drowned men, the Drowned God will be strong there,
Victarion had thought when he chose the island for the three parts
of his eet to join up again. He was no priest, though. What if he
had gotten it backwards? Perhaps the Drowned God had destroyed
the island in his wroth. His brother Aeron might have known, but
the Damphair was back on the Iron Islands, preaching against the
Crow’s Eye and his rule. No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair.
Yet the captains and kings had cried for Euron at the kingsmoot,
choosing him above Victarion and other godly men.

The morning sun was shining o the water in ripples of light too
bright to look upon. Victarion’s head had begun to pound, though
whether from the sun, his hand, or the doubts that troubled him, he
could not say. He made his way below to his cabin, where the air
was cool and dim. The dusky woman knew what he wanted without
his even asking. As he eased himself into his chair, she took a soft
damp cloth from the basin and laid it across his brow. “Good,” he
said. “Good. And now the hand.”
The dusky woman made no reply. Euron had sliced her tongue
out before giving her to him. Victarion did not doubt that the
Crow’s Eye had bedded her as well. That was his brother’s way.
Euron’s gifts are poisoned, the captain had reminded himself the day
the dusky woman came aboard. I want none of his leavings. He had
decided then that he would slit her throat and toss her in the sea, a
blood sacri ce to the Drowned God. Somehow, though, he had
never quite gotten around to it.
They had come a long way since. Victarion could talk to the
dusky woman. She never attempted to talk back. “Grief is the last,”
he told her, as she eased his glove o . “The rest are lost or late or
sunk.” He grimaced as the woman slid the point of her knife
beneath the soiled linen wound about his shield hand. “Some will
say I should not have split the eet. Fools. Nine-and-ninety ships we
had … a cumbersome beast to shepherd across the seas to the far
end of the world. If I’d kept them together, the faster ships would
have been held hostage to the slowest. And where to nd provisions
for so many mouths? No port wants so many warships in their
waters. The storms would have scattered us, in any case. Like leaves
strewn across the Summer Sea.”
Instead he had broken the great eet into squadrons, and sent
each by a di erent route to Slaver’s Bay. The swiftest ships he gave
to Red Ralf Stonehouse to sail the corsair’s road along the northern
coast of Sothoryos. The dead cities rotting on that fervid, sweltering
shore were best avoided, every seamen knew, but in the mud-andblood towns of the Basilisks Isles, teeming with escaped slaves,
slavers, skinners, whores, hunters, brindled men, and worse, there

were always provisions to be had for men who were not afraid to
pay the iron price.
The larger, heavier, slower ships made for Lys, to sell the
captives taken on the Shields, the women and children of Lord
Hewett’s Town and other islands, along with such men who decided
they would sooner yield than die. Victarion had only contempt for
such weaklings. Even so, the selling left a foul taste in his mouth.
Taking a man as thrall or a woman as a salt wife, that was right and
proper, but men were not goats or fowl to be bought and sold for
gold. He was glad to leave the selling to Ralf the Limper, who
would use the coin to load his big ships with provisions for the long
slow middle passage east.
His own ships crept along the shores of the Disputed Lands to
take on food and wine and fresh water at Volantis before swinging
south around Valyria. That was the most common way east, and the
one most heavily tra cked, with prizes for the taking and small
islands where they could shelter during storms, make repairs, and
renew their stores if need be.
“Four-and- fty ships is too few,” he told the dusky woman, “but I
can wait no longer. The only way”—He grunted as she peeled the
bandage o , tearing a crust of scab as well. The esh beneath was
green and black where the sword had sliced him.—“the only way to
do this is to take the slavers unawares, as once I did at Lannisport.
Sweep in from the sea and smash them, then take the girl and race
for home before the Volantenes descend upon us.” Victarion was no
craven, but no more was he a fool; he could not defeat three
hundred ships with fty-four. “She’ll be my wife, and you will be
her maid.” A maid without a tongue could never let slip any secrets.
He might have said more, but that was when the maester came,
rapping at the cabin door as timid as a mouse. “Enter,” Victarion
called out, “and bar the door. You know why you are here.”
“Lord Captain.” The maester looked like a mouse as well, with his
grey robes and little brown mustachio. Does he think that makes him
look more manly? Kerwin was his name. He was very young, twoand-twenty maybe. “May I see your hand?” he asked.

A fool’s question. Maesters had their uses, but Victarion had
nothing but contempt for this Kerwin. With his smooth pink cheeks,
soft hands, and brown curls, he looked more girlish than most girls.
When rst he came aboard the Iron Victory, he had a smirky little
smile too, but one night o the Stepstones he had smiled at the
wrong man, and Burton Humble had knocked out four of his teeth.
Not long after that Kerwin had come creeping to the captain to
complain that four of the crew had dragged him belowdecks and
used him as a woman. “Here is how you put an end to that,”
Victarion had told him, slamming a dagger down on the table
between them. Kerwin took the blade—too afraid to refuse it, the
captain judged—but he had never used it.
“My hand is here,” Victarion said. “Look all you like.”
Maester Kerwin went down to one knee, the better to inspect the
wound. He even sni ed at it, like a dog. “I will need to let the pus
again. The color … lord Captain, the cut is not healing. It may be
that I will need to take your hand.”
They had talked of this before. “If you take my hand, I will kill
you. But rst I will tie you over the rail and make the crew a gift of
your arse. Get on with it.”
“There will be pain.”
“Always.” Life is pain, you fool. There is no joy but in the Drowned
God’s watery halls. “Do it.”
The boy—it was hard to think of one so soft and pink as a man—
laid the edge of the dagger across the captain’s palm and slashed.
The pus that burst forth was thick and yellow as sour milk. The
dusky woman wrinkled her nose at the smell, the maester gagged,
and even Victarion himself felt his stomach churn. “Cut deeper. Get
it all. Show me the blood.”
Maester Kerwin pressed the dagger deep. This time it hurt, but
blood welled up as well as pus, blood so dark that it looked black in
the lantern light.
Blood was good. Victarion grunted in approval. He sat there
un inching as the maester dabbed and squeezed and cleaned the pus
away with squares of soft cloth boiled in vinegar. By the time he
nished, the clean water in his basin had become a scummy soup.

The sight alone would sicken any man. “Take that lth and go.”
Victarion nodded at the dusky woman. “She can bind me up.”
Even after the boy had ed, the stink remained. Of late, there
was no escaping it. The maester had suggested that the wound
might best be drained up on deck, amidst fresh air and sunlight, but
Victarion forbade it. This was not something that his crew could
see. They were half a world away from home, too far to let them
see that their iron captain had begun to rust.
His left hand still throbbed—a dull pain, but persistent. When he
closed his hand into a st it sharpened, as if a knife were stabbing
up his arm. Not a knife, a longsword. A longsword in the hand of a
ghost. Serry, that had been his name. A knight, and heir to
Southshield. I killed him, but he stabs at me from beyond the grave.
From the hot heart of whatever hell I sent him to, he thrusts his steel into
my hand and twists.
Victarion remembered the ght as if it had been yesterday. His
shield had been in shards, hanging useless from his arm, so when
Serry’s longsword came ashing down he had reached up and
caught it. The stripling had been stronger than he looked; his blade
bit through the lobstered steel of the captain’s gauntlet and the
padded glove beneath into the meat of his palm. A scratch from a
little kitten, Victarion told himself afterward. He had washed the cut,
poured some boiled vinegar over it, bound it up, and thought little
more of it, trusting that the pain would fade and the hand heal itself
in time.
Instead the wound had festered, until Victarion began to wonder
whether Serry’s blade had been poisoned. Why else would the cut
refuse to heal? The thought made him rage. No true man killed with
poison. At Moat Cailin the bog devils had loosed poisoned arrows at
his men, but that was to be expected from such degraded creatures.
Serry had been a knight, highborn. Poison was for cravens, women,
and Dornishmen.
“If not Serry, who?” he asked the dusky woman. “Could that
mouse of a maester be doing this? Maesters know spells and other
tricks. He might be using one to poison me, hoping I will let him
cut my hand o .” The more he thought on it, the more likely it

seemed. “The Crow’s Eye gave him to me, wretched creature that
he is.” Euron had taken Kerwin o Greenshield, where he had been
in service to Lord Chester, tending his ravens and teaching his
children, or perhaps the other away around. And how the mouse
had squealed when one of Euron’s mutes delivered him aboard the
Iron Victory, dragging him along by the convenient chain about his
neck. “If this is his revenge, he wrongs me. It was Euron who
insisted he be taken, to keep him from making mischief with his
birds.” His brother had given him three cages of ravens too, so
Kerwin could send back word of their voyaging, but Victarion had
forbidden him to loose them. Let the Crow’s Eye stew and wonder.
The dusky woman was binding his hand with fresh linen,
wrapping it six times around his palm, when Longwater Pyke came
pounding at the cabin door to tell him that the captain of Grief had
come aboard with a prisoner. “Says he’s brought us a wizard,
Captain. Says he shed him from the sea.”
“A wizard?” Could the Drowned God have sent a gift to him, here
on the far side of the world? His brother Aeron would have known,
but Aeron had seen the majesty of the Drowned God’s watery halls
below the sea before being returned to life. Victarion had a healthy
fear of his god, as all men should, but put his faith in steel. He
exed his wounded hand, grimacing, then pulled his glove on and
rose. “Show me this wizard.”
Grief’s master awaited them on deck. A small man, as hairy as he
was homely, he was a Sparr by birth. His men called him the Vole.
“Lord Captain,” he said when Victarion appeared, “this is Moqorro.
A gift to us from the Drowned God.”
The wizard was a monster of a man, as tall as Victarion himself
and twice as wide, with a belly like a boulder and a tangle of bonewhite hair that grew about his face like a lion’s mane. His skin was
black. Not the nut brown of the Summer Islanders on their swan
ships, nor the red-brown of the Dothraki horselords, nor the
charcoal-and-earth color of the dusky woman’s skin, but black.
Blacker than coal, blacker than jet, blacker than a raven’s wing.
Burned, Victarion thought, like a man who has been roasted in the
ames until his esh chars and crisps and falls smoking from his bones.

The res that had charred him still danced across his cheeks and
forehead, where his eyes peered out from amongst a mask of frozen
ames. Slave tattoos, the captain knew. Marks of evil.
“We found him clinging to a broken spar,” said the Vole. “He was
ten days in the water after his ship went down.”
“If he were ten days in the water, he’d be dead, or mad from
drinking seawater.” Salt water was holy; Aeron Damphair and other
priests might bless men with it and swallow a mouthful or two from
time to time to strengthen their faith, but no mortal man could
drink of the deep sea for days at a time and hope to live. “You claim
to be a sorcerer?” Victarion asked the prisoner.
“No, Captain,” the black man answered in the Common Tongue.
His voice was so deep it seemed to come from the bottom of the
sea. “I am but a humble slave of R’hllor, the Lord of Light.”
R’hllor. A red priest, then. Victarion had seen such men in foreign
cities, tending their sacred res. Those had worn rich red robes of
silk and velvet and lambswool. This one was dressed in faded, saltstained rags that clung to his thick legs and hung about his torso in
tatters … but when the captain peered at the rags more closely, it
did appear as if they might once have been red. “A pink priest,”
Victarion announced.
“A demon priest,” said Wulfe One-Ear. He spat.
“Might be his robes caught re, so he jumped overboard to put
them out,” suggested Longwater Pyke, to general laughter. Even
the monkeys were amused. They chattered overhead, and one ung
down a handful of his own shit to spatter on the boards.
Victarion Greyjoy mistrusted laughter. The sound of it always left
him with the uneasy feeling that he was the butt of some jape he
did not understand. Euron Crow’s Eye had oft made mock of him
when they were boys. So had Aeron, before he had become the
Damphair. Their mockery oft came disguised as praise, and
sometimes Victarion had not even realized he was being mocked.
Not until he heard the laughter. Then came the anger, boiling up in
the back of his throat until he was like to choke upon the taste. That
was how he felt about the monkeys. Their antics never brought so

much as a smile to the captain’s face, though his crew would roar
and hoot and whistle.
“Send him down to the Drowned God before he brings a curse
upon us,” urged Burton Humble.
“A ship gone down, and only him clinging to the wreckage,” said
Wulfe One-Ear. “Where’s the crew? Did he call down demons to
devour them? What happened to this ship?”
“A storm.” Moqorro crossed his arms against his chest. He did not
appear frightened, though all around him men were calling for his
death. Even the monkeys did not seem to like this wizard. They
leapt from line to line overhead, screaming.
Victarion was uncertain. He came out of the sea. Why would the
Drowned God cast him up unless he meant for us to nd him? His
brother Euron had his pet wizards. Perhaps the Drowned God meant
for Victarion to have one too. “Why do you say this man is a
wizard?” he asked the Vole. “I see only a ragged red priest.”
“I thought the same, lord Captain … but he knows things. He
knew that we made for Slaver’s Bay before any man could tell him,
and he knew you would be here, o this island.” The small man
hesitated. “Lord Captain, he told me … he told me you would surely
die unless we brought him to you.”
“That I would die?” Victarion snorted. Cut his throat and throw him
in the sea, he was about to say, until a throb of pain in his bad hand
went stabbing up his arm almost to the elbow, the agony so intense
that his words turned to bile in his throat. He stumbled and seized
the rail to keep from falling.
“The sorcerer’s cursed the captain,” a voice said.
Other men took up the cry. “Cut his throat! Kill him before he calls
his demons down on us!” Longwater Pyke was the rst to draw his
dirk. “NO!” Victarion bellowed. “Stand back! All of you. Pyke, put
up your steel. Vole, back to your ship. Humble, take the wizard to
my cabin. The rest of you, about your duties.” For half a heartbeat
he was not certain they would obey. They stood about muttering,
half with blades to hand, each looking to the others for resolve.
Monkey shit rained down around them all, splat splat splat. No one

moved until Victarion seized the sorcerer by the arm and pulled him
to the hatchway.
As he opened the door to the captain’s cabin, the dusky woman
turned toward him, silent and smiling … but when she saw the red
priest at his side her lips drew back from her teeth, and she hisssssed
in sudden fury, like a snake. Victarion gave her the back of his good
hand and knocked her to the deck. “Be quiet, woman. Wine for both
of us.” He turned to the black man. “Did the Vole speak true? You
saw my death?”
“That, and more.”
“Where? When? Will I die in battle?” His good hand opened and
closed. “If you lie to me, I will split your head open like a melon
and let the monkeys eat your brains.”
“Your death is with us now, my lord. Give me your hand.”
“My hand. What do you know of my hand?”
“I have seen you in the night res, Victarion Greyjoy. You come
striding through the ames stern and erce, your great axe dripping
blood, blind to the tentacles that grasp you at wrist and neck and
ankle, the black strings that make you dance.”
“Dance?” Victarion bristled. “Your night res lie. I was not made
for dancing, and I am no man’s puppet.” He yanked o his glove
and shoved his bad hand at the priest’s face. “Here. Is this what you
wanted?” The new linen was already discolored by blood and pus.
“He had a rose on his shield, the man who gave this to me. I
scratched my hand on a thorn.”
“Even the smallest scratch can prove mortal, lord Captain, but if
you will allow me, I will heal this. I will need a blade. Silver would
be best, but iron will serve. A brazier as well. I must needs light a
re. There will be pain. Terrible pain, such as you have never
known. But when we are done, your hand will be returned to you.”
They are all the same, these magic men. The mouse warned me of
pain as well. “I am ironborn, priest. I laugh at pain. You will have
what you require … but if you fail, and my hand is not healed, I
will cut your throat myself and give you to the sea.”
Moqorro bowed, his dark eyes shining. “So be it.”

The iron captain was not seen again that day, but as the hours
passed the crew of his Iron Victory reported hearing the sound of
wild laughter coming from the captain’s cabin, laughter deep and
dark and mad, and when Longwater Pyke and Wulfe One-Eye tried
the cabin door they found it barred. Later singing was heard, a
strange high wailing song in a tongue the maester said was High
Valyrian. That was when the monkeys left the ship, screeching as
they leapt into the water.
Come sunset, as the sea turned black as ink and the swollen sun
tinted the sky a deep and bloody red, Victarion came back on deck.
He was naked from the waist up, his left arm blood to the elbow. As
his crew gathered, whispering and trading glances, he raised a
charred and blackened hand. Wisps of dark smoke rose from his
ngers as he pointed at the maester. “That one. Cut his throat and
throw him in the sea, and the winds will favor us all the way to
Meereen.” Moqorro had seen that in his res. He had seen the
wench wed too, but what of it? She would not be the rst woman
Victarion Greyjoy had made a widow.

TYRION

T

he healer entered the tent murmuring pleasantries, but one
sni of the foul air and a glance at Yezzan zo Qaggaz put an end to
that. “The pale mare,” the man told Sweets.
What a surprise, Tyrion thought. Who could have guessed? Aside
from any man with a nose and me with half of one. Yezzan was
burning with fever, squirming tfully in a pool of his own
excrement. His shit had turned to brown slime streaked with
blood … and it fell to Yollo and Penny to wipe his yellow bottom
clean. Even with assistance, their master could not lift his own
weight; it took all his failing strength to roll onto one side.
“My arts will not avail here,” the healer announced. “The noble
Yezzan’s life is in the hands of the gods. Keep him cool if you can.
Some say that helps. Bring him water.” Those a icted by the pale
mare were always thirsty, drinking gallons between their shits.
“Clean fresh water, as much as he will drink.”
“Not river water,” said Sweets.
“By no means.” And with that, the healer ed.
We need to ee as well, thought Tyrion. He was a slave in a golden
collar, with little bells that tinkled cheerfully with every step he
took. One of Yezzan’s special treasures. An honor indistinguishable from
a death warrant. Yezzan zo Qaggaz liked to keep his darlings close,
so it had fallen to Yollo and Penny and Sweets and his other
treasures to attend him when he grew sick.
Poor old Yezzan. The lord of suet was not so bad as masters went.
Sweets had been right about that. Serving at his nightly banquets,
Tyrion had soon learned that Yezzan stood foremost amongst those

Yunkish lords who favored honoring the peace with Meereen. Most
of the others were only biding their time, waiting for the armies of
Volantis to arrive. A few wanted to assault the city immediately,
lest the Volantenes rob them of their glory and the best part of the
plunder. Yezzan would have no part of that. Nor would he consent
to returning Meereen’s hostages by way of trebuchet, as the
sellsword Bloodbeard had proposed.
But much and more can change in two days. Two days ago Nurse
had been hale and healthy. Two days ago Yezzan had not heard the
pale mare’s ghostly hoofbeats. Two days ago the eets of Old
Volantis had been two days farther o . And now …
“Is Yezzan going to die?” Penny asked, in that please-say-it-is-notso voice of hers.
“We are all going to die.”
“Of the ux, I meant.”
Sweets gave them both a desperate look. “Yezzan must not die.”
The hermaphrodite stroked the brow of their gargantuan master,
pushing back his sweat-damp hair. The Yunkishman moaned, and
another ood of brown water gushed down his legs. His bedding
was stained and stinking, but they had no way to move him.
“Some masters free their slaves when they die,” said Penny.
Sweets tittered. It was a ghastly sound. “Only favorites. They free
them from the woes of the world, to accompany their beloved
master to the grave and serve him in the afterlife.”
Sweets should know. His will be the rst throat slit.
The goat boy spoke up. “The silver queen—”
“—is dead,” insisted Sweets. “Forget her! The dragon took her
across the river. She’s drowned in that Dothraki sea.”
“You can’t drown in grass,” the goat boy said.
“If we were free,” said Penny, “we could nd the queen. Or go
search for her, at least.”
You on your dog and me on my sow, chasing a dragon across the
Dothraki sea. Tyrion scratched his scar to keep from laughing. “This
particular dragon has already evinced a fondness for roast pork. And
roast dwarf is twice as tasty.”

“It was just a wish,” said Penny wistfully. “We could sail away.
There are ships again, now that the war is over.”
Is it? Tyrion was inclined to doubt that. Parchments had been
signed, but wars were not fought on parchments.
“We could sail to Qarth,” Penny went on. “The streets are paved
with jade there, my brother always said. The city walls are one of
the wonders of the world. When we perform in Qarth, gold and
silver will rain down on us, you’ll see.”
“Some of those ships out on the bay are Qartheen,” Tyrion
reminded her. “Lomas Longstrider saw the walls of Qarth. His
books su ce for me. I have gone as far east as I intend to go.”
Sweets dabbed at Yezzan’s fevered face with a damp cloth.
“Yezzan must live. Or we all die with him. The pale mare does not
carry o every rider. The master will recover.”
That was a bald-faced lie. It would be a wonder if Yezzan lived
another day. The lord of suet was already dying from whatever
hideous disease he had brought back from Sothoryos, it seemed to
Tyrion. This would just hasten his end. A mercy, really. But not the
sort the dwarf craved for himself. “The healer said he needs fresh
water. We will see to that.”
“That is good of you.” Sweets sounded numb. It was more than
just fear of having her throat cut; alone amongst Yezzan’s treasures,
she actually seemed fond of their immense master.
“Penny, come with me.” Tyrion opened the tent ap and ushered
her out into the heat of a Meereenese morning. The air was muggy
and oppressive, yet still a welcome relief from the miasma of sweat,
shit, and sickness that lled the inside of Yezzan’s palatial pavilion.
“Water will help the master,” Penny said. “That’s what the healer
said, it must be so. Sweet fresh water.”
“Sweet fresh water didn’t help Nurse.” Poor old Nurse. Yezzan’s
soldiers had tossed him onto the corpse wagon last night at dusk,
another victim of the pale mare. When men are dying every hour,
no one looks too hard at one more dead man, especially one as well
despised as Nurse. Yezzan’s other slaves had refused to go near the
overseer once the cramps began, so it was left to Tyrion to keep
him warm and bring him drinks. Watered wine and lemonsweet and

some nice hot dogtail soup, with slivers of mushroom in the broth. Drink
it down, Nursey, that shitwater squirting from your arse needs to be
replaced. The last word Nurse ever said was, “No.” The last words
he ever heard were, “A Lannister always pays his debts.”
Tyrion had kept the truth of that from Penny, but she needed to
understand how things stood with their master. “If Yezzan lives to
see the sunrise, I’ll be stunned.”
She clutched his arm. “What will happen to us?”
“He has heirs. Nephews.” Four such had come with Yezzan from
Yunkai to command his slave soldiers. One was dead, slain by
Targaryen sellswords during a sortie. The other three would divide
the yellow enormity’s slaves amongst them, like as not. Whether
any of the nephews shared Yezzan’s fondness for cripples, freaks,
and grotesques was far less certain. “One of them may inherit us. Or
we could end up back on the auction block.”
“No.” Her eyes got big. “Not that. Please.”
“It is not a prospect I relish either.”
A few yards away, six of Yezzan’s slave soldiers were squatting in
the dust, throwing the bones and passing a wineskin from hand to
hand. One was the serjeant called Scar, a black-tempered brute with
a head as smooth as stone and the shoulders of an ox. Clever as an
ox too, Tyrion recalled.
He waddled toward them. “Scar,” he barked out, “the noble
Yezzan has need of fresh, clean water. Take two men and bring
back as many pails as you can carry. And be quick about it.”
The soldiers broke o their game. Scar rose to his feet, brow
beetling. “What did you say, dwarf? Who do you think you are?”
“You know who I am. Yollo. One of our lord’s treasures. Now do
as I told you.”
The soldiers laughed. “Go on, Scar,” one mocked, “and be quick
about it. Yezzan’s monkey gave you a command.”
“You do not tell soldiers what to do,” Scar said.
“Soldiers?” Tyrion a ected puzzlement. “Slaves, is what I see.
You wear a collar round your neck the same as me.”
The savage backhand blow Scar dealt him knocked him to the
ground and broke his lip. “Yezzan’s collar. Not yours.”

Tyrion wiped the blood from his split lip with the back of his
hand. When he tried to rise, one leg went out from under him, and
he stumbled back onto his knees. He needed Penny’s help to regain
his feet. “Sweets said the master must have water,” he said in his
best whine.
“Sweets can go fuck himself. He’s made for it. We don’t take
commands from that freak neither.”
No, thought Tyrion. Even amongst slaves there were lords and
peasants, as he had been quick to learn. The hermaphrodite had
long been their master’s special pet, indulged and favored, and the
noble Yezzan’s other slaves hated him for it.
The soldiers were accustomed to taking their commands from
their masters and their overseer. But Nurse was dead and Yezzan
too sick to name a successor. As for the three nephews, those brave
free men had remembered urgent business elsewhere at the rst
sound of the pale mare’s hooves.
“The w-water,” said Tyrion, cringing. “Not river water, the healer
said. Clean, fresh well water.”
Scar grunted. “You go for it. And be quick about it.”
“Us?” Tyrion exchanged a hopeless glance with Penny. “Water’s
heavy. We’re not so strong as you. Can we … can we take the mule
cart?”
“Take your legs.”
“We’ll need to make a dozen trips.”
“Make a hundred trips. It’s no shit to me.”
“Just the two of us … we won’t be able to carry all the water that
the master needs.”
“Take your bear,” suggested Scar. “Fetching water is about all
that one is good for.”
Tyrion backed away. “As you say, master.”
Scar grinned. Master. Oh, he liked that. “Morgo, bring the keys.
You ll the pails and come right back, dwarf. You know what
happens to slaves who try to escape.”
“Bring the pails,” Tyrion told Penny. He went o with the man
Morgo to fetch Ser Jorah Mormont from his cage.

The knight had not adapted well to bondage. When called upon to
play the bear and carry o the maiden fair, he had been sullen and
uncooperative, shu ing lifelessly through his paces when he
deigned to take part in their mummery at all. Though he had not
attempted escape, nor o ered violence to his captors, he would
ignore their commands oft as not or reply with muttered curses.
None of this had amused Nurse, who made his displeasure clear by
con ning Mormont in an iron cage and having him beaten every
evening as the sun sank into Slaver’s Bay. The knight absorbed the
beatings silently; the only sounds were the muttered curses of the
slaves who beat him and the dull thuds of their clubs pounding
against Ser Jorah’s bruised and battered esh.
The man is a shell, Tyrion thought, the rst time he saw the big
knight beaten. I should have held my tongue and let Zahrina have him.
It might have been a kinder fate than this.
Mormont emerged from the cramped con nes of the cage bent
and squinting, with both eyes blackened and his back crusty with
dried blood. His face was so bruised and swollen that he hardly
looked human. He was naked except for a breechclout, a lthy bit
of yellow rag. “You’re to help them carry water,” Morgo told him.
Ser Jorah’s only reply was a sullen stare. Some men would sooner
die free than live a slave, I suppose. Tyrion was not stricken with that
a iction himself, thankfully, but if Mormont murdered Morgo, the
other slaves might not draw that distinction. “Come,” he said,
before the knight did something brave and stupid. He waddled o
and hoped Mormont would follow.
The gods were good for once. Mormont followed.
Two pails for Penny, two for Tyrion, and four for Ser Jorah, two
in either hand. The nearest well was south and west of the
Harridan, so they set o in that direction, the bells on their collars
ringing merrily with every step. No one paid them any mind. They
were just slaves fetching water for their master. Wearing a collar
conferred certain advantages, particularly a gilded collar inscribed
with the name of Yezzan zo Qaggaz. The chime of those little bells
proclaimed their value to anyone with ears. A slave was only as
important as his master; Yezzan was the richest man in the Yellow

City and had brought six hundred slave soldiers to the war, even if
he did look like a monstrous yellow slug and smell of piss. Their
collars gave them leave to go anywhere they might wish within the
camp.
Until Yezzan dies.
The Clanker Lords had their slave soldiers drilling in the nearest
eld. The clatter of the chains that bound them made a harsh
metallic music as they marched across the sand in lockstep and
formed up with their long spears. Elsewhere teams of slaves were
raising ramps of stone and sand beneath their mangonels and
scorpions, angling them upward at the sky, the better to defend the
camp should the black dragon return. It made the dwarf smile to see
them sweating and cursing as they wrestled the heavy machines
onto the inclines. Crossbows were much in evidence as well. Every
other man seemed to be clutching one, with a quiverfull of bolts
hanging from his hip.
If anyone had thought to ask him, Tyrion could have told them
not to bother. Unless one of those long iron scorpion bolts chanced
to nd an eye, the queen’s pet monster was not like to be brought
down by such toys. Dragons are not so easy to kill as that. Tickle him
with these and you’ll only make him angry.
The eyes were where a dragon was most vulnerable. The eyes,
and the brain behind them. Not the underbelly, as certain old tales
would have it. The scales there were just as tough as those along a
dragon’s back and anks. And not down the gullet either. That was
madness. These would-be dragonslayers might as well try to quench
a re with a spear thrust. “Death comes out of the dragon’s mouth,”
Septon Barth had written in his Unnatural History, “but death does
not go in that way.”
Farther on, two legions from New Ghis were facing o shield wall
to shield wall whilst serjeants in iron halfhelms with horsehair
crests screamed commands in their own incomprehensible dialect.
To the naked eye the Ghiscari looked more formidable than the
Yunkish slave soldiers, but Tyrion nursed doubts. The legionaries
might be armed and organized in the same manner as

Unsullied … but the eunuchs knew no other life, whereas the
Ghiscari were free citizens who served for three-year terms.
The line at the well stretched back a quarter mile.
There were only a handful of wells within a day’s march of
Meereen, so the wait was always long. Most of the Yunkish host
drew their drinking water from the Skahazadhan, which Tyrion had
known was a very bad idea even before the healer’s warning. The
clever ones took care to stay upstream of the latrines, but they were
still downstream of the city.
The fact that there were any good wells at all within a day’s
march of the city only went to prove that Daenerys Targaryen was
still an innocent where siegecraft was concerned. She should have
poisoned every well. Then all the Yunkishmen would be drinking from
the river. See how long their siege lasts then. That was what his lord
father would have done, Tyrion did not doubt.
Every time they shu ed forward another place, the bells on their
collars tinkled brightly. Such a happy sound, it makes me want to
scoop out someone’s eyeballs with a spoon. By now Gri and Duck and
Haldon Halfmaester should be in Westeros with their young prince.
I should be with them … but no, I had to have a whore. Kinslaying was
not enough, I needed cunt and wine to seal my ruin, and here I am on
the wrong side of the world, wearing a slave collar with little golden bells
to announce my coming. If I dance just right, maybe I can ring “The
Rains of Castamere.”
There was no better place to hear the latest news and rumors than
around the well. “I know what I saw,” an old slave in a rusted iron
collar was saying, as Tyrion and Penny shu ed along in the queue,
“and I saw that dragon ripping o arms and legs, tearing men in
half, burning them down to ash and bones. People started running,
trying to get out of that pit, but I come to see a show, and by all the
gods of Ghis, I saw one. I was up in the purple, so I didn’t think the
dragon was like to trouble me.”
“The queen climbed onto the dragon’s back and ew away,”
insisted a tall brown woman.
“She tried,” said the old man, “but she couldn’t hold on. The
crossbows wounded the dragon, and the queen was struck right

between her sweet pink teats, I hear. That was when she fell. She
died in the gutter, crushed beneath a wagon’s wheels. I know a girl
who knows a man who saw her die.”
In this company, silence was the better part of wisdom, but
Tyrion could not help himself. “No corpse was found,” he said.
The old man frowned. “What would you know about it?”
“They were there,” said the brown woman. “It’s them, the
jousting dwarfs, the ones who tilted for the queen.”
The old man squinted down as if seeing him and Penny for the
rst time. “You’re the ones who rode the pigs.”
Our notoriety precedes us. Tyrion sketched a courtly bow, and
refrained from pointing out that one of the pigs was really a dog.
“The sow I ride is actually my sister. We have the same nose, could
you tell? A wizard cast a spell on her, but if you give her a big wet
kiss, she will turn into a beautiful woman. The pity is, once you get
to know her, you’ll want to kiss her again to turn her back.”
Laughter erupted all around them. Even the old man joined in.
“You saw her, then,” said the redheaded boy behind them. “You saw
the queen. Is she as beautiful as they say?”
I saw a slender girl with silvery hair wrapped in a tokar, he might
have told them. Her face was veiled, and I never got close enough for a
good look. I was riding on a pig. Daenerys Targaryen had been seated
in the owner’s box beside her Ghiscari king, but Tyrion’s eyes had
been drawn to the knight in the white-and-gold armor behind her.
Though his features were concealed, the dwarf would have known
Barristan Selmy anywhere. Illyrio was right about that much, at least,
he remembered thinking. Will Selmy know me, though? And what will
he do if he does?
He had almost revealed himself then and there, but something
stopped him—caution, cowardice, instinct, call it what you will. He
could not imagine Barristan the Bold greeting him with anything
but hostility. Selmy had never approved of Jaime’s presence in his
precious Kingsguard. Before the rebellion, the old knight thought
him too young and untried; afterward, he had been known to say
that the Kingslayer should exchange that white cloak for a black
one. And his own crimes were worse. Jaime had killed a madman.

Tyrion had put a quarrel through the groin of his own sire, a man
Ser Barristan had known and served for years. He might have
chanced it all the same, but then Penny had landed a blow on his
shield and the moment was gone, never to return.
“The queen watched us tilt,” Penny was telling the other slaves in
line, “but that was the only time we saw her.”
“You must have seen the dragon,” said the old man.
Would that we had. The gods had not even vouchsafed him that
much. As Daenerys Targaryen was taking wing, Nurse had been
clapping irons round their ankles to make certain they would not
attempt escape on their way back to their master. If the overseer
had only taken his leave after delivering them to the abbatoir, or
ed with the rest of the slavers when the dragon descended from
the sky, the two dwarfs might have strolled away free. Or run away,
more like, our little bells a-jingle.
“Was there a dragon?” Tyrion said with a shrug. “All I know is
that no dead queens were found.”
The old man was not convinced. “Ah, they found corpses by the
hundred. They dragged them inside the pit and burned them,
though half was crisp already. Might be they didn’t know her,
burned and bloody and crushed. Might be they did but decided to
say elsewise, to keep you slaves quiet.”
“Us slaves?” said the brown woman. “You wear a collar too.”
“Ghazdor’s collar,” the old man boasted. “Known him since we
was born. I’m almost like a brother to him. Slaves like you,
sweepings out of Astapor and Yunkai, you whine about being free,
but I wouldn’t give the dragon queen my collar if she o ered to
suck my cock for it. Man has the right master, that’s better.”
Tyrion did not dispute him. The most insidious thing about
bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it. The life of
most slaves was not all that di erent from the life of a serving man
at Casterly Rock, it seemed to him. True, some slaveowners and
their overseers were brutal and cruel, but the same was true of
some Westerosi lords and their stewards and baili s. Most of the
Yunkai’i treated their chattels decently enough, so long as they did
their jobs and caused no trouble … and this old man in his rusted

collar, with his erce loyalty to Lord Wobblecheeks, his owner, was
not at all atypical.
“Ghazdor the Great-hearted?” Tyrion said, sweetly. “Our master
Yezzan has often spoken of his wits.” What Yezzan had actually said
was on the order of, I have more wits in the left cheek of my arse than
Ghazdor and his brothers have between them. He thought it prudent to
omit the actual words.
Midday had come and gone before he and Penny reached the
well, where a scrawny one-legged slave was drawing water. He
squinted at them suspiciously. “Nurse always comes for Yezzan’s
water, with four men and a mule cart.” He dropped the bucket
down the well once more. There was a soft splash. The one-legged
man let the bucket ll, then began to draw it upward. His arms
were sunburnt and peeling, scrawny to look at but all muscle.
“The mule died,” said Tyrion. “So did Nurse, poor man. And now
Yezzan himself has mounted the pale mare, and six of his soldiers
have the shits. May I have two pails full?”
“As you like.” That was the end of idle talk. Is that hoofbeats you
hear? The lie about the soldiers got old one-leg moving much more
quickly.
They started back, each of the dwarfs carrying two brim-full pails
of sweet water and Ser Jorah with two pails in each hand. The day
was growing hotter, the air as thick and wet as damp wool, and the
pails seemed to grow heavier with every step. A long walk on short
legs. Water sloshed from his pails with every stride, splashing round
his legs, whilst his bells played a marching song. Had I known it
would come to this, Father, I might have let you live. Half a mile east, a
dark plume of smoke was rising where a tent had been set a re.
Burning last night’s dead. “This way,” Tyrion said, jerking his head to
the right.
Penny gave him a puzzled look. “That’s not how we came.”
“We don’t want to breathe that smoke. It’s full of malign
humors.” It was not a lie. Not entirely.
Penny was soon pu ng, struggling with the weight of her pails.
“I need to rest.”

“As you wish.” Tyrion set the pails of water on the ground,
grateful for the halt. His legs were cramping badly, so he found
himself a likely rock and sat on it to rub his thighs.
“I could do that for you,” o ered Penny.
“I know where the knots are.” As fond as he had grown of the
girl, it still made him uncomfortable when she touched him. He
turned to Ser Jorah. “A few more beatings and you’ll be uglier than
I am, Mormont. Tell me, is there any ght left in you?”
The big knight raised two blackened eyes and looked at him as he
might look at a bug. “Enough to crack your neck, Imp.”
“Good.” Tyrion picked up his pails. “This way, then.”
Penny wrinkled her brow. “No. It’s to the left.” She pointed.
“That’s the Harridan there.”
“And that’s the Wicked Sister.” Tyrion nodded in the other
direction. “Trust me,” he said. “My way is quicker.” He set o , his
bells jingling. Penny would follow, he knew.
Sometimes he envied the girl all her pretty little dreams. She
reminded him of Sansa Stark, the child bride he had wed and lost.
Despite the horrors Penny had su ered, she remained somehow
trusting. She should know better. She is older than Sansa. And she’s a
dwarf. She acts as if she has forgotten that, as if she were highborn and
fair to look upon, instead of a slave in a grotesquerie. At night Tyrion
would oft hear her praying. A waste of words. If there are gods to
listen, they are monstrous gods who torment us for their sport. Who else
would make a world like this, so full of bondage, blood, and pain? Who
else would shape us as they have? Sometimes he wanted to slap her,
shake her, scream at her, anything to wake her from her dreams. No
one is going to save us, he wanted to scream at her. The worst is yet to
come. Yet somehow he could never say the words. Instead of giving
her a good hard crack across that ugly face of hers to knock the
blinders from her eyes, he would nd himself squeezing her
shoulder or giving her a hug. Every touch a lie. I have paid her so
much false coin that she half thinks she’s rich.
He had even kept the truth of Daznak’s Pit from her.
Lions. They were going to set lions on us. It would have been
exquisitely ironic, that. Perhaps he would have had time for a short,

bitter chortle before being torn apart.
No one ever told him the end that had been planned for them, not
in so many words, but it had not been hard to puzzle out, down
beneath the bricks of Daznak’s Pit, in the hidden world below the
seats, the dark domain of the pit ghters and the serving men who
tended to them, quick and dead—the cooks who fed them, the
ironmongers who armed them, the barber-surgeons who bled them
and shaved them and bound up their wounds, the whores who
serviced them before and after ghts, the corpse handlers who
dragged the losers o the sands with chains and iron hooks.
Nurse’s face had given Tyrion his rst inkling. After their show,
he and Penny had returned to the torchlit vault where the ghters
gathered before and after their matches. Some sat sharpening their
weapons; others sacri ced to queer gods, or dulled their nerves
with milk of the poppy before going out to die. Those who’d fought
and won were dicing in a corner, laughing as only men who have
just faced death and lived can laugh.
Nurse was paying out some silver to a pit man on a lost wager
when he spied Penny leading Crunch. The confusion in his eyes was
gone in half a heartbeat, but not before Tyrion grasped what it
meant. Nurse did not expect us back. He had looked around at other
faces. None of them expected us back. We were meant to die out there.
The nal piece fell into place when he overheard an animal trainer
complaining loudly to the pitmaster. “The lions are hungry. Two
days since they ate. I was told not to feed them, and I haven’t. The
queen should pay for meat.”
“You take that up with her the next time she holds court,” the
pitmaster threw back at him.
Even now, Penny did not suspect. When she spoke about the pit,
her chief worry was that more people had not laughed. They would
have pissed themselves laughing if the lions had been loosed, Tyrion
almost told her. Instead he’d squeezed her shoulder.
Penny came to a sudden halt. “We’re going the wrong way.”
“We’re not.” Tyrion lowered his pails to the ground. The handles
had gouged deep grooves in his ngers. “Those are the tents we
want, there.”

“The Second Sons?” A queer smile split Ser Jorah’s face. “If you
think to nd help there, you don’t know Brown Ben Plumm.”
“Oh, I do. Plumm and I have played ve games of cyvasse. Brown
Ben is shrewd, tenacious, not unintelligent … but wary. He likes to
let his opponent take the risks whilst he sits back and keeps his
options open, reacting to the battle as it takes shape.”
“Battle? What battle?” Penny backed away from him. “We have
to get back. The master needs clean water. If we take too long, we’ll
be whipped. And Pretty Pig and Crunch are there.”
“Sweets will see that they are taken care of,” Tyrion lied. More
like, Scar and his friends would soon be feasting on ham and bacon
and a savory dog stew, but Penny did not need to hear that. “Nurse
is dead and Yezzan’s dying. It could be dark before anyone thinks to
miss us. We will never have a better chance than now.”
“No. You know what they do when they catch slaves trying to
escape. You know. Please. They’ll never let us leave the camp.”
“We haven’t left the camp.” Tyrion picked up his pails. He set o
at a brisk waddle, never looking back. Mormont fell in beside him.
After a moment he heard the sounds of Penny hurrying after him,
down a sandy slope to a circle of ragged tents.
The rst guard appeared as they neared the horse lines, a lean
spearman whose maroon beard marked him as Tyroshi. “What do
we have here? And what have you got in those pails?”
“Water,” said Tyrion, “if it please you.”
“Beer would please me better.” A spearpoint pricked him in the
back—a second guard, come up behind them. Tyrion could hear
King’s Landing in his voice. Scum from Flea Bottom. “You lost,
dwarf?” the guard demanded.
“We’re here to join your company.”
A pail slipped from Penny’s grasp and overturned. Half the water
had spilled before she could right it once again.
“We got fools enough in this company. Why would we want three
more?” The Tyroshi icked at Tyrion’s collar with his spearpoint,
ringing the little golden bell. “A runaway slave is what I see. Three
runaway slaves. Whose collar?”

“The Yellow Whale’s.” That from a third man, drawn by their
voices—a skinny stubble-jawed piece of work with teeth stained red
from sourleaf. A serjeant, Tyrion knew, from the way the other two
deferred to him. He had a hook where his right hand should have
been. Bronn’s meaner bastard shadow, or I’m Baelor the Beloved.
“These are the dwarfs Ben tried to buy,” the serjeant told the
spearmen, squinting, “but the big one … best bring him too. All
three.”
The Tyroshi gestured with his spear. Tyrion moved along. The
other sellsword—a stripling, hardly more than a boy, with fuzz on
his cheeks and hair the color of dirty straw—scooped up Penny
under one arm. “Ooh, mine has teats,” he said, laughing. He slipped
a hand under Penny’s tunic, just to be sure.
“Just bring her,” snapped the serjeant.
The stripling slung Penny over one shoulder. Tyrion went ahead
as quick as his stunted legs would allow. He knew where they were
going: the big tent on the far side of the re pit, its painted canvas
walls cracked and faded by years of sun and rain. A few sellswords
turned to watch them pass, and a camp follower sniggered, but no
one moved to interfere.
Within the tent, they found camp stools and a trestle table, a rack
of spears and halberds, a oor covered with threadbare carpets in
half a dozen clashing colors, and three o cers. One was slim and
elegant, with a pointed beard, a bravo’s blade, and a slashed pink
doublet. One was plump and balding, with ink stains on his ngers
and a quill clutched in one hand.
The third was the man he sought. Tyrion bowed. “Captain.”
“We caught them creeping into camp.” The stripling dumped
Penny onto the carpet.
“Runaways,” the Tyroshi declared. “With pails.”
“Pails?” said Brown Ben Plumm. When no one ventured to
explain, he said, “Back to your posts, boys. And not a word o’ this,
to anyone.” When they were gone, he smiled at Tyrion. “Come for
another game of cyvasse, Yollo?”
“If you wish. I do enjoy defeating you. I hear you’re twice a
turncloak, Plumm. A man after mine own heart.”

Brown Ben’s smile never reached his eyes. He studied Tyrion as a
man might study a talking snake. “Why are you here?”
“To make your dreams come true. You tried to buy us at auction.
Then you tried to win us at cyvasse. Even when I had my nose, I was
not so handsome as to provoke such passion … save in one who
happened to know my true worth. Well, here I am, free for the
taking. Now be a friend, send for your smith, and get these collars
o us. I’m sick of tinkling when I tinkle.”
“I want no trouble with your noble master.”
“Yezzan has more urgent matters to concern him than three
missing slaves. He’s riding the pale mare. And why should they
think to look for us here? You have swords enough to discourage
anyone who comes nosing round. A small risk for a great gain.”
The jackanapes in the slashed pink doublet hissed. “They’ve
brought the sickness amongst us. Into our very tents.” He turned to
Ben Plumm. “Shall I cut his head o , Captain? We can toss the rest
in a latrine pit.” He drew a sword, a slender bravo’s blade with a
jeweled hilt.
“Do be careful with my head,” said Tyrion. “You don’t want to
get any of my blood on you. Blood carries the disease. And you’ll
want to boil our clothes, or burn them.”
“I’ve a mind to burn them with you still in them, Yollo.”
“That is not my name. But you know that. You have known that
since you rst set eyes on me.”
“Might be.”
“I know you as well, my lord,” said Tyrion. “You’re less purple
and more brown than the Plumms at home, but unless your name’s
a lie, you’re a westerman, by blood if not by birth. House Plumm is
sworn to Casterly Rock, and as it happens I know a bit of its
history. Your branch sprouted from a stone spit across the narrow
sea, no doubt. A younger son of Viserys Plumm, I’d wager. The
queen’s dragons were fond of you, were they not?”
That seemed to amuse the sellsword. “Who told you that?”
“No one. Most of the stories you hear about dragons are fodder
for fools. Talking dragons, dragons hoarding gold and gems,
dragons with four legs and bellies big as elephants, dragons riddling

with sphinxes … nonsense, all of it. But there are truths in the old
books as well. Not only do I know that the queen’s dragons took to
you, but I know why.”
“My mother said my father had a drop of dragon blood.”
“Two drops. That, or a cock six feet long. You know that tale? I
do. Now, you’re a clever Plumm, so you know this head of mine is
worth a lordship … back in Westeros, half a world away. By the
time you get it there, only bone and maggots will remain. My sweet
sister will deny the head is mine and cheat you of the promised
reward. You know how it is with queens. Fickle cunts, the lot of
them, and Cersei is the worst.”
Brown Ben scratched at his beard. “Could deliver you alive and
wriggling, then. Or pop your head into a jar and pickle it.”
“Or throw in with me. That’s the wisest move.” He grinned. “I
was born a second son. This company is my destiny.”
“The Second Sons have no place for mummers,” the bravo in pink
said scornfully. “It’s ghters we need.”
“I’ve brought you one.” Tyrion jerked a thumb at Mormont.
“That creature?” The bravo laughed. “An ugly brute, but scars
alone don’t make a Second Son.”
Tyrion rolled his mismatched eyes. “Lord Plumm, who are these
two friends of yours? The pink one is annoying.”
The bravo curled a lip, whilst the fellow with the quill chuckled
at his insolence. But it was Jorah Mormont who supplied their
names. “Inkpots is the company paymaster. The peacock calls
himself Kasporio the Cunning, though Kasporio the Cunt would be
more apt. A nasty piece of work.”
Mormont’s face might have been unrecognizable in its battered
state, but his voice was unchanged. Kasporio gave him a startled
look, whilst the wrinkles around Plumm’s eyes crinkled in
amusement. “Jorah Mormont? Is that you? Less proud than when
you scampered o , though. Must we still call you ser?”
Ser Jorah’s swollen lips twisted into a grotesque grin. “Give me a
sword and you can call me what you like, Ben.”
Kasporio edged backward. “You … she sent you away …”
“I came back. Call me a fool.”

A fool in love. Tyrion cleared his throat. “You can talk of old times
later … after I am done explaining why my head would be of more
use to you upon my shoulders. You will nd, Lord Plumm, that I
can be very generous to my friends. If you doubt me, ask Bronn.
Ask Shagga, son of Dolf. Ask Timett, son of Timett.”
“And who would they be?” asked the man called Inkpots.
“Good men who pledged me their swords and prospered greatly
by that service.” He shrugged. “Oh, very well, I lied about the
‘good’ part. They’re bloodthirsty bastards, like you lot.”
“Might be,” said Brown Ben. “Or might be you just made up some
names. Shagga, did you say? Is that a woman’s name?”
“His teats are big enough. Next time we meet I’ll peek beneath
his breeches to be sure. Is that a cyvasse set over there? Bring it out
and we’ll have that game. But rst, I think, a cup of wine. My
throat is dry as an old bone, and I can see that I have a deal of
talking to do.”

JON

T

hat night he dreamt of wildlings howling from the woods,
advancing to the moan of warhorns and the roll of drums. Boom
DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM came the sound, a thousand hearts
with a single beat. Some had spears and some had bows and some
had axes. Others rode on chariots made of bones, drawn by teams of
dogs as big as ponies. Giants lumbered amongst them, forty feet
tall, with mauls the size of oak trees.
“Stand fast,” Jon Snow called. “Throw them back.” He stood atop
the Wall, alone. “Flame,” he cried, “feed them ame,” but there was
no one to pay heed.
They are all gone. They have abandoned me.
Burning shafts hissed upward, trailing tongues of re. Scarecrow
brothers tumbled down, black cloaks ablaze. “Snow,” an eagle cried,
as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders. Jon was armored in black
ice, but his blade burned red in his st. As the dead men reached the
top of the Wall he sent them down to die again. He slew a
greybeard and a beardless boy, a giant, a gaunt man with led
teeth, a girl with thick red hair. Too late he recognized Ygritte. She
was gone as quick as she’d appeared.
The world dissolved into a red mist. Jon stabbed and slashed and
cut. He hacked down Donal Noye and gutted Deaf Dick Follard.
Qhorin Halfhand stumbled to his knees, trying in vain to staunch
the ow of blood from his neck. “I am the Lord of Winterfell,” Jon
screamed. It was Robb before him now, his hair wet with melting
snow. Longclaw took his head o . Then a gnarled hand seized Jon
roughly by the shoulder. He whirled …

… and woke with a raven pecking at his chest. “Snow,” the bird
cried. Jon swatted at it. The raven shrieked its displeasure and
apped up to a bedpost to glare down balefully at him through the
predawn gloom.
The day had come. It was the hour of the wolf. Soon enough the
sun would rise, and four thousand wildlings would come pouring
through the Wall. Madness. Jon Snow ran his burned hand through
his hair and wondered once again what he was doing. Once the gate
was opened there would be no turning back. It should have been the
Old Bear to treat with Tormund. It should have been Jaremy Rykker or
Qhorin Halfhand or Denys Mallister or some other seasoned man. It
should have been my uncle. It was too late for such misgivings,
though. Every choice had its risks, every choice its consequences.
He would play the game to its conclusion.
He rose and dressed in darkness, as Mormont’s raven muttered
across the room. “Corn,” the bird said, and, “King,” and, “Snow, Jon
Snow, Jon Snow.” That was queer. The bird had never said his full
name before, as best Jon could recall.
He broke his fast in the cellar with his o cers. Fried bread, fried
eggs, blood sausages, and barley porridge made up the meal,
washed down with thin yellow beer. As they ate they went over the
preparations yet again. “All is in readiness,” Bowen Marsh assured
him. “If the wildlings uphold the terms of the bargain, all will go as
you’ve commanded.”
And if not, it may turn to blood and carnage. “Remember,” Jon
said, “Tormund’s people are hungry, cold, and fearful. Some of
them hate us as much as some of you hate them. We are dancing on
rotten ice here, them and us. One crack, and we all drown. If blood
should be shed today, it had best not be one of us who strikes the
rst blow, or I swear by the old gods and the new that I will have
the head of the man who strikes it.”
They answered him with ayes and nods and muttered words, with
“As you command,” and “It will be done,” and “Yes, my lord.” And
one by one they rose and buckled on their swords and donned their
warm black cloaks and strode out into the cold.

Last to leave the table was Dolorous Edd Tollett, who had come
in during the night with six wagons from the Long Barrow. Whore’s
Barrow, the black brothers called the fortress now. Edd had been
sent to gather up as many spearwives as his wagons would hold and
bring them back to join their sisters.
Jon watched him mop up a runny yolk with a chunk of bread. It
was strangely comforting to see Edd’s dour face again. “How goes
the restoration work?” he asked his old steward.
“Ten more years should do it,” Tollett replied in his usual gloomy
tone. “Place was overrun with rats when we moved in. The
spearwives killed the nasty buggers. Now the place is overrun with
spearwives. There’s days I want the rats back.”
“How do you nd serving under Iron Emmett?” Jon asked.
“Mostly it’s Black Maris serving under him, m’lord. Me, I have
the mules. Nettles claims we’re kin. It’s true we have the same long
face, but I’m not near as stubborn. Anyway I never knew their
mothers, on my honor.” He nished the last of his eggs and sighed.
“I do like me a nice runny egg. If it please m’lord, don’t let the
wildlings eat all our chickens.”
Out in the yard, the eastern sky had just begun to lighten. There
was not a wisp of cloud in sight. “We have a good day for this, it
would seem,” Jon said. “A bright day, warm and sunny.”
“The Wall will weep. And winter almost on us. It’s unnatural,
m’lord. A bad sign, you ask me.”
Jon smiled. “And if it were to snow?”
“A worse sign.”
“What sort of weather would you prefer?”
“The sort they keep indoors,” said Dolorous Edd. “If it please
m’lord, I should get back to my mules. They miss me when I’m
gone. More than I can say for them spearwives.”
They parted there, Tollett for the east road, where his wagons
waited, Jon Snow for the stables. Satin had his horse saddled and
bridled and waiting for him, a ery grey courser with a mane as
black and shiny as maester’s ink. He was not the sort of mount that
Jon would have chosen for a ranging, but on this morning all that

mattered was that he look impressive, and for that the stallion was
a perfect choice.
His tail was waiting too. Jon had never liked surrounding himself
with guards, but today it seemed prudent to keep a few good men
beside him. They made a grim display in their ringmail, iron
halfhelms, and black cloaks, with tall spears in their hands and
swords and daggers on their belts. For this Jon had passed over all
the green boys and greybeards in his command, choosing eight men
in their prime: Ty and Mully, Left Hand Lew, Big Liddle, Rory, Fulk
the Flea, Garrett Greenspear. And Leathers, Castle Black’s new
master-at-arms, to show the free folk that even a man who had
fought for Mance in the battle beneath the Wall could nd a place
of honor in the Night’s Watch.
A deep red blush had appeared in the east by the time they all
assembled at the gate. The stars are going out, Jon thought. When
next they reappeared, they would be shining down upon a world
forever changed. A few queen’s men stood watching from beside the
embers of Lady Melisandre’s night re. When Jon glanced at the
King’s Tower, he glimpsed a ash of red behind a window. Of
Queen Selyse he saw no sign.
It was time. “Open the gate,” Jon Snow said softly.
“OPEN THE GATE!” Big Liddle roared. His voice was thunder.
Seven hundred feet above, the sentries heard and raised their
warhorns to their lips. The sound rang out, echoing o the Wall and
out across the world. Ahoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. One long
blast. For a thousand years or more, that sound had meant rangers
coming home. Today it meant something else. Today it called the
free folk to their new homes.
On either end of the long tunnel, gates swung open and iron bars
unlocked. Dawn light shimmered on the ice above, pink and gold
and purple. Dolorous Edd had not been wrong. The Wall would
soon be weeping. Gods grant it weeps alone.
Satin led them underneath the ice, lighting the way through the
gloom of the tunnel with an iron lantern. Jon followed, leading his
horse. Then his guardsmen. After them came Bowen Marsh and his
stewards, a score of them, every man assigned a task. Above, Ulmer

of the Kingswood had the Wall. Two score of Castle Black’s best
bowmen stood with him, ready to respond to any trouble down
below with a rain of arrows.
North of the Wall, Tormund Giantsbane was waiting, mounted on
a runty little garron that looked far too weedy to support his
weight. His two remaining sons were with him, tall Toregg and
young Dryn, along with three score warriors.
“Har!” Tormund called. “Guards, is it? Now where’s the trust in
that, crow?”
“You brought more men than I did.”
“So I did. Come here by me, lad. I want my folk to see you. I got
thousands ne’er saw a lord commander, grown men who were told
as boys that your rangers would eat them if they didn’t behave.
They need to see you plain, a long-faced lad in an old black cloak.
They need to learn that the Night’s Watch is naught t’be feared.”
That is a lesson I would sooner they never learned. Jon peeled the
glove o his burned hand, put two ngers in his mouth, and
whistled. Ghost came racing from the gate. Tormund’s horse shied
so hard that the wildling almost lost his saddle. “Naught to be
feared?” Jon said. “Ghost, stay.”
“You are a black-hearted bastard, Lord Crow.” Tormund HornBlower lifted his own warhorn to his lips. The sound of it echoed o
the ice like rolling thunder, and the rst of the free folk began to
stream toward the gate.
From dawn till dusk Jon watched the wildlings pass.
The hostages went rst—one hundred boys between the ages of
eight and sixteen. “Your blood price, Lord Crow,” Tormund
declared. “I hope the wailing o’ their poor mothers don’t haunt your
dreams at night.” Some of the boys were led to the gate by a
mother or a father, others by older siblings. More came alone.
Fourteen- and fteen-year-old boys were almost men, and did not
want to be seen clinging to a woman’s skirts.
Two stewards counted the boys as they went by, noting each
name on long sheepskin scrolls. A third collected their valuables for
the toll and wrote that down as well. The boys were going to a
place that none had ever been before, to serve an order that had

been the enemy of their kith and kin for thousands of years, yet Jon
saw no tears, heard no wailing mothers. These are winter’s people, he
reminded himself. Tears freeze upon your cheeks where they come
from. Not a single hostage balked or tried to slink away when his
turn came to enter that gloomy tunnel.
Almost all the boys were thin, some past the point of gauntness,
with spindly shanks and arms like twigs. That was no more than Jon
expected. Elsewise they came in every shape and size and color. He
saw tall boys and short boys, brown-haired boys and black-haired
boys, honey blonds and strawberry blonds and redheads kissed by
re, like Ygritte. He saw boys with scars, boys with limps, boys
with pockmarked faces. Many of the older boys had downy cheeks
or wispy little mustachios, but there was one fellow with a beard as
thick as Tormund’s. Some dressed in ne soft furs, some in boiled
leather and oddments of armor, more in wool and sealskins, a few
in rags. One was naked. Many had weapons: sharpened spears,
stone-headed mauls, knives made of bone or stone or dragonglass,
spiked clubs, tanglenets, even here and there a rust-eaten old sword.
The Hornfoot boys walked blithe and barefoot through the
snowdrifts. Other lads had bear-paws on their boots and walked on
top of the same drifts, never sinking through the crust. Six boys
arrived on horses, two on mules. A pair of brothers turned up with a
goat. The biggest hostage was six-and-a-half feet tall but had a
baby’s face; the smallest was a runty boy who claimed nine years
but looked no more than six.
Of special note were the sons of men of renown. Tormund took
care to point them out as they went by. “The boy there is the son of
Soren Shieldbreaker,” he said of one tall lad. “Him with the red
hair, he’s Gerrick Kingsblood’s get. Comes o’ the line o’ Raymun
Redbeard, to hear him tell it. The line o’ Redbeard’s little brother,
you want it true.” Two boys looked enough alike to be twins, but
Tormund insisted they were cousins, born a year apart. “One was
sired by Harle the Huntsman, t’other by Harle the Handsome, both
on the same woman. Fathers hate each other. I was you, I’d send
one to Eastwatch and t’other to your Shadow Tower.”

Other hostages were named as sons of Howd Wanderer, of Brogg,
of Devyn Sealskinner, Kyleg of the Wooden Ear, Morna White
Mask, the Great Walrus …
“The Great Walrus? Truly?”
“They have queer names along the Frozen Shore.”
Three hostages were sons of Alfyn Crowkiller, an infamous raider
slain by Qhorin Halfhand. Or so Tormund insisted. “They do not
look like brothers,” Jon observed.
“Half-brothers, born o’ di erent mothers. Alfyn’s member was a
wee thing, even smaller than yours, but he was never shy with
where he stuck it. Had a son in every village, that one.”
Of a certain runty rat-faced boy, Tormund said, “That one’s a
whelp of Varamyr Sixskins. You remember Varamyr, Lord Crow?”
He did. “The skinchanger.”
“Aye, he was that. A vicious little runt besides. Dead now, like as
not. No one’s seen him since the battle.”
Two of the boys were girls in disguise. When Jon saw them, he
dispatched Rory and Big Liddle to bring them to him. One came
meekly enough, the other kicking and biting. This could end badly.
“Do these two have famous fathers?”
“Har! Them skinny things? Not likely. Picked by lot.”
“They’re girls.”
“Are they?” Tormund squinted at the pair of them from his
saddle. “Me and Lord Crow made a wager on which o’ you has the
biggest member. Pull them breeches down, give us a look.”
One of the girls turned red. The other glared de antly. “You
leave us alone, Tormund Giantstink. You let us go.”
“Har! You win, crow. Not a cock between ’em. The little one’s got
her a set o’ balls, though. A spearwife in the making, her.” He called
to his own men. “Go nd them something girly to put on before
Lord Snow wets his smallclothes.”
“I’ll need two boys to take their places.”
“How’s that?” Tormund scratched his beard. “A hostage is a
hostage, seems to me. That big sharp sword o’ yours can snick a
girl’s head o as easy as a boy’s. A father loves his daughters too.
Well, most fathers.”

It is not their fathers who concern me. “Did Mance ever sing of
Brave Danny Flint?”
“Not as I recall. Who was he?”
“A girl who dressed up like a boy to take the black. Her song is
sad and pretty. What happened to her wasn’t.” In some versions of
the song, her ghost still walked the Nightfort. “I’ll send the girls to
Long Barrow.” The only men there were Iron Emmett and Dolorous
Edd, both of whom he trusted. That was not something he could say
of all his brothers.
The wildling understood. “Nasty birds, you crows.” He spat. “Two
more boys, then. You’ll have them.”
When nine-and-ninety hostages had shu ed by them to pass
beneath the Wall, Tormund Giantsbane produced the last one. “My
son Dryn. You’ll see he’s well taken care of, crow, or I’ll cook your
black liver up and eat it.”
Jon gave the boy a close inspection. Bran’s age, or the age he would
have been if Theon had not killed him. Dryn had none of Bran’s
sweetness, though. He was a chunky boy, with short legs, thick
arms, and a wide red face—a miniature version of his father, with a
shock of dark brown hair. “He’ll serve as my own page,” Jon
promised Tormund.
“Hear that, Dryn? See that you don’t get above yourself.” To Jon
he said, “He’ll need a good beating from time to time. Be careful o’
his teeth, though. He bites.” He reached down for his horn again,
raised it, and blew another blast.
This time it was warriors who came forward. And not just one
hundred of them. Five hundred, Jon Snow judged, as they moved out
from beneath the trees, perhaps as many as a thousand. One in every
ten of them came mounted but all of them came armed. Across their
backs they bore round wicker shields covered with hides and boiled
leather, displaying painted images of snakes and spiders, severed
heads, bloody hammers, broken skulls, and demons. A few were
clad in stolen steel, dinted oddments of armor looted from the
corpses of fallen rangers. Others had armored themselves in bones,
like Rattleshirt. All wore fur and leather.

There were spearwives with them, long hair streaming. Jon could
not look at them without remembering Ygritte: the gleam of re in
her hair, the look on her face when she’d disrobed for him in the
grotto, the sound of her voice. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,”
she’d told him a hundred times.
It is as true now as it was then. “You might have sent the women
rst,” he said to Tormund. “The mothers and the maids.”
The wildling gave him a shrewd look. “Aye, I might have. And
you crows might decide to close that gate. A few ghters on t’other
side, well, that way the gate stays open, don’t it?” He grinned. “I
bought your bloody horse, Jon Snow. Don’t mean that we can’t
count his teeth. Now don’t you go thinking me and mine don’t trust
you. We trust you just as much as you trust us.” He snorted. “You
wanted warriors, didn’t you? Well, there they are. Every one worth
six o’ your black crows.”
Jon had to smile. “So long as they save those weapons for our
common foe, I am content.”
“Gave you my word on it, didn’t I? The word of Tormund
Giantsbane. Strong as iron, ’tis.” He turned and spat.
Amongst the stream of warriors were the fathers of many of Jon’s
hostages. Some stared with cold dead eyes as they went by,
ngering their sword hilts. Others smiled at him like long-lost kin,
though a few of those smiles discom ted Jon Snow more than any
glare. None knelt, but many gave him their oaths. “What Tormund
swore, I swear,” declared black-haired Brogg, a man of few words.
Soren Shieldbreaker bowed his head an inch and growled, “Soren’s
axe is yours, Jon Snow, if ever you have need of such.” Red-bearded
Gerrick Kingsblood brought three daughters. “They will make ne
wives, and give their husbands strong sons of royal blood,” he
boasted. “Like their father, they are descended from Raymun
Redbeard, who was King-Beyond-the-Wall.”
Blood meant little and less amongst the free folk, Jon knew.
Ygritte had taught him that. Gerrick’s daughters shared her same
ame-red hair, though hers had been a tangle of curls and theirs
hung long and straight. Kissed by re. “Three princesses, each
lovelier than the last,” he told their father. “I will see that they are

presented to the queen.” Selyse Baratheon would take to these three
better than she had to Val, he suspected; they were younger and
considerably more cowed. Sweet enough to look at them, though their
father seems a fool.
Howd Wanderer swore his oath upon his sword, as nicked and
pitted a piece of iron as Jon had ever seen. Devyn Sealskinner
presented him with a sealskin hat, Harle the Huntsman with a bearclaw necklace. The warrior witch Morna removed her weirwood
mask just long enough to kiss his gloved hand and swear to be his
man or his woman, whichever he preferred. And on and on and on.
As they passed, each warrior stripped o his treasures and tossed
them into one of the carts that the stewards had placed before the
gate. Amber pendants, golden torques, jeweled daggers, silver
brooches set with gemstones, bracelets, rings, niello cups and
golden goblets, warhorns and drinking horns, a green jade comb, a
necklace of freshwater pearls … all yielded up and noted down by
Bowen Marsh. One man surrendered a shirt of silver scales that had
surely been made for some great lord. Another produced a broken
sword with three sapphires in the hilt.
And there were queerer things: a toy mammoth made of actual
mammoth hair, an ivory phallus, a helm made from a unicorn’s
head, complete with horn. How much food such things would buy in
the Free Cities, Jon Snow could not begin to say.
After the riders came the men of the Frozen Shore. Jon watched a
dozen of their big bone chariots roll past him one by one, clattering
like Rattleshirt. Half still rolled as before; others had replaced their
wheels with runners. They slid across the snowdrifts smoothly,
where the wheeled chariots were foundering and sinking.
The dogs that drew the chariots were fearsome beasts, as big as
direwolves. Their women were clad in sealskins, some with infants
at their breasts. Older children shu ed along behind their mothers
and looked up at Jon with eyes as dark and hard as the stones they
clutched. Some of the men wore antlers on their hats, and some
wore walrus tusks. The two sorts did not love each other, he soon
gathered. A few thin reindeer brought up the rear, with the great
dogs snapping at the heels of stragglers.

“Be wary o’ that lot, Jon Snow,” Tormund warned him. “A savage
folk. The men are bad, the women worse.” He took a skin o his
saddle and o ered it up to Jon. “Here. This will make them seem
less fearsome, might be. And warm you for the night. No, go on, it’s
yours to keep. Drink deep.”
Within was a mead so potent it made Jon’s eyes water and sent
tendrils of re snaking through his chest. He drank deep. “You’re a
good man, Tormund Giantsbabe. For a wildling.”
“Better than most, might be. Not so good as some.”
On and on the wildlings came, as the sun crept across the bright
blue sky. Just before midday, the movement stopped when an
oxcart became jammed at a turn inside the tunnel. Jon Snow went
to have a look for himself. The cart was now wedged solid. The
men behind were threatening to hack it apart and butcher the ox
where he stood, whilst the driver and his kin swore to kill them if
they tried. With the help of Tormund and his son Toregg, Jon
managed to keep the wildlings from coming to blood, but it took
the best part of an hour before the way was opened again.
“You need a bigger gate,” Tormund complained to Jon with a
sour look up at the sky, where a few clouds had blown in. “Too
bloody slow this way. Like sucking the Milkwater through a reed.
Har. Would that I had the Horn of Joramun. I’d give it a nice toot
and we’d climb through the rubble.”
“Melisandre burned the Horn of Joramun.”
“Did she?” Tormund slapped his thigh and hooted. “She burned
that ne big horn, aye. A bloody sin, I call it. A thousand years old,
that was. We found it in a giant’s grave, and no man o’ us had ever
seen a horn so big. That must have been why Mance got the notion
to tell you it were Joramun’s. He wanted you crows to think he had
it in his power to blow your bloody Wall down about your knees.
But we never found the true horn, not for all our digging. If we had,
every kneeler in your Seven Kingdoms would have chunks o’ ice to
cool his wine all summer.”
Jon turned in his saddle, frowning. And Joramun blew the Horn of
Winter and woke giants from the earth. That huge horn with its bands
of old gold, incised with ancient runes … had Mance Rayder lied to

him, or was Tormund lying now? If Mance’s horn was just a feint,
where is the true horn?
By afternoon the sun had gone, and the day turned grey and
gusty. “A snow sky,” Tormund announced grimly.
Others had seen the same omen in those at white clouds. It
seemed to spur them on to haste. Tempers began to fray. One man
was stabbed when he tried to slip in ahead of others who had been
hours in the column. Toregg wrenched the knife away from his
attacker, dragged both men from the press, and sent them back to
the wildling camp to start again.
“Tormund,” Jon said, as they watched four old women pull a
cartful of children toward the gate, “tell me of our foe. I would
know all there is to know of the Others.”
The wildling rubbed his mouth. “Not here,” he mumbled, “not
this side o’ your Wall.” The old man glanced uneasily toward the
trees in their white mantles. “They’re never far, you know. They
won’t come out by day, not when that old sun’s shining, but don’t
think that means they went away. Shadows never go away. Might
be you don’t see them, but they’re always clinging to your heels.”
“Did they trouble you on your way south?”
“They never came in force, if that’s your meaning, but they were
with us all the same, nibbling at our edges. We lost more outriders
than I care to think about, and it was worth your life to fall behind
or wander o . Every nightfall we’d ring our camps with re. They
don’t like re much, and no mistake. When the snows came,
though … snow and sleet and freezing rain, it’s bloody hard to nd
dry wood or get your kindling lit, and the cold … some nights our
res just seemed to shrivel up and die. Nights like that, you always
nd some dead come the morning. ’Less they nd you rst. The
night that Torwynd … my boy, he …” Tormund turned his face
away.
“I know,” said Jon Snow.
Tormund turned back. “You know nothing. You killed a dead
man, aye, I heard. Mance killed a hundred. A man can ght the
dead, but when their masters come, when the white mists rise
up … how do you ght a mist, crow? Shadows with teeth … air so

cold it hurts to breathe, like a knife inside your chest … you do not
know, you cannot know … can your sword cut cold?”
We will see, Jon thought, remembering the things that Sam had
told him, the things he’d found in his old books. Longclaw had been
forged in the res of old Valyria, forged in dragon ame and set
with spells. Dragonsteel, Sam called it. Stronger than any common steel,
lighter, harder, sharper … But words in a book were one thing. The
true test came in battle.
“You are not wrong,” Jon said. “I do not know. And if the gods
are good, I never will.”
“The gods are seldom good, Jon Snow.” Tormund nodded toward
the sky. “The clouds roll in. Already it grows darker, colder. Your
Wall no longer weeps. Look.” He turned and called out to his son
Toregg. “Ride back to the camp and get them moving. The sick ones
and the weak ones, the slugabeds and cravens, get them on their
bloody feet. Set their bloody tents a re if you must. The gate must
close at nightfall. Any man not through the Wall by then had best
pray the Others get to him afore I do. You hear?”
“I hear.” Toregg put his heels into his horse and galloped back
down the column.
On and on the wildlings came. The day grew darker, just as
Tormund said. Clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, and
warmth ed. There was more shoving at the gate, as men and goats
and bullocks jostled each other out of the way. It is more than
impatience, Jon realized. They are afraid. Warriors, spearwives, raiders,
they are frightened of those woods, of shadows moving through the trees.
They want to put the Wall between them before the night descends.
A snow ake danced upon the air. Then another. Dance with me,
Jon Snow, he thought. You’ll dance with me anon.
On and on and on the wildlings came. Some were moving faster
now, hastening across the battleground. Others—the old, the young,
the feeble—could scarce move at all. This morning the eld had
been covered with a thick blanket of old snow, its white crust
shining in the sun. Now the eld was brown and black and slimy.
The passage of the free folk had turned the ground to mud and
muck: wooden wheels and horses’ hooves, runners of bone and horn

and iron, pig trotters, heavy boots, the cloven feet of cows and
bullocks, the bare black feet of the Hornfoot folk, all had left their
marks. The soft footing slowed the column even more. “You need a
bigger gate,” Tormund complained again.
By late afternoon the snow was falling steadily, but the river of
wildlings had dwindled to a stream. Columns of smoke rose from
the trees where their camp had been. “Toregg,” Tormund explained.
“Burning the dead. Always some who go to sleep and don’t wake
up. You nd them in their tents, them as have tents, curled up and
froze. Toregg knows what to do.”
The stream was no more than a trickle by the time Toregg
emerged from the wood. With him rode a dozen mounted warriors
armed with spears and swords. “My rear guard,” Tormund said,
with a gap-toothed smile. “You crows have rangers. So do we. Them
I left in camp in case we were attacked before we all got out.”
“Your best men.”
“Or my worst. Every man o’ them has killed a crow.”
Amongst the riders came one man afoot, with some big beast
trotting at his heels. A boar, Jon saw. A monstrous boar. Twice the
size of Ghost, the creature was covered with coarse black hair, with
tusks as long as a man’s arm. Jon had never seen a boar so huge or
ugly. The man beside him was no beauty either; hulking, blackbrowed, he had a at nose, heavy jowls dark with stubble, small
black close-set eyes.
“Borroq.” Tormund turned his head and spat.
“A skinchanger.” It was not a question. Somehow he knew.
Ghost turned his head. The falling snow had masked the boar’s
scent, but now the white wolf had the smell. He padded out in front
of Jon, his teeth bared in a silent snarl.
“No!” Jon snapped. “Ghost, down. Stay. Stay!”
“Boars and wolves,” said Tormund. “Best keep that beast o’ yours
locked up tonight. I’ll see that Borroq does the same with his pig.”
He glanced up at the darkening sky. “Them’s the last, and none too
soon. It’s going to snow all night, I feel it. Time I had a look at
what’s on t’other side of all that ice.”

“You go ahead,” Jon told him. “I mean to be the last one through
the ice. I will join you at the feast.”
“Feast? Har! Now that’s a word I like to hear.” The wildling
turned his garron toward the Wall and slapped her on the rump.
Toregg and the riders followed, dismounting by the gate to lead
their horses through. Bowen Marsh stayed long enough to supervise
as his stewards pulled the last carts into the tunnel. Only Jon Snow
and his guards were left.
The skinchanger stopped ten yards away. His monster pawed at
the mud, snu ing. A light powdering of snow covered the boar’s
humped black back. He gave a snort and lowered his head, and for
half a heartbeat Jon thought he was about to charge. To either side
of him, his men lowered their spears.
“Brother,” Borroq said.
“You’d best go on. We are about to close the gate.”
“You do that,” Borroq said. “You close it good and tight. They’re
coming, crow.” He smiled as ugly a smile as Jon had ever seen and
made his way to the gate. The boar stalked after him. The falling
snow covered up their tracks behind them.
“That’s done, then,” Rory said when they were gone.
No, thought Jon Snow, it has only just begun.
Bowen Marsh was waiting for him south of the Wall, with a tablet
full of numbers. “Three thousand one hundred and nineteen
wildlings passed through the gate today,” the Lord Steward told
him. “Sixty of your hostages were sent o to Eastwatch and the
Shadow Tower after they’d been fed. Edd Tollett took six wagons of
women back to Long Barrow. The rest remain with us.”
“Not for long,” Jon promised him. “Tormund means to lead his
own folk to Oakenshield within a day or two. The rest will follow,
as soon as we sort where to put them.”
“As you say, Lord Snow.” The words were sti . The tone
suggested that Bowen Marsh knew where he would put them.
The castle Jon returned to was far di erent from the one he’d left
that morning. For as long as he had known it, Castle Black had been
a place of silence and shadows, where a meagre company of men in
black moved like ghosts amongst the ruins of a fortress that had

once housed ten times their numbers. All that had changed. Lights
now shone through windows where Jon Snow had never seen lights
shine before. Strange voices echoed down the yards, and free folk
were coming and going along icy paths that had only known the
black boots of crows for years. Outside the old Flint Barracks, he
came across a dozen men pelting one another with snow. Playing,
Jon thought in astonishment, grown men playing like children,
throwing snowballs the way Bran and Arya once did, and Robb and me
before them.
Donal Noye’s old armory was still dark and silent, however, and
Jon’s rooms back of the cold forge were darker still. But he had no
sooner taken o his cloak than Dannel poked his head through the
door to announce that Clydas had brought a message.
“Send him in.” Jon lit a taper from an ember in his brazier and
three candles from the taper.
Clydas entered pink and blinking, the parchment clutched in one
soft hand. “Beg pardon, Lord Commander. I know you must be
weary, but I thought you would want to see this at once.”
“You did well.” Jon read:
At Hardhome, with six ships. Wild seas. Blackbird lost with all
hands, two Lyseni ships driven aground on Skane, Talon taking
water. Very bad here. Wildlings eating their own dead. Dead
things in the woods. Braavosi captains will only take women,
children on their ships. Witch women call us slavers. Attempt to
take Storm Crow defeated, six crew dead, many wildlings. Eight
ravens left. Dead things in the water. Send help by land, seas
wracked by storms. From Talon, by hand of Maester Harmune.
Cotter Pyke had made his angry mark below.
“Is it grievous, my lord?” asked Clydas.
“Grievous enough.” Dead things in the wood. Dead things in the
water. Six ships left, of the eleven that set sail. Jon Snow rolled up the
parchment, frowning. Night falls, he thought, and now my war begins.

THE DISCARDED KNIGHT

A

ll kneel for His Magni cence Hizdahr zo Loraq, Fourteenth of That
Noble Name, King of Meereen, Scion of Ghis, Octarch of the Old Empire,
Master of the Skahazadhan, Consort to Dragons and Blood of the
Harpy,” roared the herald. His voice echoed o the marble oor and
rang amongst the pillars.
Ser Barristan Selmy slipped a hand beneath the fold of his cloak
and loosened his sword in its scabbard. No blades were allowed in
the presence of the king save those of his protectors. It seemed as
though he still counted amongst that number despite his dismissal.
No one had tried to take his sword, at least.
Daenerys Targaryen had preferred to hold court from a bench of
polished ebony, smooth and simple, covered with the cushions that
Ser Barristan had found to make her more comfortable. King
Hizdahr had replaced the bench with two imposing thrones of
gilded wood, their tall backs carved into the shape of dragons. The
king seated himself in the right-hand throne with a golden crown
upon his head and a jeweled sceptre in one pale hand. The second
throne remained vacant.
The important throne, thought Ser Barristan. No dragon chair can
replace a dragon no matter how elaborately it’s carved.
To the right of the twin thrones stood Goghor the Giant, a huge
hulk of a man with a brutal, scarred face. To the left was the
Spotted Cat, a leopard skin ung over one shoulder. Back of them
were Belaquo Bonebreaker and the cold-eyed Khrazz. Seasoned
killers all, thought Selmy, but it is one thing to face a foe in the pit

when his coming is heralded by horns and drums and another to nd a
hidden killer before he can strike.
The day was young and fresh, and yet he felt bone-tired, as if he’d
fought all night. The older he got, the less sleep Ser Barristan
seemed to need. As a squire he could sleep ten hours a night and
still be yawning when he stumbled out onto the practice yard. At
three-and-sixty he found that ve hours a night was more than
enough. Last night, he had scarce slept at all. His bedchamber was a
small cell o the queen’s apartments, originally slave quarters; his
furnishings consisted of a bed, a chamber pot, a wardrobe for his
clothing, even a chair should he want to sit. On a bedside table he
kept a beeswax candle and a small carving of the Warrior. Though
he was not a pious man, the carving made him feel less alone here
in this queer alien city, and it was to that he had turned in the black
watches of night. Shield me from these doubts that gnaw at me, he had
prayed, and give me the strength to do what is right. But neither prayer
nor dawn had brought him certainty.
The hall was as crowded as the old knight had ever seen it, but it
was the missing faces that Barristan Selmy noted most: Missandei,
Belwas, Grey Worm, Aggo and Jhogo and Rakharo, Irri and Jhiqui,
Daario Naharis. In the Shavepate’s place stood a fat man in a
muscled breastplate and lion’s mask, his heavy legs poking out
beneath a skirt of leather straps: Marghaz zo Loraq, the king’s
cousin, new commander of the Brazen Beasts. Selmy had already
formed a healthy contempt for the man. He had known his sort in
King’s Landing—fawning to his superiors, harsh to his inferiors, as
blind as he was boastful and too proud by half.
Skahaz could be in the hall as well, Selmy realized, that ugly face of
his concealed behind a mask. Two score Brazen Beasts stood between
the pillars, torchlight shining o the polished brass of their masks.
The Shavepate could be any one of them.
The hall thrummed to the sound of a hundred low voices, echoing
o the pillars and the marble oor. It made an ominous sound,
angry. It reminded Selmy of the sound a hornets’ nest might make
an instant before hornets all came boiling out. And on the faces in
the crowd he saw anger, grief, suspicion, fear.

Hardly had the king’s new herald called the court to order than
the ugliness began. One woman began to wail about a brother who
had died at Daznak’s Pit, another of the damage to her palanquin. A
fat man tore o his bandages to show the court his burned arm,
where the esh was still raw and oozing. And when a man in a blueand-gold tokar began to speak of Harghaz the Hero, a freedman
behind him shoved him to the oor. It took six Brazen Beasts to pull
them apart and drag them from the hall. Fox, hawk, seal, locust, lion,
toad. Selmy wondered if the masks had meaning to the men who
wore them. Did the same men wear the same masks every day, or
did they choose new faces every morning?
“Quiet!” Reznak mo Reznak was pleading. “Please! I will answer
if you will only …”
“Is it true?” a freedwoman shouted. “Is our mother dead?”
“No, no, no,” Reznak screeched. “Queen Daenerys will return to
Meereen in her own time in all her might and majesty. Until such
time, His Worship King Hizdahr shall—”
“He is no king of mine,” a freedman yelled.
Men began to shove at one another. “The queen is not dead,” the
seneschal proclaimed. “Her bloodriders have been dispatched across
the Skahazadhan to nd Her Grace and return her to her loving lord
and loyal subjects. Each has ten picked riders, and each man has
three swift horses, so they may travel fast and far. Queen Daenerys
shall be found.”
A tall Ghiscari in a brocade robe spoke next, in a voice as
sonorous as it was cold. King Hizdahr shifted on his dragon throne,
his face stony as he did his best to appear concerned but
unperturbed. Once again his seneschal gave answer.
Ser Barristan let Reznak’s oily words wash over him. His years in
the Kingsguard had taught him the trick of listening without
hearing, especially useful when the speaker was intent on proving
that words were truly wind. Back at the rear of the hall, he spied
the Dornish princeling and his two companions. They should not have
come. Martell does not realize his danger. Daenerys was his only friend
at this court, and she is gone. He wondered how much they
understood of what was being said. Even he could not always make

sense of the mongrel Ghiscari tongue the slavers spoke, especially
when they were speaking fast.
Prince Quentyn was listening intently, at least. That one is his
father’s son. Short and stocky, plain-faced, he seemed a decent lad,
sober, sensible, dutiful … but not the sort to make a young girl’s
heart beat faster. And Daenerys Targaryen, whatever else she might
be, was still a young girl, as she herself would claim when it
pleased her to play the innocent. Like all good queens she put her
people rst—else she would never have wed Hizdahr zo Loraq—but
the girl in her still yearned for poetry, passion, and laughter. She
wants re, and Dorne sent her mud.
You could make a poultice out of mud to cool a fever. You could
plant seeds in mud and grow a crop to feed your children. Mud
would nourish you, where re would only consume you, but fools
and children and young girls would choose re every time.
Behind the prince, Ser Gerris Drinkwater was whispering
something to Yronwood. Ser Gerris was all his prince was not: tall
and lean and comely, with a swordsman’s grace and a courtier’s wit.
Selmy did not doubt that many a Dornish maiden had run her
ngers through that sun-streaked hair and kissed that teasing smile
o his lips. If this one had been the prince, things might have gone
elsewise, he could not help but think … but there was something a
bit too pleasant about Drinkwater for his taste. False coin, the old
knight thought. He had known such men before.
Whatever he was whispering must have been amusing, for his big
bald friend gave a sudden snort of laughter, loud enough so that the
king himself turned his head toward the Dornishmen. When he saw
the prince, Hizdahr zo Loraq frowned.
Ser Barristan did not like that frown. And when the king
beckoned his cousin Marghaz closer, leaned down, and whispered in
his ear, he liked that even less.
I swore no oath to Dorne, Ser Barristan told himself. But Lewyn
Martell had been his Sworn Brother, back in the days when the
bonds between the Kingsguard still went deep. I could not help
Prince Lewyn on the Trident, but I can help his nephew now. Martell
was dancing in a vipers’ nest, and he did not even see the snakes.

His continued presence, even after Daenerys had given herself to
another before the eyes of gods and men, would provoke any
husband, and Quentyn no longer had the queen to shield him from
Hizdahr’s wroth. Although …
The thought hit him like a slap across the face. Quentyn had
grown up amongst the courts of Dorne. Plots and poisons were no
strangers to him. Nor was Prince Lewyn his only uncle. He is kin to
the Red Viper. Daenerys had taken another for her consort, but if
Hizdahr died, she would be free to wed again. Could the Shavepate
have been wrong? Who can say that the locusts were meant for
Daenerys? It was the king’s own box. What if he was meant to be the
victim all along? Hizdahr’s death would have smashed the fragile
peace. The Sons of the Harpy would have resumed their murders,
the Yunkishmen their war. Daenerys might have had no better
choice than Quentyn and his marriage pact.
Ser Barristan was still wrestling with that suspicion when he
heard the sound of heavy boots ascending the steep stone steps at
the back of the hall. The Yunkishmen had come. Three Wise Masters
led the procession from the Yellow City, each with his own armed
retinue. One slaver wore a tokar of maroon silk fringed with gold,
one a striped tokar of teal and orange, the third an ornate
breastplate inlaid with erotic scenes done in jet and jade and
mother-of-pearl. The sellsword captain Bloodbeard accompanied
them with a leathern sack slung across one massive shoulder and a
look of mirth and murder on his face.
No Tattered Prince, Selmy noted. No Brown Ben Plumm. Ser
Barristan eyed Bloodbeard coolly. Give me half a reason to dance with
you, and we will see who is laughing at the end.
Reznak mo Reznak wormed his way forward. “Wise Masters, you
honor us. His Radiance King Hizdahr bids welcome to his friends
from Yunkai. We understand—”
“Understand this.” Bloodbeard pulled a severed head from his
sack and ung it at the seneschal.
Reznak gave a squeak of fright and leapt aside. The head bounced
past him, leaving spots of blood on the purple marble oor as it
rolled until it fetched up against the foot of King Hizdahr’s dragon

throne. Up and down the length of the hall, Brazen Beasts lowered
their spears. Goghor the Giant lumbered forward to place himself
before the king’s throne, and the Spotted Cat and Khrazz moved to
either side of him to form a wall.
Bloodbeard laughed. “He’s dead. He won’t bite.”
Gingerly, so gingerly, the seneschal approached the head, lifted it
delicately by the hair. “Admiral Groleo.”
Ser Barristan glanced toward the throne. He had served so many
kings, he could not help but imagine how they might have reacted
to this provocation. Aerys would have inched away in horror,
likely cutting himself on the barbs of the Iron Throne, then shrieked
at his swordsmen to cut the Yunkishmen to pieces. Robert would
have shouted for his hammer to repay Bloodbeard in kind. Even
Jaehaerys, reckoned weak by many, would have ordered the arrest
of Bloodbeard and the Yunkish slavers.
Hizdahr sat frozen, a man trans xed. Reznak set the head on a
satin pillow at the king’s feet, then scampered away, his mouth
twisted up in a moue of distaste. Ser Barristan could smell the
seneschal’s heavy oral perfume from several yards away.
The dead man stared up reproachfully. His beard was brown with
caked blood, but a trickle of red still leaked from his neck. From the
look of him, it had taken more than one blow to part his head from
his body. In the back of the hall, petitioners began to slip away.
One of the Brazen Beasts ripped o his brass hawk’s mask and
began to spew up his breakfast.
Barristan Selmy was no stranger to severed heads. This one,
though … he had crossed half the world with the old seafarer, from
Pentos to Qarth and back again to Astapor. Groleo was a good man.
He did not deserve this end. All he ever wanted was to go home. The
knight tensed, waiting.
“This,” King Hizdahr said at last, “this is not … we are not
pleased, this … what is the meaning of this … this …”
The slaver in the maroon tokar produced a parchment. “I have the
honor to bear this message from the council of masters.” He
unrolled the scroll. “It is here written, ‘Seven entered Meereen to sign
the peace accords and witness the celebratory games at the Pit of

Daznak. As surety for their safety, seven hostages were tendered us. The
Yellow City mourns its noble son Yurkhaz zo Yunzak, who perished
cruelly whilst a guest of Meereen. Blood must pay for blood.’ ”
Groleo had a wife back in Pentos. Children, grandchildren. Why
him, of all the hostages? Jhogo, Hero, and Daario Naharis all
commanded ghting men, but Groleo had been an admiral without
a eet. Did they draw straws, or did they think Groleo the least valuable
to us, the least likely to provoke reprisal? the knight asked
himself … but it was easier to pose that question than to answer it. I
have no skill at unraveling such knots.
“Your Grace,” Ser Barristan called out. “If it please you to recall,
the noble Yurkhaz died by happenstance. He stumbled on the steps
as he tried to ee the dragon and was crushed beneath the feet of
his own slaves and companions. That, or his heart burst in terror.
He was old.”
“Who is this who speaks without the king’s leave?” asked the
Yunkish lord in the striped tokar, a small man with a receding chin
and teeth too big for his mouth. He reminded Selmy of a rabbit.
“Must the lords of Yunkai attend to the natterings of guards?” He
shook the pearls that fringed his tokar.
Hizdahr zo Loraq could not seem to look away from the head.
Only when Reznak whispered something in his ear did he nally
bestir himself. “Yurkhaz zo Yunzak was your supreme commander,”
he said. “Which of you speaks for Yunkai now?”
“All of us,” said the rabbit. “The council of masters.”
King Hizdahr found some steel. “Then all of you bear the
responsibility for this breach of our peace.”
The Yunkishman in the breastplate gave answer. “Our peace has
not been breached. Blood pays for blood, a life for a life. To show
our good faith, we return three of your hostages.” The iron ranks
behind him parted. Three Meereenese were ushered forward,
clutching at their tokars—two women and a man.
“Sister,” said Hizdahr zo Loraq, sti y. “Cousins.” He gestured at
the bleeding head. “Remove that from our sight.”
“The admiral was a man of the sea,” Ser Barristan reminded him.
“Mayhaps Your Magni cence might ask the Yunkai’i to return his

body to us, so we may bury him beneath the waves?”
The rabbit-toothed lord waved a hand. “If it please Your
Radiance, this shall be done. A sign of our respect.”
Reznak mo Reznak cleared his throat noisily. “Meaning no
o ense, yet it seems to me that Her Worship Queen Daenerys gave
you … ah … seven hostages. The other three …”
“The others shall remain our guests,” announced the Yunkish lord
in the breastplate, “until the dragons have been destroyed.”
A hush fell across the hall. Then came the murmurs and the
mutters, whispered curses, whispered prayers, the hornets stirring
in their hive. “The dragons …” said King Hizdahr.
“… are monsters, as all men saw in Daznak’s Pit. No true peace is
possible whilst they live.”
Reznak replied. “Her Magni cence Queen Daenerys is Mother of
Dragons. Only she can—”
Bloodbeard’s scorn cut him o . “She is gone. Burned and
devoured. Weeds grow through her broken skull.”
A roar greeted those words. Some began to shout and curse.
Others stamped their feet and whistled their approval. It took the
Brazen Beasts pounding the butts of their spears against the oor
before the hall quieted again.
Ser Barristan never once took his eyes o Bloodbeard. He came to
sack a city, and Hizdahr’s peace has cheated him of his plunder. He will
do whatever he must to start the bloodshed.
Hizdahr zo Loraq rose slowly from his dragon throne. “I must
consult my council. This court is done.”
“All kneel for His Magni cence Hizdahr zo Loraq, Fourteenth of That
Ancient Name, King of Meereen, Scion of Ghis, Octarch of the Old
Empire, Master of the Skahazadhan, Consort to Dragons and Blood of
the Harpy,” the herald shouted. Brazen Beasts swung out amongst
the pillars to form a line, then began a slow advance in lockstep,
ushering the petitioners from the hall.
The Dornishmen did not have as far to go as most. As be t his
rank and station, Quentyn Martell had been given quarters within
the Great Pyramid, two levels down—a handsome suite of rooms
with its own privy and walled terrace. Perhaps that was why he and

his companions lingered, waiting until the press had lessened before
beginning to make their way toward the steps.
Ser Barristan watched them, thoughtful. What would Daenerys
want? he asked himself. He thought he knew. The old knight strode
across the hall, his long white cloak rippling behind him. He caught
the Dornishmen at the top of the steps. “Your father’s court was
never half so lively,” he heard Drinkwater japing.
“Prince Quentyn,” Selmy called. “Might I beg a word?”
Quentyn Martell turned. “Ser Barristan. Of course. My chambers
are one level down.”
No. “It is not my place to counsel you, Prince Quentyn … but if I
were you, I would not return to my chambers. You and your friends
should go down the steps and leave.”
Prince Quentyn stared. “Leave the pyramid?”
“Leave the city. Return to Dorne.”
The Dornishmen exchanged a look. “Our arms and armor are back
in our apartments,” said Gerris Drinkwater. “Not to mention most of
the coin that we have left.”
“Swords can be replaced,” said Ser Barristan. “I can provide you
with coin enough for passage back to Dorne. Prince Quentyn, the
king made note of you today. He frowned.”
Gerris Drinkwater laughed. “Should we be frightened of Hizdahr
zo Loraq? You saw him just now. He quailed before the
Yunkishmen. They sent him a head, and he did nothing.”
Quentyn Martell nodded in agreement. “A prince does well to
think before he acts. This king … I do not know what to think of
him. The queen warned me against him as well, true, but …”
“She warned you?” Selmy frowned. “Why are you still here?”
Prince Quentyn ushed. “The marriage pact—”
“—was made by two dead men and contained not a word about
the queen or you. It promised your sister’s hand to the queen’s
brother, another dead man. It has no force. Until you turned up
here, Her Grace was ignorant of its existence. Your father keeps his
secrets well, Prince Quentyn. Too well, I fear. If the queen had
known of this pact in Qarth, she might never have turned aside for
Slaver’s Bay, but you came too late. I have no wish to salt your

wounds, but Her Grace has a new husband and an old paramour,
and seems to prefer the both of them to you.”
Anger ashed in the prince’s dark eyes. “This Ghiscari lordling is
no t consort for the queen of the Seven Kingdoms.”
“That is not for you to judge.” Ser Barristan paused, wondering if
he had said too much already. No. Tell him the rest of it. “That day at
Daznak’s Pit, some of the food in the royal box was poisoned. It was
only chance that Strong Belwas ate it all. The Blue Graces say that
only his size and freakish strength have saved him, but it was a near
thing. He may yet die.”
The shock was plain on Prince Quentyn’s face. “Poison … meant
for Daenerys?”
“Her or Hizdahr. Perhaps both. The box was his, though. His
Grace made all the arrangements. If the poison was his
doing … well, he will need a scapegoat. Who better than a rival
from a distant land who has no friends at this court? Who better
than a suitor the queen spurned?”
Quentyn Martell went pale. “Me? I would never … you cannot
think I had any part in any …”
That was the truth, or he is a master mummer. “Others might,” said
Ser Barristan. “The Red Viper was your uncle. And you have good
reason to want King Hizdahr dead.”
“So do others,” suggested Gerris Drinkwater. “Naharis, for one.
The queen’s …”
“… paramour,” Ser Barristan nished, before the Dornish knight
could say anything that might besmirch the queen’s honor. “That is
what you call them down in Dorne, is it not?” He did not wait for a
reply. “Prince Lewyn was my Sworn Brother. In those days there
were few secrets amongst the Kingsguard. I know he kept a
paramour. He did not feel there was any shame in that.”
“No,” said Quentyn, red-faced, “but …”
“Daario would kill Hizdahr in a heartbeat if he dared,” Ser
Barristan went on. “But not with poison. Never. And Daario was not
there in any case. Hizdahr would be pleased to blame him for the
locusts, all the same … but the king may yet have need of the
Stormcrows, and he will lose them if he appears complicit in the

death of their captain. No, my prince. If His Grace needs a poisoner,
he will look to you.” He had said all that he could safely say. In a
few more days, if the gods smiled on them, Hizdahr zo Loraq would
no longer rule Meereen … but no good would be served by having
Prince Quentyn caught up in the bloodbath that was coming. “If you
must remain in Meereen, you would do well to stay away from
court and hope Hizdahr forgets you,” Ser Barristan nished, “but a
ship for Volantis would be wiser, my prince. Whatever course you
choose, I wish you well.”
Before he had gone three steps, Quentyn Martell called out to
him. “Barristan the Bold, they call you.”
“Some do.” Selmy had won that name when he was ten years old,
a new-made squire, yet so vain and proud and foolish that he got it
in his head that he could joust with tried and proven knights. So
he’d borrowed a warhorse and some plate from Lord Dondarrion’s
armory and entered the lists at Blackhaven as a mystery knight.
Even the herald laughed. My arms were so thin that when I lowered my
lance it was all I could do to keep the point from furrowing the ground.
Lord Dondarrion would have been within his rights to pull him o
the horse and spank him, but the Prince of Dragon ies had taken
pity on the addlepated boy in the ill- tting armor and accorded him
the respect of taking up his challenge. One course was all that it
required. Afterward Prince Duncan helped him to his feet and
removed his helm. “A boy,” he had proclaimed to the crowd. “A
bold boy.” Fifty-three years ago. How many men are still alive who were
there at Blackhaven?
“What name do you think they will give me, should I return to
Dorne without Daenerys?” Prince Quentyn asked. “Quentyn the
Cautious? Quentyn the Craven? Quentyn the Quail?”
The Prince Who Came Too Late, the old knight thought … but if a
knight of the Kingsguard learns nothing else, he learns to guard his
tongue. “Quentyn the Wise,” he suggested. And hoped that it was
true.

THE SPURNED SUITOR

T

he hour of ghosts was almost upon them when Ser Gerris
Drinkwater returned to the pyramid to report that he had found
Beans, Books, and Old Bill Bone in one of Meereen’s less savory
cellars, drinking yellow wine and watching naked slaves kill one
another with bare hands and led teeth.
“Beans pulled a blade and proposed a wager to determine if
deserters had bellies full of yellow slime,” Ser Gerris reported, “so I
tossed him a dragon and asked if yellow gold would do. He bit the
coin and asked what I meant to buy. When I told him he slipped the
knife away and asked if I was drunk or mad.”
“Let him think what he wants, so long as he delivers the
message,” said Quentyn.
“He’ll do that much. I’ll wager you get your meeting too, if only
so Rags can have Pretty Meris cut your liver out and fry it up with
onions. We should be heeding Selmy. When Barristan the Bold tells
you to run, a wise man laces up his boots. We should nd a ship for
Volantis whilst the port is still open.”
Just the mention turned Ser Archibald’s cheeks green. “No more
ships. I’d sooner hop back to Volantis on one foot.”
Volantis, Quentyn thought. Then Lys, then home. Back the way I
came, empty-handed. Three brave men dead, for what?
It would be sweet to see the Greenblood again, to visit Sunspear
and the Water Gardens and breathe the clean sweet mountain air of
Yronwood in place of the hot, wet, lthy humors of Slaver’s Bay.
His father would speak no word of rebuke, Quentyn knew, but the
disappointment would be there in his eyes. His sister would be

scornful, the Sand Snakes would mock him with smiles sharp as
swords, and Lord Yronwood, his second father, who had sent his
own son along to keep him safe …
“I will not keep you here,” Quentyn told his friends. “My father
laid this task on me, not you. Go home, if that is what you want. By
whatever means you like. I am staying.”
The big man shrugged. “Then Drink and me are staying too.”
The next night, Denzo D’han turned up at Prince Quentyn’s door
to talk terms. “He will meet with you on the morrow, by the spice
market. Look for a door marked with a purple lotus. Knock twice
and call for freedom.”
“Agreed,” said Quentyn. “Arch and Gerris will be with me. He can
bring two men as well. No more.”
“If it please my prince.” The words were polite enough, but
Denzo’s tone was edged with malice, and the eyes of the warrior
poet gleamed bright with mockery. “Come at sunset. And see that
you are not followed.”
The Dornishmen left the Great Pyramid an hour shy of sunset in
case they took a wrong turn or had di culty nding the purple
lotus. Quentyn and Gerris wore their sword belts. The big man had
his warhammer slung across his broad back.
“It is still not too late to abandon this folly,” Gerris said, as they
made their way down a foetid alley toward the old spice market.
The smell of piss was in the air, and they could hear the rumble of a
corpse cart’s iron-rimmed wheels o ahead. “Old Bill Bone used to
say that Pretty Maris could stretch out a man’s dying for a moon’s
turn. We lied to them, Quent. Used them to get us here, then went
over to the Stormcrows.”
“As we were commanded.”
“Tatters never meant for us to do it for real, though,” put in the
big man. “His other boys, Ser Orson and Dick Straw, Hungerford,
Will of the Woods, that lot, they’re still down in some dungeon
thanks to us. Old Rags can’t have liked that much.”
“No,” Prince Quentyn said, “but he likes gold.”
Gerris laughed. “A pity we have none. Do you trust this peace,
Quent? I don’t. Half the city is calling the dragonslayer a hero, and

the other half spits blood at the mention of his name.”
“Harzoo,” the big man said.
Quentyn frowned. “His name was Harghaz.”
“Hizdahr, Humzum, Hagnag, what does it matter? I call them all
Harzoo. He was no dragonslayer. All he did was get his arse roasted
black and crispy.”
“He was brave.” Would I have the courage to face that monster with
nothing but a spear?
“He died bravely, is what you mean.”
“He died screaming,” said Arch.
Gerris put a hand on Quentyn’s shoulder. “Even if the queen
returns, she’ll still be married.”
“Not if I give King Harzoo a little smack with my hammer,”
suggested the big man.
“Hizdahr,” said Quentyn. “His name is Hizdahr.”
“One kiss from my hammer and no one will care what his name
was,” said Arch.
They do not see. His friends had lost sight of his true purpose here.
The road leads through her, not to her. Daenerys is the means to the
prize, not the prize itself. “ ‘The dragon has three heads,’ she said to
me. ‘My marriage need not be the end of all your hopes,’ she said. ‘I
know why you are here. For re and blood.’ I have Targaryen blood
in me, you know that. I can trace my lineage back—”
“Fuck your lineage,” said Gerris. “The dragons won’t care about
your blood, except maybe how it tastes. You cannot tame a dragon
with a history lesson. They’re monsters, not maesters. Quent, is this
truly what you want to do?”
“This is what I have to do. For Dorne. For my father. For Cletus
and Will and Maester Kedry.”
“They’re dead,” said Gerris. “They won’t care.”
“All dead,” Quentyn agreed. “For what? To bring me here, so I
might wed the dragon queen. A grand adventure, Cletus called it.
Demon roads and stormy seas, and at the end of it the most
beautiful woman in the world. A tale to tell our grandchildren. But
Cletus will never father a child, unless he left a bastard in the belly

of that tavern wench he liked. Will will never have his wedding.
Their deaths should have some meaning.”
Gerris pointed to where a corpse slumped against a brick wall,
attended by a cloud of glistening green ies. “Did his death have
meaning?”
Quentyn looked at the body with distaste. “He died of the ux.
Stay well away from him.” The pale mare was inside the city walls.
Small wonder that the streets seemed so empty. “The Unsullied will
send a corpse cart for him.”
“No doubt. But that was not my question. Men’s lives have
meaning, not their deaths. I loved Will and Cletus too, but this will
not bring them back to us. This is a mistake, Quent. You cannot
trust in sellswords.”
“They are men like any other men. They want gold, glory, power.
That’s all I am trusting in.” That, and my own destiny. I am a prince
of Dorne, and the blood of dragons is in my veins.
The sun had sunk below the city wall by the time they found the
purple lotus, painted on the weathered wooden door of a low brick
hovel squatting amidst a row of similar hovels in the shadow of the
great yellow-and-green pyramid of Rhazdar. Quentyn knocked
twice, as instructed. A gru voice answered through the door,
growling something unintelligible in the mongrel tongue of Slaver’s
Bay, an ugly blend of Old Ghiscari and High Valyrian. The prince
answered in the same tongue. “Freedom.”
The door opened. Gerris entered rst, for caution’s sake, with
Quentyn close behind him and the big man bringing up the rear.
Within, the air was hazy with bluish smoke, whose sweet smell
could not quite cover up the deeper stinks of piss and sour wine and
rotting meat. The space was much larger than it had seemed from
without, stretching o to right and left into the adjoining hovels.
What had appeared to be a dozen structures from the street turned
into one long hall inside.
At this hour the house was less than half full. A few of the patrons
favored the Dornishmen with looks bored or hostile or curious. The
rest were crowded around the pit at the far end of the room, where

a pair of naked men were slashing at each other with knives whilst
the watchers cheered them on.
Quentyn saw no sign of the men they had come to meet. Then a
door he had not seen before swung open, and an old woman
emerged, a shriveled thing in a dark red tokar fringed with tiny
golden skulls. Her skin was white as mare’s milk, her hair so thin
that he could see the scalp beneath. “Dorne,” she said, “I be
Zahrina. Purple Lotus. Go down here, you nd them.” She held the
door and gestured them through.
Beyond was a ight of wooden steps, steep and twisting. This
time the big man led the way and Gerris was the rear guard, with
the prince between them. An undercellar. It was a long way down,
and so dark that Quentyn had to feel his way to keep from slipping.
Near the bottom Ser Archibald pulled his dagger.
They emerged in a brick vault thrice the size of the winesink
above. Huge wooden vats lined the walls as far as the prince could
see. A red lantern hung on a hook just inside the door, and a greasy
black candle ickered on an overturned barrel serving as a table.
That was the only light.
Caggo Corpsekiller was pacing by the wine vats, his black arakh
hanging at his hip. Pretty Meris stood cradling a crossbow, her eyes
as cold and dead as two grey stones. Denzo D’han barred the door
once the Dornishmen were inside, then took up a position in front
of it, arms crossed against his chest.
One too many, Quentyn thought.
The Tattered Prince himself was seated at the table, nursing a cup
of wine. In the yellow candlelight his silver-grey hair seemed
almost golden, though the pouches underneath his eyes were etched
as large as saddlebags. He wore a brown wool traveler’s cloak, with
silvery chain mail glimmering underneath. Did that betoken
treachery or simple prudence? An old sellsword is a cautious sellsword.
Quentyn approached his table. “My lord. You look di erent without
your cloak.”
“My ragged raiment?” The Pentoshi gave a shrug. “A poor
thing … yet those tatters ll my foes with fear, and on the
battle eld the sight of my rags blowing in the wind emboldens my

men more than any banner. And if I want to move unseen, I need
only slip it o to become plain and unremarkable.” He gestured at
the bench across from him. “Sit. I understand you are a prince.
Would that I had known. Will you drink? Zahrina o ers food as
well. Her bread is stale and her stew is unspeakable. Grease and
salt, with a morsel or two of meat. Dog, she says, but I think rat is
more likely. It will not kill you, though. I have found that it is only
when the food is tempting that one must beware. Poisoners
invariably choose the choicest dishes.”
“You brought three men,” Ser Gerris pointed out, with an edge in
his voice. “We agreed on two apiece.”
“Meris is no man. Meris, sweet, undo your shirt, show him.”
“That will not be necessary,” said Quentyn. If the talk he had
heard was true, beneath that shirt Pretty Meris had only the scars
left by the men who’d cut her breasts o . “Meris is a woman, I
agree. You’ve still twisted the terms.”
“Tattered and twisty, what a rogue I am. Three to two is not
much of an advantage, it must be admitted, but it counts for
something. In this world, a man must learn to seize whatever gifts
the gods chose to send him. That was a lesson I learned at some
cost. I o er it to you as a sign of my good faith.” He gestured at the
chair again. “Sit, and say what you came to say. I promise not to
have you killed until I have heard you out. That is the least I can do
for a fellow prince. Quentyn, is it?”
“Quentyn of House Martell.”
“Frog suits you better. It is not my custom to drink with liars and
deserters, but you’ve made me curious.”
Quentyn sat. One wrong word, and this could turn to blood in half a
heartbeat. “I ask your pardon for our deception. The only ships
sailing for Slaver’s Bay were those that had been hired to bring you
to the wars.”
The Tattered Prince gave a shrug. “Every turncloak has his tale.
You are not the rst to swear me your swords, take my coin, and
run. All of them have reasons. ‘My little son is sick,’ or ‘My wife is
putting horns on me,’ or ‘The other men all make me suck their
cocks.’ Such a charming boy, the last, but I did not excuse his

desertion. Another fellow told me our food was so wretched that he
had to ee before it made him sick, so I had his foot cut o , roasted
it up, and fed it to him. Then I made him our camp cook. Our meals
improved markedly, and when his contract was ful lled he signed
another. You, though … several of my best are locked up in the
queen’s dungeons thanks to that lying tongue of yours, and I doubt
that you can even cook.”
“I am a prince of Dorne,” said Quentyn. “I had a duty to my
father and my people. There was a secret marriage pact.”
“So I heard. And when the silver queen saw your scrap of
parchment she fell into your arms, yes?”
“No,” said Pretty Meris.
“No? Oh, I recall. Your bride ew o on a dragon. Well, when
she returns, do be sure to invite us to your nuptials. The men of the
company would love to drink to your happiness, and I do love a
Westerosi wedding. The bedding part especially, only … oh,
wait …” He turned to Denzo D’han. “Denzo, I thought you told me
that the dragon queen had married some Ghiscari.”
“A Meereenese nobleman. Rich.”
The Tattered Prince turned back to Quentyn. “Could that be true?
Surely not. What of your marriage pact?”
“She laughed at him,” said Pretty Meris.
Daenerys never laughed. The rest of Meereen might see him as an
amusing curiosity, like the exiled Summer Islander King Robert used
to keep at King’s Landing, but the queen had always spoken to him
gently. “We came too late,” said Quentyn.
“A pity you did not desert me sooner.” The Tattered Prince sipped
at his wine. “So … no wedding for Prince Frog. Is that why you’ve
come hopping back to me? Have my three brave Dornish lads
decided to honor their contracts?”
“No.”
“How vexing.”
“Yurkhaz zo Yunzak is dead.”
“Ancient tidings. I saw him die. The poor man saw a dragon and
stumbled as he tried to ee. Then a thousand of his closest friends

stepped on him. No doubt the Yellow City is awash in tears. Did you
ask me here to toast his memory?”
“No. Have the Yunkishmen chosen a new commander?”
“The council of masters has been unable to agree. Yezzan zo
Qaggaz had the most support, but now he’s died as well. The Wise
Masters are rotating the supreme command amongst themselves.
Today our leader is the one your friends in the ranks dubbed the
Drunken Conqueror. On the morrow, it will be Lord
Wobblecheeks.”
“The Rabbit,” said Meris. “Wobblecheeks was yesterday.”
“I stand corrected, my sweetling. Our Yunkish friends were kind
enough to provide us with a chart. I must strive to be more
assiduous about consulting it.”
“Yurkhaz zo Yunzak was the man who hired you.”
“He signed our contract on behalf of his city. Just so.”
“Meereen and Yunkai have made peace. The siege is to be lifted,
the armies disbanded. There will be no battle, no slaughter, no city
to sack and plunder.”
“Life is full of disappointments.”
“How long do you think the Yunkishmen will want to continue
paying wages to four free companies?”
The Tattered Prince took a sip of wine and said, “A vexing
question. But this is the way of life for we men of the free
companies. One war ends, another begins. Fortunately there is
always someone ghting someone somewhere. Perhaps here. Even
as we sit here drinking Bloodbeard is urging our Yunkish friends to
present King Hizdahr with another head. Freedmen and slavers eye
each other’s necks and sharpen their knives, the Sons of the Harpy
plot in their pyramids, the pale mare rides down slave and lord
alike, our friends from the Yellow City gaze out to sea, and
somewhere in the grasslands a dragon nibbles the tender esh of
Daenerys Targaryen. Who rules Meereen tonight? Who will rule it
on the morrow?” The Pentoshi gave a shrug. “One thing I am
certain of. Someone will have need of our swords.”
“I have need of those swords. Dorne will hire you.”

The Tattered Prince glanced at Pretty Meris. “He does not lack
for gall, this Frog. Must I remind him? My dear prince, the last
contract we signed you used to wipe your pretty pink bottom.”
“I will double whatever the Yunkishmen are paying you.”
“And pay in gold upon the signing of our contract, yes?”
“I will pay you part when we reach Volantis, the rest when I am
back in Sunspear. We brought gold with us when we set sail, but it
would have been hard to conceal once we joined the company, so
we gave it over to the banks. I can show you papers.”
“Ah. Papers. But we will be paid double.”
“Twice as many papers,” said Pretty Meris.
“The rest you’ll have in Dorne,” Quentyn insisted. “My father is a
man of honor. If I put my seal to an agreement, he will ful ll its
terms. You have my word on that.”
The Tattered Prince nished his wine, turned the cup over, and
set it down between them. “So. Let me see if I understand. A proven
liar and oathbreaker wishes to contract with us and pay in promises.
And for what services? I wonder. Are my Windblown to smash the
Yunkai’i and sack the Yellow City? Defeat a Dothraki khalasar in the
eld? Escort you home to your father? Or will you be content if we
deliver Queen Daenerys to your bed wet and willing? Tell me true,
Prince Frog. What would you have of me and mine?”
“I need you to help me steal a dragon.”
Caggo Corpsekiller chuckled. Pretty Meris curled her lip in a halfsmile. Denzo D’han whistled.
The Tattered Prince only leaned back on his stool and said,
“Double does not pay for dragons, princeling. Even a frog should
know that much. Dragons come dear. And men who pay in promises
should have at least the sense to promise more.”
“If you want me to triple—”
“What I want,” said the Tattered Prince, “is Pentos.”

THE GRIFFIN REBORN

H

e sent the archers in rst.
Black Balaq commanded one thousand bows. In his youth, Jon
Connington had shared the disdain most knights had for bowmen,
but he had grown wiser in exile. In its own way, the arrow was as
deadly as the sword, so for the long voyage he had insisted that
Homeless Harry Strickland break Balaq’s command into ten
companies of one hundred men and place each company upon a
di erent ship.
Six of those ships had stayed together well enough to deliver their
passengers to the shores of Cape Wrath (the other four were lagging
but would turn up eventually, the Volantenes assured them, but
Gri thought it just as likely they were lost or had landed
elsewhere), which left the company with six hundred bows. For
this, two hundred proved su cient. “They will try to send out
ravens,” he told Black Balaq. “Watch the maester’s tower. Here.” He
pointed to the map he had drawn in the mud of their campsite.
“Bring down every bird that leaves the castle.”
“This we do,” replied the Summer Islander.
A third of Balaq’s men used crossbows, another third the doublecurved horn-and-sinew bows of the east. Better than these were the
big yew longbows borne by the archers of Westerosi blood, and best
of all were the great bows of goldenheart treasured by Black Balaq
himself and his fty Summer Islanders. Only a dragonbone bow
could outrange one made of goldenheart. Whatever bow they
carried, all of Balaq’s men were sharp-eyed, seasoned veterans who

had proved their worth in a hundred battles, raids, and skirmishes.
They proved it again at Gri n’s Roost.
The castle rose from the shores of Cape Wrath, on a lofty crag of
dark red stone surrounded on three sides by the surging waters of
Shipbreaker Bay. Its only approach was defended by a gatehouse,
behind which lay the long bare ridge the Conningtons called the
gri n’s throat. To force the throat could be a bloody business, since
the ridge exposed the attackers to the spears, stones, and arrows of
defenders in the two round towers that anked the castle’s main
gates. And once they reached those gates, the men inside could pour
down boiling oil on their heads. Gri expected to lose a hundred
men, perhaps more.
They lost four.
The woods had been allowed to encroach on the eld beyond the
gatehouse, so Franklyn Flowers was able to use the brush for
concealment and lead his men within twenty yards of the gates
before emerging from the trees with the ram they’d fashioned back
at camp. The crash of wood on wood brought two men to the
battlements; Black Balaq’s archers took down both of them before
they could rub the sleep out of their eyes. The gate turned out to be
closed but not barred; it gave way at the second blow, and Ser
Franklyn’s men were halfway up the throat before a warhorn
sounded the alarum from the castle proper.
The rst raven took ight as their grapnels were arcing above the
curtain wall, the second a few moments later. Neither bird had
own a hundred yards before an arrow took it down. A guard inside
dumped down a bucket of oil on the rst men to reach the gates,
but as he’d had no time to heat it, the bucket caused more damage
than its contents. Swords were soon ringing in half a dozen places
along the battlements. The men of the Golden Company clambered
through the merlons and raced along the wallwalks, shouting “A
gri n! A gri n!,” the ancient battle cry of House Connington, which
must have left the defenders even more confused.
It was over within minutes. Gri rode up the throat on a white
courser beside Homeless Harry Strickland. As they neared the
castle, he saw a third raven ap from the maester’s tower, only to

be feathered by Black Balaq himself. “No more messages,” he told
Ser Franklyn Flowers in the yard. The next thing to come ying
from the maester’s tower was the maester. The way his arms were
apping, he might have been mistaken for another bird.
That was the end of all resistance. What guards remained had
thrown down their weapons. And quick as that, Gri n’s Roost was
his again, and Jon Connington was once more a lord.
“Ser Franklyn,” he said, “go through the keep and kitchens and
roust out everyone you nd. Malo, do the same with the maester’s
tower and the armory. Ser Brendel, the stables, sept, and barracks.
Bring them out into the yard, and try not to kill anyone who does
not insist on dying. We want to win the stormlands, and we won’t
do that with slaughter. Be sure you look under the altar of the
Mother, there’s a hidden stair there that leads down to a secret bolthole. And another under the northwest tower that goes straight
down to the sea. No one is to escape.”
“They won’t, m’lord,” promised Franklyn Flowers.
Connington watched them dash o , then beckoned to the
Halfmaester. “Haldon, take charge of the rookery. I’ll have
messages to send out tonight.”
“Let us hope they left some ravens for us.”
Even Homeless Harry was impressed by the swiftness of their
victory. “I never thought that it would be so easy,” the captaingeneral said, as they walked into the great hall to have a look at the
carved and gilded Gri n Seat where
fty generations of
Conningtons had sat and ruled.
“It will get harder. So far we have taken them unawares. That
cannot last forever, even if Black Balaq brings down every raven in
the realm.”
Strickland studied the faded tapestries on the walls, the arched
windows with their myriad diamond-shaped panes of red and white
glass, the racks of spears and swords and warhammers. “Let them
come. This place can stand against twenty times our number, so
long as we are well provisioned. And you say there is a way in and
out by sea?”

“Below. A hidden cove beneath the crag, which appears only
when the tide is out.” But Connington had no intention of “letting
them come.” Gri n’s Roost was strong but small, and so long as
they sat here they would seem small as well. But there was another
castle nearby, vastly larger and impregnable. Take that, and the
realm will shake. “You must excuse me, Captain-General. My lord
father is buried beneath the sept, and it has been too many years
since last I prayed for him.”
“Of course, my lord.”
Yet when they parted, Jon Connington did not go to the sept.
Instead his steps led him up to the roof of the east tower, the tallest
at Gri n’s Roost. As he climbed he remembered past ascents—a
hundred with his lord father, who liked to stand and look out over
woods and crags and sea and know that all he saw belonged to
House Connington, and one (only one!) with Rhaegar Targaryen.
Prince Rhaegar was returning from Dorne, and he and his escort had
lingered here a fortnight. He was so young then, and I was younger.
Boys, the both of us. At the welcoming feast, the prince had taken up
his silver-stringed harp and played for them. A song of love and
doom, Jon Connington recalled, and every woman in the hall was
weeping when he put down the harp. Not the men, of course.
Particularly not his own father, whose only love was land. Lord
Armond Connington spent the entire evening trying to win the
prince to his side in his dispute with Lord Morrigen.
The door to the roof of the tower was stuck so fast that it was
plain no one had opened it in years. He had to put his shoulder to it
to force it open. But when Jon Connington stepped out onto the
high battlements, the view was just as intoxicating as he
remembered: the crag with its wind-carved rocks and jagged spires,
the sea below growling and worrying at the foot of the castle like
some restless beast, endless leagues of sky and cloud, the wood with
its autumnal colors. “Your father’s lands are beautiful,” Prince
Rhaegar had said, standing right where Jon was standing now. And
the boy he’d been had replied, “One day they will all be mine.” As if
that could impress a prince who was heir to the entire realm, from the
Arbor to the Wall.

Gri n’s Roost had been his, eventually, if only for a few short
years. From here, Jon Connington had ruled broad lands extending
many leagues to the west, north, and south, just as his father and
his father’s father had before him. But his father and his father’s
father had never lost their lands. He had. I rose too high, loved too
hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.
After the Battle of the Bells, when Aerys Targaryen had stripped
him of his titles and sent him into exile in a mad t of ingratitude
and suspicion, the lands and lordship had remained within House
Connington, passing to his cousin Ser Ronald, the man whom Jon
had made his castellan when he went to King’s Landing to attend
Prince Rhaegar. Robert Baratheon had completed the destruction of
the gri ns after the war. Cousin Ronald was permitted to retain his
castle and his head, but he lost his lordship, thereafter being merely
the Knight of Gri n’s Roost, and nine-tenths of his lands were taken
from him and parceled out to neighbor lords who had supported
Robert’s claim.
Ronald Connington had died years before. The present Knight of
Gri n’s Roost, his son Ronnet, was said to be o at war in the
riverlands. That was for the best. In Jon Connington’s experience,
men would ght for things they felt were theirs, even things they’d
gained by theft. He did not relish the notion of celebrating his
return by killing one of his own kin. Red Ronnet’s sire had been
quick to take advantage of his lord cousin’s downfall, true, but his
son had been a child at the time. Jon Connington did not even hate
the late Ser Ronald as much as he might have. The fault was his.
He had lost it all at Stoney Sept, in his arrogance.
Robert Baratheon had been hiding somewhere in the town,
wounded and alone. Jon Connington had known that, and he had
also known that Robert’s head upon a spear would have put an end
to the rebellion, then and there. He was young and full of pride.
How not? King Aerys had named him Hand and given him an army,
and he meant to prove himself worthy of that trust, of Rhaegar’s
love. He would slay the rebel lord himself and carve a place out for
himself in all the histories of the Seven Kingdoms.

And so he swept down on Stoney Sept, closed o the town, and
began a search. His knights went house to house, smashed in every
door, peered into every cellar. He had even sent men crawling
through the sewers, yet somehow Robert still eluded him. The
townsfolk were hiding him. They moved him from one secret bolthole to the next, always one step ahead of the king’s men. The
whole town was a nest of traitors. At the end they had the usurper
hidden in a brothel. What sort of king was that, who would hide
behind the skirts of women? Yet whilst the search dragged on,
Eddard Stark and Hoster Tully came down upon the town with a
rebel army. Bells and battle followed, and Robert emerged from his
brothel with a blade in hand, and almost slew Jon on the steps of
the old sept that gave the town its name.
For years afterward, Jon Connington told himself that he was not
to blame, that he had done all that any man could do. His soldiers
searched every hole and hovel, he o ered pardons and rewards, he
took hostages and hung them in crow cages and swore that they
would have neither food nor drink until Robert was delivered to
him. All to no avail. “Tywin Lannister himself could have done no
more,” he had insisted one night to Blackheart, during his rst year
of exile.
“There is where you’re wrong,” Myles Toyne had replied. “Lord
Tywin would not have bothered with a search. He would have
burned that town and every living creature in it. Men and boys,
babes at the breast, noble knights and holy septons, pigs and
whores, rats and rebels, he would have burned them all. When the
res guttered out and only ash and cinders remained, he would
have sent his men in to nd the bones of Robert Baratheon. Later,
when Stark and Tully turned up with their host, he would have
o ered pardons to the both of them, and they would have accepted
and turned for home with their tails between their legs.”
He was not wrong, Jon Connington re ected, leaning on the
battlements of his forebears. I wanted the glory of slaying Robert in
single combat, and I did not want the name of butcher. So Robert
escaped me and cut down Rhaegar on the Trident. “I failed the father,”
he said, “but I will not fail the son.”

By the time Connington made his descent, his men had gathered
the castle garrison and surviving smallfolk together in the yard.
Though Ser Ronnet was indeed o north somewhere with Jaime
Lannister, Gri n’s Roost was not quite bereft of gri ns. Amongst
the prisoners were Ronnet’s younger brother Raymund, his sister
Alynne, and his natural son, a erce red-haired boy they called
Ronald Storm. All would make for useful hostages if and when Red
Ronnet should return to try and take back the castle that his father
had stolen. Connington ordered them con ned to the west tower,
under guard. The girl began to cry at that, and the bastard boy tried
to bite the spearman closest to him. “Stop it, the both of you,” he
snapped at them. “No harm will come to any of you unless Red
Ronnet proves an utter fool.”
Only a few of the captives had been in service here when Jon
Connington had last been lord: a grizzled serjeant, blind in one eye;
a couple of the washerwomen; a groom who had been a stableboy
during Robert’s Rebellion; the cook, who had grown enormously
fat; the castle armorer. Gri had let his beard grow out during the
voyage, for the rst time in many years, and to his surprise it had
come in mostly red, though here and there ash showed amidst the
re. Clad in a long red-and-white tunic embroidered with the twin
gri ns of his House, counterchanged and combatant, he looked an
older, sterner version of the young lord who had been Prince
Rhaegar’s friend and companion … but the men and women of
Gri n’s Roost still looked at him with strangers’ eyes.
“Some of you will know me,” he told them. “The rest will learn. I
am your rightful lord, returned from exile. My enemies have told
you I am dead. Those tales are false, as you can see. Serve me as
faithfully as you have served my cousin, and no harm need come to
any of you.”
He brought them forward one by one, asked each man his name,
then bid them kneel and swear him their allegiance. It all went
swiftly. The soldiers of the garrison—only four had survived the
attack, the old serjeant and three boys—laid their swords at his feet.
No one balked. No one died.

That night in the great hall the victors feasted on roast meats and
fresh-caught sh, washed down with rich red wines from the castle
cellars. Jon Connington presided from the Gri n’s Seat, sharing the
high table with Homeless Harry Strickland, Black Balaq, Franklyn
Flowers, and the three young gri ns they had taken captive. The
children were of his blood and he felt that he should know them,
but when the bastard boy announced, “My father’s going to kill
you,” he decided that his knowledge was su cient, ordered them
back to their cells, and excused himself.
Haldon Halfmaester had been absent from the feast. Lord Jon
found him in the maester’s tower, bent over a pile of parchments,
with maps spread out all around him. “Hoping to determine where
the rest of the company might be?” Connington asked him.
“Would that I could, my lord.”
Ten thousand men had sailed from Volon Therys, with all their
weapons, horses, elephants. Not quite half that number had turned
up thus far on Westeros, at or near their intended landing site, a
deserted stretch of coast on the edge of the rainwood … lands that
Jon Connington knew well, as they had once been his.
Only a few years ago, he would never have dared attempt a
landing on Cape Wrath; the storm lords were too ercely loyal to
House Baratheon and to King Robert. But with both Robert and his
brother Renly slain, everything was changed. Stannis was too harsh
and cold a man to inspire much in the way of loyalty, even if he had
not been half a world away, and the stormlands had little reason to
love House Lannister. And Jon Connington was not without his own
friends here. Some of the older lords will still remember me, and their
sons will have heard the stories. And every man of them will know of
Rhaegar, and his young son whose head was smashed against a cold
stone wall.
Fortunately his own ship had been one of the rst to reach their
destination. Then it had only been a matter of establishing a
campsite, assembling his men as they came ashore and moving
quickly, before the local lordlings had any inkling of their peril. And
there the Golden Company had proved its mettle. The chaos that
would inevitably have delayed such a march with a hastily

assembled host of household knights and local levies had been
nowhere in evidence. These were the heirs of Bittersteel, and
discipline was mother’s milk to them.
“By this time on the morrow we ought to hold three castles,” he
said. The force that had taken Gri n’s Roost represented a quarter
of their available strength; Ser Tristan Rivers had set o
simultaneously for the seat of House Morrigen at Crow’s Nest, and
Laswell Peake for Rain House, the stronghold of the Wyldes, each
with a force of comparable size. The rest of their men had remained
in camp to guard their landing site and prince, under the command
of the company’s Volantene paymaster, Gorys Edoryen. Their
numbers would continue to swell, one hoped; more ships were
straggling in every day. “We still have too few horses.”
“And no elephants,” the Halfmaester reminded him. Not one of
the great cogs carrying the elephants had turned up yet. They had
last seen them at Lys, before the storm that had scattered half the
eet. “Horses can be found in Westeros. Elephants—”
“—do not matter.” The great beasts would be useful in a pitched
battle, no doubt, but it would be some time before they had the
strength to face their foes in the eld. “Have those parchments told
you anything of use?”
“Oh, much and more, my lord.” Haldon gave him a thin smile.
“The Lannisters make enemies easily but seem to have a harder
time keeping friends. Their alliance with the Tyrells is fraying, to
judge from what I read here. Queen Cersei and Queen Margaery are
ghting over the little king like two bitches with a chicken bone,
and both have been accused of treason and debauchery. Mace Tyrell
has abandoned his siege of Storm’s End to march back to King’s
Landing and save his daughter, leaving only a token force behind to
keep Stannis’s men penned up inside the castle.”
Connington sat. “Tell me more.”
“In the north the Lannisters are relying on the Boltons and in the
riverlands upon the Freys, both houses long renowned for treachery
and cruelty. Lord Stannis Baratheon remains in open rebellion and
the ironborn of the islands have raised up a king as well. No one

ever seems to mention the Vale, which suggests to me that the
Arryns have taken no part in any of this.”
“And Dorne?” The Vale was far away; Dorne was close.
“Prince Doran’s younger son has been betrothed to Myrcella
Baratheon, which would suggest that the Dornishmen have thrown
in with House Lannister, but they have an army in the Boneway and
another in the Prince’s Pass, just waiting …”
“Waiting.” He frowned. “For what?” Without Daenerys and her
dragons, Dorne was central to their hopes. “Write Sunspear. Doran
Martell must know that his sister’s son is still alive and has come
home to claim his father’s throne.”
“As you say, my lord.” The Halfmaester glanced at another
parchment. “We could scarcely have timed our landing better. We
have potential friends and allies at every hand.”
“But no dragons,” said Jon Connington, “so to win these allies to
our cause, we must needs have something to o er them.”
“Gold and land are the traditional incentives.”
“Would that we had either. Promises of land and promises of gold
may su ce for some, but Strickland and his men will expect rst
claim on the choicest elds and castles, those that were taken from
their forebears when they ed into exile. No.”
“My lord does have one prize to o er,” Haldon Halfmaester
pointed out. “Prince Aegon’s hand. A marriage alliance, to bring
some great House to our banners.”
A bride for our bright prince. Jon Connington remembered Prince
Rhaegar’s wedding all too well. Elia was never worthy of him. She was
frail and sickly from the rst, and childbirth only left her weaker. After
the birth of Princess Rhaenys, her mother had been bedridden for
half a year, and Prince Aegon’s birth had almost been the death of
her. She would bear no more children, the maesters told Prince
Rhaegar afterward.
“Daenerys Targaryen may yet come home one day,” Connington
told the Halfmaester. “Aegon must be free to marry her.”
“My lord knows best,” said Haldon. “In that case, we might
consider o ering potential friends a lesser prize.”
“What would you suggest?”

“You. You are unwed. A great lord, still virile, with no heirs
except these cousins we have just now dispossessed, the scion of an
ancient House with a ne stout castle and wide, rich lands that will
no doubt be restored and perhaps expanded by a grateful king, once
we have triumphed. You have a name as a warrior, and as King
Aegon’s Hand you will speak with his voice and rule this realm in
all but name. I would think that many an ambitious lord might be
eager to wed his daughter to such a man. Even, perhaps, the prince
of Dorne.”
Jon Connington’s answer was a long cold stare. There were times
when the Halfmaester vexed him almost as much as that dwarf had.
“I think not.” Death is creeping up my arm. No man must ever know,
nor any wife. He got back to his feet. “Prepare the letter to Prince
Doran.”
“As my lord commands.”
Jon Connington slept that night in the lord’s chambers, in the bed
that had once been his father’s, beneath a dusty canopy of red-andwhite velvet. He woke at dawn to the sound of falling rain and the
timid knock of a serving man anxious to learn how his new lord
would break his fast. “Boiled eggs, fried bread, and beans. And a jug
of wine. The worst wine in the cellar.”
“The … the worst, m’lord?”
“You heard me.”
When the food and wine had been brought up, he barred the
door, emptied the jug into a bowl, and soaked his hand in it.
Vinegar soaks and vinegar baths were the treatment Lady Lemore
had prescribed for the dwarf, when she feared he might have
greyscale, but asking for a jug of vinegar each morning would give
the game away. Wine would need to serve, though he saw no sense
in wasting a good vintage. The nails on all four ngers were black
now, though not yet on his thumb. On the middle nger, the grey
had crept up past the second knuckle. I should hack them o , he
thought, but how would I explain two missing ngers? He dare not let
the greyscale become known. Queer as it seemed, men who would
cheerfully face battle and risk death to rescue a companion would

abandon that same companion in a heartbeat if he were known to
have greyscale. I should have let the damned dwarf drown.
Later that day, garbed and gloved once more, Connington made
an inspection of the castle and sent word to Homeless Harry
Strickland and his captains to join him for a war council. Nine of
them assembled in the solar: Connington and Strickland, Haldon
Halfmaester, Black Balaq, Ser Franklyn Flowers, Malo Jayn, Ser
Brendel Byrne, Dick Cole, and Lymond Pease. The Halfmaester had
good tidings. “Word’s reached the camp from Marq Mandrake. The
Volantenes put him ashore on what turned out to be Estermont,
with close to ve hundred men. He’s taken Greenstone.”
Estermont was an island o Cape Wrath, never one of their
objectives. “The damned Volantenes are so eager to be rid of us
they are dumping us ashore on any bit of land they see,” said
Franklyn Flowers. “I’ll wager you that we’ve got lads scattered all
over half the bloody Stepstones too.”
“With my elephants,” Harry Strickland said, in a mournful tone.
He missed his elephants, did Homeless Harry.
“Mandrake had no archers with him,” said Lymond Pease. “Do we
know if Greenstone got o any ravens before it fell?”
“I expect they did,” said Jon Connington, “but what messages
would they have carried? At best, some garbled account of raiders
from the sea.” Even before they had sailed from Volon Therys, he
had instructed his captains to show no banners during these rst
attacks—not Prince Aegon’s three-headed dragon, nor his own
gri ns, nor the skulls and golden battle standards of the company.
Let the Lannisters suspect Stannis Baratheon, pirates from the
Stepstones, outlaws out of the woods, or whoever else they cared to
blame. If the reports that reached King’s Landing were confused and
contradictory, so much the better. The slower the Iron Throne was
to react, the longer they would have to gather their strength and
bring allies to the cause. “There should be ships on Estermont. It is
an island. “Haldon, send word to Mandrake to leave a garrison
behind and bring the rest of his men over to Cape Wrath, along
with any noble captives.”

“As you command, my lord. House Estermont has blood ties to
both kings, as it happens. Good hostages.”
“Good ransoms,” said Homeless Harry, happily.
“It is time we sent for Prince Aegon as well,” Lord Jon
announced. “He will be safer here behind the walls of Gri n’s
Roost than back at camp.”
“I’ll send a rider,” said Franklyn Flowers, “but the lad won’t much
like the idea of staying safe, I tell you that. He wants to be in the
thick o’ things.”
So did we all at his age, Lord Jon thought, remembering.
“Has the time come to raise his banner?” asked Pease.
“Not yet. Let King’s Landing think this is no more than an exile
lord coming home with some hired swords to reclaim his birthright.
An old familiar story, that. I will even write King Tommen, stating
as much and asking for a pardon and the restoration of my lands
and titles. That will give them something to chew over for a while.
And whilst they dither, we will send out word secretly to likely
friends in the stormlands and the Reach. And Dorne.” That was the
crucial step. Lesser lords might join their cause for fear of harm or
hope of gain, but only the Prince of Dorne had the power to defy
House Lannister and its allies. “Above all else, we must have Doran
Martell.”
“Small chance of that,” said Strickland. “The Dornishman is scared
of his own shadow. Not what you call daring.”
No more than you. “Prince Doran is a cautious man, that’s true. He
will never join us unless he is convinced that we will win. So to
persuade him we must show our strength.”
“If Peake and Rivers are successful, we will control the better
part of Cape Wrath,” argued Strickland. “Four castles in as many
days, that’s a splendid start, but we are still only at half strength.
We need to wait for the rest of my men. We are missing horses as
well, and the elephants. Wait, I say. Gather our power, win some
small lords to our cause, let Lysono Maar dispatch his spies to learn
what we can learn of our foes.”
Connington gave the plump captain-general a cool look. This man
is no Blackheart, no Bittersteel, no Maelys. He would wait until all seven

hells were frozen if he could rather than risk another bout of blisters.
“We did not cross half the world to wait. Our best chance is to
strike hard and fast, before King’s Landing knows who we are. I
mean to take Storm’s End. A nigh-impregnable stronghold, and
Stannis Baratheon’s last foothold in the south. Once taken, it will
give us a secure fastness to which we may retreat at need, and
winning it will prove our strength.”
The captains of the Golden Company exchanged glances. “If
Storm’s End is still held by men loyal to Stannis, we will be taking it
from him, not the Lannisters,” objected Brendel Byrne. “Why not
make common cause with him against the Lannisters?”
“Stannis is Robert’s brother, of that same ilk that brought down
House Targaryen,” Jon Connington reminded him. “Moreover, he is
a thousand leagues away, with whatever meagre strength he still
commands. The whole realm lies between us. It would take half a
year just to reach him, and he has little and less to o er us.”
“If Storm’s End is so impregnable, how do you mean to take it?”
asked Malo.
“By guile.”
Homeless Harry Strickland disagreed. “We should wait.”
“We shall.” Jon Connington stood. “Ten days. No longer. It will
take that long to prepare. On the morning of the eleventh day, we
ride for Storm’s End.”
The prince arrived to join them four days later, riding at the head
of a column of a hundred horse, with three elephants lumbering in
his rear. Lady Lemore was with him, garbed once more in the white
robes of a septa. Before them went Ser Rolly Duck eld, a snowwhite cloak streaming from his shoulders.
A solid man, and true, Connington thought as he watched Duck
dismount, but not worthy of the Kingsguard. He had tried his best to
dissuade the prince from giving Duck eld that cloak, pointing out
that the honor might best be held in reserve for warriors of greater
renown whose fealty would add luster to their cause, and the
younger sons of great lords whose support they would need in the
coming struggle, but the boy would not be moved. “Duck will die
for me if need be,” he had said, “and that’s all I require in my

Kingsguard. The Kingslayer was a warrior of great renown, and the
son of a great lord as well.”
At least I convinced him to leave the other six slots open, else Duck
might have six ducklings trailing after him, each more blindingly
adequate than the last. “Escort His Grace to my solar,” he
commanded. “At once.”
Prince Aegon Targaryen was not near as biddable as the boy
Young Gri had been, however. The better part of an hour had
passed before he nally turned up in the solar, with Duck at his
side. “Lord Connington,” he said, “I like your castle.”
“Your father’s lands are beautiful,” he said. His silvery hair was
blowing in the wind, and his eyes were a deep purple, darker than this
boy’s. “As do I, Your Grace. Please, be seated. Ser Rolly, we’ll have
no further need of you for now.”
“No, I want Duck to stay.” The prince sat. “We’ve been talking
with Strickland and Flowers. They told us about this attack on
Storm’s End that you’re planning.”
Jon Connington did not let his fury show. “And did Homeless
Harry try to persuade you to delay it?”
“He did, actually,” the prince said, “but I won’t. Harry’s an old
maid, isn’t he? You have the right of it, my lord. I want the attack
to go ahead … with one change. I mean to lead it.”

THE SACRIFICE

O

n the village green, the queen’s men built their pyre.
Or should it be the village white? The snow was knee deep
everywhere but where the men had shoveled it away, to hack holes
into the frozen ground with axe and spade and pick. The wind was
swirling from the west, driving still more snow across the frozen
surface of the lakes.
“You do not want to watch this,” Aly Mormont said.
“No, but I will.” Asha Greyjoy was the kraken’s daughter, not
some pampered maiden who could not bear to look at ugliness.
It had been a dark, cold, hungry day, like the day before and the
day before that. They had spent most of it out on the ice, shivering
beside a pair of holes they’d cut in the smaller of the frozen lakes,
with shing lines clutched in mitten-clumsy hands. Not long ago,
they could count on hooking one or two sh apiece, and wolfswood
men more practiced at ice- shing were pulling up four or ve.
Today all that Asha had come back with was a chill that went bone
deep. Aly had fared no better. It had been three days since either of
them had caught a sh.
The She-Bear tried again. “I do not need to watch this.”
It is not you the queen’s men want to burn. “Then go. You have my
word, I will not run. Where would I go? To Winterfell?” Asha
laughed. “Only three days’ ride, they tell me.”
Six queen’s men were wrestling two enormous pinewood poles
into holes six other queen’s men had dug out. Asha did not have to
ask their purpose. She knew. Stakes. Nightfall would be on them
soon, and the red god must be fed. An o ering of blood and re, the

queen’s men called it, that the Lord of Light may turn his ery eye
upon us and melt these thrice-cursed snows.
“Even in this place of fear and darkness, the Lord of Light
protects us,” Ser Godry Farring told the men who gathered to watch
as the stakes were hammered down into the holes.
“What has your southron god to do with snow?” demanded Artos
Flint. His black beard was crusted with ice. “This is the wroth of the
old gods come upon us. It is them we should appease.”
“Aye,” said Big Bucket Wull. “Red Rahloo means nothing here.
You will only make the old gods angry. They are watching from
their island.”
The crofter’s village stood between two lakes, the larger dotted
with small wooded islands that punched up through the ice like the
frozen sts of some drowned giant. From one such island rose a
weirwood gnarled and ancient, its bole and branches white as the
surrounding snows. Eight days ago Asha had walked out with Aly
Mormont to have a closer look at its slitted red eyes and bloody
mouth. It is only sap, she’d told herself, the red sap that ows inside
these weirwoods. But her eyes were unconvinced; seeing was
believing, and what they saw was frozen blood.
“You northmen brought these snows upon us,” insisted Corliss
Penny. “You and your demon trees. R’hllor will save us.”
“R’hllor will doom us,” said Artos Flint.
A pox on both your gods, thought Asha Greyjoy.
Ser Godry the Giantslayer surveyed the stakes, shoving one to
make certain it was rmly placed. “Good. Good. They will serve.
Ser Clayton, bring forth the sacri ce.”
Ser Clayton Suggs was Godry’s strong right hand. Or should it be
his withered arm? Asha did not like Ser Clayton. Where Farring
seemed erce in his devotion to his red god, Suggs was simply
cruel. She had seen him at the night res, watching, his lips parted
and his eyes avid. It is not the god he loves, it is the ames, she
concluded. When she asked Ser Justin if Suggs had always been that
way, he grimaced. “On Dragonstone he would gamble with the
torturers and lend them a hand in the questioning of prisoners,
especially if the prisoner were a young woman.”

Asha was not surprised. Suggs would take a special delight in
burning her, she did not doubt. Unless the storms let up.
They had been three days from Winterfell for nineteen days. One
hundred leagues from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell. Three hundred
miles as the raven ies. But none of them were ravens, and the storm
was unrelenting. Each morning Asha awoke hoping she might see
the sun, only to face another day of snow. The storm had buried
every hut and hovel beneath a mound of dirty snow, and the drifts
would soon be deep enough to engulf the longhall too.
And there was no food, beyond their failing horses, sh taken
from the lakes (fewer every day), and whatever meagre sustenance
their foragers could nd in these cold, dead woods. With the king’s
knights and lords claiming the lion’s share of the horsemeat, little
and less remained for the common men. Small wonder then that
they had started eating their own dead.
Asha had been as horri ed as the rest when the She-Bear told her
that four Peasebury men had been found butchering one of the late
Lord Fell’s, carving chunks of esh from his thighs and buttocks as
one of his forearms turned upon a spit, but she could not pretend to
be surprised. The four were not the rst to taste human esh during
this grim march, she would wager—only the rst to be discovered.
Peasebury’s four would pay for their feast with their lives, by the
king’s decree … and by burning end the storm, the queen’s men
claimed. Asha Greyjoy put no faith in their red god, yet she prayed
they had the right of that. If not, there would be other pyres, and
Ser Clayton Suggs might get his heart’s desire.
The four esh-eaters were naked when Ser Clayton drove them
out, their wrists lashed behind their backs with leathern cords. The
youngest of them wept as he stumbled through the snow. Two
others walked like men already dead, eyes xed upon the ground.
Asha was surprised to see how ordinary they appeared. Not
monsters, she realized, only men.
The oldest of the four had been their serjeant. He alone remained
de ant, spitting venom at the queen’s men as they prodded him
along with their spears. “Fuck you all, and fuck your red god too,”
he said. “You hear me, Farring? Giantslayer? I laughed when your

fucking cousin died, Godry. We should have eaten him too, he
smelled so good when they roasted him. I bet the boy was nice and
tender. Juicy.” A blow from a spear butt drove the man to his knees
but did not silence him. When he rose he spat out a mouthful of
blood and broken teeth and went right on. “The cock’s the choicest
part, all crisped up on the spit. A fat little sausage.” Even as they
wrapped the chains around him, he raved on. “Corliss Penny, come
over here. What sort of name is Penny? Is that how much your
mother charged? And you, Suggs, you bleeding bastard, you—”
Ser Clayton never said a word. One quick slash opened the
serjeant’s throat, sending a wash of blood down his chest.
The weeping man wept harder, his body shaking with each sob.
He was so thin that Asha could count every rib. “No,” he begged,
“please, he was dead, he was dead and we was hungry, please …”
“The serjeant was the clever one,” Asha said to Aly Mormont. “He
goaded Suggs into killing him.” She wondered if the same trick
might work twice, should her own turn come.
The four victims were chained up back-to-back, two to a stake.
There they hung, three live men and one dead one, as the Lord of
Light’s devout stacked split logs and broken branches under their
feet, then doused the piles with lamp oil. They had to be swift about
it. The snow was falling heavily, as ever, and the wood would soon
be soaked through.
“Where is the king?” asked Ser Corliss Penny.
Four days ago, one of the king’s own squires had succumbed to
cold and hunger, a boy named Bryen Farring who’d been kin to Ser
Godry. Stannis Baratheon stood grim-faced by the funeral pyre as
the lad’s body was consigned to the ames. Afterward the king had
retreated to his watchtower. He had not emerged since … though
from time to time His Grace was glimpsed upon the tower roof,
outlined against the beacon re that burned there night and day.
Talking to the red god, some said. Calling out for Lady Melisandre,
insisted others. Either way, it seemed to Asha Greyjoy, the king was
lost and crying out for help.
“Canty, go nd the king and tell him all is ready,” Ser Godry said
to the nearest man-at-arms.

“The king is here.” The voice was Richard Horpe’s.
Over his armor of plate and mail Ser Richard wore his quilted
doublet, blazoned with three death’s-head moths on a eld of ash
and bone. King Stannis walked beside him. Behind them, struggling
to keep pace, Arnolf Karstark came hobbling, leaning on his
blackthorn cane. Lord Arnolf had found them eight days past. The
northman had brought a son, three grandsons, four hundred spears,
two score archers, a dozen mounted lances, a maester, and a cage of
ravens … but only enough provisions to sustain his own.
Karstark was no lord in truth, Asha had been given to understand,
only castellan of Karhold for as long as the true lord remained a
captive of the Lannisters. Gaunt and bent and crooked, with a left
shoulder half a foot higher than his right, he had a scrawny neck,
squinty grey eyes, and yellow teeth. A few white hairs were all that
separated him from baldness; his forked beard was equal parts
white and grey, but always ragged. Asha thought there was
something sour about his smiles. Yet if the talk was true, it was
Karstark who would hold Winterfell should they take it. Somewhere
in the distant past House Karstark had sprouted from House Stark,
and Lord Arnolf had been the rst of Eddard Stark’s bannermen to
declare for Stannis.
So far as Asha knew, the gods of the Karstarks were the old gods
of the north, gods they shared with the Wulls, the Norreys, the
Flints, and the other hill clans. She wondered if Lord Arnolf had
come to view the burning at the king’s behest, that he might
witness the power of the red god for himself.
At the sight of Stannis, two of the men bound to the stakes began
to plead for mercy. The king listened in silence, his jaw clenched.
Then he said to Godry Farring, “You may begin.”
The Giantslayer raised his arms. “Lord of Light, hear us.”
“Lord of Light, defend us,” the queen’s men chanted, “for the night is
dark and full of terrors.”
Ser Godry raised his head toward the darkening sky. “We thank
you for the sun that warms us and pray that you will return it to us, Oh
lord, that it might light our path to your enemies.” Snow akes melted
on his face. “We thank you for the stars that watch over us by night,

and pray that you will rip away this veil that hides them, so we might
glory in their sight once more.”
“Lord of Light, protect us,” the queen’s men prayed, “and keep this
savage dark at bay.”
Ser Corliss Penny stepped forward, clutching the torch with both
hands. He swung it about his head in a circle, fanning the ames.
One of the captives began to whimper.
“R’hllor,” Ser Godry sang, “we give you now four evil men. With glad
hearts and true, we give them to your cleansing res, that the darkness in
their souls might be burned away. Let their vile esh be seared and
blackened, that their spirits might rise free and pure to ascend into the
light. Accept their blood, Oh lord, and melt the icy chains that bind your
servants. Hear their pain, and grant strength to our swords that we might
shed the blood of your enemies. Accept this sacri ce, and show us the
way to Winterfell, that we might vanquish the unbelievers.”
“Lord of Light, accept this sacri ce,” a hundred voices echoed. Ser
Corliss lit the rst pyre with the torch, then thrust it into the wood
at the base of the second. A few wisps of smoke began to rise. The
captives began to cough. The rst ames appeared, shy as maidens,
darting and dancing from log to leg. In moments both the stakes
were engulfed in re.
“He was dead,” the weeping boy screamed, as the ames licked up
his legs. “We found him dead … please … we was hungry …” The
res reached his balls. As the hair around his cock began to burn,
his pleading dissolved into one long wordless shriek.
Asha Greyjoy could taste the bile in the back of her throat. On the
Iron Islands, she had seen priests of her own people slit the throats
of thralls and give their bodies to the sea to honor the Drowned
God. Brutal as that was, this was worse.
Close your eyes, she told herself. Close your ears. Turn away. You
do not need to see this. The queen’s men were singing some paean of
praise for red R’hllor, but she could not hear the words above the
shrieks. The heat of the ames beat against her face, but even so
she shivered. The air grew thick with smoke and the stink of burnt
esh, and one of the bodies still twitched against the red-hot chains
that bound him to the stake.

After a time the screaming stopped.
Wordless, King Stannis walked away, back to the solitude of his
watchtower. Back to his beacon re, Asha knew, to search the ames
for answers. Arnolf Karstark made to hobble after him, but Ser
Richard Horpe took him by the arm and turned him toward the
longhall. The watchers began to drift away, each to his own re and
whatever meagre supper he might nd.
Clayton Suggs sidled up beside her. “Did the iron cunt enjoy the
show?” His breath stank of ale and onions. He has pig eyes, Asha
thought. That was tting; his shield and surcoat showed a pig with
wings. Suggs pressed his face so close to hers that she could count
the blackheads on his nose and said, “The crowd will be even bigger
when it’s you squirming on a stake.”
He was not wrong. The wolves did not love her; she was ironborn
and must answer for the crimes of her people, for Moat Cailin and
Deepwood Motte and Torrhen’s Square, for centuries of reaving
along the stony shore, for all Theon did at Winterfell.
“Unhand me, ser.” Every time Suggs spoke to her, it left her
yearning for her axes. Asha was as good a nger dancer as any man
on the isles and had ten ngers to prove it. If only I could dance with
this one. Some men had faces that cried out for a beard. Ser
Clayton’s face cried out for an axe between the eyes. But she was
axeless here, so the best that she could do was try to wrench away.
That just made Ser Clayton grasp her all the tighter, gloved ngers
digging into her arm like iron claws.
“My lady asked you to let her go,” said Aly Mormont. “You
would do well to listen, ser. Lady Asha is not for burning.”
“She will be,” Suggs insisted. “We have harbored this demon
worshiper amongst us too long.” He released his grip on Asha’s arm
all the same. One did not provoke the She-Bear needlessly.
That was the moment Justin Massey chose to appear. “The king
has other plans for his prize captive,” he said, with his easy smile.
His cheeks were red from the cold.
“The king? Or you?” Suggs snorted his contempt. “Scheme all you
like, Massey. She’ll still be for the re, her and her king’s blood.

There’s power in king’s blood, the red woman used to say. Power to
please our lord.”
“Let R’hllor be content with the four we just sent him.”
“Four baseborn churls. A beggar’s o ering. Scum like that will
never stop the snow. She might.”
The She-Bear spoke. “And if you burn her and the snows still fall,
what then? Who will you burn next? Me?”
Asha could hold her tongue no longer. “Why not Ser Clayton?
Perhaps R’hllor would like one of his own. A faithful man who will
sing his praises as the ames lick at his cock.”
Ser Justin laughed. Suggs was less amused. “Enjoy your giggle,
Massey. If the snow keeps falling, we will see who is laughing
then.” He glanced at the dead men on their stakes, smiled, and went
o to join Ser Godry and the other queen’s men.
“My champion,” Asha said to Justin Massey. He deserved that
much, whatever his motives. “Thank you for the rescue, ser.”
“It will not win you friends amongst the queen’s men,” said the
She-Bear. “Have you lost your faith in red R’hllor?”
“I have lost faith in more than that,” Massey said, his breath a
pale mist in the air, “but I still believe in supper. Will you join me,
my ladies?”
Aly Mormont shook her head. “I have no appetite.”
“Nor I. But you had best choke down some horsemeat all the
same, or you may soon wish you had. We had eight hundred horses
when we marched from Deepwood Motte. Last night the count was
sixty-four.”
That did not shock her. Almost all of their big destriers had failed,
including Massey’s own. Most of their palfreys were gone as well.
Even the garrons of the northmen were faltering for want of fodder.
But what did they need horses for? Stannis was no longer marching
anywhere. The sun and moon and stars had been gone so long that
Asha was starting to wonder whether she had dreamed them. “I will
eat.”
Aly shook her head. “Not me.”
“Let me look after Lady Asha, then,” Ser Justin told her. “You
have my word, I shall not permit her to escape.”

The She-Bear gave her grudging assent, deaf to the japery in his
tone. They parted there, Aly to her tent, she and Justin Massey to
the longhall. It was not far, but the drifts were deep, the wind was
gusty, and Asha’s feet were blocks of ice. Her ankle stabbed at her
with every step.
Small and mean as it was, the longhall was the largest building in
the village, so the lords and captains had taken it for themselves,
whilst Stannis settled into the stone watchtower by the lakeshore. A
pair of guardsmen anked its door, leaning on tall spears. One lifted
the greased door ap for Massey, and Ser Justin escorted Asha
through to the blessed warmth within.
Benches and trestle tables ran along either side of the hall, with
room for fty men … though twice that number had squeezed
themselves inside. A re trench had been dug down the middle of
the earthen oor, with a row of smokeholes in the roof above. The
wolves had taken to sitting on one side of the trench, the knights
and southron lords upon the other.
The southerners looked a sorry lot, Asha thought—gaunt and
hollow-cheeked, some pale and sick, others with red and windscoured faces. By contrast the northmen seemed hale and healthy,
big ruddy men with beards as thick as bushes, clad in fur and iron.
They might be cold and hungry too, but the marching had gone
easier for them, with their garrons and their bear-paws.
Asha peeled o her fur mittens, wincing as she exed her ngers.
Pain shot up her legs as her half-frozen feet began to thaw in the
warmth. The crofters had left behind a good supply of peat when
they ed, so the air was hazy with smoke and the rich, earthy smell
of burning turf. She hung her cloak on a peg inside the door after
shaking o the snow that clung to it.
Ser Justin found them places on the bench and fetched supper for
the both of them—ale and chunks of horsemeat, charred black
outside and red within. Asha took a sip of ale and fell upon the
horse esh. The portion was smaller than the last she’d tasted, but
her belly still rumbled at the smell of it. “My thanks, ser,” she said,
as blood and grease ran down her chin.

“Justin. I insist.” Massey cut his own meat into chunks and
stabbed one with his dagger.
Down the table, Will Foxglove was telling the men around him
that Stannis would resume his march on Winterfell three days
hence. He’d had it from the lips of one of the grooms who tended
the king’s horses. “His Grace has seen victory in his res,” Foxglove
said, “a victory that will be sung of for a thousand years in lord’s
castle and peasant’s hut alike.”
Justin Massey looked up from his horsemeat. “The cold count last
night reached eighty.” He pulled a piece of gristle from his teeth
and icked it to the nearest dog. “If we march, we will die by the
hundreds.”
“We will die by the thousands if we stay here,” said Ser Humfrey
Clifton. “Press on or die, I say.”
“Press on and die, I answer. And if we reach Winterfell, what
then? How do we take it? Half our men are so weak they can scarce
put one foot before another. Will you set them to scaling walls?
Building siege towers?”
“We should remain here until the weather breaks,” said Ser
Ormund Wylde, a cadaverous old knight whose nature gave the lie
to his name. Asha had heard rumors that some of the men-at-arms
were wagering on which of the great knights and lords would be
the next to die. Ser Ormund had emerged as a clear favorite. And
how much coin was placed on me, I wonder? Asha thought. Perhaps
there is still time to put down a wager. “Here at least we have some
shelter,” Wylde was insisting, “and there are sh in the lakes.”
“Too few sh and too many shermen,” Lord Peasebury said
gloomily. He had good reason for gloom; it was his men Ser Godry
had just burned, and there were some in this very hall who had
been heard to say that Peasebury himself surely knew what they
were doing and might even have shared in their feasts.
“He’s not wrong,” grumbled Ned Woods, one of the scouts from
Deepwood. Noseless Ned, he was called; frostbite had claimed the
tip of his nose two winters past. Woods knew the wolfwood as well
as any man alive. Even the king’s proudest lords had learned to
listen when he spoke. “I know them lakes. You been on them like

maggots on a corpse, hundreds o’ you. Cut so many holes in the ice
it’s a bloody wonder more haven’t fallen through. Out by the island,
there’s places look like a cheese the rats been at.” He shook his
head. “Lakes are done. You shed them out.”
“All the more reason to march,” insisted Humfrey Clifton. “If
death is our fate, let us die with swords in hand.”
It was the same argument as last night and the night before. Press
on and die, stay here and die, fall back and die.
“Feel free to perish as you wish, Humfrey,” said Justin Massey.
“Myself, I would sooner live to see another spring.”
“Some might call that craven,” Lord Peasebury replied.
“Better a craven than a cannibal.”
Peasebury’s face twisted in sudden fury. “You—”
“Death is part of war, Justin.” Ser Richard Horpe stood inside the
door, his dark hair damp with melting snow. “Those who march
with us will have a share in all the plunder we take from Bolton and
his bastard, and a greater share of glory undying. Those too weak to
march must fend for themselves. But you have my word, we shall
send food once we have taken Winterfell.”
“You will not take Winterfell!”
“Aye, we will,” came a cackle from the high table, where Arnolf
Karstark sat with his son Arthor and three grandsons. Lord Arnolf
shoved himself up, a vulture rising from its prey. One spotted hand
clutched at his son’s shoulder for support. “We’ll take it for the Ned
and for his daughter. Aye, and for the Young Wolf too, him who
was so cruelly slaughtered. Me and mine will show the way, if need
be. I’ve said as much to His Good Grace the king. March, I said, and
before the moon can turn, we’ll all be bathing in the blood of Freys
and Boltons.”
Men began to stamp their feet, to pound their sts against the
tabletop. Almost all were northmen, Asha noted. Across the re
trench, the southron lords sat silent on the benches.
Justin Massey waited until the uproar had died away. Then he
said, “Your courage is admirable, Lord Karstark, but courage will
not breach the walls of Winterfell. How do you mean to take the
castle, pray? With snowballs?”

One of Lord Arnolf’s grandsons gave answer. “We’ll cut down
trees for rams to break the gates.”
“And die.”
Another grandson made himself heard. “We’ll make ladders, scale
the walls.”
“And die.”
Up spoke Arthor Karstark, Lord Arnolf’s younger son. “We’ll raise
siege towers.”
“And die, and die, and die.” Ser Justin rolled his eyes. “Gods be
good, are all you Karstarks mad?”
“Gods?” said Richard Horpe. “You forget yourself, Justin. We
have but one god here. Speak not of demons in this company. Only
the Lord of Light can save us now. Wouldn’t you agree?” He put his
hand upon the hilt of his sword, as if for emphasis, but his eyes
never left the face of Justin Massey.
Beneath that gaze, Ser Justin wilted. “The Lord of Light, aye. My
faith runs as deep as your own, Richard, you know that.”
“It is your courage I question, Justin, not your faith. You have
preached defeat every step of the way since we rode forth from
Deepwood Motte. It makes me wonder whose side you are on.”
A ush crept up Massey’s neck. “I will not stay here to be
insulted.” He wrenched his damp cloak down from the wall so hard
that Asha heard it tear, then stalked past Horpe and through the
door. A blast of cold air blew through the hall, raising ashes from
the re trench and fanning its ames a little brighter.
Broken quick as that, thought Asha. My champion is made of suet.
Even so, Ser Justin was one of the few who might object should the
queen’s men try to burn her. So she rose to her feet, donned her
own cloak, and followed him out into the blizzard.
She was lost before she had gone ten yards. Asha could see the
beacon re burning atop the watchtower, a faint orange glow
oating in the air. Elsewise the village was gone. She was alone in a
white world of snow and silence, plowing through snowdrifts as
high as her thighs. “Justin?” she called. There was no answer.
Somewhere to her left she heard a horse whicker. The poor thing

sounds frightened. Perhaps he knows that he’s to be tomorrow’s supper.
Asha pulled her cloak about her tightly.
She blundered back onto the village green unknowing. The
pinewood stakes still stood, charred and scorched but not burned
through. The chains about the dead had cooled by now, she saw, but
still held the corpses fast in their iron embrace. A raven was
perched atop one, pulling at the tatters of burned esh that clung to
its blackened skull. The blowing snow had covered the ashes at the
base of the pyre and crept up the dead man’s leg as far as his ankle.
The old gods mean to bury him, Asha thought. This was no work of
theirs.
“Take a good long gander, cunt,” the deep voice of Clayton Suggs
said, behind her. “You’ll look just as pretty once you’re roasted. Tell
me, can squids scream?”
God of my fathers, if you can hear me in your watery halls beneath
the waves, grant me just one small throwing axe. The Drowned God did
not answer. He seldom did. That was the trouble with gods. “Have
you seen Ser Justin?”
“That prancing fool? What do you want with him, cunt? If it’s a
fuck you need, I’m more a man than Massey.”
Cunt again? It was odd how men like Suggs used that word to
demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.
And Suggs was worse than Middle Liddle. When he says the word, he
means it. “Your king gelds men for rape,” she reminded him.
Ser Clayton chuckled. “The king’s half-blind from staring into
res. But have no fear, cunt, I’ll not rape you. I’d need to kill you
after, and I’d sooner see you burn.”
There’s that horse again. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“A horse. No, horses. More than one.” She turned her head,
listening. The snow did queer things to sound. It was hard to know
which direction it had come from.
“Is this some squid game? I don’t hear—” Suggs scowled. “Bloody
hell. Riders.” He fumbled at his sword belt, his hands clumsy in
their fur-and-leather gloves, and nally succeeded in ripping his
longsword from its scabbard.

By then the riders were upon them.
They emerged from the storm like a troop of wraiths, big men on
small horses, made even bigger by the bulky furs they wore. Swords
rode on their hips, singing their soft steel song as they rattled in
their scabbards. Asha saw a battle-axe strapped to one man’s saddle,
a warhammer on another’s back. Shields they bore as well, but so
obscured by snow and ice that the arms upon them could not be
read. For all her layers of wool and fur and boiled leather, Asha felt
naked standing there. A horn, she thought, I need a horn to rouse the
camp.
“Run, you stupid cunt,” Ser Clayton shouted. “Run warn the king.
Lord Bolton is upon us.” A brute he might have been, but Suggs did
not want for courage. Sword in hand, he strode through the snow,
putting himself between the riders and the king’s tower, its beacon
glimmering behind him like the orange eye of some strange god.
“Who goes there? Halt! Halt!”
The lead rider reined up before him. Behind were others, perhaps
as many as a score. Asha had no time to count them. Hundreds more
might be out there in the storm, coming hard upon their heels.
Roose Bolton’s entire host might be descending on them, hidden by
darkness and swirling snow. These, though …
They are too many to be scouts and too few to make a vanguard. And
two were all in black. Night’s Watch, she realized suddenly. “Who
are you?” she called.
“Friends,” a half-familiar voice replied. “We looked for you at
Winterfell, but found only Crowfood Umber beating drums and
blowing horns. It took some time to nd you.” The rider vaulted
from his saddle, pulled back his hood, and bowed. So thick was his
beard, and so crusted with ice, that for a moment Asha did not
know him. Then it came. “Tris?” she said.
“My lady.” Tristifer Botley took a knee. “The Maid is here as
well. Roggon, Grimtongue, Fingers, Rook … six of us, all those t
enough to ride. Cromm died of his wounds.”
“What is this?” Ser Clayton Suggs demanded. “You’re one of hers?
How did you get loose of Deepwood’s dungeons?”

Tris rose and brushed the snow from his knees. “Sybelle Glover
was o ered a handsome ransom for our freedom and chose to
accept it in the name of the king.”
“What ransom? Who would pay good coin for sea scum?”
“I did, ser.” The speaker came forward on his garron. He was
very tall, very thin, so long-legged that it was a wonder his feet did
not drag along the ground. “I had need of a strong escort to see me
safely to the king, and Lady Sybelle had need of fewer mouths to
feed.” A scarf concealed the tall man’s features, but atop his head
was perched the queerest hat Asha had seen since the last time she
had sailed to Tyrosh, a brimless tower of some soft fabric, like three
cylinders stacked one atop the other. “I was given to understand
that I might nd King Stannis here. It is most urgent that I speak
with him at once.”
“And who in seven stinking hells are you?”
The tall man slid gracefully from his garron, removed his peculiar
hat, and bowed. “I have the honor to be Tycho Nestoris, a humble
servant of the Iron Bank of Braavos.”
Of all the strange things that might have come riding out of the
night, the last one Asha Greyjoy would ever have expected was a
Braavosi banker. It was too absurd. She had to laugh. “King Stannis
has taken the watchtower for his seat. Ser Clayton will be pleased
to show you to him, I’m sure.”
“That would be most kind. Time is of the essence.” The banker
studied her with shrewd dark eyes. “You are the Lady Asha of
House Greyjoy, unless I am mistaken.”
“I am Asha of House Greyjoy, aye. Opinions di er on whether I’m
a lady.”
The Braavosi smiled. “We’ve brought a gift for you.” He
beckoned to the men behind him. “We had expected to nd the king
at Winterfell. This same blizzard has engulfed the castle, alas.
Beneath its walls we found Mors Umber with a troop of raw green
boys, waiting for the king’s coming. He gave us this.”
A girl and an old man, thought Asha, as the two were dumped
rudely in the snow before her. The girl was shivering violently,
even in her furs. If she had not been so frightened, she might even

have been pretty, though the tip of her nose was black with
frostbite. The old man … no one would ever think him comely. She
had seen scarecrows with more esh. His face was a skull with skin,
his hair bone-white and lthy. And he stank. Just the sight of him
lled Asha with revulsion.
He raised his eyes. “Sister. See. This time I knew you.”
Asha’s heart skipped a beat. “Theon?”
His lips skinned back in what might have been a grin. Half his
teeth were gone, and half of those still left him were broken and
splintered. “Theon,” he repeated. “My name is Theon. You have to
know your name.”

VICTARION

T

he sea was black and the moon was silver as the Iron Fleet
swept down on the prey.
They sighted her in the narrows between the Isle of Cedars and
the rugged hills of the Astapori hinterlands, just as the black priest
Moqorro had said they would. “Ghiscari,” Longwater Pyke shouted
down from the crow’s nest. Victarion Greyjoy watched her sail grow
larger from the forecastle. Soon he could make out her oars rising
and falling, and the long white wake behind her shining in the
moonlight, like a scar across the sea.
Not a true warship, Victarion realized. A trading galley, and a big
one. She would make a ne prize. He signaled to his captains to
give chase. They would board this ship and take her.
The captain of the galley had realized his peril by then. He
changed course for the west, making for the Isle of Cedars, perhaps
hoping to shelter in some hidden cove or run his pursuers onto the
jagged rocks along the island’s northeast coast. His galley was
heavy laden, though, and the ironborn had the wind. Grief and Iron
Victory cut across the quarry’s course, whilst swift Sparrowhawk and
agile Fingerdancer swept behind her. Even then the Ghiscari captain
did not strike his banners. By the time Lamentation came alongside
the prey, raking her larboard side and splintering her oars, both
ships were so close to the haunted ruins of Ghozai that they could
hear the monkeys chattering as the rst dawn light washed over the
city’s broken pyramids.
Their prize was named Ghiscari Dawn, the galley’s captain said
when he was delivered to Victarion in chains. She was out of New

Ghis and returning there by way of Yunkai after trading at
Meereen. The man spoke no decent tongue but only a guttural
Ghiscari, full of growls and hisses, as ugly a language as Victarion
Greyjoy had ever heard. Moqorro translated the captain’s words
into the Common Tongue of Westeros. The war for Meereen was
won, the captain claimed; the dragon queen was dead, and a
Ghiscari by the name of Hizdak ruled the city now.
Victarion had his tongue torn out for lying. Daenerys Targaryen
was not dead, Moqorro assured him; his red god R’hllor had shown
him the queen’s face in his sacred res. The captain could not abide
lies, so he had the Ghiscari captain bound hand and foot and thrown
overboard, a sacri ce to the Drowned God. “Your red god will have
his due,” he promised Moqorro, “but the seas are ruled by the
Drowned God.”
“There are no gods but R’hllor and the Other, whose name may
not be said.” The sorcerer priest was garbed in somber black, but
for a hint of golden thread at collar, cu s, and hem. There was no
red cloth aboard the Iron Victory, but it was not meet that Moqorro
go about in the salt-stained rags he had been wearing when the Vole
shed him from the sea, so Victarion had commanded Tom
Tidewood to sew new robes for him from whatever was at hand,
and had even donated some of his own tunics to the purpose. Of
black and gold those were, for the arms of House Greyjoy showed a
golden kraken on a black eld, and the banners and sails of their
ships displayed the same. The crimson-and-scarlet robes of the red
priests were alien to the ironborn, but Victarion had hoped his men
might accept Moqorro more easily once clad in Greyjoy colors.
He hoped in vain. Clad in black from head to heel, with a mask of
red-and-orange ames tattooed across his face, the priest appeared
more sinister than ever. The crew shunned him when he walked the
deck, and men would spit if his shadow chanced to fall upon them.
Even the Vole, who had shed the red priest from the sea, had
urged Victarion to give him to the Drowned God.
But Moqorro knew these strange shores in ways the ironborn did
not, and secrets of the dragonkind as well. The Crow’s Eye keeps
wizards, why shouldn’t I? His black sorcerer was more puissant than

all of Euron’s three, even if you threw them in a pot and boiled
them down to one. The Damphair might disapprove, but Aeron and
his pieties were far away.
So Victarion closed his burned hand into a mighty st, and said,
“Ghiscari Dawn is no t name for a ship of the Iron Fleet. For you,
wizard, I shall rename her Red God’s Wroth.”
His wizard bowed his head. “As the captain says.” And the ships
of the Iron Fleet numbered four-and- fty once again.
The next day a sudden squall descended on them. Moqorro had
predicted that as well. When the rains moved on, three ships were
found to have vanished. Victarion had no way to know whether
they had foundered, run aground, or been blown o course. “They
know where we are going,” he told his crew. “If they are still a oat,
we will meet again.” The iron captain had no time to wait for
laggards. Not with his bride encircled by her enemies. The most
beautiful woman in the world has urgent need of my axe.
Besides, Moqorro assured him that the three ships were not lost.
Each night, the sorcerer priest would kindle a re on the forecastle
of the Iron Victory and stalk around the ames, chanting prayers.
The relight made his black skin shine like polished onyx, and
sometimes Victarion could swear that the ames tattooed on his
face were dancing too, twisting and bending, melting into one
another, their colors changing with every turn of the priest’s head.
“The black priest is calling demons down on us,” one oarsman
was heard to say. When that was reported to Victarion, he had the
man scourged until his back was blood from shoulders to buttocks.
So when Moqorro said, “Your lost lambs will return to the ock o
the isle called Yaros,” the captain said, “Pray that they do, priest.
Or you may be the next to taste the whip.”
The sea was blue and green and the sun blazing down from an
empty blue sky when the Iron Fleet took its second prize, in the
waters north and west of Astapor.
This time it was a Myrish cog named Dove, on her way to Yunkai
by way of New Ghis with a cargo of carpets, sweet green wines, and
Myrish lace. Her captain owned a Myrish eye that made far-o
things look close—two glass lenses in a series of brass tubes,

cunningly wrought so that each section slid into the next, until the
eye was no longer than a dirk. Victarion claimed that treasure for
himself. The cog he renamed Shrike. Her crew would be kept for
ransom, the captain decreed. They were neither slaves nor slavers,
but free Myrmen and seasoned sailors. Such men were worth good
coin. Sailing out of Myr, the Dove brought them no fresh news of
Meereen or Daenerys, only stale reports of Dothraki horsemen
along the Rhoyne, the Golden Company upon the march, and other
things Victarion already knew.
“What do you see?” the captain asked his black priest that night,
as Moqorro stood before his night re. “What awaits us on the
morrow? More rain?” It smelled like rain to him.
“Grey skies and strong winds,” Moqorro said. “No rain. Behind
come the tigers. Ahead awaits your dragon.”
Your dragon. Victarion liked the sound of that. “Tell me
something that I do not know, priest.”
“The captain commands, and I obey,” said Moqorro. The crew had
taken to calling him the Black Flame, a name fastened on him by
Ste ar Stammerer, who could not say “Moqorro.” By any name, the
priest had powers. “The coastline here runs west to east,” he told
Victarion. “Where it turns north, you will come on two more hares.
Swift ones, with many legs.”
And so it came to pass. This time the prey proved to be a pair of
galleys, long and sleek and fast. Ralf the Limper was the rst to
sight them, but they soon outdistanced Woe and Forlorn Hope, so
Victarion sent Iron Wing, Sparrowhawk, and Kraken’s Kiss to run them
down. He had no swifter ships than those three. The pursuit lasted
the best part of the day, but in the end both galleys were boarded
and taken, after brief but brutal ghts. They had been running
empty, Victarion learned, making for New Ghis to load supplies and
weapons for the Ghiscari legions encamped before Meereen … and
to bring fresh legionaries to the war, to replace all the men who’d
died. “Men slain in battle?” asked Victarion. The crews of the
galleys denied it; the deaths were from a bloody ux. The pale
mare, they called it. And like the captain of the Ghiscari Dawn, the

captains of the galleys repeated the lie that Daenerys Targaryen was
dead.
“Give her a kiss for me in whatever hell you nd her,” Victarion
said. He called for his axe and took their heads o there and then.
Afterward he put their crews to death as well, saving only the
slaves chained to the oars. He broke their chains himself and told
them they were now free men and would have the privilege of
rowing for the Iron Fleet, an honor that every boy in the Iron
Islands dreamed of growing up. “The dragon queen frees slaves and
so do I,” he proclaimed.
The galleys he renamed Ghost and Shade. “For I mean them to
return and haunt these Yunkishmen,” he told the dusky woman that
night after he had taken his pleasure of her. They were close now,
and growing closer every day. “We will fall upon them like a
thunderbolt,” he said, as he squeezed the woman’s breast. He
wondered if this was how his brother Aeron felt when the Drowned
God spoke to him. He could almost hear the god’s voice welling up
from the depths of the sea. You shall serve me well, my captain, the
waves seemed to say. It was for this I made you.
But he would feed the red god too, Moqorro’s re god. The arm
the priest had healed was hideous to look upon, pork crackling from
elbow to ngertips. Sometimes when Victarion closed his hand the
skin would split and smoke, yet the arm was stronger than it had
ever been. “Two gods are with me now,” he told the dusky woman.
“No foe can stand before two gods.” Then he rolled her on her back
and took her once again.
When the cli s of Yaros appeared o their larboard bows, he
found his three lost ships waiting for him, just as Moqorro had
promised. Victarion gave the priest a golden torque as a reward.
Now he had a choice to make: should he risk the straits, or take
the Iron Fleet around the island? The memory of Fair Isle still
rankled in the iron captain’s memory. Stannis Baratheon had
descended on the Iron Fleet from both north and south whilst they
were trapped in the channel between the island and the mainland,
dealing Victarion his most crushing defeat. But sailing around Yaros
would cost him precious days. With Yunkai so near, shipping in the

straits was like to be heavy, but he did not expect to encounter
Yunkish warships until they were closer to Meereen.
What would the Crow’s Eye do? He brooded on that for a time,
then signaled to his captains. “We sail the straits.”
Three more prizes were taken before Yaros dwindled o their
sterns. A fat galleas fell to the Vole and Grief, and a trading galley
to Manfryd Merlyn of Kite. Their holds were packed with trade
goods, wines and silks and spices, rare woods and rarer scents, but
the ships themselves were the true prize. Later that same day, a
shing ketch was taken by Seven Skulls and Thrall’s Bane. She was a
small, slow, dingy thing, hardly worth the e ort of boarding.
Victarion was displeased to hear that it had taken two of his own
ships to bring the shermen to heel. Yet it was from their lips that
he heard of the black dragon’s return. “The silver queen is gone,”
the ketch’s master told him. “She ew away upon her dragon,
beyond the Dothraki sea.”
“Where is this Dothraki sea?” he demanded. “I will sail the Iron
Fleet across it and nd the queen wherever she may be.”
The sherman laughed aloud. “That would be a sight worth
seeing. The Dothraki sea is made of grass, fool.”
He should not have said that. Victarion took him around the
throat with his burned hand and lifted him bodily into the air.
Slamming him back against the mast, he squeezed till the
Yunkishman’s face turned as black as the ngers digging into his
esh. The man kicked and writhed for a while, trying fruitlessly to
pry loose the captain’s grip. “No man calls Victarion Greyjoy a fool
and lives to boast of it.” When he opened his hand, the man’s limp
body opped to the deck. Longwater Pyke and Tom Tidewood
chucked it over the rail, another o ering to the Drowned God.
“Your Drowned God is a demon,” the black priest Moqorro said
afterward. “He is no more than a thrall of the Other, the dark god
whose name must not be spoken.”
“Take care, priest,” Victarion warned him. “There are godly men
aboard this ship who would tear out your tongue for speaking such
blasphemies. Your red god will have his due, I swear it. My word is
iron. Ask any of my men.”

The black priest bowed his head. “There is no need. The Lord of
Light has shown me your worth, lord Captain. Every night in my
res I glimpse the glory that awaits you.”
Those words pleased Victarion Greyjoy mightily, as he told the
dusky woman that night. “My brother Balon was a great man,” he
said, “but I shall do what he could not. The Iron Islands shall be free
again, and the Old Way will return. Even Dagon could not do that.”
Almost a hundred years had passed since Dagon Greyjoy sat the
Seastone Chair, but the ironborn still told tales of his raids and
battles. In Dagon’s day a weak king sat the Iron Throne, his rheumy
eyes xed across the narrow sea where bastards and exiles plotted
rebellion. So forth from Pyke Lord Dagon sailed, to make the Sunset
Sea his own. “He bearded the lion in his den and tied the direwolf’s
tail in knots, but even Dagon could not defeat the dragons. But I
shall make the dragon queen mine own. She will share my bed and
bear me many mighty sons.”
That night the ships of the Iron Fleet numbered sixty.
Strange sails grew more common north of Yaros. They were very
near to Yunkai, and the coast between the Yellow City and Meereen
would be teeming with merchantmen and supply ships coming and
going, so Victarion took the Iron Fleet out into the deeper waters,
beyond the sight of land. Even there they would encounter other
vessels. “Let none escape to give warning to our foes,” the iron
captain commanded. None did.
The sea was green and the sky was grey the morning Grief and
Warrior Wench and Victarion’s own Iron Victory captured the slaver
galley from Yunkai in the waters due north of the Yellow City. In
her holds were twenty perfumed boys and four score girls destined
for the pleasure houses of Lys. Her crew never thought to nd peril
so close to their home waters, and the ironborn had little trouble
taking her. She was named the Willing Maiden.
Victarion put the slavers to the sword, then sent his men below to
unchain the rowers. “You row for me now. Row hard, and you shall
prosper.” The girls he divided amongst his captains. “The Lyseni
would have made whores of you,” he told them, “but we have saved
you. Now you need only serve one man instead of many. Those who

please their captains may be taken as salt wives, an honorable
station.” The perfumed boys he wrapped in chains and threw into
the sea. They were unnatural creatures, and the ship smelled better
once cleansed of their presence.
For himself, Victarion claimed the seven choicest girls. One had
red-gold hair and freckles on her teats. One shaved herself all over.
One was brown-haired and brown-eyed, shy as a mouse. One had
the biggest breasts he had ever seen. The fth was a little thing,
with straight black hair and golden skin. Her eyes were the color of
amber. The sixth was white as milk, with golden rings through her
nipples and her nether lips, the seventh black as a squid’s ink. The
slavers of Yunkai had trained them in the way of the seven sighs,
but that was not why Victarion wanted them. His dusky woman was
enough to satisfy his appetites until he could reach Meereen and
claim his queen. No man had need of candles when the sun awaited
him.
The galley he renamed the Slaver’s Scream. With her, the ships of
the Iron Fleet numbered one-and-sixty. “Every ship we capture
makes us stronger,” Victarion told his ironborn, “but from here it
will grow harder. On the morrow or the day after, we are like to
meet with warships. We are entering the home waters of Meereen,
where the eets of our foes await us. We will meet with ships from
all three Slaver Cities, ships from Tolos and Elyria and New Ghis,
even ships from Qarth.” He took care not to mention the green
galleys of Old Volantis that surely must be sailing up through the
Gulf of Grief even as he spoke. “These slavers are feeble things. You
have seen how they run before us, heard how they squeal when we
put them to the sword. Every man of you is worth twenty of them,
for only we are made of iron. Remember this when rst we next
spy some slaver’s sails. Give no quarter and expect none. What need
have we of quarter? We are the ironborn, and two gods look over
us. We will seize their ships, smash their hopes, and turn their bay
to blood.”
A great cry went up at his words. The captain answered with a
nod, grim-faced, then called for the seven girls he had claimed to be
brought on deck, the loveliest of all those found aboard the Willing

Maiden. He kissed them each upon the cheeks and told them of the
honor that awaited them, though they did not understand his words.
Then he had them put aboard the shing ketch that they had
captured, cut her loose, and had her set a re.
“With this gift of innocence and beauty, we honor both the gods,”
he proclaimed, as the warships of the Iron Fleet rowed past the
burning ketch. “Let these girls be reborn in light, unde led by
mortal lust, or let them descend to the Drowned God’s watery halls,
to feast and dance and laugh until the seas dry up.”
Near the end, before the smoking ketch was swallowed by the
sea, the cries of the seven sweetlings changed to joyous song, it
seemed to Victarion Greyjoy. A great wind came up then, a wind
that lled their sails and swept them north and east and north
again, toward Meereen and its pyramids of many-colored bricks. On
wings of song I y to you, Daenerys, the iron captain thought.
That night, for the rst time, he brought forth the dragon horn
that the Crow’s Eye had found amongst the smoking wastes of great
Valyria. A twisted thing it was, six feet long from end to end,
gleaming black and banded with red gold and dark Valyrian steel.
Euron’s hellhorn. Victarion ran his hand along it. The horn was as
warm and smooth as the dusky woman’s thighs, and so shiny that he
could see a twisted likeness of his own features in its depths.
Strange sorcerous writings had been cut into the bands that girded
it. “Valyrian glyphs,” Moqorro called them.
That much Victarion had known. “What do they say?”
“Much and more.” The black priest pointed to one golden band.
“Here the horn is named. ‘I am Dragonbinder,’ it says. Have you ever
heard it sound?”
“Once.” One of his brother’s mongrels had sounded the hellhorn
at the kingsmoot on Old Wyk. A monster of a man he had been,
huge and shaven-headed, with rings of gold and jet and jade around
arms thick with muscle, and a great hawk tattooed across his chest.
“The sound it made … it burned, somehow. As if my bones were on
re, searing my esh from within. Those writings glowed red-hot,
then white-hot and painful to look upon. It seemed as if the sound

would never end. It was like some long scream. A thousand
screams, all melted into one.”
“And the man who blew the horn, what of him?”
“He died. There were blisters on his lips, after. His bird was
bleeding too.” The captain thumped his chest. “The hawk, just here.
Every feather dripping blood. I heard the man was all burned up
inside, but that might just have been some tale.”
“A true tale.” Moqorro turned the hellhorn, examining the queer
letters that crawled across a second of the golden bands. “Here it
says, ‘No mortal man shall sound me and live.’ ”
Bitterly Victarion brooded on the treachery of brothers. Euron’s
gifts are always poisoned. “The Crow’s Eye swore this horn would
bind dragons to my will. But how will that serve me if the price is
death?”
“Your brother did not sound the horn himself. Nor must you.”
Moqorro pointed to the band of steel. “Here. ‘Blood for re, re for
blood.’ Who blows the hellhorn matters not. The dragons will come
to the horn’s master. You must claim the horn. With blood.”

THE UGLY LITTLE GIRL

E

leven servants of the Many-Faced God gathered that night
beneath the temple, more than she had ever seen together at one
time. Only the lordling and the fat fellow arrived by the front door;
the rest came by secret ways, through tunnels and hidden passages.
They wore their robes of black and white, but as they took their
seats each man pulled his cowl down to show the face he had
chosen to wear that day. Their tall chairs were carved of ebony and
weirwood, like the doors of the temple above. The ebon chairs had
weirwood faces on their backs, the weirwood chairs faces of carved
ebony.
One of the other acolytes stood across the room with a agon of
dark red wine. She had the water. Whenever one of the servants
wished to drink, he would raise his eyes or crook a nger, and one
or both of them would come and ll his cup. But mostly they stood,
waiting on looks that never came. I am carved of stone, she reminded
herself. I am a statue, like the Sealords that stand along the Canal of the
Heroes. The water was heavy, but her arms were strong.
The priests used the language of Braavos, though once for several
minutes three spoke heatedly in High Valyrian. The girl understood
the words, mostly, but they spoke in soft voices, and she could not
always hear. “I know this man,” she did hear a priest with the face
of a plague victim say. “I know this man,” the fat fellow echoed, as
she was pouring for him. But the handsome man said, “I will give
this man the gift, I know him not.” Later the squinter said the same
thing, of someone else.

After three hours of wine and words, the priests took their
leave … all but the kindly man, the waif, and the one whose face
bore the marks of plague. His cheeks were covered with weeping
sores, and his hair had fallen out. Blood dripped from one nostril
and crusted at the corners of both eyes. “Our brother would have
words with you, child,” the kindly man told her. “Sit, if you wish.”
She seated herself in a weirwood chair with a face of ebony. Bloody
sores held no terror for her. She had been too long in the House of
Black and White to be afraid of a false face.
“Who are you?” plague face asked when they were alone.
“No one.”
“Not so. You are Arya of House Stark, who bites her lip and
cannot tell a lie.”
“I was. I’m not now.”
“Why are you here, liar?”
“To serve. To learn. To change my face.”
“First change your heart. The gift of the Many-Faced God is not a
child’s plaything. You would kill for your own purposes, for your
own pleasures. Do you deny it?”
She bit her lip. “I—”
He slapped her.
The blow left her cheek stinging, but she knew that she had
earned it. “Thank you.” Enough slaps, and she might stop chewing
on her lip. Arya did that, not the night wolf. “I do deny it.”
“You lie. I can see the truth in your eyes. You have the eyes of a
wolf and a taste for blood.”
Ser Gregor, she could not help but think. Dunsen, Ra the
Sweetling. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei. If she spoke, she would
need to lie, and he would know. She kept silent.
“You were a cat, they tell me. Prowling through the alleys
smelling of sh, selling cockles and mussels for coin. A small life,
well suited for a small creature such as you. Ask, and it can be
restored to you. Push your barrow, cry your cockles, be content.
Your heart is too soft to be one of us.”
He means to send me away. “I have no heart. I only have a hole.
I’ve killed lots of people. I could kill you if I wanted.”

“Would that taste sweet to you?”
She did not know the right answer. “Maybe.”
“Then you do not belong here. Death holds no sweetness in this
house. We are not warriors, nor soldiers, nor swaggering bravos
pu ed up with pride. We do not kill to serve some lord, to fatten
our purses, to stroke our vanity. We never give the gift to please
ourselves. Nor do we choose the ones we kill. We are but servants
of the God of Many Faces.”
“Valar dohaeris.” All men must serve.
“You know the words, but you are too proud to serve. A servant
must be humble and obedient.”
“I obey. I can be humbler than anyone.”
That made him chuckle. “You will be the very goddess of
humility, I am sure. But can you pay the price?”
“What price?”
“The price is you. The price is all you have and all you ever hope
to have. We took your eyes and gave them back. Next we will take
your ears, and you will walk in silence. You will give us your legs
and crawl. You will be no one’s daughter, no one’s wife, no one’s
mother. Your name will be a lie, and the very face you wear will
not be your own.”
She almost bit her lip again, but this time she caught herself and
stopped. My face is a dark pool, hiding everything, showing nothing. She
thought of all the names that she had worn: Arry, Weasel, Squab,
Cat of the Canals. She thought of that stupid girl from Winterfell
called Arya Horseface. Names did not matter. “I can pay the price.
Give me a face.”
“Faces must be earned.”
“Tell me how.”
“Give a certain man a certain gift. Can you do that?”
“What man?”
“No one that you know.”
“I don’t know a lot of people.”
“He is one of them. A stranger. No one you love, no one you hate,
no one you have ever known. Will you kill him?”
“Yes.”

“Then on the morrow, you shall be Cat of the Canals again. Wear
that face, watch, obey. And we will see if you are truly worthy to
serve Him of Many Faces.”
So the next day she returned to Brusco and his daughters in the
house on the canal. Brusco’s eyes widened when he saw her, and
Brea gave a little gasp. “Valar morghulis,” Cat said, by way of
greeting. “Valar dohaeris,” Brusco replied.
After that it was as if she had never been away.
She got her rst look at the man she must kill later that morning
as she wheeled her barrow through the cobbled streets that fronted
on the Purple Harbor. He was an old man, well past fty. He has
lived too long, she tried to tell herself. Why should he have so many
years when my father had so few? But Cat of the Canals had no father,
so she kept that thought to herself.
“Cockles and mussels and clams,” Cat cried as he went past, “oysters
and prawns and fat green mussels.” She even smiled at him.
Sometimes a smile was all you needed to make them stop and buy.
The old man did not smile back. He scowled at her and went on
past, sloshing through a puddle. The splash wet her feet.
He has no courtesy, she thought, watching him go. His face is hard
and mean. The old man’s nose was pinched and sharp, his lips thin,
his eyes small and close-set. His hair had gone to grey, but the little
pointed beard at the end of his chin was still black. Cat thought it
must be dyed and wondered why he had not dyed his hair as well.
One of his shoulders was higher than the other, giving him a
crooked cast.
“He is an evil man,” she announced that evening when she
returned to the House of Black and White. “His lips are cruel, his
eyes are mean, and he has a villain’s beard.”
The kindly man chuckled. “He is a man like any other, with light
in him and darkness. It is not for you to judge him.”
That gave her pause. “Have the gods judged him?”
“Some gods, mayhaps. What are gods for if not to sit in judgment
over men? The Many-Faced God does not weigh men’s souls,
however. He gives his gift to the best of men as he gives it to the
worst. Elsewise the good would live forever.”

The old man’s hands were the worst thing about him, Cat decided
the next day, as she watched him from behind her barrow. His
ngers were long and bony, always moving, scratching at his beard,
tugging at an ear, drumming on a table, twitching, twitching,
twitching. He has hands like two white spiders. The more she watched
his hands, the more she came to hate them.
“He moves his hands too much,” she told them at the temple. “He
must be full of fear. The gift will bring him peace.”
“The gift brings all men peace.”
“When I kill him he will look in my eyes and thank me.”
“If he does, you will have failed. It would be best if he takes no
note of you at all.”
The old man was some sort of merchant, Cat concluded after
watching him for a few days. His trade had to do with the sea,
though she never saw him set foot upon a ship. He spent his days
sitting in a soup shop near the Purple Harbor, a cup of onion broth
cooling at his elbow as he shu ed papers and sealing wax and
spoke in sharp tones to a parade of captains, shipowners, and other
merchants, none of whom seemed to like him very much.
Yet they brought him money: leather purses plump with gold and
silver and the square iron coins of Braavos. The old man would
count it out carefully, sorting the coins and stacking them up neatly,
like with like. He never looked at the coins. Instead he bit them,
always on the left side of his mouth, where he still had all his teeth.
From time to time he’d spin one on the table and listen to the sound
it made when it came clattering to a stop.
And when all the coins had been counted and tasted, the old man
would scrawl upon a parchment, stamp it with his seal, and give it
to the captain. Else he’d shake his head and shove the coins back
across the table. Whenever he did that, the other man would get
red-faced and angry, or pale and scared-looking.
Cat did not understand. “They pay him gold and silver, but he
only gives them writing. Are they stupid?”
“A few, mayhaps. Most are simply cautious. Some think to cozen
him. He is not a man easily cozened, however.”
“But what is he selling them?”

“He is writing each a binder. If their ships are lost in a storm or
taken by pirates, he promises to pay them for the value of the
vessel and all its contents.”
“Is it some kind of wager?”
“Of a sort. A wager every captain hopes to lose.”
“Yes, but if they win …”
“… they lose their ships, oftimes their very lives. The seas are
dangerous, and never more so than in autumn. No doubt many a
captain sinking in a storm has taken some small solace in his binder
back in Braavos, knowing that his widow and children will not
want.” A sad smile touched his lips. “It is one thing to write such a
binder, though, and another to make good on it.”
Cat understood. One of them must hate him. One of them came to
the House of Black and White and prayed for the god to take him. She
wondered who it had been, but the kindly man would not tell her.
“It is not for you to pry into such matters,” he said. “Who are you?”
“No one.”
“No one asks no questions.” He took her hands. “If you cannot do
this thing, you need only say so. There is no shame in that. Some
are made to serve the Many-Faced God and some are not. Say the
word, and I shall lift this task from you.”
“I will do it. I said I would. I will.”
How, though? That was harder.
He had guards. Two of them, a tall thin man and a short thick
one. They went with him everywhere, from when he left his house
in the morning till he returned at night. They made certain no one
got close to the old man without his leave. Once a drunk almost
staggered into him as he was coming home from the soup shop, but
the tall one stepped between them and gave the man a sharp shove
that knocked him to the ground. At the soup shop, the short one
always tasted the onion broth rst. The old man waited until the
broth had cooled before he took a sip, long enough to be sure his
guardsman had su ered no ill e ects.
“He’s afraid,” she realized, “or else he knows that someone wants
to kill him.”
“He does not know,” said the kindly man, “but he suspects.”

“The guards go with him even when he slips out to make water,”
she said, “but he doesn’t go when they do. The tall one is the
quicker. I’ll wait till he is making water, walk into the soup shop,
and stab the old man through the eye.”
“And the other guard?”
“He’s slow and stupid. I can kill him too.”
“Are you some butcher of the battle eld, hacking down every
man who stands in your way?”
“No.”
“I would hope not. You are a servant of the Many-Faced God, and
we who serve Him of Many Faces give his gift only to those who
have been marked and chosen.”
She understood. Kill him. Kill only him.
It took her three more days of watching before she found the
way, and another day of practicing with her nger knife. Red
Roggo had taught her how to use it, but she had not slit a purse
since back before they took away her eyes. She wanted to make
certain that she still knew how. Smooth and quick, that’s the way, no
fumbling, she told herself, and she slipped the little blade out of her
sleeve, again and again and again. When she was satis ed that she
still remembered how to do it, she sharpened the steel on a
whetstone until its edge glimmered silver-blue in the candlelight.
The other part was trickier, but the waif was there to help her. “I
will give the man the gift on the morrow,” she announced as she
was breaking her fast.
“Him of Many Faces will be pleased.” The kindly man rose. “Cat
of the Canals is known to many. If she is seen to have done this
deed, it might bring down trouble on Brusco and his daughters. It is
time you had another face.”
The girl did not smile, but inside she was pleased. She had lost
Cat once, and mourned her. She did not want to lose her again.
“What will I look like?”
“Ugly. Women will look away when they see you. Children will
stare and point. Strong men will pity you, and some may shed a
tear. No one who sees you will soon forget you. Come.”

The kindly man took the iron lantern o its hook and led her past
the still black pool and the rows of dark and silent gods, to the steps
at the rear of the temple. The waif fell in behind them as they were
making their descent. No one spoke. The soft scu of slippered feet
on the steps was the only sound. Eighteen steps brought them to the
vaults, where ve arched passageways spread out like the ngers of
a man’s hand. Down here the steps grew narrower and steeper, but
the girl had run up and down them a thousand times and they held
no terrors for her. Twenty-two more steps and they were at the
subcellar. The tunnels here were cramped and crooked, black
wormholes twisting through the heart of the great rock. One
passage was closed o by a heavy iron door. The priest hung the
lantern from a hook, slipped a hand inside his robe, and produced
an ornate key.
Gooseprickles rose along her arms. The sanctum. They were going
lower still, down to the third level, to the secret chambers where
only the priests were permitted.
The key clicked three times, very softly, as the kindly man turned
it in a lock. The door swung open on oiled iron hinges, making not
a sound. Beyond were still more steps, hewn out of solid rock. The
priest took down the lantern once again and led the way. The girl
followed the light, counting the steps as she went down. Four ve
six seven. She found herself wishing that she had brought her stick.
Ten eleven twelve. She knew how many steps there were between
the temple and the cellar, between the cellar and the subcellar, she
had even counted the steps on the cramped winding stair that
spiraled up into the garret and the rungs on the steep wooden
ladder that ascended to the rooftop door and the windy perch
outside.
This stair was unknown to her, however, and that made it
perilous. One-and-twenty two-and-twenty three-and-twenty. With
every step the air seemed to grow a little colder. When her count
reached thirty she knew that they were under even the canals.
Three-and-thirty four-and-thirty. How deep were they going to go?
She had reached fty-four when the steps nally ended at another
iron door. This one was unlocked. The kindly man pushed it open

and stepped through. She followed, with the waif on her heels.
Their footsteps echoed through the darkness. The kindly man lifted
his lantern and icked its shutters wide open. Light washed over the
walls around them.
A thousand faces were gazing down on her.
They hung upon the walls, before her and behind her, high and
low, everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned. She saw old
faces and young faces, pale faces and dark faces, smooth faces and
wrinkled faces, freckled faces and scarred faces, handsome faces and
homely faces, men and women, boys and girls, even babes, smiling
faces, frowning faces, faces full of greed and rage and lust, bald
faces and faces bristling with hair. Masks, she told herself, it’s only
masks, but even as she thought the thought, she knew it wasn’t so.
They were skins.
“Do they frighten you, child?” asked the kindly man. “It is not too
late for you to leave us. Is this truly what you want?”
Arya bit her lip. She did not know what she wanted. If I leave,
where will I go? She had washed and stripped a hundred corpses,
dead things did not frighten her. They carry them down here and slice
their faces o , so what? She was the night wolf, no scraps of skin
could frighten her. Leather hoods, that’s all they are, they cannot hurt
me. “Do it,” she blurted out.
He led her across the chamber, past a row of tunnels leading o
into side passages. The light of his lantern illuminated each in turn.
One tunnel was walled with human bones, its roof supported by
columns of skulls. Another opened on winding steps that descended
farther still. How many cellars are there? she wondered. Do they just
go down forever?
“Sit,” the priest commanded. She sat. “Now close your eyes,
child.” She closed her eyes. “This will hurt,” he warned her, “but
pain is the price of power. Do not move.”
Still as stone, she thought. She sat unmoving. The cut was quick,
the blade sharp. By rights the metal should have been cold against
her esh, but it felt warm instead. She could feel the blood washing
down her face, a rippling red curtain falling across her brow and
cheeks and chin, and she understood why the priest had made her

close her eyes. When it reached her lips the taste was salt and
copper. She licked at it and shivered.
“Bring me the face,” said the kindly man. The waif made no
answer, but she could hear her slippers whispering over the stone
oor. To the girl he said, “Drink this,” and pressed a cup into her
hand. She drank it down at once. It was very tart, like biting into a
lemon. A thousand years ago, she had known a girl who loved
lemon cakes. No, that was not me, that was only Arya.
“Mummers change their faces with arti ce,” the kindly man was
saying, “and sorcerers use glamors, weaving light and shadow and
desire to make illusions that trick the eye. These arts you shall
learn, but what we do here goes deeper. Wise men can see through
arti ce, and glamors dissolve before sharp eyes, but the face you
are about to don will be as true and solid as that face you were born
with. Keep your eyes closed.” She felt his ngers brushing back her
hair. “Stay still. This will feel queer. You may be dizzy, but you
must not move.”
Then came a tug and a soft rustling as the new face was pulled
down over the old. The leather scraped across her brow, dry and
sti , but as her blood soaked into it, it softened and turned supple.
Her cheeks grew warm, ushed. She could feel her heart uttering
beneath her breast, and for one long moment she could not catch
her breath. Hands closed around her throat, hard as stone, choking
her. Her own hands shot up to claw at the arms of her attacker, but
there was no one there. A terrible sense of fear lled her, and she
heard a noise, a hideous crunching noise, accompanied by blinding
pain. A face oated in front of her, fat, bearded, brutal, his mouth
twisted with rage. She heard the priest say, “Breathe, child. Breathe
out the fear. Shake o the shadows. He is dead. She is dead. Her
pain is gone. Breathe.”
The girl took a deep shuddering breath, and realized it was true.
No one was choking her, no one was hitting her. Even so, her hand
was shaking as she raised it to her face. Flakes of dried blood
crumbled at the touch of her ngertips, black in the lantern light.
She felt her cheeks, touched her eyes, traced the line of her jaw.
“My face is still the same.”

“Is it? Are you certain?”
Was she certain? She had not felt any change, but maybe it was
not something you could feel. She swept a hand down across her
face from top to bottom, as she had once seen Jaqen H’ghar do,
back at Harrenhal. When he did it, his whole face had rippled and
changed. When she did it, nothing happened. “It feels the same.”
“To you,” said the priest. “It does not look the same.”
“To other eyes, your nose and jaw are broken,” said the waif.
“One side of your face is caved in where your cheekbone shattered,
and half your teeth are missing.”
She probed around inside her mouth with her tongue, but found
no holes or broken teeth. Sorcery, she thought. I have a new face. An
ugly, broken face.
“You may have bad dreams for a time,” warned the kindly man.
“Her father beat her so often and so brutally that she was never
truly free of pain or fear until she came to us.”
“Did you kill him?”
“She asked the gift for herself, not for her father.”
You should have killed him.
He must have read her thoughts. “Death came for him in the end,
as it comes for all men. As it must come for a certain man upon the
morrow.” He lifted up the lamp. “We are done here.”
For now. As they made their way back to the steps, the empty
eyeholes of the skins upon the walls seemed to follow her. For a
moment she could almost see their lips moving, whispering dark
sweet secrets to one another in words too faint to hear.
Sleep did not come easily that night. Tangled in her blankets, she
twisted this way and that in the cold dark room, but whichever way
she turned, she saw the faces. They have no eyes, but they can see me.
She saw her father’s face upon the wall. Beside him hung her lady
mother, and below them her three brothers all in a row. No. That
was some other girl. I am no one, and my only brothers wear robes of
black and white. Yet there was the black singer, there the stableboy
she’d killed with Needle, there the pimply squire from the
crossroads inn, and over there the guard whose throat she’d slashed
to get them out of Harrenhal. The Tickler hung on the wall as well,

the black holes that were his eyes swimming with malice. The sight
of him brought back the feel of the dagger in her hand as she had
plunged it into his back, again and again and again.
When at last day came to Braavos, it came grey and dark and
overcast. The girl had hoped for fog, but the gods ignored her
prayers as gods so often did. The air was clear and cold, and the
wind had a nasty bite to it. A good day for a death, she thought.
Unbidden, her prayer came to her lips. Ser Gregor, Dunsen, Ra the
Sweetling. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei. She mouthed the names
silently. In the House of Black and White, you never knew who
might be listening.
The vaults were full of old clothing, garments claimed from those
who came to the House of Black and White to drink peace from the
temple pool. Everything from beggar’s rags to rich silks and velvets
could be found there. An ugly girl should dress in ugly clothing, she
decided, so she chose a stained brown cloak fraying at the hem, a
musty green tunic smelling of sh, and a pair of heavy boots. Last
of all she palmed her nger knife.
There was no haste, so she decided to take the long way round to
the Purple Harbor. Across the bridge she went, to the Isle of the
Gods. Cat of the Canals had sold cockles and mussels amongst the
temples here, whenever Brusco’s daughter Talea had her moon
blood owing and took to her bed. She half-expected to see Talea
selling there today, perhaps outside the Warren where all the
forgotten godlings had their forlorn little shrines, but that was silly.
The day was too cold, and Talea never liked to wake this early. The
statue outside the shrine of the Weeping Lady of Lys was crying
silver tears as the ugly girl walked by. In the Gardens of Gelenei
stood a gilded tree a hundred feet high with leaves of hammered
silver. Torchlight glimmered behind windows of leaded glass in the
Lord of Harmony’s wooden hall, showing half a hundred kinds of
butter ies in all their bright colors.
One time, the girl remembered, the Sailor’s Wife had walked her
rounds with her and told her tales of the city’s stranger gods. “That
is the house of the Great Shepherd. Three-headed Trios has that
tower with three turrets. The rst head devours the dying, and the

reborn emerge from the third. I don’t know what the middle head’s
supposed to do. Those are the Stones of the Silent God, and there
the entrance to the Patternmaker’s Maze. Only those who learn to
walk it properly will ever nd their way to wisdom, the priests of
the Pattern say. Beyond it, by the canal, that’s the temple of Aquan
the Red Bull. Every thirteenth day, his priests slit the throat of a
pure white calf, and o er bowls of blood to beggars.”
Today was not the thirteenth day, it seemed; the Red Bull’s steps
were empty. The brother gods Semosh and Selloso dreamed in twin
temples on opposite sides of the Black Canal, linked by a carved
stone bridge. The girl crossed there and made her way down to the
docks, then through the Ragman’s Harbor and past the half-sunken
spires and domes of the Drowned Town.
A group of Lysene sailors were staggering from the Happy Port as
she went by, but the girl did not see any of the whores. The Ship
was closed up and forlorn, its troupe of mummers no doubt still
abed. But farther on, on the wharf beside an Ibbenese whaler, she
spied Cat’s old friend Tagganaro tossing a ball back and forth with
Casso, King of Seals, whilst his latest cutpurse worked the crowd of
onlookers. When she stopped to watch and listen for a moment,
Tagganaro glanced at her without recognition, but Casso barked and
clapped his ippers. He knows me, the girl thought, or else he smells
the sh. She hurried on her way.
By the time she reached the Purple Harbor, the old man was
ensconced inside the soup shop at his usual table, counting a purse
of coins as he haggled with a ship’s captain. The tall thin guard was
hovering over him. The short thick one was seated near the door,
where he would have a good view of anyone who entered. That
made no matter. She did not intend to enter. Instead she perched
atop a wooden piling twenty yards away as the blustery wind
tugged at her cloak with ghostly ngers.
Even on a cold grey day like this, the harbor was a busy place.
She saw sailors on the prowl for whores, and whores on the prowl
for sailors. A pair of bravos passed in rumpled nery, leaning on
each other as they staggered drunkenly past the docks, their blades

rattling at their sides. A red priest swept past, his scarlet and
crimson robes snapping in the wind.
It was almost noon before she saw the man she wanted, a
prosperous shipowner she had seen doing business with the old man
three times before. Big and bald and burly, he wore a heavy cloak
of plush brown velvet trimmed with fur and a brown leather belt
ornamented with silver moons and stars. Some mishap had left one
leg sti . He walked slowly, leaning on a cane.
He would do as well as any and better than most, the ugly girl
decided. She hopped o the piling and fell in after him. A dozen
strides put her right behind him, her nger knife poised. His purse
was on his right side, at his belt, but his cloak was in her way. Her
blade ashed out, smooth and quick, one deep slash through the
velvet and he never felt a thing. Red Roggo would have smiled to
see it. She slipped her hand through the gap, slit the purse open
with the nger knife, lled her st with gold …
The big man turned. “What—”
The movement tangled her arm in the folds of his cloak as she
was pulling out her hand. Coins rained around their feet. “Thief!”
The big man raised his stick to strike at her. She kicked his bad leg
out from under him, danced away, and bolted as he fell, darting
past a mother with a child. More coins fell from between her ngers
to bounce along the ground. Shouts of “thief, thief” rang out behind
her. A potbellied innkeep passing by made a clumsy grab for her
arm, but she spun around him, ashed past a laughing whore, raced
headlong for the nearest alley.
Cat of the Canals had known these alleys, and the ugly girl
remembered. She darted left, vaulted a low wall, leapt across a
small canal, and slipped through an unlocked door into some dusty
storeroom. All sounds of pursuit had faded by then, but it was best
to be sure. She hunkered down behind some crates and waited, arms
wrapped around her knees. She waited for the best part of an hour,
then decided it was safe to go, climbed straight up the side of the
building, and made her way across the rooftops almost as far as the
Canal of Heroes. By now the shipowner would have gathered up
coins and cane and limped on to the soup shop. He might be

drinking a bowl of hot broth and complaining to the old man about
the ugly girl who had tried to rob his purse.
The kindly man was waiting for her at the House of Black and
White, seated on the edge of the temple pool. The ugly girl sat next
to him and put a coin on the lip of the pool between them. It was
gold, with a dragon on one face and a king on the other.
“The golden dragon of Westeros,” said the kindly man. “And how
did you come by this? We are no thieves.”
“It wasn’t stealing. I took one of his, but I left him one of ours.”
The kindly man understood. “And with that coin and the others in
his purse, he paid a certain man. Soon after that man’s heart gave
out. Is that the way of it? Very sad.” The priest picked up the coin
and tossed it into the pool. “You have much and more to learn, but
it may be you are not hopeless.”
That night they gave her back the face of Arya Stark.
They brought a robe for her as well, the soft thick robe of an
acolyte, black upon one side and white upon the other. “Wear this
when you are here,” the priest said, “but know that you shall have
little need of it for the present. On the morrow you will go to
Izembaro to begin your rst apprenticeship. Take what clothes you
will from the vaults below. The city watch is looking for a certain
ugly girl, known to frequent the Purple Harbor, so best you have a
new face as well.” He cupped her chin, turned her head this way
and that, nodded. “A pretty one this time, I think. As pretty as your
own. Who are you, child?”
“No one,” she replied.

CERSEI

O

n the last night of her imprisonment, the queen could not
sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, her head lled with
forebodings and fantasies of the morrow. I will have guards, she told
herself. They will keep the crowds away. No one will be allowed to
touch me. The High Sparrow had promised her that much.
Even so, she was afraid. On the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne,
the day of the bread riots, gold cloaks had been posted all along the
route of the procession, but the mob had broken through their lines
to tear the old fat High Septon into pieces and rape Lollys
Stokeworth half a hundred times. And if that pale soft stupid
creature could incite the animals when fully clothed, how much
more lust would a queen inspire?
Cersei paced her cell, restless as the caged lions that had lived in
the bowels of Casterly Rock when she was a girl, a legacy of her
grandfather’s time. She and Jaime used to dare each other to climb
into their cage, and once she worked up enough courage to slip her
hand between two bars and touch one of the great tawny beasts.
She was always bolder than her brother. The lion had turned his
head to stare at her with huge golden eyes. Then he licked her
ngers. His tongue was as rough as a rasp, but even so she would
not pull her hand back, not until Jaime took her by the shoulders
and yanked her away from the cage.
“Your turn,” she told him afterward. “Pull his mane, I dare you.”
He never did. I should have had the sword, not him.
Barefoot and shivering she paced, a thin blanket draped about her
shoulders. She was anxious for the day to come. By evening it

would all be done. A little walk and I’ll be home, I’ll be back with
Tommen, in my own chambers inside Maegor’s Holdfast. Her uncle said
it was the only way to save herself. Was it, though? She could not
trust her uncle, no more than she trusted this High Septon. I could
still refuse. I could still insist upon my innocence and hazard all upon a
trial.
But she dare not let the Faith sit in judgment on her, as that
Margaery Tyrell meant to do. That might serve the little rose well
enough, but Cersei had few friends amongst the septas and sparrows
around this new High Septon. Her only hope was trial by battle, and
for that she must needs have a champion.
If Jaime had not lost his hand …
That road led nowhere, though. Jaime’s sword hand was gone,
and so was he, vanished with the woman Brienne somewhere in the
riverlands. The queen had to nd another defender or today’s ordeal
would be the least of her travails. Her enemies were accusing her of
treason. She had to reach Tommen, no matter the costs. He loves me.
He will not refuse his own mother. Jo was stubborn and unpredictable,
but Tommen is a good little boy, a good little king. He will do as he is
told. If she stayed here, she was doomed, and the only way she
would return to the Red Keep was by walking. The High Sparrow
had been adamant, and Ser Kevan refused to lift a nger against
him.
“No harm will come to me today,” Cersei said when the day’s rst
light brushed her window. “Only my pride will su er.” The words
rang hollow in her ears. Jaime may yet come. She pictured him
riding through the morning mists, his golden armor bright in the
light of the rising sun. Jaime, if you ever loved me …
When her gaolers came for her, Septa Unella, Septa Moelle, and
Septa Scolera led the procession. With them were four novices and
two of the silent sisters. The sight of the silent sisters in their grey
robes lled the queen with sudden terrors. Why are they here? Am I
to die? The silent sisters attended to the dead. “The High Septon
promised that no harm would come to me.”
“Nor will it.” Septa Unella beckoned to the novices. They brought
lye soap, a basin of warm water, a pair of shears, and a long

straightrazor. The sight of the steel sent a shiver through her. They
mean to shave me. A little more humiliation, a raisin for my porridge.
She would not give them the pleasure of hearing her beg. I am
Cersei of House Lannister, a lion of the Rock, the rightful queen of these
Seven Kingdoms, trueborn daughter of Tywin Lannister. And hair grows
back. “Get on with it,” she said.
The elder of the two silent sisters took up the shears. A practiced
barber, no doubt; her order often cleaned the corpses of the noble
slain before returning them to their kin, and trimming beards and
cutting hair was part of that. The woman bared the queen’s head
rst. Cersei sat as still as a stone statue as the shears clicked. Drifts
of golden hair fell to the oor. She had not been allowed to tend it
properly penned up in this cell, but even unwashed and tangled it
shone where the sun touched it. My crown, the queen thought. They
took the other crown away from me, and now they are stealing this one
as well. When her locks and curls were piled up around her feet, one
of the novices soaped her head and the silent sister scraped away
the stubble with a razor.
Cersei hoped that would be the end of it, but no. “Remove your
shift, Your Grace,” Septa Unella commanded.
“Here?” the queen asked. “Why?”
“You must be shorn.”
Shorn, she thought, like a sheep. She yanked the shift over her
head and tossed it to the oor. “Do what you will.”
Then it was the soap again, the warm water, and the razor. The
hair beneath her arms went next, then her legs, and last of all the
ne golden down that covered her mound. When the silent sister
crept between her legs with the razor, Cersei found herself
remembering all the times that Jaime had knelt where she was
kneeling now, planting kisses on the inside of her thighs, making
her wet. His kisses were always warm. The razor was ice-cold.
When the deed was done she was as naked and vulnerable as a
woman could be. Not even a hair to hide behind. A little laugh burst
from her lips, bleak and bitter.
“Does Your Grace nd this amusing?” said Septa Scolera.

“No, septa,” said Cersei. But one day I will have your tongue ripped
out with hot pincers, and that will be hilarious.
One of the novices had brought a robe for her, a soft white
septa’s robe to cover her as she made her way down the tower steps
and through the sept, so any worshipers they met along the way
might be spared the sight of naked esh. Seven save us all, what
hypocrites they are. “Will I be permitted a pair of sandals?” she
asked. “The streets are lthy.”
“Not so lthy as your sins,” said Septa Moelle. “His High Holiness
has commanded that you present yourself as the gods made you.
Did you have sandals on your feet when you came forth from your
lady mother’s womb?”
“No, septa,” the queen was forced to say.
“Then you have your answer.”
A bell began to toll. The queen’s long imprisonment was at an
end. Cersei pulled the robe tighter, grateful for its warmth, and
said, “Let us go.” Her son awaited her across the city. The sooner
she set out, the sooner she would see him.
The rough stone of the steps scraped her soles as Cersei Lannister
made her descent. She had come to Baelor’s Sept a queen, riding in
a litter. She was leaving bald and barefoot. But I am leaving. That is
all that matters.
The tower bells were singing, summoning the city to bear witness
to her shame. The Great Sept of Baelor was crowded with faithful
come for the dawn service, the sound of their prayers echoing o
the dome overhead, but when the queen’s procession made its
appearance a sudden silence fell and a thousand eyes turned to
follow her as she made her way down the aisle, past the place
where her lord father had lain in state after his murder. Cersei
swept by them, looking neither right nor left. Her bare feet slapped
against the cold marble oor. She could feel the eyes. Behind their
altars, the Seven seemed to watch as well.
In the Hall of Lamps, a dozen Warrior’s Sons awaited her coming.
Rainbow cloaks hung down their backs, and the crystals that crested
their greathelms glittered in the lamplight. Their armor was silver
plate polished to a mirror sheen, but underneath, she knew, every

man of them wore a hair shirt. Their kite shields all bore the same
device: a crystal sword shining in the darkness, the ancient badge of
those the smallfolk called Swords.
Their captain knelt before her. “Perhaps Your Grace will recall
me. I am Ser Theodan the True, and His High Holiness has given me
command of your escort. My brothers and I will see you safely
through the city.”
Cersei’s gaze swept across the faces of the men behind him. And
there he was: Lancel, her cousin, Ser Kevan’s son, who had once
professed to love her, before he decided that he loved the gods
more. My blood and my betrayer. She would not forget him. “You
may rise, Ser Theodan. I am ready.”
The knight stood, turned, raised a hand. Two of his men stepped
to the towering doors and pushed them open, and Cersei walked
through them into the open air, blinking at the sunlight like a mole
roused from its burrow.
A gusty wind was blowing, and it set the bottom of her robe
snapping and apping at her legs. The morning air was thick with
the old familiar stinks of King’s Landing. She breathed in the scents
of sour wine, bread baking, rotting sh and nightsoil, smoke and
sweat and horse piss. No ower had ever smelled so sweet. Huddled
in her robe, Cersei paused atop the marble steps as the Warrior’s
Sons formed up around her.
It came to her suddenly that she had stood in this very spot
before, on the day Lord Eddard Stark had lost his head. That was not
supposed to happen. Jo was supposed to spare his life and send him to
the Wall. Stark’s eldest son would have followed him as Lord of
Winterfell, but Sansa would have stayed at court, a hostage. Varys
and Little nger had worked out the terms, and Ned Stark had
swallowed his precious honor and confessed his treason to save his
daughter’s empty little head. I would have made Sansa a good
marriage. A Lannister marriage. Not Jo , of course, but Lancel might
have suited, or one of his younger brothers. Petyr Baelish had o ered
to wed the girl himself, she recalled, but of course that was
impossible; he was much too lowborn. If Jo had only done as he was

told, Winterfell would never have gone to war, and Father would have
dealt with Robert’s brothers.
Instead Jo had commanded that Stark’s head be struck o , and
Lord Slynt and Ser Ilyn Payne had hastened to obey. It was just there,
the queen recalled, gazing at the spot. Janos Slynt had lifted Ned
Stark’s head by the hair as his life’s blood owed down the steps,
and after that there was no turning back.
The memories seemed so distant. Jo rey was dead, and all Stark’s
sons as well. Even her father had perished. And here she stood on
the steps of the Great Sept again, only this time it was her the mob
was staring at, not Eddard Stark.
The wide marble plaza below was as crowded as it had been on
the day that Stark had died. Everywhere she looked the queen saw
eyes. The mob seemed to be equal parts men and women. Some had
children on their shoulders. Beggars and thieves, taverners and
tradesfolk, tanners and stableboys and mummers, the poorer sort of
whore, all the scum had come out to see a queen brought low. And
mingled in with them were the Poor Fellows, lthy, unshaven
creatures armed with spears and axes and clad in bits of dinted
plate, rusted mail, and cracked leather, under roughspun surcoats
bleached white and blazoned with the seven-pointed star of the
Faith. The High Sparrow’s ragged army.
Part of her still yearned for Jaime to appear and rescue her from
this humiliation, but her twin was nowhere to be seen. Nor was her
uncle present. That did not surprise her. Ser Kevan had made his
views plain during his last visit; her shame must not be allowed to
tarnish the honor of Casterly Rock. No lions would walk with her
today. This ordeal was hers and hers alone.
Septa Unella stood to her right, Septa Moelle to her left, Septa
Scolera behind her. If the queen should bolt or balk, the three hags
would drag her back inside, and this time they would see to it that
she never left her cell.
Cersei raised her head. Beyond the plaza, beyond the sea of
hungry eyes and gaping mouths and dirty faces, across the city,
Aegon’s High Hill rose in the distance, the towers and battlements
of the Red Keep blushing pink in the light of the rising sun. It is not

so far. Once she reached its gates, the worst of her travails would be
over. She would have her son again. She would have her champion.
Her uncle had promised her. Tommen is waiting for me. My little king.
I can do this. I must.
Septa Unella stepped forward. “A sinner comes before you,” she
declared. “She is Cersei of House Lannister, queen dowager, mother
to His Grace King Tommen, widow of His Grace King Robert, and
she has committed grievous falsehoods and fornications.”
Septa Moelle moved up on the queen’s right. “This sinner has
confessed her sins and begged for absolution and forgiveness. His
High Holiness has commanded her to demonstrate her repentance
by putting aside all pride and arti ce and presenting herself as the
gods made her before the good people of the city.”
Septa Scolera nished. “So now this sinner comes before you with
a humble heart, shorn of secrets and concealments, naked before the
eyes of gods and men, to make her walk of atonement.”
Cersei had been a year old when her grandfather died. The rst
thing her father had done on his ascension was to expel his own
father’s grasping, lowborn mistress from Casterly Rock. The silks
and velvets Lord Tytos had lavished on her and the jewelry she had
taken for herself had been stripped from her, and she had been sent
forth naked to walk through the streets of Lannisport, so the west
could see her for what she was.
Though she had been too young to witness the spectacle herself,
Cersei had heard the stories growing up from the mouths of
washerwomen and guardsmen who had been there. They spoke of
how the woman had wept and begged, of the desperate way she
clung to her garments when she was commanded to disrobe, of her
futile e orts to cover her breasts and her sex with her hands as she
hobbled barefoot and naked through the streets to exile. “Vain and
proud she was, before,” she remembered one guard saying, “so
haughty you’d think she’d forgot she come from dirt. Once we got
her clothes o her, though, she was just another whore.”
If Ser Kevan and the High Sparrow thought that it would be the
same with her, they were very much mistaken. Lord Tywin’s blood
was in her. I am a lioness. I will not cringe for them.

The queen shrugged o her robe.
She bared herself in one smooth, unhurried motion, as if she were
back in her own chambers disrobing for her bath with no one but
her bedmaids looking on. When the cold wind touched her skin, she
shivered violently. It took all her strength of will not to try and
hide herself with her hands, as her grandfather’s whore had done.
Her ngers tightened into sts, her nails digging into her palms.
They were looking at her, all the hungry eyes. But what were they
seeing? I am beautiful, she reminded herself. How many times had
Jaime told her that? Even Robert had given her that much, when he
came to her bed in his cups to pay her drunken homage with his
cock.
They looked at Ned Stark the same way, though.
She had to move. Naked, shorn, barefoot, Cersei made a slow
descent down the broad marble steps. Gooseprickles rose on her
arms and legs. She held her chin high, as a queen should, and her
escort fanned out ahead of her. The Poor Fellows shoved men aside
to open a way through the crowd whilst the Swords fell in on either
side of her. Septa Unella, Septa Scolera, and Septa Moelle followed.
Behind them came the novice girls in white.
“Whore!” someone cried out. A woman’s voice. Women were
always the cruelest where other women were concerned.
Cersei ignored her. There will be more, and worse. These creatures
have no sweeter joy in life than jeering at their betters. She could not
silence them, so she must pretend she did not hear them. She would
not see them either. She would keep her eyes on Aegon’s High Hill
across the city, on the towers of the Red Keep shimmering in the
light. That was where she would nd her salvation, if her uncle had
kept his part of their bargain.
He wanted this. Him and the High Sparrow. And the little rose as well,
I do not doubt. I have sinned and must atone, must parade my shame
before the eyes of every beggar in the city. They think that this will break
my pride, that it will make an end to me, but they are wrong.
Septa Unella and Septa Moelle kept pace with her, with Septa
Scolera scurrying behind, ringing a bell. “Shame,” the old hag
called, “shame upon the sinner, shame, shame.” Somewhere o to the

right, another voice sang counterpoint to hers, some baker’s boy
shouting, “Meat pies, three pence, hot meat pies here.” The marble
underfoot was cold and slick, and Cersei had to step carefully for
fear of slipping. Their path took them past the statue of Baelor the
Blessed, standing tall and serene upon his plinth, his face a study in
benevolence. To look at him, you would never guess what a fool
he’d been. The Targaryen dynasty had produced kings both bad and
good, but none as beloved as Baelor, that pious gentle septon-king
who loved the smallfolk and the gods in equal parts, yet imprisoned
his own sisters. It was a wonder that his statue did not crumble at
the sight of her bare breasts. Tyrion used to say that King Baelor
was terri ed of his own cock. Once, she recalled, he had expelled
all the whores from King’s Landing. He prayed for them as they
were driven from the city gates, the histories said, but would not
look at them.
“Harlot,” a voice screamed. Another woman. Something ew out
of the crowd. Some rotted vegetable. Brown and oozing, it sailed
above her head to splash at the foot of one of the Poor Fellows. I
am not afraid. I am a lioness. She walked on. “Hot pies,” the baker’s
boy was crying. “Getcha hot pies here.” Septa Scolera rang her bell,
singing, “Shame, shame, shame upon the sinner, shame, shame.” The
Poor Fellows went before them, forcing men aside with their
shields, walling o a narrow path. Cersei followed where they led,
her head held sti y, her eyes on the far distance. Every step
brought the Red Keep nearer. Every step brought her closer to her
son and her salvation.
It seemed to take a hundred years to cross the plaza, but nally
marble gave way to cobblestones beneath her feet, shops and
stables and houses closed in all around them, and they began the
descent of Visenya’s Hill.
The going was slower here. The street was steep and narrow, the
crowds jammed together tightly. The Poor Fellows shoved at those
who blocked the way, trying to move them aside, but there was
nowhere to go, and those in the back of the crowd were shoving
back. Cersei tried to keep her head up, only to step in something
slick and wet that made her slip. She might have fallen, but Septa

Unella caught her arm and kept her on her feet. “Your Grace should
watch where she sets her feet.”
Cersei wrenched herself free. “Yes, septa,” she said in a meek
voice, though she was angry enough to spit. The queen walked on,
clad only in gooseprickles and pride. She looked for the Red Keep,
but it was hidden now, walled o from her gaze by the tall
timbered buildings to either side. “Shame, shame,” sang Septa
Scolera, her bell clanging. Cersei tried to walk faster, but soon came
up against the backs of the Stars in front of her and had to slow her
steps again. A man just ahead was selling skewers of roast meat
from a cart, and the procession halted as the Poor Fellows moved
him out of the way. The meat looked suspiciously like rat to
Cersei’s eyes, but the smell of it lled the air, and half the men
around them were gnawing away with sticks in hand by the time
the street was clear enough for her to resume her trek. “Want some,
Your Grace?” one man called out. He was a big, burly brute with
pig eyes, a massive gut, and an unkempt black beard that reminded
her of Robert. When she looked away in disgust, he ung the
skewer at her. It struck her on the leg and tumbled to the street,
and the half-cooked meat left a smear of grease and blood down her
thigh.
The shouting seemed louder here than on the plaza, perhaps
because the mob was so much closer. “Whore” and “sinner” were
most common, but “brotherfucker” and “cunt” and “traitor” were
ung at her as well, and now and again she heard someone shout
out for Stannis or Margaery. The cobbles underfoot were lthy, and
there was so little space that the queen could not even walk around
the puddles. No one has ever died of wet feet, she told herself. She
wanted to believe the puddles were just rainwater, though horse
piss was just as likely.
More refuse showered down from windows and balconies: halfrotted fruit, pails of beer, eggs that exploded into sulfurous stink
when they cracked open on the ground. Then someone ung a dead
cat over the Poor Fellows and Warrior’s Sons alike. The carcass hit
the cobbles so hard that it burst open, spattering her lower legs
with entrails and maggots.

Cersei walked on. I am blind and deaf, and they are worms, she told
herself. “Shame, shame,” the septas sang. “Chestnuts, hot roast
chestnuts,” a peddler cried. “Queen Cunt,” a drunkard pronounced
solemnly from a balcony above, lifting his cup to her in a mocking
toast. “All hail the royal teats!” Words are wind, Cersei thought.
Words cannot harm me.
Halfway down Visenya’s Hill the queen fell for the rst time,
when her foot slipped in something that might have been nightsoil.
When Septa Unella pulled her up, her knee was scraped and bloody.
A ragged laugh rippled through the crowd, and some man shouted
out an o er to kiss it and make it better. Cersei looked behind her.
She could still see the great dome and seven crystal towers of the
Great Sept of Baelor atop the hill. Have I really come such a little
way? Worse, a hundred times worse, she had lost sight of the Red
Keep. “Where … where …?”
“Your Grace.” The captain of her escort stepped up beside her.
Cersei had forgotten his name. “You must continue. The crowd is
growing unruly.”
Yes, she thought. Unruly. “I am not afraid—”
“You should be.” He yanked at her arm, pulling her along beside
him. She staggered down the hill—downward, ever downward—
wincing with every step, letting him support her. It should be Jaime
beside me. He would draw his golden sword and slash a path right
through the mob, carving the eyes out of the head of every man
who dared to look at her.
The paving stones were cracked and uneven, slippery underfoot,
and rough against her soft feet. Her heel came down on something
sharp, a stone or piece of broken crockery. Cersei cried out in pain.
“I asked for sandals,” she spat at Septa Unella. “You could have
given me sandals, you could have done that much.” The knight
wrenched at her arm again, as if she were some common serving
wench. Has he forgotten who I am? She was the queen of Westeros;
he had no right to lay rough hands on her.
Near the bottom of the hill, the slope gentled and the street began
to widen. Cersei could see the Red Keep again, shining crimson in
the morning sun atop Aegon’s High Hill. I must keep walking. She

wrenched free of Ser Theodan’s grasp. “You do not need to drag me,
ser.” She limped on, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the
stones behind her.
She walked through mud and dung, bleeding, goose eshed,
hobbling. All around her was a babble of sound. “My wife has
sweeter teats than those,” a man shouted. A teamster cursed as the
Poor Fellows ordered his wagon out of the way. “Shame, shame,
shame on the sinner,” chanted the septas. “Look at this one,” a whore
called from a brothel window, lifting her skirts to the men below,
“it’s not had half as many cocks up it as hers.” Bells were ringing,
ringing, ringing. “That can’t be the queen,” a boy said, “she’s saggy
as my mum.” This is my penance, Cersei told herself. I have sinned
most grievously, this is my atonement. It will be over soon, it will be
behind me, then I can forget.
The queen began to see familiar faces. A bald man with bushy
side-whiskers frowned down from a window with her father’s
frown, and for an instant looked so much like Lord Tywin that she
stumbled. A young girl sat beneath a fountain, drenched in spray,
and stared at her with Melara Hetherspoon’s accusing eyes. She saw
Ned Stark, and beside him little Sansa with her auburn hair and a
shaggy grey dog that might have been her wolf. Every child
squirming through the crowd became her brother Tyrion, jeering at
her as he had jeered when Jo rey died. And there was Jo as well,
her son, her rstborn, her beautiful bright boy with his golden curls
and his sweet smile, he had such lovely lips, he …
That was when she fell the second time.
She was shaking like a leaf when they pulled her to her feet.
“Please,” she said. “Mother have mercy. I confessed.”
“You did,” said Septa Moelle. “This is your atonement.”
“It is not much farther,” said Septa Unella. “See?” She pointed.
“Up the hill, that’s all.”
Up the hill. That’s all. It was true. They were at the foot of Aegon’s
High Hill, the castle above them.
“Whore,” someone screamed.
“Brotherfucker,” another voice added. “Abomination.”

“Want a suck on this, Your Grace?” A man in a butcher’s apron
pulled his cock out of his breeches, grinning. It did not matter. She
was almost home.
Cersei began to climb.
If anything, the jeers and shouts were cruder here. Her walk had
not taken her through Flea Bottom, so its denizens had packed onto
the lower slopes of Aegon’s High Hill to see the show. The faces
leering out at her from behind the shields and spears of the Poor
Fellows seemed twisted, monstrous, hideous. Pigs and naked
children were everywhere underfoot, crippled beggars and
cutpurses swarmed like roaches through the press. She saw men
whose teeth had been led into points, hags with goiters as big as
their heads, a whore with a huge striped snake draped about breasts
and shoulders, a man whose cheeks and brow were covered with
open sores that wept grey pus. They grinned and licked their lips
and hooted at her as she went limping past, her breasts heaving
with the e ort of the climb. Some shouted obscene proposals, others
insults. Words are wind, she thought, words cannot hurt me. I am
beautiful, the most beautiful woman in all Westeros, Jaime says so,
Jaime would never lie to me. Even Robert, Robert never loved me, but
he saw that I was beautiful, he wanted me.
She did not feel beautiful, though. She felt old, used, lthy, ugly.
There were stretch marks on her belly from the children she had
borne, and her breasts were not as rm as they had been when she
was younger. Without a gown to hold them up, they sagged against
her chest. I should not have done this. I was their queen, but now
they’ve seen, they’ve seen, they’ve seen. I should never have let them see.
Gowned and crowned, she was a queen. Naked, bloody, limping,
she was only a woman, not so very di erent from their wives, more
like their mothers than their pretty little maiden daughters. What
have I done?
There was something in her eyes, stinging, blurring her sight. She
could not cry, she would not cry, the worms must never see her
weep. Cersei rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. A gust of
cold wind made her shiver violently.

And suddenly the hag was there, standing in the crowd with her
pendulous teats and her warty greenish skin, leering with the rest,
with malice shining from her crusty yellow eyes. “Queen you shall
be,” she hissed, “until there comes another, younger and more
beautiful, to cast you down and take all you hold most dear.”
And then there was no stopping the tears. They burned down the
queen’s cheeks like acid. Cersei gave a sharp cry, covered her
nipples with one arm, slid her other hand down to hide her slit, and
began to run, shoving her way past the line of Poor Fellows,
crouching as she scrambled crab-legged up the hill. Partway up she
stumbled and fell, rose, then fell again ten yards farther on. The
next thing she knew she was crawling, scrambling uphill on all fours
like a dog as the good folks of King’s Landing made way for her,
laughing and jeering and applauding her.
Then all at once the crowd parted and seemed to dissolve, and
there were the castle gates before her, and a line of spearmen in
gilded halfhelms and crimson cloaks. Cersei heard the gru , familiar
sound of her uncle growling orders and glimpsed a ash of white to
either side as Ser Boros Blount and Ser Meryn Trant strode toward
her in their pale plate and snowy cloaks. “My son,” she cried.
“Where is my son? Where is Tommen?”
“Not here. No son should have to bear witness to his mother’s
shame.” Ser Kevan’s voice was harsh. “Cover her up.”
Then Jocelyn was bending over her, wrapping her in a soft clean
blanket of green wool to cover her nakedness. A shadow fell across
them both, blotting out the sun. The queen felt cold steel slide
beneath her, a pair of great armored arms lifting her o the ground,
lifting her up into the air as easily as she had lifted Jo rey when he
was still a babe. A giant, thought Cersei, dizzy, as he carried her
with great strides toward the gatehouse. She had heard that giants
could still be found in the godless wild beyond the Wall. That is just
a tale. Am I dreaming?
No. Her savior was real. Eight feet tall or maybe taller, with legs
as thick around as trees, he had a chest worthy of a plow horse and
shoulders that would not disgrace an ox. His armor was plate steel,
enameled white and bright as a maiden’s hopes, and worn over

gilded mail. A greathelm hid his face. From its crest streamed seven
silken plumes in the rainbow colors of the Faith. A pair of golden
seven-pointed stars clasped his billowing cloak at the shoulders.
A white cloak.
Ser Kevan had kept his part of the bargain. Tommen, her precious
little boy, had named her champion to the Kingsguard.
Cersei never saw where Qyburn came from, but suddenly he was
there beside them, scrambling to keep up with her champion’s long
strides. “Your Grace,” he said, “it is so good to have you back. May
I have the honor of presenting our newest member of the
Kingsguard? This is Ser Robert Strong.”
“Ser Robert,” Cersei whispered, as they entered the gates.
“If it please Your Grace, Ser Robert has taken a holy vow of
silence,” Qyburn said. “He has sworn that he will not speak until all
of His Grace’s enemies are dead and evil has been driven from the
realm.”
Yes, thought Cersei Lannister. Oh, yes.

TYRION

T

he pile of parchments was formidably high. Tyrion looked at it
and sighed. “I had understood you were a band of brothers. Is this
the love a brother bears a brother? Where is the trust? The
friendship, the fond regard, the deep a ection that only men who
have fought and bled together can ever know?”
“All in time,” said Brown Ben Plumm.
“After you sign,” said Inkpots, sharpening a quill.
Kasporio the Cunning touched his sword hilt. “If you would like
to start the bleeding now, I will happ’ly oblige you.”
“How kind of you to o er,” said Tyrion. “I think not.”
Inkpots placed the parchments before Tyrion and handed him the
quill. “Here is your ink. From Old Volantis, this. ’Twill last as long
as proper maester’s black. All you need do is sign and pass the notes
to me. I’ll do the rest.”
Tyrion gave him a crooked grin. “Might I read them rst?”
“If you like. They are all the same, by and large. Except for the
ones at the bottom, but we’ll get to those in due course.”
Oh, I am sure we will. For most men, there was no cost to joining a
company, but he was not most men. He dipped the quill into the
inkpot, leaned over the rst parchment, paused, looked up. “Would
you prefer me to sign Yollo or Hugor Hill?”
Brown Ben crinkled up his eyes. “Would you prefer to be returned
to Yezzan’s heirs or just beheaded?”
The dwarf laughed and signed the parchment, Tyrion of House
Lannister. As he passed it left to Inkpots, he ri ed through the pile

underneath. “There are … what, fty? Sixty? I’d thought there were
ve hundred Second Sons.”
“Five hundred thirteen at present,” Inkpots said. “When you sign
our book, we will be ve hundred fourteen.”
“So only one in ten receives a note? That hardly seems fair. I
thought you were all share-and-share-alike in the free companies.”
He signed another sheet.
Brown Ben chuckled. “Oh, all share. But not alike. The Second
Sons are not unlike a family …”
“… and every family has its drooling cousins.” Tyrion signed
another note. The parchment crinkled crisply as he slid it toward
the paymaster. “There are cells down in the bowels of Casterly Rock
where my lord father kept the worst of ours.” He dipped his quill in
the inkpot. Tyrion of House Lannister, he scratched out, promising to
pay the bearer of the note one hundred golden dragons. Every stroke
of the quill leaves me a little poorer … or would, if I were not a beggar to
begin with. One day he might rue these signatures. But not this day.
He blew on the wet ink, slid the parchment to the paymaster, and
signed the one beneath. And again. And again. And again. “This
wounds me deeply, I will have you know,” he told them between
signatures. “In Westeros, the word of a Lannister is considered good
as gold.”
Inkpots shrugged. “This is not Westeros. On this side of the
narrow sea, we put our promises on paper.” As each sheet was
passed to him, he scattered ne sand across the signature to drink
up excess ink, shook it o , and set the note aside. “Debts written on
the wind tend to be … forgotten, shall we say?”
“Not by us.” Tyrion signed another sheet. And another. He had
found a rhythm now. “A Lannister always pays his debts.”
Plumm chuckled. “Aye, but a sellsword’s word is worthless.”
Well, yours is, thought Tyrion, and thank the gods for that. “True,
but I will not be a sellsword until I’ve signed your book.”
“Soon enough,” said Brown Ben. “After the notes.”
“I am dancing as fast as I can.” He wanted to laugh, but that
would have ruined the game. Plumm was enjoying this, and Tyrion
had no intention of spoiling his fun. Let him go on thinking that he’s

bent me over and fucked me up the arse, and I’ll go on buying steel
swords with parchment dragons. If ever he went back to Westeros to
claim his birthright, he would have all the gold of Casterly Rock to
make good on his promises. If not, well, he’d be dead, and his new
brothers could wipe their arses with these parchments. Perhaps
some might turn up in King’s Landing with their scraps in hand,
hoping to convince his sweet sister to make good on them. And
would that I could be a roach in the rushes to witness that.
The writing on the parchments changed about halfway down the
pile. The hundred-dragon notes were all for serjeants. Below them
the amounts suddenly grew larger. Now Tyrion was promising to
pay the bearer one thousand golden dragons. He shook his head,
laughed, signed. And again. And again. “So,” he said as he was
scrawling, “what will be my duties with the company?”
“You are too ugly to be Bokkoko’s butt boy,” said Kasporio, “but
you might do as arrow fodder.”
“Better than you know,” said Tyrion, refusing to rise to the bait.
“A small man with a big shield will drive the archers mad. A wiser
man than you once told me that.”
“You will work with Inkpots,” said Brown Ben Plumm.
“You will work for Inkpots,” said Inkpots. “Keeping books,
counting coin, writing contracts and letters.”
“Gladly,” said Tyrion. “I love books.”
“What else would you do?” sneered Kasporio. “Look at you. You
are not t to ght.”
“I once had charge of all the drains in Casterly Rock,” Tyrion said
mildly. “Some of them had been stopped up for years, but I soon
had them draining merrily away.” He dipped the quill in the ink
again. Another dozen notes, and he would be done. “Perhaps I could
supervise your camp followers. We can’t have the men stopped up,
now can we?”
That jape did not please Brown Ben. “Stay away from the
whores,” he warned. “Most o’ them are poxy, and they talk. You’re
not the rst escaped slave to join the company, but that don’t mean
we need to shout your presence. I won’t have you parading about
where you might be seen. Stay inside as much as you can, and shit

into your bucket. Too many eyes at the latrines. And never go
beyond our camp without my leave. We can dress you up in squire’s
steel, pretend you’re Jorah’s butt boy, but there’s some will see
right through that. Once Meereen is taken and we’re away to
Westeros, you can prance about all you like in gold and crimson.
Till then, though …”
“… I shall live beneath a rock and never make a sound. You have
my word on that.” Tyrion of House Lannister, he signed once more,
with a ourish. That was the last parchment. Three notes remained,
di erent from the rest. Two were written on ne vellum and made
out by name. For Kasporio the Cunning, ten thousand dragons. The
same for Inkpots, whose true name appeared to be Tybero Istarion.
“Tybero?” said Tyrion. “That sounds almost Lannister. Are you some
long-lost cousin?”
“Perhaps. I always pay my debts as well. It is expected of a
paymaster. Sign.”
He signed.
Brown Ben’s note was the last. That one had been inscribed upon
a sheepskin scroll. One hundred thousand golden dragons, fty hides of
fertile land, a castle, and a lordship. Well and well. This Plumm does not
come cheaply. Tyrion plucked at his scar and wondered if he ought
to make a show of indignation. When you bugger a man you expect
a squeal or two. He could curse and swear and rant of robbery,
refuse to sign for a time, then give in reluctantly, protesting all the
while. But he was sick of mummery, so instead he grimaced, signed,
and handed the scroll back to Brown Ben. “Your cock is as big as in
the stories,” he said. “Consider me well and truly fucked, Lord
Plumm.”
Brown Ben blew on his signature. “My pleasure, Imp. And now,
we make you one o’ us. Inkpots, fetch the book.”
The book was leather-bound with iron hinges, and large enough
to eat your supper o . Inside its heavy wooden boards were names
and dates going back more than a century. “The Second Sons are
amongst the oldest of the free companies,” Inkpots said as he was
turning pages. “This is the fourth book. The names of every man to
serve with us are written here. When they joined, where they

fought, how long they served, the manner of their deaths—all in the
book. You will nd famous names in here, some from your Seven
Kingdoms. Aegor Rivers served a year with us, before he left to
found the Golden Company. Bittersteel, you call him. The Bright
Prince, Aerion Targaryen, he was a Second Son. And Rodrik Stark,
the Wandering Wolf, him as well. No, not that ink. Here, use this.”
He unstoppered a new pot and set it down.
Tyrion cocked his head. “Red ink?”
“A tradition of the company,” Inkpots explained. “There was a
time when each new man wrote his name in his own blood, but as it
happens, blood makes piss-poor ink.”
“Lannisters love tradition. Lend me your knife.”
Inkpots raised an eyebrow, shrugged, slipped his dagger from its
sheath, and handed it across hilt rst. It still hurts, Halfmaester, thank
you very much, thought Tyrion, as he pricked the ball of his thumb.
He squeezed a fat drop of blood into the inkpot, traded the dagger
for a fresh quill, and scrawled, Tyrion of House Lannister, Lord of
Casterly Rock, in a big bold hand, just below Jorah Mormont’s far
more modest signature.
And it’s done. The dwarf rocked back on the camp stool. “Is that
all that you require of me? Don’t I need to swear an oath? Kill a
baby? Suck the captain’s cock?”
“Suck whatever you like.” Inkpots turned the book around and
dusted the page with a bit of ne sand. “For most of us, the
signature su ces, but I would hate to disappoint a new brother-inarms. Welcome to the Second Sons, Lord Tyrion.”
Lord Tyrion. The dwarf liked the sound of that. The Second Sons
might not enjoy the shining reputation of the Golden Company, but
they had won some famous victories over the centuries. “Have
other lords served with the company?”
“Landless lords,” said Brown Ben. “Like you, Imp.”
Tyrion hopped down from the stool. “My previous brother was
entirely unsatisfactory. I hope for more from my new ones. Now
how do I go about securing arms and armor?”
“Will you want a pig to ride as well?” asked Kasporio.

“Why, I did not know your wife was in the company,” said
Tyrion. “That’s kind of you to o er her, but I would prefer a horse.”
The bravo reddened, but Inkpots laughed aloud and Brown Ben
went so far as to chuckle. “Inkpots, show him to the wagons. He can
have his pick from the company steel. The girl too. Put a helm on
her, a bit o’ mail, might be some will take her for a boy.”
“Lord Tyrion, with me.” Inkpots held the tent ap to let him
waddle through. “I will have Snatch take you to the wagons. Get
your woman and meet him by the cook tent.”
“She is not my woman. Perhaps you should get her. All she does
of late is sleep and glare at me.”
“You need to beat her harder and fuck her more often,” the
paymaster o ered helpfully. “Bring her, leave her, do what you
will. Snatch will not care. Come nd me when you have your
armor, and I will start you on the ledgers.”
“As you wish.”
Tyrion found Penny asleep in a corner of their tent, curled up on
a thin straw pallet beneath a heap of soiled bedclothes. When he
touched her with the toe of his boot, she rolled over, blinked at
him, and yawned. “Hugor? What is it?”
“Talking again, are we?” It was better than her usual sullen
silence. All over an abandoned dog and pig. I saved the two of us from
slavery, you would think some gratitude might be in order. “If you sleep
any longer, you’re like to miss the war.”
“I’m sad.” She yawned again. “And tired. So tired.”
Tired or sick? Tyrion knelt beside her pallet. “You look pale.” He
felt her brow. Is it hot in here, or does she have a touch of fever? He
dared not ask that question aloud. Even hard men like the Second
Sons were terri ed of mounting the pale mare. If they thought
Penny was sick, they would drive her o without a moment’s
hesitation. They might even return us to Yezzan’s heirs, notes or no
notes. “I have signed their book. The old way, in blood. I am now a
Second Son.”
Penny sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “What about me?
Can I sign too?”

“I think not. Some free companies have been known to take
women, but … well, they are not Second Daughters, after all.”
“We,” she said. “If you’re one of them, you should say we, not
they. Has anyone seen Pretty Pig? Inkpots said he’d ask after her. Or
Crunch, has there been word of Crunch?”
Only if you trust Kasporio. Plumm’s not-so-cunning second-incommand claimed that three Yunkish slave-catchers were prowling
through the camps, asking after a pair of escaped dwarfs. One of
them was carrying a tall spear with a dog’s head impaled upon its
point, the way that Kaspo told it. Such tidings were not like to get
Penny out of bed, however. “No word as yet,” he lied. “Come. We
need to nd some armor for you.”
She gave him a wary look. “Armor? Why?”
“Something my old master-at-arms told me. ‘Never go to battle
naked, lad,’ he said. I take him at his word. Besides, now that I’m a
sellsword, I really ought to have a sword to sell.” She still showed
no signs of moving. Tyrion seized her by the wrist, pulled her to her
feet, and threw a stful of clothing into her face. “Dress. Wear the
cloak with the hood and keep your head down. We’re supposed to
be a pair of likely lads, just in case the slave-catchers are watching.”
Snatch was waiting by the cook tent chewing sourleaf when the
two dwarfs turned up, cloaked and hooded. “I hear the two o’ you
are going to ght for us,” the serjeant said. “That should have them
pissing in Meereen. Either o’ you ever killed a man?”
“I have,” said Tyrion. “I swat them down like ies.”
“What with?”
“An axe, a dagger, a choice remark. Though I’m deadliest with
my crossbow.”
Snatch scratched at his stubble with the point of his hook. “Nasty
thing, a crossbow. How many men you kill with that?”
“Nine.” His father counted for at least that many, surely. Lord of
Casterly Rock, Warden of the West, Shield of Lannisport, Hand of
the King, husband, brother, father, father, father.
“Nine.” Snatch snorted and spat out a mouthful of red slime.
Aiming for Tyrion’s feet, perhaps, but it landed on his knee. Plainly
that was what he thought of “nine.” The serjeant’s ngers were

stained a mottled red from the juice of the sourleaf he chewed. He
put two of them into his mouth and whistled. “Kem! Get over here,
you fucking pisspot.” Kem came running. “Take Lord and Lady Imp
to the wagons, have Hammer x them up with some company
steel.”
“Hammer might be passed-out drunk,” Kem cautioned.
“Piss in his face. That’ll wake him up.” Snatch turned back to
Tyrion and Penny. “We never had no bloody dwarfs before, but
boys we never lacked for. Sons o’ this whore or that one, little fools
run o from home to have adventures, butt boys, squires, and the
like. Some o’ their shit might be small enough to t imps. It’s the
shit they were wearing when they died, like as not, but I know that
won’t bother fuckers erce as you two. Nine, was it?” He shook his
head and walked away.
The Second Sons kept their company armor in six big wayns
drawn up near the center of their camp. Kem led the way, swinging
his spear as if it were a sta . “How does a King’s Landing lad end
up with a free company?” Tyrion asked him.
The lad gave him a wary squint. “Who told you I was from King’s
Landing?”
“No one.” Every word out of your mouth reeks of Flea Bottom. “Your
wits gave you away. There’s no one clever as a Kingslander, they
say.”
That seemed to startle him. “Who says that?”
“Everyone.” Me.
“Since when?”
Since I just made it up. “For ages,” he lied. “My father was wont to
say it. Did you know Lord Tywin, Kem?”
“The Hand. Once I saw him riding up the hill. His men had red
cloaks and little lions on their helms. I liked those helms.” His
mouth tightened. “I never liked the Hand, though. He sacked the
city. And then he smashed us on the Blackwater.”
“You were there?”
“With Stannis. Lord Tywin come up with Renly’s ghost and took
us in the ank. I dropped my spear and ran, but at the ships this
bloody knight said, ‘Where’s your spear, boy? We got no room for

cravens,’ and they buggered o and left me, and thousands more
besides. Later I heard how your father was sending them as fought
with Stannis to the Wall, so I made my way across the narrow sea
and joined up with the Second Sons.”
“Do you miss King’s Landing?”
“Some. I miss this boy, he … he was a friend of mine. And my
brother, Kennet, but he died on the bridge of ships.”
“Too many good men died that day.” Tyrion’s scar was itching
ercely. He picked at it with a ngernail.
“I miss the food too,” Kem said wistfully.
“Your mother’s cooking?”
“Rats wouldn’t eat my mother’s cooking. There was this pot shop,
though. No one ever made a bowl o’ brown like them. So thick you
could stand your spoon up in the bowl, with chunks of this and that.
You ever have yourself a bowl o’ brown, Halfman?”
“A time or two. Singer’s stew, I call it.”
“Why’s that?”
“It tastes so good it makes me want to sing.”
Kem liked that. “Singer’s stew. I’ll ask for that next time I get
back to Flea Bottom. What do you miss, Halfman?”
Jaime, thought Tyrion. Shae. Tysha. My wife, I miss my wife, the
wife I hardly knew. “Wine, whores, and wealth,” he answered.
“Especially the wealth. Wealth will buy you wine and whores.” It
will also buy you swords, and the Kems to wield them.
“Is it true the chamber pots in Casterly Rock are made of solid
gold?” Kem asked him.
“You should not believe everything you hear. Especially where
House Lannister is concerned.”
“They say all Lannisters are twisty snakes.”
“Snakes?” Tyrion laughed. “That sound you hear is my lord
father, slithering in his grave. We are lions, or so we like to say. But
it makes no matter, Kem. Step on a snake or a lion’s tail, you’ll end
up just as dead.”
By then they had reached the armory, such as it was. The smith,
this fabled Hammer, proved to be a freakish-looking hulk with a left
arm that appeared twice as thick as his right. “He’s drunk more than

not,” Kem said. “Brown Ben lets it go, but one day we’ll get us a
real armorer.” Hammer’s apprentice was a wiry red-haired youth
called Nail. Of course. What else? mused Tyrion. Hammer was
sleeping o a drunk when they reached the forge, just as Kem had
prophesied, but Nail had no objection to the two dwarfs clambering
through the wagons. “Crap iron, most of it,” he warned them, “but
you’re welcome to anything you can use.”
Under roofs of bent wood and sti ened leather, the wagon beds
were heaped high with old weaponry and armor. Tyrion took one
look and sighed, remembering the gleaming racks of swords and
spears and halberds in the armory of the Lannisters below Casterly
Rock. “This may take a while,” he declared.
“There’s sound steel here if you can nd it,” a deep voice
growled. “None of it is pretty, but it will stop a sword.”
A big knight stepped down from the back of a wagon, clad head
to heel in company steel. His left greave did not match his right, his
gorget was spotted with rust, his vambraces rich and ornate, inlaid
with niello owers. On his right hand was a gauntlet of lobstered
steel, on his left a ngerless mitt of rusted mail. The nipples on his
muscled breastplate had a pair of iron rings through them. His
greathelm sported a ram’s horns, one of which was broken.
When he took it o , he revealed the battered face of Jorah
Mormont.
He looks every inch a sellsword and not at all like the half-broken
thing we took from Yezzan’s cage, Tyrion re ected. His bruises had
mostly faded by now, and the swelling in his face had largely
subsided, so Mormont looked almost human once again … though
only vaguely like himself. The demon’s mask the slavers had burned
into his right cheek to mark him for a dangerous and disobedient
slave would never leave him. Ser Jorah had never been what one
might call a comely man. The brand had transformed his face into
something frightening.
Tyrion grinned. “As long as I look prettier than you, I will be
happy.” He turned to Penny. “You take that wagon. I’ll start with
this one.”

“It will go faster if we look together.” She plucked up a rusted
iron halfhelm, giggled, and stuck it on her head. “Do I look
fearsome?”
You look like a mummer girl with a pot on her head. “That’s a
halfhelm. You want a greathelm.” He found one, and swapped it for
the halfhelm.
“It’s too big.” Penny’s voice echoed hollowly inside the steel. “I
can’t see out.” She took the helm o and ung it aside. “What’s
wrong with the halfhelm?”
“It’s open-faced.” Tyrion pinched her nose. “I am fond of looking
at your nose. I would rather that you kept it.”
Her eyes got big. “You like my nose?”
Oh, Seven save me. Tyrion turned away and began rooting
amongst some piles of old armor toward the back of the wagon.
“Are there any other parts of me you like?” Penny asked.
Perhaps she meant that to sound playful. It sounded sad instead.
“I am fond of all of your parts,” Tyrion said, in hopes of ending any
further discussion of the subject, “and even fonder of mine own.”
“Why should we need armor? We’re only mummers. We just
pretend to ght.”
“You pretend very well,” said Tyrion, examining a shirt of heavy
iron mail so full of holes that it almost looked moth-eaten. What sort
of moths eat chainmail? “Pretending to be dead is one way to survive
a battle. Good armor is another.” Though there is precious little of that
here, I fear. At the Green Fork, he had fought in mismatched scraps
of plate from Lord Le ord’s wagons, with a spiked bucket helm that
made it look as if someone had upended a slops pail over his head.
This company steel was worse. Not just old and ill tting, but
dinted, cracked, and brittle. Is that dried blood, or only rust? He
sni ed at it but still could not be sure.
“Here’s a crossbow.” Penny showed it to him.
Tyrion glanced at it. “I cannot use a stirrup winch. My legs are
not long enough. A crank would serve me better.” Though, if truth
be told, he did not want a crossbow. They took too long to reload.
Even if he lurked by the latrine ditch waiting for some enemy to

take a squat, the chances of his loosing more than one quarrel
would not be good.
Instead he picked up a morningstar, gave it a swing, put it down
again. Too heavy. He passed over a warhammer (too long), a
studded mace (also too heavy), and half a dozen longswords before
he found a dirk he liked, a nasty piece of steel with a triangular
blade. “This might serve,” he said. The blade had a bit of rust on it,
but that would only make it nastier. He found a wood-and-leather
sheath that t and slipped the dirk inside.
“A little sword for a little man?” joked Penny.
“It’s a dirk and made for a big man.” Tyrion showed her an old
longsword. “This is a sword. Try it.”
Penny took it, swung it, frowned. “Too heavy.”
“Steel weighs more than wood. Chop through a man’s neck with
that thing, though, and his head is not like to turn into a melon.” He
took the sword back from her and inspected it more closely. “Cheap
steel. And notched. Here, see? I take back what I said. You need a
better blade to hack o heads.”
“I don’t want to hack o heads.”
“Nor should you. Keep your cuts below the knee. Calf, hamstring,
ankle … even giants fall if you slice their feet o . Once they’re
down, they’re no bigger than you.”
Penny looked as though she was about to cry. “Last night I
dreamed my brother was alive again. We were jousting before some
great lord, riding Crunch and Pretty Pig, and men were throwing
roses at us. We were so happy …”
Tyrion slapped her.
It was a soft blow, all in all, a little ick of the wrist, with hardly
any force behind it. It did not even leave a mark upon her cheek.
But her eyes lled with tears all the same.
“If you want to dream, go back to sleep,” he told her. “When you
wake up, we’ll still be escaped slaves in the middle of a siege.
Crunch is dead. The pig as well, most like. Now nd some armor
and put it on, and never mind where it pinches. The mummer show
is over. Fight or hide or shit yourself, as you like, but whatever you
decide to do, you’ll do it clad in steel.”

Penny touched the cheek he’d slapped. “We should never have
run. We’re not sellswords. We’re not any kind of swords. It wasn’t
so bad with Yezzan. It wasn’t. Nurse was cruel sometimes but
Yezzan never was. We were his favorites, his … his …”
“Slaves. The word you want is slaves.”
“Slaves,” she said, ushing. “We were his special slaves, though.
Just like Sweets. His treasures.”
His pets, thought Tyrion. And he loved us so much that he sent us to
the pit, to be devoured by lions.
She was not all wrong. Yezzan’s slaves ate better than many
peasants back in the Seven Kingdoms and were less like to starve to
death come winter. Slaves were chattels, aye. They could be bought
and sold, whipped and branded, used for the carnal pleasure of their
owners, bred to make more slaves. In that sense they were no more
than dogs or horses. But most lords treated their dogs and horses
well enough. Proud men might shout that they would sooner die
free than live as slaves, but pride was cheap. When the steel struck
the int, such men were rare as dragon’s teeth; elsewise the world
would not have been so full of slaves. There has never been a slave
who did not choose to be a slave, the dwarf re ected. Their choice may
be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.
Tyrion Lannister did not except himself. His tongue had earned
him some stripes on the back in the beginning, but soon enough he
had learned the tricks of pleasing Nurse and the noble Yezzan. Jorah
Mormont had fought longer and harder, but he would have come to
the same place in the end.
And Penny, well …
Penny had been searching for a new master since the day her
brother Groat had lost his head. She wants someone to take care of
her, someone to tell her what to do.
It would have been too cruel to say so, however. Instead Tyrion
said, “Yezzan’s special slaves did not escape the pale mare. They’re
dead, the lot of them. Sweets was the rst to go.” Their mammoth
master had died on the day of their escape, Brown Ben Plumm had
told him. Neither he nor Kasporio nor any of the other sellswords
knew the fate of the denizens of Yezzan’s grotesquerie … but if

Pretty Penny needed lies to stop her mooning, lie to her he would.
“If you want to be a slave again, I will nd you a kind master when
this war is done, and sell you for enough gold to get me home,”
Tyrion promised her. “I’ll nd you some nice Yunkishman to give
you another pretty golden collar, with little bells on it that will
tinkle everywhere you go. First, though, you will need to survive
what’s coming. No one buys dead mummers.”
“Or dead dwarfs,” said Jorah Mormont. “We are all like to be
feeding worms by the time this battle is done. The Yunkai’i have
lost this war, though it may take them some time to know it.
Meereen has an army of Unsullied infantry, the nest in the world.
And Meereen has dragons. Three of them, once the queen returns.
She will. She must. Our side consists of two score Yunkish lordlings,
each with his own half-trained monkey men. Slaves on stilts, slaves
in chains … they may have troops of blind men and palsied children
too, I would not put it past them.”
“Oh, I know,” said Tyrion. “The Second Sons are on the losing
side. They need to turn their cloaks again and do it now.” He
grinned. “Leave that to me.”

THE KINGBREAKER

A

pale shadow and a dark, the two conspirators came together
in the quiet of the armory on the Great Pyramid’s second level,
amongst racks of spears, sheaves of quarrels, and walls hung with
trophies from forgotten battles.
“Tonight,” said Skahaz mo Kandaq. The brass face of a blood bat
peered out from beneath the hood of his patchwork cloak. “All my
men will be in place. The word is Groleo.”
“Groleo.” That is tting, I suppose. “Yes. What was done to
him … you were at court?”
“One guardsman amongst forty. All waiting for the empty tabard
on the throne to speak the command so we might cut down
Bloodbeard and the rest. Do you think the Yunkai’i would ever have
dared present Daenerys with the head of her hostage?”
No, thought Selmy. “Hizdahr seemed distraught.”
“Sham. His own kin of Loraq were returned unharmed. You saw.
The Yunkai’i played us a mummer’s farce, with noble Hizdahr as
chief mummer. The issue was never Yurkhaz zo Yunzak. The other
slavers would gladly have trampled that old fool themselves. This
was to give Hizdahr a pretext to kill the dragons.”
Ser Barristan chewed on that. “Would he dare?”
“He dared to kill his queen. Why not her pets? If we do not act,
Hizdahr will hesitate for a time, to give proof of his reluctance and
allow the Wise Masters the chance to rid him of the Stormcrow and
the bloodrider. Then he will act. They want the dragons dead before
the Volantene eet arrives.”

Aye, they would. It all t. That did not mean Barristan Selmy liked
it any better. “That will not happen.” His queen was the Mother of
Dragons; he would not allow her children to come to harm. “The
hour of the wolf. The blackest part of night, when all the world’s
asleep.” He had rst heard those words from Tywin Lannister
outside the walls of Duskendale. He gave me a day to bring out Aerys.
Unless I returned with the king by dawn of the following day, he would
take the town with steel and re, he told me. It was the hour of the wolf
when I went in and the hour of the wolf when we emerged. “Grey
Worm and the Unsullied will close and bar the gates at rst light.”
“Better to attack at rst light,” Skahaz said. “Burst from the gates
and swarm across the siege lines, smash the Yunkai’i as they come
stumbling from their beds.”
“No.” The two of them had argued this before. “There is a peace,
signed and sealed by Her Grace the queen. We will not be the rst
to break it. Once we have taken Hizdahr, we will form a council to
rule in his place and demand that the Yunkai’i return our hostages
and withdraw their armies. Should they refuse, then and only then
will we inform them that the peace is broken, and go forth to give
them battle. Your way is dishonorable.”
“Your way is stupid,” the Shavepate said. “The hour is ripe. Our
freedmen are ready. Hungry.”
That much was true, Selmy knew. Symon Stripeback of the Free
Brothers and Mollono Yos Dob of the Stalwart Shields were both
eager for battle, intent on proving themselves and washing out all
the wrongs they had su ered in a tide of Yunkish blood. Only
Marselen of the Mother’s Men shared Ser Barristan’s doubts. “We
discussed this. You agreed it would be my way.”
“I agreed,” the Shavepate grumbled, “but that was before Groleo.
The head. The slavers have no honor.”
“We do,” said Ser Barristan.
The Shavepate muttered something in Ghiscari, then said, “As you
wish. Though we will rue your old man’s honor before this game is
done, I think. What of Hizdahr’s guards?”
“His Grace keeps two men by him when he sleeps. One on the
door of his bedchamber, a second within, in an adjoining alcove.

Tonight it will be Khrazz and Steelskin.”
“Khrazz,” the Shavepate grumbled. “That I do not like.”
“It need not come to blood,” Ser Barristan told him. “I mean to
talk to Hizdahr. If he understands we do not intend to kill him, he
may command his guards to yield.”
“And if not? Hizdahr must not escape us.”
“He will not escape.” Selmy did not fear Khrazz, much less
Steelskin. They were only pit ghters. Hizdahr’s fearsome collection
of former ghting slaves made indi erent guards at best. Speed and
strength and ferocity they had, and some skill at arms as well, but
blood games were poor training for protecting kings. In the pits
their foes were announced with horns and drums, and after the
battle was done and won the victors could have their wounds bound
up and qua some milk of the poppy for the pain, knowing that the
threat was past and they were free to drink and feast and whore
until the next ght. But the battle was never truly done for a knight
of the Kingsguard. Threats came from everywhere and nowhere, at
any time of day or night. No trumpets announced the foe: vassals,
servants, friends, brothers, sons, even wives, any of them might
have knives concealed beneath their cloaks and murder hidden in
their hearts. For every hour of ghting, a Kingsguard knight spent
ten thousand hours watching, waiting, standing silent in the
shadows. King Hizdahr’s pit ghters were already growing bored
and restive with their new duties, and bored men were lax, slow to
react.
“I shall deal with Khrazz,” said Ser Barristan. “Just make certain I
do not need to deal with any Brazen Beasts as well.”
“Have no fear. We will have Marghaz in chains before he can
make mischief. I told you, the Brazen Beasts are mine.”
“You say you have men amongst the Yunkishmen?”
“Sneaks and spies. Reznak has more.”
Reznak cannot be trusted. He smells too sweet and feels too foul.
“Someone needs to free our hostages. Unless we get our people
back, the Yunkai’i will use them against us.”
Skahaz snorted through the noseholes of his mask. “Easy to speak
of rescue. Harder to do. Let the slavers threaten.”

“And if they do more than threaten?”
“Would you miss them so much, old man? A eunuch, a savage,
and a sell sword?”
Hero, Jhogo, and Daario. “Jhogo is the queen’s bloodrider, blood
of her blood. They came out of the Red Waste together. Hero is
Grey Worm’s second-in-command. And Daario …” She loves Daario.
He had seen it in her eyes when she looked at him, heard it in her
voice when she spoke of him. “… Daario is vain and rash, but he is
dear to Her Grace. He must be rescued, before his Stormcrows
decide to take matters into their own hands. It can be done. I once
brought the queen’s father safely out of Duskendale, where he was
being held captive by a rebel lord, but …”
“… you could never hope to pass unnoticed amongst the Yunkai’i.
Every man of them knows your face by now.”
I could hide my face, like you, thought Selmy, but he knew the
Shavepate was right. Duskendale had been a lifetime ago. He was
too old for such heroics. “Then we must needs nd some other way.
Some other rescuer. Someone known to the Yunkishmen, whose
presence in their camp might go unnoticed …”
“Daario calls you Ser Grandfather,” Skahaz reminded him. “I will
not say what he calls me. If you and I were the hostages, would he
risk his skin for us?”
Not likely, he thought, but he said, “He might.”
“Daario might piss on us if we were burning. Elsewise do not look
to him for help. Let the Stormcrows choose another captain, one
who knows his place. If the queen does not return, the world will be
one sellsword short. Who will grieve?”
“And when she does return?”
“She will weep and tear her hair and curse the Yunkai’i. Not us.
No blood on our hands. You can comfort her. Tell her some tale of
the old days, she likes those. Poor Daario, her brave captain … she
will never forget him, no … but better for all of us if he is dead,
yes? Better for Daenerys too.”
Better for Daenerys, and for Westeros. Daenerys Targaryen loved
her captain, but that was the girl in her, not the queen. Prince
Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna, and thousands died for it. Daemon

Blackfyre loved the rst Daenerys, and rose in rebellion when denied
her. Bittersteel and Bloodraven both loved Shiera Seastar, and the Seven
Kingdoms bled. The Prince of Dragon ies loved Jenny of Oldstones so
much he cast aside a crown, and Westeros paid the bride price in
corpses. All three of the sons of the fth Aegon had wed for love, in
de ance of their father’s wishes. And because that unlikely monarch
had himself followed his heart when he chose his queen, he allowed
his sons to have their way, making bitter enemies where he might
have had fast friends. Treason and turmoil followed, as night
follows day, ending at Summerhall in sorcery, re, and grief.
Her love for Daario is poison. A slower poison than the locusts, but in
the end as deadly. “There is still Jhogo,” Ser Barristan said. “Him,
and Hero. Both precious to Her Grace.”
“We have hostages as well,” Skahaz Shavepate reminded him. “If
the slavers kill one of ours, we kill one of theirs.”
For a moment Ser Barristan did not know whom he meant. Then
it came to him. “The queen’s cupbearers?”
“Hostages,” insisted Skahaz mo Kandaq. “Grazdar and Qezza are
the blood of the Green Grace. Mezzara is of Merreq, Kezmya is
Pahl, Azzak Ghazeen. Bhakaz is Loraq, Hizdahr’s own kin. All are
sons and daughters of the pyramids. Zhak, Quazzar, Uhlez, Hazkar,
Dhazak, Yherizan, all children of Great Masters.”
“Innocent girls and sweet-faced boys.” Ser Barristan had come to
know them all during the time they served the queen, Grazhar with
his dreams of glory, shy Mezzara, lazy Miklaz, vain, pretty Kezmya,
Qezza with her big soft eyes and angel’s voice, Dhazzar the dancer,
and the rest. “Children.”
“Children of the Harpy. Only blood can pay for blood.”
“So said the Yunkishman who brought us Groleo’s head.”
“He was not wrong.”
“I will not permit it.”
“What use are hostages if they may not be touched?”
“Mayhaps we might o er three of the children for Daario, Hero,
and Jhogo,” Ser Barristan allowed. “Her Grace—”
“—is not here. It is for you and me to do what must be done. You
know that I am right.”

“Prince Rhaegar had two children,” Ser Barristan told him.
“Rhaenys was a little girl, Aegon a babe in arms. When Tywin
Lannister took King’s Landing, his men killed both of them. He
served the bloody bodies up in crimson cloaks, a gift for the new
king.” And what did Robert say when he saw them? Did he smile?
Barristan Selmy had been badly wounded on the Trident, so he had
been spared the sight of Lord Tywin’s gift, but oft he wondered. If I
had seen him smile over the red ruins of Rhaegar’s children, no army on
this earth could have stopped me from killing him. “I will not su er the
murder of children. Accept that, or I’ll have no part of this.”
Skahaz chuckled. “You are a stubborn old man. Your sweet-faced
boys will only grow up to be Sons of the Harpy. Kill them now or
kill them then.”
“You kill men for the wrongs they have done, not the wrongs that
they may do someday.”
The Shavepate took an axe down o the wall, inspected it, and
grunted. “So be it. No harm to Hizdahr or our hostages. Will that
content you, Ser Grandfather?”
Nothing about this will content me. “It will serve. The hour of the
wolf. Remember.”
“I am not like to forget, ser.” Though the bat’s brass mouth did
not move, Ser Barristan could sense the grin beneath the mask.
“Long has Kandaq waited for this night.”
That is what I fear. If King Hizdahr was innocent, what they did
this day would be treason. But how could he be innocent? Selmy
had heard him urging Daenerys to taste the poisoned locusts,
shouting at his men to slay the dragon. If we do not act, Hizdahr will
kill the dragons and open the gates to the queen’s enemies. We have no
choice in this. Yet no matter how he turned and twisted this, the old
knight could nd no honor in it.
The rest of that long day raced past as swiftly as a snail.
Elsewhere, he knew, King Hizdahr was consulting with Reznak
mo Reznak, Marghaz zo Loraq, Galazza Galare, and his other
Meereenese advisors, deciding how best to respond to Yunkai’s
demands … but Barristan Selmy was no longer a part of such
councils. Nor did he have a king to guard. Instead he made the

rounds of the pyramid from top to bottom, to ascertain that the
sentries were all at their posts. That took most of the morning. He
spent that afternoon with his orphans, even took up sword and
shield himself to provide a sterner test for a few of the older lads.
Some of them had been training for the ghting pits when
Daenerys Targaryen took Meereen and freed them from their
chains. Those had had a good acquaintance with sword and spear
and battle-axe even before Ser Barristan got hold of them. A few
might well be ready. The boy from the Basilisk Isles, for a start. Tumco
Lho. Black as maester’s ink he was, but fast and strong, the best
natural swordsman Selmy had seen since Jaime Lannister. Larraq as
well. The Lash. Ser Barristan did not approve of his ghting style,
but there was no doubting his skills. Larraq had years of work
ahead of him before he mastered proper knightly weapons, sword
and lance and mace, but he was deadly with his whip and trident.
The old knight had warned him that the whip would be useless
against an armored foe … until he saw how Larraq used it, snapping
it around the legs of his opponents to yank them o their feet. No
knight as yet, but a erce ghter.
Larraq and Tumco were his best. After them the Lhazarene, the
one the other boys called Red Lamb, though as yet that one was all
ferocity and no technique. Perhaps the brothers too, three lowborn
Ghiscari enslaved to pay their father’s debts.
That made six. Six out of twenty-seven. Selmy might have hoped
for more, but six was a good beginning. The other boys were
younger for the most part, and more familiar with looms and plows
and chamber pots than swords and shields, but they worked hard
and learned quickly. A few years as squires, and he might have six
more knights to give his queen. As for those who would never be
ready, well, not every boy was meant to be a knight. The realm
needs candlemakers and innkeeps and armorers as well. That was as
true in Meereen as it was in Westeros.
As he watched them at their drills, Ser Barristan pondered raising
Tumco and Larraq to knighthood then and there, and mayhaps the
Red Lamb too. It required a knight to make a knight, and if
something should go awry tonight, dawn might nd him dead or in

a dungeon. Who would dub his squires then? On the other hand, a
young knight’s repute derived at least in part from the honor of the
man who conferred knighthood on him. It would do his lads no
good at all if it was known that they were given their spurs by a
traitor, and might well land them in the dungeon next to him. They
deserve better, Ser Barristan decided. Better a long life as a squire than
a short one as a soiled knight.
As the afternoon melted into evening, he bid his charges to lay
down their swords and shields and gather round. He spoke to them
about what it meant to be a knight. “It is chivalry that makes a true
knight, not a sword,” he said. “Without honor, a knight is no more
than a common killer. It is better to die with honor than to live
without it.” The boys looked at him strangely, he thought, but one
day they would understand.
Afterward, back at the apex of the pyramid, Ser Barristan found
Missandei amongst piles of scrolls and books, reading. “Stay here
tonight, child,” he told her. “Whatever happens, whatever you see
or hear, do not leave the queen’s chambers.”
“This one hears,” the girl said. “If she may ask—”
“Best not.” Ser Barristan stepped out alone onto the terrace
gardens. I am not made for this, he re ected as he looked out over
the sprawling city. The pyramids were waking, one by one, lanterns
and torches ickering to life as shadows gathered in the streets
below. Plots, ploys, whispers, lies, secrets within secrets, and somehow I
have become part of them.
Perhaps by now he should have grown used to such things. The
Red Keep had its secrets too. Even Rhaegar. The Prince of
Dragonstone had never trusted him as he had trusted Arthur Dayne.
Harrenhal was proof of that. The year of the false spring.
The memory was still bitter. Old Lord Whent had announced the
tourney shortly after a visit from his brother, Ser Oswell Whent of
the Kingsguard. With Varys whispering in his ear, King Aerys
became convinced that his son was conspiring to depose him, that
Whent’s tourney was but a ploy to give Rhaegar a pretext for
meeting with as many great lords as could be brought together.
Aerys had not set foot outside the Red Keep since Duskendale, yet

suddenly he announced that he would accompany Prince Rhaegar to
Harrenhal, and everything had gone awry from there.
If I had been a better knight … if I had unhorsed the prince in that last
tilt, as I unhorsed so many others, it would have been for me to choose
the queen of love and beauty …
Rhaegar had chosen Lyanna Stark of Winterfell. Barristan Selmy
would have made a di erent choice. Not the queen, who was not
present. Nor Elia of Dorne, though she was good and gentle; had
she been chosen, much war and woe might have been avoided. His
choice would have been a young maiden not long at court, one of
Elia’s companions … though compared to Ashara Dayne, the
Dornish princess was a kitchen drab.
Even after all these years, Ser Barristan could still recall Ashara’s
smile, the sound of her laughter. He had only to close his eyes to
see her, with her long dark hair tumbling about her shoulders and
those haunting purple eyes. Daenerys has the same eyes. Sometimes
when the queen looked at him, he felt as if he were looking at
Ashara’s daughter …
But Ashara’s daughter had been stillborn, and his fair lady had
thrown herself from a tower soon after, mad with grief for the child
she had lost, and perhaps for the man who had dishonored her at
Harrenhal as well. She died never knowing that Ser Barristan had
loved her. How could she? He was a knight of the Kingsguard, sworn
to celibacy. No good could have come from telling her his feelings.
No good came from silence either. If I had unhorsed Rhaegar and
crowned Ashara queen of love and beauty, might she have looked to me
instead of Stark?
He would never know. But of all his failures, none haunted
Barristan Selmy so much as that.
The sky was overcast, the air hot, muggy, oppressive, yet there
was something in it that made his spine tingle. Rain, he thought. A
storm is coming. If not tonight, upon the morrow. Ser Barristan
wondered if he would live to see it. If Hizdahr has his own Spider, I
am as good as dead. Should it come to that, he meant to die as he
had lived, with his longsword in his hand.

When the last light had faded in the west, behind the sails of the
prowling ships on Slaver’s Bay, Ser Barristan went back inside,
summoned a pair of serving men, and told them to heat some water
for a bath. Sparring with his squires in the afternoon heat had left
him feeling soiled and sweaty.
The water, when it came, was only lukewarm, but Selmy lingered
in the bath until it had grown cold and scrubbed his skin till it was
raw. Clean as he had ever been, he rose, dried himself, and clad
himself in whites. Stockings, smallclothes, silken tunic, padded
jerkin, all fresh-washed and bleached. Over that he donned the
armor that the queen had given him as a token of her esteem. The
mail was gilded, nely wrought, the links as supple as good leather,
the plate enameled, hard as ice and bright as new-fallen snow. His
dagger went on one hip, his longsword on the other, hung from a
white leather belt with golden buckles. Last of all he took down his
long white cloak and fastened it about his shoulders.
The helm he left upon its hook. The narrow eye slit limited his
vision, and he needed to be able to see for what was to come. The
halls of the pyramid were dark at night, and foes could come at you
from either side. Besides, though the ornate dragon’s wings that
adorned the helm were splendid to look upon, they could too easily
catch a sword or axe. He would leave them for his next tourney if
the Seven should grant him one.
Armed and armored, the old knight waited, sitting in the gloom
of his small chamber adjoining the queen’s apartments. The faces of
all the kings that he had served and failed oated before him in the
darkness, and the faces of the brothers who had served beside him
in the Kingsguard as well. He wondered how many of them would
have done what he was about to do. Some, surely. But not all. Some
would not have hesitated to strike down the Shavepate as a traitor.
Outside the pyramid, it began to rain. Ser Barristan sat alone in the
dark, listening. It sounds like tears, he thought. It sounds like dead
kings, weeping.
Then it was time to go.
The Great Pyramid of Meereen had been built as an echo to the
Great Pyramid of Ghis whose collossal ruins Lomas Longstrider had

once visited. Like its ancient predecessor, whose red marble halls
were now the haunt of bats and spiders, the Meereenese pyramid
boasted three-and-thirty levels, that number being somehow sacred
to the gods of Ghis. Ser Barristan began the long descent alone, his
white cloak rippling behind him as he started down. He took the
servants’ steps, not the grand stairways of veined marble, but the
narrower, steeper, straighter stairs hidden within the thick brick
walls.
Twelve levels down he found the Shavepate waiting, his coarse
features still hidden by the mask he had worn that morning, the
blood bat. Six Brazen Beasts were with him. All were masked as
insects, identical to one another.
Locusts, Selmy realized. “Groleo,” he said.
“Groleo,” one of the locusts replied.
“I have more locusts if you need them,” said Skahaz.
“Six should serve. What of the men on the doors?”
“Mine. You will have no trouble.”
Ser Barristan clasped the Shavepate by the arm. “Shed no blood
unless you must. Come the morrow we will convene a council and
tell the city what we’ve done and why.”
“As you say. Good fortune to you, old man.”
They went their separate ways. The Brazen Beasts fell in behind
Ser Barristan as he continued his descent.
The king’s apartments were buried in the very heart of the
pyramid, on the sixteenth and seventeenth levels. When Selmy
reached those oors, he found the doors to the interior of the
pyramid chained shut, with a pair of Brazen Beasts posted as guards.
Beneath the hoods of their patchwork cloaks, one was a rat, the
other a bull.
“Groleo,” Ser Barristan said.
“Groleo,” the bull returned. “Third hall to the right.” The rat
unlocked the chain. Ser Barristan and his escort stepped through
into a narrow, torchlit servants’ corridor of red and black brick.
Their footsteps echoed on the oors as they strode past two halls
and took the third one to the right.

Outside the carved hardwood doors to the king’s chambers stood
Steelskin, a younger pit ghter, not yet regarded as of the rst
rank. His cheeks and brow were scarred with intricate tattoos in
green and black, ancient Valyrian sorcerer’s signs that supposedly
made his esh and skin as hard as steel. Similar markings covered
his chest and arms, though whether they would actually stop a
sword or axe remained to be seen.
Even without them, Steelskin looked formidable—a lean and wiry
youth who overtopped Ser Barristan by half a foot. “Who goes
there?” he called out, swinging his longaxe sideways to bar their
way. When he saw Ser Barristan, with the brass locusts behind him,
he lowered it again. “Old Ser.”
“If it please the king, I must needs have words with him.”
“The hour is late.”
“The hour is late, but the need is urgent.”
“I can ask.” Steelskin slammed the butt of his longaxe against the
door to the king’s apartments. A slidehole opened. A child’s eye
appeared. A child’s voice called through the door. Steelskin replied.
Ser Barristan heard the sound of a heavy bar being drawn back. The
door swung open.
“Only you,” said Steelskin. “The beasts wait here.”
“As you wish.” Ser Barristan nodded to the locusts. One returned
his nod. Alone, Selmy slipped through the door.
Dark and windowless, surrounded on all sides by brick walls eight
feet thick, the chambers that the king had made his own were large
and luxurious within. Great beams of black oak supported the high
ceilings. The oors were covered with silk carpets out of Qarth. On
the walls were priceless tapestries, ancient and much faded,
depicting the glory of the Old Empire of Ghis. The largest of them
showed the last survivors of a defeated Valyrian army passing
beneath the yoke and being chained. The archway leading to the
royal bedchamber was guarded by a pair of sandalwood lovers,
shaped and smoothed and oiled. Ser Barristan found them
distasteful, though no doubt they were meant to be arousing. The
sooner we are gone from this place, the better.

An iron brazier gave the only light. Beside it stood two of the
queen’s cupbearers, Draqaz and Qezza. “Miklaz has gone to wake
the king,” said Qezza. “May we bring you wine, ser?”
“No. I thank you.”
“You may sit,” said Draqaz, indicating a bench.
“I prefer to stand.” He could hear voices drifting through the
archway from the bedchamber. One of them was the king’s.
It was still a good few moments before King Hizdahr zo Loraq,
Fourteenth of That Noble Name, emerged yawning, knotting the
sash that closed his robe. The robe was green satin, richly worked
with pearls and silver thread. Under it the king was quite naked.
That was good. Naked men felt vulnerable and were less inclined to
acts of suicidal heroism.
The woman Ser Barristan glimpsed peering through the archway
from behind a gauzy curtain was naked as well, her breasts and hips
only partially concealed by the blowing silk.
“Ser Barristan.” Hizdahr yawned again. “What hour is it? Is there
news of my sweet queen?”
“None, Your Grace.”
Hizdahr sighed. “ ‘Your Magni cence,’ please. Though at this hour,
‘Your Sleepiness’ would be more apt.” The king crossed to the
sideboard to pour himself a cup of wine, but only a trickle remained
in the bottom of the agon. A icker of annoyance crossed his face.
“Miklaz, wine. At once.”
“Yes, Your Worship.”
“Take Draqaz with you. One agon of Arbor gold, and one of that
sweet red. None of our yellow piss, thank you. And the next time I
nd my agon dry, I may have to take a switch to those pretty pink
cheeks of yours.” The boy went running o , and the king turned
back to Selmy. “I dreamed you found Daenerys.”
“Dreams can lie, Your Grace.”
“ ‘Your Radiance’ would serve. What brings you to me at this
hour, ser? Some trouble in the city?”
“The city is tranquil.”
“Is it so?” Hizdahr looked confused. “Why have you come?”
“To ask a question. Magni cence, are you the Harpy?”

Hizdahr’s wine cup slipped through his ngers, bounced o the
carpet, rolled. “You come to my bedchamber in the black of night
and ask me that? Are you mad?” It was only then that the king
seemed to notice that Ser Barristan was wearing his plate and mail.
“What … why … how dare you …”
“Was the poison your work, Magni cence?”
King Hizdahr backed away a step. “The locusts? That … that was
the Dornishman. Quentyn, the so-called prince. Ask Reznak if you
doubt me.”
“Have you proof of that? Has Reznak?”
“No, else I would have had them seized. Perhaps I should do so in
any case. Marghaz will wring a confession out of them, I do not
doubt. They’re all poisoners, these Dornish. Reznak says they
worship snakes.”
“They eat snakes,” said Ser Barristan. “It was your pit, your box,
your seats. Sweet wine and soft cushions, gs and melons and
honeyed locusts. You provided all. You urged Her Grace to try the
locusts but never tasted one yourself.”
“I … hot spices do not agree with me. She was my wife. My
queen. Why would I want to poison her?”
Was, he says. He believes her dead. “Only you can answer that,
Magni cence. It might be that you wished to put another woman in
her place.” Ser Barristan nodded at the girl peering timidly from the
bedchamber. “That one, perhaps?”
The king looked around wildly. “Her? She’s nothing. A bedslave.”
He raised his hands. “I misspoke. Not a slave. A free woman.
Trained in pleasure. Even a king has needs, she … she is none of
your concern, ser. I would never harm Daenerys. Never.”
“You urged the queen to try the locusts. I heard you.”
“I thought she might enjoy them.” Hizdahr retreated another step.
“Hot and sweet at once.”
“Hot and sweet and poisoned. With mine own ears I heard you
commanding the men in the pit to kill Drogon. Shouting at them.”
Hizdahr licked his lips. “The beast devoured Barsena’s esh.
Dragons prey on men. It was killing, burning …”

“… burning men who meant harm to your queen. Harpy’s Sons,
as like as not. Your friends.”
“Not my friends.”
“You say that, yet when you told them to stop killing they
obeyed. Why would they do that if you were not one of them?”
Hizdahr shook his head. This time he did not answer.
“Tell me true,” Ser Barristan said, “did you ever love her, even a
little? Or was it just the crown you lusted for?”
“Lust? You dare speak to me of lust?” The king’s mouth twisted in
anger. “I lusted for the crown, aye … but not half so much as she
lusted for her sellsword. Perhaps it was her precious captain who
tried to poison her, for putting him aside. And if I had eaten of his
locusts too, well, so much the better.”
“Daario is a killer but not a poisoner.” Ser Barristan moved closer
to the king. “Are you the Harpy?” This time he put his hand on the
hilt of his longsword. “Tell me true, and I promise you shall have a
swift, clean death.”
“You presume too much, ser,” said Hizdahr. “I am done with
these questions, and with you. You are dismissed from my service.
Leave Meereen at once and I will let you live.”
“If you are not the Harpy, give me his name.” Ser Barristan pulled
his sword from the scabbard. Its sharp edge caught the light from
the brazier, became a line of orange re.
Hizdahr broke. “Khrazz!” he shrieked, stumbling backwards
toward his bedchamber. “Khrazz! Khrazz!”
Ser Barristan heard a door open, somewhere to his left. He turned
in time to see Khrazz emerge from behind a tapestry. He moved
slowly, still groggy from sleep, but his weapon of choice was in his
hand: a Dothraki arakh, long and curved. A slasher’s sword, made to
deliver deep, slicing cuts from horseback. A murderous blade against
half-naked foes, in the pit or on the battle eld. But here at close
quarters, the arakh’s length would tell against it, and Barristan
Selmy was clad in plate and mail.
“I am here for Hizdahr,” the knight said. “Throw down your steel
and stand aside, and no harm need come to you.”

Khrazz laughed. “Old man. I will eat your heart.” The two men
were of a height, but Khrazz was two stone heavier and forty years
younger, with pale skin, dead eyes, and a crest of bristly red-black
hair that ran from his brow to the base of his neck.
“Then come,” said Barristan the Bold.
Khrazz came.
For the rst time all day, Selmy felt certain. This is what I was
made for, he thought. The dance, the sweet steel song, a sword in my
hand and a foe before me.
The pit ghter was fast, blazing fast, as quick as any man Ser
Barristan had ever fought. In those big hands, the arakh became a
whistling blur, a steel storm that seemed to come at the old knight
from three directions at once. Most of the cuts were aimed at his
head. Khrazz was no fool. Without a helm, Selmy was most
vulnerable above the neck.
He blocked the blows calmly, his longsword meeting each slash
and turning it aside. The blades rang and rang again. Ser Barristan
retreated. On the edge of his vision, he saw the cupbearers
watching with eyes as big and white as chicken eggs. Khrazz cursed
and turned a high cut into a low one, slipping past the old knight’s
blade for once, only to have his blow scrape uselessly o a white
steel greave. Selmy’s answering slash found the pit ghter’s left
shoulder, parting the ne linen to bite the esh beneath. His yellow
tunic began to turn pink, then red.
“Only cowards dress in iron,” Khrazz declared, circling. No one
wore armor in the ghting pits. It was blood the crowds came for:
death, dismemberment, and shrieks of agony, the music of the
scarlet sands.
Ser Barristan turned with him. “This coward is about to kill you,
ser.” The man was no knight, but his courage had earned him that
much courtesy. Khrazz did not know how to ght a man in armor.
Ser Barristan could see it in his eyes: doubt, confusion, the
beginnings of fear. The pit ghter came on again, screaming this
time, as if sound could slay his foe where steel could not. The arakh
slashed low, high, low again.

Selmy blocked the cuts at his head and let his armor stop the rest,
whilst his own blade opened the pit ghter’s cheek from ear to
mouth, then traced a raw red gash across his chest. Blood welled
from Khrazz’s wounds. That only seemed to make him wilder. He
seized the brazier with his o hand and ipped it, scattering embers
and hot coals at Selmy’s feet. Ser Barristan leapt over them. Khrazz
slashed at his arm and caught him, but the arakh could only chip the
hard enamel before it met the steel below.
“In the pit that would have taken your arm o , old man.”
“We are not in the pit.”
“Take o that armor!”
“It is not too late to throw down your steel. Yield.”
“Die,” spat Khrazz … but as he lifted his arakh, its tip grazed one
of the wall hangings and hung. That was all the chance Ser Barristan
required. He slashed open the pit ghter’s belly, parried the arakh
as it wrenched free, then nished Khrazz with a quick thrust to the
heart as the pit ghter’s entrails came sliding out like a nest of
greasy eels.
Blood and viscera stained the king’s silk carpets. Selmy took a
step back. The longsword in his hand was red for half its length.
Here and there the carpets had begun to smolder where some of the
scattered coals had fallen. He could hear poor Qezza sobbing. “Don’t
be afraid,” the old knight said. “I mean you no harm, child. I want
only the king.”
He wiped his sword clean on a curtain and stalked into the
bedchamber, where he found Hizdahr zo Loraq, Fourteenth of His
Noble Name, hiding behind a tapestry and whimpering. “Spare me,”
he begged. “I do not want to die.”
“Few do. Yet all men die, regardless.” Ser Barristan sheathed his
sword and pulled Hizdahr to his feet. “Come. I will escort you to a
cell.” By now, the Brazen Beasts should have disarmed Steelskin.
“You will be kept a prisoner until the queen returns. If nothing can
be proved against you, you will not come to harm. You have my
word as a knight.” He took the king’s arm and led him from the
bedchamber, feeling strangely light-headed, almost drunk. I was a
Kingsguard. What am I now?

Miklaz and Draqaz had returned with Hizdahr’s wine. They stood
in the open door, cradling the agons against their chests and
staring wide-eyed at the corpse of Khrazz. Qezza was still crying,
but Jezhene had appeared to comfort her. She hugged the younger
girl, stroking her hair. Some of the other cupbearers stood behind
them, watching. “Your Worship,” Miklaz said, “the noble Reznak
mo Reznak says to t-tell you, come at once.”
The boy addressed the king as if Ser Barristan were not there, as
if there were no dead man sprawled upon the carpet, his life’s blood
slowly staining the silk red. Skahaz was supposed to take Reznak into
custody until we could be certain of his loyalty. Had something gone
awry? “Come where?” Ser Barristan asked the boy. “Where does the
seneschal want His Grace to go?”
“Outside.” Miklaz seemed to see him for the rst time. “Outside,
ser. To the t-terrace. To see.”
“To see what?”
“D-d-dragons. The dragons have been loosed, ser.”
Seven save us all, the old knight thought.

THE DRAGONTAMER

T

he night crept past on slow black feet. The hour of the bat
gave way to the hour of the eel, the hour of the eel to the hour of
ghosts. The prince lay abed, staring at his ceiling, dreaming without
sleeping, remembering, imagining, twisting beneath his linen
coverlet, his mind feverish with thoughts of re and blood.
Finally, despairing of rest, Quentyn Martell made his way to his
solar, where he poured himself a cup of wine and drank it in the
dark. The taste was sweet solace on his tongue, so he lit a candle
and poured himself another. Wine will help me sleep, he told himself,
but he knew that was a lie.
He stared at the candle for a long time, then put down his cup
and held his palm above the ame. It took every bit of will he had
to lower it until the re touched his esh, and when it did he
snatched his hand back with a cry of pain.
“Quentyn, are you mad?”
No, just scared. I do not want to burn. “Gerris?”
“I heard you moving about.”
“I could not sleep.”
“Are burns a cure for that? Some warm milk and a lullaby might
serve you well. Or better still, I could take you to the Temple of the
Graces and nd a girl for you.”
“A whore, you mean.”
“They call them Graces. They come in di erent colors. The red
ones are the only ones who fuck.” Gerris seated himself across the
table. “The septas back home should take up the custom, if you ask

me. Have you noticed that old septas always look like prunes?
That’s what a life of chastity will do to you.”
Quentyn glanced out at the terrace, where night’s shadows lay
thick amongst the trees. He could hear the soft sound of falling
water. “Is that rain? Your whores will be gone.”
“Not all of them. There are little snuggeries in the pleasure
gardens, and they wait there every night until a man chooses them.
Those who are not chosen must remain until the sun comes up,
feeling lonely and neglected. We could console them.”
“They could console me, is what you mean.”
“That too.”
“That is not the sort of consolation I require.”
“I disagree. Daenerys Targaryen is not the only woman in the
world. Do you want to die a man-maid?”
Quentyn did not want to die at all. I want to go back to Yronwood
and kiss both of your sisters, marry Gwyneth Yronwood, watch her
ower into beauty, have a child by her. I want to ride in tourneys, hawk
and hunt, visit with my mother in Norvos, read some of those books my
father sends me. I want Cletus and Will and Maester Kedry to be alive
again. “Do you think Daenerys would be pleased to hear that I had
bedded some whore?”
“She might be. Men may be fond of maidens, but women like a
man who knows what he’s about in the bedchamber. It’s another
sort of swordplay. Takes training to be good at it.”
The gibe stung. Quentyn had never felt so much a boy as when
he’d stood before Daenerys Targaryen, pleading for her hand. The
thought of bedding her terri ed him almost as much as her dragons
had. What if he could not please her? “Daenerys has a paramour,”
he said defensively. “My father did not send me here to amuse the
queen in the bedchamber. You know why we have come.”
“You cannot marry her. She has a husband.”
“She does not love Hizdahr zo Loraq.”
“What has love to do with marriage? A prince should know
better. Your father married for love, it’s said. How much joy has he
had of that?”

Little and less. Doran Martell and his Norvoshi wife had spent half
their marriage apart and the other half arguing. It was the only rash
thing his father had ever done, to hear some tell it, the only time he
had followed his heart instead of his head, and he had lived to rue
it. “Not all risks lead to ruin,” he insisted. “This is my duty. My
destiny.” You are supposed to be my friend, Gerris. Why must you
mock my hopes? I have doubts enough without your throwing oil on the
re of my fear. “This will be my grand adventure.”
“Men die on grand adventures.”
He was not wrong. That was in the stories too. The hero sets out
with his friends and companions, faces dangers, comes home
triumphant. Only some of his companions don’t return at all. The
hero never dies, though. I must be the hero. “All I need is courage.
Would you have Dorne remember me as a failure?”
“Dorne is not like to remember any of us for long.”
Quentyn sucked at the burned spot on his palm. “Dorne
remembers Aegon and his sisters. Dragons are not so easily
forgotten. They will remember Daenerys as well.”
“Not if she’s died.”
“She lives.” She must. “She is lost, but I can nd her.” And when I
do, she will look at me the way she looks at her sellsword. Once I have
proven myself worthy of her.
“From dragonback?”
“I have been riding horses since I was six years old.”
“And you’ve been thrown a time or three.”
“That never stopped me from getting back into the saddle.”
“You’ve never been thrown o a thousand feet above the
ground,” Gerris pointed out. “And horses seldom turn their riders
into charred bones and ashes.”
I know the dangers. “I’ll hear no more of this. You have my leave
to go. Find a ship and run home, Gerris.” The prince rose, blew the
candle out, and crept back to his bed and its sweat-soaked linen
sheets. I should have kissed one of the Drinkwater twins, or maybe both
of them. I should have kissed them whilst I could. I should have gone to
Norvos to see my mother and the place that gave her birth, so she would

know that I had not forgotten her. He could hear the rain falling
outside, drumming against the bricks.
By the time the hour of the wolf crept upon them, the rain was
falling steadily, slashing down in a hard, cold torrent that would
soon turn the brick streets of Meereen into rivers. The three
Dornishmen broke their fast in the predawn chill—a simple meal of
fruit and bread and cheese, washed down with goat milk. When
Gerris made to pour himself a cup of wine, Quentyn stopped him.
“No wine. There will be time enough for drink afterward.”
“One hopes,” said Gerris.
The big man looked out toward the terrace. “I knew it would
rain,” he said in a gloomy tone. “My bones were aching last night.
They always ache before it rains. The dragons won’t like this. Fire
and water don’t mix, and that’s a fact. You get a good cook re lit,
blazing away nice, then it starts to piss down rain and next thing
your wood is sodden and your ames are dead.”
Gerris chuckled. “Dragons are not made of wood, Arch.”
“Some are. That old King Aegon, the randy one, he built wooden
dragons to conquer us. That ended bad, though.”
So may this, the prince thought. The follies and failures of Aegon
the Unworthy did not concern him, but he was full of doubts and
misgivings. The labored banter of his friends was only making his
head ache. They do not understand. They may be Dornish, but I am
Dorne. Years from now, when I am dead, this will be the song they sing
of me. He rose abruptly. “It’s time.”
His friends got to their feet. Ser Archibald drained the last of his
goat’s milk and wiped the milk mustache from his upper lip with
the back of a big hand. “I’ll get our mummer’s garb.”
He returned with the bundle that they had collected from the
Tattered Prince at their second meeting. Within were three long
hooded cloaks made from myriad small squares of cloth sewn
together, three cudgels, three shortswords, three masks of polished
brass. A bull, a lion, and an ape.
Everything required to be a Brazen Beast.
“They may ask for a word,” the Tattered Prince had warned them
when he handed over the bundle. “It’s dog.”

“You are certain of that?” Gerris had asked him.
“Certain enough to wager a life upon it.”
The prince did not mistake his meaning. “My life.”
“That would be the one.”
“How did you learn their word?”
“We chanced upon some Brazen Beasts and Meris asked them
prettily. But a prince should know better than to pose such
questions, Dornish. In Pentos, we have a saying. Never ask the
baker what went into the pie. Just eat.”
Just eat. There was wisdom in that, Quentyn supposed.
“I’ll be the bull,” Arch announced.
Quentyn handed him the bull mask. “The lion for me.”
“Which makes a monkey out of me.” Gerris pressed the ape mask
to his face. “How do they breathe in these things?”
“Just put it on.” The prince was in no mood for japes.
The bundle contained a whip as well—a nasty piece of old leather
with a handle of brass and bone, stout enough to peel the hide o
an ox. “What’s that for?” Arch asked.
“Daenerys used a whip to cow the black beast.” Quentyn coiled
the whip and hung it from his belt. “Arch, bring your hammer as
well. We may have need of it.”
It was no easy thing to enter the Great Pyramid of Meereen by
night. The doors were closed and barred each day at sunset and
remained closed until rst light. Guards were posted at every
entrance, and more guards patrolled the lowest terrace, where they
could look down on the street. Formerly those guards had been
Unsullied. Now they were Brazen Beasts. And that would make all
the di erence, Quentyn hoped.
The watch changed when the sun came up, but dawn was still half
an hour o as the three Dornishmen made their way down the
servants’ steps. The walls around them were made of bricks of half
a hundred colors, but the shadows turned them all to grey until
touched by the light of the torch that Gerris carried. They
encountered no one on the long descent. The only sound was the
scu of their boots on the worn bricks beneath their feet.

The pyramid’s main gates fronted on Meereen’s central plaza, but
the Dornishmen made their way to a side entrance opening on an
alley. These were the gates that slaves had used in former days as
they went about their masters’ business, where smallfolk and
tradesmen came and went and made their deliveries.
The doors were solid bronze, closed with a heavy iron bar. Before
them stood two Brazen Beasts, armed with cudgels, spears, and
short swords. Torchlight glimmered o the polished brass of their
masks—a rat and a fox. Quentyn gestured for the big man to stay
back in the shadows. He and Gerris strode forward together.
“You come early,” the fox said.
Quentyn shrugged. “We can leave again, if you like. You’re
welcome to stand our watch.” He sounded not at all Ghiscari, he
knew; but half the Brazen Beasts were freed slaves, with all manner
of native tongues, so his accent went unremarked.
“Bugger that,” the rat remarked.
“Give us the day’s word,” said the fox.
“Dog,” said the Dornishman.
The two Brazen Beasts exchanged a look. For three long
heartbeats Quentyn was afraid that something had gone amiss, that
somehow Pretty Meris and the Tattered Prince had gotten the word
wrong. Then the fox grunted. “Dog, then,” he said. “The door is
yours.” As they moved o , the prince began to breathe again.
They did not have long. The real relief would doubtless turn up
shortly. “Arch,” he called, and the big man appeared, the torchlight
shining o his bull’s mask. “The bar. Hurry.”
The iron bar was thick and heavy, but well oiled. Ser Archibald
had no trouble lifting it. As he was standing it on end, Quentyn
pulled the doors open and Gerris stepped through, waving the torch.
“Bring it in now. Be quick about it.”
The butcher’s wagon was outside, waiting in the alley. The driver
gave the mule a lick and rumbled through, iron-rimmed wheels
clacking loudly over bricks. The quartered carcass of an ox lled the
wagon bed, along with two dead sheep. Half a dozen men entered
afoot. Five wore the cloaks and masks of Brazen Beasts, but Pretty

Meris had not troubled to disguise herself. “Where is your lord?” he
asked Meris.
“I have no lord,” she answered. “If you mean your fellow prince,
he is near, with fty men. Bring your dragon out, and he will see
you safe away, as promised. Caggo commands here.”
Ser Archibald was giving the butcher’s wagon the sour eye. “Will
that cart be big enough to hold a dragon?” he asked.
“Should. It’s held two oxen.” The Corpsekiller was garbed as a
Brazen Beast, his seamed, scarred face hidden behind a cobra mask,
but the familiar black arakh slung at his hip gave him away. “We
were told these beasts are smaller than the queen’s monster.”
“The pit has slowed their growth.” Quentyn’s readings had
suggested that the same thing had occurred in the Seven Kingdoms.
None of the dragons bred and raised in the Dragonpit of King’s
Landing had ever approached the size of Vhagar or Meraxes, much
less that of the Black Dread, King Aegon’s monster. “Have you
brought su cient chains?”
“How many dragons do you have?” said Pretty Meris. “We have
chains enough for ten, concealed beneath the meat.”
“Very good.” Quentyn felt light-headed. None of this seemed
quite real. One moment it felt like a game, the next like some
nightmare, like a bad dream where he found himself opening a dark
door, knowing that horror and death waited on the other side, yet
somehow powerless to stop himself. His palms were slick with
sweat. He wiped them on his legs and said, “There will be more
guards outside the pit.”
“We know,” said Gerris.
“We need to be ready for them.”
“We are,” said Arch.
There was a cramp in Quentyn’s belly. He felt a sudden need to
move his bowels, but knew he dare not beg o now. “This way,
then.” He had seldom felt more like a boy. Yet they followed;
Gerris and the big man, Meris and Caggo and the other Windblown.
Two of the sellswords had produced crossbows from some hiding
place within the wagon.

Beyond the stables, the ground level of the Great Pyramid
became a labyrinth, but Quentyn Martell had been through here
with the queen, and he remembered the way. Under three huge
brick arches they went, then down a steep stone ramp into the
depths, through the dungeons and torture chambers and past a pair
of deep stone cisterns. Their footsteps echoed hollowly o the
walls, the butcher’s cart rumbling behind them. The big man
snatched a torch down from a wall sconce to lead the way.
At last a pair of heavy iron doors rose before them, rust-eaten and
forbidding, closed with a length of chain whose every link was as
thick around as a man’s arm. The size and thickness of those doors
was enough to make Quentyn Martell question the wisdom of this
course. Even worse, both doors were plainly dinted by something
inside trying to get out. The thick iron was cracked and splitting in
three places, and the upper corner of the left-hand door looked
partly melted.
Four Brazen Beasts stood guarding the door. Three held long
spears; the fourth, the serjeant, was armed with short sword and
dagger. His mask was wrought in the shape of a basilisk’s head. The
other three were masked as insects.
Locusts, Quentyn realized. “Dog,” he said.
The serjeant sti ened.
That was all it took for Quentyn Martell to realize that something
had gone awry. “Take them,” he croaked, even as the basilisk’s
hand darted for his shortsword.
He was quick, that serjeant. The big man was quicker. He ung
the torch at the nearest locust, reached back, and unslung his
warhammer. The basilisk’s blade had scarce slipped from its leather
sheath when the hammer’s spike slammed into his temple,
crunching through the thin brass of his mask and the esh and bone
beneath. The serjeant staggered sideways half a step before his
knees folded under him and he sank down to the oor, his whole
body shaking grotesquely.
Quentyn stared trans xed, his belly roiling. His own blade was
still in its sheath. He had not so much as reached for it. His eyes
were locked on the serjeant dying before him, jerking. The fallen

torch was on the oor, guttering, making every shadow leap and
twist in a monstrous mockery of the dead man’s shaking. The prince
never saw the locust’s spear coming toward him until Gerris
slammed into him, knocking him aside. The spearpoint grazed the
cheek of the lion’s head he wore. Even then the blow was so violent
it almost tore the mask o . It would have gone right through my
throat, the prince thought, dazed.
Gerris cursed as the locusts closed around him. Quentyn heard the
sound of running feet. Then the sellswords came rushing from the
shadows. One of the guards glanced at them just long enough for
Gerris to get inside his spear. He drove the point of his sword under
the brass mask and up through the wearer’s throat, even as the
second locust sprouted a crossbow bolt from his chest.
The last locust dropped his spear. “Yield. I yield.”
“No. You die.” Caggo took the man’s head o with one swipe of
his arakh, the Valyrian steel shearing through esh and bone and
gristle as if they were so much suet. “Too much noise,” he
complained. “Any man with ears will have heard.”
“Dog,” Quentyn said. “The day’s word was supposed to be dog.
Why wouldn’t they let us pass? We were told …”
“You were told your scheme was madness, have you forgotten?”
said Pretty Meris. “Do what you came to do.”
The dragons, Prince Quentyn thought. Yes. We came for the
dragons. He felt as though he might be sick. What am I doing here?
Father, why? Four men dead in as many heartbeats, and for what? “Fire
and blood,” he whispered, “blood and re.” The blood was pooling
at his feet, soaking into the brick oor. The re was beyond those
doors. “The chains … we have no key …”
Arch said, “I have the key.” He swung his warhammer hard and
fast. Sparks ew when the hammmerhead struck the lock. And then
again, again, again. On his fth swing the lock shattered, and the
chains fell away in a rattling clatter so loud Quentyn was certain
half the pyramid must have heard them. “Bring the cart.” The
dragons would be more docile once fed. Let them gorge themselves on
charred mutton.

Archibald Yronwood grasped the iron doors and pulled them
apart. Their rusted hinges let out a pair of screams, for all those
who might have slept through the breaking of the lock. A wash of
sudden heat assaulted them, heavy with the odors of ash, brimstone,
and burnt meat.
It was black beyond the doors, a sullen stygian darkness that
seemed alive and threatening, hungry. Quentyn could sense that
there was something in that darkness, coiled and waiting. Warrior,
grant me courage, he prayed. He did not want to do this, but he saw
no other way. Why else would Daenerys have shown me the dragons?
She wants me to prove myself to her. Gerris handed him a torch. He
stepped through the doors.
The green one is Rhaegal, the white Viserion, he reminded himself.
Use their names, command them, speak to them calmly but sternly.
Master them, as Daenerys mastered Drogon in the pit. The girl had been
alone, clad in wisps of silk, but fearless. I must not be afraid. She did
it, so can I. The main thing was to show no fear. Animals can smell
fear, and dragons … What did he know of dragons? What does any
man know of dragons? They have been gone from the world for more
than a century.
The lip of the pit was just ahead. Quentyn edged forward slowly,
moving the torch from side to side. Walls and oor and ceiling
drank the light. Scorched, he realized. Bricks burned black, crumbling
into ash. The air grew warmer with every step he took. He began to
sweat.
Two eyes rose up before him.
Bronze, they were, brighter than polished shields, glowing with
their own heat, burning behind a veil of smoke rising from the
dragon’s nostrils. The light of Quentyn’s torch washed over scales of
dark green, the green of moss in the deep woods at dusk, just
before the last light fades. Then the dragon opened its mouth, and
light and heat washed over them. Behind a fence of sharp black
teeth he glimpsed the furnace glow, the shimmer of a sleeping re a
hundred times brighter than his torch. The dragon’s head was larger
than a horse’s, and the neck stretched on and on, uncoiling like

some great green serpent as the head rose, until those two glowing
bronze eyes were staring down at him.
Green, the prince thought, his scales are green. “Rhaegal,” he said.
His voice caught in his throat, and what came out was a broken
croak. Frog, he thought, I am turning into Frog again. “The food,” he
croaked, remembering. “Bring the food.”
The big man heard him. Arch wrestled one of the sheep o the
wagon by two legs, then spun and ung it into the pit.
Rhaegal took it in the air. His head snapped round, and from
between his jaws a lance of ame erupted, a swirling storm of
orange-and-yellow re shot through with veins of green. The sheep
was burning before it began to fall. Before the smoking carcass
could strike the bricks, the dragon’s teeth closed round it. A nimbus
of ames still ickered about the body. The air stank of burning
wool and brimstone. Dragonstink.
“I thought there were two,” the big man said.
Viserion. Yes. Where is Viserion? The prince lowered his torch to
throw some light into the gloom below. He could see the green
dragon ripping at the smoking carcass of the sheep, his long tail
lashing from side to side as he ate. A thick iron collar was visible
about his neck, with three feet of broken chain dangling from it.
Shattered links were strewn across the oor of the pit amongst the
blackened bones—twists of metal, partly melted. Rhaegal was
chained to the wall and oor the last time I was here, the prince
recalled, but Viserion hung from the ceiling. Quentyn stepped back,
lifted the torch, craned his head back.
For a moment he saw only the blackened arches of the bricks
above, scorched by dragon ame. A trickle of ash caught his eye,
betraying movement. Something pale, half-hidden, stirring. He’s
made himself a cave, the prince realized. A burrow in the brick. The
foundations of the Great Pyramid of Meereen were massive and
thick to support the weight of the huge structure overhead; even the
interior walls were three times thicker than any castle’s curtain
walls. But Viserion had dug himself a hole in them with ame and
claw, a hole big enough to sleep in.

And we’ve just woken him. He could see what looked like some
huge white serpent uncoiling inside the wall, up where it curved to
become the ceiling. More ash went drifting downward, and a bit of
crumbling brick fell away. The serpent resolved itself into a neck
and tail, and then the dragon’s long horned head appeared, his eyes
glowing in the dark like golden coals. His wings rattled, stretching.
All of Quentyn’s plans had ed his head. He could hear Caggo
Corpsekiller shouting to his sellswords. The chains, he is sending for
the chains, the Dornish prince thought. The plan had been to feed
the beasts and chain them in their torpor, just as the queen had
done. One dragon, or preferably both.
“More meat,” Quentyn said. Once the beasts were fed they will
become sluggish. He had seen it work with snakes in Dorne, but here,
with these monsters … “Bring … bring …”
Viserion launched himself from the ceiling, pale leather wings
unfolding, spreading wide. The broken chain dangling from his neck
swung wildly. His ame lit the pit, pale gold shot through with red
and orange, and the stale air exploded in a cloud of hot ash and
sulfur as the white wings beat and beat again.
A hand seized Quentyn by the shoulder. The torch spun from his
grip to bounce across the oor, then tumbled into the pit, still
burning. He found himself face-to-face with a brass ape. Gerris.
“Quent, this will not work. They are too wild, they …”
The dragon came down between the Dornishmen and the door
with a roar that would have sent a hundred lions running. His head
moved side to side as he inspected the intruders—Dornishmen,
Windblown, Caggo. Last and longest the beast stared at Pretty
Meris, sni ng. The woman, Quentyn realized. He knows that she is
female. He is looking for Daenerys. He wants his mother and does not
understand why she’s not here.
Quentyn wrenched free of Gerris’s grip. “Viserion,” he called. The
white one is Viserion. For half a heartbeat he was afraid he’d gotten it
wrong. “Viserion,” he called again, fumbling for the whip hanging
from his belt. She cowed the black one with a whip. I need to do the
same.

The dragon knew his name. His head turned, and his gaze
lingered on the Dornish prince for three long heartbeats. Pale res
burned behind the shining black daggers of his teeth. His eyes were
lakes of molten gold, and smoke rose from his nostrils.
“Down,” Quentyn said. Then he coughed, and coughed again.
The air was thick with smoke and the sulfur stench was choking.
Viserion lost interest. The dragon turned back toward the
Windblown and lurched toward the door. Perhaps he could smell
the blood of the dead guards or the meat in the butcher’s wagon. Or
perhaps he had only now seen that the way was open.
Quentyn heard the sellswords shouting. Caggo was calling for the
chains, and Pretty Meris was screaming at someone to step aside.
The dragon moved awkwardly on the ground, like a man scrabbling
on his knees and elbows, but quicker than the Dornish prince would
have believed. When the Windblown were too late to get out of his
way, Viserion let loose with another roar. Quentyn heard the rattle
of chains, the deep thrum of a crossbow.
“No,” he screamed, “no, don’t, don’t,” but it was too late. The fool
was all that he had time to think as the quarrel caromed o
Viserion’s neck to vanish in the gloom. A line of re gleamed in its
wake—dragon’s blood, glowing gold and red.
The crossbowman was fumbling for another quarrel as the
dragon’s teeth closed around his neck. The man wore the mask of a
Brazen Beast, the fearsome likeness of a tiger. As he dropped his
weapon to try and pry apart Viserion’s jaws, ame gouted from the
tiger’s mouth. The man’s eyes burst with soft popping sounds, and
the brass around them began to run. The dragon tore o a hunk of
esh, most of the sellsword’s neck, then gulped it down as the
burning corpse collapsed to the oor.
The other Windblown were pulling back. This was more than
even Pretty Meris had the stomach for. Viserion’s horned head
moved back and forth between them and his prey, but after a
moment he forgot the sellswords and bent his neck to tear another
mouthful from the dead man. A lower leg this time.
Quentyn let his whip uncoil. “Viserion,” he called, louder this
time. He could do this, he would do this, his father had sent him to

the far ends of the earth for this, he would not fail him.
“VISERION!” He snapped the whip in the air with a crack that
echoed o the blackened walls.
The pale head rose. The great gold eyes narrowed. Wisps of
smoke spiraled upward from the dragon’s nostrils.
“Down,” the prince commanded. You must not let him smell your
fear. “Down, down, down.” He brought the whip around and laid a
lash across the dragon’s face. Viserion hissed.
And then a hot wind bu eted him and he heard the sound of
leathern wings and the air was full of ash and cinders and a
monstrous roar went echoing o the scorched and blackened bricks
and he could hear his friends shouting wildly. Gerris was calling out
his name, over and over, and the big man was bellowing, “Behind
you, behind you, behind you!”
Quentyn turned and threw his left arm across his face to shield his
eyes from the furnace wind. Rhaegal, he reminded himself, the green
one is Rhaegal.
When he raised his whip, he saw that the lash was burning. His
hand as well. All of him, all of him was burning.
Oh, he thought. Then he began to scream.

JON

L

et them die,” said Queen Selyse.
It was the answer that Jon Snow had expected. This queen never
fails to disappoint. Somehow that did not soften the blow. “Your
Grace,” he persisted stubbornly, “they are starving at Hardhome by
the thousands. Many are women—”
“—and children, yes. Very sad.” The queen pulled her daughter
closer to her and kissed her cheek. The cheek unmarred by greyscale,
Jon did not fail to note. “We are sorry for the little ones, of course,
but we must be sensible. We have no food for them, and they are
too young to help the king my husband in his wars. Better that they
be reborn into the light.”
That was just a softer way of saying let them die.
The chamber was crowded. Princess Shireen stood beside her
mother’s seat, with Patchface cross-legged at her feet. Behind the
queen loomed Ser Axell Florent. Melisandre of Asshai stood closer
to the re, the ruby at her throat pulsing with every breath she
took. The red woman too had her attendants—the squire Devan
Seaworth and two of the guardsmen the king had left her.
Queen Selyse’s protectors stood along the walls, shining knights
all in a row: Ser Malegorn, Ser Benethon, Ser Narbert, Ser Patrek,
Ser Dorden, Ser Brus. With so many bloodthirsty wildlings infesting
Castle Black, Selyse kept her sworn shields about her night and day.
Tormund Giantsbane had roared to hear it. “Afraid of being carried
o , is she? I hope you never said how big me member is, Jon Snow,
that’d frighten any woman. I always wanted me one with a
mustache.” Then he laughed and laughed.

He would not be laughing now.
Jon had wasted enough time here. “I’m sorry to have troubled
Your Grace. The Night’s Watch will attend to this matter.”
The queen’s nostrils ared. “You still mean to ride to Hardhome. I
see it on your face. Let them die, I said, yet you will persist in this
mad folly. Do not deny it.”
“I must do as I think best. With respect, Your Grace, the Wall is
mine, and so is this decision.”
“It is,” Selyse allowed, “and you will answer for it when the king
returns. And for other decisions you have made, I fear. But I see
that you are deaf to sense. Do what you must.”
Up spoke Ser Malegorn. “Lord Snow, who will lead this ranging?”
“Are you o ering yourself, ser?”
“Do I look so foolish?”
Patchface jumped up. “I will lead it!” His bells rang merrily. “We
will march into the sea and out again. Under the waves we will ride
seahorses, and mermaids will blow seashells to announce our
coming, oh, oh, oh.”
They all laughed. Even Queen Selyse allowed herself a thin smile.
Jon was less amused. “I will not ask my men to do what I would not
do myself. I mean to lead the ranging.”
“How bold of you,” said the queen. “We approve. Afterward some
bard will make a stirring song about you, no doubt, and we shall
have a more prudent lord commander.” She took a sip of wine. “Let
us speak of other matters. Axell, bring in the wildling king, if you
would be so good.”
“At once, Your Grace.” Ser Axell went through a door and
returned a moment later with Gerrick Kingsblood. “Gerrick of
House Redbeard,” he announced, “King of the Wildlings.”
Gerrick Kingsblood was a tall man, long of leg and broad of
shoulder. The queen had dressed him in some of the king’s old
clothes, it appeared. Scrubbed and groomed, clad in green velvets
and an ermine half-cape, with his long red hair freshly washed and
his ery beard shaped and trimmed, the wildling looked every inch
a southron lord. He could walk into the throne room at King’s Landing,
and no one would blink an eye, Jon thought.

“Gerrick is the true and rightful king of the wildlings,” the queen
said, “descended in an unbroken male line from their great king
Raymun Redbeard, whereas the usurper Mance Rayder was born of
some common woman and fathered by one of your black brothers.”
No, Jon might have said, Gerrick is descended from a younger
brother of Raymun Redbeard. To the free folk that counted about as
much as being descended from Raymun Redbeard’s horse. They
know nothing, Ygritte. And worse, they will not learn.
“Gerrick has graciously agreed to give the hand of his eldest
daughter to my beloved Axell, to be united by the Lord of Light in
holy wedlock,” Queen Selyse said. “His other girls shall wed at the
same time—the second daughter with Ser Brus Buckler and the
youngest with Ser Malegorn of Redpool.”
“Sers.” Jon inclined his head to the knights in question. “May you
nd happiness with your betrothed.”
“Under the sea, men marry shes.” Patchface did a little dance
step, jingling his bells. “They do, they do, they do.”
Queen Selyse sni ed again. “Four marriages can be made as
simply as three. It is past time that this woman Val was settled,
Lord Snow. I have decided that she shall wed my good and leal
knight, Ser Patrek of King’s Mountain.”
“Has Val been told, Your Grace?” asked Jon. “Amongst the free
folk, when a man desires a woman, he steals her, and thus proves
his strength, his cunning, and his courage. The suitor risks a savage
beating if he is caught by the woman’s kin, and worse than that if
she herself nds him unworthy.”
“A savage custom,” Axell Florent said.
Ser Patrek only chuckled. “No man has ever had cause to question
my courage. No woman ever will.”
Queen Selyse pursed her lips. “Lord Snow, as Lady Val is a
stranger to our ways, please send her to me, that I might instruct
her in the duties of a noble lady toward her lord husband.”
That will go splendidly, I know. Jon wondered if the queen would
be so eager to see Val married to one of her own knights if she
knew Val’s feelings about Princess Shireen. “As you wish,” he said,
“though if I might speak freely—”

“No, I think not. You may take your leave of us.”
Jon Snow bent his knee, bowed his head, withdrew.
He took the steps two at a time, nodding to the queen’s guards as
he descended. Her Grace had posted men on every landing to keep
her safe from murderous wildlings. Halfway down, a voice called
out from above him. “Jon Snow.”
Jon turned. “Lady Melisandre.”
“We must speak.”
“Must we?” I think not. “My lady, I have duties.”
“It is those duties I would speak of.” She made her way down, the
hem of her scarlet skirts swishing over the steps. It almost seemed
as if she oated. “Where is your direwolf?”
“Asleep in my chambers. Her Grace does not allow Ghost in her
presence. She claims he scares the princess. And so long as Borroq
and his boar are about, I dare not let him loose.” The skinchanger
was to accompany Soren Shieldbreaker to Stonedoor once the wayns
carrying the Sealskinner’s clan to Greenguard returned. Until such
time, Borroq had taken up residence in one of the ancient tombs
beside the castle lichyard. The company of men long dead seemed
to suit him better than that of the living, and his boar seemed happy
rooting amongst the graves, well away from other animals. “That
thing is the size of a bull, with tusks as long as swords. Ghost would
go after him if he were loose, and one or both of them would not
survive the meeting.”
“Borroq is the least of your concerns. This ranging …”
“A word from you might have swayed the queen.”
“Selyse has the right of this, Lord Snow. Let them die. You cannot
save them. Your ships are lost—”
“Six remain. More than half the eet.”
“Your ships are lost. All of them. Not a man shall return. I have
seen that in my res.”
“Your res have been known to lie.”
“I have made mistakes, I have admitted as much, but—”
“A grey girl on a dying horse. Daggers in the dark. A promised
prince, born in smoke and salt. It seems to me that you make

nothing but mistakes, my lady. Where is Stannis? What of
Rattleshirt and his spearwives? Where is my sister?”
“All your questions shall be answered. Look to the skies, Lord
Snow. And when you have your answers, send to me. Winter is
almost upon us now. I am your only hope.”
“A fool’s hope.” Jon turned and left her.
Leathers was prowling the yard outside. “Toregg has returned,”
he reported when Jon emerged. “His father’s settled his people at
Oakenshield and will be back this afternoon with eighty ghting
men. What did the bearded queen have to say?”
“Her Grace can provide no help.”
“Too busy plucking out her chin hairs, is she?” Leathers spat.
“Makes no matter. Tormund’s men and ours will be enough.”
Enough to get us there, perhaps. It was the journey back that
concerned Jon Snow. Coming home, they would be slowed by
thousands of free folk, many sick and starved. A river of humanity
moving slower than a river of ice. That would leave them vulnerable.
Dead things in the woods. Dead things in the water. “How many men
are enough?” he asked Leathers. “A hundred? Two hundred? Five
hundred? A thousand?” Should I take more men, or fewer? A smaller
ranging would reach Hardhome sooner … but what good were
swords without food? Mother Mole and her people were already at
the point of eating their own dead. To feed them, he would need to
bring carts and wagons, and draft animals to haul them—horses,
oxen, dogs. Instead of ying through the wood, they would be
condemned to crawl. “There is still much to decide. Spread the
word. I want all the leading men in the Shieldhall when the evening
watch begins. Tormund should be back by then. Where can I nd
Toregg?”
“With the little monster, like as not. He’s taken a liking to one o’
them milkmaids, I hear.”
He has taken a liking to Val. Her sister was a queen, why not her?
Tormund had once thought to make himself the King-Beyond-theWall, before Mance had bested him. Toregg the Tall might well be
dreaming the same dream. Better him than Gerrick Kingsblood. “Let
them be,” said Jon. “I can speak with Toregg later.” He glanced up

past the King’s Tower. The Wall was a dull white, the sky above it
whiter. A snow sky. “Just pray we do not get another storm.”
Outside the armory, Mully and the Flea stood shivering at guard.
“Shouldn’t you be inside, out of this wind?” Jon asked.
“That’d be sweet, m’lord,” said Fulk the Flea, “but your wolf’s in
no mood for company today.”
Mully agreed. “He tried to take a bite o’ me, he did.”
“Ghost?” Jon was shocked.
“Unless your lordship has some other white wolf, aye. I never
seen him like this, m’lord. All wild-like, I mean.”
He was not wrong, as Jon discovered for himself when he slipped
inside the doors. The big white direwolf would not lie still. He
paced from one end of the armory to the other, past the cold forge
and back again. “Easy, Ghost,” Jon called. “Down. Sit, Ghost.
Down.” Yet when he made to touch him, the wolf bristled and bared
his teeth. It’s that bloody boar. Even in here, Ghost can smell his stink.
Mormont’s raven seemed agitated too. “Snow,” the bird kept
screaming. “Snow, snow, snow.” Jon shooed him o , had Satin start
a re, then sent him out after Bowen Marsh and Othell Yarwyck.
“Bring a agon of mulled wine as well.”
“Three cups, m’lord?”
“Six. Mully and the Flea look in need of something warm. So will
you.”
When Satin left, Jon seated himself and had another look at the
maps of the lands north of the Wall. The fastest way to Hardhome
was along the coast … from Eastwatch. The woods were thinner
near the sea, the terrain mostly atlands, rolling hills, and salt
marshes. And when the autumn storms came howling, the coast got
sleet and hail and freezing rain rather than snow. The giants are at
Eastwatch, and Leathers says that some will help. From Castle Black the
way was more di cult, right through the heart of the haunted
forest. If the snow is this deep at the Wall, how much worse up there?
Marsh entered snu ing, Yarwyck dour. “Another storm,” the
First Builder announced. “How are we to work in this? I need more
builders.”
“Use the free folk,” Jon said.

Yarwyck shook his head. “More trouble than they’re worth, that
lot. Sloppy, careless, lazy … some good woodworkers here and
there, I’ll not deny it, but hardly a mason amongst them, and nary a
smith. Strong backs, might be, but they won’t do as they are told.
And us with all these ruins to turn back into forts. Can’t be done,
my lord. I tell you true. It can’t be done.”
“It will be done,” said Jon, “or they will live in ruins.”
A lord needed men about him he could rely upon for honest
counsel. Marsh and Yarwyck were no lickspittles, and that was to
the good … but they were seldom any help either. More and more,
he found he knew what they would say before he asked them.
Especially when it concerned the free folk, where their
disapproval went bone deep. When Jon settled Stonedoor on Soren
Shieldbreaker, Yarwyck complained that it was too isolated. How
could they know what mischief Soren might get up to, o in those
hills? When he conferred Oakenshield on Tormund Giantsbane and
Queensgate on Morna White Mask, Marsh pointed out that Castle
Black would now have foes on either side who could easily cut them
o from the rest of the Wall. As for Borroq, Othell Yarwyck claimed
the woods north of Stonedoor were full of wild boars. Who was to
say the skinchanger would not make his own pig army?
Hoarfrost Hill and Rimegate still lacked garrisons, so Jon had
asked their views on which of the remaining wildling chiefs and war
lords might be best suited to hold them. “We have Brogg, Gavin the
Trader, the Great Walrus … Howd Wanderer walks alone, Tormund
says, but there’s still Harle the Huntsman, Harle the Handsome,
Blind Doss … Ygon Oldfather commands a following, but most are
his owns sons and grandsons. He has eighteen wives, half of them
stolen on raids. Which of these …”
“None,” Bowen Marsh had said. “I know all these men by their
deeds. We should be tting them for nooses, not giving them our
castles.”
“Aye,” Othell Yarwyck had agreed. “Bad and worse and worst
makes a beggar’s choice. My lord had as well present us with a pack
of wolves and ask which we’d like to tear our throats out.”

It was the same again with Hardhome. Satin poured whilst Jon
told them of his audience with the queen. Marsh listened
attentively, ignoring the mulled wine, whilst Yarwyck drank one
cup and then another. But no sooner had Jon nished than the Lord
Steward said, “Her Grace is wise. Let them die.”
Jon sat back. “Is that the only counsel you can o er, my lord?
Tormund is bringing eighty men. How many should we send? Shall
we call upon the giants? The spearwives at Long Barrow? If we
have women with us, it may put Mother Mole’s people at ease.”
“Send women, then. Send giants. Send suckling babes. Is that
what my lord wishes to hear?” Bowen Marsh rubbed at the scar he
had won at the Bridge of Skulls. “Send them all. The more we lose,
the fewer mouths we’ll have to feed.”
Yarwyck was no more helpful. “If the wildlings at Hardhome
need saving, let the wildlings here go save them. Tormund knows
the way to Hardhome. To hear him talk, he can save them all
himself with his huge member.”
This was pointless, Jon thought. Pointless, fruitless, hopeless. “Thank
you for your counsel, my lords.”
Satin helped them back into their cloaks. As they walked through
the armory, Ghost sni ed at them, his tail upraised and bristling.
My brothers. The Night’s Watch needed leaders with the wisdom of
Maester Aemon, the learning of Samwell Tarly, the courage of
Qhorin Halfhand, the stubborn strength of the Old Bear, the
compassion of Donal Noye. What it had instead was them.
The snow was falling heavily outside. “Wind’s from the south,”
Yarwyck observed. “It’s blowing the snow right up against the Wall.
See?”
He was right. The switchback stair was buried almost to the rst
landing, Jon saw, and the wooden doors of the ice cells and
storerooms had vanished behind a wall of white. “How many men
do we have in ice cells?” he asked Bowen Marsh.
“Four living men. Two dead ones.”
The corpses. Jon had almost forgotten them. He had hoped to
learn something from the bodies they’d brought back from the

weirwood grove, but the dead men had stubbornly remained dead.
“We need to dig those cells out.”
“Ten stewards and ten spades should do it,” said Marsh.
“Use Wun Wun too.”
“As you command.”
Ten stewards and one giant made short work of the drifts, but
even when the doors were clear again, Jon was not satis ed. “Those
cells will be buried again by morning. We’d best move the prisoners
before they smother.”
“Karstark too, m’lord?” asked Fulk the Flea. “Can’t we just leave
that one shivering till spring?”
“Would that we could.” Cregan Karstark had taken to howling in
the night of late, and throwing frozen feces at whoever came to
feed him. That had not made him beloved of his guards. “Take him
to the Lord Commander’s Tower. The undervault should hold him.”
Though partly collapsed, the Old Bear’s former seat would be
warmer than the ice cells. Its subcellars were largely intact.
Cregan kicked at the guards when they came through the door,
twisted and shoved when they grabbed him, even tried to bite
them. But the cold had weakened him, and Jon’s men were bigger,
younger, and stronger. They hauled him out, still struggling, and
dragged him through thigh-high snow to his new home.
“What would the lord commander like us to do with his corpses?”
asked Marsh when the living men had been moved.
“Leave them.” If the storm entombed them, well and good. He
would need to burn them eventually, no doubt, but for the nonce
they were bound with iron chains inside their cells. That, and being
dead, should su ce to hold them harmless.
Tormund Giantsbane timed his arrival perfectly, thundering up
with his warriors when all the shoveling was done. Only fty
seemed to have turned up, not the eighty Toregg promised
Leathers, but Tormund was not called Tall-Talker for naught. The
wildling arrived red-faced, shouting for a horn of ale and something
hot to eat. He had ice in his beard and more crusting his mustache.
Someone had already told the Thunder st about Gerrick
Kingsblood and his new style. “King o’ the Wildlings?” Tormund

roared. “Har! King o’ My Hairy Butt Crack, more like.”
“He has a regal look to him,” Jon said.
“He has a little red cock to go with all that red hair, that’s what
he has. Raymund Redbeard and his sons died at Long Lake, thanks
to your bloody Starks and the Drunken Giant. Not the little brother.
Ever wonder why they called him the Red Raven?” Tormund’s
mouth split in a gap-toothed grin. “First to y the battle, he was.
’Twas a song about it, after. The singer had to nd a rhyme for
craven, so …” He wiped his nose. “If your queen’s knights want
those girls o’ his, they’re welcome to them.”
“Girls,” squawked Mormont’s raven. “Girls, girls.”
That set Tormund to laughing all over again. “Now there’s a bird
with sense. How much do you want for him, Snow? I gave you a
son, the least you could do is give me the bloody bird.”
“I would,” said Jon, “but like as not you’d eat him.”
Tormund roared at that as well. “Eat,” the raven said darkly,
apping its black wings. “Corn? Corn? Corn?”
“We need to talk about the ranging,” said Jon. “I want us to be of
one mind at the Shieldhall, we must—” He broke o when Mully
poked his nose inside the door, grim-faced, to announce that Clydas
had brought a letter.
“Tell him to leave it with you. I will read it later.”
“As you say, m’lord, only … Clydas don’t look his proper
self … he’s more white than pink, if you get my meaning … and
he’s shaking.”
“Dark wings, dark words,” muttered Tormund. “Isn’t that what
you kneelers say?”
“We say, Bleed a cold but feast a fever too,” Jon told him. “We say,
Never drink with Dornishmen when the moon is full. We say a lot of
things.”
Mully added his two groats. “My old grandmother always used to
say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter
friends are friends forever.”
“I think that’s su cient wisdom for the moment,” said Jon Snow.
“Show Clydas in if you would be so good.”

Mully had not been wrong; the old steward was trembling, his
face as pale as the snows outside. “I am being foolish, Lord
Commander, but … this letter frightens me. See here?”
Bastard, was the only word written outside the scroll. No Lord
Snow or Jon Snow or Lord Commander. Simply Bastard. And the
letter was sealed with a smear of hard pink wax. “You were right to
come at once,” Jon said. You were right to be afraid. He cracked the
seal, attened the parchment, and read.
Your false king is dead, bastard. He and all his host were
smashed in seven days of battle. I have his magic sword. Tell his
red whore.
Your false king’s friends are dead. Their heads upon the walls of
Winterfell. Come see them, bastard. Your false king lied, and so
did you. You told the world you burned the King-Beyond-theWall. Instead you sent him to Winterfell to steal my bride from
me.
I will have my bride back. If you want Mance Rayder back, come
and get him. I have him in a cage for all the north to see, proof of
your lies. The cage is cold, but I have made him a warm cloak
from the skins of the six whores who came with him to Winterfell.
I want my bride back. I want the false king’s queen. I want his
daughter and his red witch. I want his wildling princess. I want his
little prince, the wildling babe. And I want my Reek. Send them
to me, bastard, and I will not trouble you or your black crows.
Keep them from me, and I will cut out your bastard’s heart and
eat it.
It was signed,
Ramsay Bolton,
Trueborn Lord of Winterfell.

“Snow?” said Tormund Giantsbane. “You look like your father’s
bloody head just rolled out o’ that paper.”
Jon Snow did not answer at once. “Mully, help Clydas back to his
chambers. The night is dark, and the paths will be slippery with
snow. Satin, go with them.” He handed Tormund Giantsbane the
letter. “Here, see for yourself.”
The wildling gave the letter a dubious look and handed it right
back. “Feels nasty … but Tormund Thunder st had better things to
do than learn to make papers talk at him. They never have any
good to say, now do they?”
“Not often,” Jon Snow admitted. Dark wings, dark words. Perhaps
there was more truth to those wise old sayings than he’d known. “It
was sent by Ramsay Snow. I’ll read you what he wrote.”
When he was done, Tormund whistled. “Har. That’s buggered,
and no mistake. What was that about Mance? Has him in a cage,
does he? How, when hundreds saw your red witch burn the man?”
That was Rattleshirt, Jon almost said. That was sorcery. A glamor,
she called it. “Melisandre … look to the skies, she said.” He set the
letter down. “A raven in a storm. She saw this coming.” When you
have your answers, send to me.
“Might be all a skin o’ lies.” Tormund scratched under his beard.
“If I had me a nice goose quill and a pot o’ maester’s ink, I could
write down that me member was long and thick as me arm,
wouldn’t make it so.”
“He has Lightbringer. He talks of heads upon the walls of
Winterfell. He knows about the spearwives and their number.” He
knows about Mance Rayder. “No. There is truth in there.”
“I won’t say you’re wrong. What do you mean to do, crow?”
Jon exed the ngers of his sword hand. The Night’s Watch takes
no part. He closed his st and opened it again. What you propose is
nothing less than treason. He thought of Robb, with snow akes
melting in his hair. Kill the boy and let the man be born. He thought
of Bran, clambering up a tower wall, agile as a monkey. Of Rickon’s
breathless laughter. Of Sansa, brushing out Lady’s coat and singing
to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow. He thought of Arya, her hair
as tangled as a bird’s nest. I made him a warm cloak from the skins of

the six whores who came with him to Winterfell … I want my bride
back … I want my bride back … I want my bride back …
“I think we had best change the plan,” Jon Snow said.
They talked for the best part of two hours.
Horse and Rory had replaced Fulk and Mully at the armory door
with the change of watch. “With me,” Jon told them, when the time
came. Ghost would have followed as well, but as the wolf came
padding after them, Jon grabbed him by the scru of his neck and
wrestled him back inside. Borroq might be amongst those gathering
at the Shieldhall. The last thing he needed just now was his wolf
savaging the skinchanger’s boar.
The Shieldhall was one of the older parts of Castle Black, a long
drafty feast hall of dark stone, its oaken rafters black with the
smoke of centuries. Back when the Night’s Watch had been much
larger, its walls had been hung with rows of brightly colored
wooden shields. Then as now, when a knight took the black,
tradition decreed that he set aside his former arms and take up the
plain black shield of the brotherhood. The shields thus discarded
would hang in the Shieldhall.
Hundreds of knights meant hundreds of shields. Hawks and
eagles, dragons and gri ns, suns and stags, wolves and wyverns,
manticores, bulls, trees and owers, harps, spears, crabs and
krakens, red lions and golden lions and chequy lions, owls, lambs,
maids and mermen, stallions, stars, buckets and buckles, ayed men
and hanged men and burning men, axes, longswords, turtles,
unicorns, bears, quills, spiders and snakes and scorpions, and a
hundred other heraldic charges had adorned the Shieldhall walls,
blazoned in more colors than any rainbow ever dreamed of.
But when a knight died, his shield was taken down, that it might
go with him to his pyre or his tomb, and over the years and
centuries fewer and fewer knights had taken the black. A day came
when it no longer made sense for the knights of Castle Black to dine
apart. The Shieldhall was abandoned. In the last hundred years, it
had been used only infrequently. As a dining hall, it left much to be
desired—it was dark, dirty, drafty, and hard to heat in winter, its

cellars infested with rats, its massive wooden rafters worm-eaten
and festooned with cobwebs.
But it was large and long enough to seat two hundred, and half
again that many if they crowded close. When Jon and Tormund
entered, a sound went through the hall, like wasps stirring in a nest.
The wildlings outnumbered the crows by ve to one, judging by
how little black he saw. Fewer than a dozen shields remained, sad
grey things with faded paint and long cracks in the wood. But fresh
torches burned in the iron sconces along the walls, and Jon had
ordered benches and tables brought in. Men with comfortable seats
were more inclined to listen, Maester Aemon had once told him;
standing men were more inclined to shout.
At the top of the hall a sagging platform stood. Jon mounted it,
with Tormund Giantsbane at his side, and raised his hands for quiet.
The wasps only buzzed the louder. Then Tormund put his warhorn
to his lips and blew a blast. The sound lled the hall, echoing o the
rafters overhead. Silence fell.
“I summoned you to make plans for the relief of Hardhome,” Jon
Snow began. “Thousands of the free folk are gathered there,
trapped and starving, and we have had reports of dead things in the
wood.” To his left he saw Marsh and Yarwyck. Othell was
surrounded by his builders, whilst Bowen had Wick Whittlestick,
Left Hand Lew, and Alf of Runnymudd beside him. To his right,
Soren Shieldbreaker sat with his arms crossed against his chest.
Farther back, Jon saw Gavin the Trader and Harle the Handsome
whispering together. Ygon Oldfather sat amongst his wives, Howd
Wanderer alone. Borroq leaned against a wall in a dark corner.
Mercifully, his boar was nowhere in evidence. “The ships I sent to
take o Mother Mole and her people have been wracked by storms.
We must send what help we can by land or let them die.” Two of
Queen Selyse’s knights had come as well, Jon saw. Ser Narbert and
Ser Benethon stood near the door at the foot of the hall. But the rest
of the queen’s men were conspicuous in their absence. “I had hoped
to lead the ranging myself and bring back as many of the free folk
as could survive the journey.” A ash of red in the back of the hall
caught Jon’s eye. Lady Melisandre had arrived. “But now I nd I

cannot go to Hardhome. The ranging will be led by Tormund
Giantsbane, known to you all. I have promised him as many men as
he requires.”
“And where will you be, crow?” Borroq thundered. “Hiding here in
Castle Black with your white dog?”
“No. I ride south.” Then Jon read them the letter Ramsay Snow
had written.
The Shieldhall went mad.
Every man began to shout at once. They leapt to their feet,
shaking sts. So much for the calming power of comfortable benches.
Swords were brandished, axes smashed against shields. Jon Snow
looked to Tormund. The Giantsbane sounded his horn once more,
twice as long and twice as loud as the rst time.
“The Night’s Watch takes no part in the wars of the Seven
Kingdoms,” Jon reminded them when some semblance of quiet had
returned. “It is not for us to oppose the Bastard of Bolton, to avenge
Stannis Baratheon, to defend his widow and his daughter. This
creature who makes cloaks from the skins of women has sworn to
cut my heart out, and I mean to make him answer for those
words … but I will not ask my brothers to forswear their vows.
“The Night’s Watch will make for Hardhome. I ride to Winterfell
alone, unless …” Jon paused. “… is there any man here who will
come stand with me?”
The roar was all he could have hoped for, the tumult so loud that
the two old shields tumbled from the walls. Soren Shieldbreaker
was on his feet, the Wanderer as well. Toregg the Tall, Brogg, Harle
the Huntsman and Harle the Handsome both, Ygon Oldfather, Blind
Doss, even the Great Walrus. I have my swords, thought Jon Snow,
and we are coming for you, Bastard.
Yarwyck and Marsh were slipping out, he saw, and all their men
behind them. It made no matter. He did not need them now. He did
not want them. No man can ever say I made my brothers break their
vows. If this is oathbreaking, the crime is mine and mine alone. Then
Tormund was pounding him on the back, all gap-toothed grin from
ear to ear. “Well spoken, crow. Now bring out the mead! Make

them yours and get them drunk, that’s how it’s done. We’ll make a
wildling o’ you yet, boy. Har!”
“I will send for ale,” Jon said, distracted. Melisandre was gone,
he realized, and so were the queen’s knights. I should have gone to
Selyse rst. She has the right to know her lord is dead. “You must
excuse me. I’ll leave you to get them drunk.”
“Har! A task I’m well suited for, crow. On your way!”
Horse and Rory fell in beside Jon as he left the Shieldhall. I should
talk with Melisandre after I see the queen, he thought. If she could see a
raven in a storm, she can nd Ramsay Snow for me. Then he heard the
shouting … and a roar so loud it seemed to shake the Wall. “That
come from Hardin’s Tower, m’lord,” Horse reported. He might have
said more, but the scream cut him o .
Val, was Jon’s rst thought. But that was no woman’s scream.
That is a man in mortal agony. He broke into a run. Horse and Rory
raced after him. “Is it wights?” asked Rory. Jon wondered. Could
his corpses have escaped their chains?
The screaming had stopped by the time they came to Hardin’s
Tower, but Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun was still roaring. The giant was
dangling a bloody corpse by one leg, the same way Arya used to
dangle her doll when she was small, swinging it like a morningstar
when menaced by vegetables. Arya never tore her dolls to pieces,
though. The dead man’s sword arm was yards away, the snow
beneath it turning red.
“Let him go,” Jon shouted. “Wun Wun, let him go.”
Wun Wun did not hear or did not understand. The giant was
bleeding himself, with sword cuts on his belly and his arm. He
swung the dead knight against the grey stone of the tower, again
and again and again, until the man’s head was red and pulpy as a
summer melon. The knight’s cloak apped in the cold air. Of white
wool it had been, bordered in cloth-of-silver and patterned with
blue stars. Blood and bone were ying everywhere.
Men poured from the surrounding keeps and towers. Northmen,
free folk, queen’s men … “Form a line,” Jon Snow commanded
them. “Keep them back. Everyone, but especially the queen’s men.”
The dead man was Ser Patrek of King’s Mountain; his head was

largely gone, but his heraldry was as distinctive as his face. Jon did
not want to risk Ser Malegorn or Ser Brus or any of the queen’s
other knights trying to avenge him.
Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun howled again and gave Ser Patrek’s
other arm a twist and pull. It tore loose from his shoulder with a
spray of bright red blood. Like a child pulling petals o a daisy,
thought Jon. “Leathers, talk to him, calm him. The Old Tongue, he
understands the Old Tongue. Keep back, the rest of you. Put away
your steel, we’re scaring him.” Couldn’t they see the giant had been
cut? Jon had to put an end to this or more men would die. They had
no idea of Wun Wun’s strength. A horn, I need a horn. He saw the
glint of steel, turned toward it. “No blades!” he screamed. “Wick,
put that knife …”
… away, he meant to say. When Wick Whittlestick slashed at his
throat, the word turned into a grunt. Jon twisted from the knife,
just enough so it barely grazed his skin. He cut me. When he put his
hand to the side of his neck, blood welled between his ngers.
“Why?”
“For the Watch.” Wick slashed at him again. This time Jon caught
his wrist and bent his arm back until he dropped the dagger. The
gangling steward backed away, his hands upraised as if to say, Not
me, it was not me. Men were screaming. Jon reached for Longclaw,
but his ngers had grown sti and clumsy. Somehow he could not
seem to get the sword free of its scabbard.
Then Bowen Marsh stood there before him, tears running down
his cheeks. “For the Watch.” He punched Jon in the belly. When he
pulled his hand away, the dagger stayed where he had buried it.
Jon fell to his knees. He found the dagger’s hilt and wrenched it
free. In the cold night air the wound was smoking. “Ghost,” he
whispered. Pain washed over him. Stick them with the pointy end.
When the third dagger took him between the shoulder blades, he
gave a grunt and fell face- rst into the snow. He never felt the
fourth knife. Only the cold …

THE QUEEN’S HAND

T

he Dornish prince was three days dying.
He took his last shuddering breath in the bleak black dawn, as
cold rain hissed from a dark sky to turn the brick streets of the old
city into rivers. The rain had drowned the worst of the res, but
wisps of smoke still rose from the smoldering ruin that had been the
pyramid of Hazkar, and the great black pyramid of Yherizan where
Rhaegal had made his lair hulked in the gloom like a fat woman
bedecked with glowing orange jewels.
Perhaps the gods are not deaf after all, Ser Barristan Selmy re ected
as he watched those distant embers. If not for the rain, the res might
have consumed all of Meereen by now.
He saw no sign of dragons, but he had not expected to. The
dragons did not like the rain. A thin red slash marked the eastern
horizon where the sun might soon appear. It reminded Selmy of the
rst blood welling from a wound. Often, even with a deep cut, the
blood came before the pain.
He stood beside the parapets of the highest step of the Great
Pyramid, searching the sky as he did every morning, knowing that
the dawn must come and hoping that his queen would come with it.
She will not have abandoned us, she would never leave her people, he
was telling himself, when he heard the prince’s death rattle coming
from the queen’s apartments.
Ser Barristan went inside. Rainwater ran down the back of his
white cloak, and his boots left wet tracks on the oors and carpets.
At his command, Quentyn Martell had been laid out in the queen’s
own bed. He had been a knight, and a prince of Dorne besides. It

seemed only kind to let him die in the bed he had crossed half a
world to reach. The bedding was ruined—sheets, covers, pillows,
mattress, all reeked of blood and smoke, but Ser Barristan thought
Daenerys would forgive him.
Missandei sat at the bedside. She had been with the prince night
and day, tending to such needs as he could express, giving him
water and milk of the poppy when he was strong enough to drink,
listening to the few tortured words he gasped out from time to
time, reading to him when he fell quiet, sleeping in her chair beside
him. Ser Barristan had asked some of the queen’s cupbearers to
help, but the sight of the burned man was too much for even the
boldest of them. And the Blue Graces had never come, though he’d
sent for them four times. Perhaps the last of them had been carried
o by the pale mare by now.
The tiny Naathi scribe looked up at his approach. “Honored ser.
The prince is beyond pain now. His Dornish gods have taken him
home. See? He smiles.”
How can you tell? He has no lips. It would have been kinder if the
dragons had devoured him. That at least would have been quick.
This … Fire is a hideous way to die. Small wonder half the hells are
made of ame. “Cover him.”
Missandei pulled the coverlet over the prince’s face. “What will
be done with him, ser? He is so very far from home.”
“I’ll see that he’s returned to Dorne.” But how? As ashes? That
would require more re, and Ser Barristan could not stomach that.
We’ll need to strip the esh from his bones. Beetles, not boiling. The
silent sisters would have seen to it at home, but this was Slaver’s
Bay. The nearest silent sister was ten thousand leagues away. “You
should go sleep now, child. In your own bed.”
“If this one may be so bold, ser, you should do the same. You do
not sleep the whole night through.”
Not for many years, child. Not since the Trident. Grand Maester
Pycelle had once told him that old men do not need as much sleep
as the young, but it was more than that. He had reached that age
when he was loath to close his eyes, for fear that he might never

open them again. Other men might wish to die in bed asleep, but
that was no death for a knight of the Kingsguard.
“The nights are too long,” he told Missandei, “and there is much
and more to do, always. Here, as in the Seven Kingdoms. But you
have done enough for now, child. Go and rest.” And if the gods are
good, you will not dream of dragons.
After the girl was gone, the old knight peeled back the coverlet
for one last look at Quentyn Martell’s face, or what remained of it.
So much of the prince’s esh had sloughed away that he could see
the skull beneath. His eyes were pools of pus. He should have stayed
in Dorne. He should have stayed a frog. Not all men are meant to dance
with dragons. As he covered the boy once more, he found himself
wondering whether there would be anyone to cover his queen, or
whether her own corpse would lie unmourned amongst the tall
grasses of the Dothraki sea, staring blindly at the sky until her esh
fell from her bones.
“No,” he said aloud. “Daenerys is not dead. She was riding that
dragon. I saw it with mine own two eyes.” He had said the same a
hundred times before … but every day that passed made it harder
to believe. Her hair was a re. I saw that too. She was burning … and if
I did not see her fall, hundreds swear they did.
Day had crept upon the city. Though the rain still fell, a vague
light su used the eastern sky. And with the sun arrived the
Shavepate. Skahaz was clad in his familiar garb of pleated black
skirt, greaves, and muscled breastplate. The brazen mask beneath
his arm was new—a wolf’s head with lolling tongue. “So,” he said,
by way of greeting, “the fool is dead, is he?”
“Prince Quentyn died just before rst light.” Selmy was not
surprised that Skahaz knew. Word traveled quickly within the
pyramid. “Is the council assembled?”
“They await the Hand’s pleasure below.”
I am no Hand, a part of him wanted to cry out. I am only a simple
knight, the queen’s protector. I never wanted this. But with the queen
gone and the king in chains, someone had to rule, and Ser Barristan
did not trust the Shavepate. “Has there been any word from the
Green Grace?”

“She is not yet returned to the city.” Skahaz had opposed sending
the priestess. Nor had Galazza Galare herself embraced the task. She
would go, she allowed, for the sake of peace, but Hizdahr zo Loraq
was better suited to treat with the Wise Masters. But Ser Barristan
did not yield easily, and nally the Green Grace had bowed her
head and sworn to do her best.
“How stands the city?” Selmy asked the Shavepate now.
“All the gates are closed and barred, as you commanded. We are
hunting down any sellswords or Yunkai’i left inside the city and
expelling or arresting those we catch. Most seem to have gone to
ground. Inside the pyramids, beyond a doubt. The Unsullied man
the walls and towers, ready for any assault. There are two hundred
highborn gathered in the square, standing in the rain in their tokars
and howling for audience. They want Hizdahr free and me dead,
and they want you to slay these dragons. Someone told them
knights were good at that. Men are still pulling corpses from the
pyramid of Hazkar. The Great Masters of Yherizan and Uhlez have
abandoned their own pyramids to the dragons.”
Ser Barristan had known all that. “And the butcher’s tally?” he
asked, dreading the answer.
“Nine-and-twenty.”
“Nine-and-twenty?” That was far worse than he could ever have
imagined. The Sons of the Harpy had resumed their shadow war
two days ago. Three murders the rst night, nine the second. But to
go from nine to nine-and-twenty in a single night …
“The count will pass thirty before midday. Why do you look so
grey, old man? What did you expect? The Harpy wants Hizdahr
free, so he has sent his sons back into the streets with knives in
hand. The dead are all freedmen and shavepates, as before. One was
mine, a Brazen Beast. The sign of the Harpy was left beside the
bodies, chalked on the pavement or scratched into a wall. There
were messages as well. ‘Dragons must die,’ they wrote, and ‘Harghaz
the Hero.’ ‘Death to Daenerys’ was seen as well, before the rain
washed out the words.”
“The blood tax …”

“Twenty-nine hundred pieces of gold from each pyramid, aye,”
Skahaz grumbled. “It will be collected … but the loss of a few coins
will never stay the Harpy’s hand. Only blood can do that.”
“So you say.” The hostages again. He would kill them every one if I
allowed it. “I heard you the rst hundred times. No.”
“Queen’s Hand,” Skahaz grumbled with disgust. “An old woman’s
hand, I am thinking, wrinkled and feeble. I pray Daenerys returns to
us soon.” He pulled his brazen wolf’s mask down over his face.
“Your council will be growing restless.”
“They are the queen’s council, not mine.” Selmy exchanged his
damp cloak for a dry one and buckled on his sword belt, then
accompanied the Shavepate down the steps.
The pillared hall was empty of petitioners this morning. Though
he had assumed the title of Hand, Ser Barristan would not presume
to hold court in the queen’s absence, nor would he permit Skahaz
mo Kandaq to do such. Hizdahr’s grotesque dragon thrones had
been removed at Ser Barristan’s command, but he had not brought
back the simple pillowed bench the queen had favored. Instead a
large round table had been set up in the center of the hall, with tall
chairs all around it where men might sit and talk as peers.
They rose when Ser Barristan came down the marble steps,
Skahaz Shavepate at his side. Marselen of the Mother’s Men was
present, with Symon Stripeback, commander of the Free Brothers.
The Stalwart Shields had chosen a new commander, a black-skinned
Summer Islander called Tal Toraq, their old captain, Mollono Yos
Dob, having been carried o by the pale mare. Grey Worm was
there for the Unsullied, attended by three eunuch serjeants in spiked
bronze caps. The Stormcrows were represented by two seasoned
sellswords, an archer named Jokin and the scarred and sour axeman
known simply as the Widower. The two of them had assumed joint
command of the company in the absence of Daario Naharis. Most of
the queen’s khalasar had gone with Aggo and Rakharo to search for
her on the Dothraki sea, but the squinty, bowlegged jaqqa rhan
Rommo was there to speak for the riders who remained.
And across the table from Ser Barristan sat four of King Hizdahr’s
erstwhile guardsmen, the pit ghters Goghor the Giant, Belaquo

Bonebreaker, Camarron of the Count, and the Spotted Cat. Selmy
had insisted on their presence, over the objections of Skahaz
Shavepate. They had helped Daenerys Targaryen take this city once,
and that should not be forgotten. Blood-soaked brutes and killers
they might be, but in their own way they had been loyal … to King
Hizdahr, yes, but to the queen as well.
Last to come, Strong Belwas lumbered into the hall.
The eunuch had looked death in the face, so near he might have
kissed her on the lips. It had marked him. He looked to have lost
two stone of weight, and the dark brown skin that had once
stretched tight across a massive chest and belly, crossed by a
hundred faded scars, now hung on him in loose folds, sagging and
wobbling, like a robe cut three sizes too large. His step had slowed
as well, and seemed a bit uncertain.
Even so, the sight of him gladdened the old knight’s heart. He had
once crossed the world with Strong Belwas, and he knew he could
rely on him, should all this come to swords. “Belwas. We are
pleased that you could join us.”
“Whitebeard.” Belwas smiled. “Where is liver and onions? Strong
Belwas is not so strong as before, he must eat, get big again. They
made Strong Belwas sick. Someone must die.”
Someone will. Many someones, like as not. “Sit, my friend.” When
Belwas sat and crossed his arms, Ser Barristan went on. “Quentyn
Martell died this morning, just before the dawn.”
The Widower laughed. “The dragonrider.”
“Fool, I call him,” said Symon Stripeback.
No, just a boy. Ser Barristan had not forgotten the follies of his
own youth. “Speak no ill of the dead. The prince paid a ghastly
price for what he did.”
“And the other Dornish?” asked Tal Taraq.
“Prisoners, for the nonce.” Neither of the Dornishmen had o ered
any resistance. Archibald Yronwood had been cradling his prince’s
scorched and smoking body when the Brazen Beasts had found him,
as his burned hands could testify. He had used them to beat out the
ames that had engulfed Quentyn Martell. Gerris Drinkwater was

standing over them with sword in hand, but he had dropped the
blade the moment the locusts had appeared. “They share a cell.”
“Let them share a gibbet,” said Symon Stripeback. “They
unleashed two dragons on the city.”
“Open the pits and give them swords,” urged the Spotted Cat. “I
will kill them both as all Meereen shouts out my name.”
“The ghting pits will remain closed,” said Selmy. “Blood and
noise would only serve to call the dragons.”
“All three, perhaps,” suggested Marselen. “The black beast came
once, why not again? This time with our queen.”
Or without her. Should Drogon return to Meereen without
Daenerys mounted on his back, the city would erupt in blood and
ame, of that Ser Barristan had no doubt. The very men sitting at
this table would soon be at dagger points with one another. A
young girl she might be, but Daenerys Targaryen was the only thing
that held them all together.
“Her Grace will return when she returns,” said Ser Barristan. “We
have herded a thousand sheep into the Daznak’s Pit, lled the Pit of
Ghrazz with bullocks, and the Golden Pit with beasts that Hizdahr
zo Loraq had gathered for his games.” Thus far both dragons
seemed to have a taste for mutton, returning to Daznak’s whenever
they grew hungry. If either one was hunting man, inside or outside
the city, Ser Barristan had yet to hear of it. The only Meereenese
the dragons had slain since Harghaz the Hero had been the slavers
foolish enough to object when Rhaegal attempted to make his lair
atop the pyramid of Hazkar. “We have more pressing matters to
discuss. I have sent the Green Grace to the Yunkishmen to make
arrangements for the release of our hostages. I expect her back by
midday with their answer.”
“With words,” said the Widower. “The Stormcrows know the
Yunkai’i. Their tongues are worms that wriggle this way or that.
The Green Grace will come back with worm words, not the
captain.”
“If it pleases the Queen’s Hand to recall, the Wise Masters hold
our Hero too,” said Grey Worm. “Also the horselord Jhogo, the
queen’s own blood rider.”

“Blood of her blood,” agreed the Dothraki Rommo. “He must be
freed. The honor of the khalasar demands it.”
“He shall be freed,” said Ser Barristan, “but rst we must needs
wait and see if the Green Grace can accomplish—”
Skahaz Shavepate slammed his st upon the table. “The Green
Grace will accomplish nothing. She may be conspiring with the
Yunkai’i even as we sit here. Arrangements, did you say? Make
arrangements? What sort of arrangements?”
“Ransom,” said Ser Barristan. “Each man’s weight in gold.”
“The Wise Masters do not need our gold, ser,” said Marselen.
“They are richer than your Westerosi lords, every one.”
“Their sellswords will want the gold, though. What are the
hostages to them? If the Yunkishmen refuse, it will drive a blade
between them and their hirelings.” Or so I hope. It had been
Missandei who suggested the ploy to him. He would never have
thought of such a thing himself. In King’s Landing, bribes had been
Little nger’s domain, whilst Lord Varys had the task of fostering
division amongst the crown’s enemies. His own duties had been
more straightforward. Eleven years of age, yet Missandei is as clever as
half the men at this table and wiser than all of them. “I have instructed
the Green Grace to present the o er only when all of the Yunkish
commanders have assembled to hear it.”
“They will refuse, even so,” insisted Symon Stripeback. “They will
say they want the dragons dead, the king restored.”
“I pray that you are wrong.” And fear that you are right.
“Your gods are far away, Ser Grandfather,” said the Widower. “I
do not think they hear your prayers. And when the Yunkai’i send
back the old woman to spit in your eye, what then?”
“Fire and blood,” said Barristan Selmy, softly, softly.
For a long moment no one spoke. Then Strong Belwas slapped his
belly and said, “Better than liver and onions,” and Skahaz Shavepate
stared through the eyes of his wolf’s head mask and said, “You
would break King Hizdahr’s peace, old man?”
“I would shatter it.” Once, long ago, a prince had named him
Barristan the Bold. A part of that boy was in him still. “We have
built a beacon atop the pyramid where once the Harpy stood. Dry

wood soaked with oil, covered to keep the rain o . Should the hour
come, and I pray that it does not, we will light that beacon. The
ames will be your signal to pour out of our gates and attack. Every
man of you will have a part to play, so every man must be in
readiness at all times, day or night. We will destroy our foes or be
destroyed ourselves.” He raised a hand to signal to his waiting
squires. “I have had some maps prepared to show the dispositions of
our foes, their camps and siege lines and trebuchets. If we can break
the slavers, their sellswords will abandon them. I know you will
have concerns and questions. Voice them here. By the time we leave
this table, all of us must be of a single mind, with a single purpose.”
“Best send down for some food and drink, then,” suggested
Symon Stripeback. “This will take a while.”
It took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon. The
captains and commanders argued over the maps like shwives over
a bucket of crabs. Weak points and strong points, how to best
employ their small company of archers, whether the elephants
should be used to break the Yunkish lines or held in reserve, who
should have the honor of leading the rst advance, whether their
horse cavalry was best deployed on the anks or in the vanguard.
Ser Barristan let each man speak his mind. Tal Toraq thought that
they should march on Yunkai once they had broken through the
lines; the Yellow City would be almost undefended, so the Yunkai’i
would have no choice but to lift the siege and follow. The Spotted
Cat proposed to challenge the enemy to send forth a champion to
face him in single combat. Strong Belwas liked that notion but
insisted he should ght, not the Cat. Camarron of the Count put
forth a scheme to seize the ships tied up along the riverfront and
use the Skahazadhan to bring three hundred pit ghters around the
Yunkish rear. Every man there agreed that the Unsullied were their
best troops, but none agreed on how they should be deployed. The
Widower wanted to use the eunuchs as an iron st to smash through
the heart of the Yunkish defenses. Marselen felt they would be
better placed at either end of the main battle line, where they could
beat back any attempt by the foe to turn their anks. Symon
Stripeback wanted them split into three and divided amongst the

three companies of freedmen. His Free Brothers were brave and
eager for the ght, he claimed, but without the Unsullied to sti en
them he feared his unblooded troops might not have the discipline
to face battle-seasoned sellswords by themselves. Grey Worm said
only that the Unsullied would obey, whatever might be asked of
them.
And when all that had been discussed, debated, and decided,
Symon Stripeback raised one nal point. “As a slave in Yunkai I
helped my master bargain with the free companies and saw to the
payment of their wages. I know sellswords, and I know that the
Yunkai’i cannot pay them near enough to face dragon ame. So I ask
you … if the peace should fail and this battle should be joined, will
the dragons come? Will they join the ght?”
They will come, Ser Barristan might have said. The noise will bring
them, the shouts and screams, the scent of blood. That will draw them to
the battle eld, just as the roar from Daznak’s Pit drew Drogon to the
scarlet sands. But when they come, will they know one side from the
other? Somehow he did not think so. So he said only, “The dragons
will do what the dragons will do. If they do come, it may be that
just the shadow of their wings will be enough to dishearten the
slavers and send them eeing.” Then he thanked them and
dismissed them all.
Grey Worm lingered after the others had left. “These ones will be
ready when the beacon re is lit. But the Hand must surely know
that when we attack, the Yunkai’i will kill the hostages.”
“I will do all I can to prevent that, my friend. I have a … notion.
But pray excuse me. It is past time the Dornishmen heard that their
prince is dead.”
Grey Worm inclined his head. “This one obeys.”
Ser Barristan took two of his new-made knights with him down
into the dungeons. Grief and guilt had been known to drive good
men into madness, and Archibald Yronwood and Gerris Drinkwater
had both played roles in their friend’s demise. But when they
reached the cell, he told Tum and the Red Lamb to wait outside
whilst he went in to tell the Dornish that the prince’s agony was
over.

Ser Archibald, the big bald one, had nothing to say. He sat on the
edge of his pallet, staring down at his bandaged hands in their linen
wrappings. Ser Gerris punched a wall. “I told him it was folly. I
begged him to go home. Your bitch of a queen had no use for him,
any man could see that. He crossed the world to o er her his love
and fealty, and she laughed in his face.”
“She never laughed,” said Selmy. “If you knew her, you would
know that.”
“She spurned him. He o ered her his heart, and she threw it back
at him and went o to fuck her sellsword.”
“You had best guard that tongue, ser.” Ser Barristan did not like
this Gerris Drinkwater, nor would he allow him to vilify Daenerys.
“Prince Quentyn’s death was his own doing, and yours.”
“Ours? How are we at fault, ser? Quentyn was our friend, yes. A
bit of a fool, you might say, but all dreamers are fools. But rst and
last he was our prince. We owed him our obedience.”
Barristan Selmy could not dispute the truth of that. He had spent
the best part of his own life obeying the commands of drunkards
and madmen. “He came too late.”
“He o ered her his heart,” Ser Gerris said again.
“She needed swords, not hearts.”
“He would have given her the spears of Dorne as well.”
“Would that he had.” No one had wanted Daenerys to look with
favor on the Dornish prince more than Barristan Selmy. “He came
too late, though, and this folly … buying sellswords, loosing two
dragons on the city … that was madness and worse than madness.
That was treason.”
“What he did he did for love of Queen Daenerys,” Gerris
Drinkwater insisted. “To prove himself worthy of her hand.”
The old knight had heard enough. “What Prince Quentyn did he
did for Dorne. Do you take me for some doting grandfather? I have
spent my life around kings and queens and princes. Sunspear means
to take up arms against the Iron Throne. No, do not trouble to deny
it. Doran Martell is not a man to call his spears without hope of
victory. Duty brought Prince Quentyn here. Duty, honor, thirst for
glory … never love. Quentyn was here for dragons, not Daenerys.”

“You did not know him, ser. He—”
“He’s dead, Drink.” Yronwood rose to his feet. “Words won’t
fetch him back. Cletus and Will are dead too. So shut your bloody
mouth before I stick my st in it.” The big knight turned to Selmy.
“What do you mean to do with us?”
“Skahaz Shavepate wants you hanged. You slew four of his men.
Four of the queen’s men. Two were freedmen who had followed Her
Grace since Astapor.”
Yronwood did not seem surprised. “The beast men, aye. I only
killed the one, the basilisk head. The sellswords did the others.
Don’t matter, though, I know that.”
“We were protecting Quentyn,” said Drinkwater. “We—”
“Be quiet, Drink. He knows.” To Ser Barristan the big knight said,
“No need to come and talk if you meant to hang us. So it’s not that,
is it?”
“No.” This one may not be as slow-witted as he seems. “I have more
use for you alive than dead. Serve me, and afterward I will arrange
a ship to take you back to Dorne and give you Prince Quentyn’s
bones to return to his lord father.”
Ser Archibald grimaced. “Why is it always ships? Someone needs
to take Quent home, though. What do you ask of us, ser?”
“Your swords.”
“You have thousands of swords.”
“The queen’s freedmen are as yet unblooded. The sellswords I do
not trust. Unsullied are brave soldiers … but not warriors. Not
knights.” He paused. “What happened when you tried to take the
dragons? Tell me.”
The Dornishmen exchanged a look. Then Drinkwater said,
“Quentyn told the Tattered Prince he could control them. It was in
his blood, he said. He had Targaryen blood.”
“Blood of the dragon.”
“Yes. The sellswords were supposed to help us get the dragons
chained up so we could get them to the docks.”
“Rags arranged for a ship,” said Yronwood. “A big one, in case we
got both dragons. And Quent was going to ride one.” He looked at
his bandaged hands. “The moment we got in, though, you could see

none of it was going to work. The dragons were too wild. The
chains … there were bits of broken chain everywhere, big chains,
links the size of your head mixed in with all these cracked and
splintered bones. And Quent, Seven save him, he looked like he was
going to shit his smallclothes. Caggo and Meris weren’t blind, they
saw it too. Then one of the crossbowmen let y. Maybe they meant
to kill the dragons all along and were only using us to get to them.
You never know with Tatters. Any way you hack it o , it weren’t
clever. The quarrel just made the dragons angry, and they hadn’t
been in such a good mood to start with. Then … then things got
bad.”
“And the Windblown blew away,” said Ser Gerris. “Quent was
screaming, covered in ames, and they were gone. Caggo, Pretty
Meris, all but the dead one.”
“Ah, what did you expect, Drink? A cat will kill a mouse, a pig
will wallow in shit, and a sellsword will run o when he’s needed
most. Can’t be blamed. Just the nature of the beast.”
“He’s not wrong,” Ser Barristan said. “What did Prince Quentyn
promise the Tattered Prince in return for all this help?”
He got no answer. Ser Gerris looked at Ser Archibald. Ser
Archibald looked at his hands, the oor, the door.
“Pentos,” said Ser Barristan. “He promised him Pentos. Say it. No
words of yours can help or harm Prince Quentyn now.”
“Aye,” said Ser Archibald unhappily. “It was Pentos. They made
marks on a paper, the two of them.”
There is a chance here. “We still have Windblown in the dungeons.
Those feigned deserters.”
“I remember,” said Yronwood. “Hungerford, Straw, that lot.
Some of them weren’t so bad for sellswords. Others, well, might be
they could stand a bit of dying. What of them?”
“I mean to send them back to the Tattered Prince. And you with
them. You will be two amongst thousands. Your presence in the
Yunkish camps should pass unnoticed. I want you to deliver a
message to the Tattered Prince. Tell him that I sent you, that I
speak with the queen’s voice. Tell him that we’ll pay his price if he
delivers us our hostages, unharmed and whole.”

Ser Archibald grimaced. “Rags and Tatters is more like to give the
two of us to Pretty Meris. He won’t do it.”
“Why not? The task is simple enough.” Compared to stealing
dragons. “I once brought the queen’s father out of Duskendale.”
“That was Westeros,” said Gerris Drinkwater.
“This is Meereen.”
“Arch cannot even hold a sword with those hands.”
“He ought not need to. You will have the sellswords with you,
unless I mistake my man.”
Gerris Drinkwater pushed back his mop of sun-streaked hair.
“Might we have some time to discuss this amongst ourselves?”
“No,” said Selmy.
“I’ll do it,” o ered Ser Archibald, “just so long as there’s no
bloody boats involved. Drink will do it too.” He grinned. “He don’t
know it yet, but he will.”
And that was done.
The simple part, at least, thought Barristan Selmy, as he made the
long climb back to the summit of the pyramid. The hard part he’d
left in Dornish hands. His grandfather would have been aghast. The
Dornishmen were knights, at least in name, though only Yronwood
impressed him as having the true steel. Drinkwater had a pretty
face, a glib tongue, and a ne head of hair.
By the time the old knight returned to the queen’s rooms atop the
pyramid, Prince Quentyn’s corpse had been removed. Six of the
young cupbearers were playing some child’s game as he entered,
sitting in a circle on the oor as they took turns spinning a dagger.
When it wobbled to a stop they cut a lock of hair o whichever of
them the blade was pointing at. Ser Barristan had played a similar
game with his cousins when he was just a boy at Harvest
Hall … though in Westeros, as he recalled, kissing had been
involved as well. “Bhakaz,” he called. “A cup of wine, if you would
be so good. Grazhar, Azzak, the door is yours. I am expecting the
Green Grace. Show her in at once when she arrives. Elsewise, I do
not wish to be disturbed.”
Azzak scrambled to his feet. “As you command, Lord Hand.”

Ser Barristan went out onto the terrace. The rain had stopped,
though a wall of slate-grey clouds hid the setting sun as it made its
descent into Slaver’s Bay. A few wisps of smoke still rose from the
blackened stones of Hazdar, twisted like ribbons by the wind. Far
o to the east, beyond the city walls, he saw pale wings moving
above a distant line of hills. Viserion. Hunting, mayhaps, or ying
just to y. He wondered where Rhaegal was. Thus far the green
dragon had shown himself to be more dangerous than the white.
When Bhakaz brought his wine, the old knight took one long
swallow and sent the boy for water. A few cups of wine might be
just the thing to help him sleep, but he would need his wits about
him when Galazza Galare returned from treating with the foe. So he
drank his wine well watered, as the world grew dark around him.
He was very tired, and full of doubts. The Dornishmen, Hizdahr,
Reznak, the attack … was he doing the right things? Was he doing
what Daenerys would have wanted? I was not made for this. Other
Kingsguard had served as Hand before him. Not many, but a few.
He had read of them in the White Book. Now he found himself
wondering whether they had felt as lost and confused as he did.
“Lord Hand.” Grazhar stood in the door, a taper in his hand. “The
Green Grace has come. You asked to be told.”
“Show her in. And light some candles.”
Galazza Galare was attended by four Pink Graces. An aura of
wisdom and dignity seemed to surround her that Ser Barristan could
not help but admire. This is a strong woman, and she has been a
faithful friend to Daenerys. “Lord Hand,” she said, her face hidden
behind shimmering green veils. “May I sit? These bones are old and
weary.”
“Grazhar, a chair for the Green Grace.” The Pink Graces arrayed
themselves behind her, with eyes lowered and hands clasped before
them. “May I o er you refreshment?” asked Ser Barristan.
“That would be most welcome, Ser Barristan. My throat is dry
from talking. A juice, perhaps?”
“As you wish.” He beckoned to Kezmya and had her fetch the
priestess a goblet of lemon juice, sweetened with honey. To drink
it, the priestess had to remove her veil, and Selmy was reminded of

just how old she was. Twenty years my elder, or more. “If the queen
were here, I know she would join me in thanking you for all that
you have done for us.”
“Her Magni cence has always been most gracious.” Galazza
Galare nished her drink and fastened up her veil again. “Have
there been any further tidings of our sweet queen?”
“None as yet.”
“I shall pray for her. And what of King Hizdahr, if I may be so
bold? Might I be permitted to see His Radiance?”
“Soon, I hope. He is unharmed, I promise you.”
“I am pleased to hear that. The Wise Masters of Yunkai asked
after him. You will not be surprised to hear that they wish the noble
Hizdahr to be restored at once to his rightful place.”
“He shall be, if it can be proved that he did not try to kill our
queen. Until such time, Meereen will be ruled by a council of the
loyal and just. There is a place for you on that council. I know that
you have much to teach us all, Your Benevolence. We need your
wisdom.”
“I fear you atter me with empty courtesies, Lord Hand,” the
Green Grace said. “If you truly think me wise, heed me now.
Release the noble Hizdahr and restore him to his throne.”
“Only the queen can do that.”
Beneath her veils, the Green Grace sighed. “The peace that we
worked so hard to forge utters like a leaf in an autumn wind.
These are dire days. Death stalks our streets, riding the pale mare
from thrice-cursed Astapor. Dragons haunt the skies, feasting on the
esh of children. Hundreds are taking ship, sailing for Yunkai, for
Tolos, for Qarth, for any refuge that will have them. The pyramid
of Hazkar has collapsed into a smoking ruin, and many of that
ancient line lie dead beneath its blackened stones. The pyramids of
Uhlez and Yherizan have become the lairs of monsters, their masters
homeless beggars. My people have lost all hope and turned against
the gods themselves, giving over their nights to drunkenness and
fornication.”
“And murder. The Sons of the Harpy slew thirty in the night.”

“I grieve to hear this. All the more reason to free the noble
Hizdahr zo Loraq, who stopped such killings once.”
And how did he accomplish that, unless he is himself the Harpy? “Her
Grace gave her hand to Hizdahr zo Loraq, made him her king and
consort, restored the mortal art as he beseeched her. In return he
gave her poisoned locusts.”
“In return he gave her peace. Do not cast it away, ser, I beg you.
Peace is the pearl beyond price. Hizdahr is of Loraq. Never would
he soil his hands with poison. He is innocent.”
“How can you be certain?” Unless you know the poisoner.
“The gods of Ghis have told me.”
“My gods are the Seven, and the Seven have been silent on this
matter. Your Wisdom, did you present my o er?”
“To all the lords and captains of Yunkai, as you commanded
me … yet I fear you will not like their answer.”
“They refused?”
“They did. No amount of gold will buy your people back, I was
told. Only the blood of dragons may set them free again.”
It was the answer Ser Barristan had expected, if not the one that
he had hoped for. His mouth tightened.
“I know these were not the words you wished to hear,” said
Galazza Galare. “Yet for myself, I understand. These dragons are
fell beasts. Yunkai fears them … and with good cause, you cannot
deny. Our histories speak of the dragonlords of dread Valyria and
the devastation that they wrought upon the peoples of Old Ghis.
Even your own young queen, fair Daenerys who called herself the
Mother of Dragons … we saw her burning, that day in the
pit … even she was not safe from the dragon’s wroth.”
“Her Grace is not … she …”
“… is dead. May the gods grant her sweet sleep.” Tears glistened
behind her veils. “Let her dragons die as well.”
Selmy was groping for an answer when he heard the sound of
heavy footsteps. The door burst inward, and Skahaz mo Kandaq
stormed in with four Brazen Beasts behind him. When Grazhar tried
to block his path, he slammed the boy aside.
Ser Barristan was on his feet at once. “What is it?”

“The trebuchets,” the Shavepate growled. “All six.”
Galazza Galare rose. “Thus does Yunkai make reply to your
o ers, ser. I warned you that you would not like their answer.”
They choose war, then. So be it. Ser Barristan felt oddly relieved.
War he understood. “If they think they will break Meereen by
throwing stones—”
“Not stones.” The old woman’s voice was full of grief, of fear.
“Corpses.”

DAENERYS

T

he hill was a stony island in a sea of green.
It took Dany half the morning to climb down. By the time she
reached the bottom she was winded. Her muscles ached, and she
felt as if she had the beginnings of a fever. The rocks had scraped
her hands raw. They are better than they were, though, she decided as
she picked at a broken blister. Her skin was pink and tender, and a
pale milky uid was leaking from her cracked palms, but her burns
were healing.
The hill loomed larger down here. Dany had taken to calling it
Dragonstone, after the ancient citadel where she’d been born. She
had no memories of that Dragonstone, but she would not soon
forget this one. Scrub grass and thorny bushes covered its lower
slopes; higher up a jagged tangle of bare rock thrust steep and
sudden into the sky. There, amidst broken boulders, razor-sharp
ridges, and needle spires, Drogon made his lair inside a shallow
cave. He had dwelt there for some time, Dany had realized when
she rst saw the hill. The air smelled of ash, every rock and tree in
sight was scorched and blackened, the ground strewn with burned
and broken bones, yet it had been home to him.
Dany knew the lure of home.
Two days ago, climbing on a spire of rock, she had spied water to
the south, a slender thread that glittered brie y as the sun was
going down. A stream, Dany decided. Small, but it would lead her to
a larger stream, and that stream would ow into some little river,
and all the rivers in this part of the world were vassals of the

Skahazadhan. Once she found the Skahazadhan she need only follow
it downstream to Slaver’s Bay.
She would sooner have returned to Meereen on dragon’s wings,
to be sure. But that was a desire Drogon did not seem to share.
The dragonlords of old Valyria had controlled their mounts with
binding spells and sorcerous horns. Daenerys made do with a word
and a whip. Mounted on the dragon’s back, she oft felt as if she
were learning to ride all over again. When she whipped her silver
mare on her right ank the mare went left, for a horse’s rst
instinct is to ee from danger. When she laid the whip across
Drogon’s right side he veered right, for a dragon’s rst instinct is
always to attack. Sometimes it did not seem to matter where she
struck him, though; sometimes he went where he would and took
her with him. Neither whip nor words could turn Drogon if he did
not wish to be turned. The whip annoyed him more than it hurt
him, she had come to see; his scales had grown harder than horn.
And no matter how far the dragon ew each day, come nightfall
some instinct drew him home to Dragonstone. His home, not mine.
Her home was back in Meereen, with her husband and her lover.
That was where she belonged, surely.
Keep walking. If I look back I am lost.
Memories walked with her. Clouds seen from above. Horses small
as ants thundering through the grass. A silver moon, almost close
enough to touch. Rivers running bright and blue below, glimmering
in the sun. Will I ever see such sights again? On Drogon’s back she felt
whole. Up in the sky the woes of this world could not touch her.
How could she abandon that?
It was time, though. A girl might spend her life at play, but she
was a woman grown, a queen, a wife, a mother to thousands. Her
children had need of her. Drogon had bent before the whip, and so
must she. She had to don her crown again and return to her ebon
bench and the arms of her noble husband.
Hizdahr, of the tepid kisses.
The sun was hot this morning, the sky blue and cloudless. That
was good. Dany’s clothes were hardly more than rags, and o ered
little in the way of warmth. One of her sandals had slipped o

during her wild ight from Meereen and she had left the other up
by Drogon’s cave, preferring to go barefoot rather than half-shod.
Her tokar and veils she had abandoned in the pit, and her linen
undertunic had never been made to withstand the hot days and cold
nights of the Dothraki sea. Sweat and grass and dirt had stained it,
and Dany had torn a strip o the hem to make a bandage for her
shin. I must look a ragged thing, and starved, she thought, but if the
days stay warm, I will not freeze.
Hers had been a lonely sojourn, and for most of it she had been
hurt and hungry … yet despite it all she had been strangely happy
here. A few aches, an empty belly, chills by night … what does it matter
when you can y? I would do it all again.
Jhiqui and Irri would be waiting atop her pyramid back in
Meereen, she told herself. Her sweet scribe Missandei as well, and
all her little pages. They would bring her food, and she could bathe
in the pool beneath the persimmon tree. It would be good to feel
clean again. Dany did not need a glass to know that she was lthy.
She was hungry too. One morning she had found some wild
onions growing halfway down the south slope, and later that same
day a leafy reddish vegetable that might have been some queer sort
of cabbage. Whatever it was, it had not made her sick. Aside from
that, and one sh that she had caught in the spring-fed pool outside
of Drogon’s cave, she had survived as best she could on the dragon’s
leavings, on burned bones and chunks of smoking meat, halfcharred and half-raw. She needed more, she knew. One day she
kicked at a cracked sheep’s skull with the side of a bare foot and
sent it bouncing over the edge of the hill. And as she watched it
tumble down the steep slope toward the sea of grass, she realized
she must follow.
Dany set o through the tall grass at a brisk pace. The earth felt
warm between her toes. The grass was as tall as she was. It never
seemed so high when I was mounted on my silver, riding beside my sunand-stars at the head of his khalasar. As she walked, she tapped her
thigh with the pitmaster’s whip. That, and the rags on her back,
were all she had taken from Meereen.

Though she walked through a green kingdom, it was not the deep
rich green of summer. Even here autumn made its presence felt, and
winter would not be far behind. The grass was paler than she
remembered, a wan and sickly green on the verge of going yellow.
After that would come brown. The grass was dying.
Daenerys Targaryen was no stranger to the Dothraki sea, the
great ocean of grass that stretched from the forest of Qohor to the
Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. She had seen it
rst when she was still a girl, newly wed to Khal Drogo and on her
way to Vaes Dothrak to be presented to the crones of the dosh
khaleen. The sight of all that grass stretching out before her had
taken her breath away. The sky was blue, the grass was green, and I
was full of hope. Ser Jorah had been with her then, her gru old
bear. She’d had Irri and Jhiqui and Doreah to care for her, her sunand-stars to hold her in the night, his child growing inside her.
Rhaego. I was going to name him Rhaego, and the dosh khaleen said he
would be the Stallion Who Mounts the World. Not since those halfremembered days in Braavos when she lived in the house with the
red door had she been as happy.
But in the Red Waste, all her joy had turned to ashes. Her sunand-stars had fallen from his horse, the maegi Mirri Maz Duur had
murdered Rhaego in her womb, and Dany had smothered the empty
shell of Khal Drogo with her own two hands. Afterward Drogo’s
great khalasar had shattered. Ko Pono named himself Khal Pono and
took many riders with him, and many slaves as well. Ko Jhaqo
named himself Khal Jhaqo and rode o with even more. Mago, his
bloodrider, raped and murdered Eroeh, a girl Daenerys had once
saved from him. Only the birth of her dragons amidst the re and
smoke of Khal Drogo’s funeral pyre had spared Dany herself from
being dragged back to Vaes Dothrak to live out the remainder of
her days amongst the crones of the dosh khaleen.
The re burned away my hair, but elsewise it did not touch me. It had
been the same in Daznak’s Pit. That much she could recall, though
much of what followed was a haze. So many people, screaming and
shoving. She remembered rearing horses, a food cart spilling melons
as it overturned. From below a spear came ying, followed by a

ight of crossbow bolts. One passed so close that Dany felt it brush
her cheek. Others skittered o Drogon’s scales, lodged between
them, or tore through the membrane of his wings. She remembered
the dragon twisting beneath her, shuddering at the impacts, as she
tried desperately to cling to his scaled back. The wounds were
smoking. Dany saw one of the bolts burst into sudden ame.
Another fell away, shaken loose by the beating of his wings. Below,
she saw men whirling, wreathed in ame, hands up in the air as if
caught in the throes of some mad dance. A woman in a green tokar
reached for a weeping child, pulling him down into her arms to
shield him from the ames. Dany saw the color vividly, but not the
woman’s face. People were stepping on her as they lay tangled on
the bricks. Some were on re.
Then all of that had faded, the sounds dwindling, the people
shrinking, the spears and arrows falling back beneath them as
Drogon clawed his way into the sky. Up and up and up he’d borne
her, high above the pyramids and pits, his wings outstretched to
catch the warm air rising from the city’s sun baked bricks. If I fall
and die, it will still have been worth it, she had thought.
North they ew, beyond the river, Drogon gliding on torn and
tattered wings through clouds that whipped by like the banners of
some ghostly army. Dany glimpsed the shores of Slaver’s Bay and
the old Valyrian road that ran beside it through sand and desolation
until it vanished in the west. The road home. Then there was nothing
beneath them but grass rippling in the wind.
Was that rst ight a thousand years ago? Sometimes it seemed as if
it must be.
The sun grew hotter as it rose, and before long her head was
pounding. Dany’s hair was growing out again, but slowly. “I need a
hat,” she said aloud. Up on Dragonstone she had tried to make one
for herself, weaving stalks of grass together as she had seen
Dothraki women do during her time with Drogo, but either she was
using the wrong sort of grass or she simply lacked the necessary
skill. Her hats all fell to pieces in her hands. Try again, she told
herself. You will do better the next time. You are the blood of the

dragon, you can make a hat. She tried and tried, but her last attempt
had been no more successful than her rst.
It was afternoon by the time Dany found the stream she had
glimpsed atop the hill. It was a rill, a rivulet, a trickle, no wider
than her arm … and her arm had grown thinner every day she spent
on Dragonstone. Dany scooped up a handful of water and splashed
it on her face. When she cupped her hands, her knuckles squished in
the mud at the bottom of the stream. She might have wished for
colder, clearer water … but no, if she were going to pin her hopes
on wishes, she would wish for rescue.
She still clung to the hope that someone would come after her.
Ser Barristan might come seeking her; he was the rst of her
Queensguard, sworn to defend her life with his own. And her
bloodriders were no strangers to the Dothraki sea, and their lives
were bound to her own. Her husband, the noble Hizdahr zo Loraq,
might dispatch searchers. And Daario … Dany pictured him riding
toward her through the tall grass, smiling, his golden tooth
gleaming with the last light of the setting sun.
Only Daario had been given to the Yunkai’i, a hostage to ensure
no harm came to the Yunkish captains. Daario and Hero, Jhogo and
Groleo, and three of Hizdahr’s kin. By now, surely, all of her hostages
would have been released. But …
She wondered if her captain’s blades still hung upon the wall
beside her bed, waiting for Daario to return and claim them. “I will
leave my girls with you,” he had said. “Keep them safe for me, beloved.”
And she wondered how much the Yunkai’i knew about what her
captain meant to her. She had asked Ser Barristan that question the
afternoon the hostages went forth. “They will have heard the talk,”
he had replied. “Naharis may even have boasted of Your
Grace’s … of your great … regard … for him. If you will forgive my
saying so, modesty is not one of the captain’s virtues. He takes
great pride in his … his swordsmanship.”
He boasts of bedding me, you mean. But Daario would not have
been so foolish as to make such a boast amongst her enemies. It
makes no matter. By now the Yunkai’i will be marching home. That was
why she had done all that she had done. For peace.

She turned back the way she’d come, to where Dragonstone rose
above the grasslands like a clenched st. It looks so close. I’ve been
walking for hours, yet it still looks as if I could reach out and touch it. It
was not too late to go back. There were sh in the spring-fed pool
by Drogon’s cave. She had caught one her rst day there, she might
catch more. And there would be scraps, charred bones with bits of
esh still on them, the remnants of Drogon’s kills.
No, Dany told herself. If I look back I am lost. She might live for
years amongst the sunbaked rocks of Dragonstone, riding Drogon
by day and gnawing at his leavings every evenfall as the great grass
sea turned from gold to orange, but that was not the life she had
been born to. So once again she turned her back upon the distant
hill and closed her ears to the song of ight and freedom that the
wind sang as it played amongst the hill’s stony ridges. The stream
was trickling south by southeast, as near as she could tell. She
followed it. Take me to the river, that is all I ask of you. Take me to the
river, and I will do the rest.
The hours passed slowly. The stream bent this way and that, and
Dany followed, beating time upon her leg with the whip, trying not
to think about how far she had to go, or the pounding in her head,
or her empty belly. Take one step. Take the next. Another step.
Another. What else could she do?
It was quiet on her sea. When the wind blew the grass would sigh
as the stalks brushed against each other, whispering in a tongue that
only gods could understand. Now and again the little stream would
gurgle where it owed around a stone. Mud squished between her
toes. Insects buzzed around her, lazy dragon ies and glistening
green wasps and stinging midges almost too small to see. She
swatted at them absently when they landed on her arms. Once she
came upon a rat drinking from the stream, but it ed when she
appeared, scurrying between the stalks to vanish in the high grass.
Sometimes she heard birds singing. The sound made her belly
rumble, but she had no nets to snare them with, and so far she had
not come on any nests. Once I dreamed of ying, she thought, and
now I’ve own, and dream of stealing eggs. That made her laugh.

“Men are mad and gods are madder,” she told the grass, and the
grass murmured its agreement.
Thrice that day she caught sight of Drogon. Once he was so far o
that he might have been an eagle, slipping in and out of distant
clouds, but Dany knew the look of him by now, even when he was
no more than a speck. The second time he passed before the sun, his
black wings spread, and the world darkened. The last time he ew
right above her, so close she could hear the sound of his wings. For
half a heartbeat Dany thought that he was hunting her, but he ew
on without taking any notice of her and vanished somewhere in the
east. Just as well, she thought.
Evening took her almost unawares. As the sun was gilding the
distant spires of Dragonstone, Dany stumbled onto a low stone wall,
overgrown and broken. Perhaps it had been part of a temple, or the
hall of the village lord. More ruins lay beyond it—an old well, and
some circles in the grass that marked the sites where hovels had
once stood. They had been built of mud and straw, she judged, but
long years of wind and rain had worn them away to nothing. Dany
found eight before the sun went down, but there might have been
more farther out, hidden in the grass.
The stone wall had endured better than the rest. Though it was
nowhere more than three feet high, the angle where it met another,
lower wall still o ered some shelter from the elements, and night
was coming on fast. Dany wedged herself into that corner, making a
nest of sorts by tearing up handfuls of the grass that grew around
the ruins. She was very tired, and fresh blisters had appeared on
both her feet, including a matched set upon her pinky toes. It must
be from the way I walk, she thought, giggling.
As the world darkened, Dany settled in and closed her eyes, but
sleep refused to come. The night was cold, the ground hard, her
belly empty. She found herself thinking of Meereen, of Daario, her
love, and Hizdahr, her husband, of Irri and Jhiqui and sweet
Missandei, Ser Barristan and Reznak and Skahaz Shavepate. Do they
fear me dead? I ew o on a dragon’s back. Will they think he ate me?
She wondered if Hizdahr was still king. His crown had come from
her, could he hold it in her absence? He wanted Drogon dead. I heard

him. “Kill it,” he screamed, “kill the beast,” and the look upon his face
was lustful. And Strong Belwas had been on his knees, heaving and
shuddering. Poison. It had to be poison. The honeyed locusts. Hizdahr
urged them on me, but Belwas ate them all. She had made Hizdahr her
king, taken him into her bed, opened the ghting pits for him, he
had no reason to want her dead. Yet who else could it have been?
Reznak, her perfumed seneschal? The Yunkai’i? The Sons of the
Harpy?
O in the distance, a wolf howled. The sound made her feel sad
and lonely, but no less hungry. As the moon rose above the
grasslands, Dany slipped at last into a restless sleep.
She dreamed. All her cares fell away from her, and all her pains
as well, and she seemed to oat upward into the sky. She was ying
once again, spinning, laughing, dancing, as the stars wheeled
around her and whispered secrets in her ear. “To go north, you must
journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward,
you must go back. To touch the light you must pass beneath the
shadow.”
“Quaithe?” Dany called. “Where are you, Quaithe?”
Then she saw. Her mask is made of starlight.
“Remember who you are, Daenerys,” the stars whispered in a
woman’s voice. “The dragons know. Do you?”
The next morning she woke sti and sore and aching, with ants
crawling on her arms and legs and face. When she realized what
they were, she kicked aside the stalks of dry brown grass that had
served as her bed and blanket and struggled to her feet. She had
bites all over her, little red bumps, itchy and in amed. Where did all
the ants come from? Dany brushed them from her arms and legs and
belly. She ran a hand across her stubbly scalp where her hair had
burned away, and felt more ants on her head, and one crawling
down the back of her neck. She knocked them o and crushed them
under her bare feet. There were so many …
It turned out that their anthill was on the other side of her wall.
She wondered how the ants had managed to climb over it and nd
her. To them these tumbledown stones must loom as huge as the

Wall of Westeros. The biggest wall in all the world, her brother
Viserys used to say, as proud as if he’d built it himself.
Viserys told her tales of knights so poor that they had to sleep
beneath the ancient hedges that grew along the byways of the
Seven Kingdoms. Dany would have given much and more for a nice
thick hedge. Preferably one without an anthill.
The sun was only just coming up. A few bright stars lingered in
the cobalt sky. Perhaps one of them is Khal Drogo, sitting on his ery
stallion in the night lands and smiling down on me. Dragonstone was
still visible above the grasslands. It looks so close. I must be leagues
away by now, but it looks as if I could be back in an hour. She wanted
to lie back down, close her eyes, and give herself up to sleep. No. I
must keep going. The stream. Just follow the stream.
Dany took a moment to make certain of her directions. It would
not do to walk the wrong way and lose her stream. “My friend,” she
said aloud. “If I stay close to my friend I won’t get lost.” She would
have slept beside the water if she dared, but there were animals
who came down to the stream to drink at night. She had seen their
tracks. Dany would make a poor meal for a wolf or lion, but even a
poor meal was better than none.
Once she was certain which way was south, she counted o her
paces. The stream appeared at eight. Dany cupped her hands to
drink. The water made her belly cramp, but cramps were easier to
bear than thirst. She had no other drink but the morning dew that
glistened on the tall grass, and no food at all unless she cared to eat
the grass. I could try eating ants. The little yellow ones were too
small to provide much in the way of nourishment, but there were
red ants in the grass, and those were bigger. “I am lost at sea,” she
said as she limped along beside her meandering rivulet, “so perhaps
I’ll nd some crabs, or a nice fat sh.” Her whip slapped softly
against her thigh, wap wap wap. One step at a time, and the stream
would see her home.
Just past midday she came upon a bush growing by the stream,
its twisted limbs covered with hard green berries. Dany squinted at
them suspiciously, then plucked one from a branch and nibbled at it.
Its esh was tart and chewy, with a bitter aftertaste that seemed

familiar to her. “In the khalasar, they used berries like these to
avor roasts,” she decided. Saying it aloud made her more certain
of it. Her belly rumbled, and Dany found herself picking berries
with both hands and tossing them into her mouth.
An hour later, her stomach began to cramp so badly that she
could not go on. She spent the rest of that day retching up green
slime. If I stay here, I will die. I may be dying now. Would the horse
god of the Dothraki part the grass and claim her for his starry
khalasar, so she might ride the nightlands with Khal Drogo? In
Westeros the dead of House Targaryen were given to the ames,
but who would light her pyre here? My esh will feed the wolves and
carrion crows, she thought sadly, and worms will burrow through my
womb. Her eyes went back to Dragonstone. It looked smaller. She
could see smoke rising from its wind-carved summit, miles away.
Drogon has returned from hunting.
Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was
looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the
moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank,
the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and
her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.
When she closed her eyes at last, Dany did not know whether she
would be strong enough to open them again.
She dreamt of her dead brother.
Viserys looked just as he had the last time she’d seen him. His
mouth was twisted in anguish, his hair was burnt, and his face was
black and smoking where the molten gold had run down across his
brow and cheeks and into his eyes.
“You are dead,” Dany said.
Murdered. Though his lips never moved, somehow she could hear
his voice, whispering in her ear. You never mourned me, sister. It is
hard to die unmourned.
“I loved you once.”
Once, he said, so bitterly it made her shudder. You were supposed
to be my wife, to bear me children with silver hair and purple eyes, to
keep the blood of the dragon pure. I took care of you. I taught you who
you were. I fed you. I sold our mother’s crown to keep you fed.

“You hurt me. You frightened me.”
Only when you woke the dragon. I loved you.
“You sold me. You betrayed me.”
No. You were the betrayer. You turned against me, against your own
blood. They cheated me. Your horsey husband and his stinking savages.
They were cheats and liars. They promised me a golden crown and gave
me this. He touched the molten gold that was creeping down his
face, and smoke rose from his nger.
“You could have had your crown,” Dany told him. “My sun-andstars would have won it for you if only you had waited.”
I waited long enough. I waited my whole life. I was their king, their
rightful king. They laughed at me.
“You should have stayed in Pentos with Magister Illyrio. Khal
Drogo had to present me to the dosh khaleen, but you did not have
to ride with us. That was your choice. Your mistake.”
Do you want to wake the dragon, you stupid little whore? Drogo’s
khalasar was mine. I bought them from him, a hundred thousand
screamers. I paid for them with your maidenhead.
“You never understood. Dothraki do not buy and sell. They give
gifts and receive them. If you had waited …”
I did wait. For my crown, for my throne, for you. All those years, and
all I ever got was a pot of molten gold. Why did they give the dragon’s
eggs to you? They should have been mine. If I’d had a dragon, I would
have taught the world the meaning of our words. Viserys began to
laugh, until his jaw fell away from his face, smoking, and blood and
molten gold ran from his mouth.
When she woke, gasping, her thighs were slick with blood.
For a moment she did not realize what it was. The world had just
begun to lighten, and the tall grass rustled softly in the wind. No,
please, let me sleep some more. I’m so tired. She tried to burrow back
beneath the pile of grass she had torn up when she went to sleep.
Some of the stalks felt wet. Had it rained again? She sat up, afraid
that she had soiled herself as she slept. When she brought her
ngers to her face, she could smell the blood on them. Am I dying?
Then she saw the pale crescent moon, oating high above the grass,
and it came to her that this was no more than her moon blood.

If she had not been so sick and scared, that might have come as a
relief. Instead she began to shiver violently. She rubbed her ngers
through the dirt, and grabbed a handful of grass to wipe between
her legs. The dragon does not weep. She was bleeding, but it was
only woman’s blood. The moon is still a crescent, though. How can that
be? She tried to remember the last time she had bled. The last full
moon? The one before? The one before that? No, it cannot have been
so long as that. “I am the blood of the dragon,” she told the grass,
aloud.
Once, the grass whispered back, until you chained your dragons in
the dark.
“Drogon killed a little girl. Her name was … her name …” Dany
could not recall the child’s name. That made her so sad that she
would have cried if all her tears had not been burned away. “I will
never have a little girl. I was the Mother of Dragons.”
Aye, the grass said, but you turned against your children.
Her belly was empty, her feet sore and blistered, and it seemed to
her that the cramping had grown worse. Her guts were full of
writhing snakes biting at her bowels. She scooped up a handful of
mud and water in trembling hands. By midday the water would be
tepid, but in the chill of dawn it was almost cool and helped her
keep her eyes open. As she splashed her face, she saw fresh blood
on her thighs. The ragged hem of her undertunic was stained with
it. The sight of so much red frightened her. Moon blood, it’s only my
moon blood, but she did not remember ever having such a heavy
ow. Could it be the water? If it was the water, she was doomed. She
had to drink or die of thirst.
“Walk,” Dany commanded herself. “Follow the stream and it will
take you to the Skahazadhan. That’s where Daario will nd you.”
But it took all her strength just to get back to her feet, and when
she did all she could do was stand there, fevered and bleeding. She
raised her eyes to the empty blue sky, squinting at the sun. Half the
morning gone already, she realized, dismayed. She made herself take
a step, and then another, and then she was walking once again,
following the little stream.

The day grew warmer, and the sun beat down upon her head and
the burnt remnants of her hair. Water splashed against the soles of
her feet. She was walking in the stream. How long had she been
doing that? The soft brown mud felt good between her toes and
helped to soothe her blisters. In the stream or out of it, I must keep
walking. Water ows downhill. The stream will take me to the river, and
the river will take me home.
Except it wouldn’t, not truly.
Meereen was not her home, and never would be. It was a city of
strange men with strange gods and stranger hair, of slavers
wrapped in fringed tokars, where grace was earned through
whoring, butchery was art, and dog was a delicacy. Meereen would
always be the Harpy’s city, and Daenerys could not be a harpy.
Never, said the grass, in the gru tones of Jorah Mormont. You
were warned, Your Grace. Let this city be, I said. Your war is in
Westeros, I told you.
The voice was no more than a whisper, yet somehow Dany felt
that he was walking just behind her. My bear, she thought, my old
sweet bear, who loved me and betrayed me. She had missed him so.
She wanted to see his ugly face, to wrap her arms around him and
press herself against his chest, but she knew that if she turned
around Ser Jorah would be gone. “I am dreaming,” she said. “A
waking dream, a walking dream. I am alone and lost.”
Lost, because you lingered, in a place that you were never meant to
be, murmured Ser Jorah, as softly as the wind. Alone, because you
sent me from your side.
“You betrayed me. You informed on me, for gold.”
For home. Home was all I ever wanted.
“And me. You wanted me.” Dany had seen it in his eyes.
I did, the grass whispered, sadly.
“You kissed me. I never said you could, but you did. You sold me
to my enemies, but you meant it when you kissed me.”
I gave you good counsel. Save your spears and swords for the Seven
Kingdoms, I told you. Leave Meereen to the Meereenese and go west, I
said. You would not listen.

“I had to take Meereen or see my children starve along the
march.” Dany could still see the trail of corpses she had left behind
her crossing the Red Waste. It was not a sight she wished to see
again. “I had to take Meereen to feed my people.”
You took Meereen, he told her, yet still you lingered.
“To be a queen.”
You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros.
“It is such a long way,” she complained. “I was tired, Jorah. I was
weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them
grow. I am only a young girl.”
No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing
fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no
trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to
be. Remember your words.
“Fire and Blood,” Daenerys told the swaying grass.
A stone turned under her foot. She stumbled to one knee and
cried out in pain, hoping against hope that her bear would gather
her up and help her to her feet. When she turned her head to look
for him, all she saw was trickling brown water … and the grass, still
moving slightly. The wind, she told herself, the wind shakes the stalks
and makes them sway. Only no wind was blowing. The sun was
overhead, the world still and hot. Midges swarmed in the air, and a
dragon y oated over the stream, darting here and there. And the
grass was moving when it had no cause to move.
She fumbled in the water, found a stone the size of her st, pulled
it from the mud. It was a poor weapon but better than an empty
hand. From the corner of her eye Dany saw the grass move again,
o to her right. The grass swayed and bowed low, as if before a
king, but no king appeared to her. The world was green and empty.
The world was green and silent. The world was yellow, dying. I
should get up, she told herself. I have to walk. I have to follow the
stream.
Through the grass came a soft silvery tinkling.
Bells, Dany thought, smiling, remembering Khal Drogo, her sunand-stars, and the bells he braided into his hair. When the sun rises in
the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow

in the wind like leaves, when my womb quickens again and I bear a
living child, Khal Drogo will return to me.
But none of those things had happened. Bells, Dany thought again.
Her bloodriders had found her. “Aggo,” she whispered. “Jhogo.
Rakharo.” Might Daario have come with them?
The green sea opened. A rider appeared. His braid was black and
shiny, his skin as dark as burnished copper, his eyes the shape of
bitter almonds. Bells sang in his hair. He wore a medallion belt and
painted vest, with an arakh on one hip and a whip on the other. A
hunting bow and a quiver of arrows were slung from his saddle.
One rider, and alone. A scout. He was one who rode before the
khalasar to nd the game and the good green grass, and sni out
foes wherever they might hide. If he found her there, he would kill
her, rape her, or enslave her. At best, he would send her back to the
crones of the dosh khaleen, where good khaleesi were supposed to go
when their khals had died.
He did not see her, though. The grass concealed her, and he was
looking elsewhere. Dany followed his eyes, and there the shadow
ew, with wings spread wide. The dragon was a mile o , and yet
the scout stood frozen until his stallion began to whicker in fear.
Then he woke as if from a dream, wheeled his mount about, and
raced o through the tall grass at a gallop.
Dany watched him go. When the sound of his hooves had faded
away to silence, she began to shout. She called until her voice was
hoarse … and Drogon came, snorting plumes of smoke. The grass
bowed down before him. Dany leapt onto his back. She stank of
blood and sweat and fear, but none of that mattered. “To go
forward I must go back,” she said. Her bare legs tightened around
the dragon’s neck. She kicked him, and Drogon threw himself into
the sky. Her whip was gone, so she used her hands and feet and
turned him north by east, the way the scout had gone. Drogon went
willingly enough; perhaps he smelled the rider’s fear.
In a dozen heartbeats they were past the Dothraki, as he galloped
far below. To the right and left, Dany glimpsed places where the
grass was burned and ashen. Drogon has come this way before, she

realized. Like a chain of grey islands, the marks of his hunting
dotted the green grass sea.
A vast herd of horses appeared below them. There were riders
too, a score or more, but they turned and ed at the rst sight of
the dragon. The horses broke and ran when the shadow fell upon
them, racing through the grass until their sides were white with
foam, tearing the ground with their hooves … but as swift as they
were, they could not y. Soon one horse began to lag behind the
others. The dragon descended on him, roaring, and all at once the
poor beast was a ame, yet somehow he kept on running, screaming
with every step, until Drogon landed on him and broke his back.
Dany clutched the dragon’s neck with all her strength to keep from
sliding o .
The carcass was too heavy for him to bear back to his lair, so
Drogon consumed his kill there, tearing at the charred esh as the
grasses burned around them, the air thick with drifting smoke and
the smell of burnt horsehair. Dany, starved, slid o his back and ate
with him, ripping chunks of smoking meat from the dead horse with
bare, burned hands. In Meereen I was a queen in silk, nibbling on
stu ed dates and honeyed lamb, she remembered. What would my
noble husband think if he could see me now? Hizdahr would be
horri ed, no doubt. But Daario …
Daario would laugh, carve o a hunk of horsemeat with his arakh,
and squat down to eat beside her.
As the western sky turned the color of a blood bruise, she heard
the sound of approaching horses. Dany rose, wiped her hands on her
ragged undertunic, and went to stand beside her dragon.
That was how Khal Jhaqo found her, when half a hundred
mounted warriors emerged from the drifting smoke.

EPILOGUE

I

am no traitor,” the Knight of Gri n’s Roost declared. “I am King
Tommen’s man, and yours.”
A steady drip-drip-drip punctuated his words, as snowmelt ran o
his cloak to puddle on the oor. The snow had been falling on
King’s Landing most of the night; outside the drifts were ankle
deep. Ser Kevan Lannister pulled his cloak about himself more
closely. “So you say, ser. Words are wind.”
“Then let me prove the truth of them with my sword.” The light
of the torches made a ery blaze of Ronnet Connington’s long red
hair and beard. “Send me against my uncle, and I will bring you
back his head, and the head of this false dragon too.”
Lannister spearmen in crimson cloaks and lion-crested halfhelms
stood along the west wall of the throne room. Tyrell guards in
green cloaks faced them from the opposite wall. The chill in the
throne room was palpable. Though neither Queen Cersei nor Queen
Margaery was amongst them, their presence could be felt poisoning
the air, like ghosts at a feast.
Behind the table where the ve members of the king’s small
council were seated, the Iron Throne crouched like some great black
beast, its barbs and claws and blades half-shrouded in shadow.
Kevan Lannister could feel it at his back, an itch between the
shoulder blades. It was easy to imagine old King Aerys perched up
there, bleeding from some fresh cut, glowering down. But today the
throne was empty. He had seen no reason for Tommen to join them.
Kinder to let the boy remain with his mother. The Seven only knew
how long mother and son might have together before Cersei’s
trial … and possibly her execution.
Mace Tyrell was speaking. “We shall deal with your uncle and his
feigned boy in due time.” The new King’s Hand was seated on an
oaken throne carved in the shape of a hand, an absurd vanity his
lordship had produced the day Ser Kevan agreed to grant him the

o ce he coveted. “You will bide here until we are ready to march.
Then you shall have the chance to prove your loyalty.”
Ser Kevan took no issue with that. “Escort Ser Ronnet back to his
chambers,” he said. And see that he remains there went unspoken.
However loud his protestations, the Knight of Gri n’s Roost
remained suspect. Supposedly the sellswords who had landed in the
south were being led by one of his own blood.
As the echoes of Connington’s footsteps faded away, Grand
Maester Pycelle gave a ponderous shake of his head. “His uncle
once stood just where the boy was standing now and told King
Aerys how he would deliver him the head of Robert Baratheon.”
That is how it is when a man grows as old as Pycelle. Everything you
see or hear reminds you of something you saw or heard when you were
young. “How many men-at-arms accompanied Ser Ronnet to the
city?” Ser Kevan asked.
“Twenty,” said Lord Randyll Tarly, “and most of them Gregor
Clegane’s old lot. Your nephew Jaime gave them to Connington. To
rid himself of them, I’d wager. They had not been in Maidenpool a
day before one killed a man and another was accused of rape. I had
to hang the one and geld the other. If it were up to me, I would
send them all to the Night’s Watch, and Connington with them. The
Wall is where such scum belong.”
“A dog takes after its master,” declared Mace Tyrell. “Black
cloaks would suit them, I agree. I will not su er such men in the
city watch.” A hundred of his own Highgarden men had been added
to the gold cloaks, yet plainly his lordship meant to resist any
balancing infusion of westermen.
The more I give him, the more he wants. Kevan Lannister was
beginning to understand why Cersei had grown so resentful of the
Tyrells. But this was not the moment to provoke an open quarrel.
Randyll Tarly and Mace Tyrell had both brought armies to King’s
Landing, whilst the best part of the strength of House Lannister
remained in the riverlands, fast melting away. “The Mountain’s men
were always ghters,” he said in a conciliatory tone, “and we may
have need of every sword against these sellswords. If this truly is
the Golden Company, as Qyburn’s whisperers insist—”

“Call them what you will,” said Randyll Tarly. “They are still no
more than adventurers.”
“Perhaps,” Ser Kevan said. “But the longer we ignore these
adventurers, the stronger they grow. We have had a map prepared,
a map of the incursions. Grand Maester?”
The map was beautiful, painted by a master’s hand on a sheet of
the nest vellum, so large it covered the table. “Here.” Pycelle
pointed with a spotted hand. Where the sleeve of his robe rode up,
a ap of pale esh could be seen dangling beneath his forearm.
“Here and here. All along the coast, and on the islands. Tarth, the
Stepstones, even Estermont. And now we have reports that
Connington is moving on Storm’s End.”
“If it is Jon Connington,” said Randyll Tarly.
“Storm’s End.” Lord Mace Tyrell grunted the words. “He cannot
take Storm’s End. Not if he were Aegon the Conqueror. And if he
does, what of it? Stannis holds it now. Let the castle pass from one
pretender to another, why should that trouble us? I shall recapture
it after my daughter’s innocence is proved.”
How can you recapture it when you have never captured it to begin
with? “I understand, my lord, but—”
Tyrell did not let him nish. “These charges against my daughter
are lthy lies. I ask again, why must we play out this mummer’s
farce? Have King Tommen declare my daughter innocent, ser, and
put an end to the foolishness here and now.”
Do that, and the whispers will follow Margaery the rest of her life. “No
man doubts your daughter’s innocence, my lord,” Ser Kevan lied,
“but His High Holiness insists upon a trial.”
Lord Randyll snorted. “What have we become, when kings and
high lords must dance to the twittering of sparrows?”
“We have foes on every hand, Lord Tarly,” Ser Kevan reminded
him. “Stannis in the north, ironmen in the west, sellswords in the
south. Defy the High Septon, and we will have blood running in the
gutters of King’s Landing as well. If we are seen to be going against
the gods, it will only drive the pious into the arms of one or the
other of these would-be usurpers.”

Mace Tyrell remained unmoved. “Once Paxter Redwyne sweeps
the ironmen from the seas, my sons will retake the Shields. The
snows will do for Stannis, or Bolton will. As for Connington …”
“If it is him,” Lord Randyll said.
“… as for Connington,” Tyrell repeated, “what victories has he
ever won that we should fear him? He could have ended Robert’s
Rebellion at Stoney Sept. He failed. Just as the Golden Company has
always failed. Some may rush to join them, aye. The realm is well
rid of such fools.”
Ser Kevan wished that he could share his certainty. He had known
Jon Connington, slightly—a proud youth, the most headstrong of
the gaggle of young lordlings who had gathered around Prince
Rhaegar Targaryen, competing for his royal favor. Arrogant, but able
and energetic. That, and his skill at arms, was why Mad King Aerys
had named him Hand. Old Lord Merryweather’s inaction had
allowed the rebellion to take root and spread, and Aerys wanted
someone young and vigorous to match Robert’s own youth and
vigor. “Too soon,” Lord Tywin Lannister had declared when word of
the king’s choice had reached Casterly Rock. “Connington is too
young, too bold, too eager for glory.”
The Battle of the Bells had proved the truth of that. Ser Kevan
had expected that afterward Aerys would have no choice but to
summon Tywin once more … but the Mad King had turned to the
Lords Chelsted and Rossart instead, and paid for it with life and
crown. That was all so long ago, though. If this is indeed Jon
Connington, he will be a di erent man. Older, harder, more
seasoned … more dangerous. “Connington may have more than the
Golden Company. It is said he has a Targaryen pretender.”
“A feigned boy is what he has,” said Randyll Tarly.
“That may be. Or not.” Kevan Lannister had been here, in this
very hall when Tywin had laid the bodies of Prince Rhaegar’s
children at the foot of the Iron Throne, wrapped up in crimson
cloaks. The girl had been recognizably the Princess Rhaenys, but the
boy … a faceless horror of bone and brain and gore, a few hanks of fair
hair. None of us looked long. Tywin said that it was Prince Aegon, and
we took him at his word. “We have these tales coming from the east

as well. A second Targaryen, and one whose blood no man can
question. Daenerys Stormborn.”
“As mad as her father,” declared Lord Mace Tyrell.
That would be the same father that Highgarden and House Tyrell
supported to the bitter end and well beyond. “Mad she may be,” Ser
Kevan said, “but with so much smoke drifting west, surely there
must be some re burning in the east.”
Grand Maester Pycelle bobbed his head. “Dragons. These same
stories have reached Oldtown. Too many to discount. A silverhaired queen with three dragons.”
“At the far end of the world,” said Mace Tyrell. “Queen of
Slaver’s Bay, aye. She is welcome to it.”
“On that we can agree,” Ser Kevan said, “but the girl is of the
blood of Aegon the Conqueror, and I do not think she will be
content to remain in Meereen forever. If she should reach these
shores and join her strength to Lord Connington and this prince of
his, feigned or no … we must destroy Connington and his pretender
now, before Daenerys Stormborn can come west.”
Mace Tyrell crossed his arms. “I mean to do just that, ser. After
the trials.”
“Sellswords ght for coin,” declared Grand Maester Pycelle.
“With enough gold, we might persuade the Golden Company to
hand over Lord Connington and the pretender.”
“Aye, if we had gold,” Ser Harys Swyft said. “Alas, my lords, our
vaults contain only rats and roaches. I have written again to the
Myrish bankers. If they will agree to make good the crown’s debt to
the Braavosi and extend us a new loan, mayhaps we will not have to
raise the taxes. Elsewise—”
“The magisters of Pentos have been known to lend money as
well,” said Ser Kevan. “Try them.” The Pentoshi were even less like
to be of help than the Myrish money changers, but the e ort must
be made. Unless a new source of coin could be found, or the Iron
Bank persuaded to relent, he would have no choice but to pay the
crown’s debts with Lannister gold. He dare not resort to new taxes,
not with the Seven Kingdoms crawling with rebellion. Half the lords
in the realm could not tell taxation from tyranny, and would bolt to

the nearest usurper in a heartbeat if it would save them a clipped
copper. “If that fails, you may well need to go to Braavos, to treat
with the Iron Bank yourself.”
Ser Harys quailed. “Must I?”
“You are the master of coin,” Lord Randyll said sharply.
“I am.” The pu of white hair at the end of Swyft’s chin quivered
in outrage. “Must I remind my lord, this trouble is not of my doing?
And not all of us have had the opportunity to re ll our co ers with
the plunder of Maidenpool and Dragonstone.”
“I resent your implication, Swyft,” Mace Tyrell said, bristling.
“No wealth was found on Dragonstone, I promise you. My son’s
men have searched every inch of that damp and dreary island and
turned up not so much as a single gemstone or speck of gold. Nor
any sign of this fabled hoard of dragon eggs.”
Kevan Lannister had seen Dragonstone with his own eyes. He
doubted very much that Loras Tyrell had searched every inch of
that ancient stronghold. The Valyrians had raised it, after all, and all
their works stank of sorcery. And Ser Loras was young, prone to all
the rash judgments of youth, and had been grievously wounded
storming the castle besides. But it would not do to remind Tyrell
that his favorite son was fallible. “If there was wealth on
Dragonstone, Stannis would have found it,” he declared. “Let us
move along, my lords. We have two queens to try for high treason,
you may recall. My niece has elected trial by battle, she informs
me. Ser Robert Strong will champion her.”
“The silent giant.” Lord Randyll grimaced.
“Tell me, ser, where did this man come from?” demanded Mace
Tyrell. “Why have we never heard his name before? He does not
speak, he will not show his face, he is never seen without his armor.
Do we know for a certainty that he is even a knight?”
We do not even know if he’s alive. Meryn Trant claimed that Strong
took neither food nor drink, and Boros Blount went so far as to say
he had never seen the man use the privy. Why should he? Dead men
do not shit. Kevan Lannister had a strong suspicion of just who this
Ser Robert really was beneath that gleaming white armor. A
suspicion that Mace Tyrell and Randyll Tarly no doubt shared.

Whatever the face hidden behind Strong’s helm, it must remain
hidden for now. The silent giant was his niece’s only hope. And pray
that he is as formidable as he appears.
But Mace Tyrell could not seem to see beyond the threat to his
own daughter. “His Grace named Ser Robert to the Kingsguard,” Ser
Kevan reminded him, “and Qyburn vouches for the man as well. Be
that as it may, we need Ser Robert to prevail, my lords. If my niece
is proved guilty of these treasons, the legitimacy of her children
will be called into question. If Tommen ceases to be a king,
Margaery will cease to be a queen.” He let Tyrell chew on that a
moment. “Whatever Cersei may have done, she is still a daughter of
the Rock, of mine own blood. I will not let her die a traitor’s death,
but I have made sure to draw her fangs. All her guards have been
dismissed and replaced with my own men. In place of her former
ladies-in-waiting, she will henceforth be attended by a septa and
three novices selected by the High Septon. She is to have no further
voice in the governance of the realm, nor in Tommen’s education. I
mean to return her to Casterly Rock after the trial and see that she
remains there. Let that su ce.”
The rest he left unsaid. Cersei was soiled goods now, her power
at an end. Every baker’s boy and beggar in the city had seen her in
her shame and every tart and tanner from Flea Bottom to Pisswater
Bend had gazed upon her nakedness, their eager eyes crawling over
her breasts and belly and woman’s parts. No queen could expect to
rule again after that. In gold and silk and emeralds Cersei had been
a queen, the next thing to a goddess; naked, she was only human,
an aging woman with stretch marks on her belly and teats that had
begun to sag … as the shrews in the crowds had been glad to point
out to their husbands and lovers. Better to live shamed than die proud,
Ser Kevan told himself. “My niece will make no further mischief,”
he promised Mace Tyrell. “You have my word on that, my lord.”
Tyrell gave a grudging nod. “As you say. My Margaery prefers to
be tried by the Faith, so the whole realm can bear witness to her
innocence.”
If your daughter is as innocent as you’d have us believe, why must you
have your army present when she faces her accusers? Ser Kevan might

have asked. “Soon, I hope,” he said instead, before turning to Grand
Maester Pycelle. “Is there aught else?”
The Grand Maester consulted his papers. “We should address the
Rosby inheritance. Six claims have been put forth—”
“We can settle Rosby at some later date. What else?”
“Preparations should be made for Princess Myrcella.”
“This is what comes of dealing with the Dornish,” Mace Tyrell
said. “Surely a better match can be found for the girl?”
Such as your own son Willas, perhaps? Her dis gured by one
Dornishman, him crippled by another? “No doubt,” Ser Kevan said,
“but we have enemies enough without o ending Dorne. If Doran
Martell were to join his strength to Connington’s in support of this
feigned dragon, things could go very ill for all of us.”
“Mayhaps we can persuade our Dornish friends to deal with Lord
Connington,” Ser Harys Swyft said with an irritating titter. “That
would save a deal of blood and trouble.”
“It would,” Ser Kevan said wearily. Time to put an end to this.
“Thank you, my lords. Let us convene again ve days hence. After
Cersei’s trial.”
“As you say. May the Warrior lend strength to Ser Robert’s arms.”
The words were grudging, the dip of the chin Mace Tyrell gave the
Lord Regent the most cursory of bows. But it was something, and
for that much Ser Kevan Lannister was grateful.
Randyll Tarly left the hall with his liege lord, their green-cloaked
spearmen right behind them. Tarly is the real danger, Ser Kevan
re ected as he watched their departure. A narrow man, but ironwilled and shrewd, and as good a soldier as the Reach could boast. But
how do I win him to our side?
“Lord Tyrell loves me not,” Grand Maester Pycelle said in gloomy
tones when the Hand had departed. “This matter of the moon
tea … I would never have spoken of such, but the Queen Dowager
commanded me! If it please the Lord Regent, I would sleep more
soundly if you could lend me some of your guards.”
“Lord Tyrell might take that amiss.”
Ser Harys Swyft tugged at his chin beard. “I am in need of guards
myself. These are perilous times.”

Aye, thought Kevan Lannister, and Pycelle is not the only council
member our Hand would like to replace. Mace Tyrell had his own
candidate for lord treasurer: his uncle, Lord Seneschal of
Highgarden, whom men called Garth the Gross. The last thing I need
is another Tyrell on the small council. He was already outnumbered.
Ser Harys was his wife’s father, and Pycelle could be counted upon
as well. But Tarly was sworn to Highgarden, as was Paxter
Redwyne, lord admiral and master of ships, presently sailing his
eet around Dorne to deal with Euron Greyjoy’s ironmen. Once
Redwyne returned to King’s Landing, the council would stand at
three and three, Lannister and Tyrell.
The seventh voice would be the Dornishwoman now escorting
Myrcella home. The Lady Nym. But no lady, if even half of what
Qyburn reports is true. A bastard daughter of the Red Viper, near as
notorious as her father and intent on claiming the council seat that
Prince Oberyn himself had occupied so brie y. Ser Kevan had not
yet seen t to inform Mace Tyrell of her coming. The Hand, he
knew, would not be pleased. The man we need is Little nger. Petyr
Baelish had a gift for conjuring dragons from the air.
“Hire the Mountain’s men,” Ser Kevan suggested. “Red Ronnet
will have no further use for them.” He did not think that Mace
Tyrell would be so clumsy as to try to murder either Pycelle or
Swyft, but if guards made them feel safer, let them have guards.
The three men walked together from the throne room. Outside
the snow was swirling round the outer ward, a caged beast howling
to be free. “Have you ever felt such cold?” asked Ser Harys.
“The time to speak of the cold,” said Grand Maester Pycelle, “is
not when we are standing out in it.” He made his slow way across
the outer ward, back to his chambers.
The others lingered for a moment on the throne room steps. “I
put no faith in these Myrish bankers,” Ser Kevan told his goodfather. “You had best prepare to go to Braavos.”
Ser Harys did not look happy at the prospect. “If I must. But I say
again, this trouble is not of my doing.”
“No. It was Cersei who decided that the Iron Bank would wait for
their due. Should I send her to Braavos?”

Ser Harys blinked. “Her Grace … that … that …”
Ser Kevan rescued him. “That was a jape. A bad one. Go and nd
a warm re. I mean to do the same.” He yanked his gloves on and
set o across the yard, leaning hard into the wind as his cloak
snapped and swirled behind him.
The dry moat surrounding Maegor’s Holdfast was three feet deep
in snow, the iron spikes that lined it glistening with frost. The only
way in or out of Maegor’s was across the drawbridge that spanned
that moat. A knight of the Kingsguard was always posted at its far
end. Tonight the duty had fallen to Ser Meryn Trant. With Balon
Swann hunting the rogue knight Darkstar down in Dorne, Loras
Tyrell gravely wounded on Dragonstone, and Jaime vanished in the
riverlands, only four of the White Swords remained in King’s
Landing, and Ser Kevan had thrown Osmund Kettleblack (and his
brother Osfryd) into the dungeon within hours of Cersei’s
confessing that she had taken both men as lovers. That left only
Trant, the feeble Boros Blount, and Qyburn’s mute monster Robert
Strong to protect the young king and royal family.
I will need to nd some new swords for the Kingsguard. Tommen
should have seven good knights about him. In the past the
Kingsguard had served for life, but that had not stopped Jo rey
from dismissing Ser Barristan Selmy to make a place for his dog,
Sandor Clegane. Kevan could make use of that precedent. I could put
Lancel in a white cloak, he re ected. There is more honor in that than
he will ever nd in the Warrior’s Sons.
Kevan Lannister hung his snow-sodden cloak inside his solar,
pulled o his boots, and commanded his serving man to fetch some
fresh wood for his re. “A cup of mulled wine would go down
well,” he said as he settled by the hearth. “See to it.”
The re soon thawed him, and the wine warmed his insides
nicely. It also made him sleepy, so he dare not drink another cup.
His day was far from done. He had reports to read, letters to write.
And supper with Cersei and the king. His niece had been subdued and
submissive since her walk of atonement, thank the gods. The
novices who attended her reported that she spent a third of her
waking hours with her son, another third in prayer, and the rest in

her tub. She was bathing four or ve times a day, scrubbing herself
with horsehair brushes and strong lye soap, as if she meant to
scrape her skin o .
She will never wash the stain away, no matter how hard she scrubs.
Ser Kevan remembered the girl she once had been, so full of life and
mischief. And when she’d owered, ahhhh … had there ever been a
maid so sweet to look upon? If Aerys had agreed to marry her to
Rhaegar, how many deaths might have been avoided? Cersei could
have given the prince the sons he wanted, lions with purple eyes
and silver manes … and with such a wife, Rhaegar might never
have looked twice at Lyanna Stark. The northern girl had a wild
beauty, as he recalled, though however bright a torch might burn it
could never match the rising sun.
But it did no good to brood on lost battles and roads not taken.
That was a vice of old done men. Rhaegar had wed Elia of Dorne,
Lyanna Stark had died, Robert Baratheon had taken Cersei to bride,
and here they were. And tonight his own road would take him to his
niece’s chambers and face-to-face with Cersei.
I have no reason to feel guilty, Ser Kevan told himself. Tywin would
understand that, surely. It was his daughter who brought shame down on
our name, not I. What I did I did for the good of House Lannister.
It was not as if his brother had never done the same. In their
father’s nal years, after their mother’s passing, their sire had taken
the comely daughter of a candlemaker as mistress. It was not
unknown for a widowed lord to keep a common girl as
bedwarmer … but Lord Tytos soon began seating the woman beside
him in the hall, showering her with gifts and honors, even asking
her views on matters of state. Within a year she was dismissing
servants, ordering about his household knights, even speaking for
his lordship when he was indisposed. She grew so in uential that it
was said about Lannisport that any man who wished for his petition
to be heard should kneel before her and speak loudly to her
lap … for Tytos Lannister’s ear was between his lady’s legs. She had
even taken to wearing their mother’s jewels.
Until the day their lord father’s heart had burst in his chest as he
was ascending a steep ight of steps to her bed, that is. All the self-

seekers who had named themselves her friends and cultivated her
favor had abandoned her quickly enough when Tywin had her
stripped naked and paraded through Lannisport to the docks, like a
common whore. Though no man laid a hand on her, that walk
spelled the end of her power. Surely Tywin would never have
dreamed that same fate awaited his own golden daughter.
“It had to be,” Ser Kevan muttered over the last of his wine. His
High Holiness had to be appeased. Tommen needed the Faith behind
him in the battles to come. And Cersei … the golden child had
grown into a vain, foolish, greedy woman. Left to rule, she would
have ruined Tommen as she had Jo rey.
Outside the wind was rising, clawing at the shutters of his
chamber. Ser Kevan pushed himself to his feet. Time to face the
lioness in her den. We have pulled her claws. Jaime, though … But no,
he would not brood on that.
He donned an old, well-worn doublet, in case his niece had a
mind to throw another cup of wine in his face, but he left his sword
belt hanging on the back of his chair. Only the knights of the
Kingsguard were permitted swords in Tommen’s presence.
Ser Boros Blount was in attendance on the boy king and his
mother when Ser Kevan entered the royal chambers. Blount wore
enameled scale, white cloak, and halfhelm. He did not look well. Of
late Boros had grown notably heavier about the face and belly, and
his color was not good. And he was leaning against the wall behind
him, as if standing had become too great an e ort for him.
The meal was served by three novices, well-scrubbed girls of
good birth between the ages of twelve and sixteen. In their soft
white woolens, each seemed more innocent and unworldly than the
last, yet the High Septon had insisted that no girl spend more than
seven days in the queen’s service, lest Cersei corrupt her. They
tended the queen’s wardrobe, drew her bath, poured her wine,
changed her bedclothes of a morning. One shared the queen’s bed
every night, to ascertain she had no other company; the other two
slept in an adjoining chamber with the septa who looked over them.
A tall stork of a girl with a pockmarked face escorted him into the
royal presence. Cersei rose when he entered and kissed him lightly

on the cheek. “Dear uncle. It is so good of you to sup with us.” The
queen was dressed as modestly as any matron, in a dark brown
gown that buttoned up to her throat and a hooded green mantle
that covered her shaved head. Before her walk she would have
aunted her baldness beneath a golden crown. “Come, sit,” she said.
“Will you have wine?”
“A cup.” He sat, still wary.
A freckled novice lled their cups with hot spiced wine. “Tommen
tells me that Lord Tyrell intends to rebuild the Tower of the Hand,”
Cersei said.
Ser Kevan nodded. “The new tower will be twice as tall as the
one you burned, he says.”
Cersei gave a throaty laugh. “Long lances, tall towers … is Lord
Tyrell hinting at something?”
That made him smile. It is good that she still remembers how to
laugh. When he asked if she had all that she required, the queen
said, “I am well served. The girls are sweet, and the good septas
make certain that I say my prayers. But once my innocence is
proved, it would please me if Taena Merryweather might attend me
once again. She could bring her son to court. Tommen needs other
boys about him, friends of noble birth.”
It was a modest request. Ser Kevan saw no reason why it should
not be granted. He could foster the Merryweather boy himself,
whilst Lady Taena accompanied Cersei back to Casterly Rock. “I
will send for her after the trial,” he promised.
Supper began with beef-and-barley soup, followed by a brace of
quail and a roast pike near three feet long, with turnips,
mushrooms, and plenty of hot bread and butter. Ser Boros tasted
every dish that was set before the king. A humiliating duty for a
knight of the Kingsguard, but perhaps all Blount was capable of
these days … and wise, after the way Tommen’s brother had died.
The king seemed happier than Kevan Lannister had seen him in a
long time. From soup to sweet Tommen burbled about the exploits
of his kittens, whilst feeding them morsels of pike o his own royal
plate. “The bad cat was outside my window last night,” he informed

Kevan at one point, “but Ser Pounce hissed at him and he ran o
across the roofs.”
“The bad cat?” Ser Kevan said, amused. He is a sweet boy.
“An old black tomcat with a torn ear,” Cersei told him. “A lthy
thing, and foul-tempered. He clawed Jo ’s hand once.” She made a
face. “The cats keep the rats down, I know, but that one … he’s
been known to attack ravens in the rookery.”
“I will ask the ratters to set a trap for him.” Ser Kevan could not
remember ever seeing his niece so quiet, so subdued, so demure. All
for the good, he supposed. But it made him sad as well. Her re is
quenched, she who used to burn so bright. “You have not asked about
your brother,” he said, as they were waiting for the cream cakes.
Cream cakes were the king’s favorite.
Cersei lifted her chin, her green eyes shining in the candlelight.
“Jaime? Have you had word?”
“None. Cersei, you may need to prepare yourself for—”
“If he were dead, I would know it. We came into this world
together, Uncle. He would not go without me.” She took a drink of
wine. “Tyrion can leave whenever he wishes. You have had no word
of him either, I suppose.”
“No one has tried to sell us a dwarf’s head of late, no.”
She nodded. “Uncle, may I ask you a question?”
“Whatever you wish.”
“Your wife … do you mean to bring her to court?”
“No.” Dorna was a gentle soul, never comfortable but at home
with friends and kin around her. She had done well by their
children, dreamed of having grandchildren, prayed seven times a
day, loved needlework and owers. In King’s Landing she would be
as happy as one of Tommen’s kittens in a pit of vipers. “My lady
wife mislikes travel. Lannisport is her place.”
“It is a wise woman who knows her place.”
He did not like the sound of that. “Say what you mean.”
“I thought I did.” Cersei held out her cup. The freckled girl lled
it once again. The cream cakes appeared then, and the conversation
took a lighter turn. Only after Tommen and his kittens were

escorted o to the royal bedchamber by Ser Boros did their talk
turn to the queen’s trial.
“Osney’s brothers will not stand by idly and watch him die,”
Cersei warned him.
“I did not expect that they would. I’ve had the both of them
arrested.”
That seemed to take her aback. “For what crime?”
“Fornication with a queen. His High Holiness says that you
confessed to bedding both of them—had you forgotten?”
Her face reddened. “No. What will you do with them?”
“The Wall, if they admit their guilt. If they deny it, they can face
Ser Robert. Such men should never have been raised so high.”
Cersei lowered her head. “I … I misjudged them.”
“You misjudged a good many men, it seems.”
He might have said more, but the dark-haired novice with the
round cheeks returned to say, “My lord, my lady, I am sorry to
intrude, but there is a boy below. Grand Maester Pycelle begs the
favor of the Lord Regent’s presence at once.”
Dark wings, dark words, Ser Kevan thought. Could Storm’s End have
fallen? Or might this be word from Bolton in the north?
“It might be news of Jaime,” the queen said.
There was only one way to know. Ser Kevan rose. “Pray excuse
me.” Before he took his leave, he dropped to one knee and kissed
his niece upon the hand. If her silent giant failed her, it might be
the last kiss she would ever know.
The messenger was a boy of eight or nine, so bundled up in fur he
seemed a bear cub. Trant had kept him waiting out on the
drawbridge rather than admit him into Maegor’s. “Go nd a re,
lad,” Ser Kevan told him, pressing a penny into his hand. “I know
the way to the rookery well enough.”
The snow had nally stopped falling. Behind a veil of ragged
clouds, a full moon oated fat and white as a snowball. The stars
shone cold and distant. As Ser Kevan made his way across the inner
ward, the castle seemed an alien place, where every keep and tower
had grown icy teeth, and all familiar paths had vanished beneath a
white blanket. Once an icicle long as a spear fell to shatter by his

feet. Autumn in King’s Landing, he brooded. What must it be like up
on the Wall?
The door was opened by a serving girl, a skinny thing in a furlined robe much too big for her. Ser Kevan stamped the snow o his
boots, removed his cloak, tossed it to her. “The Grand Maester is
expecting me,” he announced. The girl nodded, solemn and silent,
and pointed to the steps.
Pycelle’s chambers were beneath the rookery, a spacious suite of
rooms cluttered with racks of herbs and salves and potions and
shelves jammed full of books and scrolls. Ser Kevan had always
found them uncomfortably hot. Not tonight. Once past the chamber
door, the chill was palpable. Black ash and dying embers were all
that remained of the hearth re. A few ickering candles cast pools
of dim light here and there.
The rest was shrouded in shadow … except beneath the open
window, where a spray of ice crystals glittered in the moonlight,
swirling in the wind. On the window seat a raven loitered, pale,
huge, its feathers ru ed. It was the largest raven that Kevan
Lannister had ever seen. Larger than any hunting hawk at Casterly
Rock, larger than the largest owl. Blowing snow danced around it,
and the moon painted it silver.
Not silver. White. The bird is white.
The white ravens of the Citadel did not carry messages, as their
dark cousins did. When they went forth from Oldtown, it was for
one purpose only: to herald a change of seasons.
“Winter,” said Ser Kevan. The word made a white mist in the air.
He turned away from the window.
Then something slammed him in the chest between the ribs, hard
as a giant’s st. It drove the breath from him and sent him lurching
backwards. The white raven took to the air, its pale wings slapping
him about the head. Ser Kevan half-sat and half-fell onto the
window seat. What … who … A quarrel was sunk almost to the
etching in his chest. No. No, that was how my brother died. Blood
was seeping out around the shaft. “Pycelle,” he muttered, confused.
“Help me … I …”

Then he saw. Grand Maester Pycelle was seated at his table, his
head pillowed on the great leather-bound tome before him. Sleeping,
Kevan thought … until he blinked and saw the deep red gash in the
old man’s spotted skull and the blood pooled beneath his head,
staining the pages of his book. All around his candle were bits of
bone and brain, islands in a lake of melted wax.
He wanted guards, Ser Kevan thought. I should have sent him
guards. Could Cersei have been right all along? Was this his
nephew’s work? “Tyrion?” he called. “Where …?”
“Far away,” a half-familiar voice replied.
He stood in a pool of shadow by a bookcase, plump, pale-faced,
round-shouldered, clutching a crossbow in soft powdered hands. Silk
slippers swaddled his feet.
“Varys?”
The eunuch set the crossbow down. “Ser Kevan. Forgive me if
you can. I bear you no ill will. This was not done from malice. It
was for the realm. For the children.”
I have children. I have a wife. Oh, Dorna. Pain washed over him. He
closed his eyes, opened them again. “There are … there are
hundreds of Lannister guardsmen in this castle.”
“But none in this room, thankfully. This pains me, my lord. You
do not deserve to die alone on such a cold dark night. There are
many like you, good men in service to bad causes … but you were
threatening to undo all the queen’s good work, to reconcile
Highgarden and Casterly Rock, bind the Faith to your little king,
unite the Seven Kingdoms under Tommen’s rule. So …”
A gust of wind blew up. Ser Kevan shivered violently.
“Are you cold, my lord?” asked Varys. “Do forgive me. The Grand
Maester befouled himself in dying, and the stink was so abominable
that I thought I might choke.”
Ser Kevan tried to rise, but the strength had left him. He could
not feel his legs.
“I thought the crossbow tting. You shared so much with Lord
Tywin, why not that? Your niece will think the Tyrells had you
murdered, mayhaps with the connivance of the Imp. The Tyrells
will suspect her. Someone somewhere will nd a way to blame the

Dornishmen. Doubt, division, and mistrust will eat the very ground
beneath your boy king, whilst Aegon raises his banner above
Storm’s End and the lords of the realm gather round him.”
“Aegon?” For a moment he did not understand. Then he
remembered. A babe swaddled in a crimson cloak, the cloth stained
with his blood and brains. “Dead. He’s dead.”
“No.” The eunuch’s voice seemed deeper. “He is here. Aegon has
been shaped for rule since before he could walk. He has been
trained in arms, as be ts a knight to be, but that was not the end of
his education. He reads and writes, he speaks several tongues, he
has studied history and law and poetry. A septa has instructed him
in the mysteries of the Faith since he was old enough to understand
them. He has lived with sherfolk, worked with his hands, swum in
rivers and mended nets and learned to wash his own clothes at
need. He can sh and cook and bind up a wound, he knows what it
is like to be hungry, to be hunted, to be afraid. Tommen has been
taught that kingship is his right. Aegon knows that kingship is his
duty, that a king must put his people rst, and live and rule for
them.”
Kevan Lannister tried to cry out … to his guards, his wife, his
brother … but the words would not come. Blood dribbled from his
mouth. He shuddered violently.
“I am sorry.” Varys wrung his hands. “You are su ering, I know,
yet here I stand going on like some silly old woman. Time to make
an end to it.” The eunuch pursed his lips and gave a little whistle.
Ser Kevan was cold as ice, and every labored breath sent a fresh
stab of pain through him. He glimpsed movement, heard the soft
scu ing sound of slippered feet on stone. A child emerged from a
pool of darkness, a pale boy in a ragged robe, no more than nine or
ten. Another rose up behind the Grand Maester’s chair. The girl who
had opened the door for him was there as well. They were all
around him, half a dozen of them, white-faced children with dark
eyes, boys and girls together.
And in their hands, the daggers.

WESTEROS

THE BOY KING

TOMMEN BARATHEON, the First of His Name, King of the Andals,
the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, a boy
of eight years,
• his wife, QUEEN MARGAERY of House Tyrell, thrice wed, twice
widowed, accused of high treason, held captive in the Great
Sept of Baelor,
• her lady companions and cousins, MEGGA, ALLA, and ELINOR
TYRELL, accused of fornications,
• Elinor’s betrothed, ALYN AMBROSE, squire,
• his mother, CERSEI of House Lannister, Queen Dowager, Lady
of Casterly Rock, accused of high treason, captive in the Great
Sept of Baelor,
• his siblings:
• his elder brother, {KING JOFFREY I BARATHEON}, poisoned
during his wedding feast,
• his elder sister, PRINCESS MYRCELLA BARATHEON, a girl of
nine, a ward of Prince Doran Martell at Sunspear, betrothed to
his son Trystane,

• his kittens, SER POUNCE, LADY WHISKERS, BOOTS,
• his uncles:

• SER JAIME LANNISTER, called THE KINGSLAYER, twin to
Queen Cersei, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard,
• TYRION LANNISTER, called THE IMP, a dwarf, accused and
condemned for regicide and kinslaying,

• his other kin:
• his grandfather, {TYWIN LANNISTER}, Lord of Casterly Rock,
Warden of the West, and Hand of the King, murdered in the
privy by his son Tyrion,
• his great-uncle, SER KEVAN LANNISTER, Lord Regent and
Protector of the Realm, m. Dorna Swyft,
• their children:
• SER LANCEL LANNISTER, a knight of the Holy Order of the
Warrior’s Sons,
• {WILLEM}, twin to Martyn, murdered at Riverrun,
• MARTYN, twin to Willem, a squire,
• JANEI, a girl of three,
• his great-aunt, GENNA LANNISTER, m. Ser Emmon Frey,
• their children:
• {SER CLEOS FREY}, killed by outlaws,
• his son, SER TYWIN FREY, called TY,
• his son, WILLEM FREY, a squire,

• SER LYONEL FREY, Lady Genna’s second son,
• {TION FREY}, a squire, murdered at Riverrun,

• WALDER FREY, called RED WALDER, a page at Casterly Rock,
• his great-uncle, {SER TYGETT LANNISTER}, m. Darlessa
Marbrand
• their children:

• TYREK LANNISTER, a squire, vanished during the food riots in
King’s Landing,
• LADY ERMESANDE HAYFORD, Tyrek’s child wife,
• his great uncle, GERION LANNISTER, lost at sea,
• JOY HILL, his bastard daughter,
• King Tommen’s small council:

• SER KEVAN LANNISTER, Lord Regent,
• LORD MACE TYRELL, Hand of the King,
• GRAND MAESTER PYCELLE, counselor and healer,

• SER JAIME LANNISTER, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard,
• LORD PAXTER REDWYNE, grand admiral and master of ships,
• QYBURN, a disgraced maester and reputed necromancer,
master of whisperers,

• Queen Cersei’s former small council,
• {LORD GYLES ROSBY}, lord treasurer and master of coin, dead
of a cough,
• LORD ORTON MERRYWEATHER, justiciar and master of laws,
ed to Longtable upon Queen Cersei’s arrest,

• AURANE WATERS, the Bastard of Driftmark, grand admiral and
master of ships, ed to sea with the royal eet upon Queen
Cersei’s arrest,

• King Tommen’s Kingsguard:
• SER JAIME LANNISTER, Lord Commander,

• SER MERYN TRANT,
• SER BOROS BLOUNT, removed and thence restored,

• SER BALON SWANN, in Dorne with Princess Myrcella,
• SER OSMUND KETTLEBLACK,
• SER LORAS TYRELL, the Knight of Flowers,

• {SER ARYS OAKHEART}, dead in Dorne,
• Tommen’s court at King’s Landing:
• MOON BOY, the royal jester and fool,

• PATE, a lad of eight, King Tommen’s whipping boy,

• ORMOND OF OLDTOWN, the royal harper and bard,
• SER OSFRYD KETTLEBLACK, brother to Ser Osmund and Ser
Osney, a captain in the City Watch,
• NOHO DIMITTIS, envoy from the Iron Bank of Braavos,

• {SER GREGOR CLEGANE}, called THE MOUNTAIN THAT
RIDES, dead of a poisoned wound,
• RENNIFER LONGWATERS, chief undergaoler of the Red Keep’s
dungeons,
• Queen Margaery’s alleged lovers:

• WAT, a singer styling himself THE BLUE BARD, a captive
driven mad by torment,
• {HAMISH THE HARPER}, an aged singer, died a captive,

• SER MARK MULLENDORE, who lost a monkey and half an arm
in the Battle of the Blackwater,
• SER TALLAD called THE TALL, SER LAMBERT TURNBERRY,
SER BAYARD NORCROSS, SER HUGH CLIFTON,
• JALABHAR XHO, Prince of the Red Flower Vale, an exile from
the Summer Isles,
• SER HORAS REDWYNE, found innocent and freed,
• SER HOBBER REDWYNE, found innocent and freed,
• Queen Cersei’s chief accuser,

• SER OSNEY KETTLEBLACK, brother to Ser Osmund and Ser
Osfryd, held captive by the Faith,

• the people of the Faith:

• THE HIGH SEPTON, Father of the Faithful, Voice of the Seven
on Earth, an old man and frail,
• SEPTA UNELLA, SEPTA MOELLE, SEPTA SCOLERA, the
queen’s gaolers,
• SEPTON TORBERT, SEPTON RAYNARD, SEPTON LUCEON,
SEPTON OLLIDOR, of the Most Devout,

• SEPTA AGLANTINE, SEPTA HELICENT, serving the Seven at
the Great Sept of Baelor,
• SER THEODAN WELLS, called THEODAN THE TRUE, pious
commander of the Warrior’s Sons,
• the “sparrows,” the humblest of men, erce in their piety,
• people of King’s Landing:

• CHATAYA, proprietor of an expensive brothel,
• ALAYAYA, her daughter,
• DANCY, MAREI, two of Chataya’s girls,

• TOBHO MOTT, a master armorer,

• lords of the crownlands, sworn to the Iron Throne:
• RENFRED RYKKER, Lord of Duskendale,

• SER RUFUS LEEK, a one-legged knight in his service, castellan
of the Dun Fort at Duskendale,

• {TANDA STOKEWORTH}, Lady of Stokeworth, died of a
broken hip,

• her eldest daughter, {FALYSE}, died screaming in the black
cells,
• {SER BALMAN BYRCH}, Lady Falyse’s husband, killed in a
joust,
• her younger daughter, LOLLYS, weak of wit, Lady of
Stokeworth,

• her newborn son, TYRION TANNER, of the hundred fathers,

• her husband, SER BRONN OF THE BLACKWATER, sellsword
turned knight,

• MAESTER FRENKEN, in service at Stokeworth,

King Tommen’s banner shows the crowned stag of Baratheon, black
on gold, and the lion of Lannister, gold on crimson, combatant.

THE KING AT THE WALL

STANNIS BARATHEON, the First of His Name, second son of Lord
Ste on Baratheon and Lady Cassana of House Estermont, Lord of
Dragonstone, styling himself King of Westeros,
• with King Stannis at Castle Black:
• LADY MELISANDRE OF ASSHAI, called THE RED WOMAN, a
priestess of R’hllor, the Lord of Light,
• his knights and sworn swords:
• SER RICHARD HORPE, his second-in-command,
• SER GODRY FARRING, called GIANTSLAYER,
• SER JUSTIN MASSEY,
• LORD ROBIN PEASEBURY,
• LORD HARWOOD FELL,
• SER CLAYTON SUGGS, SER CORLISS PENNY, queen’s men and
fervent followers of the Lord of Light,
• SER WILLAM FOXGLOVE, SER HUMFREY CLIFTON, SER
ORMUND WYLDE, SER HARYS COBB, knights
• his squires, DEVAN SEAWORTH and BRYEN FARRING

• his captive, MANCE RAYDER, King-Beyond-the-Wall,
• Rayder’s infant son, “the wildling prince,”
• the boy’s wet nurse, GILLY, a wildling girl,

• Gilly’s infant son, “the abomination,” fathered by her father
{CRASTER},

• at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea:

• QUEEN SELYSE of House Florent, his wife,

• PRINCESS SHIREEN, their daughter, a girl of eleven,
• PATCHFACE, Shireen’s tattooed fool,
• her uncle, SER AXELL FLORENT, foremost of the queen’s men,
styling himself the Queen’s Hand,
• her knights and sworn swords, SER NARBERT GRANDISON,
SER BENETHON SCALES, SER PATREK OF KING’S MOUNTAIN,
SER DORDEN THE DOUR, SER MALEGORN OF REDPOOL, SER
LAMBERT WHITEWATER, SER PERKIN FOLLARD, SER BRUS
BUCKLER
• SER DAVOS SEAWORTH, Lord of the Rainwood, Admiral of the
Narrow Sea, and Hand of the King, called THE ONION
KNIGHT,
• SALLADHAR SAAN of Lys, a pirate and sellsail, master of the
Valyrian and a eet of galleys,
• TYCHO NESTORIS, emissary from the Iron Bank of Braavos.

Stannis has taken for his banner the ery heart of the Lord of Light
—a red heart surrounded by orange ames upon a yellow eld.
Within the heart is the crowned stag of House Baratheon, in black.

KING OF THE ISLES AND THE NORTH
The Greyjoys of Pyke claim descent from the Grey King of the Age
of Heroes. Legend says the Grey King ruled the sea itself and took a
mermaid to wife. Aegon the Dragon ended the line of the last King
of the Iron Islands, but allowed the ironborn to revive their ancient
custom and choose who should have primacy among them. They
chose Lord Vickon Greyjoy of Pyke. The Greyjoy sigil is a golden
kraken upon a black eld. Their words are We Do Not Sow.
EURON GREYJOY, the Third of His Name Since the Grey
King, King of the Iron Islands and the North, King of Salt and
Rock, Son of the Sea Wind, and Lord Reaper of Pyke, captain
of the Silence, called CROW’S EYE,

• his elder brother, {BALON}, King of the Iron Islands and the
North, the Ninth of His Name Since the Grey King, killed in a
fall,
• LADY ALANNYS, of House Harlaw, Balon’s widow,
• their children:
• {RODRIK}, slain during Balon’s rst rebellion,
• {MARON}, slain during Balon’s rst rebellion,
• ASHA, captain of the Black Wind and conqueror of Deepwood
Motte, m. Erik Ironmaker,

• THEON, called by northmen THEON TURNCLOAK, a captive
at the Dreadfort,

• his younger brother, VICTARION, Lord Captain of the Iron
Fleet, master of the Iron Victory,

• his youngest brother, AERON, called DAMPHAIR, a priest of the
Drowned God,
• his captains and sworn swords:

• TORWOLD BROWNTOOTH, PINCHFACE JON MYRE, RODRIK
FREEBORN, THE RED OARSMAN, LEFT-HAND LUCAS CODD,
QUELLON HUMBLE, HARREN HALF-HOARE, KEMMETT PYKE
THE BASTARD, QARL THE THRALL, STONEHAND, RALF THE
SHEPHERD, RALF OF LORDSPORT
• his crewmen:
• {CRAGORN}, who blew the hellhorn and died,
• his lords bannermen:
• ERIK IRONMAKER, called ERIK ANVIL-BREAKER and ERIK
THE JUST, Lord Steward of the Iron Islands, castellan of Pyke,
an old man once renowned, m. Asha Greyjoy,
• lords of Pyke:
• GERMUND BOTLEY, Lord of Lordsport,
• WALDON WYNCH, Lord of Iron Holt,
• lords of Old Wyk:

• DUNSTAN DRUMM, The Drumm, Lord of Old Wyk,
• NORNE GOODBROTHER, of Shatterstone,
• THE STONEHOUSE,

• lords of Great Wyk:
• GOROLD GOODBROTHER, Lord of the Hammerhorn,
• TRISTON FARWYND, Lord of Sealskin Point,
• THE SPARR,
• MELDRED MERLYN, Lord of Pebbleton,

• lords of Orkmont:
• ALYN ORKWOOD, called ORKWOOD OF ORKMONT,
• LORD BALON TAWNEY,
• lords of Saltcli e:
• LORD DONNOR SALTCLIFFE,
• LORD SUNDERLY
• lords of Harlaw:

• RODRIK HARLAW, called THE READER, Lord of Harlaw, Lord
of Ten Towers, Harlaw of Harlaw,
• SIGFRYD HARLAW, called SIGFRYD SILVERHAIR, his great
uncle, master of Harlaw Hall,
• HOTHO HARLAW, called HOTHO HUMPBACK, of the Tower
of Glimmering, a cousin,
• BOREMUND HARLAW, called BOREMUND THE BLUE, master
of Harridan Hill, a cousin,

• lords of the lesser isles and rocks:
• GYLBERT FARWYND, Lord of the Lonely Light,

• the ironborn conquerors:
• on the Shield Islands

• ANDRIK THE UNSMILING, Lord of Southshield,
• NUTE THE BARBER, Lord of Oakenshield,
• MARON VOLMARK, Lord of Greenshield,

• SER HARRAS HARLAW, Lord of Greyshield, the Knight of Grey
Gardens,
• at Moat Cailin
• RALF KENNING, castellan and commander,
• ADRACK HUMBLE, short half an arm,

• DAGON CODD, who yields to no man,
• at Torrhen’s Square

• DAGMER, called CLEFTJAW, captain of Foamdrinker,

• at Deepwood Motte
• ASHA GREYJOY, the kraken’s daughter, captain of the Black
Wind,

• her lover, QARL THE MAID, a swordsman,
• her former lover, TRISTIFER BOTLEY, heir to Lordsport,
dispossessed of his lands,
• her crewmen, ROGGON RUSTBEARD, GRIMTONGUE, ROLFE
THE DWARF, LORREN LONGAXE, ROOK, FINGERS, SIX-TOED
HARL, DROOPEYE DALE, EARL HARLAW, CROMM, HAGEN
THE HORN and his beautiful red-haired daughter,
• her cousin, QUENTON GREYJOY,
• her cousin, DAGON GREYJOY, called DAGON THE
DRUNKARD.

OTHER HOUSES
GREAT AND SMALL

HOUSE ARRYN

The Arryns are descended from the Kings of Mountain and Vale.
Their sigil is a white moon-and-falcon upon a sky blue eld. House
Arryn has taken no part in the War of the Five Kings.
ROBERT ARRYN, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale, a
sickly boy of eight years, called SWEETROBIN,
• his mother, {LADY LYSA of House Tully}, widow of Lord Jon
Arryn, pushed from the Moon Door to her death,
• his guardian, PETYR BAELISH, called LITTLEFINGER, Lord of
Harrenhal, Lord Paramount of the Trident, and Lord Protector
of the Vale,
• ALAYNE STONE, Lord Petyr’s natural daughter, a maid of
three-and-ten, actually Sansa Stark,
• SER LOTHOR BRUNE, a sellsword in Lord Petyr’s service,
captain of guards at the Eyrie,
• OSWELL, a grizzled man-at-arms in Lord Petyr’s service,
sometimes called KETTLEBLACK,
• SER SHADRICK OF THE SHADY GLEN, called THE MAD
MOUSE, a hedge knight in Lord Petyr’s service,

• SER BYRON THE BEAUTIFUL, SER MORGARTH THE MERRY,
hedge knights in Lord Petyr’s service,

• his household and retainers:

• MAESTER COLEMON, counselor, healer, and tutor,
• MORD, a brutal gaoler with teeth of gold,
• GRETCHEL, MADDY, and MELA, servingwomen,

• his bannermen, the Lords of Mountain and Vale:

• YOHN ROYCE, called BRONZE YOHN, Lord of Runestone,
• his son, SER ANDAR, heir to Runestone,
• LORD NESTOR ROYCE, High Steward of the Vale and castellan
of the Gates of the Moon,
• his son and heir, SER ALBAR,
• his daughter, MYRANDA, called RANDA, a widow, but scarce
used,
• MYA STONE, bastard daughter of King Robert,
• LYONEL CORBRAY, Lord of Heart’s Home,
• SER LYN CORBRAY, his brother, who wields the famed blade
Lady Forlorn,
• SER LUCAS CORBRAY, his younger brother,
• TRISTON SUNDERLAND, Lord of the Three Sisters,
• GODRIC BORRELL, Lord of Sweetsister,

• ROLLAND LONGTHORPE, Lord of Longsister,
• ALESANDOR TORRENT, Lord of Littlesister,
• ANYA WAYNWOOD, Lady of Ironoaks Castle,
• SER MORTON, her eldest son and heir,
• SER DONNEL, the Knight of the Bloody Gate,

• WALLACE, her youngest son,
• HARROLD HARDYNG, her ward, a squire oft called HARRY
THE HEIR,

• SER SYMOND TEMPLETON, the Knight of Ninestars,

• JON LYNDERLY, Lord of the Snakewood,
• EDMUND WAXLEY, the Knight of Wickenden,

• GEROLD GRAFTON, the Lord of Gulltown,
• {EON HUNTER}, Lord of Longbow Hall, recently deceased,
• SER GILWOOD, Lord Eon’s eldest son and heir, now called
YOUNG LORD HUNTER,
• SER EUSTACE, Lord Eon’s second son,
• SER HARLAN, Lord Eon’s youngest son,
• Young Lord Hunter’s household:
• MAESTER WILLAMEN, counselor, healer, tutor,

• HORTON REDFORT, Lord of Redfort, thrice wed,
• SER JASPER, SER CREIGHTON, SER JON, his sons,

• SER MYCHEL, his youngest son, a new-made knight, m. Ysilla
Royce of Runestone,
• BENEDAR BELMORE, Lord of Strongsong,
• clan chiefs from the Mountains of the Moon,
• SHAGGA SON OF DOLF, OF THE STONE CROWS, presently
leading a band in the kingswood,
• TIMETT SON OF TIMETT, OF THE BURNED MEN,
• CHELLA DAUGHTER OF CHEYK, OF THE BLACK EARS,
• CRAWN SON OF CALOR, OF THE MOON BROTHERS.

The Arryn words are As High as Honor.

HOUSE BARATHEON

The youngest of the Great Houses, House Baratheon was born
during the Wars of Conquest when Orys Baratheon, rumored to be a
bastard brother of Aegon the Conqueror, defeated and slew Argilac
the Arrogant, the last Storm King. Aegon rewarded him with
Argilac’s castle, lands, and daughter. Orys took the girl to bride and
adopted the banner, honors, and words of her line.
In the 283rd year after Aegon’s Conquest, Robert of House
Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End, overthrew the Mad King, Aerys II
Targaryen, to win the Iron Throne. His claim to the crown derived
from his grandmother, a daughter of King Aegon V Targaryen,
though Robert preferred to say his warhammer was his claim.
{ROBERT BARATHEON}, the First of His Name, King of the
Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven
Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, killed by a boar,
• his wife, QUEEN CERSEI of House Lannister,
• their children:

• {KING JOFFREY BARATHEON}, the First of His Name,
murdered at his wedding feast,

• PRINCESS MYRCELLA, a ward in Sunspear, betrothed to Prince
Trystane Martell,
• KING TOMMEN BARATHEON, the First of His Name,

• his brothers:

• STANNIS BARATHEON, rebel Lord of Dragonstone and
pretender to the Iron Throne,

• his daughter, SHIREEN, a girl of eleven,
• {RENLY BARATHEON}, rebel Lord of Storm’s End and
pretender to the Iron Throne, murdered at Storm’s End in the
midst of his army,
• his bastard children:
• MYA STONE, a maid of nineteen, in the service of Lord Nestor
Royce, of the Gates of the Moon,
• GENDRY, an outlaw in the riverlands, ignorant of his heritage,
• EDRIC STORM, his acknowledged bastard son by Lady Delena
of House Florent, hiding in Lys,
• SER ANDREW ESTERMONT, his cousin and guardian,
• his guards and protectors:
• SER GERALD GOWER, LEWYS called THE FISHWIFE, SER
TRISTON OF TALLY HILL, OMER BLACKBERRY,

• {BARRA}, his bastard daughter by a whore of King’s Landing,
killed by the command of his widow,
• his other kin:

• his great-uncle, SER ELDON ESTERMONT, Lord of Greenstone,
• his cousin, SER AEMON ESTERMONT, Eldon’s son,
• his cousin, SER ALYN ESTERMONT, Aemon’s son,
• his cousin, SER LOMAS ESTERMONT, Eldon’s son,
• his cousin, SER ANDREW ESTERMONT, Lomas’s son,

• bannermen sworn to Storm’s End, the storm lords:
• DAVOS SEAWORTH, Lord of the Rainwood, Admiral of the
Narrow Sea, and Hand of the King,

• his wife, MARYA, a carpenter’s daughter,
• their sons, {DALE, ALLARD, MATTHOS, MARIC}, killed in the
Battle of the Blackwater,
• their son DEVAN, squire to King Stannis,
• their sons, STANNIS and STEFFON,

• SER GILBERT FARRING, castellan of Storm’s End,
• his son, BRYEN, squire to King Stannis,
• his cousin, SER GODRY FARRING, called GIANTSLAYER,

• ELWOOD MEADOWS, Lord of Grass eld Keep, seneschal at
Storm’s End,
• SELWYN TARTH, called THE EVENSTAR, Lord of Tarth,
• his daughter, BRIENNE, THE MAID OF TARTH, also called
BRIENNE THE BEAUTY,
• her squire, PODRICK PAYNE, a boy of ten,

• SER RONNET CONNINGTON, called RED RONNET, the Knight
of Gri n’s Roost,
• his younger siblings, RAYMUND and ALYNNE,
• his bastard son, RONALD STORM,
• his cousin, JON CONNINGTON, once Lord of Storm’s End and
Hand of the King, exiled by Aerys II Targaryen, believed dead
of drink,

• LESTER MORRIGEN, Lord of Crows Nest,
• his brother and heir, SER RICHARD MORRIGEN,

• his brother, {SER GUYARD MORRIGEN, called GUYARD THE
GREEN}, slain in the Battle of the Blackwater,
• ARSTAN SELMY, Lord of Harvest Hall,
• his great-uncle, SER BARRISTAN SELMY,

• CASPER WYLDE, Lord of the Rain House,
• his uncle, SER ORMUND WYLDE, an aged knight,

• HARWOOD FELL, Lord of Felwood,
• HUGH GRANDISON, called GREYBEARD, Lord of Grandview,
• SEBASTION ERROL, Lord of Haystack Hall,
• CLIFFORD SWANN, Lord of Stonehelm

• BERIC DONDARRION, Lord of Blackhaven, called THE
LIGHTNING LORD, an outlaw in the riverlands, oft slain and
now thought dead,
• {BRYCE CARON}, Lord of Nightsong, slain by Ser Philip Foote
on the Blackwater,
• his slayer, SER PHILIP FOOTE, a one-eyed knight, Lord of
Nightsong,

• his baseborn half-brother, SER ROLLAND STORM, called THE
BASTARD OF NIGHTSONG, pretender Lord of Nightsong,
• ROBIN PEASEBURY, Lord of Podding eld,
• MARY MERTYNS, Lady of Mistwood,

• RALPH BUCKLER, Lord of Bronzegate,
• his cousin, SER BRUS BUCKLER.
The Baratheon sigil is a crowned stag, black, on a golden
Their words are Ours Is the Fury.

eld.

HOUSE FREY

The Freys are bannermen to House Tully, but have not always been
diligent in their duty. At the outset of the War of the Five Kings,
Robb Stark won Lord Walder’s allegiance by pledging to marry one
of his daughters or granddaughters. When he wed Lady Jeyne
Westerling instead, the Freys conspired with Roose Bolton and
murdered the Young Wolf and his followers at what became known
as the Red Wedding.
WALDER FREY, Lord of the Crossing,
• by his rst wife, {LADY PERRA, of House Royce}:
• {SER STEVRON FREY}, died after the Battle of Oxcross,
• SER EMMON FREY, his second son,
• SER AENYS FREY, leading the Frey forces in the north,
• Aenys’s son, AEGON BLOODBORN, an outlaw,
• Aenys’s son, RHAEGAR, an envoy to White Harbor,
• PERRIANE, his eldest daughter, m. Ser Leslyn Haigh,
• by his second wife, {LADY CYRENNA, of House Swann}:
• SER JARED FREY, an envoy to White Harbor,
• SEPTON LUCEON, his fth son,

• by his third wife, {LADY AMAREI of House Crakehall}:
• SER HOSTEEN FREY, a knight of great repute,

• LYENTHE, his second daughter, m. Lord Lucias Vypren,

• SYMOND FREY, his seventh son, a counter of coins, an envoy
to White Harbor,
• SER DANWELL FREY, his eighth son,

• {MERRETT FREY}, his ninth son, hanged at Oldstones,

• Merrett’s daughter, WALDA, called FAT WALDA, m. Roose
Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort,
• Merrett’s son, WALDER, called LITTLE WALDER, eight, a
squire in service to Ramsay Bolton,
• {SER GEREMY FREY}, his tenth son, drowned,
• SER RAYMUND FREY, his eleventh son,
• by his fourth wife, {LADY ALYSSA, of House Blackwood}:
• LOTHAR FREY, his twelfth son, called LAME LOTHAR,
• SER JAMMOS FREY, his thirteenth son,
• Jammos’s son, WALDER, called BIG WALDER, eight, a squire
in service to Ramsey Bolton,
• SER WHALEN FREY, his fourteenth son,
• MORYA, his third daughter, m. Ser Flement Brax,
• TYTA, his fourth daughter, called TYTA THE MAID,

• by his fth wife, {LADY SARYA of House Whent}:
• no progeny,
• by his sixth wife, {LADY BETHANY of House Rosby}:

• SER PERWYN FREY, his Walder’s fteenth son,
• {SER BENFREY FREY}, his Walder’s sixteenth son, died of a
wound received at the Red Wedding,

• MAESTER WILLAMEN, his seventeenth son, in service at
Longbow Hall,
• OLYVAR FREY, his eighteenth son, once a squire to Robb Stark,

• ROSLIN, his fth daughter, m. Lord Edmure Tully at the Red
Wedding, pregnant with his child,
• by his seventh wife, {LADY ANNARA of House Farring}:
• ARWYN, his sixth daughter, a maid of fourteen,

• WENDEL, his nineteenth son, a page at Seagard,
• COLMAR, his twentieth son, eleven and promised to the Faith,
• WALTYR, called TYR, his twenty- rst son, ten,
• ELMAR, his twenty-second and lastborn son, a boy of nine
brie y betrothed to Arya Stark,

• SHIREI, his seventh daughter and youngest child, a girl of
seven,
• his eighth wife, LADY JOYEUSE of House Erenford,
• presently with child,
• Lord Walder’s natural children, by sundry mothers,
• WALDER RIVERS, called BASTARD WALDER,

• MAESTER MELWYS, in service at Rosby,
• JEYNE RIVERS, MARTYN RIVERS, RYGER RIVERS, RONEL
RIVERS, MELLARA RIVERS, others

HOUSE LANNISTER

The Lannisters of Casterly Rock remain the principal support of
King Tommen’s claim to the Iron Throne. They boast of descent
from Lann the Clever, the legendary trickster of the Age of Heroes.
The gold of Casterly Rock and the Golden Tooth has made them the
wealthiest of the Great Houses. The Lannister sigil is a golden lion
upon a crimson eld. Their words are Hear Me Roar!
{TYWIN LANNISTER}, Lord of Casterly Rock, Shield of
Lannisport, Warden of the West, and Hand of the King,
murdered by his dwarf son in his privy,
• Lord Tywin’s children:
• CERSEI, twin to Jaime, widow of King Robert I Baratheon, a
prisoner at the Great Sept of Baelor,
• SER JAIME, twin to Cersei, called THE KINGSLAYER, Lord
Commander of the Kingsguard,
• his squires, JOSMYN PECKLEDON, GARRETT PAEGE, LEW
PIPER,
• SER ILYN PAYNE, a tongueless knight, lately the King’s Justice
and headsman,

• SER RONNET CONNINGTON, called RED RONNET, the Knight
of Gri n’s Roost, sent to Maidenpool with a prisoner,
• SER ADDAM MARBRAND, SER FLEMENT BRAX, SER ALYN
STACKSPEAR, SER STEFFON SWYFT, SER HUMFREY SWYFT,
SER LYLE CRAKEHALL called STRONGBOAR, SER JON
BETTLEY called BEARDLESS JON, knights serving with Ser
Jaime’s host at Riverrun,

• TYRION, called THE IMP, dwarf and kinslayer, a fugitive in
exile across the narrow sea,
• the household at Casterly Rock:
• MAESTER CREYLEN, healer, tutor, and counselor,
• VYLARR, captain of guards,
• SER BENEDICT BROOM, master-at-arms,
• WHITESMILE WAT, a singer,
• Lord Tywin’s siblings and their o spring:
• SER KEVAN LANNISTER, m. Dorna of House Swyft,
• LADY GENNA, m. Ser Emmon Frey, now Lord of Riverrun,

• Genna’s eldest son, {SER CLEOS FREY}, m. Jeyne of House
Darry, killed by outlaws,
• Cleos’s eldest son, SER TYWIN FREY, called TY, now heir to
Riverrun,
• Cleos’s second son, WILLEM FREY, a squire,
• Genna’s younger sons, SER LYONEL FREY, {TION FREY},
WALDER FREY called RED WALDER,

• {SER TYGETT LANNISTER}, died of a pox,
• TYREK, Tygett’s son, missing and feared dead,

• LADY ERMESANDE HAYFORD, Tyrek’s child wife,
• {GERION LANNISTER}, lost at sea,
• JOY HILL, Gerion’s bastard daughter, eleven,

• Lord Tywin’s other close kin:
• {SER STAFFORD LANNISTER}, a cousin and brother to Lord
Tywin’s wife, slain in battle at Oxcross,
• CERENNA and MYRIELLE, Sta ord’s daughters,
• SER DAVEN LANNISTER, Sta ord’s son,

• SER DAMION LANNISTER, a cousin, m. Lady Shiera Crakehall,
• their son, SER LUCION,
• their daughter, LANNA, m. Lord Antario Jast,
• LADY MARGOT, a cousin, m. Lord Titus Peake,

• bannermen and sworn swords, Lords of the West:
• DAMON MARBRAND, Lord of Ashemark,
• ROLAND CRAKEHALL, Lord of Crakehall,
• SEBASTON FARMAN, Lord of Fair Isle,

• TYTOS BRAX, Lord of Hornvale,
• QUENTEN BANEFORT, Lord of Banefort,
• SER HARYS SWYFT, goodfather to Ser Kevan Lannister,
• REGENARD ESTREN, Lord of Wyndhall,
• GAWEN WESTERLING, Lord of the Crag,
• LORD SELMOND STACKSPEAR,
• TERRENCE KENNING, Lord of Kayce,
• LORD ANTARIO JAST,
• LORD ROBIN MORELAND,
• LADY ALYSANNE LEFFORD,

• LEWYS LYDDEN, Lord of the Deep Den,
• LORD PHILIP PLUMM,

• LORD GARRISON PRESTER,
• SER LORENT LORCH, a landed knight,
• SER GARTH GREENFIELD, a landed knight,

• SER LYMOND VIKARY, a landed knight,
• SER RAYNARD RUTTIGER, a landed knight

• SER MANFRYD YEW, a landed knight,
• SER TYBOLT HETHERSPOON, a landed knight.

HOUSE MARTELL

Dorne was the last of the Seven Kingdoms to swear fealty to the
Iron Throne. Blood, custom, geography, and history all helped to set
the Dornishmen apart from the other kingdoms. At the outbreak of
the War of the Five Kings Dorne took no part, but when Myrcella
Baratheon was betrothed to Prince Trystane, Sunspear declared its
support for King Jo rey. The Martell banner is a red sun pierced by
a golden spear. Their words are Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.
DORAN NYMEROS MARTELL, Lord of Sunspear, Prince of
Dorne,
• his wife, MELLARIO, of the Free City of Norvos,
• their children:
• PRINCESS ARIANNE, heir to Sunspear,
• PRINCE QUENTYN, a new-made knight, fostered at Yronwood,
• PRINCE TRYSTANE, betrothed to Myrcella Baratheon,
• SER GASCOYNE OF THE GREENBLOOD, his sworn shield,
• his siblings:

• {PRINCESS ELIA}, raped and murdered during the Sack of
King’s Landing,

• her daughter {RHAENYS TARGARYEN}, murdered during the
Sack of King’s Landing,
• her son, {AEGON TARGARYEN}, a babe at the breast,
murdered during the Sack of King’s Landing,

• {PRINCE OBERYN, called THE RED VIPER}, slain by Ser
Gregor Clegane during a trial by combat,

• his paramour, ELLARIA SAND, natural daughter of Lord
Harmen Uller,
• his bastard daughters, THE SAND SNAKES:
• OBARA, his daughter by an Oldtown whore,
• NYMERIA, called LADY NYM, his daughter by a noblewoman
of Old Volantis,
• TYENE, his daughter by a septa,
• SARELLA, his daughter by a trader captain from the Summer
Isles,
• ELIA, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,
• OBELLA, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,
• DOREA, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,
• LOREZA, his daughter by Ellaria Sand,

• Prince Doran’s court

• at the Water Gardens:
• AREO HOTAH, of Norvos, captain of guards,

• MAESTER CALEOTTE, counselor, healer, and tutor,
• at Sunspear:
• MAESTER MYLES, counselor, healer, and tutor,
• RICASSO, seneschal, old and blind,
• SER MANFREY MARTELL, castellan at Sunspear

• LADY ALYSE LADYBRIGHT, lord treasurer,
• his ward, PRINCESS MYRCELLA BARATHEON, betrothed to
Prince Trystane,
• her sworn shield, {SER ARYS OAKHEART}, slain by Areo
Hotah,
• her bedmaid and companion, ROSAMUND LANNISTER, a
distant cousin,
• his bannermen, the Lords of Dorne:

• ANDERS YRONWOOD, Lord of Yronwood, Warden of the Stone
Way, the Bloodroyal,
• YNYS, his eldest daughter, m. Ryon Allyrion,
• SER CLETUS, his son and heir,
• GWYNETH, his youngest daughter, a girl of twelve,
• HARMEN ULLER, Lord of Hellholt,
• DELONNE ALLYRION, Lady of Godsgrace,
• RYON ALLYRION, her son and heir,

• DAGOS MANWOODY, Lord of Kingsgrave,
• LARRA BLACKMONT, Lady of Blackmont,

• NYMELLA TOLAND, Lady of Ghost Hill,
• QUENTYN QORGYLE, Lord of Sandstone,
• SER DEZIEL DALT, the Knight of Lemonwood,

• FRANKLYN FOWLER, Lord of Skyreach, called THE OLD
HAWK, the Warden of the Prince’s Pass,
• SER SYMON SANTAGAR, the Knight of Spottswood,
• EDRIC DAYNE, Lord of Starfall, a squire,
• TREBOR JORDAYNE, Lord of the Tor,

• TREMOND GARGALEN, Lord of Salt Shore,
• DAERON VAITH, Lord of the Red Dunes.

HOUSE STARK

The Starks trace their descent from Brandon the Builder and the
Kings of Winter. For thousands of years, they ruled from Winterfell
as Kings in the North, until Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt,
chose to swear fealty to Aegon the Dragon rather than give battle.
When Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell was executed by King
Jo rey, the northmen foreswore their loyalty to the Iron Throne
and proclaimed Lord Eddard’s son Robb as King in the North.
During the War of the Five Kings, he won every battle, but was
betrayed and murdered by the Freys and Boltons at the Twins
during his uncle’s wedding.
{ROBB STARK}, King in the North, King of the Trident, Lord
of Winterfell, called THE YOUNG WOLF, murdered at the
Red Wedding,
• {GREY WIND}, his direwolf, killed at the Red Wedding,
• his trueborn siblings:
• SANSA, his sister, m. Tyrion of House Lannister,
• {LADY}, her direwolf, killed at Castle Darry,
• ARYA, a girl of eleven, missing and thought dead,

• NYMERIA, her direwolf, prowling the riverlands,
• BRANDON, called BRAN, a crippled boy of nine, heir to
Winterfell, believed dead,
• SUMMER, his direwolf,
• RICKON, a boy of four, believed dead,

• SHAGGYDOG, his direwolf, black and savage,

• OSHA, a wildling woman once captive at Winterfell,

• his bastard half-brother, JON SNOW, of the Night’s Watch,
• GHOST, Jon’s direwolf, white and silent,
• his other kin:
• his uncle, BENJEN STARK, First Ranger of the Night’s Watch,
lost beyond the Wall, presumed dead,
• his aunt, {LYSA ARRYN}, Lady of the Eyrie,
• her son, ROBERT ARRYN, Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of
the Vale, a sickly boy,
• his uncle, EDMURE TULLY, Lord of Riverrun, taken captive at
the Red Wedding,
• LADY ROSLIN, of House Frey, Edmure’s bride, great with
child,
• his great-uncle, SER BRYNDEN TULLY, called THE BLACKFISH,
lately castellan of Riverrun, now a hunted man,
• bannermen of Winterfell, the Lords of the North:
• JON UMBER, called THE GREATJON, Lord of the Last Hearth,
a captive at the Twins,
• {JON, called THE SMALLJON}, the Greatjon’s eldest son and
heir, slain at the Red Wedding,
• MORS called CROWFOOD, uncle to the Greatjon, castellan at
the Last Hearth,

• HOTHER called WHORESBANE, uncle to the Greatjon, likewise
castellan at the Last Hearth,

• {CLEY CERWYN}, Lord of Cerwyn, killed at Winterfell,
• JONELLE, his sister, a maid of two-and-thirty,
• ROOSE BOLTON, Lord of the Dreadfort,
• {DOMERIC}, his heir, died of a bad belly,
• WALTON called STEELSHANKS, his captain,

• RAMSAY BOLTON, his natural son, called THE BASTARD OF
BOLTON, Lord of the Hornwood,
• WALDER FREY and WALDER FREY, called BIG WALDER and
LITTLE WALDER, Ramsay’s squires,
• BEN BONES, kennelmaster at the Dreadfort,
• {REEK}, a man-at-arms infamous for his stench, slain while
posing as Ramsay,
• the Bastard’s Boys, Ramsay’s men-at-arms:
• YELLOW DICK, DAMON DANCE-FOR-ME, LUTON, SOUR
ALYN, SKINNER, GRUNT,

• {RICKARD KARSTARK}, Lord of Karhold, beheaded by the
Young Wolf for murdering prisoners,
• {EDDARD}, his son, slain in the Whispering Wood,
• {TORRHEN}, his son, slain in the Whispering Wood,
• HARRION, his son, a captive at Maidenpool,
• ALYS, his daughter, a maid of fteen,
• his uncle ARNOLF, castellan of Karhold,

• CREGAN, Arnolf’s elder son,
• ARTHOR, Arnolf’s younger son,
• WYMAN MANDERLY, Lord of White Harbor, vastly fat,

• SER WYLIS MANDERLY, his eldest son and heir, very fat, a
captive at Harrenhal,
• Wylis’s wife, LEONA of House Wool eld,
• WYNAFRYD, their eldest daughter,
• WYLLA, their younger daughter,

• {SER WENDEL MANDERLY}, his second son, slain at the Red
Wedding,
• SER MARLON MANDERLY, his cousin, commander of the
garrison at White Harbor,
• MAESTER THEOMORE, counselor, tutor, healer,

• WEX, a boy of twelve, once squire to Theon Greyjoy, mute,
• SER BARTIMUS, an old knight, one-legged, one-eyed, and oft
drunk, castellan of the Wolf’s Den,
• GARTH, a gaoler and headsman,
• his axe, LADY LU,
• THERRY, a young turnkey,

• MAEGE MORMONT, Lady of Bear Island, the She-Bear,
• {DACEY}, her eldest daughter, slain at the Red Wedding,
• ALYSANE, her daughter, the young She-Bear

• LYRA, JORELLE, LYANNA, her younger daughters,

• {JEOR MORMONT}, her brother, Lord Commander of the
Night’s Watch, slain by own men,
• SER JORAH MORMONT, his son, an exile,

• HOWLAND REED, Lord of Greywater Watch, a crannogman,
• his wife, JYANA, of the crannogmen,
• their children:

• MEERA, a young huntress,
• JOJEN, a boy blessed with green sight,

• GALBART GLOVER, Master of Deepwood Motte, unwed,
• ROBETT GLOVER, his brother and heir,

• Robett’s wife, SYBELLE of House Locke,
• BENJICOT BRANCH, NOSELESS NED WOODS, men of the
wolfswood sworn to Deepwood Motte,

• {SER HELMAN TALLHART}, Master of Torrhen’s Square, slain
at Duskendale,

• {BENFRED}, his son and heir, slain by ironmen on the Stony
Shore,
• EDDARA, his daughter, captive at Torrhen’s Square,

• {LEOBALD}, his brother, killed at Winterfell,
• Leobald’s wife, BERENA of House Hornwood, captive at
Torrhen’s Square,
• their sons, BRANDON and BEREN, likewise captives at
Torrhen’s Square,

• RODRIK RYSWELL, Lord of the Rills,

• BARBREY DUSTIN, his daughter, Lady of Barrowton, widow of
Lord Willam Dustin,
• HARWOOD STOUT, her liege man, a petty lord at Barrowton,

• {BETHANY BOLTON}, his daughter, second wife of Lord Roose
Bolton, died of a fever,

• ROGER RYSWELL, RICKARD RYSWELL, ROOSE RYSWELL, his
quarrelsome cousins and bannermen,
• LYESSA FLINT, Lady of Widow’s Watch,
• ONDREW LOCKE, Lord of Oldcastle, an old man,
• the chiefs of the mountain clans:

• HUGO WULL, called BIG BUCKET, or THE WULL,
• BRANDON NORREY, called THE NORREY,
• BRANDON NORREY, the Younger, his son,

• TORREN LIDDLE, called THE LIDDLE,

• DUNCAN LIDDLE, his eldest son, called BIG LIDDLE, a man of
the Night’s Watch,
• MORGAN LIDDLE, his second son, called MIDDLE LIDDLE,

• RICKARD LIDDLE, his third son, called LITTLE LIDDLE,
• TORGHEN FLINT, of the First Flints, called THE FLINT, or OLD
FLINT,
• BLACK DONNEL FLINT, his son and heir,

• ARTOS FLINT, his second son, half-brother to Black Donnel.
The Stark arms show a grey direwolf racing across an ice-white
eld. The Stark words are Winter Is Coming.

HOUSE TULLY

Lord Edmyn Tully of Riverrun was one of the rst of the river lords
to swear fealty to Aegon the Conqueror. King Aegon rewarded him
by raising House Tully to dominion over all the lands of the Trident.
The Tully sigil is a leaping trout, silver, on a eld of rippling blue
and red. The Tully words are Family, Duty, Honor.
EDMURE TULLY, Lord of Riverrun, taken captive at his
wedding and held prisoner by the Freys,
• his bride, LADY ROSLIN of House Frey, now with child,

• his sister, {LADY CATELYN STARK}, widow of Lord Eddard
Stark of Winterfell, slain at the Red Wedding,
• his sister, {LADY LYSA ARRYN}, widow of Lord Jon Arryn of
the Vale, pushed to her death from the Eyrie,
• his uncle, SER BRYNDEN TULLY, called THE BLACKFISH, lately
castellan of Riverrun, now an outlaw
• his household at Riverrun:
• MAESTER VYMAN, counselor, healer, and tutor,
• SER DESMOND GRELL, master-at-arms,
• SER ROBIN RYGER, captain of the guard,

• LONG LEW, ELWOOD, DELP, guardsmen,
• UTHERYDES WAYN, steward of Riverrun,
• his bannermen, the Lords of the Trident:
• TYTOS BLACKWOOD, Lord of Raventree Hall,
• BRYNDEN, his eldest son and heir,

• {LUCAS}, his second son, slain at the Red Wedding,
• HOSTER, his third son, a bookish boy,

• EDMUND and ALYN, his younger sons,
• BETHANY, his daughter, a girl of eight,
• {ROBERT}, his youngest son, died of loose bowels,
• JONOS BRACKEN, Lord of the Stone Hedge,
• BARBARA, JAYNE, CATELYN, BESS, ALYSANNE, his ve
daughters,
• HILDY, a camp follower,
• JASON MALLISTER, Lord of Seagard, a prisoner in his own
castle,
• PATREK, his son, imprisoned with his father,
• SER DENYS MALLISTER, Lord Jason’s uncle, a man of the
Night’s Watch,

• CLEMENT PIPER, Lord of Pinkmaiden Castle,
• his son and heir, SER MARQ PIPER, taken captive at the Red
Wedding,
• KARYL VANCE, Lord of Wayfarer’s Rest,
• NORBERT VANCE, the blind Lord of Atranta,
• THEOMAR SMALLWOOD, Lord of Acorn Hall,

• WILLIAM MOOTON, Lord of Maidenpool,
• ELEANOR, his daughter and heir, thirteen, m. Dickon Tarly of
Horn Hill,
• SHELLA WHENT, dispossessed Lady of Harrenhal,

• SER HALMON PAEGE,
• LORD LYMOND GOODBROOK.

HOUSE TYRELL

The Tyrells rose to power as stewards to the Kings of the Reach,
though they claim descent from Garth Greenhand, gardener king of
the First Men. When the last king of House Gardener was slain on
the Field of Fire, his steward, Harlen Tyrell, surrendered
Highgarden to Aegon the Conqueror. Aegon granted him the castle
and dominion over the Reach. Mace Tyrell declared his support for
Renly Baratheon at the onset of the War of the Five Kings, and gave
him the hand of his daughter Margaery. Upon Renly’s death,
Highgarden made alliance with House Lannister, and Margaery was
betrothed to King Jo rey.
MACE TYRELL, Lord of Highgarden, Warden of the South,
Defender of the Marches, and High Marshal of the Reach,
• his wife, LADY ALERIE, of House Hightower of Oldtown,
• their children:
• WILLAS, their eldest son, heir to Highgarden,
• SER GARLAN, called THE GALLANT, their second son, newly
raised to Lord of Brightwater,
• Garlan’s wife, LADY LEONETTE of House Fossoway,

• SER LORAS, the Knight of Flowers, their youngest son, a Sworn
Brother of the Kingsguard, wounded on Dragonstone
• MARGAERY, their daughter, twice wed and twice widowed,
• Margaery’s companions and ladies-in-waiting:
• her cousins, MEGGA, ALLA, and ELINOR TYRELL,
• Elinor’s betrothed, ALYN AMBROSE, squire,

• LADY ALYSANNE BULWER, LADY ALYCE GRACEFORD, LADY
TAENA MERRYWEATHER, MEREDYTH CRANE called MERRY,
SEPTA NYSTERICA, her companions,
• his widowed mother, LADY OLENNA of House Redwyne, called
THE QUEEN OF THORNS,
• his sisters:
• LADY MINA, m. Paxter Redwyne, Lord of the Arbor,
• her son, SER HORAS REDWYNE, called HORROR,
• her son, SER HOBBER REDWYNE, called SLOBBER,
• her daughter, DESMERA REDWYNE, sixteen,
• LADY JANNA, wed to Ser Jon Fossoway,
• his uncles:
• his uncle, GARTH TYRELL, called THE GROSS, Lord Seneschal
of Highgarden,
• Garth’s bastard sons, GARSE and GARRETT FLOWERS,
• his uncle, SER MORYN TYRELL, Lord Commander of the City
Watch of Oldtown,
• his uncle, MAESTER GORMON, serving at the Citadel,
• Mace’s household at Highgarden:
• MAESTER LOMYS, counselor, healer, and tutor,
• IGON VYRWEL, captain of the guard,
• SER VORTIMER CRANE, master-at-arms,

• BUTTERBUMPS, fool and jester, hugely fat,

• his bannermen, the Lords of the Reach:
• RANDYLL TARLY, Lord of Horn Hill, commanding King
Tommen’s army on the Trident,
• PAXTER REDWYNE, Lord of the Arbor,
• SER HORAS and SER HOBBER, his twin sons,
• Lord Paxter’s healer, MAESTER BALLABAR,
• ARWYN OAKHEART, Lady of Old Oak,
• MATHIS ROWAN, Lord of Goldengrove

• LEYTON HIGHTOWER, Voice of Oldtown, Lord of the Port,
• HUMFREY HEWETT, Lord of Oakenshield,
• FALIA FLOWERS, his bastard daughter,
• OSBERT SERRY, Lord of Southshield,

• GUTHOR GRIMM, Lord of Greyshield,
• MORIBALD CHESTER, Lord of Greenshield,
• ORTON MERRYWEATHER, Lord of Longtable,
• LADY TAENA, his wife, a woman of Myr,
• RUSSELL, her son, a boy of six,

• LORD ARTHUR AMBROSE,
• LORENT CASWELL, Lord of Bitterbridge,

• his knights and sworn swords:

• SER JON FOSSOWAY, of the green-apple Fossoways,
• SER TANTON FOSSOWAY, of the red-apple Fossoways.

The Tyrell sigil is a golden rose on a grass-green eld. Their words
are Growing Strong.

THE SWORN BROTHERS OF THE NIGHT’S WATCH
JON SNOW, the Bastard of Winterfell, nine-hundred-and-ninetyeighth Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch,
• GHOST, his white direwolf,
• his steward, EDDISON TOLLETT, called DOLOROUS EDD,

• at Castle Black
• MAESTER AEMON (TARGARYEN), healer and counselor, a
blind man, one hundred and two years old,
• Aemon’s steward, CLYDAS,
• Aemon’s steward, SAMWELL TARLY, fat and bookish,
• BOWEN MARSH, Lord Steward,
• THREE-FINGER HOBB, steward and chief cook,
• {DONAL NOYE}, one-armed armorer and smith, slain at the
gate by Mag the Mighty
• OWEN called THE OAF, TIM TANGLETONGUE, MULLY,
CUGEN, DONNEL HILL called SWEET DONNEL, LEFT HAND
LEW, JEREN, TY, DANNEL, WICK WHITTLESTICK, stewards,
• OTHELL YARWYCK, First Builder,
• SPARE BOOT, HALDER, ALBETT, KEGS, ALF OF
RUNNYMUDD, builders,
• SEPTON CELLADOR, a drunken devout,
• BLACK JACK BULWER, First Ranger,
• DYWEN, KEDGE WHITEYE, BEDWYCK called GIANT,
MATTHAR, GARTH GREYFEATHER, ULMER OF THE
KINGSWOOD, ELRON, GARRETT GREEN-SPEAR, FULK THE
FLEA, PYPAR called PYP, GRENN called AUROCHS, BERNARR
called BLACK BERNARR, TIM STONE, RORY, BEARDED BEN,
TOM BARLEYCORN, GOADY BIG LIDDLE, LUKE OF
LONGTOWN, HAIRY HAL, rangers

• LEATHERS, a wildling turned crow,
• SER ALLISER THORNE, former master-at-arms,

• LORD JANOS SLYNT, former commander of the City Watch of
King’s Landing, brie y Lord of Harrenhal,
• IRON EMMETT, formerly of Eastwatch, master-at-arms,
• HARETH called HORSE, the twins ARRON and EMRICK,
SATIN, HOP-ROBIN, recruits in training,

• at the Shadow Tower
• SER DENYS MALLISTER, commander,
• his steward and squire, WALLACE MASSEY,
• MAESTER MULLIN, healer and counselor,
• {QHORIN HALFHAND, SQUIRE DALBRIDGE, EBBEN},
rangers, slain beyond the Wall,
• STONESNAKE, a ranger, lost afoot in Skirling Pass,
• at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea
• COTTER PYKE, a bastard of the Iron Islands, commander,
• MAESTER HARMUNE, healer and counselor,
• OLD TATTERSALT, captain of the Blackbird,
• SER GLENDON HEWETT, master-at-arms,
• SER MAYNARD HOLT, captain of the Talon,

• RUSS BARLEYCORN, captain of the Storm Crow.

the WILDLINGS, or THE FREE FOLK
MANCE RAYDER, King-Beyond-the-Wall, a captive at Castle Black,

• his wife, {DALLA}, died in childbirth,
• their newborn son, born in battle, as yet unnamed,
• VAL, Dalla’s younger sister, “the wildling princess,” a captive at
Castle Black,
• {JARL}, Val’s lover, killed in a fall,
• his captains, chiefs, and raiders:
• THE LORD OF BONES, mocked as RATTLESHIRT, a raider and
leader of a war band, captive at Castle Black,
• {YGRITTE}, a young spearwife, Jon Snow’s lover, killed
during the attack on Castle Black,
• RYK, called LONGSPEAR, a member of his band,
• RAGWYLE, LENYL, members of his band,
• TORMUND, Mead-King of Ruddy Hall, called GIANTSBANE,
TALL-TALKER, HORN-BLOWER, and BREAKER OF ICE, also
THUNDERFIST, HUSBAND TO BEARS, SPEAKER TO GODS, and
FATHER OF HOSTS,
• Tormund’s sons, TOREGG THE TALL, TORWYRD THE TAME,
DORMUND, and DRYN, his daughter MUNDA,
• THE WEEPER, called THE WEEPING MAN, a notorious raider
and leader of a war band,
• {HARMA, called DOGSHEAD}, slain beneath the Wall,
• HALLECK, her brother,
• {STYR}, Magnar of Thenn, slain attacking Castle Black,
• SIGORN, Styr’s son, new Magnar of Thenn,
• VARAMYR called SIXSKINS, a skinchanger and warg, called
LUMP as a boy,

• ONE EYE, SLY, STALKER, his wolves,
• his brother, {BUMP}, killed by a dog,

• his foster father, {HAGGON}, a warg and hunter,

• THISTLE, a spearwife, hard and homely,

• {BRIAR, GRISELLA}. skinchangers, long dead,

• BORROQ, called THE BOAR, a skinchanger, much feared,

• GERRICK KINGSBLOOD, of the blood of Raymun Redbeard,

• his three daughters,
• SOREN SHIELDBREAKER, a famed warrior,
• MORNA WHITE MASK, the warrior witch, a raider,
• YGON OLDFATHER, a clan chief with eighteen wives,
• THE GREAT WALRUS, leader on the Frozen Shore,
• MOTHER MOLE, a woods witch, given to prophecy,
• BROGG, GAVIN THE TRADER, HARLE THE HUNTSMAN,
HARLE THE HANDSOME, HOWD WANDERER, BLIND DOSS,
KYLEG OF THE WOODEN EAR, DEVYN SEALSKINNER, chiefs
and leaders amongst the free folk,
• {ORELL, called ORELL THE EAGLE}, a skinchanger slain by Jon
Snow in the Skirling Pass,
• {MAG MAR TUN DOH WEG, called MAG THE MIGHTY}, a
giant, slain by Donal Noye at the gate of Castle Black,
• WUN WEG WUN DAR WUN, called WUN WUN, a giant,

• ROWAN, HOLLY, SQUIRREL, WILLOW WITCH-EYE, FRENYA,
MYRTLE, spearwives, captive at the Wall.

BEYOND THE WALL
• in the Haunted Forest

• BRANDON STARK, called BRAN, Prince of Winterfell and heir
to the North, a crippled boy of nine,
• his companions and protectors:

• MEERA REED, a maid of sixteen, daughter of Lord Howland
Reed of Greywater Watch,
• JOJEN REED, her brother, thirteen, cursed with greensight,
• HODOR, a simple lad, seven feet tall,
• his guide, COLDHANDS, clad in black, once perhaps a man of
the Night’s Watch, now a mystery,
• at Craster’s Keep
• the betrayers, once men of the Night’s Watch:
• DIRK, who murdered Craster,
• OLLO LOPHAND, who slew the Old Bear, Jeor Mormont,
• GARTH OF GREENAWAY, MAWNEY, GRUBBS, ALAN OF
ROSBY, former rangers
• CLUBFOOT KARL, ORPHAN OSS, MUTTERING BILL, former
stewards,
• in the caverns beneath a hollow hill
• THE THREE-EYED CROW, also called THE LAST GREENSEER,
sorcerer and dreamwalker, once a man of the Night’s Watch
named BRYNDEN, now more tree than man,
• the children of the forest, those who sing the song of earth, last
of their dying race:
• LEAF, ASH, SCALES, BLACK KNIFE, SNOWYLOCKS, COALS.

ESSOS
BEYOND THE NARROW SEA

IN BRAAVOS
FERREGO ANTARYON, Sealord of Braavos, sickly and failing,

• QARRO VOLENTIN, First Sword of Braavos, his protector,
• BELLEGERE OTHERYS called THE BLACK PEARL, a courtesan
descended from the pirate queen of the same name,

• THE VEILED LADY, THE MERLING QUEEN, THE MOONSHADOW, THE DAUGHTER OF THE DUSK, THE
NIGHTINGALE, THE POETESS, famous courtesans,
• THE KINDLY MAN and THE WAIF, servants of the Many-Faced
God at the House of Black and White,
• UMMA, the temple cook,
• THE HANDSOME MAN, THE FAT FELLOW, THE LORDLING,
THE STERN FACE, THE SQUINTER, and THE STARVED MAN,
secret servants of Him of Many Faces,
• ARYA of House Stark, a novice in service at the House of Black
and White, also known as ARRY, NAN, WEASEL, SQUAB,
SALTY, and CAT OF THE CANALS,
• BRUSCO, a shmonger,
• his daughters, TALEA and BREA,

• MERALYN, called MERRY, proprietor of the Happy Port, a
brothel near the Ragman’s Harbor,
• THE SAILOR’S WIFE, a whore at the Happy Port,
• LANNA, her daughter, a young whore,
• RED ROGGO, GYLORO DOTHARE, GYLENO DOTHARE, a
scribbler called QUILL, COSSOMO THE CONJURER, patrons of
the Happy Port,
• TAGGANARO, a dockside cutpurse and thief,
• CASSO, KING OF THE SEALS, his trained seal,
• S’VRONE, a dockside whore of a murderous bent,

• THE DRUNKEN DAUGHTER, a whore of uncertain temper.

IN OLD VOLANTIS
the reigning triarchs:

• MALAQUO MAEGYR, Triarch of Volantis, a tiger,
• DONIPHOS PAENYMION, Triarch of Volantis, an elephant,
• NYESSOS VHASSAR, Triarch of Volantis, an elephant,

people of Volantis:
• BENERRO, High Priest of R’hllor, the Lord of Light,
• his right hand, MOQORRO, a priest of R’hllor,
• THE WIDOW OF THE WATERFRONT, a wealthy freedwoman
of the city, also called VOGARRO’S WHORE,
• her erce protectors, THE WIDOW’S SONS,
• PENNY, a dwarf girl and mummer,
• her pig, PRETTY PIG,
• her dog, CRUNCH,
• {GROAT}, brother to Penny, a dwarf mummer, murdered and
beheaded,
• ALIOS QHAEDAR, a candidate for triarch,
• PARQUELLO VAELAROS, a candidate for triarch,
• BELICHO STAEGONE, a candidate for triarch,
• GRAZDAN MO ERAZ, an envoy from Yunkai.

ON SLAVER’S BAY

• in Yunkai, the Yellow City:
• YURKHAZ ZO YUNZAK, Supreme Commander of the Armies
and Allies of Yunkai, a slaver and aged noble of impeccable
birth,
• YEZZAN ZO QAGGAZ, mocked as the YELLOW WHALE,
monstrously obese, sickly, hugely rich,
• NURSE, his slave overseer,
• SWEETS, a hermaphrodite slave, his treasure,
• SCAR, a serjeant and slave soldier,
• MORGO, a slave soldier,
• MORGHAZ ZO ZHERZYN, a nobleman oft in his cups, mocked
as THE DRUNKEN CONQUEROR,
• GORZHAK ZO ERAZ, a nobleman and slaver, mocked as
PUDDING FACE,
• FAEZHAR ZO FAEZ, a nobleman and slaver, known as THE
RABBIT,

• GHAZDOR ZO AHLAQ, a nobleman and slaver, mocked as
LORD WOBBLECHEEKS,

• PAEZHAR ZO MYRAQ, a nobleman of small stature, mocked as
THE LITTLE PIGEON,
• CHEZDHAR ZO RHAEZN, MAEZON ZO RHAEZN, GRAZDHAN
ZO RHAEZN, noblemen and brothers, mocked as THE
CLANKER LORDS,

• THE CHARIOTEER, THE BEASTMASTER, THE PERFUMED
HERO, noblemen and slavers,
• in Astapor, the Red City:
• CLEON THE GREAT, called THE BUTCHER KING,
• CLEON II, his successor, king for eight days,
• KING CUTTHROAT, a barber, slit the throat of Cleon II to steal
his crown,
• QUEEN WHORE, concubine to King Cleon II, claimed the
throne after his murder.

THE QUEEN ACROSS THE WATER

DAENERYS TARGARYEN, the First of Her Name, Queen of
Meereen, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men,
Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Protector of the Realm, Khaleesi of the
Great Grass Sea, called DAENERYS STORMBORN, the UNBURNT,
MOTHER OF DRAGONS,
• her dragons, DROGON, VISERION, RHAEGAL,
• her brother, {RHAEGAR}, Prince of Dragonstone, slain by
Robert Baratheon on the Trident,
• Rhaegar’s daughter, {RHAENYS}, murdered during the Sack of
King’s Landing,
• Rhaegar’s son, {AEGON}, a babe in arms, murdered during the
Sack of King’s Landing,
• her brother {VISERYS}, the Third of His Name, called THE
BEGGAR KING, crowned with molten gold,
• her lord husband, {DROGO}, a khal of the Dothraki, died of a
wound gone bad,
• her stillborn son by Drogo, {RHAEGO}, slain in the womb by
the maegi Mirri Maz Duur,

• her protectors:
• SER BARRISTAN SELMY, called BARRISTAN THE BOLD, Lord
Commander of the Queensguard,
• his lads, squires training for knighthood:
• TUMCO LHO, of the Basilisk Isles,

• LARRAQ, called THE LASH, of Meereen,
• THE RED LAMB, a Lhazarene freedman,
• the BOYS, three Ghiscari brothers,

STRONG BELWAS, eunuch and former ghting slave,
• her Dothraki bloodriders:
• JHOGO, the whip, blood of her blood,
• AGGO, the bow, blood of her blood,
• RAKHARO, the arakh, blood of her blood,
• her captains a nd commanders:
• DAARIO NAHARIS, a amboyant Tyroshi sellsword, captain of
the Stormcrows, a free company,
• BEN PLUMM, called BROWN BEN, a mongrel sellsword,
captain of the Second Sons, a free company.
• GREY WORM, a eunuch, commander of the Unsullied, a
company of eunuch infantry,
• HERO, an Unsullied captain, second-in-command,

• STALWART SHIELD, an Unsullied spearman,
• MOLLONO YOS DOB, commander of the Stalwart Shields, a
company of freedmen,

• SYMON STRIPEBACK, commander of FREE BROTHERS, a
company of freedmen,
• MARSELEN, commander of the MOTHER’S MEN, a company of
freedman, a eunuch, brother to Missandei,

• GROLEO of Pentos, formerly captain of the great cog Saduleon,
now an admiral without a eet,
• ROMMO, a jaqqa rhan of the Dothraki,
• her Meereenese court:

• REZNAK MO REZNAK, her seneschal, bald and unctuous,
• SKAHAZ MO KANDAQ, called THE SHAVEPATE, shavenheaded commander of the Brazen Beasts, her city watch,

• her handmaids and servants:

• IRRI and JHIQUI, young women of the Dothraki,
• MISSANDEI, a Naathi scribe and translator,

• GRAZDAR, QEZZA, MEZZARA, KEZMYA, AZZAK, BHAKAZ,
MIKLAZ, DHAZZAR, DRAQAZ, JHEZANE, children of the
pyramids of Meereen, her cupbearers and pages,
• people of Meereen, highborn and common:
• GALAZZA GALARE, the Green Grace, high priestess at the
Temple of the Graces,
• GRAZDAM ZO GALARE, her cousin, a nobleman,
• HIZDAHR ZO LORAQ, a wealthy Meereenese nobleman, of
ancient lineage,
• MARGHAZ ZO LORAQ, his cousin,
• RYLONA RHEE, freedwoman and harpist,

• {HAZZEA}, a farmer’s daughter, four years of age,
• GOGHOR THE GIANT, KHRAZZ, BELAQUO BONEBREAKER,
CAMARRON OF THE COUNT, FEARLESS ITHOKE, THE
SPOTTED CAT, BARSENA BLACKHAIR, STEELSKIN, pit ghters
and freed slaves,
• her uncertain allies, false friends, and known enemies:

• SER JORAH MORMONT, formerly Lord of Bear Island,

• {MIRRI MAZ DUUR}, godswife and maegi, a servant of the
Great Shepherd of Lhazar,
• XARO XHOAN DAXOS, a merchant prince of Qarth,

• QUAITHE, a masked shadowbinder from Asshai,
• ILLYRIO MOPATIS, a magister of the Free City of Pentos, who
brokered her marriage to Khal Drogo,
• CLEON THE GREAT, butcher king of Astapor.
• the Queen’s Suitors
• on Slaver’s Bay:

• DAARIO NAHARIS, late of Tyrosh, a sellsword and captain of the
Stormcrows,
• HIZDAHR ZO LORAQ, a wealthy Meereenese nobleman,

• SKAHAZ MO KANDAQ, called THE SHAVEPATE, a lesser
nobleman of Meereen,
• CLEON THE GREAT, Butcher King of Astapor,
• in Volantis:

• PRINCE QUENTYN MARTELL, eldest son of Doran Martell, Lord
of Sunspear and Prince of Dorne,
• his sworn shields and companions:

• {SER CLETUS YRONWOOD}, heir to Yronwood, slain by
corsairs,

• SER ARCHIBALD YRONWOOD, cousin to Cletus, called THE BIG
MAN,
• SER GERRIS DRINKWATER,
• {SER WILLAM WELLS}, slain by corsairs
• {MAESTER KEDRY}, slain by corsairs,
• on the Rhoyne:

• YOUNG GRIFF, a blue-haired lad of eighteen years,

• his foster father, GRIFF, a sellsword late of the Golden
Company,
• his companion, teachers, and protectors:

• SER ROLLY DUCKFIELD, called DUCK, a knight,
• SEPTA LEMORE, a woman of the Faith,
• HALDON, called THE HALFMAESTER, his tutor,
• YANDRY, master and captain of the Shy Maid,

• YSILLA, his wife,

• at sea:
• VICTARION GREYJOY, Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, called
THE IRON CAPTAIN,

• his bedwarmer, a dusky woman without a tongue, a gift from
Euron Crow’s Eye,

• his healer, MAESTER KERWIN, late of Greenshield, a gift from
Euron Crow’s Eye,
• his crew on the Iron Victory:

• WULFE ONE-EAR, RAGNOR PYKE, LONGWATER PYKE, TOM
TIDEWOOD, BURTON HUMBLE, QUELLON HUMBLE, STEFFAR
STAMMERER

• his captains:
• RODRIK SPARR, called THE VOLE, captain of Gnef,
• RED RALF STONEHOUSE, captain of Red Jester,
• MANFRYD MERLYN, captain of Kite,

• RALF THE LIMPER, captain of Lord Quellon,
• TOM CODD, called BLOODLESS TOM, captain of the
Lamentation,

• DAEGON SHEPHERD, called THE BLACK SHEPHERD, captain of
the Dagger.

The Targaryens are the blood of the dragon, descended from the
high lords of the ancient Freehold of Valyria, their heritage marked
by lilac, indigo, and violet eyes and hair of silver-gold. To preserve
their blood and keep it pure, House Targaryen has oft wed brother
to sister, cousin to cousin, uncle to niece. The founder of the
dynasty, Aegon the Conqueror, took both his sisters to wife and
fathered sons on each. The Targaryen banner is a three-headed
dragon, red on black, the three heads representing Aegon and his
sisters. The Targaryen words are Fire and Blood.

THE SELLSWORDS
MEN AND WOMEN OF
THE FREE COMPANIES
THE GOLDEN COMPANY, ten thousand strong, of uncertain loyalty:
• HOMELESS HARRY STRICKLAND, captain-general,
• WATKYN, his squire and cupbearer,
• {SER MYLES TOYNE, called BLACKHEART}, four years dead,
the previous captain-general,
• BLACK BALAQ, a white-haired Summer Islander, commander of
the company archers,
• LYSONO MAAR, a sellsword late of the Free City of Lys,
company spymaster,
• GORYS EDORYEN, a sellsword late of the Free City of Volantis,
company paymaster,
• SER FRANKLYN FLOWERS, the Bastard of Cider Hall, a
sellsword from the Reach,
• SER MARQ MANDRAKE, an exile escaped from slavery, scarred
by pox,
• SER LASWELL PEAKE, an exile lord,
• his brothers, TORMAN and PYKEWOOD,
• SER TRISTAN RIVERS, bastard, outlaw, exile,
• CASPOR HILL, HUMFREY STONE, MALO JAYN, DICK COLE,
WILL COLE, LORIMAS MUDD, JON LOTHSTON, LYMOND
PEASE, SER BRENDEL BYRNE, DUNCAN STRONG, DENYS
STRONG, CHAINS, YOUNG JOHN MUDD, serjeants of the
company,
• {SER AEGOR RIVERS, called BITTERSTEEL}, a bastard son of
King Aegon IV Targaryen, founder of the company},

• {MAELYS I BLACKFYRE, called MAELYS THE MONSTROUS},
captain-general of the company, pretender to the Iron Throne
of Westeros, member of the Band of Nine, slain during the War
of the Ninepenny Kings,
THE WINDBLOWN, two thousand horse and foot, sworn to Yunkai,
• THE TATTERED PRINCE, a former nobleman of the Free City of
Pentos, captain and founder,
• CAGGO, called CORPSEKILLER, his right hand,
• DENZO D’HAN, the warrior bard, his left hand,
• HUGH HUNGERFORD, serjeant, former company paymaster,
ned three ngers for stealing,
• SER ORSON STONE, SER LUCIFER LONG, WILL OF THE
WOODS, DICK STRAW, GINJER JACK, Westerosi sellswords,
• PRETTY MERIS, the company torturer,
• BOOKS, a Volantene swordsman and notorious reader,
• BEANS, a crossbowman, late of Myr,
• OLD BILL BONE, a weathered Summer Islander,
• MYRIO MYRAKIS, a sellsword late of Pentos,

THE COMPANY OF THE CAT, three thousand strong, sworn to
Yunkai,
• BLOODBEARD, captain and commander,

THE LONG LANCES, eight hundred horse-riders, sworn to Yunkai,
• GYLO RHEGAN, captain and commander,
THE SECOND SONS,
Daenerys,

ve hundred horse-riders, sworn to Queen

• BROWN BEN PLUMM, captain and commander,
• KASPORIO, called KASPORIO THE CUNNING, a bravo, secondin-command,

• TYBERO ISTARION, called INKPOTS, company paymaster,
• HAMMER, a drunken blacksmith and armorer,
• his apprentice, called NAIL,
• SNATCH, a serjeant, one-handed,
• KEM, a young sellsword, from Flea Bottom,

• BOKKOKO, an axeman of formidable repute,
• UHLAN, a serjeant of the company,
THE STORMCROWS,
Daenerys,

ve hundred horse-riders, sworn to Queen

• DAARIO NAHARIS, captain and commander,
• THE WIDOWER, his second-in-command,

• JOKIN, commander of the company archers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The last one was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard.
Once again, my thanks to my long-su ering editors and publishers:
to Jane Johnson and Joy Chamberlain at Voyager, and Scott
Shannon, Nita Taublib, and Anne Groell from Bantam. Their
understanding, good humor, and sage advice helped through the
tough bits, and I will never cease to be grateful for their patience.
Thanks as well to my equally patient and endlessly supportive
agents, Chris Lotts, Vince Gerardis, the fabulous Kay McCauley, and
the late Ralph Vicinanza. Ralph, I wish you were here to share this
day.
And thanks to Stephen Boucher, the wandering Aussie who helps
keep my computer greased and humming whenever he drops by
Santa Fe for a breakfast burrito (Xmas) and a side of jalapeño
bacon.
Back here on the home front, thanks are also due to my dear
friends Melinda Snodgrass and Daniel Abraham for their
encouragement and support, to my webmaster Pati Nagle for
maintaining my corner of the Internet, and to the amazing Raya
Golden for the meals, the art, the unfailing good cheer that helped
to brighten even the darkest days around Terrapin Station. Even if
she did try to steal my cat.
As long as it has taken me to dance this dance, it would surely
have taken twice as long without the assistance of my faithful (and
acerbic) minion and sometime traveling companion Ty Franck, who
tends to my computer when Stephen’s not around, keeps the
ravening virtual mobs from my virtual doorstep, runs my errands,
does my ling, makes the co ee, walks the walk, and charges ten
thousand dollars to change a light bulb—all while writing his own
kick-ass books on Wednesdays.
Last, but far from my least, all my love and gratitude to my wife,
Parris, who has danced every step of this beside me. Love ya,
Phipps.

George R. R. Martin
May 13, 2011

BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE
Book One: A Game of Thrones
Book Two: A Clash of Kings
Book Three: A Storm of Swords
Book Four: A Feast for Crows
Book Five: A Dance with Dragons
Dying of the Light
Windhaven (with Lisa Tuttle)
Fevre Dream
The Armageddon Rag
Dead Man’s Hand (with John J. Miller)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Dreamsongs, Volume I
Dreamsongs, Volume II
A Song of Lya and Other Stories
Songs of Stars and Shadows
Sandkings
Songs the Dead Men Sing
Night yers
Tuf Voyaging
Portraits of His Children
Quartet
EDITED BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
New Voices in Science Fiction, Volumes 1–4
The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book
(with Isaac Asimov and Martin Harry Greenberg)
The John W. Campbell Awards, Volume 5
Night Visions 3
Wild Card I–XXI

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN sold his rst story in 1971 and has been
writing professionally ever since. He has written fantasy, horror,
and science ction, and for his sins spent ten years in Hollywood as
a writer/producer, working on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the
Beast, and various feature lms and television pilots that were never
made. In the mid ’90s he returned to prose, his rst love, and began
work on his epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. He has been
in the Seven Kingdoms ever since. Whenever he’s allowed to leave,
he returns to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives with his wife,
Parris, and their four cats.
www.georgerrmartin.com"""

"qas": [
    {
      "id": "00001",
      "is_impossible": false,
      "question": "Who was Whillem dimly and how was he with Dany?",
      "answers": [
        {
          "text":  " Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man,
half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The
servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to
Dany. He called her “Little Princess” and sometimes “My Lady,” and
his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though,
and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist,
sickly sweet odor. That was when they lived in Braavos, in the big
house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a
lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the
servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after
they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the
red door closed behind them forever.",
          "answer_start": 57282
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "00002",
      "is_impossible": false,
      "question": " Who was Ser Waymar Royce?",
      "answers": [
        {
          "text": "Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with
too many heirs. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed
and graceful and slender as a knife. Mounted on his huge black
destrier, the knight towered above Will and Gared on their smaller
garrons. He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black
moleskin gloves, and a ne supple coat of gleaming black ringmail
over layers of black wool and boiled leather. Ser Waymar had been
a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch for less than half a year, but
no one could say he had not prepared for his vocation. At least
insofar as his wardrobe was concerned.",
          "answer_start": 6173
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "00003",
      "is_impossible": false,
      "question": " What powers did Hand of the King had in westeroes?",
      "answers": [
        {
          "text": "The Hand of the King was the second-most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms.
He spoke with the king’s voice, commanded the king’s armies,
drafted the king’s laws. At times he even sat upon the Iron Throne
to dispense king’s justice, when the king was absent, or sick, or
otherwise indisposed. ",
          "answer_start":  91550
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "00004",
      "is_impossible": false,
      "question": " How many powerful houses are mentioned in Song of Ice and Fire?",
      "answers": [
        {
          "text": "House Baratheon
House Stark
House Lannister
House Arryn
House Tully
House Tyrell
House Greyjoy
House Martell
The Old Dynasty: House Targaryen",
          "answer_start":  3190
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "00005",
      "is_impossible": false,
      "question": "Describe the first pup of dire-wolf that starks found south of the wall?",
      "answers": [
        {
          "text": "The pup was a tiny ball of grey-black fur, its eyes still
closed. It nuzzled blindly against Robb’s chest as he cradled it,
searching for milk among his leathers, making a sad little whimpery
sound.",
          "answer_start":  34018
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
]